War in Congo has again been splashed across world headlines and the same old clichés about violence and suffering are repackaged and rebroadcast as “news”. Meanwhile, early indications out of America are that President-elect Barack Obama will assemble a foreign policy-team primed for business as usual.

How will Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State compromise the Obama Administration’s capacity to honestly redress the untold suffering, massive theft of resources and millions of deaths in Africa? And Tom Daschle? Behind the media smokescreens are people whose involvement has been documented and exposed, but there is always some African fall guy—the ‘embraceable’ black subordinate or ‘rebel’ commander—charged with war crimes and used to deflect attention from the leaders of organized white-collar crime networks.

Blacked out are the corporate executives, government officials and expatriate personnel of Western enterprises whose success amidst chaos implicates them in the deracination and death of millions of black people. What’s behind the recent hostilities and media posturing in Central Africa?

THE SHORT, BRUTISH LIFE OF SANDRINE

On a darkling plain in a far away place the skeletons of hundreds of unnamed people lie strewn over the land amidst the red dirt and brown grasses scorched by the equatorial sun. Bones poke into the air here and there, hidden by the tall grass, tripping you up as you walk; others lay bleaching white in piles where the bodies fell. These are the killing fields of Bogoro, a small hillside village on a southerly road out of Bunia, a metropolis of suffering in the wild, wild east of Congo.

The grassy plains of Bogoro were guarded by soldiers and when I arrived the militia of the day wore black trench coats and black mirror sunglasses to enhance the aura of terror that surrounds them. With AK-47’s slung over their shoulders they talked on shiny Nokias and Motorolas and Samsungs—cellphones built with the blood minerals of the Congolese people.
Militia soldier talking on is cell-phone while guarding the killing fields of Bogoro. Photo copyright 2007 Keith Harmon Snow.

Sandrine—not her real name—is a survivor who participated in the massacre at Bogoro. I interviewed Sandrine, just seventeen at the time, in 2007, and she recounted her ordeal as the sex slave of soldiers. Sandrine told how people were forced by militia commanders to chase down neighbors and kill or be killed. I found Sandrine living in misery in an evacuated refugee camp.

Sandrine knows nothing at all of the vast mining operations or minerals shipments being flown out of remote jungle airstrips in her home territory—or even that such airstrips exist. Ditto for the Congolese researchers I met, in Orientale, who worked with the International Criminal Court. Moto Gold? Mwana Africa? Walter Kansteiner? They had never heard of such companies, or such people.

In Western media reportage the plunder of raw materials in Congo is usually de-linked from the killing, even though the extractive industries are directly behind it, and even though almost everyone has begun to parrot the accusation of “resource wars” in Congo.

The Bogoro massacre occurred in February 2003 and, like the Hutu-Tutsi stories from Rwanda, the media whipped up the specter of ancient tribal animosities between Hema and Lendu tribes. But the real story is not quite so black and white. Or is it?

Today the International Criminal Court (ICC) holds three Congolese “warlords” in the ICC prison at The Hague, Netherlands, and all three were associated with events at Bogoro. However, the white patrons reaping the profits behind the bloodletting in the eastern Congo are protected by a new humanitarian order predicated on permanent inequality, structural violence and race politics.

But for a few brief periods of relative calm, the war in Congo’s eastern Orientale and Kivus provinces has hardly stopped since its’ beginning in 1996, and the realities have been shrouded in media clichés and stereotypes and disingenuous expressions of outrage that deflect attention from the true protagonists and root causes of war and plunder in Africa.¹

GOOD VERSUS EVIL AND THE NAMES GAMES

The UPC, FPRI, FNI—these are three of the scores of militias that have risen and fallen in Orientale since the war began in 1996 and, more poignantly, they are meaningless acronyms used to scramble the brains of western spectator-news-consumers.

First there was the Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) that invaded Rwanda, and then came the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Zaire (ADFL) that marched across Zaire to unseat President Mobutu. Next came the “rebellion” with Jean-Pierre Bemba and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), and all the different factions of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, or Congolese Rally for Democracy—RCD, RCD-G (Goma), RCD-K, RCD-K-ML—backed by Rwanda and Uganda.

Here are the comrades in arms who studied together at the Marxist University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania: Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president; Laurent Desire Kabila, the ADFL figurehead and assassinated president of the Democratic Republic of Congo; Meles Zenawi, president of Ethiopia; Isaias Afwerki, president of Eritrea; Africa scholar Mahmood Mamdani; former RCD leader Wamba dia Wamba; Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president; and John Garang (d. 2005), former leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and first president of South Sudan.

Both the RPF/A and SPLA waged successful covert guerrilla wars against governments that were considered “undesirable” by Washington, both achieved their objectives of seizing land and gaining control, and both insurgencies were covertly backed by U.S. Committee for Refugees official Roger Winter—a pivotal U.S. intelligence asset operating in Sudan and a dedicated ally of Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame and John Garang. Winter’s protégé is Susan Rice, Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Rice was one of the primary architects of the Pentagon’s prized Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI)—a euphemistically named entity created to project U.S. power in Africa, and run by U.S. Army Special Forces Command (SOCOM).²

The coups d’etat in Rwanda and Burundi occurred after the presidents Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira were assassinated on April 6, 1994. Similarly, more than a decade of covert U.S. military support for the SPLA, channeled through Uganda and Ethiopia, led to the Naivasha Peace Agreement of January 2005 and the creation of the autonomous country of South Sudan.

The “Rwanda genocide” began with the 1990 invasion of northern Rwanda by Ugandan forces that brutally targeted everyone in their path. By the time the RPF/A forces—comprised mostly of seasoned Ugandan troops—reached Kigali, more than 800,000 IDPs (internally displaced persons) were hovering around the capital city: they were terrified, they were homeless, they were hungry, they were angry and—justifiably—they took up arms. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) and its Canadian General Romeo Dallaire clandestinely backed the illegal guerrilla war.³

The guerrilla wars in Rwanda and South Sudan were prosecuted much like the CIA-backed low-intensity guerrilla warfare, spawned by Washington, against populist movements in Honduras, Nicaragua, Chile and Guatemala. This is exactly what is playing out in Congo and Sudan today: low-intensity guerrilla warfare prosecuted by powerful shadow forces competing for land and loot.

SPLA leader John Garang received military training at the School of the Americas, Fort Benning, Georgia. Paul Kagame received training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. At the time he was sent for training, Kagame was Museveni’s director of military intelligence; upon his return he assumed command of the army created, financed and trained by Uganda: the Rwanda Patriotic Army.

Both Garang and Kagame likely received “counter-insurgency” training through the Pentagon’s International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). Since 1998, the IMET program has provided training to 318 RDF and 291 UPDF soldiers. Many other IMET soldiers who attended the notorious School of the Americas are today known human rights violators in Latin America.

In North Kivu province we find the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) and the National Congress for the Defense of the People, the CNDP, created by self-appointed Rwandan “General” Laurent Nkunda. Here the media has historically cast General Nkunda as good, the FDLR as evil. Only recently has Nkunda come under any kind of “harsh” criticism.

The war in Eastern Congo is almost universally described with clichés about the “Rwanda genocide.” The usual targets of white media racial profiling and hysterical academic polemics are the Hutu—the infamous Interahamwe and FDLR—the “killers” that “fled Rwanda after committing genocide” there. This is how millions of innocent Hutu people—comprising over 85% of the populations of Rwanda and Burundi—are collectively dehumanized.

Congolese Mai Mai militias are described as “nationalists” sometimes “wearing bathroom fixtures on their heads” and “shooting magic bullets.” The Mai Mai are the closest thing to a people’s or indigenous justice movement in Congo. The Mai Mai have most recently allied with the Congo’s national army, the Armed Forces for the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC), and the Mai Mai are sometimes cast as good, but usually as evil.

In 2007 the Mai Mai and FLDR joined forces to form the Front for the National Liberation of Kivu (FNLK). Backed by the FARDC, the FNLK is purportedly vying for power against General Nkunda’s CNDP. However, alliances are constantly shifting based on private profit and “warlord” fiefdoms, and ALL factions, at some point or other, have collaborated in war and resource plunder.

Western news stories throw the acronyms and names of militias around with little or no information about their rise or fall, and nothing substantive about foreign backers they collaborate with. Militias mysteriously appear and disappear. Indeed, the more you read about Congo from venues like the New York Times, Harper’s, the New Yorker, or the Atlantic Monthly, the less you will understand. This is no accident, and—no, you are not dumb.

Take the militia FNI: but for the victims and their suffering, it makes no difference what the acronym stands for, it’s all one big sadistic joke of language and power. The most significant fact to remember about this “F” “N” “I” is that they served as the private proxy army for the gold mining operations of Metalor, a Swedish firm, and AngloGold Ashanti, headquartered in South Africa and partnered with Barrick Gold.⁴ Secondly, they were agents for Ugandan power brokers.

Anglo-Gold Ashanti directors include Sir Sam Jonah, who is also a director of shady mining-cum-military companies operating in Sierra Leone and connected to Tony Buckingham and other white-collar mercenaries. Buckingham affiliated companies—e.g. Heritage Oil and Gas, Branch Energy, Saracen Uganda—collaborate with the Museveni regime. Saracen’s top shareholder is General Salim Saleh, half-brother of Yoweri Museveni, and Congo’s nemesis, a Ugandan agent cited by the United Nations for war and plunder in Congo.

AngloGold Ashanti is the Anglo American mining conglomerate of the Oppenheimers and De Beers mining cartels of Britain and South Africa, interests deeply aligned with Belgian American intelligence insider Maurice Tempelsman—the godfather of covert operations in Africa. Tempelsman’s diamond interests in Congo were, at least partially, displaced by the Israeli cartels of Dan Gertler and Benny Steinmetz.⁵ It is a no-brainer that the Tempelsman gang backs Rwanda’s occupation of eastern Congo.

For a second example, media corporations have consistently blacked out the truth about the lucrative corporate “conservation” industry with articles like the recent New York Times production “Congo Violence Reaches Endangered Mountain Gorillas” (Jeffrey Gettleman, 11/18/08). Unreported however are the many accusations coming out of North Kivu that link the Jane Goodall Institute and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to local Mai Mai and FDLR: like every other militia, or occupation army, these factions have infiltrated villages and now prey on, intimidate and abuse the locals. The white agents working for Western “conservation” NGOs—and we know their names—are directly responsible for extortion, racketeering, land theft, human rights atrocities and for ripping apart the social fabric.⁶

“The commander of the Mai-Mai is Colonel Ntasibanga and the commander of the FDLR is Colonel Faraja,” report Congolese locals who have been documenting the abuses (the facts are confirmed by a Spanish journalist). “We count already five people killed because of this [conservation] project… DFGF and JGI are without doubt corrupt… they are paying armed groups and forcing us off of our lands.”⁷

The Gettleman NYT article, on the other hand, cites one of these agents, Samantha Newport, described as “a spokeswoman for Virunga National Park,” who in fact works for Richard Leakey’s organization Wildlife Direct, a shady paramilitary entity involving Walter Kansteiner.

A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE

The international arrest warrants issued by Spain and France against some 40 former RPF/A and current Rwanda Defense Force (RDF) are patently dismissed by Western media of all stripes, buried behind waves of pro-RPF propaganda and intimidation that labels anyone who does not support the Kigali military dictatorship as genocide deniers, themselves guilty, by extension, of genocide.

