From the Phoenix Program (1967-1972) to Today’s Global Gestapo (GISTAPO-666): Excerpts from D. Valentine’s “The CIA As Organized Crime” (2017)

ETK (Webmaster’s) Introduction: The following excerpts from Douglas Valentine’s 2017 book, “The CIA As Organized Crime; How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World,” demonstrate unequivocably that today’s “Global Gestapo”/GISTAPO-666/organized stalking-mind control-electronic torture operations are a direct descendant of the secret, civilian “neutralization”/”elimination” Phoenix program that the CIA and US military waged against the citizens of Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Epigraph Quotes:

Phoenix was a bounty-hunting program, an attempt to eliminate the opposition, by which I mean the opposition to us, the Americans, getting what we wanted, which was to control the Vietnamese through our clients- the Diems, the Kys, the Theius.

Phoenix was far worse than the things attributed to it. It was heinous, but no worse than the bombing.

In order to get into military intelligence school, I had to write an essay on the debate about the Vietnam War. The thrust of my paper was, “What we do in Vietnam will come back to haunt us.” It was a one-world thesis. Well, I go to Vietnam and see the bullshit (Phoenix program) going down. Then I come back to the United States and see the same thing going on here. I’m at the 116th MI (Military Intelligence) Group in Washington, DC, and as you leave the room, they have nine slots for pictures, eight of them filled: Rennie Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Ben Spock, Jerry Rubin. And I’m being sent out to spot and identify these people. This is Phoenix. THIS IS PHOENIX.

… The point is, it (Phoenix Program) was used in Vietnam, it was used in the United States, and it still is used in the United States.”

— Sergeant Ed Murphy, counterintelligence specialist, 4th Infantry Division in Vietnam, 116th MIG Group in Washington, D.C.,

Doug Valentine: Having fought for his country in defense of its civil liberties, Murphy was enraged to learn that the 116th MIG was being used against American citizens exercising their constitutional rights to protest the war.

The CIA As Organized Crime

“These things were planned 70 years ago. After World War Two, the big brains in industry and government prepared to rule the world.

The American empire consists of hundreds of military bases and a CIA station in every country. The CIA is not a law enforcement agency. It’s our Mafia operating in foreign nations.

… The (controlled) media is the reason why the public can’t see the CIA clearly for what it is: a criminal conspiracy on behalf of wealthy capitalists… I refer to the CIA as the organized crime branch of the US government. Nowhere is that more evident than in how it controls international drug networks. The CIA is the most corrupting influence in the United States.

If we were allowed to understand the CIA, we’d realize it’s a criminal organization that is corrupting governments and societies around the world. It’s murdering civilians who haven’t done anything wrong. The military does the same thing in a more violent way. Cops too….

The CIA recruits secret police forces as assets in every country where it operates (and every nation has a CIA station chief- ETK comment), including occupied Iraq.

Since 1973, the CIA has been in control of US narcotics intelligence worldwide.

Over the course of its 70-year reign of terror, the CIA has overthrown countless governments, started innumerable wars, costing millions of innocent lives (ETK comment: credible estimates range from 6 to 30 million killed), and otherwise subverted and sabotaged friends and foes alike. Despite all this murder and mayhem, it has only lost around 100 officers.

…. CIA officers are at the pinnacle of the Brotherhood. Blessed with fake identities and bodyguards, they fly around in private planes, live in villas, and kill with state-of-the-art technology. They tell army generals what to do. They direct Congressional committees. They assassinate heads of state and innocent children equally, with impunity, with indifference.

In Afghanistan, CIA officers manage the drug trade from their hammocks in the shade. Opium production has soared since they purchased the government in 2001. They watch in amusement as addiction rates soar among young people whose parents have been killed and whose minds have been damaged by15 years of US aggression. They don’t care that the drugs reach America’s inner cities.

…. The CIA plays the same role in Afghanistan that the Gestapo and SS Einsatzgruppen performed in France in World War Two- terrorizing the urban resistance and partisan bands in the countryside by targeting their friends and families. The CIA’s objective is to rip apart the poor and working class families and, in the process, unravel the fabric of Afghan society, until the Afghan people accept American domination. They don’t care how long it takes either. Afghanistan is a means to get at Russia, similar to how Nixon played the China Card in Vietnam.

…. The Afghan people hate the Americans more and more, year after year. And that makes the CIA happy, in so far as it spells protracted war and increased profits for its sponsors in the arms industry.
Afghan anger means more resistance. And more resistance provides a neat pretext for the eternal military occupation of a disposable nation strategically located near Russia and China.

The Taliban will never surrender, and, for the CIA, that means victory in Afghanistan.

But it also means spiritual defeat for America, as it descends ever further into the black hole of self-deception, militarism, and covert operations.

The CIA is allocated about $30 billion a year…. The CIA initially, and for decades, had four directorates under an executive management staff: Administration, Intelligence, Operations, and Science and Technology. Executive management had staff for congressional liaison, legal issues, security, public relations, inspections, etc. Administration is just that: staff for finance, personnel, and support services like interrogators, translators, and construction companies. Science and Technology is self-explanatory too, but with a typical CIA twist- science for the CIA means better ways to kill and control people, like the MKULTRA program. And now there’s a fifth directorate, Digital, that keystrokes and hacks foreign governments and corporations.

The Operations people overthrew foreign governments the old fashioned way, through sabotage and subversion. The Operations Directorate is now the National Clandestine Service. The Intelligence Directorate, which is now called Analysis, studied political, economic and social trends around the world so that executive management could mount better operations to control them.

The Operations Directorate was divided into several branches. The Counterintellence (CI) branch detected foreign spies. Foreign Intelligence (FI) staff “liaison” officers worked with secret policemen and other officials in foreign nations. They collected “positive intelligence” by eavesdropping or by recruiting agents. The Covert Action branch engaged in deniable political action. The Special Operations Division (now the Special Activities Division) supplied paramilitary officers. There was also a Political and Psychological branch that specialized all forms of propaganda.

