08/25/14 – Thomas Mountain – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
So on the line we have our friend Thomas Mountain, and he writes for Counterpunch.
And we had him on last week, and then we had telephone difficulties.
He writes from Eritrea in eastern Africa, and unfortunately we lost the phone call, and we're unable to finish the interview.
But now's our chance to follow up, and with a whole bonus segment too, so right on.
Welcome back to the show.
Thomas, how are you?
Good to be back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, so I lost you right when we were coming back from break last week, and the question at the time was, I was hoping that you could fill me in about the Amoros, I think is how you say it, from the Ogden region of Ethiopia, because we had talked about how when the famine hit in 2011, especially how the Somalis were hit hardest of all because of the American war there, had turned the whole society upside down, so the famine was just hitting them on top of that.
And you mentioned about in the Ogden region how they had suffered, I know I'm saying it all wrong, forgive me, but you were saying how they had suffered just as bad because there was a civil war going on in Ethiopia, where the Ethiopia wasn't just fighting the Somalis at the time, they were continually persecuting the Amoros and disrupting their civilization so bad that they were suffering the same problem as the Somalis, not just the unrelenting heat and drought, but also the complete disruption of their markets and their ability to trade and feed each other.
Well, the Ogden region is actually populated by the Somali people, but they don't consider themselves part of Somalia, they consider themselves an independent region called the Ogden.
Next door to the west and the south is the Oromo people, which actually make up at least half of some 40 million Ethiopians.
Okay, I'm sorry, I had my regions and ethnic groups wrong there.
Please, thank you for clarifying that.
Well, the Oromos actually were suffering from the drought too, not all of them, but the ones in the south were suffering from the drought.
But this is the worst drought in 60 years.
And the Oromos have been in the news more recently because there was an explosion amongst the Oromos because the Ethiopian regime had been taking their land and turning it over to foreign investors and carrying out a lot of nasty policies against the Oromos as well.
But the Ogden is where the armed struggle has been pretty unrelenting now.
I came in the news in 2007 when the Chinese tried to come in and drill for oil and natural gas in the Ogden National Liberation Front, which is the rebels fighting the Ethiopian regime.
Won the Chinese off, the Chinese didn't listen, and they attacked the Chinese drilling outfit and killed the Bantlon Chinese as well as several hundred Ethiopian guards.
So at that point the Ethiopian government went crazy because Ethiopian ports bought all of their fuel, and by some accounts up to 75% of their foreign currency goes to pay for their fuel needs.
If they could get some fuel, natural gas or oil, coming out of the Ogden, which is reported to be quite rich in energy resources, then that could solve their problem or go a long way to solving their problem.
And when the Ogden fighters put a stop to that, the Ethiopian government clamped a complete food and aid, a medical aid embargo on the region and started carrying out a scorched earth policy.
And so flash forward to the 2011-2012 drought, the worst drought and famine in 60 years, the Ethiopian government had even kicked the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
Now, what country in the world we know of has kicked out both the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders in the midst of the worst famine and drought in 60 years?
And yet nothing was said in the West.
I mean, the fact is Enough Project, headed by someone I call Obama's quiet contignery, Gail Smith, a very quiet senior member of the White House intelligence staff, was head of, in opposition to the Bush regime at the time, and founded this organization called Enough Project, today headed by John Prendergast.
And they had actually written about the scorched earth policies of the Ethiopian regime in the Ogden.
And then, of course, when Obama came to power and she became a senior member of the Obama administration, Enough Project shut up completely about this Ogden genocide.
Now, when I say genocide, actually, I'm not the only one that's labeled them this.
The International Federation of Jurists has called it a genocide and called in the International Criminal Court to prosecute the Ethiopian regime for carrying out a genocide by applying this food and medical aid embargo on the region during the worst drought and famine in 60 years.
But see, the thing is, whenever we talk about East Africa, the Horn of Africa, whenever there's a major problem, you can just about guarantee the Ethiopian regime is behind it.
