Phoenix: Vietnam, Iraq, and America

“[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.

Domestic Arm of Preemption: All

Confidential Records Data-mined

“Journalist alias Solomon notes that, with this type of government in place, the Bush administration ‘has fashioned a domestic arm of its new doctrine of preemption.’ Now, all previously confidential records will be searched, cross-indexed, and fully ‘data-mined’ (presumably using the technology from the ‘cancelled’ programs) for any information the government sees fit, with no one overseeing abuses or mistakes.” – Green, 185.

Phoenix Tortures: Osborn

Reports Not One VC Suspect

Survived in Eighteen Month Stint

Phoenix used torture. K. Barton Osborn, a Military Intelligence veteran who worked with the CIA’s Phoenix program in 1967-68, described various tortures used from driving a 6-inch dowel into the ear canal and into the brain until the person died, starving to death, and using electronic gear attached to genitalia to shock the people into submission. “During his eighteen months with the Phoenix program, not a single VC suspect had survived CIA interrogation.” –Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, 242,243.

“By 1972 the Phoenix total for enemy ‘neutralization’ had risen to 81,740 Vietcong eliminated and 26,369 prisoners killed.” –Iraq and Lessons of Vietnam, 243.

Truncheon and Electric Shock

Interrogation Widespread

In 1968, “two CORDS evaluators, John G. Lybrand and L. Craig Johnstone, conducted an official review of the program in II Corps (Central Vietnam), finding that ‘the truncheon and electric shock method of interrogation were in widespread use, with almost all [U.S.] advisers admitting to have witnessed instances of the use of these methods.’” – Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, 243.

It was just like the Gestapo and SS. Of course, massive numbers of Nazi intelligence – the entire Gehlen Org – were brought intact and wholesale into the CIA at the close of World War II.

Hypothermia, Aircraft Ejection,

Water, Shock

Hypothermia was used. People were thrown out of aircraft to their deaths. –Lessons, 244.

CIA regional chief, Orrin DeForest found the Phoenix provincial interrogation centers “sites of the worst tortures – in particular the water treatment, where they forced water down prisoners’ throats until their stomachs swelled up, or the torture in which they applied electric shock to their genitals and nipples.’ [Orrin DeForest and David Chanoff, Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990) pp. p4-57.” –Lessons from Vietnam, 241.]

Revival of Inquisition

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that America has not used torture before. It was used massively in Phoenix in Vietnam. The water torture is right out of the Roman Catholic Inquisition. Of course, the Knights of Malta were running the CIA. William Colby, Director of the CIA, was a Knight of Malta. It is the revival of the Roam Catholic Inquisition.

The Rationale for Phoenix
Protecting the People From
Terrorism

In October, 1969, the Saigon government launched “the Phoenix Public Information program’ in an attempt to ‘surface Phoenix publicly, under the rationale of protecting the people from terrorism.’ [Central Intelligence Agency, Internal Security in South Vietnam – Phoenix, December 12, 1970.]” –Lessons, 240.

Negroponte served in Iraq from June 2004 to February 17, 2005 when he was nominated as first Director of National Intelligence. With a history of years of developing death squads in Salvador and Iraq, what does that mean? By May 2005, Negroponte was back in the U.S.

By 2005, the big picture reality in Iraq was that it had become ‘the global epicenter of privatized warfare with scores of heavily armed groups of various loyalties and agendas roaming Iraq.” –Blackwater, 289.

Iron Fetters Forged on America

The iron fetters are being forged on America. When it comes home to roost, with all the lessons learned, it will mean, as Naomi Klein, author of No Logo wrote, ‘the death throes of U.S. democracy.” (Back cover of Blackwater.)

There is one basic conclusion. Rome, the Knights of Malta, and the Jesuits are taking control of the nation. Every base is being covered. Rome is even developing its mercenary military arm for enforcement.

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