All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Suja Paul.
He is the director of this new documentary, forthcoming documentary called Waiting to Explode about the still thousands, hundreds of thousands, I don't know how many, undetonated cluster bomb units and other bombs in the country of Laos, 50 years after Richard Nixon's secret war there that still detonate and kill civilians all the time.
And I think it's been maybe 15 years or more since someone did a good documentary about this.
So this is really important.
I know you guys are really going to like it.
It's called Waiting to Explode.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Suja?
Thank you so much.
Yeah, I'm doing great.
And I appreciate, you know, nobody, a lot of people don't know about this, what's happening in Laos.
Actually, I didn't know about it when before I met my producer one time and he talked about it.
I was astonished.
I was shocked, like, you know, something like this would happen.
And so I took on the challenge and traveled to Laos and shot this documentary.
Yeah, that's really something else.
So first of all, business, when does the movie come out and how can people see it?
The movie is almost done.
It's basically we are doing the sound and color correction right now.
It will be done in a month or two and we will be we are talking to distributors, networks to be able to, you know, broadcast it.
So we don't have a channel yet, but we'll definitely have something soon.
OK, great.
You know, make sure that our mutual friend Noah there keeps me informed about any updates there.
And we'll make sure to advertise the movie and let people know where they can see it when they can.
I got to see an early draft of the thing the other day.
And it's really incredible.
It's so important.
And I wonder, I guess, first of all, can you tell us how many people in Laos are killed and or maimed by these so-called duds, these so far dud bombs that are laying in the mud in the ground?
They're waiting for them.
There are about 20,000 people who have been killed after the war so far, like and so many have been injured.
Kids losing their eyes, people losing their legs, farmers losing their arms.
So many are disabled because of these bombs.
But 20,000 are dead so far after the war.
So it's just unbelievable what's happening with these guys.
Well, just quickly, you know, rough math dividing by 50, that's 400 people per year.
Yeah.
Still maimed and or killed by these things, I guess.
So part of it.
Right.
As we're talking about, it's jungle territory.
Is that is it just lousy manufacture of the bombs or it's that the bombs land on such soft ground that their fuses fail to detonate.
Right.
They just get buried in this wet mud.
And just then 50 years later, some poor kid with a, you know, trying to plant some seeds or something steps on it and off it goes.
Huh?
Yeah.
These are cluster bombs.
They're in a big container when they are dropped from the plane and it opens up and they scatter all over.
So the difference between these and mines that, you know, usually in Africa and other countries they have mines is that you don't know where they are.
Once they drop from the plane, they scatter all over.
You have no idea where they are.
So 50 years from now and a lot of them, 40 percent of them did not detonate because they fall on the soft landing or they don't detonate easily.
So they have been 40 percent are still embedded in trees, in farms, in schools.
So the story in Waiting to Explode is about this kid.
He was 18 months old when he was playing in his backyard and the bomb exploded.
And he basically, he was almost dead.
His face was completely disfigured.
And there was no provision in small country Laos for him to get operated.
So they had to drive him with all that pain to Laos, to Bangkok, to a hospital where they treated him.
And they saved his life, but they could not save his eyesight.
So this this kid is now in a blind school and he's doing so well.
He's just a hero in our movie.
And so many people love him.
He's an incredible person and he he will never be able to see, unfortunately.
Yeah.
Well, you know, go ahead, tell us some more stories, because you do feature some some more stories besides that boy.
And his story is extremely compelling.
But, you know, statistics, as Stalin said, you know, one death, a tragedy, a million is just a number on a page somewhere.
Right.
So, you know, help bring this home.
These are just individual human beings, just like anybody else.
They just happen to be from there and they go outside and walk around.
You show the mom the despair of the mom talking about how badly she regrets letting her boy go outside to play.
I mean, this is just it's sickening.
Exactly.
We were when we went to that village, we were not scheduled to interview that brother and sister.
Both their kids have been killed.
So that that woman was so she didn't want to talk at all on camera.
She just didn't want to talk about it.
So the guy who was doing our, you know, translation for us, I told him, tell her, just we just want to know about that kid.
Like, how was he?
We don't want to know anything else.
That's when she started.
I started talking about how he was.
She opened up and she basically started crying and we didn't film that.
And then she didn't want that to be filmed.
And then she said, OK, I'm ready to talk about it.
So it's brother and sister.
Both kids lost their kids.
