Bush's Blood-Orgy in Somalia:

[Nur]

U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study #23, 1948:

 

Our real task... is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity [u.S. military- economic supremacy]... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming... We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization... we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning. U.S. State Department. 1948

 

 

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Bush's Blood-Orgy in Somalia:

 

"They Are Slaughtering Somalis Like Goats"

 

By Mike Whitney

 

"Land is not our priority. Our priority is the people's peace, dignity and liberty. It is the people that are important to us." Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, Head of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU)

 

07/07/08 "ICH" -- -- While George Bush was busy railing at Zimbabwe's President, Robert Mugabe at the G-8 summit in Toyako, Japan; his Ethiopian proxy-army in Somalia was grinding out more carnage on the streets of Mogadishu. More than 40 civilians have been killed in the last 48 hours. On Sunday, Osman Ali Ahmed, the head of the UN Development Program in Somalia, was shot gangland style as he left a mosque Mogadishu. He died before he reached the hospital with wounds to the head and chest. Ali Ahmed is just the latest of the peace-keepers who have been killed in the ongoing battle between Bush's Ethiopian occupiers and Somali guerrillas.

 

"I care deeply about the people of Zimbabwe," Bush announced. "And I am extremely disappointed in the election which I labeled a sham election."

 

Right. Bush's newly-discovered empathy for black people was nowhere in sight during Hurricane Katrina when thousands of African Americans were rounded up at gunpoint and forced into the Superdome without food, water or medical supplies. Nor is it visible in Somalia today where millions of Somalis have been forced to flee their homes and relocate to tent cities in the south because of Bush's support for the Ethiopian army's invasion. The latest surge in violence has been the worst in a decade and the security situation continues to deteriorate despite the arrival of 2,600 troops from the African Union and a tentative truce that was signed in June between some of the warring factions. It should be no great surprize that the western media has stubbornly refused to report on the rising death-toll in Somalia, choosing instead to focus all of their attention on America's "villain du jour", Robert Mugabe. Mugabe is next on the neocon's list for regime change. Neocon Godfather Paul Wolfowitz even composed a postmortem for Zimbabwe's president in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial "How to Put the Heat on Mugabe".

 

In 2006, the United States supported an alliance of Somali warlords known as the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) who established a base of operations in the western city of Baidoa. With the help of the US-backed Ethiopian army, western mercenaries, US Navy warships, and AC-130 gunships; the TFG was able capture Mogadishu and force the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and their allies to retreat to the south. But, much like Iraq and Afghanistan, the resistance has coalesced into a tenacious guerrilla army which has returned to the capital and resumed the fight making it impossible for their Ethiopian rivals to govern. As the struggle continues, the humanitarian situation gets worse and worse. At least 2.6 million Somalis are now facing famine due to acute food shortages spurred by a prolonged drought, violence and high inflation. UN monitors have warned that the figure could hit exceed 3.5 million by the end of 2008.

 

The UN Security Council has played its traditional role as facilitator of American-backed imperial violence by failing to condemn US involvement in Somalia and by promising to send peacekeepers to mop up after violence subsides. The UN has shown no interest in stopping the carnage and have become little more than the glove-hand of the US military; an accomplice to Bush's chronic adventurism.

 

In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Salim Lone, a columnist for the Daily Nation in Kenya and a former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq explains the UN's role in providing the "go ahead" for the US invasion:

 

"The lawlessness of this particular war is astounding; the most lawless war of our generation. You know, all aggressive wars are illegal. But in this particular one, there have been violations of the UN Charter and gross violations of international human rights. But, in addition, there have been very concrete violations by the United States of two Security Council resolutions. The first one was the arms embargo imposed on Somalia, which the United States has been routinely flaunting for many years now. But then the US decided that that resolution was no longer useful, and they pushed through an appalling resolution in December, which basically gave the green light to Ethiopia to invade. They pushed through a resolution which said that the situation in Somalia was a threat to international peace and security, at a time when every independent report indicated, and Chatham House’s report on Wednesday also indicated, that the Islamic Courts Union had brought a high level of peace and stability that Somalia had not enjoyed in sixteen years.

 

So here was the UN Security Council going along with the American demand to pass a blatantly falsified UN resolution. And that resolution actually was a violation (of the) the UN Charter. You know, the UN Charter is like the American Constitution and the Security Council is not allowed to pass laws or rules that violate the Charter. And yet, who is going to correct them?"

 

The Bush administration has predictably invoked the "terrorist" hobgoblin to justify its involvement in Somalia, but no one is buying it. The ICU is not an Al Qaida affiliate or a terrorist organization despite the absurd claims of the State Dept. It is true that the ICU was trying to enforce Sharia Law, but a much milder form of Sharia than in Saudi Arabia. The ICU was the first government in over a decade to restore security and order to Somalia and--generally speaking--the people were supportive of the new regime.

 

Political analyst James Petras summed it up like this:

 

“The ICU was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians. Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation.”

 

The real motives behind the invasion were oil and geopolitics. According to most estimates 30 per cent of America's oil will come from Africa in the next ten years. Bush's new warlord-friends in the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) have already indicated a willingness to pass a new oil law that will encourage foreign oil companies to return to Somalia. The same oil giants that are now lining up in Iraq will soon be making their way to Somalia as well. The Horn of Africa is also critical for its deep-water ports and strategic location for future military bases. It's all part of the Grand Schema for reconfiguring the region to accommodate America's hegemonic ambitions.

