Wednesday, December 27th, 2006
Democracy Now
Former President Gerald Ford died last night at the age of 93. We begin our coverage of Ford’s time in office with a look at his support for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor that killed one-third of the Timorese population. We’re joined by Brad Simpson of the National Security Archives and journalist Alan Nairn. [rush transcript included]
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Former President Gerald Ford died last night at the age of 93. He became president in 1974 following the resignation of Richard Nixon. Ford is the only person to become president that was never elected president or vice president. Some described him as the Accidental President. At his inauguration he famously declared “the long national nightmare is over." But a month later Ford granted Richard Nixon a full and absolute pardon for all federal crimes that he committed when he was in the White House – including for crimes connected to the Watergate scandal. The decision stunned the country.
Gerald Ford served as president until he lost to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. In 1975 He ordered the final pullout of U.S. troops from Vietnam. He later offered amnesty to Vietman era draft resisters. Gerald Ford surrounded himself by advisers who would later play key roles in the current Bush administration and in shaping Bush’s Iraq war policy. Donald Rumsfeld served first as his chief of staff and then as Secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney also served as Ford’s chief of staff. Paul Wolfowitz served in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
Less well known is President Ford involvement in East Timor. Both the New York Times and Washington Post failed to mention in their obituaries today that Ford and Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State, offered advance approval of Indonesia’s brutal invasion of East Timor.
This is clip of the documentary "Massacre: the Story of East Timor" that I produced with journalist Alan Nairn.
• Excerpt of "Massacre: the Story of East Timor.”
• Brad Simpson. Research Fellow at the National Security Archives.
• Alan Nairn. Investigative Journalist.
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AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the documentary Massacre: The Story of East Timor which I produced with journalist Alan Nairn who’ll be joining us in a minute. But first to talk more about President Ford's legacy and his role in East Timor, we are joined by Brad Simpson. Brad Simpson works for the National Security Archives and is a Professor at the University of Maryland. Brad, welcome to Democracy Now!.
BRAD SIMPSON: Thank you, very much, for having me on.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad, you recently got documents declassified about President Ford and his role in 1975, in meeting with the long reigning dictator of Indonesia, Suharto. Can you explain what you learned?
BRAD SIMPSON: Yes. Gerald Ford actually met twice with Suharto, first in July of 1975 when Suharto came to the United States. And later in December of 1975, of course, on the eve of his invasion of East Timor. And we now know that for more than a year Indonesia had been planning its armed takeover of East Timor, and the United States had of course been aware of Indonesian military plans. In July of 1975, the National Security Council first informed Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford of Indonesia’s plans to take over East Timor by force. And Suharto of course raised this with Gerald Ford in July when he met with Gerald Ford at Camp David on a trip to the United States. And then in December of 1975 on a trip through Southeast Asia, Gerald Ford met again with Suharto on the eve of the invasion, more than two weeks after the National Security Council, CIA, other intelligence agencies had concluded that an Indonesian invasion was eminent. And that the only thing delaying the invasion was the fear that US disapproval might lead to a cut-off of weapons and military supplies to the regime.
AMY GOODMAN: How knowledgeable was President Ford at the time of the situation?
BRAD SIMPSON: Well, Ford was very much aware. He was receiving hourly briefings, as was Henry Kissinger, as his plane lifted off from Indonesia, as the invasion indeed commenced. And immediately afterwards Gerald Ford flew to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, or to Guam—excuse me, where he gave a speech saying that never again should the United States allow another nation to strike in the middle of the night, to attack another defenseless nation. This was on Pearl Harbor Day, of course. Realizing full well that another day of infamy was unfolding in Dili, East Timor. As thousands of Indonesian paratroopers, trained by the United States, using US supplied weapons, indeed jumping from United States supplied airplanes, were descending upon the capital city of Dili and massacring literally thousands of people in the hours and days after December 7, 1975.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad, how difficult was it to get this declassified? The memos that you got? And how long were these memos about Ford and Kissinger's meeting with the long reigning Suharto? How long were they kept classified?
