Study the “lobbying techniques” at work in the person of Kissinger, to understand the playbook of the other side. We continue with author Christopher Hitchens’ describing global patterns of monopoly and genocide - this time the exploitative actions are revealing themselves in unfortunate East Timor.
This semi-conscious reversal of rhetoric also leads to renewed episodes of hysterical and improvised lying. (Recall his claim to the Chinese that it was the Soviet Union that had instigated the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.)
The idea that Indonesia's annexation of Timor may be compared to India's occupation of Goa is too absurd to have been cited in any apologia before or since. What Kissinger seems to like about the comparison is the rapidity with which Goa was forgotten. What he overlooks is that it was forgotten because (1) it was not a bloodbath and (2) it completed the decolonization of India.
The Timor bloodbath represented the cementing of colonization by Indonesia. And clearly, an Indonesian invasion that began a few hours after Kissinger had stepped off the tarmac at Jakarta airport must have been planned and readied several days before he arrived. Such plans would have been known by any embassy military attaché worth the name, and certainly by any visiting secretary of state.
Suharto
We have the word of C. Philip Liechty, a former CIA operations officer in Indonesia, that: Suharto was given the green light to do what he did. There was discussion in the Embassy and in traffic with the State Department about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress became aware of the level and type of military assistance that was going to Indonesia at that time.
Suharto
Without continued heavy US military support the Indonesians might not have been able to pull it off. Given that legal and international responsibility for East Timor rested with Portugal, a long-term NATO ally of the United States, the decision to disregard this, and at the admitted minimum to say nothing to the Indonesians about it, must have been deliberate.
Given Kissinger's acute preoccupation with the fate of the Portuguese empire-as we will see-it may have been even more than that. It certainly cannot have been the result of inattention, or of the pressure of other distracting world events in (to take Kissinger's own cited instance) the other Portuguese colony of Angola.
The desire to appear to have been uninvolved may-if we are charitable–have arisen in part from the fact that even Indonesia's Foreign Minister, Adam Malik, conceded in public a death toll of between 50,000 and 80,000 Timorese civilians in the first eighteen months of Indonesia's war of subjugation (in other words on Kissinger's watch) and inflicted with weapons that he bent American laws to furnish to the killers. Now that a form of democracy has returned to Indonesia, which in its first post-dictatorial act renounced the annexation and- after a bloody last pogrom by its auxiliaries - withdrew from the territory, we may be able to learn more exactly the extent of the genocide.
Mobutu
Kissinger's surreptitious conduct is made very plain by the State Department cable of December 1975, and the subsequent memorandum concerning it. In point of fact, the essential decisions about Portugal's ex-colonies had been made during the preceding July, when Kissinger had secured presidential permission for a covert program of military intervention, coordinated with the South Africans and General Mobutu, to impose a tribalist regime upon Angola.
Mobutu
The following month, as a matter of record, he informed the Indonesian generals that he would not oppose their intervention in East Timor. The only bargaining in December involved a request that Indonesia delay the start of its own colonial adventure until after Air Force One, carrying Ford and Kissinger, had left Indonesian airspace. This "deniable" pattern did not dispose of two matters of legality, both of them in the province of the State Department. The first was the violation of international law by Indonesia, in a case where jurisdiction clearly rested with a Portuguese and NATO government of which Kissinger (partly as a result of its support for “decolonization") did not approve. The second was the violation of American law, which stipulated that weapons supplied to Indonesia were to be employed only for self-defense.
Mobutu
State Department officials, bound by law, were likewise bound to conclude that United States aid to the generals in Jakarta would have to be cut off. Their memo summarizing this case was the cause of the tremendous internal row that is minuted below, in a declassified State Department transcript:
SECRET/SENSITIVE MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION
The Secretary [Henry Kissinger]
Participants:
Deputy Secretary [Robert] Ingersoll Under Secretary [for Political Affairs Joseph] Sisco
Under Secretary [Carlyle] Maw
Deputy Under Secretary [Lawrence] Eagleburger
Assistant Secretary [Philip] Habib Monroe Leigh,
Legal Advisor Jerry Bremer,
Notetaker Date: December 18, 1975
Subject: Department Policy
THE SECRETARY [KISSINGER]: I want to raise a little bit of hell about the Department's conduct in my absence. Until last week I thought we had a disciplined group; now we've gone to pieces completely. Take this cable on [East] Timor. You know my mind and attitude and anyone who knows my position as you do must know that I would not have approved it. The only consequence is to put yourself on record. It is a disgrace to treat the Secretary of State this way.... What possible explanation is there for it? I had told you to stop it quietly. What is your place doing, Phil, to let this happen? It is incomprehensible. It is wrong in substance and procedure. It is a disgrace. Were you here? HABIB: No.
Whenever agents try to scold and guilt us into compliance, the irony of them taking the moral high ground is always UTTERLY RIDICULOUS.
An agent tried this tactic on me to pressure me to take something damning down about “Messiah” Menachem Schneerson. I had no idea how important he was to the other side until this agent came and pestered me about him.
Right after that they - the entire media and the platforms - took my numbers, my Wikipedia and suddenly they all started as a group to pretend I’m invisible.
When I suggested Chabad probably had something to do with pot banging and yelling type harassment outside my house, it showed up in the press that Chabad rabbis went to the local hospital to show off their charity by giving out fruit baskets.
If I wanted to publicize my charity at the hospital, could I call up the local media and get them to send people out to cover it?