'There was no one left to kill', declared General Norman Schwartzkopf

[madfloridian]

We don't talk about Iraq anymore. Not even at DU. It is almost a non-topic.

This is an article written in January. It refers back to the first Gulf War. It is unrelenting in its telling of that war. The media has been so complicit in presenting these two invasions of Iraq that it could be called a white wash.

'There was no one left to kill', declared General Norman Schwartzkopf

It was titled Operation Desert Slaughter. That seemed too graphic for the subject line.

Remember, this was the first invasion of Iraq. Only God really knows the reality of what we did this time.

It is seventeen years since America and Britain embarked on their 'Final Solution' for the population of Iraq. The forty two day carpet bombing, enjoined by thirty two other countries, against a country of just twenty five million souls, with a youthful, conscript army, with broadly half the population under sixteen, and no air force, was just the beginning of a United Nations led, global siege of near mediaeval ferocity.

Having, as James Baker boasted they would, reduced 'Iraq to a pre-industrial age', the country was denied all normality : trade, aid, telecommunications, power, sanitation, water repairs, seeds, foods, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment.

The Blitzkrieg on Iraq deliberately targeted all 'indispensable to survival'. Within twenty four hours, most was destroyed. The electricity went off within two hours, leaving patients on life support machines and vital equipment, babies in incubators, or those on oxygen to die. Refrigerators defrosted, all medicine needing refrigeration, blood banks and vital saline solutions for the injured were destroyed. Food rotted and between the bombing and the bank closures (latter for fear of looting) replacements were scarce to unbuyable.

It was the plan, they say. This is the war that was televised and sanitized all over our TV. It was made to look like we were heroes.

This was the plan by US Central Command, it seems, all along. The destruction of Iraq's water system has been described by Professor Nagy and Stephanie Miller as: 'a slow motion holocaust'. Few could have put it better.

We saw nothing of this on TV. The rest of the article is even more tragic. Yet our congress voted to invade them again in 2003. Why?

Did we not break them enough the first time?

I need to add one more statement.

'There was no one left to kill', declared General Norman Schwartzkopf after the Basra Road bloodbath, where even the injured holding white flags, and doctors accompanying them were obliterated.

But we had to go do it all over again. I don't want excuses or platitudes anymore. All of them knew what we did the first time. It was a vote of convenience.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Thank you, madfloridian. I'll be back to read this more carefully.

Hearing that from Schwartzkopf is unbearable.

Thanks for taking the time to post this.

[Captain Hilts]

2. Quoting Stephanie Miller on this issue? Weird. nt

[madfloridian]

3. Maybe this Stephanie Miller?

http://www.americanprogress.org/aboutus/staff/MillerStephanie.html

[madfloridian]

4. Agriculture in all forms was deliberately targeted.

"Chicken farms bombed, flocks of sheep and goats, broadly half of all buffalo were killed, dairy farms obliterated.

Crops, food processing factories reduced to rubble. A war crime stupendous in its immensity, for which not one murderous, genocidal, infanticidal, decision maker or pilot has stood trial.

Pharmaceutical factories were bombed, the medical syringe factory was destroyed"

oops this was meant in response to my OP

[indepat]

5. A kill 'em, kill'em all mentality as expressed by SJ? How the US used its superpower

status in the post-WWII era to impose a rigid, mostly RW, ideology on much of the world, is a must epic 10-or-so volume expose just dying to be written.

[madeline_con]

6. Retreating Iraqis buried alive...

BUSH'S WAR OF TERROR, GENOCIDE
PART 4

Our continuing campaign for the retreating Iraqis was called Operation Desert Saber which began on 24 February 1991. Many Iraqi ground troops were entrenched defending a fortified line. Two U.S. brigades from the 1st Infantry Division used a “bulldozer assault”. Driving along side the trenches in earthmoving plows mounted to tanks they buried the terrified defeated occupants alive.

http://www.newswithviews.com/Spingola/deanna14.htm

...................................................

