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Today's
Stories
January 9,
2007
Jonathan Cook
Israel's
Purging of Palestinian Christians
January 8,
2007
Werther
Why
We Fight
Jeff Leys
The Occupation Project: a Campaign of Civil Disobedience to End
Iraq War Funding
Paul Craig Roberts
Nuking Iran
Shulamit Aloni
Israeli Apartheid: Sorry, This Road is For Jews Only
Dave Lindorff
The Party of Invertebrates Reverts to Form
Sunsara Taylor
The Democrats' First Day: Same As It Ever Was
Seth Sandronsky
Syndicated Error: George Will and the Minimum Wage
Dr. Susan Block
Baghdad Cockfight Ends in Snuff Film
Website of the Day
Watch CounterPuncher Sunsara Taylor Take on Bill O'Reilly!
January 6 / 7, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
The
War and the NYT
Franklin C.
Spinney
Stalingrad
on the Tigris
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Urge to Surge
Ralph Nader
Democrats in the Spotlight
Walden Bello
Globalization in Retreat?
Marleen Martin
The Needle and the Damage Done: Tortured in the Death Chamber
Brian Cloughley
We Do What We Like: Return Our Rapist or Else ...
Uri Avnery
The Kiss of Death
Saul Landau
Fidel Castro in the Fields
Ron Jacobs
From Cointelpro to the Patriot Act: a Legacy of Torture
Joseph Nevins
Crimes Against Humanity from Ford to Saddam
William S. Lind
A State Restored? Somalia and 4GW
Gary Leupp
Attention John Conyers: Impeach the President!
Elisa Salasin
Bringing Life to Numbers
George Ciccariello-Maher
Beyond
Chavistas and Anti-Chavistas: Deepening the Bolivarian Revolution
Stefan Wray
Confronting Recruiters: the Story of the Bush Street Raiders
Michael Leonardi
Toward an International Moratorium: Italy's Crusade Against the
Death Penalty
Richard Rhames
Reality TV: Triumph of the Thugs
Jeffrey St. Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week
Barbara LaMorticella
Two Poems
Website of the Weekend
FBI Witch Hunts
Song of the
Weekend
End Times: a Soundtrack
January 5, 2007
Jorge Mariscal
Growing
the Military: Who Will Serve?
John Walsh
Clash of the Elites: Beltway Insiders vs. Neo-Cons!
Christopher Brauchli
The Great Relaxer: Bush and Federal Regulations
Travis Sharpe
No More New Nukes, Please
Tom Barry
Hawk for Hire: Roger Noriega's New Gig
Linda Schade
/ Kevin Zeese
Americans Voted for Peace: Has the New Congress Already Let Them
Down?
Tiffany Ten Eyck
Workers' Centers and Unions: a New Alliance
Mahmoud El-Yousseph
A Challenge to Pelosi
Lucinda Marshall
3003 Funerals: "And They're Still Burying Ford!"
Website of
the Day
Van the Man: Warm Love
January 4, 2007
Patrick Cockburn
The
Martyrdom of Saddam Hussein
Winslow T.
Wheeler
A Guide to Earmarks: Will the Democrats' Reforms Do Anything
to Curb Pork Barrel Spending?
M. Shahid Alam
Has Regime Change Boomeranged?
Raed Jarrar
So This is Plan B? The US Attack on Saleh Al-Mutlaq's Headquarters
Bert Sacks
Can the US Legally Kill Iraqi Children?: a Challenge to the Supreme
Court
Kathy Rentenbach
Report from Oaxaca
Stephen Fleischman
The Rain of Riches: Bonuses, Then and Now
George Bisharat
Carter's Truths
Peter Rost, MD
Hail the Hangman, Jail the Cameraman!
Evelyn Pringle
Can Eli Lilly be Held Criminally Liable for Zyprexa?
Website of the Day
Courage to Resist
January 3,
2007
Kathy Kelly
Wrapped
Around a Bullet
Paul Craig
Roberts
His Last Hurrah: Bush Cuts and Runs from Reason
William Johnson
No Worker is Illegal: SEIU Members Push Their Union to Change
Its Policy on Immigration
Stan Cox
Under a Brown Cloud: Money vs. the Monsoon
Trita Parsi
A Lose-Lose Situation with Iran
Declan McKenna
Ireland's Slavish Hostility Toward Cuba
Joe Bageant
Dispatch from the Chinese Landfill
Nicola Nasser
Somalia: New Hotbed of Anti-Americanism
Missy Beattie
Dead Wrong
Website of
the Day
Pharmed Out
January 2, 2007
Michael Watts
Oil
Inferno
Amina Mire
Return of the Warlords: Death and Destruction for Somalis
James Brooks
Pushing the Wedge in Palestine
Alevtina Rea
The Tyrant is Dead! Long Live ... ?
Al Krebs
Global Food Security: a Call to Action
Peter Rost
Invitation to a Hanging: the Saddam Hussein Execution Video
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
A Deadly December
John Stanton
Appetites for Destruction
Website of the Day
Out Now: Petition
January 1,
2007
Patrick Cockburn
Iron
Man, Tin God: the Meaning of Saddam Hussein
Uri Avnery
What
Makes Sammy Run?
Joshua Frank
Eliot Spitzer's Constitutional Hang Up: Architect of New York's
Patriot Act
December 30
/ 31, 2006
Weekend Edition
Alexander Cockburn
2006,
Hard to Call It Vintage, But 2007 Could Finally Be Bobby Byrd's
Year
Patrick Cockburn
Iraq
2006: a Nation Soaked in Blood Tears Itself Apart
Paul Wolf
Dying for Our Sins: A Lawyer for Saddam Describes How His Execution
on the First of Eid May Transform Him Into a Martyr
Manuel Garcia,
Jr.
Executing
Saddam, Protecting the Rackets
Tariq Ali
Saddam
at the End of a Rope
Paul Craig Roberts
The New Dark Age: Official Lies, Dogma and Unaccountable Power
Douglas Valentine
At the End of My Rope: Hanging With Saddam
Brian M. Downing
The New Iraq Policy: Escalation
Michael Donnelly
Injustice in Black and White: the Duke Non-Rape Case
Stephen Lendman
Did Sharon Order the Assassination of Arafat? The Revelations
of Uri Dan
Fred Gardner
Comes Now the Ghost of "Decrim:" Nixon and Marijuana
Bailly / Caudron / Lambert
Who Owns Ikea?: the Opaque Legacy of Ingvar Kamprad
Ralph Nader
The Prospects for Progressive Politics
Nick Dearden
The War on Terror Hits Africa
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
The Third Degree: an Interview with AC Thompson on the Origins
of the CIA's Secret Rendition Flights
Missy Beattie
In Harm's Way: How Our National Coward Describes War
Ron Jacobs
Sigh of the Oppressed: Religion and Politics
Dan La Botz
Defend Illegal Immigrants: Help Them! Harbor Them!
Andrew Wimmer
An Act of Contrition: the Peace Movement in 2007
Dr. Carol Wolman, MD
Psychiatrist: Impeach Bush for Good of Country
Martha Rosenberg
New Year's Resolutions for Big Pharma
Dick J. Reavis
News Before It Happens: Bush's 2007 MLK Day Speech
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Listening to James Brown and His Followers
Poets' Basement
Grima, Curtis, Davies, Orloski and Engel
Website of
the Weekend
Charlie Fowler's Photolog: a Life at Altitude
Music Video of the Weekend
"We're Winning the War on Drugs!"
December 29, 2006
Bill Quigley
A
Tale of Two Sisters: Why is HUD Spending Tens of Millions in
Katrina Money to Bulldoze 4,534 Public Housing Apartments in
New Orleans?
