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By Jonathan Capehart,

15 October 13

@ The Washington Post

If you want to curdle the blood of an African American and send a message of menace without resorting to burning a cross on the lawn or marching around in white sheets all one need do is wave the Confederate flag. So imagine my revulsion at the sight of one outside the front gates of the White House.

Michael Ashmore of Hooks, Tex., was among the many who converged on Washington for the “Million Vet March on the Memorials” to protest the government shutdown. This was the event where former half-term governor reality television star and best-selling author turned conservative gadfly Sarah Palin said, “Our vets have proven that they have not been timid, so we will not be timid in calling out any who would use our military, our vets, as pawns in a political game.” Applauding her self-awareness would be the height of irony – and sarcasm.

The protest and some of the barricades placed at the World War II Memorial then moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And it was there that Ashmore waved his Confederate flag. A symbol of Southern resistance and white supremacy unfurled in front of the home of the first black president of the United States. As Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg View and the Atlantic correctly said on Twitter yesterday, “In many parts of America, waving a Confederate flag outside the home of a black family would be considered a very hostile act.”

Ashmore’s reprehensible rebel yell wasn’t the only offensive thing to happen yesterday. In front of the World War II Memorial, Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman said, “I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.”

Ashmore’s actions and Klayman’s words are just the latest in a series of displays of disrespect directed at President Obama. For more than four years, the president’s detractors have said they “want our country back.” But they never say from whom. They continue to say he should be impeached. But they never say what his “crimes” or, if they do, said “crimes” are not grounded in any kind of reality.

For those of you who would push back by saying we’re overreacting, that the Confederate flag is nothing more than a symbol of regional pride, save it. That flag you revere so much is no better than a Swastika, a threatening symbol of hate that has no place in American political discourse.

Ex-UN, WHO officials reveal political interference to suppress scientific evidence of postwar environmental health catastrophe

By Dr. Nafeez Ahmad

13 October, 2013

@ The Guardian

Last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a long awaited document summarising the findings of an in-depth investigation into the prevalence of congenital birth defects (CBD) in Iraq, which many experts believe is linked to the use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions by Allied forces. According to the ‘summary report’:

“The rates for spontaneous abortion, stillbirths and congenital birth defects found in the study are consistent with or even lower than international estimates. The study provides no clear evidence to suggest an unusually high rate of congenital birth defects in Iraq.”

Jaffar Hussain, WHO’s Head of Mission in Iraq, said that the report is based on survey techniques that are “renowned worldwide” and that the study was peer reviewed “extensively” by international experts.

Backtrack

But the conclusions contrasted dramatically from previous statements about the research findings from Iraqi Ministry of Health (MOH) officials involved in the study. Earlier this year, BBC News spoke to MOH researchers who confirmed the joint report would furnish “damning evidence” that rates of birth defects are higher in areas experiencing heavy fighting in the 2003 war. In an early press release, WHO similarly acknowledged “existing MOH statistics showing high number of CBD cases” in the “high risk” areas selected for study.

The publication of this ‘summary document’ on the World Health Organisation’s website has raised questions from independent experts and former United Nations and WHO officials, who question the validity of its findings and its anonymous authorship. They highlight the existence of abundant research demonstrating not only significant rates of congenital birth defects in many areas of Iraq, but also a plausible link to the impact of depleted uranium.

For years, medical doctors in Iraq have reported “a high level of birth defects.” Other peer-reviewed studies have documented a dramatic increase in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the aftermath of US military bombardment. In Fallujah, doctors are witnessing a “massive unprecedented number” of heart defects, and an increase in the number of nervous system defects. Analysis of pre-2003 data compared to now showed that “the rate of congenital heart defects was 95 per 1,000 births – 13 times the rate found in Europe.”

The purpose of the WHO study was to probe the data further, but some say the project is deeply flawed.

Politicised science

Dr. Keith Bavistock of the Department of Environmental Science, University of Eastern Finland, is a retired 13-year WHO expert on radiation and health. He told me that the new ‘summary document’ was at best “disappointing.” He condemned the decision from “the very outset to preclude the possibility of looking at the extent to which the increase of birth defects is linked to the use of depleted uranium”, and further slammed the document’s lack of scientific credibility.

“This document is not of scientific quality. It wouldn’t pass peer review in one of the worst journals. One of the biggest methodological problems, among many, is that the document does not even attempt to look at existing medical records in Iraqi hospitals – these are proper clinical records which document the diagnoses of the relevant cases being actually discovered by Iraqi doctors. These medics collecting clinical records are reporting higher birth defects than the study acknowledges. Instead, the document focuses on interviews with mothers as a basis for diagnosis, many of whom are traumatised in this environment, their memories unreliable, and are not qualified to make diagnosis.”

I asked Dr. Baverstock if, given the document’s avoidance of analysing the key evidence – clinical records compiled by Iraqi medics – there was reason to believe the research findings were compromised under political pressure. He said:

“The way this document has been produced is extremely suspicious. There are question marks about the role of the US and UK, who have a conflict of interest in this sort of study due to compensation issues that might arise from findings determining a link between higher birth defects and DU. I can say that the US and UK have been very reluctant to disclose the locations of DU deployment, which might throw further light on this correlation.”

If so, it would not be the first time the WHO had reportedly quashed research on DU potentially embarrassing for the Allies. In 2001, Baverstock was on the editorial board for a WHO research project clearing the US and UK of responsibility for environmental health hazards involved in DU deployment. His detailed editorial recommendations accounting for new research proving uranium’s nature as as a genotoxin (capable of changing DNA) were ignored and overruled:

“My editorial changes were suppressed, even though some of the research was from Department of Defense studies looking at subjects who had ingested DU from friendly fire, clearly proving that DU was genutoxic.”

Baverstock then co-authored his own scientific paper on the subject arguing for plausibility of the link between DU and high rates of birth defects in Iraq, but said that WHO blocked publication of the study “because they didn’t like its conclusions.”

“The extent to which scientific principles are being bent to fit politically convenient conclusions is alarming”, said Baverstock.

Environmental contamination from the Iraq War

Other independent experts have also weighed in criticising the WHO study. The British medical journal, The Lancet, reports that despite the study’s claims, a “scientific standard of peer review… may not have been fully achieved.”

One scientist named as a peer-reviewer for the project, Simon Cousens, professor of epidemiology and statistics at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), told The Lancet that he “attended a relatively brief meeting of around one and a half hours, so just gave some comments on an early presentation of the results. I wouldn’t classify that as thorough peer review.”

Just how distant the new WHO-sponsored study is from the last decade’s scientific literature is clear from a new report released earlier this year by a Tokyo-based NGO, Human Rights Now (HRN), which conducted a review of the existing literature as well as a fact-finding mission to Fallujah.

The HRN report investigated recorded birth defects at a major hospital in Fallujah for the year 2012, confirmed first hand birth defect incidences over a one-month period in 2013, and interviewed doctors and parents of children born with birth defects. The report concluded there was:

“… an extraordinary situation of congenital birth defects in both nature and quantity. The investigation demonstrated a significant rise of these health consequences in the period following the war… An overview of scientific literature relating to the effects of uranium and heavy metals associated with munitions used in the 2003 Iraq War and occupation, together with potential exposure pathways, strongly suggest that environmental contamination resulting from combat during the Iraq War may be playing a significant role in the observed rate of birth defects.”

The report criticised both the UN and the WHO for approaches that are “insufficient to meet the needs of the issues within their mandate.”

Definitive evidence

According to Hans von Sponeck, former UN assistant secretary general and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, the gap between previous claims made by MOH researchers about the study, and the new ‘summary document’, justified public scepticism.

“The brevity of this report is unacceptable”, he told me:

“Everybody was expecting a proper, professional scientific paper, with properly scrutinised and checkable empirical data. Although I would be guarded about jumping to conclusions, WHO cannot be surprised if people ask questions about whether the body is giving into bilateral political pressures.”

Von Sponeck said that US political pressure on WHO had scuppered previous investigations into the impact of DU on Iraq:

“I served in Baghdad and was confronted with the reality of the environmental impact of DU. In 2001, I saw in Geneva how a WHO mission to conduct on-spot assessments in Basra and southern Iraq, where depleted uranium had led to devastating environmental health problems, was aborted under US political pressure.”

I asked him if such political pressure on the UN body could explain the unscientific nature of the latest report. “It would not be surprising if such US pressure has continued”, he said:

“There is definitive evidence of an alarming rise in birth defects, leukaemia, cancer and other carcinogenic diseases in Iraq after the war. Looking at the stark difference between previous descriptions of the WHO study’s findings and this new report, it seems that someone, somewhere clumsily decided that they would not release these damning findings, but instead obscure them.”

The International Coalition to Ban Depleted Uranium (ICBUW) has called for WHO to release the project’s data-set so that it can be subjected to independent, transparent analysis. The UN body continues to ignore these calls and defend the integrity of the research.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

By Jay Janson

14 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Equivalent shock for Kenyans as 9/11 was for Americans. Background of these two massacres are pathetically similar. Both were blowback on US genocidal foreign policy. Osama bin Laden in his 2002 Letter to Americans, included “attacks on Muslims in Somalia” in his list of reasons for the al Qaeda 9/11 attack. Synopsis, chronology of US genocide in Somalia given. Every American should consider his or her possible involvement.

For Kenya, with a population about the same as California, the September shopping mall massacre must have been nearly an equivalent shock for Kenyans as the much deadlier 9/11 terrorist attack was for the much larger American population. The background of these two massacres are pathetically similar. They were both blowback on US genocidal foreign policy. In fact Osama bin Laden in his 2002 Letter to Americans, included “attacks on Muslims in Somalia” in his list of reasons for the al Qaeda 9/11 attack. This article will seek to explain, how most Americans and citizens of other NATO nations have some degree of involvement in the genocidal origin of this beastly, insane, barbaric,  unforgivable, murderous blowback terror within a Nairobi shopping mall.

Also, why this massacre terror attack reprisal for Kenya’s deadly invasion of Somalia has received a hundred times more US media cartel news coverage than the daily and often larger massacres going on in Iraq every month for years that receive only passing mention. The massacres of Shiites in Iran’s neighbor Iraq’s Shiite government serve the same colonial interests as the US backed opposition massacring to topple the Shiite government of Syria, whereas terror attacks against US allies in reprisal for colonially sponsored state terror are to be more widely condemned as grist for the heralded euphemistic “War on Terror.” Wall Street’s CIA has used the al Qaeda it helped create and fund more often than the al Qaeda has attacked the US or the US has had al Qaeda bombed.[1]

Somalia being from where most of the Kenyan Shopping Mall murderers came from, we begin with an overlook chronology of early US crimes against peace in Somalia, and a chronology of subsequent years of genocidal crimes, that have resulted in a million of Somali men, women and children losing their lives for the interests of capital accumulation by neo-colonialist predatory speculative investment banking.

A synopsis of American and European genocidal policies and actions in Somalia:

– When Fascist Italy invaded Somalia in 1935, the ‘fair minded’ peace guardian white Colonial Powers run League of Nations embargoed all arms shipments to both sides, which of course was no brake on well arms stocked Italy, but made it impossible for Somalia to buy arms to defend against Italian genocide.

Somali lives by uncounted thousands were sacrificed as their country after independence was allowed, as Somalia was used as a back-and-forth pawn during the ‘cold’ war between the capitalist colonial powers and communist party run socialist USSR.[2]

During the 1980s, the US backed a brutal dictatorship without regard to great starvation. 300,000 Somalis, mostly children died. [3]

In 1992 US Marines and Rangers killed many Somalis before being pulled out of danger after a lost battle since propagated as another case of American good guys in the movie Blackhawk Down .[4]

Over the next seven years, the US government attempts overtly and covertly with funding and arming and ‘diplomatic’ maneuvering to keep the warlord most cooperative for US investment banking interests in power, or at least in power enough to prevent a non-cooperative Somali-for-Somali-interests government from forming (standard US foreign policy and that of all colonial and neo-colonial powers) – life costing internecine wars between warlords  – some of the very warlords that targeted US forces in 1992-93.

