The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
| Chapter 5 |
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
| Chapter 5 |
WHAT WE REALLY LEARNED
FROM VIETNAM: A WAR CRIMES
MODEL FOR AFGHANISTAN AND
ELSEWHERE
Evan Thomas and John Barry began their 6 November 2009 Newsweek
article, “The Surprising Lessons of Vietnam”, by recounting a curt telephone
conversation between the commander of the International Security Assistance
Force in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and author Stanley Karnow,
whose book Vietnam the pundits described as “the standard popular account of
the Vietnam War.” McChrystal asked Karnow if there were any lessons from the Vietnam War that could be applied to Afghanistan. The 84-year-old Karnow said the lesson was simple: “We never should have been there in the first place.”
Alas, the Thomas-Barry article – subtitled “Unraveling the mysteries of Vietnam may prevent us from repeating its mistakes” – was not about the costs in blood and treasure of imperial aggression. It was about improving US propaganda so that political and military leaders can build public support for the War on Terror not only in Afghanistan, but anywhere profits are waiting to be made.
Indeed, Thomas and Barry dismissed Karnow’s advice as “not all that useful to General McChrystal because like it or not, he is already in Afghanistan.”
Understanding Thomas and Barry as individuals helps to understand their militant bias. For example, in his book The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA, Thomas turned four racist, ruthless spies into daring, glamorous men who single handedly stopped Soviet aggression. Thomas’s big wet kiss to Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald earned him an inside track into the CIA’s secret archives and access to its inner circle of supplicants. Nothing more than a paean to the CIA, his book became an instant best seller.
Barry is also graced with the love of the National Security Establishment. A British citizen hired in 1985 by media empress Katherine Graham, Barry was immediately granted an audience with CIA Director William Casey. As a sign of its commitment to Barry, Newsweek bought his house in England so he could afford to buy a new one in DC. He repaid his benefactors over and over again with CIA-friendly propaganda, including the 2 March 2003 article, in which he cited a high-ranking defector as insisting that Iraq had not abandoned its Weapons of Mass Destruction ambitions. 1
Thomas and Barry exemplify that select group of national security correspondents – the old boy network – who have been so thoroughly compromised by their personal connections to the CIA that they cannot be trusted by the public. True to form, the rest of their article expanded on the fantasy of a winnable war in Afghanistan. It also engaged in shameless revisionism, contending, for example, that Karnow’s sage advice reflected the wrongheaded liberal consensus that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.
Citing Hawkish Authors as Experts
Thomas and Barry insisted that the American military could have won if
1) President Lyndon Johnson had been more militant in 1965;
2) President Richard Nixon had put more effort into pacification in 1970; and
3) Democrats in Congress hadn’t stabbed the military in the back in 1974.
To support their false assertions, Thomas and Barry relied on retired Army Lt. Col. Lewis Sorley and Professor Mark Moyar at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia.
The Newsweek correspondents cited Moyar as the source of the revisionist theory that Johnson could have won the war by leveling North Vietnam with a 1960s version of shock and awe. “In 1964–65, the top military leadership understood that to defeat the North, it was necessary to go all-out,” Thomas and Barry wrote, citing Moyar’s “groundbreaking work” with its idiotic title, Triumph Forsaken.
Moyar claimed that “a massive bombing campaign, mining Hanoi’s port, and sending troops into Laos and Cambodia to cut off the North’s all-important sanctuaries and resupply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail” would have won the war in 1965. But, Moyar contended, girly politicians and groveling military commanders prevented the hawks from going “all out”; in other words, committing genocide and annihilating the North.
“LBJ’s advisors were reluctant — fearful, in part, of dragging China and the Soviet Union into a larger war,” Thomas and Barry said. “The military pressed — but not very hard,” making “the classic mistake of telling their political masters what they wanted to hear.”
Perpetrating myths like Moyar’s requires quite a bit of dissembling, and nowhere in their article do Thomas and Barry mention that the history departments at the University of Iowa and Duke rejected Moyar’s job applications, based on his habit of spewing right-wing propaganda instead of facts. Moyar is to Vietnam War history what creationists are to science. 2 But that didn’t dissuade Barry and Thomas.
According to their other biased source, Lewis Sorley, the Democrats stabbed the military in the back by not financing a promising counterinsurgency effort late in the war. “Sorley argues [in his 1999 book, A Better War] that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the United States could have won in Vietnam – if only the U.S. Congress hadn’t cut off military aid to South Vietnam,” Thomas and Barry wrote.
For good measure, the Newsweek correspondents demeaned the books that President Barack Obama’s advisors were relying upon, including Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster. They said that Goldstein’s book “captures the conventional wisdom (at least at the center and left of the political spectrum) that Vietnam was a hopeless, unwinnable war.”
“But was it [unwinnable]?” they asked with eyebrows arched, before answering their own question: “The lessons of Vietnam are not necessarily the ones we glibly assume – chief among them that Afghanistan, like Vietnam, is a quagmire, and that achieving some sort of victory is out of reach.” [Well the Criminally Insane Association have their opium fields still going full blown,and as far as I can reason,that is the victory they were looking for all the way back to 2001! Don't believe me?Take a look at what the Taliban had done to opium production in that country leading up to 2001.Even a blind person can see what the Afghanistan police action has been all about from a American perspective DC]
The Right Course
Based on the flawed theories of Moyar and Sorley, Thomas and Barry advanced the theory that the right course of action in Afghanistan was to give McChrystal all the troops and resources he wanted for a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign. In this view, de-escalating in Afghanistan or even ordering only a small troop increase was not an option, unless Obama wanted to invite questions about his resolve (a criticism adopted by Hillary Clinton in her hawkish presidential campaigns) and renewed accusations about political backstabbing of the military.
According to Thomas and Barry, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired general who once commanded US forces in Afghanistan, fell into the camp of timid Obama advisors when, in July 2009, he questioned the wisdom of sending more troops to prop up the corrupt Afghan government of Hamid Karzai.
The bottom line of the Newsweek article was that the US could easily have won in Afghanistan if Obama had had the “heart” to prevail, and if Washington had learned the correct lessons from Vietnam. In advancing this theory, Thomas and Barry ignored the unprecedented violence Johnson did unleash against the North via his Rolling Thunder bombing campaign from March 1965 to November 1968, in which more than 300,000 bombing missions dropped 864,000 tons of bombs.
