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Summary: A work of courage, a masterpiece of investigative reporting.
Review: The Phoenix Program is a work of courage and a masterpiece of investigative reporting. It is contemporary writing at its best and should be required reading for American history and government classes in all high schools and colleges.It is a sad but telling commentary that the CIA's secret supporters have managed to suppress this book, and so I urge all scholars and historians, especially those who are currently being denied access to documents about the CIA's war crimes, to obtain this book and organize an effort to have it reprinted. My name is John Kelly. I am the author of Tainting Evidence: Inside The Scandals At The FBI Crime Lab. I have been studying and writing about the CIA for twenty years, so I can appreciate Valentine's ability to expose the essense of the CIA; which is to deceive the American public about its involvement in assassination, mass murder and torture. Moreover, he has managed to have CIA officers admit to their crimes. And yet he has d! one so without sloganeering, and thus made the best case yet for abolishing the CIA and prosecuting the war criminals within its ranks. An intelligent person knows the truth. A courageous person knows the truth and speaks it at any cost. Doug Valentine is a wise and brave man who should be heard and supported. For now the CIA and its minions have killed the messenger, but this should not be allowed to continue. This review has been written by John Kelly, author of Tainting Evidence: Inside The Scandals At The FBI Crime Lab.
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Summary: Wow - Rings of Truth for Veterans
Review: The Phoenix program
By Douglas Valentine
Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti Imperialist
vvawai@oz.net Between 1967 and 1973, the United States undertook the most ambitious and far reaching operation of the Vietnam War. Created and coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency, and implemented by mercenary "counter-terror" teams, Phoenix (or Phuong Hoang Operation) was the final solution to the problem posed by a secret underground of Vietnamese civilians who supported the armed Vietcong insurgents. Over time, hundreds of thousands of Vietcong sympathizers, and innocent bystanders, were apprehended by the Phoenix teams and sent to hideous interrogation centers manned by South Vietnam's cruel secret police. An estimated forty thousand Vietnamese were killed, and countless atrocities, including the My Lai Massacre, were perpetrated in the name of "neutralizing the Vietcong infrastructure. The Phoenix program was launched on August 1, 1968, (after the Tet Offensive) in order to eradicate the communist infrastructure. The number killed if proportionate to population, would total over 200,000 Americans deliberately assignated over a three-year period, were Phoenix in practice in the United States.
Central to the Phoenix Program is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers.. One of the principal tasks of high-level US officials, led by CIA William Colby, was to establish quotes for the number of Vietnamese to be "neutralized each month". In 1969 the target was for 1800 eliminations per month. The result was vastly increased numbers of innocent persons rounded up and imprisoned, indiscriminately murdered, and brutally tortured in an effort to show results. A Phoenix agent testified to Congress "I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lied through an entire interrogation".
Although epic in scope and significance, the Phoenix Program has never been analyzed in detail until (this book) now back in print. This book tracks the program from its roots in earlier programs, through its conclusion in South Vietnam, to its current use as a model for CIA counter-terror and counter-insurgency operations worldwide. Based on previously classified documents and extensive research conducted over four years, the book includes interviews with over one hundred participants, from senior CIA officers who created and managed the program, to the CIA officers and Serviceman who ran its field operations.
This book is documentary proof not only of CIA sponsored torture but also assassinations not only in Latin America in the eighties but also in Vietnam earlier. Phoenix was an American creation. Once arrested, suspects could not confront accusers or see dossiers, they were denied bail, legal council, and denied a trial or even a hearing. Due process was non existent. This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It shows how successive American administrations sank deeper in the vortex of covert operations and asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost?
Phoenix wasn't the first nor last special operations by the US government. The list is long from the Bolivia in '91, El Salvador from '81-92, Iraq in '91, Hungary in '57, Peru in '91 to Vietnam in the early 1960's. As the US steps up its intervention in Columbia - and as protesters fight to close the School of Americas - its more important than ever to learn from history to apply it to what our government is doing today - though much of it is yet unrevealed. Scratch the surface.
Rating: 
Summary: What a load!
Review: This book is the biggest collection of poser fantasy I've ever encountered. Written with what was obviously shoddy investigation work, it's fairly obvious that the author never bothered to check the claims of the so-called men he profiled. The fact of the matter is that the Phoenix Project (Phung Hoang Program) wasn't even secret, it was a public program. It's existence was announced at a press conference by an RVN official. It's purpose was to identify and apprehend, not assassinate. This so-called author and his ridiculous books were taken to task and exposed for the fantasy they are by Navy Cmdr. F.C. Brown in Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene, which is a publication of the National Intelligence Study Center, in 1993. Mr Valentine did not react well to his critisism. Frankly, I immediately suspect anyone who says "I was there and this is true" to be a liar. A far better book on the Phoenix Program is "Ashes to Ashes" by Dale Andrade. He is a true research historian that put together an extremely accurate account of the Phoenix Program based on files and interviews with REAL veterans. And oh yeah, I'm not anonymous.
Rating:
Summary: What a load!
