U.S. is the driving force behind the fighting in Somalia

U.S. is the driving force behind the fighting in Somalia

www.latimes.com

Washington has been quietly equipping and training thousands of African soldiers to wage a widening proxy war against the Shabab, the Al Qaeda ally that has sparked alarm as foreign militants join its ranks. "You will push … the miscreants from that country, so Somalia can once again be free of tyranny and terrorism," he told them, according to a video of the May ceremony. "We know you are ready."

These weren't American soldiers. They were from impoverished Sierra Leone in West Africa. But Hogg, a top U.S. Army commander for Africa, was in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, because

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Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
Update! US troops now in 4 African countries to fight LRA

OK I knew we had troops in Uganda, Congo, South Sudan etc with the goal to shore up security in the region. Obama even signed The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act which authorized US troop movement in 4 specific countries. In October 2011, he announced that he would send 100 American military advisors to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help the regional forces remove Joseph Kony from the region.

No mention back then of going into Somalia. Granted we've been there before... Now we are back in the business of consulting and training foreign troops to fight yet another proxy war.

Did you miss this in the midst of all of the nations current distractions. Hillary Clinton was just talking about this during her trip to Senegal.

www.latimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Clinton holds meetings in at least six other African nations expected to focus heavily on the surge of Islamist groups in many countries - including al-Shabab in Somalia, which has links to al Qaeda.

She will highlight the fact that Uganda is a "key U.S. partner" in regional security efforts and note that American troops are also training Ugandan soldiers, who make up the biggest contingent of an African Union force operating in Somalia to help defend the largely powerless government there from Islamic militants.

The U.S. military is also helping to train and equip troops from other African nations to join the fight against militants in Somalia, including in Sierra Leone, where a senior U.S. Army commander visited recently to give a pep-talk to soldiers about to be deployed. (Click here to see video from the U.S. Army)

www.cbsnews.com...

Here we go again

Nearly 20 years after U.S. Army Rangers suffered a bloody defeat in Somalia, losing 18 soldiers and two Black Hawk helicopters, Washington is once again heavily engaged in the chaotic country. Only this time, African troops are doing the fighting and dying.

The United States is doing almost everything else.

The U.S. has been quietly equipping and training thousands of African soldiers to wage a widening proxy war against the Shabab, the Al Qaeda ally that has imposed a harsh form of Islamic rule on southern Somalia and sparked alarm in Washington as foreign militants join its ranks.

Officially, the troops are under the auspices of the African Union. But in truth, according to interviews by U.S. and African officials and senior military officers and budget documents, the 15,000-strong force pulled from five African countries is largely a creation of the State Department and Pentagon, trained and supplied by the U.S. government and guided by dozens of retired foreign military personnel hired through private contractors.

a key takeaway.. keeping the lid on it...

The administration has not disclosed much in public about its role in Somalia, in part because African Union officials do not want their force seen as a Washington puppet. But Wafula Wamunyinyi, deputy head of the African Union mission, calls the U.S. "our most important partner," noting that its assistance has been "quite enormous."

The U.S. is supplying the African forces with surveillance drones, ammunition, small arms, armored personnel carriers, night-vision goggles, communications gear, medical equipment and other sophisticated aid and training, documents show.

THis is reassuring

No U.S. military personnel are deployed to Somalia with the African troops. Instead, the State Department pays a private firm to hire the retired foreign military personnel who advise the troops on tactics and operations.

"The U.S. is willing to be very open-minded about whatever the key components are that need to be funded, without which this mission would fail," said Michael C. Stock, president of Bancroft Global Development, the Washington-based company that hires the combat advisors. "When it comes to things like ammunition, when it comes to the mentoring and advising that we do, the U.S. is really playing the most important role."

Bancroft now has about 75 advisors in Somalia, double the number from a year ago, Stock said.

I'd like to see some questions asked directly to Obama regarding this quietly escalating operation.

www.latimes.com... s%2Fnews%2Fnationworld%2Fworld%20%28L.A.%20Times%20-%20World%20News%29&utm_source=feedburner

Originally posted by jibeho


OK I knew we had troops in Uganda, Congo, South Sudan etc with the goal to shore up security in the region. Obama even signed The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act which authorized US troop movement in 4 specific countries. In October 2011, he announced that he would send 100 American military advisors to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help the regional forces remove Joseph Kony from the region.

No mention back then of going into Somalia. Granted we've been there before... Now we are back in the business of consulting and training foreign troops to fight yet another proxy war.

Did you miss this in the midst of all of the nations current distractions. Hillary Clinton was just talking about this during her trip to Senegal.

www.latimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

We have been involved since 911. Not directly but through Kenya, Ethiopia and the African Union. The Transitional Federal Government began working with Somaliland and Puntland to drive out the hard core radicals. Something like order has returned to much of the country after decades of war. Of course its taking the troops of several African countries to do it but, at least they are on a positive path.