And I mentioned briefly last time about how the problems in South Sudan are based in Addis Ababa, that this Rick Machar, who is the so-called rebel chief, is actually being supported by the Ethiopian regime.
And because Ethiopia is a client state of the United States, and the United States wants to see China kicked out of Sudan, the Sudanese oil fields, which is the only Chinese-owned and controlled oil fields in Africa.
The United States gets about half of its imported oil from Africa, and it's in the U.S. national interest to deny access to African oil and energy to the Chinese.
And the Sudanese oil fields is China's only major majority-owned involvement there.
The United States wants China out.
The only beneficiary of this horrible civil war that's going on in South Sudan, with thousands of innocents being massacred, this huge famine resulting, coming about right now as I speak, because the people have been driven off their land and have no food because they couldn't plant in the rainy season, is the only beneficiary is the United States.
And the United States police them.
And one of their thugs that does the dirty work for the U.S. and the region is the Ethiopian regime, which has been carrying out a genocide in the Ogaden and now is involved in Sudan, in South Sudan.
And, you know, it's called an open secret out here.
I've interviewed a number of diplomats from Uganda and Kenya.
The chief of staff in the region government has come out and said this is an open secret.
Ethiopia is behind this war in South Sudan.
Everybody looks at Africans killing Africans when it's actually the United States.
The United States wants to get rid of the South Sudanese president, Salva Kiir, because he continues to work with the Chinese and continues to support the Chinese in their attempts to reopen the oil fields in Sudan.
The United States wants to get rid of him, and they want to install their boy Riek Machar.
Riek Machar is not new to all these massacres.
Way back in 1991 he was carrying out big massacres, and I recently saw an Al Jazeera interview from three or four years ago where they asked Riek Machar about the 1991 massacres he carried out, and he said the exact same word that he's using today to deny involvement in the massacres in South Sudan.
So this is a huge problem that we're having here in the heart of Africa, where Ethiopia was the one that destroyed the Union of Islamic Courts peace initiative that brought peace to Mogadishu for the first time in 15 years.
Now it's Ethiopia that's brought civil war to South Sudan.
Ethiopia didn't even need to retread 2000.
I mean, you know, there's this huge enemy of the people of Africa that's centered in Addis Ababa, and yet we have that former prime minister of Ethiopia, the guy that launched this genocidal aid and medical embargo on the Ogaden, Melissinari, when he passed away, who's eulogizing him?
Susan Rice.
All right, now hold it right there, Thomas.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Thomas Mountain after this.
Check him out at counterpunch.org.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
My website is scotthorton.org.
Of course, I'm on the Liberty Radio Network at libertyradionetwork.com, LRN.
FM.
Talking with Thomas Mountain from Eritrea.
Well, he's an American in Eritrea.
And we're talking about America's support for all kinds of death and destruction across East Africa and at the hands of our sock puppet proxies in Ethiopia.
First of all, in South Sudan, I know that for years and years, America supported the South in the civil war there.
And it was, you know, clearly, you know, for, I don't know, more than a decade, it's been on the record in, you know, the New York Times version of history and everything that the South is where the oil is.
And it's also where the black Christians and animists are.
And so you could conceivably, you know, you can use that as a pretext to break it off from the rest of Sudan, which is Arab and Muslim, and call it a new state.
And then, as you said, to keep China out or, you know, keep that oil either off the market or pumping this way if it gets going anywhere.
But now, so you're talking about a further level of intervention.
Since the successful secession of South Sudan from the rest of Sudan, now there's a civil war that's broken out.
And according to, you know, the NPR version of the story, it's a tribal difficulty.
And I don't know if it's the majority or the minority who supposedly control the capital and the rest want to share power.
And so now it's a big civil war within the new state.
And what you're telling me is no, because the Ethiopians, at the behest of the Americans, are backing one side against the other.