It’s hard to determine exactly how many bombs America and NATO have dropped on Afghanistan in the 15 years since 2001; but Thomas and Barry offered no sympathy for the people they fell upon.
They also glossed over the disproven rationales for the Vietnam War, from the discredited “domino theory” to the idea of a unified Sino-Soviet strategy for world conquest. They also relied on sanitized military jargon to obscure the inhuman brutality that pervaded “death squad” operations like the Phoenix program.
The Thomas-Barry article was published on 6 November 2009. Three months later, as reported by The New York Times, a raid by US Special Operations forces “left three women – two of them pregnant – and a local police chief and prosecutor dead. It was one of the latest examples of Special Operations forces killing civilians during raids, deaths that have infuriated Afghan officials and generated support for the Taliban despite efforts by American and NATO commanders to reduce civilian casualties.” 3
Initially, the commando team claimed it had been fired upon by insurgents and that the women had already been murdered when they arrived. When that lie was exposed, their commander confessed they’d made “a terrible mistake.” But he made no attempt to explain why, in an effort to cover-up their crime, the American commandos – practicing the Manson Family values they’d been taught by their CIA masters – carved their bullets out of the pregnant women’s bodies.
Is carving bullets out of dead pregnant women really a mistake? Were the American soldiers trained to do such things, or did they think it up on the scene? None of those questions were even asked.
Murdering innocent civilians indeed has been infuriating Afghanis since early 2002 when they put down their weapons and submitted to American rule. But, as Anand Gopal explains in his book No Good Men Among the Living, CIA assets within its Northern Alliance started the insurgency by falsely accusing pro-American Afghanis in Maiwand of being al Qaeda sympathizers. The CIA sponsored murders of top leaders of the Noorzai and Ishaqzai tribes forced the tribes’ remaining leaders into Pakistan, where their Pashtun relatives and associates gave them shelter while they plotted their revenge on the Americans and their occupation army of collaborators. 4
The idea that the Americans running the War on Terror are trying to reduce civilian deaths is pure propaganda, a repetition of stated policy with as much basis in fact as Colby’s blatant lies about Phoenix to Congress 40 years earlier. If military commanders were trying to reduce civilian deaths, they would have arrested and tried the commandos who murdered those five people in Afghanistan. But we will never even know their names. They are free to murder to their hearts’ content, because murdering civilians is unstated policy. [Truth!DC]
In the absence of punishment for war crimes and cover-ups, how can there be “efforts” to prevent civilian casualties? Indeed, you won’t hear it said by the likes of Thomas and Barry, but the license to kill that is granted to American forces, along with the intentional corruption of collaborating officials, is what most closely links the barbaric War on Terror with the Vietnam War.[agreed, but lets not forget the heroin DC]
The Wrong Parallels
Another problem with the Thomas-Barry analysis, is that many of the tactics the Newsweek writers suggested should have been expanded in Vietnam have no relevance to Afghanistan. For instance, there is no North Afghanistan to bomb back to the Stone Age; there is no Soviet Union that can transform the war into a nuclear confrontation; and there is no formal Taliban army, which, like the North Vietnamese Army, could come to the rescue of civilian insurgents caught up in the conflict.
The support insurgents receive from Pashtun relatives in Pakistan – civilians the CIA has targeted for death and mutilation through a record-setting but secret number of drones strikes – is itself the product of British colonialists having invented the nation of Pakistan as a way of more efficiently looting the region. Omitting historical facts like that from their narratives is yet another trick used by propagandists like Thomas and Barry.
The parallels between the two conflicts are mostly over the narrow issue of counterinsurgency tactics, which is why the Newsweek article skirted any serious discussion of the Phoenix program, instead using Pentagon-friendly language about “a true counterinsurgency, focusing on protecting the population by a strategy of ‘clear and hold.’”
Lifting language first employed in the Phoenix program, Thomas and Barry praised the Special Operations forces McChrystal directed in Iraq as focused “on protecting [my italics] civilians while ruthlessly targeting jihadist leaders.” They did so without irony or reference to an earlier article authored by Barry in 2005. That article famously revealed that the Bush administration was taking to Iraq the “death-squad” strategies that had been applied in El Salvador in the 1980s, what Newsweek called “the Salvador option.” 5
And where, indeed, did the Salvador Option originate? With the Phoenix program in Vietnam!
The strategy was named after the Reagan regime’s “still-secret strategy” of supporting El Salvador’s right-wing security forces, which used clandestine “death squads” to eliminate both leftist guerrillas and their civilian sympathizers. As Barry reported at the time, “many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians.”
Judging that those war crimes worked in Iraq, Thomas and Barry encouraged McChrystal to expand the “death squad” approach in Afghanistan. They wrote: “U.S. Special Operations Forces use the intelligence gleaned from friendly civilians to find and kill Taliban leaders. That is precisely what the Phoenix Program was designed to do 40 years ago in Vietnam: target and assassinate Viet Cong leaders.”
This “true counterinsurgency,” Thomas and Barry asserted, began to work in Vietnam when the top US commanders began to “smarten up.” [what arrogant pricks these two are,bet neither one were in any military unit DC]
Their article confidently asserted that in late 2009, “McChrystal is implementing a strategy that draws on the lessons of Iraq and looks an awful lot like the ‘pacification’ program adopted by General Abrams in Vietnam in 1968. By ratcheting back the heavy use (and overuse) of firepower, McChrystal has reduced civilian casualties, which alienate the locals and breed more jihadists.”
The steady increase in civilian deaths in Afghanistan since 2010, and the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, refutes their argument 6 which relies totally on disinformation and “prejudicial” terms like “jihadist” to justify the coldblooded murder of innocent people falsely designated as militant religious fanatics. It is the same disinformation that was used to justify Phoenix. But just as in Vietnam, where the word communist was applied to anyone who resisted the US occupation, American kidnapping and assassination programs in Iraq and Afghanistan make no distinction between “jihadists” and nationalists defending their homes and resisting foreign occupation.
The Wrong Facts
Thomas and Barry ignored some basic facts about “pacification” in Vietnam, including that:
• CIA and military Special Forces created South Vietnam’s “self defense forces” for the purpose of waging a “clear and hold” style counterinsurgency well before Abrams arrived in 1968.
• The CIA created a “general staff for pacification” in 1967 that managed the Phoenix program.
• Westmoreland’s “main force” battles with the NVA bought the US military time to implement this counterinsurgency strategy, and compelled the North to initiate the Tet uprisings of 1968, which decimated the South’s guerrilla forces before Abrams took command in June of that year.
