“Anyone who doubts that this nation building and police activity has not become real and very effective right here in the United States need only visit the area around Fort Bragg to find one of these early paramilitary CIA-oriented specialist, General Tolson, sending his American soldiers out into the countryside with nation-building programs for the citizens of the United States. If such tactics continue, it is possible that an enlargement of such a program could lead to a pacification program of areas of the United States, such as the CIA and the US Army have carried out in Indochina.”
– Col. Fletcher Prouty “The Secret Team” (1972). Prouty served as a liaison officer between the Pentagon and the CIA between 1955 and 1963.
“Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang, as it was called by the Vietnamese, due process was totally nonexistent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered, simply on the word of an anonymous informer…At its height Phoenix managers imposed quotas of eighteen hundred neutralizations per month on the people running the program in the field, opening up the program to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians as well as VCI [Viet Cong Infrastructure]…By scrutinizing the [Phoenix] program as a symbol of the dark side of the human psyche…[it will aid] to articulate the subtle ways in which the Vietnam War changed how Americans think about themselves. This…is about terror and its role in political warfare…how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations – ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies – the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideas that once defined their national self-concept. This…asks [the question] what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost.”
– Douglas Valentine “The Phoenix Program”
Hellbound and Down 