Ever watch the news? Do you take it in on the mainstream channels like CBS, NBC and ABC, or switch over to places like Fox and CNN? If so, you would be struck by a peculiar obsession the American media seems to have over the fate of single individuals…like the fate of Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, the missing girl in Aruba who now gets a full hour of coverage each night, or the single injury from the “second wave” of London terror attacks on July 21st. To be sure, that second wave was carried off with all the élan and competence of Richard Reid’s bungled attempt to light his tennis shoes on a trans-Atlantic flight, and it failed miserably, but it got 20-40 hours of solid coverage over the next day or so on all the main channels. The assertions about Carl Rove’s political shenanigans dropped nicely off the screen and the House of Representatives quietly renewed the Patriot Act, permanently riveting a host of fear based provisions into law. Clever, eh? Ever notice how the news can often become an all consuming distraction, while things go on in the world, completely unreported, that have far greater consequences?

Here’s what the House passed during all the London “terror” attack hullabaloo, but it got no public debate on our news channels at all, and just a passing mention on the day of the event. The government of the world’s greatest democracy, that bastion of freedom, liberty and human rights may now:

…Order any person or entity to turn over "any tangible things," so long as the FBI specifies that the order is part of an authorized terrorism or intelligence investigation.  “Suspicion” is now enough to carry the order, no proof is necessary.

…Obtain personal data  without any specific facts connecting those records to a foreign terrorist. This means your credit card data, financial records, medical records, etc. can now be obtained and reviewed on a whim. And the government can prohibit doctors and insurance companies from disclosing to their patients that their medical records have been seized by Federal Agents.

…Obtain library and book store records, including lists of books checked out or purchased, without any specific facts connecting the records to a foreign agent or terrorist.

…Obtain private financial business records without a court order, and without notification to the person involved.

…Conduct intelligence investigations of both United States citizens and permanent residents without probable cause, or even reasonable grounds to believe that they are engaged in criminal activity or are agents of a foreign power. Again, suspicion is sufficient grounds, so it is not wise to become a “person of interest” these days.

…Investigate U.S. citizens based in part on their exercise of their First Amendment rights, (like free speech expression in this article) and non-citizens based solely on their exercise of those rights.

So watch what you read, write or say folks. We now have the rough equivalent of “thoughtcrime” in this country, and a legal framework to support the arrest, detention and prosecution of thought criminals. Oh…you won’t read about it in the papers or see it on CNN. The courts are held incognito, secret little committees who rule on these things well beyond the public eye. And all because we are afraid.

Nifty stuff, eh? Are you that afraid of Osama Bin Ladin and his boys? I’m not. I’d much rather have my privacy.  As I’ve argued before, the statistical probability of you being injured or killed in a terrorist attack is six million to one, (assuming  we get another 9-11 scale attack), and astronomically higher if we get a little pinprick attack like the “London Terror Bombings.” (Scientists have calculated that these odds are about the same chance a pig has of mutating into an animal that could fly!)  In short, you are far more likely to be killed by a meteor…far more likely!

Some 60 people were killed in the first wave of London attacks, and 1 (one) was injured in the second. While that dominated our news from July 7 to the end of the month, about 5000 people died at the hands of the Islamic Muslim Janjaweed militias in Darfur province, Sudan. Another 10,000 died in Nigeria…of starvation as crops fail and the worst locust swarm in memorable history settled like a plague on the parched land there. (People have been reduced to eating twigs and leaves.)  So… while fewer than 100 well off white folks with two cars, a mortgage, lots of credit cards and other things died in London, (and may God rest their souls), 15,000 black folks who live in thatched roof adobe huts and cook what they can find over a wood and animal dung fire died in the heart of Africa. That’s a death rate equal to five 9-11 scale terror attacks thus far in July of 2005. In short, Africans in the Sudan and Nigeria are enduring the real terror on our planet, not the puckish, steely Brits with stiff upper lips! The Africans get hammered by a 9-11 scale death  toll every four days…Do you hear anything about it on our “news” broadcasts? Nope. You heard all about a blonde tourist missing in Aruba, and now you’re going to start hearing all about a missing pregnant woman named “Latoya,” for our news channels have whole divisions dedicated to dredging up stories like this: missing children, kidnapped women, molesters on the prowl—the fate of single individuals eating enormous broadcast bandwidth as they seem to pull in an audience segment that does wonders for TV ratings and subsequent advertising revenues…all while the genocide continues in Darfur, unnoticed and unreported.

