America’s home-grown terrorists haven’t gone away, you know

SEYMOUR HERSCH’S allegations that US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were behind the decision to abuse the Arab prisoners sexually so that they would talk must be taken seriously.

This is because Hersch has already established a reputation as possibly the greatest investigative journalist in America.

His first big scoop came in November 1969 when, as a 32-year old freelance journalist, he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the village of Son My, where over 500 Vietnamese civilians old men, women and children were murdered by American soldiers on March 16, 1968. What happened at Abu Ghraib prison has again raised the spectre of My Lai.

"I'm shocked," Secretary of State Colin Powell told Larry King on CNN. "I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai," he explained. "In war these sorts of horrible things happened every now and again, but they're still to be deplored."

Although Hersch broke the My Lai story, it was the subsequent publications of photographs taken during the massacre by army photographer Ron Haeberle that had the greatest impact. Those were splashed around the world.

He shot a sequence of three pictures of two little boys. In the first photograph they were walking down a grass pathway together. They looked about five and three years old. "When these two boys were shot at," Haeberle noted, "the older one fell on the little one, as if to protect him." That was the second picture.

"Then the guys finished them off," he added. The third picture was of the two little boys lying dead.

At one point as Haeberle focused his camera on another little boy about five feet away, American soldiers blew the boy away with their M-16s before he could snap the shutter. The force of the bullets' impact was such the boy's body was thrown backwards for several feet. He crumpled on the ground and died.

Jay Roberts, a journalist accompanying the photographer, angered some of the American soldiers when he witnessed them fondling the breasts of a teenage Vietnamese girl as they tried to strip her. Her mother rushed over to slap and scratch the soldiers manhandling her daughter. Haeberle came along with his camera, as they were about the shoot the mother, two daughters, an old man and three children. "I yelled, 'hold it,' and shot my picture," he recalled. "As I walked away, I heard M-16s open up. From the corner of my eye I saw bodies falling, but I didn't turn to look."

One American soldier fired two shots at a baby on the ground just in front of him with a .45 revolver but missed each time, much to the amusement of colleagues.

He then stepped over the baby and killed him or her with a third shot.

Lt William Calley ordered some of his men to force a large group of women and children into a drainage ditch. Calley then gave the order to slaughter them, and his men opened up with automatic weapons.

When the shooting stopped, a bloodied but unhurt two-year-old boy ran out of the ditch crying. He was heading toward the hamlet. "There's a kid," somebody shouted. Calley grabbed the child, threw him back in the ditch and shot him.

As the dead and dying lay in the bloody ditch, Calley sat down to eat a can of peaches just yards from the ditch. Disturbed by the moaning of the dying, he ordered a private to silence them by finishing them off. When the private refused, Calley threatened to finish him off, too.

"Well, I guess," the private exclaimed, pointing his gun at Calley, "we're both going to die then!" The brave Calley promptly backed off.

Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, who was providing cover in a helicopter, took some time to realise what was happening on the ground. Seeing a wounded woman on a roadway, he marked the spot with smoke and called for help on the ground. He watched in horror as Capt Ernest Medina walked up to the wounded woman and finished her off.

Seeing American troops heading in the direction of nine Vietnamese civilians who were cowering in a bunker near the drainage ditch, he landed his helicopter between the soldiers and civilians and warned off Calley, having ordered his gunners, Larry Colburn and Glen Andreotta, to fire on the soldiers if they tried to harm the civilians. He then called for another helicopter to airlift the civilians out while he provided cover as the other helicopter made two trips to ferry the nine people out.

AS they flew out over the irrigation ditch, Glenn Andreotta spotted a traumatised two- year-old boy clinging to his dead mother. They put down and rescued the boy.

Thompson, who had complained to his base by radio during the massacre, reported the killings to a colonel next day, but nothing happened, except that he and his crew were virtually ostracised. They were sent out on missions without covering helicopters. Less than a month later Andreotta was killed in action.

Sgt Michael Bernhardt had flatly refused to shoot civilians in My Lai.

"This is wrong," he kept shouting. That night Capt Medina warned him not to write to his congressman about what happened. For the next nine months Bernhardt was given one dangerous mission after another, but he survived to tell his story. After getting out of the army, Ron Ridenhour wrote to Congressman Mo Udall and 29 other officials in March 1969 with details of the My Lai massacre.

Udall pursued the matter. The day before Calley was due to get out of the army in September 1969, he was arrested, but nothing further happened until after Hersch broke the story in November.

Calley was charged with personally murdering 109 people, and he was convicted of killing 22 of them. He was sentenced to life in prison at hard labour.

Capt Medina was also charged with murder, but he was acquitted. Calley only served a couple of days in jail before he was released on the orders of President Richard Nixon.

Seymour Hersch went on to break major stories about the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), exposing its role in the coup d'etat that led to the overthrow and death of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Hersch also exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia, and the CIA's violation of its charter by engaging in domestic surveillance.

The CIA was clearly out of control. It was the extension of the illegal activity by former CIA operatives that led to Watergate and Nixon's resignation.

Largely as a result of Hersch's exposures, the US senate held special hearings in the 1970s into the activities of the CIA. What happened in My Lai was part of the CIA's Phoenix Programme.

Legislation was enacted to ensure that the excesses of the Phoenix Programme could never happen again, but Rumsfeld, who served in the Nixon administration, sought to circumvent that legislation to give more scope to the American intelligence community in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was supposedly done in the name of fighting terrorism.

The CIA could teach al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein about terrorism. Indeed, they probably did!