by Keith Harmon Snow
After US-backed forces shot their way to power in Rwanda and Uganda with armies of child soldiers and exemplary atrocities, Western propaganda blamed the horrific death toll on the losers. To legitimize its African pit bull regimes the US now hounds and deports Rwandan dissidents, concealing or concocting evidence at will.
April 1994 to April 2012: Commemorating More Than 18 years of US Sponsored Terrorism in Central Africa, Part 2 of 2
by Keith Harmon Snow
Part 1 here.
http://blackagendareport.com/content/april-1994-april-2012-commemorating-more-18-years-us-sponsored-terrorism-central-africa-part
THE RPA GENOCIDE AGAINST THE HUTU PEOPLE
Beatrice Munyenyezi survived the invasion of Rwanda's Byumba prefecture by the Ugandan troops calling themselves the Rwanda Patriotic Army in 1990. Munyenyezi then survived the next four years of RPA/F persecution and genocide that saw entire Hutu villages in Byumba razed, massacres of scores of thousands of mostly (but not only) Hutu people, and the internal displacement of some two million Hutus.
Forced into a life-and-death refugee existence inside Rwanda between October 1990 and April 1994, the displaced Hutu people fought back after the plane carrying the Hutu presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi, and other Rwandan high officials, was shot down over Kigali airport on April 6, 1994.
Beatrice Munyenyezi then survived the so-called '100 days of genocide' in Rwanda from April 6 to July 15, 1994. She fled Rwanda with family members on July 18, 1994, part of the massive exodus of millions of Rwandans, mostly innocent Hutu women and children to eastern Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo).
In Congo-Zaire, Munyenyezi survived the most ruthless and cold-blooded slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hutu civilians by the RPA, Ugandan People's Defense Forces and some lesser numbers of Ethiopian, Eritrean, and South African troops. The RPA-led genocide in Congo-Zaire began in August 1996 when the RPA shelled refugee camps in violation of international law.
In Goma, DRC, at this time, a western war correspondent photographed U.S. Special Forces machine-gunning unarmed refugee men, women and children in what he described as "one of the most horrible examples of mass atrocities I have ever seen."
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had been stockpiling World Food Program provisions ans these were being denied to starving Rwandan refugees. The massive provisions were used to feed the invading RPA troops.
For the next year, UNHCR helped the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its backers -- Pentagon, U.S. State Department, USAID, DFID, Israel, Belgium -- to hunt down and forcibly repatriate Hutu refugees as they ran for their lives all across Congo. UNHCR even paid a bounty to local Congolese for refugees. In Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, and Gabon it was the same story: UNHCR hunted the refugees down, paid a bounty, coerced the local dictatorships (Omar Bongo in Gabon, Paul Biya in Cameron), and forcibly repatriated Rwandan refugees back to death camps, torture and mass graves in Rwanda.
UNHCR head Sagato Ogata even landed by plane near Tingi Tingi refugees camp in Zaire, when the RPA/F attack was imminent, and threatened refugees -- which by now included Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi, and internally displaced Congolese people -- that if they didn't return to Rwanda they would be killed. The RPA/F attacked, Ogata was off to some posh celebration in some fancy hotel. Tens of thousands of refugees were killed and scores of thousands fled west into the forests to suffer and die.
Howard French of the New York Times made a few hollow protestations to his editors in New York, but soon he went on to work as bureau chief in China. French mumbles a few words about Rwanda and Congo now and then, but he is an officially sanctioned voice who maintains his highly paid job at the New York Times precisely because he has said nothing at all of any real substance about U.S. and British and Belgian and German and Canadian and Israeli agents responsible for the Hutu genocide in Zaire.
PERSECUTING RWANDAN DISSENTERS IN GENERAL, HUTUS IN PARTICULAR
After the refugee camps in eastern Zaire were attacked, Beatrice Munyenyezi fled from Congo to Kenya at the advice of her brother, Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, another U.S. citizen also being hunted by the Kagame regime and its political, military and economic partners.
In Tanzania and Kenya, Beatrice Munyenyezi survived RPF agents hunting refugees and assassinating dissidents, including former RPF official Seth Sendashonga, who was minister of the interior in Rwanda from 1994 to 1998.
