The self-styled enemies of terror may yet turn out to be its friends

IT IS hard to understand how anybody in his or her right mind could ever try to justify what happened in Beslan last week.

Yet that is effectively what some of John Kerry's critics are trying to do in the United States.

On Wednesday, the Irish Examiner published a front-page photograph of 10-year-old Georgi Farniyev sitting with his hands behind his head while the terrorists videoed the scene.

It was hauntingly reminiscent of the photograph that I referred to last week of the fear on the face of the little girl in Son My moments before she was murdered as part of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968.

Was there really a difference in the conduct of the terrorists in Beslan and the American soldiers at My Lai? We don't know yet how many people died in Beslan, but we do know that at least 504 people, mostly women and children, were slaughtered at My Lai.

We also know that young Georgi survived with minor physical injuries, whereas the world was never told the names of the little girl or the small boy in the My Lai photograph, as they were 'wasted' by the American soldiers.

In an Irish context one might be tempted to compare the behaviour of those Americans to that of the Black and Tans here, but that would be absurd, because the Black and Tans did not target children. If they had, oh, how we would have heard about it!

People may be tempted to suggest that the behaviour of the Americans 36 years ago is of no more significance today than the behaviour of the Black and Tans more than 80 years ago. But the problem is that some of John Kerry's former naval compatriots are now denouncing him for betraying them because he highlighted American war crimes in his testimony before Congress in 1971.

Some Americans would like to think that My Lai was a once-off incident, but there were many such massacres. The big difference between them was that there was a photographer taking pictures at My Lai. The noted military authority Col David Hackworth (who is anything but a liberal critic of the US army) has written that there were "hundreds of My Lais". Swift boat people who served at the same time as Kerry have been denouncing him for betraying them by highlighting American war crimes in 1971. It is not as if no war crimes were committed by those serving on the Swift boats.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska was a Navy SEAL serving on a Swift boat during the Vietnam war in which he won the bronze star and the congressional medal of honour, the highest American award for gallantry.

He lost a leg in action and returned to the United States, where he joined the anti-war movement like John Kerry. Hence people have often confused the two of them. Bob Kerrey won the bronze star for supposedly killing some 20 Vietcong during an attack on two huts in Thanh Phong in the Mekong Delta on the night of February 25, 1969. It was his first mission. He and his six men actually killed one old man, six women and 14 children that night. At the first hut, they expected to find Vietcong but found three children ranging in ages from a baby to 12-years-old, along with their elderly grandparents. They killed the five of them with knives. They were ensuring that the baby or the others could not betray their presence in the village to the Vietcong. Bob Kerrey held down the grandfather, while Gerhard Klann slit the man's throat.

Kerrey said he remembered it differently that all five were adults.

But there was no dispute about the dead at the other hut. They were five women and 11 children.

It was a mistake of war, according to Kerrey. They fired on the hut from a hundred yards in the dark, thinking it was a Vietcong hideout. "The thing I will remember till the day I die is walking in and finding, I don't know, 14 or so women and children who were dead," he told a reporter when the story broke 30 years later.

"I have seared into my memory the sight of the dead women and children as we came upon them." He admitted that there was "no moral or military justifications for their deaths". Yet he reported at the time that they had killed Vietcong and, for this, he was awarded and accepted the bronze star.

Gerhard Klann who was not talking to undermine Kerrey but to unburden his conscience also remembered the attack on the second hut somewhat differently. He said that they actually ordered everybody out of the hut and told them to sit on the ground outside. They then shot them from no more than six feet. As sometimes happens in such massacres one witness survived.

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD Bui Thi Luom managed to slip back into the hut in the confusion. Before leaving, the Americans threw some kind of grenade into the hut and she still carries a scar on her knee, but she survived to tell essentially the same story as Klann. "I thought they would let us go after they saw we were only women and children," Luom said a few years ago. "But they shot at us like animals." Bob Kerrey failed in a bid for the Democratic nomination for president against Bill Clinton in 1992. He was planning to run again in 2000 when the story broke about what really happened at Thanh Phong.

He withdrew from the presidential race of 2000 and quit active politics the following year at the end of his term in the US senate. The Pentagon did not investigate Bob Kerrey's awards after he was accused of war crimes, but it has launched an investigation of John Kerry's awards.

In the process the Republican-controlled Pentagon is clearly dragging the Vietnam War into this year's presidential election campaign, but they are blaming Kerry for doing so because he told the Democratic convention that he was "reporting for duty". It is ironic that one of the TV ads is criticising Kerry over his testimony before Congress whereas Senator Joe McCarthy, the Republican whose name has become synonymous with excesses of the smear campaign of the 1950s, had celebrities jailed for refusing to testify before congress. John Kerry did the United States and humanity a service with his forthright testimony in 1971, and it will therefore be an outrage if his critics succeed with their smear campaign. It not only smacks of the excesses of McCarthyism; worse, it amounts to an endorsement of the kind of outrage that was witnessed in My Lai in 1968, or in Beslan last week.

Such behaviour is not peculiar to just some twisted Americans, or lunatic Muslim fundamentalists. We saw the same kind of thing in the Balkans in the 1990s. But now we have the perversion of an American candidate being denounced for criticising such behaviour.

What are these people really looking for the licence to fight terrorism with terrorism? If civilised society ever accepts that, then terrorism will be the only winner.