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marked black from the inundation"-"the careless policies of the White House" criticized by William Shawcross. 59 At just this time, Khmer Rouge programs became extremely harsh, so available studies indicate, including a refugee study by Kenneth Quinn, of the National Security Council staff, who never considers a possible causal connection, however, between the harshening of policy and the sharp increase in the program of saturation bombing. Timothy Carney, the second of the three major U.S. government specialists on Cambodia (Quinn, Carney, Charles Twining), also notes that "sometime in 1973 the party apparently decided to accelerate its program to alter Khmer society," for no suggested reason. 60
6.2.5. Phase I
in the media
During this period, there was extensive media coverage of Cambodia, and there was no dearth of evidence on what was taking place in the regions subjected to U.S. Air Force atrocities. It was not necessary to undertake a difficult expedition to the Thai-Cambodia border to find refugees who would tell what they knew, but the victims of phase I of "the decade of the genocide" who were huddled in the slums of Phnom Penh or other towns and villages to which they fled were of no more interest than those in the miserable camps on the outskirts of Vientiane-unless they had tales of terror by the Cambodian insurgents to recount (the Vietnamese long having faded into the background).6I No books or articles were written by Father Ponchaud, who lived among the peasants and sympathized deeply with their plight, so he informed us when the time came to expose atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. The same was true of many others who were later to expre~' their heartfelt concerns for Cambodians suffering under Khmer Rouge terror, but who did not seek to investigate and publicize the plight of the rural population during phase I of the genocide, when such efforts might have had a crucial impact on the policies that were destroying Cambodia, a fact that might merit some thought. The standard U.S. media picture of phase I is something like this. "Umil the turning point in 1973, ... on the surface, Cambodians smiled and were full of pleasantries,"62 but afterwards the mood of "Cambodians" became one of "apathy" and "resignation" because "impoverished farmers, refugees and soldiers" (most of whom were press-ganged into service from among the poor and refugee communities) felt that their "leaders seem powerless to defend them against human and natural adversities."63 There is a "spirit of doom" as the government is "teeter-