While the RPF/A and UPDF are often named for leading the charge and supplying the bulk of the forces, the 1996 invasion of Zaire, launched from Uganda and Rwanda, involved U.S. covert forces with state-of-the-art C4ISTR—Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance—and there were Humvees and C-130 aircraft ferrying black-skinned U.S. Special Forces into South Sudan and northeastern Congo. The invasion also involved Israeli military experts, an assortment of Eritrean and Ethiopian regulars, and SPLA forces.⁸

The Anglo-European-Israeli forces penetrated eastern Zaire through the Gulu and Arua Districts of northwestern Uganda—the heart of Acholiland and ground zero for the ongoing genocide of the indigenous Acholi people—and they backed the RPA/UPDF who marched across Zaire massacring refugees, mostly women and children, mostly Hutus, that fled Kigali in 1994.⁹¹⁰

Howard French, then the Africa Bureau Chief for the New York Times, witnessed the Hutu genocide in Zaire, and wrote about it.¹¹ Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani—who by no means was an impartial observer when he arrived in Goma in September 1997—described “an indiscriminate slaughter” of Interahamwe, of unarmed Hutu refugees, and of Congolese Hutus in the Kivus.¹² Bill Richardson, President Clinton’s Ambassador to the United Nations, stated in a may 1997 interview: “I think there’s strong evidence that there have been these massacres.”¹³

But the subject of Hutus being slaughtered was only broached as a tool to hammer down the uppity black rebel who diverged from his script and upset Washington’s plans. Indeed, the rise and fall of ADFL figurehead Laurent Desire Kabila exemplifies the embraceable black leader transformed almost overnight into the unembraceable black fall guy. In the end, a bullet dispatched Laurent Kabila on 16 January 2001, exactly 40 years after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (17 January 1961).

Anyone who dismisses the organized and intentional RPF/A and UPDF military campaign against millions of Hutu people—massacred and chased from the Uganda border to Kigali, into to eastern Congo, and finally attacked in refugee camps and butchered all the way across Zaire—is a genocide denier. (Of course, the UPDF-RPF/A alliance also summarily executed and massacred Rwandan Tutsis and indigenous Twa, and Congolese people.) Similarly, anyone who dismisses the organized persecution and atrocities against the Acholi people in northern Uganda—maintained by the Museveni government and the UPDF occupation—is a genocide denier.

The criminality of the Kagame regime is whitewashed by the massive public relations campaigns involving Kagame’s special advisor/sponsors: former Ambassador Andrew Young and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Young’s Goodworks International also backs the Museveni regime. Buffing the shiny image of the government of Congo’s President Joseph Kabila is Stevens and Schriefer Group the Washington D.C. PR-firm that twice helped get George W. Bush elected.

The New Yorker and CNN have consistently manufactured the pro-RPF/A propaganda, reported by Christiane Amanpour and Philip Gourevitch. Amanpour is married to James Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State and Madeleine Albright’s right-hand man, and now economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama. Gourevitch—who produced the celebrated pro-RPF/A text We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, is a close friend of Paul Kagame and a conduit for State Department disinformation passed by James Rubin, who was also Chief Spokesman for the Clinton State Department (1997-2000), and whose sister, Elizabeth Rubin, was dating Gourevitch.

U.S. business tycoon Joe Ritchie “has volunteered in Rwanda for the past five years introducing the country to business leaders around the world.” Ritchie also runs an “entrepreneurial philanthropy” called Friends of Rwanda and serves on President Paul Kagame’s Advisory Council and as CEO of the Rwanda Development Board.¹⁴¹⁵ Like Walter Kansteiner, Joe Ritchie is a commodities and options trader from Chicago with deep pockets and dark secrets: involved in a private attempt to overthrow the Taliban in 2000, Joe and James Ritchie were aided by their favorite consultant, former national security adviser Robert McFarlane, who successfully lobbied the CIA to dispatch an Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) to the skies over Afghanistan.¹⁶

The Congo wars have direct links to the many long years of war in Sudan and Uganda, and they are intertwined with the current low-intensity warfare and the mass murder in Darfur, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. If we apply the genocide label to conflicts where it surely fits, then genocide is ongoing in Congo’s Orientale and Kivus provinces, and in Acholiland in Northern Uganda.¹⁷ But it is also occurring in Iraq, Afghanistan, Burundi, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Botswana, Columbia, the Palestinian Territories and Malaysia, to mention a few irrefutable cases.

These geopolitical and strategic hotspots remain mostly blanketed by media reportage that quite literally blacks out key white protagonists by putting a black African face on things. Another example: there has been little reported about the perpetual warfare and human rights atrocities in Orientale linked to tight little airstrips carved out of the rainforest and paved with support from the Pentagon-connected United States Agency for International Development (USAID).¹⁸

Consider Mwana Africa, a South African firm that controls the Kilo-Moto gold fields in Zani, DRC. The Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), led by Thomas Lubanga, occupied the Zani gold fields in 2002 and stirred up ethnic animosities that led to massive suffering and depopulation. However, according to Congolese locals, it was the white missionaries from the Africa Inland Mission that deeply divided local ethnic groups. French tycoons Jacques and Alvaro Hachuel own Mwana Africa.

Mwana Africa’s European director, Etienne Denis, began his long career of impoverishing the Congo at Umicore, formerly the Belgian mining giant Union Miniere, in 1974. The Mwana Africa airstrip at Zani, and nearby roads, were built with USAID backing, and the gold is flown out to Tanzania—one of the most underappreciated criminal players funneling weapons to Uganda and Congo—or sometimes shipped out by road through Uganda.¹⁹ Mwana Africa is also involved in Congo’s bloody MIBA diamond concessions in Mbuji Mayi and the cobalt/copper concessions in Katanga.²⁰

Similarly, almost nothing in context has been reported of the white mercenaries and their petroleum operations on the Uganda border with Orientale.²¹ Like the ongoing covert war in Darfur, where the backers of the “mysterious” rebel groups are never exposed, the militias operating in Congo are proxy armies that serve the interests of external power blocks at the expense of their competitors.

Most reporting from the Kivus zooms in on sexual violence and the Western media always blames the victims—Congolese soldiers caught in the maelstrom of international proxy warfare and organized crime—but we hear nothing about U.S. or Canadian or Australian mining companies—and for those rare times that we do the reportage de-links the mining from the mass murder.²² More often, the media turns the story upside down, claiming that responsible Western mining executives are waiting in the wings for security to improve so they can provide jobs and accountability and “sustainable development” for the Congolese people. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A recent front-page news feature, “Congo’s Riches, Looted by Renegade Troops,” about the Bisie tin mine in North Kivu, offers the perfect example. “On paper, the exploration rights to this mine belong to a consortium of British and South African investors who say they will turn this perilous and exploitative operation into a safe, modern beacon of prosperity for Congo,” wrote Jeffrey Gettleman for the New York Times. “But in practice, the consortium’s workers cannot even set foot on the mountain. Like a mafia, Colonel Matumo and his men extort, tax and appropriate at will, draining this vast operation, worth as much as $80 million a year.”²³

And thus do the valiant white knights of the New York Times shine their spotlight on plunder and extortion in Congo. Alas, it is a selective shining, an expedient “humanitarian” concern, and an arrogant moral high ground. Indeed, it is just another shade of the black and white race politics behind the politicization of the International Criminal Court.

THE BLACK AFRICAN FALL GUYS

In June of 2008 the ICC charged two black African rebel leaders, Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, with six counts of war crimes (willful killing; inhuman treatment or cruel treatment; using children under the age of fifteen years to participate actively in hostilities; sexual slavery; intentionally directing attacks against civilians; and pillaging) and three counts of crimes against humanity (murder, inhumane acts and sexual slavery).

ICC prosecutors say that Chui and his commander Katanga—known as Simba—led a militia called the Front for Patriotic Resistance of Ituri (FPRI); Chui was also a commander in another militia, the National Integrationist Front (FNI). The FPRI was fighting against the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC); another militia in Congo backed by outsiders, in particular, some faction from the U.S.

UPC commander Thomas Lubanga—another black man—was the first person detained at the ICC’s Scheveningen prison at The Hague. Charles Taylor, former “warlord” and president from Liberia was the second. Germaine Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui were next to be chosen for this auspicious club. Congolese “warlord” Jean-Pierre Bemba is the last of five detainees now held at the ICC. Bemba was the leader of the Congolese rebel army, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), but he is charged with crimes in the Central African Republic.²⁴

These five men all have more in common than the charges against them. They are all black men, once embraced by the system and empowered as local or national leaders, and they are now the black stooges who fell from grace to become, in the language of anthropologist and scholar Dr. Enoch Page, “unembraceable.”²⁵

The unembraceable status, applied to Africa, is reserved for black males, for dictators and warlords, rapists and killers, for ‘dirty’ Arabs like Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan, and for former ‘Marxist’ guerillas, like Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe. Always they are people of color: they are the O.J. Simpsons and Michael Jacksons of Africa, formerly embraced black males now ruthlessly persecuted by the Western establishment—primarily through racial surveillance and targeting in the mass media. Such treatment is rarely applied to white males, anywhere.

Someone has to be held responsible for the mass murder at Bogoro, but who paid the 29 year-old “warlord” Germaine Katanga? Why should he be the only one prosecuted? Who provided the jeeps for the “warlord” Mathieu Chui? Where did “warlord” Thomas Lubanga get the satellite phone to coordinate his private militia? How did Charles Taylor go from Harvard University to money laundering in Liberia to a Massachusetts prison—which he “escaped” from—and then on to become first the “President” and later “warlord” of Liberia?

How does Moto Gold Mining Company extract gold from a war zone? And how do the shiny black leather belts and pressed camouflage fatigues and crisp felt berets and rocket-propelled grenades find their way to Laurent Nunda’s “rebel” army now fighting in the North and South Kivu provinces of Congo?

Aware of their vulnerability as black African fall guys—and soon after the ICC arrest of Jean-Pierre Bemba—the top brass of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces curtailed their international travel plans and convened a special meeting at Uganda’s Bombo army headquarters near Kampala, in June 2008, to discuss fears of ICC warrants being issued against them.

Of course, the U.S. Government and its business partners dictate the operations of the ICC. While considering soldiers of the United States and its allies to be above international humanitarian law and protected from the jurisdiction of the ICC, the Pentagon has simultaneously directed the formation, operations and legal precedents of the ICC through the involvement of members of the U.S. military’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, the legal arm of the Pentagon.²⁶

Congolese troops and militias connected to Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and wife Janet and their military collaborators operate extortion and racketeering networks that are plundering Congo. While former militias responsible for plunder have ostensibly been disbanded, new military networks have replaced them again and again.

UGANDA ARMING MILITIAS YET AGAIN

“The Congolese military [FARDC] works with Ugandans,” reported Christian Lukusha, an expert with Justice Plus, a Congolese human rights NGO based in Bunia, “including Salim Saleh, Museveni’s half-brother. And they ship timber and minerals across the border at both Aru and Mahagi. It’s completely clandestine.”²⁷

According to the United Nations Observers Mission in Congo (MONUC), fighting in Orientale in September 2008 drove over 90,000 additional IDPs from their homes and lands. Fighting continued into October and November, and militias new and old are today floating between Uganda, South Sudan and DRC, recruiting and conscripting soldiers, including children, and training and indoctrinating them in the ideology of their “mysterious” leaders.

The FPJC—Front Congolaise Pour la Justice au Congo—is but the latest militia to suddenly emerge from the hills of Orientale. On September 29, 2008, the FPJC, described as “a newly formed rebel group,” attacked and pursued retreating contingents of President Joseph Kabila’s regular army, the FARDC, before raiding and looting villages. Since mid-September the FPJC has engaged FARDC troops in firefights along the Lake Albert border zone.

According to Congolese sources in Bunia, the FPJC is solidly backed by Uganda and provides a second front in an alliance with Laurent Nkunda’s Rwandan army, which has freely operated in the Kivu provinces for years.

“The FPJC rebels are in the bush close to the Semliki River and the Uganda border,” says Godefroid (not his real name), a Congolese professional in Bunia who travels back and forth to Uganda by land. “There is some new recruitment of former militias along the Congo-Uganda border by Thomas Lubanga’s former UPC minister Mr. Avochi, a Congolese who as been in exile in Uganda since 2004.”²⁸

Military training camps for the new FPJC recruits are today operating from at least four sites on the Uganda side of the border: {1} in the Kikong-Hoima district; {2} in Kasatu (close to Djegu) in Nebbi district; {3} in the Urusi area (close to Mahagi) of Nebbi district; and {4} in Bondo (close to Aru and Arua) in the Uganda district.