To try and illustrate the enormity of the problem, Cargill, the Minnesota-based producer and marketer of food, agricultural, financial and industrial products, recently donated 10,000 metric tons of rice to WFP USA to be distributed in the Horn of Africa. The group said the donation – the largest ever food donation to WFP USA – would feed nearly 1 million people for a month. The need is to feed between 2.3 and 9.5 million people across the Horn of Africa for the rest of this year. The enormous donation above is therefore just a drop in the ocean.

The greatest scam is that U.S. imperialism is based on food being more important than oil -- so the Food for Peace program actually caused Cargill to wipe out the farmers supplying Mogadishu's urban class -- Cargill's Food for Peace propped up the regime of Somalia by "donating" U.S. subsidized food which then undercut the local food price by selling on the Somalian market at one-sixth the local price.

That's how the U.S. empire works. Cargill: Our Taxes, Global Destruction! MAR. 2, 2000 – EDITORIAL/OPINIONS ————————————————� �————————————————� ��—————— Cargill: Our taxes, global destruction

I wrote that op-ed as a paid staff writer for the U of MN Daily newspaper so my op-eds were fact checked.

Actually, most of the nation recipients of tax-subsidized Cargill food dumping were, and are, net exporters of food already — policies imposed by colonial trading patterns. The food (for Peace) has been bought cheaply by neocolonial regimes, and then sold at a huge discount on the local market — in Somalia, for example, at one-sixth of the local prices. Many examples of these misguided policies can be found in “Betraying the National Interest: How US Foreign AID Threatens Global Security by Undermining the Political and Economic Stability of the Third World,” by Frances Moore Lappe, et al.

Cargill has its own satellite system and then works directly with the CIA, bypassing Congress.

So then control of Somalia by the U.S. means control of oil.

Somalia's interim federal government is tasked with adopting a new constitution by August, aimed in part at redefining the relationship between Mogadishu and the regions and ending a two-decade cycle of violence. The Western-backed government has been fighting al Shabaab militants who still control large swathes of the country and want to impose Sharia law. Puntland has objected to the first draft of the constitution, saying it left too much power with Mogadishu. WHO GETS WHAT? Dool said the country's petroleum law made clear the government should dictate license agreements with foreign investors, while ensuring the regions get a cut. "It has very clear guidelines on the rules on who gets what and what will be the way to resolve (disputes) between central government and (the) regions," he said. "The petroleum law makes it very clear it is the central government who has absolute control but there is a role for ... local government or regions."

Yeah make sure the West controls the oil

By MARK FINEMAN DATELINE: MOGADISHU, Somalia Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali countryside. That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation. According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there. Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake. But corporate and scientific documents disclosed that the American companies are well positioned to pursue Somalia's most promising potential oil reserves the moment the nation is pacified.

Copyright 1993 The Times Mirror Company Los Angeles Times January 18, 1993 THE OIL FACTOR IN SOMALIA

reply to post by MrSpad


I knew we had assets in Somalia and have been shipping supplies but I had no idea that the scale was so grand or that the mission was escalating so fast. The LRA disarmament act appears to be just ploy to keep boots on the ground to be at the ready.

This week, the Pentagon approved the latest $41-million aid package to African countries with troops in Somalia, with little public notice. Uganda, with the largest contingent, received $19.5 million for "vehicles, small arms, boats, night-vision devices, communications and electronic equipment, training and minor military construction" for its forces. Burundi was given $13.2 million for vehicles and other gear, and Kenya received $7.1 million for eight handheld drones and training.

Several mentions of "little public notice" in this article.

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


Tie all of that into what lies under in Uganda and we've got the whole region locked up. We have a Kenyan insider at the ready and willing to do whatever it takes.

I mentioned in this thread www.abovetopsecret.com...&addstar=1&on=13587711#pid13587711 that got grounded before it even launched to keep an eye on Africa. Operations throughout Kenya and neighboring countries are on the rise. Obama was working this angle back in 2006.

anyone remember this from a year ago

"Kenya Says Western Nations Join Fight in Somalia, as U.S. Denies Role"

NAIROBI, Kenya — Foreign military forces have joined the offensive against the Shabab militant group in Somalia as Kenyan troops advanced toward the rebel stronghold of Kismayu from two different directions, Kenya said Sunday.

A Kenyan military spokesman, Maj. Emmanuel Chirchir, said that “one of the partners,” possibly the United States or France, had been behind airstrikes in the past few days, killing a number of Shabab militants. The French Navy has also shelled rebel positions from the sea, the Kenyan military said in a statement.

Two senior American officials in Washington said Sunday that neither the United States military nor the Central Intelligence Agency had carried out airstrikes in Somalia in recent days. One of the officials, who follows American military operations closely, said the Kenyan offensive had forced many Shabab fighters and commanders to disperse, making them easier potential targets, but emphasized that there had been “no U.S. military strikes in Somalia at all recently.”

