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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
7/27/2013 10:52:38 AM
Is he being sincere? How can this match his ban on Catholics airing the church scandals?

Catholics hear pope's call to shake up church


Pope Francis blows a kiss from his popemobile as he arrives for the Stations of the Cross event on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday, July 26, 2013. Also known as the Via Crucis and Via Dolorosa, the Stations of the Cross are built around reflections on Jesus' last steps leading up to his crucifixion and death. Francis started off the day, his fifth in Rio, by hearing confessions from a half-dozen young pilgrims in a park and met privately with juvenile detainees. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)
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RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — In the thick of his historic visit to Brazil this week, Pope Francis urged young Catholics to make a "mess" in their dioceses and break out of their spiritual cages.

Francis' exhortation, spoken Thursday during a special meeting with Argentine faithful, won him acclaim as a renegade leader of the world's biggest church. But it also left many of his followers with their own interpretations of the pontiff's words about the need to shake up the church.

Some said they thought Francis wanted them to object more forcefully when taught modern ideas that clash with church doctrine. Others said it meant hitting the streets and pushing for social change.

"If in my biology class they speak about abortion, I should raise my hand and say I don't believe in that," said Maria Alejandrina de Dicindio, a 54-year-old Argentine catechism teacher who had traveled to Rio to see her pope, a fellow Argentine. "The youth should open their mouths when it's their turn."

For Mexican pilgrim Gilberto Amado Hernandez, the pope's message meant he should start showing off to the world Jesus Christ's message of love.

"It's difficult to meet young people who want to get close to Christ," Amado said. "We have to show them that faith is something beautiful."

Francis himself didn't specify what to do, but he has displayed his own mold-breaking ways throughout this week's visit to Rio de Janeiro and rural Sao Paulo state, his first overseas trip as pope.

The first pontiff from the Americas worried security officials by riding through massive crowds atop an open-sided popemobile rather than the fully enclosed, bulletproof vehicle his last two predecessors used. He's also ventured straight up to well-wishers to kiss babies and bless children and met privately Friday with juvenile offenders to provide counsel.

While speaking to his fellow Argentines Thursday, Francis said Catholics should make a concerted effort to get outside their own worlds.

"I want to see the church get closer to the people," he told them. "I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools or structures, because these need to get out."

His final message: "Don't forget: make trouble."

In his own way, he lived those words as the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, before being selected as pope in March.

Then known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future pope largely abandoned the kinds of luxuries favored by other high-ranking church officials. He rented out the archbishop's luxurious suburban mansion, living instead in a spartan room in a downtown church office building. He also rode subways and buses around town rather than keep a chauffeur.

Francis' visit to a Rio slum on Thursday wasn't his first such venture. He made regular unescorted trips to dangerous slums as archbishop and saw to it that every major "misery village" in Buenos Aires had a chapel and a priest to spread the Lord's word.

He also encouraged young people and the laity to take on leadership roles in parishes that were previously held by priests, so that church members would have much more say in what happens in their communities. Though the Catholic Church openly supported Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, Francis later approved sainthood investigations for priests who were killed by the military government.

Yet pope biographer Sergio Rubin said Francis the archbishop also had a very keen sense of politics and took care to act prudently, choosing his battles and avoiding challenging superiors in ways that would backfire.

He wasn't so gleeful and devoted to the crowd, seemingly mindful that he didn't yet have the power to make a big splash in the church, according to an Argentine Catholic official who asked not to be identified because he wasn't authorized to talk publicly about church politics.

Instead, Francis molded the church in Argentina in quieter ways by hiring and promoting a new generation of outgoing priests in his own model, and not only fellow Jesuits used to living among lay people.

His replacement as archbishop, Mario Poli, had impressed Bergoglio by earning a degree in social work from the public University of Buenos Aires. In a book of dialogues with a friendly rabbi, Francis said, "This is a much better situation, because in the (university) you become acquainted with real life, the different points of view there are about it, the different scientific aspects, cosmopolitanism. . It's a way of having your feet well planted in the earth."

