From the New York Times blog space of Nicholas Kristof, “I have been silenced,” Eric Reeves, 25 February 2015

Eric Reeves, 25 February 2015    |    http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/i-have-been-silenced/?_r=0/       •

By means of a nasty cyber-attack, the Khartoum (Sudan) regime has rendered my three Sudan-related websites unusable to all who visited my Facebook page on February 21 and 22, 2014. Many Facebook visitors subsequently going to my Sudan sites immediately found innumerable and highly aggressive “pop-up” ads.  Nothing could be accessed, by me or by my 1,200+ Facebook “friends,” mainly Sudanese from both Sudan and South Sudan.  They had received as a “message” from me pornographic videography (purportedly including me) containing potent malware; the message was sent to both my daughters as well as other family members/“Friends.” Other visitors experienced various difficulties and anomalies in accessing their own Facebook page; other consequences may as yet be undiscovered (my computer was behaving very peculiarly, and I have had to replace the hard-drive).  I experienced another cyber-attack several years ago; computer technicians traced the attack to Iran—Khartoum’s self-proclaimed “strategic ally—and found it extremely sophisticated and dangerous—and not just to my website but all websites hosted on their platform.  Understandably, I was asked to take my website elsewhere, which I did at very considerable cost in monthly security expenses.

I now have three Sudan-related websites, all of which receive substantial traffic: [1] my primary site, carrying regularly analyses of events in Sudan and South Sudan | www.sudanreeeves.org; [2] a site that carries an extensive recording of aerial attacks by Khartoum on civilians and humanitarians, going back to 1999 | www.SudanBombing.org (there have been thousands of such bombing attacks in Darfur, South Sudan, and most recently South Kordofan and Blue Nile); and [3] the site archiving my recent very lengthy E-book, Compromising With Evil: An archival history of greater Sudan, 2007 – 2012 | www.CompromisingWithEvil.org.

I have frequently been the target of slanderous comments by Khartoum’s officials, both in their domestic press, in comments to international journalists, and through their embassy in Washington, DC.  This I accept as the price for being a harsh critic of genocide, massive political repression, and the regime’s support for international terrorism and radical Islam—the latter detailed in the two sets of leaked minutes I have recently published (from July 1, 2014 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1Cb and from August 31, 2014 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1wk ).  With the publication of these leaked transcripts, however, I have apparently crossed the line.  Given my analyses of the thinking and policies of the most senior military and officials in the regime—including President Omar al-Bashir—Khartoum was ready to exact revenge from afar.

I cited al-Bashir extensively in an analysis of the July 1, 2014 minutes I had posted the day before the cyber-attack via my Facebook page (http://wp.me/p45rOG-1Cc ).

President Omar al-Bashir, indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court

The meeting begins with remarks by Minister of Defense Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein—words that will shock only those unfamiliar with this regime:

We won’t stop the war on Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Our National Dialogue initiative is just a maneuver to provide us with political cover for a continuation of the war against the rebellion. We have instructed the Air Force to bomb any place, whether it is a school, hospital, or a nongovernmental humanitarian organization operating in rebel-controlled areas without permission from the government. Such presence is offensive and should be destroyed. (Khartoum, July 1, 2014 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1Cb )

Defense Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity

Let’s be clear about what is represented by an attack on my means of communicating strong condemnation of such policies: an American citizen, writing in the U.S. under full protection of the Constitution, has been hacked by a genocidal regime and at least partially silenced.  This is the same regime with which an Obama administration State Department official is meeting this week in Khartoum.