Exposing U.S. agents of low-intensity warfare in Africa

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Alexandra Valiente

The “Policy Wonks” Behind Covert Warfare & Humanitarian Fascism.

This special report includes three unpublished video clips of interviewees from the Politics of Genocide documentary film project: Ugandan dignitary Remigius Kintu, former Rwandan prime minister Fautisn Twagiramungu, and Nobel peace prize nominee Juan Carrero Saralegui.

keith harmon snow

From the 1980s to today, Western intelligence operatives have backed low-intensity guerrilla warfare in Africa. Mass atrocities in the Great Lakes and Sudan can be linked to Roger Winter, a pivotal U.S. operative whose ‘team’ was recently applauded for birthing the world’s newest nation, South Sudan. Behind the fairytale we find a long trail of blood and skeletons from Uganda to Sudan, Rwanda and Congo. While the mass media has covered their tracks, they have simultaneously birthed a new left-liberal ‘humanitarian’ fascism. In this falsification of consciousness, Western human rights crusaders and organizations, funded by governments and multinational corporations and private donors, cheer the killers and blame the victims—and pat themselves on the back for saving Africa from itself. Meanwhile, the “Arab Spring” has spread to (north) Sudan. Following the NATO-Israeli model of regime change being used in Central & North Africa, it won’t be long before the fall of Khartoum.

SPLA Tank in South Sudan: An old SPLA army tank sits in the bush in Pochalla, Jonglei State, south Sudan in 2004. Israel, the United States, Britain and Norway have been the main suppliers of the covert low-intensity war in Sudan, organized by gunrunners and policy ‘wonks’. Photo c. keith harmon snow, 2004.

It is, oh! such a happy fairy tale!

It begins as all happy fairy tales do, in fantasy land.The fantasy is one of human rights princes and policy ‘wonks’ in shining armor and the new kingdom of peace and tranquility, democracy and human rights, that they have created. That is what the United States foreign policy establishment and the corporate mass media—and not a few so-called ‘human rights activists’—would have us believe about the genesis of the world’s newest nation South Sudan.

“In the mid-1980s, a small band of policy wonks began convening for lunch in the back corner of a dimly lit Italian bistro in the U.S. capital,” wrote Rebecca Hamilton in “The Wonks Who Sold Washington on South Sudan.” Hamilton is a budding think-tank activist-advocate-agent whose whitewash of the low intensity war for Sudan (and some Western architects of it), distilled from her book Fighting for Darfur, splashed all over the Western press on 11 July 2012. [1]

The photos accompanying Hamilton’s story show a happy fraternity of ‘wonks’—what exactly is a ‘wonk’?—obviously being your usual down-jacket, beer- and coffee-slurping American citizens from white America, with a token black man thrown in to change the complexion of this Africa story. Their cups are white and clean, their cars are shiny and new, their convivial smiles are almost convincing. There is even a flag of the new country just sort of floating across one guy’s hip. With the exception Eric Reeves, they are probably nice enough guys.

For his ‘anti-genocide’ work in Sudan, Boston College professor Alan Wolfe has written that Smith College English professor Eric Reeves is “arrogant to the point of contempt.” (I have had a similar though much more personal experience of Dr. Reeves’ petulance.)

“John Prendergast (L-R), Eric Reeves, Brian D’Silva, Ted Dagne and Roger Miller [sic]—pose for a photograph in this undated image provided to Reuters by John Prendergast,” reads the original Reuters [syndicate] news caption for the image of the five wonks posing together.

The story and its photos project the image of casual, ordinary people who, we are led to believe, did heroic and superhuman things. What a bunch of happy-go-lucky wonks! Excuse me: policywonks! And their bellies are presumably warmed by that fresh Starbucks ‘fair trade’ genocide coffee shipped straight from the killing fields of post-genocide [sic] Rwanda… where, not coincidentally, Starbucks cut a profit of a few hundred million dollars in 2011.

In fact, this is a tale of dark knights, of covert operators and spies aligned with the cult of intelligence in the United States. Operating in secrecy and denial within the U.S. intelligence and defense establishment, they have helped engineer more than two decades of low intensity warfare in Sudan (alone), replete with massive suffering and a death toll of between 1.5 and 3 million Sudanese casualties (using their own fluctuating statistics on mortality), and millions upon millions of casualties in the Great Lakes of Africa.

Behind the fantasy is a very real tale of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocides real and alleged, and mass atrocities covered up by these National Security agents with the help of a not-so-ordinary English professor—their own one-man Minister of Disinformation.

“After ordering beers, they would get down to business: how to win independence for southern Sudan, a war-torn place most American politicians had never heard of.” Rebecca Hamilton deepened the intrigue into the extra-ordinariness of this happy cabal of ‘wonks’. “They called themselves the Council and gave each other clannish nicknames: the Emperor, the Deputy Emperor, the Spear Carrier. The unlikely fellowship included an Ethiopian refugee to America, an English-lit professor and a former Carter administration official who once sported a ponytail.”

How quaint! How absolutely Clark Kent! From the photo, I immediately recognized three of the five people policy wonks standing next to the car in some casual pose in a nondescript parking lot somewhere in America. There is John Prendergast, Eric Reeves, Brian D’Silva, Ted Dagne and… Roger Winter. (Not ‘Roger Miller’.) (The massive Reuters syndicate can’t even get the wonk’s name right.)

“The Council is little known in Washington or in Africa itself.” Rebecca Hamilton deepened the intrigue. “But its quiet cajoling over nearly three decades helped South Sudan win its independence one year ago this week. Across successive U.S. administrations, they smoothed the path of southern Sudanese rebels in Washington, influenced legislation in Congress, and used their positions to shape foreign policy in favor of Sudan’s southern rebels, often with scant regard for U.S. government protocol.”

Smoothed the path of the Sudanese rebels? Well, that’s an understatement, but that’s not all they did.

Faustin Twagiramungu, former Prime Minister under Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front government (1994-1995), speaks on U.S. Intelligence Operative Roger Winter:

Wonks? What is a wonk anyway?
Sounds excessively benign. Even charming. Not being an English professor-cum-Sudan-genocide-savior or a national security operative or a gun-running covert intelligence asset myself, I looked the word up in my American Heritage dictionary, but it doesn’t exist in my (apparently) antiquated copy. Seems the word ‘wonk’ is about as new as the country of South Sudan.

wonk/wäNGk/

Synonyms: bookworm, dink [slang], dork [slang], geek, grind, swot [British],weenie, nerd

“Look at the names mentioned by the story,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, one of many former Rwandan government officials who continues to be harassed by the brutal regime of president Paul Kagame in Rwanda and watched by U.S. Homeland Security. “All of them have a good cover. They move from one job to another easily. The story suggests they are somehow unrelated to the U.S. government even though their employer is the U.S. government.”

What does this Roger Winter know about the Rwandan rebel ‘Zero Network’ and alleged CIA involvement in shooting down the presidential plane on April 6, 1994—assassinating the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, their top aides and the French crew? Was Roger Winer involved in the October 23, 1993 assassination of Burundi’s Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye?

“It is also known that Roger Winter, an influential American politician was present at Paul Kagame’s headquarters at Mulindi [Rwanda] a few days before the offensive launched in the night of April 6-7, 1994,” reported Bernard Lugan, a prominent French historian and the editor of the online journal L’Afrique Réelle.

“Whoever shot down the plane, the killing began within hours, as Kagame and his Tutsi army fought their way toward Kigali to stop the genocide they had helped provoke,” wrote U.S. scholar-diplomat Stephen Weissman in 2004. While selling the establishment mythology where Kagame “stopped the genocide’ Weissman also elaborates a very serious point. “Traveling with them, by his own account, was at least one American—the refugee’s [Paul Kagame's] friend Roger Winter. Should Congress ever investigate America’s role in the Rwandan holocaust, Mr. Winter would be a star witness.” [2]

“Roger Winter was the chief logistics boss for [RPF] Tutsis until their victory in 1994,” said Ugandan dignitary Remigius Kintu, “and he was operating from 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington D.C.”