Jean Marie Vianney Higiro is the real target of the Kagame regime's persecution of Beatrice Munyenyezi: the regime has held a vendetta against Higiro since his refusal to accept a post in the Kagame terrorist government in July 1994. Higiro was evacuated from Rwanda by U.S. marines around April 8, 1994.
The security apparatus of the Kagame regime has been hunting refugees in Europe and in North America since 1994, and Rwandan dissidents have been assassinated in Europe and Africa. The hunting down of Rwandan dissidents is backed by the U.S. Government, Britain and Israel to prop up their client regime: the dictatorship of Paul Kagame.
Rwanda provides a major base for the U.S. Department of Defense military occupation of Africa and for U.S. and allied intelligence and defense operations. While allied operations involve many NATO countries, Britain and Israel are the main intelligence and defense partners for the U.S. in Central Africa; Germany and Belgium are not far behind them.
There is no freedom of speech in Rwanda today. There is no freedom of press. There is no freedom to organize. There is no freedom of assembly. The Kagame regime continues to assassinate and disappear critics, journalists, former business associates, former military and former government officials.
On March 31, 2012, Kagame's former Chief of Staff Theogene Rudasingwa, a Tutsi in exile, announced that Paul Kagame was the instigator of the January 2001 assassination of Congolese President Laurent Desire Kabila. Theogene Rudasingwa is also the former RPA/F Secretary General and former ambassador to Washington under the Kagame regime.
The most recent assassinations include several Rwandan journalists killed in Uganda earlier this year. Opposition candidate Victoire Ingabire remains imprisoned and subject to a political charade trial because she returned to Rwanda from Belgium and courageously proclaimed the heretical and obvious: There was a genocide against Hutus as well as Tutsis.
In July 2010, the body of the deputy leader of the Democratic Green Party was found dumped by a river near the southern town of Butare. Opposition politician Andre Kagwa Rwisereka, a Tutsi politician, was decapitated for his opposition to the Kagame regime.
The RPA/F government routinely rounds up numerous supposed supporters of opposition parties, and people have routinely been disappeared merely for showing some allegiance to the opposition Green Party or the PS-Imberakuri party.
"So many Tutsis are also suffering political repression," says 'Ignace', a high level Rwandan dissident who fears retaliation from the U.S. government for speaking out. "Tutsis who live in Rwanda are silent because they fear repression. Tutsis who live abroad in exile, like Theogene Rudasingwa and Gerald Gahima and General Kayumba Nyamwasa are also living in fear of assassination."
Hutus throughout the country are subject to slavery conditions and millions of people -- Hutus, Tutsis, Twa -- outside the cliques of power are suffering extreme poverty. Most egregious, the RPA/F genocide against Hutu people continues: there is at present a campaign in Rwanda to forcibly sterilize Hutu males. At present the government claims this is "voluntary" sterilization for population control, but the government is already pressing forced sterilization in certain cases and there is a history of deeply repressive and coercive policies that have been put into practice by force. According to an ICTR defense attorney interviewed in Arusha, the program is aimed at substantial reductions of the majority Hutu population.
"The RPF's reconstruction and reconciliation policies do not represent a sincere attempt to unify and reconcile Rwandans," writes Dr. Susan Thomson. "Instead, it is a mechanism of state power that presents a self-serving version of history and manipulates the language of ethnicity to justify and maintain policies of exclusion and oppression of ethnic Hutu in maintaining the appearance of peace and security... In practice, the government approaches post-genocide justice through the maximal prosecution of all Hutu.."
A U.S. academic who worked in Rwanda and experienced the indoctrination camps run by the Kagame regime, Dr. Susan Thomson is persona non grata in Rwanda today. (And so is this correspondent.)
THE RWANDA GENOCIDE TOURISM INDUSTRY
After the arrest of Beatrice Munyenyezi in 2010, agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) traveled to Rwanda to gather evidence to support the charges against her.
