Secrets, Lies and Democracy (Interviews with Noam Chomsky) Copyright © 1994 by David Barsamian
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Cambodia

Would you talk a little about the notion of unworthy vs. worthy victims?

[NY Newsday columnist and former New York Times reporter] Sidney Schanberg wrote an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe in which he blasted Senator Kerry of Massachusetts for being two-faced because Kerry refused to concede that the Vietnamese have not been entirely forthcoming about American POWs. Nobody, according to Schanberg, is willing to tell the truth about this.

He says the government ought to finally have the honesty to say that it left Indochina without accounting for all the Americans. Of course, it wouldn't occur to him to suggest that the government should be honest enough to say that we killed a couple of million people and destroyed three countries and left them in total wreckage and have been strangling them ever since.

It's particularly striking that this is Sidney Schanberg, a person of utter depravity. He's regarded as the great conscience of the press because of his courage in exposing the crimes of our official enemies -- namely, Pol Pot [leader of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge rebel army]. He also happened to be the main US reporter in Phnom Penh [Cambodia's capital] in 1973. This was at the peak of the US bombardment of inner Cambodia, when hundreds of thousands of people (according to the best estimates) were being killed and the society was being wiped out.

Nobody knows very much about the bombing campaign and its effects because people like Sidney Schanberg refused to cover it. It wouldn't have been hard for him to cover it. He wouldn't have to go trekking off into the jungle -- he could walk across the street from his fancy hotel in Phnom Penh and talk to any of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who'd been driven from the countryside into the city.

I went through all of his reporting -- it's reviewed in detail in Manufacturing Consent, my book with Edward Herman [currently editor of Lies of Our Times]. You'll find a few scattered sentences here and there about the bombing, but not a single interview with the refugees.

There is one American atrocity he did report (for about three days); The Killing Fields, the movie that's based on his story, opens by describing it. What's the one report? American planes hit the wrong village -- a government village. That's an atrocity; that he covered. How about when they hit the right village? We don't care about that.

Incidentally, the United States' own record with POWs has been atrocious -- not only in Vietnam, where it was monstrous, but in Korea, where it was even worse. And after WW II, we kept POWs illegally under confinement, as did the British.


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