The media depicted the war as a “quagmire” begun by “right-wing hawks” who wanted to stop the spread of communism. They said the war was “unwinnable,” dragged out because the “hawks” were too proud to pull our troops out, our military having underestimated the determination of Ho Chi Minh’s forces. Here’s what the media omitted:
The roots of the Vietnam disaster trace to World War II. At the “Big Three” conferences at Teheran and Yalta, President Roosevelt asked Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin if he would break his nonaggression pact with Japan and enter the Pacific war. Stalin agreed – on condition that the United States supply him with all the weapons and materiel his Far Eastern army would need for the expedition. Roosevelt agreed, and some 600 shiploads of Lend-Lease supplies were sent to Russia to equip the Soviet army to fight Japan.
Stalin did not send his army into the Far East until five days before the war ended; Japan, already struck by the atomic bomb, was ready to surrender. In China, Soviet forces accepted the surrender of huge Japanese weapons depots. They then turned these weapons, plus their own American lend-lease supplies, over to communist rebel Mao Tse-tung for the overthrow of China’s Nationalist government. As a reward for being “co-victors” of the Pacific War they did almost nothing to win, the Soviets were also accorded control of North Korea, an idea that had been suggested in the April 1944 issue of Foreign Affairs, the CFR’s journal. Communism was now embedded in Asia, and the Korean War – which could have been completely avoided had overtures not been made to Stalin – loomed. But we turn to Vietnam.
At the 1943 Teheran Conference, President Roosevelt told Stalin that he was in “100 percent agreement” that after the war, France should no longer rule her colony Indochina (Southeast Asia). As I note in my new book Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, detaching European states from their colonies was an Illuminati postwar policy; thus enfeebled, Europe’s nations would be gradually degraded from sovereign empires to mere provinces of the EU that would morph out of the Common Market.
The U.S. initially supported Ho Chi Minh. In 1945, the OSS – forerunner of the CIA – trained Ho’s communist army and provided him with guns and 20,000 cartridges which he used in his war against the French. At that time, the U.S. press extolled him; Newsweek (1946) compared him to George Washington.
In 1954, its troops hemmed in by Ho’s forces at the critical battle of Dien Bien Phu, France begged the United States to intervene. An aircraft carrier strike could have destroyed the communist artillery and averted disaster. But Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (founding CFR member, Rockefeller in-law, drafter of the UN Charter) dragged his heels, and the U.S. government refused.
Following the French defeat and pullout, and splintering of Vietnam into North and South, U.S. foreign policy’s next objective was removing emperor Bao Dai, the one man capable of uniting the country. He later stated: “If your country had given me one-thousandth of the sum they spent to depose me, I could have won that war.”
Through a rigged plebiscite, Ngo Dinh Diem – darling of the Council on Foreign Relations – was installed as South Vietnam’s president. When he visited America in 1957, he was honored at a luncheon hosted by David Rockefeller and John D., Jr. at their Tarrytown, New York estate; the next day he addressed the CFR. The South Vietnamese detested the oppressive Diem, who drove many into the communists’ arms.
CIA Colonel Edward Lansdale (CFR) was attached to Diem and oversaw the disarming and neutralizing of three powerful anti-communist groups in Vietnam: the Cao Dai sect, Hoa Hao sect, and Le Van Vien’s private army. This was described in Hilaire du Berrier’s Vietnam: Background to Betrayal (1964) and his intelligence reports. Having sponsored Ho Chi Minh and eliminated his opponents at every level – French, imperial, and local – our CFR policymakers now launched the tragic war.
Due to the early presence of American troops in Vietnam the start date of the Vietnam War is a matter of debate. In 1998, after a high level review by the Department of Defense (DoD) and through the efforts of Richard B. Fitzgibbon’s family the start date of the Vietnam War according to the US government was officially changed to 1 November 1955. U.S. government reports currently cite 1 November 1955 as the commencement date of the “Vietnam Conflict”, because this date marked when the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Indochina (deployed to Southeast Asia under President Truman) was reorganized into country-specific units and MAAG Vietnam was established. Other start dates include when Hanoi authorized Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam to begin a low-level insurgency in December 1956, whereas some view 26 September 1959 when the first battle occurred between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese army, as the start date. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a false flag that got the US citizens to buy into the Vietnam War and rationalize the deployment of more troops and engaging more directly in the war.
