Disappearances in Pakistan: Lessons learned

Difficult to believe that the New York Times could publish today’s headline with a straight face. “Disappeared with reported ties to Pakistan worries U.S.”

“WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is expressing alarm over reports that thousands of political separatists and captured Taliban insurgents have disappeared into the hands of  Pakistan’s police and security forces, and that some may have been tortured or killed.”

According to the Times, many of those who have vanished have nothing to do with  the Taliban, but are Baluchis, a restive people in Pakistan long intent on forming an independent state. Equally alarming, the Pakistani authorities are refusing to admit any knowledge about most of the cases.

The matter has become so grave that U.S. military is now actually refusing to train Pakistani military units who have been involved in torturing and killing detainees.  

Of course, the U.S. will have nothing to do with such brutal tactics. Of course, the Obama administration is alarmed.

One can imagine the Pakistani officials shaking their heads wonder. One can also wonder how U.S. officials could make their protests without a sickening sense of cynicism and shame.  

I mean, c’mon guys---this, is the same U.S.—different President, but same country—that disappeared thousands of suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban militants—some only teenagers—into places like Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo or rendered others off to allies for brutal interrogation. And aren’t CIA drones currently blowing apart scores of supposed Taliban and others in Pakistan—and elsewhere—without the inconvenience of arrest, questioning and trial?    

We could go on and on about all this but we won’t. Surely, someone at the Times will bring it up in an editorial or Op Ed piece in the next one or two days.

[They might even point out another subtler irony: that the restive Baluchis also live in Iran. And that is where, according to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, under the Bush administration, the CIA began aiding the Baluchis to carry out terrorist attacks in hopes of undermining the regime in Teheran.

Nor that different from the tactics the Pakistini Intelligence Organization, the ISI, are using in supporting some Taliban in Afghanistan—even as they arrest others in Pakistan.]

The War on Terror-Christmas at the Forgotten Front

Almost ten years ago, President Bush announced the global War on Terror… Since then  hundreds of thousands of soldiers and mercenaries have been dispatched to Central Asia and the far corners of the globe, and hundreds of billions, probably trillions, of dollars have been poured into the effort.

But over that same period, the lot has only worsened of some of the most terrorized people on the planet, millions of people across a huge swathe of Central Africa, living in constant fear—of a horde of bloody marauders known as the Lords Resistance Army.

At Christmas time, the threat is only worse.

One survivor of  the LRA’s bloodlust is Josephine, [not her real name] an eighteen year old girl, who was having lunch with her family when a group of men stormed into her village.

 “They tied us up and then shot and then killed my grandfather right in front of me.” Two of her brother were led off.  She never saw them again. She was forced to pack heavy loads for her captives, repeatedly raped, then  assigned as a “wife” to one of her captors, a young boy.  “They sometimes would take one boy,” said Josephine, “Tie him up, then force another boy to kill him by hitting him on the back of the head with a heavy stick or a machete.”

Another young man who was kidnapped was tied to other boys from his village, then forced to carry the loot the marauders had stolen, as they continued their attacks. 

“We walked three kilometers to the next village, where the LRA men did the same thing, kidnapping more than 100 people. This time though, they counted out 20 people, tied them up, and killed them by hitting them on the back of the head. .

Every few kilometers we would stop and they would count out another 20 people and walk them into the bush. After a while, I was among the group that the LRA separated from rest. They tied our arms together behind our backs and forced us to kneel down. They took hammers, machetes and heavy sticks and began killing people one by one. One of the LRA men took a big stick and hit me hard on the back of my head. I blacked out.”

“When I woke up, I was still tied up and had several dead bodies piled on top of me. I spent four days drifting in and out of consciousness, tied up and bleeding in that stack of bodies. When people arrived to bury us, they discovered that I was still alive’. They untied me and carried me to the nearest hospital, where I took six months to recover.”

Over the past few years across a huge expanse of Central Africa, such tales have become commonplace:  thousands of civilians have been hacked, stabbed and bludgeoned to death; thousands of girls have been raped, young boys kidnapped and murdered or  forced to commit heinous atrocities themselves, turned into criminal outcasts, so they will never be able to return to their tribes. Instead, they have come to fill the ranks of the LRA.  

What’s remarkable is that, despite the widespread savagery and terror across the region, the LRA probably has only a few hundred ragged men and boys under arms.

Their leader is a demented despot by the name of Jospeh Kony, a character out of Conrad-- a faith-healer, self –styled revolutionary and Christian fundamentalist, who launched the LRA more than twenty years ago in Northern Uganda with support from the Sudan. Over the years, the group has morphed into an increasingly bloody band of killers, intent on rape, plunder and murder.

Two years ago, U.S. troops aiding the Ugandan Army, helped organize an attack on the LRA but failed to capture the major leaders. The result was catastrophic. Determined to exact bloody vengeance, the IRA metastasized, carrying out hundreds of raids again isolated villages, not just in Uganda, but across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and the Sudan as well.

No one seemed to give much of a damn except the usual NGO’s desperately trying to cope with the situation in the field, often at the risk of their own lives. Trying to get the attention of world leaders who claim to be in an all-out war against terrorism. Problem is, the LRA are not the right brand of terrorists.

If their leader was a radical Muslim instead of wacky Christian fundamentalist, things would be different. Sophisticated spy satellites, high-flying Predators or gung-ho mercenaries and Special Forces killer teams would have taken them out long ago.

