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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (95325)	1/31/2005 1:37:38 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

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:

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (95325)	1/31/2005 1:45:29 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

You know, I don't think you are reading what I post to you! Let's try again--see the complicity in Pol Pot's rise to power idea right here in this tract: 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 Programme 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. users.bigpond.com