CIA's close relationship with Sudan's government enables genocide there to continue

By Nat Hentoff
May 20th, 2005

In Um Seifa, a dusty village in Sudan's western region of Darfur, a crowd of white-robed children stood outside their newly reopened school. . . . 'The government never gave us education, development, health [services or] equality,' said the headmaster. . . . So the people of Um Seifa built their own school. A week after your correspondent visited it, it was burned to the ground, and eight children murdered [by Sudanese army forces and the Arab Janjaweed] in The Economist, April 2, 2005

During George W. Bush's campaign to spread the spirit and eventually the letter of freedom and democracy to other lands, he has made some nightmarish allies. Torture of prisoners, homegrown or supplied by the CIA, has been endemic in Jordan, Yemen, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan. In the latter's prisons, the specialty of the house is boiling prisoners, including political prisoners, to death.

But now thanks to a carefully documented report by Ken Silverstein in the April 29 Los Angeles Times, which has had far too little follow-up by the media, it is clear that the CIA, with the blessings of the Bush administration, is closely connected to the horrifying government of Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, the head perpetrator of the ongoing genocide in Darfur: over 400,000 black Africans dead, with some 500 more dying every day, and more than two million, many in peril of starvation, turned into refugees as their homes and villages are destroyed.

The lead to the L.A. Times story by Ken Silverstein, datelined Khartoum: "The Bush administration has forged a close intelligence partnership with the Islamic regime that once welcomed Osama bin Laden. . . . The Sudanese government . . . has been providing access to terrorism suspects and sharing intelligence data with the United States."

Before going into more details of this alliance from hell, the story explains the great concern of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who should have won this year's Pulitzer Prize, instead of being a finalist, because he has done more than any other journalist in the world to keep the pressure on George W. Bush, the United Nations, and every one of us to force the government of Sudan to stop the killings, the mass rapes, and the murders of black Africans and their children.

Editor's note: Appreciation goes to the Los Angeles Times for exposing these atrocities. Most impressive. Of course, we must understand why the L.A. Times and The Economist are allowed to expose this information when other top secret news is not allowed when a journalist has the inside story but is terminated because of his/her desire to print it.