Review: This book is the biggest collection of poser fantasy I've ever encountered. Written with what was obviously shoddy investigation work, it's fairly obvious that the author never bothered to check the claims of the so-called men he profiled. The fact of the matter is that the Phoenix Project (Phung Hoang Program) wasn't even secret, it was a public program. It's existence was announced at a press conference by an RVN official. It's purpose was to identify and apprehend, not assassinate. This so-called author and his ridiculous books were taken to task and exposed for the fantasy they are by Navy Cmdr. F.C. Brown in Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene, which is a publication of the National Intelligence Study Center, in 1993. Mr Valentine did not react well to his critisism. Frankly, I immediately suspect anyone who says "I was there and this is true" to be a liar. A far better book on the Phoenix Program is "Ashes to Ashes" by Dale Andrade. He is a true research historian that put together an extremely accurate account of the Phoenix Program based on files and interviews with REAL veterans. And oh yeah, I'm not anonymous.
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Summary: We Can Learn From Our Murderous Mistakes
Review: This is as good an account I have found of how the CIA got into the business of helping Vietnamese kill each other off one by one. It is a disturbing and valuable book, and I took from it several lessons: 1) CIA puppies with no military background, and military detailees with no law enforcement background, have no business getting into the gutter with foreign thugs; 2) if we support indigenous arrest, torture, and assassination programs they need to have some serious multi-cultural analysis and counterintelligence support lest we simply give one faction the means of killing off the other without regard to our interests; and 3) our general approach to interference in the internal affairs of other nations is corrupt and increases local corruption. We throw money at personalities rather than insight at institutions. We train and equip local units to inflict covert violence, and then wonder why the situation destabilizes further.
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Summary: Pure unadulterated barnyard brown
Review: To start with, the SEAL Mr. Valentine interviewed in this book never existed. There has never been an Elton Manzione who graduated from the Navy's Special Warfare Training, UDT/R or BUD/S. This combined with the fact that the Navy only sent their senior people who had time in country to work with the Phoenix Program. Either Valentine made this up or relied on sources that were pretty shaky. Do your homework better next time.
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Summary: Excellent and accurate history of Phoenix
Review: Unlike Mark Moyar's propaganda piece "Birds of Prey", this book is absolutely essential to understanding the truth about Phoenix. That it causes so much virulent anger on the part of those who saw the extermination of civilians during wartime as acceptable is the first clue to it's accuracy. An unbiased review of the history outlined in this book will find no factual errors at all. Great reading.
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Summary: The science of terror: revisited
Review: While Hollywood has done well to smoothen the edges by "informing" us that the Vietnam war was "dirty" (there must be also clean wars then) because of "isolated incidents" like the May Lai massacre, more and more books keep surfacing providing hardcore evidence that not only America conducted one of the most brutal wars and invasions recorded in history but also staged state of the art terrorism in the process.
This is exactly what the Phoenix program was about as is meticulously documented in this book. Started in 1968 and kept functioning throughout the war this program was a covert CIA operation aimed at terrorising primarily civilians who might've had the unfortunate intention (or did in fact) support the Vietkong.
Phoenix included everything in the book in averting the Vietnamese from helping the Vietkong, everything from organised torture to burning down whole villages on the mere suspicion that sympathisers might be nesting there to assasinations of key civilian figures. All in all over 40.000 civilians were murdered, most in cold blooded fashion, even though it had become clear from the very early stages that Phoenix was going to have little if any effect in America's effort to win the war.
Perhaps the one fact that strikes as most barbaric -understatement, since the mission of the program was barbarity by definition- was the accountant's logic under which Phoenix was run. Its officials had to produce monthly quotes of assasinations or "neutralisations" (hmm, this type of euphemism does bring to mind some other days in history too ) so they could report the "successes" back to headquarters.
Millions of dollars were pumped into all this but at the same time Phoenix created a massive black market as well, and contributed majorly in the -anyway- massive corruption that took place in the Vietnam war in both American personel and the Vietnamese civilian population in their struggle to survive the onslaught.
As intimidating and overwhelming this book is, i have to mention the two things that i found not in its favor: firstly, the author (who otherwise, has done a brilliant job documenting and interviewing) sinks the book too much in detail that will interest more the professional historians than the average reader. Details which include ranks, location of this or that office etc. And yes this does add undisputed credibility but it also tires. Another thing is that, as other reviewers also mentioned, the author somehow manages to come across as unwillingly glorifying sometimes the participants in Phoenix, he's trying hard to understand their other side, tries hard to portray some of them as people who saw all this as "doing a job, their job". This of course, can not work. Noone can sympathise with a torturer even if he's totally unable to understand what he's doing (something not improbable in extreme brainwashing conditions like those in the military).
But all this doesnt take anything away from the incredible work Douglas Valentine had done here. Being that this program was a co-op only made his work harder. People are not as willing to talk about a covert operation. And if they do then they are not going to give you everything on a platter. You will eventually have to conduct some painstaking work yourself to unearth the rest of the facts yourself. That means reading 100s of documents and piecing them together. Reading the bibliography at the end of the book will convince you.
Books like this further embarass war apologisers and warhawks. They drive home the point that imperialistic wars have always been and will always be brutal and merciless. Books like this also provide the evidence that everyone suspects was there to begin with.
It might be easier to read about the already "known" side of the Vietnam war (the jungles, the leeches, the boobie traps etc) but the "Phoenix program" epitomises what this war was really about and how the killing , the torture and the general destruction were no results of isolated mishaps but rather a product of deliberate policy.
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