Posts Tagged ‘North Vietnam’

War Powers, War Lies: Part 22: Not One Stone

The internal justification for area bombing either espoused a view that civilians were collateral damage to attacks on the industrial war machine or that in modern warfare, the civilian/combatant distinction was not viable or important. In some cases, bombing of civilians was, ironically, presented as humanitarian and in keeping with the larger goals of the law of war, in that collapse of the enemy could be precipitated faster, and at a lower cost in human life overall, if civilian morale could be broken from the skies.

War Powers, War Lies: Part 3: Tonkin Spook

Stockdale should know about holding the bag: the next year he would be shot down and spend seven and a half years as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war subject to routine torture. He would be kept in solitary confinement for four years. He would be held in leg irons for two years. He had to go through that and more because in the end McNamara’s men did not really care whether there had been any boats or not, and McNamara’s boss LBJ did not care about telling Congress what he was asking for.