 

Humanitarian Catastrophe: "The Ethiopian invasion has destroyed all the life-sustaining systems"

 

Heavy fighting and artillery fire have reduced large parts of Mogadishu to rubble. More than 700,000 people have been forced to leave the capital with nothing more than what they can carry on their backs. Entire districts have been evacuated and turned into ghost towns. The main hospital has been bombed and is no longer taking patients. Ethiopian snipers are perched atop rooftops across the city. Over 3.5 million people are now huddled in the south in tent cities without sufficient food, clean water or medical supplies. It is without question the greatest humanitarian crisis in Africa today; a man-made Hell entirely conjured up in Washington. Just weeks ago, Amnesty International reported that it had heard many accounts that Ethiopian troops were "slaughtering (Somalis) like goats." In one case, "a young child's throat was slit by Ethiopian soldiers in front of the child's mother.”

 

In another Democracy Now interview, Abdi Samatar, professor of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, had this to say:

 

"The Ethiopian invasion, which was sanctioned by the US government, has destroyed virtually all the life-sustaining economic systems which the population have built without the government for the last fifteen years. And the militia that are supposed to protect the population have been looting shops. For instance, the Bakara market, which is the largest market in Mogadishu, has been looted repeatedly by the militias of the so-called Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, supported by Ethiopian troops. And the new prime minister of Somalia, Mr. Hassan Nur Hussein, has himself announced in the BBC that it was his militias that—who have looted this place. So what you have is a population that’s hit from both sides--on one side, by the militias of the so-called Transitional Federal Government, which is recognized by the United States, and on the other side, by the Ethiopian invaders who seem to be bent on ensuring that they break the will of the people to resist as free people in their own country....

 

What you have is really terror in the worst sense of the word, a million people have been displaced that the Ethiopians have been denying humanitarian aid, and the United States which seems to just watch and let it happen. It’s like there's has been a calculated decision made somewhere in the world, maybe in Washington, maybe in Addis Ababa, maybe in Mogadishu itself, to starve these people until they submit themselves to the whims of the American military and the Ethiopians, who are acting on their behalf."

 

Amnesty International has called for an investigation of the United States role in Somalia. Regrettably, neither the United Nations nor the corporate media are at all interested in Bush's war crimes in Africa. What they care about is Mugabe.

 

Notes

 

Somalia: Troops killing people 'like goats' by slitting throats-new Amnesty report

 

http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=17747

[Nur]

Somalia: Troops killing people 'like goats' by slitting throats-new Amnesty report

 

Posted: 06 May 2008

 

Amnesty International today released a report revealing the dire human rights and humanitarian crisis facing the people of Somalia.

 

The report contains first-hand testimony from scores of traumatised survivors of the conflict, exposing the violations and abuses they have suffered at the hands of a complex mix of perpetrators which include Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) troops, Ethiopian troops, and various armed groups.

 

Amnesty International's Africa Deputy Programme Director Michelle Kagari said:

'The people of Somalia are being killed, raped, tortured; looting is widespread and entire neighbourhoods are being destroyed.'

 

Witnesses described to Amnesty International an increasing incidence of Ethiopian troops killing people by what is locally termed 'slaughtering' or 'killing like goats' - referring to killing by slitting the throat.

 

Those killed are often left lying in pools of blood in the streets until armed fighters, including snipers, move out of the area and relatives can collect their bodies.

 

In one case, a 15-year-old girl found her father with his throat cut when she returned home from school after Ethiopian security forces had swept through her neighbourhood.

 

Other cases in the report include:

A 56-year-old woman from Mogadishu called Haboon said Ethiopian troops had raped her neighbour's 17-year-old daughter. When the young woman's 13 and 14 year old brothers tried to protect their sister, the soldiers beat them and gouged out their eyes with a bayonet. The mother fled.

 

It is not known what happened to the boys. This girl is in a coma as a result of the injuries she sustained during the attack.

 

Qorran, another 56-year-old woman from Mogadishu, described how after her family went to bed, she went out to collect charcoal. While she was out, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at her home, completely destroying it. She said, 'When I came back, I couldn't find my house.' Her husband and sons were all killed in the attack. She told Amnesty International, 'If grief is going to kill anyone it's going to kill me.'

 

Guled, aged 32, who said that he saw his neighbours 'slaughtered'. Guled said he saw many men whose throats were slit and whose bodies were left in the street. Some had been castrated. He also saw women being raped. In one incident, more than 20 Ethiopian soldiers raped his newly-married neighbour when her husband was not home.

 

Michelle Kagari continued:

'The testimony we received strongly suggests that war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity have been committed by all parties to the conflict in Somalia - and no one is being held accountable.

 

'The human rights and humanitarian situation in Somalia is growing worse by the day. This report represents the voices of ordinary Somalis, and their plea to the international community to take action to end the attacks against them, including those committed by internationally-supported TFG and Ethiopian forces.'

 

Security in many parts of Mogadishu is non-existent and the entire city's population bears the scars of having witnessed or experienced severe violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.

 

Michelle Kagari said:

'There is no safety for civilians, wherever they run. Those fleeing violence in Mogadishu are attacked on the road and those lucky enough to reach a camp or settlement face further violence and dire conditions.'

 

Amnesty International's report insists that the TFG, as the recognised government of Somalia, bears the primary responsibility for protecting the human rights of the Somali people. However, the Ethiopian military, which is taking a leading role in backing the TFG, also bears responsibility.

 

Kagari continued:

'Attacks on civilians by all parties must stop immediately. Also, the international community must bear its own responsibility for not putting consistent pressure on the TFG or the Ethiopian government to stop their armed forces from committing egregious human rights violations.'

