Pilger - The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot

The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot
by John Pilger
Covert Action Quarterly Fall 1997

The US not only helped create conditions that brought Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pots exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support-$85 million from 1980 to 1986-was revealed six years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Winer said the information had come from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). When copies of his letter were circulated, the Reagan administration was furious. Then, without adequately explaining why, Winer repudiated the statistics, while not disputing that they had come from the CRS. In a second letter to Noam Chomsky, however, Winer repeated the original charge, which, he confirmed to me, was "absolutely correct.''
Washington also backed the Khmer Rouge through the United Nations, which provided Pol Pot's vehicle of return. Although the Khmer Rouge government ceased to exist in January 1979, when the Vietnamese army drove it out, its representatives continued to occupy Cambodia's UN seat. Their right to do so was defended and promoted by Washington as an extension of the Cold War, as a mechanism for US revenge on Vietnam, and as part of its new alliance with China (Pol Pot's principal underwriter and Vietnam's ancient foe). In 1981, President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot." The US, he added, "winked publicly" as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge through Thailand.
As a cover for its secret war against Cambodia, Washington set up the Kampuchean Emergency Group (KEG) in the US embassy in Bangkok and on the Thai-Cambodian border. KEG's job was to "monitor" the distribution of Western humanitarian supplies sent to the refugee camps in Thai land and to ensure that Khmer Rouge bases were fed. Working through "Task Force 80" of the Thai Army, which had liaison officers with the Khmer Rouge, the Americans ensured a constant flow of UN supplies. Two US relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, "The US Government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed ... the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation."
In 1980, under US pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to the Thai army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. According to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke "20,000 to 40 000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited." This aid helped restore the Khmer Rouge to a fighting force, based in Thailand, from which it de stabilized Cambodia for more than a decade.
Although ostensibly a State Department operation, KEG's principals were intelligence officers with long experience in Indochina. In the early 1980s it was run by Michael Eiland, whose career underscored the continuity of American intervention in Indochina. In 1969-70, he was operations officer of a clandestine Special Forces group code-named "Daniel Boone," which was responsible for the reconnaissance of the US bombing of Cambodia. By 1980, Col. Eiland was running KEG out of the US embassy in Bangkok, where it was de scribed as a "humanitarian" organization. Responsible for interpreting satellite surveillance photos of Cambodia, Eiland became a valued source for some of Bangkok's resident Western press corps, who referred to him in their reports as a "Western analyst." Eiland's "humanitarian" duties led to his appointment as Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief in charge of the South east Asia Region, one of the most important positions in US espionage.
In November 1980, the just elected Reagan administration and the Khmer Rouge made direct contact when Dr. Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, secretly visited a Khmer Rouge operational headquarters inside Cambodia. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser on President-elect Reagan's transitional team. Within a year, according to Washington sources, 50 CIA agents were running Washington's Cambodia operation from Thailand. The dividing line between the international relief operation and the US war became more and more confused. For example, a Defense Intelligence Agency colonel was appointed "security liaison officer" between the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO) and the Displaced Persons Protection Unit (DPPU). In Washington, sources revealed him as a link between the US government and the Khmer Rouge.
The UN as a Base
By 1981, a number of governments, including US allies, became decidedly uneasy about the charade of continued UN recognition of Pol Pot as legitimate head of the country This discomfort was dramatically demonstrated when a colleague of mine, Nicholas Claxton, entered a bar at the UN in New York with Thaoun Prasith, Pol Pot's representative. "Within minutes," said Claxton, "the bar had emptied." Clearly, something had to be done. In 1982, the US and China, supported by Singapore, invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was, as Ben Kiernan pointed out, neither a coalition, nor democratic, nor a government, nor in Kampuchea. Rather, it was what the CIA calls "a master illusion." Cambodia's former ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was appointed its head; otherwise little changed. The Khmer Rouge dominated the two "non-communist" members, the Sihanoukists and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF). From his office at the UN, Pol Pot's ambassador, the urbane Thaoun Prasith, continued to speak for Cambodia. A close associate of Pol Pot, he had in 1975 called on Khmer expatriates to return home, whereupon many of them "disappeared."
The United Nations was now the instrument of Cambodia's punishment. In all its history, the world body has withheld development aid from only one Third World country: Cambodia. Not only did the UN-at US and Chinese insistence-deny the government in Phnom Penh a seat, but the major international financial institutions barred Cambodia from all international agreements on trade and communications. Even the World Health Organization refused to aid the country. At home, the US denied religious groups export licenses for books and toys for orphans. A law dating from the First World War, the Trading with the Enemy Act, was applied to Cambodia and, of course, Vietnam. Not even Cuba and the Soviet Union faced such a complete ban with no humanitarian or cultural exceptions.
By 1987, KEG had been reincarnated as the Kampuchea Working Group, run by the same Col. Eiland of the Defense Intelligence Agency The Working Group's brief was to provide battle plans, war materiel, and satellite intelligence to the so-called "non-communist" members of the "resistance forces." The non-communist fig leaf allowed Congress, spurred on by an anti-Vietnamese zealot, then - Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-NY), to approve both "overt" and "covert" aid estimated at $24 million to the "resistance " Until 1990, Congress accepted Solarz' specious argument that US aid did not end up with or even help Pol Pot and that the mass murderers US-supplied allies "are not even in close proximity with them [the Khmer Rouge] "
Military Links
While Washington paid the bills and the Thai army provided logistics support, Singapore, as middleman, was the main conduit for Western arms. Former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was a major backer of the US and Chinese position that the Khmer Rouge be part of a settlement in Cambodia. "It is journalists," he said, "who have made them into demons."
Weapons from West Germany, the US, and Sweden were passed on directly by Singapore or made under license by Chartered Industries, which is owned by the Singapore government. These same weapons were captured from the Khmer Rouge. The Singapore connection allowed the Bush administration to continue its secret aid to the "resistance," even though this assistance broke a law passed by Congress in 1989 banning even indirect "lethal aid" to Pol Pot. In August 1990, a former member of the US Special Forces disclosed that he had been ordered to destroy records that showed US munitions in Thailand going to the Khmer Rouge. The records, he said, implicated the National Security Council, the president's foreign policy advisory body.
In 1982, when the US, Chinese, and ASEAN governments contrived the "coalition" that enabled Pol Pot to retain Cambodia's UN seat, the US set about training and equipping the "non-communist" factions in the "resistance" army These followers of Prince Sihanouk and his former minister, Son Sann, leader of the KPNLF, were mostly irregulars and bandits. This resistance was nothing with out Pol Pot's 25,000 well-trained, armed and motivated guerrillas, whose leadership was acknowledged by Prince Sihanouk's military commander, his son, Norodom Ranariddh. "The Khmer Rouge'' he said, are the "major attacking forces" whose victories were "celebrated as our own."'
The guerrillas' tactic like that of the Contras in Nicaragua, was to terrorize the countryside by setting up ambushes and seeding minefields. In this way, the government in Phnom Penh would be destabilized and the Vietnamese trapped in an untenable war: its own "Vietnam." For the Americans in Bangkok and Washington, the fate of Cambodia was tied to a war they had technically lost seven years earlier. "Bleeding the Vietnamese white on the battlefields of Cambodia" was an expression popular with the US policy-making establishment. Destroying the crippled Vietnamese economy and, if necessary overturning the government in Hanoi, was the ultimate goal. Out of that ruin, American power would again assert itself in Indochina.
The British-who have had special military forces in Southeast Asia since World War II, also played a key role in supporting Pol Pot's armed force. After the "Irangate" arms-for-hostages scandal broke in Washington in 1986, the Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation. "If Congress had found out that Americans were mixed up in clandestine training in Indochina, let alone with Pol Pot," a Ministry of Defense source told Simon O'Dwyer-Russell of the London Sunday Telegraph, "the balloon would have gone right up. It was one of those classic Thatcher-Reagan arrangements. It was put to her that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show, and she agreed."
Pol Pot's Washington Impunity
Shortly after the start of the Gulf War in January 1991, President Bush described Saddam Hussein as "Adolf Hitler revisited.'' Bush's call for "another Nuremberg" to try Saddam under the Genocide Convention was echoed in Congress and across the Atlantic in London.
It was an ironic distraction. Since the original Fuhrer expired in his bunker, the US has maintained a network of dictators with Hitlerian tendencies-from Suharto in Indonesia to Mobutu in Zaire and a variety of Latin American mobsters, many of them graduates of the US Army School of the Americas. But only one has been identified by the world community as a genuine "Adolf Hitler revisited," whose crimes are documented in a 1979 report of the UN Human Rights Commission as "the worst to have occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism.'' He is, of course, Pol Pot, who must surely wonder at his good fortune. Not only was he cosseted, his troops fed, supplied, and trained, his envoys afforded all diplomatic privileges, but-unlike Saddam Hussein-he was assured by his patrons that he would never be brought to justice for his crimes.
These assurances were given publicly in 1991 when the UN Human Rights Subcommission dropped from its agenda a draft resolution on Cambodia that referred to "the atrocities reaching the level of genocide committed in particular during the period of Khmer Rouge rule." No more, the UN body decided, should member governments seek to "detect, arrest, extradite or bring to trial those who have been responsible for crimes against humanity in Cambodia." No more are governments called upon to "prevent the return to government positions of those who were responsible for genocidal actions during the period 1975 to 1978."
Such guarantees of impunity for the genocidists were also part of the UN "peace plan" drafted by the permanent members of the Security Council: that is, by the United States. To avoid offending Pol Pot's principal backers, the Chinese, the plan dropped all mention of "genocide," replacing it with the euphemism: "policies and practices of the recent past.'' On this, Henry Kissinger, who played a leading pan in the mass bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, was an important influence.
Western propaganda prior to the UN "peace process" in Cambodia concentrated on the strength of the Khmer Rouge, so as to justify their inclusion. UN officials and American and Australian diplomats talked about 35-40,000 Khmer Rouge. "You will understand," they would say, "we can't leave a force as powerful as that outside the tent." As soon as the Khmer Rouge had been welcomed back to Phnom Penh and, in effect, given a quarter to a third of the countryside, they refused to take part in the elections. The tune then changed. They were now "finished," chorused Western diplomats. They were "weakened beyond hope."
In the meantime, the Khmer Rouge was establishing itself as the richest terrorist group in history by selling off tracts of Cambodia's forests, as well as its precious stones, to the Thai, whose government was a signatory to the "peace accords." No one stopped them. They established four large new bases inside Thailand, complete with a field hospital. Thai soldiers guarded the road that led to them. The "they are finished" line remains in vogue to this day Undoubtedly, they have been numerically diminished by defections and attrition, but their number was always a false measure of their true strength. It seems the State Department believes they are far from finished.
On July 10 this year, the spokesperson Nicholas Burns let slip that Khmer Rouge strength ran into "thousands. "
The real threat from the Khmer Rouge comes from their enduring skill at deception and infiltration. Before they seized power in 1975, they had honeycombed Phnom Penh. This process is almost certainly under way again. As one resident of Phnom Penh said recently, "They're everywhere." The "trial" of Pol Pot this year was a wonderful piece of Khmer Rouge theater cum-media-event, but was otherwise worthless as an indication of the organizations strength and immediate aims. The truth is that no one on the outside can really say what these are, and that alone is a measure of the organization's strength and resilience. The Cambodian leader Hun Sen, for one, clearly retains a respect for the veracity and menace of their ambitions.
The media relish Pol Pot as a unique monster. That is too easy and too dangerous. It is his Faustian partners in Washington, Beijing, London, Bangkok, Singapore, and elsewhere who deserve proper recognition. The Khmer Rouge have been useful to all their converging aims in the region. Eric Falt, the UN's senior spokesperson in Phnom Penh at the time of that manipulated organization's "triumph" in Cambodia, told me with a fixed smile, "The peace process was aimed at allowing [the Khmer Rouge to gain respectability." Unfortunately, many ordinary Cambodian people share his cynicism. They deserve better.