The one accurate comparison Thomas and Barry cited between the situation in Vietnam and the conduct of the terror wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was already being implemented: the counterinsurgency tactic of targeting and assassinating enemy leaders. But the comparison they made was actually incomplete and misleading, since that tactic was but the exposed tip of the iceberg, riding upon a massive programmatic development below it.
The CIA’s counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam was based on its Provincial Interrogation Center, Counter-Terror, Armed Political Action, Hamlet Informant, Census Grievance and Chieu Hoi “defector” programs; all made possible under extra-legal administrative detention laws and emergency decrees established by Americans to allow American participation. These cornerstones of the counterinsurgency were already in place and incorporated within the Phoenix program in 1967.
The purpose of these counterinsurgency programs was to chart the clandestine “front” organizations that drove the national liberation movement. In mapping out this “secret government” with its secret agents, the CIA came to understand how the Viet Cong Infrastructure helped average citizens cope with the massive violence that the US military and its puppet regime in Saigon were using to destroy their lives and livelihoods.
Meanwhile, the CIA established its own secret government. Through its parallel “secret government” of secret collaborators, the CIA, after 1967, directed the dictatorial regime of President Nguyen Van Thieu, and through his clique, exercised control of South Vietnam’s military, intelligence, security and civil organizations.
The CIA constructs similar secret governments in many nations throughout the world, including and in particular, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Death Lists
In Vietnam via the Phoenix program, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan through the new and improved version, the CIA sends its hit teams after a long list of targeted individuals. Targets included tax assessors and collectors; people operating business fronts for purchasing, storing or distributing food and supplies to the resistance; public health officials who distribute medicine; security and judicial officials who target American collaborators and agents; anyone proselytizing to the general population; officials involved in transportation, communication and postal services; political indoctrination cadres; military recruiters; guerrilla leaders and their forces; and anyone who funds and staffs front organizations.
As in Vietnam, all these categories of people – and their sympathizers and supporters – find their names on computerized, Phoenix-style death lists in Afghanistan and Iraq. As counterinsurgency guru David Galula noted, most of these people have honorable intentions and “do not participate directly, as a rule, in direct terrorism or guerrilla action and, technically, have no blood on their hands.” 7
In other words, non-combatants were already being targeted by McChrystal’s “true counterinsurgency”, which Thomas and Barry nevertheless insisted had the goal of “protecting civilians.”
They knew this, of course. As reported by Brown University Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, “In 2009, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health reported that fully two-thirds of Afghans suffer from mental health problems.” 8
Two-thirds by 2009! How many more have been driven insane after seven years of the Thomas/Barry-endorsed steady escalation of the violence? How many have been poisoned by depleted uranium and radicalized by economic insecurity, the toxic by-products of military occupation that fuel injustice and drive people into the psychological traps set by the occupation’s security forces, in the name of freedom and democracy?
The Politics of Corruption
While Thomas and Barry laid out incorrect parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan in terms of the general dynamic of the conflicts, they ignored, in their search for lessons from Vietnam that might apply to Afghanistan, the parallels in the US strategy/tactics in these conflicts which actually were taking place.
Indeed, they turned a blind eye to the single most important strategic parallel, the pervasive corruption by design – including sponsorship of drug trafficking by warlords on the CIA payroll – that was endemic to the US-backed regime in South Vietnam. This systematic corruption was already operational in Afghanistan when they wrote their article, but they intentionally failed to address it.
As outlined in Chapter 2, Air Force General Nguyen Cao Ky, while serving as head of South Vietnam’s national security directorate, won control of a lucrative narcotic smuggling franchise in 1965. Through his strongman, General Loan, Ky and his clique financed both their political apparatus and their security forces through opium profits. Likewise, upon occupying Afghanistan in 2002, the CIA allowed its chosen president, Hamid Karzai, and his clique to traffic in opium without fear of arrest and prosecution. Karzai even rejected a proposal that he exile his brother, Ahmed Wali, the political boss in southern Kandahar Province, after Ahmed was irrefutably linked to drug trafficking. Only Ahmed’s timely assassination in 2011 spared his CIA sponsors any further embarrassment.[Timely indeed,what is their saying?terminate with extreme prejudice? DC]
Another overlooked parallel is the self-delusional hubris embodied in steadfast US confidence that its forces possess accurate intelligence. But McChrystal, like every military commander before and after him, gained his intelligence about the Afghan resistance through what he referred to as “friendly civilians” like the opium trafficking warlord, Gul Agha Sherzai.
The American public is largely unaware that the Taliban laid down its arms after the American invasion in 2001, and that the Afghan people took up arms only after the CIA installed Sherzai in Kabul. In league with the Karzai brothers, Sherzai supplied the CIA with a network of informants that targeted their business rivals, not the Taliban. As Anand Gopal revealed in No Good Men Among The Living, as a result of Sherzai’s friendly tips, the CIA methodically tortured and killed Afghanistan’s most revered leaders in a series of Phoenixstyle raids that radicalized the Afghan people.
If Thomas and Barry were to have addressed that fact, they certainly would have dismissed it as “a mistake”.
But it wasn’t a mistake. The CIA felt it was necessary to enlist Sherzai in order to consolidate the power of its drug smuggling, money-laundering, land stealing clique of warlords. In my opinion, the National Security Establishment was always after control of the drugs and money.[Valentine is 100% spot on! DC]
As Karzai’s successor, President Ashraf Ghani admitted in May 2016, “The most significant driver of corruption is the narcotic cartel.” As an afterthought, Ghani noted, “the corrupt engage in the most intense propaganda when they are prosecuted and accused.” 9
But all that is ignored, as are other uncomfortable facts. For example, that America’s militant leaders used 9/11 to recruit and motivate a new generation of special operations forces, whose mission is to invade private homes at midnight on snatch and snuff missions. Nowhere, in any Establishment media outlet, is it ever mentioned that our political and military leaders did this because they wanted to seize Afghanistan and use it to establish a colony in a strategic location near Russia and China.
As Dinh Tuong An stressed in his “Truth about Phoenix” series cited in Chapter 3, friendly intelligence and false accusations are synonymous when an occupation force wages a counterinsurgency. And that’s exactly what has been happening in Afghanistan and Iraq today.
