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7. "As I Recall the Many Tortures": Michigan State University, Operation Phoenix, and the Making of a Police State in South Vietnam
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Chapter 7 "As I Recall the Many Tortures" Michigan State University, Operation Phoenix, and the Making of a Police State in South Vietnam .. . the dreary wall of the Vietnamese Surete that seemed to smell of urine and injustice. -GRAHAM GREENE, TIle Quiet American, 1955 As I recall the many tortures they tried on me, I remember the perverse inhuman joy in their shouts. -Vietnamese prison detainee, 1970 The whole thing was a lie. We weren't preserving freedom in South Vietnam. There was no freedom to preserve. Opposition to the government meant jailor death. - MASTER SERGEANT DONALD DUNCAN, U.S. Army, 1966 On April 19, 1965, a seventeen-year-old suicide bomber walked into the Flower nightclub in Dalat, Vietnam, seeking to emulate "heroes" who had given their lives for the anti-imperialist cause, including Nguyen Van Troi, a legendary guerrilla executed after attempting to assassinate Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. The teenager detonated a bomb that killed thirteen people, including himself, and injured forty-two. In a brief suicide note he condemned the war and Vietnamese who collaborated with the United States. The greatest tragedy, he wrote, was that "U.S. imperialism had made Vietnamese kill Vietnamese:'! The young suicide bomber may very well have had the American police training programs in mind in composing his final words. Following the model of previous operations in Japan and South Korea, advisers from Michigan State University and USAID trained thousands of South Vietnamese police in riot control and counterinsurgency, contributing to extensive human rights violations. In importing new technologies and Western policing standards, they felt that they were helping to create a modern administrative state capable of controlling its population efficiently and fighting communism. In practice, they modernized repression by providing the mechanisms with which state security forces could coordinate their 141 activities more systematically and on a wider scale in the service ofan authoritarian regime. Worst of all, as the suicide bomber recognized, American training programs helped to stoke civil conflict and violence and turned Vietnamese against one another, forever transforming the country. University on the Make: The Military-Academic Complex and Consolidation of the Diem Dictatorship In April 1966, the left-wing magazine Ramparts published an expose on the training ofSouth Vietnam's police by Michigan State University professors and infiltration of the program by the CIA. Illustrated by a cover featuring South Vietnam's first lady, Madame Nhu, as a buxom MSU cheerleader, the article chronicled the role of political scientist Wesley Fishel as a key adviser to Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, describing how he and tweed-jacketed colleagues had worked to build up a repressive police apparatus to liquidate the pro-communist Vietminh. The authors, Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, and Sol Stern, felt that Fishel and his associates had sacrificed their integrity as academics and epitomized the growth ofa dangerous military-academic complex in which the brainpower and resources ofAmerica's major universities were being put in the service of U.S. imperial interests.' Although MSU president John Hannah denounced the article as "grossly inaccurate;' the police training programs were indeed a bulwark of American efforts to create a client regime below the Seventeenth Parallel after the temporary division of Vietnam under the 1954 Geneva Accords3 Regarding the accords as a "disaster;' the Eisenhower administration refused to allow elections to reunify the country, knowing that Ho Chi Minh, who had led the liberation movement against France, would win. Bent on stamping out the "virus" of independent nationalism, which it feared would spread throughout Southeast Asia, the Eisenhower administration instead attempted to consolidate Diem's rule in the South. Diem had little popular backing and was described by his own advisers as "egotisticaL .. neurotically suspicious, stubborn, self-righteous, and a complete stranger to compromise:' According to the CIA, Diem was so dependent on American support, "he would have fallen in a day without it."4 A Catholic anticommunist who refused a position in Ho Chi Minh's cabinet after the August 1946 revolution because the Vietminh had killed his brother, Diem was championed by Congress, academia, and the Catholic Church as a "third force" alternative to communism and colonialism because he had not collaborated with Frances In May 1955 the State Department contracted with the MSU School of Police Administration at a budget of $25 million to provide technical assistance and training to the South Vietnamese police, with the aim of "facilitating law and order so as to create the conditions necessary...