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Baltimore & Maryland
06.14 Public Can Make Summer 'Historical' at “Chautauqua 2007: Food for Thought” Health & Environment
06.01 Fixing Our Broken Food System Ref. : Environmental Health News Ref. : What is Global Warming, and what can citizens do about it? Ref. : Global Warming Links Ref. : Health & Nutrition Links Letters
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US News Media Criticism
06.25 The Iraq-gate Cover-up Continues 06.19 Sunday Sun Hits New Low 06.19 Alliance With Atrocity: Bush's Terror War Partners in Ethiopia 06.12 Things Your Media Mama Didn't Tell You 06.12 Incendiary Weapons Are No 'Allegation' 06.11 Powell Belies 'Commander Guy' Bush 06.11 THINKING FLUFF 06.09 Romney's Iraq Gaffe Ignored 06.08 GOP/Media Rewrite Iraq War History 06.05 The New Assault on Al Gore 06.02 Bush's Global Warming Foot-Dragging 06.02 Can Democrats End the Iraq War? 06.01 Treated Like a Democrat 06.01 Journalists' Group Unmasks Sen. Jon Kyl as “Senator Secrecy” OP-EDs & Opinion
06.16 Dare We Call It Tyranny? 06.14 Unintended Uighurs 06.12 War Foretold 06.08 Impeachment on a Roll 06.01 The Hariri Case & Double Standards 05.31 Conyers is my Constitutional Hero US Politics & Policy
06.25 Goodbye to the city upon a hill and to its fabled economy 06.25 Is Obama Getting 'Colin-ized'? 06.22 Sen. Levin's False History & Logic 06.22 Which Candidate Do You Support? 06.21 Slap Doesn't Stick: Corrupted Congress Will Help Bush Escape Court Ruling 06.20 Bush's Mafia Whacks the Republic 06.20 Iraqi Labor Leaders Blame US for the Bloodshed in Iraq and say Get Out! 06.19 The Reign of the Tyrants is at Hand 06.19 Democrats in Congress: The Wheels are Coming Off 06.13 America's Fragile Republic 06.12 Congressional Failure and the Democrats' Last Chance 06.12 The Neocon Threat to World Peace and American Freedom 06.12 Sic Semper Tyrannis: A Slap in the Face of the Crawford Caligula 06.11 Everything They Say About Promoting Democracy Is, And Always Has Been, A Damnable Lie 06.09 Losing Iraq, Nuking Iran 06.07 Last Plamegate Worry for Bush-Cheney 06.06 Some democracy, America Economics
06.20 Reader response: Inflation? You'd Better Believe It! 06.18 THINKING INFLATION 06.11 Losing the Economy to Mythology 06.04 Thinking About Budgets—the “La-La” Land of Governmental Accounting Africa
06.13 'Kill Anyone Still Alive': American Special Ops in Somalia Middle East & S. Asia
06.19 Newly Discovered Nuances to the Camp David Accords 06.19 Crocodile Tears 06.07 Brothers in Arms: Bandar Bush Took a Billion in Bribes to Push UK Weapons Deal We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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MEDIA CRITICISM:Alliance With Atrocity: Bush's Terror War Partners in EthiopiaThough he ties the Bush Administration directly to atrocities, Gettleman still totes White House water by retailing the baseless charge that the overthrown Somali regime was a "potential terrorist threat".
Monday, 18 June 2007—The New York Times paints a pretty picture of George W. Bush's bosom pals in Ethiopia, in an important story that once again gives the howling lie to the Bushists' pretensions of advancing freedom and democracy in their world-encircling Terror War.Of course, the story itself, by Jeffrey Gettleman, is marred by the usual uncritical acceptance of Administration spin on its key role in aiding the Ethiopian dictatorship's aggression in Somalia, and ignores entirely the American airstrikes during the invasion that killed scores of civilians (and are still going on in the Somali hinterland). This is not surprising, given that Gettleman's last big piece from the region was a truly odious bit of propaganda hackwork that essentially painted the victims of the aggression as greedy, worthless, anarchic trash who got what was coming to them. (See "The Lies of the Times: NYT Pushes Bush Line on Somalia.")
