Rating: 
Summary: Excellent read, very readable, on a difficult subject
Review: After having read Douglas Valentine's essay on how the Phoenix is coming home to roost via Homeland Security on his website, I decided to look into his book, The Phoenix Program. Besides his comprehensive, journalistic coverage of the details involved with the program, unafraid to uncover the deeds of all sides involved, two things impressed me even more. First, this type of book usually has alphabet soup groups, projects and missions labeled with acronyms, and so many individuals' names woven through that I grow weary of reading half way through, if that far. Not so with Valentine's opus. Somehow he presents all these details in a readable fashion, which if you begin from the beginning, unfolds those normally boring and confusing details without losing the reader. At least not this one, who is easily confused by such matters. Second, and even more impressive were his interviews. It was more like watching a good documentary than reading. Valentine conveyed the characters and their personalities so that they became real people to me, and he let them tell their stories in a very human, honest way. At times even touching, those interviewed were equally human regardless of rank, station, deed or misdeed. It's rare that an interviewer gets the interviewee's real voice and viewpoint. Great stuff, really soulfull and heartfelt. Read it and check out his article on his website, the Phoenix Program is not just history, and it's not just Vietnam.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent read, very readable, on a difficult subject
Review: After having read Douglas Valentine's essay on how the Phoenix is coming home to roost via Homeland Security on his website, I decided to look into his book, The Phoenix Program. Besides his comprehensive, journalistic coverage of the details involved with the program, unafraid to uncover the deeds of all sides involved, two things impressed me even more. First, this type of book usually has alphabet soup groups, projects and missions labeled with acronyms, and so many individuals' names woven through that I grow weary of reading half way through, if that far. Not so with Valentine's opus. Somehow he presents all these details in a readable fashion, which if you begin from the beginning, unfolds those normally boring and confusing details without losing the reader. At least not this one, who is easily confused by such matters. Second, and even more impressive were his interviews. It was more like watching a good documentary than reading. Valentine conveyed the characters and their personalities so that they became real people to me, and he let them tell their stories in a very human, honest way. At times even touching, those interviewed were equally human regardless of rank, station, deed or misdeed. It's rare that an interviewer gets the interviewee's real voice and viewpoint. Great stuff, really soulfull and heartfelt. Read it and check out his article on his website, the Phoenix Program is not just history, and it's not just Vietnam.
Rating:
Summary: Vietnam and Phoenix
Review: Along with saturation bombing of civilian populations, Operation Phoenix has to rate as America's most atrocious chapter in its collection of fun facts from Vietnam. Between 1967 to 1973 an estimated 40,000 Vietnamese were killed by CIA-sponsored "counterterror" and "hunter-killer" teams, and hundreds of thousands were sent to secret interrogation centers. William Colby's records show 20,587 dead between 1968 and 1971, though he likes to believe that most were killed in military combat and afterwards identified as part of the VC infrastructure. Other testimony suggests that Colby was a bit disingenuous in these 1971 hearings. At one point Congressman Ogden Reid pulled out a list signed by a CIA officer that named VC cadre rounded up in a particular action in 1967. "It is of some interest that on this list, 33 of the 61 names were women and some persons were as young as 11 and 12," noted Reid. Valentine spent four years researching this name-intensive book, and managed to interview over 100 Phoenix participants. If post-Vietnam America had ever looked into a mirror, this book might have become a bestseller. Instead it was published just as the Gulf War allowed us to resume business as usual, and went virtually unnoticed. (Daniel Brandt is founder and president of Public Information Research, Inc.)