They both died in this 50 years after the Vietnam War, something that exploded.
And then we have a farmer who lost both his legs.
His dad explains how they were farming and suddenly it exploded and he lost both his legs and he was suicidal.
He had lost all the hope until someone, you know, a nonprofit company did some, which you will see in the documentary what happens.
But it's an incredible story of all the people who have gone through this and and their, you know, how how they adapt to this life and how they're not bitter about it.
They're not they're not saying bad things about America who dropped bombs on them.
They're just saying, what did we do?
Why?
Why were we bombed?
What did we do?
And they had nothing to do with Vietnam War.
It's a neighboring country.
It's like we're having a war with, say, Iraq and we're dropping bombs on Kuwait or something.
Just just like that.
That's that's exactly what happened to Laos in Vietnam War.
And it was a secret war.
There's a character in our in our movie.
His name is Fred Banfman.
He is the guy who exposed the secret war.
Right.
Is and was an amazing person.
He died a few years ago.
He used to he lived in he lived in Hungary.
And he when he came back, he was so fed up with the American politics, the war politics.
He moved to Hungary.
He said, I don't want to live here.
He was getting Social Security from U.S., but he was living in Hungary.
And he used to come to U.S. once a year.
And he used to stay in his friend's place in Santa Barbara.
So that's where we got a hold of him.
I went with my producer and we interviewed just an amazing person, like such a great human being.
He has done so much for this, exposing this.
And if you see in the video in our documentary, there's a clip of him being asked in the Senate, in the Congress.
He's giving the testimony about what's going on.
So he is the one who told the whole Congress what's going on in Laos.
He lived there for a long time.
He went as a young journalist to write something, and then he saw what was actually going on.
So his story is very compelling, too.
Yeah.
And everybody, that's Fred Bronfman.
And you can find him in my archives, too, at ScottHorton.org.
I spoke with him in the past, luckily, before he died.
And I'm so glad that you got a chance to interview him, too, and feature him in the documentary.
It's so important because you're right, he is the one who exposed this to the media in the West when it was, you know, highly classified secret war, just like, you know, same story in Cambodia, too, of course.
And okay, well, I just wanted to give you a chance also to emphasize what desperately poor people these are, right?
These are just subsistence farmers with dirt floors.
You know, these are just peasants who not only did they have nothing to do with the war other than be on the receiving end of it, they don't have any ability to protect themselves from this.
They have no capital to invest in some, I don't know, I guess we'll get to this later, but they have drones that can go around and find these things and detonate them.
These people have no ability to do anything about it.
And then when they're wounded, I mean, I'm sure a lot of times they just bleed out, right?
They don't even have sophisticated hospitals to protect people when they get their legs blown off from just dying on the spot and all the rest of these kinds of things.
It's not like as bad as this would be if it was happening in Austin, Texas.
At least we've got first world hospitals and et cetera like that, right, where these people just have nothing.
They're living off rice that they plant.
Exactly, exactly.
So if you see, they have this organization that goes every morning and they kind of have certain areas that they send their team to detect these bombs.
And we went and we visited that.
These are like almost like 90% female team going with just basic metal detectors.
And they're putting their lives at risk detecting the bombs and then cleaning those areas and then saying, okay, this area is clean.
The way they are doing, it's going to take 2000 years to clear louse of these bombs the way they are doing it right now.
And so each person who is doing this has had some history in the past.
We have interviewed them and they're talking about how the director of this program, he lost his mother and his brother in this explosion.
That's why he got, you know, he wanted to do this.
So they have those stories, how they are connected with cleaning, they call bombies in louse.
So it's just so tragic how they have, you know, suffered so much.
It's just unbelievable.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
So you're constantly buying things from amazon.com.
Well, that makes sense.
They bring it right to your house.
So what you do though, is click through from the link in the right hand margin at scotthorton.org and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Won't cost you a thing.
Nice little way to help support the show.
Again, that's right there in the margin at scotthorton.org.
Hey, you want to know what industry is recession proof?
Yes, you're right.
Of course, pot.
Scott Horton here to tell you about green mill supercritical extractors, the SFE pro and super producing parallel pro can be calibrated to produce all different types and qualities of cannabis crude oils for all different purposes.
These extractors are the most important part of your cannabis oil business for precision, versatility and efficiency.
Green mill supercritical.com.
Hey y'all, Scott here to tell you about Zippix toothpicks.
