posted February 14, 2005 04:18 PM            

It's even worse when it's known that Kofi Annan was the UN official in charge of peace keeping forces in Rwanda and stood by with peace keeping forces on the ground in Rwanda and did nothing to prevent or stop the Genocide. His reward for dereliction of duty? They made Kofi Secretary General of the UN...with the backing of the Clinton Administration.

Now, the UN wants desperately for the United States to join the UN run Kangaroo World Court, the Kyoto Treaty and sign on to the Treaty of the Seas.

Oddly, Sudan is or was a member of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Odd because Sudan is one of the worst violators of human rights on earth...but that's the UN.

Monday, Feb. 14, 2005 12:12 p.m. EST
ABC News: U.N. Peacekeepers in Rape Scandal

United Nations workers dispatched to the Congo as peacekeepers have instead been raping and pillaging their way through the country, with one senior U.N. official photographing his victims as he assaulted them, according to ABC News.

In what could turn out to be the United Nations version of the Abu Ghraib scandal, senior U.N. logistics officer Didier Bourguet took dozens of pictures as he attacked Congolese girls, saving them to his computer hard drive and later sharing the images with U.N. colleagues.

In one photo "a tear can be seen rolling down the cheek of a victim," ABC "20/20" reporter Brian Ross said in a story broadcast Thursday.
Bourguet wasn't the only sexual predator among the U.N. forces sent ostensibly to help the Congolese.

According to ABC News, the range of sexual abuse includes:

Reported rapes of young Congolese girls by blue-helmeted U.N. troops as well as aid workers.

A colonel from South Africa accused of molesting his teenage male translators.

Hundreds of under-age girls having babies fathered by U.N. soldiers who have been able to simply leave their children and their crimes behind.

An Internet pedophile ring run by Bourguet.
Some of the female victims were as young as 11 years old, according to an official with Human Rights Watch.

Claude Deboosere-Lepidi, Bourguet's lawyer, said his client admits he assaulted minors and that his sex crime spree included other U.N. officials.

posted February 15, 2005 09:43 AM              

I heard about it a few weeks ago.

I'm truly curious about the nationality of these "peace keepers" - were they all South African like the Col.? Were they from a variety of African states? Trans-continental?

And, yep, just in case you're wondering, I think that it's a disgusting display that illustrates how inept the UN bureaucracy apparently is at monitoring its operations and its people.

posted February 16, 2005 12:58 AM              

The muslims are gonna come for us. My mom told me that many mulsims are leaving the country and going back. Hmmmm

I hope it's not true.
http://boisdarc.tamu-commerce.edu/www/w/willmc/nostra.htm

posted February 16, 2005 10:15 AM            

quote:

---

I'm truly curious about the nationality of these "peace keepers" - were they all South African like the Col.? Were they from a variety of African states? Trans-continental?

---

Rape by UN forces is common across the world where UN peacekeeping and other UN forces are deployed and are in no way restricted to South Africans working for the UN.

The U.N.'s Rape of the Innocents
Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2005

Kofi Annan must have the world's thickest set of industrial-quality earplugs. How else can he block out the cries of Congolese girls raped by United Nations "peacekeepers" sent to protect the innocents from harm?

Fifty U.N. peacekeepers and U.N. civilian officers face an estimated 150 allegations of sexual exploitation and rape in the Congo alone. Last Friday, ABC's "20/20" program aired a devastating expose by investigative reporter Brian Ross highlighting some of the worst alleged crimes.
The accused include Didier Bourguet, a U.N. senior official from France charged with running an Internet pedophile ring in the Congo. According to ABC News and others, pictures taken from his personal computer contained thousands of photos of him with hundreds of girls. Police say Bourguet had turned his bedroom, plastered with mirrors and rigged with remote-control cameras, into a stealth porn studio. He was caught in a sting operation while allegedly preparing to rape a 12-year-old girl.

In one of the photos confiscated from Bourguet, a tear can be seen rolling down the cheek of a victim.

Hundreds of babies, fathered by U.N. personnel, have been born to Congolese girls and women -- including the 15-year-old deaf mute daughter of Aimee Tsesi, who told Ross she was turned away at the gates of the U.N. camp when she went for assistance. "The U.N. is not able to give me food or money for my grandson," she told ABC News. "But if the U.N. hadn't brought this soldier here, my daughter would not have become pregnant. And I would not be going through this suffering."

Annan's spinners would have us believe that the problem of U.N. sex predators is confined to a tiny band of rogues and locals beyond the control of headquarters. But according to Bourguet's lawyer, there was an entire network of U.N. personnel who had sex with underage girls in Congo and the Central African Republic. Investigators are now digging into claims of U.N. infiltration by organized pedophiles.