 

Amnesty International urged that the capacity of the UN Political Office for Somalia be strengthened, and that the African Union Mission to Somalia (or AMISOM) - and any succeeding UN peacekeeping mission - be mandated to protect civilians and include a strong human rights component with the capacity to investigate human rights violations.

 

The organisation also called for the UN arms embargo on Somalia to be strengthened, amongst other recommendations.

[Nur]

Mike Whitney opens the wounds in Mogadishu in his "They are Slaughtering Somalies, like Goats".

 

Black hawk down is now being reveanged, as are many of the US's defeats. No reasonable mind can see the good in Ethiopia ousting what was seen as a strict, yet judicially proficient Islamic regime which had taken to Somalia with Islam on it's mind and the law as their weapon of choice in bringing order to the anarchy of Mogadishu and Somalia.

 

AFRICOM, is just a word for Bush's CIA actions with the Ethiopian Miltary at it's center,but more on the way in terms of the usual crowd of exploiters from the US stable of Globalist Corporate raiders, looking for new fodder for the economic cannons.

 

The US is not going down without another rape and pillaging on it's already infinite rap sheet of agressive warfare for profit. The worse the US ecomomy gets, the more desperate the raiders are in pushing open new markets of labor and consumers with old ways of dubious intentions and even more dubious results in this day and age.

 

The US keeps useing the same formula to do their dirt to impoverished nations. This particular "liberation" is founded in the US's maniacal paranoia of Islam, aided and abetted , of course , by Israel and the UK, with the UN along as the solicitor to the press. The UN has it's head up it's ( Rear End) and up the (Rear End) of the US so far that they have now facilitated the demise of nearly every single one of the US war crimes and has the audacity to cry wolf when they are bludgeoned in Mogadishu. What do you expect, UN, are the people of the world BLIND, DEAF and DUMB? Your answer?

 

Mike Whitney has tears on his sleave for these people in Somalia, especially the orphans and refugees in the south of the city of Mogadishu.

 

Quat is the drug of choice in Mogadishu and when deprived of it;s balm the people are irate and unhappy. Islamic Courts Union had declared it illegal, and along with brothels and other illegal activities engaged in by the warlords of Mogadishu, the Islamic Courts Union had driven stakes into the hearts of the people, who had lived in anarchy's shadow and on the largese of their black market for too long to be taken out of their element by Islamic strictures, so things lightened up, people were happier, and things calmed down considerably, but with severe dissention of the Islamic Courts Unions sharia code's power over the people, many of whom were not and are not Muslims in the adherance sense, but familiar with it's doctrines.

 

Once integrated the Islamic Courts Union had made friends and a few , if not quite a few enemies, enough to call into question the validity of the ICU's concern for the people as their ceterpiece of governance. Bush needed no more to use as his excuse ti get the CIA into the heads of Ethiopian heads of state and their military arms to concieve an actionable plan of attack in the ICU.

 

What is galling to me is the use of a joint US/Ethiopian clandestine operation's cover in Somalia to insert chaos in a recovering drug addicts den of iniquity and use the forces of terror in military and spy garb to cause widespread hunger, famine and refugee status in a city which has seen it's share of troubles from lawwlessnes only to be thrust ,again, into a new pit of extreme deprivation, BY THE BUSH REGIMES CORPORATACRCY's war on terror. This is a crime unheard of , even in Bush's densely obtuse mind.

 

The US war on terror is truly become the war of terror and no neocon apologist can ever live this fact down or spin it in any way but criminal. But where will it end, this is incredible, but true.

 

What is at issue , aside from the horrific suffering of yet more children ,more refugees and more abject poverty is the way in which the Bush White house and their neocon associates in the UK and Israel have responded to an effort by the Islamic Courts Union to do what the US has failed miserably in attempting in the recent past, bring order to Somalia.

 

It's one thing to be suspicious of Islam's ever growing popularity and think it may be forced by radicals with guns and not derived in love, but to take this suspicion and make war with the ICU by proxies from Ethiopia is to let the warlords back in and provide them with modern firepower which brings the whole mess full circle with no relief in sight for this populous nation of the poor.

 

History show us that when wars escalate on the basis of proxies fighting for empires, the people suffer grave deprivations, certaily more so than if diplomacy had been tried with some semblance of decency and honor involved as a show of hope to the people that wars are being averted for their comfort and respect.

 

It's not too much to ask of the US to see the error of their ways in useing the war college CIA goons to drive people out of their minds to the point of exhaustion. Grow up, damn it! Does the USA feel that peoples lives are nothing but levers to sqeeze when the economy goes sour and the US gets a little depressed from excessive binging on wealth derived from other peoples suffering? Wake up US plutocrats, you are shitting in your own fetid hat and causeing undo harm to people who want relief, not tent cities with no latrines.

 

While the neocon drivel is not without some truths of it's own, we need to be reasonable with the peoples lives in theatres of war where too much war is just that, too much war. War does not fix every human tragedy ,nor have the balms of compassion which enter into negotiations with an eye to being realistic about what can be accomplised and what is a reach too far.

 

The US could have easily gone the route of resolving to work with the ICU and make inroads with an Islamic group which sees governance as their calling. Why not engage these people and work with them to develope their governig skills and learn how Sharia law has kept the peace in Saudi Arabia for all these years, with some measure of latitude to the people in allowing a kind of Algerian style Islam behind the scenes of the stricter Sharia codes of conduct.

 

Certainly, the US has much to learn of the ways and means of Islam and is deficient in tutoring it's own government in the understanding of a culture which has stood more firmly and much longer than capitalist democracy and is still standing firm in more peoples lives than capitalisn ever will.

