[News] Vietnam - The Evil Thar Was Phoenix
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Fri Jul 4 13:14:18 EDT 2014
*http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/04/the-evil-that-was-phoenix/*
Weekend Edition July 4-6, 2014
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*America’s 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./
There’s a reason the CIA wanted to prevent the publication of Douglas
Valentine’s 1990 book, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in
Vietnam
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0595007384/counterpunchmaga>.
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 CIA’s 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 wasn’t
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.”
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 book’s 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
<http://www.openroadmedia.com/blog/2014-06-10/open-road-media-announces-creation-of-forbidden-bookshelf.aspx>
series; an endeavor involving reprinting hard-to-find books addressing
the realities of the US social-political infrastructures from a critical
(and mostly left) 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 Phuang Hong, 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 don’t 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 insurgency’s civilian supporters. 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 ma’am” 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 Diem’s 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 Germany’s
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office.) 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
Washington’s 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.
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.
/*Ron Jacobs *is the author of the just released novel /All the Sinners,
Saints
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1937677397/counterpunchmaga>/.
He is also the author of /The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the
Weather Underground
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859841678/counterpunchmaga>
/and /Short Order Frame Up
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0977459098/counterpunchmaga>/ and /The
Co-Conspirator’s Tale
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0983206309/counterpunchmaga>///.
Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s
collection on music, art and sex, /Serpents in the Garden
<http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CP_Books.html>/. His
third novel All the Sinners Saints is a companion to the previous two
and is due out in April 2013. //He is a contributor to /Hopeless: Barack
Obama and the Politics of Illusion
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849351104/counterpunchmaga>/,
published by AK Press. He can be reached at: ronj1955 at gmail.com
<mailto:ronj1955 at gmail.com>./
--
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