“It’s their [South Vietnam’s] war to win. We can help them … but in the final analysis, it’s their people and their government who have to win or lose this struggle.” ~ President Kennedy in September 1963
“We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home [to fight in Vietnam] to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” ~ President Johnson in 1964
President Kennedy authorized sending the first combat troops (about 10,000) in 1961 on the advice of the State Department’s Walt Rostow (CFR), who had returned from a “fact-finding mission” to Vietnam. Though the media branded Rostow a “hawk,” his father had been a Marxist revolutionary in Russia, two of his aunts belonged to the U.S. Communist Party, his brother (Eugene Debs Rostow) was named after Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, and the Eisenhower State Department rejected Walt for employment three times as a security risk. The Kennedy administration only got him in by firing Otto Otepka, the State Department’s head of security. See The Ordeal of Otto Otepka by William J. Gill.
The war’s escalation began with passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The justification given was an alleged attack on U.S destroyers by Vietnamese torpedo boats on August 4, 1964. This is what today’s truthers call a “false flag.” James Stockdale, Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, was a pilot then stationed in the Tonkin Gulf. Called to the scene of the alleged attack, he saw no Vietnamese boats during 1 and 1/2 hours of overflight. He detailed this in his memoir In Love and War, writing:
“We were about to launch a war under false pretenses… I felt it was a bad portent that we seemed to be under the control of a mindless Washington bureaucracy, vain enough to pick their own legitimacies regardless of the evidence.”
Before the “incident” even occurred, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution had already been drafted by William P. Bundy (CFR, Skull & Bones), Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. Though called a “hawk” by the media, in the 1950s Bundy headed the defense fund for Soviet spy Alger Hiss. Hiss, of course, claimed innocence, but his guilt has been substantiated by release of the Venona files – FBI decodings of Soviet intercepts from the 1940s. After Bundy left the State Department, David Rockefeller appointed him editor of Foreign Affairs, the CFR’s journal.
Unknown to the public, President Johnson escalated at the urging of a secret clique called “the Wise Men”: 14 senior advisors, 12 of whom were CFR members. These meetings are described in The Wise Men, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, themselves CFR members.
The Wise Men’s leader, who led the demand for escalation, was Dean Acheson. Even before the United States recognized the USSR in 1933, Stalin selected young attorney Acheson to represent Soviet interests in America. While Truman’s Secretary of State, Acheson surrounded himself with communists, known spies and security risks – such as John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent and Lauchlin Currie. He promoted Service even after the FBI caught him passing government secrets to communist agents. In the late 1940s, Poland’s new communist regime hired Acheson’s law firm to win U.S. recognition. Acheson’s law partner was Donald Hiss – brother of spy Alger Hiss and a Communist Party member. Acheson was also William Bundy’s father-in-law! A small clique maneuvered us into Vietnam, and THEY WERE NOT RIGHT-WING “ARCHIE BUNKER” TYPES, as was so commonly claimed.
In 1968, the “Wise Men” did a 180, informing Johnson that Vietnam was a mistake. Left holding the bag for the unpopular war, grieved by the betrayal, this is the true reason Johnson announced he would not run for reelection, shocking the Democratic Party.
In World War II, the United States fought on two fronts – Europe and the Pacific – and, with the help of our allies, defeated the extremely tough German and Japanese militaries in just 3 and 1/2 years. But we spent 14 years fighting little North Vietnam and lost. If you think this make no sense, you’re right.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (CFR) forbade the Air Force to strike over 90 percent of the strategic targets it requested to hit. When he left the Defense Department, he was made president of the World Bank.
According to the Rules of Engagement – not declassified until 1985, when they consumed 26 Congressional Record pages – American soldiers were under orders not to shoot first, but to wait until fired upon. If a pilot saw a MiG on the ground, he couldn’t attack – he had to wait until it was airborne and showing hostile intent. If a surface-to-air missile launch site was under construction, he couldn’t bomb it – he had to wait until it was operational. Trucks more than 200 yards off the Ho Chi Minh Trail (by which the communists sent supplies south) could not be bombed; forewarned of approaching American planes detected by radar, trucks simply pulled off the trail and resumed their trek after the bombs fell. Had we fought World War II under such restrictions, we would have lost.
