SEPTEMBER 7, 2016
By Kurt Nimmo
Obama visited Laos after rubbing elbows with world leaders at the G20 in China.
“Given our history here, I believe that the United States has a moral obligation to help Laos heal,” he said.
Between 1964 and 1973 the Pentagon dropped over two million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. The massive bombing raids—equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years—were launched because the US was unable to defeat the Pathet Lao on the ground. The Pathet Lao went to war after they were excluded from the government and jailed by CIA-installed strongman Phoumi Nosavan.
“Laos was an American plantation, a CIA playground,” writes William Blum.
“Between 1957 and 1965, Laotian governments came and went at a frantic pace, with the CIA sponsoring at least one coup a year. The problem was a leftist group called the Pathet Lao which kept getting enough votes to be included in coalition governments,” notes Mark Zepezauer.
During the Vietnam War, the US claimed Laos was invaded by the communists. “The people of the United States were led to believe that Laos physically had been invaded by foreign Communist troops from across its northern border. Our Secretary of State called the situation grave; our ambassador to the U.N. called for world action; our press carried scare headlines; our senior naval officer implied armed intervention and was seconded by ranking Congressmen … The entire affair was a fraud. No military invasion of Laos had taken place,” write William Lederer and Eugene Burdick in A Nation of Sheep.
Nixon and Henry Kissinger were involved in the bombing of Lao’s Plain of Jars along with civilian targets in North Vietnam, including Haiphong harbor, dikes, cities, and the Bach Mai Hospital. Nixon’s illegal and secret bombing of Cambodia—exceeding the number of bombs dropped on Japan in World War II—resulted in the murder of 500,000 civilians and the rise of the Khmer Rouge, a brutal guerrilla group responsible for killing around three millions Cambodians. (For more on this war crime, see David Model’sPresident Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Bombing of Cambodia.)
“Within days of Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, national security adviser Kissinger asked the Pentagon to lay out his bombing options in Indochina. The previous president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had suspended his own bombing campaign against North Vietnam in hopes of negotiating a broader ceasefire. Kissinger and Nixon were eager to re-launch it, a tough task given domestic political support for the bombing halt,” writes Greg Grandin.
Hillary Clinton has courted the arch war criminal Kissinger and it now appears he will endorse her presidential campaign.
Although Obama said “I believe that the United States has a moral obligation to help Laos heal,” he didn’t offer an apology for the bombings.
But then America, as the “exceptional nation,” never apologizes for its war crimes.
Kurt Nimmo is the editor of Another Day in the Empire, where this article first appeared. He is the former lead editor and writer of Infowars.com.