They're full of nicotine is the thing about it.
Personally, I miss the stuff terribly and I'm really looking forward to getting back on it.
They'd be perfect for smokers and vapors who can't afford to stop working and go outside for a break all the time or for those traveling in planes, trains and buses and ferries and such.
It's the most affordable way to get your nicotine on the market and they taste great and come in all different flavors.
Use promo code Scott Horton and get 10% off Zippix toothpicks at zippixtoothpicks.com.
And now, you know, I've seen a documentary about this.
I don't remember what it was anymore where they showed these highly advanced drones that can go around with, you know, metal detectors and that then when they find, you know, suspected bombs or what they think are bombs with their scanners and what have you, you know, instruments, they place a tiny little shape charge on top and then fly away and then detonate the shape charge and blow up the bomb, which is obviously a lot safer than sending some poor woman with a shovel to go and try to find and a metal detector to try to find these things and diffuse them or something.
And so, you know, as horrible as the situation this is, it seems like that is the most obvious reasonable response to it and where these things can, you know, assuming that they're well maintained and controlled and whatever, they can destroy, I don't know the number, but x many of these things an hour to reduce your timetable of 20,000 years to something a bit more reasonable.
These people can have their lives back.
But it seems like what it would take would be to take, you know, the money that our government is trying to spend developing new long range bombers and instead put all of that money into fleets and fleets and fleets of swarms of drones to go around and find these undetonated bombs and then to go ahead and detonate them and clean up the mess.
This is what our army and Marine Corps should be busy doing right now instead of killing people in Iraq and Syria and Yemen and Somalia and Afghanistan and Libya and Niger and Mali.
Absolutely.
I mean, though, the guys who are doing it, they don't have this technology available.
Laos loves cleaning people.
They don't have it.
So definitely we are responsible.
We have done this.
America has done this to this country and we should be doing this.
That should be our priority rather than like, like Scott, like you were saying, rather than bombing like, you know, now providing bombs to Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen and all that.
Indirectly, we are bombing Yemen and Syria and everywhere else.
Like, I read your book, Scott.
It's just amazing.
It's so true.
Like, I have traveled.
I have traveled around the world.
I've traveled to over 25 countries.
I've spent time in Middle East.
Your book is the truest, you know, depiction of what's going on in Middle East that I have ever read.
The new one?
Yeah.
The Enough Already book that you wrote.
The truest depiction of what's happening in Middle East, what America is doing in Middle East.
Great.
Well, thank you very much for that.
That means a lot to me.
Yeah.
I'm really like, I read it yesterday and it's it's really shockingly true.
And nobody has dared to tell the truth that you have told in your book.
I mean, there have been bits and pieces told here and there, but you have put it all this together and shown what's going on, why we have these enemies.
It's always like, oh, Islam and all that.
But you you are telling the true reason why we have these people who want to want to hurt us, want to kill us.
And what America is doing in the Middle East and has been doing for years and years.
You know, I didn't know.
I didn't know about Carter like I used to like Carter before I read your book.
But I now I know that he just continued.
He did the same thing like Obama continued the war like we were hoping that Obama is going to change this world.
And, you know, he continued, he escalated actually a drone war.
And now I see that Carter did the same thing in his era.
So I don't see any government, any political head that that has really worked towards peace and global peace.
It's always been just trying to dominate the world.
And I love that about your book.
You have clearly shown that you have proven that what's been going on is so like we are the bullies of the world.
That's that's what your book shows.
And I truly, truly know that that's true.
Thank you so much for saying that.
I really do appreciate that.
And I think that it should be easy now.
Come on, it's 2021.
It's a whole how many eras ago was Vietnam?
How hard can it be for people to say, hey, Richard Nixon wasn't the best leader, OK?
He made some bad decisions like blanketing this poor country with cluster bomb units that have yet to go off.
And so we have to do something about that.
That's not an apology tour.
That's not effeminate.
That's not selling out America.
That's just doing the right thing for these poor people.
And anyone, any place on the political spectrum ought to be able to agree with that.
Who still sticks up for Richard Nixon, right?
We can all agree that sometimes things he did didn't work out great.
OK, fine.
Right.
That's not too hard.
And we ought to be able to find that consensus and make these kinds of priorities because, well, I don't know.
I know young children.
Anybody in the audience know young children?