 

Islam cares few everyone, Capitalism ..... well we lnow who capitalism cares for, just look at the current state of the USA and ask yourself are we selling THIS as a better life to others? The US has become a fugative from justice to much of the civilised world, are we going to drive the stake further into our own heart and take the ICU out to serve our pride? What other reason is there to attack a governing body which has produced more, in less time, in Mogadishu ,than the US has produced in Iraq with huge resources which have mostly been squandered on already wealthy corporate mercinaries and their masters while the poeple of Iraq still suffer and hope for an end to their occupation.

 

This is getting out of control, first Indonesia, then Afghanistan, Iraq not Somalia, where do you feel you are welcome, Mr Bush if you have not produced a single functioning democracy yet? This will not be anything but more misery for the poor and who will end this tirade of pride if no senator or congressional rep has even the balls to look Bush in the eye and tell him the truth, WAR CRIMINAL! Thanks Cindy!

 

By jerry gates | 07.07.08 - 6:32 pm |

[Nur]

............What other reason is there to attack a governing body which has produced more, in less time, in Mogadishu ,than the US has produced in Iraq with huge resources which have mostly been squandered on already wealthy corporate mercinaries and their masters while the poeple of Iraq still suffer and hope for an end to their occupation

 

By Jerry Gates (respnding to above topic)

[Nur]

Its Ramadan!

 

Time to pray for the dead, sick, maimed, raped and unjustly imprisoned Somalis!

 

Thats is the lowest Level Of Iman!

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

U.S.-Made Mess in Somalia

 

By Ivan Eland

 

04/10/07 "Consortium News" -- - - The media often report overseas developments, but don’t always explore their underlying causes, which, in many cases, conveniently lets the U.S. government off the hook. The recent internecine violence in Somalia provides a classic example.

The U.S. media have focused to date almost exclusively on the rising Islamist movement in Somalia and U.S. “covert” assistance to the Ethiopian invasion that supported Somalia’s transitional government against the stronger Islamists. The media should be focusing on one of the major causes of the Somali mess: U.S. government meddling.

 

After 9/11, the Bush administration feared that the absence of a strong government in the “failed state” of Somalia could turn the small east–African country—slightly smaller than Texas—into a haven for terrorists.

 

The administration ignored the fact that other states with weak governments have not become sanctuaries for terrorists. Even if Somalia had become a terrorist enclave, the terrorists, absent some U.S. provocation, probably would not have attacked the faraway United States.

 

As a result of the administration’s unfounded fear, the United States began supporting unpopular warlords in the strife-torn nation. That’s when the real trouble began.

 

The radical Islamists in Somalia never had much following until the Somali people became aware that an outside power was supporting the corrupt and thuggish military chieftains. The popularity of the Islamist movement then surged, allowing the Islamists to take over much of the country.

 

In sum, where no problem with radical Islamists previously existed, the U.S. government helped create one.

 

In many respects, the Somali episode is a replay of other horribly counterproductive past U.S. interventions. In the 1980s, for example, the U.S. government supported the radical Islamist Mujahadeen—then fighting the non–Muslim Soviet occupiers in Muslim Afghanistan—that metamorphosed into al Qaeda, which is now attacking the United States for its non–Muslim military presence in the Persian Gulf.

 

History followed a similar pattern in Iraq. The Bush administration justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq in part by al Qaeda’s alleged link to Saddam Hussein—a thug, to be sure, but one who had been wise enough, in reality, to support groups who didn’t focus their attacks on the United States. Now, in Iraq, where there were no anti–U.S. Islamic terrorists before, we have plenty to fight.

 

Somalia is the third example of the United States creating a potentially anti–U.S. Islamist threat where none previously existed. The U.S.–supported Ethiopian invasion weakened the Somali Islamists, but they are still fighting fiercely for control of Mogadishu, the capital.

 

Like those in Iraq, all the Somali Islamists have to do is hang on until the foreign occupier gets exhausted and leaves. When that happens, the Islamists could very well become the dominant political force in the country, capitalizing on their “patriotic” resistance to the hated Ethiopian occupiers and their U.S. benefactors.

 

The U.S.–backed Ethiopians, already unpopular, have become even more despised as a result of their alleged indiscriminate shelling of Mogadishu’s civilian areas, which human rights groups are calling a war crime.

 

Unlike the period when the Islamists controlled Mogadishu, the transitional government has been unable to keep order, undermining both its credibility and public support. As a result, many in Somalia see the period of Islamic rule as good days, and now long for its return.

 

And that’s probably what will happen. Like the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, whose recent good fortunes were brought about by continued foreign occupation of that country, we will likely see the Somali Islamists make a comeback.

 

U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia should teach foreign policy experts and the American public that U.S. meddling abroad is often counterproductive and dangerous.

 

Yet the U.S. media help the U.S. government disguise these policy failures by failing to expose the underlying causes of violence, enabling the U.S. government to make the same mistakes over and over again.

 

Ivan Eland is Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. Dr. Eland has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office, and Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

[Nur]

The Election is Over; Time to Move On to the Recriminations

 

Let the Trials Begin!

 

By DOUGLAS VALENTINE

 

November 14, 2008 "Counterpunch" -- - Amid the euphoria and angst of the Obama apotheosis, the unreality of a mismanaged, two trillion dollar, taxpayer funded bailout of freewheeling capitalists, and the wars of limbo in Iraq and Afghanistan, one little thing is being overlooked.

 

George W Bush.

