- Has anyone noticed that yet another "regime change"
accomplished with U.S. military assistance is now collapsing into savage
and entirely predictable internecine conflict?
-
- The Washington Post has certainly noticed. They put <>this
story about the growing insurgency in Somalia and the brutal reprisals
against the <>Bush-backed, Bush-trained Ethiopian occupiers and the
Somali government they installed way up near almost the very front, all
the way to...page 15.
-
- But you can see why they would do that. It is actually
an excellent story, written by Stephanie McCrummen, which exposes
with the hard facts of that "reality" thing that Bush and <>his
sycophantic followers, like Fred Hiatt, have such a hard time getting a
handle on <>the bloodsoaked chaos that follows everywhere in
the wake of Bush's "Global War on Terror." And we all know that
excellent stories exposing the follies of Bush's reckless, blunderbuss
militarism (no doubt the walls of the Oval Office are filled with buckshot
from Bush's shotgun blasts at the occasional mosquito flitting by) are
habitually buried deep in the Post's compost pit of inside pages
which was the fate of so many of the pre-war Dana Priest stories that revealed
the grave weaknesses of the Bush gang's arguments for invading Iraq.
-
- As noted here (and elsewhere), the Washington Post isn't
really like Pravda (except when Hiatt gets all trembly while gazing at
the portrait of the Generalissimo in his office). Pravda never would have
published any story that reflected badly on the government, even one buried
certain fathoms deep inside the paper. The Post has always provided stories
in which crumbs of truth and reality and sometimes whole chunks
could be unearthed from beneath the mounds of fawning spin and bogus "objectivity"
of the "<>Matt Drudge rules our world!" school. And as
the cesspool of Bush crime rises to such stenchful, overflowing levels
that even a few of the Beltway barons have been forced to scratch their
heads and say, "Hmm, looks like there might possibly be something
slightly amiss here, if I may say so without appearing shrill or unserious,"
the Post is getting more and more bold in its placement of critical pieces.
Why, they even put a story about the horrible neglect of wounded soldiers
a widespread scandal that had been going on for years, even as the
Administration and their pom-pom boy Hiatt were excoriating war opponents
for "not supporting the troops" on the front page. And
as the Scarlet Pimpernel used to say, Odd's fish, that's something, isn't
it?
-
- And to be fair, the Post has had several courageous and
resolute reporters bringing home the reality of the vast war crime that
Bush has instigated in Iraq. Often these stories have made it to the front
page although it's still a sad commentary on the state of our modern
media when the Post must be praised for occasionally speaking the plain
truth about a wretched misdeed whose monstrousness no sentient being could
deny. But here too, these stories can still just be slotted
into an acceptable Establishment narrative, a line of conventional wisdom
that has slowly emerged over these years of mass murder and ruin: the charge
that the Bush Administration has "mismanaged" the war, they "didn't
do it right," they've made so many "blunders." The "Iraq
Study Group" of heavily jowled worthies led by James Baker provided
the final seal of Establishment approval for this line, which has been
adopted by all the leading Democratic presidential candidates and most
of the Party's power players. (It was also the basic theme of John Kerry's
presidential campaign: "Hey, I can do this war better than Bush!"
Wonder what a young Kerry would have thought of any Democrat who ran for
president in 1972 on the theme: "I can fight this Vietnam War better
than Nixon!")
-
- And although this new narrative can encompass a good
deal of genuinely harsh criticism against the government, the basic premise
of the Establishment's long-running, bipartisan foreign policy remains
unchallenged: "We have the right to intervene in any country in the
world covertly, overtly, with military force if need be in
order to advance the interests (and the ignorant prejudices) of our ruling
cliques." The most any critic within the Establishment especially
one who aspires to high political office is allowed to say is that
a particular intervention has been "mismanaged," or ill-timed,
or unproductive, or too expensive. To go beyond that, to say that a war
launched by the United States is criminal and immoral, is to be cast into
outer darkness, labeled "unserious," banished to the back benches
with the cranks and the losers. (The current political situation gives
proof to this: where are the Democratic leaders with institutional power
or large national followings who will plainly say that the invasion and
occupation of Iraq was an immoral act, a work of evil?)
-
- But the underlying assumption of "unilateral action"
is never seriously questioned. And it is this bipartisan assumption that
drives the entire "War on Terror," which is simply a vast machine
for perpetuating and expanding the military-industrialist complex. It obviously
has nothing to do with combating terrorism which it has demonstrably
exacerbated or with bringing peace and democracy to benighted lands.
-
- And thus Somalia, a much-ravaged country that had at
last won some measure of stability under its homegrown "Islamic Court"
system has been plunged into murder and ruin again. (And to anticipate
the tired and tiresome troll objections at this point: No, I wouldn't want
to live under Somalia's Islamic Court system, any more than I would want
to live under the rule of the hardline religious parties that Bush has
installed in power through mass murder in Iraq. Or under the brutal religious
tyranny of Bush's family friends and business partners, the Saudis. Hell,
I might not even want to live in a dry county. But my lifestyle preferences
don't give me the right to invade other countries (or counties!) and slaughter
their people and arrange their way of life for them. One can criticize
the war crime of military aggression against a country without endorsing
that country's way of life in all particulars, or any of them. But I realize
this is a logic beyond the dwindling band of Hiatt-like bootlickers who
still keep their slavish faith in the Leader.)
-
- Now Somalia's brief moment of stability is gone. Now
the nation is occupied by a foreign power, helped in their invasion not
only by American training and money but also by extensive U.S. air raids
on fleeing refugees who supposedly had "al Qaeda terrorist leaders"
among their ranks. (And even turning fleeing Americans, uncharged with
any crime, over to the tender mercies of the Ethiopian regime. More on
this story after the jump.) But goldang it, wouldn't you know the bombs
missed them Qaeders and just killed a bunch of unimportant innocent black
nobodies instead. Oh well, as Stalin always said: "When wood is chopped,
chips fly." That's pretty much the motto of Bush's "War on Terror."