The shake-up message is also one he's applying as pope to the Vatican's staid and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Francis has made clear that big change is on the way, naming commissions of inquiry to investigate the scandals at the Vatican bank and propose an overarching reform of the entire central governance of the Catholic Church.

The pontiff has dived into the crowds that have greeted him at the Vatican and in Brazil.

During two raucous rides down Copacabana beach, he's waved, smiled and stopped repeatedly to accept gifts thrown at him from the crowd. At one point, Francis gave away his own white skullcap and put on another one tossed in from the street.

For Argentine student Ana Paula Garrote, Francis was showing Catholics they needed to live that type of spirit.

"For me, the pope wanted to say that we should go out into the streets, not stay in the parishes, and not be ashamed of talking about God," Garrote said. "The pope is telling us to talk about God without impunity because we have the truth, in uppercase, and we aren't alone."

___

Associated Press writer Marco Sibaja contributed to this report from Rio de Janeiro.

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
7/27/2013 11:01:02 AM

Snowden's father: Son better off now in Russia

This publicity image released by NBC shows Lon Snowden, father of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden on the "Today"show in New York on Friday, July 26, 2013. Snowden said there's been a concerted effort by some members of Congress to "demonize" his son. He says lawmakers should be more focused on whether the NSA's collection of the phone records of millions of Americans is constitutional. The House voted 217-205 Wednesday to spare the NSA surveillance program. (AP Photo/NBC, Peter Kramer)
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McLEAN, Va. (AP) — The father of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden said Friday his son has been so vilified by the Obama administration and members of Congress that he is now better off staying in Russia.

Lon Snowden of Allentown, Pa., had been working behind the scenes with lawyers to try to find a way his son could get a fair trial in the U.S. Edward Snowden has been charged in federal court in Alexandria with violating the Espionage Act by leaking details of NSA surveillance.

But in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, the elder Snowden said he has lost faith in recent weeks that his son would be treated fairly by the Justice Department. He now thinks his 30-year-old son is better off avoiding the U.S. if possible until an administration that respects the Constitution comes into office.

"If it were me, knowing what I know now, and listening to advice of sage people like (Pentagon Papers leaker) Daniel Ellsberg ... I would attempt to find a safe haven," Snowden said.

As a military analyst more than four decades ago, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of America's involvement in Vietnam, to major newspapers.

The elder Snowden said he thinks Russia is probably the best place to seek asylum because it is most likely to withstand U.S. pressure. Edward Snowden applied for temporary asylum in Russia last week.

Lon Snowden, a Coast Guard veteran who has worked on national security issues in his career, said he has tremendous faith in the American people and in the Constitution. He said that in a more subdued environment he feels confident that his son could get a fair trial, and the leak would be considered in context of his son's desire to expose a surveillance program that he and others believe exceeds constitutional bounds.

But he said the Justice Department's efforts to pressure other countries to turn over Snowden, coupled with silence from President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder in the face of denunciations leveled by members of Congress who have labeled Snowden a traitor, have eroded his hope for a fair trial.

On NBC's "Today" show Friday, Lon Snowden said there's been a concerted effort by some members of Congress to "demonize" his son.

Lon Snowden and his lawyer, Bruce Fein, released a letter Friday asking Obama to dismiss the criminal charges against Edward Snowden and to support legislation "to remedy the NSA surveillance abuses he revealed."

The elder Snowden and Fein said they were disgusted by Holder's letter Friday to Russian officials promising that Snowden would not face the death penalty if he were extradited. They said it reflects a mindset that Snowden is presumed guilty and that a sentence of 30 years or life would be a reasonable punishment.

In the phone interview with AP, Lon Snowden said he has had no direct contact with his son, and knows no more about his son's day-to-day life in Moscow, where he is reportedly staying at an airport transit zone, than anyone else.

