“(AHN) - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday that he will not attend the Democratic National Convention as claimed by Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard editor.

‘I do not have time to waste on Bill Kristol’s musings,’ Powell told ABC. ‘I am not going to the convention. I have made this clear.’

Kristol said in a Fox report earlier in the day that Powell was planning to endorse Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on the third night of the convention, the day Democrats speak about the theme “Securing America’s Future.” He added that Powell is scheduled to give a speech explaining his support for Obama.” — Kris Alingod/AHN News Writer

Colin Powell was a voice of moderation and reason in the Bush Administration. He was frequently at odds with Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocons, who had an ill-fated pipe dream of invading Iraq and turning the Muslim country into a bastion of democracy.

“In July 2007 Powell revealed that he spent two and a half hours trying to persuade George W. Bush not to invade Iraq but that he did not prevail.” — Quotation from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell)

Powell was deeply opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but instead of doing the honorable thing and resigning he went before the United Nations to present his “dog and pony” show in favor of attacking Iraq.

Colin Powell: The Speech that led to WAR (1/8)

Powell’s speech before the UN was such an egregious betrayal of everything that he stood for, that it forever mars an otherwise sterling political and military career.

Sen. Barack Obama’s early claim to fame was that he was against the Iraq war from the start. His vehement opposition to the Iraq war is the main reason why he is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Under no circumstances should Obama accept Powell’s endorsement, it would be a betrayal of everything he stands for.

Powell’s timidity and cowardice at a critical juncture in history has forever stained his legacy, and if Obama accepts his endorsement it will compromise his moral legitimacy.

REFERENCES:

2. Former aide: Powell WMD speech ‘lowest point in my life’ — A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state’s presentation to the United Nations on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “the lowest point” in his life.

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This is an example of the CIA Meddling in African Affairs during the cold-war era
| Other CIA activities in Africa |

By Douglas Okwatch

Fresh details of a conspiracy that could have provided a motive for the assassination of Cabinet Minister Thomas Joseph Mboya have emerged ahead of the 39th year since his death.

Kenyatta
The CIA appears to have recruited the flamboyant minister and former trade unionist in a heavily funded “selective liberation” programme to isolate Kenya’s founding President Jomo Kenyatta, who the American spy agency labelled as “unsafe.”

Declassified information in an undated issue of Ramparts, an American political and literary magazine published in the 1960s and early 1970s, accessed by The Standard at the Kenya National Archives, shows an elaborate conspiracy by CIA to prop up Mboya and isolate Kenyatta.

Ramparts closed shop in 1975. Whether this scheme sowed seeds of suspicion and mistrust between Kenyatta and Mboya, who at the time of his assassination was the Economic Planning minister and Kamukunji MP, is a matter for further investigation.

The revelations come four months after Mboya’s widow, Pamela, wrote to Mr Kofi Annan, former UN secretary-general who also chaired talks that ended political violence in Kenya early in the year, asking that the matter be investigated afresh by a truth commission.

“The assassination of my husband, like others after him, is a matter that has remained shrouded in mystery and speculation, and which has been avoided by successive regimes in this country,” she wrote.

Trail of Questions

In a telephone conversation with this writer last month, Mrs Mboya promised to “drop the bombshell” in an interview. But she later changed her mind. Her last word was that she would spill the beans at an “appropriate time.”

Questions also abound on whether the convicted assassin, Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, was actually executed. The testimony of the assassin’s own brother and anecdotal evidence that he has been seen by a retired military officer, among other claims, pile on the doubts of his execution.

Mboya
Secret letters, also declassified, further show that Mboya had a particularly tumultuous relationship with Mr Mbiyu Koinange, a minister and power broker of the Kenyatta presidency.

In one instance, Koinange wrote an emotional letter to Kenyatta to defend himself against allegations of disloyalty by Mboya.

“Sir, you know my loyalty to you personally, to our Kanu party; of my long loyalty to Kenya and latterly my loyalty to our new independent Council of Ministers.”

“My loyalty is beyond doubt, therefore, my Prime Minister. I frankly feel that there is no need for me to reply to Mr Mboya’s letter.”

“It is unfortunate, ill-timed, egoistic and, if I may say so, an irresponsible letter which is skilfully designed by one of my colleagues to endanger the good working spirit among us.”

Koinange was then Minister of State in the Office of the President and one of the most powerful figures in the Government. He died in September 1981.

The secret letters in our possession cover the period between 1961 and 1966. Desperate to extricate himself from the tag of traitor, Mboya, in a letter on March 11, 1961, pleaded with Kenyatta, who was languishing in a Lodwar jail: “I’d hate to appear a hero at your expense.”

He attached copies of various statements he had made in meetings with the Governor for Kenyatta’s perusal. The move appeared to capture his own internal consciousness that Kenyatta may have begun to perceive him as a threat.

The letters also reveal how the CIA used Kenyatta to finish Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, his Vice-President, politically by amending the Constitution to his office of all powers.

Traitor or nationalist?