Herman- Pol Pot's Death In The Propaganda System

Pol Pot's Death In The Propaganda System
by Edward S. Herman
Z magazine, June 1998

The death of Pol Pot on April 15, 1998 unleashed a media barrage of indignation and sanitized history that illustrates well their role as agents in a system of propaganda. While Pol Pot was undoubtedly a mass killer and evil force, and deserves angry condemnation, the U.S. media's indignation ebbs and flows in accord with the demands of U.S. foreign policy. In the cases of both Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein, periods of U. S. support of these criminals were accompanied by virtual silence on their misbehavior, whereas in times of official hostility the media have shifted to furious but hypocritical indignation, along with carefully modulated history. Today, no longer useful in punishing Vietnam, and with no economic interests anxious to protect his image (as with Indonesia's president Suharto), Pol Pot has resumed his role as an object lesson in the dangers of communism and attempts to create a "utopia of equality."
Media ProblemsThere are, however, three problems that the media have had to confront in assailing Pol Pot for committing genocide in Cambodia. One is that the Cambodian genocide-a "decade of genocide" according to a Finnish government research inquiry-had two phases, in the first of which-19691975-the U.S. was the genocidist.
In that period, the U.S. Air Force dropped over 500,000 tons of bombs on rural Cambodia, killing scores of thousands, creating a huge refugee population, and radicalizing the countryside. The number of U.S.-caused deaths in the first phase is comparable to, or greater than, CIA and other serious estimates of Pol Pot killings by execution (50,000-400,000). Cambodia experts like Milton Osborne and David Chandler have contended that the devastation hardened Khmer Rouge attitudes and made for vengeful and violent behavior. Furthermore, when the Khmer Rouge took over in April 1975, the country was shattered, starvation and disease were already rampant-8,000 people a day were dying in Phnom Penh alone-and these residual effects of phase one were certain to take a toll in the years to follow. In short, focusing solely on Pol Pot and making the U.S. an innocent bystander in the Cambodian genocide requires well-constructed blinders.
A second problem for the media is that following the ouster of Pol Pot by the Vietnamese in December 1978, Pol Pot's forces found a safe haven in Thailand, a U.S. client state, and for the next 15 years or more were aided and protected there by Thai, Chinese, British, and U.S. authorities. The U.S. backed Pol Pot's retention of Cambodia's seat in the UN after his ouster (which was greeted with outrage in the West and was the grounds for intensified economic and political warfare against Vietnam). This support was designed to hurt Vietnam, which had occupied Cambodia and installed friendly Hun Sen government in place of Pol Pot. When Vietnam sought a settlement in the late 1980s, the U.S. insisted strenuously that Pol Pot be included in the "peace process" with "the same rights, freedoms and opportunities" as any other party. In anticipation of a settlement, in the early l990s the U.S. and its allies not only protected Pol Pot's forces from defeat by the Cambodian army, they helped him rebuild his strength and standing. During this period, the U.S. (and UN) refused to allow the Pol Pot regime to be referred to as genocidal. In order to oust the Vietnam-supported government, the U.S. strove to preserve Pol Pot and make him a significant force in the political struggle in Cambodia.
It is obvious that its long, active support of Pol Pot, as well as its role in the first phase of the genocide, makes the U.S. sponsorship of a Cambodia Documentation Center to assemble evidence solely on Pol Pot's crimes, and its recent alleged interest in bringing him to trial, dishonest, hypocritical, and problematic. Wasn't the U.S. support from 1979-1995 legitimizing? Isn't the U.S. implicated in his numerous crimes in cross-border raids, 1979-1998, which killed large numbers of Cambodians?
A third problem for the media is the biased selectivity in the choice of villain and of victims worthy of (crocodile) tears. The obvious comparison, and the one I will explore here, is with Suharto. Suharto came to power in 1965 accompanied by a slaughter of over 700,000 people. This was cold-blooded killing, designed to wipe out a mass movement that was seen as a political threat, without even a vengeance motive. Suharto also invaded East Timor in 1975, and over the years was responsible for the death of perhaps 200,000 of a population of some 700,000. So Suharto was guilty not only of a huge internal slaughter comparable in scale to that of Pol Pot, he also engineered a genocide in a neighboring country.
But of course all Suharto's killing was done with the approval and active support, or acquiescence, of the U.S. government and the West in general. In the case of the internal genocidal effort of 1965-66, the U.S. had already armed and trained the Indonesian military, urged it to act, gave Suharto and his associates lists of people to be killed, and both in private and public exulted in the outcome. He destroyed not only a Communist party, but the only mass-based political organization in the country, one that "had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organization defending the interests of the poor within the existing system" (Harold Crouch, Army and Politics in Indonesia). The U.S. has never liked mass-based political parties that work in the interests of the poor, whether in Vietnam, Indonesia, Guatemala, or Nicaragua, where 45 years of Somoza family elite rule was fine, but the Sandinista party, trying to apply what the Latin American Studies Association observers at the 1984 election called the "logic of the majority," was intolerable and had to be removed by force.
Suharto also aligned Indonesia with the West in the Cold War, and opened Indonesia's door to foreign investors. His mass murders of 1965-1966 were therefore accompanied by increased IMF and World Bank loans, along with direct U.S. aid; his invasion of East Timor was protected against serious counter-measures in the UN by U.S. diplomats (Moynihan bragged about this in his autobiography), and that illegal occupation has not interfered one iota with U. S. support of this mass murderer.
In contrast with those pursuing a "logic of the majority" or a "utopia of equality," Suharto engaged in a class cleansing by mass murder, and then offered an "open door utopia for investors"-and a looting utopia for himself, his family, and his cronies. It follows from the difference in utopian objective that his victims were not "worthy," and that he is a states-person rather than a villain in the eyes of the Western establishment. But this rests on a blatant elite and immoral double standard, reproduced in the mainstream media.
Into the Black HoleIn discussing Pol Pot's recent death and villainy, how did the mainstream media handle the problem of the first phase of the Cambodian genocide in which the U.S. killed vast numbers and left a devastated country? The answer is: by a virtually complete blackout. Aside from a reference by Peter Jennings on "ABC News" to the "unpleasant" fact that our bombing had helped bring Pol Pot to power, I did not find a single editorial or news reference to the first phase: for the media, Cambodia's problems started in April 1975, and all deaths from starvation and disease, as well as executions, are allocated entirely to Pol Pot and his communist utopian fanaticism. In the New York Times, the Khmer Rouge "emptied the cities and marched Cambodians to the countryside to starve," and troubles and genocide began only with the KR takeover (ed., April 17, 1998).
Many editorialists and commentators did refer to Pol Pot's maoist and Parisian ideological training as influencing his behavior, but not his and the Khmer Rouge's experience under the first phase bombings. An exceptionally sleazy editorial in the Boston Globe (April 17, 1998) states that Pol Pot, "having half-absorbed the history of the French Revolution and the tenets of the French left while a student in Paris, returned to his native land determined to outdo maoism in the name of equality," but the editorial never mentions any on-the-ground events before April 1975 that might have affected Khmer Rouge behavior. Stephen Morris, in an Op Ed in the New York Times (April 17), refers to the bombings, but only to deny their influence, arguing that as the Vietnamese were also bombed heavily but didn't kill on a large scale, this demonstrates that it was communist ideology that explains Pol Pot's killings (although why the Vietnamese, also communists, didn't kill for reasons of their ideology is not explained).
Henry Kissinger, the U.S. foreign policy official who engineered the first phase of the genocide, the "sideshow" to the Vietnam War, and who was therefore responsible for scores of thousands of deaths, was a guest on CNN and NPR, invited to reflect on Pol Pot's crimes. He suggested on CNN that Pol Pot might have been assassinated to prevent a trial that would have implicated others in war crimes. It would never occur to CNN, NPR, or the mainstream media in general, that inviting Ieng Sary, Pol Pot's foreign minister, to discuss the Nixon-Kissinger slaughter of the first phase, would have been a parallel use of sources and equally justifiable morally.