More broadly, he expressed frustration that the story has become so focused on his son and his whereabouts and U.S. efforts to get him extradited, while the issues surrounding his son's disclosures of extensive surveillance programs that he says disregard the Constitution have been swept aside.

Lon Snowden said talking about the issues his son has raised allows him to connect to his son and keep the issues he raised in front of the American people. He and Fein are starting a nonprofit group called the Defense of the Constitution Foundation to promote those ideas.

"In essence, he has passed on the torch of democracy," Lon Snowden said of his son.

Lon said he's also focused on the issues rather than on his son's personal situation in part because he isn't sure there is much he can do to help him.

"He sacrificed everything and gained nothing," the elder Snowden said. "He's done what he's done. The consequences are unavoidable, and I don't know if I can mitigate those."



"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
7/27/2013 11:03:45 AM

Feds ban some Medicare providers in crackdown

Associated Press


MIAMI (AP) — For the first time in history, federal health officials said Friday they will ban certain types of Medicare and Medicaid providers in three high-fraud cities from enrolling in the taxpayer-funded programs for the poor as part of an effort to prevent scams.

The strict moratoriums, which start Tuesday, give federal health officials unprecedented power to choose any region and industry with high fraud activity and ban new Medicare and Medicaid providers from joining the programs for six months. They wouldn't ban existing providers.

The administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the agency is targeting providers of home health care in eight counties in the Miami and Chicago areas. All ambulance providers would be banned in eight counties in the Houston area.

"We fully support the action taken," said Val J. Halamandaris, president, National Association for Home Care & Hospice.

"NAHC has long supported program integrity measures such as this and strongly recommended that Congress give CMS the authority to issue a moratorium as part of the Affordable Care Act. We look forward to continue working with CMS as it considers other areas of the country where a moratorium may be needed," Halamandaris said.

The moratorium, which was first reported by The Associated Press, will also extend to Children's Health Insurance Program providers in the same areas, agency administrator Marilyn Tavenner said in a statement.

It's unclear how many providers will be shut out of the programs.

There were 662 home health agencies in Miami-Dade in 2012 and the ratio of home health agencies to Medicare beneficiaries was 1,960 percent greater in Miami Dade County than other counties, according to figures from federal health officials.

South Florida, long known as ground-zero for Medicare fraud, has also had several high profile prosecutions involving that industry.

In February, the owners and operators of two Miami home health agencies were sentenced for their participation in a $48 million Medicare fraud scheme.

The number of home health providers in Cook County, Ill., increased from 301 to 509 between 2008 and 2012. There were 275 ambulance suppliers in Harris County, Texas, in 2012. The ratio of providers to patients in both regions was also several hundred times greater than in other counties, federal health officials said.

Top Senate Republicans have criticized the agency for not using the powerful moratoriums sooner as a tool to combat an estimated $60 billion a year in Medicare fraud. Senators Chuck Grassley, who is the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, and Orrin Hatch, who is the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, sent a letter to federal health officials in 2011 urging them to use the bans.

"While it's certainly better late than never, it's unfortunate that it took CMS three years to use the tools it's had to protect seniors," Hatch said in a statement Friday, adding he hoped "to see more action like this."

Officials for the Department of Health and Services inspector general lobbied hard to ensure moratorium power was included under the Affordable Care Act as the Obama administration focuses on cleaning up fraud on the front end by preventing crooks from getting into the program in the first place.

"There's no shortage of bad actors to defraud the taxpayers, and the number gets bigger all the time, so it's good to see the administration at last using this new tool to fight fraud," Grassley said in a statement.

In the past, federal health officials tried to stall new provider applications from being processed, hoping to slow the number flocking to high-fraud sectors. But when providers inevitably complained, the agency had to process their paperwork.

