In cooperation with Author/Journalist Douglas Valentine, Cryptocomb is publishing over 8GB's of audio recordings that Mr.

Valentine collected throughout his personal interviews with former CIA and U.S. Military Officers while researching for his book, "The Phoenix Program". The Phoenix Program for the unacquainted was a CIA generated operation that sponsored mass arrests, terrorism, torture, murder and lies during the war in Vietnam. Many of the players went on to walk the halls of the Pentagon, Congress, the Department of Homeland Security, and major National Security Corporations. The recordings are just as Cryptocomb received them, in the raw, not edited or redacted. Cryptocomb would like to thank Douglas Valentine for preserving these recordings and providing them to Cryptocomb. It's only through his hard work and diligence that everyone benefits from the truth.
Edward Nelson Brady Brickham John Evan Parker Muldoon Phoenix Program Document Library Phoenix Program Photos William E. Colby George Carver Thomas Polgar Douglas Dillard Jean Andre Sauvageot Thomas Donohue James Ward Stan Fulcher Robert Simmons

Brickham Attack - November 1966 Brickham Concept - May 1967 Brickham Observations - May 1967 Brickham Proposal - June 1967 MACV Directive 381-41 - July 1967 Lathram Action Program - July 1967 Carver ICEX - August 1967 Parker "Project Takeoff" - August 1967 Telegram from Rusk to Komer, RE: "ICEX/SIDE Programs" - January 1968 State Dept Telegram, RE: Phoenix Program - June 1969 Dang Van Minh Directive - March 1968 Letter from Billard to Kissinger, RE: Phoenix Program - June 1969 JCS to ISA, RE: Phoenix Program - June 1969 Laird to ISA, RE: Phoenix Program - July 1969 Dean Moor to Kissinger, RE: Phoenix Program - July 1969 Phoenix Program Staff Directory - August 1969 JCS PRU Phoenix Program Memo - December 1969 Memo for SECDEF, RE: Phoenix Program PRU Phoenix Compromise Discredit - 1970 Komer Fiasco - July 1970 Komer Fiasco last page Clay to SECDEF, RE:Phoenix Program - August 1970 Phoenix as Internal Security - December 1970 Phoenix Program Attitudes, Scotton - December 1970 Captured VCI docs, RE: Phoenix Program - Aug/Dec 1970 CPHPO Roster Phoenix Program PsyOps Policy - July 1971 National Security Laws - July 1971 McCoid EoY Phoenix Report - August 1971 Geneva Convention / Phoenix Program - August 1971 Post Apprehension Processing of VCI An Tri Procedures An Tri Reform Phoenix Program Review - September 1972 An Tri - September 1972 Phoenix Program Stats - September 1972 Thayer, RE: Phoenix Program and Drugs - October 1972 J3 DOCSA Phoenix Program - July 1973 Brief for Congress on Phoenix Program - 1973 Future Applicability of Phoenix Program Phoenix Program Report - October 1974 Phoenix Program Comic Hand Drawn PIC Layout Phoenix Program SOP's Slater Report on MO of VCI

Director of Central Intelligence (1973-1976), Colby was chief of the CIAs Far East Asia Division when the Phoenix Program was created in 1967. He is the CIA officer most closely linked to Phoenix, as a result of his testimony to Congress about the program in 1970 and 1971, as well as at his confirmation hearings in 1973. An artist at dissembling, Colbys dispassionate voice is that of the cold bureaucrat stating, as fact, policy was contradicted by operational realities. Recording 1 Recording 2 Recording 3 Master Transcripts Here The Master Transcription List is provided only as a guide. It is not comprehensive or, in other cases, literally accurate. One can use it to search for specific "keywords" but it is not to be quoted from. Only a particular audio tape itself can serve as an undisputed source. Source Sends: Link

Edward C. Brady. An army officer who served his first tour in Vietnam in 1965 as an adviser to the a Vietnamese Ranger Battalion in Pleiku, Brady volunteered for another tour and was assigned as a Regional and Popular Forces adviser in Da Lat, where he learned about the connection between politics and the black market in Vietnam. It was sort of what Geneva was like in World War Two."' In Da Lat Brady worked with the CIA Province Officer. He learned Vietnamese and began to socialize with them. Eventually he was loaned to Australian CIA contractor Ted Serong, who was forming the CIAs PRU team in Tuyen Duc Province. Suborned by the CIA, enticed by the Vietnamese, and excommunicated by the Army, Brady - whose family was connected to a powerful U.S. senator and the III Corps commander - was reassigned to the Vietnamese Joint General Staffs Combat Operations Center. When Brady's tour at the JGS ended, the CIA station asked him to capitalize on his well-placed connections. Brady agreed and was assigned to the Phoenix Directorate as a cover for his espionage activities. "So I went over there and spent a couple hours talking to Evan Parker. He said, We're interested in targeted operations against the civilian part of the Communist party.' And I was ready for that - psychologically and emotionally. Brady, however, discovered that the Vietnamese approach to Phoenix was at odds with the one pressed by Evan Parker and the CIA: "If you really want to get down to cases, no Vietnamese of any significance in the military or in the police didn't know who the truly high-level VCI were - the district chiefs and the province chiefs. But as one top officer said to him, You don't understand. You don't have any family here. You're going to go home when this operation is over with. But I have a home and a family and kids that go to school. I have a wife that has to go to market. And you want me to set a trap for (the local VCI boss) and kill him when he comes in to see his wife? If we do that, what are they going to do

to our wives?' As Brady observes, "To conduct these clandestine police operations and really get at the heart of things, that was kind of immoral to them. That was not cricket, and the Vietnamese were very, very leery of upsetting that." Brady offers an insiders overview of Phoenix operational and organizational flaws and strengths. Recording 1 Recording 2 Recording 3 Recording 4 Recording 5 Related Link Related Link Master Transcripts The Master Transcription List is provided only as a guide. It is not comprehensive or, in other cases, literally accurate. One can use it to search for specific "keywords" but it is not to be quoted from. Only a particular audio tape itself can serve as an undisputed source.

CIA Killings Spell Defeat In Afghanistan

By Douglas Valentine January 08, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Why? Why? The grieving family members ask. Why did the terrorists kill our loved ones? The hardnosed colleagues of the four fallen CIA officers comfort the wives and children (and one husband). They shake off their sorrow, huddle together by the graves, and vow vengeance. They bathe themselves in their seething anger like it was the blood of the lamb. Why? The American public and its officials ask. Why? The media repeats, adding in shock and awe, Dont the terrorists know that you cant kill CIA officers? Why, everyone wonders, did a Jordanian suicide bomber target the CIA, knowing that the wrath of the biggest, baddest, bloodthirstiest Gang on Planet Earth is going to start dropping bombs and slitting throats until its lust for death and suffering is satisfied? Over the course of its sixty year reign of terror, in which it has overthrown countless governments, started countless wars costing countless lives, and otherwise subverted and sabotaged friends and foes alike, the CIA has lost less than 100 officers. On a good day, one CIA drone, and one CIA hit team, kills 100 innocent women and children, and

nobody bats an eye. Why would the terrorists suddenly deviate from the norm the sacred accommodation and throw the whole game into chaos? Why? OK, Ill Tell You Why There is a phenomenon called The Universal Brotherhood of Officers. It exists in the twilight zone between imagination and in reality, in the fog of war. It is why officers are separated from enlisted men in POW camps and given better treatment. It is why officers of opposing armies have more in common with one another than they have with their own enlisted men. Officers are trained to think of their subordinate ranks as canon fodder. Their troops are expendable. They know when they send a unit up a hill, some will be killed. That is why they do not fraternize with thee lower ranks. This class distinction exists across the world, and is the basis of the sacred accommodation. No slobs need apply. It is why the Bush Family flew the Bin Laden Family, and other Saudi Royals, out of the United States in the days after 9-11. If anyone was a case officer to the 9-11 bombers, or had knowledge about the bombers or any follow-up plots, it was these protected people. CIA officers are at the pinnacle of the Universal Brotherhood. They are the Protected Few, blessed with false identities and bodyguards, flying in jet planes, living in villas, eating fancy food and enjoying state of the art technology. CIA officers tell army generals what to do.They direct Congressional committees. They assassinate heads of state and innocent children equally, with impunity, with indifference. In Afghanistan they manage the drug trade from their hammocks in the shade.They know the Taliban tax the farmers growing the opium, and they know that Karzais warlords convert the opium into heroin and fly it to the Russian mob. They are amused by the antics of earnest DEA agents, who, in their ignorant patriotic bliss, cannot believe such an accommodation exists. CIA officers are trained to exist in this moral netherworld of protected drug dealers, for the simple reasons that the CIA in every conflict has a paramount need to keep secure communication channels open to the enemy. This is CIA 101. The CIA, as part of its mandate, is authorized to negotiate with the enemy, but it can only do so as long as the channel is secure and deniable. No proof will ever exist, so the American public can be deceived. Take Iran Contra, when Reagan vowed never to negotiate with terrorists, then a team to Tehran to sell missiles to thee Iranians and use the money to buy guns for the drug dealing Contras.

Theres stated and unstated policy and the CIA is always pursuing the unstated, which is why it relies so heavily on its patriotic and witless assets in the mainstream media. In Afghanistan the accommodation is the environment that allows the CIA to have a secure channel to the Taliban to negotiate on simple matters like prisoner exchanges. The exchange of British journalist Peter Moore for an Iraqi insurgent in CIA custody was an example of how the accommodation works in Iraq. Moore was held by a Shia group allegedly allied to Iran, and his freedom depended entirely on the CIA reaching an accommodation with Americas enemies in the Iraq resistance. The details of such prisoner exchanges are never revealed, but involve secret negotiations by the CIA and the resistance over issues of strategic importance to both sides. The accommodation is the intellectual environment which provides a space for any eventual reconciliation. There are always preliminary negotiations for a reconciliation or ceasefire, and in every modern conflict thats the CIAs job. And the Afghanis want reconciliation. Apart from the US and CIA, Karzai and his clique at every level have filial relations with the Taliban. No matter how powerful the CIA is, it cant overcome that. Ed Brady, an Army officer detailed to the CIA and assigned to the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon in 1967 and 1968, explains how the accommodation worked in Vietnam. While Brady and his Vietnamese counterpart Colonel Tan were lunching at a restaurant in Dalat, Tan pointed at a woman eating noodle soup and drinking Vietnamese coffee at the table next to them. He told Brady that she was the Viet Cong province chiefs wife. Brady, of course, wanted to grab her and use her for bait. Coolly, Colonel Tan said to him: You dont understand. You dont live the way we live. You dont have any family here. Youre going to go home when this operation is over. You dont think like youre going to live here forever. But I have a home and a family and kids that go to school. I have a wife that has to go to market. And you want me to go kill his wife? You want me to set a trap for him and kill him when he comes in to see his wife? If we do that, what are they going to do to our wives? The VC didnt run targeted operations against them either, Brady explains. There were set rules that you played by. If you went out and conducted a military operation and you chased them down fair and square in the jungle and you had a fight, that was okay. If they ambushed you on the way back from a military operation, that was fair. But to conduct these clandestine police operations and really get at the heart of things, that was kind of immoral to them. That was not cricket. And the Vietnamese were very, very leery of upsetting that.

Obamas Dirty War in Afghanistan relies largely on such clandestine CIA operations, in which wives and children are used as bait to trap husbands or are killed as a way of punishing men in the resistance. The CIA plays the same role in Afghanistan that the Gestapo played in the cities and the Einsatzgruppen performed in the countryside for the Nazis in World War Two killing and terrorizing the urban resistance and partisan bands. Its unstated object is to rip apart working and middle class families and thus the whole fabric of Afghan society, until the Afghan people accept American domination, through its suppletif ruling class.1 And this is why the CIA was targeted. The CIA is utterly predictable. It will invoke the 100-1 Rule used by the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen and go on a killing spree until its vengeance is satisfied. At the end of the day, the Afghan people will only hate the Americans more. This makes the CIA happy, on the premise that terror will make the people submit. But in Afghanistan it spells protracted war, and as in Vietnam, eventual defeat.

Dirty War in Afghanistan

by Douglas Valentine
by Douglas Valentine

Recently by Douglas Valentine: Who Killed Martin Luther King?

On the morning of Dec. 30, 2009, I listened in disbelief as an NPR "terrorism" expert disingenuously explained how the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan was especially hideous, because the CIA victims were spreading economic development and democracy through a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). CIA Director Lou Panetta issued a statement saying, "Those who fell yesterday were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism." President Obama likewise glorified the CIA officers, calling them "part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens, and for our way of life." On New Years Day, Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Pamela Constable began to fill in some of the blanks that the initial propaganda had ignored. Warrick and Constable reported that the seven CIA officers were "at the heart of a covert program overseeing strikes by the agency's remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."

In the past year, those strikes have killed more than 300 people (perhaps as many as 700) who are invariably described by the U.S. news media as suspected insurgents, or militants, or terrorists, or jihadists or as collateral damage, people killed by accident. There is never any distinction made between Afghan nationalists fighting the U.S. occupation of their country and real terrorists who have inflicted intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political objective (the classic definition of terrorism). Likewise, the U.S. news media describes the Dec. 30 attack on the CIA officers as "terrorism," although it doesnt fit the definition since the CIA officers were engaged in military operations and thus represented a legitimate target under the law of war, certainly as much so as Taliban commanders far from the front lines. One such commander, Jalaluddin Haggani, was said to have ordered the suicide attack from his base in North Waziristan in retaliation for drone strikes on his forces. Haggani, a former CIA ally during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, also has close ties to Pakistani intelligence. Curiously, the bomb used in the suicide attack has been linked to the Pakistani intelligence service. It is unclear, however, if Haggani arranged for the bomb to be delivered to suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian agent whom the CIA summoned in the belief that he had information as to the whereabouts of a top Al Qaeda official. What is clear is that Al-Balawi sacrificed his life to help to drive Americans from Islamic nations like Afghanistan, where they cause so much death and misery. The mainstream media describes people like Al-Balawi as irrational "jihadists" with no appreciation for the fact that Americans are merely "defending" their "interests" in the region. In the broadest sense, Al-Balawis suicide attack was retaliation for the murder of thousands of innocent Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, including ten civilians in Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the eastern Afghan province of Kunar. The ten civilians were executed during a midnight raid on Dec 27 by what NATO called "non-military" (meaning CIA) American commandos. CIA commandos, often Green Berets and Navy SEALs hired into the CIAs Special Activities Division, do not wear uniforms in violation of international rules of land warfare. Instead they grow long beards and wear traditional Afghan garb and appear to be civilians. During the post9/11 "global war on terror," these teams have engaged in widespread kidnappings and executions. CIA commandos are Americas Einsatzgruppen, the notorious Nazi death squads that hunted and terrorized partisans in the Russian countryside in World War Two. Other CIA commandos function like the Gestapo, terrorizing the resistance cells in urban areas. In both cases, their mission is to terrorize the civilian population into submission. CIA Terrorism NATO spokesmen initially labeled the ten victims in Ghazi Khan as "insurgents" belonging to a "terrorist" cell that manufactured improvised explosive devices used to kill occupation troops

and civilians. But later reports from Afghan government investigators and townspeople identified the dead as civilians, including eight students, aged 11 to 17, enrolled in local schools. All but one of the dead came from the same family. According to a Dec. 31 article published by the Times of London, the CIA death squad flew by helicopter from Kabul, landing about two kilometers from the village. The commandos snuck up to the residence, taking the inhabitants by surprise as they slept. The commandos entered the first room and shot two of their victims a guest and a student then entered the second room and handcuffed seven other students, whom they executed in cold blood. When the farmer with whom the students were staying heard the shooting and came outside, the commandos killed him too. Protests over the killings erupted throughout Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, as well as in Kabul. Hundreds of protesters demanded that American occupation forces leave the country, and that the murderers be brought to justice. A NATO spokesman claimed there was "no direct evidence to substantiate" the claims of premeditated murder. And yet, the record of American forces engaging the first degree murder of unarmed people in Afghanistan and Iraq is a long one, with testimony about premeditated executions even emerging in U.S. military disciplinary hearings. These types of "unilateral" (done without informing any Afghan nationals) CIA "covert actions" are increasing in frequency with Obamas surge of 30,000 additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan. Of course, this ratcheting up of the cycle of violence will only incite more and more revenge killings. Indeed, the CIA immediately vowed to avenge the murder of its colleagues. Typically, a public statement of revenge such as this is an invocation of the notorious 100-to-one rule employed by the Nazis: anytime the partisans killed a member of the Gestapo or Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis killed 100 innocent civilians as punishment. In the meantime, the surviving CIA personnel at Forward Operating Base Chapman have barricaded themselves inside their compound and are grilling the Afghan employees who were on duty at the time of the Dec. 30 bomb attack. Afghans who worked with the CIA on the outside are locked out. Given their elevated status and class prerogatives, CIA officers do not perform menial tasks, and every chauffeur, maid, and vendor will now be seen as a potential "double agent." This apprehension will spread (as the suicide bomber and his masters intended) from the bottom to the top: Afghan officials in the US-backed government knew little about unilateral CIA operations at FOW Chapman to begin with, but now, as mutual mistrust reaches unprecedented levels, they will have less input and the war will enter a bloodier phase reminiscent of the pacification of Iraq. The Face of Terrorism Provincial Reconstruction Teams The events of the past week are instructive in explaining how CIA covert operations are conducted in concert with the U.S. news media.

Few Americans were aware that FOB Chapman was a CIA base camp. The local Afghans, however, were well aware of this fact. They also knew that the CIA used the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) based at Chapman as a means of gathering from informants, secret agents, and field interrogations intelligence upon which to coordinate super-sophisticated drone attacks and crude paramilitary operations. Composed of Afghan and US forces, the PRTs have been a foundation stone of the CIAs secret government in Afghanistan since they were instituted in 2002 under the imprimatur of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzadin. As with all the entities the CIA has created in Afghanistan, the PRTs are entirely funded by the CIA, and staffed with collaborators under CIA control. Naturally, the suicide bombing has cast doubt on the integrity of the intelligence the PRTs produce for the CIA. Agents of the resistance have infiltrated the program and the PRTs are certainly going through an internal review. But they will not be abandoned, and so it is instructive to know how they are organized and how they operate. The PRTs provide CIA agents usually Afghans working in the PRTs with a covert way to recruit and meet sub-agents (informants) in the field. CIA "officers" run "agents" in the field and these Afghan agents in turn run "sub-agents" people in villages like Ghazi who spy on other people in the villages. The CIA managers of the PRTs also rely on interpreters, as well as Afghan "counter-parts" in the secret police and military to determine if the intelligence given about "suspects" in a particular village is reliable. This leap of faith carries considerable risk. If a sub-agent in a village or an agent in the PRT is a double, a CIA death squad can easily be misdirected against innocent civilians. Likewise, a drone strike could be directed against an enemy of Jalaluddin Hagganis within the resistance. The PRT "counter-terror" mission is to identify members of the resistance. The sub-agent tells the PRT agent where the suspect lives in the village, how many people are in his house, where they sleep, and when they enter and leave the house. He also provides a picture, if possible. Other times a PRT agent will attempt to blackmail the suspect into becoming an informant, if there is reason to believe that is possible. The PRT also has a "foreign intelligence" mission, which involves collecting intelligence on Taliban leaders and their Al Qaeda contacts in foreign nations, like Pakistan. Obviously, al Qaeda and the Afghan resistance are aware of the CIAs activities, and this fact casts suspicion on the CIAs interpreters and counter-parts in the Afghan police and military. All of this puts increasing pressure on the CIA to separate itself entirely from the untrustworthy, ungrateful Afghans it has come to liberate. The CIAs Provincial Reconstruction Teams are at the center of this dilemma. Although it bills the PRTs as a means of spreading economic development and democracy, the CIA is not a social welfare program: its job is gathering intelligence and using it to capture, kill or turn the enemy into agents. The PRTs are a means to achieve these goals but only as long as the CIA can

plausibly deny that it does so. Thus, the two main purposes of PRTs are 1) maintaining the fiction that the US is a force for positive change and 2) providing the CIA with cover for its dirty business. As the CIA tightens its security measures, and as the Obama administration moves to reactivate some of the most brutal and corrupt warlords who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, the PRTs and their "community defense forces" will become increasingly reliant on criminals and sociopaths agents who have no compunctions about pursuing unilateral CIA policies and goals that are antithetical to Afghanistans national interests. And that spells trouble for the CIA. The Origins of PRTs in Vietnam Much of this bloody strategy was tested during the Vietnam War. In the early 1960s in South Vietnam, the CIAs Covert Action Branch developed the programs that would, in 1965, be grouped within its Revolutionary Development Cadre program. The standard Revolutionary Development Team was composed of North Vietnamese defectors and South Vietnamese collaborators advised by U.S. military and civilian personnel under the management of the CIA. The original model, known as a Political Action Team, was developed by CIA officer Frank Scotton. The original PAT consisted of 40 men: as Scotton told me, "That's three teams of twelve men each, strictly armed. The control element was four men: a commander and his deputy, a morale officer, and a radioman." "These are commando teams," Scotton stressed, "displacement teams. The idea was to go into contested areas and spend a few nights. But it was a local responsibility so they had to do it on their own." "Two functions split out of this," Scotton added. First was pacification. Second was counterterror. As Scotton noted, "The PRU thing directly evolves from this." The PRU, for Provincial Reconnaissance Unit, was the name given in 1966 to the CIAs "counter-terror" teams, which had generated a ton of negative publicity in 1965 when Ohio Sen. Stephen Young charged that they disguised themselves as Vietcong and discredited the Communists by committing atrocities, including murder, rape and mutilation. Notably, propagandists like Mark Moyar, a professor of national security affairs at the Marine Corps University, advocate for the expansion of PRU-style counter-terror teams in Afghanistan. [See Consortiumnews.coms "A Bad Vietnam Lesson for Afghanistan."] Staffing is a crucial element of this "political action" strategy, and to this end Scotton developed a "motivational indoctrination" program, which is certainly used today in some form in Afghanistan and Iraq. Scottons motivational indoctrination program was modeled on Communist techniques, and the process began on a confessional basis. "On the first day," according to Scotton, "everyone would fill out a form and write an essay on why they had joined." The teams morale officer "would study their answers and explain the next

day why they were involved in a special unit. The instructors would lead them to stand up and talk about themselves." The morale officer's job, he said, "was to keep people honest and have them admit mistakes." Not only did Scotton co-opt Communist motivational techniques, but he also relied on Communist defectors as his cadre. "They could communicate doctrine, and they were people who would shoot," he explained, adding, "It wasn't necessary for everyone in the unit to be exVietminh, just the leadership." Indeed, the Vietnamese officer in charge of Scotton's PAT program, Major Nguyen Be, had been party secretary for the Ninth Vietcong Battalion before switching sides. In 1965, Scotton was transferred to another job, and Major Be, with his new CIA advisor, Harry "The Hat" Monk, combined CIA "mobile" Census Grievance cadre, PATs, and Counter-Terror Teams into the standard 59-man Revolutionary Development (RD) team. Census Grievance Teams were the primary way RD agents contacted sub-agents in the villages by setting up a portable shack in which civilians could privately complain about the government. The PRTs very likely have this Census Grievance element in their intelligence unit. Major Be's 59-man Revolutionary Development teams were called Purple People Eaters by American soldiers, in reference to their clothes and terror tactics. To the rural Vietnamese, the RD teams were simply "idiot birds." In mid-1965 the RD Cadre Program was officially launched and teams were sent across South Vietnam. With standardization and expansion came the need for more advisers, so Thomas Donohue, the CIA officer in charge of Covert Action in South Vietnam, began recruiting military men. Most came from US Special Forces, though the regular army, navy and marines also provide support personnel as "detailees" to the CIA. "We got to the point," Donohue told me, "where the CIA was running a political program in a sovereign country where they didn't know what the hell we were teaching. But what kind of program could it be that had only one sponsor, the CIA, that says it was doing good? It had to be sinister. Any red-blooded American could understand that. What the hell is the CIA doing running a program on political action? "So I went out to try to get some cosponsors for the record. They weren't easy to come by. I went to [USIS chief] Barry Zorthian. I said, `Barry, how about giving us someone?' I talked to MACV about getting an officer assigned. I had AID give me a guy." But all of it, Donohue said, "was window dressing. We [the CIA] had the funds; we had the logistics; we had the transportation." The same can undoubtedly be said for the PRTs in Afghanistan and Iraq. PRTs in Iraq

