Niger another nameless war

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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 22, 2017 11:59 am

It is not like this is the first time I am posting about Africa....I KNOW SOME HISTORY OF AFRICA

please excuse my weariness but we can rehash some African history if you want or we can discuss the present I guess it is up to you now


wow I even posted about that evil Clinton family...who knew?


U.S. Oil Firms Entwined In Equatorial Guinea Deals - Riggs Probe
Mon Sep-06-04
https://www.democraticunderground.net/d ... 102x806546



Congo plans to clamp down on "blood" mineral
Wed Feb-09-05
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 02x1224233

Coltan - Roots Of Congo Atrocities & War Lie Inside Your Cell Phone (Thanks hatrack)

The uranium used in bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 came from the mine


http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... board.ph...
Sun Nov-09-08
Coltan - Roots Of Congo Atrocities & War Lie Inside Your Cell Phone
Posted by hatrack on Sun Nov-09-08 10:10 AM

ONE hundred feet beneath the green slope of a steep hill in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a man lying flat on his front in a narrow tunnel chips at a rock face with a hammer and chisel. After two hours, drenched in sweat, he tugs on a cord tied to his waist and is pulled back to the surface, carrying with him a 30kg sack of raw columbium-tantalite ore. Some mines use child labour, often for no pay at all.

Few people have heard of this rare mineral, known as coltan, even though millions of people in the developed world rely on it. But global demand for it, and a handful of other materials used in everything from mobile phones to soup tins, is keeping the armies of Congo's ceaseless wars fighting. More than 80 per cent of the world's coltan is in Africa, and 80 per cent of that lies in territory controlled by Congo's various rebel groups, armed militias and its corrupt and underfunded national army.

Despite Friday's ceasefire summit in Nairobi and diplomatic visits to Congo by earnest international politicians and diplomats, there will be no peace until the economic forces driving the conflict are addressed, experts warn.In 2007, 428 metric tonnes of coltan, worth around €2.4m, was exported from North and South Kivu, according to the provincial ministry of mines. But these figures are notoriously inaccurate, and take no account of smuggled minerals.

There is nothing illegal in buying or using coltan, despite concerns that some of profits help fund Congo's many armed groups. All of the big electronics manufacturers say that they make every effort to ensure that they use products are from legitimate mines. But it is impossible for customers to know for sure that the tantalum in their mobile phone, DVD player or desktop computer did not come from a rebel-held mine in Congo. Buyers say that ore from these mines is mixed with that from legitimate mines. There is no equivalent of the Kimberley Process, the international system used to certify that diamonds are from conflict-free areas.

EDIT

http://www.independent.ie/world-news/af ... ile-phon...

Global Witness said Nord-Kivu and Sud-Kivu provinces were rich in cassiterite (tin ore), gold and coltan, with trade in such minerals underpinning a decade of conflict and human rights abuses. "Short-term diplomatic initiatives will not produce lasting peace unless the underlying causes of the conflict are addressed," it said in a statement from its London headquarters.

"The economic benefits of fighting a war in this region remain one of the central motives of the warring parties."

Coltan, or colombo-tantalite ore, is used to make pinhead capacitators that are essential parts in cellphones and other consumer electronics. One-third of the world's estimated coltan reserves are in Congo.

Global Witness said: "Almost all the main armed groups involved in the conflict, as well as soldiers of the national Congolese army, have been trading illegally in these minerals for years, with complete impunity." It urged "stringent due diligence" on the part of manufactuers who should refuse to buy minerals found to passed through the hands of armed groups.

EDIT

http://news.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustral ... hone_dem...


..............................



http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=229&row=1

After George Bush Senior left the White House, he became an advisor and lobbyist for a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Hey, a guy’s got to work. But there were a couple of questions about Barrick, to say the least. For example, was Barrick’s Congo gold mine funding both sides of a civil war and perpetuating that bloody conflict? Only one Congressperson demanded hearings on the matter.

You’ve guessed: Cynthia McKinney.

That was covered in the . . . well, it wasn’t covered at all in the U.S. press.

McKinney contacted me at the BBC. She asked if I’d heard of Barrick. Indeed, I had. Top human rights investigators had evidence that a mine that Barrick bought in 1999 had, in clearing their Tanzanian properties three years earlier, bulldozed mine shafts . . . burying about 50 miners alive.

War is Golden for the Bush Administration

And the commodities connection? President Pretzel's relentless hissy-fit for war on Iraq has of course goosed the price of gold enormously--and that's set Bush Family coffers a-clinking. How so? In the waning days of his failed presidency, Bush I invoked an obscure 1872 statute to give a Canadian firm, Barrick Corporation, the right to mine $10 billion in gold from U.S. public lands. (U.S. taxpayers got a whopping $10,000 fee in return.) Bush then joined Barrick as a highly-paid "international consultant," brokering deals with various dictators of his close acquaintance. Barrick reciprocated with big bucks for Junior's presidential run. And in another quid for the old pro quo, last year Junior dutifully approved Barrick's controversial acquisition of a major rival. (Barrick is also one of the biggest polluters in America, by the way.)

Thus every step toward war fills Bush pockets quite literally with gold. That's the way they operate, these liars and thieves in thousand-dollar suits, these secretive fronts who profit from war, fear, blood and greasy palms. They arm the "monsters," they disarm the monsters, making money both ways. Then they drape themselves with Bible and flag, like smug pimps promenading to church, singing "Glory Hallelujah" while the whole world burns.

http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd02152003.html


Billions of Dollars at Stake


American Minerial Fields (AMFI), a consortium based origninally in Hope,Ark.--yes, Bill Clintos's hometown--is a big player in exploiting Congo's mineral wealth. In 1997, just a month before Mobutu fell, it signed contracts with the Kabila-Rwanda-Uganda alliance forces for almost a billion dollars investment in copper, cobalt and zinc mines and processing plants in Kolwezi and Kipushi.

This project is part of the $60 billion so-called National Missle Defense system that George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donalc Rumfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice-President Richard Cheney are pushing so vigorously. Building the space station will require many rare metals found in eastern Congo.

Another big player in the eastern Congo is Barrick Gold Corp., headquartered in Canada. It is the world's second-largest gold producer after Anglo-American of South Africa.

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabila1.htm


The Lost World War


The war on Iraq is not the only war in the world and it is not the only war being fought for our material benefit. Western consumers' seemingly insatiable demand for mobile phones, laptops, games consoles and other luxury electronic goods had been fueling violent conflict and killing millions in the Democratic Republic of Congo(formerly Zaire).

The Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC) is possibily the most minerial rich place on Earth - though this has proved a curse to the people of the Congo. The Congo holds millions of tons of diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, uranium, (the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki werre built using Congolese uranium), and coltan. Coltan, substance made up of columbium and tantalum, is a particularly valuable resource - used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and mirco-capacitors.

http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/newsle ... ue13/iss...

THREE MILLION LIVES HAVE BEEN LOST SINCE 1998 IN CONGO

Barrick Corporation and Cynthia McKinney The Real Reason


The real reason McKinney was trashed.

Was Barrick Gold Mining funding both sides of a civil war and perpetuating that bloody conflict?

Top human rights investigators had evidence that a mine bought by Barrick in 1999 had in clearing their Tanzanian property three years earlier bulldozed mine shafts burying 50 miners alive.

Tundu Lissu was one of those investigators and McKinney was trying to save his life.

Only one Congressperson demanded hearings on the matter.
In 2001 Cynthia McKinney convened a special congressional panel to explore the role of US covert forces and private interest in Central Africa.

But maybe ther was another reason Andrew Young and Vernon Jordan let McKinney swing, Remember Barrick? Did I mention to you that Andy Young and Vernon Jordan are both on Barrick's payroll? Well, I just did.
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries ... tates/de... ...



Anybody read the book, King Leopold's Ghost


by Adam Hochschild? I just started it. It's about the Congo and the slave trade under King Leopold II of Belgium which killed between 5-8 million people. The author's point is that most of us have heard very little about this holocaust and the worldwide movement that happened to stop the slavery trade there in the late 1800s.

The author also mentions an encounter he had while on a trip through the Congo in 1961 and how a CIA agent who had had too much to drink described how Patrice Lumumba--the newly independent country's first prime minister, had been killed a few months earlier--someone the US regarded as a "dangerous leftist troublemaker".

Another event to make Americans proud...



Indeed, diamonds are Bill Clinton's best friend


Throughout his tenure in the White House, Clinton personally profited at profound human loss of life from Congo connections tried and true. For years influential with the brutal Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese-Seko, Cia operative Lawence Devlin used his Congo network to access diamonds and cobalt for Clintonite diamond kingpins Michael McMurrough, Jean Raymond-Bouelle, Maurice and Leon Templesman, and their companies: American Mineral Fields International (AMFI) headquatered in Hope, Arkansas in 1995; and Lazare Kaplan International.

Counted among Barrick directors is Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada. Another is Edward Neys, former US Ambassador to Canada and chairman of Burson-Marsteller one of the world's largest and most secretive public relations firms.

Burson-Marsteller is a billion-dollar company that covers for organized crime. They are in the business of "perception management" the latter day term for propaganda. They covered for the Nigerian oil barons and Shell Oil during the Biafran War. They covered for Babcock & Wilcox and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission as the Three Mile Island nuclear melted down and irradiated the American landscape. They managed the public and their perceptions as the Exxon Valdez supertanker greased the Alaskan wilderness with black crude. Burson-Marsteller covered for Union Carbide after the gas massacre in Bhopal in 1984. Burson-Marsteller has run public relations campaigns to shield extensive, state-orchestrated terror by the "governments" of Argentina, Indonesia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Singapore.

http://www.audarya-fellowship.com/showf ... WorldNew... ...




Barrick boosts Russian exposure


The 31.7% stake in Alternative Investment Market-listed Highland Gold, formerly Harmony Gold, has been picked up by Barrick Gold and an international group of institutional investors.

Barrick has acquired 10% of the equity from the placing and Highland Gold has also conditionally agreed to issue a further 29.58 million shares at the placement price of 235p per share.

This would give Barrick in total 29% stake in Highland Gold

"This agreement with Barrick marks a new phase in the progress of Highland Gold and we are excited about the prospects of developing a relationship with them in Russia."

http://www.miningnews.net/storyview.asp?storyid=19417 §ionsource=c1...



West has "failed to stop" Congo war profiteering from war {Independent}

In the past five years it is estimated that war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken three MILLION lives. Many multinational corporations have made huge profits from this.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/afr ... y.jsp?st...

The Lost World War

The war on Iraq is not the only war in the world and it is not the only war being fought for our material benefit. Western consumers’ seemingly insatiable demand for mobile phones, laptops, games consoles and other luxury electronic goods has been fuelling violent conflict and killing millions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). By Erik Vilwar.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is possibly the most mineral rich place on earth – though this has proved a curse to the people of the Congo. The Congo holds millions of tons of diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, uranium (the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were built using Congolese uranium), and coltan. Coltan, a substance made up of columbium and tantalum, is a particularly valuable resource – used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and micro-capacitors.

What is Coltan
Coltan looks like black mud, but is three times heavier than iron and only slightly lighter than gold. It is found in abundance in eastern Congo and can be mined with minimal equipment. Coltan is vital to the high tech economy. Wireless electronic communication would not exist without it. The ‘mud’ is refined into tantalum – a metallic element that is both a superb conductor of electricity and extremely heat-resistant. Tantalum powder is a vital component in capacitors, for the control of the flow of current in miniature circuit boards. Capacitors made of tantalum are found inside every laptop, pager, personal digital assistant, and mobile phone.1 Tantalum is also used in the aviation and atomic energy industries. A very small group of companies in the world process coltan. These include H.C.Starck (Germany, a subsidiary ot Bayer), Cabott Inc. (US), Ningxia (China), and Ulba (Kazakhstan). The world’s biggest coltan mines are in Australia and they account for about 60% of world production. It is generally believed, however, that 80% of the world’s reserves are in Africa, with DRC accounting for 80% of the African reserves.2

http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/newsle ... ue13/iss...

Profile: River Congo

By Mark Doyle
BBC News

The boat disaster on a tributary of the River Congo, in which over 160 people were killed, involved two of the very large ferries that ply the waterways of the region...


River rebels

It flows from the capital Kinshasa in the west, in a great arc through impenetrable jungle, to the mining city of Kisangani in the east.


Boats are the cheapest form of travel in DR Congo

The river is so strategically important that for several years, during the Congolese civil war, boats were banned from it because the authorities in Kinshasa thought it could be used by advancing rebels.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3243552.stm


By Martin Plaut
BBC regional analyst



The hunt for minerals has fuelled the conflict
A British-based development group has accused industrialised countries of failing to punish companies alleged to have profited from the DR Congo war.
The group says governments from the world's 30 richest countries failed to investigate what companies based in their countries did in the Congo.

Four years ago a UN panel named companies and individuals that had allegedly been enriched by the war.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3519002.stm





A spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency said it was very concerned about activities at the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga province.

The mine has been used in the past to producer uranium for nuclear bombs.

The government says it shut down the mine, but a BBC correspondent found 6,000 illegal miners at work there.

They are extracting large amounts of material containing cobalt, copper, platinum and uranium, says our correspondent.

The uranium is sold to nearby furnaces operated mainly by private businessmen from China and India, and exported illegally to the world market via neighbouring Zambia.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3566701.stm


Congo officials seize illegal uranium


KINSHASA, Congo (AP) -- Authorities seized two cases of uranium in Kinshasa, the capital, that they feared might end up on the black market in neighboring countries, Congo atomic energy officials said Monday.

The cases contained less than 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of uranium 235 and 238 and were not sufficient to make an atomic bomb, said Fortunat Lumu Badimayimatu, a top government atomic energy expert.

The containers were seized at the beginning of March. Badimayimatu said he believed the uranium could have been intended for use in the oil industry, in which he said small quantities are used for drilling and measuring the density of hydrocarbon.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/afric ... congo.ur... /

Trial Begins Over Alleged Congo War Crimes


Wednesday March 24, 2004 8:31 PM


By ANTHONY DEUTSCH

Associated Press Writer


He denied claims by the Dutch Immigration Service that he was ``an important member'' of an execution squad. ``I can't be a member if I have never heard of it, can I?'' he said. He also denied knowing any of the witnesses.

A statement by Francoise Mtumba said Nzapali had forced her into sexual slavery for months, in part by injecting her with tranquilizers.

Mtumba, who the judges said gave an accurate description of the inside of the defendant's house, said Nzapali held her prisoner for two weeks at the Metropole Hotel in Matadi after arresting her for ``bumping into him on the street.''

``He injected me with drugs and I went dizzy. When I woke up I was naked on the bed and he was lying next to me,'' she said in her statement. ``He forced me to, and I couldn't leave because I was scared of beatings.''

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/s ... 280,-389...

