Read the orifinal article in The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100517/turse

The Pentagon Book Club

By Nick Turse

This article appeared in the May 17, 2010 edition of The Nation.
April 29, 2010

In the spring of 1984, a young Army officer wrote a seminar paper about the use of force in the post-Vietnam era. Three years later he returned to the subject in a Princeton University doctoral dissertation titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.” What “today’s junior officers think about Vietnam–which is fast becoming ancient history–is likely to undergo significant change before they assume positions of power and influence,” he claimed. In his dissertation, he sought to investigate the legacy of the war and its “chastening effect on military thinking about the use of force,” which made military leaders, he contended, “more cautious than before.” “Caution has its virtues, of course,” he wrote. However, “the lessons from which that caution springs are not without flaws.” Among the flawed lessons he identified were a professional aversion to counterinsurgency operations, “a new skepticism about the efficacy of American forces in the Third World countries where social, political, and economic factors are the causes of unrest” and “a widespread fear among officers that assignment to counterinsurgency, special forces type missions will be the end of their career.”

Nick Turse: The eerie confluence of the tales of two convicted mass murderers, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and William Calley–and their fates.

The author of those words is David Petraeus, now a four-star general and commander of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974, one year before the fall of Saigon, and he has lately consolidated his military career around trying to reverse the lessons of Vietnam. He tasted combat for the first time during the invasion and occupation of Iraq, where he commanded the 101st Airborne Division and the Multinational Security Transition Command (tasked with training Iraqi military forces). In 2005-06, after his second tour in Iraq, Petraeus oversaw the revision of FM 3-24, the military’s counterinsurgency (COIN) field manual. (The previous Army COIN manual was published in 1986; the Marines were still using a guide from 1980.) It was a chance for Petraeus to put his dissertation into practice by literally rewriting the book on the type of warfare American officers had shunned since Vietnam. Early in 2007, following the futile efforts of generals Ricardo Sanchez and George Casey, Petraeus took command of US forces in Iraq and aided a reeling President George W. Bush by implementing the “surge” strategy, designed to tamp down violence to a so-called acceptable level. Taking a page from FM 3-24, Petraeus offered money and weapons to Sunni insurgents in exchange for a cessation of attacks on US troops, a strategy that helped to lessen bloodshed and get bad news about Iraq off the front page. In exchange, Bush made “King David” his most influential adviser on the war (Petraeus was granted much clout at National Security Council meetings) and even took him mountain biking.

To a segment of the military establishment that Andrew Bacevich has dubbed the “Crusaders,” officers who “see the Army’s problems in Iraq as self-inflicted,” the consequence of excessive post-Vietnam caution, Petraeus is seen as a successor to another top Army general, Creighton Abrams. A West Point grad and World War II tank commander under Gen. George Patton, Abrams assumed command of US forces in Vietnam in 1968 when his predecessor, William Westmoreland, was kicked up and out, to Army chief of staff, after a four-year run of failure in Southeast Asia. Abrams’s star has been on the rise in recent years too, thanks in large part to the efforts of his chief booster, the prominent historian, retired Army lieutenant colonel and CIA veteran Lewis Sorley.

Last fall, as the debate over the way forward in Afghanistan geared up, Sorley’s ten-year-old book A Better War was the pick of the Pentagon and, according to Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal, “recommended in multiple lists put out by military officers, including a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who passed it out to his subordinates.” (A Better War is also listed in FM 3-24’s annotated bibliography of recommended texts, and Abrams is mentioned and quoted several times in the manual.) Sorley’s book was also read and reread, according to Newsweek, by Petraeus’s top commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal–a counterterrorism specialist who worked closely with Petraeus when he led the Joint Special Operations Command, a unit that The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh called “an executive assassination wing.” Under this program, according to Hersh, elite units were reportedly given the authority to track and kill suspected terrorists and militants with minimal oversight, in noncombat situations and across national boundaries.