The CIAs RD Cadre program in Vietnam has been cloned into the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan and Iraq. The PRT program started in Afghanistan in 2002 and migrated to Iraq in 2004. PRTs consist of anywhere between 50 and 100 civilian and military specialists. The standard PRT has a military police unit, a psychological operations unit, an explosive ordinance-demining unit, an intelligence team, medics, a force protection unit, and administrative and support personnel. Like Scottons teams in South Vietnam, they conduct terror, political, and psychological operations, under cover of fostering economic development and democracy. Long ago the American people grew weary of the heavily censored but universally bad news they got about Iraq, and are now quiet happy to believe that PRTs have put Iraq back on its feet. Americans are quite happy to forget about the devastation they wrought. But few Iraqis are fooled by the "war as economic development" shell game, or by the deceitful standards the US government uses to measure the success of its PRT program. In his correspondence with reporter Dahr Jamail, one Iraqi political analyst from Fallujah (a neighborhood that was destroyed in order to save it) put it succinctly when he said: "In a country that used to feed much of Arab world, starvation is the norm." According to another of Jamails correspondents, Iraqis "are largely mute witnesses. Americans may argue among themselves about just how much "success" or "progress" there really is in post-surge Iraq, but it is almost invariably an argument in which Iraqis are but stick figures or dead bodies." In a publication titled "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience," the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction describes its mission as the largest overseas rebuilding effort in U.S. history. In some places in Iraq unemployment is at 4060 percent. Repairing war damage was the policy goal, but little connection was made between how the rebuilding would or even could bring about a democratic transition. As in Iraq, the PRTs in Afghanistan are a gimmick to make Americans feel good about the oppressive occupations conducted for their benefit. The supposed successes of the PRTs are cloaked in double-speak and meaningless statistics. After all, achieving statistical progress is not hard in nations whose infrastructures were destroyed by invasion and occupation, and where entire neighborhoods have been leveled in the name of security. The hard truth is that the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq always have been less about combating Islamic "terrorism" and "protecting the homeland" than about projecting the dark side of the American collective psyche. Protecting the People from the Knowledge of CIA Terrorism

Protecting Americans from any knowledge of the horror their government inflicts, is the job of the mainstream media. Its propagandists will not tell you that the CIA has a policy of targeting civilians for recruitment as agents and informants, or that it intentionally detains, without charge, and interrogates civilians as a means of coercing information from them about the Islamic resistance to American aggression. Civilians are knowingly killed and maimed in drone attacks, as well as raids by CIA commandos, as a means of terrorizing the people from associating in any way with the resistance. It is the job of mainstream propagandists to disguise this policy and characterize these civilians as either members of the enemy infrastructure, or jihadists, and thus legitimate military targets. Another thing you will not read about is the accommodation that normally exists between the opposing elites in any war. This accommodation exists in the twilight zone between reality and imagination, in the fog of war. It is why officers are separated from enlisted men in POW camps and given better treatment. It is why officers of opposing armies have more in common with one another than they have with their own enlisted men. Officers are trained to think of the lower ranks as canon fodder. Officers know when they send a unit up a hill, some men will be killed. That is why they do not fraternize with the lower ranks. This class distinction exists across the world, and is the basis of the accommodation. It is why the Bush family flew the bin Laden family, and other Saudi Royals, out of the United States in the days after 9-11. If anyone was a case officer to the 9-11 bombers, or had knowledge about the bombers or any follow-up plots, it was these "protected" people. CIA officers too are among the Protected Few. Blessed with false identities and bodyguards, they fly in private planes, live in villas, eat fancy food and enjoy state-of-the-art technology. CIA officers tell army generals what to do. They direct Congressional committees. They assassinate heads of state and innocent children with equal impunity and indifference. In Afghanistan they manage the drug trade from their hammocks in the shade. They know the Taliban tax the farmers growing the opium, and they know that Karzais warlords convert the opium into heroin and fly it to the Russian mob. They are amused by the antics of earnest DEA agents, who, in their patriotic bliss, cannot believe such an accommodation exists. CIA officers are trained to exist in this moral netherworld, for the simple reason that the CIA in every conflict has a paramount need to keep secure communication channels open to the enemy. The CIA, as part of its mandate, is authorized to negotiate with the enemy, but it can only do so as long as the channel is secure and deniable. The mainstream media makes sure that no proof will ever exist, so the American public can be deceived. But every once in a while, something disrupts the accommodation. Take Iran Contra, when President Reagan publicly vowed never to negotiate with terrorists, then secretly sent a team of spies to Tehran to sell missiles to the Iranians and use the money to buy guns for the drug dealing Contras.

There are stated and unstated policies, and the CIA exists to pursue the governments unstated policy. And without an accommodation in Afghanistan, the CIA would not have a secure channel to the resistance to negotiate on simple matters like prisoner exchanges. The exchange of British journalist Peter Moore for an Iraqi in CIA custody is an example of how the accommodation works in Iraq. Moore was held by a Shia group allegedly allied to Iran, and his freedom depended entirely on the CIA communicating secretly and in good faith with Americas enemies in the Iraq resistance. The details of such prisoner exchanges are never revealed by complicit assets in thee media, but the same channels of communication are used to discuss issues of strategic importance vital to any eventual reconciliation. The Afghanis want reconciliation. Apart from US policy, Karzai and his clique at every level have filial relations with the resistance. And no matter how powerful the CIA and its doppelgangers in al Qaeda are, they cannot overcome that. Ed Brady, an Army officer detailed to the CIA in Saigon in 1967 and 1968, explains how the accommodation worked in Vietnam. While Brady and his Vietnamese counterpart Colonel Tan were lunching at a restaurant in Dalat, Tan pointed at a woman eating noodle soup and drinking Vietnamese coffee at the table next to them. He told Brady that she was the Viet Cong province chiefs wife. Brady, of course, wanted to grab her and use her for bait. Coolly, Colonel Tan said to him: "You dont understand. You dont live the way we live. You dont have any family here. Youre going to go home when this operation is over. You dont think like youre going to live here forever. But I have a home and a family and kids that go to school. I have a wife that has to go to market. And you want me to go kill his wife? You want me to set a trap for him and kill him when he comes in to see his wife? If we do that, what are they going to do to our wives?" "The VC didnt run targeted operations against them either," Brady explains. "There were set rules that you played by. If you went out and conducted a military operation and you chased them down fair and square in the jungle and you had a fight, that was okay. If they ambushed you on the way back from a military operation, that was fair. But to conduct these clandestine police operations and really get at the heart of things, that was kind of immoral to them. That was not cricket. And the Vietnamese were very, very leery of upsetting that." The CIA relies on such clandestine operations in Afghanistan, but only among working and middle class families, in an effort to rip apart the fabric of Afghan society, until the Afghan people accept American domination, through its ruling class. And that, ultimately, is why CIA officers were targeted. It has played a double game, violating the accommodation on the one hand, and exploiting it on the other. The CIA is utterly predictable. As programmed, it will go on a killing spree until its vengeance is satisfied. But at the end of the day, the Afghan people will only hate the Americans more. And that spells defeat for the CIA and America.

July 12, 2010 Douglas Valentine [send him mail] is the author of four previously published books: The Hotel Tacloban (Lawrence Hill, 1984), The Phoenix Program, (William Morrow, 1990), TDY (iUniverse.com, 2000), and The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of Americas War on Drugs (Verso, 2004). His latest book is The Strength of the Pack (TrineDay, 2009). For more information about the author and his works, please visit his websites at www.douglasvalentine.com and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine.

Other Nelson Brickham Photos

1 2 3

Nelson Brickham was the senior CIA officer in charge of Foreign Intelligence Field Operations throughout South Vietnam, 1965-1966. In 1966 Saigon Station Chief John Hart assigned Brickham to Deputy Ambassador Robert Komers staff. Under Komers direction, Brickham through late 1966 and June 1967 created ICEX-SIDE, renamed Phoenix. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale and organizational genius, Brickham designed Phoenix to coordinate all CIA, military intelligence and public safety police programs using Ford Motor Companys executive staff structure as his model. Brickham speaks authoritatively, as the expert on the Phoenix Programs origins. Recording 1 Recording 11 Recording 2 Recording 12 Recording 3 Recording 13 Recording 4 Recording 14 Recording 5 Recording 15 Recording 6 Recording 16 Recording 7 Recording 17 Recording 8 Recording 9 Recording 10 Related Documents Related Documents Related Documents Related Documents Master Transcripts The Master Transcription List is provided only as a guide. It is not comprehensive or, in other cases, literally accurate. One can use it to search for specific "keywords" but it is not to be quoted from. Only a particular audio tape itself can serve as an undisputed source. George A. Carver Jr. In July 1965 Director of Central Intelligence William Raborn assigned Carver as head of the CIAs National Planning Task Force for Vietnam. In this lofty position Carver made independent recommendations to President Johnson on the most important policy decisions of the war. Carver brought Brickhams proposals to the highest levels of government and, in the summer of 1967, saw that the Phoenix Program was accepted as official US policy. Recording 1 See Carver Memo Recording 2

Here is a Video of George Carver

Other Dillard Photos: 1

Douglas Dillard was an army colonel assigned as the Phoenix Coordinator in the Delta in 1967-1969.

A World War Two airborne ranger veteran of the D-Day invasion, Dillard organized Phoenix operations in IV Corps under CIA officer Jim Ward. With his smooth Southern drawl and an army officers irreverence for the CIA civilians Dillard provides a colorful description of working in Phoenix in its initial phase. . Recording 1 Recording 2 Recording 3 Recording 4

Thomas Donohue, the senior CIA officer in charge of Covert Action programs in Vietnam from 1964-1966, he managed the development of the CIAs paramilitary covert action programs that Brickham and Komer incorporated in Phoenix, including the counter-terror, political action, and census grievance programs. A comparative religion graduate of Columbia University and a garrulous, blustering product and practitioner of Cook County, Illinois politics Donohue joined the CIA because he perceived the cold war as "a growth industry." Donohue is the prototype of the mythic CIA officer as charming, fast-talking, snake oil salesman. Recording 1 Recording 3 Recording 5 Recording 2 Recording 4 Recording 6 Related Link - 1 Master Transcripts The Master Transcription List is provided only as a guide. It is not comprehensive or, in other cases, literally accurate. One can use it to search for specific "keywords" but it is not to be quoted from. Only a particular audio recording itself can serve as an undisputed source.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams

And the CIA's dirty war in Afghanistan
By Douglas Valentine

n the morning of December 31, I listened in disbelief as an NPR "terrorism" expert disingenuously explained how the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan the day before was especially hideous, because the CIA victims were spreading economic development and democracy through a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). CIA Director Lou Panetta issued a statement saying, "Those who fell yesterday were far from home and close to the

enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism." President Obama likewise glorified the CIA officers, calling them "part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens, and for our way of life." On New Year's Day, Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Pamela Constable began to fill in some of the blanks that the initial propaganda had ignored. Warrick and Constable reported that the seven CIA officers were "at the heart of a covert program overseeing strikes by the agency's remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border." In the past year, those strikes have killed more than 300 people (perhaps as many as 700) who are invariably described by the U.S. news media as suspected insurgents, or militants, or terrorists, or jihadistsor as collateral damage, people killed by accident. There is never any distinction made between Afghan nationalists fighting the U.S. occupation of their country and real terrorists who have inflicted intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political objective (the classic definition of terrorism). Likewise, the U.S. news media describes the Dec. 30 attack on the CIA officers as "terrorism," although it doesn't fit the definition since the CIA officers were engaged in military operations and thus represented a legitimate target under the law of war, certainly as much so as Taliban commanders far from the front lines. One such commander, Jalaluddin Haggani, was said to have ordered the suicide attack from his base in North Waziristan in retaliation for drone strikes on his forces. Haggani, a former CIA ally during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, also has close ties to Pakistani intelligence. Curiously, the bomb used in the suicide attack has been linked to the Pakistani intelligence service. It is unclear, however, if Haggani arranged for the bomb to be delivered to suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian agent whom the CIA summoned in the belief that he had information as to the whereabouts of a top Al Qaeda official. What is clear is that Al-Balawi sacrificed his life to help drive Americans from Islamic nations like Afghanistan, where they cause so much death and misery. The mainstream media describes people like Al-Balawi as irrational "jihadists" with no appreciation for the fact that Americans are merely "defending" their "interests" in the region. In the broadest sense, Al-Balawi's suicide attack could be seen as retaliation for the murder of thousands of innocent Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, including ten civilians in Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the eastern Afghan province of Kunar. The ten civilians were executed during a midnight raid just days before, on December 27, by what NATO called "non-military" (meaning CIA) commandos.

CIA commandos, often Green Berets and Navy SEALs hired into the CIA's Special Activities Division, do not wear uniforms, in violation of international rules of land warfare. Instead they grow long beards and wear traditional Afghan garb and appear to be civilians. During the post-9/11 "global war on terror," these teams have engaged in widespread kidnappings and executions. Such CIA commandos are like a U.S. version of Einsatzgruppen, the notorious Nazi death squads that hunted and terrorized partisans in the Russian countryside in World War Two. Other CIA commandos function like the Gestapo, terrorizing the resistance cells in urban areas. In both cases, their mission is to terrorize the civilian population into submission. NATO spokespeople initially labeled the ten victims in Ghazi Khan as "insurgents" belonging to a "terrorist" cell that manufactured improvised explosive devices used to kill occupation troops and civilians. But later reports from Afghan government investigators and townspeople identified the dead as civilians, including eight students, aged 11 to 17, enrolled in local schools. All but one of the dead came from the same family. According to a December 31 article published by the Times of London, the commandos flew by helicopter from Kabul, landing about two kilometers from the village. The assassins snuck up to the residence, taking the inhabitants by surprise as they slept. They entered the first room and shot two of their victimsa guest and a studentthen entered the second room and handcuffed seven other students, whom they executed in cold blood. When the farmer with whom the students were staying heard the shooting and came outside, the commandos killed him too. Protests over the killings erupted throughout Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, as well as in Kabul. Hundreds of protesters demanded that American occupation forces leave the country, and that the murderers be brought to justice. A NATO spokesperson claimed there was "no direct evidence to substantiate" the claims of premeditated murder. And yet, the record of American forces engaging the first degree murder of unarmed people in Afghanistan and Iraq is a long one, with testimony about premeditated executions even emerging in U.S. military disciplinary hearings. As noted, dressing like the enemy is a war crime, as is murdering innocent civilians. But for these types of psychological warfare operations the CIA relies on its assets in the mainstream media to maintain its plausible deniability in "counter-terror" operations where civilians, even children, are deliberately targeted as a mean of terrorizing the locals into submission. Nevertheless the UN has stated that its investigation of the murder of the eight children continues, and it has invited the input of the Afghan government and occupation forces.

For their part, Afghan patriots are planning to avenge the first degree murder of their children by CIA terrorists. The CIA, in turn, has publicly vowed to avenge the murder of its colleaguesincluding the base chief, a mother of three young children. This ratcheting up of the cycle of violence serves the CIA's imperial interests, insofar as it can now increase the scope of its unilateral operations. Indeed, in response to the hostile public and official reaction by Afghans, the CIA barricaded itself inside its compound at Forward Operating Base (AKA Firebase) Chapman. For days after the suicide attack, all Afghan employees were locked inside the base and questioned. Those who worked with the CIA on the outside were locked out. Afghan officials in the U.S.-backed government knew little about CIA operations at FOB Chapman to begin with, but now, as mutual mistrust reaches unprecedented levels, the war has entered a new, bloodier phase reminiscent of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams

ecent events are instructive in explaining how CIA covert operations, including psywar and terrorism, are conducted in concert with the mainstream media. Few Americans were, or are, aware that FOB Chapman was officially a base camp for "civilians" involved in reconstruction. Americans, however, thanks to the efforts of the mainstream media, were the only ones in the dark. Local Afghans knew full well that Chapman was a CIA base and that "reconstruction" was a cover for coordinating drone attacks. But insofar as it is a forward base, Chapman focuses on paramilitary terror operations, using the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) as cover. The PRT is one of the primary means of gathering intelligence for these drone strikes and terror operations, collecting data from informants, secret agents, and field interrogations. Complicating the CIA's mission is the fact that its presence is well known, unwanted, and that the resistance has successfully infiltrated the ranks of the various entities the CIA has created, funded, and staffed with collaborators. Given their elevated status and class prerogatives, CIA officers do not perform menial

tasks, which allows Afghan-resistance "double-agents" to pose as chauffeurs, cleaning staff, and security guards outside CIA installations. Agents of the resistance are certainly present also in the CIA's Provincial Reconstruction Team, which are composed of both U.S. and Afghan soldiers and civilians. The PRTs have been a unilateral CIA operation since they were instituted in Afghanistan in 2002 under the imprimatur of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. They are a foundation stone of the CIA's secret government in Afghanistan, though the suicide bombing has cast doubt on the integrity of the intelligence the CIA uses to mount it psywar and paramilitary terror operations. The PRTs provide CIA "agents"often Afghans working in the PRTswith a covert way to gather intelligence from their sub-agents in the field. CIA officers run "agents" in the field and these Afghan agents in turn run "sub-agents"people in villages like Ghazi who spy on other people in the villages. Sometimes the CIA members of the PRT can handle this "sub-agent" contact function, if they speak the language, but they most often rely on interpreters. They also rely on Afghans to determine if the intelligence given about "suspects" in a particular village is reliable. If a "sub-agent" or "agent" is a double, the PRTs assassination unit can easily be misdirected. The main focus of the intelligence gathering is to identify members of the Taliban "infrastructure." The sub-agent tells the agent where the suspect lives in the village, how many people are in his house, where they sleep, and when they enter and leave. He also provides a picture, so the PRT's hit team can go out and snatch or snuff the guy. Other times an agent will attempt to blackmail the suspect into becoming an agent, if there is reason to believe that is possible. The Taliban are well aware of this and try to infiltrate the PRTs. That's the spy game that goes on in the villages of Afghanistana game the CIA is not very good at playing. As noted, the CIA officers killed at FOB Chapman were involved with the local PRT, ostensibly, as broadcast by NPR, in spreading economic development and democracy. But the CIA is not a social welfare program. Its job is gathering intelligence and using it to capture, kill, or turn the enemy into agents. Provincial Reconstruction Teams are one means the CIA uses to achieve these goalsbut only as long as it can plausibly deny that it does so. Thus, the two main purposes of PRTs are (1) maintaining the fiction that the U.S. is a force for positive change and (2) providing the CIA with cover for its deadly and dirty business. As even the Afghan army turns against the U.S., recruiting reliable collaborators into unilateral CIA entities like the PRTs (and "community defense forces" formed by PRTs) becomes an urgent necessity. And, as the CIA abandons its efforts to recruit patriotic Afghans or religiously devout Muslims, the PRTs are increasingly staffed by

criminals and sociopaths who have no compunctions about pursing unilateral CIA policies and goals that are antithetical to Afghanistan's national interests.

