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An American Oligarch‘s Dirty Tale of Corruption

By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 12.06.2015

Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.

What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene manipulation of the most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York billionaire.

In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked “Confidential” Soros outlines a detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, “A short and medium term comprehensive strategy for the new Ukraine,” the memo from Soros calls for steps to “restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.” To do the restoring, Soros blithely notes that “General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the auspices of the Atlantic Council [emphasis added—f.w.e.] will advise President Poroshenko how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.”

Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training Ukrainian army personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in Ukraine. The Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank.

Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum which does business in Poland.

Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge of the 1999 bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian soldiers guarding the Pristina International Airport. The Russians were there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia peacekeeping operation supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson refused Clark, retorting, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you.” Now Clark apparently decided to come out of retirement for the chance to go at Russia directly.

Naked asset grab

In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s “first priority must be to regain control of financial markets,” which he assures Poroshenko that Soros would be ready to assist in: “I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him out about the swap agreement.”

He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via a special EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU’s “AAA” top credit rating to provide a risk insurance for investment into Ukraine.

Whose risk would the EU insure?

Soros details, “I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian businesses. This is likely to attract the interest of the investment community. As stated above, Ukraine must become an attractive investment destination.” Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, “The investments will be for-profit but I will pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations. This should allay suspicions that I am advocating policies in search of personal gain. “

Anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980’s, will know that his supposedly philanthropic “democracy-building” projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990’s allowed Soros the businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University’s “shock therapy” messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the post-Soviet governments to privatize and open to a “free market” at once, rather than gradually.

The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the seemingly seamless interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros the philanthropist. In West Africa George Soros backed a former Open Society employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, giving her international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her presidency she had been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market game, studying economics at Harvard and working for the US-controlled World Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi. Before becoming Liberia’s President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).

Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first acts as President was to also invite the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to “protect George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human rights.”

Naftogaz the target

The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and energy monopoly, Naftogaz. He writes, “The centerpiece of economic reforms will be the reorganization of Naftogaz and the introduction of market pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden subsidies…”

In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock Therapy: “I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your government and give your wholehearted support to a radical, ‘big bang’ type of approach. That is to say, administrative controls would be removed and the economy would move to market prices rapidly rather than gradually… Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the hidden subsidies…”

Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization “big bang.”

The Puppet-Master?

The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power.

Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions, who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:

Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.

Soros shapes ‘New Ukraine’

Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros’ IRF money is behind creation of a National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree from Poroshenko which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature. Soros writes, “The framework for bringing the various branches of government together has also emerged. The National Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The International Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the Soros Foundations was the sole financial supporter of the NRC until now…”

Soros’ NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override parliamentary debate to push through “reforms,” with the declared first priority being privatization of Naftogaz and raising gas prices drastically to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt country can hardly afford.

In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key role in selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers—Natalia Jaresko, an American ex- State Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics Minister, and a health minister from Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to his proposal for a “big bank” privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states, “You are fortunate to have appointed three ‘new Ukrainian’ ministers and several natives (sic) who are committed to this approach.”

Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU that the current government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the notorious corruption that has dominated every Kiev regime since 1991. Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will convince the EU to cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March 2015 paper says that, “It is essential for the government to produce a visible demonstration (sic) during the next three months in order to change the widely prevailing image of Ukraine as an utterly corrupt country.” That he states will open the EU to make the €11 billion insurance guarantee investment fund.

While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not corrupt, Soros reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper procedures block his agenda. Talking about his proposals to reform Ukraine’s constitution to enable privatizations and other Soros-friendly moves, he complains, “The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly elected Rada on proper procedures and total transparency.”

Soros suggests that he intends to create this “visible demonstration” through his initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine’s legislature.

George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank to lobby his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no doubt playing a subtle role.

George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros once boasted in a TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile with forged papers, assisting the Horthy government to seize property of other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death camps. Soros told the TV moderator, “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”

This is the same morality apparently behind Soros’ activities in Ukraine today. It seems again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he helped bring to power in the February 2014 US coup d’etat is riddled with explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of “public-private-partnership.” Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich private investors like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his Ukraine strategy memo, “George Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new Ukraine, March 12, 2015.”

January 17, 2020 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception | Africa, AFRICOM, European Union, International Renaissance Foundation, Soros Open Society Foundation, Ukraine | Leave a comment

‘We did not expect the world to be silent’: US continuing to kill civilians with impunity

By Darius Shahtahmasebi | RT | April 4, 2019

The Trump administration, which made promises to rein in Washington’s unnecessary wars, has not only expanded the US’ covert and lethal drone program, but has taken the covering up of its civilian death toll to a whole new level.

Like most of the battlefields opened more widely under the Obama administration, Donald Trump ramped up airstrikes against the infamous Al-Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia approximately two years ago. And, like most drone wars expanded under Obama and dramatically widened under Trump, the details of this covert assault are continuously swept under the rug, particularly when it comes to civilian casualties.

The Pentagon has openly said that its airstrikes in Somalia have killed zero civilians.

Yet, recently, an Amnesty International investigation into just five of the strikes carried out since March 2017 by both manned and unmanned reaper aircraft found that the strikes resulted in at least 14 civilian deaths, with instances of eight civilian injuries as well. In total, the US has carried out more than 100 strikes in Somalia since 2017.

Amnesty has made it quite clear that the attacks have violated international humanitarian law, and may amount to war crimes (remember, they have only assessed five out of over 100 so far). Weirdly enough, the New York Times piece introducing this report failed to mention that last point, even when Amnesty mentioned it very early on in its release (though, that being said, the Times did slip a half-hearted attempt at adopting a moral and legal stance near the end of the article, noting that “critics have claimed” drone warfare “could also result in war crimes.”)

Not to worry though, when approached for comment by Amnesty International, the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) repeated the claim that no civilians have died in American operations in Somalia. So, that’s that then.

The US military truly is an amazing, benevolent force for good in the world, isn’t it? It managed to ramp up its airstrikes in Somalia after the US president signed an executive order in March 2017 declaring southern Somalia an “area of active hostilities.” It conducted more airstrikes in Somalia than in Libya and Yemen combined. Just in the first few months of 2019 alone, it has already carried out 24 strikes on Somali territory, compared to only 14 in the whole of 2016, prior to Trump taking office. In 2018, US airstrikes killed 326 people. And yet, not a single civilian has died or been injured. Remarkable.

One such strike on the hamlet of Farah Waeys in Somalia allegedly killed members “or affiliates of Al-Shabaab,” according to AFRICOM. Those affiliates, however, were actually two civilian men, as well as five women and children who were injured. Another strike killed three local farmers in the early hours of a morning in November 2017, who were resting after working all night digging canals. AFRICOM even admitted it carried an airstrike in the region on that same morning.

If we thought that it was hard to monitor US-led covert wars in the Middle East and Africa before, it seems to have gotten even worse under Trump. Just recently, Trump allowed the CIA to keep secret how many civilians are killed in its airstrikes outside of war zones. As it transpires, a law passed by Congress making it compulsory for the Pentagon to publicly report civilians killed in its operations applies to the Pentagon only, and not the CIA drone program.

The law is pointless anyway, when one considers how the Pentagon assesses whether civilians have been killed or not. Donald Trump’s relaxation of the rules surrounding airstrikes are in and of themselves a pathway to a war crime tribunal. According to a retired US brigadier general who was consulted by Amnesty, Trump’s executive order widened the list of potential targets to include adult males living in villages sympathetic to Al-Shabaab who are located within range of known fighters. This was already a known tactic under the peace-prize-winning president Barack Obama, who counted all “military-age males” in the vicinity of a target as militants.