U.S. Support, 1979-1995The media handled the U. S. "tilt" toward Pol Pot mainly by evasion, essentially blacking out the years 1979- 1995, or vaguely intimating that the U.S. had supported him for reasons of "realpolitik," but quickly moving on without giving details as to the nature and magnitude of support or offering any reflections on the morality of backing "another Hitler." The New York Times' April 17 summary of "Pol Pot's Rise and Fall" lists for "1979-1990: Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge are given refuge at Thai border where they fight back against the Vietnamese." "Given refuge" is dishonest: they were given substantial economic and military aid and political support. The Times' main reporter on Cambodia in early 1998, Seth Mydans, repeatedly blacks out U.S. support, referring to "the decade long civil war that followed" Pol Pot's ouster (April, 13), and a 19-year "guerrilla insurgency in the jungles of western and northern Cambodia" (April 17).
The April 17 Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times editorials on the death of Pol Pot, uniformly moralistic about his crimes and regretful at his escape from justice, all carefully avoid mentioning the long U.S. support of the criminal. The Chicago Tribune not only failed to mention U.S. support, it summarizes the U.S. "linked" history with Cambodia as follows: "After the nightmare of Khmer Rouge rule and genocide, the United States and its allies pumped millions of dollars into Cambodia to help rebuild and to hold elections."
The one New York Times exception to an evasion of this issue was an article by Elizabeth Becker, which gives some details on how Carter, Reagan, and Bush aided and protected Pol Pot, and cites Diane Orentlicher on how this would compromise any proposed prosecution. But Becker rationalizes the support of Pol Pot in terms of Cold War imperatives, and she takes the Clinton pursuit of Pol Pot as a war criminal seriously, seeing it "driven in part by misgivings over past American support," based on no evidence whatsoever (but featured in her title "Pol Pot's End Won't Stop U.S. Pursuit of His Circle," April 17).
Suharto and Pol PotPol Pot was described in the editorials and news columns of April 1998 as "crazed," a "killer," "war criminal," "mass murderer," "blood-soaked," and as having engineered a "reign of terror" and "genocide." Suharto has been in the news in 1998 also, as Indonesia is in a financial crisis and has been negotiating with banks and the IMF for loans. But during this crisis, and in earlier years as well, while Suharto is occasionally referred to as a "dictator" and running an "authoritarian" regime, he is often a "moderate" and even "at heart benign" (London Economist), never a "killer" or "mass murderer" or one responsible for "genocide." The linguistic double standard is maintained reliably throughout the mainstream media.
Less obvious but equally interesting is the difference in willingness to identify the responsible parties for the killings of Pol Pot and Suharto. In the case of Pol Pot, there is no uncertainty: editorials and news articles uniformly make him and the Khmer Rouge leadership clearly and unambiguously responsible for the killings of 1975-78. He was the "man who slaughtered two million" (USA Today), "the executioner" (Boston Globe), who "presided over the deaths" of his victims (Washington Post), "the man who drove Cambodia to ruin" (New York Times).
But in the case of the good genocidist, we move to an ambiguous responsibility, which means none at all: "a 1965 coup led to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of supposed communists" (ed., NYT, August 23, 1996), where we have the passive voice and no agent doing the killing; or "a wave of violence that took up to 500,000 lives and led Suharto to seize power from Sukarno in a military coup" (Seth Mydans, August 7, 1996), where the massacre not only has no agent, but is falsely situated before the takeover of power by Suharto.
In a later piece Mydans states that "More than 500,000 Indonesians are estimated to have died in a purge of leftists in 1965, the year Mr. Suharto came to power" (April 8, 1997). Note once again the passive voice, never used in connection with Pol Pot, the word "purge" instead of slaughter or massacre, and the continued failure to identify the agent.
In the case of East Timor, also, the Times regularly employs the passive voice and is uncertain about the source of the killing: "This is one of the world's sadder places, where 100,000 to 200,000 people died from 1974 in a brutal civil war and the consequent invasion through combat, execution, disease, and starvation..." (Steve Erlanger, October 21, 1990). In addition to the lack of clear agent, there is serious misrepresentation of the facts-the civil war was short and left small numbers dead; and the invasion was not "consequent" to a brutal civil war, except in Indonesian propaganda.
This pattern parallels exactly the finding in Manufacturing Consent that in the case of "worthy" victims, like Jerzy Popieluzko in communist Poland, the Times and its confreres are unrelenting in the search for responsibility at the top, but in the case of "unworthy" victims, like the four religious women murdered by "our" client government in E1 Salvador in 1980, the media lose their interest in identifying those in charge.
Another important difference, also, is in the willingness to explain away the killings. With Pol Pot, the background of the first phase of the genocide is completely blacked out in the mainstream account-there is no qualification to his responsibility as a killer because his forces had undergone terrible damage and sought vengeance for the crimes they had suffered (nor should there be); nor are any deaths in Pol Pot's years of rule to be explained by the starvation and disease already pervasive in April 1975. No, the only mentionable background is his Paris training and communist fanaticism.
With Suharto we encounter a whole new world of contextualized apologetics. For many years the main apologetic formula was that the 1965-1966 killings were "a result of a failed coup" (Shenon, NYT, August 27, 1993), which "touched off a wave of violence" (Mydans, August 7, 1996), or followed an "onslaught from the left" (Henry Kamm, June 17, 1979). This formula, invoked repeatedly, suggests that the holocaust was provoked and thus maybe justified by a prior "onslaught." The writers never explain why a failed coup could possibly justify a mass slaughter, but the hint is left hanging. In more recent years, usually in connection with the explanation and rationalization of the continuation of a dictatorship, the media regularly juxtapose political repression with "stability" and "growth": "the signs of his success are everywhere," although Suharto has brought these gains "by maintaining a tight grip on power and suppressing public criticism and political opposition" (Mydans, July 29, 1996). This is the kind of context that the Times would never give to Castro, let alone Pol Pot, but it shows an apologetics that runs deep.
This apologetics, of course, extends to the Suharto invasion and occupation of East Timor. For years, the New York Times has claimed that Indonesia invaded in the midst of a civil war, when in fact that civil war was over well before the invasion. The paper's news coverage of East Timor fell to zero as the Indonesian attacks and killings in East Timor intensified in 1977-1978, and although Indonesia still occupies East Timor in violation of standing UN rulings, the paper's reporters repeatedly refer to East Timor as a "disputed province" and East Timorese resistance as "separatist," thereby internalizing and explicitly legitimizing the aggression-occupation.
David Sanger recently differentiated Suharto and Saddam Hussein, saying "Mr. Suharto is not hoarding anthrax or threatening to invade Australia" ("Indonesian Faceoff," NYT, March 8, 1998). That is, Suharto's invasion, mass killing, and continued illegal occupation of East Timor is given zero weight, and his slaughter of a million people within Indonesia some years back is also not mentioned, although the Times has not forgotten Pol Pot's slaughter of decades back which still calls for criminal prosecution. This tells us all we need to know about how good and bad genocidists fare in the Western propaganda system.
The Unheld TrialGiven the compromised U. S. position as joint Cambodian genocidist and occasional supporter of Pol Pot, why have Clinton and company been keen on bringing Pol Pot to trial? One reason is that, given Pol Pot's ill-health and the likely lags in implementation, a trial was almost surely never going to take place. Thus credit could be gained for the interest in a criminal prosecution, without any unpleasantness that an actual trial might entail. Beyond this, it could be deemed necessary to call for the trial of such an eminent criminal as Pol Pot to sustain the war crimes tribunal now at work on Bosnia, which is designed for service to the U.S. and great powers elsewhere. It may also assuage worries of liberals in congress concerned about U.S. support of repression in Mexico and non-democracy in Saudi Arabia (etc.) to have Clinton tell Latin Americans about how important we regard human rights and democracy. Clinton may not call for the trial of Pinochet while lecturing in Chile, but if he is eager to go after Pol Pot, his heart is clearly in the right place.

