Chomsky Attacks U. S. Laotian Policy

The U. S. Government's claim that it is bombing only military targets in northern Laos is "an outright, cynical lie," Noam Chomsky, professor of Linguistics at M. I. T., charged yesterday afternoon.

Speaking to an overflow audience in Lowell Lecture Hall, Chomsky, recently returned from a visit to Laos and North Vietnam, said that the United States was trying to control Laos through the destruction and systematic demoralization of the population.

He pointed out that U. S. bombing of northern Laos-the region controlled by the Pathet Lao, the Laotian national liberation front-has escalated sharply since the limitation of air strikes on North Vietnam. "The bombers merely shifted their targets to northern Laos," he said.

Driven Underground

He said that indiscriminate U. S. bombing is driving the people into underground caves and tunnels or into refugee camps and urban slums. "The Pathet Lao is too strong to be defeat-ed any other way than by destroying the morale of the people," he said.

He predicted that this strategy "may be an important model for future U. S. involvement in Indochina." Because of recent widespread criticism of the use of American troops in Cambodia, he said, the United States will probably use the same technique of stepped-up bombings of civilian targets there to demoralize that population.

Chomsky also charged that most of the information reaching the American public from Laos is under the strict control of the American embassy in Vientiane, the capital of the country, and that most of it is inaccurate.

Before Chomsky's speech, the Peace Action Strike Committee circulated a petition calling for a nation-wide protest of the killing of 6 blacks in Augusta, Georgia, on May 11. The Committee will send the petition to newspapers across the country.