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There have been many questions raised in the mass media concerning the details of former Nebraska Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey's US Navy Seal unit massacre of civilians at Thanh Phong during the US-Vietnam war. Unfortunately, however, the US mainstream media cannot focus on the most important and significant questions because they cut too deeply into the myths these media perpetuate about the nature of US power--its benign or even noble nature, its democratic values, and its concern for the weak and powerless peoples of the world. This is not to mention the fact that such questions would offend Bob Kerrey's senatorial colleagues, the US military, and the vast majority of US war veterans who all (rightfully) fear disgrace. In order to tell the truth about the still undeclared U.S.-Vietnam War, the mass media would be forced to finally admit that, propaganda aside, all the official excuses given for the US invasion of Vietnam were lies, that the history of the war was essentially a history of war crimes committed by everyone from US presidents and cabinet officials down to the pilots, cavalry and infantry in the field. And that high amongst these war crimes was the institution and execution of the CIA's Operation Phoenix program, which intentionally and successfully targeted tens of thousands of civilians throughout southern Vietnam in a dirty campaign of terror and mass assassination. (According to the late William Colby, who ran the program for the CIA, 20,587 Vietnamese "activists" were killed between 1967-1971. More credible estimates put the number at over 40,000 civilians killed.) But neither the mass media nor the US government can speak openly or truthfully about these war crimes without a quite rational fear of undermining the continuing use of the same types of criminal strategies and tactics in the current US military interventions in Iraq, Colombia and elsewhere. For readers who are unaware of the Phoenix program (largely thanks to mass media silence), it was conceived and organized by the US Central Intelligence Agency as a means of decimating and thus destroying the civilian administration and infrastructure supporting the indigenous Viet Cong resistance to the US invasion of southern Vietnam. To accomplish this decimation, any civilian populations in areas outside direct US control (or direct control of its South Vietnamese puppet army) were unilaterally considered to be residing in "Free-Fire Zones," in which any and all war crimes were permitted by US policy. Then death squads made up of special forces units (like the Navy Seals) were sent into villages and hamlets throughout the countryside. Their first goal was to assassinate all civilian administrators (such as village mayors) on the assumption that they were supporters of the indigenous Vietnamese resistance to the US invasion forces. But beyond this their goals included assassination of any military age males, the families of administrators--including the elderly, women, children and infants, and anyone else thought to support the Viet Cong, all in order to sow terror amongst the remaining population. The Phoenix program death squads proved to be very effective in achieving their goals. The political and social infrastructure of South Vietnamese resistance was destroyed wherever US death squads operated. Which is why the US military (and allied military intelligence agencies like the CIA) continues to encourage, organize, fund and employ death squads in other countries around the world whenever conditions allow them to be effective in projecting the interests of US power. Countries where US-organized, armed and/or funded death squads have operated since the 1960s include Indonesia (where at least 500,000 and possibly as many as 2,000,000 were killed alone), East Timor, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Bolivia, Angola and Mozambique. This is only a partial list, and it should be emphasized that while the total number of men, women and children killed by these US-backed death squads will never be known, it most certainly numbers in the millions over the last forty years. Of course, this is not to mention the cowardly mass murders of many more millions of civilians over this same time by US Air Force and Navy bombings and bombardments. But that is another, equally distasteful story. The invasion and genocidal war in Vietnam is only one of the reasons why we feel such contempt for the US government and those who support its killing machine. The other reasons include every country invaded or bombed, every death squad organized and funded, and every society and economy "destabilized" or destroyed by the US military in its quest to secure the world for corporate plunder and profit. This is why we spit on the American flag. As long as it represents a national government which wages dirty and unprincipled war on poorer nations throughout the world, it displays neither honor nor valor nor humanity. It should be no wonder that so many people burn the American flag around the world. It ranks with the Nazi and Soviet flags as one of the most powerful symbols of death and destruction in history. Jason McQuinn
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