Phoenix: Vietnam, Iraq, and America

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“[Army Lt. General William] Boykin was one of the key U.S. officials in establishing what critics alleged was death-squad-type activity in Iraq…Asked in a Congressional inquiry about the similarities between the U.S. Phoenix program in Vietnam and special operations in the war on terror, Boykin said: ‘I think we’re running that kind of program. We’re going after these people. Killing or capturing these people is a legitimate mission for the department. I think we’re doing what the Phoenix program was designed to do, without all of the secrecy.’” Michael Smith, ‘Donald Rumsfeld’s new Killer Elite. The Times (London) Online, February 12, 2006, quoted in Blackwater, 309.

Covert Phoenix-style

Assassination Program in Iraq

“As early as January 2004, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reported on the existence of a covert U.S. program in Iraq that resembled ‘the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America’s death squads or Israel’s official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists’… “The former CIA chief of counter terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, said U.S. forces in Iraq were working with key members of Saddam Hussein’s defunct intelligence apparatus. ‘They’re setting up little teams of Seals and Special Forces with teams of Iraqis, working with people who were former senior Iraqi intelligence people, to do these things, Cannistraro said, ‘The big money would be for standing up an Iraqi secret police to liquidate the resistance,’ said John Pike, an expert on covert military budgets.” –Blackwater, 286.

These operations seemed to intensify once Negroponte arrived in Iraq. (Blackwater, 286).

Negroponte was called from Iraq to serve as Director of National Intelligence, a new office that oversees all intelligence in America. Scary stuff. El Salvador death squads, Iraqi death squads, Director of National Intelligence.

 

Knight of Malta, Former CIA
Director Assassinated For
Planning to Expose Phoenix
Program in US

Never forget that in the 1990s, Knight of Malta and former Director of the CIA, William Colby, who created the Phoenix program in Vietnam, was horrified to see the Phoenix terror and assassination program being implemented in the United States. So horrified, that he began writing a book to reveal, expose, and stop this terrible program from being implemented in the United States. He never finished the book. In the midst of writing this book, which had already been advertised across the nation as a book that would be like no other, he was assassinated in a classic CIA-style drowning in the river outside his home. His body was eventually found upstream. His computer had been left on, his shirt draped over the chair in front of his computer. The chickens had come home to roost. The very man who implemented the Phoenix terror and assassination program in Vietnam, and who was horrified to see it being implemented in America in the nineties, appears to have been cut down in the midst of his effort to expose the danger.

 

Military Tribunals in Vietnam
One of the Precursors of
Operation Phoenix

There is another very disturbing development. In Vietnam, which increasingly seems to be serving as the model for pacifying foreign nations as well as the homeland [it would pay to know that history], before Phoenix got rolling, the precursor programs of ICEX (Infrastructure Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation), CORDS (Civil Operations and Rural Development Support), and DIOCC (District Intelligence and Operations coordination Center), ‘the model on which Phoenix facilities were later built throughout Vietnam’” found that the Vietnamese civil court system, because of its inadequacy to deal with the sheer numbers of those fingered by the intelligence programs, stopped handling VC defendants, making “’judicial processing… the responsibility of various military tribunals.’” –Alfred W. McCoy, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: or, How Not to Learn From the Past. Ed. Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young. New York: The New Press, 2007, pp. 234-237.

 

Phoenix and Torture

Significantly the coverage of Phoenix and its associated intelligence and terror programs, occurs in the chapter entitled “Torture in the Crucible of Counter insurgency.”

Look at the Pattern – Vietnam
Iraq, US; Connect the Dots

Might it just be possible that the Department of Homeland Security, run by Jesuits and the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, is setting up America in the same fashion as was done in the pacification of Vietnam, and now Iraq? Connect the dots. It was already happening in the nineties when Colby attempted to warn the nation. There has been an enormous lot of water over the dam since then with massive intelligence bureaucracies, from the Department of Homeland Security to the Director of National Intelligence, combining untold numbers of intelligence personnel in their bureaucracies, fastening their iron grip on the nation.

 

Phoenix Used Sophisticated
Computer Information Banks at
The Combined Intelligence Center
Vietnam

Once the Phoenix [Phung Hoang Committees in Vietnamese] pacification program was fully evolved, the “Phoenix program used sophisticated computer information banks, located at the Combined Intelligence Center Vietnam (CICV), to centralize all data on the Vietcong infrastructure, identifying key Communist cadres for interrogation or elimination.” –Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam.  “Torture in the Crucible of Counterinsurgency.” P. 238.

 

Terror Information Awareness

Here is another piece of the picture. In America the powers that be attempted to install the Total Information Awareness program that would do the same thing as Phoenix, compiling massive data bases on every soul in the nation. When the people and Congress rose up against this terrible violation of the Fourth Amendment Guarantees of privacy, the program was carried forward under a new name, the Terrorism Information Awareness program.

 

Desire to Turn Local Cable or

Gas or Electrical Techs into Spies

Civil liberties lawyer Rachel King said, “’The Administration apparently wants to implement a program that will turn local cable and gas or electrical technicians into government-sanctioned peeping toms.’” –Mark Green, Losing Our Democracy. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2006, p.184.

 

No TIPS or TIA Programs
Terminated

The national uproar over TIPS and TIA caused Americans to be told that the programs were cancelled. “But in reality, their budgets were simply shuffled around and their projects renamed. None of the contracts needed to develop their massive surveillance technologies were actually terminated. ‘Research under TIA – which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States – was moved from the Pentagon’s research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency,” reported National Journal writer Shane Harris.” –Green, Losing our Democracy, p. 184. 

Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition against Censorship warns about these TIA and TIPS programs, “There seems to be no limits, no controls, no guidelines, no rules, no nothing.’” –Green, 185.

 

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