King of the Beasts Denies He Is A Torturer and Rapist

A Congolese war crimes suspect known as the King of Beasts denied accusations today that he was a feared member of an execution squad who earned his nickname by habitually raping and torturing prisoners.


Sebastian Nzapali is the first suspect to be tried in the Netherlands for war crimes allegedly committed abroad.

He was charged with crimes against humanity that allegedly occurred in 1996 when he was a colonel under Mobutu Sese Seko, the long-time dictator in then Zaire who was overthrown in 1997.

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2691661

A charter to intervene


George Monbiot
Tuesday March 23, 2004
The Guardian


.......

The third argument is surely the strongest. This is that as soon as we accept that an attack by a powerful nation against a weak one is legitimate, we open the door to any number of acts of conquest masquerading as humanitarian action. As Chomsky points out, Japan claimed that it was invading Manchuria to rescue it from "Chinese bandits"; Mussolini attacked Abyssinia to "liberate slaves"; Hitler said he was protecting the peoples he invaded from ethnic conflict. It is hard to think of any colonial adventure for which the salvation of the bodies or souls of the natives was not advanced as justification.

Faced with this dreadful choice, a sort of moral numbness comes over us. To accept that force can sometimes be a just means of relieving the suffering of an oppressed people is to hand a ready-made excuse to every powerful nation that fancies an empire. To deny it is to tell some of the world's most persecuted peoples that they must be left to rot.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Co ... 673,1175...

It seems to me that there is no instant or reliable answer to this dilemma. But one thing is clear: that the current framework of international law is incapable of resolving it for us. Even if other nations wished to act selflessly on behalf of the oppressed by attacking a despotic state, the charter of the United Nations forbids it. What this means is that any government can then claim it has a moral duty to ignore the law. In attempting to prevent unjustified acts of aggression, in other words, the charter's lack of discrimination may have encouraged them.


Per-Anders Pettersson

A precariously crammed commuter train rolls into the center of Kinshasha, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After decades of government corruption and a bloody four-year civil war, Congo-DRC—nearly the size of western Europe—has few maintained roads and a decaying transportation infrastructure, making overburdened rail lines one of the few viable travel options.



America Mineral Fields - company decription (link)


http://www.hoovers.com/america-mineral- ... -ID__535... ...

America Mineral Fields Inc. (Toronto: AMZ )
St. Georges' House, 15 Hanover Sq.
London
W1S 1HS, United Kingdom
Phone: +44-20-7355-3552
Fax: +44-20-7355-3554

http://www.am-min.com

What's in a name? America Mineral Fields is based in London but has mining projects in development in Central Africa (Angola, Congo, and Zambia). The company owns exploration and mining concessions to diamond and mineral (including copper, cobalt, and zinc) properties. Upon acquiring the concessions, America Mineral Fields conducts feasibility studies to determine if reserves can be recovered profitably. Founder Jean-Raymond Boulle owns about 30% of the company through his firms America Diamond Corp. and Gondwana (Investments). Belgian metals processor n.v. Umicore s.a. owns nearly 10%


Bush, Clinton in the Web: Behind the Assassination of Kabila


George Bush Sr., father of the president, even had an intimate connection with one of these plundering corporations.

But this is not mentioned in the commercial media, which, as usual, go even further than indifference to insult the fallen head of state, while speculating on the breakup of the Congo.

The industrial enterprises that set up AMFI, according to Baracyetse, "are interested in the contract for the construction of the orbital platform around the world that is destined to replace the Russian station MIR."

This project is part of the $60-billion so-called National Missile Defense system that George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Richard Cheney are pushing so vigorously. Building the space station will require many of the rare metals found in eastern Congo.

Another big player in the eastern Congo is Barrick Gold Corp., headquartered in Canada. It is the world's second- largest gold producer after Anglo-American of South Africa.

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabila1.htm

Poppy Strikes Gold

Tuesday, April 8, 2003

By Greg Palast,
From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Plume, 2003)


Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997-2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation. The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian’s U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.....

They could well afford it. In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush-era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could “perfect its patent” on the estimated $10 billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $ 10,000. Eureka!

How did he go from busted stereo maker to demi-billionaire goldbug? The answer: Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer, the “bag man” in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage scandals. The man who sent guns to the ayatolla teamed up with Munk on hotel ventures and, ultimately, put up the cash to buy Barrick in 1983, then a tiny company with an “unperfected” claim on the Nevada mine. You may recall that Bush pardoned the coconspirators who helped Khashoggi arm the Axis of Evil, making charges against the sheik all but impossible. (Bush pardoned the conspirators not as a favor to Khashoggi, but to himself.)

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=207&row=4



Congo Signs $332 Million Mineral Deal


EDDY ISANGO

Associated Press


KINSHASA, Congo - Congo's government has signed a $332 million deal giving a London-based mining company access to lucrative copper and cobalt mines in southeastern Congo, officials said Wednesday.

America Mineral Fields Inc. signed the agreement with the state mining company, Gecamines, in Kinshasa late Tuesday, said Francois Collette, the U.K.-based company's spokesman.

America Mineral Fields said on its Web site the mine at Kolwezi in southern Katanga province could become "one of the world's largest and lowest-cost sources of cobalt as well as a major source of copper."

Congo is struggling to recover from five years of war that ended with a peace deal between rebels, the government and their foreign backers in December 2002.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/bu ... 265869.h...

Interesting that American Mineral Fields seems to have used Executive Outcomes (Private Military Company) in the past.

http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:nv ... oJ:www.m... ...


1. The Lost World War


The war on Iraq is not the only war in the world and it is not the only war being fought for our material benefit. Western consumers’ seemingly insatiable demand for mobile phones, laptops, games consoles and other luxury electronic goods has been fuelling violent conflict and killing millions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). By Erik Vilwar.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is possibly the most mineral rich place on earth – though this has proved a curse to the people of the Congo. The Congo holds millions of tons of diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, uranium (the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were built using Congolese uranium), and coltan. Coltan, a substance made up of columbium and tantalum, is a particularly valuable resource – used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and micro-capacitors.

What is Coltan?
Coltan looks like black mud, but is three times heavier than iron and only slightly lighter than gold. It is found in abundance in eastern Congo and can be mined with minimal equipment. Coltan is vital to the high tech economy. Wireless electronic communication would not exist without it. The ‘mud’ is refined into tantalum – a metallic element that is both a superb conductor of electricity and extremely heat-resistant. Tantalum powder is a vital component in capacitors, for the control of the flow of current in miniature circuit boards. Capacitors made of tantalum are found inside every laptop, pager, personal digital assistant, and mobile phone.1 Tantalum is also used in the aviation and atomic energy industries. A very small group of companies in the world process coltan. These include H.C.Starck (Germany, a subsidiary ot Bayer), Cabott Inc. (US), Ningxia (China), and Ulba (Kazakhstan). The world’s biggest coltan mines are in Australia and they account for about 60% of world production. It is generally believed, however, that 80% of the world’s reserves are in Africa, with DRC accounting for 80% of the African reserves.2

The human costs of this conflict have been horrific. According to the UN, up until last September, in the five Eastern provinces of DRC alone, between 3 and 3.5 million people had died directly because of the war. 4 Many were killed and tortured but most died of starvation and disease. The destruction of farms has resulted in malnutrition and starvation. Millions of people have been forced from their homes. Years of war have led to a social environment in which men abuse women on a staggering scale and children become instruments of war, forced to work in mines and conscripted into armed forces. Surveys in Butembo found that 90% of people were living on less than 20 cents a day and only one meal. 5

http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/newsle ... ue13/iss...


2. Scamble for Africa: part two.

So Congo is poised to become the retirement capital of the world's mercenaries?

Somehow I do not think so unless they are planning to airfreight that ore to London. Congo has a 37 kilometre coastline on the west coast of Africa. Nip that and it is all over.

Also consider that the global economy is sinking fast and some minerals are not necessarily as important as they once were.
Compare fibre optics and copper cables.
Even diamonds are losing their value.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html
That is why Walmart has a gem counter.

The basic problem remains the same.
It is a battle between the haves and the have-nots.
Europe has never had anything that the rest of the world wants. This has meant that Europe has effectively been cut out of trade. Therefore Europe has changed this weakness into their greatest strength by investing heavily in items that nobody wants, such as a missile delivered at high speed into their living-room.
The US now finds itself in the same position, hence their funding of mercenary-led attacks on those nations with something of value.
http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id442/pg1 /

On edit:
I just saw the coltan link.
Not good for Congo. Perhaps we can take comfort in the computer-industry slump and the loss of investor interest in technology stocks.


War in Congo has claimed over three million lives since 1998 alone.


While we should perhaps applaud the New York Times and Boston Globe and other major media for having finally reported something on the inhuman conflict in Congo—which is also driving the extinction of the great apes, the deforestation of the vast Congo Basin, and hence global climate mayhem—we must also recognize that the imperatives of corporate profit have insured that four years of western military and economic exploitation of Congo have taken place completely off the radar screen of the American public.

War in Congo has claimed over three million lives since 1998 alone. Innocent civilians have been brutalized, massacred, raped and tortured by all parties to the conflict. It began with the U.S.-sponsored invasion of Rwanda in 1994, and followed with two subsequent U.S.-sponsored invasions of Congo (in 1996 and 1998). These are not the simple "civil wars" declared by the western press. Even the Rwanda "genocide" (in 1994) has to some extent been manufactured in the American mind to serve the mythology of tribalism. Meanwhile, American green berets and military advisors and Pentagon officials have participated from blackboard to battlefield.

Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Rwanda and Congo/ Zaire are wars where factions are armed with U.S.-made weapons (M16s, SAMs, tanks); where U.S. covert forces undertake brutal secret missions and psychological operations—accountable to no one—behind the headlines. They are wars where the Central Intelligence Agency is deeply and maliciously entrenched in subverting democracy and orchestrating chaos that is expediently advertised—as such—by our dubious media. At the roots, however, these are wars like any other war.

Essential to the superalloys and weaponry of the global economy of war are Congo’s cobalt, uranium and columbium tantalite (coltan). Cobalt is elemental to nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons, tank armor, industrial furnaces and aerospace, and for 50 years the CIA has insured the free flow of cobalt out of Congo. The human devastation in poverty, disease, torture and massacres is uncountable. Adjectives do not describe the suffering. Similarly, coltan is essential for cellphones and children’s playstations, and companies like Sony and Nokia have been cashing in on this windfall—paid in human blood.

Congo's four-and-a-half-year long civil war has led to factional fighting among myriad groups, some employing children. (Photo: AP)

Child soldiers in Congo




Child soldiers with weapons wait for instructions in an ethnic Hema militia camp near Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, June 16, 2003. REUTERS/Antony Njuguna



A child soldier practices with a machine gun in an ethnic Hema militia camp near Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, June 15, 2003. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen



Child soldiers holding machines guns look out from a window in an ethnic Hema militia camp near Bunia in the Democratic Republic of Congo June 15, 2003. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/photoal ... 859618.h...


Handicap International raises mine awareness around world

street theatre is used to raise awareness in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo.

People prepare to mark a zone for clearing in Kisangani.

Signs in Kisangani warn people not to step in a minefield.


http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/photoga ... gallery....


http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arm ... s/congo....

Finding 2 – The ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) is a prime example of the devastating legacy of U.S. arms sales policy on Africa. The U.S. prolonged the rule of Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Soko by providing more than $300 million in weapons and $100 million in military training. Mobutu used his U.S.-supplied arsenal to repress his own people and plunder his nation’s economy for three decades, until his brutal regime was overthrown by Laurent Kabila’s forces in 1997. When Kabila took power, the Clinton administration quickly offered military support by developing a plan for new training operations with the armed forces.


http://www.audarya-fellowship.com/showf ... WorldNew... ...



Keith Harmon Snow, photojournalist reports on U.S. Interests in Africa


Background: Keith Harmon Snow is a journalist/photographer who covers the global crises in environment and security matters. A former electrical engineer and business developement manager with GE Aerospace, he has worked in 26 countries and has presented his photos at colleges and universities across the nation. Last year, he provided expert testimony at a special U.S. congressional hearingon "Western interests, private profit and genocide in Africa." Snow address the roots of violence and the hidden agendas behind the profound, but unnecessary suffering in Africa.



Sponsor: Global HOPE, a registered UH-Hilo student organization
http://harmontalk.blogspot.com /

http://www.survivorsrightsinternational ... ut_us/co...

http://genocidewatch.org/PressReleaseAnuak022804.htm

http://www.commondreams.org/news2002/0828-04.htm

http://www.worldwar3report.com/89.html#africa2

In a new paper on the Congo conflict, award-winning investigative journalist Keith Harmon Snow connects the dots between the Congo coltan mines and the corridors of power. After the 1996 revolution that overthrew the long dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (now DRC), US-supported Rwanda and Uganda started grooming proxy guerilla forces in eastern Congo to fight the new revolutionary regime of Laurent Kabila (since assassinated, and whose son now rules). Meanwhile, figures close to the White House and global aid programs for Central Africa indirectly profited from the blood coltan:

"Some 80% of world supplies of cobalt and columbo-tantalite (coltan) are found in DRC. Coltan is essential for cell phones, Sony Playstations and computers. During the US proxy wars in Central Africa in the 1990's, Sony America's now Executive Vice-President and General Counsel Nicole Seligman was legal counselor to President William Jefferson Clinton (through the Washington DC firm Williams and Connally, LLP). During his media banking stint with First Boston, one of the major backers of profit-based 'humanitarian relief' efforts in Zaire in 1995, Sony Corporation Executive VP and Chief Financial Officer Robert Wiesenthal counted Cox Communications, Time Warner and the New York Times as major clients."

Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999


Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (African Studies, 50)

This book is the source for the information, I believe you are questioning.

Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (African Studies, 50)
by Wayne Madsen (Editor)

Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa: 1993-1999
Background
The Ba-n'daw Report
Covert American Support for the Combatants
American Military Support for the Second Invasion of the Congo
Profiting from the Destabilization of Central Africa
Summary
NOTES
Background
(c) Wayne Madsen

Prepared Testimony and Statement for the Record of

Wayne Madsen

Author,

“Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999”

Investigative Journalist

On:

Suffering and Despair: Humanitarian Crisis in the Congo

Before the

Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights

Committee on International Relations

United States House of Representatives

Washington, DC

May 17, 2001


An ominous report on the fate of refugees was made by Nicholas Stockton, the Emergencies Director of Oxfam U.K. & Ireland. He said that on November 20, 1996, he was shown U.S. aerial intelligence photographs which “confirmed, in considerable detail, the existence of 500,000 people distributed in three major and numerous minor agglomerations.” He said that three days later the U.S. military claimed it could only locate one significant mass of people, which they claimed were identified as former members of the Rwandan armed forces and the Interhamwe militia. Since they were the number one targets for the RPF forces, their identification and location by the Americans was undoubtedly passed to the Rwandan forces. They would have surely been executed.<19> Moreover, some U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in central Africa said that any deaths among the Hutu refugees merely constituted “collateral damage.”

