Sa Thi Quy was 43 years old on the morning of March 16, 1968, when Americans came to her hamlet near the coast of the South China Sea in what was then South Vietnam.
“The first time the Americans came, the children followed them. They gave the children sweets to eat. Then they smiled and left. We don’t know their language – they smiled and said OK and so we learned the word OK.”

“The second time they came, we poured them water to drink. They didn’t say anything.”

“The third time they killed everyone.”

The name of her hamlet was My Lai.

Dim memories of a horrific crime

If Americans remember that name at all, they most likely remember that something dark and awful happened there. They are probably fuzzy on the details. Maybe they remember some grainy color photographs of Vietnamese bodies piled in a ditch. Or a lieutenant named Calley.

But on this 50th anniversary of what happened in that Vietnamese hamlet, it is worth recalling the grotesque details, in the hope that doing so will help prevent a future My Lai.
It is still an unsettled question about what, exactly, the troops of the Americal Division were ordered to do and who, exactly, issued the orders. What is settled is that for four hours that morning, American young men went on a rampage of killing and rape.

When they finally broke for lunch, the Americans had butchered 504 Vietnamese old men, women, children and babies. No military-aged men were killed. Only one weapon belonging to the Vietnamese was found.

Sometimes, the soldiers shot Vietnamese one at a time. Sometimes they herded them into ditches and machine-gunned them down in groups.

Sometimes it seemed as if the Americans were making a sport out of it.

One soldier threw a wounded elderly man down a well then dropped a grenade in after him. A soldier bayoneted an old man to death.

Another soldier was armed with an M-79 grenade launcher. Other soldiers testified at Army hearings that the man was frustrated that he hadn’t been able to use his weapon, so he herded some women and children together, backed off and fired several explosive rounds into them. Other soldiers with pistols killed those who were only wounded.

In a better-disciplined outfit, the officers in the field would have stopped such violence.

But in this outfit, officers took part in the killing.

‘Blew her brains out’

According to testimony from his men, one company commander, Capt. Ernest Medina, shot and killed a wounded and helpless woman. Lt. William Calley grabbed one woman by the hair and blew her brains out with his .45-caliber pistol. Then he shot to death an infant she’d been carrying. In total, Calley is thought to have killed or ordered killed more than 100 civilians.

Lt. William S. Calley, shown on Nov. 21, 1969, with newsmen at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where he was charged with premeditated murder of approximately 100 Vietnamese civilians. AP

It is worth noting that the massacre may never have come to light if it weren’t for a soldier who was an aspiring journalist. Ronald Ridenhour served in the Americal Division in Vietnam at the time of the massacre but was not present at My Lai. Ridenhour got wind of it, interviewed men who had been there and wrote his findings in a letter to 30 members of Congress and the Pentagon.

As the story started to break – mostly due to the efforts of young investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – another soldier who had been in My Lai published the color photos that are the best documentation of the horror at My Lai.

I covered Vietnam for two years as a photojournalist and was in Vietnam when the My Lai story broke. I remember that I was stunned. I’d seen villages burned and Vietnamese pushed around, but nothing even approaching My Lai.

In the wake of all that bad publicity, the Army appointed a highly decorated and well regarded three-star general, Lt. Gen. William R. Peers, to investigate the cover-up. Over four months, he and his staff took sworn testimony from about 400 witnesses. The transcript runs to 20,000 pages.

Ten years ago a sharp producer in London, Celina Dunlop, found out that the testimony had been tape-recorded. I worked on a two-part BBC radio documentary about My Lai, using those tapes. It was the first time I’d heard the voices of the men who took part, describing what they had done and seen.

Their voices haunt me. I used voices to write a play about the massacre – called simply enough, “My Lai” – and in doing so, read all 20,000 pages of their testimony. No writer could do better than their simple, direct description of the horror they let loose on that village.

One soldier, Dennis Bunning of Raymond, California, testified that a sergeant “took one girl there, and drug her into a compartment, like in a hootch there, you know, and hootches don’t have doors or nothing, and you could see, and he raped one girl inside there. And then there was three other guys and one girl all at one time. … A guy would just grab one of the girls there and in one or two incidents they shot the girls when they got done.”

