Correspondents' Correspondence
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. WASHINGTON One of the major conundrums of the Nixon...
...at the end of February...
...George Hobart...
...It gives an inside view of what this process entails...
...Certainly, the argument will continue to rage...
...According to their lawyer, Baltimore aclu attorney William Zinman, they were initially too frightened to reveal the details of their experiences publicly...
...But if that Empire has been whittled away by the deliberate and voluntary action of its subjects, is Britain in honor bound to continue its former policies...
...The document being trafficked in the Senate last week was filed in a Baltimore court 10 months ago during an obscure trial involving two conscientious objectors...
...ironically, most Socialists would say yes...
...Although it is not sworn testimony (the lieutenants remained afraid of indictments for revealing classified material), others familiar with Phoenix confirmed the general description of the operation...
...It may also suggest that the whole phenomenon has more to do with certain international stirrings than with actual conditions inside Britain, which have improved...
...This, of course, supports Foot's charge that Powell was using racism as a bandwagon to the Tory leadership...
...While Phoenix officials dismiss the brief as "wild allegations," they concede that in the course of training the lieutenants may have heard some grisly "war stories...
...On one occasion, a civilian suspected of being a sympathizer was killed by the paid mercenaries and thereafter decapitated and dismembered, so that the eyes, head, ears and other part of the decedent's body could be and in fact were prominently displayed on his front lawn as a warning and an inducement to other Vietcong sympathizers, to disclose their identity and turn themselves in to the adviser and the mercenaries...
...The proffer received little attention until the Songmy incident renewed interest in atrocity stories...
...In essence, it is that Powell began his career after World War II as a frank imperialist (to whom, therefore, all the Queen's subjects were equals before the law), took no discernible interest in the politics of immigration between 1954-64 (when the influx of newcomers was at full swell) and then, with his now-notorious speech of spring 1968, established himself as the populist demagogue of anti-black sentiment in Britain—instantly winning a body of popular support so massive as to shift both parties significantly to the right...
...Surely he cannot escape his share of responsibility for having made it a political issue...
...Paul Foot's thesis is supported by painstaking research in the files of the newspaper serving Powell's Wolverhampton constituency...
...Aid, he feels, is bad for the national character: Britain's ex-subjects must be seen as foreigners, and in future will be treated exactly like other foreigners—black, brown, yellow or bog-green...
...The author is Army Lieutenant Francis T. Reitemeyer of Clark, New Jersey...
...yet there seems little doubt that a white backlash exists, of which the politicians are all-too-conscious (immigration is now down to a bare minimum, and nobody is likely to raise the quota...
...But Zinman persuaded him that their best chance to acquire co status was to tell all in court...
...Britain, in the days of the young, Kipling-enthused Powell, was an imperial power...
...advisers as well as the course instructor, are rife in the document...
...It would appear that Vietnamization may be working both ways...
...Still worse, it is a dismal prognosis, suggesting that Britain's race problem may lie in the future rather than in the past—and that some politician would have been tempted to exploit it sooner or later...
...Foot's reasoning runs as follows: While the British Empire existed, Britain owed certain rights to its subjects and Powell was always a very high-minded, if rather paternalistic, imperialist...
...officials in Vietnam who doubted that the program was effective in eliminating Vietcong...
...It continues: "Frequently, as related by the lecturing officers, resort to the most extreme forms of torture was necessary...
...But the statisticians inform us that there was no backlash in the years of severest maladjustment (1954-64...
...now it is a European power, with solely European interests...
...The alleged success of Phoenix in disrupting and demoralizing the Vietcong infrastructure, in fact, has become a crucial facet of Vietnamization of the war...
...And most interpretation has focused on the effort to train and equip the million-man Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which even its supporters say is currently incapable of preventing widespread massacre after the withdrawal of American troops...
...Several months ago, a Wall Street Journal reporter covering a Phoenix expedition described a Keystone Cops escapade, involving hundreds of highly trained men and producing arrests of a few wretched looking Vietcong suspects...
