WESTERN PRESS AND U.S. CRIMES
By Bertrand Russell
[The following article, issued by the International War Crimes Tribunal, was written by Bertrand Russell in November 1966. Additional copies can be obtained by writing the tribunal at lla, Wormwood St., London, E.C.2. A single copy is 3d. (.04) each. Postage is 3d. on orders under 6 to one address. Bulk orders post free.
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The United States maintains an army of occupation in Vietnam, engaged in suppressing a movement of resistance which, by humane standards, commands the support of the vast majority of the people. The Resistance in Vietnam advances demands for national sovereignty and independence, the right to self-determination. It is in this setting that we must study the record of American actions.
“Anyone who has spent much time in the field has seen the heads of prisoners held under water, bayonet blades pressed against throats, victims (with) bamboo slivers run under their fingernails, wires from a field telephone connected to arms, nipples or tesicles.
This statement appeared in the New York Times Magazine, November 28, 1965, and was written by the correspondent of Newsweek, Mr. William Tuohy. Such torture and mutilation on the part of American forces has been described with increasing frequency. Earlier, Donald Wise, the Chief Foreign Correspondent in London of the Sunday Mirror, reported:
"No American is in a position to tell his pupils to stop torturing. They are in
no mood to, either. Standard tortures are dunking men, head first, into water tanks, slicing them up with knives, swinging silk stockings full of sand against temples and hooking them to the electric generators of military headquarters." Sunday Mirror, April 4, 1965.)
This documentation is verified in independent reports by American correspondents:
"One of the most infamous methods of torture used by the Government forces is partial electrocution, or 'frying.' This correspondent was present when the torture was employed. Wires were attached to the thumbs of a Vietcong prisoner. At the other end of the string was a field generator. The mechanism produced electrical current that burned and shocked the prisoner."
American reporters have stated that electrical torture is employed throughout Vietnam by American forces, including the battlefield, where small, portable generators have been "modified" for torture purposes and "are prized for high mobility."
"The ding-a~-ling method of interrogation involves connection of electrodes from the generator to the temples of the subject. In the case of women, the electrodes are attached to the nipples," stated A.P. correspondent, Malcolm Browne.
An American soldier wrote to his sister, in the Spring of 1965:
"Our platoon leader stuck one end of this wire to the lady's chest. It was a kind of electric shock, because she got a real bad burn. They took the same wire and tried it on the lady's husband and brother, but on their lower parts."
The New York Herald Tribune is more detailed:
"Techniques designed to force prisoners to talk involve cutting off the fingers, ears, finger-nails or sexual organs of another prisoner. A string of ears decorate the wall of a Government military installation. One American installation has a Vietcong ear preserved in alcohol." (April 25, 1965.)
Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press writes:
"Many a news correspondent has seen the hands whacked off prisoners with machetes. Prisoners are castrated or blinded. A suspect has been towed, after interrogation, behind an armoured carrier across the fields. Many soldiers enjoy beating up Vietcong prisoners. The subjects of interrogation so often die after questioning that intelligence seems to be a secondary matter." (The New Face of War, 1965.)
The Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, gave this description, substantiated by the International Control Commission, of a young girl:
"The girl bared her right shoulder. I wanted to vomit. The satiny skin ended in small, cauliflower-like eruptions, where the flesh had been torn out with red-hot pincers. There were half~a-dozen searing scars on the upper part of the arm. The girl was tortured for months. She had soapy water and urine forced down the mouth and nostrils, electricity applied to the vagina and nipples, flesh torn from the breasts, thighs and shoulders by red-hot pincers, a ruler thrust into the vagina. These were interspersed with beatings, starvation and milder forms of torture."
This reporting has been so considerable that we begin to understand how it is possible for more Vietnamese to have died before the National Liberation Front began its resistance in the South than since. The years of peace between 1954 and 1960, so-called, claimed more liveS in Vietnam than the period since 1960, which includes nearly two years of bombing of the North with tonnages, according to Secretary of Defence McNamara, of four million pounds daily. The American Press, in its descriptions of the treatment of prisoners speaks freely:
"A helicopter pilot looked up from his drink to relate what happened to a captive. The man did not respond, so the officer heaved him out of the helicopter from 2,900 feet."
Similar reports appeared in the Herald Tribune:
"Vietcong prisoners were interrogated in an airplane flown towards Saigon. The first refused to answer questions, and was thrown out of the aircraft at 3,000 feet."
Again, in the New York Times of July 7, 1965:
"One American helicopter crewman told friends that he had become infuriated by a
youth, pushed him out of a helicopter at 1,000 feet."
In the New York Herald Tribune of September 29, 1965, a detailed description is given of the treatment of prisoners after capture:
: "They get a V.C. and make him hola his hands against his cheeks. Then they take wire and run. it through the one hand and through his cheek and into his mouth. They pull the wire out through the other hand. They knot both ends around stakes.
The New York Times Magazine of November 28, 1965, states:
"Further villagers were rounded up and one man was brought before the company commander. The Vietnamese officer turned to his adviser and said: 'I think I shoot this man. O.K.?! 'Go ahead,' said the adviser. The officer fired a carbine round point blank, striking the villager below the chest. The man slumped and died. The patrel moved on.'
