Summary
Much of this "calculated terrorism against civilians" was reported at the time by Jonathan Schell in the New Yorker, but even Schell didn't know that the Americans were also operating secret "Tiger Force" death squads, whose activities were fully uncovered only in 20 03, thanks to the enterprise of two reporters from the Toledo Blade. Greiner describes how the death squads "shot peasants in the field without any pretext and murdered anyone who happened to cross their path; they tortured prisoners and executed them singly or in groups; they raided villages in the late evening or early morning and mowed down with machine-gun fire everyone they could find - peasants who had gathered for a meal or were sleeping, children playing in the open, old people taking a walk".
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The Shadow of Nuremberg
The massacre at My Lai in 1968 was grotesque, but it wasn't exceptional. The rape, torture and murder of Vietnamese civilians went on before and after. The "real" war criminals are those who allowed it to continue, writes Richard Gott The shadow of Nuremberg War Without Fronts: the USA in Vietnam Bernd Greiner The Bodley Head, 518pp, £20
Years ago, as the New Statesman's correspondent at a UN conference in Chile in the early 1970s, I chance...See the full content of this document
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