Photograph Source: Robert Frola – Flickr – GNU FDL
On 2 July, 29-year-old Nicholas F. Gosselin, an American pilot, was shot and killed by members of the TPNPB (West Papuan Liberation Army) when he landed a light aircraft of the company PT AMA (Associated Mission Aviation) in Balinggalinggama in the remote mountain zone of Yahukimo, West Papua. His seven Indigenous passengers were unharmed but the plane was torched. It’s difficult to know much about this young man because the media has turned him into a cardboard cutout for sensationalist (and, yes, cynically racist) reports about an American killed by “restive” natives.
The Daily Mail is a good example with “American pilot working in Indonesia KILLED by armed separatist group looking to send a ‘message’ after he landed in small mountain village”. It gets his name wrong (“Goselin”); has him working in “Indonesia” (a very moot point—in terms of international law); capitalises KILLED, thus suggesting that a murdered corpse is more relevant than the real man; has him KILLED by “an armed separatist group”, which could also be described as Indigenous people fighting for their lives in what is literally a genocide (plus ecocide), though hardly anyone knows about it (thanks to the good offices of news outlets like the Daily Mail); casually mentions, after a reference to a spike in “decades-old insurgency” that, “The rebels have especially targeted foreign pilots”, and that the TPNPB says that the aircraft violated their no-fly zone (but wouldn’t no-fly make it hard to target foreign pilots?); has the “armed separatist group” wanting to send a “message” but doesn’t say what; skims over the fact that the “armed separatist group” says that “civilian aircraft … are assisting military operations in the region”; and sets the scene in a “small mountain village”, as if it’s some out-of-the way place where, except for a pilot being shot dead, nothing ever happens there.
If the tabloid Daily Mail were taken out of the general context of the misinformation cesspit, a reader might shrug and think “par for the course”. But we have a whole spectrum here. By its own lights at least, The Guardian is another matter: “The Guardian has something many news organisations today don’t: guaranteed independence. With no billionaire or large corporate owner, our journalists are free to report without interference. Our role is to hold power to account, not answer to it”. Really? Did it show “guaranteed independence” when reporting the death of the young bush pilot, Nicholas F. Gosselin? It didn’t. It went with the herd. “Separatist rebels in Indonesia’s restive easternmost region of Papua have shot dead an American pilot and set a civilian plane on fire” [my emphasis]. Nobody reading that “attacks by independence fighters have grown deadlier and more frequent as they have procured better weaponry” would have the faintest idea of why “restive” natives are destroying “civilian planes” and getting “deadlier”. But wouldn’t being victims of genocide make people “restive”?
It took Facebook, quoted by the Daily Mail (getting the name wrong when Facebook gets it right) to give an idea of who “American pilot” Nicholas F. Gosselin actually was. Mainstream press wasn’t interested in who he was or why he was killed because that kind of inquiry leads to questions that need to be gagged. According to his Facebook friend Kenneth Jagers, Gosselin was in West Papua because “it was the roughest bush flying in the world”. He loved adventure. He didn’t obey the no-fly demand because it “harms the people of Papua” so, in other words, he thought the “restive” natives of a small remote village were harming their own people. If he was ignorant of who is really harming the people, he would have got his non-information from corporate media, and billionaire-managed social media, which then raises the question of media responsibility for his death and the grief of the people who loved him (not to mention all the other deaths—the genocide—the media glosses over). Jagers writes that Gosselin’s last trip was an example of “selflessness and an example of humanity at its finest”. Whatever the accuracy of the friend’s description, at least a sense is given of Gosselin as a real person, a young, naïve, adventure-loving person, and not just an ideological construct of American pilot.
Gosselin’s life was one more life tragically and terribly taken among thousands and thousands of other lives tragically and terribly taken in murder on a vast scale, which can properly be called genocide. He might have been the fine, selfless young man his friend describes, but he must have been ignorant too if he decided to ignore a TPNPB no-fly order. Unless you’ve lost the ability to see, or you don’t want to see, you can’t be long in highly militarised West Papua without noticing that something terrible is happening there. Frightened strangers approach you and beg you to speak for them. Even from the air, fifty years ago, you could see the tremendous scale of the ecocidal destruction of Indigenous habitat (and therefore people). Destroyed rainforest, the hard-baked, lifeless red clay of it, is a dreadful sight. It’s also odd that, according to Jagers, his friend, this pilot working in remote areas of West Papua for more than two years was apparently unaware of what everyone else knew. For example, Eneko Bahabol, from the Papua Council of Churches who works in the region, says “[…] it is widely known that Indonesia’s military relied on small airlines in order to fly into remote airstrips in Papua’s interior, where its bigger planes cannot land”. This fits with numerous reports from West Papua that never appear in the media. Here is one, in the form of a video of Indonesian troops boarding a small civilian plane. And here is further photographic evidence. The TPNPB has given many warnings to civil aviation companies not to fly military personnel but “the pilots do not listen to it, and this applies to all pilots transporting military personnel”, Bahabol said.