There is much for the Crusaders to like about Sorley’s account of the often neglected latter half of the Vietnam War, especially his assertion that by late 1970 “the fighting wasn’t over, but the war was won” by the United States. Abrams had achieved this victory, Sorley contends, through a kinder, gentler strategy of pacification operations and population protection that stood in abject contrast to Westmoreland’s ineffective “search and destroy” missions in the countryside. As Sorley explained in a New York Times op-ed published in 2009 when President Obama was weighing his options in Afghanistan, “Abrams decided instead to try ‘clear and hold’ operations, in which small patrols were sent to villages to protect the populace.” According to Sorley, Abrams recognized that under Westmoreland US forces had been “causing undue ‘collateral damage’ to the South Vietnamese people and their property”; thus enlightened, Abrams “reined in the use of heavy firepower like artillery and tactical airstrikes.” Defeat, however, was snatched from the jaws of victory when the United States cut its support for South Vietnam’s Saigon government–a stab in the military’s back by weak-willed politicians and a war-weary public back home.

In 2004 Sorley took an up-close-and-personal approach to his hero in Vietnam Chronicles, a collection of passages selected and transcribed by Sorley from tapes of high-level meetings chaired by Abrams in 1968-72. The book is a tremendous resource, yet one gets the feeling while reading it of being not a fly on the wall but the object of a concerted propaganda campaign. In the spring of 1969, for instance, we hear Abrams yukking it up over cigars he had imported from Hong Kong. At the same time, in South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, his World War II buddy from the Siege of Bastogne, Gen. Julian Ewell, was coordinating a civilian slaughter during Operation Speedy Express, which was executed with the same heavy artillery and tactical airstrikes Abrams had supposedly shut down [see Nick Turse, “A My Lai a Month,” Dec. 1, 2008]. During the operation, Abrams publicly praised Ewell’s performance. Behind closed doors not long afterward, he laughed off his subordinates’ bloodthirsty talk while warning Ewell to consider how a proposal of his to kill Vietnamese civilians for petty crimes might look if Newsweek got wind of it.

In 1971 two reporters from Newsweek discovered much worse: namely, that as many as 5,000 noncombatants–ten times the number killed during the My Lai massacre–had been slaughtered during Speedy Express, according to one US official. When one of the Newsweek reporters, Kevin Buckley, brought the results of the investigation to Abrams’s attention and asked for comment, the general claimed to have no information and denied Buckley an interview. What Buckley couldn’t have known, and what goes unaccounted for in Vietnam Chronicles, is that Abrams knew a lot about Speedy Express. He learned of reports about mass killings in 1969 from US advisers who charged Ewell’s division with having driven up the enemy body count by killing civilians with helicopter gunships and artillery. Then, on a 1970 trip to Vietnam, Army Secretary Stanley Resor, on the advice of the Army’s acting general counsel, discussed with Abrams reports of widespread civilian killings provided by a different source, a whistleblower from Ewell’s division who had witnessed the bloodshed firsthand. Buckley and his Newsweek colleague Alex Shimkin learned about the carnage from still other US and Vietnamese sources during the meticulous investigation they conducted over a period of months. A Pentagon-level cover-up and Newsweek’s desire not to upset the Nixon administration in the wake of the My Lai revelations kept the full results of their work under wraps. The publication of a severely truncated version of Buckley and Shimkin’s original article allowed the Pentagon to ride out the coverage without being forced to convene a large-scale official inquiry of the sort that followed public disclosure of My Lai. A secret Army report, commissioned in response to Buckley and Shimkin’s investigation but buried for decades, concluded:

While there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by US forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was in fact substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000).

In both his books Sorley ignores the carnage of Speedy Express. Consequently, his readers, including McChrystal and other Crusaders in the Pentagon book club, taking notes for their own pacification campaign in Afghanistan, are left with a counterfeit history of Abrams’s bloodless “better war.”

