The number of displaced people from areas controlled by Daesh in Iraq has increased to 3.6 million over the past two years, the Iraqi Minister of Immigration and Displacement Jassim Mohammed said on Monday.
The minister pointed out in a statement that 600,000 displaced people have returned to their original home areas during the past two years.
Chairman of the Parliament Committee on Displacement and Migration Raed Duhluki warned on Monday of a humanitarian catastrophe potentially facing those displaced due to a lack of funding from the government.
The official called on the Iraqi government, the international community and human rights organizations to form government and political delegations in order to bring the necessary funds from donor countries to provide aid to displaced Iraqis.
The minister warned that the authority’s indifference towards the suffering of those displaced will cause a catastrophe.
Investigative journalist William Boardman’s findings on US vaporization of Marshall Islands and human experimentation on Marshall Islands native “savages”, as they were classed by US media:
“Nuclear Savage” is a recent documentary film that explores American nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, 1946-1958, and particularly the secret Project 4.1: an American experiment in exposing Pacific Islanders to overdoses of radiation – deliberate human radiation poisoning – just to get better data on this method of maiming and killing people. The public broadcasting establishment has spent more than two years keeping this story off the air.
The preview reel of “Nuclear Savage” includes a clip with a stentorian newsreel announcer reporting on the American treatment of Marshall Islanders in April 1957, and explaining to his predominantly American audience:
“The Marshallese caught by fallout got 175 roentgens of radiation. These are fishing people, savages by our standards, so a cross-section was brought to Chicago for testing. The first was John, the mayor of Rongelap Atoll…. John, as we said, is a savage, but a happy, amenable savage.”
…
“Some use the term ‘savage’ to refer to people from primitive cultures, but nuclear experimentation pushed savagery to new levels. In the 1950s, the U.S. conducted 67 atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, vaporizing islands and exposing entire populations to fallout. The islanders on Rongelap received near fatal doses of radiation from one test, and were then moved onto a highly contaminated island to serve as human guinea pigs for 30 years.”
Horowitz, the director of Nuclear Savage, notes that the US “bl[e]w up all these islands … purposely contaminated all these people as human experiments.”
Boardman continues:
In 1998, staff from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made a comparison study to compare the amount of radioactive Iodine-131 at four different radiation-polluted sites, measured in curies (1,000 curies of Cesium-137, as found in a radiation therapy machine, could produce serious health effects in a direct exposure of just a few minutes). The CDC team reported its finding that the atmospheric release of curies of Iodine-137 at the Hanford nuclear processing plant was 739,000 curies; at Chernobyl the release was 40 million curies; at the Nevada bomb test site, 150 million curies; and in the Marshall Islands, 6.3 billion curies (more that 30 times as much radiation as the other three sites combined).
Even recently, the US has tried “to re-re-settle some populations back to their home islands that were still dangerously radioactive.” However, the film helped rally the islanders and reduced the US re-re-settlement effort to nothing more than “a bunch of empty houses.”
One year ago, nearly to the day, the Marshall Islands bravely brought a lawsuit to the International Court of Justice and U.S. Federal District Court “against the U.S. and the eight other Nuclear Weapons States (NWS)”, which are refusing “to meet their treaty obligations to disarm.”
Obama, in direct contravention of US word and legal requirement, is devoting 1 to 1.5 trillion dollars to US nuclear weapons development, even as the US, also illegally, cuts off water to some of its own, poor residents.
From 1946-1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear weapons experiments on the Marshall Islands, the equivalent of “one-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs” every day.
On a related note, Obama continues to refuse to give the country of Diego Garcia back to its indigenous inhabitants. The pristine island nation was seized and cleansed of its nationals by the US and Britain, then turned into a US toxic waste dump-site and base for Washington’s global execution and torture racket.
Seven minute trailer for Nuclear Savage:
Reporter focuses on global force dynamics and writes professionally for the film industry. On twitter @_DirtyTruths with UK-based colleague, Dean Robinson.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been locked up in Gitmo without charge for 14 years, but the US government “has no evidence” against him, his attorney told RT. Tortured and beaten, both ordeals exposed in his memoir from behind bars, Slahi is now hoping for release.
On June 2, Slahi appeared in a 17-minute hearing before the prison’s Periodic Review Board (PRB) that essentially holds his fate in its hands. It is the PRB that examines the risk of releasing a detainee and is set to decide whether to clear Slahi. He is the 22nd detainee to go before the board this year.