The five Catholic dioceses that own AMA describe Gosselin’s death as a “humanitarian tragedy” and state that there were regular weekly flights to Balinggalinggama and the organisation had never received any threats. This conflicts with the well-known fact that the TPNPB had imposed a no-fly zone because Yahukimo had been “turned into a warzone by deadly Indonesian operations over the past three months”. So why did the TPNPB kill the pilot and destroy a light aircraft mercifully bringing necessary goods and people to a difficult terrain?
Two short answers would be, first, the documented military use of civilian aircraft and, second, the “message” TPNPB wanted to send. What was it? The media didn’t say. The bottom line is that, understanding the workings of racism better than most reporters, the TPNPB concluded that almost the only way they can draw media attention to their Indigenous struggle against genocide is to kill or capture white or American pilots, like Gosselin and New Zealand pilot Glen Malcolm Conning (killed in Mimika in August 2024), and New Zealander Phillip Mehrtens who was captured in February 2023, held hostage for more than nineteen months, and released in “remarkable good shape”. Nevertheless, in the media, their deaths and suffering eclipse the suffering of West Papuans, which the TPNPB desperately tries to get reported.
The long answer points to something much more complicated, extensive, and sinister.
No small village is alone in the world. The connections between the small village of Balinggalinggama where Gosselin died and the global neoliberal system were spelt out in another apparently unrelated but ultimately connected context by British rapper and activist Lowkey on the independent media outlet Double Down News (no, you aren’t going to find information and analysis like this anywhere in the corporate media) when speaking of the Palestine genocide. As images became easier to produce and post online, news gagging became more difficult because of the maybe too horrified responses of millions of people watching genocide in real time: “They could not stop you from looking at Palestine, so they bought the screen you were looking through.”
The TikTok story shows something of how it works. In January 2026, TikTok became TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Patrick K. Lin of the Harvard Kennedy School Carr-Ryan Centre for Human Rights reports:
Under this new corporate entity, Oracle, chaired by Republican megadonor and second richest person in the world Larry Ellison, will “retrain, test, and update” TikTok’s content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data. This is the same Oracle that manages and stores data for UnitedHealthcare, Netflix, Amazon, OpenAI, and many of the largest banks and financial institutions in the U.S. Significantly, Oracle started as a CIA project and has dozens of contracts with the NSA, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security.
Just four months later, new TikTok CEO, Adam Presser, was bragging about narrative control at a World Jewish Congress event in occupied Jerusalem. “We made a change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech”. Mentions sympathetic to Palestine were flagged and purged. Consciousness is massaged by the algorithmic code owners, in this case Oracle whose former CEO and Vice Chair fellow-billionaire Safra Catz is even more forthcoming about the institutional complicity of this “enterprise”, when she appears in a videosaying, “We have some really profoundly scary technology at Oracle and we wanted to make sure that it was available for the effort [my emphasis]. Let’s just say that, okay?” And they all agree. Okay, let’s leave it at that (… we get it). Theeffort is, of course, one way of saying “genocide” (not to mention contempt for international law and common decency). And, in case any Israeli Oracle employees felt squeamish about the effort, Catz instructed Oracle to pay them double salaries.
TikTok is owned by a consortium of international global investors. One of them, in an MGX (AI Emirates investment company) joint venture, is Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Capital which, with a $1.1 billion stake in Israel’s offshore Tamar gas field (operated by Chevron), also poured $50 million into the private equity fund that fully owns the NSO Group, the Israeli cyber intelligence firm responsible for Pegasus spyware, a weapon used globally to target journalists, dissidents, and human rights defenders. And this is where the “small village” of Balinggalinggama in West Papua comes in because “at least four Israeli-linked firms have been selling invasive spyware and cyber surveillance technology to Indonesia, which has no formal diplomatic ties with Israel”. And Oracleplans to invest in Indonesia to the tune of $6 billion. The aim is to make sure that even citizen social media reports from West Papua are re-presented by the “bought screen you are looking through”.
Indonesia (population about 288 million) is a big market for media manipulators. Now that its efforts like a decades-long restrictions on media freedom in West Papua, ban on foreign journalists, and refusal to allow a visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, are being circumvented by social media, it needs bigger, tighter control. The panicky government crackdown on screenings of the documentary Pesta Babi (Pig Feast) is one of the more recent expressions of this need to manage all information about West Papua.
The 2024 Amnesty International study “A Web of Surveillance: Unravelling a murky network of spyware exports to Indonesia” reports on malicious domain names and network infrastructure linked to advanced spyware platforms targeting individuals. These malicious domains, registered since at least 2022, include some that mimic websites of opposition groups and national and local news media outlets, including West Papuan outlets that document human rights abuses. The name of one Predator mercenary spyware decoy domain Suara Oposisi (Opposition Voice) aims to attract users interested in political opposition. Others imitate the news site Suara Papua, while also identifying targets trying to report from regions where human rights violations against activists and civil society are constant. Papuan human rights, and alternative politics are precisely the area of most interest for a government seeking to silence critical voices. Regions like Yahukimo aren’t so remote because they’re linked to Israel and its powerful allies (including, via Oracle, the US military, and CIA) by these forms of mind control. They may be “remote” in being excluded from the stage of world news, but they’re very much tied into the system.