In 1967, when Nelson Brickham was forming Phoenix to neutralize the leaders of the insurgency in South Vietnam, James Angleton and the CIA’s Counterintelligence staff were creating the MHCHAOS program in Langley, Virginia, to spy on members of the anti-war movement, and turn as many of them as possible into double agents.

Chaos was the codename for the Special Operations group within Angleton’s Counterintelligence staff. The CIA’s current Counterterrorism Center (CTC), was established in 1986, a direct descendant of Chaos.

Starting in 1967, White House political cadres, through the IDIU in the Justice Department, coordinated the CIA’s CHAOS program, the FBI’s COINTELPRO Program, and military’s domestic spying programs.

In 1970 the Chaos squad started entering its information on radicals onto IBM cards and compiling it in a data base condenamed HYDRA that ultimately contained the names of some 300,000 people. HYDRA was developed domestically at the same time as the Phoenix information system (PHMIS) in Vietnam, by the same people.

By 1972, the Chaos squad was working with (President) Nixon’s infamous Plumbers. One Chaos agent may have been involved in the botched Watergate burglary that brought Nixon down.

Incredible power was concentrated in the Chaos office. CIA officer Richard Ober worked with the National Commission on Civil Disorders, the protean Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the Special Services units (Red Squads) of America’s major metropolitan police departments. The CIA has always recruited cops as contractors to organize and advise foreign police forces, and local police forces certainly helped the CAI amass its Chaos files.

In 1972, CIA Director William Colby made Ober chief of the CIA’s International Terrorism Group (ITG)…. After the official termination of Chaos in March, 1974, the ITG continued to occupy the same space in the CIA’s basement. As of 1975, no Chaos files had been destroyed, because the CIA could not adequately define a “dissident.”

Under CIA Director William Casey’s direction, every government agency established a counterterror office as part of a secret apparatus.

… The CIA’s control of international drug trafficking is America’s darkest secret.”

The (CIA’s) Vietnam War (1952-1975)

“When the CIA moved into Vietnam (in 1952), the first thing it did was buy a lot of property. This was during the First Indochina War and they did this clandestinely, through cut-outs, so they’d have safe houses to set up organizations later on. It’s always best for them to buy real estate during times of crisis when prices are down.

The CIA bought huge tracts of property in Saigon in between 1952 and 1955 during the First Indochina War, when there was blood on the streets. …. The next thing the CIA does is seize control of a nation’s secret services; they offer training and high-tech gadgetry to people in the secret services; they corrupt them and use them for their own purposes.

Vietnam was a laboratory for military weapon and psychological warfare experimentation. Helicopter gunships made their debut, along with futuristic “psywar” strategies for pacifying civilian populations.

The communists organized the people of South Vietnam to fight the oligarchy that was working for the CIA and following American policies. The guerilla war in the villages baffled the Americans, so the CIA started experimenting with a lot of political and psychological ways of fighting the insurgency in the villages. They called it “the other war.” Pacification. The job fell to the CIA because it involved killing civilians not soldiers. The military isn’t supposed to go into a village and kill everybody. They did it anyway, plenty of times, but it turned the people against the US and its puppets in the South Vietnamese government.

So the job of killing civilians was given to the CIA, which isn’t hampered by any rules of engagement related to the laws of any country. There is nothing to stop the CIA’s hired killers from going into the villages and snuffing snatching Uncle Ho’s cadres. The cadres are teachers, laborers, mailmen, farmers, but they’re not soldiers. They provide support for the NVA and the guerrillas. They’re the backbone of the insurgency.

The CIA realizes it has to “eliminate” these people to win the war. It works through its assets in a country’s judicial system to create administrative detention laws that allow Americans and their subsidiary counterterrorism teams to snatch the cadres from their homes at midnight, without charging these targeted cadres with having committed criminal offenses. It builds secret interrogation centers where the cadres and their friends and families can be tortured and turned into double agents. It creates a system that terrorizes everyone, in order to create millions of informers. Once it finds out who the cadres are, the CIA sends out its death squads. The CIA calls them counterterrorism teams like the ones it uses today in Afghanistan and Iraq and other countries around the world. They creep into the cadres’ homes in the middle of the night, drag them away to the interrogation centers, or slit their throats and kill their friends and families for psychological reasons, and run away before anybody knows what happened.

In 1967 the CIA brings together all these methods of fighting the guerilla war in the Phoenix program. It coordinates everybody that’s involved in the war and brings every resource to bear on the political people in the villages, in an effort to wipe them off the face of the earth. That’s what the Phoenix program is. The total number of people killed was between 25,000 and 40,000.

(Phoenix program veteran Major Stan Fulcher stated): “Greedy Americans were the cause of the (Vietnam) war. The supply side economists were the emergent group during Vietnam…. It was a war that became distorted through our ability to create fiction. But really, there were only economic reasons for our supporting the fascists in Vietnam, just like we did in (the Shah’s) Iran.”

The Phoenix Program (1967-1971)

From Wikipedia:

The program was in operation between 1965 and 1972, and similar efforts existed both before and after that period. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had “neutralized” 81,740 suspected VC operatives, informants and supporters, of whom between 26,000 and 41,000 were killed.[14][15] During the same 1965–1972 period the VC killed 33,052 South Vietnamese village officials and civil servants.[16]

Valentine: “The CIA created the Phoenix program in 1967 to “neutralize” the leaders and supporters of the Communist-led insurgency in South Vietnam. Referred to by the CIA as the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI), the targets were civilians who were working at regular jobs while secretly engaged in administrative and support functions for the armed guerillas. These people were patriots resisting foreign aggression and seeking to take back their country, but they were considered spies and terrorists. American officials wrote laws that allowed US military forces to detain, torture, and kill them by every means possible, including B-52 raids, battalion-sized “cordon and search” operations, and death squads.

Phoenix was originally called ICEX-SIDE for Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation- Screening, Interrogation, and Detention of the Enemy. The name was quickly changed for symbolic purposes. In time, the mere mention of Phoenix, the omnipotent bird of prey with a blacklist in one claw and a snake in the other, was enough to terrorize not only targeted members of the VCI, but the entire civilian population.

