University of Virginia Library

The Secret Bombing Deal

Last week another protective shroud of
secrecy and deceit in which the Nixon
administration cloaks its began to
come unraveled with the testimony of a
former Air Force major before the Senate
Armed Services Committee, and by the end of
the week the shroud was completely stripped
away, revealing the true nature of the
administration's military involvement in
Cambodia.

It was a shocking tale the former officer
related, one subsequently confirmed by the
Pentagon. By the Pentagon's own admission,
the Air Force had conducted 3,6300 B-52
bombing raids into Cambodia more than a
year before the ground invasion of Cambodia
by U.S. troops in May 1970 was ordered by
President Nixon. At the same time that Mr.
Nixon was publicly proclaiming this country's
respect for the then-neutrality of Prince
Norodom Sihanouk's Cambodian territory, he
did not see fit to inform the American people
that almost nightly flights of B-52's were
dropping explosive tokens of the President's
respect of suspected Vietcong sanctuaries and
bases along the Cambodian-South Vietnamese
border.

Double-talk of this sort has not been
unique in the administration's practice of
mis-(or not) informing the public about its
conduct of the war in Indochina. One need
only think back to the recent disclosures of
unauthorized and previously unpublished
bombings of North Vietnam ordered by Air
Force Gen. John D. Lavelle. While these raids
were authorized by the President, the
Pentagon went even further this time in
attempting to conceal the secret Cambodian
air strikes by falsifying the flight orders for
the Cambodian missions. All the bombing
sorties into Cambodia were listed in official
reports as missions over South Vietnam,
because the Pentagon engaged in a "double
entry" bookkeeping system that hid the
strikes from even the rest of the military.

The disclosures last week of secret
bombings further reflect on the credibility of
the White House at a time when it is already
laboring under the strain of the Watergate
mess. After the recent disclosures, one winces
to re-read Mr. Nixon's claims as late as April
1970 that the U.S. had not moved against
enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia for the past
five years in order not to violate the territory
of a neutral nation. How many more of the
President's statements will we find, years
from now, were as "inoperative" as this one,
We shudder to think.

Yet even more serious are the ominous
implications that the military has gotten to be
"bigger than us all." When a branch of
government as critical as the military can
carry out a massive program of 3,600
bombing raids in almost total secrecy and
then falsify documents to wipe out all trace
of the raids' very occurrence, then one
wonders if 1984 has not descended upon us a
decade early, heralding an era when
"non-events" occur regularly, yet never make
it into any history books.

Such admittedly rampant speculation
aside, there can be little doubt now that the
time has come for Congress to take the
initiative and exercise new, more responsible
control over the military in the future. The
disclosures of secret bombings and falsified
documents cannot but lend added validity
and urgency to the Congress' demand that the
bombing in Cambodia end by the Aug. 15
deadline which it set.

As a final observation on this affair, we are
reminded of the old adage that freedom
entails responsibility, and when that freedom
is exercised irresponsibly then the freedom
will be taken away. In the past the President
has had almost unlimited freedom in his
exercise of military power–perhaps it is time
now for some of that freedom to be replaced
with responsibility, both to Congress and the
American people.