In the March 1968 Science & Mechanics, Lloyd Mallan interviewed nearly a dozen retired high-ranking U.S. military officers. Each, queried separately, said the Vietnam War could be won quickly – in weeks or months – with the restraints lifted. Among their recommendations: (1) declare war on North Vietnam; (2) take the war directly against the North by invasion plus decisively bombing strategic targets; (3) blockade Haiphong Harbor, where North Vietnam received some 90 percent of its war supplies; and (4) block – not bomb – the Ho Chi Minh Trail with troops. Needless to say, nearly all their advice was ignored.
Since the same clique that got us into the war authored the restrictions preventing victory, Vietnam was clearly not a “quagmire” or “blunder,” but happened as planned – just like the revolution at home. In The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, James Kunen described the 1968 annual meeting of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which spearheaded the antiwar movement:
At the convention, men from Business International Round Tables – the meetings sponsored by Business International – tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. They are the left wing of the ruling class. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered Esso (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left.
Jerry Kirk, former member of SDS and the Communist Party, testified before the House and Senate Internal Security Panels: “The radicals think they are fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes.” When college students started burning American flags, they fulfilled a major Illuminist/CFR objective: destroying patriotism is prerequisite to world government.
So why didn’t “mainstream media” report these things? As Congressman John Rarick explained in 1971: “Why doesn’t CBS tell the American people about the CFR and let the people decide whom to blame for the Vietnam fiasco? . . . Who will tell the people the truth if those who control ‘the right to know machinery’ also control the government?”
Napalm
U.S. troops used a substance known as napalm from about 1965 to 1972 in the Vietnam War; napalm is a mixture of plastic polystyrene, hydrocarbon benzene, and gasoline. This mixture creates a jelly-like substance that, when ignited, sticks to practically anything and burns up to ten minutes. The effects of napalm on the human body are unbearably painful and almost always cause death among its victims. “Napalm is the most terrible pain you can ever imagine” said Kim Phúc, a survivor from a napalm bombing. “Water boils at 212°F. Napalm generates temperatures 1,500°F to 2,200°F.” Kim Phúc sustained third degree burns to portions of her body. She was one of the only survivors of such extreme measures.
Napalm was first used in flamethrowers for U.S. ground troops; they burned down sections of forest and bushes in hopes of eliminating any enemy guerrilla fighters. Later on in the war B-52 Bombers began dropping napalm bombs and other incendiary explosives. Air raids that used napalm were much more devastating than flamethrowers; a single bomb was capable of destroying areas up to 2,500 square yards. Throughout the duration of the war, 1965 – 1973, eight million tons of bombs were dropped over Vietnam; this was more than three times the amount used in WWII.
Agent Orange
Agent Orange is a toxic chemical herbicide produced by Monsanto that was used from about 1965 – 1970 in the Vietnam War. It was one of the main mixtures used during Operation Ranch Hand. Operation Ranch Hand was intended to deprive Vietnamese farmers and guerilla fighters of clean food and water in hopes they would relocate to areas more heavily controlled by the U.S. By the end of the operation over twenty million gallons of herbicides and defoliants were sprayed over forests and fields.
Agent Orange is fifty times more concentrated than normal agricultural herbicides; this extreme intensity completely destroyed all plants in the area. Agent Orange not only had devastating effects on agriculture but also on people and animals. The Vietnam Red Cross recorded over 4.8 million deaths and 400,000 children born with birth defects due to exposure to Agent Orange. Agent Orange was later determined to be in violation of the Geneva Contract. U.S. troops gradually stopped using Agent Orange and any other harmful herbicides.
Killing History with Propaganda
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, started on the PBS network in September 2017. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way”.
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism”, Burns’ “entirely new” Vietnam war is presented as “epic, historic work”. Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans”. Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
In the series’ press release in Britain – the BBC will show it – there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. “We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.
All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy”. Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
I thought about the “decency” and “good faith” when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off Napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as “termites”.
In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers “killings”). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an “American tragedy” (Newsweek ). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American “free fire zones”. Mass homicide. This was not news.
To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam”, the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
The “meaning” of the Vietnam war is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the levelling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.
