[THS] Chris Floyd: I know no one cares about Somalia

[Peter Webster]

http://www.chris-floyd.com/

New Britney Spears Sex Tape Bares All!  	
Written by Chris Floyd
Monday, 21 April 2008

(UPDATED BELOW)

I know no one cares about Somalia;  every time I write about it on the
website, the traffic drops like a stone. (Let's see if that headline draws a few
eyeballs, though. If it works, we might just rename the whole damn blog.)
But I don't care if no one cares. There is a continuous slaughter and
ravaging of innocent human beings going on in Somalia, a vast atrocity that
is sponsored, funded, greenlighted and directly aided by the United States
government, and I'm going to keep on writing about it.

This third Terror War campaign of  "regime change" by the American
military machine has already spawned what the UN calls the world's worst
humanitarian crisis, and every day leaves more civilian bodies rotting in the
streets, and more fleeing families stranded in the middle of nowhere, with
nothing. At every step of the way, the Bush Administration has assisted its
proxy force of Ethiopian invaders and CIA-paid warlords, by rocketing
villages, killing goatherds, capturing refugees and "renditioning" them to
Ethiopian torture chambers, and even sending in openly avowed "death
squads" to "kill anyone left alive" after bombing strikes. At every step of the
way, the Bush Administration has conducted and assisted operations that
Americans once would have considered the stuff of old-movie Nazis, twirling
their waxed Prussian moustaches as they send a young mother off to a
concentration camp, or order artillery barrages on residential areas, or
dispatch death squads to pump bullets into the heads of human beings left
twitching, burned and bloodied after a sneak attack by Stukas.

Oh, I know none of this is nearly as important as working up a mighty
"blogswarm" against ABC because some witless TV talking heads aimed
some witless questions at politicians on the make who have been spouting
witless bumpersticker platitudes all over the country for months on end. I
know I should be out on the street in protest, sticking it to The Man with
some really ironic placards or something. Because after all, the only thing
that matters in this election -- where the American proxy war in Somalia has
not been mentioned at all, and where all the candidates earnestly pledge to
conduct the global War of Terror with even more ruthless efficiency than
the "incompetent" Bush -- is what a few Beltway insiders say to each other
on the Tee-Vee.

But surely, in the big and glorious tent of the blogosphere, there is room for
a minor story or two about a little American-backed mass murder in one of
those funny little countries across the ocean, right? Like this AP story
featured -- that is to say, buried -- in the New York Times on Monday: "81
Die in Clashes Between Islamists and Troops in Somalia."

You will note the NYT's clever headline, which completely distorts the plain
facts reported in the second paragraph of the AP story:

The deaths were caused when Ethiopians fired heavy artillery and tank
shells in residential areas of Mogadishu, said the rights leader, Sudan Ali
Ahmed, chairman of Elman Human Rights. “We condemn this latest
fighting,” he said. Besides the 81 people who were killed, 119 were
wounded, he said. His group said that all of those killed were civilians.

This doesn't exactly sound like a fierce firefight between "Islamists" and the
unidentified "troops" in the headline. Instead, it sounds as if the occupying
forces of a military invader turned their guns on civilians and slaughtered a
few dozen of them. But this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and
blood.

Yet let's be fair to the old Gray Lady. It's not just the headline; the AP story
itself is riddled with verbal sleight-of-hand to keep the reader from learning
the reality behind the "objective" report. For example, directly after quoting
Ahmed, the human rights leader, by name, AP goes on to provide some
mitigating spin from anonymous "witnesses" who "said that because the
insurgents wear civilian clothing, it was impossible to say how many of the
dead were noncombatants."

Who were these witnesses? Are they more credible than Ahmed, whose
group has condemned the atrocities on all sides, earning the enmity of
every armed group in the country? Was Ahmed lying?

What if there were "Islamist fighters" among the dozens of dead? Does that
mitigate the crime of firing heavy artillery and tank shells into residential
areas? Was it OK for the Nazis to, say, bombard a French neighborhood to
ruins, as long as there were a few Resistance fighters wearing civilian
clothes in the area?

There were a few more witnesses willing to be named in the story. Let's see
what they had to say:

A witness, Aden Shire, said the Ethiopians had seemed to be searching for
the bodies of fellow soldiers killed Saturday. Another witness, Omar
Abdulahi, said that among the dead he counted were two old men in their
homes who had been shot by Ethiopian soldiers.

A woman, Nasteho Moalim, said her 7-year-old daughter and three
neighbors had been killed, and her husband wounded, by tank shells that
hit their homes.

But wait; everything's OK, it wasn't an American-backed war crime after all,
because someone in the neighborhood fired back at the Ethiopian/warlord
forces that were firing heavy artillery and tank shells into the civilian area:

On the government’s side, at least one Somali soldier and two Ethiopians
were killed, said another witness, Asha Shegow Abikar.

Those bodies were certainly not taken to the hospitals and clinics in the
disputed area where the human rights group totaled up the dead from
Sunday's battle, so they did not figure into Ahmed's death count.

But in the end, what does it matter? Anyone killed in one of our righteous
"regime changes" had it coming one way or another, right? The story goes
on to retail the same kind of amorphous demonization we have seen of
every single person in the Terror War (and its conjoint operations) who
does not openly and avidly collaborate with an occupying force. In its very
brief background graf on the conflict -- which naturally omits any mention
at all of American involvement -- AP tells us that:

Ethiopian troops supporting the transitional government’s soldiers ousted
Islamist fighters from power in Mogadishu, the capital, in December 2006.