The federal agency can also revoke the IDs of suspicious providers, but those are temporary and many companies are able to reenroll later or enroll under a different name.

Federal health officials have been reluctant to use one of its most powerful new tools, worrying moratoriums may harm legitimate providers and hamper patients' access to care. Tavenner said in the statement that would not happen, but the agency didn't elaborate. Agency officials said they intend to consider other moratoriums in different industries in other cities going forward.

The ability to target certain industries and cities is especially helpful as Medicare fraud has morphed into complex schemes over the years, moving from medical equipment and HIV infusion fraud to ambulance scams, as crooks try to stay one step ahead of authorities. Fraudsters have also spread out across the country, bringing their scams to new cities once authorities catch onto them.

The scams have also grown more sophisticated, using recruiters who are paid kickbacks for finding patients, while doctors, nurses and company owners coordinate to appear to deliver medical services that they are not.

The moratoriums come as budget cuts are forcing federal health officials to retract its watchdog arm as it launches its largest health care expansion since the Medicare program.

Health and Human Services inspector general officials said they are in the process of cutting 20 percent of its staff, from 1,800 at its peak to 1,400, and cancelling several high profile projects, including an audit that would have investigated technology security in the federal and state health exchanges launching in October. The project was slated to examine issue including whether patient information was secure from hackers on the online marketplace, where individuals and small businesses can shop for health insurance.

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Follow Kelli Kennedy on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kkennedyAP


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
7/27/2013 11:08:12 AM

Syrian refugees in Lebanon face suspicion

FILE - In this March 14, 2013 file photo, Syrian refugees walk next of their tents at a small refugee camp, in Ketermaya village, southeast of Beirut, Lebanon. A housing unit designed for the United Nations' refugee agency to offer shelter for those, fleeing conflict has become the latest source of friction between Lebanese politicians and aid organizations trying to manage the massive number of Syrian refugees in the country. Lebanon's refusal to set up any kind of organized accommodation for tens of thousands of Syrians, including refugee camps. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)

BEIRUT (AP) — They're lightweight, easy to assemble and have covers that are supposed to keep you cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The U.N. refugee agency wants to test these individual housing units with an eye toward using them as shelter for Syrians fleeing their country's civil war.

But the plan is meeting stiff resistance from Lebanese officials, who fear that elevating living conditions for Syrian refugees ever so slightly will discourage them from returning home once the fighting ends. That frustrates aid organizations who are desperately trying to manage the massive refugee presence across the country.

Lebanon's refusal to set up any kind of organized accommodation for tens of thousands of Syrians — including refugee camps or government-sanctioned tent sites — is a reflection of its own civil war demons. It underlines the nation's deep seated fear of a repeat of the 1975-1990 war, for which many Lebanese at least partly blame Palestinian refugees.

Many regard the Syrians with suspicion and are worried that the refugees, most of them Sunni Muslims, would stay in the country permanently, upsetting Lebanon's delicate sectarian balance and re-igniting the country's explosive mix of Christian and Muslim sects.

"It's the fear of everything permanent, or semi-permanent, because of the Palestinian experience in Lebanon," said Makram Maleeb, a program manager for a Syrian refugee crisis unit at Lebanon's Ministry for Social Affairs.

"Any move toward a camp situation is quite worrisome because it suggests a permanent situation for the refugees," he told The Associated Press.

Palestinians living in Arab countries — including the 450,000 in Lebanon — are descendants of the hundreds of thousands who fled or were driven from their homes in the war that followed Israel's creation in 1948. They remain in Lebanon's 12 refugee camps because Israel and the Palestinians have never reached a deal that would enable them to return to their homes that are now in Israel.

The civil war in Syria, now in its third year, has killed more than 100,000 people and uprooted millions from their homes. Many fled to Iraq, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, a short drive away from the capital, Damascus.

On any given day in Lebanon, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of refugees arrive in cars loaded with children and belongings. Their presence has swelled the country's population of 4.5 million by a fifth. It's an astounding statistic for the tiny country and represents the highest number of refugees per capita of any country in the region.

