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Fwd: FW: Dangerous World of Indef. Detentions: Vietnam to Abu Ghraib & a pre-9/1
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aby adams
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Sep 20, 2006 13:04 PDT
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
To: Recipient list suppressed:;
Subject: Dangerous World of Indef. Detentions: Vietnam to Abu Ghraib &
a pre-9/11 call for war crimes prosecution of CIA
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:14:28 +0000
Excerpt from below: General Palmer "did not believe that 'people in
uniform, who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be
put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare.'"
Friends,
I and Doug Valentine, the author of the following piece (written
pre-9/11), just came out with "The Dangerous World of Indefinite
Detentions: Vietnam to Abu Ghraib" 37 Case W. Res. J. Int'l L.449
(2006). The article traces the similarities between "An Tri"
detentions under the Phoenix Program in Vietnam dur ing the war there
and indefinite "administrative" detentions today under Bush.
(The entire volume 37 is a special symposium issue on "Torture and the
War on Terror.")
The article is presently only available on Westlaw or Lexis or hard copy.
JVB
http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine.html
May 17, 2001
A CounterPunch Special Report
Fragging Bob:Bob Kerrey, CIA War Crimes,
And The Need For A War Crimes Trial
by Douglas Valentine
B y now everybody knows that former Senator Bob Kerrey led a
seven-member team of Navy Seals into Thanh Phong village in February
1969, and murdered in cold blood more than a dozen women and children.
What hardly anyone knows, and what no one in the press is talking
about (although many of them know), is that Kerrey was on a CIA
mission, and its specific purpose was to kill those women and
children. It was illegal, premeditated mass murder and it was a war
crime.
And it's time to hold the CIA responsible. It's time for a war crimes
tribunal to examine the CIA's illegal activities during and since the
Vietnam War.
War Crimes As Policy
War crimes were a central was part of a CIA strategy for fighting the
Vietnam War. The strategy was known as Contre Coup, and it was the
manifestation of a belief that the war was essentially political, not
military, in nature. The CIA theorized that it was being fought by
opposing ideological factions, each one amounting to about five
percent of the total population, while the remaining ninety percent
was uncommitted and wanted the war to go away.
According to the CIA's mythology, on one side were communist
insurgents, supported by comrades in Hanoi, Moscow and Peking. The
communists fought for land reform, to rid Vietnam of foreign
intervention, and to unite the north and south. The other faction was
composed of capitalists, often Catholics relocated from North Vietnam
in 1954 by the CIA. This faction was fighting to keep South Vietnam an
independent nation, operating under the direction of quiet Americans.
Caught in the crossfire was the silent majority. The object shared by
both factions was to win these undecided voters over to its side.
Contre Coup was the CIA's response to the realization that the
Communists were winning the war for the hearts and minds of the
people. It also was a response to the belief that they were winning
through the use of psychological warfare, specifically, selective
terror the murder and mutilation of specific government officials.
In December 1963, Peer DeSilva arrived in Saigon as the CIA's station
chief. He claims to have been shocked by what he saw. In his
autobiography, SubRosa, DeSilva describes how the VC had "impaled a
young boy, a village chief, and his pregnant wife on sharp poles. To
make sure this horrible sight would remain with the villagers, one of
the terror squad used his machete to disembowel the woman, spilling he
fetus onto the ground."
"The Vietcong," DeSilva said, "were monstrous in the application of
torture and murder to achieve the political and psychological impact
they wanted."
But the methodology was successful and had tremendous intelligence
potential, so DeSilva authorized the creation of small "counter-terror
teams," designed "to bring danger and death to the Vietcong
functionaries themselves, especially in areas where they felt secure."
