(under reconstruction)
Finkelstein, Norman G.
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 2nd Rev edition (April 2003)
Bamford, James
A Pretext For War : 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
New York : Doubleday, 1994
Manning, Paul
Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile
Lyle Stuart Inc. 1981.
Valentine, Douglas
The Phoenix Program: a Shattering Account of the Most Ambitious and Closely Guarded Operation of the Vietnam War
New York: William Morrow,1990
Editorial Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
A CIA operation, the Phoenix Program aimed at destroying the Vietcong infrastructure. Former Phoenix and CIA director William Colby contended in his book Lost Victory that the program's reputation for brutality is undeserved. Valentine ( The Hotel Tacloban ) counters that claim in this shocking expose of the origins, rationale, methods and results of a program that was responsible for the execution of some 40,000 Vietnamese and the death, torture and imprisonment of countless civilians. The author describes how entire families and whole villages were wiped out in the cause of "Vietnamization." He explores the question of how Americans, from a nation ruled by laws and the ethic of fair play, could have created a campaign of such systematic savagery. No book published to date conveys the hideousness of the Vietnam War as thoroughly as this one. Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Designed to destroy the Vietcong infrastructure and ostensibly run by the South Vietnamese government, the Phoenix Program--in fact directed by the United States--developed a variety of counterinsurgency activities including, at its worst, torture and assassination. For Valentine ( The Hotel Tacloban , LJ 9/15/84), the program epitomizes all that was wrong with the Vietnam War; its evils are still present wherever there are "ideologues obsessed with security, who seek to impose their way of thinking on everyone else." Exhaustive detail and extensive use of interviews with and writings by Phoenix participants make up the book's principal strengths; the author's own analysis is weaker. This is a good complement to Dale Andrade's less emotional Ashes to Ashes (Lexington, 1990) and such participant accounts as Orrin M. DeForest and David Chanoff's Slow Burn (S. & S., 1990).Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Morley Safer, The New York Times Book Review, September 1990.
"Within these pages is stuff of great importance: examples of human folly, courage, stupidity, and greed."
From the Author
Feel free to contact the author at: [email protected]
From the Back Cover
"This definitive account of the Phoenix Program remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians." Professor Alfred J. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in The Global Drug Trade.
About the Author
Douglas Valentine lives with his wife Alice in Western Massachusetts. He is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, a widely praised account of life and death in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and of TDY, a based-on-fact adventure story about one soldier's encounter with CIA agents and opium bandits.
Excerpted from The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine. Copyright (c) 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved : "Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers. As a result, its detractors charge that Phoenix violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war. "By analogy," said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, "if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia."
"Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang as it was called by the Vietnamese, due process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered simply on the word of an anonymous informer. At its height, Phoenix managers imposed a quota of eighteen hundred neutralizations per month on the people running the program in the field, opening up the program to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians as well as VCI. Legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein described Phoenix as, "A very good blackmail scheme for the central government: 'If you don't do what I want, you're VC.'"
"Because Phoenix "neutralizations" were often conducted at midnight while its victims were home, sleeping in bed, Phoenix proponents describe the program as a "scalpel" designed to replace the "bludgeon" of search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese population. Yet the scalpel cut deeper than the U.S. government admits. Indeed, Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counter-terror - the psychological warfare tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the entire population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.
"This book questions how Americans, who consider themselves a nation ruled by laws and an ethic of fair play, could create a program like Phoenix. By scrutinizing the program and the people who participated in it, and by employing the program as a symbol of the dark side of the human psyche, the author hopes to articulate the subtle ways in which the Vietnam War changed how Americans think about themselves. This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations - ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies - the American people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost."
Book Description
"This definitive account of the Phoenix program, the US attempt to destroy the Viet Cong through torture and summary execution, remains sobering reading for all those trying to understand the Vietnam War and the moral ambiguities of America's Cold War victory. Though carefully documented, the book is written in an accessible style that makes it ideal for readers at all levels, from undergraduates to professional historians."
-Alfred W. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Cockburn, Alexander; St. Clair, Jeffrey
Whiteout : The CIA, Drugs and the Press
London: Verso, 1999.
Webb, Gary
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
Seven Stories Press, New York, 1999
Editorial Reviews:
In July 1995, San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb found the Big One--the blockbuster story every journalist secretly dreams about--without even looking for it. A simple phone call concerning an unexceptional pending drug trial turned into a massive conspiracy involving the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, L.A. and Bay Area crack cocaine dealers, and the Central Intelligence Agency. For several years during the 1980s, Webb discovered, Contra elements shuttled thousands of tons of cocaine into the United States, with the profits going toward the funding of Contra rebels attempting a counterrevolution in their Nicaraguan homeland. Even more chilling, Webb quickly realized, was that the massive drug-dealing operation had the implicit approval--and occasional outright support--of the CIA, the very organization entrusted to prevent illegal drugs from being brought into the United States.
