TOM RIDGE AND THE PHOENIX PROGRAM

In the conventional biographies, Ridge is reported to have been a Catholic alter boy who won a scholarship to Harvard and went on to earn a B.A. in 1967. He was drafted into the Army while attending Dickinson Law School in Carlisle, PA. In Vietnam, he was awarded a Bronze Star for leading an action that cleared a small Viet Cong force from an area. This war hero won six consecutive terms in the House before becoming the governor of Pennsylvania. Under that state's term limits, he was due to leave office in 2003.

But there is a disquieting side to this all-American-boy-makes-good story.

According to investigative reporters Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, “He passed up officer training school because it would have meant an extra year of service. Ridge arrived in Vietnam [where he was given the nickname T-Bone] in November 1969, and joined Bravo Company, First Battalion, 20^th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division.”

One man who served with Ridge wrote to a veteran's webpage stating, “The last several months I participated in the Pacification program along the Red Ball. My squad consisted of four other US soldiers and up to ten ARVN [Army of the Republic of Viet Nam] What a waste. I was not impressed with Ridge either. He was the squad leader of my squad before I became sergeant. The pathetic SOB would have caused all of us to get killed if we hadn't taken care of him. I was glad when he no longer led us.”

But Ridge's leadership ability is not what concerned researchers the most. The “Pacification program” referred to by the Vietnam vet was the infamous “Phoenix Program,” in which more than 45,000 Vietnamese were assassinated and many thousands more tortured and abused.

Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program, explained, “During the Vietnam War, under the CIA’s Phoenix program—which is the model for the Homeland Security Office—a terrorist suspect was anyone accused by one anonymous source. Just one. The suspect was then arrested, indefinitely detained in a CIA interrogation center, tortured until he or she (in some cases children as young as twelve) confessed, informed on others, died, or was brought before a military tribunal (such as Bush is proposing) for disposition.

“In thousands of cases, innocent people were imprisoned and tortured based on the word of an anonymous informer who had a personal grudge or was actually a Viet Cong double agent feeding the names of loyal citizens into the Phoenix blacklist. At no point in the process did suspects have access to due process or lawyers, and thus, in 1971, four US Congresspersons stated their belief that the Phoenix Program violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war.”

Ridge received a medal for a small action during his stint in Vietnam. His Bronze Star citation states, “Sgt. Ridge moved forward and began placing accurate bursts of rifle fire on the insurgents, eliminating one and forcing the remainder of the hostile elements to take evasive action.”

Vietnam veterans noticed that the citation did not mention enemy troops but instead “insurgents,” a term given to any Vietnamese under suspicion by the US authorities.

So, Tom Ridge, a man who participated in a CIA-sponsored terror program in Vietnam that included arrest without due process, torture and assassination, was brought in to be the first head of our newest federal agency, one that is drawing power from more than 200 existing agencies.

Another man who participated in the CIA Phoenix program was Bruce Lawlor, who after serving in Vietnam went on to became a major general. Author Valentine said Lawlor admitted to his participation in Phoenix during an interview for Valentine's book.

“What Lawlor told me basically confirmed everything,” said Valentine. “Except there were some additional, startling details. To begin with, Lawlor told me that he joined the CIA in 1967, while he was getting his BA at George Washington University. The CIA hired him to work the night shift, and after he graduated, he was given the chance to become a regular CIA staff officer. He took the paramilitary course, which included instruction in weapons and military tactics, but he was also trained as a foreign intelligence officer, the kind who manages secret agents. After that he was assigned to the Vietnam Desk at Langley headquarters, where he received specialized training in agent operations in Vietnam, and took a language course in Vietnamese. During this time, Lawlor formed a rapport with the Vietnam Desk officer, Al Seal, and when Seal was assigned as the base chief in Danang, he asked that Lawlor accompany him.”

In 1984, after leaving the military, Lawlor was the Democratic Party nominee for Attorney General of Vermont. He listed the Phoenix Program on his political resume that was handed out to the press.

One journalist with a small weekly, Vermont Vanguard, published the first critical article about Lawlor and Phoenix. By the time of the state Democratic convention, activist groups in the state had organized and produced signs for convention delegates reading “No Assassins for Attorney General.” Lawlor lost the Fall primary despite a visit from former CIA Director William Colby, the CIA official who headed the Phoenix Program.

“Imagine my surprise to learn that the Bruce Lawlor is serving as the Office of Homeland Security's Senior Director for Protection and Prevention!” remarked Valentine. “To get right to the point, I have a sneaking suspicion that Lawlor…is still working for the CIA, and thus poses a major threat to democracy in America. He's someone who has access to Ashcroft's political blacklist, and he has control over the covert action teams that can be used to neutralize…dissidents. One of the reasons I have this crazy feeling, is that nowhere in any of Lawlor's official looking, on-line biographies is there any mention of his CIA service. It's like his biographers are deliberately trying to hide his CIA connection from us.”

Yet another ranking first Bush Administration senior official with a checkered background is Richard Armitage, best friend of Colin Powell and unanimously endorsed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the position of Deputy Secretary of State in 2001. He too was a major Phoenix Program operative, according to Valentine and others.

Valentine noted, “HR 19, just introduced [in January, 2001] by Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, would repeal the Executive Orders of Presidents Reagan and Carter prohibiting federal employees, including the military, from carrying out assassinations. This implies that the Bush administration plans to deal harshly with terrorists and other inconvenient persons. Richard Armitage, who was involved in the Iran-Contra deal as well as CIA covert operations in Vietnam, will reportedly head up what's called ‘The Terrorist Elimination Act of 2001.’ That's our new Deputy Secretary of State.”

It should be noted that this was not the first time that Armitage's name has come up in connection with criminal behavior. Once again, the issue of illegal drugs cropped up.

In 1987, Col. James “Bo” Gritz, a much-decorated Vietnam veteran, met with Burmese General Kuhn Sa, the head of the Golden Triangle drug trade, in an effort to locate American POWs. Gritz, in his 1988 book, A Nation Betrayed, wrote that General Sa detailed for him the heroin trade and named then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Armitage as the person who handled the financial end of the US narcotics trade through banks in Australia. Armitage reportedly was involved in a shadowy group of US government officials and mobsters conspiring to import heroin into the United States.

Shocked at this revelation, Gritz asked himself, “How could men sworn before God to defend the Constitution so befoul their office? What form of stand-up sewage would facilitate the movement of deadly addictive narcotics into their own homeland? It took several long moments for the full impact to be realized. Then it was as if someone had turned on a light in my mind. Until that moment my mental and emotional conditioning from a career of military service refused to allow such a contemplation. It was so un-American and alien as to be incomprehensible. But, if true, it explained a train of unexplained events. If Richard Armitage was, as Kuhn Sa avowed, a major participant in parallel government drug trafficking, than it explained why our efforts to rescue POWs had been inexplicably foiled.”

But if illegal drugs continued to pour into the United States, more conventional products did not in mid-2002. A labor dispute between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) caused a stack up of cargo ships along the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle that threatened to cut deeply into the 2002-03 holiday season profits. The strike was broken in October when President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, a controversial 1947 union busting law that was passed over President Truman's veto. Under this law, an 80-day “cooling off” period can be ordered during a “national emergency.”

Although Bush's action received scant attention in a media focused on the proposed invasion of Iraq, one official of ILWU, Jack Heyman, termed Bush's intervention “a historic juncture in the labor movement.” Heyman added, “By invoking Taft-Hartley against the longshore workers, Bush is effectively declaring war on the working class here and the Iraqi people simultaneously.”