Ugandan dignitary Remigius Kintu speaks on U.S. Intelligence Operative Roger Winter:

Rebecca Hamilton set out to save Sudan from itself during her Save Darfur days at Harvard University, circa 2004,where she organized the campaign to divest Harvard from corporations doing business with Khartoum. Since then doors have opened for her everywhere she goes, though she was once detained in Khartoum. Stupidly surprised to be suspect as a ‘journalist’, Hamilton later chronicled her ‘ordeal’ in the Atlantic Monthly, where she positioned herself as an innocent journalist unfairly harassed by the Government of Sudan’s “dreaded internal security agency”. With her cell she texted her husband to “contact [my] employer in Washington”—but she didn’t tell us who that is—and her self-described cunning in going to the ladies room to secretly communicate with the outside world exposes her imperial arrogance.

A “special correspondent for the Washington Post in Sudan”, Rebecca Hamilton is also supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the New America Foundation. These institutions serve and advance the ever expanding Anglo-American Zionist Empire—multinational corporations and investment banks and currency speculators like Soros and the German Jewish firm Warburg Pincus. [3] These entities have deep ties to establishment news corporations and their use of qualifiers like ‘Pulitzer’—perceived to be synonymous with truth—only serve to blind the ‘news’ consuming masses to these institutions’ biases and interests. They are also deeply tied to powerful Christian and Jewish interests, and lobbies.

The New America Foundation is funded by all the big foundations (Ford, MacArthur, Pew, Bill & Melinda Gates, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Open Society), and the U.S. Department of State donates hundreds of thousands (in the $299,000 to $999.999 category) annually. Members of their ‘Leadership Council’ and ‘National Security Advisory Council’ include the prominent Council on Foreign Relations member Fareed Zakaria, who is also editor of Newsweek and a director of The Aspen Institute. [4]

Back in 2006, the New American Foundation funded another major agitprop piece on Roger Winter by Eliza Griswold in the New York Times Magazine. Another sanitized story, a bit more honest though, “The Man for a New Sudan” makes it clear that Roger Winter effectively served as a military commander for the SPLM in Sudan. Like Rebecca Hamilton’s wonk fare, it is a story of a white knight in shining armor fighting all alone, hand and foot, sandstorms and suffering, against the evil Khartoum government. [5]

What western ‘news’ consumers fail to understand is that these left-liberal institutions hone and tune the ‘news’ that appears in venues across the political spectrum. ‘News’ stories like “The Wonks Who Sold Washington on South Sudan” are produced with the understanding that they will: [a] serve corporate interests; [b] advance themes of democracy and freedom; [c] shield western power brokers from criticism and scrutiny; [d] whitewash western war crimes; [e] demonize anyone perceived to be hostile to the western economic and financial systems; and [f] support economic, political and/or military warfare all over the world.

These hegemonic objectives are achieved by overt and covert means, including: conventional warfare; intelligence operations; low intensity warfare; psychological operations or Psy-Ops; assassinations; coup d’etats; subversion; ‘democracy promotion’; election-rigging; and other illegal tax-payer funded foreign interventions. Clean-cut American ‘media’ personalities and ‘journalists’ like Rebecca Hamilton and Eliza Griswold and Nicholas Kristof are used to manufacture domestic consent—to inculcate ignorance, apathy, confusion, complacency and patriotism—in the English-language consuming masses (U.S., Canadian, British, Australian). This is primarily achieved through emotional appeals: facts don’t matter.

The propaganda techniques used by these mainstays of American Freedom [sic] are no more or less manipulative and sinister than those we associate with communist Russia or China or the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’ states (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). Like the bloodied victims (whether foreign civilians or U.S. troops), tortures, massacres and other war crimes and crimes against humanity are whited-out from the pages and screens of Western ‘news’ venues, leaving us with sanitized fantasy tales reinforcing our own sense of truth and justice, and the inherent goodness we all want to believe in.

“The lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth,” says war correspondent John Pilger in his documentary film The War You Don’t See. Like the coverage of the ongoing western-backed terrorism in Burundi, Congo, Rwanda, Somalia and Uganda, “The Wonks Who Sold Washington on South Sudan” is a propaganda piece covering up the war we didn’t see—and the war we don’t see—in Sudan. The strategy to fracture and divide Sudan is similar to the strategy at work in the Congo, and it echoes of the slow ‘fight and talk’ program of regime change that occurred in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994.

In the low intensity wars waged against Sudan (1989-2006), Uganda (1980-1986), Rwanda (1990-1994) and Congo-Zaire (1996-1997), it was not enough to try to destroy the organized military forces of the legitimate governments in power; a movement or group responsive to U.S. interests had to be created, legitimated, and presented to the target (domestic) populations as viable alternatives to the governments to be overthrown or replaced. For these purposes the U.S. and its allies (primarily the U.K. and Israel) sponsored the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the National Resistance Movement (NRM), the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the Alliance for the Democratic Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL). [6]

SPLA soldiers and captured GoS Tank: SPLA soldiers stand near a Government of Sudan tank they destroyed at “Kit bridge battle” in south Sudan in early November 1995. SPLA soldiers commanded by Gabriel Majok Nak (third left) on standby for deployment. Photo by Jimmy Adriko on December 8, 1995, courtesy of the New Vision newspaper Kampala, Uganda.

These propaganda stories and the institutions that manufacture them also whiteout all Israeli ties to the carnage. Israel routinely advised and trained the security forces of the Mobutu regime in Zaire and the Hissen Habre regime in Chad and they backed both Idi Amin and Museveni in their guerrilla wars. Israeli MOSSAD agent David Kimche worked alongside Roger Winter to aide the RPF victory in Rwanda. Israeli commanders were spotted on the battlefields of eastern Congo-Zaire and the Israeli firm Silver Shadow reportedly armed the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces in their alliance with the Congolese warlord Jean Pierre Bemba’s Movement for the Liberation of Congo.[7]

Israel backed the SPLM with defense and intelligence cooperation for decades. Israel backed the ‘rebels’ in Darfur, both the Sudan Liberation Army—an extension of the SPLM—and, most prominently, the Justice and Equality Movement. Tanks and artillery equipment were off-loaded at the U.S. military port of Mombasa, Kenya, and driven across Kenya and South Sudan. [8]

Israel’s support for the new South Sudan is no longer covert. In April 2012, just before the full-scale SPLA offensive in the disputed Heglig border region, Israeli and South Sudanese newspapers reported that Israeli aircraft have been delivering military hardware and mercenaries (from other African countries) in South Sudan to fight against the Khartoum government. South Sudanese soon after shot down a Sudanese MiG-29 fighter jet: the SPLA claimed that Khartoum “didn’t know we have that capacity.”

In late Dec. 2011, Salva Kiir, South Sudan’s new warlord president, chose Israel for one of his first official visits, this one month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted the leaders of Uganda and Kenya. During his visit, Kiir held meetings with President Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. These are the same players backing the Dan Gertler companies behind the dictatorship of Hyppolite Kanambe (alias Joseph Kabila). [10]

In return for decades of covert Israeli support for the SPLA’s low-intensity war, on July 23, 2012, the SPLA regime running the new South Sudan signed deals over water rights and “infrastructure development” with Israel. The deals were signed by Israeli government and agents for Israeli Military Industries (IMI)—an aerospace and defense contractor fully owned by the Israeli government and a prime U.S. military supplier.

Israeli and South Sudan: Israeli Prime Minsiter Benjamin Netanyahu with South Sudan President Salva Kiir in December 2011.

“Nationhood has many midwives,” reads the long caption appearing with many of the stories’ photos. But if the ‘Council’ of policy wonks are the ‘midwives’ of South Sudan’s birthing process, their result has been a bloody abortion and a grotesquely deformed progeny whose ‘leaders’ are now selling the place off to the highest bidder.

Tirelessly and furiously pumping out disinformation, day in and day out, year in and year out, for several decades now, the happy cabal of Washington wonks has paved the public mind with hysterical accounts of Arab and Islamic terrorism and African tribalism. They have blinded U.S. taxpayers to the unholy truth that our tax dollars have been used to covertly fund, arm, supply and re-supply at least four massive guerrilla insurgencies that have fractured three sovereign countries, terrorized scores of millions of people, and drenched Sudan and the Great Lakes countries in blood and skeletons.

