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Our van is slowly driving along the dirt road, bypassing Ban Khai village, finally stopping in the middle of waste meadow. Enormous craters dot the entire countryside, plains and hills. "We can’t drive any further," says Mr. Van Lorn. "There are bombs buried in the ground and our van could explode on one of them. We have to walk."

He leads me to one of the craters and then back to the van, helping me to climb to the roof for a better view. When I finish taking photographs, he points to the village: "Pick out any house in this town. I will translate for you. There is not one family in this area which did not suffer during the war. Each family lost relatives and had to leave this part of the country."

I ask the driver to stop at a humble looking compound. We enter the courtyard and are greeted by an old man. His name is Mr. Nai Phommar and he is 81 years old. He invites us to his clean and simple house; his children bring "Lao whiskey" and fruits.

"People are dying in this area," explains Mr. Phommar. "We lost 2 people six years ago, but this is just a small village and we are lucky we have had no more casualties since then."

I first feel hesitant to ask him about the war, but the old man is happy to share his memories. "We used to hide by the side of the road, in the ditch. Bombs kept falling and once our entire family was buried and we had to dig ourselves out. People were dying all around us. They used to bomb us with enormous airplanes which flew so high that we couldn’t see or hear them approaching. And they used to send small planes which were looking for people on the ground: those flew so low that we were able to see faces in the cockpits."

"But the carpet bombing was the scariest. There was no warning. Bombs began to explode all around this area and we had no idea where they were coming from. On average, they bombed us 5 times a day. They bombed us almost every day, for more than ten years. Laos had only 2 million people then. And we were later told that the US and its allies dropped 3 million tons of bombs on us."

"Eventually, nobody could survive here, anymore. Our houses were destroyed and our fields were full of unexploded substances. People were dying and so were the animals. We had to leave and so we decided to go to Vietnam, to search for refuge. But the journey was tremendously arduous. We were moving at night, carrying few possessions. During the day we were hiding from the enemy planes."

"During the war I was very angry at Americans. I couldn’t understand how can somebody be so brutal – how can somebody kill fellow human beings in such cold blood. But now my government tells me that everything is ok, that it is past and we should forget. But how can we forget? I don’t feel angry anymore, but I would like the world to know what happened to us."

John Bacher, a Ph.D. in history and a Metro Toronto archivist once wrote about The Secret War in Laos: "More bombs were dropped on Laos between 1965 and 1973 than the US dropped on Japan and Germany during WWII. More than 350 thousand people were killed. The war in Laos was a secret only from the American people and Congress. It anticipated the sordid ties between drug trafficking and repressive regimes that have been seen later in the Noriega affair."

In reality, it is hard to call this twisted campaign of terror "a war". There were hardly any serious strategic merits of indiscriminately bombing one of the poorest countrysides in the world, scarcely inhabited by subsistence farmers and their domestic animals.

In this biggest covert operation in US history, the main goal was to "prevent" pro-Vietnamese forces from gaining control over the area. But the entire operation seemed more like a game, overgrown boys allowed to play, unopposed, their war games, bombing an entire nation into the stone age for more than a decade. The result of that "game" was one of the most brutal genocides in the history of the 20th century.

Some of the most brutal bombing raids were done out of spite, with no planning. When US bombers couldn’t find their targets in Vietnam due to bad weather, they just dumped their load on the Laos countryside, as the airplanes couldn’t land with the bombs on board. After the end of the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, the US military decided to simply use its old bomb arsenal (by dropping it on Laos) accumulated in Southeast Asia, instead of carrying it back home. The value of human lives, of the Lao people, was never taken into consideration.

I ask Mr. Van Lorn to take me to an isolated Hmong village, and after a half hour journey we park in front of the school in ancient and extremely poor Ban Tajock. We walk through traditional houses, followed by the silent stares of local inhabitants. Some of them walk around barefoot. Most of the houses have no electricity. Fences are mainly made out of rusty bombs.

I ask where they got the bombs. After all, the Hmong tribe was supporting the US during the war. Mr. Van Lorn replied laconically: "Do you think they really cared? They were just bombing everything that moved. Bombing was their main obsession."

I ask whether anyone lost his or her life in this village due to unexploded ordnance. "3 children," we were told by the school teacher. "On February 26. They were playing behind their house and found an unexploded bombie. They took it behind their hut and it exploded. All three died on the spot."

We walk towards the area where the tragedy took place. Three girls follow us. They are unwashed, some of them barefoot. Mr Van Lorn asks them whether they knew the boys.