Within the pages of Dark Alliance, Webb produces a massive amount of evidence that suggests that such a scenario did take place, and more disturbing evidence that the powers that be that allowed such an alliance are still determined to ruthlessly guard their secrets. Webb's research is impeccable--names, dates, places, and dollar amounts gather and mount with every page, eventually building a towering wall of evidence in support of his theories. After the original series of articles ran in the Mercury-News in late 1996, both Webb and his paper were so severely criticized by political commentators, government officials, and other members of the press that his own newspaper decided it best not to stand behind the series, in effect apologizing for the assertions and disavowing his work. Webb quit the paper in disgust in November 1997. His book serves as both a complex memoir of the time of the Contras and an indictment of the current state of America's press; Dark Alliance is as necessary and valuable as it is horrifying and grim. --Tjames Madison
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Michael Massing
...a densely researched, passionately argued, acronym-laden 548-page volume.
The Nation, Jo Ann Kawell
I find his argument to be very well documented, very careful and very convincing. In fact, the readability of the book suffers a bit from what seems to have been a fear that if he didn't include absolutely every bit of evidence he had unearthed, he would open himself up to new criticisms of inadequate reporting--but this editor's quibble shouldn't stop anyone from buying and reading Dark Alliance. Long-time followers of the contra tale are likely to find new revelations in the book....
Ingram
The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the "San Jose Mercury News" who broke the decade's most inflammatory news story continues to unravel the CIA-Contra-crack connection. "The most talked-about piece of journalism in 1996 and arguably the most famous--and some would say infamous--set of articles of the decade".--"Columbia Journalism Review" National media publicity. National print ads. 10-city author tour.]
Simpson, Christopher
Blowback - The First Full Account Of America's Recruitment Of Nazis, & Its Disastrous Effect On Domestic & Foreign Policy
New York, New York, U.S.A.: Grove/Atlantic, 1988
Sterling & Peggy Seagrave
Gold Warriors. America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold.
London: Verso, 2003
With the option of obtaining the 60,000 pages of supporting documentation on 2 CD-ROMS
A few brief highlights from the[ versobooks.com ]website:
In 1945, US Intelligence officers in Manila discovered that the Japanese had hidden large quantities of gold bullion and other looted treasure in the Philippines. President Truman decided to recover the gold but to keep its riches secret. These would be combined with treasure recovered inside Japan during the US occupation, and with Nazi loot recovered in Europe, to create a worldwide American political action fund to fight communism.
Overseen by General MacArthur, President Truman, and John Foster Dulles, this "Black Gold" gave Washington virtually limitless, unaccountable funds, providing an asset base to reinforce the treasuries of America's allies, to bribe political and military leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries for more than fifty years. Drawing on a vast range of original documents and thousands of hours of interviews, Gold Warriors exposes one of the great state secrets of the twentieth century.
"Fast-paced and jammed with racy details and incident ... engrossing to anyone who has ever attempted to filter through the mass of detail and conjecture, fact and rumor, and bare-faced lying that fill the bewildering hodgepodge of source we must draw on the studies of China." - Jonathan Spence, New York Times Book Review, on The Soong Dynasty
Sterling Seagrave was a reporter for the Washington Post before becoming a freelance investigative journalist contributing to Time, Life, Atlantic Monthly, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is the author of The Soong Dynasty, among other books. Peggy Seagrave was the senior researcher and picture editor at Time-Life Books. Together they are the authors of the bestselling Lords of the Rim and The Yamato Dynasty.
The Seagraves have uncovered one of the biggest secrets of the twentieth century. - Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking.
