Democracy Now! Daily Digest: A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González for Wednesday, March 25, 2015
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Fifty years after the U.S. ground invasion of Vietnam began, we look back at the 1968 My Lai massacre, when American troops killed hundreds of civilians. Journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the massacre and cover-up, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his work. But Hersh never actually went there — he interviewed soldiers stateside. Forty-seven years later, he recently traveled to My Lai for the first time, which he documents in a new article for The New Yorker, "The Scene of the Crime: A Reporter’s Journey to My Lai and the Secrets of the Past." Hersh joins us to discuss how he exposed the massacre nearly five decades ago and what it was like to visit My Lai for the first time.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Fifty years ago this month, 3,500 U.S. marines landed in South Vietnam, marking the start of the U.S. ground war in Vietnam. The date was Sunday, March 7, 1965, the same day Alabama state troopers beat back civil rights protesters in Selma. By 1968, the U.S. had half a million troops in Vietnam. The war continued until April 1975. Some scholars estimate as many as 3.8 million Vietnamese died during the war. Up to 800,000 perished in Cambodia, another one million in Laos. The U.S. death toll was 58,000.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the most horrific massacres of the Vietnam War took place in the village of My Lai. On March 16, 1968, an American contingent of about a hundred soldiers, known as Charlie Company, attacked a village of civilians. Women were raped. Houses were burned. Up to 500 villagers were murdered, most of them women, children and the elderly. The world did not find out about the massacre until November 1969. That’s when freelance journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story about the massacre and its cover-up after tracking down soldiers who took part. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his exposé. Seymour Hersh recently traveled to My Lai for the first time and writes about his trip in the new issue of The New Yorker. His piece is titled "The Scene of the Crime."
Seymour Hersh, welcome back to Democracy Now! What was it like to go to the place that has defined so much of your life, 47 years after the massacre?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, you can’t imagine. I mean, it’s a very—it’s not creepy. It was just inevitably moving. I fought it off. I’ve been—I only went, to be honest, because my family, my wife, my children, even my dog and my cat, I guess, and the gerbil, all wanted me to go and been nagging me for 20 or 30 years to go, to go see where it started. And so, I finally did go. I had been invited by the government officially years ago to come, but...
And it was hard. It was hard to see the ditch. It was hard to see how so many American boys could do so much and how it could be so thoroughly covered up by the government, not only up until the time I wrote about it, but even afterwards. There were investigations that couldn’t cope with the reality, which is—one of the realities, as you mentioned in your introduction, is, as you said, one of the massacres was, even on that day, the same unit, the same—it was a task force with three companies, Charlie Company, led by the infamous William Calley, who of course was one of six or seven officers on the ground, but he was the fall guy. They did the killing in My Lai. But less than a mile or two, maybe a mile and a half, away was another village called My Khe, where the same task force with a different company went in and executed 97 people. So, the Army, when it began to look seriously into what I had written about, discovered the second massacre, in their own interviewing, and, of course, just couldn’t cope with it. They simply buried that fact. So, My Lai, yes, it was terrible. It was much worse than other incidents. But incidents killing 60, 100, 120, there was just much too much of that during the war. Really bad leaderhip.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sy Hersh, the irony is that you were not one of the combat reporters in Vietnam at the time, yet you ended up breaking perhaps the biggest story of the Vietnam War. And you talk in your piece about how you initially found out about the massacre and how you began to track down the story. If you could talk about that?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it was one of those—if you remember, Richard Nixon came to office, defeated Humphrey in 1968. Humphrey would not go against the war, Lyndon Johnson’s war, his president’s war. He was the vice president. Nixon won by claiming he had a secret plan to end the war. And by the middle of 1969, or late 1969, it was clear his secret plan was to win it—not end it, but win it. And so, antiwar feelings were getting high. And I got a tip from—there were a lot of desertions, a lot of trouble inside the Army. Also, there were hearings and investigations, particularly one particular hearing in Detroit, Michigan, where a group of GIs, even a year earlier, 1968, had gone public with story after story of horrific incidents taking place. And I had read all those things. I was—you know, I guess I believe you can’t really write if you don’t read. And I knew how much there was an underbelly of very ugly stuff in that war that wasn’t being reported.
And so, when I got a tip in 1969, late 1969, I was a freelance writer. I had worked for the Associated Press, etc. And I had learned—I had covered the Pentagon for a few years and learned sort of OJT on how the war was being driven. Promotions in the war by 1966 and '67 were being driven by body count—how many could you kill? And inevitably, the officers and soldiers, eager to get more deaths, more killings, would stop differentiating in many areas, particularly the areas in Vietnam where My Lai took place—Quang Ngai, Quang Tri, Quang Nam—sort of areas known to be heavily engaged and committed to opposition to the South Vietnamese government. We called them Viet Cong. They weren't really—many of them were not communist, per se; they were nationalists against the war. But nonetheless, we carried the war—we were carrying the war very hard to them.
So I knew all that. So when I got a tip from a lawyer, named Geoffrey Cowan, at the time, he was just involved in antiwar issues, working in Washington, that he had heard something about a massacre, I went looking. And there’s—you know, I was a soldier, I was in the Army, and I covered the Pentagon. And there is an enormous streak of decency and goodwill among many officers. And I’ve always—I always say this about the American intelligence community, too. Don’t write them off. There’s a lot of people with a lot of high integrity. And there was one day—I got nowhere on this story. And one day I was in the Pentagon, rolling around, I guess; I was going through the legal offices. The fact that officers had been detained by the Army on the suspicion of mass murder was not part of the record. I actually had run across Lieutenant Calley’s name, but I was told he was a—he had shot up a bunch of prostitutes in a bar in Saigon or something like that. Whoever told me that, that’s what he believed, that’s what he was told. But it wasn’t true. I didn’t know that.