Not all of Sorley’s fans, however, labor under the same misconceptions about what the Vietnamese call the American War. In the acknowledgments of his Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975, John Prados writes admiringly of the herculean labors of transcription that Sorley–a friend–performed to produce Vietnam Chronicles. But Prados’s scholarly admiration goes no further. He squarely challenges the contentions of Sorley and others who have, over the years, attempted to recast US and allied efforts in Vietnam as a Lost Victory or an Unheralded Victory, among other wishfully titled studies [see Rick Perlstein, “The Best Wars of Their Lives,” October 15, 2007]. Regarding Sorley’s belief that victory was thrown away, Prados writes:

Most recent commentators of this school call themselves “revisionists,” arguing that Americans are wrong to believe they lost the Vietnam war. This is not revisionism, it is neo-orthodoxy.

Something happened in the countryside, but it was not Saigon’s victory….

The neo-orthodox commentators of the “lost victory” school make their claims as if the only important elements were pacification and Vietnamization, as if politics did not matter. Not only is this strange, given the kind of conflict–where supposedly everyone now understood the political to be paramount–but those same analysts take no account of Saigon politics.

For these reasons, General McChrystal would do well to forgo another reading of Sorley’s text and instead wade into Prados’s Vietnam. Steeped in the copious records generated by the US government during the conflict, Prados offers an expansive history, written in a lucid style, that scholars of the war will want to make room for on their shelves and casual readers can accommodate by purging a few faded volumes. Prados, a senior fellow of George Washington University’s National Security Archive and the head of its Vietnam Documentation Project, surveys the wars in Vietnam against the Japanese, French and Americans, from 1945 through 1975, and makes smartly written sojourns back to the United States to listen in on White House phone calls and take it to the streets with returning antiwar veterans. Prados demonstrates the dire effects a foreign war can have on the homeland, as criminality abroad acted as a catalyst for an increasingly lawless government at home.

While he ably covers a lot of historical territory in the United States and Southeast Asia (with surprisingly thorough, if brief, treatments of the contiguous conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), Prados is strongest on Nixon’s war in Vietnam–the period from 1969 onward–making his book a natural counterweight to Sorley’s study of the same period. Through a staggering array of primary and secondary sources, Prados discredits the “better war” thesis and the “neo-orthodox” school through his clear and thorough examination of the increasingly hollow and corrupt South Vietnamese government and its failures to win over the people, which made supposed US pacification successes meaningless.

With devastating clarity, Prados demonstrates that neo-orthodox claims of an increasingly effective South Vietnamese military taking charge, from 1969 onward, are based on smoke and mirrors and outright fabrications. In truth, just as the US military was increasingly wracked by drug use, racial tension, AWOLs, fraggings (attacks on officers and noncommissioned officers, often by fragmentation grenade), combat refusals, mutinies and other disciplinary issues, Saigon’s military forces were in dire straits, as draft evaders and deserters thinned the ranks, officers collected the pay of nonexistent “ghost soldiers” and child soldiers were, instead, put into uniform. At the same time, government corruption was rampant. (In one scandal top officials got away with skimming from a tax on soldiers that was designed to aid veterans.) Prados then couples his nuanced study of the ample shortcomings of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces with, more important, an astute analysis of the many “levels and layers of reasons” the revolutionary forces from North and South Vietnam won the war. It’s here that Prados really shines and demonstrates what a historian at the height of his powers of scholarly synthesis can accomplish.

Paying attention to the Vietnamese–whether ordinary civilians being slaughtered in the name of pacification or Saigon’s political elites emptying the public treasury–has never been a strong suit of American commentators on the war. Consciously written to render the Vietnamese visible in ways too few American histories of the war do, Mark Philip Bradley’s important history Vietnam at War mines Vietnamese novels, poetry and films, as well as a plethora of recent and often overlooked works of scholarship, to paint a more complete picture of the lived experience of the war for the people of Vietnam. Bradley begins with the millennium-long Vietnamese anticolonial struggle against the Chinese beginning in 111 BC and then chronicles the rise of French colonialism in Indochina during the latter half of the nineteenth century; the often-ignored political and intellectual developments among elites and the economic upheaval and demographic explosion in the countryside during the early part of the twentieth century; and finally the wars of liberation against France and the United States.

