Tag Archives: Sudan

Blackwater USA out of Sudan!

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Last night, some misguided peace activists in Colorado Springs got together at ‘Poor Richards’ to call for more US-UN-EU intervention into Sudan. They want to stop the bloodshed in Darfur but seem oblivious to the actual realities of US global interventionism. Their get together comes just days after Joseph Biden, a Democratic Party presidential candidate, called for US troops to be sent into Sudan.

So what in effect we have, are Colorado Springs pacifists calling for US military intervention into an African country! It is companies like Blackwater USA who will actually carry out this intervention, along with other outfits from the USA like the Louis Berger Group.

US Out of Africa, not further into it! Blackwater USA Out of Sudan!

DR Congo-4,000,000 dead in last decade and counting

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The real African locale where genocide is occurring is not so much in Sudan, but rather in the Democratic Republic of Congo. So why is there not a ‘Save Congo Coalition’? After all, 4,000,00 dead in just the last decade is nothing trivial at all. Don’t the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ folk give a damn?

No doubt as I write these words, there are speakers at the ‘Peace’ conference in Albuquerque wailing about how action must be taken FOR Darfur. But they won’t say hardly a whisper about the DR Congo. Why not? Well it might just be because there are already 18,000 ‘peacekeeper’ troops in the DR Congo, and yet the fighting keeps on continuing. And the UN Security Council wants out, even as it demands to be let into Sudan! The ‘Save Darfur’ solution of sending in the troops is no more likely to work in Sudan than it really has been working in the DR Congo.

There are real reasons why troops controlled from Washington DC and European capitals do not alleviate much the suffering, but actually add to it long term. That’s because there is no commitment to spend any money on anything other than soldiers and their equipment. The amount of money spent on food for the people of the DR Congo is far less than the money spent on troops. Much less.

It is a disgrace, that while there are those who in our country and Britain demand sending in the Pentagon controlled troops to yet more African countries, they remain largely silent about how in the epicenter of current African genocide (DR Congo), far less than $100 million dollars is spent to help out a huge population of starving people! UNICEF states that currently 1,200 people a day are dying in the DR Congo there, unnecessarily due to the conflicts and poverty/ disease arising from war.

Troops were sent into Somalia, and the US is now begging its proxy invader, Ethiopia, to stay in and further occupy Mogadishu. The US is actually spreading conflict in Africa, and not stopping inter-ethnic conflicts like there are in parts of Sudan. Want to help Africa out? Then try the following approach…

All US controlled troops out of Africa! Send- Food, not Bombs.

All of Africa’s burdensome international debt needs to be written off, and the ‘Save Darfur’ people need to think about saving Africa as a whole instead, by simply demanding that food and medical relief be prioritized instead of their current calls for economic wars (boycotts) and sending in new branches of the military to one locale or another. Help save the people of the DR Congo, and help save the Sudanese and Somalian people, too. And please, please, please…. Close AFRICOM (the US Pentagon African command center) down.

Who is to blame for hunger in Darfur and what to do about it?

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Darfur has become a cause celeb-re for many people in the imperialist countries of the US and Western Europe. They are demanding legislation that pushes for intervention by what are deemed ‘peacekeeper’ troops.

If you go to the rallies that demand ‘Save Darfur’, you hear speakers squarely putting the blame for the deaths in Darfur on Arabs and China. The solution of the ‘Save Darfur’ crowd? Send in the troops in to be controlled by the governments of the US and its European allies. The calls go out for legislation that would enable just that.

But who and what really is to blame for world hunger, including that in Darfur region refugee camps? What other possible solution to the crisis in Darfur would work, if not sending in the troops? There certainly is a crisis in Darfur and that is something worth working to alleviate.

How about campaigning for Food Aid instead of troop intervention? The Developed World only spends about $2 billion per year in world relief of hunger. That’s right! Only $2 billion for all the world. The slogan —Food Not Bombs— really is relevant here, yet the ‘Save Darfur’ activists seem oblivious to that? Instead, they blame Khartoum and China for all the problems in Darfur, and actually are demanding an economic war be engaged in against Sudan! That would work like Clinton’s sanctions did against the Iraqi people. That’s no solution at all but is a crime in the making instead.

How easy it would be to increase the food aid relief to $10 billion dollars from the current sad level of $2 billion. The US portion of that would be about $6 billion dollars. Instead, our government prefers to intervene with troops and bombs, and unfortunately there are many misguided activists that are campaigning for just that using Darfur as their excuse. Shame on them. Food, Not Bombs instead. Sending in the military is not the solution to the murders of civilians in Darfur, nor anywhere elsewhere for that matter. Lets call for Food Relief for all of Africa, and in a manner that does not destroy local food production, too. That’s the decent thing to do.

Trying to keep ‘Democracy Now’ from sounding too much like PBS news

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William Blum is a noted radical commentator, author, and historian. Here is a recent commentary of his about Amy Goodman’s reporting on Cuban ‘dissidents’ just freed by the government there.

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Democracy Now!
I’m a fan of Amy Goodman and her morning radio program “Democracy Now”. It consistently covers a wide range of issues of interest to the progressive community and undoubtedly recruits many new members to the cause. But perhaps their range is too wide to expect the Democracy Now! staff to have done all of their homework on all of the issues. Cuba is one such issue where the program tends to stumble. The latest example was on April 26. In the opening news report, Amy informed us: “In Cuba, six dissidents have been released from prison nearly two years after they were jailed. The Cuban government had drawn international condemnation after the jailings in the summer of 2005.”