Now imagine them being maimed by a cluster bomb unit and losing their eyes, losing their hands, losing their legs.
Somebody that you know.
It's the same difference.
And you got to ask, what are we doing?
What is this society that that our priorities are that that your documentary is so special because it's one of two or three that have ever been made on this subject in 50 years.
Suja.
Right, exactly.
So the kid, the kid who lost his eyesight, we took like a break from filming and we went to this mall.
It's like it's almost like an American mall.
They have the food court and he was sitting there.
I wanted to do something for him.
I went in one store and found this small harmonica in a box.
I bought this and I went to him and I handed it to him.
He has never touched harmonica ever.
He just opened it, took out the harmonica and started playing it.
That's the last scene you see in the documentary.
That was incredible.
We were all shocked.
That's so that's that's how sweet and how.
You know, intelligent this kid is, he had everything for him going, but just destroyed him.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
He'll never be able to see again.
Yeah, you know what?
Let me ask you about what you said earlier about how these people aren't mad.
They have a very kind of why me attitude, but apparently no vengeance.
Is that just the Buddhism talking or what is it?
I think it's it's it's more cultural.
I mean, religion, religion, every religion has an aspect where, you know, there is softness, there's kindness and all that.
You know, of course, we exploit religion and then we just take some part of it and exploit that.
But it's more cultural.
They are so warm and so nice people.
You go to their house, every house I get, they force us to eat.
Just incredible people.
They love people.
There's no hatred.
They don't hate us.
They don't hate Americans.
They just want this to stop.
They just want help.
And we've not been helping.
We have not been doing anything to them.
I mean, we've been providing some few million dollars, and that probably goes to the you know, where it goes in those countries.
We need to go and step up and clean up this mess that we created.
Yeah.
And now so what about non-governmental organizations of different descriptions, even, you know, European ones or whoever that don't necessarily have anything to do with America?
They are doing some work there, or it really is just the survivors of the wounded and dead who go ahead and dedicate themselves to getting out there with shovels and and doing this all by themselves.
No, there are a lot of non-profit companies who are doing this.
NGOs doing that.
There's a there's a company from UK who's providing limbs and support for the victims, like whatever happened.
They provide legs.
They're providing limbs, you know, artificial limbs and all that, like Coke.
There is a little bit of that we show in the documentary.
There is like my producer has a non-profit company that that's helping out.
So you will see that in the documentary, what they did for these victims.
So there are non-profit companies, but but it's not enough.
We don't have enough non-profit companies and NGOs involved in Laos.
We have some like what the lady who found this kid, she has a non-profit company.
Her name is Barbara.
So you will see all that in the documentary.
So, yes, there are like we have the most horrible people in this world, like our presidents who was screwed up the whole world.
And we have most amazing people in the world also.
So there's a spectrum.
There's extreme spectrum.
Like my producer is doing everything possible that he can do to to help Laotian.
And the same thing.
There are so many non-profit companies, American people like who are helping.
So I'm glad, but they don't have the resources.
They're not like Bill Gates who can pump in like, you know, a billion dollars and clean up the bombings.
These are like people who are working people like my producer is a judge, a retired judge from California.
And he's doing a lot for the country.
But there's only so much he can do like that.
Other people are also very restricted in terms of how much money they have, like the documentary we shot.
We didn't have a big budget or anything.
It was just me and my producer.
We went together, two of us, and we had a local guy who was helping us with carrying a tripod and all that.
So the whole audio, the recording, the video, everything I did and my producer was just, you know, there to help me whatever I needed help from him.
So we didn't have a big budget like Netflix behind us or Amazon or anything to shoot this documentary.
It's a low budget, two person documentary.
Basically what we did.
And now from all the people you talk to, is it, I mean, I assume it's got to be the exact same situation in Vietnam and Cambodia as well, right?
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think Laos has been most affected because Vietnam, they basically knew that where the bombs were going, they're a little more, they have a little more sophistication than Laos.
Laos is really a very, very poor farmer country who have no resources.
They don't have any resources.
It's not a tourist spot.
It's not, it doesn't have anything to attract investment.
So they are the biggest victims of Vietnam War, actually.
Long term.
Yeah.
In fact, yeah.
And now you show the plane of jars there.
Is that your own footage that you got?
Can you explain to us what is the plane of jars and why it was targeted this way?
Yeah.
Plane of jars is like mythical.
They say these are jars of, you know, like big giants or not.