Instead, UN peacekeeping forces have more than 80,000 troops stationed in the area trying to end the chaos that has wracked Central Africa for decades. It’s the largest U.N. contingent anywhere, but only 850 of them are in the area where the LRA is active.

As Marcel Stoessel, the Swiss head of Oxfam for the Congo told me by phone, “those figures show that the priority is not here, and it should be here, because the IRA is the most active and deadly of all the groups active in this region.”

But it’s hard to blame the U.N. commanders. Their troops are poorly armed, mostly poorly trained, (often feared themselves by the local population)  and woefully underequipped; lacking for instance, a modicum of helicopters to patrol a huge region where decent roads are virtually non-existent.  Their annual budget it more than  $1.3 billion. Which sounds impressive, until you remember that the U.S. spends that same amount in Afghanistan every four days.

The International Tribunal issued a warrant for Joseph Kony’s arrest more than five years ago,  and world leaders have at various times pledged to take action. Yet Kony and his rag tag forces are more feared and deadly now than at any time in the LRA’s twenty year history—particularly feared as Christmas approaches.

Perversely,  Christmas is the season when the LRA has  carried out some of their most barbarous acts.

According to a press release just put out by Oxfam and other NGO’s operating in the region: 

“On Christmas Eve 2008 and over the following three weeks, 865 women, men and children were savagely beaten to death and hundreds more abducted by the LRA in north-eastern DRC and southern Sudan. Last year, between 14 and 17 December 2009, LRA commanders oversaw the killing of more than 300 people. These attacks have largely gone unnoticed by the outside world.”

Says Marcel Stoessel, “It is unbelievable that world leaders continue to tolerate brutal violence against some of the most isolated villages in central Africa and that this has been allowed to continue for more than 20 years”

Fortunately, over the past few years, the depredations of the IRA and the plight of young people in Central Africa also stoked the outrage of thousands of high school and university students in the U.S., who, through their organizations “Invisible Children” and “Resolve”, launched a massive  lobbying campaign. In response, last Spring the U.S. Congress called for the Obama Administration to develop a plan to deal with the IRA scourge. In November, 2010 a special task force announced a plan of action.

But so far, it is just a plan, long on promises, short on funding and action.

And now it’s Christmas again.

Kissinger on gassing the Jews--nothing new.

Alot of Henry Kissinger's remaining fans were stunned by the publication this past Saturday of another batch of secret Nixon White House tapes--in which Henry Kissinger states that the Soviet Union gassing the Jews would not be a U.S. problem.

As the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported today:

"If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern," then-US sec. of state tells Nixon on 1973 tape.

 WASHINGTON – Henry Kissinger is heard saying the genocide of Soviet Jews would not be an American problem on newly released tapes chronicling President Nixon’s obsession with disparaging Jews and other minorities.
Kissinger’s remarks come after a meeting between the two men and former prime minister Golda Meir on March 1, 1973, in which Meir pleads for US pressure on the Soviet Union to release its Jews.

The men dismiss her plea after Meir leaves.!!

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” The New York Times on Saturday quoted Kissinger, then secretary of state, as saying on the tapes. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
Nixon replies: “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”
Six months later, during the Yom Kippur War, Nixon rejected Kissinger’s advice to delay an arms airlift to Israel as a means of setting the stage for an Egypt confident enough to pursue peace; Nixon, among other reasons, cited Israel’s urgent need.
Nixon secretly recorded his White House conversations.""





 While startling, such views are unfortunately par for the Kissinger course. What's suprising, is that people are still surprised.

If I may draw  your attention to an article I wrote last February for Counterpunch.

Master of Treachery

Kissinger on Iraq

By BARRY LANDO
It is amazing how Henry Kissinger has been able to retain his aura of invincible genius in international relations, continuing to counsel presidents, foreign governments and major global businesses, while occasionally writing lofty Op Ed pieces advising the U.S. on what it should or should not be doing next. This mind you, despite Kissinger’s own history of monumental cynicism and duplicity when he was guiding foreign policy for President’s Nixon and Ford. Indeed, it’s a tribute to the ability of mainstream American media to forgive and forget.
The latest example is an Op Ed piece Kissinger just wrote for the New York Times warning American leaders that they are no longer giving Iraq the attention it deserves.
The fact is, however, when Kissinger was in charge of U.S. policy for Iraq, the results for its people, particularly the Kurds, were disastrous. I wrote about it in my book "Web of Deceit-the History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush."
Over the decades, the Kurds quixotic struggle for some form of independence doomed them to a seemingly endless cycle of rebellion followed by incredibly vicious repression. Those uprisings were usually encouraged by enemies of Iraq’s rulers who made use of the Kurds to destabilize the regime in Baghdad. It was a ruthless, deceitful process, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Kurds being slaughtered and displaced over the years. And it was an ideal playing field for Kissinger.
For years, the Shah of Iran had been secretly supporting the Iraqi Kurds to put pressure on Baghdad. So were the Israelis, who hoped to distract Iraq’s increasingly virulent leader from joining an Arab attack on the Jewish state. In 1972, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, motivated by fear that Iraq was becoming too cozy with the Soviet Union, agreed to a request from the Shah to help back the Kurds.

For the sake of deniability, the U.S. supplied the Kurds with Soviet arms seized in Vietnam, while Israel provided Soviet weapons that it had captured from the Arabs. According to the Washington Post’s Jon Randal, the clandestine operation was kept secret even from the U.S. State Department, which had argued against any such support. The Kurd’s news friends, however, did not want their protégées to win their struggle. An independent Kurdish state would be much too disruptive for the region, they felt. Their support was carefully doled out—enough to keep the revolt going, but not enough to take it to victory.

