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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Thomas Mountain.
He's a reporter from, well, living in Eritrea and reporting on all things Africa, this time for Foreign Policy and Focus, and it's also running at Counterpunch Carnage in the Congo.
Welcome back to the show, Thomas.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
Good to be back.
Well, it's great to have you here.
And I've got to admit, though, I'm kind of bummed out about this Congo thing, if only because I thought here was one example of a terrible crisis in the world that wasn't the American government's fault, and now your article, in so many words, is telling me to stop being so naive and ignorant.
Yeah, that's about it.
All right, well, so give us the bad news.
You give a good rundown of the basic history here, 20 years in a nutshell.
Go ahead.
Well, you know, the United Nations has had an investigation into what's going on in northern and eastern Congo and condemned, very critical of the role of Rwanda, the Rwandan military, in supporting a warlord band of Tutsi-based, ethnically Tutsi-based rebels called the M23 movement.
Now, it's interesting that the UN would condemn Rwanda for providing weapons and military aid to these rebels, while the UN at the same time is providing tens of millions of dollars of weapons and military aid to the Rwandan military for their peacekeepers in Darfur, Sudan.
Okay, so on one hand, Rwanda is bad, and on the other hand, Rwanda is getting millions, tens of millions of dollars in aid and weapons, and if some of that aid and weapons finds its way back into the Congo, golly, the UN is angry about it all.
Now, so, and on top of that, these M23 rebels with massive armaments from the Rwandan military come in and come down and threaten the strategic city of Goma in eastern Congo and the UN and their tens of thousands of peacekeepers there who had previously bombarded the M23 rebels, turn aside and let the M23 march in and take over the city without a shot being fired by the UN.
Now, what's going on here doesn't make any sense, does it?
Condemn Rwanda, provide tens of millions of aid to Rwanda.
So if we look at the situation in the Congo going back almost 20 years now, it's been one of UN murder and mayhem.
In this case, the two key players is Rwanda and Uganda.
Now, 20 years ago, the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, was the director of what was the Ugandan secret police, the Ugandan CIA.
Previous to the massacre, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, Paul Kagame was first the director of the Ugandan CIA, then head of an army armed and equipped, a Rwandan Tutsi-based rebel army armed and equipped by President Museveni of Uganda.
So Uganda and Rwanda are joined at the hip and have been for 20 years now, so more than 20 years.
The godfather in all this really is turning out to be President Museveni of Uganda.
Uganda has 15,000, 18,000 peacekeepers in Mogadishu carrying out the dirty work of Pax Americana there, slaughtering and massacring Somalis.
Now, for several years, tens of thousands dead, half a million refugees.
So UN can't really step in and tell Uganda, oh, no, this is bad, you have to stop or we're going to do something to you.
No, they're dependent on Uganda to carry out their diktats and enforce their will in Somalia, and they're also dependent on Rwanda to carry out their diktats and enforce their will in Darfur.
And both countries have provided tens of millions of dollars in military equipment and aid by the UN.
Now, why is Rwanda and Uganda involved in the Congo?
Well, it comes down to the money.
Show me the money.
These big, very wealthy mines, illegal mines, gold mining, diamond mines, mines of other high-tech metals that are bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars under-the-table dollars in protection money paid to Museveni and Kagame.
Now, if you look at the Congo, in spite of all the Western propaganda, the Ugandan economy is in pretty bad shape.
I mean, the Ugandan government budget is something like 40 percent Western aid, and they're cutting back.
A good example of just how bad off the Ugandan economy is is the medical system.
The government medical system has collapsed in the country.
Nobody goes to the governor's offices anymore.
All the doctors haven't had their salaries paid in almost a year now, it seems, and you can't get any medicine in there.
Everybody's going out.
The doctors are working in private clinics.
The Ugandan National Health Service has collapsed because there's no money to pay them.
Why?
Because the Ugandan economy has screwed up, and Uganda is dependent on foreign aid.
So Museveni is keeping himself afloat by these hundreds of millions of dollars every year in protection money he's extorting from these illegal mines that he protects in northern and eastern Congo.
Okay, so the same goes for Kagame.
For all the talk about growth in Rwanda and how it's an economic miracle, you can't judge economic growth unless you judge the livelihoods of the ordinary people.
If ordinary people's livelihoods have improved significantly, then you can say there's growth.
That just hasn't been the case.
There's been an elite in Rwanda, in the capital particularly, that's doing very well, and the rest of the country isn't very good off, and there's even armed insurgencies along the borders and even in Burundi next door.
Okay, so, you know, you've got a situation where Rwanda and Uganda can seem to commit no evil.
They're being protected in the United Nations by Susan Rice, UN ambassador to the United Nations.
In her previous life as the assistant secretary of state for Africa under Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright was in charge, was there in office overseeing what was going on or the lack of any action when the Rwandan genocide took place back in 1994.
Her boy is Kagame.
Her boy is Museveni.
And since the death of Meles Senali and the beginning of the end of the Ethiopian empire, the gradual disintegration and eventual collapse of the Ethiopian regime, the expulsion of the Ethiopian regime from power by the rebel army in the north, the United States is falling back on plan B.
Ethiopia was their enforcer in the region, their policeman on the beat, and now they're going back to Museveni as their plan B.
And he's in pretty shaky shape.
He's at the farm, gambled on oil revenues.
He's going to have a pipeline go across Kenya.
Kenya is about to explode.
We talked about that before.
Who in their right mind is going to invest billions of dollars building a pipeline across Kenya when Mombasa is about to explode independence and there's massacres all over the country?
Any case, so, but the godmother of this whole thing is Susan Rice that the UN is protecting, so far has been protecting Kagame and his godfather, Museveni.
Now there's peace negotiations supposedly going on in Kampala, capital of Uganda, under the watchful eye of the godfather himself, Museveni between mortal enemies, declared mortal enemies, Joseph Kabila, Jr., who is president of, supposedly elected president of Congo, and Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda.
Now, you know, it's basically gangsters dividing up the loop.
Kabila is a gangster, a warlord, you know, a kleptocrat.
All three of them are.
And he and Kagame and Museveni are trying to figure out, you know, how they're going to divide up the loop, and Kabila's not happy about getting the short end of the deal.
The situation in the Congo is pretty bad, in spite of all this enormous mineral wealth and a tremendous mining industry in the country.
And, you know, 80% of the people living on less than $1.50 a day.
There's no medical care.
There's no education system.
No electricity in most of the country.
No running water, anything like that.
But never mind.
That can't be allowed to interfere with the looting and plundering of millions and millions of dollars every day and mining natural resources out of the Congo.