(Of course, Bush only increased American military aid to Ethiopia after the 2005 repression -- just as his father never let the Tiananmen massacre derail his courtship of China's leaders, which has paid off so handsomely for America's ruling family, with fat Chinese contracts for son Neil and lucre aplenty for George I's brother, Prescott Jr., long-time head of the Chinese-American Chamber of Commerce. Who wants to bet that Ethiopia will soon adopt Neil's latest wheeze, a"computer learning" gizmo he is marketing with business partners like Boris Berezovsky and Sun Myung Moon? For more on the Warbuckian Bushes, see "Uncle Sugar" and "Buried Treasure.) So let's give credit where it's due. Although Gettleman downplays the American partnership with Ethiopia's conquest of Somalia -- and takes 40 paragraphs before he mentions that the European Commission is now investigating Bush's partner for war crimes "in connection to hundreds of Somali civilians killed by Ethiopian troops" -- he does bring in a Democratic congressman to decry the U.S. military alliance with Ethiopia, and its bitter fruit in Somalia. I believe this is the first time I've seen such a criticism aired by an elected official in a story from the major corporate media since the attack on Somalia last December. What's more, the Timesman admirably puts the suffering of the persecuted ethnic Somalis of Ethiopia's Ogaden desert front and center in the story. And he makes an explicit connection between the perpetrators of these atrocities and their staunch supporters in the Bush Administration: In village after village, people said they had been brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at will.Of course, even in making this connection, which ties the Bush Administration directly to the atrocities detailed in the story, Gettleman still totes White House water by retailing, as unqualified fact, the baseless charge that the overthrown Somali regime was a "potential terrorist threat" -- and thus a legitimate target for the Terror War treatment. (Then again, you could say that any group or any person is a "potential" terrorist threat. If that's your basis for "intervention," then you can invade, detain or kill anyone you like. Which, as we have often pointed out here, is actually the operating philosophy of the Bush Regime.) But let's brush aside Gettleman's knee-jerk spin, and return to the facts and testimonies he unearths. Anab, a 40-year-old camel herder who was too frightened, like many others, to give her last name, said soldiers took her to a police station, put her in a cell and twisted her nipples with pliers. She said government security forces routinely rounded up young women under the pretext that they were rebel supporters so they could bring them to jail and rape them. “Me, I am old,” she said, “but they raped me, too.”As everywhere in the world where violence and repression flourish, women have been particular victims. (Of course, given the Administration's proven track record of callous disregard for the world's most vulnerable women, the fate of the Ogaden women is not likely to trouble the White House very much.) Asma, 19, who now lives in neighboring Somaliland, said she was stuck in an underground cell for more than six months last year, raped and tortured. “They beat me on the feet and breasts,” she said. She was freed only after her father paid the soldiers ransom, she said, though she did not know how much. Raping women and beating villagers to death, that's just background noise; but messing with the sacred crude -- now, that's serious.
As Gettleman notes, the struggle in the Ogaden was simply ignored by the Bush Adminstration -- until a rebel Ogaden faction staged a bloody attack on an oilfield in Ethiopia last April. Raping women and beating villagers to death, that's just background noise; but messing with the sacred crude -- now, that's serious. So now the Bush administration is seriously considering Ethiopia's oft-repeated request for Washington "to add the Ogaden National Liberation Front to its list of designated foreign terrorist organizations." That could open the spigot to even more U.S. military aid for the dictatorship, and perhaps even bring America's secret Terror Warriors -- such as the Special Forces units operating in Somalia today -- into the Ogaden. After all, for America's war-profiteering ruling family, and its many like-minded barons among the respectable elite, you can never have too many killing fields to play upon -- just as your proxies can never be brutal enough to forfeit your aid...as long as they keep doing your bidding. Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including the Nation, CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
This column originally appeared on Chris Floyd's site, and is republished here with the permission of the author. Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on June 19, 2007. |
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