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The Department of Homeland Security:
When The Phoenix Comes Home To Roost
By Douglas Valentine, =A9 March 2003

"The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to
insure that the people would comply." William Colby, RIP

On 12 December 1970, the big American brains running the Vietnam
War issued a report titled, Internal Security in South
Vietnam-Phoenix. The report was significant at the time insofar as
it recognized that, "the contest with the Communists has shifted
to
a new level." Main force operations had given way to political
proselytizing, terrorism, and penetrations into the Government of
South Vietnam, all of which were managed by the Viet Cong
Infrastructure, or VCI. The report described the VCI as, "the
political and administrative organization through which the
Communists control or seek to control the people of South
Vietnam."


According to the report, defense against the new VCI strategy
would
depend on the ability of the CIA's Phoenix Program to provide the
corrupt Government of South Vietnam (GVN) with internal security.
Phoenix did this first by coordinating all US and GVN agencies
that
contributed to the identification and neutralization of the VCI.
("Neutralization" meant to kill, capture or make to defect, and
the
CIA went about this in typical corporate fashion: it imposed an
1800-per-month neutralization quota on its men in the field.)
Secondly, and more importantly, Phoenix provided the GVN with
Internal Security by compiling a computerized blacklist of
political opponents, which included anyone espousing peace. Those
who found their names on the Phoenix blacklist could be
assassinated, or kidnapped, detained, and tortured indefinitely on
the false accusation of one anonymous=20 informant.

Granted, the "war on terror" is unlike the Vietnam War, but based
on his innate illegitimacy, Bush is obsessed with internal
security, and has created the Department of Homeland Security
under
former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge to pacify the American
people. It is the largest reorganization of the US government in
50
years, and according to Lawrence Korb at the Brookings Institute,
might, "bankrupt the country." But at a cost of $50 billion in
taxpayer s money, it will provide Bush with the "internal
security"
apparatus he needs to assure the continuity of political power in
his hands, indefinitely, at the expense of our democracy and
liberty.

And it brings the Phoenix Program home to roost.

Phoenix As The Conceptual Precedent For Homeland Security

The Phoenix "concept" is that terror is an organizing principle of
society. This includes every type of terror, from the A-Bomb that
incinerated Hiroshima, to the "collective punishments" Israel uses
to deny Palestinians jobs, health, education, pride. It s National
Guardsmen patrolling airports, and hooded policemen armed with
automatic rifles, searching cars without probable cause. It is
color-coded warnings of terror attacks that never occur, and
unsubstantiated reports brought to you by Network News.

The concept also includes selective terror, which was perfected by
the Viet Minh and involved the murder and mutilation of French
colonial officials and their Vietnamese suppletifs. The Viet Minh,
like the Palestinians, were so incredibly out-gunned they had to
choose between submission, annihilation in an open rebellion, or
selective terror - including suicide bombers. The purpose of
selective terror was to psychologically isolate the oppressor,
while demonstrating the ability to strike small blows for freedom,
until a general uprising was possible.

In 1964 the CIA concluded that in order to win the Vietnam War, it
had to neutralize the VCI through selective terror, so it set in
place the foundation stones upon which Phoenix was built: 1)
Counter Terror Teams; 2) the Province Interrogation Center (PIC)
Program, which consisted of a US engineering firm building an
interrogation center in each of South Vietnam s 44 provinces, one
of which was managed in 1972 by Representative Rob Simmons (CT-R):
and 3) the Hamlet Informant Program (HIP), designed to identify
VCI
suspects at the grass roots level of society. The similarities are
between HIP and Attorney General John Ashcroft s short-lived
Operation TIPS (the Terrorism Information and Prevention System)
are obvious.

These programs worked in tandem. On the basis of a false
accusation
made by a single anonymous HIP informant, a Counter Terror team
would "snatch or snuff (assassinate)" a VCI suspect. If snatched,
the suspect was detained indefinitely under "administrative
detention" laws in a PIC, or one of the hundreds of detention
centers the CIA constructed across South Vietnam. VCI suspects
were
shuffled back and forth between PICs, detention centers, and
squalid jails until they died or defected. Otherwise they were
sent
for "disposition" to a military tribunal or a CIA-advised Security
Committee. Disposition meant imprisonment on Con Son Island, 90
miles off the southern tip of South Vietnam. Referred to as Ho Chi
Minh University, Con Son Prison was the Phoenix version of Bush s
hideous detention camp in Cuba.



