The Citizens Commission of Inquiry into United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 War Crimes in Indochina

Indochina

The Indochinese peninsula, is a region in Southeast Asia. It lies roughly southwest of China, and east of India. The name has its origins in the French, Indochine, as a combination of the names of "China" and "India", and was adopted when French colonizers in Vietnam began expanding their territory...

 (CCI) was founded, according to Michael Uhl, by Ralph Schoenman in November 1969 in New York. Schoenman had earlier worked on Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...

's unofficial War Crimes Tribunal in Europe. In 1970, Tod Ensign

Tod Ensign

Tod Ensign is an American veteran's rights lawyer and Director of Citizen Soldier, a non-profit GI and veterans rights advocacy group based in New York City...

 and Jeremy Rifkin

Jeremy Rifkin

Jeremy Rifkin is an American economist, writer, public speaker, political advisor and activist. He is the founder and president of the Foundation On Economic Trends...

, of the New Left

New Left

The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...

, took over CCI to document warcrimes in Indochina.

The formation of the organization was encouraged by the Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...

 Foundation in New York, and hastened by the disclosure of the My Lai Massacre

My Lai Massacre

The My Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass murder of 347–504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968, by United States Army soldiers of "Charlie" Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. Most of the victims were women, children , and...

. An eyewitness account and documentary history of the CCI can be found in Vietnam Awakening: My Journey from Combat to the Citizens Commission of Inquiry on US War Crimes in Vietnam (McFarland, 2007), by Michael Uhl, CCI's Veteran Coordinator at Large. In 1970, Michael Uhl, Ed Murphy

Ed Murphy (activist)

Ed Murphy is an American activist and the Executive Director of the Workforce Development Institute. He is a former military intelligence agent who exposed the CIA's Phoenix Program in April 1970.- Profile :...

 and Robert Stemme exposed the Phoenix Program.

CCI organized the Dellums

Ron Dellums

Ronald Vernie "Ron" Dellums served as Oakland's forty-fifth mayor. From 1971 to 1998, he was elected to thirteen terms as a Member of the U.S...

hearings on war crimes in Vietnam in 1971.

Ensign's descriptions of his experiences are included in Kali Tal's "Big Book: Nobody Gets Off the Bus" (1994) and in Robbin's "Against the Vietnam War: Writings by Activists" (2007).