"They were our friends," says Kalia, a 10 year old girl. "We used to play together. They were good friends. Now I am so afraid. We all have to work here, even at our age. Our families don’t have money. The boys found the bomb and they probably tried to take it apart – to open it so it could be sold for scrap. Then it exploded and all three of them died. I cried for two weeks."

I ask her whether she knows how this bomb got here. I asked her whether she ever heard about the war, about the foreign pilots dropping millions of tons of explosives on her country. She listens to my questions translated by Mr. Van Lorn, while drawing long line in the dirt with her little toe. Then she looks at me, confused: "I don’t know," she said. "I never heard about it. The bombs are here. They were always here. I am sorry, I don’t knowÂ…"

Further east, there is Tham Piu Cave, the biggest of the caves penetrated by American missiles. 473 people died there. Most of them are still buried under stones and debris. There is no light inside the cave, except that which comes from the entrance. Mr. Van Lorn insists that we go inside. The cave is one huge mass grave and one of the symbols of the "Secret War".

The Lao government claims that the cave was full of civilians hiding here from the carpet bombing of the area. Others say that there were some pro-Vietnamese fighters inside when the missile struck. I find this dispute absolutely irrelevant and to a large extent insulting.

What does it matter? A foreign country comes to Laos, bombs it to the ground; bombs everybody to the ground, from those it considers its enemies to those it designates as its friends. It penetrates other caves full of civilians. Those boys on a rampage probably saw it as their highest achievement, real bravado to identify the cave and send their missile to finish the hundreds of those they didn’t even consider to be human beings. Would they bomb Tham Piu Cave if it were full of pro-Vietnamese fighters? Definitely! Would they bomb it if they knew there were only women and children hiding inside? No doubt they would, as they bombed other caves and villages full of civilians.

On the way back to Phonsavan we are passing a truck full of rusty bombs. "They will take it to the outskirts and try to open them," says Mr. Van Lorn. "If they are made of aluminum, chances are they will make some decent money. That is, if they survive. Many people die trying to open old bombs. But they are very poor; they have to eat. They will try again and again, risking their lives."

The next day in Phonsavan I meet David Davenport, Technical Field Manager of Mines Advisory Group (MAG). David is a former member of the Australian military, married to a Vietnamese woman, helping to de-mine some of the worst contaminated areas of the world: Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo. I ask him how many people have died since the end of the war in Laos.

 "It’s very hard to give exact figures," explains David. "Estimates are based only on the number of people who reached hospitals, so the numbers which we have say that since the end of the war some 20 thousand people were killed or maimed. Now, as I said to you, in many villages that we go to, if someone dies he is simply buried and it may never get recorded."

"About statistics on ordinance: we say that it’s about 10 tons per sq/kilometer but that’s dealing with the whole country – the whole country was not bombed. This is one of the most contaminated provinces in Laos and Laos is the most heavily bombed country on the face of the planet. During the conflict, Americans could do anything they wanted, because they never declared war on Laos. There were never any defined rules of engagement. That’s why temples were hit, hospitals were hitÂ… And no Geneva Convention would apply, because officially nothing happened here; there was no war in LaosÂ…"

I know what David is referring to. 20 miles away, the ancient capital of the province – Xiengkhouang or Ban Phiawat – had been leveled with the ground. Now only a statue of Buddha is sitting erect in defiance, his body partially burned, surrounded by the ruins of a once magnificent temple. The nearby French Hospital is nothing more than a mountain of rubble. No wonder, the local Xieng Khouang airport used to be, during the conflict, the second busiest in the world, with 13 thousand sorties recorded every month. All these bombs had to fall on something and so they did: on farmers, children, hospitals, rice fields, water buffaloes.

Between what is left of the ancient capital and Phonsavan (the new dusty capital city built by the refugees) is the world famous Plain of Jars, a UNESCO tentative world heritage site. It contains hundreds of mysterious and beautiful ancient jars scattered around green and gently rolling hills. But the entire site is also surrounded by craters and some of the jars are broken, the result of aerial bombardment. Bombs and bombies are scattered all around the site. A large MAG sign welcomes sporadic visitors: "Colored concrete markers at ground level indicate the area that has been cleared."

Those who pay can enter and feel relatively safe. While those outside can still have a taste of what the US stands for, all over the world, so passionately, determinedly and consistently: freedom, democracy, respect for others and justice for all.

