Our Partnership with Genocide
Hentoff, Nat
Bill of Rights Watch Nat Hentoff Our Partnership with Genocide At every stop he makes around the world, the President promotes this nation's export of freedom and democracy. But neither abroad nor...
...Moreover, Gosh, the recipient of Condoleezza Rice's warm wishes for a "fruitful relationship" with Khartoum, has been charged by the reliable Congressional Research Service with having played one of the key roles in implementing the genocide in Darfur...
...We are all indebted to Kenneth Silverstein and the Los Angeles Times for revealing our President's betrayal of those remaining perilously alive in Darfur...
...The bill has been killed...
...That measure would freeze the assets of the leaders of the genocide and finally organize an international no-fly zone over Darfur to prevent Sudan's army from strafing what villages remain...
...Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was the first major world figure to publicly charge Sudan with "genocide" for the mass killings, gang rapes, and burning of villages by Sudan's military and its savage accomplices, the Arab Janjaweed...
...But neither abroad nor at home has George W. Bush spoken of the CIA's jet plane that transported the chief of Sudan's intelligence agency (the Mukhabarat) to Washington for secret meetings with CIA officials in late April...
...But he would also be morally and constitutionally required to let us know that he is making us all accomplices in the Darfur genocide...
...His silent abandonment of the black Africans in Darfur gives the lie to all his talk of our "transparent" democracy...
...As Kenneth Silverstein reported in a carefully sourced story in the April 29 Los Angeles Times ("Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to America's War on Terrorism"), the arrival of Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh (head of Sudan's counterpart of the CIA) sealed "Khartoum's sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the Administration...
...The body count in Darfur may well exceed 800,000...
...But why hasn't there been an insistent follow up of this betrayal in our continually expanding media...
...But a May 9 editorial in the British Financial Times disclosed "it will be at least a year, maybe two, before the ICC even issues its first indictments...
...Meanwhile, the United Nations, unwilling to do anything meaningful about the genocide, has passed the buck to the International Criminal Court...
...So Bush could make a case that since he is constitutionally bound to protect America against its terrorist enemies, the information he gets from the Sudan government is vitally needed...
...He is the author of "The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance...
...Too late there was a chorus in the United States of "Never Again" after more than 800,000 were slaughtered in Rwanda because the United Nations and President Bill Clinton refused to intervene there...
...Silverstein's report has rarely been mentioned in the media, but it explains why George W Bush has been silent for months as the death toll in Darfur reaches more than 400,000- with at least 500 more black Africans being extinguished every day...
...The New York Times's columnist Nicholas Kristof-who has insistently pressured the President to bypass the United Nations and save lives in Darfur-reported on May 3 that the White House wanted to kill the Darfur Accountability Act...
...But, as Silverstein disclosed, Powell's successor has written-in a letter to this Muslim regime headed by the murderer-in-chief, Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir- that she looks forward to ongoing "close cooperation" on terrorism with Khartoum...
...Silverstein's exemplary reporting makes it undeniably clear that Sudan's intelligence agents have indeed provided extensive and valuable information on terrorists' organizing and planning in Muslim countries where the CIA is blocked...
...Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, the current head of the Mukhabarat, was in the 1990s Sudan's primary liaison with Osama bin Laden when he was forming Al Qaeda there...
...Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Village Voice, Free Inquiry, and The Progressive...
Vol. 69 • July 2005 • No. 7
