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HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.

August 07, 2012

Is Meles a Vegetable?

Ethiopian Dictator Goes MIA

by THOMAS C. MOUNTAIN

Eritrea.

Long time Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi, missing in action for almost 2 months now, is reported to be in a coma leaving the Obama White House’s Crisis Team for Africa scrambling to find a replacement. Officially, Ethiopian “Prime Minister” Meles Zenawi has taken “sick leave” and “getting better”, end of story.

In reality the situation in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa finds the CIA media handlers floating the idea that with Meles Zenawi “sick” a “Transitional Government” will hold power until national “elections” scheduled for 2015 are held.

Numerically as well as in equipment inventory the Ethiopian army is the largest best equipped in Africa. The CIA has been paying the Ethiopian army’s salaries directly for some time now, as they have done in South Sudan since 2009.

Most of the Ethiopian army is little more than militias, often times paid in wheat “donated” by the UN’s World Food Program amongst others. These militias are made up largely of street boys recruited out of Addis Ababa’s teaming slums or village boys whose service is traded by their families for grain and a few dollars a month. These “soldiers” are mainly of the Oromo nationality, half or more of Ethiopia, and are lead by the remnants of the Tigrayan officer core from within which Meles Zenawi once found a power base.

Today, with Meles a vegetable and hush-hush the word in Addis Ababa it seems only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose.

No one in control other than the CIA, no real army to turn to as in Egypt, hundreds of thousands of muslims protesting in the streets and the idea of a “Transitional Government” as a “caretaker” until 2015 roundly rejected by one and all of the real opposition fronts, the Obama regimes Africa Crisis Team has got their work cut out for them.

To make matters worse for Pax Americana, the rumble of heavy artillery continues to grow, rolling across northern Ethiopia until it can be heard even here along the Eritrean border.

Few are any longer denying the existence of a large, well armed rebel army based in northern Ethiopia with the Eritrean army behind them. Just how big they have become and if they are preparing to repeat history and launch an offensive to take Addis Ababa a la 1991 and the end of the Mengistu regime must be causing many sleepless nights in the Obama White House.

Thomas C. Mountain is the most widely distributed independent journalist in Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. His interviews can be seen on RTTV and PressTV. He can be reached at thomascmountain at yahoo dot com.