They're different versions of different myths about.
But these, these are like beautiful jars, which are like 10 feet, five feet different, you know, sizes all over one region.
So it's called plane of jars.
It's in it.
So this was like a, basically a historical place.
It could have been an amazing museum.
And they just dropped bombs on that.
And most of them, if you see those jars are broken and there are big, big piles of broken jars around, there's still some.
So it's a historical place that they destroyed.
They just dropped bombs everywhere.
It's not, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't have a target as per se.
Right.
They were just dropping these bombs from cluster bombs from the, and they would just scatter.
One of the places near the plane of jars, if you see is a cave, these low, these love people, they were escaping in the cave.
They created a hospital, a school, everything in this, in this cave.
And they were about more than 300, almost 400 people staying there.
They were taking refuge from these bombs.
And then they found out, I guess the U.S. found out somehow, and they dropped a bomb in the front of the cave and everybody there died completely.
So you will see that scene also in our documentary.
It's, yeah, such a big tragedy.
It's unbelievable.
Yeah.
You know, I'm almost certain that this is in the documentary American Holocaust, where they show footage of congressional testimony of an air force officer being asked, you know, about the continued missions and bombing Laos.
And he explains that they ran out of targets, but they just kept bombing and bombing and bombing.
And the congressman asked him why.
And he says, well, they kept sending me bombs.
So I couldn't just let them pile up on the runway, you know, or in that we didn't have the storage space for them all and they kept sending the bombs.
So we had to keep dropping them.
So he's just flying sorties just to get rid of inventory, essentially killing people.
It's amazing.
I guess, you know, that's what it means to be a bureaucrat, right?
I don't know.
Somebody else told me to do it.
So that's what I thought I was supposed to do.
What difference does it make?
You can't hear him scream from 25,000 feet.
So tell me more about your producer and how he recruited you to do this project, Suja.
So we were in, I think it was a human rights event in L.A.
That's where I met him.
And I had a documentary that I had screened and he came up to me and he said, hey, you know, I really liked it.
And then we started talking about, he started talking about Laos, what he's doing.
And then he told me the story.
I was like shocked.
I'm like, wow, I didn't know about this.
And then he said, would you be interested to work with me?
I said, yeah, sure.
So that's how it started.
It's been, you know, we have taken almost like three, four years in creating this because we edited, first edit, then we kind of screened between us.
We shot more footage.
We got a lot of archival footage now.
And so we've been working on it for a while.
It's been a long project.
You know how documentaries are.
We had hundreds of hours of footage.
And then from those, you have to basically streamline and see what works the best, how to tell the story the best.
So it's quite a journey.
And I'm really pleased with what we have come up with.
Of course, Scott, you got to look at it when you had a chance.
And it still needs some work, but I think we are in good shape.
Great.
Well, I, you know, I really hope that it's a great success and that it gets a real wide viewing and, you know, you guys can find the right venues.
I'm very happy and relieved to say I don't know how difficult it is to make a documentary.
I don't want to know.
I can only begin to imagine.
It's probably even worse than writing a book, which is the worst thing a man can do with his time.
I can promise that.
But no, I really hope it's a great success and I hope that you have people on your team who are, you know, public relations, you know, absolute ninjas who are going to figure out how to get this in front of, you know, or distributed through the right angles where the public is going to know about this and have a chance to see this and let it go viral on whatever channels and all these things as as must be done.
It's just, you know, you mentioned Yemen earlier.
It's the same difference.
You know, this is it's our it's our government's responsibility.
It's our responsibility to make them take responsibility and do the right thing here.
So I think that this must be it is obviously meant to be.
And it almost certainly will be a great contribution to that effort.
I really hope people will take a look at it.
And and I do hope that you will stay in contact with me so that in fact, I'll make sure and have you back when it's really ready to get out there and people can look at it.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much, Scott.
It's just amazing, you know, to get to be able to talk to you.
You know, when I when I told my producer to tell you honestly, I didn't know much about you.
So but when I told my producer, he said, man, I've been listening to him for so many years.
Scott is great.
We have the same thing.
So so he really appreciates what you know, you're talking to us about this documentary.
OK, cool.
Well, that's good.
Tell him I said hi.
That's real nice to hear.
And thank you again very much for your time, everybody.
The documentary is called Waiting to Explode by Suja Paul.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you so much.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com antiwar dot com Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