How Counter-Terror Worked In Vietnam
Thanh Phong village was one of those areas where Vietcong
functionaries felt secure. It was located in Kien Hoa Province, along
the Mekong Delta. One of Vietnam's most densely populated provinces,
Kien Hoa was precariously close to Saigon, and is criss-crossed with
waterways and rice paddies. It was an important rice production area
for the insurgents as well as the Government of Vietnam, and thus was
one of the eight most heavily infiltrated provinces in Vietnam. The es
timated 4700 VC functionaries in Kien Hoa accounted for more than five
percent of the insurgency's total leadership. Operation Speedy
Express, a Ninth Infantry sweep through Kien Hoa in the first six
months of 1969, killed an estimated 11,000 civilians-supposedly VC
sympathizers.
These functionaries formed what the CIA called the Vietcong
Infrastructure (VCI). The VCI consisted of members of the People's
Revolutionary Party, the National Liberation Front, and other
Communist outfits like the Women's and Student's Liberation
Associations. Its members were politicians and administrators managing
committees for business, communications, security, intelligence, and
military affairs. Among their main functions were the collection of
taxes, the recruitment of young men and women into the insurgency, and
the selective assassination of GVN officials.
As the CIA was well aware, Ho Chi Minh boasted that with two cadre in
every hamlet, he could win the war, no matter how many so ldiers the
Americans threw at him.
So the CIA adopted the Ho's strategy-but on a grander and bloodier
scale. The object of Contre Coup was to identify and terrorize each
and every individual VCI and his/her family, friends and fellow
villagers. To this end the CIA in 1964 launched a massive intelligence
operation called the Provincial Interrogation Center Program. The CIA
(employing the US company Pacific Architects and Engineers) built an
interrogation center in each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces. Staffed
by members of the brutal Special Police, who ran extensive informant
networks, and advised by CIA officers, the purpose of the PICs was to
identify, through the systematic "interrogation" (read torture) of VCI
suspects, the membership of the VCI at every level of its
organization; from its elusive headquarters somewhere along the
Cambodian border, through the region, city, province, district,
village and hamlet committees.
The "indispensable link" in the VCI was t he District Party Secretary
the same individual Bob Kerrey's Seal team was out to assassinate in
its mission in Thanh Phong.
Frankenstein's Monster
Initially the CIA had trouble finding people who were willing to
murder and mutilate, so the Agency's original "counter-terror teams"
were composed of ex-convicts, VC defectors, Chinese Nungs, Cambodians,
Montagnards, and mercenaries. In a February 1970 article written for
True Magazine, titled "The CIA's Hired Killers," Georgie-Anne Geyer
compared "our boys" to "their boys" with the qualification that,
"Their boys did it for faith; our boys did it for money."
The other big problem was security. The VC had infiltrated nearly
every facet of the GVN-even the CIA's unilateral counter-terror
program. So in an attempt to bring greater effectiveness to its secret
war, the CIA started employing Navy Seals, US Army Special Forces, F
orce Recon Marines, and other highly trained Americans who, like Bob
Kerrey, were "motivationally indoctrinated" by the military and turned
into killing machines with all the social inhibitions and moral
compunctions of a Timmy McVeigh. Except they were secure in the
knowledge that what they were doing was, if not legal or moral,
fraught with Old Testament-style justice, rationalizing that the Viet
Cong did it first.
Eventually the irrepressible Americans added their own improvements.
In his autobiography Soldier, Anthony Herbert describes arriving in
Saigon in 1965, reporting to the CIA's Special Operations Group, and
being asked to join a top-secret psywar program. What the CIA wanted
Herbert to do, "was to take charge of execution teams that wiped out
entire families."
By 1967, killing entire families had become an integral facet of the
CIA's counter-terror program. Robert Slater was the chief of the CIA's
Province Interrogation Center Program from June 1967 throug h 1969. In
a March 1970 thesis for the Defense Intelligence School, titled "The
History, Organization and Modus Operandi of the Viet Cong
Infrastructure," Slater wrote, "the District Party Secretary usually
does not sleep in the same house or even hamlet where his family
lived, to preclude any injury to his family during assassination
attempts."
