Brendan McQuade

7/29/10

Carceral Forms and Penal Practice from Poulo Condor to the PATRIOT Act:
When Counterrevolutionary Chickens Come Home to Roost

Images from The War on Terror should haunt the political culture of the United States for a long
time: US soldiers leading detainees—clad in orange jumpsuits, heads hooded, hands gloved and
cuffed—to indeterminable confinement; the victims of Abu Ghraib, hands bound behind their knees,
teetering on a boxes; and MPs posing next to the bleeding and bruised bodies of dead detainees, packed
in ice, who could not endure their “enhanced interrogation.” These images created a popular
controversy and public relations nightmare for the Bush Administration. They seemed to point toward
some dramatic shift. Indeed, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Bush administration initiated
the largest reorganization of the Federal Government since 1947 with the creation of the Department of
Homeland Security, and the reorganization of the intelligence community under the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence. With dramatic institutional change came two invasions and
occupations, both conducted with controversial policies—mass arrests, indefinite detention, and
“enhanced interrogation.” Alongside this foreign policy offensive was a related domestic push, a
crackdown on constitutionally protected political activity and regressive attack on judicial procedures:
aggressive and expanded surveillance,1 a proliferation of crimes of political status (targeting animal
liberationists and radical environmentalists within the United States2 and armed Islamic movements
across the globe3) and the debasement due process.4

1
W. Bloss (2007) “Escalating Police Surveillance After 9/11: an Examination of Causes and Effects.” Surveillance
and Society. Vol. 4, No. 3, (pp. 209-227); and D. Eggen (2005, December 16) “Bush Authorized Domestic Spying,”
Retrieved, June 1, 2010, from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/12/16/AR2005121600021.html
2
J. Sorenson (2009) "Constructing terrorists: propaganda about animal rights." Critical Studies on Terrorism Vol. 2,
no. 2, (pp 237-256); and D. Rovics (2007) “Pivotal Moment in the Green Scare.” Capitalism Nature Socialism. Vol.
18, No. 3, (pp. 8-16)
3
J. Margulies (2006) Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. New York: Simon & Schuster; R. Meeropol,
ed. (2005) America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees and the “War on Terror.” New York: Seven
Stories Press; and T. Paglen & A. C. Thompson (2006) Torture Taxi: On the Trial of the CIA’s Rendition Flights.
Hoboken: Melville House Publishing.
4
J. Mayer (2008) The Dark Side: The Inside Story of how the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.
New York: Double Day; and C. W. Michaels (2005) No Greater Threat: America After the September 11 and the Rise
of a National Security State. New York: Algora Publishing.
 McQuade~2

The apparent hardening of policy in the last decade, however, emerges from a longer history.
Indeed, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay is the 21st century incarnation of Poulo Condor Prison, the
island facility off the cost of Vietnam first constructed by the French colonialists and inherited by
counterinsurgents from the United States. Like the prison abuse scandals of the Bush Administration,
the US media and public’s attention briefly focused on the “tiger cages” of Poulo Condor, eighty
underground cells, connected by an elevated catwalk from which guards would drop caustic lime
powder on their wards. This apparent parallel speaks to deeper past in the imperial history of the United
States. Outside of the United States, there is a long history of imperial intervention and state-building:
“Indian Wars” and Mexican-American War, the turn of the century imperialism in the Caribbean and
Pacific, and the Cold War counterinsurgency campaigns and covert actions. Within the United States the
“counter-subversion” directed against organized labor and the wider “Old Left,” Black (inter)nationalists,
and the whole constellation of movements dedicated to peace, justice and equality is equally long. 5
The “Bush years,” then, are more than a war mobilization and the attendant lockdown of dissent
but a particular stage in a long history of conquest and counterrevolution, the terminal stage of the
neoliberal counterrevolution. While “Neoliberalism is often described as the ideology of the market and
private interests as opposed to state intervention,” Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy contend “it is
fundamentally a new social order in which the power and income of the upper fractions of ruling
classes—the wealthiest persons—was reestablished in the wake of a setback” (emphasis in original).6
Since the 1970s, this multifaceted “counterrevolution of property” has held the broadly “social
democratic,” corporatist arrangements (the legacy of 1848 to 1968) under siege.7 The sum total
neoliberalism is a new insecurity, sweeping away the rigidity and selective stability of social
democratic/Fordist/Cold War compromise. While sharing a common reliance on the “shock” of explicit
force, the neoliberal counterrevolution manifests itself differently across the unevenly developed world-
economy. The coup against Allende and the Falklands War were both vehicles inaugurating new
theaters of this world counterrevolution but the shock of a coup shaped Chile differently than a war

5
For a review of the historical evolution of “countersubversion” directed against social movements in the United
States, see: W. Churchill (2004) “Pinkertons to PATRIOT Act: The Trajectory of Political Policining the United States,
1870s to the Present.” The New Centennial Review. Vol. 4., No. 1, (pp. 1-72);
6
G. Duménil & D. Lévy (2005) “The Neoliberal (Counter)revolution” in A. Saad-Filho & D. Johnston, eds.
Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. (pp. 9-19). London: Pluto Press. p. 9
7
The term “Counterrevolution of Properly” is a reference to W.E.B. Dubois’ classic work, Black Reconstruction.
DuBois argues that the “abolition democracy” of the Radical Reconstruction was abandoned in the face of a
multifaceted counterrevolutionary effort, mobilized during a period of economic centralization. See: W.E.B Dubois
(1998) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press. p. 580-636.
 McQuade~3

mobilization changed the UK.8 Temporality and geography are powerfully constitutive elements of the
world-historic social transformations entailed in the neoliberal counterrevolution. The
“counterrevolution chickens” of (neo)colonial Vietnam fluttered about the US Imperial State, gradually
insinuating themselves in their new roost in the penal practices and carceral forms of the neoliberal
United States.
The literature on neoliberalism, however, largely analyzes this history through the rubric of
political economy, focusing on the abandonment of social protectionism and the related market reforms
and capital movements. The political processes behind the accomplishment of these dramatic policy
changes are the subject of less attention.9 To supplement this literature, I will focus on the
interconnections between the “foreign” and “domestic” aspects of this counterrevolution as they relate
to the uneven evolution of penal practice and carceral forms across “the US imperial state.” Historically,
I will demonstrate this argument through the example of the US “advisory” mission to the Republic of
Vietnam (RVN) during the Second Indochina War and, in particular, the consequences of a key policy
debate during the period of the Phoenix Program and Vietnamization (1967-1973). At this moment,
penal practices formalized as counterinsurgency were recast as counterterrorism, one the principal
mobilizing discourses of neoliberal counterrevolution. “Domestically,” this transformation is most
profound in the area of law and policing.
To make this argument, I engage with both the expanding literature on prisons and punishment
and the post-Cold War return to the question of the US Empire. Historically, the prison is one of the
iconic institutions of modernity.10 Various scholars argue that it is instrument of labor control,11 means
to manage surplus populations and crises of over-accumulation,12 a race making institution,13 a
formative center of public sentiment,14 and site of resistance.15 As a social institution, it is organically

8
N. Klein (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books
9
See: D. Canterbury (2005) Neoliberal Democratization and the New Authoritarianism. Burlington: Ashgate
Publishing Company; D. Harvey. (2003) The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press; M. Meeropol.
(2000) Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press; and E. Toussaint (2005) Your Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance. Chicago:
Haymarket Books.
10
M. Foucault (1995) Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage; M. Ignatieff. (1989) Just
Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. New York: Puffin.
11
For a review of Marxist criminology, see: D. Greenberg , ed. (1993) Crime and Capitalism: Reading in Marxist
Criminology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
12
R. Gilmore (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
13
L. Wacquant (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University
Press.
14
D. Garland (2002) Culture of Control: Crime Control in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
 McQuade~4

and unambiguously connected to the judiciary, police and, reaching further, to the wider world of social
policy. For these reasons, the prison has become fertile terrain for the social sciences. Despite this
flowering of scholarship, however, literature on the prison is limited by various instrumental blinders.
Many historical studies are limited to one nation-state or the wealthiest regions of the world.16
Moreover, works with more contemporary focus are often narrowly penological17 or journalistic.18 To
address these shortcomings, I will frame my study on the (neo)colonial prisons of the US-advised RVN
with the literature on empire. While Cold War politics made any discussion of empire and imperialism
“tantamount,” Andrew Bacevich reflected, “to aiding and abetting the enemy,”19 the question of the US
Empire has re-emerged in scholarship on both the left and right in the last twenty years. While ranging
on the far right to imperial triumphalism,20 more reasoned analysis ranges from the conservative realism
of Charles Maier and Bacevich, the William Appleman Williams inflected “conservative historian,” to
various permutations of the broad post- traditions within social sciences and humanities. 21 Among this
latter group, I look to the Wisconsin school of diplomatic history, the tradition starting with Cold War
Revisionism that today is pushing the limits of historiography and the social science, variously