“Everybody is working to protect the SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement) but the truth is the SPLM is doing all of these terrible things every day,” says Luke Chuol, a South Sudanese human rights defender based in Canada. “These people from the U.S. and U.N., all they care about is to give the SPLA money and weapons.” [11]

When South Sudan became the world’s newest nation on 9 July 2011, the SPLA—the armed wing of the SPLM—became South Sudan’s national army. Mr. Chuol, a member of the South Sudan’s Nuer tribe, has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes against humanitycommitted in South Sudan in May 2011 by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The Nuer community alleges that there were specific and systematic attacks against the Nuer people, also constituting ethnic cleansing.

Caption created by Reuters: John Garang (L) shakes hands with Roger Winter, now an honorary adviser to the South Sudan government and one of the Council’s original members, in this undated image taken in Sudan and provided to Reuters by Roger Winter. Nationhood has many midwives. South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people. It was southern Sudanese leaders who fought for autonomy, and more than two million southern Sudanese who paid for that freedom with their lives. U.S. President George W. Bush, who set out to end Africa’s Longest-running civil war, also played a big role, as did modern-day abolitionists, religious groups, human rights organizations and members of the U.S. Congress. But the most persistent outside force in the creation of the world’s newest state was the Council, a tightly knit group never numbering more than seven people, which in the era before email, began gathering regularly at Otello, a restaurant near Washington’s DuPont Circle.”

Caption comment by KHS: Judging the youth of Sudan People’s Liberation Army leader John Garang (L) and Roger Winter (R), this photo is probably circa 1985 (Winter would have been 42 years old). Garang was trained at Ft. Benning. Correction to previous reportage: The School of the America’s relocated from Panama to Ft. Benning in 1984, which was after Garang’s training. Technically, Garang did not attend the School of the Americas).

In January 2011, the SPLA and governor Kuol Manyang Juuk of South Sudan’s Jonglei state diverted 1000 guns meant for graduating police and delivered them to Murle tribesmen so that the Murle can fight their rival the Lou Nuer community. SPLA chief commander in Chief General Salva Kiir—the first president of the newly independent [sic] South Sudan—was aware of the diversion of weapons. Following the SPLA’s redistribution of weapons last July, massive ethnic violence in Jonglei state has led to perhaps as many as 100,000 internally displaced people (IDPs), with ongoing clashes in the spring of 2012.

“The SPLA is looting everywhere,” says Mr. Chuol, accusing the SPLA of behaving like an army of occupation and terror. “They are taking everything for themselves, acting like they are heroes. They are torturing, raping and killing people and burning down villages.” [11]

The fairy tales about Roger Winter and Eric Reeves and the Council of Wonks have airbrushed suchinconvenient truths from history. “South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people,” continues the ever-repeated Reuters caption, drumming home the new-old Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton propaganda line about ‘Africa by and for Africans’. “It was southern Sudanese leaders who fought for autonomy, and more than two million southern Sudanese who paid for that freedom with their lives.”

“The reality,” says Mr. Chuol, whose family and friends have suffered from the recent violence, “is that the U.S. and U.N. are abandoning the people of South Sudan, because they only want to focus on the problems of the Bashir government in Khartoum.” [11] The divide and conquer politics of Empire would dictate that rebel factions be set at each other’s throats, enabling greater western penetration and control of the new South Sudan.

Of course, no propaganda piece would be complete without the patriotic accolades for former U.S. President George W. Bush, who “set out to end Africa’s Longest-running civil war, [and] also played a big role,” Hamilton tells us, “as did modern-day abolitionists, religious groups, human rights organizations and members of the U.S. Congress. But the most persistent outside force in the creation of the world’s newest state was the Council, a tightly knit group never numbering more than seven people, which in the era before email, began gathering regularly at Otello, a restaurant near Washington’s [DC] DuPont Circle.”

From the very first days of their insurrection, the SPLM has committed massive atrocities, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. It was the same story with Museveni NRM guerrillas in Uganda, Kagame’s RPF guerrillas in Rwanda, and with the Uganda and Rwanda ADFL guerrillas in Congo-Zaire.

Roger Winter was involved with each of these four major guerrilla campaigns. From the early 1970′s to the present day he has moved in and out of foreign countries under the cover of the United States Committee for Refugees (USCR) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other entities.

“Starting in the early 1980′s, the United States began to reorganize the military establishment to conduct low-intensity warfare campaigns. The Joint Chiefs of Staff formed special low-intensity conflict divisions within the Department of Defense and within each military service, and also reintroduced political and psychological warfare branches. The Pentagon even drafted a Psy-Ops ‘master plan’ at the behest of a presidential directive, and the National Security Council set up a top-level ‘board for low intensity conflict’.” [12]

Spanish human rights icon Juan Carrero Saralegui on Intelligence Operative Roger Winter:

The roles of our Council of Wonks in creating conflict, shipping weapons, covering massacres, and producing propaganda for these insurgencies are not completely clear.

Rebecca Hamilton tells a happy story of the origins of the Council of Wonks. It begins in 1978, when Brian D’Silva studied at Iowa State University alongside “an intensely charismatic southern Sudanese man named John Garang, who had been dreaming of a democratic Sudan… After graduation, D’Silva went with Garang to Sudan to teach at the University of Khartoum.”

D’Silva was a Ford Foundation visiting professor at U-Khartoum, but Rebecca Hamilton drops the reference to Ford, a known conduit to the covert U.S. intelligence sector and foreign interventions.[13] Then in 1980, D’Silva joined the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), working in Sudan in the 1980′s. D’Silva’s old schoolmate is John Garang, “a conscript in the Sudanese arm [who] led a mutiny of southern Sudanese soldiers,” Hamilton tells us. Enter the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM), “which led the fight for southern autonomy.” [14]

In the early 1980′s, Sudan was run by the CIA’s man Jaafar Nimeiri, who was ousted in 1985, and USAID maintained tight ties with the CIA. From 1985 to 1989, the Reagan Administration maintained a strong allegiance to the unstable Islamic government prior to the ascension to power of Omar al-Bashir. USAID at the time was deeply involved in agriculture, especially interventions in plantations and gum arabic production. [15] Gum arabic is essential for soft drinks (Coke, Pepsi, Fanta) and beer, and for ice cream and other foods, and Sudan has a near monopoly. Gum arabic imports were exempt from president Clinton’s trade embargo of October 1997. Rep. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) sponsored the gum arabic loophole and Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.) backed it: N.J. is home to three major corporations importing gum arabic. USAID operations became more and more untenable from 1985, and were completely displaced in 1989 under the Islamic government of Omar al-Bashir. Such facts are unmentioned by Hamilton—heretical to a fairytale of U.S. policy wonks who “dreamed of democracy” in Sudan. Then as now, Brian D’Silva operated under the USAID cover.

Roger Winter appears on the wonk scene after a 1981 visit to Sudan “for a non-governmental outfit called the U.S. Committee for Refugees,” says Rebecca Hamilton. Like the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) has a euphemistic name suggesting humanitarian motives, but both are deeply connected to the U.S. intelligence and defense community, and their work with ‘refugees’ is more about selectively monitoring populations on the move, gathering intel on political dissidents, identifying points of leverage or intervention in complex emergencies.

Roger Winter then meets Francis Deng, “a respected legal scholar” at a prominent U.S. think tank, and, Hamilton tells us, Deng “calls up a cousin in the rebel movement to ensure that on future visits, Winter would have access to all the so-called liberated areas—the parts of Sudan held by the rebels—where he could gather direct testimony on the impact of the war.”

Nonsense. Like all Alice in Wonderland fairytales, the rabbit hole goes much deeper than we are told here. The true facts remain hidden in classified documents, waiting for some enterprising muckracker—completely unlike Rebecca Hamilton or Nicholas Kristof—to excavate by FOIA from the bowels of the U.S. National Security apparatus.

“By the mid-1980s,” Rebecca Hamilton tells us, “these three future Council members–D’Silva, Deng and Winter–were working in the United States as proxies for John Garang, trying to open doors for the SPLM in Washington.” Enter John Prendergast, “a wayward college graduate in search of a cause” who had been traveling in the Horn of Africa.”

