Talk:Phoenix Program

message: Just a warning here
there are accusations from BOTH sides that this page is not NPOV
PLEASE dont just edit it randomly — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.79.169.226 (talk) 12:41, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Dual accusations

message: The Phoenix Program was notorious for abuses that went beyond stated aims and rules, and resulted in the abuse, torture and murder of thousands of Vietnamese by US military/intelligence personnel. This article now reads like a sanitized whitewash, or propaganda, that misleads students of history. It appears to have been edited over the past few years with a bias towards legitimizing and justifying the program, and downplaying the documented abuses. Look at the now-archived Talk pages for some relevant discussion, and some of the older versions. It appears that comments critical of the Phoenix Program, US policy or US military personnel have been removed, often with no discussion or comment. Sometimes the alleged grounds for deletion was inadequate references, but this seems to have been applied in a selective, biased fashion. Rather than correcting the reference, the sentence was deleted. US critics of the Program, and the war, have been downplayed. One editor appears to have been User:TDC, who was blocked from editing Wikipedia, and seemed to have a nationalist-US POV agenda; there may be others. Dehma1 (talk) 00:30, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Whitewash? 

message: 20.000 + thousand civilians : medical doctors, nurses, teachers, professors, ordinary workers, managers, artists, students, many anonymous individuals without any social significance, etc. murdered in barbaric fashion, first tortured, often raped, and than butchered for sole purpose of TERRORIZING civil population. Every victim was tagged with one card - AS of spades.
CIA former employees, chiefs of stations, directors and deputy directors talk openly about "Operation Phoenix" (referring to Phoenix Program) in French documentary ARTE France 2003 "CIA: Secret Wars", using description and words mentioned above !
List of CIA employees talking about Phoenix Program, among other historical facts, can be previewed here.
Besides, intro to this article constitute pure propaganda.
--Santasa99 (talk) 14:08, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Terrorism !? 

message: Comment. About this diff. I assume this is the Douglas Valentine info you are talking about. I did not add it myself, nor did I return it to the article when it was removed. It does not name the original source (as in who witnessed it). So I don't think it should be in the article. It is not about Valentine's claims in my opinion. It is about the original sources. --Timeshifter (talk) 01:02, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Source Douglas Valentine directly

message: Maybe rename this page so we can have a disambiguation page referring to other Phoenix programs, eg DARPA Phoenix Program ? - Rod57 (talk) 10:59, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disambiguation page for other Phoenix programs 

message: Just one question about including a statement from Chomsky's book in this article: What makes Chomsky a reputable source of information on when Phoenix was terminated? He has absolutely no credentials whatever in this respect. He does, however, have radical points of view and is a well-known political activist. Are these his credentials as a source on Phoenix? Is this good enough at Wikipedia?
FoundersFan (talk) 19:55, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Noam Chomsky 

message: The decapitation photograph needs to be properly sourced. I remember seeing this photo run in our local underground newspaper, and wondering where it came from. In the present instance, there's no indication that any of the soldiers in the photograph have anything to do with the Phoenix program, and indeed, since the point of Phoenix was infiltration, it's unlikely uniformed soldiers had much to do with it. What the photo really shows is an atrocity, and that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the Phoenix program. It should be either properly sourced, or it should be deleted. Theonemacduff (talk) 19:58, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photograph 

message: Obviously this is a fairly new term,probably arrived since the Iraq war in conventional use.To be insurgents you need to be fighting against the recognised government of a country. South Vietnam was not recognised by the UN at all. Vietnam was divided in the 1954 Geneva accords on a temp basis until 1956 when elections should have been held. The Americans and Diem did not want elections held as Ho Chi Minh would have won them so they set up the South Vietnam state. The people fighting against that were Vietnamese so they were not insurgents against any recognised government,it was a civil war that had been going on since the end of WW2.Please provide you thoughts or evidence that states otherwiseZrdragon12 (talk) 19:23, 30 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Just add this piece on the Geneva accords:
The Geneva Agreements, which were issued on July 21, 1954,[11] carefully worded the division of northern and southern Vietnam as a "provisional military demarcation line",[12] "on either side of which the forces of the two parties shall be regrouped after their withdrawal".[12] To specifically put aside any notion that it was a partition, they further stated, in the Final Declaration, Article 6: "The Conference recognizes that the essential purpose of the agreement relating to Vietnam is to settle military questions with a view to ending hostilities and that the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary"..Zrdragon12 (talk) 19:41, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