Bradley discusses the many ways that ordinary people struggled to “navigate and survive the complicated terrain of wartime South Vietnam.” Weaving together disparate threads, from contemporary commentary about changing Vietnamese romantic and sexual mores amid wartime uncertainty (“It’s no longer about appreciating love but escaping the sense that one has been abandoned”) to social anthropologist Heonik Kwon’s recent meticulous and skillful reconstruction of the complex and clandestine networks of social connections that allowed a wounded South Vietnamese officer to defect to the revolutionary side, Bradley offers a social history of wartime Vietnam and of a people in a state of acute crisis. Perhaps the most important aspect of Vietnam at War, however, is Bradley’s effort to convey the ubiquity of civilian suffering during the American War–the decimation of the countryside, the mass population dislocations, the indiscriminate use of firepower, the collapse of farming, the savaging of the economy, the rampant inflation and the proliferation of a culture of corruption and prostitution among the desperate, war-ravaged Vietnamese. Given the scale of misery caused by the war, Bradley doesn’t devote enough attention to the subject. But he makes a noble effort and, even in a slim volume, is stronger on the subject than many thicker histories.

In fact, very few of the more than 30,000 books about the conflict plumb the depths of Vietnamese misery during the American War. One volume that should, by any stretch of the imagination, be counted among them is Eddie Adams: Vietnam, but the book–a glossy collection of photos and text–in many ways defies conventions. Most books, for instance, don’t begin with an admission of the photographer’s opposition to the project. But Adams didn’t have a say in the matter. He died several years ago, and Eddie Adams: Vietnam–edited by his wife, Alyssa, with text by Hal Buell, Adams’s former boss at the Associated Press, as well as short interviews with contemporaries like Morley Safer, Peter Arnett and the late David Halberstam–was published against his wishes.

Adams is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Col. (and later Brig. Gen.) Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a defenseless, restrained prisoner at point-blank range in the head with a pistol. (It is the cover image of Eddie Adams: Vietnam.) It was a photo, Arnett notes in the opening of the book, that Adams “was sorry for.” Adams would later commiserate with Nguyen (known to Americans as “General Loan”) at a pizza parlor in Virginia operated by the former general, who immigrated to the United States with help from a friend in the CIA. Adams felt the photo had been used unfairly to vilify Nguyen and not only apologized for his picture but took great pains to excuse the general’s actions. “General Loan was killing our so-called ‘bad guys,’ but the U.S. government kind of disowned him,” Adams later lamented. In his introductory piece, Arnett recalls telling Adams that he had captured a moment of truth–executions were common but rarely photographed–yet “Eddie, Mister Patriot, just would not accept that. He enjoyed winning the Pulitzer Prize as well as the fame that came with it, but in his heart he felt that he had let the country down.”

Adams, who served as a photographer in the Marines during the Korean War, was hardly critical of the US war in Vietnam and maintained a close relationship with the military. Yet while no equal of Philip Jones Griffiths’s magisterial Vietnam Inc., a 1971 collection of more than 250 photos documenting the destruction of the Vietnamese people’s way of life during the war, Eddie Adams: Vietnam almost inadvertently manages to convey the scale of Vietnamese suffering. When defending Nguyen, Adams noted that a picture can lie; yet it can also be said that multiple images can often offer a less cloudy vision of the truth. In Adams’s book we see many disturbing scenes: a bound prisoner threatened with a bayonet; another with a spear at his throat; a noncombatant being punched; a woman beckoning Adams and fellow Americans to help her wounded husband, his arm vainly grasping at air as they fly away in their helicopter; a child suspect trussed up with a rifle trained on him, mangled bodies lying in the open; children crouching and wailing in fear as an armed US marine approaches them; a young girl, hands raised to the sides of her head, whose eyes lock on Adams’s camera as she runs for cover; and a Saigon demonstrator being threatened with a bayonet.