It is unknown which, if any, of the U.S. prosecutors also traveled to Rwanda, but there were two investigative missions sent there for the Munyenyezi 'discovery'. Because Beatrice Munyenyezi was indigent, both of her defense attorneys traveled to Rwanda all expenses paid by U.S. taxpayers; it is likely that the two primary U.S. prosecutors also traveled there.
While prosecutors John Capin and Aloke Chakravarthy may or may not have traveled to Rwanda, independent investigations in Rwanda are impossible. The U.S. government does not send unbiased investigators to Rwanda: it sends agents intent on collecting the information and documentation provided by their client regime to protect their client regime.
It is especially easy to manipulate tourists or students or researchers who arrive in Rwanda for their first visit to Africa. White people are taken to the genocide memorials and the shock of these staged-managed productions -- all these Hutu and Tutsi skeletons piled up and labeled 'Tutsi victims of genocide' -- strikes deep into the psyche of the spectator. People don't arrive with clean slates: the mass media has deeply conditioned western news and entertainment consumers to see Africa through a racist and exploitative lens.
The viewing of skeletons and skulls in Rwanda has become a lucrative spectator sport and the conditioning by the white systems of power in western countries has created naive and racially conditioned spectators who are easily fooled. Once they have seen the 'horrors' of the genocide memorials the average white and even non-white western spectators (e.g. African Americans) are often horrified into a subconscious shock and disbelief where reason and common sense are no longer accessible.
Foreigners take the skeletons and skulls as the unassailable truth -- it does not cross their minds that there might be some other interpretation of the art project they see before them. It doesn't occur to people that the truth has been distilled down -- essentialized -- into piles of skeletons, or shoes, or scattered clothing, or machetes that no longer appropriately re-present the original circumstances and context..
However, the fact is that virtually everyone in Rwanda owns a machete. Ditto in Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Uganda and rural Tanzania. They are as common a personal item as a wallet or purse or ball point pen is to a westerner. The entire machete narrative -- Hutus butchering Tutsis in 100 days, blah, blah, blah -- is deeply problematic, since the RPA/F routinely killed people with machetes both to disguise (normalize) the means of death such that the perpetrators and the victims could not be distinguished and so that the RPA/F narrative of 'bloodthirsty Hutus killing Tutsis with machetes' could easily be advanced. The RPA/F also wanted to save on bullets.
There is a genocide economy in Rwanda that serves foreign visitors who spend millions of dollars annually to travel to Rwanda, stay in fancy hotels, eat at restaurants, visit the mountain gorillas in Rwanda's national parks, hire cars, and drivers, and interpreters, and purchase souvenirs -- or 'free trade' coffee produced on lands stolen from the Hutu masses. There is a whole industry that revolves around the production and maintenance of the official Rwanda genocide story about Hutus killing Tutsis in 100 days of horror.
The U.S. government pays all the travel and per diem expenses of genocide 'investigators', and everything is covered at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Rwandan 'victims' and 'survivors' who are brought to the United States are also fully paid.
"This is genocide tourism," says 'Ignace'. "They are not investigative. They stay at fancy hotels, they visit some locations, they see the skeletons and skulls at 'genocide memorials', they meet President Kagame, and they are assigned government handlers who make sure they get what Kagame and people in Washington want. They drink a lot of wine and swim in the swimming pools. They don't know anything about Rwanda and everything looks very romantic. Then they come back and accuse innocent people of genocide."
PENTAGON SATELLITE PHOTOS EXPOSED
The existence of satellite reconnaissance photographs has not been revealed even during the 18 years of very high profile genocide trials held at the ICTR.
During his entire three-plus years in Rwanda from 1990 to November 1993, former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda Robert Flatten's requests for Pentagon-DIA spy satellite photographs showing the progress of the war in the Rwandan countryside were turned down -- because of "clouds over Rwanda" they told him.
Whatever the inevitable imperfections of U.S. intelligence early on, the reports from Rwanda were severe enough to distinguish Hutu killers from ordinary combatants in civil war. And they certainly warranted directing additional U.S. intelligence assets toward the region--to snap satellite photos of large gatherings of Rwandan civilians or of mass graves, to intercept military communications, or to infiltrate the country in person. Though there is no evidence that senior policymakers deployed such assets, routine intelligence continued to pour in.
