Posted on 03/24/2004 7:43:30 PM PST by Hon
Sometime during a national meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) held November 12-14, 1971 there was an intense "discussion" and vote on a plan offered by Scott Camil to assassinate top Congressional leaders who had voted to continue funding the war in Vietnam.
There has been much discussion here and some in the media of this topic. The details are getting confused, and few people have seen any of the original source material.
I first came upon the subject in early February when I was looking for information about Kerry in "Winter Soldiers," by Richard Staciewicz. The following is an excerpt from pp 294-295:
In the fall of 1971, tensions over the direction in which the organization was heading, as it spread out into various community activities and took on a more consciously anti-imperialist position, were becoming more evident. In November, an emergency meeting of the steering committee was held in Kansas City. This meeting was a result of the growing friction among members of the steering committee, and between new members and the old leadership.[snip]
[Terry DuBose] TDB: That was also where there was actually some discussion of assassinating some senators during the Christmas holidays. They were people who I knew from the organization with hotheaded rhetoric.
They had a list of six senators ... Helms, John Tower, and I can't remember the others, who they wanted to assassinate when they adjourned for Christmas. They were the ones voting to fund the war. They approached me about assassinating John Tower because he was from Texas. The logic made a certain amount of sense because there's thousands of people dying in southeast Asia. We can shoot these six people and probably stop it. Some of us were willing to sabotage materials, but when it came to people ... I mean, there were a lot of angry people...
Staciewicz went on to say that Kerry left or was removed from the steering committee of the VVAW after this meeting:
The meeting in Kansas City brought in a new steering committee. John Kerry, Craig Scott Moore, Mike Oliver, and Skip Roberts resigned from their leadership positions and were replaced by several new members. Al Hubbard and Joe Urgo remained in office and were joined by John Birch, Lenny Rotman, and Larry Rottman.
I then came across the plan againg in Gerald Nicosia's book, "Home To War," pp 221-223:
[Scott] Camil proposed VVAW return in force to Washington, D.C., and there apply pressure in every conceivable way to the legislators who were still voting to fund the war. After the assembly of coordinators defeated the plan, he was told it was “a closed issue at this point." Camil replied that such a tactic was "never a closed issue." He then made known an even more radical proposal, which he intended to submit to the coordinators for their approval. If undertaken, he claimed, it would guarantee the end of congressional support for the war. It was this proposal that nearly blew the Kansas City convention wide open, and which branded Camil as both dangerous and crazy for the remainder of his time in the organization.What Camil sketched was so explosive that the coordinators feared lest government agents even hear of it. So they decamped to a church on the outskirts of town with the intention of debating the plan in complete privacy. When they got the church, however, they found that the government was already on to them; their "debugging expert" uncovered microphones hidden all over the place. An instantaneous decision was made to move again - to Common Ground, a Mennonite hall used by homeless vets as a "crash pad," on 77th Terrace. This time a vote was taken to exclude anyone but regional coordinators and members the national office. The rest of the members, even trusted leaders such as Randy Barnes and John Upton (who had earned their credibility in the mud and tears of Dewey Canvon III), were forced to wait outside on the grass, where messengers brought frequent word of what was going on inside. According to Barnes, everybody knew that the discussion in that hall "was grounds for criminal indictment of conspiracy."
Discussion was not exactly the word for it. John Upton recalls it being "a knock-down-drag-out [fight] at times." Randy Barnes remembers "people standing up on the tables yelling and screaming at one another." The proposal that fired so much anger was called the "Phoenix plan," in mockery of the U.S. government's similar program in Vietnam. There was, in fact, good evidence that the United States Studies and Observation Group (SOG) - known to those inside it as the Special Operations Group - had used its own Special Forces, those of South Vietnam, and even South Vietnamese mercenaries to murder various Communist and Communist-sympathizing village chiefs, political leaders, and other influential citizens in South Vietnam. Some say as many as 10,000 were assassinated, in order (theoretically) to rebuild a more democratic infrastructure in the south. Hence the name "Phoenix": a better, stronger Vietnam was supposed to rise from the ashes of the Communist-tainted one. Similarly, Camil now proposed the assassination of the most hard-core conservative members of Congress, as well as any other powerful, intractable opponents of the antiwar movement - the ones who would rather die than see America suffer a military defeat in Vietnam. Fine, let them die, suggested Camil - in fact, help them along in that direction and once they were cleared out of the way, a truly democratic America could arise, one that would choose to be at peace with the rest of the world.
