as posted here
John Pilger
24 September 2009
It is a decade since the people of East Timor defied the genocidal occupiers of their country to take part in a United Nations referendum, voting for their freedom and independence.
A “scorched earth” campaign by the Indonesian dictatorship followed, adding to a toll of carnage that had begun 24 years earlier when Indonesia invaded tiny East Timor with the secret support of Australia, Britain and the United States.
According to a committee of the Australian parliament, “at least 200,000” died under the occupation, a third of the population.
Filming undercover in 1993, I found crosses almost everywhere: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the eye.
A holocaust happened in East Timor, telling us more about rapacious Western power, its propaganda and true aims, than even current colonial adventures.
The historical record is unambiguous that the US, Britain and Australia conspired to accept such a scale of bloodshed as the price of securing Southeast Asia’s “greatest prize” with its “hoard of natural resources”.
Philip Liechty, the senior CIA operations officer in Jakarta at the time of the invasion, told me, “I saw the intelligence. There were people being herded into school buildings by Indonesian soldiers and the buildings set on fire. The place was a free fire zone ...
“We sent them everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn’t have any guns. None of that got out …
“[The Indonesian dictator] Suharto was given the green light to do what he did.”
Britain supplied Suharto with machine guns and Hawk fighter-bombers that, regardless of fake “assurances”, were used against defenceless East Timorese villages.
The critical role was played by Australia. This was Australia’s region.
During the second world war, the people of East Timor had fought heroically to stop a Japanese invasion of Australia.
Their betrayal was spelt out in a series of leaked cables sent by the Australian ambassador in Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, prior to and during the Indonesian invasion in 1975.
Echoing then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, he urged “a pragmatic rather than a principled stand”, reminding his government that it would “more readily” exploit the oil and gas wealth beneath the Timor Sea with Indonesia than with its rightful owners, the East Timorese.
“What Indonesia now looks to from Australia,” he wrote as Suharto’s special forces slaughtered their way across East Timor, “is some understanding of their attitude and possible action to assist public understanding in Australia”.
Two months earlier, Indonesian troops had murdered five newsmen from Australian TV near the East Timorese town of Balibo. On the day after the capital, Dili, was seized, they shot dead a sixth journalist, Roger East, throwing his body into the sea.
Australian intelligence had known 12 hours in advance that the journalists in Balibo faced imminent death, and the government did nothing.
Intercepted at the spy base, Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) near Darwin, which supplies US and British intelligence, the warning was suppressed so that it would not expose Western governments’ part in the conspiracy to invade or the official lie that the journalists had been killed in “crossfire”.
The secretary of the Australian Defence Department, Arthur Tange, a notorious cold warrior, demanded that the government not even inform the journalists’ families of their murders. No minister protested to the Indonesians.
This criminal connivance is documented in Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra, written by Desmond Ball, a renowned intelligence specialist, and Hamish McDonald.
The Australian government’s complicity in the journalists’ murder and, above all, in a bloodbath greater proportionally than that perpetrated by Pol Pot in Cambodia has been cut almost entirely from a major new film, Balibo.
Claiming to be a “true story”, it is a travesty of omissions. In eight of 16 drafts of his screenplay, David Williamson, the distinguished Australian playwright, graphically depicted the chain of true events that began with the original radio intercepts by Australian intelligence and went all the way to prime minister Gough Whitlam, who believed East Timor should be “integrated” into Indonesia.
This is reduced in the film to a fleeting image of Whitlam and Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips.
Williamson’s original script described the effect of the cover up on the families of the murdered journalists, and their anger and frustration at being denied information. It also depicted their despair at Canberra’s scandalous decision to have the journalists’ ashes buried in Jakarta with ambassador Woolcott, the arch apologist, reading the oration.
What the government feared if the ashes came home was public outrage directed at the West’s client in Jakarta.
All this was cut, even though the director, Robert Connolly, reinstated some of the political material in a final draft.
As if to cover the missing history in his film, Connolly appointed an “historical advisor”, Clinton Fernandes, whose distinction is as a former member of Australian military intelligence.
Fernandes claimed the 2007 coronial inquiry into the deaths of the journalists “discredited” the Ball and MacDonald book. This is both curious and untrue.
The DSD intercepts show that Benny Murdani, the Indonesian general commanding the invasion, when asked by an officer in the field what should be done about journalists, had replied, “We can’t have any witnesses”.
The officer subsequently signalled confirmation that the journalists had been executed.
DSD was listening as usual; but in testimony to the coronial inquiry a DSD official claimed that the critical message mysteriously was not translated and circulated until the following afternoon — when the journalists were dead.
The “true story” of the film is, in any case, largely fictitious.
Finely dramatised, acted and located, the film is reminiscent of the genre of Vietnam movies, such as The Deer Hunter, which artistically airbrushed the truth of that atrocious war from popular history.
Not surprisingly, it has been lauded in the Australian media, which took minimal interest in East Timor’s suffering during the long years of Indonesian occupation.
So enamoured of Suharto was the country’s only national daily, The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch, that its editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, led Australia’s principal newspaper editors to Jakarta to shake the tyrant’s hand.
There is a photograph of one of them bowing.
I asked Balibo’s director, Robert Connolly, why he had cut the original Williamson script and omitted all government complicity. He replied that the film had “generated huge discussion in the media and the Australian government” and in that way “Australia would be best held accountable”.
Milan Kundera’s truism comes to mind: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
as posted here
AUSTRALIA this week got another glimpse of the troubling global security paradigm that dominates discussions among the government's top counter-terrorism advisers.
The Melbourne-based Australians allegedly planning an attack on Holsworthy army base had links that stretched to Somalia and well beyond the Horn of Africa. It's a home-grown threat that is intimately linked to the global jihadist network.