Pham Thi Tuan, who lived in My Lai, told a documentary filmmaker, “Over there a naked woman who had been raped and a virgin girl with her vagina slit open. We don’t know why they behaved liked that.”

Heroes amid the carnage

There were really only three Americans who behaved heroically that day. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson was flying a small scout helicopter with two crewmen, Glenn Andreotti and Lawrence Colburn. They witnessed the massacre from above. When they saw American troops advancing toward a group of old men, women and children, Thompson landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the civilians and ordered his crewmen to shoot the Americans if they opened fire on the civilians. He called other choppers to evacuate the civilians. For that, Thompson was shunned by fellow officers for years afterward.

What isn’t usually written about at My Lai are the rapes.

While the exact number may never be known, the Americans raped at least several dozen women and girls, some as young as 12. And then murdered and mutilated many of them.

One soldier, Dennis Bunning of Raymond, California, testified that a sergeant “took one girl there, and drug her into a compartment, like in a hootch there, you know, and hootches don’t have doors or nothing, and you could see, and he raped one girl inside there. And then there was three other guys and one girl all at one time. … A guy would just grab one of the girls there and in one or two incidents they shot the girls when they got done.”

Pham Thi Tuan, who lived in My Lai, told a documentary filmmaker, “Over there a naked woman who had been raped and a virgin girl with her vagina slit open. We don’t know why they behaved liked that.”

‘Failure of leadership’

And that, finally, is the question that is most vexing.

How could American boys behave like that? How could they behave like Nazi and Japanese soldiers in World War II?

One excuse frequently offered is that the unit had been hard hit and was in some sort of shock. In fact, the unit had only been in Vietnam for three months and had never been in a firefight. Before My Lai, only five men from the unit had been killed, all by mines or snipers, at a time when Americans were losing 15-20 men per day.

Another excuse is that the men were subpar, draftees, the bottom of a rapidly emptying barrel. But that’s not true either, according to an Army investigation. By every measure – intelligence, education, physical fitness – they were typical of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who never engaged in such behavior.

In the end, Peers, who headed the investigation, concluded that the massacre was a failure of leadership, from the commanding general on down. He concluded that 28 officers and enlisted men had committed war crimes – murder and rape – or conspired to cover up the crimes.

But in the end, only 14 officers were charged. And only Calley was convicted. President Richard Nixon, bowing to public pressure from those who believed Calley was a scapegoat, commuted his life sentence. He spent three and half years confined, most of that time under house arrest.

Nixon wouldn’t even allow Peers to call it a massacre. The massacre became, instead, “a tragedy of major proportions.”

The darkest side of American exceptionalism is the belief that somehow we are more moral than others and that our troops would never slaughter innocents civilians. Americans need to understand that in every war in the history of humankind, soldiers commit hideous acts. Even our troops. It is inevitable.

Americans need to be prepared to share the moral responsibility for those crimes when we send our young men and women off to fight wars on our behalf.

This article has been updated to correct producer Celina Dunlop’s name and work title.

This article was first published on The Conversation. Read the original.

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Leon Thomas – from his debut album ‘Spirits Known and Unknown’. Discogs
 

Black Americans were calling for freedom, and jazz expressed it better than mere words.

This trend continued and intensified over the following decades, especially in free and spiritual jazz. These sub-genres represented an angrier battle for political freedom.
 

Profoundly beautiful

In 1969 avant garde jazz vocalist Leon Thomas, with spiritual jazz giant Pharoah Sanders, composed “Malcolm’s gone”. It’s a profoundly beautiful tribute to American civil rights activist and revolutionary, Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965.

Leon Thomas’s ‘Malcolm’s gone’.

The song appears on Thomas’s debut solo album, “Spirits Known and Unknown”. It features Sanders (on tenor sax) and other free jazz luminaries like Cecil McBee (bass), Lonnie Liston Smith (keyboards) and Roy Haynes (drums).

Thomas is often a forgotten figure in popular music. He’s best known for his unique jazz vocal style that is characterised by the experimental use of yodelling and scatting, along with his own beautiful natural voice.

