An all out war against newly independent South Sudan might not be in Sudan’s best interest. South Sudan’s saber-rattling is not an entirely independent initiative; its most recent territorial transgressions – which saw the occupation of Sudan’s largest oil field in Heglig on April 10, followed by a hasty retreat ten days later – might have been a calculated move aimed at drawing Sudan into a larger conflict.

Stunted by the capture of Heglig, which, according to some estimates, provides nearly half of the country’s oil production, Bashir promised victory over Juba. Speaking to large crowd in the capital of North Kordofan, El-Obeid, Bashir affectively declared war. “Heglig isn’t the end, it is the beginning,” he said, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Bashir also declared a desire to ‘liberate’ the people of South Sudan from a government composed of ‘insects.’ Even when Heglig was declared a liberated region by Sudan’s defence minister, the humiliation of defeat was simply replaced by the fervor of victory. “They started the fighting and we will announce when it will end, and our advance will never stop,” Bashir announced on April 20.

Statements issued by the government of South Sudan are clearly more measured, with an international target audience in mind. Salva Kiir, President of South Sudan, simply said that his forces departed the region following appeals made by the international community. This includes a statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which described the attack on Heglig as “an infringement on the sovereignty of Sudan and a clearly illegal act” (Reuters, April 19). A day before the hasty withdrawal, South Sudan government spokesman Barnaba Marial Benjamin claimed there had been no conflict in the first place. His statement was both bewildering and patronizing. He considered Sudan, which was then rallying for war to recapture its oil-rich area, a neighbor and “friendly nation”, and claimed that “up to now we have not crossed even an inch into Sudan” (Associated Press, April 19).

The fact remains, however, that wherever there is oil political narratives cannot possibly be so simple. Sudan is caught in a multidimensional conflict involving weapons trade, internal instabilities, multiple civil wars and the reality of outside players with their own interests. None of this is enough to excuse the readiness for war on behalf of Khartoum and Juba, but it certainly presents serious obstacles to any attempt aimed at rectifying the situation.

With a single act of aggression, a whole set of conflicts are prone to flaring up. It is the nature of proxy politics, as many armed groups seek opportunities for territorial advances and financial gains. News reports already speak of a possible involvement of Uganda should the fledging war between Khartoum and Juba cross conventional boundaries. “As the possibility of a full-fledged war became unnervingly higher, General Aronda Nyakairima, chief of Uganda’s defense forces, said that his army might be compelled to intervene if Bashir did overthrow South Sudan’s regime,” reported Alexis Okeowo in the New Yorker website (April 20). Both Sudans are fighting their own war against various rebel groups. Despite the lack of basic food in parts of the region, plenty of weapons effortlessly find inroads to wherever there is potential strife.

In a statement published last July, Amnesty International called on UN member states to control arm shipments to both Sudan and South Sudan. It accused the US, Russia and China of fueling violations in the Sudan conflict through the arms trade.

US support of South Sudan is already well known. “The US reportedly provided $100 million-a-year in military assistance to the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army),” according to Russia Today on April 19, citing a December 2009 diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks.

According to political author and columnist Reason Wafawarova, US interest in South Sudan is neither accidental nor motivated by humanitarian issues. He told RT, “It would not be surprising if the US is trying to capitalize on the vulnerability of South Sudan in its efforts to establish the AFRICOM base somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.” RT goes on to reference Sudan’s Al-Intibaha newspaper for its reports on Israeli weapon supplies to Juba.

US and Israeli military support of Juba is not a new phenomenon. Sudan’s civil war (1983-2005), which cost an estimated 2.5 million lives, could not have lasted as long as it did without steady sources of military funding. And while the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the January 9-15, 2011 referendum, and finally the independence of South Sudan in July were all meant to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation, none actualized. Sudan’s territorial concessions proved most costly, and South Sudan, destroyed and landlocked, was ripe for outside exploitation.

Both countries are now caught in a deadly embrace. They can neither part ways completely, nor cooperate successfully without a risk of war at every turn. Bashir also knows he is running out of options. While Khartoum has already “lost three-quarters of its oil revenue after the secession,” according Egypt’s Al Ahram Weekly, “now it is poised to lose the rest.”

Naturally, a conflict of this magnitude cannot be resolved by empty gestures and reassuring statements. The conflict has been festering for decades, and war has been the only common language. Powerful countries, including the US, Russia, China, but also Israel and regional Arab and Africa players exploited the conflict to their advantage whenever possible. In a recent analysis, the International Crisis Group in Brussels advised that a “new strategy is needed to avert an even bigger crisis.” The crisis group recommends that the “UN Security Council must reassert itself to preserve international peace and security, including the implementation of border monitoring tasks as outlined by UN Interim Security Force in Abyei.”

Expecting the Security Council to act in political tandem seems a bit too optimistic, however. Considering that the US is arming and supporting South Sudan, and that Russia and China continue to support Khartoum, the rivalry in fact exists within the UN itself.

For a sustainable future peace arrangement, Sudan’s territorial integrity must be respected, and South Sudan must not be pushed to the brink of desperation. Rivalries between the US, China and Russia cannot continue at the expense of nations that teeter between starvation and civil wars. And whatever hidden hands that continue to exploit Sudan’s woes now need to be exposed and isolated.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine

The idea of preemptive war also known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine—subsequently dubbed the “Bush Doctrine” by PNAC signatory Charles Krauthammer—can be traced as far back as Paul Wolfowitz’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East,” which was based on “a raft of top-secret documents” his influential mentor, Cold War nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, somehow “got his hands on” during a post-Six Day War trip to Israel. The “top-secret” Israeli documents supposedly showed that Egypt was planning to divert a Johnson administration proposal for regional civilian nuclear energy into a weapons program. Among those who signed PNAC’s Statement of Principles were Wohlstetter protégés Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Wolfowitz, who despite having been investigated for passing a classified document to an Israeli government official through an AIPAC intermediary in 1978 would be appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration, where he would be the first to suggest attacking Iraq four days after 9/11; Wolfowitz protégé I. Lewis Libby, who later “hand-picked” Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff mainly from pro-Israel think tanks; Elliott Abrams, who would go on to serve as Bush’s senior director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs, his mother-in-law, Midge Decter, and her husband, Norman Podhoretz; and Eliot A. Cohen, who would later smear Walt and Mearsheimer’s research on the Israel lobby’s role in skewing U.S. foreign policy as “anti-Semitic.”

On January 26, 1998, PNAC wrote the first of its many open letters to U.S. presidents and Congressional leaders, in which they enjoined President Clinton that “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power […] now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.” Failure to eliminate “the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use” its non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the letter cautioned, would put at risk “the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.” An additional signatory this time was another Wohlstetter protégé, Richard Perle, a widely suspected Israeli agent of influence whose hawkish foreign policy views were shaped when Hollywood High School classmate and girlfriend, Joan Wohlstetter, invited him for a swim in her family’s swimming pool and her father handed Perle his 1958 RAND paper, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” thought to be an inspiration for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

Having helped sow the seeds of the Iraq War five years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, PNAC wrote a second letter to Clinton later that year. Joining with the International Crisis Group, and the short-lived Balkan Action Council and Coalition for International Justice, they took out an advertisement in the New York Times headlined “Mr. President, Milosevic is the Problem.” Expressing “deep concern for the plight of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo,” the letter declared that “[t]here can be no peace and stability in the Balkans so long as Slobodan Milosevic remains in power.” It urged the United States to lead an international effort which should demand a unilateral ceasefire by Serbian forces, put massive pressure on Milosevic to agree on “a new political status for Kosovo,” increase funding for Serbia’s “democratic opposition,” tighten economic sanctions in order to hasten regime change, cease diplomatic efforts to reach a compromise, and support the Hague tribunal’s investigation of Milosevic as a war criminal. Now that “the world’s newest state” (prior to Israel’s successful division of Sudan) is run by a “mafia-like” organization involved in trafficking weapons, drugs and human organs, there appears to be much less concern for the plight of the ethnic Serbian population of Kosovo.

A New Pearl Harbor

One year after the publication of its September 2000 report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the “new Pearl Harbor” PNAC implied might be necessary to hasten acquiescence to its blueprint for “benevolent global hegemony” occurred on 9/11. Nine days after that “catastrophic and catalyzing event,” it wrote to endorse President Bush’s “admirable commitment to ‘lead the world to victory’ in the war against terrorism.” However, capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, the letter stressed, was “by no means the only goal” in the newly-declared war on terror. “[E]ven if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq,” cautioned the PNACers. “Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.” Disingenuously characterizing Israel’s enemy Hezbollah as a group “that mean[s] us no good,” the Israel partisans called on the administration to “consider appropriate measures of retaliation” against Iran and Syria if they refused to “immediately cease all military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah.” Touting Israel as “America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism,” they counseled Washington to “fully support our fellow democracy in its fight against terrorism.” The letter concluded by urging President Bush “that there be no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed to allow us to win this war.”

PNAC’s concern for “America’s staunchest ally” was even more evident in its next letter to the White House. On April 3, 2002, it wrote to thank Bush for his “courageous leadership in the war on terrorism,” commending him in particular for his “strong stance in support of the Israeli government as it engages in the present campaign to fight terrorism.” Evoking the memory of the September 11 attacks “still seared in our minds and hearts,” the Israel partisans thought that “we Americans ought to be especially eager to show our solidarity in word and deed with a fellow victim of terrorist violence […] targeted in part because it is our friend, and in part because it is an island of liberal, democratic principles—American principles—in a sea of tyranny, intolerance, and hatred.” Returning to its favorite theme of regime change in Iraq, PNAC cautioned, “If we do not move against Saddam Hussein and his regime, the damage our Israeli friends and we have suffered until now may someday appear but a prelude to much greater horrors.” Prefiguring the cheerleading of Kristol and Kagan et al. for the “Arab Spring,” they assured Bush that “the surest path to peace in the Middle East lies not through the appeasement of Saddam and other local tyrants, but through a renewed commitment on our part […] to the birth of freedom and democratic government in the Islamic world.”

PNAC Redux

Having “developed, sold, enacted, and justified” a disastrous war over non-existent WMD, PNAC’s final report in April 2005 entitled “Iraq: Setting the Record Straight” claimed that “the case for removing Saddam from power went beyond the existence of weapons stockpiles.” Smugly concluding à la Madame Albright that “the price of the liberation of Iraq has been worth it,” PNAC soon after quietly wound up its operations. However, in 2009, PNAC co-founders Kristol and Kagan were instrumental in setting up its successor organization, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), whose self-appointed mission is to address the “many foreign policy challenges” facing the United States “and its democratic allies,” allegedly coming from “rising and resurgent powers,” such as China and Russia, and, perhaps most significantly, from “other autocracies that violate the rights of their citizens.”

FPI’s February 25, 2011 letter to President Obama gave a clear indication of the significance of that mission statement. Approvingly citing the president’s declaration in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later,” they told him that he “must take action in response to the unfolding crisis in Libya.” Warning of an impending “moral and humanitarian catastrophe,” the letter recommended establishing a no-fly zone, freezing all Libyan government assets, temporarily halting importation of Libyan oil, making a statement that Col. Qaddafi and other officials would be held accountable under international law, and providing humanitarian aid to the Libyan people as quickly as possible. “The United States and our European allies have a moral interest in both an end to the violence and an end to the murderous Libyan regime,” averred FPI. “There is no time for delay and indecisiveness. The people of Libya, the people of the Middle East, and the world require clear U.S. leadership in this time of opportunity and peril.”

With Libya in the midst of a genuine catastrophe brought on by that “humanitarian intervention,” FPI turned its attention to the foreign-stoked strife in Syria. On February 17, 2012, it joined the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank closely aligned with the Israel lobby whose leadership council is dominated by PNAC alumni, in urging President Obama “to take immediate steps to decisively halt the Assad regime’s atrocities against Syrian civilians, and to hasten the emergence of a post-Assad government in Syria.” Acknowledging that Syria’s future is “not purely a humanitarian concern,” the letter writers revealed their primary concern about Syria in their remark that “for decades, it has closely cooperated with Iran and other agents of violence and instability to menace America’s allies and partners throughout the Middle East.”

Wars of Muslim Liberation

Commenting on Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Libya, Bill Kristol mocked the president’s “doubts and dithering” about “taking us to war in another Muslim country.” Declared the founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel, “Our ‘invasions’ have in fact been liberations. We have shed blood and expended treasure in Kuwait in 1991, in the Balkans later in the 1990s, and in Afghanistan and Iraq—in our own national interest, of course, but also to protect Muslim peoples and help them free themselves. Libya will be America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.” In a follow-up note to the Weekly Standard, Paul Wolfowitz had “one minor quibble”: “Libya, by my count, is not ‘America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation,’ but at least the seventh: Kuwait – February 1991, Northern Iraq – April 1991, Bosnia – 1995, Kosovo – 1999, Afghanistan – 2001 and Iraq – 2003.” With Syria awaiting its “liberation” in 2012, perhaps it’s too early yet to say, “Shukran, Israel.”

At first the Obama administration explained all this away by asserting that Syrian’s nonviolent protestors had become so frustrated with Assad’s intransigence that they joined forces with defectors from the Syrian Army. A day and a half ago, when two bomb blasts in Alepo killed twenty-five people, we were told the Syrian government had done this in a devious ploy to discredit the Free Syrian Army. This story wouldn’t wash after militants assassinated a Syrian general, a doctor responsible for running a military hospital in Damascus. Now the current line is that Iraqi members of Al Qaeda are taking advantage of Syrian civil unrest to cross the border and become Syrian Al Qaeda

NATO Support for Syria’s Armed Militants

The problem with this new version of events is that a number of credible Middle East analysts, including former FBI interpreter and whistle blower Sibel Edmunds, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, British author and foreign correspondent John R. Bradley, and Canadian economist and globalization analyst Michel Chossudovsky have been reporting on Syrian’s armed resistance for many months. Moreover all four also cite a growing body of credible evidence that the US, Turkey and other NATO forces, along with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are supplying these armed militants with funding, arms and training.

Edmonds first broke the story last November that the US and NATO were involved in arming and training Syrian militants. On November 21, 2011 sources in Turkey informed her of the presence of secret training camps at the US air force base in Incirlik. They were reportedly established in April-May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. According to her sources, these support activities included smuggling US weapons into Syria, participating in US psychological warfare inside Syria and opening a humanitarian/medical corridor between Syria and Turkey to assist opposition groups.

On December 11 she reported, based on Jordanian sources that included a Jordanian military officer, that hundreds of foreign speaking troops had been observed near the Jordan-Syria border. Her informants also revealed that NATO had established a second secret training camp near Mafraq, Jordan to train the armed wing of Syria’s Islamic brotherhood. She was also informed, by a London-based Iraqi reporter, that an unknown number of US troops had been deployed from Iraq to Mafraq Jordan.

Eight days later former CIA officer Philip Geraldi essentially confirmed Edmonds’ assertions in NATO vs Syria. This was an article he wrote for the American Conservative, based on information leaked by CIA analysts concerned by the Obama administration’s apparent “march to war” in Syria. According to Geraldi, the CIA was refusing to sign off on the frequently cited UN report that more than 3,500 civilians had been killed by Assad’s soldiers. In their view, this information was based on rebel sources and uncorroborated. They also asserted that the Syrian government’s claims of being assaulted by rebels armed, trained, and financed by foreign governments were more true than false.

Unnamed CIA sources also informed him that NATO warplanes were arriving at Turkish military bases near Iskenderum on the Syrian border, with weapons from the late Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals, as well as volunteers from the Libyan Transitional National Council. There, the latter, along with French and British special forces, engaged in training members of the Free Syrian Army. Reportedly the CIA and US Special Ops role in all this was to provide communications assistance and intelligence.

Popular Support for Syria’s Secular Government

According to John R Bradley, author of After the Arab Revolution and the only analyst to predict the Egyptian revolution, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also providing arms and funding to the Free Syrian Army. In an interview with Russia Today, Bradley supports the prevailing view of Assad as a ruthless despot. However, he also points out that Syria’s president is one of the last secular Arab leaders in the most ethnically diverse nation in the Middle East. At the moment, he enjoys wide popular support because many Syrians view him as the last bastion between them and a fundamentalist Islamic government, like the one just installed in Libya.

Recent callers from Homs (the Syrian city under siege) to the February 10, 2012 BBC Have Your Say seem to support this perspective. While none are big Assad fans, the growing strength of the Islamic resistance worries them. Moreover they see Assad’s secular administration as far preferable to Sharia Law.

The US Military Agenda in the Middle East

Michel Chossudovksy, who has also been writing for months on the covert US war in Syria, is more alarmed about its significance in the context of broader American objectives in the Middle East. He explains that the US has targeted Syria, both because of its strategic alliance with Iran and because of Pentagon’s underlying strategy of isolating and encircling Iran as a prelude to toppling its current government. In a recent interview on Guns and Butter, he describes how the US has systematically occupied and/or militarized nearly all the countries that border Iran. First, you have US-occupied Afghanistan and Pakistan (the target of a second undeclared US war) on Iran’s western border. Then you have Iraq, which is still partially occupied, Kuwait (where the US deployed 15,000 troops in December), and Turkey on Iran’s eastern border. Finally you have Saudi Arabia (also host to major US military bases) and Qatar to the south. According to Chossudovksy, US military intervention in Syria will spill over and involve the Hezbollah in Lebanon, effectively neutralizing Iran’s last remaining allies.

In a recent disturbing article entitled When War Games Go Live, Chossoduvsky quotes from retired General Wesley Clark’s 2003 book Winning Modern Wars regarding the role of military intervention against Syria and Iran in the Pentagon’s grand Middle East strategy. According to Clark, the Pentagon has been making preparation to attack both countries since the mid-nineties. On page 130 of Winning Modern Wars,Clark states

As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.

The reliability of these predictions, despite a 2008 regime change from George Bush, the so-called neocon hawk, to Barack Obama, a supposed soft power advocate, is uncanny. The US persists in its occupation of Iraq, in addition to major military engagements in Somalia and Sudan. Presumably the military intervention in Libya is complete, now that the new US-friendly regime has agreed to privatize Libyan oil for the benefit of US oil companies.

According to Chossoduvsky, countries such as Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Iran and Sudan became US military targets because they refused to play ball by allowing Anglo-American oil company unlimited access to their oil resources. In contrast, oil-poor countries like Syria and Lebanon are current targets because of strategic alliances with oil-rich Iran.

I wondered about Anderson’s commitment to anti-interventionism and his view on “humanitarian” interventions, something that should be crystal clear from someone running for president and appealing to progressives. The following email exchange resulted:

From JW to RA:  Hello Rocky,

I wish that you would spell all this out a bit more clearly.

Are you for “humanitarian” interventions as in the Balkans?  Have you read Jean Bricmont’s great (and short) book “Humanitarian Imperialism”?

Are you for getting rid of all our overseas bases and devoting a limited military to purely defensive purposes?

Many pwogs, for example, Amy Goodman and CIA “consultant” Juan Cole, were cheerleaders for the Libyan intervention, despite Libya having had the highest Human Development Index in all of Africa before NATO destroyed its infrastructure and reduced it to rubble in the name of human rights.

We have two versions of imperialism – the “tough guy” Dick Cheney brand and the “humanitarian” Susan Rice version.  Both are the same in reality whatever the words attached to them.  We must break with them both and cease viewing the world solely through the very arbitrary lens of “human rights,” a good sell among the pwogwessives.

But what good are human rights to a starving illiterate woman in India, a category that Mao consigned to the dust heap of history in China?

From RA to JW:  Yes, so long as we are in compliance with the War Power Clause of the Constitution and the U.N. Charter, I favor the U.S. working with the international community in putting to an end massive atrocities.  I strongly believe in living up to the promise of “Never Again.”  Given all my work in this area, I don’t know how you would have any doubt about my position.  I don’t think political boundaries should control our moral obligations to our brothers and sisters elsewhere.

I recommend to you A Problem From Hell, by Samantha Power.

Your reference to Susan Rice was a curious one.  She sat on her hands (as you apparently would have had her do) when she was with the NSC and failed to take any action to stop the genocide that led to the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days.  According to an article in The Atlantic by Samantha Power, Susan Rice was apparently more concerned with the political implications in the mid-term elections in 1994 than she was about the horrendous fate of the Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. Those who stood by when their action could have ended the atrocities are, in my view, complicit.

From JW to RA: I think the Samantha Powers of the world are a big part of the problem.

I recommend that you read Humanitarian Imperialism by Jean Bricmont.

From RA to JW: I think isolationist nationalists who don’t care about the suffering of other people who happen to be in other parts of the world are “the problem”.  Sorry, John, we’re on completely different moral planets here.

I’ll try to read the book you referenced.  Have you read A Problem From Hell?  It’s heart-breaking — and a real indictment of the failure of the US to do what is required to stop the atrocities.

From JW to RA: I cannot agree, Rocky.  The “international community” is a euphemism for NATO and the US.  The UN foolishly went along with the destruction of Libya – and we can now see that Russia and China are finally drawing a line in the sand at Syria.

You fail to see that the US is the most ruthless Empire in the history of humankind, and it will cover up its atrocities with appeals to “human rights.”  It is the biggest lie of all.   Would you favor military intervention to end apartheid in Israel?  Will you take that position on the campaign trail?

For those of us living in the heart of Empire there is no alternative to being principled anti-interventionists.  The Empire is incapable of waging a “good war,” whatever that may be.  An anti-interventionist is not an “isolationist nationalist.”  That is simply a smear.

Samantha Power has not written a heart rending account of what has been done to Iraq, I notice.

Finally, the Empire has always cloaked its wars in virtue, from the White Man’s burden to “human rights,” and it always will.  The path to hell is paved with naiveté.

From RA to JW: Samantha Power has not written that account of Iraq because we did not intervene on humanitarian grounds.  It was an illegal war of aggression, at odds with the War Power Clause and with the UN Charter.  You paint with a very misleading, broad brush.  You can advocate abandoning people during genocides and other mass atrocities.  I will always be on the other side.  I share your anti-imperialistic views; I do not share your willingness to turn a blind eye to humanitarian disasters.

You will never convince me of what I perceive to be an extremely selfish, heartless isolationist position.  I would always advocate doing what I would want the U.S. and international community to do if I were in the position of a victim of genocide.  To advocate doing what is right is hardly naïve.  And it is hardly countenancing wars of aggression.  No one has a stronger record of opposition to the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq than I.

From JW to RA: You are well meaning as far as I can tell, but you hold very dangerous views IMHO.

If people want to help those in far off lands, let them form their Abraham Lincoln brigades, something the US Empire also opposed.  Of course, that means putting one’s body on the line, not someone else’s body.

First do no harm.

From RA to JW: So you would advocate repeal of the Genocide Convention?  We couldn’t be further apart in our views on this.

But, then, I recognize the concerns with US empire that drive your views on this.  We need to strive to be better on all counts.  That’s why I have worked so hard in all of these areas over the years — and a large part of why I’m doing what I am now.

From JW to RA:  I never said that I wanted to repeal the Genocide Convention.  Why do you conclude that?

But what is being done to the Palestinians is a slow genocide.  Do you advocate military action against Israel to get rid of the Apartheid regime there?  You should be explicit about that.

Noam Chomsky points out that the slaughter in the Balkans, greatly exaggerated, took place AFTER NATO’s bombs started falling.  And that was not really a genocide either.

Nor is Darfur a genocide either – a brutal war on both sides apparently but not a genocide. In fact, only the US and that outrageous liar Susan Rice label it as such.

And then there is the slaughter in Libya a country that once had the highest Human Development Index in all of Africa.  The concrete reality is that the US is always up to no good and will kill and kill to get its way. We should not be in the business of providing cover for that.

I do not think that you really appreciate that the formerly colonized peoples of the world do not want Western interventions.  They have had quite enough of the benefits of such neocolonial acts.

From RA to JW: You are so incredibly wrong.  The people (at least the Tutsis) of Rwanda, and of Kosovo, view the U.S. as heroically coming to their aid and stopping the massacres.  You would have been content with sitting back after the massacre at Srebrenica.  To me, that is the greatest moral cowardice.

And how can you maintain that you would not seek the repeal of the Genocide Convention?  It creates a legal obligation to take action to stop genocides wherever they occur.

I cannot countenance the U.S. continuing to build its empire; neither can I countenance people — or our nation — turning a blind eye to mass atrocities when they can be stopped.

This will be my last email on this topic.  I’m dismayed that any person can be so insensitive toward victims of genocide or other mass atrocities.  (I’m curious.  What have you done, if anything, to help stop wars of aggression or mass atrocities?)

Good luck - 

At this point someone on the list of those cc’d to this exchange jumped in, J.A., an Israeli expat who as a young man was swept into the Yom Kippur war and saw many of his friends needlessly killed. He left Israel in part to save his son from future slaughters of this sort and has vowed never to return. He wrote:

From J.A. to RA and JW:  Rocky, h humanitarian intervention is a slippery slope argument, and is being used for imperialistic ambitions (The latest example is Libya, and still Afghanistan – freeing the Afghan women. If remember well, Samantha Power supported this view) and, in general, being used to justify our military power. (Humanitarian aid via aircraft carriers, being the good policeman of the world, etc).

BTW, you wrote “illegal invasion”; is there a legal invasion?

Here is a question: Since you support “humanitarian” intervention, do you support attacking Israel and freeing the Palestinians from the  Israeli harsh occupation? You must know about the suffering of the Palestinians under the Israeli Apartheid and the stealth genocide by Israel, so should we invade Israel?

(It is a rhetorical question to demonstrate how absurd is the “humanitarian” intervention view).

Joshua

From JW to RA:  You did not answer whether you would advocate in your campaign a military expeditionary force led by the US to end Israeli apartheid and the slow genocide of the Palestinians?  Why can you not answer that?

And will you launch another expedition to restore the Tibetan theocracy?  It will probably take a few million persons under arms and a return to the draft.  Or how about an occupation of India where the most dire poverty continues and the farmers driven from their agriculture by agribusiness commit suicide in huge numbers?  Or is that OK because “democracy” reigns?

And a second point.  The greatest stimulus to nuclear proliferation is the huge conventional military force which the US has.  That is the force that you need to preserve in order to save the world.  The only protection for a small nation is nukes.

Long ago when the US was trying to take down the Chinese revolution and waging a war on Vietnam, Mao Zedong opined that US imperialism is the number one enemy of the peoples of the world.  I am afraid that remains true.

I recommend again that you read Chomsky on the Balkans.

And you are proof positive that the progressive movement, so called, is no longer anti-interventionist or anti-Empire.

As they say, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

At least you admit it outright – and that amount of honesty deserves credit.  I suggest that you openly proclaim the new humanitarian interventionism as part of your platform.  Now if only other progressives would also do that, we could separate wheat from chaff more readily.

JW

P.S. As a medical student I learned that there are some things that are beyond one’s control and that when one tries to control them the only thing that results is harm — sometimes fatal harm. Using the US imperial military to save the world is like operating with an infected scalpel.

The war in Libya is just the start of a new cycle of external military adventurism inside Africa. The U.S. now wants more military bases inside Africa. France has also announced that it has the right to militarily intervene anywhere in Africa where there are French citizens and its interests are at risk. NATO is also fortifying its positions in the Red Sea and off the coast of Somalia.

As disarray and turmoil are once again uprooting Africa with external intervention, Israel sits silently in the background. Tel Aviv has actually been deeply involved in the new cycle of turmoil, which is tied to its Yinon Plan to reconfigure its strategic surrounding. This reconfiguration process is based on a well established technique of creating sectarian divisions which eventually will effectively neutralize target states or result in their dissolution.

Many of the problems afflicting the contemporary areas of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America are actually the result of the deliberate triggering of regional tensions by external powers. Sectarian division, ethno-linguistic tension, religious differences, and internal violence have been traditionally exploited by the United States, Britain, and France in various parts of the globe. Iraq, Sudan, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia are merely a few recent examples of this strategy of “divide and conquer” being used to bring nations to their knees.

The Upheavals of Central-Eastern Europe and the Project for a “New Middle East”

The Middle East, in some regards, is a striking parallel to the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe during the years leading up to the First World War. In the wake of the First World War, the borders of the multi-ethnic states in the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe were redrawn and reconfigured by external powers, in alliance with local opposition forces. Since the First World War until the post-Cold War period the Balkans and Central-Eastern Europe have continued to experience a period of upheaval, violence and conflict that has continously divided the region.

For years, there have been advocates calling for a “New Middle East” with redrawn boundaries in this region of the world where Europe, Southwest Asia, and North Africa meet. These advocates mostly sit in the capitals of Washington, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv. They envisage a region shaped around homogenous ethno-religious states. The formation of these states would signify the destruction of the larger existing countries of the region. The transition would be towards the formation of smaller Kuwait-like or Bahrain-like states, which could easily be managed and manipulated by the U.S., Britain, France, Israel, and their allies.

The Manipulation of the First “Arab Spring” during World War I

The plans for reconfiguring the Middle East started several years before the First World War. It was during the First World War, however, that the manifestation of these colonial designs could visibly be seen with the “Great Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Empire.

Despite the fact that the British, French, and Italians were colonial powers which had prevented the Arabs from enjoying any freedom in countries like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, these colonial powers managed to portray themselves as the friends and allies of Arab liberation.

During the “Great Arab Revolt” the British and the French actually used the Arabs as foot soldiers against the Ottomans to further their own geo-political schemes. The secret Sykes–Picot Agreement between London and Paris is a case in point. France and Britain merely managed to use and manipulate the Arabs by selling them the idea of Arab liberation from the so-called “repression” of the Ottomans.

In reality, the Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic empire. It gave local and cultural autonomy to all its peoples, but was manipulated into the direction of becoming a Turkish entity. Even the Armenian Genocide that would ensue in Ottoman Anatolia has to be analyzed in the same context as the contemporary targeting of Christians in Iraq as part of a sectarian scheme unleashed by external actors to divide the Ottoman Empire, Anatolia, and the citizens of the Ottoman Empire.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it was London and Paris which denied freedom to the Arabs, while sowing the seeds of discord amongst the Arab peoples. Local corrupt Arab leaders were also partners in the project and many of them were all too happy to become clients of Britain and France. In the same sense, the “Arab Spring” is being manipulated today. The U.S., Britain, France, and others are now working with the help of corrupt Arab leaders and figures to restructure the Arab World and Africa.

The Yinon Plan

The Yinon Plan, which is a continuation of British stratagem in the Middle East, is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the Middle Eastern and Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.

The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.

This map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters and published in the Armed Forces Journal, June 2006. Map © Ralph Peters 2006. Click for larger image.

The Eradication of the Christian Communities of the Middle East

It is no coincidence that Egyptian Christians were attacked at the same time as the South Sudan Referendum and before the crisis in Libya. Nor is it a coincidence that Iraqi Christians, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, have been forced into exile, leaving their ancestral homelands in Iraq. Coinciding with the exodus of Iraqi Christians, which occurred under the watchful eyes of U.S. and British military forces, the neighbourhoods in Baghdad became sectarian as Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims were forced by violence and death squads to form sectarian enclaves. This is all tied to the Yinon Plan and the reconfiguration of the region as part of a broader objective.

In Iran, the Israelis have been trying in vain to get the Iranian Jewish community to leave. Iran’s Jewish population is actually the second largest in the Middle East and arguably the oldest undisturbed Jewish community in the world. Iranian Jews view themselves as Iranians who are tied to Iran as their homeland, just like Muslim and Christian Iranians, and for them the concept that they need to relocate to Israel because they are Jewish is ridiculous.

In Lebanon, Israel has been working to exacerbate sectarian tensions between the various Christian and Muslim factions as well as the Druze. Lebanon is a springboard into Syria and the division of Lebanon into several states is also seen as a means to balkanizing Syria into several smaller sectarian Arab states. The objectives of the Yinon Plan are to divide Lebanon and Syria into several states on the basis of religious and sectarian identities for Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Christians, and the Druze. There could also be objectives for a Christian exodus in Syria too.

The new head of the Maronite Catholic Syriac Church of Antioch, the largest of the autonomous Eastern Catholic Churches, has expressed his fears about a purging of Arab Christians in the Levant and Middle East. Patriarch Mar Beshara Boutros Al-Rahi and many other Christian leaders in Lebanon and Syria are afraid of a Muslim Brotherhood takeover in Syria. Like Iraq, mysterious groups are now attacking the Christian communities in Syria. The leaders of the Christian Eastern Orthodox Church, including the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, have also all publicly expressed their grave concerns. Aside from the Christian Arabs, these fears are also shared by the Assyrian and Armenian communities, which are mostly Christian.

Sheikh Al-Rahi was recently in Paris where he met President Nicolas Sarkozy. It is reported that the Maronite Patriarch and Sarkozy had disagreements about Syria, which prompted Sarkozy to say that the Syrian regime will collapse. Patriarch Al-Rahi’s position was that Syria should be left alone and allowed to reform. The Maronite Patriarch also told Sarkozy that Israel needed to be dealt with as a threat if France legitimately wanted Hezbollah to disarm.

Because of his position in France, Al-Rahi was instantly thanked by the Christian and Muslim religious leaders of the Syrian Arab Republic who visited him in Lebanon. Hezbollah and its political allies in Lebanon, which includes most the Christian parliamentarians in the Lebanese Parliament, also lauded the Maronite Patriarch who later went on a tour to South Lebanon.

Sheikh Al-Rahi is now being politically attacked by the Hariri-led March 14 Alliance, because of his stance on Hezbollah and his refusal to support the toppling of the Syrian regime. A conference of Christian figures is actually being planned by Hariri to oppose Patriarch Al-Rahi and the stance of the Maronite Church. Since Al-Rahi announced his position, the Tahrir Party, which is active in both Lebanon and Syria, has also started targeting him with criticism. It has also been reported that high-ranking U.S. officials have also cancelled their meetings with the Maronite Patriarch as a sign of their displeasure about his positions on Hezbollah and Syria.

The Hariri-led March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, which has always been a popular minority (even when it was a parliamentary majority), has been working hand-in-hand with the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the groups using violence and terrorism in Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood and other so-called Salafist groups from Syria have been coordinating and holding secret talks with Hariri and the Christian political parties in the March 14 Alliance. This is why Hariri and his allies have turned on Cardinal Al-Rahi. It was also Hariri and the March 14 Alliance that brought Fatah Al-Islam into Lebanon and have now helped some of its members escape to go and fight in Syria.

A Christian exodus is being planned for the Middle East by Washington, Tel Aviv, and Brussels. It is now being reported that Sheikh Al-Rahi was told in Paris by President Nicolas Sarkozy that the Christian communities of the Levant and Middle East can resettle in the European Union. This is no gracious offer. It is a slap in the face by the same powers that have deliberately created the conditions to eradicate the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East. The aim appears to be the resettling of the Christian communities outside of the region so as to delineate the Arab nations along the lines of being exclusively Muslim nations. This falls into accordance with the Yinon Plan.

Re-Dividing Africa: The Yinon Plan is very Much Alive and at Work…

In the same context as the sectarian divisions in the Middle East, the Israelis have outlined plans to reconfigure Africa. The Yinon Plan seeks to delineate Africa on the basis of three facets:

(1) ethno-linguistics;
(2) skin-colour;
(3) religion.

It seeks to draw dividing lines in Africa between a so-called “Black Africa” and a supposedly “non-Black” North Africa. This is part of a scheme to create a schism in Africa between what are assumed to be “Arabs” and so-called “Blacks.”

An attempt to separate the merging point of an Arab and African identity is underway.

This objective is why the ridiculous identity of an “African South Sudan” and an “Arab North Sudan” have been nurtured and promoted. This is also why black-skinned Libyans have been targeted in a campaign to “colour cleanse” Libya. The Arab identity in North Africa is being de-linked from its African identity. Simultaneously there is an attempt to eradicate the large populations of “black-skinned Arabs” so that there is a clear delineation between “Black Africa” and a new “non-Black” North Africa, which will be turned into a fighting ground between the remaining “non-Black” Berbers and Arabs.

In the same context, tensions are being fomented between Muslims and Christians in Africa, in such places as Sudan and Nigeria, to further create lines and fracture points. The fuelling of these divisions on the basis of skin-colour, religion, ethnicity, and language is intended to fuel disassociation and disunity in Africa. This is all part of a broader African strategy of cutting North Africa off from the rest of the African continent.

Israel and the African Continent

The Israelis have been quietly involved on the African continent for years. In Western Sahara, which is occupied by Morocco, the Israelis helped build a separation security wall like the one in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In Sudan, Tel Aviv has armed separatist movements and insurgents. In South Africa, the Israelis supported the Apartheid regime and its occupation of Namibia. In 2009, the Israeli Foreign Ministry outlined that Africa would be the renewed focus of Tel Aviv.

Israel’s two main objectives in Africa are to impose the Yinon Plan, in league with its own interests, and to assist Washington in becoming the hegemon of Africa. In this regard, the Israelis also pushed for the creation of AFRICOM in this regard. The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) is one example.

Washington has outsourced intelligence work in Africa to Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is effectively involved as one of the parties in a broader war not just “inside” Africa, but “over” Africa. In this war, Tel Aviv is working alongside Washington and the E.U. against China and its allies, which includes Iran.

Tehran is working alongside Beijing in a similar manner as Tel Aviv is with Washington. Iran is helping the Chinese in Africa through Iranian connections and ties. These ties also include Tehran’s ties to private Lebanese and Syrian business interests in Africa. Thus, within the broader rivalry between Washington and Beijing, an Israeli-Iranian rivalry has also unfolded within Africa.¹ Sudan is Africa’s third largest weapons producer, as a result of Iranian support in weapons manufacturing. Meanwhile, while Iran provides military assistance to Khartoum, which includes several military cooperation agreements, Israel is involved in various actions directed against the Sudanese.¹

Israel and Libya

Libya had been considered as “a spoiler” which undermined the interests of the former colonial powers in Africa. In this regard, Libya had taken on some hefty pan-African development plans intended to industrialize Africa and transform Africa into an integrated and assertive political entity. These initiatives conflicted with the interests of the external powers competing with one another in Africa, but it was especially unacceptable to Washington and the major E.U. countries. In this regard, Libya had to be crippled and neutralized as an entity supportive of African progress and pan-African unity.

