I'm tortured with not knowing of my family's involvement with CIA torture when I was young...

[cascadiance]

How is that you ask?

Well, I just became aware from watching a documentary on Stan Sheinbaum ("Citizen Stan") that my dad might have been working with others while we lived in Thailand that might have been involved with the CIA training the South Vietnamese to torture the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War in the 60's...

I wish I could know if this were true or not...

However, my father now has alzheimer's and probably doesn't have much longer to live, and is in no condition to provide me any useful answers on this now.

If you read this article from Ramparts back in 1966. it will describe what Stan Sheinbaum was involved with when he was in charge of the "Vietnam Project" when heading up that MSU project overseas that had CIA agents infiltrating the professors involved in that project to work under cover to train South Vietnamese government officials how to torture the Viet Cong when he was there in 1958.

Sheinbaum left MSU when finding out about this, but from the sounds of it, some of those involved with this "stealth" project still stayed on and I recognize at least one of the names here as people working with my dad when we were on a later MSU project he started on in Bangkok in the late 60's when the war was still going on.

http://www.cia-on-campus.org/msu.edu/msu.html

Ramparts, April 1966
The University on the Make

Introduction by Stanley K. Sheinbaum



During the summer of 1958, I cut my vacation short and rushed off to San Francisco to meet the four leading police figures of South Vietnam. Among them they controlled the Saigon police, the national police and the VBI, South Vietnam's equivalent of the FBI.

Within an hour of their arrival the youngest, a nephew of Ngo Dinh Diem, conspiratorially drew me aside and informed me that one of the others was going to kill the eldest of the group. The story he told possessed plot and counter-plot. In essence, Michigan State University was being used to invite these men to the United States under the auspices of its foreign aid contract in Vietnam. The dirty deed was to be done prophylactically in the States, uncluttered by any complicating factors in Saigon.

At a time when relations between Diem and the U.S. were already strained,d the whole story might have been a trick to embarrass Washington. Or else my informant's facts could have been straight, and failure to take action would have been equally embarrassing. The upshot was some nocturnal maneuvers and a cross-country flight designed to separate the quartet by forcibly hospitalizing the supposed target on the pretext he showed signs of T.B.

Nothing ever came of the episode. The intended target lived long enough to be executed by Diem's successors for having assassinated a variety of political prisoners himself.

...

From the Citizen Stan web site:

http://www.citizenstan.com/

http://www.citizenstan.com/clips/citizen_stan_promo_cia.wmv

This has bugged me ever since, and I will never know how much my dad knew what was going on, or didn't know, but is tainted with having worked in that environment for others familiar with what went on then. Some members of my Mom's family (probably more in tune with publications like Ramparts in those days) had on many occassion asked my Mom if my dad worked for the CIA then...

I had a call from Sheinbaum on this, and hope some day I follow up on an invitation to meet with him and talk about this when I get into L.A. again.

I wish in hindsight that these incidents were made more public, so that we could all know what really happened then and perhaps reassure me that my family wasn't involved in any of those horrific incidents then. I have to believe that there may be some even in families of those who worked in these prisons, etc. that have similar feelings that I do about wanting to get out in the open what went on, so that the air can be cleared if their family's members had nothing to feel bad about (but can't talk about it).

Obama, you and Holder need to release these photos now, or we will regret it later!

[uppityperson]

1. k&r

[livefreest]

2. K&R

i hope you find closure on your personal story