Phoenix Program

This is as good an account I have found of how the CIA got into the business of helping Vietnamese kill each other off one by one. It is a disturbing and valuable book, and I took from it several lessons: 1) CIA puppies with no military background, and military detailees with no law enforcement background, have no business getting into the gutter with foreign thugs; 2) if we support indigenous arrest, torture, and assassination programs they need to have some serious multi-cultural analysis and counterintelligence support lest we simply give one faction the means of killing off the other without regard to our interests; and 3) our general approach to interference in the internal affairs of other nations is corrupt and increases local corruption.

Once you know that Manzione is a verified fraud everthing that follows is discredited. A lot of facts mixed with a lot of fiction.

Douglas Valentine's _The Phoenix Program_ is loopy conspiracy riddled nonsense that offers a great deal of speculation without much hard evidence.Valentine uses a great number of interviews with disgruntled low-level operatives to justify his rather ideologically extreme perspectives, but he offers little in the way of hard documentation.