The role of Israel and the Israeli lobby was fundamental in opening the door to NATO’s military intervention in Libya. According to Israeli sources, it was U.N. Watch that actually orchestrated the events in Geneva to remove Libya from the U.N. Human Rights Council and to ask the U.N. Security Council to intervene.² U.N. Watch is formally affiliated with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which has influence in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy and is part of the Israeli lobby in the United States. The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), which helped launch the unverified claims about 6,000 people being slaughtered by Gaddafi, is also tied to the Israeli lobby in France.

Tel Aviv had been in contact simultaneously with both the Transitional Council and the Libyan government in Tripoli. Mossad agents were also in Tripoli, one of which was a former station manager. At about the same time, French members of the Israeli lobby were visiting Benghazi. In a case of irony, the Transitional Council would claim that Colonel Qaddafi was working with Israel, while it made pledges to recognize Israel to president Sarkozy’s special envoy Bernard-Henri Lévy who would then convey the message to Israeli leaders.³ A similar pattern (to that of Israel’s links to the Transitional Council) had also developed at an earlier stage in South Sudan, which was armed by Israel.

Despite the Transitional Council’s position on Israel, its followers still tried to demonize Gaddafi by claiming he was secretly Jewish. Not only was this untrue, but it was also bigoted. These accusations were intended to be a form of character assassination that equated being a Jew as something negative.

In reality, Israel and NATO are in the same camp. Israel is a de facto member of NATO. Had Gaddafi been conniving with Israel while the Transitional Council was working with NATO, this would mean that both sides were actually being played as fools against one another.

Preparing the Chessboard for the “Clash of Civilizations”

It is at this point that all the pieces have to be put together and the dots have to be connected.

The chessboard is being staged for a “Clash of Civilizations” and all the chess pieces are being put into place.

The Arab World is in the process of being cordoned off and sharp delineation lines are being created. These lines of delineation are replacing the seamless lines of transition between different ethno-linguistic, skin-colour, and religious groups.

Under this scheme, there can no longer be a melding transition between societies and countries. This is why the Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, such as the Copts, are being targeted. This also why black-skinned Arabs and black-skinned Berbers, as well as other North African population groups which are black-skinned, are facing genocide in North Africa.

What is being staged is the creation of an exclusively “Muslim Middle East” area (excluding Israel) that will be in turmoil over Shiite-Sunni fighting. A similar scenario is being staged for a “non-Black North Africa” area which will be characterized by a confrontation between Arabs and Berber. At the same time, under the “Clash of Civilizations” model, the Middle East and North Africa are slated to simultaneously be in conflict with the so-called “West” and “Black Africa.”

This is why both Nicolas Sarzoky, in France, and David Cameron, in Britain, made back-to-back declarations during the start of the conflict in Libya that multiculturalism is dead in their respective Western European societies.⁴

Real multiculturalism threatens the legitimacy of the NATO war agenda. It also constitutes an obstacle to the implementation of the “Clash of Civilizations” which constitutes the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. In this regard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. National Security Advisor, explains why multiculturalism is a threat to Washington and its allies: “[A]s America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues [e.g., war with the Arab World, China, Iran, or Russia and the former Soviet Union], except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat. Such a consensus generally existed throughout World War II and even during the Cold War [and exists now because of the 'Global War on Terror'].”⁵

Brzezinski’s next sentence is the qualifier of why populations would oppose or support wars: “[The consensus] was rooted, however, not only in deeply shared democratic values, which the public sensed were being threatened, but also in a cultural and ethnic affinity for the predominantly European victims of hostile totalitarianisms.”⁵

Risking being redundant, it has to be mentioned again that it is precisely with the intention of breaking these cultural affinities between the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region and the so-called “Western World” and sub-Saharan Africa that Christians and black-skinned peoples are being targeted.

Ethnocentrism and Ideology: Justifying Today’s “Just Wars”

In the past, the colonial powers of Western Europe would indoctrinate their people. Their objective was to acquire popular support for colonial conquest. This took the form of spreading Christianity and promoting Christian values with the support of armed merchants and colonial armies.

At the same time, racist ideologies were put forth. The people whose lands were colonized were portrayed as “sub-human,” inferior, or soulless. Finally, the “White Man’s burden” of taking on a mission of civilizing the so-called “uncivilized peoples of the world” was used. This cohesive ideological framework was used to portray colonialism as a “just cause.” The latter in turn was used to provide legitimacy to the waging of “just wars” as a means to conquering and “civilizing” foreign lands.

Today, the imperialist design of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany have not changed. What has changed is the pretext and justification for waging their neo-colonial wars of conquest. During the colonial period, the narratives and justifications for waging war were accepted by public opinion in the colonizing countries, such as Britain and France. Today’s “just wars” and “just causes” are now being conducted under the banners of women’s rights, human rights, humanitarianism, and democracy.

1. The Economist, “Israel and Iran in Africa: A search for allies in a hostile world,” February 4, 2011.
2. Tova Lazaroff, “70 rights groups call on UN to condemn Tripoli,” Jerusalem Post, February 22, 2011.
3. Radio France Internationale, “Libyan rebels will recognise Israel, Bernard-Henri Lévy tells Netanyahu,” June 2, 2011.
4. Robert Marquand, “Why Europe is turning away from multiculturalism,” Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2011.
5. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books October 1997), p. 211.

Captain America offers spectator-consumers the chance to yet again sit back and be taken for a phantasmagorical ride. The new Hollywood film is another forces of good versus the forces of evil production, where the goodest good guy is a white superhero whose scrawny body is technologically transformed into the perfect muscular male. Moral, good, manly, just, brave, caring, altruistic — all in a physical package that buckles women at the knees. He might as well be God.

Is there anything realistic about the film? Is it the American propaganda tool that the Russia media venue Russia Today (RT) has portrayed it as? Look at the comments that follow this short RT Captain America video and you see that people question Russia Today‘s motives — rejecting it as a flagrant example of ugly Americana.

Here’s one example. “Can’t anyone just enjoy a movie?” said a guy, DaveSquibbSr, who seems to display some rather hysterical patriotic fervor about how the mass media lies to the people and falsely demonizes private enterprise.

Another example: “Dear RT News: Fuck You. By the way, Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now are without a doubt anti-war movies. And the others mentioned contain anti-war messages too,” wrote Austionous, who lists his favorite video as Glen Beck’s patriotic cheer-lead The Real Story: Iraq.

The real story is that the Pentagon’s military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan — never mind Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Rwanda or any of the other sites of U.S. covert operations — has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1,228,000,000,000 since 2001, and the ticker is ticking, and the United States economy and all social services are in collapse. The real story is that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi people and at least 4000 US troops have died, with scores of thousands of U.S. veterans wounded and traumatized. Remember Iraq war veteran Timothy McVeigh?

But here’s the best RT Captain America comment of all, replete with the threat of violence that differs little from the threat of violence advanced by Norwegian freedom fighter Anders Behring Brievik — label and segregate, kill the multiculturalists amongst us, and purify Europe by forcibly repatriating all Moslems.

“Anyone who points at Hollywood and accuses them of doing anything other than making entertaining movies for profit,” says acircleoflight, “needs a tattoo on their forehead that says, ‘I’m too stupid to understand fiction’. And then when we have all these people properly labelled, kill them and send their meat to a starving country. Nothing that comes out of Hollywood is nonfiction. Movies based on ‘real events’ or ‘based on a true story’ are still Fiction. Its never actually what happened.” This guy or gal self-identifies as a ‘pagan’ whose “spirituality is based in logic and reason.”

And that’s a death threat against, well, against your humble correspondent. Alas, I’ll have to go into hiding now, hunker down and secure my own little heavily armed fortress in preparation for the Christian crusaders, soon to come my way, as this story gains readership.

Hmmm. I wonder if that’s what Moslem immigrants or Rwandan Hutu refugees feel like? I mean, the mass media, governments, and plenty of the common people hold these awe-fully biased and ugly stereotypes about Moslems, you know, towel-headed camel jockeys and all that, and about people of color (niggers, spicks, chinks, gooks), more generally, and every Rwandan Hutu is considered a genocidal machete-wielding savage. How did these stereotypes and mythologies of persecution become so deeply seated in the mass psychology?

What is it about multiculturalism that people find so scary? The idea that we should share? Do unto others as we want others to do unto us?

Anti-Islamic fervor is whipped up by governments, corporations and individuals to provide an excuse for state terror and rationale for weapons proliferation. Such fervor is alive and thriving in the white power economies of the U.S., Canada, England, Italy, Japan (though this is changing), and, well, Norway. When stories about the twin Oslo attacks first broke, the mass media immediately launched into their private inquisition about Islamic jihadists, grounded in nothing but speculation and fear-mongering. Russia Today was no different and just as bad as the British and U.S. press.

Your correspondent, a bit too quick to speak (several friends were quite correct about this) but also caught off guard, was stupid enough to get caught up in it, and missed the chance to say, “Hey, wait, it’s a blond-haired blue-eye white man who looks more like the Viking comic book superhero THOR… This is no Osama bin Laden recruit, so please kick your Islamophobia, and stop perpetuating war against innocent people…”

Too Stupid to Understand Fiction

It seems that Norway’s self-proclaimed savior decided to launch his own personal revolution, hoping to inspire Christian Holy War against non-white immigrants who are, in somebody’s mind, soiling the blood of virile white men and defiling their (the white man’s) virgin white women. This sounds like a Neo-Nazi screed about Aryan blood purity. In fact, he has been labelled a Nazi, and saddled with all kinds of other labels, which people and organizations — who seem to have a lot in common with Breivik — have used to distance themselves from him.

Did Breivik act alone? Did he independently flee the proverbially chicken coop of Norwegian normality and privately hatch his personal ideology and revolutionary intent? Christian purity, dirty Arabs, the imminent destruction of Israel? I don’t think so. I think there are other cells, and plenty of them, or movements, and militias, spread over Europe and North America, who are quite pleased with Breivik’s as-yet simmering revolution.

I think Breivik knows perfectly well that his ideas are embraced, and that’s what gave him the sense of entitlement to do what he did. He expects to see Europe “burn”. They are also shared by plenty of North Americans. In fact, the celebrated American Islamophobe Robert Spencer was cited 64 times in Breivik’s ‘Manifesto’. Spencer co-founded the hate group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Jihad Watch. The latter was funded (2003) by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Center for the Popular Study of Culture), a “conservative” group that set out to influence Hollywood and spread their ideas about freedom.

“Some of the ideas [Breivik] expressed are good, barring the violence.
Some of them are great,” Italian official Mario Borghezio reportedly told British press. Borghezio is a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. How does a guy like that defend civil liberties? It brings a whole new meaning to the words. “Christians ought not to be animals to be sacrificed,” he said. “We have to defend them.”

The xenophobic hatred of non-white people is written all over the walls of Fortress Europe and Fortress America and Fortress Canada and Fortress Israel. Who could miss it? Kill the Moslems. Kill the Libyans. Kill the Somalis. Kill the Yemenis. Kill the Iraqis and the Afghans and the Iranians. And kill every last Rwandan Hutu — the fact that they are Christian doesn’t matter, since their spirituality was void and null after they, according to the standard mythology, chopped off their own sisters’ heads. Kill the Palestinians. To justify, to win popular support, the same people who advance these racist sentiments, and generally the ones who take action on them, are the ones who secretly produce and secretly disseminate much of the supposed ‘hate’ propaganda (Kill the Christians, Kill the Americans, Kill the Jews) that is directed at their own ethnic demographic (Christians, Americans, Jews).

Hollywood plays a huge role. Films like Captain America… well, tattoo my forehead “I’m too stupid to understand fiction.”

Kill the Arabs in Sudan — another rallying cry — and arrest Omar Al-Bashir, the Arab Islamic president of Sudan: He’s committing genocide says the powerful Jewish ‘Save Darfur’ lobby, and he’s enslaving good Christians the Christians redouble. Hollywood actors and the mass media say so, it must be true. This rhetoric spews forth from think tanks and universities and ‘human rights’ agencies and from the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Empire operates in a curious manner. Take Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts, where English professors like Dr. Eric Reeves sit in their quaint offices, surrounded by Shakespeare and Milton (and by eugenics professors like Seymour Itzkoff), worshipped by starry-eyed bleeding heart liberal elite women, and they hatch political screeds on genocide informed by intelligence operatives — you know, Central Intelligence Agency types — who are fomenting the Pentagon-backed guerrilla insurgencies on the ground in those far off places like Sudan.

Harvard University’s Samantha Power has confirmed that this is our problem from hell: America has entered the age of genocide. Of course, we don’t have anything to do with it, and poor Lady Liberty has to drag her allies with her, kicking and screaming, and stepping on the tails of her gown dragged through the mud on the rocky road to freedom. Of course, we sell ‘em the humvees, missiles, tanks and fighter-bombers to get there.

The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists

What’s a guy gotta do to get a little recognition in the world? It was only a few days after his shooting spree in Oslo and the former nobody Anders Behring Breivik already had a huge Wikipedia entry with 164 references — and it’s expanding by the day. Obviously, he didn’t create it. Is this capitalism? Or education? No one has created a page for me. Not a single word!

I mean, Rwandan government agents like Tom Ndahiro, who spin the lies for President Paul Kagame, have labeled me a “notorious Tutsi genocide denier” and such praise for my work is not restricted to Rwandans. Canadian academic Dr. Gerald Caplan, who is often seen at the side of dictator Paul Kagame, has published articles deriding me and the other “genocide deniers who drink the each other’s putrid bath water.” (Seems Caplan forgot to have his work peer-reviewed: its rather hysterical.) Meles Zenawi, the dictator in Ethiopia was a bit nonplussed by my exposure of genocide there. You’d think someone would create a Wikipedia page for me.

What’s wrong with this picture? Do I have to become an elite warrior of the Christian Knights Templar? Embrace Zionism? Steal a few million diamonds from Congo and get away with it? Plagiarize the Unibomber’s manifesto and then re-enact the Crusades by massacring a bunch of kids at summer camp? Or should I dress as a soldier and have my picture taken like King Leopold II? Leopold is still celebrated in Belgium, his crimes covered up. Is this the future historical situation of Mr. Breivik — our modern day THOR?

“The recent killings in Norway were horrific,” said British rock star Steven Morrissey (former Smiths singer). “As usual in such cases, the media give the killer exactly what he wants: worldwide fame. We aren’t told the names of the people who were killed — almost as if they are not considered to be important enough, yet the media frenzy to turn the killer into a Jack The Ripper star is… repulsive. He should be un-named, not photographed, and quietly led away.”

Does the coverage around this one Norwegian guy at all remind anyone of a guy named O.J. Simpson? Like the twin World Trade towers demolitions in New York City on September 11, 2001, did the twin Breivik attacks provide the corporate media system with the perfect topic to whip up hysteria and manufacture mass distraction? The media is now turning over every rock they can find in the hunt for clues to Breivik’s madness. Imagine if they investigated the crimes of the big mining or military or pharmaceutical corporations, or the kickbacks to government officials?

Breivik’s most favorite movie was the vaingloriousy bloody Roman war flick Gladiator. No. 2 was 300, an American comic fantasy action thriller marketed by Warner Brothers. No. 3 was independent film Dogville, with Hollywood stars James Caan, John Hurt, Lauren Bacall and, especially, Nicole Kidman — who has the townspeople killed for sexually and emotionally abusing her.

Dogville is under attack. Danish director Lars Von Trier, a self-proclaimed Nazi, stated that he’s “sorry for having made it” [the film] whose machine-gun massacre at the end might have inspired Breivik’s armed assault on the little Norwegian island Utoya. While advocates of Nazism might want to look at themselves in psychotherapy, at the very least, the film Dogville is a harsh critique on American ‘society’ and there is absolutely no reason for Von Trier to apologize for making it. Why is an independent filmmaker bullied and shamed into apology? Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino applauded Dogville; does that make Tarantino culpable in mass murder? Why isn’t director George Lucas under attack for making Star Wars now that killer robotic drone technologies are deployed against innocent people all over the world?

Why isn’t Steven Spielberg under attack — if not arrested — for his alliance with the Pentagon in the war production Saving Private Ryan, for which he was awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Service by Secretary of Defense William Cohen at the Pentagon? The award honored Spielberg for making “a historic contribution to the national consciousness.” Stephen Speilberg also has the unprecedented distinction of producing mass hysteria about sharks through the one film — Jaws — responsible for demonizing sharks as ruthless killers and, in large part, for the ongoing decimation of shark species and the uncertain fate of our oceans. What kind of national consciousness does such cinematography contribute to? How is Cohen’s ‘national consciousness’ any different from the disease of nationalism?

William Cohen was Secretary of War under President William Jefferson Clinton at the height of the U.S. invasion of Central Africa. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair. Cohen has been involved at the deepest levels of secrecy and denial in, for example, intelligence, torture, and special operations.

Saving Private Ryan provokes deep psychological sentiments and emotions based in the standard constructions and discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy and freedom. “Ryan, I must be quick to point out,” Secretary of War Cohen disingenuously declared, “is not a recruitment promotional for the Pentagon. It speaks to us, however, about the importance of values, discipline, determination and sacrifice.”

Who is “US”? It doesn’t speak to me that way. It speaks to me of war, blood, private profits and deceptions that have ripped apart millions and millions of people’s lives, and for no good reason, and that have exterminated entire nations of people. How are Cohen’s important characteristics — values, discipline, determination and sacrifice — different from the patriotism and nationalism that the Pentagon uses to conscript and recruit young people to do its dirty work? Under the Nazi regime, all music had to ‘fit’ within certain standards defined as ‘good’ German music — and censorship was ruthless. How does that differ from the Pentagon’s approval or or rejection of films?

Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen escorts Steven Spielberg through a military honor cordon into the Pentagon (1999).

The Pentagon routinely influences the scripts and the direction of Hollywood films. Plot-lines have been changed, history altered, and scripts modified to meet the Pentagon’s approval. If the Pentagon doesn’t like the direction, plot, themes or characters of pre-production films they won’t support them, and don’t.

In keeping with the privatization of war, the Pentagon’s interests are often served by civilian firms packed with ex-military who maintain tight ties to the war room. Professional soldiers with long service records in covert and psychological operations — Navy Seals or 10th Mountain Division Rangers or Green Berets — are often hired as consultants to enhance war films.This way, the Pentagon and U.S. officials can ‘plausibly deny’ involvement in a film’s direction or production — but the links, ideologies, patriotism and emotional hooks all satisfy the ideals of the American fighting machine.

Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine who earned three purple hearts in Vietnam, has worked in Hollywood as an actor, producer, writer, and consultant, with major credits for Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. “We are fighting Islamo-fascists who will not tolerate the existence of non-Muslims — infidels — on this earth,” Dye said in a Los Angeles Times article. “These are folks who are told they cannot rest until every infidel is driven from this earth…. They aren’t people you can negotiate with.”

Dye’s consulting company is Warriors, Inc., but he works three days a week to influence mass media reportage on wars the U.S. is involved in. He is a frequent ‘independent expert’ cited in corporate media stories. Dye worked as a reporter for Soldier of Fortune magazine, and he has run his own radio program. Dye’s record in Vietnam raises questions about his involvement in illegal operations like the Phoenix Program. Later, during the Reagan administration’s terrorist covert guerrilla wars Latin America, Dye worked “reporting and training troops in guerrilla warfare techniques” in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Reagan projects in Latin America were meant to subvert democracy, institute dictatorship and further U.S. corporate interests; hundreds of thousands of people died from massacres, beheadings, dismemberment and disappearing.

Who says violence in cinematography has no connection to the real world? In Captain America we find some fascinating themes that should inspire anyone to question the motives of the corporate enterprises and the star-studded casts — Hollywood, the Pentagon, Viacom, Paramount, Walt Disney, Marvel Entertainment — that bring such phantasmagorical extravaganzas to the public’s pleasure.

Isn’t Empire the main theme of Captain America? Military superiority in a we-are-the-forces-of-good-they-are-the-forces-of-evil narrative that never threatens our sensibilities or ever makes us squirm in our fifteen-dollars-a-shot-plus-popcorn-and-soda seats? Is the film aimed at indoctrination for war and the manufacture of consent for our participation in elite military imperatives premised on private profit and power?

What about Hollywood’s presentation of ideas about the manipulation of the human body achieved by modern science through genetic engineering, pharmaceutical products, (breast implants, plastic surgery, liposuction), hormones and steroids? Are there any references to these scientific advancements?

What about the theme of patriarchal male domination and the ideologies of the sexual control of women and male supremacy? Come on, can’t anyone just sit and watch a movie?

Not Just a Soldier, a Good Man

“We’re gonna make a new breed of super-soldier,” one of the military grunts proclaims. “Stay the way you are,” the slightly mad scientist with the German accent tells the scrawny un-superized-soldier, prior to his physical transformation to glossy super-chested hero. “Not just a soldier, but a good man.”

A good man. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” the as-yet-unsuperized hero says. Could be anybody from America. The mythology is that any one of us can rise to great heights if we set our minds on it. Isn’t this the great American dream?

The soldier is a good man. The goodness projected by our Captain America savior translates directly to the commonly held belief in the goodness of the average U.S. soldier who, of course, is spreading truth and democracy around the world. This is not a guy who tortures or massacres innocent people, he is a very principled and very ethical hero — like the great white American savior Jake Sully in the blockbuster 3-D emotional sensation Avatar. The projected image of the good soldier in these films maps directly onto U.S. forces deployed at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, or the heroes “defending American values” in Afghanistan through Operation Enduring Freedom. America’s soldiers are not unprincipled killers — the kind of sociopath that some people are portraying Anders Behring Breivik out to be — they are good men. Right?

Of course, Hollywood has its way with reality. Camp Lemonier is a Pentagon outpost for so-called ‘snatch-and-grab’ terrorist operations run by covert forces, in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, with secret CIA torture centers. These illegal operations and covert guerrilla wars involve violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The U.S. backs bloody dictatorships and nasty warlords all across the region. Such facts are obscured by Hollywood and its propaganda films, aren’t they?

Survivors of U.S.-backed state-sponsored genocide in Ethiopia; the government of Meles Zenawi is committing massive atrocities against numerous indigenous tribes. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

We Take the Brain

The new Captain America film is packed with action adventures and high technology war weapons. Consider the film’s presentation of the secret weapons of the HYDRA — the Nazi deep science division presented as the ominous evil enemy. It sure looks a lot like the Pentagon’s billion dollar boondoggle the Northrup-Grumman Corporation B-2 bomber. Coincidence?

Well, in the film this stealth bomber has a different name altogether, and its not our name for the thing, its the Nazi’s name for it. Like the choice of the language that the Allied scientist speaks with — a decisively Germanic accent — the choice of the stealthy ‘flying wing’ resembling the Pentagon’s B-2 bomber is no coincidence, but an intentional choice based in the hidden history of allied war crimes of WW-II.

Modern aerospace programs and technologies had their genesis in the secret aerospace programs of the Nazi-American war machine. On April 12, 1945, having crushed the last bastion of Nazi military resistance, U.S. forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower secured Thuringia, the heart of the Nazi secret weapons research and development programs in Germany. Eisenhower led the charge to transfer superior and futuristic Nazi weapons technologies to the United States before the weapons facilities were turned over to the allied invading Soviet army on July 4, 1945. The Soviets, of course, drew the iron curtain over Thuringia and Eastern Germany for the next 43 years (until 1989).

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the removal of futuristic aerospace ‘assets’, including the Fi 103 ‘flying bomb’ (propaganda name ‘V1′), the A4 rocket (‘V2′), and the world’s first deployable jet turbine aircraft, the Messerschmidt Me 262 (which as a fighter could attain speeds of over 800 km/h). At least five Me 262 planes were assembled under the direction of U.S. forces in control of the Messerschmidt Me 262 production factory from April to July 1945.

The biggest and most secretive catch was an intact prototype of an all-wing, single engine, single-seater jet plane, type named the Horten Ho IX or Go 229 V-3. The futuristic Northrup-Grumman Corporation ‘stealth’ bomber — the flying wing — unveiled in the United States (circa 1989) bears a striking similarity to the Nazi Go 229 V3. It is widely unknown that at least one complete Go 229 V-3 plane and a large number of finished parts of the prototype fell into U.S. hands and disappeared into supra-governmental ‘black’ programs in the secret weapons complex post WW-II.

Who ran this weapons complex? John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1952-1959. Allen Dulles ran the Central Intelligence Agency, until recently known as the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.). The Dulles brothers had ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930′s and into the war. Most interesting was the Sullivan and Cromwell — Dulles brothers’ law firm to a guy with a mustache named Adolf — one of their clients. So began the post WW-II era in secrecy and denial, the Cult of the Atom, and the mythology of the comic strip superhero, Captain America.

“While watching the trailer for this movie I spotted a number of what-if planes and tanks,” posted a guy named ‘Nick” on a specialized military technology Internet forum. “The main one is a giant Nazi flying wing bomber that looks like an overgrown Ho-229 [sic] and it was being chased by what looks like an XP-55 Ascender. There were also some Nazi armoured cars that looked rather slick and streamlined, only on screen for a few seconds so not too sure. This should be a fun summer movie to switch off the brain and enjoy!”

Allied intelligence ascertained well in advance the locations of the supreme Nazi weapons facilities, including the exact factories and their production capabilities but the Allied bombing campaign did not target the weapons complex. For example, while bombs fell in an ostensible attack on the V2 rocket production facilities near Nordhausen on April 3, 1945, the V2 centers were entirely spared: some 8,800 civilians instead died when the bombs hit the town. There was no military significance to these killings, merely eight days before the American troops arrived. This is yet another example of U.S. government war crimes that went unchallenged.

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the exfiltration of over 2000 Nazi scientists — experts in biological warfare, rocketry, munitions, intelligence and psychological operations (torture and propaganda) — to U.S. military and intelligence bases, mostly, but not exclusively, in the continental United States. This mass and secretive recruitment and exfiltration occurred under highly classified programs of the O.S.S. — and continued under its later incarnation, the Central Intelligence Agency. These O.S.S./CIA programs were called Project Paperclip and Project 63. Through the defense and intelligence establishment’s then “Operation Sunshine,” Nazis belonging to the elite ‘Gehlen Org’ — named for Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen — were exfiltrated into the CIA.

The U.S. Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) was set up early in WW-II and tasked with collecting scientific data on the level of research attained by the Germans in select technical fields and weapons — primarily, at first, concerned with the atom bomb. Some 3000 researchers and engineers wearing U.S. Army and Air Force uniforms were attached to General Patton’s Third Army solely for this purpose, and they converged en masse on the Nazi secret underground weapons complex in Thuringia after the Allied invasion.

Their slogan was: “We take the brain.”

Taranis, an unmanned combat aircraft prototype unveiled in Britain in 2010.

Taranis, designed and manufactured by Northrop Grumman with assistance from Boeing, the B-2 ‘Spirit’ bomber aircraft each averaged US$737 million in 1997 dollars ($1.01 billion today). Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft ($1.27 billion today), while the total program cost (development, engineering, testing) averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997 dollars ($2.87 billion today). In 2010, Britain’s scandal-ridden BAE Systems unveiled a new unmanned stealth bomber prototype of its own, Taranis, funded by the people of Britain to the tune of 143 million pounds.

The B-2 has been deployed in Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and in the recent illegal war against Libya, yet Hollywood films glamorize weapons of mass destruction, and they inspire young people to want to operate them, no matter the moral or ethical questions, which are never asked. Raining bombs down from the sky is as immoral as sitting in a remote office somewhere far from the actual war theatre pulling some joystick which rains UAV-deployed weaponry down on innocent men, women and children. Pakistan offers an egregious example which has only slightly scratched the surface of the impenetrable western mass media propaganda system.

The film Top Gun offers the premier example of western technological war propaganda and nationalism, completely stripped of all moral and ethical conundrums cast as another contest of good (US) versus evil (them). Captain America (Tom Cruise), to the rescue. Of course, he always gets his girl. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.

The Brain Drain

The military-entertainment complex comprises a lot more than the sleek propaganda and psychological mind-melts plastered across the big screen in such films. Often there are direct ties between current or past Pentagon or intelligence officials. For example, Captain America is a Paramount Films, Viacom Industries, Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Corp. production (the exact relations between these industrial giants are opaque and fluid).

One Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer director for some 19 years, who  directed the interests of the corporation, was former U.S. General Alexander Haig — the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army (1973), White House chief of staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford (1973-74), Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces (1974-79), and secretary of state under President Reagan (1981-82). While serving MGM, Haig was also a director of the multinational defense contractor United Technologies International (UTI), the parent company of Sikorsky Helicopters, the maker of the Blackhawk choppers of the Pentagon’s Somalia propaganda film Black Hawk Down.

Other highly leveraged corporate ties proliferate. For one example, one of the directors of aerospace and defense giant GE Company, Barbara Scott Preiskel, is also a director of the Washington Post, and she is Senior Vice-President of the Motion Picture Associations of America, New York, NY. You see the Motion Pictures of America cited on every pre-preview trailer. For another example, consider that Lucille S. Salhany sits on the Hewlett Packard board of directors with Philip M. Condit, Chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company, and that Lucille S. Salhany was President of United Paramount Network (1994-1997); Chairman and Director of Fox Broadcasting (1993-1994); and Chairman of 20th Century Fox Television (1991-1993).

Directors of Viacom Corporation (the parent company of numerous other media entities) include media magnate Sumner Redstone, a 1944 Harvard University and 1947 Harvard Law School graduate who served in the “Military Intelligence Division” during World War II. ” While a student at Harvard, he was selected to join a special intelligence group whose mission was to break Japan’s high-level military and diplomatic codes. Mr. Redstone received, among other honors, two commendations from the Military Intelligence Division in recognition of his service, contribution and devotion to duty, and the Army Commendation Award. Mr. Redstone served in the Military Intelligence Division during World War II.”

Redstone’s 2010 annual compensation for Viacom was $35.3 million, while Viacom CEO received the largest annual compensation in America — $84.5 million — while Viacom’s No. 2 director received $64.7 million in 2010.

The U.S. government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, established soon after Pearl Harbor, had the dual mission of providing intelligence advice to the joint Chiefs of Staff and representing the United States in combined Military Intelligence matters with its British counterparts; they were also involved in interrogation operations (torture) against Japanese and German war prisoners. The Military Intelligence Division was also used to coordinate and implement various international ‘deception operations.’

The film Pearl Harbor only advanced nationalistic and patriotic sentiments meant to further indoctrinate and recruit warriors. Starring great white hope Ben Affleck, the 2001 production is rife with inaccuracies and devoid of any serious geopolitical context. The oversimplified plot was purely based on emotion and jingoisms. Even U.S. military historians agreed.

One of the great cover-ups of the World War II era was the U.S. government’s advance knowledge of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, it seems that U.S. taxpayers needed to be coaxed into another blood-drenched war that would claim the lives of so many aspiring Captain Americas.

But that was not the only big World War II whitewash that Hollywood has massaged for the Pentagon and its corporate allies. While the blockbuster film Schindler’s List also helped recast the hidden history of World War II, it serves other propaganda purposes — favorable to capitalism and the elites who benefit most from it.

Schindler’s List fits neatly into the narratives about the Holocaust that have become industries unto themselves. Remember the wealth that ghetto refugees carried along with them in the film? Diamonds, easily concealed: the state of Israel was born out of the blood diamonds plundered from the Congo (Africa). While the suffering of the Jews in Europe was very real, it is their ‘victim’ status that has been used and abused to shield them against all charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide being perpetrated by Israeli interests in the Congo, Angola, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana — its a long list — and the Palestinian territories. (Of course, the same ‘victim’ status has been used, falsely, by the elite Tutsi dictatorship ruling Rwanda today.) But Jewish film director Stephen Spielberg has played a major role in creating war propaganda that suits his personal preferences and private interests in real life. Exemplifying his deep anti-Arab sentimentality, Spielberg was boycotted by the Arab League for having secretly donated $1,000,000 to Israel in 2006 during the second War on Lebanon.

The ‘good versus evil’ dichotomy is often used to inculcate emotionally seated ideas about patriotism and nationalism, and to indoctrinate subjects and citizens, and this dichotomy was profoundly advanced by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals and the post-WW II Cold War propaganda.  Nuremberg and the formation of the United Nations  were nothing more than sham dress rehearsals for the victor’s justice of the international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia (ICTY), Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International criminal Court. The fire-bombings of the city of Dresden and Nordhausan (Thuringia), and the atomic atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima all warranted investigation and prosecution for war crimes. Had the American and British and Belgian and French military officials and the monopoly capitalists that backed them been tried in an international court of law by a truly international League of Nations, the world would most likely be a far different place today.

Instead, the prevailing establishment narratives about genocide — born out of the Nazi Holocaust — set the stage for the evolution of deeply manipulative and hegemonic discourses that politicized the international human rights and war crimes arenas. These politicized doctrines have transformed all reasonable definitions and applications of international ‘humanitarian’ law into tools that the most powerful nations use against their ideological, political or economic enemies. Schindler’s List quite neatly fits into the political economy of genocide and the financial and political imperatives of the Holocaust industry, and it’s no surprise to find that corporate executives from Hollywood film enterprises — like Viacom director Sheri Redstone — and are deeply connected to powerful Jewish and Zionist organizations.

And the weapons procurements, productions, proliferation and profits continue to rise.

Norway is a key partner in the ongoing and illegal “War on Terror.” Norway provides a base station (on its home turf) for the U.S. Missile Defense program intelligence and reconnaissance gathering against Russia and its neighbors. Norway is the 14th largest arms importer in the world, and a major exporter, with the highest military expenditures per capita of any country in Europe.

In 2002, Norway sent 18 F-16 fighter-bombers to support the Pentagon’s illegal ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ and the illegal coalition attacks against Afghanistan. Norwegian Armed Forces are involved today in covert ‘counterterrorism’ [read: terrorism] operations with U.S. and British Special Forces in Afghanistan: between 2001 and 2010, Norway had sent over 6938 soldiers who participated in the illegal International Security and Assistance Forces (ISAF) occupation of Afghanistan.

Norway is also part of the international coalition that attacked Libya, in contravention of international law, on March 17, 2011. Norway has six General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets, and two Lockheed Martin C-130 J-30 tactical transport aircraft, operating against Libya from an air base in Crete. By April 26, 2011, Norwegian F-16s had dropped over 200 bombs on the people of Libya.

The people of Norway are not innocent spectators to the wars their government and troops and intelligence apparatus are involved in. The anti-Arab sentiments in the country are reflected by their global position vis-a-vis the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Israel — the predominant purveyors of Empire. The Norwegian government’s recent shift to stand up against Israel’s war crimes is certainly something to watch.

Imagineering War

In 1999, the University of Southern Califonia was awarded a $42 million grant by the U.S. Army to establish the Institute for Creative Technology (ICT). The ICT “was created to combine the assets of a major research university with the creative resources of Hollywood and the game industry to advance the state-of-the-art in training and simulation.” The ICT is an Army University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). The contract is managed by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s Simulation Training Technology Center (RDECOM STTC).

“At USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), high-tech tools and classic storytelling come together to pioneer new ways to teach and to train. Our goal is to create engaging and effective immersive experiences that shape the future of learning. With applications for leadership, and decision-making, ICT also seeks to redefine the range of skills these experiences can address.”

Sound pretty benign? Check out the page where this text appears and you will see that it revolves around U.S. military agendas. The graphics openly display soldiering and military hardware. One of the main thrusts of interactive simulations is war gaming, a billions of dollars a year industry.

The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has enlisted film studios and video game designers and it reflects the extensive overlap between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Officers from the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) sector of the DoD play an integral part in developing these simulations. ICT video games Full Spectrum Command and Full Spectrum Warrior use the Xbox and Sony Playstation platforms. Pac Man, Game Boy and DOOM were all used by the military as training simulation programs.

It is important to truly appreciate the subservient role that the mass media and entertainment industries play in further institutionalizing the American addiction to war and space. It is no anomaly that the Pentagon has sponsored hi-tech ‘brainstorming’ sessions with some of Hollywood’s most celebrated science fiction writers and producers. With a five-year, $45 million dollar contract with the U.S. Army, the Institute for Creative Technology in Marina del Rey (CA) has been tapping the creative genius of John Milius (co-writer: Apocalypse Now), David Ayer (writer: Training Day), Ron Cobb (creature designer for Star Wars films). Hollywood consultants are paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a day to dream up new high-tech military gizmos — coming to an Army near you.

It doesn’t take the brawn or brains [sic] of Captain America to figure out that this Pentagon research and development institute facilitates advanced robotic and simulation warfare systems. Drones. That is, robotic killing technologies such as Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) and a whole fleet of related warfare technologies.

Early in 2002, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld added over $1 billion to the fiscal 2003 defense budget request to develop certain Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) programs. The DOD invested more than $3 billion in UAV development, procurement and operations between 1996 and 2001; invested $2.3 billion more by 2005 and another $4.2 billion before 2009. According to the so-called UAV Roadmap produced several years ago, the UAV inventory of all the military services was expected to grow to 290 vehicles by 2010. How many are really out there now?

The deployment of drone technologies with bombing and strafing capabilities represents the most egregious American immorality and cowardice — the opposite of everything the Captain America supposedly stands for. There’s no courage involved in the war games environment where some G.I. Joe operates a joystick — hardly any different than masturbation — in some isolated control room far from the killing fields.