 

The Decider. The psychopath responsible for this appalling mess we're in. The architect of America's ignoble descent into moral darkness. The washed up and universally despised pseudo-despot who reveled in torture, kidnapping and assassination. The War-Monger.

 

"Bring 'em On!"

 

"Dead or Alive!"

 

The raving ignoramus whose words will haunt us forever.

 

The spoiled child of privilege playing with the lives of our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, friends and lovers, as if they were his personal toys.

 

The mass murderer who illegally invaded and occupied a foreign nation, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, utterly destroying their cities and bridges, power plants and schools, and scattering millions of them to the wind, as if he were GOD!

 

The Comic Book Madman obsessed with Death, reading CIA memos about Al Qaeda, sending kidnappers and hit teams and drones around the world, anywhere he wanted, to kill his imaginary enemies, while America burned.

 

The Super Traitor.

 

The elections are over, I say. The people have spoken. It's time to move on to the business at hand - hauling Bush's sorry *** before a war crimes tribunal of the sort he created. But not one staffed by his political cadre of complicit military officers. One composed of his victims.

 

Let the recriminations begin!

 

If there were any justice, the process would begin with his midnight arrest. Bush's beloved CIA drones and hitmen invariably kill their target's families in these little snatch operations, and if agreed upon by his inquisitors, I suggest this would be an appropriate touch.

 

Then the little ****** would be rendered to my basement and put on the waterboard. I'd ask that Joe Liebernut be made to put the wet towel on his face, but Joe would do it just for fun. Same with Limbaugh.

 

We'll find someone deserving of the job. Perhaps the boys from Gitmo? And I mean, the boys. The brothers and sisters of innocent Iraqis he killed? I think they'll be plenty of volunteers.

 

The whole point will be to make Bush confess. Not to the crimes he has committed. But to explain why he did it. Was it to show up Poppy? To win the love of Barbara?

 

I really want to know.

 

This interrogation should last seven years, and everyone Bush names as having followed his orders should be tried as well. That's Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and everyone in the CIA for starters.

 

Bush's kangaroo courtroom trial, presided over by Vincent Bugliosi, should be the highlight of the election campaign of 2016.

 

The supreme punishments to be broadcast live by Fox News.

 

Imagine.

 

Douglas Valentine is the author of four books which are available at his websites http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/ and http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.html His fifth book, The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Personalities and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped The DEA, will be published in September 2009 by Trine Day.

[S.O.S]

Originally posted by Nur:

............What other reason is there to attack a governing body which has produced more, in less time, in Mogadishu ,than the US has produced in Iraq with huge resources which have mostly been squandered on already wealthy corporate mercinaries and their masters while the poeple of Iraq still suffer and hope for an end to their occupation

 

By Jerry Gates (respnding to above topic)

.. because it would not be compatible with their adopted shaping strategy toward the Muslim world. Read this paper commissioned by the US Air Force describing critical cleavages between Muslim groups and outlines strategies available to utilise these conditions to their advantage. Needless to say, they'll not succeed.

[Nur]

SOS very interesting research brief!

 

Just went through it quickly, its by no means different than the current Bush policy, and contrary to the superficial aspect of it, I am happy with this kind of strategy, specially the allignment of US interests in the region with Shia groups,( 15% of Muslim World ), in terms of Religious groupings and with the non Arabs (Who they suspect dont know much of Islam ), in terms of the Ethnic groupings, working with "Moderate Muslims" etc.

 

I think, the above to be a blessing in disguise for the Muslim world, but its better left undiscussed in this forum until we all see the result this strategy. If this is the work of their Intellectual Think Tanks, it leaves a lot to be desired from their politicians, there will be only one sure result from all this, more owners of the Islamic Problem, which will cause more questions to be answered by their Think Tanks.

 

" Laqad ibtaghaw al fitnata, min qablu, wa qallabuu lakal umuura xataa jaa a al xaqqu wa Dhahara amrullaahi wa hum kaarihuun"

 

 

Nur

[S.O.S]

Nur,

 

I've read large parts of the original paper a while ago and I must say the most interesting thing I came across was their exact categorizations and unambiguous definitions of different types of Muslims. thanks to hem, now we officially know the meaning of "moderates"!

 

There's a drama going on in Bahrain (as a consequence of aforementioned policy) for the last few months ever since influential and intellectual shi'ite individuals were invited for a "briefing" on Capitol Hill titled "Impact of Political Reform on Religious Freedom in Bahrain." The Royal family in the meanwhile, obviously smelling fish, decided to introduce restrictions much to the disgust of some groups and there's probably more to come.

 

This, it seems, is the best they can come up with –a blatant lack of imagination- and in all honestly, tested and failed! Historically, whichever power aligned themselves with the shi'ites to attack Muslims always ended up losing. Think of Fatimids alliance with the Crusaders, collusion of the Buwayhids with the Byzantines, shi'te treasury during the Mongol genocides, etcetera.

[Nur]

"Nobody Is Watching "

 

America's Hidden War in Somalia

 

By Paul Salopek

Tribune correspondent

 

November 24, 2008 "Chicago Tribune" -- - To glimpse America's secret war in Africa, you must bang with a rock on the iron gate of the prison in this remote port in northern Somalia. A sleepy guard will yank open a rusty deadbolt. Then, you ask to speak to an inmate named Mohamed Ali Isse.

 

Isse, 36, is a convicted murderer and jihadist. He is known among his fellow prisoners, with grudging awe, as "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg."

