NOTES IN THE NEWS
The Real Song my Culprits Of the millions of words that have been spoken and written here and abroad about the massacre perpetrated by American soldiers at the South Vietnamese village of Songmy,...
...We do not endorse everything said by the President in his statement of November 3," they declared, and "we specifically do not give advance approval of future decisions on Vietnam...
...This has now been confirmed by an unimpeachable source, the European Commission for Human Rights...
...At this writing, the Symington Subcommittee is struggling with the military and diplomatic censors about the clearing of additional transcripts for publication...
...The list surely includes the name of Lyndon B. Johnson, who told the troops at Camranh Bay in 1966 to "come home with that coonskin on the wall...
...Allies for Sale Among the carefully constructed myths that encrust Washington's official rhetoric about the Vietnam war is the contention that American military intervention is part of an "allied" effort conducted with the support and participation of a half dozen Asian states...
...In any case," said Pipinelis, "there will be no question of elections...
...There are the cynics who shrug that "war is hell," and after all, the men are under strain...
...President Johnson made much of the token forces furnished to Vietnam by other nations, and President Nixon has followed suit...
...The list of those guilty at Songmy is not confined to those who defend and rationalize the massacre...
...What we did not know at that time was that Mr...
...In testimony before the President's task force last March, General Quesada called the SST project "a very serious mistake...
...Who are "they...
...But now President Nixon, in an historic decision that could have and should have been made by his predecessors, has unilaterally renounced biological warfare— even in retaliation against an enemy attack—restricted BW research to "defensive measures such as immunization," and ordered the Defense Department to dispose of its stocks of BW weapons...
...It is a recurrent theme in the periodic reports being issued by the Eisenhower Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence...
...Torture and ill treatment, said the Commission, are "an administrative practice" and "officially tolerated...
...We have known for a long time about "free fire zones" in Vietnam, about "search-and-destroy" missions, about the "zippo squads" that burn down villages...
...However, fairness is observed...
...It surely includes Richard M. Nixon, who declared on his ceremonial visit to Vietnam last summer that the war "may have been one of America's finest hours...
...We must remember," says Representative Roy A. Taylor of North Carolina, "that war is war and at best it is destructive, cruel, and stupid...
...Government...
...Hubert Humphrey's visit to the White House and his endorsement of Mr...
...While they differ about the specifics, all stress the point that it will take money, lots of money, to provide even a minimum of equity for the poor...
...It will range far beyond the circumstances of the Vietnam intervenPaying for Protection Senator Symington: Yesterday we had testimony that the external threat to the Philippines was very little...
...From its beginnings in the Kennedy Administration, we have regarded the SST as a frivolous and potentially mischievous misuse of public funds sorely needed for more significant national purposes...
...Their views, which took into account the same economic, social, and technical difficulties we discussed in November, were suppressed by the Administration until they were brought to light by persistent efforts of two public-spirited members of the House, Democratic Representatives Sidney R. Yates of Illinois and Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin...
...But the latest American film product sent abroad—to 104 countries in nine dubbed languages, including Tagalog and Mandarin Chinese—is in its own way as provocative as any of them, its own way being not sociology or nudity, but politics...
...Doesn't it come down to a quid pro quo for the bases and a means of contributing to the Filipino government...
...Meadlo told reporters, "and they made him a murderer...
...And all agree that simple justice as well as the domestic tranquillity require that the money be made available...
...Hollywood is now privileged to answer in kind...
...But the House resolution will not bring peace one day nearer because it does not deal with the key issue, acceptance of a coalition government in South Vietnam...
...We heard the Great White Father speak," said Peter McDonald, a Navajo leader who attended the White House Conference...
...This was a central theme in the report of the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders two years ago...
...Mr...
...foreign and military policies—a pair of Siamese twins with the military twin generally dominant—contributed to the destruction of Greek freedom and today are helping to stifle any faint hope of its restoration...
...The resolution could turn out to be a far more serious matter than a Nixon propaganda coup...
...We should be proud of our country," says Lieutenant Colonel James E. Shaw, the chief chaplain of the American Division, "because the American Division's rules of engagement are based on Judeo-Chris-tian traditions and are moral, unlike those of the enemy...
