A Normal, Minimal-Choice Election

The International Herald Tribune headlined it "A Proudly Normal Election" in Indonesia, and it was -- a minimal-choice election, as normally happens in most countries (Jacob Ramsay, "A Proudly Normal Election, " International Herald Tribune, July 8, 2009).

This election was a de facto choice among three mass-killing Suharto generals -- each of them old US proteges -- one of whom actually embodied the specter of something like fascist dictatorship, and people voted for the smoothest, least frightening general, the incumbent, Gen. Susilo.

But it was impossible on the ballot to vote for the poor or to vote against killing civilians, because none of the candidates, pre-screened by the establishment, stood for anything like that: these were candidates of the rich, and of murder.

Gen. Susilo had most of the army and most of the rich people behind him, so he had most of the media propaganda and also most of the campaign money.

In Indonesia a lot of poor people like the election season because they get direct cash bribes. Party messengers come to their homes and give each family several dollars, and this time everyone I met said Gen. Susilo's footmen gave the most money.

Beyond that, his two rivals were repulsive to many people. They selected as their running mates the two most hated generals in the country. One, Gen. Prabowo, has a neo-fascist style and made his name as a hands-on torturer and as Suharto's son-in-law, and the other, Gen. Wiranto, saved the army in 1998 when he threatened a Tienanmen-style massacre of demonstrators if they challenged the army after toppling Suharto.

So compared to those two, Gen. Susilo seemed less bloodthirsty, even though he's been high in the chain of command for some of the country's most famous massacres, including Jakarta '96, occupied East Timor '99, Aceh in the early 2000s, and as President he's backed nationwide police torture and army torture and murder in sealed-off Papua, and has a practice of arresting people who insult him or who hoist local independence flags. Economically, Gen. Susilo broke the law and canceled severance pay for workers, and hunger and diarrhea have been increasing nationwide, especially in Nusatenggara in eastern Indonesia.

But he's done all that smoothly. He's seen as smart, and he gets lots of foreign money. The US and investors like him because he does the necessary killing and holds down wages discreetly -- without bragging about it -- and he lets them take minerals and forests and labor while demanding smaller bribes than Suharto.

And at the same time he's made life better for city elites, lots of condos and spectacular malls. If you have money, life in Jakarta can be Valhalla. That gets him good press coverage.

But if you're poor, police thugs will come and bulldoze your home to put up those fancy condos, and your chances of working, eating, or putting your kid through primary school are the same or worse than before Susilo.

So the Herald Tribune is right, this was a normal election. There was voting but there wasn't much choice.

Link to view this posting in Arabic translation.

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Common Sense. Empty Talk. What Does It Take to Get a Meal Here, an Earthquake?

In Indonesia, the government-funded Muslim Ulema's Council (MUI) has recently issued two remarkable fatwas that, first, prohibit smoking by pregnant women, children, or people in public spaces, and that second, forbid potential voters from abstaining -- or from voting for candidates who aren't "credible" --, since these voting choices could be seen as being "dangerous for the state" (Ali Mustafa Yaqud, Deputy Chief of the Fatwa Commission, Metro TV, February 3, 2009, Western Indonesia Time).

The edicts are refreshing for those who want to breathe well, and for those who seek political insight into the fact that "the state" -- even when it's a strongarm state -- usually wants and needs some legitimacy, and often seeks it through voting, but voting on its terms, sans thoughts, options or people that are not "credible."

In the late 1960s, surveys of US business leaders showed -- amazingly, to today's mentalities -- that they actually feared revolution in the United States. Today hardly anyone even imagines it.

Today you have Marxists for Obama, and former Marxists who worked for Bush (the neo-cons) . In today's America, as in most of the world, revolution is no longer credible.

But, then again, looser talkers are now saying the same about what's called capitalism, or at least about Wall Street investment banking, which was about as solid and credible as you could get, until those weeks last September, when, as they say, it suddenly vanished into air, taking potentially lifesaving billions of imagined dollars with it (potentially lifesaving, that is, if those dollars had been used for things like food, instead of finance fun)(On the concepts of rich people's imagined and/or cybered money vs. poor people's earthbound earnings, see News and Comment postings of June 3, 2008 ["Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry. Burma, Food Crisis, Wall Street, and the World Economy"] and Nov. 21, 2007 ["Bangladesh and Wall Street After the Flood: Two Different Kinds of Property."]).

It's said that sensitivity to ground shifts tends to depend on an organism's constitution. Some claim that horses feel earthquakes before we do. And even among people, it does seem to be true that some are slower on the uptake than others.

I once sat in a Sumatra eating hall wondering why screaming people all around me were stampeding, until I looked up and noticed that the hanging light bulb was swaying back-and-forth as the earth quaked.

The MUI -- originally created by the dictator, Suharto, is showing some deep political insight. You want people on board. You want people signed-on. As their spokesman put it: "We must have a credible president."

But if people get off, refuse to affix their X's or signatures, run politically amok (an Indonesian word) -- what then?

What do presidents do, even if their boys have guns? That depends, in part, on how many guns.

But the point is this: sometimes rulers win, and -- also -- sometimes they don't win.

With conditions right, the mountains really do tremble.

And politics is not geology.

In politics, the rocks can think. They can meet and say 'Let's have an earthquake.'

People tried it in Central America and got smashed. Red huipiles ran moist with grief tears.

But people are now trying it in South America -- and from places like Bolivia, there are tremors.

When a person gets tremors, which -- for a person -- is bad, they may find, bizarrely, that nicotine helps.

But when a state gets the shakes, suppression can get messy, so preemption is clearly preferable. Thus, the minimal-choice election. Thus, the demagogue who stirs hope, but not food pots.

In the Indonesian language, to say something is 'empty talk' ('omong kosong') is to say something harshly insulting. It's worse than, in English or Spanish, crying 'bullshit!' or 'mierda!,' which makes sense, since bad as feces can be, empty talk can be even more damaging socially, especially, say, if it's on the ballot, and if the sum total of your political choice in life is voting either for package of empty talk A or package of empty talk B.

In such situations, common sense works, and it translates into any language:

It doesn't matter what they say. It matters what they do. And if they don't do it, get up and make them do it.

You could call that 'Do it yourself.' You could call it 'Revolution.'

But as the old US borscht-belt joke says, "You can call me anything you want. Just don't call me late for dinner."



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'Enemy of the Prevailing Order.' Democracy, and Saying 'Enough!'

In urban areas with street crime the idealized figure of the honest cop has long been deeply popular, especially among children.

Asked what he wants to be, a young boy in a poor household cries out, eagerly, "Polisi!," and, on getting his ear twisted by an angry mother, amends, "Allright, I'll be a doctor!"

Actually, his chances of rising to doctorhood are slim -- no spare money, no free education -- but they may be greater than those of his becoming an honest cop, since that's a species that, in this community, only seems to exist on cartoon TV.

The police almost never enter the alley (which happens to be in Indonesia) except via proxy cop-protected drug hoodlums, but poor adults with real, off-screen, experience know that to see a police officer is to tense up and then brace for a shakedown (or beating), even if you're feeling idealistic and furious enough to walk into a station to report a crime. (The practice of demanding a bribe from someone trying to report a crime sets up an infinity paradox, since the demand is itself a crime, and to report that one you'd have to pay again...)

At one of the main traffic roundabouts there's an enormous full-color poster of three top uniformed commanders, in medals, posing sternly under the slogan "Honesty"! It commemorates World Anti-Corruption Day and is directly across the street from a huge new bright-blue brothel that's advertised, in part, as a hotel, but if you walk in and ask about a hotel room, they laugh, and can't stop laughing.

This facility is on the former turf of the legendary crime lord, Olo, who went down in a power struggle with the old district police chief, Sutanto, who later became the national police commander under the president, Gen. Susilo, who ran for and won office on a platform of anti-corruption.

The other big posters are for April elections, the largest of them being for two mass-murdering, US-protege generals (Prabowo and Wiranto, Adm. Dennis Blair's old associate [See News and Comment postings of Jan. 6, 9, and 22, 2009, as well as Dec. 7, 2007]), and -- perhaps with the male electorate in mind -- for several parliamentary candidates who also happen to be beautiful women.

Elections would be one thing if you could vote consequentially against official murder, against withholding food from the starving, and against things like police-as-criminals. But elections become something else if you can't cast such big choice votes. In such typical cases, elections become diversions of popular hope and energy that end up legitimating and reinforcing unjust orders rather than reforming them.

But even if you get a rare chance to vote on basics, or on sensitive power issues, watch out if you're invadable, since if you vote wrong, there could be trouble.

Condoleeza Rice pushed for the '06 Gaza / West Bank election that Hamas surprised her by winning, and which was acknowledged by President Bush as valid, before he OK'd punishment (see footnote).

On Bloomberg TV this week, from Davos, George Soros, when asked about plunging oil prices, said that the drop was unfortunate in that it's, for example, hurting Dubai property, but on the other hand "however it's not all bad news because the main oil producing countries have been the enemies of the prevailing world order" and the price drop is now hurting them, specifically Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, where, Soros said "It's not so easy to finance a Bolivarian revolution with $40 oil."

Soros, anticipating further good news regarding Hugo Chavez, said "probably his days are numbered" -- and estimated that Chavez would last less than a year, which means that according to the world's top "democracy-promotion" funder, Venezuela's freely elected president (whose legal term is due to last 4 more years) should perhaps start looking out his window, looking not for voters, but tanks ("For the Record," Bloomberg TV, aired Jan. 30, 2009).

More fundamentallly, one might wish to hope that a major US left-liberal like Soros might also want to consider himself to be an " enem[y] of the prevailing world order," a world order in which, as a text scroll from Davos noted: "More than 24,000 people die of hunger every day" (CNN International, January 30, '09, during an interview with the Oxfam executive director). But that would be a poorly informed hope, at least regarding billionaires (who could each personally feed those 24,000 people, instead of choosing not to), and also regarding most anyone in the current top US leadership and funding strata.

But, given free will, it is indeed possible for them, and especially, less-rich people, to say 'Enough!'

If something kills innocent people en masse, it deserves to have enemies.

If a rich-world figure says they're pro-democracy, start off by asking them this: How would they feel about running the UN Security Council based on direct world popular vote, instead of nuclear weapons (vetoes are now held by the Permanent Five, the immediate-post-WWII nuclear powers), and the same with the world distribution of wealth and key questions of murder law enforcement?

That's not to suggest democracy as cure-all. Rule by the people is largely myth. Except possibly in small (non-family) groups, strong people will tend to dominate -- the questions are under what constraints; don't pretend everyone's in charge.

But the point here is merely that when today's rich leaders talk democracy, or just talk elections, they usually don't mean it if that raises the specter of a world with less-insanely-skewed wealth or power, or of a world where honest cops run around in life -- and not just on cartoon TV, arresting any evildoer who has wrongly caused, or permitted, people's deaths.

---
Footnote:

Bush said, for what it's worth as testament to pre-punishment homage to democracy:

"[T]he Palestinians had an election yesterday, the results of which remind me about the power of democracy. You see, when you give people the vote, you give people a chance to express themselves at the polls, they -- and if they're unhappy with the status quo, they'll let you know. That's the great thing about democracy: It provides a look into society. And yesterday, the turnout was significant, as I understand it. And there was a peaceful process as people went to the polls. And that's positive. What was also positive is that it's a wakeup call to the leadership. Obviously, [Palestinian] people were not happy with the status quo. The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find health care. And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories. I like the competition of ideas. I like people that have to go out and say, 'Vote for me and here's what I'm going to do.' There's something healthy about a system that does that. And so the elections yesterday were very interesting" ("President Bush Holds a White House Press Conference," transcript, The Washington Post, January 26, 2006).

Link to view this posting in Russian translation.

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A Shift Toward Worker Power? The Time is Ripe to Tip the System, Now

In bad situations, people lower their standards for what it is that constitutes good news.

There's a very sick man with a withered arm, but it hasn't been amputated, contrary to what a garbled, and panic-inducing, report had indicated.

Similarly, a boy has been coughing for three months, but a TB test says it isn't TB.

Saying this, the parent, on a cell phone from the Burma border can be heard shivering in the rare cold, even though the family has just invested in a blanket -- their second, which is now handy, since for three nights they've been sleeping in the forest to dodge police who (in a case of bad good news) aren't seeking bribes, but are instead seeking to catch people and -- word has it -- ship them to Naypyidaw (the capital) for one year's bondage labor.

The question always is, bad compared to what? One person's dump is another's home hearth.

And that can be said literally, since, not far from that coughing family, there is a garbage dump where others live in slime, but they live there not as bottom-dwellers but as, relatively speaking, rich aunts and uncles -- economic migrants -- who periodically transfer money back home, since by picking (and living) trash they make more cash than do their relatives on, or off, the farm in Burma.

There are dump cities around the world.

In Guatemala, they feature vultures (the bird kind). In the Philippines there are frequent dump-slides, killing people.

And in Cambodia, the New York Times just visited a dump city, and used the existence of this particular hell to argue against labor standards on the grounds that if people would only work more cheaply that would create more jobs for, say, dump dwellers, on the neoliberal assumption that capitalists don't currently have enough desperate, oppressed, potential workers to choose from (See Nicholas D. Kristof, "Where Sweatshops Are a Dream," The New York Times, January 14, 2009).

Very poor people can indeed be delighted when what we call a sweatshop comes to town (see News and Comment posting of Nov. 8, 2007, "Duduk - Duduk, Ngobrol - Ngobrol. Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia."), but what the Times misses is that they would be even more delighted if it paid them better wages, didn't rape and fondle the female workers, didn't spray them with toxics, etc.

Whether or not that happens and whether or not enough jobs get created depends crucially on the balance of power.

When workers are weak, it is indeed true that cutting labor standards can get more factories built, but by that Times/Davos/Burma-junta logic of job creation you should also abolish the minimum wage, permit prostitution, even permit human bondage/ slavery, since each of those steps would indeed -- under weak-worker conditions -- induce the creation of new jobs (Inconsistently, the Times editorially does support the minimum wage, and that Times writer, has, as it happens, crusaded against poor-country prostitution).

A better job-creation solution is to change the power balance and make workers strong, in which case capital is the one that has to take bad news as good, adjust their expectations downward, and realize that if they want to put their capital to work they'll have to pay people enough to, say, eat well.

Its true that, depending on what kind of historical moment one is in, such a job solution may not always be pragmatic.

If say, for example, interest rates were high, capital could say: 'Screw these workers, who needs a factory? For now, we'll just put our money in Citibank!'

Or if capital were riding higher than usual in political leverage it could just say to a government bent on imposing laws to strengthen workers: 'Screw you, government. What do we businesses need from you? What are you going to do, bribe us?'

But of course, those are not the conditions that exist today.

Today, in what's called the financial crisis (though for those hungry, life has always been "crisis," even when rich people were calling it "prosperity"), interest rates are very low and business needs a lot from government.

Workers (or unemployed) are, of course, today still more vulnerable than bosses, but the key changeable variable now is government: it has leverage, perhaps unprecedented leverage, as businesses pant for government's bailout trillions.

And vis-a-vis worker-staffed production, businesses need to get that revivified, since stashing cash in banks is not now hugely rewarding.

Which is to say, this could be a moment for a power shift -- from workers being weak to being strong -- but only if people force government to kick in on the workers' side, to, for one thing, use its leverage and condition bailouts on deep, thoroughgoing reforms that hugely elevate labor standards, not cut them, and that alter how capital is owned and controlled so that the crisis-induced power shift stays permanent and maybe even opens the door to a more rational, less-killing, system that, at the least, does not starve people.

That's not current rich-world government policy and angry workers aren't currently mobilized.

But they could be, if some see without illusion that this strange moment could be their opening.

It could be, if they make it so, without waiting for team Obama.

Sad but true, but US economic policy is now shaped by the man, Prof. Lawrence Summers, who wrote the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics entry on "Unemployment" and observed -- to the great pleasure of Bush Jr.'s advisers -- that "If unemployment insurance were eliminated, the unemployment rate would drop ... Another cause of long-term unemployment is unionization ..." (Lawrence H. Summers, "Unemployment," The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, 2008).

These Summers quotations were highlighted on the blog of Bush's old economics chief, Gregory Mankiw, of Harvard, who told neoliberals not to worry too much about the orientation of Obama Democrats.

Mankiw wrote: "What would you call a group of economists who are skeptical of regulating mortgage markets, who think unemployment insurance and unions increase unemployment, who say that tax hikes retard economic growth, and who believe that the recovery from the Great Depression was a monetary phenomenon rather than the result of New Deal fiscal policy? No, it is not a right-wing cabal. It's Team Obama ..." ("The Next Team," Greg Mankiw's Blog, www.gregmankiw.blogspot.com , Nov. 30, 2008. Mankiw followed with extensive quotations from Summers and other Obama economists).

Again, such neoliberal thinking only works in a political weak-worker environment.

But that doesn't have to be the environment now -- and for the future, unless workers decide, by inaction, to politically amputate their own arms.


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Breaking News: SE Asia Groups Claim to Plan Retaliation for Gaza Killings. Said to Target Israeli Government, Intel in Bangkok, Manila, Singapore.

By Allan Nairn

In response to Israeli terror attacks on Gaza that killed hundreds of civilians, Southeast Asia Islamist terror groups are now said to be planning retaliation against Israeli government offices, including Mossad intelligence, in Bangkok, Manila, and Singapore.

This account comes from Southeast Asia civilian sources who speak directly to some group leaders and who have in the past provided accurate information on their activities.

Such groups have frequently murdered civilians en masse, as in the Bali nightclub bombings, but are now claiming that they want to answer the Israeli mass murders of civilians in Gaza by targeting the closest thing to Israeli combatants in the Southeast Asia region, the offices housing Israeli intelligence and military sales and training operations.

They further claim, according to these sources, that they are not currently targeting Americans due to a supposed belief that new President Obama may change US policy.

The sources for this report, themselves religious Muslims, say they condemn the groups' tactics but share their anger at Israeli forces' repeated killings of civilians.

It is not clear if the planning talk is just bravado, or if it's true they'll just target combatants, since -- like their Israeli and US counterparts -- these groups have repeatedly shown their willingness to kill many civilians to make a point. (Islamist terror leaders like Bin Laden and Abu Bakar Baasyir frequently state this openly; for a rare, frank statement of near-identical Western pro-terror thinking see Thomas L. Friedman, who writes approvingly that in Gaza, Israel was "trying to 'educate' Hamas" by attacking not just Hamas combatants but also by "inflicting" "heavy pain on the Gaza population," just as in Israel's attack on Lebanon '06 "the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians..." Thomas L. Friedman, "Israel's Goals in Gaza?," New York Times, January 13, 2009. Also see News and Comment posting of Nov. 28, 2007, "Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers. Cold-Blooded Celebrity").


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A "Swiss cheese," "Bantustan" Palestine. A Recidivist America.

President Obama has just given an interview to Al - Arabiya Saudi/UAE TV which is being celebrated as "a sign that [he] is extending th[e] hand of friendship to the Arab world" (CNN International anchor, Jan. 26, 2009, US eastern time).

He said "I can't respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians, and we will hunt them down" -- hunt them down and give them money, weapons, and training, if his actions so far are any guide, since Obama appears to be continuing the US practice of backing organizations that kill innocent civilians (ie., commit terrorism), eg., the Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Iraqi, and Israeli armed and security forces, and the compliant elements of the Palestinian Authority's various armed wings .

But perhaps more remarkable than this repetition of an old sound-good work-bad US formula was his implication that he was prepared to flaunt the law more defiantly than Bush did.

Though the World Court has ruled that all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories are illegal, Bush, like Clinton, had maintained the fiction that most of the settlements are OK but that there is a small fraction of them -- some newer outposts -- that are "illegal" and have to go.

But when asked about settlements, Obama did not even stand by this Bush nano-concession to legality, instead stating merely that a Palestinian state would have to be "contiguous," ie., that the pieces would have to be attached, a formula consistent with what Bush once called a "Swiss cheese" Palestine (which Bush said would be bad), or, in more precise terms, what Ariel Sharon once called a Palestine of Apartheid-style "Bantustans" (which Sharon said would be good). (See Khaled Abu Toameh, "'Palestine can't be Swiss cheese'," Jerusalem Post [Israel], Jan. 10, 2008 for a report of Bush's press conference; Akiva Eldar, "People and Politics/ Sharon's Bantustans Are Far From Copenhagen's Hope," Haaretz [Israel], May 13, 2003 for a report of prime minister Sharon's Bantustan discussion with former Italian prime minister Massimo D'Alema).

It's unclear whether the US bureaucracy will stand by this apparent small escalation of Bush's law-defiance (Washington's dictatorial Arab clients already have enough trouble from their oppressed publics), but it is what Obama said, and he's a lawyer who often speaks carefully.

It just indicates that, as on other big matters, the US government tends to be recidivist, feeling that it can pick and choose whether to respect or break the law.


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Hero Journalist J. A. Belo Being Persecuted, Needs Support.

Many cultures have equivalents of the English-language saying "No good deed goes unpunished," maybe because there's sometimes something about decent people that can make them look like easy targets.

When East Timor was in its heroic phase, enduring tribulations that made the Bible look placid, one of the heroes was a young aspiring journalist named Jose Antonio Belo.

When, amidst liberation, Belo took me on a tour of the place where he had been tortured, he pointed to a spot where a message had been scrawled in blood by a co-detainee who hadn't made it.

(Belo and colleagues were hung from the rafters by SGI, a special Indonesian Intel unit incorporating BIA and Kopassus Group 4, both with special US intel liaison. The Indonesian armed forces illegally occupying East Timor were, as a whole, US-backed, but these commando /intel outfits that electroshocked Belo and others got special US funding, training and encouragement, all this in the Clinton years; see my "Indonesia's 'Disappeared'," The Nation [US] June 8, 1998 at http://www.etan.org/news/news2/disapprd.htm, "Indonesia's Killers," The Nation [US], March 30, 1998 at http://www.etan.org/news/news2/killers.htm, and my September 30, 1999 testimony to the US House International Operations and Human Rights Subcommittee of the House Committee on International Relations "Hearing on the Humanitarian Crisis in East Timor" at http://www.etan.org/legislation/999bhear.htm ).

Today East Timor is independent, thanks to people like J.A. Belo, and, as a result, East Timorese now live more normal-scale injustice, instead of epic daily massacre.

One of the remarkable things about Jose Belo was that, even as his homeland was burning, he still stayed devoted to the ideal of accurate handling of facts.

But now that devotion has gotten him in trouble once again since he's reported facts about a high official that that official -- Timor Leste's Justice Minister, Lucia Lobato, doesn't like, and so she's trying to jail and/or heavily fine him based on Timor's criminal defamation law which, incredibly, has been lifted wholesale from the laws of their old oppressor/occupier, Indonesia, and under which, as one official told Belo, it doesn't matter if the facts are accurate.

The newspaper which Belo now edits, Tempo Semanal, includes material in Tetum, Portuguese, and English and can be seen online and contacted at:

www.temposemanaltimor.blogspot.com
Email: tempo.semanal@gmail.com and/e/ka Taraleu@hotmail.com
Mobile/Telemovél: +670 723 4852

The International Federation of Journalists (www.ifj.org) and the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (www.etan.org) have expressed support for Belo, but he needs resources and allies to defend himself and continue speaking as a free man.


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The Torture Ban that Doesn't Ban Torture: Obama's Rules Keep It Intact, and Could Even Accord With an Increase in US-Sponsored Torture Worldwide.

If you're lying on the slab still breathing, with your torturer hanging over you, you don't much care if he is an American or a mere United States - sponsored trainee.

When President Obama declared flatly this week that "the United States will not torture" many people wrongly believed that he'd shut the practice down, when in fact he'd merely repositioned it.

Obama's Executive Order bans some -- not all -- US officials from torturing but it does not ban any of them, himself included, from sponsoring torture overseas.

Indeed, his policy change affects only a slight percentage of US-culpable tortures and could be completely consistent with an increase in US-backed torture worldwide.

The catch lies in the fact that since Vietnam, when US forces often tortured directly, the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy -- paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed.

That is, the US tended to do it that way until Bush and Cheney changed protocol, and had many Americans laying on hands, and sometimes taking digital photos.

The result was a public relations fiasco that enraged the US establishment since by exposing US techniques to the world it diminished US power.

But despite the outrage, the fact of the matter was that the Bush/Cheney tortures being done by Americans were a negligible percentage of all of the tortures being done by US clients.

For every torment inflicted directly by Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and the secret prisons, there were many times more being meted out by US-sponsored foreign forces.

Those forces were and are operating with US military, intelligence, financial or other backing in Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Nigeria, and the Philippines, to name some places, not to mention the tortures sans-American-hands by the US-backed Iraqis and Afghans.

What the Obama dictum ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage.

Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so.

His Executive Order instead merely pertains to treatment of "...an individual in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government, or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States, in any armed conflict..." which means that it doesn't even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of "armed conflict," which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren't in armed conflict.

And even if, as Obama says, "the United States will not torture," it can still pay, train, equip and guide foreign torturers, and see to it that they, and their US patrons, don't face local or international justice.

This is a return to the status quo ante, the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.

Under the old -- now new again -- proxy regime Americans would, say, teach interrogation/torture, then stand in the next room as the victims screamed, feeding questions to their foreign pupils. That's the way the US did it in El Salvador under JFK through Bush Sr. (For details see my "Behind the Death Squads: An exclusive report on the U.S. role in El Salvador’s official terror," The Progressive, May, 1984 ; the US Senate Intelligence Committee report that piece sparked is still classified, but the feeding of questions was confirmed to me by Intelligence Committee Senators. See also my "Confessions of a Death Squad Officer," The Progressive, March, 1986, and my "Comment," The New Yorker, Oct. 15, 1990,[regarding law, the US, and El Salvador]).

In Guatemala under Bush Sr. and Clinton (Obama's foreign policy mentors) the US backed the army's G-2 death squad which kept comprehensive files on dissidents and then electroshocked them or cut off their hands. (The file/ surveillance system was launched for them in the '60s and '70s by CIA/ State/ AID/ special forces; for the history see "Behind the Death Squads," cited above, and the books of Prof. Michael McClintock).

The Americans on the ground in the Guatemala operation, some of whom I encountered and named, effectively helped to run the G-2 but, themselves, tiptoed around its torture chambers. (See my "C.I.A. Death Squad," The Nation [US], April 17, 1995, "The Country Team," The Nation [US], June 5, 1995, letter exchange with US Ambassador Stroock, The Nation [US], May 29, 1995, and Allan Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon, "Bureaucracy of Death," The New Republic, June 30, 1986).

It was a similar story in Bush Sr. and Clinton's Haiti -- an operation run by today's Obama people -- where the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) helped launch the terrorist group FRAPH, the CIA paid its leader, and FRAPH itsef laid the machetes on Haitian civilians, torturing and killing as US proxies. (See my "Behind Haiti's paramilitaries: our man in FRAPH," The Nation [US], Oct 24, 1994, and "He's our S.O.B.," The Nation [US], Oct. 31, 1994; the story was later confirmed on ABC TV's "This Week" by US Secretary of State Warren Christopher).

In today's Thailand -- a country that hardly comes to mind when most people think of torture -- special police and militaries get US gear and training for things like "target selection" and then go out and torture Thai Malay Muslms in the rebel deep south, and also sometimes (mainly Buddhist) Burmese refugees and exploited northern and west coast workers.

Not long ago I visited a key Thai interrogator who spoke frankly about army/ police/ intel torture and then closed our discussion by saying "Look at this," and invited me into his back room.

It was an up to date museum of plaques, photos and awards from US and Western intelligence, including commendations from the CIA counter-terrorism center (then run by people now staffing Obama), one-on-one photos with high US figures, including George W. Bush, a medal from Bush, various US intel/ FBI/ military training certificates, a photo of him with an Israeli colleague beside a tank in the Occupied Territories, and Mossad, Shin Bet, Singaporean, and other interrogation implements and mementos.

On my way out, the Thai intel man remarked that he was due to re-visit Langley soon.

His role is typical. There are thousands like him worldwide. US proxy torture dwarfs that at Guantanamo.

Many Americans, to their credit, hate torture. The Bush/Cheney escapade exposed that.

But to stop it they must get the facts and see that Obama's ban does not stop it, and indeed could even accord with an increase in US-sponsored torture crime.

In lieu of action, the system will grind on tonight. More shocks, suffocations, deep burns. And the convergence of thousands of complex minds on one simple thought: 'Please, let me die.'

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Breaking News: US Intel Nominee Lied About '99 Massacre. US, Church Documents Show Adm. Dennis Blair Knew of Church Killings Before Crucial Meeting.

By Allan Nairn

On the eve of his Senate confirmation hearing (due for 10am, Thurs. Jan. 22), new information has emerged showing that Adm. Dennis Blair -- President Obama's nominee for US Director of National Intelligence -- lied about his knowledge of a terrorist massacre that occured before a pivotal meeting in which Blair offered support and US aid to the commander of the massacre forces.

The massacre took place at the Liquica Catholic church in Indonesian-occupied East Timor two days before Blair met face-to-face with the Indonesian armed forces commander, Gen. Wiranto (the massacre occurred on April 6, 1999; Blair and Wiranto met April 8).

A classified US cable shows that rather than telling Wiranto to stop the killing, Blair invited Wiranto to be his guest in Hawaii, offered him new US military aid, and told the Indonesian general that he was "working hard" on his behalf, lobbying the US government to restore US military training aid for Indonesia. (That training had been cut off by Congress after the 1991 Dili, Timor massacre; for an account of the US cable and the April 8, '99 Blair-Wiranto meeting see News and Comment posting of Jan. 6, 2009 at http://www.allannairn.com/2009/01/admiral-dennis-blair-prospective-obama.html).

Blair's support at that crucial April 8 meeting buoyed Wiranto, and his forces increased the Timor killings, which came to include new attacks on churches and clergy, mass arsons, and political rapes. (For a detailed chronology based on a UN report, see News and Comment posting of Jan. 9, 2009 at http://www.allannairn.com/2009/01/blair-church-massacre-continued.html).

Since I disclosed the contents of that Blair-Wiranto meeting in a report filed in 1999 (see Allan Nairn, "US Complicity in Timor," The Nation [US], Sept. 27, 1999, reprinted in the Jan. 6 '09 News and Comment posting referenced above), Blair has defended himself by claiming that he went into the meeting with Wiranto not yet knowing of the Liquica massacre.

The Associated Press reported this month, in a January 9 dispatch: "Blair has said he only learned of the massacre a few days after the meeting." (Pamela Hess, "Obama to finalize national security team Friday," Associated Press, Friday Jan. 9, 2009, 4:22 am ET; Blair made the same claim to the Washington Post: Dana Priest, "Standing Up to State and Congress," September 30, 2000).

But now, contemporaneous records have emerged -- from the US Embassy in Jakarta, and from the Catholic Church -- showing that the massacre was publicly described by Timor's Bishop one day before the Blair-Wiranto meeting, and that while Blair was in Jakarta preparing for the meeting, US officials who were there with him were discussing the massacre in graphic detail.

One written message from a US official even noted: "In the face of the scores of horrible slash wounds at Liquica, there are no surgeons to treat them."

The US official was referring to the fact that, as had been disclosed at the Timor Bishop's April 7 press conference, dozens of refugees sheltering in the church had been hacked to death with machetes, but as Blair and Wiranto prepared to meet, some of those slashed were still alive.

Another Jakarta dispatch by senior US personnel written prior to the Blair-Wiranto sitdown refers explicitly to Blair's presence, to his impending meeting with Wiranto, and, crucially, to the detail and rough death toll of the already-known Liquica massacre.

"[W]e have the CINCPAC here today (Command[e]r in Chief of the Pacific]," the message said, referring to Blair by title; and it stated, in regard to what Wiranto's men had done: "Now we may have 40 people -- who were cowering in a church -- dead."

Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, had made the key facts of the massacre clear in his April 7, 1999 press conference, which took place the day before the Blair-Wiranto meeting.

Belo was accompanied by Father Rafael Dos Santos, the Liquica pastor who survived the massacre. Their authoritative accounts received same-day coverage in the Western and local press and were also recounted in church bulletins and in US intelligence and diplomatic traffic.

For Blair to claim that he did not know of these materials or his US colleagues' discussions taking place all around him is to strain credulity to the breaking point, especially since he's being nominated as intelligence chief, and since his meeting with Wiranto was cleared by Washington precisely to address the Timor crisis.

Bishop Belo and Father Dos Santos said the following in their publicly broadcast remarks. This account is excerpted from "Timorese Bishop says more than 25 killed in church massacre," DILI, East Timor, April 7 [1999], (AFP):

"Nobel peace laureate Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo accused Indonesian-backed militia on Wednesday [April 7] of massacring more than 25 people in East Timor outside a church. Belo was speaking at a press conference with Father Rafael Dos Santos who described how refugees sheltering in his church and home at Liquisa [an alternate spelling of Liquica], 30 kilometers (20 miles) west of the Timorese capital Dili, were hacked down with machetes. Dos Santos said Indonesian mobile brigade police stood behind the militia during the attack, and fired into the air. When the attack began 'people ran for cover wherever they could,' he said. Some ran into his house and some into the church before being forced out when troops fired teargas into the buildings. 'When they came out of the church, their eyes streaming, they were mown down, hacked to death with machetes, by the Besi Merah Putih (Red and White Iron militia),' he said ... Belo travelled to Liquisa earlier Wednesday to visit the site of the attack with Indonesia's East Timor military commander Colonel Tono Suratman. 'I have a paper from the military commander that there were 25 bodies inside the priest's house,' he said, 'but according to other witnesses outside around the church there were other bodies. I don't know exactly how many.' Belo had been quoted by the Portugese news agency Lusa on Tuesday [April 6] as saying he had first been informed by the Indonesian military of the deaths of 40 people in the church and five in the priest's house... 'Firstly I am sad, for what happened in Liquisa ... secondly I am ashamed to be a citizen of the (Indonesian) republic. It has taken us back to the middle ages,' Belo said."

We shall now see where the Senate takes us.

(For another contemporaneous -- April 7, pre - Blair/Wiranto meeting -- public report of the massacre see the report of Yayasan HAK, the leading independent East Timorese human rights group, summarized at http://etan.org/et99/april/3-10/6yayasan.htm).

Readers can reach the US Senate Intelligence Committee, which is holding today's confirmation hearing on Blair, through the US Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.

Via the switchboard they can also reach the offices of Senators on the committee. Key members include the committee chair, Sen. Diane Feinstein, the ranking Republican, Sen. Kit Bond, Sen. Ron Wyden, who has said he will question Blair about Timor, Sen. Russ Feingold, a longtime critic of US aid to the Indonesian military, and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who has also criticized the US policy.

A Jan. 22 '09 Democracy Now! broadcast version of this report can be found at
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/22/report_intel_nominee_adm_dennis_blair .

A YouTube excerpt of that broadcast is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eRMV0CV4ms



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Killer in Chief. Obama's Choice: Will this President Murder Civilians?

Barack Obama said during this campaign -- speaking of a notional US president -- that he should be able to do more than one thing at a time, which is sound advice for any person.

As Americans today justly celebrate their sweet win over the country's own racism they should at the same time see that they are now installing the world's new killer in chief.

Obama , on taking office, will inherit a state pre-programmed in ways that kill civilians, a vast, globe-spanning machine on autopilot, unconstrained by murder law.

As president, Obama will instantly become the world's number one arms dealer, number one trainer of secret police, number one detonator of bombs, and number one sponsor of forces, US and foreign, that by objective definition do terrorism.

Obama can stop that. He can cry halt, order: 'Stop civilian killings. Now.'