Quoting Robert Taber‘s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said,
“There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”
Source: John Pilger
CIA Drug Trafficking in Vietnam and the Golden Triangle
The Vietnam War was all about gaining control of the Opium Poppy just like the War in Afghanistan was about getting control of their Opium.
In Laos the CIA’s complicity in drug trafficking resulted from its alliance with the Hmong tribes who, since the 1950s, had been used by the French to fight Vietnamese leftists. As early as 1959, CIA operative Lucien Conein stated that eight teams were training Hmong tribesmen on the Plain of Jars. In 1960 the CIA began recruiting units to patrol the border with China and even to send Yao and Lahu tribesmen into Yunnan province to monitor traffic and to tap telephone lines. Operating out of Vientiane, the CIA also sent recruits to the patrol the Vietnam border as well as to send Green Beret commando units into North Vietnam to sabotage the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
By far the largest goal of the CIA was to wage its secret war against the Pathet Lao in northern Laos. From 1960 to 1974, the CIA maintained a secret army of approximately 30,000 tribesmen in the mountains of northern Laos. This originated with Vientiane CIA station chief Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines, his assistant.
The first mission of the CIA was to place a puppet in power. The CIA needed to forge alliances with tribes and warlords inhabiting the northern Laos. In order to maintain its relationship with the warlords while continuing to fund the struggle against nationalistic Marxist movements in Laos and North Vietnam, the CIA first had to choose a career military official. The agency decided upon a career military leader, Lieutenant Vang Pao. Next, the CIA used several tactics to gain respect and support among the Hmong. Immediately elevated to a general, Vang Pao’s power had to be solidified in order for him to gain political support among the tribesmen in Laos’ scattered villages. First, the agency found a way for Vang Pao’s son and daughter to marry the children of Touby Lyfoung, a prominent and popular Hmong cabinet member. Second, the CIA usually chose a popular Hmong leader, with whom the agency could work, for every tribal area as its commander.
To gain support from the Hmong, the CIA supplied the tribesmen with rice. This enabled them to concentrate on growing the cash crop of opium. The Hmong relied on support from Air America for their rice supplies. Thus, the air power became the essential factor which allowed the CIA to keep Vang Pao in power. After Vang Pao was able to consolidate his power, the CIA helped him to sustain an army of 30,000 men from a tribe of only 250,000 people. The CIA relied on the villagers to supply the manpower to continue to replace the wounded and killed. By the early 1970s 30 percent of the Hmong recruits were 14 years old; another 30 percent were 15 and 16; and the remaining 40 percent were over 45.
In return for providing recruits, the Hmong opium growers received CIA support and their economy flourished. Also, Vang Pao’s control over the opium industry gave him more authority, especially when he needed to recruit young soldiers. Thus, the CIA relied on Vang Pao to supply soldiers in its secret war, and the CIA supplied his tribesmen with rice while opium was grown and frequently flown on CIA planes.
CIA operant Tony Poe was assigned as the chief adviser to Vang Pao and to supervise his secret army’s operations. Poe promised Hmong soldiers one dollar for a Pathet Lao’s ear and ten dollars for a severed head. On the one hand, Poe frequently refused to allow opium to be transported on Air American planes. On the other hand, he ignored the prospering heroin factories and never stopped any of Vang Pao’s officers from using American facilities to manage illicit drugs.
Another CIA operant, Edgar Buell, was assigned to the Plain of Jars where a large portion of the secret army was trained. Buell became in charge of dispatching Air America planes to drop rice and other necessities to the Hmong. In addition Buell used his expertise in agriculture to improve the Hmongs’ skills in the cultivation and production of opium.
While the United States was at its peak involvement in the Vietnam War, morphine base was being processed in the Golden Triangle and then exported to Hong Kong and Europe. In 1968 Shackley met in Saigon with Trafficante, Clines, and warlord Vang Pao, setting up a heroin smuggling ring to the United States. A Green Beret official speaking to Green Beret officers stated that “Shackley had been responsible for 250 political killings in Laos.”
None of the opium refineries mastered the technique to produce high-grade number four heroin which is 90 to 99 percent pure. By 1969 expert chemists from Hong Kong were imported into the Golden Triangle region, and they produced limited amounts of high grade heroin for tens of thousands of American GIs in South Vietnam. By 1970 the amount of heroin available to Americans was unlimited. The opium harvests were transported by Vang Pao’s officers and then flown on Air America UH-1H helicopters to processing plants in Vientiane and Long Tieng.