And anyway, I ran into a colonel I knew, I had known when I was in the Pentagon earlier, who had just been promoted to general. And he was limping. He had been shot in the war. And I just started talking with him about it, teased him a little bit about taking a bullet to make general. You know, the black humor always is very big in the military. And then I said, "What’s this about some guy shooting up a lot of people?" And the colonel, soon to be a general, slammed his hand against his wounded knee, the knee in which he had a bullet while in Vietnam, and he said to me, "Oh, Hersh," he said, "that guy Calley didn’t shoot anybody higher than that." And at that moment, at that moment, I knew I had a story, that there was something there, something big. So I just kept on going.
I eventually found the name of Lieutenant Calley’s lawyer. I eventually got to the lawyer. I eventually got to Calley. And it was interesting, because I had heard so much about Calley. And I had actually seen by then a charge sheet accusing him. The Pentagon had initially accused him of something like 109 or 111, the killing of—get this—Oriental human beings. That was the initial charge sheet, as if 10 whites equaled one Oriental, or 12 blacks equaled one—I wasn’t sure what the number was. But believe me, they got rid of that as soon as I went public with that word. They took it out of the charge. It was a very interesting sort of notion, the notion of racism that’s so dominant in that war, as it is in all wars, I guess. You have to dehumanize the other person.
And from there, I did see Calley. I expected to see, as I wrote—as The New Yorker said, I expected to see Satan, and instead I found this five-foot-six, obscure college dropout whose only job had been—the only thing I could find about him, he had been a switchman one summer while in school for a railroad—a small train company in Florida, and forgot to fill a switch, and there was a collision, and he got fired. That was it. But into the Army he goes, and becomes an officer, and wasn’t liked by his troops, but made up for his incompetence and other issues by being very aggressive with killing. And—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sy, you pieced together, though, the—not only did you talk to Calley, but you talked to Private First Class Paul Meadlo about his involvement in the My Lai massacre. In 1969, Meadlo agreed to talk to CBS’s Mike Wallace on national television about what happened that day.
PAUL MEADLO: Well, I might have killed about 10 or 15 of them.
MIKE WALLACE: Men, women and children?
PAUL MEADLO: Men, women and children.
MIKE WALLACE: And babies.
PAUL MEADLO: And babies.
MIKE WALLACE: Why did you do it?
PAUL MEADLO: Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it. Well, at the time, I felt like I was doing the right thing. I really did.
MIKE WALLACE: You’re married?
PAUL MEADLO: Right.
MIKE WALLACE: Children?
PAUL MEADLO: Two.
MIKE WALLACE: How can a father of two young children shoot babies?
PAUL MEADLO: I don’t know. It’s just one of them things.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Private First Class Paul Meadlo. But in your article, you talk about the enormous resentment and conflict that existed between Meadlo and Calley, who gave the orders.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, my god, yes. Paul Meadlo was interesting, because I had been on the story for weeks. I couldn’t get anybody to buy the story. It was just something that you just weren’t going to—no newspaper was going to do. I went—I had actually had a commission from Life magazine, and I was a freelance writer. And I had been in print with a lead article in The New York Times Magazine a couple of months—a couple weeks earlier even, so I wasn’t unknown in the press world. But nonetheless, nobody wanted to be the first to break that story, so we set up a little—I went to a little antiwar news agency called Dispatch News Service, and they handled the stories. And amazingly, they just—they took off. And I began to—as you said, I went from Calley—I wrote a story about Calley, and then I went and began to find people, kids who were involved, with the help of a wonderful soldier named Ronald Ridenhour, who’s now passed away, but Ridenhour was one of the few people who knew about My Lai and tried to do something about it.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back, we’re going to ask you, Sy, to tell us the story of this massacre and the cover-up—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: —from the day that Charlie Company went into My Lai. Seymour Hersh is the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New Yorker magazine. His piece is titled "The Scene of the Crime." Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Pinkville Helicopter," written and performed by Thom Parrott. Pinkville was the U.S. Army codeword for the village of My Lai. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Sy Hersh. Seymour Hersh is the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who wrote his piece for The New Yorker magazine called "The Scene of the Crime," returning to My Lai 47 years after the massacre took place. Sy Hersh, piece it together for us. Tell us the day Charlie Company moved into My Lai. And then what happened?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Boy, that’s the real thing. You know, what I did about the story, about what happened that day, the massacre, about which—you know, they just murdered everybody, a lot of rapes, terrible stuff. But then what I did is, because I was so aware of how much had been covered up and how deep it went—the institution—that I ended up writing—spending another year and a half seeing more people and writing a second book. I wrote a book called My Lai 4 right away, but a second book called Cover-up, because the institution was so corrupt.
At the time of the massacre, this was going to be a big operation, and everybody thought, boy, we’re going to get—there was very bad intelligence. The intelligence was a Viet Cong battalion was there, the 48th, I think, and our boys were going to go in and kill them, and there was going to be a big ambush. And, of course, when we went in, there was nothing but women and children. The intelligence was lousy, as it always was. And they murdered everybody. They had been told to kill everybody you see. God knows what the real reality was, whether that was actually what—what happened, they went out of control, as they had many times before.
