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[Adventurer]

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Indonesia
US trained butchers of TimorExclusive: Washington trained death squads in secret while Britain has spent �1m helping Indonesian army

Ed Vulliamy in New York and Antony Barnett guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 September 1999 23.37 BST Article historyIndonesian military forces linked to the carnage in East Timor were trained in the United States under a covert programme sponsored by the Clinton Administration which continued until last year.

The Observer can also disclose that the Government has spent about �1 million in training more than 50 members of the Indonesian military in Britain since it came to power. Human rights campaigners claim a number of these are likely to have links with those complicit in the attrocities.

The US programme, codenamed 'Iron Balance', was hidden from legislators and the public when Congress curbed the official schooling of Indonesia's army after a massacre in 1991. Principal among the units that continued to be trained was the Kopassus � an elite force with a bloody history � which was more rigorously trained by the US than any other Indonesian unit, according to Pentagon documents passed to The Observer last week. Kopassus was built up with American expertise despite US awareness of its role in the genocide of about 200,000 people in the years after the invasion of East Timor in 1975, and in a string of massacres and disappearances since the bloodbath. Amnesty International describes Kopassus as 'responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in Indonesia's history'.

The Pentagon documents � obtained by the US-based East Timor Action Network and Illinois congressman Lane Evans � detail every exercise in the covert training programme, conducted under a Pentagon project called JCET (Joint Combined Education and Training). They show the training was in military expertise that could only be used internally against civilians, such as urban guerrilla warfare, surveillance, counter-intelligence, sniper marksmanship and 'psychological operations'.

American sponsorship of the Indonesian regime began as a matter of Cold War ideology, in the wake of defeat in Vietnam. The left-wing movement in East Timor was feared by Jakarta and seen by the US as an echo of those in southern Africa and of Salvador Allende's government in Chile. Jakarta's harassment of the Timor government and the invasion of 1975 were duly encouraged by the United States.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/sep/19/indonesia.easttimor1

[Kuros]

[TheUrbanMyth]

[some waygug-in]

I suppose the reasoning is that if there were no war going on, the only people available to use these tactics on would be the civilian population.

[TheUrbanMyth]

[some waygug-in]

Well there is this:


Kopassus was built up with American expertise despite US awareness of its role in the genocide of about 200,000 people in the years after the invasion of East Timor in 1975, and in a string of massacres and disappearances since the bloodbath. Amnesty International describes Kopassus as 'responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in Indonesia's history'.


They had a history of attacking and killing their own people, but they kept training them anyway.

It's like giving an axe murderer special weapons training.

Or selling chemical weapons to someone like Saddam Hussein and expecting that he would never use them.

[TheUrbanMyth]