[Peace-discuss] AfPak, Vietnam, & the NYT

[C. G. Estabrook]

	9-07-09
	The Phoenix Program Was a Disaster in Vietnam
	and Would Be in Afghanistan--And the NYT Should Know that
	By Jeremy Kuzmarov

[Mr. Kuzmarov is assistant professor of history at Tulsa University and author 
of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs. He spent 
months pouring over the files of the public safety division and phoenix program 
in Vietnam for a book he is currently working on, Modernizing Repression: Police 
Training and Nation-Building in the American Century.]

As best expressed in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s seminal 1989 work, 
"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media," the New York 
Times, has been a consistent champion of U.S. militarism and empire over the 
course of at least the past half-century along with the neo-liberal free-trade 
policies driving its expansion. The paper hit a new low this past Friday in 
running an op ed by Mark Moyar, a professor at the U.S. Marine Corps University, 
in which he heralded the CIA trained Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU) in 
Vietnam as a model irregular guerrilla force, which the U.S. should strive to 
recreate in Afghanistan in order to wage the war more effectively.

In actual fact, the PRU’s served as one of the most brutal and corrupt colonial 
proxies of the United States in its history. They were notoriously ineffective 
in fulfilling American imperial ambitions and participated in the torture and 
killing of thousands of innocent civilians. The PRU’s were trained by the CIA 
and USAID’s Public Safety Division as “hunter-killer” squadrons to carry out the 
notorious Phoenix operation whose central aim was to eliminate the “Vietcong” 
infrastructure (VCI) through use of sophisticated computer technology and 
intelligence gathering techniques and through improved coordination of military 
and civilian intelligence agencies. Phoenix had its roots in earlier 
psychological warfare and police counter-terror operations designed to “bring 
danger and death” to “Vietcong functionaries.” It employed methods such as the 
use of wanted posters, blacklists, spies and disguises as well as violent acts 
of intimidation and terrorism.

Contrary to Moyar’s mythical view, which he presents in more depth in his 1997 
book, "Phoenix and the Birds of Prey", the PRU’s partook in indiscriminate 
brutality and failed to infiltrate the upper-echelon of the revolutionary 
apparatus. Phoenix was riddled by inaccurate reporting and bribery. South 
Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu used Phoenix to eliminate political 
rivals, including the non-communists opposition. Internal reports on record at 
the National Archives point to the widespread corruption of PRU cadres who used 
their positions for revenge purposes and for shakedowns and extortion, 
threatening to kill people and count them as VCI if they did not pay them huge 
sums. In part because defection rates were so high in the US-created South 
Vietnamese army, many of those recruited were criminals or thugs who used the 
program to advance their own agendas. Elton Manzione, a Phoenix operative noted 
that the PRU’s were “a combination of ARVN deserters, VC turncoats and bad 
motherfuckers; criminals the South Vietnamese couldn’t deal with who were turned 
over to us. Some actually had an incentive plan: If they killed X number of 
commies, they got x number of years off their prison term.”

Some model to follow for Afghanistan. Internal reports at the National Archives 
point to a proliferation of “atrocities” by “VC avenger units” including the 
mutilation of bodies and the killing of family members of suspected guerrillas 
by PRU’s, provoking mass reprisals. While the quantity of “neutralizations” was 
reported to be very high in many districts, the quality was “poor.” At best, 
those killed were low-level functionaries. High ranking officials like Robert 
“Blow-Torch” Komer, who called for a doubling of the size of the program, 
lamented that there was a high number of “phantom kills” which hampered good 
Phung Hoang statistics. There were also “flagrant” cases of report padding, 
which had occurred most egregiously in the province of Long An where Phoenix 
advisor Evan Parker Jr. noted in an internal memo that “the numbers just don’t 
add up.” Throughout the country, another memo noted, dead bodies were being 
identified as VCI, rightly or wrongly, in the attempt to at least approach an 
unrealistic quota.

In 1971, a comprehensive Pentagon study found that only 3 percent of the 
Vietcong killed, captured or rallied were full or probationary party members 
above the district level. Regional reports claimed that 1 percent or less of 
enemy neutralizations held key leadership posts in the VCI. Ralph McGehee, who 
served as the CIA chief in the Gia Dinh province and nearly committed suicide 
due to the guilt he felt over his actions, stated emphatically in his memoirs 
“never in the history of our work in Vietnam did we get one clear-cut, 
high-ranking Vietcong agent.” One key reason for the failure of Phoenix stemmed 
from the popular support enjoyed by the NLF leadership who had contacts in high 
places and infiltrated the government apparatus.

The most disturbing aspect was its inordinately high human costs. A Phoenix 
advisor commented, “It was common knowledge that when someone was picked up 
their lives were about at an end because the Americans most likely felt that, if 
they were to turn someone like that back into the countryside it would just be 
multiplying NLF followers.” In one publicized case, a detainee was kept in an 
air-conditioned room for four years to try and exploit his fear of the cold. His 
remains were later dumped at sea. K. Barton Osborne, a military intelligence 
specialist told Congress that he witnessed acts of torture including the 
prodding of a person’s brain with a six inch dowel through his ear, and that in 
his year and a half with Phoenix, “not a single suspect survived interrogation.” 
After being called before Congress to account for his actions, CIA Director 
William Colby conceded that Phoenix led to the deaths of 20,000 civilians. The 
South Vietnamese government placed the total at over 40,000. A Phoenix operative 
who had served in Czechoslovakia during World War II tellingly commented, “The 
reports that I would send in on the number of communists that were neutralized 
reminded me of the reports Hitler’s concentration camp commanders sent in on how 
many inmates they had exterminated, each commander lying that he had killed more 
than the other to please Himmler.”

In Phoenix and the Birds of Prey, Moyar tried to refute claims about the 
program’s brutality by claiming that K. Barton Osborn and other veterans who 
testified about torture and abuse were psychological scarred from their 
experience fighting in Vietnam and hence not credible witnesses. This is a 
common tactic of the swift boat crowd which is simply not true. Deborah Nelson 
and Nick Turse’s work, based on their survey of hundreds of declassified files 
at the National Archives, shows that the army in fact investigated many of the 
allegations of atrocities by antiwar veterans which turned out to be almost all 
accurate. My Lai was the tip of the iceberg. My own research and that of Jerry 
Lembcke has shown that the stereotype of the psychologically scarred veteran 
embraced by Moyar is a construct of right-wing politicians, the mass media and 
Hollywood. With regards to Osborn, William Colby himself stated that much of 
what he had said was “likely to be true.”

In the face of all the available evidence, Moyar’s claims simply do not stand up 
to scholarly scrutiny.Moyar’s argument about the need to replicate the success 
of the Phoenix program and train the Afghan equivalent of the PRU’s is 
a-historical, morally debased and intellectually worthless. The New York Times 
accordingly has done a disservice to its readers by publishing him as an 
authority on this topic, particularly given the paucity of antiwar and 
anti-imperialist views represented in the paper. The Times ironically ran a 
number of well-documented exposes on Phoenix and the draconian character of the 
South Vietnamese prison system in the early 1970s. More than anything else this 
latest decision reflects its own ideological bias and complicity in the major 
crimes against humanity now unfolding in Afghanistan.

http://hnn.us/articles/116462.html