Oh, I’m not trying to allude to some grand “wag the dog” like conspiracy in the media where the terror attacks are staged to provide cover for political reasons, but what I am saying is that the news media fails abysmally in its duty to give us really significant information, and concurrently, our government often makes skillful use of the rubbish posing as news that does manage to get “reported.” Case in point: the NY times is reporting that there seems to be a deliberate delay in the government report concerning fuel efficiency for our cars…and it just so happens that an energy bill is being debated in congress. We wouldn’t want embarrassing facts about the need for fuel efficiency to upset the petro-car apple cart our society and financial institutions seem to rest upon in this country. We wouldn’t want congress reading this report before they vote, and then doing inconvenient things like mandating fuel efficiency standards. Of course, the administration will deny the delay in the report has anything to do with the energy bill debate now underway. But such a statement has all the credibility of the assertions about yellow cake from Nigeria, and stockpiles of nuclear and bio-weapons hidden in Iraq.

Did you notice how the meat grinding reduction of Fallujah was deftly scheduled to begin just after the election and end well before Thanksgiving? Did you notice how you heard nothing at all about citizen uprisings in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nigeria this year, all aimed at oil companies sucking resources from those countries to the detriment of the peasants who struggle on in poverty? Did you know that the government of the Sudan is quietly in league with a band of roving  vigilantes called the “Janjaweed” militias? Who are these guys?

Who are they? Well, they’re the most efficient army in the world today, at least as far as killing goes. The vaunted U.S. Army has managed to kill an estimated 5000 to 7000 enemy combatants in its “war on terror” and about four times that number of noncombatant civilians. That’s chicken feed compared to the death toll rung up by these irregular cavalry militias in Darfur. They’ve killed ten times as many people since the US set out to rid the world of terrorism... But oddly, no one seems to notice or care about the ruthless efficiency of these rag tag Arab horsemen in the Sudan.

The Janjaweed (variously spelled Janjawid, Jingaweit, Jinjaweed, Janjawiid, Janjiwid, etc.) is an armed militia group in Darfur, western Sudan, comprising fighters of Muslim Arab background (mainly from the Baggara people). Since 2003 it has been one of the principal actors in the increasingly bloody Darfur conflict, which has pitted Arabs against the black African population (also Muslim) of the region. Its name translates as "a man with a horse and a gun," although it is more usefully translated as "armed men on horseback."

The Janjaweed is the successor to an earlier Arab tribal militia, the Murahilin (literally "nomads"), which had existed for many years beforehand.

They are today’s most efficient and deadly terrorist killers... completely ignored by the U.S. and the West in general.

While we focus our national might and wealth on “fighting terror” in the world, it seems we are after the wrong guys. The shadowy bomb makers who attack the West have managed to kill about 500 people since 9-11. But in the next  week or two ten times that four year toll, another 5000 people, will be dead at the hands of the real terrorists in Sudan. The Janjaweed militias, used by the Sudanese government to fight a rebel faction there, have been merrily moving from one settlement to another, burning, raping and hacking away with machetes as they go. The death toll is now above 280,000  confirmed dead in the last three years. It is now vying with some of the blackest events in modern times on the all time massacre list:  Stalin’s mass burial site uncovered in Russia (with some 200,000 bodies), The massacre during the Warsaw uprising in WWII (200,000 dead), the civilian death toll at Stalingrad (140,000 dead), the Japanese massacre at Manila (112,000 dead) and then we get  to the smaller potatoes on the hit list…places like the Tokyo firebombing (86,000 dead).