The singer, who died in 1999, is mostly remembered for his contributions to the recordings of jazz and rock heavyweights such as Randy Weston, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Oliver Nelson and Carlos Santana. That is despite the gravity of Thomas’s own solo work and his contribution to jazz, especially in the area of vocalisation.
 

Seconds of silence

Thomas’s opening line, to the mostly instrumental “Malcolm’s gone”, is simply the utterance “Malik El-Shabazz”, X’s assumed Muslim name at the time of his death. It’s then followed by a few seconds of silence before the band starts playing a deeply melancholic melody. The melody is the sonic equivalent of the emotions that one feels upon hearing of the passing of a loved one.

Thomas rejoins the melody about two minutes later with the line:
 

I know he’s gone… but he’s not forgotten.
I know he died just to set me free… yes Malcolm’s gone, but he’s not forgotten, he died just to save me, give me back dignity.

Thomas then explodes into a yodel. His gloomy wail is set to a striking cacophony of beautifully layered rhythms and melodies. The song then transcends into what resembles a spiritual jazz version of a Pentecostal funeral service. It ends with the ululating congregation honouring the late Malcolm X by clapping in unison.

The song invokes the imagery of masses of mourning people at a funeral. At the same time it creates an atmosphere of jubilation reminiscent of a congregation experiencing glossolalia and spirit possession collectively.

Sonically it draws on various black spiritual traditions to express, in sound, the emotion of losing a well loved and respected member of the Ummah, or the Muslim community. The lyrics clearly draw parallels between X and Jesus Christ, which some may regard as the ultimate tribute, or perhaps a very strong political statement given the sociopolitical climate of the USA during that period.
 

A volatile period

The late 1960s, the period when Thomas released the song, was a very volatile period for African Americans. It marked the end of the relatively nonviolent American civil rights era, and the beginnings of the militant Black Power movement.

Many black people at the time felt that the passive resistance of the civil rights era was no longer a viable option in their quest for equality. Cue an ideological shift toward the black nationalist, Pan-Africanist and socialist ideologies offered by the Black Power movements, hellbent on protecting themselves by all means necessary against an oppressive state.

It was also when many influential and leading figures were either silenced, imprisoned or assassinated. The situation was further exacerbated by the Vietnam War and the Nixon-era conservative politics.

“Malcolm’s gone” is not only a song that pays tribute to one of the most influential black freedom fighters to walk this planet (which in itself is a revolutionary act). It’s a song that dares to liken him to the very same deity that racist nationalist white America prayed to at night, Jesus Christ. This was a very provocative act given America’s Christian foundations, and the fact that Malcolm X, a black Muslim, was perceived to be an enemy of the state.

With minimal lyrics and a robust otherworldly feel the song is able to capture the pain and optimism of black America in a time of great adversity. At the same time it consolidates ideas of civil rights pacifism (through the imagery of Christ) and Black power militancy (in the form of crashing instruments and wailing). It is a profound expression of the black condition of the time, and a deeply dignified tribute to a fallen soldier.

Protest music has made a serious comeback over the past five years. This article is the second in a series featuring Songs of Protest from across the world, genres and generations.
 

Michael Shakib Bhatch, Lecturer of English. PhD Candidate in Afrofuturism and African Studies, University of the Western Cape
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Ali was shaped by his times. But his death should remind us that he also shaped them.

The reverberations. Not the rumbles, the reverberations. The death of Muhammad Ali will undoubtedly move people’s minds to his epic boxing matches against Joe Frazier and George Foreman, or there will be retrospectives about his epic “rumbles” against racism and war. But it’s the reverberations that we have to understand in order to see Muhammad Ali as what he remains: the most important athlete to ever live. It’s the reverberations that are our best defense against real-time efforts to pull out his political teeth and turn him into a harmless icon suitable for mass consumption.

When Dr. Martin Luther King came out against the war in Vietnam in 1967, to justify his new stand, he said publicly, “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all—black and brown and poor—victims of the same system of oppression.” When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, he said that Muhammad Ali gave him hope that the walls would some day come tumbling down.