Officials say an estimated 1.2 million Syrians are now in Lebanon — including some 620,000 registered refugees. Most arrived over the past eight months.

With the government providing none of the facilities and land that authorities in Turkey, Jordan and Iraq have allocated for the refugees, many Syrians in Lebanon live in appalling conditions, finding shelter in slums, tents and tin shacks strung with laundry lines and wedged between farm lands outside towns and cities.

On a casual walk in Beirut, one finds Syrians sheltering in underground parking lots, under bridges and old construction sites with no running water, sanitation, electricity or protection from Lebanon's sizzling summers and its freezing winters.

"The kids get sick all the time here," said Raghda, a 48-year-old mother of eight, living in an abandoned police station in the eastern Lebanese town of Majdal Anjar, along with 21 other relatives. They are crammed into three rooms without proper sanitation or clean water.

About 10 percent of the refugees are accommodated in unfinished private houses, and others live in garages, shops and collective shelters, according to the UNHCR. Most of them — over 80 percent — rent accommodation that costs more than $200 a month on average.

Lebanese officials say they are aware of the magnitude of the crisis, the health risks involved and the possibility that deepening resentment of refugees among the hosting population could turn into an armed conflict inside Lebanon as the civil war drags on in Syria.

Still, they insist the government will not approve any plans for setting up refugee camps or sanction erecting any kind of structure specifically designed to accommodate refugee families on Lebanese soil no matter who designs it and who pays for it.

"It's distressing and everyone is feeling anxious, wondering if they will ever go back as the fighting goes on and on and on," Maleeb said.

Still, he said it was unlikely the housing unit would be approved.

Ninette Kelley, UNHCR representative in Lebanon, said the refugees "desperately want to return home." But having people live in appalling conditions will not force them out of Lebanon before the fighting stops in Syria, she said.

"'There is this psychological worry that if people are put in a semi-permanent structure, they will never leave," Kelley told the AP. They will leave, she said, adding that one of the greatest impediments of going home after the fighting ends is not having a place to live in Syria.

The 17.5-square-meter (yard) refugee housing unit would offer a family of five a "more dignified life in exile," said Kamel Deriche, UNHCR's operations manager in Lebanon, and enables refugees to dismantle it, pack it and carry it home to reuse as a temporary accommodation until their family home is rebuilt.

Compared to a tent, which has to be replaced every three to four years, the unit's life span is expected to be up to seven years. And the price of about $1,000 per unit makes it more economical, Deriche said.

"It's not a permanent structure and we are not establishing camps by any stretch of the imagination," Kelley said, adding that the unit would be only one of several shelter options for the agency to use.

A prototype of the prefabricated house designed by the Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA has been sitting in the front yard of UNHCR's Beirut headquarters for a month.

The agency has been lobbying Lebanese officials for permission to try out 15 units over a period of six months before they can be deployed, but so far to no avail. UNHCR also intends to test the units in climate conditions of northern Iraq and in Ethiopia, Deriche said.

Lebanese officials say the historic connotation of a tent for refugees, let alone a housing unit, weighs heavy on the nation that is still reeling from the devastating 15-year civil war. The Syrian fighting has frequently spilled over into Lebanon over the past two years, deepening tensions between pro- and anti-Syrian politicians, who have been unable to form a new government since the prime minister resigned in March.

"There will be no camps and family shelters, wooden or pre-fabricated, whatsoever in Lebanon," said Maleeb, the government official.

Anything to do with the Syrian refugees, he added, is "a big political decision, and one that cannot be taken by a caretaker government."

___

Associated Press correspondent Diaa Hadid contributed to this report.

___

Follow Barbara Surk at www.twitter.com/BarbaraSurkAP .


