| Old Articles | | There isn't content right now for this block. | |
 | |
War and Terror: Freedom Rider: Death and Somalia
Sunday, October 06 @ 22:57:57 UTC |  By Margaret Kimberley
October 06, 2013 - blackagendareport.com
“Our government bears responsibility for the loss of life at the Kenyan mall.”
“Does al Shabab Pose a Threat on American Soil?” So read a headline in the New York Times’ blog, Room for Debate. Despite its name, Room for Debate rarely shows any true differences of opinion on whatever issue of the day is considered significant to the Times’ editors. None of the supposed debaters on this topic actually addressed the central issue of al-Shabaab’s existence and what it says about the United States behavior around the world. A better question would be why the United States turned Somalia into a ruin and why does it keep killing people there.
Sometimes we get the opportunity to see violence up close as in the recent al-Shabaab attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. But in the absence of good reporting, scenes of carnage tell us nothing. Thanks to liar presidents and their partners in the corporate media, Americans know nothing about Kenya or its role as American partner in keeping Somalia in a constant state of war.
| | (Read More... | 6604 bytes more | War and Terror | Score: 5) |
|
Africa Focus: Somalia: Another CIA-Backed Coup Blows Up
Thursday, December 04 @ 05:39:51 UTC | By Mike Whitney
December 02, 2008
Information Clearinghouse
Up until a month ago, no one in the Bush administration showed the least bit of interest in the incidents of piracy off the coast of Somalia. Now that's all changed and there's talk of sending in the Navy to patrol the waters off the Horn of Africa and clean up the pirates hideouts. Why the sudden about-face? Could it have something to do with the fact that the Ethiopian army is planning to withdrawal all of its troops from Mogadishu by the end of the year, thus, ending the failed two year US-backed occupation of Somalia?
The United States has lost the ground war in Somalia, but that doesn't mean its geopolitical objectives have changed one iota. The US intends to stay in the region for years to come and use its naval power to control the critical shipping lanes from the Gulf of Aden. The growing strength of the Somali national resistance is a set-back, but it doesn't change the basic game-plan. The pirates are actually a blessing in disguise. They provide an excuse for the administration to beef up it's military presence and put down roots. Every crisis is an opportunity.
| | (Read More... | 9290 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Toxic scandal in Somalia gave birth to new piracy
Sunday, November 30 @ 23:59:40 UTC | November 25, 2008
socialistworker.co.uk
The escapades of Somali pirates made headlines last week. But the media has ignored the injustice behind the phenomenon, writes Simon Assaf
When the Asian tsunami of Christmas 2005 washed ashore on the east coast of Africa, it uncovered a great scandal.
Tonnes of radioactive waste and toxic chemicals drifted onto the beaches after the giant wave dislodged them from the sea bed off Somalia.
Tens of thousands of Somalis fell ill after coming into contact with this cocktail. They complained to the United Nations (UN), which began an investigation.
| | (Read More... | 5439 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 4) |
|
Africa Focus: Alliance With Atrocity: Bush's Terror War Partners in Ethiopia
Friday, June 22 @ 16:24:42 UTC | By Chris Floyd, chris-floyd.com
June 18, 2007
The New York Times paints a pretty picture of George W. Bush's bosom pals in Ethiopia, in an important story that once again gives the howling lie to the Bushists' pretensions of advancing freedom and democracy in their world-encircling Terror War.
Of course, the story itself, by Jeffrey Gettleman, is marred by the usual uncritical acceptance of Administration spin on its key role in aiding the Ethiopian dictatorship's aggression in Somalia, and ignores entirely the American airstrikes during the invasion that killed scores of civilians (and are still going on in the Somali hinterland). This is not surprising, given that Gettleman's last big piece from the region was a truly odious bit of propaganda hackwork that essentially painted the victims of the aggression as greedy, worthless, anarchic trash who got what was coming to them. (See "The Lies of the Times: NYT Pushes Bush Line on Somalia.")
| | (Read More... | 9840 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: 'Kill Anyone Still Alive': American Special Ops in Somalia
Wednesday, June 13 @ 13:52:03 UTC | by Chris Floyd, chris-floyd.com
June 13 2007
Evidently it is now a capital crime, worthy of instant death by special ops or air raid or drone-fired missile, for any Muslim of any nationality to visit or take part in an Islamic regime which the U.S. government dislikes.
How many people did American forces actually kill when they attacked refugees fleeing from the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia last January? We know from reports by Oxfam, the Guardian, the Associated Press and Reuters that dozens of innocent civilians were slaughtered near the Kenyan border, including villagers and nomadic tribesmen hit by American gunships seeking to kill alleged al Qaeda operatives who may or may not have been among the refugees. But a new story in Esquire magazine -- detailing the creation of America's most recent military satrapy, the Africa Command -- provides disturbing indications that the post-invasion killing by American operatives in Somalia was far more extensive -- and deliberate -- than previously known. [Extensive background on the war in Somalia can be found here.]
| | (Read More... | 9928 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: See No Evil: Somalia Sinks Into the Pit as the World Looks Away
Friday, May 18 @ 11:38:38 UTC | by Chris Floyd, chris-floyd.com
May 15, 2007
How bad is the situation in Somalia, the third target of George W. Bush's "Terror War" take-downs? It's "worse than Darfur," says the UN's humanitarian chief, John Holmes.