“Such trainings cannot happen without a clear agreement and support of the upper authorities of Uganda,” says Godefroid. “It’s all connected to the oil under Lake Albert and the gold in Orientale.”

According to this source, a senior FPJC military commander named Sherif confirmed that Laurent Nkunda and his National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) are involved with these Ugandan bases. “They are providing CNDP military training and recruits are given the CNDP ideology.”

Coincidentally—but not reported by the media—a hornet’s nest of Western petroleum and mining companies, all linked to international private military companies, local militias, and the national armies of Uganda, Rwanda and Congo, are fighting for control of the land on both sides of the Congo’s eastern border.

“Salim Saleh is involved in all of this,” said one Congolese official at the border town of Aru, DRC. “He is certainly responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Saleh worked with Jerome Kakwavu when he was the big chief in Aru. Kakwavu is a FARDC general now, in Kinshasa. Salim worked all the different groups, trading arms, playing them off one against the other.”²⁹

Petroleum companies that have recently emerged and now laying claim to DRC or Ugandan concessions on Lake Albert include: Tower Resources; South African consortiums PetroSA and Divine Inspiration; and H Oil & Minerals Ltd.³⁰ Tower Resources is a U.S.-U.K. firm affiliated with U.K.-based Hardman Resources and tied to oil exploitation in Kenya and Namibia.³¹

H Oil & Minerals is a European firm operating in South Sudan, DRC and Angola; financiers include the Deutsche Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction & Development, and the Belgian giant Société Generale—one of the Congolese people’s greatest historical enemies. H Oil & Minerals is also closely linked to Marc Rich and his Switzerland-based company Glencore International, both known for arms trafficking in Angola and DRC through Angolagate notable Pierre Falcone. An Arizona (USA) republican, Falcone is reportedly very tight with the Joseph Kabila government. Marc Rich is the fugitive Swiss financier who for years appeared on the FBI’s list of most wanted criminals on charges ranging from trading with embargoed states, tax evasion, racketeering and arms trafficking; Marc Rich was pardoned by Bill Clinton on Clinton’s last day in office.³²

One of the most notorious global arms traffickers involved in Congo, Namibia and Zimbabwe is John Bredenkamp, one of Britain’s 50 richest men. Walter Hailwax, the Belgian honorary consul to Namibia, is a director of arms producer Windhoeker Maschinenfabrik, and the local director of Bredenkamp’s arms brokerage company ACS International Ltd. A key agent in Zimbabwean and DRC organized crime networks, Bredenkamp is one of the phantom white-collar criminals behind Robert Mugabe, another black African fall guy now targeted by the Western press, think tanks and flak organizations, to the exclusion of other major interests. Of course, the Ndebele people suffered war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide under Mugabe, with the bulk of the atrocities committed from 1981-1988. (Mugabe remained an embraceable black agent of white power until about 1999, and today—according to the Western economic and policy establishment, and the mass media, who no longer embrace him—he is the devil incarnate in Zimbabwe.)

THE LORD’S RESISTANCE ARMY

If you asked Western media consumers to name a bloodthirsty guerrilla movement in Africa it is likely they would point to “warlord” Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), this thanks to the one-sided fictional media campaigns waged by National Public Radio, Time magazine, Washington Post, or by Christopher Hitchens—who calls them “a Christian Khmer Rouge”—and Vanity Fair.³³³⁴

In the simplistic Western media narratives, the LRA is always described as a “fanatical Christian cult” that abducts children and forces them to commit atrocities. In the dichotomy of “good” versus “evil” the LRA is “wicked” and the forces they are fighting against, President Museveni and the UPDF, are benevolent. Indeed, evangelical Christian missionaries from the United States have been deeply involved with the SPLA war against the “satanic” forces of the LRA and the Islamic Government of Sudan.³⁵

Spilling over from the wars in Uganda and Sudan and operating a clandestine network of terror and extortion in the north of Congo today, the LRA has waged a low-intensity war against the Museveni regime since circa 1987. The LRA is a Ugandan guerrilla force backed by the government of Sudan (Khartoum) and its allies and clandestinely supported by unnamed factions in Congo, Europe and Washington.

“For 19 years, Joseph Kony has been enslaving, torturing, raping, and murdering Ugandan children,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “many of whom have become soldiers for his ‘Lord’s Resistance Army,’ going on to torture, rape, and kill other children.” Parroting the establishment line, Hitchens has no complaints about the UPDF brutalizing children in the refugee camps of Acholiland, and he never mentions the SPLA’s conscription of thousands of child soldiers.³⁶

According to a high-level United Nations source working in the DRC, the LRA maintains very high-level political ties in New York and Washington D.C. through Jongomoi Okidi-Olal, a Ugandan-American representative living in the U.S. The Uganda government has purportedly asked the Bush Administration and the United Nations to arrest Okidi-Olal and hand him over to the ICC.³⁷ Other sources claim that Okidi is a fraud.

Interestingly, we find that Mwana Africa—whose vast Kilo-Moto mining concessions sprawl across northern Orientale—is also operating in Angola and South Africa, and at five major mining concessions in the so-called “failed state” of Zimbabwe.²⁰The government of Angola has always backed President Joseph Kabila, is very hostile to the Kagame gang, and currently controls Congolese territory (Kehemba) near the Angolan border. Given the spoils to be had, it is likely that factions from Angola or Zimbabwe also back the Lord’s Resistance Army in a bid to displace Mwana Africa and other competitors from mining and petroleum sites in northeastern Congo.³⁸

Congolese sources claim that MONUC moved into the Watsa region in northern Orientale only after the LRA—coming in through Garamba National Park near the Sudan border—began threatening the operations of AngloGold Ashanti, Mwana Africa and Moto Gold Mining.³⁹ Additionally, Garamba National Park is rich in diamonds and gold.

While the LRA is also supported by Ugandan factions opposed to the Museveni dictatorship, it is widely believed the LRA is a tool of the Museveni government used to manipulate public opinion, create chaos across the region, gain international sympathy from foreign donors and thereby procure massive financial backing to facilitate some of the world’s most lucrative and unappreciated AID-for-ARMS scandals. It is the perfect ruse to facilitate permanent foreign military intervention.

The LRA also reportedly moved into the northern DRC to displace SPLA troops that had a long history of plundering the area, shooting wildlife and harassing villages.⁴⁰ Thus while the evil LRA is always in the crosshairs of the international media, the same media protects the saintly SPLA, no matter the justice or criminality of either.⁴¹

The mass media and foreign policy discourses are saturated with the writings, op-eds and policy briefs of “experts” that serve as apologetic propagandists for foreign interventions and hidden agendas. Such “experts” exercise stark biases in naming or delineating the “killers” versus “victims” and for this reason they often gain exclusive access to mass media venues. The system of information control becomes self-perpetuating in favor of power and deception.

Experts working for the Pentagon, State Department, or national security apparatus deploy arguments cloaked in righteous assumptions of higher morality about human rights or humanitarian concern. For example, Sudan “experts” like Dr. Eric Reeves and Alex De Waal provide a constant barrage of one-sided propaganda to manufacture consent at home and project American power in Sudan.⁴¹ This propaganda is unassailable by Western “news” consumers, because consumers are not otherwise privy to, interested in, or compelled to discover the deeper truths.

STARBUCKS GENOCIDE COFFEE

Like the “Save Tibet” campaign, the one-sided propaganda campaign and institutionalized big-money networking of the “Save Darfur” movement compelled ordinary citizens to become active participants in “stopping genocide.” A similar agenda is driving the new “RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO” initiative. While their ideological programs are advanced through the Western mass media, organizations—e.g. the International Crises Group, Center for American Progress, International Rescue Committee, ENOUGH!—work to manufacture consent and channel popular consciousness through jingoistic sloganeering and humanistic language that offers “news” consumers exactly what they want to hear: peacekeeping, human rights, democracy, sustainable development, participatory mapping, Africa for the African people, and “never again” interventions against genocide.

Such propaganda campaigns proscribe ideas and possibilities, and they subvert popular movements. In the end, the true grass roots initiatives for social justice and legitimate peace have been expropriated or channeled into serving narrow prerogatives of power. And the voices of the voiceless are crushed, along with their bodies. The International Criminal Court serves a similar and necessary function in manufacturing consent and consolidating Western power. It is really about keeping up appearances: the appearance of justice being served, human rights being protected.

On October 14, 2005, the ICC unsealed arrest warrants against five LRA commanders, all of them black Africans: Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen. In October 2008, after the LRA committed fresh atrocities in northern DRC, the ICC renewed its calls for the arrest of Joseph Kony.⁴²

Uganda’s representation at ICC proceedings to explore war crimes in Congo has included at least two very high-profile lawyers from Foley Hoag LLP, an influential Washington law firm.⁴³ Similarly, the Pentagon seconded its lawyers from the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corp to the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), where victor’s justice has arbitrarily and selectively politicized genocide in favor of the Pentagon’s UPDF/RPA proxy governments.⁴⁴

Foley Hoag LLP is also tied to the U.S.-Uganda Friendship Council, a consortium that involves Coke, Pfizer and Chevron-Texaco. Coke director Kathleen Black is a principle in the Hearst media empire, while Coke directors Warren Buffet and Barry Diller are directors of the Washington Post Company, and these are the media institutions that whitewash the white-collar crime in Congo. Uganda’s image is further sanitized by London PR firm Hill & Knowlton.”⁴⁵

From 2000 to at least 2004, Yoweri Museveni was co-chair of the euphemistically named Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa (PCHPA). The PCHPA is a front for multinational corporations and USAID, a Christian-based “soft policy” wing of the Pentagon that uses food as a weapon under the disguise of charity. Other PCHPA chairs include former U.S. Senator and Alston & Bird lawyer Bob Dole; Peter Seligman, Chair and CEO of Conservation International, an NGO connected to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Jane Goodall Institute operations in DRC; George Rupp, President of the International Rescue Committee, a flak-producing organization involved in DRC; and Alpha Konare, the former Chair of the Commission of the African Union (2003-2008), the governing body responsible, for example, for oversight of the supposedly “neutral” African Union “peacekeeping” force in Darfur, Sudan—a force that again deploys RDF forces as proxies to secretly further U.S./U.K. interests.

One PCHPA director also represents Bread for the World, a protectionist and nationalistic U.S.-based Christian evangelical “charity” whose directors include Bob Dole and former White House cabinet officials Mike McCurry and Leon Panetta. Along with Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice, Gayle Smith, Donald Payne, Ed Royce, John Podesta, Anthony Lake, Bill and Hillary Clinton and others, these are the architects of covert operations in Africa during the Clinton years.²

Senator Tom Daschle is a Special Policy Advisor for Alston & Bird, and an Honorary Senior fellow of the Center for American Progress (CAP), the nationalist U.S. big money “think tank” behind a multitude of front groups with hidden foreign policy agendas around Uganda, Rwanda, Congo and Sudan. These include the ENOUGH! Project, the new RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO initiative, the Genocide Intervention Network, the ONE Campaign and the International Crisis Group (ICG)—all of which somehow involve agents like John Prendergast, former national security insider for President Bill Clinton. It is interesting that a lot of the same people show up tied to different organizations involved in “grass roots” campaigns to help Africa.

The ONE campaign was launched by a coalition of 11 prominent corporate so-called “charity” organizations, including Bread for the World, CARE, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee (IRC); each of these profit-based organizations has a euphemistic name that suggests a humanitarian or humanistic agenda, but they actually serve corporate interests. CARE has received funding from weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corporation. In 1996 the IRC reportedly took over bases near the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire and proceeded to shell the camps with heavy weapons; also, Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright are IRC overseers.⁴⁶ ICG director Zbigniew Brzezinski is an advisor to President-elect Barack Obama.

In July 2008, Senator Tom Daschle led a special delegation of policymakers on behalf of the ONE Campaign, described as “a bipartisan movement of over 2 million advocates for the elimination of global poverty and disease.” The ONE delegation also “met with civic and government leaders, as well as everyday citizens and entrepreneurs, to discuss Rwanda’s courageous national reconciliation since the genocide in 1994…”⁴⁷

Child Soldiers in the Congolese National Army FARDC— Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo copyright 2006 Keith Harmon Snow.