Revising History
CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the “friendly civilians” who supply the “death squads” that are in fact their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities. CIA and military intelligence officials understand that much of the intelligence they rely upon is dubious at best, but they act on it anyway, as did Sid Towle’s bosses Tom Ahern and John Vann in Vietnam, because big “body counts” impress their superiors.
As a result, anyone can be an insurgent on a death list.
Phoenix program veteran Major Stan Fulcher, whom I interviewed at length in The Phoenix Program, succinctly explained this reality: “The Vietnamese lied to us; we lied to the Phoenix Directorate; and the Directorate made it into documented fact. It was a war that became distorted through our ability to create fiction.” [And remember,all this lying serves one purpose,to deceive the American people DC]
The big lesson from Vietnam that applies to Afghanistan and the War on Terror is the value of gray and black propaganda in maintaining public support through emotional appeals, twisted logic, and the promulgation of revisionist history. In this game for the hearts and minds of the US public, US hawks have learned to play the role of victim; in the spirit of the reactionary times, they claim reverse discrimination by the so-called liberal media. Their message is carried by Fox News and intermediaries like Thomas and Barry, whose complicity assures their career advancement and wealth.
Like the German military after the First World War, McChrystal and his replacements in Afghanistan and Iraq have wholeheartedly seized upon the “stabbed-in-the-back” argument. Revising the history of the Vietnam War to insist that victory was within grasp, if only we had more “heart”, is central to that deception.
That historical revisionism is what the Newsweek article promoted. The US and its South Vietnamese allies “finally” adopted a winning counterinsurgency strategy in the early 1970s, Thomas and Barry wrote. But “it was too late,” they added, citing Sorley’s A Better War. American public opinion had turned. President Richard Nixon signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam in 1973, but promised continued support to the GVN. The stab in the back came in 1974, Thomas and Barry said, when “Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Without logistical support or air cover, the South Vietnamese Army collapsed in 1975 and the communists swept into Saigon.”
Citing Sorley, the Newsweek correspondents claimed that key war participants – such as General Creighton Abrams and US Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker – were sure that the US would have prevailed if defeatism hadn’t taken hold.
“We eventually defeated ourselves,” Bunker is quoted as saying.
Having focused on this fatal betrayal, Thomas and Barry concluded that the key lessons to be drawn from Vietnam are the importance of decisive leadership and a presidential commitment to do what’s necessary, including genocide, to achieve victory. They doubted that Obama was made of such stern stuff.
“Obama may decide that Afghanistan is too hard,” Thomas and Barry opined, adding that if he did waver and begin “an orderly withdrawal,” he must “explain to America and the world why it’s necessary.”
The tragedy is that Thomas and Barry’s disinformation and historical revisionism worked. After their article appeared in print, Obama found the “heart” to escalate a war that has no logical end point and, in the absence of terrorist attacks on American soil, scant popular support. Now more than ever, there are growing concerns that the underlying motivation is more about economics than national security.[I would add that there is still,at least in some quarters,the political aspect of the Middle East in general in play in these idiotic wars that the United States have entangled themselves in now for over almost the last 18 years now. DC]
In a speech on 22 October 2009, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray said he had concluded that the motive for the long war in Afghanistan was the desire of Western energy interests to use its territory for a natural gas pipeline to connect the Caspian Basin to the Arabian Sea. “Almost everything you see about Afghanistan is a cover for the fact that the actual motive is the pipeline they wish to build over Afghanistan to bring out Uzbek and Turkmen natural gas which together is valued at up to $10 trillion,” Murray said. 10
There is a heavy price to pay for contradicting the official narrative, and Murray, notably, “was forced out of the British public service after he exposed the use of torture by Britain’s Uzbek allies.” As a result of his political actions, and his advocacy of diplomacy over militancy, the US government denied him an entry visa and prevented him from presenting the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence to CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou in September 2016. 11
Then there’s the question of access to Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. In 2010, China signed a multi-billion-dollar deal for a copper mine contract, angering US officials and their Afghan collaborators. Other natural resources lay waiting for American businessmen with bulging pocketbooks.
It’s Phoenix all over again, according to Major Stan Fulcher, the Binh Dinh Province Phoenix coordinator in 1972. “Phoenix,” Fulcher said, “was a creation of the old boy network, a group of guys at highest level – Colby and that crowd – who thought they were Lawrence of Arabia.”
The son of an Air Force officer, Stan Fulcher was brought up in military posts around the world, but he branded as “hypocritical” the closed society into which he was born. “The military sees itself as the conqueror of the world, but the military is socialism in its purest form. People in the military lead a life of privilege in which the state meets each and every one of their needs.” [Very insightful DC]
Having served in the special security unit at Can Tho Air Base in 1968, where he led a unit of 40 riflemen against the VC, Fulcher understood the realities of Vietnam better than Thomas and Barry. He told of the MSS killing a Jesuit priest who advocated land reform, of GVN officials trading with the National Liberation Front while trying to destroy religious sects, and of the tremendous US cartels – RMK-BRJ, Sealand, Holiday Inns, Pan Am, Bechtel and Vinnell – that prospered from the war.
“The military has the political power and the means of production,” Fulcher explained, “so it enjoys all the benefits of society. It was the same thing in Vietnam, where the US military and a small number of politicians supported the Catholic establishment against the masses. Greedy Americans,” Fulcher said, “were the cause of the war. The supply side economists were the emergent group during Vietnam.”
According to Fulcher, the Phoenix program was set up by Americans on American assumptions, in support of American policies. Alas, America’s allies in South Vietnam depended on American patronage and implemented a policy they knew could not be applied to their culture. In the process the definition of an insurgent was deliberately made ambiguous, and Phoenix was broadened from a rifle shot attack against the VC “organizational hierarchy” into a shotgun method of population control.
“It happened,” Fulcher said ruefully, because “any policy can find supporting intelligence,” meaning “the Phoenix Directorate used computers to skew the statistical evaluation of the VCI. Dead Vietnamese became VCI, and they lucked out the other five percent of the time, getting real VCI in ambushes.”
What Fulcher said earlier is worth repeating: “It was a war that became distorted through our ability to create fiction. But really, there were only economic reasons for our supporting the fascists in Vietnam, just like we did in [the Shah’s] Iran.”
Professor Nguyen Ngoc Huy, a Vietnamese historian and former professor at Harvard, was someone Barry and Thomas might have quoted in their article, had they wanted the truth, or had they risen above their own racial prejudices and considered for a moment that a Vietnamese person’s opinion might be valuable in analyzing the lessons of the war.
