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Brendan McQuade

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Carceral Forms and Penal Practice from Poulo Condor to the PATRIOT Act:

When Counterrevolutionary Chickens Come Home to Roost

Images from The War on Terror should haunt the political culture of the United States for a long

time: US soldiers leading detaineesclad in orange jumpsuits, heads hooded, hands gloved and

cuffedto indeterminable confinement; the victims of Abu Ghraib, hands bound behind their knees,

teetering on a boxes; and MPs posing next to the bleeding and bruised bodies of dead detainees, packed

in ice, who could not endure their enhanced interrogation. These images created a popular

controversy and public relations nightmare for the Bush Administration. They seemed to point toward

some dramatic shift. Indeed, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Bush administration initiated

the largest reorganization of the Federal Government since 1947 with the creation of the Department of

Homeland Security, and the reorganization of the intelligence community under the Office of the

Director of National Intelligence. With dramatic institutional change came two invasions and

occupations, both conducted with controversial policiesmass arrests, indefinite detention, and

enhanced interrogation. Alongside this foreign policy offensive was a related domestic push, a

crackdown on constitutionally protected political activity and regressive attack on judicial procedures:

aggressive and expanded surveillance,1 a proliferation of crimes of political status (targeting animal

liberationists and radical environmentalists within the United States2 and armed Islamic movements

across the globe3) and the debasement due process.4

1W. Bloss (2007) Escalating Police Surveillance After 9/11: an Examination of Causes and Effects. Surveillance

and Society. Vol. 4, No. 3, (pp. 209-227); and D. Eggen (2005, December 16) Bush Authorized Domestic Spying,

Retrieved, June 1, 2010, from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2005/12/16/AR2005121600021.html2J. Sorenson (2009) "Constructing terrorists: propaganda about animal rights." Critical Studies on Terrorism Vol. 2,

no. 2, (pp 237-256); and D. Rovics (2007) Pivotal Moment in the Green Scare. Capitalism Nature Socialism. Vol.

18, No. 3, (pp. 8-16)3J. Margulies (2006) Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. New York: Simon & Schuster; R. Meeropol,

ed. (2005) Americas Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees and the War on Terror.New York: Seven

Stories Press; andT. Paglen & A. C. Thompson (2006) Torture Taxi: On the Trial of the CIAs Rendition Flights.

Hoboken: Melville House Publishing.4J. Mayer (2008) The Dark Side: The Inside Story of how the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals .

New York: Double Day; and C. W. Michaels (2005) No Greater Threat: America After the September 11 and the Rise

of a National Security State. New York: Algora Publishing.


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The apparent hardening of policy in the last decade, however, emerges from a longer history.

Indeed, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay is the 21st century incarnation of Poulo Condor Prison, the

island facility off the cost of Vietnam first constructed by the French colonialists and inherited by

counterinsurgents from the United States. Like the prison abuse scandals of the Bush Administration,

the US media and publics attention briefly focused on the tiger cages of Poulo Condor, eighty

underground cells, connected by an elevated catwalk from which guards would drop caustic lime

powder on their wards. This apparent parallel speaks to deeper past in the imperial history of the United

States. Outside of the United States, there is a long history of imperial intervention and state-building:

Indian Wars and Mexican-American War, the turn of the century imperialism in the Caribbean and

Pacific, and the Cold War counterinsurgency campaigns and covert actions. Within the United States the

counter-subversion directed against organized labor and the wider Old Left, Black (inter)nationalists,

and the whole constellation of movements dedicated to peace, justice and equality is equally long.

5

The Bush years, then, are more than a war mobilization and the attendant lockdown of dissent

but a particular stage in a long history of conquest and counterrevolution, the terminal stage of the

neoliberal counterrevolution. While Neoliberalism is often described as the ideology of the market and

private interests as opposed to state intervention, Grard Dumniland Dominique Lvy contend it is

fundamentally a new social orderin which the power and income of the upper fractions of ruling

classesthe wealthiest personswas reestablished in the wake of a setback (emphasis in original).6

Since the 1970s, this multifaceted counterrevolution of property has held the broadly social

democratic, corporatist arrangements (the legacy of 1848 to 1968) under siege.7 The sum total

neoliberalism is a new insecurity, sweeping away the rigidity and selective stability of social

democratic/Fordist/Cold War compromise. While sharing a common reliance on the shock of explicit

force, the neoliberal counterrevolution manifests itself differently across the unevenly developed world-

economy. The coup against Allende and the Falklands War were both vehicles inaugurating new

theaters of this world counterrevolution but the shock of a coup shaped Chile differently than a war

5For a review of the historical evolution of countersubversion directed against social movements in the United

States, see: W. Churchill (2004) Pinkertons to PATRIOT Act: The Trajectory of Political Policining the United States,

1870s to the Present. The New Centennial Review. Vol. 4., No. 1, (pp. 1-72);6

G. Dumnil& D. Lvy (2005) The Neoliberal (Counter)revolution in A. Saad-Filho & D. Johnston, eds.

Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. (pp. 9-19). London: Pluto Press. p. 97The term Counterrevolution of Properly is a reference to W.E.B. Dubois classic work, Black Reconstruction.

DuBois argues that the abolition democracy of the Radical Reconstruction was abandoned in the face of a

multifaceted counterrevolutionary effort, mobilized during a period of economic centralization. See: W.E.B Dubois

(1998) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press. p. 580-636.


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mobilization changed the UK.8 Temporality and geography are powerfully constitutive elements of the

world-historic social transformations entailed in the neoliberal counterrevolution. The

counterrevolution chickens of (neo)colonial Vietnam fluttered about the US Imperial State, gradually

insinuating themselves in their new roost in the penal practices and carceral forms of the neoliberal

United States.

The literature on neoliberalism, however, largely analyzes this history through the rubric of

political economy, focusing on the abandonment of social protectionism and the related market reforms

and capital movements. The political processes behind the accomplishment of these dramatic policy

changes are the subject of less attention.9 To supplement this literature, I will focus on the

interconnections between the foreign and domestic aspects of this counterrevolution as they relate

to the uneven evolution of penal practice and carceral forms across the US imperial state. Historically,

I will demonstrate this argument through the example of the US advisory mission to the Republic ofVietnam (RVN) during the Second Indochina War and, in particular, the consequences of a key policy

debate during the period of the Phoenix Program and Vietnamization (1967-1973). At this moment,

penal practices formalized as counterinsurgency were recast as counterterrorism, one the principal

mobilizing discourses of neoliberal counterrevolution. Domestically, this transformation is most

profound in the area of law and policing.

To make this argument, I engage with both the expanding literature on prisons and punishment

and the post-Cold War return to the question of the US Empire. Historically, the prison is one of the

iconic institutions of modernity.10 Various scholars argue that it is instrument of labor control,11 means

to manage surplus populations and crises of over-accumulation,12 a race making institution,13 a

formative center of public sentiment,14 and site of resistance.15 As a social institution, it is organically

8

N. Klein (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books9

See: D. Canterbury (2005) Neoliberal Democratization and the New Authoritarianism. Burlington: Ashgate

Publishing Company; D. Harvey. (2003) The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press; M. Meeropol.

(2000) Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press; and E. Toussaint (2005) Your Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance. Chicago:

Haymarket Books.10 M. Foucault (1995) Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage; M. Ignatieff. (1989) Just

Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. New York: Puffin.11

For a review of Marxist criminology, see: D. Greenberg , ed. (1993) Crime and Capitalism: Reading in Marxist

Criminology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.12

R. Gilmore (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley:

University of California Press.13

L. Wacquant (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University

Press.14

D. Garland (2002) Culture of Control: Crime Control in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press


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and unambiguously connected to the judiciary, police and, reaching further, to the wider world of social

policy. For these reasons, the prison has become fertile terrain for the social sciences. Despite this

flowering of scholarship, however, literature on the prison is limited by various instrumental blinders.