...In any case, the two lieutenants were readily granted co status—unusual for men in uniform—and left for California...
...Should one blame this backlash entirely on Powell...
...WASHINGTON One of the major conundrums of the Nixon Administration has been the meaning of "Vietnamiza-tion...
...The proffer concludes: "Your Petitioner was warned that loss of the war and/or his personal capture by the enemy could subject him personally to trial and punishment as a war criminal under the precedents established by the Nuremburg Trials as well as other international precedents such as the Geneva Convention...
...If it is to remain so, Powell believes, it must act (as, say Argentina or Australia) to preserve its European character—meaning, of course, "whites only...
...Though 1969 has seen Powell come out against the Common Market and urge that we treat the two or three million Irish who live among us as foreigners, the talk at the moment is about The Rise of Enoch Powell, a very skillful scis-sors-and-paste job on the evolution of his political views by Paul Foot, New Leftist, son of Britain's present ambassador at the UN, and nephew of Britain's fieriest Old Leftist, Michael Foot...
...This is stern stuff, but perhaps one should allow it more logic than Foot is willing to grant...
...Such stories, closely implicating U.S...
...LONDON Enoch Powell qualifies, once again, as Maverick of The Year— this time, not so much because he has had new things to say but because a remarkable young journalist has had something new to say about him...
...The book, just published here, will be available in the U.S...
...He concluded by quoting U.S...
...In recent months, though, Operation Phoenix has emerged as a significant source of Administration optimism about the course of the war...
...Those with an appetite for more are referred to the December 11 issue of the Village Voice which printed most of the proffer...
...Louis Post-Dispatch last summer offered a much fuller account of the program, and reported that the Saigon regime was exploiting it to eliminate political enemies...
...Richard Dudman of the St...
...The document alleges that Phoenix officers, through the activities of 18 mercenaries under their command, might be required to maintain a "kill quota" of 50 bodies monthly...
...Together they drew up what is called a "proffer...
...The darker side of Vietnamiza-tion has long been known in Washington as Operation Phoenix, a joint "counter intelligence" effort by the Pentagon, the cia and the Saigon regime to identify and eliminate some 70 thousand members of the Vietcong infrastructure...
...After completing Phoenix' combat intelligence course, he and a friend, Lieutenant Michael J. Cohn, decided they wanted to become conscientious objectors...
...thus they are for more aid and assistance...
...that it only began to make itself felt in 1967—a year before Powell made his inflammatory speech...
...But Powell is like the harsh father who informs his children when they reach the age of discretion that they must now consider themselves grownups, and learn to make their way in the world...
...Phoenix advocates contend that its blacklist is the product of advanced computer techniques used to collate and verify various intelligence reports, and that overall the program has succeeded in eliminating some 30 thousand local leaders of the nlf by death, capture or defection...
...Dudman also told of stories that the program was being used by extortionists to mulct wealthy citizens...
...Last week in Washington, however, leading senatorial doves like Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and William J. Fulbright of Arkansas were pondering a document that raised serious questions as to whether the new American policy might really mean emphasizing a U.S.-sponsored campaign of terror and assassination...
...Foot is accusing Powell not so much of racism or demagoguery, but of political opportunism...
...The Pentagon alleges that the lieutenants got all their information from the Wall Street Journal, though there is little correspondence between the Journal's accounts and those in the court document...
...The emphasis throughout is on eliminating the nlf political operatives and sympathizers in much the way the Vietcong selectively removed local officials of the Diem regime early in the war...
...Your Petitioner sincerely urges that this kind of activity was never envisioned by him, whether concretely or abstractly, as a function and purpose of the United States Army, before and even after he entered the service...
...Though much of his case is difficult to refute, it is fairly plain from Foot's book that he believes Powell's change of mind was unforgivable...
Vol. 52 • December 1969 • No. 24
