> > The Hotel Tacloban is a book I came to read after unknowingly reading
some of
> > Valentine's previous articles on the web, and then knowingly being
exposed to
> > an interview with him on Black Op Radio, not long after this government
> > unveiled Operation TIPS as a Homeland Security agency program, that
would help
> > helpful U.S. residents turn in their neighbors.
> > His appearance on the internet radio show pointed out the similiarity of
TIPS
> > to HIPS, the
> > "other way of saying" abbreviation for the genocidal program from the
60's and
> > 70's, in Viet Nam, called overall, Operation Phoenix, a program executed
by
> > the cia to root out Civilian dissenters, so that they could be
interrogated,
> > i.e. tortured & hideously executed under the umbrella consolidation of
25 or
> > more intellegence agencies called Phoenix.
> > The suggestion that Phoenix is a grandfather/mentor to Homeland
Security, and
> > a harbinger of things to come for the american citizen is more than a
> > possibility with a high probability .
> > "You have relatives in the homeland?"
> > The Hotel Tacloban is the beginning, a visit to the innocence of an
underage
> > soldier in ww2, (Valentine's father) and his encounter of the forces of
> > respect for military rank and where the beginnings of where real evil
takes
> > us.
> > A story that will stay with me for the rest of my conscious life. Honest
and
> > shocking.

The Hotel Tacloban is a book I came to read after unknowingly reading some of Valentine's previous articles on the web, and then knowingly being exposed to an interview with him on Black Op Radio, not long after this government unveiled Operation TIPS as a Homeland Security agency program, that would help helpful U.S. residents turn in their neighbors.
His appearance on the internet radio show pointed out the similiarity of TIPS to HIPS, the
"other way of saying" abbreviation for the genocidal program from the 60's and 70's, in Viet Nam, called overall, Operation Phoenix, a program executed by the cia to root out Civilian dissenters, so that they could be interrogated, i.e. tortured & hideously executed under the umbrella consolidation of 25 or more intellegence agencies called Phoenix.
The suggestion that Phoenix is a grandfather/mentor to Homeland Security, and a harbinger of things to come for the american citizen is more than a possibility with a high probability .
"You have relatives in the homeland?"
The Hotel Tacloban is the beginning, a visit to the innocence of an underage soldier in ww2, (Valentine's father) and his encounter of the forces of respect for military rank and where the beginnings of real evil takes us.
A story that will stay with me for the rest of my conscious life. Honest and shocking.
An emotional timebomb ... an appropriate introduction to Douglas Valentines thoughts & writings.

The Hotel Tacloban is a book I came to read after unknowingly reading some of Valentine's previous articles on the web, and then knowingly being exposed to an interview with him on Black Op Radio, not long after this government unveiled Operation TIPS as a Homeland Security agency program, that would help helpful U.S. residents turn in their neighbors.
His appearance on the internet radio show pointed out the similiarity of TIPS to HIPS, the
"other way of saying" abbreviation for the genocidal program from the 60's and 70's, in Viet Nam, called overall, Operation Phoenix, a program executed by the cia to root out Civilian dissenters, so that they could be interrogated, i.e. tortured & hideously executed under the umbrella consolidation of 25 or more intellegence agencies called Phoenix.
The suggestion that Phoenix is a grandfather/mentor to Homeland Security, and a harbinger of things to come for the american citizen is more than a possibility with a high probability .
"You have relatives in the homeland?"
The Hotel Tacloban is the beginning, a visit to the innocence of an underage soldier in ww2, (Valentine's father) and his encounter of the forces of respect for military rank and where the beginnings of real evil take us.
A story that will stay with me for the rest of my conscious life. Honest and shocking.
An emotional timebomb ... an appropriate introduction to Douglas Valentines thoughts & writings.

"Evolutionary Paleobiology" is an elegant overview of the major themes of paleobiological research in the mid-1900's; one which continues to the present. It contains excellent papers from the most prominent researchers in the field, encompassing not only paleobiological aspects but also neontological - especially molecular biology - approaches to studying evolutionary paleobiology. This is a scientific celebration of the career of distinguished paleobiologist James W. Valentine, whom many would regard as the father of evolutionary paleobiology; each paper covers some aspect of his ecumenical approach to paleobiological research, ranging from molecular biology to field and taxonomic studies. Admittedly, this is one volume that is aimed primarily for students of paleobiology, and, in general, evolutionary biology, but it also should be of interest to historians of science.

