Exposing the CIA’s Brutal and Illegal Operation Phoenix (1971)
FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, ON JULY 15, 1971, the curtain of secrecy that had prevented public scrutiny of the CIA’s “Operation Phoenix” in South Vietnam began to open, and the revelations of the program’s illegality and brutality caused widespread outrage.
Operation Phoenix, which the CIA had started in 1968, was widely known to be what the CIA called a non-military pacification program aiming “to destroy the enemy [civilian] infrastructure, root out the shadow government, and identify and arrest the infrastructure agents where they exist,” and install a Saigon-sponsored civilian administration throughout South Vietnam.
Even though critics of Operation Phoenix claimed that one of its main methods of rooting out the shadow government was to assassinate anyone associated with it, the CIA and the Saigon government denied it. When questioned about such killings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1970, the head of Operation Phoenix called such deaths “aberrations,” saying that the program’s "policy is to assure that they are captured and held."
Then in the summer of 1971, under the pressure for disclosure that had been created by the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the House Subcommittee on Government Operations disclosed that during 1970 and early 1971, Operation Phoenix had been responsible for the summary execution of nearly ten thousand anti-Saigon civilians and the imprisonment of more than seven thousand after secret non-judicial proceedings, during which the accused had no right to present a defense or be represented by an attorney.
Put another way, Operation Phoenix officially admitted responsibility for murdering or imprisoning more than 285 South Vietnamese civilians every week because they were supposedly “guilty“ of actively opposing the U.S. refusal to allow the Vietnamese people to govern themselves.
As one House member said, “I am shocked and dismayed” by the new information. “Assassination and terror by the Vietcong or Hanoi should not, and must not, call forth the same methods by Saigon, let alone the United States, directly or indirectly.”
“The Administration,” he continued, “must totally disassociate itself from this Phoenix program and insist unequivocally that Saigon stop dead in its track this mechanism for civilian murder or stand criminally condemned before the world.” https://unredacted.com/2010/11/23/no-foia-request-needed-the-douglas-valentine-vietnam-collection/
The Class War that America Forgot (1877)
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-NINE YEARS AGO, ON JULY 16, 1877, one of the most dramatic but now forgotten months in U.S. history began with a spontaneous strike by railroad workers in West Virginia and Maryland, which developed into "a national conflagration that brought the country closer to a social revolution than at any other time in its century of existence except for the Civil War," according to historian Philip S. Foner.
Over the course of four weeks more than five hundred thousand workers in almost every industry went on strike and joined huge and sometimes violent demonstrations in cities from coast to coast, including Albany, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Kansas City, New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
There were even general strikes in Pittsburgh and St. Louis, two of the country's largest cities, which halted almost all commercial and industrial activity for days. In several cities, troops opened fire on large groups of unarmed or very poorly armed demonstrators, killing at least one hundred.
The challenge to normal authority was so prolonged and widespread as to inspire many participants and observers to compare the events to the 1871 Paris Commune, when an uprising of workers succeeded in taking control of Paris for ten weeks.
The events of the 1877 upheaval are largely forgotten, but there remain scores of unintended memorials to the unrest. The government's inability at the time to force a quick end to the demonstrations was due partly to the absence of well-armed army units in or near major cities. Deciding to prevent a repetition, authorities built more than a hundred well-fortified armories in proletarian neighborhoods over the next five years.
More than a few of those late-1870s-early-1880s armories remain standing today. https://jacobin.com/2022/07/great-upheaval-railroad-strike-1877
Right-Wing Coup Starts the Spanish Civil War (1936)
NINETY YEARS AGO, ON JULY 17, 1936, the Spanish Civil War began when right-wing members of the Spanish Army attempted a coup against the 5-year-old constitutional government of the Second Spanish Republic.
The army was divided, and the coup makers were only partially successful. They took control of Spanish Morocco in Africa and about one-third of the Spanish mainland, but failed in most of Spain’s largest city’s, leaving the country divided between areas controlled by the elected, constitutional government and areas controlled by right-wing soldiers and their allies.
The two sides fought for nearly three years until the constitutional government was defeated in April 1939. The coup makers, who were eventually led by Francisco Franco, ruled Spain until Franco’s death in 1975. https://xxxxxx.org/2023-09-09/us-fighters-spanish-civil-war
U.S. Says ‘No’ to Democracy in Vietnam (1956)
SEVENTY YEARS AGO, JULY 20, 1956, was the date specified by treaty for an election by all the people of Vietnam (in both the north and the south) to decide whether Vietnamese government would be led by the forces that had defeated the French Army in 1954 (centered in the northern part of the country) or forces allied with the U.S.-supported neo-colonial government, centered in the south.
Whichever group was elected, the new government would govern the entire country, ending its temporary partition into North and South.
With the blessing of the U.S., the government in the south refused to allow the election to take place. It did so because, as Dwight Eisenhower, who was president of the U.S. in 1956, noted in his 1963 memoir, "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai."
The refusal to hold the vote called for by the 1954 Geneva treaty, and then to abide by the election’s outcome, doomed the Vietnamese people to nearly two decades of devastation caused by one of the 20th century’s biggest and bloodiest wars.
When the Vietnam War was over, the country was unified as it would have been had the election been held. https://xxxxxx.org/2025-05-03/us-defeat-vietnam
The Frame-Up of Alfred Dreyfus Ends at Last (1906)
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY YEARS AGO, ON JULY 21, 1906, French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had–by means of perjured testimony and forged documents–been wrongfully accused and then convicted in 1894 of treason and espionage, was readmitted to the Army, promoted to Major, and awarded the Legion of Honor.
The anniversary is a good day to recall and regret all wrongful convictions, especially those that result from frame-ups, and to work to ensure they will not happen in the future. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/28/trial-of-the-century
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