The Kurdish leader, Mustafa Barzani, was hard-headed enough to understand his people were being used by Iran, but not worldly enough to comprehend that his American backers could be equally duplicitous. “We do not trust the Shah,” Barzani told reporter Randal in 1973. “I trust America. America is too great a power to betray a small people like the Kurds.”
It was to be a fatal error of judgment. In 1975 the Shah and the leaders of Iraq abruptly agreed to settle their disputes and signed a treaty of friendship. A key part of the agreement was that Iran would immediately cease its support of the Iraqi Kurds. Overnight, Iranian army units that had been supporting the Kurds—with artillery, missiles, ammunition, and even food—retreated across the border into Iran. The U.S. and the Israelis similarly called a sudden halt to their support. At the same time, Iraqi troops began a massive offensive against the hapless Kurds.

Thus, without any warning, the Kurds were abandoned; not just their fighting men, the pesh merga, but their villages, wives, and children, were exposed to a ferocious Iraqi onslaught. Barzani sent a desperate plea to Kissinger for aid. “Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way with silence from everyone. We feel, Your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country’s policy. Mr. Secretary, we are anxiously awaiting your quick response.”
Twelve days later, a U.S. diplomat in Tehran cabled CIA director William Colby, noting that Kissinger had not replied and warning that if Washington ”intends to take steps to avert a massacre it must intercede with Iran promptly.”

Meanwhile, a quarter of a million Kurds fled for their lives to Iran. Turkey closed its borders to thousands of others seeking refuge. Many of the militants left behind—especially students and teachers—were rounded up by the Iraqi, imprisoned, tortured, and executed. Some 1,500 villages were dynamited and bulldozed.

Over the following weeks and months, as the killing continued, Barzani issued more desperate appeals to the CIA, to President Gerald Ford, to Henry Kissinger. No one answered. Kissinger not only refused to intervene but also turned down repeated Kurdish requests for humanitarian aid for their thousands of refugees.

This duplicity of American officials might never have surfaced but for an investigation in 1975 by the U.S. Congress’s Select Committee on Intelligence headed by New York Democrat Otis Pike. The Pike report concluded that for Tehran and Washington the Kurds were never more than “a card to play.” A uniquely useful tool for weakening Iraq’s “potential for international adventurism.” From the beginning said the report, “The President, Dr. Kissinger, and the Shah hoped that our clients [Barzani’s Kurds] would not prevail.” The Kurds were encouraged to fight solely in order to undermine Iraq. “Even in the context of covert operations, ours was a cynical enterprise.”
The report’s damning conclusions continued: Had the U.S. not encouraged the Kurds to go along with the Shah and renew hostilities with Iraq, “the Kurds might have reached an accommodation with [Iraq’s] central government, thus gaining at least a measure of autonomy while avoiding further bloodshed. Instead the Kurds fought on, sustaining thousands of casualties and 200,000 refugees.”

One of the officials who testified before the committee in secret session was Henry Kissinger. When questioned by an appalled congressman about the U.S.’s decision to abandon the Kurds to their bloody fate, Kissinger chided the committee, “One should not confuse undercover action with social work.”

Barry M. Lando, a graduate of Harvard and Columbia University, spent 25 years as an award-winning investigative producer with 60 Minutes. The author of numerous articles about Iraq, he produced a documentary about Saddam Hussein that has been shown around the world. He lives in Paris. His latest book is “Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush.” He can be reached through his blog.

ASSANGE STRONG POSSIBILITY FOR NOBEL PEACE PRIZE:ED DIAMOND

Assange and the Noble Peace Prize. Absurd? Not at all according to my associate, Ed Diamond. 

Diamond, is an investigative reporter based in Paris for Focus, America’s most watched TV new magazine. I quote from Diamond’s blog:

I’ve just heard from an excellent source on the Nobel Prize Committee in Oslo that the committee is seriously considering nominating jailed Wikileaks head, Julian Assange, for the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize.

Word of that possibility has already touched off a storm of controversy between members of the committee, the Norwegian Government and top members of the Obama administration.  The State Department and White House have been pulling out all stops. Rumours are the CIA will also become involved. At 3 A.M. Washington time today, an outraged Hillary Clinton personally phoned the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Soltenberg to warn that if the Committee goes through with the nomination, the U.S. will boycott not only that particular award, but all future Nobel Prize ceremonies.  She also hinted darkly about possible economic sanctions (almost 25% of foreign investments in Norway are made by U.S. companies.)

If Assange is in prison and unable to attend the ceremony, my source on the Committee says they will make use of the same empty chair, that symbolized the absence of Chinese Poet  Liu Xiaobo when he received the award on December 10.

Many, of course, will be shocked by any comparison between the anarchic, self-promoting Assange and the highly respected Chinese dissident.    

But as my source on the Committee put it just an hour ago: “Of course, we realize how controversial this decision is, and how many people may be shocked by it.  On the other hand, consider the fact that the last recipient of the Peace Prize was President Obama, based solely on his lofty utterances, not on any actual deeds.

“Now, when we look for deeds, what do we find: America is still spending a trillion dollars a year building its military might and still has tens of thousands of troops and mercenaries deployed across Central Asia, not to mention clandestine and other forces involved in conflicts around the globe.

