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The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution today, May 2, 2012, that gives both Sudan and South Sudan just 48 hours to stop fighting or face sanctions. The resolution got unanimous approval, even Russia and China, who generally oppose the institution of sanctions by the international body, gave their approval in this case. China buys oil from both Sudan and South Sudan.

In response to what he considered provocations from the newly independent South Sudan, Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir declared a state of emergency in the border regions according to the Sudan Tribune Sunday, and on Monday the United Nations reported a sharp increase in the number of refugees fleeing the fighting from South Kordofan into South Sudan's Unity state. Ahram Online reported Monday, April 30, 2012:

A surging number of hungry refugees are fleeing fighting in Sudan where some are reduced to foraging in the wild, the UN said Monday as rebels said a Sudanese bomb killed a mother and two children.

There has been "a notable increase in the number of new arrivals" who have crossed the border from South Kordofan into South Sudan's Unity state, the United Nations humanitarian agency (OCHA) said in its weekly bulletin.

The refugees are fleeing fighting between Sudanese troops and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), it said.

The plague of war is again visiting the people of the southern Sudan region as border clashes threaten to grow into a full blown war. A review of the history of the region shows that war is an unwelcome visitor that has practically made itself at home in the region.

It is hoped that the threat of UN sanctions, other pressures from the international community and most importantly, the requirements of their own people will encourage the political leaders of Sudan and South Sudan to settle their differences without resorting to violence.

As a direct result of the Libyan Revolution their chances of making a peace are much better now. With Mummar Qaddafi dead, a big obstacle to peace in Sudan and the whole region has been removed because he has been a major destabilizing influence in Sudan almost from the first moment he came to power in Libya. Of all the countries in Africa that Qaddafi toyed with, Sudan may have been his masterpiece. Below the fold I want to give a short summary of that history together with a bunch of links because the minutia of a 40 year relationship could cover many volumes and can only be touched upon in this diary.      

Libyans started registering to vote in a national election for the first time in 60 years today, May Day, 2012. Libyan Tweet Forum reports:

The Libyan National Transitional Council will hold the first democratic elections in Libya as planned on the 19th of June. This election comes to apply a designated 200-member assembly to draft a new constitution and form a government.

The registration centers open their doors to register voters in Libya from the 1st of May until the 14th of May in all regions of the country.
Libyans overseas might also be able to vote through their respective embassies. You will find below information about voter registration for the 2012 Elections.
Voting Districts

Locations for voters inside Libya (Documents are in Arabic)

Tobruk (1) | Bayda (2) | Benghazi (3) | Ajdabiya (4) | Sirte and Jufrah (5) | Sabha and Shati (6) | Awbari and Murzuq (7) | Gheryan (8) | Misrata (9) | Khums (10) | Tripoli (11) | Aziziya (12) | Zawiya

Libyans in the United States may get Info and Forms Here.

Now I'm off to join the West Wind of Occupy LA for our May Day in LA.

Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone by the Special Court established jointly the United Nations and the government of Sierra Leone today.

When the trial first started, many demanded that Mummar Qaddafi stand trial for these crimes along side of Charles Taylor because Taylor and his band were trained in Libya and his campaign of terror was backed and financed by Qaddafi. What Taylor did was just one part of a larger criminal enterprise carried out in West Africa that created turmoil in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire, and was organized and funded by Mummar Gaddafi in Libya.

The NY Times reported on the verdict this morning:

THE HAGUE — Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and once a powerful warlord, was convicted by an international tribunal on Thursday of 11 counts of planning, aiding and abetting war crimes committed in Sierra Leone during that country’s civil war in the 1990s. He is the first head of state to be convicted by an international court since the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

The ruling, announced by Presiding Judge Richard Lussick of Samoa, said Mr. Taylor was guilty of involvement in crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder, rape, slavery and the use of child soldiers. The court, however, said the prosecution failed to prove that Mr. Taylor had direct command responsibility for the atrocities in the indictment.