Norman Finkelstein
The Dershowitz Treatment
John Borowski
Curb Your Environmentalism: Laurie David and Me
Abid Mustafa
The Re-Talibanization of Afghanistan
Greg Moses
World Responds to Palestinian Family's Jailing Despite Media
Blackout
Uri Cohen
Stand Up for Herod: a Seasonal Story of Ancient Palestine
Bailly / Caudron
/ Lambert
The
Secrets in Ikea's Closet
Website of
the Day
Justice for New Orleans
December 28,
2006
Norman Finkelstein
The
Ludicrous Attacks on Jimmy Carter's Book
Anthony Cowell
Highway Robbery: Privatizing New Jersey's Toll Roads
John Ross
Gateway to the Next Mexican Revolution?
Hilaria Cruz
I'm Going to Stay Right Here: Story of a Oaxacan Prisoner
Greg Moses
Palestinian Immigrant Jailings in Texas
Brittany Bond
The Blood Trail of Luis Posada Carriles, Washington's Preferred
Terrorist
Website of
the Day
Godfather of Soul and Father of Funk
December 27,
2006
Alexander Cockburn
Farewell
to Our Greatest President: Adieu, Gerald Ford
Faruq Ziada
Is
There a Sunni Majority in Iraq?
Christopher Brauchli
Burning EPA's Books: What They Don't Want You to Read Might Save
Your Life
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Journey to Vietnam: Dare We Not Say Genocide?
Nikolas Kozloff
Saving
Caracas
Mark Schneider
Why Hope? Reasons for Optimism
December 26, 2006
Peter Stone
Brown
James
Brown: Please Don't Go
Tito Tricot
Chile: the Ghosts of Torture
Gary Leupp
Cowboys Differ on Iran Attack: Cheney/Bush vs. the Baker Commission
John V. Walsh
Dershowitz vs. Carter in Beantown: Peace Movement AWOL, Again
Reza Fiyouzat
Red Christmas: Why Santa Was Hot in China This Year
Ron Jacobs
The Golem: a Conversation with Marc Estrin
Website of
the Day
JB:
Prisoner of Love
December 25, 2006
Saul Landau
A
Jeep Trip with Fidel
Lang / McGovern
To
Surge or Not to Surge?
Michael Dickinson
Should Stupid Thoughts Be Crimes?: Deny Santa If You Will, But
...
Website of
the Day
James Brown, RIP
December 23 / 24, 2006
Marjorie Cohn
What's
Going On?
Jeffrey L.
Gould
The Capital of Salvadoran Memory: El Mozote After 25 Years
Diane Christian
The Rape of Iraq
William Loren
Katz
From the Raid on "Fort Negro" to Iraq: Lessons from
the First US Invasion
Greg Moses
This War Can't be Made Right by Winning
M. Shahid Alam
An Islamic Civil War: Chaos by Design?
Fred Gardner
Exposé as Inoculant: HRT, Zyprexa, Lilly and the Press
Dave Lindorff
Crime of the Century
Azmi Bishara
Ways of Denial
Ralph Nader
The BCS: a Monopoly on College Football
Seth Sandronsky
Fiscally Imperiled Social Security?
William Hughes
Cop Assaults Activists at Lockheed Protest
Ron Jacobs
Making Stones Weep
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening to on New Year's Eve
December 22,
2006
David Rosen
Bush's
Foreign Sex Policy: Imperialism's Second Front
Christopher
Brauchli
When the Secret is the Question: Secret Prisons, Top Secret Interrogations
John Ross
Flashlights
in the Tunnel of Hate
J.L. Chestnut,
Jr.
Political
Sell-Outs in Black and White
Rahul Mahajan
Dennis Kucinich: Maverick or Stalking Horse?
Arthur Neslen
Provoking Civil War in the Occupied Territories
Peter Rost, MD
The Secrets of His Success: Fired Pfizer CEO Walks Away with
$198 Million
Website of
the Day
10 Ways to Change the World in 2007
December 21, 2006
Rosa Mariam
Elizalde
An
Interview with Gore Vidal: "I am Jealous of Cuba"
Arundhati Roy
Breaking the News
Brian Cloughley
Poppies Rising: Afghanistan's Drug Catastrophe
Daniel White
Jimmy Carter in Austin: Time to Come Clean on the Shoot Down
of That Itavia DC-9
John V. Whitbeck
On Israel's Right to Exist
Sam Smith
Still Smearing Ralph Nader for 2000
Paris Reidhead
GM Ice Cream: Something's Fishy in Your Good Humor Bar
Kevin Wehr
Denying Disaster: Katrina and the Case for Impeachment
Website of the Day
Pesticides and Amphibians: a Vital New Database
December 20, 2006
Gabriel Kolko
Rumsfeld
and the American Way of War
Winslow T.
Wheeler
The Pentagon Measures the Chaos in Iraq
Tariq Ali
The War is Lost
Saree Makdisi
Israel, Apartheid and Jimmy Carter
Bruce Jackson
Saying "Oh!": John Mohawk and the Power to Make Peace
Dave Lindorff
Democrats Walk Into a Bush Trap on Iraq
Leslie Radford
The Winter Harvest of the South Central Farmers
Dave Jansson
Divided We Stand, United We Fall: Secessionists Confront the
Empire
Johnny Barber
Jesus is a Terrorist
Website of
the Day
Is It for Freedom?
December 19, 2006
Alexander Cockburn
Democrats
Prepare to Fund Longer War
Jonathan Cook
End
of the Strongmen
Greg Moses
Globalized Gulag: Palestinian Refugees and Children Held in Hutto,
TX Jail
Sean Penn
Georgie,
There's a Crowd Downstairs
Dave Lindorff
Innocents Abroad: Cracking Down on Gitmo Detainees Despite Overwhelming
Evidence Most Are Not Terrorists
Ralph Nader
Going
Postal
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Pink Tide?
Carlos Villarreal
The
Well is Poisoned: Victory Requires an Immediate Pull-Out
Website of
the Day
Chuck Spinney on the Pentagon
December 18, 2006
Luis J. Rodriguez
En
Lak Ech: Chicanos, Mayans and Mel Gibson
Norman Solomon
Washington Refuses to End the War: Powell, Baker, Hamilton--Thanks
for Nothing!
Uri Avnery
Lebanon: War Without a Plan
Ron Jacobs
More Troops, More Body Bags
Phil Gasper
Afghanistan: Bush's Other War Unravels
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Iran's Elections: The World Isn't Florida and Bush Isn't Its
Supreme Leader
William Blum
The United States of Punishment
Jim Goodman
So What's the Big Deal If Wal-Mart Makes a Mistake?
James Brooks
Talking Surge: Let's Kill Some More Before We Go
Maria C. Khoury
Walking Into the Art World: Designing a Palestinian Academy for
the Arts
Website of the Day
Got Powell
December 16 / 17, 2006
Weekend Edition
Vijay Prashad
A
Perilous Way to Socialism
Saul Landau
Filming Fidel
Anthony Arnove
The US Occupation of Iraq: Act III of a Tragedy of Many Parts
Paul Cantor
The Puppet and the Puppeteer: Pinochet and Kissinger
Annie Nocenti
Baluchistan's Fight: The Khan of Kalat Gathers the Tribes
Nicole Colson
Hard Times on the Killing Floor: Smithfield's Rotten Record
Stephen Gowans
Tehran's Holocaust Conference
Jordan Flaherty
A Catastrophic Failure: Foundations, Nonprofits and the Second
Looting of New Orleans
Fred Gardner
Dustin Costa Faces 15 to Life
P. Sainath
There's No Such Thing as a Free Cow
Seth Sandronsky
The Democrats and Social Security: Watch What the Party Says
and Does
Nadia Hijab
An AIPAC Shot Across Baker's Bow?
Deb Reich
Dear Santa, (Or Someone): Greetings from the Occupied Holy Lands
Susie Day
Cops Shoot Another Rich White Man!
Albert Wan
Why Does It Take 50 Bullets?
Missy Beattie
Will the Next Leader Stand Up? Please!
