Deja vu all over again

Listening to the right-wing blogosphere dismiss reports of atrocities by the Israeli military in Lebanon and the U.S. military in Iraq, I got a real sense of deja vu. "I've heard all this before, somehow," I said to myself. Then I remembered...

Numerous veterans came back from Vietnam reporting massacres and atrocities there. They were called "liars", accused of having an "anti-American agenda", of "being in the pay of the Communists", sometimes even accused of never having been at the places where the atrocities supposedly occurred. In the few cases where someone was actually prosecuted, the atrocities were described as "the actions of a few bad apples", the exception, rather than the rule. A concerted propaganda program run out of the Nixon White House was quick to dredge up any lies necessary in order to discredit those who brought out evidence of atrocities in Vietnam, much as a concerted propaganda program run out of the Bush White House and Mossad is quick to dredge up any old lies necessary to discredit those who today are reporting atrocities in Iraq and Lebanon.

The problem is, those reports of atrocities in Vietnam were true. All that stuff that the right-wingers were spewing then -- that the Vietnam Veterans for Peace movement was a bunch of liars, that they had never been to Vietnam, that they were in the pay of Communists, that there were no atrocities other than a few bad apples... all of that turned out to be utter nonsense. Hundreds of atrocities were verified by U.S. military investigators, as shown from military records and probably thousands more were never even reported, much less investigated. In many cases, the military had already verified the truth of an atrocity report at the same time that Nixon's people were simultaneously painting the GI who reported the atrocity as a liar, as a Communist, and so forth.

It's deja vu all over again. Today, once more, hundreds of brave reporters and whistle-blowers are branded as "traitors" or worse for uncovering misdeeds on the part of the U.S. and Israeli military. Once more, a hoard of willing sycophants is more willing to believe known liars than the people who tell the truth, or to dismiss the scale of the atrocities as "just a few bad apples" rather than something rampant and widespread with command approval. Once more, justice will be denied for both the victims and for those who exposed the atrocities. It's deja vu all over again. And frankly, I'm sick of it.

-- Badtux the Sickened Penguin