For what it’s worth, Professor Huy believed that America “betrayed the ideals of freedom and democracy in Vietnam.” Huy added that, “American politicians have not changed their policy. What happened later in Iran was a repetition of what happened in South Vietnam. Almost the same people applied the same policy with the same principles and the same spirit. It is amazing that some people are still wondering why the same result occurred.” 12
And, one might add, the cycle is ongoing in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and many other places, thanks largely to the Big Lies told by propagandists like Evan Thomas and John Barry.
| Chapter 6 |
THE AFGHAN ‘DIRTY
WAR’
ESCALATES
NPR was badly embarrassed in 2000 when it was revealed that PSYOP
(psychological operations) personnel from Ft. Bragg were working in its
Washington, DC newsroom, apparently as interns.
1 Top managers were said to
be unaware of the arrangement, which was blamed on people in its personnel
department. However, based on NPR’s cozy relationship with the military and its
penchant to spew pro-military propaganda (some say the P in NPR stands for
Pentagon) media watchdogs, myself included, believed the PSYOP soldiers were
penetration agents meant to influence news coverage. In any event, on 30 December 2009, I listened in dismay, but not surprise, as an NPR “terrorism” expert condemned the suicide bombing that had killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan a few days earlier. 2 That particular act of terrorism, the expert said, was especially hideous because the murdered CIA officers were spreading economic development, democracy and love as members of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). [that is rich,the Criminally Insane Association spreading Love??? PLEASSSSE DC]
No less disingenuous were the comments of CIA Director Leon Panetta, who said the deceased did “the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism.”
Or fuel terrorism, as the case may be.
President Obama added his two cents, saying the fallen CIA officers were “part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens, and for our way of life.”
“Our way of life” in the twenty-first century means Full Spectrum Dominance and a burgeoning precariat.
On New Year’s Day 2010 – the story of the martyred CIA officers having expired – Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Pamela Constable ventured beyond the initial spin. Rather than cast the CIA officers as heroes, they hinted at the murderous activities they were involved in. Warrick and Constable said the CIA officers were secretly “at the heart of a covert program overseeing strikes by the agency’s remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.” 3
So much for spreading love and development. In 2009, CIA drone strikes killed more than 300 people (perhaps as many as 700) all of whom were invariably described as suspected terrorists, jihadists, or militants (a word never applied to the Americans), or people said to be killed by accident.
Neither the US government nor the media ever make any distinction between nationalists defending their country from foreign invaders and real terrorists who have inflicted intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political objective (the classic definition of terrorism). There is never any hint that people could have honorable reasons for resisting the American military occupation of their country, or that they are doing so because they’ve been driven crazy with revenge and desperation by years of relentless US air and ground attacks.
There were other reasons to doubt the hype surrounding the original story, for despite the media’s description of the attack on the CIA officers as “terrorism,” the act didn’t fit the definition. The targets were engaged in military operations and thus were legitimate targets under the international laws of war. CIA officers managing killer drones are as guilty of terrorism as the Taliban commanders they target from the safety of their enclaves.
A few press accounts did suggest that the suicide attack was in retaliation for drone strikes on Taliban forces. In which case, ironically, from the perspective of the indigenous resistance, the offing of the CIA officers was actually “counterterrorism”.
There was also speculation that the suicide attack was payback for the killing of ten people in Ghazi Khan, a village in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar. The ten Afghans were shot to death during a raid on their home by unidentified American militants. Often Green Berets or Navy SEALs detailed to the CIA’s Special Activities Division operate outside the laws of warfare. Such death squad actions also fit the classic definition of terrorism.
The rationale is that “we” must fight fire with fire; terror with terror. But do people understand, when they make such an argument, that they are calling on US personnel to murder innocent civilians with a view to terrorizing the local population in general, in order to get them to accept the US-backed client Afghan government?
As always, NATO spokespeople initially labeled the ten victims in Ghazi Khan as “insurgents” and “relatives” of an individual suspected of belonging to a “terrorist” cell that manufactured improvised explosive devices used to kill American heroes, as well as innocent Afghan civilians. However, Afghan government investigators and neighbors soon 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.
Allegations of Handcuffed Victims
According to a 31 December 2009 article in The Times of London, the US commandos faced accusations “of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.” 4
An official statement posted on Afghan President Karzai’s website (no less) said the raiding party “took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead.”
Investigator Assadullah Wafa told the UK Times that the American unit flew by helicopter from a military base in Kabul and landed about two kilometers from the village. “The troops walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation, they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and opened fire.” Wafa, a former governor of Helmand Province, added, “It’s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent.”
The Times quoted the school’s headmaster as saying the victims were asleep in three rooms when the death squad arrived. “Seven students were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.
“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him, they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”
The guest was a shepherd boy, age twelve, the headmaster said, adding that six of the students were in high school and two in primary school. All the students were his nephews. [Wow,this is so disgusting that they are doing this in our name.Bring ALL our people home Trump,screw the military-industrial complex,do the right thing for humanity sir DC]
A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. “I saw their school books covered in blood,” he said, according to The Times.
Backed into a corner, the Afghan National Security Directorate, on behalf of its owners in the CIA, tried to cover-up the war crime by saying “forces from an unknown address came to the area and without facing any armed resistance, put ten youth in two rooms and killed them.”
Protests over the killings erupted throughout Kunar Province, where the killings occurred, as well as in Kabul. Hundreds of protesters demanded that American occupation forces leave the country, and that the unidentified killers from an unknown address be brought to justice.
Fat chance.
Incredibly, a NATO spokesperson claimed there was “no direct evidence to substantiate” the claim of premeditated murder. The unknown killers from an “unknown address” had come under fire from several buildings in the village. So picture these big strong American soldiers encountering sleeping children, and make an argument how they had no recourse but to tie them up then kill them.
The record of American forces engaging in indiscriminate and intentional killings of unarmed people in Afghanistan is now a long one, with testimony about premeditated executions even emerging in military disciplinary hearings, where the perps are always exonerated, like cops who routinely kill blacks in America. 5
Engaging in war crimes, it seems, is as American as apple pie and compulsory Nuremburg-style celebrations of militant nationalism at football games. Even the United Nations must periodically warn American military forces about the dangers of conducting nighttime raids of private homes. But as the War on Terror turns into a boondoggle for US security firms and arms manufacturers, it is clear they will only increase in frequency. Obama’s “surge” in 2010 added 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, bringing the total to about 100,000. Although that number has since been reduced and amounts to around 10,000 in 2016, the violence is escalating again thanks to an off the books mercenary army and ongoing military occupation that simply incites more and more revenge killings.
