Operation Phoenix was an operation run by the C.I.A during the Vietnam war, that has been referred to as a ‘computerised genocide’ program. The aim of Phoenix was to conduct infiltration, ‘counter-terrorism’, interrogation and assassination in order to undermine the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Vietcong and destroy its infrastructure.
It was considered less a component of ‘war’ and more a systematic method of torture, murder and genocide conducted by the United States. The strategy made a point not to target soldiers, but instead actively targeted civilians and operated under laws that allowed for the detention of ‘suspected communists’. Some of the strategies used by the United States in their regional interrogation centres were truly horrific, they included gang rape, rape with animals such as eels or snakes, rape with large foreign objects, electric shocks through wires attached to the victims genitals or tongue, suspending prisoners in the air by their arms which were tired behind their backs, and mauling by dogs.
One of the intelligence officers working at a centre described these sadistic methods, including:
The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee’s ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages…The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to…both the women’s vaginas and men’s testicles [to] shock them into submission.
While the My Lai massacre was portrayed in the United States as a few rogue, evil men who deviated from the protocol, Operation Phoenix makes it clear that the massacre was not a deviation and instead was in line with the terrorist approach that the United States was taking to Vietnam, an approach that many consider genocide.
