World's Most Evil and Lawless Institution? The Executive Branch of the U.S. Government

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U.S. officials had exterminated thousands of people of the Plain of Jars, destroying their entire civilization, because the U.S. Executive just couldn't let its planes sit around with nothing to do. The fact that innocent human beings were living there was irrelevant. No one hated the Lao. For Executive policy-makers in Washington, they just didn't exist, had no more importance than cockroaches or mosquitoes.

And that wasn’t all. Once the planes became available, they did in fact discover a purpose for them, as the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Refugees reported in September 1970: "The United States has undertaken a large-scale air war over Laos to destroy the physical and social infrastructure in Pathet Lao held areas. Throughout all this there has been a policy of secrecy. The bombing has taken and is taking a heavy toll among civilians."

Once the planes became available, the people of the Plain of Jars were not "collateral damage" to military targets. They were the target.

Chomsky, who interviewed the refugees in 1970 and is the world's expert on U.S. war crimes abroad, has  called the bombing of northern Laos "one of the most malevolent acts of modern history," and  N.Y. Times columnist Anthony Lewis termed it "the most appalling episode of  lawless cruelty in American history." Chomsky has also stated that though U.S. leaders did not achieve their primary goal of winning militarily in Indochina, they did destroy a possible independent economic alternative to the U.S. model for developing countries.

"Malevolence." "Lawless." "Cruel." These are not words we normally apply to the Executive Branch as an institution, or the individuals who head its powerful agencies. But if we are to decide whether we can trust the Executive Branch with our own lives we must face the truth of its evil lawlessness.

Executive Evil Lawlessness: Might Makes Right

In the movie  The Fog of War, McNamara  stated that after World War II, General Curtis Lemay, who had firebombed Tokyo killing 100,000 civilians and dropped the atomic bomb “said, `if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

Good question. U.S. leaders dropped 6.7 million ton of bombs and fired an equal amount of ground artillery in Indochina, killed 1.2 million Vietnamese civilians, wounded over a million more, leveled towns and villages, created 10 million refugees, and poisoned Vietnam’s forests and soil. This was precisely “the indiscriminate destruction of cities, towns, and villages,” and “other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations" as so painstakingly documented in  Kill Anything That Moves, for which the U.S. executed Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. Had the same judgment been rendered on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and other top officials in their administration like Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara, they too would have been executed, as McNamara acknowledged.

But the truth is that we live in a world, and an America, in which the rule of law does not prevail and might makes right. Our leaders endlessly inform us that America is a "nation of laws not men," even though they only escape punishment for their massive violations of basic human decency and the law, as Robert McNamara suggested, because they are too powerful to be punished.

Even if one believes the U.S. had a right to intervene in Indochina, no decent human being can possibly excuse its disregard for civilian life after doing so. You do not need to be a lawyer to know this was wrong. You just need a conscience.