The Origins of PRTs in Vietnam

In the early 1960s in South Vietnam, the CIA developed the programs that would
eventually, in 1965, be grouped within its Revolutionary Development Teams, as part of the Revolutionary Development Program. The standard Revolutionary Development Team was composed of North Vietnamese defectors and South Vietnamese collaborators advised by U.S. military and civilian personnel, under the management of the CIA. The original model, known as a Political Action Team (PAT), was developed by CIA officer Frank Scotton and an Australian military officer, Ian Tiege, on contract to the CIA. The original PAT consisted of 40 men. As Scotton told me, "That's three teams of twelve men each, strictly armed. The control element was four men: a commander and his deputy, a morale officer, and a radioman. From left to right: Buzz Johnson, Val These are commando teams," Scotton stressed, Vahovich, Frank Scotton, and Joe "displacement teams. The idea was to go into Vaccaro contested areas and spend a few nights. But it was a local responsibility so they had to do it on their own." Scotton named his special PAT unit the Trung-doi biet kich Nham dou (people's commando teams). "Two functions split out of this," Scotton said. "First was pacification. Second was counter-terror." As Scotton noted, "The PRU thing directly evolves from this." The PRU, for Provincial Reconnaissance Unit, was the name given in 1966 to the CIA's counter-terror teams, which had generated a lot of negative publicity in 1965 when Ohio Senator Stephen Young charged that they disguised themselves as Vietcong and discredited the Communists by committing atrocities. "It was alleged to me that several of them executed two village leaders and raped some women," the Herald Tribune reported Young as saying. Notably, propagandists like Mark Moyar advocate today for the expansion of PRU counter-terror teams in Afghanistan. (See Consortium News, September 17, 2009, "A Bad Lesson For Afghanistan.") Staffing unilateral CIA programs is a crucial element, and to this end Scotton developed a "motivational indoctrination" program, which is certainly used today in

some form in Afghanistan and Iraq. Scotton's motivational indoctrination program was modeled on Communist techniques, and the process began on a confessional basis. "On the first day," according to Scotton, "everyone would fill out a form and write an essay on why they had joined." The team's morale officer "would study their answers and explain the next day why they were involved in a special unit. The instructors would lead them to stand up and talk about themselves." The morale officer's job, he said, "was to keep people honest and have them admit mistakes." Not only did Scotton co-opt Communist organizational and motivational techniques, but he also relied on Communist defectors as his cadre. "We felt ex-Vietminh had unique communication skills. They could communicate doctrine, and they were people who would shoot," he explained, adding, "It wasn't necessary for everyone in the unit to be ex-Vietminh, just the leadership." The Vietnamese officer in charge of Scotton's PAT program, Major Nguyen Be, had been party secretary for the Ninth NLF Battalion before switching sides. In copying the Communists, Scotton was selective. "People from the other side knew the value of motivation, but they confessed too much. So we refined the technique based on what the Vietminh disliked the most: that the party set itself up as the sole authority. We didn't have the party as number one. We had the group as the major motivational factor." By mid-1965 the CIA was using Be's 59-person model as its standard team, at which point the Rural Construction Cadre program was renamed the Revolutionary Development Cadre program. With larger teams and standardization came the need for more advisers, so Thomas Donohue, the CIA officer in charge of covert action in South Vietnam, began recruiting military men. Most came from U.S. Special Forces, though the regular Army, Navy and Marines also provide support personnel as "detailees" to the CIA. "We got to the point," Donohue told me, "where the CIA was running a political program in a sovereign country where they didn't know what the hell we were teaching. So I had Thieu and Ky down to Vung Tau, and I did all the right things. But what kind of program could it be that had only one sponsor, the CIA, that says it was doing good? It had to be sinister. Any red-blooded American could understand that. What the hell is the CIA doing running a program on political action? So I went out to try to get some cosponsors for the record. They weren't easy to come by. I went to [USIS chief] Barry Zorthian. I said, 'Barry, how about giving us someone?' I talked to MACV about getting an officer assigned. I had AID give me a guy." But all of it, Donohue said, "was window dressing. We [the CIA] had the funds; we had the logistics; we had the transportation." The same can be said for the PRTs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

PRTs in Iraq

The CIA's Provincial Reconstruction Teams started in Afghanistan in 2002 and

migrated to Iraq in 2004. PRTs consist of anywhere between 50-100 civilian and military specialists. A typical PRT has a military police unit, a psychological operations unit, an explosive ordinance/ de-mining unit, an intelligence team, medics, a force protection unit, and administrative and support personnel. Like Scotton's teams in South Vietnam, they conduct terror, as well as political and psychological operations, under cover of fostering economic development and democracy. Few people in Iraq are fooled by the "war as economic development" shell game or by the deceitful standards the U.S. government uses to measure the success of its PRT program. In his correspondence with reporter Dahr Jamail, one Iraqi political analyst from Fallujah (a city that was destroyed in order to save it) put it succinctly: "In a country that used to feed much of Arab world, starvation is the norm" (Dahr Jamail, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq). According to another of Jamail's correspondents, Iraqis "are largely mute witnesses. Americans may argue among themselves about just how much 'success' or 'progress' there really is in post-surge Iraq, but it is almost invariably an argument in which Iraqis are but stick figuresor dead bodies." The PRTs were initiated first in Afghanistan by Ambassador Khalilzad 2002, where the CIA was in charge and the military was secondary. When Khalilzad brought the practice with him to Iraq in 2005, the U.S. military played a bigger role than the CIA and, naturally, wanted control. Khalilzad preferred fielding fewer, larger teams that remained under the CIA, and maintained their own arrangements for basing and support. President Bush touted the PRTs on January 10, 2007, concurrent with the announcement of his "surge." In a nationally televised speech, he said 20,000 troops were being deployed, not to fight but, amazingly, to reduce violence. The surge in troops (and violence) was coupled with a humanitarian program (the PRTs) of neighborhood reconstruction. Smaller "ePRTs" were placed inside combat brigades while more of the larger "traditional" PRTs were sent into the country. Bush had 700 reconstruction advisors in Iraq in 2008. Obama has likely increased that number, as main force units are withdrawn.

Protecting People from Knowledge of CIA Terrorism

Despite the propaganda issued by mainstream media correspondents, the CIA has
long had a policy of targeting civilians not in the resistance for recruitment as agents and informants. Such civilians are, as part of U.S. policy, detained without charge and interrogated as a means of coercing information from them about the resistance. Civilians are also knowingly killed and maimed in drone attacks and intentionally killed in clandestine raids by CIA commandoes as a means of terrorizing the people from associating in any way with the resistance. Mainstream propagandists usually characterize innocent civilians as members of the enemy infrastructure and thus legitimate military targets. This big lie makes the unwitting reporters complicit in the terror they conceal. Another aspect of the dirty war you will not read about in the mainstream press is that the Afghan resistance and U.S.-Karzai puppet regime have an accommodation in which high ranking officials are off limits. The reason is simpleas soon as CIA hit teams start torturing and killing top resistance leaders, they will do the same to the Karzai people. As the suicide bombing at FOB Chapman makes clear, the resistance is upping the ante by targeting CIA officers who occupy the Afghans dig graves for the victims of U.S. death squads in late December pinnacle of prestige and power. This escalation of the conflict follows, not coincidentally, on the photo from www.rawa.org heels of Obama's announcement of a new "surge" in Afghanistan, which includes increased drone attacks as well as CIA commando operations targeting innocent women and children. As a result, the accommodation is teetering on the brink of collapse. The exchange of British journalist Peter Moore for an Iraqi "insurgent" in CIA custody was an example of how the accommodation works in Iraq. Moore was held by a Shia group allegedly allied to Iran, and his freedom depended entirely on reaching an accommodation with the captors. The details of such prisoner exchanges are never revealed, but involve secret negotiations by the CIA and the resistance over issues of strategic importance to both sides. Realistically, it is the accommodation which paves the path for reconciliation. Obama's dirty war in Afghanistan relies largely on such clandestine CIA operations. Often wives and children are used as bait to trap husbands or are killed as a way of punishing men in the resistance. Its unstated object is to rip families and, beyond that, the whole fabric of Afghan society apart, until the people accept American domination. However, as a result of the accommodation among political elites, the

CIA's dirty war necessarily targets middle and lower level peoplewhich, given the poor quality of intelligence available to counterinsurgents, is itself no easy task. This is typical of all attempts to conquer and pacify an occupied nation, be it the Gestapo terrorizing communist resistance fighters in Paris in WWII, or the Einsatzgruppen suppressing Russians partisans outside Leningrad. Robert Slater, the head of the CIA's Province Interrogation Center Program in Vietnam from 1967-1969, knew of no Province level VCI cadre ever being captured. District level people were sometimes captured, but were more likely killed in ambushes or raids. Mid-level cadres are rarely caught at their safe houses (because the locations are unknown), so secret agents always try to lure them to their homes. Because they are almost always caught at home (or while attending weddings or other public events), their families and friends are usually killed along with them. This makes the CIA happy, on the premise that terror will make the people submit. All of these factors push the counter-insurgent lower and lower down the hierarchy, until largely working class, innocent civilians alone are being targeted. In Vietnam the saying was, "Kill them all and let God sort them out."

Secret Government

Just as the CIA hides under PRTs, it lurks behind the Karzai government, which for
nearly eight years has been the public face of the CIA's parallel political apparatus in Afghanistan. President Obama is struggling to present the Karzai government in the best terms possible, though in reality it is no different than the corrupt political apparatus the CIA built in South Vietnam, where, in 1965, General Nguyen Cao Ky sold the CIA the right to institute its Revolutionary Development Program in exchange for a lucrative drug trafficking franchise. Likewise, the authors of a recent article for the McClatchy Newspapers noted that after U.S. militarists prevented any diplomatic solution in Afghanistan, Karzai was relieved at not having to make reforms. He even refused to send his drug dealing brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the political power in southern Kandahar province (where he sold the CIA the right to form and operate a CIA hit team), into honorable exile. This is symptomatic of secret government CIA-style. Fostering corruption is how the CIA convinces powerful figures to sell out their country. It doesn't matter that the corruption prevents the reforms that salespeople like Obama herald as our "mission." All that is necessary is that the faade be maintained.

In 2000 the Taliban successfully banned opium production, but since the advent of the U.S. and its Northern Alliance of warlords, opium cultivation has increased in the southern provinces "liberated from the Taliban control." Only the Western occupiers have the planes to fly the opium and heroin to the mob that sells it on the open market, but a steady stream of American and Afghan officials, through useful idiots in the mainstream media, claim that the Taliban alone is behind the trade and profiting from it. Corruption, upon which Obama's dirty war depends, has been guaranteed, along with the CIA's secret government and political assassins. The army of informants, interrogators, hit teams, and corrupt politicians allied to the U.S. understands the inherent stupidity of this strategy, but their prosperity and lives depend on U.S. patronage. So they implement policies they know are wrecking their country. As a result, the definition of "insurgent" gets skewed to mean anyone who is not allied to the U.S., and "counter-insurgency" becomes a shotgun method of population control.
Z

Douglas Valentine is the author of five books including his latest, The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped The DEA. A version of this article first appeared at www.consortiumnews.com.

Colonel Stan Fulcher: Veteran army intelligence officer and Phoenix coordinator in Binh Dinh Province, 1971-1973. The conscience of CIA Speaks, Fulcher, in an interview with Valentines research assistant Brendan McQuade, describes Phoenix in all its cultural, social and political dimensions. Wizened, iconoclastic, rational and critical, Fulcher puts Phoenix in its proper historical and contemporary perspective. Recording 1 Recording 2 Recording 3 Recording 4 Recording 5 Recording 6 Recording 7

Brigadier General James Hunt was a lieutenant colonel in 1971, Hunt ran the Phoenix training program in Saigon and Vung Tau. Privy to the inner-workings of the Phoenix Directorate, it bothered him that John Mason, the CIA officer in charge in 1970-1971, "blatantly lied." Hunt explains that, "Phoenix had been under the CIA; then MACV supposedly took it over. But we didn't really understand it, and that bothered us. There was always a suspicion. My impression

was that John Mason worked for Colby through Jake, but he also had a close relationship with the chief of station a professional relationship, back-channeling messages." Recording 1 Recording 2 Master Transcripts The Master Transcription List is provided only as a guide. It is not comprehensive or, in other cases, literally accurate. One can use it to search for specific "keywords" but it is not to be quoted from. Only a particular audio recording itself can serve as an undisputed source.

Brigadier General James Hunt was a lieutenant colonel in 1971, Hunt ran the Phoenix training program in Saigon and Vung Tau. Privy to the inner-workings of the Phoenix Directorate, it bothered him that John Mason, the CIA officer

in charge in 1970-1971, "blatantly lied." Hunt explains that, "Phoenix had been under the CIA; then MACV supposedly took it over. But we didn't really understand it, and that bothered us. There was always a suspicion. My impression was that John Mason worked for Colby through Jake, but he also had a close relationship with the chief of station - a professional relationship, back-channeling messages." Recording 1 Recording 2 Master Transcripts The Master Transcription List is provided only as a guide. It is not comprehensive or, in other cases, literally accurate. One can use it to search for specific "keywords" but it is not to be quoted from. Only a particular audio recording itself can serve as an undisputed source.

Muldoon 1 2 3 4 Photos John Muldoon was the CIA officer in charge of the Province Interrogation Center (PIC) Program 1964-1966. The PICs were a foundation stone, along with the counter-terror teams, upon which Brickham built the Phoenix Program. Six feet four inches tall, well over two hundred pounds, Muldoon has a booming bass voice remarkably like Robert Mitchums. In his uninhibited, unapologetic, and inimitable fashion, Muldoon gives a lecture on the CIAs interrogation program and practices that should be required listening for any serious student of the Vietnam War and War on Terror. Recording 1 Recording 3 Recording 5 Recording 2 Recording 4 Recording 6 Master Transcripts The Master Transcription List is provided only as a guide. It is not comprehensive or, in other cases, literally accurate. One can use it to search for specific "keywords" but it is not to be quoted from. Only a particular audio tape itself can serve as an undisputed source.

Evan J. Parker Jr. was the senior CIA officer William Colby chose as the first director of the Phoenix Program in Saigon. A graduate of Cornell and a colleague of Colbys in the elite OSS unit the Jedburghs, Parker was the CIAs ranking expert on unconventional warfare. He had superstar status; he brought the veneer of respectability to the Phoenix program that Colby badly wanted. Soft spoken yet firm, Parker expresses his discomfort as a company man saluting and following orders in a program that he found at times to be tragically ineffective, if not hideous. Recording 1 Recording 2 Related Link Recording 3 Recording 4

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Phoenix And The Anatomy Of Terror

by Alexander Cockburn And Jeffrey St. Clair Ledeen is seriously proposing that the Bush Administration conduct a counter-terror campaign against its political opposition in America, through its nascent domestic political police force, the OHS. But this impending attack has yet to begin, and there is still time to prepare for the repression to come. And one very good way of preparing is by putting the current emergency situation in an historical context. Doing that is the object this article, in order to provide the potential dissident (Left, Right, or otherwise) with a better understanding of the challenges he or she will be facing in the future. While the OHS appeared immediately after the tragic events of 11 September, like a rabbit pulled from a magicians star-spangled hat, its important to understand that it has been at least four years in the making. Based on studies and predictions that a catastrophic terror attack was inevitable, the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (co-haired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman) had proposed an OHS-type entity in January 2001. But the original concept for a domestic counter-terror, internal security program is much older, and was first designed and formalized 35 years ago by members of the CIAs Saigon station. The CIA believed that in order to win the Vietnam War, it had to destroy the political and administrative organizationwhat it called the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI)that managed the insurgency. The CIA based this belief on the assumption that opposing ideological factions were battling for the loyalty of the complacent Vietnamese masses, and that the VCI were winning the war for the hearts of minds of the masses through the use of armed propaganda and selective terror, meaning the cold-blooded murder and mutilation of government officials. In response, the CIA created its first official counter-terror program in 1964, as CIA Station Chief Peer DeSilva explained it in his autobiography, Sub Rosa, to bring danger and death to the VCI who were managing the reign of terror. DeSilvas statement is the key to understanding that language, or more precisely information management, is the most important weapon in political warfare. This becomes self-evident when one realizes that, by DeSilvas

definition, counter-terrorism is just another word for terrorism. They mean exactly the same thing, except that counter-terrorism is justifiable terrorism because its aimed at them not us. Us in 1964 included our proxy, the Government of Vietnam, and in order to provide the GVN with internal security, the CIA, along with the initiation of its counter-terror program, began constructing a gulag archipelago of secret interrogation centers in South Vietnams 44 provinces. (These fortresses, which were surrounded by high walls and gun towers, and equipped with real time communication systems to CIA central in Saigon, were built by Pacific Architects and Engineers.) Four regional centers also were built, and an existing national interrogation center was modernized in Saigon. The interrogation centers were staffed by South Vietnams plainclothes secret policemen, and advised and funded by undercover CIA liaison officers. The Vietnamese secret police, which functioned like the FBI in America, established a nation-wide informant network to identify VCI and their sympathizers. Informants were recruited in every district, village, and hamlet in Vietnam. On the basis of an accusation made by a single anonymous informant, a VCI suspect or sympathizer could be arrested and detained indefinitely under the An Tri (administrative detention) Laws. As is happening everyday in Israel, and has been widely proposed as the only viable means of dealing with the threat of terror in America, suspects and sympathizers were put in an interrogation center and tortured until they confessed, informed, died, or were sent to Stalinist internal security tribunals (like Bush is proposing) for disposition. Backed by the Pentagons overwhelming firepower, the CIA, with its counter-terror and interrogation center programs, was a formidable foe. And yet the Viet Cong insurgents, armed only with sticks and stones, steadily gained popular support; and by 1966, the CIAs brain trust had concluded that the problem was organizational, not conceptual. The perceived problem was that the gritty covert action officers, who advised the paramilitary counter-terror teams, were not properly sharing intelligence with the CIAs refined liaison officers, who advised the secret police at the torture centers. Nor was there any way of coordinating intelligence among any of the other, 25 some-odd entitiesincluding the U.S. army, navy and air forcethat were involved in every aspect of the war in South Vietnam. The solution concocted by the organizational geniuses in the CIAs Saigon station was ICEXthe Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program. Created in June 1967, ICEX was directed by senior CIA officer Evan J. Parker. A veteran of OSS Detachment 101, Parker had served in Burma in the Second World War, and after joining the CIA, served his first tour in Vietnam in 1950, working closely with Frances leading expert in counterinsurgency and opium smuggling, Colonel Roger Trinquier. Parker managed a staff of CIA and military officers in Saigon. As part of a support program authorized by President Lyndon Johnson, Parker, with CIA station chief Lou Lapham, also supervised 44 CIA contract officersone for each provincewho were assigned as ICEX field officers. ICEX was soon renamed the sexier-sounding Phoenix Program, and the 44 Phoenix advisors began coordinating the Counter-Terror and Interrogation Center Programs, as well as all other intelligence, security, and counter-insurgency programs in their provinces. Phoenix centers were eventually established in almost every district in South Vietnam, and from the district offices, secret policemen and counter-terror teams conducted operations in almost every village and hamlet. Phoenix Director Evan Parker was the overall coordinator in Saigon, just as Tom Ridge is the overall OHS coordinator in Washington. Like Phoenix, the OHS will likely establish field offices in the 50 states, and all of Americas major cities. In order to achieve its elusive goal of internal security, the OHS, like Phoenix, will need to extend its informant net into every American town. Inevitably, every town will probably be required to form an OHS Committee, which, like the traditional Zoning and Education committees, will be composed of average citizens. The chair of the OHS Committee, however, will be selected for his or her loyalty and ability to process confidential reports sent by concerned citizens (informants) about the activities of the Bush Administrations political opponents. Perhaps once every week these reports will be forwarded to the OHS committee at the county level. The county committee will review the reports and send the most urgent ones to the state committee. At each level, OHS Committees are more likely to be staffed by avid Bush supporters. In other words, the reports will pass through an ideological filter. The prime suspects identified at Ridges national OHS headquarters will not be flag wavers, but peace activists,

feminists, environmentalists, people opposing globalization, liberals and Leftistsin short, anyone posing a political challenge to the reactionary right wing and the internal security forces that are firmly in its grip. What makes such a system especially dangerous is that Attorney General John Ashcroft has vowed to arrest and detain any suspected terrorist who has violated the law, and has promised airtight surveillance of thembut he has yet to define what a suspected terrorist is. This is what happened in Vietnam too. There was never any consensus about the definition of a VCI sympathizer: at best, it was tacitly understood by the ideologues, and the security forces under there control, that a person was either for us or against us. Moreover, as the CIAs internal security gurus espoused, it wasnt enough just to be for us, passively: one had to be actively against them. So the definition of a terrorist suspect is deliberately left open, paving the way for political repression. The antiterror legislation passed by Congress and signed by Bush allows for secret searches of the homes of people who meet the nebulous criteria of suspected terrorist. No doubt these secret searches violate the Fourth Amendment, so Ashcroft, again lifting a page from the Phoenix playbook, has vowed to employ new tools that ease administrative burdens. Already around 1000 terrorist suspects have been arrested and detained indefinitely under these new administrative procedures. In Vietnam, administrative detention was the legal nail on which the Phoenix Program hung. Under the An Tri administrative detention laws, supporting the VCI was a crime of status. It was exactly like being a Palestinian in Israel today: one is guilty of who one is, not what one does. Indeed, administrative detention was prescribed only in cases where there wasnt sufficient evidence to convict a person for a crime. One didnt have to carry a weapon or shelter a VCI suspect. Ones thoughts were reason enough for the secret police to make a midnight arrest, no warrant required, or for the counter-terror teams to conduct an assassination. Simply advocating peace was punishable by indefinite detention, and due process was totally non-existent. There was no right to an attorney, no right to confront ones accusers, no justice at all. Thus the system was a boondoggle for corrupt officials, especially those who sat on the internal security councils that disposed of suspects. As legendary CIA officer Lou Conein said, Phoenix was a great blackmail scheme for the Government of Vietnam. Do what I say, or youre VC. Anyone who expects anything different from the OHS is living in a dream world. Four years after the Phoenix Program was initiated, on 15 July 1971, the New York Times revealed that 26,843 nonmilitary Vietcong insurgents and sympathizers had been neutralized in the previous 14-month period. During Congressman Hearings that were being held at the time, Representative Ogden Reid (D-NY) asked William Colby, the CIA officer in overall charge of the Phoenix Program, Are you certain that we know a loyal member of the VCI from a loyal member of the South Vietnamese citizenry? Colby said, No. But the Nixon Administration, under the guidance of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, was prepared to defend its pet project, and when Congressman Paul McCloskey (R-CA) claimed that Phoenix violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war, CIA legal experts argued that Article 3 applied only to sentencing for crimes, and does not prohibit a state from interning civilians or subjecting them to emergency detention when such measures are necessary for the security or safety of the state. Using the most advanced Orwellian terminology, they claimed that torture, summary execution, and indefinite detention, all carried out without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, were perfectly legal, precisely because they were the result of administrative procedures and did not involve a criminal sentence. As noted, double-speak is at the very crux of the current counter-terror campaign in America, and it was through the Phoenix internal security Program that the CIA refined psychological warfare (psywar) into the political art form it is today. Because no one wanted to have his name on a Phoenix blacklist, or his face on a Phoenix Wanted Poster, and because fear of upsetting a Phoenix official was the most effective means of creating informers and defectors, the CIA launched an intensive publicity campaign called the Popular Information Program. Under the banner of Protecting People from Terrorism, Phoenix psywar teams crisscrossed the countryside, using CIA-supplied radios, leaflets, posters, TV shows, movies, banners, and loudspeakers mounted on trucks and sampans to spread the word.

