05/07/13 – Thomas C. Mountain – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
This is Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.scotthorton.org is the website.
You can find all my interview archives there.
More than 2,800 now, going back to 2003.
And sorry, I forgot about these hard breaks, man.
I completely blew that one.
I guess we'll try again at the top of the hour here.
All right.
So our first guest on the show today is Thomas Mountain.
You can regularly find him at Counterpunch and I think at allafrica.com.
Is that right, Thomas?
Welcome back to the show.
Yeah, not all Africa.
No, all Africa is funded by George Soros.
You won't find me there.
Well, I was thinking of something else then.
Another thing with Africa in the title or wherever.
Yeah, there's a bunch.
I'm the most widely distributed independent journalist in Africa.
So there's a lot of websites.
You can find me there.
There you go.
Thomas Mountain, that's the name.
And they publish virtually all of them at Counterpunch, right?
If people want your archive or whatever, they can find them all there.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay, good deal.
Now, so I only say that because I have your latest article in my email here and I didn't have a chance to go Googling for it.
And it's called the UN and 250,000 dead Somalis.
Your reaction to this new report by FuseNet.
Please tell us all about it.
Well, yeah, the United Nations said that, guess what?
Between 2010 and 2012, at least 250,000 Somalis died of starvation.
And I warned of this in articles I've written, you know, in this period, and that we knew that there was a major, what they call a budget shortfall in funding to feed starving Somalis.
The problem is that perception is that, oh, these Somalis are dying from drought when actually they're dying as a direct result.
Most of them are dying as a direct result of the conflict generated by the Western United Nations-backed invasion of Somalia and occupation of Somalia going back to 2006, where most of the people who are dying of starvation have been driven off their land by the conflict created by this invasion.
They're what you call internally displaced people.
So in other words, the United Nations is causing this starvation and then turning around and deliberately starving these people to death.
I mean, the budget at one point was announced was like 10 cents a day to feed a million starving Somalis.
Wait a second.
And that's just, you know, just a fraction of the Somalis that are in need of food aid.
Somalis are still starving now.
But the point is that the United Nations created the crisis and then turns around and then does not feed the people.
They say, we don't have any money.
But the reality is they're spending a billion dollars a year funding 25,000 UN peacekeepers in Somalia.
And then they say, we've only got $35 million to feed the Somali refugees for the year.
Yeah.
So this is all very predictable.
Well, you know, the UN, sorry, the UN, the New York Times.
Freud didn't slip there, I guess.
The New York Times said, well, you know, the al-Shabaab rebels who exist for some reason that we've never heard, they're in the way and they prevent the UN from distributing the food aid to the poor people who need it.
Well, the reality is most of the aid is just plain stolen.
I mean, the Somali government is a pack of thieves.
They're in it to get as much as they can, as fast as they can.
And that's been their history, whether they have a different face and a high place.
But whether it was the one time al-Shabaab most wanted terrorist Sheikh Sharif, who was then transformed overnight into the democratically elected president of Somalia, who handpicked the Somali parliament that went on to vote and elected the new Somali president.
No one elected the Somali parliament.
Elected the Somali president, who's now the democratically elected president of Somalia appearing on international TV at a Somali aid conference.
You can almost see him licking his lips and thinking, hmm, boy, how many more hundred million or billion dollars is there going to be in aid that we can rip off?
So, you know, the thing is, this whole crisis was created because the West, particularly the United States, could not stand the fact that the Union of Islamic Courts, which is basically headed by Sheikh Alwais, who has been on the U.S. most wanted list because he's a fervent Somali nationalist, was, brought peace to Mogadishu in 2006.
And the ports were open and there was peace and there was hope to re-establish a new United Somalia.
So the United States sent the Ethiopians in.
They created a half a million or more refugees until they were driven out.
Then the U.N. sent in their proxies, the Ugandans, and now there are five divisions.
The division is 5,000 men.
There are over five divisions, excuse me, three divisions of Ugandan troops in Somalia.