“Also, let’s not forget how quickly Obama kowtowed to Israel’s Prime Minister Nethanyahu’s refusal to suspend construction of settlements on the West Bank. So much for an American brokered peace in the Middle East! 

“So, now” said my source on the Committee “we’re looking at Assange.”

There is no question that some of the material leaked by Assange could be detrimental to U.S. diplomacy and security. There is also no question that many of the issues revealed by Wikileaks had not been previously unreported. On the other hand, their content has certainly been judged important enough to be the obsession of the world’s leading media over the past few weeks.

The documents have demonstrated the miasma of duplicity and deceit that underlie much of U.S. policy today. The fact, for instance, that the U.S. continues to pour enormous human and material resources into Afghanistan, even as American diplomats continue outraged by the pervasive corruption and dithering of the feckless leaders the U.S. is supporting. Ditto: Pakistan—only there U.S. forces have operated much more clandestinely. 

-Or the fact that, despite years of U.S. protests, that the Arab countries which are supposedly key U.S. allies in the Middle East—Saudia Arabia and the Gulf States—are still the major source of “charitable” funds that sustain Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups, sworn enemies of the United States and Israel. At the same time, despite what they are telling their own people, the incredibly wealthy despots who run these countries are quietly assuring American diplomats that they will be delighted if the U.S. were to take military action against Iran.

-Or the fact that, leaders in Yemen who have received impressive U.S. military aid--  supposedly to battle Al Qaeda in Yemen--have in fact used those American resources against their own local opposition groups, blatantly ignoring the continued protests of American officials.

 Question: Who is the Obama administration most concerned about reading these revelations? The Pakistanis? The Afghans? The Saudis? The Yeminis? Or the American public?

Hard to argue that venting such information can only fuel those demanding a change in current U.S. policies—policies that continue to be based on hypocrisy, fear and military force.

“Thus,” sums up my source on the Nobel Committee, “The reason we want to give the Prize to Assange and Wikileaks.”

More as this story develops.

Ed Diamond.

Henry Kissinger, Master of Treachery.

It is amazing how Henry Kissinger has been able to retain his aura of invincible genius in international relations, continuing to counsel presidents, foreign governments and major global businesses, while occasionally writing lofty Op Ed pieces advising the U.S. on what it should or should not be doing next. This mind you, despite Kissinger’s own history of monumental cynicism and duplicity when he was guiding foreign policy for President’s Nixon and Ford. Indeed, it’s a tribute to the ability of mainstream American media to forgive and forget.

The latest example is an Op Ed piece Kissinger just wrote for the New York Times warning American leaders that they are no longer giving Iraq the attention it deserves.

The fact is, however, when Kissinger was in charge of U.S. policy for Iraq, the results for its people, particularly the Kurds, were disastrous. I wrote about it in my book "Web of Deceit-the History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush."

Over the decades, the Kurds quixotic struggle for some form of independence doomed them to a seemingly endless cycle of rebellion followed by incredibly vicious repression. Those uprisings were usually encouraged by enemies of Iraq’s rulers who made use of the Kurds to destabilize the regime in Baghdad. It was a ruthless, deceitful process, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Kurds being slaughtered and displaced over the years. And it was an ideal playing field for Kissinger.

For years, the Shah of Iran had been secretly supporting the Iraqi Kurds to put pressure on Baghdad. So were the Israelis, who hoped to distract Iraq’s increasingly virulent leader from joining an Arab attack on the Jewish state. In 1972, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, motivated by fear that Iraq was becoming too cozy with the Soviet Union, agreed to a request from the Shah to help back the Kurds.

For the sake of deniability, the U.S. supplied the Kurds with Soviet arms seized in Vietnam, while Israel provided Soviet weapons that it had captured from the Arabs. According to the Washington Post’s Jon Randal, the clandestine operation was kept secret even from the U.S. State Department, which had argued against any such support. The Kurd’s news friends, however, did not want their protégées to win their struggle. An independent Kurdish state would be much too disruptive for the region, they felt. Their support was carefully doled out—enough to keep the revolt going, but not enough to take it to victory.

The Kurdish leader, Mustafa Barzani, was hard-headed enough to understand his people were being used by Iran, but not worldly enough to comprehend that his American backers could be equally duplicitous. “We do not trust the Shah,” Barzani told reporter Randal in 1973. “I trust America. America is too great a power to betray a small people like the Kurds.”

It was to be a fatal error of judgment. In 1975 the Shah and the leaders of Iraq abruptly agreed to settle their disputes and signed a treaty of friendship. A key part of the agreement was that Iran would immediately cease its support of the Iraqi Kurds. Overnight, Iranian army units that had been supporting the Kurds—with artillery, missiles, ammunition, and even food—retreated across the border into Iran. The U.S. and the Israelis similarly called a sudden halt to their support. At the same time, Iraqi troops began a massive offensive against the hapless Kurds.

Thus, without any warning, the Kurds were abandoned; not just their fighting men, the pesh merga, but their villages, wives, and children, were exposed to a ferocious Iraqi onslaught. Barzani sent a desperate plea to Kissinger for aid. “Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way with silence from everyone. We feel, Your Excellency, that the United States has a moral and political responsibility towards our people, who have committed themselves to your country’s policy. Mr. Secretary, we are anxiously awaiting your quick response.”

Twelve days later, a U.S. diplomat in Tehran cabled CIA director William Colby, noting that Kissinger had not replied and warning that if Washington ”intends to take steps to avert a massacre it must intercede with Iran promptly.”

