EMPIRE OF CHAOS
COUNTRIES
PAGE 8
RWANDA
"Paul Kagame is possibly
the greatest mass murderer alive today. The fact that Paul Kagame
continues to live and work freely in the world, unthreatened by
"international justice", celebrated as the Abe Lincoln
of his war-torn domain in central Africa, and highly regarded
and honored in the United States, Britain, and Canada, shows us
unambiguously that when the events in Rwanda 1994 are at issue,
things as fragile as truth and historical clarity are only able
to survive as exiles from these powers."
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson,
2014
"Widely hailed as the person
who ended the killings in Rwanda in 1994, Rwandan President Paul
Kagame is probably the individual most responsible for the mass
slaughter. His RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda, engaged in a great
deal of killing and blew up the presidential plane, an event that
unleashed the genocidal violence."
Yves Engler, 2017
"The genocide in Rwanda
was one hundred percent the responsibility of the Americans.
The U.S. effort to prevent the effective deployment of a UN force
for Rwanda succeeded, with the strong support of Britain."
former United Nations Secretary
General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 1998
"The civil war in Rwanda
was a brutal struggle for political power between the Hutu-led
Habyarimana government supported by France and the Tutsi Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF) backed financially and militarily by Washington.
Ethnic rivalries were used deliberately in the pursuit of geopolitical
objectives.
... Major General Paul Kagame personally ordered the shooting
down of Rwandan President Habyarimana's plane with a view to taking
control of the country. He was fully aware that the assassination
of Habyarimana would unleash a genocide against Tutsi civilians.
RPA (Rwanda Patriotic Army) forces had been fully deployed in
Kigali at the time the ethnic massacres took place and did not
act to prevent it from happening.
... Kagame was an instrument of Washington. The loss of African
lives did not matter. The Rwandan civil war and the ethnic massacres
were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in
accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.
... By supporting the build up of Ugandan and Rwandan forces and
by directly intervening in the Congolese civil war, Washington
also bears a direct responsibility for the ethnic massacres committed
in the Eastern Congo."
Michel Chossudovsky
"The Paul Kagame military
machine - backed by the US, U.K., Canada, Germany and Israel -
is one of Congo's greatest enemies. Kagame was one of the original
27 soldiers to launch the guerrilla war in Uganda, 1980, alongside
now President-for-life Yoweri Museveni. Kagame soon became the
head of Museveni's dreaded Internal Security Organization, and
he was directly involved in tortures, massacres and other human
rights atrocities during the Museveni regime's consolidation of
power.
In October 1990 Kagame returned from training at the US Army base
at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to lead the Ugandan People's Defense
Forces (UPDF) illegal invasion of Rwanda. The US military and
its partners backed the invasion, just as they backed the invasion
of Congo in 1996."
Keith Harmon Snow, 2009
"Human rights groups played
an ugly role in the mass killings in Rwanda. Major organizations
like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as a matter
of policy ignore the crime of aggression and focus on war crimes
carried out in the wake of aggressions, as they did in the cases
of the U.S. attacks on Yugoslavia and Iraq. This is very convenient
for the United States, given its prolific record of aggression
in recent decades."
Edward S. Herman
"Bill Clinton was behind
the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Millions of Congolese believe this."
Professor Yaa-Lengi, New York-based
Coalition for Peace, Justice and Democracy
"Re-education camps. Networks
of spies on the streets. Routine surveillance of the entire population.
The crushing of the independent media and all political opposition.
A ruler who changes the constitution to extend his power after
ruling for two decades. It sounds like North Korea, or the totalitarian
days of China under Mao. But this is the African nation of Rwanda
- a long-time favourite of Western governments."
Yves Engler, 2017
"After I got home from
Rwanda, and the years slowly revealed to me the extent of the
cynical maneuvering by France, Belgium, the United States among
others, I couldn't help but feel that we were a sort of diversion,
even sacrificial lambs, that permitted statesmen to say that the
world was doing something to stop the killing. In fact we were
nothing more than camouflage.
