Secret Wars

BOMB CRATERS NEAR PHOSAVAN, LAO PDR.

It seems everywhere I go; there’s been a secret or “covert” war run by some arm or branch of the American industrial/military complex. Most recently, I travelled to Lao (often, and quite inexplicably spelled Laos on American made maps). Lao has the distinction of being the most heavily bombed (on a per capita basis) country on the planet. These bombs fell in a steady stream for 9 years between 1964 and 1973, despite the 1962 Geneva accord that pronounced Lao a neutral country. The “secret” air force that bombed Lao (comprised of Hmong and Vietnamese pilots trained by the CIA) dropped an average of one payload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. This is not counting the huge number of bombs that were jettisoned by American pilots who could not achieve their targets in Vietnam. Note that the bombing of Vietnam officially stopped in 1968, while Lao was bombed for another 5 years. Many of the bombs dropped did not explode. There is probably enough UXO in Lao to fight another war. Many of the bombs dropped were also cluster bombs, designed to explode and then send hundreds of little shrapnel bombs through the air until they hit something solid. Flooded rice paddies are soft, and thousands of these things are still blowing up farmers and children to this day. All this happened in “secret”. It was, of course, no big secret to the Lao people, many of whom were forced to live in caves for most of those nine years. It was also a war without a purpose. The only thing that bombing Lao changed was the life expectancy of Lao farmers and their children. Lao is still, to this day, a proudly communist country, despite all these corrective efforts. They were aiding the movement of North Vietnamese troops and artillery, as Ho Chi Minh was clever enough to route a great deal of his famous trail through eastern Lao. But this was clearly aid under duress, and if it was a legitimate reason to attack Lao, how come Nixion and LBJ kept it a secret from Americans. To this day there is still no chapter on American strong arm tactics in neutral South East Asian countries in any American history text book.

So far as I’ve experienced, it has been the same the world over. Che Guevera is a speed bump at the end of a runway near Samipata in Bolivia, an airport improvement sponsored by the CIA. Chiles democratically elected but somewhat socialist president was thrown from an airplane without a parachute, and replaced by a genocidal maniac. There is a generation of men missing in Honduras, thanks to the CIA sponsored “Contra” army. Similar fingers in the pie can be found in Guatemala, Columbia, Peru, Cambodia…just about anywhere I’ve ever been.

I would like to believe that things are getting better, but they are not. The USA is the only country in the UN that did not ratify the Ottawa convention on landmines, and is one of the only countries that still manufactures and sells them, and the USA still produces a whole line of nasty cluster bombs designed to kill civilians.

America, live free and die!