Phoenix evolved from a “rifle-shot” approach to neutralize enemy leaders into a program of systematic repression for the political control of the South Vietnamese people. It sought to accomplish this through a highly bureaucratized system of disposing of people who could not be ideologically assimilated.

…In a concerted effort to “scare” an entire population into submission, the CIA went “unconventional” in Vietnam, establishing Phoenix centers and conducting “selective terrorism” in each of the country’s 240 districts. The state policy was to replace the bludgeon of B-52 bombings and My Lai-style search and destroy operations (which had alienated the people) with the scalpel of assassinations of selected VCI. Phoenix co—creator Dr. Robert Komer called this the “rifle shot” approach.

… Komer was (President) Lyndon Johnson’s personal aid on pacification in Vietnam, what was called “the other war.”

CIA officer Nelson Brickham, actually organized the Phoenix program. Phoenix was political warfare.

… In Vietnam, the CIA built an archipelago of secret torture centers to process the hundreds of thousands of suspects that were kidnapped by its mercenary army of “counterterrorists.”

Director of the CIA, William Colby, was the person most associated with Phoenix, the controversial CIA “assassination” program that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands (estimated 25,000 to 60,000) Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War….. (the media) obscured the inhuman brutality that pervaded “death squad” operations like the Phoenix Program. (American officers were)/are free to murder to their hearts’ content, because murdering civilians is unstated policy.

The Special Police in Vietnam were the stepchildren of (Englishman) Robert Thompson, whose aristocratic Norman-English ancestors perfected torture in dingy castle dungeons, on the rack and in the Iron Lady, which thumbscrews and branding irons. (Techniques deployed) included rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder, “the Bell Telephone Hour” rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body; waterboarding; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on thte ceiling suspending the prisoner in midair while he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners. All of this and more occurred in PICs (Provincial Interrogation Centers).

The CIA found a legal basis for the program in “emergency decrees” and “administrative detention” laws that enabled American “advisors” to detain, torture, and kill “national security offenders” (as the VCI were legally referred to) without due process. The program was implemented over the objections of Government of Vietnam (GVN) officials who understood that it undermined their national sovereignty.

Within this “extra-legal judicial system, with its Stalinist security committees, a member of the VCI was anyone who didn’t actively support the government. To be neutral or advocate for peace was viewed as supporting terrorism. Proof wasn’t required, just the word of an anonymous informer.

… Modeled by its creator, Nelson Brickham, on Ford Motor Company’s “command post” structure, Phoenix concentrated power in a chief executive officer and an operating committee at the top of the Embassy’s organizational chart. The Chief Executive position- the Deputy for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development- oversaw the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon. The Directorate was headed by a CIA officer supported by a statistical reporting unit, which assigned a quota of 1800 neutralizations (i.e., kills) a month to the Phoenix “coordinators” who ran the program in the field.

But Phoenix was a CIA program and deniability was one of its main objectives, so the CIA left gaping holes in its safety net in order to facilitate the systematic corruption that ensured the program’s true but unstated objective of terrifying the entire civilian population into submission.

The program existed in relative secrecy until June 1969, when numerous South Vietnamese legislators complained in open session about Phoenix abuses. Everyone knew that thousands of innocent people were being extorted, jailed and killed, but the complicit American press corps never reported it…. It was not until late in 1970, when a handful of anti-war Phoenix veterans exposed the program’s many abuses, that Congress finally launched an investigation.

(Vietnamese reporter, Dinh Tuong An, was author of “The Truth About Phoenix”. An was) led to conclude that America was never interested in ending the war. The goal was total victory, “even if many lives must be lost.” Phoenix, for An, was a mechanism to extend the war indefinitely with a minimum of American casualties. It was a cynical ploy used to pit the Vietnamese against each other and undermine their efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement by fueling the conflict with money, lies, and psychological operations designed to destabilize the society.

…. Phoenix dragged everyone into its trap. …. The CIA’s patronage system of corruption turned into the greatest blackmail scheme ever invented. Anyone- including cops and soldiers- who visited family members in VC-controlled areas was put on the Phoenix blacklist and extorted by government security forces. They were surveilled, harassed, and forced to become informants in order to protect their family members from CIA “hunter-killer” teams and US military assaults.

Adding to the terror of being falsely accused, detained, tortured, and even killed, was the fact that the CIA rewarded security officials who extorted the people.”

The “Global Phoenix Program”

“America’s ruling national Security Establishment has expanded covert paramilitary operations from 60 nations in 2008 to 120 in 2013.

… All around the world, CIA officers and their military sidekicks teach modern torture techniques and design the torture centers concealed within the National Security Establishment’s network of military posts. Along with the CIA’s stations (at least one in every nation), these posts are the secret government’s infrastructure for Full Spectrum Dominance.

…. As DCI (Director of Central Intelligence, in 1976-77), George H.W. Bush laid the groundwork for the off-the-shelf counter-terror network that facilitated the Enterprise and the illegal selling of arms to Iran to finance the illegal Contra war in Nicaragua. He laid the basis for the global Phoenix Program.

…. Phoenix fulfilled its destiny in the wake of 9/11 and became the template for policing the (American) empire and fighting its eternal War on Terror. So successful were Phoenix operations in overthrowing the Ba’athist Party regime in Iraq that David Kilcullen, one of the US government’s top terrorism advisors in 2004, called for a “global Phoenix program.”

The threat of a global Phoenix program is that it will become fully activated in the United States. If the CIA and military are successful at politically and psychologically neutralizing suspected terrorists, what is to stop them applying the full systematic extent of Phoenix-style operations to include political dissidents, immigrants, and despised minorities in America, just as they did in Vietnam?

….. Security officials are adept at using double-speak to hide repressive “covet actions” within “intelligence” operations, and they are using the exact same advertising campaign they used in Vietnam: when the Phoenix first arrived in American in the form of Homeland Security, it was advertised as “protecting the people from terrorism,” just as it was in Vietnam.

… Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has already become the template for providing internal political security for America’s leaders. The process began immediately after 9/11 with the repressive Patriot Act and a series of Presidential executive orders that have since legalized the administrative detention and murder of American citizens said to be involved in terrorism- like Kamal Derwish, killed by a drone strike in 2002, and cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by CIA drone stikes in 2009.

