CORRECTION: The Phoenix Program

Correction:  The answers to Questions #3 and #4 have been amended.

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1.  Tell us what you know about the Phoenix Program.

Answer:  The Phoenix Program was initiated during the Vietnam War as part of a covert war effort that was classified as a "civilian pacification program."

2.  That's quite a euphemism, "civilian pacification."  What does it mean in real life?

Answer:  During the Vietnam War, it many that the U.S. was sending Special Forces personnel into remote villages in Vietnam to perpetrate violence against the Vietnamese as a means of coercing their cooperation against the Viet Cong.

Typically, a random family in the village was killed in the middle of the night for no reason.  Several days later, American Special Forces would arrive during the daylight hours to suggest that the Viet Song had committed the atrocity and to demand fealty to the cause of South Vietnam.

3.  And were Johnson and Nixon fully apprised of what Phoenix was?

Answer:  I am told that Nixon was fully informed about Phoenix.  

The tactics being employed through Phoenix, from the very beginning, were so brutal and unconscionable, they had no overt political seal of approval.

This was a Pentagon initiative with which Nixon was on board, and it was advanced clandestinely for hidden political objectives.

Nixon's complicity was certainly confirmed by his overtures to the judge in the Daniel Elsberg trial, in which his staff suggested that the judge could be appointed as Director of the FBI in return for punishing Elsberg, the source of the Pentagon Papers, as Nixon directed.

Fortunately, this corruption led the ethical judge to throw out the case.  The details appear within Elsberg's obituary in the New York Times dated last week:  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/us/daniel-ellsberg-dead.html

4.  What do you mean by hidden political objectives?  Didn't the Pentagon want to win the Vietnam War in taking a stand against Communism?

Answer:  The Pentagon realized early on that the overt war in Vietnam was not winnable.  As a reminder, the Pentagon Papers made the Pentagon's internal analysis on this point exceptionally clear.

But the Pentagon maintained a powerful interest in the progress of the covert war effort in Vietnam -- which was not being discussed or illuminated on the evening news to any degree for the American people.

5.  And what was the purpose of the covert war in Vietnam per se?

Answer:  The purpose for the Pentagon and the CIA was to establish a method of gaining control of a society through selective violence and the terror that resulted from those events, alongside a system of informants, torture, coercion and bribes -- which was also being manifested on a trial basis.

There were a lot of acronyms for these activities:  Provincial Reconnaissance Units, Intelligence and Operations Coordinating Centers, Terrorism Liaison Officers who were paid to report "suspicious activity."  All of it manifested as the CIA's blueprint for a totalitarian system in which civilian populations of any nation could be effectively controlled, directed and subdued.

6.  And when was Phoenix implemented within the United States?

Answer:  Allen Dulles was involved in Phoenix-like activities within the United States in the 1960's.  So, the CIA has been perpetrating violence for its own objectives for a long while.  But the program under its current name "Phoenix" appears to have been initiated domestically in the mid-1990's.

At present, the FBI has become formally involved with Phoenix under the false pretest of "counterterrorism initiatives," so this represents a pressing threat to our democracy -- and the democracies of other nations as well.

7.  What about the argument, made privately within the Pentagon, that climate concerns necessitate that the planet supports fewer people?

Answer:  As a justification for first-degree murder, this argument fails rather spectacularly.  The Pentagon, through Phoenix, is engaged in criminal human rights violations that cannot be defended on any basis whatsoever.

Perhaps Mark Milley is a closet environmentalist and secretly gives generous amounts of money to the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club.

But publicly, the Pentagon has concealed, and continues to conceal, its internal analyses of climate change in its communications with the American people.  In truth, propagandists on the far right continue to cynically manipulate a significant fraction of the American population by conveying that climate change is a myth, that no adaptation from the American public is required with regard to energy consumption, and that family planning is a bad idea that violates Americans' freedoms.

The truth -- which the Pentagon understands all too well -- is that a significant and immediate course correction is required from all of us with regard to our energy consumption.  Beyond this, we need to have the courage to undertake both a domestic and International dialogue involving the fact that the earth cannot likely sustain ten or fifteen billion people with our current technologies.  Perhaps current energy advances allow the earth to sustain three billion or four billion people over the long term.  The Pentagon knows the number, and it is incumbent upon them to share it with us.  Because these goals are attainable peaceable, with planning, honesty, and thoughtful communication.

Civilian pacification programs as represented by Phoenix represent none of these necessities.

And it's necessary to point out that just societies can never result from unjust means of control over human freedom of thought, agency and will.

The Nazis killed nine million people in their concentration camps in a bid for a "greater Germany."  Instead, all they accomplished was a manifestation of Hell on earth, which still stands as an permanent indictment of the inhumanity of which human beings are capable.

8.  Are utilities companies such as PG&E and Cal Water engaging in harm toward certain members of the American public at the behest of the FBI?  Is this part of Phoenix as well?

Answer:  Yes, and yes.

9.  Don't you think there is also a problem in the fact that the alleged high-mindedness of far right CIA, Pentagon, and FBI personnel in their concerns for the environmental future of the planet is paired with profiteering from the losses of those Americans wrongfully designated as "targets of interest"?

Answer:  There were an infinite number of stories from the 1930's and 40's of SS Officers shooting Jewish civilian women and gifting their victims' jewelry as bounty to their wives and girlfriends.

Profiting off of first-degree murder represents a systemic corruption that can only be perceived as an abandonment of our human potential -- a darkness that threatened to eclipse all knowledge of good.

The fact that the forced property divestment of "targets of interest" -- and other elements of these good people's suffering -- is commoditized and distributed as "profit" is perilous territory for our nation as a whole.

Those internal administrators of the Phoenix Program, the "target of interest" program, the "non-investigative subjects" program and the Signature Reduction Program are not fit to lead us as a nation.

That's why we have elections.  That's why we have a civilian Commander-in-Chief who deserves our fealty, our appreciation, and our support.

10.  Can President Biden reveal the truth of this matter to the American public?

Answer:  He possesses the courage to do so.  And if he desires it, I would like to assist him in that process.

As democracy's champion, he remains the world's best and brightest hope.

11.  You have asked for assistance in supporting your family's health given the astonishing harms the FBI has perpetrated against you in retaliation for being a whistleblower of the agency's malfeasance.

Answer:  Yes, I have, and I hope that intervention will be forthcoming.

12.  Do you hereby certify that the foregoing is true and correct?

Answer:  I do.

 

Lane MacWilliams