Whatever his internal conflicts, Adams’s fearlessness, skill and fine eye are evident in a picture he shot on April 25, 1965, in Quang Nam province. Crawling on his belly, Adams captured the abject terror on the faces of a mother, crouched low and clutching her baby, and a father, frightened and powerless, shielding his tiny child as marines, their weapons at the ready, stalk through their hamlet searching for the guerrillas who had fired at them from afar. That November, Adams pronounced the shot his favorite. Of all his many magnificent photos, including his iconic shot of the prisoner and Nguyen Ngoc Loan–which many consider the defining photograph of a conflict that produced not a few worthy contenders–this image may capture the essence of the American War as well as any other. The combination of helplessness and sheer terror in the parents’ eyes, their inability to do any more for their children than to hold them close and act as human shields while a hulking group of heavily armed foreign teenagers draw fire and return it from their yard, says much about the American War in Vietnam and American warmaking in general.

Several years ago, during a trip through the Mekong Delta, I talked with Nguyen Van Tu, a well-weathered farmer residing in a simple wood-and-thatch home with an earthen floor, likely very similar to the one he lived in during the war. Probably the only major difference was the absence of a nearby bomb shelter. During the war, such bunkers were as ubiquitous as the bombs and artillery shells from which they provided uncertain protection. Year after year, families were forced to live a semi-subterranean existence. But they still had to eat, and that meant farming and foraging out in the open. One afternoon in 1971, Nguyen heard artillery being fired from a nearby base and shouted for his family to bolt to their bunker. They made it. He didn’t. A 105-millimeter US artillery shell slammed into the ground near him and ripped off most of his right leg. It was, in fact, one of numerous tragedies he endured as a result of the American War. His brother, a simple farmer, was shot dead by America’s South Vietnamese allies in the early years of the conflict. His father was killed just after the war. While tending his garden, he accidentally detonated a US M-79 round–a 40-millimeter shell fired from a single-shot grenade launcher–buried in the soil.

In 2008 I published a story about Nguyen, and thanks to readers’ generosity he received a new prosthetic leg to replace the rudimentary wooden model he’d walked with for years. But Nguyen hadn’t asked for a new leg; it wasn’t what he wanted out of the interview. What he wanted was a story in the US press about the true suffering of the Vietnamese people that would spur the government to “take responsibility” for what it had done during the war. Nguyen was skeptical that an American would tell this story. “Do you really want to publicize this thing?” he asked. “Do you really dare tell everyone about all the losses and sufferings of the Vietnamese people here?”

Nguyen’s skepticism was well founded, even if he knew nothing of the Crusaders or their revisionist histories. There’s a moment in Petraeus’s dissertation when he pauses to take stock of the “impact of America’s longest war” and its fallout. He devotes not a word to Vietnamese civilians. There’s no mention of women with shrapnel still lurking beneath their skin, or the men with faces melted years ago by incendiary weapons, or the inconsolable people still grieving for mothers, fathers, siblings and children gunned down decades ago. Instead, Petraeus wrote, without apparent irony, that “the psychic scars of the war may be deepest among the Army and Marine Corps leadership.”

Drawing too many conclusions from a years-old dissertation is a risky proposition, but Petraeus’s writings then and his efforts since raise serious questions about just who he believes has suffered most because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what role he has played in that misery and the lessons he has drawn from the carnage. Given the Crusaders’ cheery (and bizarre) conclusions that Petraeus turned the bloody US war in Iraq into a victory and that his “surge” there offers a template for similar success in Afghanistan, one also worries what dubious lessons the next generation of Crusaders will draw from him and his “better wars.”

* Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
* If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
* Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.

