Focus on the Extrajudicial Killings in RP: Operation Phoenix's Long Shadow

What is Operation Phoenix? How can an almost-40-year- old
counterrevolutionar y program mounted on foreign shores provide
relevant insights in explaining the current murderous spree in the
Philippines?

By Joel Garduce
Contributor

IBON Features--Splashed all over media, the commission appointed by
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to look into the current spate of
extrajudicial killings began its hearings this September.

Headed by former Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo, the body was
purportedly tasked to look into the rash of political killings of
farmer activists, union leaders, student leaders, party-list
organizers, professionals, church people and journalists that had
made the Philippines look more like the killing fields for nameless
assailants who lately did their bloody fare riding on motorcycles.

Human rights group Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of
People's Rights) reported that since Arroyo exploited EDSA 2 and
assumed the seat in Malacanang in 2001, 752 Filipino citizens from
all across the country have been waylaid extrajudicially. The
impunity with which these killings were done have outraged justice
and peace advocates both in and out of the country, including
American bishops, members of the diplomatic community from European
countries, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Amnesty
International.

The Melo commission's conduct so soon after it began hearings,
however, seemed to serve as the Arroyo regime's tokenism on this
matter to appease international concerns over the human rights
violations in the country. Through its own actions, the Melo
Commission has confirmed the worst fears of authentic advocates for
justice and peace: it may as well be paving the way for the
extrajudicial killings to continue unabated.

Given the failure, this early on, of the Melo Commission to truly
probe the killings, it remains urgent for peace advocates to continue
pushing for an independent, no-holds-barred inquiry into the killings.

Among the substantive points an independent, genuine inquiry ought to
take, various political observers have noted, way before the Arroyo-
directed inquiry began, is the apparent resemblance of the current
spate of killings to a Vietnam War-era US military operation
codenamed Operation Phoenix.

Past forward: Phoenix

Operation Phoenix was an infamous US covert action plan unleashed on
the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. It was
devised by no less than "the (US) President's man in Vietnam,"
Robert "Blowtorch" W. Komer of the US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) in 1967, shortly after being appointed special assistant for
pacification by then US President Lyndon B. Johnson in February 1966.

Promoted by Komer's Civil Operations and Rural Development Support
(CORDS) organization, Phoenix, Phuong Hoang in Vietnamese, evolved
from the existing Special Platoons set up in Quang Nai Province in
1965. It was originally named the Intelligence Coordination and
Exploitation Program (ICEX) when launched in 1967, utilizing South
Vietnamese as well as US CIA resources.

The intent was to make the overall US counterrevolutionary effort in
Vietnam more efficient. All intelligence activities and covert
operations in the South Vietnamese countryside were coordinated to
enable provincial security committees—which included paramilitary
Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) helmed by CIA province
officers—to identify and arrest what the US labeled as agents of the
Vietnamese communists or Viet Cong.

Among the hundreds of Americans directly involved in Phoenix—as much
as 650 officially remained by January 1969—many were to be legendary
CIA covert action operatives who cut their teeth in the program,
among them William Colby, Theodore Shackley, Evan Parker Jr., John
Mason, and John Tilton.

As ugly as it could get

In concrete terms, Phoenix was a terror and assassination program
that was as ugly as it could get. In the US-directed drive to
quantify success against the Vietnamese people's national liberation
movement, Phoenix instituted a macabre monthly quota system that
rewarded human kills as the covert program's prime success
indicators.

Indeed, a US officer would lament on this "mania of the body count"
propelling Phoenix. Operatives found it a "matter of expediency just
to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the
paperwork." An "awful lot of vendettas (were) carried out with
Phoenix license" where covert operatives—which included ex-convicts,
corrupt police and military officials, and other mercenaries
attracted to the CIA money—"assassinated a lot of the wrong damn
people."

Colby, Komer's successor in handling Phoenix who would later become
CIA director, boasted in an official 1971 US hearing that the
clandestine operation had killed more than 20,000 Vietnamese, mostly
unarmed peasant civilians—and eliminated through other means 45,000
more—from what the US establishment conveniently called the Viet
Cong Infrastructure (VCI).

What was targeted as VCI, however, actually consisted of non-military
democratic and patriotic organizations of Vietnamese at the
grassroots.

It got worse; no less than 6,300 more would be killed and 30,000
more "neutralized" under Phoenix after Colby's testimony. Until now,
no justice remains forthcoming for the multitude of Phoenix's
Vietnamese victims.

Clearly, Phoenix's chest-deep gore flouted international humanitarian
law like the fundamental Geneva Conventions of War. Against the
backdrop of rampant trafficking of heroin and other illegal narcotics
by the US covert action establishment, the US' use of horrific
biochemical weapons as Agent Orange, the rampant corruption of both
the US and puppet South Vietnamese governments, the illegal expansion
of the Vietnam War to neighboring Laos and Cambodia, and the severe
demoralization among US soldiers that led to widespread killings of
middle-level US military officers called "fraggings", Phoenix loomed
as the centerpiece terrorist act in the desperate US-directed
criminal war of genocide against the Vietnamese people.

Foil for US gore and mayhem to come

In the Phoenix terror, the US saw the shape of gore and mayhem to
come. In the twisted mindset of the US military establishment,
Phoenix did right and well. It thus became the foil for future US-
directed so-called counter-insurgency schemes against national
liberation movements elsewhere in Asia and Latin America. Military
operation plans supervised by the US military in its neocolonies
thereafter would systematically include as a key component
Phoenix's "non-traditional" approach of recruiting, training and
unleashing death squads to prey on impoverished unarmed civilians
residing in militarized countrysides. Thus did the spectre of Phoenix
stalk the Philippines, Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala
and other US-oppressed countries.

