On Mon, 17 Jun 2002 18:54:19 -0400 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
writes:
> >To claim in 1979 that the character of the Khmer Rouge regime is
> >still open to debate seems to me to be beyond the stupid, and into
> >the malevolent.
> >
> >Brad DeLong
>
> How about supporting Khmer Rouge from 1980?
>
> ***** ...By January, 1980, the United States had begun secretly
> funding Pol Pot. The extent of this support - Dollars 85 million
> from
> 1980 to 1986 - was revealed six years later in correspondence
> between
> congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, counsel to a member of the
> Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of
> America. When copies of Winer's letter were circulated the Reagan
> Administration was furious. Then, without adequately explaining why,
>
> Winer repudiated the statistics, while not disputing that they had
> come from the Congressional Research Service. However, in a second
> letter to Professor Noam Chomsky, Winer made the same point which,
> he
> told me, was 'absolutely correct.' Here was clear evidence that Pol
> Pot's secret backer was Washington.
>
> As a cover for its secret war against Cambodia, Washington set up
> the
> Kampuchean Emergency Group, known at KEG, in the American embassy in
>
> Bangkok and on the border. KEG's job was to 'monitor' the
> distribution of Western humanitarian supplies sent to the refugee
> camps in Thailand and to ensure that they were delivered direct to
> Khmer Rouge bases.
>
> Two senior American relief workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown,
> later wrote, 'The US Government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed
>
> .. the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the
> credibility of an internationally known relief operation.' Under US
> pressure, the World Food Programme handed over Dollars 12 million
> worth of food to the Thai Army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge.
> '20,000
> to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited,' according to former
> Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke.
>
> Describing itself as a 'humanitarian organisation,' KEG was run by
> Colonel Michael Eiland, the Special Forces operation officer
> responsible for the illegal bombing of Cambodia in 1969. Eiland's
> new
> 'humanitarian' duties led directly to his appointment as Defence
> Intelligence Agency (DIA) Chief in charge of the South-East Asia
> region, one of the most important jobs in American espionage.
>
> In November, 1980 Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA
> and a close adviser of President Reagan, made a secret visit to a
> Khmer Rouge base camp inside Cambodia. Within a year, acccording to
> reliable Washington sources, 50 CIA agents were running America's
> Cambodia operation from Thailand. However, a number of governments
> were becoming decidedly uneasy about the charade of the continued
> United Nation as recognition of Pol Pot. This was dramatically
> demonstrated when a colleague of mine, Nicholas Claxton, entered a
> bar at the UN in New York with Thaoun Prasith, Pol Pot's
> representative and himself complicit in mass murder. Within minutes
> the bar had emptied....
>
> <http://pilger.carlton.com/print/48737> *****
>
> Have you concluded that the US government is malevolent?
Do you really expect a former functionary of the Clinton Administration to answer in the affirmative? Anyway, I don't think that US support for the Khmer Rouge during the 1980s was all that secret, since the US was very openly supporting the maintenance of UN recognition for Pol Pot's regime. And I seem to recall reading stories about US military aid to the Khmer Rouge in the NY Times back then.
> --
> Yoshie
>
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