Many historical studies are limited to one nation-state or the wealthiest regions of the world.16

Moreover, works with more contemporary focus are often narrowly penological17 or journalistic.18 To

address these shortcomings, I will frame my study on the (neo)colonial prisons of the US-advised RVN

with the literature on empire. While Cold War politics made any discussion of empire and imperialism

tantamount, Andrew Bacevich reflected, to aiding and abetting the enemy,19 the question of the US

Empire has re-emerged in scholarship on both the left and right in the last twenty years. While ranging

on the far right to imperial triumphalism,20 more reasoned analysis ranges from the conservative realism

of Charles Maier and Bacevich, the William Appleman Williams inflected conservative historian,to

various permutations of the broad post- traditions within social sciences and humanities.

21

Among thislatter group, I look to the Wisconsin school of diplomatic history, the tradition starting with Cold War

Revisionism that today is pushing the limits of historiography and the social science, variously

15

D. Arnold (1997) The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in Nineteenth Century India, in R. Guha,

ed. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (p. 140-178).16N. Morris & D. Rothman, eds (1997) Oxford History of Prison The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. New

York: Oxford Univeristy Press.17

M. Mauer (2006) The Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press; B. Western (2007) Punishment and

Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.18

C. Parenti (2008) Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the New Age of Crisis. New York: Verso.19

A. Bacevich (2007) Introduction in W. A. Williams. Empire as a Way of Life. Brooklyn: Ig Publishing. (pp. v-xi) p.

vi.20

The title of Max Boots book, The Savage Wars of Peace, is direct illusion to Rudyard Kiplings poem The White

Mans Burden. In the text, he argues that to maintain the inner core of its empirea family of democratic

capitalist nations, the United States must use its force against the violence and unrest that lap at the periphery

in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans and other regions teeming with failed states, criminal states or

simply a state of nature. M. Boot (2002) Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New

York: Basic Books. p. xxi.21

A. Bacevich (2004) American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press; See: F. Cooper & A. Stoler, eds. (1997) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World.

Berkley: University of California Press; V. de Grazia (2005) Irresistible Empire: Americas Advance through

Twentieth-Century Europe. Boston: Belknap; N. Ferguson (2004) Colossus: The Price of Americas Empire. New York:

Penguin; A. Kaplan & D. Pease, eds. (1993) Cultures of United State Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press;E.

Love (2004) Race over Empire: Racism and US Imperialism, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina

Press; and M. Renda (2001) Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press.


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integrating post-colonialism, world-systems, dependency theory and the broader post- traditions in a

movement toward a more fully world-relational historical social science. 22

Out of this voluminous scholarship, two works are necessary touchstones for my argument. Loic

Wacquants Punishing the Poorstands out among the literature on prisons as the only work to place the

US prison boom in the context of the neoliberal counterrevolution: The sudden expansion and

consensual exaltation of the penal stateisa ruling-class response aiming to redefine the perimeter

and missions of the Leviathan. The intended purpose to establish a new economic regime based on

capital hyper mobility and labor flexibility and to curb the social turmoil generated [by] policies of

market deregulation and social welfare*the+ building blocks of neoliberalism. Wacquant claims that

the penal apparatus is a core organ of the state,(emphasis in the original) which neoliberalism

necessarily enlarges.23 This counterrevolution, as it cohered around the prison, however, was not an

involuntarily causality of power but a discontinuous process accomplished through political struggle inthe bureaucratic field.Here, I see my argument broadly allied and supplementary to Wacquants

intervention. However, where Wacquant focuses on properly institutionalized political space, I

counterpoise his bureaucratic field against a subaltern and clandestine field, a murky and opaque

domain of power where the international capitalist, spy, gangster, political cadre and guerilla solider

thrive. The (neo)colonial prisons of the Republic of Vietnam were such a space.

Wacquants argument, further, is limited by a blinding focus on the nation-state and lack of

historical breadth. To put the properly political aspects of the neoliberal counterrevolution in fuller

world-historical focus, I turn to Alfred McCoy, Francisco Scarano and Courtney Johnsons

conceptualization ofthe American imperial state. In their introductory essay to the anthology The

Colonial Crucible, they define the American imperial state as an agile state whose diffuse, delegated

power has been the source of a surprising resilience. Instead of narrow definitions of the state as a

simple bureaucratic apparatus they advocate for a more inclusive concept of, say, a polity that is

capable of encompassingthis transnational imperial state, the US government, its domestic power

elites, colonial regimes, their collaborating elites and legions of subcontractors, both civil and

paramilitary. Through the fin de sicle US imperial expansion On the Tropic of Cancer, the US

separated itself from the formal colonial empires of Europe with the speed with which it distilled

22

For an excellent overview on the most recent scholarship concerning the US empire see the following anthology:

A. McCoy and F. Sarcano eds. (2009) Colonial Crucible: Empire and the Making of the Modern American State.

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.23

L. Wacquant (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University

Press. p. 11-12.


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altruism, self-rule and indirect empire into a supple global system that, by replacing colonial rule with a

diffuse global hegemony in the years surrounding World War I, has far outlasted more than a dozen

modern empires swept away by revolution.24 Today, however, the US Empire is in crisis: economic

decline and the specter of financial ruin, intractable small wars, rising traditional powers and

ecological crisis.25

Historically, the Second Indochina War, and particularly the period of the Phoenix Program and

Vietnamization (1967 to 1973), marks a period of transition in the US Empire. Structurally, the war is a

figurative event on three different registers, the world-economy, interstate system and structures of

knowledge: (1) war-spending helped drive the stagflation that undermined American economic power

and lead to financialization (2) the eventual victory of the NLF and North Vietnam marked the limits of

military power to directly control colonized peoples and places and (3) the discontent generated by the

war helped fuel the emancipatory agendas of movements which fundamentally challenged patriarchyand white supremacy, expanding the horizons of both discourse and imagination.26 Out this chaos

emerged some of the orienting strategies for managing the declining trend of the US Imperial State. The

separation of counterterrorism from counterinsurgency helps constitute the United States move

toward the distributive aspects of power a zero-sum-game relationship, whereby an agency can gain

power only if others lose someand move away from the the collective aspects of power, a

positive-sum-game relationship, whereby cooperation among distinct agencies increase their power

over third parties, or over nature.27 During its imperial rise, the prison emerged in the United States

not only as a mechanism to maintain social order (labor control) but as world-structuring innovation: the

Auburn (1816) and Philadelphia (1829) and Elmira (1876) penitentiaries punctuated two waves and

prison reforms and are formative institutions of modernist penology. Today, during the imperial decline,

innovations are decidedly regressive and involve the rollback of the penal welfarist rehabilitative

model and the regressive debasement of legal norms to serve instrumental imperial ends.28

24

A. McCoy, F. Scarano & C. Johson (2009) On the Tropic of Cancer: Transition and Transformation in the US

Imperial State in A. McCoy and F. Sarcano eds. Colonial Crucible: Empire and the Making of the Modern American

State. (pp. 3-33).Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 24-26.25A. Bacevich (2008) The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books; C.

Johnson (2006) Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. New York: Holt Paperbacks; and I. Wallerstein

(2003) Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. New York: New Press.26

G. Arrighi; T. Hopkins & I Wallerstein. (1989) Antisystemic Movements New York: Verso p. 35-3627

G. Arrighi (2005) Hegemony Unraveling I New Left Review: 32 (pp. 23-80) p. 33.28

The criminologist David Garland writes about the rise, crest and crisis of penal welfarism, a policy regime that

sought where possible, to be rehabilitative interventions rather than negative, retributive punishments. While

penal-welfarism had established itself has the consensus of modern penology by mid-century, the system broke

down in the 1970s and 1980s. Its place emerged a more punitive shift, which Garland is much more hesitant to pin


