Law School Holds Forum To Study War Atrocities

"The escalation of the war in Vietnam and atrocities committed there are the result of the military trying to understand Robert McNamara's statistics of success," said Ted Ensign, a coordinator of the Citizen's Commission of Inquiry into war crimes in Indochina, last night. "McNamara wanted numbers-numbers of bodies, number of villages captured-so the military invented statistics to satisfy him."

Ensign, along with Richard R. Baxter a Harvard law professor, and A. Frank Reel, a New York attorney, evaluated the importance of war crime trials at a forum sponsored by the Harvard International Law Club.

The three men compared the trial of Yamashita, a Japanese general convicted and hanged by the United States for his responsibility for atrocities committed in the Philippines during World War II, to the recent trials of American military officers connected with the My Lai massacres.

"If we apply the Supreme Court decision against Yamashita in 1946 to the present situation in Vietnam," said Reel, the defense attorney for Yamashita, "General Westmoreland and even President Johnson are guilty of committing war crimes."

In deciding that case, the Supreme Court said that an army commander is responsible for atrocities committed by soldiers under his command and is guilty of a war crime if he does not effectively control his troops, even if he was unaware of the situation.

Baxter, who teaches a course called "the causes of war." said that international law is necessary to stem brutality. Ensign disagreed, saying "The executions after World War II were supposed to serve as a lesson. Do you think the officers in Vietnam learned?"