A 20-MONTH PROBE PINPOINTS THE AGGRESSORS IN INDOCHINA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200790001-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Sequence Number: 1
• Content Type: NEWSPAPER CLIPPING

Approved For Release 2006/0e ff, C RDP88- 1350R000200790001-7
b'v`!a^~?IP~i,'t1;id PLANS AN AG-
GRESSIVE VAR. By Ralph Sta-
vies, Richard J. Parset, and
Marcus G. Raskin. Random
House, New York. 1971. $7.95.
ByJ011.N P1771 MAN
Who are the individuals viiio,
.in their role of civilian or mili-
tary members of the policy-mak-
ing and policy-implementing arms
of the government,, contributed
toward involving the United
States in the decades-long aggres-
sion against the peoples of ludo-
. china?
Are these individuals, who
I icted in their capacity as offi-
dals and agents of the state, re
sponsihle for the consequences.of
their acts. or must the entire
U.S. population be held respon-
sible? -
Do preceelents which U.S. mili-
tary and civilian officials estab-
lished at the end of the Second
World War throw any light on
the responsibility of these individ-
uals, any light on the answer to
these questions? . -
In this book the authors set out
'to respond to readers seeking the
answers.to such questions. Their to appear.in AIay, 1972. More fill-: respoihses, if falling short of pro- portant, however,' are flaws in
fundity, want for nothing in forth- conception and analysis. Their in-
rightness and candor. As mem- vestigation should have encom-
bers of the Washington-based Ill-
0 passed the period from 1915 to
stitute for Policy Studies, they 19m, the first decade of the Cold.
conducted a 20-months-long study ? War, when the direction of U.S.
of the U.S. aggression in Indo- imperialist planning was deter-
china, concentrating- on who ac- mined. Secondly, the investiga-
tually planned and decided the Lion would have been enriched by
aggressive actions. For this pur- focusing more on the objective,
pose they interviewed more than material forces behind the ag-
300 individuals and obtained use ,,,,zion in Southeast Asia.
of. their documents and papers,
and researched files and docu-
ments of the Department of De-
fense, Department of State, the
White House and the'Central In-
J telligence Agency (CIA).
The book also contains selected
documents from the U.S. occupa-
tion of Japan and Germany after
the Second World War, conclud-
ing with excerpts from the state-
ment of former U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Robert II. Jackson
at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi
war criminals in November, 19.15.
The authors believe it is neces-
sary to name names and to hold
the perpetrators of aggressive
war responsibl
"We approached the study. with STAT
t5vo explicit biases," they say in
their preface. "The first was that
the war was politically and mor-
ally wrong from the outset. That
bias was- completely confirmed
for us in. the course of the study
by mountains of documentary evi-.
dente; much of which has now
been. made public. It is a bias
which, according to recent public
opinion polls, a majority of the
country now shares.
"The second .bias was that the
lawlessness of the nation-state
constitutes the greatest threat to
peace and human survival. The
only hope of subjecting the state
to law is to hold individuals who
act for the state responsible for
their acts. Thus the establishment
of personal responsibility of na-
tional security officials for what
they do in the name of the Amer-
icall, people is the key to any
program of practical reconstruc-
tion."
The book contains several flaws.
There is no index, but this may
be corrected in the second vol-
ume, "Washington Wages an Ag-
gressive War," which is expected
since' this latter area was not
deeply probed, the authors' reme-
dies offer little . assurance for.
those Americans who believe that
a radical change of the social
system, rather than reforms of
its bureaucratic structure, is re-
quired to safeguard us from more
disasters. .
Despite these flaws, however,
the 'book offers convincing
dence that the bias of the authors
and the American majority is cor-
rect.
IIC
Approved- For Release.2006/06/19: CIA-RDP88-0'1350R000200790001-7