03/26/07 – Chris Floyd – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
It seems another American has been caught up in the U.S. enemy combatant program, this time being renditioned to Ethiopia.
What the hell's going on there?
Good thing I have Chris Floyd on the phone, former writer for the Moscow Times, author of Empire Burlesque, High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium.
And he's got a great new article you can find at his website, chris-floyd.com.
It's called Getting Away With It, Rendition and Regime Change in Somalia.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
Good to be here.
Good to talk to you again.
And boy, what is going on here?
Not only do we have so-called Al Qaeda being captured and renditioned in Somalia, but including an American, a man born in New Jersey, is that right?
Yeah, I think he's born in New Jersey, certainly in New Jersey.
He's an American citizen.
His father was from Egypt.
I believe he was born in New Jersey, yes.
But yes, what we have here, as you know, as you probably know, but as millions don't know because it's not spoken about in American media, we've had another regime change action going on in the war on terror.
Again, this is the United States heavily involved in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.
And this took place in the end of last December, right?
In the last December and earlier this year, when Ethiopian troops that had been trained by American forces, funded by the Bush administration, and apparently American special forces took part in this invasion of Ethiopia, along with the collection of warlords and clan leaders who overthrew the Islamic government that had brought some stability to Somalia.
For the first time in 15 years.
But anyway, as you know, late last year, the Ethiopian invaded Somalia with United States help, and we did some bombing also during that war.
And now, when you mention the warlords there that America's backing, those wouldn't be the same warlords who were the bad guys during Black Hawk Down, would they, Chris?
Oh, and now you find several of those warlords, yes, and those clans that we, that knocked our Black Hawk Down in that famous action, which, you know, that action itself is sort of like a, you know, it's very famous, of course.
You've got the movie, you've got the book, Black Hawk Down, they shot down an American helicopter, and they even, they dragged Americans to the streets, which wasn't very nice.
But the first half of that story, or as Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story is not often very, not told very often.
That's the fact that before that attack, the United States had attacked what was supposed to be a peace meeting with several clans there in Mogadishu.
They simply machine gun this building and killed about 50 people, which sort of got their dads up there in Mogadishu.
But anyway, that's a whole other story.
But there's usually another story behind all these things.
But yes, what we had this week, last week was, after the Ethiopian invasion, you had several people from different countries and from Somalia fleeing the Ethiopian, the foreign invasion into Kenya and surrounding countries.
Now into Kenya, two Americans came, one of them's name is Mohammed Amir Mishal, Mishal I suppose is his name, and I can't remember the name of the other man right offhand.
But they were fleeing from the fighting and they came into Kenya, they were taken by someone, at first it seemed they were taken by the Kenyan officials, now we think maybe they might have been captured by American Special Forces.
But they were interrogated by the FBI there in Kenya, and one of them was sent back to the United States, one of them confessed to having been in an Al Qaeda camp in Somalia.
Because as you know, the Somalian government that was overthrown was an Islamist government.
And they weren't, they were a thalafist, I think, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but it was a hardline Islamic government.
But they had brought some stability and they had seemed to have some genuine popular support.
But of course, anyone who's a hardline Islamist is automatically Al Qaeda.
And now it's the same way that, in fact it's even, it's the same way that Taliban, you recall in Afghanistan, you had the Taliban, you had Al Qaeda.
And now anyone that was ever remotely associated with Taliban is automatically tagged as Al Qaeda, which of course means the Pakistani Secret Service.
But in the same way, anyone who is a Muslim in Somalia in the last few months is automatically classified as Al Qaeda.
So one of these guys confessed to being in an Al Qaeda camp.
The other guy, Mishal, would not confess to being an Al Qaeda agent.
He said he was not an Al Qaeda agent.
He had gone to Somalia, and he did want to live under, he'd gone to Somalia because he had, you know, as so many Muslims are doing these days, young Muslims, he's 24 years old.
He'd gotten more serious about his religion.
He'd been radicalized by what was going on in Iraq and everything else.
You know, they wanted to defend Islam, I suppose, or take up jihad or whatever.
