Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
In the wake of September 11, 2001, my articles about the Phoenix program became more relevant than ever before. The third, "Homeland Insecurity," appeared on October 1, 2001, and predicted that the government would establish Phoenix-style "extra-legal military tribunals that can try suspected terrorists without the ordinary legal constraints of American justice."
The United States soon established detention centers at Guanta¡namo in Cuba, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. And the CIA established "black sites" around the world. But I was referring to plans by the Bush administration to rob American citizens of their right to due process. And that is exactly what happened in January 2013 when President Obama signed a National Defense Authorization Act that provides for the indefinite detention of Americans.
These developments were easy to predict, given my back-ground in Phoenix. In the October 2001 article, for example, I explained that Phoenix would become the bureaucratic model for the "homeland security" program that now envelops America and subjects its citizens to the same blanket surveillance that the Phoenix program imposed on the people of South Vietnam. Almost ten years later, in July 2011, the Washington Post published its "Top Secret America" expose, which outlined America's "heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment." Lead reporter Dana Priest calls it the "vast and hidden apparatus of the war on terror."
This Phoenix-style network constitutes America's internal security apparatus, and it is targeting you, under the guise of protecting you from terrorism. And that is why, more than ever, people need to understand what Phoenix is really all about.
When the CIA created Phoenix in June 1967, it was called ICEX-SIDE: Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation–Screening, Interrogation and Detention of the Enemy. The SIDE function is often ignored as journalists and propagandists focus on the sensational aspect that involves the targeted assassination of terrorists and their sympathizers, often by remote-controlled drones.
But in the first instance, Phoenix was a massive dragnet that packed South Vietnam's prisons, jails, and detention centers to overflowing. The foundation stone of this network was a jerry-rigged judicial system based on Stalinist security courts that did not require evidence to convict a person. People charged with national security violations had no right to legal representation, due process, or habeas corpus.
As Johan Galtung taught us, "Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance, structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure."
It was perfectly clear, following the terror attacks of 9/11, that America's elite were creating exactly this kind of criminally legal social structure. Climate change, overpopulation, income inequality, dwindling resources, and other geopolitical factors are pushing the rich into gated communities in every nation in the world.
The establishment is preparing for the dystopian future that lies ahead.
