New Information on the 1973 B52 Bombing of Neak Luong, Cambodia

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New Information on the 1973 B52 Bombing of Neak Luong, Cambodia

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Notorious 1973 Attack Killed Many More Than Previously Known
Long-buried documents indicate that the true number of civilian casualties in the bombing of Neak Luong may have been nearly twice the official tally.
Nick Turse
May 23 2023, 8:05 p.m.
Ny Sarim had lived through it all. Violence. Loss. Privation. Genocide.
Her first husband was killed after Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge plunged Cambodia into a nightmare campaign of overwork, hunger, and murder that killed around 2 million people from 1975 to 1979. Four other family members died too — some of starvation, others by execution.

“No one ever even had time to laugh. Life was so sad and hopeless,” she told The Intercept. It was enough suffering for a lifetime, but it couldn’t erase the memory of the night in August 1973 when her town became a charnel house.

Ny was sleeping at home when the bombs started dropping on Neak Luong, 30 tons all at once. She had felt the ground tremble from nearby bombings in the past, but this strike by a massive B-52 Stratofortress aircraft hit the town squarely. “Not only did my house shake, but the earth shook,” she told The Intercept. “Those bombs were from the B-52s.” Many in the downtown market area where she worked during the day were killed or wounded. “Three of my relatives — an uncle and two nephews — were killed by the B-52 bombing,” she said.

The strike on Neak Luong may have killed more Cambodians than any bombing of the American war, but it was only a small part of a devastating yearslong air campaign in that country. As Elizabeth Becker, who covered the conflict as a correspondent for the Washington Post, notes in her book “When the War Was Over,” the United States dropped more than 257,000 tons of explosives on the Cambodian countryside in 1973, about half the total dropped on Japan during all of World War II.

“They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence.”

“The biggest mistakes were in 1973,” she told The Intercept. “They caused the largest number of civilian casualties because they were bombing so massively with very poor maps and spotty intelligence. During those months ‘precision bombing’ was an oxymoron.” Neak Luong, she concurred, was the worst American “mistake.”

State Department documents, declassified in 2005 but largely ignored, show that the death toll at Neak Luong may have been far worse than was publicly reported at the time, and that the real toll was purposefully withheld by the U.S. government.

In his 2003 book “Ending the Vietnam War,” Henry Kissinger wrote that “more than a hundred civilians were killed” in the town. But U.S. records of “solatium” payments — money given to survivors as an expression of regret — indicate that more than 270 Cambodians were killed and hundreds more were wounded in Neak Luong. State Department documents also show that the U.S. paid only about half the sum promised to survivors.

The death warrant for Neak Luong was signed when U.S. officials decided that American lives mattered more than Cambodian ones. Until 1967, U.S. forces in South Vietnam used ground beacons that emitted high frequency radio waves to direct airstrikes. But the U.S. stopped using the beacons after a radar navigator on a B-52 bomber failed to flip an offset switch, causing a bomb load to drop directly on a helicopter carrying a beacon instead of a nearby site designated for attack. The chopper was blown out of the sky, and the U.S. military switched to a more reliable radar system until the January 1973 ceasefire formally ended the U.S. war in Vietnam.

At that point, the more sophisticated radar equipment went home, and the less reliable ground beacons came into use in Cambodia, where the U.S. air war raged with growing intensity.

In April 1973, according to a formerly classified U.S. military history, American officials expressed concern that “radar beacons were located on the American Embassy in Phnom Penh” and raised “the possibility that weapons could be released in the direct mode,” striking the U.S. mission by accident. Within days, that beacon was removed. But while Americans at the embassy were safe, Cambodians in places like Neak Luong, where a beacon had been placed on a pole in the center of town, remained at risk. “It should have been put a mile or so away in the boondocks,” a senior U.S. Air Force officer told the New York Times in 1973.

On August 7, 1973, a secret cable shot from the beacon-less U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh to the secretaries of State and Defense and other top American officials in Washington. At approximately 4:35 a.m. in Cambodia, according to Deputy Chief of Mission Thomas Enders’s message, Neak Luong was “accidentally bombed by a yet undetermined [U.S. Air Force] aircraft.”