Black, Edwin
War Against the Weak : Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003
Editorial Reviews :
The plans of Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis to create a Nordic "master race" are often looked upon as a horrific but fairly isolated effort. Less notice has historically been given to the American eugenics movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although their methods were less violent, the methodology and rationale which the American eugenicists employed, as catalogued in Edwin Black's Against the Weak, were chilling nonetheless and, in fact, influential in the mindset of Hitler himself. Funded and supported by several well-known wealthy donors, including the Rockefeller and Carnegie families and Alexander Graham Bell, the eugenicists believed that the physically impaired and "feeble-minded" should be subject to forced sterilization in order to create a stronger species and incur less social spending. These "defective" humans generally ended up being poorer folks who were sometimes categorized as such after shockingly arbitrary or capricious means ! such as failing a quiz related to pop culture by not knowing where the Pierce Arrow was manufactured. The list of groups and agencies conducting eugenics research was long, from the U.S. Army and the Departments of Labor and Agriculture to organizations with names like the "American Breeders Association." Black's detailed research into the history of the American eugenics movement is admirably extensive, but it is in the association between the beliefs of some members of the American aristocracy and Hitler that the book becomes most chilling. Black goes on to trace the evolution of eugenic thinking as it evolves into what is now called genetics. And while modern thinkers have thankfully discarded the pseudo-science of eugenics, such controversial modern issues as human cloning make one wonder how our own era will be remembered a hundred years hence. --John Moe
From Publishers Weekly
In the first half of the 20th century, more than 60,000 Americans-poor, uneducated, members of minorities-were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from passing on supposedly defective genes. This policy, called eugenics, was the brainchild of such influential people as Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie and Margaret Sanger. Black, author of the bestselling IBM and the Holocaust, set out to show "the sad truth of how the scientific rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were first concocted on Long Island" at the Carnegie Institution's Cold Spring Harbor complex. Along the way, he offers a detailed and heavily footnoted history that traces eugenics from its inception to America's eventual, post-WWII retreat from it, complete with stories of the people behind it, their legal battles, their detractors and the tragic stories of their victims. Black's team of 50 researchers have done an impressive job, and the resulting story is at once shocking and gripping. But the publisher's claim that Black has uncovered the truth behind America's "dirty little secret" is a bit overstated. There is a growing library of books on eugenics, including Daniel Kevles's In the Name of Eugenics and Ellen Chesler's biography of Margaret Sanger, Woman of Valor. Black's writing tends to fluctuate from scholarly to melodramatic and apocalyptic (and sometimes arrogant), but the end result is an important book that will add to the public's understanding of this critical chapter of American history.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Read all of his new book, investigative reporter Black insists, or none of it. Good advice, despite Black's many repetitions, odd word choices, and grammatical gaffes, for the story he tells shouldn't be imperfectly known. Its crux is that American researchers and laws inspired Nazi racism. Building on nineteenth-century English statistician Francis Galton's speculations about human heredity, and calling their highly subjective work eugenics, early-twentieth-century American researcher-activists persuaded many states to permit sexual sterilization of the mentally and physically inferior. With American eugenists cheering them on, the Nazis advanced to exterminating those deemed inferior. Thoroughly chronicling eugenics in America and Germany, Black stresses what happened rather than why. He doesn't probe individual eugenists' deep motivations or hazard cultural explanations; indeed, after exposing Planned Parenthood founderMargaret Sanger's lifelong adherence to eugenics, Black pronounces her a great humanitarian. Less timorously, he asks whether contemporary genetics is becoming "newgenics" as insurance companies and employers find reasons to create an uninsurable, unemployable genetic underclass. Turgid but impressive, probably the popular history of eugenics for the foreseeable future. Ray Olson
Copyright (c) American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Edwin Black is the award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author of IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST and THE TRANSFER AGREEMENT, as well as a novel, FORMAT C:. He lives near Washington, D.C.
Book Description
The explosive true story of America's century-long attempt to create a master race-by the author of the New York Times bestseller IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST
In WAR AGAINST THE WEAK, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects the crimes of the Nazis to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early twentieth century called eugenics. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island, but it ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg declared such practices crimes against humanity.
It started in 1904, when a small group of U.S. scientists launched an ambitious new race-based movement that was championed by our nation's social, political, and academic elite. Funded by America's leading corporate philanthropies, such as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, and entrenched in classrooms across America, eugenicists sought to eliminate social "undesirables." Their methods: forced sterilization, human breeding programs, marriage prohibition, and even passive euthanasia. Perhaps more shocking-eugenics was sanctioned by the Supreme Court. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in twenty-seven U.S. states, and the supporters of eugenics included such progressive thinkers as Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The victims of eugenics were poor white people from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally ill and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified. Through international academic exchanges, American eugenicists exported the movement worldwide. It eventually caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler.
To write WAR AGAINST THE WEAK, Edwin Black led a team of fifty researchers in dozens of archives in four countries, generating some 50,000 documents. In this rigorous, comprehensive, brilliantly told story that spans a century, readers will discover the chilling truth of how the scientific rationales that drove Nazi doctors were first concocted by "scientists" at the Carnegie Institution in New York; how the Rockefeller Foundation's massive financial grants to German scientists culminated in Mengele's heinous experiments at Auschwitz; how, after World War II, eugenics was reborn as human genetics; and why confronting the history of eugenics is essential to understanding the implications of the Human Genome Project and twenty-first-century genetic engineering.
Anonymous
Terrorist Hunter : The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America
New York: CCCO/Harper Collins Imprint, 2003.
Martin A. Lee
The Beast Reawakens : Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups & Right-Wing Extremists
Little, Brown & Company 1997
Gentry, Curt
J. Edgar Hoover : The Man and the Secrets
New York, NY, U.S.A.: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 1991
(From the author of Helter Skelter; a stunning piece of scholarship 16 years in the making. Covers the 1934 coup attempt in some detail)
Hohne, Heinz & Hermann Zolling
The General Was a Spy: The Truth About General Reinhard Gehlen and His Spy Ring
N.Y.: Bantam, 1972.
