by Metatone
Sun Aug 24th, 2008 at 06:31:17 AM EST
LAOS: Film Reveals CIA's 'Most Secret Place on Earth'LAOS: Film Reveals CIA's 'Most Secret Place on Earth'
By Andrew Nette
PHNOM PENH, Aug 22 (IPS) - It was known as the `secret war', a covert operation waged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) throughout the sixties and early seventies against communist guerrillas in Laos.
And the most secret location in this clandestine war was the former CIA air base of Long Chen, in central Laos, a place that remain off limits even today.
A new film, `The Most Secret Place on Earth', to be released in cinemas across Europe later this year, explores this little known conflict.
The film, which previewed for the first time in Phnom Penh in mid-August, includes images of Long Chen shot by the first Western camera crew to enter the base since the communists took control of the country in 1975.
Little is known about the Lao conflict despite the fact that it remains the largest and most expensive paramilitary operation ever run by the U.S.
It was completely run by the CIA using largely civilian pilots from the agency's own airline, Air America, and mercenaries recruited from the Hmong, an ethnic tribe living in mountainous areas in central and northern Laos.
...
Eberle also believes what happened in Laos in the sixties is relevant in that it shares strong parallels with the conflict in Iraq.
"Laos was the progenitor of the way America fights wars in the 21st century," he says.
"Outsourcing the war to private companies, gathering public support by falsifying intelligence and documents, embedded journalism and automated warfare including the use of so-called `smart weapons', all these methods were first tested in Laos."
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This film's analysis sets it apart from other books and documentaries on the subject, most of which justify the conflict, lauding the CIA operatives and their Air America pilots as heroes.
The reality, as Alfred McCoy says towards the end of the film, was very different. "We destroyed a whole civilisation, we wiped it off the map. We incinerated, atomised human remains in this air war and what happened in the end? We lost."
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American planes dropped an average of one planeload of bombs on targets in Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years, making it the most heavily bombed country on earth per capita in the history of warfare.
