Sour Grapes
Of course we're Fair and Balanced!

2003-05-27

Assassination, kidnapping & torture: surely not by the U.S. government!

The Memory Hole—"rescuing knowledge, freeing information"—has put a collection of Documents from the Phoenix Program online. What is the Phoenix Program?

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 these documents, but the creator of Phoenix gave his personal copies to author Douglas Valentine. They have never previously been published, online or in print.


This is the kind thing I think of whenever someone in the government says, "Trust us! We're not going to abuse our powers." As of this writing, there are fourteen documents online, with more planned in the coming months.




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