Ny said that her cousin, who served with the U.S.-allied Cambodian army and spoke English, got on the radio shortly after the bombing and asked an American what had happened. He was told that the bombs were dropped in error, she said.

It later became clear that a navigator had again failed to flip the offset bombing switch.
Full article: https://theintercept.com/2023/05/23/kis ... eak-luong/
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Re: New Information on the 1973 B52 Bombing of Neak Luong, Cambodia

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Kissinger Responsible for More Civilian Deaths in Cambodia Than Previously Known
Henry Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday as survivors and family members of deadly campaigns continue to grieve.
By
Amy Goodman &
Juan González ,
DemocracyNow!

Published
May 24, 2023

A bombshell new investigation from The Intercept reveals that former U.S. national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was responsible for even more civilian deaths during the U.S. war in Cambodia than was previously known. The revelations add to a violent résumé that ranges from Latin America to Southeast Asia, where Kissinger presided over brutal U.S. military interventions to put down communist revolt and to develop U.S. influence around the world. While survivors and family members of these deadly campaigns continue to grieve, Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday this week. “This adds to the list of killings and crimes that Henry Kissinger should, even at this very late date in his life, be asked to answer for,” says The Intercept’s Nick Turse, author of the new investigation, “Kissinger’s Killing Fields.” We also speak with Yale University’s Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.
TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Saturday will be the 100th birthday of Henry Kissinger. He served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Today we look at Kissinger’s ongoing influence on the national security state as the United States engages in declared and undeclared wars around the world. Human rights advocates consider Kissinger a war criminal who has escaped accountability.

We begin with a damning new investigation by The Intercept on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians, that Kissinger authorized during the U.S. War in Vietnam. Reporter Nick Turse has revealed unreported mass killings, after examining formerly classified U.S. military documents and traveling to 12 remote Cambodian villages to interview more than 75 witnesses and survivors of the U.S. attacks. With this new piece, Nick Turse also publishes transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls that show his key role in Cambodia, and CIA records connecting Kissinger’s actions to the growth of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, the regime that massacred 2 million people from 1975 to 1979.

Transcript:
https://truthout.org/video/kissinger-re ... sly-known/
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Re: New Information on the 1973 B52 Bombing of Neak Luong, Cambodia

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Henry Kissinger at 100: Still a War Criminal
Forget the birthday candles, let’s count the dead.
David Corn 2 hours ago

Henry Kissinger is turning 100 this week, and his centennial is prompting assorted hosannas about perhaps the most influential American foreign policymaker of the 20th century.
The Economist observed that “his ideas have been circling back into relevancy for the last quarter century.” The Times of London ran an appreciation: “Henry Kissinger at 100: What He Can Tell Us About the World.” Policy shops and think tanks have held conferences to mark this milestone. CBS News aired a mostly fawning interview veteran journalist Ted Koppel conducted with Kissinger that included merely a glancing reference to the ignoble and bloody episodes of his career. Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state.
Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.

Kissinger’s diplomatic conniving led to or enabled slaughters around the globe. As he blows out all those candles, let’s call the roll.

Cambodia: In early 1969, shortly after Nixon moved into the White House and inherited the Vietnam War, he, Kissinger, and others cooked up a plan to secretly bomb Cambodia, in pursuit of enemy camps. With the perversely-named “Operation Breakfast” launched, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Kissinger and Nixon were “really excited.” The action, though, was of dubious legality; the United States was not at war with Cambodia and Congress had not authorized the carpet-bombing, which Nixon tried to keep a secret. The US military dropped 540,000 tons of bombs. They didn’t just hit enemy outposts. The estimates of Cambodian civilians killed range between 150,000 and 500,000.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... -criminal/
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Re: New Information on the 1973 B52 Bombing of Neak Luong, Cambodia

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Kissinger and his critics
How does the former secretary of state feel about being called a war criminal?
Barbara Keys 9 June 2023

What was Henry Kissinger thinking on his hundredth birthday last month? He was surely gratified to be feted by the world’s foreign policy elite, who still crave his counsel on today’s global challenges and the reflected glow of his celebrity. The grandees who thronged to various celebrations included US secretary of state Antony Blinken.