Some of the companies involved in this new “scramble for Africa” have close links with PMCs and America’s top political leadership. For example, America Minerals Fields, Inc., a company that was heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of Kabila, was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo’s civil war, headquartered in Hope, Arkansas. Its major stockholders included long-time associates of former President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. America Mineral Fields also reportedly enjoys a close relationship with Lazare Kaplan International, Inc., a major international diamond brokerage whose president remains a close confidant of past and current administrations on Africa matters.<26>

When the AFDL-CZ and their Rwandan allies reached Kinshasa in 1996, it was largely due to the help of the United States. One reason why Kabila’s men advanced into the city so quickly was the technical assistance provided by the DIA and other intelligence agencies. According to informed sources in Paris, U.S. Special Forces actually accompanied ADFL-CZ forces into Kinshasa. The Americans also reportedly provided Kabila’s rebels and Rwandan troops with high definition spy satellite photographs that permitted them to order their troops to plot courses into Kinshasa that avoided encounters with Mobutu’s forces.<20> During the rebel advance toward Kinshasa, Bechtel provided Kabila, at no cost, high technology intelligence, including National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite data.<21>

One of the major goals of the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma faction, a group fighting the Kabila government in Congo, is restoration of mining concessions for Barrick Gold, Inc. of Canada. In fact, the rebel RCD government’s “mining minister” signed a separate mining deal with Barrick in early 1999.<29> Among the members of Barrick’s International Advisory Board are former President Bush and former President Clinton’s close confidant Vernon Jordan.


------------

BLOOD MONEY OUT OF AFRICA



Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney

Covert Action in Africa: A Smoking Gun in Washington, D.C.

Rayburn House Office Building
Friday, April 6, 2001
10:00am - 12:00 noon


The accounts we are about to hear today assist us in understanding just why Africa is in the state it is in today. You will hear that at the heart of Africa's suffering is the West's, and most notably the United States', desire to access Africa's diamonds, oil, natural gas, and other precious resources.

You will hear that the West, and most notably the United States, has set in motion a policy of oppression, destabilization and tempered, not by moral principle, but by a ruthless desire to enrich itself on Africa's fabulous wealth. While falsely pretending to be the friends and allies of many African countries, so desperate for help and assistance, many western nations have in reality betrayed those countries' trust--and instead, have relentlessly pursued their own selfish military and economic policies. Western countries have incited rebellion against stable African governments by encouraging and even arming opposition parties and rebel groups to begin armed insurrection.

The Western nations have even actively participated in the assassination of duly elected and legitimate African Heads of State and replaced them with corrupted and malleable officials. Western nations have even encouraged and been complicit in the unlawful invasions by African nations into neighboring counties.

Something must be done to right these wrongs.

I invite you to listen and learn first-hand of the West's activities in Africa.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Prepared Statement of Wayne Madsen

WHAT A DIFFERENCE AN ELECTION MAKES: OR DOES IT?

Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist who has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, CAQ, and the Intelligence Newsletter. He is the author of Genocide and Covert Activities in Africa 1993-1999 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999), an expose of U.S. and French intelligence activities in Africa's recent civil wars and ethnic rebellions. He served as an on-air East Africa analyst for ABC News in the aftermath of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Mr. Madsen has appeared on 60 Minutes, World News Tonight, Nightline, 20/20, MS-NBC, and NBC Nightly News, among others. He has been frequently quoted by the Associated Press, foreign wire services, and many national and international newspapers.

Mr. Madsen is also the author of a motion picture screen play treatment about the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion. He is a former U.S. Naval Officer and worked for the National Security Agency and U.S. Naval Telecommunications Command.

---

I wish to discuss the record of American policy in Africa over most of the past decade, particularly that involving the central African Great Lakes region. It is a policy that has rested, in my opinion, on the twin pillars of unrestrained military aid and questionable trade. The military aid programs of the United States, largely planned and administered by the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), have been both overt and covert.

Some of the companies involved in this new "scramble for Africa" have close links with PMCs and America's top political leadership. For example, America Minerals Fields, Inc., a company that was heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of the late Congolese President Laurent-Desire Kabila, was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo's civil war, headquartered in Hope, Arkansas. Its major stockholders included long-time associates of former President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. America Mineral Fields also reportedly enjoys a close relationship with Lazare Kaplan International, Inc., a major international diamond brokerage whose president remains a close confidant of past and current administrations on Africa matters.

One of the major goals of the Rwandan-backed Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD), a group fighting the Kabila government in Congo, is restoration of mining concessions for Barrick Gold, Inc. of Canada. In fact, the rebel RCD government's "mining minister" signed a separate mining deal with Barrick in early 1999. Among the members of Barrick's International Advisory Board are former President Bush and former President Clinton's close confidant Vernon Jordan.

Currently, Barrick and tens of other mining companies are stoking the flames of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each benefits by the de facto partition of the country into some four separate zones of political control. First the mineral exploiters from Rwanda and Uganda concentrated on pillaging gold and diamonds from the eastern Congo. Now, they have increasingly turned their attention to a valuable black sand called columbite-tantalite or "col-tan." Col-tan is a key material in computer chips and, therefore, is as considered a strategic mineral. It is my hope that the Bush administration will take pro-active measures to stem this conflict by applying increased pressure on Uganda and Rwanda to withdraw their troops from the country. However, the fact that President Bush has selected Walter Kansteiner to be Assistant Secretary of State for African, portends, in my opinion, more trouble for the Great Lakes region. A brief look at Mr. Kansteiner's curriculum vitae and statements calls into question his commitment to seeking a durable peace in the region. For example, he has envisaged the splitting up of the Great Lakes region into separate Tutsi and Hutu states through "relocation" efforts and has called the break-up of the DRC inevitable. I believe Kansteiner's previous work at the Department of Defense where he served on a Task Force on Strategic Minerals and one must certainly consider col-tan as falling into that category -- may influence his past and current thinking on the territorial integrity of the DRC. After all, 80 per cent of the world's known reserves of col-tan are found in the eastern

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/p ... blood_sp...


Africa: U.S. Covert Action Exposed

By Eric Ture Muhammad
Final Call
April 25, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Corporate greed, combined with a desire to never allow the "throne of civilization" to unite and become self-sufficient, continues to join at the hip the U.S. Government, the United Nations and corporate cartels in a persistent war on Africa, a recent congressional hearing concluded.

Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) chaired the hearing, "Covert Action in Africa: A Smoking Gun in Washington, D.C.," and led the voices of castigation that claimed the U.S. Government, the UN, private militias and western economic interests possessed complete knowledge of pending civil unrest in Africa and fed the fray between African nations. Their aim was to use war, disease, hunger and poverty as covers while continuing the centuries-old practice of rape and exploitation of the continent's human and mineral resources, testimonies charged.

Among those named as collaborators during the daylong hearing were U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright and international diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman.

http://www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp?articleid=116

A former U.S. ambassador to Uganda ? acting on behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) -- gathered intelligence on the movement of Hutu refugees through eastern Zaire. The DIA¡¯s second ranking Africa hand, who also served as the U.S. military attache in Kigali, reconnoitered the Rwandan border towns of Cyangugu and Gisenyi, gathering intelligence on the cross border movements of anti-Mobutu Rwandan Tutsis from Rwanda.<3>

The Defense Intelligence Agency¡¯s African bureau chief established a close personal relationship with Bizima (alias Bizimana) Karaha, an ethnic Rwandan who would later become the Foreign Minister in the Laurent Kabila government. Moreover, the DIA¡¯s Africa division had close ties with Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), an Alexandria, Virginia private military company (PMC), whose Vice President for Operations is a former Director of DIA.

The political officer of the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa, accompanied by a CIA operative, traveled with AFDL-CZ rebels through the eastern Zaire jungles for weeks after the 1996 Rwandan invasion of Zaire. In addition, it was reported that the Kinshasa embassy official and three U.S. intelligence agents regularly briefed Bill Richardson, Clinton¡¯s special African envoy, during the rebels¡¯ steady advance towards Kinshasa.<4> The U.S. embassy official conceded that he was in Goma to do more than meet rebel leaders for lunch. Explaining his presence, he said ¡°What I am here to do is to acknowledge them as a very significant military and political power on the scene, and, of course, to represent American interests.¡±<5> In addition, MPRI was reportedly providing covert training assistance to Kagame¡¯s troops in preparation for combat in Zaire.<6> Some believe that MPRI had actually been involved in training the RPF from the time it took power in Rwanda.<7>
Some of the companies involved in this new ¡°scramble for Africa¡± have close links with PMCs and America¡¯s top political leadership. For example, America Minerals Fields, Inc., a company that was heavily involved in promoting the 1996 accession to power of Kabila, was, at the time of its involvement in the Congo¡¯s civil war, headquartered in Hope, Arkansas. Its major stockholders included long-time associates of former President Clinton going back to his days as Governor of Arkansas. America Mineral Fields also reportedly enjoys a close relationship with Lazare Kaplan International, Inc., a major international diamond brokerage whose president remains a close confidant of past and current administrations on Africa matters.<26>
http://www.geocities.com/minjokhan/SocA ... dsenCong...

Bush, Clinton in the Web: Behind the Assassination of Kabila

By Deirdre Griswold and Johnnie Stevens

The failure of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to express even the most perfunctory regret over the assassination of Congo President Laurent Désiré Kabila last year, betrays how implicated Washington is in this latest outrage against the most important country in central Africa.

Washington's silence is even more glaring considering that its foreign policy experts are well aware that the African people view the secret intelligence agencies of the U.S. government, which work closely with corporations seeking vast fortunes in the region, as the probable authors of this crime.

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Company/kabila1.htm

Congo (Kinshasa): Arms Past and Present, 01/2699

Congo (Kinshasa): Arms Past and Present

Date distributed (ymd): 000126

Document reposted by APIC


Region: Central Africa

Issue Areas: +economy/development+ +security/peace+

+US policy focus+

Summary Contents:

This posting contains the executive summary of a new report from the Arms Trade Resource Center of the World Policy Institute, citing past and present U.S. military connections to countries involved in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The report calls for greater restrictions and transparency in U.S. programs of arms sales and military training, and for refocusing resources on civilian development.


Deadly Legacy:

U.S. Arms to Africa and the Congo War

A Report of the Arms Trade Resource Center

January 2000

William D. Hartung

World Policy Institute

65 Fifth Ave. Suite 413

New York, NY 10003

Tel: (212)-229-5808, ext. 106

Fax: (212)-229-5579

E-mail: hartung@newschool.edu

Executive Summary

As the Clinton administration moves into the presidency of the United Nations Security Council, it is declaring January 2000, "the month of Africa." Hoping to counter criticisms that it has been engaged in a rhetorical promotion of U.S.-Africa relations over the past two years without substantive follow-up, the administration has announced its intent to prioritize finding solutions to the ongoing conflicts in the region, including a 30-year civil war that trudges on in Angola and the ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It has not, however, accepted its own responsibility in helping to create the conditions that have led to these seemingly intractable conflicts.

Over the past few years, the administration has made considerable effort to put a new and improved face on its relations with African countries. High-level visits to the region -- first by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, then President Clinton himself in the spring of 1998, and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke this past December -- have reinforced the idea of a new partnership with the continent based on promoting "African solutions to African problems." The reality, however, is that the problems facing Africa and her people -- violent conflict, political instability, and the lowest regional rate of economic growth worldwide -- have been fueled in part by a legacy of U.S. involvement in the region. Moreover, the solutions being proposed by the Clinton administration remain grounded in the counter-productive Cold-War policies that have defined U.S.-Africa relations for far too long.

Unfortunately, the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo presents a vivid example of how U.S. policies -- past and present -- have failed the people of Africa. After more than two years of devastating war, African leaders are struggling, with little success, to implement the Lusaka peace accord. Signatories to the treaty continue to call for UN peacekeeping support even as they prepare for continued fighting. Despite its demonstrable role in planting the seeds of this conflict, the U.S. has done little to either acknowledge its complicity or help create a viable resolution. Official tours of the region and impressive rhetoric will not be enough to contribute to lasting peace, democratic stability, and economic development in Africa.

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Urgent_Acti ... 012600.h...

The U.S. played a major role in converting the newly independent Congo into a cold war battleground. In 1961, the Eisenhower administration authorized the murder of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who had been voted into office just months earlier in the territory’s first-ever democratic election. Washington, which then installed Mobutu in power and kept him there for more than 30 years, bears heavy responsibility for the disastrous economic conditions, massive corruption, and suppression of human rights in Zaire. The U.S. prolonged Mobutu’s rule by providing more than $300 million in weapons and $100 million in military training.

With the end of the cold war, the U.S., France, and Belgium formed a “troika” designed to pressure Mobutu to move toward democracy. This effort might have produced more positive results had not France defected to support Mobutu and the Hutu military dictator in Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, in defense of French language and culture, supposedly threatened by “Anglophone” Uganda and its Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) protégés.

All of the Western powers contributed to the Rwandan genocide of 1994 by ignoring warning signs and reducing the United Nations presence at a time when it should have been reinforced. France compounded the problem by intervening, ostensibly to protect Hutus from the vengeance of the Tutsi-dominated RPF, but also to permit the authors of the genocide to escape. The creation of refugee camps in the Congo near Rwanda was a virtual invitation to the 1997 attacks on the camps. The Clinton administration stalled international intervention, which might have saved refugee lives but which also would have thwarted the effort by Rwanda and Uganda to replace Mobutu with Kabila.

Despite the end of the cold war, Washington decisionmakers have continued to impose simplistic dichotomies on a complex, ambiguous reality. In Africa, Clinton posited a single solution to the problems of “rogue states”—notably Islamist Sudan and “dinosaurs” such as Mobutu—namely the “new leaders” of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda. Presumably these pragmatists would cooperate with Washington in establishing the new order in Africa.
http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol5/v5n10congo_body.html

Holbrooke's defenders argue that the State Department's violently pro-Rwanda policy -- one in which the U.S. has done virtually nothing to try to compel the regime in Kigali to curtail its abuses -- is not just ineffective, as it was when the crisis was restricted to Rwanda and its border areas, but has become dangerous now that a general war has broken out across so much of Central Africa. Holbrooke, they insist, may not have half of Susan Rice's background, but he at least has the wit and the vision to see that something radical needs to be done.

The problem is that despite President Clinton's well-publicized trip to Africa, and his admirable decision to apologize to the Rwandan people for the U.S. refusal to intervene to stop the genocide, Washington is not really serious about getting involved in Africa in any way that could make a difference.

Holbrooke's motives may well be of the best -- certainly, it is hard to see how focusing on Congo will impress the hard-headed pols around Al Gore -- but the initiative he is supporting for a U.N. deployment is the worst kind of symbolic politics. It may be attractive in Washington, since it will permit policymakers to say they don't just care about suffering Kosovars, but about suffering Africans as well. But it has little or no chance of working, and it also risks confirming the cynical impression -- already too common in America and Western Europe -- that no matter how hard people try, there is nothing that can be done for Africa.