In other words, we cannot trust the Pentagon to be forthcoming with these statistics even when they are compelled to by law. Consider this gate-keeping paragraph by the New York Times, which for all of its empire-serving rhetoric, cannot resist but tell the truth:

“Yet, even under the previous rules, no matter how precise the weapons, how careful the planners and how skilled the fighters, mistakes, faulty intelligence, even calculated decisions often led to civilians being killed. The official data ranges from none to maddeningly vague, and the safeguards to mitigate civilian deaths are insufficient.”

Furthermore, defence officials have said under anonymity that the CIA and the Pentagon’s efforts in places like Somalia are heavily intertwined anyway, often “piggybacking” off American military posts or US-backed militias. The potential for the US to lie to us through its teeth due to this arrangement is astounding, to say the least.

As far back as 2015, four former US Air Force servicemen wrote an open letter to Barack Obama warning about the effects of drone warfare, calling it a “recruitment tool” for groups like ISIS. They advanced the crazy notion that the killing of innocent civilians has acted as one of the most “devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world.”

At a press briefing in New York, the servicemen also revealed that drone operators would refer to children as “fun-size terrorists,” and justify their killing with the phrase that they were “cutting the grass before it grows too long.” Some drone operators even flew their missions while impaired by drug and alcohol abuse.

“We kill four and create 10 [militants],” one serviceman said.

In the past, Somali officials also warned that the United States was being duped by rival clans who fed the US military bad intelligence while conducting its operations. When the US boasts, for example, that single bombardments have killed over 150 Al-Shabaab fighters, you can be pretty sure that we are not getting the full picture.

Despite all this, you can always count on the corporate media to somehow put a rotation on the whole issue that amazingly shifts the blame to other parties. Take, for example, this gem, again, from the New York Times:

“A lack of transparency and accountability for civilian deaths helps enemies spin false narratives, makes it harder for allies to defend American actions and sets a bad example for other countries that are rapidly adding drones to their arsenals.”

The American war machine killing civilians helps Washington’s enemies “spin false narratives?” If anything, I think America’s insistence on blowing up Muslim people, left right and center, with zero accountability or compensation of any kind, makes it very easy for its so-called enemies to spin narratives that are one hundred percent grounded in the truth. Why would they even need to lie?

And where will all this take us? As astutely noted by Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project:

“The Trump era has made clear just how vulnerable policy limits are and how dangerous it is when a president claims legal authority to kill in secret. In 2017, Trump lifted a key policy constraint limiting lethal strikes to ‘high-level militants’ who pose ‘a continuing and imminent threat to Americans.’ He also reportedly declared that parts of Yemen and Somalia were exempt from the meager remaining limits. The result? The United States is killing more low-level suspects, regardless of whether the government has reason to believe they pose a threat to the United States.”

The US is not even at war with Somalia, yet somehow there are at least 500 US troops stationed there, with a further 6,500 spread out over the African continent. The US has even hired private contractors to supply proxy forces in the country. Even the Guardian reported at the end of last year that the ramping up of US airstrikes were not really changing the situation on the ground in Somalia, as the terrorist group continued to strengthen its grip on the country.

As for the innocent civilians killed by American tax dollars, we would do well to bear these “statistics” (they’re people, after all) in mind the next time a horrific attack such as the one that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, in mid-March this year occurs. We should bear in mind that those world leaders who expressed their outrage and support to New Zealand, at the end of the day, continue to be the leading perpetrators of anti-Muslim violence behind closed doors and under loosely swept rugs.

As one farmer from the Darusalaam village, Somalia told Amnesty: “We did not expect the world to be silent.”

April 5, 2019 Posted by aletho | War Crimes | Africa, AFRICOM, CIA, Somalia, United States | 1 Comment

To Ramp Up Fear of Russia in Africa, NYT Downplays Massive US Military Presence

By Adam Johnson – FAIR – April 4, 2019

The New York Times (3/31/19) added to its series of reports depicting Official Enemies surpassing the US in the race for global dominance. It seems that having taken control of the Arctic (FAIR.org, 9/15/15), the nuclear domain (FAIR.org, 3/7/18) and a whole host of other spaces the US is “behind” in, Russia is now gobbling up Africa—a threat the US, presumably, must counter with an even greater military build-up.

The report, “Russia’s Military Mission Creep Advances to a New Front: Africa,” by Eric Schmitt, asserting an uptick in Russian weapons contracts and military training exercises in Africa, is thin on context and hard numbers, but is artificially fortified with a series of anecdotes and frightening quotes. Since the obvious rejoinder to any discussion of increased Russian presence in Africa is, “OK, but what is the US’s current reach?” the Times hangs a lampshade on the inconvenience with this throwaway line:

The United States military has a relatively light footprint across Africa.

About 6,000 United States troops and 1,000 Defense Department civilians or contractors work on a variety of missions throughout Africa, mainly training and conducting exercises with local armies.

According to documents obtained by the Intercept’s Nick Turse (12/1/18), the US currently has 34 military bases in Africa; Russia has zero. The Times doesn’t tell us how many “contractors’ and “troops” Russia has in Africa, so it’s not clear what the so-called “light footprint” is “relative” to. Is it 10? 100? 10,000? If it’s a lot less than 6,000, then the story is a bit of a dud. Alas, we’re simply left guessing at the “relative” size of Russia’s Africa presence.

Also worth noting: “Light footprint” is the same Orwellian phrase the Pentagon has been using for years to obscure the growth of AFRICOM, as in this AFRICOM press release (6/13/12) :

AFRICOM Will Maintain Light Footprint in Africa — The United States has no plans to seek permanent bases in Africa, and, in the spirit of the new defense strategic guidance, will continue to maintain a “light footprint” on the continent, the top US Africa Command officer said.

AFRICOM map of Africa, published by The Intercept (12/1/18). Note that in the Pentagon’s doubletalk, the US does not have “permanent bases” in Africa—it has “enduring locations.”

It’s always reassuring when the paper of record adopts the US government’s preferred press release language. (See also New York Times, 1/25/12 , 3/1/19.)

Aside from quotes from US military brass, Schmitt’s report was primarily propped up with testimony from weapons contractor-funded think tanks, namely the Institute for the Study of War and the Center for International and Strategic Studies, which both provided urgent, stakes-raising narratives:

Russia is seeking more strategic bases for its troops, including at Libyan ports on the Mediterranean Sea and at naval logistics centers in Eritrea and Sudan on the Red Sea, according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a research organization in Washington….

“Moscow and its private military contractors are arming some of the region’s weakest governments and backing the continent’s autocratic rulers,” said Judd Devermont, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This engagement threatens to exacerbate current conflict zones.”

Panic over a creeping Russia menace in Africa is timed, not coincidentally, with congressional debate over the Defense budget, submitted by Trump two weeks ago. In addition, some congressional Democrats and Republicans are working to erode what little caps exist for the military budget, with a planned vote next week in the House for lifting limits on discretionary Defense spending.

Needless to say, the primary funders of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Institute for Study of War—the think tanks whose juicy quotes and studies bolster the primary arguments of the articles’ premise—stand to make tens of billions in profit from both of these legislative efforts. Having the New York Times provide marketing collateral for these efforts is no doubt useful in convincing an increasingly war-weary public, and accordingly, war-wary Congress, to rubberstamp yet another record-setting Pentagon budget.

For hawkish arms industry-funded groups like CSIS, the answer is always to build more weapons systems and to paint enemy states in the most sinister light possible. One 2017 study by FAIR (5/8/17) found that while commenting on Korea, CSIS’s experts either explicitly backed its funder Lockheed Martin’s THAAD weapons system, or its central value proposition that it would ward off a hostile North Korea, 30 out of 30 times. There were zero examples of a CSIS rep downplaying a threat or arguing against more military spending. When asked in email to provide an example of CSIS saying any threat was exaggerated or advising against any kind of military spending increase, the CSIS spokesperson declined to comment.