But Kissinger’s pleasure was surely mixed with bitterness at the outpouring of vitriol from the anti-imperialist left, who have long condemned him as a war criminal who deserves prison rather than praise. Marking the centenary birthday, Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC said he wanted to talk about “the many, many people around the world” who didn’t get to live even to the age of sixty because of Kissinger. He should be “ashamed to be seen in public,” Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters wrote in the Guardian.

They and many others trotted out the usual charges from his days as top foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: brutally and unnecessarily prolonging the Vietnam war, bombing neutral Cambodia, trying to help overthrow a democratically elected leader in Chile, greenlighting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, abetting genocide in East Pakistan, winking at state torture and killings in Argentina, and more.

The former secretary of state has heard this line of criticism for half a century, and the evidence suggests that it stings. Deeply protective of his honour, he has typically reacted angrily to challenges to his integrity and intelligence. In early 1970, for example, at Johns Hopkins University, a student asked whether he considered himself a war criminal — presumably referring to heavy civilian casualties in the Vietnam war. Kissinger walked out and refused to speak there again for the next twenty years.

In later years, his reaction to such questions changed very little. What did change was his willingness to be put in situations where he could be asked such questions. Being grilled about “crimes” was something that happened only when Kissinger was taken by surprise.

In 1979, for example, British journalist David Frost shocked Kissinger by posing hard-hitting questions about the bombing and invasion of Cambodia. Frost suggested that the policies Kissinger promoted had created conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge takeover and the genocide that left up to two million Cambodians dead. After the first taping, an irate Kissinger complained long and hard to the top brass at NBC, who leaned on Frost to go softer on the famed diplomat in the next taping.
Full article: https://insidestory.org.au/kissinger-and-his-critics/
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Re: New Information on the 1973 B52 Bombing of Neak Luong, Cambodia

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Henry Kissinger - a living testament to the old adage that only the good die young
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Re: New Information on the 1973 B52 Bombing of Neak Luong, Cambodia

Post by Alex »

I'm not a member of the "anti-imperialist left", not by quite some margin, and I STILL consider him a war criminal. I know pretty much nobody, left or right leaning, who knows him and doesn't despise the man.
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Re: New Information on the 1973 B52 Bombing of Neak Luong, Cambodia

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It Happened Here: William O. Douglas orders halt to U.S. bombing of Cambodia after Yakima hearing
DONALD W. MEYERS Yakima Herald-Republic 4 hrs ago

Fifty years ago, [August 1973], a legal battle in the Vietnam War played out in downtown Yakima.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas heard arguments for upholding a lower court order blocking President Richard Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia.

While Douglas’ order would be overturned, the fight would eventually lead to Congress taking steps to rein in the president’s ability to use military force without approval from the legislative branch.

The United States had been fighting in Vietnam since 1961, when President John F. Kennedy sent military “advisers” to assist the South Vietnamese government in its fight against communist North Vietnam.

U.S. officials argued that assisting South Vietnam was necessary to prevent it and other countries in the region from falling under communist control under the “Domino Theory.” Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, escalated U.S. involvement after alleging that two U.S. destroyers, the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy (which is now a museum ship in Bremerton), were attacked by North Vietnamese boats.

Nixon further escalated the war in April 1970 by secretly ordering U.S. forces to attack another Southeast Asian nation, Cambodia, which he said North Vietnam was using as a base of operations.

The invasion of Cambodia sparked protests at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guard troops killed four students and wounded nine others.

The American Civil Liberties Union had been challenging the war in the court system, arguing that Nixon’s actions violated Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which vests Congress with the authority to declare war. ACLU attorneys argued with each escalation of the war that neither passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution nor spending bills for the war did not equate to a congressional war declaration.

In the summer of 1973, the ACLU used the Cambodian invasion as the basis of a legal challenge to the war. U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a New York Democrat, and a group of U.S. Air Force officers stationed in Thailand, another Vietnam neighbor, filed suit alleging the bombing campaign was unconstitutional as it was not authorized by Congress.

A federal judge in the Eastern District of New York agreed, finding that Congress not only did not authorize the bombing of Cambodia, but barred it. The judge, Orin Judd, issued an order barring the unauthorized bombing campaign.
Full article: https://www.yakimaherald.com/news/local ... 08ce8.html
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