Long Chen: Film Reveals CIA"s Most Secret Place on Earth.

Nov 28, 2009
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Has anyone ever herd of the Rothschilds? google them and see what you think, even the CIA work for them, as that was there main informants back then, now I know that the CIA was formed and publicised at a much later date, But actually they were first formed in the late 1700's early 1800's. anyway its all there to read about. lets put it this way, in the late 1800's was the last time anyone made a estemate on there wealth, and it was arround the one trillion dollars. They have been most renound for there antics of funding both sides of war's and crashing economies. buying up all the bonds, flooding the ecomomies with money in inflating the econnomies, that was done with france, germany and so on. In the pipe line they say now they could be worth 500 trillion dollars. this one family owns the Federal reserve, there is 10 banks that form the federal reserve, all owned by the Rothschild family. And it is said that they own 68% of the worlds wealth. Hard to bieleave i know, but check it out before critisizing it.... see link below

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family
 

Rhodie

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Mar 5, 2006
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Ian Bungy;267290 wrote: It was on History Channel Sunday Night at 9pm. Quite a few of Us watched it together. OK Documentary but I thought they lost there way a bit with their Anti-American Slant? Strange considering History Channel is an American Channel? Obviously the Producers were against them!

You are quite right this doc had an agenda, but it was the film maker's own which allowed him to gain access to LS20A. It is also probably why it's taken him 2 or so years to get it broadcast. HC, like SBS in Oz, bought it off the shelf. Interesting viewing nonetheless, but the Hysterical/Hitler Channel is not always known for its accuracy.
 
Mar 30, 2010
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Ian Bungy;267290 wrote: It was on History Channel Sunday Night at 9pm. Quite a few of Us watched it together. OK Documentary but I thought they lost there way a bit with their Anti-American Slant? Strange considering History Channel is an American Channel? Obviously the Producers were against them! There was a lot of things happening during that Era and All Sides were Guilty of Atrocities Much like Afghanistan & Iraqi today. A Total Mess! You can't fight a War with one Hand Tied behind Your back and You can Never Win if the UN is involved!!! I have the Perfect Solution for all such Conflicts but best not Publish them here!!!

Agree with you.. Anti American agenda.
The book The Raven's gives you a bit more balance to the history as well as what they really did there.

There is no mention that when Laos was declared neutral the US sent in the CIA.. but the North Vietnamese changed uniforms for Pathet Lao and continued fighting..
or
Not only did the US drop bombs over Laos because they could could not land with bombs on-board.. They also did this over South Vietnam where the tunnels were.. indiscriminate bombing there too.. no mention of that in the documentary.

But it was still good to see and like anything, we always have to do your own research to ensure you have a balanced view.

Cheers
Brian
 

DavidFL

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Tonight at the Alliance Francaise in Chiang Mai.

REMINDER
334th Meeting – Tuesday, May 17th 2011, 19.30 at the Alliance Française

The Most Secret Place on Earth: The CIA’s Covert War in Laos
A 75 minute DVD documentary directed by Marc Eberle
Additional commentary will be provided by Rebecca Weldon

It was known as the ‘secret war’, a covert operation waged by the US 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 still off-limits today. The Most Secret Place on Earth, which explores this little known conflict, 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.
“I first got the idea to do the film when I visited the Plain of Jars in Laos in 2002,” recalls Marc Eberle, the 36 year-old German director. “You could still see the craters from the air bombing and unexploded ordnance was everywhere. Then I heard about Long Chen and the fact that no one had got there since the war and I thought, how do I visit and how do I make a film about it?”
Little is known about the Lao conflict despite the fact it remains the largest and most expensive paramilitary operation ever run by the US. 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.
Despite being the centre of the covert operation and at its peak one of the world’s busiest airports with a population of 50,000 people, Long Chen’s location was never marked on any map. “I found it bizarre that at one time this was the second biggest city in Laos and it was completely secret,” Eberle says.
Long Chen remains off-limits to foreigners and most Lao due to clashes with remnants of the CIA’s Hmong army and until recently formed part of a special administrative zone under the direct control of the Lao army.
Renewed interest in the Laos’ secret war was briefly rekindled in 2003 when two Western journalists made contact with members of the Hmong resistance, the first white people they had seen since the CIA abandoned them 27 years ago.