BRAD SIMPSON: Well, they are kept classified until the fall of 2002. We now know, actually, that a Congressman from Minnesota, Donald Fraser, had actually attempted to declassify the memo, the so-called Smoking Gun Memo, the transcript of General Suharto’s conversation with Gerald Ford, in December of 1975. Congressman Fraser actually tried to declassify this in document in 1978 during the Suharto adm--or during the Carter years and Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, realizing full well the explosive nature of this cable would show that the United States had been an accomplice in an international act of aggression, recommended that the State Department refuse to declassify the memo, a mere three years after the invasion.
And it took another 25 years after this episode before the cables were finally declassified and of course much more has come out. And I think it's incontrovertible that the United States played the crucial role in enabling the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. And I think it's wrong to say that Gerald Ford was completely unconcerned with the aftermath of the invasion. We now know that just a few days after the invasion Gerald Ford sent a telegram to the State Department asking that an emergency diplomatic cable be sent to General Suharto, in response to his recent visit. And inside the cable, which was sent by diplomatic pouch from the US Embassy, was a set of golf balls from Gerald Ford.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, the--you have a large body of declassified documents surrounding Indonesia and East Timor, of which this is a part, at the National Security Archive. If people want to look, where do they go online, Brad Simpson?
BRAD SIMPSON: They can go to www.nsarchive.org. And there is a link to the Indonesia and East Timor document case and project on that website.
AMY GOODMAN: Brad Simpson, I want to thank you for being with us. Of the National Security Archive and Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park.
-break-
AMY GOODMAN: : To talk more about President Ford’s legacy and his role in Indonesia and East Timor, joined by colleague and Independent Journalist Allen Nairn, who Co-produced the Documentary Massacre: The Story Of East Timor. Alan, welcome to Democracy Now!
ALLAN NAIRN: : Thanks.
AMY GOODMAN: : We just talked to Professor Brad Simpson who got the document declassified on the National Security Archive website, of President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's role in giving the green light for the invasion of Timor, December 7, 1975. Can you talk about your interview with President Ford, and the significance of the information that has come out since?
ALLAN NAIRN: : Well, I interviewed Ford by phone, and beforehand had told his assistant that I wanted to discuss his meeting with General Suharto, the Indonesian Dictator, on December 5th. So coming into the interview Ford knew the topic. And when I asked Ford whether he did in fact authorize the invasion of East Timor, he said, “Frankly, I don't recall.” He didn't remember. And I believed him.
What Ford said was that there were many topics on the agenda that day with Suharto. Timor was not very high on the agenda. It was one of the lesser topics, and he just couldn't remember whether he had authorized this invasion, which ended up killing 1/3 of the Timorese population. And it's kind of an illustration of the fact that when, like the United States, you're a global power with regimes everywhere dependant on your weapons, you can start wars, authorize wars, take actions that result in mass deaths in a fairly casual way.
In this case, the US didn't have a great interest in East Timor. All the evidence suggests that they didn’t particularly care one way or the other whether Timor became independent. But as a favor to Suharto, who was close to Washington, who was their protégée, they decided to let him go ahead with the invasion. So, for just a marginal, fleeting gain – or, out of doing a favor for a buddy -- they ended up causing a mass murder that proportionally was the most intensive killing since the Nazis, a third of the population killed.
AMY GOODMAN: : Now documents, Allan Nairn that you did get declassified were a memo that involved Henry Kissinger, again, it was Kissinger and Ford that gave the go ahead for the invasion when they visited Suharto, the long-reigning dictator. And that was information they were getting as they flew out of Indonesia through to Guam and Pearl Harbor, as Brad Simpson described. But what about those documents and Kissinger's reaction?
ALLAN NAIRN: : Well, Kissinger, and Ford, they, one of the points they made to Suharto, was that you have to try to get this invasion over with quickly. And Kissinger when he-- they wanted them to go in intensively, presumably kill as many Timorese as they could quickly. So that it wouldn't get international attention, and also, apparently they were worried that it could get attention in Congress. Because Ford and Kissinger knew that by authorizing this invasion, they were technically violating US law. Because the US weapons laws at the time stated US weapons given to foreign clients could not be used for purposes of aggression. And this was in the judgment of the State Department's own legal analysts, this looked like it would be an act of aggression if Indonesia were to invade East Timor, and that could, technically, if Congress got wind of it and started to pay attention to it, be grounds for stopping, cutting off US weapons supply to Indonesia.
