Secret Bombing Of Cambodia (Khmer, Kampuchea)
In the fall of 2000, twenty-five years after the end of the war in Indochina, Bill Clinton became the first US president since Richard Nixon to visit Vietnam. While media coverage of the trip was dominated by talk of some two thousand US soldiers still classified as missing in action, a small act of great historical importance went almost unnoticed. As a humanitarian gesture, Clinton released extensive Air Force data on all American bombings of Indochina between 1964 and 1975. Recorded using a groundbreaking IBM-designed system, the database provided extensive information on sorties conducted over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Clinton's gift was intended to assist in the search for unexploded ordnance left behind during the carpet bombing of the region. Littering the countryside, often submerged under farmland, this ordnance remains a significant humanitarian concern. It has maimed and killed farmers, and rendered valuable land all but unusable. Development and de-mining organizations have put the Air Force data to good use over the past six years, but have done so without noting its full implications, which turn out to be staggering. The Bombing Database The still-incomplete database (it has several "dark" periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons' worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having "unknown" targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. Even if the latter may arguably be oversights, the former suggest explicit knowledge of indiscretion. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed -- not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson. The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d'état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide. The data demonstrates that the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have disastrous consequences. It therefore speaks to contemporary warfare as well, including US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite many differences, a critical similarity links the war in Iraq with the Cambodian conflict: an increasing reliance on air power to battle a heterogeneous, volatile insurgency.
Comments
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Nixon your so evil
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and, the more my own people back here in the good old USA accused my buddies and I of killing babies the worse it got. Jane Fonda was cheered! Go tell the REDS that war is hell. You bunch of liberals at the colleges got us ran out of SE Asia and look what's happening. now!
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Now we need new prime minister for Cambodia, Not Hun Sen he not khmer
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From a perspective of a Cambodian, I still strongly demand the US responsible on the disastrous casualties in our country. US led the war into Cambodia and left us behind after its troops safety withdrawn. Sure, partly NV also took part for the disaster of that year.
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Does any one know the man at 2:30 please please please
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where is this from/ who's the first man who is shown talking?
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do you have any evidence to support this statement? if so i would be very interested in hearing
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every president after jfk was a war criminel
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I'm writing an explanatory essay on the Khmer Rouge regime and I would like to cite this film/documentary for it. What's this documentary's name?
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There you go America, the great nation ? more like a great liar
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AMERICA
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KHMER PRIDE!!!
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Stupid shit happens when theres a drunk president in charge. FUCK NIXON!!!
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@AnthonyLoung SCUM AMERICA MAKING FALSE ACCUSATIONS AGAINST PAKISTAN ON THE ISI. TOTALLY FALSE THE LYING BASTERDS. THEY LOSING WAR IN AFGHANISTAN & MAKING UP BULLS & BLAMING PAKISTAN. THE UNGRATFUL BASTERDS !!! MULLEN & PANETTA LYING SCUM !!!
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fuck america man
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@gatorn its tru what he said i read many book of the genocide s21 and much more the king his an asshole for sure
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To Kissinger, the only good yellow person is a dead yellow person.
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@BunchJohn Demographic evidence indicates that American bombing killed about 40,000 Khmer Rouge fighters and Cambodian civilians (Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8, 57). The entire civil war cost 200-300,000 lives; Noam Chomsky found one sentence in a CIA report noting that Sihanouk claimed 600,000 dead on all sides and then used it to propagate the extravagant lie that "the CIA estimated American bombing killed 600,000 civilians!"
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Interesting to note that in 1940, Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin. After six days of bombing, Hitler ordered retaliation, and the East End of London paid the price. The overall game plan was to present German bombing of London as a war crime, and thus bring the US into the War. In the event, it took Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to bring the US into WWII. Also remember that Churchill declared war on Japan before the US. Only a matter of hours, sure.
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