https://youtube/watch?v=bmKxhbeE8-8 The longtime confident to power and celebrity Henry Kissinger is doing the rounds this month to promote a new book and — yet again — finds himself fending off pointed questions about his role in American skulduggery and deadly Cold War policies. In her all-but-announced preparations for another presidential run in 2016, Hillary Clinton has made no secret of her affection for Kissinger. But in public radio appearances this month, he reacted angrily to questions about his role in Chiles 1973 coup and the Nixon administrations bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973. Kissinger told NPR he believed that fewer civilians died in the bombing of Cambodia than in current drone strikes by the Obama administration and, in an appearance on WNYC radio, said the bombing covered a ten-mile strip of Cambodian territory where very few people were killed — if any. This is clearly untrue. Without informing Congress, the United States secretly bombed Cambodia to combat communist forces during the Indochina War, known as the Vietnam War in the U.S. and the American War in Vietnam. This was unsuccessful even though the United States dropped 2.8 million tons of ordnance on the tiny country, making Cambodia one of the most heavily bombed countries on earth. In 2000, the Clinton administration released an Air Force database of bombing records that for the first time showed the precise locations of a quarter-million sorties at 114,00 locations in Cambodia. A 2006 analysis of the data by data journalist Taylor Owen and Yale professor Ben Kiernan showed that the bombing targets, far from covering a ten-mile strip, had blanketed virtually all of eastern Cambodia and veered directly into populated areas. Kissingers claim that very few if any civilians died in the bombing also appears untenable. After a three-year survey aimed at determining population changes in Cambodia throughout the 1970s, the demographer Marek Sliwinski estimated in 1995 that the bombings had killed 41,050 people. Kissinger was personally involved in target selection, according to the late writer Christopher Hitchens, who wrote that Kissinger had comprehensive control over U.S. defense policy and the conduct of the war. In 2012, Taylor Owen gave this public presentation of his findings, which you can view in this video.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 22:09:01 +0000
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