However, with the beginning of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy in the months to follow, the market for heroin drastically dropped. Then Chinese, Corsican, and American syndicates began sending large shipments of number four heroin directly to the United States. As a result of these massive exports to the United States, the wholesale price for a kilogram of number four heroin in the processing plants in the Golden Triangle actually increased by 44 percent — from $1,240 to $1,780 — in less than one year. At the same time, the price of raw opium in the villages jumped from $24 to $45 per kilogram. In 1970 the number of heroin addicts in the United States reached 750,000. More than a thousand tons of opium was being raised in the Golden Triangle.
By 1973, the United States was losing in Vietnam and in Laos as well. The CIA was forced to import approximately 20,000 Thai mercenaries in order to replenish the exhausted Hmong troops who could not provide additional recruits. That year, the Laotian government signed a truce with the Pathet Lao, ostensibly ending the CIA’s secret war. Slowly, the CIA abandoned over 300 landing strips and turned over its aircraft to the Laotian government. In 1974 on orders from the Laotian government, Air America abandoned its facilities. As Pathet Lao soldiers increased their presence in Laos, Vang Pao’s military and dwindled to 6,000 troops. Usually, Vang Pao retreated rather than to fight, and eventually the Pathet Lao marched into Vientiane. Vang Pao finally agreed to flee to Thailand, and the CIA provided transportation for him and his top officers.
Opium production plummeted after 1975. After the United States withdrew from Vietnam, black market operations dwindled, making it difficult for Shan rebels to purchase weapons. In addition, between 1978 and 1980 the Golden Triangle was hit with two droughts. This was followed by two seasons of intense monsoon rains, reducing the region’s opium production to a record low. The usual 600 ton opium harvests were cut to 160 tons in 1978 and 240 tons in 1979. Recovering from this two year failure, the region began to produce a bumper crop in the 1980s.
Khun Sa stated that Richard Armitage, at that time an envoy in the American embassy, financed drug smuggling in Vietnam and Bangkok from 1975 to 1979. CIA agents Daniel Arnold and Jerry Daniels trafficked weapons and drugs with Khun Sa. The operation was believed to be at its peak in 1975 and 1976 under George Bush. In a letter to George Bush, Gritz maintained that Khun Sa claimed that he had once engaged in narcotics transactions with Richard Armitage, who later became the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Shackley, as well as other American officials. Bush was head of the CIA in 1976 when Khun Sa said that he was selling drugs to top CIA officials. Gritz says that, strangely, nobody in the American government was interested in an investigation. Gritz later testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s International Narcotics Control Task Force.
By 1983, Khun Sa strengthened his forces, and opium production was on the rebound. With Hong Kong chemists and over ten refineries, Khun Sa increased his holdings, controlling 75 percent of Golden Triangle opium production. Khun Sa was able to defeat KMT forces, and he destroyed numerous heroin facilities. With a virtual monopoly on opium trade in the Golden Triangle, Khun Sa was only briefly attacked by Thai and Burmese government forces which were able to secure a small area. Khun Sa was forced to evacuate some of his heroin laboratories, but he merely moved them into Laos.
Khun Sa had eliminated all his rebel rivals, and by 1986 he was refining 80 percent of the opium harvest in the Golden Triangle. The king of opium trade, Khun Sa had risen to become the world’s largest single heroin trafficker by controlling 60 percent of the world’s illicit opium supply.
In 1986, Bo Gritz went to Burma with White House approval to meet with Khun Sa who supposedly had information on American MIAs. Khun Sa said that he wanted to end the opium and heroin traffic in his territory and to expose American officials involved in the drug smuggling. Gritz claimed that he took this message to the United States government and was told by Tom Harvey of the National Security Council that “there is no interest here” in the Khun Sa overture. Gritz had in his possession 40 hours of video tape of Khun Sa who “charged American officials, both past and present, with being the chief buyers of drugs produced in that part of the world.” He also claimed that he wanted to stop drug trafficking, but that the United States government would not let him. Khun Sa said that the CIA were some of his best customers. He offered support to the DEA to alert them of drug movements, but this was rejected at the headquarters level.