Martha Rosenberg
Kicking the Wyeth Habit Saves Women's Lives
Lee Ballinger
The Devil's Highway: Clinton, Border Checkpoints and the Deaths
of the Yuma 14
Michael Dickinson
Kingdom of Fear
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Live/Evil: Listening to Miles Davis
Poets' Basement
Davies, Buknatski and Ford
Website of
the Weekend
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine"
December 15,
2006
Eliza Ernshire
Palestinian
"Civil War" and the Israeli Chocolate Ration
Virginia Tilley
What
Are You Going to Do Now, Israel?
Mike Ferner
Roll Call for the Choir: If They Vote for War, Occupy 'Em!
John Ross
Mad Mel's Mayan Apocalypse
Fred Wilhelms
The Flip Side of Ahmet Ertegun: Where Did You Get Those Shoes?
Kevin Zeese
Dennis Kucinich's Strange Mission: Can You Be a Real Anti-War
Candidate in a Pro-War Party?
David Severn
Social Engineering Begins at Home: Jeffrey Skoll, Billionaire
Philantropist
Dave Lindorff
Sen. Tim Johnson Death Watch: Senate Gridlock May Be Best Outcome
Sunsara Taylor
As American as Shopping and Torture
Website of
the Day
June 2, 2004: When Iraq Was There For The Looting
December 14,
2006
Jonathan Cook
The
Recognition Trap
Riz Khan
An Interview with Jimmy Carter
Jason Hribal
Kasatka, the Sea World Orca
Pennick / Gray
The Plight of Black Farmers: Racism in the US Farm Program
Richard Levins
That Embezzled Anti-Castro Money
Pat Williams
The College Crisis: Universal Access, Student Loan Debts and
Pell Grants
Peter Rost, MD
Simply Irresistible: Do Women Prefer Bad Boys?
Website of
the Day
The Sound of Rummy
December 13,
2006
Patrick Cockburn
Iraq
is Beyond Repair
Greg Moses
The Dixie Chicks Come Home to Roost
Elizabeth Schulte
Hungry for the Holidays
Joshua Frank
Death By Coke
Debra Eschmeyer
Corporations Control Your Dinner
Leon Hadar
Baker's Rescue Mission: Too Little, Too Late
Peter Rost, MD
I've Been a Very Bad Boy
Margaret Knapke
Mow bé and Malachi, Presenté!
Reza Fiyouzat
Are Cows Free?
Fred Wilhelms
A Last Minute Appeal: If You Know One of These Musicians Let
Them Know They Are Owed Money--By Friday!
Website of
the Day
The Crimes of Augusto Pinochet
December 12, 2006
Fernando A.
Torres
The
Last Man of the Junta: an Open Letter to Kissinger from One of
Pinochet's Political Prisoners
Paul Craig
Roberts
America's
Injustice System is Criminal
Stephen Soldz
Abusive Interrogations
Uri Avnery
Baker's Cake
William S. Lind
Knocking Opportunity: From Vulcans to Vultures in Iraq
Missy Beattie
Convicted for Our Convictions: Trespassing for Truth at the UN
Dave Lindorff
The 35-Year Long Scream: Torture, Impeachment and a Vietnam Vet's
Tears
George Pyle
Our Perverse Farm Plan: Where Christmas Comes Every Five Years
Norman Solomon
Is the USA the Center of the World?
Website of
the Day
Citizens' War Tribunal
December 11,
2006
Virginia Tilley
Banning
Mandela
Roger Burbach
The Condor Model: the Atrocities of Pinochet and the US
Col. Douglas MacGregor
There's Only One Option Left: Leave!
Fawwas Traboulsi
Lebanon on the Brink
Ron Jacobs
Death of a Pig: Poetic Justice for Pinochet
Gideon Levy
The Cruel Line into Gaza: Elbow to Elbow, Like Cattle
Mary McGrane
Burning Books at Harvard Law
Bernardo Ruiz
The Disappeared of Oaxaca: a Message from One of the Actors in
Apocalypto
Website of the Day
La Cancion de la Unidad
Video of the
Day
Killing
Castro: Congresswoman as Contract Killer?
December 9
/ 10, 2006
Weekend Edition
Alexander Cockburn
Liberal
Consensus for More Troops in Iraq
Sen. Gordon Smith
Out of Iraq: Cut and Run or Cut and Walk
Greg Grandin
Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Mid-Wife of the Neo-Cons
Paul Craig Roberts
How Many More Will Die for Bush's Ego?
Col. Dan Smith
The Vietnamization of Iraq: Inside the Military Training Program
Ralph Nader
The Man from NAM: John Engler's Trail of Destruction
Behrooz Ghamari
The Donkey and the Date: Iran's Upcoming Municipal Elections
Rev. Willliam Alberts
Doing Unto Others: Pastor Haggard and President Bush
James T. Phillips
The James Gang: "Did You Kill Her?"
Bennis / Leaver
A Bi-Partisan Occupation
Dave Lindorff
A Congress of Hucksters and Pipsqueaks
Nikolas Kozloff
Robert Gates and Venezuela: Another Saber Rattler in Latin America
Seth Sandronsky
Activating White Racism
Lucinda Marshall
McKinney and Karpinsky: Silenced for Telling the Truth
Mike Whitney
Something's Gotta Give: James Baker vs. the Lobby
John V. Whitbeck
Recommendation No. 80
Faisal Kutty
Is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Merely a Western
Construct?
Hugh Sansom
Smearing Jimmy Carter: an Open Letter to the New York Times
Robert Gold
My South American Journey: Impunity in Colombia
Boots Riley
Crash and Burn: an Urgent Message from The Coup
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Engel & Buknatski
Website of
the Weekend
Alive in Mexico
December 8, 2006
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Study Group's Cautious Appraisal
Leutisha Stills
Just
How Progressive is the Congressional Black Caucus?
Norman Finkelstein
The Media Lynching of Jimmy Carter
Will Youmans
Mr. Lieberman Comes to Washington: Brookings Hosts an Ethnic
Cleanser
Peter Rost, MD
What Went Wrong at Pfizer?
Jonathan Demme
My Friend Bruce Langhorne: a Great Musician Needs Your Help!
Ray McGovern
Senate Democrats Give Gates a Free Pass
Lucinda Marshall
What She Wore
Tariq Ali / Robin Blackburn
The Lost John Lennon Interview
Website of
the Day
John Lennon's FBI Files
December 7,
2006
Alex Friedman
Rev.
Phelps' Hate-Fueled Fanatics Find a Home in the Kansas Prison
Industry
Maureen Webb
Risk Scoring and the National Insecurity State
Paul Craig Roberts
Catastrophe Still Awaits
Dave Lindorff
Prosecutor Admits: Mumia Abu-Jamal Had "No True Defense"
Matt Vidal
Drug Pushers, Inc.: Power and Profit in the Legal Drug Trade
Yifat Susskind
Looking for a Few Good Principles: What Should be Done in Iraq
Rodriguez / Jones
NYPD's Death Squads: From Diallo to Sean Bell
Website of
the Day
2006, Remixed
December 6, 2006
Robert Bryce
Omitting
the Obvious with James Baker: From the S&L Crisis to the
Iraq Study Group
William S. Lind
The Boomerang Effect: When Will the First IED Strike Cincy?
Zoe Blunt
The Clearcut Truth About the Great Bear Rainforest
Corporate Crime Reporter
The New Conventional Wisdom: Prosecute Individuals, Not Corporations
Amira Hass
A Regrettable Indifference: Israel's Treatment of Palestinian
Prisoners
Richard W. Behan
The Surreal Politics of Premeditated War
Sophie McNeill
Why Hezbollah is Broadcasting Sunday Mass
December 5, 2006
Virginia Tilley
Apartheid
Israel: a Beacon of Hope?
Sharon Smith
The New Washington Consensus: Blame the Victims in Iraq
Joe Bageant
Somewhere a Banker Smiles
Ron Jacobs
A War Washington Can't Win
Norman Solomon
Media Consensus, Stay in Iraq!