Contrary to the propaganda of assurance and accountability ever touted by the Obama administration, the drones are every day deployed to spy on, terrorize, strafe and bomb innocent civilians from Pakistan to Iraq to Darfur to the Mexican border of the U.S.

Farmers working in poppy fields in Balakh, Afghanistan. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

“Al Qaeda seeks to bleed us financially by drawing us into long, costly wars that also inflame anti-American sentiment,” John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s Office of Homeland Security counter-terrorism adviser. “Going forward, we will be mindful that if our nation is threatened, our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.”

America will pursue war “in the shadows” Brennan said, “relying heavily on missile strikes from unmanned aerial drones, raids by elite special operations troops, and quiet training of local forces to pursue terrorists… No civilians are ever hurt… And by that I mean, if there are terrorists who are within an area where there are women and children or others, you know, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger.”

“In the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision, of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop,” said good soldier John Brennan, lying through his teeth. According to a British investigative journalism agency, and countless witnesses on the ground, civilians are routinely killed by drones. Brennan is a veteran CIA operative with a distinguished career in deception and death for profit.

Never explained are the direct connections between drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the poppy (opium) growers who are not on the Central Intelligence Agency’s list of approved growers. The opium trade is used to fund covert operations all over the world — to back our Captain Americas in their pursuit of freedom and truth.

In 2005,  Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld appeared in a Pentagon press conference with Marvel superaction heroes Spiderman and Captain America. The purpose of the Pentagon photo op was to launch a new domestic war propaganda program aimed at active duty troops dubbed “America Supports You.”

Under Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, the Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle sector has grown exponentially, exceeding its own expectations, and the military roles, uses, launch platforms, control rooms and payloads of UAVs — like government expenditures on research, development and acquisition — are out of sight. In 2005, tactical and theater level unmanned aircraft alone, had flown over 100,000 flight hours in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States, Belgium, France, Germany and Israel are the leading producers of UAVs and related weaponry.

These are the Predators and other UAV drones being deployed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon to bomb and strafe “insurgents” in remote Afghan villages, to patrol and surveil national borders in Israel and Texas, and to “stop genocide” in places like Sudan, where NATO alliance forces — especially the US, Canada, Britain and Israel — are deeply involved in perpetrating war crimes.

For example, instead of offering anything close to the truth about Sudan, the military-entertainment complex’s “Save Darfur” (a province in Sudan) narrative has been based on flagrant propaganda channeled from the Pentagon and intelligence operatives in Sudan, and onto the western English-language press, through mouthpieces like National Security Council operative John Prendergast or the Holocaust Memorial Museum or Smith College English professor Eric Reeves. The ‘Save Darfur’ and ‘Never Again’ sloganeering advances by these propagandists relies accusations (e.g. Reeves) of a “genocidal war against African people’s” ostensibly being committed by President Omar Al-Bashir, whose government is under a Pentagon ‘regime change’ attack.

May the Force Be with You

Today’s battle-fighting environments — often cast in jungles, like Apocalypse Now or Rambo or the post-apocalyptic Mad Max genre films or Predator — are awash in weaponry and mythologized storylines that destroy the links between state-sponsored terrorism and domestic violence, between war propaganda and our complicity in war crimes, environmental destruction and terrorism. The ugly truth is that the ‘universal American soldier‘ is indoctrinated to kill, and to kill ruthlessly, and is not some aberration who went astray of the pack and lost his sense of ‘goodness’.

We see this lone aberration soldier gone awry in the Rambo films, and it is most starkly personified by Marlon Brando’s caricature of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. The film is packed with references to Central Africa, culminating in the bloody death where Kurtz (Brando) exclaims, “the Horror, the horror,” right out of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel on Belgian atrocities in the Congo, Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now is no anti-war film. Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is a Special Operations assassin with the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Captain Willard is sent up the Mekong River to deep territory to assassinate a rogue U.S. Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who has gone ‘native’. There’s that theme of rogue U.S. commando again. In fact, MACV-SOG was responsible for covert operations, and sometimes these actually were against U.S. military — but probably against officers and soldiers who opposed the illegal Pentagon or CIA operations and had become ‘liabilities’ that needed to be ‘neutralized’.

The MACV-SOG operations supplemented a ruthless CIA ‘counterinsurgency’ program called ‘Phoenix‘ — an instrument of terror, accountable to no one, a psyop gone mad — that cut like a scalpel deep into the hearts and minds and bodies of Vietnamese civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions and all reasonable codes of war. Tortures, assassinations, kidnappings, detention for years without trial or survival — ‘neutralizations’ of soldiers, fathers, mothers, supporters, innocent bystanders, friendly agents, entire families and entire villages, that occurred late at night after people went to bed. “Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.” And everything occurred behind the smiling faces and democratic assurances — standing up in front of the patriotic Western mass media for photo-ops — of intelligence and defense officials’ lies.

Hollywood cinematography introduced robotic technologies to the general public through the Hollywood Star Wars trilogies — everything from the 1970′s hit TV series The Six Million Dollar Man to the Schwarzennegger Terminator films. Thus we can say for certain where the language and public introduction of the new Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAV) technologies came from — language like ‘drones’, names like Predator and StrikeStar and DarkStar. These films habituated U.S. citizens to an increasingly militarized environment, the physical and social environments of every day life now characterized by rapid technological changes that are occurring at a rate far more accelerated than the rate of human adaptability, and beyond the capacity for any organized social protest.

These major Hollywood productions clearly facilitated the military objectives of “turning science fiction into fact” and it is in the context of the popularity of these films, and the hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to their production and proliferation, that we can situate the realities of the “death-and-destruction” technologies that were developed behind them. Indeed, the technologies did not appear overnight: the Hollywood Star Wars type films were the chronicles of death foretold. Drones, droids and other ‘futuristic’ robotic systems employed in war zones today include sophisticated gadetry like Robotic Vehicle Trainers and these, in turn, revolve around simulation and gaming technologies.

“The robotic vehicle trainer teaches Soldiers how to operate robots like the Talon, SWORDS and PackBot,” reads the US Army RDECOM Research Laboratory description, “using a virtual environment in the ‘America’s Army’ video game.” RDECOM is the U.S. Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command, another war-making agency that has a direct relationship to Hollywood.

Simulation centers create the means for remotely piloted killing machines to perpetrate atrocities (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide) on innocent civilian populations in places where the Pentagon seeks to limit soldier (human) casualties.

While the text explaining what the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is supposedly about makes laudable (I’m being very sarcastic) attempts to classify their activities as civilian — there is always some civilian benefit, like the peaceful atom and the medical uses of biological weapons — there is no attempt to cover up the fact that this “university research center” is highly militarized and serves the Pentagon’s war-making agenda: it is written all over the ICT web site.

For those traumas and casualties that do occur, the survivors can try to piece themselves — and their relations with their significant others — back together and lead semi-productive lives with the support of Bill Ford — one of the ICT’s trauma recovery simulation coaches. Retired Sergeant Major and Vietnam war veteran Bill Ford is a virtual human who is “based on the personality and experiences of real soldiers and marines.”

Remember that rush of emotion that overwhelmed your body when watching the 3-D simulation of the decimation of ‘Home Tree’ in Avatar?

Hollywood, in conjunction with academic and military research institutions, has honed in on subliminal psychology and ways to more deeply impact and influence human emotion. Avatar was no progressive film, but a deeply compromised narrative with all the same old stereotypes and ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy, and contrary to commonly held public beliefs, the film helps to inculcate deeply insidious messages that actually enhance the western imperial project of Empire.

That is, Avatar facilitates conquest, and resource plunder, it does not challenge it. It does not challenge the destruction of the earth, and it facilitates the ongoing genocides of indigenous peoples, everywhere. Like Captain America, already is, or King Kong, Avatar became an industry unto itself — complete with Na’vi action superheroes, books, costumes, T-shirts, and other materialistic paraphernalia peddled by Toys R’ Us and other garbage producers.

Enter scientists like Jonathan Gratch, a member of the ICT research and development team, whose research focuses on virtual humans and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision-making and physical behavior. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR and RDECOM. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and AFOSR is the Air Force Office of Scientific Research — two of many amongst the most secretive military-intelligence entities on earth.

ICT’s Associate Director Dr. Stacy Marsella has lead research efforts on a number of technologies, but his most recent work includes “modelling beliefs about others (Theory of Mind) plays in multi-agent based social simulation and the design of virtual humans, software-artefacts that look like, act like and can interact with humans within virtual environments.” Doctors Gratch and Marsella’s accomplishments include development and implementation of the Pentagon requisitioned MRE/SASO warfare systems: the “Mission Rehearsal Exercise” [play MRE Movie Clip] and the Stability and Support Operations [play SASO Movie Clip] training prototypes.

ICT Associate Director Dr. Albert Rizzo’s latest project “has focused on the translation of the graphic assets from the Xbox game, Full Spectrum Warrior, into an exposure therapy application for combat-related PTSD with Iraq War veterans.” ICT director Randall Hill graduated with a bachelor of science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point and subsequently served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for six years with assignments in field artillery and military intelligence before getting an advanced degrees in computer sciences (artificial intelligence).

No connection between Hollywood and the Pentagon?

The Marvel Universe

The Pentagon’s public web pages — for all these agencies — are awash in public relations, greenwashing (the Pentagon is the top global environmental polluter) and propaganda (read: perception management) whitewashing their true missions, agendas and record. Hollywood sets the stage by programming the minds of entertainment consumer-spectators.

While Hollywood continues to falsify the consciousness of consumer-spectators through the bombast of 3-D film extravaganzas like Captain America, the other forms of mass media — the information overload of “news” productions, advertising and military-corporate whitewashing — are sure to help finish the job.

Walt Disney Corporation purchased Marvel Entertainment in 2009. Hollywood’s Walt Disney productions are legendary, of course, with such animation films as The Lion King, Madagascar, and Pocahontas — each with its own subliminal themes dedicated to the indoctrination of youth in service to the entrenchment of capitalist interests (values, desires, associations) at a young age.

The indoctrination of children to serve the military-entertainment complex in its operational war theaters begins at an early age. It’s not just the films. Amongst the many commodities being mass marketed by Marvel Industries are a whole line of superhero action apparel for children. You can also get your superaction hero dolls and fleece blankets and T-shirts and underwear.

That’s right, for just $16.50 you can order your superaction hero pajama tops and shorts set on line today and tuck your tiny tot into bed in his Captain America pajamas for a restful night of superhero action associations — influencing the developmental character structure at a deeply subconscious level through dreams — which translate into early childhood indoctrination for weaponry, war and patriarchy. The Lion King, for example, has a deeply anti-immigration message, this crafted over and above the more obvious racial stereotypes and patriarchal themes of male power and dominance that serve the ongoing evisceration of resources from Africa, and the depopulation that attends these. Such animation shorts are filled with mythologizing themes and images that distort the spectator-consumer’s perceptions of reality, underscoring the supposed supremacy of the white societies (the light-skinned lions) and the supposed sociopathologies of people of color (the dark-skinned lion plotting with sniveling and drooling hyenas to leave the ‘spoiled’ badlands and take the good lands).

Never mind the elderly ape with walking stick being the closest thing to a human. While the Pentagon and multinational corporations are engaged in exercises to depopulate landscapes in Africa, we have co-existent and simultaneous the production and mass consumption of racialized animation imagery of The Lion King or Madagascar — and it’s not a whole lot different with Out of Africa either, it’s just different — that inculcates the white consciousness with the un-peopled Africa. This is yet another debasing projection of savagery and bestiality onto African people — and the blotting out of indigenous tribes of East Africa in favor of the mining and tourism interests of white western capitalism, backed by the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Along with these primary western agents of disinformation come the Pentagon’s ‘humanitarian’ entourage, Hollywood actorvists like George Clooney, Mia Farrow, and Don Cheadle, our Captain Americas for Sudan, and Ben Affleck, Angelina Jolie and now Emile Hersch, our Captains America for Congo. Hollywood films that disinform consumer-spectators and whitewash the historical and contemporary realities of western military and multinational corporate interventions in Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Congo are spread around the globe through the global cinema distribution complex. These films include The Devil Came on Horseback (Darfur, Sudan); Hotel Rwanda; Black Hawk Down; The Last King of Scotland; King Kong and Blood Diamond.

In the late fall of 2005, the Hollywood film King Kong opened to sellout crowds everywhere. The high-action cinematography and special effects combined with the racy recycled story of Beauty and the Beast to bring home a walloping fortune for everyone involved. Behind the film, however, is a dark forest of conservation organizations, primatologists and public relation firms peddling billions of dollars in so-called ‘conservation’ programs for Central Africa. Behind these conservation organizations, funding them, or working with them directly, are some very interesting corporate species. As you penetrate deeper and deeper into this jungle of surprises, the landscape gets curiouser and curiouser.

The King Kong industry and Kong paraphernalia was peddled at Starbucks and Burger King, but there’s a whole jungle of Kong-related products on sale out there. The King Kong media machine pumped articles into many print magazines, including WIRED, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Turner Broadcasting (CNN/TBS/TNT) ‘scooped up’ the rights for the television network premier of King Kong from owner-producers NBC/Universal and Universal Studios Home Entertainment peddled the King Kong DVD and King Kong computer games.

Remarkably, there are many real life parallels to the characters and events in the King Kong epic. Included in these are interests connected to Universal Studios. One interesting entity cashing in on the King Kong frenzy is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). Behind or partnered with them are a whole troop of multinational corporations whose interest in gorilla conservation appears to be a front for the control and exploitation of Banana Republics — Rwanda, the two Congos, Uganda, Central African Republic, Gabon.

One of these secretive firms, ESRI (Earth Sciences Research Institute), has worked in the defense sector for years, initially focused on supporting defense mapping organizations and advanced terrain analysis and other cartographic military necessities for military base development. “Now as a result of Congressional mandate,” said expert John Day in Military Geospatial Technology, “technology is being deployed into a wide range of warfighter, intelligence and base support programs; and ESRI is playing a leading role in that transformation.”

At the heart of the King Kong tale is the white damsel in distress. Like the Tarzan myth, the sassy white female makes the adventure, and her sexuality is the central draw. Ann Darrow (actress Naomi Watts) makes her Kong debut in a flimsy nightgown and she closes the film in an equally seductive dancing gown. The seductress captures the imagination of the viewers, adding a titillating energy of subliminal sexual desire, but her white femininity is situated in a subordinate role, and her sexual availability is advertised most clearly when the big beast pokes at her. For the spectator-consumer, the titillating advances provoke subliminal sexual emotions.

Like Tarzan‘s Jane, Kong‘s Ann Darrow offers a metaphor for the real life femme fatales of the primate conservation community involved in the imperial enterprise of ‘conservation’ in Africa. A central character is Dian Fossey, the primatologist whose pioneering research on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda led to her murder in 1985. Another is Sigourney Weaver, the Hollywood star who played Dian Fossey in the late 1980′s Hollywood film Gorillas in the Mist. And then there is Jane Goodall, the internationally renowned chimpanzee specialist. More recent femme fatales to enter the fray are Daryl Hannah and Madison Slate.

The buck doesn’t stop there. The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) has a base in an out-of-this-world place called Walikale, in South Kivu province, Congo. The JGI has been involved with militias and land theft, and is indirectly backing extortion, war crimes and genocide in Eastern Congo.

Of course, like the place itself (Walikale), such stories appear completely off the map of establishment media reality — an so they appear as crazy as the people of color, portrayed as drooling tribal zombies, in King Kong.

Black Hawk Down

“And ah, can someone explain to me how Hollywood was dishonest with Black Hawk Down?” said DaMarlboroMan3, commenting on RT’s Captain America video. “We were there to help people and they tried to kill us and we killed a lot of them to defend ourselves. Somalia has no resources we would want unless dust becomes the next big thing on wall street.”

And, ah, DaMarlboroMan3 watches too many Hollywood movies (or smokes too much). Black Hawk Down was an outrageous war propaganda production that completely falsified the story of western occupation and plunder of Somalia. Scandalous corporate entities like Save the Children, and the deceptive spin on the Pentagon’s war machine there, were chronicled in journalist Michael Maren’s expose The Road to Hell.

The early 1990′s crises in Somalia had its roots in the invasion of Western humanitarian aid organizations that occurred steadily as big money and big relief flooded into Somalia from 1981 onward. By the mid 1980′s the aid machine had crippled the local economy and Somalia could not feed its own people.

After a furious political scramble involving Royal/Dutch Shell, Agip and other petroleum vultures, all oil concessions were granted (1989) to Conoco, Chevron, Amoco (BP) and Philips Petroleum. The Pentagon’s Operation Restore Hope was never a “humanitarian” mission: that was the cover story.

U.S. forces killed scores of thousands of Somali people — and a few Captain America wannabees were dragged through the streets to ridicule our American arrogance. The Israeli-American-Ethiopian-Ugandan mission in Somalia today is far more nasty, involving U.S. Covert Ops in war crimes qualifying the US and Israel for the International criminal Court, and the western powers are equally culpable in the massive ongoing famine. So, oil in Darfur, covert operations in Somalia? This is the new, old, ‘humanitarian’ warfare in Africa and Hollywood covers it all up.

Like the representations of the females in Avatar, in the Indiana Jones series, in The Lion King Pocahontas and the many King Kong flicks, the typical Hollywood propaganda film casts females either in weak or subservient roles, or as lusty sex-craved female fatales out to eat every good man alive. In both cases the stereotypical females are overshadowed by dominant male roles, protectors and saviors of all that is good, out to rid the world of the scourge of evil.

The White Male Savior-Slaughterer

Sigourney Weaver appears in Avatar as an older woman scientist who can hardly trot for the scenes where she appears in human form, and so she is recast as a young, nubile, sexually attractive Na’vi avatar. Weaver can’t accomplish what she wants, nor can the other non-white minorities (Latino helicopter pilot), until their dominant white male Jake Sully comes along and saves the day. The crippled Jake Sully is portrayed as an impotent soldier who, like the Six Million Dollar Man, can be made whole again through the technological transformation to an avatar. But even as a paraplegic, Jake Sully retains his white male superhero savior status and all the privileges that come with it, and this status is enhanced and reconfigured — just as Captain America is physically reconfigured — when he embodies a Na’vi, the people his occupying imperialist other-worldly corporate-dominated (earth) society has come to conquer.

Many Hollywood propaganda films promote technological utopia: science and technology are presented as a religion we should all (continue to) worship. The scrawny weakling but omnipotent moral soldier in Captain America is marvelously transformed into a spectacle of masculinity. Not only is he smart, and moral, now he is the super athletic man. In Avatar, Jake Sully goes native with the help of the futuristic technologies of the conquerors (that would be you, me, US). Here is the glorification of science, and the real-time corporate influence (aligned with Hollywood) provides the impetus behind the higher ‘moral’ purpose to save and not bomb ‘Home tree’. Weaver’s scientist character facilitates this medico-pharmaceutical-academic narrative which, translated, means biopiracy and theft of indigenous people’s traditional knowledge, intellectual property, and ways of life. Sounds a lot like genocide, but the film does not leave ANYONE with any greater awareness of the actual genocides against indigenous people’s that are happening while we sit in the theater watching the film.

The story is only slightly different in District 9. The weaponry is futuristic, to the average spectator-consumer’s eye, but the Pentagon has already created weaponry which the general public is almost totally unaware of: directed energy weapons; advanced artificial intelligence systems; nanotechnology; biological weapons; and weather as a weapon. These things don’t just appear out of the blue. District 9 is another film with a deep, dark anti-immigration message, but now the ‘illegals’ and ‘refugees’  are actual aliens from elsewhere in the universe. I saw in District 9 a depiction of a present day state, South Africa, which had fallen from black control under the unseen hand of white corporate control in the near future,” says anthropologist Dr. Enoch Page. “That white control was exemplified in that film by a white male corporate executive who superficially seemed to be a racist bungling idiot, but in exercising his racism against the aliens he got infected with their genetic material and began to morph himself into the physical form of that oppressed alien population. As the man morphs into the other he is, of course, rejected by his own who deem him crazy or at least lost in battle. Consequently, he can only gain safe haven among the oppressed and begins to assist their liberation (but only with the thought of being healed so he can return to his white wife and white life). The total completion of his metamorphosis probably will be the basis for a sequel to that film. So we are seeing in recent films venues for projecting an imagined future in which the strategy of appropriating the physical form of the oppressed becomes the vehicle for a white male hero.”

District 9 builds tension in the spectator-consumer by playing on deep-seated psychological anxieties about bodily fluids and primordial origins of existence. This tension is mapped over all the standard racial stereotyping where the whites — the forces of good — are superior, civilized, educated and rational, and they (we) must protect them (our) selves. In contradistinction, the non-whites — the mixed up crazy forces of evil fighting amongst themselves — are disgustingly irrational, violent, drug-dealing crack-addicted savages (the African warlords in the films) out to get us, or disgustingly insect-like alien prawns, whose biological material is infectious and dangerous to our society, mimicking the Africa disease narratives about ebola and malaria and HIV/AIDS spreading to the uninfected global north. “It is important [to note] that we are seeing in both these films images of formerly colonized people of color who are aiding and abetting the white invasions as fellow Americans,” says Dr. Page. “In District 9 we never see them come to the aid of the aliens. Even the raunchiest Africans engaged in the lowest of trade and behavior racially despise the aliens, while at the same time seeking to gain parts of their bodies to enhance their own sexual and physical powers. In Avatar people of color are positioned more centrally in support of the hero and defect from the cause of the invasionary force along with him but not on their own.”

Avatar went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing more than US$2.730 billion ($2.8 billion adjusted for inflation) in box-office receipts worldwide. It should be no surprise to find out that Sam Worthington (Jake Sully) also stars in Call of Duty: Black Ops a first-person shooter video game released worldwide on November 9, 2010 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 consoles, with a separate version for Nintendo DS. Within 24 hours of going on sale, the game sold more than 7 million copies, 5.6 million in the U.S. and 1.4 million in the U.K.

Talking about immigration and plunder of resources and human trafficking, note that Marvel Entertainment director Morton Handel is also a director of American Uranium Mining and Trump Entertainment Resorts. The Trump casinos in Atlantic City exploit Mongolian students, lured into the United States through a U.S. State Department affiliated program, in hopes of experiencing the American Dream, and then forced to accept horrendous working conditions, to engage in survival sex, to be subject to rat infested living conditions and drug dealers and armed gangs. This is the trafficking and slavery side of the war on immigrants, refugees and people of color.

The film Blood Diamond also stars a muscular great white male (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a seductive white female (Jennifer Connelly) who assumes a subordinate role. Here the white savior warrior is again the savior of the other protagonist subordinates [1] first, the white female; [2] second, the African negro and freed diamond mine slave (Djimon Hounsou) who found the big diamond everybody is killed for.

Blood Diamond is packed with overt and covert racial codings that further entrench white superiority and the discourses that proclaim the need for white economic, political and military deployments to rescue/save Africa. “It’s my teekit to geet out of thees God-forsaken continent,” the white South African mercenary hero (DiCaprio) tells his soon-to-be-lover girl.

Blood Diamond appeared at precisely the same time as the diamond industry was whitewashing its bloody operations through the Harvard University-sponsored development of the Kimberley Process — another faux mechanism shielding the true agents of warfare and plunder in Africa through a hegemonic protection mechanism — conquerors policing themselves — that criminalizes anyone who cuts into the profits of the big diamond cartels.

Blood Diamond ends by informing the reader that the Kimberley Process has sorted it all out, when in reality it merely rinses the blood off the diamonds sold in western luxury boutiques. The happy Hollywood ending arrives when the freed slave succeeds in testifying at some faux international court — another euphemistic ‘United Nations’ reference — and the journalist chick (Connelly) gets her story. Both of the subordinate role (white female, freed negro slave) successes relied on the supreme white warrior savior muscle male (De Caprio) who, in the end, is presented as a reformed and moral man, a good man, a martyr.

The Captain America of the savage jungles — themes of darkness portrayed in such films as King Kong — is our Hollywood hero Tarzan, another white Marvel comic action hero of stellar repute, and a popular fixture around Hollywood since the 1950′s. Of course, every Tarzan has his seductive and easily seduced sidekick, Jane.

Tarzan and the Lion Man was set in the Ituri forest in Congo. “It has the makings of a good story,” the publisher wrote, on the book jacket of the 1934 Edgar Rice Burroughs classic. “A motion picture company in the wilds of Africa, two beautiful girls, ruthless Arabs [emphasis added], a half-maniacal scientist, a tribe of gorillas that he has taught to speak English, a coward who looks like Tarzan, and Tarzan himself.”

The whole Tarzan genre set the stage for the historical and ongoing conquest of Africa — led by the Central Intelligence Agency, the French and Belgian and Israeli (Mossad) secret service, the Pentagon and the French Foreign Legion, and the rapacious multinational corporations that have long been plundering and killing on the continent.

In this 2009 AFRICOM image screen-captured from a 'Operation Lightning Thunder' video, the Pentagon forgot to expunge the white pilot.

Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa

Hotel Rwanda covers up the United State’s invasion of Central Africa. From the very first words, where the image has yet to appear and the screen is completely black, the film Hotel Rwanda sets up viewers to think a certain way about what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Here is a story about good versus evil. An ominous African voice is heard, clearly the announcer on a radio program, and he is describing the Tutsis as ‘cockrrrRRROACHES.’ The voice is black and the cataclysm unfathomable, as anyone will tell you, and the black screen underscores the evil darkness of Africa. This voice of terror returns throughout the film to haunt the innocent Tutsi refugees, on screen, and the viewers gripping their seats.

The good guys are the Tutsis, the victims of genocide. They are not killers in the movie: they are never killers. At the end of the film, when a well-attired guerrilla force is shown — the “rebels” of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — they are rescuers. They are disciplined, organized. They keep a tidy United Nations camp safely behind their lines. They don’t kill Red Cross nurses, or orphaned children, in the film: they reconnect them to their families. They are good men — the forces of good fighting the forces of evil. The Hutus in the standard Rwanda genocide stories are always the bad guys, and they are all bad guys. Every Hutu is a genocidaire. These are Hollywood’s forces of evil.

“Speaking as an Englishman I am often appalled by the blatant propaganda that comes out of Fox News,” said randomsamno9, commenting on Russia Today’s Captain America video. “But on an equal level or perhaps even more so RT is pure propaganda… RT just spends all day bitching about the US rather than giving you actual news. Also ‘The Last King of Scotland‘ may have been a fictionalized account but that doesn’t change the fact that Amin was a real mass murderer rather than a fictional one.”

Oh really? Back in the late 1960′s the big imperialists were alarmed by Ugandan President Milton Obote’s socialist shift. Imagine the audacity of an African leader — who was supported by Israel — actually taking care of his people at the expense of foreign interests! In a new alliance with Sudan, Obote challenged the Israeli backing of southern Sudanese guerrillas from Uganda, armed by Israel to punish Sudan for backing Arabs in the Six-Day War (1967). Everywhere derided as a nasty dictator today, Obote was a truly great African leader who was saddled with false accusations of genocide and war crimes, these actually committed by his enemies.

Idi Amin Dada received training in Israel after Ugandan independence. As one of Obote’s generals, Amin maintained Israeli supply lines to the Sudanese rebels. Backed by Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli Defense attache, Amin’s army overthrew Obote in 1971 and restored relations with Israel (severed in 1967). In 1972 Israel refused Amin’s request for tanks, and so Amin expelled Israeli residents from Uganda, severed relations, and forged a pact with Libya. Well, we all know how Washington and the Israelis feel about Muammar Gaddafi — the supreme commander of the Islamic forces of evil, and so Israel and the west blockaded the Amin government, which overnight became a ‘dictatorship’ in western news reportage. Enter and the falsified narrative in Hollywood’s Last King of Scotland.

The real mass murderer is Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president for the past 25 years, but this is the Pentagon’s man. The Last King of Scotland deflects public attention away from the ongoing Acholi and other genocides committed by the Museveni dictatorship, and Museveni is far more bloodthirsty and ruthless than Idi Amin ever was. The early 2009 US-Israeli-Ugandan ‘Operation Lightning Thunder‘ was a massive military failure that led to thousands of civilian deaths in the border areas of South Sudan, northern Uganda and eastern Congo. But I am not even scratching the surface on the Museveni apparatus of terror in Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia or Congo. The prisons in Uganda are packed, the people starving, with high maternal death rates, after 25 years of “a model African success story”. All “development” aid to Uganda has been converted into weapons and war.

All of the documentary films about the Uganda/Sudan/Rwanda region — The Devil came on Horseback, Shake Hands with the Devil, Lost Boys of Sudan, Invisible Children — serve a one-sided and essentialized agenda: the advancement of Empire. Enter the Pentagon’s PR machinery — each year pumping thousands of “news” stories into the New York Times and Washington Post and National Public Radio — and the pictures of U.S. troops holding smiling African children orbuilding  schools in desert villages. Enter the great white actorvist hero Ben Affleck and the corporate sustained catastrophe in the Congo that his debonair Hollywood image and sleek Stars-and-Stripes privileges shield us from seeing.

Do western war superhero films like Captain America influence children? Exit the matrix, jump back to the most deadly conflict in the world: Congo. The western human rights nexus likes to shake its trigger-happy fingers at foreign armies, rogue militias and uncooperative governments, and the Pentagon and State Department, with the help of USAID, are quick to accuse them of everything and anything the US, NATO and Israel are also doing. Massacres, torture, mass rape, spreading land mines across the land, and, of course, child soldiers. Well, look at the image of the child soldiers below, a photo snapped by your soon-to-be-killed foreign correspondent in eastern Congo. There’s no mistaking the red-white-and-blue superhero graphic splashed across one soldier’s T-shirt, and the twelve year-old children with AK-47′s and cigarettes didn’t pick these fruits of western progress out of the trees of the King Kong forests nearby.

“The recruitment of young people to military service in African conflicts has provoked a unanimous moral outcry from the West,” writes Danish academic Dr. Kasper Hoffman. Child soldiering is by no means new or restricted to Africa, Hoffman notes, since children aged 16 can bear arms in U.S. military, and the West engages in a disingenuous hegemonic discourse where the use of child soldiers is always equated to disorder and moral corruption in Africans. But Hoffman found that child soldiers in Congo were heavily influenced by Hollywood superaction hero films.

The West likes to point its trigger-happy fingers at African conflicts, like the wars in Congo, where many child soldiers — called ‘kadogos‘ — joined militias of their own accord to defend their country against foreign invaders. The West use accusations of child soldiering, immorality, tribalism and irration spirit magic to demonize the highly organized and nationalist Mai Mai militias, and most all violence is blamed on the Mai Mai or the remnants of the Hutu Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) that fled the illegal RPA invasion in 1994. Mai Mai do not fight with any sense of purpose or morality, according to arrogant Western agents and the corporate mass media, themselves complicit in plunder and genocide in Congo — the Mai Mai worship spirit mediums and they rip out and eat the bloody hearts of their victims and they walk backwards into battle wearing bathroom fixtures on their heads (Newsweek, 1996).

Hoffman found that Mai Mai militia members fight out of a sense of pride, nationalism and a highly ethical sense of home-defense. They have seen entire villages wiped off the face of the earth by the U.S.-backed Rwandan (Kagame) and Ugandan (Museveni) troops and they know very well that clandestine cells of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) are perpetrating terrorism there. The RPA/UPDF employ ruthless and unaccountable false flag operations and pseudo operations (covert psychological operations developed by British Maj. Frank Kitson during the Mau Mau insurgency on Kenya) to disguise their origins and intent.

The Global War on _____  (please fill in the blank).

Western governments and United Nations, and the human rights, development and ‘humanitarian’ industries — the merchants of death that profit off violence — all play along with Western media reports that generally whitewash reality to exonerate Rwanda and Uganda and the corporations involved in eastern Congo (Banro, Moto Gold, DHL International, OM Group). More expedient to the mass media whitewashing of war in Congo, every Congolese Mai Mai and Hutu soldier is accused of mass rape, this offering another essentialized narrative convenient for conquest, and one that is peddled by tabloids from the New York Times to Wired to the BBC, from CNN to OPRAH to Democracy Now. Even the rape of men is excluded by the international discourse which confines all discussion about war in eastern Congo to the manipulative discourse about rape of women.

“The influence of Western action films emerges clearly in the care of the self among the kadogos Mai Mai,” reports Dr. Hoffman in The Ethics of Child Soldiering. Popular culture influences the forms of violence, slang, gestures, and body language of the militia members that re-enact the attitudes and actions of ‘freedom fighter’ heroes. They aren’t just mimicking Captain America: the kadogo internalize the deeper ethical constructs of freedom and resistance and apply them to the formation of their self and strength of purpose. The Rambo (Stallone) and Commando (Schwartzenegger) films were especially important in offering a sense of purpose and ethical direction to sustain their unending struggle.

“In these films the heroes are subject to grave injustices and are made to suffer immensely before they vanquish their enemies against all odds through the use of spectacular violence,” wrote Hoffman. “The sublime qualities of the hero such as manliness, bravery, initiative, innate sense of justice, strength, speed, power, muscularity, warrior-skills, tactical abilities, etc., insure him of victory in the end.”

Of course, the heroes in these films are the white saviors, the good men, the super-ethical-anything-in-the line-of-duty-goes-soldiers, the Captains America and Captains Norway.

Breivik in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon.

“I grew up in the 80′s and read a lot of comics — not Captain America but i know the story line,” says CasinoHijack, another commenter on the Russia Today Captain America propaganda video. “Looking back at my old comics I saw a ton of guns, violence, and every woman superhero looks like a stripper. Now that I’m older and more aware of the world we live in I see the propaganda in those comics and how it helped getting young men to fight for something they are not truly aware of. I educate kids all the time of the negative side of comics and superheros. Now I’m their super hero.”

Super heroes, super heroines. We have become saturated by media that seeks to create super duper dumbed-down spectator entertainment warfare consumer conquerors who plead ignorance, rationalize our supposed non-participation in war, and even fight back against all who suggest that we might be more culpable than we want to believe. Kill them and feed their bodies to the starving masses in Somalia…

“The military-industrial complex, contrary to initial expectations, did not fade away with the end of the Cold War,” wrote Tim Lenoir, in the excellent research paper All But War is Simulation. “It has simply reorganized itself. In fact, it is more efficiently organized than ever before. Indeed, a cynic might argue that whereas the military-industrial complex was more or less visible and identifiable during the Cold War, today it is invisibly everywhere, permeating our daily lives. The military-industrial complex has become the military-entertainment complex. The entertainment industry is both a major source of innovative ideas and technology, and the training ground for what might be called post-human warfare.”

Sadly, post-human warfare prosecuted by western military institutions and their highly armed proxy forces involve real human beings on very real battlefields. What has not evolved to match the technologies themselves are the moral and ethical standards by which these post-human battles can be seen to be inhuman, fostered by machine thinking, cold warrior killing. This is the all-too-omnipotent man that the military-entertainment complex has created — the man whose psyche is grounded in absolutes about god versus evil themselves informed by nationalistic propaganda themes based in fear, hatred, difference and the false beliefs about superiority.Nationalism, patriotism, subliminal sexuality, female sexual control, and the destruction of matriarchal power all go hand in hand, as this translates to the anchoring of authoritarian beliefs in the basic character structure of the human beings in everyday technological society.This is fascism. “‘Fascism’ is the basic emotional attitude of man (sic) in authoritarian society,” wrote Dr. Wilhelm Reich, in his potent 1933 work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life…. It is the mechanistic mystical character of man in our times which creates fascist parties, and not vice versa.”We can name several of the most egregious manifestations of this post-human fighting man. We saw him in Avatar — no, not Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he was the ‘good soldier’ of the Captain America variety whose goodness and humanity is projected into the consciousness of the masses by the military-entertainment complex and its video games and other industrial war-making offshoots. It is the antagonist, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the supreme destructor who takes out ‘Home Tree’ and everything else that gets in his way.

We can be sure that Quaritch will be back, more lethal than ever, along with the corporate world government Imperial earth forces — Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 are already in production and, as we have seen over and over, imperialist forces never die, they only come back to finish the job. The early (white) conquistadors to arrive in the Philippines were slaughtered after the indigenous people were abused and their goodness exhausted. Ditto the first (white) Puritans to land on Turtle Island (North America) and the first (white) settlers who became the subjects of umpteen Cowboys and Indians films.

Dances with Wolves was no radical critique of western military conquest and genocide: the narratives about ‘good’ soldier / ‘bad’ soldier, ‘good’ white man / ‘bad’ white man, and whitey-goes-native all reared their ugly heads. The white hero also saves a white woman in this film — though she too first had to undergo a transformation to native. The good-versus-evil / savior-versus-savage films all entrench racial (white) superiority and they are coexistent with the overwhelming racialized propaganda about Christians versus Pagans, Christians versus Moslems, Christians versus Arabs, Israelis versus Arabs, Jews versus Arabs, Arabs versus black Africans, civilized people versus savage others, Christianity versus Islamic Fundamentalism.

So what are the real life consequences of all this warfare gaming, warfare simulation, warfare propaganda, racial propaganda, anti-immigration propaganda, technological propaganda, and weapons proliferation?

Well, most of the actual atrocities occur out of sight of the western media, because the media corporations are directly tied to the profits and perks of the power structure and the imperial project falsifies our consciousness about victims and killers. Soldiers do what they do because they can. They can get away with it because they are taught to. Their training, their education, the dynamics of the groups they are surrounded with, the messages in the mass media, the entire process of enculturation within and from a society premised on the supposed permanence and necessity of war, conquest and private profit.

