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Hammer of Los wrote:...

And thanks to Professor Jeremy Keenan of the School of Oriental And African Studies.

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Lies, lies and yet more lies

Jeremy Keenan’s The Dark Saharareveals a web of state-inspired disinformation and myths behind “the war on terror” in Africa. Corinna Lotz reviews this pioneering and often shocking book.

Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited seven African states on a tour of the continent as part of a charm offensive by the Obama administration. But as The Dark Sahara author Jeremy Keenan has pointed out, the US government is still giving primacy to AFRICOM, its military command in Africa. AFRICOM, Keenan notes, grew out of EUCOM, European Command while it was in the charge of General Jim Jones, who is presently President Obama’s national security adviser.



Keenan is a social anthropologist and a renowned authority on the Tuareg nomads, ethnic Berbers who inhabit the Sahel belt which lies below the Sahara desert and stretches from west to east bordering on Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan and Eritrea. According to the World Bank, it is one of the poorest and most environmentally damaged regions in Africa. In September 2007, Tuaregs came together to declare an independent state.

A dangerous turn of events in the region surfaced briefly in the British media when a British national, Edwin Dyer, was kidnapped at the beginning of this year. Dyer was with a group of Austrian tourists at a cultural festival in north east Mali, near the Niger border. Dyer was executed on May 31, 2009 by terrorists belonging to Al Qa’ida of the Islamic Maghreb(AQIM). AQIM is an Algerian-based terrorist group that changed its name from the Groupe Salafiste pour La Prédication et le Combat (GSPC)in 2007.

Months before Dyer’s death, Keenan had dissected the elaborate tissue of myths and disinformation woven by a sinister alliance between Algerian military intelligence, the DRS (Direction des Renseignement et de la Sécurité) and the Bush-Cheney White House.

He believes that after the 9/11 terror attacks on the US, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika of the FLN (National Liberation Front) seized what he saw as an opportunity to secure sophisticated US military and intelligence technology by “getting into bed with America” after the 9/11 attacks.

The Algerian state had waged a notoriously brutal civil war during the 1990s, in which 200,000 died. The war was originally sparked by the imminent electoral victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) which was prevented by a military coup d’etat early in 1992. After 9/11, the Algerian state sought to wheedle favours from the US government by preying on the notion that Al Qaeda terrorism was spreading west from Afghanistan into Africa through the Sahel region.

In his book, Keenan deconstructs the unholy alliance between US military hawks and the politically bankrupt Algerian state. With the connivance of allies elsewhere in Africa and Europe, they have funded and encouraged the rise of terrorist thugs. In this sorcerer’s apprentice-style process, Islam has often become a cover for military, financial and power struggles.

The Dark Sahara tracks the rise and rise of a half-real, half-mythical terrorist dubbed “El Para”, believed by many to be run by Algeria’s military intelligence. The Bush administration declared El Para a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”, but as Keenan notes, he was not “taken out”, as is normally the case with such individuals.

A chilling and at times farcical story is told of innocent tourists being made pawns as the Algerian government plotted with a rag-tag band of fighters-turned Algerian government agents and performed elaborate fake kidnappings and pseudo-battles in the vast expanses of the Sahara. The hostage taking, Keenan explains, "enabled the US to launch a new 'African' – or, more accurately, a Sahara-Sahelian – front in the GWOT. The Pan-Sahel Initiative, launched in 2002, was expanded in May 2005 into a $100 million, five-year programme known in Washington as the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI)."

“The ‘US invasion’ as locals described it, has led to ‘blowback’, or what I prefer to call résistance,” Keenan writes. His 273-page book seeks to document how “terrorism in the Sahara-Sahel, fabricated to justify the launch of the GWOT [global war on terror] in Africa, has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Multiple Tuareg rebellions have transformed the Sahara-Sahel from what the Bush administration and military imagined as a ‘terror zone’ into a very real war zone.”

But it is not only the tourists who became pawns. In the bigger picture, it is nomadic peoples like the Tuareg who suffer the most. Behind the war on terror propaganda lie other motives. Africa has become the target of a neo-colonialist land and resources grab. Keenan highlights The 2001 Cheney Report, which warned of the decline in US oil production and singled out Africa as an area which could help to satisfy US energy requirements. Keenan’s chapter “Oil and Empire”, provides a wealth of statistics showing the vast reserves of Libya, Nigeria, Gabon, Chad and the waters off the Gulf of Guinea. Readers may be surprised to discover that in 2007, Nigeria overtook Saudi Arabia as the third largest oil exporter to the US.

Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, has noted that “oil can be a curse on poor nations”. This bitter truth, first observed by Venezuela’s oil minister in the 1960s, points to the underlying – but by no way the only – reason for the expansion of the war on terror into Africa, which Keenan has researched and documented so well in his book.

The days when the Algerian FLN were heroic fighters against French imperialism are long gone. And it is some time since Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi championed the cause of oppressed peoples like the Bedouin and the Tuareg. Today, neither they nor the other tribal peoples in the area have anyone to turn to.

Not surprisingly, as in Palestine, Egypt and elsewhere, religious as well as mercenary forces of one kind and another have cashed in on the political vacuum. But the days of Bouteflika and his ilk in the Algerian ruling caste are numbered as a crisis of leadership extends right across an entire generation of former anti-colonial fighters turned corrupt dictators, who still hide behind the rhetoric of their glory days.

Keenan exposes the network of state sponsored myth-spinners who plant stories in the global media, from The Washington Post in US, the Münchner Merkur in Germany through to the Daily Telegraph and The Economist in the UK. He has done sterling work in showing the mythology and disinformation behind the “war on terror” in this pioneering and often shocking book. It deserves to be read by any serious opponent of the US-UK axis of occupation and illegal wars.

The Dark Sahara, America’s War on Terror in Africa by Jeremy Keenan is published by Pluto Press. £ 17.99 A sequel to The Dark Sahara, The Dying Sahara, will be published in January 2010.

AWTW

Barack Obama versus Martin Luther King; The Mali Endgame, Imperial Handover

By Michael Welch
Global Research, January 25, 2013

“Obama is not the lesser of two evils, he is the more effective of two evils… Obama is getting away with things that no white president could get away with .. .those who have orchestrated his two terms are well aware of that.” -Jared Ball, crediting Glen Ford.

Obama is NOT the Realization of King’s Dream

Barrack Obama is the first African-American to hold the office of President of the United States. This is a major milestone to be sure. In 1963, when civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous and iconic “I have a Dream” speech, such an achievement would have seemed unachievable, if not unthinkable.

Considerable attention has been brought to the fact that this year, the date of his second and final presidential nomination falls on Martin Luther King Day. This would not be the first time comparisons have been made between the two men.

A popular sentiment in America is that the election of Barrack Obama to the US Presidency represents the realization of King’s dream. However, anyone who has taken a close look at Obama’s background and record in office should find this puzzling.

In one of his last speeches, King spoke of the triple evils not only of racism, but of materialism and militarism. Obama has overseen the expansion of Bush’s wars, as well as government bail-outs of financial interests implicated in the scandalous sub-prime mortgage fiasco. (Incidentally, seven of those Wall Street firms – Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse were by February 2008, among the top fourteen donors to Obama’s first campaign for US President. ) [1]

This week’s Global Research News Hour focuses on the role of Barack Obama within the framework of the American power structure. Our guest is Jared Ball, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. The interview focuses on Obama’s track record in office, his inaugural address, and what his Cabinet picks tell us about his policy priorities moving forward.

Mali The End Game. Imperial Hand-Over?

In one of his most recent essays, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: Who’s Who? Who is Behind the Terrorists? Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization addresses the current crisis in Northern Mali, and the hostage-taking in Algeria.

Professor Chossudovsky spent years in Mali doing research work. In this interview he deconstructs the propaganda surrounding the rebel fighters in Northern Mali and presents the remarkable thesis that France’s military build-up to defeat rebel activity in Northern Mali is actually part of a re-colonization of former French Africa…by the US!

References

1) Pam Martens, “Obama’s Money Cartel“, Counterpunch.org, May 8, 2008

http://www.globalresearch.ca/barack-oba ... er/5319457

Insight - Mystery Canadian coordinated Algeria gas field attack, premier says
By Lamine Chikhi

ALGIERS | Mon Jan 21, 2013 5:40pm GMT

(Reuters) - The Islamist attack on the sprawling desert gas complex in southern Algeria that triggered one of the worst hostage crises in years was conceived in Mali and coordinated by a mystery Canadian named only as Chedad, the Algerian prime minister said.

Five days after about 40 jihadist fighters raided the facility not far from the Libyan border and Algeria responded with a full-on military operation to kill or capture them, a picture of what happened is emerging.

While some hostages escaped in the early stages of the crisis, hopes soon faded for dozens of others once the army decided to take on the raiders.

Workers from the United States, Britain, France, Japan, Romania, Norway and the Philippines were either dead or missing, with the overall death toll among hostages and militants put at 67 and potentially rising by up to five.