If he truly does, he'll be a hero worthy of Dr. King, of the freedom giants he rode.

If not, he'll become responsible for mass murders, and the first victims will likely fall sometime between today's swearing-in and the last inaugural ball.



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The Blair Church Massacre, Continued. A Chronology of the Timor Killings.

It is now reported that Admiral Dennis Blair is due to be nominated later today as President-elect Obama's new US Director of National Intelligence.

Blair was implicated in the 1999 East Timor church massacres (See posting of January 6, 2009, "Admiral Dennis Blair. Prospective Obama Appointee Aided Perpetrators of 1999 Church Killings").

Below is a detailed chronology of the killings and related events, based on a UN report.

Though Blair was instructed to tell the killers -- the armed forces of Indonesia -- to stop, he chose not to do so. He did the opposite. He offered them support and US aid, instead, and the killings intensified. They culminated with the torching of the Bishop's house (plus executions), a church massacre of perhaps 200, in Suai, a slaughter at the Catholic diocesan office, the rapes and assassinations of clergy, the burning of perhaps 80% of Timor's housing, and the murders of more than 1,000 civilians.

US cables reported Blair's repeated proffers of support to the Indonesian commander, Gen. Wiranto. UN, CIA, human rights, and international press reports recorded the consequences.

The chronology is based on "ANNEX B - Select Chronology May 1998 - October 1999" of "Crimes Against Humanity in East Timor: Their Nature and Causes" by UN human rights consultant James Dunn, a retired Australian diplomat formerly posted to Timor, who wrote it for UNTAET, the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor. The text below is excerpted from the Dunn report except for the material in square brackets.


1998

May 21: President Suharto [a general, the longtime dictator] of Indonesia is forced from power, and replaced by his vice-president, Dr B J Habibie.

June 9: President Habibie states (to Reuters) that he will consider offering
special status to [Indonesian occupied] East Timor.

June 15: An estimated 15,000 students demonstrate in Dili [Timor's capital], calling for referendum [a UN-supervised vote on independence for Timor], and release of Xanana Gusmao [the imprisoned East Timorese resistance leader]...

August 12: Maj Gen Damiri and Col Tono Suratnam [of TNI, the Indonesian armed forces, run by Gen. Wiranto]meet with [militia leaders] Joao Tavares, Eurico Guterres and Cancio de Carvalho, and tell them they must organise "to protect integration [ie. continuation of the Indonesian occupation]."...

October 6:[Occupation] Governor Abilio Soares demands that all government employees, who oppose integration [the occupation of Timor], resign immediately.

October 11: Rally of 30,000 in Dili calls for Governor's resignation.

October 12: Thousands protest in Baucau [Timor's second city] against TNI
[Wiranto's occupying Indonesian armed forces].

November 1: TNI [Indonesian armed forces] troops carry out a series of raids on villages in Manufahi district.

November 4: Several hundred Kopassus [US-trained Indonesian TNI special forces]
troops reportedly arrive in Kupang for deployment in East Timor.

November 20: UN Secretary General expresses concern over violence in E Timor...

December 27: TNI troops, with Gada Paksi [militia], arrest and allegedly torture four
civilians, and destroy several homes in Maubara district.


1999

January 3: Mahidi Militia kill and injure independence supporters in Ainaro [a town in Timor].

January 24-25: Mahidi [militia], with TNI [Indonesian armed forces] involvement, kill 4 in Zumalai [a town in Timor].

January 27: It is announced in Jakarta that [Indonesian President] Habibie will ask the MPR [the upper house of the Indonesian legislature] to approve independence [for occupied East Timor] if a special vote for autonomy [permanent, modified occupation]
is rejected.

February 8: Bishop Belo and Jose Ramos Horta [a Timorese leader,and, with Bishop Belo, a Nobel Peace Prize winner] declare that East Timor should become independent, after a period of Autonomy.

February 15: BMP [militia] group and local TNI attack Guiso village in Maubara district and arrest several persons.

February 16: According to South China Morning Post report Lt. Col. Yayat
Sudradjat, head of [TNI's US-trained] Kopassus Intelligence unit (SGI) convenes a meeting of militia leaders and calls for killing of pro-independence leaders and their families.

February 17: [Militia leader] Joao Tavares reportedly tells meeting of sub-district and village heads in Bobonaro [,Timor] that they will be sacked if they fail to mobilise their citizens to attend pro-[Indonesian] government rally in Balibo [,Timor].

February 19: [Militia leader] Tavares tells Balibo rally that there will be war if people reject the [TNI-backed] autonomy [modified occupation] proposal.

February 22: General Wiranto states in Jakarta that TNI will continue to
deploy the militia to help Polri [the Indonesian national police, also under
Wiranto's supervision] maintain security.

February 24: Two Timorese shot dead in Dili, apparently not by militia, but
by TNI troops in civilian clothes.

February 25: Portuguese Prime Minister [Portugal is the former colonial power
in Timor] calls for UN presence in East Timor....

[March 3: Admiral Blair, chief of US armed forces in the Pacific, tells the US Congress House Armed Services Committee that TNI, the Indonesian armed forces, are
" the main instrument for order" in Indonesia and that their leaders have
"a strong sense of commitment to the constitution." Blair is testifying
in support of new US aid to the TNI.]

March 4: A classified Australian Defence Intelligence Organisation report
concludes that TNI "are clearly protecting, and some instances operating
with, militants'. It notes that TNI 'could apprehend or easily control
pro-Indonesian militants, but has chosen not to."

March 8: More than 1,000 Timorese from Guiso village are reported to have
fled into mountains after militia attacks.

March 11: In New York it is announced that Jakarta and Lisbon have agreed to
give Timorese a vote on their future.

[Timorese leader Xanana] Gusmao and [militia leader] Tavares agree to cooperate for a cease-fire.

March 16: BMP militia surround the Carmelite convent in Maubara, accuse the
nuns of supporting independence movement, and threaten to kill them.

March 26: According to one of those present, at a meeting with militia
leaders, [Indonesian occupation] Governor Abilio Soares orders that priests and nuns
should be killed.

April 6: At Liquica as many as 50 Timorese located in the church compound are
murdered by BMP militia, with TNI involvement. Gusmao calls on Falintil [the Timorese]forces to defend themselves. General Wiranto tells media that the massacre
was the result of conflict between 'rival groups'.

[A subsequent CIA cable says of the massacre at Liquica: "“Indonesian military
had colluded with pro-Jakarta militia forces in events preceding the attack and
were present in some numbers at the time of the killings.”]

[April 8: Admiral Blair meets General Wiranto in Jakarta, offers him reassurance
and new US military aid, invites him to Hawaii as his guest, offers specific aid
for BRIMOB -- a unit that helped stage the Liquica massacre, and offers
to lobby the US Congress to restore the TNI's US IMET military
training which was cut off by Congress after a 1991 army massacre
at a Catholic cemetery in Dili. Contrary to his instructions from the White House and State Department, Blair does not tell Wiranto to shut the militias down.]

April 12: At Cailaco in Bobonaro area, six villagers are kidnapped and then
murdered by Halilintar [militia] and TNI troops in house of Manuel Soares Gama. A
Falintil [Timorese resistance] group retaliates, killing Gama and 2 TNI troops.

April 13: In revenge attack a force of TNI and militia, led by Lt Col.
Burhanuddin Siagian and Joao Tavares reportedly kidnap, torture and then kill
six Cailaco villagers.

April 16: Belarmino da Cruz, a brother of Lopez, is reportedly killed at
Laclubar.

April 17: Massacre at home of Manuel Carrascalao [a Timorese leader].
Manuelito, Manuel's son, and at least 11 others are killed by Aitarak [militia]
and BMP [militia] members, following a militia rally, addressed by
[Indonesian army] Colonel Tono Suratman.

Team Alpha militia murder Virgilio de Sousa, an independence supporter, at
his home in Bauro, Lospalos [Timor].

[April 18: Admiral Blair calls General Wiranto and once again offers
him new US aid and assurances of support. Blair once again declines
to tell Wiranto to stop the massacres and militias, even though the
call had been arranged at State Department behest to get Blair
to correct his earlier April 8 failure to tell Wiranto to stop the killings.
Indonesian officers say Wiranto is delighted with Blair's continued
support, and takes it as a US green light to escalate the militia terror.]

April 20: [Timorese leader] Jose Ramos Horta calls for international sanctions
against Indonesia. General Wiranto visits Dili, and claims security situation is
under control.

[A Top Secret US Senior Executive Intelligence Brief states “to restore stability,
the Indonesian security forces must stop supporting the militias and adopt a
neutral posture.” But that is not what Admiral Blair tells Gen. Wiranto,
and support for the militias continues. ]

April 21: Evaristo Lopes believed dead after being arrested by Kopassus [Indonesian
Army special forces] and Team Alpha militia in Los Palos.

Falintil and militia leaders sign peace agreement at Bishop's residence in
Dili, which envisages setting up of a Joint Commission on Peace and Stability.

April 23: Catholic Church reports that between 42 and 100 persons killed by
militia units in Suai.

According to Australian Defence Intelligence Organisation report General
Wiranto had chosen to ignore the violent behaviour of TNI and militia forces
in Timor.

April 24: After two days of talks Portuguese and Indonesian officials reach
broad agreement on autonomy package and referendum [vote on independence]
, but security arrangements are yet to be resolved.

April 26: Commission on Peace and Stability for East Timor created with
representatives from pro-integration [occupation], pro-independence,
local government, military, police, Church and KOMNASHAM [Indonesian government
human rights commission]..

April 27: At meeting with Australian Prime Minister Howard, [Indonesian President]
Dr Habibie promises to hold a [Timor] self-determination ballot under UN supervision
on 8 August.

April 28: [TNI Col.] Suratman promises that pro-integration [occupation]militias
would be disarmed in coming weeks.

April 30: Report that bodies of 11 pro-integrationists found in Bauhati.

May 1: Sakunar militia, led by Simao Lopes, established in Oecussi....

May 3: [TNI] Kopassus troops and militia members reportedly kill Domingos Soares
Aparicio near Viqueque.

May 4: Mateus Soares Monis, of Sagadate, Baucau, is arrested and killed by
[TNI] Kopassus troops.

May 5: Agreement between Indonesia, Portugal, and the UN on a referendum for
East Timor is signed in New York. It provides for international experts to
help set up and supervise the ballot, and for unarmed police to observe the
process. Responsibility for security, however, rests with ABRI forces [another,
previous, name for TNI]..

May 7: The UN Security Council passes Resolution 136, in support of 5 May
Agreement, and moves quickly to commence its implementation.

May 9: [TNI] Maj. Gen. Damiri tells media that disarmament of militia and
pro-independence forces was 'proceeding smoothly' and that security situation
was now under control.

[May 10: A Top Secret CIA Intelligence Report notes that “local commanders
would have required at least tacit approval from headquarters in Jakarta to
allow the militias the blatant free hand they have enjoyed.”]

May 18: More than 30 Timorese reported killed by militia in Atara.

May 23: [Indonesian] President Habibie promises to release [Timorese leader]
Xanana [Gusmao] after ballot.

May 24: The SYSG [a UN body] urges the Security Council to send a team of
military advisers to East Timor, as Indonesian authorities was not maintaining
security there. After 3 day visit, Special Envoy Soragjee tells Habibie that
all East Timorese must be disarmed.

[Col.] Timbul Silaen, Kapolri [head of the Indonesian national police], tells
media that his police were neutral and 'had done as best as possible to
prevent violence.'

May 27: The Security Council expresses its deep concern at the continuing
violence in East Timor.

May 28: The [official government-backed] Peace and Justice Commission
reports that militia were compiling lists of pro-independence leaders, with the
assistance of intelligence agencies, so that they could be targeted if the
consultation result were to go against the autonomy [modified occupation] proposal...

June 5: Lamberto da Costa and another person reported killed after arrest by
joint TNI/BMP [militia] members. 11 others reported killed.

June 6: BMP militia force 23 women into domestic and sexual slavery in Maubara,
Liquica (KPP HAM [Indonesian human rights] Report)...

Eduardo Pereira, 50, is killed at Liquica, reportedly by 4 BMP [militia] members who
accused him of supporting Falintil.

June 11: The Security Council passes Resolution 1246, formally establishing
UNAMET [the United Nations Mission in East Timor].

The Australian Foreign Ministry announces that it has information that the
TNI [Indonesian armed forces] has actively encouraged and supported the
pro-integration [pro-occupation] militia.

June 15: UNAMET staff unexpectedly witness BMP militia destroying Leotela
village, and beating locals, with TNI watching.

June 23: The UN, citing unsatisfactory security conditions, postpones
referendum to 22 August. General Wiranto records his disagreement with the
postponement.

June 26: Bishop attends peace talks in Jakarta. Jose Ramos Horta and Xanana
[Timorese leaders] allowed to attend.

June 29: Seven UN officials injured in Maliana [a Timor town] in attack by
pro-autonomy mob [pro-occupation]. The UN Security Council President
subsequently expresses his grave concern at attack. SYSG [a UN body]
report states that security situation in East Timor not yet
conducive to holding of ballot.

July 4: A UN driver is shot during militia attack on UNAMET staff and aid
workers in Liquica and Maliana.

July 7: Indonesia sends extra 1,200 police to East Timor, in response to
international concern at security problems.

July 8: UNAMET staff in Maliana witness 60-80 militia being given military
training, reportedly organised by local TNI nco [non-commissioned officer].

July 10: Falintil [the Timorese resistance] proclaims cease-fire...

[July 14: Admiral Blair's Pacific Command naval chief, Admiral Archie
Clemins, goes to Jakarta to tell Indonesian officers that the US wants
to more fully "re-engage" with the Indonesian armed forces and proposes
that a joint US-TNI military facility be established in Surabaya, Indonesia. For detail see my testimony to the US House International Operations And Human Rights Subcommittee of the House Committee on International Relations, September 30, 1999, available at http://www.etan.org/legislation/999bhear.htm ]

July 14: Wiranto declares that there was no cause to deploy UN troops in East
Timor, which would in any case violate the May 5 Agreement.

July 16: Voter registration begins, with one militiaman killed during a clash.

August 4: Voter registration ends, with 438,000 registered...

August 8: Pro-independence and pro-integration [pro-occupation] leaders
sign code of conduct agreement, as a commitment to referendum. General Wiranto declares that surrendering of weapons is prerequisite to peaceful implementation of the ballot.

August 11: Two Timorese killed in Viqueque, and two others wounded in attack
by 59/75 Junior Militia on a poll information centre. SYSG calls for more
Indonesian police to be deployed in Timor, and for more international police
monitors.

August 12: Wiranto issues assurance that military will ensure security during
post-ballot period, and will accept outcome of the ballot.

August 13: [TNI] Colonel Suratnam is replaced by [TNI] Colonel Noer Muis.

August 16: Three Timorese are reportedly killed in Maliana by militia.

August 22: [TNI Col.] Noer Muis warns of bloodshed before and after
the announcement of the results of the ballot. Admitted to mounting
tensions in Suai.

August 25: [TNI Col.] Noer Muis says that security forces would face a big problem if
pro-independence won, and it would incite reaction of their opponents. But
'possibility of war and violence would be very small if pro-integration
[pro-occupation] faction won'.

August 26: [Militia leader] Eurico Guterres tells rally of 15,000 in Dili that
East Timor will become a sea of fire if independence is declared. After the rally two
Timorese are killed by Aitarak militia in a brawl, witnessed by Indonesian
police who failed to intervene....

August 28: In Los Palos village chief Verissimo Quintas is killed by militia,
who accused him of supporting CNRT [Timorese pro-independence
group]..

Militia force journalists and UN staff out of Maliana where two locals are
then killed.

Kapolri [Indonesian national police chief] Silaen declares that his forces
are adequate for security.

[Indonesian Foreign Minister] Alatas rejects need for peacekeeping force
in East Timor.

August 29: CNRT [pro-independence] offices in Dili, Ambeno and Los Palos
are destroyed by militia.

A senior UN field officer reports that TNI troops have stockpiled 400 M-16
rifles in Maliana, and that local commander (Lt Col Siagian) is planning to
carry attacks with militia on those who vote for independence.

August 30: The consultation ballot is held in East Timor, with more than 97%
of registered voters participating

Polling station at Gleno attacked by more than 50 militia.

August 31: Militia attacks in Dili, Gleno, Ermera, Aileu, Ambeno and
Maliana leave 11 killed, including 3 UN local staff.

United Front for East Timor Autonomy [militia group] accuses UNAMET of bias
and describes consultation as "garbage."

[Indonesian Foreign Minister] Alatas praises the referendum.

September 1: Thousands of Indonesians and pro-integrationist [pro-occupation]
Timorese start fleeing to West Timor.

September 2: UN Special Envoy Jamsheed Marker endorses Indonesian management
of security in East Timor. Portuguese, however, ask Security Council to
prepare contingency plans for peacekeeping force.

September 3: UNAMET staff in Maliana evacuate to Dili after militia attacks.

General Wiranto announces that in order "to face unexpected circumstances"
two battalions of troops had been dispatched to East Timor. He said that "he
had just heard that the situation in Timor had returned to normal."

September 4: The results of the plebiscite are officially announced at the
Mahkota Hotel, with 78.5% voting against autonomy option [ie. in favor
of Timor independence, an end to the 24-year occupation].

Within an hour of the announcement militia, many in TNI uniforms but with
Aitarak [militia] cloaks, pour into Dili, and destruction of the city begins. An early target is the Mahkota Hotel.

In Maliana Halilintar and Dadurus Merah Putih militias, in tandem with TNI
troops, begin a campaign of destruction, and kill several locals including
two UNAMET staff.

September 5: A violent operation is launched throughout East Timor,
apparently launched by the TNI with code-names Wiradharma and Guntur. 25
refugees in the Camara Ecclesiastica [Catholic diocesan office]killed by
Aitarak militia.

US Civpol offer wounded in militia attack near Liquica.

September 6: Killings and destruction at Bishop Belo's house. Refugees
forcibly evicted, several believed murdered.

Refugees also forcibly removed from ICR [Red Cross] compound.

Suai massacre at Ave Maria Church. More than 200 persons seeking refuge are
brutally killed by Mahidin and Laksaur militia, with TNI and BRIMOB support.
Colonel Sediono and Lieutenant Sugito played leading roles in the attack and
the disposal of bodies. Several woman who survived the attack were later
taken to local military (Kodim) headquarters and raped.

President Habibie imposes martial law in East Timor, and places Major
General. Kiki Syahnakri in charge.

September 7: Many East Timorese university students, returning to Dili from
Java, are reported to have been killed, and some of the women raped.

Bishop Belo is evacuated from Dili to Darwin [Australia]. Xanana [Gusmao] is
released from house arrest and taken to British Embassy in Jakarta.

September 8: Maliana Police Station massacre. More than 50 persons are killed
by Dadurus Merah Putih militia at Maliana Police Station, with TNI backing.

Timorese killed at Tumin and Kiobiselo in Oecussi in militia attack, with TNI
involvement.

Killings reported in other parts of East Timor.

Military and militia activities in Dili reflect close cooperation, under
TNI command.

[Official] Indonesian Commission on Human Rights condemns the violence, noting
complicity of [Indonesian] security forces.

Massive operation to force East Timorese to go to West Timor on commandeered
or military vehicles gets under way, accompanied by massive systematic
destruction.

September 9: As many as 14 persons killed near Batugade by militia and TNI
ncos.

UN decides to evacuate all its staff to Darwin [,Australia].

US suspends military ties to Indonesia.

Indonesian MPR [legislative upper house] accepts results of [Timor] ballot.

September 10: Massacre at Passabe, Oecussi, by Sakunar militia, assisted by
troops from [TNI's] 745 Battalion.

Reverend Ximenes is killed on road from Dili to Baucau.

UN Secretary General calls on Indonesia immediately to accept peacekeeping
force.

US President Clinton say that "it is now clear that the Indonesian military
is aiding and abetting the militia violence. This is unacceptable." [Though,
as the CIA and public reports reflected, it had been clear from the start.]

September 11: A German priest, Albert Garim, and a Timorese are killed at
Dare, allegedly by [TNI] Kopassus troops.

UN Security Council delegation, with General Wiranto, visits Dili.

September 12: Killings reported at Ainaro, Los Palos and Baucau by militia
and TNI.

Indonesian Government formally agrees to peacekeeping force intervention.

September 13: Indonesia allows international food and airdrops in East Timor.

September 14: Two Timorese killed at Raifun village.

UNAMET staff and 1,400 Timorese evacuated from Dili to Darwin.

The EU bans arms sales to Indonesia.

September 15: UN Security Council Resolution 1264 approves Interfet
[International Force for East Timor] deployment.

September 16: [TNI] Maj Gen Syahnakri denies TNI support for militias.

September 17: TNI withdraw from East Timor begins, and UN aerial food drop
commences.

September 19: Interfet commander, Maj.Gen. Peter Cosgrove, meets with Maj Gen
Syahnakri in Dili.

September 20: Seven Timorese killed by Sakunar militia in Ambeno, Oecussi.

Interfet commences deployment in Dili, without incident.

September 21: As [TNI] Battalion 745 withdraws to West Timor, its soldiers
reportedly kill Timorese and destroy houses. Financial Times journalist,
Sander Thoenes is murdered by [Batallion] 745 troops in the Becora area...

September 23: Militia groups start flooding into West Timor, and TNI troops
begin burning their barracks and other buildings.

September 24: UNHCR reaches an agreement to aid refugees in West Timor.

September 25: Massacre in Lautem area when Team Alpha militia ambush vehicle
carrying nuns, brothers and an Indonesian journalist. Nine person are killed
and their bodies mutilated.

September 27: The UN CHR calls for an international commission to investigate
violations in East Timor.

September 29: Militia reportedly kill two persons in Maliana.

October 3: Interfet troops push towards the western part of East Timor.

October 6: Bishop Belo returns to East Timor.

October 8: East Timorese refugees start returning from West Timor.

October 9: One militiaman is killed and two wounded when engaged by Interfet
troops near border.

October 13: UN officials report that about 400,000 East Timorese are missing.

October 20: Indonesia's MPR passes a decree, annulling the formal
incorporation [Indonesian military takeover] of East Timor, which took
place in July 1976.

October 25: The UN Security Council, in Resolution 1272, creates UNTAET.

October 26: East Timor is taken over by the UN and Sergio Vieira de Mello is
appointed as transitional administrator.

[End of chronology based on the UN Dunn report.]

--------------
The think tank of Obama's transition chief, John Podesta, writes that the choice of Admiral Blair, among others, is "indicative of Obama's intent to work within the rule of law in fighting terrorism" ("Putting the Law Back Into Intelligence," The Progress Report, Center for American Progress, January 6, 2009).

Did Blair "work within the rule of law" in 1999 Indonesia/Timor?

If Obama thinks he didn't, Blair should be prosecuted, not appointed. And if Obama thinks he did, then sponsoring mass killing of civilians is legal, and is indeed the kind of conduct to be rewarded in Obama's Washington.


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Admiral Dennis Blair. Prospective Obama Appointee Aided Perpetrators of 1999 Church Killings.

Reports say that President-elect Obama wants to nominate retired Admiral Dennis Blair as the new United States Director of National Intelligence.

In 1999, in the midst of massacres of East Timor civilians and churches, Admiral Blair gave support to the perpetrators, the armed forces of Indonesia.

Two days after a massacre at Liquica that left flesh hanging from the church walls, Blair contacted the Indonesian commander, offered him US aid, and according to classified US cables, failed to tell him to stop the attacks.

Reassured by the evident support from Blair, then the US Pacific Command chief, the Indonesian commander, General Wiranto, escalated the attacks.

The Indonesian forces subsequently struck the Red Cross and the Bishop's residence, killing more than a thousand as they went, burning churches and raping nuns.

They were trying to derail a free election, taking place under UN auspices, that eventually ended Jakarta's illegal occupation of East Timor.

I disclosed the cables documenting Blair's proffers of support to Gen. Wiranto in a dispatch from Timor published in the September 27, 1999 Nation magazine.

Blair did not deny the report, and when I later asked President Clinton about it, he also did not deny it. Instead, Clinton pleaded ignorance and said I'd have to ask Blair.

The Nation report is reprinted below.

(Note: Though the Indonesian military denied responsibility for the murders, UN and CIA reports say otherwise. One CIA cable later declassified at the request of Prof. Brad Simpson of the National Security Archives says of the Liquica massacre that "“Indonesian military had colluded with pro-Jakarta militia forces in events preceding the attack and were present in some numbers at the time of the killings.” It was immediately after those killings that Blair offered new aid to that military.)

---

THE NATION [US]
September 27, 1999

US Complicity in Timor

While the Indonesian military's thugs continue their rampage in East Timor, most foreign reporters have fled the country. As of September 7, frequent Nation contributor and award-winning journalist Allan Nairn was believed to be the only US reporter still there. Nairn left the besieged UN compound and walked the streets of Dili, where he hid in abandoned houses as he observed troops and militia burning and looting. Nairn has been writing about the troubles there for years. In 1991, after being badly beaten by Indonesian troops while witnessing the massacre of several hundred East Timorese, he was declared a "threat to national security" and banned from the country. He has entered several times illegally since then. In his most recent Nation dispatch from East Timor, on March 30, 1998, Nairn disclosed the continuing US military training of Indonesian troops implicated in the torture and killing of civilians. He filed this report by satellite telephone to The Nation through Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!

--The Editors

Dili, East Timor

It is by now clear to most East Timorese and a few Westerners still left here that the militias are a wing of the TNI/ABRI, the Indonesian armed forces. Recently, for example, I was picked up by militiamen who turned out to be working for a uniformed colonel of the National Police. [Editors' note: The Indonesian government has denied any connection between the militias and either the police or the military.] But there is another important political fact that is not known here or in the international community. Although the US government has publicly reprimanded the Indonesian Army for the militias, the US military has, behind the scenes and contrary to Congressional intent, been backing the TNI.

US officials say that this past April, as militia terror escalated, a top US officer was dispatched to give a message to Jakarta. Adm. Dennis Blair, the US Commander in Chief of the Pacific, leader of all US military forces in the Pacific region, was sent to meet with General Wiranto, the Indonesian armed forces commander, on April 8. Blair's mission, as one senior US official told me, was to tell Wiranto that the time had come to shut the militia operation down. The gravity of the meeting was heightened by the fact that two days before, the militias had committed a horrific machete massacre at the Catholic church in Liquiça, Timor. YAYASAN HAK, a Timorese human rights group, estimated that many dozens of civilians were murdered. Some of the victims' flesh was reportedly stuck to the walls of the church and a pastor's house. But Admiral Blair, fully briefed on Liquiça, quickly made clear at the meeting with Wiranto that he was there to reassure the TNI chief. According to a classified cable on the meeting, circulating at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, Blair, rather than telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, instead offered him a series of promises of new US assistance.

According to the cable, which was drafted by Col. Joseph Daves, US military attaché in Jakarta, Admiral Blair "told the armed forces chief that he looks forward to the time when [the army will] resume its proper role as a leader in the region. He invited General Wiranto to come to Hawaii as his guest in conjunction with the next round of bilateral defense discussions in the July-August '99 time frame. He said Pacific command is prepared to support a subject matter expert exchange for doctrinal development. He expects that approval will be granted to send a small team to provide technical assistance to police and...selected TNI personnel on crowd control measures."

Admiral Blair at no point told Wiranto to stop the militia operation, going the other way by inviting him to be his personal guest in Hawaii. Blair told Wiranto that the United States would initiate this new riot-control training for the Indonesian armed forces. This was quite significant, because it would be the first new US training program for the Indonesian military since 1992. Although State Department officials had been assured in writing that only police and no soldiers would be part of this training, Blair told Wiranto that, yes, soldiers could be included. So although Blair was sent in with the mission of telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, he did the opposite.

Indonesian officers I spoke to said Wiranto was delighted by the meeting. They took this as a green light to proceed with the militia operation. The only reference in the classified cable to the militias was the following: "Wiranto was emphatic: as long as East Timor is an integral part of the territory of Indonesia, Armed Forces have responsibility to maintain peace and stability in the region. Wiranto said the military will take steps to disarm FALINTIL pro-independence group concurrently with the WANRA militia force. Admiral Blair reminded Wiranto that fairly or unfairly the international community looks at East Timor as a barometer of progress for Indonesian reform. Most importantly, the process of change in East Timor could proceed peacefully, he said."

So that was it. No admonition. When Wiranto referred to disarming the WANRA force, he was talking about another militia force, different from the one that was staging attacks on Timorese civilians. When word got back to the State Department that Blair had said these things in a meeting, an "eyes only" cable was dispatched from the State Department to Ambassador Stapleton Roy at the embassy in Jakarta. The thrust of this cable was that what Blair had done was unacceptable and that it must be reversed. As a result of that cable from Washington to Roy, a corrective phone call was arranged between General Wiranto and Admiral Blair. That call took place on April 18.

I have the official report on that phone call, which was written by Blair's aide, Lieut. Col. Tom Sidwell. According to the account of the call and according to US military officials I spoke to, once again Blair failed to tell Wiranto to shut the militias down. In fact, Blair instead permitted Wiranto to make, in essence, a political speech saying the same thing he had said before. Here is one passage from the account: "General Wiranto denies that TNI and the police supported any one group during the incidents"--meaning during the military attacks. "General Wiranto will go to East Timor tomorrow to emphasize three things:...Timorese, especially the two disputing groups, to solve the problem peacefully with dialogue; 2) encourage the militia to disarm; 3) make the situation peaceful and solve the problem." At no point did Blair demand that the militias be shut down, and in fact this call was followed by escalating militia violence and increases in concrete, new US military assistance to Indonesia, including the sending in of a US Air Force trainer just weeks ago to train the Indonesian Air Force.

Allan Nairn


Link to ETAN East Timor & Indonesia Action Network site for official reports on the 1999 killings and for a petition regarding the prospective Blair nomination

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Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry. Burma, Food Crisis, Wall Street, and the World Economy.

In parts of Burma before the cyclone hit the heat was so severe that you could walk around on a hazy day and run the risk of sunstroke.

On Thingyan the Buddhist holiday in which people dunk each other with water you could get a full-face full-pail drenching and be crisply sundried in minutes.

But when the storm water rose on the Irrawaddy Delta drying out became secondary because the sun's rays were largely gone and so was much of the land, housing, and plantings.

No one really knows how many people died but the world press has made the point that it would have been far fewer if Burma had a better government.

The point could also be made, though, that far fewer still would have died if the world had a better system of producing and allocating its wealth.

It's hard to come up with solid figures but it seems safe to estimate that the entire disposable wealth of the Irrawaddy Delta before the storm, that of its' 3.5 million residents, could have been less than that of one table-full of diners at New York's Four Seasons Grill Room.

Actually, it's more dramatic than that.

Working with figures from Forbes magazine, the IMF, and the UNDP, it's possible to estimate that there are between three hundred and a thousand individuals whose accumulated wealth is so vast that any one of them alone could pay each person in the Irrawaddy Delta for a year, and in the case of the richest, like Warren Buffett, could do it for six decades running and still have billions left.

One could get a visualization of this notion and its implications when flying over the Netherlands. Looking down from the Royal Dutch Airline a few weeks after Irrawaddy sank, you could see another delta, a country with much land below sea level, but where long infusions of wealth -- much of it extracted from Southeast Asia by whip (see the histories of the Dutch East and West Indies Companies) -- have made possible the building, behind strong dikes, by the sea, of nice, glassy homes and offices.

A cyclone Nargis would have killed anywhere -- viz. the recent storms in the US midwest -- but whether you survive a storm depends in important part on whether you and your ancestors were rich or poor and were able to build good infrastructure (even in the US, see New Orleans).

So the rich world is right to flagellate the Burmese generals for holding back resources as people die (a BBC World TV interviewer yesterday called it "criminal neglect") but wrong to fail to note that they do the same thing daily, on a global, far more deadly, scale.

The rich do pass out some of their spare wealth during a cyclone or other covered crisis, but on a daily basis withhold enough of it such that 850 million people routinely go hungry.

The recent food price hike has upped that statistic by perhaps a hundred million, and so it is said that we are in a "food crisis" and that "the era of cheap food is over."

The world would indeed be in a food crisis if there were not enough food to feed the people. But that is not the case.

The problem is that many millions of people can't afford food. That, clearly, is not a food crisis, but rather a wealth crisis, more precisely a wealth distribution crisis that can be solved by shifts from rich to poor, and a crisis that can be kept from recurring if laws and economies are then modified to institutionalize a new, more realistic, system that doesn't happen to starve people -- an objective which, one would think, is a fairly modest, and perhaps popular, goal.

Today in Rome there is a world summit on food and there has been a political stir over an attempt to exclude Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's liberator and despot.

The point is made correctly that Mugabe runs a failed economic system that kills many people who could have been saved if he had made different choices.

But the same could also be said of a number of others at the summit -- those who run the world economy --, which is certainly failed from the point of view of those who draw their last breath hungry.

UN people from FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and other agencies have also caused a flutter by talking about $50 billion, over many years, for various food projects, which is a tenfold increase but still less than the personal holdings of Buffett, Bill Gates, and Carlos Slim, who got quite rich essentially overnight when Mexico gave him its cell phone system. It's also what the US goes though in about five months of occupying Iraq, where child malnutrition has risen in rough correlation with precision bomb drops and Iraqui democracy.

If someone's dying and you have a dollar that could save them and you withhold it, you have killed them. It's so extreme it sounds ridiculous, but it happens to be true, and will continue to be true so long as surplus coexists with bodies living on the cliff of death, or, for the luckier young ones, the cliff of mere body stunting and underdevelopment of their brains.

The big story before the food crisis was the US Wall Street financial crisis. For some weeks sober economists were fearing 1929-style panic. But Ben Bernanke, the US Federal Reserve chairman, stepped in to save the day by essentially imagining into existence several hundreds of billions of dollars worth of money that was effectively made available to some of the world's richest institutions and people.

The coverage focused on the fact that Bernanke did this cleverly, and succeeded, but it could also have noted that this is a remarkable aspect of today´s economy: while most people have to work for their money incrementally, bending in mud to plant their rice, a few can imagine it into existence in large blocks, and give it to their friends and colleagues.

By printing money, issuing bonds, making loans, creating new financial instruments, and by other means, these few create notions that have the power to buy goats, or anything else one wants, and can continue doing so indefinitely so long as rich society buys the pretense.

Which is to say that though, say, getting food to people, requires rearranging some physical things, most of the task involves rearranging the notions that govern actions from people's heads.

It´s simply a choice as to whether the power to conjure funds will be used for hungry people, and not just the juridical, imaginary persons that are investment corporations (US judicial precedent gives corporations the legal rights of persons, but like persons become ghosts it´s impossible to jail them if they transgress).

And it is likewise simply a choice whether or not to save expiring people by allowing resources to be shifted from an aid ship off Burma´s shore, or from the guys having drinks and lunch at the Four Seasons, table four.


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And Satan Said: 'Recite the Names of the People You Killed.'

The other day a Chilean journalist asked whether the Spanish Guatemala genocide prosecution was mainly "symbolic," but I said that it was more than that since international arrest warrants had been issued. (Re. the prosecution see postings of February 5, 7, and 9, 2008).

What neither of us knew was that as we were speaking one of the defendants had just died, and that the International Herald Tribune/ AP headline would read: "Former Guatemalan police director wanted in Spain for crimes against humanity dies" (International Herald Tribune website, February 18, 2008).

Though that only begins to ping the surface of the lake of blood that is his legacy, it is not a bad summing-up of the life of Col. German Chupina, torturer, rapist, murderer, and steward of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala (AMCHAM).

