PENTAGON SATELLITE PHOTOS: New Revelations Concerning "The Rwandan Genocide"
Commemorating More Than 18 years of Terrorism in Central Africa. April 6,
1994 - April 6, 2012
by Keith Harmon Snow
<
http://www.globalresearch.ca> Global Research, April 11, 2012
Eighteen years after the historic '100 days of genocide' in Rwanda the
United States Government has suddenly produced never-before-seen satellite
images to support the genocide extradition trial of a former Rwandan now
U.S. citizen in New Hampshire (USA). The existence of satellite imagery shot
over Rwanda would enable the 'international community' to further explore
heretofore hidden facts about the double presidential assassinations of
April 6 or massacres committed before, during and after 1994. As the world
commemorates the official Rwanda genocide story on the 18th anniversary of
the Rwanda genocide the people of Central Africa continue to suffer under
the brutal terrorism of the Kagame military regime. Instead of celebrating,
we should be asking: who are the real victims and who are the real
criminals, and what really happened in Rwanda?
In his opening statements in a Concord, New Hampshire (USA) courthouse on
February 23, 2012, federal prosecutor John Capin launched the U.S.
government's trial against a 41 year-old Rwandan so-called 'genocide
fugitive' by wielding satellite photographs purportedly showing the road
blocks where she "commanded extremist Hutu militia and ordered the rapes and
killings of Tutsi" in Rwanda in 1994.
In a remarkable development, this is the first time in the history of the
'Rwanda genocide' trials or related Rwanda asylum hearings where Pentagon
satellite photographs have been produced as evidence, and the first time
that the existence of satellite photographs taken over Rwanda during the
so-called '100 days of genocide' has been verified.
Later in the Munyenyezi trial the U.S. prosecutors produced a 'Pentagon
analyst' who testified about the satellite photographs. The Pentagon
analyst was Mr. Eric R. Benn, Technical Executive, Analysis and Production
Directorate, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)-one of 16 U.S.
intelligence agencies aligned with surveillance, reconnaissance and
war-fighting in the shadowy bowels of the U.S. national security apparatus.
The photographs introduced into the public record in the latest charade
staged by the Kagame military regime include very high-resolution images
shot over Rwanda in May, June and July of 1994. The court transcript
indicates that the selected images used in the trial come from a much larger
set of reconnaissance photographs that remain classified.
The confirmation of satellite reconnaissance and intelligence photographs
newly implicates the U.S. government in the mass atrocities of 1994, and
raises serious new questions about the cover-up of the double presidential
assassinations of April 6, 1994 and the atrocities committed by the Rwandan
Patriotic Army (RPA) commanded by now President Paul Kagame.
The sudden and unexpected revelation of the existence of satellite imagery
shot over Rwanda in 1994 also further corroborates claims and evidence that
U.S. and Pentagon officials had plenty of satellite evidence of the numbers
and whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees massacred by
the Kagame war machine in Congo's forests.
Eighteen years after the so-called '1994 Rwanda genocide', Rwanda is today
everywhere peddled as an economic miracle of recovery and freedom, once
again 'the Switzerland of Africa.' Rwanda is also peddled as the model
homeland for the 'stateless' Tutsis.. President Paul Kagame is everywhere
applauded for rescuing the Tutsis, stopping the genocide, and rebuilding
Rwanda.
Meanwhile, the real situation for ordinary people in Central Africa is
everywhere inhumane and unjust. The average Ugandan citizen suffers under
the brutal dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni. The people in northern Uganda,
already subject to genocide as policy under the Museveni government, now
have a new threat: the hysterical KONY2012 movement. The people of Congo
continue to suffer under the terrorist government of Hyppolite Kanambe
(alias Joseph Kabila), a Tutsi and the nephew of General James Kabarebe,
another Rwandan Tutsi and Kagame's top commander. Western mining,
petroleum, logging and private mercenary companies are all over Congo.
Since January 2012 more than 100,000 Congolese have been internally
displaced by violence under the occupation of the Kagame regime in the Kivu
provinces. And, as it as been since 1994, both Hutus and Tutsis and the
forgotten Twa people suffer massive repression under the Kagame regime
inside Rwanda.
MILLION DOLLAR MUNYENYEZI TRIAL
On June 24, 2010, Beatrice Munyenyezi (MOON'-yen-yezi) was arrested in
Manchester, New Hampshire (USA) and charged, according to U.S. prosecutors,
with "procuring U.S. citizenship unlawfully by misrepresenting her
activities during the 1994 Rwandan genocide."