“There is no reason for him not to be cleared. He has never committed any hostile act to the United States. There is no evidence against him,” Slahi’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, told RT in its GTMO 2016 special report.
Together they have been fighting for Slahi’s freedom since 2005, when Hollander first met him in Guantanamo. She says she spends “probably third of a year” in Guantanamo to be with her client.
A native Mauritanian, Slahi’s story is an unusual one. He did not arrive at Guantanamo the way the majority of detainees did.
The primary reason for his illegal detention is not related to 9/11, but has its roots in the 1990s, when Slahi pledged allegiance to the group that would eventually become known as Al-Qaeda. He stopped his engineering studies in Germany to go fight along with the mujahideen against the communist government in Afghanistan.
At the time, the Islamist group and its leader Osama bin Laden enjoyed the support of the US in its fight against the Soviets.
Slahi claims he had “broken ties” with Al-Qaeda in 1992 to return to his studies in Germany. Nearly ten years after, when Al-Qaeda became Washington’s top enemy, Slahi turned himself in for questioning to Mauritanian authorities.
On November 1, 2001, he was interrogated in relation to the so-called 2000 millennium attack plots, a series of foiled attacks, including the one at a Los Angeles airport planned for late December 1999.
It appeared that when Slahi lived in Canada in 1999, he crossed paths with Ahmed Ressam, a convicted perpetrator of the thwarted attacks. The two prayed in the same mosque in Montreal.
After Ressam’s arrest, Slahi was questioned several times, including by the FBI and each time cleared for release.
That was not the case at his last meeting with Mauritanian authorities. Slahi was detained and then handed over to Jordan, where he spent eight months. After subsequent chain of custody transfers, he was put in Guantanamo.
Now, 14 years later, Slahi is one of the most prominent prisoners among 80 remaining Guantanamo detainees.
“He is a very funny person, a very empathic, very curious and of course as everyone has seen now a very gifted writer,” Nancy Hollander said of Slahi, describing their work together as “a very warm relationship.”
Shali has gone through torture, beatings, death threats and sexual humiliation, all of which he exposed in details in his bestselling book, ‘Guantanamo Diary,’ written in his single cell.
“There is no doubt that he was tortured during early years, 2003-2004,” Hollander told RT. “Finally, they realized that they were not going to learn anything from him they did not already know because he had nothing else to tell him. They began then to rehabilitate him.”
At one point, his captors tried to trick him by showing him a forged letter from his mother, but the ploy failed for two reasons. One is that the forgery misspelled Slahi’s name and, second, because unbeknownst to his jailers, his mother was illiterate.
He eventually became friends with his guards. In April 2016, one of the guards submitted a letter to the PRB, speaking of his very pleasant impression of Slahi.
“Based on my interactions with Mr. Slahi while in Guantanamo, I would be pleased to welcome him into my home,” the guard wrote.
In 2010, federal judge James Robertson reviewed Slahi’s profile, the same one the government submitted to the PRB, and granted him his habeas corpus petition, ordering him released.
However, the decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Now, Slahi has his hopes high for the PRB to rule on his release.
“I believe, I hope that Mohamedou will be cleared, there is no reason for him not to be and then for the State Department to start working with Mauritania. The country of Mauritania has said they would welcome him home. That’s where his family is,” Hollander told RT.
Dr. Samir al-Qadi, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, was among one of at least nine Palestinians arrested by the Israeli occupation forces early Sunday, 12 June, in armed night raids in Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank.
Al-Qadi, 60, was arrested in an early-morning military raid on his home in Surif, northeast of Al-Khalil. He is a member of the Change and Reform Bloc in the PLC, associated with Hamas.
Al-Qadi was among at least four Palestinians arrested in al-Khalil district, alongside Ahmed Abdelfattah Hudoush, 30; Izz al-Ghaith; and Shaher Daoud, 40; as well as three in Jerusalem, Mohammed Ruweidi, Hamza al-Nimr and Musa Dabbagh, all working in the Islamic Waqf; Amer Samih Hamdan, 17, of Bethlehem; and Thaer Abu Zaher, 25, of Deir Bzeigh near Ramallah, reported the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society.