About Nick Turse
Nick Turse, the associate editor of The Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Every­day Lives (Metropolitan). He was the recipient of a Ridenhour Prize and a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 2009 for his Nation article “A My Lai a Month,” a multi-year investigation of mass civilian slaughter by US forces in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. more…
Advertisement
Advertisement

* Most Read
* Most Emailed
* Popular Topics

1. » The Improbability Pump
2. » New Study: Liberals More Open Than Conservatives Online
3. » Slide Show: You Know You’re on a Nation Cruise When…
4. » Slide Show: The Far-Right Fringe
5. » Loose Tea
6. » A New Climate Movement in Bolivia
7. » Professor Pants-on-Fire
8. » Bill Moyers Retires
9. » Kyrgyzstan’s Islamist Blowback
10. » Not-Black by Default
11. » Breaking the Banks
12. » ‘God, What a Piece of Crap’
13. » Fueling the Afghan War

1. » A New Climate Movement in Bolivia
2. » The Improbability Pump
3. » Bill Moyers Retires
4. » A Conscious Pariah
5. » Black by Choice
6. » Loose Tea
7. » Professor Pants-on-Fire
8. » Not-Black by Default
9. » 350 Degrees of Inseparability
10. » Breaking the Banks
11. » ‘God, What a Piece of Crap’
12. » Disposable Soldiers
13. » Going Postal in the Digital Era
14. » Europe’s Answer to Wall Street
15. » How to Talk to a Tea Party Activist
16. » New Study: Liberals More Open Than Conservatives Online

1. » Conservatives & The American Right
2. » War Profiteering
3. » Afghanistan War
4. » Former Soviet Republics
5. » Executive
6. » Banks & Banking
7. » Internet & New Media
8. » Racism & Discrimination
9. » PBS
10. » Science
11. » African-Americans
12. » US Foreign Policy
13. » Islam & Muslims
14. » Environment
15. » Media
16. » Activism & Organizing
17. » Economic Policy
18. » Campaigns & Elections
19. » Afghanistan
20. » U.S. Economy
21. » Bolivia
22. » Environmental Activism
23. » Government
24. » Bill Moyers

*
*
*
*
*

Name

Mailing Address

City

State

ZIP Code

Email Address

TRY
4 ISSUES
FREE!
Advertisement
Blogs
» The Dreyfuss Report

Crippling, Crushing, and Suffocating Iran | Members of Congress outdo each other in the zeal to bring down wrath on Tehran’s head.
Robert Dreyfuss
35 Comments
» The Notion

Good Enough for Oklahoma, How About Goldman? | Democrats could use new restrictive laws in Arizona and Oklahoma as a guide for financial regulation.
Laura Flanders
17 Comments
» Editor’s Cut

What ‘Cleggmania’ Can Teach the US | Nicholas Clegg’s rise as a credible third party candidate in Britain’s elections could teach America’s rigid two-party system a thing or two.
Katrina vanden Heuvel
23 Comments
» The Beat

An Arizona Congressman’s Courageous Dissent | Raul Grijalva leads the fight against his state’s new anti-immigrant law.
John Nichols
81 Comments
» Act Now!

Taking it to the Banks | National protests are challenging the influence of the big banks.
Peter Rothberg
49 Comments

* Copyright © 2009 The Nation

The Authority Smashing! Hour

With Mr1001Nights and

Paul from RI

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Political Prisoners Locked Away in the “Land of the Free”

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/printer_6923.shtml

POLITICAL PRISONERS LOCKED AWAY IN THE “LAND OF THE FREE”

New report calls for justice for U.S. political prisoners and takes human rights case to the United Nations

U.S. political prisoners have endured decades of abuse, many face death in prison

By Richard B. Muhammad -Editor-in-Chief

CHICAGO (FinalCall.com) – When it comes to the United Nations and countries charged with rights violations, the United States is usually the chief accuser of others and remains a self-ordained defender of human rights.

But a recent report filed with the world body raises the ugly issue of political prisoners and repression in America and her human rights violations.