So the United States basically looks at the situation and says, hey, crisis management.
We've got the U.S. here to do our dirty work, and crisis management is our policy, which means that the U.S. can create a crisis to better manage the looting and plundering of the country.
What they don't want is a strong nationalist leader in power.
Joseph Kabila, Sr. was just such a man.
And the fact that his bodyguard that assassinated him had the business card of U.S. military attaché in Congo in his pocket when he was found dead after killing, assassinating Kabila, gives you a pretty good idea that the United States did not want Kabila to go and turn Congo into an independent nationalistic government working closely with China and possibly Iran and not with the West.
Well, Joseph Kabila, Jr. was put in power because he's much, much more compliant and willing to, you know, go along to get along.
But, you know, he's been, he's a Francophone.
He's closer to the French.
And he's been heard mutterings about, well, maybe I can get a better deal out of all this from the Chinese.
And, you know, hey, the United States could, you know, I mean, the fact is the M23 rebels, which are proxies for the Rwandan and Ugandan regimes, have threatened, you know, just go right ahead and march all the way to Kinshasa in the west of Congo and kick Kabila out and install their own government, sort of like Moussa Veni did when he installed the Kagame military government in power in Rwanda in 1994, which, thank God, put an end, at least it put an end to the massacre that was going on.
So I mean, there's been a history of Uganda and Rwanda coming in and taking over.
I mean, of course, Angola's not too thrilled about all this.
Angola's been more supportive of Kabila.
They're not too thrilled about Uganda and Rwanda coming in and taking over the Congo, because the Angolans have also got their finger in the pie there and making their share of protection money off of mines, especially in the south and the massive copper mines in southern Congo.
So Uganda's sort of been acting, no, no, no, you're not going to come in and take over Moussa Veni.
The United States is protecting him.
The whole situation really stinks.
Boy, it sure does.
It sure does.
And now tell me, is it really true that millions have died in this conflict in Congo over, say, the last decade?
Well, you know, I'm very kind of thick-skinned when it comes to them talking about millions of people dying in Africa.
They claimed, I mean, we can remember the great Darfur myth fraud, which was perpetrated saying first it was 100,000 people died in Darfur, 200, 300, and then they came out and said 400,000 died in the Darfur genocide.
And it turns out maybe 30,000 people died.
That was way back in 2004, when long after the Darfur people got upset about it, the killing and the war had already stopped.
But in the Congo, yeah, I don't think there's any doubt that peripheral damage, because there's been this 20-year-long back-and-forth between warlords.
I mean, these aren't principled guerrilla armies trying to set up a new independent country and want to gather people's support.
These people are there to loot and plunder, and there's ethnic hatreds and ethnic divisions and nasty mining types in there, bribing people.
So people have been driven from their homes, forced out into the malaria-ridden forests and without any shelter, medical care, adequate food.
So there's been a lot of people died there.
And I could say, you could probably say millions is an accurate figure, because it's been going on for 20 years.
Well, yeah, the way that we talk about the civilian consequences from the Iraq war is not just the number of Iraqi civilians killed in battles in the war, but we compare the rate of death before the war and after, and extrapolate how many more people are dying just from not being able to get to the hospital or from getting cholera.
Yeah, maternal mortality, child mortality, the fact that there's no health care system, where there's malaria, dengue fever, and all these nasty infectious diseases, and there isn't even aspirin to treat people, there isn't even infusions available, there's cholera outbreaks, and, you know, there's even Ebola there.
So, I mean, it's like, yeah, it's a crime.
It's a massive crime being committed on the African people.
And when you trace the money trail back to where it's sourced, it always ends up being outside of Africa, whether it's the French or the Americans or, who knows, maybe even the Chinese now are in there, you know, looting and plundering.
And now when it comes to further intervention, of course, what TV is going to say is that, well, if you care about the people of Africa, then be a good liberal and support intervention all to help them.
So, I mean, that's definitely not what we're not hearing here from you is that, you know, if only America would intervene and help these people.
What we're hearing about is how America is helping the worst of the worst get away with this murder and plunder.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's like Museveni and Kagame have been untouchable in the U.N. Security Council, even though the U.N.'s own investigators have come out and, you know, I mean, according to their report, Kagame is supposed to be in the International Criminal Court on trial for crimes against humanity and all kinds of nasty things.
One of the very important things that you said there, Thomas, too, was that both of these countries' militaries, Rwanda and Uganda, have been useful in Somalia.
Now, is that right?
Rwanda, too?
I know Uganda's there.
Well, there's about, you know, there's not that many Rwandans.
The Rwandans mainly play a role in the intelligence in Mogadishu.
I think there's about maybe a couple hundred Rwandans there.
They're more like the CIA liaisons there.
More are there in Darfur, several thousand in Darfur.
Now, this is a very...
But there are Rwandans.
I've seen Rwandans interviewed on international TV channels in Mogadishu, so I know there are Rwandans there, and they're pretty much, I think, they're higher up in the intelligence chain of command.
And then, so now, I actually want to get back to Darfur, because I sure would like an update about that.
It's been quite a long time.
But I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about Somalia.
It's been a while since we heard a real good update of the state of things there as far as the al-Shabaab rebellion.
I know they were driven out of Kismayo, and there were people in Western newspapers saying, you know, congratulations, we're winning the war because we marched into a city, and they withdrew.
But I was thinking that doesn't really mean anything.
But then again, you know, maybe they really did take a serious fight to those guys and really whoop them and cripple them on the verge of total victory.
I don't know.
It's unconventional warfare when you talk about the Somali resistance.
They're lightly armed, Krasnikov rifles and maybe some machine guns, you know, RPGs.
Not really any match for the heavy armor, tanks, long-range artillery, helicopters, gunships, and even jet fighters that have been bombarding them.
So, you know, they kind of meld into the surrounding population.
Guys that are al-Shabaab today in uniform can just take off their uniform and be an ordinary civilian tomorrow, which is what they do.
And then, you know, what they do is they do improvise explosive devices and suicide bombings and harass the supply lines.
Kenya is going crazy.
Their military's bogged down in this, you know, oh, we're going to win this war, and they've got a long supply line that's being harassed, and people of Kenya's army, people are being wounded and even killed almost every day.
And it resulted in the Kenyans carrying out counterinsurgency against their own Somali population because they're blaming them for the attacks on the supply line.
So the situation in Somalia is destabilizing its neighbors.
It's destabilizing Kenya.
The largest minority in Kenya is the Somali population in the north, and historically they really haven't had that much problem with them, but now they seem determined to create a problem, and they have.