The primary purpose of organizations like CSIS and ISW is to push the weapons systems of the corporations that fund them. Any analysis of their reports, studies or media appearances will show that at least 99 percent of the time, they come down on the side of hyping threats and pushing for the shiny new publicly funded instruments that would counter those threats.

This glaring conflict of interest, as usual, isn’t disclosed by the New York Times. A particularly strange omission, since it was the Times itself in 2016 that, citing leaked emails, argued (8/7/16) that CSIS was acting as a thinly veiled lobbyist for its weapons-maker funder General Atomics, and was, according to its own report, “blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists.”

“As a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies did not file a lobbying report,” Eric Lipton and Brooke Williams reported, “but the goals of the effort were clear.”

They are clear indeed. Yet since that time, CSIS has continued to be the go-to source for analyzing global threats for the Times, without even a token disclosure.

Also as usual, the article went to no skeptical voices for any comment; the only sources sought were war makers and those funded by war makers. They all worked to paint a one-sided, cartoon picture of a Russian takeover of Africa, complete with the patented New York Times double standard of motives: Russia is said by Schmitt to be seeking “new economic markets and energy resources.” The United States? Simply there to provide “foreign aid” and “train and conduct exercises with local armies.” In the Times, the idea that the US would also be motivated by securing markets and resources would be tantamount to lizard people conspiracy theory talk. But for Russia, it’s simply taken for granted.

In the Times, Official Enemy threats are unquestionably bad and unquestionably sinister in nature. The only answer? Let the Pentagon gravy train run its course, year in and year out because invariably there will always be, with the help of the New York Times, the specter of an enemy threat “advancing on a new front.”

April 5, 2019 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Africa, AFRICOM, New York Times, United States | Leave a comment

US Military Presence in Africa: All Over Continent and Still Expanding

By Arkady SAVITSKY | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.08.2018

Around 200,000 US troops are stationed in 177 countries throughout the world. Those forces utilize several hundred military installations. Africa is no exemption. On August 2, Maj. Gen. Roger L. Cloutier took command of US Army Africa, promising to “hit the ground running.”

The US is not waging any wars in Africa but it has a significant presence on the continent. Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and other special ops are currently conducting nearly 100 missions across 20 African countries at any given time, waging secret, limited-scale operations. According to the magazine Vice, US troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises and military engagements throughout Africa per year, an average of 10 per day — an astounding 1,900% increase since the command rolled out 10 years ago. Many activities described as “advise and assist” are actually indistinguishable from combat by any basic definition.

There are currently roughly 7,500 US military personnel, including 1,000 contractors, deployed in Africa. For comparison, that figure was only 6,000 just a year ago. The troops are strung throughout the continent spread across 53 countries. There are 54 countries on the “Dark Continent.” More than 4,000 service members have converged on East Africa. The US troop count in Somalia doubled last year.

When AFRICOM was created there were no plans to establish bases or put boots on the ground. Today, a network of small staging bases or stations have cropped up. According to investigative journalist Nick Turse, “US military bases (including forward operating sites, cooperative security locations, and contingency locations) in Africa number around fifty, at least.” US troops in harm’s way in Algeria, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan Tunisia, and Uganda qualif y for extra pay.

The US African Command (AFRICOM) runs drone surveillance programs, cross-border raids, and intelligence. AFRICOM has claimed responsibility for development, public health, professional and security training, and other humanitarian tasks. Officials from the Departments of State, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, and Justice, among other agencies, are involved in AFRICOM activities. Military attachés outnumber diplomats at many embassies across Africa.

Last October, four US soldiers lost their lives in Niger. The vast majority of Americans probably had no idea that the US even had troops participating in combat missions in Africa before the incident took place. One serviceman was reported dead in Somalia in June. The Defense Department is mulling plans to “right-size” special operations missions in Africa and reassign troops to other regions, aligning the efforts with the security priorities defined by the 2018 National Defense Strategy. That document prioritizes great power competition over defeating terrorist groups in remote corners of the globe. Roughly 1,200 special ops troops on missions in Africa are looking at a drawdown. But it has nothing to do with leaving or significantly cutting back. And the right to unilaterally return will be reserved. The infrastructure is being expanded enough to make it capable of accommodating substantial reinforcements. The construction work is in progress. The bases will remain operational and their numbers keep on rising.

A large drone base in Agadez, the largest city in central Niger, is reported to be under construction. The facility will host armed MQ-9 Reaper drones which will finally take flight in 2019. The MQ-9 Reaper has a range of 1,150 miles, allowing it to provide strike support and intelligence-gathering capabilities across West and North Africa from this new base outside of Agadez. It can carry GBU-12 Paveway II bombs. The aircraft features synthetic aperture radar for integrating GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The armament suite can include four Hellfire air-to-ground anti-armor and anti-personnel missiles. There are an estimated 800 US troops on the ground in Niger, along with one drone base and the base in Agadez that is being built. The Hill called it “the largest US Air Force-led construction project of all time.”

According to Business Insider, “The US military presence here is the second largest in Africa behind the sole permanent US base on the continent, in the tiny Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti.” Four thousand American servicemen are stationed at Camp Lemonnier (the US base located near Djibouti City) — a critical strategic base for the American military because of its port and its proximity to the Middle East.

Officially, the camp is the only US base on the continent or, as AFRICOM calls it, “a forward operating site,” — the others are “cooperative security locations” or “non-enduring contingency locations.” Camp Lemonnier is the hub of a network of American drone bases in Africa that are used for aerial attacks against insurgents in Yemen, Nigeria, and Somalia, as well as for exercising control over the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. In 2014, the US signed a new 20-year lease on the base with the Djiboutian government, and committed over $1.4 billion to modernize and expand the facility in the years to come.

In March, the US and Ghana signed a military agreement outlining the conditions of the US military presence in that nation, including its construction activities. The news was met with protests inside the country.

It should be noted that the drone attacks that are regularly launched in Africa are in violation of US law. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), adopted after Sept. 11, 2001, states that the president is authorized to use force against the planners of those attacks and those who harbor them. But that act does not apply to the rebel groups operating in Africa.

It’s hard to believe that the US presence will be really diminished, and there is no way to know, as too many aspects of it are shrouded in secrecy with nothing but “leaks” emerging from time to time. It should be noted that the documents obtained by TomDispatch under the United States Freedom of Information Act contradict AFRICOM’s official statements about the scale of US military bases around the world, including 36 AFRICOM bases in 24 African countries that have not been previously disclosed in official reports.

The US foothold in Africa is strong. It’s almost ubiquitous. Some large sites under construction will provide the US with the ability to host large aircraft and accommodate substantial forces and their hardware. This all prompts the still-unanswered question — “Where does the US have troops in Africa, and why?” One thing is certain — while waging an intensive drone war, the US is building a vast military infrastructure for a large-scale ground war on the continent.

August 31, 2018 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Africa, AFRICOM, Yemen | Leave a comment

US Military Fraud Endemic in Overseas Operations

By Wayne MADSEN | Strategic Culture Foundation | 21.11.2017

History shows us that when empires over-extend themselves, military commanders become semi-independent warlords who usher into place systems of graft and corruption. Such was the case in the Roman Empire in 193 A.D., when Emperor Pertinax’s Praetorian Guard – a combination personal security force for the emperor and elite special forces unit that distinguished itself on distant battlefields – sold out the emperor in exchange for a bribe from an aspirant emperor, Didius Julianus. The Praetorian Guard assassinated Pertinax and swore their allegiance to the new emperor, Julianus.

The rot of corruption would help ensure the downfall of other global empires. The fraudulent British East India Company and its corporate nabobs, backed by British military and naval power, helped to ignite colonial rebellions in America in the 1770s and India in 1857.