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During this critical period of transition in the US Imperial State, counterterrorism operated to

recuperate colonial practices of rule developed under the rubric of counterinsurgency and refashion

them for new institutional contexts. The prison, as physical space where dominated and dominant

contended to define and control social space, is a dramatic site of social struggle and powerful engine of

transformation. Counterinsurgents met Vietnamese communists, nationalists and others unlucky

enough to be caught in the clumsy dragnet. Out this dialectic of resistance and rule came a

reformulation of penal practice and carceral forms. Organized under the rubric of counterterrorism, this

new complex of discourse and practice recuperated the classic tactics of counterinsurgency in such a

way that these methods of rule could be employed to manage the some of the insecurity and upheaval

created by the neoliberal reversal of the Fordist/social democratic/Cold War compromise. By focusing

on the struggles in the (neo)colonial prison of Vietnam, one the events constituting the post 1968-crisis

of the US Imperial State, I use the framing of the Wisconsin School trace the boomerang effect ofcolonial practices of rule on the imperial center: in this case, the conflictive origins of the current

criminalization of dissent as it organized by the discourse of counterterrorism.29

The Knowledges of the (Neo)Colonial Prison: Revolutionary Nationalism and

Counterinsurgency

The United States direct involvement in Vietnam began in 1950, with support the French in the

first Indochina War (1946-1954).30 After the war, Vietnam was divided into Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in

down, speaking only of a vague culture of control. See: D. Garland (2002) Culture of Control: Crime Control in

Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 34, 168.29

As Foucault noted It should never be forgotten that while colonizationobviously transported European models

to other continents, it had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the

apparatuses, institutions and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the

West and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization or internal colonization

on itself. M. Foucault (2004) 4 February 1976in Society Must be Defended. A. Davidson eds. (pp. 87-114) New

York: Picador. p. 103.30

With the start of the Korean War, the Truman administration started to give aid to the French war effort,

beginning with $10 million in 1950. By the time of French withdrawal in 1954, the United States was paying $1.063

billion or 78 percent of the wars burden. To manage the American aid and assistance to the French in Vietnam,

the US military set up the 350-member US Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG), while American

advisors, in April 1952, started training Vietnamese units. The following December, an Army attach unit arrived in

Hanoi to interrogate prisoners. While MAAG helped the French try to pacify Vietnam, the Special Technical and

Economic Mission provided CIA officers, under station chief Emmett McCarty, with the necessary cover to mount

operations. See: G. Lewy (1978). America In Vietnam New York: University Press. p. 14; J. Prados (2009)Vietnam:

The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of Kansas Press. p. 64-65; D. Valentine

(1990). The Phoenix Program. New York: William & Morrow. p. 24.


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the south and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north, with unification pending a

nationwide election to be held in 1956.The election never came to fruition. By 1958, the United States

had largely replaced French influence of over the region.31 Colonial institutions were remade and

professionalized with a distinctly liberal veneer: a piecemeal system centered on the indirect rule

through Nguyen Dynasty was replaced by a Western-style administration organized around government

ministries; the old French Sret became the Cong An, or Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation; colonial

axillaries were transformed into the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). A variety of Americans

variously ugly and quiet32descended in country and, with particular zeal, implemented their

programs to modernize the government and economy, while pacifying Indian Territory.33

The reforms of the liberal counterinsurgents only went so deep, however. The complexity of

(neo) colonial situation left many illegible, subaltern spaces that preoccupied and cofounded state-

managers. The prisonsimultaneously an institutional center of US imperial power anda conflictivespace and site of subaltern and potentially counterhegemonic strugglewas one such space. This

heterogeneous conception of the prison as a social space is precisely David Arnolds contention when he

argues that The prison created an institutional and social space that was colonized by other, unofficial

networks of power and knowledge than those represented by the formal prison authority. He writes:

one can find abundant evidence of resistance and evasion in the Indian prison system and a whole

network of power and knowledge over which the prison authorities exercised scant control, but that this

limited authority and control was partly the result of pragmatic choice by the colonial regime, a

recognition of its practical and political limitations and partly a frank expression of its limited interest in

31In between the First and Second Indochina Wars, a power struggle unfolded in the Republic of Vietnam: on one

side, Emperor Bao Dai, the French and their allies in the Binh Xuyenthe Vietnamese mafiaand the Hoa Hao and

Cao Dia politico-military religious sects, which together became the United Sect Front and, challenging them, Ngo

Dinh Diem, his Can Loa party, Vietnamese Catholics and their American backers. Edward Lansdale of the Saigon CIA

Station and General Lawton Collins of the Military Assistance Advisory Group worked with Diem and ARVN General

Trinh Minh The to defeat the Binh Xuyen and break the sects support for Boa Dai and the French. In October 1955,

Diem won an obviously rigged plebiscitecarrying 98.8 percent of the votethat disposed Bao Dai and solidified

Diems control over South Vietnam. See: B. Fall (1965). How The French Got out of Viet-Nam. In M. Raskin, & B.

Fall, The Viet-Nam Reader(pp. 81-95). New York: Random House; J. Prados (2009) Vietnam: The History of an

Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of Kansas Press. p. 42-49.32

This evokes the two novels Graham Greenes Quiet American(1955) Eugene Block and William Lederers Ugly

American (1958) which both satirized and commented upon the US advisory mission to Vietnam. The works drew

on the actual figure of Edward Lansdale for inspiration. See: J. Nashel (2005) Edward Lansdales Cold War.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.33

Indian Country was the racist term for the land inhabited solely by Vietnamese adversaries. Evoking the

colonial conquest of the US West, the term underscores the racialized episteme entailed in colonial power

relations. Indian Country saw a particularly unrestrained application of US military power. The primary ground

for excursions in Indian Country became the search and destroy mission, in which troops entered enemy territory

and laid waste to anything the deemed valuable. The intent was to force a battle, holding the enemy in place

while commanders marshaled the capabilities to annihilate them. J. Prados (2009) Vietnam: The History of an

Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of Kansas Press. p. 136-137.


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the declared purposes of penal discipline and reformthe prison was nonetheless a critical site for the

acquisition of colonial knowledge for the exerciseor negotiationof colonial power.34

Here, Arnold challenges some of formative works that raised prominence of the prison as topic of

interest for social science. In contrast to the modern, rehabilitative penitentiaries and their coercive and

corrective power (Foucaults disciplinary power producing docile bodies or Ignatieffs confinement as

coercive education35), we have what Peter Zinoman, in his history of imprisonment in colonial Vietnam

calls the ill-disciplined prison. 36

In the prisons of colonial Vietnam, the alleged republican ethos of Second French Empire and

Third French Republic bottomed out on the brutal realities of colonial administration. One the emergent

properties of this clash was a hardened a cadre of Vietnamese nationalists who appropriated the world-

discourse of Marxism and fused it with an imagining of a modern Vietnam nationalism to create a social

movement that would finally win Vietnamese independence and shake the world. Evolving out of the

prisoner of war camp (construction on the Poulo Condor prison began four months before the Treaty of

Saigon legally ceded the first Vietnamese territory to France), inflected by the racist and miserly colonial

state, disciplinary practices *of the colonial prison+ were overshadowed by a host of ill-disciplined and

exclusively repressive methods of coercion and control. This distance between the French colonial

states professed commitment to modernization and republican values.and the old-fashioned

brutality, squalor and corruption of the colonial prison systemhighlighted a contradiction within the

imperial project that anticolonial activists were quick to exploit. The insertion of a centralized,

hierarchical, and highly disciplined political organization," Zinoman asserts, "into an ethnically divided,

administratively haphazard, and chronically ill-disciplined colonial prison system resulted in the former's

virtual colonization of the latter." The over-crowding and/or communal confinement of the prisons and

the willingness of Vietnamese guards to collaborate with the prisoners in the running of the prisons

turned the prison into a site of national and anticolonial struggle, increasingly relevant to the wider

politics and culture of the time. 37

34

D. Arnold (1997) The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in Nineteenth Century India, in R. Guha,

ed. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (p. 140-178). p. 145, 14835 M. Ignatieff. (1989) Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. New York:

Puffin. p. 1136

P. Zinoman. (2001) The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940. Los Angeles:

University of Chicago Press p. 737

For Zinoman, the dramtic events the Thai Nguyen prison rebellion of 1917where an alliance between lower

class Vietnamese prison guards and the mandarin revolutionary Luong Ngoc Quyen, mobilized prisoners from least

thirty provinces and representing every stratum of Indochinese societyillustrate how the prison system gave

Vietnamese nationalism and anti-imperialism a vehicle to transcend the social and geographical confines of native

place networks. Ibid. p. 8, 17, 28-30, 84-91, 99, 159, 200.


