The fierce battles now erupting in Vietnam could provide the final curtain in the charade of "Vietnamisation'. Thieu's puppet regime is splitting apart at the seams under the hammering it is receiving, and remains held together only by the massive U.S. air support flying in from Laos, Guam, Thailand and the Seventh Fleet.
What happened with "Vietnamisation" and the rapid reduction in the number of U.S. ground troops was simply that computers moved in as the troops moved out. Automatic warfare has taken over the battlefields, turning South East Asia into the largest "test range in the history of the world. A quarter of a million square miles where U.S. militarism experiments on millions of human pasta pip.
Im 1968 the U.S. forces began the wholesale destruction of the Vietnamese environment. Ten million bombs dropped on southern Vietnam, including the monster daisy cutter' (a bomb of record dimensions which destroys all life, human, animal and plant, in an area of 770 acres). Over 15 million gallons of defoliant, the U.S. Engineering Command with its giant bulldozers and tractors clearing forests at an infernal rate. The result of this destruction is not only to "rob the NLF of cover", but also that the cleared areas are taken over by bamboo, the topsoil is lost, and the area rapidly degenerates into a dustfree fire zone The essential procedure is to declare a wide area a "free fire zone" where all people are automatically assumed to be the "enemy". and where every man, woman and child is fair game for all the horrors of technological warfare. The area is saturated with a network of sensors of various kinds which can detect relevant sounds such as the human voice tremors such as those caused by footsteps, the heat given out by the human body, etc.: there is even a people sniffer sensitive to minute quantities of ammonia which can detect human perspiration at a considerable distance. The signals from the sensors are picked up by an automatic pilotless plane which re-transmits the information to two IBM 360-65 computers in the Nakhom Phanom base in Thailand. The computer may explode mines on the ground or else activate a sinke wrom an airbase waere une paane is given the course automatically and the bombs released automatically. At present up to 600 airstrikes a day are being ordered.
new weapons The new anti-personnel weapons developed over the past few years are diabolical in design. Those we know about include: -1. The spherical 'guava' bomb weighing slightly under one pound contains 300 balls.
These are not effective against military installations but are deadly against people.
The balls are ejected at high velocity and pierce the flesh, perforate the organs and badly mutilate the victims. It is often impossible to take all the pellets out of the body. This bomb is not primarily designed to kill but rather to injure a large number of people so as to remove them from the processes of production and defence, as well as generally lowering the morale of the population. 2. Shrapnel Balls are shells fired by 155mm and 203mm cannon. When they explode these shells shoot out about 100 small balls, each ball bounces off the ground and explodes at a height of five feet, projecting hundreds of sharp fragments towards the neck, head and chest. 3. The dum-dum bullet, banned by the Hague Convention and never used against the fascist forces - "too inhuman" - reappears as a 20mm shell fired from aircraft, exploding after it strikes the victim. 4. The Dragon Tooth Mine, a very light device with a small but very powerful charge and a minute detonator, and a small plastic wing; it is carried by the wind like the seed of the sycamore tree. 5. The Gravel Mine is a small flat three inch square of brightly coloured cloth, which can be mistaken for a folded handkerchief or wound dressing, containing about 20 grammes of explosives. It also contains plastic pellets which fragment on explosion and may be the source of the plastic fragments reported by Vietnamese doctors which are virtually undetectable by X-rays. 6. The "Smartie" bomb, a smail brightly coloured ball which explodes when activated by the heat of the human hand.
These last two appear to have been designed with children in mind. Brightly coloured balls are unlikely to be collected by adults, and the cloth squares have been found sewn up as doll's dresses.
