Tom Harkin: “almost 35 years ago, in July of 1970, when I was a staff person in the House of Representatives, I was sent with a…”

“almost 35 years ago, in July of 1970, when I was a staff person in the House of Representatives, I was sent with a commission to Vietnam. My commission was to investigate reports about the South Vietnamese military using tiger cages to imprison, torture and kill people. Our State Department denied the existence of the cages, and our military denied the existence of the cages, calling reports of their existence Communist conspiracy stories. Thanks to the courage of Congressman William Anderson of Tennessee and Congressman Augustus Hawkins of California, we were able to uncover the notorious tiger cages on Con Son Island. When the pictures I took appeared in LIFE magazine, the world saw North Vietnamese, Vietcong, and civilian opponents of the war in South Vietnam all bunched into these tiger cages, in clear violation of human rights, and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. The reaction was overwhelming. The pictures presented evidence of the cruel, torturous conditions in these tiger cages, how people had been tortured and killed, and how we, the U.S. Government, had provided not only the funding but the supervision for these prisons. I thought that we had learned from that experience. So it was with a terrible sense of deja vu that I saw the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison last year.”