Did Bill O’Reilly Cover Up a War Crime in El Salvador?

[Electric Monk]

(cross posting from the Latin America Group)

Did Bill O’Reilly Cover Up a War Crime in El Salvador?
Greg Grandin on February 9, 2015 - 2:34 PM ET

Before Bill O’Reilly was, well, Bill O’Reilly, he worked for a time as a foreign correspondent for CBS Nightly News, anchored by Dan Rather. O’Reilly talks about that period of his career in two of his books, and in both mentions that in early 1982 he reported from northeastern El Salvador, just after the infamous El Mozote Massacre. “When the CBS News bureau chief asked for volunteers to check out an alleged massacre in the dangerous Morazán Territory, a mountainous region bordering Nicaragua, I willingly went.”

El Mozote is a small, hard-to-reach hamlet. The massacre took place on December 11, 1981, carried out by US-trained Atlacatl Battalion, which was not just trained but created by the United States as a rapid response unit to fight El Salvador’s fast-spreading FMLN insurgency. El Mozote was a liberation-theology village, supportive of the guerrillas. The killing was savage beyond belief: between 733 and 900 villagers were slaughtered, decapitated, impaled and burned alive.

The story of the massacre was broken on the front page of The New York Times by the journalist Raymond Bonner and in The Washington Post by Alma Guillermoprieto; both stories were published on January 27, 1982, and accompanied by photographs taken by Susan Meiselas. Bonner and Meiselas got to El Mozote, after hearing about the massacre, by walking for days in from Honduras. Guillermoprieto wrote about seeing “countless bits of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column” poking “out of the rubble.” Bonner noted the “charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles.” Later, Mark Danner reported on the massacre in detail, first in a lengthy New Yorker essay and then in a book.

Aside from the brutality of the killing, El Mozote is distinguished by the fact that Washington moved quickly to cover it up.

more
http://www.thenation.com/blog/197401/did-bill-oreilly-cover-war-crime-el-salvador
http://www.democraticunderground.com/110837250

[Electric Monk]

1. (kick, nt)

[Scuba]

2. In all likelihood, O'Liarly never left his hotel room and just made shit up and submitted it.

[UTUSN]

3. R#8&K, but BUT he's a WAR CORRESPONDENT!1 The depth of his denial is stupendous

Oh, and his droppings of Spanish!1 "los muchachos"!1 "periodistas"!1 and the ever lovely "cojones"!1

His research is so profound that years later he used the word for "wetbacks" for human smugglers instead of "coyotes". But he has built a Faux academy for all the flunk-outs from the pro outlets: Bernard Golddigger, BecKKK, STOSSEL, CAROLLA, ATKINSON, Dennis MILLER, and on and on. And he's RICH, RICH!1 All those killing books "co-"written!1

I've said it before, I'll say it again: O'LOOFAH is a 1950s repressed, oppressive, at least verbal and emotional abuser, White male (repeating: ) from the 1950s. The VFW's hero!1

[kelliekat44]

4. Didn't everyone in the US government and media at that time? nt

[ck4829]

5. Right wing groups like Accuracy in Media labeled anyone who even said "El Mozote" a COMMUNIST

Gee, doesn't that sound familiar?

But, yes, they not only denied that the El Mozote massacre happened, they all but denied that El Mozote even ever existed.