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At the same time, however, the prison helped form a counterrevolutionary knowledge,

providing grounds to test and elaborate the transimperial practice of counterinsurgency. Practically and

historically, imperial powers developed counterinsurgency to mobilize and integrate the colonizing

capacities instituted in the targeted state against the anti-colonial and nationalist movements; this

mobilization includes: social policy (including in US advised Vietnam: land reform, economic

development, the census, and social scientific research) the diplomatic corps (as cover) and, the military

branches and intelligence agencies (as leading, integrative institutions), and judiciary, police and carceral

system (as the primary instruments of processing populations). Historically, it developed as form of

institutional practice specific to the colonial situations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century. Institutionally, the counterinsurgency emerged as transimperial, world-discourse among mainly

French, British and US state-managers. After World War II, the practical suggestions of an older

generation of officers (like French Field Marshalls like Joseph Gallieni and Louis Hubert GonzalveLyautey, who pioneered counterinsurgency in Indochina and Morocco, respectively, and Madagascar,

collectively), and US Marine Corp General Elwell Otis (who directed the US effort to suppress the so-

called Phillpine inserrecution, 1989-1902) and British Army Lieutenant Colonel T.E. Lawarence (of

Arabia), were objectized in text and military docterine and variously instituted in state structures

througout the world.38 Formally, the celebrated 2006 US Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field

Manual, the preeminent objectification of the contemporary practice of counterinsurgency as it has

been instituted in the bureaucratic field, defines insurgency as an organized protracted politico-

military struggle to weaken the control of and legitimacy of an established government, occupying

power or other political authority while increasing insurgent control, and Counterinsurgency as the

military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions taken by a government to

defeat insurgency. 39

This formerly instituted knowledge of the bureaucratic field cannot be taken exclusively on its

own terms and must be counterpoised against the illegible clandestine field. Here, the broad subaltern

tradition as represented by Ranajit Guha and Eqbal Ahmad provides the angle of vision from the

insurgent in the clandestine field. From the perspective the subaltern studies, counterinsurgency is

38

Its formative texts were: from the UK, T.E. Lawarences Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) on the English backed

Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire from 1916 to 1918 and Capitan B.H. Liddell Harts Strategy: Indirect

Approach(1942); from France, Roger Trinquiers Modern Warfare (1964) and David Galula Counterinsurgency War

(1964), both drawing on World War II, The First Indochina War, and The Algerian War; and from the US, the

Marine Corps Small Wars Manual(1940), drawing on US occupations of the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua.39

S. Sewall; J. Nagl; D. Petraeus, and J. Amos. (2007). The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Chicago :University of Chicago Press.


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McQuade~11

both is a euphemism for counterrevolution that reveals its character as a form of colonialist

knowledge [that] derives directly from that knowledge which the bourgeoisie had used in the period of

their ascendancy to interpret the world in order to master it and establish their hegemony. As such,

counterinsurgency serves a blinding that function that renders the subaltern struggles of peasants

illegible, deemed spontaneous and not, as Guha insist they be framed, the results of motivated and

conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses.40 Referring directly to the Second Indochina

War, Ahmad arguments supports Guhas formulation, reminding us that

Counterinsurgency is not directed against insurgency, which is defined as a revolt against a government,

not reaching the proportions of an organized revolution and not recognized as belligerency. It would be

inappropriate to describe the Vietnamese and Laotian revolutions as insurgencies and the fateful

American invasion of Indochina as an exercise in counterinsurgency. In fact, the Congress and the country

would be in an uproar if the government claimed that US counterinsurgency capabilities were available to

its clients for putting down revolts not reaching the proportions of an organized revolution. The

opposite is true: counterinsurgency involves a multifaceted assault against organized revolutions. This

euphemism for counterrevolution is a product neither of accident nor of ignorance. It serves to concealthe reality of a foreign policy dedicated to combating revolutions abroad and helps to relegate

revolutionaries to the status of outlaws. This reduction of revolution to mere insurgency also constitutes

an a priori denial of its legitimacy.

Counterinsurgents, Ahmed maintains, hold a conspiratorial theory which views revolutionary warfare

as being primarily a technical problem, i.e., a problem of plotting and subversion, on the one hand, and

of intelligence and suppression, on the other.41 Discursively, then, counterinsurgency occludes the

social causes of colonized revolt with colonial knowledge that attempts to penetrate into subaltern

clandestine space, order it and, once rendered legible to the bureaucratic field, and control and

incorporate it.

Despite its colonizing and counterrevolutionary character, counterinsurgency contains some of

the shades of altruism in entailed in all imperial practices of rule. The rhetoric which defines its goals is

reformist and liberal, Ahmad wrote Freedom, progress, development, democracy, reforms,

participation, and self-determination are its favorite working words. Generally, its theorist, of whom a

majority come from France and the USA have been men of impeccable liberal credentials. [A]mong its

most prominent exponents, Ahmad counts many of Kennedys New Frontiersmen and well-known

university professors, and in Francesuch eminent politicians as Jacques Soustelle *an anthropologist

and the French Minister of State in charge of Overseas Departments+ and Robert Lacoste, a socialist

40

R. Guha The Prose of Counterinsurgency in in N. Dirks, ed. Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary

Social Theory. (336-371.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.336-337.41

E. Ahmad. (2006). "Counterinsurgency." in C. Benglesdorf, M. Cerullo, & Y. Chandrani, eds. The Selected Writings

of Eqbal Ahmad(pp. 36-65). New York: Columbia University Press. p. 47-48.


12/31


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McQuade~13

directorate linked to Regional Phoenix Officers who supervised and directed Provincial Phoenix

Committees). Connecting this committee system was an analogous systems of lateral intelligence

sharing and processing (Province and District Intelligence Operations Coordinating Centers, 48 PIOCCs

and 240 DIOCCs), and underpinning both, a legal-carceral system of 48 Province Security Committees

(run by the CIA-advised Police Special Branch), four national RVN jails, 37 more provincial jails (many old

Sino-Vietnamese-turned-French-ill-disciplined-prisons), countless more ad hoc district jails and POW

camps, and network of 48 Provincial Interrogation Centers, culminating with the National Interrogation

Center in Saigon.

The principle function of Phoenix was, in the language of its founding documents, to coordinate

and give new impetus to US and [R]VN operations, both intelligence collection and processing, and

action operations, directed toward the elimination of VC infrastructure (VCI).44 Phoenix targeted

members of Peoples Revolutionary Government (the civilian shadow government) and NationalLiberation Front (the guerilla army) for neutralization, by, in order of official desirability, inducing

defection from, capturing or killing the targeted person.45In the conception of the counterinsurgency

planners, if they could neutralize the leadership, the resistance would wither and die. Reflecting

actuarial and positivist tendencies implicit in the counterinsurgents gaze, Phoenix integrated

intelligence and after action reporting into computer systems for data analysis and visualization (the

Hamlet Evaluation System and Viet Cong Infrastructure Information Service); the program, further, was

centrally directed by neutralization quotas.

