US Military in Thailand 1952 - 2010

August 2, 2010 at 2:09 AM

The Beginning

In late 1952 , the CIA and the U.S. Information Service put out handbills and booklets in Thai declaring how Communism opposed [Thailand's] nation, religion and king. They exaggerated the threat by manufacturing fake communist tracts in Thai that attacked the monarchy. Over time, the United States expanded the effort into pictures, books and movies. In 1956 the U.S. had eight mobile teams putting on film and music shows contrasting the beloved king and queen with the evil spectre of communism.

Bhumibol also presided over the investiture of [General] Phao's personal brigade of aswan or knights, actually the thugs who ran Phao's drugs and protection rackets. [This group was the BPP.]

As the CIA client for anticommunist operations, the BPP was better trained and armed than the regular army. Its training center was next to the king's Hua Hin palace. As he [the king] used the BPP airfield, and they served as his local escort, a special relationship blossomed...

This special relationship was encouraged by both Phao and the CIA...

excerpt from The King Never Smiles, by Paul Handley
p 124-125

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1960s

Bangkok reacted [to Lao communist activities] by forming a counterinsurgency task force, the Communist Suppression Operations Command, or CSOC, run by Deputy Prime Minister Praphas along with U.S. advisers. Behind them was the massive force the United States had built up in Thailand, consuming the country like an occupation. In the early 1960s the Americans, together with Thai soldiers, were already conducting guerrilla raids into Laos and launching air strikes on Laos and Vietnam from Thai bases. By 1965 there were roughly 14,000 U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Thailand. A year later the total topped 34,000 accompanied by 400 aircraft. The American force was there ... to prevent the rise of a domestic Thai insurgency...and legitimized the Thai military's control of the country.

...Washington threw huge resources at winning the people's hearts and minds through development, hoping to avoid the problems of Vietnam. U.S. directed projects built roads, dug fish ponds and established social services in rural villages. Within a few years U.S. annual spending in Thailand equaled the total economic product of the entire northeast where the lion's share of it was deployed, all accompanied by anit-communist and pro-monarchy propaganda.

Arguably, the extensive U.S. presence and aid worsened the problems. Much of Washington's hundreds of millions of dollars dropped into the pockets of the traditional elite, the landowning aristocrats, Sino-Thai traders, and powerful bureaucrats and generals. Bangkok spent up to three times as much on arms as it did on education, and health services got much less. Strong economic growth came with high inflation near military bases, GIs on holiday carousing drunkenly throughout the kingdom, and  a very visible explosion of the sex industry

excerpt from The King Never Smiles, by Paul Handley
p. 184

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1966

... Thailand had agreed to Washington's request for a large Thai combat deployment to Vietnam

Increasingly Thailand's generals were being accused of Dictatorship, by anitwar activists in the United States. Bhumibol told "Look" [magazine] that the American student protesters were ignorant and victims of communist manipulation. Thailand had to be wary of such communist trickery, he argued.

excerpt from The King Never Smiles, by Paul Handley
p. 188

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1967

In an interview with reporters, the king stressed the global communist threat and repeated that American opponents of the Vietnam war were victims of brainwashing. (New York Times June 14, 1967)

The regular [Thai] police were meanwhile being funded by another U.S. government arm, the State Department's secretive Office of Public Safety...The office offered the police 100 new aircraft and fuel.

[Eventually these were seized from the police by the BPP (king's personal guard) with the blessing of the king]
excerpt from The King Never Smiles, by Paul Handley
p. 191-193

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And more recently:

Thailand has served as an outsourced CIA sponsored Torture center. This started with Bush's War of Terror and allows the US military/government to avoid public relations problems in the US and further allows sticky legal issues to be avoided in 'der USA homeland'

March 2002: First Secret CIA Prison Built in Thailand

ABC News : the first CIA secret prison is established in Thailand at this time to house Abu Zubaida, the first important al-Qaeda target who is captured at this time (March 28, 2002). President Bush had recently authorized the creation of CIA prisons (see After February 7, 2002). After being captured in Pakistan and treated for gunshot wounds, Zubaida is flown to Thailand around the middle of April 2002 and housed in a small warehouse inside a US military base. He is waterboarded and interrogated (Mid-May 2002 and After)...Some reports place the secret prison at the Voice of America relay station near the north-eastern Thai city of Udon Thani close to the border of Laos, but this is unconfirmed. [Sydney Morning Herald, 11/5/2005]

http://tinyurl.com/27brk6y

Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, termed the detention policies used by the U.S. “Crimes against Humanity”:

“These instances of the enforced disappearances of human beings and their consequent torture, because they are both widespread and systematic, constitute Crimes against Humanity in violation of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, which have been ordered by the highest level officials of the United States government…”

Referring to President Bush and his principal advisers, Boyle continued, “Since these criminal activities took part in several states that are parties to the ICC Rome Statute, that renders these U.S. government officials [AND I MIGHT ADD - THAI OFFICIALS - THAKSIN's boys or ABBY's] subject to prosecution by the International Criminal Court on the grounds of territoriality of the offense, even though the United States [OR THAILAND] is not a party to the Rome Statute.”

And there is no expiration date on these charges.

http://pubrecord.org/torture/7326/two-dozen-countries-complicit-torture/

**Thailand is at least 'looking into' buying a used submarine from the US Navy - which, if they do it, will involve ongoing purchases of spare parts, etc...

Thailand still conducts regular Military "exercises" with the US military - including naval and land war games.

http://www.thaiphotoblogs.com/index.php?blog=5&title=cobra-gold-2009&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1