By Patrick Martin
Apr. 7— The Ohio daily newspaper Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer
Prize for its series on Vietnam War atrocities committed by the Tiger
Force, an elite US Army unit, it was announced Apr. 5. The series, by
reporters Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss, and Joe Mahr, examined the
record of the platoon during a seven-month period in 1967 when its members
killed hundreds of civilians.
The report was unusual, not only in exposing atrocities by American
soldiers — murders known about and covered up by higher authorities
in the military — but in linking the killings to official US military
policy in Vietnam, which declared large parts of the country to be “free-fire”
zones in which soldiers were authorized to kill anything that moved.
The series took a compassionate approach both to the Vietnamese victims
and to the soldiers who belonged to Tiger Force, many of whom suffered
mental and emotional breakdowns as a result of their wartime actions.
The Blade series was doubly significant because it ran in the newspaper
during the US occupation of Iraq, when new atrocities were being committed
against innocent civilians. The timing of the award is also appropriate
— coming during the week that the US military launched its biggest
search-and-destroy mission since Vietnam, targeting insurgent guerrillas
in the city of Falluja while also engaging in street-by-street combat
with Shiite insurgents in Baghdad and in southern Iraq.
The series of articles on Tiger Force, entitled Buried Secrets, Brutal
Truths, was triggered by the decision of several veterans of the unit
to come forward with their accounts. Some had witnessed the atrocities
and been unable to stop them; others had directly participated and are
now remorseful and haunted by the memories. Nine of the former soldiers
suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The reporters found that an Army investigation had found substantial
evidence that 18 soldiers had committed war crimes by killing unarmed
and unresisting Vietnamese civilians, but the Nixon and Ford administrations
failed to prosecute anyone. Weiss told the Blade, according to an account
on the newspaper’s web site, “I’m glad we won, but it’s
really a somber victory. Tiger Force killed innocent men, women, and
children and the men who committed these acts continue to go unpunished.”
Sallah added, “What’s important to me is the Army get to the
bottom of who killed this investigation 29 years ago.” The records
of the official investigation still remain classified, and no official,
civilian or military, has been held accountable for the killings or
the cover-up.
The work of the three reporters included interviewing 43 former Tiger
Force members and traveling to Vietnam to talk to the families of the
victims. This clearly involved a substantial commitment of resources
for a regional newspaper in a city of 300,000, which has never before
won a Pulitzer Prize. Managing Editor Kurt Franck told the Blade, “We
had a moral obligation to report this news. Where the government failed,
The Blade closed that chapter.”
The award is an implicit rebuke to the bulk of the American media, which
ignored the Blade series at the time. There was virtually no television
coverage of this major exposure of wartime atrocities and most daily
newspapers — including the Washington Post and New York Times —
ran only brief and perfunctory accounts.
Several other Pulitzers awarded Apr. 5 went to reporting and commentary
that was critical of the agenda of the Bush administration and corporate
America, in what is perhaps an indication of more fundamental political
shifts in the United States.
The prize for international reporting went to Washington Post foreign
correspondent Anthony Shadid, a descendant of Lebanese immigrants who
is fluent in Arabic and provided vivid, on-the-spot reporting from Baghdad
throughout the US invasion. The Pulitzer Prize committee praised Shadid’s
“extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices
and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled,
and their way of life upended.”
None of the myriad reporters who were embedded in US military units
during the war was nominated for an award, nor were any of the editorial
writers or columnists — the overwhelming majority — who backed
the Bush administration’s drive to war and enthused over the swift
US military advance.
Shadid’s reports were noteworthy for detailing the impact of the
US bombing campaign on Iraqi civilians in Baghdad during the war. As
an Arab-American who previously covered the Palestinian intifada on
the West Bank for the Boston Globe—where he was shot and wounded
by Israeli troops—he clearly was more sensitive to the suffering
of the Iraqi people than most of the US press corps.
This was reflected in front page reports like these: “In a Moment,
Lives Get Blown Apart,” on Mar. 27, 2003; “‘The Whole
World Cries’: Crowded Market Turns Into Scene of Carnage,”
Mar. 29, 2003; “A Boy Who Was ‘Like a Flower’: ‘The
Sky Exploded’ and Arkan Daif, 14, Was Dead,” Mar. 31, 2003.
The Pulitzer committee clearly focused on these reports, since they
gave the award to Shadid only, and not to his Post colleagues who joined
him in Baghdad after the US conquest of Iraq and co-authored much of
his subsequent reporting.
While many of these later reports were standard coverage of the actions
of the US occupation regime and the American military forces, Shadid
was one of a handful of journalists — and perhaps the only American
— who interviewed guerrilla insurgents on why they were fighting
the US, as well as profiling ordinary Iraqis with a wide range of views
on the occupation and the future course of their country.
The Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzer prizes, including an award for
national reporting for an examination of the methods used by Wal-Mart
in its rise to the status of the world’s largest corporation. This
included a clear picture of how the company drives down labor costs,
both by squeezing its own workers in the United States, and by building
a huge network of low-cost suppliers, mainly in China.
The New York Times won the Public Service Award for a series examining
the problem of workplace safety. The Pulitzer committee noted that reporters
David Barstow and Lowell Bergman “relentlessly examined death and
injury among American workers and exposed employers who break basic
safety rules.”
Source: World Socialist Web site
