John Kerry the Betrayer: Unfit to Command, part 3

[Ned]

Originally posted by molly bloom

Let me guess, with pinpoint accuracy, using bombs that were careful not to kill Cambodians, only nasty North Vietnamese types.


Pretty advanced machinery of war you have there Ned.


But then you didn't want to believe your uncle might have bombed civilians in WWII.

Tell me, how exactly from the vantage point of a B-52 do you accurately distinguish between a Cambodian village by the Mekong and a Communist supply point?

When the idea surely, was that they looked entirely similar?

Or are you suggesting that the Viet Cong and North Viet Namese troops put conveniently large targets overhead, saying:

'We love you long time, you bomb us' ?

Do you, or anyone, have independent sources to verify any of this communist propaganda?

[Ned]

Originally posted by Arrian


When you start crossing those annoying lines on the map, Ned, I believe it is time for Congress to have a say. In this case, I do not see how being open about interdicting supply lines in Cambodia would've hurt us. It's not like the NVA didn't know we were trying to bomb them. The only reason for the secrecy was to get around Congress, and that's bull****.

-Arrian

That was not the ONLY reason. Sihanouk was OFFICIALLY neutral while privately supporting the bombing.

As to crossing the border issue, I the original Congressional authorization to Johnson clearly included the whole of SE Asia.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned


A commander in chief has full authority to conduct a war in a manner to win it and to protect the troops. When an enemy is basing in a so-called neutral country, that country is no longer neutral. It either supports interdiction or it becomes and enemy.

In Cambodia's case, it became an ally.

The commander in chief, eh, Ned?

'In his own memoirs, 'White House Years', Kissinger claims that he usurped the customary chain of command whereby commanders in the field receive, or believe that they receive, their orders from the President and then the Secretary of Defense. He boasts that he, together with Haldeman, Alexander Haig and Colonel Ray Sitton, evolved "both a military and a diplomatic schedule" for the secret bombing of Cambodia.

.....

When Kissinger was finally exposed in Congress and the press for conducting unauthorized bombings, he weakly pleaded that the raids were not all that secret, really, because Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia had known of them.

He had to be reminded that a foreign princeling cannot give permission to an American bureaucrat to violate the United States Constitution.

Nor, for the matter of that, can he give permission to an American bureaucrat to slaughter large numbers of his "own" civilians.

It's difficult to imagine Bismarck cowering behind such a contemptible excuse. (Prince Sihanouk, it is worth remembering, later became an abject puppet of the Khmer Rouge.)

.....

The raids were flown by B-52 bombers which, it is important to note at the outset, fly at an altitude too high to be observed from the ground and carry immense tonnages of high explosive: they give no warning of approach and are incapable of accuracy or discrimination because of both their altitude and the mass of their shells. Between 18 March 1969 and May 1970, 3,630 such raids were flown across the Cambodian frontier. The bombing campaign began as it was to go on - with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with flagrant deceit by Mr Kissinger in this precise respect.

......

Having gained access to a pilot's radio, he tape-recorded the conversations between pilots on bombing missions over the Cambodian interior. On no occasion did they run any checks designed to reassure themselves and others that they were not bombing civilian targets. It had been definitely asserted, by named US government spokesmen, that such checks were run. Branfman handed the tapes to Sydney Schanberg, whose New York Times report on them was printed just before the Senate met to prohibit further blitzing of Cambodia (the very resolution that was flouted by Kissinger the following month).


.....

Thus, according to the Pentagon, the following are the casualty figures between the first Lyndon Johnson bombing halt in March 1968 and the same date in 1972:

Americans - 31,205

South Vietnamese regulars - 86,101

"Enemy" - 475,609

The US Senate Subcommittee on Refugees estimated that in the same four-year period rather more than three million civilians were killed, injured or rendered homeless. In the same four-year period, the United States dropped almost 4,500,000 tons of high explosive on Indochina. (The Pentagon's estimated total for the tonnage dropped in the entire Second World War is 2,044,000.) This total does not include massive sprayings of chemical defoliants and pesticides, the effects of which are still being registered by the region's ecology. Nor does it include the land-mines which detonate to this day.'