Since then, the government has steadily sought to expand its powers to target Americans. In an editorial correction to an article written in 2010 by Dana Priest, the Washington Post said: “The military’s Joint Special Operations Command maintains a target list that includes several Americans. In recent weeks, U.S. officials have said that the government is prepared to kill U.S. citizens who are believed to be involved in terrorist activities that threaten Americans.”

The list of targeted individuals is growing too, and the intent to kill them is there. As part of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, the military (no mention is ever made of the CIA) was given the right to administratively detain and assassinate US citizens without due process. In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that President Obama “has authority to use drone strikes to kill Americans on US soil.”

The bureaucratic groundwork is being laid as well. Just as Phoenix “Intelligence Operations and Coordination Centers” (IOCC) (also National Interrogation Centers NIC- and Provincial Interrogation Centers- PIC) were established in every province and district in South Vietnam, the Department of Homeland Security has now established fusion centers, and the FBI has established Joint Terrorism Task Forces, to coordinate representatives from every police, security, military, and civic organization in every state and major city.

The fascist merging of government and corporate forces against the public interest is the most insidious facet of Phoenix in American society. And it is done with the full coordination of the corporate media, which exploits each and every mass murder we endure, whether it is a terrorist attack or not- like the gay attacker’s assault on the gay nightclub in Orlando- to terrorize the public into consenting to greater restrictions on civil liberties and more wars overseas.

CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of (1000) bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators.

Throughout this book I’ve given examples of how the CIA uses “civic actions” as a cover for “invisible” armed teams aimed at political enemies. Ensuring deniability is the first step, and to that end Phoenix employed the motto “Protecting the People from Terrorism” to present itself as goodness and light. And yet the CIA was inserting secret hit teams inside the Self-Defense Force that were ostensibly “Protecting the People from Terrorism” in order to kill (without trial and based on all the flawed sources we have discussed) those whom they presumed might be aiding the Viet Cong in some way- people who were civilians and had rights as such.

It is exactly this type of duplicity that informs the Homeland Security apparatus. The DHS has even adopted the Phoenix motto, “Protecting the People from Terrorism,” and for the same exculpatory purposes. The big question is: will these security forces conduct Phoenix-style paramilitary and psywar operations against dissident Americans in a crisis?”

(ETK Comment: The answer to that question, of course, is yes, and we refer to this program here The Global Gestapo, GISTAPO-666, and/ or organized gang stalking.)

The Death Lists

“In Vietnam via the Phoenix program, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan through the new and improved version, the CIA sends its hit teams after a long list of targeted individuals. Targets included tax assessors and collectors; people operating business fronts for purchasing, storing or distributing food and supplies to the resistance, public health officials who distribute medicine; security and judicial officials who target American collaborators and agents; anyone proselytizing to the general population; officials involved in transportation, communication, and postal services; political indoctrination cadres; military recruiters; guerilla leaders and their forces; and anyone who funds and staffs front organizations.

As in Vietnam, all these categories of people- and their sympathizers and supporters- find their names on computerized, Phoenix–style death lists in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The Phoenix Program Goes to Latin America

… “Latin America was, for economic reasons, the place the US aimed its aggression after Vietnam. The Phoenix people brought their techniques and ideas into South and Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico and began applying and perfecting the Phoenix model in various ways in these countries.

In fact, the people who created and imposed the “Salvador Option” were Phoenix veterans. The “Pink Plan” approved by Vice President Bush for use in El Salvador in 1981 was developed by CIA officers Donald Gregg, Rudy Enders, and Felix Rodrigues in Vietnam, and exported to El Salvador and Iraq.

By 1973, the people who had been running Phoenix were overthrowing the elected socialist government in Chile. One of them was Ted Shackley, who’d been station chief in Saigon. By 1973, Shackley was head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division and helped engineer the coup in Chile. From there the CIA and military fanned out through Latin America. If you review the history, you’ll see that there’s an infusion of American covert forces into Latin America as the war in Vietnam winds down.

Nowhere was this more evident than in El Salvador, where lieutenant Colonel Stan Fulcher served from 1974 until 1977 as an intelligence advisor with the US Military Advisory Group, Fulcher had run Phoenix operations in Binh Dinh Province in South Vietnam in 1972. Two years later in El Salvador, as he told when I interviewed him, he saw the same “old boys” who’d run the war in South Vietnam. The big difference in El Salvador was that the CIA effected US policies through proxies from allied countries as a result of the reduction in the XCIA’s paramilitary forces.

Fulcher watched while Israeli advisors taught El Salvador’s major landowners how to organize criminals in vigilante death squads. The death squads used intelligence from El Salvador’s military and security forces to target and murder labor leaders and other opponents of the oligarchy. But they were deniable.

Fulcher watched while Taiwanese military officers taught Kuomintang political warfare techniques at El Salvador’s command and General Staff College: Phoenix-related subjects like population control through psychological warfare, the development and control of agent provocateurs, the development of military officers in the civilian security forces. He saw political prisoners put in insane asylums he described as being “like Hogarth’s paintings.”

Fulcher saw Americans smuggle weapons and money to the death squads. He was outraged by what he saw and organized at his own home a study group of young military officers who supported land reform, nationalization of the banks, and civilian control of the military. In 1979 these reformist officers staged a successful but short-lived coup. As a result of that coup the Salvadoran National Security Agnecy (ANSESAL) which the CIA had formed in 1962, was disbanded and reorganized as the National Intelligence Agency (NIA).

This reorganization didn’t put an end to the death squads. Instead, the landowners and the fascist military officers moved to Miami and Guatemala, where they formed a political front called Arena, to which the CIA channeled funds for the purpose of eliminating the reformers. Major Roberto d-Aubuisson was chosen to head Arena. D’Aubuisson was a former member of ANSESAL, and he transferred its files to general staff headquarters where they were used to complete blacklists. Operating out of Guatemala, under CIA supervision, D’Aubuisson’s death squads murdered Archbishop Oscar Romero and El Salvador’s attorney general in early 1980. In December of that year, six members of El Salvador’s executive council were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by a death squad. The death squads went on a rampage which included the murders in January 1981 of the head of the land distribution program, along with his American advisors, Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman.

