Democracy Now!
As Obama Arrives in Jakarta, Secret Docs Show U.S.-backed Indonesian Special Forces Unit Targets Papuan Churches, Civilians
Investigative journalist and activist Allan Nairn, who has just released secret documents from Kopassus—the feared Indonesian special forces—which has been responsible for human rights abuses since the 1950s. Earlier this year, the Obama administration lifted a 12-year funding ban for the training of Kopassus. While Obama talks about human rights, the documents indicate that Kopassus targets churches and civilians and includes a Kopassus enemies list topped by a local Baptist minister in West Papua. Nairn will continue to release documents on his website AllanNairn.com.
Indonesia's US-backed security forces engage in "murder [and] abduction" and show that Kopassus targets churches in West Papua and defines civilian dissidents as the "enemy."
Acclaimed Indian Author Arundhati Roy on Obama’s Wars, Poverty and India’s Maoist Rebels
I think the big lesson today is that—look at the richest country in the world, America, having attacked and made war on the poorest countries but not being able to win those wars. You know, they have not been able to win. And here’s the lesson. You know, you couldn’t win Vietnam, you couldn’t win Afghanistan, couldn’t win Iraq, cannot win Kashmir.
America wants to interfere, it doesn’t give anyone a choice. So it’s destroyed Afghanistan, it’s destroyed Pakistan, it’s destroyed Iraq. And it will destroy India, if—because India doesn’t have the spine. The Indian government is just willingly allowing this to happen, the U.S. to dictate everything.
( Or not winning : it's not a bug, it's a feature ! )
There are several wars going on in India. There’s Kashmir, which is up in flames now, and there’s what’s happening in the northeast. But what I’ve been writing about recently is the war on tribal people in the tribal heartland of India, where something like 200,000 paramilitary troops have been called out to really push through about, I don’t know, 200 or more memorandums of understandings with mining companies and infrastructure companies. And there’s—it’s all being fought in the name of clearing the forests of the Maoist guerrillas.
And as the war escalates, there have been, you know, attacks and counterattacks, but really people, the poorest people in the world, are in a lot of trouble now. And there was a lot of pressure to ask for peace talks, you know, because these poor people in the villages, the tribal people, are kind of under siege—no medicines, no food, no ability to come out of the forest. And so, the government actually has been—you know, because it needs to keep on this mask of being a great democracy, it sort of offers peace talks, on the one hand, and then undermines them, on the other.
Anti-Nuclear Sentiment Swells In Germany
Police trade unions complained in unusually hard terms that they have been "scapegoated" by politicians, who "made a fatal mistake" when they extended nuclear plants life spans, and that citizens are right to protest.
Pedro is a Brazilian cattle farmer and former trade official. He has huge glasses and a gray bushy mustache. He says the U.S. is cheating.
U.S. cotton farmers, Pedro says, get subsidies from the U.S. government that add up to somewhere between $1.5 billion and $4 billion a year.
"We want to compete farmer against farmer," Pedro says. "Not Brazilian farmer and the American farmer with the help of the United States government."
"We want to compete farmer against farmer," Pedro says. "Not Brazilian farmer and the American farmer with the help of the United States government."
He says the U.S. isn't following the World Trade Organization's rules of global trade — rules that the U.S., Brazil and 151 other countries have agreed to follow.
Pedro became secretary of trade in the Brazilian Agriculture Department in 2000; two years later, Brazil filed a case against the U.S. at the WTO.
The U.S. kept losing its appeals, but the subsidies stayed in place. And there wasn't anything the WTO could do about it.
WTO rules let the winning country — in this case Brazil — tax imports from the losing country.
So Brazilian officials decided to threaten some powerful American industries with taxes, in an effort to recruit them into their battle against American cotton.
They made a list of 102 products and got in touch with powerful American business groups. They said the new import tax would apply within 30 days — unless the U.S. government sent a team to Brazil to negotiate the cotton issue.
It worked.
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