*Coming soon: US death squad programme for West Africa*
June 2, 2014 Opinion & Analysis <http://www.herald.co.zw/category/articles/opinion-a-analysis/> [image: Barack Obama] <http://www.herald.co.zw/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/barack_obama.jpg> Barack Obama Glen Ford Correspondent Militarily, Africa is fast becoming an American continent. Barack Obama, who has been president for all but the first year of AFRICOM’s existence, has succeeded in integrating US fighting units, bases, training regimens, equipment and financing into the military structures of all but a handful of African nations. The great Pan-Africanist and former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah’s dream of a militarily united Africa has been all but realised — with Americans and Europeans in charge. Under the guise of “humanitarian” intervention, Obama has vastly expanded Bill Clinton and George Bush’s African footprints, so that only a few patches on the continental map lie outside Washington’s sphere of operations. Eritrea and Zimbabwe are the notable exceptions — and, therefore, future targets. Africa is occupied territory. The African Union doesn’t even pretend to be in charge of its own nominal peacekeeping missions, which are little more than opportunities for African militaries to get paid for doing the West’s bidding. China and Brazil may be garnering the lion’s share of trade with Africa, but the men with the guns are loyal to AFRICOM — the sugar daddy to the continent’s military class. US troops now sleep in African barracks, brothers in arms with African officers who can determine who will sleep next week in the presidential mansion. The pace of US penetration of West Africa has quickened dramatically since 2011, when Obama bombed Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government out of existence, setting a flood of jihadists and weapons streaming east to Syria and south to destabilise the nations of the Sahel. Chaos ensued — beautiful chaos, if you are a US military planner seeking justification for ever-larger missions. NATO’s aggression against Libya begat the Sub-Saharan chaos that justified the French and US occupation of Mali and Niger. Hyperactive North African jihadists, empowered by American bombs, weapons and money, trained and outfitted their brethren on the continent, including elements of Nigeria’s Boko Haram. The Yoruba-speaking Islamic warriors then bequeathed AFRICOM a priceless gift: nearly 300 schoolgirls in need of rescuing, perfect fodder for “humanitarian” intervention. Nobody had to ask twice that Obama “do something!” The heads of Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Benin and Cameroon were summoned to Paris (pretending it was their idea) where they declared “total war” on Boko Haram, as “observers” from the US, France, Britain and the European Union (Africa’s past and future stakeholders) looked on. French President Francois Hollande said “a global and regional action plan” would come out of the conference. Of course, the five African states have neither the money, training, equipment nor intelligence gathering capacity for such a plan. It will be a Euro-American plan for the defense and security of West Africa — against other Africans. Immediately, the US sent 80 troops to Chad (whose military has long been a mercenary asset of France) to open up a new drone base, joining previously existing US drone fields in Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Seychelles Islands, Djibouti (home to a huge French and American base), and CIA sites that need not be disclosed. The new West African security grouping became an instant imprint of NATO, an appendage to be shaped by imperial military planners to confront enemies chosen by Washington and Paris. What a miracle of humanitarian military momentum! The girls had only been missing for a month, and might not be rescued alive, but five neighbouring African countries — one of them the biggest economy on the continent — had already been dragooned into a NATO-dominated military alliance with other subordinate African states. It soon turned out that AFRICOM already had a special relationship with the Nigerian military that was not announced until after the schoolgirls’ abduction. AFRICOM will train a battalion of Nigerian Rangers in counterinsurgency warfare, the first time that the Command has provided “full spectrum” training to Africans on such a scale. With the American public in a “save our girls” interventionist frame of mind, operations that were secret suddenly became public. The New York Times reveals that the US has been running a secret programme to train counterterrorism battalions for Niger and Mauritania. Elite Green Berets and Delta Force killers are instructing hand-picked commandos in counterinsurgency in Mali, as well. The identity of one Times source leaves little doubt that the previously secret operations are designed to blanket the region with US trained death squads. Michael Sheehan was until last year in charge of special operations at the Pentagon — Death Squads Central — where he pushed for more special ops trainers for African armies. Sheehan now holds the “distinguished chair” at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre. In the 1980s, he was a Special Forces commander in Latin America — which can only mean death squads. US Army Special Forces have always been political killers, most often operating with the CIA. The Phoenix Programme in Vietnam, which murdered between 26 000 and 41 000 people and tortured many more, was a CIA-Special Forces war crime. >From 1975 to deep into the ‘80s, the CIA and its Special Forces muscle provided technical support and weapons to killers for Operation Condor, the death squads run by a consortium of military governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, believed responsible for 60 000 murders. Sheehan was probably involved in Operation Condor and its Central American component, Operation Charly, and has perfected the art of political murder, ever since. If he is happy and feeling vindicated by events in Africa, then US-trained death squads are about to proliferate in that part of the world. There is no question that Obama is enamoured of special ops, since small unit murders by professional killers at midnight look less like war — and can, if convenient, be blamed on (other) “terrorists”. However, history — recent history —proves the US can get away with almost limitless carnage in Africa. Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of Somalia, backed by US forces on land, air and sea, resulted in “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa” at the time, “worse than Darfur”, according to UN observers, with hundreds of thousands dead. The US then withheld food aid to starve out Somali Shabaab fighters, leading to even more catastrophic loss of life. But, most Americans are oblivious to such crimes against Black humanity. US ally Ethiopia commits genocide against ethnic Somalis in its Ogaden region with absolute impunity, and bars the international media from the region. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama — each of them with help from Susan Rice — have collectively killed six million Congolese since 1996. The greatest genocide since World War II was the premeditated result of the chaos deliberately imposed on mineral-rich Congo by the US and its henchmen in neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda. The death squads the Americans are training in Nigeria, Niger, Mauretania and Mali, and those that will soon be stalking victims in Cameroon and Benin, will not be limited to hunting Boko Haram. Death squads are, by definition, destabilising; they poison the political and social environment beyond repair, as Central Americans who lived through the ‘80s can attest. Yet, that is US imperialism’s preferred method of conquest in the non-white world. It’s what the Americans actually do, when folks demand that they “do something”. —Black Agenda Report.
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