Meanwhile, a quarter of a million Kurds fled for their lives to Iran. Turkey closed its borders to thousands of others seeking refuge. Many of the militants left behind—especially students and teachers—were rounded up by the Iraqi, imprisoned, tortured, and executed. Some 1,500 villages were dynamited and bulldozed.

Over the following weeks and months, as the killing continued, Barzani issued more desperate appeals to the CIA, to President Gerald Ford, to Henry Kissinger. No one answered. Kissinger not only refused to intervene but also turned down repeated Kurdish requests for humanitarian aid for their thousands of refugees.

This duplicity of American officials might never have surfaced but for an investigation in 1975 by the U.S. Congress’s Select Committee on Intelligence headed by New York Democrat Otis Pike. The Pike report concluded that for Tehran and Washington the Kurds were never more than “a card to play.” A uniquely useful tool for weakening Iraq’s “potential for international adventurism.” From the beginning said the report, “The President, Dr. Kissinger, and the Shah hoped that our clients [Barzani’s Kurds] would not prevail.” The Kurds were encouraged to fight solely in order to undermine Iraq. “Even in the context of covert operations, ours was a cynical enterprise.”

The report’s damning conclusions continued: Had the U.S. not encouraged the Kurds to go along with the Shah and renew hostilities with Iraq, “the Kurds might have reached an accommodation with [Iraq’s] central government, thus gaining at least a measure of autonomy while avoiding further bloodshed. Instead the Kurds fought on, sustaining thousands of casualties and 200,000 refugees.”

One of the officials who testified before the committee in secret session was Henry Kissinger. When questioned by an appalled congressman about the U.S.’s decision to abandon the Kurds to their bloody fate, Kissinger chided the committee, “One should not confused undercover action with social work.”

America's complicity with Chemical Ali

Today in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majeed, known as Chemical Ali, was finally hanged, charged with crimes against humanity committed during Saddam’s reign. If not also joining Chemical Ali on the scaffold, some American leaders should have at least been charged along with him.

The fact is that the U.S. and several of its allies were themselves complicit in many of Chemical Ali’s (and Saddam’s) most savage acts--acts which set the stage for the bloody, trillion dollar quagmire that Iraq has become. (I wrote at length about that history in my book Web of Deceit.)


But good luck to anyone searching the Western mainstream media for details on that unholy alliance. Ever since the fall of Saddam, the whole sordid story has been consigned to the black hole of history.

But when Saddam and Chemical Ali and the rest of Saddam’s killers were doing their worst, the U.S. governments of Ronald Reagan and later George Bush Senior were their de facto allies, providing them with vital satellite intelligence, weapons and financing, while shielding them from U.N. investigations or efforts by the U.S. Congress to impose trade sanctions for their depredations.

But you have to hand it to the U.S. (and Iraqi) officials who set up and then manipulated the Special Iraqi Tribunal so that the complicity of the U.S. and other Western countries with Saddam and his crimes was never discussed.

For some reason I’ve never been able to fathom, virtually none of the American reporters covering the Tribunal and its aftermath have ever chosen to write about that shameful tale either.

So here’s a sampling. In the light of where we’re at in Iraq today, it’s worth combing through.

The most horrific crime that Chemical Ali was charged with was his role in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Shiites following the abortive uprising or Intifada of 1991. Too bad the Special Iraqi Tribunal couldn’t also subpoena, George H.W. Bush and some of his top officials.
It was H.W. who in February 1991, as American forces were driving Saddam's troops out of Kuwait, called for the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow the dictator. That message was repeatedly broadcast across Iraq. It was also contained in millions of leaflets dropped by the U.S. Air Force. Eager to end decades of repression, the Shiites arose. Their revolt spread like wildfire; in the north, the Kurds also rose up. Key Iraqi army units joined in. It looked as if Saddam's days were over.

But then George H. W. Bush blew the whistle. Things had got out of hand. What Bush had wanted was not a messy popular uprising but a neat military coup -- another strongman more amenable to Western interests. The White House feared that turmoil would give the Iranians increased influence, upset the Turks, wreak havoc throughout the region.

But the Bush administration didn't just turn its back; it actually aided Saddam to suppress the Intifada.

The Uprising Smashed

When Saddam's brutal counter-attack against the rebellions began, the order was given to American troops already deep inside Iraq and armed to the teeth not to assist the rebellion in any way -- though everyone knew that they were condemning the Intifada to an awful defeat. Thanks to their high-flying reconnaissance planes, U.S. commanders would observe the brutal process as it occurred.

At the time, Rocky Gonzalez was a Special Forces warrant officer serving with U.S. troops in southern Iraq. Because he spoke Arabic, he was detached to serve with the Third Brigade of the 101st Infantry when the ground war began. There were about 140 men in his unit, which was stationed at Al Khadir on the Euphrates, just a few kilometers from Kerbala and Najaf.

Rocky was one of the few Americans who could actually communicate with the Iraqis. When the Intifada erupted, the Americans prompted the rebels to raid the local prison in Kerbala and free the Kuwaitis who were being held there. "We didn't think there was going to be a lot of bloodshed," said Gonzalez, "but they executed the guards in the prison." Prior to the uprising, the rebels had also been feeding intelligence to the Americans on what Saddam's local supporters were up to.

