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A CIA operative provided materials for a massive bomb that ripped through a main square in Saigon in 1952. A Life magazine photographer was waiting on the scene, and his resulting snap appeared with a caption blaming the carnage on Viet Minh Communists. The New York Times headlined its report: “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.”

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-forgotten-terrorist-pretext-of-the-vietnam-war/

by Jim Bovard 

Since 9/11, terrorism has become the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to pieces, invoking terrorism provides all the cover needed for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check to fight terrorism should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.

Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Anti-terrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War II.

As the French Foreign Legion struggled to reconquer Vietnam in the wake of World War II, the U.S. government constantly embellished the storyline to demonize the communist opposition. A CIA operative provided materials for a massive bomb that ripped through a main square in Saigon in 1952. A Life magazine photographer was waiting on the scene, and his resulting snap appeared with a caption blaming the carnage on Viet Minh Communists. The New York Times headlined its report: “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center.” The bombing was touted as “one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism” committed by “agents here of the Vietminh.” The press coverage boosted public support for U.S. government aid to the French army fighting the Communists. A Vietnamese warlord named General Trinh Minh Thé, a CIA collaborator, claimed credit for the bomb but the U.S. media ignored his statement.

In the wake of the French defeat in 1954, U.S. military advisors poured into Vietnam. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy declared: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.” The Kennedy administration sought credibility by profoundly deceiving the American people and Congress regarding its Vietnam policy. JFK violated the limits on the number of American military advisors established in the 1954 Geneva peace treaty between the French and the Vietnamese communists. He also deceived the American public by mislabeling the growing U.S. contingent in South Vietnam as advisors at a time when they were becoming actively engaged in fighting.

The US government regarded the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem as corrupt, oppressive, and inept. The Pentagon Papers described a May 8, 1963 debacle in the city of Hue, South Vietnam: “Government troops fire on a Buddhist protest demonstration, killing nine and wounding fourteen. The incident triggers a nationwide Buddhist protest and a crisis of popular confidence for the Diem regime. [The Government of South Vietnam] maintains the incident was an act of [Viet Cong] terrorism.”

The Diem government was outraged that the Buddhists demanded legal equality with Catholics and the right to fly the Buddhist flag. In August 1963, South Vietnamese Special Forces “carried out midnight raids against Buddhist pagodas throughout the country. More than 1,400 people, mostly monks were arrested and many of them were beaten,” according to the Pentagon Papers. The CIA was bankrolling these Special Forces, which were supposed to be used for covert operations against the Viet Cong or North Vietnam, not for religious repression. Diem’s terrorizing of the Buddhists swayed the U.S. to back a coup that led to his assassination a few months later.

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