The international legal term thrown around by ‘human rights’ and ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrines is impunity. People are not being held to account for their wrong actions. Wrong actions come from wrong thinking, wrong education, wrong messages about virulence and domination and entitlement encoded in a zillion different ways in the mainstream cultures of technological civilization. Such wrong thinking infects and grows in the minds of people increasingly isolated and disconnected from their true inner nature, their loving and compassionate selves and from the earth. Every now and then somebody is called out for their white supremacy — some Bronx Catholic Seminary principal or other — but most of the racial profiling and extrajudicial executions committed by police go unchecked by the system, unnoticed by the (white) public, and the perpetrators are often enough rewarded or celebrated.

The fears and insecurities are compounded by the many forms of class warfare and structural violence that We The People are increasingly subject to. Meanwhile the very same elites producing and disseminating the disturbing propaganda — disguised as harmless entertainment — are benefiting from the manufacture of consent and the structural violence that insures their elite economic status. More and more ordinary people, all over the world, are watching as their lives and loves are being stolen from them. We can see the contradictions that surround us, and we are many.

While presenting good versus evil narratives to justify bombing the coasts of North Africa, there is little discussion of why there are so many people, mostly people of color, seeking refuge and survival in the economically advantaged countries of North America and Europe. Refugees are presented as aliens, devoid of context or agency, people who ostensibly seek to steal our jobs and steal our land and steal our sons and daughters and steal everything that we have worked so hard to build. There is little discussion or awareness of why or how the rich First World countries got so rich or came in ‘first’.

At its roots, the film engages in class warfare against the average middle and lower class spectator-consumers of the United States, and it facilitates imperialist conquest against people everywhere else, based on a hierarchical order of ethnicity that values white people and devalues people of color by degrees and categories and labels.

On immigration and refugees and displaced peoples, the military-entertainment and their corporate ‘news’ partners inculcate emotional and irrational beliefs grounded in fear, confusion, associations, falsified history, stereotypes and simplifications. The manufacture or production of ‘refugees’ and ‘displaced peoples’, or the political economy of the misery industry that feeds on them, are never examined. These things falls under the rubric of charity and philanthropy and… with all the ‘good’ things we are doing for those people over there, the least they could do is stay put and show some appreciation.

That is: “I think RT is stretching on this one” said MarcFaust. “The REAL story is the fact that it was renamed “The First Avenger” to other parts of the world because the USA is SO fucking horrible. How dare the US do whatever it takes to quell terrorism and donate billions across the world with aid… fucking Americans!”

These films distill the context and truth of the world down to nothing of value, save to perpetuate suffering and further institutionalize injustice. It is all summed up by that moment in Avatar when the white conquerors are force-marched (very politely!) onto their aerospace weapons platforms and sent back to earth sans unobtanium. The losers look for sympathy. It’s as if they expect more privileges, even as losers.

Of course, almost every Hollywood film has some brand recognition and product placement. For example, how many products do you see advertised in the ‘anti-war’ film Across the Universe? And what about product placement and brand recognition in The Matrix? How many products do you see there? Neo gets a cell phone delivered by Fed-X. But what else? Take a hard look, and then look again, and then again. How many?

So, coming to the end of this little not-so-comic tale, we can at last examine the violence perpetrated within the dominant cultures themselves — in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Norway — the so-called thriving democracies. The psychic propaganda assault — of patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, racial superiority, male domination, subliminal sexuality, consumerism, individuality and desire — saturates our society with irrational emotional beliefs and psychological insecurities. Fear is a driving force, and testosterone its sidekick. These are the effects inculcated by the propaganda films of the military-entertainment complex.

When the story of the Oslo massacres first broke, mass media outlets of all stripes, including Russia Today (“Oslo-Terrorist-Norway-Jihadist“), were quick to broadcast the typical western fear-mongering propaganda about Islamic jihad.

Naturally, the global assault on our consciousness, where everything Islam is suspect, where Israel is above reproach, has not spared Norway. Not every Jew is a victim, and many are perpetrators. Not every Christian is a fundamentalist, and many are. Not every Hutu is a genocidaire; many Tutsis are. Not every Tutsi is a victim; many Hutus are.

Of course, the killing sprees perpetrated by individuals are no different then those perpetrated on the battlefield. In one case the mass murder is sanctioned by society, and in the other case society is victimized by it.

You get what you pay for. We get what we pay for. Perhaps that’s why we have more killing, more bloodshed, more conquest, more rape, more white supremacy of the Anders Breivik and Tim McVeigh variety. These men are products of the societies in which they lived. Both men apparently believed themselves to be superheroes, called to rid their societies of the scourge of evil, to assault a tyrannical federal government out of control, and both brought other innocent human lives to a definitive end.

And so we have Timothy McVeigh, who appears to be a fine example of what our society teaches people they can do. Norwegian nationalist Anders Behring Breivik — now described as an aberration, a Christian fanatic, a psycho, fascism behind a mask of morality — appears to be another. McVeigh might have been part of a government conspiracy; he claimed to be a martyr in defense of U.S. government tyranny, but he was a Gulf War veteran socialized by our permanent warfare society and he probably suffered from serious post-war traumatic stress disorder. Breivik saw himself as a martyr who would spark a revolution, “a real European hero”, “the savior of Christianity” and “the greatest defender of cultural-conservatism in Europe since 1950,” and he called for a patriarchal revival. The two men held some similar beliefs. They are very much not alone in their fanaticism. They are Captains America, by any other names.

Make Love, Not War

Why did Anders Breivik target the young people? Vulnerability, for one: they were an easy target and the most vulnerable to attack. He targeted them for political currency: they symbolized multiculturalism and waved flags calling for Palestinian liberation and truth and equality. If I had any heroes in this story, it would be these kids. They didn’t do anything wrong. Were these kids naive? I don’t think so. They stood up for what they believed is right, and good, and just. They believed in working for a better world. I guess they believed in love, and advocated for it. They had something going for them: the bluebird of consciousness.

I mean, just look at these kids — really look at them — and weep.

Some of the younger victims of the Breivik massacre in Oslo, Norway, 2011.

And if you can’t weep, then you are moving too fast, watching too many Hollywood movies, drinking too much coffee, consuming too much New York Times or Economist, chasing after some addiction or other, caught up in meaninglessness, in denial, suffering from collective amnesia or the mass psychology of fascism, and stuck.

Stuck. Are you stuck?

These could be your friends, or your kids. They are not just someone else’s kids, they are now part of our collective responsibility to wake up and stop the violence. To show compassion and tolerance, to sacrifice and to share, to organize for the betterment of all. There’s plenty of information out there on how this needs to be done. What is lacking is the courage and the initiative. What is needed is love, more love, and more love.

Gosh, I can’t think of a single Hollywood movie where love is the motivation for superheroism. We see plenty of love nonsense in the Hollywood war films, white male white female protagonists fall in love, blah blah blah, and in sit-com films like City of Angels or Beyond the Universe, films that ostensibly have nothing to do with war, blah blah blah, but where do we ever get propaganda that peddles love? Where is our U.S. Government Department of Peace? Why isn’t the Dalai Lama speaking out for state-sanctioned acts of love in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan, achieved through an immediate U.S. military withdrawal?

Presented with this story are petroleum industry concessions maps   for North Africa that people might want to ponder in between the Western propaganda on Libya. Amidst the full-court press of propaganda presented by the western media and State Department disinformation apparatus we find that Muammar Gaddafi is even accused of committing genocide against his own people. Are there double standards at work?

An original photograph; backside text reads: Al Haji Amin (centre) is introducing military senior officers to his brother Col. Gaddafi, Chairman of the Revolutionary Command of Arab republic of Libya, shortly on arrival at Gulu Airfield [northern Uganda] to perform the official handing over of aircrafts to Uganda Airforce, March 3, 1974.

From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli

On September 1, 1969 the pro-western regime that had ruled in Libya was overthrown by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his officers. At the time, Libya was home to the largest US Air Base (Wheelus Air Base) in North Africa. Agreements between the USA and Libya signed in 1951 and 1954 granted the USAF the use of Wheelus Air Base and its El Watia gunnery range for gunnery and bombing training and for transport and bombing stopovers until 1971. During the Cold War the base was pivotal to expanding US military power under  the Strategic Air Command, and an essential base for fighter and reconnaissance missions. The Pentagon also used the base — and the remote Libyan desert — for missile launch testing: the launch area was located 15 miles east of Tripoli. Considered a ‘little America on the shores of the Mediteranean’, the base housed some 4600 US military personnel until its evacuation in 1970.

With the discovery of oil in Libya in 1959, a very poor desert country became a very rich little western protectorate. US and European companies had huge stakes in the extremely lucrative petroleum and banking sectors, but these were soon nationalized by Gaddafi. Thus Libya overnight joined the list of US ‘enemy’ or ‘rogue’ states that sought autonomy and self-determination outside the expanding sphere of western Empire. Further cementing western hatred of the new regime, Libya played a leading role of the 1973 oil embargo against the US and maintained cooperative relations with the Soviet Union. Gaddafi also reportedly channeled early oil wealth into national free health care and education.

At one time Gaddafi played around with Idi Amin, but his ties to other despots — such as Tony Blair and George H. W. Bush — are far more notable, though far less advertised. Of course, just as Gaddafi is heavily slammed and maligned — in disproportion to his actual actions — we find that Idi Amin is not the premier African terrorist he is always billed to be: Amin’s crimes pale in comparison to the current despot in power in Uganda, President-for-Life Yoweri Museveni. Remember that Gaddafi has served the prerogatives of imperialism for years, even while being presented as the world’s premier terrorist.

Like previous revolutionary figures of the 20th century such as Mao and his Little Red Book, Gaddafi followed the example of other revolutionary figures like Mao Zedong in authoring his own unique and highly idealistic political philosophy. Gaddafi’s Green Book was published in three volumes between 1975 and 1979 and, as you might expect, it is almost unknown by the western enlightened [sic] world.

Over the past four decades the US and its closest allies, including Israel and Japan, have maintained a mostly hostile relationship with Muammar Gaddafi and Libya. This relationship has included economic sanctions, covert attacks, open warfare and other actions of aggression committed by the United States. The ‘international community’ repeatedly enforced or renewed sanctions against Libya in the 1980s and 1990s.

After September 11, 2001, the US issued extensive threats and warnings against Libya to pressure it to accept US demands and collaborate in the US “War on Terror.” Since Libya was considered one of the premier ‘rogue states’ involved in ‘terrorism’ and Gaddafi was forced to concede some of his country’s independence and autonomy. After diplomatic wrangling, sanctions against Libya were dropped in 2004 in exchange for Gaddafi’s (limited) collaboration.

In 2004, during heightened western media propaganda about Libyan terrorism and Gaddafi’s supporting Al Qaeda — all kinds of disingenuous reports and outright lies — the G.W. Bush administration dropped sanctions against the regime — and paved the way for a new era in US-Libyan bilateral trade.

US officials were reportedly under pressure from multinational corporations, including big petrol companies BP, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Chevron, Conoco and Marathon Oil, and defense giants like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, and other corporations like Dow Chemical and Fluor. These corporations and lobbyists then formed a “trade” association, US-Libya Business Association (USLBA) in 2005 with $US 20,000 membership dues.

USLBA members lobbied the US government to protect and advance their interests in Libya, through the US government, and business executives flocked to Libya and negotiated for million or billion dollar deals. Bilateral trade with Libya totaled $2.7 billion in 2010, up from virtually nothing when sanctions were in place prior to 2004. The USLBA also lobbied on behalf of the former outlaw state of Libya and has sponsored policy conferences, briefing sessions and events featuring senior U.S. and Libyan officials.

Officials traveled to Libya for meetings with Libyan government officials, private business leaders, and representatives of American companies working in the country — leading to some of the unbridled development that was evident in Tripoli (2009).

Through the secretive Libyan Investment Authority, billions of Libya’s petrodollars were reportedly invested in US Equity and Big Banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and others, and into other private equity like the Carlyle Group — connected with Frank Carlucci, who is noted herein to be affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy (described below).

The CIA has long wanted to eliminate and replace Muammar Gaddafi. President Reagan bombed Tripoli, killing Gaddafi’s infant daughter: the United States bombing of Libya (code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon) comprised the joint USAF, Navy, and Marines air-strikes against Libya on April 15, 1986. The US CIA brought down the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 flight over Scotland in 1988 and blamed this on Gaddafi.

Many of the top-level security documents from the Reagan Administration pertaining to Libya remain classified. These include National Security Decision Directives 16 (Economic and Security Decisions for Libya), NSDD 205a (Annex: Acting Against Libyan Support of International Terrorism), NSDD 224 (Counter-Terrorist Operations Against Libya), and NSDD 234 (Libya Policy), while even those that have been declassified are partially redacted. The George H.W. Bush NSDD 19 (US Policy Toward Libya) also remains classified.

In recent years Gaddafi has played along with the western fiction of Al-Qaeda, though it seems likely that some of the true mercenaries in Libya today are ‘Al-Qaeda’ terrorists trained by the United States to serve US interests in places like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and now Libya. However, the CIA has always had their sights on Gaddafi.

Note the double standard in how the western press presents the accusations of Gaddafi using mercenaries, as if it is something unique to Gaddafi and Libya, and not something we ever do.

National front for the Salvation of Libya

In almost all western media accounts, the so-called “opposition” in Libya includes the unspecified, unnamed, unidentified “rebels” of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL). These are not innocent ‘pro-democracy’ protestors who began with a ‘peaceful sit-in’ as reported by the New York Times and uncritically repeated everywhere else.

Reportage of atrocities in Darfur, Sudan (2003-20011), and Rwanda (1990-1994) was always blamed on the governments (Omar Bashir in Khartoum and Juvenal Habyarimana in Kigali) with no context to the foreign backed insurgency and intervention occurring, which in both cases involved the US, UK and Israel. Similarly, in Libya today, there is no context or history to the FNSL ‘rebels’: they are categorically presented as the good guys, no matter that they seem to have appeared out of thin air. No one explains who these people are who are cited by the New York Times or CNN or Democracy Now as sources.

Street scene in Tripoli, September 2009

The FNSL was part of the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition held in London in 2005, and British resources are being used to support the FNSL and other ‘opposition’ in Libya. The FNSL was actually formed in October 1981 in Sudan under Colonel Jaafar Nimieri — the US puppet dictator who was openly known to be a Central Intelligence Agency operative, and who ruled Sudan ruthlessly from 1977 to 1985. The FNSL held its national congress in the USA in July 2007. Reports of ‘atrocities’ and civilian deaths are being channeled into the western press from operations in Washington DC, and the opposition FNSL is reportedly organizing resistance and military attacks from both inside and outside Libya.

Italy and France are also said to be backing these opposition groups, as the Italian and French oil companies AGIP and ELF and others seek to chop off and eat their pieces of the predatory pie. The US, Britain and Israel seek to insure control of the petroleum sector in advance of competitor corporations from other European countries.

Many of the petroleum concessions in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt appear (the map is 15 years old) to be held by state-owned oil companies. The US/European/Israeli nexus seeks to dislodge state-ownership — to whatever extent it actually exists — and dislodge any Chinese workers or Chinese companies involved in the oil exploitation, and replace these with western companies and western agents.

National Endowment for (non) Democracy

In 1983, the Pentagon, USAID, US State Department, and the CIA were all involved in the creation and implementation of ‘Project Democracy’ –based on National Security Decision Directive 77 (NSDD 77) — and this led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy.

After that, some of the ‘softer’ tactics used in covert interventions were shifted away from the CIA and onto the NED, whose involvement with covert operations and foreign interventions are nonetheless well-established.

A ‘soft’ intervention CIA front, the National Endowment for Democracy has been deeply involved in Libya along with the CIA fronted Freedom House (under their Blue Umbrella program and others). These entities have backed ‘opposition’, supported propaganda campaigns and so-called ‘pro-democracy’ movements, and are known to be involved with backing armed insurgents and interventions.

Libyan currency 2009

NED works its overt intelligence sector magic through four organizations under its (own) umbrella: National democratic Institute; International Republican Institute, Center for Private Enterprise, and the AFL-CIO’s American Center for International Labor Solidarity.  NED is closely aligned with US foreign policy interests and achieves its mission through the revolving doors between US Government and the NED Board of Directors.

Some of these NED directors include: former US Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger (Nixon) and Madeleine Albright (Clinton), former US Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci (Reagan), former National Security Council Chair Zbigniew Brzezinski (Carter), former NATO Supreme Allied Command in Europe, General Wesley K. Clark (Clinton), and the current head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz (George W. Bush).

Freedom House is supportive of NED programs but has been around since its creation by Elanor Roosevelt and they have been very active against Libya. Freedom House is funded by, amongst others, UNILEVER Corporation, USAID, and the US Information Agency (USIA). Freedom House, in alliance with USIA, has provided covert and overt “Radio Free” disinformation programs all over the world since at least 1952: e.g. Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia. The USIA is directly involved with US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group in planning and coordinating major military operations (e.g. the Gulf War and the UNITAF intervention in Somalia).

Past and present Freedom House trustees include: former CIA director R. James Woosley; former national security adviser (at the time of the 1996 US invasion of Congo-Zaire) Anthony Lake; Harvard professor Samuel Huntington; UNILEVER executive Ned Bandler; CIA insider Andrew Young; former Joseph Mobutu confidant and national security insider Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick; former NED director and International Crisis Group trustee Zbigniew Brzezinski; USAID intelligence operative J. Brian Atwood (USAID administrator who oversaw the US-backed genocide against millions of Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire, 1996-1998) and many more.

Freedom House is also very likely affiliated with the phantom US Office of Strategic Information (OSI), formed after September 11, 2001. OSI is said to have been reorganized, with all its original functions reassigned to the Office of Global Communications, Information Awareness Office (IAO), and the newly reactivated Counter-Disinformation/Misinformation Team (Counter-Information Team). However, then-Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld issued statements affirming that the OSI’s operations would continue.

Banner mural on a building in downtown Tripoli, September 2009

Rogue State Painted with Blatant Propaganda

In the ABC LITELINE report “FNSL Leader Speaks from Washington,” we find the Washington monument in the background for an interview with an Arab agent being used by the western propaganda system as a credible source — but with zero explanations of who he is or why his claims might be false.

FNSL operative Irahim Sahad speaks freely, making any claim he likes, and nothing he says is challenged or counter-balanced. Sahad suggests that the UN Security Council MUST be convened to stop the ‘war crimes and ‘mass murder’ and ‘genocide’ being committed by Gaddafi against his own people. Ibrahim Sahad’s bias is unveiled by such statements as “The UN Security Council was convened when just one man was killed in Lebabon — so it should be convened to address the most brutal use of live ammunition, heavy arms and mercenaries.” The claim employs a double-standard, saying in short that Lebanese lives are worth more than Libyan, which is not at all the case, and that the United Nations takes serious one man’s life in Lebanon, so they should take far more serious the monumental loss of life [claimed] in Libya.

Here are some of the media’s rallying cries making headlines everywhere the English language is used:

• Gaddafi killing his own people!
• West worried that Gaddafi may use Nerve Gas!
• Heavy Weaponry Used Against Civilians!
• Heavy Arms Used in Libyan Crackdown!
• Gaddafi Committing Crimes Against Humanity!

The death tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and Congo-Zaire — by US/NATO/ Israeli forces — far surpass anything that might have occurred in Libya. Meanwhile, most ‘news’ on Libya is based on false accusations and false assertions — such as the THREAT of nerve gas being used.

However, just prior to the dropping of sanctions in 2004 it was established that Washington and London were grossly exaggerating claims of Gaddafi’s development of nuclear and chemical weapons. The western propaganda about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Libya had the same empty ring as the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction used to justify the war against Iraq.

In Afghanistan the US is using weapons of mass destruction and has been since the invasion of 2001: these include phosgene and uranium weapons. A deeper issue might be the loss of certain nuclear weapons, by the west, as claimed by sources in London, which reportedly went missing from US/NATO stocks. Claims are that these weapons made their way into the hands of British arms dealer John Bredenkamp, a long time crony of the Robert Mugabe gang in Zimbabwe and war lord involved in Congo-Zaire, and that they may have been sold to Libya, Yemen or North Korea.

Muammar Gaddafi Sides with the Empire?

“[T]he fundamental problem and issue before the people in the region is that the US rulers seek imperial control and imposition of semi-colonial country-selling regimes,” reports Ralph Schoenman, in ‘US Imperialism Against Democratic ME.’ “The more autocratic and brutal, the better from the point of the US imperialism that is unrelenting history. Every time the population is given the opportunity to shape its own destiny, to seek its national independence, to seek its own control over its own resources, to seeks its own sovereignty and determination of its own future, that is incompatible with the US imperialism.”

When Barack Obama was accepted by the US people as the new president, Gaddafi praised Obama and described Obama’s White House house-sitting gig as “a victory against racism,” and he urged the first Black U.S. president “to lead his country boldly and with integrity.”

“The Black people’s struggle has made tremendous advances against racism in America,” Gaddafi said. “It was God who created color. Today President Obama, son of a Kenyan father, a true son of Africa, has made it in the United States of America.”

At a speech he gave in his private tent in Tripoli in September 2008, Gaddafi rambled and muddled and zipped his all-over-the-place speech up as quick as he began it. Is he a desert mystic? Did he write the infamous Green Book or was it ghost-written? Are his sometimes rambling speeches emblematic of his propensity to try to please, to do what he likes, to be careful not to say the wrong thing, while being unable to remain silent when the hypocrisies of the west are (or were) thrown up in his face?

The Green Book says that workers should be involved and self-employed, and that the land must be of those who work it and those who live in the house. And power shall be exercised by the people directly, without intermediaries, without politicians, through popular congresses and committees, where the whole population decides the fundamental issues of the district, city and country. These are fighting words to predatory international capitalism.

When Gaddafi bowed to Western demands in 2004, it was most likely in part due to the incredible alignment of forces against Libya. Gaddafi and the Libyan government, and governments of other countries, will agree to a lot of imperialist dictates to avoid having a war launched against their country and to allow the people to still enjoy some decent standard of living and peaceful lives. Gaddafi played along with the West’s moral righteousness for “the war on terror,” knowing that he didn’t have much choice. His opening to western interests made no difference in the end, as too many forces have desired his destruction for far too long. Now that time has come: this is no ‘popular revolution’ sweeping Libya.

Pentagon Invasion Already Underway

The US will use any propaganda necessary to whip up American fervor over Gaddafi and justify Pentagon or MI6 or NATO operations. US and British warships sit off the coast of Libya — and they don’t sit there idly. The imposition of a ‘no-fly’ zone means that US/NATO plannes can do as they like, with the understanding that what we are really talking about are possible bombing and fighter sorties against Libya.

US troops have already moved ashore in Libya, joining the ‘opposition’ and ‘rebel’ forces in ‘rebel’ controlled territories. The US, France and Britain have already set up Bases in Libya.

The recent report noted that British and US special forces entered Libyan port cities of Benghazi and Toburk on February 23 and 24.

US covert operatives have been on the ground for weeks, and probably much longer than that, whether they have entered by sea (SEALS) or by way of Niger, where the US has openly published information about its covert operations. (See, for example, the travelology reports by former U.S. Special Forces now ‘journalist’ Robert Kaplan in America’s African Rifles a Pentagon massaged and approved propaganda feature in the pro-war Atlantic Monthly). Any opportunity to attack, destabilize, invade will be exploited by the Pentagon.

Of course, as this is written the US media is preparing the ground for the English-news consuming masses to see the Pentagon invasion as a “humanitarian” mission in Libya. There is nothing humanitarian about the Pentagon, and there has never been.

It’s Not Only the Oil, Stupid

Using state-of-the-art satellite remote sensing, the western powers have certainly mapped the mineral deposits that lie beneath the sands of the Libyan desert. For example, Canada’s Barrick Gold has for years had concessions in Niger and Mali — this is the corporation affiliated with former US President George Herbert Walker Bush, former US Senator Howard Baker and former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney — and Libya has a huge landmass with massive untapped mineral potential that goes way beyond the known petroleum deposits.

Another strategic geopolitical concern of the western powers is the protection and control of the massive nuclear (uranium) resources both inside Libya and nearby. France and Canada had already signed memorandums (circa 2007-2008) with Libya to explore and exploit uranium in Libya.

France’s entire nuclear weapons complex (and massive nuclear power industry) revolves around uranium extracted from Agadez and Arlit in northern Niger and it was built, over the past 50 years, out of the blood, seat and tears of the Nigerienne people. Japanese companies have been extracting uranium out of Niger through the Overseas Uranium Resources Development Corporation (OURD), in cooperation with U.S., Israeli, German and French corporations. In 2008, France and former colony Algeria signed defense and civil nuclear power accords, including cooperation in research, training, technology transfer and the exploration and production of uranium, all of interest to French nuclear giant Areva. Canadian and Australian corporations are also mining in Libya’s other southern neighbor, Burkina Faso. And yet, unlike Libya, where the people have seen some benefits from the extraction of wealth from their land, Niger remains the second poorest country in the world and Burkina Faso is close behind.

Russia and Ukraine had also signed memorandums with Libya regarding uranium exploration and development. However, China intends to quadruple its uranium consumption and China’s largest nuclear power corporation China National Nuclear Corp, has signed an agreement with China-Africa Development Fund to jointly develop uranium resources in Africa. Western nuclear corporations aim to monopolize Libya’s uranium sector and exclude China and Russia from the exploration and development — so they can build the nuke plants themselves and sell uranium to their Asian competitors.

Egypt
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The Desert Mystic

 

Libya is a country of approximately 6 million people, having a huge geographical area but low population density. Claims that Gaddafi has uplifted his people over the course of his 40 year dictatorship are questionable. Supporters claim that poverty is low and enemies that poverty is high throughout the country. However, in Tripoli in September 2009 there were the obvious signs of capitalism: overcrowding, traffic, poverty, pollution and destruction of nature. There was also an element of fear visible in people’s faces.

It is completely hypocritical of citizens of the United States to speak of the outrage of ‘poverty’ abroad when that poverty is so often the result of US militarization, unjust trade, and plundering entities like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Further, some of the worst poverty in the world can be found in US cities like Gary, Indiana and on Native American reservations like Pine Ridge. Hillary Clinton complaints about Muammar Gaddafi are really just a projection of her shadow — a long, dark shadow steeped in bloodshed and deception — and another example of the hypocrisy on Libya.

Gaddafi’s Green Book and the ‘Third Universal Theory’ it propounds are worth reading. Had it been written by most anyone else who is opposed to the expansion of western empire with all its horrors, it would be more widely appreciated. The book addresses the falsification of democracy and the proliferation of organized criminal gangs — like the Republicans and Democrats that call themselves parties of and for the US people.

Gaddafi has funded Pan-African organizations and individuals, some of whom have very noble missions and serve to challenge the downtrodden, while he has also funded some armed factions involved in unjust wars or destabilizations. Gaddafi also supports one state in Palestine with equal rights for everyone, and he has spoken forcefully about the unjust war against the Palestinians by Israel. Gaddafi has funded Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (this is a value neutral comment by this white author).

Gaddafi also funded Jean Pieerre Bemba and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), the ‘rebellion’ [sic] that was also backed by Yoweri Museveni and allied with Rwandan ‘rebel’ forces (Congolese Rally for Democracy) backed by Paul Kagame, and these forces were responsible for a very definite genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo-Zaire). Bemba is on trial at the ICC for war crimes committed in the Central African Republic.

Human Rights Watch has reported that international arms dealer Victor Bout illegally shipped weapons into Congo-Zaire, picking them up in Libya and delivering them to Rwandan Hutu forces. However, Human Rights Watch is deeply compromised when it comes to reporting and not reporting the facts — or selectively reporting them — on Central Africa. If Gaddafi did supply or facilitate the provision of arms to Rwandan Hutu insurgents in Congo-Zaire, it may be one of the more reasonable actions he took: e.g. the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) are forever misaligned by the Pentagon and its propaganda minions precisely because they fought against the illegal invasion of Rwanda by Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni. Meanwhile, it is Rwanda, Uganda and their foreign multinational corporate allies that are responsible for the preponderance of killing in Central Africa, not the FDLR.

According to Amnesty International, another selective human rights organ serving western interests, Gaddafi also reportedly armed Sudanese in Darfur — long before the current conflict began in 2003 — to fight against western backed interventions in Chad and Sudan.

Gaddafi reportedly owns land in Zimbabwe and may flee there or to other countries where repressive control is maintained in service to western interests.

Muammar Gaddafi is/was the most recent chairman of the African Union, another elite organization designed to serve western exploitation — or run by a cabal of thieves, at the very least, who all have the goods on each other, and so none will ever challenge the way things are — while the people, the masses of Africa, everywhere suffer.

The African Union (AU) signed on with Washington for the devastating neo-liberal trade and tariffs agreement known euphemistically as the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). The AU special report on genocide in Rwanda was a complete whitewash serving US/UK interests and protecting dictators Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni. The AU has also been slammed by African leaders for inaction and silence in various developments on the continent.

Former AU chairman have included some of Africa’s most criminal dictators, such as Dennis Sassou Nguesso, who has reigned with absolute military brutality in the Republic of Congo for some 20 years (with a gap from 1992-1997). Gabon’s present ruler Albert-Bernard Bongo is the son-in-law of Dennis Sassou-Nguesso, and both have been
sustained with millions of Elf petrol dollars (see, e.g., keith harmon snow: “The Crimes of Bongo“). Sassou-Nguesso’s elite Cobra militia were also trained by French advisers and, like Colonel Joseph Mobutu, Sassou-Nguesso relied on Israeli security and intelligence for protection.

The AU’s alliance with NATO began long ago, and it saw expanded joint military operations in Sudan, where the AU served as NATO’s “African face” for US/UK and Israeli military interventions in the war for Darfur. For example, forces fighting for the NATO interests, commanded and commandeered under an AU banner, came from Paul Kagame’s Rwanda Defense Forces (formerly called Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army) responsible for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Uganda, Rwanda, Congo-Zaire, and then Darfur. Rather than condemning western military expansion and different forms of AFRICOM or CIA-backed terrorism, for example, the AU backs the western war of annihilation in Somalia, involving Ugandan troops trained by US Special forces, and the Pentagon’s expansion in Ethiopia, and support for dictator Meles Zenawi there. Ethiopia is the site of an ongoing genocide against the Annuak, Omo and Orono people — and no one has reported the atrocities in the blood-drenched oil-rich Ogaden basin there. What say the AU?

In “AFRICA: Global NATO Seeks to Recruit 50 New Military Partners,” journalist Rick Rozoff reports: “A recent article in Kenya’s Africa Review cited
sources in the African Union (AU) disclosing that the 28-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] is preparing to sign a military partnership treaty with the 53-nation AU.” Rozoff explains that this is a likely maneuver against the spread of Chinese interests in the continent.

According to Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford, who also traveled to Tripoli in 2008, Gaddafi is on the outs: the man who ruled this not-so-little North African dictatorship is about finished. Whatever the truth about Muammar Gaddafi, at least one thing is certain: he was not the big bad bogeyman now under attack by the West.

SUDAN
(Darfur is the giant block 12 concession on the left side.)
View full size pop-up image 

And Now, the Gaddafi Genocide

On February 22, 2011, the Libyan deputy ambassador to the United Nations called on Muammar Gaddafi to step down and face trial over “war crimes and genocide.”

The charge has now been widely repeated in other news venues. “European diplomats are meeting around the clock to minimise risks for their nationals after a speech by Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi yesterday (22 February) was interpreted as “code to start genocide.”

“Gaddafi’s Genocide!” declared one CNN news pundit. A Stop Gaddafi Genocide! page was created on Facebook.

Such claims made by Libyan ‘opposition’ and reported in the western press that Gaddafi is committing genocide or about to commence genocide against his own people represent the height of western arrogance and hypocrisy.

The disinformation frenzy and hysteria knows no bounds. A web site dedicated to English language reporting on human rights in Cuba had this headline: “Human Rights in Cuba: Is Casto Supporting Gaddafi’s Genocide?” “Are Cuban pilots flying Gaddafi’s military jets, which are being deployed to attack peaceful Libyan protesters?” the article begins. Interestingly, Fidel Castro was the first international leader to publicly assert that Washington was about to invade Libya: Castro was right.

At this very moment the wars being prosecuted by the USA and its allies, including Japan, Europe, Israel, South Africa, Canada and Australia, far dwarf the ‘atrocities’ committed in Libya. While we have no credible reporting about who is killing, who is opposition, how many dead, etc., out of Libya, we have credible report after credible report establishing that the US and its allies have perpetrated massacres, tortures, and other atrocities, including genocide, in the millions of people, in Congo-Zaire, Rwanda, Uganda, Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan — for a short list.

The claim of genocide here, akin to the one-sided charges against former Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, or against Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, are one more clear example of the Politics of Genocide delineated in great detail by this writer and others. Reports in western media — provided, again, by the FNSL and other western intelligence, covert operations or psychological operations flak organizations — are filled with harsh language and characterizations not seen in reporting on or by western military campaigns. For example, in many western reports we can find, such as Gruesome Footage Proves Libya Using Heavy Arms makes claims that “newspapers obtained shocking footage of corpses with bodies blasted off and several torsos in Libyan hospitals.”

So there are several torsos. That is not quite genocide. Where are the images? If such images of death and destruction do appear it will be in sharp contrast to the complete whiteout on dead bodies in the Pentagon’s other theaters of war, in the eastern Congo-Zaire or Somalia, or in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, some videos purporting to be ‘violence in Libya’ have disappeared from the web.

Images of dead bodies can be produced and published but these are easily stripped of context. How do western audiences and propaganda consumers know that these are authentic and not recycled images of protests from Yemen or Bahrain dumped into the western press (with their willing acknowledgment) by Britain’s MI-6, as has been alleged? Al-Jezeera shows its true western colors by not reporting much of anything, and that certainly not critical of western manipulation or involvement.

Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni greets the entourage of foreign mercenaries Tony Buckinham and others as part of the Heritage Oil & Gas / Sandline International meetings to secure oil concessions in the bloody Semliki basin bordering eastern Congo-Zaire & northern Uganda: both sites of actual genocides.

We saw the tactic of collecting dead bodies and skeletons used in Rwanda by the Pentagon’s agents of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and in Darfur and South Sudan, where journalist Nicholas Kristof produced some dead shriveled bodies from some desert somewhere and claimed these were from the New York Times‘ Secret Genocide Archives. The atrocities were committed, we are told, by President Omar al-Bashir and the government of Sudan.

However, there is never any mention of US military involvement, mercenaries (Pacific Architects and Engineers, Dyncorp, others) on the ground in Sudan. Dead men tell no tales, or dead women: these dead bodies are as likely dead from US or Israeli backed ‘rebels’ — the Justice and Equality Movement or Sudan Liberation Army backed by the US, NATO, Israel and our puppet dictator in Uganda.

The double-standards and outright lies can be seen quickly, if one knows there are deeper truths, by examining propaganda produced by the International Crisis Group, or such propaganda tracts as Smith College English teacher Eric Reeves’ “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide” — where there is not one reference to Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni and his backing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in South Sudan — a US military covert operation — and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) in Darfur, in all of the 386 pages.

Western mercenaries that have been deeply involved, and remain so, in some of the world’s bloodiest conflicts, in coup d’etats, in massacres and other atrocities, include British mercenary Tony Buckingham — whose mercenary past is legendary — founder of Heritage Oil & Gas, a petroleum company linked by Buckingham to mercenary firms Branch Energy and Sandline International. Buckingham was also a partner in the infamous Executive Outcomes, with former British Special Air Services (SAS) soldier-of-misfortune Tim Spicer — the recipient of massive Pentagon contracts in Iraq. Heritage director General Sir Michael Wilkes retired from the British Army in 1995 and is a former Middle East adviser to the British government and a member of the Army Board. Wilkes commanded Britain’s SAS regiment and was director of Special Forces. Heritage Oil has exploited opportunities in Mali, Uganda, Republic of Congo, Oman and Iraq.

 

Heritage Oil & Gas map of operations in Iraq

Similarly, there was no public outcry about the use of mercenaries to shore up a dictator when Central African Republic dictator Ange Felix Patasse called in Libyan troops and commanders to protect his private diamond republic. When Ethiopian troops joined the Pentagon’s efforts to overthrow Col. Joseph Mobutu and reorganize capitalist interests in Congo-Zaire (1996) — no one said a word. What are UN troops from Pakistan, Guatemala, India or Bangledesh — paid to carry a gun and use it if necessary in support of protecting capitalist interests? Mercenaries.

If there are acts of genocide being committed in Libya, they are not being committed by Gaddafi or those fighting for Gaddafi. Reports are emerging that indicate that black Africans are being targeted by ANTI-government forces — these would be the western media’s precious ‘rebels’ — for their perceived support of Gaddafi. These include black Africans from Sudan, Chad, or Egypt, many of which are apparently laborers who have been working the service and lower menial jobs in Libya.

In short, almost everything in the western press on the crises in Libya is slanted by some faction, or interest, or it is tainted by western arrogance, or by anti-imperialist ideology (of ‘solidarity’), even in the case of what is perceived to be the ‘alternative’ media. There is very little accurate reporting of any kind (but some good work linked or cited herein).

Muammar Gaddafi has been a champion for people of color — providing funding, hope and solidarity where none existed, and this correspondent is aware that this correspondent’s writing herein is deficient in presenting all the positive aspects of his collaboration with people of color.

“The lies of the media cannot hide the fact that Gaddafi has supported the struggles of peoples for liberation in Nicaragua, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and many other countries, specifically concretely helping the people who fought for liberation,” writes Antonio Cesar Oliviera, in “Who Is Muammar Gaddafi?”

“In practice, Gaddafi has always been a benefactor of mankind, but for the mercenary [western] media, a benefactor is one who creates wars in search of profits for the arms industry or to dominate the world, as were the wars created by the U.S. in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua and many other countries.”

Gaddafi’s alliance with Islam and his support for truly revolutionary movements must be understood for what the capitalist system sees them as: slaps in the face of power and threats to that power. This is one of the biggest reasons that Gaddafi, throughout his tenure as leader of the Libyan Revolution, has been considered the devil incarnate by Washington and London etc.