In her pivotal propaganda piece, "Bystanders to Genocide" (Harpers, September 2001), Harvard University scholar and U.S. war crimes apologist Samantha Power claimed that the U.S. had the means to 'stop the genocide' but instead we stood by. These means, she correctly noted, would include satellite imagery. However, Power's role was to further whitewash U.S. involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, as her Pulitzer prize-winning book The Road to Hell: America in the Age of Genocide quite clearly demonstrates.
In a December 2001 letter to Harper's editors, U.S. academic Alan J. Kuperman disputed Samantha Power's claim that "the United States failed to snap satellite photos of large gatherings of Rwandan civilians or of mass graves" stating: "Actually, within three days of the outbreak of violence on April 6, 1994, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency obtained satellite photos, communications intercepts, and human intelligence confirming that a widespread, centrally controlled killing campaign was underway. I reported these facts, based on interviews with senior U.S. intelligence officials, in my recent book, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Brookings, 2001)."
However, in a 2000 edition of Foreign Affairs, Alan Kuperman argued that President Clinton "could not have known that a nationwide genocide was under way" until about two weeks into the killing. In any case, the existence of satellite photos has never received any substantive attention and they have never been revealed until now.
The authenticity of the satellite images produced in the Munyenyezi trial in New Hampshire has not been established and there is good reason to assume that the satellite images may be completely fraudulent.
Question: If satellite images existed, say some critics, then why were they not produced in high-profile cases at the ICTR -- which is a show trial completely run by the United States? Answer: Good question. Perhaps the images show U.S. military involvement, RPA/F troop movements and bases, and etc., and are therefore too revealing. This is quite likely.
Alternately, the satellite photos may have been produced during a different time period than is claimed by the prosecutors, and thus have nothing to do with the actual events and timeframes, which might be the case with the satellite photos produced for the Munyenyezi case.
There is also substantial reason to believe that the satellite photographs may be exactly what the Pentagon described them as. If Washington had the capability to monitor events from a satellite platform they certainly were doing so. And Washington had that capacity indeed.
In 1994, the U.S. intelligence and defense establishment was flying two older versions of the LANDSAT remote sensing satellite platforms in outer orbit. LANDSAT-4 and LANDSAT-5 had both exceeded their design lifetimes but were operational and had the capability to capture accurate and detailed imagery of what was happening in Rwanda during the 100 days of genocide.
One direct witness to events in Rwanda leading up the 1994 genocide was a researcher connected to a foreign NGO who knows something about NASA space shuttle images collected over Rwanda but who has never gone public. Witness GOR-2 (not connected to the Munyenyezi case) worked closely with the Juvenal Habyarimana regime prior to April 1994 and again closely with the new Kagame government after 1994.
Witness GOR-2 had regular contact with the Rwandan Ministry of Defense, the office of President Kagame, and with former RPA Secretary General Theogene Rudasingwa. According to GOR-2, there were NASA space shuttle flights over Zaire and Rwanda in April and September of 1994, on U.S. government-sponsored research under contract NAS7-1260.
The prosecutors in the Munyenyezi case are claiming that Beatrice Munyenyezi was present and directed killings and kidnappings at a road block just outside the Hotel Ihuriro in Butare. The RPA/F apparently captured Butare through an offensive launched from Burundi. Satellite images produced during the trial included images from around May 23, and a series from May 28 to June 1. At this time the Hotel Ihuriro was intact, but in a later image dated around July 19th the hotel had been leveled to the ground by the RPA/F attack.
According to sources present at the Munyenyezi trial, the satellite pictures are taken over a time period and show clear changes from day to day. For example, the photos showed people and cars moving towards Burundi. "When they zoom in on a given location you can see the buildings, you can see people and cars. It's not a video, it's a snapshot."
"They first showed the hotel, which doesn't exist any more. They tried to show that somehow there was a roadblock that [Beatrice Munyenyezi] was at. The pictures were also supposed to show a mass grave a few feet from the hotel and another mass grave near the Episcopal church nearby The defense attorneys were able to prove that there was no road block shown in the pictures, and there were no mass graves."