There's a division of Burundians.
There's thousands of troops from Sierra Leone and other countries across West Africa.
And now you've got well over a division of Kenya's best army units in Southern Somalia, occupying Kismayo.
And it's all a big counterinsurgency that started in 2006 when the West United States sent in the troops.
Okay, so this created all this refugee crisis, all this internally displaced people.
Then on top of that, they had the worst drought in 60 years and only $35 or $40 million budgeted to feed all these people.
And they can spend a billion a year on their military.
So, you know, it's the U.N. created all this and now they're crying crocodile tears saying, oh, yeah, a quarter million Somalis died in two years.
That's 10,000 people dying of starvation a month.
That's over 350 people a day dying of starvation.
And, you know, how could this happen?
Well, you don't have to look very far to find the usual suspects.
We're talking about one Anthony Tony Lake, former National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton, who is the second most powerful man in the world as the National Security Advisor during the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and later admitted that he regretted not doing anything while knowing full well exactly what the mass murder that was going on.
He was running the Blackhawk down operation too.
I remember Bill Clinton blaming him.
He's got a long history of really nasty things in Somalia.
This man is personally responsible for ordering the Blackhawk unit to go in and attack a gathering of Somali elders.
Previous to the incident in the movie, and this is never mentioned, the reason the Somali population was up in arms against Americans was because there'd been a major peace conference held in Mogadishu where senior representatives, the sheikhs from all the clans in the country had gathered, over 200 of them.
They gathered to see if they could reunite Somalia and Americans came in and massacred, killed them, almost all of them, attacked them, Blackhawked on, attacked them.
Okay, so this is ordered by Anthony Lake.
Anthony Lake sat back and watched the Rwandan genocide, admitted he knew all about it, and regretted not doing anything about it.
This is Anthony Lake that personally oversaw the Ethiopian invasion of Eritrea in 2000.
From 1998 to 2000, it saw 123,000 dead Ethiopians, 150,000 dead people and maybe a million and a half refugees.
Anthony Lake's got this really genocidal criminal record when it comes to Africa.
So now, where's Anthony Lake now?
He's the head of UNICEF, the largest NGO aid organization, UN aid organization on the ground in Somalia.
Most of the people that died were women and children.
And UNICEF is the largest aid organization in the world in charge of feeding women and children in time of crisis.
Anthony Lake's the head of it.
And we find out that 200 and a quarter million people died from starvation.
And this is under Anthony Lake's watch.
So why should we be surprised, right?
Anthony Lake was Barack Obama's senior policy advisor prior to the election, leading up to Barack Obama's election.
And his payoff was to be given the head of UNICEF.
Okay, so I've written in the past that every competent investigation carried out in a major, the head of a major aid organization has turned up an intelligence background in these aid agencies.
They're not innocent, wanna help people agencies.
These are run by hardcore killers that headed up aid agencies.
Anthony Lake's history goes way back.
After Anthony Lake left the White House under Bill Clinton, he was promised, Bill Clinton promised him to put him in the head of the CIA.
So Clinton nominated him at the end of his term that Anthony Lake to head the CIA.
And lo and behold, all this corruption charges come out and Anthony Lake withdraws his nomination.
So he had derailed from being head of CIA.
Then after the election, Anthony Lake's looking around.
Guess what kind of job he picks up?
He becomes a registered foreign agent for the Ethiopian regime of Melissinoe.
Anthony Lake was an employee of this broom killer Melissinoe after he left the Clinton administration.
How do we know?
Because Anthony Lake admitted it as such in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe Magazine way back over 10 years ago.
Okay, so he went to work for, actually on the payroll of this notorious killer, corrupt and broom, sought out Ethiopian dictator, the late Melissinoe.
Anthony Lake was getting paid by this guy.
Okay, now he's headed up UNICEF.
Okay, so this, I mean, the whole history of this guy, I got another article coming out soon.
It's called The Grey Ghost in the White House about another real cold-blooded killer in the White House.
