Talk:Phoenix Program

Whitewash?

The Phoenix Program was notorious for abuses that went beyond stated aims and rules, and resulted in the abuse, torture and murder of thousands of Vietnamese by US military/intelligence personnel. This article now reads like a sanitized whitewash, or propaganda, that misleads students of history. It appears to have been edited over the past few years with a bias towards legitimizing and justifying the program, and downplaying the documented abuses. Look at the now-archived Talk pages for some relevant discussion, and some of the older versions. It appears that comments critical of the Phoenix Program, US policy or US military personnel have been removed, often with no discussion or comment. Sometimes the alleged grounds for deletion was inadequate references, but this seems to have been applied in a selective, biased fashion. Rather than correcting the reference, the sentence was deleted. US critics of the Program, and the war, have been downplayed. One editor appears to have been User:TDC, who was blocked from editing Wikipedia, and seemed to have a nationalist-US POV agenda; there may be others. Dehma1 (talk) 00:30, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Terrorism !?

20.000 + thousand civilians : medical doctors, nurses, teachers, professors, ordinary workers, managers, artists, students, many anonymous individuals without any social significance, etc. murdered in barbaric fashion, first tortured, often raped, and than butchered for sole purpose of TERRORIZING civil population. Every victim was tagged with one card - AS of spades.

CIA former employees, chiefs of stations, directors and deputy directors talk openly about "Operation Phoenix" (referring to Phoenix Program) in French documentary ARTE France 2003 "CIA: Secret Wars", using description and words mentioned above !

List of CIA employees talking about Phoenix Program, among other historical facts, can be previewed here.

Besides, intro to this article constitute pure propaganda. --Santasa99 (talk) 14:08, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Anything particular? Saying the whole article is propaganda isnt going to help. You can always add to it yourself if you have good references.Dougy05050 (talk) 07:53, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Article NPOV

The sources in this article are completely atrocious in light of the number of high quality sources available on this subject. Polemical sources should not be substituted for high quality academic works. I have tagged the article until these issues are addressed or I have time to address them. ZHurlihee (talk) 17:01, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

You need to be more specific. And you need to specify exactly which part of this article violates exactly which part of WP:NPOV before you re-add the tag. You can't just say "there's a problem" and then slap a tag on the entire article. You need to specify exactly what the problem is. -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 17:57, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

As I stated above ... the articles sources are almost entirely polemic in nature and full of serious errors. One such error is in Otterman's book when he uses information from former US Navy SEAL Elton Manzione (Manzione was never a SEAL and lied about his service). As such, the article is in need of a great deal of pruning, attribution and additional material from sources such as the following:

• Stuart Herrington’s “Stalking the Vietcong”
• John Cook’s “The Advisor”
• John Plaster’s SOG
• Dale Andrade’ “Ashes to Ashes”
• and Moyar’s account of Phoenix

The article as it is currently written is a left wing screed. If you disagree, I would ask you to get a third opinion. ZHurlihee (talk) 18:23, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I am gobsmacked by User:ZHurlihee's assertion and his WP:POV edits on this article. The article now reads like a right-wing screed. As noted above, earlier versions of this article (going back years) present a more balanced portrayal than the US military sources or revisionist historians with an axe to grind, who ZHurlihee seems to rely on, and who have an inherent conflict of interest. There are now decades of scholarship which document in excruciating detail the murders, torture and rape of thousands of innocent civilians which occured under this program. To selectively emphasize those sources which whitewash the history not only does a disservice to those who sufferred or died, but also to those who are trying to draw objective lessons from Vietnam (which resulted in an ignominious defeat for the USA) to apply to current 'counterinsurgency' killings. There are still areas that new research may shed light on. E.g., few studies to date have examined the broader impact on Vietnamese society, or the inflammatory impact in Vietnam created by the program's abuses. Dehma1 (talk) 05:05, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your input here. The sources I used here are all high quality and non polemic. Several of them are academic studies and a great deal more needs to be added to the article. According to WP:RS these are considered the highest quality sources. Concerning the abuses, I would tend to agree with Colonel Finlayson’s assessment that the majority of the allegations tend to be anecdotal, unsubstantiated, and false or as Moyar and Andrade document, made by individuals who later shown to unreliable. ZHurlihee (talk) 13:52, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Military sources have WP:COI issues. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:13, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your input, ZHurlihee, to the extent you keep it truly balanced, and not merely Wikipedia:Civil POV pushing. You have selectively chosen sources that are on only one side of a highly-contentious program. This is not NPOV. You have also deleted a dozen sources from the bibliography on the other side of that issue, including: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] Again, this is not NPOV. You cite only two sources (one from RAND which is funded mainly by DOD and one from a US military source) in order to make the sweeping generalization: "generally viewed by both US Military and former North Vietnamese officials as being the most productive counterinsurgency operation of the conflict and dealt a serious blow to the Viet Cong and the VCI," while ignoring many other sources which conclude it was not only a failure but actually made the situation worse by inflaming broad-based sentiment against the US. This is not NPOV. You rely heavily on work by Dale Andrade, who is employed by the U.S. Army, and Mark Moyar, who was employed by the U.S. Marine Corps until he joined Orbis Operations (a US paramilitary company operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the UAE). This selective reliance is not NPOV. You deleted a dozen related WP links, all of which are critical of the US role, including: Pentagon Papers, Russell Tribunal, My Lai Massacre, Winter Soldier Investigation, Human Rights Record of the United States, War crimes and the United States, Tiger Force and Tiger cages. You added a link about the Iraq war (rather oddly), Awakening movements in Iraq. This is not NPOV. You removed a half-dozen WP Categories from the article, all of which are critical of US policy in Vietnam, including: [[Category:Dirty wars]], [[Category:Terrorist incidents in the 1960s]], [[Category:Terrorist incidents in the 1970s]], [[Category:Torture in Vietnam]] and [[Category:War crimes in Vietnam]]. This is not NPOV. In every case, your edits show a consistent bias. Again, Wikipedia:Civil POV pushing is not NPOV. Dehma1 (talk) 14:52, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Dehma1, The sources I have included are all academic. While some individuals may object to the heavy use of them because of their connection to the US military, they are all very well researched and the authors are considered experts on this subject specifically and on military history in general. Andrade and Moyar, from everything I have read, are highly regarded scholars and noted for their study on this subject.