The story is all over the news now. You'll find an Al Jazeera YouTube video, a link to the diary that broke the story on the Daily Kos and more about the Qaddafi connection below the fold.

I'll try to keep this short and sweet,
its too short for a blog,
but too long for a tweet.

I have now taken about a year of abuse from so-called anti-imperialists and anti-interventions that have accused me of being on NATO's side in Libya.

Therefore I would like to set the record straight. As anyone familiar with my writings knows, I weighed in on the side of the Libyan Revolution months before NATO got involved.

So get it straight, NATO was on my side.

Of course, with friends like that, you've got to watch your back, but that's another story.

Let me tell it another way:

If you see me pushing a car down the street, its because I think somebody deserves a hand and I can help. I'm not going to walk away from the car because a cop or even a cia spook starts helping.

After weeks of skirmishes in the Nafusa Mountains southwest of Tripoli, Sifaw Twawa and his brigade of freedom fighters are at a standstill. It’s a mid-April night in 2011, and Twawa’s men are frightened. Lightly armed and hidden only by trees, they are a stone’s throw from one of four Grad 122-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers laying down a barrage on Yefren, their besieged hometown. These weapons can fire up to 40 unguided rockets in 20 seconds. Each round carries a high-­explosive fragmentation warhead weighing 40 pounds. They urgently need to know how to deal with this, or they will have to pull back. Twawa’s cell phone rings.

Two friends are on the line, via a Skype conference call. Nureddin Ashammakhi is in Finland, where he heads a research team developing biomaterials technology, and Khalid Hatashe, a medical doctor, is in the United Kingdom. The Qaddafi regime trained Hatashe on Grads during his compulsory military service. He explains that Twawa’s katiba—brigade—is well short of the Grad’s minimum range: at this distance, any rockets fired would shoot past them. Hatashe adds that the launcher can be triggered from several hundred feet away using an electric cable, so the enemy may not be in or near the launch vehicle. Twawa’s men successfully attack the Grad—all because two civilians briefed their leader, over Skype, in a battlefield a continent away.

This is basically the Reader's Digest version of John Pollock's People Power 2.0 published on the Libyan Tweepform yesterday. I tried to include some of the best stuff here, together with my comments, but I have left a lot of good stuff out so I strongly encourage you to read the original.

World War III or Cyber War I?

The revolutionary war to overthrow Mummar Qaddafi and free the Libyan people from his brutal regime wasn't just fought in Libya. Chiefly through cyberspace, it was fought by activist from around the world that enrolled themselves, in many cases full time, in the Libyan struggle and ended up playing a role as crucial as NATO's, if not more so. In many ways, the Libyan Revolution qualifies for the title of world war, at least on the side of the revolution.

The current U.S. Army Field Manual for Operations says, “information has become as important as lethal action in determining the outcome of operations.” This was completely proven by the Libyan Revolution, and this was almost certainly the first war anywhere in which activists, working through the Internet, played such a critical role in the outcome of the military struggle. This is a very important story that is just beginning to be told.

Republished by Libyan Tweet Forum

Slowly but surely, the revolution in Libya is bringing stability and making progress. Yesterday, the Zintan Brigade turned over control of the Tripoli Airport to the Libyan government. Two days ago, Libyan Airlines started regular flights to Malta and the Zintan Brigade are now making plans to transfer their prize catch, Saif Qaddafi, to the NTC as well.

A four day conference, Infrastructure Libya 2012, backed by the ministries of Planning and of Communications, and Oil and Gas Libya 2012, hosted by the Oil Ministry at the Tripoli International Fairground, begins on Monday. Companies from Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE, UK and USA, as well as those from Libya, are expected to attend. Even the Russians and the Chinese are negotiating their return to Libya. Libya just bought 50,000 tons of Russian wheat.

