Antiwar Group Plans Attempts to End U.S. Financing of Vietnamese Prisons

About 100 people gathered at the First Parish Church mf Cambridge last night to hear about mistreatment and torture of South Vietnamese political prisoners and to plan steps to end this country's financing of these activities.

The New England Coalition to Free Saigon's Political Prisoners, a coalition of nine local antiwar groups which called last, night's meeting, will hold another meeting tonight at 7:30 at the Catholic Student Center, 20 Arrow Street.

Members of the group plan protests and educational activities, including a letter-writing campaign asking Congressmen to cut off funds for South Vietnamese police and prisons.

They are also organizing a prisoner-adoption campaign, in which individual Americans write to American and Vietnamese officials about the plight of individual prisoners--including National Liberation Front soldiers and supporters, neutralists and pacifists, and people apparently arrested by mistake.

Last night's meeting featured films and speakers discussing the use of American aid. They said these have ranged from manufacturing identity cards, which Vietnamese over 15 are required to carry at all times, to building prisons and hiring guards who allegedly beat prisoners, administer electric shocks to them, and torture them in other ways.

Even aid programs with professedly peaceful purposes are used for similar purposes, speakers said. They cited the Food for Peace program. In this program, the Department of Agriculture ships surplus American-grown rice to Vietnam and sells it to Vietnamese importers. The Department then deposits 80 per cent of the money it collects in a South Vietnamese Government bank for military uses, including the construction of isolation cells or tiger cages.

"If Thieu did not hold 200,000 or more political prisoners in his jails, he could not maintain the political no-man's land he uses to make reconciliation of differing Vietnamese impossible," David Truong told last night's meeting.

Truong's father, Truong Dinh Dzu, finished second to Thieu in South Vietnam's last multi-candidate election--in the fall of 1967--and spent the next few years in prison.

Truong called for "at least a two-to-three-month effort" to slash the Defense Department and agency for International Development budgets. He said the American government would then reallocate funds budgeted for the Saigon government to programs that were cut.

Two documentaries were show at the meeting, one an American Friends' Service Committee (AFSC) slide program and the other a film made for British television last April. The films included interviews with survivors of Vietnamese prisons and former and present American officials.

One such official, once associated with the CIA's Phoenix program, spoke of prisoners he said were "interrogated to death." "The Marines were kind of embarrassed," he said.

Other speakers in the film included prisoners who claim to have lost the use of their legs as a result of long confinements in tiger cages which were too small to stand up in.