Anybody got an e-addy for the Swiftbots? ZINN's chapter on Vietnam

[UTUSN]

From ZINN, A People’s History of the U.S.

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p.470: For a few weeks in September, 1945, Vietnam was--for the first and only time in its modern history--free of foreign domination, and united from north to south under Ho Chi Minh.

p.471: After the Communist victory in China in 1949 and the Korean war the following year, the United States began giving large amounts of military aid to the French. By 1954 …. The U.S. was financing 80 percent of the French war effort.

p. 472: As the Pentagon Papers put it: “South Viet Nam was essentially the creation of the United States.”

p. 473: When Kennedy took office in early 1961 he continued the policies of Truman and Eisenhower in Southeast Asia. Almost immediately, he approved a secret plan for various military actions in Vietnam and Laos…

p. 474: Under the Geneva Accords, the United States was permitted to have 685 military advisers in southern Vietnam. Eisenhower secretly sent several thousand. Under Kennedy, the figure rose to sixteen thousand, and some of them began to take part in combat operations.

p. 475: The Pentagon historians wrote that when Eisenhower met with President-elect Kennedy in January 1961, he “wondered aloud why, in interventions of this kind, we always seemed to find that the morale of the Communist forces was better than that of the democratic forces.”

p. 476: The Tonkin Resolution gave the President the power to initiate hostilities without the declaration of war by Congress that the Constitution required. The Supreme Court, supposed to be the watchdog of the Constitution, was asked by a number of petitioners in the course of the Vietnam war to declare the war unconstitutional. Again and again, it refused even to consider the issue.

p. 478: The CIA in Vietnam, in a program called “Operation Phoenix,” secretly, without trial, executed at least twenty thousand civilians in South Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist underground. ….

After the war, the release of records of the International Red Cross showed that in South Vietnamese prison camps, where at the height of the war 65,000 to 70,000 people were held and often beaten and tortured, American advisers observed and sometimes participated. ….

By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II--almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam.

p. 479: Thousands of Americans came to his defense. Part of it was in patriotic justification of his action as necessary against the “Communists.” Part of it seems to have been a feeling that he was unjustly singled out in a war with many similar atrocities. Colonel Oran Henderson, who had been charged with covering up the My Lai killings, told reporters in early 1971: “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.” Indeed, My Lai was unique only in its details.

p. 483: By early 1968, the cruelty of the war began touching the conscience of many Americans.

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