This infamous US covert program may well have been the forerunner of
all the so-called counter-insurgency programs launched by the
Philippine reactionary state since the Marcos dictatorship. The
various Orwellian-labeled "oplans"—from Marcos' "Katatagan" to
Macapagal-Arroyo' s "Bantay-Laya"—aimed to coordinate the state's US-
directed counterrevolutionary efforts for every administration, just
like Phoenix sought to do.

As in Phoenix, all these Philippine oplans seem to have been laid
down in tight coordination with the US military establishment, from
the US-RP Mutual Defense Board during Marcos' heyday to the US-RP
Defense Policy Board and the current US-RP Security Engagement Board,
though the newly-formed security engagement board stands on shaky
legal grounds as the agreement that formed it has not gone through
the constitutionally- mandated approval of both the US and Philippine
Senates.

Phoenix imprint on the current spate of killings

Phoenix's dark shadow seems to cast long as well over the current
spate of illegal killings. As the US dogmatically regarded the
independent democratic and patriotic organizations of the Vietnamese
at the grassroots as part of the Vietcong infrastructure (VCI), so
does Macapagal-Arroyo' s Oplan Bantay Laya generals blindly take the
Phoenix tack and criminally regard the historically unprecedented
growth of democratic organizing specially at the grassroots
countryside in the country as part of the "infrastructure" of the
Communist Party of the Philippines- New People's Army-National
Democratic Front (CPP-NDF-NPA) .

Arroyo's military henchmen appear to have bared their undemocratic
Phoenix indoctrination and taken the lead in libelously labeling the
leading people's organizations in the Philippines today as mere
CPP "fronts" as gleaned from the infamous "Knowing the Enemy" AFP
Powerpoint presentation and the book "Trinity of War" written by a
Macapagal-Arroyo general.

The regularity of the extrajudicial killings of late may also well
point to a Phoenix imprint: a demented military quota system of
illegal bloodletting could be underlying this spree of gore. The
masterminds and implementers of these covert actions appear to
robotically fulfill their death quotas, unmindful and undeterred by
growing democratic outrage both here and abroad.

Even the region-by-region local setup of Phoenix may have been
mimicked by the authors of the killings. This can be gleaned by the
telling case of the August 3, 2006 assassination in Daraga, Albay
province of United Methodist Church pastor Isaias Sta. Rosa, a member
of a local farmers' group identified with the leading national
peasant organization Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (Peasant
Movement of the Philippines) .

Isaias' death would have looked so similar to the other killings.
Except for one small detail. He was found dead with another dead man
bearing gunshot wounds lying beside him.

The other dead body turns out to be that of Cpl. Lordger Pastrana of
the Philippine Army. Isaias' wife later pointed out to him as one of
his husband's abductors. Despite her husband's armed abductors being
masked, Isaias' wife was able to identify Pastrana from his build.
All these confirmed the belief of Jonathan Isaias, the pastor
activist's brother and witness to his abduction, that Isaias'
abductors were from the military, because of their bearing, the
fatigues they were wearing, the high-powered firearms they carried
and their combat boots. Two previous occasions saw men in similar
military uniform, with nameplates hidden from view, searching his
brother's house.

And where did Pastrana come from? The abandoned military man was
apparently assigned to the Public Affairs Office of the 9th Infantry
Division based in the military's regional headquarters in Pili,
Camarines Sur.

Command behind the covert actions

While likely having an organization spread across the regions, Oplan
Bantay Laya's (OBL) covert action command is centralized, ensconced
at the heart of the regime's power, Pres. Arroyo herself and her
close partner committee, the Cabinet Oversight Committee on Internal
Security (COC-IS), whose members are Executive Secretary and former
AFP General Eduardo Ermita, National Security Adviser Norberto
Gonzales, Justice Secretary Raul Gonzales, Defense Secretary Avelino
Cruz and AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon who recently
replaced Gen. Generoso Senga, together with the US-RP Security
Engagement Board.

As in Phoenix, Oplan Bantay Laya's workings seem to ride roughshod
over both local and international human rights standards specially
those relating to the conduct of war. Such barbaric treatment of
unarmed civilians in the hands of government security forces
flagrantly violate international legal instruments gained from the
global anti-fascist struggle during World War II as the Geneva
Conventions. More tellingly, the architects of this Phoenix-like
terror seem intent on copying Vietnam War-era bloodshed to the point
of nullifying the 1987 Constitution' s superior Bill of Rights as
well as the Comprehensive Agreement on Human Rights and International
Humanitarian Law (CAHRIHL), among the best things gained for peace
and justice by the Filipino people.

Could it be that the Phoenix-like extrajudicial killings in our
country serve some ugly politics? Similarities with Vietnam cannot be
ignored, where killings may manifest an eerie desperation on the part
of the ruling regime and its patron, the US. Such similarities
demonstrate the path towards state deception and violence that should
not have a place in a `democratic society'. Sadly, it is doubtful
that the Arroyo-appointed Melo Commission—as seen by its concrete
actions so early in its inquiry—will give the victims of
extrajudicial killings the full, authentic justice they deserve.

References
Beckett, Ian Frederick William, Encyclopedia of Guerilla Warfare. New
York, NY:Checkmark Books, 2001.
Corn, David, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades. New
York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
Helms, Richard, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central
Intelligence Agency. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, The CIA and American Democracy. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989.
Marchetti, Victor and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of
Intelligence. New York, NY: Dell Publishing Co., 1974.
Ranelagh, John, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. New
York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
"Partners in Terror", Paninindigan, September 2006.