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Edited on Tue Sep-14-04 10:50 PM by Minstrel Boy
I don't know - I'm asking for informed opinion.
I didn't follow the flap concerning the 1999 story, which claimed that on a 1970 raid into Laos US special forces employed sarin gas to kill defectors. But I have recently read former CNN producer April Oliver's account of her experience pursuing the story, and losing her job for it when CNN backed away under pressure from the Pentagon, in Into the Buzzsaw.
If the US did use nerve gas, particularly "against its own people," so much for that trump card against the legacy of Saddam.
Here's an interesting passage from Oliver's entry, "A Dream Job":
"The whole point of a black operation is to conceal the facts. That's why there is so little coverage of such events.... In a chilling warning, an officer on the Tailwind raid told my cameraman at the Special Forces convention in June, 'Geez, I am really sorry we're doing this to April.' Meaning the disinformation campaign about me, casting me alternatively as a wildly imaginative conspiracy theorist, or else as the Attila-the-Hun producer who pushes hardened combat veterans to the walls, choking the truth out of them. But, this officer said, we can't let the Tailwind story have legs. It can lead to too many other things being uncovered, even worse things. Special Forces guys have got to understand they are not to talk to reporters, and reporters have got to understand they are not to try and uncover black operations, otherwise they are going to end up like April. The tactic? An old cliche of warfare: kill the messenger."
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