Predator (which can drain the entire contents of a target’s phone without the victim realising it) is the flagship product marketed by the Intellexa Alliance founded in 2018 by a former Israeli military officer Tal Dilian, who was previously associated with the NSO Group, creator of Pegasus spyware. It sells to at least twenty-five countries, including Indonesia. Moreover, in 2023, the IndonesiaLeaks consortium reported that the NSO Group had also supplied Pegasus spyware to the Indonesian authorities. Indonesia’s spyware system embraces more than a single vendor. Intellexa, Candiru and Q Cyber Technologies (linked to the NSO Group) all figure in its digital surveillance plan. This isn’t just spyware business. It’s a global structure of power and an extension of state power in monitoring who is speaking, to whom, and about what, and manipulating what they see and say. Billions of dollars are poured into capturing digital public space and re-engineering codes. One faraway result is that a young bush pilot somehow seemed unaware that he was operating in the midst of literal genocide.
All the above may seem a long digression from the death of a bush pilot in a “remote” part of West Papua, but this wasn’t an isolated event in Yahukimo, and if his death is to be understood, the dots must be joined. When reporting the death of Gosselin, the corporate press, in bed with the tech “titans” (and don’t forget the titan Cronus who ate his own children), couldn’t be bothered to explain why the people of Yahukimo are “restive”. Here are a few recent episodes which you won’t find reported in The (“guaranteed independence”) Guardian. Or any other mainstream media outlet.
+ Yahukimo has suffered systematic human rights violations since 2021, including shootings, arbitrary arrests of civilians, drone attacks, and anti-personnel landmines. By August 2025, nearly 2,000 people in Yahukimo had been forced to flee their homes. The IDPs face severe health crises due to limited medical access.
+ In 2023, military raids and clashes in Dekai, Yahukimo led to the internal displacement of 554 persons from 169 families of the regency.
+ In August 2024, four Indonesian police officers killed Tobias Silak and seriously injured Naro Dapla in Dekai.
+ In late December 2025, Agus Magayang died from injuries sustained after stepping on a victim-activated explosive device placed on a path used by local people to move between gardens and homes in Dekai.
+ The West Papua source Human Rights Monitor documented 41 armed attacks and clashes in the fourth quarter of 2025, most in Yahukimo, and 29 clashes in the third quarter.
+ On 25 November 2025, at around 9 p.m. a military drone circled a neighbourhood of Dekai, lit up one house and released an aerial explosive which killed 17-year-old student, Listin Sam, and injured another civilian, Yondinus Dapla.
+ Between April and June 2026, security force raids in the Yahukimo and other regencies caused new mass internal displacement. With a growing presence of military personnel, customary land is commandeered for new military posts. By late June 2026, more than 124,931 civilians across several regencies were displaced due to military operations and armed conflict. Jakarta blocks humanitarian access to IDPs. The so-called Cartenz Peace Unit, a joint military-police unit has permits for 28 military posts in Yahukimo, and is accused of extrajudicial executions, excessive use of force, torture, and civilian displacements.
+ Yahukimo was the top hotspot of armed violence in 2025. This has continued throughout 2026. Security forces have carried out a series of arbitrary arrests over a period of five months, many of which included torture and ill-treatment.
+ Between January and April 2026, Human Rights Monitor reported a sharp escalation of arbitrary arrests, torture, and ill-treatment in Dekai, Yahukimo. Joint security forces—the Indonesian Marine Corps (TNI-AL), the Cartenz Peace Operation Task Force, the Habema Task Force, and the Yahukimo District Police—detained dozens of West Papuans without warrant, among them children as young as fourteen.
Genocide Watch sums up the general situation. “[…The] Indonesian military has committed genocide against West Papuans. It is estimated that the military has killed up to 500,000 West Papuans … [and] commits systematic atrocities against West Papuans…” This is the part of the story of Nicholas F. Gosselin’s death that wasn’t reported by the corporate media, the “message” that the TPNPB was desperately trying to send out to the world. The small village where an American pilot was shot by “restive” natives represents the whole of what is happening in Yahukimo, what is happening in West Papua, and what is happening in a world that tolerates genocide and ecocide because a few billionaire tech titans dominate a system that won’t let us know what is happening, that persecutes and kills those who do try to inform (like the 260 Palestinian journalists Israel has killed in Gaza), and that is literally aiming to control our minds, our capacity to think about what the people who rule the world actually represent. And what they represent is literally murder on a gigantic scale. To quote Lowkey again, “The question is no longer just what are we watching, but who is controlling the eyes with which we see”. Or don’t see.
The post Death of a Bush Pilot…Among All the Others appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Julie Wark.