Those who escaped had harrowing tales to tell. One Briton recounted how the attackers had strapped Semtex plastic explosive around his neck, bound his hands and taped his mouth. Another man hid for more than a day and a half under his bed as jihadist fighters searched the workers' residential complex.

Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said the plot had been hatched in war-ravaged Mali and the attackers had travelled through Niger and Libya before slipping into Algeria.

The jihadists were said to come from Egypt, Mauritania, Niger, Tunisia, Mali, Algeria and, in one case, from Canada. The Canadian, identified initially as Chedad, was coordinating the raiders, Sellal said.

The In Amenas gas plant probably felt impregnable to those who worked there - fenced in, hundreds of miles from anywhere and with the Algerian army patrolling its desert approaches.

That was a mirage. Libya, an ex-police state turned arms bazaar and now open for jihad, lies just 50 miles away.

At least some of the Islamist guerrillas who stormed in before dawn on Wednesday had driven along smugglers' tracks across the Libyan border, an Algerian security official told Reuters, citing evidence from mobile phones traced to the militants.

NINE TOYOTAS

The militants arrived in nine Toyotas with Libyan plates and painted in the colours of Sonatrach, the Algerian oil and gas company that has a share in the plant, according to the Algerian daily El Khabar.

The ease with which they entered the fortified housing compound and nearby natural gas plant left Algerians in little doubt the gunmen had allies among people at the site.

"They had local cooperation, I'm sure, maybe from drivers or security guards, who helped the terrorists get into the base," was the immediate reaction of Anis Rahmani, editor of Algeria's Ennahar newspaper and a writer on security issues who said he was briefed by officials.

Sellal confirmed that a driver who had formerly worked at the plant had been supplying information to the raiders.

Locally hired workers who escaped told Reuters of seeing the gunmen moving around the facility with confidence, apparently familiar with its layout and well prepared.

The militants said they launched the raid to halt French military intervention in neighbouring Mali, which began earlier this month, however the link is not yet clear.

It is possible the attack would have happened anyway, or that the French military operation provided a trigger to carry out an attack based on preparations made earlier.

First word of trouble came crackling over a walkie-talkie to the communications room at In Amenas, where a 27-year-old radio operator called Azedine logged a contact with a bus driver who, at 5:45 a.m. (4.45 a.m. British Time), left to take some foreigners to the airstrip at the town of In Amenas, some 50 km (30 miles) away.

"Moments after the bus left, I heard shooting, a lot of shooting, and then nothing," Azedine told Reuters on Friday.

BUS SKIRMISH

Two people, one British and one Algerian, were killed on two buses heading for the airport. The Briton was identified as a Gulf war veteran who had been in the French Foreign Legion and was working for a security company.

Sellal said the raiders planned to seize the foreign passengers, but came under fire from soldiers guarding them.

It is not clear whether that incident was part of the plan that secured the militants access to the compound. Almost immediately after the bus skirmish, they were inside, in at least three vehicles.

They shot an Algerian guard but he was able to raise the alarm before dying, Sellal said.

People who have worked at the site say there was normally an overnight curfew, leaving it unclear how the gunmen were able to get so close before being challenged. Their initial approach may have been well off the main roads.

Freed hostages spoke of frightened people staying in their offices or hiding in their dormitories.

Azedine saw a gunman put on the ID badge of a French supervisor who had been shot dead.

A French catering firm employee spent 40 hours cowering alone under his bed, terrified he would be killed.

Alexandre Berceaux said he had survived by staying in his room away from other foreigners, hidden behind a barricade of wooden planks and having Algerian colleagues sneak him food and water.

"I was completely isolated ... I was afraid. I could see myself already ending up in a wooden box," Berceaux said in a radio interview.

Rapidly the area was surrounded by heavily armed Algerian troops, with tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopter gunships from a nearby military base. Sellal said there had been an attempt to negotiate but it had collapsed over the hostage-takers' demands.

SMUGGLERS' TRAILS

People who know the site, operated by Britain's BP and Statoil of Norway along with Algeria's Sonatrach, said a barracks housing several hundred soldiers lies along the three km (two miles) of road separating the accommodation compound from the industrial plant.

A former senior Algerian government official said guards appeared to have been caught napping: "They have all kinds of equipment, detailed surveillance, cameras," he said. "They were caught maybe at the right time, at five in the morning."

But he also acknowledged the militants may have had help among the local workforce: "Out of 700 Algerians, I am sure they will find a couple who will cooperate. It always happens."

