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The Whole Story, Please
Time's controversial upcoming cover shows Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan girl whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban, with the headline, "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan?" Its managing editor explains that running the photo was not meant "either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it, but to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground." This is all well and good - the plight of Afghan women is a real and frightening concern - but surely he is being disingenuous here.
The headline and tenor of the article - "An early withdrawal of international forces could be disastrous" - paint a simplistic version of a complex picture that omits a host of other things "actually happening on the ground" - the atrocities committed daily against Afghan civilians by U.S. ground forces and air attacks, the fact the Taliban attacked Aisha while thousands of U.S. forces were on the ground, the question of how much the U.S. occupation does or doesn't actually help Afghan women, the impossibility of the U.S. protecting every Aisha out there, the cost in dollars, deaths and moral stature to the U.S. and in the world, etc. etc.
The role of journalism, it's true, is to tell the story, however ugly, as it presents itself. But the whole story, please.
More from RethinkAfghanistan and The Nation.
155 Comments so far
Show AllActually, this picture does NOT show what will happen if the US leaves Afghanistan. This picture shows what is happening now, with the US remaining in Afghanistan.
Then there are all those Afghans who have lost noses, ears, eyes, legs, skin and loved ones under US bombs and bullets. Where are their pictures?
We owe this woman and all the victims whatever medical care, including reconstructive surgery, prostheses and rehab, they need. Will the Obama Regime provide this? That's what Time Mag should be asking.
jareilly
Intelligently and persuasively well stated.
agreed good post. time magazine is just another in the crappy corporate media of the US. dick dems and lunatic repugs are saying pretty much the same thing.
although with many of them its al-qaida, al-qaida, al-qaida like screwed up broken record.
matt
green party of harris county
I was just logging to state pretty much exactly this. Well put.
I wonder if similar pictures were posted on the front pages of Russian magazines in the late 80's right before the USSR pulled out of Afghanistan. Too bad TIME magazine wasn't out advocating for the USSR to remain to fight the violent US-funded mujahideen then. (just so there is no misunderstanding, that is sarcasm, I do not believe the Russians should've remained in Afghanistan)
Why not a picture of the girl reportedly born with two heads in Fallujah, Iraq, on the cover of Time?
why not indeed?...................
could it be that it wasn't the 'taliban' who caused this deformity?.......
Considering that TIME magazine has operated as a periodic propaganda arm of both the Imperialistic "Military-Industrial Complex" and the Corporatist Globalization for some, what, five or six DECADES now, I'm not sure how much value yet MORE proof of this really is to us.
Clearly they are evil bastards and the picture is meant to replicate the National Geographic photo of the beutiful Afghan girl from the eighties, only now horribly disfigured "if we leave" -thus scaring the good readers away from supporting an end to the quasi-legal U.S. Military occupation (which is a part of U.S. Imperial overreach, which is currently destroying our economy, which is ruining the lives of those very same good readers).
Clearly Taliban human rights violations can be stopped in fully-legal ways only peripherally involving the U.S. Military.
Forget some Journalism School idea of "telling the whole story"!
They are biased and everyone with half a brain knows it.
So where is OUR biased magazine cover?
Where is the photo of a beautiful-girl wedding guest, torn to red, oozing shreds by a "smart bomb" dropped from a "drone plane" with the headline: "What happens if we STAY in Afghanistan" ?!?!?!
-matti.
matti July 30th, 2010 12:48 pm:
"Where is the photo of a beautiful-girl wedding guest, torn to red, oozing shreds by a "smart bomb" dropped from a "drone plane" with the headline: "What happens if we STAY in Afghanistan" ?!?!?!"
My thoughts exactly!
extortion
Yes, it's very curious that the people who publish TIME are the same ones likely to object to a woman's right to self determination for her own body.
Hey, c'mon - we're protecting the women on Okinawa from their men, too...
Time Magazine, as a major player in Corpstream Media, the Ministry of Propaganda for the collapsing but still-monstrous U.S. Empire, must satisfy its Ruling Class owners who control both the corporations and the all best politicians money can buy in our federal, state, and local governments.
It's just following orders, as all the other servants of U.S. imperialism are.
Me too. Cheap heart-tugs to the American pro-military ego with more mythology: we're actually over there rescuing the Afghan women from their husbands. Don't ya know, that's also why we went to Korea, Vietnam, etc.
