Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [237]
In this connection, we should observe that the numerous stories on the Hué massacre cited by Braestrup in self-refutation referred to the official allegations that 300 to 400 government officials were killed in Hué, a considerable massacre but “only one-tenth of the civilian toll in the fighting,” so that “it did not seem like a major story,” Gareth Porter comments; he adds that “What made the ‘Hue massacre’ a major story was the publicizing by U.S. embassy propagandist Douglas Pike, who wrote a pamphlet on the subject in late 1969 at the request of the American ambassador to Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker.” Pike’s account was given wide coverage when it appeared and has become the basis for the standard versions since, despite the dubious source: “given the fact that Pike was relying on the Saigon political warfare department for most of his data, which was otherwise unverified, one might have asked for more skepticism and reserve from the press,” Porter observes—rather plausibly, it would seem. Porter adds that the documents made available by the U.S. mission in 1971 “contradicted Pike on every major point.” According to former CIA analyst Frank Snepp, “The whole idea of a bloodbath was conjured out of thin air,” and the stories were planted in the press by American officials “to generate sympathy for the South Vietnamese abroad”—in short, the “careful psychological warfare program pinning the blame on the$$$ communists” urged by “seasoned observers,” as John Lengel of AP reported from Hué.2
Presenting no evidence or argument, Braestrup accepts Pike’s analysis and the U.S. government position as correct. In a footnote, he remarks that “Pike’s account was challenged by D. Gareth Porter, a Cornell University graduate student, admirer of the National Liberation Front, and, briefly, a Saigon resident,” but dismisses this as part of “a minor point of political contention” (I, 285–86). He describes Pike, in contrast, as “the independent-minded USIA specialist on the Vietcong” (I, 196),3 and makes no reference to the detailed analysis of Pike’s allegations that had been presented by Porter, one of the few American scholars concerned with Vietnam. Similarly, Leonard Sussman takes it as obvious, without argument, that the government position must be correct, and that “the war’s largest systematic execution of civilians” is the responsibility of the Viet Cong—thus excluding the systematic slaughter of thousands of civilians in Hué by U.S. firepower, possibly including many of those attributed to the Viet Cong massacre.4 Also unmentioned here is the curious timing of the exposures that have since become the standard version of the Hué massacre, a few days after the belated exposure of the My Lai massacre in late November 1969, when
Army officers in Saigon made available “newly found” captured Viet Cong documents showing that Communist troops killed nearly 2,900 Vietnamese during the Hue offensive in February, 1968. Officers said the documents went unnoticed in U.S. military files for nineteen months until a correspondent’s questions about Hue brought them to light. “I know it sounds incredible, but that’s the truth,” one official said.5
We will not attempt to explore in this review what is not so much as attempted in the Freedom House study, but merely note, once again, that we have here not a work of scholarship but rather a government propaganda tract.
Max