Month: November 2011

The Obama administration still denies is has anything to do with Kenya’s violent invasion of Somalia, although it is known that US drone strikes have been pounding southern Somalia, which is of course assisting the Kenyans. Some believe them, but others are skeptical, especially since the US was lending security support to Kenya as late as 2009, according to embassy cables released by WikiLeaks. Plus, the New York Times reported that despite efforts of US officials to deny the claims, Kenyan military officials have said they are receiving help from the US and France. Here a report from the East Africa:

Independent analysts in the United States tend to accept the Obama administration’s claim that it did not push Kenya into launching military action in southern Somalia.

But some of those same analysts say it is likely that the US is now providing Kenyan forces with intelligence assistance in hopes of inflicting a fatal blow on their mutual enemy: the Al Shabaab insurgency.

…according to one of the documents released by the whistleblower website, Wikileaks, dated 2009, US has been helping Kenya secure its borders.

If the US has in fact collaborated in Kenya’s incursion or its ongoing attacks in Somalia, it would certainly complete the trend we’ve seen from the Obama administration. About 100 combat forces have been sent to Uganda and surrounding areas like South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That takes care of Somalia’s western front. Technically secret drone bases have been recently constructed and are now operational in Ethiopia, Djibouti and perhaps Eritrea. That covers Somalia’s north and north west. The US has covert operatives and a lingering client state inside Yemen, may have a drone site in Seychelles, and patrols much of the Arabian Sea with US navy warships, taking care of Somalia’s eastern front. To have Kenya attacking southern Somalia certainly fits, circumstantially at least.

I suppose it goes without saying, but putting aside the potential for utter disaster – a worsening of the truly dire humanitarian situation in Somalia, an increasing threat of considerable civilian casualties and thus more blowback, and a nascent set of oppressive US-supported client states in East Africa – all of this Obama strategy in that region has been conducted illegally. There has been no recognition or approval from Congress and it has all been done in utter secrecy. Citizens are left to pick up the unconfirmed pieces in a region lacking the journalistic presence that might be able to mitigate the whitewash of secret war. Nobody knows exactly what US policy there is, and worse it isn’t even acknowledged that we have a right to know what the government does in our name.

I wrote recently about five Colombian soldiers accused of murdering two farmers, in the latest case of “false positive” killings, in which the US-supported Colombian army kill civilians and report them as combatants. One officer, two sub-officers, and two soldiers of the Army’s 31st Rifle Battalion allegedly killed two farmers in the northwest rural area of Valdivia, Antioquia and then presented them as FARC guerrillas killed in combat. The military report had claimed that the two victims were insurgents who were carrying two handguns and a grenade, but evidence from witnesses, ballistics experts, and investigators invalidated that report.

But now, one of the accused, named Antonio Rozo Valbuena, is daringly pointing the finger at his superior officer – General Javier Fernández Leal – saying he collaborated in the killings. It should be noted that this unit was trained by the US, and Leal in particular was studying US Army War College in Pennsylvania a mere three months before the false positives killings in question. And in 2009, he blocked investigations into police and army killings of civilians.

“When a soldier gets hit with charges and says, ‘I did it, I killed him, my colonel knew nothing,’ it’s a lie,”said Rozo Valbuena. “To do a false positive requires a logistical train, a very broad intellectual capacity to be able to set it up and plot the procedure well,” he said.

“They’re sentencing the most idiotic ones. Don’t look here, look higher,” Rozo said.

The 11^th Brigade in Córdoba, of which the GAULA unit was part, was commanded by then-Colonel Fernández Leal from June 2005 to December 2006. Three months before ascending to command the 11^th Brigade, Fernández Leal was studying at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, where he wrote about the costs of the war in Colombia.

The United States assisted the 11^th Brigade during this period and beyond – in 2005, 2006 and 2007, according to a State Department list of assisted units (pdf, 1.6MB)

Fernández Leal subsequently sat on a military panel that in 2009 stymied investigations into false positives, according to statements by the former Army Inspector General to U.S. Embassy officials, revealed in a cable published by Wikileaks.

Check out my recent blog post on the neocon myth that US Colombia policy is some sort of success, so much so that it ought to be exported to Afghanistan.

Addendum: The Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has dissolved the country’s intelligence agency, DAS, after years of controversy for having deep ties to right-wing paramilitaries, obstructing their justice, implementing a nationwide illegal spying regime, cracking down on free speech, etc. At least 20 current and former DAS officials have been jailed, including the Director Jorge Noguera. Unfortunately, this does not seem to signal some wonderful reform: 92% DAS staff are just being transferred to other government departments. Ah yes…I almost forgot to mention again: all with exorbitant and steadfast US support/collaboration.

This Reuters headline is “Libya’s NTC struggles to stay the “good guys.”

The selection by the NTC of little known academic Abdurrahim El-Keib as interim prime minister on Monday also highlighted how mysterious the internal workings of the new ruling group can be to perplexed diplomats, journalists and Libya analysts, as well as – especially – to an increasingly impatient Libyan public.