This report [herein] is just another incomplete picture of an incomplete puzzle — but it seeks to penetrate through and expose the ongoing western media campaign for what it is: a psychological operation against the masses of earth’s people who have not and do not benefit from the nasty policies and actions implemented to serve a very small and elite group of people.

Muammar Gaddafi is not my enemy, and I am not his, and so my criticisms are reserved for those involved in the unjust and illegitimate invasions and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Congo-Zaire, Somalia and now Libya. Gaddafi has opposed the unjust International Criminal Court, and so do I.

People wishing to support the legitimate grievances and actions for freedom and truth in Libya should challenge the western terrorist apparatus out of Washington, DC, Tel Aviv, Brussels, London and Toronto.

Prayers for the true innocent civilians in Libya, and across the region.

• keith harmon snow traveled to Tripoli, Libya in 2009 and stayed about 3 days while attending the “2009 International Conference of the Green Book Supporters” as a member of the US Delegation invited by former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia Mckinney (D-GA).
• Maps are from a petroleum industry map of all Africa produced in 1996: much has changed since then, only for the worse, in terms of oil and gas expansions.
• Photography Credits: keith harmon snow

It is not about Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Michele Bachmann, Ann Coulter or Sarah Palin.  They are not the cause of this disease; they are only symptoms.

It is about that part of ourselves we do not wish to see.  It is that part of our souls that we keep hidden in the shadows and refuse to acknowledge.  It has been with us and within us for thousands of years and it will be within us until the end of time.

It is the killing spirit, the spirit of vengeance, intolerance, greed and hatred.  Its antithesis is understanding, empathy, kindness and civility.  The one poisons the soul of humanity and the other heals.

So you still think it is a good idea to allow guns at political rallies?

So you still think possession of automatic assault weapons is a god-given right and not a privilege born of responsibility?

If the latest psycho killer to claim more than his share in the fifteen-minutes-of-fame game had been a member of a well-regulated militia, he would surely have lost his membership card long ago and with it his right to bear arms.

To those who have sold their souls to the National Rifle Association it does not matter.  No amount of bloodshed is sufficient to justify any infringement on the right to purchase deadly weapons and ammunition.

I do not wish in any way to diminish the tragedy in Tucson, Arizona.  It has touched the heart of the nation in a way that few events can.  We reach out to the fallen and the wounded.  We know their faces and stories and we share their grief.

But I cannot ignore the greater picture.  The same weekend as that horrific slaughter in the border town of Tucson, fifty-one people lost their lives to drug related violence south of the border, including fifteen decapitated bodies in Acapulco.  The death toll stands at 30,000 since Felipe Calderon became president four years ago.  The city of Juarez and its surrounding area resemble Fallujah at the height of the Iraq War:  an estimated 200,000 exiles and over 3,000 murders this year alone.

Where do they get their weapons?  Welcome to the USA where anyone from drug lords and criminals to terrorists and madmen can purchase weapons of mass destruction as long as you’ve got the cash.  We have so armed the drug lords that they typically outgun the police and the Mexican army.

I would not wish to diminish the tragedy in Mexico but even the killing fields of Ciudad Juarez demure when compared to the mass graves of modern Africa, whose often genocidal wars in Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia and Nigeria were all supplied with deadly weapons made in the USA.

We may have yielded manufacturing and industry to foreign markets where labor is cheaper than dirt but we remain the chief supplier of weaponry to the world at war where blood is cheaper than water.  What else can we do with yesterday’s killing machines?

How can we expect to close down Guns and Ammo shows when our nation supplies missiles to every dictator who comes looking?  How can we expect to ban cop-killer bullets when we sell Apache gunships to genocidal maniacs?

I make no bones:  I don’t believe in the individual right to carry arms and I don’t care what our founders said about it.

I believe that societies like species undergo a process of evolution.  At an advanced stage of civil society, government disavows the state’s right to kill.  At an advance stage, government delivers universal health care, ensures a minimum standard of living, provides security for the aged and infirm, and limits handguns and assault weapons to officers of the law.  At an advanced stage, nations will come together to ban the international weapons trade.

The world is perhaps half a century away from disarming its most dangerous members and the nation is likewise half a century away from civilized gun control.

The killing spirit will not be defeated in a day.  It will, from time to time, emerge from the shadows with acts that shock and appall us, like the murder of an innocent child or the attempted assassination of a promising leader.

The killing spirit can never be destroyed, not completely, for we cannot as a species survive without it, but those who believe in the better part of human nature must believe that it can and will be subdued.  It is the process of civilization that will ultimately defeat the killing spirit by nurturing the better part of our nature: the healing spirit.

There are many who would scorn or sneer at such a notion and I have walked among them long enough to learn that that collective cynicism, a cynicism often born of fear, may be as great a barrier to civil evolution as the intolerance and vitriol of politicians and talking heads.

We Americans like to consider ourselves the most advanced of nations but we are in this fundamental sense severely behind.  It is not a problem that religion or education can resolve; it is a problem of collective consciousness.  When we can envision a world in which violence is as rare as a lunar eclipse on winter solstice, we will have taken the first step toward fulfilling that vision.

Meantime, let us all share a moment of silent contemplation, remembrance and mourning.

“Those who intentionally target innocent civilians must be held accountable, and we will continue to support institutions and prosecutions that advance this important interest,” states the NSS, even while later admitting that the United States refuses to hold itself to the same standard by refusing to officially be party to the International Criminal Court, currently the main vehicle for prosecuting alleged crimes against humanity.

Charges of genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities are just the latest in the list of imperial alibis Washington uses to promote its narrow foreign policy objectives of resource accumulation and global hegemony. This effectively fills the vacuum first created by the end of the Cold War, the subsequent near-disappearance of the use of state communism, and then later with the Bush administration’s ineffective brand management of the “Global War on Terror.”

The Obama administration’s predisposition toward humanitarian intervention, and the popularity the concept has taken in liberal circles, makes Edward S. Herman and David Peterson’s new book The Politics of Genocide (published by Monthly Review Press) a timely and indispensable read.

Herman and Peterson challenge conventional narratives concerning so-called genocides and mass atrocities in countries such as Darfur, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia – places supported for intervention by actors across the political spectrum (left, liberal, and right). The book uses a framework established by Herman and Noam Chomsky in the early 1970′s for a study they penned about U.S. mass killings in Vietnam entitled Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda. In it, Herman and Chomsky establish four categories of bloodbaths: “Constructive,” “Benign,” “Nefarious,” and “Mythical.” Herman and Peterson adopt these categories for The Politics of Genocide, where the authors use case studies to similarly illustrate how “U.S. officials, with the help of media and establishment intellectuals [produce] a stream of propaganda to divert attention away from U.S.-organized and -approved violence, and onto that of its enemies.”

Herman and Peterson’s first target, classified as a “Constructive Genocide,” is the U.S.-U.K. led sanctions against Iraq after the first Gulf War, something the authors label as “perhaps the largest genocidal act in the last thirty years.” These sanctions prevented Iraq from repairing its infrastructure which had been deliberately destroyed during the war’s massive bombing campaign.

According to a joint study carried out by the World Health Organization and UNICEF in 1999, these sanctions were responsible for the deaths of approximately 500,000 children under the age of 5, “more children than died in Hiroshima.” Dennis Halliday, the first UN Coordinator of Humanitarian affairs in Iraq resigned in 1998, having labeled the effects of sanctions “genocide.” But Herman and Peterson point out that “Iraq’s hundreds of thousands of victims were unworthy of official notice and therefore of no interest to the establishment media and intellectuals.” The authors reveal the media bias towards U.S. based-crimes by tabulating newspapers’ use of the word genocide for the Iraq sanctions regime and comparing it to cases in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur. The table notes the estimated deaths per theater and the number of instances newspapers use the word genocide to describe the conditions of the locality to show the ratio of deaths to genocide usage. In Iraq the rate was 10,000 deaths to 1 use of the word genocide with 80 instances (with an estimated 800,000 deaths from the sanctions). Meanwhile Kosovo, with an estimated 4,000 deaths, genocide usage has a ratio of 12 to 1 with 323 instances.

The other “constructive” genocide the authors use is the more recent U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, where well over a million Iraqis have died. The invasion was illegal, a clear violation of the UN Charter that ensures force can only be used when authorized by the Security Council, while the authors also point out that under Nuremberg (which Obama cites in his NSS) the invasion would be classified as a “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” So the authors ask where were the R2P advocates in calling out for sanctions or military intervention to protect Iraqi civilians from mass atrocities. (The Bush administration even brazenly announced that it would execute a “Salvador option”, where it would employ the use of Death Squads to pacify the country as it had done during the Cold War in El Salvador in the 1980′s.)

One of the “Nefarious Genocides” that Herman and Peterson dissect is Darfur, “the 21st Century’s First Genocide.” Darfur is an “acceptable” focus on villainy for reasons including that its government is run by Muslim Arabs, there is oil in Sudan, and China has become a principal business partner of Khartoum. Herman and Peterson call it “the most successful propaganda campaign of its kind this decade.” Quoting Steven Fake and Kevin Funk, authors of The Scramble for Africa: Darfur Intervention and the USA, unlike “[e]fforts to halt Western-backed humanitarian catastrophes, such as the bloodbath in Iraq, or the Israeli occupation, [which] fail to attract corporate funding or sympathetic pledges from the Oval office,” Darfur activism thrives because it is “largely rooted in establishment-friendly ideals such as Western ‘purity of arms’…and the use of force in this case by self-designated benevolent Westerners to save darkskinned vicitms from their Arab tormentors.”

But while the deaths and suffering in Darfur is horrendous, it does not constitute genocide. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon commented that the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.” In fact, the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, established by the UN Security Council with US support, ruled that the violence and killings carried out by Sudan’s Government did not amount to genocide. Furthermore, the authors point out that more than three times as many people died in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 than in Darfur. Another African theatre where the authors argue genocide has been politicized and distorted, and which may shock some readers, is Rwanda. “To a remarkable degree, all major sectors of Western establishment swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside down,” write Herman and Peterson.

The authors reveal the role current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a U.S.-backed (and trained) former military officer of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), of fomenting the violence that spiraled into epic proportions between April and July in 1994. The RPF, formerly a wing of the Ugandan army (where Kagame formerly served as intelligence director) took part in the Ugandan invasion of Rwanda in 1990, displacing several hundred thousand Hutu farmers.

Herman and Peterson point out that noticeably missing was any kind of action by the UN Security Council, which took swift action when Iraq, no longer of use to Washington, invaded Kuwait that same year. The RPF has also been accused of carrying out the assassination of former Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana in 1994, an act that many believe triggered the Hutus’ bloody response. It should also be noted that Kagame has come recently under fire for arresting and detaining an American lawyer who had filed a lawsuit against Kagame in Oklahoma City accusing the president of the former president’s assassination, and who has been representing a Rwandan and Kagame opponent against trumped up charges of genocide. Further evidence Herman and Peterson use to dismantle the simplistic, yet politically useful perpetrator-victim narrative includes International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda testimony and rulings.

As for “Benign Bloodbaths,” the authors turn to Israel as one of their examples. From Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982, which resulted in approximately 15,000 to 20,000 deaths, to its recent assault on Gaza in late December 2008 which caused destruction “ten times greater than an earthquake,” Washington’s strongest ally in the Middle East enjoys the ability to commit war crimes and what could be considered acts of genocide with impunity from justice and serious scrutiny in the media. Herman and Peterson turn their attention to treatment of the Goldstone Report as an example to support their argument. The report found that the Israeli onslaught was a form of collective punishment and that it caused “the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses.” The authors note that “there was no one within the establishment prepared to argue that Gaza Palestinians also possess a right to defend themselves or that other states bear a ‘responsibility to protect’ a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.’” The other “Benign Bloodbaths” the authors cover, for which Washington bears responsibility, include East Timor, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Finally, the “Mythical Bloodbath” addressed is the Račak massacre, where Kosovo Serbs allegedly massacred dozens of ethnic Albanian civilians on January 15, 1999. The authors argue, with the aid of cited testimony, reports and articles, that this massacre never happened, and that the media storm it created provided a pretext for Washington and NATO to launch air strikes in former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia territory. One of the more interesting figures responsible for manufacturing the “massacre” whom Herman and Peterson write about is William Walker, “a veteran U.S. administrator of Reagan-era wars in Central America” who helped cover-up the Jesuit murders in El Salvador. Walker served as an official for the Organization of Security Cooperation of Europe in Kosovo at the time and was the first to report the “massacre” to then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

I would have liked this slim, yet very informative book to use this definition and apply it on a case-by-case basis to specifically determine whether the atrocities that they scrutinized qualified as genocide or acts of genocide. Instead the book often relied on comparing the magnitude and treatment of the aforementioned atrocities to show that those committed by Washington or U.S. client states were downplayed or whitewashed (and were largely more egregious), while the ones committed by U.S. enemies or targeted states were exaggerated and manipulated in order to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives and maintain our woeful global status-quo regarding international peace and justice. But the book clearly shows the politicization of the term genocide and the dangers and contradictions behind humanitarian intervention and the “responsibility to protect.”

“Just as the guardians of ‘international justice’ have yet to find a single crime committed by a great white northern power against people of color that crosses their threshold of gravity, so too all of the fine talk about the ‘responsibility to protect’ and the end of impunity has never once been extended to the victims of these same powers, now matter how egregious the crimes,” Herman and Peterson astutely point out.

Until we address and correct these inadequacies, biases and contradictions within the global hierarchy, international justice system and current human rights regime history will continue to be littered by the corpses of the innocent, whether genocide is the goal or the alibi. This book can be used as a reference by activists and policy makers to help us right these wrongs. We can’t afford to wait.

"Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror" by Mahmood Mamdani

In Errol Morris’s 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during WWII, saying that “if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay was merely articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

Like the Middle East, parts of Africa have been engulfed in conflict for much of the post-colonial period. While the media coverage in both cases is perfunctory, in the case of Africa it is also sporadic. To the extent that there is coverage, the emphasis is on the dramatic or the grotesque. When the subject is not war, it is usually famine, disease or poverty — sometimes all together, always free of context. The wars are between “tribes” led by “warlords,” that take place in “failed states” ruled by “corrupt dictators.” Driven by primal motives, they rarely involve discernible issues. The gallery of rogues gives way only to a tableau of victims, inevitably in need of White saviors. A headline like “Can Bono save Africa?” is as illustrative of Western attitudes towards the continent as the comments of Richard Littlejohn, Britain’s highest-paid columnist, who wrote at the peak of the Rwandan genocide “Does anyone really give a monkey’s about what happens in Rwanda? If the Mbongo tribe wants to wipe out the Mbingo tribe then as far as I am concerned that is entirely a matter for them.”

Darfur is the conspicuous exception to this trend, though Rwanda did enter Western vocabulary after the 1994 genocide. This, Mamdani argues, is primarily due to the efforts of one organization — the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) — whose advocacy has been central to turning this into the biggest mass movement in the United States since the anti-Vietnam mobilization, bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. While the mobilization did have the salutary effect of raising awareness about an issue otherwise unknown to the majority of US citizens, its privileging of acting over knowing renders this less meaningful. Indeed, the campaign’s shunning of complexity, its substituting of moral certainty for knowledge, and its preference for military solutions, precludes the very end that it purports to strive for. Invoking what it claims are lessons of the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide, it combines slogans such as “never again” with the battle cries of a new “good war”, such as “boots on the ground”, and “out of Iraq and into Darfur”. Mamdani contends that SDC is not a peace movement, it is a war movement.

The SDC was established in July 2004 through the combined efforts of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service. It has since been joined by a broad spectrum of political and religious organizations, a gaggle of celebrities and prominent intellectuals. It has spawned student chapters all across the country that range from the high school to university levels. Led by an advertising executive, it is the only organization capable of bringing together such unlikely partners as the Reverend Al Sharpton and author Elie Wiesel, actor George Clooney and former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. If the signature activity of the anti-Vietnam war movement was the teach-in, for the SDC it is the advertising campaign. The expert has been replaced by the celebrity, the campaigner by the advertising agent. With an annual budget of $14 million the SDC employs the DC-based PR firm M+R Strategic Services (M&R) for its publicity. While M&R boasts a clientele comprising mainly green and humanitarian non-profits, in 2002 it was exposed by PR Watch for using its progressive credentials to greenwash DuPont, one of the world’s leading polluters. The centrality of propaganda to the SDC’s success was underscored by the fact that in the period between Spring 2007 and January 2008, the president of M&R Bill Wasserman also served as Save Darfur’s executive director.

The apparent diversity of the SDC’s affiliates also obscures the fact that its agenda is mainly driven by Zionist organizations and the Christian Right. However, Mamdani pays scant attention to the composition of the SDC even though he devotes a whole chapter to its politics and methods. As The Jerusalem Post reported ahead of the SDC’s rally in Washington on 30 April 2006, it is “[l]ittle known … that the coalition, which has presented itself as ‘an alliance of over 130 diverse faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organizations’ was actually begun exclusively as an initiative of the American Jewish community.” It noted that even in 2006 that coalition was “heavily weighted” with a “diverse collection of local and national Jewish groups.” The Washington Post reported the same day that “[k]eeping the peace within the diverse Save Darfur Coalition has not been easy” due to tensions, in particular, between evangelical Christians and the mostly Muslim Darfuri immigrants. The Sudanese immigrants also objected to the lineup of speakers which, according to the paper, included “eight Western Christians, seven Jews, four politicians and assorted celebrities — but no Muslims and no one from Darfur” (two were eventually added at the last minute). Ned Goldstein has suggested in his investigation of the Zionist interests behind the SDC that Darfur is being deployed as a strategic distraction from Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (most recently at the UN anti-racism conference). The salient feature of the SDC propaganda is to paint the conflict as war between “Arabs” and “Africans” and to label the violence “genocide.”

The genocide debate hinges on two factors: numbers and identity. For mass violence to qualify as genocide the killing has to be on a large enough scale, and the intent to eliminate a discrete racial, ethnic, or religious group has to be established. Mamdani argues that in order to sustain its claim of genocide, the SDC has inflated casualty figures and racialized the conflict.

The mortality figure of 400,000 has become a staple of SDC propaganda even though it has been repeatedly discredited. In 2007, the British Advertising Standards Authority chided the SDC (and the Aegis Trust) for breaching “standards of truthfulness” in its use of the figure for its UK advertising campaign. The number had already been challenged when a panel convened by the US Government Accountability Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences concluded that of the six estimates they studied, the figures presented by the SDC were the least reliable. The most reliable estimate was the study carried out by the World Heath Organization-affiliated Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) that had recorded 131,000 excess deaths at the peak of the conflict of which only 30 percent were due to violence. The violence had dropped sharply after January 2005; this, Mamdani avers, was due mainly to the intervention of African Union peacekeepers. By 2008, the total deaths for the whole year had dropped to 1,500. These numbers are far lower than what constitutes an emergency according to the UN, let alone genocide.

The conflict began as a civil war in 1987-89, driven less by race or ethnic rivalries than by a struggle for land and resources — it pitted the mostly nomadic landless Arabs against the mostly sedentary Fur peasants. Compounded by Khartoum’s botched attempt at land reform during the 1990s, turning it into a party to the civil war, the simmering conflict erupted into a full-scale insurgency in 2003. This eventually led to the government’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign where it turned to nomadic tribes from Darfur and Chad to serve as proxies.

Mamdani identifies three causes as having contributed to the conflict. First, is the history of colonial rule wherein the British went about a project of retribalizing Darfur through a system of native administration which created tribal homelands and introduced a principle of discrimination that privileged “natives” over “settlers.” This led to the dispossession of nomadic tribes, especially the camel nomads of the north. The tribal identities were further solidified through a census that required each registrant to choose a “race”; a written history that presented Arabs as “settlers” from the Middle East; and laws that gave preferential treatment to whoever was deemed a “native”. This narrative also allowed the British colonizers to present themselves as merely following the precedent of an earlier Arab colonization.

Drought and desertification was the second contributing factor. The Sahara’s southern rim expanded by 100 kilometers, forcing nomadic tribes further south and eventually to encroach on the lands of the sedentary Fur tribes.

Finally, the civil war in neighboring Chad where opposition groups armed by Cold War rivals — the US, France and Israel on one side, and Libya and the Soviet Union on the other — had frequently taken refuge in Darfur, leading to a proliferation of weapons and militias. Mamdani explains that the Western powers were involved in the conflict long before the Sudanese government was; and Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist regime wasn’t even in power at the time.

The Arab-versus-African narrative obscures the fact that since at least the British colonial era, Arabs have been Darfur’s most deprived constituency. “If Darfur was marginal in Sudan,” writes Mamdani, “the Arabs of Darfur were marginal in Darfur.” Contrary to the British historiography — whose assumptions have since been reproduced in 20th century nationalist writings — most Arabs arrived in Sudan as refugees fleeing persecution in Mamluk Egypt. Moreover, the diffusion of Arab culture was more a consequence of commerce than of conquest. Mamdani demonstrates that “Arab” is not a racial, ethnic, or cultural identity. It is an assumed political identity that is more a reflection of preference and power than of genealogy. For example, former slaves once freed would become Fur in Darfur, and Arab in Funj, the Sultanate in riverine Sudan where Arabs dominated. To be an Arab in Darfur therefore signifies nothing so much as weakness. The conflict in Darfur today is as much between Arabs (the Abbala camel nomads against the Baggara cattle nomads) as it is against the relatively privileged Fur and Massalit, and the less privileged Zaghawa. The SDC however emphasizes the north-south axis of the conflict that pits Arab against Fur and ignores the south-south Axis which pits Arab against Arab.

The Darfuri rebels likewise defy easy classification. When the insurgency began in 2003, there were two major groups — the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) — they have now split into 26. JEM, which is the largest rebel organization, has an Islamist orientation and draws its inspiration from Hassan al-Turabi, the influential Sudanese Islamist and one time ally of Omar al-Bashir. In contrast, the SLA is secular-Africanist with ties to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the South (led by the late John Garang). Before the split between the Islamists in Khartoum, the government had employed Darfuri Islamists led by future JEM founder Khalil Ibrahim for its counterinsurgency in the south. (Ibrahim opposed the power-sharing agreement that ended the war in the south.) However, according to Sudan scholar Alex de Waal, both organizations learned “to characterize their plight in the simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign sympathy for the south: they were the ‘African’ victims of an ‘Arab’ regime.” The government’s response to the insurgency was at first a half-hearted attempt at reconciliation, followed by the arming of a proxy force comprising nomadic militias, many of them from Chad, who have come to be known as the Janjawid. The consequences were devastating, with large-scale bloodletting and the displacement of 2.5 million people.

Khartoum’s use of proxies to quell an insurgency and the resulting death and displacement parallel US policies in Iraq, where ethnic-sectarian militias have been deployed against the mostly-Sunni insurgency. Yet, unlike Iraq, where in excess of a million have died according to the lates ORB poll, and five million displaced, the violence in Darfur has been labeled a genocide. Darfur has also spawned domestic mobilization in the US on a scale for which there is no parallel in the case of Iraq. Mamdani argues that this is due to the fact that Iraq requires Americans to act as citizens, with all the responsibility and complicated political choices it entails, whereas Darfur only requires them to act as humans where they choose to take responsibility out of a sense of philanthropy. He notes that “In Darfur, Americans can feel themselves to be what they know they are not in Iraq: powerful saviors.” As the Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala observed, “It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption.” In adopting the language of good and evil, Mamdani observes, the SDC has acted as “the great depoliticizer” in precluding political reconciliation in favor of a moral (read military) solution.

In Saviors and Survivors, Mamdani emphasizes regional over international solutions. Western modes of conflict resolution in Africa resemble nothing so much as the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs: “Those who made decisions did not have to live with their consequences, nor pay for them.” The Western emphasis on the humanitarian crisis in lieu of a political solution merely prolongs the conflict. By contrast, the AU’s approach is both humanitarian and political. The African Union’s (AU) intervention in Darfur had been largely successful in reducing the violence, yet its operation was undermined by Western powers that failed to deliver the support they had pledged when the AU brokered the N’DJamena ceasefire agreement in April 2004. It was also vilified in SDC propaganda. Mamdani asserts that much of the foot-dragging was to discredit the AU so that the notion of an African solution for an African problem could be discredited. The aim was to “blue hat” the AU forces and bring them under Western command. In a Washington Post op-ed pointedly titled “Stop Trying To ‘Save’ Africa,” Iweala asked, “How is it that a former mid-level US diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?”

The recent International Criminal Court case has further entrenched the Khartoum government in its defiant stance. Criminal prosecutions during an ongoing conflict merely exacerbate matters, Mamdani argues. More so when the adjudicating body has a demonstrable record of bias. The model for justice must be the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission rather than Nuremberg — survivors’ justice rather than victors’ justice. The well-being of surviving multitudes must not be subordinated to the imperative of punishing individual perpetrators. Mamdani offers a trenchant critique of what he calls the “New Humanitarian Order,” which has supplanted traditional colonialism and turned human rights into the new pretext for intervention. The “international community”, which Mamdani argues is nothing more than a “post-Cold War nom de guerre for the Western powers”, has created “a bifurcated system whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East” reducing citizens to wards in “an open-ended international rescue operation”.

The Obama Administration already appears to be making a break with its predecessor’s approach and has ordered a review of its Sudan policy. Scott Gration, the new envoy, has already visited Khartoum and Darfur, as has John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the case of the Bush Administration, the SDC was able to mobilize Congress against the State Department that was seeking a political resolution modeled on the power-sharing agreement that ended the longstanding conflict in the south. It remains to be seen how much the Obama Administration is able to resist the formidable lobbying power of the SDC. While Mamdani maintains that the aim of the SDC is to induce the US government to intervene militarily in Sudan, it appears that the real interest of its core organizations is to perpetuate the conflict so as to continue using the image of the Arab as the perpetrator to distract from the regional reality of the Arab as the victim.

* A shorter version of this first appeared on the Electronic Intifada.

Mamdani called Save Darfur “the most successful piece of single issue organizing since the Vietnam era antiwar movement, really more successful than the antiwar movement.” But Save Darfur, with slogans like “boots on the ground,” “out of Iraq, into Darfur” and persistent demands for the creation of “no fly zones” is far from being an antiwar movement.

As Black Agenda Report (BAR) pointed in a 2007 article, “Ten Reasons Why ‘Save Darfur’ is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa,” Save Darfur is no grassroots movement either.

The backers and founders of the ‘Save Darfur’ movement are the well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite. According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer,

The “Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country — the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum . . .

The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year . . .

‘Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars.’

Though the “Save Darfur” PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heavy with evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to manufacture consent for US military intervention in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.

None of the funds raised by the “Save Darfur Coalition”, the flagship of the “Save Darfur Movement” go to help needy Africans on the ground in Darfur, according to 2008 stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

The Appeal of Save Darfur to US Audiences

Mamdani explained the unique appeal of the Save Darfur Movement to US audiences by noting that unlike US responsibility for the one million Iraqi dead over the last six years, the Save Darfur Movement does not demand that we understand Darfur’s history, ethnography, or the complexities of the current conflict there, or acknowledge any culpability of our own. Unlike the killings in Iraq, Save Darfur does not demand that Americans respond as citizens, with a need to account for responsibilities and actions, but merely as human beings with a need to feel powerful and justified. Save Darfur, Mamdani argued, has de-historicized and de-politicized the conflict for its American audience, presenting them with a simple morality play in which they can be the heroes.

Everybody wants to be a hero. Nobody wants to be a citizen.

And what could be more heroically self-justifying and self-affirming than intervening on the side of the angels in the picture of straight-up racial conflict presented to us by the Save Darfur Movement? The trouble is, it’s an utterly false picture. The historic and present uses and definitions of race in America are not nearly the same as those in Africa. Most of Darfur’s janjaweed who committed atrocities against civilians in Darfur are as black as those they murdered, and just as indigenous. The prosecutors at the International Criminal Court who recently indicted the Sudanese president are accountable only to the wealthy nations of the UN Security Council, not to anybody on the African continent. And the casualty figures thrown out by Save Darfur are wildly inflated.

Darfuri Casualties Inflated by Save Darfur and US Authorities

Professor Mamdani noted that in response to a request from members of Congress, GAO, the independent US government agency whose job it is to monitor the accuracy of information disseminated by other organs of government assessed the widely varying casualty figures coming out of Darfur in 2006. 2004-2006 was the time when the atrocities in Darfur were at their height. They took the low-end figures of 50 to 70 thousand dead, which came from the World Health Organization, and the much higher ones of 200 to 400 thousand coming from people affiliated with Save Darfur, and submitted them to the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists told GAO that the lower figures were more accurate, and those were used in its 2006 assessment of the Darfur situation.

The State Department however, produced reports with two different sets of casualty figures, low numbers for the use of its policymakers, and the higher ones produced by Save Darfur and its allies for public consumption.

To this day, Mamdani contended, the US public is being fed grossly inflated on Darfuri casualties. He recounted a briefing he attended where the commander of the African Union’s forces reported 1,500 deaths in Darfur in all of 2008, as many as Save Darfur and the US government claim are dying every month.

Comparing Darfur and the Congo, Fake vs Real Genocides

Nobody disputes that there is a bipartisan military industrial complex in the US, which creates the “facts” it requires to justify interventions around the world. The Save Darfur coalition, comprising as it does figures who trace their activism to the Freedom Movement like Congressman John Lewis, along with the compatriots of the late Jerry Falwell, would not hold on any other issue under the sun. It is a creation of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, which urgently needs “humanitarian” cover for its imperial ambitions to control Africa’s oil and other resources.

The blatant hypocrisy of the Save Darfur Movement is most evident when one compares the manufactured concern over 50 to 70 thousand dead in Darfur to the ink and air devoted to five million dead in neighboring Congo. But using professor Mamdani’s yardstick, it’s not hard to understand. Intervening in Darfur makes us heroes. But in the Congo, proxies of the US and the West have been instigated the invasion and depopulation and plundering of the whole of Eastern Congo. There is a lake of oil beneath Sudan, much of it in Darfur. But the Chinese are pumping that oil, not Chevron or BP or Exxon.

To return to our own 2007 article on the Save Darfur movement”

The selective and cynical application of the term “genocide” to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy around the “Save Darfur” movement. In the Congo, where local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan for Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue undisturbed.

Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no Congolese “genocide” worth noting, much less interfering with. For their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.

Responding to the very real genocide in the Congo would require ordinary Americans to think like citizens rather then heroic self-affirmers. But that’s a hard sell.

We can only hope that the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other members of Congress who last month lent their credibility to the Save Darfur people can get over their self affirming “heroism” and begin to meet Dr. Mamdani’s challenge: to act like citizens and the leaders of citizens, to do the homework, to help others do the homework and to face up to our responsibilities for real genocide in the Congo, and prolonging the war in Sudan. It’s not too late.

After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an e-mail at the definitive moment when they were hoping to receive a brief “dossier” about the specific case — which they said “had generated a lot of interest” at the ICC — and I shared my uncertainty about the ethics of collaborating with an “International Criminal Court” that was only indicting black Africans. I indicated my concern for the witness ‘Sandrine,’ a young girl discussed in my story who named names of commanders, dates of executions, and who herself used a machete in an ethnic massacre and was raped by militiamen. I noted that witnesses identified for the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) had been murdered or mysteriously disappeared, and noted my awareness of the injustice of the Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the disconcerting trajectory of the ICC.

I told them I couldn’t in good conscience help them, it seemed, until the ICC arrested some of the white-collar war criminals running loose around the world. It was the right decision, in light of the recent ICC indictments against another black man, and an Arab at that. It was a very stupid career move, some one else remarked.

On 4 March 2009 the ICC prosecutors announced that they were at last issuing the long-threatened but first ever indictments against a sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, the Arab President of Sudan. Meanwhile, Somali ‘pirates’ off East Africa recently freed a Ukrainian ship with a Panamanian registration, a Ukrainian crew and flag of Belize. The freighter carried tanks, rockets and munitions destined for Darfur, and is owned by an Israeli ‘businessman’ and reputed MOSSAD operative named Vadim Alperin.

It is difficult to make sense of the war in Darfur — especially when people see it as a one-sided “genocide” of Arabs against blacks that is being committed by the Bashir ‘regime’ — but such is the establishment propaganda. The real story is much more expansive, more complex, and it revolves around some relatively unknown but shady characters. What follows is a short and imperfect summary of some of the deeper geopolitical realities behind the struggle for Sudan.

THE POLITICS OF WAR CRIMES

First note that the ICC can now be viewed as a tool of hegemonic U.S. foreign policy, where the weapons deployed by the U.S. and its allies include the accusations of, and indictments for, human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity. To understand this, we can ask why no white man has yet been charged with these or other offenses at the ICC, which now holds five black African “warlords” and seeks to incarcerate and bring to trial another black man, also an Arab, Omar Bashir. Why hasn’t George W. Bush been indicted? Or what about Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? Henry Kissinger? Ehud Olmert? Tony Blair? Vadim Alperin? John Bredenkamp?

Following on the heels of the announcement that the ICC handed down seven war crimes charges against al-Bashir, a story broadcast over all the Western media system and into every American living room by day’s end, President al-Bashir ordered the expulsion of ten international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Darfur under the pretense of being purely ‘humanitarian’ organizations.

What has not been reported anywhere in the English press is that the United States of America has just stepped up its ongoing war for control of Sudan and her resources: petroleum, copper, gold, uranium, fertile plantation lands for sugar and gum Arabic (essential to Coke, Pepsi and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream). This war has been playing out on the ground in Darfur through so-called ‘humanitarian’ NGOs, private military companies, ‘peacekeeping’ operations and covert military operations backed by the U.S. and its closest allies.

However, the U.S. war for Sudan has always revolved around ‘humanitarian’ operations — purportedly neutral and presumably concerned only about protecting innocent human lives — that often provide cover for clandestine destabilizing activities and interventions.

Americans need to recognize that the Administration of President Barack Obama has begun to step up the war for control of Sudan in keeping with the permanent warfare agenda of both Republicans and Democrats. The current destabilization of Sudan mirrors the illegal covert guerrilla war carried out in Rwanda — also launched and supplied from Uganda — from October 1990 to July 1994. The Rwandan Defense Forces (then called the Rwandan Patriotic Army) led by Major General Paul Kagame achieved the U.S. objective of a coup d’etat in Rwanda through that campaign, and President Kagame has been a key interlocutor in the covert warfare underway in Darfur, Sudan.

During the Presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. Government was involved with the intelligence apparatus of the Government of Sudan (GoS). At the same time, other U.S. political and corporate factions were pressing for a declaration of genocide against the GoS. Now, given the shift of power and the appointment of top Clinton officials formerly involved in covert operations in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan during the Clinton years, pressure has been applied to heighten the campaign to destabilize the GoS, portrayed as a ‘terrorist’ Arab regime, but an entity operating outside the U.S.-controlled banking system. The former campaign saw overt military action with the U.S. military missile attacks against the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (1998); this was an international war crime by the Clinton Administration and it involved officials now in power.

The complex geopolitical struggle to control Sudan manifests through the flashpoint war for Darfur and it involves such diverse factions as the Lord’s Resistance Army, backed by Khartoum, which is also connected to the wars in the Congo and northern Uganda. Chad is involved, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Germany, the Central African Republic, Libya, France, Israel, China, Taiwan, South Africa and Rwanda. There are U.S. special forces on the ground in the frontline states of Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and the big questions are: [1] How many of the killings are being committed by U.S. proxy forces and blamed on al-Bashir and the GoS? And [2] who funds, arms and trains the rebel insurgents

UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVASTATION

Rebels? Insurgents? The drumbeat of western propaganda portrays the conflict as a one-sided affair: a “genocidal counter-insurgency by the GoS” — in the words of Eric Reeves — versus the good Samaritans of the ‘humanitarian’ NGO community . . . and throw in a few (non-descript) rebels.

“Sudan ordered at least 10 humanitarian groups expelled from Darfur on Wednesday after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the country’s president,” wrote Associated Press reporter Ellen M. Lederer. “Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the action ‘represents a serious setback to lifesaving operations in Darfur’ and urged Sudan to reverse its decision, U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.”

However, when Ban Ki-moon met with Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame recently, he never called for Kagame’s arrest, no matter the findings of two international courts of law that have issued indictments against top RPA officials. Instead Ban Ki-moon praised Kagame and called for African countries to hunt down and arrest Hutu people purportedly involved in the now specious ‘genocide’ in Rwanda in 1994.

The non-governmental aid groups ordered out of Darfur by President al-Bashir on March 4 were Oxfam, CARE, MSF-Holland, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, Action Contre la Faim, Solidarites and CHF International.

Of course, the western media is all over the expulsion of any big ‘humanitarian’ moneymaker from Darfur — the moral outrage is so thick you can almost wipe it. The NGOs and the press that peddles their images of suffering babes complain that hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees will now be subjected to massive unassisted suffering — as opposed to the assisted suffering they previously faced — but never asks with any serious and honest zeal, why and how the displaced persons and refugees came to be displaced or homeless to begin with. Neither do they ask about all the money, intelligence sharing, deal making, and collaboration with private or governmental military agencies.

Large ‘humanitarian’ NGOs (and ‘conservation’ NGOs) operate as de facto multinational corporations revolving around massive private profits and human suffering. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Darfur these NGOs also provide infrastructure, logistical and intelligence collaboration that supports U.S. military and government agendas in the region. Most are aligned with big foundations, corporate sponsors and USAID — itself a close and long-time partner for interventions with AFRICOM and the Pentagon.