As the United States has over-extended its military realm into the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, Europe, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, corruption within so-called “Areas of Responsibility” assigned to regional US military commands has run rampant.

Within the US Pacific Command (PACOM) region, a major bribery and fraud scandal centered on a US Navy contractor, Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), headed by Leonard Glenn Francis, a 350-pound Malaysian citizen nicknamed “Fat Leonard.” In return for cash, vacations at five-star hotels, first- and business-class flights, expensive concert tickets, Rolex watches, Mont Blanc pens, Dom Perignon champagne, vintage wine, Cuban cigars, spa treatments, foie gras, $2000 bottles of cognac, and prostitutes, US Navy officers provided Leonard with virtual unfettered access to Navy intelligence and sensitive contract information that was used by GDMA to secure lucrative Navy logistics contracts. The “Fat Leonard” scandal grew to include senior officers, including admirals, attached to the US Seventh Fleet in Japan. The Navy’s investigation is continuing, and more than 60 additional admirals are reportedly under investigation by law enforcement authorities. For years, the Navy scandal extended from Japan to the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sabah, South Korea, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Australia, Sri Lanka, Hawaii, and Washington, DC and involved, in addition to Navy officer and enlisted personnel, Marine Corps officers and US government civilians, including investigators of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).

One of the worst frauds to have arisen from the neo-conservative bowels of the George W. Bush administration was the US Africa Command (AFRICOM). The June 4, 2017, strangling death in Bamako, Mali of US Army Green Beret Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar by two US Navy SEALs is now linked to his discovery that the two Navy personnel were pocketing official funds used by AFRICOM to pay off informants in the West African country. This type of fraud points to a culture of malfeasance present in US area of responsibility commands, including AFRICOM, Central Command (CENTCOM), and Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

According to reports in The New York Times and The Daily Beast, the death of Melgar at the hands of the two SEAL thieves occurred within a barracks unit within the heavily-fortified US embassy compound in Mali. The SEALS, Petty Officer Anthony DeDolph and Adam C. Matthews, allegedly killed Melgar after he refused an offer to share their ill-gotten loot and shared, via email, his concerns with his wife back in the United States. The SEALS claimed Melgar died after becoming unconscious during a hand-to-hand combat training session. The SEALS also told military investigators that Melgar was drunk when he became unconscious as the result of a chokehold placed on him during the roughhousing. However, the US Special Operations Command and Army Criminal Investigative Command (USACIC) decided the SEALS had changed their stories so many times that they became subjects, rather than witnesses, in the investigation. An autopsy revealed that there were no traces of alcohol or drugs in Melgar’s body at the time of his death. Furthermore, Melgar was reported by friends and family to have been a teetotaler.

AFRICOM and USACIC tried to cover up the details of Melgar’s death until The New York Times originally broke the story about the death last month. USACIC handed off investigation of the case to the NCIS, which is worse than its Army counterpart in covering up sensitive military criminal cases. Neither of the two SEALS, both of whom were transferred back to the United States and were placed on administrative leave, have been charged in the murder of Melgar. It was apparently officers of the US Special Operations Command, which is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, who tipped off the press about the cover-up involving Melgar’s death.

AFRICOM has also been hesitant to provide full details about an ambush of a joint US-Nigerien unit operating near the Niger village of Tongo-Tongo in October of this year. Four US Army personnel were killed by an armed force that remains unidentified by AFRICOM. Tongo-Tongo sits astride a major African smuggling route for humans, drugs, ivory, and weapons between West Africa and the failed state of Libya. It was later reported that the four US soldiers died at the hands of the attackers after their unit’s Nigerien army personnel fled the scene during the attack. The body of one of the American troops, Sgt. La David Johnson, showed signs of being tortured and executed by the unidentified captors.

The case of Melgar is similar to the murder of West Point ethics professor, Army Col. Ted Westhusing in Baghdad in 2005. Like AFRICOM in Mali and other African countries, CENTCOM was entrusted with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash used to pay-off informants and make local purchases on the Iraqi economy.

Westhusing’s family and friends rejected the Army’s determination that Westhusing took his own life. The Army based its decision on a “suicide” note said to be written in Westhusing’s handwriting. At the time of his death, Westhusing was investigating contract violations and human rights abuses by US Investigations Services (USIS), a privatized former entity of the US Office of Personnel Management later purchased by The Carlyle Group, a firm with close links to George H. W. Bush. While he was in Iraq training Iraqi police and overseeing the USIS contract to train police as part of the Pentagon’s Civilian Police Assistance Training Team, Westhusing received an anonymous letter that reported USIS’s Private Services Division (PSD) was engaged in fraudulent activities in Iraq, including over-billing the government. In addition, the letter reported that USIS security personnel had murdered innocent Iraqis. After demanding answers from USIS, Westhusing reported the problems up the chain of command. After an “investigation,” the Army found no evidence of wrongdoing by USIS.

Days before his supposed suicide by a “self-inflicted” gunshot wound in a Camp Dublin, Iraq, trailer located at Baghdad International Airport, West Point Honor Board member Westhusing reported in e-mail to the United States that “terrible things were going on in Iraq.” He also said he hoped he would make it back to the United States alive. Westhusing had three weeks left in his tour of duty in Iraq when he allegedly shot himself in June 2005.

The cover-up of Westhusing’s death involved the same Army Criminal Investigative Command that covered up Melgar’s death in Mali. The murders of Melgar and Westhusing are not stand-alone events regarding US military forays around the world. Army Corporal Pat Tillman, the star National Football League player who enlisted in the Army after 9/11, became disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan. After Tillman’s private feelings about the Afghan war were discovered by senior commanders in his chain-of-command, Tillman was “fragged” by members of his own unit in Khost province on April 22, 2004. Tillman’s diary, uniforms, and other possessions were burned by his unit to cover up his execution by his own colleagues.

On September 4, 2006, Army Lt. Col. Marshall Gutierrez, the chief logistics officer at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, who was investigating over-payments for goods and services and other fraud, supposedly committed suicide in his base quarters after ingesting prescription sleeping pills and anti-freeze. In December 2006, Army Major Gloria Davis, a contracting officer at Camp Arifjan, allegedly committed suicide in Kuwait after she admitted to receiving $225,000 in bribes from Lee Dynamics, an Army logistics contractor. Davis had reportedly agreed to cooperate with government investigators in their overall investigation of contract fraud in Iraq and Kuwait.

In 2007, a senior Blackwater manager threatened to kill Jean C. Richter, the chief US State Department investigator of Blackwater’s dubious operations in Iraq, unless the State Department called off the investigation. The incident occurred as Richter focused on problems with Blackwater’s $1 billion State Department contract. The CEO of Blackwater was Erik Prince, whose sister, Betsy DeVos, now serves as Donald Trump’s Education Secretary. Prince later sold Blackwater, which is now known as Academi. Prince has reportedly been involved in AFRICOM operations in Libya and Somalia via his Reflex Responses (R2) firm, which is based in Abu Dhabi.

The July 2, 2007, “suicide” of Army Lt. Col. Thomas Mooney, the US Defense Attaché in Nicosia, Cyprus, was said to be the result of a “self-inflicted cut to the throat.” Mooney’s body was found next to an embassy vehicle parked in a secluded location, some 30 miles west of Nicosia. He was said to have left the embassy in the embassy’s black Impala Chevrolet to pick up an arriving passenger at Larnaca International Airport. Although the US embassy and State Department ruled Mooney’s death a suicide, the Cypriot police did not agree with those findings but merely pointed out that suicide was illegal in Cyprus. Mooney was, according to our sources, investigating Iraq-related contract fraud involving companies headquartered in Cyprus, some of which were linked to the Israeli Mafia.

