Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...After the My Lai revelations, ten liberal members of the House of Representatives jointly sponsored the Congressional Conference on War and National Responsibility, where a number of experts on a specially invited panel expounded on matters like the relevance of the Nurenberg war crimes trials to American conduct in Vietnam, the use of experimental weapons like herbicides in jungle warfare, and the dilemmas of individuals who opposed...
...groups of public officials we used to call hawks and doves will probably prove to be infinitely more durable than the "peace with honor" that Richard Nixon achieved in Paris shortly after the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi. A conspiracy of silence will rob the United States of its Vietnam heritage: the moral, legal and political questions that American involvement raised but never quite settled...
Most American public officials have never exhibited much willingness to discuss the subject of war crimes in Vietnam, either while the war was going on or now that it is over. But the war crimes issue was once a much-discussed one outside of the government establishment. During the spring and winter of 1967, for instance, the Bertrand Russell Foundation sponsored the first International War Crimes Tribunal, which gathered evidence of malfeasance in the American conduct of the Indochina war. Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre invited the American government to send representatives to state its case to the tribunal...
...early 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War began its Winter Soldier Investigations, an inquiry into American war crimes in Indochina. A VVAW panel took testimony from nearly 100 veterans of the U.S. war effort, and compiled an impressive record of military disregard for life and the rules...
...congressmen themselves were largely noncommital on these questions, but one, Henry S. Reuss (D-Wisc.), called for "the application of existing facets of the law of war to some of the hellishness that has been brought to our attention in Vietnam"--in effect, a call for some sort of war crimes proceedings. Since the war has ended, Reuss has remained silent on the subject of war crimes, and he will probably follow the lead of his colleagues on Capitol Hill in letting the matter rest...