Daschle and Dole’s law firm, Alston & Bird, is a sponsor of the corporate “Millennium Promise” project, and they provide pro bono legal services, in both the U.S. and Africa, for the Millennium Villages and Millennium Promise, both in Rwanda.⁴⁷ These programs are designed to put a “development” face on Africa while maintaining structural inequality, protectionist trade barriers and military superiority.

To put it simply, white people will always get the best jobs, corporations will run and ruin the world—dumping substandard and outdated products on confused populations; seeding the natural world with genetically engineered crops; peddling pretty plastic junk; pushing pharmaceutical pills; strip-mining everything—and we will all fool ourselves and ease our consciences by pretending that we are breaking down barriers of inequality and building a better world.

According to a very high level United Nations special investigator sent to negotiate with LRA commanders in DRC’s far north Garamba region in February 2007, the Uganda government had then recently “arrested” a U.S. military agent and five Congolese militia leaders discovered in Uganda. Originally detained in Kampala, the U.S. military agent was nonetheless allowed to move freely in and out of the DRC.⁴⁸

The U.S. maintains “Intelligence Fusion Cells” in Congo and one cell, in Kisangani, capital of Orientale, was situated in a compound, ringed with coils of barbed wire, near the Tshopo River power station, and was run by a “ex” marine named “Tom” who refused to discuss the cell. There were two U.S. military and two Rwandan military working there.⁴⁹ MONUC’s local spokesman confirmed only that the cell revolves around a “tripartite security arrangement between Rwanda, Uganda and DRC,” adding, “that one we don’t touch. It’s very hot.”⁵⁰ British soldiers stationed in Kisangani said the American fusion cell “monitors intelligence on tantalum extraction.”

A few years back, the U.S. donated to Rwanda two Boeing aircraft that were routinely used by the regime’s Ministry of Defense for arms and minerals trafficking between Rwanda, Belgium, Albania and Bulgaria. Operated by Silverback Cargo Freighters, a Kigali-based company blocked from European airspace since 2006, the planes were also reportedly used for CIA operations, including the transfer of U.S. “war on terror” prisoners. The Rwandan government refused to aid UN investigators seeking information about the company’s clandestine operations.⁵¹⁵²

Recent massive human suffering and the escalation of hostilities by the Nkunda army in eastern Congo have provoked a spate of high-visibility policy statements where some powerful Western interests are calling on the “international community” to strengthen the MONUC military occupation of Congo, while other powerful interests from the new humanitarian order are calling for the European Union to send in a rapid reaction force.⁵³

BLESSED BE THE PEACEKEEPERS

Congolese sources everywhere confirm the widespread involvement of MONUC soldiers in guns-for-minerals swaps and sexual violence; sources repeatedly accuse MONUC troops of delivering weapons back to militias to justify MONUC’s one billion dollar a year occupation of Congo.⁵⁴

“MONUC was giving weapons to the militias,” says yet one more Congolese official. “MONUC had their own ambitions. It was about gold. The peace that was achieved in Orientale around 2006 was not achieved by MONUC; the National Police Force from Kinshasa and the integrated FARDC brigades achieved it. MONUC was frustrating the peace.”⁵⁵

In the new Congo war documentary by Dutch filmmaker Renzo Martens, ENJOY POVERTY, we see South African mining staff of AngloGold Ashanti confirming MONUC’s pivotal role in securing the company’s access to gold in Orientale. The entire “humanitarian” enterprise must be properly situated in the political economy of profit-based charity, resource control and racial injustice.⁵⁶

MONUC doesn’t need more guns, it needs fewer guns (but arms dealers keep shipping them in), and Congo doesn’t need more foreign mercenary forces posing as “peacekeepers” but secretly serving narrow, undisclosed interventionist agendas on behalf of multinational corporations.

Ditto for Darfur. In an “explosive” new book by progressive activists that mildly exposes some of the hypocrisies of the Save Darfur movement we find the authors calling for greater military intervention and sneering at others who have criticized and rejected military intervention for being what we might call the new, old humanitarian warfare in Africa.⁵⁷

The book, Scramble For Africa: Darfur—Intervention and the USA, cites ad nauseum all the usual propagandists that are monopolizing the English language mass media, publications from the far right to progressive left, on Darfur. These experts include Alex De Waal and Eric Reeves—and the International Crisis Group—but there are plenty of citations and references to journalists who peddle the establishment inventions and thereby black out the forces of Western control.

By page xvii of the preface, the authors—who have no experience anywhere near Sudan—have become the prosecution, judges and jury of their own private international court: “That [President Omar al-Bashir] is a major war criminal is beyond doubt,” they wrote, “as is the fact that he should face trial for his substantial violations of international human rights law.” The American authors, it seems, are also in the business of overthrowing governments: “Given the litany of abuses for which [the Government of Sudan] is guilty,” they wrote, “there would be little to mourn in Bashir’s overthrow, and such a move—depending, of course, on the actors involved, and its prospects for success—could be cautiously supported.”⁵⁸

In other words, it’s fine for white people from the United States to organize the overthrow of sovereign governments, as long as we selectively chose the “right” people for the job. The authors never similarly condemn “leaders” from the United States, Canada, Israel or Europe, and they never suggest that President Bush should be overthrown, or that Donald Rumsfeld, or Henry Kissinger, or General Norman Schwarzkopf, or Maurice Tempelsman, should be prosecuted for war crimes. The book makes no mention of covert operations or private military companies operating in South Sudan or Darfur, and while it illuminates the Bush Administration’s collaboration with the Khartoum government, it is nothing more than a cheerleading tool for the opposing power blocks, including the massive so-called “humanitarian relief” operations. Such is the racial obliviousness of the new humanitarian disorder.

But Darfur’s cheerleaders and Khartoum’s enemies are not so neutral as they appear.

In 1992, Darfur human rights expert Alex De Waal established African Rights, an NGO based in London, co-directed with Rakiya Omaar. In August 1995, African Rights published the report, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, one of the first “human rights investigations” to appear after the so-called “100 days of killing” and the successful RPA/UPDF coup d’etat in Rwanda of 1994.

“Among the early reports on the genocide, none matches Africa[n] Rights, Rwanda, Death, Despair and Defiance (September 1994) for the clinical description of the atrocities inflicted upon Tutsi victims,” wrote renowned Africa scholar René Lemarchand, “ranging from political murders to collective massacres in churches, schools and stadiums, and the daily manhunts conducted on the hills. Significant as it is to our understanding of the sheer savagery that has accompanied the carnage, the African Rights report is utterly silent on the grisly crimes and torture inflicted by Tutsi soldiers on innocent Hutu civilians, some of which are by now well documented (Nduwayo, 2002: 9-16; Amnesty International, 1994; Des Forges, 1999; Reyntjens and De Souter, 1994).”⁵⁹

Lemarchand makes the usual error of accepting the “clinical description of the atrocities inflicted on Tutsis” at face value. How does he know they are all Tutsis and only Tutsis? Because African Rights says they are? Where does he get his information about “daily manhunts conducted on the hills”? Why would Lemarchand so quickly trust the claims of a report that he simultaneously castigates for its (authors’) extreme and obvious biases?

“This woman of Somali origin is an RPF agent,” says Jean-Marie Higiro of African Rights’ co-director Rakiya Omaar. Higiro was Director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINFOR). “She has her office in Kigali. In 1994 she was at Mulindi, the headquarters of the RPF. As the RPF conquered territories from the Rwandan Government Forces, she collected information fed to her by the RPF.”⁶⁰

“An intensive back and forth activity between this so-called British human rights organization, African Rights, and the intelligence services of the President’s office and the military, has been observed,” wrote Paul Rusesabagina. “Her investigators are very close to the [RPF/RDF] military intelligence apparatus, and the modus operandi of both appears to be similar.”⁶¹

The African Rights report was one of the first to manufacture and promulgate the false (one-sided) mythology of “genocide” in Rwanda. It says nothing about RPF/A massacres or foreign military involvement and peddles the now clichéd and disingenuous stereotypes about victims and killers. What does the African Rights report tell us about the veracity of Alex De Waal’s “human rights” reports and political analyses coming out of Darfur? Further, Alex De Waal’s ties to U.S. intelligence include his involvement with Harvard University and the Council on Foreign Relations: De Waal was a member of a CFR task force focused on defining a new military and intelligence engagement with Africa that is cloaked in “humanitarian” rhetoric.⁶²

We further witness the hypocrisy and international scandal of having three battalions of Pentagon “trained” Rwandan Defense Force (RDF) “peacekeepers” operating in Darfur while the RDF is openly backing Laurent Nkunda’s occupation proxy force in Congo. Similarly, the UPDF—having received fresh military training by U.S. covert forces in Uganda—has been sent to Somalia. This is not “peacekeeping,” it is crazy making.

A few well-placed arrests—beginning in Washington, Frankfurt, London, New York or Brussels—would redress the problem of impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity everywhere.

THE KANSTEINER CONNECTION

The Moto Gold Project is located in the Kilo Moto goldfields in the north east of the DRC, some 150 kilometers west of the Ugandan border town of Arua. Kilo Moto was President Joseph Mobutu’s private mine, but the project, at various stages, involved powerful Western interlocutors: Belgians Yves Le Norvan and the Damseau family; Roger Lemaire, a Houston (TX) insider; and an Israeli military agent identified as David Agnon.⁶³ Kilo Moto’s gold, then as now, usually exited Congo (Zaire) through remote airstrips.⁶³

The present Moto Gold Mining “lease”—a massive land grab corruptly obtained—covers an area of approximately 1,841 square kilometers and involves sites at Durba, Watsa and Doko. Moto Gold’s partners in Orientale include Siemens and Ken Overseas. Siemens director Tiego Moseneke is also a director of PetroSA, a new South African oil minor poaching DRC oil concessions on Lake Albert.⁶⁴ Ken Overseas Company is involved in the Minière de Bakwanga (MIBA) diamond mines in Congo’s Mbuji-Mayi province. In their reports on war and plunder in DRC, the United Nations Panel of Experts named Ken Overseas in a MIBA mining consortium linked to Belgian tycoon Philippe de Moerloose and Israeli mining magnate Dan Gertler; both men have been flagged for arms trafficking.⁶⁵

Walter Kansteiner III is one of the shadiest architects of Congo’s troubles. The son of a coltan trader in Chicago, Kansteiner was Assistant Secretary of State for Africa under G.W. Bush and former “National Security” insider and member of the Department of Defense Task Force on Strategic Minerals under Bill Clinton. Kansteiner’s speech at The Forum for International Policy in October of 1996 advocated partitioning the Congo (Zaire) into smaller states based on ethnic lineage; Laurent Kabila was marching across Zaire at the time.⁶⁶

The balkanization of Congo appears to be a major objective behind the current organized chaos in the Great Lakes region.⁶⁷ Further, it is obvious that conflicts from within the U.S.—between the Department of State, Pentagon and intelligence agencies—are translating to regional warfare on the ground in, especially, Sudan, Uganda, and Congo.

Kansteiner is a trustee of the Africa Wildlife Foundation—another profit-based “conservation” corporation tied to Conservation International, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and the Jane Goodall Institute—entities whose front of gorilla and chimpanzee protection hides a deeper agenda.⁶⁸ It is not surprising to find that one of the AWF’s premier sponsors is Barrick Gold. Kansteiner is also linked to Richard Leakey’s paramilitary front organization Wildlife Direct, and to the Africa Conservation Fund, a shady Washington D.C. entity.⁶⁹

Kansteiner is a director of the precious metal firm Titanium Resources Group, a company deeply tied to Sierra Rutile Limited, a firm pivotal to the bloodshed in Sierra Leone.⁷⁰ Sierra Rutile Ltd. director Sir Sam Jonah reportedly helped finance Rwandan RCD rebel groups in DRC while he was a CEO of Ashanti Goldfields; Jonah is also a director for Moto Gold.² Sierra Rutile is owned by Max and Jean-Raymond Boulle and Robert Friedland, “Friends of Bill” Clinton who are linked to clandestine networks of offshore holdings and front companies involved in weapons trafficking, money laundering and human rights atrocities from Burma to the Congos to Mongolia.²

On April 28, 2008, the ICC issued an international arrest warrant for militia commander Bosco Ntaganda, former commander of the Forces Patriotiques pour la Libération du Congo (FPLC), a militia that operated in the oil and gold areas of Orientale. Bosco is currently the Chief of Staff of Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP army in North Kivu.