Mike Whitney
Rumsfeld's Final Snowflake: "I Was Just About to Change
Everything ... "
Derrick O'Keefe
Regimes Unchanged: Chavez's Victory Strengthen's Cuba
Julian Assange
The Road to Hanoi
Missy Beattie
Bush, the Unhappy Helmsman
Website of
the Day
Lessons of Suez and Iraq
December 4,
2006
Alexander Cockburn
Gaza
and Darfur
George Ciccariello-Maher
Tears of the Escualidos: Election Diary, Venezuela
Ray McGovern
Lame Ducks, Hold That Nomination!: a CIA Insider's Take on Gates
John Ross
Repression on the Menu in Mexico
Walden Bello
Hurricane Milton: Friedman, Bayonets and Markets
Peter Rost,
MD
Pfizer's Clueless Executives
Stephen Lendman
The Withering of the Bush Dynasty
Gideon Levy
This Ceasefire will Go Up in Flames
Website of the Day
The "Babes" of Hizbullah?
December 2
/ 3, 2006
Weekend Edition
Barucha Calamity
Peller
The
Dirty War of Oaxaca
Paul Craig
Roberts
Is Bush Sane?: When Denial Goes Pathological
Ralph Nader
The Big Boys of Financial Crime
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Committee of Enablers: Is Gates Fit to Serve? Are the Senators?
Amira Hass
The Checkpoint Generation
Maymanah Farhat
Depoliticizing Arab Art: Christie's and the Rush to "Discover"
the Arab World
Dave Lindorff
Fighting the Iraq War--At Home
Fred Gardner
Dr. Jimenez Defends His Practice Methods
Col. Dan Smith
The Semantics of Civil War
Raed Jarrar
Maliki's Monopoly of Power
Seth Sandronsky
US Prison Nation: Locking Up Surplus Labor
K.-Y. Taylor
The Bride Wore Black: the Shooting of Sean Bell and the Resurgence
of American Racism
Yifat Susskind
Greed, Dogma and AIDS
David Rosen
Made in China: the Global Trade in Sex Toys
Ron Jacobs
All Hands on Deck!: the New Pirates of the Caribbean
Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Prepares to Vote
Talli Nauman
Fighting La Choya: the Secret Toxic Dump on the Border
Alan Gregory
Shadow Trout: Why Hatchery Fish Aren't Real
Joe Allen
RFK and Hollywood Mythmaking: Emilio Estevez's Beatification
of Bobby Kennedy
St. Clair /
D'Antoni
Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Davies, Engel, Ford and Orloski
Website of
the Day
Demo for Oaxaca
December 1,
2006
Greg Grandin
Midnight
in Mexico: Calderón's Inauguration Behind Closed Doors
Linn Washington,
Jr.
The
Mumia Case After 25 Years: Still More Keystone Kops Antics
George Ciccariello-Maher
Sleeping with the Enemy: At Home with the Anti-Chavistas
Brian J. Foley
Taking Responsibility for Iraq
Dave Zirin
Rebel Athletes: Organizing the Jocks for Justice
Joshua Frank
The Montana Formula: Jon Tester's Neopopulism
Chris Floyd
Hideous Kinky: Thomas Friedman Comes Undone
Ingmar Lee
Atomic Porker Strikes Indian Point Nuke Plant
Manuel Garcia,
Jr.
Dark Fire: the Fall of WTC 7
Website of the Day
No Gun Ri Revisited
Video of the
Day
Drunken Hack Goes Ape at Aussie "Pulitzers"
|
January
9, 2007
To the Shores of Muqdisho: Usama in the
Land of Qat, Clan and Cattle
The
Somalian Labyrinth
By R. T. NAYLOR
It did not take long after 9/11/2001
for certain American institutions with small minds containing
bitter memories to see the chance to use the post 9/11 atmosphere
to even some outstanding scores. The usual prime-time experts
on places to which they had never been, with names they could
not pronounce, insisted that Usama received much of his terror
treasure from sympathetic Somalis, well known for their hoards
of clandestine wealth, that his operatives (including those responsible
for the 1998 embassy bombings) had taken advantage of Somalia's
lawless society, long shoreline, and porous borders to smuggle
guns and operatives, and that bin Laden himself was intent on
making the place his next hideout. He could also use Somalia
to run lucrative rackets, particularly in drugs and counterfeit
money, to bolster his finances.
To deal with the first, the
U.S. Treasury right after 9/11 had blocked on virtually a world-wide
basis the transfer of funds from the Somali Diaspora to families
back home--at a time when those remittances, annually around
$250 million (some estimates ran to $500 million), were the only
thing keeping the country afloat. (Apparently no one bothered
to point out to the Treasury that if the problem was Somalia
as a source of terror funds, it made little sense to block the
flow of money to the country.) To handle the second, the U.S.
Navy quickly sent a warship to keep an eye on Somalia's unguarded
1,000-plus kilometer coastline which is serviced by enough small
smuggling vessels to make southern Florida blush with envy. To
take care of the third, the military dusted off plans for direct
intervention, while waiting the situation on the ground to become
more propitious. After all, based on the emerging fiasco in Afghanistan
and the inevitable drainage of forces that Iraq would entail,
it had enough sense to let to wait until proxy forces could do
as much of the work, face as much of the danger and share as
much of the resulting opprobrium as possible. After all, it had
bitter experience in such matters.
Information about bin Laden's
intimate association with Somalia came from the kinds of objective
and disinterested sources so often called upon in the Terror
War. They included landlocked Ethiopia covetously eyeing a strip
of the Somali coast; Somali warlords who, eager to emulate the
Afghan Northern Alliance, wanted to use the U.S. military against
local rivals; and the Pentagon, which had its own grudge. Among
the misdeeds in Somalia they jointly and severally imputed to
the dour Saudi were: his central role in the lucrative traffic
in qat, the popular local "narcotic"; his financing
and/or training of al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Islamic Unity), a
local terrorist movement that had repaid him by helping to bomb
the U.S. embassies; and his role in  killing eighteen U.S. soldiers
who, in 1993, had been simply helping with relief aid in the
famine-ravaged country. Proof of this last offense came during
the invasion of Afghanistan, when U.S. troops found in an "al-Qaeda
stronghold" a GPS system taken from a U.S. soldier killed
in Somalia--where he undoubtedly had been using it to locate
pockets of starving people in need of an Afghan-style food drop.
Hours after the find was announced, the company that had supplied
the unit pointed out, uncooperatively, that it had been manufactured
four years after U.S. forces had precipitously pulled out of
Somalia.
ENTRANCE
STRATEGY?
It remains somewhat of a mystery
why the U.S. military blundered into Somalia in the first place.
Even the most doctrinaire Marxist would have trouble blaming
old-fashioned economic imperialism. Nearly 75 percent of the
population lived a pastoral existence; manufacturing was almost
nonexistent; and agriculture had been savaged by drought and
war. Perhaps the fact that bananas were the main export crop
triggered in Washington a conditioned reflex. Although indications
of offshore deposits had excited some big oil companies, the
discoveries came during a world glut. Apart from camels (hardly
to U.S. taste even before 9/11) and cattle (of which the U.S.
scarcely needed more), about the only local product foreigners
found of interest was the gum from some of Somalia's unique trees,
which for more than four thousand years had yielded frankincense
and myrrh. While a Christian "fundamentalist" might
see that as ample reason to sound boots and saddles, at the time
of the decision to intervene the U.S. was under the reign of
George I, not his Born-Again son. In any case, the trees were
in a part of the country that had already seceded by the time
U.S. troops arrived in Muqdisho, the capital city.
Looking beyond the economic
to the strategic, in the past one attraction had been the port
facilities at Berbera, which the U.S.S.R. had briefly used. But
with the end of the Cold War, the old Soviet fleet was rusting
out in home ports; and other littoral states welcomed the U.S.
Navy.
Perhaps the answer was simply
that George I, who had just lost his re-election bid, wanted
as his final act in office to show once again the same kind of
humanitarian concern as when he had unleashed his Air Force to
bomb slum areas of Panama and kill several hundred (perhaps many
more) civilians in order to save them from misrule by a CIA agent
allegedly turned drug dealer. A Somali intervention seemed costless
(to him) and would bequeath to his successor the problem of extrication.
