This is fascinating!

Revealing a 40-year-old horror
The Pulitzer-winning reporters who exposed the U.S. Tiger Force's atrocities in Vietnam discuss why the case was whitewashed -- and its scary parallels to Iraq.
By Bill Frogameni

May. 24, 2006 | For seven months in 1967, an elite platoon known as Tiger Force went on a rampage, killing hundreds of Vietnamese men, women and children. The soldiers mutilated bodies, wore necklaces made of human ears and executed unarmed civilians at close range. It was the longest known series of continuous war crimes in the history of the Vietnam War. Tiger Force fought in the theater of operations where the My Lai massacre later happened, a fact that suggests atrocities in Vietnam occurred due to the failure -- or even the design -- of leadership as opposed to the isolated actions of a few rogue soldiers.

The Army began an investigation of Tiger Force in 1971. Despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes, no charges were ever filed against any Tiger Force soldiers or made public. The investigation was apparently killed at the highest levels of government in November 1975 -- the same month Donald Rumsfeld began his first term as defense secretary under President Gerald Ford and Dick Cheney began as White House chief of staff.

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Bush and Rumsfeld came out after Abu Ghraib and made some comments, but at the end of the day they only really went after the grunts. The same thing happened with My Lai where everybody just said, "Well, it's Lt. Calley -- he was an aberrant soldier." In fact, it went up higher, but the only person convicted of killing 500 Vietnamese villagers was one lieutenant. That's the kind of military justice that occurs all too often. To this day the military won't release the records of the Tiger Force case; we got them, but we didn't get them from the military. Airing this stuff could help them become more accountable by creating some kind of institutional memory that helps establish safeguards. Without this, they're doomed to repeat the same mistakes. The longer the current war goes on, you're going to have another whacked-out, crazy platoon that goes over the edge and you're going to have the military bury the case. Then, 20 years from now, another paper in Middle America is going to find the case and report it. And it's the same story over and over.

Would you explain how Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney might have been involved in the Tiger Force coverup?

Sallah: War crimes were a paramount concern to our government at the very top levels because they didn't want any more My Lais. The Tiger Force investigation started in 1971 and grew very large. So, starting at the end of 1973 during Nixon's presidency, there was a policy instituted where the Army's Criminal Investigation Division would send regular summaries of the Tiger Force investigation to both the Pentagon and the White House. In fact, Nixon made John Dean the liaison between the White House and Army CID.

Weiss: After Nixon's resignation, the reports continued. Once Gerald Ford took over in August 1974, Donald Rumsfeld became the White House chief of staff. Then, in November 1975 -- the same month the Tiger Force investigation stopped -- Rumsfeld began his first term as secretary of defense. At the same time, Dick Cheney took over for Rumsfeld by becoming Ford's chief of staff. Prior to that, Cheney had a role as a White House staffer. I'm not sure about Cheney's connection, but it's hard for me to believe he didn't know.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/24/weiss/print.html