But, Slater added, "the Allies have frequently found out where the
District Party Secretaries live and raided their homes: in an ensuing
fire fight the secretary's wife and children have been killed and
injured."
This is the intellectual context in which the Kerrey atrocity took
place. This CIA strategy of committing war crimes for psychological
reasons to terrorize the enemy's supporters into submission also
is what differentiates Kerrey's atrocity, in legal terms, from other
popular methods of mass murdering civilians, such as bombs from the
sky, or economic boycotts.
Yes, the CIA has a global, illegal str ategy of terrorizing people,
although in typical CIA lexicon it's called "anti-terrorism."
When you're waging illegal warfare, language is every bit as important
as weaponry and the will to kill. As George Orwell or Noam Chomsky
might explain, when you're deliberately killing innocent women and
children, half the court-of-public-opinion battle is making it sound
legal.
Three Old Vietnam Hands in particular stand out as examples of this
incestuous relationship. Neil Sheehan, CIA-nik and author of the aptly
titled Bright Shining Lie, recently confessed that in 1966 he saw US
soldiers massacre as many as 600 Vietnamese civilians in five fishing
villages. He'd been in Vietnam for three years by then, but it didn't
occur to him that he had discovered a war crime. Now he realizes that
the war crimes issue was always present, but still no mention of his
friends in the CIA.
Former New York Times reporter and author of The Best and The
Brightest, David Hal berstam, defended Kerrey on behalf of the media
establishment at the New School campus the week after the story broke.
CIA flack Halberstam described the region around Thanh Phong as "the
purest bandit country," adding that "by 1969 everyone who lived there
would have been third-generation Vietcong." Which is CIA revisionism
at its sickest.
Finally there's New York Times reporter James Lemoyne. Why did he
never write any articles linking the CIA to war crimes in Vietnam?
Because his brother Charles, a Navy officer, was in charge of the
CIA's counter-terror teams in the Delta in 1968.
Phoenix Comes To Thanh Phong
The CIA launched its Phoenix Program in June 1967, after 13 years of
tinkering with several experimental counter-terror and psywar
programs, and building its network of secret interrogation centers.
The stated policy was to replace the bludgeon of indiscrim inate
bombings and military search and destroy operations which had
alienated the people from the Government of Vietnam with the scalpel
of assassinations of selected members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure.
A typical Phoenix operation began in a Province Interrogation Center
where a suspected member of the VCI was brought for questioning. After
a few days or weeks or months undergoing various forms of torture, the
VCI suspect would die or give the name and location of his VCI
comrades and superiors. That information would be sent from the
Interrogation Center to the local Phoenix office, which was staffed by
Special Branch and Vietnamese military officers under the supervision
of CIA officers. Depending on the suspected importance of the targeted
VCI, the Phoenix people would then dispatch one of the various action
arms available to it, including Seal teams like the one Bob Kerrey led
into Thanh Phong.
In February 1969, the Phoenix Program was still under CIA control. But
because Kien Hoa Province was so important, and because the VCI's
District Party Secretary was supposedly in Thanh Phong, the CIA
decided to handle this particular assassination and mass murder
mission without involving the local Vietnamese. So instead of
dispensing the local counter-terror team, the CIA sent Kerrey's
Raiders.
And that, very simply, is how it happened. Kerrey and crew admittedly
went to Thanh Phong to kill the District Party Secretary, and anyone
else who got in the way, including his family and all their friends.
Phoenix Comes Home To Roost
By 1969 the CIA, through Phoenix, was targeting individual VCI and
their families all across Vietnam. Over 20,000 people were
assassinated by the end of the year and hundreds of thousands had been
tortured in Province Interrogation Centers.
On 20 June 1969, the Lower House of the Vietnamese Co ngress held
hearings about abuses in the Phoenix VCI elimination program.
Eighty-six Deputies signed a petition calling for its immediate
termination. Among the charges: Special Police knowingly arrested
innocent people for the purpose of extortion; people were detained for
as long as eight months before being tried; torture was commonplace.