– 1991-1999, After the collapse of the Somali government in 1991, a system of sharia-based Islamic courts had become the main judicial system, funded through fees paid by litigants. Over time the courts began to offer other services such as education and health care. The courts also acted as local police forces, being paid by local businesses to reduce crime. The Islamic courts took on the responsibility for halting robberies and drug-dealing, as well as stopping the showing of what pornographic films in local movie houses. Somalia is almost entirely Muslim, and these institutions initially had wide public support. They soon saw the sense in working together through a joint committee to promote security.  In 1999 the group began to assert its authority. The courts in Somalia formed a union of Islamic courts, partly to consolidate resources and power and partly to aid in handing down decisions across, rather than within, clan lines. The judges of the various courts of clans represented a wide spread of factions within Islamic scholarship from Liberal to Salafist, Salfi’i and Sufi. [ ICU, Wikipedia ]

In 2000, a group of businessmen in Mogadishu having enough of deadly violence, social degradation and the economy’s disruption, formed the Islamic Courts Government Movement, to bring the law down on the chaotic situation often sought by powerful criminal overseas investors by funding Somali warlords. Supporters of the Islamic courts and other institutions united to form the ICUP, an armed militia.  In April they took control of the main market in Mogadishu and, in July, captured the road from Mogadishu to Afgoi. Their system of government, controlled by judges, is known as a krytocracy. Christian Science Monitor, 7/13/1999, “The bandits who presided over the treacherous road from Mogadishu to Afgoi were gone. The pick-up trucks packed with gun-brandishing youths who manned some 50 roadblocks along the 20-mile stretch were nonexistent. The combined militia forces of five Islamic courts had cleared the road. [http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0713/p1s2.html] [5]

2002, December, The United States establishes an ‘anti-terrorism task force’ in neighboring Djibouti, with 1,600 U.S. troops.

2003-2005, Increased US funding and support for the warlords being defeated by new and immensely popular  conservative Islamic Courts Union government.

– 2004, Under US guidance a unity warlord government, the Transitional Federal Government is formed in neighboring Kenya.  It did not convene on Somali soil until February 2006, when it met in a converted grain warehouse in the western city of Baidoa because security concerns kept the legislature from entering Mogadishu

– 2005 – As the courts begin to assert themselves as the dispensers of justice, they come into conflict with the foreign backed secular warlords who control most of the city. In reaction to the growing power of the ICU, a group of Mogadishu warlords formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), so named to seek Western backing. This was a major change, as these warlords had been fighting each other for many years.

February 2006, Agence France Presse:

“A group of powerful warlords controlling the Somali capital on Tuesday held secret talks with US agents in a provincial town. The talks between the warlords, who recently formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), and the US agents were held in Jowhar, 90 kilometres (55 miles) north of the capital Mogadishu. The delegates arrived in Jowhar, the seat of Somali transitional government, in two planes — one carrying the warlords and the other carrying the US agents.”

By 2006 this merchant supported moderate Islamic Courts Union, had quickly become extremely popular in the overwhelmingly Islamic population throughout Somalis, and had all but defeated the US backed warlords and were expected and awaited by the long violence suffering inhabitants of Somalia’s capital city Mogadishu, the last remaining part of Somalia not under its rule.

2006 February 18  begins battle for Mogadishu. The alliance loses battle after battle. ICU forces defeat the ARPCT and gain control of Mogadishu by June 5. Somali Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys said on Radio Shabelle, the violence was started by the people who have proclaimed themselves to be fighters against terrorism. Some warlords flee to Ethiopia.

2006, May 17, Washington Post admits, ‘U.S. Secretly Backing Warlords in Somalia’ “More than a decade after U.S. troops withdrew from Somalia following a disastrous military intervention, officials of Somalia’s interim government and some U.S. analysts of Africa policy say the United States has returned to the African country, secretly supporting secular warlords who have been waging fierce battles against Islamic groups for control of the capital, Mogadishu. [author: same warlords that drove them out of the war-torn Horn of Africa nation a decade ago.]

Clashes, last week and over the weekend, were some of the most violent in Mogadishu since the end of the American intervention in 1994, and left 150 dead and hundreds more wounded. Leaders of the interim government blamed U.S. support of the militias for provoking the clashes.

2 JUNE 2006, Large Rally Against United States Staged in Mogadishu

Thousands of people from all different districts in Banadir Region participate chanting Anti American slogans and “we don’t need those in Dollar interest, we don’t refuse our religion”

On 5 June 2006,  Warlords not captured have fled the city, abandoning most of their weapons, with the majority fleeing to Jowhar, which would be taken by the ICU militia on 14 June in spite of US involvement. This brought the ICU in control of much of the weaponry in the country, which made a resurgence by the warlords difficult without outside support. London’s Guardian Unlimited said the Bush administration funneled $100,000 to $150,000 a month to “proxies” based at a CIA-controlled base in Nairobi, Kenya. The International Crisis Group reported that the money was funneled through the Pentagon’s Joint Combined Task Force. Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso, chair of the African Union for 2006, also criticized the support given by the U.S. to the warlords, following his meeting with President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

June 8, New York Times , Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia ? “A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.”

June 13, 2006, Aljazeera , A leading member of the US-backed Somali commanders alliance, Abdi Hassan Awale Qeidid, on advice of elders from his Sa’ad sub-clan, in order to avoid further bloodshed, defects to the Islamic courts, dealing a blow to the weakened coalition that was routed from the capital Mogadishu.

July 15, the Islamic Courts reopened Mogadishu International Airport, which had been closed since the withdrawal of the international forces in 1995. The first airplane chartered by the Arab League flew from the airport for the first time in 11 years picking up Islamic Courts delegates to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.[

June 15, Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a news conference on June 15, “it was wrong for the United States government to support warlords in Somalia.”

[http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/World_News_3/article_2716.shtml]

June 16,  10,000 people demonstrate against a proposed peacekeeping mission to Somalia.. Photo: AP

[author: Colonial powers can always resort to using the UN which it created, to enforce colonialism.] Africa News described the Alliance (of warlords) as disappearing, their regions over-run by the Islamic Courts Union.

July 20, The ICU organize a clean-up campaign for the streets of Mogadishu. This was the first time litter and rubbish is collected in the entire city since it collapsed into chaos over a decade earlier.

On August 24, 2006, the ICU capture Harardhere, some 500 km northeast of Mogadishu, which had become a safe haven for pirates, who had forced shipping firms and international organizations to pay large ransoms for the release of vessels and crews.

On August 25, 2006 the Islamic Courts reopen historic Mogadishu seaport, which had been one of the busiest in East Africa, shut down for ten years. These successes of the Islamic Courts government were achieved in spite of the US crimes against humanity described even by as Wall Street loyal a source as the New York Times owned Washington Post:

When the popular Islamic Courts Union government forces finally defeated the warlords despite foreign troops and US helping the warlords, the US trained Ethiopian Army and Air Force invaded and murderously temporarily defeated the Somalian Islamic Courts in turn. [6]

Ethiopian troops had moved into Somalian territory on July 20, 2006 and pushed northward into the semi-autonomous state of Puntland. Several Ethiopian armored convoys heading to Baidoa are destroyed in sophisticated ambushes.

December 22, 2006: 20 T-55 Ethiopian tanks, four attack helicopters in Baidoa.

December 23, Ethiopian tanks and further reinforcements arrived in Daynuunay, 30 kilometres east of Baidoa; prompting ICU forces to vow all-out war despite a commitment to an EU-brokered peace. [author: Sending in the Ethiopian Army is the white imperial way of brokering peace.

December, 2006, Open, conventional warfare breaks out between the Islamic Courts and Ethiopian forces seeking to reinstate the TFG towards the end of December. Fighting is intense, with hundreds of casualties on both sides. After several days of deadlock around Baidoa, Ethiopian armored columns, backed by air and artillery support, punch through and take Mogadishu,  The Ethiopians then pivot their columns and headed south. By New Years Day, the Islamic Courts abandoned Kismayo, the strategic southern port city and final stronghold of the ICU. The Ethiopians are reported to have executed foreign prisoners in the field and the ICU is said to have taken thousands of casualties. Stripped of almost all their territory, the ICU will pursue guerrilla-style warfare against the government.

Warlords return to fight against the ICU, resuming their places in Mogadishu following its fall to the and Ethiopian forces in December 2006. Wikipedia

On December 31, 2006, Sharif Sheik Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, along with other senior ICU officials in the port city of Kismayu about 500 km (310 mi) south of Mogadishu, urge Islamist supporters across the country to initiate an insurgency, to wage guerrilla war, against the Ethiopian troops. Ahmed issued the statement after the Muslim Eid prayers on Saturday: “I call on the Islamic Courts fighters, supporters and every true Muslim to start an insurgency against the Ethiopian troops in Somalia. We are telling the Ethiopians in Somalia that they will never succeed in their mission. By Allah, they will fail… We will not allow the Ethiopian troops to stay peacefully in Somalia.”

January 2007, The Islamic Courts indicate they will conduct an insurgency, and many of their fighters and all of their leaders are still unaccounted for. Kenya has closed the southern border, the United States Navy is blockading the Somali coast and Ethiopian forces are conducting operations along the Kenyan border. Al Shabaab militant youth wing of the Islamic Courts rises to leadership role. Besides al Shabaab, other hardline Islamists broke ranks with the ICU and formed other militant groups like Hizbul Islam, to continue the war against the the Ethiopian reinstalled government of warlords amenable to US investment interests. Wikipedia

The dis and misinforming ploy used in investor owned media coverage up to now is that the Islamic Courts Union government would hide Islamists wanted by US for questioning about US Embassy attacks will be hyped up to justify the next round of carnage by intervention organized and militarily supported by the US.

January 3, 2007 – Ethiopian, U.S. airstrikes force ICU withdrawal from Kismayo. Jan. 4, Ethiopian aircraft and attack helicopters struck the town of Doble near the Kenyan border. January 5–12, 2007 CNN; even six Kenyan herders killed by Ethiopian aircraft.  US airstrike hits Badmadow Island; series of Ethiopian airstrikes January 10, chief of staff to the Somali president: ”US airstrikes killed 31 civilians.” More AC-130 airstrikes were hit Ras Kamboni. CNN . US warplanes from aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in strikes ( AP ); AC-130 plane rained gunfire down on the southern village of Hayo – “many dead bodies and animals.”

January 15, British SAS team at the Kenyan border reportedly looking for the fleeing Al Qaeda suspects. Reuters [or anyone opposing invasion]

2007,  January 19, The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) is created by the African Union’s Peace and Security Council upon urging by the UN Security Council on US initiative to support the Federal Government of Somalia’s (Warlord dominated) forces in their battle against Al-Shabaab militants. January 22, Christianized Malawi agrees to send 400 to 1,200 troops

January 24,  U.S. airstrike;  Nigeria pledges 770 to 1,100 troops. Reuteres

On January 31, Popular Resistance Movement releases a video warning African Union peacekeepers to avoid coming to Somalia, claiming “Somalia is not a place where you will earn a salary – it is a place where you will die.” AP

February 1, Burundi  pledges 1,000 troops BBC

On February 9, 800 Somali demonstrators in Mogadishu, burn U.S., Ethiopian, and Ugandan flags. Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi and Burundi had committed troops to the ‘peacekeeping mission’,Uganda had pledged 1,400 troops and some armored vehicles for a mission. BBC

By the end of March, the fighting intensified in Mogadishu – more than a thousand people, mostly civilians killed.

Ethiopian helicopters attack rebel positions, while the insurgents were calling on the people of the city over the mosque loudspeakers to resist the Ethiopians. 15 Ethiopian soldiers and civilians killed.

March 30, 2007, Islamic insurgents shoot down Ethiopian Mi-24 military helicopter.

April 4, 2007, [‘evenhandedly fair’ as all colonial based organizations] Amnesty International demands Somalia’s President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, ensure their forces abide by international humanitarian law [both the invaded defenders and the invaders that is]

September 2007, The Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) created, when members of the Islamic Courts Union and Somali opposition leaders met in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, and united to oppose Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and its Ethiopian allies.

On March 3, 2008, the United States air strike on Dhoble kills the leader of Al-Shabab Aden Hashi Eyrow; does nothing to slow down the Insurgency.

April 20, 2008, Al-Hidaya Mosque massacre: Ethiopian soldiers storm a mosque, 11 bodies found, some with their throat slit, others shot to death. Of the 11 dead victims, nine were regular congregants. Tabliiq official, “Ethiopians “slaughtered” clerics. Sheikh Said Yahya, Imam, killed as he opened the mosque door after soldiers knocked.

April 25, 2007, FOX. Missile hits hospital ward packed with civilians;

May 1, 2008, BBC American plane drops three large bombs on a house in the Dhuusamarreeb region in central Somalia. kills up 30 people.

On 9 June 2008. Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia split into two between those based in Eritrea, aligned with former ICU leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who are adamantly opposed to cooperation with the TFG or Ethiopia, and those who were based in Djibouti, aligned with former ICU leader Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who were open to reconciliation in spite of the Ethiopian and UN sponsored African Union invasions.

THE WORM TURNS

July 1, 2008, Battle of Beledweyne Somali opposition fighters ambush Ethiopian army convoy leaving 47 Ethiopian soldiers and 235 Islamist fighters dead.