Munyenyezi is a naturalizedU.S. citizen falsely accused of Rwanda genocide
rape crimes
<
http://www.consciousbeingalliance.com/2010/08/us-citizen-falsely-accused-of
-rwanda-genocide-rape-crimes> in yet another case adding up to millions of
U.S. taxpayers dollars being used to fund fabricated Rwanda genocide and
asylum trials and, now, genocide tourism expeditions in Rwanda.
The U.S. Department of Justice seeks to deport Beatrice Munyenyezi to face
genocide charges in Rwanda. But Ms. Munyenyezi's will be a milestone case:
this is the first ever international legal proceeding in the United States
involving a woman accused of rape as a genocide and war crime.
According to the government of Rwanda, Beatrice Munyenyezi, 41, allegedly
"participated in, committed, ordered, oversaw, conspired to, aided and
abetted, assisted in and directed persecution, kidnapping, rape and murder
during the Rwandan genocide of 1994."
The Kagame regime makes general accusations that you can arrest and charge
any Hutu with. These are generic genocide charges used by the Rwandan
military regime against all people of the Hutu ethnicity.
The fifteen-day trial of Beatrice Munyenyezi in February and March 2012
concluded with four additional days of deliberations by the all-white jury.
On March 15 the jury delivered a deadlocked decision and the U.S. government
declared a 'mistrial'. The re-trial is set to begin September 10, 2012.
Mark Howard, one of Beatrice Munyenyezi's attorneys, revealed to the press
the huge sums of money spent by the U.S judiciary to try Rwandan genocide
suspects. Howard estimated that U.S. taxpayers paid between US$ 2.5 million
and $US 3 million for Munyenyezi's recent prosecution and trial in federal
court.
Howard estimates that a retrial is likely to cost an additional US$ 1
million. Howard's estimates include attorney fees, agent salaries, the
"extraordinary expense" of investigating in a foreign country, the costs of
bringing some fifteen witnesses to New Hampshire, and the hiring of experts.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for defense attorneys Mark Howard
and David Ruoff have also been paid by U.S. taxpayers through the U.S.
judiciary. Defense attorneys twice traveled to Rwanda in discovery for the
Munyenyezi case.
The cost of bringing the Kagame regime's authorized 'witnesses' to the
United States and putting them up -- some under tight security and others at
expensive hotels -- for the duration of the trial represents additional
massive costs to U.S. taxpayers for what amounts to fraud by the U.S.
government and its partner regime in Rwanda.
Amongst the many prosecution witnesses brought over from Rwanda are those
described by the U.S. and Rwanda government as "extremist Hutu genocidaires"
who were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The veracity of these
'extremist genocidaires' is based on the claim that they have nothing to
lose and must be telling the truth.
Others are witnesses from a women's genocide survivor organization in
Butare, whose travel to New Hampshire is fully paid by the U.S. government,
and whose profits from the traveling and testifying can be used to support
their mission in Butare. Such economic interests play a major role in the
official choice and production of 'genocide witnesses' and 'genocide
survivors'.
Defense attorneys described the fifteen Rwandan witnesses flown over to the
U.S. from Rwanda as "psychopathic killers who never mentioned Munyenyezi in
nearly two decades of trials and investigations into the Rwanda genocide."
The credibility of 'witnesses' incarcerated in Rwanda is highly suspect.
First there is the problem of coercion: many people in prison in Rwanda or
accused by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) and Gacaca
[people's] courts have been framed. Other 'confessed genocidaires' have
been tortured, and some have been silenced or coerced to lie by the RPA
threat of retaliation against their families.
Often enough, 'witnesses to killings' and 'genocide survivors' are frauds;
sometimes they are people who were not even in Rwanda during the 1994
cataclysm. Other government plants and handlers have been coached.
In Munyenyezi's case, the press apparently decided that the witnesses
brought in to accuse Beatrice Munyenyezi were not credible. First, the
claim by the RPA/F that Munyenyezi commanded soldiers to rape Tutsi women in
the basement of the hotel is presented as an absolute. The rape occurred
'in the context of genocide' and so it is believable and believed. However,
according to Rwandan people, no Rwandan woman in the context of Rwandan
culture would ever oversee mass rape of other Rwandan women. In fact,
Beatrice Munyenyezi was also pregnant at the time -- making the hypothesis
of rape even less plausible.
Second, we can imagine that any credible testimony on a genocide rape charge
against a woman would have provoked an endless barrage of news stories
titled 'Hutu genocidaire woman ordered rape of innocent Tutsis in hotel's
basement', stories that would have made their way right up to CNN and the
New York Times. But the court's decision on the rape charges went
unmentioned by the New Hampshire press because the credibility of dishonest
government witnesses (coached to lie) was easily destroyed.
