Things that go "bang" in the night

In a class where every lecture ends in an unsolved mystery, I was not surprised to hear this story in Southeast Asian Politics. Apparently some years back, in the dead silence of Indonesian night, rebel forces kidnapped six powerful military officers. They shot three, and took the other three to an Air Force Base on the outskirts of Jakarta. Three days later, the bodies of the three remaining generals were discovered at the bottom of a well. The bodies were grossly disfigured, and no one knew the cause of death. Soon after, Indonesian newspapers got wind of a horrific story: apparently, the popular "Women's Movement" (wing of the Communist Party) tortured the brave generals with razor blades. They gouged out their eyes and castrated them. Then, these bloodthirsty harpies took off all their clothes and started to dance naked around the whimpering generals. More torture followed. Then they dumped the bodies down the well.

The military nationalists warned that this was what happened when Communists ran free. The orthodox Muslims warned that this was what happened when women didn't wear headscarves (Salem witch trials, anyone?) Public sentiment turned against the Communists. People took up arms in the streets, and before the year was out, nearly 1 million Indonesian communists had been massacred, most by their neighbors and countrymen.

Years later, an American scholar going through some discarded papers came across copies of the military autopsies for the three generals who were found at the bottom of the well. The reports contained descriptions of three relatively intact bodies, all with eyes and genitals untouched. Each man had died of a single gunshot wound.

So the question is: what really happened at the Air Force Base? And who planted the story that led to mass murder? The CIA has released most of its files on Indonesia. But there are four files that it has not yet declassified, and scholars suspect they contain the answers, because rumor has it the CIA supplied the insurgents who kidnapped the generals in the first place.

Looking at Indonesia, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Argentina and Vietnam, I feel the US foreign policy of the past has been to ship boxes of guns to ill-informed and poorly-trained guerrillas and watch the resulting battles with mounting consternation and horror. In the case of Saddam, it was not guns but weapons-grade VX gas (which answers the question of where the WMD's came from, if not where they went). It seems that despite our best intentions, the only democratic principle we've consistently exported is the 2nd Amendment.