He has been arrested and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces on multiple occasions in the past, in 1997, 2006, 201 and 2014, generally under administrative detention without charge or trial. He joins 6 more PLC members in Israeli prisons: 4 fellow Change and Reform Bloc PLC members, Hassan Yousef, Hatem Kufaisheh, Mohammed Abu Teir, and Abdel Jaber Fuquha; Ahmad Sa’adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, elected on the Abu Ali Mustafa slate; and Marwan Barghouthi of Fateh.
Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine – Last Wednesday Rajab Khaled Abu Riela, 30 years old, his brother and two cousins left Gaza’s port at 12 pm. They stayed out fishing until 1:30 am. “When we started our way back to the port one Israeli warship approached, the soldiers started insulting us through the microphone and immediately after started shooting against our two small boats with live ammunition”. “Then their warship crashed against us. In that moment I decided to try to escape, but I was immediately shot in the leg with live ammunition”. They took Rajab and his brother to Ashdod port, where they wouldn’t give him any medicine or treatment for the injury he sustained by the Israeli forces. “I was left bleeding until 9:30am”. Finally they were sent back to Gaza, where an ambulance took him directly from Erez border to the hospital, where he had to undergo surgery.
When he finally reached Shifa Hospital, doctors managed to remove the biggest pieces of the bullet – but many small pieces still remain in his leg.
Rajab’s mother shows the bullet removed from his leg
“Our future [for the fishermen] is uncertain; we don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Israel assaults us every day, takes our boats, shoots at us… Since 2005 I have pain in my chest due to an attack of the occupation, and as well my brother was injured while fishing in 2008. I’m responsible for providing for my family, we are 21 members… Now no one is providing for us, as I’m injured and they took our boat and motor. How I can work now without a boat?”
The economy of the state of Israel that enables it to treat the international community with such contempt, is dependent entirely upon its trade with the EU single market. And that, apart from any other consideration, is another important reason for the UK to vote to leave the European Union.
The position of the EU as Israel’s primary trading partner is enabled under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, notwithstanding that Article 2 of that Agreement very clearly states:
“Relations between the parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this agreement.”
It is a blatant fact that Israel – as illegal occupier of the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been in gross breach of this provision since the very inception of the Agreement and yet the EU has turned a blind eye to the continuing violations that include the illegal settlement of over a half a million Israelis on Palestinian soil in a deliberate effort to prevent the establishment of an independent state for the largest indigenous people of the region.
The reason for this intolerable state of affairs is unquestionably the influence of the lobbyists embedded within the councils and committees of the European Union at virtually every level in Brussels and elsewhere, who exert a corrupting effect upon EU political and economic policy in order to skew EU political decisions, funding and bilateral trade to the favour of the (non-member) Israeli state.
A vote to divorce the United Kingdom from the EU would clearly indicate British rejection of such artificial and dangerous ‘arrangements’ that have such an adverse impact upon both regional and world peace.
RT traveled to the site of the most avoidable public health emergency of the decade, interviewing those who defied authorities and spent their time and money to uncover the lead poisoning that has affected thousands of residents of Flint, Michigan.
“The water is not safe yet. And we are traumatized by the unknowns of tomorrow: what is this lead going to do for our community? What does it mean? Moms are coming to clinic, they just hear “brain damage” and “irreversible neurotoxin,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha told documentary-maker Miguel Francis-Santiago, when he visited the city earlier this year, to find out that while Flint may have left the headlines, the impact of years of errors and cover-ups has not been smoothed over.
“There is no treatment for lead, there is no lead pill, there is no lead antibiotic… There’s not some magic thing that we can do to reverse this,” said Hanna-Attisha.
A prominent pediatrician, Mona Hanna-Attisha personally undertook testing for blood lead levels in local children, following hundreds of complaints of fatigue, nausea and malaise resulting from drinking the discolored, often strange-smelling liquid that flowed from Flint’s faucets after it changed its water source in 2014.
Hanna-Attisha noted that dangerous lead levels had doubled in just a matter of months, but her findings were disregarded by top local officials, who repeatedly claimed that the water was safe in public, even as they already noted concerns in private.
As her claims have been verified, her critics have been forced to apologize, while Hanna-Attisha’s research has been published, and she has been awarded a PEN prize for speaking out.