ANDRE VLTCHEK: novelist, journalist and filmmaker, co-founder of Mainstay Press, a new publishing house for progressive political fiction (http://www.mainstaypress.org). He can be reached at: andre-wcn@usa.net

I took my translation – "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" – from the indefatigable Professor Juan Cole’s website where it has been for several weeks.

But it seems to be mainly thanks to the Guardian giving it prominence that the New York Times, which was one of the first papers to misquote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came out on Sunday with a defensive piece attempting to justify its reporter’s original "wiped off the map" translation. (By the way, for Farsi speakers the original version is available here.)

Joining the "off the map" crowd is David Aaronovitch, a columnist on the Times (of London), who attacked my analysis yesterday. I won’t waste time on him since his knowledge of Farsi is as minimal as that of his Latin. The poor man thinks the plural of casus belli is casi belli, unaware that casus is fourth declension with the plural casus (long u).

The New York Times’s Ethan Bronner and Nazila Fathi, one of the paper’s Tehran staff, make a more serious case. They consulted several sources in Tehran. "Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran’s most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say ‘wipe off’ or ‘wipe away’ is more accurate than ‘vanish’ because the Persian verb is active and transitive," Bronner writes.

The New York Times goes on: "The second translation issue concerns the word ‘map’. Khomeini’s words were abstract: ‘Sahneh roozgar.’ Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as ‘map’, and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not ‘Sahneh roozgar’ but ‘Safheh roozgar’, meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word ‘map’ again."

This, in my view, is the crucial point and I’m glad the NYT accepts that the word "map" was not used by Ahmadinejad. (By the way, the Wikipedia entry on the controversy gets the NYT wrong, claiming falsely that Ethan Bronner "concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map".)

If the Iranian president made a mistake and used "safheh" rather than "sahneh", that is of little moment. A native English speaker could equally confuse "stage of history" with "page of history". The significant issue is that both phrases refer to time rather than place. As I wrote in my original post, the Iranian president was expressing a vague wish for the future. He was not threatening an Iranian-initiated war to remove Israeli control over Jerusalem.

Two other well-established translation sources confirm that Ahmadinejad was referring to time, not place. The version of the October 26 2005 speech put out by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based on the Farsi text released by the official Iranian Students News Agency, says: "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history." (NB: not "wiped". I accept that "eliminated" is almost the same, indeed some might argue it is more sinister than "wiped", though it is a bit more of a mouthful if you are trying to find four catchy and easily memorable words with which to incite anger against Iran.)

MEMRI (its text of the speech is available here) is headed by a former Isareli military intelligence officer and has sometimes been attacked for alleged distortion of Farsi and Arabic quotations for the benefit of Israeli foreign policy. On this occasion they supported the doveish view of what Ahmadinejad said.

Finally we come to the BBC monitoring service which every day puts out hundreds of highly respected English translations of broadcasts from all round the globe to their subscribers – mainly governments, intelligence services, thinktanks and other specialists. I approached them this week about the controversy and a spokesperson for the monitoring service’s marketing unit, who did not want his name used, told me their original version of the Ahmadinejad quote was "eliminated from the map of the world".

As a result of my inquiry and the controversy generated, they had gone back to the native Farsi-speakers who had translated the speech from a voice recording made available by Iranian TV on October 29 2005. Here is what the spokesman told me about the "off the map" section: "The monitor has checked again. It’s a difficult expression to translate. They’re under time pressure to produce a translation quickly and they were searching for the right phrase. With more time to reflect they would say the translation should be "eliminated from the page of history".

Would the BBC put out a correction, given that the issue had become so controversial, I asked. "It would be a long time after the original version", came the reply. I interpret that as "probably not", but let’s see.

Finally, I approached Iradj Bagherzade, the Iranian-born founder and chairman of the renowned publishing house, IB Tauris. He thought hard about the word "roozgar". "History" was not the right word, he said, but he could not decide between several better alternatives "this day and age", "these times", "our times", "time".

So there we have it. Starting with Juan Cole, and going via the New York Times’ experts through MEMRI to the BBC’s monitors, the consensus is that Ahmadinejad did not talk about any maps. He was, as I insisted in my original piece, offering a vague wish for the future.

A very last point. The fact that he compared his desired option – the elimination of "the regime occupying Jerusalem" – with the fall of the Shah’s regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel. As a schoolboy opponent of the Shah in the 1970’s he surely did not favour Iran’s removal from the page of time. He just wanted the Shah out.