This one that people don't even know about.
Her name is Gail Smith.
But talking about Anthony Lake, head of UNICEF, quarter million Somalis are dead from starvation, a couple of billion dollars spent on the war there that caused all these people to be in a situation where they would starve to death.
So I remember Anthony Lake up crying crocodile tears on international news when the drought finally was breaking and all these people, I mean, at one point there were 500 Somalis dying every day.
You know, here's the thing about this.
The world just stood by.
Pardon?
One thing is I've been doing this show this whole time and I've been covering, you know, the show actually started in January 2007 and I've been covering the Somali war the whole time.
It only began, well, that stage of it only began, you know, a month before Christmas 2006 was when the Ethiopians invaded.
And I've talked with all these different experts, and Leslie Lefkow from Human Rights Watch and these others.
And, you know, we're keeping tabs in real time about 2009.
You can go back through the archives, 2009, 2010, 2011.
The people are starving.
Before the period of time covered in this study, Leslie Lefkow was on the show saying the people are living in refugee camps by the millions, living in refugee camps up and down the sides of the roads.
And they're sick and they're hungry and they're diseased.
And there were at one time, she said, half a million people on the brink of starvation.
And I think that was in August of 2010.
That was before what, I mean, that was at the beginning of what this, the time period that this study covers.
So, you know, your accusation isn't an accusation.
This is simply just the fact of the matter.
America has been waging war throughout Somalia this whole time.
And then the weather comes and intervenes on the side of the devil and just comes in.
Here's a society that America has turned completely upside down and then it doesn't rain.
And so where every other country in the region goes hungry, they starve to death.
And see, the thing is, it doesn't only restrict it to the Somalis of Somalia.
There are eight to 10 million Somalis living in the Ogaden right next door.
And they've been had a complete food aid and medical aid blockade since 2007.
Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have been expelled from the Ogaden next door to Somalia since 2007.
And there was a whole series of droughts going on leading up to the major Great Horn of Africa drought that took place recently, where the worst drought in 60 years.
So it's not just confined to Somalia.
There's a major counterinsurgency being fought across not only Somalia, but the Ogaden, but now in Northern Kenya by the Kenyan army who's fighting a counterinsurgency in Southern Somalia and in Northern Kenya against the...
It's spreading to the Somali population in Northern Kenya because they're fed up with being blamed for all the kid and run attacks that the Somali resistance is carrying out against the Kenyan army and the counterinsurgency coming in, the murders and the kidnappings and the rapes and the pillaging that the Kenyan army is doing amongst the Somali population in Southern Somalia and in Northern Kenya.
So you've got this major counterinsurgency being fought by the Ethiopians within the Somali population in the Ogaden.
You've got 25,000 peacekeepers in Somalia itself fighting, spending 60, 70, $80 million a month, maybe 100 million a month being spent keeping them fighting al-Shabaab, continuing to claim victory.
And now you've got the Kenyans involved in the Southern Somalia and in Northern Kenya, okay?
And now you hear about independence movement Kenyans trying to suppress in Mombasa among the Muslim population there.
So there's potential for this counterinsurgency to gradually spread across the region and engulf the whole area, which explains why the American government sat back, Barack Obama congratulated, called up and congratulated the International Criminal Court indictment president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta.
And Kenyatta blatantly stole the election again.
Rilo Dinga got up and cried on TV.
You know, and it was really, hey, heavy manners was put on the whole situation by the Kenyan military because they cannot afford right now to have a big conflict breakout in Kenya when the best troops of the Kenyan army involved in the counterinsurgency in Southern Somalia.
So the Kenyan military basically told, you know, told Rilo Dinga, who basically won the last election, won this election if the votes were actually counted correctly, that no, you're not gonna take over right now.
And the United States said, that's fine to congratulate Obama personally, the first major leader to call up and congratulate Uhuru Kenyatta on his victory.
Now, so, you know, we've got, this is, the region is getting complex.