text: An insurgency is an armed rebellion against a constituted authority (for example, an authority recognized as such by the United Nations) when those taking part in the rebellion are not recognized as belligerents.  Zrdragon12 (talk) 20:24, 30 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Use of the term Insurgency

message: The opening para says that "Few of the prisoners survived—most of them were tortured to death, and those that survived the torture sessions were generally killed afterwards" but then says later "By 1972, Phoenix operatives had "neutralized" 81,740 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters, of whom 26,369 were killed." 26,369/81,740 is 32% killed, so the earlier quote seems to be a gross exaggeration. Mztourist (talk) 15:09, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opening para confusion 

message: I've removed an old neutrality tag from this page that appears to have no active discussion per the instructions at Template:POV:
::This template is not meant to be a permanent resident on any article. Remove this template whenever:
::#There is consensus on the talkpage or the NPOV Noticeboard that the issue has been resolved
::#It is not clear what the neutrality issue is, and no satisfactory explanation has been given
::#In the absence of any discussion, or if the discussion has become dormant.
Since there's no evidence of ongoing discussion, I'm removing the tag for now. If discussion is continuing and I've failed to see it, however, please feel free to restore the template and continue to address the issues. Thanks to everybody working on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 12:26, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  removing POV tag with no active discussion per [[Template:POV]] 

message: In different places of this article, the name of a witness is reported both as "K. Milton Osborne" and "K. Milton Osborn".
What's the right spelling? 
--Filippof (talk) 15:04, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  The right spelling 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Phoenix Program. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070625022447/http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/milreview/English/MarApr06/Andrade-Willbanks.pdf to http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/milreview/English/MarApr06/Andrade-Willbanks.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.
Cheers.—cyberbot IITalk to my owner:Online 21:11, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on Phoenix Program. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070928142425/http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/MyLaiPhoenix.html to http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/MyLaiPhoenix.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20140718102901/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/phoenix-scfr-19700217.html to http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/phoenix-scfr-19700217.html
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 21:14, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Phoenix Program. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20101221233032/http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla%3A65c9763227c226e106cadd63f7ef9024ad4e3224 to http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla%3A65c9763227c226e106cadd63f7ef9024ad4e3224
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 22:59, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 4 external links on Phoenix Program. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120917183147/http://www.douglasvalentine.com/the_phoenix_program_11712.htm to http://www.douglasvalentine.com/the_phoenix_program_11712.htm
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070928142528/http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/LettersGood.html to http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/LettersGood.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070622184714/http://www.counterpunch.org/homeland2.html to http://www.counterpunch.org/homeland2.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070824174303/http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine0824.html to http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine0824.html
*Added  tag to http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/org.wgbh.mla%3Aa23370d5564726bb0e43a60dbafb06ae9916d140
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 01:24, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: you must follow WP:BRD rather than edit warring with me as you have done here:  and here: . As I said here:  you don't put refs in the lede. You don't get to decide that there were US war crimes, you need to present the relevant information from your refs in the appropriate section, if multiple WP:RS shows that war crimes occurred, then your statement can go in the lede.
In relation to my deletion here:  which you also reverted here: , I deleted this because I didn't regard it as being from an RS, in addition it repeated an account already contained under the Torture section. Mztourist (talk) 10:55, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "War crimes" 

message: By this diff:  I reverted various changes to the page which  made with the comment "rvt to last good version. Please don't engage in political debate on this page". Firstly proper citing of a webpage is unarguable. Gary Kulik in his book War Stories calls into question the claims regarding war crimes during the Phoenix Program, particularly those made by  K. Barton Osborne (who is later incorrectly referred to as K. Milton Osborn). In accordance with WP:WEIGHT if Osborne's claims are presented then contradictory RS information such as that of Kulik should also be presented. We don't need to repeat Osborne's story about a dowel being inserted in a detainee's ear. Nick Turse is the source claiming that war crimes were common and so it is correct to make this clear. We don't list in the See Also section links that are already contained in the body of the page.Mztourist (talk) 03:55, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  28 June 2020 

message: By this diff:  I have reverted the 3 July edits by IP 98.28.42.70 who stated "removed outlier opinion unsupported by any other sources" and "removed unsubstantiated claims unsupported by bulk of literature". Gary Kulik is a WP:RS, if you have a problem with the source take it to Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard for a review. In relation to the comments that Kulik's claims are "unsupported by bulk of literature" no justification is given for this assertion. In fact the existing sources on the page are all rather biased to one viewpoint and adding Kulik gives WP:WEIGHT to the page and so must be retained, even if some authors like the anonymous IP don't like what he says. Mztourist (talk) 15:00, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  12 July 2020