That was it. CBS or NPR couldn’t have followed the State Department script any better. There must be many thousands in American prisons who could be called “dissidents” for having at one time or another expressed serious disgust with what the US was doing in some part of the world and who had taken part in a protest; or done the same in regard to some vital economic, civil rights, or civil liberties issue at home. “Oh,” you declare, “but they were not imprisoned because of their dissidence.” Yes, that’s true about almost all of them. But it’s also true about almost all Cuban prisoners.

To grasp this, one must first understand the following: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials, particularly in Havana through the American Embassy (the United States Interests Section). Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization inside the United States? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States, evidence gathered by Cuban double agents.

From the Bill Blum Report
……….

Last week I spent some of my time listening to ‘dissidents’ from Sudan and Yugoslavia who had come to America who had also allied with the US government’s plans for their regions. We can expect more ‘dissidents’ to come forth from places like Iran and Somalia in the months ahead, too. They will be paraded before the world press and American public, most especially, as they us tell their varying tales of villainy, that somehow must be alleviated principally through our Emperor’s help, and with the help of the Emperor’s troops, too, as enforcers.

While we should not be unsympathetic to their appeals, we should understand that little liberation for the people of the world can be achieved by us in the US allowing our government to act as world ‘policeman’. US ‘policemen’ work for the US super rich ultimately, and not for the oppressed anywhere.

There are much better ways for Americans to support peoples’ rights in other countries than supporting manipulation by the US gangsters now in power in D.C., as they use one group or another against each other in foreign countries. We should reject appeals for foreign interventions with US controlled troops PERIOD, and get our own house in order.

Report from Denver Darfur rally

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I went to the Denver’s sparsely attended ‘Save Darfur’ rally today with signs made special for the rally. US OUT OF AFRICA, US/NATO OUT OF SUDAN, and STOP US WAR ON SOMALIA were 3 of them, and we used these to face the listeners that numbered about 150.

Some attending seemed to agree with our message, while others were rather hostile. As I passed out fliers my message was, ‘US OUT- NOT IN’. Many would ally with the Devil himself to try to stop the killing, and the huge number of deaths from this war is certainly horrifying with nobody in the antiwar community wanting the bloodshed to continue. However…

What is the context of this war? We have people calling on their government now committing genocides in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan to come to the assistance of others suffering from fighting occurring in another country. I heard at the rally, many blaming China and Arabs for the mayhem in this one region of Sudan called Darfur. I saw not one sign and heard not one person other than our group mention what the US is doing now in Somalia. Nobody brought up the genocide in the Congo that has killed many more than in Darfur. Nobody but nobody had any sign calling for US OUT of IRAQ!

We had one sign that had the US flag on it and the word GENOCIDE, and then a short, short list of the genocides the US has been involved with. NATIVES, SLAVES, KOREANS, SE ASIANS, IRAQIS. We could not put the many other ones on a poster board sign. They would have included RWANDA, ANGOLA, ANGOLA, MOZAMIQUE, THE HORN OF AFRICA, THE CONGO, and others lesser known ones on the continent of Africa alone. The US has played a major role in all these genocides, yet many in arms about the Darfur massacres insist on trying to turn the US government into a peacekeeper!

The Darfur activists are demanding that US ‘take action’, that the federal legislature put pressure on Bush to be aggressive. One group actually had a score card on this, and listed Congressman Tom Tancredo as having an A+ along with Senator Ken Salazar. No surprise here at all, as Pelosi’s gang actually are trying to outflank Bush to the Right on demanding ‘action’. That’s right. Some Democrats like Democratic Party Congressman Donald Payne are now calling on Bush to start a bombing campaign on Khartoum! So much for the Darfur crowd as being ‘non-violent peacemakers’ we think. How sick is this? A Democratic Party Congressman and a ‘peace organization’ together calling on George W. Bush to initiate yet more military action on yet another country? All in the name of ‘stopping genocide’!

Well that’s enough for now, other than to further mention again that the head of the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ is straight from the US State Department and the UN Security Council’s US support operations branch for occupying countries invaded by the US. Not satisfied with how few countries the US has invaded, occupied, and/or bombed he wants to try for yet more I guess? See this press puff piece about former US Ambassador Lawrence Rossin. He now heads up the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’! He’s going for another one it seems! Bombs away, Lawrence!

The ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ propaganda in support of US African military intervention is utterly reactionary

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Sunday in Denver one of the many nationwide rallies by the so-called ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ will be held, demanding that Bush, John Negroponte, Condaleeza Rice, and The Pentagon move troops into Sudan supposedly to help stop a civil war in that country.

Their incredible demands pushing for yet more US militarism come at the exact same time that the US government has just created close to half a million refugees in Somalia in the short time span of just 6 weeks! The US is the cause of genocides worldwide not the relief of any of them.

One cannot imagine anything more totally reprehensible and retrograde than what these nitwitty do-gooder liberal types are doing now than in currently rallying to justify to the public yet more US global foreign interventionism at this particular moment. It’s like they haven’t an ounce of common sense about them at all? It’s all very sad to see liberal peaceniks actually push for US governmental militarism rather than opposing it as they should be spending their entire energies doing.