On July 14, 2008, the prosecutor of the ICC applied for an arrest warrant for Sudanese President, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, accused of crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur. Bashir is an Arab—another person of color—and the ICC has deeply politicized the Darfur conflict in keeping with the imperialist smokescreen of the “Save Darfur” movement.

There have been no ICC indictments against a single white man who could be proven to be equally culpable in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, though the list of possibilities—as indicated herein—is very, very long.

“Its name notwithstanding, the ICC is rapidly turning into a Western court to try African crimes against humanity,” writes Mahmood Mamdani. “It has targeted governments that are U.S. adversaries and ignored actions the United States doesn’t oppose, like those of Uganda and Rwanda in eastern Congo, effectively conferring impunity on them.”⁷¹

Kagame & RPF officials & Directors of Royal/Dutch Shell Corp. (Photo courtesy New Vision newspaper Kampala, Uganda.)

The writing is on the wall, and we can anticipate the eventual arrest of Ugandan military commanders, including Laurent Nkunda, James Kazini, James Kabarebe, Salim Saleh and Paul Kagame. Such arrests aren’t likely to involve legitimate judicial proceedings, and it won’t merely because these people deserve to be arrested, which they do, and they probably won’t be arrested before a few more million people are slaughtered in Central Africa.

The arrests will come because these are the notoriously visible people of color used to make invisible—quite literally black out—the white war criminals and covert operators wrecking havoc in Africa and elsewhere around the world. They are the embraceable black Africans, and the future fall guys, and Africa’s “leaders” should take note. And so should Barack Obama.

Even more critical is the need for the Western news consuming public to recognize the face of propaganda and the nature of “change” and what it means to people of color everywhere. Thus it is critical to note the recent shift in media coverage that accompanies the imminent shift in the post-election balance of U.S. power. General Laurent Nkunda has been deeply involved in Congo for years and the Kagame military machine has been shipping weapons and officers directly to Congo; these Rwanda Defense Force (RDF) officers infiltrate the country and direct the “rebel” operations, and the CNDP has served as a lever of power used against the Kabila government. Reported herein—and nowhere else—is the ongoing secret military involvement of Yoweri Museveni and the Ugandan crime networks.

Only recently, as power shifts from the G.W. Bush power elite to the incoming Obama Administration—being packed with Clintonite friends and officials, and by Democratic Party financiers like diamond kingpin Maurice Tempelsman—has Nkunda or Rwanda been subject to any kind of “harsh criticism”. The New York Times article of December 3, 2008, is the perfect example of the “news” media serving hidden agendas. In “Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo,” the New York Times peddles the standard narrative about “genocide in Rwanda” in 1994.

Suddenly, writes Jeffrey Gettleman, one of the NYT’s chief Congo propagandists of late, there is a “secret Rwandan brotherhood” and Rwandan government officials are involved in the bloodletting and plunder in Congo.⁷² Such “exposés” appear only because power factions—in this case a right-wing Republican faction allied with the Bush administration—are exerting leverage through their mouthpiece, the New York Times, and thus mildly exposing the obvious links of the former Clinton administration—a competing power faction, more heavily comprised of right-wing Democrats—to war and covert operations in Congo. There is a similar political economy of intervention at work vis-à-vis Darfur, Sudan.

Suddenly it is beneficial to name a few names—names like Modeste Makabuza Ngoga—names that have been known and named before.⁷³ These New York Times articles are nothing more than expedience, tricks in a bag of tricks, as power jockeys for its positions, and for massive private profit, as we approach the zero hour and the twilight of savior Barack Obama’s coming, bringing “change” to America, and the same old, new, humanitarian warfare to Africa.

1. There are exceptions to the rule, including the extensive publications by this author and those by Africa researcher David Barouski. See, e.g., David Barouski, “Mining in the Ituri Province of the Congo-A Contemporary Profile,” Z-Net, April 15, 2008; and David Barouski, Laurent Nkundabatware, His Rwandan Allies, and the ex-ANC Mutiny: Chronic Barriers to Lasting Peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo, February 13, 2007. [↩]
2. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Books, 1999. [↩] [↩] [↩] [↩]
3. Investigations into the 1994 events in Rwanda and documents presented at the International Criminal tribunal for Rwanda reveal a huge body of evidence supporting what soon become obvious conclusions. [↩]
4. keith harmon snow and David Barouski, “Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in Congo,” Z Magazine, March 1, 2006; and Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold, June 1, 2005. [↩]
5. See: keith harmon snow, “Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang,” Dissident Voice, February 9, 2008. [↩]
6. Private investigations, North Kivu, DRC, 2005-2007, and private communications, 2008. [↩]
7. Private communications, July through November 2008. [↩]
8. See: Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Books, 1999; and keith harmon snow, “Darfurism, Uganda, and U.S. War in Africa: The Spectre of Continental Genocide,” Dissident Voice, November 24, 2007; private interviews, eyewitnesses working in western Uganda at the time, October 2007. [↩]
9. The Acholi people—non-combatant men, but mostly women and children—have suffered decades of genocidal treatment by UPDF soldiers deployed by Yoweri Museveni, president in Uganda, and top military commanders Gen. James Kazini, Gen. Salim Saleh, Gen. Kahinda Otafiir, Gen. Aronda Nyakairima, Lt. Gen. Katumba Wamala, Maj. Gen. Jim Owoyesigire, and Brig. Gen. Robert Rusoke. [↩]
10. Private interview, eyewitness working in western Uganda at the time, October 2007; see also Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999, Mellon Books, 1999. [↩]
11. Howard French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Vintage, April 2005. [↩]
12. Mahmood Mamdani, Understanding the Crisis in Kivu: Report of the CODESRIA Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo September, 1997, Centre for African Studies University of Cape Town, November 20, 1998. [↩]
13. “ZAIRE: Peace Possible?” “Interview with Bill Richardson,” PBS Online News Hour, May 9, 1997. [↩]
14. Friends of Rwanda advisory board. [↩]
15. “A Brief Profile of Joe Ritchie,” New Times, November 26, 2008. [↩]
16. Marc Kaufman and Robert E. Pierre, “Rich Brothers Mission to Save Afghanistan Stirs Suspicions,” Washington Post News Service, International herald Tribune On-Line, November 9, 2001. [↩]
17. Quotes are used because the “genocide” label and realities on the ground are highly contested. [↩]
18. Moto Gold Mines web site. [↩]
19. Private interviews, Bunia, Kisangani and Zani, DRC, March 26-28, 2007; and Mwana Africa presentation, 30th Minesite Mining Forum March 28, 2006. [↩]
20. Mwana Africa presentation, 30th Minesite Mining Forum March 28, 2006. [↩] [↩]
21. See: keith harmon snow, “Northern Uganda: Hidden War, Massive Suffering: Another White People’s War for Oil,” Global Research, May 26, 2007. [↩]
22. See: keith harmon snow, “Three Cheers for Eve Ensler? Propaganda, White Collar Crime and Sexual Atrocities in Eastern Congo,” Z-Net, October 24, 2007. [↩]
23. Jeffrey Gettleman, “Congo’s Riches, looted by renegade Troops,” New York Times, November 18, 2008, p. 1. [↩]
24. See: keith harmon snow, “A People’s History of Congo’s Jean-Pierre Bemba,” Toward Freedom, September 18, 2007. [↩]
25. See: Dr. Enoch (Helan) Page, “‘Black Male’ Imagery and Media Containment of African American Men,” American Anthropologist, March 1997, Vol. 99, No. 1, pp. 99-111. [↩]
26. See e.g., William K. Lietzau. [↩]
27. Interview with human rights investigator, Bunia, DRC, March 23, 2007. [↩]
28. Private communications, Orientale, DRC, November. [↩]
29. Private interview, Aru official, Aru, DRC, March 26, 2007. [↩]
30. See: “An Industry Rebirth? Oil in the DRC,” Consultancy Africa Intelligence; and Tower Resources; H Oil and Minerals Ltd. [↩]
31. Tower Resources. [↩]
32. Ken Silverstein, “The Arms Dealer Next Door: International billionaire, French prisoner, Angolan weapons broker, Arizona Republican. Who is Pierre Falcone?” In These Times, December 22, 2001. [↩]
33. Christopher Hitchens, “Childhood’s End,” Vanity Fair, January 20076. [↩]
34. After querying Vanity Fair editors with a story idea about war in Africa, the editors responded that Christopher Hitchens is their sole source correspondent on Africa. [↩]
35. See: Richard Bartholomew, “American Pastor Helps SPLA Battle LRA in Sudan,” January 25, 2005; and keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, February 7, 2007. [↩]
36. Jo Becker, “Children as Weapons of War,” Human Rights Watch World Report 2004, Human Rights Watch, January 2004. [↩]
37. Interviews with UN Official in eastern DRC, August 2006 and February 2007. See also: “U.S. asked to arrest Ugandan-American rebel Jongomoi Okidi-Olal—The real brain behind LRA leadership?” Xinhua, April 9, 2006. [↩]
38. See: Charles Onyango Obbo, “Soon the Guns of Goma might be heard in Kampala,” Monitor On-Line, November 19, 2008. [↩]
39. Private interviews, Bunia and Kisangani, February and March 2007. [↩]
40. The international rhino conservation programs at Garamba are reportedly somehow tied to the political interests of the opposition party in Zimbabwe; private interview, UN investigator, Kisangani, DRC 2007. [↩]
41. See: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, February 7, 2007. [↩] [↩]
42. “ICC calls for renewed efforts to arrest Joseph Kony,” RNW International Justice Desk, October 6, 2008. [↩]
43. Paul S. Reichler and Lawrence H. Martin. See: Public sitting held on Monday 18 April 2005, at 10 a.m., at the Peace Palace, President Shi presiding, in the case concerning Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Uganda), International Court of Justice, CR 2005/7, 2005. [↩]
44. Ralph G. Kershaw, “Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: International Justice According to Washington,” Covert Action Quarterly, No. 74, Fall 2002. [↩]
45. Jeevan Vasagar, “Uganda hires PR agency to buff up its image,” Guardian, May 21, 2005. [↩]
46. Private interview with UN special investigator XXX XXX, Kisangani, DRC, 2006; investigations in Goma and Bukavu, DRC, 2005-2007. [↩]
47. See: “Senator Tom Daschle Leads Delegation in Rwanda,” Alston & Bird web site, July 22, 2008. [↩] [↩]
48. Private interview with UN special investigator XXX XXX, Kisangani, DRC, 2006. [↩]
49. Investigations of “American Intelligence Fusion Cell,” Kisangani, DRC, July 31, 2006. [↩]
50. Investigations and interviews in Kisangani, DRC, 2006. [↩]
51. Private interview with UN special investigator XXX XXX, Kisangani, DRC 2007. [↩]
52. See: “Silverback Cargo Freighters Rwanda,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and Silverback Cargo Freighters. [↩]
53. Marianna Brungs, “EU: Coalition of Leaders Calls for EU Force in Congo,” Crisis Watch Press Release, Human Rights Watch, London, November 27, 2008. [↩]
54. Private interviews, Bunia, DRC, February and March 2007. [↩]
55. Private interviews, Bunia, Aru and Zani, February 2007. [↩]
56. Renzo Martens, Enjoy Poverty, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. [↩]
57. See: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia? The New, Old, Humanitarian Warfare in Africa,” Global Research, February 7, 2007. [↩]
58. Kevin Funk and Steven Fake, The Scramble for Africa: Darfur—Intervention and the USA, Black Rose Books, 2008. [↩]
59. René Lemarchand, Scholarly Review: Rwanda: The State of Research. [↩]
60. Private communication, Jean-Marie Higiro, October 17, 2008. [↩]
61. Paul Rusesabagina, “Rusesabagina responds to Rwanda government book on ‘Hotel Rwanda’,” EUX-TV (Brussels), April 12, 2008. [↩]
62. More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa, Council on Foreign Relations, Task Force Report Number 56, January 2006. [↩]
63. Private interview, keith harmon snow with OKIMO Company officials, Bunia, March 24, 2007. [↩] [↩]
64. Legal Brief Today, July 27, 2006; and “Local Companies in Scramble for DRC Oil,” Johannesburg Sunday Times, August 18, 2008; and H Oil and Minerals Ltd. web site. [↩]
65. The others included the Groupe Van De Ghinste, Demimpex, Chanic and OSS; both OSS and Demimpex are De Moerloose companies. See: Report of the United Nations Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Also see: keith harmon snow, “Gertler’s Bling Bang Torah Gang,” Dissident Voice, February 9, 2008; and keith harmon snow, “Congo’s President Joseph Kabila: Dynasty or Travesty?” Toward Freedom, November 13, 2007. [↩]
66. “Genocide and Covert Operations In Africa, 1993-1999,” United States One Hundred Seventh Congress, Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, First Session, 17 May 2001, comp. Centre for Research on Globalization. [↩]
67. “The U.S. (Under)mining Job of Africa.” [↩]
68. See the KING KONG series published by keith harmon snow and Georgianne Nienaber, Op-Ed News, 2007 and 2008. [↩]
69. Africa Wildlife Foundation. [↩]
70. Titanium Resources Group. [↩]
71. Mahmood Mamdani, “The New Humanitarian Order,” The Nation, September 29, 2008. [↩]
72. Jeffrey Gettleman, “Rwanda Stirs Deadly Brew of Troubles in Congo,” New York Times, December 3, 2008; and Jerome Delay, “Many of the most powerful people in Congo have close ties to Rwanda’s elite in Kigali,” New York Times, December 3, 2008. [↩]
73. See: Roxanne Stasyszyn, “A World Playground: Congolese People Sacrificed for International Games and Profits,” Dissident Voice, November 8, 2008. [↩]