Rating:
Summary: Setting the record straight
Review: Amazon posed a review (twice for some strange reason) dated August 26, 2003 in which augustabookman described the Phoenix Program book as "unsubstantiated". This is an outright lie, and possibly libelous. Mr. Valentine, the author of the Phoenix Program, interviewed numerous senior CIA officers directly involved in the Phoenix Program including: Nelson Brickham, who created the Phoenix Program, Evan Parker the first Phoenix Program director, John Muldoon, director of the Province Interrogation Center program, plus Jim Ward, Tom Donohue, Tully Acampora, Clyde Bauer, Ed Brady, William Colby, Sam Drakulich, Rudy Enders, Donald Gray, Jack Horgan, Robert Komer, Edward Lansdale, Charles Lemoyne, Roger McCarthy, Tom McCoy, Ralph McGehee, Walter Mackem, Warren Milberg, Stu Methven, Robert Peartt, Rufus Phillips, Bernard Picard, Tom Polgar, Ron Radda, Lionell Rosenblatt, Frank Scotton, Robert Slater, Howard Stone, John Tilton, and Robert Wall. This list does not include the dozens of senior military officers, American and Vietnamese, he interviewed; and State Department officers, Congressmen and others who were directly involved in all aspects of the Phoenix Program. It just kills me that Amazon prints lies as if they were fact.
Rating:
Summary: Setting the record straight
Review: Amazon posed a review (twice for some strange reason) dated August 26, 2003 in which augustabookman described the Phoenix Program book as "unsubstantiated". This is an outright lie, and possibly libelous. Mr. Valentine, the author of the Phoenix Program, interviewed numerous senior CIA officers directly involved in the Phoenix Program including: Nelson Brickham, who created the Phoenix Program, Evan Parker the first Phoenix Program director, John Muldoon, director of the Province Interrogation Center program, plus Jim Ward, Tom Donohue, Tully Acampora, Clyde Bauer, Ed Brady, William Colby, Sam Drakulich, Rudy Enders, Donald Gray, Jack Horgan, Robert Komer, Edward Lansdale, Charles Lemoyne, Roger McCarthy, Tom McCoy, Ralph McGehee, Walter Mackem, Warren Milberg, Stu Methven, Robert Peartt, Rufus Phillips, Bernard Picard, Tom Polgar, Ron Radda, Lionell Rosenblatt, Frank Scotton, Robert Slater, Howard Stone, John Tilton, and Robert Wall. This list does not include the dozens of senior military officers, American and Vietnamese, he interviewed; and State Department officers, Congressmen and others who were directly involved in all aspects of the Phoenix Program. It just kills me that Amazon prints lies as if they were fact.
Rating:
Summary: Valentine writes an unflinching account of covert warfare.
Review: During the past few months, I have been devouring the literature on covert ops during the Vietnam War. By far the most candid, unflinching examination of these controversial programs is the excellent book by Doug Valentine. He carefully explains all the special operations techniques of compartmentalization, cover stories, plausible deniability, and secrecy oaths which are designed to keep covert ops secret forever. Moreover, he appears to have interviewed at length all the central players in Phoenix. Many books on covert ops, (which sometimes tend to glorify the operatives), rely on supposedly secret or newly declassified documents to buttress their claims. The problem with such an analytical approach is that frequently such documents are bogus, especially designed to camoflouge controversial or illegal activities. Valentine goes directly to the source -- the men of Phoenix and the officers in the chain of command. Valentine has succeeded in gaining access to many special operators who appear to have spoken from the heart about their missions. Moreover, he thoroughly and concretely lays out the structure of the controversial Phoenix program, in all of its complicated facets, from Provincial Reconnaissance Units to Studies and Observations Group missions. His book is likely to be criticized by those who wish to bury the uglier side of covert ops forever. It is precisely for this reason that his is such an important contribution to literature on Vietnam. April Oliver (former producer, CNN)
Rating: 
Summary: Oliver Stone, call your office
Review: More unsubstantiated tripe bout events that never took place, told by unqualified people and written down wholesale by a naive author. It is very telling that one of the most positive reviews posted here is from one of the purveyors of the fairy tale about Americans using nerve gas on other Americans. Avoid this book; there are lots of better and more balanced ones. And, yes, I was there, as a matter of fact.