From their base, Rocky and his units watched as Saddam's forces launched their counterattack against the rebel-held city. Thousands of people fled toward the American lines, said Gonzalez. "All of a sudden, as far as the eye could see on Highway Five, there was just a long line of vehicles, dump trucks, tractors -- any vehicle they could get -- coming to us in streams."

"The rebels wanted aid, they wanted medical treatment, and some of the individuals wanted us to give them weapons and ammunition so they could go and fight. One of the refugees was waving a leaflet that had been dropped by U.S. planes over Iraq. Those leaflets told them to rise up against the regime and free themselves."

"They weren't asking us to fight. They felt they could do that themselves. Basically they were just saying 'we rose up like you asked us, now give us some weapons and arms to fight.'"

The American forces had huge stocks of weapons they had captured from the Iraqis. But they were ordered to blow them up rather than turn them over to the rebels. "It was gut-wrenching to me," said Gonzalez. "Here we were sitting on the Euphrates River and we were ordered to stop. As a human being, I wanted to help, but as a solider I had my orders."

Ironically, according to a former U.S. diplomat, some of the arms that were not destroyed by American forces were collected by the CIA and shipped to anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan, who at the time were being clandestinely backed by the U.S.

A Shiite survivor of the uprising later said he had seen other American forces at the river town of Nassiriya destroy a huge cache of weapons that the rebels desperately needed. "They blew up an enormous stock of arms," he said. "If we had been able to get hold of them, the course of history would have been changed in favor of the uprising, because Saddam had nothing left at that moment."

Indeed, Saddam's former intelligence chief, General Wafiq al-Samarrai, later recounted that the government forces had almost no ammunition left when they finally squelched the revolt. "By the last week of the intifada," he said, "the army was down to two hundred and seventy thousand Kalashnikov bullets." That would have lasted for just two more days of fighting.

In his autobiography, General Schwarzkopf, without giving details, alludes to the fact that the American-led coalition aided Saddam to crush the uprising. According to his curious reasoning, expressed in another interview, the Iraqi people were not innocent in the whole affair because "they supported the invasion of Kuwait and accepted Saddam Hussein."

Iraqi survivors of the Intifada also claimed that U.S. forces actually prevented them from marching on Baghdad. "American helicopters landed on the road to block our way and stopped us from continuing," they said. "One of the American soldiers threatened to kill us if we didn't turn back." Another Shiite leader, Dr. Hamid al-Bayatti, claimed that the U.S. even provided Saddam's Republican Guards with fuel. The Americans, he charged, disarmed some resistance units and allowed Republican Guard tanks to go through their checkpoints to crush the uprising. "We let one Iraqi division go through our lines to get to Basra because the United States did not want the regime to collapse," said Middle East expert Wiliam Quandt.

The U.S. officials declined even to meet with the Shiites to hear their case. As Peter Galbraith said, "These were desperate people, desperate for U.S. help. But the U.S. refused to talk to any of the Shiite leaders: the U.S. Embassy, Schwarzkopf, nobody would see them, nor even give them an explanation."

The stonewalling continued even when evidence that Saddam was using chemical weapons against the rebels emerged. "You could see there were helicopters crisscrossing the skies, going back and forth," Rocky Gonzalez said. "Within a few hours people started showing up at our perimeter with chemical burns. They were saying, 'We are fighting the Iraqi military and the Baath Party and they sprayed us with chemicals.' We were guessing mustard gas. They had blisters and burns on their face and on their hands, on places where the skin was exposed," he said. "As the hours passed, more and more people were coming. And I asked them, 'Why don't you go to the hospital in Kerbala,' and the response was that all the doctors and nurses had been executed by the Iraqi soldiers, 'so we come to you for aid.'"

One of the greatest concerns of coalition forces during Desert Storm had been that Saddam would unleash his WMD. U.S. officials repeatedly warned Iraq that America's response would be immediate and devastating. Facing such threats, Saddam kept his weapons holstered -- or so the Bush administration led the world to believe.

Rocky's suspicion that Saddam did resort to them in 1991 was later confirmed by the report of the U.S. Government's Iraq Survey Group, which investigated Saddam's WMD after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and concluded that Saddam no longer had any WMD. Almost universally ignored by the media, however, was the finding that Saddam had resorted to his WMD during the 1991 uprising. The "regime was shaking and wanted something 'very quick and effective' to put down the revolt." They considered then rejected using mustard gas, as it would be too perceptible with U.S. troops close by. Instead, on March 7th, 1991 the Iraqi military filled R-400 aerial bombs with sarin, a binary nerve agent. "Dozens of sorties were flown against Shiite rebels in Kerbala and the surrounding areas," the ISG report said. But apparently the R-400 bombs were not very effective, having been designed for high-speed delivery from planes, not slow-moving helicopters. So the Iraqi military switched to dropping CS, a very potent tear gas, in large aerial bombs.

Because of previous U.S. warnings against resorting to chemical weapons, Saddam and his generals knew they were taking a serious risk, but the Coalition never reacted. The lingering question is why. It's impossible to believe they didn't know about it at the time. There were repeated charges from Shiite survivors that the Iraqi dictator had used chemical weapons. Rocky Gonzalez said he heard from refugees that nerve gas was being used. He had also observed French-made Iraqi helicopters -- one of which was outfitted as a crop sprayer -- making repeated bomb runs over Najaf.Gonzalez maintained that, contrary to what the ISG report said, many of the refugees who fled to U.S. lines were indeed victims of mustard gas. "Their tongues were swollen," he said, "and they had severe burns on the mucous tissue on the inside of their mouths and nasal passages. Our chemical officer also said it looked like mustard gas." Gonzalez suggested that local Iraqi officials, desperate to put down the uprising, may have used mustard gas without permission from on high. "A lot of that was kept quiet," he said, "because we didn't want to panic the troops. We stepped up our training with gas masks, because we were naturally concerned."