(See postings of December 2, 2007, "'Go ahead, kill them. Just be sure to fill out your expense account.,'"and February 9, 2008, "It's Not the Man, It's the Mission. The Whisperers of Death.").

That's one small benefit of trying to enforce the murder laws, even in a world that doesn't yet want to. Sometimes the proceeding makes chroniclers feel free to call things by their proper names.

That didn't much happen with Suharto, who was a bigger fish and better connected, and who was, in any event, never brought up before a murder tribunal.

(The New York Times managed to start its story on the man who surpassed Saddam and rivaled Pol Pot: "Indonesia embraced Suharto as a great leader Sunday, greeting his death with official solemnity and with surging, shouting crowds..." [Seth Mydans, "In death, ex-dictator elicits grief and tributes," in International Herald Tribune, January 28, 2008]; for poor victims', rather than rich perpetrators', perspectives see posting of January 13, 2008, "General Suharto of Indonesia. One Small Man Leaves a Million Corpses." ).

But imagine if proceedings, even after the fact, were brought against those who deserved it. In the US there's a popular TV cop show, "Cold Case," devoted to that notion.

But the show only deals with common criminals, like people who kill kids -- that is, people who kill kids while not on state business, or with no state political motive.

US Presidential libraries would have to start devoting exhibits in their biographical dioramas. 'The Early Years,' 'The Race for the White House,' 'The State Terrorism Tribunal.'

Though these cases are small breakthroughs, they're big, because they happen on a big, important front.

Yesterday's Haaretz tells the story of Israeli Gen. Doron Almog who, in 2005, cowered in a plane for two hours on the tarmac at London's Heathrow airport and thereby "escaped arrest for alleged war crimes ... because U.K. police feared an arrest would spark a shootout with Israeli security officials..." ( Haaretz Service, "Report: IDF general dodged U.K. arrest as police feared shootout," Haaretz, February 20, 2008.)

He wasn't such a shrinking violet when he allegedly lobbed flesh-shredding flechette shells at Gaza civilians or was smashing 50 homes there, but its different when you're not playing on your home court, and there's real law enforcement, with guns.

As it happened, this outbreak of law enforcement was unexpected, and quickly contained. Citizens had complained, a local British court had issued a warrant, the cops went to do their job, and after the general had returned to Israel -- where the cops had no job to do -- the British Foreign Office apologized profusely.

The general deplaned.

Tony Blair recently went to the trouble of commenting that a similar contemplated British case against Avi Dichter, Israel's Public Security Minister, was "utter nonsense" (The case concerns a "targeted killing" that killed the target's wife and three children, among others. Dichter last year threatened Palestinians with a "Nakba" -- cataclysm -- if they kept remembering their 1948 Nakba), an interesting remark by Blair, a man now tasked by the Quartet as an honest broker on Israel-Palestine, and who backed an Iraq invasion that his own Foreign Office's deputy legal adviser called "a crime of aggression" (which is prosecutable).

(For Blair quote: Barak Ravid, "Sources: Blair 'shocked' by Dichter fears of arrest in U.K.," Haaretz, February 8, 2008. For Dichter quote: Meron Benvenisti, "Time to Stop Mourning," Haaretz, December 12, 2007. For legal adviser quote see posting of January 17, 2008, "US Precision Bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Killing Civilians, Carefully.").

So what would Chupina and Suharto talk about, if they met, at the boiling pool, in Hell?

'CIA Station Chiefs I have known?'

In Chupina's case, it would include V. Harwood Blocker 3d, 1977-1980; Barry Royden, 1980; and Robert Hultslander, 1981-83 (see my "The Country Team," The Nation [US], June 5, 1995).

Or maybe Satan would step in: 'OK Chupina, OK Suharto, before you get to eat (if they eat down there), recite for me, from memory, the names of all the people you killed.'

You know how long it takes to recite a million names, or even some mere thousands?

And what if, as is likely, they didn't know or have forgotten most of the names?

Maybe even Satan wouldn't be that cruel.

For true viciousness, you must look aboveground.


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"Dying for a Second Round." Israel Said to Plan Attack on Lebanon.

On Friday I asked a top-level Israeli, a former IDF (Israel Defense Forces) elite unit man and prime-ministerial confidante, whether the assassination of Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh could have been done by a Lebanese group.

He snorted at the preposterous notion. This was "way too sophisticated," he said. "This [the car bombing] was a precisely orchestrated international operation," and this was the "third or fourth or fifth time in a year that Israel has carried out a military operation in Syria."

When I asked him to repeat that last part he added the word "allegedly."

But the message, or at least the boast, was clear. So why is Israel doing this?

The man said of his colleagues: "There are a lot of [Israeli] military and cabinet people just dying for a second round with Lebanon. If given the opportunity they'll take it," i.e. attack Lebanon again, not in spite of "but because of" the perception that their '06 attack failed.

Though the IDF leveled blocks and villages, dropped 4 million cluster bomblets (some of which are still exploding), and killed some 200 Hezbollah combatants and 1,000 Lebanese civilians (roughly 40 Israeli civilians were killed by Hezbollah), they apparently departed Lebanon feeling politically inadequate.

The official feeling was that they either did not destroy enough, or destroy enough of the right people and items, to avoid the embarrassing perception that they lost to Hezbollah.

So to have the option of solving this problem they've apparently staged a provocative assassination in hopes of goading Hezbollah into retaliating and providing a pretext for new -- better -- destruction that this time around will "succeed," i.e. soothe hurt Israeli feelings.

There've been attempts to put this in strategic terms, as educated killers (and those who study them) prefer. 'Israel must prove its strategic value to the United States' (What? Washington is going to dump Israel? Hezbollah's "victory" strengthened the Palestinians, or Lebanon, or put Israel's existence in danger?). Or, alternatively: 'Hezbollah must be eradicated' (which everyone knows is impossible).

In fact, the closer you look the more it looks like leaders' blood psychotherapy.

And the same thing goes for the publics that follow them. Olmert is in political trouble. If he doesn't kill some Arabs soon (who or where is secondary), his governing coalition may well dissolve. The public has to feel good, too.

The problem -- for the to-be-killed, and for the notion of murder law, not to mention (and few do) decency -- is that the Israeli body politic is now set this way: demanding -- with a few, brave, exceptions -- not just daily, routine, killings of Palestinians, but periodic dramatic strikes that thrill and let them strut like hero/ victims.

It's as if the inhabitants of a US Fox News studio had multiplied and become a nation.

It, of course, doesn't have to be that way, but it is obviously that way now. All you have to do to see it is pick up the papers or talk to a few Israelis. (For representative quotations see Gideon Levy, "Little Ahmadinejads, Haaretz," 10/06/2007).

Its one thing for a state to be murdering and/or oppressing others when their local public doesn't know about it (as was largely the case when Washington was decimating Central America in the 1980s), but it's another when the public knows about it and supports the injustices and crimes (as was the case with US whites and slavery, and in the first stages of US/Iraq, where public support seemed to turn -- as it may still -- on the question of whether the US was "winning").

In the first situation, the killing policy is vulnerable. If word gets out, the public might be angry. But in the second it is more stable, and deadly, since the public knows, and asks for more.

But people and states don't get to entirely write their own histories.

They usually interact with others.

In the case of Israel, the key interaction is with the US, their military guarantor/ mass subsidizer, and with American Jews, where, among the young, opinion appears to be slowly turning (see postings of December 7, 2007, "Imposed Hunger in Gaza. The Army in Indonesia. Questions of Logic and Activism," and February 13, 2008, "Big Killer Takes Out Smaller One. 'Wipe Out a Neighborhood.' Life by Mafia Rules in the Israeli - US Domain," particularly the plaint of Malcom Hoenlein.).

Alternatively, Palestinians and groups like Hezbollah and Hamas could join the US as important determinants, but only if they too reset their outlooks (and their willingness to kill or murder) -- as some Palestinians and other Arabs at the grassroots level are now urging, cautiously -- and switched to active, but non-violent, or minimally violent resistance (like the first intifada, or the Gaza wall-breaking) and stopped letting themselves be used as a "provocation-response" button that Israel can press when it wants a thrill.

(See posting of January 26, 2007. "The Breaking of the Gaza Wall. Wise, Justified Political Violence.").

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Big Killer Takes Out Smaller One. "Wipe Out a Neighborhood." Life By Mafia Rules in the Israeli - US Domain.

I happened to learn about the car-bomb assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commander, while talking to a Palestinian Fatah man who is a confidante of Mohammed Dahlan, who is famously reputed in the press to have been both a torturer and the CIA's man in Gaza, until the Hamas ousted him.

The Fatah/ Dahlan man who imparted the assassination news hates Hamas with a passion -- he said that in last year's rival security forces showdown they grabbed and tortured him with knives for four hours (he was earlier tortured by the Israelis far longer, and worse, but views that as par for the course)-- and is no fan of Hezbollah, but he viewed the killing with irony. He said he was hearing that the Israelis were saying "we cleared the account with him (Mughniyeh)" (Palestinian Authority security forces, like those Dahlan ran, now have regular coordination meetings with their ostensible enemies, Israeli intelligence), yet he claimed that Mughniyeh's major killings had been more against other Arabs (eg. Saudi, Kuwait) than against Israelis.

The Israeli killing men are trying to contain their grins. The government issued a non-denial denial "Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident. We have nothing further to add" -- i.e. they reject terror groups saying they were involved, but do not say that they were not involved.

The US, which had a $25 million bounty on Mughniyeh's head (he's implicated, in, among other things, the Lebanon Marine barracks bombing, the kidnap/ holding of AP reporter Terry Anderson, a TWA hijacking) felt no need to show restraint, saying, through the State Department: "The world is a better place without this man in it. He was a cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost."

In a world of proportionality and full enforcement of the murder laws -- or even, rough justice-style "what goes around comes around" -- George Bush's men would not want to make that statement, since they (and Israel) are responsible for vastly more, and vastly more civilian, killings, don't have Mughniyeh's sometime excuse of responding to invasion, and don't want to start up their cars tomorrow morning and wind up blown to bits.

But that is not this world. This is mafia world. If you're big enough, you can whack guys.

It so happened that, hours before, another Palestinian man had used that mafia term as we wove through scrolls of barbed wire, checkpoints, walls, and Galil/M-16 toting Occupation men as Jewish settlers/occupiers zipped through the West Bank on ethnically/religiously segregated superhighways.

Two days before, a fairly typical day in Israeli politics, the lead front page headline in the Haaretz newspaper was "IDF (Israel Defense Forces) to step up Gaza assassinations," in response to homemade rockets from besieged, hungry, bombed Gaza that had recently wounded Israelis (for background on the siege and the disproportionate death tolls, see postings of December 7, 2007, "Imposed Hunger in Gaza, The Army in Indonesia. Questions of Logic and Activism," and January 6, 2008 "The Breaking of the Gaza Wall. Wise, Justified Political Violence.").

"The IDF needs to wipe out a neighborhood in Gaza," said the Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit, "We need to target all those responsible for terrorism without asking who they are" -- suggesting a broad definition of "responsible" that encompasses those whose actions are unknown, but who do, at least, fit the criterion of being Palestinians living in Gaza. (Haaretz English Edition, February 11, 2008).

Dani Yatom, the former Mossad chief, now a parliamentarian for what constitutes Israel's establishment left, the Labor Party, said on TV of blowing up the smaller killer Mughniyeh that "the free and democratic world today achieved a very important goal" -- suggesting that freedom and democracy do not have law and order (as opposed to whacking) as a prerequisite, which seems to undercut the whole US worldwide project of building up heavily-armed security forces (along with non-troublesome courts) -- in places including occupied Palestine -- on the claimed premise that you can't have freedom and democracy until you've first established the rule of law.

The politics are pretty clear. The US Republicans want terrorism -- other people's -- on the US electoral front burner (see posting re. the just-announced 9/11 tribunals, February 11, 2008, "The Guantanamo Gambit. A Smart But Vulnerable Establishment. Tactical Options in US Politics."), and Israel's Olmert administration is still smarting from a new official report (the Winograd Commission) saying they lost the '06 Lebanon war with Hezbollah (and with the precision-carpet-bombed civilian populations of southern Leabanon, and southern Beirut), and are simultaneously facing a fierce Israeli public clamor to go in and kill more Gazans.

There's always a certain -- weak -- case to be made for just taking out a killer if nice, legal courts can't do it (its the kind of thing that leftist guerrilla/liberation movements, or the French Resistance, did all the time). That was basically the case -- apart from the weapons/ Al Qeada lies -- that the US made for taking out Saddam Hussein. But the weak case becomes dangerously unserious when the one proposing to do the ajusticiamiento (delivery of justice, as they used to say in rebel Central America), has, like, say, the US or Israeli leadership, killed and murdered far more prolifically than has the proposed target. Then, though you remove a smaller killer from the face of the earth, you make the bigger killer still stronger, thus making life even more dangerous for regular people who are still walking around.

Surprisingly enough, for a man based in the New York area -- an old mob stronghold and recently the fictional home of HBO's Tony Soprano -- Malcom Hoenlein, head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations seemed to express surprise, at a Tuesday Jerusalem press conference, at his group's poll findings that American popular support for Israel is "broad" but "also thin, and most Americans see Israel as a dark and militaristic place."

Evidently they shouldn't. When an assassination car bomb explodes, it gives off a lot of light.

(For the Hoenlein press conference see Anshel Pfeffer, "Hoenlein: Obama's spirit of change could harm Israel," Haaretz, February 13, 2008; despite the headline, he wasn't criticizing Obama, who like all the big 3 candidates, is already pledged to the official US/Israeli government line, including on Gaza. He was merely fretting that "[t]here is a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign... All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be, is an opening for all kind of mischief.").

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The Guantanamo Gambit. A Smart But Vulnerable Establishment. Tactical Options in US Politics.

Though they never said it, it now appears that Bush, or at least his Pentagon, did not, for whatever reason, want Rudy Giuliani to be US president.

Though purportedly weaker than the Democrats, these Republicans have made an ingenious move by announcing a surprise 9/11 death-penalty tribunal just months before the US election.

Giuliani must be pounding the earth at the news that -- just after he dropped out of the race -- the US pre-election discussion will now be shaped, in important part, by the theme that was his only issue.

The Republicans were already in position to maybe overcome some bad fundamentals (Iraq, the US economy, too much incumbency) with the political brilliance of Senator John McCain, a man who is at once a rich military aristocrat (his father and grandfather were admirals), a regular guy in personality, a bomber, a torture survivor (by the people he was bombing), and a conservative Republican lauded for candor who manages to convince some liberal Democrats that he's actually lying -- excusably -- when he repeatedly says he's conservative.

To non-US readers asking what these US political terms mean (in Australia, for example, "liberal" is the name of the "conservative," "right wing" party), the short answer is: don't puzzle over it too much; it doesn't really affect you.

"Liberal" or "conservative," US foreign policy is quite consistent, historically -- as each new US Secretary of State accurately tells the world when there's a White House change of party.

Now, whatever small distance might have existed between the US establishment left and right (see posting of January 2, 2008, "The US Election is Already Over. Murder and Preventable Death Have Won") will be subjected to a powerful converging pull with this big Al Qaeda Guantanamo proceeding.

Senator Barack Obama, who, at this instant, may be slightly ahead for the Democrats' nomination, will now have one more reason to make sure that his eloquent, vague, talk of "change" will, if in office, actually amount to small change (See my January 3, 2008 Democracy Now! discussion of atrocities by advisers to Obama, as well as to Clinton, McCain, and others).

But one aspect of vast US killing/sparing power is that even tiny relative changes, can -- in absolute terms -- produce many more or many fewer corpses.

If, say, in theory, a series of US policy decisions can kill or save 1,000,000 people, a variation of just one percent can kill or save 10,000 people.

So even if the bitter, minimal, electoral choice must be made among 99% - identical candidates, that 1% difference does make a difference, though you may not know in which direction.

(It was the Democrats -- John F. Kennedy, for example, who created the Central American death squads [see my "Behind the Death Squads: An exclusive report on the U.S. role in El Salvador’s official terror," The Progressive, May, 1984, and a resulting Senate Intelligence Committee report, which you can't see, because it's classified] and did the most damage on Vietnam, and who, in the Kerry-Bush campaign had the harsher rhetoric on South American matters like Venezuela [key Democrats like James Carville and Mark Penn have been paid consultants to Chavez's anti-democratic, pro-coup opponents]).

Though Bush II varied from post-Vietnam establishment tactics with an Iraq invasion that made Washington look bad (not, in their terms, because of the mass civilian death, but because of the US failure to win fast) Bush himself has now been partly pulled back into line, and McCain was already in line (McCain helped to oust Rumsfeld, who, with Cheney, hurt US power by overplaying it, i.e. by invading a non-defenseless country, and, to boot, getting lots of US troops killed and maimed, conspicuously, on television).

What this means is that though the public rhetoric appears to stake out big differences, Washington insiders agree that on Iraq, as on many matters, the Republicans and Democrats are on the same page.

The Democrats' talk, for example, of starting to withdraw troops immediately does not mean anything. There are always troop rotations, so when some come home that can be called a withdrawal. Or you can withdraw -- drawing down numbers -- today and build them up tomorrow. The only pull-out statement that would be meaningful would be an expressed willingness to let Iraq's regime fall, something inconceivable for a Democratic nominee -- more so now with the Al Qaeda tribunal.

Its not just that the US has a habit of killing civilians, it's also that it has such huge power to do so (see posting of December 5, 2007,"It Takes [Out] a Village: Illegitimate American Power"). Neither is acceptable. Both should be broken, and the killers tried. But electing a Democrat -- or Republican -- as president won't do that. Other tactics must be attempted.

The US system is, in some respects, unusually open and even vulnerable. The electoral process, for one thing, is, as in most places, heavily influenced by rich people's money (it's a combination of one - person - one - vote, and one - dollar - one - vote), but it is also susceptible to not-fully-controlled television spectacle.

At one point, in 1992, the wild card candidate Ross Perot, actually led Bush I and Clinton, almost entirely based on some cable TV appearances that seemed to strike a chord (though a rich man, he hadn't even yet spent much campaign money).

Then, however, Perot self-destructed, starting with a speech implying racist sentiments and dropped out (though he later re-entered, weaker) suggesting that North Vietnamese snipers were on his lawn, and hinting that there was also some sinister plot to disrupt his daughter's wedding.

If a somewhat crazy man could come that close, it says something about US politics.

The whole thing may not be quite as tightly nailed-down as we think.

People and movements (beyond electoral matters) can, in the US, figuratively catch fire, today through TV -- which is big-corporate owned, but finds it hard to resist a circus -- and can, when given space by still-existing civil liberties, win change, as in the '60s and '70s.

That's yet to happen much in recent years, but the US social underpinnings are shaking slightly. Obama's smart enough to see that and imply promises he has no plans to keep.

If many other, more serious, less indebted-to-power people saw it, the shaking could grow stronger still.

But so far, tactically, the US establishment is still smarter than its' real opponents.

We'll now be talking 'Fry these Al Qaeda bastards or not?' instead of 'Why let a child die when you can save it?' and 'When are we going to get tough on crime and really start enforcing the murder laws?'

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The Shooting of Jose Ramos Horta.

Some news reports are now claiming that Jose Ramos Horta, Timor-Leste's president, is or was in a coma. If he goes, his soul will get a good laugh from the fact that he outlasted Suharto -- who killed a third of his people --, and an ironic laugh from the fact that the first bullets to ever hit him were fired by an East Timorese.

The man behind those bullets, the rebel soldier Alfredo Reinado, is reportedly dead, and if that's true the ridiculous crisis that has gripped East Timor may actually slowly dissipate.

In some countries, a two-year upheaval that kills several dozen and features a double-assassination try (Xanana Gusmao, the prime minister, was also attacked, but not hit) might rank as the biggest thing in recent memory, but in Timor it's not even close.

The Indonesian military occupiers -- armed and green-lighted by the United States government -- killed that many on many hundreds of mornings. Their winnowing of the population was so vast that it put them in Nazi-land (see posting of December 3, 2007, " Knowing Where the Bodies Are Buried. The Indonesian Generals -- and Putin -- Laugh," and also those of August 16 '05, November 13 '07, December 5 and 7 '07, and January 13 and 27 '08).

Occupied Timor was the most terrifying place I've ever seen. There was perpetual threat of execution.

But, as sometimes happens, the oppressed people actually won.

And with gradual independence, starting in 1999, the Timorese won the right to behave as pettily as everyone else, and their leaders have been exercising it.

The rebel Reinado stood for nothing that anyone could discern, and the older generation of leaders has been bickering even as there is still hunger in the countryside, side-by-side with newly-won oil money.

Compared to the Indonesian Occupation holocaust, all of this is -- amazingly enough -- small for Timor, but that proportional comparison is, in many senses, beside the point: Just one death ends the world for someone, and when it's preventable, it's inexcusable.

Poor people are now hungering unnecessarily in Timor-Leste, under a regime that is not bad or oppressive.

The country can do much better. It can be an example for the world, as its' political victory over terror was.

When Ramos Horta, hopefully, comes back, the independence leaders should sit down and reflect. Then bury their rivalries and feed the hungry, or step aside, and let younger survivors take over.

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Murder Watch. Note to Readers Re. Even-Handed Enforcement of the Murder Laws.

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It's Not the Man, It's the Mission. The Whisperers of Death.

The other night a Mayan survivor remarked that there are Kaibiles in the Congo. They're a special unit of US-trained Guatemalan troops officially called "The Messengers of Death," but he noted that recently eight of them were ambushed and died themselves in that faraway land.

The poor Kaibil killers must not have known what hit them, since, on the road, away from home, they were in the Congo under actual legal constraint, as peacekeeping troops of the United Nations.

It's a similar story with Indonesian troops, now deployed as UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Back home, unbound by law, they kill civilians, but, away -- where that would cause problems -- such behavior is banned, and, generally, despite their past record, they don't go around murdering people (rape is another matter; its a problem of men in armies most everywhere, and UN troop assignments vary: In Haiti, it has included repression).

It's not the man, its the mission. Political killers are not killing machines.

They are human components of killing machines, and if the machine setting is switched from "kill" to "don't kill," as trained people, they do tend to comply.

While its true that some people are what these days are called psychopathic killers, such compulsive blood-spillers are rare in any society.

There aren't enough of them to stock a brigade, let alone a government or a Harvard institute.

In the Guatemala torture/ state terrorism/ genocide case now being tried in Spain (see postings of February 5 and 7, 2008), there is one such lunatic figure -- Col. German Chupina, the former national police chief and close ally of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala, who, some of his old employees say, liked to cruise the city in a black-windowed van and point out women from the street for raping, and then cutting up and finishing off with his own literally bloody hands.

Gen. Rios Montt, one of the massacre dictators, is also often described as, in his way, crazy, but that is because he combined religious fanaticism with impolitic speaking bluntness (In his case, the fanaticism was Evangelical Christian. When he wasn't killing families he was lecturing them, on TV, on their sexual mores).

As he was helping him burn the Mayan highlands President Reagan said that Rios Montt was "totally dedicated to democracy" and getting a "bum rap" on human rights (New York Times, December 5, 1982). But Rios Montt spoiled the effect a bit when he explained to the press: "It is not true that I have a policy of scorched earth! I have a policy of scorched communists!"

But the crazies are exceptions.

Most top killers avoid the smell of burning flesh. They are calm bureaucrats, ideologues, politicians, academics. They kill with whispers, papers, and keyboard strokes.

And on the earthly -- implementation -- level, where sharp knives enter chests, the human adjustment is sometimes difficult for those who must do the actual killings.

Some of the people in Spain for the Mayan trial have occasionally cried, but the other day one man did it for a different reason than the others. He cried because he'd been made a killer.

As a teen he had been snatched into the Guatemalan army and that US counterinsurgency favorite, the "Civil Patrols," (The US has used them in dozens of countries, including, recently, Nepal, the Philippines, and Iraq. Gen. Rios Montt, a Fort Bragg trainee, was director of studies at the Pentagon's Washington, D.C. Inter-American Defense College), and when this man was brought for training he found that his imposed mission included becoming "one of the destroyers of everything, of our own people in Guatemala."

The old adage among murder trainers is that once you've killed you can't go back, especially if the person you've killed is a bound and screaming, unarmed captive.

It's fair that people should pay for their crimes. But the judgers should consider circumstances. Sentences should vary according to whether the killer was under coercion, or a coercer who whispered death from an office.

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Give Me Back My Land. My Memories? That's Another Question.

Before the Spanish court the other day, one of the surviving Mayans ended his testimony by standing up at the judge's desk and asking for his land back.

(Re. this torture/ state terrorism/ genocide case against US-backed Guatemalan officials, see posting of Tuesday, February 5, 2008, "As US Votes on Who Will Hold the Trigger, Mayans Propagate Civilization.").

How much land was it?, I asked him last night. Less than five acres, corn land.

But after all these years, he still wants it back, and wants to leave it to a surviving son.

When the army of his homeland entered his village they burned the 3-room schoolhouse ("They stole the roof!") and cut and crushed the drinkable-water pipes. And as they raped, throat-sliced, and trigger-pulled their way through , they forced people onto the mountain -- dodging US-arranged Israeli Galil bullets as they clambered upward, toward life.

They left behind land -- which, in theory, is recoverable; the man was raising a fundamental point -- but also much that cannot be gotten back, like a life without tormenting memories.

There was the time, for example, a woman recounted just now, that she snuck down from the mountain and found that "All that was left were the dogs, barking in the houses."

Outside, elsewhere, there were fires, bad smells, smoke, some crying, still-living children, as well as her own mother, dead -- dead as a result of policy.

"There arrived a great sadness, a great pain," she said, "a pain that remains until this moment."

She said that she had carried that two-decade torment to Spain and that on this formal, legal, occasion, "This is the moment that we take out our pain," and seek justice from society.

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A Short Update on Civilization, and on Guatemalan and US Criminals

This morning, speaking publicly in Spain (see previous posting of today, February 5, 2008, "As US Votes on Who Will Hold the Trigger, Mayans Propagate Civilization"), a very brave man from the Mayan highlands remarked that when he returned to his mother's house once the US-backed Guatemalan army had gotten through with it, he found that his entire family had been "carbonized," i.e. burnt carbon-black and crispy.

Soon after, the US sent more money (and other things) to that very army, perhaps pioneering -- under Reagan -- the first known application of the "carbon credits" concept.

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As US Votes on Who Will Hold the Trigger, Mayans Propagate Civilization.

Today, as Americans decide who will get the power to kill or spare millions (see posting of Wednesday, December 05, 2007, "It Takes [Out] a Village: Illegitimate American Power"), a group of Guatemalan Mayan campesinos are in Madrid, on a civilizing mission.

They are here to testify about the US-sponsored Guatemalan officers who, in the '70s and '80s, murdered their families, and came out on top as rich men, drug dealers, US embassy consultants, and Harvard fellows.

It's not as if you can bring back the dead wives, missing kids, or shot-in-the cerebrum husbands, or even sufficiently punish the guilty, who now grin in elegant Zona Cinco pools and in MacLean, Virginia homes with lawns. They still twirl power and walk around, uncuffed, in polite society.

But you can, as one of the mountain corn farmers observed yesterday, "Capture them, imprison them. That's sufficient," which is generous of him, since they butchered his dear ones, friends, and animals, and burnt his gut till his intestines spilled out -- and it is to the great credit of Spain's judiciary that they are willing to let him try.

This is a case of torture, state terrorism, and genocide -- and international arrest warrants have been issued -- but the big, tough Generals who once could answer the question (posed by the conservative Guatemalan daily, El Grafico, [May 17, 1982]) "How is it possible to behead an 8- or 9-year-old child? How is it possible for a human adult to murder in cold blood a baby of less than a year and a half?" are now afraid to fly to Madrid and face the parents of the kids they consumed while pocketing cash from Langley. (Grafico referred to the massacre of Semeja II, Chichicastenango, but, in all, according to army records, 662 villages were destroyed, and perhaps 120,000 civilians were murdered in a place the population of New York City).

They're afraid because there's been something like a tear in the fabric of the political universe and, somehow, as in one of those anomalies of quantum physics, there has emerged -- in this world -- a stray particle of civilization: a legal forum perhaps willing to enforce the murder laws, even against high officials.

Not yet too high, mind you. There are not yet American names on the defendants list. But as we say in the sports which American guys love, its not over till its over.

The case is in Spain's Audiencia Nacional (National Court), which, operating on the principle 'We're all people here,' is exercising its right under international law to try atrocity cases involving non-Spaniards.

(Mayan survivors of things like crucifixion by hanging -- from the big log cross at Rio Negro -- will be testifying. I'll be testifying as well, on the army, the massacre policy, and the US. Lawyers and professionals advancing the case come from CJA [US], APDHE [Spain], RMTF [Guatemala], CALDH [Guatemala], Hastings Law School [US], Impunity Watch [The Netherlands], and the National Security Archive [US].)

Imagine if that precedent caught on. Today's US primary might be awkward, as candidates and advisers dodged the cops, were pressed to sign pledges to stop murdering, and were asked by the press to explain their own pasts -- vis a vis killing civilians, not trivia -- and to explain their bipartisan ideological softness on official crime.

In this particular US-killing matter, one of dozens from around the world, the Republicans' patron saint is Ronald Reagan, so beloved by the Guatemalan leaders who slaughtered the Mayans (and others) that they hung ten-foot portraits of him in their homes as he sent them CIA men, surveillance equipment, covert money and -- most importantly -- open political blessings. The US Democrats' dove is Barack Obama, whose chief foreign adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, greenlighted Israel to deliver the actual killing rifles (Galils) to Guatemala, since his President -- Carter -- was a little embarrassed.

Is that the difference between the two big US parties on mass murder -- embarrassment versus pride? Maybe.

We shouldn't have to wrestle with such fine -- though, sometimes, bitterly consequential -- distinctions.

We should be able to vote effectively against, and prosecute, murder.

Maybe US politics needs a civilizing Mayan invasion.

(For background, and re. the US role see Jesus Tecu Osorio, "Memoria de las Masacres de Rio Negro," Guatemala, 2006, and my "The Guns of Guatemala: The Merciless Mission of Rios Montt's Army," The New Republic, April 11, 1983, "Guatemala Can't Take 2 Roads," The New York Times, op ed, July 20, 1982, "Choices on Guatemala," The New York Times, op ed, April 4, 1983, "Despite Ban, U.S. Captain Trains Guatemalan Military," The Washington Post, October 21, 1982, "The Guatemala Connection," The Progressive, May, 1986," "C.I.A. Death Squad," The Nation [US], April 17, 1995, "The Country Team," The Nation [US], June 5, 1995, letter exchange with US Ambassador Stroock, The Nation [US], May 29, 1995, and Allan Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon, "Bureaucracy of Death," The New Republic, June 30, 1986, and Jean-Marie Simon, "Guatemala," W.W. Norton, New York, 1987).

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Eating Dirt for Lunch in Haiti. "Overwhelming Strength" in Florida.

At about 8:25 Wednesday morning, US Eastern time, AOL's internet welcome screen juxtaposed two AP news stories: "He (McCain) Jumps Ahead in Republican Race: What Will Rudy Giuliani Do Now?" and "Desperate Haitians Eat Dirt: 'One Day I'll Have Enough Food.'"

("Hungry people in the slums of Haiti are giving new meaning to the phrase 'dirt poor.' As food prices soar, many desperate people are eating mud cookies to stave off their hunger pangs...;" Jonathan M. Katz, AP, January 29, 2008, quote from AP photo gallery by Ariana Cubillos).

One thing Rudy Giuliani did after losing the Florida primary was give a speech with the line "The best way to achieve peace is through overwhelming strength."

That could have been said by the rulers of colonial France as they tore the gold from Haiti's mountains, or by Thomas Jefferson as he warned against tolerating Haiti's slave uprising. Or by the US rulers of the '50s through '80s as they backed the Duvaliers as Haiti's dictators, or of the '90s as they backed the FRAPH death squad and imposed a World Bank/IMF plan on Haiti that -- a decade before Wednesay's dirt- consumption update -- began making Haitians hungrier.

(Re. FRAPH and the World Bank/ IMF, respectively, see my "Our Man in FRAPH: Behind Haiti's Paramilitaries," October 24, 1994, "He's Our S.O.B.," October 31, 1994, and "Haiti Under the Gun," January 8 / 15, 1996, all in The Nation [US], and "Aristide Banks on Austerity," Multinational Monitor, July/August, 1994).

It might be true, in theory, that overwhelming strength could achieve peace, but only if wielded by a figure like, say, God, and the Bible, Torah, and Koran all agree that even that scenario makes massacres.

The US founders may not have followed their own stated principles -- few do -- but they were cynically insightful about people in general, so as rich men, some of them slave holders (like Jefferson), they sought to contain the popular "mob" but also to structurally, constitutionally constrain future rulers like themselves.

In stated principle, at least, the US founders feared overwhelming strength in the hands of humans.

But today, the stated principle has reversed.

Giuliani's statement was not peculiar. McCain says things like that all the time, and it was the Clinton administration, where Hillary worked, that produced the 20-year Pentagon plan for "Full-spectrum Dominance," i.e. the ability "to defeat any adversary and control any situation," anywhere, anytime (Jim Garamore, American Forces Press Service [US Department of Defense], "Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance," June 2, 2000).

But if you fully dominate the world, who's going to stop you if you murder, or if you cause people to hunger because of the way you move and concentrate scarce wealth?

Those are the murder and preventable death problems that Americans are free to raise in politics -- but usually don't, but there's also another, straight-power problem that may eventually have to get discussed.

The problem is that though militarily, in some senses, the US still overwhelms, economically the US is becoming one power-center among several.

In his State of the Union President Bush said he'd "make sure America remains the most dynamic nation on earth."

That was possible to do after World War II with the rest of the rich world ravaged, but with nodes of capitalism now having dispersed worldwide it is no longer possible.

The fastest growth will inevitably happen elsewhere and, before long, a number of others will equal the US as centers of capital, exchange, and even innovation (and, on the latter, sooner than later if the US sustains its anti-immigrant hysteria).

What then? Elected US rulers always talk in supremacist, nationalist terms (though they personally and professionally invest globally). If they truly want the US to have/keep overwhelming dominance, their comparative advantage will have to be in gunpowder.

The sensible answer by non-rulers should be: who cares about attaining/keeping dominance? As a means of achieving peace it is discredited. As a means of feeding people, it hasn't produced.

It's more reasonable to search for other means, means toward good ends like ceasing death squad sponsorship, and shifting enough wealth so that people can sustain their strength by eating real food instead of dirt.

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State of the Union. Entitlement, Justice, and the War of All Against All.

President Bush just said "We will deliver justice to our enemies" (US State of the Union Address, January 28, 2008).

So does that mean that it's dependent on our enemies to deliver justice to us?

That's the way people like Bin Laden think, and Bush apparently shares his mindset.

A leader chooses his definition of justice and goes out and kills -- or does whatever -- to the culprit.

Thats the way things theoretically work by default in the absence of a strong society, in the condition of something like what Thomas Hobbes called "the war of all against all."

But if we didn't have a strong society, Bush wouldn't have a $2.8 trillion budget (FY 2007). He wouldn't have Secret Service bodyguards, so he'd have to wear a holster to the podium, as Arafat -- who had a smaller budget -- once did.

Without a strong society there wouldn't be any effective inheritance laws, so Bush would be out there scrambling for work and food like everybody else.

In other words, you can't have it both ways.

