Revealed: how Israel helped Amin to take power

By Richard Dowden
17 August 2003

When Radio Uganda announced at dawn on 25 January 1971 that Idi Amin was Uganda's new ruler, many people suspected that Britain had a hand in the coup. However, Foreign Office papers released last year point to a different conspirator: Israel.

The first telegrams to London from the British High Commissioner in Kampala, Richard Slater, show a man shocked and bewildered by the coup. But he quickly turned to the man who he thought might know what was going on; Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli defence attaché. He found the Israeli colonel with Amin. They had spent the morning of the coup together. Slater's next telegram says that according to Colonel Bar-Lev: "In the course of last night General Amin caused to be arrested all officers in the armed forces sympathetic to Obote ... Amin is now firmly in control of all elements of army which controls vital points in Uganda ... the Israeli defence attaché discounts any possibility of moves against Amin."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=434486

Regardless of who backed him getting to power, Amin ended up biting every single hand that fed and nurtured him. He expelled all Israeli citizens from Uganda in 1972 after the Israelis refused to sell his government F-4 Phantom fighters to bomb his neighbors.

The height of his turning on Israel came with the Entebbe raid when he "hosted" a hijacked Air France plane that required an IDF raid on the airport at Entebbe where the hijackers had landed the plane.

Mugabe is the last of the wingnut dictator breed from the "Good Old Days" in Africa: His buddies Mobutu and Amin are waiting for him in the Afterworld.

Same is true of the US. The longstanding foreign policies of both regimes are a clear indication of how they value the lives of their citizens.

and I am off topic but it was the name Amin that jogged this thought along with a gigantic article in the paper today on Amin. Amin will garner (actually already has garned) more coverage to memoralize his passing than Mazen Dana an award winning photo journalist who was reviled today on CNN as a terrorist sympathizer by Blitzer. That is how it is now. Socio and psychopaths kind of honoring each other. Sort of like honor among thieves I guess.

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