Collins- The Cambodian Memory Hole

The Cambodian Memory Hole

by Paul David Collins ©, April 27th, 2007

Cambodia has a serious problem. Many of the nation's young people are having a hard time wrapping their heads around the fact that the Khmer Rouge conducted a campaign of genocide in their country. Some even deny that the genocide ever happened. This fact is revealed in a recent movie entitled Wanting To See The Truth, which "shows footage of young Cambodians who do not believe stories of the atrocities of the late 1970s" ("Khmer Rouge film reveals horror," no pagination). Evidently, this epidemic of historical denial is promulgated on an institutional level because the "period is not taught in schools" (no pagination).

The danger of national amnesia that Cambodia is now facing is a result of the globalization of the postmodern paradigm. We all want to instantly grasp the "Big Picture" without taking the necessary trip down Memory Lane. A thorough study of history is the only way one can gain a firm understanding of modern realities. However, like children, we resist this fact with all our strength so that we might be able to live in a perpetual "now." Even I find myself having to fight the urge and temptation to approach the topics I study as if they are videotapes that I can fast forward directly to the end.
The power elite have helped promote this sorry state of affairs. It helps conceal their involvement in history's crimes and atrocities. The Cambodian "killing fields" are certainly no exception. The postmodern mind has difficulty seeing the bloody fingerprints of the power elite upon Cambodia during the period of 1975 to 1979. Nonetheless, those who bother to revisit the crime scene can discover these fingerprints.

NSSM 200: The Politics of Genocide

The motivation for the Cambodian genocide can be found in a document entitled National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 200. The National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger's guidance put this document together in 1974. The thesis was quite simple: population growth in lesser-developed countries constitutes a threat to national security. NSSM 200 named target countries:

In order to assist the development of major countries and to maximize progress toward population stability, primary emphasis would be placed on the largest and fastest growing developing countries where the imbalance between growing numbers and development potential most seriously risks instability, unrest, and international tensions. These countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, The Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia. Out of a total 73.3 million worldwide average increase in population from 1970-75 these countries contributed 34.3 million or 47%. (No pagination)

NSSM 200 captured the power elite's preoccupation with carrying capacity and population control. These concepts originated with the ideas of Thomas Malthus, an Anglican clergyman who had received the blessings of French deist Jean-Jacques Rousseau and radical empiricist David Hume (Keynes 99). Malthus authored Essay on the Principle of Population, a treatise premised upon the thesis: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio" (qutd. in Taylor 61). Malthus' thesis was vintage scientism. Malthus' demographic theory attempted to reduce the labyrinthine and complex machinations comprising the natural order to overly simplistic mathematic equations. Moreover, Malthus' Essay overlooked the role of human innovation in the enhancement of subsistence production methods. Nonetheless, Malthus concluded that society should adopt certain social policies to prevent the human population from growing disproportionately larger than the food supply. Of course, these social policies were anything but humane. They stipulated the stultification of industrial and technological development in poor communities. With the inevitable depreciation of vital infrastructure, society's "dysgenics" would eventually be purged by the elements. According to Malthus, such sacrifice guaranteed a healthy society.
Historically, Malthus' demographic theory has continually proved advantageous to oligarchs and elitists. Given his role as a retainer for the British East India Company, it is quite possible that Malthus formulated his postulates to serve oligarchical interests. The British Opium Wars against China stands as one case in point. NSSM 200 provides another. However, what distinguished NSSM 200 from previous oligarchical campaigns premised upon Malthusianism is the document's governmental ramifications. NSSM 200 represented an attempt to enshrine demographic warfare under the rubric of national security. Suddenly, the fallacious contentions of a long refuted demographic theory were given currency within the halls of officialdom. William Engdahl eloquently reiterates: "The document [NSSM 200] made Malthusianism, for the first time in American history, an explicit item of security policy of the government of the United States" (148).
NSSM 200 was reaffirmed as the cornerstone of the United States' population policy on November 26, 1975 when Brent Scowcroft signed National Security Decision Memorandum 314 (NSDM 314) (Jones 527). This document endorsed the policy recommendations presented in NSSM 200 (527). NSSM 200's reaffirmation was clearly at odds with world opinion. Just a year later, opposition towards population proposals like NSSM 200 arose at a United Nations-sponsored population conference in Bucharest. According to author E. Michael Jones:

There the Holy See along with Communist and Third World countries, led by Algeria, denounced the United States for practicing what they called "contraceptive imperialism." (526)

While most of the world opposed the "contraceptive imperialism" recommended by NSSM 200, many Western elites felt that it should be official policy for the United States. Even more sinister, it was a policy they felt had to be put into practice.

