THE PHOENIX PROGRAM: AMERICA’S USE OF TERROR IN VIETNAM - DOUGLAS VALENTINE

 Meaning to get to this one for a while. If you get into parapolitical, CIA-adjacent, conspiracy-theory type stuff, it’s not too long before you hear quite a lot about the Phoenix program and therefore this book. If you don’t know, Phoenix was the CIA’s program during the Vietnam War (which should more properly be thought of as the South East Asian war since it began in Laos and involved Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam) to destroy the infrastructure of the VC, by which they meant assassinations, torture and killing, often to civilians who were accused of being covert VC supporters. We’ll never know the true numbers but famously CIA-friendly Wikipedia thinks that 81,740 people were “neutralized” and “26,396 were killed. Again, almost certainly an under-count and the people who weren’t killed, who were “neutralized,” were put into incredibly brutal prisons and tortured for years many of them crippled physically or mentally forever. As far as these prisons themselves, called PIC or Provincial Interrogation Centers, here’s what the CIA’s one-time head of the PICs, John Patrick “Picadoon” Muldoon says was going on,  “rape, gang rape, rape using eels, rape using snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shocks (the bell telephone hour) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind their back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.” As you might imagine, a program where people were black-listed by snitches then killed by paramilitary groups led to a lot of abuse. People were often accused of being VC by others in their community with a personal grudge or financial incentive (there were rewards for fingering VC agents), the kill-teams themselves were sometimes made up of Special Forces folks and/or “bad motherfucker criminals” freed from South Vietnamese jails to do some dirty work. The program relied on terror so mutilations and massacres were common. Often the Phoenix forces would dress like or otherwise try to impersonate the NVA to psy-op peasants into thinking these were communist atrocities. It was also the first major military/intelligence program to rely heavily on computers and computer networks, to maintain the black-lists. I could go on and on about the evil shit that went down in the program but you should read the book for that stuff, what most interested me was the long shadow that Phoenix has cast over history since then. There are obvious examples, many literal Phoenix alumni like Felix Rodrigez show up all over South and Central America training various death-squads to enact a local Phoenix program. The playbook is simple: organize criminals and psychos into small groups, train them with US/Isreali/Australian commandos in the dark arts, use local and international intelligence agencies to deliver kill-lists and disguise who they are when they’re out there doing their dirty work. We see this in Honduras and Nicaragua and Guatemala. Mexico’s current drug war is increasingly run by narcos with Special Forces training (look into the GAFE and their relationship to the Zetas as well as what they did to the Zapatistas before that). Recently, I was reading about the “Zero units” in Afghanistan, who are CIA run death-squads we were using in that country who got prioritized to leave when the corrupt narco-government of Afghanistan fell. Like THE JAKARTA METHOD, this book is at it’s most harrowing when you see how something monstrous in one country was exported by Amerika around the world. The most tantalizing aspect of Phoenix is to what extent it came back to America. The book quotes several Phoenix people (there’s a whole side story about how Valentine wrote this book, it has to do with him getting Colby’s permission because he, Colby, liked Valentine’s previous book about his father’s experience in Vietnam. Colby gave him interviews and told people to talk with him so people were perhaps more candid than they should have been. It’s amazing and I doubt very much the CIA will ever make this big of a fuck-up again) who return to the USA into law enforcement and see Phoenix tactics at play contra the counter-war movement. A domestic Phoenix was perhaps involved with the US’s obvious involvement in MLK’s murder. All amazing stuff. I’d easily put this in the top tier of the CIA books I’ve read in the past 2 years. If you want to understand how Amerika’s empire works, you need to read this book. If we had a real education system or a real press, this would be the thing everyone knew about the Vietnam war, but we don’t so you have to search out stuff like this for yourself.  64 mythical birds

Article about the Zero units, if you’re interested. Again, this is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg, you can find shit like this in basically in country Amerika has any interest in. :https://theintercept.com/2021/10/05/zero-units-cia-afghanistan-taliban/