... To my mind, their [Western powers] crimes had made them inhuman,
turned them into machines made of flesh that imitated the motions
of being human."
former Lieutenant-General Romeo
Dallaire who commanded the UN peacekeping force in Rwanda in 1993-1994
"The United States and
its allies and the UN did not intervene to stop the bloodshed
in Rwanda in 1994. They supported Paul Kagame at all times. And
as he was on the road to victory and wanted no outside interference,
the United States and the rest of the "international community"
obliged him, viewing the huge bloodbath as acceptable "collateral
damage," with hypocritical apologies to follow. But this
policy went beyond non-intervention - Kagame was supported logistically
and diplomatically, and the United States and its allies deliberately
forced the reduction of UN troops as the mass killings escalated."
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson,
2014
"Paul Kagame was indicted
on November 17, 2006 by then French magistrate in charge of counter-terrorism
affairs Jean-Louis Bruguière. He is accused in the indictment
of ordering the attack on the plane carrying then Rwandan President,
Juvenal Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of
Burundi."
Congo News Agency, 2008
"The Kagame government
is immunized against prosecution thanks to their connections to
top former Clinton and Bush officials. Kagame, with its foreign
backers, has pursued an identical strategy in Congo as they did
in Rwanda, 1990-1994. The goal is to destabilize the region, manufacture
chaos, sue for peace while pursuing war, and use the UN 'peacekeeping'
mission to aid the predatory agenda. The final solution is to
permanently criminalize the Hutu majority and balkanize Congo."
Keith Harmon Snow
"Because President Paul
Kagame's Rwanda crimes were covered-up by the U.S. in 1994, and
because he was not prosecuted at the ICTR (International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda) for the assassination of the previous president
in 1997, he has been free to rape the Congo of its riches and
to massacre millions."
Peter Erlinder
"Paul Kagame's toll of
victims, first in Rwanda and then in Zaire-DRC, runs into the
millions, and exceeds that of Idi Amin by a factor of at least
five. And yet, in one of the miracles of modern propaganda, Kagame
became a savior-modernizer-moral giant for the U.S., U.K., and
Canadian establishment to admire and exploit.This favorable portrayal
of Kagame flows from the fact that he served U.S. and other powerful
interests in the African Great Lakes region."
Edward S. Herman
"Major General Paul Kagame
was an instrument of Washington. The loss of African lives did
not matter. The civil war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were
an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance
with precise strategic and economic objectives."
F. William Engdahl
"Rwanda is an American
proxy with a mission to keep Congolese minerals moving cheaply
to Western-based mining companies."
John Lasker
"All members of the Security
Council are benefiting from the resources of the Congo. The UN
does only what the Security Council wants and by that we mean
what the super powers want."
Professor Yaa-Lengi, New York-based
Coalition for Peace, Justice and Democracy
"Between 1990 and 1994,
the RPA [Rwandan Patriot Army] waged a systematic, pre-planned,
secretive but highly organized terrorist war aimed at eliminating
the largest number of Rwandan people possible-bodies were hacked
to pieces and incinerated en masse. From 1994, once the RPA violently
seized power, a terror regime was created, and developed, and
a criminal structure parallel to the state was set up to pursue
pre-determined kidnappings; torturing and raping of women and
young girls; terrorist attacks (both directly and by simulating
that the same had been perpetrated by the enemy); illegal detention
of thousands of civilians; selective murdering; systematic elimination
of corpses either by mass incineration or by throwing them into
lakes and rivers; indiscriminate attacks against civilians based
on pre-determined ethnic categories for the elimination of the
predominant ethnic group; and also to carry out acts of war in
Rwanda and Congo."
Keith Harmon Snow
SAUDI ARABIA
"The Bush family and the
House of Saud, the two most powerful dynasties in the world, have
had close personal, business, and political ties for more than
20 years.
In the private sector, the Saudis supported Harken Energy, a struggling
oil company in which George W. Bush was an investor. Most recently,
former president George H. W. Bush and his longtime ally, former
Secretary of State James A. Baker III, have appeared before Saudis
at fundraisers for the Carlyle Group, arguably the biggest private
equity firm in the world. Today, former president Bush continues
to serve as a senior adviser to the firm, whose investors allegedly
include a Saudi accused of ties to terrorist support groups...
Just days after 9/11, wealthy Saudi Arabians, including members
of the bin Laden family, were whisked out of the U.S. on private
jets. No one will admit to clearing the flights, and the passengers
weren't questioned."