In 2010, Afghani patriots vowed to avenge the killings of their school children in Ghazi Khan, and the CIA in turn vowed to avenge the killing of its officers, including the base chief, a mother of three. Trapped in this cycle of violence, the surviving CIA personnel at FOB Base Chapman barricaded themselves inside and began the systematic grilling of all Afghan employees who were on duty at the time of the attack. Afghans who worked with the CIA on the outside were locked out.
Such is the downside of waging an endless but otherwise profitable war.
Provincial Reconstruction Teams
The Ghazi Khan massacre serves as an entrée into how covert CIA psyops and terror operations are conducted and then whitewashed by the American news media.
Few Americans, for example, were aware that FOB Chapman (named after Nathan Chapman, a Green Beret member of a CIA unit who was the first American killed in Afghanistan) was a CIA outpost. The local Afghanis knew, of course, that Chapman was a base for launching commando raids, like the one at Ghazi Khan. They knew the CIA used its Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) to obtain intelligence for its lethal raids, and that “reconstruction” was merely a cover. There would be nothing to reconstruct if not for the fact that the Americans have destroyed so much.
Since they were perfected in Vietnam, PRTs have been a primary means of gathering intelligence from informants and secret agents in enemy territory. Today, the PRTs are a foundation stone of the CIA’s parallel government in Afghanistan, and have been a unilateral CIA operation since 2002 when the program started under the reign of US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. [←←←bad guy D.C]
As evidenced by the suicide attack at FOB Chapman, the resistance has infiltrated every entity the CIA has created in Afghanistan, including the PRTs. This infiltration is made possible, ironically, by the fact that CIA officers jealously guard their elevated status and class prerogatives. It’s impossible to get them to run death squads and mutilate innocent people in drone strikes unless they are very well rewarded and shielded from responsibility for their acts of terror. CIA officers, as a result, do not perform menial tasks, enabling Afghan “double-agents” to infiltrate the bases as chauffeurs, cleaning staff and security guards. Other double agents prop up inflated CIA egos by pretending to be informants or loyal members of the police and military.
In the case of the 30 December suicide bombing, the “friendly civilian” informant who carried out the deadly act was identified as Humam Khalil AbuMulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian national who had been captured – and supposedly turned into a double agent – by Jordanian intelligence and the CIA. Before detonating the bomb strapped to his chest, Humam lured his CIA bosses to the meeting at FOB Chapman with promises of target information relating to al Qaeda’s second-in command, Ayman Zawahiri.
The case of the Jordanian double agent raised questions about the quality of the intelligence that the CIA collects to mount its drone and death squad operations. If some informants were willing to die in order to kill CIA personnel, it was a reasonable assumption that other informants were, and still are, passing along bogus tips to discredit the CIA and sabotage its operations from within, as frequently happened in Vietnam. 6
The likelihood that its operations had been penetrated presented CIA bigwigs in Washington with a dilemma, given that the P.R.T.'s provide CIA “Principal Agents” with a clever cover to gather intelligence from their sub-agents in the field, people in villages like Ghazi Khan who spy on their neighbors.
Unfortunately, CIA officers managing the P.R.T.'s must rely on Afghani interpreters and policemen to determine if the intelligence about “suspects” in a particular village is reliable. If any one of the CIA’s hired helpers is a double agent, then the P.R.T. death squad components can easily be misdirected and subverted.
Each P.R.T. has an intelligence unit whose purpose is to identify members of the Taliban and al Qaeda “infrastructure.” Typically, a sub-agent in a village tells the PRT intelligence unit where a suspect lives, how many people are in his house, where they sleep, and when they enter and leave. The sub-agent also provides a clandestinely obtained photograph of the target, so the commandos know who to snatch or snuff.
But the high-toned CIA is not a social welfare outfit; its job is gathering intelligence and using it to capture, kill or defect the enemy, and it needs dependable agents to do the job. Thus, since the military occupation began, it has relied on the same brutal and corrupt warlords – mercenaries serving their own self-interest, and thus dependent on the CIA – it organized to fight the Soviets in the 1980s.
The most effective PRTs are composed of members of a warlord’s militia; people who have as little empathy for the Afghan people in a particular area as do the American commandos. They are soldiers whose job is to protect the PRT while CIA-trained cadres are organizing “community defense forces” and spreading pro-American propaganda.
Afghani leaders see big bucks to be made through this arrangement. Malik Osman, leader of a Pashtun tribe in Jalalabad, offered one fighter from each Shinwari family to fight the Taliban in return for no-bid construction project contracts. Six years later his son and 12 other guests were killed in a suicide bombing, apparently engineered by an ISIS faction fighting the Taliban as well as the government and its CIA collaborators. 7
Nation Building and the
Origins of PRTs in Vietnam
Vietnam was a laboratory for military weapon and psychological warfare experimentation. Helicopter gunships made their debut, along with futuristic “psywar” strategies for pacifying civilian populations.
In the early 1960s, the CIA first developed the programs that would be combined in 1965 within its 59-man Revolutionary Development (RD) teams as part of the similarly named Revolutionary Development Cadres (RDC) program established at Vung Tau by the CIA’s chief of Covert Action, Tom Donohue. 8
The original model, known as a Political Action Team (PAT), was developed by US Information Service officer Frank Scotton and an Australian military officer, Ian Teague, 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.
“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.”
Scotton named his special PAT unit the Trung-doi biet kich Nham dou for people’s commando teams. “Two functions split out of this,” he said. First was pacification. Second was counterterror. As Scotton noted, “The PRU thing directly evolves from this.”
PRU (for Provincial Reconnaissance Unit) was the name given in 1966 to the CIA’s counterterror teams, which had generated a lot of negative publicity in 1965 when Senator Stephen Young charged that the CT teams 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. 9
CIA officer Tom Ahern, mentioned in the previous chapter as the CIA’s Province Officer in Charge in Vinh Long Province in 1971, documented a similar incident in his book Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency. 10 Ahern told how in October 1965 the senior CIA officer in Da Nang briefed Senator Daniel Brewster (D-MD) on the CIA’s secret operations in the area. As Ahern recalled, Brewster “conducted a detailed interrogation on the structure and activity of each program, and this led (the CIA officer-in-charge in Da Nang, Robert) Haynes, in the context of counterterror, into a mention of black operations. Pressured to define the term, Haynes cited as a hypothetical example a killing by a CT-team made to look like the work of the VC.”