But, what I learned was that this was the big deal for the whole division. Charlie Company was attached to a task force, that was attached to a battalion, that was attached to a division. You know, we’re talking about 20,000 men, led by a major general named Koster. And that day, Koster, his deputy, another general named Young, a colonel who was in charge of the regiment to which the task force was attached, a battalion—colonels, generals, lieutenant colonels, majors were flying above, and I can just tell you from what I know, you had to understand, when you saw that village, with pits full of bodies, you knew there was something horrible that happened. They all knew it. They all covered it up. Actually, what they did is they reported to headquarters that that day had produced a great victory, that they had killed 128 Viet Cong with only three weapons captured—I mean, which was a flag in itself.
And that story about the victory at Pinkville, which was pink being red for communists. The village was seen as a pro-communist—which it was—pro-Viet Cong. But there’s still—innocents are innocents, women and children. And in any case, that story about the massacre ended up on the front page of The New York Times, and the lead general of the war, General Westmoreland, sent a personal letter of commendation to General Koster, who by the time I was writing my stories was commandant of West Point, the great, elite military training institution, the college for young officers in New York. And so, it was just one huge, from the top to the bottom, cover-up. Westmoreland himself was very concerned about war crimes, about being responsible for war crimes. The whole thing was simply—even though they did look at My Lai, and they did an investigation, the Army set up an investigation—why Congress allowed the Army to do that, I don’t know. They did their own investigation, that seemed honorable. It looked very hard at My Lai, looked very hard at Calley. And it did punish some of the senior officers, including General Koster, with demotions and charges of dereliction of duty, but we’re talking about massive misprison of, what, 400 felonies?
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe what happened on March 16, 1968?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, sure. They went in in the morning, a group of boys—and you’ve got to give them credit. You know, they toked the night before, and they did their whiskey the night before. They had their—you know, their drugs. But that morning, they got up thinking they were going to be in combat against the Viet Cong. They were happy to do it. Charlie Company had lost 20 people through snipers, etc. They wanted payback. And they had been taking it out on the people, but they had never seen the enemy. They’d been in country, as I said, in Vietnam for three or four months without ever having a set piece war. That’s just the way it is in guerrilla warfare—which is why we shouldn’t do it, but that’s another story. And they went in that morning ready to kill and be killed on behalf of America, to their credit. They landed. There were just nothing but women and children doing the usual, as you said in your intro—cooking, warming up rice for breakfast—and they began to put them in ditches and start executing them.
Calley’s company—Calley had a platoon. There were three platoons that went in. They rounded up people and put them in a ditch. And Meadlo was ordered by Calley. He was among one or two or three boys who did a lot of shooting. There was a big distinction, basically, between the white boys, country boys like Paul Meadlo who did the shooting, and the African Americans and Hispanics, who made up about 40 percent of the company. In my interviews, I found that distinction. Most of the African Americans and Hispanics, that was Whitey’s war. The whole thing was Whitey’s war for them. And they did shoot, because they were afraid that their white colleagues might shoot at them if they weren’t participating, but they shot high. One guy even shot himself in the foot to get out of there. I mean, we had that going on, too, above and beyond the normal stuff.
The other companies just went along, didn’t gather people, just went from house to house and killed and raped and mutilated, and had just went on until everybody was either run away or killed. Four hundred and some-odd people in that village alone, of the 500 or 600 people who lived there, were murdered that day, all by noon, 1:00. At one point, one helicopter pilot, a wonderful man named Thompson, saw what was going on and actually landed his helicopter. He was a small combat—had two gunners. He just landed his small helicopter, and he ordered his gunners to train their weapons on Lieutenant Calley and other Americans. And Calley was in the process of—apparently going to throw hand grenades into a ditch where there were 10 or so Vietnamese civilians. And he put his guns on Calley and took the civilians, made a couple trips and took them out, flew them out to safety. He, of course, was immediately in trouble for doing that.
It was just the instinct to not do the right thing. You know, the thing that you discovered about Vietnam was, there was no such thing as a war crime. It just didn’t exist. The idea of a war crime didn’t exist. There were violations of rules and things you did wrong. And one of things that emerged in Vietnam—a defense to, let’s say, rape—would have been what they called the MGR, the Mere Gook Rule: It was just a gook. I’m not exaggerating. It was that terrible, that racist. You talk about number of deaths in Iraq, and the number is staggering, but we usually talk in Vietnam—we don’t get within—we talk—is it one or two or three million civilians and innocents killed between the North and the South?
Since the war ended—and this is something I discussed in the piece quite a—not a bit anyway—100,000 people had been killed in the North alone, what used to be North Vietnam, in areas around Hanoi and some of the areas in northern South Vietnam, Quang Nam again, Quang Tri. A hundred thousand farmers, and mostly children, more than 40 percent of them children, had been killed by unexploded ordnance, bombs, cluster bombs, that had been in the ground, that were triggered inadvertently by plowing or just kids playing around in a field. A hundred thousand since the war ended. The casualties—anyway, you get me going—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Sy, I wanted to—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sy, I wanted to ask you, as much as you have written about My Lai and the events of that period, when you returned on your trip, you learned even more. And you specifically spoke with Pham Thanh Cong, the director of the My Lai Museum, a survivor of the massacre. I want to turn to Cong in his own words when he spoke with Al Jazeera about what happened to him in the morning of that massacre.