August 22, 2008, Al-Shabaab retakes Kismayo, IRIN News (Islamic Courts Union, had been driven out of Kismayo in January 2007 when Ethiopian forces rolled into Somalia to take control of much of central and southern Somalia.)

The Islamic Courts’ Youth Wing, al Shabaab (Shabaab = ‘youth’ in Arabic), with great cost in deaths and casualties to themselves heroically pushed the  heavily weaponized Ethiopians back out of cities, though UN authorized African Union ‘Peace Keeping’ forces invaded as well to protect the remnants of a revamped warlord coalition,

In early December 2008, Ethiopia announced it would withdraw its troops after first securing the withdrawal of the AMISOM peacekeepers from Burundi and Uganda. Withdrawal of the AMISOM peacekeepers puts pressure on the UN to provide troops.

January 25, 2009 [oft defeated] Ethiopian troops completely pulled out of Somalia.

 

Situation in Somalia in February 2009, following the second Ethiopian withdrawal

Al-Shabab captured Baidoa, where the TFG parliament was based, on January 26. Following the collapse and end of the TFG, moderate Islamist leader of Islamic Courts, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was elected to become the new President of a United Somali government including the warlords. Al-Shabab declares war on him and pledges to continue attacks on TFG.

March 25, 2009,  Five TFG soldiers shot execution style in a Mogadishu district known for rogue soldiers stealing from civilians and local shops, setting up illegal toll blocks.

2009-01-27–explosions and gunfire heard as government soldiers fight among themselves over control of the city, following the departure of Ethiopians. Police, local militia looting the presidential palace and parliament building as well as police stations; police who have splintered into clan groups. Mareeg.com-

January 5, 2010,  CNN, More than 1 million in Somalia going hungry, aid agency says

10 March 2010, Up to half the food aid in Somalia is diverted to corrupt contractors, local UN workers and Islamist militants, a leaked UN report says. It says WFP contracts are awarded to a few powerful individuals who operate cartels that sell the food illegally. US funding cut. The UN document says food aid is diverted to a web of distributors, transporters and armed groups, with some local UN workers also taking a cut in the profits, and transporters have to navigate roadblocks manned by various militias and bandits. BBC

“In May (2010), the fighting intensifies in Mogadishu; 270,000 displaced; internally displaced persons 1.5 million ” UNHCR website.

July 6, 2010, (CNN) — Anti-government demonstrators, including women dressed in full hijabs brandishing AK-47 automatic rifles, march through the streets of Somalia’s violence-torn capital accuse African Union Mission of killing people. “AMISOM killed my mummy” and “AMISOM get out of our country” said two signs. e and it will happen in Bujumbura [the Burundi capital] too.” [7]

12 JULY 2010, The Somali Islamist group al-Shabab has said it was behind Kampala Uganda blasts that killed 74 people, one American.

Somali militants recruit Americans Video CNN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e59GUaGYnaQ

10 June 2011, Somali Interior Minister killed by Niece, BBC

Three more regions of Somalia struck by famine, including the capital, Mogadishu, UN

28 Oct,    US launches drones from Ethiopia   BBC

19 November 2011,   Ethiopia troops ‘enter Somalia’  Ethiopian troops cross border into Somalia in significant numbers, eyewitnesses say. At least 20 vehicles carrying Ethiopian troops. BBC

Kenya’s intervention in southern Somalia in October 2011 had been planned for at least two years. The release of WikiLeaks cables in 2010 documented the plans and the role of the State Department.

The UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon arrived in Somalia fresh from the UN-US-NATO re-conquest of Libya for the West, and the assassination of the its revolutionary leader and Chairman of the African Union. “We are now at a critical juncture — a moment of fresh opportunities for the future of Somali people,” Mr. Ban said. The reader might Step back a moment an consider how commonplace a UN ruthless and inhumane military attack has been over the sixty odd years of the UN’s existence: [see Korean Traitor US Stooge UN ‘Terror Council’ Sec. Gen. in Somalia

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Korean-Traitor-US-Stooge-U-by-Jay-Janson-111210-798.html

(In addition to U.S. NATO and the UN involvement in Somalia and Kenya, the state of Israel has close ties with the government in Nairobi and has contracts to train the Ethiopian Armed Forces.)

Aug.14,  Rights group says all sides guilty of crime  Human Rights Watch has said all sides in Somalia’s are guilty of serious violations of international law. BBC [author notes: invaders and invaded receiving equal condemnation!

Jul.12, 2011, CNN,  CIA aiding Somalia suspect interrogations Jul.20,   U.N. declares famine in southern Somalia

August 2011, the United Nations, African Union’s AMISOM ,United States, and the TFG battling Al Shabaab claim control of Mogadishu.

Aug. 3,  Somalia’s famine reaches into Mogadishu , three more regions. UN

Aug.12,  U.N .: Not enough money to fight famine

Aug.17,   UK minister visits Mogadishu

Oct.17, Somali militants al-Shabab threaten Kenya retaliation, BBC

January 13, 2012 (CNN) — Distribution of food, seed and medical relief intended for drought victims suspended, International Red Cross announces. Aid for up to 1.1 million people held up because local authorities block distribution of ICRC food and seed relief in the Middle Shabelle and Galgaduud regions in central and southern Somalia, according to Red Cross.

7 January 2012,  BBC Kenyan troops, air strikes, ‘kill 60 al-Shabab fighters’ in Somalia

January 20, African Union forces launch offensive against Al-Shabaab positions on the northern outskirts of Mogadishu.[2]

January 24, Al-Shabaab suicide attack against an Ethiopian military base in Beledweyne.

10 March 2012, Somalia Islamists, al-Shabab ambush Ethiopia troops

Al-Shabab claimed to have killed 73 Ethiopians, most intense fighting since Ethiopian troops entered Somalia last November.

May 29, Kenyan naval forces shell Kismayo. Al-Shabaab insurgents open fire on Kenyan patrol vessels off Somalian coast. Garowa on line

July 24 Christian Science Monitor “ corrupt TFG had foreigners defeat Islamic Courts [8]

August 16, Kenyan Forces stationed in Southern Somalia engage in combat with as many as a thousand Al-Shabaab militants attempting to assault  Kenyan garrison in Fafadhun.

September 4,  offensive by AMISOM, the Kenyan navy shells the Islamist stronghold of Kismayo. Kenyan fighter jets bomb city. Aljazeera

January 11, 2013, Al-Shabaab fighters kill French soldiers trying to rescue agent Allex,  taken hostage in 2009 while training Somali government troops. In exchange for his release, Al-Shabaab had demanded cessation of French involvement and complete withdrawal of AMISOM forces.

June 19, The UN’s Development Program offices in Mogadishu attacked by Islamist militants. Four from Great Britain and South Africa dead.

July 4, UN WHO reports massive clashes in Kismayo. Raskamboni movement and Barre Adan Shire Hiiraale militia battling for control of city. Somali government blames Kenyan troops for covertly supporting rival militias opposed to the government

UN Security Council votes to increase the AU force. Kenyan soldiers fighting al-Shabab in Somalia to be integrated into the Amisom force.

Decent people everywhere are not on the side of US imperialism, but when Somalian and foreign al Qaeda praised the Islamic Courts when it was attacked by the US and began fighting alongside al Shabaab facing down the Ethiopians, Western war mongering media could easily bolster the pretext of fighting al Qaeda, the pretext the US uses elsewhere to prevent independent governments from existing in the Arab world. And as elsewhere this US use of ‘legalized’ terror has brought ‘illegal’ terror blowback. In Somalia’s case, because an American genocidal foreign policy of destroying Somalia’s popular conservative Islamic Courts Union government with continuous warfare since 2000, which brought quite naturally its more radical Youth Wing al Shabaab lead the fight against Western genocidal neo-colonialism. [9] [10]

Al-Shabaab with other militants had taken back cities conquered by the Ethiopians and the hard pressed Ethiopians withdrew when more the UN authorized African Union Force troops arrived. When again the forces of colonialism were on the verge of defeat, US proxy Kenyan Armed Forces were added into the soup of death, to accomplish what the Ethiopians had begun.

Kenyan armed forces entered Somalia two years ago, with US attack aircraft support, to combat al-Shabaab (‘Youths’ in Arabic language), who had taken up leading the fight against US supported warlords, when the popular conservative Islamic Courts Union government of their elders was overthrown by the deadly and brutal US proxy Ethiopian Army and Air Force invasion, which brought back  those defeated US backed warlords.

RESULT: More death, maiming, destruction and more importantly creating

STARVATION [Between 2010 and 2012, more than a quarter of a million people died in the famine in Somalia… ” Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures” Oxfam . [11]   In Somalia’s case, because the US of genocide destroyed Somalia’s chosen government, which is normal colonial procedure. During all these above decades famine relief has taken second priority to Western exploitive business interests in Somalia with genocidal consequences. [12]

al-Qaeda has entered the fight against the US with more suicide bombings and in the last week of September came the Kenya Shopping Mall terror massacre. The reader is invited to check his or her possible involvement in the horrific neo-colonial events that have surely produced this shopping mall massacre.

The adolescent Great White Father, now quite globalized, has let the Somalian people know over and over again, through merciless gunfire, missiles and drone assassinations, that they are prohibited from choosing their own government. This of course is, again, is standard operating procedure for predatory speculative investment US imperialism: Greeks, Koreans, Guatemalans, Iranians, Congolese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Dominicans, Salvadorians, Panamanians, Nicaraguans, Haitians and at one time or another, almost every other nation in Latin America, Iraqis Libyans, Afghanis have though calculated genocide, not been allowed to choose their own government. (An in depth investigation would show that Americans are also not allowed to choose their own government.) The Nazis did the same, but then its Wehrmacht was built by a crash investment and joint venture with America’s top fifty corporations which all made a killing during WW II and the Holocaust, and made the United States the single super Colonial Power, capable of dictating a lot more than just who governs where.

Those US victim countries will have their day in court and compensation for wrongful death in the millions, injuries in the billions, destruction of property and theft of natural resources. In the meantime mayhem that divides and destroys whichever side of any commodity, or nation worth plundering, can be made to be profitable for speculative investment bankers skilled in selling short.

Again: Reader, check your possible involvement! Have you believed in silly but vicious fairy tells of colonial powers being democratic and seeking democracy’s spread? North America was stolen from its indigenous natives, Africans enslaved for their labor, half of Mexico raped away, a million Filipinos butchered for their land? Democratically?

With US genocide still ongoing, progressive neo-colonialist journalism slaps the hands of Somali warlords in an example of back-handed support for silly but vicious fairy tales:

8/20/2012, Christian Science Monitor : “Somalia’s rulers must make the crucial step, going from being an unelected interim authority toward creating a more lasting government.”

Smooth commentating?

FOOTNOTES

1

It was Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to be President Jimmy Carter, who, in mid 1979, first encouraged and used Islamic fundamentalist terror by ordering the secret funding, arming and training of non-Pashtun Afghani warlord armies of fundamentalist men fearful of the new popular women-liberating Socialist government in Kabul, which was providing unwanted schooling for their daughters and wives. (The most infamous warlord the US funded was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, known for spraying acid on unveiled women while still a university student.) [2]”-

It is well known that the CIA funded al Qaeda during its beginning through payments to Osama bin Laden, who, along with thousands of Arabs of the strict Saudi Wahabi sect, had been invited into that part of Afghanistan controlled by the CIA, after the Soviets had entered Afghanistan to protect its ally in Kabul. There is an amazing video of Presidential Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski speaking to newly arrived, CIA imported, Arab fighters, calling for jihad against the Soviet army and the Kabul government.[3]

Thereafter, it was the US Holocaust in Iraq that produced the greatest growth of al Qaeda, which entered and further sprang up in that country to fight Americans, who again were mercilessly invading another Muslin nation that had been friendly to the US.  In the case of Iraq, even merciless to the point of CIA having helped Saddam Hussein to power and later partnering with Saddam during his horrific million death invasion of Iran, that had so gratified President Reagan and his Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld.[4]

Subsequently, the criminal speculative investment banking conspiracy, which rules most of the world from Wall Street, had its outright owned US government[5], hire battle seasoned al Qaeda recruits to fake a revolt in wealthy and prosperous Libya, which had been the poorest nation in Africa under oil plundering British and French colonial domination, only to become the 53rd highest quality of life nation in the world (higher than nine European nations, according to the 2010 UN Index), under its Arab Socialist government. For nine weeks the captive CNN world satellite audience heard obviously tough looking hombres in heavy weapons laden pick-up trucks hailed as ‘freedom fighters’ ‘from all walks of life.’