Sure, all in the antiwar community want the end of warfare in Sudan as well as throughout Africa to occur. But calling for ‘peace’ to be implemented by the Pentagon meddling is hair brained at best. And asking for the Pentagon to intervene in Darfur is exactly what the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ is doing despite their stealth tactics in going about it.

Their ‘Call to Action’ is the polar opposite of the mainstream International Peace Movement’s strategy, which is to call for the US to end the Made-by-the-US genocide currently being implemented by the US military against the Iraqi people. It is the job of the Peace community to oppose one’s own government’s imperialism and not to help justify it, as the ‘Save Darfur Coalition’ is currently doing.

With the construction of a US military African command center (AFRICOM) now underway, the ‘Save Darfur Coaliton’ should be opposing this. Instead, they are actually demanding that it be put into service! And once in Darfur, where else in Africa will the call go out to to send in US or US directed troops as directed by AFRICOM? We know already, do we not? AFRICOM is directing the war against the Somali people now and abducting POWs taken there to be taken out and tortured in other countries, same as has been done in Afghanistan and Iraq. The call to ‘Save Darfur’ in actuality is a call to plan out more genocides, rather than to eliminate one of them.

US troops out of Africa, not into the continent! Stop the Pentagon! No more military adventures using supposed humanitarianism as the justification.

PS… here is from the ‘Save Darfur’ blog. The same types that had the US kidnapping and removing President Aristide from Haiti and occupying that country with US directed troops are the same people now running the “Save Darfur Coalition’. This is not a group of humanitarians at all. They are from the US State Department.

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Global Day for Darfur III – A Critical Initiative Now!
Posted on Monday, 04/23/07 – 9:23 am
Cross-posted at Globe for Darfur

Amb. (ret.) Lawrence Rossin, Senior International Coordinator at the Save Darfur Coalition, is responsible for designing and leading implementation of the Coalition’s outreach to foreign governments and non-governmental organizations to advocate on behalf of the people of Darfur. Rossin joined the Coalition after serving as Assistant Secretary General and Principal Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, and as part of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. He has also served in a number of diplomatic positions in the U.S. Department of State.

New Age posturing with the ‘pickaninnies’

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Those who grew up in the Old South, remember when racist politicians used to pose with ‘Negro’ children to supposedly show their concern for Black people. That was a crude technique to deflect criticism for being a racist.

White racists often called Black children ‘pickaninnies’, and loved to rub their heads with the different type of hair. They would then comment about how cute and funny Black children were as opposed to the uppity adult Blacks who never fully wanted to acknowledge their assigned places in Apartheid America.

Why the term ‘pickaninny’ for Black children? Try thinking about what ‘pick a ninny’ means. A ninny means a fool. Black children were considered kind of adorable jesters in the court of White racist America of that era, so Whites often tried to help out the supposedly ‘adorable pickaninnies’ with gifts of food and clothing. That made the racist feel good and generous, instead of feeling full of self loathing for being the miserable monsters that most racists really are.

So enter today’s world, and has the posturing with the ‘pickaninnies’ now disappeared? No, it has just morphed into technicolor instead. Instead of touching the ‘pickaninnies moppy heads’ old style, we have good hearted folk posing themselves next to emaciated, injured, and distraught ‘pickaninnies’. And this is done outside US borders, and not inside them as of Old. Case in point is Mia Farrow posing in Chad today on Yahoo News with her great concern for the welfare of the ‘pickaninny’.

Don’t get me wrong here. Much suffering is underway in Africa, as it has been ongoing for centuries. That’s not the point of the posturing though, no more than it was with the posturing of the past. Why is Darfur THE GENOCIDE, and not Congo or Iraq or Palestine? That is the point of the posturing, simply to deflect attention elsewhere from one’s own crimes.

It is not just actresses like Mia Farrow, doing the posturing with the ‘pickaninny’ neither. Here is from antiwar.com today which links to an article titled… Bush considering Darfur no-fly zone. The title says it all. But look who else is posturing to deflect attention away from their own constructed genocides! It is Israel itself. We have Israel, Bush, and Mia Farrow all posing with the ‘pickaninny’. That little ‘pickaninny’ is called Darfur and we are supposed to forget all context in the real world and cry along with the crocodile tears of the genocidal and racist maniacs running amok across the planet. I refer to the governmental leaders of Israel and the US.

They can’t be racists and genocidists at all, look at their concern for the ‘pickaninny’! ‘Save the Pickaninny!’ they seem to be all shouting at one time. Send the candy distributing troops (our boys) in to save the ‘pickaninnies’ of Darfur! Hands off the ‘pickaninnies’! In the link, it is noted that ‘The Holocaust museum has taken the lead on behalf of Darfur’. How nice. Not noted is why the Holocaust museum has not taken the lead on behalf of the Palestinians instead? And why is Bush not trying to impose a no-fly zone over Iraq at this time instead of Darfur?

Let’s face it, New Age posturing with the ‘pickaniny’ is just as nauseating as it was in the Old South of another era. In fact, it may be even more repulsive than before.

America’s War for Terrorism

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One of the most bizarre aspects of the age we live in, is that the world’s major terrorist promoting country is now waging what its marketeers have the incredible gall to call, ‘The War on Terror’! Just this week in the CS Justice and Peace Center, our resident Right Wing nut who attends certain events for some reason or other (maybe monitoring), was telling our book club about the delights of cluster bombs and napalm. What a world class creep, right?

