Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning. Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms, men renowned for their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and declaring prophecies.

- Ecclesiasticus 44:1-4

The grunts are the stars of this series. Had this series been titled "Reminiscences of Front Line Infantrymen in Vietnam", I would be a lot less critical of it. The series does genuinely relate the feelings of soldiers, especially the actual grunts out in the field. However, the anti-war movement is presented predominantly from the point of view of soldiers and their families, especially VVAW members, while the one tame protestor talking head is constantly bemoaning the bad tactics of the antiwar movement. By claiming to present the entire war from many viewpoints, the series opens itself to charges of bias in its selection of viewpoints. A charge that is obvious to anyone really familiar with history. Fortunately for Mr. Burns, his audience is largely historically illiterate.

The relentless historical revisionism underway in this country today could not be more on display (for historians) than in this series. It is a carefully crafted, corporate funded whitewash of the CIA coupled with a general hagiography for the lucky few, of both sides, who survived the massive human damage caused by elite scheming. When it comes to atrocities and war crimes, we get the classic "few bad apples" excuse from ex-military people; and no rebuttal from anyone like Nick Turse.

The middle management of the war - the officers between the rank of captain and general - are barely acknowledged, as if all the bad stuff that happened to the grunts was the direct responsibility of Presidents and Defense Secretaries. That makes for a clean, and biased, narrative. This grunt-centric viewpoint is "balanced" by faint praise for non-military anti-war demonstrators, represented in significant part by incosequential expats, minor league protestors apologizing constantly for the excesses of "crazies", and other losers.

This series is propaganda to get the working class to support being cannon fodder again, because that's its role in the elite's worldview. To accomplish that, the simplistic oppostion of noble grunts to privileged pinstripes is hammered on again and again. But, no mention is made of the CIA sitting behind it all. The series begins before the CIA was founded, and could easily have traced its role in all of the anti-communist hysteria that manufactured the Vietnam disaster. But Mr. Burns chose to avoid that in favor of simple-minded waving of the bloody shirts of both sides.

Here is an outline of the methods used to accomplish the series' goals. There are about twenty bullet points. If the series spent five minutes on each point, it would have consummed about two hours or 10% of the series.

1. DISAPPEAR THE CIA AND AIR AMERICA

1.1 . Disappear the CIA "Secret War" in Laos and Cambodia

How do you do twenty hours on the Vietnam war and never mention the Secret War in Laos? Never mention Air America, Vang Pao, and opium? Never mention Ted Shackley, the Blond Ghost?

It's easy. The CIA's standard operating procedure has been running for fifty years: deny, stonewall, and counter-attack, while running the document shredders 24 hours a day. They have had the resources to contest any charge, defame, subborn, or intimidate any witness, and generally behave like a mob since they were organized in 1947. Dog curse Harry Truman.

That is why any narrative of the CIA's role in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that I present will be disputed and dismissed as CT. So, let's just jump into a good narrative of Ted Shackley's career on what many would call a CT website. (Its a JFK assassination site - you know, of course, that Shackley was involved in the plotting against Castro.)

In early 1962 Harvey brought Ted Shackley into the project as deputy chief of JM WAVE (CIA station in Miami). In April, 1962, Shackley was involved in delivering supplies to Johnny Roselli as part of the plan to assassinate Fidel Castro...

In 1966 Shackley was placed in charge of CIA secret war in Laos...It was at this point that Shackley and his gang became involved in the drug trade. They did this via General Vang Pao, the leader of the anti-communist forces in Laos. Vang Pao was a major figure in the opium trade in Laos. To help him Shackley used his CIA officials and assets to sabotage the competitors...

In 1969 Shackley and Clines were posted to Saigon. They took charge of Operation Phoenix, a program that was based on what Shackley had been doing in Laos...Shackley also brought others into his operation. This included Richard Armitage, a US Navy official based in Saigon's US office of Naval Operations by the name of Richard Armitage and Major General Richard Secord...According to Daniel Sheehan: “From late 1973 until April of 1975, Theodore Shackley, Thomas Clines and Richard Armitage disbursed, from the secret, Laotian-based, Vang Pao opium fund, vastly more money than was required to finance even the highly intensified Phoenix Project in Vietnam. The money in excess of that used in Vietnam was secretly smuggled out of Vietnam in large suitcases..."