So the situation in Somalia has destabilized Kenya.
You know, there's warlords all throughout Somalia, the so-called Somaliland and the democracy fraud when the warlords there are fighting it out among each other regularly over land and power.
And, of course, Puntland where the pirates at one time were very active and now have seemed to scale back some.
You know, there's been the whole situation there continues to be unstable.
And al-Shabaab's not going away because basically it represents a Somali national movement.
The Somalis have never accepted, you know, being colonized.
You know, the best people that ever did it was the Italians, and they got kicked out in 61.
You know, the British colonized the Somaliland and Kenya and up until what's today the Ogaden in Ethiopia, and all they ever did was establish it pretty much in an uneasy peace.
So the Somalis just, no one's going to come in and occupy Somalia.
And if you want to look at how bad things are, just look at the nature of the so-called Somali government where they had an election where almost all the members of parliament were not elected.
The so-called members of parliament were all appointed by the Somali government, headed by Sheikh Sarif, one time most wanted al-Qaeda leader of the Union of Islamic Courts who went to sleep one night, wanted al-Qaeda, and woke up the next morning as president of the democratically elected president of Somalia, of course elected in Djibouti under the watchful eye of the French and U.S. military.
But Sheikh Sarif's government handpicked the members of the parliament who elected the president of Somalia.
So it was democracy.
Of course, 90 percent of all these members of parliament flew in for the election.
They don't even live in Somalia.
They're wealthy Somalis in the diaspora.
They flew in for the election, elected the president, and flew out, and the world had another democratic election in Africa.
And no Somalis ever voted for anybody.
It was all handpicked and it was all done inside.
I really wish, I don't know what difference it would make, but it seems only fair, you know, sort of like marching the German people through the camps and saying, see what you did, kind of thing.
You know, like the American people should have to know that this whole war in Somalia is now being fought for the guy that the war started out against.
We have to do this.
We have to have the Ethiopians invade and overthrow this Islamic Courts Union and start this terrible war and turn al-Shabaab from a group of nobodies into a group of pretty close to wannabe al-Qaeda guys doing suicide bombings and stuff to get rid of these terrible men.
And now, same war.
These are now the guys that we're fighting to install in power and that al-Shabaab guys now figure are traitors and sellouts to the West and so they're still fighting.
And this whole thing is going on for six years for no reason at all.
Well, there's 25,000, if you include the Kenyans, there's close to 30,000 so-called peacekeepers.
And then there's another 30,000 or 40,000 Ethiopian troops in Somalia.
So you're talking about 60,000 or 70,000 foreign troops occupying the country.
What people of any country is going to sit back and allow these foreign troops to come in and take over their country and drive around in their trucks and do whatever they please like?
If they don't like you, you didn't stop when they commanded you to stop at nighttime on a back road, they just open fire and blow you away.
The Somali people are not happy about this occupation.
There's just no way the Somali people are going to give up and say, okay, you guys can occupy us and tell us what to do.
So this is going to drag on and drag on and drag on.
Maybe someday they'll declare victory and withdraw, but until then I don't think they really can afford to do so, because like I've talked about in the past, Somalia sits right on the gates to the Red Sea, and the biggest economic trade in the world now is passed through the Bab al-Mandeb or the Strait of Tears between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
So every day all these hundreds of container ships, the largest trading partners in the world, Europe and Asia, and they pass through there, and Somalia is sitting right there at the entrance.
So I don't think they're going to be able to just cut and run, because the situation for the U.S. geopolitically and strategically is that Somalia could be a, if it went over, it became a truly independent Islamic government, and America would be in serious problems in terms of their military control of the region.
But, you know, it's sort of like today Al-Qaeda is our friend, tomorrow it's our enemy, the next day it's our friend again.
It's sort of like Al-Qaeda was bad.
We put Bill Hodge from the Libyan Islamic fighting group into prison, tortured him, turned him over to the Libyans, and then turned him into a hero again.
You know, he was in Iraq with the head of the Islamic Jihad in Iraq, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, slaughtering thousands of Shia civilians and pilgrims and others, and then now he's like part of a democratic Libya.
It's sort of like Al-Qaeda's in Syria.
They were bad, but now we're in Syria and we're giving them weapons.
Wait a second.
You know the latest one?
I have an article coming out entitled, Mali, Wahhabis and Saudis following the money trail.
In other words, since Gaddafi's fall, all of a sudden there's this great big Wahhabi movement, well-armed, well-equipped, coming into Mali and defeating the traditional, outgunning the traditional Tuareg rebels, and taking over Mali and setting out in the most Wahhabist manner, destroying tombs of ancient Islamic kings of Africa, the Mansas, the kings of Mali.
Their tombs are now being destroyed.
These were Islamic kings, and their tombs are being destroyed by these Wahhabi fanatics that are getting their money from the Saudis.
And now, well, to start with, every single Wahhabi movement that's been investigated has been tied directly to the Saudis, usually to the almost 30,000-strong Saudi royal family.
So the Western Sahel, the Central Sahel is in the middle of a massive drought, hundreds of thousands starving to death, millions more children being damaged permanently by malnutrition.
The pastoralist nomadic culture, the Tuaregs, has just collapsed.
And a very well-armed, well-financed movement is coming out of the desert and with all these weapons from Libya, brand-new pickup trucks, lots of fuel, lots of money, experienced fighters in the ranks from God knows how many years in Afghanistan, other places that these Tuareg fanatics went to and joined.
And now their world is saying, oh, we have to send an expeditionary force into Mali.
Well, you know what?
It comes back to the Saudi money again.
All these problems, and this is America's major ally, is the Saudis, and yet the Saudi royal family is the main contributor to this al-Qaeda chaos.
It's coming back, but that's okay.
If it's in Syria, it's good.
If it's in Libya, it's good.
If you're al-Qaeda, it's okay.
We'll forget about your past.
But now you're going to come into Mali, and if al-Qaeda is bad, wait a second.
There was one report, I think, in The Independent, where there are Afghan mujahideen who are traveling to Syria because they figure it's easier to fight for America than against America in Afghanistan.
So they go to Syria, where America is on the side of al-Qaeda.
And then, like you're saying, right, the Saudis are helping us in Libya and Syria bankroll these guys.
And then when they go to Mali, they become the excuse.
And, in fact, I think this is becoming the narrative for Syria, is that, you know what?
Thomas Mountain is right.
We have been backing al-Qaeda in Syria for the last year and a half.
Oh, no, there's al-Qaeda in Syria.
They're our new excuse to intervene there.
Well, you know, the thing is, on the one hand, they've condemned, they've supposedly said these are extremists and terrorists, and we're not going to support them.