He is a retired lifer in the US military who wanted us peaceniks to understand the lighter side of weaponry, no less. The side he sees, but peaceniks can’t simply because they are so blinded by goodness instead of the ‘logic’ welded by our lifer. This creep is also big on supporting the current so-called ‘War on Terrorism’. He says that with some savages you just cannot negotiate with. And of course, he represents the side of civilization… lol. Colonel Klink to Colonel Napalm attending a book club in his senior years… We live in strange world.

So what we have is people in love with nuclear weapons, napalm, and cluster bombs, all pretending to be mobilizing to stop terrorism, and all the while our press reports all their ‘thoughts’ with straight face! Now we have the master of US ’80s Central American pushed terrorism, John Negroponte, in Africa trying to stop ‘genocide’ in order to help Black people, no less! Oh thank you, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms! Thank you, Bush.

And it’s like we are all supposed to forget that Osama bin Laden was Made in US, too? War on terrorism, stop genocide, stop Osama…stop Saddam… oh stop it now, Fine Fellers you are indeed! Sure it’s a war on terrorism. Sure it is. We believe you for sure. (They play us for total fools it seems.)

But my favorite group of terrorist monsters backed by the US masters of the ‘War on Terrorism’ is the Colombian death squad government. Our group of anti-terrorists down at the White House love these chain saw welding creeps. They consider Colombia an American success story even.

They would boast about it more, the neocons, except Clinton’s gang are the ones that got these lovelies really sawing their way into action. That’s when the DC- DP crowd weren’t bombing The Danube and Sudan’s pharmaceutical factory back then. Oh, and plus murdering down kids in Waco in all their huff and rush.

Let’s not forget, too, all the good deeds of America’s anti-terrorist league for sure. Everybody’s on board this ‘War Against Terror’ though, from Hillary to Condi to the neighbor next door! From ‘Drug War’ to ‘War on Terrorism’, nothing plays too absurd in Orwellian America that can’t be launched into orbits of nonsensical hyperbole. Long Live the War on Satan! Stop the Eastern pedophile evil! So let’s generally Pace ourselves a step at a time, Civilized Christian Crusaders. Long shall live the CCC vs terrorism!

And so what about any collateral damage taking place outside of their dream world? Today at the vigil the sign PEACE got a rather somber response from motorist USA. People seemed to be thinking more than usual. Wonder what might have provoked that change? Wonder if there really is any change that will last more than a week or two?

Why should Bush and Blair be telling Sudan what to do?

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Bush and Blair have begun to order Sudan around. Do this or we will wage war on you. But why on earth do some of us seem to think that Bush and Blair have the right to intervene in Sudan? Don’t tell us that it is to stop genocide, PLEASE! The simple call to make is to just demand that the US, British, and any other colonialists just stay altogether out of Sudan’s affairs. And stay out of the affairs of all of Africa, too.

If you are worried about genocide, then do something about your own damn governments role in causing genocides around the planet first. Get them out of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as Eastern Europe. That”s the best way to be spending your time, Liberals. Otherwise you end up in bed with people like John Negroponte. You should be ashamed of yourselves for calling for imperialist intervention into other countries’ affairs. There is nothing humanitarian or progressive about that at all.

Jundallah- the newest weapon in the US divide and conquer game

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The average American has trouble knowing which of the oceans, Atlantic or Pacific, is east or west of the land mass. But our corporate government is another thing altogether. There, the rulers are always looking to divide and conquer and to pit one ethnic group against another. With such success in Iraq, they are looking for new playgrounds, from the Horn of Africa, to Afghanistan, to Sudan-Chad, to now Pakistan-Iran. Jundallah is the newest weapon in the arsenal.

Darfur needs peace, not peacekeepers

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Thanks to the Libertarian antiwar.com for publishing this one. The title speaks for itself. Darfur needs peace, not peacekeepers. Except, are these really genuine peacekeepers in the first place? And is John Negroponte a genuine peacekeeper? Is Bush?

Out of Congo and into Sudan?

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Today’s news has John Negroponte, the US point man for its interventions in Africa, getting the Sudanese government to allow US proxy troops into the Darfur region. Meanwhile, in Congo, US proxy troops under the UN Security Council command, have decided to stay one month longer in that country. And meanwhile, the scandal of US directed torture and invasion continues to unfold in the news coming from the Horn of Africa, as well over a hundred thousand Somalis have been forcerd to flee for their lives from the capital of Somalia alone.

The US and its forces are now all over the continent of Africa ‘directing the traffic’ of war, and clueless George and his neocon gang haven’t the beginning idea of how to bring about any long term stability anywhere in that region. That’s where the US antiwar movement should help, by simply demanding that the US and its European allies vacate ALL their African activities. That’s the long term solution for Africa’s problems, and the sooner the better. The majority of Latin Americans want the US to stay out of their political, military, and economic affairs, and so do the majority of Africans.

Algeria, Eritrea, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Chad, Yemen- all pulled into made by US war

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It is no longer even just Iran, Somalia, and Syria that are now being pulled into the vortex of the US government’s mad assault on the Muslim world. The above countries, too, are all being made part of the US grab for declining oil reserves. All are to have their security sacrificed, and all in the name of making the US supposedly more secure!.

This should give some people, who believe that it is total madness for the US to attack Iran therefore it can’t be in the planning, some food for thought? Regionalized warfare is in the planning and is being carried out though, whether we like it or not. It is no longer a matter of when it might occur, simply because it already is occurring.