Even the bad news has a good side. Last Thursday, when Amnesty International reported on the death by torture of yet another black man from Tawargha in a Misrata detention center, it was the headline in the decidedly pro-revolutionary Libyan Herald, indicating that the revolution is willing to look honestly at itself, warts and all. And while, as I have said before, even one such death is one too many, the fact that AI found only one such death in the two months since their earlier report of more than a dozen killed by torture between September and February, indicates that things are trending in the right direction.

I have just obtained this footage of a massive anti-government protest in Syria this morning after Friday pray. The half dozen UN observers are taking Friday off so as not to be involved in the political situation, so they say. Few independent journalist are operating in Syria and there are very few outlets to show what is happening on the ground now, so I wanted to share this rare find with you right away.

More later.

          Demonstration in front of the Great Mosque in Douma Hailing the Syrian cities

One of my tweets from yesterday has been widely retweeted and even published by the Libya News Daily. When I saw the tweet "Top stories today via @libyans_revolt @mrzine_notes @travelguideweb @clayclai" I was curious because I haven't done a recent article about Libya. I've never has a tweet published like that before:

The only privilege of a slave is the absence of responsibility, but with freedom comes responsibility. #Libya #Feb17 "The only privilege of a slave is the absence of responsibility" was a statement made by someone name Paulo. I lifted it from a comment he made on the Libya Tweets Forum where I am also a member.

A US soldier sent pictures of other US soldiers posing with bodies and body parts of dead Afghans to the LA Times. The LA Times broke this story at 4:30am this morning. To it's credit, it did so in spited of objections by the Pentagon. David Zucchino of the LA Times wrote:

The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan's Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held — and others squatted beside — the corpse's severed legs.

A few months later, the same platoon was dispatched to investigate the remains of three insurgents who Afghan police said had accidentally blown themselves up. After obtaining a few fingerprints, they posed next to the remains, again grinning and mugging for photographs.

Two soldiers posed holding a dead man's hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man's hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading "Zombie Hunter" next to other remains and took a picture.

You can check the LA Times story to see the pictures for yourself but the practice of US soldiers "having fun" with the bodies of the people our country has invaded and occupied has a long and ignoble history. Here is a picture from the Vietnam War, it is from my film Vietnam: American Holocaust:

Carl Rippberger at the Winter Soldier hearings, 1971 said:

The next slide is a slide of myself. I'm extremely shameful of it. I'm showing it in hope that none of you people that have never been involved ever let this happen to you. Don't ever let your government do this to you.

Ammar Abduhamid wrote Wednesday on the Syrian Revolution Digest:

Nothing impresses anymore: killing entire families by smashing their skulls or slashing their throats, pounding residential neighborhood with tanks, missiles, choppers and heavy artillery, burning people alive, commanding snipers to target children… nothing! The world remains indifferent to our suffering. After all, it’s nothing people haven’t seen before. Just another dictator torturing and killing his people, so what! So what! As of this morning, the ceasefire is said to be "relatively holding," which is to say that the killing of Syrians by the murderous Assad regime has slowed to a trickle. While the snipers continue to be a big problem, the heavy guns and rockets have been silent.

But they remain in place. Assad has not withdrawn his tanks and heavy weapons. His security forces have replaced the army in places were they have withdrawn and his gunmen still shoot protesters.

While it would be delightful to think the current lull represents a serious turn for the better, the history of the Assad regime does not encourage that. If he truly allows peaceful political protests, as the UN resolution requires, the streets all across Syria will soon be filled with millions of Syrians demanding not only his ouster but also his prosecution.

He can't allow that, so it is likely that he will soon find some excuse to return the killing to the levels of the past month.

