Masked and Anonymous
By CHRIS FLOYD
...Most of the news stories about the release centered on the Nixon Gang's panicky efforts to deal with bad publicity from the rape-and-slaughter rampage by U.S. troops in My Lai. As in today's Iraqi torture scandal, the panic was sparked by the existence of photographs confirming atrocities that were long known to the top brass: in this case, pictures of mutilated bodies in a burned-out village. And as with Abu Ghraib, the great statesmen were concerned wholly with "containing" the PR damage, not stopping the systematic abuses--which were, after all, being carried out at their command. Then as now, rump-covering was the order of the day.
But hidden in the pile of power-talk--and virtually ignored by the press--was an extraordinary historical snapshot of a war crime in the moment of conception. It's 1970. Nixon is angry: the Air Force is not killing enough people in Cambodia, the country he's just illegally invaded without the slightest pretense of Congressional approval. The flyboys are doing "milk runs," their intelligence-gathering for targets is too tame, too by-the-book:. There are "other methods of getting intelligence," Nixon tells Kissinger. "You understand what I mean?" "Yes, I do," pipes the loyal retainer.
Nixon then orders Kissinger to send every available plane into Cambodia--bombers, fighters, helicopters, prop planes--to "crack the hell out of them," smother the entire country with deadly fire: "I want them to hit everything." Kissinger dutifully calls his own top aide, General Alexander Haig, and tells him to try to implement the plan: "He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia," Kissinger says. "It's an order, it's to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves."
"Anything that flies on anything that moves." That's how the system works--beneath the mask. A blustering fool issues an order--and thousands upon thousands of innocent people die. An entire country is ripped to shreds, and into the smoking ruins steps a fanatical band of crazed extremists--the Khmer Rouge--who murder a million more.
Just hours after the transcripts' release, the image of Kissinger in 1970, jowls pressed to the phone, calmly ordering mass death, morphed into the squinting visage of Pentagon chief Don Rumsfeld, addressing West Point graduates in 2004, exhorting the young cadets to a life of honor and moral purpose-- without a single mention of the rape-and-torture gulag he's strung across the world at the order of his own hell-cracking master, George W. Bush. Rumsfeld also issued this stark warning to the world: the illegal invasion of Iraq is just "the beginning" of what is no longer merely a "war on terror" but is now an all-out death-struggle with what Rumsfeld called--in a major slip of the mask--"global insurgency."
..MORE
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd06042004.html 
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