Algeria is now sinking back into its decades long dirty war between its military and Islamic Rightist forces, as Turkey ‘s millitary is with its newest attacks on its oppressed Kurdish citizens. Hezbollah, in Lebanon, announces that Dick Cheney has begun a covert war against them inside that country, while Chad has now become drawn into conflict with Sudan. And in the Horn of Africa, the US is torturingand murering people alongside allies Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, as Eritrea is being accused newly of supporting ‘terrorism’ because it opposes the US made invasion of Somalia with Ethiopian troops! Even in Thailand, the former government’s persecution of its Muslim community has now rebounded into that country presently being ruled most unstably by a group of coup leaders.

The real threat ahead as the US government moves its troops into line for an assault on Iran, is that the countries of Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Egypt will also have their stability crumble, not to mention other places like Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Nigeria, and the Congo, once again. Meanwhile, our politicians of both parties act as if all this is not all their doing! It is, and just like they don’t give a damn about the destruction they are causing abroad, they don’t give a damn about what they aere doing to the common American, neither.

Bush threatening military intervention into Sudan (thanks to Democratic Party liberals)

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Congratulations go out to the ‘Save Darfur’ community of liberals. How pleased you have to be now. Your campaign to send US troops and US directed troops to intervene in the affairs of yet another nation are now bearing fruit, and the Bush Adminstration is now mobilizing itself with Democrats to invade yet another country, that country being Sudan. Oh for sure you never called it a ‘Send in the Troops campaign’, but called it a ‘Stop the Genocide’ campaign instead. How clever! How so ever decent of you.

Funny though that genocide was never used to describe what happened (and still probably is happening) in the Congo, and not once did I hear you sweethearts call for a campaign to stop the US GENOCIDE in Iraq. Since 1991 the US has killed several million Iraqis through war and economic sanctions, yet somehow that never sparked your indignation and labelling of the US as a genocide perpetrator? Why not? Instead you call upon the genocidal US forces to ‘save’ others, all located far outside US borders. How very bizarre. I just don’t get it? Are you liberals total numbskulls. or what?

Yesterday John Negroponte, Ronald Reagan’s master architect of screwing up Central America during the ’80s, was in North Africa threatening US military intervention into Sudan. Joseph Biden, a leading Democratic Party hack, is also calling for US troops to be sent in. Anbd unbelievably in this context, many liberals ac`tually are holding a week of rallies around the planet in 2 weeks to rally support to this cause! Two weeks from Sunday there is one to be held in Denver, and liberals lost in fantasy land here in Colorado Springs also plan to attend the rally! How about using some of that gray matter in your skulls and reconsider what you are actually mobilizing for?

I will be attending this rally, too, with signs calling for the US to get out of Africa, not into it. What a radical concept, ay? I will have signs calling for the US to get out of Somalia, and calling for the US to terminate its new military African command center called, AFRICOM. We need to be calling for the demobilization of US controlled military forces, not calling for further extension of their warfare. Activists working for US and European intervention into Darfur are doing the absolute worst thing possible at this time when they should actually be working to pull US troops out of Iraq instead. Stop getting yourselves lost in space, Space Cadets! If you are against genocide, then at least educate yourselves enough to know which countries perpetrate it. The US would be at the top of the list, FYI.

Liberals sometimes just seem to be totally living in a fantasy world. Just this week I was at a Justice and Peace event where the speaker was actually praising the United Nations! How ass backwards is that? The US controls the UN Security Council and has these military forces doing its dirty work around the globe. The UN is now a thoroughly controlled and thoroughly reaccionary force everwhere. It specializes in mop up operations for the Pentagon, from the Balkans to Haiti to Iraq and Afghanistan. It will be a blissful day in heaven when liberals in the US can begin to put 2 plus 2 together and begin to differentiate reality from their fantasies some little bit. Praising the UN and/ or calling for African Union troops, NATO troops, and UN troops to intervene in places like Sudan is not a move towards world peace and an end to conflict, but are words and actions that will just help increase US military interventionism everywhere.

US OUT OF AFRICA NOW, not into it! Nobody likes the mass deaths inside Africa and that’s why we need the imperialists out, and not in. Demonstrate to withdraw US forces now. Get the US Out of all the foreign places where they are now repressing the world’s peoples. Our government has absolutely no progressive role to play in world politics until we can radically alter it. Since we are not even close to doing that at this point, the call for troops to be used elsewhere is about as backwards as liberal Democrats can be. You should be trying to demobize the military-industrial complex, not use it abroad! Get with the program, Liberals. And I’m not talking about getting with the Bush program for Africa, as you are currently doing.

MTA and the ‘failure to communicate’

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There is a sad but funny commentary on Alternet titled, ‘The Iraq Debacle- Failure to Communicate?‘ I took a semester of Modern Standard Arabic ages ago and this article and the subsequent commentaries discuss the lack of available Arabic translators amongst ‘our troops’ and the various causes for that.

Following is my comment under one of the threads discussing this article.

Nothing new here…
Posted by: logansafi on Apr 9, 2007 7:14 PM

There’s nothing new here with our clownish military and our clown CIC. Nobody knew how to speak Albanian or Serbo Croat either, and God save us if they ever go into Darfur-Chad-Sudan! ‘Saviours’ without a clue they always are.

