CIA services by proxy

CIA services by proxy

Although in his letter (The Jakarta Post, Feb. 2, 2000: On the
CIA's role), Mr. Richard Lewis confirms some of the facts
mentioned in my article (the Post, Jan. 13 and Jan.14: The U.S.:
A party to mass murder?), worryingly he stops just short of
exonerating the CIA by rather recklessly stating, "The CIA, while
a contributor, was neither the cause nor the catalyst".

It is Mr. Lewis' opinion that, even without CIA involvement,
the massacre would have occurred, but he provides no real basis
for such a view except the opinion of an Indonesian embassy
spokesman who claimed, "the Indonesian people fought by
themselves to eradicate the communists". Since the communist
threat was used to justify and provide legitimacy for what was in
fact an American-sponsored Soeharto coup, would one expect an
Indonesian embassy spokesman to claim otherwise?

Mr. Lewis needs to delve deeper than the Internet alone allows
him. He might like to consult Brian May's book The Indonesian
Tragedy and read Distant Voices by the Australian journalist,
John Pilger, who writes that, "Declassified American documents
have since revealed that the United States not only supported the
slaughter but helped the generals to plan and execute it. The CIA
gave them a 'hit list' of 5,000 Communist Party supporters
including party leaders, regional committee members and heads of
trade unions and women's and youth groups, who were hunted down
and killed".

Pilger goes on: "In 1990 a former U.S. embassy official in
Jakarta disclosed that he had spent two years drawing up a hit
list, which was a big help to the army".

Historian Gabriel Kolko, in his book Confronting the Third
World, writes that, "No single American action in the period
after 1945 was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it
tried to initiate the massacre, and it did everything in its
power to encourage Soeharto".

In light of this, can the CIA use the rather suspect,"the
massacre would have happened anyway" as an extenuating factor? If
I shoot dead a man whose life appears to be endangered by
another, am I absolved? Can I plead that my victim would have
died anyway at the hand of another? I would suggest that anyone
using this as mitigating circumstances is on very dangerous
ground indeed. I am sure that if Gen. Wiranto were to use such a
defense to reduce his culpability for the East Timor mayhem, he
would be laughed out of court.

It may be hard for Mr. Lewis to accept that the American
government through, inter alia, the services of the CIA, is
responsible for torture and mass murder by proxy. However, he
should be aware that it is this apparently unshakable but often
unfounded conviction of Westerners, that their governments act
morally and benevolently, which still makes it possible for
sophisticated, covert barbarity to be carried out by Western
governments when they deem it necessary.

FRANK RICHARDSON

Jakarta