If the risks are small for the United States and its allies (they can all do their Bill Clinton imitations and say they feel Africa's pain), the risk for sub-Saharan Africa is great. The last thing the continent needs is more symbolic politics, either in the U.S. or the U.N. version.
http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2000/ ... ngo/inde...

Depopulation & Perception Management

Keith Harmon Snow, October 7, 2003
GENOCIDE IN RWANDA - capital “G” for its omnipotent grounding in the American psyche - is said to have killed 1,000,000 people in 1994. It is said that hard-line Hutus, which held a monopoly on power for decades, slaughtered minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus. There is some truth in this. Like the 1996 and 1998 “rebellions” in Zaire and its nemesis the Democratic Republic of Congo, this Genocide was attributed to tribalism: “An African conflict by Africans themselves,” wrote the western media. That part is pure fiction.

There has been another genocide small “g” for its service to globalization -- and this contre-genocide was orchestrated by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) -- the 1994 victors in Rwanda -- to consolidate power. That the RPF may have been Tutsis is incidental.

“Rwanda was invaded by Uganda,” says one Genocide investigator. “These were powerful Ugandans and their job was to grab the place. This pack of terrorists didn’t give a damn whether 1,000,000 fellow Tutsis were killed. And I don’t believe it was one million -- that’s the standard number of dead Africans they need to get Americans to pay attention. Before the RPF invaded there was an army of 5000 in Rwanda. The United States gave them all the support they needed. Now there are 60,000 soldiers and all the money that goes into “helping the victims of Genocide” goes for war. All hell has broken loose. There’s blood all over the place.”
http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc3006.html


An investigative journalist, and African scholar


* * *
Amartya Sen does not address rape in the Indian context. With hundreds of thousands of women incorporated into the sex trade in Indian brothels, and thousands taken by sale, coercion or force from Nepal, Myanmar and other countries - among them are girls as young as 10 years old - Sen's omission is highly problematic. Indeed, in terms of some of India's gravest gender inequalities, Sen's scholarly article really says hardly anything.

The United States perhaps leads the world in various forms of gender inequality, discrimination and violence against women. As in Japan, the "glass ceiling" prevails in the work place and restricts women's access to pivotal career opportunities.

Rape as a social institution prevails, particularly in the burgeoning prison industry - and is an epidemic problem for men as well - where thousands of women in numerous U.S. state and federal prisons are constantly subject to egregious coercive sexual violence and rape by their male captors.

Keith Harmon Snow

(An investigative journalist,
photographer and African scholar)
Williamsburg, Massachusetts.

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1826/18261050.htm


principal author of this joint GW and SRI report
Keith Harmon Snow

Crimes Against Humanity, Acts of Genocide and Ongoing Atrocities Against the Anuak People of Southwestern Ethiopia

A Genocide Watch and Survivors’ Rights International Field Report

25 February 2004

http://traprockpeace.org/anuak_report_25feb04.doc

A. CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Crimes Against Humanity have been crimes under customary international law since at least 1945. Article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court codifies them as follows:

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

(a) Murder; (b) Extermination; (c) Enslavement; (d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population; (e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; (f) Torture; (g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; (h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court; (i) Enforced disappearances of persons; (j) The crime of apartheid; (k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health….

Crimes committed in violation of customary international law cannot be perpetrated against a civilian population, regardless of whether the State has ratified a particular convention or treaty. According to a current codification of customary international law (articulated in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC), numerous acts constituting “crimes against humanity” have taken place.

The following acts reportedly committed by the EPRDF and Highlanders as part of the larger widespread and systematic attack against the civilian Anuak population, constitute crimes against humanity and are punishable as violations of customary international law:

1) Widespread and systematic murders and executions of Anuaks
2) Arson and murder in order to forcibly deport the Anuak population
3) Mass rape of Anuak women and girls
4) Forced pregnancy to produce non-Anuak children
5) Enforced disappearances of Anuak persons
6) Arbitrary arrests, detention and torture of Anuak persons
7) Purposeful transmission of HIV/AIDS to Anuak rape victims (inhumane acts)
8) Intentional mutilation of Anuak persons
9) Other cruel or inhumane acts intentionally causing great suffering or bodily harm.

B. GENOCIDE

According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Article II, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Ethiopia was one of the first signers of the Genocide Convention on December 11, 1948, and ratified it in July 1949.

The following acts committed by the EPRDF constitute acts of genocide:

1) The intentional killing of members of the Anuak ethnic group, targeted solely because they are Anuak, destroying a substantial part of the Anuak group.
2) The deliberate targeting of members of the Anuak ethnic group to cause serious bodily or mental harm.
3) The deliberate infliction on the Anuak group, through burning of homes and destruction of food supplies, of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.
3) The systematic use of rape as a weapon against a large number of Anuak women in order to destroy the Anuak ethnic group, by:
a. Forcing Anuak women to bear the children of non-Anuak fathers.
b. Intentional infection of Anuak women with HIV/AIDS so as to cause future death.
c. Rapes of Anuak young girls so as to prevent them from having children in the future.

C. ARBITRARY ARREST, ILLEGAL DETENTION & TORTURE

Article 9 of the ICCPR prohibits arbitrary arrest and detention. It provides in its relevant part:

2. Anyone who is arrested shall be informed, at the time of arrest, of the reasons for his arrest and shall be promptly informed of any charges against him; and

3. Anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to a trial within a reasonable time or to release.

States parties to the ICCPR are prohibited under paragraph (1) of Article 9 to deprive persons of liberty “except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedures as are established by law.”

The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights states in Article 6:

Every individual shall have the right to liberty and to the security of his person. No one may be deprived of his freedom except for reasons and conditions previously laid down by law.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 89x4421875


Barrick Gold blocks booklaunch: Noir Canada
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=17165&hilit=a+genocide
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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seemslikeadream
 
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Sun Oct 22, 2017 12:13 pm

Being able to vomit reams of hypertext without an even remoted attempt to focus on the origin of the issue at hand is not the same as knowing history. Ironically pointed comments about the Clinton family are hardly evidence of someone without a partisan agenda. It's up to me know, huh? Sorry for ruining your parade. I won't bother in the future.
[quote="seemslikeadream » 8 minutes ago"]It is not like this is the first time I am posting about Africa....I KNOW SOME HISTORY OF AFRICA

please excuse my weariness but we can rehash some African history if you want or we can discuss the present I guess it is up to you now


wow I even posted about that evil Clinton family...who knew?[quote]
Seeing the world through rose-colored latex.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 22, 2017 12:16 pm

being able to vomit just a little ...vomit still smells like vomit with out the volume .....smell is in the nose of the smeller


apparently all you want to discuss is smell ..... now it is not African history that you want to discuss it is the smell of my posts

goal posts reset


and you have no partisan agenda? :rofl:


Spiro C. Thiery » Sun Oct 22, 2017 11:13 am wrote:Being able to vomit reams of hypertext without an even remoted attempt to focus on the origin of the issue at hand is not the same as knowing history. Ironically pointed comments about the Clinton family are hardly evidence of someone without a partisan agenda. It's up to me know, huh? Sorry for ruining your parade. I won't bother in the future.
seemslikeadream » 8 minutes ago wrote:It is not like this is the first time I am posting about Africa....I KNOW SOME HISTORY OF AFRICA

please excuse my weariness but we can rehash some African history if you want or we can discuss the present I guess it is up to you now


wow I even posted about that evil Clinton family...who knew?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 22, 2017 12:36 pm

When an apology just isn't good enough

You could have said at the very beginning "I do not have time to discuss this" then there would have been no misunderstanding on my part

So your post which you did NOT say anything but linked to an article with RED letters ..I misunderstood?

yea right...I did not misunderstand your red letters


back to the future with CNN or The Libertarian Institute smell since apparently we are NOT going to discuss history or maybe there is a time limit to history now

he has time to talk about vomit ..trash talk my detailing of African history...all the while giving me the excuse that he has NO time to talk history ..plenty of time to demean and personally attack my collection of some of the history of Africa by calling it vomit :roll:

yes Mr. Spiro C. Thiery some attempt at archiving is just like the smell of vomit

attempting to document that I do have some knowledge about Africa is JUST LIKE THE SMELL OF VOMIT

it is so good to know that you are above personal attacks ..you bring up history of Niger then go on to call my proving that I have been posting about Africa for more than 13 years VOMIT!


I'm sure the roots extend through the Clinton sandwiched in Bush bread, which would indeed implicate Reagan, but I'm not all together convinced he had much agency in these things.


so tell me again where Niger is? Did it just sprout up in 2013? Niger has nothing to do with Africa? When does the history of a country begin? I am so confused are we talking about the history of Niger or are we not? Oh that's right maybe someone does not have the time to talk about the history of Niger, or he doesn't like the smell of too much history ... then why bring it up in the first place...to blame the black guy or the woman that lost the election...cause that is EXACTLY what trump does?

News Flash the history of Niger or Africa..cause that is where Niger is ..I think....did not begin with the election of the black guy

Spiro C. Thiery » Sun Oct 22, 2017 10:52 am wrote:
seemslikeadream » 3 minutes ago wrote:just what did YOU post?

what was IMPORTANT to you?

where have YOU stopped?



I clearly don't have as much time as you do. Sorry. I seem to detect your having found my initial reply to be of fractional focus. Perhaps a less inundated thread would encourage more contributors with deeper knowledge of the background here. I don't have it, but I know it goes back to at least as far as 2013. I'm sure the roots extend through the Clinton sandwiched in Bush bread, which would indeed implicate Reagan, but I'm not all together convinced he had much agency in these things.



What Chad has to do with Trump and Niger

David A. Andelman
2 hours ago

(CNN)Just how was it left to Nigerian troops, French helicopters and some contract aircraft to find and fetch the bodies of our heroic service members killed in Niger?

Why did they apparently have so little air or intelligence muscle to protect them in the first place? We could get a final answer after the completion of a Benghazi-style after-action probe by the United States Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

But what already seems likely is that at least some of the blame lies with those who set in motion a bewildering series of actions.

The timeline begins on September 24, when the Trump administration suddenly and inexplicably added Chad to the list of countries whose citizens would be included in the latest iteration of the president's travel ban. Chad and its leaders were utterly blindsided as there was no sense whatsoever that this nation has harbored or even encouraged terrorists -- certainly no more culpable than such nations as Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, or for that matter Chad's neighbors Mali, Niger and Nigeria, none of which were included on this list.

Au contraire, Chad's troops have for some time served as an effective ally in the region -- the best fighting force deployed in nearby Niger and Mali, with the best intel and best-trained warriors. They were the best because they were trained by the French and its redoubtable Foreign Legion. I know, because I was there in Chad in 1983 when the French had to send in their forces to backstop them when they thought Libya's Moammar Gadhafi might invade from the north.

Over the next 30 years, the French turned them into a first-rate fighting force, utterly allied to the Western anti-terrorist effort in the Sahel -- itself a desperately critical part of the success of our war against ISIS and against the spread of Islamic terrorism that is threatening to overrun Africa. If the Pentagon and National Security Council have been searching for the next place where, hydra-like, a post-Raqqa ISIS might rise, they need look no further than here.

Chad, Mali and Niger offer a central conduit from north African nations like Libya -- quite rightly a fellow member of the Trump travel ban, and potentially the richest recruiting lode for Islamic jihad -- to the vastly populous regions of Nigeria and its neighbors. Already, Nigerian-based Boko Haram, a proto-Islamic group comprised more of heavily-armed thugs than confirmed jihadis, has made enormous inroads in this region. Now, ISIS is knocking on the door. Some determinedly anti-jihadist nations like Chad, have stepped up to block these efforts.

And then Trump went and insulted them. In fact, the September 24 action was only the latest backhanded and ill-informed insult. It seems that US Homeland Security gave all countries 50 days to meet a "baseline" of security conditions, including producing a counterfeit-proof version of their passport to prove that they were reliable enough to allow their citizens into America. But Chad, desperately poor, had quite simply run out of passport paper.
They reportedly offered to provide a pre-existing sample of this type of passport. No dice. The next thing they knew they were on the banned list, alongside their arch enemy Libya and other clearly terrorist-driven nations.

Barely a week after the announcement of the new travel ban, the Chadian government suddenly began pulling hundreds of their fighters from Niger. There was no immediate explanation, though the nation's communications minister Madeleine Alingué condemned the Trump administration's unheralded move, observing that it "seriously undermines" the "good relations between the two countries, notably in the fight against terrorism." Hard to be more direct than that.
Troops from Niger and Mali were now all that now stood between the forces of ISIS and Boko Haram and our own military.

"We have about 1,000 [American] forces distributed over the Chad Basin, most of them in Niger, but not all of them," Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, a senior official of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said at a news conference held after the soldiers were ambushed. Indeed, the United States not only has hundreds of troops but also a major drone operation in Niger, something McKenzie failed to mention.
But now, Chad's troops, one of the major components of the multinational force in Niger, are largely gone. They had been assembled to patrol, defend and especially to understand this vast stretch of largely barren desert that includes Mali and Niger -- a combined territory nearly four times the size of Texas. Few could understand it better or be better equipped to fight there than the army of Chad. I've seen that first-hand. Donald Trump has not.

Inexplicably, though, we still sent our small, under-armed band of troops into harm's way. Fifty jihadis, heavily armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, utterly outgunned and outmanned the slim American force they ambushed.
And then our boys died there. The backstory is frightful -- filled with mindless decisions executed with minimal knowledge and catastrophic results. It's urgent that we uncover quickly just what led to this terrible disaster. Mr. President, you must see it as your highest priority to find out what or who is really behind the deaths of these four heroic young men.


The Truth About Niger

Jihadists would be no threat to Americans who were left to mind their own business.
Sheldon Richman | October 22, 2017

Predictably, the news media spent most of last week examining words Donald Trump may or may not have spoken to the widow of an American Green Beret killed in Niger, in northwest Africa, in early October. Not only was this coverage tedious, it was largely pointless. We know Trump is a clumsy boor, and we also know that lots of people are ready to pounce on him for any sort of gaffe, real or imagined. Who cares? It's not news.

But it was useful to those who wish to distract Americans from what really needs attention: the U.S. government's perpetual war.

The media's efforts should have been devoted to exploring—really exploring—why Green Berets (and drones) are in Niger at all. (This is typical of the establishment media's explanation.) That subject is apparently of little interest to media companies that see themselves merely as cheerleaders for the American Empire. For them, it's all so simple: a U.S president (even one they despise) has put or left military forces in a foreign country—no justification required; therefore, those forces are serving their country; and that in turn means that if they die, they die as heroes who were protecting our way of life. End of story.