Militant leaders like Taher Ben Cheneb, said by officials to have been one of the commanders of the operation and to have been killed on Thursday, have stoked resentment among southerners at the way foreigners and northerners dominate the better paid jobs in the oil fields.

Ben Cheneb, described as a high school maths teacher in his 50s, led the Movement of the Islamic Youth in the South. Security expert Rahmani said he joined forces for this operation with followers of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a veteran of Afghan wars and a leading figure in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) who recently formed a new group named Mulathameen.

Belmokhtar, the overall commander but not present during the attack, claimed responsibility on behalf of al Qaeda for a raid he called a "blessed operation".

While Ben Cheneb's group appeared to have moved on In Amenas from a base inside Algeria, Rahmani said, another group led by Abu El Bara appeared to have come in from Libya.

ONE-EYED JACK

The group's field commander was a veteran fighter from Niger called Abdul Rahman al-Nigeri, Mauritanian media reported. He led his men into the gas plant, where he is believed to have been killed, while Abu El Bara died at the residential complex.

Noting the one-eyed Belmokhtar's reputation as a cigarette smuggler as well as a holy warrior - locals call him "Mister Marlboro" - Rahmani added: "They use the same back roads as the smugglers. You need a perfect knowledge of the Sahara to do it.

Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler, who was captured by Belmokhtar in Niger in 2008 and released after four months, nicknamed him "Jack" so as to be able to discuss him privately with fellow captives. Belmokhtar in turn referred to his prisoners as apostates and infidels.

More than a decade after Algeria's civil war killed some 200,000 people, Islamist fighters roam the sandy wastes of Africa's biggest country, mixing smuggling and kidnapping for ransom with opposition to the political establishment that has ruled in Algiers since French colonists left half a century ago.

These groups have been energised by the return of heavily armed ethnic Tuaregs and others from Libya, where they fought as mercenaries for Muammar Gaddafi until his overthrow in 2011. The new Libyan authorities are struggling to control their own deep south and it provides a launchpad for raids across the frontier.

ARMY ASSAULT

While security forces seek to impose control, the tracts of sand are vast, borders among the half dozen countries around the desert are unmarked, and the big money that can be made from illicit trade or kidnapping tourists and Western engineers can be used to buy favours from ill-paid officials.

Al Qaeda says it is fighting for a Muslim caliphate that transcends artificial borders in the Maghreb set by colonial powers.

Once inside the facility, militants, including bearded, ragged fighters and others in more urban dress, herded groups of Westerners together. Hundreds of Algerians were guarded more loosely. One Algerian worker told Reuters the gunmen said they were only interested in killing "Christians and infidels".

Algeria told Western governments, which voiced dismay at the storming of the facility on Thursday, that troops moved in only because guerrillas were trying to leave with hostages, hoping to reach Mali.

The captors loaded hostages into a convoy. Special forces backed by helicopters moved in around noon, some 30 hours after the plant was seized.

In what appears to have been the deadliest part of the siege, as described by the family of Irish survivor Stephen McFaul, government forces bombed the convoy, blasting apart four vehicles full of hostages. McFaul was in a fifth truck which crashed. He dashed for his life and escaped, and believes all those in the other vehicles were killed.

McFaul told how the attackers had turned him into a human bomb, strapping Semtex around his neck.

Another Briton, Garry Barlow, called his wife from within the site during the attack and said: "I'm sat here at my desk with Semtex strapped to my chest."

During Thursday, most of the hundreds of people at the site were able to flee, some of them Westerners posing as Algerians.

"We cut the wire with clippers and ran for it, all together, about 50 of us with the three foreigners," one man was quoted as saying by The Times.

By Friday night, it remained unclear how many of the gunmen and their hostages were still in the facility.

The operation at the larger, residential compound was over and troops were now surrounding the industrial site, where Nigeri and his men were reported to be holding a group of hostages.

But this left Western governments and intelligence officials, long used to difficult relations with Algeria which is proud of its sovereignty, desperate for hard facts about the fate of their nationals.

Western capitals seemed to be in the dark when the dramatic and bloody final assault came on Saturday morning.

Algerian soldiers shot dead 11 gunmen who had executed seven foreign hostages, according to the state news agency. The militants were then found to have booby-trapped the gas complex with explosives, which the army had to defuse.

The operation was over, authorities said, but mopping up went on for hours, with dozens more bodies found and many questions still to be answered.

(Additional reporting by Alex Lawler and Jessica Donati in London, Writing by Alastair Macdonald and; Giles Elgood, editing by Peter Millership)

Code: Select all

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/01/21/uk-sahara-crisis-raid-idUKBRE90H1DL20130121

MinM wrote:As with the upheaval in Maldives there's anecdotal evidence of covert activities in Mali. In Mali it's under the guise of CIA front "Catholic Relief Services".

