Americas Use of Terror in Vietnam The Evil That Was Phoenix by RON JACOBS Phoenix was far worse than the things attributed to it. —Ed Murphy, former member of the Phoenix program. Theres a reason the CIA wanted to prevent the publication of Douglas Valentines 1990 book, The Phoenix Program: Americas Use of Terror in Vietnam. This masterwork is more than an exposé of the US pacification program in Vietnam the book is titled after. It is an indictment of a cynical and bloody plan to kill Vietnamese. In his book The Family Jewels, author John Prado wrote, When a (CIA) Publications Review Board lawyer checked to see whether Phoenix was off-limits ..., he was advised to caution interviewees not to talk to Valentine. Valentine wrote in an email regarding the CIAs attempts to stifle his investigation: There were other form of harassment as well, the kind all investigators of CIA war crimes are subjected to. The midnight calls threatening to kill me or burn my house down. My wife got in the habit of telling the callers to take a number and stand in line. We never took it seriously. Ironically, everything I was doing was legal, and I wasnt trying to hide anything....Many of the threats came from former Navy SEALs, who were angry about my portrayal of them as psychopathic killers on a murder spree. A group of former Phoenix advisors, who did not like characterizing them as war criminals for conducting Gestapo style operations against Vietnamese civilians, were also prone to threats and later, after the book came out, slanders on Amazon and elsewhere. This is the same Swift Boat clan that attacked John Kerrey during his presidential campaign. The midnight calls threatening to kill me or burn my house down. - Valentine [We urge you to see our articles on what the US does to those who speak out: THE DEATH OF GARY WEBB - Is the government sending us a message? and THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF MICHAEL HASTINGS: a repeat of the Gary Webb affair - The governments war on truthtellers.] However, times were slightly different then. Intelligence agencies, while powerful, were not as powerful as they are today, in part because of the popular revulsion at their modus operandi. So, one assumes, the Agency really could not prevent the books publication. It has been out of print until now. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies and a media critic, is now publishing it as the first of his Forbidden Bookshelf series; an endeavor involving reprinting hard-to-find books addressing the realities of the US social-political infrastructures from a critical ... perspective. The Phoenix program was the culmination of a number of counterinsurgency plans undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and a few other related agencies. All of these plans, like Phoenix itself, were designed to infiltrate and destroy the infrastructure of the communist-led Vietnamese insurgency—or as it was known by most US residents—the Viet Cong. Valentine describes in specific detail a bureaucratic machinery of torture and deceit: a single-minded operation designed to sow distrust, uncertainty and death. The first several chapters in the book describe and dissect the agencies, programs and individuals involved in the counterintelligence precursors to the Phoenix Program. It is a tale of inter-agency competition and occasional cooperation, clashing egos in Vietnam and DC and differences of opinion between Vietnamese and US police and government agencies. The latter is perhaps best exemplified by the different meanings attributed to the Phoenix bird symbol. The Vietnamese word for Phoenix is Phuong Hoang, yet the graphic used by the Vietnamese represented hope, while the US symbol was a bird of prey holding missiles in its claws. For those who dont know, Phoenix was a systemic attempt to find and kill Vietnamese fighting against the US and its designs. It did this through terror, torture, intelligence-gathering and the relocation (and murder) of the insurgencys civilian supporters. My rightwing critics like to say that I dont know what I am taking about - OH, BUT I DO! [Please see our article, About S.R. Shearer.] S.R. Shearer Even if one believes the worst of the US military and intelligence agencies in Vietnam, the facts on how Phoenix played out on the ground among the Vietnamese people remains difficult reading. Valentines journalistic just the facts maam approach does not hide anything. Nor is that his intention. By laying out the facts in the manner that Valentine does, the reader finds passages in this book where the recitation of those facts cause great sadness and anger. Perhaps the greatest such example of this occurs in the chapter Valentine calls Modus Vivendi where he summarizes the Vietnamese writer Truong Buu Diems 1968 article in the liberal Catholic Vietnamese newspaper Tin Sang (Morning News). The article, which was titled, The Truth About Phoenix, describes the violent and deadly effects of the program, questions its purpose, and calls it American revenge for Tet. The layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy constructed and maintained in order to facilitate this machine remind the reader of both General Motors and Nazi Germanys Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office.). SS torture that went on behind closed doors at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt just as it goes on today behind closed doors at CIA rendition sites around the