Cambodia
Would you talk a little about the notion of unworthy vs. worthy
victims?
[Former New York Times and Newsday reporter and columnist]
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 also 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.