The Howard and Rudd governments have spent more than $9 billion bolstering our national security since September 11, 2001. The Australian Intelligence Security Organisation, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, the Australian Federal Police and defence intelligence agencies have been transformed and forced to learn new skills in the face of a protean threat that continues to evolve in unexpected ways.
The central issue facing national security planners in Western democracies is whether our spy agencies, founded in the Cold War era, and based on rigidly defined operational and legal boundaries, can be truly effective in countering threats in a borderless world.
It's not just Islamist terror but rapidly emerging issues such as cyber warfare and far more sophisticated transnational crime networks that are driving the rethink at the heart of the Rudd government.
The AFP and ASIO have come a long way in recent years. They have become far more closely linked with other intelligence agencies and tackle a range of wholly new cross-border challenges. But in the view of some of our top national security thinkers, inside and outside government, Australia's intelligence community needs to evolve even further if we are to thwart the emerging threat spectrum.
According to defence expert and close government adviser Ross Babbage, this should include the contentious removal of strict legal and operational constraints that apply to the Defence Signals Directorate , the country's main collector of signals intelligence. It could also include a renewed debate about whether ASIO and ASIS, Australia's secret external intelligence agency, should be merged.
Babbage argues that DSD's charter should be amended to allow it to assist ASIO and the AFP in an unrestricted way when it comes to tracking terrorists or criminals who move into Australia. At present, tight legislative provisions restrict DSD from spying on Australian citizens at home and abroad but it does provide technical assistance to ASIO and other agencies for specific operations.
DSD played the critical role in tracking down the Bali bombers across the Indonesian archipelago. Babbage argues DSD now needs to be able to monitor communications seamlessly at home or abroad and have the ability to work in cross-agency joint teams.
"The Australian Intelligence Community needs to be restructured to permit the full weight of technical and human resources to be applied against priority targets, whether they be international, domestic or both," Babbage tells Inquirer.
Australia's key intelligence agencies are structured to address either international threats or domestic threats when the terrorist, criminal and foreign intelligence service operations we confront show no respect for national boundaries.
"My biggest concern is not when you have already identified a target but what happens if you haven't identified a target. It's not just DSD, it's the whole panoply. What we need to be doing is reducing, maybe even removing, the constraints on effective teaming from detection right through to detailed observations and monitoring," Babbage says.
This week's events involving Somali-born Australians is a harbinger of the new challenges ahead. "We managed to pick this up. But in the area of terrorism and in the cyber area we are going to face more demanding international challenges. We can't afford to be tripping over each other or missing things," Babbage says.
New ASIO director-general David Irvine acknowledged last week in his first public speech that contemporary security challenges were provoking debate in Canberra about whether Australia's spy agencies were correctly positioned for the challenges ahead.
Irvine stressed the intelligence community had to move towards a "single federation, rather than a group of capability specific sites". Vital information also had to be shared more quickly and effectively inside and outside the key intelligence agencies.
"The concept of some separation of powers remains a valid element of the community today and I would advocate caution in tampering with it for no good reason," Irvine said, referring to the basic structure of the Australian Intelligence Community created as a result of the Hope royal commission more than 30 years ago.
Nevertheless, the contemporary security environment -- particularly with technological advances and the emergence of non-state actors as a first-tier threat -- has forced the AIC to come together in ways the Hope commission could not have predicted.
There's no doubt that the radical changes mooted by Babbage would encounter strong political opposition as well as a wall of bureaucratic resistance. A whole new legal and administrative edifice, including civil liberty safeguards, would have to be built. In Britain and the US, similar mooted changes have produced a powerful public backlash.
Senior government sources believe recent changes to the AIC, including Kevin Rudd's creation of the post of National Security Adviser and establishment of a National Intelligence Co-ordination Committee, preclude the need for further big structural reform. The argument inside the bureaucracy is that the key agencies have already developed the new collaborative, cross-jurisdictional relationships vital for our national security. As Irvine points out, the NICC is designed to set priorities as well as ensure optimal levels of sharing intelligence information and intelligence capability between agencies.
But the real debate about further structural change has yet to be had. Senior intelligence sources and security experts inside and outside the government agree on one thing: even closer co-operation will be needed in the future, from better co-ordination of intelligence collection at the national level to sharing of vital information right down to local police working in suburban communities.
The University of Sydney's Alan Dupont agrees with Babbage on the need for further overhaul of the AIC.
"DSD should be able to work closely with domestic agencies on national threats in a way that they can't at the moment. Our intelligence structures are still out of sync with today's threats even though we have made major improvements," Dupont says.
"If you getting national intelligence in Canberra, how are you getting that down to a local police force that has to respond in a way that protects sources and methods but allows them the latest information? We also still haven't closed the gap between national counter-terrorism responses and emergency management arrangements. Both are integral in responding to terrorist attacks."
Defence expert Allan Behm, who has worked for all four government departments covering Australia's intelligence community including the Prime Minister's, Attorney-General's and Defence departments, agrees ASIO and the AFP have done well since 2001. But he says the intelligence community must achieve greater efficiency, working outside the traditional "stove-pipes" as inter-agency teams, while understanding that some jurisdictional boundaries must always remain.
Behm also says Australia's counter-terrorism response must extend beyond good intelligence and tough border controls and embrace troubled communities such as the Somalis. "The problem has been with us for a while. Through inadequate policy over the (past) 10 years we have treated Islamic terrorism as though it had a legitimacy that it doesn't really have. It is a criminal act like any other form of terrorism. Governments have got to keep talking about Australia as an inclusive society, supporting the leadership within the Islamic community as a matter of public policy. We have got to keep talking about the fact this is a society built (on) mutual respect for each other."