Caption by Reuters: Smith College Professor and South Sudan expert Eric Reeves is pictured at home in Northampton, Massachusetts June 29, 2012. Nationhood has many midwives. South Sudan is primarily the creation of its own people… blah, blah, blah.” REUTERS: Matthew Cavanaugh.

“By the early 1990s, the group’s work was starting to pay off.” Rebecca Hamilton distills the fairy tale down to platitudes. Ted Dagne “was seconded from the Congressional Research Service to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, where he began to build allies for the southern Sudanese cause… By the mid-nineties, five men—Dagne, Deng, D’Silva, Prendergast and Winter—were meeting regularly at Otello’s.”

Another key player in the covert network, and Roger Winter’s protégé, was Susan Rice, William Jefferson Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs political hit-man [sic] on Sudan and the Great Lakes. According to Rebbecca Hamilton, John Prendergast “applied to work for Susan Rice”—sometime in the 1990′s—and “she hired him.”

The Prendergast history is intentionally vague. “At 33, he was former President Bill Clinton’s director of African Affairs at the National Security Council,” wrote a Philadelphia magazine. [16] It was 1996. The Clinton administration was sponsoring the invasion of Congo-Zaire, and famine was sweeping south Sudan—due in part to the SPLM using food as a weapon of war—but this is a clean and shiny profile of John Prendergast. Susan Rice hired Prendergast after his gig at the National Security Council, making him one of her special advisers at the U.S. Department of State.

“While you sing [John Prendergast's] praises, the Congolese people who have been dying since 1996 have NO use of JP, though he might go by there and spread some crumbs around from the money he raises and lives by.” Dr. Yaa-Lengi Ngemi, Congolese author of Genocide in the Congo, sent a letter to the posh Philadelphia tabloid. “WHY? Let me put it this way for you to understand: It’s like raising money to feed someone in chains and who is being tortured everyday instead of denouncing and getting rid of the brutes torturing the man.” [17]

Prendergast later worked for the International Crises Group, another intelligence think tank and agitprop NGO fronting for factions close to the U.S. government—described by Rebecca Hamilton as “an independent research group”. Operating behind front groups like ENOUGH and Raise Hope for Congo, John Prendergast has been long involved in supporting and covering up the western defense and intelligence sector’s involvement in low-intensity conflicts in Africa. Like RESOLVE, Save Darfur, STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur), United to End Genocide, the Genocide Intervention Network and many more, these groups morph and reconfigure, always drawing massive funds from specious U.S. government front organizations like the Center for American Progress..

Rebecca also deleted the key fact that Susan Rice and John Prendergast worked together to create the Pentagon’s prized Africa Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI)—a euphemistically named entity created to project U.S. power in Africa—run by U.S. Army Special Forces Command (SOCOM).

“By the late 1990s, Washington was not just providing humanitarian assistance to the southern Sudanese,” Hamilton’s agitprop reports. “It was also giving leadership missions and training, as well as $20 million of surplus military equipment to Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea, who all supported the southern rebels. Prendergast said the idea was to help states in the region to change the regime. ‘It was up to them, not us,’ he said in an interview…”

Operation Lifeline Sudan: An International Rescue Committee plane flying from the United Nations’ base for Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) in Lokichogio, Kenya, lands in south Sudan’s Jonglei State near Pochalla and is met by Anuak and Nuer refugees. The plane dropped a humanitarian mission to investigate attacks against Ethiopian Anuak and Nuer refugees in nearby Gambella state, Ethiopia, January 16-24, 2004. Photo c. keith harmon snow, 2004.

Africa by and for Africans! Notice how Rebecca Hamilton distances the U.S. government from the already 15 plus years of covert low-intensity warfare facilitated—since the early 1980′s—by Roger Winter. The military equipment is also described as ‘surplus’—a ploy of plausible denial and disinformation that further downplays the covert support for a nasty and bloody low-intensity war in Sudan. Of course, there is no mention of Roger Winter’s role in the low-intensity wars in Africa’s Great Lakes countries.

“The Council’s Deputy Emperor, Eric Reeves, joined in 2001.” Rebecca Hamilton writes. “Reeves was a professor of English literature at Smith, a small college in Western Massachusetts. He had no background in Sudan. But after reading about the humanitarian conditions in the south and attending a lecture Winter gave at the college, Reeves became the Council’s most prolific writer. He published hundreds of opinion pieces and blogged detailed reports brimming with moral outrage against Khartoum.” [18]

Dr. Eric Reeves is perhaps America’s greatest emotional manipulator. Reading his texts, one is overwhelmed by superlatives and assaulted by inflammatory emotional language. “The brutal regime in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, has orchestrated genocidal counterinsurgency war in Darfur for five years, and now is poised for victory in its ghastly assault on the region’s African populations.” [19]

Add the delusions, the outright lies and invented facts provided from the field by the other members of the Council of Wonks, the arrogance and brow-beating of anyone who dissents against him, and the patriotism, and it is clear that Reeves demonstrates what Wilhelm Reich described as fascism. [20]

And then there is his petulant behavior. Reeves tolerates zero criticism or divergence from the party line. If he doesn’t want to hear what someone has to say, and his mind is closed to alternative perspectives, he quite literally throws a temper tantrum: even Rebecca Hamilton wrote how he stormed out of a Save Darfur meeting. [21]

He refuses to sit on any panels with experts who deviate from his sacred script, and he can be downright nasty. At Smith College on December 9, 2010, a journalist interrupted Reeves during the question and answers session following Reeves’ lecture on Darfur: Reeves went berserk, the journalist was assaulted by the organizers, and Smith College Security issued the journalist a “No Trespassing for Life” notice for three colleges: Smith College, Mt. Holyoke and Hampshire College.

The mass media spread Reeves’ Sudan propaganda far and wide, and whole social movements have been engineered—from Mia Farrow and George Clooney to the Darfur Action Group of the Northampton (MA)-based Congregation B’Nai Israel Church to the Holocaust Memorial Museum—to mobilize constituencies and misdirect public action. The political calculus at work is based in a left-liberal hawkishness that has lost its moral compass, and this misplaced moralism is a cultural phenomenon that serves the powerful forces of Empire.

This is what I call humanitarian fascism. The cover story is full of fictions, little lies and outright disinformation. While the resumés of most development and policy experts are typically findable on-line, the details of Prendergast, Dagne, D’Silva and Winter’s careers are not so easily discoverable.

For example, in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s, John Prendergast worked in southern Sudan for several so-called non-government organizations that, in fact, have very close ties to the foreign policy and intelligence establishment: Bread for the World and Human Rights Watch.

Access to south Sudan was facilitated through the so-called ‘humanitarian’ wing of the SPLM, the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA). From Nairobi—a hub for U.S., British and Israeli defense and intelligence interests in East Africa and the Horn—western agents fly to Lokichogio, on the Kenya-Sudan border, where a United Nations base offered support for the billion dollar western misery-cum-missionary enterprise, Operation Lifeline Sudan.

Sudan in pictures: A racist and decontextualized New York Times Magazine photo that accompanied a Nicholas Kristof article.

Very euphemistically named, Bread for the World is a very Christian faith-based organization close to the heart of the Christian Coalition. Past and current Bread for the World directors have included U.S. Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.)(d. 2012) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). Other directors include Clinton White House insiders Mike McCurry and Leon Panetta—president Barack Obama’s current Secretary of Defense and former CIA director (2009-2011).

“In 1995, Christian Solidarity International initiated a controversial program in Sudan called slave redemption,” wrote Rebecca Hamilton. “The Zurich-based human-rights organization began paying slave traders for the freedom of southerners captured in raids by government-backed militias from the north. Christian Solidarity took journalists and pastors from the black evangelical community along on their missions, and stories of modern-day slavery filtered into church congregations and the U.S. media.”

Many Jewish and Christian political organizations and think tanks have supported the long years of covert low-intensity warfare in Sudan. The religious propaganda produced by the policy wonks sold western minds to support a Jewish and Christian fundamentalist war against Islam that would otherwise never have existed. The slavery campaigns amounted to one massive fabrication after another, Psy-Ops used against western ‘news’ consumers and the Christian and Jewish masses. [22]

Intelligence operatives Ted Dange, John Prendergast and Roger Winter shuttled U.S. politicians to SPLM territory to see the misery for themselves—misery that the Council of Wonks’ Dr. Eric Reeves always attributed to a “genocidal counterinsurgency by the Government of Sudan.” Nicholas Kristof took the flag and ran with it in such massive disinformation pieces as “The Secret Genocide Archive.” [23] Nicholas Kristof was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize for his Sudan agitprop.