You can't luxuriate in huge social entitlements while ignoring society's most basic laws and taboos: the ones regarding killing other people, the ones that say that society defines justice on these matters -- not individual leaders, or even establishments -- and it defines it by consensus and law (i.e. murder laws), made laboriously over time.

So if Bush wants to go out and kill somebody with a sword, as he might in a Hobbesian world, that's up to him.

But he shouldn't be surprised -- or complain -- when he's arrested by society's law-enforcers.

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Suharto Dead. Six Billion Alive. Time for a Little Reform.

To the Clinton White House, General Suharto was "our kind of guy," but to many Indonesian -- and other -- children he was the guy who killed their parents.

Now, General Suharto is dead, and in Heaven a million souls are beseeching God for permission to invade Hell and give him what he's got coming.

But even if they gave him a proper trial, it would be too late for their shot, starved bodies.

There are six billion people still above ground in this world.

Isn't it time for a little reform?

(See posting of January 13, 2008, "General Suharto of Indonesia. One Small Man Leaves a Million Corpses." For "our kind of guy" quote see David E. Sanger, "Real Politics: Why Suharto is In and Castro is Out," New York Times, October 31, 1995).

Link to Democracy Now! discussion re. Suharto and the US.

Link to tape of questioning of Richard Holbrooke and Bill Clinton re. their support for Suharto's killings.


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The Breaking of the Gaza Wall. Wise, Justified Political Violence.

The breaking of the Gaza-Egypt wall is clearly a good thing, and a rare example of the moral -- and also wise -- use of violence in politics. (For the logic and effects of the Israeli cordon of Gaza see posting of December 7, 2007, "Imposed Hunger in Gaza, The Army in Indonesia. Questions of Logic and Activism").

Most all political violence consists of clear wrongs , like murder or unjustified war, but sometimes, sadly, disgustingly, some violence is justified as a last resort, and sometimes -- as a subcategory of that -- some of that justified violence is also wise, tactically.

Once you get far outside the murder and the crimes of war and those against humanity, some of the choices regarding whether or not to use some violence can be legitimately tough and debatable.

But the Gaza wall-breaking was an easy call: no people were killed, some may have been saved, and the spectacle of an exodus into Egypt effectively dramatized a gross injustice.

It's ironic that this was apparently done -- its not yet clear from what level -- by or with some Hamas people, since that's a movement that has, in its bombings of Israeli civilians, been immoral, criminal, and tactically stupid, turning the oppressed into oppressors, in many eyes, and turning some victims into actual murderers.

But this use of violence -- against mere bricks in a wall -- was right and a stroke of genius. The legend of all-knowing Israeli intelligence notwithstanding, some of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)/ Shin Bet/ Mossad/ Cabinet killers must have been stunned, and temporarily shaken.

This was, after all, the first big, smart Palestinian move since the David and Goliath stone intifada, which pitted mere stone-throwing teenagers against Israeli tanks and body-armored soldiers, and exposed the Occupation, twenty years ago, putting Israel's regime on the defensive. (Not that it lasted long enough to produce results. The Peace Laureates Rabin and Arafat killed it; Rabin with knee-breaking -- "force, might, and beatings" was his order, which, for a while, made Israel look still worse, but then Arafat shut the teen Davids down since they were winning without his approval).

The poor Washington Post was clearly stunned and shaken by this wall breach in Gaza.

They were reduced to accusing Hamas of "exploit[ing] [Israel's] temporary shutdown of fuel supplies" -- i.e. by telling people about it (aren't newspapers supposed to encourage that?), and were cornered into the unfortunate position -- if one accepts their logic -- of seeming to support the denial of rights to Darfur refugees. ("As thousands stream across the border to Egypt, Hamas blockades the peace process," The Washington Post, January 24, 2008).

The Post asked rhetorically: "Would Mr. Mubarak allow tens of thousands of Darfur refugees to illegally enter Egypt from Sudan, where a real humanitarian crisis is underway?," the expected answer from the reader being a realistic, shameful (for Mubarak) "No," and then demanded that Mubarak apply exactly that shameful standard by likewise barring uninvited Gazans.

So in order to keep the Palestinians out (or, more precisely, keep them cooped-in), you seem willing to bar the Darfuris too?

When you reach for arguments like that, it's a sign that your side's case is in trouble.

So what would happen if some Palestinians decided to break the West Bank wall, too? Say, tens of thousands of teens one morning, at dawn, turning up with picks and crowbars?

Would the IDF destroy people to save concrete?

Quite possibly.

They feel entitled.

As then - Justice Minister Haim Ramon put it, "we are allowed to destroy everything" (Gideon Levy, Little Ahmadinejads, Haaretz, 10/06/2007), and though he was talking about Lebanon '06 (Final rough tallies: 1,000 Lebanese civilians killed, 40 Israeli civilians, and 4 million mainly-US cluster bomblets scattered by IDF in southern Lebanon) he could have been articulating the broad moral/criminal law philosophy of today's Israeli/US establishments, and -- when it comes to Israel -- much of today's Israeli/US society.

But if they did, if they opened fire, Israel-Palestine history would begin anew, and though many Palestinians would die, as usual, this time they might not die in vain, since many in the world -- including the US -- would see who's oppressing whom.

Incidentally, Israel's leading newspaper, Haaretz, recently carried an airtight critique of the security rationale behind the vast complex of barriers that seal-in West Bank villages -- a complex of which the wall is only the final, tallest, manifestation.

The stated reasons for these barriers, that divert and slow Palestinians, making them fade and die in ambulances, is that they keep suicide/homicide bombers from attacking, in-and-of-itself, a good objective.

But Haaretz reporters found that, incredibly, 475 of 572 roadblocks were unmanned, and then posed the logically clinching questions: What? Suicide bombers can't get through here? They're not willing to step over the unmanned barriers that stop ordinary people (and ambulances)?

The Haaretz analyst reached the reasonable conclusion that the sealing-in has a different function:

"Is it seriously contended by anyone that a mound of earth, a ditch or a series of concrete blocks can stop terrorists from moving around? Do these barriers serve any function other than embittering the lives of the Palestinians? The sick and the elderly, pregnant women and people carrying shopping baskets undoubtedly find it more difficult to get in and out of their barricaded towns and villages. Indeed both B'Tselem and the organization Physicians for Human Rights have documented cases of sick people being unable to receive treatment because they couldn't reach their doctors or clinics - while anybody planning a terrorist attack can easily clamber over the mounds, traverse the ditches or circumvent the blocks..."

"Nobody I've spoken with," continued the writer, Daniel Gavron, " has a convincing military explanation for the unmanned roadblocks. In fact, people familiar with Israeli military thinking have convinced me that the main object of these barriers is to fragment the territory, effectively preempting the 'contiguous Palestinian state' recently touted by U.S. President George Bush. Nothing I have heard has convinced me that the unmanned roadblocks increase the security of Israelis in Israel, or even of the Jewish settlers in the territories." (Daniel Gavron, "Start with the unmanned roadblocks!," Haaretz, December 23, 2007, which also refers to earlier Haaretz reporting ).

And as the veteran Israeli correspondent Amira Hass points out, there seem to be other, non-barrier/wall, factors behind the recent decline in bombings; that is, bombings by walking Palestinians; bombings by flying Israelis have increased (see Amira Hass, "Where are the suicide bombers?," December 2007 | Kibush.co.il , translated from Hebrew by George Malent. Hass notes that some Palestinians, desperate for work, slip the wall into Israel daily. If they can do it, so could suicide bombers, if they personally or politically wanted to).

And, at any rate, the settlers and the Occupation are illegal, as is the wall, according to the World Court -- and not surprisingly, the Palestinians are justly unhappy with them all -- , so the best security solution is to simply remove them.

But the Israeli regime seems to want perpetual war tension. It now sustains their political culture.

That's fine. They can want whatever they want.

But they don't have the right to impose it.

And neither do the Palestinians, of course. They just have the right to their rights.

And since one of them is to have that illegal wall breached, and Mr. Olmert doesn't want to do it, maybe some Palestinian teens can do it for him.

He can meet them at the wall, at dawn.

Tell him to bring a pick.

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Little Hands With Fever. Some Consequences of Poverty Death.

At an orphanage this morning, the ustad (Muslim cleric) in charge said they were taking care of 387 kids, and when I shook hands with twelve of them -- mainly little girls -- four of them clearly had fevers.

When I asked the ustad how the parents had died, he first answered "They were poor people." Asked to elaborate, he listed sickness, hunger, disaster (the tsunami), accident, and work (ie. on-the-job injury/ overwork) as being among the reasons the kids were now there, instead of in a family.

(We had just met. He prudently omitted murder, private and official).

He went on to explain that some of the kids were on loan, since one of their parents or relatives was living, but so poor that they had chosen to bring a kid or two to the orphanage -- securing them better nutrition, etc. -- until they found some money, food, or pick-up work and felt equipped to reclaim their children.

When the kids are sick, the ustad said, the orphanage takes them to the PUSKESMAS, the public health clinics for Indonesia's poor that stand in contradistinction to what poor people call "good doctors" (dokter bagus).

At a PUSKESMAS you're lucky if a. it's open b. they have real doctors, nurses or trained aides c. they dispense more than over-the-counter pain killers/ cough medicines and d. the bribe isn't too heavy.

Even if you borrow/pawn/sell something and go to a dokter bagus if you're poor you may still be in trouble, since favorite tactics include quite expensive, unnecessary X-rays and, for people with diabetes, walking into the doctor's office with a swollen foot and walking out with no foot.

One good doctor who truly studied well and wants to help the poor once told of another class of kids-on-loan: kids rented out by their families as beggars, then run by preman (street thugs with army, police or big-shot backing) and, he said, sometimes sedated to be compliant and look still more pitiable.

(All in all, though, one still encounters fewer street beggars than one does in, say, New York City. For a reason why, having to do with extended families, see posting of January 14, 2008, "Economic Indicator").

Jakarta and other cities have now made it a crime to beg, or to give.

Another shakedown excuse for Indonesia's POLRI police.

The kids in the orphanage are actually lucky.

Lucky not in comparison to a decent world, where people don't die of poverty (or, more precisely, die of a failure to move excess wealth from people who merely want it to people whose bodies need it), but lucky in comparison to life on the streets.

No mom or dad is pretty awful.

But its good to be clean, and also to have roughly 386 friends.


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Assassination Update

The activist threatened with "a Munir" -- assassination -- by Indonesian intelligence (BIN) has, people say, arrived on foreign soil, after fleeing his native country. (See posting of January 22, 2008, "Breaking News: Indonesian Intelligence (BIN) Threatens to Kill Activist").

But he shouldn't count his chickens prematurely.

The country he's in has been known to do its own assassinations -- some of them on foreign soil -- and, as is often the case among killer rulers, has an "intelligence" relationship with Jakarta.

Its just a question of who feels politically empowered/ compelled to ask whom to do what.

And what is this man supposed to do now? Live hiding in exile away from work and family and away from his efforts to stand up to certain powers and, as he's been heard to say, "help my country, Indonesia"?

It is said that the US Embassy in Jakarta is well aware of BIN threats against activists. Some hope that the Embassy may now make "representations," an old diplomatic practice, which entails using one hand/finger to make "human rights" admonishments to the regime you're sponsoring, while using the other to hand over fresh supplies of guns, bullets, and money to the admonishees.

And even if BIN -- ie. President Susilo, the General who runs Indonesia -- decided to call the whole thing off, what precisely would they do?

Send a note to the activist's family saying 'Come home. It's OK. We've decided not to kill you'?

Such a statement might indeed be enough to lure a brave man home, but the only thing that would be enough to really guarantee his -- and others' -- safety would be to oust murderers from power and have their decisions made for them by jailers.


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Breaking News: Indonesian Intelligence (BIN) Threatens to Kill Activist

Last night, local time, during a ceremony celebrating democracy, one of the most noted killers in Indonesia, Col. Chairawan of BIN intelligence (Badan Intelijen Negara, State Intelligence Body), waited quietly in plainclothes.

(Chairawan, a US-trained Kopassus veteran, has been publicly implicated in disappearances, and told me in 1998 that he reported to a US Colonel, who worked for the US Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA]; see my "Our Man In Jakarta," The Nation [US], June 15, 1998).

After the dancers and speeches had finished and the guests were gone from the Aceh governor's palace, Col. Chairawan slipped in and met the governor till midnight.

As this was happening, news from Jakarta was confirming again that BIN had assassinated the famous activist, Munir, and -- unreported -- another far less famous activist was fleeing Indonesia in fear of his life.

This man had been at a pool with his wife and kids one recent Saturday when he got an urgent SMS text message, from family, saying he'd better come to Jakarta.

There he was confronted by a senior BIN man whom he, luckily, knew through family, and who informed him sternly that BIN was -- as they now say in Indonesian security -- considering "doing a Munir on him" ("akan di Munirkan").

Munir was poisoned to death with arsenic as he traveled from Jakarta to Amsterdam, vomiting to death on the plane, reaching The Netherlands as a corpse (see posting of November 13, 2007, "Vomiting to Death on a Plane. Arsenic Democracy").

(The new public news was that a BIN functionary who had paid Munir's poisoner had now fingered one of his own bosses, Gen. Muchdi. This talking BIN man, though, was unavailable for court, overseas on "state duty," and is reportedly "believed to be involved in intelligence operations in Pakistan"; see Mark Forbes, "Jakarta Spy Agency Linked to Murder," The Age [Australia], January 17, 2008.)

The summoned activist, known to be a brave man, appeared to be shaken by the death threat since it followed two things: one, a detailed -- accurate -- recital of what he'd done in previous weeks ("You go to the store, we know it"), and, two, a reminder that BIN's orders come directly from Indonesia's President, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

This was relevant since the activist -- not from a poor family -- has a few connections himself, but since BIN is the instrument of the country's military president, "You can't do anything," he was told.

His offenses were severalfold. He was trying to oust a BIN agent from political office (his purported right, under democracy), and he had been seen meeting with people from watch-listed regions, including West Papua (likewise, a supposed right).

He already knew that BIN men had been watching his house, coming to his workplace looking for him. He had disconnected his phones, and, at the Jakarta death-threat meeting he learned that BIN was perusing his bank accounts.

So as they danced democracy in Banda Aceh, he got some things together and fled.

Several of the countries he's said to be considering going to now boast enhanced martial ties with Jakarta.

When told about the situation, one senior elected official tried to play down the danger. His theory: if they threaten you, you're OK. "The barking dog doesn't bite," he said.

That didn't work for Munir, the receiver of many threats, but some threatened are, indeed, still living.

When you live shadowed by killers in democratic plainclothes, you just have to count your blessings -- or, secure more of them.


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Action, Motive, Distraction, and Nukes in Politics. An Interview With the Iranian Press.

The following is the text of an e-mail interview with Iranian Press TV (http://www.presstv.ir/).

(UPDATE NOTE, Jan. 29, 2008: Contrary to my insistence that this e-mail interview be published in full, if at all, Iranian Press TV published a version that cut all my criticisms of the Iranian rulers.)

Questions by Press TV. Answers by Allan Nairn.


1- Press TV (Iran) : The US troops say they have resorted to ‘precision bombing’ in Iraq. What exactly is precision bombing? Could you please elaborate?


Allan Nairn: Precision bombing is more accurate bombing that purports to kill fewer civilians. The Washington Post (January 17, 2008) paraphrases US Air Force General Gary L. North as saying that US forces in Iraq are doing precision bombing, "using 250-pound GBU-39 small-diameter bombs to make blasts safer for civilians." But in fact, precision bombing probably ultimately increases the civilian death toll because by making each bomb-drop more legitimate back home (eg. some US human rights people defend it) it increases the likelihood that there will be more bomb-drops, and even the most ardent precision bombers admit that their 250-pound weapons do kill civilians.


2- Press TV (Iran): The so-called US war on terror has turned Iraq into a graveyard. Why is it that the international community has done nothing to stop quixotic Mr Bush?


Allan Nairn: The US government bears prime responsibility for the illegal invasion of Iraq and the mass killing that that invasion helped touch off, but the government of Iran has blood on its hands as well. By backing militias that kill civilians in Iraq, the Tehran regime is also committing murder.

I wouldn't call Bush quixotic. Don Quixote was an idealist who wanted to help people, but had delusions. Bush is a cynical ruler -- like so many -- who acts above the murder laws.

Today's world is still so lawless and uncivilized that the international community tends to only stop or punish minor and/or defeated murdering powers. The US, as the biggest power, is the least constrained, but many others also get away with murder. The International Criminal Court, for example, has had to start by going after isolated killer forces like the Lord's Resistance Army of Uganda. When they recently tried to do prosecutions re. Darfur -- and Sudan is hardly a major power -- they were stopped from doing so by Russia and China, which invest in Sudan.

There are many practical reasons for the world's failure to enforce the murder laws on high officials. One is that many regular people have yet to assimilate the idea that their rulers have no more right to commit murder than they do. Another, on a political-mechanical level is the UN Security Council. The original holders of the atom bomb have veto power, so, naturally, they block UN action against themselves and their clients. A more democratic UN structure -- based on criteria other than bomb-holding -- would be a step in the right direction


3- Press TV (Iran): What do you think is the main motivation of US troops to stay on in Iraq? Is it only because they intend to expropriate the Iraqi national wealth or is there some other grand plan?


Allan Nairn: In politics, motive is almost always a secondary or tertiary question. What matters most is what you do, not why you do it. Figuring out motivation can, in theory, be useful for planning effective political action, but it is often very difficult and speculative, and the US in Iraq is an example.

The different players in the US decision to invade and stay probably had a mix of motivations. I think that primary among them was that, after Afghanistan, Bush wanted to keep the war excitement going. His father, remember, lost his reelection bid after his politically popular victory in the so-called First Gulf War, but by the time the US election came around people had already essentially forgotten about it. (It is an ancient tactic for rulers to distract their people with war or war-talk; I think Ahmadinejad blusters and provokes so much in part to distract Iran's poor from economic suffering).

So I think Bush and Cheney wanted to invade somewhere new -- they just had to decide which country -- and since the broad rationale with the US public was still 9-11 revenge it essentially had to be a Muslim country. (See the posting on my blog , News and Comment, http://www.newsc.blogspot.com/, for Thomas L. Friedman's revealing comments on this; Wednesday, November 28, 2007, "Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers. Cold-Blooded Celebrity.").

Even before the Afghan invasion the US actually considered, at the highest level, small-scale, simultaneous invasions of Yemen, Somalia, Malaysia, the Philippines (presumably the southern, Muslim, part), and Indonesia ( See Bob Woodward's Bush At War, 2002, Simon & Schuster, p. 90). It was a bizarre proposal, advanced by White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, since Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia -- particularly the latter two -- were US intelligence/ military associates, and it would have been impossible to choose even remotely plausible targets for attack in either Malaysia or Indonesia. But it just goes to show that some key US officialdom was, at that moment, itching to invade some Muslims. (Over time, US attack policy is cold-blooded and ecumenical, but in that historical moment bin Laden, who was in part apparently seeking to provoke a religious war, in part, temporarily, did have some success).

Why the US chose Iraq as the target is a complex, somewhat mysterious, question, and it was obviously a very bad choice, from the US establishment point of view, and the US establishment, led by figures like Gen. Brent Scowcroft -- Bush I's old right-hand-man, has been giving Bush II grief about it ever since. In choosing to invade Iraq they discarded the formula that the establishment had successfully developed post-Vietnam: if you're going to invade, choose only weak, defenseless targets (eg. Grenada, Panama), use a minimum of US ground troops, and be sure to get them out within weeks, before domestic and international opposition builds.

One factor seems to have been that Bush and Cheney were almost willfully misinformed and deluded about Iraq. They may have thought it would be quick and easy (easy in the ruler's terms, that is -- perhaps thousands dead, but power is seized quickly and the ruler wins), though many in Washington were thinking otherwise.

I don't think oil or expropriating the Iraqui national wealth was a primary factor in the decision to invade or to stay. There were people like Wolfowitz who were saying Iraqui oil will pay for the invasion , which he claimed would be quick and easy. And there were some old-fashioned strategists who thought: lets get the Iraqui oil in order to control it.

But the US oil companies were against the invasion -- they don't like instability in the oil region, and if the Wolfowitz claim of greatly increased Iraqui oil production had come true, that would have dropped the world oil price, which they wouldn't want.

And the seize-the-oil strategists were working on assumptions from an older world. In today's world of global markets your worst enemy will sell you all the oil you want (remember, the whole point of the Bush I - Clinton sanctions against Iraq was that Saddam wanted to sell his oil on the world market, but the US wouldn't let him), at prices set by the world market. Actions like the old OPEC oil embargo would be nearly impossible today given the newer sources of production (eg., the North Sea, Russia -- which wasn't on the world market then, etc.). And the idea that the US could use seized Iraqui oil as leverage against Europe and Japan is also implausible. They could go elsewhere for supply, and the politico/economic disruption caused by such a move would likely outweigh imagined benefits. I think there are many US strategists who recognize these newer realities, so the advice coming up to Bush would have been mixed.

As it turns out, ironically, the invasion has been a boon for the oil companies, sending oil prices skyward. But thats not what they expected.

And, for the US government the invasion has been extremely costly. Whatever wealth they extract from Iraq is outweighed by the vast daily expenditure on the occupation.

I think that, as often, political, even whimsical emotional factors were paramount, not material ones. In fact, if you look back at the list of recent-era US-invaded countries they include some of the world's poorest places: Afghanistan, Haiti, Nicaragua, etc. And Vietnam was no treasure-trove.

So why do they stay in Iraq? My guess is because they're stuck there. It would be embarrassing to pull out, especially if the US-backed Iraqui regime then fell, and cynical rulers are frequently willing to keep on causing death -- even of their own people -- in order to avoid embarrassment.


4- Press TV (Iran): The US government has proved to be a threat to world peace by attacking Iraq and Afghanistan and exacting an inconceivable number of human casualties. Yet, they accuse Iran of jeopardising the security in the region. What is your opinion in this regard?


Allan Nairn: Both the US and Iran are ruled by murderers, its just that those of the US are more powerful and reach around the globe. So the US government is correct when it says Iran is a threat to security and the Iranian government is correct when it says the same re. the US (though both often lie and exaggerate about the details). Just because a person is a murderer, that doesn't mean everything they say is incorrect. Both the US and Iran should get out of Iraq militarily and stop backing foreign killer forces.


5- Press TV (Iran): Do you think there is any possibility of any US attack on Iran?


Allan Nairn: Who knows? I doubt that Bush himself has decided. But you probably can't completely rule out the possibility.

There are some in Washington openly agitating for an attack (and I suspect that Ahmadinejad and Khameni want it too), but the bulk of the US establishment is against it. They reasonably argue that it could trigger problems comparable to or worse than Iraq, but Bush isn't required to listen to them.

If it looks like Bush's party -- the US Republicans -- are heading for a bad defeat in November, 2008 -- ie. the election of a Democratic party president and Democratic House and Senate chambers with sufficient majorities to pass Democratic legislation and subpoena, investigate, and maybe even charge with corruption (charging them with murder is politically inconceivable) people from the Bush administration -- then I think Bush and Cheney could be cynical enough to consider invading some country at the last minute to salvage the election (since invasions are usually popular in their early stages).

But Iran would be a foolish target to choose. A tiny, weak, country would make more sense, by their standards. But they already made a foolish choice re. Iraq, so you never know.

I think Iran's leadership is being deeply cynical and irresponsible on the whole nuclear issue. If they are developing or keeping open the option of developing nuclear weapons they should stop. And even if they are merely developing nuclear energy, they should stop that too.

Each new nuclear weapon makes the world a more dangerous place. Nuclear deterrence theory -- developed by the US Dr. Strangeloves at MIT, the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Institute, and elsewhere -- says that having the bomb discourages other countries from attacking you, and though that is probably true in the short-term, micro sense, over time as the weapons build up and proliferate it becomes all but inevitable that control, discipline, and/or rational calculation will at some point fail (it almost happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis, back when only a few countries had the bomb) and nuclear bombs will start going off, including in countries that ostensibly were merely seeking protection.

Nuclear energy is also a bad idea. Iran's leadership is foolish -- or worse -- to follow in the footsteps of countries like the US -- and , especially, France -- which have developed complexes of nuclear plants that generate endless, eternal, toxic byproducts, expose citizens to the risk of catastrophic accident (see Chernobyl, Three Mile Island), to the risk of catastrophic military or terrorist attack (you're voluntarily, stupidly, creating devastating targets for your enemies to hit), which require totalitarian levels of security and secrecy that have a bad effect on politics, and that make energy production still more dependent on vast infusions of concentrated capital, often foreign.

If the reports that say Iran is doing nuclear energy for prestige are true, that is a pathetic reason. It would seem far better for the people and perhaps, in the long run, maybe even more prestigious, to invest the country's brainpower in developing safer, more rational alternative energy sources, especially since given oil prices and geological oil supply questions there's a fast-rising world market demand for such alternative technologies. How would Iran look -- and profit -- if it made breakthroughs in solar energy?

Even on a more mundane, immediate level, if Iran wants to address energy problems, it would seem to economically make more sense to address its gasoline refining bottlenecks rather than wastefully and dangerously diving into the nuclear morass.

But, of course, if Iran did that it would make it harder for Bush and Ahmadinejad to trade bluster, and that would be less fun for both rulers, though better for both peoples.

(Parenthetically, its worth noting that though the US still has a lot of nuclear energy, US nuclear plant expansion was essentially stopped in the 1970s [and has only recently started to revive] in part by a US popular movement that included mass demonstrations against government and corporate policy. Such freedom of speech and assembly [though some are now trying to cut it back] is a very good aspect of the current US system -- hard-won by centuries of popular struggle. I think Iranians will be better off when they succeed in winning similar rights, and Americans will be better off when they start using theirs more again.)
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US Precision Bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Killing Civilians, Carefully.

CNN's Ed Henry, their White House correspondent, recently spotted the President of the United States "walking in the footsteps of Jesus along the Sea of Galilee" (CNN International, January 17, 2008 [WIB]).

The Washington Post reports that as the President was walking, troops under his command were bombing Iraq and Afghanistan with increasing intensity. (Josh White, "U.S. Boosts Its Use of Airstrikes In Iraq," Washington Post, Thursday, January 17, 2008).

It's part of the return to the post-Vietnam tactics that worked so well for Washington, substituting US bombs for US troop deaths: lessening the political damage in the US by increasing the physical damage in the place you're bombing.

(The Post quotes Georgetown security studies professor Colin Kahl, who recently visited the US bombers, as noting that "as U.S. forces begin to draw down you may see even more airstrikes.")

The Post, paraphrasing Air Force Lt. Gen. Gary L. North, says that US forces are doing precision bombing, "using 250-pound GBU-39 small-diameter bombs to make blasts safer for civilians."

Regarding precision bombing they quote Marc Garlasco, a Human Rights Watch military analyst: "My major concern with what's going on in Iraq is massive population density... you have the potential for very high civilian casualties, so you need really granular intelligence on what you're going to hit. But I don't think they're being careless."

If you buy this logic, as long as, say, Iraqui insurgent forces weren't being careless, it would be OK on human rights grounds for them to bomb the US White House so long as they had sufficiently "granular intelligence" on where President Bush was sitting, and used one of those 250-pound bombs that "make blasts safer for civilians."

Just hope that at that moment a servant wasn't bringing Bush a cup of coffee, or that he wasn't being visited by nieces, or a Cub Scout troop, or even, say, one of those human rights officials who now consult with General Petraeus or legitimize the idea of bombing countries that have been invaded illegally (according to, say, the British Foreign Office's former deputy legal adviser, who resigned because "an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to a crime of aggression") so long as painted on one side of the bombs is the word "precision" (re. the British lawyer, see Steven Marks, "The legality of war," Letters, The Economist, January 5th, 2008).

The whole theory of precision bombing is to narrow down the killing radius so that your piece of metal dropped from the sky (or thrown from a distant tube or ship) behaves like an assassin's bullet.

In theory it, may, in a micro sense, occasionally spare some civilians (that is, in comparison to a hit by a bigger bomb, not in comparison to no bombing), but in both theory and practice, in a macro sense, it's likely to increase the civilian death toll since by making each bomb-drop more legitimate back home it increases the likelihood that there will be more of them, and even the most ardent precision bombers admit that their 250-pounders do get civilians.

Indeed, the Post cites the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq as estimating "that more than 200 civilian deaths resulted from U.S. airstrikes in Iraq from the beginning of April to the end of last year, when U.S. forces began to significantly increase the strikes to coordinate with the expansion of ground troops." And re. Afghanistan: "Human rights groups estimate that Afghan civilian casualties caused by airstrikes tripled to more than 300 in 2007, fueling fears that such aggressive bombardment could be catastrophic for the innocent."

Those fears were fueled, not least, in the mind of US/UN-selected Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has complained frequently, but -- in a ritual common to sponsor-client state relationships -- not so vehemently that his US sponsors took his statements seriously enough to cut his budget, or simply replace him.

Regarding Iraq, the Post says the U.S. strategy "calls for coalition troops to clear hostile areas before holding and then rebuilding them" -- which is impossible, since not even Bush of Galilee can rebuild 200-plus dead people.

Link to view this posting in Danish translation.

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Correction

In the posting of January 14, 2008, "Economic Indicator," there was a bad typographical error.

The original, incorrect, text said that the UN's FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) had established a fund to counterbalance market-induced hunger from food price hikes that "will cost 17 billion US dollars .... mere pocket change for each Forbes 400 member, and for thousands of others."

The correct figure for the size of the FAO fund is 17 million -- not billion -- dollars.

Which indeed means that there are thousands of rich people who could cover this world fund personally, and therefore theoretically have the power to, by their whim, condemn or spare those the fund will feed.

But if the figure really had been 17 billion, that would have been pocket change for only a few, including

Bill Gates, US citizen (net worth $56 billion),
Warren Buffett, US ($52 b),
Carlos Slim Helu, Mexico ($49 b),
Ingvar Kamprad & family, Sweden ($33 b),
Lakshmi Mittal, India ($32 b),
Sheldon Adelson, US ($26.5 b),
Bernard Arnault, France ($24 b),
Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong ($22 b),
David Thomson & family, Canada ($22 b),
Lawrence Ellison, US ($21.5 b),
Liliane Bettencourt, France ($20.7 b),
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, Saudi Arabia ($20.3 b),
Mukesh Ambani, India ($20.1 b),
and Karl Albrecht, Germany ($20 b).

In all, Forbes magazine, the source of these estimates, lists 21 people (or person/family units) as having net worths in excess of 17 billion US dollars.

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Tremble (II)

After seeing millions murdered, scholars have asked
"Why did the heavens not tremble?"

But they do,
each time another person dies

Its just that our gaze is horizontal.

On January 15, 2007, at 1700 hours, Western Indonesia Time,
There was a sky quake so enormous
that people in several kampungs looked up

And before the soul completed the laborious process
of exiting its electro-shocked-from-within
body

the lamentations began

and they have yet to begin stopping.

Can a person cry forever?

There may have been 32 marks
on the body

but it was too embarrassing to count precisely

they were small matters, rarely thought of,

The daily brain attacks were paramount

A hungry person doesn't dwell on past inconveniences.
They see goats walking and, in that, they see food.

When the trembling began,
there was, at last
the prospect of restful sleep

without the fear of waking up
having, frankly,
forgotten
who one is
or what the world is.

When, by 2200 hours -- muscles straining from above --
the soul was finally extracted

they had to open the heavens archipelago-wide
to accommodate its enormous bulk

Some say that this world is too crowded simply because when people sleep on mats

they are side-by-side,
like canned silverfish in a room
a family tree, horizontal, snoring

or because at breakfast time when passing out food
some fool somewhere made a mistake
and stacked too much in one house
leaving another with stomachs pulsing

But I tell you, if the world was too crowded before
-- and it wasn't
it sure isn't now.

There's vast open human terrain
because it is missing
a soul the size of Indonesia.

Who Was That? (II)

Sg., last night I heard a story
about the stone six orphanage

where on your birthday
and on deathdays
and on red days

you'd bring unhulled rice
and pyramids

of banana leaves
with cooked rice,
sambal
sliced cumber
and a little meat

transported laboriously
over stony roads
on Uncle's wood-platform
foot-pedaled
transporter

J. said the kids were thrilled.
Who wouldn't be?
125 pyramids!

Cooked the night before
by you, and her,
and T. -- praying at her wall shrine

But when the kids asked you
What should we pray for, Older Sister?
For your luck, for your prosperity?

You answered -- shocking my ears, from your grave

Pray for my disease to lift.
It afflicts me.

I never heard you talk like that
to anyone

to any stranger

anywhere

And when they asked your name
you refused to answer

Leaving the poor clerics
up to their knees
in rice sacks

and confused

On the peddle platform,
bumping home,
you told J.

They'll know my face.

The kids must have thought

who was this mysterious lady
who brings still-warm food
and full canvas sacks?

But does not bring her name,

and talks so clearly about her agony

Economic Indicator

Returning to a familiar neighborhood after an absence of nearly two months it seemed that many kids were skinnier, though there were various possible explanations.

The rains were slowing, so it was hotter, there had been a run of diarrhea and bleeding fever, and the holidays were recently over so -- like everywhere -- people had blown (some of) their money, but, in this case, not on flat-screen TVs the size of ping-pong tables, but rather on consecutive days of rice with meat, and on bus and ferry-fare to reunite family.

I was staring at two white, embroidered hanging cloths that do service as a corridor door when, to my disappointment, the dead person I was thinking of did not miraculously bustle through, but instead there emerged an aunt, with harassed eyes, and the news that we needed lots more food.

The al-Kuran reciters would be coming from the mosque -- who knew how many, on a given day? -- as well as the orphans (two motorcycle taxis-full -- which is a lot; they're fairly tiny). There would also be their two guardian clerics, assorted relatives, alley neighbors, and the budget was busted: the purchased ingredients would not suffice to feed the guests for the death anniversary.

Why not? "Rice is up! Cooking oil is up! Peppers, chicken, everything!" (The chicken price-hike might have been minor good news two years ago, given the stinking coops behind the hanging cloths, but the bird flu had put an end to that protein-source, and sometime "micro-enterprise").

It was true, and almost everywhere. Food prices are on the rise. Which means for those on the edge of the nutritional cliff, some bodies are on the fall.

Some economists are stunned by the rapidity of the rise -- and flexible markets can indeed stun you -- and commodities futures prices suggest that the peak may not be seen until North American springtime, if then.

Reasons for such market moves are always complex, but studies cite bio-fuels as a big one, and then there's oil-price hikes -- a gift for Exxon and co., who actually didn't want the Iraq invasion -- a serious matter in a world food economy now dependent on fertilizers that use oil.

But though the reasons are complex, some consequences can be simple: hungry people can get hungrier, since they lack the wealth cushion one needs to ride-out market fluctuations.

"Win some, lose some," Americans like to say.

When their holdings drop, American Wall Street guys say they're getting "killed."

But they're not. After saying that, they can go out to lunch.

What they lose today they may make up tomorrow.

And, the key point: they will still be alive -- and undamaged -- to celebrate it.

For poor people, the world's majority, market life has some different principles.

Fluctuations that rich people later forget can be life-altering catastrophes for poor people.

For rich people, what counts is whether, in the end, your market wins outweigh your losses.

But for people on the edge of survival, one bad loss and the counting game is over.

If a market-induced loss pushes you off the cliff, with a consequence that is irreversible -- like death, subsequent market moves that would have been in your favor become irrelevant to you.

And there are a number of ireversibles, or consequences nearly so.

There's baby brain stunting from a few bad hunger days or weeks, body-growth stunting from bad months, pulling a kid from school so he never comes back and lives forever unable to read, or unable to read any of the billions of pages written beyond his given literacy level.