AFRICOM and PACOM – just as is the case with CENTCOM, which complements the culture of baksheesh bribery in the Middle East and South Asia – now find themselves mired in the same depths of kleptocratic fraud as is practiced in countries like Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso, where AFRICOM is active. The Fat Leonard scandal and the recent murder of Melgar in Mali are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the malfeasance involved in global US military operations.

When it comes to the US military operating in its overseas locations, the Latin phrase popularized by the Roman poet Juvenal, perhaps wise to the corruption of the Praetorian Guard of his time, comes to mind. “Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Who watches the watchmen?”

November 21, 2017 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | AFRICOM, United States, US Pacific Command | Leave a comment

U.S. Troop Deaths in Niger: AFRICOM’s Chickens Come Home to Roost

By Mark P. Fancher | Black Agenda Report | October 18, 2017

From the outset, the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has incorrectly presumed the stupidity of Africans and others who are concerned about the continent. To answer accusations that the U.S. uses its military to ensure continuing imperialist domination of Africa, AFRICOM has stubbornly insisted that its sole objectives are to advise and support the armies of African government “partners” and to provide humanitarian assistance. But we know the truth to be otherwise.

U.S. Army General Donald Bolduc shamelessly told NBC News: “America is not at war in Africa. But its partner forces are.” But even a soldier can recognize the farce. Former Green Beret Derek Gannon said: “[U.S. military involvement in Africa] is called Low Intensity Irregular Warfare, yet technically it’s not considered war by the Pentagon. But warfare is warfare to me.”

The U.S. maintains two facilities in Africa that qualify as military bases. However, according to NBC the U.S. increased the number of embassy-based military missions called “Offices of Security Cooperation” from nine in 2008 to 36 in 2016. Researchers say the U.S. military now has a presence in at least 49 African countries, presumably to fight terrorism. Even if anti-terrorism were the actual ultimate objective, military.com has pointed out:

“The U.S. has found some of its efforts to fight extremists hobbled by some African governments, whose own security forces are ill-equipped to launch an American-style hunt for the militants yet are reluctant to accept U.S. help because of fears the Americans will overstay their welcome and trample their sovereignty.”

In the face of Africa’s suspicion, the U.S. still sees strategic benefits to extending AFRICOM’s tentacles into every corner of the continent. In one case the Obama Administration sent 100 troops to Niger in 2013 to set up a drone base in a location where the U.S. was already providing aerial refueling assistance to the French. By June of this year, the number of U.S. military personnel in Niger had grown to at least 645, and by now there may be as many as 800 U.S. troops in that country. While the military establishment may believe that ever-deepening engagement of this kind is helpful to U.S. interests, there is a cost. Earlier this month four U.S. soldiers in Niger were killed in a firefight with alleged terrorist forces. According to at least one account:

“On October 5, about 30 Nigerien troops were patrolling in unarmored trucks alongside a dozen U.S. Army soldiers, among them Green Beret special forces. The patrol was coming from a meeting with tribal leaders and came within striking distance of the border between Niger and its war-torn neighbor Mali. The militants rode in on motorcycles and attacked the patrol with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns, killing eight: four Nigeriens, three Green Berets, and another U.S. soldier whose body wasn’t discovered until two days after the attack.”

Implicit in AFRICOM messaging is that U.S. troops help African soldiers protect helpless Africans from an unwanted “terrorist” presence. However, a CNN report about the ambush in Niger states:

“Some of the soldiers who attended the meeting with local leaders said that they suspected that the villagers were delaying their departure, stalling and keeping them waiting, actions that caused some of them to suspect that the villagers may have been complicit in the ambush…”

Military commanders who intervene in other countries should know that when non-combatant villagers have taken up the cause of any group — regardless of the group’s objectives — a military victory for the interveners is practically hopeless. Nevertheless, “[m]ultiple officials told CNN that the Trump administration is talking to the Nigerien government about a potential imminent U.S. military action to hit back at the militant group that killed the American soldiers.”

Under U.S. law, Congress has the opportunity to arrest any continuing reckless military engagement by Trump. The War Powers Resolution provides that under certain circumstances a President can deploy troops into combat situations, but there are periodic reporting requirements for a President as well as time limits on how long troops can remain engaged in conflicts without a formal declaration of war or specific Congressional authorization. Nevertheless, the Congress has a history of failing to curb U.S. military intervention in other countries, and we should not expect them to do it now. Notwithstanding the deaths in Niger, Africa is not regarded in the minds of Congress or the broader public as a place where the U.S. is at war.

AFRICOM has been confident of its ability to expand the U.S. military presence in Africa while flying below the radar because of its supposed advisory role. Its plan has been to use proxy African soldiers to engage in actual combat without worries of U.S. casualties and the attendant controversies and backlash. But the deaths in Niger represent an unexpected snafu.

While it may be true that on this occasion, the deaths in Niger faded quickly from media focus, and consequently from the attention of the U.S. public, there is good reason to believe there are more deaths to come. Africans are not stupid, but U.S. military officials are if they ignore the possibility that even the most humble African villagers passionately resent an ever-widening presence of U.S. military personnel in their communities. These humble people may lack the wherewithal to effectively demonstrate their hostility, but the recent killings in Niger with the suspected assistance of villagers evidence the possibility that there are forces eager to exploit African anger and confusion about the presence of U.S. troops.

If the death toll of U.S. troops continues to climb and AFRICOM loses its low profile, there should be no surprise in the Pentagon about its chickens coming home to roost.

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney who writes periodically for Black Agenda Report. He can be contacted at mfancher(at)Comcast.net.

October 18, 2017 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Africa, AFRICOM, Niger, United States | 2 Comments

US must end all military involvement in African continent: Analyst

Press TV – October 11, 2017

The US military must end its growing involvement in Africa and allow the nations of that continent to solve their own problems, otherwise the American people will pay dearly for these misguided actions, an African American journalist in Detroit says.

“We cannot accept the explanation of the US government at its face value. The US should end these military missions in Africa, the drone stations, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stations; all military involvement in the African continent should end,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor at the Pan-African News Wire.

“Africa must solve its own problems, through its own regional and continent organizations and mass organizations. Otherwise the Unites states and the people inside the United States will pay dearly for these misguided and of course unfortunate military actions,” Azikiwe said in a phone interview with Press TV on Wednesday.

The United States Army’s top officer says it is likely to “increase” its train, advise and assist (TAA) missions after the death of four soldiers in Niger by developing a new unit, he describes as “similar to special forces,” but “not special Forces.”

The US Army’s top officer said Monday it is likely to “increase” its train, advise and assist (TAA) missions after the death of four soldiers in Niger by developing a new unit.

General Mark Milley made the comments at the Association of the army’s annual meeting in Washington, not long after four special operations commandos were ambushed to death by militants in the Western African country of Niger.

The army’s chief of staff did not mention who was responsible for the attack although he asserted that the US military does know the group.

Two other Green Berets were injured on the October 4 ambush near the Nigerien capital Niamey by militants said to be linked with the Daesh Takfiri group in Iraq and Syria.

This represents yet another escalation by the US military in Africa,” Azikiwe said. “They are claiming that they are there just on a training mission.”

“Even though the US claims to be against these extremist organizations, they have worked with these groups in various geo-political regions including Libya, including Iraq, as well as Syria and Yemen,” he added.

The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2007 under former US President George W. Bush and strengthened and enhanced the following year during the presidency of Barack Obama.

The force has been operating in at least 35 countries across the African continent.

October 11, 2017 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Africa, AFRICOM, United States | Leave a comment

Say No to War: Thousands of Germans Demand Withdrawal of US, UK Troops

Sputnik – October 19, 2015

Christoph Horstel, a government consultant and publicist from Germany, began collecting signatures against the presence of US and UK troops in Germany. The petition has gathered more than 40,000 signatures.

The people who have signed the petition are demanding the withdrawal of US and UK troops from Germany.