At this time, according to Salvadoran Army officer Ricardo Castro, death squad supervision passed to Department 5, the civil affairs branch of the Salvadoran general staff. “Department 5 suddenly started coordinating everything,” said Castro, a West Point graduate with a master’s degree in engineering.

Formed in mid-1970’s by the CIA, Department 5 became “the political intelligence apparatus within the general staff. “ Although it was designated as an investigative, not an operating agency, Department 5 had “a large paramilitary force of people dressed in civilian clothes,” and because it targeted civilians, “They can knock someone off all by themselves, or capture them,” Castro said.

When military as opposed to political targets were involved, Department 2, the intelligence branch of the general staff, would send information from its informant nets to Department 3 (operations), which then dispatched its own death squad. Whether the people to be killed were guerillas or civilians, Castro explained, “The rich people- the leading citizens of the community- traditionally have a great deal of input. Whatever bothers them, if they’ve gone someone who just came into their ranch or their farm and they consider them a bad influence, they just send a messenger to the commander.”

(ETK Comment: The CIA-instigated civil war in El Salvador resulted in the deaths of about 80,000 people, whereas the CIA-instigated civil war in Guatemala resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 people.)

Major Joe Blair, the Director of Instruction at the School of the Americas (1986-1989), described the training the US gave to Latin American officers as follows:

“The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse…. False imprisonment…. Threats to family members… and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or to stop what they’re doing, you simply assassinate them, and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

A Salvadoran army officer, Ricardo Castro, who was running a death squad in El Salvador described what they would do as a sort of daily routine. He said: “Normally you eliminate everyone. We usually go in with an informant who is part of the patrol and who has turned these people in. When you turn somebody in, part of your obligation is to show us where they are and identify them. We would go in and knock on people’s houses. They’d come out of their house and we’d always tell them we were the left and we’re here because you don’t want to cooperate with us or whatever. And then we’d eliminate them all, always with machetes.”

Corrupting the leadership of a country in order to keep it in your pocket is integral to maintaining an empire. It is a well-established colonial policy. The two main facts of Phoenix- controlling the “upper tier” people in a foreign government by corrupting them, and terrorizing the lower tier into submission- come together in the mid-70s in Central America and explode with Iran-Contra in the 1980s.

Corruption is the best way of destabilizing a country. If a nation’s top officials are corrupt and don’t represent the people, then it’s not the people’s government.

The Phoenix Foundation of Homeland Security In America

Over the last 40 years, dissent has come to equal terrorism. It’s how the one percent want us to see non-violent protest.

In 2003, torture became so popular that the US Supreme Court approved the practice of withholding medical treatment for domestic law enforcement purposes.

CIA spy training for the Phoenix Program involved paramilitary training- handling weapons and making bombs- and intelligence training- surveillance, spy craft, running agent nets, setting up proprietary companies, etc.

When an agent submitted a report on a VCI suspect, a Special Branch operation began. The Special Branch would assign people to watch him or her. Special Police Officers worked in two man teams around the clock. They’d find where the suspect lived and worked and where his “contact points” were. Other agents were set up in business, perhaps a soup shop close to the suspect’s house, or a bicycle repair shop near his favorite café… Places the suspect visited were kept under surveillance.

CIA advisors like Simmons often worked under military cover. The CIA funds, equips, and manages the special police forces it has created worldwide.

When the Special Police draft a Preliminary Plan to train a new recruit in tradecraft… how to collect information, how to maintain a cover story, how to make contact with and secretly report to a case officer. Then the recruit is provided the necessary equipment: cameras, tape-recorders, safe-houses, and items like antibiotics to purchase the target’s cooperation.

Special Police Chief, SSS Chief and SSS case-officer would periodically meet with the CIA advisor to evaluate the agent’s Information Report. Then an Operational Plan was made. An Infiltration Plan is made to infiltrate VCI cadres.

PRU teams were called the CIA’s Hired Killers.”

SIFU (Special Intelligence Force Unit)- were volunteers from the Special Police and the National Police Field Forces.

The CIA lumped together peaceniks, neutralists, and political opponents as VCI (Vietcong Infrastructure). These were considered targets for extermination.

Congressman Bob Simmons (formerly a CIA officer with Phoenix) have applied the same tactics they used in South Vietnam against their “liberal” enemies in America.

In all the CIA used the Phoenix, PRU, PICs, and Special Police as part of a system of repression for the political control of people. They used assassination, extortion, massacres, Tiger Cages, terror, and torture.

General: The business party’s strategic goal is the political control of people at home and abroad- and the subsequent acquisition of their property, wealth and resources- through the centralization of power in multinational corporations and giant financial institutions exempt from anyone’s laws, as well as through psychological operations.

Congressional investigators revealed that the CIA used the Phoenix Program as “an instrument of mass political murder” to neutralize politicians and activists who opposed the puppet regime or espoused peace. Five years later, the Church (Senate) Committee reveal the extent of the FBI’s similar attempts to suppress the Communist Party in the United States, which it claimed controlled the anti-war and civil rights movements. The FBI used the same kind of illegal operations Phoenix used in Vietnam; spreading lies and using forged documents to break up marriages and otherwise harass people into submission.

The military was at the forefront of the repression of the anti-war movement, and is leading the charge again.

As Ed Murphy recalled, the 116th MIG targeted specific leaders of the anti-war movement. Photos of the targets were posted at headquarters.

That’s what DHS agents are prepared to do in the US. And with advances in technology and 40 years to learn from mistakes, political neutralizations are easier than ever. Consider the anthrax letters mailed to Democratic senators after 9/11, now recognized as an inside job. It took only a few “black propaganda” terror operations to silence the political opposition’s leadership and its resistance to the Patriot Act.

Information management- including official secrecy and false accusations- is the key to pacifying people through implicit terror, while making the internal security apparatus appear legal, moral and popular. This is being done against American citizens through the most ambitious psywar campaign ever waged on planet earth.

