An open response to Nick Schou, News and Investigations editor of the OC Weekly

 by Jean Libby, editor, Viet Am Review (http://vietamreview.blogharbor.com)

“A Vietnam War in O.C.”  header:  “Right-wing exiles in Orange County are on an increasingly desperate mission to root out any hint of communism.”  Sept. 6, 2007

Los Angeles Times

‘Thirty two years after the fall of Saigon,’ he says, ‘the war against communism rages on in Orange County’s Little Saigon…”  Conveniently omitting the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the double-communist bloodbath beginning in 1978—or the toppling of the Soviet empire in 1991, Schou tags the entire Orange County ethnic Vietnamese population who are over thirty with the acts of a right-wing death squad who claimed responsibility for five murders of journalists that occurred in several areas around the USA between 1987 and 1990. 

Just to be sure, he calls the anticommunists ‘Vietnamese exiles,’ while the journalists from the same place and generation were ‘Vietnamese Americans.’  Some of these journalists were murdered in retribution for what they did in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, when the entire South Vietnamese infrastructure—more than 100,000 officers and civilian officials—were sent to concentration camps and their land and possessions confiscated.  At least 10,000 of those in the prisons died within fifteen years.  Their wives and families were dispossessed and sent to “New Economic Zones” where they were required to supply their own needs from the ground up without tools or seeds.  Many of them returned to the cities and are homeless.  Children, now orphaned because the mothers and grandparents died of exposure, live in urban dumps to find food. 

It was illegal to do small marketing of food or crafts during the 1980s anywhere in Vietnam unless you were licensed by the Communist victors.  They made such a mess of the traditional market economy system of small suppliers that the South Vietnamese children are still living in dumps.  According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, children near Hanoi who shine shoes near West Lake are regularly rounded up and sent to outlying concentration camp prisons originally built by Ho Chi Minh in the late 1950s for “reeducation into proper communist citizens.”   They are beaten and starved, interned with adult criminals, and sent back to the streets with a warning not to try their enterprise again.  It doesn’t look good for tourism.   

There was a demonstration of 2,000 people in Saigon only a month ago who demanded redress for their losses in the aftermath of communist victory.  They were forcefully dispersed into the countryside in military trucks.  One elderly woman demonstrator died.  An African news agency says there were more.  It’s not about yesterday that 1,000 Vietnamese Americans in Orange County are peacefully assembling and protesting within the law, it’s about today.

The Communists, who control the press, imprison and restrict and sometimes murder religious leaders—Catholic, Evangelical, and Buddhist—do not say what happened to the people loaded into the trucks.  Investigative journalism is severely punished in Vietnam.  Just ask Cong Danh Do, imprisoned in Saigon for internet communication that included the word “democracy” in 2006.  An article by Vanessa Hua in the San Francisco Chronicle December 10, 2006 just won the Asian American Journalists Association award of best print story of the year.  Hua writes of Do’s arrest, imprisonment, and rescue through the efforts of his family who quit school and jobs in San Jose to mobilize support from the larger community, including his Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  If Nick Schou investigated how many are voting American citizens among the people he calls “Vietnamese exiles” he might think again about his knee-jerk reactionary rhetoric. 

This is the regime that is supported by the publisher of Viet Weekly, Le Vu.  He has been caught red-handed cutting and pasting articles from the Communist papers into his own.  His Spring 2007 trip to Hanoi to cover the police manhandling of women outside the Ambassador’s residence in the presence of Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez is a good example.  On the previous day the former Ambassador Michael Marine had written a powerful op-ed essay criticizing the Vietnam government and political imprisonment of Father Nguyen Van Ly.  I interviewed Le Vu in June 2007 about his false reporting of the Ambassador’ statements.   He said he did not know about the April 5 press release of the criticism because “he had only arrived in Hanoi at 1 a.m. on April 6.”  Apparently his Vietnamese hosts did not give it to him for press background. Nor did he bother to check with Congresswoman Sanchez’ office for her statement.  Instead, he baldly lied to me on the telephone and told me that she was not there.  She was seated with the rest of the Congressional delegation at the second table.  Le Vu published verbatim (in Vietnamese) the Communist version of the incident outside the Ambassador’s residence in which they state Rep. Sanchez was interfering with “internal affairs” by being there.  No wonder Le Vu gets a ticket to the lavish dinner in honor of the Vietnamese president at the resort in Dana Point.  He got an exclusive interview, too. 

Los Angeles Times writer Nick Schou wrote an investigative book on the life and suicide of Gary Webb, a reporter who exposed the connection of the CIA and crack cocaine on the pages of the San Jose Mercury in 1996.  According to this review of Kill the Messenger (published by Nation Press, 2004) in Buzzflash.com: 

Author and investigative journalist Nick Schou was the only reporter to significantly advance Webb's exposé. Drawing on exhaustive research and personal interviews with Webb's family, colleagues, and both supporters and critics, Kill the Messenger argues convincingly that Webb's editors betrayed him despite mounting evidence that his stories were correct. Schou examines what Webb's death and Dark Alliance's aftermath says about journalism in America.