For two years now the CIA has been running another faked ‘spontaneous’ revolt in yet another previously well run, sophisticated nation in the cradle of civilization, with, as in the case of Iraq and Libya, fine free health care and education through PhD for all its citizens. (America has liberated sixty million from such benefits). With all the unnecessary gall in a world watching CIA fed CNN,

US officials proclaim their CIA’s right to hire, arm and train whomsoever to overthrow the proven popular government of Syria, no matter that al Qaeda within America’s “freedom fighter’ opposition armies executes civilians, even teenagers, and is now famous for the video of an opposition leader cutting out and eating the heart of a Syrian soldier.

As in the case of Libya, without a single really corroborating video or photo, the angel of death President of the US has the confidence to lie that President Assad (as the year before, that Revolutionary Leader Gadaffi) “is killing his own people.” Al Qaeda, a now world wide amorphous movement, can be used to butcher or as an excuse to bomb, depending on what is profitable.

After twelve years of genocidal Western occupation, the al Qaeda that the US brought into Persian speaking Afghanistan is still the excuse for the white armies to continue to turkey shoot members and adherents of Taliban, the former recognized government of what was left of Afghanistan after the US backed and armed warlords saw to infighting that brought the nation to unimaginable violent chaos, with widespread raping of women and complete lawlessness, until defeated by national-salvation minded religious Taliban (‘Taliban’ means ‘students’ in Pashun language). In spite of the tragic toll taken on these Afghani battling invaders with by superior weaponry, Taliban has remained in power throughout most of the countryside of Afghanistan.

US drone missiles continue to turn al Qaeda and whomever happens to be nearby into ‘bugsplats’ in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. Do Americans, English and citizens of other white nation members of collaborating NATO and beyond, bite their tongue when reading of the US use of al Qaeda first in Afghanistan, then in Libya, now in Syria and most probably in Iraq?

Finally the super gruesome daily suicide bombings in Iraq of as many victims as ninety in a single day, going on now for a year or more, bears mention in regard to US involvement in al Qaeda.

What would the heartless automaton bankers of profitable genocide working for total globalized US hegemony not do to keep 65% Shiite Iraq from a normal and to be expected political rapprochement and cooperation with 95% Shiite Iran. (Please, don’t any reader fall for that sap about of ‘sectarian violence’ between Sunni and Shiite, who have intermarried everywhere over the last thousand years.) Notice that there are no serious US plans to help the Shiite majority Iraq government save its citizens from being slaughtered, and notice that US media which ran the story of the sixty lives lost Kenya shopping mall massacre for two weeks, devotes prime time news to no more than reporting the daily number of dead in Iraq massacres.

It is exceedingly probable that the US is somehow covertly heavily involved in the al Qaeda and other Sunni suicide attacks on Shiites in Iraq.  Even if somehow were not, Washington certainly would have the power through its satellite Saudi Arabia to mitigate this stupid, astounding loss of precious life for ordinary, read wonderful, men, women and children.

What is not being sufficiently often pointed out is these overt US atrocities, and this decades ongoing American produced genocide will only come to an end, either when there is planetary destruction, or when powerful speculative private investors calculating profit, are forced to enter a factor of possible imprisonment and seizure of assets to compensate wrongful deaths, injuries, destruction of property and theft of natural resources (as explained on the educational and stimulus to action website Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now, endorsed by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and containing the pertinent laws, exhortations by Einstein, Helen Keller, Eugene Debs and others and featuring a country-by-country history of US crimes in nineteen (and counting) nations – and a link to the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Atrocity Wars and Covert Genocide on Three Continents for Predatory Investments International Awareness Campaign. source:

? Russian TV Asked Shouldn’t Public Sleep Better After CIA FBI Manhunt Success? VIDEO? Wall Street’s CIA has used the al Qaeda it helped create and fund more often than the US Air Force has bombed it. An awakened public will make war unprofitable by law.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Russian-TV-Asked-Shouldn-t-by-Jay-Janson-Government-sponsored-Terrorism_International-Funding-Terrorism_State-Terrorism_Terrorism-Funding-131010-196.html

2

1974, US encouraged, heavily armed and aided a bloody Somalian invasion of Ethiopia when a military coup by leftist officers topples the Ethiopian monarchy and declares the country a Marxist-Leninist state.

1976, in a reversal, US covertly supplied arms and support to all foreign based attempts to violently overthrow the 1976 founded revolutionary socialist government in Somalia for its receiving aid from the USSR; large-scale American military support of Somalia’s historic rival Ethiopia, then under the rule of the feudal emperor Haile Selassie.

3

the 1980s, despite warnings by Africa specialists, human rights groups and humanitarian organizations that continued American aid to the dictatorial government of Siad Barre would eventually plunge Somalia into chaos. US poured in more than $50 million of arms annually to prop up this disastrous Barre dictatorship while offering  virtually no assistance that would have helped build a self-sustaining economy which could feed Somalia’s people. In addition, the United States pushed a structural adjustment program through the International Monetary Fund severely weakening the local agricultural economy. Combined with the breakdown of the central government, drought conditions and rival militias disrupting food supplies, there was famine on a massive scale, resulting in the deaths of more than 300,000 Somalis, mostly children.

Just before dictator Siad Barre’s overthrow in early 1991, the U.S. sends hundreds of millions of dollars of arms to Somalia in return for the use of military facilities which had been originally constructed for the Soviets. (These bases will to be used to support American military intervention in the Middle East.)

4

1992, November, outgoing Bush administration sent 30,000 U.S. troops, primarily Marines and Army Rangers, to Somalia in what was described as a humanitarian mission to assist in the distribution of relief supplies.  In some cases, U.S. forces essentially dumped food on local markets, hurting indigenous farmers and creating greater food shortages over the longer term – few Somalis were involved in the decisions during this crucial period.

Such an overbearing foreign military presence in a country which had been free from colonial rule for only a little more than three decades leads to growing resentment, particularly since these elite combat forces were not trained for such humanitarian missions. U.S. Secretary of Defense is reported to quip to an associate, “We’re sending the Rangers to Somalia. We are not going to be able to control them. They are like overtrained pit bulls. No one controls them.” Shootings at U.S. military roadblocks became commonplace and Somalis witnessed scenes of mostly white American forces harassing and shooting their black countrymen. [Stephen Zunes, The Long and Hidden History of the U.S in Somalia]

1992, US attempts to control Somalian politics through US Armed Forces brought in under the pretext of protecting the distribution of food aid. US arming financial backing of Mogadishu warlords, who are willing to rule favoring US unjust predatory investments.

We might pick the so called Blackhawk Down incident as a point in history when of US crimes against peace, wherein weapons are supplied, their use encouraged and weapons supplied to others to attack Somalia, to Americans themselves committing crimes against humanity in Somalia that become genocidal.

In Mogadishu on October of 1993, shortly after a Blackhawk attack helicopter, seen firing down into the roof of a closed market attempting to assassinate a designated enemy Somali clan leader, is shot down by Somail militia along with a second Blackhawk.  Enraged Somalis drag the bodies of American airmen through their dirt streets. The battle resulted in 18 US deaths, 80 wounded. American sources estimate between 1,500 and 3,000 Somali casualties, including civilians.

The high casualties of this Battle of Mogadishu more commonly referred to as Black Hawk Down or, locally, as the Day of the Rangers, and other painful incidents for the US Armed Forces in Somalia,, caused President Clinton to order 5,300 additional Troops to Somalia “to protect our troops and to complete our mission and bring all American combat forces home by March 31.”

5

http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0713/p1s2.html

Islamic clerics combat lawlessness in Somalia

By Lara Santoro, Special to The Christian Science Monitor / July 13, 1999

MOGADISHU, SOMALIA

A few weeks ago, an odd thing happened in the utter anarchy of Somalia.

The bandits who presided over the treacherous road from Mogadishu to Afgoi were gone. The pick-up trucks packed with gun-brandishing youths who manned some 50 roadblocks along the 20-mile stretch were nonexistent.

The combined militia forces of five Islamic courts cleared the road. It was the second time the courts – that view Islamic law as the only antidote to Somalia’s chaos – acted together. In April, they took control of the Bukhara market in Mogadishu. This second action reveals a unity of purpose largely unseen in the capital since the collapse of the Somali state in 1991.

“Islamic law is the only thing that will save this country,” says Sheikh Hassan Sheikh Mohammed Adde, a cleric who merged and presides over the Joint Islamic Courts.

Sheikh Hassan is clear about his political ambition and his determination to impose Islamic law over Somalia. Although it is close to stricter forms of Islam, Somalia has held fast to a tradition of Sunni religious moderation for nearly a millennium.

But beyond Sheikh Hassan’s ambitions, analysts say the issue is whether the courts will act as conduits for Islamic fundamentalism – or merely help bring about an organized state, and then compete fairly for power.

Somalia devolved into a state of near anarchy nearly a decade ago. The guns of different warlords have kept it at the bottom of the United Nations index of human development. Life expectancy is 43 years, infant mortality one of the highest in Africa, with 1 out of every 4 children likely to die before the age of five. In a country where nearly everyone is armed, crime is rampant.

Yet as recently as 1992, Somalia was at the center of the world’s attention. A colossal relief operation to feed victims of famine saved the lives of thousands, but soon became embroiled in factional warfare for the control of Mogadishu. In October 1993, 18 US Marines were killed in a gunfight by militiamen loyal to warlord Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid. That prompted the first military intervention mounted by the UN for humanitarian purposes to haul down its flag and leave Somalia to itself.

Predictably, Somalia’s warlords prospered. But years of constant fighting and unregulated economic activity have finally taken their toll. The prolonged closure of Mogadishu’s main port and airport, the languishing banana trade, and a drop in the export of livestock have drained resources. The warlords became financially weak and increasingly vulnerable to the emerging power of the courts.

Whether the courts will succeed in challenging the factional rule of the warlords will depend largely on Somalia’s businessmen, observers say. Exasperated by the cost of lawlessness, business owners have thrown their financial weight behind the courts, providing sufficient means for them to acquire guns and set up their own militia.

Each of the five courts claims to have between 200 and 250 gunmen and an unspecified number of “technicals,” pickup trucks with machine guns and grenade launchers mounted on them, and armored personnel carriers.

The gunmen – who dress in the same torn clothes as the previous warlords – patrol the areas in which the courts operate. They round up thieves, rapists, and murderers, and deliver them to the first detention centers set up in Mogadishu since 1991.

The courts have won the loyalty of the gunmen with the guarantee of two meals a day and 30,000 Somali shillings ($30) a month. The businessmen pick up the tab.

“Without the businessmen, the courts would not exist,” says a Western observer. “The businessmen don’t care whether it’s Islamic law or Napoleonic law or Common law. Any law will do.”

That, however, is not the way others see it. According to a Middle Eastern Muslim diplomat in Mogadishu, a growing number of Islamic countries and organizations – including Somalia’s own homegrown fundamentalist At-Ittihad al-Islam group – are contributing money in the hope of seeing Somalia evolve into an Islamic state.

Somalia, though, has a history of ingratitude, as well as what appears to be a natural resistance to fundamentalism.

The court’s own interpretation of Islamic law is perhaps the most accurate measure of the sort of innate religious moderation that has made it difficult for fundamentalism to gain ground here. None of the five courts has dared resort to amputation for fear of becoming unpopular. There have been public executions of felons convicted of murder, 37 over the past 14 months.

“We don’t cut people’s hands off because they don’t like it,” Sheikh Hassan says.

The courts also have been careful to operate within the confines of Somalia’s clan structure, limiting their jurisdiction to members of the clan. The court set up by the Murosade clan, for example, is unable to prosecute members of the Suleiman or Ayr tribe, both notorious for their violence, and both with newly instituted Islamic courts of their own.

“Very simply, even though there is an Islamic component, the courts are clan-based organizations which are imposing discipline among themselves” says Mohamed Nur Gutale, Somalia’s former ambassador to the US.

Analysts say that if the courts succeed in taking over Mogadishu’s main port and airport as they have vowed to do, the era of the warlords will most likely come to an end.

[author j janson: Fat chance in a world still owned by the genocidal, amoral,criminally usurious speculative investment   banking conspiracy of the brutally barbaric, colonial, now neo-colonial powers.

6 On February 23, 2007, the New York Times reported that the US government had been secretly training Ethiopian soldiers for several years, in camps near the Ethiopia-Somalia border. Support for Ethiopia’s invasion began after a failed CIA effort to arm and finance Somali “warlords.”

7 February 03, 2009, Hiraan Online, Fishermen who fish on the Shore of the Indian Ocean near Mogadishu complain UNISOM troops often fire on them.