The problem in Syria is that the best fighters are the al-Qaedas, because they're militarily trained and dedicated.
They've come in from the trading in Iraq and in Afghanistan and Libya, from all over Chechnya, and they're all there, and they're the best fighters.
The rest of these guys like to talk.
The Syrian National Council and the rest of these guys are all talkers and politicians.
And, you know, they're fully prepared to hold al-Qaeda's coats while al-Qaeda gets out and does the real fighting.
And that's what's going on in Syria.
And yet, so the Americans are kind of, the West is kind of stuck in a bad spot.
They can't really come in and do much, because al-Qaeda is there, you know, directly.
They've got to kind of do it all indirectly.
But they need the al-Qaeda guys to do the dirty work.
So, you know, it's like, like I say, I've seen, the links between al-Qaeda and the CIA were never severed.
You know, we saw it here in the Horn of Africa back in the 1990s when bin Laden first got started in Sudan, and his first project was to create the Irritian Islamic Jihad in Sudan to make the newly independent Irritia an Islamic regime.
And this was all fine and dandy in the West until, you know, they started attacking Americans.
And then, you know, but then lo and behold, the Irritian Islamic Jihad was operating offices publicly, openly in the United States up until and after September 11th, up until about 2004.
Wait a second.
Irritian Islamic Jihad had been an al-Qaeda wanted list of offices and people operating openly in the United States after September 11th?
I mean, you know, because they're against Eritrea, and Eritrea is America's Hitler.
So that was okay to be al-Qaeda in that case.
But in other cases, it's not okay to be al-Qaeda.
And then today it's okay to be al-Qaeda, and tomorrow it's not okay to be al-Qaeda, and the day after it's okay to be al-Qaeda again, because Americans have a short attention theater, right?
So I guess that's what it is.
I'm in the third world.
I've been in America for, it's been three years since I've been in the U.S.
You guys have got all the McDonald's and Super Bowl and everything else going on.
I don't know about all that stuff.
Well, and you know, part of what it is too is it's the Democrats that are doing it.
And so the right wing doesn't have a problem.
They can't tell from whether we're fighting for or against Iran or al-Qaeda in any particular stupid war.
But they like violence, so they're cool with that.
And the Democrats have every reason, the liberal rank and file out there, I mean, they have every reason to be silent and ignore it and tell themselves that if Obama's doing it, then it must be really necessary or whatever it is they tell themselves, and they don't pay attention at all.
Well, you're there.
I don't really know what the American people are really thinking.
But, you know, I think part of the main problem is, for example, I live out here in the third world, but yet I've got a satellite dish and I've got the BBC, Friends 24, Year Old News, Al Jazeera English, Press TV, China TV in English, Korean TV and Japanese TV in English.
I've got like eight international news channels that I go back and forth to every morning for an hour and then again an hour in the evening.
So I've got a pretty wide range.
Plus I've got the Retreat News here and, you know, other channels.
So we get a pretty wide range of opinion from around the world.
We're just hoping we can get Russia Today in English out here.
I've been begging them for the last year or two.
Then we'd really be, I mean, it's like I hardly have to go to the Internet sometimes because I get all the news.
Because, you know, if they don't got it on Euro News, you'll see it on Press TV.
So, you know, the American people are really brainwashed.
I just remember going back to America in 2009 after being in the third world for three years and realizing that, damn, MSNBC, CNN and Fox, and it's like this is it.
This is it.
Oh, my God.
And they're all the same.
No wonder the American people are so ignorant.
This is all the news.
They won't let Obama himself watch Al Jazeera every day.
But he's made it clear he's not going to bother to allow Al Jazeera on American satellite channels or anybody's cable TV without a fight.
You know what I'm saying?
Well, yeah, I mean, part of it is this is part of the beauty of the United States and of the new world really is this is all the land of the immigrants, the people who fled the old world and its troubles to come here and be free.
And you can live your whole life in Kansas and mind your own business and have your own little business and your family and your friends and live a good life.
And you don't have to worry about the border dispute between Puntland and anything else.
And yet the problem here is the American government is the world empire.
The American government is in the business of everyone in the whole wide world, which makes the whole wide world the business of the American people who would just as soon live their own life and live and let live for the most part, you know.
Well, I think there's been a history of anti-interventionism in the United States going back to the First World War when Wilson ran on the we kept us out of war program.
And then they created the first major propaganda, public relations propaganda machine to shift the American public's opinion into a pro-war stance, which they managed to do within a year very successfully by employing the, you know, the forerunners of the Madison Avenue advertising executives.
So they've gotten really good in the United States at convincing people that up is down and right is wrong and white is black.
And, you know, on top of that, they've got a black man in the White House.
So we have, you know, they've got a black attorney general and a black U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and so black generals in the military.
You know, they had a program called the Civil Rights Movement that became a massive assimilation program that had equal opportunity and allowed a third of African and black Americans to make it in America, you know, to buy into the dream and Condoleezza Rice and Susan Rice and everybody else now are up there doing the dirty work in the United States.
But then, you know, that's sort of how it works in the assimilation system in the United States the way I saw it.
And, you know, they come into Africa and, you know, they've got their policy of using local enforcers in the world.
They've got the Colombian death squad democracy enforcing Pax Americana in South America.
They've got Nigeria and East Africa threatening to go into Mali.
They've got Israel in the Middle East, one of the most powerful militaries in the world, in a country of 6 million people.
And they had Ethiopia, Melissa now in Ethiopia, but now it's looking more and more like they have to have Museveni in Uganda doing their dirty work in this part of the world.
So, you know, that way the Americans can hold up their hands to their own people and say, Look, our hands are clean.
These are other people who are doing it.
We told them not to do it.
And they're like these attack dogs they've got.
The local enforcers are like cleverly trained dogs.
They train them to bite when they say sit.
And then they say bad dog and feed them steak.
All right, now let's talk about Darfur because, of course, this is the George Clooney one.
This is the one that good liberal centrists are supposed to want to intervene because this would prove the selflessness of the American army, like that one time when we liberated France from the Nazis.
Yeah, Darfur and George Clooney.
You know, I mean, it's like there's a food aid blockade, then the worst drought in 60 years in southern Ethiopia, food and medical aid blockade with this huge drought and cholera outbreaks.
The Wood Cross and Doctors Without Borders expelled from southern Ethiopia, Ogaden, even a large place in Romia.
And right next door in Sudan were the largest, most successful, you know, the largest and theoretically most successful U.N. relief effort in history took place in Darfur, which could not have been possible without the support of the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir.