FAMILY
VALUES
While Somalia is ethnically
and religiously more uniform than almost any other country in
Africa, it is deeply divided into clans (six major ones) and
subclans (many hundreds). A geographic division partly overlaps
the ethnic one. Greater Somalia as a political entity has never
existed. Prior to the colonial era the interior was largely nomadic,
while the coastal areas were commercial, with Arabic the lingua
franca among those who traded ivory, ostrich feather, slaves,
and frankincense. During colonization, Somalis came under five
jurisdictions--the French ruled Djibouti; the British grabbed
the north of present-day Somalia proper, which seceded again
in 1993 to form the Republic of Somaliland; the Italians took
most of Southern Somalia; another chunk of the South was incorporated
by Britain into Kenya; and, after Ethiopia defeated a late-nineteenth-century
Italian invasion, the British encouraged it to grab the Somali-inhabited
Ogaden before the Italians could incorporate the region.
Although, to cater to domestic
opinion, Somali politicians occasionally called for "reunification,"
on independence the Italian and British pieces were joined into
the Republic of Somalia, which officially accepted the general
African consensus not to question colonial-era borders, lest
that open a Pandora's Box of competing claims. That was the theory.
In practice different states covertly backed ethnic insurgencies
on each other's turf, hoping that a successful secessionist movement
would, once recognized internationally, opt to join their country.
Somalia, for instance, stirred up the ethnic Somalis who comprise
60 percent of the population in northeastern Kenya; and it equipped
anti-Ethiopia rebels in the Ogaden. That was just business as
usual in postcolonial Africa, until Somalia decided to change
the rules.
In 1969 the country was taken
over by the military dictatorship of Mohammed Sayed Barre, with
support from urban elites fed up with traditional clan-based
politics. Facing an Ethiopia strongly supported by the U.S.,
Barre responded with slogans about "scientific socialism"
in which he combined elements of the Qur'an with random ideas
from Marx, Mao, and even Mussolini. He nationalized banks, insurance
companies, electrical power stations, petroleum distribution,
sugar estates, and refineries, but not the banana plantations,
the sole sector to have substantial foreign interests. The expropriated
sectors were subsequently made into state agencies run by his
kin and cronies. He also opened his ports to Soviet vessels and
his Army to Soviet weaponry.
In 1974 the Ethiopian monarchy
was overthrown in a pro-Communist coup. For a time the U.S.S.R.
tried to balance its regional allies. But in 1977 Barre, sensing
weakness as Ethiopia battled local insurgents, invaded the Ogaden.
The Soviet Union dropped its support of Somalia and shipped massive
amounts of weapons to its new protegé. Cuba followed with
troops and advisors. Despite initial support from Washington,
the now ardently capitalist Barre saw his forces chased from
the area, then had to deal with half a million fleeing Ogadenis.
Somalia had its first, but not its last, modern refugee crisis,
followed by its first, but again not its last, emergency infusion
of the foreign food aid, which would later play a big role in
the collapse of state, society, and economy.
Barre survived the Ogaden
debacle for three reasons. First, he still had the backing of
Washington, which was happy to flood Somalia with its own weapons
to replace the Soviet ones, some of which may have ended up in
Afghanistan. Barre's willingness to give oil concessions to four
U.S. companies and port facilities to the U.S.Navy further raised
his approval rating. Then came development aid, although the
main thing developed was the bank accounts of the president's
relatives.
Second, Barre manipulated local
rivalries, provoking clashes in a country where family loyalties
ensured that vendettas could last for decades. He encouraged
the Ogaden refugees to encroach on territory of less compliant
clans while he maintained the veneer of commitment to the Ogaden
by arming refugees (assembled into the Western Somali Liberation
Front) with old Soviet weapons. Meanwhile he kept his own entourage
happy with phony loans and foreign exchange advances from state
banks along with "contracts" to provide nonexistent
services to the state and by turning a blind eye to their contraband.
Third, Barre played the refugee
crisis to his own ends. He inflated the numbers, then diverted
food aid from international donors to maintain alliances or to
sell on the black market. Later an investigation by the U.S.
General Accounting Office found that perhaps 20 percent of the
U.S. portion of the food aid ended up in the mouths of genuine
refugees.
Although the formal economy
shrank, the country was kept afloat by contraband, both money
and goods. Remittances from tens of thousands (perhaps many more)
of émigré workers in the Gulf bypassed the formal
banking system to come home via underground channels. Livestock
merchants underreported exports to bring the proceeds back via
the black market. Most frankincense was snuck off to the Gulf,
evading license requirements and taxes--the hard currency earned
could be salted abroad or brought home without detection. Wages
for government service were a pittance, but the jobs were a license
to collect bribes and run rackets. In effect the economy switched
from formal production and trade to trafficking and smuggling.
It was when Barre tried to crack down on one of the most important
parts of the off-the-books economy that his problems began to
spin out of control.
HARD
TIMES, HIGH TIMES
In December 1992, when the
Marines first charged ashore at Muqdisho, they were no doubt
convinced that they were about to confront armies of doped-up
terrorists plotting to flood the world with mind-blowing substances,
then invest the proceeds in nerve gas and nuclear missiles. The
U.S. military afterwards bragged that its Somalia operation
had been planned with the effects of the national drug habit
in mind--the troops arrived at 4:00 a.m., when local militiamen
were presumed to be sleeping off their last high. Back home,
the brass fretted about whether open availability of drugs would
undermine "combat readiness" the way opiates had in
Vietnam two decades back. No doubt all of them, armchair generals
and grunts alike, were startled to find that Somalia's notorious
dealers were likely mothers selling little packets of largely
innocuous leaves in open markets to raise a few shillings to
feed their children.
The leaf of the "tree
of paradise" had a long and honorable history in religious
ritual and traditional pharmacology before the U.S. woke up to
the dangers of another killer plague and became the sole major
Western country to ban the stuff. Although folklore credits qat
with many medical miracles, including the prevention of cholera,
its main effect is as a mild stimulant; chewing fresh leaf releases
alkaloids that suppress appetite and maintain alertness. Sometimes
used by manual workers in need of extra energy (much as is coca
leaf by Andean Indians) and by shepherds trying to remain alert
to predators, it was also adopted by soldiers and Sufi saints.
In the West in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, troops were encouraged to use tobacco--nicotine
kept them wired even when hungry and tired. The main alkaloid
in qat, chemically akin to amphetamine, produces similar results.
Hence the drug found favor among militiamen. As in war, so in
prayer. Followers of Sufi orders decided (to the despair of orthodox
ulema) that, since qat was not explicitly banned in the Qur'an,
it was halal, particularly since chewing qat helped them to stay
up all night reciting prayers. In lay society it was used ceremonially
at business and political gatherings. With demand bolstered by
the repatriated earnings of émigré workers, it
also became a mass recreational drug. However, it was associated
with sociability not self-indulgence--etiquette frowns on chewing
qat in private.
The tree is indigenous to highlands
in Yemen, Ethiopia, and Kenya--and does not grow in Somalia.
Usama's ancestral home of Yemen is self-sufficient. There small-scale
farmers hire for the harvest extra labor paid with a share of
the crop. Since the product is highly perishable, traders usually
purchase only a day or so before harvest, then rush it in small
lots to urban centres--the spread of paved roads was a boon to
its traffic--for retail sale. An impressive (and probably exaggerated)
90 percent of the adult male population and a growing number
of women are reputedly regular users, while some industries pay
their workers partly in qat. In the old South Yemen, a nominally
Marxist government had tried to ban use except on weekends, when
it was permitted only if grown on state land where production
could be taxed. On unification with the North, the regulations
were dropped. Subsequently the government relied on exhortation
and a 30 percent retail tax, which few dealers pay. However use
of the drug is opposed by both orthodox clergy and secular modernizers--the
first insist that, despite the absence of explicit mention in
the Qur'an, qat is haram; the second blame the national pastime
for low productivity and for keeping the population in an apolitical
stupor.
