Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-AS-Indonesia-Cold-War-Massacre.html
SURABAYA, Indonesia (AP) -- The men bound the thumbs of dozens of suspected communists behind their backs with banana leaves and drove them to a torch-lit jungle clearing. As villagers jeered, the prisoners were killed, one by one.
''There was no resistance,'' remembers Sulchan, then the 21-year-old deputy commander of an Islamic youth militia. ''All of them had their throats cut with a long sword.''
Sulchan was a killer in one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, where up to half a million people were massacred in 1965-66 in a purge of communists backed by the United States government. The bloodbath swept into power the dictator Suharto, who ruled for three decades. Today, Indonesian history books make no mention of any deaths, and government and military officials depict what happened as a necessary national uprising against a communist threat.
In a series of interviews with The Associated Press, Sulchan and three other killers said the massacres were in fact a carefully planned and executed state operation and described some of its horrors for the first time. In their rare testimony, all the men spoke of what they did with detachment and often pride, and expressed no regret at what they described as defending their country and religion, Islam.
The CIA refuses to talk about the operation even today, citing security reasons. But documents released by the National Security Archives in Washington, D.C., show that the U.S. Embassy passed the names of dozens of Communist Party leaders, and possibly many more, to the Indonesian army, along with some of their locations. Documents also show that officials from the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia passed on information to Washington about the killings of 50 to 100 people every night. The U.S. Embassy declined to comment.
Even after Suharto's death in January, many who aided the purge are still in positions of power or influence, including former and current government, military and intelligence leaders, experts say. And the suppression of information about the abuses of the era means there has been no meaningful redress for the families of the dead.
''In all the newspapers and magazines published since late 1965, it is extraordinarily rare to find a perpetrator's description of the killings,'' says John Roosa, a professor at the University of British Colombia who wrote the book ''Pretext for Mass Murder.''
The testimony of the four men gives a glimpse into how the killings unfolded.
The frenzy began shortly after Sept. 30, 1965, after an apparent abortive coup in which six right-wing generals were murdered and dumped in a well near the capital, Jakarta. Suharto, an unknown major general at the time, stepped into the power vacuum. He blamed the assassinations on Indonesia's Communist Party and claimed they were targeting Islamic leaders.
No conclusive proof of communist involvement in the coup has been produced, but the party was then the largest outside the Soviet Union and China, with some 3 million members. It also had an armed wing and serious financial clout. Its growing ties with China and Russia worried Washington, at a time when the Vietnam War was intensifying and fears of communist takeovers in Southeast Asia were running high.
The four men interviewed by the AP, were members of the local Islamic youth militia, Banser, or of anti-communist youth movements in East Java. They were in their 20s at the time, and Sulchan and his superior jointly commanded a 200-member branch of Banser.
Sulchan, now a 64-year-old preacher, says the ''order to eliminate all communists'' came through Islamic clerics with Indonesia's largest Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. Sulchan led the first killing in his neighborhood -- that of a schoolteacher, Hamid, said to have had communist ties.
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