When the Phoenix plan first came before the steering committee meeting, John Upton had been standing almost next to Camil, and he recalls that "at first it was laughed off. Then he [Camil] became really irate, and some other people that were supporting that got really irate, and it got down to a really hard discussion about it. There was a time, I'm not kidding you, I was almost one of them. Especially when we moved over to 77th Terrace, a lot of people were convinced that this was the way to do it. I thought it was a novel idea, but it was not something I would support. I looked on it as doing just what we were fighting against. It was killing people for no [good] reason. I remember saying this, and somebodv stood up and called me a 'moderate'! If I went an inch more crazier than I was, I could have endorsed it one hundred percent. Scott was pissed off just like I was. He was one of those people I really identified with with the anger I saw there. My whole instinct here was, `Let's demonstrate and do these things against the fucking war, to get the word out. Let's talk in high schools. But let's do things legal. Let's get the right permits.' The Phoenix plan was like, that's what needs to be done, but, God, we can't really do that."
Nicosia's book was confusing in that he had claimed that Kerry had quit the VVAW in July after a showdown with Al Hubbard. And yet even he then went on to talk about the change in leadership after the KC meeting.
We now know for a fact, thanks to the FBI surveillance files, that Kerry was in fact at this meeting--despite Kerry's many earilier denials to the contrary.
Also, it should be noted that despite Nicosia's claim that this proposal "branded Camil as both dangerous and crazy for the remainder of his time in the organization" -- in fact, Camil became one of the two top leaders in the VVAW from then on. And indeed, Camil had been a major force and a close ally of Kerry's before then.
Yes this certainly casts doubt on the "it was just one guys hare-brained idea and immediately hooted down" story the RATS are telling. And Randy Barnes has changed his story rather dramatically........
Reminder Ping!
Well, according to Nicosia's (oft-interally contradictory) account, Barnes wasn't even allowed to attend the final discussion and vote.
An instantaneous decision was made to move again - to Common Ground, a Mennonite hall used by homeless vets as a "crash pad," on 77th Terrace. This time a vote was taken to exclude anyone but regional coordinators and members the national office. The rest of the members, even trusted leaders such as Randy Barnes and John Upton (who had earned their credibility in the mud and tears of Dewey Canvon III), were forced to wait outside on the grass, where messengers brought frequent word of what was going on inside. According to Barnes, everybody knew that the discussion in that hall "was grounds for criminal indictment of conspiracy."So how would Barnes know what happened during the vote?
Prairie
Is he the guy who was reading from his notes the other night on TV slamming the reporter from NY sun?
The Phoenix plan, like the rest of Camil's proposals, was voted down in Kansas City, but its specter had only begun to haunt the organization; and, ironically enough, among those whose imaginations it enflamed were those very agents who had been charged with finding a way to destroy VVAW.It also immediately made Camil himself a government target, perhaps for the very sort of elimination he had envisioned for some of the diehard supporters of the war. On December 22, 1971, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a classified memo to the director of the Jacksonville office, dealing specifically with Camil. It read in part: "Information developed to date regarding subject [Camil] indicates clearly subject is extremely dangerous and unstable individual whose activities must be neutralized at earliest possible time."
Several other memos that followed used that same word, neutralize, in an even less ambiguous context, such as: "Jacksonville continue to press vigorously to insure that all necessary action taken to completely neutralize subject without delay." As Camil later explained: "When you pin the government down, they'll say, ‘Well, "neutralize" just means to render useless.' But if you talk to guys in the field, they say it means to kill."
When Camil returned to Florida from Kansas City, despite his failure to get any of his programs adopted, he took with him a goodly measure of respect from many coordinators and much of the membership.
In typical Nicosia fashion he quotes from FBI files to try to make Camil look like a target for a hit (preposterously), and yet he ignored the FBI files that placed Kerry at the KC meeting.
Nicosia also got it wrong that none of Camil's proposals were carried out--for Camil had proposed contacted POW families and using them in their agit-prop--which Kerry went on to do for future photo-ops and press conferences, while still calling himself a spokesman for the VVAW.
This usually precedes a fact-free assertion when a troll intones it.
"you have failed to make the point that any government agency took this seriously enough to consider it to be a criminal act."
I never sought to make any points. I'm trying to relate information to the forum.
But as a matter of fact, your own assertion might be open to question since Nicosia quoted the following from the FBI (which I believe is a government agency):
On December 22, 1971, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a classified memo to the director of the Jacksonville office, dealing specifically with Camil. It read in part: "Information developed to date regarding subject [Camil] indicates clearly subject is extremely dangerous and unstable individual whose activities must be neutralized at earliest possible time."
Given that there was very little time for Camil do have done anything in the short time following the KC meeting, this FBI memo almost certainly indicates that they had gotten wind of this plot. "Hotheaded BS?" You're soaking in it! "FR doesn't need your brand of weird contra agit-prop, imo."
Folks, TPaine is another one of the trolls who have joined a campaign to try to drive me from Free Republic. I didn't know he was an owner or even a moderator. All I can say is that it is tiresome and not conducive to my efforts here, which many say they appreciate.
I know that FR has a history of driving away good posters who present valuable information. Tpaine and the trolls are the people who do that. Why not put an end to all of that?
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