knew there were there was as i say tyranny there were certain things you could not get the chicago police department was operating in a world of its own things have changed a lot since then but what a lesson that was in sixty sixty one i went in the army i worked for united press international i covered the legislature in peter south dakota town of ten thousand i was a chicago kid never lived in a small city i then worked in chicago and i was sent to washington covered the war from the pentagon learned they hate the war but the point i'm making is by the time i got to the me life story had been in the business eight or nine years and so when i got a tip about somebody shooting up a village you've got to read before you write so i used to it was not about watching reading the new york times coverage of the war and then i read the french the french journalist and bernard fall there was a couple wonderful french journalists who wrote about the fall of france india being fool in one nine hundred fifty four and so i read a lot and so i and there was muscle tribunals was very important although everybody in america said burton russel's he hates america he's ninety four it was an

incredible document there was testimony from american soldiers about shooting of villages like crazy fifty sixty five very early so when i got a tip about me i just whatever else i was doing and i thought i could do it but i thought i would heard that some g.i. went crazy and shot up seventy five people and that sounded like something that could happen what they did in the war early on is we would go into villages american units a company would go in on a raid find nobody there and we the way it worked as we always thought the viet cong our enemy the north through the maze they were farmers by day and guerrillas at night so we go early in the morning and catch him in bed after a night of being a guerrilla i don't know what the craziness was woman and children so after enough of those raids you would get frustrated sometimes the officers would say ok guys i know you're all angry everybody can have a mad moment in this village the tank gunner with his missiles and the machine gun just you can shoot the villagers up so that we. let the guys get off if you will

they said be happy so they should have villages and that's what i thought they were talking about and then i got into the story and at the same time as i'm writing about the fact these people killed five hundred sixty seven people something like that and innocent people there was no they were the company been in the war for about three months the kids did nothing about the vietnam or the culture and they were proportionately more hispanics and blacks then in the population and poor farm kids really white kids. are the secretary defense of lowered the standard by sixty seven and sixty eight he wanted no more there was a draft that presumably would take very edge well educated middle class white people he didn't want them in the war because they would come home and talk and be articulate about it and the senator who ran against lyndon johnson eugene mccarthy used to talk recently about me that mcnamara wanted to change the color of the corpses but in this village they were brief this this company that hadn't seen the

enemy they had been sniped at and they'd fallen in the pits with sticks pull of poison they'd lost about twenty or thirty people of their hundred and they want to pay back and they were told by the cia official contract employ bad intelligence some are going to go into a village and are going to see the enemy there so they got ready to go to their credit to be kill or be killed for america right they had seen no combat really and they fly in and there's nothing there woman making five hundred fifty sixty men women no one no men old man woman children and they began to round him up and executed what i could write about the they did things like throwing up babies and catching them alive on bayonets i mean and raping like crazy i didn't. so much trouble with that story because i didn't know what i was getting into when i first started and the whore and shame i felt for my country and for my soldiers i been in the army i did the army i was it was a piece of everything idea that the guys i served with this guy. it is tough so in

a way the kids who did it was mostly the white kids hispanics and the african-americans no way man this is that the old face the whites that they do it this isn't for us and the next day they all wore on band some of the miners minorities and they were ordered to take them off their black armbands odds trying to separate themselves from the white kids had done the shooting anyways just a mess was a great story and if it didn't in the book you don't blame those soldiers also thank you for they were getting the one told anything about the society they didn't they were told they were communists they're out to kill us they didn't they weren't and they couldn't figure out these kids we're not talking about the crime to the crime of america these are their working lower working class kids make them or lowered the standards that normally would be bright enough or have not about brains about education they want to get into the army so what did they know one of the problems they had is my god these people didn't have refrigerators. i mean i talked to forty or fifty that before i realized you know after i wrote a book about this afterwards and i went i spent six eight months just flying around

america talking to kids some slam the door some did talk to me but many did and pouring out their heart they had a problem in vietnamese society when they evacuate one of the planes one of the things we did in the war was we would remove families from their lands that had been ancestral fields for their protection it was called a movement of what we called fortified hamlets which enabled us to declare the areas that they cleared free fire zones you could shoot in anything and when they had villages there were people you could do it so we had evacuated and say it's where they're good and put them in the little armed protected areas with fences around away from their fields i mean they would do but choppers did and in vietnam society a mother would never let a child go into a strange threshold first they would go first and the soldiers would say ok when they lined up these kids the same group they would have had a village and they would say to the woman no children go first and the woman would not know english would would resist and they would beat him with their rifle butts