The same with regard to Israel. The Iranian president is undeniably an opponent of Zionism or, if you prefer the phrase, the Zionist regime. But so are substantial numbers of Israeli citizens, Jews as well as Arabs. The anti-Zionist and non-Zionist traditions in Israel are not insignificant. So we should not demonise Ahmadinejad on those grounds alone.

Does this quibbling over phrases matter? Yes, of course. Within days of the Ahmadinejad speech the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was calling for Iran to be expelled from the United Nations. Other foreign leaders have quoted the map phrase. The United States is piling pressure on its allies to be tough with Iran.

Let me give the last word to Juan Cole, with whom I began. "I am entirely aware that Ahmadinejad is hostile to Israel. The question is whether his intentions and capabilities would lead to a military attack, and whether therefore pre-emptive warfare is prescribed. I am saying no, and the boring philology is part of the reason for the no."

Unless Avastin is approved in the UK by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) it will not be universally available within the NHS. But because Genentech declines to apply for a licence for this use of Avastin, Nice cannot consider it. In spite of the growing drugs bill of the NHS, it will appraise, and probably approve, Lucentis next year.

Although Nice’s role is to look at cost-effectiveness, it says it cannot appraise a drug and pass it for use in the NHS unless the drug is referred to it by the Department of Health. The department says its hands are tied.

"The drug company hasn’t applied for it to be licensed for this use. It wouldn’t be referred to Nice until they have made the first move," said a Department of Health spokeswoman. "They need to step up and get a licence. If they are not getting it licensed, why aren’t they?"

New drugs for the condition are badly needed: those we have now only slow the progression to blindness. With Avastin, many patients get their sight back with just one or two injections.

Avastin was first used on human eyes by Philip Rosenfeld, an ophthalmologist in the US, who was aware of animal studies carried out by Genentech that showed potential in eye conditions. This unlicensed use of Avastin has spread across continents entirely by word of mouth from one doctor to another. It has now been injected into 7,000 eyes, with considerable success.

Professor Rosenfeld has published his results and a website has been launched in the US to collate the experiences of doctors from around the world. But although the evidence is good, regulators require randomised controlled trials before they grant licences, which generally only the drug companies can afford to carry out.

Prof Rosenfeld said the real issue was drug company profits. "This truly is a wonder drug," he said. "This shows both how good they [the drug companies] are and on the flip side, how greedy they are." He would like to see governments fund clinical trials of drugs such as Avastin in the public interest.

Rising drug bills are a big problem on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, said David Wong, chairman of the scientific committee of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, doctors are fighting battles to persuade primary care trusts to pay for drugs to stop their patients going blind while they wait for Nice to decide on Lucentis and another expensive drug called Macugen. That decision is not expected before the end of next year.

About 20,000 people are diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration in the UK each year. "From the patient’s point of view, if they have an eye condition that deteriorates very quickly, there is no question of waiting," said Professor Wong. "We’re talking about days and weeks, rather than months. The question is should we do nothing and say there is no randomised controlled trial to prove Avastin is of value?" He called for primary care trusts to agree to pay for the planned phasing-in of new drugs for the condition.

Last night Genentech said its main concern over the use of Avastin to treat eye conditions was patient safety. "While there are some small, single-centre, uncontrolled studies of Avastin being performed, safety data on patients who are treated with Avastin off-label is not being collected in a standard or organised fashion," said a spokeswoman for the company.

Pharmaceutical firms say they need to launch drugs at high prices because of the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on developing them. Critics point out that the company’s calculations also include the marketing budget.

http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=15095

The government has hired defense subcontractor Lockheed Martin to design and develop an enormous blimp that will be used to spy on Americans, according to the Athens News. Government agencies such as the NSA are anticipating that as early as 2009 the blimp will be operational and begin supporting new ways of monitoring everything that happens in the country.

A prototype of the blimp is already being developed at a cost of $40 million. The spy ship, called the High Altitude Airship, will be seventeen times larger than the Goodyear Blimp and hover 12 miles above the ground. Although it is very large it will be invisible to both the naked eye and ground radar because of its distance from the earth. Fuel economic and self sufficient, it will be powered by solar energy and will be able to fly for years at a time.

The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command has already conducted a study to determine some of the uses of the spy ship. It has the capability of monitoring an area 600 miles in diameter at a time with surveillance equipment, such as high-resolution cameras. The government has ordered 11 of them – enough to monitor every parcel of land in the U.S.