The Houston Chronicle of December 24, 1964, described the fate of captured prisoners: me . : : °
“There were four, all suspected of being Vietcong. They lined them up and shot the first man. Then they questioned the second. They shot him too."
David. Halberstam reports. in 1965:
“The marines simply lined up the seventeen and shot them down in cold blood."
Reuters reports on November 18, 1965: .
"In one place, Americans found three Vietnamese wounded. "You won't smile any more,' said one of the soldiers, pumping bullets into his body. The other two met the same fate."
The Chicago: Daily. News reports, November 19, 1965:
"It is almost impossible to walk without stumbling upon a body. Suddenly, a wounded soldier lifted one arm weakly. An American sergeant poured a long burst of rifle bullets into him. 'I'd like to find more of those bastards trying to give up,' the sergeant said. No one disagreed with him."
The New York Times of October 14, 1965, quotes a former executive of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva:
"When (the Vietcong prisoners) were tortured, the American army started to destroy Vietcong hospitals and to cut off.medical supply."
U.P.I. reports on August 3, 1965:
"'T got me a Vietcong. I got at least two of them bastards.' The Americans ordered a Vietnamese to go down into the hole to pull out their victims. The victims were three children, between 11 and 14."
Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press reported again:
"A man leaped up fifty yards away and began to run. Every machine gun poured fire at that man. Finally, he went down silently. We found him on his back in the mud, four bullet holes across the top of his naked chest. He was alive, moving his legs and arms. The squad looked down at the man and laughed. One of the men picked up a heavy stake, lying in. the mud; and rammed one end of it into the ground, next to the wounded man's throat. He forced the stake down over the throat, trying to throttle the man. Someone stamped on the free end of the stake, to break the wounded man's neck, but the stake broke instead. Another man tried stamping on the man's throat, but somehow the spark of life was still too strong. Finally, the whole group laughed and walked back to the path.
_ "Two women ran up from one of the huts. One of them put a hand to her mouth as she saw the wounded man, whom she recognised as her husband. She dashed back to her hut and returned in a moment, carrying a bucket which she filled with water. She poured paddy water over the wounds, to clean off the clotting. blood. Occasionally she would stroke his forehead, muttering something. Slowly, she looked around at the troops, and then she spotted me. Her eyes fixed on me, in an expression that still haunts me sometimes."
The New York Post of April 30, 1965, quotes a marine who, after having shot a villager in the back, said:
"Don't think we're killers. We're marines."
The New York Journal American on September 16, 1965, states:
"This is a new breed of Americans that most of us don't know about, and it is time we got used to it. The eighteen and nineteen-year-olds have steel in their backbones and maybe too much of the killer instinct. These kids seem to enjoy killing Vietcong."
I have concentrated on the small daily events of this war, as reported in the Western Press, because these accounts disclose more than the equally full Western descriptions of the special and experimental weapons, which have been developed and used on a vast scale against the Vietnamese people. The casual accounts of the behavior of the American occupying army in Vietnam have been published without noticeable protest from significant numbers amongst those who have read these articles. It is necessary to understand why.
Two weeks ago, one of the Editors of the New York Times, Mr. James Reston, wrote an article entitled: "That Coon Skin on the Wall." In this article, he quotes the President of the United States in his remarks to American troops at Cam Ranh Bay: “Come home with that coon skin on the wall." "Coon skin" referred to Vietnamese. "Coon skins" are an American expression for Negroes. "Coon skin" explains how it is possible for the most esteemed paper in the Western world to print, without inhibition or apparent embarrass-— ment, descriptions which are just those we have come to know in Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald. The President of the United States who so addressed his soldiers is the same man who said in the House of Representatives of that country on March 15, 1948:
"No matter what else we have of offensive or defensive weapons, without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant, impotent and éasy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife."
This is the legacy, the true and direct inheritance of the extermination squads and the gas chambers to which the yellow dwarfs and the coons and the gooks were sent to inferior extermination.
The New York Times of September 25, 1966, published a lengthy article by the leading military correspondent, Hanson Baldwin: -
"The Defence Department contends that our utilisation of chemical agents in Vietnam is not only militarily useful, but more humane than bullets or explosives."
Mr. Baldwin states:
"Production of many different types of chemicals has been expanded in the United States since 1960. These include the deadly nerve gases and the newer so-called 'benevolent incapacitators.'"
He continues:
"Many of the experts add that modern chemical agents offer greater hope for humane warfare than any other weapons."
Documented reports of these chemicals and gases establish that they result in paralysis, convulsions, asphyxiation and blindness. They have been used throughout South Vietnam. A Washington official stated on November 1, 1965, at the National Foreign Policy Conference: ,
"We are making limited use of arsenic and cyanide compounds in the southern part of Vietnam, but not yet in the North."
The documentation which I possess concerning the bombing of hospitals, schools and sanatoria, consciously and systematically, is taken also from Western sources. The use of such weapons as bombs containing millions of razor-sharp steel fragments, jellygasoline in immense quantity, phosphorus and bacterial devices is considerable. The development of forced labour camps and a policy of scorched earth, which has led to the imprisonment of 59 per cent of the rural population of South Vietnam, numbering eight million people, is Western in origin and has been reported in Time Magazine and the London Observer.