THE GREAT LAKES GENOCIDE COVER-UP
The existence of satellite images raises questions about what the Pentagon knows and what they are hiding. For example, satellite imagery would clearly show the wreckage of the presidential plane crash site, and photos would show who was in control of the crash site immediately after the April 6 assassinations, and who controlled the site over the next weeks and months. But they would also show military hardware being shipped in by the U.S., and U.S. military involvement.
"The U.S. was directly involved in the April-July 1994 events," says ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black. "U. N. investigator Michael Hourigan implicates the CIA in the attack on the plane. There is the presence of U.S. defense attaché Lt. Col. Charles Vuckovic in Kigali just days before the shoot down. After April 6th, the U.S. was supplying the RPF forces using C-130 Hercules aircraft. General Ndindiliyimana testified [at the ICTR] that the U.S. Air Force was airdropping men and weapons to the RPF and he was not challenged on this testimony. Also, the U.N. Rwanda Emegency Office was in reality completely staffed by U.S. army officers and acted as the operational headquarters for the RPF. Further, U.S. allies like Canada also assisted the RPF: General Romeo Dallaire was in breach of his required U.N. neutrality and Belgian forces also are deeply implicated."
The United States has blocked every bonafide investigation into the double presidential assassinations since 1994. The Kagame regime has produced several reports (e.g. Mucyo Report), but these self-interested productions are easily discredited.
Former RPA/F official Theogene Rudasingwa claims that Paul Kagame and an elite RPA/F hit squad are behind the shooting down of the presidential plane, and thus the RPA/F sparked the genocide of Tutsis, knowing Tutsis would be massacred everywhere, and these claims are backed up by other former RPA/F soldiers.
Satellite imagery would also show the locations, strengths and activities of RPA/F troops, government (FAR) troops and militias. It is well known that the RPA/F infiltrated the Interahamwe militias, and therefore RPA/F are believed to have controlled some road blocks, and it is very curious that no satellite photos have previously been produced to show where road blocks and bridges were occupied, and who occupied them.
Probably this is because the RPA/F was in control of areas like the Kagera National Park, and RPA were dumping dead Hutus and (French-speaking) Tutsis in the Kagera RIver. The infamous mythology about Tutsi bodies floating down the Kagera River is completely contradicted by the declassified memo from Mark Prutsalis of the NGO Refugees International.
In a May 17, 1994 situation report (SITREP #10: Rwandan Refugees in Tanzania) to Refugees International headquarters in Washington D.C., Mark Prutsalis described documented RPA atrocities on the Tanzania-Rwanda border. The document details gruesome and egregious war crimes, crimes against humanity and the indiscriminate killing of both Hutus and Tutsi civilians by RPA soldiers -- atrocities witnessed and documented by foreigners working for UNHCR and UNICEF, and for the international NGOs Refugees International, Red Cross, CARE, International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
For example, the following are excerpts from a UNHCR-Ngara protection report on border crossing points from an assessment made on 14 and 15 May:""At RUSUMO commune, sector KIGARAMA, the RPF came and called for a 'peace meeting'. Those, who did not participate voluntarily, were forced to the meeting. At the school people were tied together, three by three -- men/women/children - and stabbed. The bodies were put on trucks and thrown into the Kagera River, north of Rusumo Bridge..."
"At RUSUMO commune, sectors NYAMUGARI, GISENYI, NYARUBUJE, the RPF comes at 05h00 waiting for villagers to open their doors. The villagers are caught and taken away to the river by trucks. No one has returned. Refugees from the area have seen people being tied together and thrown into the river. It seems as if guns are used only if somebody tries to escape..."
At RUSUMO commune, sector MUZAZA, village GASARABWAYI (4 kms from the river), the RPF launched several attacks on the village and its population. On the 13.05 [May 13] 40 RPF soldiers came at 07h00. They surrounded the village. Villagers were gathered in houses, which were burned down. An eyewitness saw 20 people being killed this way. 8 villagers were thrown into a latrine, and the latrine was filled with soil. Asked by UNHCR field officer refugees said that the RPF did not care whether victims were Hutu or Tutsi villagers."