Noting that it was illegal to do so, several deputies protested
instances in which American troops detained or murdered suspects
without Vietnamese authority. Others complained that village chiefs
were not consulted before raids, such as the one on Thanh Phong.
After an investigation in 1970, four Congresspersons concluded that
the CIA's Phoenix Program violated international law. "The people of
these United States," they jointly stated, "have deliberately imposed
upon the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies
due process of law," and that in doing so, "we appear to have violated
the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian people."
During the hearings, U.S. Representative Ogden Reid said, "if the
Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets
would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon,
Georgia."
But the American establishment and media denied it then, and continue
to deny it until today, because Phoenix was a genocidal program -- and
the CIA officials, members of the media who were complicit through
their silence, and the red-blooded American boys who carried it out,
are all war criminals. As Michael Ratner a lawyer at the Center for
Constitutional Rights told CounterPunch: "Kerrey should be tried as a
war criminal. His actions on the night of February 24-25, 1969 when
the seven man Navy Seal unit which he headed killed approximately
twenty unarmed Vietnamese civilians, eighteen of whom were women and
children was a war crime. Like those who murdered at My Lai, he too
should be brought into the dock and tried for his c rimes."
Phoenix, alas, also was fiendishly effective and became a template for
future CIA operations. Developed in Vietnam and perfected with the
death squads and media blackout of Afghanistan and El Salvador, it is
now employed by the CIA around the world: in Colombia, in Kosovo, in
Ireland with the British MI6, and in Israel with its other kindred
spirit, the Mossad.
The paymasters at the Pentagon will keep cranking out billion dollar
missile defense shields and other Bush league boondoggles. But when it
comes to making the world safe for international capitalism, the
political trick is being more of a homicidal maniac, and more cost
effective, than the terrorists.
Incredibly, Phoenix has become fashionable, it has adhered a kind of
political cachet. Governor Jesse Ventura claims to have been a Navy
Seal and to have "hunted man." Fanatical right-wing US Representative
Bob Barr, one of the Republican impeachment clique, has introduced
legislation to "re-legali ze" assassinations. David Hackworth,
representing the military establishment, defended Kerrey by saying
"there were thousands of such atrocities," and that in 1969 his own
unit committed "at least a dozen such horrors." Jack Valenti,
representing the business establishment and its financial stake in the
issue, defended Kerrey in the LA Times, saying, "all the normalities
(sic) of a social contract are abandoned," in war.
Bullshit.
A famous Phoenix operation, known as the My Lai Massacre, was
proceeding along smoothly, with a grand total of 504 Vietnamese women
and children killed, when a soldier named Hugh Thompson in a
helicopter gunship saw what was happening. Risking his life to
preserve that "social contract," Thomson landed his helicopter between
the mass murderers and their victims, turned his machine guns on his
fellow Americans, and brought the carnage to a halt.
Same with screenwriter and journalist Bill Broyles, Vietnam veteran,
and author Brothers In Arms, an excellent book about the Vietnam War.
Broyles turned in a bunch of his fellow Marines for killing civilians.
If Thompson and Broyles were capable of taking individual
responsibility, everyone is. And many did.
Phoenix Reborn
There is no doubt that Bob Kerrey committed a war crime. As he admits,
he went to Vietnam with a knife clenched between his teeth and did
what he was trained to do kidnap, assassinate and mass murder
civilians. But there was no point to his atrocity as he soon learned,
no controlling legal authority. He became a conflicted individual. He
remembers that they killed women and children. But he thinks they came
under fire first, before they panicked and started shooting back. The
fog of war clouds his memory
But there isn't that much to forget. Thanh Phong was Kerrey's first
mission, and on his second mission a grenade blew off his foot,
abruptly ending his military career.
Plus which there are plenty of other people to remind Kerrey of what
happened, if anyone will listen. There's Gerhard Klann, the Seal who
disputes Kerrey's account, and two Vietnamese survivors of the raid,
Pham Tri Lanh and Bui Thi Luam, both of whom corroborate Klann's
account, as does a veteran Viet Cong soldier, Tran Van Rung.
