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Colin Powell
A former White House covert operations official has told The American Reporter that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, then a military aide to the U.S. Army command staff in Vietnam, misunderstood a general's instructions and mistakenly ordered the notorious March 16, 1968, My Lai massacre, and successfully covered up his error until now.
This uppity nigger made this stupid and irresponsible statement in spite of thousands of years of Christian teaching to the contrary, not a single shred of scientific evidence that his statement is true, thousands of studies which prove just the opposite to be true--that condoms cause increased adultery and immorality, and rampant STD (sexually transmitted diseases)--and against the will of the vast majority of we the people.
This uppity nigger also blamed the shooting down of a private airplane in South America during his "war on drugs" was the fault of drug users rather than the government who shot it down.
POWELL BLAMED FOR 'MISTAKE' IN MY LAI MASSACRE
An A.R. Exclusive "He [Powell] made a stupid mistake," said the official, now a retired and wealthy civilian, in a wide-ranging three-hour interview last week. A State Dept. spokesman, Jo-Anne Prokopowicz, said she would forward questions about Powell's possible role to officials at the Dept. of State. "I don't even know if he was in Vietnam at that time," she said. "We don't usually comment on military matters." News reports have placed Powell in Vietnam no earlier than June 27, 1968, about two months after the massacre occurred. The source, who said he would deny the information if he was named in this story because he has suffered several heart attacks and might not survive the controversy his charges could create, said that he had been asked by then-President Richard Nixon to see if the sentence received by Lt. William "Rusty" Calley for the Vietnam War massacre could be reduced. In the course of that investigation, the source said, Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to July 1968, told him that Powell had mistaken his orders to subdue the village as an order to wipe out its inhabitants, and relayed the mistaken order through an Army major to Calley, who was court-martialed and sent to jail for murder. He was released after serving only part of his sentence as the result of his findings, the source said. Westmoreland left Vietnam to become Army Chief of Staff just four months after the incident and before Calley was court-martialed. The source said he did not talk with Powell about the incident, but did talk with the major through whom the orders were relayed to Calley. According to various reports, some 347 unarmed men, women and children were wiped out in the village, which was actually named Son My. Several officers were charged with covering up the incident, and five were court-martialed. Lt. Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 22 unarmed civilians. His sentence was reduced to 10 years, and in 1974 a Federal court judge reversed the conviction and freed Calley. Powell, a major and deputy assistant chief of staff for operations G-3 at Americal Division headqurters in Chu Lai, was assigned eight months later to investigate rumors of the the incident and wrote a controversial 1969 official report that cleared American soldiers of any serious wrongdoing. After the incident became public in the Fall of 1969, a friendly biographical account says, "Powell sided with the American Division General during the court martial proceedings" against Calley. Powell has been heavily criticized in later years for not using his position on the command staff to prevent the massacre at the time it occurred. The major through whom Gen. Westmoreland allegedly relayed the order is dead, and the source said many but not all of those who had firsthand knowledge of Powell's role are no longer living. The source said he is a liberal Democrat who was a CIA officer for many years before accepting a military commission from President Reagan. He also was a military liaison to Saudi Arabia's royal family and said he was responsible for the destruction of a satellite-bearing Russian rocket on a launch pad in Russia, and was shot during that operation. The source, a high-ranking retired military officer who said he had served Presidents Nixon and Reagan, said an unexpurgated transcript of the secret proceedings of a military tribunal that convicted Calley would reveal Powell's role. The transcripts remain classified, he said. Powell's role in the My Lai massacre has been the subject of many articles over the years, but until now there has been no suggestion made that he was responsible for ordering it. Powell was unavailable for comment, but in an autobiography said he did not learn of the incident until two years after it occurred. "Senior officers who were in Vietnam at the time are quietly skeptical of [Powell's] account," Newsweek reported on Sept. 11, 1995. "They point out that word of the massacre - which did not become public until November 1969 - quickly spread through the region, and to the Americal Division's headquarters." The magazine, in a lengthy article, said Powell never talked to the soldier who first reported the incident to command staff, and his claim that he didn't know of the incident until after it became public is at odds with his report's dismissal of rumors about the massacre. Calley was convicted in a court-martial in Septermber 1969, before the incident became public, when a soldier named Tom Glen wrote to Westmoreland's successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, and told him American soldiers in the field were killing Vietnamese civilians. Powell's report failed to confirm that allegation. Powell was implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair as the official who provided information to the National Security Council about Iran's request for missiles in a scheme to trade them for the release of hostages taken at U.S. Embassy in Teheran in 1979. He was also criticized for failing to send an American rescue mission to help U.S. soldiers pinned down in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the events pictured in the film "Black Hawk Down." At the same time, he has served four U.S. Presidents, successfully directed the 1991 Gulf War as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and is a frequently-mentioned possible black candidate for the nation's highest office. In 1999, he was endorsed in advance of any declaration of his candidacy by this newspaper in the event he should seek the presidency in 2000. He later decided not to run, citing family obligations.
http://www.nowarcollective.com/powellbio.htm
Colin Powell is a traitor to the United States, to the US Constitution, and to his oath of office by continuing to demand affirmative action and all kinds of other discriminatory, illegal, and unconstitutional special treatment.
