The Global Phoenix Program: Music: Return to Dixie From Stone River Banjo Anthology by Eric Thor Karlstrom (3:22)
From Douglas Valentine, “The CIA As Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World” (2017) and “The Phoenix Program” (1990)
“The (CIA’s) Phoenix program, created in 1967, brought together 25 agencies and aimed them at (Vietnamese) civilians in the “insurgency….” They are teachers, laborers, mailmen, farmers; but they’re not soldiers… It’s political warfare. It’s secret. It’s against the rules of war. It violated the Geneva Conventions…. It pulls together people from the army, navy, air force, and Special Forces. It includes the Vietnamese secret services. It coordinates everybody that’s involved in the war and brings every resource to bear on the political people in the villages, in an effort to wipe them off the face of the earth.… The total number of (civilian) people killed was between 25,000 and 40,000 (Other estimates reach nearly 90,000). They relied on sanitized military jargon to obscure the inhuman brutality that pervaded “death squad” operations like the Phoenix program.
(This) is what Homeland Security does in the US (today); bringing agencies together and focusing them on civilians who look like “terrorists”…. (Now, as then, murdering civilians is unstated policy.
“Where can the Phoenix Program be found today? Wherever:
1) Governments of the left or right use military and security forces to enforce their ideologies under the aegis of anti-terrorism, 2) Police check points ring major cities, 3) Paramilitary police units patrol in armored cars, 4) Military forces are conducting counterinsurgency operations, 5) Emergency decrees are used to suspend due process, 6) Dissidents are interned indefinitely, 7) Dissidents are rounded up and deported, 8) Security forces use informants to identify dissidents, 9) Security forces keep files and computerized black lists on dissidents, 10) Security forces conduct secret investigations and surveillance on dissidents, 11) Security forces (or thugs in their hire) harass and murder dissidents, 12) Such activities go unreported in the press.”