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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
7/27/2013 11:13:42 AM

'Act of Killing' Director on Filming His Shocking Documentary: It Gave Me Nightmares

By Steve Pond | The Wrap – 10 hours ago

Forget about "The Conjuring": no movie has brought more true horror to the screen this year than the documentary "The Act of Killing," which opens in Los Angeles on Friday after bowing in New York last week.

In director Joshua Oppenheimer's film, Indonesian gangsters recreate government sanctioned killings of as many as 1 million communists, left-wingers, union workers and others nearly 50 years ago. And they do it in the style of their favorite films.

Surreal, horrifying and utterly unlike any other film on this kind of subject, the Drafthouse Films release features harrowing film-noir sequences in which the gangsters portray their own victims as they reenact the killings, as well as bizarrely lavish musical numbers in which the dead thank their killers. The killers have openly bragged about their deeds for decades, but the film shows a few of them grappling with the memory – notably Anwar Congo, head of a group of Northern Sumatra gangsters obsessed with the movies, who suddenly begins retching, gagging and shaking with the dry heaves when he returns to the rooftop where he'd strangled hundreds.

TheWrap wrote about the film after it premiered at Toronto last September, when Oppenheimer (above) said he'd been approached before a screening by two men from the Indonesian embassy who'd warned him, "We're following this film very closely."

Also read: Horrifying Toronto Doc 'Act of Killing' Restages Mass Killing as Twisted Entertainment

Since then, "The Act of Killing," executive produced by iconic documentarians Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, has been shown in private screenings there. Oppenheimer talked with TheWrapabout the death threats he has received and the ongoing need to protect the identify of people in the film, lest they face reprisals in a country where for 47 years the government has either officially denied that the massacre took place, or claimed it was justified.

When we spoke in Toronto last September, you didn't know how you were going to release the film in Indonesia.
We knew that if we just submitted it to the censors and it was banned, then it would become a crime to screen it. And that would become an excuse for the [government-sanctioned] paramilitary group or the army to attack screenings with impunity. But once it became a big news story during Toronto, we realized that we needed to get the media to see the film. So we started screening right after Toronto. We told everybody, "Why don't you hold screenings, but do it by invitation?" On the 10th of December last year, which was International Human Rights Day, there were 50 screenings in 30 cities, ranging in size from 30 people to 600 people. By the first of April, there had been more than 500 screenings in 95 cities.

What has the reaction been?
We held screenings for Indonesia's leading news publishers, producers, editors, filmmakers, historians, educators, human rights advocates, artists, writers, survivors' groups all through the autumn, and everybody really loved the film. But the most powerful reaction was from the editors of Indonesia's leading news magazine, Tempo. They decided that the film was so important for them that they had to break what had been a decades-long silence about the killings.

They sent dozens of journalists around the country to show that "The Act of Killing" was a repeatable experience, that they could find men who would boast about what they had done. They gathered something like 500 or 600 pages of boastful testimony from perpetrators, edited it down to 75 pages and gathered another 25 pages of material about the film. And that really set the tone for the mainstream Indonesian media to say, "We need to talk about this."

The film has really come to Indonesia like the child in the Emperor's New Clothes, which is how I intended it. That's been the most wonderful thing – pointing at the king and saying, "Look, the king is naked." Everybody knew it and had been too afraid to say it, but now that it's been said so undeniably, there's no going back. The moral consensus around these events has really shifted.

I don't think the killings are particularly well-known in the United States, but the film suggests that the U.S., which was desperate to halt the spread of communism in Asia at the time, was complicit in what happened.
The U.S. was absolutely complicit. The U.S. provided money, provided weapons, provided lists of people they wanted dead. They encouraged the army to kill everybody on the left, or put everybody on the left in political prisons as a way of making sure that the whole left was annihilated.

But I had a decision facing me when I made the film. If I were to go into that history, it would inevitably become a historical film, not a film in which the audience is immersed in the now, in the present, in the world of these men. The most important thing was that we don't have distance from them, that we don't see them as exhibits in a framework given to us by experts or voiceover or historical narration.