15
D. Arnold (1997) “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in Nineteenth Century India,” in R. Guha,
ed. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (p. 140-178).
16
N. Morris & D. Rothman, eds (1997) Oxford History of Prison The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. New
York: Oxford Univeristy Press.
17
M. Mauer (2006) The Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press; B. Western (2007) Punishment and
Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
18
C. Parenti (2008) Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the New Age of Crisis. New York: Verso.
19
A. Bacevich (2007) “Introduction” in W. A. Williams. Empire as a Way of Life. Brooklyn: Ig Publishing. (pp. v-xi) p.
vi.
20
The title of Max Boot’s book, The Savage Wars of Peace, is direct illusion to Rudyard Kiplings poem “The White
Man’s Burden.” In the text, he argues that to maintain “the inner core of its empire…a family of democratic
capitalist nations,” the United States must use its force against “the violence and unrest” that “lap at the periphery
in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans and other regions teeming with failed states, criminal states or
simply a state of nature.” M. Boot (2002) Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New
York: Basic Books. p. xxi.
21
A. Bacevich (2004) American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press; See: F. Cooper & A. Stoler, eds. (1997) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World.
Berkley: University of California Press; V. de Grazia (2005) Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through
Twentieth-Century Europe. Boston: Belknap; N. Ferguson (2004) Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York:
Penguin; A. Kaplan & D. Pease, eds. (1993) Cultures of United State Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press; E.
Love (2004) Race over Empire: Racism and US Imperialism, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press; and M. Renda (2001) Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
 McQuade~5

integrating post-colonialism, world-systems, dependency theory and the broader post- traditions in a
movement toward a more fully world-relational historical social science. 22
Out of this voluminous scholarship, two works are necessary touchstones for my argument. Loic
Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor stands out among the literature on prisons as the only work to place the
US prison boom in the context of the neoliberal counterrevolution: “The sudden expansion and
consensual exaltation of the penal state…is…a ruling-class response aiming to redefine the perimeter
and missions of the Leviathan.” The intended purpose “to establish a new economic regime based on
capital hyper mobility and labor flexibility and to curb the social turmoil generated [by] policies of
market deregulation and social welfare…*the+ building blocks of neoliberalism.” Wacquant claims that
“the penal apparatus is a core organ of the state,” (emphasis in the original) which neoliberalism
necessarily enlarges.23 This counterrevolution, as it cohered around the prison, however, was not an
involuntarily causality of power but a discontinuous process accomplished through political struggle in
the “bureaucratic field.” Here, I see my argument broadly allied and supplementary to Wacquant’s
intervention. However, where Wacquant focuses on properly institutionalized political space, I
counterpoise his bureaucratic field against a subaltern and clandestine field, a murky and opaque
domain of power where the international capitalist, spy, gangster, political cadre and guerilla solider
thrive. The (neo)colonial prisons of the Republic of Vietnam were such a space.
Wacquant’s argument, further, is limited by a blinding focus on the nation-state and lack of
historical breadth. To put the properly political aspects of the neoliberal counterrevolution in fuller
world-historical focus, I turn to Alfred McCoy, Francisco Scarano and Courtney Johnson’s
conceptualization of the “American imperial state.” In their introductory essay to the anthology The
Colonial Crucible, they define the American imperial state as “an agile state whose diffuse, delegated
power has been the source of a surprising resilience.” Instead of “narrow definitions of the ‘state’ as a
simple bureaucratic apparatus” they advocate “for a more inclusive concept of, say, a ‘polity’ that is
capable of encompassing…this transnational imperial state, the US government, its domestic power
elites, colonial regimes, their collaborating elites and legions of subcontractors, both civil and
paramilitary.” Through the fin de siècle US imperial expansion “On the Tropic of Cancer,” the US
separated itself from the formal colonial empires of Europe with “the speed with which it distilled

22
For an excellent overview on the most recent scholarship concerning the US empire see the following anthology:
A. McCoy and F. Sarcano eds. (2009) Colonial Crucible: Empire and the Making of the Modern American State.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
23
L. Wacquant (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University
Press. p. 11-12.
 McQuade~6

altruism, self-rule and indirect empire into a supple global system that, by replacing colonial rule with a
diffuse global hegemony in the years surrounding World War I, has far outlasted more than a dozen
modern empires swept away by revolution.”24 Today, however, the US Empire is in crisis: economic
decline and the specter of financial ruin, intractable “small wars,” rising traditional powers and
ecological crisis.25
Historically, the Second Indochina War, and particularly the period of the Phoenix Program and
Vietnamization (1967 to 1973), marks a period of transition in the US Empire. Structurally, the war is a
figurative event on three different registers, the world-economy, interstate system and structures of
knowledge: (1) war-spending helped drive the “stagflation” that undermined American economic power
and lead to financialization (2) the eventual victory of the NLF and North Vietnam marked the limits of
military power to directly control colonized peoples and places and (3) the discontent generated by the
war helped fuel the emancipatory agendas of movements which fundamentally challenged patriarchy
and white supremacy, expanding the horizons of both discourse and imagination.26 Out this chaos
emerged some of the orienting strategies for managing the declining trend of the US Imperial State. The
separation of counterterrorism from counterinsurgency helps constitute the United States’ move
toward the “distributive aspects of power”— a zero-sum-game relationship, whereby an agency can gain
power only if others lose some”—and move away from the “the collective aspects of power,” “a
positive-sum-game relationship, whereby cooperation among distinct agencies increase their power
over third parties, or over nature.”27 During its imperial rise, the prison emerged in the United States
not only as a mechanism to maintain social order (labor control) but as world-structuring innovation: the
Auburn (1816) and Philadelphia (1829) and Elmira (1876) penitentiaries punctuated two waves and
prison reforms and are formative institutions of modernist penology. Today, during the imperial decline,
innovations are decidedly regressive and involve the rollback of the “penal welfarist” rehabilitative
model and the regressive debasement of legal norms to serve instrumental imperial ends.28

24
A. McCoy, F. Scarano & C. Johson (2009) “On the Tropic of Cancer: Transition and Transformation in the US
Imperial State” in A. McCoy and F. Sarcano eds. Colonial Crucible: Empire and the Making of the Modern American
State. (pp. 3-33). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 24-26.
25
A. Bacevich (2008) The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books; C.
Johnson (2006) Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. New York: Holt Paperbacks; and I. Wallerstein
(2003) Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. New York: New Press.
26
G. Arrighi; T. Hopkins & I Wallerstein. (1989) Antisystemic Movements New York: Verso p. 35-36
27
G. Arrighi (2005) “Hegemony Unraveling I” New Left Review: 32 (pp. 23-80) p. 33.
28
The criminologist David Garland writes about the rise, crest and crisis of “penal welfarism,” a policy regime that
sought “where possible, to be rehabilitative interventions rather than negative, retributive punishments.” While
penal-welfarism had established itself has the consensus of modern penology by mid-century, the system broke
down in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s place emerged a more punitive shift, which Garland is much more hesitant to pin
 McQuade~7

During this critical period of transition in the US Imperial State, counterterrorism operated to
recuperate colonial practices of rule developed under the rubric of counterinsurgency and refashion
them for new institutional contexts. The prison, as physical space where dominated and dominant
contended to define and control social space, is a dramatic site of social struggle and powerful engine of
transformation. Counterinsurgents met Vietnamese communists, nationalists and others unlucky
enough to be caught in the clumsy dragnet. Out this dialectic of resistance and rule came a
reformulation of penal practice and carceral forms. Organized under the rubric of counterterrorism, this
new complex of discourse and practice recuperated the classic tactics of counterinsurgency in such a
way that these methods of rule could be employed to manage the some of the insecurity and upheaval
created by the neoliberal reversal of the Fordist/social democratic/Cold War compromise. By focusing
on the struggles in the (neo)colonial prison of Vietnam, one the events constituting the post 1968-crisis
of the US Imperial State, I use the framing of the Wisconsin School trace the “boomerang effect” of
colonial practices of rule on the imperial center: in this case, the conflictive origins of the current
criminalization of dissent as it organized by the discourse of counterterrorism.29

The Knowledges of the (Neo)Colonial Prison: Revolutionary Nationalism and

Counterinsurgency

The United States direct involvement in Vietnam began in 1950, with support the French in the
first Indochina War (1946-1954).30 After the war, Vietnam was divided into Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in

down, speaking only of a vague culture of control. See: D. Garland (2002) Culture of Control: Crime Control in
Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 34, 168.
29
As Foucault noted “It should never be forgotten that while colonization…obviously transported European models
to other continents, it had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the
apparatuses, institutions and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the
West and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization or internal colonization
on itself.” M. Foucault (2004) “4 February 1976”in Society Must be Defended. A. Davidson eds. (pp. 87-114) New
York: Picador. p. 103.
30
With the start of the Korean War, the Truman administration started to give aid to the French war effort,
beginning with $10 million in 1950. By the time of French withdrawal in 1954, the United States was paying $1.063
billion or 78 percent of the war’s burden. To manage the American aid and assistance to the French in Vietnam,
the US military set up the 350-member US Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG), while American
advisors, in April 1952, started training Vietnamese units. The following December, an Army attaché unit arrived in
Hanoi to interrogate prisoners. While MAAG helped the French try to “pacify” Vietnam, the Special Technical and
Economic Mission provided CIA officers, under station chief Emmett McCarty, with the necessary cover to mount
operations. See: G. Lewy (1978). America In Vietnam New York: University Press. p. 14; J. Prados (2009) Vietnam:
The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of Kansas Press. p. 64-65; D. Valentine
(1990). The Phoenix Program. New York: William & Morrow. p. 24.
 McQuade~8

the south and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north, with unification pending a
nationwide election to be held in 1956. The election never came to fruition. By 1958, the United States
had largely replaced French influence of over the region.31 Colonial institutions were remade and
professionalized with a distinctly liberal veneer: a piecemeal system centered on the indirect rule
through Nguyen Dynasty was replaced by a Western-style administration organized around government
ministries; the old French Sûreté became the Cong An, or Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation; colonial
axillaries were transformed into the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). A variety of Americans—
variously ugly and quiet32—descended “in country” and, with particular zeal, implemented their
programs to modernize the government and economy, while pacifying “Indian Territory.”33
The “reforms” of the liberal counterinsurgents only went so deep, however. The complexity of
(neo) colonial situation left many illegible, subaltern spaces that preoccupied and cofounded state-
managers. The prison—simultaneously an institutional center of US imperial power and a conflictive
space and site of subaltern and potentially counterhegemonic struggle—was one such space. This
heterogeneous conception of the prison as a social space is precisely David Arnold’s contention when he
argues that “The prison created an institutional and social space that was colonized by other, unofficial
networks of power and knowledge than those represented by the formal prison authority.” He writes:
…one can find abundant evidence of resistance and evasion in the Indian prison system and a whole
network of power and knowledge over which the prison authorities exercised scant control, but that this
limited authority and control was partly the result of pragmatic choice by the colonial regime, a
recognition of its practical and political limitations and partly a frank expression of its limited interest in