But he went to Somalia, he said, in order to live under this more strict Islamic regime.
They just wanted to live in that way.
I mean, I wouldn't want to do it, you wouldn't want to do it.
But he has the right to do it, seems like to me.
But so he went there.
He's caught up in the fighting.
He was arrested and sent to Kenya.
He was interrogated by the FBI in Kenya.
He told them that he was not Al Qaeda.
And they said, well, you know, if you don't tell us, confess to what we want to hear, we're going to send you back to Ethiopia.
Now, as you know, our own State Department has harsh words to say about the Ethiopian prison system.
And Ethiopia itself is an authoritarian government run by, you know, one of those unity executives that we have so many of in the world these days.
Yeah.
Former Soviet henchmen turned Western friendly.
Yeah, turned, you know, Bush loving tyrant in the war on terror.
He said, all you have to do is say I'm on your side of the war on terror, then all past sins are forgiven.
So he runs a pretty rough regime there.
They've killed thousands of his own people just in the last year or two.
But in the end, you will have to say this, if the FBI was as good as they were when he said he was an Al Qaeda agent, they turned it back over to the, supposedly turned it back over to the Kenyans, who turned him over to the Somalians, who turned him over to the Ethiopians.
And he's now in an Ethiopian prison cell, where the Ethiopians say they'll take several weeks to figure out, you know, what they're going to do with him, which time he may be if they decide that he's a bad guy, or if he was actually, you know, a Muslim in Ethiopia, I mean, in Somalia at the wrong time.
Or, indeed, that he took up arms with the Islamists.
In other words, indeed, he tried to defend the country that he's gone to live in.
They're going to declare him a prisoner of war, and that's probably the last we'll ever see him.
But it is, as several of the human rights organizations down there in Kenya were saying, that it's an extraordinary rendition.
The Americans got him, they interrogated him, and they turned him over to these other people, I suppose, until he admits what they want him to admit.
Because, you know, one thing that Bush has done to justify this new regime change operation, and I think we really need to call it that.
I mean, people, the American press is treating it like a complete sideshow.
Oh, they had a little trouble in Somalia.
Oh, it looks like, well, maybe the Americans were involved somewhat.
This is just simply another Afghanistan-Iraq operation, except this time they did even more on the cheap.
You know, they had some good proxies.
They had the Ethiopian, they had the warlords.
They didn't have to commit too many troops and make it too obvious, but we had U.S. air power, we had U.S. special forces involved, we had U.S. money, we had U.S. training.
It's a regime change operation, and the war on terror is like the third one we've had so far.
But maybe it's a little practice run for Iran, I don't know.
Yeah, I wouldn't even call it a sideshow.
I'd say it's being treated as even less than that.
If you ran a poll, I bet 10% of Americans even know there was a war there, or that America had anything to do with it.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, sideshow is a bit strong.
It's an invisible thing.
It didn't happen.
It just didn't happen.
You wrote on your blog that it wasn't even worthy of a joke on Jay Leno.
Oh, no, they didn't even mention it on television.
I mean, I don't even know if Jon Stewart got around to mentioning it.
Of course, one thing about that is I've noticed this, especially in the last few months, you can notice it in the traffic on the blog, and you can notice it just throughout the blogosphere, if you want to use that word.
The American election, the horse race of the American election is sucking up all the oxygen in the political media, you see.
I mean, nothing is mentioned now except the minutia of Barack matted Hillary and blah, blah, blah.
Blonde is George Romney.
Mitt Romney, I'm sorry, I showed my age there.
Mitt Romney, what kind of underwear he wears, you know, that sort of thing.
If you write about that, people will pay attention.
But if you try to write about, and I'm not complaining about not getting enough traffic, I'm talking about the whole general thing across the blogosphere, is that trying to find stories about Somalia, even trying to find a lot of stories about Iraq, they're just dropping out, you see.
And it's being squeezed out by all this.
And this is what's going to happen for the next year.
So this is actually a good opportunity for Bush to do whatever he wants to do.
Everyone's attention is focused on this, you know, these marvelous candidates that we have running for president.
Everyone's attention is focused on that, and more and more attention is going to be focused on that.