 

8 http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2012/0724/If-all-goes-well-Somalia-soon-may-have-a-government?International Crisis Group, “After more than 20 years of internal conflict, it is perhaps remarkable that Somalia has a government at all, even a weak one. The current Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed is the fourteenth attempt to create a government after the fall of President Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991, and it spent its first three years operating in the neighboring country of Kenya. When the TFG finally finally moved to Mogadishu in 2007, following several defeats of a fundamentalist Islamic Courts Union, it did little to impress Somalis or foreign diplomats. Friendly diplomats and even government supporters call the TFG “corrupt.”

9 The Taliban (Pashto: ??????? ?aliban “students”), fundamentalist youth group rose to save Afghanistan from the murderous chaos of US backed waring factions after the Soviet withdrawal and defeat of the Socialist women liberating Kabul government two years later. Taliban had formed a government, ruling as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from September 1996 until December 2001, with Kandahar as the capital. It gained diplomatic recognition from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Mohammed Omar has been serving as the spiritual leader of the Taliban since 1994.[

10 According to the National Counterterrorism Center, the outfit’s rank-and-file members hail from disparate local groups, sometimes recruited by force.[24] Unlike most of the organization’s top leaders, its foot soldiers are primarily concerned with nationalist and clan-related affairs as opposed to the global jihad. Schaefer,, Ahren; Andrew Black. “Clan and Conflict in Somalia: Al-Shabaab and the Myth of “Transcending Clan Politics””]. Jamestown Foundation.

 

11 http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/02/world/africa/somalia-famine/index.html

Somalia famine killed close to 260,000 people, report says

Mogadishu, Somalia (CNN) — Between 2010 and 2012, more than a quarter of a million people died in the famine in Somalia -The study, which covered the period from October 2010 to April 2012, suggests that an estimated 4.6% of the total population and 10% of children younger than 5 died in southern and central Somalia…

International humanitarian organization Oxfam said Thursday, “Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures,” it said in a statement.2, 2013

World leaders meeting in London next week to discuss the situation in Somalia, investing in long-term development, creating jobs, supporting farmers and pastoralists, and ensuring properly trained security forces. [author: by ‘world leaders’ one should understand ‘the same colonial powers which less than a century ago owned and plundered every inch of Africa and every African, by savage white terror of course.]

12 The UN definition of genocide (recognized by 142 states) is:

“…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The US has committed these acts many times over and in many different countries. Some people object that this is some watered down version of genocide that risks diluting the significance of this “ultimate crime”. However, bear in mind that the victims of US armed violence are not usually combatants and even if they are they are not engaged in some sort of contested combat that gives them some ability to defend themselves or to kill or be killed. They are helpless as they die of incineration, asphyxiation, dismemberment, cancer, starvation, disease. People of all ages die in terror unable to protect themselves from the machinery of death. Make no mistake, that is what it is: a large complex co-ordinated machinery of mass killing. There is nothing watered down about the horrors of the genocides committed by the US, and their victims number many millions. The violence is mostly impersonal, implacable, arbitrary and industrial

The United States of Genocide

Putting the US on trial for genocide against the peoples of Korea, Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Iraq and elsewhere.

http://ongenocide.wordpress.com/

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents, Kerala, India; Minority Perspective, UK; Dissident Voice, Uruknet; Voice of Detroit; Ethiopian Review; Palestine Chronicle; India Times; Ta Kung Bao; China Daily; South China Morning Post; Come Home America; OpEdNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News have published his articles; 300  of which are available at: click http://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html ; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989.  Is coordinator of the  King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign : (King Condemned US Wars) http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/ and website historian of  Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign  http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/ featuring a country by country history of US crimes and laws pertaining.

By Nicola Nasser

14 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

More than two and a half years on, Israel’s purported neutrality in the Syrian conflict and the United State’s fanfare rhetoric urging a “regime change” in Damascus were abruptly cut short to unveil that the Israeli factor has been all throughout the conflict the main concern of both countries.

All their media and political focus on “democracy versus dictatorship” and on the intervention of the international community on the basis of a “responsibility to protect” to avert the exacerbating “humanitarian crisis” in Syria was merely a focus intended to divert the attention of the world public opinion away from their real goal, i.e. to safeguard the security of Israel.

Their “Plan A” was to enforce a change in the Syrian regime as their “big prize” and replace it by another less threatening and more willing to strike a “peace deal” with Israel and in case of failure, which is the case as developed now, their “Plan B” was to pursue a “lesser prize” by disarming Syria of its chemical weapons to deprive it of its strategic defensive deterrence against the Israeli overwhelming arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Their “Plan A” proved a failure, but their “Plan B” was a success.

However, the fact that the Syrian humanitarian crisis continues unabated with the raging non – stop fighting while the United States is gradually coming to terms with Syria’s major allies in Russia and Iran as a prelude to recognizing the “legitimacy” of the status quo in Syria is a fact that shutters whatever remains of U.S. credibility in the conflict.

President Barak Obama, addressing the UN General Assembly on last September 24, had this justification: “Let us remember that this is not a zero-sum endeavor. We are no longer in a Cold War. There’s no Great Game to be won, nor does America have any interest in Syria beyond the well-being of its people, the stability of its neighbors, the elimination of chemical weapons, and ensuring it does not become a safe-haven for terrorists. I welcome the influence of all nations that can help bring about a peaceful resolution.”

This U – turn shift by the U.S. dispels any remaining doubts that the U.S. ever cared about the Syrian people and what Obama called their “well being.”

The U.S. pronounced commitment to a “political solution” through co-sponsoring with Russia the convening of a “Geneva – 2” conference is compromised by its purported inability to unite even the “opposition” that was created and sponsored by the U.S. itself and the “friends of Syria” it leads and to rein in the continued fueling of the armed conflict with arms, money and logistics by its regional Turkish and Gulf Arabs allies, which undermines any political solution and render the very convening of a “Geneva – 2” conference a guess of anybody.

Israeli “Punishment”

Meanwhile, Israel’s neutrality was shuttered by none other than its President Shimon Peres.

Speaking at the 40th commemoration of some three thousand Israeli soldiers who were killed in the 1973 war with Syria and Egypt, Peres revealed unarguably that his state has been the major beneficiary of the Syrian conflict.

Peres said: “Today” the Syrian President Basher al-Assad “is punished for his refusal to compromise” with Israel and “the Syrian people pay for it.”

When it became stark clear by the latest developments that there will be no “regime change” in Syria nor there will be a post- Assad “Day After” and that the U.S. major guarantor of Israel’s survival has made, or is about to make, a “U-turn” in its policy vis-à-vis the Syrian conflict to exclude the military solution as “unacceptable,” in the words of Secretary of State John Kerry on this October 6, Israel got impatient and could not hide anymore the Israeli factor in the conflict.

On last September 17, major news wires headlined their reports, “In public shift, Israel calls for Assad’s fall,” citing a report published by the Israeli daily the Jerusalem Post, which quoted Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, as saying: “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”

“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren added.

And that’s really the crux of the Syrian conflict: Dismantling this “arc” has been all throughout the conflict the pronounced strategy of the U.S.-led so-called “Friends of Syria,” who are themselves the friends of Israel.

The goal of this strategy has been all throughout the conflict to change the regime of what Oren called the Syrian “keystone in that arc,” which is supported by a pro-Iran government in Iraq as well as by the Palestinian liberation movements resisting the more than sixty decades of Israeli military occupation, or otherwise to deplete Syria’s resources, infrastructure and power until it has no choice other than the option of yielding unconditionally to the Israeli terms and conditions of what Peres called a “compromise” with Israel as a precondition for the return of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Syria the Odd Number

This strategic goal was smoke-screened by portraying the conflict first as one of a popular uprising turned into an armed rebellion against a dictatorship, then as a sectarian “civil war,” third as a proxy war in an Arab-Iranian and a Sunni-Shiite historical divide, fourth as a battle ground of conflicting regional and international geopolitics, but the Israeli factor has been all throughout the core of the conflict.

Otherwise why should the U.S.-led “Friends of Syria & Israel” care about the ruling regime in a country that is not abundant in oil and gas, the “free” flow of which was repeatedly pronounced a “vital” interest of the United States, or one of what Obama in his UN speech called his country’s “core interests;” the security of Israel is another “vital” or “core” interest, which, in his words, “The United States of America is prepared to use all elements of our power, including military force, to secure.”

The end of the Cold War opened a “window of opportunities” to build on the Egyptian – Israel peace treaty, according to a study by the University of Oslo in 1997. A peace agreement was signed between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Hebrew state in 1993 followed by an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty the year after. During its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 Israel tried unsuccessfully to impose on the country a similar treaty had it not been for the Syrian “influence,” which aborted and prevented any such development ever since.

Syria remains the odd number in the Arab peace – making belt around Israel; no comprehensive peace is possible without Syria; Damascus holds the key even to the survival of the Palestinian, Jordanian and Egyptian peace accords with Israel. Syria will not hand over this key without the withdrawal of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) from Syrian and other Arab lands and a “just” solution of the “Palestinian question.”

This has been a Syrian national strategy long before the Pan-Arab Baath party and the al-Assad dynasty came to power.

Therefore, the U.S. and Israeli “Plan A” will remain on both countries’ agendas, pending more forthcoming geopolitical environment.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

nassernicola@ymail.com

By Vacy Vlazna

14 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Warning! The Lab contains war-porn and hard-core evil; watch and weep.

Yotam Feldman’s documentary, released in August, is one of the most important exposés of the obscene rationale and execution of Israel’s hugely lucrative arms and security industries through the voices of some of its ex-military key operators: Amos Golan, Shimon Naveh, Leo Gleser, and Yoav Galant.

Israel’s armament juggernaut currently turns over $7 billion p.a. and its phenomenal success is, as Feldman reveals, due to experience, that is, the testing of weaponry on the Palestinian population in the Israeli military ‘labs’ of Gaza and the West Bank:

“I think the main product Israelis are selling, especially in the last decade, is experience. .. the testing of the products, the experience is the main thing they [customers] are coming to buy. They want the missile that was shot in the last operation in Gaza or the rifle that was used in the last West Bank incursion.”

Without blinking an eye, Benjamin Ben Eleixer, Industry Minister proudly asserts the reason for the tremendous demand for Israeli weapons and technology,

‘If Israel sells weapons, they have been tested, tried out. We can say: we’ve used this for 10 years, 15 years,”

Tested by Israeli killers on 1,398 Palestinian children murdered since 2000 and the hundreds of thousands of children who struggle with war trauma, PTSD and perpetual terror.

The Lab makes plain why the peace process, past, present and potential, is a total sham. The economy of Israel is inextricably dependent on war and the suffering of the Palestinians;

“And the other is the fact that now the Israeli economy is so much dependent on these operations. It’s 20 percent of the exports. It’s 150,000 families–not people–in Israel actually dependent on this industry. And if one day it will stop, if there will be no next operation in Gaza, so Israel will have some economic problems.”

‘The arms industry doesn’t belong to a few dealers, its owned by a whole country.’

What better justification of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which targets state and private companies as well as all Israeli universities, through their military R&D programmes, that are ‘turning blood into money’.

Which gun made the shekel accelerate when sisters Amal, 2 and Suad Abed-Rabbo, 9,who was waving a white flag, were shot by tank personnel in Gaza?

The degradation of the Israeli mind and society through the perverted normalising of state-sanctioned cruel aggression and violent criminality is apparent in the egotistic strutting throughout the film of the Israeli warmongers, politicians and arms dealers, who are oblivious that to civilised people they come across as psychopaths:

Gen (ret.) Amiran Levin,

“I want to move onto one point, speaking of Gaza, speaking of Lebanon, and other places we will occupy in the future. Since we want to maintain equilibrium, as a developed country, punishment as a strategy should be the main element…That’s the most important thing, Quantity is more important than quality. One mistake the army makes is judging each case individually, whether the person deserves to die or not. Most of these people were born to die, we just have to help them.”

Lt.Co.(ret.) Shimon Naveh, a military philosopher, yes, you read right, military philosopher, who talks like he’s swallowed a kilo of amphetamines, strolls through a bullet-riddled mock Arab village used for military exercises, moaning,

“As you can see this isn’t an Arab village. It is a dead place. Maybe in our rosiest dreams this is what a Palestinian village would look like, but it isn’t one.”

Gen.Yoav Galant, the ‘inventor’ of the 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead;

“As far as I’m concerned the enemy has 3 options either he get killed, or he surrenders, or he flees.”

Galant omits that the 1.6 million men, women, children and elderly of Gaza (for that matter all Palestinians) have nowhere to flee because Israel tightly controls Palestinian land, sea and airspace.