“The United States is very, very concerned when its citizens begin to raise questions in these international forums, because the United States still prefers to posture itself, including the Obama administration, as still the leader of the free world and that they don’t have any human rights violations and they certainly don’t have any political prisoners, and we have to dispel that notion in the international community,” said Stan Willis, of the National Conference of Black Lawyers.

Atty. Willis filed the report April 14 as part of a process in which the United Nations reviews the status of each country and its human rights record. The U.S. is currently under review and will respond in November during a gathering in Geneva, Switzerland.

The United Nations’ Universal Period Review process was introduced in 2006 and community-based, non-governmental and other organizations are allowed to point out human rights issues within their countries and where they feel violations of international law or UN treaties have been committed.

For Black America, the process is another way to hold the U.S. government accountable and to demand the release of Black Power era leaders and members of organizations whose political views are objectionable, said Mr. Willis, in an interview.

Beyond freeing an aging population of some 100 former Black Panthers, members of the MOVE organization and other revolutionary-oriented groups, taking the issue to the United Nations puts America and her dirty laundry on front street, said the longtime activist and lawyer.

“They (American officials) do not want to have these issues reach the world’s people. How do you go into Iraq or Afghanistan telling people about their democracy when you got Black people that are locked down in prison for 30-40 years as political prisoners?”

Whether the problem was leftist ideology, nationalists and those calling for a Black homeland, demands for a new economic order or Native American rights and anti-Vietnam War efforts, government security agencies infiltrated dissident groups.

The security activity went hand-in-hand with crackdowns on Black, Latino, Native American and even some White groups demanding a more just and peaceful society­and greater demands for respect for rights and opposition to police violence.

“Such repression resulted in murders, injuries, false arrests, malicious prosecutions and lengthy imprisonments of scores of political activists,” the report said.

The continued incarceration and mistreatment of these prisoners violates UN treaties and conventions that guarantee human rights, forbid torture and outlaw racial and political targeting by government, the report charges.
Surveillance and destroying organizations

The plight of political prisoners is largely rooted in the 1960s-1970s era surveillance against Black groups, which included respected civil rights organizations as well as so-called Black radicals, according to Mr. Willis. About two-thirds of the jailed dissidents are Black, he said.

The FBI teamed with local law enforcement to attack, disrupt and destroy groups like the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was admitted during congressional hearings in 1976 empanelled to probe these secret domestic wars.

The covert Counterintelligence Program run by then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and approved by the White House, focused in specially on the Black Panther Party, and most political prisoners are either former Panthers or from MOVE, a radical “back-to-nature” group whose homes were bombed by the Philadelphia Police Department in 1985.

“U.S. political prisoners have languished in U.S. prisons for decades under cruel and inhumane conditions. Several have died in prison; others have endured years of solitary confinement, poor medical health care, various other forms of abuse, and perfunctory parole hearings resulting in routine denial of human rights,” the report noted.

The report calls for the unconditional release of political prisoners jailed as a result of the government’s Counterintelligence Program, an executive review of all cases related to the covert operation, a murder probe into the deaths of Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and actions to repair and redress harm done and to prevent similar acts in the future.

While Atty. Willis is pushing the plight of political prisoners, he said the impact of the government wrongdoing went beyond the heavy price young activists paid at the time.

“Movements move forward with masses of people but they move forward with a certain kind of leadership,” said Mr. Willis.

During the revolutionary times of the 1960s and 1970s, youth and students were influenced by the efforts of the Nation of Islam, Congress of Racial Equality, and NAACP as well as the African liberation movement on the continent and Cuba’s revolution, he continued.

A type of leadership was developing that America had never seen before and the government moved to crush that leadership, Mr. Willis said.

The Panthers and SNCC were wiped out and law enforcement and government sent clear signals that if others persisted in demanding progressive action they would also be destroyed, he said.