So can you talk about the Minka men and the different tribes and who's on whose side and how exactly this works a little bit for us, please?
Sure.
Well, just, you know, a little bit of background.
The man that's considered the founding father of South Sudan is John Garang.
And John Garang, interestingly enough, was vehemently opposed to the independence of South Sudan.
Way back in 2005, John Garang, when he first, after the peace deal was signed between the Bashir government and the South Sudanese People's Liberation, South Sudan People's Liberation Movement, headed by John Garang, he came to his Khartoum and spoke in front of a crowd of over a million people.
And President Bashir, the biggest crowd he ever pulled was about 100,000.
John Garang spoke to over a million people.
And what did he say?
He said that he was against South Sudanese independence.
He said that we were going to have one Sudan.
There was equal rights and justice for all Sudanese with John Garang as the president.
He was going to run for president in the next election.
And also he said they were going to have an independent foreign policy and they weren't going to work with the Western exploitation regime.
They were going to work with the Chinese and come in and try to set up some sort of partnership with the Chinese and develop an independent economy.
And within just a matter of weeks, John Garang was dead.
So John Garang, the father of independent South Sudan, was actually against South Sudanese independence.
So that should tell you that there were storm clouds that gathered over South Sudan before it was even born.
And then I had an article predicting all the present outbreak of violence two years ago when I said that the U.S. planned to destabilize Sudan, when I wrote about how the United States wanted the Chinese out and how the United States was going to form a crisis in the country.
But they managed to South Sudanese, and the Sudanese managed to patch things back up, get the Chinese oil flowing again.
And then we had this so-called coup led by Riek Machar, who was from a minority tribe called the Nuer.
And the president of South Sudan is from the majority tribe called the Dinka.
His name is Salva Kiir.
Salva Kiir was the head of the military under John Garang that fought against the Bashir government.
And he became, after John Garang's mysterious death, he became the new president of South Sudan, where they finally have independence.
So you have, you know, the conflict is based upon ethnic groups.
But the question is, the report's coming out now that tens of millions of dollars worth of weapons are pouring into South Sudan.
And where are those weapons coming from?
Who's paying for all that?
The oil fields are shut down.
How is Riek Machar's army and his ethnic-based army paying their bills?
How's he getting ammunition?
Where's he getting the money from?
That's the question that's not being, show me the money.
The question's not being asked.
Okay, where's this funding coming from?
So it's become an open secret.
The Ethiopians are supporting him.
Now, like I mentioned, Ethiopia has an ongoing energy crisis.
They're hemorrhaging foreign currency to pay for their fuel imports.
Now, the Brazilians have promised to build a railroad from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to the western border in Gambela, where there's large amounts of oil, underground oil.
And the Gambela fields are linked into the South Sudanese fields geologically, and you can transport oil via railroad cars.
And if the Ethiopians are able to come in and get a hold of the Sudanese oil, then they could solve this major problem.
So they have their own axe to grind in this conflict.
And, of course, the United States is paying something like $3 billion a year in aid to Ethiopia.
I mean, Ethiopia is a well-kept secret.
Ethiopia is the most independent country in the world.
Ethiopia's export bill last year was something like, I mean, they had about $2.1 or $2.2 billion coming in in exports for a country of 80 million people.
And the import bill was over $11 billion.
So it's something like $9 billion a year.
Nobody explains where that money's coming from.
It's keeping the Ethiopian regime afloat.
Well, and not only that, but, yeah, keeping them in occupation, as they've re-invaded Somalia and are occupying Somalia, which is costing a zillion dollars a day.
Obviously, it's the American taxpayer that's picking up the, that's pushing the tab for all of this, whether we know it or not.
That's really something else.
And my apologies here in my ignorance.
You know, I got fooled by the headline here.
Minkemen is a place, of course, in South Sudan.
I know nothing about it.
So it's the Nuer and the Dinka are the groups that are fighting.