Institutionally and practically, the Central Intelligence Agency was vanguard of the

counterinsurgency effort. Here, the self-described the organizational genius behind the Phoenix

Program, CIA officer Nelson Brickham, provides necessary insight. Brickham needed to bring together

the competing professional mentalities of the military, police and intelligence agencies in a unified

counterrevolutionary mobilization, while displacing the more limited diplomatic mission of the State

Department. For Brickham, the military mentality is to set up a battle; the police mentality is to

arrest, convict, and send to jail; andthe intelligence mentality is to capture, interrogate, and turn in

place.46 These mentalities reflect the institutional positions of each profession. Police are bound by the

ostensible rules of the state. The military is defined by the exception of the battle. The intelligence

44

Military Assistance Command Vietnam. (1967, September 9). MACV 381-41. Retrieved June 1, 2010 from The

Memory Hole: 45

Nelson Brickham interviewed by Doug Valentine, tape recorded (n.d.). Douglas Valentine Private Collection:

Longmeadow, MA.46

Ibid


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McQuade~14

mentality, however, is slippery. It seeks to know what eludes discovery and co-opt into others into its

political project. The police are product of nation-states and operate internally. The military is the states

lumbering war-making machine. It can destroy and occupy but, in the age of nationalism, at least, it has

great difficulty ruling. The intelligence mentality subverts, it can accomplish rule indirectly. For this

reason, it is one of the most instrumental and common practices of rule in (neo)colonial situations.47

The CIA, then, was tasked by an overwhelmed Lyndon Johnson to address the other war in

Vietnam. In 1966, Johnson sent Robert Komer, CIA officer and National Security Council member, to

Vietnam to redirect and harness the activities of civilian agencies as well as military efforts to provide

security and defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas, as part of a better-coordinated US effort to support the

government of South Vietnam. In effect, his mission was to turn the institutional capacity of RVN and

US operations organized through both diplomatic corps and military in place; that is to subvert their

professed professional ethos of participating agents and agencies and direct them in ruthlesscounterrevolutionary mobilization against the PRG and NLF. Johnson named Komer a diplomat which

gave him rank equaling that of any US official in Vietnam. 48 With the institutional power to pull rank

and the cover to hide his CIA connection, Komer, earning the nickname Blowtorch, willed Brickhams

policy papers into existence against the resistance of State Department (the pieces of USAID and Office

Public Safety not used by the CIA for cover), the US Military, ARVN, the National Police (with the

exception of Police Special Branch, which formally advised by the Saigon CIA Stations liaison branch)

and, before the Tet Offensive, the RVN president Nguyen Thieu. The institutional reorganization

effected by Komer created an integrated bureaucracy called Civil Operations and Revolutionary

Development Support (CORDS), which enabled the Phoenix Program to draw on the resources of many

other agencies. Komers position became the Deputy to CORDS (DEPCORDS) a position equal to the

Ambassador to Vietnam and the Commanding General of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. 49

47

This Martin Thomas convincingly shows the primary of intelligence mentality in his accounts of the colonial

intelligence states in French in British colonies in the Middle East and North Africa during the WWI/interwar

years. See. M. Thomas (2009) Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914. Berkley:

University of California Press.48

F. Jones (2005). "Blowtorch: Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacificaiton Policy." Parameters (pp. 103-

118) p. 10349

Komer ordered CIA Station Chief John Hart to develop a general staff for pacification. The task fell to Nelson

Brickham who combined Galulas Counterinsurgency Warfare and a 1959 Harvard Business Reviewarticle on the

reorganization of Ford Motor Companys information system as points of departure to draft the formative CIA

recommendations that shaped what became the Phoenix Program. See: Memo to Robert Komer from Nelson

Brickham. Attack on the VCI,10/22/66. Retrieved June 1, 2010, from The Memory Hole:

http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/attack-against.pdf; Memo to Robert Komer from Nelson Brickham and

John Hansen. A Concept for Organization for Attack on VC Infrastructure 22 May 1967, Retrieved June 1, 2010,

from The Memory Hole: http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/concept-for-organization.pdf; Memo to


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McQuade~15

Addition to setting up system, the CIA drove the program. The programs first regional Phoenix

coordinators were the CIAs own Region Officers in Charge. Until 1973, the CIA maintained unilateral

control of Provincial Reconnaissance Units, an infamous paramilitary force and operated a high-level

penetration unit that culled the best intelligence from the CIAs own unilateral operations separate from

the interagency Phoenix Program.50 After Komer, the institutional head of Phoenix (DEPCORDs) was

William Colby who drove the program, setting neutralization quotas and communicating directly with

Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), from 1968 to until 1971, when he was promoted to that position.

William Colby, then, headed the CIA during much of the Vietnamization period (1969-1973). The

election of Richard Nixon in November 1968 brought willingness to negotiate an end to US involvement

in Vietnam, beginning the era of Vietnamization. At this point the US advisory mission began to be

reduced the Embassy and CIA Station. The counterinsurgency campaign was to be collapsed into the

operations of RVNsNational Police, including the CIAs prized unilateral paramilitary units. InNovember 1968, Colby launched a three year Accelerated Pacification Program (APC). Designed to

bolster Kissinger's negotiating position, the APC aimed to add twelve hundred hamlets to the five

thousand already classified under the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) as "relatively secure." Afterward

APC was to be followed by an annual "full year pacification and development program." In a post-Tet

Offensive Vietnam, the direction of war was clear but, in the short term, the underground NLF and PRG

cadres had surfaced and the aftermath of the offensive, as intensified by the APC and Vietnamization,

became the most violent moment of the Phoenix Program.51

From 1968 to 1973, officially Phoenix killed between 20,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese civilians

and ensnared thousands in its dragnet, leaving them to languish in indefinite detention in its ill-

disciplined (neo)colonial prison system. In 1972, a Newsweekarticle estimated that there were 45,000

official prisoners in the RVN with an additional 100,000 in detention centers, while Amnesty

International set the number at as many as 150,000.52 The detainees and related allegations of abuse

Robert Komer from *redacted+, Action Program for Attack on VCInfrastructure, 6/16/67; Retrieved June 1, 2010,

from The Memory Hole: http://www.thememoryhole.org /phoenix/action-program.pdf; M. Moyar (1997). Phoenix

and the Birds of Prey. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press p 45-55; E. Stahrl. (1957) The Reach of an Executive.

Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb59, Vol. 37 Issue 1 (pp. 87-96); and D. Valentine. (1990). The Phoenix Program.

New York: William and Morrow. P. 114-120, 127-136.50

Brickham: We created a VCI penetration unitto review penetration cases generated anywhere in country, go

out and interview people, evaluate the cases and, if they looked any good, to set up special arrangementswe

would apply special care to the development and nurturance of the particular case. Nelson Brickham interviewed

by Doug Valentine, tape recorded (n.d.). Douglas Valentine Private Collection: Longmeadow, MA.51

J. Prados (2009) Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of Kansas Press.

p. 321-329; D. Valentine. (1990). The Phoenix Program. New York: William and Morrow p.253-258.52

Quoted in: D. Valentine. (1990). The Phoenix Program. New York: William and Morrow. p.400-402


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McQuade~16

presented major practical problem for the CIA and serious source of tension for both the Republic of

Vietnam and its US allies. On the US side, no one wanted the label of the jailer of Vietnam; Nelson

Brickham explains:

When you go through some of these villages sweeps you would have whole compounds, I should say,

corrals barbed wire enclosures just filed with Vietnamese just sitting looking at you all day long packedfilled, you know Men, woman and children. There were legal questions. What do we do? Do we

reindoctrinate them? Do we shoot them? Do we do this? Do we do that? Do we put them back on the

farm? How do we control them? This. This. This. This. So one of [CIA Station Chief] John Harts tasks in the

original ICEX53

chargeoriginal general staff for pacificationis what do we do with these prisoners? Do

they have prisoner of war status or dont they? There is no war going on and yet the Americans were

saying were treating these people like prisoners of war. In Geneva, the Swiss were saying well ok let us

in there. We want into those prison camps. So it went around and around. The long and short of it was

no one wanted to get the name of the jailer of Vietnam attached to them. The USAID didnt want to touch

the prison problem with a ten-foot pole; military wouldnt touch it with a ten-foot pole. These were

POWs. Forget about it. When the war is over we will ship them back in flocks. Things like that. Facetious.54

To resolve this issue, the CIA launched a Screening, Detention, and Interrogation (SIDE) Program to

process detainees as part of the Phoenix Program. This SIDE reorganized the already militarized juridical

and caceral practices under the rubric of counterinsurgency. The legal basis for SIDE had been

established in 1956, with RVN Ordinance 6, which provided for the administrative detention of security

offenders as determined by Province Security Committes.55 Ordinance 6 was succeeded by several

Decree-Laws and Ministerial orders, most importantly, the 1965 Emergency Decree Law 3/65. This law

provided for administrative detention of persons considered dangerous to the national security,

without court hearing and continues the emergency power of the Executive to temporarily detain

53

ICEX stands for Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation. It was the provisional CIA program that immediately

preceded and set the model for Phoenix.54

Nelson Brickham interviewed by Doug Valentine, tape recorded (n.d.). Douglas Valentine Private Collection:

Longmeadow, MA.55

Province Security Committees (PSC) were created in 1957 to provide the GVN with an administrative method of

settling the status of political detainees considered threats to the national security. Their purpose is political; their

method is administrative detention of those persons reasonably believed to endanger the national security, but

against whom sufficient evidence for a trial is lacking. Where evidence for trial is lacking, but it is apparent that the

suspect is a threat to the national security, the committee may impose administrative (an tri) detention. This is a

type of preventative detention to protect the state from a known threat to its security. There is the additional

provision of continual extension of 2 year terms if the individual remains a threat to the national security. An tri

detention is nonjudicial and administrative in nature. A violation of the national security laws need not be proven;

all that must be demonstrated is that a reasonable belief exists that the suspect threatens the national security.