The goal was to convince the public that only traitors didnt support the government, and that its security forces were ubiquitous, like God; and thus a typical broadcast would say, You know who you are, John Smith. We know where you live! We know you are a traitor and a lackey of the terrorists. Soon the soldiers and police will come to get you. Rally now, John Smith, before its too late! The Phoenix Directorate also produced a movie explaining how Phoenix Helps Protect People From Terrorism, and hundreds of thousands of cartoon books were distributed to the same end. As is happening in Afghanistan, where propaganda leaflets describe the Taliban as anti-Islamic, Phoenix leaflets portrayed Communism as a socially destructive force that violated traditional Confucian beliefs. Last but not least, in keeping with the dictum that it wasnt enough to passively support the government, that one had to actively seek out the enemy in order to prove ones loyalty, the Phoenix Directorate taught village chiefs how to conduct classes on the spiritual value of government internal security programs. One can expect exactly the same avalanche of propaganda, only in far more sophisticated form, from Tom Ridge and any OHS committees that are established across America. Think of it as a DARE Program, hinging on some vague definition of a suspected terrorist, but aimed at everyone, not just children. Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Three: Chaos and Political Terrorism in America Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIAs torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

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Chaos And Political Terrorism In America

by Alexander Cockburn And Jeffrey St. Clair The similarities between the Phoenix Program and the OHS are obvious, and with its computerized database of terrorist suspects, Phoenix is certainly the organizational model for an OHS-style counter-terror program based on intelligence coordination and exploitation. 3 But as everyone is aware, the threat of radical Islamic terrorism is not comparable to the insurgency in Vietnam. In that case America rushed to defend a hapless ally, thousands of miles away, much as we did in Kuwait. In the present situation, the OHS has been created to defend us from terrorists on our own turf. Its counter-terror function is equivalent to that of providing internal security, in so far as the Bush Administration defines internal security in political terms. Historically, and ironically, the U.S. Government considered Native Americans as our homelands first domestic terrorists, and various methods were devised to deal with the threat, such as the distribution of blankets infected with smallpox. Abolitionists, whether peaceful or violent like John Brown, also were regarded as terrorists, and for decades the reactionary right wing of American civilization, and its unreconstructed representatives in the government (many of

whom still hold office), regarded the Ku Klux Klan as a legitimate means of countering the terror of Emancipation. Indeed, until today, the reactionary right wing still considers a genuine American to be an active proponent of this ideology, with its repulsive mix of racial purity, patriotism, and Christian fundamentalism, with its divine savior nailed to the cross, a symbol of the spiritual terror that enabled our Founding Fathers to rationalize slavery in the land of free and the home of brave. Segregation persisted as unstated policy, and by the late 19th Century, organized labor had emerged as our homelands new breed of domestic political terrorists; and after private police forces proved ineffective in eliminating the unions, the U.S. Government created the FBI to nullify the threat labor posed to its Robber Baron patrons. The FBI quickly established that foreigners (mostly Jews, Bolsheviks and immigrants with no rightful claim to America as their homeland) were controlling the labor movement. Over the years Communists replaced Bolshevists, and eventually Civil Rights and Anti-War activists were added to the hit list of domestic terroristsall of which brings us the FBIs notorious Counter Intelligence Program. Created in the late 1950s, COINTELPRO was designed to neutralize radical political movements inside the U.S. In its attempt to provide decent Americans with internal security, the FBI employed agent provocateurs, conducted burglaries, engaged in black propaganda (disinformation), fraud, and perhaps in the case of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and several other black leaders, outright assassination. 4 But COINTELPRO failed to neutralize Americas Anti-War and Civil Rights insurgency, and by 1967, President Johnson and the FBI were sensing the presence of foreign intelligence agencies. And the mere fear that the KGB was directing the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements provided the FBI with the pretext to enlist the CIA in domestic intelligence operations. The precipitating event was a February 1967 expose in Ramparts magazine, which revealed that the CIA had suborned the leadership of the National Student Association. The exposure of this illegal CIA domestic activity prompted even moderate students to join and support radical, alternative organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society. The Anti-War movement blossomed like never before. The Ramparts revelation, and the resulting surge in anti-establishment activities, was deemed to be a Soviet provocation, and confirmed the FBIs suspicions that foreign agitators were fueling the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements, so Johnson ordered the CIA to investigate Robert Scheer, the author of the Ramparts article. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms gave the job to veteran CIA officer Richard Ober, a Harvard graduate (1943), World War II veteran, and member of the CIAs counter-intelligence staff. And thus came Operation Chaoswhich, with its counterpart organizations in the Justice Department and White House, enabled the CIA and political ideologues to get involved in internal security operations such as will be conducted by the OHS. 5 Obers Counter-Intelligence, Special Operations Group (CI/SOG), codenamed MHCHAOS, was created in August 1967, concurrent with the Phoenix Program (and for a similar purpose), and existed until March 1974. Its initial mission, ostensibly on behalf of the FBI, was to collect intelligence information on radical domestic political groups, to discover if they were being manipulated by foreign intelligence agencies. To coordinate Chaos and COINTELPRO operations, Johnsons attorney general, Ramsay Clark, created the Interdepartmental Intelligence Unit (IDIU) within the Justice Departments Internal Security Division. Ober became the CIAs representative on the IDIU, which (like the OHS) was managed by senior members from the White House staff. In other words, from its inception, CIA intelligence information on dissidents was reported to people whose primary interest was in politics, not internal security. Upon assuming office in January 1969, President Nixon immediately grasped the partisan political potential of the IDIU, which he moved under the Civil Rights Division. In June 1969, through his advisor on Domestic Affairs, John Deanand Deans youthful assistant, Tom HustonNixon directed Ober to engage Chaos in covert actions against dissidents. Ober was assigned a deputy and a case officer whose names remain secret until today. The deputy and the case officer moved into Obers suite of offices in a vault in the basement at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Among the rooms was a library where files were kept and where slides of suspects and potential recruits were viewed. Several female CIA officers managed the precious, super secret Chaos files.

Central to Chaos was its super-secrecy. Assignment to CI/SOG was considered a command performance, and security was commensurate with the responsibility. Ober, at the direction of his immediate supervisor, CounterIntelligence Chief James Angleton, devised a communications system exclusively for Chaos cables and couriers to overseas stations. These back-channels by-passed the geographical division chiefs and reached right into the stations, to trusted counter-intelligence officers. In some cases Chaos by-passed the station chiefs, and corresponded directly with its unilateral assets and representatives in a country. Chaos traffic carried the highest security classification, was restricted only to those involved in the operation (as were Chaos files), and was inaccessible even to the CIAs top administrators, often for their own protection. Based on names provided by the FBI (and the CIAs Offices of Security, Domestic Contacts, Foreign Resources, and Domestic Operations 6 ) the Chaos case officer in October 1969 began recruiting double agents from within the Black Power and Anti-War movements. The case officer approached only those people with radical credentials. Only those who proved trustworthy (some were polygraphed, others given psychological assessments) were recruited. Recruits were given a training course in the clandestine arts, supplied with the proper technical equipment and sufficient funds, sheep-dipped (meaning their records were falsified), and then sent overseas. The case officer referred to his 40-50 double agents as dangles, because their job was to operate as a dissident normally would, and hope that a foreign intelligence agent would make an approach. With the approval of Nixons National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, the Pentagon joined in the counter-terror effort through a secret committee formed under the aforementioned Tom Huston, and began leveling requirements on the Chaos unit. The Pentagon was intent on tracking deserters, and gathering information on foreign nationals who were attempting to persuade American soldiers to desert from military bases in Germany. Chaos dangles were sent to North Vietnam, North Africa and Cuba, and one Chaos agent, possibly Timothy Leary, was launched against Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria. Here it is important to remember that Bush has granted the CIA unprecedented freedom to coordinate with law enforcement and military officials, through the OHS. Previous restrictions on CIA domestic operations have been waived. As Bob Woodward reported in the 21 October Washington Post, CIA covert action is now a key element in defending America from terrorist attacks. Every day the CIA provides the Bush Administrations top national security and intelligence officialsincluding OHS Director Tom Ridgewith current intelligence on possible bombings, hijackings or poisonings within the U.S. But other than the anthrax outbreak, which appears to be the work of the radical right, none of the threats has materialized, and there is no way of knowing if, as the CIA is wont to do, the anthrax outbreak has been manufactured for purely political and psychological warfare reasons. It also is likely that the CIA, on behalf of the OHS, will start sprinkling Chaos-type dangles overseas, and within the United States, to tempt terrorists into exposing themselves. It is a chilling prospect, but these dangles may exist only on paper, with the sole purpose of contriving reasons to launch counter-terror operations against opponents of Bush Administration policy. Hundreds of businesses and institutions across the country have already been placed on the CIAs watch list. According to Woodward, one Bush official said that merely being on the list could destroy the livelihood of all those organizations without a bomb being thrown or a spore of anthrax being released. Loss of livelihood is perhaps the heaviest psychological hammer a security agency can hold over a middle class Americans head. But thats what its come down to. You Dont Need A Weatherman Incidental to their role as dangles designed to entrap foreign agents, Chaos agents reported on U.S. citizens. A folder, or hard file, was created for each suspected dissident the CIA targeted. The folder contained the dissidents 201 personality file, as well as Situation Reports about his or her radical activities. The 201 file included every scrap of biographical information about the person, from arrest records to report cards to surreptitious photos taken of the person with other suspects. Some 7-10,000 hard files were eventually assembled. In May 1970, Chaos chief Richard Ober starting entering the information from his index cards and hard files onto IBM cards, and compiling them in a data base codenamed HYDRA, which ultimately contained the names of some

300,000 people. HYDRA was developed at the same time as the Phoenix computer system in Vietnam. A mail intercept program codenamed HTLINGUAL also was part of the Chaos operation. Thirty years later, far more sophisticated databases exist in the United States, and so much information is already available on every American citizen, that a computerized, national ID card system isnt required to keep track of everyone. But the on-going anthrax scare, which may be a CIA provocation, could serve as the pretext to institute, under the OHS, a mail intercept program similar to HTLINGUAL. And OHS Director Tom Ridge already has a deputy, cyber security expert Richard Clarke, to monitor and ultimately censor all politically incorrect Internet information. As is well known, the paranoid Nixon Administrationwhose ideology is compatible with Bushswas ruthless in the application of its executive authority to attack its domestic political enemies under the aegis of national security. To this end, the Nixon Administration formed the IDIUs secret Intelligence Evaluation Committee in December 1970 under Robert Mardian, the assistant attorney general in charge of Internal Security. Mardian reported directly to Nixons attorney general, John Mitchell. A major player in Nixons illegal political and fundraising schemes, Mitchell was sentenced for his Watergate crimes in February 1975. Bushs right wing attorney general, John Ashcroft, will be a major player at OHS, and can be expected to play the same partisan political role for Bush as Mitchell played for Nixon. Indeed, it is evident from the records of the 1975 Report by the Presidents Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States that Chaos agents, at the behest of White House officials, operated domestically, illegally, and that Chaos operations were directed against non-violent dissidents, including Daniel Ellsberg, the Berrigan Brothers, Tom Hayden, and others. Many of these activists had important political connections, and by association, Left politicians came under Chaos scrutiny. The coverage was vast, and in order to advance policies he wished to keep secret from the secretaries of State and Defense, Kissinger kept close track of the most critical Chaos operations, especially agent operations that might impact his secret peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. One of Chaos most important agents played a critical though undisclosed role at the May 1971 anti-war demonstrations in Washington. DC. And at least one Chaos agent may have been involved in the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon. Yes, by 1971 Ober and the Chaos unit were working for Nixons secret team of political dirty tricksters, the infamous Plumbers. Master Plumber G. Gordon Liddy, a deranged former FBI agent with a penchant for eating live rats, actually leveled requirements on Ober at the Intelligence Evaluation Committee. Before Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, were imprisoned for burglarizing the office of Ellsbergs psychiatrist, they directed Ober to spy on members of other government agencies, as well as on Nixons political and bureaucratic enemies. Ober, who died earlier this year, is thought to have reacted negatively to this ultimate violation of the Constitution, and at least one researcher has suggested that he may have been Woodwards Deep Throat. But theres never any guarantee that any CIA officer will ever break ranks, and the threat of Nixon-style abuses loom large under the OHS and the illegitimate Bush Administration, with its fascist ideology and unprecedented, dictatorial emergency powers. The Shell Game Incredible power was concentrated in the Chaos office. Ober was the CIAs liaison to the National Commission on Civil Disorders and to the Ginsburg Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. He was the CIAs liaison to the protean Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and to the Special Services units (Red Squads) of Americas major metropolitan police departments. He reported directly to DCI Richard Helms (later convicted of lying to Congress about the CIAs major role in the violent coup that toppled the elected government of Chile, and resulted in the torture and murder of thousands of Leftists), and he sat on the Huston Committee, which was chaired by FBI Counter Intelligence chief William C. Sullivan (assassinated in 1977). 7

However, by mid-1972, CIA Executive Director William E. Colby was concerned that revelations of illegal CIA domestic political activities, on behalf of the Nixon Administration, might destroy the Agency. The big problem was Obers association with rat-eater Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer Howard Hunt, and it is probably not a coincidence that the Chaos case officer was reassigned concurrently with the 17 June 1972 arrest of the five Watergate buggers. The IDIU was dissolved six months later. By September 1973, Colby was the new Director of Central Intelligence, and had prepared a list of the CIAs family jewels, an array of illegal domestic activitiesnow legal under the Bush Administrationwhich Colby felt should be revealed. The abuses included spying on politicians and government agencies, helping other agencies conduct domestic surveillance, and following U.S. citizens abroad. Colby blamed counter-intelligence chief James Angleton for the public relations disaster, and forced his retirement, amid much bitterness and rancor. But Colbys limited hangout and scapegoating of Angleton were part of a clever shell game, and the Chaos staff continued to conduct name traces, and follow dissidents abroad, and respond to FBI and military requirements. Everything was exactly the same as before, including the ultra-secure communications system and restricted filing system, except now it was acceptable because it was done under the aegis of counter-terrorism. Colby started the ball rolling in July 1972, when he assigned Ober a second job as Chief of the CIAs newly created International Terrorism Group (ITG). Ober told the Rockefeller Commission that his new responsibility was setting up and running a central program within the CIA of information on international terrorism and hijackings, and very possibly the penetration of terrorist training camps in Algeria, Cuba and other enemy states. The ITG also kept track of homeland-based black militants and white racists with international terror connections. ITG reports were, like Chaos reports, were sent to Kissinger at the National Security Council. Obers appointment as chief of ITG coincided with the establishment of Nixons Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism, the first U.S. Government entity of its kind. But even after the official termination of Chaos in March 1974, the ITG continued to exist in the same suite of offices in the same vault in the CIAs basement. In March 1974 Ober was assigned other duties and a new ITG chief (not named in the Rockefeller Commission Report) was assigned. The second ITG chief (perhaps Lawrence K. White), had no deputy or case officer, and was assisted by approximately ten female file clerks in what is described as basically an analytical capacity. But ITG operations still relied on the Chaos folders and computer tapes, which were maintained and updated. As of 1975, despite the recommendations of several Congressional Committees, no Chaos files had been destroyed, because the CIA could not adequately define a dissident. Senior CIA officer John Ryan became the third ITG chief in April 1975 and served until 1977, when he was replaced by veteran CIA officer Howard Bane. While Chaos was evolving into the CIAs International Terrorism Group, the Phoenix Programwhich did not expire with South Vietnam in April 1975was being employed as the model for a worldwide anti-terrorism unit in the CIAs paramilitary Special Operations Division (SOD). Its main proponents, all veterans of the Phoenix Program, had climbed the corporate ladder and were in positions to turn their monster loose on all mankind. Colby, the father of Phoenix and its staunchest defender before Congressional Hearings in 1970 and 1971, appointed his close friend, Evan Parker (the first Phoenix Director) as chief of the SOD in 1973. Parker awarded CIA officer Robert Wall (self-described as the grandfather of Phoenix, for his pioneering work on a pilot program in 1966) the first terrorism account, and then began reorganizing the SOD to fight Communist insurgencies, using the Phoenix anti-terrorism model.8 The CIAs resident counter-terrorists found willing allies, invariably fascist military dictators, around the world, and gladly taught them how to terrorize entire nations into submission, through the arcane art of political and psychological warfare. Perhaps the CIAs greatest success, in this regard, was achieved in the midst of the Watergate scandal, under the supervision of Kissinger, Colby, and the CIAs Western Hemisphere Division chief, Theodore Shackley.

Donald Freed in Death In Washington (p 83-84) describes the CIAs covert action that resulted in the bloody rightwing military coup in Chile September 1973. Devised by the CIAs resident black propaganda expert, David Atlee Phillips, the plan used classic depth psychology and behavior modification techniques to program individual Chileans toward a destiny of victims or executioners. The CIA aim was to serialize and atomize the Chilean people by using psychological terror to fractionate what had been growing popular unity behind (Allendes) government. Freed explains that, Under the CIA program the middle classes had to be organized to save freedom, the military to impose temporary controls, the workers to give up their drive for power. The centerpiece of the CIAs Track II plan to overthrow the elected government of Chile, by terrorizing the middle class through incredible acts of violence, was the widespread publication of pictures of a man who was allegedly quartered by radical leftistsbut who in fact was mutilated by the CIAs proxies in the Chilean secret service, DINA. This ability to commit the most horrific acts of terror, and successfully blame them on its enemies through black propaganda, is what makes the CIAs inclusion in the OHS so dangerous. This one-two punch, in conjunction with the CIAs expertise at provoked responses and false flag recruitments, also makes the CIA itself a prime suspect in the terror attacks of 11 September, and the current propaganda campaign being waged in America now, as a pretext to threaten terror against the Bush Administrations domestic political opponents, as well as to win support from the terrified middle class for the illegitimate Bush regime. Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Four: The Terrorism Account Goes Underground Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIAs torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

November 08, 2001 Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on googleMore Sharing Services0 Homeland Insecurity by Douglas Valentine

The Terrorism Account Goes Underground

by Douglas Valentine As noted earlier, terrorism and counter-terrorism are the same thing, and as Michael McClintock notes in Instruments of Statecraft, CIA instructors in the early 1970s trained students in making criminal terrorist devices and in assassination methods. A four-week course took place at the Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas, where students were given courses in terrorist concepts, fabrication of terrorist devices, and assassination weapons. As McClintock notes, the Los Fresnos Bomb School officials offered courses not in bomb disposal but in bomb making. It is critically important to understand that members of the CIAs paramilitary Special Operations Divisions are the people who provide this instruction, and that they themselves are the worlds leading experts in the various tools of the terror trade. The abolition of the Bomb School in 1974, however, did not deter the CIAs terror experts, and they devised other methods of training foreign secret policemen and paramilitaries to terrorize communist insurgents. Much of the

training took at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, or was conducted by the SODs stable of counter-terrorists, working undercover as private consultants. Nor did the CIAs unilateral terror operations cease with Nixons resignation, in utter disgrace, in August 1974, nor did it abate with the ascension of Americas first unpresident Gerald Ford. Not even a series of Congressional investigations into CIA abuses, starting in 1974 and continuing through 1977, could keep the CIA from making its appointed rounds. And its no coincidence that the current Presidents father, in one brief year, oversaw one of the CIAs most horrendous terror campaigns. CIA terror activities flourished from January 1976 until January 1977 under DCI George H. W. Bush, with much of the terror taking place in Latin America, through a network of proxy foreign intelligence service united under Operation Condor (the CIAs version of Phoenix in South America) and operating closely with several CIAsupported anti-Castro Cuban terrorist groups, including CNM (Cuban Nationalist Movement), CORU (Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations) and Omega Seven. Two Cuban terrorists with direct ties to the CIA, Luis Posada Carrilles and Dr. Orlando Bosch, blew a Cuban plane out of the sky in October 1976, killing 73 people. But the CIA never pursued either man, and neither was ever convicted of the crime. On the contrary, the CIA protected them, because both were involved, through DCI Bush, his Assistant Deputy Director of Operations, Ted Shackley, and the Chilean secret service, DINA, in the 21 September 1976 assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in downtown Washington, D.C. As in most other terror incidents committed by the CIAs assets while Bush was DCI, that crime too has gone unpunished. The ITG continued to exist under DCI Bush, but only in an analytical capacity, and Bushs anti-terrorism expert, Ted Shackley, managed actual counter-terror operations out of his hip pocket. Having managed the CIAs counterterror and interrogation center programs in Vietnam, as chief of station from 1969 through 1971, Shackley was well qualified for the anti-terrorism job. He was aware of where the effort needed to be directed, and terrorist training camps in Libya, Angola, and Iran ranked high on his list of targets, along with established terrorist organizations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But Shackley and Bush were painfully aware that Gerald Ford was considered illegitimate by the American public, and was destined to lose the 1976 elections to whatever candidate the Democrats threw at the Republicans. And so in mid-1976 they began contracting the important work to mercenaries and SOD operators who voluntarily retired or resigned. It was arranged for these contractors to obtain employment in a few select foreign intelligence services, and several proprietary oil equipment, shipping and computer consulting companies established by veteran CIA agent, and notorious rogue elephant, Edwin P. Wilson. Having resigned from the CIA in 1971 to pursue million dollar business ventures in several terrorist-infected nations around the world, and having been fired from the Office of Naval Intelligences super secret Task Force 157 in April 1976, Wilson was the perfect deniable deep cover agent. Thus in mid-1976, at the direction of DCI Bush and ADDO Shackley, the secret governments counter-terror apparatus, manifest as a private enterprise owned and operated by Death Merchant Wilson and his unsavory associates (including Shackley himself, CIA officer Tom Clines, Hussem Salem, and perhaps, as a silent partner, Air Force General Richard Secord, in EATSCOthe Egyptian American Transport and Services Company), began its slow and steady descent off the CIAs organizational chart. As a result of this shell game, little changed when President Jimmy Carter named Admiral Stansfield Turner as his Director of Central Intelligence. In response to negative publicity about the CIAs reign of terror under Bush, and his right wing predecessors, and in response to Carters policy of stressing Human Rights over covert action, Turner drastically reduced the SOD in size, firing 600 employees in what became known as the Halloween Massacre of October 1977. Turner also scraped Air America, the CIAs private air force, and named James Glerum, a former executive with Air America, as Evan Parkers replacement as head of the SOD. But Turners purge merely earned Carter the same degree of hatred the national security elite naturally felt toward Clinton, and thanks to the off-the-shelf Enterprise established by Bush and Shackley, the purge failed to curb CIA abuses. Holding their hatred close to their hearts, those CIA terror experts still on the payroll burrowed deep within

the labyrinth at Langley headquarters, and began courting their right wing supporters in the media, academia, private enterprise, and the Republican Party. To assure Carters defeat in the 1980 elections, they instructed their domestic assets in the intricacies of political warfarePhoenix-related skills such as population control through psychological warfare, discrediting and compromising ones political enemies through covert actions, the development of political cadre within the officer corps, the placement of indoctrinated military officers in control of civilian security forces like the OHS, and, of course, selective terror and assassination. Psychological operations were especially important in the covert political war being waged by the right wing during the Carter Administration. In the shadows of this propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the American public, the CIAs privateers mounted covert actions below the radar of top Carter Administration officials. They forged secret alliances with proxy nations, such as Israel and Taiwan, which taught Latin American landowners how to organize criminals into vigilante death squads, which then murdered and terrorized labor leaders, Human Rights activists, and all other enemies of the various oligarchies, including our own. To compensate for the reduction in size of the SOD and the loss of the CIAs air force, the military branches began beefing up their own terror capabilities. The Army assembled Delta Force, the Air Force formed its own special operations unit, and the Navy organized SEAL Team Six. In these ways the national security elite was able to subvert Carters Human Rights policy, just as they were able to characterize Clinton as immoral and unpatriotic, and establish the basis of public mistrust that would enable them to drive Carter from office through a disingenuous political and psychological warfare campaign in 1980. 9 The Office of Terrorism This is an historical overview, and in order to fully inform potential dissidents and subjects of homeland insecurity, it is necessary to pause and go back in time, briefly. By late 1977, when Howard Bane was assigned as chief of the CIAs new Office of Terrorism, the threat of international terrorism had captured the imagination of the world. Terror incidents had been increasing since the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Israeli Army, anticipating an attack by its neighbors, occupied vast tracks of Palestinian territory. (The Six Day, notably, occurred simultaneously with the birth of Phoenix and Chaos.) In response to the Israeli land grab, Wadi Haddad formed the Popular Front of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (which itself was formed in 1964). Popular Front terrorists staged the worlds first major terrorist act in 1968, hijacking an El Al 707 passenger aircraft en route from Rome to Tel Aviv, and forcing it to land in Algiers. After a month of negotiations the passengers were released unharmed. But no land was returned to the Palestinians and instead, the Israelis started bombing Palestinian terrorist training camps in Jordan. The cycle of violence escalated and on 6 September 1970, in an event that hauntingly resembled that of 11 September, Haddad ordered the simultaneous hijacking of four airliners bound for New York. 10 In February 1972 a Popular Front team hijacked a Lufthansa airliner with 172 passengers, including Joseph Kennedy, son of the late Robert Kennedy. Again there were negotiations, and a ransom was paid, and Kennedy and the other hostages were released. But the policy of negotiating with terrorists began to lose its appeal after Palestinian terrorists seized a group of Israeli athletes and their coaches at the Munich Olympics. The situation ended with a gun battle in which nine Israeli athletes and five terrorists were killed. Meanwhile, more and more dissident groups began to adopt terror as a method of waging political war. Chief among them were the PLOs Black September, Germanys Baader-Meinhof gang, Frances Action-Direct, and Italys Red Brigade. Carlos the Jackal became a famous terrorist for hire and held OPEC hostage in 1976. By 1977 the notion of state-sponsored terrorism had also emerged, and was attributed to Libya and Iraq, both of which were said to have Soviet backing. As a result, DCI Turner directed Howard Bane to organize the CIA against the new threat of terrorism. But according to Bane, counter-terrorism was a hot potato and a low priority, and because of the seemingly endless