31
In between the First and Second Indochina Wars, a power struggle unfolded in the Republic of Vietnam: on one
side, Emperor Bao Dai, the French and their allies in the Binh Xuyen—the Vietnamese mafia—and the Hoa Hao and
Cao Dia politico-military religious sects, which together became the United Sect Front and, challenging them, Ngo
Dinh Diem, his Can Loa party, Vietnamese Catholics and their American backers. Edward Lansdale of the Saigon CIA
Station and General Lawton Collins of the Military Assistance Advisory Group worked with Diem and ARVN General
Trinh Minh The to defeat the Binh Xuyen and break the sects’ support for Boa Dai and the French. In October 1955,
Diem won an obviously rigged plebiscite—carrying 98.8 percent of the vote—that disposed Bao Dai and solidified
Diem’s control over South Vietnam. See: B. Fall (1965). “How The French Got out of Viet-Nam”. In M. Raskin, & B.
Fall, The Viet-Nam Reader (pp. 81-95). New York: Random House; J. Prados (2009) Vietnam: The History of an
Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of Kansas Press. p. 42-49.
32
This evokes the two novels Graham Greene’s Quiet American (1955) Eugene Block and William Lederer’s Ugly
American (1958) which both satirized and commented upon the US advisory mission to Vietnam. The works drew
on the actual figure of Edward Lansdale for inspiration. See: J. Nashel (2005) Edward Lansdale’s Cold War.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
33
“Indian Country” was the racist term for “the land inhabited solely by Vietnamese adversaries.” Evoking the
colonial conquest of the US West, the term underscores the racialized episteme entailed in colonial power
relations. “Indian Country” saw a particularly unrestrained application of US military power. “The primary ground
for excursions in Indian Country became the ‘search and destroy’ mission, in which troops entered enemy territory
and laid waste to anything the deemed valuable.” The intent was to “force a battle, holding the enemy in place
while commanders marshaled the capabilities to annihilate them.” J. Prados (2009) Vietnam: The History of an
Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of Kansas Press. p. 136-137.
 McQuade~9

the declared purposes of penal discipline and reform…the prison was nonetheless a critical site for the
34
acquisition of colonial knowledge for the exercise—or negotiation—of colonial power.

Here, Arnold challenges some of formative works that raised prominence of the prison as topic of
interest for social science. In contrast to the modern, rehabilitative penitentiaries and their coercive and
corrective power (Foucault’s disciplinary power producing docile bodies or Ignatieff’s “confinement as
coercive education”35), we have what Peter Zinoman, in his history of imprisonment in colonial Vietnam
calls “the ill-disciplined prison.” 36
In the prisons of colonial Vietnam, the alleged republican ethos of Second French Empire and
Third French Republic bottomed out on the brutal realities of colonial administration. One the emergent
properties of this clash was a hardened a cadre of Vietnamese nationalists who appropriated the world-
discourse of Marxism and fused it with an imagining of a modern Vietnam nationalism to create a social
movement that would finally win Vietnamese independence and shake the world. Evolving out of the
prisoner of war camp (construction on the Poulo Condor prison began four months before the Treaty of
Saigon legally ceded the first Vietnamese territory to France), inflected by the racist and miserly colonial
state, “disciplinary practices *of the colonial prison+ were overshadowed by a host of ill-disciplined and
exclusively repressive methods of coercion and control.” This “distance between the French colonial
state’s professed commitment to modernization and republican values….and the old-fashioned
brutality, squalor and corruption of the colonial prison system…highlighted a contradiction within the
imperial project that anticolonial activists were quick to exploit. The insertion of a centralized,
hierarchical, and highly disciplined political organization," Zinoman asserts, "into an ethnically divided,
administratively haphazard, and chronically ill-disciplined colonial prison system resulted in the former's
virtual colonization of the latter." The over-crowding and/or communal confinement of the prisons and
the willingness of Vietnamese guards to collaborate with the prisoners in the running of the prisons
turned the prison into a site of national and anticolonial struggle, increasingly relevant to the wider
politics and culture of the time. 37

34
D. Arnold (1997) “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in Nineteenth Century India,” in R. Guha,
ed. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (p. 140-178). p. 145, 148
35
M. Ignatieff. (1989) Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. New York:
Puffin. p. 11
36
P. Zinoman. (2001) The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940. Los Angeles:
University of Chicago Press p. 7
37
For Zinoman, the dramtic events the Thai Nguyen prison rebellion of 1917—where an alliance between lower
class Vietnamese prison guards and the mandarin revolutionary Luong Ngoc Quyen, mobilized prisoners from least
thirty provinces and representing “every stratum of Indochinese society”—illustrate how the prison system gave
Vietnamese nationalism and anti-imperialism a vehicle to transcend the social and geographical confines of native
place networks. Ibid. p. 8, 17, 28-30, 84-91, 99, 159, 200.
 McQuade~10

At the same time, however, the prison helped form a counterrevolutionary knowledge,
providing grounds to test and elaborate the transimperial practice of counterinsurgency. Practically and
historically, imperial powers developed counterinsurgency to mobilize and integrate the colonizing
capacities instituted in the targeted state against the anti-colonial and nationalist movements; this
mobilization includes: social policy (including in US advised Vietnam: land reform, economic
development, the census, and social scientific research) the diplomatic corps (as cover) and, the military
branches and intelligence agencies (as leading, integrative institutions), and judiciary, police and carceral
system (as the primary instruments of processing populations). Historically, it developed as form of
institutional practice specific to the colonial situations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. Institutionally, the counterinsurgency emerged as transimperial, world-discourse among mainly
French, British and US state-managers. After World War II, the practical suggestions of an older
generation of officers (like French Field Marshalls like Joseph Gallieni and Louis Hubert Gonzalve
Lyautey, who pioneered counterinsurgency in Indochina and Morocco, respectively, and Madagascar,
collectively), and US Marine Corp General Elwell Otis (who directed the US effort to suppress the so-
called Phillpine inserrecution, 1989-1902) and British Army Lieutenant Colonel T.E. Lawarence (“of
Arabia”), were objectized in text and military docterine and variously instituted in state structures
througout the world.38 Formally, the celebrated 2006 US Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field
Manual, the preeminent objectification of the contemporary practice of counterinsurgency as it has
been instituted in the bureaucratic field, defines “insurgency” as “an organized protracted politico-
military struggle to weaken the control of and legitimacy of an established government, occupying
power or other political authority while increasing insurgent control,” and “Counterinsurgency” as the
“military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological and civic actions taken by a government to
defeat insurgency.” 39
This formerly instituted knowledge of the bureaucratic field cannot be taken exclusively on its
own terms and must be counterpoised against the illegible clandestine field. Here, the broad subaltern
tradition as represented by Ranajit Guha and Eqbal Ahmad provides the angle of vision from the
“insurgent” in the clandestine field. From the perspective the subaltern studies, counterinsurgency is

38
Its formative texts were: from the UK, T.E. Lawarence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) on the English backed
“Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Empire from 1916 to 1918 and Capitan B.H. Liddell Hart’s Strategy: Indirect
Approach (1942); from France, Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare (1964) and David Galula Counterinsurgency War
(1964), both drawing on World War II, The First Indochina War, and The Algerian War; and from the US, the
Marine Corps Small Wars Manual (1940), drawing on US occupations of the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua.
39
S. Sewall; J. Nagl; D. Petraeus, and J. Amos. (2007). The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
Chicago :University of Chicago Press.
 McQuade~11

both is “a euphemism for counterrevolution” that “reveals its character as a form of colonialist
knowledge [that] derives directly from that knowledge which the bourgeoisie had used in the period of
their ascendancy to interpret the world in order to master it and establish their hegemony.” As such,
counterinsurgency “serves a blinding that function that renders the subaltern struggles of peasants
illegible, deemed ‘spontaneous’” and not, as Guha insist they be framed, the results of “motivated and
conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses.”40 Referring directly to the Second Indochina
War, Ahmad arguments supports Guha’s formulation, reminding us that
Counterinsurgency is not directed against insurgency, which is defined as “a revolt against a government,
not reaching the proportions of an organized revolution and not recognized as belligerency.” It would be
inappropriate to describe the Vietnamese and Laotian revolutions as insurgencies and the fateful
American invasion of Indochina as an exercise in counterinsurgency. In fact, the Congress and the country
would be in an uproar if the government claimed that US counterinsurgency capabilities were available to
its clients for putting down revolts “not reaching the proportions of an organized revolution.” The
opposite is true: counterinsurgency involves a multifaceted assault against organized revolutions. This
euphemism for counterrevolution is a product neither of accident nor of ignorance. It serves to conceal
the reality of a foreign policy dedicated to combating revolutions abroad and helps to relegate
revolutionaries to the status of outlaws. This reduction of revolution to mere insurgency also constitutes
an a priori denial of its legitimacy.