In 1988, the government of Burma fell into the hands of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC). Its goal was to bolster the nation’s economy by doubling opium exports, and within two years 60 percent of the world’s heroin — valued at $40 billion a year — was exported from Burma.
Also in 1988, the single largest heroin seizure was made in Bangkok. The 2,400-pound shipment of heroin, en route to New York City, originated from Khun Sa in the Golden Triangle. Two years later in a meaningless gesture an American court indicted Khun Sa in absentia on heroin trafficking. He was charged with importing 3,500 pounds of heroin into New York City over the course of 18 months, as well as holding him responsible for the source of the heroin seized in Bangkok. Specifically, he was charged with being the owner of a 2,400 pound shipment which was intercepted in Bangkok en route to New York City in 1988. This was the largest single heroin seizure ever.
In 1990, Lo Hsing-han was released from prison and was welcomed back by the same factions which had driven him out. He met with Burmese government officials and soon thereafter opened 17 new heroin factories in the Golden Triangle.
By 1995, the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia remained the leader in opium production, yielding 2,500 tons annually. According to American drug experts, new drug trafficking routes from Burma through Laos, to southern China, Cambodia and Vietnam were drawn up.
In 1996, the SLORC cut a deal with Khun Sa. He had been indicted by the United States Justice Department six years before, but SLORC refused to extradite him. Instead, he was given the Burma-to-Thailand taxi concession and a 44 acre ranch where his son plans to build a gambling and shopping complex. The agreement also reportedly included a deal allowing him to retain control of his opium trade in exchange for ending his 30 year old war against the government. Underground activist groups, operating along the Indo-Burma border, have continued to purchase arms and ammunition from Khun Sa’s soldiers.
Sources for Drug trafficking: DarkPolitics
Killing Field Atrocities
US troops routinely referred to the enemy by various racist names: gooks, dinks, slopes, and so on – a deep state tactic to dehumanize the enemy so killing other humans is more tolerable, or even enjoyable. More than 3 million Vietnamese were killed in the war, mostly innocent women and children. US troops were pushed and rewarded for high body counts. A notorious example was US Army Lieutenant General Julian Ewell. The commanding general of the 9th Infantry Division, Ewell became known as the “Butcher of the Delta.” Douglas Kinnard, an American general serving in Vietnam under Ewell, recounted his impressions of him (in “Adventures in Two Worlds: Vietnam General and Vermont Professor”). Ewell, recalled Kinnard, “constantly pressed his units to increase their ‘body count’ of enemy soldiers. This had become a way of measuring the success of a unit since Vietnam was [for the US Army] a war of attrition, not a linear war with an advancing front line. In the 9th [infantry division] he had required all his commanders to carry 3” x 5” cards with body count tallies for their units by date, by week, and by month. Woe unto any commander who did not have a consistently high count.” “ Slackers” who didn’t kill enough of the enemy were punished.
Helicopters. As one soldier put it, a helicopter gave you a god’s eye view of the battlefield. It gave you distance from the enemy, enabling easier kills (If farmers are running, they’re VC, it was assumed, so shoot to kill). Helicopters facilitated a war based on mobility, firepower, and kill ratios, rather than a war based on territorial acquisition and interaction with the people. In short, US troops were often in and out, flitting about the Vietnamese countryside, isolated from the land and the people – while shooting lots and lots of ammo. They were then rewarded for producing high body counts. And when atrocities followed, massacres such as My Lai, US leaders like Richard Nixon conspired to cover them up.
What are we fighting for? For the grunt on the ground, the war made no sense. Bernard Fall noted that, after talking to many Americans in Vietnam, he hadn’t “found anyone who seems to have a clear idea of the end – of the ‘war aims’ – and if the end is not clearly defined, are we justified to use any means to attain it?” In short, atrocities were not aberrational. They were driven by the policy; they were a product of a war fought under false pretenses. This is not tragedy. It’s criminal.
Source: Antiwar.com
POW’s Left in Vietnam
The LA Times reported:
In their book, “Kiss the Boys Good Bye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own P.O.W.’s in Vietnam,” the Stevensons have elected to become the advocates for families of lost soldiers and the community of former soldiers who came home but never stopped fighting the war. They call this network, whose most prominent members include such personalities as Texas financier H. Ross Perot and Navy Capt. Eugene (Red) McDaniel (said to be the most tortured POW during the war), the Telephone Tree.