He is completely undeserving of his position as the result of having been promoted ahead of 32 more highly qualified generals BECAUSE he is "black".
It's not a mere coincidence that the US was thrown off the UN Human Rights Commission and the UN Drug Policy Commission within 3 months of his appointment, even though we had been unquestioned members of these commissions since 1947. Most of the rest of the world despises discriminatory government programs like affirmative action, and those who support it, even more than the 89% of American Whites and 80% of American blacks who oppose it. If he was still back home in Jamaica, he would be living in a country where the average per capita income is $272 per month. If he were in an equivalent position in Jamaica as he is here, he would be secretary of state of a country which is smaller than Nike Shoes.
He owes the United States of America far too much to be running around trying out novel ways to destroy it.
80% of blacks and 89% of whites oppose affirmative action!!
http://slate.msn.com/HeyWait/97-12-13/Heywait.asp "The issue, Mr. President, is not affirmative action but racial preferences," declared Abigail Thernstrom to President Clinton at his "Town Hall" discussion on race in Akron, Ohio, Dec. 3. Clinton returned the volley: "Do you favor abolishing the affirmative-action program that produced Colin Powell? Yes or No?" Thernstrom, co-author of an anti-affirmative-action tome (and participant in a current dialogue on race in Slate), responded that she does not "think that it is racial preferences that made Colin Powell."
As Jacob Weisberg noted in last week's Slate, critics of reverse discrimination often insist that they support affirmative action. And they often point to the military as the one American institution that's got the distinction right. The military, by all accounts, has indeed done a great job of integrating its higher reaches and achieving racial harmony without harming its ability to serve its mission. Affirmative action in the military is a success. But has the military avoided the alleged poison of reverse discrimination? Not at all. The real lesson of affirmative action in the military is that reverse discrimination is not so poisonous. It gave us Colin Powell. Thernstrom's anecdote about how Powell became brigadier general is ambiguous on its face. The boss asked for a list that included blacks and then chose a black off the list. Equal opportunity or reverse discrimination? A little more information resolves the ambiguity. One reason Powell wasn't on the original list is that he was, at 42, below the age normally considered eligible for promotion to brigadier general. An exception was made in order to give Secretary Alexander a black as he had requested. Powell, who has always been forthright in his defense of affirmative action, says himself that he wouldn't have appeared on the second list or been made the youngest general in the Army if it had not been for preferential treatment.
Thernstrom and others imagine the military as a place where (in her words) "people rise or fall according to their merits, not their race." But this is a misconception. The services set stringent guidelines for minority recruitment and promotion that sometimes surpass the supposed excesses of racially obsessed university admissions officers. For instance the Air Force, long the most resistant of the services to affirmative action, recently changed its promotion policy to increase its number of black pilots. Now, 90 percent of black applicants are accepted, compared with only 20 percent of white applicants. Do you believe this is the result of pure "equal opportunity," with nary a drop of "racial preference"? Both the Navy and the Marines have set themselves five-year deadlines to make their officer corps 12-percent African-American, 12-percent Latino, and 5-percent Asian-American. In a Nation article supporting these quotas, an ex-Marine recruiter boasts of his tactic for meeting these goals: "I routinely turned down long lines of qualified white males to save room for blacks. I denied whites interviews. I put their names on waiting lists. Every few months I threw stacks of their r�sum�s into the trash."