To go along with the dead, the Sudan Tribune reports that another 2 million have been rendered homeless there, with about half of the total population of the region, some 3.5 million, now starving. What have you heard about this terror war in Sudan on the “news?” Virtually nothing. Perhaps there have just not been enough deaths at the hands of the Janjaweed to merit coverage. After all, the death toll in Darfur is only a few thousand more than the total dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined… it’s only four times more than the Buchenwald concentration camp death toll... it’s only eight times more than the number of Jews slaughtered by the German Nazis at Babi Yar, and eight times the number of dead when the allies bombed Dresden. It’s just about twelve times the casualties in the Death March of Batan, and fourteen times the total dead in the London Blitz of WWII... there were 900,000 deaths in Rwanda that we heard barely a whisper about during Bill Clinton’s presidency. That little African terror is firmly nested in the number two spot on the modern  massacre list for events under 1.5 million—right behind the 1,200,000 who died at the Auschwitz death camp - though it cannot compare with other great genocides like the Turkish Armenian massacres, the slave trade, China’s “cultural revolution,” Pol Pot’s Killing fields of Cambodia and the greatest slaughter the world has ever seen--the destruction of the American Indian Natives by the US Government. Yet, Darfur is firmly positioned as #1 on the intermediate list where the death toll is less than 300,000...though some claim the toll is higher there. Perhaps you have to kill at least half a million to get consistent US media attention these days...

2,992 - September 11, 2001 attacks, (New York City, Arlington, VA, Shanksville, PA, United States, 2001)
344 - Beslan School Siege, (Beslan, Russia, 2004)
329 - Air India Flight 182 (Atlantic Ocean, south of Ireland, 1985)
299 - US and French barracks bombings, (Beirut, Lebanon, 1983)
270 - Pan Am Flight 103, (Lockerbie, Scotland, 1988)
257 - 1993 Mumbai bombings (Mumbai, India, 1993)
225 - 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, (Tanzania, Kenya, 1998)
220 - Kerbala and Baghdad attacks [2], (Iraq, 2004)
202 - 2002 Bali bombing, (Indonesia, 2002)
191 - 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings, (Spain, 2004)

Sorry... the recent London “Terror” attacks don’t make this list.

TOTAL deaths from top 10 terrorist attacks = 5,329

Worried about terrorism?  You are if you live in Darfur province. More die there each week than the total of all deaths in the top 10 terrorist attacks of all time.

One would think, given the glaring truth of these statistics, that we don’t need cameras on subways and snoops in our libraries to fight terrorism today... We need Marines in Darfur province opening up a can of American Whoop-Ass on the Janjaweed militias! We need to establish, in no uncertain terms, that we will no longer tolerate this kind of genocidal slaughter, anywhere on this earth. Unfortunately…we have no Marines to spare in such a venture. They are all over in Iraq fighting an insurgency that was not there when they first arrived…fighting terrorists who were not terrorists two years ago, but who were recruited in droves because of the US invasion in the heart of the Islamic world. We are fighting an enemy of our own making in Iraq, pretending to be planting the seeds of liberty, while our real interest lies in surveying and controlling the oil reserves there, and in the region as a whole.

You see…there’s not much oil in Darfur province, and so you won’t find US Marines there any time soon, nor will you find big multi-billion dollar operations by American contractors there to “rebuild” the place at taxpayer expense and set all the people of Darfur province “free.”  There won’t be elections there any time soon, or purple fingers raised jubilantly as the poverty stricken people of Sudan wade into “democracy.” Nope. No commercial interest in Darfur that I can see in the far, far future. And that means no US corporate contracts, no profits, and therefore no Marines.

That means the Janjaweed will go about their business unopposed, and by next Tuesday, there will be another 3000 dead there, and by Saturday, 3000 more…  Imagine the planes crashing into our skyscrapers here at that pace, and killing Americans!

So all you god fearing voters on the Right out there who were so upset about the “right to life” during the last election can sit in front of your wide screen TVs and continue to pretend you are Christians while you watch the latest entertainment... or you can flex that political influence we once called “the moral majority” in this country, and put in a good word at the White House for the poor people of the Sudan, who are, you would be quick to agree, all God’s children.

And me? I’m just another liberal elitist intellectual with a conscience, who thinks there’s something wrong with America’s priorities and actions in the world these days.

-- John Schettler

Rounding out this macabre baker’s dozen, the Iraq war has now reached Buchenwald proportions.

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