From Theory to Practice: The Pol Pot Demonstration Model

According to Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, the Pol Pot Regime was "a demonstration model of the NSSM 200 policy" (276). The Khmer Rouge could not have made the gains it did in Cambodia without the aid of Kissinger and Nixon. It was the Nixon Administration's bombing of Cambodia that aided the Khmer Rouge in their takeover of Cambodia. Tarpley and Chaitkin elaborate:

The most important single ingredient in the rise of the Khmer Rouge was provided by Kissinger and Nixon, through their systematic campaign of terror-bombing against Cambodian territory during 1973. This was called Arclight, and began shortly after the January 1973 Paris Accords on Vietnam. With the pretext of halting a Khmer Rouge attack on Phnom Penh, U.S. forces carried out 79,959 officially confirmed sorties with B-52 and F-111 bombers against targets inside Cambodia, dropping 539,129 tons of explosives. Many of these bombs fell upon the most densely populated sections of Cambodia, including the countryside around Phnom Penh. The number of deaths caused by this genocidal campaign has been estimated at between 30,000 and 500,000. Accounts of the devastating impact of this mass terror-bombing leave no doubt that it shattered most of what remained of Cambodian society and provided ideal preconditions for the further expansion of the Khmer Rouge insurgency, in much the same way that the catastrophe of World War I weakened European society so as to open the door for the mass irrationalist movements of fascism and Bolshevism. (279)

The ruin visited upon Cambodia by the Nixon Administration paved the way for Pol Pot and his murderous insurgents. The Khmer Rouge forced the Cambodian people out of the cities and into brutal agrarian slave labor. The end result was the death of some two million Cambodians.

The Case of Anthony Lake

The power elite also hope that amnesia concerning the Cambodian "killing fields" also extends to the American. This contention is reinforced by attempts within the Establishment to help Anthony Lake climb the political ladder. In 1997, Clinton attempted to place Lake in the position of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) (Heilbrunn, no pagination). Lake was a stalwart supporter of the Khmer Rouge, and made this position known in a Washington Post op-ed piece. Jacob Heilbrunn elaborates:

He [Lake] provided a revealing glimpse of his views in a lengthy March 19, 1975, Washington Post op-ed titled "AT STAKE IN CAMBODIA: EXTENDING AID WILL ONLY PROLONG THE KILLING." The article, which was entered several times into the Congressional Record, was directed at Lake's old boss, Kissinger. It began by reciting the standard liberal line that Vietnam was not a war of aggression by the North against the South. It was, Lake wrote, a civil war. The distinction was fundamental. Since Vietnam was a civil war, and both sides were nationalists, the U.S. should view the struggle with equanimity. The North might even be morally superior to the South.
Developing the idea, Lake applied this logic to Cambodia. "Cambodia," he explained, "must be recognized as a civil war, not an international war, as Vietnam should have been so long ago." Lake went on to hail the Khmer Rouge, despite the common knowledge that they were slaughtering innocents: "A further measure of damage-limitation would involve adopting a diplomatic and rhetorical position which eschewed bitter attacks on Lon Nol's enemies. They are indeed supported by Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow. But, to the extent we know much about them, they include many Khmer nationalists, Communist and non-Communist. Once they gain power, we must hope for as much nationalism on their part as possible." Indeed, Lake called for "an immediate, peaceful turning over of power" to the Khmer Rouge. "This," he concluded, "would stop the final, useless killing." (No pagination)

The elite-controlled Clintonista regime would have not felt comfortable with such an appointment if they did not believe that the people of the United States had forgotten the genocide in Cambodia. However, more than just political appointments are at stake for the elite if public awareness over the Cambodian genocide is ever heightened. An awareness campaign might cause many to dig deeper into the topic. That digging would reveal the fact that the Khmer Rouge had accomplices: the power elite.

Sources Cited

• Engdahl, F. William. A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
• Heilbrunn, Jacob. "The Great Equivocator." The New Republic 24 March 1997
• Jones, E. Michael. Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2000.
• Keynes, John Maynard. Essays in Biography. Toronto, Canada: Macmillan, 1933.
• "Khmer Rouge film reveals horrors." BBC 16 December 2006
• National Security Study Memorandum 200. April 1974.
• Tarpley, Webster Griffin and Anton Chaitkin. George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992.
• Taylor, Ian T. In the Minds of Men: Darwin and the New World Order. Toronto: TFE Publishing, 1999.

About the author

Paul D. Collins has studied suppressed history and the shadowy undercurrents of world political dynamics for roughly eleven years. In 1999, he earned his Associate of Arts and Science degree. In 2006, he completed his bachelor's degree with a major in liberal studies and a minor political science. Paul has authored another book entitled The Hidden Face of Terrorism: The Dark Side of Social Engineering, From Antiquity to September 11. Published in November 2002, the book is available online from www.1stbooks.com, barnesandnoble.com, and also amazon.com. It can be purchased as an e-book (ISBN 1-4033-6798-1) or in paperback format (ISBN 1-4033-6799-X). Paul also co-authored The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship (ISBN 1-4196-3932-3).

Herman- Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity

Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity
by Edward S. Herman
1997 Z Magazine