The Gulf War
Source: Muslim & Arab Perspectives 2:11-12 (1995)
Pages No: 31 to 43

When Sergeant Joe Queen returned to his home town of Bryson City North California, after the Gulf war, the first thing he saw was a huge banner drapped outside Hardees Burger Restaurant, which read: `Welcome Home Joe Queen.' Joe Queen, who'd been awared a bronze star, wanted to chill out after the war, but Bryson City wouldn't let him Joe, 19-years old, had gone straight from Desert Storm to become one of the first American troops to cross the Saudi border in an armoured bulldozer. His job was to bury the Iraqis alive in their trenches and then cover over the trenches real smooth so the rest of the Big Red One, as The First Armored Mechanized Brigade is called, could come nice and easy behind him.

Joe Queen doesn't know how many Iraqi troops he buried alive on the front line. But five years later, in his military base in Georgia, he remembers well how it worked: `The sand was so soft that once the blade hits the sand it just caves in right on the sides, so we never did go back and forth. So you are travelling at five, six, seven miles an hour just moving along the trench... You don't see him. You're up there in the half hatch and you know what you got to do. You did it so much you could close your eyes and do it... I don't think they had any idea because the look on their faces as we came through the berm was just a look of shock.'

One of the Iraqis in the trenches was a 30-year old conscript from Baghdad. His first name is Yussif. He asked not to be identified. Yussif was defending the lines at Hafr al-Batin when, over a two-day period, three US brigades bulldozed Iraqi soldiers. At this stretch on the front line, he estimates around 300 Iraqis were buried alive. Military sources in Baghdad and Washington put the total number of Iraqis buried alive during the war as between one and two thousand.

`While I was retreating, I saw some of the soldiers trying to surrender, but they were buried. There were two kinds of bulldozers, real ones, actual ones, and also they had tanks and they put something like a bulldozer blade in front of them. Some of the soldiers were walking towards the troops holding their arms up to surrender and the tanks moved in and killed them. They dug a hole in the ground and then they buried the soldiers and levelled it.

http://www.missionislam.com/nwo/gulfwar.htm

........................................................
War without death
The Pentagon promotes a vision of combat as bloodless and antiseptic
Patrick J. Sloyan

Sunday, November 17, 2002

Daniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plows funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops.

"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's assault. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and land things sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/17/IN178228.DTL

[alfredo]

23. I remember a guy I worked with bragging about that. He thought it

was funny. He took part in the war, but never saw the enemy.

[defendandprotect]

33. Oviously, our war planners see Iraqis as less than human -- and they teach that to the troops --- !!

[truedelphi]

7. I remember reading in The Village Voice, that when our planes entered

The Iraqi border, our planes began obliterating the shepherds on the hills with their flocks.

Since mid January 1991, I have never considered myself a citizen of this country.

[madfloridian]

10. I found some more. There were two escape routes they bombarded.

They showed it on TV briefly, then we never saw it again. They wanted us to see the glorious victory, but it looked too much like carnage.
It is hard to find much about it.

http://pnews.org/PhpWiki/index.php/HighwayToHell

"U.S. television tended to sanitize the pictures of the Highway of Death by removing troubling images of burned and mutilated bodies. Moreover, photographs of the episode were pulled from distribution to try to erase the memory of the unsavory episode. An image of an Iraqi soldier burnt to a crisp in the Desert Slaughter was published by the British Guardian on March 3 and created a great uproar...

