If you follow the agency’s world operations from it’s inception to the present day, you find it has implemented the Phoenix Program in most of the countries of the world. Since it is not in the interests of the U.S. government to eliminate dissidents across the globe indiscriminately, there is an fundamental disconnect between the stated policies of the U.S. government and the goals of the private military corporations that now comprise the CIA. This should concern everyone.
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY'S NEW PHOENIX PROGRAM
The Phoenix Program was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiative designed to destroy the Vietcong (VC) support infrastructure in Vietnam during the war. Unlike the military, the CIA wasn't engaged in combat with the VC. The CIA wages war on civilian populations, it's targets are civilians. The infrastructure the agency sought to eliminate was the support for the VC provided by civilians. Among these resources were Communist Party leaders, administrators, couriers, security forces and intelligence assets. These resources were neutralized through kidnapping, indefinite detention, interrogation centers, assassination, and imprisonment.
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| The Phoenix Program and Development of Homeland Security (Audio) |
A RETROSPECTIVE ON COUNTERINSURGENCY OPERATIONS - THE TAY NINH PROVINCIAL RECONNAISSANCE UNIT AND ITS ROLE IN THE PHOENIX PROGRAM, 1969-70
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| Anit-Phoenix Program Poster from Vietnam featuring William Colby then director of the program. |
“By 1967, the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), had succeeded in consolidating all military and civilian pacification efforts into one entity, called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS).“
“Another component of CORDS was the Phoenix Program. Although Phoenix was run and ostensibly controlled by the Saigon government, CIA funded and administered it. Phoenix built on the work of the CIA-created network of over 100 provincial and district intelligence operation committees in South Vietnam that collected and disseminated information on the VCI to field police and paramilitary units.“
“The PRUs became probably the most controversial element of Phoenix. They were special paramilitary forces that were originally developed in 1964 by the government of South Vietnam and CIA. Initially, they were known as Counter-Terror Teams."
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol51no2/a-retrospective-on-counterinsurgency-operations.html
THE ARMY'S PROJECT X TAUGHT TORTURE TECHNIQUES TO LATIN AMERICAN (AND AMERICAN) MILITARY PERSONNEL
As a researcher it strikes me how often I encounter references to Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations such as MKULTRA and The Phoenix Program. They are mentioned so much that I believe the magnitude of the crimes committed under their banners are lost on us. Given that, it perplexes me how ignorant people are of these programs. The programs are a reality. The details surrounding their development, execution, and in some cases, demise, raise serious concerns about lack of oversight and accountability.
Torture is a crime condemned internationally as well as nationally. Considered a crime against humanity by all nations. While very clear laws, rules, treaties, as well as social morality all forbid the use of torture in both war and peace, military and intelligence communities disregard the law of the world for purposes known only to themselves.
In the featured article (sourced from the NSA Archives), we find an U.S. Army training manual, Project X, used at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC, formerly the School of the America's) to train Latin American armed forces. Project X collects the torture techniques from sources such as MKULTRA and the Phoenix Project. WHINSEC's stated goal was to provide anti-communist counterinsurgency training. During the 1980's it taught torture, and did so up until 1992 when the DoD ordered all copies destroyed.
As an American, the act of training our military in the practice of torture techniques, as well as that of foreign military, is counter to international law and portrays America as a people who condone the use of torture for political goals. As we travel the globe and encounter people from nations the CIA and military interrogators have tortured, we should understand the less than enthusiastic welcome we receive is due to the complete disregard for human rights law our military intelligence agencies demonstrate.
My reasons for sharing this information is to draw attention to practices by military and intelligence agencies that contradict their mission, law, and our own ethical and moral codes. However, the CIA is a government unto itself. When created, it was given power that precluded it from oversight and accountability. It not only conducts operations overseas but here as well. In the case of MKULTRA, when discovered they were operating on American soil, they destroyed all documents pertaining to their crimes and covered up the rest. Although the Church Committee found wrongdoing, no one was prosecuted for it. If we ever learn the full truth about what the CIA has done and is doing in our name, it will be a black day for our nation.