But as you're saying, and which side is it that's backed by the Ethiopians, or they're just trying to destabilize the whole situation?
Well, Rick Mishar is from the Nuer tribe.
And historically, the Nuer and the Dinka have been at each other's throats.
Back in 91, Rick Mishar led a Nuer massacre of a lot of Dinkas.
The Nuers live around the oil fields along the border, the Abyei region along the border between North and South Sudan.
Yeah.
So something other interesting people don't realize, the extent the United States is actually trying to, you know, they have a, it's not just a Biden rule.
It's actually a crisis management.
The United States prefers to create crisis and then manage these crises the better to move and plunder the resources of the area.
The United States doesn't want to see African countries cooperating and working together.
And I'll give you a prime example.
Ethiopia is building a giant new dam called the Renaissance Millennium Dam.
It's going to dam up the historic waters of the Nile River.
And it's threatening Egypt's very survival, because if that dam fills up, Egypt's going to lose 20 or 30 percent of their water, which they need desperately to keep their country afloat.
I mean, just to feed their country, let alone create electricity that keeps the people alive.
So now this dam is going to produce 6,000 megawatts of electricity.
Well, right presently, 75 percent of Ethiopia, 60 million people have no electricity.
So even if, and there's no budget to bring electricity to these people, and yet there's big dams being built with 6,000 megawatt dams, and by estimates is the most Ethiopia could use, even if they put electricity in for the 60 million people who don't have it, would be 2,000 megawatts.
So why is Ethiopia building a big dam, blocking off the Nile River, creating a conflict with Egypt?
Egypt's going to launch a war against Ethiopia if this dam goes into effect.
And Ethiopia doesn't even need electricity.
They only can use a third of the electricity being generated.
Well, lo and behold, who are the ones that started, the brainchild of this dam was the World Bank, 51 percent owned by the USA.
So now the USA has got two of their client states, Ethiopia and Egypt, even though Egypt may be less and less of a client state, he said, at each other's throats, threatening war, rather than working together and developing economic partnership and developing independence and self-sustainability apart from Western economic domination.
So, you know, every time we turn around and we see a problem, who's behind the problem?
Who's actually the one that pushed this brainchild, that pushed the creation of this dam in the first place, a dam that the electrical needs of Ethiopia could easily be met by smaller dams on tributaries to the Nile and not threaten Egypt's access to that water.
Yeah, that's what they did in Sri Lanka.
And then Egypt would have all the water to feed the people.
Yeah, that's the same thing they did in Sri Lanka in the book By Way of Deception.
It was a big IMF boondoggle and just served to split the population and set them at war and make a bunch of money.
In that case, for the Israelis, I don't know if they're in on this one or not, but same old scam, it sounds like.
Well, you know, that's the thing.
So, you know, when I tell people anything you read, don't trust anything you read about the Horn of Africa and almost nothing you see.
You know, that whenever you take a deep look at what's really going on in the Horn of Africa and the conflicts that are going on, the major conflicts, inevitably you see a foreign hand in all of this.
And then you want to blame Africans for being savages that are just incapable of living together in peace and, you know, it's just tribal violence and bloodshed and it's all just big chaos and famine and war and this is just inherent to the black savages in Africa.
Well, you know what?
There's somebody behind all of this.
And I think that's something I've really come to appreciate the Scott Horton Show because you're one of the very few voices out there that's willing to have this sort of a viewpoint put out there.
And I want to tell all your listeners out there, you guys ought to dig deep in these hard times and donate to the Scott Horton Show because otherwise there's these huge crimes that are going on about that we're just not going to hear.
And I've got to say this, even though it may sound a bit harsh, in the middle of the summer of 2011, as the worst-drought and famine in Somalia and the Horn of Africa was beginning to rage and hundreds of people were dying every day on the outskirts of Mogadishu, an award-winning journalist named Jeremy Scahill landed in Mogadishu and the result of which he wrote a groundbreaking exposé about not the famine that was taking hundreds of lives a day, ended up taking 250,000 lives.