But what about the Army--the service most celebrated for its history of colorblindness? The Army implemented its affirmative-action policy in the mid-'70s, responding to rising resentment of white superiors among the black rank and file, which had resulted in race riots on bases. To diversify its officer corps, the Army began targeting scholarship money disproportionately to ROTC programs at historically black colleges and began heavily recruiting blacks for West Point. At least 7 percent of each West Point class must be black. That's an order. Army guidelines explicitly require that the officer-promotion panels take candidates' race into consideration. Promotions, the guidelines say, must roughly match the racial composition of the pool of candidates. The regulations naturally say that the panels should not lower standards simply to boost numbers, but affirmative-action plans often say similar things, and critics usually have little trouble seeing through it. Members of the panels are under heavy career and political pressure to meet goals. According to the Pentagon, more minorities and women have been appointed to promotion boards and explicitly instructed to act as advocates for the minority and women candidates who appear before them. To see that as expanding "opportunity" and not granting "preference" is wildly naive. Promotions are reviewed by a Pentagon agency called the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute to ensure that the process was racism- and sexism-free. A recent article in the Weekly Standard showed that the officers who serve in the institute on a rotating basis are trained in lengthy seminars, rife with the goofiest sort of political correctness. In one class on the "White Male Club," an instructor lectured: "Q: Who are the white males that sustain power over us? A: Ted Turner, Alan Greenspan, and Bill Gates." In other sessions, they were required to confess their own biases and were shown videos from the Oprah Winfrey Racism Series. So if the mechanics of affirmative action in the military mimic those of affirmative action in higher education, why hasn't the military taken the same flak? Unlike the universities, the military has none of the notorious statistics about dropouts and racial separatism and it has many success stories, such as Colin Powell's. The military's officer corps, especially the Army's, has been successfully transformed from a clubby elite, where promotions depended on golfing partners, into a more integrated meritocracy. To be sure, the Army's program insists, though more vaguely than people admit, that affirmative-action beneficiaries must meet the same minimum qualifications as their white counterparts. But there is a critical difference between being qualified, in the sense of meeting some minimum standard, and being better qualified than all those who are rejected. Choosing a black over a better-qualified white is still racial preference, even if they both are "qualified" in the absolute sense. The main difference between military and civilian affirmative action is that the military has an overabundance of minority candidates. Consequently, the Army can eliminate its weakest candidates--about one-half of blacks and one-third of whites--and still have a large number of blacks--about one-third of the Army. Most universities and federal agencies must compete aggressively over a much smaller pool. When affirmative action works, its critics deny its essential nature. For affirmative action to do anything, it must involve advancing people who are slightly less qualified. Not, one hopes, unqualified, but less qualified, under otherwise prevailing standards, than people who get passed over. It is necessarily a sloppy process that injects another arbitrary standard into an already arbitrary decision-making process. But the Army shows the process can work, and can help.
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0839944.html
Powell, Colin Luther, 1937–, African-American U.S.. army general, the highest ranking African-American officer in U.S. history and chairman (1989–93) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; b. New York City, grad., City College, 1958. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Powell was the first African American and the youngest person to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He entered the U.S. army as a commissioned officer and served two tours of duty (1962–63, 1968–69) during the Vietnam War. In the 1970s he worked in several staff positions in the White House, including in the Office of Management and Budget, and also served in the military command. In 1979 he was made a major general and the military assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, a position he held until 1981, when he assumed command of the 4th Infantry Division. From 1983 to 1986 Powell was military assistant to the secretary of defense and in 1986 he served as commander of the V Corps, Europe. The next year, he was named assistant to the president for national security affairs. In 1989 he became a four-star general and was named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had an important role in planning the American invasion of Panama in late 1989, and prior to the Persian Gulf War (1991), he played a crucial role in planning and coordinating the military victory of U.S. and allied forces. In 1995 he declined to run for the U.S. presidency, despite widespread encouragement to do so. Since 1997, Powell has been chairman of America's Promise–the Alliance for Youth, a charitable organization formed to help needy and at-risk U.S. children. See his autobiography (1995, with J. E. Persico).