After Nixon resigned Gerald Ford brought in George H. W. Bush as Director of the CIA. This was followed by Shackley being appointed as Deputy Director of Operations. He therefore became second-in-command of all CIA covert activity.

Shackley was hoping to eventually replace Bush as director of the CIA. However, the election of Jimmy Carter was a severe blow to his chances. Carter appointed an outsider, Stansfield Turner, as head of the CIA. He immediately carried out an investigation of into CIA covert activities. Turner eventually found out about Shackley’s “Secret Team”.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/5597-ted-shackley-and-the-secret...

So, a very interesting narrative about the major role the CIA played in Southeast Asia - a narrative which could be presented, as Mr. Burns likes to do, through the story of one man, Ted Shackley - just gets left out. We only hear about military plans and the Secretary of Defense, not one word about the CIA and its intelligence plans. There were about three sentences that mentioned Laos in the entire series.

1.2 Disappear CIA covert political and military activities in Vietnam

These items have been covered in my episode-by-episode reviews:

1. No mention that Diem was hand-picked by Allen Dulles of the CIA to become president.

2. No mention of Edward Lansdale, the CIA counter-insurgency expert brought in to "mentor" Diem. (Even though Lansdale is shown next to Diem in a photo.)

3. No mention of the sabotage and disinformation campaign Lansdale ran in North Vietnam in 1954-55, which incited many Catholics to flee to the South as part of a CIA plan to get more people to support Diem.

4. No mention of how the CIA created and used the legend of Catholic hero Tom Dooley to create empathy in the US for Diem's Catholic background.

5. No mention of how the CIA largely ran the South Vietnamese government. The sum total of information about the scope of CIA involvment is that, in the final episode, we are told, in passing, that the CIA had the entire top floor of the US embassy in Saigon.

the CIA provided (President Diem) with millions of dollars, a phalanx of bodyguards, and a direct line to (CIA director) Allen Dulles . The agency created South Vietnam's political parties, trained its secret police, made its popular movies, and printed and peddled an astrological magazine predicting that the stars were in Diem's favor.

- Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes - The History of the CIA, p243

6. Avoiding mentioning Thieu and Ky's direct involvement in providing drugs to US servicemen. Providing instead a mere statement of general financial corruption.

Once the raw opium was processed into the powdery No. 4 heroin in the Golden Triangle's laboratories, elements within South Vietnam's ruling military factions secured the bulk of their heroin supplies through contacts in Laos. The structure of this traffic was exposed in 1970-1971 when seizures and subsequent investigations uncovered official involvement in South Vietnam's heroin trade. In 1971, the U.S. Army provost marshal reported that the "backers of the illicit drug traffic ... may be high level, influential political figures, government leaders, or moneyed ethnic Chinese." In June, the director of the Public Safety Directorate for Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) reported that "the father of General [Ngo]Dzu, MR [Military Region] II Commanding General, is trafficking in heroin." Allegations of official involvement gained substance in March when two national assembly representatives, both allied with President Nguyen Van Thieu, were arrested at Saigon's airport carrying 9.6 and 4.0 kilograms of Laotian Double U-O Globe Brand heroin. While President Thieu controlled the army and the assembly, another Saigon factional leader, Prime Minister Tran Thien Khiem, placed his close followers inside the customs unit. In February 1971, a U.S. customs adviser reported that the conditions at Saigon's main airport had "reached a point to where the Customs personnel of Vietnam are little more than lackeys to the smugglers."

"Drugs and Drug Use." Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, edited by Stanley I. Kutler, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996. U.S. History in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/BT2336200141/UHIC?u=imgacademy&xid=815a7e3c

7. Minimizing the CIAs role in the Phoenix Program. Minimizing the fact that the program ran for five years.

8. No mention that Ambassador Martin (1975) had long had an extensive relationship with the CIA, arranging airfields for the war in Laos while ambassador to Thailand, and funding political subversion and an outright coup in Italy. This is no small omission. The fall of Saigon - and Ambassador Martin's role in it - occupies 30 minutes of the final episode, and is a major focus of the series.

1.3 Disappear CIA covert and political activities outside Vietnam and in the US

1. Never mention how often the CIA was mentioned in war protests. How its activities all over the world (Jamaica, Indonesia, Italy...) were printed by the underground press.

