THE 5TH ESTATE
By Wayne Madsen
08/1/2011
DATELINE: JAKARTA --
The official histories of Indonesia and the Obama administration would have everyone believe that in 1965, Indonesian army general Suharto put down an attempted Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) coup attempt that saw six senior Indonesian military officers plus a first lieutenant mistaken for General Nasution brutally shot by PKI partisans and dumped down a dry well. The official time line continues by suggesting that a lowly enlisted man, Lolo Soetoro, re-called from a scholarship at the University of Hawaii and drafted into the Indonesian army about five months before the PKI coup attempt, was sent into the field to fight anti-government guerrillas.
Two years later, in 1967, along comes Soetoro's American wife, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, along with her six year-old mulatto child by a Kenyan father, Barry Obama, to take on a series of odd jobs and help raise her son in practical poverty.
Ann Dunham, a free-spirited hippie type, eventually uses her anthropology degree to assist Javanese villagers in marketing their batik textiles and be entrepreneurs by taking out micro-loans. These "official" time lines of history works for those who also believe in the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus.
The actual history of Indonesia is that General Suharto, the head of the army under President Sukarno, conspired with the CIA to topple the nationalistic Sukarno, who was opposed to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, US Agency for International Development (USAID), and U.S. Peace Corps presence in Indonesia.
The abduction and execution of the six top Indonesian military officers was carried out by Suharto's men and then blamed on the PKI as a reason to carry out a coup against Sukarno and a bloody pogrom against the PKI, an operation that saw between 800,000 and 1 million Indonesians killed by Indonesian military and intelligence officers over a period of time that included Dunham and her son's arrival and residence in Indonesia.
Lolo Soetoro, a reserve Indonesian army officer called back into service in the army in 1965 from his CIA-supplied scholarship at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, was a foot soldier in the putschist cabal of Suharto, the man who the CIA designated as the leader of the 1965 coup. Lolo Soetoro was one of some 4000 Indonesian army officers who were trained in the United States between 1958 and 1965 and the CIA and Pentagon ensured that these officers would be available for the long-planned overthrow of Sukarno.
Barry Obama Soetoro's mother, Ann, was dispatched from Hawaii to Indonesia in 1967, along with seven year-old Barack Obama, to infiltrate villages in Java to carry out a CIA survey of political leanings among the Javanese population. Those unfortunate enough to be tagged as Communists or Sukarno supporters were targeted for elimination by the CIA, which turned the target lists over to Suharto's army officers, including Lolo Soetoro. During the Cold War, the use of anthropologists by the CIA and Defense Department in the collection of ethnographic and cultural intelligence was commonplace. In Indonesia, the CIA/Pentagon program to infiltrate villages and report on political allegiances was called Project PROSYM.
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Obama at school in Jakarta |
A "cargo cult" personality has been built up around Barack Obama in Indonesia and the United States.
The Indonesian museum located at the former air base at Halim where the bodies of seven Indonesian military officers were dumped into a dry well, allegedly by the PKI, is now a showcase for the CIA-contrived history of Indonesia. Various displays at the museum push the CIA/Suharto time line. For example the infamous "Gilchrist memo" is referred to as a forgery.
In July 1965, a few months after Lolo Soetoro arrived from Hawaii, a mysterious letter surfaced in Indonesia, purportedly sent by British ambassador in Jakarta Andrew Gilchrist to the British Foreign Office in London. The memo referred to "our local army friends" in the Indonesian army. Gilchrist, in the months leading up to the coup, told London that regime change in Jakarta would entail "more than a little shooting." Before being posted to Jakarta, Gilchrist was British Consul General in Chicago.
The anti-PKI museum in the eastern part of Jakarta states the following in one of its displays about the time frame leading up to the September 1965 coup: "The campaign against ABRI [the Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia], and in particular against the Army, had as its background the jealousy of the PKI amongst the people. Various kinds of anti ABRI Campaigns were carried out by the PKI such as changes, issues, Provocations, political slander which were launched to the public by PKI mass media and propaganda bodies. Since 1964 this campaign increased as a "revolutionary offensive." Unilateral acts of violence, demands for the dissolution of the territorial [sic] instrumentalists, the issue of the influence of "Nasakom" (Nationalist, Religious, Communist) on ABRI, the issue of the "Fifth Force" i.e., Peasements [sic] and workers, and the false Gilchrist document were all manifestations of their actions. A climax of the campaign was the issue of the Council of Generals in 1965, which led to the attempted communist coup of 30th September 1965 (G.30 S/PKI).
One of the covert actions of the campaign was conveyed to the Congress of the Association of Indonesian Village Administration (PPDI), a PKI Mass organization, on 3rd August 1964 at the Railway Workers Union Building Manggarai, Jakarta."
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Obama continues to blow smoke over his CIA ties |
Retired investigative journalist and Jakarta resident Robert S. Finnegan contributed to this report.
Wayne Madsen (USA)
Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist, Madsen has over twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy.
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Wayne Madsen |