This is just false. The main piece of evidence -- the death figures published by La Couture -- which was being widely cited, had to be retracted after Chomsky fact-checked it. The author himself said in the retraction something to the effect of "it doesn't matter what the numbers are".
As for "Gentle Land" he supports his claim that "[their] scholarship collapses under the barest scrutiny". He writes: "To cite a few cases, they state that among those evacuated from Phnom Penh, “virtually everybody saw the consequences of [summary executions] in the form of the corpses of men, women and children rapidly bloating and rotting in the hot sun,” citing, among others, J.J. Cazaux, who wrote, in fact, that “not a single corpse was seen along our evacuation route,” and that early reports of massacres proved fallacious (The Washington Post, May 9, 1975). They also cite The New York Times, May 9, 1975, where Sydney Shanberg wrote that “there have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials … But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners,” and that “Here and there were bodies, but it was difficult to tell if they were people who had succumbed to the hardships of the march or simply civilians and soldiers killed in the last battles.” They do not mention the Swedish journalist, Olle Tolgraven, or Richard Boyle of Pacific News Service, the last newsman to leave Cambodia, who denied the existence of wholesale executions; nor do they cite the testimony of Father Jacques Engelmann, a priest with nearly two decades of experience in Cambodia, who was evacuated at the same time and reported that evacuated priests “were not witness to any cruelties” and that there were deaths, but “not thousands, as certain newspapers have written” (cited by Hildebrand and Porter)."
Elsewhere he cites official CIA figures which also did not support the claim.
But none of this was even the point of his article, he explicitly writes "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments". The point is that the evidence is distorted to smear enemies and make ourselves look good. He writes in the penultimate paragraph:
"What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role, like the Hildebrand and Porter volume, is ignored, not on the basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable."
That is the simple message that Chomsky has been conveying his entire political life and, as exemplified by current events, people continue to ignore it.