Uganda is involved, Rwanda is involved in Somalia, Kenya is involved in Somalia, Ethiopia is involved in Somalia, because I haven't even mentioned the fact that there were over 25,000 Ethiopian troops, five divisions or maybe six divisions of Ethiopian troops that are either in Somalia, in Southern Puntland or in, on the border of Somalia that have been actively engaged in fighting the Somali counterinsurgency in Somalia as well.
So you're talking about 50,000 foreign troops and really heavily armed.
There's like over 400 tanks that the AU peacekeepers have got in Somalia, as well as the Kenyan army with their tanks and the Ethiopian army with their tanks.
And then you've got helicopter gunships and you've got drones flying around.
And all of this against a lightly armed insurgency base that they call Al-Shabaab.
Okay, which means the youth.
So they're fighting the terrorist group that they call the youth.
And they think they're gonna win.
And they keep saying, you know, we need more money.
We need this and we need that.
And bombs keep going off in Mogadishu.
And they keep talking about how Al-Shabaab's on the run and then how we need more money and then how we haven't.
Next thing I know, another bomb goes off.
So this is a never ending story.
And the drought, you're right.
The drought's been going on for years.
Somalis and their thousands and tens of thousands.
And now we find out hundreds of thousands have been starving to death.
And it's all being paid for by, basically comes back to Obama and the White House.
And some really nasty characters.
I mean, you've got Anthony Lake there, which I'm trying to refocus attention on because he's got a long history.
You might wanna take a look at Anthony Lake's history back when he used to be the ambassador to Korea, back when Korea was under a military government.
I mean, you know, I almost wrote an article called Returning to the Blue House about how the former first lady of a fascist military rule of North Korea, I mean, South Korea is now the president of South Korea.
Right.
Now, wait a minute.
This lady was the first lady.
Here's one thing I can tell you about Lake.
And I don't know, I don't really have a good recommendation necessarily.
Well, I don't know.
I got a couple ideas.
But anyway, what you need to do is you need to make sure right-wingers see your attack on Lake.
Because right-wingers hate Lake because they think he's a commie.
But so if you just, anything scandalous about him, they might run with it.
Get something in the front page magazine.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Send it to David Horowitz.
Send it, send it to Bill Kristol.
Anyway, because you're right.
I mean, he was defeated for head of the CIA.
And I forget exactly what the connections were, but it was some of this, you know, pals around with terrorists.
It was corruption charges.
Corruption.
Going way back to when he was involved in Korea.
No, you know, it was something, no, no, no.
It was ideological.
It was ideological too.
The right-wingers hated his guts.
They had enough dirt on him.
Yeah.
It was ideological, of course.
That was the basis of it all.
But they had it so much easy, so much dirt.
Yeah.
At the tip of the iceberg started to come out and after they said, okay, okay, okay.
I'm stepping down.
Yeah.
So they used the dirt to get him out.
But yeah, they're all dirty themselves.
But you know, he's been notorious for dirt.
I mean, he even went on the payroll of the Ethiopian government, was actually admitted in the Boston Globe in an article he wrote after he was criticized by the Eritrean ambassador.
Yes, he had been an employee of a registered foreign agent for Melissino's regime in Ethiopia, but he wasn't anymore.
So I mean, Jesus, this guy's like, he went from the second most powerful man in the country who's a national security advisor to work getting paid cash by the Ethiopian regime.
I mean, damn, this guy's like a real political prostitute.
And now he's the head of the UNICEF.
So I mean, these NGOs are actually the enemy of the people and it's most obvious in Africa.
But there's a whole lot of things going on.
I started to broach a little bit on the Kenyan election because Americans and especially the British now they've got, they've hosted Uhuru Kenyatta at this conference they're holding in London that David Cameron's hosting.
And this guy's been indicted by the International Criminal Court and everybody sort of forgot about that now.
Like, yeah, we're gonna overlook all that because we need the guy, you know what I'm saying?
So, you know, the hypocrisy of it all is even almost too much for the mainstream Western media to try to swallow.
