Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [185]
As the Vietnam War escalated, Laos became “only the wart on the hog of Vietnam,” as Dean Rusk put it, a “sideshow war,” in Walter Haney’s phrase, as Cambodia was to be later on. Media coverage declined as the “sideshow war” escalated. There were, in fact, three distinct U.S. wars: the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail in the South; the bombing of the peasant society of northern Laos, which the U.S. government conceded was unrelated to the war in South Vietnam; and the “clandestine war” between a CIA-run mercenary force based on mountain tribesmen and the Pathet Lao, backed by North Vietnam apparently at about the level of the Thai and other mercenaries introduced by the United States. The bombing of southern Laos was reported; the clandestine war and the bombing of northern Laos were not, apart from tales about North Vietnamese aggression, often fanciful and subjected to no critical analysis.6
In July 1968, the Southeast Asia correspondent of Le Monde, Jacques Decornoy, published lengthy eyewitness reports of the bombing of northern Laos, which had become “. . . a world without noise, for the surrounding villages have disappeared, the inhabitants themselves living hidden in the mountains . . . it is dangerous to lean out at any time of the night or day” because of the ceaseless bombardment that leads to “the scientific destruction of the areas held by the enemy.” He describes “the motionless ruins and deserted houses” of the capital of Sam Neua district, first bombed by the U.S. Air Force in February 1965. Much of this “population center” had been “razed to the ground” by bombing, and as he arrived he observed the smoking ruins from recent raids with phosphorus bombs, the “enormous craters” everywhere in the town, the churches and houses “demolished,” the remnants of U.S. fragmentation bombs dropped to maximize civilian casualties. From this town to a distance of thirty kilometers, “no house in the villages and hamlets had been spared. Bridges had been destroyed, fields up to the rivers were holed with bomb craters.”7 After Decornoy’s reports, there could be no doubt that the U.S. Air Force was directing murderous attacks against the civilian society of Northern Laos. These reports of terrible destruction were repeatedly brought to the attention of the media, but ignored or, more accurately, suppressed. Later described as “secret bombings” in an “executive war,” the U.S. attack was indeed “secret,” not simply because of government duplicity as charged but because of press complicity.
Not only did the media fail to publish the information about the attack against a defenseless civilian society or seek to investigate further for themselves, but they proceeded to provide exculpatory accounts that they knew to be inaccurate, on the rare occasions when the bombing was mentioned at all. As the bombing of Laos began to be reported in 1969, the claim was that it was targeted against North Vietnamese infiltration routes to South Vietnam (the “Ho Chi Minh trail”), and, later, that U.S. planes were providing tactical support to government forces fighting North Vietnamese aggressors, a far cry from what Decornoy had witnessed and reported, and a much more tolerable version of the unacceptable facts.8
Keeping just to the New York Times, through 1968 there was no mention of the bombing apart from tiny items reporting Pathet Lao complaints (Dec. 22, 31, 1968). On May 18, 1969, the Times reported U.S. bombing in Laos, alleging that it was “directed against routes, including the socalled Ho Chi Minh Trail, over which the North Vietnamese send men and supplies to infiltrate South Vietnam.