It is obvious why the US military is so in bed with Israel. Israel is the only country that has some Arab linguist ability, especially when you count their Falangist Lebanese killer friends.

MTA should be what this lingua franca should be called. Modern Torture Arabic. Good for use while stealing Iraqi oil.

Has the US started a new war across the Horn of Africa?

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Fighting is raging across Somalia as the people of that country are increasingly resisting the invasion and occupation of their country by US directed foreign mercenary troops from Uganda and Ethiopia. Over 50,000 refugeees have fled Mogadishu already, and the war there threatens to spark clashes between Ethiopia and Eritrea, too, eventually. All this because English only assholes sitting in their Washington DC giovernment offices nonchalantly decided like chess players, to move their pawns into action on the African board. The resulting conflicts potentially could destabilize the Congo once again, not to mention to destabilize Sudan further.

Funny how all the Darfur fethishists seem so silent now about what the US is now doing to Somalia. Check out aljazeera.net’s reporting on these 2 locales- Somalia and Sudan for a breath of fresh air in reporting.

The best thing for the entire continent of Africa would be for all the US and European military interventions into Africa’s affairs to immediately end. The UN has nothing to contribute positively to bringing peace to Africa neither, since the UN Security Council is itself firmly in the hands of the Bush Adminstration and its Democratic Party allies, that together make up the US government.

Today at the vigil- Darfur

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Today at the noon vigil on Nevada Street, I held a sign that said ‘Hands Off Iran’ and was talking with my Mennonite friend who was holding a sign that said ‘PEACE’. Lo’ and Behold if my favorite Right Wing bicyclist came by once again.

He always has a sour look on his face, not just when he sees us, but in general I rather do believe. In short, he is the Sour Right Wing Bicyclist of the Colorado Springs barrio I live in, and he always passes by with a nasty and arrogant look on his face. He flies by so rapidly, that he usually just has a one word or two that he let’s fly when he sees us on the street corner with our signs. Today it was, ‘DARFUR’.

So just what was his word of wisdom to us miscreants supposed to mean, I thought? Why did he say what he did, at this time? Was it simply a message for us to have a sign calling for peace in Darfur, or was it more than just that? Would he get off his bike and protest in common cause with us if we had included mention of Darfur amongst our signs? I rather think not.

In fact, this particular Right Winger has shown his opposition to our vigil more than a few times before. When he shouted out ‘Darfur”, he was counterposing that cause to ours. This is bullshit, because we would like peace to come to the Darfur regions of Sudan and Chad, too. Who can be for a continuation of the slaughter that has been occurring there? Only a lunatic, I think.

How sad it is, though, that so many have deluded themselves into believing that an end to conflict anywhere, though, is to send in the Pentagon! That’s where we part company with those who campaign around the issue of Darfur. And in the case of this one sour pus neighborhood bicyclist, he was counterposing campaiging for military intervention from the US government and its allies into Sudan, against campaigning to end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by US troops, plus probable future extension of US warmaking into Iran. Somalia alone shows that the US is no peacemaker force anywhere. Not to mention the example of Haiti.

Economic aid to Africa, including Sudan. Not military. If I could put all this on a sign I would. But I doubt that that would satisfy my favorite Right Wing Bicyclist. He’s not all that concerned about Darfur at all, except as an excuse to support the Pentagon. I’d like to think otherwise, but his past behavior regarding our vigil is not a good reason to do so.

Calling for intervention in Darfur rather than calling for withdrawal from Iraq

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More and more people are getting smart about knowing what the ‘Save Darfur’ campaing is really about. Today’s Spotlight article on antiwar.com (The largest antiwar website out there) had an article that hit the nail on the head about the campaign to encourage further US/ European militarism in Africa under the facade of giving humanitarian assistance. The commentary by Anthony Arnove and Tom Engelhardt was appropriately titled, ‘The Anniversary From Hell‘.

Tom Tancredo and Darfur

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While nice sweet liberals like Rebecca Tinsley and Jody Williams are pushing for imperialist interventionism into Sudan for supposedly humanitarian reasons, it is interesting to see the company they keep on their Darfur rescue missions. They are long time Far Right reactionaries like Elliot Abrams, Kansas Senator Brownback, and our very own lovable Colorado prick, Tom Tancredo.

Tom, who is for Border Walls, deporting penniless undocumented workers looking for work, and committing US genocide against the Iraqi people, is also teaming up with the good hearted interventionist liberals who love NATO, the UN Security Council, European and African Union troopers under the Pentagon’s AFRICOM control. Both groups are united in desire to be ‘humanitarian’ it seems, by principally sending in the troops.

Check out ‘The Right’s Stuff in Africa‘ published on the counterpoint. org site. Tom Tancredo stars in this Darfur ‘benevolency’ as the article mentions.

US troops in African fender benders

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Two US troops died in Ethiopia this week. Bush’s soldiers are adrft from their stations in Djibouti a lot these days and we can look for more f’ender benders’ ahead. What with the US Pentagon directing deployment of Ethiopian troops into Somalia and Ugandan troops into Somalia, these traffic accidents will happen.

That last is an interesting item. Ugandan troops are being sent to Somalia as ‘peacekeepers’! Wow, I’m surprised they can find time from fighting the 20 year war taking place n the Northern part of Uganda next to Southern Sudan, all to come across and ‘peacekeep’ for Dubya in Somalia.