Refugees and displaced populations are strategic tools of statecraft and foreign policy, just as ‘humanitarian’ NGOs consistently use food as a weapon and populations as human shields. The history of the U.S. covert war in South Sudan is rich with examples of the SPLA and its ‘humanitarian’ partners, especially Christian ‘charities’, committing such war crimes and crimes against humanity.¹

CARE International has received funding from Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world’s largest and most secretive producer of weapons of mass destruction, and both CARE and Save the Children are tied up with weapons and extractive industries in other ways. A peek at the board of directors of Save the Children makes it clear why the U.S. media is so devoid of truth about Darfur. Similarly, the International Rescue Committee does not work with refugees, per se, but serves as a policy and pressure group involved in funneling private profits from the west back to the west. The IRC has also been cited for involvement in military operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and it has deep ties to people like Henry Kissinger.

The AID (read: misery) industry in Sudan was by the mid-1990s the largest so-called ‘humanitarian’ enterprise on the planet, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) — a form of managed inequality and a temporary and mobile economy of white privilege, adventurism and, of course, good will (sic). The misery industry shifted its focus from South Sudan to Darfur after a pseudo peace ‘treaty’ was organized to end the decades old war between the SPLA and GoS; the U.S. and Israel backed the SPLA from 1990 onward, and continue to do so at present. The result of more than 12 years of illegal U.S. covert low-intensity warfare in Sudan resulted in the creation of the independent and sovereign state of South Sudan in circa 2005 — a state dominated by Jewish and Christian faith-based interests and western multinational corporations.

Much of the AID infrastructure in Sudan has at one time or another been used as a weapon through the use of human shields, food deliveries to refugee populations inseparable from insurgents, and shipments of weapons by ‘humanitarian’ NGOs. This is both incidental and deliberate policy. Christian ‘relief’ NGOs played a huge role in supporting the covert western insurgency in South Sudan. One notable ‘humanitarian’ NGO involved in weapons deliveries was the Norwegian People’s Aid (known affectionately in the field as the Norwegian People’s Army).

In Darfur, Sudan, the U.S. government agenda is to win control of natural resources and leverage the Arab government into a corner and, at last, establish a more ‘friendly’ government that will suit the corporate interests of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and Israel.

Several major think tanks — read: propaganda, lobbying and pressure — behind the destabilization of Sudan include the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, Center for American Progress, Center for Security Policy, International Rescue Committee and International Crises Group. Individuals from seemingly diverse positions of the political and ideological spectrum run these organizations, which are ultra-nationalist capitalist organizations bent on global military-economic domination.

The former Clinton officials most heavily focused on the destabilization of Sudan include: Susan Rice, Madeleine Albright, Roger Winter, Prudence Bushnell, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Anthony Lake and John Prendergast. Carr Center for Human Rights co-founder Samantha Power, now on the Obama National Security Council, has helped to whitewash clandestine U.S. involvement in Sudan.

John Prendergast has continued to peddle disinformation disguised as policy and human rights concerns through the International Crisis Group (ICG), and through its many clone organizations like ENOUGH, ONE and RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO. Prendergast has been a pivotal agent behind the hi-jacking of U.S. public concern and action through the disingenuous (and discredited) SAVE DARFUR movement.

Other notable agents of disinformation on Sudan include Alex de Waal and Smith College Professor Eric Reeves. It is through these and other conduits to the corporate U.S. media that the story of ‘genocide’ in Sudan is cast as an Africa-Arab affair devoid of western interests.

In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995, African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, one of many pivotal ‘human rights’ reports that falsely represented events in Rwanda, set the stage for victor’s justice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists: Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Army, and their western backers.

THE MAN FOR A NEW SUDAN

The pivotal intelligence asset working on the ground in Sudan to destabilize and overthrow the Government of Sudan (GoS) is Roger Winter, profiled very disingenuously in the seven-page New York Times Magazine feature story of 15 June 2008.

Interestingly, “The Man For A New Sudan” story, an establishment whitewash of the involvement of the U.S. military-intelligence establishment in Sudan, was written by Eliza Griswold, a ‘Fellow’ with the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank and pressure group with a very confused ideological but nationalist-militaristic position. (The NAF is obviously dependent on U.S. foundation funding, and it reveals no apparent policy formulations of substance on the Great Lakes or Horn of Africa, conflicts for which they remain completely silent).

“When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men swamped the plane,” Griswold wrote. “Some came running over the rough red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the 65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some Sudanese call Winter ‘uncle’; others call him ‘commander’.”

Winter’s special post at the State Department was created specifically for him and his ‘work’ in Sudan. Why do Sudanese people in South Sudan call Roger Winter ‘commander’?

Roger Winter is the primary conduit for the ongoing covert destabilization of Sudan. His operations are run primarily out of Uganda, with the terrorist government of Yoweri Museveni providing support through the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) alliance with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

The SPLA is the de facto backbone of the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the main so-called ‘rebel’ factions involved in Darfur; the SPLA provides military and logistics support to Uganda from the Pentagon through unknown channels, but most likely involving the nearby Pentagon client states of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Chad and Eritrea.

The primary Ugandan agents supporting the U.S. war in Darfur have always been, and remain, Brigadier General James Kazini, a nephew of Ugandan dictator Museveni and the chief of staff of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF); General Salim Saleh, half-brother of Museveni; and President Yoweri Museveni himself.

One of the main protagonists in the Darfur conflict is the current military regime in Rwanda, whose troops have been involved in Darfur under the guise of an ‘independent’ and ‘peacekeeping’ operation under the African Union ‘peacekeeping’ umbrella — back by NATO and private military companies.

Little known and widely misunderstood is the role of the United States and its proxies, the UPDF and the RPA, in committing massive crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide during the Rwandan conflagration from 1990 to 1994. Prior to the RPA invasion of Rwanda (from Uganda) in October 1990, the RPA and Rwandan Tutsi Diaspora had publications like Impuruza published in the United States between 1984 and 1994 (when the RPA achieved the coup d’etat against Rwandan President Habyarimana). Tutsi refugees joined Roger Winter, who was at the time the Director of the United States Committee for Refugees, to help fund the publication. The editor, Alexander Kimenyi, is a Rwandan national and a professor at California State University. Like most RPA publications Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite and it peddled a genocidal ideology against Hutu people.

The Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA, assisted by Roger Winter, organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda [Tutsi] Refugees in Washington, DC in 1988, and this is where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was chosen. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and transportation.

THE DEVIL CAME IN A HELIOCOPTER

Roger Winter was one of the primary architects of the RPA guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that has led to the loss of more than ten or twelve million lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since 1990. Winter acted as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies, and he appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as PBS and CNN. New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch and Roger Winter made contacts on behalf of the RPA with American media, particularly the Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine.

Roger Winter moved through Rwanda during the RPA invasion and worked the front lines of the covert war as a key Pentagon and U.S. State Department asset in collaboration with the Kagame-RPA operation of terror. From 1990 to 1994, Winter traveled back and forth from the RPA-controlled zone to Washington D.C., where he briefed and coordinated activities and support with U.S. military, intelligence and government officials.

Roger Winter is intimate with USAID, and is a long-time ally of Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs (1997-2001), Special Assistant to President Clinton (1995-1997), and National Security Council insider (1993-1997). Susan Rice is the Obama Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations and staunch enemy of Omar al-Bashir.

Roger Winter is also a staunch supporter of U.S. Rep. Donald Payne, one of the leading U.S. Democrats pressing for action to “stop genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. Payne sponsored the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act and was arrested in June 2001, along with John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International, for protesting against the GoS.

Christian Solidarity International has a very subversive relationship to ‘peace’ and ‘religion’ in Sudan, and they have been one of the front-runner organizations peddling the accusations of slavery by the al-Bashir government, in particular, a highly contested and controversial issue generally inflated and manipulated by fundamentalist Jewish and Christian NGOs and missionary organizations, like Christian Solidarity International, Samaritan’s Purse, Servant’s Heart, and Freedom Quest International, that operate in Sudan.

“Roger Winter was the chief logistic boss for [RPA] Tutsis as early as mid-1990,” says Ugandan human rights expert Remigius Kintu, “and until their victory in 1994 they were operating from 1,717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. Roger Winter told a [name deleted] South Sudanese exile at the time [1994]: ‘I have now stabilized Rwanda and will turn my full attention to Sudan.’ Winter subsequently closed up shop in Rwanda and based himself in Kampala working on Sudan. A few years later, Darfur exploded and with Winter’s manipulations, Rwanda was the first to send troops into that troubled area. From my sources, the Rwanda Defense Forces [working under the African Union umbrella] have killed civilians and brought in their media experts to pile the blame on Sudanese government troops.”

This is exactly what the Kagame and Museveni terror apparatus has done in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the terror operations of the UPDF/RPF in Rwanda in the 1990s were covered up by Human Rights Watch experts Alison Des Forges (d. February 2009) and Timothy Longman, Associate Prof. of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College.

Similarly, throughout the long war in south Sudan, and now in Darfur, the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed factions were/are downplayed, dismissed or ignored, while those committed by competing factions are amplified and spotlighted. Also, following the pattern of UPDF and RPA criminal activities — such as massacres committed under disguise and/or attributed to the ‘enemy’ — for which there is now a long history of documentation, and given the lack of any true independent evaluation, there is no telling who actually committed the massacres always blamed on the GoS or ‘Janjaweed’ militias.

One Sudanese professional from the south told me recently that it was not the Government of Sudan but rather the UPDF and SPLA who were arming the Janjaweed — the so-called Arab militias accused of wanton killing in an Arab-against-Black genocide. (This Arab-on-black genocide has been widely discredited.

Professor Timothy Longman and Alison Des Forges co-produced the fat treatise on ‘genocide’ in Rwanda, Leave None to Tell the Story, published in 1999. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents, based on field investigations in Congo (Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi, from 1995 to 2008, touted as independent and unbiased human rights reports but always skewed by hidden interests. Both Longman and Des Forges had relationships with the U.S. Department of State, National Security Council and Pentagon, both were regular consultants with USAID, and they certainly worked with Roger Winter, the Pentagon’s secret weapon in Sudan.

On 25 September 2008, a Ukrainian freighter was seized by ‘pirates’ off the coast of Somalia and was held until a ransom of $3.2 million was paid on 5 February 2009. (Somali fishermen disenfranchised by international dumping of toxic [and possibly nuclear] wastes off Somalia are labeled ‘pirates’ when they fight for their rights and freedoms.) The MV Faina is registered in Belize, owned by a company registered in Panama and piloted by Ukrainians. The MV Faina carried 33 Soviet T-72 battle tanks, grenade-launchers, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition en route to Mombassa, Kenya, the Pentagon’s primary base on the east coast of Africa.

The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet monitored the Ukrainian ship during the four-month standoff, with the MV Faina pinned down by at least six U.S. and four European warships. The ship’s owner is Israeli national Vadim Alperin (alias Vadim Oltrena Alperin), said to be a MOSSAD agent involved with clandestine activities through offshore front companies and money laundering. The ship was unloaded in Mombassa on February 12, and the weapons are destined for Juba, South Sudan.

There are reports that weaponry also included tank munitions heads sporting deadly depleted uranium and that the final recipients are the Israeli-backed Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) ‘rebels’ in Darfur. Sudan has previously accused Israel of supporting ‘rebels’ in the Darfur war. International arms syndicates and dealers routinely transfer ‘Soviet-era’ arms for international organized crime, including covert military operations involving proxy militias and national governments in Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda.

1. See: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, 7 February 2007.

Among the latest false realities being pushed upon the American people are the simplistic pictures of Black vs. Arab genocide in Darfur, and the proposed solution: a robust US-backed or US-led military intervention in Western Sudan. Increasing scrutiny is being focused upon the “Save Darfur” lobby and the Save Darfur Coalition; upon its founders, its finances, its methods and motivations and its truthfulness. In the spirit of furthering that examination we here present ten reasons to suspect that the “Save Darfur” campaign is a PR scam to justify US intervention in Africa.

1. It wouldn’t be the first Big Lie our government and media elite told us to justify a war.

Elders among us can recall the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which the US government deliberately provoked to justify initiation of the war in Vietnam. This rationale was quickly succeeded by the need to help the struggling infant “democracy” in South Vietnam, and the still useful “fight ‘em over there so we don’t have to fight ‘em over here” nonsense. More recently the bombings, invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been variously explained by people on the public payroll as necessary to “get Bin Laden” as revenge for 9-11, as measures to take “the world’s most dangerous weapons” from the hands of “the world’s most dangerous regimes”, as measures to enable the struggling Iraqi “democracy” stand on its own two feet, and necessary because it’s still better to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here”.

2. It wouldn’t even be the first time the U.S. government and media elite employed “genocide prevention” as a rationale for military intervention in an oil-rich region.

The 1995 US and NATO military intervention in Kosovo was supposedly a “peacekeeping” operation to stop a genocide. The lasting result of that campaign is Camp Bondsteel, one of the largest military bases on the planet. The U.S. is practically the only country in the world that maintains military bases outside its own borders. At just under a thousand acres, Camp Bondsteel offers the US military the ability to pre-position large quantities of equipment and supplies within striking distance of Caspian oil fields, pipeline routes and relevant sea lanes. It is also widely believed to be the site of one of the US’s secret prison and torture facilities.

3. If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?

“The notion that a quarter million Darfuri dead are a genocide and five million dead Congolese are not is vicious and absurd,” according to Congolese activist Nita Evele. “What’s happened and what is still happening in Congo is not a tribal conflict and it’s not a civil war. It is an invasion. It is a genocide with a death toll of five million, twenty times that of Darfur, conducted for the purpose of plundering Congolese mineral and natural resources.”

More than anything else, the selective and cynical application of the term “genocide” to Sudan, rather than to the Congo where ten to twenty times as many Africans have been murdered reveals the depth of hypocrisy around the “Save Darfur” movement. In the Congo, where local gangsters, mercenaries and warlords along with invading armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola engage in slaughter, mass rape and regional depopulation on a scale that dwarfs anything happening in Sudan, all the players eagerly compete to guarantee that the extraction of vital coltan for Western computers and cell phones, the export of uranium for Western reactors and nukes, along with diamonds, gold, copper, timber and other Congolese resources continue undisturbed.

Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young and George H.W. Bush both serve on the board of Barrcik Gold, one of the largest and most active mining concerns in war-torn Congo. Evidently, with profits from the brutal extraction of Congolese wealth flowing to the West, there can be no Congolese “genocide” worth noting, much less interfering with. For their purposes, U.S. strategic planners may regard their Congolese model as the ideal means of capturing African wealth at minimal cost without the bother of official U.S. boots on the ground.

4. It’s all about Sudanese oil.

Sudan, and the Darfur region in particular, sit atop a lake of oil. But Sudanese oil fields are not being developed and drilled by Exxon or Chevron or British Petroleum. Chinese banks, oil and construction firms are making the loans, drilling the wells, laying the pipelines to take Sudanese oil where they intend it to go, calling far too many shots for a twenty-first century in which the U.S. aspires to control the planet’s energy supplies. A U.S. and NATO military intervention will solve that problem for U.S. planners.

5. It’s all about Sudanese uranium, gum arabic and other natural resources.

Uranium is vital to the nuclear weapons industry and an essential fuel for nuclear reactors. Sudan possesses high quality deposits of uranium. Gum arabic is an essential ingredient in pharmaceuticals, candies and beverages like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and Sudanese exports of this commodity are 80% of the world’s supply. When comprehensive U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime were being considered in 1997, industry lobbyists stepped up and secured an exemption in the sanctions bill to guarantee their supplies of this valuable Sudanese commodity. But an in-country U.S. and NATO military presence is a more secure guarantee that the extraction of Sudanese resources, like those of the Congo, flow westward to the U.S. and the European Union.

6. It’s all about Sudan’s strategic location

Sudan sits opposite Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, where a large fraction of the world’s easily extracted oil will be for a few more years. Darfur borders on Libya and Chad, with their own vast oil resources, is within striking distance of West and Central Africa, and is a likely pipeline route. The Nile River flows through Sudan before reaching Egypt, and Southern Sudan water resources of regional significance too. With the creation of AFRICOM, the new Pentagon command for the African continent, the U.S. has made open and explicit its intention to plant a strategic footprint on the African continent. From permanent Sudanese bases, the U.S. military could influence the politics and ecocomies of Africa for a generation to come.

7. The backers and founders of the “Save Darfur” movement are the well-connected and well-funded U.S. foreign policy elite.

According to a copyrighted Washington Post story this summer

“The “Save Darfur (Coalition) was created in 2005 by two groups concerned about genocide in the African country – the American Jewish World Service and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum…

“The coalition has a staff of 30 with expertise in policy and public relations. Its budget was about $15 million in the most recent fiscal year…

“Save Darfur will not say exactly how much it has spent on its ads, which this week have attempted to shame China, host of the 2008 Olympics, into easing its support for Sudan. But a coalition spokeswoman said the amount is in the millions of dollars.”

Though the “Save Darfur” PR campaign employs viral marketing techniques, reaching out to college students, even to black bloggers, it is not a grassroots affair, as were the movement against apartheid and in support of African liberation movements in South Africa, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique a generation ago. Top heavy with evangelical Christians who preach the coming war for the end of the world, and with elements known for their uncritical support of Israeli rejectionism in the Middle East, the Save Darfur movement is clearly an establishment affair, a propaganda campaign that spends millions of dollars each month to manfacture consent for US military intervention in Africa under the cloak of stopping or preventing genocide.

8. None of the funds raised by the “Save Darfur Coalition”, the flagship of the “Save Darfur Movement” go to help needy Africans on the ground in Darfur, according to stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times.

None of the money collected by Save Darfur goes to help the victims and their families. Instead, the coalition pours its proceeds into advocacy efforts that are primarily designed to persuade governments to act.

9. “Save Darfur” partisans in the U.S. are not interested in political negotiations to end the conflict in Darfur President Bush has openly and repeatedly attempted to throw monkey wrenches at peace negotiations to end the war in Darfur.

Even pro-intervention scholars and humanitarian organizations active on the ground have criticized the U.S. for endangering humanitarian relief workers, and for effectively urging rebel parties in Darfur to refuse peace talks and hold out for U.S. and NATO intervention on their behalf.

The PR campaign which depicts the conflict as strictly a racial affair, in which Arabs, who are generally despised in the US media anyway, are exterminating the black population of Sudan, is slick, seamless and attractive, and seems to leave no room for negotiation. But in fact, many of Sudan’s ‘Arabs”, even the Janjiweed, are also black. In any case, they were armed and unleashed by a government which has the power to disarm them if it chooses, and refusing to talk to that government’s negotiators is a sure way to avoid any settlement.

10. Blackwater and other U.S. mercenary contractors, the unofficial armed wings of the Republican party and the Pentagon are eagerly pitching their services as part of the solution to the Darfur crisis.

“Chris Taylor, head of strategy for Blackwater, says his company has a database of thousands of former police and military officers for security assignments. He says Blackwater personnel could set up perimeters and guard Darfurian villages and refugee camp in support of the U.N. Blackwater officials say it would not take many men to fend off the Janjaweed, a militia that is supported by the Sudanese government and attacks villages on camelback.”

Apparently Blackwater doesn’t need to come to the Congo, where hunger and malnutrition, depopulation, mass rape and the disappearance of schools, hospitals and civil society into vast law free zones ruled by an ever-changing cast of African proxies (like the son of the late and unlamented Idi Amin), all under a veil of complicit media silence already constitute the perfect business-friendly environment for siphoning off the vast wealth of that country at minimal cost.

Look for the adoption of the Congolese model across the wide areas of Africa that U.S. strategic planners call “ungoverned spaces”. Just don’t look expect to see details on the evening news, or hear about them from Oprah, George Clooney or Angelina Jolie.

When President George Bush met with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni at the White House on October 30 they certainly discussed much more than “Uganda’s leadership in Somalia, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and President Museveni’s development plan for northern Uganda” or their “strong partnership to combat malaria and HIV/AIDS in Uganda,” as announced by the White House Office of the Press Secretary.

The role of Yoweri Museveni and his “government” in service to the Western economic neoliberalism and the shock doctrine of deconstruction and chaos is greatly misunderstood and deeply camouflaged by simplified establishment narratives like those above. Bush and Museveni discussed the U.S.-Uganda military relations and bilateral involvement in the ongoing wars in Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo). The “partnership to combat malaria and HIV/AIDS” is camouflage language for military vaccination and bio-warfare programs involving pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, USAID, and “humanitarian” philanthropies.¹ A vaccine for malaria was developed for the U.S. military some time ago and this is shared only with certain U.S. client state partners, though “clinical trials” have been undertaken in public using African “volunteers.”²

Museveni and Bush certainly discussed America’s escalating war in the Sahara desert, expanding petroleum operations across the region, U.S. Special Forces deployments and newly identified uranium resources in Uganda.³ Maybe they discussed the March 1, 1999 killing of eight foreign tourists at Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, a story that has not yet been critically unpacked.⁴ The “development plan for northern Uganda” is euphemistic language for the ongoing depopulation and massive natural resource extraction that today proceeds in northern Uganda in parallel with the genocide of the Acholi people and Uganda’s militarization in support of covert programs in Sudan and Congo.

The Darfur conflict rides along the fault line of continental warfare spread from Niger to Djibouti and Somalia, and from eastern Congo and Rwanda, through Uganda and Sudan, to Eritrea and the Red Sea. Congo is at war with Uganda and Rwanda. Ethiopia is at war with Somalia, and poised to reinvade Eritrea: there are massive troop build-ups on both sides of the Eritrean-Ethiopia border. Ethiopia, Uganda and Chad are the three “frontline” states militarily destabilizing Sudan. Uganda is internally and externally at war, has intervened secretly in Burundi, and the Ugandan military recently re-occupied towns in eastern Congo over petroleum. Rwanda is fighting in Eastern Congo, meddling in Burundi, and has some 2000 troops in Darfur. Burundi is militarily involved in Congo and soon to be in Somalia. Khartoum backs guerrilla armies in Uganda, Chad and Congo.

The U.S. is all over the place, with both covert and overt military programs. France, England, Canada, Belgium, Libya, Israel and China are all involved. All these conflicts are intertwined, and the targeted populations have allegiances and alliances dictated by the pre-colonial boundaries demarcated at the Berlin Conference of 1885 by the imperial doctrine of divide and conquer. In 1885 “Soudan” was synonymous with “Sahara” and “Darfur” was the center of power.⁵ Conflict involving U.S. covert forces and nomads in Niger and Nigeria, for example, impacts Sudan: the history of the Sahara revolves around the trans-Saharan influence of the Mahdi. In 1875 the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, led the indigenous resistance against Britain. ‘Abdallah at-Ta‘ishi, the Mahdi’s “Khalifah” or successor, who took over as leader of the independent Sudan when the Mahdi died in June 1885, was a native of Darfur.⁶

PEACE IS WAR IS PEACEKEEPING

On October 24, 2007, the United Nations awarded Lockheed-Martin subsidiary Pacific Architects and Engineers a $250 million no-bid contract to provide “infrastructure” for the United Nations “peacekeeping” missions now unfolding in Sudan (Darfur), Somalia, and Chad/Central Africa Republic. The newly announced contract is to build five new camps in Sudan’s Darfur and Kordofan regions for 4,100 U.N. and African Union personnel. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest and most secretive aerospace and defense corporation.

This is not Pacific Architects and Engineers’ first contract in Darfur, or in Africa’s “peacekeeping” missions. PAE won the contract for staffing the deeply compromised “Civilian Protection Monitoring Team” (CPMT) in Sudan under a U.S. State Department contract. In 2004, the CPMT office was being run by Brigadier General Frank Toney (retired), who was previously the commander of Special Forces for the United States Army; General Toney organized covert operations into Iraq and Kuwait in the first Gulf War.

Pratap Chaterjee reported in 2004 how “Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Bittrick, the deputy director of regional and security affairs for Africa at the State Department, flew to Ethiopia to hammer out an agreement to support African Union troops by committing to provide housing, office equipment, transport, and communications gear. This will be provided via an ‘indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity’ joint contract awarded to Dyncorp Corporation, and Pacific Architects & Engineers (PAE) worth $20.6 million.”⁷ PAE also set up MONUC operations in Congo, and continues to operate there; the total PAE involvement includes numerous intermediary contracts. In 2002, PAE/Daher won a $34 million air-services follow-on contract amidst complaints of a “lack of transparency and irregularities in the procurement system…confirmed by the bidding of the air-service contract with PAE/Daher.”⁸ Daher International is a French aerospace and defense corporation.⁹

Meanwhile, the “Save Darfur” advocates pressing military intervention in Darfur as a “humanitarian” gesture have escalated pressure in the face of mounting failures, including allegations that millions of “Save Darfur” dollars fundraised on a sympathy for victims platform have been misappropriated.

But the players, the private military companies, the arms dealers—and a handful of missing SRAM missiles armed with nuclear warheads dumped by an American B-52 before it crashed—are mostly unknown to the general public. These covert wars all involve different propaganda strategies to provide cover and deflect attention through “perception management”—managing the perceptions, stereotyping and creating false belief systems—of the North American and European public.

The numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons across the region are staggering and they are indicative of a cataclysmic regional crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. This is not because refugees, insurgency and guerrilla warfare are inherent to Africa: refugees and IDPs are big business for white systems of power that maintain structural violence based on profits and the globalization of poverty, terror and war. The numbers are staggering, and these are not merely statistics, they are about suffering human beings.

United Nations agencies report some 4,700,163 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Sudan—2,152,163 in Darfur and 2,276,000 in Northern Sudan—with some 686,311 refugees out of Sudan.

REGIONAL REFUGEES AND INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSONS¹⁰

      Burundi: 100,000 IDPs 396,541 refugees out

      Chad: 179,940 IDPs 36,300 refugees out

      Central Africa Rep.: 212,000 IDPs 71,685 refugees out

      Dem. Rep. of Congo: 1,400,000 IDPs 401,914 refugees out

      Eritrea: 32,000 IDPs 193,700 refugees out

      Ethiopia: ?200,000? IDPs 80,000 refugees out

      Kenya: 413,000 IDPs 5,356 refugees out

      Rwanda: ???? IDPs 92,966 refugees out

      Somalia: 700,000 IDPs 464,253 refugees out

      Sudan: 4,703,163 IDPs 686,311 refugees out

      Uganda: 1,310,000 IDPs 21,752 refugees out

Is Kenya at war? Sure looks like it. Unreported anywhere are the massive petroleum concessions and exploration projects in Kenya’s remote Samburu and Turkana districts. (For $5000 apiece you can purchase reports like “Petroleum Potential of Lake Turkana Area” from international oil and gas consultants Beicip-Franlab.¹¹) G.H.W. Bush’s old Swedish pal Adolph Lundin and Lundin Petroleum signed an exploration contract for the Turkana region in June 2007.¹²

While the United Nations lists some 200,000 IDPs in Ethiopia, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (iDMC) reports: “[r]elatively little is known about the extent and nature of conflict-induced internal displacement in Ethiopia.” There are 92,966 refugees out of Rwanda, if we can trust the iDMC numbers, and an “indeterminate” number of IDPs. Refugee and IDP statistics, like mortality figures, are highly politicized. The situation in Ethiopia today is cataclysmic and the United Nations and the vast network of profit-based NGOs operating in Ethiopia are complicit in genocide because they do not stand up against that regime in fear of losing business.¹³

These humanitarian emergencies involve massive depopulation and death, internally displaced persons and trans-national refugees, all of which provide a lucrative business opportunity for Western “relief” and “development” organizations. The business of AID is a racket. Weapons sales are a racket. The people who suffer are different from the industries, the providers of services, equipment and expertise who profit from these crises. Like most weaponry, landmines are predominantly manufactured in white economies of North America and Europe and, scandalously, it is the companies from the same white economies who have a lock on UN landmine removal contracts worth billions of dollars a year. The so-called “humanitarian relief” business is an industry that relies on the creation of markets. Millions of people across the region are dying, while millions more are homeless, set adrift in a sea of nowhere, with no rights, no possessions, no protection and very little prospect for survival; their only hopes come from the false belief that the Western “humanitarian” AID enterprise is designed to rescue them.

The engagement of the world’s premier war-making industries—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Bechtel, SAIC—behind and within a so-called “peacekeeping” platform is not new, and something is seriously wrong with this picture.

THE ‘SAVE DARFUR’ NARRATIVE

“Save Darfur” is the predominant propaganda front running on Africa and it has overwhelmed the public consciousness with deceptions. In this establishment narrative Arabs on horseback, the Janjaweed, backed by the Sudan government seated in Khartoum, are the purveyors of genocide. This mirrors the establishment narrative of Rwanda, 1994, which said that the Hutus and the nasty Interahamwe militias committed genocide against the Tutsis in 100 days of killing with machetes. The Rwanda genocide narrative—combined with the narrative about “humanitarian” intervention in Yugoslavia, where the final blow to dismember the country came with the NATO bombing campaign—set the stage for the Darfur genocide narrative.

All over the United States, Britain and Canada advocates and activists who claim to be concerned about human rights, and even those who otherwise would not get involved, have supported the “Save Darfur” movement, a political movement similar to the anti-Apartheid movement mobilized against South Africa in the 1980s. The “Save Darfur” movement has resulted in a huge outpouring of funds, and it has mobilized support from people in all walks of life, and across the political spectrum, on the “never again” platform of “stopping genocide.”

Hollywood personalities dubbed “actorvists,” including Mia Farrow, Don Cheadle and George Clooney, have helped to whip up the “Save Darfur” hysteria. From Elie Wiesel to Barak Obama, people are “outraged” by genocide that the Bush Administration, we are told, is reluctant to stop. And it is hysteria, in the true definition of the word, but it did not simply rise out of a sudden concern for a bunch of Africans in some far-off God-forsaken place (as it is portrayed).

At a “Voices for Darfur” fundraiser held on October 21, 2007 at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for example, the local chapter of the Congregation B’Nai Israel Darfur Action coalition, raised over $14,000 for “humanitarian” aid to Darfur. The B’Nai Israel Save Darfur Coalition had a broad array of public and organizational support, including other Jewish organizations, Smith College, Northampton Mayor Claire Higgins, Massachusetts’ Senator Stan Rosenberg and Representative Peter Kocot. The campaign organizers claim that “more than 90% goes to direct-on-the-ground AID.” Working with big humanitarian groups like Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children, it is impossible that 90% of funds will hit the ground in Darfur.¹⁴

Behind the “Save Darfur” movement are fundamentalist organizations and think tanks with a deeply nationalistic, militaristic, religious fundamentalist agenda. The Center for Security Policy, for example, supports the “star wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, Homeland Security—which is nothing more than expanding militarism and emasculated public rights—and the Biometric Security Project. The BSP centers around emerging biological technologies that will be used to register, identify, monitor, track and control each and every U.S. citizen. They call it “identity assurance,” it involves state-of-the-art recognition equipment, sensors and security technologies, and it is a central component of the evolving national security and “counter-terrorism” apparatus.¹⁵

The Center for Security Policy is the nerve center of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus, a deeply nationalist, neoliberal think-tank and flak organization promoting the all-out attack against non-cooperative governments—dubbed “rogue states”—peripheral to Western economic control. These, of course, are primarily Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, North Korea and Cuba. Zimbabwe is a special case that has joined the list to some degree. What these states have in common is that they are all targeted for divestment by the Center for Security Policy brainchild, divestterror.org. Sudan is another of the “rogue states” targeted.

The establishment narrative on Darfur motivates U.S. citizens to take action to “Save Darfur,” thus facilitating popular support for heightened U.S. military involvement. The truth is that the United States military is already there, in its various incarnations, and the United States is involved in atrocities.

THE UGANDA NARRATIVE

In the northern Uganda region—involving South Sudan and northeastern Congo—another conflict has boiled for over 21 years between the government Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), led by Yoweri Museveni, and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony. This war offers yet another one-sided Western establishment narrative that says that Kony and the LRA—always described as a Christian fanatical cult that captures and drugs children—is the primary problem in northern Uganda. (Usually African savages are not Christian enough for America’s liking; here we find that they are too Christian.)

The establishment narrative has been furthered across the popular culture, in everything from Vanity Fair to the BBC to the journal The National Catholic Weekly (America). The newly established ENOUGH Project (ENOUGH “genocide” and “not on my watch” etc. etc.) picked up the mantle of LRA atrocities and, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, has supported the establishment narrative which shields the Museveni government from the kind of criticism and international action that is called for in keeping with the scale of the atrocities the Uganda government is responsible for. Amnesty International and Human Rights have produced disinformation, in some cases, Rwanda and Yugoslavia being the most notable.

The Museveni war machine and its state terror apparatus have perpetrated massive atrocities in the region and it has evolved into genocide against the Acholi, Teso and Lango people of the north. The indigenous Acholi people have been forced onto concentration camps over the past 21 years, and these camps have become places of death. In the establishment narrative, the people are always the victims of Kony’s LRA “rebellion.”

Human Rights Watch has addressed torture and government complicity in atrocities in Uganda, and other problems, but they have rarely named names or corporations and they almost never link the conflict or the atrocities to Western interests. One massive report on Northern Uganda details criminal government actions, but the recommendations sections effectively sanction structural violence and white supremacy.¹⁶ The net effect of these policy and “human rights” positions is complicity in genocide and genocide denial on Uganda.

Contrary to the proliferation of propaganda always attributing Kony’s LRA with child abductions—another example of Western Orientalism that essentializes Africa to serve political purposes—is research showing that many LRA abductions are short term with children returning home from LRA abductions in less than three weeks. Further, many children who fight with the LRA have joined by choice, and they do so willingly.¹⁷ In “Childhood’s End” (Vanity Fair, 2006) Christopher Hitchens described the LRA as a “grotesque zombie-like militia…that has set a standard of cruelty and ruthlessness…” American troops that have committed atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan, no less brutal or gruesome or masochistic, would never be described this way.

Yoweri Museveni and his business and military partners are responsible for millions of deaths, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Eastern Congo. Museveni and his generals were the primary backers of Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo. With UPDF support, Bemba’s MLC perpetrated massive atrocities under the covert military operation, Effacer le Tableau (Erasing the Board)—a scorched earth policy amounting to genocide against the Mbuti pygmies of Eastern Congo.¹⁸

The U.S. military invasion of Zaire (now Congo), involved U.S. covert forces, U.S. military communications, logistical and weapons support, and Ugandan and Rwandan forces. Humvees, C-130’s and black-skinned U.S. Special Forces entered South Sudan and northeastern Congo through the Gulu and Arua Districts of Uganda, the heart of Acholiland and the center of atrocities against the Acholi people.¹⁹

Ugandan and British interests living mostly in Britain and aligned with the former dictator Idi Amin have always backed the Lord’s Resistance Army and the West Nile Bank Front; support also came from Saudi Arabia and Qatar (the Qatar General Petroleum Corporation is involved in Sudan’s oil sector and has partnered in various international enterprises with Norwegian, Japanese and French corporations). Idi Amin, the brutal dictator, lived out his life in luxury in Saudi Arabia (d. 2003). The LRA stepped up its military actions in parallel with the UPDF invasion of Zaire (1996), and the subsequent years of warfare and plunder in Congo (1998-present).

According to the investigations of the United Nations and the humanitarian law work of lawyer Karen Parker, the war in Uganda involves massive rapes, killing, tortures, and extrajudicial executions as a policy by the Ugandan military. Some 1.3 million people are displaced in the Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts of northern Uganda (there were 1.7 million IDPs in March 2007). There are over 73 camps with from 1000 to 50,000 people in them, all forcibly displaced by UPDF soldiers, with over 350,000 people out of some 400,000 people displaced from the Gulu district alone.²⁰

THE U.S.-UGANDA INVASION OF ZAIRE

The forced displacements of Acholi people began with Museveni’s ascension to power in 1986, but major forced displacements occurred throughout the 1990’s and again in 2002-2003. However, there was a massive displacement operation in 1996 that appears to have been coordinated in part with the planned U.S. invasion of Zaire from Northern Uganda and Rwanda.

The UPDF Army barracks at Masindi and airstrip at Gulu, both in Northern Uganda, served as the staging grounds for the U.S. invasion of Zaire. The Museveni government organized the closure of northern Uganda in October 1996 ostensibly because of heightened LRA attacks. The UPDF, in chronological coincidence with the U.S. invasion, forced hundreds of thousands of Acholis into concentration camps in the fall of 1996, often by bombing and burning villages and murdering, beating, raping and threatening those who would not comply.

According to testimony from eyewitnesses, on Oct 26, 1996 the top Ugandan brass behind the invasion of Zaire met at the village of Paraa, in the Murchison Falls National Park, near Lake Albert, in the Gulu District. At the meeting were: [1] UPDF Brigadier General Moses Ali—Idi Amin’s right hand man who later became Minister of Internal Affairs, Minister for Disaster Preparedness, and Deputy Prime Minister in the Museveni administration; [2] Museveni’s half-brother Salim Saleh; [3] then Colonel James Kazini; and [4] Dr. Eric Adroma—head of Uganda National Parks. Salim Saleh is perhaps the leading agent of terror in the UPDF Zaire/Congo wars, but both Saleh and commander James Kazini led UPDF troops involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide involving millions of people in Eastern Congo (1996-2007).