As CBS News was careful to point out, the Vietnamese were former VC
and thus hostile witnesses and because there were slight
inconsistencies in their stories, they could not be believed. Klann
became the target of Kerrey's pr machine, which dismissed as an
alcoholic with a chip on his shoulder.
Then there is John DeCamp. An army captain in Vietnam, DeCamp worked
for the organization under CIA executive William Colby that ostensibly
managed Phoenix after the CIA let it go in June 1969. DeCamp was
elected to the Nebraska State Senate and served until 1990. A
Republican, he claims that Kerrey le d an anti-war march on the
Nebraska state capitol in May 1971. DeCamp claims that Kerrey put a
medal, possibly his bronze star, in a mock coffin, and said, "Viet
Cong or North Vietnamese troops are angelic compared with the ruthless
Americans."
Kerrey claims he was in Peru visiting his brother that day. But he
definitely accepted his Medal of Honor from Richard Nixon on 14 May
1970, a mere ten days after the Ohio National guard killed four
student protestors at Kent State. With that badge of honor pinned on
his chest, Kerrey began walking the gilded road to success. Elected
Governor of Nebraska in November 1982, he started dating Deborah
Winger, became a celebrity hero, was elected to the US Senate, became
vice-chair of Senate Committee on Intelligence, and in 1990 staged a
run for president. One of the most highly regarded politicians in
America, he showered self-righteous criticism on draft dodger Bill
Clinton's penchant for lying.
Bob Kerrey is a symbol of what it means to be an American, and the
patriots have rallied to his defense. And yet Kerrey accepted a bronze
star under false pretenses, and as John DeCamp suggests, he may have
been fragged by his fellow Seals. For this, he received the Medal of
Honor.
John DeCamp calls Bob Kerrey "emotionally disturbed" as a result of
his Vietnam experience.
And Kerrey's behavior has been pathetic. In order to protect himself
and his CIA patrons from being tried as a war criminals, Bob Kerrey
has become a pathological liar too. Kerrey says his actions at Than
Phong were an atrocity, but not a war crime. He says he feels remorse,
but not guilt. In fact, he has continually rehabbed his position on
the war itself-moving from an opponent to more recently an enthusiast.
In a 1999 column in the Washington Post, for example, Kerrey said he
had come to view that Vietnam was a "just war. "Was the war worth the
effort and sacrifice, or was it a mistake?" Kerrey wrote. "When I came
home in 1969 and for many years afterward, I did not believe it was
worth it. Today, with the passage of time and the experience of seeing
both the benefits of freedom won by our sacrifice and the human
destruction done by dictatorships, I believe the cause was just and
the sacrifice not in vain."
Then at the Democratic Party Convention in Los Angeles last summer
Kerrey lectured the delegates that they shouldn't be ashamed of the
war and that they should treat Vietnam veterans as war heroes: "I
believe I speak for Max Baucus and every person who has ever served
when I say I never felt more free than when I wore the uniform of our
country. This country - this party - must remember." Free? Free to
murder women and children. Is this a consciousness of guilt or
immunity?
CBS News also participated in constructing a curtain of lies. As does
every other official government or media outlet that knows about the
CIA's Phoenix Program, which continues to exist and operate worldwide
today, but fails to mention it.
Why?
Because if the name of one targeted Viet Cong cadre can be obtained,
then all the names can be obtained, and then a war crimes trial
becomes imperative. And that's the last thing the Establishment will
allow to happen.
Average Americans, however, consider themselves a nation ruled by laws
and an ethic of fair play, and with the Kerry confession comes an
opportunity for America to redefine itself in more realistic terms.
The discrepancies in his story beg investigation. He says he was never
briefed on the rules of engagement. But a "pocket card" with the Laws
of Land Warfare was given to each member of the US Armed Forces in
Vietnam.