Thus the establishment media see no need to present a dissenting view, say, from an analyst who would question the dogma that inserting American warriors into faraway conflicts whenever a warlord proclaims his allegiance to ISIS is in the "national interest." Patriotic media companies have no wish to expose their audiences to the idea that jihadists would be no threat to Americans who were left to mind their own business.

Apparently the American people also must be shielded from anyone who might point out that the jihadist activity in Niger and neighboring Mali is directly related to the U.S. and NATO bombing of Libya, which enabled al-Qaeda and other Muslim militants to overthrow the secular regime of Col. Muammar Qaddafi. That Obama-Clinton operation in 2011, besides producing Qaddafi's grisly murder and turning Libya into a nightmare, facilitated the transfer of weapons and fanatical guerrillas from Libya to nearby countries in the Sahel — as well as Syria. Since then the U.S. government has been helping the French to "stabilize" its former colony Mali with surveillance drones and Green Berets based in Niger. Nice work, Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. (Citizen Trump was an early advocate of U.S. intervention in Libya.) Need I remind you that the U.S./NATO regime-change operation in Libya was based on a lie? Obama later said his failure to foresee the consequences of the Libya intervention was the biggest mistake of his presidency. (For more on the unintended consequences for the Sahel, see articles here, here, and here.)

So the media, which pretends to play a role in keeping Americans informed, have decided the people need not hear the truth behind the events in Niger. Instead, "reporters" and "analysts" perform their role as cheerleaders for the American Empire by declaring the dead men "heroes" and focusing on the tragedy that has befallen their families. Public scrutiny of the military operation is discouraged because it thought to detract from the Green Berets' heroism.

What makes them heroes? They were killed by non-Americans in a foreign land while wearing military uniforms. That's all it takes, according to the gospel of what Andrew Bacevich calls the Church of America the Redeemer and its media choir.

But are they really heroes? We can question this while feeling sorrow for the people who will never see their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers again. Reporters and analysts who emote over alleged heroism base their claim on the dubious proposition that the men were "serving their country" and "protecting our freedom." A brief examination, however, is enough to show this is not so, although the troops, their families, and many others believe it.

First, their "country," if by this term we mean the American people, did not call them to "service," which itself a question-begging word. The source of the call was a collection of politicians and bureaucrats (including generals) who wouldn't know the public interest from a hole in the ground.

Second, U.S. intervention in the Muslim world, which predates 9/11 and the creation of al-Qaeda and ISIS, has not made Americans safe. On the contrary, it has put them at risk, as the attacks on the World Trade Center demonstrated. Is it hard to believe that people will seek vengeance against those whose government bombs them and starves their children, as the U.S. government did in Iraq all through the 1990s (to take just one example)?

Dying (and killing) for the Empire is not heroic. Allowing yourself to be ordered to intervene in distant conflicts you surely don't understand is not worthy of admiration. What's heroic is resisting the Empire.

Anyone who thought Trump would bring the troops back should now know better. He, of all people, is not about to give up imperial power. The Guardian quotes a former military officer saying, "Since [President] Trump took power, US forces deployed around the world have had a lot more room to manoeuvre. Decisions about when and what to engage have been devolved right down to unit level. Any soldier knows that if you give guys on the ground more independence, then they will be that much more aggressive and will take more risks."

At this point we can't expect the corporate media to quit propagandizing on behalf of the war state and start informing the public of the harm "their" government has inflicted abroad and at home. Fortunately, we have virtually costless access to alternative sources of information about the politicians' and military's mischief. The conundrum is that most people, having been fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda, won't turn to those sources until they become suspicious of power.

This piece was originally published by The Libertarian Institute.
http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/22/d ... not-heroic
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 22, 2017 2:18 pm

back to the present with Alex Jones and his love for our military

here is the lovely Alex on Kelly

when did Alex start siding with the U.S. military industrial complex?

oh that's right since the black guy is not the president any more


Powerful: General Kelly Calls Out Congresswoman Caught Lying About Trump Gold Star Phone Call

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeJmP_BQrNc


'Trump is messing with the wrong woman'

The president has never feuded with a politician quite like Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson.
By MARC CAPUTO 10/20/2017 09:17 PM EDT

Of President Trump’s many opponents in Congress, none looks or sounds remotely like Rep. Frederica Wilson, the Miami Democrat known for her bedazzled, sequined-blinged hats, her vibrant matching outfits and her reputation in Florida for never backing down from a fight.

But Wilson has never had a foe like Trump or a fight this personal, which began with the president’s condolence call to the widow of a young soldier the congresswoman helped steer away from Miami’s mean streets — only to see him die in a mysterious ambush in sub-Saharan Niger.

Despite tough criticism and insults from the president and his allies — a top African-American Trump surrogate, former Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, characterized Wilson as “a buffoon” while White House chief of staff John Kelly teed off on her from a White House lectern — the 74-year-old Democrat hasn’t flinched, firing back with caustic responses honed by years of full-contact Miami politics.

The president is a “jerk” and a “liar” who “doesn’t know how to be a president,” Wilson said. She then mocked him for raising her profile.

“You mean to tell me that I have become so important that the White House is following me and my words?” Wilson laughed. “This is amazing. That's amazing. That is absolutely phenomenal. I'll have to tell my kids that I'm a rock star now.”

Yet the technicolor clothes and flashy demeanor belie the grim legacy that has made her an icon in the African-American community in Florida and, now, the nation: her advocacy for young black men, particularly those who end up dead. Since her time in the Florida Legislature, Wilson’s political identity has been forged by fights — often with a white, male-dominated establishment — to figure out what happened to them and why.

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More than 11 years before Sgt. La David Johnson was killed with three other soldiers in Niger, a 14-year-old named Martin Lee Anderson died after he was beaten by guards at a boot camp in Panama City, a Deep South city in northern Florida.

The Bay County Sheriff’s Office ran the boot camp and was slow to investigate. So was the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Wilson, however, joining with a bipartisan team of legislators, helped force an independent investigation and an exhumation of the teenager’s body for a second autopsy. While the boot camp guards and a nurse were acquitted of charges, the state Legislature ultimately changed boot camp laws and compensated the family for the teen’s death.

For the Anderson family's attorney, Benjamin Crump, the public relations tactics that snagged statewide headlines — from a second autopsy to organized marches featuring Al Sharpton — became a template for drawing national attention to the death seven years later of another 14-year-old, Trayvon Martin, who was shot by a neighborhood watch member named George Zimmerman.

Wilson stood by the side of the parents of Trayvon, who hailed from her district based in the heavily African-American city of Miami Gardens in the shadow of the stadium where the Miami Dolphins and Miami Hurricanes play.

“Black men are targets. The system has the scope aimed directly at our backs and Frederica Wilson has devoted a life to exposing that,” said Crump, who has allied with her in yet another case involving the shooting death of motorist Corey Jones by a Palm Beach Gardens police officer.

“From our first case with her, with Martin Lee Anderson, she was vocal. She would begin every press conference by saying, ‘it’s murder.’ She would not be quiet. She demanded the truth,” Crump said. “And it’s similar to La David Johnson’s case. She will not be quiet … Trump is messing with the wrong woman.”

Unlike the other high-profile cases with which Wilson has been involved, Johnson’s death after an Oct. 4 ambush in Niger had a deeply personal dimension.

Johnson had enrolled in Wilson’s nonprofit, 5000 Role Models of Excellence, a program for at-risk African-American kids. His father had been a student when Wilson was a principal at a local school decades before. Johnson’s mother is a constituent, as well as a bus driver with the school district where Wilson has deep roots.

Rep. Frederica Wilson is pictured. | AP
White House slams Rep. Wilson as 'all hat, no cattle'
By LOUIS NELSON
When the congresswoman and the family tried to find out what happened, Wilson said, the Pentagon gave no answers. She joined with fellow Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Democrat and fellow member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and penned a letter seeking answers. Still nothing. Wilson said she wanted to know not just why Johnson and his fellow soldiers were so at risk, but why Johnson appeared to have been left behind when the others were evacuated shortly after the attack.

“Why was he separated?” Wilson asked. “Was he kidnapped? Was he lost? Was he already expired? What happened to him? Why, 48 hours later, did we still not know where he was?”

Johnson’s family, meanwhile, had not heard from the president with a condolence call, either. When reporters finally asked about the attack in Niger, Trump, who had not acknowledged the deaths publicly, responded by inaccurately criticizing President Barack Obama and suggesting his predecessor never called Gold Star families of the fallen.

“Throughout all this time, Trump had been tweeting and carrying on about NFL football players taking a knee and not one damn time did he say a word about Niger,” Hastings said. “But if he thinks someone like Frederica Wilson is going to let this go, he doesn’t know Frederica Wilson.”

On Thursday, it was Kelly’s turn with Wilson after the retired Marine Corps general denounced Wilson as a grand-stander who politicized what should have been a private, personal call. It was an example of “empty barrels making the most noise,” he said, and falsely claimed that, in a 2015 speech at the dedication of an FBI building in Miami, she bragged about securing money for the facility due to her connections with Obama. Video of her speech showed she made no such statement.

Wilson promptly attacked Kelly, a Gold Star dad himself, as someone willing to “say anything to save his job.”

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Miami Republican, said she thought the entire episode was a big misunderstanding. A persistent Trump critic, Ros-Lehtinen faulted the president because he “waited so long, so many golf days, for him to express words of condolences about these brave heroes’ deaths in an operation that is mired in controversy and secrecy.”

A fierce liberal in a Republican-controlled Congress to which she was elected in 2010, Wilson is known more for her advocacy than her legislative accomplishments. The few Republicans in her heavily Democratic, African-American district — which backed Hillary Clinton over Trump by 83 percent to15 percent — periodically grouse she's ineffective. And after her dust-up with Trump this week, conservatives nationwide began examining her votes and called her anti-veteran for voting against numerous bills concerning active and former military personnel.

Ros-Lehtinen said Wilson won’t let go of issues important to her. In one instance, Wilson persuaded many of her House colleagues to periodically wear red articles of clothing and post “#bringbackourgirls” tweets aimed at the terrorist group Boko Haram after it kidnapped 300 girls in Nigeria.

“I have five red jackets thanks to her,” Ros-Lehtinen laughed.

Like Hastings, she said Wilson has “stick-to-it-iveness.” And unlike others Trump has clashed with, Wilson probably won’t go away quietly.

“She will go toe to toe with President Trump, and who knows who will stop tweeting and talking first,” Ros-Lehtinen said. “I wouldn’t bet against her.”



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMeXf1IPbWY


a bit of history without the vomit ..I wouldn't want to disgrace my own thread with too much of my own vomit so I will only post links far be it for me to vomit in my own thread....oh wait it is MY thread


'Petroleum lures dogs of war to Africa'
August 25, 2004
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 102x775315



U.S. Oil Firms Entwined In Equatorial Guinea Deals - Riggs Probe
Mon Sep-06-04
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 102x806546



Dollars for Guinea: how palms were greased by oil - Riggs Bank

Sun Sep-05-04
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 102x803240


Dictator sues British 'coup plotters'
Sat Jul-17-04
https://www.democraticunderground.org/d ... 102x692616




Senate investigators grill Riggs officials
Fri Jul-16-04
Washington, DC, Jul. 16 (UPI) -- A former Riggs Bank manager has given the silent treatment to U.S. Senate investigators trying to untangle apparently suspicious money transfers by a dictator.

Simon P. Kareri, who managed Riggs's West African business until he was fired in January, invoked the Fifth Amendment instead of answering senators' questions about accounts of Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the strongman of Equatorial Guinea, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Among questions asked of Kareri and others:

-- Why did Kareri haul a 60-pound suitcase filled with $3 million in plastic-wrapped cash to a Riggs's branch in the District of Columbia?

-- Why did the bank not report as suspicious activity the fact Obiang and his wife made cash deposits of nearly $13 million over a three-year period into their Riggs accounts?
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 102x689802
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 23, 2017 8:38 am

10/20/2017


Oh, Just Fuck Off, John Kelly
Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: No matter where the fighting is and no matter the cause, most soldiers will act bravely, sometimes even heroically, to support their fellow soldiers. In every bullshit war, there are men and women who fight, get wounded, and die, and their sacrifice should be honored and respected. They went to war because the leaders we elected made them go there.

But let's also get another thing straight: We have not fought a war that wasn't bullshit since World War II. And every death and every wound has been for nothing (beyond the soldiers protecting each other.) Korea was bullshit. Vietnam was bullshit. The Persian Gulf was bullshit. Iraq was bullshit. Afghanistan is bullshit. They are all built on lies. Sometimes we allow ourselves to believe they weren't lies. But each and every one was based on lies to advance some policy or ideology that no Americans should have had to die for.

Which gets us to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general. Yesterday, Kelly appeared at the White House press briefing to set the record straight or some fucking thing about President Trump's callous phone call to the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, killed in Niger earlier in this month.

In doing so, Kelly took his career and any respectability he had, which he had already handed over to Trump when he agreed to work for him in the first place, and he allowed Trump to fuck it in the ass while he cheered Trump on.

You can read about the many ways in which Kelly lied about Congresswoman Frederica Wilson. You can get confused at Kelly's statement that Wilson "listened in" on a conversation that was on a fucking speakerphone in the car she was riding in and therefore she had no fucking choice but to listen in. You can roll your eyes at Kelly calling Donald Trump "brave" for reaching out to the family of a fallen soldier, as if Donald Trump has ever done anything braver than eat one too many Big Macs in a single sitting. You can even shake your head at Kelly's beyond ignorant invocation of the past when "Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor."

But I'm saying, "Oh, just fuck off" to John Kelly for a couple of reasons.

First, he should fuck off for talking about how Gold Star families (those who lost someone in battle) are no longer sacred because "I think that left in the convention over the summer." He is probably invoking the Khan family, who criticized Trump at the Democratic Convention, and not Patricia Smith, who lost her son in the Benghazi attack and called Hillary a murderer, more or less, at the Republican Convention.

And Kelly should fuck off because in the rest of his fucked-up appearance he completely politicized Gold Star families - who, it should be noted, often politicize themselves in honor of their lost loved ones. He ignored that the president didn't treat those families as sacred when he attacked the Khans. That didn't fucking crop up in his obsequious fluffing of Trump. As if to make his point clear about who he values, Kelly took a couple of questions but only from reporters who are in Gold Star families or are related to them.

Then he pretty much said that you're an asshole if you don't serve in the military: "We don't look down upon those of you who that haven't served. In fact, in a way we're a little bit sorry because you'll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our service men and women do -- not for any other reason than they love this country. So just think of that."

To which one can only say, "Fuck off. There are so many ways to serve your country and your community that don't involve the military and how fucking dare you diminish those."

Even more, John Kelly can fuck off because of what I started with here. Kelly said he was so upset that Rep. Wilson said mean things about Donald Trump (by, you know, quoting Donald Trump) that he had to take a walk. So, as one does, he went to Arlington National Cemetery, and "I went over there for an hour-and-a-half, walked among the stones, some of whom I put there because they were doing what I told them to do when they were killed."