Counterinsurgents, Ahmed maintains, hold a “conspiratorial theory which views revolutionary warfare
as being primarily a technical problem, i.e., a problem of plotting and subversion, on the one hand, and
of intelligence and suppression, on the other.”41 Discursively, then, counterinsurgency occludes the
social causes of colonized revolt with colonial knowledge that attempts to penetrate into subaltern
clandestine space, order it and, once rendered legible to the bureaucratic field, and control and
incorporate it.
Despite its colonizing and counterrevolutionary character, counterinsurgency contains some of
the shades of altruism in entailed in all imperial practices of rule. “The rhetoric which defines its goals is
reformist and liberal,” Ahmad wrote “Freedom, progress, development, democracy, reforms,
participation, and self-determination are its favorite working words. Generally, its theorist, of whom a
majority come from France and the USA have been men of impeccable liberal credentials. [A]mong its
most prominent exponents,” Ahmad counts “many of Kennedy’s New Frontiersmen and well-known
university professors,” and “in France…such eminent politicians as Jacques Soustelle *an anthropologist
and the French Minister of State in charge of Overseas Departments+ and Robert Lacoste,” a socialist

40
R. Guha “The Prose of Counterinsurgency” in in N. Dirks, ed. Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary
Social Theory. (336-371.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.336-337.
41
E. Ahmad. (2006). "Counterinsurgency." in C. Benglesdorf, M. Cerullo, & Y. Chandrani, eds. The Selected Writings
of Eqbal Ahmad (pp. 36-65). New York: Columbia University Press. p. 47-48.
 McQuade~12

MP and senator.42 The liberal counterinsurgent went to Vietnam to embody, activate and participate
the world-discourse of counterinsurgency, a knowledge constructed to defeat revolutionary nationalist
struggles of colonized peoples, while rendering them invisible through paternal tropes of imperial
beneficence.

“Chickens Come Home to Roost”: The Structural Importance of Phoenix Program and Vietnamization

The managers of the US Imperial State first mobilized counterinsurgency for collective ends. The
doctrine provided allied (sub)imperial centers with an ostensibly liberal mechanism to intervene
dramatically in their formally decolonizing empires, as long as they remained loyal to the US Cold War
consensus (the US financing of French campaign in the First Indochina War underscores this point). After
the 1968 crises, penal practices and carceral forms associated with counterinsurgency became mobilized
in new institutional contexts. In regards to its traditional applications, counterinsurgency was redefined
as “low-intensity warfare” during the Reagan-era fight against the “Vietnam syndrome” before its
dramatic recuperation during the contemporary War on Terror. The original elements of my argument,
however, focus on the way that the logic of counterinsurgency was redefined as “counterterrorism” and
helped organize the “domestic” aspects of the neoliberal counterrevolution (law and policing). To
illustrate this process, I will focus on creation of the Phoenix Program, the ultimate US/RVN
counterinsurgency program of the Second Indochina War and the way the program was collapsed into
the juridical functions of the RVN during the Vietnamization period. This critical period in the Second
Indochina War greatly affected the postwar attempts to reform security agencies within the “domestic”
United States and, while giving discursive space to organize countermeasures, shaped the
criminalization of dissent during the neoliberal period.
As a final and most-sophisticated counterinsurgency effort of the Second Indochina war, the
Phoenix Program (1967-1973) was eventual response to complete breakdown of the RVN’s institutional
capacity following the 1963 assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and the fourteen counter-coups that
followed. By 1968, Phoenix had corralled the full institutional capacity of the RVN and directed it under
the rubric of counterinsurgency: integrating of paramilitary, police and military “reaction forces” and
their institutional homes43 through nested hierarchy of interagency committees (a national Phoenix

42
Ibid. P.39.
43
Specifically, Phoenix coordinated the CIA, all branches of the US military and the State Department (including
USAID and OPS) with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the Central Intelligence Organization, and the Special
Branch Police and other RVN police agencies under the National Police.
 McQuade~13

directorate linked to Regional Phoenix Officers who supervised and directed Provincial Phoenix
Committees). Connecting this committee system was an analogous systems of lateral intelligence
sharing and processing (Province and District Intelligence Operations Coordinating Centers, 48 PIOCCs
and 240 DIOCCs), and underpinning both, a legal-carceral system of 48 Province Security Committees
(run by the CIA-advised Police Special Branch), four national RVN jails, 37 more provincial jails (many old
Sino-Vietnamese-turned-French-ill-disciplined-prisons), countless more ad hoc district jails and POW
camps, and network of 48 Provincial Interrogation Centers, culminating with the National Interrogation
Center in Saigon.
The principle function of Phoenix was, in the language of its founding documents, “to coordinate
and give new impetus to US and [R]VN operations, both intelligence collection and processing, and
action operations, directed toward the elimination of VC infrastructure” (VCI).44 Phoenix targeted
members of People’s Revolutionary Government (the civilian shadow government) and National
Liberation Front (the guerilla army) for “neutralization,” by, in order of official desirability, inducing
defection from, capturing or killing the targeted person.45 In the conception of the “counterinsurgency”
planners, if they could “neutralize” the leadership, the resistance would wither and die. Reflecting
actuarial and positivist tendencies implicit in the counterinsurgent’s gaze, Phoenix integrated
intelligence and after action reporting into computer systems for data analysis and visualization (the
Hamlet Evaluation System and Viet Cong Infrastructure Information Service); the program, further, was
centrally directed by neutralization quotas.
Institutionally and practically, the Central Intelligence Agency was vanguard of the
counterinsurgency effort. Here, the self-described “the organizational genius” behind the Phoenix
Program, CIA officer Nelson Brickham, provides necessary insight. Brickham needed to bring together
the competing professional mentalities of the military, police and intelligence agencies in a unified
counterrevolutionary mobilization, while displacing the more limited diplomatic mission of the State
Department. For Brickham, “the military mentality is to set up a battle;” “the police mentality is to
arrest, convict, and send to jail;” and “the intelligence mentality is to capture, interrogate, and turn in
place.”46 These mentalities reflect the institutional positions of each profession. Police are bound by the
ostensible rules of the state. The military is defined by the exception of the battle. The intelligence

44
Military Assistance Command Vietnam. (1967, September 9). MACV 381-41. Retrieved June 1, 2010 from The
Memory Hole: <http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/macv-381-41.pdf>
45
Nelson Brickham interviewed by Doug Valentine, tape recorded (n.d.). Douglas Valentine Private Collection:
Longmeadow, MA.
46
Ibid
 McQuade~14

mentality, however, is slippery. It seeks to know what eludes discovery and co-opt into others into its
political project. The police are product of nation-states and operate internally. The military is the state’s
lumbering war-making machine. It can destroy and occupy but, in the age of nationalism, at least, it has
great difficulty ruling. The intelligence mentality subverts, it can accomplish rule indirectly. For this
reason, it is one of the most instrumental and common practices of rule in (neo)colonial situations.47
The CIA, then, was tasked by an overwhelmed Lyndon Johnson to address “the other war” in
Vietnam. In 1966, Johnson sent Robert Komer, CIA officer and National Security Council member, to
Vietnam “to redirect and harness the activities of civilian agencies as well as military efforts to provide
security and defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas, as part of a better-coordinated US effort to support the
government of South Vietnam.” In effect, his mission was to “turn” the institutional capacity of RVN and
US operations organized through both diplomatic corps and military “in place;” that is to subvert their
professed professional ethos of participating agents and agencies and direct them in ruthless
counterrevolutionary mobilization against the PRG and NLF. Johnson named Komer a diplomat which
gave him rank equaling that of any US official in Vietnam. 48 With the institutional power to pull rank
and the cover to hide his CIA connection, Komer, earning the nickname “Blowtorch,” willed Brickham’s
policy papers into existence against the resistance of State Department (the pieces of USAID and Office
Public Safety not used by the CIA for cover), the US Military, ARVN, the National Police (with the
exception of Police Special Branch, which formally advised by the Saigon CIA Station’s liaison branch)
and, before the Tet Offensive, the RVN president Nguyen Thieu. The institutional reorganization
effected by Komer created an integrated bureaucracy called Civil Operations and Revolutionary
Development Support (CORDS), which enabled the Phoenix Program to draw on the resources of many
other agencies. Komer’s position became the Deputy to CORDS (DEPCORDS) a position equal to the
Ambassador to Vietnam and the Commanding General of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. 49

47
This Martin Thomas convincingly shows the primary of intelligence mentality in his accounts of the colonial
“intelligence states” in French in British colonies in the Middle East and North Africa during the WWI/interwar
years. See. M. Thomas (2009) Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914. Berkley:
University of California Press.
48
F. Jones (2005). "Blowtorch: Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacificaiton Policy." Parameters (pp. 103-
118) p. 103
49
Komer ordered CIA Station Chief John Hart to develop “a general staff for pacification.” The task fell to Nelson
Brickham who combined Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare and a 1959 Harvard Business Review article on the
reorganization of Ford Motor Company’s information system as points of departure to draft the formative CIA
recommendations that shaped what became the Phoenix Program. See: Memo to Robert Komer from Nelson
Brickham. “Attack on the VCI,”10/22/66. Retrieved June 1, 2010, from The Memory Hole:
http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/attack-against.pdf; Memo to Robert Komer from Nelson Brickham and
John Hansen. “A Concept for Organization for Attack on VC Infrastructure” 22 May 1967, Retrieved June 1, 2010,
from The Memory Hole: http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/concept-for-organization.pdf; Memo to
 McQuade~15

