All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're streaming live worldwide on the Internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our first guest today is Douglas Valentine.
His website is douglasvalentine.com.
He's an author, investigator, consultant, and poet.
He's the author of The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf, and the new sequel to that, The Strength of the Pack.
Welcome to the show, Douglas.
Thank you very much for having me on the show.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And thinking back on it, I can't even really figure it out what it was that got me interested in this topic a month or so ago.
But it is very interesting, and I can see a lot of parallels to current counterterrorism policy in the Middle East and so forth.
And that's the story of The Phoenix Program, which is the title of one of your books, of course.
And this was a joint operation, is that right, between the CIA and military special forces targeting civilians, the support network for Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam during that war.
Is that basically the outlines?
That's pretty close.
In the beginning, it was a unilateral CIA program, which was created by the CIA without any approval by the South Vietnamese.
During the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Vietnamese got with the program, but originally it was just a unilateral CIA program.
And then in 1969, it pretty much became a joint operation.
Well, you know, learning history is a good way to see what's going on, because it does simply repeat itself.
We never seem to learn from it.
And so it seems like we can really gain a lot of context looking back at this.
First of all, especially for younger people in the audience, North and South Vietnam had been divided in half when it became apparent that the communists were going to win the elections and the pro-American or pro-Western forces, the mostly Catholic, pro-Western groups mostly were located in the South.
And so they divided the country in half.
And so you had the North Vietnamese communists under Ho Chi Minh, but then what we call the VC, the Viet Cong, they were the pro-communist guerrillas in the South, right?
Well, the important thing to remember about the Phoenix program is that it targeted civilians.
The National Liberation Front was the organization, the political organization of the insurgency.
And it was a government, just like the South Vietnamese had a government with President Hu and congressmen and stuff like that, the insurgency had a government as well.
And it was composed of civilians who lived in secret in the villages and districts and provinces of Vietnam.
That's what Phoenix targeted.
It targeted the government of the insurgency, these civilian people who were political people.
That's why the CIA ran that program.
It wasn't a military program going after guerrillas.
It was a political program going after political people, okay?
Yeah, in fact, in one of your articles, you make the comparison to the American Civil War and say, this would be as if Abraham Lincoln used parts of his intelligence apparatus or the army to murder mayors of Southern towns and things like that.
That's right.
Yes, civilians.
So, that's why it was considered in violation of the Geneva Convention, because it was targeting civilians, it was not soldiers.
And it's also why the Phoenix program became the model for George Bush's war on terror.
Bush's war on terror is really no different.
It goes after non-military people.
It goes after political people, people who organize some shadowy organization called Al-Qaeda.
Or, in Iraq, it goes after the political leaders of the insurgency over there.
So, that's the distinguishing characteristic of Phoenix and this kind of what the French always call a dirty war, an assault, yeah.
Well, and that's sort of part and parcel of fighting wars of occupation in other people's countries rather than, say, for example, fighting the Japanese Navy on the high seas or something like that.
We're not talking about fighting people's armies, we're fighting them.
Oh, that's right.
I knew of one guy who was in the CIA who refused to become part of Phoenix because he was Jewish and his parents had lived in occupied Paris during World War II, and the guy saw the Phoenix program as the same thing as America doing the same thing in South Vietnam that the Germans did in Paris in World War II, which is, when you're an occupying force and the people you're occupying organize against you, the first way they have to organize is politically before they can organize militarily.
And so, the Gestapo went after the French who were organizing administratively and politically to oppose their occupation.
And again, that's what's happening in Iraq and in Afghanistan, too.
And you don't read anything about it in the news, because CBS and Fox and T.A.
C.D.
S. or whoever, they never report on the CIA or what the CIA is doing.
But that's essentially what this war on terror is all about, is secret U.S. forces going out and identifying and then capturing and interrogating and, when necessary, killing the political leaders in these countries, the political leaders of the insurgencies in these countries.
Well, morality aside, since morality usually doesn't count when we're talking about killing foreigners for some reason, let me just ask you about the utility of these kinds of operations.
You describe in some of what I read here, operations mostly targeting people's families, terrorizing villages full of civilians.
It seems like all of this would be counterproductive, rather than actually help.
It's supposed to scare, whether they're Vietnamese or Iraqis, into complete submission.
But it seems like the kind of thing that would only motivate them to fight harder.
Well, there's two points to make about that.