and say look at these crazy woman want to go first leaving the kids behind not knowing the culture and so how can you they were as much victims in a way as as those they killed so i have. in this going on the ground special after the break. that's guys are. going to take it easy this is a central plank for diagramming problem right now so he stopped to. welcome back we're still here with his latest book reporter

a memoir is out now in the past forty eight hours israeli jets of targeted damascus i mean the war seems to be continuing all of a kind you said that there were actually two suspects for the chemical attacks that news of which was beamed around the world as a reason why i say britain should bomb syria why do you think any journalist would just say no there is only one suspect the as a government and well that would happen if. you're talking about an incident in which. bashar assad's use of nerve agents against his own people. which is a. that was a two thousand and thirteen was a very rich from his point of reactionary force there was very hostile to his presidency. and of course there was constant conflict conflict it was. one of the gangs and i says later it was a stronghold as we all know now it's bob and bob the smithereens war is awful we americans should maybe be a little more tolerant made to hatred for bashar he had

a war it was an awful war and you fought it awfully but so do we everybody does that's the horrible thing about wars and they're not good when it was government funding the white helmets right now that say it's one sided here it's the only can we trust you there's no question there's a look there i'm sure there are some people in the white helmet that were very actually doing with you know trying to save lives but the it's pretty clear now that they're basically the major funding also i think america was indirectly supplying some money certainly the brits were and so certainly it was a hedge it was a propaganda gorga zation to along with possibly doing some real good relief work but too many times you've seen this same child in photographs you know year after year always covered in dust i mean there's been a lot of actually good reporting on it that they do and gauge anti assad but it's very easy here assad is hated and i get a lot of criticism criticism for saying having a different story for example about the use of sarah and i could publish what i

wanted about him in america i had to publish it here in the london review now all that happens is in june of two thousand and thirteen there was a very important all source intelligence report put up by the american defense intelligence agency to include it but made it complicated for me i got a copy leaked i guess you call it and it had a lot of signals intelligence and the one reason i sort of stay alive i only ten i don't want to write i don't want to cross up any intelligence operation that's reasonable legitimate so there's a lot of stuff. in this particular document i didn't publish it because i didn't know how much of this stuff is is very competent were doing us good learning some stuff about the other side i just didn't know so what i had a report that said there was tremendous concern in the community because both turkey the two they're judged amerie their paramilitary police units were driving truck folds of the chemicals that when mixed together make a nerve agent it's called kitchen sir and it's very crude the syrian army has

a very sophisticated sarah and that has additives that make it more lethal more toxicity more penetration much better weapon in fact it's so toxic nerve agent you can once you meld it once you make it taken or. phosphate and. alcohol i mean certain specific kinds you mix them and the additives you have to put in a weapon because it will burn through a weapon in a day even a congress deal with and so it's use it or lose it if you milled it and so we used to monitor the syrian chemical arsenals and we could for once we detected a melding it that we were going to attack and israel was in this with us to israel knows the story i'm telling you and we also knew then the syrian army had a very sophisticated weapon and we also knew from this intelligence report that saudi arabia turkey were supplying the basic chemicals to al nusra which isis was

in there then i was the cutting edge and so there was a tremendous yes well absolutely. we always think everything because there was a law passed in two thousand and two after the invasion that said any time the president could do what he wants with congress so we always called everything. i mean everything everything around him in libya it was al qaeda in africa because that gives you the cover of the law congress passed that stupid act he even push the right to. dean anywhere without going congressional authorization is amazing piece of legislation talk about dumb anyway the point is this report troubled everybody there was a study done about what can we do about it how many people american soldiers we should we didn't want to have there's a nerve agents something comes this attack and we get a sample from the russians and it's taken to serve peter wall who is the director jeff the head of the british military the sample is taken to his people down here

they go take at the port down where they conclude we know what the syria has serious been signed in a signatory to the geneva convention on chemical weapons we we know what syria has we know what it looks like and what was used in that place was not the same as in the syrian military this is told obama two times by the chairman of the joint chiefs before the recent. memory the red line when when the attack took place. so when the attack took place it allegedly forty found it was one tenth as many as matter when the attack took place and people were killed and the world said shahrizat did it my government said that the government knew they knew from this very important intelligence report that caused a huge study to be done inside about what to do but it would take sixty thousand troops to get into the war we were thinking of maybe sending troops on the side of bashar really to get rid of this stuff we don't want these guys they have it and of course there was too many troops and it didn't happen but they knew there were two suspects that knew a noosa had the stuff in syria the stuff forget about having it analyzed they knew