Administrative detention, detention centers, and military
tribunals
are principal Phoenix-derived elements of the illegitimate Bush
Regime s homeland security apparatus.

In June 1967 these CIA programs were combined to form the Phoenix
Program, which coordinated all the existing US intelligence,
police
advisory, and military units in the attack on the VCI. Phoenix
ostensibly had no operational units of its own, but as is true of
homeland security personnel, Phoenix advisors organized and
participated in terror missions, even in countries outside South
Vietnam.

Phoenix employed every weapon of terror available to it, including
assassins who performed what Israeli euphemistically refers to as
"targeted kills", military cordon and search operations like the
one that generated the My Lai massacre, massive round-ups of
civilians, and indiscriminate air and artillery strikes like the
ones in Afghanistan.

Under Phoenix, due process was non-existent, and corrupt US and
Vietnamese officials used the Phoenix blacklist to extort innocent
civilians as well as VCI. It was the greatest blackmail scheme
ever
invented: if you didn t do what the President and his clique
wanted, your name appeared on the blacklist - and you were as good
as dead.

Be forewarned: the Bush Regime is already compiling its
blacklists:
the INS-State Department TIPOFF blacklist; the "No-Fly" blacklist
of peace activists, which is distributed to airlines by the FBI
and
the Transportation Security Administration; and local blacklists
like the one kept by the Denver police department.

The Method In Their Madness

After the uninvestigated terror attacks of September 11, Bush s
rationale for "eternal war on terror" evolved, and on 20 September
2002, it was set in stone with the promulgation of "The National
Security Strategy of the United States," through which Bush
conferred upon himself the right to launch preemptive attacks on
any nation he can characterize as a terrorist threat. This First
Degree Murder strategy makes Americans feel safer, but it has a
sinister, unstated purpose: by generating more human misery and
terrorists around the world, Manifesto Bush will generate more
domestic dissidents, and provide Bush with the pretext he needs to
impose the internal security apparatus that will terrorize and
repress Americans, and allow his Regime to maintain its dominance.

Manifesto Bush is a function of Bush s paranoid belief - based on
his innate illegitimacy - that the American people must be
pacified
to ensure their support for his eternal war on terror. In fact,
homeland security is the lynchpin in the Bush Regime s plan for
world domination, for without political "internal security," it
cannot wage the eternal war on terror abroad (with all the
economic
benefits to Bush and his clique that entails). There is no other
need for the Department of Homeland Security; it is a Trojan Horse
through which Bush will unleash his ideological storm troopers on
America, and exploit his ill-gotten power to achieve personal and
political gain.

The Bush Regime is creating this fascist police state through the
Big Lie. Case in point: the Homeland Security website says that
the
threat of terrorism, "is a permanent condition," that "requires
our
country to design a new homeland security structure."8 In
"Metaphoric Entrapment In Time," sociologist Anthony Judge tells
how terror is the key to creating the new homeland "security
structure." "Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance,"
but, "structural violence is the tool of the professional. The
amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses
social structure. The legal criminality of the social system and
its institutions, of government, and of individuals at the
interpersonal level is tacit violence. Structural violence is a
structure of exploitation and social injustice."

Now that the Department of Internal Security has been voted into
law, Bush has laid the groundwork for America s new "legally
criminal" social structure. And the Phoenix has landed in our
midst.

Phoenix As The Organizational Model For Homeland Security



Upon its creation in 1967, Phoenix was managed by a committee of
five senior CIA and military officers. The Phoenix Committee
functioned like Bush s Homeland Security Council; as a board of
directors that advised the chairman and formulated policy.

Directly under the committee was a Directorate, which the CIA hid
in the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support
(CORDS) component of the Military Assistance Command/Vietnam
(MACV). A senior CIA officer served as Phoenix Director, and was
assisted by a staff of CIA and military personnel. The Directorate
planned and conducted anti-VCI operations, managed the judicial
processing of 200,000 Vietnamese civilians caught in the Phoenix
dragnet, and made sure that CORDS and its six divisions (for
defectors, security, refugees, public safety, civil affairs, and
psychological warfare) stayed focused on anti-VCI operations.

CORDS is the organizational model for the Department of Homeland
Security, which consists of directorates for Information Analysis
and Infrastructure Protection, Science and Technology, Border and
Transportation Security, and Emergency Preparedness and Response.
The critical Office of Intelligence, which will include 1000
analysts from dozens of contributing agencies, is hidden within
the
Directorate of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection.
Former CIA officer John Gannon will head this Office, which,
insofar as it will coordinate the other directorates in terror
operations, is the homeland security equivalent of the Phoenix
Directorate.