-
- * * *
-
-
- From McClatchy Newspapers (Knight-Ridder as was), which
has probably been the best, most forthright mainstream service covering
the Bush Imperium's wars, comes the story of a U.S. citizen who fled the
violence spread by the Bush-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, only
to find himself thrust back into captivity in Ethiopia by American agents.
-
- Of course, he wasn't a "real" American, in
the Bushist sense. He was one of "them" -- Amir Mohamed Meshal,
24. And he committed three cardinal sins in the eyes of the Imperium: he
happened to be in a "regime change" target country when the Bushists
pulled the trigger; he was a Muslim; and he refused to confess to being
a member of al Qaeda -- even though FBI agents in Kenya strongarmed him
with the threat of turning him over to torture chambers in Ethiopia. And
true to the spirit of that great American cross-dresser, J. Edgar Hoover,
they were men of their word -- they gave him, a fellow American, to Ethiopia,
despite admitting that there were "no outstanding charges" against
him and no plans to arrest him. There is another term for that condition:
"innocent," as we used to say in the old days, before the Unitary
Executive descended from the Holy Crawford Cowpat and delivered us from
the rule of law. Here's how McClatchy tells it:
-
- American's jailing in Ethiopia raises questions about
U.S. role Excerpts: A U.S. citizen who was caught fleeing the recent fighting
in Somalia was questioned about links to al Qaida by the FBI in Kenya,
then secretly sent back to the war-ravaged country, where he was turned
over to Ethiopian forces.
-
- Amir Mohamed Meshal, 24, is now imprisoned in Ethiopia,
where the State Department's 2006 human rights report says "conditions
in prisons and pre-trial detention centers remain very poor" and "there
were numerous credible reports that security officials often beat or mistreated
detainees."
-
- The fact that Meshal has landed in an Ethiopian prison
without any semblance of due process raises new questions about what role
the rule of law plays in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Other
suspected terrorists or "enemy combatants" have been exposed
to extreme interrogation methods, secretly sent to countries that practice
torture, held for extended periods without charges or lawyers, or put under
surveillance without court warrants.
-
- [This is the kind of context, the kind of reality that
you might find -- sometimes -- in the 27th paragraph of a typical Washington
Post story, yet here it is in the third paragraph. This kind of thing too
had a name in the old days: we called it "journalism."]
-
- An American official who met Meshal in Kenya but wasn't
authorized to discuss his case publicly told McClatchy Newspapers that
the U.S. Embassy asked Kenya to release Meshal so he could return to the
United States. There are no outstanding charges against Meshal, and U.S.
law enforcement officials weren't planning to take him into custody, the
official said. "The Kenyan authorities decided otherwise. It's not
something we have control over," the official said. State Department
spokesman Tom Casey said the U.S. has protested Meshal's deportation.
-
- Human rights groups in Kenya and the United States, however,
disputed the contention that the U.S. was powerless to win Meshal's release
from Kenyan custody before he was deported. "Anyone who tells you
that the United States doesn't have the clout to convince the Kenyans to
return an American citizen is either misinformed or lying," said John
Sifton of Human Rights Watch, in New York.
-
- Kenya and Ethiopia are key allies in the Bush administration's
battle against Islamic extremism in Africa, and President Bush has requested
a total of more than $1 billion in aid for the two countries in fiscal
2008, making them among the largest recipients of U.S. aid in Africa....
-
- Meshal's saga appears to have begun began late last year,
when Ethiopia sent troops into Somalia to help crush the Islamic Courts
Council, an alliance of militias that the Bush administration alleges is
an al Qaida front. The administration backed the Ethiopian operation with
training, intelligence, special forces, and aerial surveillance, and worked
closely with Kenya, Ethiopia and the interim Somali government to capture
suspected al Qaida members and other potential terrorists....
-
- While Meshal was jailed in Kenya [for immigration violations
after crossing the border in flight from the war], he told other detainees
and Muslim human rights activists who visited the group that FBI agents
had threatened to send him back to Somalia if he didn't admit he was an
al Qaida member. Meshal said he was an American citizen from New Jersey,
that he'd recently been in Dubai, and that he'd gone to Somalia to practice
Islam under the Courts regime, which had imposed Islamic law on much of
the country.
-
- Meshal told the human rights activists that FBI agents
drove him to a hotel in a U.S. Embassy car for an interview on Feb. 5.
He said the agents told him to confess to being a member of al Qaida or
they'd send him to Mogadishu, the Somali capital, according to Omar Mohammed
of the Nairobi-based Muslim Human Rights Forum, who spoke regularly with
Meshal in prison. "He was informed that he was in a lawless country
and had no right to legal representation," Mohammed said. "He
was being treated as a terrorist."
-
- Mohammed said that Meshal had told him that the FBI agents
had showed him photos of several people and told him they'd been taken
at terrorist training camps in Somalia. Meshal said that when he denied
knowing the people, the agents threatened him with torture and said they'd
come back the next day, according to Mohammed...Two U.S. officials in Washington,
speaking on condition of anonymity, said Meshal was turned over to Ethiopian
forces in Somalia and is being held in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
-
- Maybe the Ethiopians will be able to persuade him into
confessing. If not -- well, he'll just be one more wood chip on Bush's
growing pile. But who's counting? And who cares?
-
-
- Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared
in print and online in venues all over the world, including the Nation,
CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor,
Il Manifesto, theMoscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire
Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder
and editor of the <>"Empire Burlesque" political blog.
He can be reached at<>cfloyd72@gmail.com.
|