Roger Winter took Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and another member of Congress (unnamed by Rebecca Hamilton) to meet SPLM commander John Garang on one of his visits to rebel-held areas of Sudan in 1989. Ted Dagne’s “network of southern Sudan allies in Congress solidified,” Hamilton wrote. “He organized trips into SPLM-held areas for bipartisan delegations, including Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist and the late New Jersey Democratic Rep. Donald Payne.”

Donald Payne served on numerous top-level Congressional committees involved in African Affairs and he accompanied the Clinton’s on the victory tour in Africa in 1998, he was arrested for protesting in front of the Sudan Embassy in 2001, and supported the Genocide Intervention Network, one of the Prendergast-linked intelligence agitprop groups. Payne was tied to numerous other Christian-right charity organizations—like Servant’s Heart—working in Africa, and to the Africa Society, a pro-business intelligence and propaganda front group.

Bread for the World director and former senator Bob Dole (R-KA) worked for years to advance the interests of mid-western U.S. grain corporations, esp. Archers Daniels Midland. U.S. lobbyists for big agribusiness seeking vast landholdings in Sudan worked out of Dole’s office and frequently traveled to Sudan. Dole also used and manipulated the World Food Program as an imperial tool to both leverage foreign markets and protect domestic ones.

Famines, starvation, internally displaced people and refugees flows are these organizations’ stock in trade, and the war in south Sudan simultaneously took land out of agricultural production and created a market for U.S. corporations to dump surplus and sub-standard grains for a profit. Many of these organizations are today connected to Yoweri Museveni—former co-chair of the euphemistically named Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa (PCHPA)—and they operate in tandem with USAID, which is really just a Christian-based “soft policy” wing of the Pentagon that uses food as a weapon under the disguise of charity.

Kigali, Rwanda, 4 July 2010: Paul Kagame decorates Roger Winter with special medalscelebrating RPF victory; U.S. Rep. Donald Payne also received one of Kagame’s medals.

Donald Payne and Roger Winter were decorated by Rwandan president Paul Kagame at the July 4, 2012 celebration of the 16th Anniversary of the RPF’s victory in Rwanda. Donald Payne, then 76, received only the UMURINZI “Campaign Against Genocide Medal for being “among ‘very few’ people in the world who recognized the Tutsi Genocide as the governments, media and individuals continued to debate.” Roger Winter, then 67, received both Rwanda’s URUTI Liberation Medal and UMURINZI medal.

“Roger Winter is one of Kagame’s most ardent supporters, and one of the most biased, and least credible,” says Rene Lemarchand, long-time Central Africa expert and former USAID consultant (1992-1998). “It is not for nothing that Winter has been decorated by [Paul] Kagame for his past services as a praise-singer (griot) on behalf of his patron. He played a key role in 1992 in putting Kagame in touch with high-ranking bureaucrats in the U.S. State Department, and he kept in close touch with the RPF in subsequent years. I would trust him about as far as I can throw a piano. I believe you’re right in saying that Winter worked as a U.S. intelligence operative. That’s my gut feeling but I cannot prove it.” [24]

“The silence is fathomless and overwhelming and eventually there will be no more sounds from this region,” wrote Roger Rosenblatt in a July 1993 Vanity Fair feature article (later published as a book) that sold the U.S. policy line on Sudan in 1993. [25] The article is a sales pitch, a provocative pornography of misery and violence meant to tug on western heart strings and open purses for western charity NGOs. Whether by accident or intention, depopulation of indigenous lands is one of the objectives of Empire, enabling foreign interests to more easily steal and occupy the land.

“No side has a claim on morality in these wars.” Rosenblatt prepares the argument for our SPLA support, taking the side sanctioned by the popular insanity, and in sync with the National Security apparatus. This is, after all, a war for public opinion at home, as much as for Empire in Sudan.

“When [Government of Sudan] military convoys lose vehicles to rebel mines, they usually burn the closest village and murder its inhabitants.” Rosenblatt is unwilling to expose the SPLM tactics in low-intensity warfare, where the people are used as human shields. “Soldiers routinely rape women displaced from their homes by the fighting; the SPLA has also been accused of rape and kidnapping.” The GoS soldiers are guilty of rape, while SPLA soldiers are only accused. “Both the government and the SPLA have menaced relief operations and blown up trucks carrying food and medicine.” So there are, in fact, two warring factions in this war! “The government has amputated the limbs of prisoners of war; so has the SPLA.” [25]

“Yet nearly everyone [sic] agrees that the Bashir government has been the main persecutor in the wars.” Rosenblatt’s script is still in use today! “Muslim fundamentalists armed and inspired by Iran, they are the theocratic cleansers of their country—a twist on the ethnic cleansers in Bosnia. They seek to “Islamize” the Sudan—as indeed Iran may seek to Islamize the entire Horn of Africa—by converting or killing off all the Christians and animists in the South. Their weapons are famine, political repression, the torture of dissidents, and outright slaughter.” [25]

Yet nearly everyone does not agree.

To conclude the upside-down and backwards charade, Rosenblatt proffered the thesis that “the U.S. government provided only intermittent humanitarian aid to the Sudan, either because it is loath to interfere with a sovereign government (this is how the political situation in Sudan differs from Somalia) or because there is no obvious geopolitical advantage in doing so in the post-Cold War environment.” [25]

No obvious geopolitical advantage! No geopolitical interests! No strategic interests! “The silence is fathomless and overwhelming,” indeed, and if “eventually there will be no more sounds from this region,” it will be due to the massive corporate depopulation land-grab [Lebensraum] by Wall Street bankers, industrial philanthropists and other white collar predators.

The example of Jarch Capital comes quickly to mind. Wall Street banker Philippe Heilberg’s Jarch Capital, an investment firm, acquired 400,000 hectares in South Sudan in the last few years. These landholdings the size of Vermont were acquired in a deal with SPLM warlord Gabriel Matip. Jarch Capital came under some mild scrutiny when it was learned that Jarch executives include a former Clinton era Pentagon agent named Gwenyth Todd, and Joseph Wilson. In 1997, just before Clinton destroyed Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory with cruise missiles, Joseph Wilson ran the National Security Council’s East Africa Desk. Working under him was none other than National Security Council agent John Prendergast, America’s humanitarian poster boy for Sudan and George Clooney’s sidekick. [26]

“Whatever the causes of the war, it is southern civilians who have paid most dearly for it, and continue to pay,” wrote Human Rights Watch in a November 1994 report. “In this second civil [sic] war, even the adults are hard pressed to survive where displacement, asset destruction, famine and disease are constantly recurring. Children, always the most disadvantaged in any war, have been additionally punished in Sudan by being separated from their families, where they might find a modicum of adult protection, supervision and concern. They remain at greater risk than adults.”[27]

John Prendergast was one of several key researchers for the HRW report, based on research at refugee camps in Kenya, Sudan and Uganda from January to June 1993, and interviews in conducted in London, Cairo, Nairobi and Washington DC. The report concluded that “the SPLA has engaged in recruitment of boy soldiers and in the separation of children from their families… Since 1987 the SPLA has maintained large camps of boys separate from their relatives and tribes in refugee camps in Ethiopia and in southern Sudan. From these camps the SPLA has drawn fresh recruits as needed, regardless of the age of the boys.”

Not only were the SPLA “lost Boys” camps used for military recruitment: they were also places of death. Conditions were abhorrent. While the Operation Lifeline Sudan was paying huge salaries to western ex-patriots, and while Christian NGOs were shipping bibles to remote locations suffering famine, boys were living in absolute misery in these camps. Scores of thousands of children have died due to the indirect causes of the U.S. covert war. Roger Winter and the low-intensity SPLM war created the so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan”—not the Khartoum government, as we are always led to believe.

SPLA child soldiers in south Sudan: photo courtesy of the New Vision newspaper, Kampala, Uganda.