Phoenix personnel were assigned at national, regional, province,
and district levels. A province in Vietnam is the equivalent of a
state in the US, and the Province Coordinator was the main man in
the Phoenix chain of command. He managed the CIA s Counter Terror
teams, and its interrogation and informant programs. And just like
the Phoenix Directorate eclipsed CORDS, the CIA managed DHS
Intelligence Office unit will wag the homeland security dog - by
coordinating intelligence, sending warnings to state, local, and
private sector officials, and managing terror operations. The DHS
will employ close to 170,000 people and operate at an annual
budget
of about $50 billion, but, as Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) has
said, "(I)f we don t create a very strong coordinator and analyzer
of intelligence, we have not completed our work."

Employees from the CIA s Counter-Terror Center will fill the most
important positions within the DHS Intelligence Office. The
Counter-Terror Center has also posted officers within terrorism
task forces in 56 US localities, to "plan daily operations." These
56 CIA officers serve the same function as the 44 Province Phoenix
Coordinators.

The involvement of CIA officers in domestic law enforcement means
the suspension of our civil liberties, for in their search for
opponents of the Bush Regime, the CIA will reach into every corner
of society, including our homes, workplaces, public facilities and
computers.

But worse abuses than blanket surveillance will occur. The problem
of internal security is tactical - sniffing out terrorists and
launching preemptive attacks that kill them before they strike.
That is what the Phoenix Directorate did, and the Department of
Homeland Security ostensibly will do. But just as the Phoenix
Committee managed the strategic "internal security" function in
Vietnam, Bush s Homeland Security Council will wage political
warfare against its domestic opposition in America, and this
operation will not appear on any organizational chart.

Phoenix As The Prototype Of Political Warfare

The greatest danger facing America is the Bush Regime s secret
political warfare program within its internal security structure.
The precedent is the Phoenix Program.

In 1968, through the Phoenix Program, South Vietnam's President
Nguyen Van Thieu sabotaged peace negotiations with the North
because, like Bush, he had stolen his office and thus preferred
political "internal security" over a settlement that would allow
for majority rule. Thieu s actions led to Congressional
investigations, which in 1970 revealed that the CIA had used
Phoenix as, "an instrument of mass political murder," to
"neutralize" politicians and activists who opposed Thieu or
espoused peace.



"By analogy," said Representative Ogden Reid (D-NY), "if the Union
had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, it targets would
have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon,
Georgia." Nowadays such "neutralizations" are made to look like
accidents, as in the Senator Paul Wellstone and Missouri Governor
Carnahans plane crashes. Like the anthrax letters mailed to
Democratic senators, it takes only a few such black propaganda
operations to silence Bush s political opposition.

The Bush Regime policy of using terror as an organizing principle
of society was clearly summarized by right wing pundit Michael
Ledeen when he said, "New times require new people with new
standards." These new people will have the will power to, "stamp
out," the, "corrupt habits of mind," manifest in the thoughts or
actions of anyone who opposes Bush Regime aggression. According to
Ledeen, "The entire political world will understand it and applaud
it. And it will give Tom Ridge a chance to succeed, and us (the
fascists) to prevail."

This is the maximum danger of homeland security, and it happened
here before, when Oliver North established his infamous "off the
shelf" Counter-Terror network to side step Congress and wage the
illegal Contra War, and enable Reagan to sell missiles to Iran
without notifying Congress. This Counter Terror network evolved
into the CIA s Counter Terror Center, which will staff the DHS
Intelligence Office, and, in liaison with 56 terror task forces,
will provide the Bush Regime with the same political "internal
security" it has provided right wing regimes since Eisenhower.
Blackmail is the key, and hundreds of businesses and institutions
across the country have already been placed on the CIA s homeland
security "Watch List." According to Bob 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."

According to Elizabeth Becker of the New York Times, "the leaders
of many federal departments and agencies have been scrambling to
figure out& how they can influence the outcome (of the impending
Department of Homeland Security) without appearing disloyal."

According to James Bamford, "pressure has been building on the
intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a
political agenda," and "a growing number of military officers,
intelligence professionals and diplomats &charge that the
administration squelches dissenting views..." What this boils down
to is mandatory self-censorship: no one will probe Bush s
relations
with the bin Laden family, or ask why he whisked them and members
of the Saudi Royal family out of the country in the wake of
September 11. And no one will ask about Israeli spy rings in the
US, and their "false flag" relationship with the people who flew
the planes into the Twin Towers.

