The Scariest Thing You Will Read This Year

Douglas Valentine writes:

My article “An Open Letter to Maj. Gen. Bruce Lawlor” appeared in August 2002 and spoke to this imminent threat of fascism. As a CIA officer in South Vietnam in the early 1970s, Bruce Lawlor ran a counterterror team in one of the northern provinces. In 2002 Lawlor became the Office of Homeland Security’s senior director for protection and prevention. The Office of Homeland Security would soon evolve into the Department of Homeland Security, with its Orwellian “fusion centers,” which are replicas of the Phoenix IOCCs and serve the same “intelligence” function.

After 9/11, the influence of Phoenix proponents like Simmons, Kerrey, and Lawlor was crucial in reshaping America’s attitude in regard to conducting murderous, illegal Phoenix-style operations against civilians in foreign nations, and against dissidents at home. Such men and women are everywhere in positions of authority, threatening the democratic institutions we hold dear....

The Phoenix has landed. The ultimate fusion of bureaucracy and psychological warfare, it serves as the model for America’s homeland security apparatus, as well as its global war on terror. That is not a theory. In his strategy paper “Countering Global Insurgency” published in Small Wars Journal in September–November 2004, Lt. Col. David Kilcullen called for a “global Phoenix program.” Kilcullen would become one of the government’s top counterinsurgency advisors.

Phoenix terms like high-value target and neutralization are now as common as Phoenix strategies and tactics. And the process of institutionalizing the Phoenix program, conceptually and programmatically, is just beginning.

Read the full story here.