In Ethiopia and Kenya, since
growers are mainly non-Muslim, there is no religious sanction.
Furthermore, domestic demand is low except among ethnic Somalis
in Ethiopia's Ogaden or Kenya's Northeastern Frontier. There
are no great international "cartels" running the resulting
traffic. From Kenya, the biggest supplier, the qat, once harvested,
must be rushed by local traders to Nairobi's Wilson Airport (which
serves domestic and regional traffic), where Somali buyers have
small planes waiting even at times when the airport is technically
closed. A few bribes suffice for air-traffic controllers to ignore
overloading or lack of flight plans. Then the planes land in
Somalia at several small airfields and at the major one in the
capital. On arrival, qat is distributed to a horde of dealers
waving bundles of cash. Qat also moves by sea from Mombassa to
Somali port towns south of Muqdisho as well as by land through
Somali-inhabited areas of Kenya, although overland loads are
vulnerable to hijacking. With the spread of a refugee Somali
population across Europe, new markets have opened there as well.
The expanding qat trade triggered
old alarm bells. During Britain's long struggle to impose its
will on unruly Somali clans, it pointed the finger at Muhammed
ibn Abdullah Hassan, the so-called Mad Mullah, a Sufi leader
and poet who, the British claimed, financed his long insurrection
through the proceeds of qat--which the British had tried in vain
to regulate and tax. His uprising was the first major effort
by Somalis to throw off foreign rule. Enormously costly in death
and destruction, the rebellion was only crushed in 1920 after
the British deployed air power they had developed in World War
I. As to the notorious Usama as reincarnation of the Mad Mullah,
while tales still abound of him and his followers, in cooperation
or competition with so-called organized crime, muscling in on
the supposedly lucrative international traffic, if he were really
a "Wahhabi fundamentalist," it would be odd for him
to peddle a haram substance to hardcore Muslim followers who
allegedly abound in Yemen and in Somalia. Furthermore, the notion
that an outsider could impose his will on the trade is another
drug-driven fantasy.
Not even the Barre government,
with its military and police power, could do that. In 1983 the
regime banned the trade, arresting hundreds of people, impounding
dozens of vehicles, and confiscating (so it claimed) tens of
thousands of kilos. Presumably most of what it did grab quickly
returned to the black market before the stuff lost its kick.
The government rationalized the crackdown by the need to stop
drug abuse. More likely the reasons were that the traffic bypassed
the national banking system, which the regime manipulated to
its advantage; that much of the profit went to opposition groups;
and that cronies of the president saw prohibition as a way to
unleash the Army and police on their competitors.
HANDWRITING ON THE (BERLIN) WALL?
Despite Barre's success in
mobilizing external support and manipulating internal politics,
dissent grew. In 1978 disgruntled senior officers from the clan
that dominated the northeast fled to Britain to form the nucleus
of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front. Financing for its rebellion
came not from an international Islamic terror chest but from
Diaspora contributions and from "taxes" on smugglers
running coffee and qat from Ethiopia into Northern Somalia. (By
the late 1980s Somali was exporting fifteen thousand tons of
coffee a year without the inconvenience of growing any.)
Barre managed to bribe away
some SSDF leaders. But 1981 saw the emergence of the Somali National
Movement, based on the clan that controlled old British Somaliland
in the North. That region had special economic strengths. It
was the place of origin of most Somalis who worked in the Gulf
and sent their earnings home through the parallel money market.
And it was home to the frankincense plantations. With the area
increasingly restive, Barre launched a campaign of economic warfare.
When he ruled that all frankincense exports required a special
license, granted only to Southern supporters, tree owners just
smuggled more or unloaded gum weighed down with stones and rocks
on official buyers. When Barre jailed some of the owners, clansmen
in the Gulf invested in fast boats to run arms into Somalia and
frankincense back out again. Then Ethiopia, to repay Barre for
his support of Ogaden insurgents, allowed the Somali National
Movement to set up base camps.
In a sort of dress rehearsal
for Washington's anti-terror-dollar policies in the region, Barre
tried (in vain) to get Saudi Arabia to cut off the underground
flow of money from émigré workers back to the North;
and he tried to squeeze the rebels locally by freezing bank accounts
and preventing state banks from giving credit to any Northerners
suspected of disloyalty. When the uprising spread, he hired white
mercenaries to bomb the regional capital; and he tried to attack
the Somali National Movement's mini-navy. His only success was
a deal with Ethiopia, which closed down the SNM camps in exchange
for Barre ceasing to aid the Ogaden rebels. But that proved his
undoing. Ogaden refugees denounced the sellout and linked up
with dissidents in Barre's own clan to form the Somali Patriotic
Movement. Then, in the area around Muqdisho, the most powerful
local clan, alarmed at Barre's efforts to squeeze it out of urban
trade, created the United Somali Congress. By the late 1980s
the country had descended into a civil war in which four major
clan-based insurgent groups were temporarily united against the
regime.
The end of the Cold War also meant the end of Barre's usefulness
to Washington. With outside support gone, in 1991 he fled to
Kenya and later to Nigeria. Left behind was a civilian population
ravaged by war, drought, and famine. Hundreds of thousands ended
up in urban shantytowns or in refugee camps; many tens of thousands
more fled abroad. The remnants of the formal economy shut down,
and the banking system collapsed. As in Afghanistan, people,
particularly in the growing Diaspora, had to rely on informal
bankers (the soon-to-be-notorious hawala system) for back-and-forth
remittances. Then, in another development also seen in Afghanistan,
different factions began to print their own money--people caught
with another faction's currency could be shot on sight. As the
post-9/11 propaganda mills began to churn, Usama would get the
blame for both--the hawlaa banks were singled out, along with
Islamic charities, as the main targets in the financial War on
Terror, while the head of the UN Committee monitoring financial
sanctions against bin Laden gravely noted that "We suspect
that al Qaeda has exploited the counterfeit currency trade in
Somalia." The UN official managed that brilliant insight
at a time when the practice of printing and importing fake Somali
currency was so widespread that not just warlords but even ambitious
local businessmen were cashing in on the trend.
DIVIDE
AND MISRULE
Yet another similarity to Afghanistan
in the early 1990s was that victory over the common enemy was
followed by a civil war that was even more destructive, at least
to the capital city. Smaller clans, formerly content to follow
the majors, formed their own militia groups; while the old factions
squabbled over power and money. The United Somali Congress, which
dominated the Muqdisho area, imposed a businessman named Ali
Mahdi as "president." That led the Somali National
Movement in the northwest to proclaim independence. The Somali
Patriotic Movement took up arms against the USC, then split into
two antagonistic subfactions. So, too, a short time later did
the USC itself after Mohammed Farah Aideed, its military leader
and patriarch of one of its two main subclans, had a falling
out with Ali Mahdi, a leading figure in the other. For the next
five years Aideed insisted that he, not his rival, was the real
"president." The conflicts turned Muqdisho (like Kabul)
into a free-fire zone. The city was further plagued by gangs
staffed by country boys brought in by Barre to fight the clans,
then left adrift with his departure. Owing no allegiance to any
faction, they supported themselves by looting, trafficking qat,
and extorting from relief agencies--whose presence may have done
more harm than good.
While Somalia had hardly been
a model of peace and prosperity, historically it had dealt with
the vagaries of nature, if not of politics, reasonably well.
Farmers stored grain in good years while, when drought threatened,
nomads would exchange ailing or aging animals for farmers' surplus
grain. This reciprocity, which served to keep traditional farmer-pastoralist
hostilities in check, was a mystery to foreign relief workers
who poured into the country along with a massive influx of food
aid. The effect was, no doubt, to save some, perhaps many thousands,
from immediate starvation, but it threatened indigenous agriculture
and helped prolong the wars by doing as much to feed militias
with weapons as to provide refugees with nutrition.