The first is that terror is a very good organizing principle, generally speaking.
You can organize a society through fear generally more easily than you can organize a society through love, which is why the McCain campaign, for example, has chosen to go 100% negative and try to scare Americans about Obama being an African born in Africa and a Muslim and whatever they tend to scare, you know, that he hangs out with domestic terrorists.
Because if you fear something, you are more likely to become compliant, whereas if you have no fear or if you have no terror, you're more likely to act in an independent manner and governments want people to be compliant, not independent.
So the idea of terrorizing people into submission has long been thought to be a very good strategy.
Not a tactic, but a strategy for pacifying populations, whether you're pacifying the American people through fear of 9-11 or, you know, and using it as a pretext to implement a Patriot Act and therefore limit people's civil liberties, or whether you're terrorizing foreign enemies by killing their families with drone missiles.
The other thing is that all these programs, the Phoenix program in Vietnam or what's going on in Iraq right now, all rely on informants.
That's the big problem with these programs is because in Vietnam, probably more than half of the informants were actually Viet Cong agents feeding false information into the system.
And this happens all the time.
I mean, if you look at Guantanamo, more than half the prisoners have been released there because they were found to be completely guilty, because the United States went into Afghanistan in 2001 and offered million-dollar rewards for information on terrorists, and all these people started just making up names and feeding them to the Americans.
And to this day, that's the big problem in these kinds of programs, is that Americans are not Vietnamese, Americans are not Iraqis, Americans are not Afghanis, they don't speak the language.
They don't know for sure what anybody's telling them, and so there's just tons of misinformation.
It's really a screwy way to run a war.
Well, yeah, that's like what economists call the local information problem, right?
Kind of central planning doesn't work, whether in war or passing out whatever it is, bailouts to banks, it goes to whatever some guy's whim.
I always think of when I was a kid, my mom always watched MASH, and Clinger the corporal would always order medical supplies, and he would always get a box of hot pants in the middle of the wintertime or whatever from I-Corps.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, you know, in theory, it's one thing, but in reality, it's another thing, and that's an important distinction to make, because people talk a lot about policy, and they can say, our policy is not to hurt anybody who's innocent.
Our policy is to abide by the law.
Our policy is only to use torture when we're sure that somebody's really on hot information.
But all those policy statements are contradicted by what's called the operational reality, the reality on the ground, the Clinger reality of the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing.
You order a box of medicine, and you get a pair of pants.
In reality, nobody ever really knows in a combat situation, in a war, in Iraq, or Afghanistan, what's going on.
It's always the best guess.
So your listeners should be really, really skeptical about anybody who tells them, this is our policy, without actually understanding what the realities are on the ground.
Now, I wish I knew the details of this before I go making wild assertions, but I've heard this before, that when Jack Kennedy authorized the coup against Diem, and this was a major turning point in the war, that basically what had happened was, there were, I guess, two very prominent families in South Vietnam that were competing for power, and simply because the Americans didn't speak the language or really know anything about it, and they called everybody by their one easiest name to pronounce, like Diem, for example, they didn't even realize, the Americans didn't realize that what was happening was, there were two South Vietnamese families vying for power here, and that when they killed Diem, they were only helping one family in power over the other, and that if they had seen it that way, they would have realized that it was a big mistake, and that they should go ahead and let things stay the way they were.
Do you know anything about that?
Well, first of all, Kennedy authorized the coup, but he didn't authorize the assassination, okay?
Okay.
And a lot of Americans, including Kennedy, were shocked when Diem was actually assassinated.
You can have a coup without assassinating somebody, and Kennedy thought there was going to be a coup, and Diem was going to be imprisoned and then, you know, sent into honorable exile or something like that.
The assassination was sort of a counter-coup, a coup within a coup that took a lot of people by surprise, and it had to do with CIA double-dealing.
The other thing is, Diem was removed from power because he was a Catholic, not because there was a...
He was a member of one family vying with another family, but all the generals in his army were Buddhists.
Vietnamese was a Buddhist country, 90% of the population was Buddhist or animist.
A mere 10% of the population was Catholic, Christian, and most of them had come into the country in 1954 from North Vietnam.
So Diem had no popular base, no popular political base, and he couldn't move the government or the people to do anything, and the CIA realized that after having propped this guy up for 10 years.