And so much is going to get done in the background.
And Somalia is one of these things.
You know, what was going on while the Somali war was going on?
Well, we had the new Congress coming in.
We have the stuff about the Democrats with their sort of toothless anti-war resolution, which they've just passed.
They know it won't get through the Senate, it won't get through Bush.
And in any case, as you probably know, this much ballyhooed provision that calls for the removal of American troops by the end of 2008 only calls for the removal of American combat brigades, which would leave at least half of our troops still there.
You know, they're just saying we want to remove this de-specific combat brigade.
It still leaves about 70,000 American troops in the country, I suppose, to fill up those permanent bases that they built there.
But anyway, all this sort of stuff was going on during when the Somalia war was going on, and so it just wasn't noticed.
And now all this fallout, you know, what's happened since then, Somalia has once again been plunged into lawless chaos.
You know, we had this week, they had an attack on, there's a handful of UN, or maybe it's African Union peacekeepers, and African Union peacekeepers are in there.
And some of them have been killed because they're seen as collaborators with these foreign invaders in Ethiopia.
So it's the same kind of situation that obtains in Iraq.
It's the same kind of situation that obtains in Afghanistan.
But it's just totally ignored, because as I say in my piece, who cares about these people?
Not only are they Muslims, which is bad enough, you know, they're all Africans, they're blacks on top of it, no one cares about it.
I mean, who's going to care about it?
Chris Matthews?
Is he going to care about it?
These kind of things, it's not going to disappear.
And so you're going to have these renditions like that, and can you imagine what an American citizen seized in the middle of, I don't know, had been seized in the war, in the Bosnian war?
Well, there have been heaven and earth moved, you know, to find out what's happened.
If he'd been, you know, taken from Croatia on one of these sides in that war, it's just unimaginable that he would just simply be forgotten and left to rot like this.
But that's what's happened here in Somalia.
Well, it is almost, kind of as you describe it, we're just overloaded, not just with the presidential election, but so many scandals.
I mean, you can only fit so many pieces of bad news in a news cycle, and then it gets flushed right away and replaced by the next one.
It's impossible to keep up.
Well, that's true.
I mean, that's absolutely true.
I mean, and if we get to the bottom of some of these scandals, that'll be good.
But I think one reason why, though, one reason why this sort of thing is easy to ignore, this, this, our involvement in the Somalian war should be as scandalous as it should at least be a topic of discussion.
But I think, you see, what's happening here is that it's an indication of the basic assumptions, I guess you could say the basic imperialistic assumptions that are shared by the Democrats and the Republicans all across the American establishment.
I mean, you know, this is unimportant because, hey, this is just what we do.
I mean, it's our right to intervene in countries like this if we want to.
We can do it, you know, this has been America's foreign policy for the last 50 years.
We have the right to intervene in any country in the world, covertly or overtly or with military force if we need be, in order to advance the interests of our ruling elites, basically, our ruling elites, basically, American interests, you know.
And so this is not a scandal.
Yes, it's a scandal if, you know, some US attorneys get fired when they shouldn't get fired.
And it is a scandal.
It's a scandal that they lied about it.
It's a scandal that they are politicizing the Justice Department even more than it's usually been politicized.
It is a scandal, and I'm glad to see how that come up.
But it's not nearly the biggest scandal.
The biggest scandal is involving another war and the hundreds and thousands of Somalians that were killed, and also the documented cases of civilians being killed by American bombs after the Islamist regime was overthrown in Somalia, and they were fleeing into Kenya and fleeing into neighboring countries.
The Americans pursued them, claiming they were Al Qaeda leaders among them, you see.
Right.
Well, why else would you be running if you weren't a bad guy?
Absolutely.
I mean, of course, if you're innocent, you should just stay there and wait for the CIA to come and take you off to Guantanamo Hilton for, you know, some accommodation and a few questions.
Yeah, if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about.
Well, no, but if you're Muslim and black in Somalia, you are automatically wrong.
I mean, you know, you're just wrong, so you better run.