Once an tridetention is imposed there are no judicial remedies. The duration and place of detention are governed

by GVN administrative regulations See: House of Representatives, F. O. (1971).U.S. Assistance Programs in

Vietnam:Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives,

Ninety-second Congress, first session. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 332; and Memo to

William Colby from Robert Star. 7/16/1971. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive,

Washington DC.


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McQuade~17

people considered to constitute a danger to the National Security by publicizing or carrying out

Communism in any form. 56Every two years the detention could be renewed so long as the offender is

considered still to constitute a danger.These detention orders became known as the an trilaws.

During the Vietnamization period the an trilaws became the center of an internal struggle

within the RVN and, later, a critical policy debate within the US Imperial State that resulted in the

discursive and juridical redefinition of Phoenix as a counterterrorism program. This tension came to a

head during into congressional investigations in February of 1971. Here it is important to note that this

move happened in the context escalating revolutionary activity and increasing disclosures of

controversial classified programs. The period between the Nixon election and Paris Armistice that ended

overt involvement of the US military in Vietnam included following explosions of revolutionary activity:

the April 4 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and related uprisings that occurred in at least

125 places throughout the country; the 19 month Alcatraz occupation (beginning November 20 1969) bythe United Indians of All Tribes; shootings at anti-war protests at Kent State University and Jackson State

University in May of 1970; the September 1971 takeover of the Attica State Prison; the November, 1972

The Trail of Broken Treaties March on Washington, DC, ending in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian

Affairs and the Second Massacre at Wounded Knee in February 1973. The same period saw

hemorrhaging of classified material documenting state activities in illegible subaltern and clandestine

social spaces: in 1968, the Phoenix Program began to make headlines in major papers; in November

1969, the My Lai story broke, eventually listing CIA officer Evan Parker, the Director of the National

Phoenix Directorate, as the signatory to the operationsneutralization list and, as result, implicating

senior policymakers and the CIAs darling program in the travesty; on July 20, 1970, Time Magazine

exposed the Tiger Cages of Poulo Condore prison leading to public attention on incarceration in

Vietnam;57 in 1971, still unidentifed activists with the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke

into the FBI office in Media, PA and exposed of the FBIs COINTELPROs;58

the same year, Daniel Ellsberg

leaked the Pentagon Papers, precipitating the Watergate scandal.59

56 Emergency Decree Law 3/65. 5/9/65. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington

DC.57

Viet Nam: The Tiger Cages of Con Son Island Time. July 20, 1970.58

The FBIs COunterINTELligence PROgrams, COINTELPROs, domestic programs that used intelligence methods

similar to Phoenix, targeted the Communist Party USA, Socialist Workers Party, the Black Liberation Movements,

the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and the American Indian Movement for neut ralization.During this

period the FBI admits to having engaged in a total of 2,218 separate COINTELPRO actions many of them coupled

directly with other sorts of systematic illegality such as the deployment of warrantless phone taps (a total of 2,305

admitted) and bugs (697 admitted against domestic political targets, and receipt of correspondence secretly


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McQuade~18

In this context, Senator J. William Fulbright (Democrat, Arkansas, 1945-1975) condemned

Phoenix as a program for the assassination of civilian leaders.60 By analogy, Congressman Ogden

Reid (Democrat, New York, 1963-1975), explained if the Union had had a Phoenix program during our

Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, GA.61 Facing

of public challenge, Colby had plan. Reflecting his intelligence mentality, Colby sought to (a) minimize

the CIAs role in Phoenix and (b) and position the State Departments Office Public Safety, the nominal

advisor to South Vietnamese prisons and courts, for the fall. As Donald Bordenkircher, the State

Departments Office ofPublic Safety (OPS) Senior Advisor to the RVN Directorate of Corrections,

explains Colby decided on his own damage control, and gave OPS as a bone to toss to Congress and

the media. Bordenkircher reasoned that Colby postulated that if both groups were busy feeding on

that prize the more important and substantive programs (covert activities) could continue to flourish

undaunted.

When the investigative mission of Congressman John E. Moss (Democrat, California 1953-1978) traveled to Vietnam, Colby distanced the CIA and Phoenix from the provincial jails, the RVN

Department of Corrections and their OPS advisors. In so doing, he highlighted the State Departments

role and minimized the importance of the CIAs liaison mission to the Police Special Branch, which

operated RVNs 48 Provincial Interrogation Centers. Colbys strategy succeeding in hiding the covert

aspects of Phoenix. The Office of Public Safety absorbed the punches and was disbanded in 1974. 62

However, Colby did not get out entirely enscathed. The House of Representatives passed the

Anderson-Hawkins resolution in July of 1971 demanding that an tribrought in accordance with the

Geneva convention. More importantly, Colby improvised a counterterrorism as a clever discursive

formulation to deflect Congressional investigations. Here an exchange between William Colby and

Senator William Fulbright is critical:

FULBRIGHT: have we done this beforea program for the assassination of civilian leaders?

COLBY: I question whether that is an appropriate title for it, Mr. Chairman.

intercepted by the CIA (57,846 separate instances admitted). For more on COINTELPRO see: W. Churchill, & J.

Vander Wall. (1990) The COINTELPRO Papers. Boston: South End Press. p. 30359

D. Ellsberg (2002) Secrets. New York: Penguin Books60

Quoted in: T. Szluc (1971, February 18). U.S. Aide in Saigon Denies 'Counter-Terror' Charge. The New York Times.61

House of Representatives, F. O. (1971). U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam:Hearings Before a Subcommittee of

the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Ninety-second Congress, first session.

Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. P. 72562

S. Bordenkricher. (1998) Tiger Cages: An Untold Story. Cameron, WV: Abby Publishing p. 133-144; A. McCoy

(2006) A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Metropolitan

Books. p. 60-71.


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McQuade~19

FULBRIGHT: You rephrase it. I was trying to shorten it,

COLBY: I dont think that is the appropriate title. I think it is an internal security program.

FULBRIGHT: Neutralization is the word. I couldnt think of it for a momentneutralization of

civilian leaders

COLBY: No, sir, my title for it and actually the Vietnamese governments this program is a

program to protect the people against terrorism. Now, I think you could call it an internal

security program, one aimed at identifying the members the members of the enemy

infrastructure, to get them either to rally or to capture them. In cases of firefights they do get

killed (emphasis added)63

This deflection of Fulbrights line of questioning by Colby marks the beginning of the new discursive

formulation of counterterrorism. Practically, the reformulation around the rubric of counterterrorism

was immensely useful for the project of Vietnamization. The US was drawing back influence. Officially,

the US-advised counterinsurgency was becoming the counterterrorism policies of the Republic of

Vietnam.