Overall 58,000 NATO soldiers are currently stationed in the country; that number includes 13,000 UK troops and 42,000 US soldiers.

The petition says that such an excessive military presence from two particular NATO member states threatens Germany’s own security.US troops were first placed in Germany after the Second World War to deter an invasion by the Soviet Union. Over the years their numbers have decreased.

Speaking to Sputnik in an exclusive interview, author of the petition Christoph Horstel explained why he feels foreign troops must withdraw from Germany.

“People in the past were not ready in large numbers to tell those troops to go home. Now there is a time when even the center of the bourgeois people in Germany have noticed that we have a crisis with Russia going on since the demise of the Soviet Union. This is the first time in 25 years that they know that something is going deeply wrong.”

He said that the authorities are not listening to them and he went on to explain why the German authorities are not listening to those who are calling for resistance against the government based on the German constitution.

“It is important that we get our rights. The US has forces in 156 countries with more than 800 bases. This is their habit. People protest because Germany doesn’t want to be involved in another armed conflict. More and more Germans are becoming aware that the US is using Germany’s Ramstein military base to indulge in wars abroad,” the author said.

Horstel further said that according to international law Germany, from the moment it launches bombers, immediately becomes a participant in whatever war the US is fighting elsewhere.

“The US is implementing aggressive military policies in 124 countries worldwide from Stuttgart in Germany, where they operate various commands such as AFRICOM and CENTCOM.”

He further spoke about how NATO has broken promises that were made and how it spends billions of dollars to destabilize Ukraine in order to get ever closer to Russia’s borders.

The petition calls for putting an end to NATO troops in Germany as the country does not want to be involved in any US-led wars abroad.

“The true interest of Germans and Europeans has changed. These countries want a strong Russia, a country that can contradict and challenge the US, otherwise we will all end up as slaves,” Horstel said.

October 21, 2015 Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | AFRICOM, Germany, NATO, United States | 2 Comments

Africom’s War on Libya

In this excerpt from Bob Coen and Eric Nadler’s film “Shadow War of the Sahara”, broadcast on the Franco-German channel ARTE charts the rise of the U.S.military’s AFRICA COMAND (AFRICOM). This excerpt reveals why AFRICOM’s chief critic, Libya’s Mohammar Gaddafi, had to be removed from power for the project to succeed.

April 12, 2015 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Africa, AFRICOM, Libya, NATO, United States | 1 Comment

The Vicious Circle of U.S. Military Involvement in Africa

By Sonny Okello | Dissident Voice | March 27, 2015

It seems that a day rarely passes without news of a new atrocity committed by an increasingly notorious terrorist group. And, without fail, this news is accompanied by an increase in U.S. military interventions around the world.

While for many Americans, supporting intervention may come from a laudable sentiment – the desire to ‘do something’ in the face of widespread suffering – the situation on the ground is always more complicated than it appears, with various powerful interests intersecting. Now, under the guise of counterterrorism efforts – the U.S. military’s alibi of choice since 9/11 – the Pentagon is spreading its ever-expanding footprint throughout the African continent despite the understandably lackluster welcome they are receiving from many ordinary Africans on the ground.

The African front

Just as the specter of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has led President Obama to continue indefinitely bombing the Middle East, “terrorism concerns” in Africa are leading to an ever greater American military presence on this otherwise neglected continent. Boko Haram and other radical Islamist groups are wreaking havoc in multiple African countries, taking advantage of states’ lack of resources, corruption or general ineptitude. The Nigerian terrorist group, which recently declared its allegiance to ISIS, now reportedly controls a territory roughly the size of Costa Rica, commands 4,000 to 6,000 well-equipped fighters, and is relentlessly pushing outwards in the region.

Much of this military ‘pivot to Africa’ has taken place under the auspices of the United States Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Brought to life by renowned warmonger Donald Rumsfeld in 2006 and authorized by President George W. Bush the following year, AFRICOM aims to “build defense capabilities, […] advance U.S. national interests and promote regional security, stability, and prosperity, according to their vague mission statement. The neoconservative founders should leave no doubt as to AFRICOM’s true motives, however: further military intervention, “national building”, and gaining a hold on Africa’s immensely valuable natural resources.

While Washington initially expected African countries to jump at the opportunity to host AFRICOM’s headquarters, outbidding each other for the contract, only Liberia offered to host a new base. Even close allies of the United States such as Nigeria and South Africa expressed their strong opposition to AFRICOM, with many claiming that the Pentagon’s new offensive is more about mineral and oil interests than peacekeeping or anti-terrorism activities. In the end, AFRICOM announced it would remain headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany for the “foreseeable future”.

America’s favorite dictator

The closest the U.S. has gotten to achieving Rumsfeld’s dream of occupying Africa is AFRICOM’s Camp Lemonnier drone base in the small East African country of Djibouti. Though poor in natural resources, what Djibouti offers is a strategic location on the Gulf of Aden, north of anarchic Somalia and across from the Arabian Peninsula. Djibouti’s coastline is also among the most valuable for maritime commerce, bordering both the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.

An impoverished country run by aging autocrat Ismaïl Omar Guelleh (or ‘IOG’) since 1999, Djibouti has based its economy around selling its strategic position to the highest bidder. So far, this seems to be the United States, who signed a 20-year lease on Camp Lemonnier in May 2014 at the cost of $63 million a year, plus an additional $7 million per year for “development aid”. However, IOG has additionally courted the Chinese, who are increasingly present in East Africa, even suggesting that Beijing construct their own military base in his small country. Playing one great power off another has not only allowed IOG and his clique to enrich themselves, it has also reinforced his position as dictator-in-residence, as the United States would not risk political instability in a country hosting its 4,000 troops and an undisclosed number of Predator drones.

The tragic but all too typical outcome of America’s military presence in Djibouti is that the population is even worse off. On one hand, civilians have even less hope of ever moving towards greater democracy and accountability from their government as IOG entrenches his position with backing from his powerful allies. Even if its GDP doubled in the last decade, 74% of Djibouti’s population still live on less than $3 a day, lack access to drinking water and are subject to grueling human rights abuses.

On the other, they have to fear the consequences of these allies’ military presence in their country. Al Shabaab claimed responsibility for a May 2014 suicide attack in the country’s capital, which killed a Western soldier and wounded 11 others. It was the first suicide bombing in Djibouti’s history and the terrorist group vowed others would follow. Furthermore, according to the UK website Drone Wars, there have been at least five drone crashes in Djibouti in the past five years and it goes without saying that the Djibouti population has not been asked how they feel about foreign drones circling overhead.

Boko Haram’s recent allegiance to ISIS will only increase the potential justifications for the Pentagon to extend its reach across the African continent but the Djibouti experience should remind us that military deployments only embroil the United States into further quagmires, make Washington dependent on questionable strongmen, and worsens the situation of the population on the ground.

Sonny Okello is a writer and social entrepreneur based in Uganda.

March 27, 2015 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Militarism | Africa, AFRICOM, Djibouti, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment

Hillary Clinton and the Weaponization of the State Department

By JP Sottile | News Vandal | June 5, 2014

On May 23, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) trade show in Tampa, Florida to share her vision of “smart power” and to explain the State Department’s crucial role in extending the reach and efficacy of America’s growing “international counterterrorism network.”

First, there is such a thing as a “Special Operations Forces Industry Conference trade show.” Without some keen reporting by David Axe of Wired, that peculiar get-together might’ve flown completely under the radar—much like the shadowy “industry” it both supports and feeds off of like a sleek, camouflaged lamprey attached to a taxpayer-fattened shark.

Second, “special operations” have officially metastasized into a full-fledged industry. United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and, therefore, conveniently located near the special operations trade show, which happened again this year at the Tampa Convention Center. The theme was “Strengthening the Global SOF Network” and the 600,000-square-foot facility was filled with targets of opportunity for well-connected and well-heeled defense contractors.

