AntiWar.Com has an excellent piece by Alexander Cockburn comparing the media treatment that former Sen. Bob Kerrey received after he finally went public with his story about killing civilians in Vietnam, to the media coverage received by Tom Blanton, who was finally convicted for the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing.
No one is talking about the “ambiguities of that bitter and divided time,” or the “fog” of the fight over segregation in the South. No one is saying that Blanton was just a compliant foot soldier in a struggle for which the commanding officers in Dixie — Strom Thurmond and the others — bear responsibility.
Yet listen to the forgiving words from liberals for Bob Kerrey, yesterday a US Senator and today the President of the New School in New York. Bob Scheer, Los Angeles Times columnist, liberal Democrat, writes that Kerrey is “a good man”, and that our anger should be reserved for Robert McNamara, Pentagon chief in the JFK-LBJ years.
And, of course, he quotes Christopher Hitchens on Fox News going on about how he likes Kerrey “very much” (apparently if Henry Kissinger kills innocent women and children he’s a war criminal, but if you current boss at the New School admits to such transgressions, it was just another day in a bad war).
Cockburn notes that if the United States were being consistent, it would call for a special United Nations expeditionary force to seize Kerrey (and perhaps bomb Washington, DC, into submission if the government interfered with such efforts).
Especially since, as in Kosovo and in the Birmingham, Alabama, bombing, the government seems to have played a major role in helping domestic criminals cover up their acts. The Federal Bureau of Investigation long had surveillance recordings demonstrating Blanton’s culpability but never divulged that fact, just as a number of people had to look the other way for decades for Kerrey’s actions to have gone uninvestigated and unpunished.
Maybe it’s time for sanctions and other measures to force the United States to comply with international human rights laws.
Source:
Kerrey, Blanton and the Liberals. Alexander Cockburn, AntiWar.Com, May 4, 2001.