All I can hope for is that this film opens a space for people to remember what happened, to investigate what happened, to make other films, to write. So it says at the beginning that America was complicit, but I don't go into the details.

When you started filming the killers, I would guess that you had no idea they would lead you into this bizarre world of reenactments.
No. I started with a community of survivors, and when it became too dangerous to film with the survivors, they told me to continue to film with the perpetrators. I was hesitant, because my loyalties were with the survivors. But I started filming with the perpetrators and got this boasting, and my questions gradually shifted from "What happened then?" to "What's going on now that these men would want to be seen this way?"

They were boasting and showing off and doing these simple demonstrations of what they had done. And I would say, "You want to show me what you've done? Show me in whatever way you want. I'll film the process, I'll film the re-enactments, as a way of understanding what these events mean to you and your society." And then I met Anwar (below), and his pain was somehow closer to the surface.

That pain really emerged when we see him watching the re-enactments of his killings that you had filmed.
Yeah. The second or third day I filmed Anwar, he watched himself on that roof [where he demonstrated how he'd strangled people], and he looked very disturbed. But what did he do with that feeling? He didn't dare say, "This is wrong," because he's desperately clung to the lie that it was good and justified, so that he doesn't have to look in the mirror and see a mass murderer. So he looked really disturbed, but he said, "It's my trousers. It's my hair." He placed it onto something really trivial. And so began this process of embellishment, the motor of which from the very beginning was actually him running away from his conscience.

Maybe it was inevitable that if I followed that process, those reenactments would become the prism through which he recognized his broken self. But that was not my motive. So you're exactly right, I didn't know where it was going. And if I did, if I was able to anticipate I was going to bring him to some moment of remorse, I think the film would have been sentimental, and also obscene. Because in the face of the death of a million people, with the perpetrators still in power, it cannot be the goal to get one man to feel regret.

When you were filming, how hard was it to stifle a sense of horror or outrage?
You know, it wasn't so hard. I learned from the very beginning to be quiet and to hold myself back, so that I would be able to document what had happened. I always had to see them as human beings. I don't think I can make an honest film about somebody else if I'm not close to that person. And to be close, you have to be vulnerable.

There were sections of the film that really haunted me, that gave me nightmares. I would wake up and I couldn't sleep the rest of the night or the next night at all. I would finally crash the night after that, and then it would start again. That went on for eight months. There were moments when I just felt hatred or total exhaustion, and those two things usually went together. And then I would stop, I would rest for a couple of days and I would come back.

I insisted that the moment I start seeing this man as a monster or a psychopath or pure evil, what I'm really doing is reassuring myself that I'm not like that, and that we're all different from that. And then I lose the possibility of understanding the most fundamental question here, which is, "How do we human beings do this to each other?"

Has Anwar seen the film?
For a long time he hadn't wanted to see it, but then he found himself the center of a big news story inIndonesia and he wanted to see it. I couldn't go to Indonesia, and I didn't think I could bring him out safely, because he's now in the news for having killed all these people. And so with the help of an Al Jazeera journalist, we flew him to Jakarta, put him in a hotel where there was great internet, and I was with him by Skype throughout the screening.

He saw the film and gosh, it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. At the end he sat there in silence for a very long time, tearful. He went to the bathroom, he pulled himself together, he came back and then he said, "This film shows what it's like to be me."

One of my big fears was that he might be under pressure to denounce the film. I said, "Look, you can denounce the film if you have to." But he hasn't. And he hasn't been blamed by the paramilitary group. They just blame me.

What form does that blame take?
I get a lot of threats from them. The worst one was the other day, when they sent me a message via Facebook saying, "Look forward to doing something very unusual with your head." That wasn't nice.

'2016: Obama's America' Docu Producer Misses Mark With Oscar Beef

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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