Earlier this year, a US drone strike killed two innocent hostages, one American and one Italian citizen near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

The incident spurred outrage across the media, resulting in Obama having to apologize for the grave error.

If only one could expect the same apology for the thousands of drone victims across the Muslim World since the advent of the War on Terror, most of whose names were never so much as uttered by those who sealed their deaths.

In today’s globalized world almost everything is interconnected. When it comes to war, conflicts are often interlocked in disturbing ways. For example, every death by way of drone wouldn’t be possible without turning a blind eye to the ongoing genocide from resource wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC.

While people rightly demand that “Black Lives Matter” in America, black lives have been forgotten in the Congo, where nearly six million people have died just in the last fifteen years.

Media Roots Radio is joined by Kambale Musavuli, Spokesperson for Friends of the Congo, to talk about how Congo’s resource curse feeds the military industrial complex and why anti-drone activists need to organize with the Congolese to disrupt cobalt extraction.

 

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Kambale came on Breaking the Set to discuss the cobalt connection to the civil war in the Congo, and Media Roots covered this issue in depth. He also visited BTS during the last Africa Summit to break down backlash against US military policy in the continent.

 

How the US Military Took Over the African Continent

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Many DRC soldiers are trained and equipped in the United States. Breaking the Set expands upon a UN report bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by a US-trained Congolese battalion.

 

US Sponsors Rape in the Congo

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This Media Roots podcast is the product of many long hours of hard work and love. If you want to encourage our voice, please consider supporting us as we continue to speak from outside party lines. Even the smallest donations help us with operating costs.

Listen to all previous episodes of Media Roots Radio here.

Follow Abby @abbymartin & @kambale.

http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/

Saudi Arabia’s American backed war in Yemen continues, yet it is massively failing to achieve its stated objectives.

The Houthis continue to advance in the region, and the instability is causing Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to gain more ground.

Bombing civilians in the poorest country in the Arab World is only exacerbating the crisis. Before the bombing campaign even started, two thirds of Yemen’s population was already in need of aid, and almost half food insecure.

Since the assault started on March 26, more than 1,000 people have been killed, half of which are civilians, according to the United Nations. At least 115 of the victims have been children, according to UNICEF. 

Despite the recent collaborative wave of aggression, the US government has already been carrying out covert operations in Yemen for over a decade. Many have pointed out that the ongoing destabilization of Yemen is a direct result of US’ drone bombing there since the advent of the War on Terror.

Director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, Ali Al-Ahmed, talks to Media Roots Radio about the American backed war in Yemen and unyielding partnership between the two countries; the Saudi export of terrorism and ultra orthodox Wahhabism; and the political bribery on behalf of Gulf States to maintain a culture of silence.

 

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After the death of King Abdullah, Ali came on Breaking the Set to discuss the oppressive Saudi Arabian monarchy and dissect why the corporate media covered him as a great reformer.

 

King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia: Slavery, Terror & Women as Property

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In the past four months, Saudi Arabia has already beheaded 71 people. Amnesty International has called the upswell in executions a “macabre spike”, having already ranked the country among the top three executioners in the world in 2014.

Last year, I gave an extensive outline of the country’s extensive human rights record and repressive theocracy by discussing the open discrimination against women, public executions for petty crimes and harsh sentencing for government critics.

 

Saudi Arabia’s Tyrannical Death State

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The toxifying partnership between the US and Saudi Arabia exemplifies the utter hypocrisy of the War on Terror, and the faster it’s exposed as the fraud it is, the faster we can galvanize to stop it.

Abby

Follow @AbbyMartin | @AliAlAhmed_en

Photo by flickr user Tribes of the World

For twenty years, Western elites have spun a tale of how Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame heroically ended the 1994 genocide in that country.

That narrative has persisted despite the fact that a great deal of evidence shows that Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) did much of the killing and has committed extraordinary levels of violence in neighboring Congo since invading that country not long after seizing power.

The recent BBC telecast of Rwanda: The Untold Story indicates that the truth about Kagame may finally be penetrating the mainstream. Rwanda: The Untold Story presents much information that contradicts the official narrative, specifically that the dramatic escalation in violence began not in April 1994 but in October 1990 when the RPF invaded from its outposts in Uganda; that RPF forces killed tens of thousands of people in the 42-month period from the invasion to April 1994; and that the RPF is responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand more Rwandans during the three month period of bloodshed in 1994.  

In contrast, the spinners of the Kagame the Hero tale have put the entire responsibility on the Hutu-controlled government and armed Hutu mobs. The RPF’s 1990 invasion, meanwhile, has been completely written out of history in the official narrative, as has RPF responsibility for the shooting down of a plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana. It was immediately after the murder of Habyarimana that what has been known since as the Rwandan Genocide began.

Another part of the official narrative that was exposed long ago by Edward Herman, Robin Philpot and others is that the US didn’t do enough to stop the killing. In fact, Kagame was an imperial operative as early as the 1980’s who trained at Fort Leavenworth and the US was closely allied with the RPF even before the 1990 invasion. Throughout the spring of 1994, the Clinton administration was proactive in blocking the UN from taking measures that might have prevented much of the killing. Former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Gali, for one, has put the entire blame for what happened in Rwanda in the 1990’s on the United States.

In addition, while the Rwandan government and France, its primary ally, supported international action to stop the killing, Kagame was so determined to take complete control of the country that he eschewed a ceasefire and negotiations. The inescapable conclusion is that the mounting deaths on both sides were acceptable to Kagame and, by extension, the US, so long as the end result was complete victory and the ascension of the RPF to power.

From the outset, both Hutu and Tutsi survivors, UN officials and numerous investigators have presented an entirely different version of events. Those stories, which have been fortified by population studies and other means, reveal that both sides are each responsible for hundreds of thousands of killings. These dissident voices have been ignored and, in the case of several studies by human rights groups and the UN, suppressed – at least until the airing of Rwanda: The Untold Story.

Perpetrators and supporters of empire who have never seen a US war crime they didn’t like have attacked critics of the official narrative and obfuscated who really benefits from the ongoing warfare. It’s a neat trick practiced regularly: falsely accuse dissidents of denying atrocities and deny imperial atrocities, all the while obscuring the billions in US business profits made possible by Kagame’s invasions of the Congo.

Western plunder of the region dates to the murderous rule of Belgian King Leopold II. No sooner did the Congolese independence movement succeed in 1960 than Congolese reactionaries and their Belgian and CIA helpers overthrew and eventually murdered Patrice Lumumba, the nation’s first elected Prime Minister. Eventually installed in Lumumba’s place was US puppet Mobutu Sese Soko, who for 30 years served US business interests as zealously as Kagame has. And much as a succession of US administrations hailed Mobutu as a great man, Clintons, Madeline Albright, George Bush II, Samantha Power and Susan Rice hail Kagame as “the man who ended the Rwandan Genocide.” Never mind the millions of Congolese who have been killed or died from starvation, disease and other causes traced directly to Kagame’s invasions.

The unraveling of the official Rwanda story has global implications, as the US has invoked “preventing another Rwanda” to justify invasions of the former Yugoslavia, Libya and large swaths of the Middle East. With a population increasingly alarmed by endless wars of aggression, the fact that the foundation for those acts is one big lie brings us closer to the day when we can end forever imperial ambitions and war.

Andy Piascik of Bridgeport writes for Z Magazine/Znet

Photo by flickr user DFID