NY Times Covers Up Washington’s Monstrous Evil
April 08, 2015
Hiding Americas War Crimes in Laos, While Reporting on the Grim Results
NY Times Covers Up Washingtons Monstrous Evil
by DAVE LINDORFF
The NY Times on Monday ran a lengthy piece (One Womans Mission to Free Laos from Millions of Unexploded Bombs) on Channapha Khamvongas, a 42-year-old Laotian-American woman on a mission to get the US to help Laos clean up the countless unexploded anti-personnel bombis that it dropped, which are still killing peasants especially children half a century after the so-called Secret War by the US against Laos ended.
The article explained that Khamvongas, as a young adult in Virginia, had read a book by anti-war activist Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War (originally published in 1972 and reissued in 2013), which featured accounts and hand drawings by refugees from that war of the deadly US aerial attacks and bombings of their farms and villages. It was a book that sparked revulsion in the US over the saturation bombing of Southeast Asias smallest and least developed country a nation of under six million people.
While the Times article mentioned that the secret air war, launched by Lyndon Johnson against Laos in 1964 and continued by Richard Nixon through 1973, was one of the most intensive air campaigns in the history of warfare, and that it had made Laos, a country the size of Great Britain with a population of only a few million peasants, into one of the most heavily bombed places on earth. What it did not make clear was that this bombing and strafing campaign, which Branfmans research showed was so intense that US jets were even killing individual water buffalo, and so continuous that any Lao person, including children, who dared to venture out from underground shelters during the daytime, was targeted.
Instead, Times reporter Thomas Fuller simply parrots the official US line about the Laos air war, which was kept secret from the American public at the time, writing that the campaigns targets were North Vietnamese troops especially along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a large part of which passed through Laos as well as North Vietnams Laotian Communist allies, the Pathet Lao.
This is a patent falsehood.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/08/ny-times-covers-up-washingtons-monstrous-evil/