Laos

The Lao government in 2015 continued to pursue an economic opening while tightening its control over political space. Although the country has achieved high growth rates overall, inequality is growing sharply as well, fueling public discontent. The authorities appeared increasingly attentive to criticism on social media during the year. Officials detained citizens for contentious posts and seemed concerned about the country's image ahead of its 2016 chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Since the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, the CIA has engaged in similar disguised assaults on the governments of Guatemala (1954); the Congo (1960); Cuba (1961); Brazil (1964); Indonesia (1965); Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (1961-73); Greece (1967); Chile (1973); Afghanistan (1979 to the present); El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua (1980s); and Iraq (1991 to the present)—to name only the most obvious cases. [emphasis added]

[Consider] what's happening today in Laos, in southeast Asia. The U.S. military bombed Laos from 1964 to 1973, during its war on Vietnam, to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh trail ... which ran through Laos and Cambodia. According to the website Legacies of War, "the U.S. dropped over 2 million tons of ordnance over Laos in 580,000 bombing missions, the equivalent of one planeload every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years." That would have been bad enough, but the U.S. government dropped cluster bombs, which are made up of many so-called bomblets, about 30 percent of which did not explode immediately ...