Does it matter that Kerrey would lie about this? Yes. General Bruce
Palmer, commander of the same Ninth Division that devastated Kien Koa
Province in 1969, objected to the "involuntary assignment" of American
soldiers to Phoenix. He did not believe that "people in uniform, who
are pledged to abide b y the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the
position of having to break those laws of warfare."
It was the CIA that forced soldiers like Kerrey into Phoenix
operations, and the hidden hand of the CIA lingers over his war crime.
Kerrey even uses the same rationale offered by CIA officer DeSilva.
According to Kerrey, "the Viet Cong were a thousand per cent more
ruthless than" the Seals or U.S. Army.
But the Geneva Conventions, customary international law and the
Uniform Code of Military Justice all prohibit the killing of
noncombatant civilians. The alleged brutality of others is no
justification. By saying it is, Kerrey implicates the people who
generated that rationale: the CIA. That is why there is a moral
imperative to scrutinize the Phoenix Program and the CIA officers who
created it, the people who participated in it, and the journalists who
covered it up to expose the dark side of our national psyche, the
part that allows us to employ terror to assure ou r world dominance.
To accomplish this there must be a war crimes tribunal. This won't be
easy. The US government has gone to great lengths to shield itself
from such legal scrutiny, at the same it selectively manipulates
international institutions, such as the UN, to go after people like
Slobodan Milosevic.
According to human rights lawyer Michael Ratner the legal avenues for
bringing Kerrey and his cohorts to justice are quite limited. A civil
suit could be lodged against Kerrey by the families of the victims
brought in the United States under the Alien Tort Claims Act. "These
are the kinds of cases I did against Gramajo, Pangaitan (Timor),"
Ratner told us. "The main problem here is that it is doubtful the
Vietnamese would sue a liberal when they are dying to better relations
with the US. I would do this case if could get plaintiffs--so far no
luck." According to Ratner, there is no statute of limitations problem
as it is newly discovered evidence and there is a stro n argument
particularly in the criminal context that there is no statute of
limitations for war crimes.
But criminal cases in the US present a difficult, if not impossible,
prospect. Now that Kerrey is discharged from the Navy, the military
courts, which went after Lt. Calley for the My Lai massacre, has no
jurisdiction over him. "As to criminal case in the US--my pretty
answer is no," says Ratner. "The US first passed a war crimes statute
(18 USC sec. 2441 War Crimes) in 1996--that statute makes
what Kerrey did a war crime punishable by death of life
imprisonment--but it was passed after the crime and criminal statutes
are not retroactive." In 1988, Congress enacted a statute against
genocide, which was might apply to Kerrey's actions, but it to can't
be applied retroactively. Generally at the time of Kerrey's acts in
Vietnam, US criminal law did not extend to what US citizens did
overseas unless they were military.
[As a senator, Kerrey, it should be noted, voted for the war crimes
law, thus opening the opportunity for others to be prosecuted for
crimes similar to those he that committed but is shielded from.]
The United Nations is a possibility, but a long shot. They could
establish an ad hoc tribunal such as it did with the Rwanda ICTR and
Yugoslavia ICTY. "This would require action by UN Security council
could do it, but what are the chances?" says Ratner. "There is still
the prospect for a US veto What that really points out is how those
tribunals are bent toward what the US and West want."
Prosecution in Vietnam and or another country and extradition is also
a possibility. It can be argued that war crimes are crimes over which
there is universal jurisdiction--in fact that is obligation of
countries-under Geneva Convention of 1948--to seek out and prosecute
war criminals. "Universal jurisdiction does not require the presence
of the defendant--he can be indicted and tried in some countries in
absentia--or his extradition c an be requested", says Ratner. "Some
countries may have statutes permitting this. Kerrey should check his
travel plans and hire a good lawyer before he gets on a plane. He can
use Kissinger's lawyer." CP
Douglas Valentine is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only
comprehensive account of the CIA's torture and assassination operation
in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug
trade.
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