To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The letter of April 24 defending Prof. Samuel Huntington against the charge of "war criminal" displays 29 famous signatories, strings a few pieties about academic freedom-and doesn't muster up a single rational argument. Not one. Now, slogans and stickers from PL may not be the most genteel approach to the question of war crimes. Style, however, isn't all that relevant-and after all, aren't bad manners and unsubtlety as American as cherry pie? So are slogans, and the answer from the 29 professors contains nothing more than certain predictable slogans of their own.

The 29 professors, bless their souls, do make it clear that they disagree with Prof. Huntington's "policy recommendations." However, they see this as no reason to call him a war criminal. And what are Prof. Huntington's policy recommendations? He is well-known for an article in Foreign Affairs (July 1968). In it he frankly praises the use of massive bombardment and technological destruction on such a scale as to empty out the Vietnamese countryside. The result of this tactic is-in his famous word-"urabnization." Now it so happens that policies like those recommended by Prof. Huntington are implicitly or explicitly forbidden by the Hague Convention and the Geneva Convention of 1949. Freefire zones, defoliation, forced relocation, squalid refugee camps, the shooting of prisoners. the saturation bombing in areas such as Northern Laos where literally all villages have been destroyed-these brutal actions are part and parcel of a calculated "solution" which Prof. Huntington unabashedly singles out and encourages as a good thing. And they are policies which, if we went by certain clauses in the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Army Manuals, could not hold their own in any war crimes trial of the Nuremberg or Yamashita type.

Moreover, the Professors of Government still ignore the all-too-familiar Geneva Accords of 1954, an international legal document which divided Vietnam only temporarily, guaranteed re-unification in 1956, and explicitly prohibited any foreign military presence anywhere in Vietnam. The U.S.-which, I assume, does not stand above the norms of international law-violated this. . . . .

Incidentally, not only SDS has raised the charge of war crimes. The guilt and liability of civilian policy planners has been rationally and objectively formulated by Richard Falk of Princeton, Neil Sheehan of the N.Y. Times, Nicholas von Hoffman of the Washington. Post, Talford Taylor in Nuremberg and Vietnam, and ex-Kissinger aide Dan Ellsberg. (Sheehan and Taylor both mention Huntington in passing.) It is also implied by George McGovern when he says that the Indochina war is the most barbarous act since Hitler, as well as in similar statements by Generals Hugh Hester and David Shoup, and in the war-crimes testimony of thousands of Vietnam veterans.

Those charging war crimes-an impressively wide range of individuals-have a solid case, with facts, legal documents, and points logically argued. Can the sages from Littauer offer anything in Huntington's defense other than rank-pulling, some unctuous murmurings about "slander" and "intimidation," and their 29 famous names?TF, Romance Languages