Timeline to Domestic Terror:

1969: CIA formed the Central Security Committee (CSC) in Saigon, S. Vietnam to dispose of citizens arrested under the administrative detention laws.

1984: Lt. Col. Oliver North created the Terrorist Incident Working Group (TIWG).

1985: Vice President George H.W. Bush created the Vice President’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism.

1986: Oliver North was appointed “chief coordinator” of Casey’s secret counter-terror network through the Office to Combat Terrorism (OCT), where he planned the repression of domestic dissent and criticism.

1986: CIA’s “Counterterrorism Center (CTC), a direct descendant of the CIA’s Operation Chaos, was formed. CTC operates globally through Phoenix-style Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers (CIC)., in collaboration with suborned military, police, and intelligence services of cooperating nations. CTC has its own communications system and paramilitary Special Operations Unit that functions like a global PRU team. The CTC is modeled on the Phoenix program.

1994: The CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center (CNC) created by DCI James Woolsey in 1994 to combat international criminal activities, DCI Woolsey in 1994 by renaming and expanding the duties performed by the Counternarcotics Center (established in 1989). The new CNC includes about 200 people, 90% of whom are CIA personnel, the standard pattern for DCI centers. …

1996: FBI launched its InfraGard program in Cleveland, Ohio. InfraGard is a “non-profit” organization serving as a public-private partnership between businesses and the FBI. It’s a private sector Phoenix Program in which business people, college presidents, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other civil guardians funnel tips to the FBI to prevent hostile acts against America’s “critical infrastructure.” It has over 50,000 employees and operates in secret. Since 2003, DHS, under FBI supervision, has shared responsibility for InfraGard assets.

September 11, 2001: The U.S. Government in cooperation with Nation of Israel (including both American and Israeli Jews) staged the synthetic terror attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program enacted immediately thereafter, enabled US government to track billions of phone calls made by millions of Americans over a period of decades. This was part of the President’s Surveillance Program.

Oct. 8, 2001: Bush administration signs into law the Office of Homeland Security to detect, prevent, and recover from terrorist attacks and/or “weapons of mass destruction” attacks on America.

On Aug. 17, 2005: US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled the program unconstitutional and illegal.

On June 6, 2013: the Terrorist Surveillance Program was replaced by the a new NSA program, codeword, PRISM, which collects data from major US internet companies.

October, 2001: Congress passes the USA Patriot Act, vastly expanding the governments domestic intelligence gathering and law enforcement powers, while rolling back individual rights and protections from government intrusions.

January, 2002: Information Awareness Office (IAO) established by US DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Total Information Awareness (TIA) began in 2003, then this became Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA), based on concept of predictive policing. Admiral John Pointedexter called it the “Manhattan Project for Counter-Terrorism.” It was biggest surveillance program in US history.

Nine government agencies participated: INSCOM, NSA, DIA, CIA, CIFA, Stratcom, SOCOM, JFCOM, JWAC. Companies included SAIC (Scientific Applications International Corp.), Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin Corp, Schafer Corporation, SRS Technologies, Adroit Systems, CACI Dynamic Systems, ASI Systems International, Syntek Technologies. Cooperating universities included UC Berkeley, Colorado State Univ., Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cornell, Dallas, Georgia Tech, Maryland, MIT, and Southampton.

This program was defunded in late 2003, but is still thriving at NSA.

September, 2002: National Security Strategy for U.S. is adopted. Henceforth, National Security Establishment conferred upon itself the right launch murderous, pre-emptive attacks on Muslim nations with valuable natural resources. Russia and China were listed as long-range strategic targets.

November 25, 2002: Bush signed the Homeland Security Act, creating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to coordinate the anti-terror elements of dozens of federal agencies. This act created the policy-making Homeland Security Council comprised of four standing members, the President (as chairman), Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and Attorney General.

This Homeland Security Council is a grander version of the Phoenix Committee in Vietnam, which included Deputy for CORDS (William Colby) as chairman, plus the CIA’s station chief, MACV’s assistant chiefs of staff for intelligence and operations, and the CIA chief of Revolutionary Development.

DHS Office of Coordination and Planning oversees DHS National Operations Center (NOC). NOC collects and “fuses” information from the same federal, state, territorial, local, social media, and private sector agencies as the I&A. (Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OI&A).

DHS has Emergency Operations Center (EOC). FEMA was absorbed within DHS in 2003.

DHS has over 250,000 employees, including detectives within its own departments, every agency it coordinates, and every branch of the military.

DHS has another investigations unit that oversees international operations and intelligence functions. This unit has about 7,000 special agents operating in 200 US cities and 60 countries. It works with the CIA and assigns agents to the FBI’s Field Intelligence Groups, through which they run vast informant networks. Several DHS investigation units maintain paramilitary Special Response Teams, probably managed by CIA paramilitary officers.

DHS has its own counterintelligence unit, and a war crimes unit.

DHS maintains fusion centers which operate in every state and major city, just like Phoenix intelligence and operations coordinating centers were set up in Vietnam. Every law enforcement entity in a state or city sends a representative to the local fusion center, which tries to anticipate threats through analysis of shared intelligence. There is a fusion center in Mexico City.

Along with FBI task forces (JTTF), fusion centers serve as a cover for domestic CIA operations. CIA Chaos-style officers specialize in the recruitment of American citizens who travel abroad, as well as foreign students, diplomats, scientists, and businesspeople willing to sell out their countries for an SUV or a pat on the back.

DHS cadres instruct civilian “critical infrastructure” personnel on how to spy and report on colleagues who serve as “terrorist surrogates” by even inadvertently revealing on infrastructure vulnerabilities.

DHS “front” organizations include Citizen Corps, Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, Community Emergency Response Teams, Neighborhood Watch, and Medical Reserve Corps.

Blacklists abound: The TIPOFF blacklist, the No-Fly blacklist; the CAPPS II blacklist (uses credit card information and secret data bases to access a person’s security risk level; and local blacklists like the one kept by the Denver police department.