“Your time is done, NTC,” a young Libyan blogger wrote this week. “Thank you – the Libyan people.”

Many of them are worried about whether a coalition of armed factions that were bound mostly by hatred of Gaddafi can hold together now his regime has crumbled and he has been buried.

Rights groups are attacking the NTC, too. First it was accusations of the illegal detention and torture of thousands of pro-Gaddafi fighters and, now, reports from Human Rights Watch that fighters loyal to the NTC may have executed scores of captured Gaddafi loyalists in his hometown.

Revenge attacks are common in other parts of the country.

Reuters reporters have heard residents of one Tripoli suburb shout, “You’re just the same as he was! One dictatorship for another!” at a patrol of NTC fighters, combing the neighborhood for locals they say still worship a dead man.

I wrote about that new interim prime minister, Abdurraheem el-Keib, who was rather shadily elected (appointed?) by the NTC leaders this week. Part of what makes people skeptical about the choice is that he is a dual US-Libyan citizen and has at least some tenuous ties to the energy industry. He is supposed to select an interim cabinet over the next couple of weeks “after which it will serve for an eight-month run-up to an election for a national assembly charged with drawing up a new constitution,” then “elections proper” a year following. Which I think all sounds more pretty than it actually is on the ground.

The other big factor – that is, other than continuing fighting and unrest, vigilante revenge killings, loose weapons caches, and an impoverished, war-torn country – is that many of the tribal and rebel factions making up the National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters are backtracking on a pledge to give up their weapons, demanding their own local autonomy in Tripoli, Misrata, Benghazi, etc.

“A basic problem is that the allegiance of most fighters who helped defeat the pro-Gaddafi forces is firstly to their own militias, whose identity is mostly based on specific towns, and only second to the NTC,” Alex Warren, of Frontier MEA, a Middle East and north Africa research and advisory firm, told Reuters.

Clyde Prestowitz at Foreign Policy explains the elephant in the room: that the recent militarism and aggressive rhetorical chest-beating coming from the highest reaches of America’s national security state towards Asia-Pacific is not about any sort of military threat. Rather, they are trying to “use military power (the only area in which the United States remains unquestionably competitive) to compensate for rapidly declining economic power.” What irony. As the US sows the seeds of its own economic collapse – ballooning the regulatory state and erasing the lines between public and private – it seeks to maintain global dominance not by reversing these trends, but by bullying successful economies with guns and bombs.

I wrote about the current attempts to fortify the empire in Asia-Pacific here.

Prestowitz urges us to make wealth, not war. I like it. Here’s an excerpt:

According to Panetta, the objective is to expand U.S. influence in the area (Asia). This comes in the wake of Secretary of State Clinton’s recent statements about America being “back” during her own recent swing through Asia.

But wait a minute, I never heard that we had left. I mean with six of our twelve carriers stationed in the Pacific and with close to the 100,000 troops that we have had in the Asia-Pacific region for the past forty years still stationed there, how can anyone think that we need to be “back” or that we lack influence, at least of the military variety?

…In fact, the reason for the plans for an increased military presence have nothing to do with any military threat emanating from China or anywhere else in Asia. The use of the terms “increase U.S. influence in the region” is a tipoff. It’s true that U.S. influence in the Asia-Pacific area has fallen dramatically over the past decade. But that is not for lack of troops or aircraft carriers in the region. It is because of the erosion of U.S. economic competitiveness. America makes little that Asians want to buy and is now also buying relatively less of what Asians make as well as providing less of the cutting edge technology they are focused on obtaining.

…It won’t work. Japan’s pre war Finance Minister Korekiyo Takahashi was correct when he long ago emphasized that “the consequences of an economic defeat are far more difficult to reverse than those of a military defeat.” America’s asian allies and friends want the United States to balance their growing economic reliance on China with U.S. military power. But military power will not for long offset economic power. Indeed, perversely, the effort to use U.S. military power to balance China’s economic power will only serve more rapidly to erode U.S. economic power which ultimately is the only power that counts.

 

Via As’ad AbuKhalil, AP reporter Matt Lee makes US State Department spokesperson squirm on Palestine and UNESCO issue:

I guess this would be less relevant if Obama had not just sent combat troops to support the Ugandan military and government in their fight against the LRA.

Amnesty International:

The Ugandan government and public officials are increasingly placing illegitimate restrictions on freedom of expression and peaceful assembly to silence critical voices, Amnesty International said in a report released today.

Stifling Dissent: Restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly in Uganda describes how journalists, opposition politicians and activists face arbitrary arrest, intimidation, threats and politically motivated criminal charges for expressing views deemed critical of the authorities.

Public protests have been banned in Uganda amid unverified claims that the organisers planned violence. In recent weeks four political activists have been charged with treason – a capital offense – for their involvement in organising the protests.

“The Ugandan authorities are creating a climate where it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to freely criticise government officials, their policies or practices,” said Godfrey Odongo, Amnesty International’s Uganda researcher.

The report also documents increasing restrictions on the media in Uganda which hinder it from freely broadcasting information.