The meeting was ostensibly about security and it was announced that due to a recent LRA rebel attack at Paraa, the UPDF would be placing parts of Northern Uganda off limits to all non-military personnel. (LRA rebels committed the Paraa attack; UPDF troops arrived on the scene quickly and looted bodies but did not pursue the LRA.) The main road from Karuma to the border town of Pakwach was thereafter closed. This road apparently served as a primary transport route for Ugandan and non-Ugandan military—including black U.S. Special Forces—who invaded Zaire.²¹

On November 6, 1996, Bill Clinton was elected. Around 10 November 1996 an armored 4×4 Humvee (HUMMWV)—heavily rigged with sophisticated communications equipment inside and out—was encountered carrying two black U.S. special forces in the Murchison Falls region: the soldiers were wearing UPDF uniforms. Two busloads of black U.S. Special Forces were encountered at a UPDF checkpoint on the Karuma-Pakwach road; wearing civilian clothes, with duffel bags, the muscled and crew cut “civilians” showed U.S. passports and claimed they were “doctors” heading to the tiny Gulu hospital. From November 21-23 Boeing C-130 military aircraft passed over the region every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, heading both north and south. The C-130’s apparently landed at Gulu airstrip—closed by the Museveni government for a two-week period—and offloaded military equipment then moved by roads—closed by the UPDF—to the border. Some C-130’s were charted on a course believed to take them to Goma, Zaire. From mid-November to February 1997 access to northwestern Uganda regions was highly restricted. On 1 March 1997 another wave of C-130’s passed over the region. The UPDF used the LRA threat as cover for massive military operations involving the invasion of Zaire for the United States of America.¹⁹

The in-country U.S. Ambassador to Uganda at the time was E. Michael Southwick (October 1994-August 1997). Oil surveys began in 1998 and the entire Northwestern Uganda region is now designated as oil concessions controlled by Heritage Oil and Gas, Hardman Oil and Tullow Oil, three Anglo-American companies connected to British mercenary Tony Buckingham (founder of he mercenary firms Sandline International and Executive Outcomes) and his partners.²² Nexant, a Bechtel subsidiary, is involved with the trans-Uganda-Kenya pipeline. South African firm Energem—tied to Tony Buckingham through Anthony Texeira, the brother-in-law of Congolese warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba—is also involved. Another Energem and Buckingham affiliated company tight with the Museveni regime is Branch Energy, involved with the oil pipeline and mining in Uganda.

On September 5, 2007, UPDF troops—and rebels reportedly aligned with Jean-Pierre Bemba—had occupied the Congo’s oil- and gold-rich Semliki Basin on the western shores of Lake Albert. Heavily armed foreign forces occupied the villages of Aru, Mahagi, Fataki, Irengeti and the Ruwenzori mountains. The international press and the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC) remained completely silent about the Ugandan incursions. By September 8, 2007, Ugandan troops were heavily massed on the Congo border while Kabila and Museveni were signing oil and gold sharing agreements in Tanzania. UPDF forces and “rebel” troops alleged to be Bemba’s remained in Congo as of October 25. The MONUC information offices were claiming by mid-October that UPDF had pulled out, but Congolese citizens in eastern Congo continued to report a significant UPDF military occupation.²³

The China Petroleum Pipeline Engineering Company is also involved in the Uganda-Kenya pipeline, offering an interesting comparison for people concerned about China’s involvement in atrocities in the Darfur region. And, after much scrambling, Libya was cut out of the Kenya-Uganda pipeline deals.²⁴ The petroleum sector in Libya involves U.S., Canadian, and European companies.

Uganda’s representation at the International Criminal Court exploring war crimes in Congo has included at least two very high-profile lawyers from Foley Hoag LLP, an influential Washington law firm deeply entrenched in the proliferation of the mainstream narratives and the victor’s justice doled out—through the ICTY and ICTR tribunals—on Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Pentagon seconded its lawyers from the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corp to the ICTR to “try” those unfortunate “enemies” both arbitrarily and selectively accused of genocide.²⁵

The people most responsible for atrocities in the region—unprecedented human bloodletting, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide—are protected. These include Yoweri Museveni, Salim Saleh, Paul Kagame, James Kazini, Moses Ali, James Kabarebe, Taban Amin, Jean-Pierre Bemba, Laurent Nkunda, Meles Zenawi… a long list of people whose culpability is without question, many of whom have been named for atrocities again and again. U.S. Special Operations forces know what happened and should be deposed under oath in a legitimate International Criminal Court, which at present does not exist, and is not in the making. Ditto for Madeleine Albright, Anthony Lake, Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice, John Prendergast, General William Wald, General Frank Toney, Walter Kansteiner, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Holbroke, Roger Winter, Frank G. Wisner, Andrew Young… another short list.

Foley Hoag LLP is also tied to the U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council. On May 6, 2002 in Washington D.C. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and wife Janet were special guests at U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council event sponsored by members Coke, Pfizer and Chevron-Texaco. Museveni also met with President Bush at the White House. Coke director Kathleen Black is a principle in the Hearst media empire, while Coke directors Warren Buffet and Barry Diller are directors of the Washington Post Company, and these are the media institutions that whitewash client regimes, corporate plunder and Pentagon actions. Of course, Coca Cola covets the gum Arabic potential of Darfur, and Coke is a client of Andrew Young’s PR firm Goodworks International. Uganda’s image is sanitized by one of the world’s largest PR firms, London’s Hill & Knowlton. In 2005 Uganda spent some $700,000 on a Hill & Knowlton contract to facilitate and “encourage dialogue between the Ugandan government and people like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, Oxfam.”²⁶

THE RWANDA NARRATIVE

Museveni’s bush war began in 1980. Paul Kagame, current President of Rwanda, was Museveni’s Director of Military Intelligence in the mid-1980’s. Museveni and Kagame led the invasion of Rwanda in 1990. The two military commanders utilized terrorist tactics that assigned blame for atrocities they committed—against both their enemies and their own people—on their enemies. They used psychological operations, embedded international reporters, and fabrication of massacres. These tactics have continued to the present.

While Rwanda is billed as a major “success story” of recovery and development after a devastating genocide—see for example the PR “documentary” film Rwanda Rising produced by Andrew Young’s Goodworks International—the country is ruled with an iron-fist and a finely tuned intelligence and torture apparatus involved in political assassinations, suppression of information and disappearances. Huge areas of Rwanda were entirely depopulated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front and UPDF as they hammered away at Rwanda beginning in October 1990. The invasion culminated in a coup d’etat that succeeded, with broad U.S. military support, in capturing Kigali in July of 1994.

From 1994 to the present President Paul Kagame has used the genocide card and the establishment narrative to institutionalize repression, criminalize or assassinate anyone who challenges the regime, and further depopulate rural areas for “development” benefiting corporate interests.

Another member of the U.S.-Uganda Friendship council is the Honorable Andrew Young, former Mayor of Atlanta and U.S. Ambassador. Andrew Young and his firm Goodworks International have helped whitewash the image of the Rwanda government and its state apparatus of terror. Andrew Young, Quincy Jones and other wealthy Americans are building (have built) mansions on the shores of Rwanda’s Lake Mwazi in areas where peasants were driven off the land or killed by the Kagame terror machine before, during and after 1994. State terror and depopulation is ongoing along Lake Kivu and in the Volcanoes National Parks regions for methane and high-end tourism development.²⁷

Back to the refugees and IDPs question, the United Nations recognized some 650,000 IDPs in “makeshift camps” in Rwanda in 1998 and 1999, in the northwestern prefectures of Ruhengeri and Gisenyi. These IDPs were categorized as “mostly Hutu” and forcibly resettled through implementation of Rwanda’s “National Habitat Policy, or “villagisation” policy, of December 1996, which provides for the relocation of all Rwandans living in scattered homesteads into government-created villages.²⁸ While the UN ceased to recognize these people in Rwanda as internally displaced, in 2003 there remained 200,000 families living in IDP conditions.²⁹ What is their status today?

Rwanda gains currency and good press through big HIV/AIDS projects run by Paul Farmer but funded by the Clinton AIDS foundation. Rwanda was overthrown by and for the Pentagon on Clinton’s watch. Hillary Clinton toured Uganda in July 1997, wore African clothes, danced African dances, and spoke about “democracy” and “development” and a “partnership” against HIV/AIDS.

The Kagame regime has recently awarded petroleum concessions to Canada’s Vangold Resources for the project titled “White Elephant” in northern Rwanda—2700 sq. kilometers of land depopulated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army between 1990 and 2007.³⁰ Contracted to provide “feasibility studies” of petroleum infrastructural development in Rwanda is the San Diego firm Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).³¹

SAIC has ongoing collaborations with Bechtel—another of the world’s most secretive aerospace technology, energy infrastructure and defense contractors—both known for their involvement in U.S. beyond top-secret “black” programs; SAIC also works closely with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.³² Recent SAIC directors have included: U.S. Navy Admiral B.R. Inman (Ret.); U.S. Army General W.A. Downing (Ret.); and U.S. Air Force General J.A. Welch (Ret.). SAIC also has an ongoing collaboration with the multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS).³³ Unsurprisingly, through shared directorships, BMS is economically and politically aligned with the New York Times Corporation. SAIC has also been flagged for involvement in highly questionable U.S. mercenary activities and human rights violations in Africa.³⁴

Petroleum, defense and mining interests connected to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International programs in “gorilla conservation” led to the production of high-tech satellite prospecting data, gathered by remote sensing over-flights (1994-2000), delivered to the Rwandan Ministry of Defense.³⁵

The Pentagon has been involved in building military bases in Rwanda, installing military and civilian communications infrastructure, and training Rwandan Defense Forces; a military-communications radar installation has been constructed with U.S. support on Mt. Karisimbi in Ruhengeri Province.³⁶ The installation is being built by the Rwanda Ministry of Defense in partnership with the “Rwandan” company Terracom SPRL and Rwandatel. Terracom is owned by U.S. businessman Greg Wyler; Rwandatel is 99%-owned subsidiary.³⁷

It is believed that Rwanda Defense Forces (RDF) sent to Darfur on the African Union “peacekeeping” mission include black U.S. Special Forces disguised as RDF—just as the black U.S. Special Forces were disguised as UPDF during the invasion of Zaire.

Andrew Young is widely lauded as a leader of the African-American civil rights movement and ally of Martin Luther King Jr., claims that were specious to begin with. “In Rwanda Rising,” reads the PR promo for the film, Andrew Young, “a former United Nations Ambassador, Civil Rights leader and top aide to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. documented the amazing transformation taking place in Rwanda today, including the country’s remarkable story of reconciliation despite the 1994 Genocide.”³⁸

Rwanda Rising opened the 15th Annual Pan African Film and Arts Festival February 8, 2007. “Fifteen years into the Pan African Film and Arts Festival and we continue to showcase the important stories of our brothers and sisters on the Continent,” Festival Director Ayuko Babu said. “Having Rwanda Rising open this year’s festival is keeping in that tradition while making sure that we stay connected to our roots in Africa.”³⁸

THE ROOTS OF STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE IN AFRICA

Lockheed Martin is a California-based aerospace and defense giant involved in classified black programs that are beyond “top-secret” and shielded from government oversight. In September 2003, CNN—a corporate-military “news” agency deeply embedded with the Pentagon—reported “[a]ccording to the U.S. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) classified or black programs account for about $23.2 billion or 17 percent of the 2004 budget request for the Department of Defense.”

According to United Nations spokeswoman Michele Montas the six-month Darfur contract with Lockheed-Martin subsidiary Pacific Architect Engineers, Inc. was awarded without competitive bidding “because of complex requirements and a short timeline.”

Reporting from the United Nations, Inner City Press said the terms of the contract will not be public and the United Nations has violated numerous UN charter laws in the tendering of this award.³⁹

The no-bid award process followed the United Nation’s issuance of an official “Expressions of Interest” notice on October 9, 2007. “The United Nations is seeking Expressions of Interest (EOI) from experienced Multi Functional Logistics Services (MFLS) contractors,” the UN’s EOI notice reads, “for the provision of a wide range of services at headquarters, logistic bases, military and police camps, airfields and water resources at various locations in any or all of the following: the Darfur Region of Sudan, Chad/Central African Republic (CAR), and Somalia.”

Inner City Press reported that the EOI solicitation, made after the rules had already been waived to allow the transfer of $250 million to Lockheed Martin for six months in Darfur, is intended to try to clean up the process after-the-fact.³⁹

Another multinational aerospace and defense corporation directly benefiting from this regional U.S. war is Boeing Aircraft Corporation. The U.S. military used Boeing Chinook helicopters in the U.S. invasion of Somalia in 2006. Tom Pickering, former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, is senior vice president for International Relations and a member of the Boeing Executive Council since January 2001. Pickering played a decisive role in the Clinton Administration overthrow of Rwanda (1990-1994) and Congo (1996-1997). He is a leading advocate for the “Save Darfur” propaganda. He is also a member of the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa along with Ed Royce (R-CA), former U.S. Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker (R-KS), Donald Payne (D-NJ), and Andrew Young.

While the New York Times reported in December 2006 that the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia began in late December, military involvement of U.S. covert forces had been ongoing, and was heightened significantly in the early spring of 2006 when the U.S. Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency openly complained about cross purposes in Somalia. Private military companies were all over Somalia, as were known international arms syndicates, including of course the criminal networks of John Bredenkamp, one of Britain’s fifty richest tycoons and one of the primary financial backers behind the rise and fall of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

John Bredenkamp reportedly acquired three SRAM missiles with nuclear warheads jettisoned in shallow water off the coast of Somalia by a U.S.A.F. B-52 that soon after crashed into the Indian Ocean near the U.S. military base on the island of Diego Garcia. The U.S. invasion of Somalia is believed to have been partly an aborted attempt to recover the lost nukes—called “broken arrows” in Pentagon speak. While the story of the dumped nukes “lost” by Dick Cheney has received some attention, no one has publicly identified John Bredenkamp as the likely weapons dealer involved.⁴⁰

COVERT OPS IN SOMALIA

The war in Somalia dates back to deep U.S. involvement in the 1980s, where major oil concessions were awarded to four Western multinational petroleum giants: Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Philips petroleum. The infusion of Western “AID” provoked destabilization of Somalia, leading to the U.S. military invasion that culminated in the October 3, 1993 mission where scores of U.S. Special Operations Forces were killed when their Blackhawk helicopter was shot down over the capital city, Mogadishu. The mythology of U.S. involvement was indelibly inscribed in the popular consciousness through the Hollywood/Pentagon film Blackhawk Down. Part of the consistent propaganda on Africa is that “the U.S. does not want to get involved and potentially face another Somalia.” But the U.S. pullout of Somalia occurred in perfect synchronicity with the heightened military involvement in Rwanda (1994).

U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) did not cease Special Ops deployments in Somalia with the U.S. withdrawal and covert operations have proceeded on and off, with heightened activity through the late 1990’s. The Pentagon confirmed in November 2006 that SOCOM forces were in Somalia as of October “providing military advice to Ethiopian and Somali forces on the ground.” The U.S. Navy moved “additional forces” into waters off the Somali coast, where the Pentagon said they “conducted security missions, monitoring maritime traffic and intercepting and interrogating crew on suspicious ships.” These included the USS Ramage guided missile destroyer, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier, the USS Bunker Hill and USS Anzio guided missile cruisers, and the USS Ashland amphibious landing ship.⁴¹ On June 2, 2007, a U.S. Navy destroyer shelled northern Somalia. Somali media reported that News media reported that the strikes destroyed farms, flattened hilltops and killed or injured an unknown number of villagers.⁴²

The British Navy’s newest warship HMS Bulwark was also stationed off the Somali coast in early 2006. The HMS Bulwark deployed to the Indian Ocean on 9 January 2006 for the first live operation of this “unique Commando Assault ship” (as it is described by the British Navy).⁴³

However, sources in Kenya and Eritrea reported “snatch and grab” terrorist operations involving massacres and torture that were run by SOCOM forces inside Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. There are at least 52,000 U.S. special operations forces on active duty and reserve military worldwide, including SEALs, Green Berets and commando-style troops from the 10th Mountain Division and others.

At least three U.S. Navy guided missile destroyers were operating off Somalia in October and November 2007. The U.S.S. Porter, U.S.S. Arleigh Burke and U.S.S. James E. Williams were operating—sinking “pirate ships” and “terrorist” vessels—as part of the Combined Maritime Forces Task Force headquartered in Bahrain.⁴⁴

The establishment narrative is that Ethiopia invaded Somalia to displace Al-Qaeda terrorists and check the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, both of which are propaganda themes that misrepresent the reality of U.S. and allied military interventions.

Ethiopia is considered an essential partner of the U.S. in its “War on Terrorism” and Ethiopian bases have been used for attacks on Somalia. In 2003, the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division (SOCOM) completed a three-month program to train an Ethiopian army division in “counter-terrorism tactics”—code language for covert operations. Operations are coordinated through the Combined Joint Task Forces-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) base in Djibouti. In January 2004, SOCOM forces from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment replaced the 10th Mountain Division forces at a new base “Camp United” established at Hurso, northwest of Dire Dawa, near the border with Somalia. Since 2003, under the U.S. State Department-sponsored Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program, CJTF-HOA provided instruction to thousands of Ethiopian soldiers at a base in Legedadi. CJTF-HOA forces from the U.S Army’s 478th Civil Affairs Battalion also operated in Ethiopia (Somalia) in and around Dire Dawa, Galadi and Dolo Odo, among other areas.⁴⁵

Ethiopia seeks to control Somalia to gain access to a much-needed deepwater seaport. Ethiopia’s oil concessions are contiguous with the oil reserves in Sudan, Somalia, Kenya and Yemen. Hunt Oil, the Chinese National Petroleum Company and many others are active in Ethiopia.⁴⁶ Hunt’s $18-million refinery across the waters in Yemen was officially dedicated by then U.S. Vice-President G.H.W. Bush in April, 1986. In remarks during the event, Bush emphasized the critical value of supporting U.S. corporate efforts to develop and safeguard potential oil reserves in the region.⁴⁷

The U.S. military used and uses Ethiopian air bases modernized by infusions of millions of dollars of “AID” funds to launch attacks against Somalia. Ethiopia now has the largest standing army on the continent and this was achieved through the conversions of millions of dollars in “AID” to weapons and militarization; even “debt forgiveness”—where foreign “debt” was canceled—benefited the militarization of Ethiopia, and the same occurred in Uganda.See: Ituri: Covered in Blood (part VII), Human Rights Watch, July 2003. U.S. spy satellites were used provide intelligence to Ethiopian troops as they swept across the Oganden basin and Somalia. Presidents Bush and Zenawi both denied that the invasion was coordinated and well planned, and both denied the involvement of the U.S.

The Ethiopian government retained former U.S. Republican house majority leader Dick Armey as a lobbyist in Washington to whitewash the Ethiopian regimes’ crimes.⁴⁸

ETHIOPIA’S GENOCIDES

The Ogaden, Oromo and Anuak regions of Ethiopia have seen massive military occupation and state repression. The Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi has perpetrated mass starvation and scorched earth policy in the region. There has been very little international media coverage and most is favorable the Zenawi regime or pressing the upside-down stories about “relief” and “starvation” that serve the Western “humanitarian” business sector. The Ogaden basin is a bloodbath today. Applying the same legal standards as in Darfur, all three Ethiopian regions qualify as ongoing genocides against indigenous people.⁴⁹ Failure to apply the genocide standards constitutes genocide denial.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1778 (2007) on 25 September 2007 established the United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT). According to the UN’s October 2007 Expression Of Interest, “[i]n it’s Presidential Statement of 30 April 2007, the Security Council requested the Secretary General to ‘immediately begin appropriate contingency planning for a United Nations mission to Somalia’. At this early stage it is planned to have a UN logistics base at Mombassa, Kenya to support the main supply line from Mombassa to Kismayo, Mogadishu and Hobyo, which will serve as secondary logistics bases in Somalia. At this early stage the number and location of these sites is unknown, but it is envisaged that approximately 24,000 personnel may be required.”

Ethiopia’s war in Somalia has taxed the government drawing widespread criticism. The U.S. is pressing for an African Union mission as a proxy force to replace the Ethiopian troops and further U.S. interests. Mombasa, Kenya is a U.S. military port. The U.S. war in Somalia is ongoing. More than 100 U.S. military “trainers” supervised “combat training” of two Burundian “African Union” battalions (1700 troops) in Bujumbura, Burundi, in advance of their deployment in Somalia expected in November 2007. French military also provided training, while the U.S. and France both are providing logistical and telecommunications support. Burundian troops are also in Darfur.⁵⁰ On November 28, 2004, the Bush White House issued a document announcing a cooperative agreement with Burundi, Guyana and Liberia preventing the International Criminal Court from proceeding against U.S. personnel operating in these countries.⁵¹

In March 2007 the Pentagon deployed an additional 150 SOCOM Forces in Uganda. The troops were part of the Combined Joint Task Force Horn-of-Africa, an “anti-terrorist naval force” deployed around the Horn of Africa with support points in Bahrain and Djibouti. Ugandan sources divulged that the SOCOM troops would be dispersed “around the country” to “support UPDF troops” and “provide support to distribute humanitarian aid.” It was openly reported that the SOCOM are “possibly training the South Sudanese army, which has just signed an agreement for this with its Ugandan counterpart, strengthening Ugandan capacity to fight terrorism.” The U.S. military has also modernized the old Entebbe airport for UPDF operations, and the Entebbe airport supports a small but permanent U.S. military contingent.⁵²

It is believed that U.S. SOCOM troops are operating in blood-drenched Eastern Congo. Ugandan opposition sources have reported that SOCOM forces in UPDF uniforms have joined the more than 2000 Pentagon-trained UPDF forces sent by Museveni to Somalia. The UPDF troops operating in Somalia behind a “peacekeeping” propaganda front have been accused of widespread atrocities. More than 1000 people die daily in Eastern Congo where fighting since 1996 has claimed at least 7 million lives. The Democratic Republic of Congo has seen multiple genocide campaigns, and multiple genocide denials are ongoing.

SOCOM forces have been openly reported in Niger, where operations are billed as “humanitarian” and “human rights” training of Nigerien troops.⁵³ But the insurgency and “rebellion” by the Tuareg and Toubou nomads has always been about uranium and depopulation: Canadian and Chinese companies have recently gotten involved but Esso (Exxon), Japan and French corporations were exploiting the Agadez and Air regions in the 1970’s and 1980’s (at least), dumping radioactive sickness and social devastation on another indigenous population.⁵⁴ Niger is the poorest country in the world. Yet another genocide?

Exxon, Elf and Hunt Oil are in Niger for oil. Barrick Gold is also in Niger, and in Guniea, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mali; through their partnership with Anglo-Ashanti, Barrick is responsible for atrocities and plunder in eastern Congo. Directors of the G.H.W. Bush-connected Barrick Gold include former U.S. Senator Howard Baker (R-TN), whose wife, Nancy Kassebaum Baker, has been an outspoken advocate for immediate action on Darfur.

“I was in the Senate at the time of Rwanda,” said Kassebaum Baker at a speech in 2006 where discussed Darfur. Kassebaum Baker served as chairwoman of the Foreign Relation Committee’s Subcommittee on African Affairs. “We were all aghast at what was taking place there [Rwanda], but I must say no one really knew what to do about it,” Kassebaum Baker said.⁵⁵

The Bakers are on the advisory board for the nationalist think-tank Partnership for a Secure America—another policy-formulating-perception-management-force behind the “Save Darfur” movement—along with a stellar cast of corporate executives involved in war and plunder in Africa.⁵⁶ Most notable of these are Frank G. Wisner, Richard Holbroke, Anthony Lake, Thomas Pickering, Carla Hills and Sam Nunn. Wisner was also on the National Security Council under Clinton, along with the International Crisis Group (ICG) Special Advisor and ENOUGH co-chair John Prendergast. Wisner’s co-directors of the American International Group include: Marshall Cohen, a director of the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation; Clinton Cabinet members William Cohen and Richard Holbrooke; and Carla Hills, NAFTA negotiator and director of Chevron-Texaco and the ICG. Partnership for a Secure America advisory board members Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pickering, Hills, and Kassebaum Baker are all on the Board of Trustees for the ICG—International Crisis Group—the leading flak organization pressing the “Save Darfur” and Lord’s Resistance Army (Uganda) narratives.

DARFURISM

The Darfur region of western Sudan has been a hotbed of clandestine activities, gunrunning and indiscriminate violence for decades. The Cold War era saw countless insurgencies launched from the remote deserts of Darfur. Throughout the 1990s factions allied with or against Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo, Libya, Eritrea and the Central African Republic operated from bases in Darfur, and it was a regular landing strip for foreign military transport planes of mysterious origin.

In 1990, Chad’s President Idriss Déby launched a military blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrew President Hissan Habre; Déby then allied with his own tribe against the Sudan government. Sudanese rebels today have bases in Chad, and Chadian rebels have bases in Darfur, with Khartoum’s backing. When the regime of Ange-Félix Patassé collapsed in the Central African Republic in March 2003, soldiers fled to Darfur with their military equipment. Khartoum supported the West Nile Bank Front, a rebel army operating against Uganda from Eastern Congo, commanded by Taban Amin, the son of the infamous Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, who heads Uganda’s dreaded Internal Security Organization.

France is deeply involved in covert operations and genocide in Africa. Central Africa Republic (C.A.R.), run by General François Bozizé, is a major base of French defense and intelligence operations linked to security regimes in the bloody dictatorships of Republic of Congo, Togo, Cameroon and Gabon, and France backs guerilla groups committing atrocities in Chad, Sudan, DR-Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. C.A.R. is also a conduit for blood diamonds, and the back-up for France’s nuclear policy, today heavily reliant on uranium exploitation in Niger: C.A.R. reportedly has massive uranium reserves. Like oil-cursed Equatorial Guinea, C.A.R. is also a bloodbath, completely off the international media screen.⁵⁷

Darfur is another epicenter of the modern-day international geopolitical scramble for Africa’s resources. Conflict in Darfur escalated in 2003 in parallel with negotiations “ending” the south Sudan war. The U.S.-backed insurgency by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the guerilla force that fought the northern Khartoum government for 20 years, shifted to Darfur, even as the G.W. Bush government allied with Khartoum in the U.S. led “War on Terrorism.” The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)—one of some twenty-seven rebel factions mushrooming in Darfur—is allied with the SPLA and supported from Uganda. Andrew Natsios, former USAID chief and now U.S. envoy to Sudan, said on October 6, 2007 that the atmosphere between the governments of north and south Sudan “had become poisonous.” This is no surprise given the magnitude of the resource war in Sudan and the involvement of international interests, but the investigation should center on the involvement and activities of USAID officials Andrew Natsios, Roger Winter and Jendayi Frazer.

Roger Winter, USAID chief in Khartoum today, is directly linked to the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army and U.S. military campaign that destabilized Rwanda and decapitated the leadership of Rwanda and Burundi. USAID’s affiliations with the Department of Defense are now openly advertised with the propaganda peddling AFRICOM—the Pentagon’s new Africa Command. AFRICOM combines U.S. CENTCOM, PACIFICOM and EUCOM operations in Africa; it is nothing new, merely the consolidation and expansion of widespread and ongoing involvement.⁵⁸

Darfur is reported to have the fourth largest copper and third largest uranium deposits in the world.⁵⁹ Darfur produces two-thirds of the world’s best quality gum Arabic—a major ingredient in Coke and Pepsi. Contiguous petroleum reserves are driving warfare from the Red Sea, through Darfur, to the Great Lakes of Central Africa. Private military companies operate alongside petroleum contractors and “humanitarian” agencies. Sudan is China’s fourth biggest supplier of imported oil, and U.S. companies controlling the pipelines in Chad and Uganda seek to displace China through the U.S. military alliance with “frontline” states hostile to Sudan: Uganda, Chad and Ethiopia.

There are claims in the Arab community that Israel provides military training to Darfur rebels from bases in Eritrea, but insiders in Eritrea dispute this. Israel has a deep history of intelligence and military relations with both Eritrea and Ethiopia, and Israel reportedly has a naval and air base on Eritrea’s Dahlak and Fatma islands, from which German-made Dolphin-class submarines patrol the Red Sea with long-range nuclear cruise missiles.⁶⁰ Eritrea reportedly serves as Israel’s outpost for spying on enemies Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Sudan.⁶¹ Africa Research Bulletin in 1998 reported an Israeli base in Eritrea’s Mahal Agar Mountains.⁶² Israel has clearly strengthened ties with the regime in Chad, from which more weapons and troops penetrate Darfur. The refugee camps have become increasingly militarized. There are reports that Israeli and U.S. military and intelligence operate from within refugee camps in Darfur. Israel is all over the Sahara, from Burkina Faso to Ethiopia and Uganda. Israel’s clandestine actions are partly funded by Israeli-American diamond magnates involved in Angola, Sierra Leone, C.A.R. and Congo, especially Dan Gertler (G.W. Bush’s unofficial Ambassador to Congo), Beny Steinmetz, Nir Livnat, Lev Leviev and Maurice Tempelsman.⁶³

African Union (AU) forces in Darfur include Nigerian and Rwandan troops responsible for atrocities in their own countries. Ethiopia has committed 5000 troops for a UN force in Darfur. AU troops receive military-logistic support from NATO, and are widely hated. Early in October 2007, SLA rebels attacked an AU base killing ten troops. In a subsequent editorial sympathetic to rebel factions Smith College English professor Eric Reeves espoused the tired rhetoric of “Khartoum’s genocidal counter-insurgency war in Darfur,” a position counterproductive to any peaceful settlement.⁶⁴ To minimize the damage this rebel attack has done to their credibility Reeves and other “Save Darfur” advocates cast doubt about the rebels’ identities and mischaracterized the SLA attackers as “rogue commanders.” However, there is near unanimous agreement, internationally, that rebels are “out of control,” committing widespread rape and plundering with impunity, just as the SPLA did in South Sudan for over a decade.

Debunking the claims of a “genocide against blacks” or an “Islamic holy-war” against Christians, Darfur’s Arab and black African tribes have intermarried for centuries, and nearly everyone is Muslim. The “Save Darfur” campaign is deeply aligned with Jewish and Christian faith-based organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel. These groups have relentlessly campaigned for Western military action, demonizing both Sudan and China, but they have never addressed Western military involvement—backing factions on all sides.

Christian and Jewish involvement in the “Save Darfur” campaign centers on a long-running but deeply manipulative narrative about slavery and genocide in South Sudan. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum furthered the establishment narrative about Darfur in keeping with the genocide theme; no one ever examines the interests behind the Holocaust Memorial Museum (e.g. Bob Dole), it is merely some apolitical institution with the championing of supposed “universal” human rights of all people everywhere as its raison d’etre. The new political and propaganda doctrine that uses “genocide” as a political tool is morally ambiguous, it attacks the crimes of some and passes over the crimes of others. It uses as its universal principle the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its complementary covenants and proclamations. On the one hand, however, this involves genocide inflation, and on the other hand genocide denial. But the USA—with good Christian and Jewish foot soldiers—is always the final arbitrator: global cop, judge, jury, executioner, surgeon and savior all in one.

Christian organizations involved in Sudan for years include Servant’s Heart and Christian Solidarity International. On Servant’s Heart’s “Board of Reference” is British Baroness Caroline Cox, who is also closely affiliated with Christian Solidarity International (CSI)—one of the main Christian allies of the SPLM/A war in southern Sudan. The propaganda system advocates in favor of the “rebels” in Darfur using a handful of techniques developed in their propaganda campaign behind the “rebels” in South Sudan. Rebels are supported partly by never mentioning them, partly by decrying abuses against them, partly by providing sympathetic one-sided accounts of Khartoum government attacks, and partly by defending their excesses if and when—infrequently—the rebel abuses come to light.⁶⁵

Christian Solidarity International (CSI) in 2006 issued press releases claiming that the Lebanese organization Hezbollah “is using Christian villages to shield its military operations in violation of international law.”⁶⁶ These reports appear to be fabrications to begin with and the CSI accusation a projection of their own involvement with the SPLA in South Sudan, where the SPLA for over a decade used the civilian population as human shields, used the Western AID apparatus (Operation Lifeline Sudan) as cover for military support, and used food as a weapon. If Hezbollah did this during the recent U.S.-Israeli invasion they [Hezbollah] certainly learned it by studying SPLA (CSI) tactics in Sudan. Thus we have twisted triple-standards where the establishment propaganda accuses Hezbollah of violating international law, but the SPLM/A—and the “rebel” groups in Darfur—while doing exactly the same thing, are never anything but poor, defenseless Christians under attack in a “genocidal counter-insurgency” run out of Khartoum government.⁶⁵

Who are the rebels in Darfur? Where do they get new uniforms and modern weapons? With the establishment propaganda on Rwanda and the invading Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army from 1990-1994, all abuses were covered up, the government of Juvenal Habyarimana was blamed for everything, and the “rebels”—backed by Washington, partnered with the Pentagon—were never exposed for atrocities and scorched earth attacks. It was the same with the establishment propaganda that covered for the SPLA: their role in committing and provoking atrocities in South Sudan from 1983 to 2003 has been greatly misrepresented and mischaracterized by virtually every popular source cited in the western press. No one has pressed this line more than Dr. Eric Reeves, the Smith College English professor and most widely cited “expert” behind the establishment narrative to “Save Darfur.”⁶⁷

There is growing dissent within the “Save Darfur” movement as more supporters question its motivations and the links to Israel. “Save Darfur” leaders have been replaced after complaints surfaced about expenditures of funds. Many rebel leaders reportedly receive tens of thousands of dollars monthly, and rebels emboldened by the “Save Darfur” movement commit crimes with impunity. There is a growing demand to probe the accounts of “Save Darfur” to find out how the tens of millions collected are being spent due to allegations of arms-deals and bribery—rebel leaders provided with five-star hotel accommodations, prostitutes and sex parties.⁶⁸

The French “humanitarian” charity NGO Zoe’s Ark (L’Arche de Zoé) involved in Chad and Darfur is under investigation by the United Nations, France and Chad for trafficking in black children in the widely under-reported “L’Arche de Zoé affair.” Chadian President Idriss Déby is under attack for alleging “pedophilia” and “organ trafficking” and for arresting seventeen Europeans intercepted at an airport in Chad attempting to depart to France with 103 “Darfur orphans” aged six to ten. The Zoe’s Ark project began fundraising April 28, 2007 to “evacuate 10,000 orphans facing certain death” to France and the United States. Some 300 European’s paid 2000 Euros ($3450) each as “donations” toward logistics costs to receive an orphan. UNHCR determined the children “were living with their families in communities”—they were neither from Darfur nor were they orphans—and their health was not a serious concern.⁶⁹ The NGO was reportedly provided logistical support by the French military, and they had made numerous trips to villages on the Darfur border offering enticements and taking children.⁷⁰ Outraged Chadians on the border with Sudan had already been questioning the motives of scores of foreign aid groups that work with Darfur refugees.⁶⁹ The United Nations and other relief organizations initially denied all knowledge of the Zoe’s Ark NGO but the NGO was registered as an international charity with the UN Mission in Sudan. The Zoe’s Ark website lists 800,000 children “in mortal danger today who must be saved now!”

Humanitarian relief is an industry, with corporate directors, big salaries, career advancement, permanent infrastructure in white economies but mobile, structurally nebulous projects in black countries that entrench structural violence and perpetuate dependence and suffering. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, the outspoken advocate for Congo and Darfur, is also a Director Emeriti for the International Medical Corps (IMC), a “humanitarian” NGO with operations in Darfur, South Sudan, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierre Leone—all the “problem” countries involved in the transcontinental warfare and then some—and 14 countries outside Africa, including the U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. Total revenue to IMC in 2005 was $101,727,119.

Amongst the (many) large IMC donors for 2005 and 2006 were numerous Christian and Jewish organizations, charities and missionary affiliates, the Christian right organization euphemistically named Bread for the World (Bob Dole, Donald Payne, David Beckman, Leon Panetta links), and the American Jewish World Service, Pfizer, BP, American Friends Service Committee, Chevron, Trammel Crow (affiliated with Barrick Gold directors), Coca Cola, World Food Program (Bob Dole link), USAID, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

“Save Darfur” is today the rallying cry for a broad coalition of special interests. Advocacy groups—from the local Massachusetts Congregation B’Nai Israel chapter to the International Crises Group and USAID—have fueled the conflict through a relentless, but selective, public relations campaign that disingenuously serves a narrow policy agenda. These interests offer no opportunity for corrective analyses, but stubbornly press their agenda, and they are widely criticized for inflaming tensions in Darfur. This is what we might call Darfurism.