The Council of Wonks are all well aware of the atrocities committed by the SPLM. Like Human Rights Watch, and sometimes working for them, sometimes not, John Prendergast wrote about the SPLM campaigns of terror in south Sudan. In his book, Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa, for example, Prendergast explores how the SPLM uses food as a weapon, how they shuttle refugees around for their strategic and tactical advantage, using people as human shields, attacking relief organizations and enforcing starvation to leverage foreign intervention. Over the years however, Prendergast went silent on SPLM abuses.

The government think tank U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) funded Prendergast’s Frontline Diplomacy project, just as they funded Philip Gourevitch to travel back and forth to see his friend Paul Kagame and produce the ‘non-fiction’ propaganda book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (Verso, 1999).

The USIP funded other Sudan and Rwanda propaganda, conferences and policy papers. Speaking at a USIP conference titled “Religion, Nationalism and Peace in Sudan” on September 16-17,1997, Roger Winter reportedly demanded full-scale backing from the U.S. government for a war “to bring down the Khartoum government” in Sudan, adding, “even though I know it will bring about a humanitarian catastrophe.” John Prendergast and Ted Dagne were on the same panel as Winter, and Council of Wonks member Francis Deng spoke on another panel.

Over the past few decades, the human rights agencies became and more and more muted about crimes committed by the U.S., the U.K. or Israel—if mentioned at all—with resources and public relations increasingly concentrated on documenting the crimes of ‘enemies’ that are in the way of Empire. “The grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext which depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on the other,” writes Professor Makau Mutua. [28]

SPLM war crimes and crimes against humanity are documented in stark detail in the March 1990 Human Rights Watch/Africa Watch report Denying “The Honor of Living”: Sudan, a Human Rights Disaster. Between 1984 and 1989, the SPLM attacked southern Garrison towns, disappeared and tortured, and shot civilian airliners out of the sky. In 1986, the SPLM attacked Ugandan (mostly Acholi) refugees in southern Sudan—forced out of Uganda by Museveni’s NRM low-intensity war there—killing refugees and forcing at least 35,000 refugees back to insecurity in Uganda. In 1989 the SPLM attacked Ethiopian refugee camps on the Ethiopian border. Both instances were violations of international humanitarian law.

As Operation Lifeline Sudan grew in scope, so too did the scale and magnitude of the crimes committed by the SPLM—and the sophistication of the western intelligence apparatus at hiding them. The Council of Wonks and the ‘human rights’ establishment and the misery industry increasingly closed their eyes to SPLM atrocities, funded by western taxpayers, and increasingly honed and tuned the propaganda corps to demonize the Government of Sudan in keeping with the savior versus savage narrative at work behind the new humanitarian fascism.

Did the SPLM reform itself in the mid-1990s and post-2000 era? Starting in 1996, from his offices at Smith College, policy wonk Eric Reeves screamed louder and louder—ever more hysterical by the day—about the Government of Sudan’s bombing campaigns, the climbing death tolls, the genocide, and about our moral imperative to facilitate “regime change” in Khartoum by any means necessary. Meanwhile, John Prendergast became increasingly silent about SPLM terrorism in Sudan in direct proportion to his proximity to the U.S. government. The closer Prendergast got to the National Security apparatus—and the perks of power and private profit—the quieter he became.

Ditto with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and the western human rights corpus. The massive tome Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (1999), researched and written by Human Rights Watch agent Alison Des Forges, offers a scant 43 pages (out of 793 pages) on crimes committed by the “highly disciplined” RPF, and these crimes are often downgraded to allegations or unverified reports. Roger Winter is not once mentioned in the book. Alison Des Forges also worked as a consultant to USAID.

Similarly, the 343-page Human Rights Watch book Behind the Red Line: Political Repression in Sudan (1996) offers a mere 20 pages (out of 343 pages) attending to SPLM crimes, and these 20 pages also include further “Crimes by All Parties to the Conflict.”

As human rights and so-called humanitarian NGOs have evolved, they have become ever more focused on presenting western civilization as saviors and our proxy forces (SPLM, RPF, etc.) as victims, in a contest with savages. In the case of the governments (and people) we wish to overthrow, the ‘savages’ are the Arab Government of Sudan, the Hutu government of Rwanda, and so on, and so forth. It is all too easy for affluent westerners to adhere to this narrative.

It is “a project for the redemption of the redeemers,” writes Makau Mutua, “in which whites who are privileged globally as a people—who have historically visited untold suffering and savage atrocities against nonwhites—redeem themselves by ‘defending’ and ‘civilizing’ ‘lower,’ ‘unfortunate,’ and ‘inferior’ peoples.” [28]

An early SPLA photo: A photo of an SPLM bridge in south Sudan taken by Roger Winter in the 1980′s.

Hamilton reports that Smith College professor Eric Reeves began working with the policy wonks—and the implication is he began working on Sudan—in 2001 after Roger Winter spoke at Smith College. In fact, it was the other way around: Eric Reeves began screaming about “genocide in Sudan” in 1999. If his Sudan crusade was inspired by Roger Winter, he has changed his story.

“When the former executive director of the U.S. branch of Doctors Without Borders, Joelle Tanguy, told Reeves she thought Sudan needed a champion, she probably didn’t expect it to be an English prof from Northampton, Massachusetts.” John Prendergast wrote this while eulogizing Eric Reeves in his book Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond. [29] “Fighting cancer and frequently working from his hospital bed, he has waged an often lonely but always Herculean struggle to ensure that the American public is aware of what is happening to the people of Sudan…”

Reeves has stated he met Joelle Tanguy and adopted the Sudan cause “early in 1999″. On April 1, 1999, Smith College hosted a lecture by Roger Winter organized by Eric Reeves. “Winter ‘is a really distinguished presence in the world of humanitarian agencies,’ says Smith English professor Eric Reeve, an organizer of the event…” [30]

On October 30, 2000, Smith College hosted a special ceremony where Roger Winter and the U.S. Committee for Refugees honored Reeves with an award recognizing Reeves “for his widely published work calling attention to Sudan’s vast and ongoing humanitarian crisis.” [31]

Eric Reeves Disinformation Graphic: ‘They Bombed everything that Moved’: a flagrant example of Dr. Eric Reeves’ highly incredible anti-Khartoum propaganda. In Eric Reeves’ hysterical perspective, virtually all violence in Sudan is attributed to the “genocidal counterinsurgency by the [Khartoum] Government of Sudan.” Reeves’ disinformation—especially his inflation and fluctuation of mortality estimates in Darfur (2003-2010)—has been roundly debunked. [32] The charge of genocide in Darfur was equally specious—meaningless in the context used by Eric Reeves and Nicholas Kristof.

In 2006, the U.S. Government Accountability Office in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences convened twelve experts to review six sources of data on mortality in Darfur. The GAO study, reported to the U.S. Congress in November 2006, questioned the validity of three of the six ‘expert’ international sources providing estimates of mortality on Darfur, offering a “devastating critique of assumptions, source data and extrapolations behind the findings of the two most prolific high-end researchers associated with Save Darfur…” [32]

One of these high-enders was professor John Hagan, who authored the highly politicized “Atrocities Documentation Report” produced by an NGO called the Coalition for International Justice. The second high-end researcher was Dr. Eric Reeves. “Nine of the experts found Hagan’s source data ‘generally’ or ‘definitely’ unsound, while ten experts said the same of Reeves’ source data. Ten said Hagan’s assumptions were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very unreasonable,’ and eleven said so with regard to Reeves. Eleven said Hagan’s extrapolations were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very inappropriate,’ and all twelve said so in reference to Reeves.” [32]

Worse still, the escalation of Save Darfur hysteria occurred in 2006, even as the violence in Darfur had greatly receded. Reeves’ mortality estimates went up and down and up again, and he paid no attention to the GAO critique, but continued to scream about between 400,000 to 500,000 dead due to the “genocidal counterinsurgency” by the Government of Sudan. Given the cloudy assessments of the actual mortality—somewhere between the Government of Sudan’s estimate of 10,000 and other reasonable estimates of around 200,000—the hysterical behavior of Dr. Eric Reeves is shocking.