At the afternoon Pentagon briefing on March 1, Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly said bluntly that the United States was not in the game of counting casualties and when pushed said that they had "killed an entire army." Details of the magnitude of the systematic annihilation of the Iraqis emerged, however, when reporters journeyed up the highway leading from Kuwait City to Iraq, and about twenty miles from the city found evidence of a tremendous slaughter of Iraqis who were fleeing from Kuwait. The first report on what became known as "the Highway of Death" was broadcast on CNN during the morning of March 1, which showed pictures of the road from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border. According to CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, video had just surfaced of a scene outside of Kuwait City depicting "vehicles who were going nowhere." The fleeing Iraqis took any vehicles that they could find to drive to Iraq and when they got outside of the city the allies put a pincer movement on them. They were hit by allied aircraft and artillery in place along the highway, producing a massive traffic jam and subsequent slaughter. The vehicles included civilian cars, buses, trucks, tanks, fire engines, and armored vehicles, some of which burned together as they caught fire and then exploded, producing a conflagration from which few, if any, escaped. There were hundreds of victims, Mintier reported, and charred bodies, burned beyond recognition, were evident inside and around the vehicles.

....'There was very little mainstream media discussion or commentary on the full scope of the high-tech massacre. One report observed that Marine Gen. Walter Boomer passed along a message to his commanders from Norman Schwarzkopf "not to let anybody or anything out of Kuwait" ( Bill Gannon, Newark Star-Ledger, Feb. 27, 1991). The Highway of Death was briefly featured but there were few reports on the other killing fields of the ground war. The other major route out of Kuwait to Iraq was a coastal route running north to the Iraqi border city of Umm Qasr and according to an Army officer on the scene there was "'nothing but shit strewn everywhere, five to seven miles of just solid bombed-out vehicles.The U.S. Air Force,' he said, 'had been given the word to work over that entire area, to find anything that was moving and take it out'" ( Michael Kelly , The New Republic, Apr. 1, 1991, p. 12). A Navy A-6 pilot noted that the convoy consisted of "a 20-mile nose-to-tail jam" ( Mike Gaines, Flight International, Mar. 6-12, p. 8). A powerful account of the carnage on the road to Umm Qasr, Kuwait, was found in the Los Angeles Times in a story by Bob Drogin ( Mar. 10, 1991) which contained much graphic detail.

For 60 miles, hundreds of Iraqi tanks and armored cars, howitzers and antiaircraft guns, ammunition trucks and ambulances were strafed, smashed and burned beyond belief. Scores of soldiers lie in and around the vehicles, mangled and bloated in the drifting desert sands. . . . Every truck is riddled with shrapnel. No looting by the dead soldiers was evident. No survivors are known or likely. . . . At one spot, snarling wild dogs have reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds claw and pick at another; only a boot-clad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable (p. A1). (See also the graphic account by Michael Kelly in the New Republic, Apr. 1, 1991.)

..."Reports indicated that many of those retreating from Kuwait City had put white flags on their vehicles which were visible to U.S. pilots ( Rowan Scarborough , "Pool Report Aboard the USS Blue Ridge", Washington Times, Feb. 27, 1991) and, as noted, there were many reports that Kuwaitis, Palestinians, and other civilians were massacred by U.S. forces. Consequently, there were claims that the slaughter of retreating Iraqis and others constituted a war crime, violating "the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat" ( Joyce Chediac, "The Massacre of Withdrawing Soldiers on 'The Highway of Death",' in Clark et al. 1992, p. 91). The Bush administration claimed that the Iraqi troops were retreating to regroup and were thus in "fighting retreat," but, in fact, they were a "fleeing rabble," as the Pentagon would eventually admit."

[defendandprotect]

34. This is Vietnam all over again --- in its brutality, torture, etal ---

[ConcernedCanuk]

8. I remember . . the strafing of thousands as the Iraqis fled from Kuwait -

.
.
.

"The Road of Death"

"Mai-Lai"

The bloodthirst of the USA's war machine outdoes the Vikings a thousandfold.

[madfloridian]

9. More about The Highway of Death...and a video.

This is another article by the author above, it has some quotes by General Barry McCaffrey, whose face we often see on TV.

http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=3296&blz=1

The Iraqi pull out from Kuwait began on 26th February 1991; the ceasefire was signed on 28th February. On 2nd March 1991, the US 24th Mechanised Division slaughtered thousands more Iraqi soldiers, an action approved by General Norman Schwartzkopf (who famously remarked: “no one left to kill”. His autobiography is “It doesn't take a Hero”. Indeed.)