The featured link contains five documents:
CIA, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, July 1963 (released February 25, 2014)
CIA, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, July 1963 (released January 1997)
"This 128-page report, classified Secret, was drafted in July 1963 as a comprehensive guide for training interrogators in the art of obtaining intelligence from "resistant sources." (As indicated above, two versions of the document — declassified 17 years apart — are presented in this posting.) KUBARK — a CIA codename for itself — describes the qualifications of a successful interrogator, and reviews the theory of non-coercive and coercive techniques for breaking a prisoner. Some recommendations are very specific. The report recommends, for example, that in choosing an interrogation site "the electric current should be known in advance, so that transformers and other modifying devices will be on hand if needed." Of specific relevance to the current scandal in Iraq is section nine, "The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources," (pp 82-104). Under the subheading, "Threats and Fears," the CIA authors note that "the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain, for example, can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain." Under the subheading "Pain," the guidelines discuss the theories behind various thresholds of pain, and recommend that a subject's "resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself" such rather than by direct torture. The report suggests forcing the detainee to stand at attention for long periods of time. A section on sensory deprivations suggests imprisoning detainees in rooms without sensory stimuli of any kind, "in a cell which has no light," for example. "An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective," the KUBARK manual concludes."
CIA, Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983
"This secret manual was compiled from sections of the KUBARK guidelines and from U.S. Military Intelligence field manuals written in the mid 1960s as part of the Army's Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program codenamed "Project X." The manual was used in numerous Latin American countries as an instructional tool by CIA and Green Beret trainers between 1983 and 1987 and became the subject of executive session Senate Intelligence Committee hearings in 1988 because of human rights abuses committed by CIA-trained Honduran military units. The manual allocates considerable space to the subject of "coercive questioning" and psychological and physical techniques. The original text stated that "we will be discussing two types of techniques, coercive and non-coercive. While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them." After Congress began investigating human rights violations by U.S.-trained Honduran intelligence officers, that passage was hand edited to read "while we deplore the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them so that you may avoid them." Although the manual advised methods of coercion similar to those used in the Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. forces, it also carried a prescient observation: "The routine use of torture lowers the moral caliber of the organization that uses it and corrupts those that rely on it….""
DOD, Improper Material in Spanish-Language Intelligence Manuals, SECRET, 10 March 1992
"This "report of investigation" was sent to then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney in March 1992, nine months after the Defense Department began an internal investigation into how seven counterintelligence and interrogation manuals used for years by the Southern Command throughout Latin America had come to contain "objectionable" and prohibited material. Army investigators traced the origins of the instructions on use of beatings, false imprisonment, executions and truth serums back to "Project X"-a program run by the Army Foreign Intelligence unit in the 1960s. The report to Cheney found that the "offensive and objectionable material in the manuals" contradicted the Southern Command's priority of teaching respect for human rights, and therefore "undermines U.S. credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment." Cheney concurred with the recommendations for "corrective action" and recall and destruction of as many of the offending manuals as possible."
DOD, USSOUTHCOM CI Training-Supplemental Information, CONFIDENTIAL, 31 July, 1991
"This document records a phone conversation with Major Victor Tise, who served in 1982 as a counterintelligence instructor at the School of the Americas. Tise relates the history of the "objectionable material" in the manuals and the training courses at SOA. A decade of training between 1966 and 1976 was suspended after a Congressional panel witnessed the teaching program. The Carter administration then halted the counterintelligence training courses "for fear training would contribute to Human Rights violations in other countries," Tise said, but the program was restored by the Reagan administration in 1982. He then obtained training materials from the archives of the Army's "Project X" program which he described as a "training package to provide counterinsurgency techniques learned in Vietnam to Latin American countries." The course materials he put together, including the manuals that became the subject of the investigations, were sent to Defense Department headquarters "for clearance" in 1982 and "came back approved but UNCHANGED." Although Tise stated he removed parts he believed to be objectionable, hundreds of unaltered manuals were used throughout Latin America over the next nine years."