Meanwhile, where is TIME on Wikileaks? Who dat? I can find no better example of the collapse of American 'journalism' than to contrast the two organizations (Time and Wikileaks) reportage on Afghanistan this week.
yes, a rather 'convenient' article at the time of the wikileaks revelations.................
Which explains the timing.
How long are we going to allow TIME to dictate to us the 'controversy' here? Thats the real question. What a hopeless tool of AIPAC that rag has become.
I'm against the war in Afghanistan and I think that Time magazine should have used a different caption on the cover. However, this is NOT about AIPAC. AIPAC is a right wing pro-Israel lobby; not a lobby on Afghanistan policy.
Wikileaks reveals how our aid money to Pakistan gets diverted to the Taliban... so it's possible that the guy who did the mutilation to this girl was paid (indirectly) by the American military.
The moral of TIME'S Picture Worth a Thousand Words: surely it would be a far, far better thing for Aisha to have been instantly pulverized by an errant Imperial drone missile, or cleanly bisected by Imperial Stormtrooper automatic arms fire at a checkpoint, or during a secret night-time raid, than to suffer this Fate Worse Than Death at the hands of the barbaric Hun!
Dontcha SEE?
Thank God Chelsea will be on next week's cover, if only to take the ugly taste out of their readership's mouths.
How depressing of TIME to be so unobjective and hawkish.
TIME is doing what TIME has always done. I see no change.
It is not "unobjective and hawkish" to expose the results of extreme misogyny.
It is "unobjective and hawkish" to use a caption that frames the issues of misogyny in terms of an implicit assumption that American military intervention is the only effective strategy for eradicating extreme misogyny in Afghanistan.
American military intervention is not a strategy for eradicating extreme misogyny in Afghanistan, much less an effective one. War and pestilence has always produced the extreme.
Nothing new here at all.
Time, Readers digest, BBC etc, deliver their product with heavy doses of propaganda. Picking and choosing they would like to tell you and what they silently fail to tell you has always been the most important propaganda technique. Like convincing your readers that a certain mostly orange painting is in fact mostly purple by revealing only the purple bits. It is human nature to subconsciously assume that you are getting a random sample and that the rest of the painting is more or less like what you have seen, where in reality what you have been shown was highly selective.
National Geographic is also a great magazine. But watching the National Geographic channel, I also came to notice that they were incapable of telling the truth wherever the USA was responsible for the misery. I picked it because I happened to know. Those details were hidden with silence, or sometimes with lies. For example, I can recall a documentary more than a decade ago that documented terrible things in Afghanistan, i.e. ongoing suffering from the previous war. At that point, the Taleban was still, as in Reagan's words "freedom fighters" - pure gold. And the weapons that enabled the eviction of the USSR were attributed not to the USA, but to Pakistan. No mention whatsoever of $20 billion of weapons supplied by the USA. I could supply another breathtaking example where America's best magazine found itself unable to utter the truth, but I think I have made my point.
Look what happens if we withdraw! Wasn't that the same article Time ran about us leaving Vietnam?
What the Taliban did to that young woman was indeed terrible! It is not however, up to us to tell the Afghan people how to live their lives and who they should choose to govern them. We could of made that argument nine years ago, but George W. Bush decided that Iraq was a more pressing problem.
If the Afghan people want to rule themselves, free of the oppression of the Taliban, al-Qadea and the US, they will have to fight for their freedom just as our Founding Fathers did, and as we will have to if we wish to live free again. Otherwise, they like us are stuck with what they've got!
More incubator poopaganda.
I don't like the caption that Time Magazine used with the photograph, but I'm glad that the photograph was published and that Aisha is getting reconstructive surgery in the United States.
Let the world see what misogyny looks like and where it leads - and yes there should be more photographs of American atrocities published too.
Aisha was photographed with her consent. She is not "a poster girl" for anyone. She is a survivor of horrendous abuse who wants to tell her story in hopes that she can contribute to efforts to end this abuse and spare other women from undergoing it.
Why are you engaging with someone so snowed, foolish, or disingenuous that they would call the U.S. Military occupation of Afghanistan " efforts to end this abuse and spare other women from undergoing it." ?
Seems silly to me.