 

That "thing" is a stainless steel surgical pin screwed into his bullet-shattered femur, courtesy, he says, of the U.S. Navy. How it got there — or more to the point, how Isse ended up in this crumbling, stone-walled hellhole at the uttermost end of the Earth—is a story that the U.S. government probably would prefer to remain untold.

 

That's because Isse and his fancy surgery scars offer what little tangible evidence exists of a bare-knuckled war that has been waged silently, over the past five years, with the sole aim of preventing anarchic Somalia from becoming the world's next Afghanistan.

 

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids' success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)

 

It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and—according to Isse and civil rights activists—secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.

 

Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that Washington appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.

 

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."

 

What the Bush administration wanted, when it tacitly backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in late 2006, was clear enough: to help a close African ally in the war on terror crush the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU. The Taliban-like movement emerged from the ashes of more than 15 years of anarchy and lawlessness in Africa's most infamous failed state, Somalia.

 

At first, the invasion seemed an easy victory. By early 2007, the ICU had been routed, a pro-Western transitional government installed, and hundreds of Islamic militants in Somalia either captured or killed.

 

But over the last 18 months, Somalia's Islamists—now more radical than ever—have regrouped and roared back.

 

On a single day last month, they flexed their muscles by killing nearly 30 people in a spate of bloody car-bomb attacks that recalled the darkest days of Iraq. And their brutal militia, the Shabab or "Youth," today controls much of the destitute nation, a shattered but strategic country that overlooks the vital oil-shipping lanes of the Gulf of Aden.

 

Even worse, in recent days Shabab's fighters have moved to within miles of the Somalian capital of Mogadishu, threatening to topple the weak interim government supported by the U.S. and Ethiopia.

 

At the same time, according to the UN, the explosion of violence is inflaming what probably is the worst humanitarian tragedy in the world.

 

In the midst of a killing drought, more than 700,000 city dwellers have been driven out of bullet-scarred Mogadishu by the recent clashes between the Islamist rebels and the interim government.

 

The U.S. role in Somalia's current agonies has not always been clear. But back in the Berbera prison, Isse, who is both a villain and a victim in this immense panorama of suffering, offered a keyhole view that extended all the way back to Washington.

 

Wrapped in a faded sarong, scowling in the blistering-hot prison yard, the jihadist at first refused to meet foreign visitors—a loathed American in particular. But after some cajoling, he agreed to tell his story through a fellow inmate: a surreal but credible tale of illicit abduction by the CIA, secret helicopter rides and a journey through an African gulag that lifts the curtain, albeit only briefly, on an American invisible war.

 

"Your government gets away with a lot here," said the warden, Hassan Mohamed Ibrahim, striding about his antique facility with a pistol tucked in the back of his pants. "In Iraq, the world is watching. In Afghanistan, the world is watching. In Somalia, nobody is watching."

 

 

From ashes of 'Black Hawk Down'

 

 

In truth, merely watching in Mogadishu these days is apt to get you killed.

 

Somalia's hapless capital has long been considered the Dodge City of Africa—a seaside metropolis sundered by clan fighting ever since the nation's central government collapsed in 1991. That feral reputation was cemented in 1993, when chanting mobs dragged the bodies of U.S. Army Rangers through the streets in a disastrous UN peacekeeping mission chronicled in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down."

 

Yet if Mogadishu was once merely a perilous destination for outsiders, visiting today is suicidal.

 

For the first time in local memory, the airport—the city's frail lifeline to the world—is regularly closed by insurgent mortar attacks despite a small and jittery contingent of African Union peacekeepers.

 

Foreign workers who once toiled quietly for years in Somalia have been evacuated. A U.S. missile strike in May killed the Shabab commander, Aden Hashi Ayro, enraging Islamist militants who have since vowed to kidnap and kill any outsider found in the country.

 

The upshot: Most of Somalia today is closed to the world.

 

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way when Washington provided intelligence to the invading Ethiopians two years ago.

 

The homegrown Islamic radicals who controlled most of central and southern Somalia in mid-2006 certainly were no angels. They shuttered Mogadishu's cinemas, demanded that Somali men grow beards and, according to the U.S. State Department, provided refuge to some 30 local and international jihadists associated with Al Qaeda.

 

But the Islamic Courts Union's turbaned militiamen had actually defeated Somalia's hated warlords. And their enforcement of Islamic religious laws, while unpopular among many Somalis, made Mogadishu safe to walk in for the first time in a generation.

 

"It's not just that people miss those days," said a Somali humanitarian worker who, for safety reasons, asked to be identified only as Hassan. "They resent the Ethiopians and Americans tearing it all up, using Somalia as their battlefield against global terrorism. It's like the Cold War all over again. Somalis aren't in control."

 

When the Islamic movement again strengthened, Isse, the terrorist jailed in Berbera, was a pharmacy owner from the isolated town of Buro in Somaliland, a parched northern enclave that declared independence from Somalia in the early 1990s.

 

Radicalized by U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is serving a life sentence for organizing the killings of four foreign aid workers in late 2003 and early 2004. Two of his victims were elderly British teachers.

 

A dour, bearded man with bullet scars puckering his neck and leg, Isse still maintains his innocence. Much of Isse's account of his capture and imprisonment was independently corroborated by Western intelligence analysts, Somali security officials and court records in Somaliland, where the wounded jihadist was tried and jailed for murdering the aid workers. Those sources say Isse was snatched by the U.S. after fleeing to the safe house of a notorious Islamist militant in Mogadishu.

 

How that operation unfolded on a hot June night in 2004 reveals the extent of American clandestine involvement in Somalia's chaotic affairs—and how such anti-terrorism efforts appear to have backfired.