Holmes, a former top British diplomat, told the Telegraph that "In terms of the numbers of people displaced, and our access to them, Somalia is a worse crisis than Darfur or Chad or anywhere else this year."
| | (Read More... | 6977 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Getting Away With It: Rendition and Regime Change in Somalia
Saturday, March 24 @ 08:01:25 UTC | By Chris Floyd, chris-floyd.com
March 24, 2007
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.)
| | (Read More... | 12560 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 5) |
|
Africa Focus: Somalia and Ethiopia: a new front in the 'long war'
Wednesday, January 17 @ 18:49:06 UTC | By Ken Olende and Charlie Kimber
January 17, 2007; socialistworker.co.uk
Last week's US attack on Somalia is the latest stage of imperialist intervention in the Horn of Africa, write Ken Olende and Charlie Kimber
To understand the current crisis in the Horn of Africa you have to look at the role of the US and its "war on terror" - or the "long war" as US rulers are coming to call it.
This war is no more about terrorism than previous "humanitarian" interventions were about helping local populations.
There are three important things about Africa for the US. Firstly there are natural resources, notably oil.
Secondly there are wider strategic interests and thirdly the global development of an imperial strategy.
| | (Read More... | 13399 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Instead of 'al-Qaeda,' U.S. Kills Nomads in Somalia
Sunday, January 14 @ 10:52:20 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
January 13, 2007
As usual, it takes a few days for the truth to emerge, not that the corporate media here in America notices.
Instead of killing Fazul Abdullah Moham-med, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Abu Taha al-Sudani, supposedly "al-Qaeda" operatives responsible for the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the Pentagon killed "herdsmen ... gathered with their animals around large fires at night to ward off mosquitoes" in Somalia, according to the Independent.
"Oxfam yesterday confirmed at least 70 nomads in the Afmadow district near the border with Kenya had been killed. The nomads were bombed at night and during the day while searching for water sources. Meanwhile, the US ambassador to Kenya has acknowledged that the onslaught on Islamist fighters failed to kill any of the three prime targets," described as "backfir[ing] spectacularly" by the British newspaper.
| | (Read More... | 6362 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: U.S. Air strikes on Somalia
Wednesday, January 10 @ 07:49:09 UTC | A new stage in Washington's illegal "terror" war
By Chris Marsden, wsws.org
January 10, 2007
US air strikes against targets in the south of Somalia have claimed a substantial number of civilian lives. The bombing campaign, begun Sunday night and continued on Monday, mark a major escalation in the Bush administration's lawless use of violence to achieve Washington's strategic aims under the auspices of its "global war on terrorism."
The attacks mark the first direct US military intervention in Somalia since 1994, when President Clinton ordered US troops withdrawn following the "Blackhawk Down" episode that led to the deaths of 18 Army commandos during street fighting in Mogadishu. The recent attacks, part of an intensified attempt to establish American hegemony over the entire Horn of Africa, have heightened the threat that the conflict in Somalia will ignite a regional war with unforeseeable consequences.
| | (Read More... | 13291 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Neocons Attack 'al-Qaeda' in Somalia
Tuesday, January 09 @ 13:11:45 UTC | By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
January 09, 2007
It is simply amazing how many times the transparently bogus "al-Qaeda" has been used as an excuse to unleash violence against largely innocent Muslims and yet so few people here in America catch on, preferring to believe the corporate media fed illusion, now hammered firmly into place and accepted as political reality.
Earlier today, we learned a "U.S. Air Force gunship has conducted a strike against suspected members of al Qaeda in Somalia," CBS reports straight from a Pentagon script. "The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa," apparently reason enough to kill around 200 people. "The gunship flew from its base in Dijibouti down to the southern tip of Somalia... where the al Qaeda operatives had fled after being chased out of the capital of Mogadishu by Ethiopian troops backed by the United States."
| | (Read More... | 7630 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 0) |
|
Africa Focus: Ethiopia joins Bush's imperialist crusade
Thursday, January 04 @ 15:03:05 UTC | by Charlie Kimber, socialistworker.co.uk
January 04, 2007
The recent Ethiopian invasion of Somalia is a direct product of the US-British "war on terror". It threatens to further destabilise a region which has repeatedly been torn apart by war and famine.
Ethiopia's rulers ordered the war on behalf of George Bush in order to prosecute their own regional interests, to deflect Western criticism of their own repressive regime, and to collect the pay off from being a top US ally in a strategically crucial area. Somalia is just across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
But the rejoicing in Ethiopia and the US at the defeat of the Islamic militias in Somalia may prove short-lived.
| | (Read More... | 6531 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 5) |
|
Africa Focus: Somalia: Washington's warlords lose out
Tuesday, July 11 @ 20:09:06 UTC | by Rohan Pearce, greenleft.org.au
Monday, 03 July 2006
On June 5, militia aligned with the Islamic Courts Uniοn (ICU) declared victory in their struggle to control Mogadishu, capital of the east African country of Somalia. The militia had routed the grossly misnamed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism (ARPCT) — a coalition of US-backed warlords who had put a halt to their near-ceaseless internecine fighting in a failed effort to stop the ICU's growing control of the capital.
Fierce fighting broke out between the ARPCT and the ICU in March, leaving hundreds of people dead. In the week following the ARPCT's defeat in Mogadishu, the last ARPCT stronghold in the country's south, the town of Jowhar, fell with little resistance to the ICU.
| | (Read More... | 11401 bytes more | Africa Focus | Score: 5) |
|
| |
| Facebook & Twitter | 
 | |
| Big Story of Today | | There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet. | |
|