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Indochina_TOHK.html

'This is pure conjecture and communist propaganda.'

Ned

'I am sure it was less that 500,000 Cambodians killed, and I assure you it saved American lives in the thousands.'

Patroklos

So Patroklos and Ned- would you say the Pentagon and the U.S. Senate Sub Committee were hard line Commies, pinko Commies, or simply Commie Symp fellow travellers?


As for saving American lives- how does killing a non-combatant Cambodian rice farmer save an American life?

That's just bizarro world logic.


'Evidence from U.S. official documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that this US. 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." '

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/polpot.htm

[Patroklos]

The amount of munitions an personal miving through Cambodia was hardly "miniscule."

But lets just ask Kerry, he was there.

I would like to see even a communist source that claim 500,000. The number is simply ridiculous.

*Edited, need to read closer

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
If we even killed close to that in terms of NVA and Khmer body count, the bombing would be considered to be successful. I doubt whether we ever go more than 10,000 commies.

You might be correct in that only about 10K Vietnamese were killed, but since I was discussing the number of Camodians killed, that's irrelevent. When the bombing began, the KR were a tiny fringe organization. The devastation we wreaked on Cambodia turned them into a mas organization capable of bringing down Lon Nol.

BTW, the Vientamese did not support the Kmher Rouge. The KR and the Vietnamese were enemies with very different ideologies. The Vietnamese were Marxists. The KR was based on the writings of Robbspierre.

[Patroklos]

Was it not the Vietnamese (we were gone by then) that actually went into Cambodia and ousted the KR? Albiet late, but they did.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Patroklos
The amount of munitions an personal miving through Cambodia was hardly "miniscule."

According to The Perfect War, the amount of material brought south on the HCMT was the equivalent of a truck or two a night. One of the main suppleriers for the VC turned out to be ARVN itself. ARVN was so sorrupt that an enormous amount of American supplies destined for ARVN were sold to the VC, not by the government, but by corrupt officers. IIRC, about 50% of the stuff we gave to SV ended up in enemy hands.

The problem was compounded because we pretended SV as an independent government, the U.S. couldn't go after the guys selling the weapons.

[Ned]

Give me chapter and verse. I have a copy of the White House years.

Kissinger kept the bombing secret from Congress in order to keep it SECRET. Sihanouk required secrecy as a condition of his permission to assualt communist bases.

[Patroklos]

Haven't read that book, but it smells like bull. The river traffic alone beats that.

I can't refute it for now though, so game on.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Patroklos
Was it not the Vietnamese (we were gone by then) that actually went into Cambodia and ousted the KR? Albiet late, but they did.

Yup, but not beause of the killing fields. No one knew about them yet. The KR began raiding VN soon after the came to power. After three years of this, VN had enough and invaded in a move that was denounced by the U.S. Soon after, the U.S. began supplying the KR as a resistence against the VN, probably the most disgusting thing the U.S. has ever done.

[Arrian]

Yes.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Ned
Give me chapter and verse. I have a copy of the White House years.

Kissinger kept the bombing secret from Congress in order to keep it SECRET. Sihanouk required secrecy as a condition of his permission to assualt communist bases.

Secret from who? Like the Cambodians didn't know they were being bombed?

[Arrian]

Secret from Congress, Ned. So that Congress couldn't stop it.

-Arrian

[Ned]

Arrian, Congress could only stop it if it stopped funding the war as a whole. That WAS a worry of the administration, true.

[Ned]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


Secret from who? Like the Cambodians didn't know they were being bombed?

It interesting, is it not, that the commies who were being bombed never called the NYTimes to complain.

Why?

Officially, they were not there either.