Would this sort launch a virus campaign from within our governments to drive us to our last extremity? The virus campaign came for me Spring/2020 with my own personal neighborhood cheerleader who was making noise outside my house for 2 months straight at 7 p.m. and he fled his own house when I let him know he was looking to me and others like a 911 criminal.
This is my case against my hidden harassers who all behave in the same manner as if they are working together towards the same goals. Christopher Hitchens, through this book, is showing that the hidden harasser shoe fits perfectly on Henry Kissinger. I’ve also shown it fits on the Mossad as well.
For Henry Kissinger, no great believer in the boastful claims of the war-makers in the first place, a special degree of responsibility attaches.
Not only did he have good reason to know that field commanders were exaggerating successes and claiming all dead bodies as enemy soldiers-a commonplace piece of knowledge after the spring of 1968–but he also knew that the issue of the war had been settled politically and diplomatically, for all intents and purposes, before he became National Security Advisor.
Thus he had to know that every additional casualty, on either side, was not just a death but an avoidable death. And with this knowledge, and with a strong sense of the domestic and personal political profit, he urged the expansion of the war into two neutral countries-violating international law-while persisting in a breathtakingly high level of attrition in Vietnam itself.
From a huge range of possible examples, I have chosen cases which involve Kissinger directly and in which I have myself been able to interview surviving witnesses.
The first, as foreshadowed above, is Operation Speedy Express. My friend and colleague Kevin Buckley, then a much-admired correspondent and Saigon bureau chief for Newsweek, became interested in the "pacification" campaign which bore this breezy code name.
Designed in the closing days of the Johnson-Humphrey administration, it was put into full effect in the first six months of 1969, when Henry Kissinger had assumed much authority over the conduct of the war.
The objective was the disciplining, on behalf of the Thieu government, of the turbulent Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa. On 22 January 1968, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had told the Senate that “no regular North Vietnamese units" were deployed in the Mekong Delta, and no military intelligence documents have surfaced to undermine his claim, so that the cleansing of the area cannot be understood as part of the general argument about resisting Hanoi's unsleeping will to conquest.
The announced purpose of the Ninth Division's sweep, indeed, was to redeem many thousands of villagers from political control by the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC).
As Buckley found, and as his magazine Newsweek partially disclosed at the rather late date of 19 June 1972: All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians-perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official-were killed by US firepower to "pacify" Kien Hoa.
All together. One time when I was working at a celebrity photography event, Patrick McMullen physically blocked me and my camera and I had to shoot from the floor. I’m not surprised his name is on so many of these sort of photos. That was one of my first jobs of this sort and I was shocked that a famous photographer would behave like that. No one seemed surprised in the least at his behavior. That’s when I realized the celebrity atmosphere was some sort of parallel reality.
The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison. The Ninth Division put all it had into the operation. Eight thousand infantrymen scoured the heavily populated countryside, but contact with the elusive enemy was rare.
Thus, in its pursuit of pacification, the division relied heavily on its 50 artillery pieces, 50 helicopters (many armed with rockets and mini-guns) and the deadly support lent by the Air Force.
There were 3,381 tactical air strikes by fighter bombers during "Speedy Express."... "Death is our business and busi- ness is good," was the slogan painted on one helicopter unit's quarters during the operation. And so it was.
Cumulative statistics for "Speedy Express" show that 10,899 “enemy" were killed. In the month of March alone, "over 3,000 enemy troops were killed... which is the largest monthly total for any American division in the Vietnam War," said the division's official magazine.
When asked to account for the enormous body counts, a division senior officer explained that helicopter gun crews often caught unarmed “enemy" in open fields.... There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cong were well armed.
Simple civilians were, of course, not armed. And the enormous discrepancy between the body count (11,000) and the number of captured weapons (748) is hard to explain-except by the conclusion that many victims were unarmed innocent civilians...
The people who still live in pacified Kien Hoa all have vivid recollections of the devastation that American fire-power brought to their lives in early 1969.
Virtually every person to whom I spoke had suffered in some way. "There were 5,000 people in our village before 1969, but there were none in 1970," one village elder told me.
“The Americans destroyed every house with artillery, air strikes, or by burning them down with cigarette lighters. About 100 people were killed by bombing, others were wounded and others became refugees. Many were children killed by concussion from the bombs which their small bodies could not withstand, even if they were hiding underground."
Other officials, including the village police chief, corroborated the man's testimony. I could not, of course, reach every village. But in each of the many places where I went, the testimony was the same: 100 killed here, 200 killed there. Other notes by Buckley and his friend and collaborator Alex Shimkin (a worker for International Voluntary Services who was later killed in the war) discovered the same telltale evidence in hospital statistics.
How they sell real life horror to us.
As if it’s okay WHEN IT’S NOT.
In March 1969, the hospital at Ben Tre reported 343 patients injured by “friendly fire" and 25 by “the enemy," an astonishing statistic for a government facility to record in a guerrilla war where suspected membership of the Viet Cong could mean death.
And Buckley's own citation for his magazine-of "perhaps as many as 5,000 deaths" among civilians in this one sweep-is an almost deliberate understatement of what he was told by a United States official, who actually said that "at least 5,000" of the dead "were what we refer to as noncombatants": a not-too-exacting distinction, as we have already seen, and as was by then well understood. [italics mine]