The hunt is on once again for war criminals, with ongoing trials of accused Serbs in The Hague, NATO raids seizing and killing other accused Serbs, and much discussion and enthusiasm in the media for bringing Pol Pot to trial, which the editors of the New York Times assure us would be "an extraordinary triumph for law and civilization" (June 24).
The Politics of War CriminalityThere are, however, large numbers of mass murderers floating around the world. How are the choices made on who will be pursued and who will be granted impunity? The answer can be found by following the lines of dominant interest and power and watching how the mainstream politicians, media, and intellectuals reflect these demands. Media attention and indignation "follows the flag," and the flag follows the money (i.e., the demands of the corporate community), with some eccentricity based on domestic political calculations. This sometimes yields droll twists and turns, as in the case of Saddam Hussein, consistently supported through the 1980s in his war with Iran and chemical warfare attacks on Iraqi Kurds, until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, transformed him overnight into "another Hitler." Similarly, Pol Pot, "worse than Hitler" until his ouster by Vietnam in 1979, then quietly supported for over a decade by the United States and its western allies (along with China) as an aid in "bleeding Vietnam," but now no longer serviceable to western policy and once again a suitable target for a war crimes trial.
Another way of looking at our targeting of war criminals is by analogy to domestic policy choices on budget cuts and incarceration, where the pattern is to attack the relatively weak and ignore and protect those with political and economic muscle. Pol Pot is now isolated and politically expendable, so an obvious choice for villainization. By contrast, Indonesian leader Suharto, the butcher of perhaps a million people (mainly landless peasants) in 1965-66, and the invader, occupier, and mass murderer of East Timor from 1975 to today, is courted and protected by the Great Powers, and was referred to by an official of the Clinton administration in 1996 as "our kind of guy." Pinochet, the torturer and killer of many thousands, is treated kindly in the United States as the Godfather of the wonderful new neoliberal Chile. President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, who gave the go ahead to Suharto's invasion of East Timor and subsequent massive war crimes there, and the same Kissinger, who helped President Nixon engineer and then protect the Pinochet coup and regime of torture and murder and directed the first phase of the holocaust in Cambodia (1969-75), remain honored citizens. The media have never suggested that these men should be brought to trial in the interest of justice, law, and "civilization."
U.S./Western Embrace of Pol PotThe Times editorial of June 24 recognizes a small problem in pursuing Pol Pot, arising from the fact that after he was forced out of Cambodia by Vietnam, "From 1979 to 1991, Washington indirectly backed the Khmer Rouge, then a component of the guerrilla coalition fighting the Vietnamese installed Government [in Phnom Penh]." This does seem awkward: the United States and its allies giving economic, military, and political support to Pol Pot, and voting for over a decade to have his government retain Cambodia's UN seat, but now urging his trial for war crimes. The Times misstates and understates the case: the United States gave direct as well as indirect aid to Pol Pot-in one estimate, $85 million in direct support-and it "pressured UN agencies to supply the Khmer Rouge," which "rapidly improved" the health and capability of Pol Pot's forces after 1979 (Ben Kiernan, "Cambodia's Missed Chance," Indochina Newsletter, Nov.-Dec. 1991). U.S. ally China was a very large arms supplier to Pol Pot, with no penalty from the U.S. and in fact U.S. connivance-Carter's National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that in 1979 "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot...Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could."
In 1988-89 Vietnam withdrew its army from Cambodia, hoping that this would produce a normalization of relationships. Thailand and other nations in the region were interested in a settlement, but none took place for several more years "because of Chinese and U.S. rejection of any...move to exclude the Khmer Rouge. The great powers...continued to offer the Khmer Rouge a veto," which the Khmer Rouge used, with Chinese aid, "to paralyze the peace process and...advance their war aims." The Bush administration threatened to punish Thailand for "its defection from the aggressive U.S.-Chinese position," and George Shultz and then James Baker fought strenuously to sabotage any concessions to Vietnam, the most important of which was exclusion of Pol Pot from political negotiations and a place in any interim government of Cambodia. The persistent work of the Reagan-Bush team on behalf of Pol Pot has been very much downplayed, if not entirely suppressed, in the mainstream media.
The Times has a solution to the awkwardness of the post-1978 Western support of Pol Pot: "All Security Council members...might spare themselves embarrassment by restricting the scope of prosecution to those crimes committed inside Cambodia during the four horrific years of Khmer Rouge rule." We must give the Times credit for semi-honesty in admitting that this is to avoid embarrassing the Great Powers. It is interesting, though, that the Times finds no real problem in the "dirty hands," and hypocrisy, so apparent in the lengthy support of war criminals, and that it offers no reflections on how "law and civilization" are served if the criminals were protected and supported for more than a decade by the forces of law and order.
Two Phases of Cambodian "Genocide"The Times, along with everybody else in the mainstream media, also fails to mention that before Pol Pot came to power in 1975, the United States had devastated Cambodia for the first half of what a Finnish government's study referred to as a "decade" of genocide (not just the four years of Pol Pot's rule, 1975-78). The "secret bombing" of Cambodia by the Nixon-Kissinger gang may have killed as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge and surely contributed to the ferocity of Khmer Rouge behavior toward the urban elite and citizenry whose leaders had allied themselves with the foreign terrorists.
The U.S.-imposed holocaust was a "sideshow" to the Vietnam War, the United States bombing Cambodia heavily by 1969, helping organize the overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970, and in collaboration with its puppet Saigon government making period incursions into Cambodia in the 1960s and later. "U.S. B-52s pounded Cambodia for 160 consecutive days [in 1973], dropping more than 240,000 short tons of bombs on rice fields, water buffalo, villages (particularly along the Mekong River) and on such troop positions as the guerrillas might maintain," a tonnage that "represents 50 percent more than the conventional explosives dropped on Japan during World War II". This "constant indiscriminate bombing" was of course carried out against a peasant society with no air force or ground defenses. The Finnish government study estimates that 600,000 people died in this first phase, with 2 million refugees produced. Michael Vickerey estimated 500,000 killed in phase one.
At the end of the first half of the decade of genocide, with the Khmer Rouge victorious and occupying Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia was a shattered, embittered society, on the verge of mass starvation with crops unsowed and vast numbers of refugees in and around Phnom Penh suddenly cut off from the U.S. aid that had kept them alive. High U.S. officials were estimating a million deaths from starvation before the Khmer Rouge takeover. The Khmer Rouge forced a mass exodus from Phnom Penh, whose population they were in no position to feed, an action interpreted in the West as simply a completely unjustified exercise in vengeance.
There is no question but that the Khmer Rouge were brutal and killed large numbers. Michael Vickerey estimated 150-300,000 executed and an excess of deaths in the four years of Pol Pot rule of 750,000. David Chandler estimates up to 100,000 executions (Newsweek, June 30, 1997). The Finnish study estimated the total deaths in the Pol Pot years at a million, encompassing both executions and deaths from disease, starvation and overwork. Other serious studies of Cambodia yield comparable numbers.
Genocide in the Propaganda SystemThroughout the "decade of genocide" the media's performance fitted perfectly the propaganda model Noam Chomsky and I advanced in Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 1988). As the first phase was U.S.-sponsored, the Cambodian victims were "unworthy," and the hundreds of thousands killed and several million refugees were almost entirely ignored-the existence of "killing fields" was only discovered in phase two. Of 45 columns by Sydney Schanberg, who reported for the New York Times from Phnom Penh at the peak of the 1973 bombing, only three granted first phase refugee victims a few phrases to describe what was happening, and in not a single article did he interview at length one of their vast numbers in the nearby refugee camps.
