Maybe the NIS report was destroyed in the St. Louis fire in the early seventies. Who knows?
The NIS should know. The NIS investigators should know. And Kerry should have have a keen interest.
Hatfield and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committe should have seen a copy. I don't know that the NIS even archived its reports in St. Louis, and only there. The NIS spokesman, O'Donnell, doesn't claim the fire destroyed the report.
But the worst "war crimes" I saw was some off-duty, yahoo GIs throwing rocks at Vietnamese civilians. I believe Kerry propagated this slander against all servicemen just to further his political ambition.
I don't doubt your experience. Many different experiences.
The My Lai massacre, its concealment, and its almost total absence of legal penalty point to something far darker for some units and higher levels of command.
Perhaps the NIS found they could not debunk some of the WSI testimony. Perhaps the NIS never investigated and just "lost" the report of an inquiry it never made, fearing it would validate some of the stories, or fearing it could not debunk enough of them.
Or perhaps the report did debunk the WSI in large part, but a Kerry supporter "disappeared it".
That wouldn't stop the NIS investigators from stepping forward now, or anyone else that saw the report. Guenter Lewey stands as the the exclusive witnesss to the NIS report, and even he can't remember if he saw it himself or got "briefed on its contents". Perhaps he can remember who might have briefed him, and give us a lead.
For practical purposes, the NIS report never happened, and those who depend on it have set themselves up for embarrassment.
Better to take the lead. Admit error in citing the NIS report, before getting confronted with it by Kerry defenders, and demand the first serious inquiry into the WSI. We have yet to see one.