“Our community suffered. Our community deserves reparations just on that issue because it set us back in the 1960s and we see where we are now, we haven’t recovered from that,” he said. “It’s not just those in prison that suffered, and they certainly suffered mightily because they have been locked down and some of them are dying in prison. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered. But the community suffered,” he said. Young leaders Hampton and Clark headed the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. They were shot and killed in a police raid on a west side home in 1969.
U.S. power vs. the power of the people

While the U.S. wields considerable power at the United Nations, in particular with its veto power on the Security Council, Atty. Willis rejects the notion that holding the superpower to international standards is a futile effort.

The General Assembly is largely made up of delegates from around the world, and public opinion and moral authority is bigger than U.S. power, he said.

The lawyer pointed to fighting in Chicago for two decades for Blacks tortured in a police precinct and officers under former police commander John Burge. It was only after the case, which involved hundreds of suspects coerced into making confessions because of torture, was put before international bodies that U.S. law enforcement officials moved against Mr. Burge. He will go on trial May 10 in federal court and is accused of obstruction of justice and perjury.

“It was only after the United Nations mentioned torture in the context of Abu Grahaib, Guantanamo Bay and Chicago, in the same paragraph, that John Burge was indicted within months of that,” Mr. Willis said. The Justice Dept. reached out about the case after the world body noted the violations, he said.
International forums and broader remedies

More involvement is needed in international forums, where violations of basic rights to education, health, employment, housing, and abuses of discrimination and police brutality can be brought out, Mr. Willis argued.

Essentially the forums provide a way to call attention to government failures or misdeeds and ask that the UN or other bodies where the U.S. holds membership to investigate and demand America comply with international law or treaties. The forums can also be highly embarrassing for the world’s greatest democracy.

“We can have a mighty voice because when we speak in the international context it resonates with African people all over the world, unlike anybody else, and they look for us to speak because they know we are in the lion’s den,” said Atty. Willis.

The U.S. civil rights laws also say what government can’t do, while the international standards stress what countries must do, Mr. Willis explained. Under the United Nations standards, countries must educate children and localities could not argue that because of a lower tax base Black children get a lesser quality or failing education, he explained.

Remedies are much broader in the international context, which include reparations as a common remedy, but civil rights laws don’t provide for reparations, Mr. Willis added.

It’s not just going to Geneva but confronting local entities, like school districts, and being able to redefine education and press districts to come in line with international standards, he said. Blacks have also tried to take their struggle to the United Nations in the past, Mr. Willis said.

“We have a history of trying to get there, but we haven’t got there because I think we got so focused on civil rights we forgot there is a remedy out there and we can draw on the collective sentiments of the world community by trying to take our case into a more international forum,” he said. “We don’t have to rely on who is the president, we can force the president because the president and the administration is very, very sensitive to world opinion. There is no question about that,” he said.

Concerns about the arrest and targeting of Arab and Palestinian communities and Muslims after 9-11 and 23-hour-a-day lockdowns make government abuses relevant today, Atty. Willis said.

Political prisoners have traditionally been locked down, not because they violated prison policy or disrupted prison but because officials don’t want disruption based on ideas, he said.

The Obama administration, unlike its predecessors, has taken the position that they support human rights and the U.S. has a member on the Human Rights Council, said Mr. Willis.

His goal is to get the political prisoners on the agenda, but filing a report isn’t enough, he said.

It will take more awareness and education of the Black community, activism and lobbying for political prisoners at the United Nations, town hall meetings to explain where the issues are, and getting the academic and faith communities to weigh in on the problem, he said.

“It’s a way of organizing our people and encouraging them to take these international forums seriously and adding that to their tools of raising issues related to various problems we have in the United States. It doesn’t mean you stop doing anything else.

“The fact that I am trying to raise issues in the international forum doesn’t mean I am stopping suing police,” he said.

“It just means this is an additional weapon that we have to try to get this country in compliance with international human rights laws.”

FCN is a distributor (and not a publisher) of content supplied by third parties. Original content supplied by FCN and FinalCall.com News is Copyright 2009 FCN Publishing, FinalCall.com. Content supplied by third parties are the property of their respective owners.