Last August, I wrote about Syria and the left in my Daily Kos diary entry: CCDS Statement on Libya - a Critique. I printed my entire statement here at the Daily Kos precisely because CCDS deleted this and two other opening paragraphs from the version they published on their website. When I wrote this, the protesters were still trying to make non-violence work:

This Sunday I am told that 142 Syrians in Hama were slaughtered by Assad's tanks. It is estimated that as many as 1700 peaceful protesters have been massacred by Assad since the Syrian people welcomed the Arab Spring. I find it absolutely shameful that much of the left, including CCDS remain silent in the face of the Syrian people's cries for international support. I think we can do a lot better than that. With CCDS, as with most of US left, the shameful silence on the plight of the Syrian people continues.

As I prepare to publish this I see that a UN Observer mission is going to Syria. They had better get their fast. I just received this tweet:

SaMo #Syria #Homs: Shelling on the nieghbourhoods of Homs is renewed by the tanks stationed at Souq al-Hal roundabout near the Masabigh
8:56 AM - 13 Apr 12

Warning!! This is a video of Assad's victims being burned alive in Syria. You do not want to watch this.

The regime that famously told Libya's Mummar Qaddafi what he was welcome to flee to Guinea Bissau in September has apparently been overthrown in a military coup as another African country feels the winds of change that are following the Libyan revolution. Reuters is reporting:

BISSAU (Reuters)- - Heavy weapons fire echoed through the capital of Guinea-Bissau on Thursday, witnesses said, and soldiers surrounded the residence of former Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior, the frontrunner in a presidential election in the small West African state.

The reason for the military action and Gomes Junior's whereabouts were not immediately known. Armed soldiers stopped journalists from approaching the residence, which is located almost opposite the Angolan embassy in the capital Bissau.

Witnesses said the firing later subsided.

Guinea-Bissau has not been your most stable African countries and has a long history of coups.

From the Washington Post:

The West African regional bloc known as ECOWAS said it “formally condemns any attempt at a coup d’etat,” said Daniel Kablan Duncan, president of the body’s Council on Mediation and Security.

The violence comes just weeks before the country’s presidential runoff vote, which Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jr. was favored to win. There have been fears of a coup ever since Guinea-Bissau’s president died of complications from diabetes in January, leaving an interim leader in charge of the chronically unstable country known for cocaine trafficking.

On September 10, 2011 Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior of Guinea Bissau said on Radio Diffusion Portuguese (RDP): "If Gaddafi asks to come to Guinea Bissau we will welcome him with open arms and we will ensure his security,"

Earlier, in August, as the siege of Tripoli was being launched, he said,

"Gaddafi and Libya are friends of Guinea Bissau. If the Libyan leader wants to come to Guinea Bissau we will receive him with open arms."

Guinea-Bissau is not a member of the International Criminal Court and so Qaddafi would have been beyond the court's reach there.

Just a little over an hour ago I posted this diary with the hopeful title "Syria: Cease fire takes hold as mass protests breakout", now that ceasefire appears to be faltering as new reports start streaming in of new attacks by the Assad regime on peaceful protesters in Syria.

From Al Jazeera Live Blog:

12:04pm pst - Syria Activists have uploaded a number of videos which appear to show that the government has not complied with the demand to withdraw troops and heavy weaponry from residential areas. This footage is from the centre of the city of Homs.

11:40am pst Syria - This video appears to show students being arrested in the city of Aleppo.

About 9:17am pst we received this from Al Arabiya English: #BreakingNews: Syrian army forces fire on protesters outside the parliament in Damascus: Local Coordinating Committees #Syria This live stream from Ahrarsy2, purporting to show Syrian forces firing on peaceful protesters in Syria went dead.

From the International Business Times we have this:

Syria Ceasefire Violations Reported in Homs, Idlib and Hama

Activists in Syria have said that Bashar al-Assad’s troops were violating conditions of a ceasefire in major cities, although no major attacks have been reported.

The Syrian government said it had agreed to fully withdraw troops and tanks from city centres and was committed to ending the violence as part of Kofi Annan’s peace plan, which came into effect at 3am GMT.

While no major attacks have been reported, activists reported violations in Homs, Idlib, Hama and Zabadan.

