Tuesday, July 19, 2011

CIA Secret Prisons In Somalia Revealed By Jeremy Scahill & How the U.S. Government uses its media servants to attack real journalism - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com


                               -------UPDATE: 4: 23 PM , July 19, 2011--------


Just like The Communist was seamlessly replaced by the Terrorist when a new enemy was needed, the death of Osama bin Laden and the virtual non-existence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan means that Yemen and Somalia are the New War on Terror Battlegrounds. Quote from: The War on Terror, now starring Yemen and Somalia BY GLENN GREENWALD at Salon .Com, July 18, 2011


...President Obama pledged when he signed his executive order that the United States would win the struggle against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.” The latest report from Mogadishu shows that his order has instead been interpreted very narrowly, leaving CIA proxy-prison regimes in place. The result is a considerable gap between the values Obama articulated on the campaign trail and in his speeches, and those of the nation’s clandestine services under his leadership.
Above quote: " The CIA’s Secret Prison in Somalia " By Scott Horton, Harper's Magazine ,July 14, 2011



Jeremy Scahill interviewed on RT.

Mainstream Media Won't Report on CIA's Secret Sites: As the CIA expands covert missions, it's no surprise than many of their operations go unreported. Jeremy Scahill of The Nation says, though, that many outlets are aware of some injustice carried out by the CIA and are just failing to report them
Video By RT Posted July 15, 2011 via Information Clearing House





Alyona at RT criticizes media for spending a great deal of time covering what is now a non-story that of Casey Anthony who was found not guilty of murdering her child by a jury while the media ignores other big stories such as Jeremy Scahill's expose on CIA secret prisons.

I could add a few more such as the Rupert Murdoch story and the way Fox News is defending his empire for instance or the stalled uprising in Bahrain and the Saudi & US supported brutal crackdown in Bahrain or the story of the one million pro-Qaddaffi Regime in Libya or the connections of the Libyan rebels to Al Qaeda and the Taliban or the continuing abuse of Bradley Manning or other Whistleblowers or the protest in Egypt because the people fear the government with US backing will not commit to real reform and so on...

The basic problem is that most citizens enjoy a good juicy story or scandal such as watching every move of Casey Anthony or Charlie Sheen or other unimportant media stars such as Paris Hilton et al Rupert Murdcoch is correct in his assessment that most people prefer Tabloid or Yellow journalism and they prefer only positive stories concerning foreign affairs.

MSM: Casey Anthony Free v. Somalia

Uploaded by TheAlyonaShow on Jul 18, 2011
The mainstream media went crazy covering Casey Anthony's release. On the other hand, remember that report by The Nation's Jeremy Scahill on CIA's secret sites in Somalia? Where the CIA is running a counterterrorism training program, and paying Somali's to run prisons where prisoners are held that have been rendered from Kenya? Today the LA Times reported that New American Intelligence raises concerns about a widening alliance of Islamic terrorist groups plotting to target the US. Find out more here.




Glenn Greenwald criticizes the mainstream media in the U.S. for either downplaying or ignoring the report by the intrepid investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill's explosive story of CIA secret prisons and Obama continuing with the same illegal or unethical and egregious policies of the Bush Regime. Greenwald accuses much of the media of being lackey's of the CIA and the establishment .

As the mainstream media failed to do its job by acquiescing to the Bush administration's propaganda of deception, outright lies in the run up to the US unnecessary invasion of Iraq.The freedom of the press means that the press has the responsibility to question and investigate the policies and statement of the government of the day.

The importance of a free press is undermined when it merely acts as an echo chamber for those in power or as in the case of Rupert Murdoch's media it merely reflects the owners own narrow agenda.

Unfortunately the U.S. mainstream media sees such revelations about the CIA and the Obama administration as anti-Obama or even UnAmerican because it reveals state secrets during a time when America is at War that is the Global War on Terror.