Hard to imagine now, but the Congress of that era freaked out and Haynes (who in 1967 was assigned to the original Phoenix staff) was summoned to Washington to explain himself. Afterwards, presidential advisor Clark Clifford visited the CIA station chief in Saigon and told him not to allow his minions to give congressional briefings anymore. Behind the scenes, the CIA was forced to admit that CT teams were, as Ahern reluctantly admitted, “extra-legal”. As a result, “headquarters called for a GVN approval procedure whose application at the province level would allow the agency to say in good conscience [my italics] that the government had approved each operation as in the best interest of the war effort.”
Since that incident in 1965, the CIA, in concert with its protectors in Congress and the media, has only gotten better at hiding, dissembling, and lying about its illegal and barbarous CT teams.
Fitting the Proper Profile
Staffing unilateral CIA programs like CT teams and P.R.T.'s is the foundation stone of the “nation building” aspect of American neocolonialism. Indeed, Scotton’s patented “motivational indoctrination” program developed in Vietnam is still used today. A living legend among the swaggering warrior elite, he was attached to the 1st Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg the second time I spoke with him in 1988; his job was advising military commanders how to implement his psywar brain child.
Scotton’s motivational indoctrination program was, ironically, modeled on Communist techniques. The process began on a confessional basis. “On the first day,” Scotton explained, “everyone would fill out a form and write an essay on why they had joined.” Then 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, Scotton said, “was to keep people honest and have them admit mistakes.”
Not only did Scotton copy Communist organizational and motivational techniques, he relied on VC defectors as his cadre. “We felt ex-Vietminh had unique communication skills. 11 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, Nguyen Be, had been party secretary for the Ninth Vietcong Battalion before switching sides.
In 1965, Scotton was transferred to another job while He and his new CIA advisor, Harry “The Hat” Monk, combined CIA “mobile” Census Grievance cadre, 12 PATs, and CT Teams into the standard 59-member Revolutionary Development (RD) team employed by the CIA in South Vietnam until 1975.
The RD teams were facetiously called Purple People Eaters by American soldiers, in reference to their clothes and terror tactics. To the rural Vietnamese, they were simply “idiot birds.”
The Truth About Phoenix author Dinh Tuong An felt that reconstruction projects only helped the ever-adaptable VC, who simply returned from their jungle hideouts when the RD projects were done. Most Vietnamese certainly agreed with An that “Revolutionary Development only teaches the American line.”
However, “nation building” was seen as the key to winning the Vietnam War, by stealing the hearts and minds of the rural Vietnamese from the Communists. Scotton’s P.A.T.'s were central to the strategy, and the CIA created its nation-wide RDC program based in Vung Tau on that premise.
In July 1967, the chief of the CIA’s RDC program, Lou Lapham, became a member of the national-level Phoenix Committee. RD team leaders and the local Chieu Hoi (defector) program 13 representative became members of Phoenix committees at district level, so that tips on VCI gained from RD teams and defectors could be re-routed by Phoenix coordinators to the PRU-CT teams for instant “exploitation.”
In this way the Phoenix “coordination” program became the centerpiece of US pacification policy in Vietnam. The program took hold after the Tet uprising of 1968, when many VCI were captured or killed and the National Liberation Front was weakened. By 1969, as defined by William Colby (the Deputy Ambassador for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development), the first stage in “nation building” was military security, as provided by US military forces.
The second stage was territorial security – the dubious “Self-Defense Forces” put in place by RD teams.
The third and final stage was internal “political” security provided by Phoenix.
Despite Colby’s claims of success, which he backed with carefully skewed statistics, the insurgency was regrouping. In a Defense Department report titled “A Systems Analysis of the Vietnam War 1965-1972”, Thomas Thayer recognized that “The Revolutionary Development program had significant problems in recruiting and retaining high quality personnel.” The desertion rate was over 20 percent, “higher than for any GVN military force, perhaps because they have a 30% better chance of being killed.” In response, the RD teams were redirected “to concentrate on building hamlet security and to defer, at least temporarily, the hamlet development projects which formerly constituted six of the teams’ eleven RD tasks.” 14
Given the drawbacks of military and territorial security, neutralizing the VCI through Phoenix replaced “nation building” as Colby’s top priority. The Phoenix program, along with the CIA’s RDC program, were incorporated within the CORDS Pacification Security Coordination Division and heavy-handed military personnel gradually took over civil operations, bringing about a further decline in performance. The CIA station under Ted Shackley moved CIA personnel away from nation building operations back toward classic intelligence functions. But the CIA continued to collect RDC intelligence; and obviously, it still uses the modern manifestation of the RDC program today.
The issue of “nation building” was a hot topic in the 2016 presidential campaign. Donald Trump made getting out of the nation building business, and out of NATO, the basis of his America First platform. “I do think it’s a different world today, and I don’t think we should be nation building anymore,” he said. “I think it’s proven not to work, and we have a different country than we did then. We have $19 trillion in debt. We’re sitting, probably, on a bubble. And it’s a bubble that if it breaks, it’s going to be very nasty. I just think we have to rebuild our country.” 15
In a 30 March 2016 article for the Huffington Post titled “Back to Nation Building?” George Washington University Professor Amitai Etzioni implied that Hillary Clinton would engage in nation building and cited her as calling for a more “active” foreign policy. “When talking about conflicts around the world, from Syria to Ukraine to Afghanistan, she says the US needs to ‘do more.’ Secretary Clinton is of course not very forthcoming on the campaign trail about what exactly a more active foreign policy entails.”
As America wrestles with its role as the world’s only superpower, hell bent on Full Spectrum Dominance, the details of what “nation building” actually entails become ever more vital for people to understand.
PRTs in Iraq
The CIA’s Revolutionary Development team concept in Vietnam was the model for its Provincial Reconstruction Team concept in Afghanistan and Iraq. The new and improved PRT program started in Afghanistan in 2002 and migrated to Iraq in 2004.
The standard PRT consists of anywhere between 50-100 civilian and military specialists. It has units for military police, psyops, explosive ordinance/demining, intelligence, medics, force protection (security forces that organize community defenses), and administrative and support personnel. Like Scotton’s PAT teams in South Vietnam, the PRTs engage in counterterror operations as part of their political and psychological warfare function, under cover of fostering economic development and democracy.