In general, the majority of my edits have been made to add to the factual content of the article. The who what when where why and how of the subject were extremely thin. The majority of the article was claims of abuses from some less than reputable sources, specifically Douglas Valentine. Valentine’s book, which is the primary source for nearly all of the critical material, has some grievous issues with both its factual accuracy as well as the individuals he interviewed. I wont get into specifics here, but a rather devastating review was performed in 1990 in the Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene by US Naval commander Fred Brown. I think given the issues with Valentine’s work on the subject, he shouldn’t be used a source for anything in the article and sources that rely on him should be used to cite opinion only, not fact. ZHurlihee (talk) 13:45, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

My cursory memory of the last few months of editing is that a lot of stuff has been deleted by all "sides" in this discussion. WP:NPOV requires that all significant viewpoints be entered to make something neutral. Be bold and return everything with a semi-reasonable reference. State the source in the text. --Timeshifter (talk) 06:08, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

I would agree on issues of opinion not on matters of fact, which the article up to this point was sorely lacking. I have been busy in the real world, but plan on finishing most of my edits this week. ZHurlihee (talk) 13:45, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Military sources have WP:COI issues. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:10, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

How so? ZHurlihee (talk) 13:23, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I think he's saying that using nothing but U.S. military sources for a U.S. military counterinsurgency program might not give you the complete picture about what is going on. That would be like writing the article Al Qaeda based exclusively on Al Qaeda literature. At Wikipedia, we try to write articles with a WP:NPOV (neutral point of view), not a WP:USMPOV (U.S. military point of view). What would be best is to, wherever possible, write the article based on high quality secondary sources that are not published by the military, which obviously has a conflict of interest when writing about its own wrongdoing. -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 16:55, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Include all sources, military and otherwise. WP:NPOV requires all significant viewpoints. --Timeshifter (talk) 17:32, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, sorry I wasn't clear on what I meant. The reason I said "wherever possible" is that I understand that sometimes all we will have available is U.S. military sources, in which case it will be OK to use them (carefully). But non-military sources are preferable to military sources, as far as reliability is concerned (note that "non-military" doesn't mean that they won't hold the same views as the military -- just that they aren't under the editorial control of the military). I'm not opposed to including military sources -- I just prefer higher quality sources without the COI, and think we should use military sources very carefully, and only when we don't have other sources that are covering the same topic. The military's view can still be included, of course, but it's best to get their views from a publisher has no COI and a more balanced editorial process, rather than directly from military publications. Anyhow, what we certainly shouldn't have is an entire article citing nothing but military sources, which is where things seem to be headed at this point. -- Jrtayloriv (talk) 18:15, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

The article, as I found it, was nearly devoid of facts and was derived almost entirely, if the sources were any indication, from polemic opinion. Every article should be fact based and academic sources subject to peer review, whether they be from military historians or not, are preferable. That’s the RS policy. Considering the bulk of all material of a factual nature on the subject comes from military historians, it naturally follows that the article’s content should come from these. Please note that I am not saying that the entire article should be derived from these sources, just the bulk of it, as the majority of the other sources on the subject are certainly no without their own biases, and as I have demonstrated, show an astonishingly low lack of credibility considering the magnitude and severity of what they alleged. ZHurlihee (talk) 19:32, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

I think the tag can stay up for now since some reasons have been given for it. Concerning WP:NPOV I suggest including all referenced views in the article, and let the reader decide.

I am not passing judgement on any of this, and will not be editing the article in any serious way. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:13, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Valentine as a source

Douglas Valentine’s book (the source for the “eel rape” quote) was based, in large part off many fraudulent sources. Among these include Elton Manzione who Valentine claimed was a US Navy Seals. Needless to say (or I wouldn’t be posting this), he wasn’t and this, and many more, were all documented in a review on Valentine’s book by US Naval Commander Fred Brown in Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene shortly after the books release. I have a copy of the article, but I dont knwo how to make it available for use here. Use of Valentine and derived material is not acceptable. ZHurlihee (talk) 21:50, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

RE. Elton Manzione[12] was not a SEAL and was represented as such by Douglas Valentine. Valentine has been known to invent quotes or take them out of context.

Like: "The implication or latent threat of force alone was sufficient to insure that the people would comply" quoted here as well. Attributed to William Colby, meaning that the USA was using threats and intimidation to bully the vietnamese.

Colby’s actual quote was: "the implication or latent threat of force alone was sufficient to insure that the people would comply with Communist demands." Meaning that the communists were using threats and intimidation to bully the vietnamese. Valentine simply inverted the meaning of someone else's quote to suit his agenda. V7-sport (talk) 22:40, 15 June 2011 (UTC)