What the forces of the Ethiopian dictatorship actually ousted with the help
of American money, training, weapons -- and direct military support -- was
a federation of Islamic groups that had coalesced into the first relatively
stable government that Somalia had known since 1991. Some of the groups
in this Islamic Courts coalition had militias -- like every other clan and
political faction and criminal organization in the anarchic land. But not
everyone involved in the new government, and not everyone who
supported it, or tolerated it for the security and stability it had brought,
were "Islamist fighters." Yet AP's description -- repeated over and over in
most of American media stories on this Terror War front -- paints them all
with this sinister brush.

And thus any Somali who now opposes the Ethiopian occupation is
automatically an "Islamist fighter" or an "insurgent" or, inevitably, a
"terrorist." Just as every Palestinian in Gaza is part of Hamas, and every
Iraqi not actively working for the Bush-backed government is a "Mahdi
Army fighter" or an "insurgent" or, inevitably, "al Qaeda" -- and thus fair
game for a drone missile attack launched by some goober eating Hot
Pockets at his computer terminal in Nevada. The killing of anyone slapped
with these labels is considered "justified" by the Bush Regime, and by the
American press. Even the murder of innocent people who happen to be in
vague proximity to someone assigned one of these ever-expanding labels is
considered a "regrettable" but necessary bit of "collateral damage."

And so the slaughter goes on in Somalia. If you are an American, it has
your name on it. If you are a Democrat, neither of your presidential
candidates gives a damn about it. (It goes without saying that Bush-hugger
John McCain doesn't give a damn.) But hey, that's all right; the main thing
is that George Stephanopoulos probably feels a bit sheepish right now. I'm
sure that will make Nasteho Moalim feel a whole lot better as she buries her
seven-year-old daughter.

UPDATE. More innocent dead: Clerics killed in Somali mosque. From the
BBC:

The bodies of 10 people have been found in a mosque in the Somali
capital, after two days of clashes between Ethiopian troops and insurgents.
Local residents blame the killings on the Ethiopians, who are backing the
government against Islamist fighters.

Six of the dead are religious leaders from the Tabliq Sufi sect, which is not
involved in the conflict...

Aden Haji Yusuf, 60, was one of the local elders helped to bury the dead on
Monday. "We are now out, for the first time in two days, to discover the
dead bodies of some neighbours and bury them," he said.

Tabliq official Shiekh Abdi-kheyr Isse said the Ethiopians had "slaughtered"
the clerics. "The Ethiopians surrounded al-Hidaya Mosque on Sunday and
killed [the] mullahs mercilessly, including Sheikh Sa'id, the chief of the
group in southern Somalia," he said.

Elsewhere, the story notes that the "regime change" in Somalia has had the
same effect as the similar operations in Iraq and Afghanistan: it has
destroyed moderate forces, radicalized multitudes, and fueled the rise of
religious extremism:

Islamic militants of the al-Shabab movement are still holding the south-
western town of Wajid, 90 kilometres (52 miles) north of Baidoa, the current
seat of the interim parliament. They took the town on Sunday, shutting
down video cinema and kiosks selling narcotic leaves known as "khat" and
also forced some boys in the city to shave their heads because they had
their hair cut into western styles, witnesses said.

"Heavily armed young men, who masked their faces with turbans, have
been in control of the town and they have also been patrolling in the
streets," local resident Madey Isaq Nur told the BBC by telephone.

This actually follows a much older strategy followed by the US and the UK in
the region. The Western powers have long favored alliances with pliant (or
paid-off) warlords and tyrants -- the Saudis, the Shah, Mubarak, Saddam,
etc. -- helping them destroy any centrist forces that might pose a genuine
alternative to rule by U.S. clients. Very often this also takes the form of
deliberately stoking religious extremism, giving violent sectarian groups
money, arms, and support to bring down more nationalist, secular targets:
such as the democratic Iranian government toppled in favor of the Shah.
Or Israel's role in the rise of Hamas as a counterforce to the secular,
nationalist PLO. Or Putin's obliteration of Chechen society, leaving nothing
but Kremlin-backed warlords and fanatical extremists to fight it out.

Likewise in Iraq, the Bush Administration has empowered a client
government dominated by violent Shiite factions long aligned and nurtured
by Iran's mullahs. And of course the supreme example of this strategy is the
key American role in creating an international organization of militant
Islamic extremists to topple the secular, Soviet-backed government in
Afghanistan.

And even where active support is not given to extremists (as in Egypt
today), the chaos and suffering wrought by aggressive "regime changes"
and the political repression imposed by American-backed tyrants drive
people toward extremist factions, which are often the only alternative
organization left standing when civic society has been destroyed.

But again, that's all OK; the more chaos and extremism there is out there,
the bigger the profits of the war machine -- and of the politicians who serve
it so faithfully.

For a recent example, see Hillary Clinton's bloodthirsty promise to
"obliterate" Iran if it dares to attack Israel -- something that is not even
remotely a possibility. What will be the effect of Clinton's bellicosity? Why, to
strengthen the extremists and hardliners in Iran, of course! To store up
more suffering, death and chaos for generations to come.

But why on earth would she do that? Well, which candidate has received
the most money from the war machine in this campaign? Here's a hint: It's
not Bush-hugger McCain or Business-as-usual Barry. (Although both men
are also trousering plenty of blood money, of course.)