Now, wait a second.
You've got a Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders kicked out of southern Ethiopia during a major drought, and nobody says a thing about it, and yet in Darfur they want to put Bashir on trial.
Oh, he's playing a role in saving all these lives.
Now, Bashir is no angel.
I've been very critical of Bashir in the past, but the reality is that when Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross came into Darfur, Bashir was helping them, playing a very important, even according to over a dozen aid workers with some 50 years of experience in Darfur that I've interviewed, without Bashir's support and leadership, that relief effort, the most successful relief effort in history, largest and most successful, wouldn't have been possible.
In other words, Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross was being helped by Bashir, and yet he's supposed to go on trial for crimes against humanity in a criminal court for murdering all the same people that he was doing such a good job helping to save.
At the same time, Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross are kicked out of Ethiopia It was instituted a food aid blockade, and everybody is deadly silent.
Of course, they can't say they don't know, because the Enough Project headed by the CIA's man in Africa, John Prendergast, formerly headed by Gail Smith, now Obama's senior advisor in Africa in the White House, had actually published a report using words like genocide and scorched earth policy back before Obama was elected mayor in opposition to Bush.
So on one hand, they're talking about all these terrible crimes, you know, when they're not in the White House.
And then when they get in the White House, everything goes silent to the point where the report that the U.N. commissioned to study the genocide in the Okaden in southern Ethiopia, southeastern Ethiopia, has been sit on, never published.
Navi Pillai, the so-called heroine from South Africa, sitting on a report that uses words like genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder to describe what the Ethiopian government's been doing against their own people.
And yet George Clooney, I call him Looney, because he's talking about a genocide that never took place in Darfur, and ignoring and creating a smoke screen so people don't live right next door to the real genocide, which, of course, is being funded to the tune of $7 billion a year.
People talk about U.S. aid to Israel, Western aid to Israel, $3 billion a year.
Talk about a billion and a half a year to Ethiopian military.
According to the IMF chief in Addis Ababa in 2010, Ethiopia's import bill was $8.7 billion a year, and their export income was only $1.7 billion a year.
So there's $7 billion a year in Western aid flooding into Ethiopia every year, but propping up that regime is carrying out genocide against its own people.
So what's going on here?
You're paying for genocide, and then you're turning around and accusing people where there isn't a genocide of a genocide.
And that's what Hollywood is all about.
I mean, George Clooney, they can track, you know, I mean, politicians aren't very trusted, but a Hollywood philanthropist, a handsome guy that makes such great movies like George Clooney, if he gets up there and says there's a genocide in Darfur, there must be one.
Let me ask you, though, I couldn't ever figure out why.
Now, I have a friend named Bill who was a relief pilot, and he explained to me years and years ago, 2003, 2004, during the very worst of the killing there, that it wasn't a genocide.
Everybody involved was an Arab.
It was a thing between tribes, mostly between nomads and farmers.
And as you say, the Sahara Desert encroaching, and the nomads, you know, traipsing through the tomato fields, and then, you know, people start hacking each other up and whatever.
Well, here's the problem in Sudan.
There was a problem in Sudan.
It wasn't only in Darfur.
It was in East Sudan.
It was in West Sudan.
It was in South Sudan.
I first wrote about it in 2003.
And at the time, you know, I predicted that the Americans were going to come into Sudan, and it basically separates South Sudan from North Sudan.
And that's what came true.
Well, see, that's what I always thought, that the whole thing about Darfur was to just get a foot in the door in Sudan somewhere, and then they would just use that really to break off the South.
But I don't really see the connection, though.
I mean, the CIA was running around breaking off the South anyway, right?
And they never really did intervene in Darfur.
Well, you know, Sudan has been a kind of very complex situation.
And I've written the only really accurate history of the Sudan peace process in an article entitled Storm Clouds Over South Sudan from a couple years ago.
And in Storm Clouds Over South Sudan, I pointed out that, you know, Sudan had been in this long war that Bashir was no angel.
The North had a lot of reasons to be blamed.
But Eritrea intervened in Sudan in 2003 in support of the eastern Sudanese rebels and cut the Port Sudan-Khartoum highway for two or three weeks and repelled all the attempts by the Sudanese military to reopen the highway and made it very clear to the Sudanese that things were going to come to a head very quickly and be the end of the Bashir regime unless they sat down and started talking peace with John Garang in the south.
And within a year, the Eritreans had brokered a peace deal between John Garang and Bashir.
That deal had no mention whatsoever of any independence for South Sudan.
And when John Garang finally found that the Americans came in, hijacked the deal, made all kinds of broken promises to Bashir and John Garang, and renegotiated the whole thing in Navasha in Kenya, and there, lo and behold, all of a sudden there's a referendum, a plebiscite for independence for South Sudan.
And then John Garang signed the deal.
He shows up in Khartoum for the first time at a political rally of over a million people.
Now, Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, has never had more than about 100,000 people show up at any of his rallies.
The first time John Garang shows up in the home of his enemy, northern Sudan, Khartoum, over a million people turn out.
And what does John Garang say?
We are not going to have independence in South Sudan.
We're going to have one Sudan united with equal rights and justice for all Sudanese, with me as its president in the next election.
And we're not going to look to the west for our help.
We're going to look to the east.
And six months later, John Garang was dead.
So that's the real history of the Sudanese peace process.
And, you know, we see today, I wrote an article a year ago, in December of 2011, entitled, what is it?
Oh, U.S. Plan to Destabilize Sudan, which is just like I had a crystal ball.
I predicted all this.
The South Sudanese coming in, shutting down the oil wells, kicking the Chinese out, starting a war with the north.
And all the broken, you know, the Americans had promised them aid and told them you don't need oil, we'll support you.
Lo and behold, the Americans broke all their promises, and South Sudan now, the economy's starting to collapse because there's no oil.
The country's completely dependent on it.
So who in their right mind would shut off the oil when your economy is completely dependent on oil?
Somebody must have made you a lot of promises for a whole lot of money.
The Americans promised South Sudan $200 million a month if they shut down the oil fields and kicked the Chinese out of their only Chinese major owned and controlled oil infrastructure in Africa.
If they did, South Sudan did that.
The Americans promised them $200 million a month.
But, boom, what happened?
The Americans didn't come through.
And the more broken promises.
But it was too late.
There had almost been a war.
The oil fields had been shut down.
The Bashir regime was somewhat destabilized because of the financial shortfalls.
And the Americans are hoping they'll kill two birds with one stone, bring down the Bashir regime by cutting off the oil revenue and kick the Chinese out of Africa and their major energy investment and control, only major energy investment and control in Africa.