I don't think Marion L mentioned the military as a means to ending the abuse. There are plenty of people concerned with the plight of women in fundamentalist Islamic countries, and appropriately so. You are right that the timing and captioning of that image advocates for the typically American quick fix: sending in goons to wipe out the abusers. Putting our energies into the support of grass roots movements - such as those organized (primarily by women so far) in countries like India - will produce better results. If we let ourselves get mad at sharia or Islam itself we are taking on a bigger problem than we can solve. Islam can be as compatible with decency and human rights as Christianity, but that is not the message of the Time cover.
I am NOT saying that the military occupation of Afghanistan is an effort to spare women from abuse. I AM saying that even with the misleading caption, I'm glad that the photo was published and I'm glad that Aisha is getting reconstructive surgery in the United States.
I'm against the military occupation of Afghanistan. I think that President Obama should withdraw our troops from Afghanistan and support indigenous Afghan women's and human rights organizations, and Afghans who are fighting the Taliban.
I thought of the incubators too.
Oh, and Hooray for Governor Slugwell!
Flesh and limbs lie strewn across the dust. A dying mother looks up at a US soldier, "Why?" she screams, "Why are you killing our families? our children?"
"To save you from the Taliban".
and next week, are they doing an article on the barbaric practice of (forced) female circumcision in africa?.......................
What? Do you want them to invade there too?
I can't believe I'm reading these comments *here*, at CD. We certainly need to stop killing innocents over there, but leaving the people to the Taliban would be a crime against humanity all by itself. "Who can protest and does not is an accomplice in the act".
Imagine, please, all of the most psychopathic, misogynist pseudo-religious fundies of all stripes in the US being allowed to freely impose their evil, lunatic will on adults and children of both sexes, but women and girls especially. Disfiguring women isn't the half of it.
Read RAWA's site for more information.
"Kabul: Beware Taliban revisionism. You're going to hear much more of it in the coming months as policy makers from Kabul to Washington seeking to reintegrate Taliban fighters try to explain why the enemy isn't so bad after all. Bombs that slaughter civilians, acid attacks that disfigure school girls, assassinations of women in public life-all of this will be swept under the carpet." (Rachel Reid is the Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch)
Liberal interventionists, who believe that invading another nation and waging violent wars that result in the slaughter of innocents and the displacement of large populations in order to protect them from the bad guys, are no different than neo-con militarists that claim a right to imperial domination. It's warped thinking either way.
Amen to that, Q.
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2010/07/14/the-taliban-war-on-women-continues.html
Please don't continue to lie about *me*, okay? Had you actually looked, you'd have found that quote all over the internet.
Of course RAWA want us to stop killing innocent people! The reality is that the US military and the Taliban are both vicious and destructive. But nevertheless, the US bailing out means the Taliban are once again free of *any* threat, and can do their psychopathic worst. Which is, mutatis mutandis, what happened in Srebrenica, only with the Cloggies in the role of the US.
If you think walking out wouldn't amount to handing the girls and women of Afghanistan over to the Taliban the way the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica were handed over to the Bosnian Serbs by the Dutch, do please share your insights with us.
"If you think walking out wouldn't amount to handing the girls and women of Afghanistan over to the Taliban the way the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica were handed over to the Bosnian Serbs by the Dutch, do please share your insights with us."
I'm sure you know this, but there are some on the left whose view of the Yugoslav mess is that the Serbs are misrepresented and sinned against saints. Or who at least attempt to apologise away what the Serbs did*. They are essentially taking the same viewpoint with the Taliban. The Taliban are fundamentalist extremists. The American invasion and occupation did not cause that extremism. They were fundamentalists extremists well before America invaded; in fact that extremism was damn convenient for the US, when it created the Taliban with the help of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UK, to weaken the USSR.
The US is in large part responsible for the humongous mess that is Afghanistan. Along with help from the UK, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and some help from the USSR when it existed.
*Before someone points out that everyone else in the Yugoslav war committed atrocities too, I'm aware of this. The Serbs just committed more of them, if for no other reason than them being the strongest group.
Thank you for owning up, Katrine --I very much admire you for it, since so many prefer to ignore their errors and pretend they never happened.
I chose to quote the para I did only because Rachel is talking about the repeat of the revisionist lies that, as RFloh reminded us, were perpetrated about Bosnia. It's a movie we've seen before, but we apparently don't want to remember the ending.