The Times of London reports further that two Russian pilots who served in the U.N.'s peacekeeping contingent based in Mbandaka "paid young girls with jars of mayonnaise and jam to have sex with them. They filmed the sessions and sent the tapes to Russia. But the men were tipped off and left the area before U.N. investigators arrived." The paper also reports that at least two other U.N. officials -- a Ukrainian and a Canadian -- left the Congo after getting local women pregnant.

In July 2002, Congolese military official Jean Pierre Ondekane said that all the U.N. mission in Congo would be remembered for in the village of Kisangani was "for running after little girls." Annan's special adviser from Jordan, Prince Zeid Raad Al Hussein, concluded last year that the "situation appears to be one of 'zero-compliance with zero-tolerance' throughout the mission."

Human rights groups say such monstrosities have been tolerated by U.N. brass for years. Joseph Loconte noted in the Weekly Standard last month that the Congo revelations come three years after another U.N. report found "widespread" evidence of sexual abuse of West African refugees. Girls and women in East Timor, Cambodia and Kosovo have reported sex crimes perpetrated by U.N. peacekeepers.

In 2001, American whistleblower Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska policewoman who worked for U.N. security in Bosnia, uncovered scores of sex crime allegations and prostitution rings in the Balkans involving her fellow U.N. employees. Girls were forced to dance in bars for U.N. personnel and beaten or raped, Bolkovac reported. After being fired from her job for "time sheet irregularities," she told a British tribunal that Mike Stiers, the international police task force's deputy commissioner, flippantly dismissed victims of human trafficking as "just prostitutes."

This mother of all humanitarian abuse scandals at the U.N. is only just beginning to pierce the world's conscience. Annan has trotted out a refurbished zero-tolerance policy and is trumpeting a few arrests in Morocco. But such faint-hearted damage control measures are not enough.

posted February 16, 2005 06:08 PM              

CIA, FBI Warn Panel on Top Threats to U.S
By KATHERINE SHRADER, AP

AP


CIA Director Porter Goss, left, and FBI Director Robert Mueller appear before a Senate panel Wednesday.

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WASHINGTON (Feb. 16) - Al-Qaida and associated groups top the list of threats to the United States, leading government intelligence officials told Congress on Wednesday in a grim assessment that also highlighted Iran's emergence as a major threat to American interests in the Middle East.

Despite gains made against al-Qaida and other affiliates, CIA Director Porter Goss, in an unusually blunt statement before the mostly secretive Senate Intelligence Committee, said the terror group is intent on finding ways to circumvent U.S. security enhancements to attack the homeland.

''It may be only a matter of time before al-Qaida or other groups attempt to use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons. We must focus on that,'' Goss said.

FBI Director Robert Mueller cautioned of the risk posed by radicalized Muslim converts inside the United States and said he worries about a sleeper operative who may have been in place for years, awaiting orders launch an attack.

''I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing,'' he said in his prepared remarks.

More than three years since the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Goss, Mueller and other intelligence leaders provided these and other bleak assessments at the annual briefing on threats from around the globe.

Also at the hearing, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, painted Iran as a leading threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East. In his prepared testimony, Jacoby said he believes that Iran will continue its support for terrorism and aid for insurgents in Iraq.

He said the country's long-term goal is to expel the United States from the region, and noted that political reform movements there have lost momentum.

Goss said that Islamic extremists are exploiting the conflict in Iraq and fighters there represent a ''potential pool of contacts'' to build transnational terror groups. He said the most-wanted terrorist in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, hopes to establish Iraq as a safe-haven to bring about a final victory over the West.

Goss also said that the intelligence community has yet to get to the ''end of the trail'' of the nuclear black market run by disgraced Pakistani scientist, A.Q. Khan. Goss wouldn't rule out the possibility that organizations, rather than states, could obtain nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

He also couldn't assure senators that the United States doesn't face a threat from nuclear weapons that may be missing from Russia.

In the past year, the intelligence community has been faced with a series of negative reports, including the work of the Sept. 11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee's inquiry on the flawed Iraq intelligence.

And next month, President Bush's commission to investigate the intelligence community's capabilities on weapons of mass destruction is also expected to submit its findings.

Given the after-the-fact investigations into the Iraq intelligence, Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said his panel will become more proactive in how it reviews the intelligence community's strengths and weaknesses, already focusing on nuclear terrorism and Iran.

In related developments:

-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld also sent out a warning, telling the House Armed Services Committee he believes terrorists are regrouping for another strike. But he also said the United States is preparing to deal with any threat.

''The extremists continue to plot to attack again. They are at this moment recalibrating and reorganizing. And so are we,'' the Pentagon chief said.

-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plugged the administration's request for $5.8 billion to fight terrorism and also made a pitch on Capitol Hill for an additional $750 million this year for other countries that assisted in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Senate hearing came as the White House continues its eight-week-long search for a new national intelligence director, a position created in last year's intelligence reorganization bill.

Democrats were critical Wednesday of the pace of the search, saying the administration has not shown the same urgency that Congress showed in creating the position.

AP-NY-02-16-05 14:52 EST