Addition to setting up system, the CIA drove the program. The program’s first regional Phoenix
coordinators were the CIA’s own Region Officers in Charge. Until 1973, the CIA maintained unilateral
control of Provincial Reconnaissance Units, an infamous paramilitary force and operated a high-level
penetration unit that culled the best intelligence from the CIA’s own unilateral operations separate from
the interagency Phoenix Program.50 After Komer, the institutional head of Phoenix (DEPCORDs) was
William Colby who drove the program, setting neutralization quotas and communicating directly with
Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), from 1968 to until 1971, when he was promoted to that position.
William Colby, then, headed the CIA during much of the Vietnamization period (1969-1973). The
election of Richard Nixon in November 1968 brought willingness to negotiate an end to US involvement
in Vietnam, beginning the era of Vietnamization. At this point the US advisory mission began to be
reduced the Embassy and CIA Station. The counterinsurgency campaign was to be collapsed into the
operations of RVN’s National Police, including the CIA’s prized unilateral paramilitary units. In
November 1968, Colby launched a three year Accelerated Pacification Program (APC). Designed to
bolster Kissinger's negotiating position, the APC aimed to add twelve hundred hamlets to the five
thousand already classified under the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) as "relatively secure." Afterward
APC was to be followed by an annual "full year pacification and development program." In a post-Tet
Offensive Vietnam, the direction of war was clear but, in the short term, the underground NLF and PRG
cadres had surfaced and the aftermath of the offensive, as intensified by the APC and Vietnamization,
became the most violent moment of the Phoenix Program.51
From 1968 to 1973, officially Phoenix killed between 20,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese civilians
and ensnared thousands in its dragnet, leaving them to languish in indefinite detention in its ill-
disciplined (neo)colonial prison system. In 1972, a Newsweek article estimated that there were 45,000
official prisoners in the RVN with an additional 100,000 in detention centers, while Amnesty
International set the number at as many as 150,000.52 The detainees and related allegations of abuse

Robert Komer from *redacted+, “Action Program for Attack on VC Infrastructure,” 6/16/67; Retrieved June 1, 2010,
from The Memory Hole: http://www.thememoryhole.org /phoenix/action-program.pdf; M. Moyar (1997). Phoenix
and the Birds of Prey. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press p 45-55; E. Stahrl. (1957) “The Reach of an Executive.”
Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb59, Vol. 37 Issue 1 (pp. 87-96); and D. Valentine. (1990). The Phoenix Program.
New York: William and Morrow. P. 114-120, 127-136.
50
Brickham: “We created a VCI penetration unit…to review penetration cases generated anywhere in country, go
out and interview people, evaluate the cases and, if they looked any good, to set up special arrangements…we
would apply special care to the development and nurturance of the particular case.” Nelson Brickham interviewed
by Doug Valentine, tape recorded (n.d.). Douglas Valentine Private Collection: Longmeadow, MA.
51
J. Prados (2009) Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of Kansas Press.
p. 321-329; D. Valentine. (1990). The Phoenix Program. New York: William and Morrow p.253-258.
52
Quoted in: D. Valentine. (1990). The Phoenix Program. New York: William and Morrow. p.400-402
 McQuade~16

presented major practical problem for the CIA and serious source of tension for both the Republic of
Vietnam and its US allies. On the US side, no one “wanted the label of the jailer of Vietnam;” Nelson
Brickham explains:
When you go through some of these villages sweeps you would have whole compounds, I should say,
corrals barbed wire enclosures just filed with Vietnamese just sitting looking at you all day long packed
filled, you know… Men, woman and children. There were legal questions. What do we do? Do we
reindoctrinate them? Do we shoot them? Do we do this? Do we do that? Do we put them back on the
farm? How do we control them? This. This. This. This. So one of [CIA Station Chief] John Hart’s tasks in the
53
original ICEX charge—original general staff for pacification—is what do we do with these prisoners? Do
they have prisoner of war status or don’t they? There is no war going on and yet the Americans were
saying “we’re treating these people like prisoners of war.” In Geneva, the Swiss were saying “well ok let us
in there. We want into those prison camps.” So it went around and around. The long and short of it was
no one wanted to get the name of the jailer of Vietnam attached to them. The USAID didn’t want to touch
the prison problem with a ten-foot pole; military wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. These were
54
POWs. Forget about it. When the war is over we will ship them back in flocks. Things like that. Facetious.

To resolve this issue, the CIA launched a Screening, Detention, and Interrogation (SIDE) Program to
process detainees as part of the Phoenix Program. This SIDE reorganized the already militarized juridical
and caceral practices under the rubric of counterinsurgency. The legal basis for SIDE had been
established in 1956, with RVN Ordinance 6, which provided for the administrative detention of “security
offenders” as determined by Province Security Committes.55 Ordinance 6 was succeeded by several
Decree-Laws and Ministerial orders, most importantly, the 1965 “Emergency Decree Law 3/65. This law
provided for “administrative detention of persons considered dangerous to the national security,
without court hearing” and “continues the emergency power of the Executive to temporarily detain

53
ICEX stands for Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation. It was the provisional CIA program that immediately
preceded and set the model for Phoenix.
54
Nelson Brickham interviewed by Doug Valentine, tape recorded (n.d.). Douglas Valentine Private Collection:
Longmeadow, MA.
55
“Province Security Committees (PSC) were created in 1957 to provide the GVN with an administrative method of
settling the status of political detainees considered threats to the national security. Their purpose is political; their
method is administrative detention of those persons reasonably believed to endanger the national security, but
against whom sufficient evidence for a trial is lacking. Where evidence for trial is lacking, but it is apparent that the
suspect is a threat to the national security, the committee may impose administrative (an tri) detention. This is a
type of preventative detention to protect the state from a known threat to its security. There is the additional
provision of continual extension of 2 year terms if the individual remains a threat to the national security. An tri
detention is nonjudicial and administrative in nature. A violation of the national security laws need not be proven;
all that must be demonstrated is that a reasonable belief exists that the suspect threatens the national security.
Once an tri detention is imposed there are no judicial remedies. The duration and place of detention are governed
by GVN administrative regulations” See: House of Representatives, F. O. (1971). U.S. Assistance Programs in
Vietnam:Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives,
Ninety-second Congress, first session. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 332; and Memo to
William Colby from Robert Star. 7/16/1971. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive,
Washington DC.
 McQuade~17

people considered to constitute a danger to the National Security by publicizing or carrying out
Communism in any form.” 56 Every two years the detention could be renewed so long as “the offender is
considered still to constitute a danger.”These detention orders became known as the an tri laws.
During the Vietnamization period the an tri laws became the center of an internal struggle
within the RVN and, later, a critical policy debate within the US Imperial State that resulted in the
discursive and juridical redefinition of Phoenix as a counterterrorism program. This tension came to a
head during into congressional investigations in February of 1971. Here it is important to note that this
move happened in the context escalating revolutionary activity and increasing disclosures of
controversial classified programs. The period between the Nixon election and Paris Armistice that ended
overt involvement of the US military in Vietnam included following explosions of revolutionary activity:
the April 4 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and related uprisings that occurred in at least
125 places throughout the country; the 19 month Alcatraz occupation (beginning November 20 1969) by
the United Indians of All Tribes; shootings at anti-war protests at Kent State University and Jackson State
University in May of 1970; the September 1971 takeover of the Attica State Prison; the November, 1972
The Trail of Broken Treaties March on Washington, DC, ending in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs and the Second Massacre at Wounded Knee in February 1973. The same period saw
hemorrhaging of classified material documenting state activities in illegible subaltern and clandestine
social spaces: in 1968, the Phoenix Program began to make headlines in major papers; in November
1969, the My Lai story broke, eventually listing CIA officer Evan Parker, the Director of the National
Phoenix Directorate, as the signatory to the operation’s “neutralization” list and, as result, implicating
senior policymakers and the CIA’s darling program in the travesty; on July 20, 1970, Time Magazine
exposed the “Tiger Cages” of Poulo Condore prison leading to public attention on incarceration in
Vietnam;57 in 1971, still unidentifed activists with the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, broke
into the FBI office in Media, PA and exposed of the FBI’s COINTELPROs; 58 the same year, Daniel Ellsberg
leaked the Pentagon Papers, precipitating the Watergate scandal.59

56
Emergency Decree Law 3/65. 5/9/65. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington
DC.
57
“Viet Nam: The Tiger Cages of Con Son Island” Time. July 20, 1970.
58
The FBI’s COunterINTELligence PROgrams, COINTELPROs, domestic programs that used intelligence methods
similar to Phoenix, targeted the Communist Party USA, Socialist Workers Party, the Black Liberation Movements,
the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and the American Indian Movement for “neutralization.”“During this
period the FBI admits to having engaged in a total of 2,218 separate COINTELPRO actions many of them coupled
directly with other sorts of systematic illegality such as the deployment of warrantless phone taps (a total of 2,305
admitted) and bugs (697 admitted against domestic political targets, and receipt of correspondence secretly
 McQuade~18

In this context, Senator J. William Fulbright (Democrat, Arkansas, 1945-1975) condemned

Phoenix as a “program for the assassination of civilian leaders.”60 “By analogy,” Congressman Ogden
Reid (Democrat, New York, 1963-1975), explained “if the Union had had a Phoenix program during our
Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, GA.”61 Facing
of public challenge, Colby had plan. Reflecting his “intelligence mentality,” Colby sought to (a) minimize
the CIA’s role in Phoenix and (b) and position the State Department’s Office Public Safety, the nominal
advisor to South Vietnamese prisons and courts, for the fall. As Donald Bordenkircher, the State
Department’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) Senior Advisor to the RVN Directorate of Corrections,
explains “Colby decided on his own damage control,” and gave OPS as “a bone to toss to Congress and
the media.” Bordenkircher reasoned that Colby “postulated that if both groups were busy feeding on
that prize the more important and substantive programs (covert activities) could continue to flourish
undaunted.” When the investigative mission of Congressman John E. Moss (Democrat, California 1953-
1978) traveled to Vietnam, Colby distanced the CIA and Phoenix from the provincial jails, the RVN
Department of Corrections and their OPS advisors. In so doing, he highlighted the State Department’s
role and minimized the importance of the CIA’s liaison mission to the Police Special Branch, which
operated RVN’s 48 Provincial Interrogation Centers. Colby’s strategy succeeding in hiding the covert
aspects of Phoenix. The Office of Public Safety absorbed the punches and was disbanded in 1974. 62
However, Colby did not get out entirely enscathed. The House of Representatives passed the
Anderson-Hawkins resolution in July of 1971 demanding that an tri brought in accordance with the
Geneva convention. More importantly, Colby improvised a counterterrorism as a clever discursive
formulation to deflect Congressional investigations. Here an exchange between William Colby and
Senator William Fulbright is critical:
FULBRIGHT: …have we done this before…a program for the assassination of civilian leaders?