Holy Warriors and African Crusades! That’s all Africa needs now, a ‘clash of civilizations’, Christians vs Muslims. Meanwhile, uranium kleeps coming up missing from the Congo (1oo bars or so). Oh well, it’s not really all that radioactive, is it?

AFRICOM and the US/ European drive to control Africa’s oil

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The Center for International Policy has an excellent report about the newest US push to further militarize the continent of Africa and control the oil supplies located there. All of this is to be done under the propaganda cover of fighting terrorism, and through the establishment of the new African command operation center (AFRICOM) of the US military, which is already the military coordinator of US interventions into Somalia, into Chad and Sudan, and into Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, and where much of the African oil is located.

No area of Africa will actually be free from US military control when these plans are fully put into place, and antiwar activists should be pushing to oppose the expansions of US and European military organizations into the African continent now. That includes opposing the further deployments of African Union and United Nations Security Council troops as well, since these groups are not autonomous or free of Pentagon control. Not in the least.

After literally killing hundreds of millions of Africans through decades and centuries of European/ US colonialism and imperialism on the continent, the new push to control and loot African oil for the industrialized countries promises much more suffering to come to Africa in the years ahead. The real genocide that is taking place throughout Africa has been in march for a very long time through the entire continent, and can only be ended by giving the boot to the US and Europe and their imperialist armies out of the region altogether. African oil for Africans and not for imperialist based multinational oil companies backed up by the Pentagon! Stop AFRICOM now. We need to stop the genocide across the entire African continent, and that can only be done by getting our own US government’s military demobilized.

(You might want to read the entire CIP report and not just the link I provided to the summary of that report. The link to the entire PDF shown article, if you missed it, is at the bottom of the introduction itself. Very interesting material.)

Democracy Now’s adulatory interview with Gen. Wesley Clark, war criminal

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America’s ruling elite have split about whether Bush’s decision to expand the War to Steal Iraq’s Oil into the neighboring countries of Syria, Lebanon, and Iran is likely to succeed or not. Wesley Clark, Clinton’s mad war criminal bomber of Yugoslavia, certainly is on the side that fears future failure by the Bush Administration.

He even has his own website dedicated to trying to stop the expansion of US government started warfare into Iran. But in the Amy Goodman interview, it appears that he actually wanted to attack Iran, and not Iraq, first. Now he feels that it is a mistaken strategy to do this attack he previously supported, after 6 years of Bush’s bungling, incompetence, and failure.

Amy Goodman all but begged Wesley Clark to run for president, echoing the incomprehensible stupidity of Michael Moore in the previous election. These liberals seem to be looking for some Dwight Eisenhower type to latch on to? How pathetic, since Wesley Clark is absolutely nothing more than a war criminal who started a war with a sovereign country illegally, and sat quiet as Clinton/ Gore killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents through economic sanctions and continual bombings of Iraq during the 8 years of that Administration. These are the type of imperialist liberals who now talk of helping citizens of Sudan out, when during their time in office they were bombing illegally targets in that country, specifically one of Africa’s largest pharmaceutical factories. Clark, and his Slick Commander Clinton, sat and twiddled their thumbs, while hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were cut down. The US and French could easily have stopped that slaughte, but they were occupied with ‘stopping the Serbs’.

After much of the interview with Clark by Goodman conducted on a chit-chat friendly level, Goodman eventually felt the need to let Clark pretend to respond somewhat adequately to his record of continually bombing Yugoslav civilian infrastructure when he was top general in command of the Clinton war of Aggression Against Yugoslavia. This record includes the deliberate bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, also bombing the Serbian television station in that city killing journalists and and other civilians at work there, and bombing various factories along the Danube River, thereby contaminating that important waterway for years afterwards with toxic chemicals, as well as killing workers and neighborhood residents. The few parts of his miserable terrorist record Clark was asked to account for by Goodman, was predictably blamed on Milosevic and the Serbs themselves. Goodman made no effort to illustrate the dishonesty of his responses.

Further, Clark went on to support the continued US use of nuclear weapons and cluster bombs in US war making. Amy Goodwin let him walk on all of this, absolutely free as a breeze. How very sad to see this desperate desire for allies against the neocons turned into Goodman’s covert prompting of Clark towards a run for US presidency by this war criminal. Shame on you, Amy. I respect your show immensely but felt ashamed for you Friday night. Don’t let these rats off the hook when they try to desert the ship that Bush is trying to run aground. These imperialist just want a better vessel at hand to continue their imperialist aggressions against other countries. Certainly everything about Wesley Clark points towards continued disaster if he were actually to gain the presidency in 2008. Why prompt for more capable imperialists to regain command? Wesley Clark couldn’t even muster up a call for the impeachment of Bush or a description of the invasion and occupation of Iraq as being illegal. I guess not, since that would have been to illustrate how he himself had carried out and commanded an illegal war against Yugoslavia.

Rebecca Tinsley and Darfur- when ‘Waging Peace’ is calling for imperialist military action

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Rebecca Tinsley, head of a British group called ‘Waging Peace’, spoke this past Tuesday at Colorado College. Her topic was Darfur and stopping a supposed genocide going on there. The report of the meeting in the Colorado College student newspaper neglected to mention that she was also director of this group, ‘Waging Peace’, nor that Tinsley is also a hotshot within the Carter Center.