PHAM THANH CONG: [translated] I survived. The corpses of my mother and youngest sisters and brothers covered my body. I was wounded, but at 4:00 p.m., I was rescued by other villagers.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you also, in your piece, talk about a returning soldier who had participated in the massacre and the encounter between him and Cong.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, one of the things that struck me was, the Vietnamese—as you know, Vietnam now has become a major tourist center for Americans. It is a beautiful country—Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh. It’s a beautiful country, very welcoming to Americans. They have a saying in Vietnam, you know, that the past is the past, we have to look forward. And as you know, Vietnam has been embroiled with wars with the Chinese and others for many—for a thousand years. So, another group of invaders come, and kill and be killed. But, of course, it isn’t that simple.
And of course the notion that survivors would always do interviews—and Cong often did, himself. By the way, there’s a marvelous picture of him. If you take a look at the photo in The New York Times, a photographer named Katie Orlinsky got a photograph of him, and in his face you can see it all in that photograph. You can see it all, all that pain. But in his conversation with this American soldier, named Schiel—soldiers were always welcome to come to the My Lai Museum. They get thousands of tourists a day. Many Americans do come when they’re in the country, to go see what happened and go to look at the photographs they have, and the graves and the site. And this particular soldier, Cong began to talk to, and he discovered that he had been actually at My Lai. His name was Schiel, from Michigan. Just another guy, wrong place, wrong time. And if it hadn’t been for the war, I’m sure he would have been fine, not going around killing people, as he ended up doing.
And so, Cong discovered he was somebody that had actually been there, the first time he had ever met somebody—he had been head of the museum for a couple of dozen years at the time. And he couldn’t get the soldier to acknowledge anything. He wouldn’t acknowledge shooting anybody. And Cong actually got mad. And he was talking to me about it, how mad he got, too. And, yes, we do, we do, we do turn the other hand, we learn to live with the past, but this case, he really wanted this young man to express some contrition, some sense of guilt, and not to say, "I don’t remember." And he got very angry. And I was happy to see it, in a way. It was a real thing. I’d been hearing so much in Vietnam—I had been there for a few weeks already. I was there two weeks on this trip. I had heard so much about this notion of turning the other cheek. You can’t really not live with something like that. It is in your face. It’s in the face of other survivors that one sees, too, from the village.
We just can’t—history—you know, things recede with history, but not for me, and not for many people in Vietnam. I understand that for the modern generation—you know, I remember growing up as a kid in the Second World War. The First World War was, you know, about fields of poppy and Ernest Hemingway and ambulances. So, we don’t really pay much attention to the history. But this history is pretty acute, because it does tell us about the present. We fought a war in a society where we didn’t understand the culture. We didn’t have any respect for the culture. We didn’t know the language. Our soldiers were trained incredibly poorly. The discipline was terrible. The lack of—the small-unit leadership was disgraceful. I think the Army came out of this war in terrible shape. I’d like to think it’s in better shape now. I don’t know. Many bad things still happen in the wars we’re in now in Afghanistan. As you know, I wrote about Abu Ghraib for The New Yorker a decade ago, and what happened there was very eerily similar—you know, the contempt for prisoners, the contempt for people whose societies we don’t understand.
And so, I’d like to think that, you know, just to take what I learned from Vietnam and put it into the modern context, we have been fighting the war on terror since 9/11, you know, 13, 14 years now, with drones and soldiers, and it’s only gotten worse. The fundamentalism and the hatred of America has gotten more acute. And maybe we ought to think that there’s other ways to conduct ourselves when we have opposition like we do in this case of religious opposition and opposition to our way of life and our notion of democracy. I’d really like to think that maybe we can learn something. Instead what we seem to be doing is spreading into the use of drones, so we have not even any direct responsibility, no soldiers engaging, no chance for a—you don’t have a Meadlo anymore, but you also don’t have any chance for collective guilt and collective understanding of what we do.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I wanted to go back to Paul Meadlo. If you could talk about what happened on March 16, 1968, between Lieutenant Calley, the other soldiers, and particularly Meadlo, as you describe so poignantly in the piece, standing at that ditch? Meadlo was actually playing with the children he would then gun down?
SEYMOUR HERSH: He and another soldier from Texas had been asked by Calley—they had no idea what Calley’s intent was. Paul Meadlo was a kid. You know, he had been married young. He was from New Goshen, Indiana, from a farm family. His father worked in the mines on the border with Illinois. And they were very close to the border in New Goshen, near Terre Haute. He was a farm kid, into the Army, trained to be a killer. His brother told me when I was doing interviews for this piece—I talked to his brother, Larry, who lives near him, and said Paul was the—he couldn’t skin an animal after shooting them when hunting. He didn’t like the sight of blood. The last person that should have been drafted, but he was drafted, and he went.
And that morning, Calley ordered Meadlo and others to collect a group of women and children. They had 40 or 50, perhaps more, some old men, mostly women and kids. And Paul and the other guys, Calley said to watch them. And so they did what kids, American guys, will do: They passed out candy. They were horsing around with the kids, playing with the kids. They told the people where to sit. And Calley came back and said, you know, in effect, "What are you doing?" He said, "I told you to take care of them." He said, "Well, I am." He said, "No, I want them killed."
And then Meadlo began following orders. He began crying. This is something I did not know until I revisited some of the investigations. I went and reread everything that the Army had done. I just had not read it all before. And I found other witnesses who testified at Army hearings. After my stories came out, there was a big investigation by a general named Peers. And there was another soldier, a New York kid. Naturally, a New York street kid wasn’t going to shoot, but he watched what happened. He testified about Meadlo beginning to cry. He didn’t want to do it, and Calley ordered him to. And he began to shoot and shoot. And they fired clips—I don’t know how many clips; he told me at one point five or six; he testified later about one, but he told me four, maybe five, clips—a clip in that rifle, an M1, has 17 bullets—into it, into the ditch.