Witnesses reported shelling in Homs, near the Jouret Shiyah and Khaldiyeh neighbourhoods, in the Hama neighbourhood of Jabal Shahshabo-Qalaat Al Madiq and in the Al Zalah area of Zabadan. Heavy gunfire was also reported in Idlib.

“Security forces are still here, the snipers are still here, the tanks are still here. Nothing has changed and the shelling is continuing”, a Syrian activist for the Syrian Network for Human Rights told IBTimes UK from Homs.

Although the Syrian Army has failed to remove its army and heavy weapons as called for by Kofy Annan's peace plan, they do appear to be honoring the ceasefire that started at 6:00am Syria time. Activist plan to test the ceasefire by calling mass protests in many areas of the country. These are expected to build towards the time after Friday prays, the traditional time of protests. Already mass protests have been reported in four areas. Armed conflicted began in Syria only after the regime had been firing upon peaceful protesters for months.

Here is your basic AP story from the Huffington Post:

Syria Ceasefire Deadline Observed, Assad Regime Forces Remain In Place

BEIRUT — A fragile cease-fire brokered by the U.N. took hold in Syria on Thursday with regime forces apparently halting widespread attacks on the opposition. But there were reports of scattered violence and the government defied demands to pull troops back to barracks.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the onus was on President Bashar Assad's regime to keep the peace.

"As of this moment, the situation looks calmer," he told reporters in Geneva. But the cease-fire is "very fragile" and a single gunshot could derail the process, he added.

Ban will now ask the U.N. Security Council for speedy deployment of an observer mission, said special envoy Kofi Annan, who brokered the truce.

In the hours after the 6 a.m. deadline, a civilian was reported killed and the state-run news agency said "terrorist groups" launched a roadside bomb that killed a soldier. But there was no sign of the heavy shelling, rocket attacks and sniper fire that have become routine.

If the truce holds, it would be the first time the regime has observed an internationally brokered cease-fire since Assad's regime launched a brutal crackdown 13 months ago on mass protests calling for his ouster.

Here is a livestream that shows anti-regime protest rally in Deir ez-Zour. It is active as I publish this. It is coming from an Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S:

Meanwhile there are many more deflections from the Syrian Army. Both of these videos were posted to YouTube yesterday:

There have been massive deflections from the Syrain army in countryside of Aleppo. Does the ceasefire mean that Assad has to stop shooting his own troops?  
 

These soldiers are from the city of Deraa:

From the New Syria: #Bayyadah‪ ‬#Homs‪ ‬#Al‪ Assad thugs killed a mother with her baby after the announcement of the cease-fire!!!

In Damascus tonight....

More later.....

                           "If you want to own slaves, then you'd better arm yourself."

This is the one truth that ties America's perchance for gun violence to its history of racial slavery and racism. It is no accident that Trayvon Martin and the five black people shot in Oklahoma were attacked in the former Confederate States or allied territories.

Certainly, the hundred year push west against an often hostile indigenous people was another reason Americans became a uniquely armed people but that was mainly done by bodies of armed men, militias, and mainly at the frontier.

Maintaining slavery required a much finer integration of fire arms into the society, essentially, they aways had to be as close at hand as the slaves were.

I have to go now and really tend to business or else I may become another one of those homeless old black men that America is so good at creating. I can't do my usual in-depth dairy on this or be around for responses. I just wanted to follow up on what I said in an update to yesterday's diary, which I will repeat below the fold, with one example.

I don't have time to do the research and present you with the facts but I'll bet if you look into it [Google is your friend] you will find all things guns, # owned, # of deaths, etc. concentrated in the Ole Confederacy.        

Yesterday, prominent women rights activist Joyce Banda became the first female head of state in Southern Africa. Bulawayo24 wrote:

Malawian Vice-President Joyce Banda took over the running of the country on Saturday after the death of President Bingu wa Mutharika, and fears of a succession struggle receded as state institutions backed the constitutional handover.