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It marks the single biggest government bailout to date, outstripping the $200 billion allocated in the takeover of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the more than $150 billion given to insurance conglomerate American International Group.

The agreement reached between the failing bank and top federal regulators, headed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy Geithner, makes the government responsible for the vast bulk of a $306 billion pool of worthless or dubious residential and commercial loans and mortgage-backed assets, in addition to injecting $27 billion in government funds into Citigroup’s coffers in return for preferred shares of stock.

The terms of the deal are extraordinarily favorable to the bank, which is allowed to pay lower-than-market interest on the preferred shares without having to accept any government control over its investment or lending policies.

The current management, headed by CEO Vakrim Pandit, will remain in place. There are no requirements that the bank use the federal money to lend to other banks, businesses or consumers, restrictions on executive compensation are of the same token character as those included in the original $700 billion bank bailout package approved last month by Congress, and a requirement that the bank adjust the mortgage terms for some distressed homeowners mirrors a program already instituted by Citigroup.

The three agencies that brokered the deal, the Treasury Department, the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), let it be known that the Citigroup bailout would set the pattern for similar rescue operations of other banks and financial institutions. President George W. Bush underscored this point in remarks to the press Monday morning following a meeting with Paulson and other top economic advisers.

“We have made these kinds of decisions in the past, made one last night, and if need be we’re going to make these kind of decisions to safeguard our financial system in the future,” Bush said.

He pointedly announced that he had informed President-Elect Barack Obama of the bailout agreement on Sunday. Obama, for his part, went out of his way to make it clear that the Wall Street bailout would continue when he takes office in January, telling the press that he was committed to do “whatever it takes” to shore up the financial system and announcing that he had spoken on Sunday with Bush and Fed Chairman Bernanke. Standing behind Obama at a press conference called to announce his top economic advisers was Geithner, his pick for treasury secretary, who had spent the previous two days working out the terms of the government rescue of Citigroup.

According to a report posted Monday by Bloomberg News, with the rescue of Citigroup the US government has to date provided $3.18 trillion to financial institutions in the form of loans, cash infusions and federal guarantees of assets.

Under conditions of a deepening US and world recession that is further undermining the financial markets, this represents only a down-payment on the vast social resources and taxpayer funds that will be channeled into securing the economic interests and personal fortunes of the American financial elite. As Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard put it, “It will mean spending trillions of dollars.”

The United States is, quite literally, being bankrupted to rescue the Wall Street multi-millionaires whose reckless pursuit of bloated profits and compensation packages precipitated a breakdown of the global financial system that is threatening to plunge the world into a new Depression.

Under the terms of the bailout, as reported in the press, the Treasury Department, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve will guarantee all but $40 billion of a pool of $306 billion of the $2.2 trillion in assets on Citigroup’s books, including residential mortgages, commercial real estate, leveraged loans, collateralized debt obligations and auction rate securities.

Citi will absorb the first $29 billion in losses from the government-backed asset pool, use $7 billion in reserve capital to cover additional losses and pay 10 percent of any further losses. The Treasury will take on the next $5 billion in losses after the $36 billion covered by Citigroup, the FDIC will absorb the following $10 billion in losses, and the Fed will cover the rest.

The Treasury Department will also inject $20 billion from the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) into Citi in return for preferred stock, for which the bank will pay an annual dividend of 8 percent. Citigroup will receive an additional $7 billion in return for preferred shares issued to both the Treasury and the FDIC as recompense for their roles in guaranteeing the bank’s failing assets.

In addition to this $27 billion capital infusion, according to the Financial Times, the “reconstruction of Citi’s balance sheet in effect frees up an additional $13 billion, so the total capital benefit to Citi will be $40 billion.”

This cash infusion is over and above the $25 billion handed to Citi by the Treasury last month as part of $125 billion allocated to the nine biggest US banks.

Citi will also issue warrants to the US Treasury and the FDIC for some 254 million common shares at a strike price of $10.61.

The only significant condition placed on Citigroup is a requirement that for the next three years it pay no more than a penny per share annually in stock dividends. This, however, is only a small penalty for big shareholders, whose equity investments would have been wiped out had the bank been allowed to fail.

Neither the government nor Citi sought to conceal the extraordinarily lenient terms of the deal. The 8 percent dividend on the preferred shares is lower than what private shareholders have been offered.

Government officials said they did not want to impose punitive terms on Citigroup because its stability was crucial to protecting the financial system. Citigroup’s chief financial officer, Gary Crittenden, repeated the same line, saying the agreement “was not about punitive, it was about financial stability.”

Crittenden added that the deal was deliberately packaged in “a plain vanilla flavor” so it could be applied to other lending institutions.

Wall Street applauded the bailout, sending share prices soaring on Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 397 points, a gain of 4.9 percent. The other major indexes also rose sharply, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index climbing 6.5 percent and the Nasdaq Composite Index gaining 6.3 percent. On top of Friday’s surge following the announcement that Geithner would be Obama’s treasury secretary, Monday’s close marked the biggest two-day rally since 1987.

Citigroup stock, which had plunged 60 percent just last week to a 16-year low of $3.77, bringing its decline to 87 percent over the past year, climbed 58 percent. Other financial stocks also rose sharply, with JPMorgan Chase and Bank of American jumping more than 21 percent.

Citigroup, just two years ago the largest US bank by market value, came to ruin over the past 16 months as a result of its aggressive involvement over previous years in the highly lucrative subprime mortgage market. At the bidding of its senior counselor and board member, Robert Rubin, who joined Citi after ending his stint as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, the bank took on added risk in order to increase profits. From 2003 to 2005, Citigroup more than tripled its issuance of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)—securities based on bundles of subprime and other risky loans–to more than $20 billion from $6.28 billion, making Citi one of the industry’s biggest players.

As one person who worked in the bank’s CDO department told the New York Times, “As long as you could grow revenues, you could keep your bonus growing.”

When the credit and housing bubbles collapsed in the summer of 2007, Citigroup was hit with massive losses. It has to date registered more than $65 billion in losses, write-downs for bad assets and charges for future losses, more than half from mortgage-related assets. It reported net losses of $20 billion over the last four quarters.

Obama’s economic team, it should be noted, is staffed by Rubin protégés, including Lawrence Summers as his top economic adviser, Geithner at Treasury, and Peter Orszag, his pick to head the Office of Management and Budget.

Despite the market surge on Monday, it is unlikely that the government bailout will solve Citigroup’s solvency problem. It is the world’s largest issuer of credit cards, and the surge in unemployment is certain to result in a flood of defaults on credit card and other forms of consumer debt, further undermining the bank’s balance sheet. In addition, Citi has $1.21 trillion in entities that are not reflected on its balance sheet, some of which are tied to mortgages and will likely have to be brought back onto the bank’s books. Its large holdings in commercial real estate are being hit by defaults in that sector. Finally, Citigroup is heavily invested in so-called emerging markets, which are sliding rapidly into recession.

The same, to a greater or lesser extent, can be said of virtually all of the major US banks. The financial crisis triggered a deepening slump in the broader economy, which is now feeding back once again on the banking system, making inevitable further banking panics and more huge government bailouts. Citigroup itself could very well be returning for a new infusion of taxpayer money.

For their part, the Treasury and the Fed are in a state of disarray and perplexity. Just last Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Paulson told a congressional committee that the government had “turned the corner as far as stabilizing the system” and said he did not plan to announce any new rescue efforts from the $700 billion bailout program. Now he is preparing to ask Congress to authorize the remaining half of the $700 TARP fund and preparing to launch new rescue schemes to stave off a collapse in the consumer credit markets.

While the government hands out trillions to the banks, virtually nothing is allocated to provide relief for millions of workers who are losing their jobs, their homes and their life savings. Instead, the banks that are receiving the government handouts are ruthlessly shrinking their workforces. On November 17, a week before it received its bailout from the government, Citigroup announced plans to slash 52,000 jobs over the next several months. By early next year, the company is expected to reduce its worldwide workforce to 300,000, down 20 percent from a high of 375,000 workers in 2007.

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A new U.S.-Iraq security agreement doesn’t specifically prevent Iraqi officials from bringing criminal charges retroactively in cases such as the September 2007 shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians by contractors protecting a State Department convoy, officials told security company officials during meetings in Washington Thursday.

The news caught company officials by surprise.

“We are still trying to make sense of it,” said Anne E. Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Blackwater Inc., whose security guards have been involved in some of the most controversial incidents in Iraq, including the Sept. 16, 2007, shooting at al Nisoor Square in Baghdad.

An order signed in 2003 by L. Paul Bremer, then head of the Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq, granted private security guards immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law. In the ensuing years, private security contractors became critical to U.S. operations in Iraq, guarding State Department convoys and undertaking other critical military missions.

Contractors were often involved in controversial incidents, including the killing of a bodyguard to Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdel Mahdi.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki insisted that they be accountable to Iraqi law under the new security deal.

But the question of whether Iraqis could use the agreement to prosecute contractors for previous incidents wasn’t addressed in the new agreement. When security company officials asked Thursday, “We told them that’s a question we don’t know the answer to,” said a State Department official, who spoke to reporters about the meetings under the condition of anonymity.

A Defense Department official who also participated in the briefing under the condition of anonymity added that many contractors are taking a “wait-and-see attitude.”

The State Department official said he couldn’t comment on whether the matter had been raised in discussions with the Iraqis, but said the U.S. will bring the contractors’ concerns to them.

He also said U.S. officials didn’t know how the agreement would affect the ability of American civilian officials to move around Iraq. State Department employees currently are protected almost exclusively by private security guards as they travel away from the U.S. Embassy. However, the agreement addresses only security contractors working with U.S. military forces.

We are in “diplomatic engagement with the Iraqis” on the matter, the State Department official said.