Thus we understand that the Israelis have the identical strategy of low intensity or asymmetrical warfare as the USA; only attack nations that are on their knees through sieges, sanctions and substandard armaments.

Naveh, in an interview in the Small Wars Journal admits as much, “When you fight a war against a rival who’s by all means inferior to you, you may lose a guy here or there, but you’re in total control. It’s nice. You can pretend that you fight the war and yet it’s not really a dangerous war.”

Apart from the Hamas freedom fighters armed with Kalashnikovs and a ‘modest stock of weapons’, Palestine has no army, navy, airforce to defend its people. There are, of course, President Abbas’ US armed and trained security forces but they brutally police their own people on behalf of Israel.

Feldman shows how Israel’s major arms companies make arms selling sexy. At a weapons trade exhibition in Paris, a perky young female rep demonstrates on screen the precision capabilities of IAI products, and at the Shivta military base, foreign officers who have come to view a missile demonstration are divided into groups led by ‘lovely’ female Israeli soldiers.

Foreign governments, like Australia, contribute generously to optimising the profits of Israel’s death merchants while simultaneously appeasing their electorates, Galant complains, “Theres a lot of hypocrisy, they condemn you politically, while they ask you what your trick is, you Israelis, for turning blood into money,” nevertheless the gains for Israel as specified by him are,

“First of all it gains security, secondly the nations and the armies of the world want to be friends with the strong, just side, and the winning side.”

Strong, yes, JUST? Not according to the parents of little 3 year old Ahmed As -Sinwar who was found under a pile of rubble and stones with a hole in his head, and not according to the parents of the other 352 children killed plus the 860 children injured and maimed in Operation Cast Lead by the sought-after Israeli air and ground missiles, artillery shelling, phosphorous bombs, flechettes, bullets and unexploded ordnance.

It is utterly macabre and beyond decent comprehension that the sales of drones were boosted by the wilful killing by drones of 116 children during Operation Cast Lead.

The highest echelon of the Israeli government has control of the business of death. All export of arms and security services are OKd by SIBAT, the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s export agency.

Amos Golan, an arms dealer who started ‘with a dream’, views himself as a ‘good guy’ not someone who kills innocent people in his spare time. He was a former commander of the Duvdevan special forces unit that conducts undercover operations disguised as Arabs and the inventor of the highly profitable Cornershot assault and sniper gun that enables the user to see around corners.

His Silver Shadow Advanced Security Systems (SSASS), listed with SIBAT, has provided security solutions and training for the dictatorships of the Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Uganda where SSASS trained the Black Mamba death squad accused of human rights violations.

Leo Gleser, a generous father and grandfather, states that since 9/11 “all defense solutions now come from Israel through Israeli companies.” Who’d have thought 9/11 would benefit Israel? His own company, International Security and Defense Systems (ISDS), listed with SIBAT, was “established in 1982 by highly experienced officers, former operatives of I.S.A. Israeli Security Agency, the MOSSAD and the Defence Forces” has among its clients the Athens, Barcelona, Beijing and Rio Olympic Games, 2014 World Cup Soccer, joint ventures in security training with China, India, Brazil, Spain and USA.

It also serves the United Nations which appears to have overlooked that Gleser’s company trained, in the 80s, the CIA backed brutal Honduran Battalion 3-16 involved in the disappearance of 191 people. (This has been documented in Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s book Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship.)

War criminal and child-killer, Noav Galant, once tipped to become the next Chief of General Staff, is now retired because of allegations that he appropriated public lands near his home for his private use which is irony par excellence given he is on the board of HaShomer HaChadash that helps Israeli “farmers and ranchers in the Negev and the Galilee who administer vast tracts of state-owned land to deal with the threat of illegal seizure of their land”, which is to say, to prevent the ‘ongoing encroachment of the Bedouin on state-owned land ‘ which we all know is ancestral Bedouin land seized by Israel. As we have seen, Galant knows all about hypocrisy.

The Lab’s exposition of Israel’s profiteering from its military expertise and arms dealing is nothing new as this has been well documented elsewhere such as in Jane Haapiseva-Hunter ‘s ‘Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America’. The impact of The Lab lies in directly hearing and seeing for ourselves Israel’s deviants cheerily admit to making big bucks from ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Feldman ends The Lab with a masterstroke of irony filming, at a conference, these fat Israeli death feeding maggots, nodding and smiling to John Lennon’s beautiful and inspiring song, ‘Imagine’..

Imagine all the people,

Living life in peace…

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

 

Critique of response to EU debt crisis highlights unemployment, widening poverty gap, and growing risk of social unrest

By Ian Traynor in Brussels

10 October 2013

@ The Guardian

Europe is sinking into a protracted period of deepening poverty, mass unemployment, social exclusion, greater inequality, and collective despair as a result of austerity policies adopted in response to the debt and currency crisis of the past four years, according to an extensive study being published on Thursday.

“Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it,” says the 68-page report from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “The long-term consequences of this crisis have yet to surface. The problems caused will be felt for decades even if the economy turns for the better in the near future … We wonder if we as a continent really understand what has hit us.”

The damning critique, obtained exclusively by the Guardian, of the policy response to the debt crisis that surfaced in Greece in late 2009 and raised fundamental questions about the viability of the euro single currency, foresees extremely gloomy prospects for tens of millions of Europeans.

Mass unemployment – especially among the young, 120 million Europeans living in or at risk of poverty – increased waves of illegal immigration clashing with rising xenophobia in the host countries, growing risks of social unrest and political instability estimated to be two to three times higher than most other parts of the world, greater levels of insecurity among the traditional middle classes – all combine to make a European future more uncertain than at any time in the postwar era.

“As the economic crisis has planted its roots, millions of Europeans live with insecurity, uncertain about what the future holds. This is one of the worst psychological states of mind for human beings. We see quiet desperation spreading among Europeans, resulting in depression, resignation and loss of hope. Compared to 2009, millions more find themselves queuing for food, unable to buy medicine nor access healthcare. Millions are without a job and many of those who still have work face difficulties to sustain their families due to insufficient wages and skyrocketing prices.

“Many from the middle class have spiralled down to poverty. The amount of people depending on Red Cross food distributions in 22 of the surveyed countries has increased by 75% between 2009 and 2012. More people are getting poor, the poor are getting poorer.”

The survey conducted in the first half of this year “mapped” the 28 countries of the EU plus a further 14 in the Balkans, eastern Europe and central Asia.

In the EU, it found that the grave impact of the crisis was not confined to the crisis-ravaged, bailed-out countries of southern Europe and Ireland, but extended to relative European success stories such as Germany and parts of Scandinavia.

Last year the Spanish Red Cross launched a national appeal to help people in Spain, the first ever. Suicides among women in Greece have at least doubled. Many employed in Slovenia have not been paid for months. In France 350,000 people fell below the poverty line from 2008 to 2011. One in five Finns born in 1987 have been treated for psychiatric or mental disorders, associated with the economic slump in Finland in the 1990s.

Despite Germany’s vaunted success in avoiding the high levels of unemployment prevalent across much of the EU, a quarter of the country’s employed are classified as low-wage earners, almost half of new job contracts since 2008 have been low-paid, flexible, part-time so-called mini-jobs with little security and usually no social benefits. In July last year 600,000 employed in Germany with social insurance did not have enough to live on.

The problems are also affecting Europe’s wealthiest societies, such as Denmark and Luxembourg, the study found.

In the Baltic states and Hungary up to 13% of the populations have left in recent years due to economic hardship. The study reports a mounting trend of intra-European migration, mainly from east to west, in search of work.

The jobs crisis is one of the most debilitating issues facing the EU and the eurozone. Of more than 26 million unemployed in the EU, those out of work for longer than a year stands at 11 million, almost double the level of five years ago when the international financial crisis broke out in the US.

The social impact is immense, the study found. In Greece and Spain adult children with families are moving back in with their parents, several generations are living in single households with one breadwinner between them. It is now a common sight to find formerly prosperous middle-class men and women sleeping rough in Milan, Italy’s financial capital.

Youth unemployment figures in a quarter of the countries surveyed ranged from 33% to more than 60%. But as destructive to families, the report said, is the soaring jobless levels among 50-64 year-olds which has risen from 2.8 million to 4.6 million in the EU between 2008 and 2012.

“The rate at which unemployment figures have risen in the past 24 months alone is an indication that the crisis is deepening, with severe personal costs as a consequence, and possible unrest and extremism as a risk. Combined with increasing living costs, this is a dangerous combination,” the study said.

Despite the perceived success of Germany, Europe’s economic engine, the study takes the EU’s biggest country to illustrate the widening wealth gap, raising questions about the longevity of the EU’s traditional model, the social market economy. According to Germany’s Bertelsmann Foundation some 5.5 million Germans have lost their middle-class social status over the past decade and fallen into the ranks of low-income earners while at the same time half a million others made the grade as high-income earners.

 

By Robert Reich

12 October 13

@ Robert Reich’s Blog

Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama and a fierce critic of the Affordable Care Act, has just changed his tune. He now says: “My primary focus is on minimizing risk of insolvency and bankruptcy. There are many paths you can take to get there. Socialized medicine is just one of the component parts of our debt and deficits that put us at financial risk.”

Translated: House Republicans are under intense pressure. A new Gallup poll shows the Republican Party now viewed favorably by only 28% of Americans, down from 38% in September. That’s the lowest favorable rating measured for either party since Gallup began asking this question in 1992. The Democratic Party is viewed favorably by 43%, down four percentage points from last month.

So Republicans are desperately looking for a way of getting out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves – and the President has given them one. He told them that if they agree to temporarily fund the government and raise the debt ceiling without holding as ransom the Affordable Care Act or anything else, negotiations can begin on reducing the overall budget deficit.

What’s the lesson here? The radicals who tried to hijack America didn’t understand one very basic thing. While most Americans don’t like big government, Americans revere our system of government. That’s why even though a majority disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, a majority also disapprove of Republican tactics for repealing or delaying it.

Government itself has never been popular in America except during palpable crises such as war or deep depression. The nation was founded in a revolution against an abusive government – that was what the original Tea Party was all about – and that distrust is in our genes. The Constitution reflects it. Which is why it’s hard for government to do anything very easily. (I’ve never been as frustrated as when I was secretary of labor – continuously running into the realities of separation of power, checks and balances, and the endless complications of federal, state, and local levels of authority. But frustration goes with the job.)

No one likes big government. If you’re on the left, you worry about the military-industrial-congressional complex that’s spending zillions of dollars creating new weapons of mass destruction, spying on Americans, and killing innocents abroad. And you don’t like government interfering in your sex life, telling you how and when you can have an abortion, whom you can marry. If you’re on the right, you worry about taxes and regulations stifling innovation, out-of-control bureaucrats infringing on your freedom, and government deficits as far as the eye can see.

So when Tea Party Republicans, bankrolled by a handful of billionaires, began calling the Affordable Care Act a “wholesale takeover of American health care,” many Americans were inclined to believe them. Health care is such a huge and complicated system, affecting us and our families so intimately, that our inherent distrust of government makes us instinctively wary. It’s no accident we’re still the only advanced nation not to have universal health care. FDR decided against adding it to his plan for Social Security because he didn’t want to jeopardize the rest of the program; subsequent presidents never got close, at least until Obama.

The best argument for the Affordable Care Act is that our current healthcare system is so dysfunctional – the most expensive in the world with the least healthy outcomes (highest infant mortality, shortest life spans, worst rates of chronic disease) of any advanced nation – that we had no choice but to try to fix it. Even so, it’s a typical American fix: It’s still based on private health providers and private insurers. All government does is subsidize the poor, require insurers to take in people with pre-existing health problems, and pay for it by requiring everyone to be insured.

The Tea Party Republicans’ mistake was to assume that Americans’ distrust of big government, and, by extension, the Affordable Care Act, would allow them to ride roughshod over the process we have for making laws.

Their double-barreled threat to shut down the government and cause the United States to default on its obligations if the Affordable Care Act isn’t repealed or at least delayed is a direct assault on our system of government: If even unpopular laws can be gutted by a majority in one house of Congress holding the rest of government hostage, there’s no end to it. No law on the books will be safe. (Their retort that Congress holds the “purse strings” and can therefore decide to de-fund what it dislikes is bunk; appropriation bills have to be agreed to by both houses and signed into law by the president, like any other legislation.)

While most of us distrust government, we’re indelibly proud of our system of government. We like to think it’s just about the best system in the world. We don’t much like politicians but we canonize the Founding Fathers, the Framers of the Constitution. And we revere the fading parchment on which the Constitution is written. When we pledge allegiance to the United States we bind ourselves to that system of government. Anyone who seeks to overthrow or undermine that system is deemed a traitor.

