Michael Maclear’s 1975 documentary, Spooks and Cowboys, Gooks
and Grunts (Part 1)
Introduction by Douglas Valentine
Michael Maclear’s 1975 documentary, Spooks and
Cowboys, Gooks and Grunts (Part 1) is more relevant now than ever.
Forty-two years after its release, it exposes the suppressed, shameful truths
that have corrupted America since the Vietnam War. The documentary makes it
perfectly clear that “we” have always known what was going on – and that “we”
have perfected the means of denying and obfuscating it.
Maclear’s documentary
stands in stark contrast to the current Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War, which is nothing more than historical
revisionism, sprinkled with massive doses of cognitive dissonance, served up as
healing.
While Burns assiduously
avoids connecting the conflicts of the Vietnam War to America’s on-going
experiment in technofascism, Maclear’s documentary is straightforward in
stating several shameful truths. Foremost, that the CIA has corrupted not only
the military, but America’s political and judicial systems; and that, through
its secret control of the media, the CIA’s power to create the official version
of history has left veterans of the Vietnam War, as well as every subsequent
generation of Americans as well, in a state of neurotic delusion.
This is what Guy Debord meant
when he said,
“Secrecy dominates this world, and
foremost as the secret of domination.”
While Burns falsely characterizes the war as a tragedy engendered by
decent men with good intentions, Maclear offers incontrovertible proof that it
was a war of imperial aggression in the pursuit of counterrevolution.
Maclear gets to the heart of the matter by focusing on the CIA’s
Phoenix program, which Burns spends all of two minutes on. Through interviews
with Bart Osborn and Jeff
Stein, both veterans of Phoenix, Maclear shows what happens to combat
veterans when they are made to function as judge, jury, and executioner of
civilians. Mass murder and computerized genocide are the terms used in the
documentary.
While Burns places combat veterans on an unassailable pedestal,
and makes America’s involvement in the Vietnam War “noble” based on their
sacrifices, Maclear shows how the war managers indoctrinated the troops with
lies, and then aimed them at innocents. As Maclear explains, by 1968, the CIA
knew American military forces could not win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese
people, so they turned to eliminating, through torture and terror, members of
the revolution’s civilian infrastructure, as well as anyone who could be said
to be sympathetic to it.
Burns has no stomach for this
hard truth, or the fact that Phoenix, as Maclear made perfectly clear 42 years
ago, has become not only the template for policing the American empire, but for
the SWAT teams and militarized police forces that control America’s political
and social movements on behalf of their corporate masters in the war industry.
I’ll close this brief introduction by honoring Bart
Osborn, who, along with several other Phoenix veterans, testified to
Congress about the Phoenix program. Based on the testimony of these veterans in
1971, four Congresspersons stated that Phoenix was a policy of waging war
crimes and violated the Geneva Conventions.
In 1973, Osborn, along with Air Force veterans Perry
Fellwock and Tim Butz,
formed the Committee for Action-Research on the Intelligence Community (CARIC)
in response to revelations about the CIA’s role in Watergate. CARIC exposed
individual CIA officers and operations through its publication, CounterSpy.
At the same time in 1973, Norman Mailer and
several of his associates created The Fifth Estate to counter the CIA’s secret intervention
in America’s domestic political and social affairs. In January 1974, CARIC and
The Fifth Estate combined to create the Organizing Committee for a Fifth
Estate. The plan was to organize groups on campus and in communities to
investigate and expose the CIA. CounterSpy was its publication.
If only such organizations existed today.
Before the security forces and complicit media subverted CARIC
and its efforts to expose the CIA, CARIC worked with the British Corporation
Granada Television Inc, to produce a documentary on political prisoners in
Vietnam.
Titled A Question of Torture,
it too has also been suppressed, but is well worth viewing as an antidote to
the Burns propaganda film, as well as to the duplicitous Vietnam War narrative
Americans have had shoved down their throats for the past 40 plus years.
In the absence of any organizations dedicated to exposing the
CIA, war crimes have since become official US policy, at home and abroad.
Video Copyright, Michael Maclear, 1975
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Michael Maclear and Douglas Valentine,
Global Research, 2017
