INDEPTH: IRAQ
My Lai
Robin Rowland, CBC News Online | May 6, 2004
In March 1968, a company of the U.S. soldiers attacked the village of My Lai in Vietnam, killing perhaps as many as 500 inhabitants
Bodies of women and children lie in the road leading from the village
of My Lai, South Vietnam, following the massacre of civilians in March
of 1968. (AP photo / Ronald L. Haeberle / Courtesy Life Magazine)
|
Despite an immediate complaint from a helicopter pilot who witnessed the massacre, it took a year for the upper chain of command to even hear about what happened. An investigation began only when a soldier complained to Congress and the U.S. army inspector general. While the army was investigating, the story broke in the press, along with shocking pictures of piles of bodies. The reporter who did the most extensive investigation of My Lai was Seymour Hersh, the same man who wrote about Abu Ghraib for The New Yorker.
Despite clear evidence of mass murder, no one was punished. The man who commanded the company that carried out the massacre, Lt. William Calley, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Calley spent just three days in a military stockade before President Richard Nixon commuted the sentence to house arrest, partly due to pressure from conservatives. Three years later, Calley was released on full parole.
Lt. William L. Calley Jr., facing trial on murder charges in the deaths of 109 Vietnamese
civilians at the village of My Lai in March 1968, leaves the courtroom
at Ft. Benning after a hearing before military judge Lt.-Col. Reid W. Kennedy. (AP Photo)
|
Calley's immediate superior officer, Capt. Ernest Medina, also faced a court martial but was acquitted after in a vigorous defence by F. Lee Bailey in which key evidence was excluded and the trial judge gave the military jury a controversial narrow definition of command responsibility.
The brigade commander, Col. Oran Henderson, was acquitted by a court martial. A number of enlisted men in Calley's company also faced charges, but most were dismissed before trial. For those men who did face trial, again, charges were dismissed or there was no conviction. After an army investigation, 14 senior officers, including two generals, were charged with covering up the massacre. Again there were no convictions.
Another problem facing investigators and the army was that a U.S. Supreme Court decision forbade charging soldiers once they were discharged – and those soldiers were often advised by lawyers not to testify, even if granted immunity, because there was a possibility they could be charged with war crimes – although that never actually happened.
In words that are echoed by U.S. officials today when discussing Abu Ghraib, the U.S. secretary of the army at the time said the My Lai massacre was "wholly unrepresentative" of American national or military policy.
Although the strict liability standard was modified in Nuremberg soon after the Yamashita case, anti-war activists revived the concept during the debate over Vietnam, believing that some politicians, and senior U.S. commanders in Vietnam should have been held responsible for what happened.
The U.S. army successfully prosecuted others charged with misdeeds in Vietnam in cases with a much lower profile – but it is the My Lai debacle that tarnished not only the U.S. army but the American reputation for military justice and its standard for trying war crimes.
After Vietnam the U.S. military began a vigorous program to ensure that everyone from the top generals to the lowest private knew the basics of the laws of war. It appears that in the case of Abu Ghraib this system broke down due to the use of poorly trained reservists and private contractors.
NEXT: The privatization of war crimes
^TOP
|
|
 |
 MENU |
|
|
| EXTERNAL LINKS: |
|
|
| MORE: |
|
|
|
CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites. Links will open in new window.
