CIA Assassination Operation In Vietnam Revealed

Wednesday, 28 May 2003, 1:17 pm
Article: Scoop Link

Created by the CIA in Saigon in 1967, Phoenix was a program aimed at "neutralizing"--through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture--the civilian infrastructure that supported the Viet Cong insurgency in South Vietnam. It was a terrifying "final solution" that violated the Geneva Conventions and traditional American ideas of human morality.

The CIA destroyed its copies of the documents related to this program, but the creator of Phoenix gave his personal copies to author Douglas Valentine. He, in turn, has given them to The Memory Hole. They have never previously been published, online or in print.

These extremely rare and revealing documents are being posted at The Memory Hole, a Website dedicated to rescuing knowledge and freeing information. The site's publisher and editor, Russ Kick, says: "I had worked with Doug before, and I knew that he had lots of documents on Phoenix, one of the CIA's most controversial and hushed-up programs. When I asked if I could post them, he immediately agreed. He was even kind enough to write introductions to each document and to Phoenix in general especially for the site."

Kick continues: "This is exactly the type of material I had in mind when I created The Memory Hole last July. The mainstream media is terrified of this story and won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. I think it was during a segment on Senator Bob Kerrey that '60 Minutes' made a hit-and-run reference to Phoenix, saying something like, 'The full story of this program has yet to be told.' Then the narration went on to other things. That was it--one or two sentences, and I'm yelling at the TV: 'Then why don't you tell the whole story?' The primary documents are available. A lot of the people involved are still alive. Several books about it have been written (of course, they've been published by independent publishers). This is obviously something that frightens the media, and the CIA has tried to erase it by destroying the documents. What better subject for The Memory Hole?"

Currently, the site contains fourteen multi-page documents, and more will be posted in the coming months.

http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/

ENDS

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