In South Korea and India there has developed a recent sad tradition of indebted farmers killing themselves, after a bad turn -- for them, (they need higher prices) -- in the global markets.

Its Indonesian counterpart is Baygon or the chair-and-noose. The Baygon insecticide cocktail tends to be for the girls, the chair-and-noose for the boys -- a not uncommon reaction among poor pre-teens who, pulled from school, hurting, choose suicide.

Or what about choices born of desperation brought on by bad fluctuation? A mother becomes a one-night prostitute. A father goes overseas to work. We all know what can happen to family life then. Mental blows can heal more slowly than body ones.

(One US near-equivalent to all this is being evicted and becoming homeless, a threat that is, quite significantly, proportionally smaller in the kampungs [proportionally, adjusting for differing poverty levels] than it is in the United States, since with extended families still intact, even the poorest person in, say, Indonesia, often has somewhere to go. Capitalist development knows some bitter jokes. You, an American, may be richer than your poor-world counterpart, but if both your putative extended family and your cash/credit are gone, you may end up worse-off than him -- on the street, stinking and shivering, and, to boot, in a country with an ideology that says that this is a good thing for you: an incentive to go find work.)

In capitalist theory, markets are directionally neutral. Up or down is neither good nor bad. Which is true for people who live on cushions. But false for those on cliffs.

Just as there's no such thing as a free lunch, there's also no such thing as a free market.

There are always rules -- lots of them -- otherwise markets couldn't function.

The question is merely: what rules? For what ends? Lives turn on the answers.

Recently the Indonesian communications workers hung plaintive but profound banners outside workplaces: "Don't Write the Regulations For the Capitalists Only."

They were referring to a privatization fight but they could have been discussing the core issue that confronts any economy -- including this global capitalist one: will a society commit or not to writing the regulations such that everyone gets fed, and goes to market (or wherever) tall and with a clear head?

If they won't, then decent people have to force changes, call them what you will, that solve this solvable problem using whatever appropriate tools.

Coincidentally, after that incident with the harassed aunt and the hanging white cloths, I made the short physical but long social journey to a place in town with an internet connection, and read the news that, first, "Thousands of tofu and tempeh producers and vendors in Greater Jakarta began a three-day strike Monday to protest the rocketing price of soybeans," and, second, that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is setting up a fund to try to counterbalance this market-induced hunger.

(Parenthetically, the fund will cost 17 million US dollars, and the total of FAO aid for "imported foodstuffs for Low Income Food Deficit Countries," is $107 million, in both cases mere pocket change for each Forbes 400 member, and for thousands of others).(See: The Jakarta Post, Tuesday, January 15, 2008, "Tofu, tempeh disappear from dishes;" "Fund launched for poor countries struggling with high food prices," OUAGADOUGOU, 14 January 2008 (IRIN)).

The fund will undoubtedly spare -- for the moment -- many painful deaths. But as free-market economists love to tell you in other contexts, such schemes are wildly inefficient. They cannot possibly know, find, and deliver to each newly enhungered stomach in the world.

OK, so, then, what will? The current global "free market" system obviously does not. It is so perversely unbalanced that nearly a billion starve a year.

If it could have solved this problem, it would have.

So we can conclude that it can't.

Even on the flip-side of a food-price hike, which in theory should benefit farmers, the current system actually often hurts the poor ones, while bloating Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland.

So take down those books -- that fill several shelves -- that constitute the global trade, property and rulemaking rules, and start rewriting -- fast -- before the next stack of savable baby dies.

Don't want to do that? OK, we'll have to find people who do.

On the decision and commitment level, this is simple stuff. The implementation gets complicated, but not so complicated as to be undoable, if enough people want it and decide that they will also become strivers for it.

The first step toward political choice is recognizing that a choice is needed.

On hunger, the choices for poor people are rough.

For rich people, they should be easy.

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General Suharto of Indonesia. One Small Man Leaves a Million Corpses.

General Suharto of Indonesia is fading fast, the news bulletins say.

So when I came into the country, I started asking how people felt about their dying killer. (Body count, circa one million plus, overwhelmingly civilian).

The first man I ran into -- near a coffee/ rice stall -- though the radio blared the death watch, said nothing about it, until I raised it. "So much the better," he smiled.

Even people I know well did not bother to mention it, though they know I follow politics.

One market lady had just described her own recent ailments -- decades of squatting and pounding grain take a toll -- when I asked about Suharto.

"Suharto?", she said. "He ate too much money. He's full. He ate so much that others can't eat."

She chuckled at her own joke. Everybody laughed. The mourning period should be over by lunchtime.

The New York Times, in 1993, after the East Timor massacres, said Suharto "r[a]n the country with a grandfatherly smile and an iron fist" and lamented that his "accomplishments are not widely known abroad." (Philip Shenon, "Hidden Giant -- A special report.; Indonesia Improves Life for Many But the Political Shadows Remain," The New York Times, August 27, 1993.)

On earth, in Indonesia -- below the towers of life-giving-or-taking wealth and distant killing decision -- Suharto seemed to have been seen, on the one hand, as a small man, but on the other, as a menace.

You could talk corruption, but you could not mention the murders. You had to work hard to forget them. The government helped with "Clean Environment" laws that banned the surviving relatives from social contacts, on the theory that if they got around, their memories might pollute society.

A grandmother, when pressed, once told me about bodies bobbing in Sumatra rivers.

But, as a rule, people don't like to talk about Suharto's founding massacre, the one that was, in the words of James Reston of The Times, the "gleam of light in Asia" (June 19, 1966), and in the words of the CIA, which assisted, "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century" (for background see posting of November 8, 2007. "Duduk - Duduk, Ngobrol - Ngobrol. Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia.").

Interestingly enough, on the official, bureaucratic level, though, it is corruption talk that is taboo.

In 1998, I was being interrogated after giving a press conference on Suharto's secret aid from Clinton (including snipers and "PSYOP"(s); see posting of December 12, 2007), and Suharto's man began to read aloud from my file -- parts disturbingly accurate, parts ridiculous.

He asked about my political views. I went into a speech about the massacres and how Suharto and Clinton should share a jail cell. The man was thoroughly bored. But, then, somehow, I mentioned corruption.

He was offended, angry. He sat upright: "What do you mean, corruption?!"

It made sense, on the popular level that was Topic A. So, therefore, it was a dangerous topic. Bureaucrats are not encouraged to speak the word. Cash envelopes enter pockets quietly.

But the massacres? They were unlikely to spark a flame, the Suhartoites had calculated.

Survivors really can be selfish sometimes -- forget the dead and kiss the killers -- especially if clever ongoing terror is applied. Forced thought control is sometimes possible.

When Suharto goes, there won't be weeping in the kampungs I know, but there may be on some US campuses.

There, there developed a school of thought (and of subsidy) that held that Suharto was OK since, though he had "human rights" problems, the official statistics showed rapid GDP growth.

The proponents were strict anti-communists, but had absorbed some Pravda thinking, since that argument was -- as it happened -- the same one once used to justify Stalin.

But as short, thin people gathered this morning at, say, the Belawan ferry to Malaysia could tell you, Pak Harto's massacre development, unlike Uncle Joe's, did not vault Indonesia onto a new plane.

Neighboring countries, starting tied with Indonesia in real-eating development, have post-rise-of-Suharto-and-his-army far surpassed it, so Indonesians leave home, seeking work, often trading dignity for their babies' brain growth. (See "Duduk-Duduk" on the choices sending poor Indonesians overseas, and the posting of November 24, 2007, "Rising in Malaysia. The Dangers of Feeding Poor People, " on Malaysia's different, far-faster development).

The interesting question is not why are foreign sponsors so suave about explaining murder (key answer: because they can get away with it), but rather why do local people, in so many places, let one small man rise above them?

That's a complex question, for another day. But right now, some people here are busy with the death anniversary of another, far bigger, person, a lady buried in a goat field, who was -- by consensus of several kampungs -- a shining, good person, a great one.

If they had met, Suharto would have told her to wash his floor (I can assure that you she wouldn't have).

But even she, with her strong shoulders, could not possibly have washed all that blood.

That's a task for a whole society, after Suharto is condemned and gone.

Then they'll have to get together and resolve to henceforth keep the floor clean.

Link to view this posting in Arabic translation.

Link to Democracy Now! discussion re. Suharto and the US.

Link to tape of questioning of Richard Holbrooke and Bill Clinton re. their support for Suharto's killings.

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The US Election is Already Over. Murder and Preventable Death Have Won.

The US press is reporting that on Thursday the American political system will begin the process of selecting the next President of the United States.

But that is not true.

The process is already largely completed, in that we already know that the next president will highly likely be one of eleven rich people each of whom have positions that -- if implemented -- will kill perhaps eleven million poor people.

The plausible candidates -- Bloomberg, Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, Gore, Huckabee, McCain, Obama, Rice, Romney, and Thompson -- differ in many ways, including differing marginally in their likely body counts, and differing in whether they have already in their lives facilitated gun murders (Bloomberg, Huckabee, and Romney may not have, since they haven't yet held national office).
'
But they all oppose even-handed enforcement of the murder laws, and they all oppose shifting enough wealth now to prevent all preventable deaths.

These should not be controversial goals. Most decent people would support them. And even the US rulers themselves often support them -- though only on paper, in principle.

Regarding murder, President Bush told the United Nations on November 10, 2001: "We must unite in opposing all terrorists, not just some of them ... No national aspiration, no remembered wrong, can every justify murder of the innocent...The allies of terror are equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to justice."

But as Bush spoke, sitting in the audience, as part of his delegation, was Elliott Abrams who was, and is, one of Bush's top policy makers on Israel/Palestine, and who ran the '80s US support for terror killings of civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua (where, as US General John Galvin put it, they went after "soft targets," like farmers' coops).

Yet the President did not cap his speech by asking UN security to slap shackles on Mr. Abrams.

And the President did not go to the New York Police Department's Midtown South to turn himself in for -- at that very moment -- bombing Afghan villages, or for arming, training, or financing regimes that in several dozen US-allied countries around the world make a practice of murdering innocents.

And none of the possible new US presidents would have done it differently.

They all supported the Afghan invasion (though they vary on Iraq), and none have rejected the routine US practice of yearly support for killer regimes (Congress just passed two big defense and foreign operations appropriations bills that will lethally aid, among many others, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Congo, Pakistan, and Indonesia), and -- crucially -- none have called for putting US officials on trial for any of these or similar acts.

Its a similar story with preventable death. The US speaks against it and has food aid and world health programs, and Bill Clinton has a foundation that spares some lives privately (as well as providing a conduit for big-money donations to the Clintons).

But taking the theoretically easy step of shifting enough wealth to stop all the hunger? To stop children from defecating to death, anywhere? None of the possible presidents has ever pushed for that.

If the US had wanted to do it it would have been done. Millions now dead would be alive. But they didn't, either during the Republican administrations or the presidency of Clinton/Gore.

Indeed, if Michael Bloomberg, personally, had wanted to do it -- if he had chosen otherwise -- the roughly 5 million kids who died malnourished last year could have been fed, and kept alive, with his own personal money, since, according to Forbes magazine, he's worth 11.5 billion dollars.

Such is democracy in America.

You get a vote, but not a choice, at least if you want to vote against murder and for keeping hungry kids alive and thinking.

No choice, that is, unless you force it. Americans have yet to get that.


Link to a Charlie Rose show debate with Elliott Abrams re. subjecting him to a Nuremberg trial.

Link to a transcript of the Charlie Rose show debate with Elliott Abrams.

Link to a January 3 Democracy Now! discussion re. tactics for change in the US system and atrocities by advisers to the top presidential candidates.

Link to view this posting in Arabic translation.

Link to view this posting in Danish translation

Link to view this posting in French translation.



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Cataclysm by Money Whim. The Islamist Industry. The World Ends Every Few Seconds.

Three years ago today, the tsunami hit Aceh. It was a cataclysm so vast that Acehnese don't talk about it all that much.

It's easier to deal with human-scale things.

That morning, December 26, 2004, in an inland town far from the impact, the initial rumbling of the earth was so terrifying that people ran into the alley, screaming.

One of them, a woman, did so in a daze, having woken from a deep sleep, and, apprehending what was happening around her seized up and fell down to the dirt path, trembling.

Not long after -- and it is still mysterious why, since phones from the shore, at Banda Aceh, were down -- someone started yelling "tsunami!, tsunami!," as strange trickles of water indeed appeared from nowhere.

Everyone knew that the sea was an hour's journey away, but this was no time for theorizing.

People ran to the mosque, which has a second floor, a kind of cupola below the call-to-prayer niche, and Muslims and Hindus gathered praying, talking, and crying, awaiting Noah's flood.

Not all of them, though. A few stayed with that woman who was stiff and trembling, then fully unconscious.

If they were going to drown, they would drown a few minutes sooner, and in the good company of a beloved one.

As it happened, the tsunami never struck that town. The earthquake had shattered the municipal water pipes.

That accounted for the trickle, which, in a kind of celestial joke, would be the only piped water some ever saw, since in that, as in many poor kampungs piped water -- "PAM" -- was a mere dreamt-of, anti-microbial luxury.

If the tsunami had been high enough to take out that town, which is well inland and elevated, it would indeed -- for the world -- have been the end of the world, but that didn't happen, so we're now talking.

But for much of coastal Aceh, the world did end that day, and in such a way that rich people noticed.

It was a slow news day -- the week after Christmas is, as they say in America, "dead" -- and within days Brian Williams was doing the NBC Nightly News live, by klieg light, from Banda Aceh.

That brief moment in the global manmade electronic sun did not dry out flooded Aceh, but it did bring vast donations since, when people see suffering they can be decent provided that a. they really see it -- and in graphic terms --, and b. they are not told by authority that the dead people deserved it.

Traveling west from Banda in the aftermath was like traveling on an Apollo space mission, since, once the bodies had gassed and popped or been taken away, the scene was less beachfront than lunar.

There were three old men sitting on folding chairs -- actually, probably in their thirties or forties. All of their extended families were dead. They, still stunned, were a new social unit.

Not fifty yards behind them, on a slab that was once a house, there was an obscene graffito.

Like a number of indecent writings in history, it was authored by a religious grouping.

"These are the wages of sin," it said. The signature was "FPI" -- the Islamic Defenders Front, a group of men usually found in Jakarta girlie bars busting up the places when the owners don't pay off or when they are too tightwad in doling out instructional-use bottles of the sinful liquor.

The FPI is one of those useful institutions found in places like Indonesia and Pakistan that are simultaneously the subject and the object of the US Global War on Terror (GWOT, an official Pentagon term), and its symbiotic affiliate, the Islamist Industry.

They are both the problem and the solution since, on the one hand, they are scary Islamists, but on the other, they are backed by the Indonesian security forces, which are backed by the US to fight Islamists.

Creatures of the POLRI -- the Indonesian National Police -- FPI also works with the armed forces (TNI) (Two years ago the FPI actually hung banners in Jakarta generously praising the POLRI, the kind of street recognition -- that if you're a POLRI man -- you know you'll never get without paying well for).

After the tsunami the TNI flew the FPI to Aceh on US C-130s, with the apparent idea that they would intimidate and spread havoc, as Aceh activists reasonably feared.

But in a surprising turn, suggesting that even hypocrites can experience awe, the FPI guys seemed to largely behave themselves, ideologues' graffiti notwithstanding.

According to a doctor who worked alongside them in the gruesome task of lifting bodies, they were quiet, and -- as poleaxed as everyone else -- went about their work with some humbled diligence.

Not so a visiting cleric who I was unfortunate enough to share a van with, who explained benignly that the particular wrecked town that we were viewing was famed for gambling, racing, alcohol, and infidelity.

He was suggesting, in other words -- like, say, an American spokesman in bombed Fallujah -- that all those dead people deserved it.

He didn't even get annoyed when I asked why the divine tsunami had managed to miss Jakarta -- where he's from -- where the venues of sin are famous (and police-protected) and outstrip those of coastal Aceh.

Instead his smile got wider, and still more beneficent. It was like watching American religious -- or some political -- TV. The signal is : 'You pathetic sap. I know the secret. You are going to hell. And get out of my way, I've got a date tonight, in Jakarta (or in Washington).'

The tsunami in Aceh killed perhaps 200,000 people, the same rough number as the toll of children killed worldwide, in some part, by malnutrition roughly every two weeks. (For 16,000 child malnutrition deaths daily, see 2007 World Population Data Sheet, Population Reference Bureau, Washington.)

Politically, we don't define each preventable -- undeserved -- death as being a cataclysm, though for the dier, and for their loved ones, it is, and, unlike a tsunami, stoppable.

This anniversary week, the news reports that Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs got a 67.9 million dollar bonus, enough to put a tsunami's - worth of children in his hands -- to let-die or save, strictly at his own whim. (Alistair Barr, MarketWatch, "Goldman Sachs CEO gets $67.9 million bonus," December 21, 2007).

The little brother of a friend of mine survived the tsunami by climbing up a light pole, and when the flood receded he climbed down and, the story goes, sat upon the ground and thought some.

The 30-foot flood had swept cows, cars, and children on past him.

When he got down he saw corpses and mud. Was he the world's last surviving person?

He considered that possibility.

Eventually, they say, he regained his wits, started walking, and, with some relief, learned -- as another young man would later say, commenting on life in the wake of one death -- that "this world still exists," which is true. But the converse is also true.

Every time one single person dies, the world they saw from ends.

The world ends, somewhere, every few seconds. It's a cataclysm. We should see it as such, and, when preventable, prevent it, even if that means contravening some whims.


(For "...this world still exists" see posting of November 8, 2007, "Duduk - Duduk, Ngobrol - Ngobrol. Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia").


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No More Coddling Big Criminals. Huckabee Fails to Get Tough on Crime.

After Mitt Romney accused Mike Huckabee of being soft on crime, Huckabee -- the nice guy in the US race -- responded by pointing out that as governor of Arkansas he had put 16 people to death.

This stood in presumed embarrassing contrast to Romney's death toll of zero, since Massachusetts didn't have the death penalty while Romney was governor there.

Romney is undoubtedly ready to respond, if asked, that if given the chance to execute, he will.

It's just that, sometimes awkwardly for their US presidential candidacies, US governors don't always get the opportunity to order killings, and thereby prove their mettle, since 13 of the 50 US states prohibit execution.

(Lead New York Times commentator R.W. Apple once wrote, regarding Bush I and his unprovoked invasion of Panama, that each US commander must complete "a presidential initiation rite" by "demonstrating their willingness to shed blood" -- ie., other people's blood; [the Timesman was not suggesting that the President open up a vein]. [R.W. Apple, "Fighting in Panama: The Implications; War: Bush's Presidential Rite of Passage," The New York Times, December 21, 1989.])

Of course, Romney was correct when he slated Huckabee as being soft on crime, a charge that could be made against Romney himself, and most all members of the US establishment.

They're usually plenty tough on petty crime and on things like common murders, and lately, any offense -- including running red lights -- by undocumented foreign workers.

But on big crime they're as soft and squishy as the proverbial Chablis-sipping US liberal.

If they weren't, Huckabee, could have requested his state attorney general to try to extradite Bill Clinton to Arkansas to face international crimes - against -humanity charges for his sanctions against Iraq, sanctions that, according to two of the top UN administrators who dealt with them on the ground (Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck), gratuitously killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqui civilians, mainly children.

Its not as if Huckabee wouldn't have relished a chance to sting his political rival, Clinton (they both even come from the same home town, Hope, Arkansas), its just that doing so in such a way would have been politically unthinkable and taboo in today's pre-civilized United States, even though legally it isn't since international law allows national/state prosecutors and courts to take on such cases.

That's a slogan for a new decency and justice movement: No More Coddling Big Criminals.

What we need here is law and order, starting at the official top.

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Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, Excuses for Murder. Tell it to the Judge.

Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, the Indonesian cleric and political leader, says that the Bali bombers "were not terrorists but counter-terrorists." (Suherdjoko, "Ba'asyir pays homage to Bali bombers in jail," The Jakarta Post, December 16, 2007).

It's a claim that should outrage anyone who realizes that the Bali bombers executed their victims just to use their corpses to send what they saw as a political message. (For discussion of this theme see posting of November 28, 2007, "Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers. Cold Blooded Celebrity.")

Such outrage could lead to the answer : 'You're wrong, they weren't counter-terrorists,' and it's a powerful answer since you shouldn't claim to be fighting terrorism if what you're doing is committing it.

But as a social and legal matter, that answer -- though important for honesty and for clear thinking -- should be seen to be part of an argument that is somewhat beside the point.

The bigger problem is not how people see their crimes -- in a certain sense, who cares? -- but rather whether those crimes get stopped and deterred, and whether the criminals get caught and punished.

A staple of American legal drama is the scene where the just-arrested accused perp is hauled before the booking judge (who sets the date and conditions for trial), and, sweating, begins to frantically tell his story, before the bored jurist cuts him off.

With a courtroom full of purported lowlifes to process, he/she doesn't have time to hear rationalizations, so out of the corner of their mouth the judge mutters something to the effect of: 'Whatever. Call it whatever you want. But if you murdered those people, buddy, you're going to prison. [Gavel slap]. Next case!'

Americans -- and foreign audiences who watch them in translation -- seem to love these shows, for good reason. Its fulfilling to see, or at least to imagine, justice being done.

If we were civilized we would also be able to imagine -- and create -- similarly crowded, brusque, courtrooms, in which all murderers, high and low, were hauled before similarly no-nonsense jurists:

There's a president. There's a prime minister. There's a dear, beloved leader, waiting.

And maybe even squeezed among the Commanders on the crowded benches of the waiting accused sit some mere power-talkers -- editorialists, broadcasters, ideologues -- who, as has already happened in the Rwanda tribunals, have been arrested and could be -- as also happened re. Rwanda -- convicted and sent to prison for the purported international law crime against humanity of "public incitement to commit genocide" (eg., one of the charges against Augustin Ngirabatware for things said on his radio station, BBC News online, "Rwandan genocide suspect arrested," September 9, 2007).

Each of them has a noble rationalization for their killing -- which is fine, that is their right. But each of them would also have to persuade a jury, or face a long time in ugly lockup.

Just recently they say Donald Rumsfeld fled France to avoid a torture lawsuit, which is amusing. Isn't he a tough guy? He's the one who was so thrilling to the press in his blunt language about bombing Afghans that Jamie McIntyre of CNN, Pentagon, produced a piece themed (in McIntyre's words): "Everybody loves Rumsfeld."

Isn't part of the point of being a tough guy that you confront and stare down your accusers?

People who dabble in the mass maiming of others should be thoroughgoing in their macho. Their attitude toward murder/ torture proceedings against them should be, as Bush once said,: "Bring it on."


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"Shoot them on the spot." The Traditional Dance of Rewarding War Crimes.

Last June, when President/General Susilo of Indonesia visited one of his provinces, in the Moluccas, he was greeted by local residents performing a traditional dance for him, a ritual often repeated around the world when powerful rulers travel, the implicit message being: this is us, but to you, we bow.

This time, however, something went wrong, and to the evident astonishment of the visiting democrat (Gen. Susilo was just awarded a democracy medal by the International Association of Political Consultants. See posting of November 13, 2007, "Vomiting to Death on a Plane. Arsenic Democracy."), the dancers unfurled a freedom flag with an entirely different implicit message: it was the banned four-color banner that symbolizes Moluccan independence from Indonesia.

After the performers were hauled off to jail by Indonesia's POLRI national police ("I want the performers of the dance [to] be investigated," Susilo ordered,"If the dancers have certain purposes, there should be a resolute action against them." "President Yudhoyono orders investigation into 'unscheduled dance'", Antara [official Indonesian government news agency], June 29, 2007), the area police and army commanders were both sacked for inexcusable laxness.

They had apparently let arise an atmosphere so loose that prohibited thought could not only be thought, but could be so bold as to find expression before the very eyes of the visiting sovereign.

Fortunately for national stability, as it is called in Jakarta, Washington, and elsewhere, that problem has now been cured with the appointment of regional army commander Gen. Rasyid Qurnuen Aquary who has informed his TNI (Indonesian national armed forces) troops to "act firmly against anyone engaging in separatist actions, and if need be, shoot them on the spot." (The General's spokesman, Maj. Sukriyanto, quoted in AFP, Jakarta, "Indonesia General Says Separatists Could Be Shot," Dec. 12, 2007, via Joyo Indonesia News Service).

Fortunately for those dissident dancers -- and perhaps also for the President, whose shirt might have gotten spattered red that day -- the order comes too late to have gotten them shot-on-spot (they merely sit, untried, in prison), but not too late for a bold 19 year old Moluccan man just shot by TNI troops on Saturday (he's apparently still alive) for the offense of hanging a similar flag on a tree near which they were working.

In a time and in a place where some authority was bothering to enforce the murder laws, such a public "shoot them on the spot" order against dissidents might be seen to constitute a war crime, or -- since the Moluccas are arguably not in a state of war -- an equally prosecutable, under international law, crime against humanity.

But that's not the case in today's Indonesia, or in most of the world's geography, where official murder -- and even public orders to commit it -- goes unpunished, and is, instead, rewarded. The US Congress is looking to do that this week as they process a Foreign Operations bill that would ship further US taxpayers' millions in lethal assistance to TNI (202-224-3121 is the Congressional switchboard number).


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Breaking News: US Intelligence Personnel Tap Indonesian Phones. British Also Involved. Detachment 88, Kopassus Get Covert US Aid.

News and Comment, http://www.newsc.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 9:21 AM US Eastern time)


By Allan Nairn


US intelligence officers in Jakarta are secretly tapping the cell phones and reading the SMS text messages of Indonesian civilians.

Some of the Americans work out of the Jakarta headquarters of Detachment 88, a US-trained and funded para-military unit whose mission is described as antiterrorism, but that was recently involved in the arrest of a West Papuan human rights lawyer.

The Papuan lawyer, Iwangin Sabar Olif, was seized by police and Detachment 88 on the street and later charged with "incitement and insulting the head of state" after he forwarded SMS text messages that criticized the Indonesian armed forces (TNI), as well as the President of Indonesia, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. (West Papua is a restricted-access region where Indonesian forces have been implicated in rapes, tortures, kidnappings, assassinations, mass surveillance and intimidation.)

The information on the US surveillance program is provided by three sources, including an individual who has worked frequently with the Indonesian security forces and who says he has met and formally discussed their work with some of the American phone tappers, as well as by two Indonesian officials who work inside Detachment 88.

The first source says that the he was told that the Americans are employees of the US CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), but it could not be confirmed whether they work for the CIA or other US agencies. He says that through his work he has observed that these US intelligence specialists help run a sophisticated wiretapping network that uses much new US equipment.

He says the US operation includes the real-time monitoring of text messages, as well as mapping contact "networks," ie. tracing who is calling or texting whom.

This individual deals frequently with Detachment 88, but says that he has not inquired about the seizure of the Papuan human rights lawyer, Iwangin .

He said that Detachment 88 units are also present in other outlying zones including Solo, Ambon, and Poso, the later two of which have been the scene of TNI - POLRI (the Indonesian National Police, who formally oversee Detachment 88) "provokasi" operations that have helped to spur deadly fighting between poor Muslim and Christian villagers.

This source also says that US intelligence is providing covert intelligence aid to Kopassus, the Indonesian army's red beret special forces famed for abduction, torture, and assassination.

Classified Kopassus manuals discuss the "tactic and technique" of "terror" and "kidnapping" (see "Buku Petunjuk tentang Sandi Yudha TNI AD, Nomor: 43-B-01").

Kopassus has, in the past, been heavily trained by US Green Berets and other forces, in topics that included "Demolitions," "Air Assault," "Close Quarters Combat," "Special Reconnaissance," "PSYOP"(s) and "Advanced Sniper Techniques" (all of these during the Clinton administration, under a program called JCET -- Joint Combined Exchange Training).

But after this training was exposed and after the TNI - POLRI Timor massacres of 1999 (which followed a UN - supervised independence vote, and in which Kopassus was implicated), many in Congress were under the impression that they had succeeded in stopping US aid to Kopassus.

(Congress is due to decide within days on a new lethal aid bill for Indonesia).

The American presence inside Detachment 88 was confirmed by an Indonesian Detachment 88 official who said that a team of Americans did telecommunications work in the "Intel Section," along with an individual whom they believed to be a British national.

A second Detachment 88 official also confirmed the US presence, but said he did not know the name of the American team leader. Like the first Detachment 88 official, he gave the name of the operative whom he said was British, but that named individual could not be reached for comment.

Asked for comment on December 12, during the late afternoon, local time, Stafford A. Ward, a spokesman for the US Embassy in Jakarta at first said he was not familiar with such a US program and did not know what Kopassus was.

An hour later Ward read out a statement that said that "there are no Americans in either Detachment 88 or Kopassus." When asked if there was any kind of US assistance to those units he said: "The US is not involved with either of those organizations. I can confirm to you that the US has no involvement with either Detachment 88 or Kopassus."

In fact, though, that US Embassy statement appeared to contradict the public record. US officials have frequently spoken on the record about their involvement with Detachment 88, including to the press and in meetings with and testimony to the US Congress.

Twenty minutes after issuing that denial, Embassy spokesman Ward sent the following email: "I misspoke earlier when you called me a second time today. The U.S. government works with Indonesia to bolster its counterterrorism capabilities. For example, the Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s Office of Antiterrorism Assistance has trained Indonesian Antiterrorist Units."

This revised Embassy statement did not repeat the denials of the earlier statement, nor did it deny the presence of US personnel inside Detachment 88, nor did it deny the existence of covert US intelligence aid to Kopassus.

US officials have never acknowledged on the record the presence of US intelligence wiretappers inside Jakarta's security forces, nor have they acknowledged on the record the provision of intelligence assistance to Kopassus.

The initial Embassy denial, phrased in the present tense, came less than 24 hours after the US Congress, in Washington, made private inquiries to the US Executive Branch about whether the US was aiding or planning to aid Kopassus.

These Congressional inquiries came after this blog reported on December 7 that "the State Department this week was putting out urgent queries around Washington that make it sound as if they are planning to openly aid Kopassus," and after people in a position to know privately declined to deny that report.

It is not known whether the Congressional inquiries included the question of Detachment 88.

But in a call to the Detachment 88 office hours before today's initial carefully-phrased Embassy denial, the Indonesian officer who answered the phone said that the Americans had not come in to work today and that, as far as he knew, the British staffer there was on vacation.

Detachment 88 has been mentored by veteran CIA and State Department official Cofer Black, who was one of the architects of the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Detachment 88 is publicized as being aimed at violent jihadists, like the groups implicated in the bombings in Bali and Jakarta that killed more than 200 civilians.

But the US wiretapping program provides a capacity to target any kind of phone user in Indonesia, an issue of concern in a country where the security forces -- often US-assisted -- have killed many hundreds of thousands of civilian dissidents.

@2007 by Allan Nairn, News and Comment, http://www.newsc.blogspot.com/

Imposed Hunger in Gaza, The Army in Indonesia. Questions of Logic and Activism.

The UN World Food Program estimates that, in the wake of Israel's cutoffs,"Food imports into the Gaza Strip are only enough to meet 41 percent of demand," (paraphrase by the UN-sponsored news agency, IRIN. IRIN, Jerusalem, "Only 41 percent of Gaza's food import needs being met," 6 December 2007), ie. Gazan food intake has been cut by a shock 59 percent.

Even a small cut in food consumption can stunt or kill already hungry people, particularly infants in the brain-development stage.

The UN sponsored IRIN news service reports that "Israeli travel and trade restrictions have led to a decline in purchasing power in Gaza. A recent WFP survey found that of the 62 percent of people who said they had reduced their expenditure in recent months, 97 percent reported a decrease in spending on clothing and 93 percent on food."

IRIN cites the case of Naheda Ghabaien, "a mother of five in the Beach refugee camp in central Gaza" whose husband "used to work three or four days a week bringing home about US$10 a day" but now, post sanctions, "only works a few days a month."

At least the Ghabaien family is getting some aid, unlike so many other nutritionally threatened people around the world. Every twelve weeks, another UN agency (UNRWA) gives them "amounts of rice, flour, oil and sugar that can last for four to six weeks. The family rarely eats meat anymore, relying mostly on vegetables."

"'When the agency food runs out,'" IRIN quotes Naheda Ghabaien as saying, "we buy the food we need on credit from the grocer. When my husband works, most of his daily earnings go to settling the debt."

The news agency notes that "(a)id workers say these sorts of coping mechanisms are reaching their limits" and cannot keep yielding food for Gaza's straitened people much longer.

Israel's government says that its sanctions are legal -- ie. are not a disproportionate reprisal, which is a war crime -- so it is logically saying that these food and other cutoffs are not worse than the Gazan rocketing of Israel .

So, if that is the case, Israel should be willing to agree to a simple switch: Gaza gets the power and right to effectively cut off 59% of Israel's food (as well as being able to shut its electricity, fuel, communications, medical supplies, travel rights, airspace etc.), and Israel gets the right to rocket Gaza as Gaza has rocketed Israel, ie. in a manner that has killed Israeli civilians at the rate of roughly one every four months.

Would the Israeli government agree to this bargain that is strictly based on its own legal logic?

Of course not. They'd be foolish if they did. They already bomb and shell Gaza, and other places, at will, killing Palestinan and Arab civilians at roughly the rate of ten for each Israeli civilian (for statistics within the Occupied Territories, see the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, http://www.btselem.org), and if anyone were to cut more than half of Israel's food, as Israel is now doing to Gaza, that place would immediately be leveled by Israel, and/or the United States.

As in so many other cases, power, not a power-wielder's own legal logic, prevails.

In Indonesia, a Muslim-majority country ostensibly critical of Israel -- but whose killer armed forces have discreetly taken Israeli aid -- the President, Gen. Susilo, is in the process of appointing his country's army commander as the overall armed forces chief, even though it is not the army's turn in the supposed rotation.

Reuters, Jakarta (November 28, 2007) calls it "a move some observers say will ensure [Susilo] the support of the powerful military in the run-up to 2009 elections" (also see AFP, Jakarta, December 6, 2007, which draws the same conclusion) which is required since, as political Jakarta knows, no one wins and governs without the army.

The twist is that, a few years ago, when Indonesia started putting in non-army men (ie. air force and navy men) as armed forces commanders, this was hailed as progress and reform by the regime's academic and political apologists.

Their somewhat self-incriminating argument was that since most civilian killings were done by the army (which is true), things would be better with the navy (that helped abduct many tens of thousands in post-'99-vote Timor, and this year did a massacre in Java [see posting of November 13, 2007, "Vomiting to Death on a Plane. Arsenic Democracy."]) or the air force (that bombed Timor and Aceh) in charge.

If they believed their own logic they should now say that this appointment of an army man is a regression, a conclusion unlikely to be drawn, since the US Congress is just now deciding just how many millions they are going to give these very armed forces.

In fact, the State Department this week was putting out urgent queries around Washington that make it sound as if they are planning to openly aid Kopassus, the most notoriously sadistic army unit, and, historically, the most heavily US-trained one.

(Gen. Prabowo, the most notorious of all Kopassus commanders -- and that is saying a lot -- did his training at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, among other places, and, his murderous record notwithstanding, was once cited in a US Embassy memo as an example of the success of US training, specifically the IMET [International Military Education and Training] program. Prabowo once complained to an American that all this had been a mixed blessing for him since, he said, some other Indonesian generals made fun of him because he spoke English so well; he said they called him "The American").

The phone number of the US Congress is 202-224-3121, the members of the deciding Conference Committee are listed below, and the East Timor & Indonesia Action Network, ETAN (http://etan.org/) has documented background information and action suggestions, as a starting point.