That would have been devastating for the invasion of Timor because about 90% of the Indonesian weapons were coming from the US and they needed spare parts, they needed ammunition, they needed a re-supply. And it also would have been dangerous for the regime of Suharto which was based on repression within Indonesia and needed those weapons to keep their own population down. So Kissinger, in his internal discussions within the state department, was pressing his people to make sure that all information about Timor be kept under wraps. They didn’t want the US Congress paying too much attention to it. As it turned out, I think Kissinger was giving Congress a little too much credit because there was not much evidence at the time that apart from a few members like then-Congressman Tom Harkin, that there was much interest in probing what the US was doing. But Kissinger knew this was an illegal operation so he was trying to keep it quiet.
AMY GOODMAN: : And the information about Suharto's role in general, in Indonesia at the time, as you mentioned both the invasion of East Timor, but Suharto--what happened, how he came to power? The man that eventually Ford and Kissinger would meet with in the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta?
ALLAN NAIRN: : Well, Suharto came to power on the back of essentially a military coup which overthrew Sukarno who was the founding President of Indonesia. And from the period of 1965 to 67, when General Suharto was consolidating his power, his army and groups working with the army carried out a mass slaughter of Indonesian civilians. It's not clear exactly how many were killed, but anywhere from 400,000 to perhaps more than a million Indonesians were massacred as the Suharto regime gained power. And they did this, the military did this with US weaponry. And in fact, the US CIA station even gave a list of 5,000 names of people who they had identified as communists and potential opponents of the army, and they turned this list over to Suharto and his military intelligence people and many of those people were subsequently assassinated.
AMY GOODMAN: : Well, Allan Nairn, I want to thank you, very much for being with us. Allan Nairn, a journalist who interviewed President Ford roughly a decade and a half ago about Ford's involvement in the invasion of East Timor. That was December 7th, 1975 that the invasion occurred.
Ford and Rumsfeld
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006
Investigative Journalist Robert Parry on Gerald Ford's Legacy and the Bush Administration's Roots in the Ford White House
Journalist Robert Parry talks about Gerald Ford’s role in ending the Watergate era, his moves to limit Congressional and media oversight on executive power, and the roots of Bush administration in the Ford White House. [rush transcript included]
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Gerald Ford granted Richard Nixon a full and absolute pardon for all federal crimes that he committed when he was in the White House – including for crimes connected to the Watergate scandal. The decision stunned the country. Ford surrounded himself by advisers who would later play key roles in the current Bush administration and in shaping Bush’s Iraq war policy. Donald Rumsfeld served first as his chief of staff and then as Secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney also served as Ford’s chief of staff. Paul Wolfowitz served in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
• Robert Parry. Veteran Investigative Journalist; author,"Secrecy & Privilege".
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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: : As we turn now to the issue of Vietnam and Watergate. Yes, President Ford is dead at the age of 93. And President Ford died last night. He became president in 1974 following the resignation of Richard Nixon. The only person to become president who was never elected president or vice president. Some described him as the accidental president. We are--many people are talking about President Ford, the statement of President Bush is “President Ford was a great American who gave many years of dedicated service to our country on August 9, 1974, after a long career in the House of Representatives and service as Vice President, he assumed the Presidency in an hour of national turmoil and division.” President Bush went on to say “with his quiet integrity, common sense, and kind instincts, President Ford helped heal our land and restore public confidence in the presidency. The American people will always admire Gerald Ford's devotion to duty, his personal character and the honorable conduct of his administration. We mourn the loss of such a leader, and our 38th president will always have a special place in our nation's memory. On behalf of all Americans, Laura and I offer our deepest sympathies to Betty Ford and all President Ford’s family. Our thoughts and prayers will be with them in the hours and days ahead”. That, again, the statement of President Bush upon the death of President Ford.