“We really waxed them”, said one Commander. Another American was recorded saying, “Say hello to Allah”, as his Hellfire missile obliterated a vehicle. “Yee-hah”, said another voice. There was an attempt to cover up the carnage of another vehicle strewn road, since: “...it didn't look good coming after the ceasefire.” (Ramsey Clark, "The Fire this Time", Thunder's Mouth Press.)

Lagauche* adds: “The March 2nd incident should go down as one of the most shameful occurrences in history. Eight thousand Iraqis (men, women and children) were burnt to a crisp. General Barry McCaffrey called it ‘absolutely one of the most astounding goddamned operations ever seen in the history of military science.’” Further: “The following day, a U.S. sergeant inspected the area and said: ‘I stopped as a familiar smell wafted through the air ... It was the smell of a cookout on a warm summer day, the smell of seared steak.’” McCaffrey, who has the blood of tens of thousands on his hands, was promoted, received another star, was not tried as a war criminal and was then assigned to a US Cabinet post as “US Drug Czar”.

Here is a video I found:

https://www.videosift.com/video/The-Highway-of-Death

You may have click the video link twice, as an ad comes on the first time.

[malaise]

11. K & R

Too late to recommend. Some of us do try to talk about Iraq but our threads sink like stones.

Great post. Genocide - nothing less has been committed against innocent people.

[Cleita]

12. We can still keep this kicked if not recommended.

I didn't see it until now. This is horrific.

[malaise]

13. I'll keep kicking n/t

[trashcanistanista]

14. Kicking ... no words for this.

:kick:

[Cleita]

20. Another

:kick:

[SalmonChantedEvening]

15. Another Big Lie: "They hate us for our freedoms"

It wouldn't really be for things like this, now would it.

:grr:

[Old_Growth]

21. That term needs to be redefined to it's proper perspective.

Not that it's true but it should be "They hate us for our privileges"

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

16. But..but..we saved that glorious democracy in Kuwait...oh, wait.

Or, was it our oil in Kuwait?

[Octafish]

17. The Highway of Death (warning: graphic photo)

The attack was relentless.



Estimates are 100,000 fleeing Iraqi soldiers died -- almost all draftees.



Just another one of the BFEE's great war crimes.



Heil, Bush!

http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/HighwayofDeath.html

[madfloridian]

19. 60 miles of that horror, octafish. 60 miles.

Be sure you see the link above. Here you go.

http://pnews.org/PhpWiki/index.php/HighwayToHell

[rucognizant]

37. And then.........

Bill Clinton cleaned up after Bush I. And Hillary wants to clean up after Bush II......................
I don't hate her; just not going to vote for her!~ I'll just hold my nose & vote Obama, as I did for Bill.
Alternatives??? Hot tar & feathers to Washington any one?
Was going to vote for Edwards...but according to Candy Crowley ( Candy?) he is one delegate less than he had before suspending, I can't find ANY delegate count for him online. It would be a lot easier to "
disappear delegate counts, than a family of 5 which is essentially what has happened to Edwards!

[Orwellian_Ghost]

18. Silence kills

[madfloridian]

22. We knew so little then. Why? Not much internet access. Am I right?

I think I am. The TV and newspapers sanitized it so much. I can even remember feeling some pride in how quickly we did things. After all, we were being told horror tales by Ted Koppel and others we trusted about bodies being sliced into pieces in Kuwait by the Iraqi invaders. Why wouldn't we believe it? We had no other way of knowing.

Here is an interview from 1997 on PBS. I am looking for the Frontline video, but the transcript is here. The remarks by Gorbachev I found fascinating. Also Bernard Trainor's description of Schwarzkopf.

http://www.pbs.org:80/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/script_b.html

"MIKHAIL GORBACHEV, Soviet President: I told President Bush, "George, you shouldn't just be thinking about how to begin your attack. You should be thinking about how to avoid it. While the generals plan, we should think about how to end the war."