And so in 1963, they decided to replace him with a Buddhist, and that was the dynamic behind that coup, but the important thing is, is that the United States thought for 10 years, from 1954 until 1963, that it could put a puppet Catholic in charge of a Buddhist nation and actually achieve something, and that's the kind of stupidity and arrogance that defines American foreign policy.
Well, I guess, why don't you tell us how this thing worked?
You know, what was it that the CIA was, and to the degree that it included special forces, what was it that they were actually doing in this Phoenix program?
Well, basically they did two things.
Through their network of informants, they identified the leaders of the civilian government, which was a, you know, a clandestine organization.
You could think of it as, and this is not an analogous, but it's just a way of thinking of it, like going after the mafia, okay?
And you know, they tried to make organizational charts to show who the most important people were in this shadow government, and they did this through, mostly through informants, and then they did two other things.
They set up a secret interrogation center in each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces.
They had one in Saigon, and they had them at the region level, too.
These were CIA interrogation centers.
They were secret facilities, and they were staffed by CIA officers and members of the special branch of the South Vietnamese police, and they would bring in people that they suspected of being members of the shadow government, and they would torture them until these people ratted out their colleagues or became double agents or died.
And then the other part of the program, the other major part of the program, were mercenary teams of, I'm going to call them hunter-killer teams or counter-terror teams.
Sometimes they were just U.S. Navy SEALs.
Sometimes they were South Vietnamese mercenaries or Chinese mercenaries or Cambodian mercenaries, and these were the...
Sometimes they were also paramilitary policemen who were working for secret branches of the South Vietnamese government, and these counter-terror teams would go out, and they would kidnap the suspects, kill their families, torture them out in the field.
So, on the one hand, you had these counter-terror teams going out and doing the dirty work and bringing people into the interrogation centers where they were worked over.
Again, that's basically the template for the war on terror.
Well, and what about framing the Viet Cong for brutal acts that they committed?
I guess leaving evidence behind to make it look like the VC had done what they had actually done.
Yeah, that was one of the...
That's called black propaganda, and they would actually have teams dress up like Viet Cong and go out and commit atrocities and then blame it on the Viet Cong, and they would bring in American reporters, and they would film the scene, and they would say, you know, this is the kind of terror that the VC does, and it's good for propaganda purposes, but it's called black propaganda because it's actually a staged event.
And this is something else that your listeners should be aware of.
The CIA is responsible for probably a good portion of all the suicide bombings, or so-called suicide bombings that go on.
The CIA is in the business of blowing up buildings and assassinating people and making them look like the enemy did it.
So anytime you hear a report that so-and-so, that Al-Qaeda parked their car in front of somebody's house and blew it up, you really have to be skeptical about these kind of reports because, in truth, you never know who's doing it, and a lot of the times it's actually the CIA that's doing it.
Now, you're talking about in Iraq and Afghanistan, or including Bali?
Yeah, all over the world, anywhere, even in Georgia, you know, or those two little tiny provinces that broke away from Georgia where the Soviets were recently mixing it up.
The Russians, excuse me, were recently accused of invading Georgia.
Just a few weeks ago, a car bomb blew up killing a Russian general.
Nobody blamed the CIA, but in my opinion, it was a standard CIA operation.
Well, you know, it's pretty clear that, you know, that things like that have happened in the past.
Of course, the bombings and the bombing of the barracks in Beirut in 1983 was retaliation.
I'm sorry?
That's a very good example.
Yeah, it was the CIA had done a couple of truck bombings first, and then the barracks got blown up in retaliation for that, but you wouldn't say that the CIA was the one that blew up their own barracks, though, kind of thing.
I wouldn't put anything past them.
First of all, one of the things that the CIA is notorious for is something called full-flag operations, and that's when they recruit people, even suicide bombers, to go do, like, really outrageous things, and they do it by adopting the recruitment methods of, let's say, Al-Qaeda.
In other words, the CIA will have agents working for it, Arab-Muslim agents working for it, who they pay millions of dollars, and these people go out and they form what appears to be a splinter cell of Al-Qaeda.
You know, they get five or six guys, and they go out and they say to recruits, I'm actually working for Al-Qaeda, and we want you to go be a suicide bomber, and these people then become suicide bombers, and they work for CIA agents who are pretending to be Al-Qaeda, and they go out and they actually keep all this terrorism rolling, but you never really know who it is.
I mean, this is what they do, and they do it professionally, and they do it all the time all over the world.
It's how they get the Russians to fight the Chinese, or the Iraqis to fight the Iranians.
