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fragmentation bombs dropped to maximize civilian casualties. From this town to a distance of thirty kilometers, "no house in the villages and hamlets had been spared. Bridges had been destroyed, fields up to the rivers were holed with bomb craters."7 After Decornoy's reports, there could be no doubt that the U.S. Air Force was directing murderous attacks against the civilian society of northern Laos. These reports of terrible destruction were repeatedly brought to the attention of the media, but ignored or, more accurately, suppressed. Later described as "secret bombings" in an "executive war," the U.S. attack was indeed "secret," not simply because of government duplicity as charged but because of press complicity. Not omy did the media fail to publish the information about the attack against a defenseless civilian society or seek to investigate further for themselves, but they proceeded to provide exculpatory accounts that they knew to be inaccurate, on the rare occasions when the bombing was mentioned at all. As the bombing of Laos began to be reported in 1969, the claim was that it was targeted against North Vietnamese infiltration routes to South Vietnam (the "Ho Chi Minh trail"), and, later, that U.S. planes were providing tactical support to government forces fighting North Vietnamese aggressors, a far cry from what Decornoy had witnessed and reported, and a much more tolerable version of the unacceptable facts. S Keeping just to the New York Times, through 1968 there was no mention of the bombing apart from tiny items reporting Pathet Lao complaints (Dec. 22, 31, 1968). On May 18, 1969, the Times reported U.S. bombing in Laos, alleging that it was "directed against routes, including the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, over which the North Vietnamese send men and supplies to infiltrate South Vietnam." A June 14 report states that "American planes bomb targets all over Laos, especially along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to harass the Pathet Lao, the Communist-led rebel movement in Laos, and to stop tbe flow of enemy supplies to South Vietnam." Charles Mohr reported on July 16 that U.S. bombing "is directed against infiltration routes from North Vietnam that pass through Laos en route to the South." There is a July 28 reference to "200 American bombing sorties a day over northeastern Laos," directed against North Vietnamese forces, and Hedrick Smith adds from Washington on August 2 that the United States "has been bombing North Vietnamese concentrations" in Laos. T. D. Allman repOI1ed bombing sorties "in tactical support" of government forces fighting the North Vietnamese and "harassing attacks against Communist positions all over northeast Laos" on ~llgust 25, the latter providing
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