Scholars uniformly pointed to the important contribution the first phase made to Khmer Rouge behavior in phase two: by destroying the fabric of society and providing the victors "with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution" (David Chandler). But for the mainstream media, phase one did not exist; Cambodian history began with Khmer Rouge genocide starting in April 1975. Now we had "worthy" victims in a "gentle land" undergoing terror based on Parisian intellectual/maoist theory, and reporters rushed to interview refugees in Thailand. Jean Lacouture, in a well-publicized book review in the New York Review of Books, claimed that the book, Cambodia: Year Zero, cited Pol Pot officials "boasting" that they had "eliminated" two million people. This claim was withdrawn by Lacouture after it was shown to be a fabrication (one of a number he advanced), but the two million figure remained authoritative, and it and other forgeries and fabrications have proved impossible to dislodge.
These convenient views prevail today: there is no phase one, although it is sometimes admitted in passing that the United States dropped some bombs on Cambodia before 1975 and aligned itself with the "resistance" (including Pol Pot) after 1978. All deaths in phase two are attributed to Pol Pot and his fanatical beliefs, so that it is reasonable to identify him as the unique villain deserving a war crimes trial. It can be suggested in the Canadian media that maybe Nixon and Kissinger are war criminals also (Thomas Walkum, "Let's try Kissinger along with Pol Pot," Toronto Star, June 30, 1997), but not in the mainstream U.S. press. Even a scholar like Ben Kiernan, who wrote eloquently about the U.S. support of Pol Pot in the Reagan-Bush years, now places an op ed column in the New York Times (June 20, 1997) denouncing Pol Pot and calling for his trial, without even mentioning phase one or suggesting any compromising of the case by the aggressive post-1978 U.S. and Western support of the war criminal. Kiernan had been subjected to a furious red-baiting campaign by the right-wing fanatic Stephen Morris and Wall Street Journal editors, and in an excellent illustration of the working of "flak" is now busily proving his anti-Pol Pot credentials.
Anthony Lewis: Lying With ImpunityAnother feature of the U.S. propaganda system is that contesting propaganda campaigns is not permissible, and results in a blackout and/or gross misrepresentation and vilification. As soon as Chomsky and I criticized media coverage of Cambodia, in 1977, we, and especially Chomsky, were accused of being apologists for Pol Pot. William Shawcross eventually (and ludicrously) blamed Chomsky for having paralyzed Western policy responses to genocide by his (and my) single review article in the Nation.
Those who attack alleged "defenders of Pol Pot" can lie with impunity. On June 23, Anthony Lewis jumped into the fray, boldly denouncing Pol Pot and urging his prosecution for war crimes. Lewis did mention the "bombing inflicted on the peasant society by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger," but only as an introduction to the fact that Pol Pot outdid our leaders. No suggestion of any causal relation between the bombing (etc.) and the "one million Cambodians [who] lost their lives" in phase two. Lewis also does not discuss whether, even if Pol Pot was worse, the toll under Nixon and Kissinger wasn't high enough to be worthy of a war crimes trial.
Lewis then goes on: "A few Western intellectuals, notably Prof. Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia. At first, at least, they put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution." This is a multiple lie: First, we did not disbelieve the reports in general and were very clear that "gruesome" atrocities were being carried out. We did contest some blatant lies, like those of Lacouture, and media gullibility, which in this case, where points were being scored against an enemy. reached remarkable levels. Second, we never believed or said that there was any conspiracy going on, and regularly cited State Department experts as sources of plausible information. Third, we weren't defending the "Cambodian revolution," and never believed that the propaganda campaign was designed to destroy it; in fact, we stressed that its spokespersons didn't do, or even propose doing, anything to help Cambodians. We saw the propaganda campaign as aimed at Americans, to help reconstruct an imperial ideology that had been badly damaged by the Vietnam War.
Lewis goes on to speak of "explaining away reports of rights violations as a Western way of interfering in other countries," ignoring the fact that a vast stream of human rights reports on El Salvador, Guatemala, Turkey, Colombia, Peru, etc., have involved human rights violators funded and protected by the United States. In our writings on Cambodia, Chomsky and I often point out that the Indonesian invasion and genocidal actions in East Timor began in the same year that Pol Pot took power in Cambodia; and we stressed that in the case of East Timor, in contrast to Cambodia, the United States as the primary weapons supplier and with extensive economic relationships to Indonesia could have effectively protected human rights. But that genocide was carried out by an ally, was approved by U.S. officials, and silence prevailed in the U.S. media. The sanctimonious Anthony Lewis does not address this anomaly.
Lewis can lie and mouth his clichés about the need to bring his country's preferred war criminals to trial without fear of reply because his newspaper gives him impunity from criticism. A letter from Chomsky answering Lewis's lies, and several other letters doing the same, were refused publication in the New York Times.
The Collapsing LeftThe left is so weak in the United States that establishment propaganda themes and untruths often become part of the left's own intellectual apparatus. One critic of Manufacturing Consent, noting that even the antiwar leaders didn't refer to U.S. policy in Vietnam as "aggression" or an "invasion," asked why we should expect more from the mainstream media? It didn't occur to him that if the establishment view is so powerful as to define the discourse boundaries even for dissidents, that this shows an overwhelmingly potent propaganda system.
With the U.S. left today, the conventional wisdom on Cambodia, as on many other issues, frequently predominates. In an article in In These Times for July 29, Adam Fifield finds only Pol Pot guilty of genocide, plays down the U.S. role, and gives the conventional lie about Chomsky, who allegedly "disparaged the [news] accounts as fabrications aimed at demonizing Pol Pot's noble revolution." As in the case of Anthony Lewis it is unlikely that the author ever bothered to look at any of Chomsky's writings on Cambodia. The mainstream lie about Chomsky is reported without question in this left journal, just as in the New York Times, although in this case there is a right of reply.
A July 1997 piece on Cambodia by Philip S. Robertson Jr., in the Foreign Policy in Focus series issued by the supposedly left Institute for Policy Studies and Interhemispheric Resource Center, literally starts Cambodian history in 1975, gives a death toll of the Khmer Rouge period as 1.5-2 million, without mentioning any earlier events that might have contributed to the toll, expresses regret at the "impunity" of Cambodian civil servants, but nobody else, and urges that the United States "must continue the vital work of bringing Pol Pot and the remaining KR leaders to trial for genocide..."
With a left like this who needs a right?
Power as JusticeIn one famous formulation, "the bigger the crime the smaller the penalty" (Friedrich Schiller). This is not unreasonable for single countries, but in international affairs we need a refinement: the bigger the crime the smaller the penalty only if you are the dominant power, servant of that power, or military victor. Though Germany was powerful, some Nazi leaders were executed for war crimes after the German defeat; Pol Pot may be tried because he is weak, a loser, and no longer useful to the Great Powers as he was from 1979 to the mid 1990s.
On the other hand, Suharto services U.S., Japanese, and other global interests, is protected by the hegemonic power, and is therefore a "moderate" rather than war criminal for Western elites and mainstream media. Henry Kissinger's role in the Cambodian genocide, Chile, and East Timor, makes him a first class war criminal, arguably at least in the class of Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, hanged in 1946. But Kissinger has the impunity flowing naturally to the leaders and agents of the victorious and dominant power. He gets a Nobel Peace prize, is an honored member of national commissions, and is a favored media guru and guest at public gatherings.
 Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Pilger-The Friends of Pol Pot