Activism actually beat the US Executive (under presidents Bush I and Clinton) and, through military aid cutoffs forced via Congress, helped to bring down Suharto and free occupied Timor.

(Suharto's old security chief, Adm. Sudomo once told me that Suharto fell because they failed to open fire early and thoroughly on the Jakarta student demonstrators, because they feared further US aid cutoffs, as were imposed after the '91 Dili, Timor massacre. As I left his vast cement-bunker house, adorned with pictures of him and the US golfer, Arnold Palmer, I realized that he probably hadn't paid attention to who he was telling this story to, since on the way out he gave me a book that condemned me for my actions at Dili, and after.)

Those activist victories were possible in part because Indonesia was not a Washington priority. It was handled mainly by middle-level bureaucrats. The big boys were busy with other killer forces. Likewise, our entire fierce nine-year Congressional aid-cut struggle was ignored by the US corporate media, which was in a way frustrating, but in another way perhaps good, since that may have delayed the counter-mobilization by Jakarta, US corporations, and the US diplomatic/ military/ intelligence establishment that didn't get serious until 1994 with the launching of the US-Indonesia Society lobby group (in which Gen. Prabowo had a hand), and other initiatives.

Israel/ Palestine is an entirely different matter, top of the government, media, and counter-mobilization lists. Efforts to change that policy cannot hope to steal a march under the political radar. But the distinguished -- and therefore, often vilified -- scholar of the matter, Norman G. Finkelstein (highly praised by the most serious figures, eg. Raul Hilberg, Avi Shlaim, while, at the same time, lied about by others) believes that a slow shift in US opinion is underway, starting, interestingly, among younger US Jews.

Power is one thing. Fact and logic are another. They should not be confused.

The sooner people at our end, the trigger-end, honestly open their eyes and simply see, the sooner people at the exit-end -- where the bullets and food-cuts come out -- will stop having their own eyes forcibly and permanently closed by death.

Link to view this posting in German translation.

---------------
Members of the US House - Senate Foreign Operations Appropriations Conference Committee currently deciding on major parts of US military aid to Indonesia:

House Democrats:

Nita M. Lowey (NY), Foreign Operations Subcommittee Chair [a critic of the Indonesian military, but has been under strong pressure from the Executive Branch and from her subcommittee's ranking Republican, Frank Wolf (VA); as with Sen. Leahy (VT), how strong a stand she takes will be crucial]
Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. (IL)
Adam Schiff (CA)
Steve Israel (NY)
Ben Chandler (KY)
Steven R. Rothman (NJ)
Barbara Lee (CA)
Betty McCollum (MN)
Dave Obey (WI), Ex Officio, Appropriations Committee Chair [former strong critic of the Indonesian military, less involved in recent years]

House Republicans:

Frank R. Wolf (VA), Ranking Member [generally interested in human rights, but formerly a critic of the Indonesian military, and now a key supporter of them]
Joe Knollenberg (MI)
Mark Steven Kirk (IL) [former State Department official who professes interest in human rights]
Ander Crenshaw (FL)
Dave Weldon (FL)
Jerry Lewis (CA), Ex Officio, Appropriations Committee Ranking Member

Senate Democrats:

Robert Byrd (WVA), Appropriations Committee Chair
Patrick Leahy (VT), Foreign Operations Subcommittee Chair [most important critic of the Indonesian military, but much depends on how strong a stand he takes]
Daniel Inouye (HI) [single most important backer of the Indonesian military]
Tom Harkin (IA)
Barbara Mikulski (MD)
Richard Durbin (IL)
Tim Johnson (SD)
Mary Landrieu (LA)
Jack Reed (RI)

Senate Republicans:

Thad Cochran (MS), Appropriations Committee Ranking Member
Judd Gregg (NH), Foreign Operations Subcommittee Ranking Member
Mitch McConnell (KY), [longtime supporter of the Indonesian military]
Arlen Specter (PA)
Robert Bennett (UT)
Christopher Bond (MO),[current lead Republican backer of the Indonesian military, and the Indonesian presidential intelligence agency, BIN]
Sam Brownback (KS), [a Republican often receptive on human rights issues]
Lamar Alexander (TN)

All can be reached through the US Congressional Switchboard: 202-224-3121

It Takes (Out) a Village: Illegitimate American Power.

Hillary Clinton just pointed out that whoever holds the US presidency can, on both national and foreign matters, engage in "split-second decision-making that can affect the lives of millions of people" (AFP, New Straits Times [Malaysia], December 5, 2007).

Clinton made her remark as a criticism, but of her campaign opponent, not the system.

She was saying that her competitor, Barack Obama, was unqualified to have that power, not that there was any problem with the fact that such Zeus-like power exists in the first place.

One American deciding. Millions of lives. Fates determined almost in passing.

If you pull back and think about it -- slowly -- doesn't it all seem a bit improper?

For most political Americans the answer would probably be that they haven't yet thought about it, because in US politics, the existence of such power is taken as a no-need-to-think-of given.

But at the other end of the stick -- or the other end of the rifle, where the bullets come out -- there is a bit more consciousness of this remarkable fact about today's wildly unbalanced world.

Its why the US presidential campaign gets heavily covered in the popular press of, say, Malaysia, while on the other, US, end -- the trigger end -- editors are only dimly aware that that country exists.

It is also why, say, junior US Congressional or Executive Branch aides -- or, for that matter, US journalists -- can get treated like pashas when they visit weaker countries overseas.

If people figure out that you or your perceived (or real) team have the power to kill them or feed them, they tend to -- as one would rationally expect -- act toward you accordingly.

For years, those actions have tended toward deference -- though lately there's sometimes been more anger -- but both the deference and the anger flow from the same realization: that when you talk to extremely powerful people, you are talking to he (or she) who can shape your fate.

Of course, concentrated power is not a modern or a US invention, and it will always exist to some degree. But, as with many things, it is a question of, first,: to exactly what degree? And second, power to do what? To take my life, if you feel like it?

In today's world, power is so skewed -- in its distribution, its nature, and in its very scale -- that people like, say, American presidents can take out villages and barely know or remember it.

I once interviewed former President Ford on the phone and asked him if it was true that in a meeting with the dictator Suharto he had authorized the East Timor invasion.

Although I had told Ford's staff in advance that I was going to ask him about that meeting, he replied -- I think, honestly -- that he just could not remember.

He said the meeting had had a long agenda -- a fact confirmed by the later-declassified transcript -- and Timor was somewhere down the list, so he apologetically said that he couldn't be sure.

In fact, Ford did give the thumbs-up and, thereby, launched -- within a day -- what would become the greatest proportional slaughter since the Nazis.

If you're the ruler of any other country (including China, Russia, England, or France, the arguable candidates for distant -- very distant -- #2 world killing power), you don't have to stick Post-It notes on your computer to remember what countries you've caused to be invaded, or have provided with "lethal aid" (the actual Washington term for US assistance to the killing capacities of friendly forces).

How could such power possibly be legitimate? It can't be, by definition.

Even though you may have won a vote, and the voters are sovereign, the voters do not have the right to authorize you to facilitate murder.

People should not be running for president, they should be running to abolish the American presidency -- and state -- as they are now constituted, that is, as institutions that assume killing rights that no one has the right to give them.

Back in the summer of 2000, before he flew off to his death in Indonesia, I had several conversations with Jafar Siddiq Hamzah about his survival chances.

He was an Acehnese human rights lawyer, the emerging international voice of his people. He was waging a political struggle against the terror of the US-sponsored Indonesian army and police (a Clinton official had told the New York Times that Suharto was "our kind of guy"), and he had left the country after interrogation, surveillance, repeated threats, the torching of his office, and the disappearance or assassination of many of his friends.

But now he had a plan to go back -- for just a couple of months, he said -- and it turned in part on the fact that he had become, arguably, a kind of quasi-American. He had driven a New York City cab, was working on a Masters (The New School, political science), had achieved US permanent residency, and had even met with State Department officials and testified in the US Congress.

That had to count for something, he thought. But it didn't quite suffice.

When they found his body, it was unrecognizable . His jaw was gaping, as in a death scream, and the doctor said that they had apparently sliced off his face, perhaps with razor blades, or knives.

Maybe Jafar's mistake was that he did not become American enough.

Maybe he should have gotten citizenship, moved to Iowa, participated in the caucuses, and then cast that mystically-imbued American vote that grants life-and-death decision over millions, but have figured out how to cast it in such a way that it would have allowed him to return home without ending up outside Naga Lingga, North Sumatra, at the bottom of the village ravine.

I don't know how he could have actually cast such a vote. There was no serious anti-murder candidate.

But, who knows, perhaps he could have figured something out. Jafar was a creative fellow.

Knowing Where the Bodies Are Buried. The Indonesian Generals -- and Putin -- Laugh.

The phrase "knowing where the bodies are buried" has different meanings in Timor and Washington.

In Washington, it means knowing some incriminating gossip about somebody, whereas in Timor-Leste the meaning of that phrase is unfortunately literal.

The November 12, 1991 Santa Cruz, Dili massacre was a turning point in Timorese history. The fact that it got outside attention opened the door for an independence that has been rough for Timor (due to ridiculous squabbling among its' politicians), but that has ended the daily terror and massacre that was the Indonesian occupation.

But one thing that Timor independence didn't do was produce a regime confident or responsive enough to stand for justice and insist that Indonesian officers be put on trial for their crimes.

(Of course, a Timorese insistence would not suffice, since the Indonesian generals are still in power and the last thing Washington wants is a Nuremberg for its' trainees [or, for that matter, itself], but it makes some political -- and moral/ morale -- difference when the new Timorese rulers say 'Don't bother.').

Instead of testifying and watching the perpetrators of this Nazi-like slaughter hauled off to lock-up (both the Nazis and the Jakarta generals killed a third of their target populations; in Timor's case, it was 200,000, starting after the 1975 US-backed invasion), the Timorese people have been reduced to politely begging their old murderers to tell them where they dumped the bodies.

This past November 12, some Timorese survivors requested precisely that in a petition submitted via the Indonesian Embassy in Dili to President/ General Susilo of Indonesia.

The press quoted the group's spokesman as suggesting that "every human being must have a grave," but reported that the petitioners made clear that they weren't seeking to offend Indonesia's government. (see Jose Sarito Amaral, "East Timor marks anniversary of 1991 cemetery killings," Tempo [Jakarta] website, 13 November, 2007, [in English], via BBC Monitoring, Asia Pacific, via Joyo Indonesian News Service).

Its easy to imagine the response to this petition by whatever uniformed man may have perused it: soft laughter and a search for the trash can. 'Will those Timorese never learn?'

The elected leaders of independent Timor have been hugging the Indonesian generals for years (this is not a figure of speech), and instead of being jailed, the perpetrator officers have been promoted, gotten richer, gotten their US aid restored, and make regular appearances as respected figures, including ones on Indonesian TV during which, rather than being exposed, shunned, and humiliated for their unwashable blood-sticky hands, they dance and laugh and josh around with sexy female celebrity singers.

As Vladimir Putin's triumph in Russia says to the ghosts of Anna Politkovskaya and of the Chechens she wrote about, if justice ever gets here, it often doesn't happen in this lifetime.

Maybe that's one reason people turn to God. For they often cannot turn to politics for even such a simple, earthly thing as justice for their family's slaughter.

Bereft, they feel no choice but to pray. Either that, or change the system.

'Go ahead, kill them. Just be sure to fill out your expense account.' Law and Order in Bangkok, Washington, and other Pre-Civilized Capitals.

A headline in the Bangkok Post (November 27, 2007) says that ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra "faces up to 26 years in jail" for corruption, while elsewhere in the paper it is reported that his party might well win the coming Thai elections.

If that happens and Thaksin's people win big, there is no way that he will be jailed. Indeed, it is far more likely that he will return from exile a hero.

It just goes to show that law, even criminal law, is ultimately political, and one test of a society's progress is how impartial it lets law be.

Rich, powerful countries like to claim they have achieved great impartiality, but that is true only to a certain extent, and, more importantly, only on certain matters.

As President Nixon, for example, learned, the US has many rules on cheating, and if he is caught breaking them even a powerful president can be brought down.

Just last week, the Texas oil man, Oscar Wyatt -- a donor and friend to many presidents -- was sentenced to prison because he made some illegal deals with Saddam Hussein. Kenneth Lay of Enron, once Bush's #1 donor, was convicted of corruption and died in disgrace. Another of America's biggest businessmen, Bernie Ebbers, is now doing a long corruption term, and Conrad Black, a buddy of Kissinger, Richard Perle, and other Washington powers, is facing a similar fate because he was convicted of stealing from his company's shareholders.

Rudolph Giuliani, one of the frontrunners for the US Republican nomination for president, is now getting flak because he reportedly used public money to visit his mistress.

The point is that in places like the United States rich and powerful people can face real constraints, but only on secondary matters like cheating and corruption, not on the biggest one: official murder.

US business people fall left and right if they're, say, caught backdating stock options, but have never yet faced prosecution for the murders of labor leaders at their foreign factories.

Fred Sherwood, then a leader of AMCHAM, the American Chamber of Commerce in Guatemala, told me in 1980 how he would call in the legendary killer, torturer, and rapist Col. German Chupina (then the national police chief of Guatemala) if any of the workers at his factory, Productos de Kenaf, got too aggressive in their unionism. Half a dozen such workers were assassinated. Sherwood said he had given Chupina their names. He then capped the story with a joke about archaeologists who were baffled by a mummy they'd found, but then they called in Col. Chupina, and "within an hour, the mummy talked!"

The transaction is usually more subtle than that, but MNCs routinely cut deals to do business in places where the security forces routinely murder dissidents, and -- lo and behold -- discover that a. they can attract good workers for very low wages, and b. occasionally some of their own workers get shot if they persistently ask for higher ones.

The fact that such killings happened in recent years at Coca-Cola in Colombia, for example, did nothing to damage the stellar reputation of major stockholder Warren Buffett, and its a safe bet that no one in Washington's Justice Department even thought of opening a case file, or asking their prosecutorial colleagues in Colombia to have a look at the matter themselves.

US overseas big business is seen as a quasi-extension of the US state, and when playing on foreign turf they essentially get an only somewhat weaker version of the same exemption US state officials get: a license to cause the death of foreign civilians in the course of official business without fearing that a police officer will come knocking on their own door.

If Giuliani becomes President, and, say, decides to bomb Mecca as a symbolic gesture (a move that one Republican candidate, Rep. Tom Tancredo, has actually suggested, if there's another terrorist attack on the US), he won't have to answer to a US judge for the civilian lives he'll take.

But if, Allah help him, Giuliani is ever caught, say, cheating on his taxes, he could find that US justice can be impartial, swift, and fair.

Power Can Buy You People. Can It Buy You Happiness? The Regime Still Stands in Burma, Where "The People Just Want Food."

Crossing the Moei river from Thailand into Burma you see many river bathers. But if you look again more closely you notice they are all on the Burma side.

More Thais enjoy a degree of wealth conducive to piped-in water, which means fewer bad microbes, and therefore a chance at longer, more active lives.

If you happen to enter Burma via a legal route, through a regime checkpoint reputed as "rustic," you notice that it actually has an IBM clone running Windows and a camera-capture program that impressively prints out in seconds two cards containing one's personal data, and, in the upper right-hand corner of each, a little color photo of your face, from below.

The army Intel man in the booth has a nice silver watch and Che Guevara t-shirt, but he is not visibly packing a pistol. Few arms are visible in this Intel town.

A middle-aged Burmese woman, a highly-trained professional who fled Rangoon post-September, said that she was surprised when the army fired on them since, this time, they followed the monks' lead, and rather than demonstrating "angrily" with fists raised, they mainly proceeded quietly.

But the soldiers opened-up anyway, so now she's sheltering near the mountains.

"The people cannot understand why they are in poverty," she argued, a state which degrades them "physically, educationally, even morally," thus making it easier for the military to recruit thugs from regular people, basically doubling their virtually non-existent normal wage to get them to beat up dissenting neighbors.

Walking through town, one sees the usual Buddhist temples and, for this region, Christian churches, but also many pool halls and karaokes, lots of Johnny Walker Red and Black, and smart-ass young men lounging back on low teak chairs playing X-Box video.

They are smaller and thinner than their Thai contemporaries across the river, but still -- given what they have -- muscular. They give off what an Indonesian would call a distinctly "preman" vibe (preman being the Indonesian street thugs sponsored by army police, or local big men, or, freelancing if they're small-time enough).

One, using the universal semaphore of jerked back thumb and extended pinkie invites me to drink with him and his laughing boys. Another, inside a temple compound, before a golden shrine to the Buddha, ascertains that I'm from America, laughs when I point to his "US Army" jacket, and, without further preliminaries, offers to procure me a Burmese "lady."

A block off the main street, the houses' walls are paper thin, as with the very poor in Indonesia, but this in a region where it is cool -- even by US northern standards --, and where many wear long sleeves and jackets.

Outside Basic Education High School there is an anti-drug sign, in English ("The Fight Against Drug Menace is a National Cause"), this from a regime that helped lead the world in heroin (the phrase was "Golden Triangle," and the CIA's facilitating role was documented in Alfred W. McCoy's classic scholarly study "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" [1972]) until it was recently outstripped by US/NATO occupied Afghanistan.

Outside the police base there is another English sign, this one announcing a "crime free week" this past March, presumably a week in which the junta sold no drugs and freed its political prisoners.

The military base is tucked a ways off the main road, beside some just-turned-over black earth and is so not-under-siege in feeling that its gate was sitting open and I didn't even notice the one very young guard until I shifted position to look for buffalos in the farmland and spotted him behind a pillar.

Its an anticlimactic contrast to the September footage from bloodsmeared downtown Rangoon, or, for that matter to the scene in today's Muslim southern Thailand where a vicious insurgency has the Thai army and police (who were vicious first, and still are) locked-in and very frightened.

When I asked that professional woman whether she thought the Burmese junta was frightened, she said: "Yes, I think they are afraid. They cannot sleep at night. And if they sleep, they have nightmares; they cannot be happy. They have power but they cannot have happiness."

That may (hopefully) be the case, but given a chance to reverse that polarity, I doubt that many repressive Generals would take it, inside Burma or elsewhere.

Indeed, there is a rumor going around the world that power brings -- or is a form of -- happiness, and many act is if they believe that to be so, hiring and shooting their way toward fulfillment.

On the way out of town I was accosted by a plump, spectacled man in safron monk's garb, who, sweating and speaking good English, explained rapid-fire -- with my barely asking a question -- that he had studied engineering in Singapore, was still meditating to control his body, and that the demonstrations had been staged by a team of "false monks" controlled by "an underground communist unit" (as were, he said, all the other various rebel/ dissident groups in Burma), that Aung San Suu Kyi was British, not Burmese, that her father had been a communist (which happened to be true, though his main politics were nationalist), and that -- getting interesting -- his own
(the monk's) sister is on the board of a shipping firm in Singpore that is controlled by Gen. Maung Aye, the junta's current number two (an Intel specialist), and that he, the monk, is related to various other generals, including the former Intel chief and Prime Minister, Gen. Khin Nyunt (who not long ago lost an internal power struggle, and is now, as this monk put it, "behind the partition," ie. interned inside the Insein political prison).

The monk gave me his G-mail and Hotmail addresses, said the Burmese don't know what democracy is (though -- he said -- he and I do), and in the most interesting moment, answered the question: "Do the people like the government?"

"I and people like me do," he said, "but the people just want food. All they want is food and peace." I said I had to go.

He said if I wanted "the truth about Burma," he would send it to me through G-mail.

Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers. Cold-Blooded Celebrity.

The Daily Telegraph of Australia carries a report of an extraordinary death-row press conference/ festive family visit (Indonesian death rows run on looser rules than do American ones) involving Bali-bomb planner Imam Samudra who is said to have told reporters when asked what he would say to the victims' families: "If they are unbelievers I say to them, it is your risk because you are kafir and unbeliever ... If the people are not Muslim I am never, never sorry for them."(Cindy Wockner and Gita Anggun Athika, "Terrorists' Final Insult. Facing hate: the day I met the Bali bombers," The Daily Telegraph (Australia), Saturday, November 24, 2007 [via Joyo Indonesian News Service])

The writer justly complained that Imam Samudra and his two co-convicts "were being treated more like celebrities than the cold-blooded killers they are."

In May, 2003, not on death row, but on a prestige forum on US network TV, a leading thinker of the US establishment, New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, gave perhaps the most compelling explanation yet by a powerful Washington figure for why the US invaded Iraq -- or, more precisely, why it felt compelled at that moment to invade a Muslim country like Iraq.

Speaking on the Charlie Rose show, Friedman postulated the existence of a terrorist "bubble" -- a prevailing idea -- then popular, he said, in a certain part of the world:

"And what we needed to do was go over to that part of the world, I'm afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble. And there was only one way to do it. Because part of that bubble said: 'We've got you. This bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between us and you because we don't care about life. We're ready to sacrifice and all you care about are your stock options and your Hummers.'"

"And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying: 'Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know, we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this.'"

"OK? That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."

(Thomas Friedman appearance on Charlie Rose, PBS, May 30, 2003 , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slLzZmA3WvU&feature=related )

Friedman was obviously speaking metaphorically, playing the tough-guy on PBS, but when he was saying to the Muslims chosen to be used as examples "suck on this" -- once again articulating Washington's Id -- he seemed to be speaking not just in the sexual sense but also in the sense of inviting them to wrap their lips around an M-16.

Given the fact that the invasion of Iraq really was, to a significant extent, a case of find-a-Muslim, any Muslim,-and-kill-them, it can be difficult to convince overseas Muslims who raise the issue that US policy is not religion-driven.

But it isn't. The US system is too cold-blooded for that, despite the presence in it of some religious fanatics (like, for example, General William G. Boykin, Rumsfeld's special operations chief, or, for that matter, President Bush himself, who is reported to believe in Armageddon).

It was Washington's Zbigniew Brzezinski (now foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama) who once boasted of creating the Afghani jihadists (to screw the Soviets, he said, and, he added, it was definitely worth it; see "'The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan,'" Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001), and it was the US that flew early Al Qaeda types to Bosnia to fight on the Muslim/ NATO side.

If you actually took Washington's pile of corpses from recent decades and sorted them out by religion, there's a good chance that the Catholic stack would stand highest, given the operations in South, then Central, America.

So there are clearly differences between the targeting criteria employed by a Friedman and an Imam Samudra. One would kill you if you had the wrong religion. The other if you had the wrong (non-US) address, and if he woke up that morning and simply felt that the national interest (or whim) required the killing of someone vaguely resembling your description.

There are differences, but there is a more important commonality, ie. a willingness to commit holy murder (or at least advocate it from a first class hotel room). In the name of God, in the name of the State, it doesn't really matter. If you're the victim, you're just as dead, and the perpetrator feels just as uplifted.

Its not clear if Imam Samudra is a good, punchy, concise writer, but that doesn't matter either. Since he is due to be executed, there won't be time for The New York Times to offer him a column

Rising in Malaysia. Handle With Care. The Dangers of Feeding Poor People.

In downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, some Dior dresses just got dry-cleaned with tear gas, in an interesting illustration of the principle that if aggrieved people get enough food, things can happen, politically.

This Sunday morning, November 25th, local time, an extraordinary demonstration was mounted by vast numbers -- many tens of thousands, at least -- of Malaysian ethnic Tamils .

Among the poor ethnic Tamils of Indonesia, across the Malacca Straits, their Malaysian cousins are regarded as lucky, even "rich," to be living in such an affluent land.

But though the Malaysian Tamils -- known as "Indians" locally -- have crossed the thresholds of nutrition and energy, they are, in the Malaysian context, largely working class and politically marginal.

So Malaysia's rulers must have had their eyes popping out as they watched the closed-circuit security feeds (there was no public live broadcast of this momentous event on state-controlled or private TV) and saw waves of upset, well-built, mostly-male Tamils descending on the streets around the KLCC (Kuala Lumpur City Center complex), the site of the elegant Petronas twin towers -- until recently, the world's tallest buildings -- , and the high-end Suria KLCC shopping center, which makes most US malls look shabby.

They had banned that demonstration, arrested its organizers for "sedition" (potential three years jail time, at least), and ringed the city with security checkpoints. And yet here they all were -- those formerly quiet working people -- mainly not even bussed-in or holding banners, the semi-spontaneous eruption of a political movement that just a few months ago did not exist. A few shouted things like "Freedom!," "Justice!" A few gave soapbox speeches without the soapboxes. But mainly they were just vast numbers of people standing and walking (and calling their friends on cell phones) in the street, and then suddenly sitting down when they saw the police open-up with water cannons.

If one asked what was going on, the first response was "we're non-violent!" (the one visible held poster was a color blow-up photo of Gandhi). As to why they were demonstrating, "Indian rights, we just want our rights!" One older gentleman started contending: "Under the British colony we were slaves. Now, freedom, but we are still slaves, we want equal rights to land, housing, our temples," but he stopped as everyone involved started shedding tears and retching, as the police opened-up again, this time with a fusillade of tear-gas canisters.

In the planned, high-political sense this was a procession to the nearby British High Commission to present a petition to the Queen in connection with a reparations lawsuit seeking 4 trillion dollars as compensation from the British for the colonial crime of having brought the Tamils to then-Malaya as indentured laborers.

But many in the huge crowd seemed not to know those details. The lawsuit, one of those long-shot political gambits that once in a blue moon actually works, had somehow lit a fire among people who had grown strong enough to carry torches, an ethnic minority (8% of Malaysians are Tamil) who noticed that the regime, for other reasons, was weakening and decided that their time had come -- in front of the mall with the designer labels.

As those affected fled the clouds of tear gas -- but, on recovery, cheered each new arc of canisters -- one could notice that the few police close to the scene had folding-stock machine-guns in the smalls of their backs.

If just one of them had reached around, pointed crowd-ways and pulled the trigger, Kuala Lumpur this morning probably would be amidst a mass uprising.

But today's Malaysia largely isn't like that. That's one of the reasons its people are fairly rich. After a vicious '50s counterinsurgency by the British in which many died in concentration camps (and which, along with El Salvador, is now being touted as a model "CI" by US intellectuals), Malaysia, after independence took a different road than post-'65 Indonesia, putting some controls on foreign investors, shockingly defying the IMF, and developing a big middle class with domestic industry, public works and housing, and -- as Malaysia pulled away economically from Indonesia and Bangladesh -- cheerfully exploiting the labor of the country's really poor poor people, the rotating pool of immigrant workers who work, get abused, get paid, and go home (or are sent home).

And crucially, Malaysia did something that London and Washington normally frown on: they utterly castrated the army as a political institution. Though Malaysia has been, and is, authoritarian with engineered elections, no free press, and a very nasty police Special Branch, they chose to eschew mass murder as a tool of (domestic) politics (internationally, they were close to Suharto, and now are to the Burmese junta).

In Malaysia, the army is a non-factor, not even a political joke, since almost literally no one thinks about it, let alone worries about it wielding power. I once spent a week in a Malaysian hospital room overlooking an army base and never once observed anything more martial there than coed volleyball.

What Jakarta and Washington (by proxy) have long done by usually having the guy pull the trigger, modern Malaysia has sought to do through more subtle repression and cooptation -- including the mounting of a tame, pro - government, Tamil political party (The Malaysian Indian Congress, MIC, whose leaders must also, at this moment, be sweating).

That regime formula is now in some trouble (in some part because, years ago, they got undisciplined and made the mistake of beating and jailing a complaining Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, who is now out and mounting a challenge).

But the fact that they faced today's surprise popular surge and were able to hold their gun-fire shows that this is a regime that is still quite smart and disciplined.

They have come to understand that when poor people get rich enough to be strong but not rich enough to feel justly treated, those people become politically dangerous and should be handled with care.

Bangladesh and Wall Street After the Flood: Two Different Kinds of Property

Early estimates say that maybe 3,000 people have died in the Bangladesh cyclone and floods.

And the footage shows that much poor-people's property has been destroyed -- houses gone, animals rotting -- therefore bringing many people closer to worse hunger, stunting, and earlier death.

If those now-famous rising sea-level projections are correct, Bangladeshis will perhaps suffer most, since on their very low landscape there reside large numbers of very poor people.

Those same computer animations that imagine what might happen if the oceans rise, also claim that, under extreme scenarios, New York's Wall Street might be under water.

But though that would destroy many papers and computers, and even immerse some vaulted-up gold, the damage would be largely temporary and the world's rich people would come out fine.

In the old days, when a Spanish galleon went down and its Aztec gold hit the ocean floor, the gold's new Spanish owners could figuratively hit the bottom too since there was no recovering that lucre by clicking a computer mouse (for such reasons, insurance arose).

But today, big money is digitized and safely launched into cyberspace to orbit, physically untouchable, until it is needed for recovery at its' owner's whim. (The only, now remote, exception to this situation -- unlikely to happen short of nuclear detonation or its internet equivalent -- is if the computer server that vouches for the money's existence somehow gets destroyed, and if no one has been sent a backup copy attesting that the owner is, indeed, still rich).

That's part of the nature of today's big capital, much of it is slippery, liquid, un-pin-down-able. It can be instantly recovered and/ or instantly moved, crashing (or bubbling) markets and currencies, or even -- again, at the owner's whim -- deigning to not let some people die.

But when you're very poor in most of the world you have no digitized, cybered, bank account. You're lucky if you have some coins or folding cash, and if its stored in, say, an elder's pocket or the lemari (the chest of drawers, as in Indonesia), and if it gets burnt or washed away then its lost and gone forever, as with chickens, full grain jars, or other small properties.

Richer peoples might say "a dollar's a dollar," but, economically, that isn't true. A rich person's cybered dollar carries its own built-in, arguably no-cost insurance. Come fire, flood, or come what may, that dollar will always be there, ie. that dollar is, in practice, worth more than the non-cybered dollars (or equivalents) held by the poor.

In homes in poor deltas in places like Bangladesh -- and such places make up most of the world -- one's modest wealth can, by its mere physicality, be eradicated by the hand of God, or by a petty thief, by a careless kid with matches (or, for that matter, by a developer's arsonist) or even, -- in those more recognizedly political cases -- by an unofficial, self-appointed bomber on foot, or an official Air Force one from on high.

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Approach With Caution, Americans: Adam Smith Has a Gun

When hard rain falls on a tin-roofed house it sounds like a machine-gun assault. Unless you know the person you're talking to very well and can essentially read their lips, they have to bellow and you have to lean in ear-to-mouth to have a clue as to what they are saying.

But one of the blessings of the Suharto dictatorship -- and there weren't all that many -- was that though the Indonesian neighborhoods still have flimsy metal roofs, they largely do not have machine guns.

There are many semi-organized criminals -- "preman" -- , many with "beking" from the army/ police, but they do not usually carry firearms, only knives, short swords, machetes, or sticks. Suharto wanted to reserve the guns for only his most formal, disciplined agents.

Suharto's reasons for control were nefarious. But some kinds of social control are good, and today's poor Indonesians, in most places, still benefit from the absence of something bad, guns, an absence that -- like, say, the absence, in most countries, of plagues of locusts -- you don't normally even think of as being absent since you don't think about it at all

But Indonesians are notionally aware of what life might be like if poor neighborhoods were flooded with firearms since, via international TV syndication, they've heard a lot about the United States.

At least before Homeland Security kicked in, most everyone wanted to visit America, and poor Indonesians were no exception, except that many would say that though they imagined a land of regular-eating opportunity, they would be kind of afraid to go there. 'Lots of mafia there, ya?' they'd say after watching countless shows of Americans shooting. And many asked me: 'Is it really true that all Americans carry a gun?'

I'd have to answer, no, but you're not all that far off; things are different in America. "Ngeri," "horrifying," was a typical -- sympathetic -- response, and this from often-hungry people in a country where the government was famed for massacre, torture, and assassination.

Back in the US a few months ago I rode through Newark, New Jersey's West and South Wards with Lawrence Hamm/ Adhimu Changa, an old friend, and a brilliant community and national leader (he is chair of the People's Organization for Progress), and as we roamed the neighborhoods where he grew up and has continued to work ever since -- and where white, openly racially hostile police used to mete out unchecked abuse to black residents, like the POLRI (Indonesian national police) do to Indonesia's poor today -- there were police helicopters hovering overhead, and street-level gunshots in the distance.

A few years ago, the last time I had been there, it hadn't been that way. The guns and youth-crime were surging again, he said -- not that they ever went away. The same phenomenon is happening in a number of cities across the US, while others still have placid, privileged enclaves yet to feel the wave of propelled metal, still thinking that their cities have been "cleaned up," that their urban problem has been solved.

A few weeks later, when I was talking to Adhimu on the phone, he was interrupted by another call: A colleague of his -- a community anti-violence activist -- had been attending the funeral of a young gun victim, when that man, Anthony Hall, got a call that his own son had just been shot dead in another incident.

If a poor kampung resident came to Newark's western Wards they might say 'Look at all these rich people' (They have drinkable water, houses with solid worm-proof floors, regular electricity, access to cars), but if asked to exchange street situations with them, I doubt that many would take the deal (indeed one such resident who made a similar trip said just that, in emphatic terms).

Its complex to analyze different societies, but simple to note one key aspect: though it is arguably a technical difference, it makes a huge difference to the outcomes of lives whether a troubled society -- and, how many societies aren't? -- has or does not have large numbers of popularly available guns.

Its troubling to see an agitated teenager on the corner twirling an 18-inch curved sword. But its another story to see a similarly composed young man standing there twirling a MAC-10 machine pistol.

The differences are quite concrete. You can fight off a knife/sword wielder. The moves are well known. Little kampung boys leap around practicing them, jabbing the air, squealing with super-hero delight.

You can retreat, duck down, kick out his legs, or suddenly grab your assailant's arm from below or from the side. Or you can really retreat, shut a door, and wait for the hothead to cool down, go away, or just get bored and crouch down, having a smoke, like everybody else.

Even in the worst case, if he strikes flesh, a single slash might not be crippling, and if he inserts to stab, that takes some crucial micro-seconds, allowing friends or bystanders to jump him. (There are some women who are as good with a sharp weapon as men are -- on offense or defense; its not necessarily a skill greatly honored among women, but drunk spouses tend not to mess with them).

And even in the very worst case -- he succeeds -- a knife/sword wielder can usually only kill one at a time. And in a crowded kampung, if the death toll does rise to two, it is just as likely that that second decedent will be the assailant himself (finished off via kicking and beating by an outraged crowd), as opposed to another one of his targets or a mere coincidental bystander.

But with a fire-arm, as they say on those mafia shows that give foreigners key facts about America -- forget about it -- , its over with a trigger-twitch, maybe even an accidental one. There's no self-defense, unless you're also packing (and lucky enough to have an assailant with bad aim), and the numbers of mortal/crippled victims are easily multiple. Instant murderers and murderees. One little finger pull and its all over: marriages, futures, lives.

If poor Indonesians really knew what they were missing out on they'd be sending the evil Suharto prayers (even though he is still alive, and ill -- at least when the word "prosecution" is mentioned).

In the US, activists often pointedly observe that there are no gun factories in the poor, gun-shot neighborhoods, and ask how these social time-bombs keep getting smuggled into their communities. Sometimes people get too fancy in their analysis and suggest a genocidal plot. But such a big, motivated, complex thing isn't necessary: all it takes is a working free market -- a working free market and a state that feels no compulsion to keep the invisible hand from shooting people.

Getting Shot in the Stomach: Hunger and Dissent in Burma, and Other Countries...

Talking with some Burmese activists the other day, one young leader made a crucial point.