"MIKHAIL GORBACHEV: I said we shouldn't waste any time. We must still try to find a political way out. He said, "I am interested in that. I am interested in that. Understand me, I am interested in finding a political solution, but nothing happens." "Well," I told him, "don't lose that will. Don't lose the opportunity. Don't rush things. We're acting together. Let's find a political solution."

And the description of Stormin Norman.

"BERNARD TRAINOR, Author, The Generals' War: Schwarzkopf was more than a bully. I mean, he was a- he was a competent military officer, but for most of the officers that served under him, it was a frightening thing to have this man of such large size and power just exploding all over you. And he did intimidate many of his_ of his subordinates and most of them considered him to be a tyrant and a bully.

Gen. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF, Commander in Chief, Coalition Forces: I have always regretted the fact that I have a temper. I think it's more the fact that I_ that I care so very much about the lives of our troops.

When human lives are on the line, you cannot be cavalier. You can't do enough. You cannot do enough. You must, must do everything you possibly can and leave no stone unturned and you can't settle_ can never settle for second best or a second-class solution when you're dealing with enterprises of such magnitude that they involve the lives of literally thousands and thousands and thousands of people"

Yes, Norman just not the lives of those fleeing.

And this description of the Highway of Death. It is chilling to me.

SARDAR, Iraqi Soldier: There were many wounded people on the road, some of them without arms or legs. They were just stranded there half dead. When they saw our car, they started to crawl towards us. We didn't have space for them. With all the strength they could muster, they were throwing themselves at the side of the car. The windows were smeared with blood. We had no space. We had to drive on.

NARRATOR: The pilots called it "the highway of death." Three days into the land war, the army that had occupied Kuwait City for seven months no longer existed as a fighting force. Thousands of footprints led off into the desert. Hundreds had been killed. In the coming hours, what happened here would become an important factor in ending the war.

Gen. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: Why did we bomb them? Because there was a great deal of military equipment on that highway. I had given orders to all of my commanders that I wanted every piece of Iraqi equipment that we possibly could destroyed. This was not a bunch of innocent people just trying to make their way back across the border to Iraq. This was a bunch of- of rapists, murderers and thugs who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying to get out of the country before they were caught.

Looking the Frontline video. We did not have the internet access then, and we knew so little.

[Why Syzygy]

38. A lot of us knew enough

to not start another war! They know exactly what they are doing. Exactly. They are more than menaces.
Their rule should be termed a fatal pandemic.

[Mind_your_head]

24. I want to look into this further

so this will 'mark' it for me and give it a kick too! (too late to recommend for more eyes to see, and hopefully, comment upon)

[lovuian]

25. Its been Americas darkest hour

very very sad

[malaise]

26. Kick n/t

[Misskittycat]

27. kicked

[trthnd4jstc]

28. This is why War should not be the Driver of Policy

War is the breakdown of civilization. It is not what builds people up. Obviously. Further, We are in a fix. We have created so many enemies from the great amount of death that our nation has wrought upon the world; we will need to play good for the rest of this century, which I believe, including impeaching our set of War Criminals, Bush, Cheney, etcetera. How should we move from where we are to the world we need to live in. I believe that we should have an international force for international "policing". End all Foriegn interventions. Let the UN act, instead of the US. Further, in the case of the 1st Gulf War, we had made many mistakes, including carpet bombing of civilians, leaving the innocent to die in these hospitals, etcetera. It is true that Saddam, and the Baathists of Iraq invaded Kuwait, but we could have dealt with that, honestly, without destroying so much of Iraq. Our military has a successful history of using overwhelming force. It allows our country to win battles. Yet, what battle is won when we kill innocents? Just as in our current war in Iraq, we are creating more enemies, by our killing of innocents. It seems one solution is simply stop killing! How can anyone love our country when they have it in their minds that our country heartlessly kills innocents, and then rationalizes the necessity of it?