COLBY: I question whether that is an appropriate title for it, Mr. Chairman.

intercepted by the CIA (57,846 separate instances admitted). For more on COINTELPRO see: W. Churchill, & J.
Vander Wall. (1990) The COINTELPRO Papers. Boston: South End Press. p. 303
59
D. Ellsberg (2002) Secrets. New York: Penguin Books
60
Quoted in: T. Szluc (1971, February 18). U.S. Aide in Saigon Denies 'Counter-Terror' Charge. The New York Times.
61
House of Representatives, F. O. (1971). U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam:Hearings Before a Subcommittee of
the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Ninety-second Congress, first session.
Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. P. 725
62
S. Bordenkricher. (1998) Tiger Cages: An Untold Story. Cameron, WV: Abby Publishing p. 133-144; A. McCoy
(2006) A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Metropolitan
Books. p. 60-71.
 McQuade~19

FULBRIGHT: You rephrase it. I was trying to shorten it,

COLBY: I don’t think that is the appropriate title. I think it is an internal security program.

FULBRIGHT: Neutralization is the word. I couldn’t think of it for a moment—neutralization of

civilian leaders—

COLBY: No, sir, my title for it and actually the Vietnamese government’s this program is a
program to protect the people against terrorism. Now, I think you could call it an internal
security program, one aimed at identifying the members the members of the enemy
infrastructure, to get them either to rally or to capture them. In cases of firefights they do get
killed… (emphasis added)63

This deflection of Fulbright’s line of questioning by Colby marks the beginning of the new discursive
formulation of counterterrorism. Practically, the reformulation around the rubric of counterterrorism
was immensely useful for the project of Vietnamization. The US was drawing back influence. Officially,
the US-advised counterinsurgency was becoming the counterterrorism policies of the Republic of
Vietnam.
In the continuing policy debate over the Anderson-Hawkins resolution, Colby’s counterterrorism
provided the language to reinstitute the CIA’s counterinsurgency campaign as a police-led RVN
counterterrorist effort. To do so, however, the Agency needed to defeat a State Department effort to
follow through on the Anderson-Hawkings resolution. The State Department proposed gradually
eliminating the whole an tri structure, including the Province Security Committees. The CIA, in contrast,
wanted to institutionalize an tri and the capacity for indefinite detention by transferring jurisdiction over
detainees from the Province Security Committees to the courts. Challenged by a study written by
CORDS legal adviser Ray Meyers that recommended opening an tri hearings to the public,64 the CIA
pulled rank and DEPCORDS John Tilton (a CIA careerist and, previously, the Station Chief in Laz Paz,
Bolivia when Che Guevara was killed) dragged his feet. 65 With the CIA raising endless security
considerations, the embassy dropped an tri reform indefinitely before the end of April 1972.66 The
Province Security Community was renamed the Central Security Committee and was made a

63
House of Representatives, F. O. (1971). U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam:Hearings Before a Subcommittee of
the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Ninety-second Congress, first session.
Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 63.
64
Discussion of Meyer’s report is in the following memo: Memo to Department of State from Embassy Siagon, “An
Tri” April 7, 1972. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.
65
Memo from John Tilton to Director, MACCORDS. “An Tri Observation and Recommedations” Douglas Valentine
Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.
66
Memo from Embassy Saigon to Department of State “An Tri” April 28, 1972. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4.
National Security Archive, Washington DC.
 McQuade~20

"temporary" measure, which "offers possibilities for avoiding possible criticism under the terms of the
Geneva Convention." Article 19 of Decree Law 004 of 1966 was amended to "preclude charges that the
system violates Article 7 of the RVN Constitution," and Ambassador Bunker put the US seal of approval
on an tri. With carceral capacities for counterinsurgency no longer a threat, RVN President Thieu
presented sixty-nine amendments to the agreement and, stating that the VCI "must be wiped out
quickly and mercilessly," ordered a new wave of arrests. On November 25, 1972, three weeks after
Richard Nixon was reelected, Thieu signed Decree Law 020, "Concerning National Security and Public
Order." Issued in secret, 020 modified an tri to the extent, Ambassador Bunker wrote, "that these
powers are no longer limited to wartime and may be applied following a ceasefire and the end of an
officially declared state of war.67 The Vietnamization of Phoenix was unchallenged. The RVN would be a
permanent counterinsurgency-cum-counterterrorism state for the rest of its short life.
Structurally, counterterrorism proved to be a very useful mobilizing discourse of the neoliberal
counterrevolution. The US could advise a counterinsurgency campaign against communist guerillas
Vietnam or Central America but it could apply counterterrorism domestically and in countries where an
overt military presence was not a politically possible (such as contemporary Pakistan). As the case of
the RVN illustrates, counterinsurgency is the militarization of the entirety of state. The RVN used all
state functions attempt colonize (or at try to least contain) a counter-hegemonizing subaltern struggle.
Here, the an tri debate RVN is important because it shows the professional pressures Phoenix applied to
those who worked within the program and its effects wider professional mentalities. Donald
Bordenkircher, a Former San Quentin Correction Officer before serving in as an OPS Senior Advisor to
the RVN Directorate of Corrections, ran against the instrumental goals of the counterinsurgency
campaign with his attempts to professionalize the prison system. In his memoir, Bordenkircher blames
CIA dominance for “Hoi Cai incident.” After Colby replaced Komer as the institutional head of the
Phoenix Program, Bordenkircher and his allies agitated to establish “national prison and jail standards,”
publish “a uniform manual of standards for all confinement, processing, prisoner care” and advocating
separating OPS from the CIA and the formation of Hoi Cai directorate to manage the prisons and courts.
This challenge was effectively squashed by Colby because it challenged the instrumental objectives of
the Accelerated Pacification Program.68 CIA dominance over the RVN derailed similar professionalizing
efforts by Police Special Branch Chief Nguyen Mau; he explains:

67
Summary of these decrees by Thieu is in the following memo: Memo From Embassy Saigon to Department of
State “Prime Ministerial Decree on Administrative Detention and An Tri Procedures.” Jun 6, 1973 Douglas
Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.
68
S. Bordenkricher. (1998) Tiger Cages: An Untold Story. Cameron, WV: Abby Publishing p. 15-25, 90-92
 McQuade~21

Phoenix Program imposed a monthly quota of Vietnamese Communist infrastructure to be neutralized

but it did not define the difference between the Vietnamese Communist agents and sympathizers. This
policy struck me down. It worked against my plan for boosting the professional skill of the SB. My great
concern in taking command of the SB was about the unjustified arrest, false accusation, and arbitrary
detention. Those bad ‘manipulations’ couldn’t be stopped since the province chiefs and other officials
would do anything to make Phoenix, which assured them job security and higher regard. They knew that
Phoenix was under the supervision of an American Ambassador and President Nguyen Van Thieu always
listened to this powerful personage… no VN [Vietnamese] officials would challenge or discuss American
policy, planning or even procedure at the tactical level. They were so docile to American advisors that I
stopped short in the idea of presenting to my superiors an alternative Phoenix II Programme [sic] and kept
my mouth shut

In time, Mau tried to reach his US counterparts only through indirect actions such as “results of the SB
professional operation like the destruction of spy rings in Independence Palace,” the RVN’s presidential
palace. In time, Mau “realized no correction was possible. My guideline became very simple: I do my job
and let them be happy with their operation.” 69
These incidents show the subversive effects of colonizing knowledges. Bordenkircher and Mau
merely wanted to professionalize their agencies in line with ostensible dictates their professional
mentality as a corrections officer or a police chief. Both found themselves stymied by the instrumental
goals of the CIA’s counterinsurgency effort. As Nguyen Mau’s comments indicate, however, the
intelligence mentality colonized the police agencies of the RVN. A well-professionalized judicious police
force did not fill out the counterinsurgents kill quotas quickly enough. They did not yield instrumental
results, as measured by Colby’s Hamlet Evaluation System. Those willing to give the counterinsurgents
want they wanted advanced. South Vietnam’s police force, after all, was being prepared to for
Vietnamization, readying itself to absorb the Phoenix Program.
The colonization of police mentality by intelligence mentality is also evident in the policing
innovations of the post-Vietnam period, although in a much more diffuse fashion, owning to its slow
movement across the geographic space of the US Imperial Sate. In response to the Watts Riots, LAPD
chief Daryl Gates brought in Marine Corps Vietnam veterans, to create an “elite, military-trained cadre
of law enforcement officers who could react quickly, accurately, and with overwhelming force to
particularly dangerous situations.” Gates innovative team was first many and coincides with the
development of intelligence branches in most city police departments across the United States.70 During
this time, the CIA ran Operation CHOAS, a domestic operation to monitor political dissidents. Through

69
Mau Nguyen. (n.d.). Personal Correspondence with D. Valentine. Longmeadow, MA: Douglas Valentine Private
Collection.
70
R. Balko. (2006) Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. Washington DC: The CATO Institute. p.
6
 McQuade~22