“Without question, Americans were left behind” in Vietnam, William Stevenson said in a recent interview. “But I got involved in this quagmire only after I saw what was being done to good people, to POW wives and honorable men who fought for their country in an unpopular war and are now getting discredited by their own government for telling the truth about POWs being alive.”
His wife, her eyes narrowed and angry, added: “It seemed to me, well, it seemed to us that it was time the American public were told that this is not the cause of a bunch of kooky people and Rambo-esque types.”
Their book did encounter hurdles getting into print and the strain seems to have worn on the Stevensons. Their first publisher rejected their original manuscript, claiming it was editorially and legally unacceptable. They countered with a lawsuit, insisting the publisher was bowing to government pressure. “We have a whole basement filled with manuscripts, ” William Stevenson said wearily.
Anger and resignation would seem odd conduct for this couple. Monika Jensen Stevenson was a producer for the prestigious “60 Minutes” television show who left in 1986 after the program would not let her do a full story on the POW issue. Her husband, an acclaimed author of such books as “A Man Called Intrepid” and “90 Minutes At Entebbe,” is considered an expert in government intelligence.
But the couple’s book clearly shows their struggles with one of the most emotional remnants of Vietnam, the war after the war, the bitter, complex battle over the unanswered questions that remain about America’s POWs. After the United States signed the 1973 peace accords with the Vietnamese, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said the government knew of no American POWs alive in Vietnam. That line changed by the 1980s, particularly after former Marine Bobby Garwood got out.
In an article from The American Conservative titled John McCain and the POW Cover-Up, evidence is given that the “war hero,” former Presidential candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam.
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.
The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the U.S. prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What’s more, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of “debunking” POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.
The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.
One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon’s performance was an insider, Air Force Lt. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon’s position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement.
Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general’s briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war’s end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.
Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a Feb. 2, 1973 formal letter to Hanoi’s premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid “without any political conditions.” But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party “in accordance with its own constitutional provisions.” That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored—and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners—just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.
In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi’s desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture—were eventually executed.
An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called “the Truth Bill” and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: “[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency.”
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as “the McCain Bill,”suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios, and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying, “Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both.” A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.
The full article is well worth a read as it goes on to detail McCain’s role in covering up the evidence of POW’s left behind in Vietnam, the key evidence that proves they were left behind, and how the Senate committee perpetuated the debunking.
As most readers are aware, the Rothschild’s and international bankers love war because it makes them lots of money, and for many other reasons they enjoy that we won’t get into here. It’s also documented by Norman Dodd in his research of the tax exempt foundations for the Reece Committee that the deep state planned to use war because it was deemed the most effective way to create change in the overall culture and drive the masses towards a new world order. Thus, James Perloff may be correct when he draws the following conclusions for the purpose of the Vietnam War:
And what was their purpose in Vietnam? Aside from lesser motives (such as elimination of the draft, a move necessary to transform the military into an international police force—difficult to do with scruples-minded draftees in the ranks—and the usual weapons profiteering), the war was used to create a national divide. Americans faced a catch-22: they could either be “doves” and join the Rockefeller-backed, drugged-up hippies; or they could be scorned as “hawks” in the ranks of Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” favoring a war rigged to be lost.
In reality, the Deep State was deceiving both sides, though few people knew the Deep State even existed. But in the great national struggle over Vietnam, one side would wind up on top. The winner was predictable from who was universally favored by Hollywood, the music industry, and the rest of mainstream media: the “doves.” When all will power to continue the war had been inevitably exhausted, and the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, the doves could shout: “We told you so!”
While communism was allowed to win militarily in Vietnam, in America cultural Marxism won. We were changed from a Leave It to Beaver society to a Woodstock society. It hadn’t been just about Vietnam; a sweeping assault had been launched on the nation’s core Christian values, as sexual liberation—previously known as “immorality”—infected American youth, along with getting high on drugs. And having been defeated by “invincible” communism, many of my generation became political leftists, in a variation on Stockholm Syndrome.
This opened a Pandora’s Box, as a host of other counterculture agendas were piggybacked onto the antiwar movement: feminism (feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA), the gay movement, the pro-abortion movement, finally morphing into today’s transgenderism, pedophilia, and open Satanism.