This book was a great read. I didn't want to put it down. Valentine really knows how to keep you in suspense. The only problem I had was that I doubted some of his research and he tended to go off on conspiracy theories. But then you have to remember Valentine was interviewed on Oct 17 2001 for a South African Muslim Radio show. This happened after the many tragic deaths due to Anthrax and after the Terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The interviewer ask Valentine if the CIA could responsible for sending Anthranx to American People. Valentine said "CIA happens to be the prime suspect in all these incidences, and the CIA may have a very good reason for sending, and I don't know that it is doing it, but hypothetically speaking, it may well be that the CIA sent the Anthrax letters to the individuals in the US simply to perpetuate the hysteria in the US." When I read that, much of "TDY" suddenly lost credibility. Other than that it reads ok.

Doug Valentine has really impressed me with his writing. The story itself is very spellbinding if you are at all interested in military covert operations. But not as important as the superb was the tale is unwoven.

Before going to bed I made the mistake of thinking I could just read the first chapter... I could not put the book down until I finished at 5:00 am. And after the gut wrenching toll on my emotions, I was thanking myself to be alive after what I just went through. The attention to detail gave me, and everyone I have lent the book to, the same reaction. You felt you were right there in the moment. I don't give this review lightly, it is that riveting!

The story is based on a real incident somewhere in Southeast Asia. No need to give the plot away, but if you want to hear the author discuss this book. An archived interview is posted at Black Op Radio.

This is the kind of book that you will want to lend to a friend the minute you finish the last page.

I doubt you will ever volunteer for any kind of 'temporary duty' after reading this.

I highly recommend this book.

Len Osanic osanic@prouty.org

While Hollywood has done well to smoothen the edges by "informing" us that the Vietnam war was "dirty" (there must be also clean wars then) because of "isolated incidents" like the May Lai massacre, more and more books keep surfacing providing hardcore evidence that not only America conducted one of the most brutal wars and invasions recorded in history but also staged state of the art terrorism in the process.
This is exactly what the Phoenix program was about as is meticulously documented in this book. Started in 1968 and kept functioning throughout the war this program was a covert CIA operation aimed at terrorising primarily civilians who might've had the unfortunate intention (or did in fact) support the Vietkong.
Phoenix included everything in the book in averting the Vietnamese from helping the Vietkong, everything from organised torture to burning down whole villages on the mere suspicion that sympathisers might be nesting there to assasinations of key civilian figures. All in all over 40.000 civilians were murdered, most in cold blooded fashion, even though it had become clear from the very early stages that Phoenix was going to have little if any effect in America's effort to win the war.
Perhaps the one fact that strikes as most barbaric -understatement, since the mission of the program was barbarity by definition- was the accountant's logic under which Phoenix was run. Its officials had to produce monthly quotes of assasinations or "neutralisations" (hmm, this type of euphemism does bring to mind some other days in history too ) so they could report the "successes" back to headquarters.
Millions of dollars were pumped into all this but at the same time Phoenix created a massive black market as well, and contributed majorly in the -anyway- massive corruption that took place in the Vietnam war in both American personel and the Vietnamese civilian population in their struggle to survive the onslaught.
As intimidating and overwhelming this book is, i have to mention the two things that i found not in its favor: firstly, the author (who otherwise, has done a brilliant job documenting and interviewing) sinks the book too much in detail that will interest more the professional historians than the average reader. Details which include ranks, location of this or that office etc. And yes this does add undisputed credibility but it also tires. Another thing is that, as other reviewers also mentioned, the author somehow manages to come across as unwillingly glorifying sometimes the participants in Phoenix, he's trying hard to understand their other side, tries hard to portray some of them as people who saw all this as "doing a job, their job". This of course, can not work. Noone can sympathise with a torturer even if he's totally unable to understand what he's doing (something not improbable in extreme brainwashing conditions like those in the military).
But all this doesnt take anything away from the incredible work Douglas Valentine had done here. Being that this program was a co-op only made his work harder. People are not as willing to talk about a covert operation. And if they do then they are not going to give you everything on a platter. You will eventually have to conduct some painstaking work yourself to unearth the rest of the facts yourself. That means reading 100s of documents and piecing them together. Reading the bibliography at the end of the book will convince you.
Books like this further embarass war apologisers and warhawks. They drive home the point that imperialistic wars have always been and will always be brutal and merciless. Books like this also provide the evidence that everyone suspects was there to begin with.
It might be easier to read about the already "known" side of the Vietnam war (the jungles, the leeches, the boobie traps etc) but the "Phoenix program" epitomises what this war was really about and how the killing , the torture and the general destruction were no results of isolated mishaps but rather a product of deliberate policy.