Rebecca Weldon is the daughter of two physicians, Charles Weldon and Patricia McCreedy, who administered the public health assistance program in Laos for USAID between June 1963 and September 1974. Raised in Laos during the war and fluent in French and Lao, she worked as a summer intern for USAID/Laos between 1968 and 1973. Her duties included translation of Lao government documents, collation and research on the origin and personal histories of refugees from northeast Laos to the Vientiane Plain, research in Lao government archives to create a chronology of political and military events in northern Laos between 1945 and 1972 and translation from French to English of the first doctoral thesis written by a Hmong, Yang Dao.
In 1981 she worked for Joint Voluntary Agency (JVA) in the Nongkhai refugee camp, documenting events in Laos from 1975 to 1981 by collecting oral histories of Lao refugees, organized by social background and profession. She also recorded oral histories of refugees in the holding center, recently released from “seminar” camps and was the first to record the story of the deaths of the King, Queen and Crown Prince of Laos.
With a background in material culture and museum studies, she has worked in Thailand from 1982 to the present as a gallery owner, curator and museological consultant.
Rebecca writes: “Many people, across generations and around the world, have grown up in a war zone. I am one of those people. I do not pretend to have played any significant role. My father documented his work and experiences in Laos in his book, “Tragedy in Paradise”, and I recommend it as a personal memoir to those who would like to understand how a non-military, non-CIA, but, active participant, viewed the events that transpired in the north of Laos. It was through his work and my mother’s that I met General Vang Pao, the CIA officers, USAID officials, writers and journalists featured in the documentaries of the “Secret War”. My knowledge of the events in Laos was nurtured by conversation around my parent’s dinner table. Many of them told stories I could never forget. On occasion, and because my father retired in Chiang Rai, where I live, I discussed and helped to illuminate for others, the story of the war. I was much amused to discover that Long Tieng was “secret”, for it never was in our family. I was distressed to read of attributions of Air America as “Air Opium”, knowing many of the pilots who flew the planes. I joined the Air America Association, just to be with them when they met, as a representative of friends from the past.
Over the years, when researching the history of Chiang Rai, I met many Thai who fought the war; an immigration officer in Mae Sai, a businessman in Chiang Khong, even a T’ai Lue villager in Sri Don Chai. These stories remain to be told and the generation who lived them is passing away. I hope that there will be a time when modern Southeast Asian history is better understood by all who live here, a time when the politics of the situation will give way to facts. This can only happen if the personal stories can be recorded and the documents be revealed.”

Comment: for those at all interested Charles Weldon's book "Tragedy in Paradise" is a highly recommended read.

268100=3438-booktragedyinparadise.jpg
 

DavidFL

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Fred Branfman has died on 24th September 2014 in Budapest.

Fred Branfman, who exposed secret U.S. bombing of Laos, dies at 72

By Matt Schudel October 4 at 7:14 PM

Fred Branfman, the first person to draw public attention to a previously unknown U.S. bombing campaign inside Laos during the Vietnam War and who later became a leading antiwar activist in Washington, died Sept. 24 at a medical facility in Budapest, where he had lived for several years. He was 72.

The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, said his wife, Zsuzsanna Berkovits Branfman.

Mr. Branfman, who was born in New York, moved to Laos, a landlocked nation bordering Vietnam, as an education adviser in 1967. He was fluent in the Laotian language and began to hear reports from refugees who had been driven from their villages by relentless bombing attacks.

He visited the refu*gee camps himself and learned that thousands of Laotians had been killed. The picturesque Plain of Jars, a region dotted with giant, hollowed-out stone receptacles, had been reduced to ruins.

“I interviewed over 2,000 people,” Mr. Branfman said in “The Most Secret Place on Earth,” a 2008 documentary, “and every single one told the same story.”

Refugees made drawings of the destruction, which depicted U.S. warplanes flying overhead and dropping munitions from the sky. The toll on local residents, animals and vegetation was immense.

Investigations by Mr. Branfman and others revealed that a secret CIA-built air base in Laos was, in effect, the busiest airport in the world. Bombing missions were carried out over Vietnam, but much of the ordnance was dropped on Laos in an effort to disrupt Viet Cong supply routes.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail, used by North Vietnam to supply Viet Cong fighters in South Vietnam, ran through the area, which was also roamed by communist guerrillas known as the Pathet Lao.

To Mr. Branfman, however, nothing could justify the human cost. He first made his discoveries in 1969 and was deported from Laos in 1971 “under pressure from the United States Embassy,” according to a Harper’s magazine article by journalist Christopher Hitchens.

Writing in the New York Times in 1971, after his return to the United States, Mr. Branfman described what Laotian refugees had told him:

“Each, without exception, said that his village had been totally leveled by bombing. Each, without exception, said that he had spent months or even years on end hiding in holes or trenches dug into foothills.

“The refugees say that the bombing began in 1964.”

At a Senate hearing in April 1971, Mr. Branfman said, “There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the United States has been carrying out the most protracted bombing of civilian targets in history.”