And there was a horrible moment that got me, really got me. At some point, when they were done shooting, some mother had protected a baby underneath her body in the bottom of the ditch. And the GIs heard, as somebody said to me, a keening, a crying, whimpering noise, and a little two- or three-year-old boy crawled his way out full of other people’s blood from the ditch. It’s hard for me to talk about this. And right across what was—it’s now been plowed over, but it was a rice ditch. It’s now been paved over at the site. And I saw it all. I’d seen it in my mind, and I saw it visually that day I was there. And the kid was running away, and Calley went after it—Calley, big, tough guy with his rifle—and dragged him, grabbed him, dragged him back into the ditch and shot him. And that stuck in people’s minds.
That’s how I got to Calley. It was a repressed memory, what happened at that ditch. And as I was doing my interviews early in the story—I had written two stories for Dispatch. And the press, I will tell you, the American press, was—they were open to the story. They didn’t really get into it. They let me sort of run with it for weeks. It made me think, as I still do, that you can really do stuff if you want to do stuff. The American press, they may not be aggressive, but if you do stuff that they think is right, they will publish it. I’d like to think that’s still true. I mean, it happened in Abu Ghraib, and it happened in other stories I’ve written. There’s a lot of resistance to stories sometimes, but not in this case. It just seemed right. And anyway, soldiers had told me—finally, they told me about Paul Meadlo. And as I wrote in the piece, I was in Salt Lake City at the time I heard about him and what he did and what happened. I didn’t hear about crying, but I heard about his resistance and about the little boy. And I spent hours on a payphone. His name was M-E-A-D-L-O, and I knew he lived in Indiana. I called every major phone district, city, and got the chief operator and asked for Meadlo, finally found him.
And I asked—I got the house, and I called the house in New Goshen. And I asked—I knew he had had his—the next day, Paul Meadlo had had his leg blown off by stepping on a mine. And he kept on saying—as he was waiting for the helicopter to take him to a hospital, he kept on yelling at Calley, "God is punishing me! And God will get you, B! God will get you for this!" And they finally took him away. So, when I called his home, and I would ask—I got this woman, this old Southern voice, and I said, "Is Paul there?" And she said, "Yes," which was great. And I said, "How is his leg?" She says, "Well, you know, I don’t know." And I asked if I could see him. She said, "Yes. Ask him." She didn’t know. She didn’t know much about what happened. She knew something bad had happened. And I flew down there.
And I went—it took me a long time to get to New Goshen, Indiana. No GPS then. I mean, I flew across country all night, but I got there by afternoon to this little rinkety-dinkety farm full of—a farm with no man around, full of chickens, that were—chicken coops that were broken down. But she came out to meet me. And this is one of those moments you live for as a journalist, I guess. This woman, who really wasn’t really in the world, didn’t know much about what was going on. Paul hadn’t told her much. She came out to meet me, and I pulled in 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. And I said, "I’m the"—I told her I was a reporter, and I said, "I’ve come to see Paul. Is he in?" She said, "He’s in there." She said, "I don’t know if he’ll talk to you, but he’s in there. He knows you’re coming." And then she said to me, this old woman, she said, in this tone of a voice, "I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer." And you can go a long time in this business without having a line like that played in your head.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Seymour Hersh, and end with a quote from your trip when you interviewed Nguyen Thi Binh, who headed the National Liberation Front delegation at the Paris peace talks in 1970s. She said, quote, "I’ll be honest with you. My Lai became important in America only after it was reported by an American. I remember it well, because the antiwar movement in America grew because of it. But in Vietnam there was not only one My Lai—there were many."
Sy Hersh, thanks so much for spending this time with us, for doing the work that you did 47 years ago and all of the work that you’ve done since. And I look forward to reading your next article, as well. Seymour Hersh is the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New Yorker magazine. His piece is titled "The Scene of the Crime." He returned to My Lai 47 years after the My Lai massacre took place. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
The Obama administration continues to expand its controversial practice of detaining mothers and their children despite a judge’s order that using it to deter mass migration is illegal. Starting last summer, thousands of Central American women with kids as young as a few months old crossed into the United States seeking asylum. Even though many were later found to have a "credible fear" of violent persecution, they found themselves rounded up and put into detention, with little chance for freedom until they were deported. But last month, a federal judge ordered immigration authorities to begin releasing the women and children. He found the Obama administration’s policy of detaining them in order to deter others from coming was illegal. Since then, more families have been granted bond and released, while others who are unable to afford the bonds remain locked up. They are held at one of two new family detention centers run by private prison companies in southern Texas. We air an on-the-ground report from Texas by Democracy Now! producer Renée Feltz, who speaks to a recently released mother and her son. We are also joined by Barbara Hines, former director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School. Hines’ affidavit in a lawsuit challenging detention of women and children as a method of deterrence to mass migration was cited by the federal judge in his order to halt the practice.
Click here to watch Part 2 of this discussion.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show with an update on a story Democracy Now! has followed closely: President Obama’s expansion of the controversial practice of detaining mothers and their children. Starting last summer, thousands of Central American women with kids as young as a few months old crossed into the United States seeking asylum. Even though many were later found to have a credible fear of violent persecution, they found themselves rounded up and put into detention, with little chance for freedom until they were deported.
AMY GOODMAN: But last month a federal judge ordered immigration authorities to begin releasing the women and children. He found the Obama administration’s policy of detaining them in order to deter others from coming was illegal. Since then, more families have been granted bond and released, while others who are unable to afford the bonds remain locked up. They’re held at one of two new family detention centers run by private prison companies in South Texas. Democracy Now!’s Renée Feltz went there to find out more. She filed this report.
