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By Root 2920 0

” A June 14 report states that “American planes bomb targets all over Laos, especially along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to harass the Pathet Lao, the Communist-led rebel movement in Laos, and to stop the flow of enemy supplies to South Vietnam.” Charles Mohr reported on July 16 that U.S. bombing “is directed against infiltration routes from North Vietnam that pass through Laos en route to the South.” There is a July 28 reference to “200 American bombing sorties a day over northeastern Laos,” directed against North Vietnamese forces, and Hedrick Smith adds from Washington on August 2 that the United States “has been bombing North Vietnamese concentrations” in Laos. T. D. Allman reported bombing sorties “in tactical support” of government forces fighting the North Vietnamese and “harassing attacks against Communist positions all over northeast Laos” on August 25, the latter providing the first glimpse of something beyond the approved version. Further reports of U.S. air power in tactical support and “to cut North Vietnamese supply routes” appear on September 7, followed by Allman’s report of successes of a government offensive with forces “stiffened by Thai soldiers,” supported by “the most intense American bombing ever seen in Laos” (Sept. 18). Then followed reports from Washington and Vientiane (Sept. 19, 20, 23, 24, 30) confirming that the U.S. Air Force was providing tactical support for government combat missions in addition to bombing North Vietnamese infiltration routes, including a September 23 Agence-France-Presse dispatch reporting “bombing of Pathet Lao areas by United States aircraft,” thus implying that the bombing went well beyond infiltration routes and combat operations, common knowledge in Paris and Vientiane but yet to be reported here.

In short, the terror bombing of northern Laos, although known, remained off the agenda, and reporting in general was slight and highly misleading, to say the least. Elterman observes that the war in Laos and Cambodia was virtually “invisible” in the media through 1969, apart from the leftist National Guardian, which gave substantial coverage to what was in fact happening.9

On October 1, 1969, the New York Times finally ran an account by T. D. Allman, whose valuable reporting throughout the war appeared primarily overseas, concluding that “the rebel economy and social fabric” were “the main United States targets now,” and that the American bombardment had driven the population to caves and tunnels during the daylight hours, making it difficult for the Pathet Lao “to fight a ‘people’s war’ with fewer and fewer people.” Control of territory was now of lesser importance, he wrote, “with United States bombers able to destroy, almost at will, any given town, bridge, road or concentration of enemy soldiers or civilians.”10

This confirmation of what had long been known in restricted peacemovement circles, and consciously suppressed in the mainstream press, passed without particular notice. The CIA clandestine army had swept through the Plain of Jars in the preceding months, evacuating all remaining civilians to areas near Vientiane, where they and their harrowing stories were largely ignored by the well-represented media, although available elsewhere.11

Walter Haney, a Lao-speaking American who compiled a detailed collection of refugee interviews that was described as “serious and carefully prepared” by U.S. Ambassador to Laos William Sullivan, quotes remarks by a UN official in Laos as “the most concise account of the bombing”:

By 1968 the intensity of the bombings was such that no organized life was possible in the villages. The villages moved to the outskirts and then deeper and deeper into the forest as the bombing reached its peak in 1969 when jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures. Nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves. They only farmed at night. [Each] of the informants, without any exception, had his village completely destroyed. In the last phase, bombings were aimed at the systematic destruction