When Dr. Martin Luther King came out against the war in Vietnam in 1967, he was criticized by the mainstream press and his own advisors who told him to not focus on “foreign” policy. But Dr. King forged ahead and to justify his new stand, said publicly, “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all—black and brown and poor—victims of the same system of oppression.”

When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, he said that Muhammad Ali gave him hope that the walls would some day come tumbling down.

When John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists on the medal stand in Mexico City, one of their demands was to “Restore Muhammad Ali’s title.” They called Ali “the warrior-saint of the Black Athlete’s Revolt.”

When Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers in Lowndes County, Alabama launched an independent political party in 1965, their new group was the first to use the symbol of a black panther. Beneath the jungle cat’s black silhouette was a slogan straight from the champ: “WE Are the Greatest.”

When Billie Jean King was aiming to win equal rights for women in sports, Muhammad Ali would say to her, “Billie Jean King! YOU ARE THE QUEEN!” She said that this made her feel brave in her own skin.

The question is why? Why was he able to create this kind of radical ripple? The short answer is that he stood up to the United States government… and emerged victorious. But it’s also more complicated that that.

What Muhammad Ali did—in a culture that worships sports and violence as well as a culture that idolizes black athletes while criminalizing black skin—was redefine what it meant to be tough and collectivize the very idea of courage. Through the Champ’s words on the streets and deeds in the ring, bravery was not only standing up to Sonny Liston. It was speaking truth to power, no matter the cost. He was a boxer whose very presence and persona taught a simple and dangerous lesson: “real men” fight for peace and “real women” raise their voices and join the fray. Or as Bryant Gumbel said years ago, “Muhammad Ali refused to be afraid. And being that way, he gave other people courage.”

My favorite Ali line is not him saying, “I hospitalized a rock. I beat up a brick. I’m so bad I make medicine sick” or anything of the sort. It was when he was suspended from boxing for refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War. Ali was attending a rally for fair housing in his hometown of Louisville when he said:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

Damn. This is not only an assertion of black power, but a statement of international solidarity: of oppressed people coming together in an act of global resistance. It was a statement that connected wars abroad with attacks on the black, brown and poor at home, and it was said from the most hyper exalted platform our society offered at the time: the platform of being the Champ. These views did not only earn him the hatred of the mainstream press and the right wing of this country. It also made him a target of liberals in the media as well as the mainstream civil rights movement, who did not like Ali for his membership in the Nation of Islam and opposition to what was President Lyndon Johnson’s war.

But for an emerging movement that was demanding an end to racism by any means necessary and a very young, emerging anti-war struggle, he was a transformative figure. In the mid-1960s, the anti-war and anti-racist movements were on parallel tracks. Then you had the heavyweight champ with one foot in each. Or as poet Sonia Sanchez put it with aching beauty, “It’s hard now to relay the emotion of that time. This was still a time when hardly any well-known people were resisting the draft. It was a war that was disproportionately killing young Black brothers and here was this beautiful, funny poetical young man standing up and saying no! Imagine it for a moment! The heavyweight champion, a magical man, taking his fight out of the ring and into the arena of politics and standing firm. The message was sent.” We are still attempting to hear the full message that Muhammad Ali was attempting to relay: a message about the need to fight for peace.

Full articles can and should be written about his complexities: his fallout with Malcolm X, his depoliticization in the 1970s, the ways that warmongers attempted to use him like a prop as he suffered in failing health. But the most important part of his legacy is that time in the 1960s when he refused to be afraid. As he said years later, “Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free.” Not the fight, the reverberations. They are still being felt by a new generation of people. They ensure that the Champ’s name will outlive us all.

Bill Russell said it best in 1967. “I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. I’m worried about the rest of us.” That is more true than ever.

Courtesy:The Nation.
 

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We are veterans of the United States armed forces. We stand with the majority of humanity, includ- ing millions in our own country, in opposition to the United States’ all-out war on Iraq. We span many wars and eras, have many political views and we all agree that this war is wrong. Many of us believed serving in the military was our duty, and our job was to defend this country. Our experiences in the military caused us to question much of what we were taught. Now we see our REAL duty is to encourage you as members of the US armed forces to find out what you are being sent to fight and die for and what the consequences of your actions will be for humanity. We call upon you, the active duty and reservists, to follow your conscience and do the right thing.