Phoenix As Psychological Warfare Precedent for Homeland Security

Information management is key in the Bush Regime s effort to make
terror the organizing principle in American society, while at the
same time making its homeland security apparatus appear to be
legal, moral, and most importantly, popular. And the way that is
done is through a concerted psychological warfare campaign. The
first step is organizing a political cadre to spread the word, and
again we look to Phoenix as a model. The soldiers slated to
participate in Phoenix were trained at a CIA-managed Special
Forces
motivational indoctrination school at Fort Bragg. These Phoenix
advisors were the first political cadres to infiltrate the
American
military. In return for adopting the right wing party line, a
successful career was guaranteed. Several former Phoenix officers
now enjoy important internal security posts, like Major General
Bruce Lawlor, Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland
Security.

At Fort Bragg, CIA unconventional warfare experts instructed
Phoenix advisors in using Armed Propaganda to wage political
warfare. A training manual on the subject was reprinted in the
early 1980s by a former Phoenix operator involved in the Reagan
Regime s illegal Contra War. Titled "Psychological Operations in
Guerrilla Warfare," it states that, "the human being should be
considered the priority objective in a political war. And
conceived
as the military target of guerrilla war, the human being has his
most critical point in his mind. Once his mind has been reached,
the "political animal" has been defeated, without necessarily
receiving bullets."



Homeland security personnel will pass through the same political
and motivational indoctrination courses before they go to work.
Critical Infrastructure personnel will spy on colleagues who may
inadvertently or maliciously serve as "terrorist surrogates," by
publicly or privately revealing information on infrastructure
vulnerabilities. They will "covertly identify" and watch these
people, until it becomes necessary to expose them in the media as
being under investigation. No one will want to be identified, even
falsely, as "inadvertent" or "malicious terrorist surrogates,"
knowing that once they have been defined in these terms they are
subject to being "stamped out," as right wing pundit Michael
Ledeen
has suggested.

The Bush Regime already has its political cadre, Ledeen s "new
people" who have been defeated by implicit threat and have
embraced
the fascist principles they were subliminally indoctrinated with
for years through the corporate propaganda machine. These "new
people" are fast joining "front" organizations like the Freedom
Corps, the Citizen Corps, Community Emergency Response Teams
(which
will train kids at school to prepare for the disasters the
illegitimate Bush regime and its Timmy McVeighs will surely visit
upon America); the Neighborhood Watch Program that will allow the
Bush Regime to detain its drunk and disorderly political opponents
as terrorist surrogates; and the Medical Reserve Corps (MRC),
through which overpaid doctors will monitor patients within the
faltering health care system.

Within these front groups, as stated in the Guerrilla Warfare
manual, are the cadre trained "in techniques of persuasion over
control of target groups" to support the Bush Regime. In a
national
emergency, including the preordained war on Iraq and economic
depression, the cadre will be mobilized; they will attend mass
meetings, carry placards, shout slogans, and if necessary grab
guns
and ropes and form lynch mobs.

As in Vietnam, only five percent of the people need to be
organized
in this fashion in order to wield control over the indifferent
ninety percent, and defeat the five percent that form the
resistance.

Again, we look to Phoenix for what s to come. In 1969 Phoenix
became a massive screening operation, and generating defectors
became its main objective through the Popular Information Program.
Under the banner of, "Protecting the People From Terrorism,"
Phoenix psychological warfare teams crisscrossed the countryside,
Michael Savage-style radio shows, leaflets, posters, and movies to
appeal to peoples cultural beliefs to get them to denounce
Communism and accept the corrupt Government of Vietnam. CIA
officers taught Vietnamese district chiefs how to teach classes on
government ideology: "problem individuals" were given a
motivational indoctrination course, and everywhere "the populace
was encouraged to report the activities of the VCI by dropping a
note addressed to the police in local mailboxes." This method
accounted for 40% of the information used in Phoenix operations in
one province.

Psychological operations in support of the Phoenix attack against
the VCI were so effective that in 1970, the Pentagon s Special
Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities described
Phoenix as, "the number one MACV PSYOPS priority."20 Likewise,
when
Bush publicly his proposed legislation for the Department of
Homeland Security on 6 June 2002, he stressed that the
organization
s primary mission was to "mobilize and focus& the American people
"to accomplish the mission of attacking the enemy where he hides
and plans." By which he means the enemy within.

