Saturday, January 07, 2006

Hugh Thompson Jr. and Colin Powell:
A Hero and a Toady
It was 1968. Lt. Calley and his troops were raping and killing the peasants in the village of My Lai, South Vietnam. The pilot of a US helicopter, Hugh Thompson Jr., couldn’t believe the scene he and his crew witnessed from the air. Thompson set his bird down on the ground in between defenseless Vietnamese women, children and old men and a murderous gang of American soldiers. He demanded that Calley and his men put down their weapons or Thompson and his crew would open fire on them. He then rescued the wounded in My Lai and took them for medical treatment. Thompson stopped the carnage that day, but not before “America’s finest” had killed 500 people in cold blood.

Thompson put his body on the line that day to save innocent people. He put his reputation on the line by reporting the massacre to his superiors. Superiors who did nothing. One of those superiors was Colin Powell who did his best to cover-up the massacre. If not for the best investigative journalist in America for the past forty years, Seymour Hersh, the Powell cover-up might have succeeded and the village of My Lai would have remained as anonymous as all the other villages in Vietnam....

A real American hero died yesterday. At the age of 62 in a VA hospital in Louisiana. ...

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