Even they have to kind of gulp and say, yeah, you know.
But, you know, on top of all of this, it's like we're looking at a situation where, see, Somalia sits on the Bab al-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears, which is the entrance between the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
And this is why this genocide against the Somali people is going on because the major world economic partners is the European Union and Asia.
It's no longer the Asia and North America.
So all of this trade, all these container ships, hundreds and hundreds of container ships, stock full of containers going back and forth through the Bab al-Mandeb, the Strait of Tears, between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
And that's right there on Somalia's, you know.
And so if Somalia becomes a strong, independent, united Islamic government, and they say, hey, you Western powers have to stop committing all these crimes or we'll block you from going to the Bab al-Mandeb, what's going to happen?
See, so they can't allow this.
The Americans can't allow this threat to come in any way real.
So the best thing the Americans can do is keep Somalia fragmented, you know, keep them in Somaliland, keep them in Puntland.
And if they can't just, you know, put their puppets in power in the South, then they'll keep, you know, 50,000 foreign forces in Somalia and just pay for it all.
And if they've got to starve a quarter million Somalis to death in the process, so be it.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the hypocrisy of it all is sickening.
It's got to the point where I can barely write and talk about it anymore.
It's been going on, like you say, you've been covering it since it started, the most recent period started, what, eight years ago.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, and it's so frustrating that few know and fewer care at all.
And frankly, you know what?
It's about racism.
It is, right?
Somalis are some of the blackest black people of all over there way over in East Africa.
And they're black.
And Americans just don't care.
If they all starve to death, it's better for us, right?
Yeah, or at least it just doesn't matter either way.
They might as well be, you know, it might as well be a famine on Mars that we're talking about or a famine on an ant pile.
Who cares?
Well, you know, the portrayal of Africans in general is that there are tribal, racist, violent people that kind of deserve what we get.
And that all these problems we have here are basically our own fault.
And that the West is trying to come in and save us from ourselves and save us from terrorism in Somalia.
And the reality is that the West is causing all the problems and it's completely upside down.
But, you know, there's a braille of life.
We've got Eritrea here where I live, where everybody's calm.
And, you know, we had this so-called coup that never happened back in January that the Pulitzer Prize, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter from 2012, Jeffrey Gettleman, wrote and said there was a coup in the region.
It was a complete fabrication.
I mean, this is the sort of coverage we get out here.
And Gettleman in the New York Times ought to be infamous for the slant on his report.
And we libertarians especially had a great laugh at a piece that he did about the Islamic Courts Union portraying them basically as a bunch of cranky, right-wing tax protesters who are just like a bunch of real selfish libertarian types the way they like to portray libertarian types.
And I don't know.
We just thought that was hilarious.
You know, this foreign government is here just to do right by these poor people, you know?
Well, you know, there's been a series of major attacks on the Horn of Africa community outside.
I mean, there's been these attacks on the Somali community that are putting people in prison for allegedly helping al-Shabaab.
And this has been an ongoing thing.
And they're terrorizing the Somali community and preventing them from sending money home to their families.
Families are starving back home.
And they're preventing the Somalis from sending money back home.
What?
And the same things they're trying to do to Eritrea.
And we saw firebombings, three firebombings in Eritrean community centers in Sweden on February 24th on the same night after a really nasty anti-Eritrean racist program in Sweden.
This is liberal democracy, Sweden.
And yet they're firebombing, three Eritrean community centers are firebombed in one night.
In Sweden, in a capital of Sweden.
And nothing is said.
But listen, Scott, I think everything, I'm about to get cut off.
So it's been great to be on your show.
And all you people that listen out there, you got to contribute to Scott Horton's show because there's very few like Scott out there.
Okay?
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot.
I appreciate that.
Okay.
Take care, Scott.
Thanks very much for your time, Thomas.
Good to talk to you again.
All right.
Well, I don't know what was going on there.
He had to go.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
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Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Oh, okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my- Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights.
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card.
A stainless steel business card size copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
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