But it didn't quite work that way.
But, you know, it's still up in the air.
And if you look at South Sudan today, it's like a failed state.
It's warring between the government and military.
The Gurkhas have stolen over $10 billion.
South Sudan received $15 billion in oil revenues from the north between 2007 and 2012, $15 billion, just like 50 miles of paved roads.
There's no schools.
There's no water.
There's no electricity.
Where did $15 billion go?
Into the pockets of the South Sudanese leadership, into Western banks?
I mean, of course, you know, without the Western banks, whether it's drug money from the, you know, from the cartels in Mexico or the stolen money from African kleptocrats, it all has to be loaned into the Western banks.
So, you know, the banksters are the real criminals in all this.
But now hang on one second, because I still got to ask you, because believe me, I was even kind of predicting the same sort of thing in much more general strokes than the way you describe it, as far as the West breaking off South Sudan and really taking a conflict where, as you say, they already had a peace deal and then, you know, making it worse and all of this.
But I still don't really see, I never did understand exactly what was the point of the whole propaganda campaign about Darfur in the West.
That's like trying to, you know, get boots on the ground out in Utah, Nevada, somehow in order to break George off from the Union.
But I don't understand the connection, really.
Well, see, that was a smokescreen to, on one hand, demonize Omar al-Bashir, because he'd been able to withstand over a decade of Western sanctions.
They wanted him out because he was an independent nationalist.
And on the other hand, to create a smokescreen to keep the news media from looking into Ethiopia's internal situation, which was much worse, much more criminal, and yet in Ethiopia was the West's strong arm in the region.
I mean, Susan Rice gave the eulogy at Melissinawe's funeral with Gail Smith, her big sister, sitting in the front row at Melissinawe's funeral.
So, I mean, in other words, Melissinawe was their boy, and they could not have news of a genocide in Ethiopia coming out and destabilizing a regime which, you know, was already shaky.
And so, you know, why not create a big brouhaha about Darfur?
Darfur, because we have three strikes against Omar al-Bashir.
One, he's a black African, and two, he's a Muslim, so he must be a murderer, right?
Well, Melissinawe, he's a Christian, and he's our boy, and he's a democratically elected president.
So, you know, Meliss is a good guy, Bashir is a bad guy.
So, you know, put a smokescreen up about Darfur, and maybe we'll get rid of Meliss in the process.
Maybe we'll be able to get boots on the grounds in Darfur, which is what they'd like.
And, you know, but it didn't ever quite work out the way they planned.
But, you know, and unfortunately, today, Darfur is a huge sinkhole of U.N. money.
And all the aid workers I know, all they say is this money is being wasted, it's inefficient.
They're spending, what, a billion and a half a year on Darfur?
And you couldn't tell it from what's going on in the countryside.
Can you tell us a little bit, because, can you please tell us about the genocide or near-genocide, however you characterize it, of the Oromos?
Because you mentioned that, and that's the real mass killing that you're saying was being covered for here.
But we really don't know very much about that.
These are actually ethnic Somalis.
The Ogadeni people are ethnic Somalis.
There's about 8 or 10 million of them in southeast Ethiopia.
And they've been, almost 100 years, they've been fighting against Ethiopian colonization.
They were given to Ethiopia by the British.
And they've always, they've never accepted that.
And in 2007, Chinese oil engineers came in and were drilling for oil and natural gas in the region, which is supposed to be very rich, especially natural gas.
And Ethiopia is spending something like 75 percent of their hard currency, according to WikiLeaks, on energy imports.
And they're pretty desperate to get their, you know, energy industry going.
And so the Chinese, like fools, come in into an area where there's an active civil war going on between the Ogaden National Liberation Fund and the occupying Ethiopian army and their death squad, Louis police.
And the fighters from the Ogadenis attacked and killed several, a bunch of Chinese and a couple hundred Ethiopians, and drove the Ethiopian regime crazy, at which point they kicked out all the, you know, only independent Western aid agencies, the Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, way back in 2007, so that there would be no witnesses to what they're about to do, and then clamped a complete aid and medical blockade on the region, which had been in the midst of kind of an ongoing drought for years, until the worst drought in 60 years that took place last year.
So, you know, the Ogaden was like a, had a potential to be a major flashpoint.
The Ogaden fighters were guerrilla fighters, and they remain guerrilla fighters today, similar to what the Melissinawi, who'd been a guerrilla fighter, that was helped in the overthrow of the previous Ethiopian regime under Hailemariam Mangustu, backed by the Soviets.
And so Melissinawi knew all too well that today's guerrilla fighters could be tomorrow's rebel army marching into the capital, chasing him out of power.
And so he came in ruthlessly against these, you know, independence movement in the Ogaden, and first thing you've got to do is you've got to get all the eyewitnesses out of there so you can do all your bloody work without anybody calling you on it.
So he kicked out Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, and of course he left the World Food Program of the UN there.
And what does the World Food Program do for the UN?
They turn over all these thousands of tons of grain to the Ethiopian military to pay the paramilitary militias that are out carrying out the Scorched Earth policy and the genocide against the Ogaden people.
So the UN's actually helping pay for all this.
But, you know, of course the World Food Program is run by an appointee by George Bush II, and she's making sure that nobody there, everybody there is going to know they're going to keep her job, they'd better keep their mouth shut.
And so the World Food Program's cooperating.
I've had three World Food Program people over the last several years come to me and tell me, we're turning our food-aid grain over to the Ethiopian military instead of to the millions of starving Ogadenites.
And the military's using it to feed the death squads.
I've got an article called Feeding Death Squads in Ethiopia on how the World Food Program is doing this.
So, I mean, you know, and all along, while they're doing this since 2007, the fade-off movement is kicking into high gear, raising, you know, at one point, I know in England alone they raised over $30 million, and, you know, they've got George Clooney and Angelina Jolie out there, the U.N.'s humanitarian representative out there calling a press conference and saying the United States needs to declare war and invade and bomb Sudan for Darfur.
But wait a second.
You know what I'm saying?
They've got a full court press using their big Hollywood stars to divert what's really going on in the region, the genocide in Southeast Ethiopia against the Ogadenites, and to say it's going on in Darfur, which is actually at the time, by 2007, was already the victims of the Darfur conflict were already the beneficiaries of the largest, most successful relief works in history by the U.N.
And yet there at that time, while this successful relief work was going on, they're claiming there was a genocide going on.
Well, and, you know, whatever fighting there was going on, I remember back in 2005 it was apparent that all the different sides were holding out on peace talks because they all thought the Americans are coming, the U.N. is coming, and we would rather keep fighting and try to get them, you know, take a gamble that we can get them to pick our side so that we can come out ahead.