RENÉE FELTZ: My first stop in Texas is a small town called Dilley. An hour north of the Mexican border, just off Interstate 35, is a family detention center that opened in December. It was built on the site of a former man camp for oil field workers. I meet a resident who lives nearby and offers to show me around.
DILLEY RESIDENT: Here we are at the South Texas Family Residential Center. Pretty far out of sight. And out of sight, out of mind.
RENÉE FELTZ: We drive around a 50-acre site now run by Corrections Corporation of America. It’s filled with hundreds of mud-colored trailers. Each one can house eight people, or about three families. Much of the site is surrounded by a high fence. But peeking through it, I can see rows of trailers stretching into the distance. In one area, the top of a playground rises above the fence, and I can hear children’s voices. Much of the site is still under construction. Two large tents look like they’ve just been finished, each one big enough for hundreds of beds. When the facility is done, it will be able to hold 2,400 women and children. I asked my contact what Dilley residents think of it all.
DILLEY RESIDENT: What I’ve heard the most is, "Hey, they’re building a new detention facility over there. I’m going to ask them for a job." Or showing someone the headline in the local paper that came out the week that they announced this, and it said, "Feds OK internment camp at Dilley." And the sub-headline was: "Opportunities for job employment."
RENÉE FELTZ: In fact, this part of Texas is no stranger to the detention of families. In 1942, the nearby town of Crystal City was home to an internment camp for Japanese and German men, along with their wives and children.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: The filming of the Crystal City facility, which you are about to see, shows how men, women and children, detainees of World War II, lived, worked and played under traditional American standards of decent and humane treatment.
RENÉE FELTZ: Details from a 1946 government film about the Crystal City internment camp sound eerily similar to the present-day camp in Dilley about an hour away.
FILM NARRATOR: Originally, it was a migratory labor camp of approximately 100 housing units, utility and recreation buildings. To provide for a population of 3,600, we added more than 500 housing units. Plastic camp money was issued to them in accordance with the size and needs of the family. Here are some children at play under the direction of a detainee teacher.
RENÉE FELTZ: Most of the women and children interned in Crystal City were U.S. citizens. The government later apologized for their treatment. Today, the women and children detained in Dilley are immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. But their detention has drawn similar scrutiny. In February, a federal judge ordered immigration authorities to begin releasing the women and children. Since then, many judges have granted them bonds between $4,000 and $10,000. If the women and children can pay, they are released to live with relatives while they seek legal status. But some detainees can’t afford their bonds, and others are ineligible if they’ve been deported before. Still, while I’m at Dilley, I do see a group of newly freed detainees being loaded into a small white bus. One of my sources tells me they’ll be dropped off at the Greyhound bus station about an hour north in San Antonio. I decide to meet him there and find out.
And we’re here speaking with?
MOHAMMAD ABDOLLAHI: Mohammad Abdollahi. I’m with RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. We work in collaboration with the Interfaith Welcome Coalition. And each night we’re here at the Greyhound bus station in downtown San Antonio, where we have vanfuls of women that are usually brought from either of the family detention centers. And usually what unfolds is the women come in the facilities, and it’s very surprising for us, in that the women are usually released from detention in the same clothing that they were probably caught in in the summer.
RENÉE FELTZ: As I talked to Mohammad, a van stops by and drops off a group of five mothers and eight children. They had been held at the other family detention center in Karnes City. Most will travel for days to live with an approved family member or friend. But they have no money or supplies, so the Interfaith Welcoming Committee brings them backpacks full of donated food, toys and diapers. Volunteer Rebecca Ortiz lists the ages of the newly freed people she’s met.
REBECCA ORTIZ: As young as 10 months, two weeks, usually three and four, seven, 10. Just recently we’ve seen some teenagers. They’re dropped off here at the bus station. And we’re here to help them, because we know that they don’t understand English. We’re here to help translate their tickets, show them how to read the tickets, explain the journey. Sometimes we’ll have a map of the United States, because they have no idea that they’re in Texas, or they know they’re in Texas, but they don’t know how far it’s going to be when they travel to California or Florida or Massachusetts or New York, Montana, Wyoming. So we have the map, and we show them, "You’re here, and you’re going to travel through here, you know, until you reach your destination." And we may not have control over things our government does. We have no control over what a foreign government does. But when someone is standing in front of you, who needs help, we’re ready.
RENÉE FELTZ: As families wait to board their buses, I watch a volunteer give the kids stuffed animals she pulls from her purse. She’s been helping the women when they were detainees to connect with lawyers. She tells me about the ID cards issued to them inside.
JOHANA DE LEON: This is the ID for one of our clients that we had, Patricia—oh, I don’t want to say her name, but just Patricia. We represented her in a pro bono capacity. We helped her with her bond representation. She was there for three months, and after three months she got a $5,000 bond, that also, with the help of the Interfaith Welcome Coalition, we were able to raise money and pay that bond on behalf of her.
RENÉE FELTZ: So, you’re holding a card that belongs to Patricia. Can you describe what this is?
JOHANA DE LEON: Yes, this is the ID the women and the kids in detention have. Each woman and kid get assigned a card that—they can be used for buying food at the commissary. Also, they must show it to the guards when they get count, which is three times a day. And also, if the kids want to take out a toy from the room area, they have to leave their IDs, just in case they lose the toy.
RENÉE FELTZ: Most of the women I meet at the bus station are too tired and nervous to talk to me on camera just after their release. But the next day, one of them agrees to share her experience of being detained.