In the last Gulf War, as troops, we were ordered to murder from a safe distance. We destroyed much of Iraq from the air, killing hundreds of thousands, including civilians. We remember the road to Basra—the Highway of Death—where we were ordered to kill fleeing Iraqis. We bulldozed trenches, burying people alive. The use of depleted uranium weapons left the battlefields radioactive. Massive use of pesticides, experimental drugs, burning chemical weapons depots and oil fires combined to create a toxic cocktail affecting both the Iraqi people and Gulf War veterans today. One in four Gulf War veterans is disabled.

During the Vietnam War we were ordered to destroy Vietnam from the air and on the ground. At My Lai we massacred over 500 women, children and old men. This was not an aberration, it’s how we fought the war. We used Agent Orange on the enemy and then experienced first hand its effects. We know what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder looks, feels and tastes like because the ghosts of over two million men, women and children still haunt our dreams. More of us took our own lives after returning home than died in battle.

If you choose to participate in the invasion of Iraq you will be part of an occupying army. Do you know what it is like to look into the eyes of a people that hate you to your core? You should think about what your "mission" really is. You are being sent to invade and occupy a people who, like you and me, are only trying to live their lives and raise their kids. They pose no threat to the United States even though they have a brutal dictator as their leader. Who is the US to tell the Iraqi people how to run their country when many in the US don’t even believe their own President was legally elected?

Saddam is being vilified for gassing his own people and trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. However, when Saddam committed his worst crimes the US was supporting him. This support included providing the means to produce chemical and biological weapons. Contrast this with the horrendous results of the US-led economic sanctions. More than a million Iraqis, mainly children and infants, have died because of these sanctions. After having destroyed the entire infrastructure of their country including hospitals, electricity generators, and water treatment plants, the US then, with the sanctions, stopped the import of goods, medicines, parts, and chemicals necessary to restore even the most basic necessities of life.

There is no honour in murder. This war is murder by another name. When, in an unjust war, an errant bomb dropped kills a mother and her child it is not "collateral damage," it is murder. When, in an unjust war, a child dies of dysentery because a bomb damaged a sewage treatment plant, it is not "destroying enemy infrastructure," it is murder. When, in an unjust war, a father dies of a heart attack because a bomb disrupted the phone lines so he could not call an ambulance, it is not "neutralising command and control facilities," it is murder. When, in an unjust war, a thousand poor farmer conscripts die in a trench defending a town they have lived in their whole lives, it is not victory, it is murder.

There will be veterans leading protests against this war on Iraq and your participation in it. During the Vietnam War, thousands in Vietnam and in the U.S. refused to follow orders. Many resisted and rebelled. Many became conscientious objectors and others went to prison rather than bear arms against the so-called enemy. During the last Gulf War many GIs resisted in various ways and for many different reasons. Many of us came out of these wars and joined with the anti-war movement. If the people of the world are ever to be free, there must come a time when being a citizen of the world takes precedence over being the soldier of a nation. Now is that time. When orders come to ship out, your response will profoundly impact the lives of millions of people in the Middle East and here at home. Your response will help set the course of our future. You will have choices all along the way. Your commanders want you to obey. We urge you to think. We urge you to make your choices based on your conscience. If you choose to resist, we will support you and stand with you because we have come to understand that our REAL duty is to the people of the world and to our common future.

SIGNERS, name, branch, years; Updated February 1, 2003.

Terry Scott Adams, Army, 1964-1966
Kelly A. Allison, Navy, 1975-1979
Arvid Antonson, Air Force, 1942 – 1945
Ed Armas, Army, 1962-1965
Beatrice Arva, Army, 1985-1986, 1991-1993
Stephanie R. Atkinson, Army, 1984-1990
Paul L. Atwood, Marine Corps, 1965-1966
Niall Aslen, Royal Air Force, 1962-1986
and 400 others.
(www.calltoconscience.net)

Remember Nuremberg

Veterans For Peace has sent an open letter to fifteen generals and admirals in the top ranks of the US military advising them of their possible liabilities, under international law, to criminal prosecution for being part of a pre-emptive war against Iraq. Veterans For Peace, headquartered in St. Louis, MO, is an organisation of men and women who have served in peacetime and in most of the wars of the last century, with 92 chapters nationwide.