Hanna-Attisha said she was doing her job, but Virginia Tech Engineering Professor, said he went “a bit crazy” – spending over $100,000 of his own money to conduct a study to definitively prove contamination after being dispatched to conduct a study in 2015.
Edwards correctly pinpointed the problem with the multi-million dollar filtration plant the local authorities began using just over two years, to save money by pumping and treating water from Flint River, instead of purchasing it from Lake Huron.
“If they had just followed the law, if they’d added a corrosion inhibitor, that switch to Flint River water would have actually saved money, none of these problems would have happened, you know. If they had just put that phosphate in the water, we wouldn’t have had the pipe leaks, wouldn’t have had the lead in water, wouldn’t have had the legionella,” said Edwards, referring to an outbreak of the disease that killed 10 people in the months while the plant was operational.
But Edwards reserves his harshest words for senior regional Environmental Protection Agency official Susan Hedman, who he says “incredibly” used her role to “cover-up” the crisis, keeping Flint residents oblivious to the harm they were doing themselves, just as Edwards himself was going round houses and warning residents to avoid the water. Hedman has since resigned.
While many lives were saved through the intervention of several public crusaders, others were not.
Nakiya Wakes already suspected something was amiss when her two children’s hair started falling out after being washed with local water, but pregnant with twins at the time, she did not know that worse was to come.
Late last year, she suffered two miscarriages, losing one child after the other.
“I feel like if they would’ve let the city of Flint know this, my babies would have been born on February 11 of 2016. Back in 2015 when I was coming home from the hospital I got a letter from the City of Flint saying that pregnant women and people 55 and over should not be drinking this water,” she told Miguel-Santiago.
“So I got to thinking then, I just lost my babies, what is in the water? So… I immediately had my kids tested for lead, and they tested 5.0, they tested positive for high levels of lead. They can’t tell me long-term what’s going happen to my kids?”
The full documentary will be broadcast on RT on June 12, and every day until June 14 on RTD.
Thanks to FBI meddling, a straightforward electronic communications privacy reform with bipartisan support and barely any opposition is now stalled, and is dangerously close to dying this session.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) became law in 1986, and hasn’t been updated since. The statute, which governs law enforcement access to electronic communications, contains an obsolete clause enabling government agencies to obtain stored communications without warrants as long as the records are over 180 days old. This provision made more sense when the law was passed, at a time when computer data storage was expensive and most people couldn’t afford to store anything in digital form for as long as 6 months. Today, when storage is cheap and many people have emails dating back a decade in their Gmail inboxes, the law makes no sense. For years now, advocates including the ACLU and major tech companies have been furiously lobbying to update the law. This year, the House finally passed an ECPA modernization bill, which if enacted would do away with the 6 month rule and instituting a warrant requirement for content across the board—no matter how long the information has been sitting in your Dropbox folder or Gmail account. After the unanimous House vote, I and others expected the reform to quickly move through the Senate and get a signature from President Obama. Finally!
Alas, that’s not what is happening.
Unfortunately, the FBI intervened, and now the bill has a poison pill in it. Republican Senator John Cornyn attached an amendment to the bill that would vastly expand the FBI’s power to use much-abused ‘National Security Letters,’ or NSLs, secret subpoenas. Email privacy supporters Senators Pat Leahy and Mike Lee have said they will pull the bill from consideration instead of allowing their efforts to be coopted by the FBI—which intends to broaden its surveillance authorities, instead of contract them, as the email privacy bill intends.
“Unfortunately, some Senators on the committee have decided late in the day that this bill should be a vehicle to move an unrelated and controversial expansion of the use of national security letters by the FBI,” Lee said. “Such an expansion would swallow up the protections this bill offers to the American people. While there are other concerns we had hoped to negotiate, the national security letter amendment is something I cannot in good conscience have attached to this bill.”
FBI Director James Comey has said getting the NSL power extended to internet information is his organization’s top legislative priority.
THE EU is not defending workers’ rights as the Remainiacs never cease to claim.
In fact the EU is directly behind the huge assault on wages, pensions, collective bargaining and other workers’ rights across the EU, including the current battle going on in France.
Moreover it is being done in contravention of its own treaties in a typically bureaucratic and Byzantine way.
Officially, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, Article 153.5), explicitly states that the EU has no competences in the area of wage policy.
Yet this has not prevented EU institutions such as the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) or even the European Council from demanding wage “moderation” across the EU.
The Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPG), regularly produced by the Commission since 1993, always included demands for wage “moderation.”
However a new system of European economic governance began to emerge in 2010 with the adoption of the controversial, neoliberal Europe 2020 strategy, which included a yearly cycle of EU economic policy co-ordination.
This explicitly includes wage policy which is considered the most important adjustment variable for promoting “competitiveness.”
The legal basis for this new form of “authoritarian neoliberalism” as it has been called comprises above all the Euro Plus Pact adopted on the initiative of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy in March 2011.
As a result, while EU competence over wage policy is still expressly forbidden, with the Euro Plus Pact wage policy intervention at EU level is now mystically allowed.
Now the EU issues annual policy recommendations for all member states which must then be transformed into national “reform programmes” whose effectiveness will again be assessed by the EU.
The annual economic co-ordination cycle was further developed in 2011 with the adoption of a package of five Regulations and one Directive.
The so-called “six-pack” contains two new major instruments in order to intensify economic policy co-ordination: one is the establishment of a new system of surveillance and the second is the introduction of fines on those countries that fail to comply.
The 2013 Treaty for Stability, Co-ordination and Governance (TSCG) further reinforced mechanisms to enable the EU to “co-ordinate and monitor the economic and budgetary policies of the member states.”
Each February the Commission publishes detailed reports on each country and their “progress.” This year’s report pointed out an “excessive” imbalance — too much public expenditure and a lack of competitiveness.
However, it recorded “substantial progress in the matter of reducing the cost of labour and retirement pension reform.”
On April 13, the French government adopted its EU National Programme of Reform (NPR) and acquiesced to EU demands for “giving more latitude to companies, to adapt wages and working hours to their economic situation” — ie huge changes to French employment law.
It is this that French workers are fighting against.
The scope for EU attacks on wages and collective bargaining expanded most rapidly in those crisis-hit countries which rely on “bailouts” from the EU and/or the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In exchange for bailouts, these countries had to introduce “reforms” laid down either in so-called memorandums of understanding with the Troika of EU, European Central Bank (ECB) and IMF in the case of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, or in “stand-by arrangements” with the IMF, in the case of Hungary, Latvia and Romania.
These policy measures comprised attacks on wages, social services and public ownership and far-reaching labour market “reforms” including the abolition of systems of collective bargaining.
There is a simple reason for this — where there is no collective bargaining there is a decline in wages.
For the hard-line German member of the ECB Executive Board Joerg Asmussen, labour market “reforms” such as removing collective rights are even “the key if a country wishes to remain within the euro.”
As a result attacks on workers at national level are being driven by a new EU interventionism in an unprecedented way.
For example prior to the 2008 crisis, Romania had a legal system that supported dialogue between trade unions, employers and the government, resulting in widespread collective bargaining at all levels.
By 2011, at the behest of the EU, the government had scrapped all collective agreements and changed, without parliamentary debate, the main labour laws, making it impossible to have cross-sectoral collective agreements.
The recession was thus exploited by the EU and a compliant government in Bucharest as a pretext to rip the guts out of the existing industrial relations system and lower labour costs.
Even the EU-funded European Trade Union Confederation general secretary Bernadette Segol identified two fronts where collective bargaining is coming under attack: the decentralisation of bargaining and allowing employers to ignore trade union bodies in favour of non-union bodies.
Addressing the theme of Social Europe, she points out that “policies that are being implemented are attacking industrial relations systems, putting pressure on wages, weakening public services and weakening social protection.
“These are the core aspects of the social model,” confirming the view of many observers that the model is now dead — if indeed it was ever alive at all.
Brian Denny is a spokesman for Trade Unionists Against the EU.
Palestinian journalist and human rights defender, Hasan Safadi, the Arabic Media Coordinator for Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, was ordered to six months imprisonment without charge or trial under administrative detention by Israeli occupation forces today, Friday, 10 June.
Safadi, 24, who has been imprisoned since 1 May while crossing the Karameh bridge between Jordan and Palestine’s West Bank, has been under interrogation consistently at Al-Moskobiya interrogation center since that time. His detention had been repeatedly renewed. Prior to the issuance of the administrative detention order, the Jerusalem Magistrate Court had decided to release him today on a bail of 2500 NIS (approximately $650 USD), which had already been paid.
