Editing Disembowelment (section)

====Vietnam====
Various accounts have asserted that during the [[Vietnam War]], members of the [[Viet Cong]] sometimes made calculated use of disembowelment as a means of [[psychological warfare]], to coerce and intimidate rural [[peasant]]s.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hubbel |first=John G. |title=The Blood-Red Hands of Ho Chi Minh |journal=Reader's Digest |date= November 1968  |pages=61–67 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |title=Off With Their Hands |journal=Newsweek |date=15 May 1967}}</ref> Peer De Silva, former head of the [[Saigon]] department of the [[Central Intelligence Agency]] (CIA), wrote that from as early as 1963, Viet Cong units were using disembowelment and other methods of mutilation as psychological warfare.<ref name=desilva>{{cite book |last=De Silva |first=Peer |title=Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence |year=1978 |publisher=Time Books |place=New York |isbn=0-8129-0745-0}}</ref> The extent, however, to which this punishment was perpetrated may be impossible to gauge and while detailed accounts survive regarding how civilians were disemboweled by Viet Cong,{{citation needed|date=February 2022}} the use of this torture appears to have been quite arbitrary and there is no record that such actions were sanctioned by the [[North Vietnam]]ese government in [[Hanoi]]. Disembowelment and other methods of intimidation and torture were intended to frighten civilian peasants at a local level into cooperating with the Viet Cong or discourage them from cooperating with the [[South Vietnamese Army]] or its allies.<ref name=desilva/>{{citation needed|date=February 2022}}