He wrote about the drone program and the assassination drone program and a supposedly secret CIA prison there.
And whether it was intentional or not, and I don't know how he missed the fact that within a few miles of the hotel he was staying, hundreds of people were dying every day from a Western-imposed famine.
Instead he had what was in effect a smokescreen that pointed everybody off into this drone, where hundreds of people were assassinated by the drone program.
The fact is that at least a quarter million Somalis died and maybe a couple hundred thousand Somalis in the Ogaden died, and not a mention of this in anything.
So the Scott Horton show is one of the few places that you're actually going to hear about this on the radio, and you're listening, you've got to get behind Scott, because I know life must be tough for an independent journalist like you.
Well, you know, at the time I actually was talking with Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch, and she was doing great work on the famine there.
And I'll give Jeremy credit because I think he does the best job of any Western reporter so far of putting in a nutshell, in his article, Blowback in Somalia, he's got maybe one or two big paragraphs where he really goes point by point by point, this is how America intervened and escalated and escalated and escalated and escalated, and you're right.
It's like a mortal sin, the omission, apparently by ignorance, of the famine that was taking place at the time.
But on the other hand, he really does tell the story about how whatever's going on there is America's fault pretty damn well too.
And in fact, on page 222 of his book, he quotes the State Department goon saying, oh, we wanted to keep Sheikh Sharif all along anyway.
We just wanted to take him down a peg.
Yeah, that's why they killed a quarter of a million people in this horrible war and led to the rise of al-Shabaab, you know, Mad Men and all the rest of this.
It was because they wanted to take Sheikh Sharif down a peg or two.
They didn't even want to get rid of him.
So, I mean, that to me is the ultimate indictment.
They had to all be doing a thousand years in prison for that.
And so, you know, I'll give him some credit for that.
We had an earlier smoke screen.
It was called the Darfur Genocide.
And see, the Darfur Genocide was something that was created by mainly pro-Israel Zionist organizations in the West.
And it raised at least $100 million claiming to help the victims of the Darfur Genocide.
And I haven't been able to find any evidence that anybody, that $100 million ever made it to anybody in Darfur.
But the fact was, the fighting in Darfur took place mainly in 2003, 2004.
By the time, maybe 20,000 or 30,000 people died.
A real tragedy.
But no genocide.
By the time these Western pro-Zionist, pro-Israel organizations started raising the hue and cry of the Darfur Genocide, they're fighting it already over.
And yet they, you know, they demonized the president of Sudan, who was actually credited by all the UN staffers from Darfur that I've ever spoken to, was playing an active role in actually preventing mass starvation.
And the reason for the cooperation and support of Omar al-Bashir, that the most successful relief project in history, which was the largest most successful relief project in history, which was the Darfur relief effort, would not have been possible.
All along, in Ethiopia, the real genocide was going on.
And who was covering all this up?
Well, you know, it takes us back to the Obama White House.
We've got people like Gail Smith.
Now, have you ever heard of Gail Smith?
Only from you.
Yeah, and yet if you Google her name on the Internet, you come up with she's a senior foreign policy advisor to Obama, on Africa and foreign aid.
And she was after, she, Tony Lake, and Susan Rice were senior foreign policy advisors to Obama in his campaign.
The payoff to Anthony Lake was he got head of UNICEF, the failed head of, the failed nominee to head the CIA, became head of the organization of the world.
And Susan Rice went on to become ambassador to the UN.
And then now national security advisor to Obama, but Gail Smith is the quiet conciliary.
She's the one that's behind the scenes.
She's the senior advisor to Obama.
She's the big sister to Susan Rice.
Susan Rice's actual godmother, really, literally godmother, was Madeleine Albright.