Gonzalez's unit also passed their information on to their superiors. "There was no way that officers higher didn't know what was happening," Gonzalez said. "Whether those reports went above our division, I have no idea." Gonzalez's former commander turned down my request for an interview. At the time, few subjects were more sensitive than Saddam's potential use of WMD. It's difficult to believe that reports from Gonzalez's unit weren't flashed immediately up the chain of command in the Gulf and Washington.

There were other American witnesses to what happened. U.S. helicopters and planes flew overhead, patrolling as Saddam's helicopters decimated the rebels. Some of those aircraft provided real-time video of the occurrences below. A reliable U.S. intelligence source confirmed that such evidence does indeed exist.

On March 7th, Secretary of State James Baker warned Saddam not to resort to chemical weapons to repress the uprising. But why, when the U.S. was notified that the Iraqi dictator actually had resorted to chemical weapons, was there no forceful reaction from the administration of the elder Bush?One plausible explanation--denouncing Saddam for using chemical weapons would have greatly increased pressure on the U.S. President to come to the aid of the Shiites.

Instead, the American decision to turn their backs on the Intifada gave a green light to Saddam Hussein's ruthless counterattack. General Wafiq al-Samarrai learned of the decision after Iraqi units intercepted frantic conversations between two Islamic rebels near Nassariya. One told the other that he had gone to the Americans to ask for support, and twice was rebuffed. "They say, 'We are not going to support you because you are Shiites and are collaborating with Iran.'" After hearing that message, al-Samarrai recalled, "The position of the regime immediately became more confident. Now [Saddam] began to attack the Intifada."

The repression when it came was as horrendous as everyone knew it would be.

"Women were being raped. People were being shot in the streets and just left to rot there." Zainab al-Suwaij recounted. "The citizens were forbidden to bury the bodies. Many of them were eaten by the dogs. The government ordered people out of Kerbala to take the road to Najaf. They were slaughtered and executed along the roadway. Many of those killed were teenagers."

As an object lesson to his people, Saddam Hussein himself ordered Iraqi television to record and broadcast scenes of the repression: appalling scenes of captured Shiites, some with ropes around their necks, being kicked and beaten and insulted, threatened with pistols and machine guns, a few pleading for mercy. Most of them, eyes downcast, are eventually dragged away to execution.

The Bush administration attempted to disengage itself from any responsibility. They were helped by the fact that there were no graphic news reports in the West of the slaughter that was taking place. U.S. intelligence agencies had their own accounts and explicit images, but they weren't sharing them with the press or the public. Anonymous government figures, wise in the ways of Realpolitik, were making statements such as, "It is far easier to deal with a tame Saddam Hussein than with an unknown quantity."

Because of Saddam's savage repression of the uprising, the ensuing U.N. sanctions, and the carnage unleashed by the 2003 invasion, at least one million Iraqis have probably lost their lives since 1991.

Imagine if, instead of blocking the Intifada, George H.W. Bush had given a green light -- without even sending American troops to Baghdad -- just sent the needed signals: met with rebel leaders, ordered Saddam to stop flying his helicopter gunships.

Granted there would have been a period of tumult. The Kurds might have achieved an autonomous or semi autonomous state, which is probably what they will wind up with. The Iranians would have certainly increased their influence through their Shiite allies, but probably no more than they have today.

Indeed, some in the Bush I administration were recommending that he do just that: support the revolt he had called for. They were overruled.

Barry Lando is the author of "Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush (Other Press,N.Y. Doubleday, Toronto.)

You can also view segments of a documentary Lando produced with Michel Despratx at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeY05iS5iv0&feature=related

22 month old Ethan and his Ipod Touch

Following along on my previous blog, here now is 22 month old Ethan at play with his Ipod Touch...

Ipod Touch and the under two market-pros and cons

I was going to blog further about Haiti today, but then got to thinking about something I did the other day and wanted to tell you all about it: I bought my grandson an Ipod Touch. What is so remarkable about that? The fact that my grandson, Ethan, is only one year and ten months old

Even the Apple sales woman was somewhat taken aback. But there he was yesterday afternoon happily playing away with several different Apps, his small fingers flicking across the screen manipulating one game after another: Elmo in one, a series of toy trains in another, instinctively interacting with his world of the future that is already here.

That fact is that for several weeks Ethan has already been playing with a couple of Apps on his father's Iphone.

But won't it corrupt his spirit? Digitize his soul before he has learns to explore the real world out there on his side of the Ipod screen? Of course, I had a serious conversation with my son and daughter-in-law before I made the move. And they are as concerned about their childrens' upbringing as any parents could be: No TV violence allowed.

And the Brave New Digital World can be frightening. This past New Years for instance, we were at dinner in our hotel, and at the table next to us was a family of five, two young children, probably three and five, and three adults. The three adults were all on their mobiles, probably exchanging New Years greetings with friends on the other side of the world. And the two children? They each had their own small DVD readers or laptops in front of them on the table, each one viewing a different Disney-like video. Again, they were all sitting around the same table--"together"--but they were also all off in their own little worlds.

Not good, we agree.