The charge that Beatrice Munyenyezi commanded and organized the rape of
Rwandan women is as implausible as the charge by Invisible Children
co-founder Jason Russel
<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEVKNVTnYRA&feature=youtu.be> that Joseph
Kony "he's the most perverse, in the world, he's just the most perverse. No
one makes...anyone else... takes children... makes them kill their parents
and eat their parents."
Some so-called 'genocidaires' may be guilty, but others are not, and the
Kagame regime uses all kinds of bribery, subterfuge and threats to pull the
wool over the eyes of tourists, researchers and other 'guests'. Many people
in Rwanda are forced to spy, tattle and inform on others or else face
personal persecution or threats to their families.
Anyone who challenges the officially sanctioned narrative in Rwanda is
branded, arrested, exiled, disappeared or -- in the case of pesky American
academics, like Dr. Christian Davenport, Dr. Alan Stam or Dr. Susan Thomson,
who all asked too many questions of the 'wrong' kind -- barred from Rwanda
forever.
Dr. Timothy Longman <
http://faculty.vassar.edu/tilongma/> is the Rwanda
genocide expert that was brought in to testify as a witness for the
prosecution in the Beatrice Munyenyezi case. The director of African
Studies at Boston University, Dr. Longman is another academic who has fallen
into 'disrepute' with the Kagame regime. Dr. Longman and former Human
Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Alison Des Forges
<
http://www.hrw.org/des-forges-tribute> (d. 2009) co-authored the HRW book
on Rwanda Leave None to Tell the Story, and both formerly worked with USAID,
the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon; the 790 page tome did not
mention a word about Beatrice Munyenyezi.
The defense attorneys in the Munyenyezi trial took advantage of the
prosecution's genocide expert and cross-examined. Longman and made important
points for their case. Dr. Longman, Dr. Susan Thomson and other academics
came under fire from the Kagame regime just prior to the April 2012
publication of the book Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights
After Mass Violence
<
http://www.amazon.ca/Remaking-Rwanda-Building-Rights-Violence/dp/toc/029928
2643> . The Kagame regime created a web site
<
http://theremakingrwanda.blogspot.com/2011/04/remaking-rwanda-only-rwandans
-can-do-it.html> (by an 'anonymous' blogger) spreading disinformation and
attacking the authors of the edited edition.
"The book is a collection of articles by a group of people who have made it
their mission to shoot down anything that the government of Rwanda does,"
the propaganda begins. "The new book should be seen as the latest project
of an association of what may be appropriately called 'Genocide Deniers
Inc.' and 'Hate Rwanda Ltd'. The editors have brought together the works of
a wide array of members of these two groups."
The lists of 'friends' and 'enemies' of the government of Rwanda is
constantly in flux, but ever growing. First, France was the hostile enemy
of Kagame, after the publication of the report on the shooting down of the
presidential plane produced by French anti-terrorist Judge Jean-Louis
Bruguiere. Then when business and profits took precedents over truth and
human rights, President Nicholas Sarkozy made some kind of deal with Kagame
and the French government and soon after became more hostile to Madame
Agatha Habyriamana and more accommodating to Paul Kagame. But the recent
volume of supposed 'Genocide Deniers Inc.' includes articles by Rwanda
scholars, such as professors David and Catherine Newbury, or Dr. Scott
Strauss, who have never previously fallen anywhere near the specious
categorization of 'genocide deniers'.
For the past 20 years, hordes of NGO workers and humanitarian relief
workers, and countless academics and researchers involved in millions of
dollars of private profit have been going and coming from Rwanda. The NGOS
are always advertising their effectiveness in "peace" and "reconciliation"
programs and flashing the starving child brand to raise sympathy donations
from the U.S. public. Yet at present, 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.
CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS
The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) certainly collected satellite
imagery over the four years of warfare in Rwanda. 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 Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA).
All NRO operations are highly classified - black programs operations -- and
even the existence of the NRO was only declassified in 1992.
The NRO was declassified to facilitate interaction with other parts of the
government, to make it easier for the NRO to support military operations,
and in response to Congressional pressure. As part of the process of
declassification NRO consulted Richard Curl, head of the Office of
Intelligence Resources of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and
Research, recommended a "low-key approach" to declassification.
This is a tactic that the intelligence and defense sectors use often:
casually bring the formerly beyond top secret 'asset' - some previously
classified plane, satellite or document -- into the public sphere without
any mention. Then, after the unusual and unknown 'asset' is finally
noticed, acknowledge the 'asset' with a summary dismissal saying, 'that has
been there all along.