According to the SOFIC website, this year’s conference afforded attendees “the opportunity to engage with USSOCOM Program Executive Officers, Science and Technology Managers, Office of Small Business Programs and Technology & Industry Liaison Office representatives, and other acquisition experts who will identify top priorities, business opportunities, and interests as they relate to USSOCOM acquisition programs.”

Third, Hillary’s widely-ignored speech marked a radical departure from the widely-held perception that the State Department’s diplomatic mission endures as an institutional alternative to the Pentagon’s military planning. Instead, Secretary Clinton celebrated the transformation of Foggy Bottom into a full partner with the Pentagon’s ever-widening efforts around the globe, touting both the role of diplomats in paving the way for shadowy special ops in so-called “hot spots” and the State Department’s “hand-in-glove” coordination with Special Forces in places like Pakistan and Yemen.

Finally, with little fanfare or coverage, America’s lead diplomat stood before the shadow war industry and itemized the integration of the State Department’s planning and personnel with the Pentagon’s global counter-terrorism campaign which, she told the special operations industry, happen “in one form or another in more than 100 countries around the world.”

If this isn’t entirely unexpected, consider the fact that under then-Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the State Department fought attempts by the Pentagon to trump its authority around the globe and, as reported by the Washington Post, “repeatedly blocked Pentagon efforts to send Special Operations forces into countries surreptitiously and without ambassadors’ formal approval.”

But that was before Hillary brought her “fast and flexible” doctrine of “smart power” to Foggy Bottom and, according to her remarks, before she applied lessons learned from her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee to launch the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which she modeled on the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review. That Pentagon-style review spurred the creation of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations to “advance the U.S. government’s foreign policy goals in conflict areas.”

According to a Congressional Research Service analysis, the initial intent of the Conflict Bureau was to replace the ineffectual Office of the Coordinator of Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was created in 2004 to help manage “stabilization” efforts in two nations the U.S. was actively destabilizing—Afghanistan and Iraq.

But the new, improved bureau does more than just react to messes made by unlawful invasions or direct costly remediation efforts in war zones—it also collaborates with “relevant partners” in the Department of Defense and NATO “to harmonize civilian and military plans and operations pertaining to conflict prevention, crisis response, and stabilization.”

This integrated relationship between State and Defense was confirmed by U.S. Special Operations chief Admiral William McRaven shortly after Hillary’s speech. When asked about the “unlikely partnership,” McRaven assured DefenseNews that SOCOM has “an absolutely magnificent relationship with the State Department” and that SOCOM doesn’t “do anything that isn’t absolutely fully coordinated and approved by the U.S. ambassador and the geographic combatant commander.”

As David Axe aptly described it in Wired, “Together, Special Operations Forces and State’s new Conflict Bureau are the twin arms of an expanding institution for waging small, low-intensity shadow wars all over the world.”

In fact, during Hillary’s time as America’s chief diplomat, the State Department embraced the shadowy edge of U.S. foreign policy where decision-makers engage in activities that look like war, sound like war and, if you were to ask civilians in places like Yemen and Pakistan, feel a lot like war, but never quite have to meet the Constitutional requirement of being officially declared as war.

The Whole-of-Government Shift

Once upon a time, “low-intensity shadow wars” were the Congressionally-regulated bailiwick of the Central Intelligence Agency. But 9/11 changed everything. However, the excesses of the Bush Administration led many to hope that Obama could and would change everything back or, at least, relax America’s tense embrace of “the dark side.”

Although the new administration did officially re-brand “The War on Terror” as “Overseas Contingency Operations,” Team Obama employed an increasingly elastic interpretation of the 9/11-inspired Authorization for Use of Military Force and expanded covert ops, special ops, drone strikes and regime change to peoples and places well-beyond the law’s original intent, and certainly beyond the limited scope of CIA covert action.

Obama’s growing counter-terrorism campaign—involving, as Secretary Clinton said, “more than 100 countries”—took flight with a new, ecumenical approach called the “Whole-of-Government” strategy. Advanced by then-Secretary of Defense Bill Gates and quickly adopted by the new administration in early 2009, this strategy catalyzed an institutional shift toward inter-agency cooperation, particularly in the case of “state-building” (a.k.a. “nation building”).

During remarks to the Brookings Institution in 2010, Secretary Clinton explained the shift: “One of our goals coming into the administration was… to begin to make the case that defense, diplomacy and development were not separate entities, either in substance or process, but that indeed they had to be viewed as part of an integrated whole and that the whole of government then had to be enlisted in their pursuit.”

Essentially, the Whole-of-Government approach is a re-branded and expanded version of Pentagon’s doctrine of “Full-Spectrum Dominance.” Coincidentally, that strategy was featured in the Clinton Administration’s final Annual Report to the President and Congress in 2001. It defined “Full-Spectrum Dominance” as “an ability to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with forces tailored to specific situations and possessing freedom to operate in all domains—space, sea, land, air, and information.”

In 2001, Full-Spectrum Dominance referred specifically to 20^th Century notions of battlefield-style conflicts. But the “dark side” of the War on Terror stretched the idea of the battlefield well-beyond symmetrical military engagements. “Irregular warfare” became the catchphrase du jour, particularly as grinding campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the reality that the full spectrum still wasn’t enough.

An assessment by the Congressional Research Service identified the primary impetus for the Whole-of-Government “reforms” embraced by Team Obama as the “perceived deficiencies of previous inter-agency missions” during the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those missions failed to address a myriad of problems created—culturally, economically and politically—by the wholesale bombing and occupation of those countries. The Full-Spectrum was half-baked. Lesson learned.

But the lesson wasn’t that the U.S. should avoid intervention, regime change or unleashing nascent civil, ethnic or religious conflicts. Instead, the lesson was that the “Whole-of-Government” must be marshaled to fight a worldwide array of Overseas Contingency Operations in “more than 100 countries.”

This Whole-of-Government shift signaled a renewed willingness to engage on variety of new fronts—particularly in Africa—but in a “fast and flexible” way. With other agencies—like the State Department—integrated and, in effect, fronting the counter-terrorism campaign, the military footprint becomes smaller and, therefore, easier to manage locally, domestically and internationally.

In some ways, the Whole-of-Government national security strategy is plausible deniability writ-large through the cover of interagency integration. By merging harder-to-justify military and covert actions into a larger, civilian-themed command structure, the impact of the national security policy overseas is hidden—or at least obfuscated—by the diplomatic “stabilization” efforts run through the State Department—whether it’s the Conflict Bureau working against Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, “stabilizing” post-Gaddafi Libya or spending $27 million to organize the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime.

The Pass Key

The cover of diplomacy has traditionally been an effective way to slip covert operators into countries and the State Department’s vast network of embassies and consulates still offers an unparalleled “pass-key” into sovereign nations, emerging hot spots and potential targets for regime change. In 2001, the Annual Report to the President and Congress foresaw the need for more access: “Given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full-spectrum dominance.”

Having the way “pre-paved” is, based on Hillary’s doctrinal shift at State, a key part of the new, fuller-spectrum, Whole-of-Government, mission-integrated version of diplomacy. At the SOFIC’s Special Operations Gala Dinner in 2012, Hillary celebrated the integration of diplomatic personnel and Special Operations military units at the State Department’s recently created Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications—a “nerve center in Washington” that coordinates “military and civilian teams around the world” and serves “as a force multiplier for our embassies’ communications efforts.”

As with most doors in Washington, that relationship swings both ways and mission-integrated embassies have served as an effective force multiplier for the Pentagon’s full spectrum of activities, particularly around Africa.