Feb. 2003: Total Information Awareness (TIA)

May 2003: Bush created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) as White House coordinating mechanism under future DCI John O. Brennan. Located at CIA headquarters, TTIC was staffed by counter-terrorism experts from the CIA, FBI, DOD and DHS. It responded directly to the White House political staff, beyond public and congressional scrutiny.

In late 2004: TTIC was renamed the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) and placed under the newly created position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). NCTC operates like a global Phoenix directorate with a computerized blacklist of suspects. It has access to all military and law enforcement data bases, foreign and domestic, which it skims for “High Value” targets. If these high value targets cannot be “turned” and recruited as “penetration agents” at home and abroad, they are placed on Obama’s “kill list” and “neutralized” by some CIA/Special Forces hit team or a predator drone.

NCTC claims its databases, which have complete information on all Americans, help their “pre-crime” pacification effort. The CIA manages the NCTC and when “suspected threat” emerges, the CIA can direct every homeland component, the same way it used Phoenix to coordinate every cooperating agency in Vietnam.

The US military’s NORTHCOM is the backbone of the homeland security apparatus.

Homeland Security = protection racket and biggest boondoggle ever.

Stakeholders in the NSE (National Security Establishment/Enterprise) = owners of the private businesses that comprise the critical infrastructure of the NSE; anything related to war and law enforcement.

DHS and parallel mechanisms are identifying and targeting the NSE’s “political and administrative” opponents for neutralization. Upper tier dissidents are targets of “compromise and discreditation” campaigns.

(Webmaster:  I.e., targeted individuals).

Since creation of Homeland Security apparatus protection racket, over $8 trillion have been moved from social programs into “internal security” programs.

“Anyone can dominate others by becoming a spy for homeland security.”

DHS managers study the collective terror that Israel imposes to crush the Palestinians. At the highest levels, they wage feudalistic “economic warfare” that drive entire nations into poverty.

The PIC (Provincial Interrogations Centers) of the Phoenix Program are the model for the network of black sites, detention centers, prisons and jails America builds in every nation it occupies. Guantanamo Bay facility, the CIA has perfected torture and punishes suspects by slowly driving them insane.

The gulag archipelago of black sites the CIA built after 9/11 in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan, and “several democracies in Eastern Europe.”

“Administrative detention” is the legal nail upon which the “pacification” of America hangs.

Elements of administrative detention include: “absence of human rights safeguards and normal legal guarantees such as due process, habeas corpus, fair trial, confidential legal counsel, and judicial review, vague and confusing definitions, standards, and procedures, inadequate adversarial procedural oversight, excessive Executive Branch power stemming from prolonged emergencies (the War on Terror being the ultimate example), and the involvement of the CIA and other secret, thus unaccountable Executive Branch agencies.”

“The linkage between administrative detention, torture, and repressive police states is evident for all to see, but remains unrecognized due to the systematic censorship of information. The U.S. and Israel are at the forefront of this ominous development, manufacturing crisis after crisis to maintain a perceived national emergency with its corresponding emergency decrees that target the unprotected classes and specifically US citizens such as blacks and Muslims. Intelligence laws that permit spying on suspects without probable cause of criminal activity are secretly revised and expanded, secret torture centers ensure confessions; and Star Chamber “security courts” are convened specifically to operate outside international law.

Administrative detention elements have been set in place by the Patriot, Homeland Security, and Domestic Security Enhancement Acts.

DHS issues secret subpoenas to obtain information… These cannot be refused or disclosed, so it is impossible to defend against false charges. People can be arrested for unknown crimes as a result of secret surveillance…. They are not entitled to judicial review of the warrant or the evidence obtained as a result. Detentions, evidence, trials, deportations, and executions are now conducted in secret.

Anti-terror legislation passed by Congress allows for secret searches of the homes of people who meet the nebulous criteria of “suspected terrorist.” These secret searches violate the Fourth Amendment.

The U.S. is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions prohibits “the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

Article 3 also prohibits mutilation, cruel treatment (withholding medicine, for example) and torture.

However, CIA legal experts argued that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies “only to sentencing for crimes, and does not prohibit a state from interning civilians or subjecting them to emergency detention when such measures are necessary for the security or safety of the state.”

In this way, indefinite detention, torture and summary execution, all carried out without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, are perfectly legal in the criminal Homeland Security state because they result from “administrative procedures.”

What differentiates the CIA and the Mafia, inter alia, is that the CIA more perfectly controls public institutions and information.

For a glimpse into the future look at Israel, which has had a leading role in teaching Americans “how to do it.” There administrative detention centers make it OK to round up civilians, detain and torture them indefinitely, destroy their homes with bulldozers, cast them to the four winds, and steal everything they own simply because they are Palestinians.

Being a stateless Palestinian is a crime of status.. In America, being a pacifist is a crime of status. The key is loosely defining what a terrorist is.

Army intelligence officer (during the Vietnam War, working with the Phoenix Program), Bart Osborn stated: “I had no way of establishing the basis on which my agents reported to me suspected VCI. There was no cross-check; there was no investigation; there was no second opinion. I never knew of an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals. They all died. There was never any reasonable establishment of the fact that any one of those individuals was, in fact, cooperating with the VC, but they all died and the majority were either tortured to death or things like thrown out of helicopters.”

(CIA Director, William) Casey jumped in the stirrups of the counterterrorism network established by CIA careerists. Casey used the network to bypass Congress and launch “The Enterprise,” the network of companies established by Major Richard Secord to secretly sell arms to Iran, through Israeli agents, as a way of financing the illegal Contra war in Nicaragua. At Casey’s direction, the CIA formed death squads, demolished an oil factory, and mined a harbor in Nicaragua– all violations of international law that had as their intent the terrorizing of civilians, the sort of thing former CIA dropout John Stockwell described as “destabilization.”

… His (Congressman Rob Simmons) career illustrates how the old boy network coordinates the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government on behalf of the arms industry, to which the military and CIA are joined at the hip, while simultaneously imposing increasingly systematic repression on the American people. It is rule by organized crime under the rubric of patriotism and national security.