I mean, it may be hard to digest, but it's a fact that it's what they do.
Well, and throughout history, I mean, you can just look at the Japanese blew up their own train to blame it on the Chinese to justify their invasion of Manchuria.
You can look at the blind eye turn to Pearl Harbor.
In the beginning of World War II, German soldiers dressed up as Polish army officers.
Polish troops had invaded part of Germany.
So, this is nothing new.
It happens all the time.
It never happens if you were to watch Fox News, you know?
Well, on the other hand, though, I mean, every time something blows up, we should just safely assume that the CIA did it then?
I mean, that's not really right either.
No, it isn't.
And, you know, I mean, you can take any of these things to an extreme.
I'm just trying to, and I don't want you to think that I believe that either.
I'm just saying to you that these things happen.
Okay?
Yeah.
I'm just, I had a lot of experience studying the CIA, talking to CIA officers.
I know things about the CIA that other people don't know.
I don't know that all your listeners know these things.
I'm just saying that they do happen.
And that you just, in the back of your mind, have to keep open the possibility, in any case, that unless you're an investigator, and unless you're actually looking at the evidence, you have to really just remind yourself that you don't know.
Right.
Okay?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's absolutely fair.
And, in fact, when we look at Iraq, and I guess I've gotten some criticism for not emphasizing this enough, but there are some bombings, at least, some pretty major bombings in Iraq that are suspicious.
I guess it's widely concluded that the bombing of the Samara Mosque at the beginning of 2006 was done by al-Qaeda in Iraq, and which provoked a massive response by the Shiite militias, and yet we don't really know who set off that bomb.
Well, yeah, you know, I mean, that's another example, but there's British forces operating in Iraq, and a whole bunch of them, there was one unit of them that had worked in Ireland before they went to Iraq, and this is exactly what they were doing in Ireland.
They were posing as IRA, and going around and blowing things up, and blaming it on the IRA so that the English military would have a pretext to go into certain villages and wipe them out.
This is what happens, and there's American, and English, and all sorts of mercenary contractors from all around the world, driving all over Iraq and Afghanistan, dressed up as Muslims, creating all sorts of havoc, just as a pretext so that the occupation can continue.
It's not very likely.
They certainly lie, outright, about the motivations and political ties about whichever group is doing fighting wherever they are, whether they're black ops type psychological operations or not.
They just simply mischaracterize every position of everybody fighting, no matter who they are.
So I don't know at what point we're supposed to believe the lies.
Stop at this point, really.
Well, what's the question, really?
Oh, I don't know.
I was just agreeing with you, really.
Before I brought you on, we were talking about the CNN story where they're saying, well, any Shiite fighter in Iraq is working for Iran, that kind of thing, even though we all know that, really, it's the government of Iraq that works for George Bush also works for Iran.
It's not the people opposing us.
It's the people who are our friends there.
So I was just basically agreeing with you that, even short of actual false flag type operations, the whole bit about continuing the occupations in the Middle East are all based on lies from beginning to end, top to bottom.
Yeah, well, you know, these wars are begun based on lies.
I mean, you acknowledge that, right?
I mean, the war in Iraq was based on a lie that, as we say, weapons of mass destruction, you know?
I mean, the war in Vietnam was based on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which turned out to be a fabrication, a provocation.
It led to the bombing of North Vietnam, rolling thunder.
So, you know, the United States is looking to expand the empire.
And in order to do that, it has to start waging wars overseas.
But most people, most countries are smart enough not to want to get into a war with the United States.
So you have to create a war.
I mean, Saddam Hussein didn't want to go to war with the United States.
Afghanistan didn't want to go to war with the United States.
Vietnam didn't want to go to war with the United States.
I mean, these people, they don't want to.
The United States has a bigger military than all the other militaries in the world combined.
Why would anybody want to start a war with us?
So it just doesn't make sense that these people would start wars with us.
So we have to go around and figure out ways to start wars with them.
And that you do through covert operation.
You do through lies.
You do through propaganda.
I mean, all those things combined.
Well, can you speak to the wars in Central America in the 1980s?
I remember reading.
Oh, yeah, sure.
I read a book back, Out of Control, by one of the Coburn brothers' wives, I think, wrote it.
And a big part of that was that the very same men who are running the drugs, running the guns, murdering the civilians in Central America during the Reagan years, were the very same men who'd come home from doing the exact same things in Vietnam.
