You are twisting my words. That sentence about grooming despots for power was a general sentence about the myriad CIA operatives we put in power. Suffice to say, our government support of Pol Pot was extensive, fairly long term (and quite helpful to him). Do you deny this is true? You seem to get fixated on one sentence and manage to twist it around and obsess on it without seeing the bigger picture, so I would like to remind you of that bigger picture.
Sorry--the first page of that report about Pol Pot somehow didn't copy. Here it is:
t is my duty,” wrote the correspondent of the Times at the liberation ofBelsen, “to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.” Thatwas how I felt in the summer of 1979, arriving in Cambodia in the wake of PolPot’s genocidal regime.In the silent, grey humidity, Phnom Penh, the size of Manchester, was like a citythat had sustained a nuclear cataclysm which had spared only the buildings.Houses, flats, offices, schools, hotels stood empty and open, as if vacated that day.Personal possessions lay trampled on a path; traffic lights were jammed on red.There was almost no power, and no water to drink. At the railway station, trainsstood empty at various stages of interrupted departure. Several carriages hadbeen set on fire and contained bodies on top of each other.When the afternoon monsoon broke, the gutters were suddenly awash withpaper; but this was money. The streets ran with money, much of it new andunused banknotes whose source, the National Bank of Cambodia, had beenblown up by the Khmer Rouge as they retreated before the Vietnamese army.Inside, a pair of broken spectacles rested on an open ledger; I slipped and fellhard on a floor brittle with coins. Money was everywhere. In an abandoned Essostation, an old woman and three emaciated children squatted around a potcontaining a mixture of roots and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fuelled withpaper money: thousands of snapping, crackling riel, brand-new from the De LaRue company in London.With tiny swifts rising and falling almost to the ground the only movement, Iwalked along a narrow dirt road at the end of which was a former primary schoolcalled Tuol Sleng. During the Pol Pot years it was run by a kind of gestapo, “S21”,which divided the classrooms into a “torture unit” and an “interrogation unit”. Ifound blood and tufts of hair still on the floor, where people had been mutilatedon iron beds. Some 17,000 inmates had died a kind of slow death here: a fact notJOHN PILGER| WORDS AGAINST WARPol Pot: |