A declassified secret intelligence memo of July 1992 shows that NRO
consultant Richard Curl recommended that the U.S. government and Pentagon
very quietly make public the 'fact of' the NRO. Specifically, Curl advised
"not worrying public relations guidance too much, not making a big public
announcement, and just letting the change pass with little notice. keep down
the fanfare and just let the change happen."
In fact, perhaps thinking that the Beatrice Munyenyezi story would remain a
quiet, local New Hampshire affair, this is exactly how the Pentagon made
public the 'fact of' the 1994 Rwanda genocide satellite reconnaissance
images used in Beatrice Munyenyezi's trial. Never previously acknowledged -
even denied to Ambassador Flatten from 1990 to 1993 - and never formally
revealed, the images were casually introduced in the Munyenyezi trial. The
local media missed the significance, focusing only on the fantastic charges
of Munyenyezi's involvement in genocide.
INTERNATIONAL WARS OF AGGRESSION
In 1981, Yoweri Museveni and his newly formed National Resistance Army (NRA)
launched an invasion of the sovereign country of Uganda. From 1980 to 1986,
the NRA perpetrated massive war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide
in the Luwero Triangle and other areas in central and northern Uganda.
These atrocities were universally attributed -- and are so attributed to
this day -- to the government forces, the Uganda National Liberation Army,
commanded by then President Milton Obote. (See for example: Notes On the
Concealment of Genocide in Uganda, A. Milton Obote, April 1990.)
The massive atrocities committed by the NRA set the stage for the rise of
Joseph Kony, the Ugandan bogeyman used by Museveni, Washington, London and
Israel to facilitate a permanent state of insecurity in northern Uganda.
Under permanent emergency, Museveni was able to justify the forcible
displacement of millions of indigenous Acholi people and their internment
into concentration camps. Museveni also allegedly authored a document
attesting to genocidal intent <
http://www.musevenimemo.org/> against the
Acholis.
One of the 27 guerrillas who took up arms alongside Yoweri Museveni in the
illegal NRA invasion of Uganda was Paul Kagame, the future leader of the
Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front, the Ugandan guerrilla army that illegally
invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990.
Loyal to Museveni and his bloody guerrilla tactics, Kagame rose through the
ranks to become Museveni's director of military intelligence -- a position
for which his enemies now claim he was known as 'the butcher'.
At the time of the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, Paul Kagame was being
trained at the Pentagon's General Staff and Command College at Fort
Leavenworth, in Kansas (USA). Kagame returned and led the four-year war
that resulted in the deaths of perhaps several hundred thousand Hutu people
between October 1990 and April 1994 alone.
A prima facie case can be made that each of the invasions of Uganda, Rwanda
and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) constitute the supreme
crime against humanity, that being the illegal war of aggression against a
sovereign nation. The United States, Britain and Israel were the strongest
backers behind backed Museveni and Kagame in all three of these illegal wars
of aggression.
Involved at the highest level in the RPA/F invasion of Rwanda from 1990 to
1994 were US and Israeli Mossad agents as well as military intelligence
<
http://allthingspass.com/uploads/html-135Hotel%20Rwanda%20Corrected%20Final
%201%20Nov%2007.htm> as well as U.S. military intelligence.
The U.S. House of Representative hearings by the Subcommittee on Africa of
the Committee on International Relations
<
http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa46881.000/hfa46881_0f.htm>
reveal that the United States knew that the Hutu refugees in Congo-Zaire
were being massacred, and it makes clear some of those who knew what, where
it was happening, and when.
In May 2001, U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) convened a hearing
for the Subcommittee on Africa where investigative journalist Wayne Madsen
testified about U.S. covert operations and U.S. involvement in genocide in
Central Africa.
"A French military intelligence officer said he detected some 100 armed U.S.
troops in the eastern Zaire conflict zone," Madsen's statement began:
"Moreover, the DGSE [French secret service] reported the Americans had
knowledge of the extermination of Hutu refugees by Tutsis in both Rwanda and
eastern Zaire and were doing nothing about it. More ominously, there was
reason to believe that some U.S. forces, either Special Forces or
mercenaries, may have actually participated in the extermination of Hutu
refugees." (See: Statement by Wayne Madsen, Subcommittee on International
Operations and Human Rights, 17 May 2001, and Genocide and Covert Operations
in Africa, 1993-1999, Wayne Madsen, Mellen Press, 1999.)
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Received on Wed Apr 11 2012 - 13:21:32 EDT