Yet investigating the protest of Viet Weekly, the OC Weekly News and Investigative Editor Nick Schou is at best perfunctory.   One of the issues is the manipulation of the audio file of the press conference at the Hilton Hanoi on April 6 which Le Vu recorded onsite and published, in Vietnamese, with the statement that the then-Ambassador Michael Marine supported the forceful smothering of the mouth Father Nguyen Van Ly by the policeman  standing behind him in a photograph that has gone around the world showing the true face of the Communist repression.  Le Vu changed his story for awhile after it was shown (or rather, heard, on the audio file which he published) that Michael Marine said that he and the Congressional delegation did not talk about the trial of Father Ly in the meeting with VN Deputy Prime Minister Khiem that immediately preceded the press conference.  This muffled sentence was not transcribed by Viet Weekly.  The Ambassador’s public remarks in the presence of the Vietnamese government on the manipulated tape also included that he did not believe Father Ly should be in prison.  The diplomat praised the government for being more open in this trial (which occurred one week previous, on March 30) “than most.”  That sentence can be heard clearly on the file.

Nick Schou contacted the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi for his article “Red Scare in Little Saigon” which was published in OC Weekly on August 16, 2007.  He apparently asked the Embassy Public Affairs office only the question:  if there was a controversy regarding Viet Weekly.  He published the reply from Angela Aggeler (who can be assumed to be related to the Counselor for Political Affairs Brian C. Aggeler) that her office knew of no controversy regarding Viet Weekly.  The head of that office, James Warren, did know of the controversy about the remarks of Michael Marine that were published by the Viet Weekly.  I wrote several times to the Embassy between May and July to get a written transcript of the press conference at the Hilton Hanoi from the Embassy recording.  I even called the press bureau of the U.S. State Dept. in Washington to complain about the lack of response, and found someone who suggested I use his name to the Embassy staff in getting information, and that I not ask the Vietnamese staff for it any longer, but talk to Americans.  I finally got the transcript, which was made in the U.S.A. rather than at the Embassy.  It does not compare favorably with the audio file published by Le Vu as “evidence” on June 14. 

When I told Le Vu that I had requested the transcript he quickly asked me if I had sent them the published audio file.  I told him I had not, because it was not my right under U.S. copyright law to do so.   I did point to the audio publication several times in investigative reporting on my blog, Viet Am Review.  I know that James Warren read these articles because he chastised me sternly for my conclusion that Ambassador Michael Marine resigned (took early retirement) because he refused to toady to the Vietnamese government and was not backed up by the U.S. State Department.  I stand by that conclusion based on the Ambassador’s farewell statement in August that his biggest disappointment with his tenure in office was the human rights violations of the VN government and specifically political imprisonment of its citizens.  This was reported by Associated Press but not by Vietnamnet, the Communist English-language news service, and certainly not by Viet Weekly or OC Weekly. 

Nick Schou knows about this series of events with the Embassy before he wrote the article of Sept. 6 in the Los Angeles Times.  Yet he chooses to minimize the protesters in Orange County by saying that they are only protesting two articles that were lifted from another web site and published by Le Vu at the same time.  He asked the wrong question to the State Dept. and was satisfied with the convenient wrong answer.  This is the same writer who is praised for his book by Lukery in the “At Largely” investigative journalism site on January 23, 2007:

Schou chalks up many of the attacks on Webb to “professional jealousy and journalistic laziness,” as well as to vehement denials by the CIA. Years later the CIA did admit to knowing that the Contras were involved in drug deals, a piece of news that was overlooked by the mainstream media because, at the time, they were obsessed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  

Now that Nick Schou is part of the mainstream media himself he is clearly behaving in the same way.  It is more important to him to vilify the Vietnamese refugees who are now Americans by calling them exiles and minimizing their position.  This position is not based on “the war.” Schou’s mention of only one war conveniently shuffles away the reason for Le Vu’s escape from Vietnam: to avoid the draft in his country in 1979 for an unpopular and genocidal war between Vietnam and Cambodia, another communist country. 

The demonstrations against the Viet Weekly and its publisher Le Vu are about what the Communist government is doing in Vietnam today.  There will be several thousand people gathered in Sydney tomorrow and Sunday to protest the participation of Vietnam in APEC 2007.  One of the speakers will be the Vietnamese American Nguyen Chi Thien, a leader of the demonstration of the pro-communism of Viet Weekly in Orange County.  Nick Schou did interview Mr. Thien for his earlier piece.  He was incredulous about this American citizen’s statement that he was imprisoned by Ho Chi Minh as early as 1961, for a total of twenty-seven years until his eventual release in 1991 due to international outcry led by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and Vietnamese in the worldwide diaspora that was caused by the Communist government of Vietnam.  Nguyen Chi Thien’s book, in English, the Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories will be released by the Council for Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University in a few weeks. 

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Jean Libby is a retired U.S. History instructor at the college level who writes a blog on Vietnamese American Achievement called Viet Am Review.  She is the author of the Preface of  Nguyen Chi Thien’s forthcoming Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories and a member of the Asian American Journalists Association, San Francisco Chapter.