Rating:
Summary: The Shotgun Approach
Review: One appalling fact in particular stands out to me from Doug Valentine's valuable history of the Phoenix Program: the CIA and U.S. military leadership knew very well that their operatives were torturing and murdering thousands of innocent civilian people in Vietnam. They knew it and they didn't care. The problem for the CIA and U.S. military was that the Viet Cong were a superior enemy. They were intelligent, very resourceful, very tough and much more highly motivated than most American soldiers. Most important of all, the VC had the steadily increasing support of the Vietnamese people. The CIA doesn't want you to know that the Vietnam War was a true People's War. The vast majority of Vietnamese people very justifiably despised the murdering, raping, racist American invaders. It was therefore quite natural for the people to support their Viet Cong brothers and sisters. The VC were the best and most courageous of the southern Vietnamese people. For all these reasons it was extremely difficult for U.S. forces even to identify them, much less catch them. Knowing all this privately (and, of course, never admitting it publicly) the CIA's Phoenix Program adopted the shotgun approach: murder, rape and torture as many people as you can, and hopefully there will be a few VC among them. This bestial, genocidal approach was in fact the (unofficial) method of every branch of the U.S. government and military involved in Vietnam. The U.S. Air Force dropped millions of tons of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs on people all over Southeast Asia, knowing full well it would brutally murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian women and children -- but hoping to get a few VC, Pathet Lao and NVA among them. U.S. Navy SEALS like Bob Kerrey snuck into villages considered to be populated by VC sympathizers and slit the throats of children and their grandparents. Under the guidance of the CIA's Phoenix Program the U.S. Army committed thousands of atrocities like the My Lai massacre: murdering, raping and sodomizing women and girls, literally blowing away little babies with M-16 rifles, tossing grenades into huts full of children, bayonetting old men, cutting people's ears and fingers off, torturing people in horrible ways. The victims were the children, the wives, the sisters, mothers, fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers of suspected VC. "The Phoenix Program" is a serious wake up call to all Americans. We were definitely the bad guys in Vietnam. No honest person can deny it. The genocide of the Vietnamese people was fueled by racism. In their own twisted minds, CIA and U.S. military personnel imagined Vietnamese people as ... That made it easy for such Americans to justify the cold-blooded butchery of literally millions of innocent, helpless children and civilian people. There is no fundamental difference between those Americans and the demonic Nazis. In 1967, during the height of the genocide, Senator Wayne Morse (D-Oregon) had this to say: "We're going to become guilty, in my judgement, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It's an ugly reality, and we Americans don't like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that's going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia." The Phoenix Program is one of those chapters. The whole Vietnam Genocide is one of the absolute ugliest chapters of American history. And as long as the war criminals of the CIA are still walking around loose, it's a chapter that is still being written today. It's no wonder the CIA is attempting to suppress and denigrate this book. In "The Phoenix Program" Doug Valentine is not afraid to name names. Lots of them. In the middle of the book he even provides 16 pages of photographs of many U.S. government, military and CIA officers involved in the Phoenix Program. Looking at the photos one is struck by the ordinary appearance of these men. It's hard to picture them involved in the mass-murder, rape and torture of their fellow human beings. They look just like any businessman, bureaucrat or soldier you might see on the street of any town in America. And that is an important point. As Mr. Valentine writes in the introduction: "This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost." The CIA works endlessly to cover up all evidence and silence all testimony of its war crimes. But do we as a nation really think we can just sweep this monumental horror under the rug? The United States butchered over three million people in Vietnam alone. No sane person could actually believe there will be no punitive consequences for one of the greatest and most brutal genocides of the twentieth century. Mainstream American society has deeply poisoned itself by its collective refusal to come clean about the war crimes committed by our government and military around the world. And if we, as a nation, do not take serious steps to undo all this violent evil -- it will destroy us.
Rating:
Summary: Just one question ....
Review: One reviewer writes: "It is a sad but telling fact that the CIA's secret supporters have managed to suppress this book"...
Hmmm. If the book is "suppressed," then why can you buy it on Amazon? (In fact, a REPRINT of the original version!)
Maybe the answer is in my motto: never trust anyone, esp. an "author," who talks about himself in the third person. :)
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The author's intent is very obvious, however, his structure is too detailed in facts that clouded the issues by making a boring and difficult read. The flow and continuity were just not there. I am quite surprised the editor did not have a field day rewriting much of his work.
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