John Perkins
"The world market in weaponry,
with total sales of $40 billion, grew 8 percent in 1996. Leading
the list of buyers was Saudi Arabia at $9 billion. For several
years that country has also led the list of countries that violate
human rights. In 1996, says Amnesty International, "reports
of torture and ill-treatment of detainees continued, and the judicial
punishment of flogging was frequently imposed.
We never see, hear, or read anything about Saudi Arabia's atrocities
in the media, the same media that tend to get quite worked up
about human rights abuses in other Arab countries. Best friends
are those who buy the most weapons. The U.S. arms industry wages
a struggle against terrorism by selling weapons to terrorist governments
whose only relation to human rights is to do all they can to trample
them."
Eduardo Galeano, 1998
"The U.S. Treasury had
established a secret accord with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency
(SAMA). Under the terms of the agreement, a sizeable part of the
huge new Saudi oil revenue windfall was to be invested in financing
the U.S. government deficits. A young Wall Street investment banker
was sent to Saudi Arabia to become the principal 'investment adviser'
to SAMA; he was to guide the Saudi petrodollar investments to
the correct banks, naturally in London and New York."
F. William Engdahl
"With 261 billion barrels
of crude oil lying beneath its soil, Saudi Arabia remains the
lynchpin in the international oil grab presided over by the Four
Horsemen [Shell, Chevron. British Petroleum, Exxon].
... ARAMCO [Arabian American Oil Company] now controls over one-quarter
of the world's crude oil reserves.
... As of 1990 ARAMCO produced over 8 million barrels of crude
oil a day, ensuring the Saudi role as "swing producer".
During the 1991 Gulf War ARAMCO underwent another expansion and
now cranks out an unprecedented 10 million barrels a day."
Dean Henderson, 2005
"George H. W. Bush, the
father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business
in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting
firm."
Judicial Watch, 2001
"To compare Saudi Arabia's
belligerent actions in Yemen to Nazi Germany's undeclared wars
of aggression prior to WWII is no exaggeration. Likewise the failure
of a corrupt UN to censure Saudi Arabia for its flagrant violation
of international law, the Nuremberg Principles and the entire
Geneva Convention."
Vanessa Beeley
"9/11 was a "black
operation" that was carried out by a splinter cell of the
United States government and intelligence agencies, in conjunction
with Israel's Mossad, and financed by Saudi Arabia, in order to
destabilize the Middle East and remove potential challenges to
Israel and Saudi Arabia's control of the region."
Charlie Robinson
"The Saudi royal family,
and especially the brand of religion that it believed in, the
Wahabi faith, represented a tiny number of people in Saudi Arabia.
So they used the strength they gained first from their deals with
the British Empire and subsequently with the United States in
order to preserve their stranglehold over their own people and
to impose this particular religion on the people in Saudi Arabia,
who really didn't share it."
Tariq Ali
"If Exxon pays Saudi Arabia
$50 million, all that happens is that we debit Exxon and credit
Saudi Arabia. The balance sheet of Citibank remains the same.
And if they say they don't like American banks, they'll put it
in Credit Suisse. All we do is charge Saudi Arabia and credit
Credit Suisse. Our balance sheet remains the same. So when people
run around waiting for the sky to fall there isn't any way that
money can leave the system. It's a closed circuit."
Citibank Chairman Walter Wriston
"The United States balances
its payments by secret agreements with Saudi Arabia to recycle
petrodollars to the United States and to ensure that OPEC sales
all over the world are denominated in U.S. dollars. These arrangements
to ease pressure on the U.S. currency have helped, as an inevitable
consequence, to create debt crises all over the Third World."
Peter Dale Scott
"Just days after the hijackers
took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter
flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama's family
off to Saudi Arabia."
BBC-TV's Newsnight (November 6,
2001)
"As early as June 8, 1974,
in his capacity as U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger had
signed an agreement establishing a little-noted U.S.-Saudi Arabian
Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation, whose official mandate
included, among other projects, 'cooperation in the field of finance.'
... The U.S. Treasury had signed an agreement in Riyadh with the
Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency [SAMA], whose mission was 'to establish
a new relationship through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
with the [U.S.] Treasury borrowing operation. Under this arrangement,
SAMA will purchase new US Treasury securities.