The Phoenix Program is a grim history of one of the darkest episodes of the Vietnam War, the CIA's civilian torture and assassination program called Phoenix. Phoenix was the grotesque brainchild of William Colby and may have resulted in the elimination, to use Colby anaseptic phrase, more than 40,000 South Vietnamese civilians, suspected by the CIA of having anti-American sentiments. This was a difficult story to excavate, taking all of the professional and human resources of one of America's most gifted and tenacious investigative reporters, Douglas Valentine.

Valentine dares to tred across territory long considered taboo to reveal the shocking and baldly criminal behavior of the CIA and its South Vietnamese clients at the peak of the war in Vietnam. Wholesale arrests of non-combatants, burtal interrogations, torture of the most unspeakable nature and murder. Valentine shows that the My Lai massacre was no isolated incident, but an outgrowth of a systematic, decade-long program of state sponsored terrorism.

Dare to tell the truth about the CIA and you will pay a heavy price. Valentine's book has oddly disappeared from the shelves of American bookstores. This a historical tragedy, since it is one of the few volumes that has dared to tell the truth about the true nature of the CIA's role in Vietnam. This book demands to be republished, as it is quite simply one of the best histories of the Vietnam war.

Jeffrey St. Clair Co-author Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

The Phoenix program
By Douglas Valentine
Vietnam Veterans Against the War Anti Imperialist
vvawai@oz.net

Between 1967 and 1973, the United States undertook the most ambitious and far reaching operation of the Vietnam War. Created and coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency, and implemented by mercenary "counter-terror" teams, Phoenix (or Phuong Hoang Operation) was the final solution to the problem posed by a secret underground of Vietnamese civilians who supported the armed Vietcong insurgents. Over time, hundreds of thousands of Vietcong sympathizers, and innocent bystanders, were apprehended by the Phoenix teams and sent to hideous interrogation centers manned by South Vietnam's cruel secret police. An estimated forty thousand Vietnamese were killed, and countless atrocities, including the My Lai Massacre, were perpetrated in the name of "neutralizing the Vietcong infrastructure. The Phoenix program was launched on August 1, 1968, (after the Tet Offensive) in order to eradicate the communist infrastructure. The number killed if proportionate to population, would total over 200,000 Americans deliberately assignated over a three-year period, were Phoenix in practice in the United States.
Central to the Phoenix Program is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers.. One of the principal tasks of high-level US officials, led by CIA William Colby, was to establish quotes for the number of Vietnamese to be "neutralized each month". In 1969 the target was for 1800 eliminations per month. The result was vastly increased numbers of innocent persons rounded up and imprisoned, indiscriminately murdered, and brutally tortured in an effort to show results. A Phoenix agent testified to Congress "I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lied through an entire interrogation".
Although epic in scope and significance, the Phoenix Program has never been analyzed in detail until (this book) now back in print. This book tracks the program from its roots in earlier programs, through its conclusion in South Vietnam, to its current use as a model for CIA counter-terror and counter-insurgency operations worldwide. Based on previously classified documents and extensive research conducted over four years, the book includes interviews with over one hundred participants, from senior CIA officers who created and managed the program, to the CIA officers and Serviceman who ran its field operations.
This book is documentary proof not only of CIA sponsored torture but also assassinations not only in Latin America in the eighties but also in Vietnam earlier. Phoenix was an American creation. Once arrested, suspects could not confront accusers or see dossiers, they were denied bail, legal council, and denied a trial or even a hearing. Due process was non existent. This book is about terror and its role in political warfare. It shows how successive American administrations sank deeper in the vortex of covert operations and asks what happens when Phoenix comes home to roost?
Phoenix wasn't the first nor last special operations by the US government. The list is long from the Bolivia in '91, El Salvador from '81-92, Iraq in '91, Hungary in '57, Peru in '91 to Vietnam in the early 1960's. As the US steps up its intervention in Columbia - and as protesters fight to close the School of Americas - its more important than ever to learn from history to apply it to what our government is doing today - though much of it is yet unrevealed. Scratch the surface.