...Eighty-two House members earlier joined in a statement expressing their reservations about the ambiguities and dangers of the resolution's wording...
...We are in Vietnam, say President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Ag-new, an American of Greek ancestry, to defend freedom—but in Greece, where freedom has been crushed since the colonels seized power in April 1967, we are on the side of the torturers...
...How much that position duplicates the discredited Lyndon Johnson policy could be seen from the fact that Mr...
...General Warren: Internally, sir...
...Speaking against the Vietnam resolution, Representative William S. Moor-head, Pennsylvania Democrat, said: "I do not believe that any member of this House ever dreamed [the Gulf of Tonkin] resolution would be used as the legal basis for . . . over 500,000 U.S...
...Nixon's television adviser during the campaign, it is His Master's Voice...
...Society must aid them or they will remain poor...
...There are the Gott mit Uns clergymen who profane their faith by praying for "victory...
...They told how they had seen Quangngai province "utterly destroyed" as a matter of official U.S...
...General Quesada's term is the right one: There is every reason to gag at the SST...
...Nobody but the narrator is heard supporting the President, who is shown twice in excerpts from his November 3 speech...
...The USIA's next big film production for abroad will be a biography of Spiro Agnew...
...Senator Symington, who was long regarded as part of the military's coterie on Capitol Hill, is reported to be astonished and appalled by the information he has already uncovered...
...Actually it took place even before the first...
...It came to the floor under a Rules Committee edict which permitted no amendments and little discussion...
...The President's "initiative for peace," as he described it, followed a lengthy Administration examination of BW leading to the conclusion, reportedly, that employing disease against an enemy population could result in its worldwide spread, and that the frightful U.S...
...We are doing our best...
...In other words, it is American propaganda...
...There is a saying: 'You fool me once, shame on you...
...a dangerous undertaking and an expensive undertaking, and in my opinion often motivated by false values...
...For all time," President Nixon declared last May...
...Senator Symington seems to recognize the danger, and is in a unique position to do something about it...
...The theory of the sovereignty of the people is contrary to democracy...
...Last month, when the "moment" had already stretched into more than half a year, Mr...
...Humphrey's White House call is presented within the context of the second Vietnam moratorium...
...We are being asked to do the same thing today...
...It surely includes all those aging patrioteers whose courage knows no bounds when it comes to sending young men off to fight their wars...
...They know what the other countries are getting, and want their share also...
...Politics and 'Peace' A combination of steam roller tactics, rally-round-the-flag-and-the-President slogans, and parliamentary trickery recently enabled the House of Representatives to adopt a resolution, 333 to 55, expressing support "for the President in his efforts to negotiate a just peace in Vietnam . . ." The resolution—packed into a single sentence that ran to 167 words—was so murky that supporters promptly came up with sharply differing interpretations of what it was supposed to mean...
...My own feeling," said Foreign Relations Chairman J. W. Fulbright, "is that all we did was go out and hire the soldiers in order to support our then-Administration's view that so many people were in sympathy with our war in Vietnam, and we paid a very high price for it...
...Senator Symington: From whom...
...The Real Song my Culprits Of the millions of words that have been spoken and written here and abroad about the massacre perpetrated by American soldiers at the South Vietnamese village of Songmy, none strikes us as so tragic as those uttered by the mother of Paul David Meadlo, the twenty-two-year-old former GI who told CBS news that he had killed thirty-five or forty men, women, and children...
...Americans used to make grim jokes about the "good Germans" who annihilated millions because they were "just following orders...
...In addition, the President announced that he would ask the Senate to ratify the Geneva Protocol of 1925 which prohibits first use in war "of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases, and of bacteriological methods of warfare...
...The USIA movie also interviews the opinion pollster who found out from 500 telephone calls that the President commanded large majority support for his policy of gradual American troop withdrawal...
...If his action deescalates the greatly feared U.S.-Soviet competition in stockpiling weapons of germ warfare, it will be a major step toward peace...