Congressional investigations into CIA abuses, Turner was hung up on the definition of terror. He was insisting that CIA officers refer to counter-insurgency as low intensity warfare, and in his effort to polish up the CIAs image, Turner renamed the ITG the Office of Terrorism. Again, it was just a shell game, and the Bush-Shackley Enterprise continued to operate off the reservation. In the meantime, Bane moved into the Chaos office in Langleys basement, in the room behind the vault door. An avid proponent of covert action, hed served as chief of the North Africa Division, and as chief of station at The Hague prior to his return to headquarters in late 1977. He was nearing the end of his career, and was expecting to be named head of a division, and he approached his new assignment with all the energy of a man seeking to enshrine his legacy. As Bane describes it, the Chaos office was a windowless room as large as the ground floor of a house, divided into cubicles. Ten to twelve little old ladies running around in tennis shoes, all the operations were compartmentalized, and there was a vault mentality. Little was happening. The acting chief was the ITG operations officer, and his job was mainly following U.S. citizens overseas. So Bane summoned everyone to a staff meeting and said, Lets advertise ourselves to divisions. He set up a reference system to service each of the divisions, and each little old lady became an expert in regard to a particular geographical area. Next Bane started meeting with his counterparts at State, Treasury, the FBI, the Pentagon, the White House and the National Security Agency. As the Office of Terrorism began to serve a visible function, Bane was able to move it from the basement vault to a fourth floor suite with windows. The office received new computers, and the old girls started entering profiles of the worlds new terrorists into it. Bane was awarded an operations officer, and recruited several disgruntled CIA officers, who began to replace the women as his liaison officers to the divisions. And he began working closely with SOD chief Jim Glerum to beef up the operational forces at his command. Delta Force had been created by U.S. Army colonel Charles Beckwith in response to the numerous, well-publicized terrorist incidents that occurred in the 1970s. Delta, and later the Navys elite counter-terrorist unit, SEAL Team Six, were to serve as the CIAs front line forces in the nascent war against terror. Within the context of the new strategy of low intensity warfare, the Office of Terrorism and the anti-terror experts in the CIAs SOD and Delta Force had adopted a new lexicon, in which anti-terrorism was the term for broad policy, and counter-terrorism was used in regard to specific, immediate actions. Bane sought and acquired a bigger budget, and started improving and developing the governments formal technological counter-terror capabilities things like silenced weapons and covert eavesdropping equipment for use in hostage rescues. Bane also worked to obtain a fleet of black helicopters for use by counter-terror units. His own original contribution was a Crisis Management Training Program team, composed of a psychiatrist and a few case officers, which advised U.S. and foreign law enforcement officers on how to negotiate with, and outwit, terrorists. After all this, Bane set up a two-man intelligence unit at Delta headquarters at Fort Bragg, and hooked them up to his office computer. At this point Delta became a customer of CIA intelligence. Banes Office of Terrorism also sent daily reports, which profiled known terrorists and their activities, to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI. Very quietly his unit began to coordinate actual counter-terror operations. Say someone in Frankfurt had access to the Red Army, Bane explains. Then Delta would send a team. Banes Office of Terrorism handled each incident on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether or not it was defined as international terrorism, meaning the terrorists crossed borders or had foreign support, or domestic terrorism, in which case the terrorists were operating within their own country. If the incident related to domestic terrorism, the CIAs Office of Terrorism could not get involved, unless specifically authorized through a presidential executive order called a finding.

The need for a finding was a nagging bureaucratic stumbling block, and as an example, Bane cites the time Colombias M19 terror group took 20 foreign diplomats, including the American ambassador, hostage at a party at the Dominican Embassy. Thinking the trans-national nature of the incident qualified it as international terror, Bane, with the approval of the State Departments terrorism unit, launched a Delta operation in conjunction with the CIAs new SOD chief, Rudy Enders. Bane provided intelligence on the terrorists while Enders and his assistant, Burr Smith, provided Delta with the equipment it needed to stage a rescue operation. Meanwhile the Crisis Management Team assembled in Florida, and prepared to jump into Colombia. But the operation came to a screeching halt when the CIAs Assistant Deputy Director of Operations, John Stein, was forced to reveal the operation to Turners Deputy Director of Operations, John McMahon. As Bane recalls, McMahon asked him, Are you trying to send us all to jail? McMahon then put the operation on hold until Carter issued a finding. Bane was forced to call his officers back to Langley, where they waited while the lawyers met with members of Carters national Security Council staff. Only after the lawyers gave their approval did Carter issue the required finding. In another situation Bane was not allowed to help mount a covert action to rescue Italys Prime Minister Aldo Moro, because Moros Red Brigade captors were Italian nationals, and were deemed to be operating domestically. Colby, Bane sighs, felt that covert action should be equated with intelligence. He said it was better than sending in Marines. Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Five: The Turning Point Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIAs torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

November 08, 2001 Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on googleMore Sharing Services0 Homeland Insecurity by Douglas Valentine, Part Five

The Turning Point

by Douglas Valentine The take-over of the American Embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979 propelled Howard Bane and the Office on Terrorism into the limelight. Twenty-one years later, the CIA is still reeling from the event, which saw all its files fall into enemy hands, and every one of its agent networks exposed throughout the region. This seminal event, which had an impact on the American public not unlike that of 11 September, marked the beginning of the propaganda war between the Great Satan and the Islamic fundamentalists, at the time represented by Irans Ayatollah Khomeni, and allowed Ronald Eagan to crush Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. In the wake of the Embassy take-over, President Carter ordered Howard Bane to work with General Shy Meyer, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, and Delta Force, to come up with a plan to rescue the 53 hostages. As Bane notes, the plan was based on a covert action to obtain current intelligence on the status of the hostages, including several top CIA officers. Bane needed this intelligence information in order to know where to direct the black and gray propaganda necessary to disguise the CIAs actual intentions. There was also a need to train Delta Force to operate in the Iranian desert.

The required intelligence was obtained, but as is well known, the governments first major counter-terror operation, the Desert One rescue mission, failed to get off the ground. Sand clogged the aircraft and on 25 April 1980, eight soldiers were killed. To Ronald Reagan and George Bushs delight, the hostage situation continued unabated for another six months, and enabled them to characterize Jimmy Carter throughout the campaign as someone who did not take security seriously. Just as merrily George W. Bush capitalized on the 11 September catastrophe, the Great Communicator shamelessly rode the Iranian hostage tragedy into the White House. As in Chile, the secret to success was persuading the middle class to support the cause of freedom. After defeating bumbling George Bush (the CIAs preferred candidate) in the primary, Reagan repudiated Carters Human Rights crusade, and in the wake of the hostage crisis, declared a totally disingenuous war against terrorism. The seizure of the embassy had shaken the American public as never before, and Reagan played on that infantile fear. Indeed, terror was the organizing principle in his campaign. His avowed and central principle, written in stone, was of never negotiating with terrorists, as Jimmy Carter was attempting to do, and of restoring America to its rightful position as the most powerful and feared nation in the world. Meanwhile, according to eyewitness Ari Ben-Menasche, Reagans campaign manager, William J. Casey, had arranged for vice presidential candidate and former CIA director George Bush to meet with Iranian officials in Paris on the weekend of 18-19 October 1980. In exchange for holding the hostages through the election, then releasing them, Reagan, Bush and Casey agreed to sell weapons to Iran, which had been invaded in September 1980 by CIA asset Saddam Hussein and Iraq. The secret deal, called the October Surprise, allowed Reagan, Bush and Casey to steal the presidency. The fact that the hostages were released on the day of Reagans inauguration highlighted the fact that a secret deal had been made. But the American media had already been compromised by the National Security elites four-year old disinformation campaign, and under the Great Communicator, the major TV networks and newspapers would become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Israeli Lobby and Americas reactionary right wing. Terrorism As Growth Industry The final chapter in the history of the national security elites campaign of terror against the American people began with Reagan and his successful efforts to destroy the Soviet Union. It was advanced through the presidencies of George H. W. Bush, and the aberration called Bill Clinton, and has achieved its apotheosis under George W. Bush. Upon assuming office, Reagan declared that he would replace Carters Human rights crusade with an all-out war on terrorism, and to implement this policy he appointed OSS veteran William Casey as Director of Central Intelligence. Casey immediately reconstituted the SOD under Rudy Enders, wrapped anti-terrorism in a veil of black and gray propaganda, and began mounting terror operations worldwide through a hip pocket operation managed by a secret team of counter-terror experts. Many old Phoenix veterans staffed several key positions in the Reagan, Bush and Casey regime. SOD chief Rudy Enders had managed the CIAs counter-terror teams in Vietnams III Corps in 1965-1966, and 1970-1972. On his second tour, Enders worked under the direction of III Corps Regional Officer in Charge, Donald Gregg. During the Reagan Administration, Gregg would serve as Vice-President George H. W. Bushs national security advisor. In Vietnam, Gregg, Enders, and Enders deputy Felix Rodriguez, a crazed anti-Castro Cuban associated with some of the CIAs most ruthless terrorists, managed III Corps Phoenix Program. In this capacity the trio developed what they called the Pink Team plan for identifying, capturing, and killing specific members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure. In 1981, after a survey in Latin America, Enders assigned Rodriguez to El Salvador specifically to implement an updated version of the Pink Plan against the political leadership of the insurgency. After receiving approval from Bush, through Greg, the strategy was applied uniformly throughout Central America and resulted in the proliferation of death squads and the formation of the worlds largest narco-terrorist group, the Contras, with the able assistance of Panamas Manuel Noriega, one of the CIAs most famous assets ever. Veteran field hands from the Phoenix Program were re-hired by the SOD and assigned to security forces and death squads in numerous nations around the

world. Everywhere they went they carried a field manual developed by the U.S. Army Special Forces for use in the Phoenix Program. Titled Psychological Operations In Guerilla Warfare, the manual specifically states that Guerilla warfare is essentially a political war, and that the human being should be considered the primary target. Once the mind had been reached, the manual said, the political animal was defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets. Guerrilla warfare is born and grows in the political environment; in the constant combat to dominate that area of political mentality that is inherent to all human beings and which collectively constitutes the environment in which guerrilla warfare moves, and which is where precisely its victory or failure is defined. This conception of guerrilla warfare as political war turns Psychological Operations into the decisive factor. The target, then, is the minds of the population, all the population: our troops, the enemy troops, and the civilian population. The essential element in these psychological operations was implicit terror, as applied through Armed Propaganda Teams, as developed in Vietnam. When implicit terror failed to convince people to join the cause, the explicit terror of torture and summary execution were applied. Here it is wise to note that the soldiers being trained and assigned to the Office of Homeland Security will ultimately perform the same psywar function, of implicitly terrorizing the American public, through their uniforms and arms, into submission. Suspected terrorists and their sympathizers can expect to receive explicit terror. Through a junta headed by Oliver North at the NSC, and a group of secret agents in the Enterprise originally formed by Ed Wilson, and managed after 1983 (when Wilson was convicted of selling 20 tons of C-4 explosive in 1977 to Libyas Moammar Quadaffi) by retired Air Force General Richard Secord, Casey used profits from the illegal sale of weapons to Iran, and the profits from CIA-protected drug smuggling through Panama, to fund the Contra terror campaign in Nicaragua. To cover these illegal terror operationsand a separate, immense covert action, which involved the recruitment and training of Moslem mercenaries, including Osama bin Laden, to repel the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thus bleed the Soviet Union into oblivionCasey penetrated the Office of Public Diplomacy within the State Department. A totally illegal CIA domestic operation, Caseys hijacking of the Office of Public Diplomacy enjoyed the tactic approval of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Part of the reason for this incredible oversight was the fact that CIA officer Robert Simmons was staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee. During the Vietnam War, Simmons had advised a CIA Interrogation Center for 18 months in Phu Yen Province. Today, unbelievably, he is now a Congressman from Connecticut. Totally sympathetic to Caseys policy, Simmons was unable to provide any information about illegal CIA covert actions, including the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, to those Committee members who might have objected. Thanks to Simmons and the Committees chairman, Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), the Office of Public Diplomacy, under Otto Reich, had free reign to inundate the media with black and gray propaganda, thus protecting all of Caseys illegal activities. A staff report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (September 7, 1988) summarized various investigations of Mr. Reichs office and concluded that senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through an obscure bureau in the Department of State which reported directly to the National Security Council rather than through the normal State Department channels. Through irregular sole-source, no-bid contracts, S/LPD established and maintained a private network of individuals and organizations whose activities were coordinated with, and sometimes directed by, Col. Oliver North as well as officials of the NSC and S/LPD. These private individuals and organizations raised and spent funds for the purpose of influencing Congressional votes and U.S. domestic news media. This network raised and funneled money to off-shore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands or to the secret Lake Resources bank account in Switzerland for disbursement at the direction of Oliver North. Almost all of these activities were hidden from

public view and many of the key individuals involved were never questioned or interviewed by the Iran/Contra Committees." 11 The Office of Public Diplomacy was so successful in manipulating the media, that it was able to convince the public that Reagan had not approved the funding of the illegal Contras from profits from illegal secret arms sales to Iran even after he confessed to the crime, with a glistening Hollywood tear in his eye, on national TV in November 1986. Likewise all Congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal were successfully subverted, and George Bush was elected president in 1988, despite his integral role in what was the most egregious violation of the Constitution in American history. What amounted to a military coup went unpunished, due to the success of the CIAs psychological warfare capabilities, and its near absolute control of the major American media. The current Bush Administration, incidentally, is considering nominating Otto Third Reich as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. Prelude To Disaster While Casey initiated covert terror actions around the world and in America, the Office of Terrorism was reorganized to serve an essentially clandestine purpose. Casey thrived on hip-pocket operations and compartmentalization, and as DCI he took a more active role managing specific operations than any of his predecessors. Thus, as a replacement for Howard Bane, Casey chose William Buckley, a veteran CIA officer whod spent much of his career undercover as an officer in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Buckley served several tours in Vietnam, managing counter-terror and counter-intelligence operations, and from 1969 until 1972, under Ted Shackley, he was the director of the CIAs national counter-terror program in Vietnam. In 1978 Buckley was assigned to Damascus, Syria, and in mid-1979 he trained President of Egypt Anwar Sadats bodyguards. Buckley was assigned to Islamabad, Pakistan in 1979, and in November 1979 he became involved in planning for the Iran Embassy hostage rescue operation. In February 1981 he was assigned to train the SODs own counter-terror team at Fort Bragg, and to reorganize CIAs counter-terrorism office. Buckley was profoundly influenced during his first tour in Vietnam, when he saw a Buddhist monk immolate himself. Buckley was convinced, like rat-eater Liddy, that Americans must become as fanatically self-sacrificing as their suicidal enemies if they were to persevere. Apparently Casey shared this philosophy, and when they met in March 1981, he and Buckley formed an affinity. Buckley became Caseys close advisor, and they traveled together to Saudi Arabia in April to pave the way for the construction of secret military bases, now occupied by U.S. counterterror forces arrayed against Al Qaeda, and to obtain private funding for Caseys Contra terror campaign.12 The first step in this secret war of terror was the October 1981 assassination of Sadat by the bodyguards Buckley had trained. The assassination nullified the Camp David Accords President Carter had worked so hard to achieve. Israel was now free to target PLO bases in Lebanon, and in May 1982, Israeli General Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon, and, through his paid assets in the Christian Phalange militia, organized one of the greatest terror acts of all timethe massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Currently serving as the elected Prime Minister of Israel, the worlds greatest human rights abuser and second largest sponsor of state-terrorism, Sharon may be indicted as war criminal for this despicable act, in the same Belgian court that may try Nixons ferocious National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, for war crimes committed during the Chilean coup. In August 1982 Buckley returned to CIA headquarters to revamp and coordinate Reagans anti-terrorism policy, through what was called the Domestic Terrorism Group. According to author Mark Perry, For six months Buckley and the government officials hammered out a policy. The result was that the CIA maintained responsibility for foreign counter-terror operations, while the FBI acquired the domestic internal security terrorism account.

Under the direction of Attorney General Edwin Meese, the FBI went about its internal security task with ideological fervor, harassing, discrediting, and stifling each and every Peace group that sought to educate the public about the CIAs human rights abuses. Citizens opposed to CIA death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador fared the worst, because the Reagan Administration, with the earnest assistance of its right wing supplicants in the media, was eminently able to equate peace with an unpatriotic support for terrorism. It was all a Big Lie, of course, but the national security elite is willing to deceive the public for the greater good of its internal security. In the case of Reagans freedom fighters, as he called the terrorist Contras in Nicaragua, it was done under the rubric of counter-terrorism, to protect the CIAs illegal activities from coming to light. The Office of Homeland Security will undoubtedly serve a similar disinformation function for the Bush Administration, although all pretenses that the CIA is not involved in domestic counter-terrorism have been dropped. The CIA has been unleashed. In so far as spying on U.S. citizens with suspected links to foreign terrorists was an on-going, albeit top secret priority since Chaos, it was impossible for the CIA not be involved in domestic counter-terror in 1981. But in that na?ve era the myth needed to be maintained, and for that reason Buckley suggested to Casey that the Domestic Terrorism Group be renamed the International Anti-terrorism Group. Buckleys plan, Perry said, called for a coordinated effort to combat security breaches under the leadership of the NSC director, whod be in charge of monitoring the agencies that were responsible for domestic law enforcement. Citing Pentagon officials, Perry says that the Domestic Terrorism Group became a part of the Armys Intelligence Support Activity, and that Buckleys plan for an independent CIA office disintegrated as a result. Casey re-assigned Buckley as the CIAs chief of station in Beirut following the March 1983 bombing of the American Embassy. Buckley arrived in June or July, but failed to prevent the attack on the U.S. Marine Corps barracks, on 23 October 1983, that killed 241 Marines. On 16 March 1984, Buckley was kidnapped by Hezbollah guerrillas, and after being tortured for months, died in captivity in Tehran in June 1985, shortly after a March 1985 car bomb, reportedly planted by the CIA or the Phalange militia, and intended for terrorist suspect Hussein Fadallah, killed 80 Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah reportedly passed a copy of Buckleys 400-page videotaped confession to Casey in May 1986. Perry speculates that Buckley was part of secret, hip pocket operation into Iran, to recruit members of Irans junior officer corps. Be that as it may, the Reagan, Bush, Casey reliance on covert actions had only worsened the problem of terrorism, creating one disaster after another, and severely escalating the cycle of violence. With Congress conducting a number of official inquiries into CIA abuses, the time had come to take terror operations out of escapading Bill Caseys hip pocket, and create a new office within the CIA to manage the situation. Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Six: The Counter-Terror Network Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIAs torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

How the CIA penetrates the Left Check it out at the Lew Rockwell Show "Doug Valentine belongs to that precious remnant of journalists and historians with the wisdom to see our time, the integrity and courage to write about it, and the literary grace to bring it all chillingly alive. This indispensable book may quite well be the best yet in the author's already singular body of work. He takes us again into that dark inner reality of policy and politics that Americans so tragically deny and evade, and gives us back a reflection there is no denying, no escaping. If there is hope for America at this moment of so many reckonings, it is out of pages like these." Roger Morris, author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician

Published Works The Hotel Tacloban, a highly praised account of my father's experiences in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II. The Phoenix Program, described by Professor Alfred W. McCoy as "the definitive account" of the CIA's most secret and deadly covert operation of the Vietnam War. TDY, a novel about an Air Force photojournalist who participates in an unusual military mission in 1967. The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs, recipient of the Choice Academic Excellence Award . The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Personalities and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA, described by Peter Dale Scott as "an indispensible resource for those who wish to understand the politics of drug enforcement in America; and for those with any sense of the subjects real importance it is a gripping read as well." The Hotel Tacloban and The Phoenix Program are available through iUniverse.com as backinprint books under the Authors Guild imprint. TDY is also available through iUniverse.com. See my Books page for ordering information.

My research and interview notes, and tape recorded interviews with numerous CIA officers are available to the public at the National Security Archive The Douglas Valentine Vietnam Collection at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, has been open and used by researchers since early 2007. The Collection contains the research material, including audio files of interviews with senior CIA and military officers in the Phoenix program, original handwritten interview notes, and government documents obtained from CIA and military officers as well as through FOIA requests, for my book The Phoenix Program. The Collection can only be used in the National Security Archive's Reading Room; it is not available for interlibrary loan and an appointment must be made to use it. The "resguide" link below will help anyone who wants to read the material.