But, you know, we killed several civilians in that bombing, and there's just no mention of it because, again, I think the underlying thing is that both Democrats and Republicans and the media establishment, they all buy into these basic, arrogant assumptions that we can do this sort of thing.
It's not a scandal, you know, it's just business as usual.
Right.
And as far as the Post and the Times are concerned, the war's over.
We already won.
So what's to report?
Yes, of course, although it's falling apart, just like all the rest of them, yes.
I mean, it's just, you know, the only reason they got into the news last week, last week is because they had that incident where this crowd in Somalia had killed one of the African Union peacekeepers or people who moved in there.
They killed one of the foreign fighters in their country, and they dragged them to the street, just like they did in Black Hawk Down.
So you could have, oh, that's just like Black Hawk Down.
And suddenly you had a few stories on that because this is reminiscent of the Black Hawk Down thing.
I mean, it's the only echo that it happened to that.
But otherwise, it's just, you know, as you say, it's completely ignored.
Right.
And surely no mention that, oh, Black Hawk Down, yeah, those guys are the good guys now.
Don't worry about it.
Oh, well, no, absolutely no mention of Idid and all these people.
I think Idid was the name of the big warlord at that time, and now his son is on our side, of course.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing that actually Justice Raimondo pointed this out at the end of December in his article when this first happened was that last summer, the Washington Post reported the story that the CIA and some special forces guys had flown in and just by happenstance had landed at this airstrip right in the middle of a firefight between two local forces, neither of whom had anything to do with America or al-Qaeda or anything else whatsoever.
But what happened was they heard gunfire and just assumed because, of course, the whole universe revolves around North America or something, they just assumed that the gunshots were meant for them and that al-Qaeda is here.
And obviously they run the whole place and they knew we were coming.
And all these phony assumptions that the Washington Post basically explains were not correct.
What was happening was simply a fight over land and over roadblocks between the Islamic Court's union and some of the other warlords, whatever.
Are you going to block off this street or are we going to block it off?
It was simply one of those things that happens in Somalia all the time.
And here the Americans just stumbled into this thing, assumed it was all about them.
And the next thing you know, it's like that movie, The Tailor of Panama, where you have this invasion that's just based on nothing, lie upon lie upon lie.
Nobody even knows what's going on.
Well, absolutely.
I mean, this is a whole basic take on a whole war on terror and everything else is that we're living in a world of lies.
These are lies that are children and grandchildren of lies because they're lies based on other lies.
So you never get to the bottom of it.
And of course, this is what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about this imperial arrogance, this imperial assumption that we can intervene in every place.
And as you say, it's all about us.
And it just involves us in this world, into this hell that goes on and on and on and on.
And it serves no one's interest.
It serves no one's interest.
It doesn't serve the American people's interest for sure.
No, it's just horrible.
Yeah, well, and now they've got a new African command, I guess, to complement the Northern command that is now the military's jurisdiction over the United States.
They have one for the whole continent of Africa now, is that right?
Yes, that's right.
This is a new thing that's come up in the last couple of months, maybe in the last month or so.
Yes, the African command, as you say, the world's been divided for years into these commands, the Central Command, which is the one over the Middle East and well-named.
And it's sort of like the way the old Roman Empire was divided up between, and you'd have a proconsul over this area, you know, over North Africa, you'd have a proconsul over the Middle East, you'd have a proconsul over the Balkans and all these sort of things.
And they would sort of go out and ruin it.
And we had these generals, these little commander-in-chiefs of the different commands set out over different parts of the world.
As you say, before, there was one in Europe, there was one in Asia, there was one in the Middle East, and now they've developed one for Africa.
Which is, you know, this is where you really, I mean, if you think the politics of the Middle East is Byzantine and hard to sort out and hard to read from outside, I mean, the politics of Africa make the Middle East look like, I don't know, a New England town meeting or something like that.
I mean, to get to enmesh yourself into the politics of Africa militarily, you know, to barge in there, well, all these countries, you know, all these countries, almost all of them, artificial creations of imperialism in the first place and colonialism in the first place, almost all of them are riven by different kinds of conflicts between different tribes and different ethnic groups and clans and things like this.