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

29. Sorry, I have no words - only tears

:kick:

[Subdivisions]

30. Deleted

[scarface2004]

31. bush killed 6 million iraqis! and is sneering about it!

we are 'good' germans.

[defendandprotect]

32. US also refused to clean up the DEPLETED URANIUM ---

half a million children died --- plus birth defects!!!

And, the suffering of our own troops and their families --- !!!

[Rosemary2205]

35. Too late to R - Kicked

[Cleita]

36. ---

:kick:

[madfloridian]

39. I never knew this...stuff like this did not make the news then.

Even those the war was on TV most of the day, making us look like heroes....we never saw stuff like this.

"The telecommunications tower was also one of the earliest casualties, an elegant, soaring, structure on the edge of Baghdad's Mansur district. It lay, broken and crumpled, as did the remains of those who worked inside it. Iraq was thus cut off from the world, the extent of the bombing and atrocities largely unknown for considerable time. Iraqis throughout the world had no way of knowing if their families, friends, loves, were dead or alive. Radio and television stations across Iraq were blitzed so no warnings to populus could be given (journalists too have special protection in wars, but decision makers, seemingly are not only illiterate, but ignore legalities.)

Hospitals, health clinics, schools and kindergartens were bombed, education eradicated so totally that the stores for educational materials, in buildings separate from the schools (usually in a central distribution point some miles away) were also bombed."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7920

[east texas lib]

40. I believe that Frontline aired a program about a lot of this...

What is forever seared into my mind was a scene with two troopers looking over the
aftermath of the destruction of the retreating Iraqi forces. One of the troopers turned
to the other and said, with tears in his eyes, "I wish George Bush (Sr.) was here to
see this" . And this time, as before, it was really all about the fucking oil. Or as it
was referred to, "access to a Strategic Asset".

[mojowork_n]

41. And when there were none left fighting, they found some more, retreating:

Seymour Hersh wrote about this in The New Yorker, I think, but the Pentagon or somebody threatened to sue (the army had conducted an investigation of itself, and concluded no wrong-doing) so the article was taken off the New Yorker's website.

Excerpts, it's still available on line:


"...Sometime after the battle, an interpreter for the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion interrogated a captured Iraqi tank commander who, according to an officer in the 124th, plaintively asked again and again, "Why are you killing us? All we were doing was going home. Why are you killing us?..."

"...Military analysts at the coalition headquarters asked to view the battle films that were automatically recorded by cameras on board each Apache helicopter. The footage clearly showed, one officer told me, that the Iraqi tanks were in full retreat when the attack began, and in no way posed a threat to the American forces. "These guys were in an offroad defensive position -- deployed in a perimeter," the analyst added. Once the American attack reached full force, some Iraqi vehicles did attempt to return fire. "We saw T-72s in battle lines, firing away blindly in the air. They didn't know what was killing them, but they were gamely shooting -- knowing they would die." (An American could be overheard on the footage shouting, as a missile tore into an Iraqi vehicle, "Say hello to Allah!")

It was clear at the Pentagon, too, that something had gone awry. One colonel assigned at the time to monitor war reports at the National Military Command Center -- he is now a major general, and still on active duty -- told me that the reports from the 24th Division were extremely ''unsettling,'' because "it made no sense for a defeated army to invite their own death. It didn't track with anything we knew about the theatre. It came across as shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone was incredulous..."

'...Sometime late in the spring of 1991, three members of the 5th Engineer Battalion at Fort Leonard Wood went to the Inspector General's office on base. They told a story much like Larimore's and Walker's about the shooting of Iraqi prisoners of war by soldiers from the 1st Brigade of the 24th Division..."

"...Near the end of his testimony, McCaffrey summarized his views on the issue of prisoner rights and possible war crimes. As a combat commander, he said, he routinely spoke to his soldiers about honor. "To a civilian that might sound funny," McCaffrey added, "but one of those points was talking about your honor as a soldier . . . When you get out there and you have helpless people in your grasp . . . If you kill or maltreat prisoners you will violate international law and create a terrible political disaster for us. But that is not important compared to the fact that you will violate your honor as a soldier."