[speaking Spanish]
RENÉE FELTZ: Erika and her 17-year-old son, Christian, agree to do an interview at the shelter for newly freed immigrants where they spent the night.
ERIKA RODRIGUEZ: [translated] My name is Erika Rodriguez. I left El Salvador on January 13th, crossed the river on January 27. The 27th, I was in McAllen. Once there, the immigration agent took us into custody and drove us to what we call the ice box. We were there almost three days and then taken to a place called the doghouse, a warehouse with chain-link fence cages. After two days, they brought us to the detention center in Karnes City, where we had a medical checkup and they gave us food. They gave us five changes of clothes and a blanket. They told us we were going to remain as a family in our rooms, but then we were separated from our children, and my son was put with other teenagers. Only children under eight years old could remain with adults in our rooms.
CHRISTIAN RODRIGUEZ: [translated] My name is Christian Rodriguez. I am 17 years old. Sometimes I complain about the week that they locked me up in medical isolation, because it was very ugly to be there, because I could not go anywhere. I was sitting there by the window watching the nurses pass by.
ERIKA RODRIGUEZ: [translated] They just told us to gather all our stuff and go to the nursery. And once there, we were locked in a room for five days. We did not see daylight, dusk, anything, because it was all locked. After five days, five officers came, but they did not give us a reason. In the week of punishment, my son lost five pounds because he was not eating. They gave him three meals, but he was eating once a day at most.
RENÉE FELTZ: Why didn’t he want to eat?
CHRISTIAN RODRIGUEZ: [translated] Because I felt very sad to be there locked up. Because I had no friends, could not see anything. It was the same every day, and I had no desire to eat.
ERIKA RODRIGUEZ: [translated] Thank God I was there not more than a month and eight days. But it seems like it was for my entire life. It is something that has really left a mark in me.
RENÉE FELTZ: After I speak with Erika and her son, I meet Rosalinda Maldonado. She helps run the shelter that housed them the night before.
ROSALINDA MALDONADO: It’s inhumane what we’re doing with these families, you know. They are being terrorized.
RENÉE FELTZ: Rosalinda tries to stay in touch with the women who pass through the house after being released from detention. She worries that some had their bonds paid for by traffickers. But she says even those who are reunited with family face trauma from their detention ordeal.
ROSALINDA MALDONADO: I feel like when they’re telling me they were put in these cells, or they tell me they’re going to take my children away, being the person who they are releasing all the pain, I start telling them, "Forgive my country," even though this is not my country. I’m Mexican. I’m undocumented. But I say I’ll forgive my country, you know, because this is a new step for you.
RENÉE FELTZ: In San Antonio, I’m Renée Feltz for Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: That report by Democracy Now! producer Renée Feltz, who joins us now. Renée, your thoughts as you were in Texas doing this story?
RENÉE FELTZ: Amy, it was striking to see how young the children were coming out of detention, just babies in their mothers’ arms. And while I was down there, reportedly one woman in detention tried to commit suicide.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re also joined by Barbara Hines, former director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas Law School. Her affidavit in a lawsuit challenging detention of women and children as a method of deterrence to mass migration was cited by the federal judge in his order to halt the practice. Explain that lawsuit, Barbara.
BARBARA HINES: Well, that lawsuit was a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Texas Immigration Clinic and a private law firm to challenge the practice of holding mothers and children to send a deterrence message to other families, arguing that these mothers and children were a national security risk, picking the most vulnerable group of immigrants coming to the United States, really asylum seekers, women and children fleeing the most horrific violence, and saying that that group had to be locked up in private prisons that are run on the profit motive.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about this issue of some people saying that these are not asylum seekers, but actually just undocumented immigrants.
BARBARA HINES: Well, that’s actually not true in our experience. The vast majority of the women and children that have been held at all of the detention facilities that have been ramped up since June are asylum seekers. They have passed the initial screening, which is called the credible fear interview, to show that they meet the threshold standard for asylum. And under our international law and our domestic law, they have the right to apply for asylum to seek protection in this country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what are some of the conditions that they’re being held under that you mentioned in your submission?
BARBARA HINES: Well, you know, first of all, these are run by—the facility in Karnes is run by the GEO Group. The facility in Dilley is run by the Corrections Corporation of America. The Corrections Corporation of America is same facility that ran Hutto, the last iteration of family detention that I actually did litigate, where children were held in—babies in prison uniforms, and these corporations thought that was acceptable.
The women and the children have no control over their lives. Everything is regimented—what time they get up, what they eat. The food is very bad. The medical care is substandard. Guards, just like when we litigated at Hutto, as I said, which was the last version of family detention, women have told us that they have been threatened that if their children misbehave, they’ll be reported to the immigration judge, that it can negatively affect their case. Children who get out of line—and, of course, these are young children. How can you have children running around that don’t stay in line? We had a mother with a baby that was learning to crawl, and that baby was not allowed on the ground, because the guards at GEO said that that was unsafe. She was forced to carry a baby around, which, of course, has terrible developmental effects for a child who is trying to learn to crawl and walk.
AMY GOODMAN: Barbara Hines, we have to leave that here, but we’re going to do part two of the conversation and post at online at democracy.org, especially what happens in the courtroom, when the women see the judge through a video screen from prison. Barbara Hines, former director of the Immigration Clinic at University of Texas Law School, and Renée Feltz, thanks so much. And thanks to Tish Stringer for her video.