How the U.S. government uses its media servants to attack real journalism - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Earlier this week, the truly intrepid investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill published in The Nation one of the most significant political exposés of the year. Entitled "the CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia," the article documented that the CIA uses and effectively controls a secret prison in Mogadishu, where foreign nationals who are rendered off the streets of their countries (at the direction of the U.S.) are taken (along with Somali nationals) to be imprisoned with no due process and interrogated (by U.S. agents).
 Although Somali government agents technically operate the facility, that is an obvious ruse: "US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners" and are "there full-time," Scahill reported. On Democracy Now on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed it has no knowledge of this secret prison. This arrangement, as Scahill told me yesterday, is consistent with standard Obama administration practice: "they continue even the most controversial Bush terrorism policies by having some other government technically operate it so they can keep their fingerprints off it."
 Indeed, the administration has even resorted to this playbook by using "torture by proxy" -- as we saw when the Kuwait government, with at least the complicity if not direction of the U.S., detained and beat American teenager Gulet Mohamed during interrogation sessions. Just yesterday, a federal judge "reacted skeptically" to the Obama DOJ's demands for dismissal of a lawsuit (on secrecy grounds) brought by an American citizen imprisoned for four months in Africa, where "U.S. officials threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and other serious harm unless he confessed to ties with al-Qaida in Somalia."Scahill's discovery of this secret prison in Mogadishu -- this black site -- calls into serious doubt the Obama administration's claims to have ended such practices and establishes a serious human rights violation on its own.
 As Harper's Scott Horton put it, the Nation article underscores how the CIA is "maintaining a series of 'special relationships' under which cooperating governments maintain[] proxy prisons for the CIA," and "raises important questions" about "whether the CIA is using a proxy regime there to skirt Obama's executive order" banning black sites and torture.
Despite the significance of this revelation -- or, more accurately, because of it -- the U.S. establishment media has almost entirely ignored this story. Scahill thus far has given a grand total of two television interviews: on Democracy Now and Al Jazeera.
No major television news network -- including MSNBC -- has even mentioned his story. Generally speaking, Republicans don't care that the worst abuses of the Bush era are continuing, and Democrats (who widely celebrated Dana Priest's 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning story about Bush's CIA black cites) don't want to hear that it's true.
Meanwhile, the CIA has been insisting that discussion of this Mogadishu site could jeopardize its operations in Somalia, and while that typical, manipulative tactic didn't stop Scahill from informing the citizenry about this illicit behavior, it has (as usual) led government-subservient American media stars to refrain from discussing it. Indeed, Scahill said that this site is such common knowledge in Mogadishu (where even ordinary residents call it "that CIA building") that he'd be "very surprised" if international reporters who cover Somalia were unaware of it; he has confirmed with certainty that at least one correspondent covering East Africa for one of the world's leading media outlets was aware of, but never reported, the CIA's role at this secret prison.

The War on Terror, now starring Yemen and Somalia
BY GLENN GREENWALD at Salon .Com, July 18, 2011

There is a concerted campaign underway to ensure that the War on Terror bonanza continues unimpeded in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, and even despite Leon Panetta's acknowledgment that Al Qaeda has a grand total of "fewer than two dozen key operatives" on the entire planet. That effort relies primarily on touting a growing villainous alliance -- the scariest since Marvel Comic's Masters of Evil -- between Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (mostly in Yemen) and the al Shabab group in Somalia. To accomplish this, all the standard fear-mongering propaganda is being trotted out, and the War on Terror apparatus is simply being re-directed to those nations. Most notably, the establishment media is being used to disseminate these messages, using its familiar journalistically bankrupt practices to serve this agenda.

In recent months, government officials have been insisting that the greatest Terrorist threat now resides in Yemen. Almost before the Al Qaeda leader's body hit the ocean floor, U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki, in Yemen, assumed his (fabricated) role in American government and media depictions as The Next Osama bin Laden. The Obama administration has escalated the existing drone program and begun a new CIA drone campaign in Yemen (one that just killed numerous people over the weekend); it also, contrary to public denials, provided the arms to Saudi Arabia to attack a rebel group in Northern Yemen. Yemen is also the justification for Obama's attempt to institutionalize a due-process-free assassination program aimed at U.S. citizens. The administration just commenced a separate drone campaign in Somalia.
And, as Jeremy Scahill revealed last week, the U.S. is relying upon interrogations conducted in a secret prison in Mogadishu, filled with people from that country and those rendered at the behest of the U.S. from other African nations. Just like The Communist was seamlessly replaced by the Terrorist when a new enemy was needed, the death of Osama bin Laden and the virtual non-existence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan means that Yemen and Somalia are the New War on Terror Battlegrounds.