right away and they only talked about one and so i wrote an article saying while that's hold on folks what i also learned because i was ready once later is that the material that was taken by russia russian and challenges which is quite what can i tell you russian intelligence in damascus i mean without russia i don't think he could have survived i think they saved a couple you fifteen he was in trouble he might a survivor anyway the army was holding forth there wasn't collapsing as much as people thought that he was having trouble. anyway and by the way i'm always taken his apologist for bashar assad only doing is telling the truth i'm telling facts period. people who fight wars all fight with same way he's he doesn't do anything differently than we do the hell out of people how can the united states use the nuclear bomb on hiroshima did daylight bombing of major cities in germany one thousand forty four cities you know the scent the famous bombings that everyone dreads that just fire storms we just say somebody's house is is war criminal for

fighting the war they say he was in a war a real war and by all accounts the casualties were almost the same of both sides if this is an apology that's just that's just people not wanting to believe not wanting to believe their prefer their just like letting their personal dislike overcome the reality the point is that it was analyzed important the brits had it and only which is a laboratory we in america respect for those skilled in chemical weapons it was delivered to account was good liver to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff its name was norman dempsey dempsey takes it i write this categorically in the london review i write this i don't say who the source is but i say he takes it you don't hear him denying it you hear nothing said about this takes it to the president and says mr president you can't you don't have a case it's not clear it's not clear bashar did it the same day we learned later years later two thousand and fifteen. obama does a long interview with

a man named jeffrey goldberg of land a monthly magazine one of his people he liked a lot twenty thousand word interview in the middle of the interview he says about that incident the red line the head of national intelligence a general named clapper air force one comes to see me and he says mr president. it's not a slam dunk which is you know like considered to be the that be a perhaps no it's not that you know it so he didn't do the bombing because he didn't think he could win the case in the public arena that's why he did do the bombing not because there was a deal made on getting rid of weapons he lied and so i write this stuff he didn't tell the truth syria wanted to get rid of the. what for shares i want to get i wrote in two thousand and three for the new yorker mustapha to last the head of the fence of a huge defense minister of syria and been defense minister for ten twenty years wrote a lot of poetry stuff and i quote him saying at one point there was a worry that america may take syria and i said what would you do then he said what

could i do and i said well you could use a chemical weapons and the call it was in the new yorker and it was read to him and you know the new yorker check stuff he approved this was in english he speaks english and he said to me. he said those things chemical weapons he says those things those use this things that the old man bashar is father want it off us he thought it was a deterrent against israel cost us the fortune teller we have to protect them it's a big pain he said if we use those weapons america could incinerate us with nukes and they'd be right and so crazy would be to use those weapons i said what would you do then and he said well we let america let the americans call that they come to damascus so let's see what happens i said what are you talking about he said just like in baghdad when the when the when the when the knights of malta came in the thirteenth century the rivers would be full of their blood he said we have a resistance and so i remember going back and telling my general friends in washington you know this is not textbook you talk with the defense made it it's not

he's not going to defend the country is going to let you come and kill you when you get there they're different i remember saying you're not going to have it's not going to be like the fight against not going to have a defense perimeter and you're have to fight your way into the city he's going to let you in and get you when you're there it was very interesting but then he was prime minister here was telling us it is. the british troops should be involved we're getting huge amount of persuasion here. i mean is syria now on syria up until say you know the drought is over now is the kurds to cut a deal with bashar assad it's over and drums or changes policy because when it comes to doubt we've been having here a thing where. has been accused on a regular basis in the british well of it of assassinating people in britain well that's the case is sort of falling apart there's been several porting from europe and i should say the book says you get all you start researching on w m d contexts for stories for decades now. for example there was

a story about let's get let's get to the let me just say this there was a story in the press where syria was using chlorine in. the endgame in the isis and he you know this spring there was an end game and it was stories that they were using sarin gas and chlorine together and so here's why hellman said footage of it in the fifty's koreans are very volatile gas and it's of great interest to the it's not it's not a worry for egypt and there was a story just the other day about syria drop the un report saying they dropped as chlorine gas pond there's no such thing it anybody's arsenal a korean bomb you have to how much chlorine can you put into it cory's a gas it dissipates quickly it moves quickly it's not lethal you can breathe and keep on what it's not it's not a war for agent you could there's no such bomb but even more important because chlorine so reactive in the chemical corps in america when they develop those nerve agents in the fifty's they thought let's see what happens if we meld chlorine with it maybe with soup it up make it even more more efficient as