Follow this link to learn how to use the Archive's Reading Room Link to the document the Department of Justice posted online regarding my Privacy Act request from the CIA. This case was heard in federal court Phoenix audio files and documents at Cryptocomb Many of the most important Phoenix documents and the first four taped interviews are up at Cryptocomb. More to follow. The documents show the development of targeted kills, "administrative detention" and "High Value" rewards programs, among other things relevant to the eternal war on terror and Homeland Security.

interview with Joyce Powers (6.7MB) Adam Engel reviews Strength of the Pack John Jiggens reviews Strength of the Pack Thomas Wilkinson reviews Strength of the Pack Ron Jacobs Review of Strength of the Pack Click this link to order my new book Strength of the Pack. View the dust jacket too! Article in the Sunday Republican, 11-22-09 Ron Jacobs reviews Strength of the Wolf

Carlo Parcelli reviews Strength of the Wolf The Strength of the Wolf has been published online in Russian and is available by clicking this link Adam Engel (author of Topiary) reviews TDY

National Security Archive Index to the Valentine Vietnam Collection (51.5KB) Some documents from the file the CIA keeps on me as a result of my work on The Phoenix Program (654.0KB) interesting link

November 08, 2001 Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on googleMore Sharing Services1 Homeland Insecurity by Douglas Valentine

The Counter-Terror Network

by Alexander Cockburn And Jeffrey St. Clair The CIAs counter-terror network, as established by William Casey, was a direct descendant of the counterintelligence special operations unit, CHAOS, formed by James Angleton in August 1967, specifically to spy on the New Left and other radical political groups in the anti-war and civil rights movements. From its earliest beginnings, Chaos was distinguished from other CIA operations by its secure communications system, its super inaccessibility and compartmentalization, its inter-connected domestic and international mandate, and its essentially political nature. All of this was permissible in so far as Chaos was a special counter-intelligence function designed to ferret out the plans and strategies of foreign intelligence services. As we know, the CIA underwent a major reorganization in 1974 after William Colby fired counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, and exposed the CIAs family jewels at a Congressional Hearing conducted by Representative Otis Pike (D-NY). Chaos became the International Terrorism Group, and the repository of some of the hip pocket operations that forced Angleton from the Agency. The ITG remained buried in the bowels of the CIA until it was resurrected as Howard Banes Office of Terrorism in late 1977. The Iran hostage crisis and the disaster of Desert One enabled Ronald Reagan to steal the presidency, denounce Carters Human Rights crusade, and initiate a new foreign policy based on combating terrorism. In 1981, Reagans Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, saw the political possibilities of turning Buckleys Office of Domestic Terrorism into a back-channel mechanism, like Chaos under Angleton and Ober, for conducting secret hip pocket operations outside the normal chain of command. And thus was born The Counter-Terror Network that exists until today, as the official manifestation of the off-the-shelf Enterprise formed by Bush and Shackley back in 1976. 13 The ultimate object of Reagan Administration policy was the destruction of the Soviet Union through the application of low-intensity warfare in Afghanistan; counter-terror in the Middle East, and pro-active terror in Latin America. Effecting this policy involved a number of illegal covert actions, and so Casey had to run his Counter-Terror Network outside of the CIA itself, through a cabal of secret agents throughout the government, acting under his direction through a group of veteran CIA officers who embrace the same essentially fascist world view. Like Chaos, The Counter-Terror Network had a secure communications system, as Peter Dale Scott observed, that excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints.

As Scott notes, The counter-terrorism network even had its own special worldwide antiterrorist computer network, codenamed Flashboard, by which members could communicate exclusively with each other and their collaborators abroad. Casey laid the groundwork for this Counter-Terror Network in 1981, when he appointed David Whipple as the CIAs National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for counter-terrorism. A veteran CIA officer with extensive service in the Far East, Whipple had been serving as the CIAs station chief in Switzerland, where hed conducted successful counter-terror operations, before being summoned back to headquarters to take on the job as Caseys NIO for counter-terrorism. According to Whipple, Caseys staff consisted of 16 NIOs, eight of whom were responsible for geographical divisions, while the other eight were responsible for issues, such as narcotics, counter-intelligence, nuclear weapons, economics, and in Whipples case, counter-terror. Under Caseys direction, every government agency established a counter-terror office as part of this secret apparatus. Whipple as NIO coordinated them all, collating all the information they provided at CIA headquarters. In consultation with Casey, Whipple assisted the CIAs division chiefs, making sure their station chiefs were properly handling counter-terror issues in their designated areas. Whipple maintained the Office of Domestic Terrorism after Buckley departed, through a staff that included an operations chief, intelligence analysts, photo interpreters, and several case officers. Because it had the authority to access any divisions files and to co-opt its most precious penetration agents, the ODT was resisted by the divisions especially by the Near East Division, which was on the front lines of the war against terrorism. Thus in 1983 Casey sent Buckley to Beirut to personally oversee counter-intelligence operations there. And he conscripted Oliver North, a doe-eyed Marine lieutenant colonel assigned to the National Security Council, as his penetration agent inside the NSC. Notably, Whipple served as Norths case officer in this monumental misadventure. A Vietnam veteran, cut from the same erratic mold as Liddy and Buckley, North came from nowhere and in 1982 was the NSC staff coordinator for crisis management. According to Scott, Vice President Bush was in overall charge as chair of the Cabinet-level Crisis Management Committee. Starting in February 1983, North, according to Scott, developed a secret Crisis Management Center, and REX 84, a plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad. Sound familiar? In light of the recent national emergency, it is not surprising that Norths plan called for the roundup and internment of large numbers of both domestic dissidents (some twenty-six thousand) and aliens (perhaps as many as from three to four thousand), in camps such as the one in Oakdale, Louisiana. And just as the vast majority of Congresspersons went along with the draconian anti-terror legislation passed on 29 October, Senator Daniel Inouye in 1986 cut-off all debate about Norths plan to suspend the Constitution when Congressman Jack Brooks raised the issue during the televised Iran-Contra Hearings. North next formed a personal relationship with Vice President Bush in the winter of 1983, when they inspected El Salvadors death squad commanders. After that Norths stock soared, and in April 1984 he created the Terrorist Incident Working Group (TWIG) specifically to rescue several American hostages, including Buckley, held in Lebanon. North became TWIGs chairman, and in October 1985 he managed its first successful operationthe capture of the hijackers of the Achille Lauro. A few months earlier, in June, after the hijacking of a TWA Flight 847 to Beirut, Bush created the Vice Presidents Task Force on Combating Terrorism. According to Scott, as the NSCs liaison to the Task Force, North drafted a secret annex for its report which institutionalized and expanded his counter-terrorist powers, making himself the NSC coordinator of all counter-terrorist actions. On 20 January 1986, Norths efforts were crowned with National Security Decision Directive 207, making him chief coordinator of the Administrations counter-terror program, and providing him with a secret office and staff known as the Office To Combat Terrorism. Working through the inter-agency Operations Sub-Group (OSG), North coordinated the secret Counter-Terror Network and Secords Enterprise in a series of mind-boggling illegal

operations, including illegal arms sales to Iran through Israels counter-terrorism expert Amiram Nir; illegal Contra drug smuggling by through CIA asset Manuel Noriega in Panama, by a group of anti-Castro Cubans, all of whom were directly connected to Bush through his chief of operations, Donald Gregg, via Rudy Enders and Felix Rodriguez (all Phoenix Program veterans); illegal arms supply operations to the Contras through right wing domestic terror groups; and the repression of domestic dissent on a massive scale unmatched until the recent assaults mounted on the civil liberties of American citizens by fundamentalist Attorney General John Ashcroft and the U.S. Congress. As Scott notes, the Office to Combat Terrorism became the means whereby North could coordinatethe propaganda activities of Carl Spitz Channel and Richard Miller (and) the closing of potential embarrassing investigations by other government agencies. The ranking members of this Counter-Terror Network included: Donald Gregg (Bushs National Security Advisor); CIA officer Charles Allen (Whipples replacement as Caseys Counter-Terror National Intelligence Officer in 1985); Robert Oakley at the State Departments Office of Counter-Terrorism (a former CIA officer with experience in political operations in Vietnam, Oakley co-chair of Norths Operations Sub-Group until mid-1986); Richard Armitage (a member of the Enterprise) at the Defense Department, Lt. Gen. John Moellering at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, FBI Counter-Terror Chief, Oliver Revell, and, wonder of wonders, Michael Ledeen at the National Security Council. The lynchpin between the Israelis and the Americans, Ledeen had proposed illegal arms sales to Iran in 1984 through Mossad double agent Manucher Ghorbanifar. The CIAs Deputy Director for Operations, Clair George, considered Ghorbanifar totally unreliable, and as having only his personal financial interests, and Israels security, at heart. But Georges objections were neutralized in June 1985, when Bush formed the Terrorism Task Force, at which point the illegal arms sales went forward. And to assure that no one else in the CIA would obstruct Reagans secret policy, Casey in January 1986 conscripted veteran CIA officer Duane Clarridge into The Counter-Terror Network, as its de-facto security chief, and directed Clarridge to form the CIAs Counter-Terror Center, which exists until today. 14 Terror Central Under the current unpresident Bush, counter-terrorism is a mechanism to conduct illegal operations on behalf of his economic patrons, to circumvent Congress, and to his harass domestic critics. Counter-terrorism is the preferred political and psychological weapon of the radical right wing, and it was perfected in 1986 with the creation of the CIAs Counter-Terror center Duane Dewey Clarridge, a man with an extensive background in terror, was well equipped for managing this job. A rabid right wing ideologue, he was chief of the CIAs station in Turkey in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the fascist Grey Wolves went on a terror rampage, bombing, shooting and killing thousands of officials, journalists, students, lawyers, labor organizers, social democrats, left-wing activists and Kurds. Since then, Turkey military dictatorship has been one of Americas strongest allies. A body-builder and certified member of the Old Boy clique that runs the CIA, Clarridge in August 1976 helped ADDO Ted Shackley recruit Albert Hakim, later a member of Secords Enterprise, to spy in Iran.15 (Shackley was soon thereafter forced into retirement due to his association with rogue elephant Ed Wilson, the CIA officer who sold tons of explosives to Libya.) Clarridge was serving as the CIAs station chief in Rome when the Pope was shot, and was chief of Latin America Division from 1981 until 1984, when Nicaraguan harbors were mined and the psyops murder manual was distributed to the Contras, with his approval. In this capacity Clarridge helped Richard Secord move PLO weapons captured by Israeli forces during their bloody invasion of Lebanon, through Noriega in Panama, to the Contras. Clarridge, as chief of the Europe Division, next played a pivotal role in the illegal Iran-Contra operation, by providing the back channel, through his station chief in Lisbon, that allowed North and Secords Enterprise to sell HAWK and TOW missiles to the Iranians, at a huge profit for Secord and his Israeli counterparts, in exchange for

the release of several American hostages. The operation, which subverted the U.S. Constitution and the Bolland Amendments passed by Congress, made Ronald Reagan into the worlds biggest, but most adorable, liar. According to Scott, The intrigues of North, Secord, Clarridge and Oakley at this point showed a concern for politics rather than security. In that case, the political imperative was to gain the release of hostages, so that Reagan, who had sworn never to negotiate with terrorists, would not be unfavorably compared to Carter, or exposed as bold-faced liar, and so Bush would not lose the up-coming election. Gaining the release of the hostages, of course, involved the illegal arms sales to Iran, which itself was a flagrant flimflam by the Israelis and their agents in the U.S. Government. One of those Israeli agents, Michael Ledeen, while serving as a special assistant on terrorism at the State Department, made the original proposal in 1982 to divert money from arms sales to fund covert counter-terror operations. Ledeen also was responsible, while employed at the National Security Council in 1984, for convincing North and Secord to employ Mossad double agent and world-class swindler Manucher Ghorbanifar as the middleman between the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans. As the record shows, it was Ghorbanifars duplicity and avarice that led the entire misadventure to its ignoble conclusion. The homeland thanks you, Michael Ledeen. Youre exactly the sort of corrupt public official we need advising the Bush regime on how to wage its counter-terror campaign against the Moslem world. In an interview with this writer, Clarridge described the Counter-Terror Center, which has coordinated the CIAs back-channel activities since its formation in 1986, as a central unit with members from the four directorates, operating under a committee at the National Security Council. With input from the different divisions, the CounterTerror Center divines anti-terrorism policy, and then constructs entities that can conduct operations. It is not function of the U.S. Army Special Forces, according to Clarridge, but pieces together counter-terrorism action teamscommando squads trained to capture suspected terrorists and bring them to the United States to stand trial. During his tenure from 1986 to 1988, Clarridge oversaw a massive increase in intelligence gathering on suspected terrorists, and developed new weapons for use against them. He worked especially closely with George W. H. Bush, much to his advantage. Indeed, after it was revealed that Clarridge had assisted North in the transfer of surface-to-air missiles to Iran, he was forced to resign from the CIA. He lied about it when called before Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, and was indicted on seven counts of perjury. But he never went to trial, thanks to a last minute pardon issued by Bush on December 24, 1992. Bushs pardon provided blanket amnesty to Clarridge, Reagans Secretary of Defense Casper Weinburger, Elliott Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, CIA officer Alan Fiers, and CIA officer Clair George. Unlike Clinton, Bush received no criticism for his pardons, though they were far worse than anything Clinton ever did. For with those pardons, Bush assured that his role in the October Surprise, and the Iran-Contra Scandal, and many other crimes, would never be revealed. The moral to this story is crystal clear: Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush created secret counter-terror cabals within their administrations to conduct illegal operations and harass their domestic political opponents. Under the aegis of counter-terrorism, the FBI since then has conducted extensive surveillance against every peace group that opposes any right wing Administrations blatant terrorism. Oliver North blamed Washington for losing the Vietnam War. His hatred of the peace movement was and is palpable, and its no coincidence that he exploited his power as chief of counter-terrorism to terrorize his domestic opponents. As Scott notes, North believes that the most pressing problem is not in the Third World, but here at home in the struggle for the minds of the people. Thus, when Jack Terrell informed the Justice Department that North was involved in drug smuggling, North labeled Terrell a terrorist and sicced the FBIs counter-terror unit on him. Like all the other rabid right wing ideologues presented in this essay, Oliver North was mostly concerned about his own personal power. But none of his abuses,

or those of the Reagan and Bush regime were ever exposed, because, as McClintock notes, the very notion of counter-terror as terrorism was forbidden, while circumlocution was the norm. 16 Homeland Insecurity Continued in Part Seven: The Last Decade Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIAs torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

Douglas Valentine
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Web: http://www.douglasvalentine.com
[2009 Nov] Mass.: Local Author Takes on the DEA [2001] Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial by Douglas Valentine

See: My Lai massacre Radio

Topic: The Strength Of The Pack Play Part One Interview - Douglas Valentine Topic: The Strength Of The Pack Play Part Two Interview - Douglas Valentine

Books
[2009] The Strength of the Pack by Douglas Valentine The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine [extract] The My Lai Massacre and The Tiger Cages by Douglas Valentine

External
[2003] Preemptive Manhunting: The CIAs New Assassination Program Homeland Security: When The Phoenix Comes Home To Roost Flight of the Phoenix: From Vietnam to Homeland Security Sex & Drugs & CIA Homeland Insecurity: Phoenix, Chaos, The Enterprise, and The Politics of Terror In America The Spook Who Would Be a Congressman - Rob Simmons, the CIA, and the Issue of War Crimes in Vietnam The Execution of Martin Luther King The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs by Douglas Valentine John McCain: War Hero or Go-To Collaborator?

Quotes
On August 25, 1970, an article appeared in The New York Times hinting that the CIA, through

Phoenix, was responsible for My Lai. The story line was advanced on October 14, when defense attorneys for David Mitchell a sergeant accused and later cleared of machine-gunning scores of Vietnamese in a drainage ditch in My Lai citing Phoenix as the CIAs systematic program of assassination, named Evan Parker as the CIA officer who signed documents, certain blacklists, of Vietnamese to be assassinated in My Lai. When we spoke, Parker denied the charge. ......As in any large-scale Phoenix operation, two of Task Force Barkers companies cordoned off the hamlet while a third one Calleys moved in, clearing the way for Kotouc and Special Branch officers who were brought to the field to identify VC from among the detained inhabitants. .....The CIA, via Phoenix, not only perpetrated the My Lai massacre but also concealed the crime. ....As Jeff Stein said, The first thing you learn in the Army is not competence, you learn corruption. And you learn to get along, go along. Unfortunately not everyone learns to get along. On September 3, 1988, Robert TSouvas was apparently shot in the head by his girl friend, after an argument over a bottle of vodka. The two were homeless, living out of a van they had parked under a bridge in Pittsburgh. TSouvas was a Vietnam veteran and a participant in the My Lai massacre. .....TSouvass attorney, George Davis, traveled to Da Nang in 1970 to investigate the massacre and while there was assigned as an aide a Vietnamese colonel who said that the massacre was a Phoenix operation and that the purpose of Phoenix was to terrorize the civilian population into submission. Davis told me: When I told the people in the War Department what I knew and that I would attempt to obtain all records on the program in order to defend my client, they agreed to drop the charges. .....Bart Osborn (whose agent net Stein inherited) is more specific. I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation, Osborn testified before Congress in 1971. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were wither tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters. [book extract] The My Lai Massacre and The Tiger Cages by Douglas Valentine But the American establishment and media denied it then, and continue to deny it until today, because Phoenix was a genocidal program -- and the CIA officials, members of the media who were complicit through their silence, and the red-blooded American boys who carried it out, are all war criminals. As Michael Ratner a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights told CounterPunch: "Kerrey should be tried as a war criminal. His actions on the night of February 24-25, 1969 when the seven man Navy Seal unit which he headed killed approximately twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom were women and children was a war crime. Like those who murdered at My Lai, he too should be brought into the dock and tried for his crimes." ......A famous Phoenix operation, known as the My Lai Massacre, was proceeding along smoothly, with a grand total of 504 Vietnamese women and children killed, when a soldier named Hugh Thompson in a helicopter gunship saw what was happening. Risking his life to preserve that "social contract," Thomson landed his helicopter between the mass murderers and their victims, turned his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and brought the carnage to a halt.

.....It was the CIA that forced soldiers like Kerrey into Phoenix operations, and the hidden hand of the CIA lingers over his war crime. Kerrey even uses the same rationale offered by CIA officer DeSilva. According to Kerrey, "the Viet Cong were a thousand per cent more ruthless than" the Seals or U.S. Army. [2001] Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes, And The Need For A War Crimes Trial by Douglas Valentine

November 08, 2001

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The Last Decade

by Alexander Cockburn And Jeffrey St. Clair Michael Ledeen, who was forced from the Reagan Administration after the Iran arms fiasco became public, described George Bush in the 20 August 1987 Boston Globe as the most powerful man in America. And after his election, Bush tried his hardest to prove he was the most powerful man in the world as well. His devastating invasion of Panama left thousands dead, and tens of thousand homeless, but did nothing to curb international drug smuggling. Likewise, his massive terror bombing of Kuwait and Iraq killed tens of thousands, and his economic sanctions, endorsed by Clinton, have killed hundreds of thousands, for no reason at all, save vengeance. Saddam Hussein is still in power. For all the violence and terror he inflicted on the world, Bush did nothing to make America a safer place. And while Americas anti-terrorism policy remained unchanged under his son and ideological heir, our sacred homeland, according to Michael Ledeen, is a much unsafer place. In his 1 October article for NRO, Ledeen said: The last great chief of the CIA, Bill Casey, saw the necessity of creating a counter-terrorism center where all the information came into a central location and was analyzed in toto. He entrusted the task to Dewey Clarridge, who cracked his very active whipgreatly improving the quality of our intelligence. Then came the infamous although unspecified restrictions put in place by Clinton. What it required now, Ledeen contends, is a top guy with real power and total support from the president, and it requires men and women at the working level who not only have the resolve and the courage to do it laying waste to dead wood as they go but who know the system cold, know how the bureaucratic games are played, and know which walls have to be broken down. What Ledeen is prescribing, of course, is a recipe for the type of domestic political repression outlined in detail in this essay, that Americans have endured under previous right wing regimes. Will we never learn? Our constitutionally protected right to political activity has been under constant attack for decades now, and it will only get worse. As a result of the recent anti-terror legislation, even your email can be subjected to permanent monitoring by the FBI, CIA or the new OHS. As of this week, the FBI can seek a peak inside your home or office without a warrant, and seize your files, property or computers without any notice, and they dont have to tell you about until afterwards. Committing any petty misdemeanor, which can in anyway be interpreted as frightening some National Guardsman at some Office of Homeland Security checkpoint of airport, is now grounds for surveillance of your home and person, and monitoring of your internet activity. God forbid you should stoop to political dissent, or opposition to Bushs eternal war. Internationally the story isnt any prettier. Bushs ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, has stated that America must attack more and more countries. Like other terrorists in the Bush Administration, Negroponte is well suited to this task. As U.S. ambassador to Honduras under Reagan, he funded that particular right wing regimes most notorious death squads, Battalion 316.

