Abandons Human Rights for Indonesia to Train Its Worst Military and Police

December 19, 2007 - Human rights advocates have learned that the U.S. is training members of Kopassus, the notorious Indonesian Special Forces unit with a long record of human rights violations. The similarly-brutal Brimob, the para-military mobile police brigade, is receiving training as well.

The East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (ETAN) and the West Papua Advocacy Team (WPAT) today strongly condemned U.S. training for the two units, saying that it undermines the little credibility the U.S. has left in promoting human rights and accountability in Indonesia. ETAN and WPAT urged Congress to intervene to prevent such training and called on the administration to publicly pledge not to provide further assistance to the two units.

"The Bush administration promised Congress that it would ‘carefully calibrate’ any security assistance to promote reform and human rights," said John M. Miller, National Coordinator of ETAN. "Getting in bed again with Kopassus and Brimob promotes the opposite. Clearly, the administration's moral gauges are in need of a major realignment."

I just heard on the progressive Seattle radio station (1090) that the on line petition that has been launched by Robert Wexler (D Fla who sits on the House Judiciary Committee) that supports hearings on the impeachment of Vice President Cheney, has gathered more than 100,000 signatures in just three days. The Judiciary committee has been sitting on this proposal for a LONG time and at least two members besides Wexler are in support of opening these hearings. Conyers is the chair of the committee and perhaps he needs a mass outpouring of support to get the hearings underway. Everyone can sign the petition by going to wexlerwantshearings.com and filling in the dots. Hearings would make public in a dramatic way the violations of the constitution that have happened in the present administration. I recommend that everyone join in this big email petition that might build a fire under congress people who have said that impeachment in order butrefuse to act on it now that it is a possibility.

Go to Wexler Wants Hearings and put your name down. What is the down side?

The people of the northern Italian city of Vicenza, with help from activists around Italy, the rest of Europe, and even in the United States, are continuing to block the proposed construction of a new U.S. military base on their soil. When a company laid underground fiber-optic cables at the site of the proposed base, activists fill a junction box with cement. When another company tried to begin the work of removing World War II era U.S. bombs from the site, activists camped out in the cold for three days and nights while allies in Florence and a small town near Naples conducted simultaneous protests in front of the company's offices. The company backed off and has suspended the work. And a small town outside Vicenza has now refused to allow the United States to construct a residential village for troops.

Recently, Italy's foreign minister assured Condoleezza Rice, and Italy's president assured George W. Bush - not for the first time - that the base will be built. And the U.S. Congress, unbeknownst to the American people, has approved the funding. But there is a reason for these repeated public assertions that everything is on track. It isn't.

Ever since Hillary Clinton supported the reckless Kyl-Lieberman Iran bill, her Democratic competitors have been blasting her for her stand, and rightly so. By defining Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, a core branch of the Iranian military, as a foreign terrorist organization, the bill put the U.S. Senate on record as vindicating the Bush-Cheney line that Iranian proxies are part of a global conspiracy, linking Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Hamas, Hezbollah, and any other enemy the administration wants to conjure up. It made a US attack on Iran just that much more possible and confirmed that she learned little from her earlier Iraq war vote. 

But what none of the candidates challenging her have done, as far as I can tell, is use the most succinct and damning description of the vote's implications that's been expressed, when Senator James Webb called it "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream." "It could be read as tantamount to a declaration of war," Webb concluded, a description that goes to the heart of the issue, with words likely to stick in the minds of the voters. But the other candidates have to publicly quote them, and so far they haven't.