Long ago the American public grew skeptical of the heavily censored but universally bad news they got about Iraq, and until the advent of ISIS, most were happy to forget the devastation their government has wrought. But few Iraqis are fooled by the “war as economic development” deception, or by the 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 suburb outside Baghdad recently occupied by ISIS) put it succinctly when he said: “In a country that used to feed much of Arab world, starvation is the norm.” 16
According to another of Jamail’s sources, 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 described the mission as the largest overseas rebuilding effort in US history. In some places in Iraq, unemployment was at 40-60 percent in 2010. Repairing the damage done by US bombing was the goal, but little connection was made between how the rebuilding would or even could bring about the heralded democratic transition that never happened.
As in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the P.R.T.'s in Iraq are a gimmick to make Americans feel good about their government’s imperial misadventures. The supposed successes of the P.R.T.'s are cloaked in double-speak and the meaningless statistics Phoenix coordinator Stan Fulcher referenced in the previous chapter when he said “any policy can find supporting intelligence.” Achieving statistical progress is not difficult in nations whose public service infrastructures were destroyed by “shock and awe” invasions, where entire neighborhoods like Fallujah were leveled in the name of American prestige, and where the occupying power controls all information outlets.
As Fulcher also noted, it’s all about business profits. The truth about US wars is less about combating Islamic terrorism or “protecting the homeland” than it is about the dark side of the American psyche, rooted in slavery and the genocidal conquest of a continent. For American businessmen, the global War on Terror with its relentless bombing campaigns and extra-legal methods shrouded in official secrecy, translates into big profits.
For politicians, war is also a good way to get elected. As ex-Vice President Dick Cheney proved, calling a political adversary soft on terror remains a fearsome club to wield. Apparently for many people, drone strikes and spectacular commando teams killing terrorists like Osama bin Laden quell carefully nurtured fears and sate the carefully cultivated hunger for revenge that was nurtured after 9/11. The same ultra-patriotic Americans who wave flags and salute the military at professional footballs games (apart from a few black players who raise their fists in defiance) seem happy as long as the outcome can be packaged as a “win” for the USA.
Pushed out of the headlines, deep into the national subconscious, are the horrendous war crimes that have promoted the policies inflicted on the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Next
VIETNAM REPLAY ON AFGHAN DEFECTORS
footnotes
Chapter 5
1 John Barry, “The Defector’s Secrets”, Newsweek, 2 March 2003.
2 As a grad student at Harvard, Moyar wrote to me in 1992. He said my Phoenix book was “very informative” and begged me to refer him to the CIA officers I’d interviewed. Sensing a scam, I agreed, but only on condition that he acknowledge that he’d based his research on mine. Moyar then went to my sources and said – as one of them later told me – “Now is your chance to screw Valentine.” Not satisfied with ripping me off, he smeared me in his thesis. He graduated first in Harvard’s history department; Harvard is, after all, a pillar of the imperial war machine.
3 Richard Oppel Jr and Abdul Waheed Wafa, “Afghan Investigators Say U.S. Troops Tried to Cover Up Evidence in Botched Raid”, April 5, 2010.
4 Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among The Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2013, pp. 110-117.
5 John Barry and Michael Hersh, “The Pentagon May Put Special Forces Led Assassination and Kidnapping Teams in Iraq”, 7 January 2005.
6 Jason Ditz, “Pentagon Report: Afghan Civilian Casualties at ‘Record Highs,’ Warns Congress Security
Situation ‘Dominated’ by Resilient Taliban”, Antiwar.com, 17 June 2016.
7 David Galula, Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, p. 124.
8<http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan.
9 Nadia Khomami, “Afghan president: I have no issue with Cameron corruption remark”, <Guardian, 12 May 2016.
10 Craig Murray, “How a Torture Protest Killed a Career”, Consortium News, 26 October 2009.
11 “U.S. Denies Entry to former British Ambassador Craig Murray”, Global Research, 12 September 2016.
12 Nguyen Ngoc Huy and Stephen B Young, Understanding Vietnam, The DPC Information Service, The Netherlands, 1982, p. 168-70.
Chapter 6
1 J. Max Robins, “Military Interns Booted From CNN, NPR: How Did Army Officers Get Into The News Business?”, TV Guide, April 15-21, 2000.
2 Daniel Nasaw, “Taliban suicide attack kills CIA agents at US outpost in Afghanistan”, Guardian, 31 December 2009.
3 Joby Warrick and Pamela Constable, “CIA base attacked in Afghanistan supported airstrikes against alQaeda, Taliban”, Washington Post, 1 January 2010.
4 Jerome Starkey, “Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children”, The Times, December 31, 2009.
5 Robert Parry, “Bush’s Global Dirty War”,, Consortium News, 1 October 2007.
6 See previous article for Vietnamese teachers falsely accused and placed on the Phoenix blacklist.
7 “Deadly suicide blast strikes Afghan compound”, Al Jazeera Afghanistan, 16 January 2016.
8 The acronyms are confusing, I know, but I didn’t create them. Just to clarify, RD teams were part of the overall RDC program that trained the CIA’s PRU and Census Grievance (yet to be explained) personnel as well.
9 The Herald Tribune, October 21, 1965
10 Tom Ahern, Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency, The University Press of Kentucky,2009.
11 The insurgents referred to themselves as Viet Minh, but in the early 1950s, in an attempt to stigmatize them in the Western mind, CIA officer Ed Lansdale renamed them the Viet Cong (Cong for Communist). Just as the US press uniformly referred to the Peoples Republic of China as “Red China”, it thereafter referred to the Vietnamese insurgents pejoratively as the VC, as a form of psychological warfare directed against the American public.
12 Census Grievance Teams were the primary way a principal agent contacted sub-agents in the village –by ostensibly setting up a secret means (usually a portable shack) for civilians to complain about the government. The PRTs have this Census Grievance element within their intelligence unit.
13 Chieu Hoi is discussed at length in the next chapter.
14 Thomas Thayer, A Systems Analysis of the Vietnam War 1965-1972, Vol. 10: Pacification and Civil Affairs (Washington D.C.: Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1975), pp. 40-43
15 Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Trump questions need for NATO, outlines non-interventionist foreign policy”, Washington Post, 21 March 2016.
16 Dahr Jamail’s Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, Haymarket Books, 2008.
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