Safadi’s administrative detention order is scheduled to be confirmed by a judge at a time set in the next 48 hours, reported Addameer, making him one of approximately 750 Palestinians held without charge or trial under administrative detention. Administrative detention orders are indefinitely renewable and issued for one to six month periods at a time; some Palestinians have spent years at a time in administrative detention, on the basis of secret evidence submitted by the Shin Bet.
The detention of Safadi is part of the continued attack on Palestinian journalists and media workers, which includes the administrative detention without charge or trial of Omar Nazzal, member of the General Secretariat of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate; Musab Kafisheh, freelance journalist; Mohammed Kaddoumi, freelance journalist; and Ali Al-Oweiwi, an announcer on Arabah radio station.
Other Palestinian journalists like Samer Abu Aisha, Sami al-Saee and Samah Dweik are imprisoned on “incitement” charges for posting on Facebook about Palestinian politics and struggle, while Abu Aisha also faces charges for visiting neighboring Lebanon, an “enemy country.” Other imprisoned journalists targeted for membership in political parties include Hazem Nasser and Mujahid Saadi. They are among 19 journalists imprisoned in Israeli jails.
Further, the imprisonment of Safadi also continues attacks on Palestinian human rights defenders, particularly those who work to free Palestinian prisoners, including recently released Addameer vice-chair and Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar; imprisoned land defender and advocate Samer Arbeed, held without charge or trial; civil society leader Eteraf Rimawi, executive director of Bisan, imprisoned without charge or trial; and repeatedly targeted prisoners’ advocates like Ayman Nasser of Addameer and Osama Shaheen of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Center for Studies.
One of the essential functions of the corporate media is to marginalise or silence acknowledgement of the history – and continuation – of Western imperial aggression. The coverage of the recent sentencing in Senegal of Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad, for crimes against humanity, provides a useful case study.
The verdict could well have presented the opportunity for the media to examine in detail the complicity of the US, UK, France and their major allies in the Middle East and North Africa in the appalling genocide Habré inflicted on Chad during his rule – from 1982 to 1990. After all, Habré had seized power via a CIA-backed coup. As William Blum commented in Rogue State (2002: 152):
With US support, Habré went on to rule for eight years during which his secret police reportedly killed tens of thousands, tortured as many of 200,000 and disappeared an undetermined number.
Indeed, while coverage of Chad has been largely missing from the British corporate media, so too was the massive, secret war waged over these eight years by the United States, France and Britain from bases in Chad against Libyan leader Colonel Mu’ammar Gaddafi. (See Targeting Gaddafi: Secret Warfare and the Media, by Richard Lance Keeble, in Mirage in the Desert? Reporting the ‘Arab Spring’, edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble, Abramis, Bury St Edmunds, 2011, pp 281-296.)
By 1990, with the crisis in the Persian Gulf developing, the French government had tired of Habré’s genocidal policies while George Bush senior’s administration decided not to frustrate France in exchange for co-operation in its attack on Iraq. And so Habré was secretly toppled and in his place Idriss Déby was installed as the new President of Chad.
Yet the secret Chad coups can only be understood as part of the United States’ global imperial strategy. For since 1945, the US has intervened in more than 70 countries – in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South America and Asia. Britain, too, has engaged militarily across the globe in virtually every year since 1914. Most of these conflicts are conducted far away from the gaze of the corporate media.
Reporting of the Habré sentencing has been predictably consistent across all the leading newspapers in the UK and US. Thus the focus has been on the jubilant reactions of a few of the victims of Habré’s torture and rape, on the comments from some of the human rights organisations involved for many years in the campaign to bring the Chad dictator to justice – and on the fact that it was the first time an African country had prosecuted the former head of another African country for massive human rights abuses. Only a tiny part of the reporting has mentioned the West’s role in the genocide. None of the reporting has placed the Chad events in the broader context of US/Western imperial aggression.
The story in the Guardian, by Ruth Maclean, was typical. Some 21 paragraphs were devoted to the report. But only in the last one (appearing almost as an after-thought) was there any mention of US complicity:
The US State department and the CIA propped up Habré, sending him weapons and money in return for fighting their enemy, Muammar Gaddafi.
In a follow-up editorial on 1 June 2016, the Guardian again left mentioning the West’s role until the last paragraph:
Many questions still remain unanswered, including several concerning the responsibility or complicity of Western countries, such as France and the US, which actively supported Habré during the cold war years, turning a blind eye to his methods.