As you probably recall, Clinton "high-mindedly" chose to embargo arms to both sides in the former Yugoslavia. The fact that the Serbs had most of the hardware from the former Yugoslav military, and the Bosnian Muslims had almost nothing was ignored...except by the Serbs, who used that disparity to commit crimes against peace and humanity, including mass murder. Whence the eventual trial of the blatant criminal psychopath Karadzic and the hunting of his pal Mladic. Unfortunately, trials for mass murder are of no comfort to the victims or their families. They would certainly have preferred prevention.
As RFloh noted, many liberals (of the Ochsian love-me-I'm-a type) chose to believe the Serbs were blameless, inventing a complete mythology to justify their own uncaring detachment from the plight of the victims. That's what's beginning to happen with Afghanistan, too, and that's what Rachel is warning us about and why I quoted that paragraph. The propaganda is not all on one side.
Unless we keep a firm grip on reality, we're going to see a lot more of the distancing we're already seeing in this thread from people who, if they stepped back and looked at what they're doing, would feel ashamed. And I think people should feel ashamed if they try to duck out.
We're certainly not doing the right thing in Afghanistan, and the Time piece might be propaganda (I say "might" because that cover and story were probably planned a year or 18 months ago --magazines are still laid out by hand, even using computer tools rather than illustration board, blue pencil, and rubber cement, and it takes an age to create each issue).
But even though we're doing the wrong things for a bad reason, and there's certainly military-industry propaganda going on, for us to totally walk away is the exact ethical equivalent of walking down the street and deciding that it's none of our business to intervene if we see a girl or woman being beaten up in the street by a large, vicious male.
How many of us here would even think it marginally acceptable, never mind right, for someone who could intervene to tell themselves "it's no doubt an internal family quarrel and I've no business mixing in" or "males have been beating up women and children for ages, it's a cultural thing", and walk on by with face averted? We revile the many people who chose to do nothing when Kitty Genovese was being slowly tortured to death. How is choosing to walk away from the plight of the women and girls of Afghanistan different?
Maybe if you went a little further back into the recent origins of the Bosnian war that you so selfrighteously blame on Serb nationalists, you would find that other nationalists groupings actually did a lot of initiating of division with Western help and support. When the West helps instigates and backs division in a nation and then pronounces selfrighteously about the destruction the West has themselves set in motion, my hackles go up. Something similar to Bosnia happened in Rwanda where the Western (USA and UK)trained and backed Rwandan Patriotic Front mounted a campaign to militarily take back Rwanda for the minority Tutsis. I lay the blame for slaughter that followed squarely at the feet of the Western Nations that were determined to extend their geopolitical sphere of influence by using those Tutsi refugees who had fled to Uganda after having been ousted 20 odd years earlier. The one sided anti Hutu approached later forced on the International Court's Prosecuter caused her to resign and write a book about it.
Similarly in Yugoslavia. While it suited the West to prop up and support Yugoslavia against the USSR, Western nations' security services informed the Yugoslav police/military about Croation Nationalist sneaking in to destabilise Yugoslavia. However as soon as Yugoslavia was no longer needed to help contain the USSR, the West switched and did all it could to promote and support separatists throughout Yugoslavia. Most people think of Srebrenica as having been a passive "safe haven" for non combatants. It wasn't. It was a base from which an army of armed men fought the Serb army. The Western propaganda is so complete that almost no-one knows that the small group of Dutch soldiers there were heavily outnumbered by armed men on both sides.
The final thing that really narks me is when humanitarian reasons are given to justify invasions for self interest. Most commondreamers are not falling for it anymore. This is not that different from the old colonial days when we went to civilise the "barbaric" natives but really just wanted to control the land and resources.
Maybe if you went a little further back into the recent origins of the Bosnian war that you so selfrighteously blame on Serb nationalists, you would find that other nationalists groupings actually did a lot of initiating of division with Western help and support.
--------------------------------
Do you have any evidence that the West were the ones behind the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia? I'm not particularly interested in who initiated the breakup of Yugoslavia (I think that's what you're charging; apologies if that's not so). That's a rather minor matter, really. The atrocities were that Milosevic tried to grab Bosnia for Serbia and exterminate the Bosnian Muslims, using the Bosnian Serbs as his proxy.
