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By
Chris Floyd
Yesterday
we wrote of the plight of a U.S. citizen who had fled the fighting
during the Bush-backed invasion of Somalia only to find himself
"renditioned" into the sinister prisons of the Ethiopian
invaders despite the fact that U.S. officials declared that
there were no charges against him. (See the second half of that
post.)
Now The Independent reports that Amir Meshal the 24-year-old
New Jersey man renditioned by U.S. officials because he refused to
confess to being an al Qaeda agent is not alone in being
subjected to the lawless procedure so beloved by the defenders of
civilization. (For an early example of this, which also involved
Somalia, see Render Unto Caesar.)
Anger at US 'rendition' of refugees who fled Somalia (Independent)
Excerpts: At least 150 people arrested in Kenya after fleeing
violence in Somalia have been secretly flown to Somalia and
Ethiopia, where they are being held incommunicado in underground
prisons, human rights groups say...
Several of the suspects are understood to be held in underground
prisons at Mogadishu airport where they are held shackled to the
wall. Most have since been sent on to two detention facilities in
Addis Ababa. Ethiopia has been accused of routinely torturing
political prisoners. A further 50 or 60 people accused of
belonging to Ethiopian rebel groups fighting alongside Somalia's
Union of Islamic Courts were sent directly to Ethiopia....
The suspects deported from Kenya were interrogated beforehand by
American FBI officials in Kenyan prisons, where they were accused
of having links with al-Qa'ida. "This is extraordinary
rendition," said Maini Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National
Human Rights Commission. "Britain and America are involved in
interrogating suspects."
Following the US-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian troops,
thousands of Somalis have tried to escape the violence by crossing
the long, porous border with Kenya. Many of those caught on the
Kenya-Somalia border were accused of belonging to the Islamic
Courts and refused entry.
At least 150 of those who managed to get through were detained by
Kenyan police, including 17 women and 12 children, one a baby of
seven months. Many needed medical attention but did not receive
it, including a pregnant Tunisian woman who had a bullet lodged in
her back.
All were held in Kenyan prisons for several weeks without access
to lawyers and family members. As well as being interrogated by
the FBI, human rights groups in Nairobi also claimed British
officials were involved.
"The Americans had direct access to the prisoners, one on
one," said Al-Amin Kimathi of the Muslim Human Rights Forum,
adding that US diplomatic vehicles carried the suspects from
Nairobi police stations to be questioned. "Senior Kenyan
police officers told us they had nothing to do with the
operation," said Mr Kimathi. "It was out of their
hands."
The US has claimed that Somalia's Islamic Courts, which controlled
much of the country until December, was run by an al-Qa'ida cell.
Ethiopian troops, backed by US intelligence and logistical
support, overpowered the Islamic Courts within a few days of
fighting at the end of last year.
This latter claim is baseless. It is simply a reflection of the
Bush gang's primitive tactic of labeling any inconvenient Muslim
group or individual as "al Qaeda," which then
"justifies" any action taken against them: military
invasion, assassination, rendition, indefinite detention, torture.
It's clear that no nation on earth will be allowed to organize its
own society as it wishes, or work out its own internal conflicts,
if the American elite decides they have some financial or
strategic interest in the matter. The only nations immune to this
power-mad interventionist philosophy are those who can strike back
hard enough to upset the elite's apple cart. And thus we have
Bush's "war on terror" which is, as we've often
noted, simply an escalation of the long-running, bipartisan
foreign policy of the "National Security State" that has
ruled America for 60 years.
This year marks the anniversary of this coup d'ιtat: the 1947
"National Security Act." Writing on the 50th anniversary
of this supplanting of the Republic, Gore Vidal wrote:
Fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a
national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual
wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February
27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman,
Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional
leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he
could have his militarized economy only IF he first "scared
the hell out of the American people" that the Russians were
coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative
government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only
corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and
presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is
entirely accountable because those who have bought the government
also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard
at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase.
Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states,
we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor
no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally
wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do
not pay our dues...we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although
We the People of the United States are the sole source of
legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in
Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate
America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine..."
