An artificial scab over the putrefaction beneath

When the story first broke, the people were told that one of Australia's most respected senior military intelligence officers, Lieutenant Colonel Lance Collins, had written to John Howard, (with an accompanying report by military lawyer Captain Martin Toohey) "detailing a litany of intelligence failures and calling on the PM to launch a royal commission to investigate them."
Captain Martin Toohey was appointed to review the complaints first raised by Lt. Col. Collins and, because of what he discovered, wrote a damning critique of the Defence Intelligence Organisation which was presented to John Howard as the present prime minister.
In the report Toohey strenuously defended Collins and produced "a damning critique of the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO)." Lateline, ABC 13/4/04.
The 'big picture' presented was that "the relationship between the government and its intelligence agencies has become somewhat dysfunctional" and incidents and events bearing out this claim were listed.
Reference was made to relationships between certain personnel within army intelligence and the DIO; with Captain Toohey claiming that during his investigation he found the DIO head, Frank Lewincamp "was not a credible witness because of his strong dislike for Colonel Collins and went on to allege that as a result, Lewincamp actually cut off the flow of intelligence to army officers on the ground during the East Timor crisis..."
Captain Toohey found that "a pro-Jakarta lobby exists within the DIO… and within the Office of National Assessments (ONA) and even more so, previously, at the top levels of the Defence Department and the Australian Military and the Foreign Affairs Department and the Prime Minister's department."
"If you go back in history," observed guest investigative journalist and intelligence commentator, Brian Toohey, (no relation to Captain Toohey) on the Lateline programme, "the Defence Department actually tried to oppose, before the 1975 Indonesian invasion, a very well written superb piece of analysis from the Defence Department [which said] 'look this not really a good idea, we should try and stop it before it happens' and predicted that there would be years and years of turmoil within East Timor. Foreign Affairs was split on the issue but was led by the then ambassador Dick Woolcott and Gough Whitlam as PM.
They got through a policy which grew and grew, in terms of support, until the Australian military, at the end, was completely onside with the Suharto dictatorship, very keen for the Australian SAS to help train the brutal Kopassus special forces, and so forth. ONA was totally and absolutely onside in terms of its analytical intelligence on the dictator."
DIO reports what government wants to hear
The interviewer, Tony Jones, then referred to the other guest, Dr. Carl Ungerer, lecturer in international relations at the University of Queensland:
"Let me bring you back in on this because it actually gets worse in the report of Captain Toohey in terms of him laying out the reasons these things happen; for the dispute, if you like, between the army intelligence officer and the DIO. He says that that lobby, the 'pro-Jakarta lobby' as he calls it, in the DIO, distorts intelligence statements apparently because of Government policy which overlooks atrocities and terrorists activities committed by the TNI, the Indonesian army, for those who don't know the TNI."
Carl Ungerer went on to defend the Australian Government's policy supporting Suharto and his brutal regime, to which Brian Toohey responded:
"… that policy changed in Canberra over a period of 20 or so years from which sound advice was given, particularly under defence, for what Australian policy should be, to a policy completely supportive of a particular brutal dictator."
Claims made on Nightline ABC radio
I caught the phone-in discussions about the issue on Tony del Roy's ABC Nightline programme 14/4/04.
The following claims were made:
The 'disinformation' faction within the DIO have links to businessmen as well as politicians.
They support the Indonesian psychopathic-criminal military generals whose soldiers are still let loose to kill people in places such as Aceh.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer should never be allowed to get away with the lie that these killings were being perpetrated by 'rogue elements' within the communities.
The source of the 'putrefaction' goes back to the Whitlam years.
Our own troops and the East Timorese people's lives were put at risk because of the 'failure' of the DIO.
It would seem the Prime Minister is a good liar and a bad Prime Minister or incredibly naïve.

WAR ON 'TERROR'?
The Adelaide Advertiser 15/4/04 in its page (suggestively?) titled WAR ON TERROR revealed:
"Vital clues missed by spy agency" by Ian McPhedran in Canberra:
"The nation's peak military spy agency missed vital clues before the Bali terrorist bombing in October 2002 a Senate inquiry has been told. The embattled Defence Intelligence Organisation will be criticised in a Senate Committee report.
It will be published by June and follows an investigation into threats to Australian security at the time of the Bali blast which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians. The Advertiser also can reveal commanders in East Timor were cut off from vital raw intelligence, including movements by militia thugs and their Indonesian military masters, for 24 hours at a crucial time during the East Timor conflict in late 1999.
A top secret web page used to deliver the classified electronic material to senior officers' laptops was shut down "due to a technical fault", they were told. It was later revealed the true reason was concern in Canberra about leaks within the army intelligence organisation. DIO and the electronic spying outfit, the Defence Signals Directorate, made the risky decision to cut the feed which was authorised by then Defence Chief Admiral Chris Barrie."