You're talking about a Washington where people don't even understand the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, and you're going to get into this sort of thing in Africa, and you're just going to have, you know, this is an Africa where they just had a war, they had more people killed than they had in World War I, and that was another war that was absolutely ignored by the American media.
Imagine World War I going on and no one knowing anything about it, but that's what happened in Africa in the late 90s and the early part of this century.
Over 4 million people killed.
Yeah, well, and what they keep telling us, the lesson from that is that America should have intervened in Rwanda, and we must intervene in Sudan.
Well, the lesson of that is that if the United States had intervened in this war that was revolved around the Congo, it would still be going on, and there'd be about 12 million people killed.
And again, Welk, you mentioned that, you mentioned in Sudan, that's another situation where the basic problem, again, we come back to arrogance, the basic problem is we treat, I'm sorry, let me get that, think about the politics in your county.
You know, just your own regular county politics, think how complicated it is, you know, who's on this side, who's on that side, you know, if you read your small town newspaper, I used to work for small town newspapers, you could write reams and reams and stuff about the ins and outs of the politics in that one county.
But we treat all these other nations, these whole nations, as if they're simply monoliths that we can understand and we can, you know, we know what's going on.
But see, the politics in Sudan are very complex.
The things that's going on in Darfur are very complex, you know, you have a, yes, you have the Janjaweed, which is in the middle, which is a militia that was backed by the government.
You have insurgents who'd risen up against the government, which is why they got up with the Janjaweed in the first place.
You have the Janjaweed doing enormous atrocities, yes, they're doing atrocities.
Some of the surgeons are doing atrocities.
You have peace deals that fall apart because this group doesn't like it, that group doesn't like it.
And the whole thing is also part of an overarching conflict over decades between nomads and more settled people, where in the old days, before there was all this drought, they'd worked out more of an accommodation, you know, the nomads moved around, the settled people had to land here.
But now that the resources over the last couple decades have started drying up, you have more conflict.
I mean, it's a resource conflict.
It's not simply what's portrayed in the American media as, well, would you have poor black Africans being killed by a bunch of Muslims.
Of course, the Janjaweed are also black Africans, but, you know, and they're also Muslim, so it goes around.
You have all sorts of mini conflicts going on between many different groups over resources, over land, over ethnicity, over...
And of course, now, after you have all these atrocities on both sides, and I'm not trying to make a moral equivalence here, but you do have atrocities on both sides, you've got the cycle of revenge going on.
You say, well, you know, I'm not going to make peace with the Janjaweed because they killed my father and they raped my mother.
I wouldn't either.
On the other side, you have people saying, you know, Janjaweed said, well, these people came and attacked our village, we're going to kill them when we show them no mercy.
So you have all these things going on.
And what people want to do is, I've seen these things, you know, oh, get our troops out of Iraq and put them into Darfur.
You know, the situation in Darfur is just as complex as the situation in Iraq, and the situation in Iraq is just as complex as, you know, Austin city politics or, you know, Watertown city politics, where I come from in Tennessee.
But we don't, we make no recognition of that fact, and we just blunder around as if, you know, as if these people aren't real people.
Again, that gets down to the bedrock arrogance that we have, that guides our foreign policy, is that the people that we deal with, really, now really, deep down, we don't feel that they're actual human beings.
You know, they're people that can be manipulated this way or that, or if they get out of line, they can be beat back into line like a puppy or something.
But we do not treat them as if they were complex, whole, complete human beings in complex, complete, whole human societies, you know, as we would our own, or as we would if we dealt with France or England or something like that.
And this is what's happening in Somalia, and this is what will happen if the more and more we get involved in Africa.
Now, if we can bring this back to what the American people might actually have as their interest in this, I don't know if you believe it or not, Chris, but I'm not sure if I do.
But last summer, an audio tape was released that was supposed to be of the voice of Osama bin Laden, telling those who were interested in what he has to say and following him that, telling them to go to Somalia and go to Sudan because the Americans are coming.
These are the new fronts in the war against the American imperialists.
So, you know, go west to Africa, young man, and prepare to fight them.
