US declared mass murder in Indonesia to be 'fantastic'

[pisacake]

A detailed four-page report covering mid- to late November 1965 by the U.S. Embassy’s political affairs officer, Edward E. Masters, discussed the spread of mass executions to several provinces and the role of youth groups in helping to solve the “main problem” of where to house and what to feed PKI prisoners. PKI is the Indonesian acronym for the country’s communist party.

“Many provinces appear to be successfully meeting this problem by executing their PKI prisoners, or killing them before they are captured, a task in which Moslem youth groups are providing assistance,”

A Dec. 21, 1965, cable from the embassy’s first secretary, Mary Vance Trent, to the State Department referred to events as a “fantastic switch which has occurred over 10 short weeks.” It also included an estimate that 100,000 people had been slaughtered.

In Bali alone, some 10,000 people had been killed by mid-December, including the parents and distant relatives of the island’s pro-communist governor, and the slaughter was continuing, the cable said. Two months later, another embassy cable cited estimates that the killings in Bali had swelled to 80,000.

A cable that was part of the 2001 State Department volume showed that by April 1966, the embassy was staggered by the scale of the murders and acknowledged, “We frankly do not know whether the real figure is closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000.” Even the Indonesian government had only a “vague idea” of the true number, the cable said.

www.apnews.com/a14d23b403804c548b3c6da3428827fa/Files-show-new-details-of-US-support-for-Indonesia-bloodbath

Fantastic as in a fantasy.

Yes, different use of fantastic, does not mean it's wonderful, just very surprising/hard to credit.

No, they and we were pleased and complicit in the killings.

edition.cnn.com/2016/07/21/asia/indonesia-genocide-panel/index.html

Is that surprising?

no

A report 40 years on by a panel of judges chosen by a group who campaigned for the result they got.

Don't be fooled having at the Hague doesn't mean it was anything official - just a group using the location as a smoke screen of legitimacy.

"The Foundation IPT 1965 (International People's Tribunal) was formally established in 2014 and consists of Indonesian exiles, human rights activists, members of victims' organizations and researchers.

They organized the International People's Tribunal on the 1965 Crimes Against Humanity in Indonesia in response to an "absence of an official domestic process of transitional justice based on truth finding," according to a statement."

Sounds impartial to me - I don't think.

Sorry what part of this are you doubting?

www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/how-we-destroyed-sukarno-1188448.html

www.namebase.net/kadane.html

The veracity and impartiality of the whole thing.

Of what whole thing? The people being killed? The anti-Communist propaganda? The regime change?

You actually read that and thought their use of the term "fantastic" meant "wonderful/amazing"?

It doesn't.

But they did think it was wonderful and amazing, they supported the genocide and provided a list of people to kill.

www.nytimes.com/1990/07/12/world/cia-tie-asserted-in-indonesia-purge.html?pagewanted=all