CHOAS, the CIA trained many of these budding intelligence branches.71 During the years of neoliberal
counterrevolution, SWAT teams multiplied dramatically: “Wisconsin’s Capital Times reported that as of
2001, 65 of the state’s 83 local SWAT teams had come into being since 1980, 28 since 1996, and 16 since
2000. Many of those newly established teams had popped up in absurdly small towns like Forest County
(population 9,950), Mukwonago (7,519), and Rice Lake (8,320).”72
By end of the first decade of the 21st century, the sporadic, fluttering flights of
counterrevolutionary chickens had come full circle, leaving their colonial coops for their new
metropolitan roosts. The new forms of policing dramatically illustrated in the expansion of SWAT teams
and intelligence branches laid the institutional groundwork for broad reorganization both foreign and
domestic policy under the rubric of counterterrorism during the Bush years. “Domestically,” the
capstone to the neoliberal counterrevolution is the PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Act. Together
these two statues brought recuperated the colonial tactics of counterinsurgency as the shrewd and
necessary policies to protect the United States in new era of terrorism. “Internationally,” the declaration
of “the war on terror” mirrored this domestic offensive and created an interlocked policy to manage to
insecurity of a neoliberal world, while displacing political discussions of social justice into a Manichean
scheme of vicious terrorism and rule-bound states.
Both the PATRIOT Act and the Homeland Security Act dramatically increased the reach of the
Federal government. The PATRIOT Act expands the definition of terrorism to include “‘acts dangerous to
human life that also are a crime under any State or federal law and ‘appear to be intended’ to intimidate
or a coercive a civilian population, influence government policy by intimidation or coercion or affect
government conduct by mass destruction, assassination, and kidnapping.” Added to this broad
definition of terrorism is any “attempt*s] to commit or conspiracy to commit a terrorist crime,” as well
as harboring or directly supporting any “person or group committing or about to commit a terrorist
crime.”73 Like the politicized criminalization of communism in the RVN, the criminalization of
“terrorism” operates to bloat the coercive capacities of the state to manage the insecurity of neoliberal
economy and stifle related dissent. In 2005, Summit, NJ, an affluent New York City suburb,
unsuccessfully invoked the PATRIOT Act to defend their forcible removal of homeless people from train
stations. While the defense was repudiated by both the New Jersey Attorney General and the Justice

71
A. Mackenzie. (1997) Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home. Berkley: University of California Press. p. 60-61.
72
R. Balko. (2006) Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. Washington DC: The CATO Institute. p.
10
73
C. W. Michaels (2005) No Greater Threat: America After the September 11 and the Rise of a National Security
State. New York: Algora Publishing. p. 34
 McQuade~23

Department, the attempt to use counterterrorism to manage pleasantly gentrified spaces of the
neoliberal United States was made.74 Similarly, Minnesota pointed toward its version of the PATRIOT Act
when it arrested eight anarchists with Republic National Committee Welcoming for "conspiracy to riot in
the second degree in furtherance of terrorism." The arrests were the culmination of a yearlong
investigation by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department, as well as state and federal agencies. Using
undercover agents and paid informants to infiltrate the organization, the police contended there was
“reasonable suspicion” that the RNC Welcoming Committee planned “criminal activity” and cited
intelligence from informants claiming “the RNC 8” were building incendiary and explosive devices and
planning to kidnap delegates and sabotage airports. Referring to the arrest of eight organizers during
the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Jordon Kushner, a National Lawyers Guild member
representing one of the defendants, explained “We haven’t seen this kind of police activity since the
Chicago 8…What has happened with these criminal charges is very extreme and dangerous because
people are being prosecuted for political reasons.”75 These two exceptional cases, moreover, are
underscored by a persistent and deliberate misuse of the expanded state powers created under the
PATROIT Act. A 2007 audit conducted by the Justice Department found that the FBI illegally used the
PATROIT Act powers, specifically “an administrative subpoena…suspected terrorism and espionage
cases to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.”
Between 2002 and 2005, the FBI issued 143,074 of these subpoenas. 76
The new legal powers created by the PATROIT Act—however challenged in the courts—are
further supported by the massive reorganization of the federal government effected by the Department
of Homeland Security. In DHS, counterterrorism is creating its institutional home. In the eight years since
the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the department has grown into the third largest
federal cabinet agency, employing over 200,000.77 The DHS superbureaucracy operates like CORDS from
the Phoenix Program, absorbing many preexisting executive branch agencies and reworking them into a
unified structure.78 Furthermore, the director of Homeland Security like DEPCORDs is vested with

74
W. Perry (2005, July 1) “The Patriot Act vs. Homeless.” Retrieved, June 1 2010, from The Seattle Times:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20050701&slug=patriot01
75
S. Stocker (2008, October 10) “Framing the RNC 8.” Retrieved, June 1 2010, from In These Times:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3962/framing_the_rnc_8/
76
Staff and Agencies (2007, March 9) “FBI Abused Patriot Act powers, audit finds,” Retrieved, June 1, 2010, from
The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/09/usa
77
J. Guo (2009, December 14) “Guarding America.” Retrieved, June 1, 2010, from Newsweek:
http://www.newsweek.com/2009/12/02/guarding-america.html
78
DHS absorbed the Immigration and Naturalization Service (part of the Department of Justice), the Custom
Services (part of the Treasury Department), the Federal Protective Services (part of the Government Services
 McQuade~24

sustainable and definitive power. According to the Act, the Secretary has the provisional rule of
executive power to, “delegate any of the Secretary’s functions to any officer, employee, or
organizational unit of the Department.” Additionally the Secretary has the right to subcontract out
the authority and functions of the Department, “the authority to make contracts, grants, and
cooperative agreements, and to enter into agreements with other executive agencies.” The
Secretary also has the responsibility, through the Office of State and Local Coordination, to work
with non-Federal internal security organizations—state, local, and private security. Lastly the DHS
Secretary is part of the National Security Council bringing him into the highest and most powerful
forum of executive power in the United States and the world.79 Taken together, “these provision
virtually create a mini-‘CIA’ within the DHS.”80
More directly, this massive reorganization articulated under the rubric of counterterrorism was
led by some Phoenix veterans. Thomas Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security, was, as an Army
Sergeant and Platoon leader, a participant in Phoenix raids during Colby’s Accelerated Pacification
Program. 81 Bruce Lawlor, CIA Police Special Branch Advisor in Quang Nam Province during the Phoenix
Program, became the Department of Homeland Security’s first Chief of Staff.82 Robert Simmons,
another CIA Police Special Branch Advisor (to Phu Yen province), was the chairman of the DHS House
Subcommittee on Intelligence Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, a DHS oversight
committee until his failed bid at reelection in November of 2006.83 Compounding this domestic offensive
is the continuing framing of US foreign policy through the (c)overt War on Terror (limited not just to
Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan but at least 75 countries, including the Philippines, Colombia, Yemen,
Somalia and “elsewhere in Middle East, Africa and Central Asia).84 The recuperation of
counterinsurgency through discourse of counterterrorism is so complete that the wars and Iraq and

Administration) and the Coast Guard and Transportation Security Agency (both part of the Department of
Transportation) all under the Border and Transportation Security Directorate. DHS also has Directorates of
Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Countermeasures, Information Analysis and Infrastructure
Protection, and Emergency Preparedness and Response, each absorbing a panoply of Executive Branch agencies
and offices
79 th nd
Homeland Security Act, 107 Congress, 2 Session, 10/25/02. <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:h.r.5005.enr:>
(3/4/07).
80
C. W. Michaels (2005) No Greater Threat: America After the September 11 and the Rise of a National Security
State. New York: Algora Publishing. p. 34
81
J. St. Clair & A. Cockburn “Tom Ridge in Vietnam: Tarnished Star” Counterpunch, October 1, 2001.
82
D. Valentine “An Open Letter to Major General Bruce Lawlor” Counterpunch, August 25, 2002
83
D. Valentine “The Spook Who Would be a Congressman” Counterpunch, November 4, 2000
84
K. DeYoung & J. Gaffe (2010, June 4) “U.S. ‘Secret War’ expands globally as Special Operations take larger Roel”
Retrieved, June 4, 2010, from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/06/03/AR2010060304965.html
 McQuade~25

Afghanistan has brought the term “counterinsurgency” back into popular discourse after twenty year
bout of “the Vietnam Syndrome.”
This extended reflection on a brief moment of history gives a different perspective on the
current criminalization of dissent. Historically, locating counterterrorism here is important because links
the one the principal organizing discourses of the neoliberal counterrevolution to the great
(counter)revolutionary tumult of the 1960s. Declaration of the War on Terror and the creation of
Homeland Security are not definitive breaks but gathering-in of the most ruthless colonial practices of
declining imperial center as it makes one more bid to maintain dominance. Since defeat in the Second
Indochina War, the United States has been mobilizing distributive aspects of power: economically, it’s
the predations of finance; politically, it the strong arm of global and domestic counterterrorism. While
much remains to be investigated in between the separation of counterterrorism from counterinsurgency
during the final years of the Second Indochina War and the triumph of counterterrorism under
Homeland Security and the resurgence of counterinsurgency with the War on Terror, I hope that by
locating the transition in the actual struggles shaping the imperial patterns that structure the world-
system I can give example of the benefits of a historical perspective that is attentive to the structural
dynamics of empire, the vicissitudes of social struggles, and strange and often illegible places were it all
plays out.
 McQuade~26

Works Cited

Primary Documents

Emergency Decree Law 3/65. 5/9/65. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive,
Washington DC.