And we're just making every one of this guy's wishes come true as we prepare to bomb Iran as well and get rid of the Shiite dogs that rule Iran to him, you know, in his view, they're dogs.
Well, I mean, you've hit it right there.
Of course, we all know that Osama bin Laden's biggest fan and the man who listens more to Osama bin Laden than anyone is Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney quotes, and Bush too, Dick Cheney especially quotes bin Laden all the time when they're trying to say, well, I'll tell you what, people start taking the war on terror seriously, but bin Laden says this, he says that, he says this.
You know, bin Laden is a great authority to these people.
He's like their imam or something like that, you know.
You're absolutely right.
Yes, go to Sudan because Americans are coming and we'll attack them there, but if we don't come, we would frustrate bin Laden, wouldn't we?
I mean, why would we come to Sudan?
Why would we come to Somalia?
But he knows us well, I'm afraid.
I mean, he knows because he has the same mindset as Bush, you know, they know how each other thinks, you know, we're going to attack each other.
Yes, of course, absolutely.
We've made bin Laden and his, you know, his philosophy, gave it a world stage, gave it world importance and world historical importance.
And yes, you're right, absolutely.
At every stage, we do exactly what he wants to do.
I'm sure, I think you've had Michael Schur on there, you know, who used to track bin Laden and everything.
And, you know, he'll tell you the same thing, that we simply walk into their trap time again and time again and time again.
That's because, and again, I think, as I mentioned in my blog, our leadership is just stupid.
Basically, they're stupid and they can't, you know, I mean, they're stupid and they're greedy and they're blinded by their own arrogance and their own prejudices.
And bin Laden is playing them like a, you know, pipe organ.
Yeah.
Well, as far as Schur telling me that we're still doing whatever it is bin Laden wants, he told me the same thing just last Thursday.
So, yeah.
And now, look, we only got about three and a half, four minutes here, so I want to wrap up with Iran.
The Iranians have captured some British, I don't know the latest news today on it, but I wonder if you think that this is that Gulf of Tonkin incident that you predicted, what, back in November?
Well, I mean, a lot of people are looking for that sort of thing.
I have the feeling that this is not the incident, but I think it's going to be part of the, what we're going to have, I think, is not one incident, we're going to have a mosaic build up, you know, and then I think this is part of the powder keg thing.
But, of course, this is the kind of thing they want to do.
They're running these boats into these disputed waters.
I mean, almost in the Gulf of Tonkin, the Persian Gulf is filled with American military boats, British military boats, Iranian boats.
I mean, it's just, I mean, they're stirring these waters up on purpose, and I don't think this particular one will launch the war because it's the British, for one thing.
And so, if it's good old Americans capturing them, that might be something different.
If I can just throw in here, the Downing Street memo, which was the minutes of a meeting between Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, and Tony Blair on his return from the United States, talked about a plan for option B, running start for the invasion of Iraq, that they would paint an American U2 spy plane in UN colors and get it shot down in order to provide a pretext for war.
So this is not the kind of thing that's, you know, beyond the pale.
No, no, yes, you're right.
No, absolutely.
No, this thing is, this is what they do.
And speaking just quickly of scandals that are, how is it that these two governments still stand when the Downing Street memos have come out?
I mean, how can, how are these two governments still in power when it's been proven and never, and never even denied by the government that they had this plan to, which is just what Hitler did, to launch against Poland.
He staged an attack against the German radio station.
This is the exact sort of thing they were going to do against Iraq.
And how these two governments are still standing, I don't understand.
The only answer I can think of is that our two societies are just full of adult children who are just too cowardly to stand up for what's right.
What other explanation is there?
Yeah, I think it may all be down to Simon Cowell, this cow on the American Idol, because they have, he came from Britain, they have the same thing over here and everybody just watches these shows and that's it.
Maybe he's a government agent, I don't know.
All right, everybody, that's Chris Floyd.
He's the author of Empire Burlesque, High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium.
And you can check out his blog at chris-floyd.com.
Thanks for your time today, Chris.
Well, thank you.
This is Anti-War Radio on Radio Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.