The Friends of Pol Pot
by John Pilger
The Nation magazine, May 11, 1998

It is my duty," wrote the correspondent for The Times of London at the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Belsen, "to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That was how I felt in the summer of 1979 when I arrived in Cambodia. In the silent humidity, houses, office blocks, hotels and schools stood empty, as if vacated that day. In the ruined National Bank, blown up by the retreating Khmer Rouge, a pair of spectacles rested on a ledger. When the afternoon monsoon broke, the streets nearby ran with money as thousands of brand-new bank notes washed away in the gutter. Children, orphans, collected and dried them for fuel; I can still hear the crackle as the money burned.
As if in a mirage, a pyramid of cars rose on a football field. It included an ambulance, a fire engine, police cars, refrigerators, washing machines, TV sets, telephones and typewriters. It was as if these had been swept there by a gigantic broom on April 17, 1975-Year Zero in Pol Pot's calendar. From that date, anybody who had owned them, anybody who had lived in a city or town, or anybody who knew or worked with foreigners was in mortal danger. More than a million and a half would die-although recent discoveries of mass graves by a Yale University team suggest that this figure may be a gross underestimate. During the three years and eight months they held power, Pol Pot and his medievalists may have put to death a third of the nation.
It is all too easy and too dangerous to remember Pol Pot as a unique monster. What is remarkable about the U.S. coverage of his death is the omission of U.S. complicity in his rise to power, a complicity that sustained him for almost two decades. For the truth is that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would be historical nonentities-and a great many people would be alive today- had Washington not helped bring them to power and the governments of the United States, Britain, China and Thailand not supported them, armed them, sustained them and restored them. In other words, the iconic images of the piles of skulls ought to include those who, often at great remove in distance and culture, were Pol Pot's accessories and Faustian partners for the purposes of their own imperial imperatives.
To hear Henry Kissinger deny recently that the United States and especially the Nixon Administration bore any responsibility for Cambodia's horror was to hear truth denigrated and our intelligence insulted. For Cambodia's nightmare did not begin with Year Zero but on the eve of the U.S. land invasion of neutral Cambodia in 1970. The invasion provided a small group of extreme ethnic nationalists with Maoist pretensions, the Khmer Rouge, with a catalyst for a revolution that had no popular base among the Cambodian people. Between 1969 and 1973, U.S. bombers killed perhaps three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply bases, many of which did not exist. During one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodians, living mostly in straw huts, than were dropped on Japan during all of World War II, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. Evidence from U.S. official documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that this U.S. terror was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. "They are using [the bombing] as the main theme of the propaganda," reported the C.I.A. Director of Operations on May 2, 1973. "This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men [and] the propaganda has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes."
What Kissinger and Nixon began, Pol Pot completed. Had the United States and China allowed it, Cambodia's suffering could have stopped when the Vietnamese finally responded to years of Khmer Rouge attacks across their border and liberated the country in January 1979. But almost immediately the United States began secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Direct contact was made between the Reagan White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr. Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., made a clandestine visit to Pol Pot's operational base inside Cambodia in November 1980. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Reagan. Within a year some fifty C.I.A. and other intelligence agents were running Washington's secret war against Cambodia from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok and along the Thai-Cambodian border. The aim was to appease China, the great Soviet foe and Pol Pot's most enduring backer, and to rehabilitate and use the Khmer Rouge to bring pressure on the source of recent U. S. humiliation in the region: the Vietnamese. Cambodia was now America's "last battle of the Vietnam War," as one U.S. official put it, "so that we can achieve a better result."
Two U.S. relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, "The U.S. government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed.. .the U.S. preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation." In 1980, under U.S. pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. In that year, I traveled on a U.N. convoy of forty trucks into Cambodia from Thailand and filmed a U.N. official handing the supplies over to a Khmer Rouge general, Nam Phan, known to Western aid officials as The Butcher. There is little doubt that without this support and the flow of arms from China through Thailand the Khmer Rouge would have withered on the vine. If the U.S. bombing was the first phase of Cambodia's holocaust and Pol Pot's Year Zero the second, the third phase was the use of the United Nations by Washington, its allies and China as the instrument of Cambodia's, and Vietnam's, punishment. With Vietnamese troops preventing the return of the Khmer Rouge and a Hanoi-installed regime in Phnom Penh, a U.N. embargo barred Cambodia from all international agreements on trade and communications, even from the World Health Organization. The U.N. withheld development aid from only one Third World country: Cambodia, which lay unreconstituted from the years of bombing and neglect. For the United States the blockade was total. Not even Cuba and the Soviet Union were treated this way.
If on his deathbed Pol Pot had felt moved to offer thanks to his Western collaborators, he surely would have made special mention of an unworkable U.N. "peace plan" imposed by the West and China in 1992. At the insistence of Washington and Beijing, the Khmer Rouge was included in the U.N. operation as a legitimate "warring faction"; the rationale was that they were far too powerful to be left out. Since then, the argument has been turned upside down. Thanks to the "triumph" of the U.N. in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge has "virtually disappeared." In 1993 the U.N.'s military maps showed that in half of Cambodia Pol Pot had a military advantage he did not have before the U.N. arrived. "You must understand," the U.N. spokesman in Phnom Penh, Eric Falt, told me in 1992, "the peace process was aimed at allowing the Khmer Rouge to gain respectability."
I watched Khmer Rouge officials welcomed back to Phnom Penh by U.N. officials who went to astonishing lengths not to offend them. Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's henchman who once said that the only mistake the Khmer Rouge had made was not killing enough people, took the salute of U.S. and other U.N. troops as a guest of honor on United Nations Day in Phnom Penh.
The West, with the U.N. as its vehicle, brought to Cambodia elections, the "free market," AIDS and massive corruption, all of it reminiscent of the surreal and violent days in the early seventies when the B-52s were bombing the countryside and the Khmer Rouge was infiltrating the cities and towns. The fact that this process of infiltration is under way again was one of the reasons Cambodia's "second prime minister," Hun Sen, last year attacked the forces and supporters of the "first prime minister," Prince Ranariddh, who in exile had been the leader of the Khmer Rouge-dominated coalition.
Are the Khmer Rouge now finished? I doubt it. The more pertinent question is: Will those foreign governments that backed Pol Pot while wringing their hands now help rebuild the country they helped devastate? Henry Kissinger appeared to answer this when he said, "Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"

John Pilger has twice won Britain's highest award for journalism. His documentary films have won awards in the United States and Britain.

9/11 Symbolism in Hollywood

9/11 Symbolism in Hollywood

In Hollywood’s many Masonic productions, we find the 9/11 World Trade Center "terrorist" attacks alluded to in several films long before 2001! (This propaganda technique is known as Predictive Programmingor Revelation of the Method)

In 20^th Century Fox’s 1988 film Die Hard the first lines are spoken on a plane about how to get over the fear of flying. One guy says what he has done for 9 years and Bruce Willis says what he has been doing for 11 years. So here we have 911, on a plane, talking about fears of flying, from a Masonic production company (notice the one-eye symbolism). In the first Die Hard, John McClane (Bruce Willis) takes on 12 terrorists in a tower; in the second movie it’s terrorists at an airport. Isn’t it interesting how in the 1988 movie we have John McClane afraid of flying, terrorists, towers, 9/11, and in 2008 we had John McCain on a presidential fear campaign revolving aroundterrorists, towers, and 9/11?

In 1998 we also have Bruce Willis saving the world in MasonicDisney/Touchstone’s Armageddon. Toward the end of the movie there is a countdown which passes 9:11 minutes just as the camera pans past. 

In another 1998 Disney/Touchstone film, Enemy of the State, a politician played by Jon Voight has his birthday on September 11^th.

In Warner Bros. 1990 film Gremlins 2 there are two reporters from channels 9 and 11 holding microphones with those numbers juxtaposed. 

In the 1990 Universal film Problem Child the Healy’s live at house number 911. The actor in this movie, John Ritter, in real life had a baby girl, Stella Ritter born on 9/11/98, then 5 years later suddenly and suspiciously John died on 9/11/03. At first glance these synchronicities may seem like mere coincidence until you realize their Masonic significance, and Hollywood’s Masonic dominance.

In the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie the Two Towers are depicted eerily half destroyed and smoking just as they would be on 9/11/01.In the movie, the Twin Towers each have on them a large symbol of a hand holding two lightning bolts. This is the very aspect of Tarot imagery from “The Tower” card substituted by “hijacked” planes on 9/11.

In 33^rd Degree Mason James Cameron and Columbia Tri-Star’s 1991 Terminator II, Judgment Day, there is an overpass that warns “Caution 9-11.” 

In the 1996 film Independence Day, there is also a countdown which just happens to pass 09:11:01 (9/11/01) as the camera pans across. At the start of another Columbia Tri-Star Picture, 2000’s The 6^th Day,Arnold Schwarzenegger looks at his schedule which has only two times: 9:00 and 11:00. 

The same year in Columbia’s The Patriot, Mel Gibson’s first words, weighing a chair, in the film, are: "9 pounds, 11 ounces, perfect."Here we have 911, the “patriotic” concept of the post-911 “Patriot Act,” a Masonic production company, a Masonic measuring device and symbol of the mystery schools, ounces or OZ (77) revenge of Lamech, and the closing word, “perfect.”

In 1997 DreamWorks’ first film, The Peacemaker, George Clooney is shot perfectly between aisle 9 and 11.

In a 1997 episode of the Simpsons, Lisa holds up a magazine that reads “New York $9” with a picture of the Twin Towers after the 9 which looks like 911. 

In 1998’s Godzilla the camera cuts to a wrist-watch showing 8:55 with the little hand on the 9 and the big hand on the 11. 

In 1999’s The Thirteenth Floor a wall clock shows 11:45 with the big hand on the 9 and the little hand on the 11. In Universal/Columbia’s 1999 The Bone Collector, Denzel Washington finds a piece of paper from page 119, and the date is 11/9, November 9^th.

In Warner Bros. 1999 film The Matrix, Neo's passport expires on exactly Sept. 11, 2001!

In 2000’s Traffic, a large delivery truck is shown full of boxes, and on every single box are a Scorpio/scorpion symbol and the number 911.

In March, 2001 (6 months before 9/11) the pilot episode for The Lone Gunman aired on FOX with the plotline of terrorists hijacking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center! Let me guess, these are all just coincidence, and I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist, right?

http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2008/09/911-symbolism-in-hollywood.html