Dear all;
Further to our ongoing discussion about chemical weapons; I've found another interesting little article in today's paper - about (apparently) the US Army's use of nerve gas on defectors during the Vietnam war.(I'm not doing this solely because I have a grudge against the US, by the way, I'd be equally horrified if the British Government had done it in Malaya or Belize.)
--article follows--
US 'struck its Vietnam defectors with nerve gas'
(The Guardian, 8/6/98, Mark Tran)
United States special forces used sarin - the deadly nerve gas released in the Tokyo underground attack three years ago - to kill American defectors in the Vietnam war, CNN and Time Magazine reported last night.
The gas was released, the report says, during Operation Tailwind in September 1970, when Richard Nixon was in the White House. The mission involved 16 members of a secret unit - innocuously called the Studies and Observations Group (SOG) - and about 140 Montagnard mercenaries. They flew from Dak To, then in South Vietnam, 60 miles into Laos. Their objective was to kill a group of defectors spotted at a village.
The report is of more than historical interest. The US has never admitted using nerve gas in combat and, if it has resorted to chemical weapons, its moral authority would be severely undermined.
Earlier this year, the US was on the brink of bombing Iraq for its refusal to grant access to inspectors tracking Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. US officials regularly single out Iraq on the grounds that it is the only country to have used chemical weapons in battle.
Concerning the Vietnam claims, the former SOG commander John Singlaub told CNN: "It may be more important to your survival to kill the defector than to kill the Vietnamese or Russian." He added that defectors' knowledge of communications and tactics could be "damaging".
In Operation Tailwind, US planes bombed and strafed the camp where defectors were believed to be hiding and in the evening gassed it with lethal sarin contained in CBU-15 cluster bombs.
The SOG team went in the following morning, wiping out the camp. About 100 people were killed in 10 minutes, most of them civilians. The report does not explain why so many people were still alive in the camp after the use of sarin the evening before.
Lieutentant Robert Van Buskirk told CNN that he saw two Caucasians, one of whom slipped down a "spider hole" in an underground tunnel system and refused to come out. The lieutenant threw a white phosphorous grenade into the hole. The group believed at least a dozen Caucasians were killed in the raid.
US planes were called in to cover the getaway. Two Skyraiders dropped more nerve gas, this time on pursuing Vietnamese troops. Mike Hagen, a platoon sergeant on Tailwind, told CNN: "They had thrown up. They were in convulsions on the ground...Without the gas, we would never have made it out."
CNN and Time said their account of the incident emerged after eight months of reporting and interviews with 200 people,including Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Adm. Moorer said Nixon's national security team had to approve use of the gas and the CIA had partial responsibility for Tailwind. He confirmed that nerve gas was used, adding: "I would be willing to use any weapon and any tactic to save the lives of American soldiers."
But the Pentagon said in a statement that the army "has found no documentary evidence to support CNN's claims".
Melvin Laird, defence secretary at the time, is quoted as saying: "I do not dispute what Admiral Moorer has to say on this matter."
--end of article--
And this is the country that sees itself as the global policeman?
How many kids on the wall of D.C. were killed by the old men in D.C.?
Comments, folks?
Gideon.
(And as I said, I'd put this on the board just the same if it were the UK that had done it.)