Homeland Security Act, 107th Congress, 2nd Session, 10/25/02. <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-

bin/query/z?c107:h.r.5005.enr:> (3/4/07).

House of Representatives, F. O. (1971). U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam:Hearings Before a

Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Ninety-second
Congress, first session. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Mau Nguyen. (n.d.). Personal Correspondence with D. Valentine. Longmeadow, MA: Douglas Valentine
Private Collection.

Memo to William Colby from Robert Star. 7/16/1971. Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National
Security Archive, Washington DC.

Memo to Department of State from Embassy Saigon, “An Tri” April 7, 1972. Douglas Valentine Collection
Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.

Memo to Department of State from Embassy Saigon “An Tri” April 28, 1972. Douglas Valentine
Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.

Memo From Embassy Saigon to Department of State “Prime Ministerial Decree on Administrative
Detention and An Tri Procedures.” Jun 6, 1973 Douglas Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security
Archive, Washington DC.

Memo to Robert Komer from Nelson Brickham. “Attack on the VCI,”10/22/66. Retrieved June 1, 2010,
from The Memory Hole: http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/attack-against.pdf

Memo to Robert Komer from Nelson Brickham and John Hansen. “A Concept for Organization for Attack
on VC Infrastructure” 22 May 1967, Retrieved June 1, 2010, from The Memory Hole:
http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/concept-for-organization.pdf

Memo to Robert Komer from *redacted+, “Action Program for Attack on VC Infrastructure,” 6/16/67;
Retrieved June 1, 2010, from The Memory Hole: http://www.thememoryhole.org /phoenix/action-
program.pdf

Memo from John Tilton to Director, MACCORDS. “An Tri Observation and Recommedations” Douglas
Valentine Collection Box 4. National Security Archive, Washington DC.

Military Assistance Command Vietnam. (1967, September 9). MACV 381-41. Retrieved June 1, 2010 from
The Memory Hole: <http://www.thememoryhole.org/phoenix/macv-381-41.pdf>
 McQuade~27

Nelson Brickham interviewed by Doug Valentine, tape recorded (n.d.). Douglas Valentine Private
Collection: Longmeadow, MA.

Secondary Documents

E. Ahmad. (2006). "Counterinsurgency." in C. Benglesdorf, M. Cerullo, & Y. Chandrani, eds. The Selected
Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (pp. 36-65). New York: Columbia University Press

D. Arnold (1997) “The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in Nineteenth Century India,” in
R. Guha, ed. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (p.
140-178).

G. Arrighi (2005) “Hegemony Unraveling I” New Left Review: 32 (pp. 23-80)

G. Arrighi; T. Hopkins & I Wallerstein. (1989) Antisystemic Movements New York: Verso

A. Bacevich (2004) American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press

(---) 2007) “Introduction” in W. A. Williams. Empire as a Way of Life. Brooklyn: Ig Publishing. (pp. v-xi) p.
vi.

(---)(2008) The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books

R. Balko. (2006) Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. Washington DC: The CATO
Institute

W. Bloss (2007) “Escalating Police Surveillance After 9/11: an Examination of Causes and Effects.”
Surveillance and Society. Vol. 4, No. 3, (pp. 209-227)

M. Boot (2002) Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic
Books
S. Bordenkricher. (1998) Tiger Cages: An Untold Story. Cameron, WV: Abby Publishing

D. Canterbury (2005) Neoliberal Democratization and the New Authoritarianism. Burlington: Ashgate
Publishing Company

W. Churchill (2004) “Pinkertons to PATRIOT Act: The Trajectory of Political Policining the United States,
1870s to the Present.” The New Centennial Review. Vol. 4., No. 1, (pp. 1-72)

W. Churchill, & J. Vander Wall. (1990) The COINTELPRO Papers. Boston: South End Press

F. Cooper & A. Stoler, eds. (1997) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkley:
University of California Press

K. DeYoung & J. Gaffe (2010, June 4) “U.S. ‘Secret War’ expands globally as Special Operations take
larger Roel” Retrieved, June 4, 2010, from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/06/03/AR2010060304965.html
 McQuade~28

W.E.B Dubois (1998) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press

G. Duménil & D. Lévy (2005) “The Neoliberal (Counter)revolution” in A. Saad-Filho & D. Johnston, eds.
Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. (pp. 9-19). London: Pluto Press.

D. Eggen (2005, December 16) “Bush Authorized Domestic Spying,” Retrieved, June 1, 2010, from The
Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/12/16/AR2005121600021.html

D. Ellsberg (2002) Secrets. New York: Penguin Books

B. Fall (1965). “How The French Got out of Viet-Nam”. In M. Raskin, & B. Fall, The Viet-Nam Reader (pp.
81-95). New York: Random House

N. Ferguson (2004) Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York: Penguin

M. Foucault (2004) “4 February 1976”in Society Must be Defended. A. Davidson eds. (pp. 87-114) New
York: Picador

(---) (1995) Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage

D. Garland (2002) Culture of Control: Crime Control in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press

R. Gilmore (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

V. de Grazia (2005) Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Boston:
Belknap

D. Greenberg , ed. (1993) Crime and Capitalism: Reading in Marxist Criminology. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.

R. Guha “The Prose of Counterinsurgency” in in N. Dirks, ed. Culture/Power/History: A Reader in

Contemporary Social Theory. (336-371.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. p.336-337.

J. Guo (2009, December 14) “Guarding America.” Retrieved, June 1, 2010, from Newsweek:
http://www.newsweek.com/2009/12/02/guarding-america.html

D. Harvey. (2003) The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press

M. Ignatieff. (1989) Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850.
New York: Puffin.

C. Johnson (2006) Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. New York: Holt Paperbacks
 McQuade~29

F. Jones (2005). "Blowtorch: Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacificaiton Policy." Parameters
(pp. 103-118)

A. Kaplan & D. Pease, eds. (1993) Cultures of United State Imperialism. Durham: Duke University Press

N. Klein (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books

G. Lewy (1978). America In Vietnam New York: University Press. p. 14;

E. Love (2004) Race over Empire: Racism and US Imperialism, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press

A. Mackenzie. (1997) Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home. Berkley: University of California Press. p. 60-61.

M. Mauer (2006) The Race to Incarcerate. New York: The New Press

J. Margulies (2006) Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. New York: Simon & Schuster

J. Mayer (2008) The Dark Side: The Inside Story of how the War on Terror Turned into a War on American
Ideals. New York: Double Day

A. McCoy (2006) A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. New
York: Metropolitan Books.

A. McCoy and F. Sarcano eds. (2009) Colonial Crucible: Empire and the Making of the Modern American
State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

A. McCoy, F. Scarano & C. Johson (2009) “On the Tropic of Cancer: Transition and Transformation in the
US Imperial State” in A. McCoy and F. Sarcano eds. Colonial Crucible: Empire and the Making of the
Modern American State. (pp. 3-33). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 24-26.

M. Meeropol. (2000) Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press

R. Meeropol, ed. (2005) America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees and the “War on
Terror.” New York: Seven Stories Press

C. W. Michaels (2005) No Greater Threat: America After the September 11 and the Rise of a National
Security State. New York: Algora Publishing.

N. Morris & D. Rothman, eds (1997) Oxford History of Prison The Practice of Punishment in Western
Society. New York: Oxford Univeristy Press.

M. Moyar (1997). Phoenix and the Birds of Prey. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press

J. Nashel (2005) Edward Lansdale’s Cold War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press
 McQuade~30

T. Paglen & A. C. Thompson (2006) Torture Taxi: On the Trial of the CIA’s Rendition Flights. Hoboken:
Melville House Publishing.

C. Parenti (2008) Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the New Age of Crisis. New York: Verso.

W. Perry (2005, July 1) “The Patriot Act vs. Homeless.” Retrieved, June 1 2010, from The Seattle Times:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20050701&slug=patriot01

J. Prados (2009) Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawarence: University of
Kansas Press

M. Renda (2001) Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press

D. Rovics (2007) “Pivotal Moment in the Green Scare.” Capitalism Nature Socialism. Vol. 18, No. 3, (pp.
8-16)

S. Sewall; J. Nagl; D. Petraeus, and J. Amos. (2007). The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field
Manual. Chicago :University of Chicago Press.

J. Sorenson (2009) "Constructing terrorists: propaganda about animal rights." Critical Studies on
Terrorism Vol. 2, no. 2, (pp 237-256);

E. Stahrl. (1957) “The Reach of an Executive.” Harvard Business Review, Jan/Feb59, Vol. 37 Issue 1 (pp.
87-96)

Staff and Agencies (2007, March 9) “FBI Abused Patriot Act powers, audit finds,” Retrieved, June 1,
2010, from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/09/usa

J. St. Clair & A. Cockburn “Tom Ridge in Vietnam: Tarnished Star” Counterpunch, October 1, 2001.

S. Stocker (2008, October 10) “Framing the RNC 8.” Retrieved, June 1 2010, from In These Times:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3962/framing_the_rnc_8/

T. Szluc (1971, February 18). U.S. Aide in Saigon Denies 'Counter-Terror' Charge. The New York Times.

M. Thomas (2009) Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914. Berkley:
University of California Press

E. Toussaint (2005) Your Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

D. Valentine “An Open Letter to Major General Bruce Lawlor” Counterpunch, August 25, 2002

(---) (1990). The Phoenix Program. New York: William & Morrow

(---) “The Spook Who Would be a Congressman” Counterpunch, November 4, 2000.

“Viet Nam: The Tiger Cages of Con Son Island” Time. July 20, 1970.
 McQuade~31

L. Wacquant (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke
University Press.

I. Wallerstein (2003) Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. New York: New Press.

B. Western (2007) Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

P. Zinoman. (2001) The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940. Los Angeles:
University of Chicago Press