In the continuing policy debate over the Anderson-Hawkins resolution, Colbys counterterrorism

provided the language to reinstitute the CIAs counterinsurgency campaign as a police-led RVN

counterterrorist effort. To do so, however, the Agency needed to defeat a State Department effort to

follow through on the Anderson-Hawkings resolution. The State Department proposed gradually

eliminating the whole an tristructure, including the Province Security Committees. The CIA, in contrast,

wanted to institutionalize an triand the capacity for indefinite detention by transferring jurisdiction overdetainees from the Province Security Committees to the courts. Challenged by a study written by

CORDS legal adviser Ray Meyers that recommended opening an trihearings to the public,64 the CIA

pulled rank and DEPCORDS John Tilton (a CIA careerist and, previously, the Station Chief in Laz Paz,

Bolivia when Che Guevara was killed) dragged his feet. 65 With the CIA raising endless security

considerations, the embassy dropped an trireform indefinitely before the end of April 1972.66 The

Province Security Community was renamed the Central Security Committee and was made a

63 House of Representatives, F. O. (1971). U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam:Hearings Before a Subcommittee of

the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Ninety-second Congress, first session.

Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 63.64

Discussion of Meyers report is in the following memo: Memo to Department of State from Embassy Siagon, An

Tri April 7, 1972. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.65

Memo from John Tilton to Director, MACCORDS. An Tri Observation and Recommedations Douglas Valentine

Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.66

Memo from Embassy Saigon to Department of State An Tri April 28, 1972. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4.

National Security Archive, Washington DC.


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McQuade~20

"temporary" measure, which "offers possibilities for avoiding possible criticism under the terms of the

Geneva Convention." Article 19 of Decree Law 004 of 1966 was amended to "preclude charges that the

system violates Article 7 of the RVN Constitution," and Ambassador Bunker put the US seal of approval

on an tri. With carceral capacities for counterinsurgency no longer a threat, RVN President Thieu

presented sixty-nine amendments to the agreement and, stating that the VCI "must be wiped out

quickly and mercilessly," ordered a new wave of arrests. On November 25, 1972, three weeks after

Richard Nixon was reelected, Thieu signed Decree Law 020, "Concerning National Security and Public

Order." Issued in secret, 020 modified an tri to the extent, Ambassador Bunker wrote, "that these

powers are no longer limited to wartime and may be applied following a ceasefire and the end of an

officially declared state of war.67 The Vietnamization of Phoenix was unchallenged. The RVN would be a

permanent counterinsurgency-cum-counterterrorism state for the rest of its short life.

Structurally, counterterrorism proved to be a very useful mobilizing discourse of the neoliberalcounterrevolution. The US could advise a counterinsurgency campaign against communist guerillas

Vietnam or Central America but it could apply counterterrorism domestically and in countries where an

overt military presence was not a politically possible (such as contemporary Pakistan). As the case of

the RVN illustrates, counterinsurgency is the militarization of the entirety of state. The RVN used all

state functions attempt colonize (or at try to least contain) a counter-hegemonizing subaltern struggle.

Here, the an tridebate RVN is important because it shows the professional pressures Phoenix applied to

those who worked within the program and its effects wider professional mentalities. Donald

Bordenkircher, a Former San Quentin Correction Officer before serving in as an OPS Senior Advisor to

the RVN Directorate of Corrections, ran against the instrumental goals of the counterinsurgency

campaign with his attempts to professionalize the prison system. In his memoir, Bordenkircher blames

CIA dominance for Hoi Cai incident. After Colby replaced Komer as the institutional head of the

Phoenix Program, Bordenkircher and his allies agitated to establish national prison and jail standards,

publish a uniform manual of standards for all confinement, processing, prisoner care and advocating

separating OPS from the CIA and the formation of Hoi Cai directorate to manage the prisons and courts.

This challenge was effectively squashed by Colby because it challenged the instrumental objectives of

the Accelerated Pacification Program.68 CIA dominance over the RVN derailed similar professionalizing

efforts by Police Special Branch Chief Nguyen Mau; he explains:

67

Summary of these decrees by Thieu is in the following memo: Memo From Embassy Saigon to Department of

State Prime Ministerial Decree on Administrative Detention and An Tri Procedures. Jun 6, 1973 Douglas

Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.68

S. Bordenkricher. (1998) Tiger Cages: An Untold Story. Cameron, WV: Abby Publishing p. 15-25, 90-92


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McQuade~21

Phoenix Program imposed a monthly quota of Vietnamese Communist infrastructure to be neutralized

but it did not define the difference between the Vietnamese Communist agents and sympathizers. This

policy struck me down. It worked against my plan for boosting the professional skill of the SB. My great

concern in taking command of the SB was about the unjustified arrest, false accusation, and arbitrary

detention. Those bad manipulationscouldnt be stopped since the province chiefs and other officials

would do anything to make Phoenix, which assured them job security and higher regard. They knew that

Phoenix was under the supervision of an American Ambassador and President Nguyen Van Thieu alwayslistened to this powerful personage no VN [Vietnamese] officials would challenge or discuss American

policy, planning or even procedure at the tactical level. They were so docile to American advisors that I

stopped short in the idea of presenting to my superiors an alternative Phoenix II Programme [sic] and kept

my mouth shut

In time, Mau tried to reach his US counterparts only through indirect actions such as results of the SB

professional operation like the destruction of spy rings in Independence Palace, the RVNs presidential

palace. In time, Mau realized no correction was possible. My guideline became very simple: I do my job

and let them be happy with their operation.69

These incidents show the subversive effects of colonizing knowledges. Bordenkircher and Mau

merely wanted to professionalize their agencies in line with ostensible dictates their professional

mentality as a corrections officer or a police chief. Both found themselves stymied by the instrumental

goals of the CIAs counterinsurgency effort. As Nguyen Maus comments indicate, however, the

intelligence mentality colonized the police agencies of the RVN. A well-professionalized judicious police

force did not fill out the counterinsurgents kill quotas quickly enough. They did not yield instrumental

results, as measured by Colbys Hamlet Evaluation System. Those willing to give the counterinsurgents

want they wanted advanced. South Vietnams police force, after all, was being prepared to for

Vietnamization, readying itself to absorb the Phoenix Program.

The colonization of police mentality by intelligence mentality is also evident in the policing

innovations of the post-Vietnam period, although in a much more diffuse fashion, owning to its slow

movement across the geographic space of the US Imperial Sate. In response to the Watts Riots, LAPD

chief Daryl Gates brought in Marine Corps Vietnam veterans, to create an elite, military-trained cadre

of law enforcement officers who could react quickly, accurately, and with overwhelming force to

particularly dangerous situations. Gates innovative team was first many and coincides with the

development of intelligence branches in most city police departments across the United States.

70

Duringthis time, the CIA ran Operation CHOAS, a domestic operation to monitor political dissidents. Through

69

Mau Nguyen. (n.d.). Personal Correspondence with D. Valentine. Longmeadow, MA: Douglas Valentine Private

Collection.70

R. Balko. (2006) Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. Washington DC: The CATO Institute. p.

6


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McQuade~22

CHOAS, the CIA trained many of these budding intelligence branches.71 During the years of neoliberal

counterrevolution, SWAT teams multiplied dramatically: Wisconsins Capital Times reported that as of

2001, 65 of the states 83 local SWAT teams had come into being since 1980, 28 since 1996, and 16 since

2000. Many of those newly established teams had popped up in absurdly small towns like Forest County

(population 9,950), Mukwonago (7,519), and Rice Lake (8,320).72

By end of the first decade of the 21 st century, the sporadic, fluttering flights of

counterrevolutionary chickens had come full circle, leaving their colonial coops for their new

metropolitan roosts. The new forms of policing dramatically illustrated in the expansion of SWAT teams

and intelligence branches laid the institutional groundwork for broad reorganization both foreign and

domestic policy under the rubric of counterterrorism during the Bush years. Domestically, the

capstone to the neoliberal counterrevolution is the PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Act. Together

these two statues brought recuperated the colonial tactics of counterinsurgency as the shrewd andnecessary policies to protect the United States in new era of terrorism. Internationally, the declaration

of the war on terror mirrored this domestic offensive and created an interlocked policy to manage to

insecurity of a neoliberal world, while displacing political discussions of social justice into a Manichean

scheme of vicious terrorism and rule-bound states.