Instigating the breakup of a nation isn't a crime against peace, as far as I'm aware. Trying to grab land and kill/drive off its inhabitants is.
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Most people think of Srebrenica as having been a passive "safe haven" for non combatants. It wasn't. It was a base from which an army of armed men fought the Serb army.
--------------------------------
Cite, please?
---------------------------------
The Western propaganda is so complete that almost no-one knows that the small group of Dutch soldiers there were heavily outnumbered by armed men on both sides.
-----------------------------------
From the Radio Nederlands archives:
"The Dutch claimed that they were powerless to stop the actions of the Bosnian Serbs, led by Commander Ratko Mladic, though later it emerged that Mladic had made a deal with Dutch Colonel Ton Karremans to hand over thousands of Bosnian Muslims in exchange for the release of 14 of their peacekeepers held by the Bosnian Serbs.
After the deal was done, the Dutch pulled out of Srebrenica leaving the Muslims who were sheltering there to their fate. A report on the atrocity compiled by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) eventually led to the resignation of the Dutch government, led by then Prime Minister Wim Kok, in 2002."
http://static.rnw.nl/migratie/
www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/
sre061204mc-redirected
"Milosevic tried to grab Bosnia for Serbia and exterminate the Bosnian Muslims, using the Bosnian Serbs as his proxy."
How can you say that eliminating Bosnian Muslims was Milosovic's goal when there were Moslem forces led by a local mayor in the West of Bosnia who were on the same side as the Serbs.
The fact that the Serbs overran the Srebrenica enclave doesn't tell you anything to contradict my claim the anti Serb Moslem forces were using Srebrenica to mount armed raids, sabotage etc behind Serb lines.
In Bosnia and Croatia, Serbs were also ousted and killed. I have a Croatian brother in law who lost a Serb friend; his friend had returned to Croatia well after hostilities were over to see how his house was. Croatian nationalists killed him.
The evidence gathered from mass graves in Bosnia, was gathered by forensics people gathering evidence for the prosecution. Where were the people gathering evidence that might counter the prosecution's evidence? Where were the Serb observers?
In Bosnia, elected Serbs get sacked repeatedly by western appointed Governors until someone complient gets elected, someone who admits to things or else the Serbian people wouldn't get Western investment or trade. These people get bulldozed from start to finish. Do you even know how many Serb refugees there were? Hundreds of thousands from Croatia where they had been around 20% of the population. They had been there for hundreds of years used by the Catholic Holy Roman Empire to hold the line against the advancing Ottoman Empire.
During these latest rounds of war, as Serbs civilians were escaping the Croat army advance, our TV cameras only showed them from a long way off so they wouldn't become human interest stories and westerners couldn't get close enough to empathise with them. Now after having been ethnically cleansed by our proxy army, the Croats, there are only a few percent Serbs left in Croatia. The same Croatian military sweep destroyed the pro Serbian Muslim army in Western Bosnia and drove Bosnia Serbs out of huge parts of Bosnia.
Serbs were once the majority in Bosnia and Herztgovinia until the Croat Nationals and pro Nazi Bosnian Muslims slaughtered them wholesale during World War Two.
Mairead you said earlier Clinton supported an arms embargo that prevented the non Serbs from arming themselves. Well, the Non Serbs especially the Croats did arm themselves; the "embargo" was an attempt to siege the Serbs in the softening up preparation for the final Western onslaught that would come much later with the Kosovo bombing war. The embargo didn't work that well as China still managed to get fibre optics through to Serbia which helped improve its integrated airdefence system which would later become very effective in making it hard for NATO bombing runs. In the meantime, Croatia had its forces armed by East German armour and aircraft, after East Germany had gotten itself swallowed up by West Germany in so called German "unification", and the Croatia forces were trained by mercinary Western military experts on contracts. So much for Clinton's arms embargo!
During the wars in Bosnia my sister and brother in law saw Muslim warriors from the Middle East and elsewhere enter Bosnia via Split (which is on the Dalmatia coast of Croatia) Al Qaeda with CIA help was increasingly involved as were revolutionary guards from Iran.
Here is an extract of another article on Radio Nederland that helps fill out the picture of what happened at Srebrenica. The article is called: Former Dutch Peacekeeper Returns to Srebrenica.