(translated from the German--- a series that appeared in Der Spiegel in the early 1970's.)
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas
The Occult Roots of Nazism : Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology
New York, NY, U.S.A.: New York University Press, 1992
Shawcross, William
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia.
New York, NY; Simon and Schuster 1979
Goñi, Uki.
The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina
London , Granta Books 2002
Unger , Craig
House of Bush, House of Saud : The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
New York ; Scribner 2004
Holden, David & Johns, Richard
The House of Saud: The Rise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World
London, UK: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981
Briody, Dan
The Iron Triangle : Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group
Hoboken, NJ, U.S.A.: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2003
Prouty,Col. L. Fletcher
The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World
Englewood Cliffs Nj Prentice Hall 1973
Loftus, John
The Belarus Secret : In the aftermath of WWII certain government agencies smuggled hundreds of Nazis and their collaborators into the United States and continue to protect them. This edition updated with new evidence about Klaus Barbie, the 'Butcher of Lyons'
Penguin Books, Middlex, England, 1983
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth
Fascist Modernities : Italy, 1922-1945 (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, Vol. 42)
Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.: University of California Press, 2001.
Hewitt, Andrew
Fascist Modernism : Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde
Standford, CA ; Stanford University Press,1993
Freidman, Alan
Spider's Web : The Secret History Of How The White House IIlegally Armed Iraq
Bantam, 1993
Lepre, George
Himmler's Bosnian Division: The Waffen-SS Handschar Division 1943-1945
Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 1997.
Hersh, Seymour
The Price of Power : Kissinger in the Nixon White House
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Summit Books, 1983
Kornbluh, Peter, ed.
The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (A National Security Archive Book)
W. W. Norton & Co. 2003
Lasby, Clarence G.
Project Paperclip : German Scientists and the Cold War
New York: Atheneum, 1971
Higham, Charles
Trading with the Enemy : The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949
MacClear, Michael
The Ten Thousand Day War: Vietnam; 1945-1975
St Martins Press 1981
Ascherson, Neal; Hilton, Isabel; Linklater, Magnus
The Nazi Legacy : Klaus Barbie and the International Fascist Connection
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Henry Holt & Company, 1985.
Bellant, Russ
Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party : Domestic Fascist Networks and Their Effect on U. S. Cold War Politics
Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.: South End Press, 1991
Kutler, Stanley I.
Abuse of Power : The New Nixon Tapes
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Simon & Schuster,,1998
Colodny, Len
Silent Coup : The Removal of a President
New York, NY, U.S.A.: St. Martin's Press, 1992
[the Alexander Haig- Bob Woodward connection]
Anderson, Scott & Anderson, Jon Lee
Inside The League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986
Simpson, Christopher.
The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century
Grove Press 1993.
Black, Edwin
IBM and the Holocaust : The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Crown Publishing Group, Incorporated, 2001.
Scott , Peter Dale
Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina
Rowman & Littlefield (May 2003)
Higham, Charles.
American Swastika - The Shocking Story Of Nazi Collaborators In Our Midst From 1933 to the Present Day
Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1985
Coogan, Kevin.
Dreamer Of The Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International
Autonomedia 1999
Riefenstahl, Leni
Leni Riefenstahl : A Memoir
New York, NY, U.S.A.: St. Martin's Press, 1993.
Leigh, Wendy
Arnold : An Unauthorized Biography
Congdon & Weed; (May 1990)
Bamford, James
Body Of Secrets : Anatomy Of The Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
New York, New York., Random House (2001)
Infield, Glenn B.
Secrets Of The SS
New York. Stein and Day. 1982
Infield, Glenn B.
Skorzeny : Hitler's Commando
New York, St Martin's Press, 1981
Stevenson, William
The Bormann Brotherhood
New York: Bantam, 1974
Fargo, Ladislas
Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Morrow/Avon, 1975
Rhodes, Richard
Masters Of Death : The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Knopf Publishing Group, 2002
Eatwell, Roger
Fascism: A History
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Viking Penguin, 1996
Hohne, Heinz
The Order Of The Death's Head: The Story Of Hitler's SS
London: Penguin Books, 2000
Griffin, Roger, ed.
Fascism
Oxford University Press
Archer, Jules
The Plot to Seize the White House
New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973
(1934 corporatist coup / assassination attempt against FDR)
Heartfield, John
Photomontages of the Nazi Period
New York, NY, U.S.A.: Universe Publishing, 1977
Marks, John
The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioural Sciences
New York: Dell Publishing, 1988
DiEugenio, James and Pease, Lisa, eds.
The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X.
Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003
Pepper, William F.
Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King
New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995.
Prouty, Col. L. Fletcher.
JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy
New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992
Evanzz, Karl.
The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X
New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992.
Comments