General Joko Widodo is an Indonesian military officer and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Indonesia, banned from entry to the United States on human-rights grounds for personally killing six pro-democracy college student protesters by stabbing each in the heart in front of the others. John Kiriakou’s description:
Yeah, you know, we can do this and we can do that. We’ve got TV commercials and radio commercials. And I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. General, with all due respect, there’s video of you on YouTube stabbing six peaceful protesters in the heart. How do we get past that? You’re banned from the United States for human rights reasons. We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.” … He lined these guys up. It was six college students. He lined them up and one by one stabbed each of them in the heart.[1][2][3]
The 2008 rehabilitation effort
In 2008 John Rendon’s firm engaged Karl Rove as bad cop and Kiriakou as good cop on a contract — for Kiriakou, $25,000 to write four op-eds — to rehabilitate Widodo’s reputation in the U.S. press in support of his Indonesian presidential bid. The op-eds, framing Widodo as “misunderstood,” were submitted to the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times among others; none were published. Widodo dropped out of the presidential race and was subsequently elected Vice President of Indonesia. The U.S. travel ban was never lifted.[4][5][6][7]