Seems more plausible now. I believed it then.

www.nytimes.com...

Good read with comments from top brass within AFRICOM
www.countercurrents.org...



American officials in Kenya declined to comment. A French diplomat in the United States did not return phone calls.

reply to post by jibeho


The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


Funny how no one wants to talk about what has been going on there or in that entire region. Guess its not good for a reelection campaign.

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


The food aid programs are what's holding Africa back and making it a 3rd world continent.

It's a big nasty mess.

If I controlled the money I'd be donating water well drilling equipment instead of food. A well program with irrigation and farm training would transform Africa.

I sincerely hope Somalia does not become another Afghanistan where sponsored leaders go rogue and screw their handlers. Then again, there is a leadership void in Somalia pirates seem to be exploiting. Perhaps a middle path is needed using controlled figures whose loyalty is unwavering.

reply to post by MysteriousHusky


Blowback in Somalia Jeremy Scahill September 7, 2011

Maybe you're referring to Scahill's article.

Basically I was hanging in the Somalian mall in Minnesota and as we watched CNN or something in a restaurant everyone was pissed about claims of Al Qaeda in Somalia stating it was a lie. I pointed out, being the only white person in the place, that the U.S. just wanted the oil and everyone immediately agreed with me.

The thing is that the Islamic Court was well supported by Somalians but the U.S. messed it up because the U.S. wants a puppet regime that will promote U.S. imperialism.

So Somalians traditionally rely on camel food but camel is too expensive to import to the U.S. so the refugees rely on goat food instead.

So the farming food was actually for the Mogadishu urban elite which then fell pray to the U.S. "food aid" scam via Cargill -- ironically headquartered in Minnesota, home to the largest Somalian refugee community.

So then "extremist" Muslim militants being funded and trained by the CIA and then going out of control - what do people expect when the traditional Muslims want to ban heroin in Afghanistan (which goes against the CIA reliance on drug dealing) and so the traditional Somalian culture is actually more Sufi-based and not at all extreme.




Yeah so the Somalian community had bumperstickers on all their cars -- Ethiopia out of Somalia -- and everyone knew it was a U.S. funded war against Somalia by Ethiopia.

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


Interesting stuff. I also liked how Sufi Islam came in as one can arguably joke that Suffi Muslim poets are almost Buddhist-like in "peacefulness" and tranquillity. However, the article is new to me but I have heard of Noam Chomsky although his well-known bias/leanings might alter the accuracy of his verdict.

reply to post by MysteriousHusky


Well my dad was the assistant attorney general of Minnesota, a NYU law school graduate and so my dad would give me books to read that he supported. I would read the books and write a detailed critique of the books and then I requested my dad to read Noam Chomsky. My dad never read Noam Chomsky because he didn't need to since those in power don't need to engage intellectually with those who work to support the underdogs.

If you want to learn about Noam Chomsky his best four books are 1) At War with Asia. 2) Year 501: The Conquest Continues. 3) Political Economy of Human Rights Vol 1: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. 4) World Orders: Old and New.

I emailed Noam Chomsky about why his book "At War with Asia" was out of print and he said that actually not a lot of people read his actual books but rather tend to read the more superficial interviews with him published. Then Chomsky mentioned how this has changed since in the U.S. in the 1930s he said how there would be a worker assigned to read to the other workers so that the workers stayed educated. Also there were tons more newpapers in those days so that people were less biased, etc.

Of course I don't idealize Chomsky - I critique him in my masters thesis published here -- link

But on the other hand I told Chomsky how I relied on his research when I presented my case for the U of MN to stop buying sports clothing from corporations using sweatshops -- when the student senate tried to debate about "free trade" etc. I easily dismissed their arguments using Chomsky's research. So then my resolution easily passed the student senate but the president of the student senate was not in attendance and then vetoed it in secret later on. haha. Still our coalition did get the U of MN to join the Workers Rights Consortium and then we did join a boycott that did improve workers conditions for making sports clothing. Still I had to volunteer my time and I spent a year presenting that information against the administration with the lawyer running the University and the public relations department, etc. I was shocked at the lies and juvenile tactics used by the administration to stall -- since their multi-million dollar contract with Nike was being subjected to scrutiny.

So then I just dropped out of graduate school disgusted with the corruption at the top of the social ladder so to speak. I figured if those people are running the University (the president at the time went on to run the whole University of California system and before that ran the University of Texas system and he personally emailed me patronizingly said I had "done" enough).

I finished my degree only by doing nonwestern philosophy self-directed research with a Chinese yoga energy master now confirmed by randomized controlled research of the Mayo Clinic, considered a top research medical hospital. springforestqigong.com...