2. No mention that The CIA were up to their eyeballs in the bloody coup/massacre in Indonesia in 1965 - well within the timeframe and geographic scope of this series - but not a word. The brutality of the anti-communist crusade, the willingness to rely, across the board, on military coups and dictators - all of this was a thread in the antiwar, anti-colonialist aspects of the protest movement. It is completely ignored.

It has been known for more than 10 years that the CIA supplied lists of names for Suharto's assassination squads. What is less widely known is that the supposed pro-communist coup that triggered the crisis was almost certainly also the work of the CIA.

Isabel Hilton, Our Bloody Coup in Indonesia

3. No mention of the pushing and shoving between Nixon and the CIA. No mention of how Nixon distrusted the CIA as "East Coast establishment liberals", or of how the plumbers were all ex-CIA Cubans and their WASP handlers. No mention of any of the controversy about major Watergate figures, such as John Dean and Bob Woodward having spook backgrounds.

4. No mention of the exposure (but only short-lived disgrace) of the CIA in the 1977 Church/Pike hearings - themselves a direct outcome of the twin disasters of Nixon and Vietnam.

1.4 Do not acknowledge the "dirtiness" of some of the series commentators.

1. Donald Gregg, who worked in Honduras/Nicaragua with Felix Rodriguex, a member of Ted Shackley's team. Gregg supported the genocidal Rios Montt in Honduras, while facilitating yet another Air America guns/drugs supply chain.

2. John Negroponte, another Honduras/Nicaragua player.

3. Rufus Philips, who is captioned as USAID, but is on record as working for Ed Lansdale of the CIA in Vietnam.

Bottom line: the series refuses to take a hard look at the CIA, how it got us involved in Asia on the wrong side (after genuine Asia hands had been purged in the McCarthy witch hunt over "who lost China?"), how it pushed for neocolonialism and dictatorial rule using the excuse of anti-communism, how it was the personal tool of presidents (giving them a power trip, but also compromising them and controlling them), how it circumvented government oversight, how it ran drugs and laundered money.

2. IGNORE OTHER ANTI-WAR FACTORS, BESIDES DRAFT RESISTANCE

1. Minimize the anti-nuke campaign and the general terror of nuclear war. Erase Gen LeMay and all the military crazies, so the audience has little awareness of that motivation.

2. Minimize the Electronic Battlefield and the deep involvement of university researchers (The Jasons) in it, again removing motivation for the student protests.

3. Ignore horrific weapons like White Phosphorous and Cluster Bombs. Along with the un-ignorable napalm, they are all now banned by International Convention. Ignore the barbarity of free fire zones. Demonstrators knew about all of those weapons and tactics being used. And, having been raised on stories of Nazi war crimes, they rightly protested them.

4. Don't interview Daniel Elsberg, Noam Chomsky, or Tom Hayden. Wouldn't want anyone articulate tying the war to the CIA and the MIC.

3. IGNORE OTHER UNIQUE SOCIAL TRENDS

1. Completely ignore the fact that the boomer generation was the first in history to have working class kids go to college en masse. Don't look into how confused working class kids were about their role. Instead smear them together with the "pinstriped" instigators of the war.

2. Fail to point out all the freedoms that have been lost over the last 50 years. Pretend instead that the press is still a watchdog, and that the Constitution is still in force, and the MIC cares about upholding it.

The most striking thing for me in this series is the genuine freedom available to the protestors, and the press freedom. Reporters used to have access to the battlefield, and editors used to back them up. The SCOTUS used to defend the Constitution, and oppose racism and warmongering. The police used to be mere ham-fisted bullies instead of the smooth, Stasi-like machine they are today. The MIC used to contain honorable men who loved their country and its Constitution enough to blow the whistle. Today whistleblowers don't join the MIC. The few that do turn up can expect brutal punishment or exile for telling the truth.

arendt - https://caucus99percent.com/comment/298608#comment-298608.

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Well, that's it. Bullet points will have to do. No summary can concisely summarize this cluster bomb of a series.

THE END - only the clueless lived happily ever after.

Now I'm going to take a very long shower, take a very big drink, and try to forget this whole pile of bunkum. Its on to Catalonia (Maidan 2), Kurdistan (Israel 2), Puerto Rico, and Las Vegas. The bad memories of this series won't have time to become triggers, because they will be stepped on by new bad memories about the most recent misbehaviors of the US Empire.