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

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Phung Hoang == Phoenix  (Feng Huang in "Mandarin")



On 9/8/2009 12:58 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>     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
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