The latest Lockheed Martin contract with the United Nations illustrates the latest stage in the transformation of international conflict whereby military-industrial giants are openly engaged, rather than clandestinely, as has been previously the case. This development parallels the rise of Darfurism— a mass movement in the West designed to channel popular sympathy and agitate people to act on a cause they know nothing about, but think they do. Darfurism is a pathological mix of fear, patriotism, social immaturity, opportunism and unconsciousness akin to fascism. Under the current climate of apathy, fear and public opinion, anything goes, and warfare involves humanitarian agencies as active players in the mix. Like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum they are seen as neutral, described as apolitical, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The United Nations and African Union serve as pseudo-privatized military forces backing a hegemonic, corporate, political and economic agenda. Someone who produces both the danger and, at a price, the shield against it is a racketeer.⁷¹ The future has arrived, and it uses human rights institutions, the label of genocide and accusations of atrocities, and the ever-expanding international AID and charity industry—operating out of pure profit motives—as pivotal elements in the Western portfolio of soft and hard weapons used to further the prerogatives of Empire and clear the land for absolute corporate exploitation. ~

More information:

EXPOSE UGANDA’S GENOCIDE

CEGUN: Campaign to Stop Genocide in Uganda Now

UNIGHT: FOR THE CHILDREN OF UGANDA

FRIENDS OF THE CONGO

ANUAK JUSTICE COUNCIL

1. Maurice Tempelsman chairs the International Advisory Council at the Harvard AIDS Institute (HAI) of the School of Public Health; his involvement in covert actions and interventions flags this program as cover for clandestine biowarfare. HAI partners with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program (USMHRP), a program whose said purpose is to develop vaccines and AIDS prevention for U.S. Military servicemen.
2. Malaria Vaccine.
3. Dulue Mbachu, “Africa’s Unfolding Desert War,” ISN Security Watch, July 11, 2007.
4. “Tourist Killings in Buhoma,” Gorilla Journal, June 18, 1999.
5. See the 1885 map before partition and after.
6. Abu Iskandar as-Sudani, Darfur: The New American French Protectorate, translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr from Al-Hadaf, Damascus, No.1365, May 2005, pp. 22-25.
7. Pratap Chatterjee, “Darfur Diplomacy: Enter the Contractors,” CorpWatch, 21 October 2004.
8. FIFTH COMMITTEE CONCLUDES CONSIDERATION OF FINANCING OF UN MISSION IN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO, Press Release GA/AB/3499, United Nations, 12/3/2002.
9. Daher International
10. Statistics generated by United Nations bodies and reported by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
11. See: National Oil Corporation of Kenya and Beicip-Franlab
12. “Lundin Petroleum Signs Production-sharing Contract with Kenya,” Alexander’s Gas & Oil Connections, June 10, 2007.
13. See: Livelihoods & Vulnerabilities Study Gambella Region of Ethiopia, UNICEF, January 2006.
14. See: Michael Maren, The Road To Hell: The Ravaging Affects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, 1996.
15. From the BSP web site: “As biometrics becomes an increasingly important component of physical and logical security systems there is a need for an authoritative and regularly updated reference and data base on virtually all aspects of biometrics and identity assurance.”
16. See e.g. “Uprooted and Forgotten: Impunity and Human Rights Abuses in Northern Uganda,” Human Rights Watch, Vol. 17, No. 12a, September 2005.
17. David M. Rosen, “Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 109, Issue 2, 2007, p: 299.
18. See: Keith Harmon Snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007; and “Effacer le Tableau: Rapport de la mission internationale de recherche surles crimes commis, en violation du droit international, contre les Pygmées bambuti dans l’est de la République démocratique du Congo,” Minority Rights Group International, ISBN 1904584217, July 2004.
19. Private interviews, eyewitnesses, October 2007.
20. Karen Parker, “Forced Displacement in Northern Uganda,” United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights.
21. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999.
22. See: Tullow, Hardman and Heritage Oil concessions maps
23. keith harmon snow & Georgianne Nienaber, “Are USAID Gorilla Conservation Funds Being Used for Covert Operations in Central Africa?” Z Magazine Online (ZNET) September 19, 2007.
24. Angelo Izama, “How badly did Libya want the Kenya-Uganda oil pipeline deal?” Alexander’s Gas and Oil Connections, Vol. 11, Issue 12, November 24, 2006.
25. Ralph G. Kershaw, “Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: International Justice According to Washington,” Covert Action Quarterly, No. 74, Fall 2002.
26. Jeevan Vasagar, “Uganda hires PR agency to buff up its image,” The Guardian, May 21, 2005.
27. Private interview, Eastern Congo, March 2007.
28. See: Internal Displacement
29. “Are the Internally Displaced Persons in Rwanda?” ReliefWeb, July 2003.
30. The Rwandan Patriotic Army was renamed the Rwanda Defense Forces (circa 2000?).
31. “Uganda: Kampala-Kigali Oil Pipeline Estimated at $ 193.6 Million,” 16 October 2007, Rwanda News Agency.
32. Laton McCartney, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story, Simon & Schuster, 1988.
33. SAIC information is taken from their Annual Reports, Proxy Statements, and web site.
34. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellen Press, 1999: 358.
35. Keith Harmon Snow and Georgianne Nienaber: “Gorillas ‘Executed’ Stories front for Privatization and Militarization of Congo Parks, Truth of Depopulation Ignored,” ZNET, August 3, 2007; and “King Kong: The Map, The Mad Scientist, and the Mayor.”
36. “Rwanda’s Karisimbi Antenna to Cost USD 2.3 Million,” New Times (Rwanda), 2007.
37. David Barouski, “Laurent Nkundabatware, His Rwandan Allies and the Ex-ANC Mutiny: Chronic Barriers to Lasting Peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” ZNET, February 2007.
38. “Rwanda documentary to open US Black gala,” Rwanda Cinema Center, January 2007.
39. Mathew Russel Lee, “At UN, Darfur No-Bid Contract Spun by UK, Chad and Somalia Preemptively Bid Out,” Inner City Press, October 24, 2007.
40. See, e.g., Wayne Madsen, “The CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division (CPD) and British intelligence have evidence that then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney lost three nuclear weapons in 1991,” Madsen Report, May 2, 2007; Alexander Cockburn, “Broken Arrows and Iran,” Counterpunch, August 3, 2005.
41. Pauline Jelenek, “U.S. special forces in Somalia,” Associated Press, November 1, 2007.
42. Stephanie McCrummen, “U.S. Warship Fires Missiles at Fighters in Somalia,” Washington Post, June 3, 2007.
43. “HMS Bulwark welcomed home after Lebanon operations,” defense news, 15 August 2006.
44. “U.S. Gunships Battle Pirates Who Seized Ships Off Somalia, Mogadishu,” Fox News, October 30, 2007.
45. keith harmon snow, “State Terror Against Indigenous People in Ethiopia: Another Secret War for Oil,” World War Four Report, April 2004.
46. See: keith harmon snow, “Today is the Day of Killing Anuaks,” Genocide Watch and Survivor’s Rights International Report, February 25, 2004.
47. Mark Fineman, “The Oil Factor in Somalia,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1993.
48. Xan Rice, “US military ‘used Ethiopian base’ to attack Somali militants,” Guardian Unlimited, February 23, 2007.
49. Livelihoods and Vulnerabilities Study, Gambella Region of Ethiopia, UNICEF report, December 13, 2006.
50. “Burundi: Troops Ready for Deployment in Somalia,” www.allafrica.com, October 5, 2007.
51. “Waiving Prohibition on United States Military Assistance with Respect to Burundi, Guyana, and Liberia, Presidential Determination” No. 2005–08 of November 29, 2004, The White House.
52. “Uganda: American Advisors Being Deployed,” Indian Ocean Newsletter, No. 1209, March 3, 2007.
53. Robert Kaplan, “America’s African Rifles,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2005; Dulue Mbachu, “Africa’s Unfolding Desert War,” ISN Security Watch, July 11, 2007.
54. See e.g.: Mouvement des Nigeriens Pour la Justice; James Finch, “Uranium Mining in Niger at Risk,” The Conservative Voice, July 20, 2007; Sven Ridley-Wordich, “Niger’s Uranium and Oil Sector Threatened by Rebels,” Resource Investor, July 9, 2007; “Uranium prices fall again, conflict in Niger,” National Post, July 9, 2007; “Niger Rebels Pressure Uranium Miners,” The Conservative Voice, July 9, 2007; “Niger rebels attack power plant in uranium area,” Reuters, July 5, 2007.
55. Bill Blankenship, “Ex-senator speaks out: Kassebaum Baker touches on politics of Sudan, Iraq,” The Capital-Journal, October 16, 2006.
56. See: “DARFUR ACTION NOW, Partnership for a Secure America.”
57. Johann Hari, “Inside France’s Secret War,” The Independent, October 5, 2007.
58. AFRICOM
59. Abu Iskandar as-Sudani, “Darfur: The New American French Protectorate,” translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr from Al-Hadaf, Damascus, No.1365, May 2005, pp. 22-25 ; see also : keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Covert Ops in Somalia? The New, Old Humanitarian Warfare in Africa,” Global Research, February 2007.
60. See: “Close intelligence relations between Israel and Ethiopia, Eritrea
,” June 26, 1998, Arabicnews.com; “Israel to acquire two more German Submarines,” IMRA Newsletter, December 22, 2004.; Muhammed Salahuddin, “How Israel Casts Its Dark Shadow Over Horn of Africa,” Arab News, August 31, 2006.
61. Muhammed Salahuddin, “How Israel Casts Its Dark Shadow Over Horn of Africa,” Arab News, August 31, 2006.
62. Africa Research Bulletin, Vol. 35, Issue 6, p. 13131-13166, June 1-30, 1998.
63. keith harmon snow and Rick Hines, “Blood Diamond: Doublethink and Deception Over Those Worthless Little Rocks of Desire,” Z Magazine, June & July 2007.
64. Eric Reeves, “Darfur’s Bitter Ironies,” Guardian Online, October 4, 2007.
65. See: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Covert Ops in Somalia? The New, Old Humanitarian Warfare in Africa,” Global Research, February 2007 and revised for allthingspass, April 2007.
66. “Hezbollah is Using Christian Villages to Shield its Military Operations in Violation of International Law,” Christian Solidarity International, 1 August 2006.
67. See keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Covert Ops in Somalia? The New Old Humanitarian Warfare in Africa” and, e.g. “SPLA Offensive Overwhelms Muslim Forces,” excerpted from Frontline Fellowship News, 197, Edition 2.
68. Private communication, October 2007. See also, e.g.: “Gaddafi, the Peacemaker in Chad and Darfur.”
69. Stephanie Hancock, “Most Chad Case Children Not Orphans,” Reuters, November 1, 2007.
70. “CHAD: French NGO Accused of Trafficking Children,” IRIN News, October 26, 2007; “Chad: Government Accused of Hypocrisy in Zoe’s Ark Affair,” IRIN News, November 8, 2007; Guillemette Faure, “Trafic d’enfants ou pieds nickelés de l’humanitaire?,” October 26, 2007, Anne Else, “Untangling the Zoe’s Ark Affair,” Anne Else’s Letter from Elsewhere, November 6, 2007.
71. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” In Bringing the State Back In, Peter Evans et al.

The Darfur region of western Sudan has been a hotbed of clandestine activities, gunrunning and indiscriminate violence for decades.

“The humanitarian tragedy in Darfur revolves around natural resources… Given current realities, no intervention in Darfur will proceed, and if it did it would fail.”

So opined the authors of the September 2006 OPED “Keeping Peacekeepers out of Darfur” [GN1](DHG, 9/15/06). Now, over a year later, the situation in Sudan is grimmer than ever, the Darfur conflict remains widely mischaracterized, and many of the predictions of that OPED have come true. Meanwhile, the “Save Darfur” advocates pressing military intervention in Darfur as a “humanitarian” gesture have escalated pressure in the face of mounting failures, including allegations that millions of “Save Darfur” dollars fundraised on a sympathy for victims platform have been misappropriated.

The Darfur region of western Sudan has been a hotbed of clandestine activities, gunrunning and indiscriminate violence for decades. The Cold War era saw countless insurgencies launched from the remote deserts of Darfur. Throughout the 1990s, factions allied with or against Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo, Libya, Eritrea and the Central African Republic operated from bases in Darfur, and it was a regular landing strip for foreign military transport planes of mysterious origin. In 1990, Chad’s Idriss Deby launched a military blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrew President Hissan Habre; Deby then allied with his own ethnic group against the Sudan government. Sudanese rebels today have bases in Chad, and Chadian rebels have bases in Darfur, with Khartoum’s backing.[GN2] When the regime of Ange-Félix Patassé collapsed in the Central African Republic in March 2003, soldiers fled to Darfur with their military equipment. Khartoum supported the West Nile Bank Front, a rebel army operating against Uganda from Eastern Congo, commanded by Taban Amin, the son of the infamous Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, who heads Uganda’s dreaded Internal Security Organization. Darfur is the epicenter of a modern-day international geopolitical scramble for Africa’s resources.

Conflict in Darfur escalated in 2003 after in parallel with negotiations “ending” the south Sudan war. The U.S.-backed insurgency by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the guerrilla force that fought the northern Khartoum government for 20 years, shifted to Darfur, even as the G.W. Bush government allied with Khartoum in the U.S. led “war on terror.” The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)—one of some 27 rebel factions mushrooming in Darfur—is allied with the SPLA and supported from Uganda. Andrew Natsios, former USAID chief and now US envoy to Sudan, said on October 6, 2007 that the atmosphere between the governments of north and south Sudan “had become poisonous.” This is no surprise given the magnitude of the resource war in Sudan and the involvement of international interests.

Darfur is reported to have the fourth largest copper and third largest uranium deposits in the world. Darfur produces two-thirds of the world’s best quality gum Arabic—a major ingredient in Coke and Pepsi. Contiguous petroleum reserves are driving warfare from the Red Sea, through Darfur, to the Great Lakes of Central Africa. Private military companies operate alongside petroleum contractors and “humanitarian” agencies. Sudan is China’s fourth biggest supplier of imported oil, and U.S. companies controlling the pipelines in Chad and Uganda seek to displace China through the US military alliance with “frontline” states hostile to Sudan: Uganda, Chad and Ethiopia.

Israel reportedly provides military training to Darfur rebels from bases in Eritrea, and has strengthened ties with the regime in Chad, from which more weapons and troops penetrate Darfur. The refugee camps have become increasingly militarized. There are reports that Israeli military intelligence operates from within the camps, as does U.S intelligence. Eritrea is about to explode into yet another war with Ethiopia.

African Union (AU) forces in Darfur include Nigerian and Rwandan troops responsible for atrocities in their own countries. While committing 5000 troops for a UN force in Darfur, Ethiopia is perpetrating genocidal atrocities in Somalia, and against Ethiopians in the Ogaden, Oromo and Anuak regions. Uganda has 2000 U.S.-trained troops in Somalia, also committing massive atrocities, and the genocide against the Acholi people in northern Uganda proceeds out of sight. Ethiopia is the largest recipient of U.S. “Aid” in Africa, with Rwanda and Uganda close on its heals. France is deeply committed to the Anglo-American strategy, which will benefit Total Oil Corp.

AU troops receive military-logistic support from NATO, and are widely hated. Early in October 2007, SLA rebels attacked an AU base killing ten troops. In a subsequent editorial sympathetic to rebel factions (“Darfur’s Bitter Ironies,” Guardian Online, 10/4/07), Smith College English professor Eric Reeves espoused the tired rhetoric of “Khartoum’s genocidal counter-insurgency war in Darfur,” a position counterproductive to any peaceful settlement. To minimize the damage this rebel attack has done to their credibility, Reeves and other “Save Darfur” advocates cast doubt about the rebels’ identities and mischaracterized the SLA attackers as “rogue commanders.” However, there is near unanimous agreement, internationally, that rebels are “out of control,” committing widespread rape and plundering with impunity, just as the SPLA did in South Sudan for over a decade.

Debunking the claims of a “genocide against blacks” or an “Islamic holy-war” against Christians, Darfur’s Arab and black African ethnic groups have intermarried for centuries, and nearly everyone is Muslim. The “Save Darfur” campaign is deeply aligned with Jewish and Christian faith-based organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel. These groups have relentlessly campaigned for Western military action, demonizing both Sudan and China, but they have never addressed Western military involvement—backing factions on all sides. By mobilizing constituencies sympathetic to the “genocide” label and the cries of “never again” they do a grave disservice to the cause of human rights.

There is growing dissent within the “Save Darfur” movement as more supporters question its motivations and the Jewish-Israeli link. “Save Darfur” leaders have been replaced after complaints surfaced about expenditures of funds. Many rebel leaders reportedly receive tens of thousands of dollars monthly, and rebels emboldened by the “Save Darfur” movement commit crimes with impunity. There is a growing demand to probe the accounts of “Save Darfur” to find out how the tens of millions collected are being spent due to allegations of arms-deals and bribery—rebel leaders provided with five-star hotel accommodations, prostitutes and sex parties.

“Save Darfur” is today the rallying cry for a broad coalition of special interests. Advocacy groups—from the local Massachusetts Congregation B’Nai Israel chapter to the International Crises Group and USAID—have fueled the conflict through a relentless, but selective, public relations campaign that disingenuously serves a narrow policy agenda. These interests offer no opportunity for corrective analyses, but stubbornly press their agenda, and they are widely criticized for inflaming tensions in Darfur. Rhetoric, aggression and propaganda do not make a strong foreign policy, and the African people suffering from this brutal international conflict involving China, Saudi Arabia, France, Britain, Canada, the United States and Israel cannot eat good intentions foolishly delivered under the banners of “humanitarian aid” and a poorly cloaked militarism.

The West is desperate to deploy a “robust peacekeeping” mission in Darfur, to press the Western agenda, but United Nations forces will only deepen the chaos. The UN forces will cost billions of dollars and will achieve nothing positive. Indeed, the results will be disastrous, creating another Iraq and Afghanistan—only increasing the chaos and devastation already apparent. The United States is hated for this kind of aggression and posturing, and the U.S. economy will continue to suffer.

This article was first published at Black Agenda Report.

Why is mass death the cause of indignation and confrontation in Sudan, but exponentially more massive carnage in Congo unworthy of mention? The answer is simple: in Sudan, the US has a geopolitical nemesis to confront: Arabs, and their Chinese business partners. In the Congo, it is US allies and European and American corporate interests that benefit from the slaughter. Therefore, despite five million skeletons lying in the ground, there is no call to arms from the American government. It is they who set the genocidal Congolese machine in motion.

Active US Passivity

In 1994, Rwanda was on the brink. The Hutu majority, which had for a century been oppressed by Tutsi surrogates for European colonialists, feared that another massacre of their kin was imminent. There had been many massacres of Hutus, before, in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi, also under minority Tutsi control. Pent-up hysteria exploded in an orgy of violence that claimed the lives of as many as 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus that did not support the genocide.

The US did nothing to interfere, because they had two actors in the game. Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni was now the Americans’ guy in central Africa. Tutsi Rwandan exiles, headed by Paul Kagame, were an integral part of Museveni’s army. As the genocide began, Kagame’s forces launched an offensive from Uganda into Rwanda. It did not halt the massacre of Tutsis, but succeeded in driving the disorganized Hutus into neighboring Congo. The Americans now had another player in the African game: the new head of the Rwandan Tutsi-dominated state, Paul Kagame. His forces then invaded eastern Congo, chasing the fleeing Hutus.

The eastern Congo was up for grabs, and everybody grabbed some.

All hell broke loose. President Mobutu Sese Seko, America’s man in the Congo, then called Zaire, was terminally ill. He fled and died in exile in 1997. The eastern Congo was now up for grabs, and everybody grabbed some. Eastern Congo is one of the most minerally rich places on Earth, an extractors’ paradise. According to the CIA’s “Factbook,” the DRC abounds with “cobalt, copper, niobium, tantalum, petroleum, industrial and gem diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, manganese, tin, uranium, coal, hydropower, timber.” All of these resources are exploited by European and American corporations that maintain their own mercenary armies to guard the extraction fields. For generations they have run their patches of Congolese land like governments, with the support of France, Belgium, the United States and other powers. The so-called civil war effectively gave them full autonomy in the wake of Mobutu’s corrupt demise, as the power of the central government in Kinshasa, crumbled. Mass carnage raged around them, but did not interrupt the extraction process.

Geopolitical Crimes

In the thirteen years since Rwandan Tutsi Paul Kagame’s forces — surrogates for the U.S. puppet president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni — invaded the eastern Congo, possibly five million people have died. President Bill Clinton, the man who stood aside while the Rwandan genocide took place, then presided over a far bigger mass murder in Congo. He has apologized for only one. In a visit to Kigali, capital of Rwanda, Clinton said:

“We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred.”

But what occurred is not over. The bloodshed spread rapidly to eastern Congo, unleashed by U.S. surrogate forces, and continues to this day. Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, has served US imperial ambitions well. He supported the US invasion of Iraq, and continues to destabilize Congo with his forces in the eastern region. Multinational corporations, of course, operate their own airstrips and communications networks. Their patches of Congo proceed like business as usual, while the death toll mounts by millions among the people, who are overrun by militias of various ethnicities and Kagame’s Rwandan army.

A quarter million people have died in Darfur, compared to five million in Congo.

The Congolese genocide is not part of the American political discussion. When Africa is mentioned at all, it is about Darfur. A quarter million people have died there, compared to five million in Congo. Both holocausts are crimes against humanity, but only the smaller one, Darfur, is a fit subject for inclusion in the US political debate. During the June 3 CNN Democratic debate, moderator Wolf Blitzer demanded that the candidates “raise their hands” if they supported the imposition of a no-fly zone in Darfur — an act of war against the government in Khartoum according to international law. Only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and former Senator Mike Gravel declined to endorse the violation of Sudanese sovereignty. In the following Republican debate, the consensus was almost unanimous, except for Rep. Ron Paul: impose a no-fly regime over the western Sudan.

Imperial Chess Game

The Congressional Black Caucus follows the same script as Wolf Blitzer. Members have lobbied and demonstrated against the Sudanese regime, to the applause of the corporate press. But they have never said a word, as a body, about the hellacious carnage in Congo. It is a taboo subject, too close to “vital American interests.” But the Sudanese conflict is fair game, and so the Black Caucus joins in the general mob attack. They make common cause with imperial ambitions in the Horn of Africa, while ignoring the murder of millions in central Africa.

“The Black Caucus makes common cause with imperial ambitions in the Horn of Africa.”

The preferred narrative of Darfur fits nicely with that of the Israeli lobby in the United States. Although all the antagonists are Black Africans and Muslims, the aggressors are classified as “Arabs.” A regional inter-African, inter-Muslim conflict is made to appear as part of the “clash of civilizations” — the new Cold War. The proof is that the Chinese are partners with the Khartoum regime, having engaged in oil contracts. The evil Chinese menace threatens American interests, and it follows that any country that deals with the Chinese is involved in an anti-American conspiracy. If they are Arabs (although black as my shoe), then the narrative is complete. Arabs have collaborated with Chinese to kill Africans just as black as themselves. Let’s declare war on them, beginning with a no-fly zone that violates their sovereignty.

The scenario is the same as Iraq: take control of their skies and the land beneath it, and bomb at will. Remove any semblance of government authority, under the guise of ending genocide. Extend the reach of the US military’s paws in the Sahel region. The African Union has tried mightily to put an effective peace-keeping force on the ground in Darfur, but the United States and the Europeans refused to supply the logistical forces that are necessary; the C-130s to reinforce and supply the African troops. The Americans and Europeans held out until the African contingent was at the breaking point, and then forced through the UN Security Council a plan to place 26,000 US and European-led soldiers on the ground. Another piece of Africa will pass into foreign hands.

Darfur has been made into a stage-set of anti-Arab conflict, which perfectly suits the pro-Israel lobby in the US. Congo, where far more people have died, remains a gargantuan killing field, uncovered by the corporate media and ignored by the Congressional Black Caucus and the array of Democratic presidential candidates. Genocide depends on who is doing the killing, apparently.

In their paper, published in The European Journal of Public Health (EJPH), the researchers, Rony Blum, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter in Jerusalem and Gregory H. Stanton in Fredericksburg, VA, write that the term “ethnic cleansing” emerged politically with Slobodan Milošević to what he deemed the Kosovar Albanians’ violence against Serbs. Blum et al. lament the creeping prominence “ethnic cleansing” has since gained, especially in diplomatic and legal language, noting that it has even entered the lexicon of the United Nations.

The problem is that, unlike “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” has no legally recognized status and no legal obligations.

The researchers draw a historical link to such phrases as Judenrein (used by Nazis to refer to an area without Jews; rein means “pure, clean” in German). “The genocides of the past century have shown the propagation of an in-group exterminatory exclusivity based upon myths of hygiene or purity, and dehumanization of the other group, are warning signs of imminent genocide.”² To which I would append “or a genocide in perpetration.”

Some experts point to a vagueness over what “ethnic cleansing” is. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, author of Ethnic Cleansing, wrote that “ethnic cleansing”

defies easy definition. At one end it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide. At the most general level, however, ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an ‘undesirable’ population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these.³

The definitional murkiness plays into the hands of genocidaires. Blum et al. argue, “The role of ‘reverse jargon’ in reversing ordinary social ethics has been crucial to the genocidal agenda of the perpetrators and to sustaining in-group self-esteem. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ ‘normalizes’ the delusion that massacres are measures to promote ‘hygiene.’”⁴

The researchers identify avoidance of the term “genocide” as a pretext for inaction.⁵ They speculate that earlier labeling as “genocide” may have saved tens of thousands of lives in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Darfur.

Herein lies a criticism of the study by Blum et al. While the etymology of the term “ethnic cleansing” and its misuse demand attention and action, the examples provided in the paper by Blum et al. are suggestive of an agenda. The regions where they determined genocide to have occurred (Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Darfur) are those that concur with the expressed view of the United States government. Aside from Rwanda, the occurrence of genocide is disputed. The International Court of Justice determined that Serbia committed no genocide in Bosnia.⁶ Veteran journalist John Pilger referred to Kosovo as “the site of a genocide that never was”;⁷ this was backed by a UN court.⁸ Darfur is the scene of African Muslim fighting African Muslim. Neither the UN nor EU finds Darfur to be a genocide.⁹ Neither do the CIA nor MI6 who deal openly with Sudanese government officials.¹⁰

Missing from Blum et al.’s study are, for instance, the genocides in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Iraq, and Palestine.

Genocide in the DRC

Genocide has been wreaked in the Congo since before the days of the genocidal Belgian monarch Leopold. In Leopold’s day it was elephant tusks and rubber that spurred European greed.¹¹ The plunder of the DRC’s resources still attracts western corporations.¹² The people of the DRC still suffer.

Dr. Les Roberts’ epidemiological studies into Iraqi civilian mortalities stirred up some minor controversy in the corporate media before being directed to the Memory Hole. Previously, he had less controversially led survey teams in the DRC which concluded:

• 1.7 million excess deaths or more have occurred over the past 22 months as a result of the fighting in the eastern DRC. This equates to 77,000 deaths per month and the IRC believes this is a conservative estimate.
• Young children are missing from the demographic profile. Some 34 percent of the excess deaths are children under five and, depending on the location, 30 to 40 percent are children under two years of age. In addition to the violent deaths of children in battles zones, it is presumed that excessive infant mortality rates and high maternal death rates have contributed to this troubling discovery.
• Violent deaths and “non-violent” deaths are inseparable.

…

• Violence against civilians is indiscriminate. Women and children constituted 47 percent of the violent deaths reported.¹³

Several writers report a figure of 4 million Congolese killed. One writer pointed the finger at western corporations’s lust for the DRC’s “black gold” of coltan, used to make tantalum capacitors for cell phones and other high-tech electronics, as driving the genocide.¹⁴

Foreign traders sell the coltan to just three companies: Cabot Inc. of the US, Germany’s HC Starc and China’s Nigncxia. Only these firms are capable of refining coltan into the desired tantalum powder. The tantalum powder is sold to Nokia, Motorola, Compaq, Sony and other manufacturers.¹⁵

News of the millions killed in the DRC, however, has been largely propagandized or marginalized in the corporate media.

Genocide in Iraq

This use of racist epithets characterizes the language of US occupation soldiers to describe Iraqis. US soldier Joshua Key wrote:

Iraqis, I was taught to believe, were not civilians; they were not even people. We had our own terms for them. Our commanders called them ragheads, so we did the same. We called them habibs. We called them sand niggers. We called them hajjis; it wasn’t until I was sent to war that a man in Iraq explained to me that hajji was a complimentary term for a Muslim who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In training, all I knew was that a hajji was someone to be despised…¹⁶

Former staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, a 12-year veteran of the Marines described the US-initiated violence in Iraq: “As far as I’m concerned, the real war did not begin until they saw us murdering innocent civilians. I mean, they were witnessing their loved ones being murdered by US Marines. It’s kind of hard to tell someone that they are being liberated when they just saw their child shot or lost their husband or grandmother.”

Massey unequivocally identified what was happening in Iraq. “We are committing genocide in Iraq,” he bluntly declared, “and that is the intention.”¹⁷

That the US-uk invasion-occupation is a genocide in perpetration is attested to by excess mortality data published in the esteemed medical journal the Lancet. The researchers carried out a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq, randomly selecting 50 clusters from 16 governorates between May and July in 2006. They concluded a probability that 655,000 excess mortalities had occurred since the invasion in March 2003. The researchers also stated that the mortalities were on a year-by-year increase.¹⁸

One academic extrapolated and updated the Lancet data, arriving at a figure of a million excess civilian mortalities among Iraqis.¹⁹ This does not include the genocidal UN-US sanctions prior to 2003 that killed another million or more Iraqis.

Genocide in Palestine

Zionists’s dehumanization of Palestinians is well documented. Various Israeli prime ministers have called Palestinians, among other slights, crocodiles, cockroaches, beasts on two legs, and non-existent. Scholar Noam Chomsky said, “Contempt for the Arab population is deeply rooted in Zionist thought.”²⁰

In March, I reviewed ex-patriate Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s recent book²¹ that forthrightly affirmed that Zionists had carried out an ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Gary Zatzman and I took exception with Pappe’s fudging on the question of genocide.

Pappe writes, “Massacres accompany the operations [of ethnic cleansing], but where they occur they are not part of a genocidal plan: they are a key tactic to accelerate the flight of the population earmarked for expulsion. (p. 2) [italics added]

“Ethnic cleansing is not genocide, but it does carry with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchery.” (p. 197) [emphasis added] Pappe is generous with the definition of “ethnic cleansing” (e.g., “part of the essence of ethnic cleansing is the eradication, by all means available, of a region’s history”) but parsimonious with the definition of “genocide.”

Pappe considers 1948 is a “clear cut case, according to informed and scholarly definitions, of ethnic cleansing.”

Simply put, “genocide” is the killing of a group, and “ethnic cleansing” is the removal of a group. But “genocide” is not so simple. Article 2 (a,b,c, & d) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide seems to apply well to the case of 1948 and also today.²²

Linguistic Cleansing

The EJPH paper calls for linguistic accuracy so that agents of flagrant criminal actions will bear full culpability and responsibility. Blum et al. compellingly make the case for ditching the term “ethnic cleansing” and calling genocide what it is. Given the horror and massive moral repulsion of genocide, linguistic cleansing is required. I had previously used “ethnic cleansing” in the denotation of “forced mass expulsions,” unaware of its sinister etymology. However, mere linguistic accuracy per se is insufficient.

While linguistic accuracy is important, of greater importance is the recognition and identification of the genocidaires. Blum et al. focused on countries outside their backyards and overlooked genocides perpetrated by their own countries. This is not only intellectually dishonest, but it detracts from the morality that implicitly underlies their position in the EJPH paper.

Stopping Genocide

Juan Mendez, a UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide, said, “We need to talk about early warning and early action in ways that can help prevent genocide without waiting until the last minute.”²³

Already the legal apparatus exists to deal with the perpetrators of genocide once it has been identified. But former UN secretary general Kofi Annan lamented countries’ continued reluctance to honor their obligations under international law.

“We continue to lack the needed political will, as well as a common vision of our responsibility in the face of massive violations of human rights and humanitarian catastrophes occasioned by conflict.” Despite massacres of “near genocide proportions” in the DRC, Liberia and elsewhere, “our response to them has been hesitant and tardy.”²⁴

What is needed is an independent international institution fully empowered to investigate and identify genocide wherever it may occur in the world and to make public its findings. The ghastly crimes of genocide must not be left to the inexpertise of ad hoc bureaucracy.

Countries must not shirk from genocide. They must speak out unhesitatingly, with linguistic clarity and act with forthright remediation. Elementary morality demands, though, that we confront, criticize, act against, atone, and repent of our own great crimes first before we can criticize, with any iota of moral integrity, the great crimes of others. After all, linguistic honesty is more easily practiced when one has a clear conscience.

1. Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter, “‘Ethnic cleansing’ bleaches the atrocities of genocide,” The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access, 18 May 2007: 5 of 6.
2. Blum et al., 1 of 6.
3. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, “A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.
4. Blum et al., 2 of 6.
5. Blum et al., 4 of 6.
6. “ICJ: Serbia not guilty of Bosnia genocide but broke law by not preventing Srebrenica,” JURIST, 26 February 2007.
7. John Pilger, “John Pilger reminds us of Kosovo,” New Statesman, 13 December 2004.
8. “Kosovo assault ‘was not genocide,’” BBC News, 7 September 2001.
9. Rupert Cornwell, “Darfur Killings Not Genocide, Says UN Group,” Independent (UK), 31 January 2005. Rory Carroll, “Sudan massacres are not genocide, says EU,” Guardian, 10 August 2004.
10. Jonathan Steele, “Darfur wasn’t genocide and Sudan is not a terrorist state,” Guardian, 7 October 2005. Steele held that there is “not genocide or classic ethnic cleansing” in Darfur, rather it “was, and is, the outgrowth of a struggle between farmers and nomads.”
11. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999).
12. Kim Petersen, “Canadian Predation in Africa,” Dissident Voice 5 June 2003.
13. “Mortality Study, Eastern D.R. Congo (April-May 2000),” International Rescue Committee, 2000.
14. Sprocket, “High-Tech Genocide,” Lughnasadh (July-August 2005). Available at Earth First! Journal. Press Release, “Security Council Condemns Illegal Exploitation or the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Natural Resources,” UN Security Council, 5 March 2001.
15. Sprocket.
16. Nilanjana S. Roy, “Jarheads, ragheads and deserters,” BS Online, 22 May 2007.
17. Jeff Riedel, “We’re committing genocide in Iraq,” World Socialist Web Site, 11 November 2004.
18. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey,” Lancet, 368: 21 October 2006: 1421-1428.
19. Gideon Polya, “US Iraqi Holocaust And One Million Excess Deaths,” Countercurrents, 7 February 2007.
20. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians (South End Press, 1999).
21. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006).
22. Kim Petersen, “Nakba: The Israeli Holocaust Denial,” Dissident Voice, 18 March 2007.
23. In Mary Kimani, “Protecting civilians from genocide,” Africa Renewal, Vol. 20 #2 (July 2006), 4.
24. Ibid.

A crowd of a few thousand gathered at Downing Street for Global Day for Darfur, on April 29. They were largely Sudanese, mostly from Darfur. They gathered in London’s hotspot for protests with a seemingly decisive and uncompromising demand: intervention. They called on Britain — as tens of thousands rallying simultaneously in 36 cities called on their respective governments and the international community — to intervene to end the effective ‘genocide’ in Sudan’s Eastern province. Though a UN investigative team denied that the killings there were being carried out with genocidal intent, the fact is, an uncountable number of people are unnecessarily dying, mostly due to starvation and disease, but also murdered with impunity. Two million live in refugee camps, still targeted mostly by Janjaweed militias but also rebel fighters. Even those who cross into Chad — 200,000 refugees are now living along the 600 kilometer stretch that separates Sudan from its neighbor to the West — are not safe. The ethnic profile that makes Darfur a testing place for social and national cohesion, also exists in eastern Chad, thus similar feuds are carried out across the border.

The Darfur crisis is not that of black and white, Arabs and Africans. This is nonsense. They are all Africans. They are all Muslims, almost to the last one. Reductions and oversimplification might be useful to the media and short-sighted or self-serving politicians and governments, but deceptive and simply inaccurate. Even the two main rebel groups — The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem) — are now fighting one another following the mid 2006 Abuja agreement. Chad is arming Sudan’s rebels and Sudan is doing the same.

But considering that the victims and the aggressors are all Muslim, what have Muslim countries and organizations done to bring the crisis to a halt? As the United States is keenly interested in hyping the tragedy and exploiting it for its own purposes, Muslim institutions in the West appear
uninterested in the whole affair, merely paying lip service to fend off accusations. At least this is how I felt when I caught up with Dr. Daud Abdullah, the Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the largest umbrella Muslim group — representing over 400 Muslim organizations in the country.

Abdullah spoke at the Darfur rally with unequaled passion, a quality known of this man, a Jamaican-British Muslim who has obtained his Ph.D. in modern Sudanese history from the University of Khartoum. He lived in the war torn country for seven years. He seemed neither apologetic nor bashful to lay the blame where it deserves to be laid; but he was clearly fearful of misguided military adventures like those of the United States in the Middle East.

“Muslims learned bitter lessons from the Kuwait episode when foreigners invaded Muslim lands,” he told me, proposing “an internal political settlement within Sudan using African and Muslim resources.” When I suggested to Abdullah that such a proposal is useless considering its
repeated failures, and considering the urgency of the situation in Sudan, he responded: “failure of the part of Muslims on more than one occasion shouldn’t negate the notion that Muslims must not to try to resolve the situation internally and present their own alternatives.”

Dr. Abdullah knows more than anyone else I know how Sudan “is prone to fragmentation.” He said the country “was put together in the 19th century (in a political concoction) that has left it in constant struggle and civil war. The country is hardly in need for further fragmentation.”

“This conflict will be resolved at the negotiation table,” according to Abduallah, who is also one of the most well known Muslim rights advocates in the country, if not in all of Europe. “There can be no military solution. Muslim countries, civil societies and other parties must strive to bring
conflicting parties to talk on the basis of sharing wealth and creating equality and ending the marginalization that has defined Darfur for generations.”

Rights groups however, suggest that the intensity of the violence has increased since the peace agreement signed last year between the government and the rebels. The rebels’ split lead to an internal clash and the killings are no longer defined according to the simplified media line: Janjaweeds vs. Africans.

Dr. Abdullah defended the MCB against my suggestion that some Muslim groups seem little interested in direct involvement, and that Darfur has been dropped out of their political sphere for it simply involves no other party other than Muslims. “The MCB has been involved in efforts to support political settlement in Sudan. We are in direct contact with Khartoum and
are exploring ways to ensure that the central government honors its responsibilities toward the people of that region.” He spoke of “some progress” on that front, and insisted that the powerful Muslim organization fully supports the Abuja Agreement. According to Abdullah, MCB continues to exert all efforts to help bring an end to the conflict.

In such conflicts, when regional control, political interests and economic booty are all at stake, human lives, especially those of these least importance – peasants, nomads and defenseless innocents with little clout — become a pawn in the hands of those who wish for conflict to perpetuate, so long as there is a good reason for its continuation. As I left the Darfur rally, the echo of an angry speaker, demanding intervention and justice and all the rest followed me a long distance from the crowd. My mind was totally consumed with the most expressive hourglass of blood. It was still streaming as people continue to die.