Well, Troy, I actually followed, you know, some of the same people.
The guys who were running these assassination teams I was telling you about in the Phoenix program or the interrogation centers in Vietnam.
After 1975, when the United States was forced out of Vietnam, these guys didn't have a whole lot to do.
And a lot of them ended up in Central America, where they started working with really repressive regimes.
And again, one of the things that really defined these repressive regimes in Central America was that they represented the oligarchy, a very small percentage of the population of the people.
There were popular uprisings in El Salvador and Nicaragua, where 90% of the people wanted reforms, and they wanted to be part of the system.
But the CIA, the United States, inevitably backed, like they did in Vietnam with Diem and the Catholics, this very, very small percentage of the ruling class.
And so they would have to resort to the most crass propaganda and covert operations in order to somehow make American public believe that what they were doing in these countries was somehow on behalf of freedom fighters or pro-democracy forces.
But again, it's all just a bait-and-switch show.
It's all done with smoke and mirrors, and again, with the cooperation of the press and the media.
Well, and this also speaks to, or at least our current situation, I think, speaks to something that you referred to in one of your articles that I read about how all these covert operations and so forth in other people's countries, how this changes America back home.
Of course, Vietnam never invaded America, nor did El Salvador, but we have wars in their countries, and yet it ends up changing our system.
We end up really in a situation now where we have no law.
And just in the past week, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro have been mocking George Bush, calling him Comrade Bush, and talking about how he's had to nationalize all the banks.
And part of this is because we're always at war.
Our national government has become the center of our society, and it has grown so powerful that there's no law that even pretends to bind them anymore.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If I could just go back a second, too.
You also mentioned drugs.
Oh, yeah.
You know, and the CIA's involvement in drugs.
And again, it gets to this point of, if you're supporting a very small portion of a population against the majority of the population in a foreign country, lots of times you have to have a real incentive for these people to join forces with the CIA against their own people.
And one of the greatest incentives is money.
And, you know, to turn against your own country and your own people, you have to get a pretty big bribe.
And that's when drugs come in.
In Vietnam, the CIA was supporting warlords who were, you know, on the CIA payroll and working against their own people.
And one of the ways they did it was by giving them, you know, a big percentage of the heroin business that was going on.
And a lot of that heroin was being sold to American soldiers.
And in Central America was the same thing.
The CIA paid off its puppet rulers by giving them a cut of the drug business.
And all those drugs would end up in Florida or California or in New York City or Los Angeles being sold to American citizens.
It just goes to show you, the CIA is not a democratic organization that somehow has the interests of the American, average American at heart.
They're not out there fighting the world for Joe Sixpack or Sarah Palin.
They're fighting it for Wall Street and a small percentage of the American people, the rich people.
Yeah, and that really is the key, I think, you know, when Gary Webb wrote all about the dark alliance and the Contras and the CIA, the so-called debunkers in The Washington Post and The New York Times tried to portray his story as though he was claiming that the CIA did all this on purpose to destroy the black community and all these things.
When that's not what he said, what he said was they don't care at all.
All they cared about was financing the Contras.
And whatever consequences there were for poor black people in Los Angeles or anywhere else just never even occurred to them.
And if it had, they would have just shrugged it off.
They don't care about that.
It wasn't their purpose.
It's just that they are immune to any consequences for their behavior.
Well, they care a little bit.
They care that if there's a big drug epidemic in the United States, it empowers the law enforcement establishment.
It means that more tax dollars go to creating prisons in the United States and selling guns to cops, and uniforms to cops, and tasers to cops, and all those businesses are owned by CIA cronies.
So, bringing drugs into the United States actually serves the purposes of imperialists and it just gives a pretext to law enforcement and right-wing forces here in the United States to clamp down harder on civil rights.
Yeah.
It all fits together very nicely.
As our country becomes just like the communists we work so hard to confront.
Exactly.
In fact, that's really the way I look at it.
I don't see us, the average American, as any different than that National Liberation Front.
To me, it's all class warfare.
Internationally.
Well, and the Americans are the Viet Cong?
They're the government in Saigon.
Let's just say the Viet Cong were a lot more aware and politically astute than the average American, and they didn't ride around in SUVs with cell phones stuck to their ears.
They didn't have a living standard and healthcare that sort of anesthetized them politically.
They were really astute politically.
