The naked girl running with her clothes burned off by napalm was not, in fact, napalmed by the Americans, but by the South Vietnamese, who had called in air support after the North Vietnamese had attacked her town. The photo was taken in 1972 after almost all the American troops had left. The girl, Kim Phuc, resisted North Vietnamese efforts to use her for propaganda,fled West, and now lives in Toronto.
Photographer Eddie Adams of the AP won a Pulitzer Prize for the picture of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong prisoner at point blank range. What is not evident from the picture is that just moments before that prisoner had murdered a Vietnamese policeman along with his entire family. This is a photo about the death penalty for atrocities, not a photo about an atrocity.
The quote "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" was reported by Peter Arnett
of the AP, later a propagandist for Saddam Hussein. Also: ... he was fired by CNN in conjunction with the Tailwind story, the report he
filed claiming that the United States had used sarin gas (a nerve agent) against U.S.
defectors during the Vietnam War.
You've probably heard the phrase: "It became necessary to destroy the village in
order
to save it." Peter Arnett included that quote in a story and attributed it to an unnamed
American officer. The quote ran in a February 7th story describing a battle at Ben Tre.
It made it sound like the Americans had gone completely insane, flattening villagers to
save them from themselves.
B en Tre WAS destroyed, but not by Americans. It was destroyed by the retreating Viet
Cong.
Mona Charen says that nobody has been able to track down Arnett's unnamed source,
and
Phil Cannella, who thinks he might have been the source, says if he was, he was
misquoted.
Thus: don't trust anti-American reporting, even by Americans hired by supposedly
reputable organizations such as the Associated Press. I guess this is just an extension
of "Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers".
... [in full at 04.05.19c.htm]
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