{"id":113517,"date":"2018-07-02T12:02:12","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T11:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=113517"},"modified":"2018-06-30T15:06:59","modified_gmt":"2018-06-30T14:06:59","slug":"how-four-words-changed-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/how-four-words-changed-history\/","title":{"rendered":"How Four Words Changed History"},"content":{"rendered":"

21 Jun 2018<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: \u201cAnd babies?\u201d<\/p>\n

A: \u201cAnd babies.\u201d<\/p>\n

These four words, broadcast by CBS News in 1969, had a profound impact on the American public, the Nixon presidency and the course of the Vietnam War. Questions about babies have arisen again at the White House, this time about thousands of immigrant children, some only months old, ripped from their parents and jailed in cages on the orders of President Trump.<\/p>\n

That question, asked half a century ago, \u201cAnd babies?\u201d was posed by veteran investigative journalist Mike Wallace while interviewing a young Vietnam veteran named Paul Meadlo. \u201cAnd babies,\u201d Meadlo answered. He was an Army private who, along with scores of other U.S. soldiers, conducted a raid on March 16, 1968, attacking a Vietnamese village called My Lai.<\/p>\n

What followed came to be known as the My Lai Massacre. U.S. soldiers slaughtered over 500 civilians over the course of the day. \u201cThey was begging and saying, \u2018No, no.\u2019 And the mothers was hugging their children and \u2026 well, we kept right on firing. They was waving their arms and begging,\u201d Meadlo told Wallace.<\/p>\n

Meadlo was brought to CBS by a young freelance reporter named Seymour Hersh, who was investigating the massacre. He tracked down Meadlo, got his story and convinced him to do the CBS interview. What Hersh uncovered about the My Lai Massacre haunts him to this day. Speaking on the \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d news hour about his new book, \u201cReporter: A Memoir,\u201d Hersh said, \u201cInstead of meeting the enemy, there were just families, women and children and old men. And so they began to murder them. They put them in ditches. And they raped. They killed. They threw babies up \u2014 this was hard for me to even, in the first year \u2014 and caught them on bayonets. Some of the stuff I kept out of the initial story, it was just so awful.\u201d<\/p>\n

He recalled, of Meadlo\u2019s CBS appearance, \u201cMike Wallace, who\u2019s tough as nails, asked him \u2014 he asked him five times in that interview, \u2018And babies?\u2019 Again, he kept on saying, \u2018And babies?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Hersh later published the story, through the small anti-war Dispatch News Service, after several major U.S. media outlets turned down the story. It earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.<\/p>\n

Hersh sees parallels with how the press is finally covering the immigrant family separation crisis now. \u201cThis could be a turning point,\u201d he said<\/p>\n

Today we see photos of crying toddlers next to handcuffed parents, accompanied by an audio recording released by the news outlet ProPublica in which children are heard crying, \u201cMama! Papi!\u201d while a guard mocked them, saying in Spanish: \u201cWell, we have an orchestra here. What\u2019s missing is a conductor.\u201d Elected officials and the media have flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border region, demanding access to detention centers. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was questioned at a White House press briefing, asked why her department had only released photos of jailed boys in cages over the age of 10, with no photos of girls or toddlers there. \u201cWhere are the girls? Where are the young toddlers?\u201d she was repeatedly asked. Her confusion as to their whereabouts stoked even more furor.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s \u201czero tolerance\u201d policy toward undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers along the U.S. southern border, announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on April 6, allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement division (ICE) and Border Patrol to arrest adults whom they suspected of crossing the border without proper documentation, and to separate them from their children. The number of children kidnapped by DHS and ICE is over 2,300, The Intercept estimates over 3,700 have been taken since October.<\/p>\n

Scores of immigrants rights activists across the country have been protesting Trump\u2019s order since the day it was issued. The movement snowballed. Congress members demanded to see the children. Democratic and Republican governors began issuing executive orders withdrawing or preventing their National Guard troops from going to the border to assist DHS. Airlines joined in, refusing to transport children stripped away from their parents. By Wednesday, Trump issued an executive order, reversing his own decision. Families would not be separated moving forward.<\/p>\n

But that does not solve the crisis for those thousands already snatched from their parents. There is no mechanism in place to reunite parents, some of whom have already been deported, with their children, who are still in cages, jails and hastily erected tent cities scattered around the country in 17 states.<\/p>\n

Fifty years ago, four words broadcast nationally changed the course of the Vietnam War. Question: \u201cAnd babies?\u201d Answer: \u201cAnd babies.\u201d Four words heard this week, \u201cMama, Mama. Papi, Papi,\u201d have exposed the cruelty of the Trump administration, and have powerfully changed the course of the immigration debate.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Q: \u201cAnd babies?\u201d
\nA: \u201cAnd babies.\u201d
\nThat question, asked half a century ago, \u201cAnd babies?\u201d was posed by investigative journalist Mike Wallace to Vietnam veteran Paul Meadlo. \u201cAnd babies,\u201d Meadlo answered. He was an Army private who conducted a raid on a Vietnamese village. What followed came to be known as the My Lai Massacre. Hersh sees parallels with how the press is finally covering the immigrant family separation crisis now. \u201cThis could be a turning point,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":65754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}