But her big sister that guided her from her days in the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of state for African affairs was Gail Smith, who went from a career as a supposedly award-winning journalist in the Horn of Africa, who actually lived in the trenches with the Marxist-Leninist Enver Hoxhaite Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, which is now the ruling party in Ethiopia, and was actually the mistress of one of their fighters named the guerrilla fighters, Dome Deguerre's name was Jamaica.
I mean, she was so down in the trenches that she won the admiration of her at the top levels of the U.S. intelligence community In 1991, she was given an award as a journalist, and three years later, in 1994, she became the chief of staff of the Agency for International Development.
Now, how do you go from being a journalist in three years to being head of the, actually the chief operating officer of the largest U.S. multi-billion dollar aid agency, Agency for International Development, which has actually just recently been in the spotlight because they were trying to destabilize the Cuban government through their AIDS awareness program in Cuba.
So she, you know, in three years, from a journalist to head of USAID, I mean, that should give you an idea that this woman had the, you know, she caught the attention of the top members of the U.S. intelligence community.
And by 1998, four years later, she was the head of the African desk for the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and under Tony Leigh.
So this woman today now sits in the White House, just down the hall from Obama, and before Obama does anything, he calls Gail Smith in and says, you know, my consigliere, what should we do about these problems in Africa?
Or my consigliere, what should we do about these foreign aid programs we're going to use to destabilize countries around the world?
And this woman nobody's ever heard of.
And, you know, I've actually, I've been overdue to write an article about her because she's someone that nobody knows about, and yet she's a darling of the liberal establishment.
When she was, after her time in the trenches of the Clinton administration, she went after, I think it's the Center for American Progress or something like that.
I mean, you know, she was a darling of the liberal society, and now she's back in the White House.
You know, one of those that was little pushers behind the scenes for this big disaster in Libya, the one that knows full well because the organization spoke about genocide in Ogaden when she was in opposition to the Bush regime, and now she's doing her best to raise smoke screens and other things to try to keep anybody from talking about the real genocide that's going on in Ethiopia.
So, you know, I think that some of your listeners ought to look into.
It's interesting that her personal biographical information on how she went from a journalist to being head of a chief of staff of USAID in three years is no longer available on her website.
Well, you know, when I Google her, I'm really falling down on the job here, Tom.
As I Google her, it says here her official title is Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the National Security Council.
So, yeah, I should know everything about this lady and what she's up to, not just her background, but what she's up to.
I will note that it's hilarious that her latest blog entry is from January 2013 and it's about more humanitarian aid for the Syrian rebels.
Well, this woman got up at Melifinawi's funeral and eulogized him and talked about him.
I saw this on Ethiopian TV, a satellite here, and she got up and talked about how she'd been good friends with Melifinawi for over 30 years.
Talking about going back to the early 1980s when back when Melifinawi was a guerrilla fighter off in the trenches of the Sahel Desert fighting the Soviet-backed Derg regime of Mengistu Hailemariam.
And so she's like, you know, good bosom buddies eulogizing this Melifinawi that's committing genocide in the Ogaden right next to Barack Obama who's the son of an African from Kenya.
So, you know, I had an article a few years back, you can start with that, I think it's called From Guerrilla Mistress to Obama Confidant, The Life and Crimes of Gail Smith.
And I'm about to come out with another one that's called Obama's Quiet Contigliere and how this woman that eulogized I mean, she's praised affluent praise of Melifinawi at his funeral.
And likewise, we're both there sitting in the front row praising one of the worst dictators Africa's ever known.
And, you know, this is the liberal establishment in the United States that drives so much of us progressive and revolutionary forces to close alliances with libertarians because the liberals can't be trusted.
And I mean, when I say liberals can't be trusted, I have to include at times even people who do such good work as Amy Goodman, because democracy now went on and on about Darfur genocide, and I've never heard of them ever doing a program about the genocide in the Ogaden.
So, you know, it's like, I mean, I don't personally, I don't trust liberals.