...In addition to the recommendations of the latest White House Conference —which disconcerted the Administration by calling for an annual guaranteed income of $5,500 and a series of steps that could be taken immediately to alleviate the hunger emergency— the President has before him at least a half-dozen voluminous reports of blue-ribbon panels charged with examining the nation's domestic ills...
...The food stamp program, entangled in the red tape of agricultural politics, serves as an inadequate quarter-step toward the alleviation of the most desperate need...
...You fool me twice, shame on me.' I do not intend to vote another Vietnam blank check...
...In the same measure, the House reduced by half the pathetically insufficient $50 million authorization sought by the Administration for urban mass transit research and development...
...After more than two years of investigation it compiled a 1,200 page report concluding that the Greek government run by the colonels permits torture of political prisoners and denies many basic human rights...
...Nothing at all is said about another alternative, which is the basis of nearly all informed opposition, in Congress and out, that a political settlement can be, and should be, negotiated to end the war...
...But word has already leaked out from other sources about America's cash-on-the barrelhead payment of up to $1 billion for the assignment of one Thai division to Vietnam, and the stiff subsidies paid to the South Korean regime have long been on the public record...
...This was made clear in a recent report by Nora Beloff in the London Observer...
...Fearing an adverse vote, Greece withdrew...
...The Subcommittee recently released its first public record—a carefully "sanitized" transcript of its hearings on American military transactions with the Philippine Republic...
...Speaker John McCormack insisted that it was really "confined" to the free election issue while his Republican opposite number, Minority Leader Gerald Ford, could hail it as an "endorsement" of whatever the President might be doing to end the war in Vietnam...
...In time it could take on some of the aspects of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the fateful declaration adopted by Congress on August 7, 1964, which President Johnson viewed as his sanction for sending more troops to Vietnam...
...But it is also to help the Filipino forces to physically protect U.S...
...The list of culprits is much longer than the Army's roster of commissioned officers...
...Over long periods of time," the Commission pointed out, "a prosperous society shifts its patterns of consumption upward and these shifts affect the poor...
...Today we have testimony that the United States support of counter-insurgency is minimum...
...Under Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson...
...Despite many pages of deletions ordered by censors at the Pentagon and State Department, the basic facts are unmistakable: Washington forked over about $38 million in payment for a 2,200-man force of Filipino noncombatants sent to Vietnam for three years, a period recently ended...
...and Henrick S. Houthhakker of the Council of Economic Advisers...
...Laws would be issued by the government, he said, to protect human rights "at the time and in the way it judges proper, and when it is convinced that the time has come to let the people take part in public life...
...We have mob rule and tyranny...
...The European Commission's report concluded that the Greek government's repression of human freedom violated the conditions of membership set forth in the charter of the Council of Europe...
...But none of these investigations—important as they may be to help us understand the facts—will get to the truth, the whole truth, about who made murderers of Paul David Meadlo and his buddies in Company C of the First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry...
...These basic issues must be faced...
...It includes those of us who have written and marched and demonstrated against the Herblock in The Washington Post "And I trust you'll take an equally close look at complaints about me" war while dutifully paying our taxes and voting for the "lesser evils" served up by the political machines...
...The innocent-looking civilian by day becomes the treacherous killer by night...
...forces in the Philippines...
...In perhaps its most important section, the Commission's report emphasized that even if an adequate income maintenance program is established, it will provide no quick or permanent solution to the problem of poverty in America...
...We have seen these things on our television screens...
...His Master's Voice It won't draw as many movie house lines in Europe or Latin America as the one about the two young drug pushers on motorcycles, or the one about the Times Square cowboys, or the one about some lady's restaurant...
...In place of action—and money ¦—the nation's poor have been treated to a series of official studies, commissions, and conferences whose findings must, by now, easily fill a ten-foot shelf...
...Promises and "The moment is at hand to put an end to hunger in America itself...
...Among those whose negative conclusions the White House chose to disregard were Lee A. DuBridge, the President's science adviser...
...arsenal of killer germs did not add to national security...
...I gag, if I may use my own term, at the Federal Government by its positive action replacing economic demand," General Quesada said...
...On this ground, Britain led a move to expel Greece from the Council...
...Nixon has won his propaganda victory...
