It is simply amazing how many times the transparently bogus “al-Qaeda” has been used as an excuse to unleash violence against largely innocent Muslims and yet so few people here in America catch on, preferring to believe the corporate media fed illusion, now hammered firmly into place and accepted as political reality.

Earlier today, we learned a “U.S. Air Force gunship has conducted a strike against suspected members of al Qaeda in Somalia,” CBS reports straight from a Pentagon script. “The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa,” apparently reason enough to kill around 200 people. “The gunship flew from its base in Dijibouti down to the southern tip of Somalia… where the al Qaeda operatives had fled after being chased out of the capital of Mogadishu by Ethiopian troops backed by the United States.”

In other words, it was a turkey shoot, and the targets were not necessarily “al-Qaeda” but rather members of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), Muslims who not long ago ruled Somalia under the Sharia, or Islamic law. CBS does not bother to mention the fact ICU was popular in Somalia, a Muslim nation.

Here in America, they are called the Somali Islamists—granted, a simplistic term, but then we here in America like our simplistic terms—and thus the Somali version of a Muslim is lumped in with all the other Islamists, including those we are told are fascist, never mind European fascist movements of the early 20th century have nothing to do with Islam, and the word “Islamofascists” is little more than a meaningless and rather crude political epithet.

Of course, the word and nonsensical idea is strictly for domestic consumption, as evil Nazis are part of the firmly entrenched cultural landscape and it is apparently easy to associate Hitler and Nazism with people—indeed, entire cultures and religions—one does not like or understand (remember, “al-Qaeda” is a magnet for Hitler types like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or so the corporate media, with their neocon reading scripts in hand, tell us).

Last December, the popular ICU lost control after Ethiopia, with U.S. backing and encouragement, invaded and sent them packing to the southern-most tip of the country. According to CBS, the fleeing ICU are “al-Qaeda” to the man and, as such, fair game for an AC-130 gunship, sent from a U.S. airbase (at Camp Lemonier) in Dijibouti.

Of course, this is little more than a facile and threadbare excuse to kill Muslims, as Bush’s “minds” from the American Enterprise Institute are big on slaughtering large numbers of them on ice-thin pretext.

For instance, take the neocon Vance Serchuk, a scribbler at the Weekly Standard, who specializes in making excuses for the Ethiopia invasion, an affair wholly rigged by the United States. According to Serchuk and the neocons, the “Somalia problem came to metastasize over the past six months,” and Somalia is not simply “a failed state that could be occasionally exploited by terrorists,” but “an active and steadfast ally of the global jihadist movement,” thus the “Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa… at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti…. constitutes the U.S. military’s first post-9/11 outpost in sub-Saharan Africa.”

As Serchuk readily admits, this task force fits “squarely with what last year’s Quadrennial Defense Review” proposed, that is a “shifting emphasis” toward the use of “surrogates” in the war on terror, that is to say proxies will do the bidding of the neocons in the hundred or more year “war” planned for us and our children, and our children’s children.

Thus the attack against “al-Qaeda” may be considered yet another in a series of attacks against “Islamofascists” in Africa, as effete and bilious chicken hawks, hiding out in their comfy academic and think-tank lairs, are keen to chase Muslims hither and thither—or have National Guard kids from Nebraska chase them—as the neocon “clash of civilizations” plan dictates.

Oh, coincidentally, the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips hold concession rights in Somalia. According to the Los Angeles Times, “corporate and scientific documents disclosed that the American companies are well positioned to pursue Somalia’s most promising potential oil reserves the moment the nation is pacified,” that is to say after a suitable number of Muslims are killed and a requisite dictatorship takes hold, as the rule of Mohammed Siad Barre didn’t exactly work out as planned back in the 90s.

“Somalia is of geostrategic interest to the Bush administration, and the focus of operations and policy since 2001,” writes Larry Chin. “This focus is a continuation of long-term policies of both the Clinton administration and the George H.W. Bush administrations. Somalia’s resources have been eyed by Western powers since the days of the British Empire.”

“A new US cleansing of Somalian ‘tyranny’ would open the door for these US oil companies to map and develop the possibly huge oil potential in Somalia,” notes F. William Engdahl. “Yemen and Somalia are two flanks of the same geological configuration, which holds large potential petroleum deposits, as well as being the flanks of the oil chokepoint from the Red Sea.”

No doubt, as kissing cousins to the neolibs, who are primarily interested in “free trade” fire sales, the neocons have taken note of the potential for a Somalian oil and gas bonanza, especially with China eager to get in on the game with its insatiable thirst for petroleum. However, neocons are known primarily for their sociopathic hatred and fear of Muslims, be they Arab or African, and that is the immediate impetus behind their current fascination with the impoverish “failed state” (failed because it was ruled by Muslims) of Somalia.

“And even when the media are looking the other way, our enemies are not,” rants Vance Serchuk, AEI research fellow. “Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two, has already issued a recording calling Somalia ‘one of the crusader battlefields that are being launched by America … against Islam,’ a message that will no doubt resonate in the Muslim world.”

But of course, as the neocons believe, or rather expect us to believe, such messages, issued by documented intelligence assets, “resonate” in Islamic “failed states,” that is to say states inching up the neocon target list, as should be expected so long as these career criminals remain on the loose and are not forced to do the perp walk in orange jumpsuits.

US official confirms at least one American AC-130 gunship strike against al Qaeda fugitives in S., Somalia Monday night

January 9, 2007, 11:13 AM (GMT+02:00)

Witnesses report that two such strikes left many casualties. The White House did not confirm or deny the incident. Somali president Abdulahi Yusuf, just returned to Mogadishu, justified the US air attacks against al Qaeda. The Bahrain-based US navy’s Fifth Fleet announced Tuesday that the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has joined three other warships in the coastal waters of Somalia “due to rapidly developing events in Somalia.”