Ramparts reported that: “The CIA programme in Kenya could be summed up as one of selective liberation. The chief beneficiary was Tom Mboya who, in 1953, became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour.”

Koinange
Both a credible nationalist and an economic conservative, Mboya who was popularly known as ‘TJ’, was ideal for CIA’s purpose. The main nationalist hero and eventual chief of state, Kenyatta, was not considered “sufficiently safe” owing to his initial deep socialist leanings, the dossier said.

Ramparts quotes Mboya as saying: “Those proven codes of conduct in the African societies, which have over the ages conferred dignity on our people and afforded them security regardless of their station in life.

“I refer to the universal charity, which characterises our societies, and I refer to the African thought processes and cosmological ideas, which regard men, not as a social means, but as an end and entity in society.”

This powerful quote not only captures Mboya’s own prescription of African socialism, which endeared him to the West and made the CIA view his policy as safe, but it also paints the picture of an articulate, sophisticated and ambitious political thinker.

Soon after, Mboya joined the CIA jet set, travelling around the world from Oxford in the UK to Calcutta in India on funds from such conduits as the Africa Bureau and from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

ICFTU, which played a key role in Kenya’s independence through trade unionism, is an aggregation of international trade union secretariats set up in 1949 to counter an upsurge of left-wing trade unionism outside the communist bloc, according to Ramparts. The CIA allegedly funded operations at the time.

But when George Cabot Lodge, one of the directors of the ICFTU, made the statement (believed to have been in specific reference to Mboya at the time) that “the obscure trade unionist of today may well be the president or prime minister of tomorrow,” he left no doubt about Mboya’s personal ambitions and by extension the CIA’s scheme of things.

Initially, CIA’s natural strategy was to underwrite Mboya and his labour federation as a force against Kenyatta. But when tact changed in accordance with the world order and the CIA’s new priorities, it was agreed that Western labour groups stop funding Mboya.

An accommodation with Kenyatta was now thought necessary, particularly to ensure that he did not support rebels in Congo, and to get him to close ranks against the agitating Kenyan left.

But the die had been cast. The CIA, through its activities, had effectively propped up Mboya as a possible future President of Kenya. That threat was real during Kenyatta’s time and even at the dawn of the second decade of his leadership, according to Ramparts.

It was a strategy that the CIA would use again to the benefit of Kenyatta against Odinga – use the credibility of the appropriate militant to crush the rest. The CIA link, which Mboya vigorously fought to distance himself with, would be used later to fight him politically by branding him a traitor and a man who could not to be trusted. He wrote lengthy responses in his defence.

But had the CIA sowed enough seeds of wrath between Mboya and the political establishment in Kenya to provide someone with enough reason to kill him?

REFERENCES:

1. Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya’s murder & the return of one-party State
2. Ready or Not - TIME
3. Setback for Tom - TIME

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   A USAToday Editorial: Accountability in Darfur

For five and a half years, government-backed forces in Sudan have committed unspeakable acts  — murder, rape, torching villages  — in the vast western province of Darfur. About a quarter of a million people have died, with millions displaced.

In 2004, the U.S. government condemned this for what it is: genocide. But efforts to stop it, even sending in thousands of international peacekeepers, haven’t ended the horror.

On Monday, the International Criminal Court, a tribunal set up in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2002 to prosecute individuals for crimes against humanity, took a bold action. Its prosecutor asked its judges to indict Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on war crimes and genocide charges — the court’s first indictment of a sitting head of state. (Two others, Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, were indicted by special nited Nations courts.)

The value of the criminal court’s extraordinary decision is that it continues a movement over the past decade of putting leaders of countries on notice that they might not get away with terrible crimes against their people. That trend gained momentum after Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, in which the world stood by as 800,000 were slaughtered.

Each new effort can also put new pressure on countries that do business with tyrants. China has lucrative oil deals with Sudan and is its main arms supplier. The indictment gives China additional incentive to use its leverage to burnish its image as it prepares to host next month’s Olympic Games.

The potential downside is that the indictment could provoke a backlash by al-Bashir. He has played a game of promising to comply with efforts to end the genocide, including allowing in foreign peacekeepers.

In reality, he has aided the horror. Now, he could end all pretense. Already, worrisome new attacks on peacekeepers include one last week in which seven were killed and 22 injured. The U.N. said Monday it was withdrawing some non-essential staff.

Al-Bashir certainly won’t hand himself over. He is more likely to model himself on a fellow African tyrant, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who unleashed a murderous onslaught on anyone who opposes him after it became clear he would lose this year’s election.

Like Mugabe, al-Bashir might be counting on help from China and Russia. Both are frequently accused of human rights violations and fear international moves that infringe on national sovereignty. Appallingly, they used their U.N. Security Council vetoes last week to block new sanctions against Zimbabwe.

One organization might have more influence than the international court or U.N. on al-Bashir and Mugabe. That organization
is the African Union.

Its members, led by powerful South Africa, have behaved more like a cozy old boys’ network.
On Monday, they even asked the court to stop the indictment. They should be more concerned with getting the thugs in their club to stop the killing.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY:

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