...The narrator says that dissent is part of the American tradition, but no clue is given as to what the Vietnam dissent is about, or why it is considered not quite sporting...
...Nixon's action with only a few reservations...
...ground forces in Vietnam...
...The USIA used to assail Hollywood for sending films abroad which gave the wrong impression of this country...
...When the colonels carried out their coup and imposed martial law, which is still in effect nearly three years later, the pretext was advanced that it was done to prevent a Communist takeover...
...The Commission report disclosed that Greeks are denied such fundamental rights as freedom of expression and association and a fair trial...
...Initiative for Peace' For decades successive Administrations have permitted the development of chemical warfare weapons...
...Washington reports suggested that the President and Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird decided to restrict chemical and biological warfare (CBW) activities in spite of strong objections by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose recommendations, wrote Richard Homan in The Washington Post, "would have led to increased activity by the United States in the fields of both chemical and biological warfare...
...Much of the credit for the President's action must go to Representative Richard D. McCarthy, the New York Democrat who fought so hard and effectively, in Congress and through the news media, to expose the development and stockpiling of CBW weapons and to stimulate popular support for their renunciation by the U.S...
...For example, he did not propose to stop the American use in Vietnam of tear gas, and of defoliant chemicals which have done lasting damage to that ravaged country, although it was reported that he would require closer control over the future use of tear gas there...
...We Indians are very quick to detect the disease of forked tongue in its early stages...
...Some time this spring or summer, when it has elicited all the information it can behind closed doors, the Symington Subcommittee plans to hold open hearings on the extent and nature of the foreign military commitments that have been entered into by the United States...
...Orville and Jonathan Schell, two journalists who have reported sensitively and compassionately from Vietnam, wrote recently to The New York Times to dispel the "possible misapprehension . . . that the tragedy of Songmy is an isolated atrocity...
...The government of colonels announced in October that it was lifting press censorship but now has issued a new code of 101 articles to "cleanse and discipline" the press...
...The propaganda movie's assumption, like the President's, is that a middle course is being pursued between the two extreme alternatives—immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, or re-escalation of the war...
...While most American boys would not kill needlessly, the Communists would...
...At a minimum, the House action was a political ploy by the White House and the Republican leadership —with the shameful connivance of House Democratic leaders—to glorify the President's address and create the appearance of unity behind his Vietnam position...
...Nor did the President forbid continued chemical warfare research and the manufacture of chemical-carrying weapons...
...Unfortunately, the President offered only vague promises to the ten or fifteen million Americans to whom hunger is a daily fact of life and the ten million more who, even by austere Federal standards, are classified as poor...
...This film shows that under Frank Shakespeare, who was Mr...
...I sent them a good boy," Mrs...
...If delineated only by unchanging absolute standards, the life style available to the poor will grow increasingly separate from and inferior to the way of life followed by others in the society...
...The Federal antipoverty program, hobbled from its beginnings by insufficient funds and bureaucratic timidity, appears to be in the final stages of dissolution, and the President's welfare reform proposals languish in limbo on Capitol Hill...
...There is evidence indicating that it [a Communist takeover] was neither planned at that time nor seriously anticipated by either the military or police authorities...
...Johnson liked the resolution so much that he telephoned one of its authors, Representative James C. Wright, Texas Democrat, to offer encouragement for its adoption...
...Senator Symington: In other words, we are paying the Philippine government to protect us from the Philippine people who do not agree with the policies of the government or do not like Americans...
...What, therefore, is the real purpose of this military assistance...
...How convincing is it...
...The Greek foreign minister, Panayotis Pipinelis, at a meeting with Greek ambassadors to European nations in Switzerland on August 26, made statements, supposedly secret, replete with the contempt for democracy which the colonels and their cabinet puppets hold...
...The praise for Mr...
...But there are more, many more, on the list of those who must share in the responsibility for the murders at Songmy...
...When it completes its far-flung inquiries, his subcommittee may shock the nation into demanding basic reform policies...
...Its potential for mischief is great, however, because it could open the door to escalation of the war, as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution did five years ago...
...Whenever somebody or other is sovereign, the king or the people, we have no more democracy...
