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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (91445)	4/9/2003 8:47:02 AM
From: Sarmad Y. Hermiz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

>> The Phoenix Program that you said was responsible for both actions was not involved in either. You are right. The Phoenix program was this: vwip.org [excerpt] In a document entitled Vietnam: Toward Peace and Prosperity, published by the Saigon Ministry of Information, the GVN states that The Phoenix program was launched on August, 1, 1968, in orderto eradicate the communist infrastructure, with the following results;...Killed--40,994. Colby himself testified that Phoenix had resulted in the deaths of 20,587 persons as of May 1971. This number proportionate to population, would total over 200,000 Americans deliberately assassinated over a three-year period, were Phoenix in practice in the United States. Michael Uhl, a Phoenix military intelligence operative, testified before Congress: a Phoenix military intelligence team measured its success...not only by the body count and kill ratio but by the number of CD's [civil detaineess] it had captured.... Between 1968 and 1972 hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians were rounded up and turned over to the Vietnamese police for questioning. Such interrogation has usually been marked by brutal torture. Uhl also said "All CD's, because of command pressure...were listed as VCI. To my knowledge, not one of these people ever freely admitted to being a cadre member. An again contrary to Colby's statement, most of our CD's were women and children. The yearly processing of hundreds of thousands, this detention of tens of thousands, inevitably led Phoenix to change judicial procedures. Civilians rounded up by Americans. The U.S. Phoenix program resuscitated the Security Committee as a means of jailing detainees without a trial. Under the An Tri law, the Security Committees have been empowered to jail any South Vietnamese citizen for up to two years, renewable. The Security Committee does not see or talk with the accused. The accused has no right to be represented by a lawyer, confront witnesses, present evidence, or even plead in his or her own behalf. The quota system, was also used for sentencing. The Phoenix program decreed that at least 50 percent of those captured were to be sentenced. Colby said: The reason for putting in the 50 percent sentencing was to put a greater pressure on officials to do a more professional job of capturing and interrogating and then sentencing .... From: UNCLOAKING THE CIA, H. Frazier editor, 1978, The Free Press,pages 111-119.