We turn now to Robert Parry, who is a veteran investigative journalist, author of Secrecy and Privilege. Robert Parry, can you talk about the significance of the role of President Ford in history?
ROBERT PARRY: : Well, I think Gerald Ford gets a lot of credit because of when he became President and the extraordinary circumstances, in which he became President. He was, of course, the person who followed Richard Nixon, and brought, in a sense, the end to the national nightmare of Watergate. In another sense however, he also marks the beginning of the counter-attack, if you will, against the efforts by Congress, the Press and other Americans to reign in the Imperial Presidency.
You start seeing already, in the early days of the Ford Administration, an effort to strike back against those efforts to limit the Executive Power. We have efforts in the CIA, when he brings in George H.W. Bush, to push back against Congressional oversight. To allow more space for the CIA to operate, to fight against efforts to expose some of the more corrupt CIA actions. And oddly, because of the timing of Ford’s Presidency, that it sort of came after the period, the Church Commission looked at, in terms of CIA abuses, and it came before the beginning of the formal congressional oversight process, the CIA operated during that year with a great deal of freedom. And we know -- we don't know enough about some of the things that were done during that period.
So I think while Ford gets a great deal of credit, because he helped mend the nation's wounds over Watergate, it wasn't entirely this pleasant experience that some people are making it out to be. It was, in a sense, the incubator for the resurgence of the Imperial Presidency. People like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were in the Ford White House, and many of their feelings about re-establishing that Imperial Presidency have lived to this day.
AMY GOODMAN: : Talk more about this critical period, and the coming together of Cheney and Rumsfeld, when they came together for the first time with Ford. And also about what the pardon meant. Those who said that the country just had to move on. Many feel it's the reason why Ford lost to Carter. It would have been the only time he was elected to federal office, if he had actually become president as a result of an election as opposed to being chosen by the president as vice-president then taking over as president when Nixon left.
ROBERT PARRY: : Well, clearly the pardon of Richard Nixon was a politically understandable step. But again, it cut off some of the investigative efforts to really fully understand what happened during that period of Nixon’s presidency. There's always been this balance in Washington where there seems to be this obsession with moving on, and sometimes that leaves the American people without the full understanding of the facts of the situation. And therefore, some of the problems can re-emerge years down the road, as we've seen in this resurrection of the Imperial Presidency in the past 6 years. So I would think that was, some of the lessons learned by Cheney and Rumsfeld in the Ford White House were the need to fight for those executive powers in ways that were sometimes surreptitious as well as more open.
We saw at the CIA, for instance, during that period, the CIA Director, George H.W. Bush attempt to conduct a number of CIA operations with the same kind of arrogance and secrecy that had covered previous ones. The main point during that period was to get the CIA off the front pages, as Bush once put it. So when you had events like the Argentine military coup which set in motion the so-called Dirty War and led to some 30,000 deaths, that occurred during that period. And we still don't know the full involvement of the U.S. government in that.
The assassination of Orlando Letelier, the Chilean foreign minister, and his American co-worker, Ronni Moffitt occurred in September of 1976. And again, the impetus was not to find the truth, but to protect both the Pinochet government and the CIA from any fallout that might have occurred. Again, the timing of those things that are important because Ford was trying to win that election in November. So if one overlays the political calendar to the effort to misdirect investigators on the Letelier assassination, one sees the effort to keep the CIA from having negative press and therefore hurting Ford's chances. So again you see this idea of protecting the presidency from negative information. And that whole approach of keeping the American people in the dark is something that the Ford White House, in a sense, put back in motion after Watergate. And I think the pardon was part of that.
AMY GOODMAN: : Bob Parry, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Bob Parry is an investigative journalist. He's written the book Secrecy and Privilege. His website is: consortiumnews.com. When we come back from break we will be joined by the publisher of The Nation magazine, Victor Navasky, about a very interesting court case that involved The Nation, and yes, former President Ford. Again, the latest news, President Ford is dead at the age of 93. This is Democracy Now! democracynow.org. We’ll be back in a minute.
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