In the name of anti-terrorism, the illegitimate Bush Administration can be expected to revitalize this practice worldwide, training torturers and tyrants to wage global counter-terrorism against any nation that harbors suspected terrorists, or critics of U.S. foreign policy. And any connection you have to these foreign enemies, even if it is merely sympathy for the Palestinians, subjects you to imprisonment, loss of livelihood, and worst of all, forfeiture of your sense of humor. Thats right. You cant even make fun of the situation anymore. Which is, when you think of it, perfectly in keeping with out time honored Judaic-Christian ethic. Here at home, through the Office of Homeland Security, we will endure more political and psychological warfare, more black and gray propaganda, and more deceit and disinformation than any society on earth before. Were told we must become new people in a brave new world, where indefinite detention, torture and summary execution of our suspected enemies will make us free. Award winning reporter and likely Mossad propagandist Seymour Hersh tells us that we must resort to the tactics the Jordanian security service used to catch the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. The Jordanians did not move directly against suspected Abu Nidal followers but seized close family members instead, mothers and brothers, Hersh notes. Then he quotes an anonymous CIA officer as saying, Jordan is the one nation that totally succeeded in penetrating a group, because it was able to get their families under control. So much for family values. Hersh disingenuously adds that these tactics defy CIA procedures, but suggests its a better alternative than sitting around making diversity quilts. Well, this is exactly the type of psychological warfare you can expect to be subjected to on a daily basis from here on out. As noted in the Marine Corps Gazette, Psychological operations may become the dominant operational and strategic weapon in the form of media/information intervention. Logic bombs and computer viruses, including latent viruses, may be used to disrupt civilian as well as military operations. Fourth generation adversaries will be adept at manipulating the media to alter domestic and world opinion to the point where skillful use of psychological operations will sometimes preclude the commitment of combat forces. Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored divisions. Let me say it one last time: in the name of anti-terrorism, all of the nations pent-up anger and frustration over Vietnam, and a host of other, mostly Clinton-related issues, is poised to be unleashed on an enemy that lurks inside our borders. And that enemy is you. But in order to survive, and enjoy, and laugh, you need only know one thing: when Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Powell tell you that America needs to wage unrelenting war for the next fifty years, in order to achieve peace, they are lying. War, dear Citizen, is not Peace. Hail The Republic! Homeland Insecurity Continued: Footnotes Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIAs torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

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Footnotes
by Douglas Valentine Footnotes 1 Does Thornbergs statement, which sounds so much like Sen. Bob Kerreys recent confession about his unpunished massacre of civilians inVietnam, for which he fradulently accepted a gold star, mean that America already does, as a matter of policy, torture its enemies? 2 On behalf of Reagans National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, likely Mossad agent Ledeen directed Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to illegally sell weapons to Iran in 1985, thus instigating the Iran Contra scandal. 3 In August 1968, a nationwide quota of 1800 neutralizations was imposed on the Phoenix Directorate, as a management-by-objective tool to promote CIA efficiency. Neutralization statistics were tracked by The Viet Cong Infrastructure Information System. VCIIS had its origins in February 1966, when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara established the Defense Departments Southeast Asia Programs Division. The process was advanced in Saigon in January 1967, when the joint Vietnamese CIA Combined Intelligence Staff fed the names of 3000 terrorist suspects into the IBM 1401 computer, installed at its political order of battle section. The era of the computerized political blacklist had begun. In January 1969 VCIIS was renamed the Phung Hoang Management Information System. It contained the names and biographical information of tens of thousands of confirmed and suspected terrorists. PHMIS was eventually turned over to two CIA proprietary companies: Southeast Asia Computer Associates and the Computer Science Corporation. Researchers, see where they go. 4 The Chicago Red Squad, working with the FBI, killed Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton on 4 December 1969. That night BPP infiltrator William ONeal slipped Hampton a Mickey Finn., then left the apartment. Around 4:30am the police kicked in the door and shot another BBP member in the chest as he lay in bed. Other bullets ripped through the walls, wounding Hampton; as he lay in bed with his pregnant girlfriend, police entered the room and shot Hampton in the head. It was a typical Phoenix-style assassination. For more information on Hampton see the website COINTELPRO and Government Oppression . 5 Information about Chaos was obtained through the Rockefeller Commission report. See also the parts about Chaos and Ober in Deborah Daviss, Katherine The Great. 6 The CIAs Office of Security was infiltrating the anti-war movement through the use of a reserve cadre of trained personnel, like cab drivers, construction workers, and janitors. These cover assets reported on demonstrators that threatened CIA facilities. Its this writers belief, not paranoia, that all manner of public employees, from librarians to postmen to Pakistani Seven-Eleven operators have already been recruited. 7 After Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, Nixon told Helms to Make the economy scream, as indicated by Helms notes of their September 15, 1970 meeting. Helms lied when he denied to Congress that the CIA was involved in coup, in which Allende was assassinated, and tens of thousands of Chileans were tortured and killed and disappeared. Having had acess to many a politicians sex and drugs and rock n roll files, Helms was allowed to plead no contest to two misdemeanors but wore his conviction like a badge of honor. Sullivan was killed in November 1977. He had just acknowledged that the FBI had used whatever means necessary to hunt down the Weathermen, and was about to testify as the chief witness in the trial of an FBI agent, John J. Kearney, charged with having employed illegal wiretaps and mail intercepts in the Weathermen

investigation. He was killed by a New Hampshire state troopers son, who thought Sullivan was a deer, and shot him twice in the neck. The kid lost his hunting license for a year. 8 The age of anti-terrorism can be traced to September 1972, when the last Phoenix coordinator, John Tilton, crossed off the phrase Phung Hoang Program (Vietnamese for Phoenix) in an evaluation report, and substituted the phrase anti-terrorism program throughout the report. 9 According to McClintock (p. 304-5) There was a conscientious effort by (CIA and DIA) to shield host country counterterror programs from unwanted attention. However strong the signal that.selective counterterror had become mass counterterror, the efforts from within to oppose mass killings were stymied. 10 One group, led by Leila Khaled tried to hijack an El Al flight from Tel Aviv via Amsterdam. But Khaled and her accomplice were overpowered by an El Al sky marshal and several passengers after the pilot made a steep dive. British security forces took Khaled into custody. The second hijacked plane was flown to Cairo where the passengers and crew were ordered off before the plane was blown up. A Swissair DC8 from Zurich and a TWA 707 from Frankfurt were hijacked and flown to Zarqa airstrip in Jordan. The Popular Front described the attacks as the first strike in avenging the American plot to liquidate the Palestinian cause by supplying arms to Israel. They demanded that the Swiss and West German governments release several of their jailed comrades. After another hijacking resulted in the release of 360 passengers and crews in exchange for Khaled and six other convicted terrorists. As a final act of revenge, terrorist bombers destroyed the aircraft. King Hussein of Jordan had allowed over fifty terrorist groups into his country, but Israeli attacks forced him to drive the Palestinians out of Jordan. The purge created the Black September group. (From the website Crime Library, article Carlos the Jackal: Trail of Terror.) 11 See the National Security Archive website for Public Diplomacy and Covert Propaganda: The Declassified Record of Ambassador Otto Juan Reich, by Thomas Blanton, March 2001. 12 Some of the information on Buckley was obtained from Mark Perrys February 1989 article in Regardies, p. 96 13 Some of the information on the Counter-Terror Network came from Peter Dale Scotts essay, The CounterTerrorism Network: Bush, North, And The Accumulation of Secret Power. 14 Scott: Clair George.. testified how.Casey.bypassed him by having Charles Allen, the national Intelligence Officer for Counter-Terrorism, deal with Ledeen and Ghorbanifar on terrorist matters. 15 Emerson, Steve, Secret Warriors, p 24. Shackley, Secord, Hakim, Tom Clines and Ed Wilson were all linked to various moneymaking scams conducted under the aegis of national security. 16 Instruments, p 306. Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIAs torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.

Thomas Polgar was CIA Station Chief in Saigon, 1972-1975. Described as rigid and a bureaucrat who was not well versed in intelligence field work, Polgar provides the technical explanation for the CIA programs of which Phoenix was composed, as they existed in the final stages of the Vietnam War. A Hungarian national who fled to the US in 1938, Polgar had just finished a

stint as chief investigator for the Senate Select Committee probing the Iran-contra affair when Mr Valentine interviewed him. His style, like that of Colbys, is that of a detached policy-maker. When properly analyzed and contrasted with the operational realities presented by those involved in the field, Polgars dissembling stands as a stark reminder of the dangers of official propaganda. Recording 1 Recording 2

Jean Andre Sauvageot arrived in Vietnam in the summer of 1964 as a US Army district advisor to regional and popular forces. He fell under the tutelage of Frank Scotton, a pioneer in counterinsurgency warfare, and was hired by Covert Action Chief Tom Donohue into the CIAs Revolutionary Development Cadre program. Saugaveot explains the development of the RD cadre program as well as Census grievance under CIA officer Dick Fortin. Recording 1 Recording 2 Recording 3

James R. Ward was a senior CIA officer and comrade of William Colby and Evan Parker in the elite OSS unit the Jedburghs. Upon his arrival in Vietnam, Ward assisted US Army Colonel Junichi Buhto (also a Jedburgh) and Evan Parker in composing the document (see MACV Directive 381-41) that enabled the Phoenix Program. Ward then served as the CIA officer in charge of Phoenix program operations in IV Corps, 1967-1969. An earthy man of action (he won an Iron Man contest at the age of 70) and a paramilitary specialist, Ward gives a straight forward though sanitized account of Phoenix in the Delta. Recording 1 Recording 3 Recording 2 Recording 4

Robert R. Simmons was a junior CIA officer involved in Phoenix operations in Phu Yen Province, where he ran the Interrogation Center from November 1970 to June 1972. Simmons also formed a special police intelligence unit that functioned as a counter-terror team; he mounted numerous paramilitary and psychological warfare operations against the Viet Cong Infrastructure. Simmons, like Lawlor, has a grudge against the political Left and places loyalty to the CIA above loyalty to the American people. He served as a Republican U.S Congressman on the Armed Services Committee and is an ardent supporter of the eternal War on Terror. His voice is shrill and laced with unintended ironies.

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Rob Simmons was a torturer in VietNam http://talknationradio.com/?p=53 Rob Simmons (R-CT) Ran a CIA Interrogation Center in Vietnam Posted on Thursday 5 October 2006 Why didnt Rob Simmons mention that he ran an interrogation center in Vietnam and did interrogations himself when he discussed changes to the way American forces would interpret the Geneva Conventions? Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights, and the environment. Im Dori Smith. Our guests this time are author Douglas Valentine and Attorney Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights The US Military has been shifting tactics in Iraq in a chaotic war where reports from the media are erily reminiscent of Vietnam War reports of the early 1970s. In this two part special we look at failed U.S. policies in Iraq and Vietnam and talk about the disastrous consequences of Americas reliance on bad intelligence, of the use of physical and psychological torture in war zones and at the corruption and ever shifting alliances that led to long term crisis and instability for the U.S. Government and the Military. We begin by looking specifically at the role of Republican Congressman Rob Simmons in Connecticut s 2nd Dist., the role he played in both Vietnam and Iraq . Rob Simmons has mentioned his credentials as a soldier and spy often but has never been pressed for the significant details about his own role in the treatment of detainees; that despite many public statements about new laws that would impact detainee treatment. Journalist Douglas Valentine joins us to talk about his interivews with Rob Simmons for the book, The Phoenix Program, about a dark episode involving the systematic neutralizing of Vietnamese men and women accused of being Communist sympathazers. The author lays out hard evidence for war crimes in interrogation centers and as you shall hear one interrogation center in Phu Yung Province , was run by Rob Simmons. Dori Smith: Doug Valentine welcome to Talk Nation Radio. Douglas Valentine: Thank you for having me on your show Dori. Dori Smith: I want to start with the impact of an article going back to a writer named Georgie Ann Geyer the CIAs Hired Killers. (See the article Published in True Magazine, February 1970, see here Colby; I might have met her, Mr. Chairman. I dont recall it.] You say in your book that it raised Congressional eyebrows and some in the CIA then argued for what was essentially the few bad apples argument about Vietnam . Talk about the overall process of discovery and what you learned from the people you interviewed about the Phoenix Program. Douglas Valentine Well it took many years for me to understand what was going on and to discover the truth about that. It wasnt something that happened quickly. I started around 1984 and I finished my book in 1989 so it was five years. I did read the Congressional hearings into the Phoenix Program and they helped and that was how I came across Georgie Ann Geyers about what were called, counter-terror teams. The softened the name and changed the name from Counter Terror Teams to Provincial Reconaissance Units. You know now a days nobody has a problem with the word counter-terror. Its all over the place all the time. But back then during the Vietnam War, that era, this was the late 1960s, the idea of terror and counter-terror were not concepts and ideas that the American public was familiar with, not the way they are now. So the idea that as Georgie Ann Geyer wrote about that the CIA actually hired mercenaries to go out and do its dirty work had a very sobering influence on a lot of people including the Congressional Committees that were looking into it. And it should still have a sobering effect on people though evidently the public has become somewhat desensitized to this whole subject. Dori Smith: Well lets turn to Congressman Rob Simmons and talk about what he was doing when Phoenix was going on. Im going to be playing some audio that you shared with me of an interview you did with Simmons before writing your book about Phoenix . Why dont you set this audio up and just explain what we are about to hear as an admission from Rob Simmons that he did interrogations for the CIA in Vietnam . Douglas Valentine: When I wanted to find out about Phoenix I decided I didnt want to be a writer who did document searches, that I wanted to go out and interview the CIA officers who participated in Phoenix and the programs that were incorporated into Phoenix . That decision led me down a very unusual path like I said from 2984 to 1989 when I went around with my tape recorder and I found CIA officers like Rob Simmons who had been in Vietnam working with counter-terror teams and in interrogation centers and doing those kinds of things for the CIA. And I interviewed them, many many of them. I dont know that such a thing could be done anymore. I dont know that anybody ever did anything like it before or after but thats what happened and thats how I got to know about this subject. And because I was interviewing so many CIA officers at the time many within their little secret society didnt think it was such an unusual thing. And the more CIA officers I interviewed the more that became available to me to interview. So I got a very personal and intimate understanding of what was involved in all this.

And Rob Simmons was one of the people I ended up talking with. Dori Smith: So lets listen to what Rob Simmons told you at one point: Rob Simmons: for particular types of information, and occasionally I would do the interrogation myself. Valentine: OK. Simmons: For somebody that seemed to be reluctant to work with the South Vietnamese or with any Vietnamese because you know if an American comes in and hes alone and he speaks a little bit of the language maybe theyll warm up to him. So I did some of it myself. The whole focus was to try to have good relations with the police, was to insure that prisoners were being properly treated because as far as I was concerned the PIC Program was an American program and if it didnt run right it was gonna make us look bad. Valentine: Well how many, did you have a special police officer who was your PIC Chief? Simmons: Yes, but the PIC Chief worked for the, uh for the, you know, he was a policeman. Valentine: A special branch policeman? Simmons: Special branch, thats correct. Valentine: But he reports to the National Police Chief. Simmons: Thats right. He reports up through the police structure but he also knows that the building was built; see they were built and then turned over. Valentine: Yeah. I understand. Simmons: OK. But he also knows that hey you know this building came from the guy in the Quonset Hut. Valentine: Also, Special Branch salaries are paid by the Americans not by the Vietnamese. Simmons: Special Branch, thats right, and also the agents, if youve got a hot agent that you want to recruit the money comes Valentine: Yeah. Simmons: Yeah. So. Valentine: The informant network. Simmons: The informant networks. And so so uh you know I was very interested in the informant network. I was very interested in some of the quality of interrogation that was going on and I had access to resources so that I could manage (phone rings) so that I could get what I wanted(audio provided by Douglas Valentine.) Dori Smith: You talked with a very different person from the one we see on FOX News and other networks. Douglas Valentine: Well yeah, at that time he was working, I think at Yale University . He may have been doing something else at the same time. I dont know that he had any political aspirations. Maybe he did. He certainly wasnt running for office at that time. I think at the most he was doing was involved with local politics in Stonington or his church or something like that. He was something of a public figure but not to the extent that he is now so he let his hair down, very much so, and he was talking about a subject that was very deeply personal to him also. So for him to get to the point where he could discuss that was itself a pretty big break through because I dont know that a CIA, a former CIA officer like Rob Simmons makes a habit of walking around talking to his neighbors or his business associates about the intimate details of his work in an interrogation center in Vietnam; but he did with me. Dori Smith: In Chapter 5 you talk about PICS, PIC. And theres a lot of discussion about torture. You interviewed someone named Johnson and he verified that torture was basically normal, that this was something the South Vietnamese were doing. Talk about what else you wrote about what was going in these PICS Rob Simmons discussed with you. Douglas Valentine: Rob Simmons was in South Vietnam from November 1970 until 1972, I believe, around the middle of that year so he was there close to two years. The interrogation centers, of which he was an advisor, he was an advisor to an interrogation center, those were built starting in 1964 by the CIA as part of a program that the CIA had to build an interrogation center in every one of South Vietnams 44 provinces and the whole idea was to run these interrogation centers with the special branch of the South Vietnamese Police which is like our FBI. So when in his little excerpt paragraph there he said the PIC was run by a South Vietnamese policeman that was kind of disingenuous. It was run by the equivalent of an FBI agent and Simmons was that persons advisor. So that program, the Province Interrogation Center program, (PIC,) had been in operation for six years by the time Rob got there. And those interrogation centers were terrible horrible places and all sorts of awful things went on inside of them. The CIA had a policy of, if a CIA advisor to a PIC, somebody like Rob Simmons, saw torture they were obligated to report it but the operational reality was far different. Policy statements were issued and are issued all the time by the government in communiqus and internal memorandums to people, but in a war and in a place like South Vietnam, the policy is often diametrically opposed to what people refer to as the operational reality and the operational reality in those PICs was something almost unimaginable. One would actually have to be inside one of those facilities and see the squalid, horrible conditions that the prisoners lived in to understand the kind of traumatic impact that experience would have on a young man like Rob Simmons. Dori Smith: Some of what youve written here on page 85 sounds oddly familiar and those of us who were watching news coverage about the Abu Ghraib Prison abuse scandal will remember that there were some wires that were evidently attached to genitals and wires attached to fingers and there was that awful picture of that man with his arms outstretched that we all remember, the hooded man. In your book you talk about electrical shock, the Bell Telephone Hour? And about these wires attached to genitals and other sensitive parts of the body like the tongue and you also talk about the water treatment or the airplane where a prisoners arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling suspending the prisoner in mid air after which he or she was beaten. Not to belabor the point but this is only one part of your book that sounds particularly awful. Comment on the degree to which it has been your understanding that this stuff went on and that its likely that most of the people involved in the program surrounding the prisons knew that there were abuses were going on. Douglas Valentine: Theres no doubt that abuses were going on and that they were overlooked routinely. The CIA is not in the business of creating bad publicity for itself. Its in the business of trying to polish up its image. But in fact the CIA is a criminal conspiracy and Rob Simmons as a member of the CIA was involved in a criminal conspiracy and that criminal conspiracy was to spy on people in foreign countries; and to hire informants in those countries, some of whom were informing on the South Vietnamese Government, the people that we were supposedly advising. There was just a duplicitous situation and Rob Simmons as a member of the CIA was one of the people who was trained and highly skilled in that art of duplicity, of tricking people, of interrogating people and making them tell things that they didnt want to tell. He was involved in setting up basically what was a hit team that went out and assassinated members of what they called

the Viet Cong infrastructure. Which was in effect, probably more so than the puppet regime that the CIA put in place in South Vietnam , the actual government of South Vietnam . And Rob Simmons was basically going around knocking those people off and putting them in interrogation centers and torturing them. He could say well they were the enemy but Rob Simmons was a CIA agent in somebody elses country doing illegal things and thats the bottom line there. Dori Smith: I want to take a look at an interview with Rob Simmons that was published in a rather odd book by Mark Moyar called Birds of Prey. Rob Simmons: When prisoners were wounded, we had a 50 percent better chance of getting them to cooperate with us than if they were not. These people knew very well that good medical treatment was scarce. Vietnamese hospitals were very primitive, and to get care you had to have money. If you were a peasant VC suspect, you wouldnt get much there. I knew some American doctors who helped me out from time to time. Id bring in an American doctor with a big bag full of pills and devices and everything, and hed put his gear on and listen to a heartbeat and go through a fairly elaborate routine, which seemed quite sophisticated to a peasant. Then the doctor would look at the wound and say, Oh, that looks very bad. It could get infected. You could lose that limb. The prisoner would ask, what can you do? Id usually let the doctor go, Rob Simmons says, and then tell the prisoner, Wed like to help, but its hard to get the medicine. I cant do anything to help you without getting some sort of help in return. That tended to work well. (Rob Simmons in Birds of Prey, Mark Moyar, Intelligence Page 105.) Dori Smith: So, theres a violation of the Geneva Conventions right there then? Douglas Valentine: Well lets assume that the person has a bullet wound. Thats pretty painful. These people arent being brought in with paper cuts. When were talking about wounds that these doctors and medical attention, were usually talking about wounds that occured while the person was being arrested. Because people did not go to these interrogation centers voluntarily. Counter-terror teams went out to snatch them from their homes at midnight. Or they were snatched up in Special Branch, FBI, or Police round ups. Often times they were pretty well shot up. So these people were in a lot of serious pain. What Rob Simmons was doing is not only a war crime, its the epitomy of whats called psychological warfare. Its terrorizing people in order to get intelligence from them, information from them about their associates, their political associates; people that trusted them with their lives. And Rob Simmons was trying to pry that information out of them any way he can. So softening them up first by shooting them is a good idea put them in a position where theyre going to have to betray members of their secret government. Hes very good and in his conversations with Mark Moyar which you just read hes very careful in his language to try and minimize whats going on. You really have to understand what the operational realities were that he was dealing with to understand the immensity of the war crime that he committed. Dori Smith: Douglas Valentine is author of the book, The Phoenix Program first published in 1990 by William Morrow Co. and again by Avon Books in 1992. Its been hailed as the most definitive work on the Phoenix Program. His other books are the Hotel Tacloban inspired by his fathers experience as a WWII prisoner of the Japanese. His latest book is The Strength of the Wolf, about the secret history of the CIAs War on Drugs. You will find his work at VersoBooks.com and other major book sellers and you can find his web site at DouglasValentine.com. His articles appear in Counterpunch and other places. And we will be hearing part 2 of my interview with Douglas Valentine next time. Dori Smith: We turn next to Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He works on Guantanamo related issues. I asked Wells Dixon if Rob Simmons was correct where he said prisoners in the war on terror are exceptions to the Geneva Conventions and other laws and regulations. Smith: The Congressman has argued that suspects in the war on terror are exceptions to the Geneva Conventions and that rules that have been used in the past do not apply to them. Wells Dixon : Well the Congressman is correct that the war on terror presents unique challenges that are unlike many of the conventional wars that we have fought in the past, however, he is wrong to state that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the detainees or to those involved in combat. Dori Smith: Talk more about the Geneva Conventions, what specifically about them is going to be affected by the new law that Rob Simmons has just voted for in the House version. Wells Dixon : There are many parts to the Geneva Conventions. The Third Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners of war. The Fourth Geneva Conventions apply to all other persons who may be captured during times of armed conflict. And Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions also apply to that exception to individuals who are captured during times of armed conflict; the Supreme Court said this in the Hamdan case in June. And the Geneva Conventions and Common Article Three are also part of U.S. Military Law and Military training. They are part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and they are also part of Army Regulation 190.8 which governs the treatment of prisoners. The Geneva Conventions, of course, have also protected our soldiers for more than 50 years and will continue to do so as long as we adhere to them fully ourselves. Dori Smith: Rob Simmons was interviewed by David Lightman of the Hartford Courant and he told Lightman that unlike the war in Southeast Asia the war on terror is not a war against sovereign nations or organized liberation movements and that the rules of prisoners engagement are different, ill defined and even non existent. Simmons has argued in this way before and said that soldiers had told him that they couldnt figure out how to treat prisoners in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib prison; hes visted both places. Is what he is saying correct? Wells Dixon : No he is not correct as I mentioned before the Geneva Conventions and Common Article 3 in particular have been part of U.S. Military law and training for more than fifty years. They are included and incorporated in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and they are included in Army regulations such as 190-8. I would also point out that the Supreme Court held in the Hamdan case that there was no basis for concluding that compliance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice was impracticable in the war on terror. That just is not the case. Smith: Rob Simmons also visited Guantanamo and he said that conditions there were more open than at Osborn Correctional facility in Connecticut . He also argued that the food was good, medical care seemed good, in other words, whats the problem here? And again, the Congressman was there on official business and his task really was to find out if some of the claims of