Yet the continuing struggle by the people of Vietnam against U.S. imperialist aggression shows that the future of mankind - socialism or barbarism - will be decided not primarily by technology or weaponry but by the will of the people and their tenacity and purpose in struggle. british complicity In addition to the British Government's diplomatic and quasi-military support for the U.S. in Vietnam more than 40 British firms have or have had contracts with the U.S. Defence Dept. Exact details are hard to obtain, and the research contracts with universities virtually impossible to determine, but the following firms are known:- Westland Aircraft - Sioux helicopters; British Hovercraft - river patrol aircraft: Bristol Siddeley- barbed wire: Hawker Siddeley jet planes; Short Bros- Skyvan aircraft; Martin Baker- ejector seats; Decca Navigation - helicopter guidance systems; Rolls Royce and General Electric- engines and computer equipment.
END BRITISH COMPLICITY!
WITHDRAW ALL U.S. FORCES FROM S.E. ASIA-NOW!
SOLIDARITY WITH THE REVOLUTION.
ARY STRUGGLE OF THE INDOCHINESE MASSES!
VICTORY TO THE VIETNAMESE REVO. LUTION!
The Scarman report on 'Violence and Civil Disturbance in Northern Ireland in 1969' has just been published. Its consensus-type approach ties in Despite the fact that Justice Scarman's Report was signed on 4th February 1972, two months later it is above all appropriate to the present conjuncture of British imperialism'sstrategy in Ireland. Its subject is the history of the civil disturbances in the north of Ireland in 1969 which exploded in Derry in August and resulted in the large scale deployment of the British army to keep "law and order' on the streets. In accordance with ruling class historiographical tradition it is essentially pragmatic and ideological. The facts' appear sacrosanct, but are garnished according to the needs of the moment. This is evident from its main lines of argument and conclu sions. It is designed to please everyone and blame no-one who is part of the present attempt to inch towards the political settle ment that Heath hopes will emerge cventually from the recent "initiatives'. Thus the middie class Catholic leaders are exonerated the SDLP completely, while the Civil Rights movement gets off with a reprimand - from any serious responsibility for the violence. Naturally enough, 'extremists" and socialists like Bernadette Devlin have little to commend them to Scarman as they are clearly outside the consensus that the Hon, Justice wishes to The role of the police is at once obscured by the verbosity of the narrative, and by euphemistic descriptions of extremely concrete events. The murderous rampages of the police and 'UVE style mobs-an "unhappy affair" — are regarded as incidental, the "excess" of an individual or an "error" of judgement. One such "error" of the RUC officers during August "69 was that in nearly every case of indiscriminate shooting by the Ulster Special Constabulary they had directly contravened official police orders that the B's were not to carry fire arms on riot control duty.
When you add up all these apparently isolated cases of flouting orders and breaches of discipline by the police, their generality rather than their episodic nature becomes ap parent. The relationship between the pollice and the Protestant mobs is similarly dealt with it as bo of the m I case of a Sobe to attack Cars.
people is deroid of substance, and we reject it utterly™. But as one reads the report of each town and inciHowever, none of these things make the reportpolitically significant, and it has rightly been given little notice in the bourgeois press. It merely confirms accepted government and middie class opinion rather than suggests any initiative. However, one lesson that emerges from the report is worth repeating, mainly because if is a lesson for some of the left, who during those days in the middle of August 1969 abandoned fundamental anti-imperialist postons ang jome m tac cnorus or approva. for the intervention of the imperialist army It is clear from the report that troops were deliberately kept out of the streets until after the USC had been let off the leash for a time. The troops were thus to appear as the saviours of the Catholics from a massive pogrom. This was the deliberate policy of the Wilson government, to make the troops more credible as a "peace keeping" force, Thus, far from being responsible for stopping the threatening build up of armed attacks on the Catholics it was the British government itself and Wilson in particular that must largely bear the responsibility for unleashing these forces.
-Ben Joseph An RUC man, with helmet and shield solidarity activity in Manchester with the Irish national liberation struggle, has been extremely bad. But its faults are not those ascribed to it by your correswatches a fire at the Bogside barricades in 1969 the
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very well with the present 'initiatives. SCARMAN TRIBUNAL REPORTS
APPEAL FROM LONG KESH