"An IRC staff person wrote to their office," the Refugees International SITREP concluded. "Things are getting very bad at the border here... Someone really needs to do something about all of the [RPA] killing and torture on the other [Rwanda] side. Each day there are more and more bodies in the river and most of them without their heads; the count is between 20 and 30 each 30 minutes."
"The people of Rwanda have nowhere else to go and we cannot expect them to stay and be slaughtered in their homes," Mark Prutsalis wrote. "This remote inaccessible part of Tanzania cannot continue to receive thousands of refugees per day. We will soon be overwhelmed here unless someone takes action to end the bloodshed, the atrocities, the massacres in Rwanda."
The genocide against Tutsis and Hutus continued after 1994 and there has never been a U.S. investigation into the roles of the Pentagon, CIA and DIA in the cataclysms in Rwanda and Congo-Zaire.
Witness GOR-2 described how the RPA/F used the Volcanoes National Park as a military base to launch Congo-Zaire operations after 1994.
GOR-2 said that white soldiers driving tanks were seen inside the park heading to Zaire in September 1996. GOR-2 said that the United Nation's IRIN report described this as U.S. soldiers going into Goma but that the IRIN report was quickly removed from the Internet. GOR-2 explained how the RPA?F would close the Volcanoes National Park for days at a time while involved in military operations and 'clean-ups': "The Rwandan Patriotic Army would just close the park for days at a time and we didn't know what was going on in there."
GOR-2 explained how the Volcanoes National Park was flooded with thousands of Rwandan refugees returning from Zaire after the U.S.-backed invasion by Kagame and Museveni forces in 1996, and that the park became an RPA 'killing zone'.
"We had a massive clean-up operation to remove bodies in 1999ter ," GOR-2 said, "trying to get out all the dead bodies, and all the rags and pots and pans."
GOR-2 was always in close personal contact with Major Richard Skow, the U.S. military attache' from the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, and Robert E. Gribbon, the U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda at the time.
GOR-2 described airborne remote sensing flyovers using a new state-of-the-art technology involving hyper-spectral analysis where flights were made over Rwanda and eastern Congo. GOR-2 claims that some 22 CDs of raw data were delivered by Claire Richardson, the head of the USA-based Dian Fossey Gorrilla Fund (DFGF), to Theogene Rudasingwa at the Rwandan Ministry of Defense. GOR-2 said the flyovers were coordinated by the National Geographic Society and DFGF and were supposedly for gorilla conservation -- habitat mapping -- but were actually meant to locate mineral resources that the RPA could exploit.
DFGF's initiatives in remote sensing occurred in partnerships with two high-technology intelligence and defense research firms, the Idaho-based Earth Search Sciences Inc. (ESSI) and an affiliated firm, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). The secrecy of these firms, the lack of oversight and the suspicious nature of the projects suggests they may be involved in covert operations in Central Africa.
Satellite imagery was almost certainly collected over the four years of warfare in Rwanda by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), one of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. The NRO designs, builds and operates U.S. government spy satellites and coordinates the analysis of aerial surveillance and satellite imagery from several intelligence and military agencies, including the Defense Investigative Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). All NRO operations are highly classified.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) was created in 2003. Prior to 2003 it was known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), which in 1996 absorbed four highly secretive intelligence entities: National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), the Defense Dissemination Program Office, and the Central Imagery Office. According to one NIMA report, "[i]n the late 1990's... NIMA supported humanitarian relief efforts in Rwanda and Uganda with quickly produced Landsat image maps used by U.N. relief workers to deliver aid shipments to the refugee camps."
The satellite imaging conducted over Rwanda from 1990 to 1994 probably involved the DMA and NPIC. DMA was formed in 1973 to consolidate mapping operations of the armed forces. NPIC began in 1953 as an expansion of the CIA's photo-interpretation organization. NPIC was the agency that identified the missiles that created the Cuban missile crises and also flew the U-2 spy planes that were being shot down over Red China.