The discussion included familiar topics like sanctions and military practices -- at the Mingalardon base, for example, the Myanmar army supposedly likes to recruit from orphanages, and, according to a fellow who once lived on base, recruits seeking permission to go to the toilet are required to first take off all their clothes to ensure that they won't try to run away.

But that young leader kept coming back to a theme that applies to very poor people everywhere: "Burmese people are in a very dramatic situation," he said. "If they want to participate in demonstrations they have to look at their own stomachs. They wish to participate in demonstrations, but they have to think about their food. If they wish to oppose, they have to think about their own self. If they spend just a few hours in opposition they pay a very difficult price."

The price he was referring to was not the danger of being caught, shot or beaten by soldiers, but rather to the price of having to forgo a couple of hours of work, and, thereby, some crucial number of grams of food for one's self or family.

The point is that if you're close to the hunger line, time (and energy) for politics is very costly.

Some societies, like the US, like to say that time is money. But if you really don't have much money, its different. Then, time is food (or it can be, if you're lucky enough to have a job or location that can enable you to make it food).

"The Burma people want to spread their feeling," he continued, "but they are scared by the regime. Not only because of the killing and imprisonment, but because daily life is also very difficult in this day."

"The Burmese person wants to gain democracy, but what does he do for the family? If he opposes the military regime, the next day his family maybe faces starvation."

If you don't, say, pick and sell your fruit for half a day, or get the boss's pocket change you all count on, you may come home charged-up by politics but to a very disappointed family.

Under normal circumstances for poor people in today's Burma, he contended, "You may have enough for lunch for a big family, but going home to the house all the family is waiting for the dinner!"

The activists claimed that hunger is now bad, for example, in places west of Rangoon like Shwe pyi thar township, Hlain thar yar, and Ayar thar gyi.

They were referring to a threshold of hunger that is present -- not future -- oriented. It is one thing to worry about a few consecutive days of hunger endangering you babies' brains (see posting of November 8, 2007, "Duduk - Duduk, Ngobrol - Ngobrol. Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia."), but it is another to worry about a lack of food tonight maybe causing you to keel over.

When you reach such a point, you reach for anything (almost). In East Nusa Tenggara Indonesia it is not-normally-consumable roots or leaves. In Burma now the meal of non-choice is rice-water porridge, served with nothing.

It is reminiscent, in a way, of Honduras in the 1980s, a far looser, semi-feudal regime. At that time, much of popular Central America was rising up, but in Honduras, largely not. When you asked people why, the answer was usually the same: the Hondurans are too hungry and tired. It was true that they had a big US base and a US-trained military death squad (Battalion 316, backed by the US Army Rangers, the CIA, and then "proconsul" John Negroponte), but it was emblematic of the situation that 316 murdered civilians by the dozens, while its US-backed counterparts in neighboring countries found it necessary to do it by the tens of thousands.

Though the Burmese regime did one of the big all-at-once massacres of recent decades -- 3,000 in 1988 -- the regime has since maintained its power with much less actual gun murder than, say, Indonesia.

It is interesting that the recent Burmese protests were apparently dispersed with fewer killings than in '88. Back then, all the activists agreed, people were eating better.

Hunger -- other people's -- can be the ruler's friend, so long as it doesn't undermine the regime's style of economy (and in today's Burma, it apparently doesn't, since its based not on broad production but on a well-fed martial elite selling minerals, gems, and narcotics to foreigners).

That's not to say that those rulers are not vulnerable. They may be. It in some part depends on their foreign customers/backers.

But for a poor Burmese, you have to think before you spread your feeling. You might get shot in the stomach, even if your adversary doesn't fire his gun.

Vomiting to Death on a Plane. Arsenic Democracy.

On Tuesday the big front page news in the two leading newspapers of northern Sumatra was that Indonesia's President, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, has received a democracy medal from the International Association of Political Consultants.

The banner headline in Waspada -- citing Susilo -- was "Indonesian Democracy is Permanent" ("Demokrasi RI Permanen"). Analisa's front page ran a huge above-the-fold photo of a sea of fierce-looking TNI (Indonesian armed forces) camouflage soldiers -- heading for Lebanon, as peacekeepers, as well as a photo of three top TNI commanders clasping hands, and a photo of the President General with his medal and his American presenter, Ben Goddard.

It reminded me of the time the United Nations presented a population - control award to the former President (seven times elected) of Indonesia, General Suharto. I was sitting in the UN General Assembly gallery that day, waiting for Suharto to enter, when UN security came up and politely explained that they had to throw me out.

They said that Ali Alatas, the Indonesian Foreign Minister, had spotted me from the Assembly floor and was insisting that I be expelled before Suharto would enter the room. He was afraid I might create an incident. He was right -- I had recently witnessed one of Suharto/TNI(then called ABRI)'s massacres, this one in occupied Dili, East Timor, but I would not have disputed that Suharto was indeed an expert in population control.

Gen. Susilo is likewise an undisputed expert in pre-civilized-world democracy, having sustained the TNI's primacy and exemption from the murder laws while winning foreign democratic plaudits and thereby, billions of divertable dollars (Farid Faqih, the man who first blew the whistle on army tsunami aid corruption was beaten, jailed, and is now forgotten) and a refreshed flow of foreign weapons and, particularly, "antiterrorist" gear and training.

This includes mass wiretapping facilities, including the ability to quickly home in on SMS text messages, like the one that sent Detachment 88, the new SWAT-jumpsuited, US-created antiterrorist task force ("antiterrorist" in the rationale sense, not in the objective sense), descending on Iwangin Sabar Olif -- a human rights lawyer -- as he walked down the street in West Papua, an effectively occupied region to which visits by outsiders are restricted, and that was incorporated into Indonesia in a rigged vote later termed "a whitewash" by the UN official who oversaw it (Chakravarthy Narashiman, then the undersecretary general: "Indonesia's Papua Referendum Was A Farce - Ex UN Officials," Associated Press, Jakarta, November 21, 2001).

Iwangin wasn't planning a jihadist bombing (the kind of terrorism the US likes to criticize), or a shooting of civilians (the kind the TNI likes to commit; indeed, one of the officers in today's Analsia front page photo, the new Navy commander, heads a department that has just seen charges dropped against Marines who, in Pasuruan, East Java, shot dead four civilians, including a pregnant woman, after villagers protested a TNI land-grab. The Navy chief at the time -- also in the photo -- said the Marines had followed standard procedure [see Tony Hotland, "Navy Denies Rights Abuse in Pasuruan," Jakarta Post, June 7, 2007.]).

The Papuan lawyer wasn't planning anything, just forwarding to family and friends an SMS he had received that criticized the TNI in Papua -- criticized them in milder terms, it should be said, than a couple of foreign academic reports (from Yale, in the US, and from Australia's University of Sydney) that have gone so far as to claim that Jakarta's depletion of Papuans might qualify as "genocide."

That's a word that is overused, but the point is that Papuans are now facing the kind of operation -- and some of the same perpetrator officers -- previously used to control the population in Timor and Aceh. One of them, Col. Siagian, twice indicted for crimes against humanity in Timor (the indictment was by a UN-sponsored tribunal, but Susilo's government won't turn him over), has vowed to "destroy" and "crush" Papuan dissidents, informatively adding "we are not afraid of human rights." (Cenderawasih Pos, May 12, 2007, cited in "Urge Indonesia to Remove Indicted Officer from West Papua," East Timor and Indonesia Action Network & West Papua Advocacy Team Action Alert).

The Papuan lawyer seized by those US-trained antiterrorists was charged with "incitement and insulting the head of state," ie. Gen. Susilo. ("Police need to explain arrrest of Papuan human rights lawyer -- Komnas HAM [the official national human rights commission]," Kompas, November 1, 2007, translation by James Balowski, via Joyo Indonesian News Service; see also, West Papua Human Rights Report, 24 October 2007, "West Papuan Human Rights Lawyer arrested by US & Australian trained Anti Terrorism police," also via Joyo.)

Indonesia is called a democracy because Gen. Susilo could indeed be voted out (as opposed to Suharto who decided the country needed him, personally), but it is taken as a mere given in Jakarta that he could not be replaced by anyone who did not win the approval of the institutional TNI, and indeed, some vast financial support from military-allied oligarchs.

In the days when Indonesian political activism was still hot, not long after Suharto fell, one President, Abdurahman Wahid, "Gus Dur," did briefly, tentatively, cross the army and he was ushered out with cannons pointing at the palace and the Moluccan islands in in flames. (In the Moluccas, it was what TNI military manuals call a "provokasi" operation.)

There was still standing one brilliant national political figure, another human rights lawyer, named Munir, but he vomited to death on a plane after ingesting arsenic with his juice or noodles.

Evidence in Munir's assassination points clearly to the presidential intelligence agency, BIN -- this from a time when BIN was, as now, a liason partner of the CIA. The President at that time was Megawati Sukarnoputri (Gen. Susilo had, until they quarreled, been her Minister of Politics and Security), and the head of BIN was Gen. Hendropriyono, who liked to flaunt his US connections, and who was granted personal meetings with the heads of the CIA (Tenet) and FBI (Mueller).

One of Hendropriyono's top BIN aides, Gen. Muchdi was the one whose phones were found to have made or taken at least 35 crucially-timed calls to and from the man now officially named as the hands-on assassin, a part-time BIN contact -- who was with Munir on the plane -- a former Timor/ Aceh/ Papua pilot, Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto.

Of this above-listed chain of officialdom, only one of them is in trouble, the unfortunate Pollycarpus, who is perpetually in and out of prison as the system grapples with domestic and international grassroots pressure for somebody's scalp, while having to maintain the policy of Indonesian and US democracy of not enforcing the murder laws against favored official killers.

Apart from winning his democracy medal, Gen. Susilo recently put out an album of love songs. It somehow reminded me of a conversation years ago with a resident of a poor kampung, one of the people who was mentioned in a previous posting (November 8, 2007, "Duduk - Duduk, Ngobrol - Ngobrol. Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia."). She was reading a magazine article with a big photo of candidate Susilo. I asked her what she thought of him: "Like Suharto, only better looking."

Military Dictatorship: Administer Only as Needed

Referring to the $10 billion in military and financial aid that the US has given the government of Pakistan since it formally switched sides in late 2001 (Pakistan's military had long backed the Afghan Taliban, as had the US oil firm UNOCAL, now part of Chevron), the State Department's John Negroponte told the US Congress on Wednesday: "Cutting these [aid] programs would send a negative signal to the people of Pakistan." (Jay Solomon, "Musharraf ratchets up diplomacy in the U.S.," The Wall Street Journal [Asia], November 9 - 11, 2007).

Like what? That they might be able to demonstrate without being shot by an American client? That the US actually is opposed to military dictatorship?

Negroponte apparently doesn't want to send such signals to Pakistanis right now, since the US has decided that Musharraf's their man -- that is, at least until he isn't.

But, generally speaking, unlike the old days, given newly matured means of influence, the US no longer holds any special brief for military dictatorship as a form of government (The US Army's training school for foreign officers at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, actually had -- and may still have -- an International Officer Hall of Fame [Eisenhower Hall, General Instruction Building] that featured portraits of graduates who rose to run countries, by whatever means [one of the honorees being Pakistan's old dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia, featured in a photo with President Reagan]; likewise for the now-renamed School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia).

The US has found recently that, under the right conditions, civilian/royal/ family dictatorships (like Jordan), military democracies (like Indonesia), or civilian democracies (like Colombia) can all work equally well for Washington and, indeed, that civilian democracy -- well constrained -- tends to be more stable and salable. Today some of those constraints on democracies come from the newer global markets, trade regimes, and IMF/Paris Club - type outfits, and from older factors like the dominance of the local rich, the ever-hovering threat of foreign invasion, and, for that matter, the threat of domestic invasion by the likes of the Hall of Fame men.

Its just that sometimes if you hold a vote the wrong people might win, and then be able to go on and do things you really don't want them to do. Today that actually happens far less frequently than people think. Minimal-choice elections are the rule. And even when seeming rebels win, they tend to behave themselves.

But in certain times, in certain countries, things threaten to get out of hand. And in Washington, cognoscenti sigh and say: 'OK, for this one, we need a tyrant.'

But that is no longer the first choice, the preferred go-to US option, -- whatever small comfort that might be for the anti-dictator elites of the country in question. Its a medicine that Washington basically promises to administer only as needed.

(Washington's declining ability, in recent years, to impose its will overall is a separate -- and not always relevant -- question, since for many millions of poor people around the world, the US still holds its old political/ military/ para-military leverage over them, and US rich people -- by the very fact of their being rich -- still hold their lives in the palms of their hands. See posting of November 8, 2007, "Duduk - Duduk, Ngobrol - Ngobrol. Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia" for further explanation of this latter point.).

State of Emergency in Pakistan, But Not in the United States.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, and in the White House, Bush and Cheney may be, in some part, a little envious. Musharraf made the cogent point that other branches of the political system (in Pakistan's case, the judiciary and the parties) were "interfering" with the ability of the government -- ie. him, Musharraf -- to function. Its cogent because that's exactly what independent branches or entities are supposed to do. In the US its called checks and balances, which a small but important authoritarian current in the US seems to want to start phasing out.

But any White House envy must be only partial, heavily tempered by condescension, since under the US's far more subtle system, crude Musharraf-like steps are rarely needed.

Musharraf has arrested dozens of established human rights activists, intellectuals, and civil-society campaigners. How many such figures in the US today could (or would) so threaten the rulers that Bush or Cheney would even know their names, let alone think about arresting them? In the US, such figures are lucky to be invited on corporate cable TV (MSNBC, CNN, or Fox) to be sometimes shouted-at by the interviewers, or to be invited in for micro policy-change negotiations by State Department or Pentagon people who set policy on the killing of foreigners. (The new edition of the US Army/ Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, overseen by now-Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus, carries an Introduction by Sarah Sewall, the director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy).

But the deeper twist to the Musharraf move, is that below the middle-class and activist level, the impact may be barely perceptible in the daily life of Pakistan's poor.

The Karachi newspaper Dawn dramatically front-page headlined it "Musharraf's Second Coup." But it reminded me of a discussion two days before on the Indonesian web forum Indonesia News Blog (http://indosnesos.blogspot.com), which reported that the U.S. academic, Alfred C. Stepan (author of "Rethinking Military Politics" [Princeton, 1988], and director of Columbia University's Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion) had come to Indonesia, and standing before Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono, lavishly praised the hated TNI -- the Indonesian armed forces --, reassuring Indonesians that there was little chance that they would stage a military coup. To this, one reader, going by the name Gravatar Arema, posted -- in English -- the dry response: " Uhm, the military are already in power… so why they need a coup d’etat?"

Duduk - Duduk, Ngobrol - Ngobrol. Sitting Around Talking, in Indonesia.

Sitting around in a house in Indonesia over green agar-agar (seaweed gelatin) for diarrhea, the talk is of the "dog" POLRI police, the "sadis" TNI army, the local mob boss who likes to rape his servants (the servants are friends of this family), a framed son in prison due to lack of a well-timed payoff and his own culpable stupidity, the caterpillars that after house-floods like to crawl into your ears, the tiny worms that like to bore into children's feet and then steal food from their intestines, buying "monja" -- cast-off, used clothes from rich lands -- and finding money, occasionally, in the pockets, but, most fundamentally, jobs, wages, a recent labor outrage, and the question of whether, in America, you have to pay a bribe to get a job, as you often do in Indonesia.

By the second hour the air starts stinking slightly of flood sewage. The thin wood walls have been stripped of tchotchkes. At first I thought -- wrongly -- that the little ceramic animals had been sacrificed: sold or brought to the pawnshop. But it turns out they had merely been taken down for holiday cleaning. The selloff involved other things.

You never really own anything if you're poor. Its just a matter of time. You accumulate a little property and, then, if you're unlucky, somebody steals it, or the police escort a bulldozer in, and simply level the house. But if you're luckier, you're compelled to sell (or pawn) your property to pay a series of, say, important bribes for which you actually get something in return, in this case the right of that locked-up son to eat soft rice instead of hard rice so that, on the way down, it doesn't get stuck in his throat and trigger his fits of fainting asthma. That payoff costs about 70 US cents per meal, in addition to garbage money, key money, do-not-break-his-nose-this-week money, let-your-mother -visit money, toilet visit money, and 11 other kinds of money, if I counted correctly.

No soft-on-crime liberals, the family said that the kid deserved to do some time, though the offense was non-violent, nobody knew it was an offense, and the conviction flowed from a larger, fake, charge. The boy had screwed up, embarrassed the family, and now the predator state had its hooks in. These payoffs were bringing the family down. They were selling off everything.

Imagine, someone said, if they were really poor people, because in local terms, they weren't, yet. The women rise at 4 am to make and sell mini cakes in the traditional market, on a good day hoping to clear a profit of 2 dollars 70 US cents. The men, when there's work, sell durian fruit by the roadside or do pickup construction. That makes them "rakyat kecil," literally, society's small people; essentially, regular folks. But not really "orang susah" -- people with woes. Those are the poor people, one family member had explained, when we met years ago.

She lived in a shack 12 feet off the railroad tracks, but liked to help the poor. As a Muslim, she would bring them rice and cooking oil for Ramadhan. Hindu family members did likewise ( "If I were President of Indonesia," she once said, "I'd make sure everybody had a house, and I'd guarantee that all the children would be able to go to school." She, like others, was surprised at the news that in some countries schooling was free.)

But today, in the house, as we all talked, the one they really felt for was the poor washerwoman down the alley who makes $18 a month and couldn't pay the bribe to get her son a cell -- a room about the size of an American kitchen, which accommodates 30 guys. So the authorities locked him, squatting, in the toilet -- a very slippery hole in the floor. That's where he'll live until she comes across. He'll have a lot of visitors.

Yet things could be worse. In the past year and a half two household members have died. But, despite the drain on their patrimony, their locked-up boy is still alive.

Likewise, thankfully, during this past year, none of the babies have died -- that perhaps due to outside cash infusions, but such things are a matter of fortune. Of the two adults who died one was a man in his early forties, "middle-aged" by rich world standards, "old" in local terms. The other, a somewhat younger woman, that lady from by the railroad tracks, was a "tukang baca," a craftsperson of reading, who was also considered old. The man went stiff as he was placed in a motorcycle sidecar. The woman ascended in the midst of a massive, violent, brain seizure.

In their cases, prolonging their lives might have required decades of better health care. But if you ruminate about that notion people look at you and laugh incredulously.

Four to five decades ago, when most of the "old" people in this house were kids, there was talk in Indonesia of revolution, or something like it; for starters, creating a situation in which thinking about schooling, housing, and health for all would not be ridiculous. That talk happened in the '60s counterparts of places like the mechanic's shop where that late man worked (his 2006 wage of roughly 55 dollars per month led many in the family to call him a "rich man," but, unfortunately -- everyone says -- he didn't handle money well), and the rice paddy where that woman was on the evening when she suddenly died.

The '60s talk was led by a communist party that launched a byzantine intrigue against the army and that got obliterated in, in the CIA's words, "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century" (declassified US CIA Directorate of Intelligence research study, "Indonesia --1965: The Coup That Backfired", 1968). The CIA should know, since they gave a list of 5,000 targeted people to the army, but once they murdered the intellectual leaders, most of the victims were -- as often -- poor farmers. (See the interviews with US officials by Kathy Kadane, the American journalist, eg., Kathy Kadane, States News Service, "Ex-agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians; After 25 years, Americans speak of their role in exterminating Communist Party," San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990; also in Washington Post, May 21, 1990) .

Today there is no talk of revolution, but there's a lot of bitter complaining. Among poor people I've met, the terms of art are "dogs" for the POLRI police, and "sadists" for the TNI army, navy, air force and marines. Its a term the soldiers have no doubt heard themselves, since they actually, on their website, ran a photo of army officers giving gifts to children, over the memorable caption : "Is It True The TNI Is Sadist?" ( "Benarkah TNI Sadis?", web page: "Tentara Nasional Indonesia Angkatan Darat, The Indonesian Army, Galeri Foto, Arsip Foto, Juni, Agustus, Oktober," online as of September 7, 2005, but later wisely taken down).

But on this afternoon, despite all the talk of payoffs -- and, another matter of drug dealers supplied from on-high who are making the neighborhoods unlivable -- the most agitated discussion is about the cancellation of the THR (Tunjangan Hari Raya).

This is the holiday season. Muslim Idul Fitri is wrapping up, and Hindu Deepavali began on Thursday. Usually, people lucky enough to have a wage job -- and they are the elite of the poor -- count on an ostensibly mandatory holiday bonus equal to one month of wages, known as the THR ("count on" is an optimistic choice of words, since wage workers frequently go long stretches without being paid at all. At PPD, for example, a state bus company in the process of privatization, workers have gotten nothing for the past five months. Their most vocal union leaders have been arrested by POLRI, and blamed for the lack of payment. ["MNC Today," TV news, October 26, 2007]).

This year, at many factories and construction sites, the THR was abruptly canceled, this at a time when Indonesia has made its debut as a site for global speculative capital, and when the recycling of money from Aceh relief/ reconstruction is going so well for Indonesia's real rich people that in this town's streets there are easy sightings of new Mercedes and BMWs, and within shooting distance of this tin-roofed house there is going up a previously unheard-of thing: a world-luxury-brand hotel that is to be the tallest structure in the province (another topic of discussion is that unfortunate young laborer who just fell to his death from, they say, the seventh floor).

The THR cancellation was a blow to the gut, since if you want your kids to not be stunted or to not develop slow brains, you have to budget like a corporate Chief Financial Officer, you have to maintain cash-flow consistency. The key is never having more than a couple of days of hunger in a row, since during the early brain-development years that's when the damage gets done. Its rare to enter a poor household, including this one, that can claim to have always achieved that goal. When defining the difference between rakyat kecil like themselves and the really poor people, one mother in the house explained that rakyat kecil "are people who can eat every day."

But if you don't, its trouble for the small ones. So budgeting is huge: 'X' dime-equivalents for cooking oil; 'Y' for cooking kerosene; 'Z' for unhulled rice (four grades to choose from, depending on your level of poverty), and then, the big question, rice "pakai apa?," rice served with what? Chopped peppers, oil, spices, onions and garlic only? Maybe a little tofu or tempeh? But these are the holidays, there should be meat, or at least some salted mini-anchovies. If a thirteenth of your yearly income is suddenly snatched its hard to plan for or have such things, not to mention meeting the demands of excited kids, counting on gifts of crisp new 1000 Rupiah -- or, if you're richer -- 5000 Rupiah notes (9 US cents or 45 US cents) and, maybe, a new set of holiday clothes, a ball, or a set of pencils.

The blame for the yanking of the THR , in the view of some men who joined the discussion, fell on Vice President of Indonesia Yusuf Kalla and on the heavily ethnic-Chinese employers, ethnic thinking being popular everywhere in the world, but especially encouraged in Indonesia ever since the army took over during the 1960s slaughter.

But isn't the whole point of being a big employer to get what you can from your workers? The old Dutch colonialists used to draw-and-quarter unruly plantation hands, and even did the same to one of their own governors, who was deemed to have gone native. A US business newsletter once noted Indonesia as a good place to invest due to labor discipline due to "the underlying threat of force." When I first showed up in this neighborhood years ago excited people gathered round, asking if I was there surveying the ground to build a factory. They were disappointed when I said no, even though they had no reason to expect that it would be other than what we call a sweatshop -- 11 hour days, toxic air, molestation of female workers by the foremen, and sporadically paid wages that are not enough to keep a family eating.

But as the foreign corporate PR people love to point out -- their lips dripping with friendly cynicism -- local people LOVE those jobs, or, more precisely, they really do covet them (what the corporates fail to point out is that those relatively-higher-than-average coveted wages are still so absolutely low that they could, say, triple them, thereby keeping various children alive -- and still be making a killing).

Anyone who scores a sweatshop job here is considered to have hit the jackpot, so much so that there's a lot of griping that you need connections to get one. Likewise, I can't count the times that younger women here have asked me about the prospects for obtaining one of those servants' jobs in Malaysia or Singapore. This despite the well-known stories of rapes, beatings, confiscated passports and unpaid wages, fatal falls from strange high-rise apartments, and the percentage who are informed by their "calo" (agent/ fixer) upon arrival on foreign soil that their real job won't be cooking, cleaning, or cradling foreign babies, but, instead, having no-choice sex with yet-to-be-determined hundreds of foreign men.

Some are naive, but many are not. Those foreign wages are roughly six times higher. So if you want to keep the family babies away from too many brain-hunger days, as they used to say in the United States: you pays your money and you takes your chances (and that is literal, since you have to pay the agent to get the chance to become the servant).

One young man -- stick thin, with bulging arm veins, and, he said, sore and tired from lifting cement bags, even though he hadn't worked for many days -- mentioned that there had been a number of demos in response to the canceled THR. But he wasn't speaking as if the ground were shaking. The "orang kaya," rich people, still rule, backed up by all those US/ British/ Australian/ and -- soon -- Russian weapons of the TNI/POLRI.

But there's interesting news coming out of China, and it concerns the balance of power, the balance of power between those who merely want more money and those whose bodies need it.

For the first time in a long time there may now be upward pressure on world wages, since China's market, which has been pulling them down, may now be starting to push them up. (for part of the story see, for example, Tom Mitchell and Geoff Dyer, "Heat in the workshop: The 'China price' is under upward pressure," Financial Times, October 15, 2007).

If this is true, and those tsunami-like ripples start emanating through the global market, when they wash ashore in Indonesia, and other places, it could make for interesting times. The creation and distribution of wealth has long been a cold maneuver. Who gets depends in large part on who can get, whether they're in position to do so. Part of that positioning depends on, to begin with, the crossing of certain thresholds: enough infant (and prenatal) food to make your brain quick, enough later food to make you strong, enough health protection to keep you still strong, enough education to make you a reader, enough housing to keep you safe from animals, thugs, and floods, enough sanitation to drain your emissions, enough clean water to make you happy and relaxed instead of sick, enough energy and time to think, and then -- more grandly -- enough of a labor shortage/ wage situation to give you enough leverage vis a vis the rich so that you can get enough wealth to cross those thresholds, and then begin the good stuff.

Its always chancy to rely on outside agency, especially on something that might not get there (eg., the China wage current, though fundamental, will be facing pull-down crosscurrents, like the WTO trade regime, and rising world food prices due to the increasing use of food crops and fungible land for biofuel), but the ugly reality is that if you're spent and drowning, you'll drown unless somebody (or something) intervenes and throws you a line.

So if some poor people get lucky and the market finally temporarily starts to break their way, that fortunate appearance of some meat on the rice could set the stage for bigger things, like, say, giving more people a chance to think and talk about doing more than complaining.

But one of the points about a pre-civilized world order, like the one we live in today, is that people are dying unnecessarily every day, every hour, every minute.

So whatever happens with regard to market wages, and with regard to willed social change, it will happen too late for the prematurely dead, too late for the already stunted, and perhaps even too late for many of the prematurely dying.

That tukang baca lady who once spoke of arranging houses and schooling for all is now resting (bodily) by the riverside, and there are loved ones of hers in this house who will probably also be gone soon, perhaps by next holiday season. The question is, which ones? But nobody speculates on that. They all say its up to God. "God selects, not us."

But even if that is true, there is the co-existent fact that today's world has enough liquid capital to prevent the preventable deaths. There is, in fact, so much wealth washing around that if a mere fraction of it were well-shifted, it could bring everyone who needs it above those bodily thresholds listed above.

Imagine, a world of people whose brains are OK. Who aren't always sick. Who are strong enough to do a good job and literate enough to write about it. Its what an individualist in North America might call a level playing field. And what the people in this house might call an implausible paradise.

But rather than being in the hands of people whose bodies need it, that life-saving/ transforming money in question is in the hands of people who merely want it. Those holders of the potentially life-altering money constitute a relative handful of the world's inhabitants, and they include not just the rulers, but also the global middle class.

Among that handful also reside the ones who have made the unexamined decision to forgo enforcement of the murder laws when it comes to official actions by officials, thereby clearing the way for things like arming armies and police that like to kill civilians.

For those in this rich, controlling, world minority there are decisions to be made. Decisions like whether to shift a little cash or let the dying die. And decisions like whether we're ready to be even-handed in enforcing the murder laws.

For these rich ones, solving the solvable worldwide problem of mass, unnecessary death is a matter of some thinking, some action -- perhaps, for some, various kinds of sacrifice -- but little risk-of-life to speak of and, indeed, not even many real encounters with gratuitous death.

But for the poor majority in the world, those whose babies' brain-growth clocks are ticking, it is a matter of some tougher stuff, like occasionally staring down gun barrels and deciding whether or not to risk your -- and/or your family's -- life, but also, much more fundamentally, learning how to cope with, and overcome, the frequent, needless, ridiculous, death that is the background music of daily life. It can be pretty exciting and inspiring to be shot at by an oppressor. But it can tear your soul out from the inside to have a loved one die too soon.

Earlier this year, before he got locked up and pulled the family into the vortex, that young man sat in this very room and tried to console an inconsolable relative. Evidently tired of the weeping before him, he suddenly rose from his crouch, and, to the astonishment of everyone -- this is a very quiet young man -- he suddenly launched into a declamation on the matter of death and living. "These eyes can only emit tears," he said. "They are incapable of emitting blood" (the point being that crying merely produces tears, which are useless salty water, as opposed to producing something useful, like blood, which is the stuff of life). "Do not be sad! We cannot be crushed by grief! This world still exists! There are still tasks to be performed" he said. "We must remember that."

As an answer to grief, it was helpful, but insufficient. But as a statement of political outlook, the kid definitely had a point.

The Bush Standard: If You Aid a Terrorist You Are a Terrorist. An Al Jazeera Debate Re. Accountability for Terrorism.

Unofficial Transcript
101 East
10.31.2007 | Aljazeera -- International English Edition
(first aired Oct. 25, 2007)

TEYMOOR NABILI: In recent years, Indonesian authorities have arrested or killed some 300 alleged Islamic militants, and in June of this year they announced their biggest success to date: the arrest of Abu Dujana, the alleged head of the military wing of Jemaah Islamiyah. Now, these successes have been attributed to a new focus on counterterrorism using elite units within the police force and helped by arms and
training from Western governments. But those same elite units have been implicated in a catalogue of human rights abuses and criminal activity.

I'm Teymoor Nabili, and on this edition of 101 East we look inside Indonesia's antiterrorism police.

BRIMOB is one of the oldest special operations units within the Indonesian police force, and within BRIMOB itself, the newer units, Detachment 88 and Gegana, are spearheading the current fight against terrorism. 101 East has been granted rare access to BRIMOB and Gegana training. Fawziah Ibrahim [phon.] reports.

FAWZIAH IBRAHIM: They're Indonesia's frontline in the war on terror, the country's top police force in training. They're part of the mobile brigade better known by its acronym BRIMOB. They're trained in anti-terror and bomb-disposal operations and are deployed in emergency situations. Being part of the 34,000-strong BRIMOB means being part of an elite force.

BRIMOB TRAINER: [translated] If you love BRIMOB, clap your hands. If you love BRIMOB, stomp your foot. If you love BRIMOB, and you really want to show it, if you love

BRIMOB, laugh out loud

FAWZIAH IBRAHIM: BRIMOB is essentially a police unit, but one trained along military lines. It's used in domestic security and defense operations. Its two main anti-terror units, Gegana and Detachment 88, have been credited with crippling the Jemaah Islamiyah terror network in Indonesia. Several raids conducted by the units in recent years have resulted in the deaths or arrests of key JI members.
But with the accolades come allegations of human right abuse. Activists have continuously accused BRIMOB of torture, indiscriminate killings and abuse of civilians in restive areas like Aceh, East Timor and Poso.

BILLAH (Fmr Nat Human Rights Commissioner): The action and also the paradigm behind police men is more or less the same as the army, so they easily treated the others as enemy. So they took and killed other people [inaudible] of a military person easily.

FAWZIAH IBRAHIM: A recent Human Rights Watch report is typical of the abuse allegations against BRIMOB. HRW's investigations in the province of Papua turned up fourteen cases of alleged human rights violations, including rape, murder, torture and ill treatment. The report claims the police unit had used excessive, brutal and lethal force against civilians while seeking out militants. HRW goes on to accuse BRIMOB of encouraging a culture of impunity and that members continue to act as if they are above the law.

In response, BRIMOB has promised to conduct its own investigations into the allegations and to punish those found guilty. The force is keen to clean up its tarnished image and insists they have revised their operations.

STEVANUS YULIAN (Head of BRIMOB): [translated] Our doctrine has changed. Our motto is now: “My heart and soul for all of humanity.” It's important that we set a good example. We have an internal judicial process, so if anyone targets citizens or violates human rights or is found to have committed torture, they will face our judicial process. If they're guilty, they'll be punished. We feel that if you commit a crime, you should face the consequences.

FAWZIAH IBRAHIM: Some observers, however, say BRIMOB may have been pressured to change its tactics by sponsors who can no longer ignore the reports of abuse. Indonesia's elite police force is backed by countries like the United States and Australia in their fight against terrorists.

STEVANUS YULIAN: [translated] Yes, we receive help from America in the form of antiterrorism training. We conduct exercises with the ICRC and Germany's defense force. When it comes to our weapons, we buy them through credit export and soft loans from Britain and Australia.

ANSYAAD MBAI (Indonesian Counter-Terror Body): The funding is relative. There is no definite number of the funding, but we just need the training, the training for this special team. I don't want to say the number of the funding, and I don't know. I don't know that.

FAWZIAH IBRAHIM: While these foreign sponsors may be uncomfortable with the level of accountability of Indonesia's security forces, a recent study was more critical. A report co-authored by the Indonesian Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies found the security sector has been too slow to implement changes legislated over five years ago. For some, the reforms have come too late.

Twenty-five-year-old Ponimin is paralyzed from the waist down. He says he was shot by BRIMOB police seven years ago during a riot in his village. Ponimin had been trying to escape the violence when he felt the bullet hit him, causing him to fall into a ditch. That's when seven BRIMOB policemen turned on him.

PONIMIN (BRIMOB Victim): [translated] They beat me with their hands and legs. They pressed the gun barrel to my head so hard it left an imprint on my skin. I was in so much pain that it got to the point where I could not feel any more pain, because the attack was so savage. They took turns hitting me, treating me like a ball. They pulled me out of the ditch by my jacket. They kept shouting, “Let him die!” At the same time, I was beaten on my left thigh. Shortly after that, I was shot again and beaten some more. At that point, I left my fate to God. I was prepared to die, because I was at their mercy. In that situation, there was nothing I could do.

FAWZIAH IBRAHIM: Ponimin was eventually rescued by a villager and taken to safety. He's angry that none of the BRIMOB policemen who attacked him have been brought to justice.

PONIMIN: [translated] It's always the little people like me who will always lose out, and the more important people like them will always win.

FAWZIAH IBRAHIM: Ponimin remains skeptical about the nation's security forces' ability to reform. And until ordinary Indonesians are convinced that they have changed, they'll run the risk of being seen as a threat rather than a protector of the people.

TEYMOOR NABILI: I'm joined in the studio today by Allan Nairn, an American investigative journalist who has testified about Indonesian police and military before US Congress; Robert Lowry is a retired lieutenant colonel from Australia and a graduate of the Indonesian Army Command and Staff College; and also by Noor Huda Ismail, an Indonesian security expert who has carried out extensive research on jihadist networks and religious extremism. We also invited a representative of the Indonesian police to take part in this discussion, but they declined that offer.
Gentlemen, to you I say welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

ROBERT LOWRY: Thank you.

ALLAN NAIRN: Thank you.

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: Thank you.