Planes from the carrier have begun flying over the country after a series of intelligence-gathering missions.

DEBKAfile: the air strikes signal increasing US involvement in the Ethiopian-backed operation to reinstate the Somali government six months after it was swept from power by al-Qaeda linked Islamists and lay hands on al Qaeda's East African leaders.

Somali president Abdulahi Yusuf arrived in Mogadishu Monday and announced his objection to dialogue with the Islamists. It was the first time he set foot in the capital since he was elected in 2004 and his arrival coincided with the second day of Islamic guerrilla attacks on Ethiopian and government forces.

After driving the Islamic Courts fighters from the rest of Somalia, Ethiopian and government troops were poised Monday, Jan. 8, to capture their stronghold at Ras Kamboni between the sea and the Kenyan border. Both sides have taken heavy casualties in two days of battles. The Islamists holed up in the jungle fastness are cut off from escape by sea by patrolling US warships and across the Kenyan border by the Kenyan military.

US special forces have joined the hunt for wanted al Qaeda leaders. Ras Kamboni was described after 9/11 as an al Qaeda-supported training ground and refuge of al Qaeda terrorist masterminds including Fazul Abdullah Fazul, perpetrator of the 1988 embassy bombings in East Africa and many other acts of terror.

US assistant secretary of state of Africa Jendayi Frazer is in Mogadishu to promote talks between the government headed by Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi and moderate non-al Qaeda Islamists, including the Somali parliament speaker Sherif Hassan Sheikh Aden. Somalia is strategically located at the point where the Red Sea opens into the Indian Ocean. She said Washington had already opened dialogue with some ICU officials. The African Union is planning a peacekeeping mission to stabilize Mogadishu amid the chaos and deprivation of a country which has had no organized government since 1991.

DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources identify the three notorious al Qaeda leaders as: Abdullah Fazul, from the Comoro Islands, Ali Saleh Nabhan, from Kenya, and Abu Taha al-Sudani, from Sudan. Fazul, the most senior, is wanted for lead roles in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, the 1996 Ethiopian Airline hijack in which four Israeli air industry directors and 3 Israeli civilians were murdered; the Oct. 2000 ramming of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor which cost the lives of 19 US seamen, and the 2002 coordinated air-missiles attacks on the Mombasa Paradise hotel and the Israeli Arkia airliner bringing Israelis to the hotel.

Fazul is also the highest ranking operative in contact with clandestine al Qaeda networks in the Sinai Peninsula. His capture and interrogation would for the first time provide access to a primary source on al Qaeda’s precise plans for operations against Israel, but he has more than once escaped when his pursuers were hot on his heels.

DEBKAfile Exclusive: US forces in Somalia launch biggest anti-al Qaeda crackdown since the Afghanistan 2001 invasion

January 9, 2007, 6:45 PM (GMT+02:00)

Our military sources report that the US Central Command has massed substantial naval, air and marine strength around Somali shores, led by The USS Eisenhower carrier (picture) which is patrolling the water between Ras Kamboni on the Somali-Kenyan border and Kismayo port. Kenyan units and the German navy are also deployed. Fighting in support of Somali government troops and Ethiopian forces, they are tightening the noose trapping the embattled al Qaeda and Islamic Courts fugitives in their last positions, after being driven south into southern Somalia from Mogadishu. Their immediate mission is to block off the fugitives’ escape across the high peaks on the Somali-Kenyan frontier, or by sea, disguised as fishermen, through a chain of small Indian Ocean islands.

If the defeated men can reach the mountains, said to resemble Afghanistan’s Tora Bora (through which al Qaeda leaders slipped away early on in the Afghan war), they will be hard to winkle out of the caves and gullies. Warplanes from the Eisenhower are therefore pounding al Qaeda-Islamist routes to safety.

The AC-130 gunship strikes from US air bases in Kenya were launched Monday night, Jan. 8, when a combined Ethiopian-Somali military onslaught failed to resolve the battle with the Islamists and casualties were mounting steeply on both sides. DEBKAfile’s military sources disclose that even when Kenyan special forces under US command were thrown into the fray, they battle was undecided.

The US warships now engaged in the Somali campaign, the first direct American military intervention in the country since the disastrous 1992-4 “Black Hawk Down” mission, include the guided missile destroyers USS Ramage and USS Bunker Hill, as well as German naval units stationed in Kenyan ports. They are blasting the Islamist concentrations from the sea.

In the last week of December 2006, alongside the Ethiopian intervention, US special forces were flown in from the big American base in Djibouti to the S. Somali mountain range. Their mission was to trap al Qaeda’s East African leader, Abdullah Fazul, from the Comoro Islands, as well as Ali Saleh Nabhan, from Kenya, and Abu Taha al-Sudani, from Sudan. Fazul is wanted for the 1998 US embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, the 1996 Ethiopian Airline hijack in which four Israeli air industry directors and 3 Israeli civilians were murdered; the Oct. 2000 ramming of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor which cost the lives of 19 US seamen, as well as the 2002 coordinated air-missiles attacks on the Mombasa Paradise hotel and the Israeli Arkia airliner bringing Israelis to the hotel.

Fazul’s capture or death would be a major American feat, pivotal to eradicating al Qaeda’s operational organization in East Africa. However, he is an exceptionally slippery customer and has escaped close pursuit more than once before.

As if two wrongs make a right...

There is a lot of background info on the 1998 US Embassy Bombings page on the Complete 911 Timeline project:

 http://www.cooperativeresearch.net/timeline.jsp?warning_signs:_specific_cases=1998USEmbassyBombings&timeline=complete_911_timeline