According to the NGA web site: "As both a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community and a Department of Defense Combat Support Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) produces timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, to help all levels of users meet their strategic and operational needs in support of national security.
A cursory review of NGA personnel reveals deep ties to many intelligence and defense entities, including Lockheed Martin Corporation, Being, SAIC and a variety of other beyond Top Secret entities like ERDA and ESRI. NGA 'customers' include the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
The prosecution witness and Pentagon analyst Eric Benn joined the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in 1983 and he was promoted to Senior Analyst for the DIA's Office for Imagery Analysis in 1991. He attended the National War College at Ft. McNair in 1993-4 and received a Masters Degree in National Security Studies. "The Technical Executive of NGA's Analysis and Production Directorate, Eric Benn serves as the principal adviser to the NGA, IC and DoD leadership on the current and future Geospatial Intelligence analytic environment."
Beyond supporting the 16 Intelligence Community (IC) 'customers', one of the primary responsibilities of NIMA (and its predecessor agencies) is to support Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA) and warfighting command.
NGA's geospatial intelligence mission supports four main customer sets: 1. The warfighter 2. National policymakers 3. Local first responders through federal agencies 4. Intelligence Community partners
Before April 6, 1994 the RPF occupied the large portions of the prefectures of Byumba and Ruhengeri: American satellite pictures would shed light on the destruction caused by the RPF offensive from 1990 to the 1993 ceasefire.
"I spent 3 months in the demilitarized zone resettling internally displaced people," says another unnamed Rwandan genocide survivor. "Based on what I saw, the RPF policy was to kill people, destroy buildings, destroy houses, destroy archives," says witness GOR-3 (not connected to the Munyenyezi trial). "Doors, iron sheets and corrugated metal covering the roofs of houses, furniture, toilets -- everything had been removed and taken to Uganda to be sold. We need the pictures taken by the Pentagon to show the brutality of the RPA invasion and occupation." Hordes of NGO workers and humanitarian relief workers involved in millions of dollars of private profit come and go from Rwanda, always advertising their effectiveness in "peace" and "reconciliation" programs.
Tutsis and Hutus alike inside and outside Rwanda are increasingly speaking about military confrontation as more and more people become alienated and disaffected by the elite Tutsis in the Kagame regime.
RWANDAN REGIME A MAJOR PLAYER IN ONGOING PLUNDER AND GENOCIDE IN CONGO
The U.S. Department of Defense also oversees and supports plunder and depopulation in the Eastern Congo, where Rwanda and Uganda maintain economic, political and military control.
Under the cover of military operations to capture and kill supposed Rwandan "genocidaires" in Congo (Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda) and supposed Ugandan terrorists (including Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army) western mining companies have been stripping and shipping Congolese minerals without oversight or regulation since the Pentagon-backed invasion of September 1996.
Canadian Banro Corporation is one of the most secretive corporations operating in Congo, and they have established and maintained their control through very tight relations with the Kagame regime. Banro has taken over thousands of hectares of South Kivu province by manipulating the local mwamis (chiefs), by bribing officials and by infiltrating officials onto power who are friendly to Banro and Kagame's interests.
Banro describes its operations as 'stable' and 'community-aligned' but local human rights groups paint a very different picture, one of terrorism all over the region. Banro's secutrity manager is from the private military company Erinys International, a British mercenary firm 'registered' in the British Virgin Islands. Banro works exclusively with Erinys International, a firm that also operates in Iraq.
The areas around Banro concessions (e.g. Shabunda, Fizi, Walungu) have seen some of the worst bloodshed in all of the Congo, often perpetrated by Rwandan forces conected to Paul Kagame and then blamed on Congolese Mai Mai or the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The Banro concessions can be seen in the map below, where total territory under Banro exploration is almost as big as the entire countries of Rwanda or Burundi. This would not be possible without a close military and intelligence alliance between Banro and the Kagame government.
Keith Harmon Snow is a photographer, journalist and researcher who resides in Western Massachusetts, and has worked in and reported from many African and Asian countries. Find more of his work at http://allthingspass.com/, at http://www.keithharmonsnow.com/ and his current site, http://www.consciousbeingalliance.com/. Contact him here or here.
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