Of course, behind Reeves was the Council of Wonks. To his credit, Dr. Eric Reeves specifically acted as Minister of Disinformation for the Council’s anti-Sudan campaign: he had nothing to do with the low-intensity wars in Uganda, Rwanda or Congo. Or did he?

With extremely conservative International Rescue Committee estimates of death tolls in the neighboring Congo at 3.9 million dead by 2004 and 5.4 million dead by 2007—some 45,000 Congolese dying every month—Reeves was inflating mortality statis on Darfur, monopolizing attention, getting shriller and shriller by the day, focusing the global consciousness on Darfur. Like Mahmood Mamdani—whose analyses of Reeve’s manipulation of Darfur mortality stats was utilized above—Dr. Eric Reeves has protected Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame from scrutiny; the former by defecting attention from the SPLM’s covert supply chain in Uganda, the latter by whitewashing the Rwandan Defenses Forces’ (formerly known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front) combat operations under the African Union flag in Darfur.

Roger Winter and Ted Dagne and the other Council of Wonks members were Reeves’ primary sources of information, and Reeves accepted their data and perspective all too happily. His reports, appearing anywhere and everywhere in the U.S. media, reeked of hysteria and outright lies. Reeve’s understanding of a greater geopolitical context, such as the political fault lines of front line states (Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda) involved in Sudan’s war (or the international geopolitical importance of countries like Libya) was unnecessary for the mission of propagandizing the western public and providing cover for the covert low-intensity war prosecuted by the SPLA and backed by Washington.

New York Times Magazine caption: Winter meets a Darfur rebel [sic], Minni Minawi, in Juba, Sudan.

“To this day [Reeves] carries his draft card from the Vietnam war in his wallet,” wrote Rebecca Hamilton in Fighting for Darfur, “its status is marked ’1-0′—conscientious objector.” [21] The irony is thick as the blood in South Sudan. While the media always underscores Reeves’ supposed morality—was it a commitment to non-violence or a refusal to support an imperialist war?— Reeves openly advocated more conventional U.S. military war against Sudan. His draft card in his wallet offers proof of his saintliness.

Dr. Reeve’s struggle with leukemia is also invoked as irrefutable evidence of his saintliness. While believing himself to be a saintly moral being endowed with the purest of motivations and a deep love for the people of Sudan, a crusader beyond reproach, and, of course, Sudan’s savior, Reeves’ support for the imperial enterprise in Sudan has earned him countless seraphic accolades and enshrinement in America’s human rights crusader’s halls of fame. Of course, Dr. Reeves’ deep love for the people of Sudan cannot be challenged—no matter that this love commenced several years before Reeves had even met any of the people of Sudan.

Reeves’ statements before the U.S. Congress sound like pro-SPLM military briefings. “The SPLA has not, so far, successfully attacked in a major way the oil infrastructure.” Reeves is responding to U.S. Congressman Ed Royce, Chair of the U.S. House of Representatives Africa Subcommittee in March 2001. “There have been attacks on the oil pipeline as it approaches Eritrea. There have been attacks and seizures of individual wells, but the security is very, very extensive. The scorched earth warfare that the government of Sudan has conducted has created a cordon sanitaire that has made it virtually impossible for the SPLA to deploy resources that would allow for major military attack on the infrastructure in the Unity and Heglig fields.” [33]

There is no rest for the wicked, and so the Council of Wonks will not stop their war until the National Islamic Front Government of Sudan is gone. It doesn’t matter how messy it gets.

“Security cooperation between Khartoum and Washington [Central Intelligence Agency] and London [Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)] has increased sharply in volume over the past two years, for instance in the number of documents handed over and the numbers of joint liaison meetings,” reported Africa Confidential. The article stated obvious facts that the policy wonks have hidden. “Some Western strategists regard the longer term plan to engage the NIF regime on security, and also more widely in peace negotiations with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, as regime change by stealth.” The same AC article reported: “Western intelligence sources briefed journalists that some teams of U.S. Special Forces units were operating in northern Sudan in pursuit of terror cells and Al Qaida units.” [34]

In a speech before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights on June 16, 2011, Roger Winter–described as “the former U.S. special envoy to Sudan—called for immediate military action against Khartoum in order to strengthen the South Sudan army and halt attacks on civilians.

“Take a military action against a Khartoum military target now,” Winter said, adding that the goal would be “to strengthen the SPLA in meaningful ways as a deterrent against Khartoum aggression, provocation and attacks against civilians.” [35]

Like Reeves and the other members of the Council of Wonks, Winter blames all the violence on Khartoum and he inflates mortality estimates out of thin air. “Winter said that any commitments made by the Khartoum government are unreliable and that the government’s actions had led to the death of three million people.” [35]

No matter their hysteria, warmongering or lack of credibility, these guys continue to be widely celebrated and published. “We are, once again, on the verge of genocidal counterinsurgency in Sudan,” screamed the mad Dr. Eric Reeves, the indefatigable dink at Smith College, in a Washington Post Op/Ed titled “In Sudan, Genocide Anew?” on June 13, 2011. “History must not be allowed to repeat itself.”

Irish Catholic gun-runner Daniel Eiffe is another shady intelligence operator who is never mentioned by Dr. Eric Reeves, and certainly a friend of Roger Winter and the Council of Wonks.

“This year, the Republic of South Sudan officially became a state,” reported Eoin Butler, in the Irish Times, “thanks in no small part to a diminutive former priest from County Meath [Ireland], who also has gunrunning, renegade militancy and newspaper publishing on his CV.” [36]

“How did a diminutive priest [Daniel Eiffe] go from providing humanitarian aid for the victims of civil war, to taking up arms in support of one side?” Butler asks. Eiffe is the publisher of the Sudan Mirror, a pro-SPLA and pro-Christian South Sudan newspaper published with the support of Trociare and other international AID agencies.

In the early 1990′s, Eiffe was employed by Norweigan People’s Aid, a gun-running NGO that uses humanitarian relief as its cover. Eiffe organized weapons and logistics for the SPLA through Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni in Kampala, Uganda. [36] USAID has funded Norwegian People’s Aid for years; USAID support in 2010, for example, was $8.5 million (while other U.S. government agencies gave NPA $6.9 million in 2010).

Photo: Daniel Eiffe in Juba, Sudan.

The rebel priest ‘commander’ Dan Eiffe’s Sudan Mirror is also funded by USAID, ensuring that the people of the new South Sudan are properly educated about the wonders of their new found freedom and democracy. The Office of Transitional Initiatives (OTI), a subsidiary of USAID, in conjunction with the Sudan Development Trust (run by Eiffe) set up The Sudan Mirror and the Sudan Radio Service. USAID’s OTI also works with PACT, another U.S. government NGO ‘charity’ front staffed by former U.S. government officials, intelligence and financial planners, including a close relative of the Bush family.”

Eighteen months after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [sic] that ended Sudan’s two-decade civil war had been signed, few Sudanese knew its details. This was precisely because the power brokers involved—including USAID and Roger Winter, U.S. government officials, and the leadership of the SPLA—do not represent the people or their best interests.

“That began to change in April and May 2006, when USAID launched an initiative to help more than 150,000 people in five Southern Sudanese states access details of the agreement and participate more fully in implementing the peace. Documents in Arabic and English were distributed to all government officials in the south, and an official summary was developed and published in English and Arabic. The Sudan Radio Service created audio versions of the summary in seven languages—Moro, Arabic, simple Arabic, Toposa, Shilluk, Dinka, and Nuer—and the Sudan Mirror published 22,000 summaries to be included as supplements in its Easter edition.” [37]

The Sudan Mirror has also been supported by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, a British government-backed organization, akin to the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI) and National Democratic Institute (NDI), all involved in “promoting democracy and human rights” through subversive and clandestine programs aligned with NATO intelligence and defense operations. [38]

Daniel Eiffe’s ties to Roger Winter and USAID are outlined in a 1998 expose by the right-wing Lyndon LaRouche publication Executive Intelligence Reveiw. “Eiffe himself operates out of Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, and has a forward base at Lokichoggio, Kenya, along the border with Sudan. Even in July, after the scandals around the NPA had exploded in Norway, Winter’s U.S. Committee for Refugees brought Eiffe to Washington to lobby for money, a stance that was endorsed in July 29 [1998] hearings by the Africa Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, in which Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice called for funding non-governmental organizations operating outside of the United Nations’ Operation Lifeline [Sudan]—a clear reference to the NPA.”

