Darfur Accountability Act Passes the Senate Unanimously

The Senator has posted a diary on Daily Kos on this issue.

Most importantly for the United States, large numbers of Somalis saw the American forces as representatives of the government which served as the major Western supporter of the hated former dictatorship. Such an overbearing foreign military presence in a country which had been free from colonial rule for only a little more than three decades led to growing resentment, particularly since these elite combat forces were not trained for such humanitarian missions. (Author and journalist David Halberstam quotes the U.S. Secretary of Defense telling an associate, "We're sending the Rangers to Somalia. We are not going to be able to control them. They are like overtrained pit bulls. No one controls them.") Shootings at U.S. military roadblocks became increasingly commonplace and Somalis witnessed scenes of mostly white American forces harassing and shooting their black countrymen.
http://www.alternet.org/story/12253

Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/

Sudan Oil and Gas Concessions holders (text version)
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/sudan/map_oil_text.html

More blood, for oil.

The Pentagon's New Map is cartographically designed to support the mission of eliminating Gap states. In this quest, the American military as well as the American social political system will be reoriented. The military becomes both Leviathan attack forces and System Administrator nation builders supported by a global garrisoning scheme that retains most of our Cold War overseas bases and adds new launching pad bases in new places. Soldiers of the future will get orders not only to Japan and Germany, but to strange new bases in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, and ultimately West Africa, Southern Africa, and South America.
http://www.antiwar.com/kwiatkowski/?articleid=2762

Pile on the brown man's burden,
compel him to be free;
Let all your manifestoes
Reek with philanthropy.
And if with heathen folly
He dares your will dispute,
Then, in the name of freedom,
Don't hesitate to shoot.

Pile on the brown man's burden,
And if his cry be sore,
That surely need not irk you--
Ye've driven slaves before.
Seize on his ports and pastures,
The fields his people tread;
Go make from them your living,
And mark them with his dead.

Pile on the brown man's burden,
Nor do not deem it hard
If you should earn the rancor
Of those ye yearn to guard.
The screaming of your Eagle
Will drown the victim's sob--
Go on through fire and slaughter.
There's dollars in the job.
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/xxx074.html

If Senator Jon Corzine REALLY cared about stopping genocide,
he would be taking action AGAINST the war in Iraq,
instead of which he diverts attention away from inquisitors of Abu Ghraib and the desolation of Fallujah.

Still, even when genocide is considered, the crime is so big, so morally horrific, that it seems unconquerable and unstoppable, looking like a tangle of warring parties instead of an assymetrical slaughter of the innocent.
-- Senator Jon Corzine

Los Angeles Times
January 18, 1993
According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.

Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake.
<snip>

Conoco, whose tireless exploration efforts in north-central Somalia reportedly had yielded the most encouraging prospects just before Siad Barre's fall, permitted its Mogadishu corporate compound to be transformed into a de facto American embassy a few days before the U.S. Marines landed in the capital, with Bush's special envoy using it as his temporary headquarters. In addition, the president of the company's subsidiary in Somalia won high official praise for serving as the government's volunteer "facilitator" during the months before and during the U.S. intervention.

Describing the arrangement as "a business relationship," an official spokesman for the Houston-based parent corporation of Conoco Somalia Ltd. said the U.S. government was paying rental for its use of the compound, and he insisted that Conoco was proud of resident general manager Raymond Marchand's contribution to the U.S.-led humanitarian effort.
<snip>

But the close relationship between Conoco and the U.S. intervention force has left many Somalis and foreign development experts deeply troubled by the blurry line between the U.S. government and the large oil company, leading many to liken the Somalia operation to a miniature version of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led military effort in January, 1991, to drive Iraq from Kuwait and, more broadly, safeguard the world's largest oil reserves.

"They sent all the wrong signals when Oakley moved into the Conoco compound," said one expert on Somalia who worked with one of the four major companies as they intensified their exploration efforts in the country in the late 1980s.

"It's left everyone thinking the big question here isn't famine relief but oil -- whether the oil concessions granted under Siad Barre will be transferred if and when peace is restored," the expert said. "It's potentially worth billions of dollars, and believe me, that's what the whole game is starting to look like."

Although most oil experts outside Somalia laugh at the suggestion that the nation ever could rank among the world's major oil producers -- and most maintain that the international aid mission is intended simply to feed Somalia's starving masses -- no one doubts that there is oil in Somalia. The only question: How much?
http://www.netnomad.com/fineman.html

Another reason the U.S. war machine is in Somalia is that it needs an enemy, it needs a mission. General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called the operation in Somalia, "a paid political advertisement" for maintaining the current military budget. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Pentagon has come under growing pressure to radically cut its bloated budget. The $300 billion a year arms industry links over 70,000 military contractors, including the largest corporations in the world, with the Pentagon. The Generals and the weapons makers are using the intervention in Somalia to justify their very existence.
http://www.netnomad.com/poster.html

Wall Street Journal
May 11, 2004
Pg. 1
The lights dimmed and Mr. Barnett, clad in a dark turtleneck and khakis, launched into his brief. He soon flashed up on a screen a picture of a mock personal ad that he found taped to a Pentagon wall in the late 1990s.
"ENEMY WANTED: Mature North American Superpower seeks hostile partner for arms racing, Third World conflicts and general antagonism. Must be sufficiently menacing to convince Congress of military financial requirements...Send note with pictures of fleet and air squadrons to CHAIRMAN JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF/PENTAGON."
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/wsj.htm

Q: Who has not ratified and why not?
A: The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely and rapidly ratified human rights treaty in history. Only two countries, Somalia and the United States, have not ratified this celebrated agreement. Somalia is currently unable to proceed to ratification as it has no recognized government. By signing the Convention, the United States has signalled its intention to ratify – but has yet to do so.
http://www.unicef.org/crc/faq.htm

JUNE 10, 1999
The USA, supported by the UK and the Netherlands, lobbied hard to prevent an outright prohibition on using child combatants. The purpose of the Convention is to protect children under 18 from the most hazardous and exploitative forms of child labor.
http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/june99/061099f.htm

JUNE 15, 1999
The United States has been obstructing a broad prohibition on the use of child soldiers in a new international agreement on child labor. The agreement was being finalized yesterday and should be formally adopted Wednesday at the International Labor Conference in Geneva.
<snip>
The United States has been a leading opponent of another proposed international agreement to establish eighteen as a minimum age for recruitment and participation in armed conflict. The United States is one of a minority of countries that still recruits minors, although it has fewer than 7,000 minors in its 1.5 million active duty force. Five years of United Nations-sponsored negotiation have failed to produce a comprehensive ban on the use of child soldiers, largely due to U.S. opposition.
Becker said the United States was sacrificing strong international protections for children in order to protect its own military recruitment policies. "Recruits under the age of eighteen are a neglible part of the U.S. armed forces," she said. "There's no reason that thousands of children around the world should be at risk, just so the Pentagon won't be inconvenienced."
http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/june99/061599c.htm

DECEMBER 21, 1998
In October, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution, introduced by Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN), calling on the United States not to block international efforts to establish eighteen as the minimum age for participation in armed conflict. The United Nations working group negotiating the proposed international agreement will convene for its next session in Geneva in January.
http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/Dec98/122198a.htm

Senator Wellstone Killed In Plane Crash
http://bushspeaks.com/home.asp?did=103

Surely no one would do this, they argue, and it's hard not to believe them. Who could be so cruel? Yet the logic of mass slaughter exists, and is aided by aparthy masquerading as disbelief.
-- Senator Jon Corzine
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/4/22/153235/245