The Telegraphadopted a similar approach. Aislinn Laing, based in Johannesburg, reported briefly:
Mr Habré, 73, is a former rebel leader who took power by force in Chad in 1982 and was then supported by the US and France to remain at the helm as a bulwark to Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
Adam Lusher, in the Independent, devoted just eight words to contextualising the trial:
Hissène Habré was once backed by America’s Cold War-era CIA.
In the New York Times, buried in paragraph 24 of a 27-paragraph report by Dionne Searcey are these words:
Mr. Habré took power during a coup that was covertly aided by the United States, and he received weapons and assistance from France, Israel and the United States to keep Libya, to the north of Chad, and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, then the Libyan leader, at bay.
Similarly, in Paul Schemm’s 23-paragraph report in the Washington Post, his paragraph 15 reads:
Supported by the United States and France in his wars against Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, Habré was accused of killing up to 40,000 people and torturing hundreds of thousands.
Intriguingly, the final paragraph in the Guardian‘s report also included a statement by John Kerry, the US secretary of state, which ‘acknowledged his country’s complicity’:
As a country committed to the respect for human rights and the pursuit of justice, this is also an opportunity for the United States to reflect on, and learn from, our own connections with past events in Chad.
But how hypocritical is this rhetoric given the fact that the US today is still supporting human rights offenders across the globe – including the current dictator of Chad, Idriss Déby. Moreover, the Western powers, the US and France in particular, are using Chad as a major base for their covert military operations in Africa.
A number of newspapers have commented on how the case set an important precedent for holding high-profile human rights abusers to account in Africa. Yet there has been little mention of the extraordinary background. For in June 2003, the US actually warned Belgium that it could lose its status as host to Nato’s headquarters if the Habré case went ahead on the basis of a 1993 law, which allowed victims to file complaints in Belgium for atrocities committed abroad. Campaigners determined to bring Habré to justice only then shifted their attention to Africa.
William Blum comments in the introduction to Killing Hope (p. 13) on the US’s secret wars:
With a few exceptions, the interventions never made the headlines or the evening TV news. With some, bits and pieces of the stories have popped up here and there, but rarely brought together to form a cohesive and enlightening whole; the fragments usually appear long after the fact, quietly buried within other stories, just as quietly forgotten…
How perfectly this both predicts and explains the corporate media’s coverage of the Chad dictator, Hissène Habré!
• Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln since 2003, has written and edited 36 books. In 2014, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association for Journalism Education.
Although decades have passed since atomic tests were conducted by the US on the northern Marshall Islands, radiation levels within the territory are still dangerously high, a recent study revealed.
In 1940s and 50s, during a heavy period of nuclear weapons testing, scientists predicted that background radiation would eventually drop to a level that would allow the return of relocated indigenous people to their native islands.
According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the Pacific Ocean islands are still too dangerous for habitation, 60 years since the massive hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll.
The lead author of the research, Autumn Bordner, from Columbia University’s Center for Nuclear Studies, accompanied by fellow scientists, traveled to the islands to test gamma radiation levels on Enewetak, Rongelap, and Bikini.
The team stayed on the islands for two weeks and covered an area of over 1,000 square miles. Radiation readings were then compared to measurements from Majuro Atoll, an island far enough away to be used as a control. Measurements were also taken in Central Park, in New York City, New York, as an additional control.
“Central Park and the Majuro Atoll experience 13 and 9 millirems of radiation per year, respectively,” the study said. “Enewetak had the lowest radiation levels, at 7.6 mrem/y, which makes sense, since the island has had extensive cleanup efforts. Rongelap has higher levels at 19.8 mrem/y, and Bikini Atoll has the most radiation of the islands studied, with a mean of 184 mrem/y.”
Radiation on Bikini Atoll was found to be higher than the minimum accepted levels agreed upon by the US and Marshall Islands governments.
The scientists observed that the measurements differ little from those taken two decades ago, although it had been expected that radiation levels would by now have measurably decayed.
Researchers affirm that, without studying the effects of the environment on humans, it is not known whether the Marshallese people can safely return to Rongelap and Bikini.
Reknowned economist M. Shahid Alamoffers this excellent critique of Noam Chomsky’s defective analysis of the relative influence of Oil versus the Israel lobby over US foreign policy: … continue
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