What were they doing under his orders? Fighting in a bullshit war in Iraq, where Kelly had various commands, up to being in charge of the whole damn show in 2008. Yeah, Kelly led men to die for nothing. And so many in the military know that they were it was a war for nothing. Oh, he could have retired, but he didn't. Which means he believed in the bullshit war and sent soldiers to die for bullshit. I'm pretty fucking sure they didn't sign up for that.

But let's go even further here because, you know, if you're gonna tell someone to "Fuck off," you may as well go all the way. One of Kelly's sons died in combat. He usually doesn't talk about it because it's horrific and personal and why should he. But Trump dragged the corpse of Kelly's son into this shitpool. And Kelly brought him up yesterday. Kelly's son died in Afghanistan in 2010 in a war that should never have been started and was fucked up from the start by President Bush and it wasn't even unfucked by President Obama. Like every other soldier in this war, he died for nothing because he shouldn't have been there in the first place. Kelly's younger son is now on his fifth tour of duty in Afghanistan.

Yeah, John Kelly walked out in front of the world yesterday to announce that he is just another piss whore in Trump's bed, and he'll willingly degrade himself and his family in order to stay there.

(Note: I support the troops so much that I don't want them to have to fight because some politician needs to prove that a think-tank's position on democracy or terrorism is correct. I want them to defend us and defend our allies. And, yes, I have family in the military. I don't want them to die for bullshit.)
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com





Here Are the 20 Lies Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly Told in Just 4 Minutes


BY TOMMY CHRISTOPHER

Kelly 10-19 lies
So far, The Response has taken at least three shots at encompassing the rage-inducing awfulness of Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly's disgraceful defense of Donald Trump's attacks and lies about deceased Sgt. La David Johnson's family and longtime family friend Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), but apparently, we're not done yet.

One particularly annoying facet of the way this has been covered is the way many outlets shy away from calling Kelly's lies “lies” and the fact that even those who characterize it properly leave news consumers with the impression that he only told one lie.

Part of the media's problem is that they confuse the lie with the liar. You can tell a lie without even knowing it, and while that arguably doesn't make you a “liar,” the thing you said is still a lie.

Even in the case of “unintentional” lies, the effect is the same, and the lack of intent does not relieve the culpability for their telling, especially when the lies are such that the teller should have known or should have checked. Indifference to the truth is no less a crime than the intentional subversion of it.

So I will leave Gen. Kelly's intent and character up to the reader. This is only about the lies themselves.

When I saw this portion of Kelly's remarks, I knew it contained multiple lies, but even I had no idea how many he managed to pack into just over four minutes of screen time:

I set out to quantify Kelly's lies, and to borrow his favorite word, I was stunned at the sheer volume. Here they are in order, including repetitions/variations on the same lies because those count, too, and without the lies of omission, that surely would have doubled or tripled the count (video of the speech Kelly refers to is here):

Image
Sgt. Johnson was separated from his unit during the fighting, a fact that was reported over a week before Kelly's remarks. It is still not known exactly when — during the 48 hours he was missing — that he actually died.

Image
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(The Man From Homeland)


Image
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From The Miami Herald, April 13, 1986 (archived here):

Grogan, who had no children, came to the FBI somewhat late, after teaching Latin and biology at Marist College in Atlanta. He was a religious man. His other survivors include his mother, Alice; two sisters, Mary Anne Desposito and Susan Semmes; and a brother, Michael. [...]

Dove, an agent since 1982, was an ambitious, hard-working bachelor who came to the FBI after a brief career as a lawyer... After joining the FBI, Dove served in the Huntington, W. Va., San Diego and Miami offices. The agent had no siblings and is survived by his mother and grandmother.

So he got the slain agent's name wrong twice and invented children that neither of them had. Or maybe they're hiding out in Bowling Green.

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After Kelly was already busted for all of those lies with video evidence, Sarah Huckabee Sanders came to the podium and stood by them all, and ran up an impressive score all her own:
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You can judge for yourself what this says about Gen. Kelly's character, but there's no denying what it says about his place in the Trump administration. He fits right in.
http://ijr.com/the-response/2017/10/100 ... 4-minutes/



7 million dollars ...8 hearings

Congress spent more time investigating Benghazi than it did 9/11

found nothing

NEWS FLASH

The BLACK GUY IS NO LONGER PRESIDENT...THE WHITE WOMAN LOST THE ELECTION

It now the time to hold the present sociopath in charge and HIS lying generals accountable and NOT blame anyone else....this happened on trump's watch ...will there be 7 million dollars and 8 hearings on this?...of course NOT

but at least we can agree on one fact trump is president now ...put the blame where it belongs..I am so fucking tired of hearing that EVERY fucking thing is the black guy's fault..I heard over and over here that if Clinton was elected we would be in a nuclear war...well now we have a sociopath in the White House and we have this

US Preparing/Nuclear Bombers Back on 24-Hour Alert
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40732



JackRiddler » Mon May 29, 2017 3:51 pm wrote:
seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 13, 2016 1:16 am wrote:
House Benghazi committee files final report and shuts down
Mary Troyan , USA Today 6:07 p.m. EST December 12, 2016

Congress spent more time investigating Benghazi than it did 9/11


Now there's an understatement. In years, about the same time (if you add the JICI and the 9/11 Commission together.) In hours of hearings and human-hours of research and clerical work, I'll wild-guess six times. In pages of junk released, must be a dozen or more times. What's most disgusting is that in media coverage, which is a corporate and not a Congressional decision, the Benghazi proceedings must have gotten at least twice as much as the 9/11 investigations.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36370&hilit=benghazi&start=210



John Kelly and the Dangerous Moral Calculus of Working for Trump

By Ryan Lizza
October 20, 2017

The White House chief of staff, John Kelly, is the latest example of how the President sullies the reputations of those who work with and for him.Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
Anyone in politics or government who works for Donald Trump, whether on the payroll or in some other supporting role, is forced to make a sacrifice. Working for Trump means that one’s credibility is likely to be damaged, so there is a kind of moral calculation that any Trump supporter must make: Does working for him serve some higher purpose that outweighs the price of reputational loss?
There is a hierarchy of justifications for backing Trump. At the bottom are the spokespeople and purely political officials who are almost instantly discredited, because they are forced to defend the statements of a President who routinely lies and manufactures nonsensical versions of events. Sean Spicer learned this on his first day on the job, when Trump sent him into the White House briefing room to tell the press lies about Inauguration-crowd sizes. He never recovered. But there was also no higher purpose for which Spicer could claim he was serving Trump, except that he was a political-communications official, and being the White House spokesman is the top prize in that profession.
Republicans in Congress are a little farther up the pyramid. Many privately say that they believe Trump is a disaster of a President, an embarrassment to the G.O.P., and, as Bob Corker recently said publicly, echoing what he claimed were the views of most Republican senators, setting America “on the path to World War III.” They justify their support by noting that Trump will implement the core Republican agenda, and that alone is worth the price of a person at least some of them believe is unfit to be President. They may be privately embarrassed by Trump, the agreement goes, but at least he has appointed a reliable conservative to the Supreme Court, almost repealed Obamacare (and still might), and has a decent chance at signing a big tax cut into law. How morally justifiable one believes this argument is depends a lot on how bad one believes Trump is for the country and the world, though a Third World War seems like it would be a steep price to pay for Neil Gorsuch.
The tougher cases are at the top of the pyramid. The government needs to be staffed, and, especially in positions of national security, it’s hard to argue against anyone taking a senior position at the Pentagon, the State Department, or the National Security Council to insure that Trump’s worst instincts are contained. This, of course, was the moral dilemma of the three generals now in top civilian jobs serving Trump: Defense Secretary James Mattis; the national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster; and the White House chief of staff, John Kelly. They were all generally respected for their military service, untainted by prior association with Trump, and their work in the Administration was generally believed to be a continuation of their service to the country by making sure our erratic President doesn’t fulfill Corker’s warning.
We learned this week that, even if you maintain the most sympathetic view of why these ex-generals continue to serve Trump, there is no way to work for him without paying the Trump tax on one’s reputation. Since joining the White House, Kelly has been viewed as a force for good. He helped defactionalize the West Wing by removing some of its most difficult personalities, such as Steve Bannon. He has implemented some basic processes that all modern White Houses have had, such as a system for controlling who meets with Trump and what information flows to him. But then, yesterday, he was dragged into the sordid spectacle of Trump’s fight with a congresswoman and the grieving family of La David Johnson, the Army sergeant who was killed in Niger earlier this month.
Trump called Johnson’s widow to express his condolences. Some things that Trump said, rather than console, offended Myeshia Johnson, who allowed her local congresswoman and friend, Frederica Wilson, to listen to the call. After Wilson complained publicly about the tone of the call, Trump, rather than doing what any normal President would do by apologizing for any miscommunication, escalated the apparent misunderstanding into a Twitter war. The fact that Trump’s targets, a widow and a Democratic congresswoman, are African-Americans added to the sense that the President was, yet again, being racially divisive. Kelly, who rarely speaks publicly, stepped into the briefing room yesterday to defend the President. The most newsworthy comments he made concerned Wilson, who he said was an “empty barrel” who had once turned a ceremony meant to commemorate the deaths of two F.B.I. officers killed in the line of duty into a celebration of her ability to steer tax dollars to her district.
His attack on Wilson is worth quoting at length:
A congresswoman stood up, and in the long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there and all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call he gave the money—the twenty million dollars— to build the building. And she sat down, and we were stunned. Stunned that she had done it. Even for someone that is that empty a barrel, we were stunned. But, you know, none of us went to the press and criticized. None of us stood up and were appalled. We just said, “O.K., fine.”
As was quickly reported, the video of Wilson’s nine-minute speech is online. Wilson did tell a story about how she; John Boehner, the House Speaker at the time; and Obama worked together to make sure that the building was named after the two slain F.B.I. agents in time for the event. She said nothing about securing funding (she was, in fact, not in Congress when the money was authorized) and nothing about “how she took care of her constituents.” She asked law-enforcement officials present to stand up “so we can applaud you and what you do,” adding, “we’re proud of you, we’re proud of your courage.” She then told the tragic story of the two agents who lost their lives. The speech bears no resemblance to the speech Kelly described. The White House chief of staff maligned a congresswoman, whose only crime seemed to be criticizing Trump, with a series of lies.
When a reporter at the White House on Friday asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the glaring discrepancy between Kelly’s account and the actual speech, she said that the White House stood by his remarks. “There was a lot of grandstanding,” she said. “He was stunned that she had taken that opportunity to make it about herself.” The reporter pressed: “He was wrong yesterday in talking about getting the money. The money was secured before she came into Congress.”
Sanders shot back with the kind of statement that would be normal in an authoritarian country, suggesting that Kelly’s previous military service placed him beyond criticism. “If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you,” she said. “But I think that that—if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.”
No, it is not. Kelly is the chief of staff and a political operative. He held a press conference and told a lie that smeared one of Trump’s political opponents. No government official’s military background, no matter how honorable, makes him immune to criticism, especially given the subject at hand. Sanders’s response was unnerving. But the bigger lesson of the episode is that no matter how good one’s intentions are, when you go to work for Trump, you will end up paying for it with your reputation. For Kelly, not even his four stars prevented thathttps://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan ... -for-trump


and just as I am about to post this the fucking sociopath is STILL this morning trashing and calling the widow a liar

On Oct. 17, Sgt. La David T. Johnson finally came home from Niger.

Image
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Widow Of Fallen Soldier Confirms Rep.’s Account Of POTUS Call: ‘It Made Me Cry’ (VIDEO)

By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published OCTOBER 23, 2017 8:27 AM
Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David T. Johnson, a soldier killed in Niger earlier in October, spoke out in public for the first time since her husband’s death on Monday morning and confirmed Rep. Frederica Wilson’s (D-FL) account of President Donald Trump’s call with Johnson.

Johnson told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Trump seemed to forget her husband’s name on the call and told her that her husband knew what he was signing up for, as Wilson told the press last week.

“The President said that he knew what he signed up for but it hurts anyway,” Johnson told “Good Morning America.” “It made me cry because I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said it.”

“He couldn’t remember my husband’s name,” she continued, adding that Trump only remembered Sgt. La David T. Johnson’s name because he had his report in front of him.

“I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband’s name,” she said. “And that was hurting me the most because if my husband is out here fighting for our country, and he risked his life for our country, why can’t you remember his name? And that’s what made me upset and cry even more.”


Johnson told GMA that she asked for the phone to go on speaker phone while in the car with Wilson and others so that her family could hear the call with the President. Wilson then revealed to the press that Trump told Johnson that her husband “knew what he was signing up for.”

The President has repeatedly accused Wilson of lying, even after White House Chief of Staff John Kelly essentially confirmed the congresswoman’s account of the call.

Johnson told GMA that Wilson did not fabricate Trump’s comments on the call.

“What she said was 100 percent correct,” she said.

Johnson is also still looking for answers about her husband’s death and is upset that the military has not let her see her husband’s remains.

“I don’t know how he got killed, where he got killed, or anything,” she told GMA.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/m ... ade-me-cry
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Oct 23, 2017 1:12 pm

I have a friend who was a bugler in an honor guard while serving in the Navy during the Vietnam war who I last saw in 1968 before hooking up with him in 2005. We had been very close throughout high school and was with in when we saw the Rolling Stone play in a barn in Montauk Point during the summer of '64. We were guests of the family for a week and boyfriends to two of their many daughters and sons and that was when I was first introduced to surfing. The spot with the best wave-break on the east coast, Ditch Plains. I was crushed earlier this year when I sought to book a room post labor day at the East Deck Motel only to learn it had recently been sold and was now demolished, sigh!

I read an obituary for his wife and eventually tracked him down and was sad to learn his only son, 16 years old, bearing my name, had been killed in a traffic accident.

So when we met it was both tears and laughter. Three years later we had more in common when we met again after he remarried and wanted to introduce me to his wife.

When in the sixth grade I got a D in some subject or other and for my reward, my just begun music lessons were curtailed and I gave my guitar to him and he played it well and formed a band, my first real involvement in the music business and probably my greatest contribution to the art and industry - giving away my guitar!

His father was Naval Intelligence during WWII and had personally handled messaging warning of the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor, my first non-medicynical reality-altering experience.

After my friend's wife died, he bought a house in Virginia with immediate backyard access to a golf course and was living there when we first reconnected. I remember him presenting me with another reality-twisting telling me he had spent his life as an "exterminator." A conversation killer, thank god! The wry look on his face when he told me what he's been doing, well, I was afraid to press him further - not even a wtf?, just "Oh."

My entire point, before commenting upon our involvement in Africa, was prompted by the sullen expression on the Master Sergeant's face, a member of the honor guard tasked with presenting the widow with the American Flag that had been draping his casket.

I remember saying to my friend how fortunate he was to have missed experiencing the horrors of war and his brief response - "I didn't miss any of them." My eyes teared writing this. I remained silent until after he spoke again.