Sudanese refugees at the Ethiopian border: A makeshift refugee camp sports the usual western misery industry branding meant to stand out for fundraising purposes and product placement in western media productions. Miserable conditions in Sudanese IDP and Ugandan and Ethiopian refugee camps in South Sudan dictate high levels of disease and death, and whole generations have been lost to misery. Conditions at Sudanese refugee camps in Ethiopa, Kenya, and Uganda were equally miserable. Photo c. keith harmon snow, Pochalla, Sudan, 2004.

In a 2009 radio interview, Daniel Eiffe stated that in June [sic] 1998 he stood in the U.S. Congress and said to the congressmen and women: “Southern Sudan is apartheid at its worst. Apartheid is a tea party in comparison to what happens in Southern Sudan.” Eiffe confirmed that he was in Washington “meeting with Congressman Donald Payne, the head of the [Congressional] Black Caucus, he’s very close to Clinton, he’s a good friend of mine.” [39]

Donald Payne was one of the Council of Wonks closest collaborators.

A few key details about the Council of Wonks’ Francis Deng are also in order. Sudanese diplomat Francis Deng is on the board of the ‘charity’ International Alert—which is also funded by the Westminister Foundation for Democracy. Other International Alert funders are USAID, Bread for the World, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

In formulating the U.S. position on Sudan, Francis Deng worked closely with the prominent U.S. government official Elliot Abrams. “For example, on Sudan, we helped elevate the issue of religious persecution in southern Sudan,” said Abrahms, then chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, “and for that matter in northern Sudan, to get it more attention from the president and the National Security Council and the secretary of state and make it a larger item in U.S. foreign policy.” [40]

While serving for president Ronald Reagan and in the U.S. State Department, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and retired U.S. Marine Corps officer Oliver North were integral players in the Iran-Contra affair.

In Francis Deng we find another choice topic for a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Deng has the perfect cover: he has for many years been the United Nation’s Special Adviser to the Secretary General on Displaced Persons and, since 2007, the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Deng began his long and distinguished career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: common sense suggests he is a Central Intelligence Agency spook.

If Francis Deng is merely an honorable diplomat, then Americans are equally foolish in their acceptance of the drug-dealer-turned-Christian-savior cover story provided for Sam Childers—the infamous ‘machine gun preacher’ of south Sudan.

A mercenary who could not possibly operate in south Sudan without the sanction of the U.S. and commanders Roger Winter and Dan Eiffe, Sam Childers has been backed by the Museveni regime and the SPLM—who put a unit of SPLA soldiers under Childers’ personal command. Childers exemplifies the countless fronts in which militarized Christianity operates in South Sudan with both open and clandestine U.S. support. Of course, machine-gun preacher makes a great ‘documentary’ film for oblivious propaganda consumers and arm-chair human rights patrons. “God protects me in Africa,” Sam Childers always says.

Remember the trial of Henry Kissinger?

Can a case be made that Roger Winter should be indicted and charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide? [41]

Where was Roger Winter in the 1970′s? His public dossier suggests that he started with the U.S. Committee for Refugees in 1981, at the age of 38; he was director of USCR by the middle of the 1980′s and transitioned to USAID working in Sudan from 2001 to 2006. Then he became some kind of Special Adviser in south Sudan, and they even created a special office for him in Washington.

Back in the 1980′s, Roger Winter also worked with USCR in Indochina at a time when U.S. intelligence and defense operations were assisting ‘refugees’ fleeing the Pol Pot regime after decades of U.S. state-sponsored terrorism there; these ‘refugees’ would have included a phalanx of political and military operatives who supported U.S. covert operations like ‘Pheonix‘.

Winter’s ties to guerrillas in Central Africa pre-date the SPLM war in Sudan. In the early 1980′s Winter backed the National Resistance Movement (NRM) guerrilla war—led by Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame and other Hema-Tutsi elites—against the Obote (II) government in Uganda. Winter regularly visited Museveni’s NRM guerrilla’s in the bush. Winter is alleged to be the architect behind the false accusations blaming the Obote government for genocide in the Lowero Triangle. Most likely, Winter also advised the NRM in some of the nasty tactics in low-intensity warfare, including ‘pseudo-operations’—where NRM guerrillas disguised as government forces committed atrocities—and Psy-Ops terrorizing the population. [42] The terror tactics seen in Uganda appeared later in Rwanda (1990-1994) and again and again in the bloody Congo wars (1995-present)—the signature of Museveni and Kagame’s guerrillas.

For the duration of the 1980′s Winter advanced the militant plans of the Banyarwanda—Rwandan Tutsi elites who had ruled over the Hutu masses but fled Rwanda in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Roger Winter even funded their propaganda tracts advocating guerrilla war. Working with Alexandre Kimenyi, a Rwandan Tutsi with U.S. citizenship, Roger Winter and the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda [Tutsi] Refugees in Washington, DC in 1988, and this is where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was decided. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and transportation for the event.

“Roger Winter is an intelligence operative,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, a former Rwandan government official who fled Rwanda under threat of death in April 1994. “Winter organized the meeting of the Rwandan [Tutsi] diaspora in Washington, D.C in 1988. He funded Impuruza through the U.S. Committee for Refugees.”

The best known of the RPF and Banyarwanda publications was Impuruza, created by Alexandre Kimenyi and published in the U.S. from 1982 to 1994. Like most RPF publications Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite. This publication began the process of dehumanizing the Hutu people and set the stage for the ongoing genocide against them—a genocide facilitated by Roger Winter, funded by western tax-payers who have been betrayed by the military-industrial-media complex.

“Winter followed the activities of the RPF in Uganda, including visiting the battlefield,” says Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro. “He visited RPF forces in Rwanda before April 6, 1994. I met him in Chicago in 1995 at a conference on Rwanda, organized by the University of Illinois. Alison Des Forges was there too. [43] Roger Winter tried to stop the conference from happening. Winter handed out pro-RPF literature prepared by the U.S. Committee for Refugees. Then he was in Congo [Zaire] after the RPF and AFDL launched their military offensive to topple Mobutu regime. After the overthrow of Mobutu his target became Sudan where he sought the overthrow of the central government, but then settled with the independence of South Sudan. In South Sudan he serves under the cover of an adviser to the government of South Sudan. So, what is next? He has accumulated success after success.”

Acting as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies during the earlier stages of the RPF guerrilla war, Roger Winter appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as PBS and CNN at times when the RPF was committing atrocities (e.g. in northern Rwanda 1990-1993). Winter and Rwanda ‘genocide’ propagandist Philip Gourevitch also made contacts on behalf of the RPF with American media, particularly the Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine. U.S. Rep. Donald Payne worked closely with them to support the RPF’s low–intensity wars in Africa and the necessary propaganda in the U.S. and Canada. When the war in Sudan shifted from the south to Darfur, Donald Payne sponsored the hegemonic Darfur Genocide Accountability Act.

Roger Winter and Jeff Drumtra, another U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) agent, released numerous pro-RPF policy statements and alerts during the RPF assault of 1994. In fact, Roger Winter was amongst the first U.S. officials to advocate that the civil war in Rwanda in 1994 be declared a genocide against Tutsi civilians. He also advocated on behalf of the RPF leadership that the Rwandan interim government was an illegitimate government, and the RPF was a legitimate rebel force.

“Effective policy requires a proper understanding of the root causes of the violence in Rwanda,” Winter and Drumtra wrote in a USCR alert. “The U.S. media have generally mischaracterized Rwanda’s massacres as amorphous, uncontrollable ‘tribal violence’ that Westerners cannot possibly understand or affect. Other reports mistakenly imply that the huge numbers of deaths are due to crossfire in the civil war between the government army and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).”

Winter and Drumtra helped shift the simplistic media accounts from their focus on tribal warfare to a new focus on coordinated and planned campaign of genocide being committed by the Hutu power structure. Winter facilitated the dehumanization of millions of Hutus and set the stage for the invasion of Congo-Zaire two years later. The parallels with south Sudan are striking.