The government only officially confirmed 78-year-old Mutharika's death earlier on Saturday, two days after he had died following a heart attack.

His body had been flown to a military hospital in South Africa.

The delay in the announcement had raised worries about a political crisis because Banda had been expelled from Mutharika's ruling DPP party in 2010 after an argument about the succession, though she retained her state position.

Many Malawians believed that Mutharika, who's rule had become increasingly dictatorial in recent years, was grooming is son to take over, which would have been a complete violation  of the constitutional process.

Last July, protests over high prices, devolving foreign relations and poor governance left 18 people dead and 44 others injured by gun shot wounds as Mutharika started emulating his old African Union rival, Mummar Qaddafi, in methods of protest suppression.  

Two white men in Tulsa, have been arrest for a shooting spree in the black neighborhoods of Tulsa that have left three black people dead and two others wounded.

Horace Boothroyd III wrote a diary about this earlier this morning however he failed to note these extremely important facts.

According to Al Jazeera English [on TV minutes ago, not in the web piece quoted below] there are other reason for believing these killings were racially motivated.

THOSE THAT FAILED TO ARREST TRAYVON MARTIN'S KILLER BEAR A RESPONSIBILITY FOR THESE MURDERS!

Please Recommend and Tweet!

My dairy on Malawi was schedule to publish @ 9:30 this morning. It will have to wait. [or not] I didn't know I could publish two diaries in one day.

According to Reuters:

(Reuters) - Police acting on a tip arrested two white men on Sunday for a shooting spree in Tulsa that left three dead, two wounded and rattled the predominantly black neighborhood.

Tulsa police spokesman Jason Willingham said police were not prepared to label the shootings racially motivated hate crimes after the arrest of Jake England, 19, and Alvin Watts, 32, on murder charges just before 2 a.m. (0600 GMT) Sunday.

"At this point we don't have a motive," Willingham said. "Obviously there's still a lot of investigation to do. Hopefully in the coming days we'll be more clear on what exactly the reason was."

In response to a tip, police put the suspects under surveillance and they were arrested at a home north of Tulsa, Willingham said. England and Watts were charged with three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of shooting with intent to kill, police said.

The shootings early Friday set the predominantly black north side of Tulsa on edge after a victim told police the gunman was a white man in a pickup truck who stopped and asked for directions before opening fire.

FBI and U.S. marshals joined the manhunt, swelling the task force to 30 officers, Willingham said.

"It's been a long 48 hours but we're glad we were able to get them into custody. It's been an all hands on deck type situation to get these guys in custody," he said.

From Al Jazeera: Federal authorities are helping Oklahoma police investigate the shootings of five of African-Americans, three of whom were killed, within a few hours.

Three men and one woman were shot within 1.6km of each other in north Tulsa at around 1am local time on Friday morning, police and community members said.

Police said that a fifth victim, 31-year-old William Allen, whose body was discovered outside a nearby funeral home around 8am on Friday, was likely shot at about the same time as the others.

Each of the victims were African-American, but Chuck Jordan, Tulsa police chief, said it was too early to know whether the shootings were racially motivated, and police have not yet been able to prove forensically that the shootings are linked.
...
As investigators searched for the killer,  the attacks sparked anxiety among Tulsa's black community, leaving many people worried that the shooter, or a copy-cat criminal, will continue the assault.

"People are fearful ... . They are afraid they can't walk down the street," said Jack Henderson, Tulsa city councilman who represents the district in which the shootings took place.

Authorities asked people to come forward with any information on the shootings.

"All citizens of Tulsa understand the significance of this event," Dewey Bartlett, Tulsa's mayor, said.

But the Reverend Warren Blakney Sr, the local chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil rights organisation, said "avid distrust" between the black community and the police department had raised concerns that the shootings would not be fully investigated.

"We have to handle this because there are a number of African-American males who are not going to allow this to happen in their neighborhood," he said.