And Americans in the Western countries are coming in and bribing their leaders and saying keep on fighting, you're going to get even more from us.
Right.
Because they wanted them to be stable.
At one point one of the Darfur movements, the justice and equality movement, did something really crazy and launched an offensive that went all the way into Khartoum, to attack Khartoum.
I mean, they're supposed to be talking peace, they try to come in and militarily overthrow the Bashir government.
Well, they all ended up getting kind of down and executed.
But, I mean, it was like who in their right mind would have done that unless you'd have been promised a whole lot of things by some pretty powerful people outside.
Right.
All right, now, so tell us about Ethiopia post-Melas.
As you said, however you say it, Susan Rice's best friend there, the former dictator of Ethiopia, now dead.
Last time you and I spoke, you said there was a giant rebel army that was coming to finish off what was left of his entire state.
They weren't just going to replace him at the top.
Well, this rebel army is there.
I haven't written about it because it's difficult to really confirm.
I mean, you know, I can hear from one very reliable source, but I'd really like to have more than one source tell me what's going on.
And so we know there's a large rebel army in northern Ethiopia along the Eritrean border.
We know they're very well equipped.
We know they've been regularly sending division-sized offenses into northern Ethiopia, which is basically the province of Tigray, which is the ethnic homeland of the current ruling party in Ethiopia.
It's the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which is now the government in Ethiopia, which Melas Zadali was the head of.
So northern Tigray, Tigray itself has become the enemy of the Ethiopian government because their people were the, you know, the cannon fodder for the Ethiopian, the Tigray People's Liberation Front's drive to come to power.
And once they came to power, they never did anything for their people.
So now Tigray itself is sort of a no-man's land for the Ethiopian government, and the situation is slowly unraveling in Addis Ababa.
When we talked before, I talked about how the Al-Bahara, which is the ethnic minority, highly Selassie there, but it came from traditionally-ruled Ethiopia, the Al-Bahara bureaucratic elite's been complaining bitterly about the fact that they're Ethiopians, they're high-ranked, they can't make any decisions.
All the decisions have to come from a white guy, CIA guy, sitting in the ministries.
So the CIA's running the government.
They've got some unknown weakling name, this highly-bodied, this alien that Melas Zadali handpicked because he was no threat.
It was basically kind of a power vacuum.
The people that really wanted to replace Melas, who survived Melas' purges, are in fighting, eating each other.
For the first time in history, the Muslim population of Addis Ababa and Ethiopia's north are out on the streets protesting every Friday against the regime, which never happened under the darkest days of the red terror of the Benghista regime back in the 1970s and 80s.
But today the Muslim population is out protesting against the government because the Ethiopian regime is trying to install their own leaders in the Muslim community.
So things are slowly falling apart.
The United States and the Europeans continue to pump $7 or $8 billion a year into Ethiopia, something like over $600 million a month are pumped in to try to keep their government afloat in Addis Ababa.
There's armed insurgencies continuing to grow slowly in the Gambela against the ethnic cleansing and land theft that's taking place by the Saudi millionaires that are coming in and stealing the land from the Anubak people for their massive rights and other agricultural plantations.
In the Ogaden, the armed struggle continues.
So, you know, even there's fighting going on in Oromia, which is about half of the Ethiopian population.
So the Ethiopian regime is crumbling.
And I expect that 2013 is going to see the end of this regime.
And like I said, it's not going to come by collapse.
It's going to come by this rebel army.
The rebel army is apparently taking their time.
You know, the thing is this.
With the end of the Ethiopian government, it's going to be the end of Ethiopia as an empire, because the Somalis in the Ogaden are determined for having independence.
So they're going to go.
There's no stopping them.
And the people of the Gambela, the Anubak people in the west of Ethiopia, are sitting on a billion barrels of oil and a lot of rich agricultural land, and they're saying, look, South Sudan got independence.
Why can't we have independence, too?
We want nothing to do with Ethiopia.
We don't.
Ethiopia just wants our oil and our land.
So they want independence.
And so, you know, even the Oromo people who make up half of Ethiopia, at least 40 million of them, have been talking about independence for many, many years.
So, you know, if Gambela goes and Ogaden goes, you know, it's going to be the end of Ethiopia.
So I think that's what the Americans are really worried about.
So on the one hand, it's one thing to say, yeah, it's good to get rid of the regime, but then if Ethiopia splits up, what's going to happen?
You know what I'm saying?
And so the rebel army and its advisors in Eritrea are fully cognizant of the threat of Ethiopia splintering into warring states and the threats that, you know, al-Qaeda could come in and all kinds of things.
So I think there's really a go-slow approach right now about what the future of Ethiopia is going to be.
They need to have some consensus about all the resistance and independence movements in Ethiopia.
They have to have some sort of a national front government that can oversee, you know, the rights of the people, their self-determination, on the one hand, and prevent it from turning into a big, violent ethnic bloodbath on the other.
So I think there's, you know, this year is going to happen, I'm pretty sure, 2013.
It might happen sooner than we think.
I think, in one sense, they're waiting for the crisis to really come to a head, an explosion to take place in Addis Ababa, sort of like you saw in Cairo and Egypt when, you know, when people who were hungry, basically, people who didn't have the Internet, people who didn't have Facebook and all that, just basically couldn't afford to buy bread, cooking oil, and sugar, went out in the streets, you know, behind the students and overthrew them, brought down the Mubarak regime.
I think they're sort of waiting for that moment to happen in Ethiopia, because, you know, food prices are continuing to climb, climb to record levels.
Hunger and starvation is getting worse and worse in Ethiopia.
Even the middle classes now can hardly afford to eat meat in Addis Ababa.
So I think the situation is headed for a crisis.
It's going to happen in Ethiopia, but, you know, it may happen in Kenya before then.
So I'm just sort of, I've made a lot of predictions.
I'm sort of sitting back and watching him, trying to confirm some of his reports I've heard.
And, you know, I mean, I think they're very credible, but it's hard to write about it, put it in black and white if you just got one, you know what I mean, if you haven't really been able to confirm it, you know what I'm saying?
Right.
Well, I guess we'll see.
Now, speaking of which, this most recent piece, Carnage in the Congo, it's at Counterpunch and I think at Foreign Policy and Focus.
Do you have your own site?
Is there a place where we can count on finding all your new articles?
No.
You pretty much see all of them in Counterpunch.
Counterpunch is your primary.
You know, in Africa you can get them in the Modern Ghana and the Marig online.