To be honest, Hotel Tacloban does not pose as truth as long as you first read the "Publisher's note" hidden in tiny print in the introductory pages. If you just sail in and read it as an attempt to tell the truth then if you are me you do not twig to what is going on until the end, when the US Army somehow destroys forever all proof that the Japanese POW camp in which the author''s father was allegedly kept (along with 100 others) ever existed. Pure garbage. It is disturbing that a book like this can go out masquerading as truth ....it is only when you finish the book and then you go back to the front and carefully analyse the back of the cover etc that you realise you have been had, but that everyone has covered their backs.

The Hotel Tacloban is a fascinating read. The book flows well, reads easily, and keeps pulling you along to the next chapter - a marvelous peice of literary craftsmanship. The only downside is the nagging thought that it might just be a made-up story.

That would be easy to accept if the author said outright that it was fiction. It would also be easy to accept if we had independent confirmation of the events. What is hard to accept is that the story has the ring of authnticity - we do know that many things just like this happened - and the author claims that it is true, but we have no way of proving or disproving those assertions.

A war veteran myself, I can testify that things like the events related in this book are unfortunatly normal occurences in many circles throughout the world, even today. Further, the types of actions purported to have been carried out by the US Army at the end of the book have in fact been done before, another well-documented fact. More importantly, perhaps, is this - the words of the author ring with the tone of truth. A wise VA counselor once remarked to me, when we were discussing whether or not specific events had occured to a mutual aquaintance, that even if we could never establish the exact sequence or total sum of events, it was obvious that SOMETHING had happened to him. I get the same feeling from this book. Whether it is the story given here or something else entirely, there seems to be some dark chapter in the life of the man protrayed. Thus, while I will never quote from this book as history, I believe that it does bequeth an adequate portrayal of what life was like for some people during the war. I look at it more as historical novel than historical fact, which allows me great luxury in finding a place for it in my library.

Read it for what it is, though we can never know for sure. Is it eyewitness to history, a fascinatingly and cunningly crafted fictional masterpiece, or the dark broodings of a man with deep psychological problems of some sort? It is a remarkable example of whichever one of those it is, and it is also a reminder (no matter what the truth is) of the dark side of the largest war ever fought on this planet.

Valentine shares with the world his father's tragedy--being in the wrong place at the wrong time, one might say. But he was doing what he thought was right--patriotically defending his country--in the jungle highlands of Papua New Guinea in WWII.Captured by the Japanese, his life spared apparently by his irreverent (unauthorized) sewing of another unit's patch on his uniform (the enemy thought he was an intelligence officer), he ended up the only U.S.soldier amidst Australian and British prisoners in a POW camp on Leyte. The story chronicles his struggle for survival, under terribly inhumane conditions, and the treachery of the POW's ranking officer, a British major. The Major's squealling to the Japanese commander about an escape by Aussies led to their immediate capture and beheading, and to Valentine's father acting to avenge their deaths--and to have nightmares for the rest of his life for his role in the assassination of the cowardly Brit Major. I have read another reader's skeptical review about this--that, horrors, the U.S. government might shred Valentine's fathers personnel file to try to hide the events in the POW camp--named Hotel Tacloban by the inmates. Get real buddy! We now are learning about the tragic events in Korea at No Gun Ri, where GIs machine gunned civilians. The dirty realities in our wars -- that the big honchos in authority in the government -- would rather hide, are thank goodness, being brought to the light of day by authors like Valentine, and Carroll Case (The Slaughter, 1998, isbn 0-9666499-0-7) and Bob King (Spooky 8, 1999, isbn 0-312-20579-1). My only concern is that, as a historian, there are no footnotes.