abuses going on there were true. Wells Dixon : Well again Congressman Simmons is incorrect. The conditions at Guantanamo are not fine. They are not more open than at Osborn Correctional facility. For one thing there is no question that the detainees at Guantanamo have been tortured and abused by U.S. Military personnel and intelligence agents. The Center for Constitutional Rights has documented this in a report issued in July that provides first hand accounts from current detainees and their lawyers of many of the abuses they have suffered while they have been detained in Guantanamo . Thats something that a lot of people have questioned and I would suspect that Congressman Simmons would question. I can say that in December of 2002 Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of techniques that included among other things, hooding of prisoners, the use of stress positions, sensory depravation, isolation, and the exploitation of phobias. We know with total certainty that some of these techniques were used on our clients and we know that Secretary Rumsfeld also approved special interrogation techniques for some of our clients including one client who I can tell you was deprived of sleep for 49 out of 50 days, who was subject to an induced hypothermia and who was also subject to things like a false kidnapping; he was led to believe that he was in Egypt and he would be tortured unless provided information to the Government. And to a certain extent the detainees at Guantanamo are still subject to these kinds of techniques. Now, as to whether or not these rise to the level of torture I think that under any sort of common sense or legal definition of torture they certainly would. But you certainly dont need to take my word for it. The General Counsel of the Navy Alberto Mora said in 2004 in a memorandum that it was his opinion that these sorts of activities would be not only unlawful but also unworthy of military service. And that in his view they would rise to the level of torture. He raised a number of rhetorical questions such as, what does depravation of light and auditory stimuli mean? Can a detainee be locked in a completely dark cell? For how long? For a month, for a year? Another question he asked was can phobias be applied until madness sets in? And I think that if you consider the conclusions of people like Mr. Mora I dont think that there is any credible dispute at this point that the detainees in Guantanamo have been subject to torture and abuse. Smith: One of the points that he made in this interview with Lightman was that the bill would offer the judicial system a series of steps to follow about excluding some statements that were obtained through torture; providing defense attorneys to suspects, having an independent Military judge presiding, and allowing classified evidence to be shared with suspects unless that evidence would be detrimental to national security? Do you feel that these steps would add more workability to the law? Wells Dixon : Certainly not. For one thing to be precise the law prohibits the use of secret evidence but only to the extent practicable. As the Supreme Court said in the Hamdan case there is no basis to argue that the Uniform Code of Military Justice which establishes a series of court martial procedures is inadequate to try terrorism suspects. Thats just not the case. Smith: Now again, Rob Simmons is arguing that we need a new handbook, a new manual, a new set of laws, because soldiers at places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib dont know what to do with these prisoners. Can you comment on that in terms of whats already happened to prisoners at these facilities? I mean in essence what else needs to be done with these prisoners other than to hold them, investigate the evidence against them, try them, and then take proceedings accordingly right? Wells Dixon : Absolutely. The United States Government has held more than 400 people in Guantanamo for nearly five years. At this point in time none of those people can possibly have any intelligence value or pose a threat to the United States . The CIA concluded in a 2002 report that most of the people who are in Guantanamo are there because they were captured at the wrong place at the wrong time. They had nothing to do with terrorism. This is a statement thats been echoed by many former Military officials including the former Guantanamo Commander Jay Hood who said, look, sometimes we just didnt get the right folks. So I think its important to remember that. But to the extent that there is any confusion about whether certain techniques are permissible or legal. US soldiers only need to consider two things. First, whether if those techniques were applied to their fellow soldiers would they think that those soldiers had been abused? And if so, those procedures should not be employed. Its a really very simple test. Smith: You have some law suits in mind to challenge these laws and really challenge Congress. What is going on? Wells Dixon : Well there is another very troubling provision in the Military Commissions Act that suspends Habeas Corpus for any alien detained by the United States . This would include lawful immigrants picked up on the streets of New Haven or Hartford . And it therefore deprives them of any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention. So as a result of this provision we expect that the United States will move to dismiss a number of the pending Habeas cases and we will then challenge the law on the ground that its an unconstitutional suspension of Habeas Corpus. Smith: Earlier in the program I mentioned a statement by Rob Simmons that he would withhold medical care from wounded prisoners when he was running an interrogation center in Vietnam . That was a violation of the Geneva Conventions wasnt it? Wells Dixon : Absolutely. The denial of medical care to someone in the custody of the United States certainly would be illegal and unconscionable and it would violate the Geneva Conventions. No question about it. Smith: Do you think that he should have been more open about this when he argued for changes to US law and the way we interpret the Geneva Conventions? Wells Dixon : I dont know that I could comment on his particular circumstances. I would comment I guess in one respect. In September, on the same day that President Bush transferred the 14 so-called high value detainees to Guantanamo . The United State s Army issued a new Army Field Manual, to govern in part the interrogations of detainees. And the Army Field Manual which doesnt apply to the CIA said that torture is not only illegal but it also yields poor performance and is unreliable. This is a statement that was then echoed by LT. General Kimmons who is the Army General Chief of Staff for Intelligence who said, quote, Im absolutely convinced that no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that. And I think that he is exactly correct and I would point to two instances in which evidence obtained by torture has proved to be extremely unreliable and in fact extremely dangerous. One instance involves the rendition by the United States of Mahar Arar to Syria where he was tortured and then confessed. The Canadian Government has just cleared Mahar Arar of any wrong doing.

And so I think that you can see from that example that coercion and torture really is not useful for interrogation practices. The other instance that I would point to is the case of a man named al-Libi (Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi) who is a suspected Bin Laden associate who was captured a few months after September 11th in Afghanistan . He was rendered by the CIA to Libya where he was tortured and under torture provided information concerning the connection between Iraq and Al Qaida. This information formed the basis for Colin Powells presentation to the United Nations in February of 2003 in which he said essentially that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaida. We now know that thats not the case, that that information was false, and we now know what the unfortunate results are of that information. So to the extent that Congressman Simmons or any other interrogator would employ coercive or other means to obtain information I would be very very suspicious and very cautious about the quality of that information. A number of former Military interrogators said in a statement of July of this year that prisoner and detainee abuse and torture are to be avoided at all costs because they can degrade the intelligence collection effort. I think that thats particularly poignant and should be considered by Congressman Simmons and other members of Congress when theyre considering whether or not torture is permissible; whether or not we as a nation will as a matter of policy or a matter of law allow that kind of misconduct. Wells Dixon is an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights online at CCR-NY.org. For Talk Nation Radio Im Dori Smith. This program is produced at WHUS, Radio for the People, at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, CT. WHUS.org to listen live Wed. at 5 pm. Talknation.org and talknationradio.org for transcripts and discussion. Music in this broadcast was by Fritz Heede Scott Gibson and locally the Known Unknowns with Tell The Truth. for more information, see Music Director. Related links: http://talknationradio.com/?p=52 Interview with Rob Simmons who denies CIA wrongdoing during the Vietnam era that was investigated by the Church and Pike Committees and calls their findings, hogwash. http://talknationradio.com/?p=50 Rep. Rob Simmons and Former President George HW Bush Complain about Efforts to Hold the CIA Accountable for Torture, Accountability, Illegal Surveillance http://talknationradio.com/?p=51 http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=19777 http://www.douglasvalentine.com/Van%20Bergen%20and%20Va... The Dangerous World of Indefinite Detentions: Vietnam to Abu Ghraib, Jennifer Van Bergen and Douglas Valentine The Center for Constitutional Rights read with concern the misguided decision issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in the case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on July 15, 2005. Mr. Hamdan, a detainee designated by President Bush to be tried before a military commission in Guantnamo Bay , Cuba , had filed a lawsuit challenging the Presidents authority to establish military commissions in the absence of specific congressional action and the militarys authority to try him in violation of the Geneva Conventions. http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/report.asp?ObjID=yEQ7q... Center for Constitutional Rights, report on Mr. Hamdan. Withholding Medical Care http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:Q9se3mAT1NsJ:www.f... CRS Report for Congress, Received through the CRS Web, Order Code RL32567, Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques, under the Geneva Conventions.] http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Report_on_Guantanamo_... http://www.chelseagreen.com/2004/items/guantanamo http://www.chelseagreen.com/about/politicsandpractice/n... http://hrw.org/press/2003/02/powell-ltr020303.htm http://www.house.gov/mckinney/20050722transcript.pdf http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20... http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0512-06.htm http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1754348,00.html http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2525 I did some interrogation work when I was assigned to Vietnam and these types of activities dont work. Rob Simmons, see Rumsfeld Testifies, AntiWar, May 7, 2004 http://connecticutlocalpolitics.blogspot.com/2005/07/si... Connecticut Local Politics, Wednesday, July 13, 2005, Simmons on Guanatanamo Bay : Try the Rice; Detainees at Guantanamo Bay are treated well, the food is good and the medical care seems decent, Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd District, said Tuesday. He and nine other members of Congress took a half-day trip Monday to the Cuban military prison to see for themselves if harsh criticism leveled at the base was justified. Guantanamo had a lot of openness I have not seen in penitentiaries in my own state, Simmons said, recalling that he felt claustrophobic during a recent visit to Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers. He also said the food was surprisingly good, including the best institutional rice Ive had. (AP) http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:x3ELlWX7l5YJ:www.b... / ethicsbook_files/Ethics2/Ethics-ch-23.pdf+new+legislation%2BMlitary%2Bgeneva+conventions &hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 Torture in wartime is usually used to extract in-formation from the enemy. However, it may also be used to merely punish an individual physically or damage him psychologically. Torture may include acts of abuse ranging from cruel and degrading treatment to physical assaults leading to death. Physician participation in torture has occurred throughout history. The most recent, glaring examples were revealed in the war crimes trials following World War II. Unfortunately, torture and physician participation in it have frequently been given legal respectability by governments that lacked moral integrity. A physician may participate in torture by administering a drug to an individual to facilitate interrogation, or by evaluating whether a prisoner is physically capable of undergoing torture for purposes of interrogation. A physician may participate in torture by wrongly applying psychiatric diagnosis and treatment to fulfill a political goal. A physician may even participate in torture by using his medical skills to devise new methods of torture, even though he is not directly involved in administering that torture. Whether or not

physician participation in capital punishment represents participation in torture is still an open debate. If Lieberman sees supporting the Warner/McCain/Graham bill as a way to take an election year stand against Bush while posing as protector of our historical international obligations, he is dead wrong. As J. Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights said, The Administration and Warner billswould authorize the life-long detention of more than 450 men who have been imprisoned in Guantnamo for nearly five years without ever having been charged with an offense or receiving a fair hearing. This is unconscionable. Every person detained by our nation must receive a fair hearingone that does not rely on secret evidence or evidence obtained by torture or coercionbecause fairness and due process are what America stands for. In Connecticut , and across the nation, as candidates are forced to take a stand on such issues as torture, habeas corpus, and the separation of powers, we will learn who represents our finest traditions, and who would settle for a poor imitation which will further erode our historical role as a beacon for human rights. BLOG | Posted 09/19/2006 @ 5:02pm, The War on Torture, Katrina vanden Heuvel, quotes J.Wells Dixon, see The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?mm=9&yr=2006 Unusual, of interest: MTV: The Geneva Conventions for dummies.http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1470867/03312003/id_0....In the case of war, actually, many things are not fair.

Weekend Edition November 4-6, 2000 Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on googleMore Sharing Services0 Rob Simmons, the CIA, and the Issue of War Crimes in Vietnam

The Spook Who Would Be a Congressman

by Douglas Valentine Congressional candidate Robert Simmons vehemently denies that he committed war crimes while serving as a CIA officer in South Vietnam.? According to the five-term state representative from Stonington, Connecticut, the charges amount to character assassination. Any veteran, anybody who served his country in war, should be offended, Simmons claims. The specific charge against Simmons is that he routinely violated the Geneva Conventions while interrogating civilian prisoners during his 20 months of service with the CIA in Vietnam.? The charge stems from a profile of Simmons published by the New London Day in May 1994.? In that profile Simmons said he would threaten to withhold medicine from injured prisoners, in order to obtain information, but that he would never actually make good on the threat.? According to Simmons, such coercive tactics are perfectly legitimate and do not reach the threshold of a war crime. On the contrary, If I hadnt involved myself, many people would have lost their limbs or their lives, Simmons said in May 1994. But Simmons, who is a Lector at his Episcopal Church, has not been totally forthcoming about his CIA activities in South Vietnam.? His reticence, notably, is partly a result of non-disclosure agreements he has with the CIA and Senate.? These secrecy agreements prevent him from divulging certain types of information, such as names of his colleagues and informants, and the methods he used.? While these secrecy laws restrict Simmons in certain respects, they also protect him from the type of public scrutiny that might resolve, once and for all, the question of his involvement in war crimes in Vietnam.? Without access to CIA records and reports, there is no way to determine what Simmons did or did not do in Vietnam. However, based on information and documents Simmons provided to this writer in an interview conducted in September 1988, there is evidence that his involvement in questionable activities was greater than he publicly admits.

This is a most sensitive subject that requires factual background information. From November 1970 until June 1972, Rob Simmons served as a CIA officer in Tuy Hoa, the capitol city of Phu Yen, a coastal province in South Vietnams Military Region II.? His job was twofold, and involved both liaison with the South Vietnamese special police, as well as mounting and conducting paramilitary operations. As the liaison officer and advisor to the special police, Simmons assisted his Vietnamese counterpart in identifying civilian members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure? (the VCI) and in penetrating their organization with double agents.? He also advised the special police chief of the Phu Yen Province Interrogation Center, located in Tuy Hoa.? With the assistance of Simmons, suspected members of the VCI, including women and youngsters, had their names placed on a blacklist and were subjected to surveillance by the special police.? If they appeared to be doing something suspicious, or if they were accused by an anonymous informer, the suspects could be arrested and held in the Interrogation Center, in administrative detention, for as long as two years, without any access to due process. If they survived their interrogations, prisoners were eventually brought before the Province Security Committee, a non-judicial body that disposed of captured VCI. During the Vietnam War there were repeated allegations that innocent people were being tortured in CIA Provincial Interrogation Centers, including the one in Tuy Hoa.? As a result, several U.S. Congresspersons traveled to Vietnam to investigate the situation.? Their investigation culminated in 1971 with Congressional Hearings.? At the end of these Hearings, U.S. Representatives Paul McCloskey, John Conyers, Bella Abzug and Ben Rosenthal stated their belief that The people of these United Stateshave deliberately imposed upon the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law, and that in doing so, we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian people. They also stated their belief that torture is a regularly accepted part of interrogation, and that U.S. civilian and military personnel have participated for over three years in the deliberate denial of due process of law to thousands of people held in secret interrogation centers built with U.S. dollars. Congressman Ogden Reid asked CIA Director William Colby if any CIA officers had ever resigned on the grounds that they could not be morally satisfied that they were identifying, interrogating, and in some cases assassinating the right individuals.? Colby replied that not one CIA officer had ever resigned. Although the CIA acknowledged that it funded the special police and the interrogation centers -? one of which existed in each of South Vietnams 44 provinces it refused to acknowledge or accept responsibility for the torture that occurred in those facilities.??????? Rob Simmons likewise absolves himself of responsibility for any abuses that occurred at the Phu Yen Province Interrogation Center.? He said he never let himself get into the sort of untenable situations that prompted the four members of Congress to conclude that the interrogation centers, which the CIA built and maintained, were de-facto torture chambers. In the absence of any documentary evidence, it is impossible to know what really happened at the Phu Yen Province Interrogation Center.? The CIA will never make public whatever records it has in this regard.? However, there is documentary evidence that, as the CIAs paramilitary advisor in Phu Yen Province, Rob Simmons mounted operations that were designed to kill specific targeted members of the VCI. Prior to arriving in Vietnam, Simmons had received intensive training in paramilitary operations.? He knew how to handle weapons and make bombs, in order to efficiently kill people and blow things up, and in this paramilitary capacity he worked with Phu Yens Provincial Reconnaissance Units, or PRU.

Like the special police interrogation centers, the PRU were a creation of the CIA.? But while the job of the special police was to identify and turn VCI into double agents in the interrogation centers, it was the job of the PRU teams to identify, capture, and kill VCI, depending on the circumstances.? Throughout the Vietnam War, the PRU were accused of rampant war crimes.? Called The CIAs Hired Killers by acclaimed journalist Georgie Anne Geyer, the PRU were recruited by CIA talent scouts from South Vietnams minority ethnic and social groups.? PRU teams were composed mostly of Chinese Nungs, Montagnards, Muslim Chams, Cambodians, convicts and former VC.? The one thing they had in common was a complete lack of any personal connection to Vietnamese community and the ability to assassinate without remorse. As the CIAs paramilitary officer, Rob Simmons worked with the Phu Yen PRU teams, which in 1971 and 1972 were still funded by the CIA.? Simmons used PRU files and sources to develop intelligence on targeted individuals, and in return, he let the PRU use his radio.? But the PRU teams were controversial, so Simmons was instructed to develop his own special action paramilitary unit for capturing and killing individual VCI. Simmons likened this aspect of his job to fishing for bluefish.? When youre fishing for bluefish, you need a bluefish lure and bluefish bait.? Going after the VCI is the same thing. During the interview with this writer in 1988, Simmons produced reports of paramilitary operations in Phu Yen Province.? One of the reports tells how a special police team killed three VCI in November 1970.? Based on information provided by an anonymous informer, the VCI were ambushed at night while digging a spider hole outside Vinh Phu hamlet.? One of the people killed was Nguyen Van Toan, described as the Secretary of the Communist Party Chapter Committee and chairman of the Village Peoples Revolutionary Committee. Toan was 20 years old and a native of Vinh Phu hamlet. As a result of this operation, Simmons was directed to develop the regions paramilitary capability.? In response he created the prototype special action team in Military Region II.? Called the Special Intelligence Force Unit (SIFU) it was formed and trained in October and November of 1971.? Recruits came from five nearby districts.? All were volunteers from the special police and the National Police Field Forces.? Eventually there were six teams, each team consisting of four men from the special police, and four men from the National Police Field Forces.? The Phu Yen SIFU detachment, which had its own facility, was commanded by special police officer Nguyen Van Quy, and was advised and funded by Rob Simmons. Simmons did not say if he accompanied the SIFU team on its missions, but in order to command respect, CIA paramilitary officers routinely did go on missions. Documents provided by Simmons indicate the SIFU had continued success.? In a report dated December 1971, the National Police Commander in Phu Yen Province discussed several recent SIFU operations.? Colonel Nam specifically used the word exterminate to describe one particular mission, in which two VCI were killed in an ambush. As another example of SIFU effectiveness, Simmons provided this writer with a copy of a 29 January 1972 letter he sent to one of his superiors.? The letter was a request for awards and medals for the members of the SIFU who had participated in the recent Lien Tri operation. The Lien Tri operation began on 26 January 1972, when an anonymous informer reported to the special police that elements of the Tuy Hoa City Party Committee Action Team were planning to enter Lien Tri hamlet to build secret hiding places in preparation for an attack against Tuy Hoa and its northern suburbs.? According to the letter provided by Simmons, the SIFU moved into the area the following day to intercept the VC Action Team.? At 9:00 pm four VC, three women, and seven youths were seen digging a hole.? They were taken under fire.? Killed were Trinh Tan Luc, Tuy Hoa Party Committee member, and Nguyen Dung, Tuy Hoa Current Affairs Committee.?

Under South Vietnamese law, it was perfectly legal for CIA officer Simmons to target these South Vietnamese civilians for assassination.? Indeed, these two VCI had organized a recent attack on Tuy Hoa, and Simmons was especially happy to have eliminated them.? The operation was over by 11:00pm. This operation epitomizes the type operation we encourage the police to run against the VC/VCI in Phu Yen province, Simmons reported to his boss.? The special police prepared detailed information on the individual VC, tasked their local sources for information on the individuals targeted which was of immediate value and then were able to mount a strike force which was sufficiently well-equipped to effectively react to the information in a timely manner.? The results speak for themselves. ? Prior to leaving Vietnam in June 1972, Simmons conducted one last major operation in Phu Yen.? In the spring of 1972 the North Vietnamese Army and the VCI launched an offensive against the South Vietnamese government and military.? A bridge in Phu Yen was a major target, as were CIA and special police installations.? Binh Dinh Province, directly north of Phu Yen, was overrun by enemy forces, which were advancing on Tuy Hoa.? As Simmons recalls, everyone was in a panic.? For several harrowing days they were cut-off from the rest of Military Region II.? Simmons himself spent one night alone in the compound monitoring the radio, and the next day he helped move reinforcements and re-supply across the Tuy Hoa beachhead.?? It was touch and go, and even after the main attacks were repulsed, Simmons and his CIA colleagues were confronted with a dangerous situation.? Tens of thousands of refugees were fleeing Binh Dinh Province, and the VCI were using the refugees as cover to smuggle in their own assassins.? CIA officers had been targeted for assassination in Binh Dinh, and intelligence reports indicated that the CIA officers in Phu Yen were next on the list.? There was tremendous fear and apprehension, but Simmons and the SIFU saved the day.? Documents captured in March, during an SIFU operation, revealed that the VC were infiltrating Tuy Hoa in Lambros.? So, Simmons explains, we rolled them up and we put them all in the PIC.? Thats fifteen to twenty people.? We interrogated the Lambro drivers, he continues, and learned they had all been conscripted.? They were bringing VC cadres posing as farmers into Tuy Hoa.?The Lambros were driven by VCI, including a few women.? They had weapons hidden under seats, to attack government offices. ???????????????????? As a CIA officer, Rob Simmons traveled 12,000 miles to take the lives of Vietnamese men and women in their own backyards.? He did so unflinchingly. Im a poor farm girl, he says, mocking a woman he had in the PIC.? So we released her and watched her for three months, and then we put her name in the paper. Arresting and watching suppressed her.? It suppressed the organization too. What Simmons is describing is psychological warfare -? the application of terror to subdue people.? Terror is what Simmons took to his enemies, in the secret war between the CIA and subversives in South Vietnam.? But the effects of psychological warfare are insidious and one must wonder if, as a Congressman, Rob Simmons might apply the same tactics in the United States that he applied in South Vietnam?? If Simmons was willing to deny suspected subversives due process in South Vietnam, might he not deny due process to suspected subversives here?? Will he apply, in America, the psychological warfare tactics he learned in Vietnam?? When asked about the morality of interrogation centers and hit teams, he said, Most of what we did was benign. He admits only to negligent cruelties, and there is very little evidence to contradict what he says.? To some extent, the lack of evidence is attributable to Simmons himself.? As Staff Director of the Senates Select Committee on Intelligence, a position he held for over three years, he helped sponsor the Agency Identities Bill, making it illegal to name CIA officers.? To this day he is required to clear anything he publishes with the CIA and the Senate.?

This fact raises the issue of his ability to function as a representative of the citizens of Connecticuts 2nd congressional district.? Can the voters be certain they know everything they need to know about him?? Can they be certain he is free to speak his mind? If it is true, as Simmons says, that Politicians Dont Belong In The Classroom, then perhaps CIA officers do not belong in the legislative process?? How can anyone know for sure they arent playing a double game?? Indeed, unless Simmons submits to the democratic process, and fully discloses, explains, and justifies his past actions, in the legal and moral context in which they occurred, he is, by his own hand, disqualified from holding public office.? Congessman Sam Gejdenson, a liberal Democrat, has represented the 2nd Congressional District of Connecticut since 1981. On Thursday, November 3rd, Gejdenson fired two campaign workers for inciting students at Wesleyan University to charge that Simmons had committed war crimes. Douglas Valentine (douglasvalentine.com) is the author of The Phoenix Program and the recently published novel about Vietnam, TDY.