Washington, Mar 14 (IPS/Jim Lobe) -- President Bill Clinton's unprecedented apology last week for US support of successive right-wing governments in Guatemala was greeted with considerable satisfaction by human-rights activists and researchers here.

They added that now it may be time for the United States to convene its own "truth commission" - to study and expose Washington's aid during the Cold War to repressive governments abroad, especially in Latin America.

"What we all need to do now is to call for a US Truth Commission which examines the US record in a detailed and serious way that has not been possible before," said Kate Doyle, an analyst for the National Security Archive (NSA), who helped Guatemala's Historical Clarification Commission obtain key US documents for its research.

The Guatemalan commission, set up under the 1996 UN-mediated peace accord, found the country's military guilty of "acts of genocide" against the Indian population during the 36-year civil war and of 93% of the 200,000 killings which took place.

It also found that Washington, particularly through its spy agencies, "lent direct and indirect support to some illegal state operations."

That finding was based in part on thousands of secret US documents obtained by Doyle which clearly established both Washington's aid to Guatemala's military and its knowledge of the human rights abuses.

The conclusions apparently provoked Clinton's unexpected - but carefully scripted - remarks to an informal gathering of leaders from Guatemalan civic groups during his four-day tour of Central America.

"For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression, of the kind described in the report, was wrong," he said.

"The United States must not repeat that mistake."

The admission gratified US human rights activists. "It is a watershed," said Michael McClintock, a researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of a classic work on US support for right-wing repression in Latin America.

"But it's a step which could be pushed further," he added. "Once it is accepted that this was genocide, and that the United States was up to its ears in it, it becomes a lot harder to say we shouldn't investigate the past."

According to McClintock's book, 'Instruments of Statecraft,' the United States, beginning during the 'Alliance for Progress' in the early 1960s, systematically provided aid and advice to Latin American armies which condoned the use of political murder against real or suspected leftists.

The "national security" doctrine, as it was sometimes called, justified terrorist methods against alleged insurgents and their sympathizers.

But the documents obtained by Doyle and the Clarification Commission about Guatemala presented the most complete picture so far about US complicity in, and knowledge of, serious rights abuses.

One 1966 report revealed how US personnel advised Guatemala's military intelligence on setting up a safe house in the presidential palace to coordinate counter-insurgency operations.

That office, at which a CIA officer also worked well into the 1970's, evolved into an operation which Amnesty International denounced in 1980 as the headquarters for political murder in Guatemala.

State Department, CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) officers reported in detail about specific operations, including kidnapping, torture, and murder, carried out by the Guatemalan army and its paramilitary auxiliaries.

The only qualms reflected in the documents about the repression were that, in the words of one 1967 cable, things were "running wild," and thus risked becoming counter-productive.

In one typical example, a 1971 Defence Intelligence cable worried that the government's "heavy-handed tactics could provoke popular antagonism."

Until the late 1970's, when President Jimmy Carter promoted his human rights policy, the cables did not reflect any inclination to distance the United States from the Guatemalan military.

The one exception was a 1968 memorandum by Viron Vaky, a State Department officer who had just completed a tour of duty in Guatemala City, to the assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs.

The five-page report, an appeal for Washington to make clear its condemnation of "counter-terror" in Guatemala, argued that such tactics were destroying Guatemalan society and presented a "serious problem" for the US image in Latin America, as well as US values.

"We have condoned counter-terror; we may even have in effect encouraged or blessed it," said Vaky - who later served as Carter's assistant secretary. "Is it conceivable that we are so obsessed with insurgency that we are prepared to rationalize murder as an acceptable counter-insurgency weapon?"

The documents also revealed that US intelligence agencies knew about specific massacres committed by the army in the early 1980s, even while senior officials of the Ronald Reagan administration assured Congress that reports of such atrocities were disinformation spread by solidarity groups and Amnesty International.

To Doyle and McClintock, the Guatemala documents are just the tip of the iceberg of all US documents still held in secret archives of US agencies.

While Washington has begun declassifying information about abuses committed under the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, it has withheld information from investigators in Haiti, Honduras and El Salvador, where US complicity with repressive regimes both more recent and more direct.

Already, right-wing forces have expressed their unhappiness about Clinton's remarks.

"I don't think we need to go abroad and exaggerate our involvement," according to Otto Reich, who led Reagan's public-diplomacy campaign on Central America from the White House. "Let's face it, the Guatemalans who were killed were killed by Guatemalans."

Vaky, now a senior associate with the Inter-American Dialogue, believes that "what the President said was just about right" although he does not favour a major review of the past US role.

"My own inclination is to concentrate on what we can do to help in the current situation," he said.

But his own words of 31 years ago still echoed: if Washington fails to disassociate itself from the Guatemalan army's methods of terror, "we will stand before history unable to answer the accusations that we encouraged the Guatemalan Army to do these things."