And I would hope that limits will be put on his Ipoding.

On the other hand, that is the world that my grandson already inhabits. And we are descending ever deeper into that digitized world at an astonishing rate, much faster than most of us realize. Think of the glut of notepads and tablets and e-book readers and smart phones that are now the hottest selling items in our stores, economic crisis or not. Think of bing and twitter and plaxo and Facebook. Ask yourself how many of those items you had even heard about a couple of years ago. Now ask yourself what will be on the market two years from now.


But if I can give my grandson the tools he needs to inhabit that new world, why not? Those Apps he is already playing with could, of course, turn him into some kind of digital vegetable --on the other hand, properly used, they can also teach him mathematics and spelling and geography and logic, and that's just the threshold. I also bought an Ipod for his seven year old sister which she has no problem mastering. She's had her own computer for years. His father, a film maker, is himself exploring the limits of digital video and editing and blogging his results. My other son, seventeen, is now coming home from school in Paris to log on to MIT's site and follow a (free) series of lectures on calculus. He is also in daily contact via Facebook with twenty or thirty other young people around the world who are going to be attending the same university beginning next September. But why wait til then to get to know each other and exchange ideas?


In other words, no one knows where this revolution is headed. Not even the people caught up in it. It's like a surfer trying to ride a tsunami. Of course, we have the choice not to join in this world. But I figure that my grandson is already there.

Which is why I bought him his Ipod Touch.

Haiti and Al Qaeda Memo 2

Memo from the Director of the Save Haiti NGO
Haiti and Al Qaeda, developments

Eyes Only

Further to my memo of yesterday, I have further researched the plan presented and find that we may already have fertile fodder in-country, saving us the expense of importing talent. Indeed, Haiti already has 3250 Muslims. True, that's only 0.04 percent of the population, but, hey, surely one despairing type would be willing to don a pair of loaded briefs and hop a plane to New York. We may try contacting the Bilal Mosque and Islamic Centre in Cap Haitien, which has a mosque and an Islamic study center. There is also the spiritual centre Alahu al Akhbar in Port au Prince. Maybe we could offer scholarships in Salafist studies.

In fact, according to revisionist history, Douty Boukman, whose death supposedly kicked off Haiti's revolution, may well have been of Muslim origin. Some later Muslim immigrants were Palestinians. (Signal the Israelis) They even had a Muslim representative in their Chamber of Deputies.

I would only think it's a question of time before one of the horde of reporters in Haiti covering the current disaster checks all this out and files a piece.

So, I ask you, what more do we need?

Haiti and Al Qaeda-A Modest Proposal

Memo from the Director of the Save Haiti NGO
To: Top Staff
Confidential
Al Qaeda in Haiti

In a few days, when the world tires of the horrific images from Haiti, when the bodies are buried, the wreckage bulldozed, the hordes of reporters and foreign military have pulled out, then what happens to Haiti? Does it slink back to its status as one of the poorest countries on the face of the globe? In other words, how do we keep the momentum going? How do we keep Haiti and its desperate plight on page one? How do we get the tens of billions of dollars of long term aid and effort that this country needs?

I think I've found the answer. We close down our regular programs, our school lunches, and seed development and well-drilling and free dental clinics---Instead we launch Al Qaeda in Haiti. Through cut-outs of course.

We get a couple of hundred of young Haitians, desperate for anyway out of their poverty, we import a couple of fire-breathing radical Muslims to give appropriate cover to the operation, we give our Haitians a few weeks of clandestine training, and then we're ready. We could start with a suicide bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy to announce that Al Qaeda in Haiti has arrived, follow that up with a flurry of roadside bombs, attacks against smaller police stations and city halls across the country.

There results are obvious: The U.S. media arrive once again en masse. The original skeptical reports give way to shock, alarm, and calls for the American president to act. We're no longer talking about the threat from radical Islam in far-off Afghanistan. It's here, at our door step!

Then we move to the big time: two of our trainees get picked up sailing a fishing boat towards Galveston, its hold filled with fertilizer-based explosive, another gets caught boarding a plane for New York from Port Au Prince, each of his voodoo beads filled with nerve gas.

By now thousands of American troops are back in Haiti. Now, instead of a few million dollars in U.S. aid, America is pouring billions into Haiti--training a brand new Haitian army, educating thousands of civil servants, rooting out corruption, building new roads and bridges, working with every local community organization they can find.

As far as continuing to supply new recruits to our operation, the U.S. will take care of that as well. They'll be there with their Predators and frightened, trigger-happy young soldiers who know nothing about our culture and people. In fact, once we have started the ball-rolling it will maintain a momentum of its own.

Indeed, if this model works as well as I think it will, we might try it out in some of our other locations around the globe. But let's start with Haiti.

Haiti and the Times

Take a look at the front page of today's New York Times (and the rest of the world's media) and you would swear that chaos and violence are running rampant in Haiti, that everyone from journalists to relief workers must be risking their necks just to venture out into the streets. You would think! But then listen to the audio feed from the same New York Times reporters who wrote the article on all that violence, and, turns out, folks, there's just a few pockets and a small number of vandals at work. The overwhelming majority of Haitians are attempting to survive without trashing their stores and knifing each other over welfare supplies. Even more ironic, the Times audio report says that fears of such violence are playing a part in delaying the aid effort, with relief workers leary of possible danger. Unfortunately the Times itself, by playing the sensational photos for all they are worth, is itself putting out a badly distorted picture of what is actually going on.