'It took him a while to accept thousand of men had been killed during the march to Tuzla, trying to escape General Ratko Mladic’s troops. He says he simply couldn’t believe it: “I was there and I saw nothing”.'
Notice he talks about Muslims "marching" to Tuzla, trying to escape General Mladic's troops; at least a number of the killed were not simply captives lined up and shot. It's at:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/former-dutch-peacekeeper-returns-srebrenica
I have also heard an interview of a Dutch officer who explained how the Muslims men were armed and threatened them before the final offensive by Mladic.
Has anyone ever seen any evidence that the enclave was actually ever disarmed by the "peace keepers"...you won't find it because it didn't happen. Earlier there had been a similar situation in Western Slovonia which had been controlled by Croatian Serbs and had also become a UN "Safe Haven". When the Croatia "police", ie their military, stormed it many of the Serbs there escaped across the river to Banjaluka and the USA leaders commended the Croats for the way they took back control of part of Croatia. That set a great example for the Serbs to storm "safe haven" enclaves likewise later.
A later article by Rachel Reid helps complete the picture in the light of the latest leaks.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/by/rachel-reid
Just copying and pasting the quote Mairead posted into google, brings up a link to RAWA's website.
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/category/women
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2010/07/14/the-taliban-war-on-women-continues.html
Ditto
Yes, we are better off fighting the Taliban and leaving the people to War Lords that grow poppy and sell opium. (Sarcasm) The Taliban government was in Houston prior to 9/11 dealing with the oil executives. The US government could care less about the the woman on the magazine cover. It is a government that tortures or supports other countries torturing people, uses indiscriminant weapons of war that kills civilians, supports Middle Eastern and other government that suppress and torture their own people, supports Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians...
Let's be honest as to why we are in Afghanistan. It has nothing to do with the cover of the magazine. The magazine cover conveniently comes out as Afghanistan's war popularity sinks in the US and casualties are at all time monthly highs.
The Viet Cong used to cut off the arms and legs of children when the US military was trying to subjugate their country. Not a nice thing to do, but they stopped doing it after we left.
I'm all in favor of making cultural inroads into isolated and medieval societies whose practices we find cruel. Most Islamic countries today are outgrowing the worst aspects of Sharia (just as we Christians outgrew witch burning) in favor of the perks of joining the wider and more civilized world. The way to do this is commercial and cultural contact rather than by driving them into the arms of their fundamentalists
In another context this photo would be an appropriate call for modernization of the third world. As it is it is simply inflammatory - a call to revile and crush fundamentalist Islam. The effort to do this worldwide, as happy as it would make Richard Dawkins, would create a level of death and misery beyond anything we could handle. The Taliban and their equivalents around the world are used to asserting their cultural identity against other sects and invading armies, so the threat of annihilation that this image is certain to call forth does not scare them. What scares them is television and laptop computers, education and commerce, the seductions of contact with the modern world and the incremental change that comes when isolated people are engaged in some positive way.
Please CITE, with as much documentation as there is avaiable, ANY instances where the Viet Cong "cut off the arms and legs of children." If you cannot (my guess) then I recommend you stop such inflammatory rhetoric and get your sources of information from non-Holloywood movies at least.
I heard a returning vet make similar claims at a high school history class presentation in 1971. He was a conscientious objector who worked as a medic in Nam. He claimed that the Viet Cong shot people regularly (nobody disputes this) but that also, to terrorize a town into non-compliance with the US, they took a pregnant woman, cut out her baby then sewed it back in. He was not a war supporter, but he made this statement after one of my fellow high school students asked him what was the worst atrocity he had ever seen. Come to think of it, however, I don't remember how he came to know this (did he see the result, find the bodies, hear it from somebody?).
And of course, I had and have know way of knowing who this guy really was. The "intelligence community" was running big disinformation campaigns on Vietnam by '71. But it's an ugly fact, the Viet Cong were ruthless and merciless and fanatical. Their generals were utterly callous towards the lives of their own troops. They routinely took 20 - 30 dead for each one of us they killed, starting in Dien Bien Phu, 1954, when they overan the French but lost about 4 times as many soldiers as the French in doing it. Even Elsberg, no friend of US intervention called the Viet Cong fanatics. No justification for the war of course; argument against it really.