Obviously, the situation that Vidal describes didn't begin with
the illegal implantation of the Bush Regime by the rightwing
faction of the Supreme Court (two of whom had family members
profiting from the Bush campaign) in December 2000. It has gone on
for decades, under "liberal" Democrats and
"conservative" Republicans. But it has reached a new
pitch of intensity, audacity and recklessness today.
Somalia might seem an odd choice for "the path of
action" the Hitlerian phrase that Bush incorporated into
the official "National Security Strategy of the United
States" in formalizing the doctrine of "preventive"
i.e., aggressive war. (It was also then that he declared
that his version of corrupt crony capitalism to be the
"single sustainable model of national success.") But as
"blaqfather," a commentor on the previous points out,
before Somalia collapsed into anarchy in 1991, it was being
actively explored by major oil companies: "A World Bank and
U.N. survey that year of eight northeastern African countries'
petroleum potential ranked Somalia second only to Sudan as the top
prospective commercial producer. Northern Somalia lay within a
regional oil window reaching south across the Gulf of Aden, the
geologists said." So Somalia's affairs are not entirely
without interest to a Washington regime populated by professional
oilmen.
What's more, Somalia's geographic location gives it heightened
importance in the Bush Regime's strategy to control the Horn of
Africa and dominate the continent's ever-more-vital oil supplies.
The Pentagon recently set up its first-ever "African
Command," adding it to the string of regions under the
command of a military proconsul. (Bush has also created the first
such satrapy covering the United States itself, which has never
before been the subject the target? of a military
"command.")
And finally, Somalia was "doable." You can crush it
without cost, squash it like a fly, and not only do it on the
cheap with Ethiopian troops and local warlords serving as your
proxies you can do it without notice. The entire Somalian
campaign and America's very extensive involvement in it
has passed virtually unremarked in the U.S. media, and plays no
part at all on the national political scene. It is simply a
non-event, something happening far away to a bunch of darkies
Muslim darkies, on top of that so who cares? It's not even
worth a joke by Leno or Letterman.
But "doability" is a major factor in the "War on
Terror" strategy. The Bush gang thought Iraq was
"doable," as the BBC's John Simpson noted in 2006:
It was a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq, three years ago. I
was interviewing the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud
al-Faisal, in the ballroom of a big hotel in Cairo...he described
to me all the disasters he was certain would follow the invasion.
The US and British troops would be bogged down in Iraq for years.
There would be civil war between Sunnis and Shias. The real
beneficiary would be the government in Iran.
"And what do the Americans say when you tell them this,"
I asked? "They don't even listen," he said.
... I asked him why he thought the US was determined to invade
Iraq.
He said he had put the same question to Vice-President Dick
Cheney. Mr. Cheney had replied: "Because it's doable."
The Bushists were wrong about Iraq, of course, because they are
stupid, arrogant, third-rate characters, blinded by their greed
and by the ignorant prejudices that boil up in their
"guts," which Bush cites so often as his guide. But
Cheney's remark is a perfect expression of their approach, which
is the way of the coward and the bully, who only beat up people
who can't hit back.
That is doubtless the only thing delaying the attack on Iran for
which they have openly prepared: they're trying to figure out,
with their crabbed little minds, if they can get away with it with
all their apple carts intact. Anyone not blinded by greed or drunk
on imperial arrogance knows that such an attack will be a costly,
ghastly moral horror and a vast strategic mistake. But then, that
was also the case with the attack on Iraq, which millions of
people across the world marched against, in an outpouring for
peace never seen before in human history. But the Bushists and
their drunken sycophants in the American political and media
establishments were still stupid enough to pull the trigger.
And although some of those Establishment figures have sobered up a
bit since then, why should we think that the Bushists themselves
who rejected the wan Establishment attempts to rein in the
Iraq war and instead "surged" into an escalation are
any smarter now?
Meanwhile, they have slaked their constant craving for
"regime change" with this little "do-able"
appetizer in Somalia. And they have gotten away with it.
Chris Floyd is the author of Empire Burlesque: The Secret History
of the Bush Regime. Visit his blog at www.chris-floyd.com
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