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'etat: 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.
*The archive photo shows Truman signing an amendment to the National Security Act in 1949.*