a killer and it turns out that chlorine immediate is first thing it did in their field reports this is published documents in the field chlorine immediately would go and grab all the hydrogen molecules from this era dignity disappeared so worked exactly the opposite in other words sarah and drop of chlorine would become just another useless gas it would be much less lethal the korean would make it weak so that you can't which isn't the way it was record you can't use sarin and chlorine together just about the nobody does any homework this script and we had geoffrey robertson q.c. one of the world's leading human rights biases and who said that russia has a posture in this killing live in a. the m i six by it was. we were told in this country i mean clearly this was a lethal military grade yeah it was a nerve gas as if you have to population you that you kept no idea of military grade military grade v.x. . you could wipe out half of london with that one i mean it's really it was. called

a story look i've written about it so i asked myself that i haven't written the story i always had about it from my friends in america is. those two were helping your british intelligence services with information about the russian mafia that's what they were doing here in other words the people that would high on the list that would want to hurt them would be the russian mafia russians but not the russian got to read the script. i mean that was the understanding and there's also been some reporting in europe of it that it's been pretty much wiped widespread there was a story but the same after the same thing that they were actually were doing work for the marriage for the british intelligence committee activities i mean there is a big russian mafia let's face it but that isn't the russian government all you would say is i think i mean tony what i was told but i haven't done a reporting on it so i don't know firsthand i know secondhand i've been told by people in america because you ask about it is that is that most likely. most likely that they were known to have been talking to the six and five relevant six or five

people that i am i five or six people about what they knew about russian corruption in and you're not in russia again you know the activities and so the only you from there you can draw your own conclusions of all who wanted to hurt him so i thank you for the show his book report your memoir is out now that's after the show will be back on monday to link you to death by social media was forty two years to the day the socialist republic of vietnam was reunified after losing millions of men women and children and defeating the united states in the. fight for many years so i know the game and so i got. the ball isn't only about what happens on the beach or the final school it's about the passion from the fans it's the age of the. superman to just kill you narrowness and spending to get to

the twenty million one fly. it's an experience like nothing else not to because i want to share what i think of what i know about the beautiful guy but great so one more chance with. a nice minute. feel. such. i. feel.

now it was even month that. you had just one must walk. a month of thought one can. decide about you can have a a month at. the pub and we know. more than enough nothing that. mark i'm a can hire i don't have the piece of i doubt at the head you think on my blog. sort of kind of what but what if he's to be jumping up. and we can all agree there's a way i'm going out above the net. without us but you can see it was hoping. to get a head to head. with

a muppet i thought of. something and said i think any of the women puzzle females i will dump. all. day ok easy i. was. the.

only woman there. oh no the. let's. listen you know. love. on. top and you can move on is that moment when we can have them can you want to just

put on them that most of them are kind of them and you one of them at the thought of me i see. one of. the. up on. a little one of them. but. let's not have you and them as usual but how many so can you add them up that come up with two feet c.n.n. and is it home what that the four little but a lot of the would it just sum. up on him that that means i'm a macand i am a note to myself becoming. in the hunt for what they have the kind of people must

that i would be among them at. i think father. well. you can at the. for the last can to but off but. you can now for coffee my love them and for what. can they any of them not of my do and if you was that i do any of myself a come of. but that. was you not to be.

just a on the one of them and feeding on that out of that on if you just any special for me. michelle by any vision. i want to be just any other company if you don't know what. i'm. thinking. about you know i can be whatever. i should be. some i'm just fifteen then oh yes the gift shop. but i say ok. thank. you because you. don't know what i must follow up on.

the back. just like that of me she had. a w i need. to fuck and moan but the economists of the i.c. and the t. . say thought how i can i left. lemme know what i mean and. had he. let it end i. mean if you invest my time a certain number on your fair share in general. dollars not so if you're not with us we can do one thing again you know because i think.

we're dedicating the trucks here marching in so many. again we have to go with the who are no one has pushed. through them away in the studio john they're going to lead them into that incident no need to work on these or. ride or move into other. fields.