...As we look at these problems around the world, time and time again, with country after country, we pay and we pay and we pay, and we commit and we commit and we commit," he says...
...In the ultimate reckoning, the list of the guilty at Songmy includes those good men in Congress who have boldly spoken out against the war and timidly voted to finance it because, after all, a vote against "national security" would be poor politics...
...General Warren: In my opinion, to a degree, yes, sir...
...There are many things to learn from the catastrophe of Vietnam...
...It includes all but the very few of us who can honestly say, "I have done everything I could...
...We pay Korea and Thailand exorbitant prices for what they furnish, and the trouble is you have here a built-in resistance to any ending of the war," Senator Fulbright said during the hearings on the Philippines...
...and Communist China, with the United States and Japan the only major nation holdouts...
...Nixon's policy are used in the film, but not the numerous second thoughts the former Vice President has had...
...The question is how long can heavily taxed America take it...
...No lieutenant, captain, or colonel is responsible for making murderers of the "good boys" who have been dispatched to Vietnam to do murderers' work in our names...
...According to a Pentagon source quoted by Homan, the Joint Chiefs accepted it because "it wasn't something they were willing to go to the wall on...
...No dissent is allowed to be heard either...
...In the Department of Transportation, which has joined the airlines and aircraft manufacturers in energetic lobbying for the SST, Under Secretary James M. Beggs dismissed the findings of the review committee as "not in any sense representative of an expert view...
...The present regime will not permit elections...
...The inquiry is potentially the most important to have been conducted by Congress in many years...
...It is the fifteen-minute documentary of the U.S...
...In recent years the emphasis has been on biological warfare (BW), the more terrifying of these two monstrous forms of mass slaughter...
...Nixon, who has rejected out of hand the major recommendations of his latest White House Conference, will soon call for another study, we fear...
...The reason for the American subsidy, officials testified, was that President Ferdinand Marcos could not persuade his own Congress to provide funds...
...Isn't this really a means of keeping the government satisfied...
...Not the least of them is that we, too, are good Germans...
...In his November 3 address on Vietnam, Mr...
...Nixon repeated the comment almost word for word, and told the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health that he intends to "put an end to poverty and malnutrition due to poverty in America...
...to maintain internal security and stability and, thereby, make our own activities over there more secure...
...It was stressed a year ago in the findings of the Douglas Commission on Urban Problems...
...By means of exhaustive staff investigations and intensive questioning of official witnesses behind closed doors, the Symington subcommittee is compiling a detailed dossier of the sordid cash transactions with which the United States has bought its corrupt and corruptible "friends...
...We did not realize that we were giving the President of the United States a blank check...
...But the House has already complied with the Administration's request for $96 million for the SST (in addition to $99 million previously appropriated) for the construction of two prototype planes, and the Senate is expected to follow suit...
...But Congressman Reuss has now uncovered another suppressed document—the expert testimony of Lieutenant General Elwood R. Que-sada, the former head of the Federal Aviation Administration...
...He does not give equal stress to the other part of his finding, however, that an equally large majority believed his policy of Vietnamization would not work...
...By the examples we set today, we hope to contribute to an atmosphere of peace and understanding between nations and among men...
...Moreover, the principal Congressional question about the USIA for years has been whether it was the voice of America, reflecting all shades of opinion, or merely the voice of the American administration in office...
...Exchange between Senator Stuart Symington and Lieutenant General Robert H. Warren, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, October 2, 1969 tion, covering Europe and Latin America as well as Asia...
...The Commission, an agency of the eighteen-nation Council of Europe, torpedoed this lie with these words...
...Senator Fulbright called it "the ultimate in corruption for us to make deals like this in pursuit of an illusory policy all designed to prove to the world that we have great support in Vietnam...
...An answer of sorts will come, we suppose, from the court martial proceedings now in preparation and from the various official inquiries under way...
...For the moment, however, both the Administration and Congress seem unwilling or unable to face even the urgent issue of coping with the problem as it exists today...
...There are figures from a House committee that there are three and a half billion people in the world, and all but thirty-six million have received American aid...
...Well, the people shown in the film, typifying average Americans, may or may not constitute a majority, but they certainly are silent...