You can see them in, you know, most of them you see in the Foreign Policy Journal.
But they've been pretty, Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunch is, you know, seems to have, you know, he's been very good about covering this, what's going on in Africa.
He's been carrying all my articles.
I even had an article about Dan Inouye called Hawaii's One-Armed Bandit, and it was entitled The Contra's Crack, and Senator Inouye had looked back at the, you know, at what's really been, what happened in the 1987 Oliver North and Iran-Contra scandal.
Yeah, sure.
And how Dan Inouye, who's from Hawaii, my hometown, covered up the fact that the CIA started the crack cocaine epidemic, which grew to became a pandemic.
And this all could have come out in the open.
The criminal parties could have been arrested.
They could have suppressed the crack cocaine epidemic before, back in 87, before it had become such a huge epidemic even in the U.S.
And Dan Inouye personally stopped any discussion of that.
He had Oliver North's personal diary and Oliver North's own handwriting, which had over 500 references to drugs in it.
And Dan Inouye could have put that in the public record, and he could have shown how the Reagan administration and the CIA started the crack cocaine pandemic, which became an, I mean, you know, international, killed millions of people, destroyed tens of millions of lives.
And Dan Inouye personally made sure that none of this came out in the open, and he was eventually given the Congressional Medal of Honor for this.
And, you know, his nickname in Hawaii is the one, his former comrade-in-arms in World War II, nicknamed him the one-armed bandit.
And he got that name because this is the story that they took, that his old comrade-in-arms told in Hawaii was because he'd stolen a wedding ring off a dead civilian in Italy.
And all his Japanese-American, the infamous 442 Gopher Broke outfit made up of Japanese-Americans who all had their families in concentration camps in the United States fighting for U.S. imperialism in Italy, they warned him.
They said, don't put that ring on your finger.
That's bad.
Batchy.
It's going to bring you bad luck.
And sure enough, the arm allegedly bearing that stolen wedding ring was blown off by a German artillery shell.
So they called him the one-armed bandit.
So this is Dan Inouye.
He started his whole career in politics by being famous for losing his arm.
But no, but the true story about him losing his arm doesn't make him look very good.
And then he went on in his career to become, to suppress the, you know, the role of the United States in this huge international pandemic called crack cocaine.
And for it, they, 50 years after the fact, gave him the Congressional Medal of Honor.
So this is something people don't really like to talk about, speak ill of the dead and all that.
You know what I mean?
Oh, I don't mind.
Hey, listen, here's the one clip I have from the Oliver North hearings.
It's Jack Brooks, who is a horrible, terrible Texas Democrat congressman.
But he asked one good question here about the Rex 84 Operation Garden Plot, suspending the Constitution, declaring martial law.
Hang tight, Ashley.
It's not very long, and it's Daniel Inouye saying, hey, hey, hey, stop talking about that.
Dear NSC, will you not assign at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?
Mr. Chairman.
I believe the question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area.
So may I request that you not touch upon that, sir?
I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami Papers and several others that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of an emergency that would suspend the American Constitution.
I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked.
May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage.
If we wish to get into this on certain arrangements, it can be made for an executive session.
So there's that.
Anyway, that's just one small sample of the role that he played during the Ron Contra.
You've got a wicked archive.
Suspend the Constitution, Dan Inouye.
Not only crack cocaine, but suspend the Constitution.
This Dan Inouye really deserved his Medal of Honor, didn't he?
Yeah, for sure.
And you know what?
Actually, people can find it.
I don't have it at my fingertips.
But it is, I'm 99% sure, it's June 1987, Miami Herald is the Miami Paper he's referring to.
You might go look at the National Security Archives, too.
Because the National Security Archives has got, you can download Oliver Norris' personal diary and his own handwriting and see all the references to drug smuggling that was going on.
So, yeah, that's an untold story that people would really want to keep buried.
Yeah, you know, you can find that in The Panama Deception.
I think it's from The Panama Deception, which is narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched.
And it's a great little documentary, and that's where that clip comes from.
The late Gary Webb had a book called Dark Alliance.
He documented all of this, and they drove him to suicide, destroyed his career.
And yet that book remains a remarkable documentation of all this.
And, of course, the late Alexander Colbert and Jeffrey St. Clair's book, Whiteout, has a lot of background on all of this.
I'd recommend people go dig up these classic books from back in the 90s.
I never did read Whiteout.
I should have, but I did read Dark Alliance, and I interviewed Gary Webb about it about a year before he died.
Yeah, I had Gary out to Hawaii to speak on all this back in December of 1996, just like a month or two after he broke that story.
And he spent a week with me in Hawaii, and we were talking about all this.
He was talking about what was going to become Dark Alliance, and he was going to publish it next.
And he wouldn't really get into it too much because it was all going to be published, and none of it was ever published.
They did one of the most effective hit jobs on a Pulitzer Prize-winning, award-sharing journalist.
I mean, it's not saying much Pulitzer Prize.
I wouldn't even accept one.
But still, even under their own guidelines, Gary Webb was an exceptional journalist, and they just did a number on him.
But Gary was sort of believed in America.
It was really unfortunate.
I mean, it sort of broke his spirit because he was a journalist.
He was a journalist.
That was his life, and they just took that away from him.
In a sense, he was naive at the time, and he came out to stay with me.
I was asking him, Gary, you really think they're going to allow you to continue to do all this?
And he got angry at me.
He said, what do you mean?
You know, I'm working for the Sacramento Bee, and we're going to do this.
We're going to expose them.
I've done my work right.
And they just did another round.
They don't care about freedom of the press.
All they care about is protecting themselves.
And, of course, all the other major papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and everybody turned on him.
None of them stood up.
Even David Corn of The Nation, that infamous dust raker at The Nation, did a number on Gary Webb.
The Nation magazine did a hit on Gary Webb.
So, you know, the whole system was really seriously threatened by his work.
In fact, when we talked on the show, I made a remark about, geez, you did all this great work, and all you have to show for it is they ruined you.
And I thought, you know, here we are years later.
They're sort of got to have an ironic look back and chuckle sort of thing.
But my kind of not very funny joke fell completely flat.
And I could tell that he was not over it at all, what had happened.
I mean, it was really, it was a sad thing.
I felt like an idiot for saying it that way, you know?
Yeah, it was really sad.
But it's been great being on your show.
Yeah, thank you very much for your time, as always.
Okay, thanks, Scott.
Ciao.
All right, see you.
Everybody, that's Thomas Mountain.
He writes from Eritrea in Counterpunch, counterpunch.org.
The latest is Carnage in the Congo.
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