Joseph Kony and the ‘Visible Children’

http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/its_time_to_catch_joseph_kony_20120307/

which is part of:

Obama Mines for Voters With High-Tech Tools

Daniel Borris for The New York Times

Inside a Chicago office complex, Obama aides sift through reams of data about supporters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/us/politics/obama-campaigns-vast-effort-to-re-enlist-08-supporters.html?_r=3&hp

By JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY

Published: March 8, 2012

First, let me say that Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army is burnt into my heart. I do care about this issue and don't like to see it trivialised or cynically harnessed to a campaign for the re-election of a war-making US Commander-in-Chief.

I spent 2 years, from 2002 till 2004 in Uganda as a human rights volunteer. I went to the north of Uganda to the war zone and saw schools that had been closed because the children who were student had been abducted by the LRA. I interviewed children who had escaped the LRA and worked with young adults who had previously been those abducted children.

I have been to parts of the north where it wasn't safe to land a plane and I could have been shot down. I have seen some of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people and slept with them in their huts. I have been within a few kilometres of where Kony and his main force were, and all of the 50 soldiers who were protecting me were killed two weeks later, including the Ugandan soldier who was 11 years old and the one I held in my arms while he had an epileptic fit.

Please watch this video, and appreciate that it was made by one of the USA's most expensive PR firms and remember:

1. The video promotes the ICC, the International Criminal Court - which the US government refuses to recognise. The US also has plenty of war criminals, not just Africans and Bush and Obama are among them.

2. The US was funding and arming the SPLA which fought for South Sudan's independence from Sudan to enable the USA to get their hands on South Sudan's oil. The abundance of weapons in that region enabled Joseph Kony to continue fighting, as the video says, for 20 years, when "no one cared".

3. For part of the time the war against Kony was being fought, part of the Ugandan army was diverted into an illegal invasion of the DRC and the plundering of resources. That was also a time when three African nations were receiving huge military aid. They were Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Uganda.

4. The Ugandan army is part of Yoweri Kaguta Museveni's military dictatorship which tortures political opponents while collecting huge aid donations. I have also met children who had been abducted to fight in Museveni's army. He says that white people think all Africans look young and cannot tell their age. He is a liar and a murderer. He is also now Obama's ally.

5. Don't even get me started on the cynical US aid given to Uganda, especially the aid to HIV NGOs who were not permitted to give out condoms because US pharmaceutical corporations were going to profit from an outbreak of AIDS. George W Bush even visited to clinch the deal.

I'll save the rest, but this will give some idea why I say watch this video but be careful what you believe. Obama is desperate to get re-elected so he can go on making wars, mostly in secret. US special forces are said to be in 19 African countries.

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