The second 7" from Koudede for Sublime Frequencies and the sixth volume in the now-legendary Guitars from Agadez series. The circumstances surrounding these recordings are the stuff of which legends are made: In January 2012, a major insurgency brewing in the far north of Mali turned Timbutku's Festival au Désert into a heavily fortified spectacle. Just one day after the festival, rogue Tuareg rebels launched a full takeover of northern Mali, armed to the teeth with weapons from the Libyan war that ended in the murder of Col. Gadaffi, the spiritual father of the Tuareg in their struggle with the surrounding governments. By the time Koudede's group made it back to the capital city of Bamako -- with Sublime Frequencies' Hisham Mayet in tow -- discord had flared between the mostly Bambara ethnic south and the Tuareg community in the capital region. With a Tuareg exile already in progress, Koudede decided after much hesitation to follow through with a live concert at Toumast -- the Tuareg compound in Bamako -- in defiance of advice that all Tuareg should leave the city immediately. Recorded on location at Toumast by Hisham Mayet in January 2012, these two tracks are a scorching distillation of the urgency and fire in Koudede's music: the pure sound of his people and their constant struggles. Limited edition of 700 copies.

p.s. With deep regret, Sublime Frequencies is saddened to confirm that on October 28th, 2012, Koudede was pronounced dead from a fatal accident on the road back to Niger from a gig in Burkina Faso. This news was delivered the same day as the test pressing was approved for this release. His legacy will live on through his music. RIP Koudede!

It's almost a footnote, but as far as I can tell Mokhtar Belmokhtar is himself something of a US intel creation -- though not a US intel asset -- in an indirect kind of a way.

Because per what I read, he got started on jihad at age 19 in Afghanistan in 1992. That was at the very, very tail end of the period during which the US spend billions funding that stuff. The last year of it, in fact. But first of all, there wouldn't have been a cause with enough recruiting reach for him to join to begin with, without our efforts. And second of all, even though they were a last installment and there were other funders, we still spent two or three hundred million dollars on them in 1992. So who knows? Maybe we paid his way through training.

Anyway. That's pretty much trivia by this point, sad to say. I guess it just seemed worth noting before forgetting or something.

1/15/13 Jeremy Keenan
Published: January 15, 2013 | By Scott
Posted in: Uncategorized

Jeremy Keenan, professor at SOAS University of London, discusses his article “How Washington helped foster the Islamist uprising in Mali;” why the US and Algeria have spent ten years manufacturing terrorism in the Sahara with false-flag operations; the complex background of Mali’s Tuareg rebellion; and how the French are inviting blowback at home from their intervention abroad.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:13 — 7.4MB)
http://dissentradio.com/radio/13_01_15_keenan.mp3
http://scotthorton.org/2013/01/15/11513-jeremy-keenan/

Byrne wrote:
Professor Jeremy Keenan's book The Dark Sahara looks deeper into the 'War on Terror' bullshit now occuring in Africa:

Lies, lies and yet more lies

Jeremy Keenan’s The Dark Saharareveals a web of state-inspired disinformation and myths behind “the war on terror” in Africa. Corinna Lotz reviews this pioneering and often shocking book.

Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited seven African states on a tour of the continent as part of a charm offensive by the Obama administration. But as The Dark Sahara author Jeremy Keenan has pointed out, the US government is still giving primacy to AFRICOM, its military command in Africa. AFRICOM, Keenan notes, grew out of EUCOM, European Command while it was in the charge of General Jim Jones, who is presently President Obama’s national security adviser.
.

@ddayen: US Special Ops forces probably already working in Mali http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... story.html …

https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/329324629963468801

As with the upheaval in Maldives there's anecdotal evidence of covert activities in Mali. In Mali it's under the guise of CIA front "Catholic Relief Services".

Here's more on Mali...

Barack Obama versus Martin Luther King; The Mali Endgame, Imperial Handover

By Michael Welch
Global Research, January 25, 2013

“Obama is not the lesser of two evils, he is the more effective of two evils… Obama is getting away with things that no white president could get away with .. .those who have orchestrated his two terms are well aware of that.” -Jared Ball, crediting Glen Ford.

Obama is NOT the Realization of King’s Dream

...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/barack-oba ... er/5319457

‏@MailOnline: US special forces storm Mali hotel and free six American hostages from jihadist gunmen http://dailym.ai/1T3MxkW

@ddayen: US Special Ops forces probably already working in Mali