My Lai Massacre Essay

My Lai Massacre versus Prison Torture and Abuse Scandal at Abu Ghraib Prison

“To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity” Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa. To start off I'm going to be talking about two very tragic events that occurred, one of them being the My Lai massacre and the other one being the prison torture and abuse scandal in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I will go into further detail in answering the following questions, what are some key differences? Who is most responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib? does Abu Ghraib, as well as incidents involving rape and killings of civilians in Iraq suggest that we haven't learned our lessons of My Lai? And lastly what needs to be

done to prevent these gross affronts to human dignity during the stress of war?
In march 1968 one of the most atrocious and violent killings against a village occurred, a unit of american soldiers murdered almost the whole population of the My Lai village in Vietnam, during the Vietnam war (Staff, 2009). The unit called themselves “Charlie Company” who were lead by Lieutenant William Calley Jr, the soldiers were on a mission to find the 48th Viet Cong Squadron which was thought to be in the northern part of South Vietnam (Staff, 2009). the group of C Company soldiers met no mercy in My Lai, when they arrived to the village they didn't see males of fighting age, instead they found villagers living their daily lives (Staff, 2009). The next 4 hours were spent killing over 500 Vietnamese villagers between the ages of under 3 years old and civilians in their 70’s and 80’s. Higher ranking U.S army officers managed to cover up what happened that day in My Lai (Staff, 2016). In 1970 U.S army board charged 14 soldiers of multiple war crimes that occurred in My Lai that fell under these basic rules of International Humanitarian Law: Distinction, Treatment and Weapons and Tactics. Only one soldier was convicted (Staff, 2009). The great cruelty of the My Lai killings and the cover up the soldiers had tried to accomplish increased the large antiwar thought on the home from the united states and continued to divide the country over ongoing presence in Vietnam (Staff, 2009). The events that happened in My Lai only become available information to the public in November 1969 when the C Company member, Paul Meadlo who admitted to killing “ten of fifteen men, women and children in My Lai”(Meadlo,1967). His interview caused so much commotion for the U.S military that an investigation was demanded and in fact placed on the allegations that were made, an investigation launched in April 1969 (Trueman, 2015). Lieutenant Calley was sentenced to life in prison, but only served 3 years of his sentence before being released (Trueman, 2015).
Similarly but not quit the same, in the era of Saddam Hussein twenty miles from Baghdad, was one of the most infamous prisons, with drastic torture, executions and atrocious living conditions (Hersh.

2004). June of 2003 an army reserve brigadier general names Jane Karpinski, was granted the commander position of the 800th Military Police Brigade and was given responsibility of prisons in Iraq (Hersh, 2004). She was unfamiliar with running a prison due to the face she has never had the responsibility to run one before, she had been given the job to run 3 large prisons eight battalions and thirty four hundred military soldiers most of which also did not know how to handle prisoners (Hersh, 2004). After a month of doing this she was reprimanded and silently suspended, due to the fact that a major investigation was being done on the army prison system, which was authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, A fifty three page report written by General Antonio M. Taguba was later leaked and in the possession of The New Yorker last February. The report concludes that the organized failures of the army prison was tragic, Taguba went on about how from October to December of 2003 there were multiple times where there had been atrocious and very tragic reports of criminal misconduct and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison (Hersh, 2004). They later found incriminating evidence to support their allegations and

accusations.