So anyway the Sufi culture is considered underground in Islam but not so much in Somalia with the connections to the Zar trance music matrifocal culture of Africa. Somalia was trading with China when China ruled the world back in the early 1400s -- Somalia sent a representative to China as Somalia excels in garment apparel craftsmanship.

At least now Chomsky is giving more emphasis to the global climate catastrophe caused by Western industrialism. This was my focus in my masters thesis -- that Chomsky needs to be more amenable to radical ecology and nonwestern philosophy and I think he is leaning more towards that now.

Oh yeah when I was in North Africa I went to the oldest most traditional Berber village in Morocco and the Berbers for thousands of years relied on humanure compost to feed themselves - recycling their waste mixed with hay to then grow their food, transforming the desert into fertile fields of vegetables, wheat, potatoes, etc.

O.K. so people in the West are really cut off from the natural cycles of the land and how to have sustainable human civilization -- relying on humanure farming as humans are just animals. Humans = humus = fertile soil.

So the nomadic pastoralist culture was created actually after the middle east in the Levant started using lime casing to waterproof their houses and this caused vast deforestation and desertification to make the lime and so their agriculture then ran out of water due to loss of the forest. So then people were forced into nomadic pastoralism. I have a free e-book with 725 scholarly footnotes providing the references for this research download it here

Pastoralism may have developed independent in Somalia but I'm not sure as they are Nilotic people -- although Somalian is a tonal language.

Also the Turkana of Kenya for example have their religion as a "sacrifice of the son" when there is a solar eclipse of the sun -- an animal is sacrificed to protect the son from the evil magic of the moon covering up the son. So this pastoralism represents an early fear of the lunar matrifocal cultures closer to the land with the domestication of animals as an attempt by males to control Nature.

So I think there is a similar dynamic going on in Somalia.

A good ol' Cold War-style proxy war.

Only the faces have changed.

I got a call from a recruiter for a Somalia job to support the AU a few months ago. Crazy money for Mogadishu, i laughed and said "no thanks", Iraq was bad enough.

So the Soviet influence in Somalia ended in the mid-70s in any meaningful military way

SOMALIS www.cal.org/co/somali/shist.html Feb 18, 2004 – In November 1977, Siyaad Barre expelled the Soviets from Somalia. By the spring of 1978, as a result of the Soviet shift of support to Ethiopia, ..

Somalia's leaders, many of whom had been educated in Italy and Britain, were initially well disposed to the West. Their desire to be nonaligned, however, led them to establish close ties with the Soviet Union and China. During the 1960s, the Soviet Union provided both military and economic aid, while China provided considerable development assistance. The United States provided development aid only. During that time, Ethiopia was the United States' principal ally in the region and a beneficiary of large-scale U.S. development and military aid. For as long as that alliance lasted, the United States remained reluctant to provide military assistance to Somalia.

Then the Soviets actually opposed Somalian external aggression:

The continued push of the Somali forces and their capture of most of the Ogaden forced the Soviet Union to choose sides; it cut off all arms to Somalia and provided Ethiopia with massive military assistance in the form of air power and Cuban and Yemeni troops.

Even in Minneapolis there's signs up about the clans not fighting each other:

By the mid-1980s, government and opposition movements were clan based.

It's been pretty much hell ever since -- I know someone who had to flee Mogadishu with his family -- starving and dehydrated through the desert for maybe a week to get to the refugee camps.

The Mitrokhin Archives:Somali KGB Agents “Operator” and “Rashid” By Abdul Ahmed III Dec 04, 2011 pdf

reply to post by fulllotusqigong


Cheers, keep up the good work! Will look into those books if they are out of print at least I have their names to begin the search. Also I'd like to thank you for providing a brief sketch about your background. Too often this field is stereotyped as the refuge of crooks and crazy folk and as such your submission is but another nail in that stigma's coffin.

reply to post by MysteriousHusky


Actually AK Press reissued Chomsky's At War with Asia book a year after I had the email exchange with Chomsky.

I asked him about it years later in another email and he said he wasn't even aware that it had been reissued. haha.

They are difficult reads -- especially The Political Economy of Human Rights Vol. 1 -- that was South End Press. Yeah it got reissued in 1999 and still available

The World Orders Old and New is Columbia University Press.

Places like India and Bengal (Bangladesh) which were highly advanced industrial societies by the mid-1700's but all of the industries which were superior to their counterparts in Britain were deliberately undermined or simply forced out of existence by the British colonisers. India and Bangladesh became extremely poor, feudal agricultural countries supplying Britain with raw materials and as a captive market for British goods. The latter is a familiar pattern outlined by Chomsky in this book. The West, since World war II, dominated by the U.S., has always sought any way it could to block advanced economic development in the third world.

Yeah Year 501 was also reissued in 1999

A 2005 edition of At War with Asia was also released in mass market paperback.