Bob Kerrey is lost in the haze of Vietnam. As he has contended with the public revelation that the Navy SEAL team he led killed a dozen or so civilians during a nighttime mission in 1969 (accidentally, he and five colleagues maintain; not-so-accidentally, says one team member), his recollections have shifted. "Please understand," he told journalist Gregory Vistica, who uncovered this story, "that my memory of this event is clouded by the fog of the evening, age and desire." Share this article
As Powell notes in his 1995 autobiography, My American Journal, in 1969 he was an Army major, the deputy operations officer of the Americal Division, stationed at division headquarters in Chu Lai. He says that in March of that year, an investigator from the inspector general's office of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) paid a call. In a "Joe Friday monotone," the investigator shot questions at Powell about Powell's position at the division and the division's operational journals, of which Powell was the custodian. The inspector then asked Powell to produce the journals for March 1968. Powell started to explain that he had not been with the division at that time. "Just get the journal," the IG man snapped, "and go through that month's entries. Let me know if you find an unusual number of enemy killed on any day." Powell flipped through the records and came upon an entry from March 16, 1968. The journal noted that a unit of the division had reported a body count of 128 enemy dead on the Batangan Peninsula. "In this grinding, grim, but usually unspectacular warfare," Powell writes, "that was a high number." The investigator requested that Powell read the number into the tape recorder he had brought, and that was essentially the end of the interview. "He left," Powell recalls, "leaving me as mystified as to his purpose as when he arrived." It would not be until two years later (according to the orginal version of Powell's book) or six months later (according to the paperbck version of the book) that Powell figured out that the IG official had been probing what was then a secret, the My Lai massacre. Not until the fall of 1969 did the world learned that on March 16, 1968, troops from the Americal Division, under the command of Lieut. William Calley, killed scores of men, women and children in that hamlet. "Subsequent investigation revealed that Calley and his men killed 347 people," Powell writes. "The 128 enemy 'kills' I had found in the journal formed part of the total." Though he does not say so expressly, Powell leaves the impression that the IG investigation, using information provided by Powell, uncovered the massacre, for which Calley was later court-martialed. That is not accurate. The transcript of the tape-recorded interview between the IG man--Lieut. Col. William Sheehan--and Powell tells a different story. During that session--which actually happened on May 23, 1969--the IG investigator did request that Powell take out the division's operations journals covering the first three weeks of March. (The IG inquiry had been triggered by letters written to the Pentagon, the White House and twenty-four members of Congress by Ron Ridenhour, a former serviceman who had learned about the mass murders.) Sheehan examined the records. Then he asked Powell to say for the record what activity had transpired in "grid square BS 7178" in this period. "The most significant of these occurred on 16, March, 1968," Powell replied, "beginning at 0740 when C Company, 1st of the 20th, then under Task Force Barker, and the 11th Infantry Brigade, conducted a combat assault into a hot LZ [landing zone]." He noted that C Company, after arriving in the landing zone, killed one Vietcong. About fifteen minutes later, the same company, backed up by helicopter gunships, killed three VC. In the following hour, the gunships killed three more VC, while C Company "located documents and equipment" and killed fourteen Vietcong. "There is no indication of the nature of the action which caused these fourteen VC KIA," Powell said. Later that morning, C Company, according to the journal, captured a shortwave radio and detained twenty-three VC suspects for questioning, while two other companies that were also part of Task Force Barker were active in the same area without registering any enemy kills. Powell did not find in the journals any evidence suggesting something terribly amiss had happened in My Lai. No suspicious numbers of enemy killed, such as the 128 figure he recounts in his memoirs. The official records merely reflected what Powell had referred to as "a hot combat assault" during the IG interview. Seven weeks later, the MACV IG recommended that the case be closed, but a Pentagon IG investigation was already under way, and the Army's Criminal Investigation Division was soon pursuing an inquiry. The matter could not be smothered, and in November of 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed C Company's massacre of civilians at My Lai. There had been attempts at cover-up. Prior to Ridenhour's letter, the Army promoted the story that C Company had killed 128 VC and captured three weapons in the March 16 action. (Note the 128 figure--which Powell, in his memoirs, uses in describing the number of enemy kills he supposedly found in the journals. In his book, he is repeating the cover story, not recalling what was actually in the journal.) And information pertaining to My Lai disappeared from the Americal Division's files. A military review panel--convened after the Hersh stories to determine why the initial investigations did not uncover the truth of My Lai--found that senior officers of the Americal Division had destroyed evidence to protect their comrades. Powell keeps that out of his account. Powell has never been implicated in any of the wrongdoing involving My Lai. No evidence ties him to the attempted cover-up. But he was part of an institution (and a division) that tried hard to keep the story of My Lai hidden--a point unacknowledged in his autobiography. Moreover, several months before he was interviewed by Sheehan, Powell was ordered to look into allegations made by another former GI that US troops had "without provocation or justification" killed civilians. (These charges did not mention My Lai specifically.) Powell mounted a most cursory examination. He did not ask the accuser for more specific information. He interviewed a few officers and reported to his superiors that there was nothing to the allegations [see "Questions for Powell," The Nation, January 8/15, 2001]. This exercise is not mentioned in his memoirs. Powell notes that "My Lai was an appalling example of much that had gone wrong in Vietnam.... The involvement of so many unprepared officers and non-coms led to breakdowns in morale, discipline, and professional judgment--and to horrors like My Lai--as the troops became numb to what appeared to be endless and mindless slaughter." Yet he is silent on how the military brass (including himself) responded to the horrors. Too often, in-the-field warriors who witnessed or engaged in tragedies or atrocities involving civilians--men like Bob Kerrey and his fellow SEALs--kept their secrets. Too often, their superiors--men like Powell--were not interested in unearthing these awful truths (which usually were the results of their orders and demands), and certainly they had no desire to share that side of the war with the public. The willful denial of the war's managers is as much a part of the dark memory of Vietnam as the lethal misdeeds and mistakes of the soldiers.
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Modified Monday, July 13, 2009 Copyright @ 2007 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party |