Both the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act dramatically increased the reach of the

Federal government. The PATRIOT Act expands the definition of terrorism to include acts dangerous to

human life that also are a crime under any State or federal law andappear to be intended to intimidate

or a coercive a civilian population, influence government policy by intimidation or coercion or affect

government conduct by mass destruction, assassination, and kidnapping. Added to this broad

definition of terrorism is any attempt*s] to commit or conspiracyto commit a terrorist crime, as well

as harboring or directly supporting any person or group committing or about to commit a terrorist

crime.73 Like the politicized criminalization of communism in the RVN, the criminalization of

terrorism operates to bloat the coercive capacities of the state to manage the insecurity of neoliberal

economy and stifle related dissent. In 2005, Summit, NJ, an affluent New York City suburb,

unsuccessfully invoked the PATRIOT Act to defend their forcible removal of homeless people from train

stations. While the defense was repudiated by both the New Jersey Attorney General and the Justice

71

A. Mackenzie. (1997) Secrets: The CIAs War at Home. Berkley: University of California Press. p. 60-61.72

R. Balko. (2006) Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. Washington DC: The CATO Institute. p.

1073

C. W. Michaels (2005) No Greater Threat: America After the September 11 and the Rise of a National Security

State. New York: Algora Publishing. p. 34


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McQuade~23

Department, the attempt to use counterterrorism to manage pleasantly gentrified spaces of the

neoliberal United States was made.74 Similarly, Minnesota pointed toward its version of the PATRIOT Act

when it arrested eight anarchists with Republic National Committee Welcoming for "conspiracy to riot in

the second degree in furtherance of terrorism." The arrests were the culmination of a yearlong

investigation by the Ramsey County Sheriffs Department, as well as state and federal agencies. Using

undercover agents and paid informants to infiltrate the organization, the police contended there was

reasonable suspicion that the RNC Welcoming Committee planned criminal activity and cited

intelligence from informants claiming the RNC 8 were building incendiary and explosive devices and

planning to kidnap delegates and sabotage airports. Referring to the arrest of eight organizers during

the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Jordon Kushner, a National Lawyers Guild member

representing one of the defendants, explained We havent seen this kind of police activity since the

Chicago 8What has happened with these criminal charges is very extreme and dangerous becausepeople are being prosecuted for political reasons.75 These two exceptional cases, moreover, are

underscored by a persistent and deliberate misuse of the expanded state powers created under the

PATROIT Act. A 2007 audit conducted by the Justice Department found that the FBI illegally used the

PATROIT Act powers, specifically an administrative subpoenasuspected terrorism and espionage

cases to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.

Between 2002 and 2005, the FBI issued 143,074 of these subpoenas. 76

The new legal powers created by the PATROIT Acthowever challenged in the courtsare

further supported by the massive reorganization of the federal government effected by the Department

of Homeland Security. In DHS, counterterrorism is creating its institutional home. In the eight years since

the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the department has grown into the third largest

federal cabinet agency, employing over 200,000.77 The DHS superbureaucracy operates like CORDS from

the Phoenix Program, absorbing many preexisting executive branch agencies and reworking them into a

unified structure.78 Furthermore, the director of Homeland Security like DEPCORDs is vested with

74

W. Perry (2005, July 1) The Patriot Act vs. Homeless. Retrieved, June 1 2010, from The Seattle Times:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20050701&slug=patriot0175

S. Stocker (2008, October 10) Framing the RNC 8. Retrieved, June 1 2010, from In These Times:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3962/framing_the_rnc_8/76

Staff and Agencies (2007, March 9) FBI Abused Patriot Act powers, audit finds, Retrieved, June 1, 2010, from

The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/09/usa77

J. Guo (2009, December 14) Guarding America. Retrieved, June 1, 2010, fromNewsweek:

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/12/02/guarding-america.html78

DHS absorbed the Immigration and Naturalization Service (part of the Department of Justice), the Custom

Services (part of the Treasury Department), the Federal Protective Services (part of the Government Services


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sustainable and definitive power. According to the Act, the Secretary has the provisional rule of

executive power to, delegate any of the Secretarys functions to any officer, employee, or

organizational unit of the Department. Additionally the Secretary has the right to subcontract out

the authority and functions of the Department, the authority to make contracts, grants, and

cooperative agreements, and to enter into agreements with other executive agencies. The

Secretary also has the responsibility, through the Office of State and Local Coordination, to work

with non-Federal internal security organizationsstate, local, and private security. Lastly the DHS

Secretary is part of the National Security Council bringing him into the highest and most powerful

forum of executive power in the United States and the world.79

Taken together, these provision

virtually create a mini-CIA within the DHS.80

More directly, this massive reorganization articulated under the rubric of counterterrorism was

led by some Phoenix veterans. Thomas Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security, was, as an Army

Sergeant and Platoon leader, a participant in Phoenix raids during Colbys Accelerated Pacification

Program. 81 Bruce Lawlor, CIA Police Special Branch Advisor in Quang Nam Province during the Phoenix

Program, became the Department of Homeland Securitys first Chief of Staff.82 Robert Simmons,

another CIA Police Special Branch Advisor (to Phu Yen province), was the chairman of the DHS House

Subcommittee on Intelligence Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, a DHS oversight

committee until his failed bid at reelection in November of 2006.83 Compounding this domestic offensive

is the continuing framing of US foreign policy through the (c)overt War on Terror (limited not just to

Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan but at least 75 countries, including the Philippines, Colombia, Yemen,

Somalia and elsewhere in Middle East, Africa and Central Asia).84 The recuperation of

counterinsurgency through discourse of counterterrorism is so complete that the wars and Iraq and

Administration) and the Coast Guard and Transportation Security Agency (both part of the Department of

Transportation) all under the Border and Transportation Security Directorate. DHS also has Directorates of

Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Countermeasures, Information Analysis and Infrastructure

Protection, and Emergency Preparedness and Response, each absorbing a panoply of Executive Branch agencies

and offices79

Homeland Security Act, 107th

Congress, 2nd

Session, 10/25/02.


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McQuade~25

Afghanistan has brought the term counterinsurgency back into popular discourse after twenty year

bout of the Vietnam Syndrome.

This extended reflection on a brief moment of history gives a different perspective on the

current criminalization of dissent. Historically, locating counterterrorism here is important because links

the one the principal organizing discourses of the neoliberal counterrevolution to the great

(counter)revolutionary tumult of the 1960s. Declaration of the War on Terror and the creation of

Homeland Security are not definitive breaks but gathering-in of the most ruthless colonial practices of

declining imperial center as it makes one more bid to maintain dominance. Since defeat in the Second

Indochina War, the United States has been mobilizing distributive aspects of power: economically, its

the predations of finance; politically, it the strong arm of global and domestic counterterrorism. While

much remains to be investigated in between the separation of counterterrorism from counterinsurgency

during the final years of the Second Indochina War and the triumph of counterterrorism underHomeland Security and the resurgence of counterinsurgency with the War on Terror, I hope that by

locating the transition in the actual struggles shaping the imperial patterns that structure the world-

system I can give example of the benefits of a historical perspective that is attentive to the structural

dynamics of empire, the vicissitudes of social struggles, and strange and often illegible places were it all

plays out.


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McQuade~26

Works Cited

Primary Documents

Emergency Decree Law 3/65. 5/9/65. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive,

Washington DC.

Homeland Security Act, 107th Congress, 2nd Session, 10/25/02. (3/4/07).

House of Representatives, F. O. (1971). U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam:Hearings Before a

Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Ninety-second

Congress, first session. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Mau Nguyen. (n.d.). Personal Correspondence with D. Valentine. Longmeadow, MA: Douglas Valentine

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Memo to William Colby from Robert Star. 7/16/1971. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. NationalSecurity Archive, Washington DC.

Memo to Department of State from Embassy Saigon, An Tri April 7, 1972. Douglas Valentine Collection

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Memo to Department of State from Embassy Saigon An Tri April 28, 1972. Douglas Valentine

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Memo From Embassy Saigon to Department of State Prime Ministerial Decree on Administrative

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Memo from John Tilton to Director, MACCORDS. An Tri Observation and Recommedations Douglas

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Military Assistance Command Vietnam. (1967, September 9). MACV 381-41. Retrieved June 1, 2010 from

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