F. William Engdahl
The price of oil suddenly quadrupled in 1974. That highly suspicious
rise occurred soon after an oil deal was engineered by U.S. interests
with the royal family of Saudia Arabia, the largest oil producer
in OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries).
The deal was brokered by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
It involved an agreement by OPEC to sell oil only for dollars
in return for a secret U.S. agreement to arm Saudi Arabia and
keep the House of Saud in power. The U.S. dollar, which had formerly
been backed by gold, was now "backed" by oil."
Ellen Hodgson Brown
"Saudi Arabia now boasts
the highest per capita defense spending in the world. In 1984
alone the Saudis spent $22.7 billion on US weaponry. The Saudis
have elaborate military assistance arrangements with Pakistan,
whereby the Saudis send Karachi aid in return for the services
of Pakistani military units."
Dean Henderson, 2005
"The Bush administration
continues to support a fundamentalist and authoritarian regime
in Saudi Arabia while refusing to support the Palestinians' right
to statehood until they create a democratic political system based
upon 'tolerance and liberty'."
Stephen Zunes
"The fact is that when
totalitarian nations like Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business
interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely
elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the
Bush administration treats him as an enemy."
Los Angeles Times columnist Robert
Scheer, 2005
"Right after World War
II, building on the so-called Quincy Agreements with Saudi Arabia
in 1945, the United States moved to dominate a global system for
the production and distribution of oil. Starting with the Truman
Doctrine in 1946, U.S. geostrategic thinking was oil based. What
began as a strategy for containment of the Soviet Union has become
more and more nakedly a determination to control the oil resources
of the world."
Peter Dale Scott
"We worked out a deal whereby
the House of Saud would reinvest petrodollars in U.S. treasury
securities.
Part of the agreement also was for Saudi Arabia to maintain the
price of oil at a level acceptable to us and we would agree to
keep the House of Saud in power."
John Perkins
"The current strength of
the dollar is supported by OPEC's requirement, secured by a secret
agreement between the U. S. and Saudi Arabia, that all OPEC sales
be denominated in dollars."
Peter Dale Scott, 2003
"A transformational company
of the nineties, manned by prominent figures from the departing
Bush administration-George H. W Bush himself and Secretary of
State James A. Baker Ill - was the Carlyle Group, partly funded
by rich Saudi investors. Military and Pentagon contractors were
conspicuous on the list of Carlyle subsidiaries. One was the Vinnell
Corporation, close to the CIA, which held contracts to train the
security and internal police forces of countries including Saudi
Arabia."
Kevin Phillips
"Our assignment was twofold:
to formulate a strategy to ensure that OPEC would funnel the billions
of dollars we spent on oil back to U.S. companies and to establish
a new "oil standard" that would replace the former "gold
standard."
... As far as the media was concerned, the House of Saud agreed
to three important conditions; it would: 1) invest a large portion
of its petrodollars in U.S. government securities; 2) allow the
U.S. Treasury Department to use the trillions of dollars in interest
from these securities to hire U.S. corporations to westernize
Saudi Arabia; and 3) maintain the price of oil within limits acceptable
to the corporatocracy. For its part, the U.S. government promised
to keep the Saud family in power.
There was an additional agreement, one that made few headlines
but was crucial to the corporatocracy's need to maintain the dollar
as the standard global currency. Saudi Arabia committed to trading
oil exclusively in U.S. dollars. With the scratch of a pen, the
dollar's sovereignty was reestablished. Oil replaced gold as the
measure of a currency's value."
John Perkins
"Earlier this month, the
Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, reported that FBI agents had been
told by the Bush administration to back off investigating members
of the bin Laden clan living in the U.S. In September, the Wall
Street Journal documented the lucrative business connections between
the bin Laden family and senior U.S. Republicans, including the
president's father, George Bush Sr.
What are we to make of all this? One possible conclusion is that
the bin Laden terror problem was allowed to get out of hand because
bin Laden, himself, had powerful protectors in both Washington
and Saudi Arabia."
Toronto Star newspaper, 2001
"The dollar's current strength
is supported by the requirement of the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC), secured originally by a secret agreement
between the United States and Saudi Arabia, that all OPEC oil
sales be denominated in dollars."