In his 2011 testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Africa, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Don Yamamoto noted that State had “significantly expanded the number of DoD personnel who are integrated into embassies across the continent over the past three years,” and read a surprisingly long laundry list of collaborative efforts between State and the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), including: “reduction of excess and poorly secured man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS); Defense Sector Reform in Liberia, DRC, and South Sudan; counterpiracy activities off the Somali coast; maritime safety and security capacity building; and civil-military cooperation.”

It seems that “civil-military cooperation” is a primary focus of the State Department in Africa. Most notably, Yamamoto told Congress that “embassies implement Department of State-funded Foreign Military Financing (FMF) and International Military Education and Training (IMET) programs, which further U.S. interests in Africa by helping to professionalize African militaries, while also assisting our African partners to be more equipped and trained to work toward common security goals.”

As the ever-vigilant Nick Turse recently reported, U.S. presence on the continent has only grown since that testimony was given in 2011. On TomDispatch.com, Turse identified the infamous attack on Benghazi on September 11, 2012 as the catalyst for “Operation New Normal”—the continent-wide response to, quite ironically, the political potboiler still simmering around Secretary Clinton. Whether or not Congressional Republicans find anything more than incompetence at the root of Benghazi, the U.S. military certainly finds itself in a “new normal” of increased activity in response to the forces—and the weaponry—unleashed by U.S.-led regime change in Libya. According to Turse, the U.S. is “now conducting operations alongside almost every African military in almost every African country and averaging more than a mission a day.”

Those missions are, of course, integrated with and augmented by the State Department’s Conflict Bureau which has used a variety of state-building programs and its diplomatic “pass key” in places like Libya, Nigeria, Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and six other African nations, all to develop a growing roster of “host country partners.”

Establishing “host country partners” is the nexus where the State Department, its Conflict Bureau and the AFRICOM meet—implementing the Whole-of-Government strategy in emerging or current conflict zones to fuse a mounting counter-terrorism campaign with stabilization, modernization and state-building initiatives, particularly in oil and resource-rich areas like the Niger River Delta, Central Africa and around AFRICOM’s military foothold on the Horn of Africa.

As Richard J. Wilhelm, a Senior Vice President with defense and intelligence contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, pointed out in a video talk about “mission integration,” AFRICOM’s coordination with the Departments of State and Commerce, USAID is the “most striking example of the Whole-of-Government approach.”

And this is exactly the type of “hand-in-glove” relationship Secretary Clinton fostered throughout her tenure at State, leveraging the resources of the department in a growing list of conflict areas where insurgents, terrorists, al-Qaeda affiliates, suspected militants or uncooperative regimes threaten to run afoul of so-called “U.S. interests”.

Ultimately, it became a hand-in-pocket relationship when Clinton and Defense Secretary Gates developed the Global Security Contingency Fund (GSCF) to “incentivize joint planning and to pool the resources of the Departments of State and Defense, along with the expertise of other departments, to provide security sector assistance for partner countries so they can address emergent challenges and opportunities important to U.S. national security.”

Although he’s been criticized as feckless and deemed less hawkish than Secretary Clinton, President Obama’s newly-proposed Counterterrorism Partnership Fund (CTPF) is the logical extension of the Clinton-Gates Global Security Contingency Fund and epitomizes the Whole-of-Government shift.

The $5 billion Obama wants will dwarf the $250 million pooled into the GSCF and will, the President said at West Point, “give us flexibility to fulfill different missions including training security forces in Yemen who have gone on the offensive against al Qaeda; supporting a multinational force to keep the peace in Somalia; working with European allies to train a functioning security force and border patrol in Libya; and facilitating French operations in Mali.”

That “flexibility” is exactly what Hillary Clinton instituted at State and touted at the SOFIC conference in 2012. It also portends a long-term shift to less invasive forms of regime change like those in Yemen, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, and an increased mission flexibility that will make the Authorization for the Use of Military Force functionally irrelevant.

Normalizing the War on Terror

The ultimate outcome of this shift is, to borrow from Nick Turse, yet another “new normal”—the new normalization of the War on Terror. What the adoption of the Whole-of-Government/mission integration approach has done is to normalize the implementation of the re-branded War on Terror (a.k.a. Overseas Contingency Operations) across key agencies of the government and masked it, for lack of the better term, under the rubric of stabilization, development and democracy building.

It is, in effect, the return of a key Cold War policy of “regime support” for clients and “regime change” for non-client states, particularly in strategically-located areas and resource-rich regions. Regimes—whether or not they actually “reflect American values”—can count on U.S. financial, military and mission-integrated diplomatic support so long as they can claim to be endangered… not by communists, but by terrorists.

And because terrorism is a tactic—not a political system or a regime—the shadowy, State Department-assisted Special Ops industry that fights them will, unlike the sullen enthusiasts of the Cold War, never be bereft of an enemy.

June 6, 2014 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | 9/11, Afghanistan, Africa, AFRICOM, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Full-Spectrum Dominance, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Obama, Overseas Contingency Operations, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Special forces, United States, United States Special Operations Command, US State Department, USAID, USSOCOM, Yemen | 1 Comment

US Secretly Training and Funding ‘Elite’ African Commandos

By Sarah Lazare | Common Dreams | May 27, 2014

The Pentagon has been secretly backing a U.S. Special Operations program to build elite units to fight “terrorism” in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali, the New York Times revealed Monday.

The program was launched last year and is backed by millions of dollars in classified Pentagon funds. U.S. military trainers, including members of the Green Berets and Delta Force, are working with African “commandos” to “build homegrown African counterterrorism teams,” according to the Times.

According to the reporting, $70 million in Pentagon funds is going towards “training, intelligence-gathering equipment and other support” for commandos in Nigeria and Mauritania. And $16 million is going towards commandos in Libya. In Mauritnaia, $29 million has been allotted for “logistics and surveillance equipment in support of the specialized unit.” According to the Times, the program in Mali “has yet to get off the ground as a new civilian government recovers from a military coup last year.”

The U.S. military has for years been increasing its role across the continent of Africa, including the expansion of AFRICOM, drone attacks in Somalia, air strikes and arms shipments to Libya, and more.

May 28, 2014 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Africa, AFRICOM, Libya, Mal, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria | Comments Off on US Secretly Training and Funding ‘Elite’ African Commandos

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How Macrocosmic Western Propaganda Launders Geopolitical Crimes

By Ronald Thomas West | February 10, 2021

This essay goes to the matter of Kosovo; where the Western states (NATO & the EU) have determined Serbia is not fit to govern a minority (of ethnic Albanians) on their own (Serbian) territory but the now purported (by the West) independent Kosovo is fit to govern a minority (of ethnic Serbs.)

The EU position seems to embrace an attitude of ‘never mind the inconvenient fact’ that recent Kosovo ‘leaders’ are being arrested and delivered to international tribunal for crimes against ethnic Serbs (includes organ harvesting), also not to mention what amounts to mere ‘lip service’ (no concrete action or enforcement) concerning the repatriation of 250,000 Serbs driven from Kosovo in an ethnic Albanian engineered cleansing pogrom following the NATO bombing of Serbia.

Insofar as an EU repatriation precedent, Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of Srpska Krajina shows the dishonesty of the EU position; there is no realistic expectation (and never was) by the European Union that the 200,000 Serbs expelled from this (formerly) Serb majority region would be allowed to return to Croatia and their homes. Meanwhile Croatia had been admitted to the European Union.

So, in the context of Serbs are not trustworthy to govern an ethnic minority of Albanians but Albanians are trustworthy to govern a minority of Serbs, the EU de facto embraces (actual outcomes, not political postures) just the sort of ethnic cleansing the NATO bombing was supposed to stop? … continue

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AFRICOM map of Africa, published by The Intercept (12/1/18). Note that in the Pentagon’s doubletalk, the US does not have “permanent bases” in Africa—it has “enduring locations.”

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