When you delete data on a computer, actually you only erase pointers to the data. The files remain, but you’ve eradicated the addresses of where to find them. Likewise, to get away with a crime, you eliminate the witnesses who could point the finger at you. Luckily internet search engines are still proving impervious to “cleaners” due to the proliferating network of memory hole archivists and blogger sidewalk barkers. Try this at home: Google “tiger cages.” Think you’ll see images of tigers? Hardly! While Americans are being led to infer that John McCain was mistreated by his North Vietnamese jailers, let’s revisit how our forces treated the communist civilian captives. There was a precedence for Guantanamo. Vietnamese non-combatant detainees were caged on an offshore island prison called Con Son.
The occasional pots held lye which the guards threw unto the prisoners for purposes of “hygiene.” When the Con Son brutality was found out, the victims were transfered to worse quarters called “cow cages.”
good to see the connection being made — a reminder that no person, no organisation, no state is immune from abusing their power
I think there is pictures of it in Life Magazine (July 17, 1970), but cleaned from google!?
con son wasnt a US administered prison.It was first french then Vitnamese administered. There was a US advisor there who may have had some say but he didnt run the place.
So the puppet Saigon dictatorship didn’t answer to the U.S. in any way? I mean, they had the U.S. Air Force bombing the living dogshit out of the citizens of South VietNam, was it the tail wagging the dog?
Westmoreland was a prick. He micromanaged everything through his proxies including the ARVNs. Every time a president, governor, ARVN member or even mayor of an ap than disobeyed his orders that person was removed. Sometimes to Con son.
It’s been relevant for a while because some of the top dogs at the Pentagon were junior officers at the time, and a lot of the non-uniformed policymakers as well. Mostly appointed rather than elected.
AND, there’s that little matter of Assassinations being codified as part of our “defense” strategy, including, apparently, the murders of Prisoners of War.
A lot of their pretenses are being stripped bare but they don’t seem to really care about it, kind of like Bush giving us the finger, Cheney telling us to fuck ourselves and both publicly declaring the Constitution to be “just a piece of goddamn paper”.
A dying empire is always the most dangerous, and now the Latest Empire has somehow acquired the majority of the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the world.
It really doesn’t look very bright, the near future.
A really beautifil island. Spent a week there, delivering supplies, in 1969. It was used by embassy types for R & R, even while prisoners present. Hawaii must have looked like this, at one time.