  Jackson, who is likely sleeping in his own bed, urged patience for the thousands who have been displaced since August of 2005: "Rebuilding and revitalizing public housing isn’t something that will be done overnight."

Patience is in short supply in New Orleans as over 200,000 people remain displaced. "I just need somewhere to stay," Patricia Thomas told the Times-Picayune. Ms. Thomas has lived in public housing for years. "We’re losing our older people. They’re dropping like flies when they hear they can’t come home."

Demolition of public housing in New Orleans is not a new idea. When Katrina displaced New Orleans public housing residents, the Wall Street Journal reported U.S. Congressman Richard Baker, a 10 term Republican from Baton Rouge, telling lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did."

This demolition plan continues HUD’s efforts to get out of the housing business. In 1996, New Orleans had 13,694 units of conventional public housing. Before Katrina, New Orleans was down to half that, 7,379 units of conventional public housing. If they are allowed to accelerate the demolition, public housing in New Orleans will have been reduced by 85% in the past decade.

The federal demolition of housing in New Orleans continues a nation-wide trend that has led some critics to suggest changing HUD’s official name to the Department of Demolition of Public Housing.

Much of the public housing demolition nationally comes through of a federal program titled "Hope VI" – a cruelly misnamed program that destroys low income housing in the name of creating "mixed income housing."

Who can be against tearing down old public housing and replacing it with mixed income housing? Sounds like everyone should benefit doesn’t it? Unfortunately that is not the case at all. Almost all the poor people involved are not in the mix.

New Orleans has already experienced the tragic effects of HOPE VI. The St. Thomas Housing Development in the Irish Channel area of New Orleans was home to 1600 apartments of public housing. After St. Thomas was demolished under Hope VI, the area was called River Gardens. River Gardens is a mixed income community – home now to 60 low income families, some middle income apartments, a planned high income tower, and a tax-subsidized Wal-Mart! Our tax dollars at work – destroying not only low-income housing but neighborhood small businesses as well.

Worse yet, after Katrina, the 60 low-income families in River Gardens were not even allowed back into their apartments. They were told their apartments were needed for employees of the housing authority. It took the filing of a federal complaint by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center to get the families back into their apartments.

As James Perry, Director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center says about the planned demolition of public housing, "If the model is River Gardens, it has failed miserably." Despite HUD’s promise to demolish homes, the right of people to return to New Orleans is slowly being recognized as a human rights issue. According to international law, the victims of Katrina are "internally displaced persons" because they were displaced within their own country as a result of natural disaster. Principle 28 of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement requires that the U.S. government recognize the human right of displaced people to return home. The US must "allow internally displaced persons to return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes or places of habitual residence. Such authorities shall facilitate the reintegration of returned or resettled internally displaced persons. Special efforts should be made to ensure the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration." The US Human Rights Network and other human rights advocates are educating people of the Gulf Coast and the nation about how to advocate for human rights. HUD has effectively told the people of New Orleans to go find housing for themselves. New Orleans already has many, many people, including families, living in abandoned houses – houses without electricity or running water. New Orleans has recently been plagued with an increase in the number of fires. HUD’s actions will put more families into these abandoned houses. Families in houses with no electricity or water should be a national disgrace in the richest nation in the history of the world. But for HUD and others with political and economic power this is apparently not the case.

As in the face of any injustice, there is resistance.

NAACP civil rights attorney Tracie Washington promised a legal challenge and told HUD, "You cannot go forward and we will not allow you to go forward."

Most importantly, displaced residents of public housing and their allies have set up a tent city survivors village outside the fenced off 1300 empty apartments on St. Bernard Avenue in New Orleans.

If the authorities do not open up the apartments by July 4, they pledge to go through the fences and liberate their homes directly. The group, the United Front for Affordable Housing, is committed to resisting HUD’s efforts to bulldoze their apartments "by any means necessary."

If the government told you that they were going to bulldoze where you live, and deny you the right to return to your home, would you join them?

For more information about the July 4 protest by the United Front for Affordable Housing, call Endesha Juakali at 504.239.2907, Elizabeth Cook 504.319.3564, or Ishmael Muhammad at 504.872.9521. If you know someone who is a displaced New Orleans public housing resident and they want to join in a challenge to HUD’s actions, they can get more information at www.justiceforneworleans.org ; For more information on the human rights campaigns for Katrina victims, see the US Human Rights Network at www.ushrnetwork.org or the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, www.nesri.org.]

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans School of Law. You can reach him at Quigley@loyno.edu