:backtotopic:

I'm not sure, but I guess wanting to know why Niger is another nameless war is a diversion, deliberate at that.


We're protecting current and future American "interests," of course. (Is there ever any other reason given?)

Sell weapons to whomever to create a diversion where desirable in order to weaken both parties before moving in with Made in America solutions for all problems while garnering possession of all your human and natural resources. But don't worry! - We'll always be there with "our helping" hands.

Pretty interested, aren't you? I am. So what else was going on when this story "broke?"

The Congresswoman's questions should must be answered.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby PufPuf93 » Mon Oct 23, 2017 2:21 pm

I had a friend whose younger brother was in early 40s and had done 20 and out with "Special Forces". He occasionally worked (his only work actually) as a very well paid "military contractor" one would assume for Blackwater or the like as this was during GWB's years when Iraq was still occupied. He would not talk about where he went or what or who was his employer he did except that he had been in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Every several months he would ask her to watch his house and he would be gone for several weeks.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Oct 23, 2017 5:31 pm

^^^ Interesting fellow. I long for the good old days, when a mercenary was called a "mercenary" or a "soldier of fortune." Wise not to press him about his business, though.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 24, 2017 6:17 pm

Survivor confirms Donald Trump is lying about deadly Niger mission
Bill Palmer
Updated: 5:48 pm EDT Tue Oct 24, 2017
Home » Politics


Donald Trump and his administration spent two weeks essentially pretending that a deadly U.S. military operation in Niger didn’t exist. After Trump’s lack of phone calls to the fallen soldiers’ families turned the Niger op into a media frenzy, Trump and his people then insisted that it was a mere reconnaissance mission, and blamed it on an intelligence failure. Now a survivor of the Niger mission and other inside sources are confirming it was something different entirely.



The unnamed survivor and unnamed military official both spoke with ABC News and offered the real picture of how the mission morphed away from its original intent, and how it turned deadly (link). The U.S. soldiers had indeed initially been sent on a reconnaissance mission, but while they were in the field, they were ordered to pursue and capture or kill a specific enemy target. One of the sources says that because the soldiers were out in the field for too long on a “mission that morphed, they were spotted, surveilled and ultimately hit.”



The U.S. soldiers on the recon mission were ordered to divert in favor of targeting the enemy target, even after a second supporting team was unable to join them. It’s not yet clear who changed the orders, or how high up the chain it went. However, this did come just five days after the nation of Chad pulled its support troops from the Niger effort, in retaliation for Trump’s decision to add Chad to his racist Muslim travel ban.



There are still several other questions about the Niger mission. Why did Donald Trump work so hard to try to cover it up in the first place? Why did he then lie by claiming it was a recon mission? Why did he use a private contractor to evacuate U.S. soldiers after the mission went wrong, instead of using the military itself? Finally, how is this all related to Niger’s decision to sign a military alliance with Russia just seven weeks earlier?
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/su ... rump/5690/


'He died fighting for his brothers,' Niger ambush survivor says of fallen US soldier
By ADAM CIRALSKYKIRIT RADIA CONOR FINNEGAN ELIZABETH MCLAUGHLIN Oct 24, 2017, 9:12 AM ET
Jerome Delay/AP, file photo
COMING UPNew details on Niger ambush that killed 4 US soldiers

Nearly three weeks after the deadly ambush on U.S. Special Ops forces in Niger, ABC News has learned chilling new details about the mission gone wrong from a survivor of the attack and a senior U.S. intelligence official.

Their accounts, provided in separate interviews, raise questions about why a second, potentially more dangerous mission was tacked on late in the day even after a second team that was supposed to join them was unable to do so.

What was started as a reconnaissance mission to meet with local leaders turned into a kill-or-capture mission aimed at a high-value target, according to both sources.

That target – codenamed Naylor Road – has ties to both al Qaeda and ISIS, according to the intelligence official.

According to multiple intelligence sources, this target is one of the U.S.’s “top three objectives in Niger,” one that the U.S. has been “actively pursuing.”

But that change in plan meant that the team was out for over 24 hours and put them at greater risk.

“They should have been up and back in a day. Because they were up there so f------ long on a mission that morphed, they were spotted, surveilled and ultimately hit,” the official said.

Despite being massively outnumbered, the American and Nigerien troops held their own -- including Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in the ambush, the sources told ABC News.

“He was the best kid you could ask for,” the survivor said of Johnson, who fought back the militants with machine gun fire from the back of a pickup truck, before grabbing a sniper rifle and continuing to shoot.

“The guy is a true war hero,” the survivor added. “I really want his wife and kids to know that.”

The team of 12 Americans set out with 30 Nigerien soldiers in the early morning on Oct. 3, according to the sources and confirmed by Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who on Monday offered the first official timeline of events for the ambush in Niger.

They rode in six to eight vehicles, three of them American. They were headed from Niamey, Niger’s capital, to a village 85 kilometers to the north, called Tiloa.

Their pre-mission threat assessment never considered the possibility of 50 to 60 enemy combatants attacking them, according to the official. That matches what Dunford told reporters on Monday. He also added that the leaders on the ground assessed that contact with the enemy was unlikely.

On their way back, the team received a call from the base back in Niamey, asking them to turn around and kill or capture a high-value target who is a known al Qaeda and ISIS operative, according to two senior officials.

There was “high confidence” that the target was in the area, the sources told ABC News. A second U.S. Special Forces team was directed to meet up with their patrol, but when they could not, the original 12-member team and their Nigerien partners were told to proceed anyway.

The team arrived at the target location in the early morning hours of Oct. 4, but found nothing. They burned the remnants of the abandoned campsite and headed back south as the sun came up, stopping back through a nearby village called Tongo Tongo around 8:30 AM.

There, the Nigerien force requested they stop to eat, while U.S. soldiers met with a village elder, who was “obviously and deliberately trying to stall them,” according to the official.

“He was definitely stalling as long as he could to keep us there,” the survivor said, saying he had an entourage, showed the unit a child with an illness, and even grabbed a goat he wanted to prepare for them.

But the unit suspected something was definitely wrong when they saw two motorcycle riders watch them and race out of the village.

The “hair on the back of their necks stood up,” a U.S. official told ABC News.

It was around midmorning or midday by the time the team departed the village. According to the survivor, they had only gone a few hundred yards when they came under fire from machine guns, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades.

An assessment is still underway to determine who ambushed the patrol, but the survivor said it is “absolutely” possible that the high-value target was involved. Dunford said Monday the Pentagon assessment is that “it is an ISIS-affiliated group.”

The unit began returning fire, including with their own machine guns mounted on two of the American vehicles, according to the senior official.

One vehicle was hit by a mortar and another vehicle was disabled by gunfire.

Exactly how and where Johnson died remains unclear, but the survivor praised him as a “war hero” who went “above and beyond” to defend his team.

“Without a doubt, his courage and bravery in action that day were above and beyond expectation. He died fighting for his brothers on his team. You can quote that verbatim,” the survivor added. “He grabbed any and every weapon available to him. The guy is a true war hero.”

One hour into the fight, the unit requested support – with an unarmed drone reaching them in minutes, according to Dunford.

The senior intelligence official credited the French forces who responded with “saving our bacon.”

“The French saved our men. Yes, we lost four. But we would have lost everybody if it wasn't for the French,” the official told ABC News.

Within an hour of the calls – and two hours after the firefight started – French Mirage fighter jets came overhead, Dunford confirmed.

They flew low to scare off the ISIS-affiliated fighters. They did not drop bombs, however, because “they didn’t know exactly where our guys were situated,” the official said.

Shortly after, French Special Forces from Ouagadougou in neighboring Burkina Faso arrived on attack helicopters, each with one or two U.S. Green Berets. French helicopters evacuated the wounded to Niamey, Niger’s capital.

But it wasn’t until two days later on the evening of Oct. 6, according to Dunford, that Johnson’s body was found. The top general denied that the U.S. ever left him behind, arguing that French, American, or Nigerien troops were in the area at all times until his body was recovered.

The survivor described an all-out effort to find Johnson during those 48 hours, saying he was missing, but presumed alive.

“Until his death was confirmed, every asset was devoted to recovering him,” the survivor said. “We threw everything we had at it… Literally hundreds of people were focused on getting La David back.”

It was Nigerien forces that eventually found Johnson’s body, according to Dunford.

The White House was notified as soon as there was a report of a missing soldier, according to Dunford – meaning some time on the evening of Oct. 4.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/died-fig ... d=50670787
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 25, 2017 8:44 am

Niger Ambush Could Become a Scandal Trump Can't Evade
Why are U.S. troops in West Africa? What we know, and don’t know, about the attack that killed four Americans.
By Sophia Tesfaye / Salon October 24, 2017, 8:21 AM GMT


Dozens more militants have reportedly crossed the border from Mali into Niger to carry out another ambush on Nigerien troops, not quite three weeks after the mysterious ambush that led to the deaths of four U.S. Special Forces troops. Nearly every American official connected to the deaths of the Green Berets is still struggling to explain exactly what happened.

"I didn't know there was 1,000 troops in Niger," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" Sunday. Graham, who serves on the Senate Committee on Armed Services, said the Pentagon is "going to brief us next week as to why they were there and what they were doing."

In his most striking admission, the veteran Republican senator added, "We don't know exactly where we're at in the world, militarily, and what we're doing.”

The rules of engagement

Details of what happened on Oct. 4 in Niger, a large, landlocked and predominantly Muslim nation in West Africa with a population of about 21 million, remain murky. Trump administration officials have largely focused on an increasingly fractious exchange with the family of Sgt. La David Johnson, one of the fallen soldiers, following more than a week of radio silence about the attack.

What we do know is that a 12-member team of U.S. Special Forces known as Green Berets accompanied a larger troop of Nigerien soldiers to the village of Tongo Tongo on Oct. 3. After spending the night in the village, the soldiers were ambushed as they attempted to leave on Oct. 4.

Initially, the Pentagon only confirmed that three U.S. troops had been killed and two wounded in the incident. The Department of Defense evidently withheld information about a fourth soldier who had gone missing during the ambush. (That was Johnson.) His remains were found by Nigerien forces roughly 48 hours after the ambush.

The circumstances of how Johnson was separated from his comrades, and the nature of his death, remain unknown. The FBI has joined Department of Defense investigators looking into the incident.

While no group has officially taken responsibility for the attack, the most detailed account of the firefight was reported by Voice of America on Monday.

Moussa Aksar, director of the newspaper l'Evènement in Niamey, the capital of Niger, said the soldiers were in the area to track down an accomplice of Abu Adnan al-Sahraoui, a former member of the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), who joined the Islamic State terror group in the Sahara Desert. (About 80 percent of Niger's land area is in the Sahara, much of it sparsely inhabited or uninhabited.)

Aksar, a specialist on terrorism in the Sahel region of Africa, told Voice of America that members of the patrol questioned residents of the village, who dragged out the discussions, possibly giving the attackers time to organize an ambush.

"It turns out that this village was a little contaminated by hostile forces," said Aksar, who said he received the details from Nigerien Defense Minister Kalla Moutari. "The unit stayed a little longer than expected because, apparently, people were aware that something was going on."

While the soldiers were still in the village, a fake terror attack was staged nearby, according to Aksar and local sources. The soldiers rushed to the scene, where about 50 or more assailants with vehicles and motorcycles opened fire with Kalashnikovs and heavy weapons

According to Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Joseph Dunford, however, the soldiers were attacked while leaving the village to return to their operating base. Dunford, who provided a timeline of events on Monday, went on to admit: “I do not know how this attack unfolded.”

Dunford pointed to the U.S. military’s rules of engagement in the region, which state that troops should only accompany local forces when the chances of combat are low, to say that the members of Third Special Forces Group based at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg “did not expect significant resistance on their visit to the village.”

Yet somehow, Staff Sgt. Bryan Black of Washington state, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson of Ohio, Sgt. Johnson of Florida and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright of Georgia all lost their lives on that visit, and two more U.S. soldiers were injured. Five Nigerien soldiers were also killed in the attack, and 13 more were killed in another ambush over the weekend.

"I totally changed rules of engagement," President Donald Trump boasted last week, as he was in the midst of a battle of words with Johnson's widow. "ISIS is now giving up, they are giving up, there are raising their hands, they are walking off. Nobody has ever seen that before." Weeks before the ambush in Niger, the New York Times reported that Trump's overhaul of the rules "paves the way for broader and more frequent operations against Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other jihadists":

It would also apply in countries where the United States has targeted Islamist militants outside of regular combat for years, including Yemen, Somalia and Libya, and would ease the way to expanding such gray-zone acts of sporadic warfare to elsewhere in Africa, Asia and the Middle East where terrorists operate.

Mission creep?

The United States has more troops stationed in Niger, where jihadists have reportedly taken root in recent years, than in any other African nation. French troops who intervened in neighboring Mali in 2012 after militant groups, including one affiliated with al-Qaida, took control of the northern part of the country. Not long after that, President Barack Obama deployed 40 U.S. military personnel to the region.

That number has since ballooned to 800. The U.S. has also set up a drone base in the capital city of Niamey and continues construction on a second drone base near the border with Mali. Congress, however, has never authorized the mission in Niger -- as is required by the Constitution.

Despite this quiet buildup of international forces, the United Nations estimates that at least 46 militant attacks have been carried out on the Mali-Niger border since early 2016. On Saturday, as a UN Security Council delegation was in the country to discuss the violence, the Malian government announced a one-year extension of its national state of emergency.

Groups linked to both ISIS and al-Qaida are active in this region of northwestern Africa, known generally as the Sahel. With European countries not far away across the Mediterranean, Western forces have aggressively attempted to crack down on the movement of weapons and individuals across the Sahara.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi directed his fighters to the new “base of the caliphate” in West and North Africa in an audio message last November. A year and a half earlier, it was revealed at a Senate hearing that al-Qaida controls an area the size of Texas in the region, where it has helped train members of Boko Haram and al-Shabab. Boko Haram, an extremist movement based in Nigeria, also operates in southeast Niger, southern Chad and northern Cameroon. In May, a U.S. Navy Seal was killed in a raid on an al-Shabab compound in Somalia -- the first American combat death in that country since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in 1993.

But as the Washington Post’s Max Bearak recently noted, despite the significantly increased American involvement on the continent -- and an increasing American death count -- President Trump’s National Security Council has yet to appoint a senior director for Africa, while the highest Africa position in the State Department is held by a temporary appointee.

“You’re going to see more actions in Africa, not less; you’re going to see more aggression by the United States toward our enemies, not less; you’re going to have decisions being made not in the White House but out in the field,” insisted Sen. Graham, after being briefed on the Niger ambush late last week.