In the United States, we have such a high standard of living that it's basically okay to go along with it.
Yeah, it cuts both ways.
On one hand, hey, it's a great thing that people who in any other time or society would be peasants actually can live a long time and live like a wealthy man from 50 or 100 years ago by that standard.
On the other hand, it does kind of make them immune where they don't care if their government is torturing people overseas because they've got all their little gadgets that they wouldn't want to risk in trying to change the way things are.
Yeah.
You know, there's an alternative to what goes on, and I think that for a few minutes last week when this financial crisis was brewing and people didn't want the government giving a trillion dollars to Wall Street, there was a feeling around the country, a sense of what we're up against.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
There was actually a rumbling out there.
All the average people in the country were saying, no, we don't want you giving a trillion dollars of our money to Wall Street.
Give it to us.
You know, if the government, you keep telling us you don't have enough money for roads, you don't have enough money for education, you don't have enough money for health care.
Well, if they had taken that trillion dollars they gave to Wall Street and given it to the American people, everybody would have health care.
So there was something going on there last week where people had an inkling for a moment about what a big scam was being run on them.
Right.
Well, and it also showed because people were so activated or, you know, enthusiastic about trying to do something, and the Congress was just flooded with calls and letters and everything, and they beat it for a week.
But then after a week, it all fell apart.
Yeah, Congress doesn't answer to the people.
You know, that's another myth.
Congress answers to its lobbyists who work for the corporation.
And that truth has certainly been laid bare.
I think that was one thing about having the panic in the market happen this close to the election and that kind of thing and happened so severely, so quickly that there wasn't really time to build up the psychological operations program for it.
It became, it was obvious immediately.
This was simply a bailout.
This was a transfer program from us to them.
And we're against it.
And that idea got out so quickly.
And I think the feeling is still there.
Maybe people have been convinced that it was necessary or whatever they call it.
But I was discouraged by it as much as I was encouraged by it because I saw people stand up against it.
But then it all fell apart.
And, you know, the masses don't seem to have the ability to stay focused and, yeah, organize and, you know, be our own group of lobbyists more powerful than them, you know?
Yeah, well, that's the predicament that we're in.
And that's not the predicament that the Vietnamese are in.
The Vietnamese during the Vietnam War actually organized down at the grassroots level the whole country in a way that Americans can't seem to do because we've actually handed over all our individual responsibilities, all our individual responsibilities, our sense of obligation to this country, to our elected representatives.
And that's a big problem.
Until people actually are taking matters into their own hands and reaching out to each other in the spirit of what was going on there a week ago, nothing will ever happen.
But the way this capitalist system is organized, it's almost impossible to do that unless you live in a small village in New Hampshire or something where you can, you know, go to a town meeting and have some impact, at least on your own community.
But nationally, forget it.
Yeah, it's the vested interest.
Congressmen can give away taxpayer money at no cost to themselves.
And it's just a system for the most powerful to stay that way at the expense of the rest of us, to use that force.
And this is where I want to end the interview here is something that you've written about a few times for Counterpunch, which is the danger that we're going to really start seeing Phoenix program type actions against the American people as we move into economic calamity, which government seems to insist on only making worse.
And as we have, as you've written about the new Northern Command, just like we have Central Command and Pacific Command and European Command and the Africa Command, we have the Northern Command for the United States of America.
There's now an active duty army brigade that was brought home from Iraq and is, I guess, on alert and waiting for use against the American people.
You know, all this, you know, happened as a result of 9-11 and the Patriot Act and all sorts of secret military directives that Bush has issued and which Congress has signed off on and approved.
And a lot of it has happened secretly.
And so in a sense, it is the government waging covert operations against the American people.
So far, we've seen Abu Amari and Jose Padilla.
I think that's it.
As far as U.S. persons, they call it in the law, U.S. persons turned over to the CIA to be tortured.
But that's a precedent set already.
The pieces are being put in place incrementally, and it's not going to happen in a day.
It won't happen in a year.
But every one of these pieces of legislation that gets put in place is just another brick in the wall.
All right, everybody, that's Douglas Valentine.
The website is douglasvalentine.com.
The books, The Hotel, Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, The Strength of the Wolf, and the new one, The Strength of the Pack.
And I hope it's OK with you if I read these books about the drug wars and get you back on the show to discuss the history of that in this country.
All right.
That's one of my favorite subjects.
And thank you so very much for it.
You're a great host.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time today.