U.S. Delays Afghan Withdrawal Through Year’s End; Drone War to Continue
President Obama has again delayed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Obama had vowed to remove half of the 10,000 troops currently in Afghanistan in the coming months. But following a request from visiting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Obama announced he will leave 9,800 soldiers at least through the end of 2015. Obama said the United States will still meet its goal to consolidate forces in Kabul and remove all but 1,000 forces by the end of his term in early 2017.
President Obama: "The date for us to have completed our drawdown will not change. But it is my judgment, it’s the judgment of General Campbell and others who are on the ground, that providing this additional time frame during this fighting season for us to be able to help the Afghan security forces succeed is well worth it."
According to The New York Times, administration officials say the delayed pullout will preserve secret U.S. drone strikes and other paramilitary operations. CIA personnel, contractors and special operations forces will continue operating out of a base in Kandahar and another in Jalalabad.
Thousands Protest Mob Killing of Afghan Woman in Kabul
Thousands of people have marched in the Afghan capital of Kabul to protest the brutal killing of a woman by an angry mob. Twenty-seven-year-old Farkhunda was beaten with sticks and set on fire after being falsely accused of burning the Qur’an. Demonstrators gathered in front of the Afghan Supreme Court to demand justice.
Najla Habibyaar: "It was one of the most brutal actions in the history of humanity. We have never seen something like her. And at the same time, it was very close to the palace, it was very close to the police officers, but unfortunately there were hundreds of people watching her being killed and taking her movie, but nobody reacted to that."
Amrullah Saleh: "Those who have endorsed this barbaric act should be brought to justice. Those who have shown incompetence and negligence have to be brought to justice. Those who have endorsed it, either knowingly or unknowingly, should be brought to justice."
Houthi Rebels Advance on Aden; Saudi Arabia Moves Weaponry Near Border
Houthi rebels in Yemen are reportedly advancing on the southern city of Aden, the refuge of deposed President President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Hadi fled to Aden last month after the Houthis moved against his government in the capital Sana’a. Hadi has asked for U.N. Security Council intervention to defeat the Houthis. There are reports Saudi Arabia, which backs Hadi, is moving heavy weaponry to areas near its border with Yemen.
Study: U.S. Wars Have Left Over 1 Million Dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan
A new report has found that the Iraq War has killed about one million people. The Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and other groups examined the toll from the so-called war on terror in three countries — Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The investigators found "the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around one million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan (i.e. a total of around 1.3 million). Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware. ... And this is only a conservative estimate," they wrote. They say the true tally could be more than two million.
Obama Will "Evaluate Honestly" Approach to Mideast Peace After Netanyahu’s 2-State Rejection
President Obama says he continues to re-evaluate his approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of a two-state solution. U.S. officials have suggested they might take steps including no longer vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions critical of Israel. Speaking to reporters, Obama said a peace deal is unlikely while Netanyahu is in office.
President Obama: "I will continue to do whatever I need to do to make sure that our friends in Israel are safe. That’s what I’ve done since I’ve been president. And that’s not going to stop. And so, the Israeli people need to know that. But I am required to evaluate honestly how we manage Israeli-Palestinian relations over the next several years. What we can’t do is pretend that there’s a possibility of something that’s not there. And we can’t continue to premise our public diplomacy based on something that everybody knows is not going to happen, at least in the next several years."
Obama: Iran Nuclear Deal Would Be "Good Agreement"
In his news conference Tuesday, President Obama addressed the ongoing talks over an Iran nuclear deal. Obama said any agreement he might reach would be a good one.
President Obama: "I have confidence that if there is an agreement, it’s going to be a good agreement that’s good for American security and Israeli security and the region’s security. And if it isn’t, then there probably won’t be an agreement. So there will be, I think, significant transparency in the whole process."
World Social Forum Opens in Tunis with Solidarity March over Museum Attack
In Tunisia, tens of thousands of people have marched to mark the opening of the World Social Forum and protest the shooting rampage at a Tunis museum last week. Twenty-one people, mostly foreign tourists, where killed when gunmen opened fire at the Bardo museum. The self-proclaimed Islamic State has claimed responsibility. On Tuesday, participants from more than 120 countries opened the World Social Forum with a march to the Bardo steps. More than 4,000 groups are attending the Forum, which brings together social movements from around the world to discuss grassroots struggles for political change.
Lone Mississippi Abortion Clinic Vandalized Overnight
In the United States, the only abortion clinic left in Mississippi has been attacked by a vandal. On Monday, staff arrived at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization to find their outdoor security cameras destroyed and their electric generator seriously damaged. Surveillance video appeared to show a masked intruder carrying a long-handled tool. The clinic is nicknamed "the Pink House," since it was painted bright pink as a symbol of defiance against repeated Republican efforts to shut it down. It has recently been targeted by the extreme anti-choice groups Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust and Operation Save America. In an online statement, the clinic wrote, "the goal of the anti-abortion terrorists is to transform a legal, safe, and common medical procedure into a fearful, and traumatic experience for everyone involved. But we will always do whatever it takes to make sure our doors open every single Monday morning."
Top Museums Urged to Drop Ties with Fossil Fuel Industry Funders
Some of the nation’s top museums are facing calls to sever all ties with billionaire funders who profit from global warming. In an open letter, a coalition of climate scientists and environmental groups says science and natural history museums should no longer accept money from fossil fuel corporations and individual donors like the Koch brothers. The brothers’ Koch Industries has extensive energy industry holdings and has funded climate denial. David Koch is a board member of both the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The letter says: "When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions in museums of science and natural history, they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge. This corporate philanthropy comes at too high a cost."
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