Re: Bush sr's CIA used Nazi torturers in South American Dictatorships

Thus spake Anonymous Sender <anonymous@remailer.metacolo.com> :

Another remailer domain in the kf

--
dillon

"When the French are against it, you know we can't
be far wrong." - Adm. Bobbie Ray Inman

"Dillon Pyron" <dmpyronINVALID@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
news:981hs0ht0mg7jnrk2qo31i4dcrk5q5mu82@4ax.com...

> Thus spake Anonymous Sender <anonymous@remailer.metacolo.com> :

> Another remailer domain in the kf

Oh, please, allow me:

The Real Reason Kofi Annan Must Go

Genocide, not oil money, is the proof of his failed leadership.

BY KENNETH L. CAIN

Monday, December 20, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

A debate currently rages about whether Kofi Annan enjoys the moral authority
to lead the United Nations because the Oil for Food scandal happened under
his command. That debate is 10 years too late and addresses the wrong
subject. The salient indictment of Mr. Annan's leadership is lethal
cowardice, not corruption; the evidence is genocide, not oil.

As the controversy roiled over the past several weeks, I was on a research
trip to the two ground-zeros of Mr. Annan's failed leadership while he was
head of the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations--Rwanda and Bosnia.
We have heard from too many conservative commentators and Republican
politicians recently--most of whom reject multilateralism anyway--about Mr.
Annan's qualifications to lead. But we have not heard from enough Rwandans
or Bosnians. I thought I'd talk to a few.

Before my recent return, the last time I was in Rwanda was 10 years ago; I
was counting skulls. A young U.N. human-rights officer, I was tasked with
collecting evidence for the U.N.'s forthcoming war-crimes tribunal after the
successful genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi minority by Hutu militias in 1994. We
were looking for the mass graves of mass murder. We found them in churches,
schools, gardens, latrines--anywhere Tutsis had gathered seeking protection
or their killers had dumped their bodies, dismembered and entangled, like
life-size rag dolls. Some 800,000 bodies rotted in the African sun.

But it isn't just the stench of death I remember so vividly; the odor of
betrayal also hung heavily in the Rwandan air. This was not a genocide in
which the U.N. failed to intervene; most of the U.N.'s armed troops
evacuated after the first two weeks of massacres, abandoning vulnerable
civilians to their fate, which included, literally, the worst things in the
world a human being can do to another human being.

It did not have to happen. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the U.N.'s force commander
in Rwanda, sent Mr. Annan a series of desperate faxes including one warning
that Hutu militias "could kill up to 1,000" Tutsis "in 20 minutes" and
others pleading for authority to protect vulnerable civilians. But at the
crucial moment, Mr. Annan ordered his general to stand down and to
vigorously protect, not genocide victims, assembled in their numbers waiting
to die, but the U.N.'s image of "impartiality."
The outline of this story is well known, but its most important detail is
not: Tutsis often gathered in compounds (large church complexes, schools and
even stadiums) where they had assumed they would be safe based on implicit,
and sometimes explicit, promises of protection by Blue Helmeted
peacekeepers. The U.N.'s withdrawal was, therefore, not a passive failure to
protect but an active, and lethal, perfidy.

Rwandans still seethe. Last month I went to a tiny, remote village, deep in
the central Rwandan hills to meet Charles Kagenza, a famous Tutsi survivor
who hid in the bell tower of a church full of Tutsis that was bulldozed to
the ground, burying victims alive. When I told him I worked for the U.N. 10
years ago, just after the war, he looked me straight in the eye, with his
one remaining good eye, and shot back, "What are you doing here? You had the
capacity to save us but you abandoned us."

Some 3,300 miles directly north from Kigali is the town of Srebrenica, a
grim, shell-pocked village on the border of Republika Srpska and Serbia. A
few kilometers down a decrepit road is a sprawling abandoned battery
factory. Ten years ago, thousands of Muslim civilians concentrated here
seeking shelter at a U.N. base. But Serb militias separated the men and boys
from their women and put them on buses. Armed Blue Helmeted U.N.
Peacekeepers--tasked under Mr. Annan's leadership to protect Srebrenica's
civilians in this U.N.-declared "Safe Area"--watched passively. The women of
Srebrenica never saw their men again.
Across the street lies a new cemetery and memorial for the 8,000 fallen men
of Srebrenica. The remains of most of Safe Area Srebrenica's men have not
yet been identified through DNA, but 1,300 have, and they rest in fresh
mounds of earth on one end of the mostly empty graveyard. A long desolate
green field waits to bury the rest of the remains.

The most arresting elements of this memorial are inscribed on its small,
uniform, green headstones bedecked in Muslim prayer beads: All the names of
the dead are men, and, though the birthdates span three generations, the
death dates are all the same: 1995. Whole families of men lay clustered
together.

One of the women of Srebrenica whom these men left behind entered the
graveyard while I was there. Ashen white face and gold teeth framed in a
traditional black Bosniac headscarf, she moved from tombstone to tombstone
bowed in prayer. She told me her name was Magbula and she lost six of her
men here, husband, sons and brothers. The whole family had gathered across
the street at the battery factory, assuming the U.N. soldiers there would
protect them, she said. Her men were put on a bus at the gate of the factory
and she never saw them again.

"Do you think the U.N. was at fault?" I asked. Not the soldiers, she said,
but the leaders. "If they had done their job, and were responsible, this
would not have happened." I asked if she'd heard about the current
controversy over Mr. Annan's leadership. Yes she had. So I asked if she
thought he should resign. It was not oil that fueled her angry answer, but
genocide: "Yes," she said, waving her hand, "all the U.N. leaders. They
could have reacted if they wanted to. If the U.N. goes somewhere now, how
can the people there believe or trust that the U.N. will save them?"

Liberal multilateralists on the left, like me, are often skittish about
offering too pungent a critique of Mr. Annan, because it offers aid and
comfort to the "enemy" on the conservative unilateralist right. But if
anyone's values have been betrayed at the U.N. over the past decade it is
those of us who believe most deeply in the organization's ideals. Just ask
the men and women of Rwanda and Srebrenica.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110006052