Typifying the subservient role played by the establishment media in propagating this narrative is this new article in The Los Angeles Times by Brian Bennett. Headlined "Al Qaeda's Yemen branch has aided Somalia militants, U.S. says," the article grants anonymity to "U.S. counter-terrorism officials" to do nothing more than echo the official administration line: that we now face "a widening alliance of terrorist groups."
These anonymous officials claim that "leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen have urged members of the hard-line Shabab militia to attack targets outside Africa for the first time" and that bin Laden "had sought to strengthen operational ties between Al Qaeda and the Shabab." In other words, anonymous, unaccountable intelligence officials went to the L.A. Times to depict desires and aspirations of a scary Terrorist alliance as fact, and that paper uncritically headlined these scary developments.

and :
" The secret war in Somalia Who the U.S. is fighting in the Horn of Africa, and why " BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT, Salon.com, July 16, 2011

Writing in the Nation this week, Jeremy Scahill revealed that the CIA is running "a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives" at Mogadishu’s airport and also using a secret prison in the beleaguered Horn of Africa nation.

The revelations come just two weeks after media reports -- sourced to unnamed American officials -- of a U.S. drone attack in Somalia on members of the Islamic militant group Shabaab, which was designated a terrorist organization by the State Department in 2008.

The Washington Post noted that Somalia is now the sixth country -- joining Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen -- where the Obama administration has launched drone attacks.


and from Harper's Magazine on the importance of Jeremy Scahill's revelations about CIA secret prisons:

" The CIA’s Secret Prison in Somalia " By Scott Horton, Harper's Magazine ,July 14, 2011

The Obama Administration’s recent decision to charge a Somali militant named Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame with crimes in a federal court in Manhattan has focused a good deal of attention on American intelligence operations in the Horn of Africa. Somalia is still viewed as the quintessential failed state, and it has been cited by American analysts as a breeding ground for Islamist militants. The U.S. government has made no secret of the special attention it devotes to the country, but it has been remarkably short on details about what that attention entails. Much of this knowledge gap has now been filled in by a remarkable piece of reporting from The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill.
" Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda. "
"As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners."
Scahill proceeds to unfold, through an array of first-hand accounts, a convincing picture of the site’s prison, training operation, and intelligence-gathering operation, which draws on human, signals, and satellite sources. He pays particular attention to the prison, detailing its conditions and its absence of legal process and rights. Indeed, its very existence is a point of special concern.

...President Obama pledged when he signed his executive order that the United States would win the struggle against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.” The latest report from Mogadishu shows that his order has instead been interpreted very narrowly, leaving CIA proxy-prison regimes in place. The result is a considerable gap between the values Obama articulated on the campaign trail and in his speeches, and those of the nation’s clandestine services under his leadership.

CIA Accused of Running Secret Terrorist Prison in Somalia by Alexis Garrett Stodghill at Atlanta Post, JULY 18, 2011

The Nation magazine author Jeremy Scahill has unearthed what many believe is a secret prison for terrorists in Somalia run by the CIA. In his recent article for the political weekly, Scahill details a relationship between the American and Somalian governments in which this Guantanamo Bay-style facility operates without the attendant political backlash. Apparently, these types of underground “black sites” for the detainment and questioning of terror suspects were common before Obama’s presidency, and widely criticized for generating numerous human rights violations through the use of torture.
President Obama signed an order ending the CIA’s black site program on the second day of his term, so the discovery that these prisons appear to remain in operation is causing international outrage. Despite being pressed for answers by news outlets such as CNN and ABC, the CIA remains evasive in discussing its role in Somalia’s secret terrorist prisons, and similar CIA outposts across Africa. Time.com reports:
"Whatever the depth of the involvement of the CIA and other intelligence and military agencies in Somalia, the report raises this specter of longstanding and much-loathed U.S. counter-terrorism practices in the Muslim world — policies that many hoped would fade under the Obama Administration and in the wake of the Arab Spring. Before, brutal regimes like those of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and even Muammar Gaddafi in Libya happily collaborated with U.S. agents in the arrest, secret detention and likely torture of Islamists and terror suspects. Scahill’s piece suggests not much has changed, at least in the Horn of Africa, a part of the world that has vexed American policy makers for nearly two decades."
and :

CIA using secret Somalia prison facility: report by Agence France-Presse via Raw Story, July 12, 2011

and so it goes,
GORD.

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