The failure of the agreement to clarify issues about security contractors comes as some military officials have questioned whether the agreement doesn’t give Iraq more control of U.S. military activities than U.S. officials had contemplated when they began negotiating the agreement last spring.

U.S. officials have told McClatchy that the Bush administration was eager to complete the deal before it leaves office in January and acquiesced to many Iraqi demands, including deleting sections that would have allowed the Americans to delay their departure if security conditions deteriorated. Currently, the agreement requires all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

The U.S. hasn’t released an English-language version of the agreement, but the Arabic version distributed by the Iraqis calls the accord a “withdrawal agreement.”

As part of the accord, which U.S. and Iraqi officials signed in Baghdad on Monday, effective Jan. 1, the U.S. cannot conduct missions without approval from the Iraqi government. Iraq also will assume control of the U.S.-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad and of the nation’s airspace on Jan. 1.

Representatives of 172 contracting companies were invited to Thursday’s briefings on the agreement. The companies provide a wide array of services, such as security and laundry, and their 173,000 employees outnumber the 150,000 U.S. military personnel now in Iraq.

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The American security company Blackwater is planning to cash in on the rising threat of piracy on the high seas by launching a flotilla of gunboats for hire by the shipping companies.

The firm, which gained international notoriety when its staff killed civilians in Iraq, has already equipped one vessel, called The McArthur, which will carry up to 40 armed guards and have a landing pad for an attack helicopter.

The McArthur, a former survey ship, arrives in the Gulf of Aden, the scene of the recent high-profile hijackings and shootouts with Somali pirates, at the end of the year. It is to be joined by three or four similar vessels over next year to form the company’s private navy.

Blackwater, which has strong ties with the Republican administration in Washington, was the subject of investigations by the US Congress and the Iraqi government after its guards shot dead 17 people in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square last year, a massacre which led directly to changes in law regarding security contractors in Iraq.

Several security companies are rushing to the region despite the presence of British, American, Russian and Indian naval warships, among others, sent to protect ships. For fees ranging from £8,000 to £12,000 for transits of three and five days, companies are offering teams of unarmed guards, “non-lethal deck security personnel”.

With more than 60 ships attacked in the Gulf and ship-owners paying an estimated £75m in ransom for the return of crew and cargo, the security companies foresee a lucrative business.

One US company, Hollowpoint Protective Services, says it is offering a comprehensive service of hostage negotiations backed by armed rescue operations if the talks fail. Eos, a British concern, says it favours a “non-lethal” approach with the use of sophisticated laser, microwave and acoustical devices. But Blackwater plans to have the largest and most heavily armed presence among the security contractors. The company believes that the presence of escorting gunboats will have a deterrent effect, with criminal gangs being forced to switch to more vulnerable targets.

A Blackwater spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, said there have already been about 15 inquiries about its anti-piracy service. The company refused to reveal how much it will charge. Its executive vice-president, Bill Matthews, said the US Navy and the Royal Navy do not have the resources in the region to provide total security, opening up a role for companies such as his. He added: “While there are temporary needs that perhaps outpace the limited resources of the Department of Defence [Washington] and the Ministry of Defence [London], the private sector is available to fill those gaps.

“We have been contacted by ship-owners who say they need our help in making sure goods get to their destination. The McArthur can help us accomplish that. We have not sought to enter the space until recently. It was not part of our business plan. But as the world changes, so does our business plan.”

Nick Davis, a former British Army pilot who runs a company in Poole called Anti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions, said: “It frightens me that Blackwater is going down there. Their background is not in deterrence. Their background is in weapons. To me, the best people to be armed are the military. Pirates might approach McArthur without knowing it’s a Blackwater boat and try to hijack it.”

Chris Austen, chief executive of Maritime & Underwater Security Consultants, in London, said ship-owners should be cautious about armed guards. “There are some flags that prohibit the carriage of arms or the use of violence. There are some insurers that will not accept it, and your insurance will be void.”

Guns for hire: The violent option

The massacre on Baghdad’s “Bloody Sunday” became a lethal symbol of the aggression with which Blackwater’s private army carried out its mission in Iraq. I saw the deadly result of panicked security guards opening fire at a crowded Nisoor Square in the city centre. Round after round mowed down terrified men, women and children. At the end of the shooting spree, 17 people were dead and 20 injured. The killings sparked one of the most bitter and public disputes between the Iraqi government and its American patrons, and brought into focus the often violent conduct of the Western security companies – and that of Blackwater in particular. Operating in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, they were immune from scrutiny or prosecution. This was the seventh shooting of civilians involving Blackwater. The company’s reputation in Iraq was particularly controversial. After Nisoor Square, the Iraqi government threatened to expel Blackwater. But it was forced to let the company operate again under pressure from Washington.

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As the United Nations seeks increased financial assistance from donor countries to help meet the flagging Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the inadequacy of international aid and fairer trade agreements has never been so clear. In 2007 alone, aid to developing countries fell by 8.4%, leaving huge challenges ahead to meet the Gleneagles G-8 target of doubling aid to Africa by 2010. In July, the Doha round of trade talks collapsed again for the third time as developing countries refused to bow down to US pressure allowing increased access to their markets. These factors, alongside the rise in hunger as a result of the food crisis and the worsening global financial crisis, underline the low global priority given by rich nations to the world’s poor.

Pledges and promises of aid to eradicate poverty made by rich nations over the past four decades have resulted in few changes for the Global South. If genuinely concerned with poverty reduction, all OECD member states would have long ago reached the 0.7% target for aid, pledged via the United Nations in 1970. Thirty-eight years later, not a single G8 country has met this target. Any reasons or excuses are rendered largely irrelevant when considering that it took a matter of days for Western governments to find an estimated three trillion dollars to bailout banks caught in the financial crisis. The Jubilee Debt Campaign estimates that less than a quarter of this amount is needed to wipe the debts of the poorest 100 countries - simply to allow them to meet their people’s most basic needs.

At a time when the rise in food prices has caused an additional 105 million people to join the ranks of the hungry, the impact of the economic crisis is likely to see the needs of the developing countries further sidelined as Western governments rush to divert money to contain the problem.

Systemic Failures

As these crises worsen, the global trading system continues to do more harm than good. Import surges of heavily subsidized goods flood the markets of poor countries, wreaking havoc on domestic producers and driving many out of business and into poverty. Additionally, rich nations consistently force developing countries to lower their tariffs while refusing to do so themselves, thereby denying poor farmers the right to protect their livelihoods. The situation is further exacerbated when considering that two-thirds of developing countries are now net food importers. The WTO and the international trading system that it promotes has served to strengthen the status quo, keeping those at the top of the ladder in place while kicking away the ladder from those at the bottom.

Even if the targets for aid and trade were met in the near future, the underlying problems of how trade and aid are administered would continue. Aid would still leave developing countries in a state of dependence upon rich nations and continue to come with conditions attached forcing them to open up their markets to foreign goods and services. Furthermore, aid used by poor countries to pay their external debts would detract them from providing the most basic needs for their citizens. On a broader level, the unaccountable and undemocratic ways in which the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO function would not be addressed, much less resolved, while the enormous influence of corporate lobbying groups would persist.

Calling for better trade rules and more aid to reduce poverty and growing inequality is not enough to achieve real change. The neoliberal ideologies of economic growth are enshrined in the very institutions that are designed to help developing countries prosper. A belief in the free market, deregulation, privatization and corporate globalization is the basis upon which these institutions operate. We have seen in recent weeks how unsustainable the current economic system is and how liable it is of causing a financial tsunami upon the lives of people everywhere.

The biggest financial crisis since the 1930s is not taking place in a vacuum - its roots are based in the neoliberal ideologies stemming from the Washington Consensus dating back to the 1980s. Only a few weeks ago, it seemed we had reached a stage where the conceptual apparatus of neoliberalism had become “so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question.” Since then, the world’s most profitable banks have been part-nationalized, a worldwide recession is looming and a global crisis in confidence in the current economic model has become the norm.

Recent events have demonstrated that to continue working within the confines of the global economic framework may result in slight changes for a small proportion of the world’s poor, but will not be significant enough to achieve targets such as the UN’s Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015. This goal, which is already insufficient, was made further unattainable since the World Bank revised the international poverty line from $1.08 to $1.25 per day, effectively plunging a further 430 million people into extreme poverty overnight.

Securing Basic Human Needs

The current economic system, based on ever-increasing economic growth as the overarching solution to fighting poverty, is both ineffective and unsustainable. The key to tackling poverty and inequality must come from a change in principles and priorities from which practical steps can be taken to put long-term structures in place. One such solution would be to define and redistribute essential resources in order to immediately secure basic human needs. The universal right to a life of dignity and survival has long been enshrined in article 25 of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights which states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services.”

There is no reason why 967 million people should go to bed hungry every day. The problem is not defined by a scarcity of food, but by the insufficient access to resources for millions of the world’s poor who lack the necessary purchasing power to survive. The ‘trickle-down theory’ of economic growth, or the political promise that wealth accumulated by the rich would eventually permeate down through society, has proven to be grossly insufficient in dealing with the urgent demand for basic and essential needs.

To immediately reduce inequality and end extreme poverty, a new international mechanism is required which can facilitate a greater economic sharing of essential resources. The most critical of these are land, basic agricultural produce, water, energy and essential medicines, which together need to be defined, withdrawn and protected from international markets and no longer traded by multinational corporations. A similar initiative was supported by over 100 civil society organizations at the recent WTO talks. Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua presented a proposal to remove healthcare, education, water, telecommunications and energy from the WTO “on the basis that these essential public services are human rights which governments have an obligation to provide, and should not be treated as tradable commodities.”

Although the UN is in need of considerable reform, it should play a lead role in redistributing essential resources. It is the only international body with the experience, expertise and financial resources to initiate and coordinate such a crucial program. A new body within the UN needs to be responsible for a short-term emergency relief program to address the urgent needs of the 50,000 people who die each day from poverty, of which 30,000 are children. Simultaneously, a long-term program could begin to coordinate securing the wider basic needs of the global public.

A genuine change in principles and a renewed sense of commitment is urgently needed to tackle extreme poverty and inequality. A global undertaking of this scale would not come without further challenges and complexities, but it would lead to rapid and progressive change as low-income countries lift themselves out of poverty without permanently relying on financial hand-outs. Campaigning for the redistribution of essential resources, rather than just more aid or fairer trade, is the first vital step to securing the basic needs of the world community.

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A federal grand jury in North Carolina is investigating allegations the controversial private security firm Blackwater illegally shipped assault weapons and silencers to Iraq, hidden in large sacks of dog food, ABCNews.com has learned.

Under State Department rules, Blackwater is prohibited from using certain assault weapons and silencers in Iraq because they are considered “offensive” weapons inappropriate for Blackwater’s role as a private security firm protecting US diplomatic missions.

“The only reason you need a silencer is if you want to assassinate someone,” said former CIA intelligence officer John Kiriakou, an ABC News consultant.

Six Blackwater employees are under investigation by another federal grand jury, in Washington, D.C., in connection with the shooting deaths of at least 17 civilians in September, 2007 at a Baghdad traffic circle. Prosecutors are expected to return indictments in the next few weeks, according to people familiar with the case.

The investigation of the alleged dog food smuggling scheme began last year after two Blackwater employees were caught trying to sell stolen weapons in North Carolina. The two, Kenneth Cashwell and William “Max” Grumiaux pleaded guilty in February and became government witnesses, according to court documents.

Two other former employees tell ABCNews.com they also witnessed the dog food smuggling operation. They say the weapons were actually hidden inside large sacks of dog food, packaged at company headquarters in North Carolina and sent to Iraq for the company’s 20 bomb-sniffing dogs.

Larger items, including M-4 assault weapons, were secreted on shipping pallets surrounded by stacks of dog food bags, the former employees said. The entire pallet would be wrapped in cellophane shrink wrap, the former employees said, making it less likely US Customs inspectors would look too closely.

Last year, a US Department of Commerce inspector at JFK airport in New York discovered an unlicensed two-way radio hidden in a dog food sack being shipped by Blackwater to Iraq, according to people familiar with the incident.