 

 

Interrogation aboard ship

 

 

"I captured Isse for the Americans," said Mohamed Afrah Qanyare. "The Americans contracted us to do certain things, and we did them. Isse put up resistance so we shot him. But he survived."

 

A scar-faced warlord in a business suit, Qanyare is a member of Somalia's weak transitional government. Today he divides his days between lawless Mogadishu and luxury hotels in Nairobi.

 

But four years ago, his militia helped form the kernel of a CIA-created mercenary force called the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in Somalia. The unit cobbled together some of the world's most violent, wily and unreliable clan militias—including gangs that had attacked U.S. forces in the early 1990s—to confront a rising tide of Islamic militancy in Somalia's anarchic capital.

 

The Somalis on the CIA payroll engaged in a grim tit-for-tat exchange of kidnappings and assassinations with extremists. And Isse was one of their catches.

 

He was wounded in a CIA-ordered raid on his Mogadishu safe house in June 2004, according to Qanyare and Matt Bryden, one of the world's leading scholars of the Somali insurgency who has access to intelligence regarding it. They say Isse was then loaded aboard a U.S. military helicopter summoned by satellite phone and was flown, bleeding, to an offshore U.S. vessel.

 

"He saw white people in uniforms working on his body," said Isse's Somali defense lawyer, Bashir Hussein Abdi, describing how Isse was rushed into a ship-board operating room. "He felt the ship moving. He thought he was dreaming."

 

Navy doctors spliced a steel rod into Isse's bullet-shattered leg, according to Abdi. Every day for about a month afterward, Isse's court depositions assert, plainclothes U.S. agents grilled the bedridden Somali at sea about Al Qaeda's presence.

 

The CIA never has publicly acknowledged its operations in Somalia. Agency spokesman George Little declined to comment on Isse's case.

 

For years, human-rights organizations attempted to expose the rumored detention and interrogation of terror suspects aboard U.S. warships to avoid media and legal scrutiny. In June, the British civil rights group Reprieve contended that as many as 17 U.S. warships may have doubled as "floating prisons" since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

 

Calling such claims "misleading," the Pentagon has insisted that U.S. ships have served only as transit stops for terror suspects being shuttled to permanent detention camps such as the one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

 

But Tribune reporting on Isse indicates strongly that a U.S. warship was used for interrogation at least once off the lawless coast of Somalia.

 

The U.S. Navy conceded Isse had stayed aboard one of its vessels. In a terse statement, Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet that patrols the Gulf of Aden, said only that the Navy was "not able to confirm dates" of Isse's imprisonment.

 

For reasons that remain unclear, he was later flown to Camp Lemonier, a U.S. military base in the African state of Djibouti, Somali intelligence sources say, and from there to a clandestine prison in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

 

Isse and his lawyer allege he was detained there for six weeks and tortured by Ethiopian military intelligence with electric shocks.

 

Ethiopia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and office of prime minister did not respond to queries about Isse's allegations.

 

However, security officials in neighboring Somaliland did confirm that they collected Isse from the Ethiopian police at a dusty border crossing in late 2004. "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg" was interrogated again. After a local trial, he was locked in the ancient Berbera prison.

 

"It doesn't matter if he is guilty or innocent," said Abdi, the defense lawyer. "Countries like Ethiopia and America use terrorism to justify this treatment. This is not justice. It is a crime in itself."

 

Tales of CIA "snatch and grab" operations against terror suspects abroad aren't new, of course. President George W. Bush finally confirmed two years ago the existence of an international program that "renditioned" terrorism suspects to a network of "black site" prisons in Eastern Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

As for the CIA's anti-terror mercenaries in Mogadishu, they may have kidnapped a dozen or more wanted Islamists for the Americans, intelligence experts say. But their excesses ended up swelling the ranks of their enemy, the Islamic Courts Union militias.

 

"It was a ****** idea," said Bryden, the security analyst who has written extensively on Somalia's Islamist insurgency. "It actually strengthened the hand of the Islamists and helped trigger the crisis we're in today."

 

In the sweltering Berbera prison, Exhibit A in Washington's phantom war in Somalia had finished his afternoon prayers. He clapped his sandals together, then limped off to his cell without a word.

A sinking nation

 

 

The future of Somalia and its 8 million people is totally unscripted. This unbearable lack of certainty, of a way forward, accommodates little hope.

 

Ethiopian and U.S. actions have eroded Somalis' hidebound allegiance to their clans, once a firewall against Al Qaeda's global ideology, says Bryden. Somalia's 2 million-strong diaspora is of greatest concern. Angry young men, foreign passports in hand, could be lured back to the reopened Shabab training camps, where instructors occasionally use photocopied portraits of Bush as rifle targets.

 

Some envision no Somalia at all.

 

With about $8 billion in humanitarian aid fire-hosed into the smoking ruins of Somalia since the early 1990s—the U.S. will donate roughly $200 million this year alone—a growing chorus of policymakers is advocating that the failed state be allowed to fail, to break up into autonomous zones or fiefdoms, such as Isse's home of Somaliland.

 

But there is another possible future for Somalia. To see it, you must go to Bosaso, a port 300 miles east of Isse's cell.

 

Bosaso is an escape hatch from Somalia. Thousands of people swarm through the town's scruffy waterfront every year, seeking passage across the Gulf of Aden to the Middle East. Dressed in rags, they sleep by the hundreds in dirt alleys and empty lots. Stranded women and girls are forced into prostitution.

 

"You can see why we still need America's help," said Abdinur Jama, the coast guard commander for Puntland, the semiautonomous state encompassing Bosaso. "We need training and equipment to stop this."