But, you know, that's just my opinion.
Well, yeah, I mean, if this is what the revolutionaries are like when they take power, just DLC Hillary Clinton Democrats, that's pretty damn dangerous.
I wanted to ask you two real quick here, Thomas, about the new dictator of Ethiopia ever since Zinawi died there.
Who is he and how bad is he?
Yeah, well, he was like a flunky that had no...
Melissinali hadn't picked a guy that's highly modest and disheveled because he was no threat.
He had no basis in power and he could provide no threat, and Melissinali picked him shortly after the United States dumped Mubarak.
And Mubarak was a loyal servant to the United States policy for all those decades, and Melissinali saw quickly the United States disposed of him.
So Melissinali, apparently he was sick.
He had a brain tumor, and he knew that his time was up and he knew that the United States might want to get rid of him, so he showed up as his deputy.
Somebody nobody had ever heard of had a master's degree in public sanitation from someplace and he became, now he's the new prime minister of Ethiopia.
And he's sort of like a compromise candidate because the pack of hyenas that Melissinali is surrounded by, who is his former comrade-in-arms in the guerrilla movement called the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, the ethnic group that Melissinali is from, one of the smallest, most despised ethnic groups in Ethiopia.
But he succeeded to power after the European guerrilla army overthrew the Soviet-backed Mengistu regime in 1991.
Now these Tigrayan hyenas that each of them want to have power, and like any pack of hyenas, if one hyena runs in to take a bite of Haile Mariam, the other hyenas will bite him from the back.
So they sort of have a compromise candidate that they're letting sort of be the front man while they sort of circle and see who's going to be the chief hyena that eventually wants to come to power.
But see, the reality is the situation in Ethiopia is so unstable that the United States has had to step in.
And this is something I really would hope that the latest Snowden revelations would expose more, because we'd heard in the WikiLeaks revelations that how the United States has been involved in a lot of scandalous activities in support of the Ethiopians, are fully aware of crimes the Ethiopians are committing, and are blaming the retrainers and others for.
Because what I wanted to know was, you know, the role of the CIA in Ethiopia, because I've had an article based upon reports that many of the high-ranking Ethiopian officials have been complaining about the fact that they can't make any decisions without consulting the white man down the hall in the CIA office.
And that the CIA has basically been setting a lot of policy in Ethiopia.
And the fact is, there's been a series of high-level assassinations of leading members of the Ethiopian resistance, whether they're the new Tigrayan resistance or among the Ogaden fighters.
There's been some very disastrous assassinations, not just of key leaders, but oftentimes the majority of the central committee of the resistance organization.
And, you know, something that ought to get people paused about what's going on in South Sudan is that recently Ban Ki-moon, the head of the UN, nominated the former head of the Ethiopian military intelligence to head the South Sudanese quote-unquote peacekeepers of the UN.
And this general formerly had been head of the 10,000-man Ethiopian quote-unquote peacekeepers that had been occupying the oil fields on the border between North and South Sudan.
These Ethiopian peacekeepers who had been so blatant about arming the rebels of Riek Machar that UN staff even held a press conference last year to denounce the destabilizing acts of the Ethiopian peacekeepers in Sudan, which should have tipped everybody off that Ethiopia was behind Riek Machar, but somehow UN even missed all that.
So the head of the Ethiopian, former head of Ethiopian military intelligence is now head of so-called peacekeepers in South Sudan.
And this is the guy that was assassination death squads that was going out and killing the people in the resistance movement.
So, well, you know, I've kept you way over time here and the phone bill is going to completely bankrupt me, man.
I better stop it now, Thomas.
Hey, man, your listeners gotta come through.
Your listeners gotta come through, Scott.
Great to be back on the show, man.
Thank you, Thomas.
I sure appreciate it.
Okay, John.
That's Thomas Mountain, everybody, reporting from Eritrea.
And he writes for counterpunch.org.
That's where you can find him most often.
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