A Blackwater spokesperson, Anne Tyrrell, said certain arms shipmens were sent to Iraq surrounded by dog food “to secure them on the airplane and not to smuggle them.” Tyrrell said she could not comment on specifics because of “the ongoing investigation” but she denied the company had done anything wrong.

In addition to the grand jury investigation, Blackwater sources say the company is facing a multi-million dollar fine for some 900 instances in which it violated State Department licensing requirements for the export of certain weapons.

Of the 900 cases, about 100 of them have been referred to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution, according to lawyers briefed on the case.

Last month, Blackwater hired a team of former federal law enforcement officials and defense experts that it said would review the company’s compliance with export laws.

Andrew Howell, Blackwater’s general counsel, said, “Ongoing reviews by the Department of Justice, State and Commerce have highlighted the need for a significant and systems-wide initiative.”

Another former Blackwater insider who talked with ABCNews.com said company executives made the decision to smuggle the weapons and silencers in the dog food “because it’s a war over there and our guys need them.”

Despite four separate federal grand jury investigations of its operations, Blackwater’s contract to provide security services for the US State Department was renewed earlier this year. The contract pays Blackwater $250 million a year and runs for five years.

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Some of the weapons are believed to have ended up on the country’s black market, department officials told McClatchy, but no criminal charges have been filed in the case.

The expected fine is the result of a long-running federal investigation into whether employees of the firm shipped weapons hidden in shrink-wrapped pallets from its Moyock, N.C. headquarters to Iraq, where Blackwater is the State Department’s largest personal security contractor.

Since the arms shipment allegations first became public 14 months ago, Blackwater, which has received $1.2 billion in federal contracts, according to the Web site fedspending.org, has consistently denied involvement in illicit arms trafficking.

However, the State Department found that Blackwater shipped 900 weapons to Iraq without the paperwork required by arms export control regulations, one department official said. Of that number, 119 were “particularly … erroneous,” he said. He and the other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision hasn’t been announced.

Federal laws require obtaining a license before exporting military hardware, including automatic weapons, overseas.

Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said Wednesday that the company had “not been informed of an intent to impose a fine, however … we have been cooperating with the government to respond to inquiries into our export processes.”

The State Department’s “resolution of export matters with other significant defense contractors, such as Boeing, L-3, Lockheed-Martin and General Dynamics has typically resulted in some payment” to the government, she said in an e-mail exchange.

Blackwater last month announced what it billed as a major new initiative to ensure that the company complies with rules for exporting military hardware.

Saying that “our company has experienced remarkable growth in the last few years,” Blackwater CEO Erik Prince said: “This growth, our work for the U.S. Government around the world, and the nature of the services we offer have created compliance challenges.”

Blackwater said it created the position of Vice President of Export Compliance and created a three-person independent oversight committee whose members include former U.S. Rep. Asa Hutchinson, R-Ark.

The amount of the planned fine couldn’t be learned, but one State Department official said it was “way in the millions.” The official said the fine could be announced as early as this week. A second official, however, cautioned that it’s not imminent.

Jay Greer, a spokesman for the State Department Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs, which implements defense export controls, declined comment.

The weapons case became public in September 2007 as part of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee inquiry into then-State Department inspector general Howard Krongard.

The Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer, a McClatchy newspaper, first reported that two former Blackwater employees, Kenneth Wayne Cashwell and William Ellsworth “Max” Grumiaux, had pleaded guilty to weapons charges and were cooperating with federal prosecutors in North Carolina.

What became of the weapons may never be known.

Iraq has a brisk black market for weapons. Pentagon probes have found that Defense Department-supplied weapons intended for Iraq’s security forces were diverted. The Turkish government has complained that some ended up in the hands of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which Washington and Ankara consider a terrorist group.

Blackwater employees are also the subjects of a Justice Department probe into the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square on Sept. 16, 2007. That incident sparked outrage over the actions of private military contractors and forced the State Department to impose tighter rules on the contractors.

A federal grand jury is weighing whether to indict the Blackwater guards who were involved in the killings.

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An extra-legal measure quietly enacted by the Treasury Department in the shadow of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package will hand the country’s biggest banks another $140 billion windfall, the Washington Post reported this week.

In a five-sentence memo issued on September 30, on the eve of the first House vote on the bailout bill, the Treasury Department unilaterally overturned a two-decade-old tax law passed by Congress. The measure denied profitable companies the ability to shield their profits from taxation by buying up bankrupt firms as shell companies and using their losses as a tax dodge.

The law, section 382 of the tax code, was enacted by Congress in 1986. It was aimed at curtailing what was seen as an egregious corporate scamming of the tax system. The Republican right and corporate lobbyists have been pushing for the measure’s repeal or amendment ever since.

Treasury Department spokesman Andrew DeSouza defended the action, telling the Post that the administration had the power to overturn a law passed by Congress as part of its mandate to interpret the tax code. He further insisted that the action was a necessary means of rescuing the banks from the financial meltdown.

“This is part of our overall effort to provide relief,” he said.

The Post reported in its November 10 article: “More than a dozen tax lawyers interviewed for this story - including several representing banks that stand to reap billions from the change - said the Treasury had no authority to issue the notice.”

“Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no,” George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, told the Post. “They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks.”

The action by the Treasury Department has been dubbed the “Wells Fargo Ruling,” as it apparently provided direct aid to the successful bid by Wells Fargo to buy up the failing Wachovia bank. According to sources cited by the Post, the tax change will net Wells Fargo $25 billion from the deal.

In other similar takeovers, PNC bank, enjoyed a windfall of $5.1 billion in its takeover of National City as a result of the scrapping of the tax law, while the Spanish Banco Santander gained another $2 billion because of the change when it gobbled up Sovereign Bancorp.

The clear aim of the tax measure was to steer the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been injected into the biggest private banks into the profitable buying up of their weaker competitors, thereby facilitating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few giant banks, allowing them to exercise monopoly control over the financial system.

The cost of the measure will be paid by American working people, who will be faced with the slashing of funds for health care, education and other vital social programs in order to make up for the tax giveaway to the banks.

The most revealing aspect of the Post article is its depiction of the reaction of the Democratic leadership in the US Congress to the Treasury Department’s usurpation of power through the unilateral repeal of a law by executive fiat.

As the article makes clear, neither Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson nor anyone else in the department bothered to inform Congress of the action.

While leading legislators were described as “outraged” when they discovered the action days later, they acted deliberately to keep it from being revealed to the American people.

“Lawmakers worried about discussing their concerns publicly,” the Post reported. When a conference call was organized between Treasury and Capitol Hill staff members, the staff of Senator Max Baucus (Democrat-Montana), the chairman of the Finance Committee, “asked that the entire conference call be kept secret,” the Post reported.

The newspaper quoted one congressional aide as saying: “We’re all nervous about saying that this was illegal because of our fears about the marketplace. To the extent we want to try to publicly stop this, we’re going to be gumming up some important deals.”

Another aide told the Post, “None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression.”

The newspaper cited legal experts who compared the Democrats’ spinelessness in their secret protests over the extra-legal measures by the Treasury Department to similar objections made before the Democratic leadership passed the measure granting the Bush administration unrestricted power to wage a war of aggression against Iraq.

This extraordinary episode has exposed the complete subservience of the Democratic Party to the interests of Wall Street and the willingness of its leadership to submit to an effective dictatorship exercised by finance capital in violation of the law and the US Constitution.

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An analysis of 168,900 autopsies conducted in Florida in 2007 found that three times as many people were killed by legal drugs as by cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines put together. According to state law enforcement officials, this is a sign of a burgeoning prescription drug abuse problem.

“The abuse has reached epidemic proportions,” said Lisa McElhaney, a sergeant in the pharmaceutical drug diversion unit of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. “It’s just explosive.”

In 2007, cocaine was responsible for 843 deaths, heroin for 121, methamphetamines for 25 and marijuana for zero, for a total of 989 deaths. In contrast, 2,328 people were killed by opioid painkillers, including Vicodin and Oxycontin, and 743 were killed by drugs containing benzodiazepine, including the depressants Valium and Xanax.

Alcohol directly caused 466 deaths, but was found in the bodies of 4,179 cadavers in all.

While the number of dead bodies containing heroin jumped 14 percent from the prior year, to a total of 110, the number of deaths influenced by the painkiller oxycodone increased by 36 percent, to a total of 1,253.

Across the country, prescription drugs have become an increasingly popular alternative to the more difficult to acquire illegal drugs. Even as illegal drug use among teenagers have fallen, prescription drug abuse has increased. For example, while 4 percent of U.S. 12th graders were using Oxycontin in 2002, by 2005 that number had increased to 5.5 percent.

It’s not hard for teens to come by prescription drugs, according to Sgt. Tracy Busby, supervisor of the Calaveras County, Calif., Sheriff’s Office narcotics unit.

“You go to every medicine cabinet in the county, and I bet you’re going to find some sort of prescription medicine in 95 percent of them,” he said.

Adults can acquire prescriptions by faking injuries, or by visiting multiple doctors and pharmacies for the same health complaint. Some people get more drugs than they expect to need, then sell the extras.

“You have health care providers involved, you have doctor shoppers, and then there are crimes like robbing drug shipments,” said Jeff Beasley of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. “There is a multitude of ways to get these drugs, and that’s what makes things complicated.”

And while some people may believe that the medicines’ legality makes them less dangerous than illegal drugs, Tuolumne County, Calif., Sheriff’s Office Deputy Dan Crow warns that this is not the case. Because everybody reacts differently to foreign chemicals, there is no way of predicting the exact response anyone will have to a given dosage. That is why prescription drugs are supposed to be taken under a doctor’s supervision.

“All this stuff is poison,” Crow said. “Your body will fight all of this stuff.”
Tuolumne County Health Officer Todd Stolp agreed. A prescription drug taken recreationally is “much like a firearm in the hands of someone who’s not trained to use them,” he said.

While anyone taking a prescription medicine runs a risk of negative effects, the drugs are even more dangerous when abused. For example, many painkillers are designed to have a delayed effect that fades out over time. This can lead recreational users to take more drugs before the old ones are out of their system, placing them at risk of an overdose. Likewise, the common practice of grinding pills up causes a large dose of drugs to hit the body all at once, with potentially dangerous consequences.

“A medication that was meant to be distributed over 24 hours has immediate effect,” Stolp said.

Even more dangerous is the trend of mixing drugs with alcohol, which, like most popularly abused drugs, is a depressant.

“In the case of alcohol and drugs, one plus one equals more than two,” said Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Lt. Dan Bressler.

Florida pays careful attention to drug-related deaths, and as such has significantly better data on the problem than any other state. But a recent study conducted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) suggests that the problem is indeed national. According to the DEA, the number of people abusing prescription drugs in the United States has jumped 80 percent in six years to seven million, or more than those abusing cocaine, Ecstasy, heroin, hallucinogens an inhalants put together.

Not surprisingly, there has been a corresponding increase in deaths. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, the number of emergency room visits related to painkillers has increased by 153 percent since 1995. And a 2007 report by the Justice Department National Intelligence Drug Center found that deaths related to the opioid methadone jumped from 786 in 1999 to 3,849 in 2004 - an increase of 390 percent.

Many experts attribute the trend to the increasing popularity among doctors of prescribing painkillers, combined with a leap in direct-to-consumer marketing by drug companies. For example, promotional spending on Oxycontin increased threefold between 1996 and 2001, to $30 million per year.

Sonora, Calif., pharmacist Eddie Howard reports that he’s seen painkiller prescriptions jump dramatically in the last five years.

“I don’t know that there is that much pain out there to demand such an increase,” he said.
The trend concerns Howard, and he tries to keep an eye out for patients who are coming in too frequently. But he admits that there is little he can do about the problem.

“When you have a lot of people waiting for prescriptions, it’s hard to find time to play detective,” he said.

Still, the situation makes Howard uncomfortable.

“It almost makes me a legalized drug dealer, and that’s not a good position to be in,” he said.

Sources for this story include: www.nytimes.com; www.uniondemocrat.com

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