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
According to Enver Masud of The Wisdom Fund, Sept. 1999, Arlington USA:
Greed has more to do with East Timor's problems and indeed much of Indonesia, rather than the Muslim-Christian divide portrayed in the media.
From ancient times until the 7th century AD, Indonesia was ruled by various Hindu kingdoms among which the Majapahit Empire became the most powerful. Sumatra was then known as the "island of gold," and Java as the "rice island."
Muslim traders began arriving in the 13th century, and spread peacefully through the islands. The descendants of the Hindu kingdoms retreated to the islands of Bali and Lombok where they flourish to this day. With the fall of Muslim Spain in 1492 (as in the Americas, Africa, and South Asia), came 350 years of colonial rule.
First to arrive were the Portuguese in 1511 AD. The Portuguese were followed by the Dutch (1602 to 1799 AD), the British (1811 to 1815 AD) and again the Dutch (1816 to1908 AD).
When the Dutch and Portuguese formally partitioned East Timor between them in the 19th century, East
Timor became a Portuguese colony.
By 1908 nationalist movements began seeking self-government, and Indonesia declared independence on August 17, 1947. Sukarno, a leader of the independence movement, became president.
He was overthrown in 1965 by Suharto in a U.S. backed military coup in which it is reported that one million people, mainly Chinese, were killed.
1967 - After the coup, the U.S. Louisana-based Freeport McMoRan Corporation became the first foreign company granted an operating permit on Irian Jaya.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is credited with having introduced the company officials to Suharto. It is reported Kissinger sits on Freeport's board receiving US$500,000 annually and the firm also engages his law firm Kissinger and Associates for a reputed annual fee of US$200,000. With reserves valued at US$40 billion, the Freeport project is said to be the largest single gold deposit in the world and the third largest open-cut copper mine.
1971 -- On Aceh, Mobil Oil discovered one of the richest onshore reserves of natural gas.
1975 - The Portuguese Governor and officials abandoned the capital Dili in August 1975.
1991 -- Off-shore oil discoveries - Timor Gap Treaty came into force 1991. Massive revenues are said to flow …to whom?

USING ATROCITIES FOR 'PSY-WARS'
Further background details of the East Timor nightmare and the role played by the U.S. military - and by implication its government and administration -- is provided in a 32-page article by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D. published in 1999: "Exporting Terror: East Timor and the US".
He writes:
"One of the great needs of the twentieth century is a scientific study of atrocity and of the moral issues involved."
He differentiates between uncontrollable irrational acts - humans out of control - and those 'managed' atrocities; outrages provoked and exploited by state powers within the so-called civilised world. He breaks the categories down even further, putting aside the massive bombings of Dresden or the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
He focuses attention on the western media's eagerness to highlight the inhumane massacres in Yugoslavia or Rwanda or Cambodia, but asks where have they focused on the ones for which the United States is responsible?
U.S. responsibility for what happened in Indonesia and East Timor
He explains managed atrocities do not 'just happen', the more they are studied the more they emerge as part of a single coherent narrative. Most of the bloody massacres today can be seen as part of an on-going legacy of 'colonialism': a single narrative, whether the colonialism we speak of is Capitalist, Socialist, or Islamic.
Atrocities can be used politically in different ways
· They can be threatened (this practice is widespread).
· They can be committed.
· Or the commission of atrocity can be directed and exploited psychologically to induce further terror among the survivors.
This last stage, which he calls 'managed atrocity', is known and taught at special U.S. military schools as part of psychological warfare or psywar. A fully managed atrocity is one in which the pretext for the exploited atrocity is developed by the managers of the atrocity itself. Not all psywar is managed atrocity, but all managed atrocity is psywar, and psywar is responsible for the seminal managed atrocities of today.
He deplores the fact: "We close this century with the sad awareness that virtually all major states, and particularly those states who have prided themselves on their degree of civilisation, have been responsible for major massacres of civilians".
For three decades, with long interludes to preserve his sanity, Peter Dale Scott studied U.S. involvement (along with other countries like Britain and Japan) in the great Indonesian massacre of 1965. And it was only in the latter 1990s, as the pattern presented itself did he come to focus on the defining paradigm for what happened: a psywar operation.

The exploitative detail
What opened his eyes was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the slaughter.
This made it clear that the corpses flooding down the rivers of East Java were not just dumped there to dispose of them; they had been rigged to float, and thus terrorize those living downstream.
"Stomachs torn open. The smell was unbelievable. To make sure they didn't sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes. And the departure of the corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew."
This exploitative detail, the display of mutilated corpses… is in particular a signature of U.S.-trained atrocity managers in Chile, El Salvador, and Columbia.
Corpses were also displayed by the Indonesians in East Timor after 1975, as part of a genocidal campaign supported and supplied by the United States.
Noam Chomsky had already told the U.N. General Assembly in 1979, contrary to false testimony by government witnesses at congressional hearings, the U.S. continued to supply Indonesia with attack helicopters and other equipment required to wipe hundreds of villages off the face of the earth, destroy crops and herd the remnants of the population into internment centres.
'Psychological' preparation
As for the 'psychological preparation' for the Indonesian invasion, Scott refers to former Australian diplomat James Dunn's observations in his book Timor: A People Betrayed:
"The flow of disinformation from Jakarta was carried by Australian, U.S., British and some other foreign media and news agencies, which also served to divert world attention to Indonesia's false dilemma… what should it do to help the strife-torn people of Timor? Many observers were thus asking the obvious question: how much longer could Indonesia stand by and not intervene with this terrible war going on right on its own borders, and posing a potential threat to its own security?"
Scott comments: "It is hard to imagine how the tiny half-island of East Timor could have posed a threat to one of the world's largest nations!"
Space does not permit further revelations of the U.S. psywar methods and the disinformation coming out of Canberra, and the betrayal of the East Timorese and our Australian soldiers, etc., but after musing on the revelations of Lt. Col. Lance Collins it is not hard to see how the same techniques are being used to condition the Australian people to the "psychologically induced fear of a war of terror".