And that’s exactly what some Tea Partiers have begun sounding like – traitors to the system, radicals for whom the end they seek justifies whatever means they think necessary to achieve it. As such, they began losing support even among Americans who had bought their view of the Affordable Care Act.

So they’ve had to back down, and soon, hopefully, we can move to the next stage – negotiating over the size of government. That should be stronger ground for the Tea Partiers. But the President, Democrats, and any moderate Republican who dares show his face can still gain ground by framing the question properly: The size of government isn’t the real issue. It’s who government is for. The best way to reduce future budget deficits is to ensure it’s for all of us and not just a privileged few.

That means revenues should be raised from the wealthy, who have never been wealthier – limiting their deductions and tax credits, closing loopholes like “carried interest,” and taxing financial transactions. Spending should be cut by ending corporate welfare – terminating tax subsidies to oil and gas, ballooning payments to agribusiness, sweetheart deals for military contractors, and the “too big to fail” subsidy for Wall Street’s biggest banks. Future health-care costs should be contained by using the government’s bargaining leverage over providers (through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act) to force a shift from fee-for-service to payments-for-healthy-outcomes. And we should spend more on high-quality education and infrastructure for everyone.

Americans distrust big government, and always will. There’s ample reason – especially given the huge sums now bankrolling politicians, coming from a relative handful of billionaires, big corporations, and Wall Street. But we love our system of government. That’s what must be strengthened.

By using tactics perceived to violate that system, the Tea Partiers have overplayed their hand. If they don’t stop their recklessness, they’ll be out of the game.

Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock” and “The Work of Nations.” His latest is an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

 

By Karthick RM

12 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

“Successes send weak souls to sleep; they spur strong souls on.” -Maximilien Robespierre

When a band of Vietnamese communists overran a garrison of French Far East Expeditionary Corps in Dien Bien Phu on May 1954, it created shockwaves across the world. It pricked the sensors of military minds in the West, even as it reinforced the thoughts of revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara that successful guerrilla wars against colonial and neo-colonial forces can be waged. If the brains behind this historical victory were to be sought, it would be this diminutive person called Vo Nguyen Giap.

It is, I would say, Hegelian irony that General Giap is popularly called ‘Red Napoleon’. Unlike Hegel’s vision of the French leader as the world-soul on a horseback, the Vietnamese General who played crucial roles in campaigns against the Japanese, the French and the Americans cut no grand picture in appearance. A person with a keen desire for social change, witnessing close relatives fall prey to the cruelties of French colonial rule, he joined the resistance movement young. After a brief career as a teacher of history, he began creating it. But this article is not so much about the man’s life as it is about the relevance of his thought.

Giap’s most popular statement is his observation on armed struggle. “Violence is the universal objective law of all thorough national liberation revolutions, of all revolutions which are truly popular in character.” While being a Vietnamese nationalist, Giap was profoundly Universalist in orientation. He did not wax on the particularities of the Vietnamese people, but rather focused on what the superior knowledge of the Leninist revolution of the USSR, and the French and American revolutions before that, could teach the Vietnamese in liberation of their country. And, he believed that “Marxism-Leninism never disowns the history and the great constituent virtues of a nation; on the contrary, it raises these virtues to new heights in the new historical conditions.” The race-gender-sexuality pseudo-radicals of today would, of course, call him a totalitarian, an upholder of metanarratives and whatever.

It was not idealism alone that fuelled Giap, but a cold and pragmatic assessment of the forces at home and the forces abroad. The Vietnamese war against the US was not just won, as some leftists romantically put it, by peasants with pitchforks, but rather by the ability of the Vietnamese leaders to adopt the right military strategy and tactics as according to time, their understanding of the Sino-Soviet relation and receiving help from both powers, and their recognition of the strategic importance of a rear base. As Giap observed in the context of Dien Bien Phu, “a strong rear is always the decisive factor for victory in a revolutionary war.”

The strategic directive of the Vietminh to apply “dynamism, initiative, mobility and rapidity of decision in the face of new situations” was to General Giap a military art “whose characteristic is to defeat material force with moral force, defeat what is strong with what is weak, defeat what is modern with that is primitive, defeat the modern armies of the aggressive imperialists with the people’s patriotism and determination to carry out a thorough revolution.” A down-to-earth realist, he implored revolutionaries to “strike to win, strike only when success is certain, if it is not, then don’t strike.”

Critics of Giap generally pick on the fact that the Vietnamese lost so many in their war of liberation. Many of the obituaries for Giap in the western media have referred to the criticism of Giap’s nemesis, US Army General William Westmoreland, who followed a strategy of attrition (simply called body counts) against the Vietnamese rebels. The good General, with his deep concern for the loss of Vietnamese lives, said of Giap “Now such a disregard for human life may make a formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius. An American commander losing men like that would hardly have lasted more than a few weeks.” Leaving aside the criminal irony in Mr. Westmoreland’s observations, no less a person than Martin van Creveld, a leading military historian and strategist of contemporary times, said emphatically in his book The Changing Face of War that “Cruel as it sounds, history shows that a tenth of the population dying in a protracted struggle is not necessarily too high a price to pay to fend off the yoke of a foreign power”. Indeed, freedom never comes free.

The real tragedy, as far as Vietnam is concerned, is not the atrocities of French or American imperialism. It is rather the 1979 invasion of Vietnam by China; the latter’s response to the former’s deposing of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Though the Chinese got a miserable drubbing at the hand of the Vietnamese, this event raises a lot of questions on both the practical and ethical possibilities of ‘Socialism in One Country’ (SOC). Though ‘Permanent Revolution’ is only an ideological pipedream, the regression of countries that adopted the SOC model into state capitalism – quite brutal in many cases – must compel activists and ideologues on the left to seriously rethink what was wrong in the original theory in the first place.

This is all the more necessary now at a time when ‘revolutions’ and ‘springs’ in the middle-east and elsewhere are simulated by Western powers or have been hijacked by them, at a time when counterinsurgency has become a highly professional academic discipline, at a time when obsessing about identities, ‘lived experiences’ and particularities is an intellectual fashion, and worse, to take from Oscar Wilde who wrote this well over a century ago, at a time when “it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.”

But even this rethinking, this ‘military art’ of asking the right questions, requires strategic formulation. Sadly, people associate strategy and tactics with armed struggle – in fact, the most non-violent struggle requires it. We need to know who the enemy is, we need to know on what grounds is his superiority, and we need to know how to pull him into a terrain where we can strike to win. And let us learn from the man who defeated the best military minds at their own game. Comrade Hero of Dien Bien Phu.

*All quotes of General Vo Nguyen Giap have been sourced from “The Military Art of People’s War: Selected Writings of General Vo Nguyen Giap”. Edited and with an introduction by Russell Stetler, published by Monthly Review Press, London, 1970.

Karthick RM is a research scholar at the University of Essex, UK

 

By Francis A. Boyle

12 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Indictment of the Federal Government of the U.S. for the commission of international crimes and petition for orders mandating its proscription and dissolution as an international criminal conspiracy and criminal organization, 18 September 1992

Introduction

All citizens of the World Community have both the right and the duty under public international law to sit in judgment over a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental norms of international criminal law committed by any member state of that same World Community. Such is the case for the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nationalities in the United States of America that convenes in San Francisco during the weekend of October 1-4, 1992. Its weighty but important task is to examine the long history of international criminal activity that has been perpetrated by the Federal Government of the United States of America against the Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America since it was founded in 1787.

Toward that end, I have the honor to present to the Members of this Tribunal the following charges against the Federal Government of the United States of America under international criminal law. In light of the gravity, severity, and longstanding nature of these international crimes and also in light of the fact that the Federal Government of the United States of America appears to be irrevocably committed to continuing down this path of lawlessness and criminality against Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America and elsewhere, I hereby petition the Members of this Tribunal to issue an Order proscribing the Federal Government of the United States of America as an International Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as the other sources of public international law specified below. For that reason, I also request that the Members of this Tribunal issue an Order dissolving the Federal Government of the United States of America as a legal and political entity. Finally, I ask this Tribunal to declare that international legal sovereignty over the Territories principally inhabited by the Native American Peoples, the New Afrikan People, the Mexicano People, and the People of Puerto Rico resides in the hands of these respective Peoples Themselves.

In this regard, I should point out that the final Decision of this Tribunal will qualify as a judicial decision within the meaning of article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice and will therefore constitute a subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law for international law and practice. The Statute of the International Court of Justice is an integral part of the United Nations Charter under article 92 thereof. Thus, this Tribunal’s Decision can be relied upon by some future International Criminal Court or Tribunal, as well as by any People or State of the World Community that desires to initiate criminal proceedings against named individuals for the commission of the following international crimes. The Decision of this Tribunal shall serve as adequate notice to the appropriate officials in the United States Federal Government that they bear personal criminal responsibility under international law and the domestic legal systems of all Peoples and States in the World Community for designing and implementing these illegal, criminal and reprehensible policies and practices against Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America. Hereinafter, the Federal Government of the United States of America will be referred to as the Defendant.

BILL OF PARTICULARS AGAINST THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The Native American Peoples

1. The Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes Against eace, Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes against Native American Peoples as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles.

2. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against Native American Peoples as recognized by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

3. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against Native American Peoples as recognized by the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

4. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of Native American Peoples as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

5. The Defendant has perpetrated numerous and repeated violations of the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination against Native American Peoples.

6. The Defendant has systematically violated 371 treaties it concluded with Native American Peoples in wanton disregard of the basic principle of public international law and practice dictating pacta sunt servanda.

7. The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of Native American Peoples to self-determination as recognized by the 1945 United Nations Charter, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, fundamental principles of customary international law, and jus cogens.

8. The Defendant has violated the seminal United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Territories of 1960 with respect to Native American Peoples and Territories. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize Native American Territories immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the Native American Peoples.

9. The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured Native American independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant’s treatment of captured Native American independence fighters as common criminals and terrorists constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime.

10. The Defendant has deliberately and systematically permitted, aided and abetted, solicited and conspired to commit the dumping, transportation, and location of nuclear, toxic, medical and otherwise hazardous waste materials on Native American Territories across North America and has thus created a clear and present danger to the lives, health, safety, and physical and mental well-being of Native American Peoples in gross violation of article 3 and article 2(c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention, inter alia: Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; …

The New Afrikan People

11. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Slavery upon the New Afrikan People as recognized in part by the 1926 Slavery Convention and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. The Defendant has illegally refused to pay reparations to the New Afrikan People for the commission of the International Crime of Slavery against Them in violation of basic norms of customary international law requiring such reparations to be paid.

12. The Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes Against Humanity against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles.

13. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of genocide against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

14. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention.

15. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two aforementioned United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966.

16. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the New Afrikan People. The Defendant is the paradigmatic example of an irremediably racist state in international relations today.

17. The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the New Afrikan People to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens.

18. The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to the New Afrikan People and to the Territories that they principally inhabit. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize New Afrikan Territories immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the New Afrikan People.

19. The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured New Afrikan independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant’s treatment of captured New Afrikan independence fighters as common criminals and terrorists constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime.

The Mexicano People

20. In 1821, Mexico obtained its independence from colonial Spain as a sovereign Mestizo State, extending from Yucatan and Chiapas in the south, to the northern territories of California and New Mexico, which areas the Defendant today calls the states of Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Nevertheless, in 1836 so-called settlors under the sponsorship of the Defendant began the division of the Mexicano People and State by causing the division of the Mexican state of Coahuila-Texas into the Mexican state of Coahuila and the so-called republic of Texas.

21. In 1846, the Defendant perpetrated an unjust, illegal and unjustifiable war upon the remainder of the sovereign People and State of Mexico that violated every known principle of public international law in existence at that time, including, but not limited to, the Christian Doctrine of just war, which was the then reigning standard of customary international law. As a result thereof, the Defendant illegally annexed close to 51% of the territories of the sovereign State of Mexico by means of forcing it to conclude the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo under military duress. For these reasons, this Treaty was and still is null and void ab initio as a matter of public international law. The Defendant acquired more Mexican territory through the Gadsen Treaty (Purchase) of 1854.

22. Since these 1848 and 1854 Treaties, the Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories, as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

23. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories, as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention.

24. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories, as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two aforementioned United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966.

25. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories.

26. The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories to self-determination, as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens.

27. Since the militarily-imposed division of the Mexican State, the Defendant and its agents have militarily occupied other portions of the Mexican State, have sought to influence the outcome of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, have practiced a consistent pattern of intervention into Mexico’s internal affairs, all of which have resulted in the arresting distortion and deformation of the Mexican social and economic order. In this regard, Defendant’s so-called North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) constitutes nothing more than an attempt to impose its hegemonial imperialism, economic colonialism, and human exploitation upon the People and State of Mexico.

