After 41 years of silence, the American officer responsible for the massacre of 500 men, women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai has finally offered an apology. Lt. William Calley, who led his unit in one of the most infamous of war crimes, told a meeting in Columbus, Georgia, that he was deeply sorry for what had happened but insisted he was only following orders.
This excuse, trotted out by Nazi war criminals before him, in no way exonerates Calley and members of the C-Charlie company he commanded from this dreadful deed. But it does reopen the question of whether the orders given Calley by his commanders for this “search and destroy” mission did include an instruction to massacre the luckless inhabitants of My Lai and torch their village. Calley first made these claims in his four-month military trial in 1971, at the end of which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. This sentence was later reduced by President Nixon to just three years house arrest. Amid the outrage at this change there was widespread suspicion that Calley had indeed been the scapegoat for senior commanders who had fully intended this young officer to make an example of a village that US intelligence knew to be supporting the Viet Cong fighters.
The same excuse, that they were acting under orders, was trotted out by the US military personnel accused of perpetrating the disgusting torture and humiliation of Abu Ghraib detainees. Eleven soldiers were convicted and the prison commander was demoted but the allegations that this behavior had been ordered by senior officers were never properly tested.
What is clear, however, that the Bush White House played word games with the legal concept of torture to allow the CIA to use methods such as waterboarding and mock executions to try and extract confessions from terrorist suspects. A CIA report due to be published in the coming days, after a freedom of information challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is expected to give extensive detail of abuses which it is clear were sanctioned at an extremely high level in the Bush administration.
My Lai, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and CIA’s extreme renditions and torture all run completely counter to the values of justice and humanity for which the US so often claims to stand. Thoughtful Americans argue that the fact that these atrocities have come to light and that some at least of the guilty have been punished, demonstrates that at base the US remains a just and civilized society. Unfortunately, this overlooks one important fact. Every war in which Americans have been involved in recent history has been fought in someone else’s country. Ordinary American soldiers typify the insularity of the wider US and the facile conviction that they are always the good guys. Thus when their hegemony is challenged by people from cultures they neither understand nor respect, the response is often extreme and brutal and the likes of My Lai and Abu Ghraib become almost inevitable. For such a multicultural country, American ignorance is often stunning.