In Somalia, political power
grew both from the barrels of foreign-made guns and out of the
bushels of foreign-grown grain. Control of food supplies by any
faction meant priority of distribution to their own clansmen;
while diversion to the black market allowed the purchase of more
soldiers and more weapons, which, in turn, permitted the particular
faction to control more of the food supply. Aid agencies, including
the Red Cross and the UN, learned to strike deals with militia
leaders for access to port and airstrip facilities; they hired
from the militias security guards to protect relief stores and
to guard convoys on the way to distribution centres; if necessary
they paid off freelancers. Although there were still ambushes
of trucks leaving the port, theft from storage sites, extortion
en route, and rackets run by truck drivers--all of which drove
up expenditures for security--the arrangements worked reasonably
well. Furthermore by the summer of 1992 the famine had peaked:
the drought had alleviated and local production began to improve.
The real emergency seemed over. Then the USA came to the rescue.
As its food-aid program long
worked, the US government bought farm surplus from a handful
of grain companies, paid US shipping companies to move it, then
sold it cheaply to governments of "developing" countries
for local currency. They paid into local bank accounts from which
the US embassy could draw to influence politics or make mischief.
Although now gifts have replaced soft-currency sales, the economic
impact is much the same. The influx of grain depresses prices
of locally grown foodstuffs and drives small farmers off the
land; it builds up a taste for (and infrastructure to process)
US grains; it encourages a shift to luxury cash crops (usually
grown on large, capital-intensive plantations that further dispossess
the small-holder population) for export to the West; and it facilitates
the rise of intermediaries who get rich distributing US food
aid and who act as cheerleaders for pro-US policies. All of this
is applauded by well-meaning NGOs who rush about the globe finding
more humanitarian crises to reaffirm their importance and to
ensure further funding, either direct from Western governments
or from tax-deductible contributions by concerned individuals
and grateful agribusiness corporations. Some people are certainly
saved from starvation in the short run, while the recipient country
is left more vulnerable economically and more dependent politically
in the long run.
Throughout 1992, Western media
were replete with pictures of starving Somali children and tales
of massive looting of relief rations--up to 80 percent in some
versions, while the Red Cross itself reported losses at a manageable
10 percent. The stories were usually linked to the qat trade--militias
seized food and sold it on the black market to buy qat, which
in turn drove them into a homicidal frenzy while innocent bystanders
were left hungry. One person singled out for particular opprobrium
was Osman Hassan Ali, a wealthy businessman who (under the title
"minister of humanitarian affairs") played the roles
of finance minister and national security advisor to Aideed's
self-declared presidency. Allegedly Ali had taken over the racket
of hiring out armed guards to aid agencies, taxed the fuel they
needed for their operations, and cornered the weapons and q_t
trades, paying for both with diverted food aid.
Thus Americans cheered when
George I declared Operation Restore Hope--none so loudly as four
big oil companies whose concessions had been thrown into doubt
by the end of the Barre regime. Conoco even put its compound
at the disposal of the newly reconstituted US Embassy, a gift
the State Department, with its customary sense of good public
relations, accepted. Then the Marines arrived to begin a farce
that soon turned into a bloody tragedy and that cost in one year
$2-4 billion, enough to feed all of Somalia many times over,
and more than enough to restore the infrastructure so that the
country could again feed itself. Ultimately it was not even clever
politics--by the time the troops arrived, the presidential elections
were over and George I was bound for retirement to nurse his
wounded pride and to plot a comeback (even if by proxy), an urge
the Pentagon would soon share.
Once the US forces arrived,
priorities changed. Since much of the food aid that came with
them was no longer necessary, it ended up making black-market
dealers happy and further retarding Somali agricultural recovery.
The primary US objective became to restore not hope but "stable
government." Therefore, unlike the Red Cross orUN , the
UN decided to bypass the existing power structure. Yet General
Aideed, who increasingly portrayed himself as a nationalist transcending
clan and opposing neocolonialism, had repeatedly warned against
a US presence without his explicit permission--never solicited
or granted. Instead some four hundred members of the US elite
Rangers were sent in (on top of troops already present) with
the task of "neutralizing" Aideed. As in Afghanistan,
there were two main targets: Aideed himself (the "warlord")
on whose head they posted a measly $25,000 reward; but also Osman
Hassan Ali ("the financier"). Thus, the United States
closed Aideed's airport, proclaiming that they were trying to
stop the flow of qat (which would scarcely enhance US popularity)
and weapons. They shut down a radio station that broadcast Aideed's
message, killing several demonstrators in the process. They fired
missiles from helicopters at a gathering of Aideed's clansmen,
killing fifty. They kidnapped Osman Hassan Ali. Then they went
looking for the Aideed himself.
Aideed had caused so much suffering
that his own clan elders along with his chief advisors were often
on the verge of repudiating him. But each time the US confronted
him directly, clansmen were required by family loyalty to rally.
At least in the ensuing melee, there was no confusing who was
who. Somalis were woolly haired and dark skinned, while US elite
forces were unrelentingly white, perhaps with a touch of boiled-lobster
red from the Somali sun. But things did not go completely according
to plan. Aideed's militiamen shot down four US helicopters and
killed eighteen Rangers--who evened the score by slaughtering
about one thousand Somalis, most of them innocent bystanders
and some reputedly hostages murdered by US soldiers in reprisal.
The success against the US helicopters would later sustain stories
(recounted, for example, by the prosecution during the embassy
bombings trial) that Usama himself may have provided the missiles
from his stockpile of surplus Afghan Stingers.
Aideed's warlord career did
come to an abrupt end a few years later. But it had nothing to
do with the US military. First, Aideed quarrelled with his "financier,"
who bolted to the opposition. Then he got into another war with
Ali Mahdi over the control of the banana trade. That struggle,
along with Aideed's pretensions to the presidency, was ultimately
settled with a single bullet. Unlike when the Rangers tried to
do the job, there was no "collateral damage" to innocent
bystanders.
For the United States, the
abrupt departure of its forces from Muqdisho joined the story
of their ignominious flight from Beirut ten years earlier, and
perhaps even scenes from the US Embassy in Saigon a decade before
that, as incidents best forgotten publicly although not forgiven
privately. But after 9/11 came the electrifying discovery of
the real cause of the USA's humiliation, namely that Usama had
created in Somalia a vicious gang of protegés.
BROTHERS IN PRAYER, PARTNERS IN CRIME?
For a while one Somali faction
had stood above the fratricide. The very name of the group, al-Ittihad
al-Islamiyya (Islamic Unity), reflected its members' hopes not
to wage global holy war but to unite Somalis (including those
in the Ogaden) on the basis of one thing they had in common.
Inspired more by the salafi of Saudi Arabia than by the Muslim
Brothers of Egypt, much less by radical political Islamists of
the bin Laden stripe, originally members of al-Ittihad kept out
of politics but earned public trust because they avoided clan
feuds and, using contributions from Islamic charities abroad,
devoted themselves to relief work. The Somali Salvation Democratic
Front, in whose turf they first operated, left them to their
own devices. But within a year of Barre's fall, al-Ittihad rose
against clan rule in several towns of the northeast. The SSDF
counterattacked, sending the group's armed wing into exile in
isolated areas near the Ethiopian border. In 1996 the group was
accused of attempting to assassinate the Ethiopian Minister of
Transportation, himself an ethnic Somali who was regarded as
a traitor to the cause of reunification. Ethiopia scattered al-Ittihad
and effectively ended its military career, but not its political
usefulness. Typed as a violent Islamic terrorist group that had
participated in the "ambush" of US Rangers in 1993,
shared training facilities with al-Qa'idah, helped with the 1998
embassy bombings, and was a lynchpin in the worldwide system
bin Laden used to raise, move, and deploy terror-dollars, al-Ittih_d
became a propaganda tool in the hands of both the US and Ethiopia.
In fact Ethiopia tried to use the tale of al-Ittihad's Islamic
legions to rectify its greatest strategic weakness.