Phoenix As The Model For Maximum Abuses

In a national emergency, the CIA will form "special units" within
the 56 terror task forces around the country. And it will form hit
teams within the special units for political "internal security"
operations, just like Phoenix Coordinators formed hit teams under
cover of the security forces at their disposal.

Phoenix psyops also included "compromise and discreditation"
operations, like the one the FBI used against Martin Luther King
before they killed him. Information about his personal life was
leaked to discredit him; he was blackmailed about extramarital
affairs; and he was sent a message with the suggestion that he
should commit suicide. "There is only one way out for you," the
forged document read. "You better take it before your filthy,
abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation."



Forged documents like the one used against King are an important
facet of internal security. One political opponent jailed by Thieu
through the Phoenix Program revealed the existence of, "a
systematic campaign of vilification by use of forged documents."
Forged documents used to justify false arrests or conceal illegal
operations often emerged as "captured documents." Aides to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigating Phoenix in 1970
wryly reported that "There seems to be captured documents to prove
any point or to support, retrospectively, almost any conclusion."

Forged documents and "compromise and discreditation" operations
will become a tool of the Bush Regime s homeland security
apparatus, just as they are in the eternal war on terror overseas.
We have already seen Network News broadcast "edited" videotapes of
Osama bin Laden, and in the Afghanistan war, captured documents
were routinely used as a form of black propaganda to justify
military actions that resulted in "collateral" damage.

We can also expect a slew of false rumors from the homeland
security cadre, designed to ruin the reputations of politically
incorrect families in their villages and towns, especially
environmentalists who pose a threat to critical infrastructure
corporations. The paranoia that currently infects the Arab-
American
community will spread nationwide, until no one is sure who is a
spy
for the Thought Police. Midnight arrests and disappearances into
"administrative detention centers" will become commonplace, as the
definition of a "terrorist surrogate" achieves political
connotations, and, as happened in Vietnam, the definition is
expanded to include people deemed dangerous to the "public order."
As Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker wrote in 1972, this "means that
virtually any person arrested&can now be held on criminal instead
of political charges."

No specific charge will be required; a homeland security cadre
will
simply accuse someone of disturbing the public order. The
definition of sedition will grow to include disseminating
information about government corruption, or undermining the will
of
the State (as Ashcroft is fond of saying) by challenging its
authority. Calling for civil disobedience will be equated with
threatening homeland tranquility. Cadre in the Office of
Cyberspace
Security will expose you as a terrorist surrogate for sending
sarcastic or satirical emails. How can you prove you were only
joking when you blamed Bush for the terror attacks on the World
Trade Center, and said that Cheney s refusal to investigate the
attacks proves that Bush did it?

A Final Word Of Warning

Already we passively permit paramilitary policemen in hoods to
search our cars, without probable cause, for snipers who may or
may
not be connected to Al Qaeda. These policemen are helping us,
right? They would never turn their guns on us, right? As stated in
the CIA s terror manual, and as is known to the homeland security
cadre like Michael Ledeen, "Implicit terror always accompanies
weapons, since the people are internally "aware" that they can be
used against them."

Knowing this, every town will form a Homeland Security Committee,
chaired by the Bush Regime s local political cadre, who will
process "confidential" reports from concerned citizens about the
activities of terrorist suspects. These reports will pass through
an ideological filter as they work their way up to the DHS
Intelligence Office, where motivationally indoctrinated CIA
officers will gleefully pull the plug on peace activists,
environmentalists, people espousing national health care, and
anyone else posing a challenge to the reactionary right wing and
the internal security forces that are firmly in its grip.

What makes this possible is that Ashcroft has vowed to "arrest and
detain any suspected terrorist who has violated the law," but 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. Four years after the Phoenix
Program was initiated, the New York Times revealed that 26,843 VCI
and VCI 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,
"Are you certain that we know a loyal member of the VCI from a
loyal member of the South Vietnamese citizenry?" Colby said, "No."



So the definition of a terrorist suspect or surrogate is
deliberately left open, paving the way for political repression
through institutionalized terror. The anti-terror 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."

Ashcroft was laying his meaning between the lines, but what he
meant was that the Bush Regime s political police will be
empowered
to detain US citizens without probably cause. When four
Congresspersons charged that the administrative detention laws
under the Phoenix Program 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."

In this way indefinite detention, torture, and summary execution,
all carried out without previous judgment pronounced by a
regularly
constituted court, were perfectly legal, because they were the
result of "administrative procedures" and did not involve a
"criminal sentence."

This is Phoenix, and it s what the Bush clique of crazies has in
store for America.