TEYMOOR NABILI: Bob, let me begin with you, if I might. Let's start from a premise that there is a significant terror threat in Indonesia that needs to be addressed. Is the way that it's being addressed appropriate?

ROBERT LOWRY: It seems to be quite effective at the moment, both from the point of view of law enforcement, through BRIMOB and other police activities, especially police intelligence activities.

TEYMOOR NABILI: You say it's effective, and we've seen a number of high-profile arrests, but what I'm really asking is, the structure of the approach, is this, as a military person, something that you think, as a textbook exercise, is effective?

ROBERT LOWRY: I think there's no doubt that it is effective, because they're also looking at the social side through the religious organizations in Indonesia. But if we turn to another aspect of that is -- and the reform of the security sector, then that is going very, very slowly, and we need to look at why that is so.

TEYMOOR NABILI: To you, Noor Huda Ismail, you've studied the terrorism situation from the inside perspective. What do you think? Is the approach being taken an effective one, and is it necessarily yielding any result in terms of the cultural approach that Bob has mentioned?

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: Gradually, I think the Indonesian police started to learn how to handle this terrorist network. From the first Bali bombing, for instance, they arrested them and then tortured them, and then they didn't get a lot of information from -- they cannot get crucial information from the arrests. But for the next arrest, they started to learn, and they used family, even reformed JI members, to actually talk to the jihadists themselves.

TEYMOOR NABILI: So you're saying that, in fact, the military is much more than simply a military operation. There is a great deal of --

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: Yes, there is a gradual change. You know, initially they just arrest them, use forces and then so -- but they failed to extract so much information. But gradually, they start to pick up and understanding the social -- well, like psychological aspect of this terrorist group.

TEYMOOR NABILI: And, yes, as was pointed out in that film, Allan, we still have any number of accusations of human rights abuses and all manner of illegitimate activity
.
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it's massive. We have to be objective when we're talking about terrorism. President Bush essentially defines “terrorism” as Muslim jihadists who kill Westerners. But if you use a more fair and accurate definition of “terrorism,” which is even the one used in the USA PATRIOT Act, it's anyone who kills civilians for political purposes. And by that definition, the main terrorist threat in Indonesia comes not from the fanatics like the Bali bombers, who have killed hundreds of civilians, but from the Indonesian military and police forces themselves, who have killed hundreds of thousands.

When they seized power in Indonesia in '65-'67, they killed anywhere from 400,000 to a million civilians. The New York Times's James Reston, the top commentator there, called that a “gleam of light in Asia.” When they invaded East Timor, they did it with the personal go-ahead of President Ford and Henry Kissinger. They killed a third of the Timorese population.

In more recent years, they've done similar mass slaughter operations in Aceh, now more recently in Papua. They've done provocation operations in the Moluccas, where they set Christian and Muslim peasants against each other, in which thousands have died. BRIMOB itself, which is just one of many very menacing security forces, was notorious for using checkpoints in Aceh to take women and rape, and they're now doing political rapes in Papua. They're the larger threat.

TEYMOOR NABILI: Well, what we have here is a circumstance under which we've got two issues that need to be addressed. That is, now, Bob, first the terrorism and the success against terror, the terrorist threat, which it seems is yielding some results. But the ancillary to that is, when they're not fighting terrorists, they're doing all manner of other activities. How do you control that in a military?

ROBERT LOWRY: Well, there are a number of ways. I mean, we've got to recognize that Indonesia is in the transition to democracy. It didn't suddenly become a democracy overnight. And so, lots of things have got to be put in place, like the legislation, like the supervision, like a reform of the whole concept of policing in Indonesia. And they've been very slow. For example, the law provides for a national police commission to supervise the police and to supervise the breaches of discipline, etc., and make sure they're investigated. But that commission, headed by the coordinating minister for security, has not actually been -- although it's established and people have been appointed, it's not functional. So there's no real supervision by an external body of the actions of the police.

TEYMOOR NABILI: The question we really need to address is, to what extent is other people who are enforcing and legitimizing these forces to be held responsible for the kind of activities the forces actually perpetrate outside of their duties. We'll address that question in just a moment. We're going to have to take a short break. We'll be right back with this discussion, and we'll take a look inside Gegana. We'll hear from one officer what it's like working for Indonesian police's special operations unit.

[break]

TEYMOOR NABILI: Welcome back to 101 East, where we are discussing the role of Indonesia's anti-terror police force. One of BRIMOB's branches is Gegana, a special operations unit whose duties include counterterrorism, search and rescue, and bomb disposal. It also has a tarnished human rights record. So, what sort of person works for Gegana? We've spoken to one anti-terror policeman from the brigade. Here's his story.

GANAJAYA (Gegana Detachment): [translated] My name is Ganajaya. I'm forty years old. I work as a policeman with BRIMOB, specifically with the special operations unit Gegana. I joined BRIMOB because it's always been my ambition to work for them. When I was much younger, I wanted to join the military, but after I entered the academy I became qualified to join the police. And within the police force, there was BRIMOB, so I chose to join the BRIMOB unit.

The job of a policeman is very honorable, because we provide protection and we serve the community. We are always deployed to trouble areas to deal with conflict between rival groups. We go to places like Aceh, Poso, Ambon and Papua. But to be honest, the most satisfying aspect of my job is fighting terrorism. It's not because I enjoy fighting the terrorists, but because we are able to stop terrorist activities.
Terrorists are people who are angry, or they're suffering from poverty or have ideologies that are not shared by the rest of the nation. They feel the need to take up arms to further their cause. Regardless of their motive, we fight them, because we are sworn to fight crime.

My team, as part of Gegana, never feels fear when fighting terrorists. We are not afraid, because every day we take part in exercises that prepare us to face such dangerous situations, whether on a national or international scale.

As a member of BRIMOB, which is part of the national police, I am aware of the past abuses our unit has been linked to. We are trying to improve ourselves. The leadership is also trying to implement a program and a culture of policing ourselves, so we can move ahead. The police unit of the past is very different from the present brigade.

TEYMOOR NABILI: And in the studio today, Allan Nairn, Robert Lowry and Noor Huda Ismail. Let's get into the issue we were mentioning just before the break, and that is the human rights side of the affair. Now, how bad do you think the accusations are?

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: I think it's very bad, if you look at, you know, all the numbers of the victims of these human rights by this police section, you know?

TEYMOOR NABILI: But, I mean, you've already said that a lot of this is down to the absence of civil institutions within Indonesia. So how do you propose it's solved?

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: I think we need to have a more democratic atmosphere, where we can actually have a civil society that actually can control, can open up a discussion. Like you already mentioned, that most of the top leaders who were actually involved in this human right atrocity are still free, and most of the effort to curb the problem on human right only targeted the lower levels. So that's what we need.

TEYMOOR NABILI: Allan, to what extent should we hold the funders of these organizations responsible, to a large extent Western governments? We've seen this pattern before, where Western governments take a short-term approach to fighting a certain threat in a certain place and the long-term consequences are not addressed. Are the Western governments turning a blind eye to these abuses?

ALLAN NAIRN: I think you can use President Bush's standard: he says if you aid a terrorist, you are a terrorist. The US has aided the TNI, Polri, the Indonesian armed forces and police, as they've carried out massive terrorist killings, so therefore the US officials who have done that, as well as the Australian officials, the European officials, they have to be held accountable, as well.

If we enforce the murder laws, if we had a civilized world order, these people would be facing trials for crimes against humanity, Indonesians and Americans and other Westerners, as well.

TEYMOOR NABILI: A lot of people argue that right now we are reaping the whirlwind of exactly the same practice that happened in Pakistan: all the arms that were pumped into Pakistan twenty years ago are coming back to haunt us. Is this going to happen in Indonesia?

ROBERT LOWRY: No, because the external governments are actually trying to improve the quality of the performance of the Indonesian police in this particular aspect, though we should emphasize --

TEYMOOR NABILI: That is the top line, but the bottom line, the actual effect, is human rights abuse.

ROBERT LOWRY: But they were always going on, anyway, under the authoritarian regimes of the Suharto era. And as I said before, you can't change these things suddenly. And you have to ask yourself, what is the priority of the Indonesian government, in terms of the transition? And if we look at the present presidency, for example, the priority is obviously economic growth, because without economic growth he doesn't have the taxes to pay public servants, the police and the military, to the point where they don't have to be involved in criminal activity.

TEYMOOR NABILI: Again, practical considerations, and all correct, but, Allan, address the point.

ALLAN NAIRN: You see, foreign training actually makes matters worse, because if you have a bad force, a force with a bad mission, if you make them more technically proficient, they're even more dangerous. They kill people more effectively. If you have a criminal, it's better if he's bumbling. You don't want him to be good at his job.

There are basically two roads to a solution, as you asked before. One, the main action, obviously has to come from the Indonesians themselves, who rise for justice. And thousands have died trying to do that. And the second aspect is that the foreign accomplices, facilitators of these crimes, in the US and Europe and Australia, they have to cut them off and themselves be brought to justice.

TEYMOOR NABILI: Is there -- within Indonesia, is there any message being received by the people who are selling arms, the soft loans that are coming from Britain and the United States? Is there any message attached to those saying, look, we are concerned about the potential for the downside here, or do they just --

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: Yeah, this is always the problem with this -- to see this problem. There's a double standard of, I said to you, the double standard of the West. You know, I'll give you the money and all the infrastructure, as long as you fight our enemy. But I don't care about with your human rights inside your country. So this is the problem. You have to address this issue together, the short term and the long term.

TEYMOOR NABILI: Is there a double standard, Bob?

ROBERT LOWRY: No, I don't believe that there is. Most of this problem affects Indonesia just as much as it affects the rest of the world. For example, Indonesia can't have economic growth if it's got terrorism units active in its own country. It won't attract the foreign investment it needs to do the reforms it needs to do.

TEYMOOR NABILI: But should these arms shipments not come with some kind of moral attachment, some suggestion?

ROBERT LOWRY: Well, they actually do. From seven or eight years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross has had teams in there teaching international human rights law, etc. The problem is that there isn't the infrastructure within the country to enforce the laws that actually exist. And that's the issue we face at the moment. That's why I say we've got to go back to why that is the case. Why isn't the government pressing ahead with reforms in the security sector?

TEYMOOR NABILI: Well, let me put that to you, Noor.

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: OK.

TEYMOOR NABILI: Why isn't the government pressing ahead with reforms in the security sector?

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: Because, of course, the rampant corruption inside the justice system, you know. Because once the police who has such a high position, they will have access to the law, so this is the problem.

ALLAN NAIRN: But the fundamental point is that while these jihadist terrorists are despicable -- they're criminals, they kill hundreds -- the TNI and Polri, the Indonesian security forces, they've killed hundreds of thousands.

And another aspect that's very important, apart from the mass slaughters in places like Timor, Aceh, Papua, the Moluccas, there's also the daily life of the poor. For many poor communities in Indonesia, it's like living in occupied territory, with the police and the preman, the police- and military-linked thugs. They sell drugs. They do extortion rackets. There's no law. If someone robs your house, you can't go to the police. The police will demand bribe money from you. The police are hired by rich people to tear down poor neighborhoods, to evict poor women from their markets so new developments can be put up. People are living without basic law and order, --

TEYMOOR NABILI: A culture of immunity, as Human Rights Watch called it.

ALLAN NAIRN: -- and it's the police who are the daily oppressors, completely apart from larger politics.

TEYMOOR NABILI: Well, let's finish off with this issue, then: the reform is the duty of the government, and the Western governments and outsiders have no responsibilities here; do you agree with that?

NOOR HUDA ISMAIL: Yes, I think so. I mean, like, there is no such a strong commitment from Indonesian government to look at this security reform as such a top priority. For instance, let us use terrorism as one of the issues. If you look at all the priority of the president candidates, all the politicians, they don't mention even terrorists as part of their programs, you know, part of top list of their priority. Again, economics and economics.

TEYMOOR NABILI: OK, well, that being the case, then, presumably we can just look forward to continued human rights abuses and a continued culture of immunity.

ALLAN NAIRN: So long as the West keeps backing them. The Clinton White House said of Suharto, “He's our kind of guy.” And Suharto is gone, but recently Bush and Condoleezza Rice overrode the US Congress and are starting to restore military aid to the Indonesian military. It's putting the lives of brave Indonesians who try to speak up for justice, who try to speak up for the poor, it's putting them on the line.

ROBERT LOWRY: It is a mistake to say the Indonesian government is puppets of the United States, though, you have to say that. I mean --

ALLAN NAIRN: They're not puppets; they're partners, and they're being sponsored by the US.

ROBERT LOWRY: Well, partners, but they bear the major responsibility for the actions that occur in their country, and they would be the last to claim that they're directed by foreign governments, and quite rightly so.

ALLAN NAIRN: Oh, no, they're not being directed, but the one who pulls the trigger is guilty, as is the one who supplies the gun and the training.

TEYMOOR NABILI: OK, there we will have to leave it. Gentlemen, thank you all for joining me today. That's all we have time for on this edition of 101 East. Until next time, goodbye.



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Legal Arms for Illegal Purposes: A Note on the Aceh Militias

In Central Aceh, the TNI has an ethnic Javanese and Gayo militia force that is estimated to be larger than the Aceh-wide GAM. An investigator who speaks the local Gayo language puts their strength at 12,000 people and 6,000 weapons -- some homemade, some military issue. The Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Indonesia and GAM has a clause (4.9) for the "decommissioning of all illegal arms" but only those held by "illegal groups and parties," and under Indonesian law state-organized militias can be construed as legal.

Arms held by the TNI - POLRI are, of course, implicitly defined as legal, a privilege which every country in the world grants to its security forces. Some theorists say that the very definition of a state is its monopoly on legitimate violence. So the state's arms are always legal, even if routinely used for illegal acts like murder and theft, or to carry out policies like illegal invasions or occupations.

Good Cop - Bad Cop Blackmail on Aceh: The Advantages of Seeming Crazy

The TNI - POLRI is now saying that they have about 35,000 men in Aceh, which, if true, would mean that under the Helsinki deal with GAM signed yesterday they will be temporarily withdrawing about 32% of their troops, not much more than a normal rotation.

It is often said that there are more TNI - POLRI bases than there are schools or mosques in Aceh, and traveling along the roads and counting suggests that in many zones that might well be true. In populated areas of the main Medan - Banda Aceh road one encounters a marked base or post every few hundred meters, not including the unmarked Intel and Kopassus bases, which are sometimes known to residents. In Langsa, plainclothes Kopassus officers can be seen smoking in their undershirts outside a run-down commercial building where local civil servants have been dragged in and had their faces mauled on suspicion of giving food to GAM.

The Kopassus men have money and are wordly; they move all over the archipelago, and their foreign trainers have included Americans, Australians, Germans, and Taiwanese. But it is the TNI's cruder street level militias -- not counted in official troop numbers -- that are now in the spotlight since people fear that if the Jakarta generals don't get enough payoff from the GAM surrender deal, they may unleash the militias in order to provoke the GAM into taking up arms again.

That scenario may be unlikely, but everyone knows from experience in Timor and elsewhere that it is not impossible, and that hanging possibility of supra-normal terror creates leverage for TNI - POLRI, both within Aceh and in their lobbying for restored aid overseas.

It is a classic good cop - bad cop con: the smooth lobbyists (like the President, Gen. Susilo, and Juwono Sudarsono, the defense minister) say to the foreigners: 'Look, these generals are crazy! You'd better buy them off with aid, or God know what they'll do. And as much as I'd like to stop them I can't be responsible for their actions. '

So on top of the continuing rule by their oppressors there's an implicit blackmail hanging over Aceh: if the generals don't get what they want -- like restored US guns and money -- they may take it out on Aceh and burn it, as they did to Timor in 1999.

Kejelasan tercapai, Penindas bertahan di tempat: kesepakatan yang melucuti senjata sepihak di Aceh

Hari ini (15 Agustus 2005), Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) akan menandatangani kesepakatan dengan pemerintah Indonesia. Dengan ini mereka sepakat untuk meletakkan senjata dan menerima amnesti, uang dan tanah pertanian. Mereka akan diizinkan membentuk partai politik lokal dan sebagai imbalannya, membuat janji politik untuk diam: dalam hukum Indonesia, partai ini tidak akan diizinkan untuk menganjurkan apa yang selama ini menjadi pendiriam GAM-kemerdekaan untuk Aceh, atau sekurang-kurangnya pemilihan melalui referendum mengenai kemerdekaan.

TNI-POLRI, yang telah membunuh jutaan warga sipil Aceh (GAM juga melakukan pembunuhan, tetapi dalam jumlah yang jauh lebih kecil), sementara akan menarik beberapa pasukannya, tetapi dalam jangka panjang berhak untuk mengirimnya kembali ke Aceh sekehendaknya karena Jakarta tetap menjadi penguasa di Aceh.

Sekarang pun, dalam bulan-bulan transisi mendatang, ketika beberapa ratus monitor asing akan hadir, pasukan-pasukan dari satuan-satuan militer dan polisi yang dikenal paling ganas masih berada di Aceh: operator-operator Intel yang menyelenggarakan rumah-rumah penyiksaan, personel Angkatan Udara yang telah menjatuhkan bom di desa-desa, dan BRIMOB yang melakukan penculikan dan perkosaan di berbagai checkpoint boleh tetap di sana selama secara teknis diklasifikasi sebagai unsur-unsur "organik." Dan di luar butir-butir formal kesepakatan ini-sebagaimana diakui baik oleh aktivis maupun kalangan militer-Kopassus, pasukan khusus yang dilatih oleh AS, pasukan yang paling ditakuti, juga tetap berada di Aceh, bergerak secara terselubung dan menerapkan "taktik dan teknik" dengan "menteror" dan "penculikan", seperti dicantumkan dalam salah satu pedoman pelatihan rahasia mereka (Buku Petunjuk tentang Sandi Yudha TNI AD, Nomor: 43-B-01).

Kesepakatan ini disajikan sebagai penarikan TNI dan kesepakatan perdamaian untuk Aceh. Tetapi sesungguhnya kesepakatan ini tidak memenuhi kedua butir tersebut - TNI-POLRI akan bertahan di Aceh dan berhak mempertahankan senjata dan menggunakan sekendaknya -dan mereka yang selama ini merupakan pelanggar perdamaian utama, melakukan sebagian besar pembunuhan warga sipil, penyiksaan, pembakaran, perkosaan, penghilangan, pencurian, pemerasan dan penahanan tanpa dasar hukum.

Namun kesepakatan ini memang membawa perubahan besar karena mematikan langkah GAM dan dengan demikian membantu memperjelas situasi: sekarang tak dapat disangkal lagi bahwa keadaannya ialah TNI-POLRI versus warga-warga sipil. Inilah yang senantiasa menjadi inti kehidupan politik di Aceh modern, yang tidak dilihat dunia luar karena GAM secara sia-sia menembaki penindas dan mengalihkan perhatian pihak luar (yang memang sudah seadanya saja) dari pembunuhan warga-warga sipil yang dilakukan TNI-POLRI.

GAM pantas mendapat pujian karena meletakkan senjata. Seharusnya sudah lama mereka melakukannya. Selama ini mereka hanya memperburuk permasalahannya, dan sekarang mereka telah pergi dan berbagai peluang terbuka. Namun, tindakan menegasi diri itu tidak boleh disalah-artikan sebagai penyelesaian masalah Aceh, dan yang secara de facto menjadi janji tutup mulut juga tidak boleh disalah-artikan sebagai sikap yang berlaku bagi masyarakat Aceh sebagai keseluruhan.

Pada bulan November 1999, masyarakat Aceh menyelenggarakan demonstrasi besar yang, dilihat secara proporsional merupakan salah satu demonstrasi terbesar dalam sejarah dunia. Mungkin seperempat penduduk Aceh memasuki Banda Aceh dan secara damai menyuarakan tuntutan untuk referendum. TNI-POLRI yang tidak cukup mengantisipasi kejadian ini, menghancurkan gerakan warga sipil ini karena tahu bahwa meski mereka tidak akan kalah secara militer dalam perang tembak-menembak melawan GAM, mereka mungkin sekali kalah secara politik apabila dunia sempat mendengar suara-suara damai Aceh itu.

Hal itu tidak terjadi. Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, suara internasional Aceh saat itu, yang telah memberi kesaksian di Kongres AS, disiksa hingga mati ketika pulang (jenazahnya ditemukan bulan September 2000). Suara-suara lain dibunuh, ditahan atau menjadi eksil, dan baru dengan tsunami bulan Desember 2004, untuk pertama kalinya dunia mulai mengetahui Aceh.

Secara legal dan militer, orang-orang Aceh masih tersubordinasi seperti dahulu. Meskipun kesepakatan perdamaian memuat dua rujukan pada perjanjian-perjanjian PBB mengenai hak-hak sipil dan politik dan membentukan institusi lokal seperti pengadilah HAM (tanpa wewenang yang tercantum secara khusus), hukum-hukum represif yang mengikat semua orang Indonesia juga masih berlaku bagi orang Aceh. Dan, lebih penting lagi, TNI-POLRI-yang secara efektif masih berdiri di luar hukum-masih menduduki wilayah Aceh.

Namun, dilihat secara dingin dan pragmatis, dengan tersisihkannya GAM, ada peluang bagi suara-suara perlawanan yang meski masih tertindas mungkin bisa menjadi produktif secara politis. Muhamad Nazar, aktifis sipil yang paling dikenal-yang dinilai terlalu besar untuk dibunuh-dipenjarakan karena menganjurkan referendum dalam pidatonya di desa. Ada berita informal bahwa ia akan dibebaskan, tetapi apabila ia menyampaikan isi pidato yang sama, ia bisa dipenjarakan sekali lagi-atau mengalami nasih yang lebih buruk. Tetapi dalam masa paska-GAM ini, akan terbuka kemungkinan bahwa pengorbanan seperti itu akan menarik perhatian luar yang berarti.

Perhatian seperti itulah yang memungkinkan Timor Timur memperoleh kemerdekaannya dalam kondisi yang berbeda. Tetapi bagi Aceh, hal itu lebih sulit karena secara historis Aceh menjadi bagian Indonesia (dan sudah berdiri bahkan sebelum ada Indonesia), sementara Timor Timur merupakan wilayah asing yang di-invasi oleh Indonesia dengan dukungan AS pada tahun 1975. Kehilangan sepertiga dari penduduknya dalam pembantaian oleh TNI-POLRI tidak menghasilkan apa-apa bagi masyarakat Timor sampai pada pembantaian Dili tahun 1991 menarik perhatian luar dan pengakuan bahwa ini merupakan kasus pembunuhan kaum sipil oleh militer yang tidak dapat dibenarkan.

Aceh merupakan kasus serupa, dan orang-orang Aceh juga banyak yang mati sia-sia. Kalau mereka terus berbicara menuntut referendum, kemungkinan besar mereka akan terus mati, tetapi sekarang mungkin mereka bisa memperoleh sesuatu dari pengorbanan itu karena situasi tidak lagi ditutupi kabut konflik bersenjata antara TNI-POLRI dan GAM, sehingga represi sepihak yang dilakukan TNI-POLRI akan menjadi gamblang.

Yang mungkin mereka peroleh ialah publisiti yang melemahkan TNI/POLRI dan aparat pemerintahan Indonesia yang umumnya represif. Dan pelemahan seperti itu merupakan satu-satunya harapan akan tercapainya demokrasi, kebebasan ataupun keadilan di Aceh dan di Indonesia secara keseluruhan. Tetapi institusi-institusi represif itu hanya akan menjadi lemah kalau bisa dicegah penggunaan kesepakatan ini oleh AS, Eropa, Australia dan kekuatan-kekuatan luar lain untuk berusaha memaksakan pengembalian militer dan/atau menambah bantuan asing bagi militer dan polisi. Dapat dikatakan bahwa dihentikannya bantuan militer atas desakan akar-rumput membuka jalan untuk berakhirnya pendudukan Timor Timur, dan sebelum itu, jatuhnya Jend. Suharto, diktator yang didukung AS.

Jadi, apakah kesepakatan ini membantu atau merugikan akan banyak tergantung juga pada perilaku pihak-pihak luar, dan justru risiko-risiko dan kerumitan seperti ini yang menyebabkan beberapa orang jenderal TNI-POLRI enggan menerimanya. Banyak liputan pers dan spekulasi akar-rumput di Aceh berpusat pada apakah TNI-POLRI dan, bisa juga dikatakan pejuang lapangan GAM, akan mematuhi kesepakatan. Bagi banyak orang GAM, kesepakatan ini merupakan obat yang pahit. Merekalah, dan bukan pembunuh-pembunuh berskala besar, yang harus meletakkan senjata, melepaskan tujuannya dan merendahkan diri di hadapan negara musuh. Tetapi pada saat yang sama mereka akan memperoleh amnesti dan di atas kertas akan bebas pulang ke rumah masing=masing. Bagi TNI-POLRI, nampaknya sebagai kemenangan: mereka memperoleh senjata api dan hak untuk berkuasa, sementara Aceh memperoleh bendera lokal. Tetapi konflik dengan GAM ini sangat menguntungkan jenderal-jenderal Jakarta karena telah memberi pembenaran pada dominasi mereka di Indonesia dan menjadikan banyak jutawan. Mudah sekali melihat kenapa banyak di antara mereka akan menyesal dengan perginya GAM yang bersenjata.

Tetapi Presiden Indonesia, Jend. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono-yang melakukan supervisi pada represi dan darurat militer di Aceh di bawah Presiden yang lalu, Megawati Sukarnoputri-mempunyai pandangan yang lebih strategis. Ia nampaknya menyadari bahwa meskipun TNI membutuhkan perang bersenjata dua pihak untuk membenarkan dirinya pada masyarakat Indonesia, TNI tidak membutuhkan konflik bersenjata lebih banyak lagi. (Baru-baru ini militer mengirim 15.000 pasukan Kostrad dan Kopassus ke Papua yang sangat tertindas, di mana terdapat gerakan perlawanan bersenjata ringan, dan militer masih memprovokasi kekerasan Muslim lawan Kristen di kepulauan utara Indonesia tengah), dan bahwa hilangnya uang surplus yang dapat dicuri dari Aceh sebagai zona perang bisa diimbangi dengan uang yang dapat dicuri dari penambahan bantuan tsunami, serta kekuasaan yang dapat diperoleh kembali oleh TNI-POLRI secara keseluruhan dengan bantuan militer dan polisi dari luar. (Militer dan polisi juga bisa berharap akan melanjutkan proyek-proyek gelapnya di Aceh dan Sumatra Utara, termasuk penebangan ilegal, ganja, prostitusi, hijacking, pemerasan, "keamanan" dan landasan perikanan lepas pantai yang menggunakan anak-anak yang dipaksa kerja). Jend. Susilo juga yang mengatakan bahwa "menuntut referendum" di Aceh "dianggap sebagai tindak pidana melawan negara" (Jakarta Post, 24 Desember 2003), dan prinsip itu masih akan dipaksakan dengan kekerasan, tetapi nampaknya ia berharap bahwa kesepakatan ini sekarang memungkinkan pihak luar negeri melihat bahwa Jakarta telah berubah.

Kalau ternyata Jend. Susilo benar, dan bahwa kesepakatan ini membawa sumberdaya dan kekuatan baru bagi TNI-POLRI, maka keluhan jenderal-jenderalnya tidak akan berakar, dan kesepakatan ini akan menjadi malapetaka bagi Indonesia dan Aceh. Tetapi para petinggi militer sekarang masih mempunyai alasan kedua untuk prihatin: seorang penasihat bagi Yusuf Kalla, wakil presiden Indonesia yang juga seorang pengusaha, yang merupakan pemain utama di balik kesepakatan aceh, secara pribadi mengatakan bahwa sekarang Kalla juga akan menjadi broker finansial bagi perjanjian perdagangan senjata internasional yang baru (penasehat ini mengatakan bahwa perjanjian perdagangan paska Aceh sekarang telah muncil dengan Eropa, Cina dan Israel, antara lain), peran menguntungkan yang secara tradisional dimainkan oleh jenderal-jenderal purnawirawan TNI dan POLRI.

Pada saat ini ditulis-beberapa jam sebelum penandatanganan kesepakatan di Helsinki, Finlandia-orang-orang berkumpul di masjid-masjid dan gereja di Aceh dan berdoa secara publik untuk perdamaian, dan mungkin berdoa secara pribadi untuk kebebasan dan keadilan. Kesepakatan ini tidak akan mengantarkan hal-hal ini. Mereka masih divonnis hidup di bawah penindasan. Tetapi kesepakatan ini juga mengacak situasi yang lalu dan membuka peluang kecil yang, kalau mereka masih berani mengangkat suara, kali ini, kalau mereka ditembaki atau dibelenggu, ada seseorang di luar yang mungkin mendengarnya.

How Many Weapons Did the Aceh GAM Have?: The Pathetic Pretense for Indonesian Terror

With the release today of the final Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Indonesia and GAM the fact has now been revealed that the GAM -- the pretense for TNI - POLRI's massive terror in Aceh -- has all of 840 weapons, barely enough to fill one big truck. At least that's the figure they declare in the document, and though the tally may not be totally honest, people familiar with GAM say that it cannot be that far from the truth.

The MOU also says that TNI - POLRI will for the moment openly keep 23,800 troops in Aceh, half or more of what they have now, and a figure roughly equivalent to their troop levels during many recent years. This gives the lie to the widely reported claim in recent weeks that TNI - POLRI would be pulling out, and heightens the question of their rationale for being there at all once the GAM has fully disarmed.

In any event, the troop numbers aren't that crucial, what matters is who's in control (the Indonesian government and TNI - POLRI) and what their policy is (no free speech, repression). As one local human rights monitor put when discussing the MOU clause that temporarily limits troop movements to one platoon (about 100 men in the TNI system): "it only takes one platoon to do a massacre or to start a riot."

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Clarity Achieved, Oppressors Still in Place: A Deal Disarms One Side in Aceh

Today (August 15, 2005) the Aceh Freedom Movement (GAM, Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) will sign a deal with the government of Indonesia under which they agree to disarm and accept amnesty, money and farmland. They will be allowed to form a local political party in exchange for a political vow of silence: under Indonesian law the party will not be allowed to stand for what GAM has always stood for -- independence for Aceh, or at least a referendum vote on independence.

The TNI - POLRI (the Indonesian national armed forces and police), which has slaughtered many thousands of Acehnese civilians (GAM has also killed some, but a fraction as many), will temporarily withdraw some of its troops, but will have the long term right to bring them back at its pleasure since Jakarta remains Aceh's sovereign.

Even now in the upcoming transition months, when a couple of hundred foreign monitors will be present, troops from some of the most notorious military and police units can remain in Aceh: Intel operatives who run the torture houses, Air Force men who have bombed villages, and BRIMOB police who abduct and rape at checkpoints can stay so long as they are technically classified as "organic" elements. And outside and above the formal terms of the deal -- activists and military people agree -- the US-trained Kopassus special forces, the most feared of all, can also stay in Aceh, working undercover and applying the "tactic and technique" of "terror" and "kidnapping," as one of their classified training manuals puts it (Buku Petunjuk tentang Sandi Yudha TNI AD, Nomor: 43-B-01).

This deal has been portrayed as a TNI withdrawal and an Aceh peace deal. It is neither -- the TNI - POLRI stay, and they get to keep their weapons and use them at will -- and it is they who have been the main peace violators, doing the vast majority of civilian killings, tortures, arsons, rapes, disappearances, thefts, extortions, and arbitrary detentions .

But the deal does change the situation in a major way in that it puts armed GAM out of business, and helpfully clarifies the situation: it is now undeniably TNI - POLRI versus civilians. That has always been the essence of political life in modern Aceh but the world has never seen it because the GAM was futilely shooting at the oppressors and drawing away all outside attention (such as it was) from the TNI - POLRI's killings of civilians.

GAM deserves credit for disarming. They should have done it a long time ago. They were only making matters worse, and now that they're gone, there are possibilities. But their act of self-abnegation should not be misconstrued as a settlement to the Aceh problem, and their de facto vow of silence should not be construed as applying to Acehnese as a whole.

In November, 1999 the Acehnese mounted what was, in proportional terms, one of the largest demonstrations in world history. Perhaps a quarter of the population turned out in Banda Aceh to peacefully call for referendum. Caught completely off guard, the TNI - POLRI moved to crush the civilian movement, knowing that though they could not lose militarily in a shooting war with the GAM, they could well lose politically if the world got to hear peaceful Aceh voices.

That didn't happen. Jafar Siddiq Hamzah, the leading international voice, who had testified before the US congress, was tortured to death upon returning home (his body was found in September, 2000) (see posting below, "Other People's Hands," of September 22, 2004). Others were assassinated, jailed or driven into exile, and the first the world heard of Aceh was when the tsunami struck in December, 2004.

In legal and military terms the Acehnese are still as subordinated as they were before. Though the deal contains two references to the UN covenants on civil and political rights and establishes local institutions like a human rights court (with no specified powers), the same repressive laws that bind all Indonesians still apply to them, and, far more importantly, the TNI - POLRI -- effectively above the law anyway -- still occupy their region.

But in cold pragmatic terms, with the GAM now out of the way there is the chance that dissident speech, though still repressed, might now become politically fruitful. Muhammad Nazar, the best known civilian activist -- who was seen as too big to kill -- was jailed for giving a speech in a village in which he advocated referendum. Word is that he will be released, but if he gives the same speech again he can be jailed -- or worse -- again, but now, post-GAM, there will be a chance for such a sacrifice to draw some meaningful outside attention.

It was such attention that made it possible for East Timor to win independence in different circumstances, but for Aceh that is more difficult since it is historically part of Indonesia, and indeed predates it, while Timor was a foreign land that was invaded by Indonesia, with US backing, in 1975. The loss of a third of their population to TNI - POLRI slaughter gained nothing for the Timorese until the Dili massacre of 1991 drew some outside attention and the acknowledgment that this was an unjustified case of a military killing civilians.

Aceh is also such a case, and the Acehnese have also been dying in vain. If they continue to speak for referendum they will likely continue to die, but they may now get something for it, since the fog of two-sided combat will presumably no longer obscure the one-sided repression by TNI - POLRI.

What they might get is publicity that weakens the TNI/POLRI, and the repressive Indonesian state apparatus generally, and such weakening is the only hope for any substantial democracy, freedom, or justice in Aceh, and in Indonesia as a whole. But those harmful institutions will only be weakened on balance if the US, Europe, Australia and other outside powers can be stopped from using this deal as yet another excuse to try to push through a restoration and/or increase of foreign military and police aid. It was after all the cutting of that aid, in response to grassroots pressure, that cleared the way for the ending of the Timor occupation and, prior to that, the downfall of the US-backed dictator, Gen. Suharto.

So whether this deal helps or hurts will in important part depend on the behavior of outside parties, and it is just such risks and complexities that have made some TNI - POLRI generals reluctant to accept it. Much press coverage and grassroots speculation in Aceh has centered on whether TNI - POLRI and, for that matter, the GAM field fighters, will follow the deal. For many GAM people it is a bitter pill. It is they, and not the big-time killers who will have to lay down their arms, renounce their goal, and prostrate themselves before the enemy state. But at the same time they will get amnesty and will be ostensibly free to return to their homes. For the TNI - POLRI it looks like victory: they get the guns and the right to rule, while Aceh gets a local flag. But this sparring with GAM has been very good to the Jakarta generals. It has helped to justify their dominance of Indonesia and it has made many of them millionaires. It is easy to see why many of them will be sorry to see the armed GAM go.

But Indonesia's President, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono -- who supervised the Aceh repression and martial law under the previous President, Megawati Sukarnoputri -- takes a more strategic view. He seems to r