The New York Times, April 26, 2001, Thursday, Late Edition - Final Ex-Senator Kerrey Says Raid He Led in '69 Killed Civilians By AMY WALDMAN Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator who won the Medal of Honor for his military service in Vietnam, has acknowledged that a combat mission he led there three decades ago caused the deaths of 13 to 20 unarmed civilians, most of them women and children. . . The incident, he said, illustrated why the military needed to provide training not only in how to kill, but also how to cope with killing. "When contemplating war we must abandon euphemism and answer the question: does the cause justify sending young men out to kill other human beings?" he said in the speech. When he finished speaking, Mr. Kerrey received a standing ovation. Men his age, he said, came up to him to describe similar experiences. He also said that while attending a conference last weekend at the United States Military Academy at West Point, he had discussed the incident at Thanh Phong with Gary Solis, who is a war crimes expert who teaches the rules of war at the academy. "It's the first time I had read the rules of war," Mr. Kerrey said. "I certainly wasn't trained in them." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/26/nyregion/26KERR.html ==== NY Times, April 27, 2001 Police Dept. Rejects Punishment for Officers in Diallo Shooting By ROBERT D. McFADDEN Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik has decided not to discipline the four officers who killed Amadou Diallo in a hail of gunfire in the Bronx two years ago, but will order them to undergo retraining in tactics, high-ranking police officials said last night. These officials said Mr. Kerik would announce as early as today that he had accepted recommendations by two departmental investigating panels that found that the officers, despite their barrage at an unarmed man, had not violated police guidelines because they believed that Mr. Diallo had a gun and that their lives were in imminent danger. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/27/nyregion/27DIAL.html Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