 

Dapper in camouflage and a Yankees cap, Jama was a rarity in Somalia, an optimist. While Bosaso's teenagers shook their fists at high-flying U.S. jets on routine patrols—"Go to hell!" they chanted—Jama still spoke well of international engagement in Somalia.

 

On a morning when he offered to take visitors on a coast patrol, it did not seem kind to tell him what a U.S. military think tank at West Point had concluded about Somalia last year: that, in some respects, failed states were admirable places to combat Al Qaeda, because the absence of local sovereignty permitted "relatively unrestricted Western counterterrorism efforts."

 

After all, Jama's decrepit patrol boat was sinking.

 

A crew member scrambled to stanch a yard-high geyser of seawater that spurted through the cracked hull. Jama screwed his cap on tighter and peered professionally at land that, despite Washington's best-laid plans, has turned far more desperate than Afghanistan.

 

"Can you swim?" Jama asked. But it hardly seemed to matter. Back on dry land, in Somalia, an entire country was drowning

[Nur]

A RESPONSE ON THIS STORY FOLLOWS!

 

Paul Salopek,a master disinformationist and shill for the criminal invaders of Afganistan,Iraq

and Somalia...He calls the people defending their countries against the illegal invaders terrorists!...That resistance fighter in prison is probably innocent of the murders of the aid workers,but this Salopek rather believe everything the terrorist state department says with no evidence whatsoever!..A real scumbag!...What a twisted world we live in!The good guys are bad guys,and vice versa!...There's no hope for western journalists to ever straighten out,and tell the truth,the whole truth,and nothing but the truth,so help us all God!...PEACE TO ALL...

 

A MESOPOTAMIAN

[Nur]

War Crime Case Against Tony Blair Now Rock-solid

 

Neil Clark: A trial would be warmly welcomed by millions – so what happens next?

 

By Neil Clark

 

December 16, 2009 "The First Post" - -- Tony Blair's extraordinary admission on Sunday to the BBC's Fern Britton - that he would have gone to war to topple Saddam Hussein regardless of the issue of Iraq's alleged WMDs - is sure to give fresh impetus to moves to prosecute our former prime minister for war crimes.

 

The case against Blair, strong enough before this latest comment, now appears rock solid. Going to war to change another country's regime is prohibited by international law, while the Nuremburg judgment of 1946 laid down that "to initiate a war of aggression", as Blair and Bush clearly did against Iraq, "is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole".

 

Blair's admission, that he "would still have thought it right to remove him [saddam]" regardless of the WMD issue, is also an acknowledgement that he lied to the House of Commons on February 25, 2003, when he told MPs: "I detest his [saddam's] regime. But even now he [saddam] can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully. I do not want war... But disarmament peacefully can only happen with Saddam's active co-operation."

 

The view that Blair is a war criminal is now mainstream: when comedian Sandi Toksvig, host of Radio Four's News Quiz, called him one on air, the BBC, according to the Mail on Sunday, did not receive a single complaint.

 

But while it is easy to label Blair a war criminal, what are the chances of him actually standing trial - and how could it be achieved? Various initiatives have already been launched.

 

The Blair War Crimes Foundation, set up by retired orthopaedic surgeon David Halpin, has organised an online petition, addressed to the President of the UN General Assembly and the UK Attorney General, which lists 14 specific complaints relating to the Iraq war, including "deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war" and violations of the Geneva Conventions by the occupying powers.

 

The campaigning journalist George Monbiot, who attempted a citizen's arrest of the former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, for his role in the Iraq war, said at the Hay Literary festival in 2008 that he would put up the first £100 of a bounty payable to the first person to attempt a non-violent citizen's arrest of Blair.

 

Monbiot has also called for the setting up of national arrest committees in countries which, unlike Britain, have incorporated the 'Crime of Aggression' into their domestic law. These committees would exchange information with one another and make sure that Blair "would have no hiding place".

 

If Blair is to face an international trial, then the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague - to which Britain is a signatory - would be the likeliest forum. While the ICC has said that it will not conduct prosecutions for the Crime of Aggression until it has been defined by its own working group, the court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the Sunday Telegraph in 2007 that he would be willing to launch an inquiry into US/UK war crimes in Iraq. Charges could also be brought against Blair at the ICC for failing to prosecute the war in a "proportionate manner".

 

From Iraq itself, there are also moves to bring Blair to book. It has been reported that lawyers acting for Tariq Aziz, the former deputy leader of the country, now held in captivity, have written to Britain's top legal adviser asking permission to prosecute Blair for

Lawyers acting for Tariq Aziz have written to Britain's top legal adviser asking permission to prosecute Blair for war-crimes

Tariq Aziz

 

war-crimes, in the light of his latest comments.

 

Whichever way it comes about, if Blair is forced to stand trial, there can be no underestimating the event's significance. Up to now, the only political leaders who have faced war crimes trials since World War Two are those who fell foul of the west - and in particular the United States of America. But the notion of international justice will never be taken seriously if western politicians are deemed to be exempt from the same rules that leaders in Africa and elsewhere are supposed to adhere to.

 

The prospect of Teflon Tony finally having to answer for his crimes in a court of law, would be warmly welcomed by millions of people throughout the world, not least all those who marched for peace through central London in February 2003, one month before the Iraq invasion.

 

There is widespread contempt for a man who has made millions while Iraqis die in their hundreds of thousands due to the havoc unleashed by the illegal invasion, and who, with breathtaking arrogance, seems to regard himself as above the rules of international law.

 

The next decade will tell us whether that is indeed the case.