world. [Please see our article, REMBERING DACHAU WHILE PONDERING THE FATE OF THE CIAS PRISONERS SCATTERED AROUND THE WORLD.] NOTE: In an article that appeared a few years ago in Counterpunch Magazine Douglas Valentine described how such a Neighborhood Watch Program would work. The article said that the program would most likely be patterned after the infamous Phoenix Program the U.S. ran in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Phoenix was run essentially by a cadre of secret police advised by the CIA and American military intelligence officers. Informants were recruited in every district, village, and hamlet in Vietnam. On the basis of an accusation made by a single anonymous informant, a VC suspect or sympathizer could be arrested and detained indefinitely. They were held until they confessed (often under torture); and then they were sent to Stalinist internal security camps where they were disappeared permanently. To this end, according to Valentine, the government is surreptitiously extending informant nets throughout the country and tying them into local DHS Committees which will be comprised of citizens that the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has deemed politically suitable. Eventually, it is hoped that committees will be set up in every village, town, and city in the country. The job of these committees will be to process reports by concerned citizens (i.e., informants) about the activities of suspected citizens. Perhaps once a week these reports will be forwarded to the DHS Committee at the county level. The country committee will review the reports and send the most urgent ones to the state committee. What makes such a system especially dangerous is that the government has refused to spell out exactly the criteria to be used that will land someone on the suspected citizen list. This is what happened in Vietnam too. There was never any consensus about the definition of a VC sympathizer; at best, it was tacitly understood by the those in charge of the program, and the security forces under their control, that a person was either for us or against us. Moreover, it wasnt enough to be just for us in a passive sense; one had to be actively against them. Heinrich Mueller So the definition of a terrorist suspect is deliberately left open, paving the way for political repression. The anti-terror legislation passed by Congress and signed by Bush allows for secret searches of the homes of people who meet the nebulous criteria of suspected citizen. Heinrich Mueller, chief of Hitlers Gestapo, commenting on the efficacy of this kind of system, said that there is - ... nothing quite as efficient as an internal spy system (i.e., citizens spying on other citizens) for isolating the individual by making it impossible for anybody to trust anybody else. Commenting on all this, Representative Kuchinich of Ohio says: It appears we are being transformed from an information society to an informant society ... Now, stop and think about what this kind of system might mean to you when at last this system visits you in the middle of the night in the guise of an armed SWAT team kicking in your door, throwing stun grenades, and threatening to shoot everything that moves. Ill tell you what will happen! - you will at last begin to find out what Christ meant when He said: ... take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to councils; and in the ... (churches) ye shall be beaten: and ye shall be brought before rulers and kings for my sake ... (Mark 13:9) Morality was not part of the equation. Although some military members assigned to Phoenix objected on moral grounds or because they were expected to violate the Geneva conventions, most of those who opposed their assignment did so on career grounds or because they resented being under CIA command. Valentine ends the body of his text with a look at the US-sponsored warfare and counterinsurgency operations being waged in Central America in the 1980s (when his book was originally published.) If one extrapolates the essence and practices of the Phoenix Program to Washingtons more recent wars—from Afghanistan to Iraq to the so-called Global War on Terror, it becomes clear that Phoenix remains a working template of how the US continues to conduct such operations. [We URGE you to read our article, THE HORROR OF JOHN DIMITRI NEGROPONTE AND EVERYTHING HE REPRESENTS for a horror-filled example of how the US operates in its Central American puppet states.] The Phoenix Program is an alternative history of the US war on the Vietnamese. It is closer to the truth than anything published by the military or intelligence establishment and gives lie to the ongoing efforts by various veteran and government historians to turn the US war into a noble effort—something that it never was. There is currently a campaign to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the US war in Vietnam. The campaign relies on a revisionist retelling of that adventure and attempts to relieve US forces (military and otherwise) responsibility for the death and destruction they caused. This is one more reason the republication of The Phoenix Program is therefore quite timely. It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise reality. ― Joseph Goebbels Propaganda Minister for the Third Reich More next time. God bless you all, SR Shearer, Antipas
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 01:32:27 +0000
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