Allan Nairn

Who is Allan Nairn?

Allan Nairn is an award-winning American investigative journalist who became well known when he was imprisoned by Indonesian military forces under United States-backed strongman Suharto while reporting in East Timor. His writings have focused on U.S. foreign policy in such countries as Haiti, Guatemala, Indonesia, and East Timor.

In "A Witness to U.S.-Supported Horror," The Washington Post noted: "As a reporter he has gathered facts in El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and other countries where amoral regimes have murdered and suppressed their own people and been rewarded by weapons or the succor of economic aid from Washington. Nairn specializes in human rights stories. As valuable as the annual reports of such organizations as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International may be, they remain abstract compilations of horrors, not muddy-boot accounts from Third World villages and streets where people chance their lives to practice the simplest of freedoms. Nairn goes further: exposing links between local violence - clubbing Timorese students, death squads in El Salvador, disappearances in Guatemala - to the sanctioning of that violence by successive arms-supplying U.S. administrations."