And who else is hot within the Carter Center right now? Why it happens to be Madelyn Albright, who once told a CBC reporter that the deaths of half a million Iraqis per Clinton’s sanctions ‘were worth it’. Albright was also a featured speaker last year at an American rally calling for ‘action’ against Sudan. ‘Waging Peace’ it seems, is in reality making propaganda in favor of imperialist intervention rather than against it, though they might try to deny it.

I was unable to get to the Colorado College forum on time, but a quick google on Tinsley and ‘Waging Peace’ is quite educational in itself. Here is Tinsley calling for European imperialist intervention into the African country of Sudan from the website of that group she directs. See their Feb. 15, 2007 press release.

Rebecca Tinsley spends much of her time lobbying Tony Balir and George W. Bush to ‘intervene’ in Africa where she is fond of shouting GENOCIDE, GENOCIDE, GENOCIDE in every direction. It seems that she is not that interested in the genocides underway against the peoples of Iraq, Palestine, or Afghanistan, though. She specializes in calling for imperialist action, not for calling to stop imperialist action. She calls this ‘Waging Peace’!

Progressives need to educate themselves more about these NGO types that do as Rebecca Tinsley and the Carter Center associated liberal hawks like Madelyn Albright are doing with Darfur. Edward Herman has an interesting commentary today on Znet about Human Rights Watch, another NGO that is prone to shrill for starting off imperialist ‘actions’ by crying GENOCIDE, while staying rather mum on ongoing genocides by imperialist countries. See HRW in Service to the War Party

Of note: Rebecca Tinsley is also a member of the London Human Rights Watch committee.

The UN becomes a creature of Bush and The Pentagon in Somalia

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As the second US aircraft carrier moves into the Persian Gulf threatening to attack Iran and while Ethiopia is bombing civilians in Mogadishu, the UN is busy rubber stamping the joint Ethiopia/ US invasion and occupation of Somalia. UN troops are being organized to go and occupy Somalia for Dubya. Like the UN occupation of Haiti, the United Nations Security Council has again demonstrated that it is in fact a creature of Washington DC and the Pentagon, and not the world’s nations.

Far from bringing democracy to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush Administration and its Democratic Party loyal ‘opposition’ are spreading mayhem and terror throughout the world. Who would have thought that after decades of the US Right Wing screaming that ‘we’ need to get out of the UN, that in fact they would actually go on to make the UN into a tool of neocon reaction? But it has happened.

The only just thing that American peace activists can call for, is removal of all foreign troops out of Somalia, including those of the UN, US, Ethiopia, and all troops from other African countries bought and mobilized by the US. This onfolding chaos in the Horn of Africa due to the US oil-grabbing war on Islam, illustrates the dangers of calling for US intervention into Darfur/ Chad/ Sudan as some liberal do-gooders are doing. We need to call for European and US troops out of Africa, and not for them to go into countries there with their imperialist troops. That is just common sense.

Is Kosovo just an accident of war?

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Remember when America was torn asunder and went to war for the Albanians? Yeah, the liberals’ war. Clinton and Gore’s war. We cared so much about Albanians then and whether they were getting a fair shake! Makes one laugh in retrospect, does it not?

Care about them now, Liberal? We bombed and invaded another nation, and the cheerleaders for that activity back then, are the liberals innocents so aghast about Dubya’s and Dick’s actions these days. They’re planning to ‘take back America’ for us the Democrats say! What a bunch of sorry ass phonies those donkeys are! But if one day you support invading and tearing apart one ethnic minority out of a multi-ethnic society, then it shouldn’t surprise the Democrats that the Republicans are doing the exact same thing in Iraq today. Oops, didn’t Slick Willy start that off, in fact, by arming the Kurds?

Well what to do about Kosovo? The NATO forces want to move on, yet can’t. They’re too busy guarding Albanians for Western humanists, I guess? So why not have 2 Albanias? The genius who thought that might be a cute trick is Bill Clinton! But how to do it? Even with all the aid and support the Kosovo Albanians have received, the 2,000,000 of them have an unemployment rate of over 50%. Remember those evil Serbs that oppressed these gentle US allies so? Well, Milosevic never allowed such a crime to occur to the people there. It was the American, Brit, European Union imperialists that did them in.

I remember even all the so many European, American, Australian, Canadian socialist and communist groups that said that they were against that war, yet supported the US objectives there. They said that they opposed Milosevic, and opposed NATO in equal part. Heard any of them lately urging that NATO pick up and leave? Shoot, NATO is using the bases they built in Bosnia and Kosovo both, to ‘render’ and torture prisoners from other parts of the globe. Heard the Lefty, anti-Milosevic do-gooders campaign on that issue much? Neither have I.

Is Kosovo an accident of war? examines the issues a bit. Heck, Kosovo as it exists today was no accident, but rather it was an excuse for a crime. It was an excuse for a gang of imperialist countries to further crack up the multiethnic society that was once called Yugoslavia. Your British and American liberals brought that crime on, and by extension they brought the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq into being.

Let’s take back American from the Democratic Party liberal dummies, too! And the other Kosovo lesson to take home to heart? Just because a group calls itself Left, socialist, or communist even, does not mean that they know much what they are doing or talking about. They may be screaming along with the liberals to supposedly help folk out in boonies, like Darfur, East Timor, Kosovo, etc. But when all is said and done they are mainly helping the imperialists formulate propaganda to convince people that their wars are necessary to help people, when in fact, they are most certainly not.