Just figure: the CIA runs the arms for drugs trade through its covert paramilitary army, while its logistics experts handle “off-the-shelf” shipping companies, and its financial experts create off-shore banks to recycle the cash into new operations. All of it is highly compartmented, with intelligence officers suborning foreign customs agents and special policemen, some of whom arrange, without their own government’s knowledge, the construction and operation of black sites.

Wells Dixon, attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights: “The Geneva Conventions and Common Article Three are part of US military law and training. They are part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and they are also part of Army Regulation 190.8, which governs the treatment of prisoners. The Geneva Conventions, of course, have also protected our soldiers for more than 50 years and will continue to do so as long as we adhere to them fully ourselves.….

“There is no question that the detainees at Guantanamo have been tortured and abused by US military personnel and (CIA) agents. The Center for Constitutional Rights has documented this in a report issued in July that provides firsthand accounts from current detainees and their lawyers of many of the abuses they have suffered while they have been detained at Guantanamo.

A provision in the Military Commissions Act suspends Habeas Corpus for any alien detained in the United States … we expect that the United States will move to dismiss a number of pending Habeas cases and we will then challenge the law on the ground that it’s an unconstitutional suspension of Habeas Corpus.

The other instance I would point to is the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a suspected Bin Laden associate who was captured a few months after September 11th in Afghanistan. He was rendered by the CIA to Libya where he was tortured and under torture provided information concerning the connection between Iraq and al Qaida. This information formed the basis for Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations in February of 2003 in which he said essentially that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaida. We now know that that’s not the case; that the information (al-Libi provided) was false, and we now know what the unfortunate results are of that information (i.e., the 2003 invasion of Iraq). So to the extent that Congressman Simmons or any other interrogator would employ coercive or other means to obtain information I would be very suspicious.”

The Phoenix Flies to Iraq and Afghanistan

… “(Since the Vietnam War), the CIA and US military have been conducting joint Phoenix-style operations worldwide without any compunctions, most prominently in Afghanistan and Iraq.

… America’s militant leaders used 9/11 to recruit and motivate a new generation of special operations forces, whose mission is to invade private homes at midnight on snatch and snuff missions. Nowhere, in any Establishment media outlet, is it ever mentioned that our political and military leaders did this because they wanted to seize Afghanistan and use to establish a colony in a strategic location near Russia and China.

As America wrestles with its role as the world’s only superpower, hell bent on Full Spectrum Dominance, the details of what “nation building” actually entails become ever more vital for people to understand.

The Bush and Obama regimes killed more than a million Iraqis, displaced around five million, and imprisoned and tortured hundreds of thousands without trial.

The draconian administrative detention laws, systematic torture and executions that characterize the occupation are still in place in 2016….. Today, Iraq’s prisons are still rife with rape, torture, executions and disappearances. ….

The systematic oppression the Americans imposed upon Iraq meets the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, and violates multiple articles of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war.

…. What happened in Iraq amounts to an official but unstated policy of carefully planned war crimes. Indeed, the CIA modeled the Iraqi Special Police Commandos on the Special Police forces it organized and funded in Vietnam.

Every militia and Iraqi Special Forces unit has a CIA case officer in a similar management position. Every top Iraqi politician and ministry official has a CIA case officer too. And New York Times reporters drink with these advisors inside the Green Zone. It’s the family secret that enables atrocity.

The CIA plays the same role in Afghanistan that the Gestapo and SS Einsatzgruppen performed in France in World War Two– terrorizing the urban resistance and partisan bands in the countryside by targeting their friends and families. The CIA’s objective is to rip apart poor and working class families and, in the process, unravel the fabric of Afghan society, until the Afghan people accept American domination. They don’t care how long it takes, either, Afghanistan is a means to get at Russia, similar to how Nixon played the China Card in Vietnam.

The CIA’s Revolutionary Development team concept in Vietnam was the model for its Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) concept in Afghanistan and Iraq. The new and improved PRT program started in Afghanistan in 2002 and migrated to Iraq in 2004.

The standard PRT consists of anywhere between 50-100 civilian and military specialists. It has units for military police, psyops, explosive-ordinance/de-mining, intelligence, medics, force protection (security forces that organize community defenses), and administrative and support personnel. Like Scotton’s PAT teams in South Vietnam, the PRTs engage in counterterror operations as part of their political and psychological warfare function, under cover of fostering economic development and democracy.”

Jade Helm Military Drills (2015): Recent Incarnation of Phoenix

“Jade Helm was a military training exercise in Texas, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Utah. Military and local officials set up Phoenix-style coordination centers, as a way of giving Special Operations and “Civil Affairs” personnel experience working with para-militarized police forces in what was called a realistic “war experience” in domestic counterinsurgency operations.”

Conclusion:

In the final chapter of “The Phoenix Program” (1990), Valentine states:

“Where can Phoenix be found today? Wherever governments of the left or the right use military and security forces to enforce their ideologies under the aegis of anti-terrorism. Look for Phoenix wherever police checkpoints ring major cities, wherever paramilitary police units patrol in armored cars and wherever military forces are conducting counterinsurgency operations. Look for Phoenix wherever emergency decrees are used to suspend due process; wherever dissidents are interned indefinitely; and wherever dissidents are rounded up and deported. Look for Phoenix wherever security forces use informants to identify dissidents; wherever security forces keep files and computerized black lists on dissidents; wherever security forces conduct secret investigations and surveillance on dissidents; and wherever security forces (or thus in their hire) harass and murder dissidents, and wherever such activities go unreported by the press.”

Webmaster (ETK) Conclusion: As a TI, this certainly is an accurate description of my world… a world of lies, spies, set-ups, covert operations, slander, defamation, psychological operations directed at innocent civilians, such as myself, who have been secretly and extra-judicially “watchlisted,” stripped of their civil liberties and of due process of law, and are being targeted for neutralization.

Why is there such a desperate fixation on neutralizing “dissidents?” (The term, dissident, is used six times in the paragraph above). Here we return full cycle to the introductory quote by Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany, on the home page of this website:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Indeed, the state must use all its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the greatest enemy of the (criminal) state.