Peter Dale Scott
"A revolutionary government
in Yemen would be highly antagonistic towards America's trusted
Saudi proxy state would be a threat to America's interests throughout
the entire Middle East."
Andrew Gavin Marshall
"George H W Bush and George
Schultz pressured the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to turn on the oil
spigot in early 1986 and flood the world with cheap oil. That
succeeded brilliantly from the standpoint of this U.S. strategy.
It bankrupted thousands of small independent oil companies across
the United States, but for Rockefeller, Standard Oil, BP, Shell
and so forth that simply rid them of small competition and allowed
them to buy up their oil assets on the cheap."
F. William Engdahl
"Wahhabism is a radical
form of Islam only practiced in Saudi Arabia and by the Afghan
Taliban."
Dean Henderson, 2005
"In March 2015, Saudi Arabia,
while enjoying the support of the United States and Britain, without
any approval by the UN Security Council, unleashed an armed aggression
against Yemen.
Saudi Arabia introduced an economic blockade against Yemen, thus
inflicting unspeakable suffering upon the peaceful population
of Yemen. That is why Riyadh should be held responsible for tens
of thousands of civilian deaths caused by malnutrition.
... Of the 27 million people living in Yemen, almost 20 million
people experience an acute shortage of food, which means they
are being starved to death."
Martin Berger
"France has joined with
Israel and with Saudi Arabia in quashing the true Arab spring,
deciding who does and does not stay in power in Syria or Libya
and finally in scuttling any chance for a nuclear power agreement
with Iran. The Saudis and the French are equal opportunity crooks.
The Saudis will give the French the right to build nuclear power
plants there, the French sell the Saudis armaments and voila,
a deal between two devils."
Margaret Kimberley
"Saudi Arabia and Israel
have a shared agenda to shape the Middle East to their liking
even if it means using violence and terrorism to bring the region
to the brink of war.
... The United States and Israel want the Middle East dominated
by Arab dictators, who can control the Sunni faithful through
petrol dollars and the Saudi royal's promotion and financing of
Wahabism, an extreme form of Islam."
Richard Walker
"While the U.S. is not
leading the fight in Yemen, it has ardently backed the war's aggressor
- Saudi Arabia - from the beginning and has supplied the Saudis
with billions of dollars in weapons, as well as occasionally bombed
locations in Yemen to aid their Gulf allies.
In addition, the U.S. has turned a blind eye to the Saudis' numerous
war crimes in Yemen, despite the enormity of the tragedy unfolding
there, including blocking aid shipments and consequently triggering
widespread famine. The U.S. has been eager to see Saudi influence
continue in Yemen - as it was prior to the conflict - due to Yemen's
location, which grants it control over the strategic strait of
Bab al-Mandab, a chokepoint for the Saudi oil trade."
Whitney Webb
"Saudi Arabia's deep complicity
in terrorism gets a "never mind" from the Deep State's
leadership. The kingdom's role as a leading producer of fossil
fuels is not the only thing that gives it immunity from official
censure. It is worth considering what the kingdom does with all
those dollars (estimated at $ 405 billion during 2014) that it
accumulates from its oil sales. The kingdom dutifully recycles
its huge petrodollar overhang back into U.S. investments, buys
U.S. Treasuries, and stocks up every few years with multibillion-dollar
weapons purchases. In short, the feudal tyrants of the Arabian
Peninsula are one of the bevel gears that make the whole global
money machine function."
Mike Lofgren
"Out of the Al Qaeda in
Iraq, the Pentagon and CIA created a new, far larger Jihadist
killing machine - ISIS. Its purpose was to create the preconditions
needed to bring US military troops back into Iraq, into Syria,
Lebanon and beyond, and to remove Russia's ally Assad in Damascus.
... The key fighters of ISIS were trained by CIA and US Special
Forces Command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012. Saudi Arabia
and Qatar financed the Jordan ISIS training."
F. William Engdahl
"Of the $66.3 billion in
U.S. overseas arms sales in 2011, over half, or $33.4 billion,
consisted of sales to Saudi Arabia. Saudi arms sales reflect an
agreement between the two countries to offset the flow of U.S.
dollars to pay for Saudi oil. The wealth of the two nations, the
United States and Saudi Arabia, has become more and more interdependent."
Peter Dale Scott