Open letter to America’s top military commanders:

General Richard B. Myers, Chairman, USAF;
General Peter Pace, Vice Chairman, USMC
Admiral Vern Clark, Chief of Naval Operations
General Michael W. Hagee, Commandant USMC
General John P. Jumper, Chief of Staff, USAF
General Erick Shineski, Chief of Staff, USA
United States Unified Combatant Commanders:
General James L. Jones, USMC, US European Command, Admiral Thomas B. Fargo, USN, US Pacific Command, Admiral E.P. Giambastiani, USN, US Joint Forces Command, General James T. Hill. USA, U Southern Command, General Tommy R. Franks, USA, US Central Command, General Ralph E. Eberhart, USAF, US Northern Command,
General Charles R. Holland, USAF, US Special Operations Command, General John W. Handy, USAF, US Transportation Command, Admiral James O. Ellis, Jr., USN, US Strategic Command,

February 13, 2003

Dear Gentlemen,

Veterans For Peace is an organisation whose members have served with honour in the armed forces of the United States of America. Among our members we count decorated veterans of WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Many served during two, and in several instances, three of these wars. Two of our members are recipients of the Medal of Honor, dozens received Silver and Bronze Stars for valour in combat, and hundreds were awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received in action. One of our members was a POW for over seven years in the Hanoi Hilton.

We learned the horrors of war through our military experience and we want the killing stopped. We believe it is not just enough to be against war, we must also work against war and that is the purpose of our organisation.

We, like you, know the world is a dangerous place and that our military forces are necessary for our defence. We realise that you too have seen and do not want war. War must only be the option of last resort.

We believe the war against Iraq that the US government is planning and preparing for is in violation of the Charter of the United Nations and customary international law. The judgement of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg noted, "Resort to war of aggression is not merely illegal, but is criminal."

The principle of renunciation of the use or threat of force is now one of the fundamental principles of international law and, as such, is stated with the utmost clarity in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which imposes definite obligations on states participating in international affairs. States are bound in their international relations to renounce "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the UN".

The US seeks to justify a pre-emptive strike on Iraq on the basis of self-defence. Article 51 of the UN Charter permits the use of force by a state to repel an armed attack or a substantial and immediate threat to the national security of the state until the Security Council exercises jurisdiction. A threat which permits the use of force must be an immediate, specific threat to US national security and not a general threat to the Gulf region or a possible future threat. The legality of pre-emptive self-defence has been rejected on the basis that use of force to deter future use of force constitutes punitive rather than defensive action. If the US fails to gain Security Council approval for war, the US is bound by Article 51 and may not lawfully, unilaterally take military action.

It is clear that the planned massive attack on Iraq is not based upon self-defence. Iraq has not attacked the US nor does Iraq constitute an immediate and specific threat to US national security. We are not apologists for Saddam Hussein but we believe there are ways to deal with his regime without the resort to a war of aggression. Other countries and many Americans have suggested reasonable and safe alternatives.

We members of VFP remember well our military service. We swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We were informed of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the conviction and punishment of soldiers for following illegal orders. We were taught that we must not follow an illegal order. US military leadership must not only know and teach the obligations of international law but must respect and follow them.

You are in high military positions and you have awesome responsibilities under our Constitution and international law. We believe you are honourable men. We respectfully urge that you do the right thing in this terribly difficult situation. Clearly your duty is to not engage in the political leaderships’ illegal war. Many veterans will support you if you refuse to participate in an illegal war and we believe that you can successfully use your high positions to warn the American people and you will be supported.

If you fail your sworn duty to the Constitution and international law by engaging in an illegal war against Iraq, we fear the US will become a rogue nation that will believe in and act on the principle that might is right to the great dishonour of all our professed values and to the great discredit of all who served in the armed services of the US so that their children and future generations could live in peace and freedom.

With great urgency,

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 6

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