"We're trying to quell the feeling of `let's get someone' and we will make as certain as we can that this isn't pushed under the rug."

More, later....

The short answer to why the US didn't find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq is, of course, that there were no WMD in Iraq. The search had an unlimited budget and it turned up zip.

The further question is, given the enormous political stakes, both for the Bush administration and US imperialism as a whole, why no WMD were planted in Iraq, when it became clear that the search would not pan out.

Anyone familiar with my writing already knows that my answer does not rely on the integrity either of the Pentagon or the Bush Administration.

I think the answer is that things like that really aren't all that easy to fake and the political consequence of being caught in that lie would have been much worst than finding no WMD at all.

In the first place any "found" WMD has to have a creditable "legend." It had to be made somewhere with materials obtained by Iraq and manufactured by people in Iraq and that legend makes it much more difficult than simply planting a load of poison in a warehouse because it will be subjected to exhaustive tests also, not just the WMD. And then there are so many people that would have to be in the loop, the chances are great that somebody would spill the beans.

I only bring this up because many people on the left seem to favor elaborate conspiracy theories to explain everything from the Arab Spring and the Libyan Revolution to the collapse of the twin towers. If ever a situation cried out for the people in power to put the fix in, it was the failure of the Bush administration to find WMD in Iraq.

Just a cautionary tale that came to mind while watching the Green Zone...      

Anybody that has ever been in an abusive relationship or supported someone in an abusive relationship may find that the period immediately after ending the relationship can be a most dangerous one. This is a truth that it well known to homicide detectives.

Even though I know this, I'd nevertheless curse the advisors that would counsel staying in an abusive relationship because of the hazards that may attend ending it. Likewise, I will call out those 'left' anti-interventionists that are now promoting counter-revolution in Libya because for years they harbored certain western 'left' mis-conceptions about Mummar Qaddafi.

For example Glenn Greenwald wrote five years ago:

It is not, of course, actually fair to compare the torture to which the prisoners in Libya were subjected to the treatment which detainees in American custody receive. After all, there is no indication that the torture of the prisoners in Libya included even a fraction of the torture which Jane Mayer, in a truly superb article in The New Yorker this week, documented was practiced by the American government under the Bush presidency in the CIA’s secret camps, i.e., “black sites,” established beyond the reach of law With Qaddafi gone, they are now finding mass grave after mass grave in Libya. I fear they will for many years to come. Take for example, this article yesterday in the newly established Libya Herald: Tripoli, April 2: Another mass grave has been found today, Tuesday, this time in the wadi just outside Qaddafi’s Bab Al-Aziziya barracks. We now know that not only did Qaddafi subject his citizens to an incredible regime of torture, murdering 1270 prisoners in a matter of hours in one case, some of those self-same Bush presidency CIA "black sites" in which Greenwald thought the torture much worst than anything in Qaddafi's Libya were, in fact, being run by Qaddafi in Libya.

In Senegal Sunday night they were dancing in the streets as the election results came in. Very much in line with its 164 year democratic history, the president of twelve years, Abdoulaye Wade was unseated in what by most accounts was a fair and peaceful reelection. Wade who was 85 and running for a third term in spite of a two term limit, and attempting to position his son to succeed him, insisted on clinking to power in the face of widespread opposition.

At least six people were killed in the violence that accompanied mass protests in the earlier election in which Wade faced 12 opponents. For the run off, all of the opposition united around Macky Sall who received 65% of the vote to Wade's 35%. While the new president faces many challenges like high food prices and high unemployment, this was a day for the Senegalese, who took to the streets in protest a month ago, with some being martyred, to celebrate the fact they they have been able to chose new leadership.

