It's kind of "new found" because he just took the presidency under 3 months ago. Just because he's said some things critical of the Obama administration doesn't mean this guy isn't a homicidal crackpot. 3,526 currently dead since his election.

Duterte may have been elected three months ago, but the US has had deep military involvement in the Philippines for at least a century, and it is, by a SIGNIFICANT margin, the oldest (and least reported-on) battlefield in our Global War on Terror. As for Duterte's body-count, whether the allegations are true or not, it's not like the United States has ever had a problem with homicidal crackpots before, at least not until they've stopped playing ball. Hell, Duterte's body count is just a fraction of what happened in Libya alone, and yet the Western media is all set to hand Hillary the keys to our own domestic kingdom.

So, yeah, I gotta ask: why now?

Obviously, the Philippine's are going up on the State Department's hit list; the MSM does not push propaganda like this unless they've got reason to. But is this just a little schoolyard payback for Duterte getting uppity and telling the imperialists to go fuck themselves, conveniently timed, so that the MSM can tar the presidential candidate they like only second-best through guilt-by-vague-intangible-association? Or is America's Next Top President seriously going to be franchising ISIS out to the Asian market now?!

I mean, ***even this video***, on the face of it, has little to do with Duterte himself. Assuming that what Mr Matobato says is correct, and not just a pack of self-serving lies (as was been determined by the recent Senate hearings), then the atrocities Mr Matobato committed occurred in the 1980s and 1990s - hardly "fresh news".

Where was the Western concern back then? Duterte - who was never a member of Mr Matobato's vigilante group, but merely a regional official and alleged sympathizer - was not condemned by the American public at that time. Nor was Corazon Aquino or Fidel Ramos, the presidents under whose watch these killings would have occurred. Nor was the NPA or the Moros insurgents, both of whom have carried out similar atrocities for decades, nor Duterte's immediate predecessors, the flagrantly-corrupt Arroyo and the flagrantly-toadying Aquino, nor even the various US and Western multinational interests who've had their hands in the colony's honeypot since the Spanish got kicked out (and probably had a *little* something to do with the city of Davao's massive drug problem).

Given the amount of stuff that our media *could* have been focusing on, suddenly going after the Filipino Mike Haggar based on officially-denied, 25-year-old information, makes the Times' motives here seem rather transparent.

^"has been".

Look, Homer, I like you as a person and appreciate your presence on POETv and all that, but whatever seems to be driving the United States crazy also seems to be getting to you in a big way, and maybe you should switch to decaf or something.

>>whatever seems to be driving the United States crazy

You mean the Council on Foreign Relations, our corporate media, and the security-industrial complex?

You conveniently missed out the people specifically saying that at least some extrajudicial executions are due to alleged bad debts.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37172002