...In announcing his decision, the President said: "Mankind already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction...
...For the bulk of the poor, both, young and old, unemployed and working, urban and rural, there are few bootstraps available by which they pull themselves out of poverty," the Heine-man Commission found...
...The United States had opposed the expulsion move, telling its European allies that it might prompt Greece to drop out of NATO...
...General Warren: To a degree, yes, sir...
...President Johnson, who declared "unconditional war on poverty" five years ago, was equally long on rhetoric and short on performance...
...In this peculiar war in Vietnam, it is difficult to distinguish friend from foe...
...Under Secretary of Interior Russell E. Train...
...Supersonic Suppression Two months ago in these columns The Progressive took issue with President Nixon's decision to proceed with Federally-subsidized development of a commercial supersonic transport plane...
...This report conflicts sharply with the Pentagon's official version that the Joint Chiefs "concurred" in the President's decision...
...Information Agency entitled The Silent Majority, which like Vice President Agnew's speeches is based on the premise that President Nixon's Vietnam policy is not only right, but is widely supported, and should not be criticized...
...Nixon's peace efforts came despite his ominous warning in his November 3 address to the nation that he reserved to himself the decision to re-escalate the war...
...It includes those who are genuinely shocked by murders executed at point-blank range but find it tolerable to contemplate death dropped by airplanes from the sky or dealt out by the computerized targeting of artillery pieces...
...The Tortured Greeks While some European leaders express outrage at the regime of the colonels in Greece, the United States supplies the military junta in Athens with arms, maintains an ambassador there, and has aligned itself against a European move to condemn the Greek government's suppression of freedom...
...If it also helps to make the SALT talks between the two superpowers productive of a mutual curb on nuclear weapons systems, President Nixon may have made a contribution to peace even more "historic" than it appeared to be when he announced it...
...They do not want the war to end, I would not think, with the kind of income they are getting for these troops...
...Under Secretary of the Treasury Paul A. Volcker...
...Meadlo was not asked, and she didn't say...
...Moorhead, along with fifty-three other Democrats and one Republican, Representative Ogden R. Reid of New York, voted against the Vietnam resolution, while 172 Republicans and 161 Democrats voted for it...
...The true nature of the "alliance" in which the United States takes such pride is slowly emerging from the inquiry into American security agreements and commitments that is being conducted by a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee headed by Senator Stuart Symington, Missouri Democrat...
...Whatever the inside story behind the decision, we applaud Mr...
...Nixon is hardly the first to be afflicted by the disease...
...Alexander Kendrick...
...Nor will these investigations tell us who made murderers of all the other Americans who took part in those atrocities about which we have not yet heard, and those about which we will probably never hear...
...I feel that a supersonic transport or any other commercial device should be the product of economic demand...
...The hiring of the Filipino mercenaries is the rule, not the exception...
...The President was so eager to have the resolution adopted that he took the unique step of appearing before the House three weeks earlier to praise the resolution as being "along the lines of the proposal I made in a speech on November 3." The House Foreign Relations Committee held no hearings on the resolution and discussed it behind closed doors for less than two hours...
...policy, and concluded: "Such atrocities were and are the logical consequences of a war directed against an enemy indistinguishable from the people...
...It seems to happen every time something needs to be done...
...Our free enterprise system, at least in my opinion, has been a very successful system and I would hate to see it replaced by something else...
...In this country, where the film cannot be shown, that premise is subject to continuing debate, but the purpose is to persuade the rest of the world...
...Where was the indignation and soul-searching...
...One result of a "precipitate withdrawal" from Vietnam, the President warned, would be that "our allies would lose confidence in America...
...U.S...
...Nixon solemnly warned that the United States "cannot remain great if it betrays its allies and lets down its friends...
...In Greece, torture is an instrument of government policy...
...Nixon's own interagency SST review committee had raised serious objections to the project...
...It has been developed most thoughtfully in the recently released report of the Heineman Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, which concluded, like the White House Conference, that a national system of guaranteed annual income must be established...
...About eighty countries have ratified it, including the U.S.S.R...
Vol. 34 • January 1970 • No. 1