28. The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to the Mexicano People and to these occupied territories that they inhabit. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize both the Mexican occupied territories and the Republic of Mexico immediately, and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the Mexicano People.

The People and State of Puerto Rico

29. Since its illegal invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898, the Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes against the People and State of Puerto Rico as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles.

30. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against the Puerto Rican People as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

31. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the Puerto Rican People as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention.

32. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the Puerto Rican People as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human rights and the two aforementioned United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966.

33. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the Puerto Rican People.

34. The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the Puerto Rican People to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens.

35. The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to Puerto Rico. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize Puerto Rico immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the Puerto Rican People.

36. The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured Puerto Rican independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant’s treatment of captured Puerto Rican independence fighters as common criminals and terrorists constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime.

An International Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization

37. In light of the foregoing international crimes, the Defendant constitutes an International Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles and the other sources of public international law specified above. The Federal Government of the United States of America is legally identical to the Nazi government of World War II Germany. Indeed, the Defendant’s President, George Bush, has proclaimed a so-called New World Order that sounds and looks strikingly similar to the New Order proclaimed by Adolph Hitler over fifty years ago.

Conclusion

Like unto a pirate, the Defendant is hostis humani generis: The enemy of all humankind! For the good of all humanity, this Tribunal must condemn and repudiate the Federal Government of the United States of America and its grotesque vision of a New World Order that is constructed upon warfare, bloodshed, violence, criminality, genocide, racism, colonialism, apartheid, massive violations of fundamental human rights, and the denial of the international legal right of self-determination to the Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America and elsewhere around the world. Consequently, this Tribunal must find the Defendant guilty as charged on all of the counts specified above beyond a reasonable doubt. This Tribunal must also issue an Order that formally proscribes the Federal Government of the United States of America as an International Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization. This Tribunal must also issue a separate Order mandating the dissolution of the Federal Government of the United States of America as a legal and political entity. Finally, this Tribunal must declare that international legal sovereignty over the Territories principally inhabited by the Native American Peoples, the New Afrikan People, the Mexicano People, and the People of Puerto Rico resides, respectively, in the hands of these Peoples Themselves. The very lives, well-being, health, welfare, and safety of the Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America and elsewhere around the world depend upon the ultimate success of your deliberations.

Professor Francis A. Boyle is an international law expert and served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include “ Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (2003), and “ The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law” (2010).

See USA on Trial: The International Tribunal on Indigenous Peoples’and Oppressed Nations in the United States. The Book and Verdict are available from Editorial El Coqui, 1671 N. Claremont,Chicago Illinois 60647. Or you can try calling the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago at 312-342-4295. The Video can be obtained from Mission Creek Video, PO Box 411271 San Francisco CA 941141 (phone:415-695-0931).

By Human Rights Watch
12 October, 2013
Hrw.org
Download the full report

(New York) – Armed opposition groups in Syria killed at least 190 civilians and seized over 200 as hostages during a military offensive that began in rural Latakia governorate on August 4, 2013, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. At least 67 of the victims were executed or unlawfully killed in the operation around pro-government Alawite villages.

The 105-page report, “‘You Can Still See Their Blood’: Executions, Indiscriminate Shootings, and Hostage Taking by Opposition Forces in Latakia Countryside,” presents evidence that the civilians were killed on August 4, the first day of the operation. Two opposition groups that took part in the offensive, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham and Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, are still holding the hostages, the vast majority women and children. The findings strongly suggest that the killings, hostage taking, and other abuses rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said.

“These abuses were not the actions of rogue fighters,” said Joe Stork, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “This operation was a coordinated, planned attack on the civilian population in these Alawite villages.”

To provide victims a measure of justice, the UN Security Council should immediately refer Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Human Rights Watch said. Human Rights Watch has also documented war crimes and crimes against humanity by Syrian government forces.

For the report Human Rights Watch conducted an on-site investigation and interviewed more than 35 people, including residents who survived the offensive, emergency response staff, and fighters and activists on both government and opposition sides.

Human Rights Watch found that at least 20 distinct armed opposition groups participated in the operation they alternately termed the “campaign of the descendants of Aisha, the mother of believers,” the “Barouda offensive,” or the “operation to liberate the coast,” which lasted until August 18. It is not clear whether all or most of these groups were in the villages on August 4 when the vast majority of abuses apparently took place.

However, five groups that were the key fund-raisers, organizers, and executors of the attacks were clearly present from the outset of the operation on August 4: Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, and Suquor al-Izz. Human Rights Watch concluded through multiple interviews, the on-site investigation, and a review of opposition statements and videos that these five armed groups are responsible for specific incidents that amount to war crimes.

Through the on-site investigation, witness statements, videos and photographs, and a review of hospital records, Human Rights Watch determined that opposition forces unlawfully killed at least 67 of the 190 dead civilians who were identified. For the rest of those killed, further investigation is required to determine the circumstances of their deaths and whether the victims died as a result of unlawful killings.

The high civilian death toll, the nature of the recorded wounds – for example, multiple gunshot or stabbing wounds – and the presence of 43 women, children, and elderly among the dead together indicate that opposition forces either intentionally or indiscriminately killed most of the remaining victims.

The scale and pattern of the serious abuses carried out by opposition groups during the operation indicate that they were systematic and planned as part of an attack on a civilian population. The evidence strongly suggests that the killings, hostage taking, and other abuses committed by opposition forces on and after August 4 rise to the level of crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said.

The local and senior commanders of Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, and Suquor al-Izz who led the operation may bear criminal responsibility for the killings, hostage taking, and other abuses. For both war crimes and crimes against humanity the principle of “command responsibility” applies to military commanders and others in position of authority who can be held criminally liable for crimes committed by forces under their effective command and control.

This covers situations in which the commanders knew or should have known of crimes being committed by their subordinates and failed to prevent the crimes or hand over those responsible for prosecution. Fighters from these and other groups who directly ordered or carried out abuses should also be held criminally accountable.

Human Rights Watch has previously documented war crimes and crimes against humanity by Syrian government and pro-government forces. These include systematic torture and summary and extrajudicial executions after ground operations, such as in Daraya (a suburb of Damascus) and in Tartous, Homs, and Idlib governorates. Abuses by opposition forces under no circumstances justify violations by the Syrian government.

The UN Security Council should impose an arms embargo on groups on all sides against whom there is credible evidence of widespread or systematic abuses or crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch also urged the UN Security Council to promote justice for victims of abuse by all sides by referring the situation in Syria to the ICC.
“Syrian victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity have waited too long for the Security Council to send a clear message that those responsible for horrible abuses will be held to account,” Stork said. “The ICC referral is long overdue.”

Attacks and Killings
The opposition fighters attacked between 4:30 and 5 a.m. on August 4, the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan. The fighters overran government army positions guarding the area and entered more than 10 Alawite villages. The government began an offensive to retake the area on August 5, regaining full control on August 18.

In separate interviews local residents and a government military intelligence officer serving in the area told Human Rights Watch that opposition fighters first entered the Sheikh Nabhan area of Barouda, where government soldiers were positioned. Once the opposition overtook that and other neighboring military positions, they attacked the villages of Barouda, Nbeiteh, al-Hamboushieh, Blouta, Abu Makkeh, Beyt Shakouhi, Aramo, Bremseh, Esterbeh, Obeen, and Kharata. In the following days, opposition fighters also gained control of Qal’ah, Talla, and Kafraya.
Fourteen residents from eight of these villages told Human Rights Watch that they awoke to the sounds of gun and mortar fire and the voices of incoming opposition fighters. They described frantically attempting to flee as opposition fighters stormed the area, opening fire apparently indiscriminately, and in some cases deliberately shooting at residents.

In some cases, opposition fighters executed or gunned down entire families. In other cases, surviving family members had to leave loved ones behind. One resident of the hamlet between Blouta and al-Hamboushieh described fleeing his home with his mother as opposition fighters entered his neighborhood, and having to leave his elderly father and blind aunt behind because of their physical infirmities. He said that when he returned to the neighborhood after the government retook the area, he found that his father and aunt had been killed:
My mom was here in the house with me. She came out of the house first, and I was behind her. We saw the three fighters just in front of us, and then we fled on foot down behind the house and into the valley. The three fighters that I saw were all dressed in black. They were shooting at us from two different directions. They had machine guns and were using snipers. My older brother came down and hid with us as well. We hid, but my dad stayed in the house. He was killed in his bed. My aunt, she is an 80-year-old blind woman, was also killed in her room. Her name is Nassiba.

Fourteen residents and first responders, interviewed separately, told Human Rights Watch that they witnessed executions or saw bodies that bore signs of execution, including some corpses that were bound and others that had been decapitated. A doctor working in the National Hospital in Latakia, which received the casualties from the countryside, told Human Rights Watch that the hospital received 205 corpses of civilians killed during the August 4-18 operation.

The doctor showed Human Rights Watch a medical report the hospital prepared on August 26 stating that the “[c]ause of death in several of [the bodies] was multiple gunshot wounds all over the bodies, in addition to stab wounds made with a sharp instrument, given the decapitation observed in most bodies … Some corpses were found in a state of complete charring, and others had their feet tied …” The medical report reflected that the degree of decomposition of the corpses was consistent with the victims having been killed around August 4.

Hostage Taking
According to opposition sources, including an opposition military officerfrom Latakia involved in negotiations, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham and Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, are holding over 200 civilians from the Alawite villages as hostages, the vast majority women and children. Nine residents from the Latakia countryside separately told Human Rights Watch that their relatives had been taken hostage. Three of these residents said they saw their relatives in the background of a video published on YouTube on September 7. The video showed civilians from the area held hostage by Abu Suhaib, the Libyan local leader of Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar.

A Barouda resident told Human Rights Watch that 23 of her relatives were missing. She said she saw several of them on the YouTube video: “The oldest son of my brother… [who was executed] would have just been starting school … He has two sons, [one] who is six, and [another] who is four-and-a-half.”

Other residents told Human Rights Watch about cases in which opposition fighters executed adult male family members, and then captured women and children from the family as hostages.
Groups that hold hostages should ensure they are treated humanely and immediately released, Human Rights Watch said. Countries with influence over these groups should urge them to release the hostages.

Some of the opposition atrocities during the operation had clear sectarian motivation. For example, in Barouda, opposition fighters intentionally damaged an Alawite maqam (a site where a religious figure is buried) and appear to have intentionally damaged and dug up the grave of the religious figure buried there. On August 4, opposition fighters abducted and later executed Sheikh Bader Ghazzal, the local Alawite religious authority in Barouda who presided over the maqam. The opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra released a statement on what is believed to be their website acknowledging that its members executed the sheikh, who was a relative of Fadl Ghazzal, an adviser to former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, because the sheikh supported the Syrian government.

Recommendations for Neighboring and Other Concerned Governments
All concerned governments with influence over these armed opposition groups should press them to end deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks on civilians, Human Rights Watch said. In addition, all governments, companies, and individuals should immediately stop selling or supplying weapons, ammunition, materiel, and funds to these groups, given the compelling evidence that they have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Support for these five groups should continue to be withheld until the groups stop committing these crimes and those responsible are fully and appropriately held to account. Anyone providing or selling arms and military assistance to the groups may be complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Governments should also not permit the use of their national territory for shipment of arms, ammunition, and other materiel to these groups, Human Rights Watch said. According to Syrian security officials, media reports, Western diplomats, and observations by journalists and humanitarian workers, foreign fighters in these groups enter Syria from Turkey, from which they also smuggle their weapons and obtain money and other supplies, and to which they retreat for medical treatment.

Turkey should increase border patrols and prevent the entry of fighters and arms for groups credibly implicated in systematic human rights violations. Turkey should also investigate and prosecute, under the principle of universal jurisdiction and in accordance with national laws, anyone in Turkey suspected of committing, being complicit in, or having command responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The UN Security Council and Turkey’s allies should call on Turkey in particular to do more to verify that no arms are passing through Turkey to abusive groups, Human Rights Watch said.
Public statements by fundraisers and financiers, opposition activists, and opposition fighters reveal that at least some of the funding for the Latakia operation came from individuals residing in Kuwait and other Gulf countries. Governments should restrict money transfers from Gulf residents to groups credibly implicated in systematic human rights abuses.
Universal jurisdiction laws also are a key backstop against impunity for heinous abuses, especially when no other viable justice options exist, Human Rights Watch said. Countries, such as Turkey should investigate people credibly linked to atrocities in Syria and avoid being a safe haven for human rights abusers.
© Copyright 2013, Human Rights Watch