Like Southern Somalia, Eritrea
had been an Italian colony. After World War II the victors decided
that the way to balance Ethiopia's need for an outlet to the
sea with Eritrea's demands for independence was to link Eritrea
to Ethiopia as an autonomous region. A decade later Ethiopia
formally annexed Eritrea. Although much of the population of
Eritrea's Christian highlands is closely related ethnically to
that of parts of Ethiopia, a big portion of those living in the
coastal area is historically, culturally, and commercially closer
to the Middle East--Muslim and often Arabic-speaking. Hence annexation
led first to the emergence of the Eritrean Liberation Front,
which secured support from both Arab and East Bloc countries.
Then a splinter group, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front,
emerged, with a Christian Marxist leadership. Despite efforts
by Gulf-state donors, especially Saudi Arabia, to bolster the
ELF in the face of the new challenge, after a brief but bloody
civil war, the EPLF triumphed to become de facto the real voice
of Eritrean aspirations to independence.
For a time independence looked
like a losing proposition. Most Arab states publicly shunned
the new movement; and after the 1974 pro-Communist coup in Addis
Ababa, Moscow and Eastern Europe swung behind Ethiopia. The EPLF's
principal source of external support became the Sudan, which
took the opportunity to repay Ethiopia for its aid to the Sudan
People's Liberation Army. But there was also an Eritrean Diaspora
whose members were regularly shaken down for contributions; while
the Eritrean Relief Association scoured the international scene
to collect famine relief aid, some of which was undoubtedly diverted
to the struggle. As the rebel movement's lock on the interior
improved, it began to charge its own transit duties on goods
moving between Ethiopia and the Eritrean ports. The EPLF also
created underground factories to make everything from weapons
to medicines to consumer goods, while covert support continued
to come in from Syria and Iraq. Ultimately a tactical alliance
between the EPLF and rebels inside Ethiopia proper brought down
the Communist government and set the stage for Eritrea's secession.
Cut off from the Red Sea, Ethiopia
tried to compensate through ports in Djibouti. But originally
they were too small and too poorly equipped to handle the volume
of traffic. Hence Ethiopia began to dream of its own outlet to
the sea. The most tempting target was Puntland, the northeast
corner of Somalia wedged between the warring South and the seceded
North. Under a breakaway faction of the Somali Salvation Democratic
Front, Puntland had declared autonomy. But to seize a piece of
Somalia, Ethiopia needed both a plausible pretext and Washington's
permission. According to Ethiopian military intelligence, behind
the Puntland secessionists could be found the plots of al-Ittihad,
and behind them could be found the guiding hand of Usama bin
Laden. Puntland, it seemed, was destined to be the new Afghanistan
and, with its well-known global communications and transportation
infrastructure, the staging point for terror attacks worldwide.
In the final analysis, probably the only thing that saved Puntland
from forcible annexation to Ethiopia was an internal coup in
2002 that led to it renouncing its autonomous status and rejoining
Somalia proper. By then, however, al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya had
earned a special place on the US post-9/11 hit list of forbidden
organizations whose assets were to be frozen and contributors
prosecuted.
It was an odd choice for inclusion
on the list. For one thing, al-Ittihad was hardly the only "fundamentalist"
movement in Somalia. The Muslim Brotherhood had a local affiliate,
al-Harakat al-Islah (the Reform Movement), not to be confused
with al-Islah al-Islamiyya (Islamic Reform) or al-Harakat al-Islamiyya
(Islamic Movement), which were also busy in Somalia. In the realm
of politics there was also the Hizb al-Islami (Islamic Party)
of Somalia. On the other hand, Gama'at al-Tabligh al-Isl_mi (Community
to Deliver the Message of Islam) shunned politics but did campaign
to persuade women to don the veil and men to shun qat. Add to
them the Abi al-Sunna wa al-Gama'a (Community of Sunni Believers,
more or less), the Somali Hizbullah (Party of God), the Tahaluf
al-Qaba'il al-Islamiyah al-Muwahada (United Alliance of Islamic
Tribes), and several more. Some were of considerably greater
consequence than al-Ittihad, especially after its military debacle.
For another, apart from the
Ogaden question, al-Ittihad had never shown any interest in events
outside Somalia. Nor had it ever numbered more than a few hundred
militants, as distinct from people who broadly supported its
social program. (This paucity of numbers did not prevent the
US from claiming that the group had two to four thousand members
armed, while some reports in the Western press credited it with
up to seventy thousand.) Furthermore, the sudden discovery that
al-Ittihad had helped al-Qa'idah with the Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam
bombings must have been a surprise to the US prosecutors who
had certainly not been shy about casting the accusatory net as
widely as they could. There were also claims that al-Ittihad,
acting as Usama's local auxiliary, had aided Aideed in his confrontation
with US forces in Muqdisho. Yet Aideed was vehemently anti-Islamist.
Reputedly, when a business representative of bin Laden's arrived
in Somalia (probably looking to sell sesame and sorghum), that
agent had to flee for his life on a qat plane heading back to
Kenya. As to the alleged terrorist training camps jointly operated
by the al-Ittihad and al-Qa'idah (which, in the run-up to Gulf
War II, Saddam Hussein, naturally, was helping to finance), they
seemed to have vanished into thin desert air.
Ultimately the US claim of
"links" between al-Ittihad and al-Qa'idah was based
on three pieces of evidence. One was that, while Usama was reclaiming
land and building roads in Northern Sudan, Khartoum was (briefly)
giving support to al-Ittihad in its (rather ineffective) quarrel
with Ethiopia, which in turn was aiding the (considerably more
serious) scorched-earth campaign of John Garang's SPLA. In short,
al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya was guilty not by association (with al-Qa'idah)
but by association with a country formerly associated with the
alleged boss of another association, a remarkable new concept
in law and diplomacy.
The second foundation stone
for the claim that the two groups were in cahoots was that, during
the Battle of Muqdisho, the United States intercepted communications
in Arabic. Aside from the fact that Usama and his followers are
hardly the only native speakers of that tongue, hearing Arabic
on the radio would not be exactly unexpected in Somalia: over
the years the country had sent hundreds of thousands of guest
workers to the Gulf states; its youth (when the schools operate)
start to study the Qur'an in Arabic at age five; the coastal
elites often speak Arabic as a second language, a reflection
of both their trade ties to the Middle East and the frequency
with which they were educated in universities there; a knowledge
of the language became even more desirable after Somalia, in
a bid for aid money, defied ethnology and joined the Arab League;
and, not least, Somalia's soldiers were routinely trained in
Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Egypt.
In any case, Somalis hardly
needed bin Laden to show them the arts of war. Nor, after the
slaughter of Aideed's clansmen and the kidnapping of Osman Ali
Hassan, did they need al-Qa'idah to teach them to hate the US
military. And how a tall, pale (to Somalis) Saudi was supposed
to impose his authority on a society inhabited by people who
are loyal first to family, then to subgroup, then to clan (in
that order), who are traditionally suspicious of strangers, and
who refuse to take orders from any outsider or, for that matter,
frequently from an insider, was not immediately self-evident.
Still the story was too useful
to die. In 2002 Hassan Aideed, son and heir of the late Mohammed
Farah Aideed, offered to the US military bases in Somalia and
promised to put his forces at US disposal to deal with all of
the nasty al-Qa'idah/al-Ittihad joint activities he claimed to
know all about, in parts of the country still outside his own
control.
There was also another third
factor keeping al-Ittihad al-Islamiya locked firmly in US sights:
namely its supposed role on behalf of al-Qa'idah in moving terror-dollars
through phony charities and underground banking systems. Thus
did al-Ittihad, or, more specifically, a set of international
banking institutions "linked" to it, become the most
important target during the opening salvos of the financial War
on Terror.
R.T. Naylor is the author of highly original
and radical work on Money, Myth and Misinformation, now assembled
in Satanic
Purses, being published by McGill-Queen's University Press,
from which this essay has been excerpte |