A subsequent Washington Post investigation concluded: “By the admission of American officials closely associated with the war there, Laos has been the most heavily bombed country in the history of aerial warfare.”

It was later determined that the United States dropped more bombs on Laos in the 1960s and 1970s than on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. Mr. Branfman edited a collection of writings and artworks by Laotian refugees, “Voices from the Plain of Jars” (1972), which highlighted the devastation of the air war in Laos.

In Washington, Mr. Branfman founded the Indochina Resource Center, an information service that was allied with the antiwar movement.

“He made no secret,” journalist Les Whitten wrote in The Post in 1974, “of where his heart was: on his left sleeve, armband high.”
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In 1972, he organized a star-studded antiwar demonstration at the U.S. Capitol. Those arrested included singer Judy Collins, Dr. Benjamin Spock, leftist scholar Noam Chomsky, painter Larry Rivers, theatrical producer Joseph Papp and writer Garry Wills.

“Fred was brilliant,” said William Goodfellow, executive director of the Center for International Policy, who worked with Mr. Branfman in the 1970s. “He was one of the intellectual lights of the antiwar movement.”

Fredrick Robert Branfman was born March 18, 1942, in New York City. His father was a textile executive.

Mr. Branfman received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago in 1964 and a master’s degree in education from Harvard University in 1965.

He spent time on an Israeli kibbutz as an undergraduate and, from 1965 to 1967, worked as a teacher in Tanzania. He received a draft deferment to teach and advise educators in Laos, beginning in 1967.

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Branfman moved to California, where he became active in the solar energy movement and served as research director for the failed Senate campaign of former Chicago Seven defendant Tom Hayden.

Mr. Branfman was a research director for California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) from 1979 to 1983 and helped coordinate the state’s outreach to the early high-tech pioneers of Silicon Valley.

He returned to Washington in the mid-1980s to work on the presidential campaign of Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.), then directed a nonprofit organization called Rebuild America, which promoted U.S. manufacturing and domestic job creation.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fred-branfman-who-exposed-secret-us-bombing-of-laos-dies-at-72/2014/10/04/083d90e4-4be6-11e4-b72e-d60a9229cc10_story.html
In a book I have just finished reading "Shooting At the Moon" Branfman feastures heavily through out the book & was truly one of the amazing characters in Indochina in the late 60-70s, during the Secret Bombing War.

See: http://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Moon-Story-Americas-Clandestine/dp/1883642361

THE CIA IN ITS GLORY DAYS and the mad confidence that led to disaster in Vietnam are the subjects of Roger Warner's prizewinning history, Shooting at the Moon: The CIA's War in Laos (first published as Back Fire, Simon & Schuster, 1995). For a few years in the early 1960s the CIA seemed to be running a perfect covert war in Laos - quiet, inexpensive, just enough arms to help Meo tribesmen defend their home territory from the Communist Pathet Lao. Then the big American war next door in Vietnam spilled across the border. How the perfect covert war ballooned into sorrow and disaster is the story Roger Warner tell in Shooting at the Moon, awarded the Cornelius Ryan Award for 1995's Best Book on Foreign Affairs by the Overseas Press Club.
Warner describes his characters with a novelist's touch - soldiers and diplomats busy with war-making; CIA field officers from bareknuckle warriors to the quiet men pulling strings in the shadows; and above all the Meo as they realized they had been led down the garden path.
This is a book about war, about secrecy, and its illusions, about the cruel sacrifice of small countries for the convenience of large ones. Nothing better has been written about the CIA in the years when it thought a handful of Americans in sunglasses could do anything with planeloads of arms and money to burn.
Amazon.com Review
In Shooting at the Moon, Roger Warner chronicles a covert operation that used Hmong villagers as guerrilla fighters against the North during the Vietnamese War. Thought to be an expendable resource by Central Intelligence Agency strategists, the Hmong died by the thousands fighting the North Vietnamese. Those who survived were abandoned to their fate when the United States pulled out of the war. Warner's history is the moving and tragic story of how America's "secret war" devastated its own allies in Southeast Asia.

Review
"... A terrific book. Much of it reads like a wild, imaginative adventure novel. That the story is true and only now coming fully to light makes it all that much more amazing. It can only add to our understanding of how strong men and their convictions and their daring so often lead to calamity, especially for those who believe in and follow them." -- The Los Angeles Times

"With the publication of Shooting at the Moon, Roger Warner emerges as the first significant war historian of the post-Vietnam generation." -- The Nation

"This is a book about the war in the mountains of Laos between 1961 and 1973. It is not the first, but it is certainly the best." -- Journal of Asian Studies

"Better than fiction..." -- Houston Chronicle
 

DavidFL

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DavidFL

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Researching for some info I found this useful link of references