Dinkel, who today is the principal of a Lutheran elementary school in Tampa, Florida, made clear in a series of interviews that he has had no second thoughts about the McCaffrey investigation. "The case was closed once we confirmed that rounds were indeed fired," he said. "If I had the assets that McCaffrey had, I'd have done the same thing."

Rowell isn't as sure. When he was interviewed, he was the most senior investigator in the C.I.D. -- thirty-six years on the job -- and its highest-ranking warrant officer. He is now an instructor at the C.I.D.'s training center at Fort Leonard Wood. "We never did think we got the whole story on everything,'' Rowell told me. McCaffrey had emerged as a hero from the war, and there was "some anticipation that he was to grow up and be Chief of Staff. We knew that we have senior military officers looking at their careers. There was a lot of sealed lips, and people with amnesia." Everyone's story was that the Iraqis fired first, he said, and "We never had information to the contrary.... Nothing to prove that they were lying to us."

Rowell said he felt that he and his fellow-investigators had established that, at best, only two rounds were fired by Iraqi forces at the 2-7 Scout platoon on the morning of March 2nd. But, regardless of his and the others' doubts about McCaffrey, he said, the Dinkel investigation "came up with nothing that would have won a trial. If you're a two-star general, you can do whatever you want to do, under the confusion of war..."

Link to the complete text:

http://cryptome.org/mccaffrey-sh.htm

General McCaffrey now routinely appears as a tv talking head:

from sourcewatch:

"...McCaffrey "serves as a national security and terrorism analyst for NBC News and writes a column on national security issues for Armed Forces Journal.

McCaffrey served as the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) from February 29, 1996, through January 7, 2001. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate. McCaffrey was also a member of the National Security Council and the President's Drug Policy Council. <3><4>

Just prior to appointment as drug czar, he was the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Southern Command, coordinating national security operations in Latin America..."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Barry_McCaffrey

[mojowork_n]

42. It does all trace back to Vietnam.

but times have obviously changed:

More, here:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E6D9103BF936A25756C0A9669C8B63

Excerpt:

Report Revives Criticism of General's Attack on Iraqis at End of the Persian Gulf War

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: May 15, 2000

One of the top American commanders in the Persian Gulf war came under investigation in 1991 after a member of his unit complained that his troops had pummeled retreating Iraqi forces in an unprovoked attack two days after a cease-fire went into effect.

Military investigators, who fielded the anonymous complaint and completed a secret report in 1991, exoner ated Barry R. McCaffrey, now a re tired four-star Army general and President Clinton's top drug control official. But questions about the at tack have been revived by a report appearing in The New Yorker maga zine on Monday that quotes senior Army officers, including one of the top officers on General McCaffrey's staff, as saying the attack was unjustified.

Patrick Lamar, the operations of ficer of General McCaffrey's division, told the magazine that the at tack was a ''giant hoax'' in which overwhelming firepower was used against an Iraqi armored force that put up little resistance.

The article by Seymour M. Hersh pits a tenacious investigative reporter against one of the nation's most aggressive military men.

Mr. Hersh first made his name by reporting on the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by Americans in the hamlet of My Lai. His 25,000- word article on General McCaffrey is the longest The New Yorker has published since 1993.

In addition to challenging General McCaffrey's conduct, Mr. Hersh also asserts that some of the commander's troops fired on Iraqi prisoners. And he questions the integrity of the military's investigations of this and other allegations of gulf war misconduct, charging that critics were often either ignored or intimidated.

But General McCaffrey insists that he has been the victim of a journalistic attack. He says Mr. Hersh pursued him for months and tried unsuccessfully to prove that he had committed felonies during his service in Vietnam and had stolen a bicycle as a child.

[madfloridian]

44. I never realized that about Hersh and McCaffrey...

I just know that I can not watch McCaffrey on TV. My skin crawls.

[The Stranger]

43. He is a modern day Nazi.