BREAKING News: Senegalese president for 12 years Abdoulaye Wade has conceded defeat to Macky Sall in today's run off election. See more below:

There are a bunch of things happening this weekend with some of the stories from Africa that I have been covering lately and I need to update these diaries but I didn't want them to get lost at the end of past diaries, so I thought that I would also gather them up here. The diaries that I'm updating are:

Mali Coup is latest post-Qaddafi fallout Fri Mar 23
What the PSL got right & wrong about KONY 2012 Sat Mar 10
African Spring continues in Senegal Mon Feb 27
Occupy Nigeria - 1st African fruits of Qaddafi gone? Tue Jan 10

A military coup that overthrew the elected government of Mali on Thrusday became the latest repercussion of the Libyan revolution and the fall of Mummar Qaddafi to rock the continent of Africa.

Friday, Mali's coup leaders ordered soldiers to return to barracks and imposed a 6am to 6pm curfew in Barnako, the capital. All the country's borders were also closed according to Lieutenant Amadou Konare, spokesman for the National Committee for the Recovery of Democracy and the Restoration of the State, said yesterday on state television.

According to Bloomberg:

Army officers yesterday said they had toppled President Amadou Toure’s government and suspended the constitution over the state’s handling of a Touareg rebellion in northern Mali. The military formed a transitional council that will organize elections and plans to restore power to a democratically elected leader, Konare said. Mali vies with Tanzania to be Africa’s third-biggest gold producer, after South Africa and Ghana.
...
Soldiers in Mali have complained about their lack of preparation and resources in a campaign to quash a two-month uprising by the Touareg separatists who are seeking autonomous rule in northern Mali. Hundreds of soldiers’ wives last month marched on the presidential palace to protest the danger their husbands are being exposed to in the military campaign.  
The coup has been widely condemned in the international community. The African Union has been joined by the UN, the US and a host of other nations in opposing it. On Friday, the AU suspended Mali's membership and former colonial power France said it was suspending cooperation with Mali. As William G Moseley, who lived in Mali for a number of years points out in his Al Jazeera opinion piece Mali's coup must be widely condemned:   While this is a Malian problem that must be resolved by the Malian people, the international community (including the Arab League, African Union and UN) must condemn the recent coup in no uncertain terms. This is not the Arab Spring moving south, but a serious backwards step for democracy in the region. Captain Sanogo and his band of thugs must be made to step aside, ATT (if he is still alive) allowed to serve out his remaining month in office, and democratic elections kept on schedule to occur in late April. The main support for the coup appears to becoming from junior army officers that have been in the thick of the fighting against Tuareg rebels in northern Mali. The Mali army has suffered both a lost of territory and a heavy lost of life in carrying out the government's campaign against the northern rebellion and they blame the president and his government for ordering the strategy and then failing to adequately support it.

In the latest report at this hour [1:09 PST] , the Tuareg are reporting that they have just take a northern Mali town.

I really didn't pay much attention to Twitter until the Arab Spring broke out and forced me to take it seriously. Now I find it the most vital of all the social media services.

I signed up for Facebook MySpace and Twitter all on the same day at some time in the distance past because I had decided it was time to do the social media thing. I spent a lot of time customizing my MySpace page because it could do html and so could I, then I let it fall by the wayside.

Facebook became my social media center. In addition to my own wall, I built a Vietnam: American Holocaust movie page and eventually made over two thousand "friends."

For years, about the only thing I did with Twitter was to use the button that appeared above my posts here at the Daily Kos to tweet out each new diary to my 30 or so followers but in the course of following the quickly unfolding events in North Africa last year I found Twitter to be the most important source of information and the most vital form of communication.

I also found it to be a challenging format to write for. Just 140 characters, 20 less if you include a link and the challenge is to say something with meaning and elegance in that small space. I compose a tweet as though I am writing a 21th century haiku, and on this rainy Saturday in Venice Beach, I thought I'd share what I consider some of my best tweets from the last year with my readers here who are use to me going on ad nauseam about a subject. This is one I just send this morning:

#Assad's soldiers murder women & children in #Syria because for them its a case of kill or be killed <- from behind. Find more beneath the fold.