Now, as the atmosphere of scandal surrounding the death of U.S. troops begins to thicken, many members of Congress are finally calling for a proper accounting of our military involvement in Niger and elsewhere in Africa. But as legislators appropriated billions of dollars to deploy troops to an ever-growing list of sovereign states in a seemingly endless war on terror, they have refused to engage in actual oversight to ascertain any semblance of a strategic plan from the Trump administration.

The White House defended its actions on Monday by pointing out that it notified congressional leaders in June that 645 troops were conducting counterterrorism duties in Niger.

Across Democratic and Republican administrations, Congress has taken advantage of poor nations’ difficulty dealing with destabilizing forces to abrogate its constitutionally mandated duty. American troops were stationed in Niger at the invitation of that nation's government, and operated under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which remains in force 16 years after the 9/11 attacks. With that in mind, all remaining questions surrounding the ambush seem just a tad too late.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... me-scandal


NEWS & POLITICS
'Empty Barrel': The Real Meaning of John Kelly's Slurs Against Frederica Wilson
So much for military honor. Kelly’s attack on Wilson was not just false but redolent of racism and sexism.
By Chauncey DeVega / Salon October 24, 2017, 12:18 PM GMT


Donald Trump gets particularly upset when women or black people dare to disagree with him. So black women are the perfect targets for his ire.

To wit: Trump's enemies list of black women includes sports journalist Jemele Hill, Rep. Maxine Waters, former national security adviser Susan Rice and White House reporter April Ryan. Trump's newest enemies? Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat, and Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, an Army Special Forces sergeant who was killed in action Oct. 4 during a mission in the West African nation of Niger.

After being publicly shamed into contacting Myeshia Johnson -- Trump has evidently been negligent in reaching out to the families of soldiers killed under his command -- he told her during a phone conversation that her husband "knew what he was getting into when he signed up, but I guess it hurts anyway." It was also reported by those who heard the call that Trump apparently did not even refer to Sgt. Johnson by name instead saying, "your guy."

Myeshia Johnson, the slain soldier's aunt (who raised him after his mother died) and Rep. Wilson, a family friend, were all stunned by Trump's thoughtless and disrespectful comments. Facing public condemnation for his behavior, Trump, as he apparently always does, decided to attack Wilson, Myeshia Johnson and La David Johnson's aunt as liars. Of course the president also declared that this episode was another example of him being depicted unfairly by "fake news."

He has chosen Wilson as a special obsession for his rage. On Twitter, Trump has repeatedly described her as "wacky" and said she is "killing the Democrat Party." (Republicans almost never say "Democratic Party," for reasons of their own.)

In response to this debacle, Trump apparently instructed White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, to appear in person at last Thursday's White House press briefing. Kelly's mission? To be a human shield for his boss. How? By enabling Trump's malignant narcissism, sociopathy, lies and cruel treatment towards a grieving war widow, her family and other loved ones. Despite claims about how "honorable" Kelly is, at least for that day he was Trump's water carrier and stooge.

Kelly insisted that Trump is being treated unfairly and that Myeshia Johnson and Rep. Wilson were the offenders against propriety and good taste, violating some imaginary "sacred" rule where no one should listen to a phone call between a president and the family members of a killed soldier. This norm apparently does not apply to Kelly himself, or other members of Trump's inner circle.

Kelly demonstrated his thinly veiled contempt for the fundamental norm that in a democracy, civilians have command and control over the military. Such an attitude legitimates Trump's authoritarian behavior.

Kelly let slip that Trump did in fact tell Myeshia Johnson that her husband "knew what he was getting into." Once again, Trump is caught out in a lie.

Kelly's finale in aiding and abetting Trump's war on black women was a rhetorical killshot in which the former general said that Wilson was "in a long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise." He claimed he had heard her brag about her role in making a new FBI building in South Florida possible. Wilson, according to Kelly, spoke at the opening ceremony "about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call, he gave the money, the $20 million, to build the building. . . . And we were stunned, stunned that she’d done it. Even for someone that is that empty a barrel, we were stunned.”

Translated: Kelly publicly defamed Wilson -- and, by implication, Myeshia Johnson -- as being a loud, stupid, ignorant person. But words can also mean more than a superficial reading would suggest.

Language derives power from the social, political and historical context in which it is used. The meaning of language is also a function of the relationship between the individuals and groups in question.

Kelly is one of the most powerful men in the world. He is also one of the most powerful white men in America. Black women and girls are undervalued and dehumanized in American society. White supremacy endures as one of the most powerful forces in all of American political and social life. It works through and not apart from sexism and misogyny.

For centuries, black women and girls in America have been stereotyped as being loud, aggressive, hypersexual, lazy and violent. Simultaneously, black women and girls have also been viewed by the white gaze as being natural caregivers, unselfish and possessed of unique emotional and physical strength which makes them immune (unlike white women) to pain and suffering. In total, these stereotypes transform the complex and diverse life experiences and humanity of black women and girls into caricatures such as "the mammy," the "black harpy" or the "Sapphire."

At the website for the Jim Crow Museum, sociologist David Pilgrim explains the "Sapphire" stereotype in the following way: "The Sapphire Caricature portrays black women as rude, loud, malicious, stubborn, and overbearing. The Sapphire Caricature is a harsh portrayal of African American women, but it is more than that; it is a social control mechanism that is employed to punish black women who violate the societal norms that encourage them to be passive, servile, non-threatening, and unseen.

Wilson immediately decoded the racist and sexist invective in Trump's and Kelly's attacks on her character.

Stacey Plaskett, the U.S. Virgin Islands' delegate to Congress, also understood the deeper meaning of Trump's and Kelly's slurs against Rep. Wilson. Plaskett told The New York Times, “He continually called that fallen soldier ‘your guy’ to his wife. That was his wife. . . . It was almost as if he doesn’t believe that we have husbands and wives as black people. And that I find very disturbing, that he would not give her the respect of calling that soldier her husband. . . . I think he challenges anybody who goes after him and corrects him, whether they are black or white or male or female," she continued. "I think the attack is more stark when it is a woman of color.”

Ultimately, John Kelly, who served the United States as a four-star Marine general, and is now White House chief of staff, basically called a congresswoman a loud, stupid black bitch.

It does not matter to Kelly, Trump, the right-wing media or Trump's deplorable foot soldiers that Wilson has a graduate degree in education and worked for decades as a school principal.

It does not matter to Kelly, Trump, the right-wing media or Trump's human deplorable foot soldiers that everything Wilson said was correct and that Trump and Kelly's accounts have proven to be lies.

For Trump and his cabal, all that matters is the political power that comes from slurring a black woman, and how such an action inflames and arouses the racist voters who installed him in the White House.

Trump was in fact correct, however, when he tweeted over the weekend that: "Wacky Congresswoman Wilson is the gift that keeps on giving for the Republican Party, a disaster for Dems. You watch her in action & vote R!" Social scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that racially resentful white voters can be motivated to support Republican policies by the mere act of showing them the image of a black person.

Perhaps the United States will always remain a racist country, whose idea of democracy is inseparable from white male supremacy. At any rate, Donald Trump reminds the world of that heritage nearly every day.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... ica-wilson
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby Grizzly » Sat Oct 28, 2017 12:26 am

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby SonicG » Sun Oct 29, 2017 10:11 pm

Next door in Mali...

2 Navy SEALs Under Suspicion in Strangling of Green Beret in Mali

WASHINGTON — Navy criminal authorities are investigating whether two members of the elite SEAL Team 6 strangled an Army Green Beret in June while they were in Mali on a secret assignment, military officials say.

Staff Sgt. Logan J. Melgar, a 34-year-old veteran of two tours in Afghanistan, was found dead on June 4 in the embassy housing he shared in the Malian capital, Bamako, with a few other Special Operations forces assigned to the West African nation to help with training and counterterrorism missions.

His killing is the latest violent death under mysterious circumstances for American troops on little-known missions in that region of Africa. Four American soldiers were killed in an ambush this month in neighboring Niger while conducting what was initially described as a reconnaissance patrol but was later changed to supporting a much more dangerous counterterrorism mission against Islamic militants in the area.

The Navy SEALs’ potential involvement also raised the prospect of a highly unusual killing of an American soldier by fellow troops, and threatened to stain SEAL Team 6, the famed counterterrorism unit that carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Sergeant Melgar’s superiors in Stuttgart, Germany, almost immediately suspected foul play, and dispatched an investigating officer to the scene within 24 hours, military officials said. Agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command arrived soon after and spent months on the case before handing it off last month to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

No one has been charged in Sergeant Melgar’s death, which a military medical examiner ruled to be “a homicide by asphyxiation,” or strangulation, said three military officials briefed on the autopsy results. The two Navy SEALs, who have not been identified, were flown out of Mali shortly after the episode and were placed on administrative leave.

The biggest unanswered question is why Sergeant Melgar was killed. “N.C.I.S. does not discuss the details of ongoing investigations,” Ed Buice, the agency’s spokesman, said in an email, confirming that his service had taken over the case on Sept. 25.

Neither the Army nor the military’s Africa Command issued a statement about Sergeant Melgar’s death, not even after investigators changed their description of the two SEALs from “witnesses” to “persons of interest,” meaning the authorities were trying to determine what the commandos knew about the death and if they were involved.

The uncertainty has left soldiers in the tight-knit Green Beret community to speculate wildly about any number of possible motives, from whether it was a personal dispute among housemates gone horribly wrong to whether Sergeant Melgar had stumbled upon some illicit activity the SEALs were involved in, and they silenced him, according to interviews with troops and their families. Other officials briefed on the inquiry said they had heard no suggestion that the Navy commandos had been doing anything illegal.

When contacted separately by telephone on Saturday, Sergeant Melgar’s widow, Michelle, and his brother, Shawn, declined to comment.

Lawmakers have criticized top officers and Pentagon officials for offering a shifting timeline of the events in the Niger attack, and for failing to respond with timely, accurate information about the American military’s role on the continent at a time when President Trump has loosened restrictions on the armed forces to intensify attacks against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda around the world.

Sergeant Melgar, a graduate of Texas Tech University who joined the Army in 2012, was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., the same unit whose soldiers were attacked by a much larger and heavily armed group of Islamic State fighters near the border between Niger and Mali on Oct. 4.

According to military officials, Sergeant Melgar was part of a small team in Bamako assigned to help provide intelligence about Islamic militancies in Mali to the United States ambassador there, Paul A. Folmsbee, to protect American personnel against attacks. The sergeant also helped assess which Malian Army troops might be trained and equipped to build a counterterrorism force.

Sergeant Melgar, a native of Lubbock, Tex., was about four months into what military officials said was a six-month tour in Mali, and was living with three other American Special Operations troops in a house provided by the American Embassy.

Two of those housemates were members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, which has over the past decade carried out kill-or-capture missions in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, as well as the one that killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.

According to two senior American military officials, the two SEAL commandos were in Mali at the request of Mr. Folmsbee in a previously undisclosed and highly unusual clandestine mission to support French and Malian counterterrorism forces battling Al Qaeda’s branch in North and West Africa, known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as well as smaller cells aligned with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. The Americans helped provide intelligence for missions, and had participated in at least two such operations in Mali this year before Sergeant Melgar’s death.

Much is unknown about what happened around 5 a.m. on June 4 in the team house. The initial reports to Sergeant Melgar’s superiors in Germany said he had been injured while wrestling or grappling with the two Navy commandos, according to three officials who have been briefed on the investigation.

According to one version of events, one of the SEALs put Sergeant Melgar in a chokehold. When the sergeant passed out, the commandos frantically tried to revive him. Failing that, they rushed him to an emergency clinic, where he was pronounced dead.

Spokesmen for the Africa Command, the Special Operations Command, the Defense Department and the Army and Navy investigative services declined to comment, citing the continuing investigation, or did not respond to emails and phone calls on Sunday.

A spokesman for the State Department’s Africa Bureau and Mr. Folmsbee, Nicholas A. Sadoski, directed all questions to the Pentagon. Mr. Sadoski declined to answer questions about what kind of oversight the ambassador exercised over the American military personnel in Mali, how frequently was he briefed on Special Operations missions there and when he learned about Sergeant Melgar’s death.

Why American Special Operations forces are in Mali at all is a story in a nutshell of the American military’s successes and failures in Africa.

Mali had been one of West Africa’s most stable nations before 2012, and was held up by the Pentagon as a model partner in combating Islamic militants. But when secular Tuareg separatists began an uprising, as they had done in the past, insurgents linked to Al Qaeda took advantage of the deteriorating security situation.

When the militants surged across Mali’s northern desert in 2012, American-trained commanders of the country’s elite army units defected at a critical time, taking troops, trucks, weapons and their newfound skills to the enemy. A confidential internal review completed by the Africa Command after the debacle concluded that there were critical gaps in the American training for Malian troops and senior officers.

With Mali’s army in collapse, the rebels were pushed out by French and Chadian troops early in 2013, and the United Nations established a peacekeeping mission. But the chaos continues today. Various armed insurgents regularly attack Malian forces and the United Nations peacekeepers. To date, 149 peacekeepers have been killed in Mali, making it one of the most dangerous peacekeeping missions in the world.

And terrorists continue to mount deadly attacks, including an assault in June on a resort outside Bamako that killed at least five people.

For the 3rd Special Forces Group, the past year has served as a reminder that Africa remains a dangerous assignment. In addition to Sergeant Melgar and the four soldiers killed in Niger, one soldier committed suicide in Kenya last October and another died in a vehicle accident while on patrol in Niger in February.

Those who knew Sergeant Melgar described him as a soldier’s soldier — he deployed to Afghanistan twice on training missions between July 2014 and February 2016, according to his Army service record — and a devoted father of two sons, 13 and 15, who texted and talked via Skype multiple times a day with his wife while serving overseas.

More than four months later, his death still has many at Fort Bragg and in Lubbock reeling. An online community bulletin board in Lubbock stated: “A Melgar family representative shared that ‘Staff Sgt. Melgar did what most only dream of and excelled at every turn! His life was epic! He is missed dearly every single day.’”

Sergeant Melgar was also honored at the high school he attended in Wolfforth, Tex., Frenship High, during the homecoming football game on Oct. 6.

A final tribute awaits Sergeant Melgar: He is scheduled to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Nov. 20.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/us/p ... pe=article
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 31, 2017 7:44 am

thanks for that

now that the generals are in charge


this is the "grown up" in the room


Chief of Staff John Kelly praises Robert E Lee as "honorable man," says "lack of an ability to compromise led to the civil war," not slavery



John Kelly Says ‘Lack Of An Ability To Compromise Led To The Civil War’ (VIDEO)


By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published OCTOBER 31, 2017 7:09 AM
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on Monday said that the Civil War stemmed from a “lack of an ability to compromise,” ignoring that the two sides fought over whether slavery should be legal.

Kelly made the comments in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, also telling the new Fox host that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was an “honorable man.”

Ingraham asked Kelly about a church in Virginia that decided to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee since the plaques “create a distraction in our worship space and may create an obstacle to our identity as a welcoming church and an impediment to our growth and to full community with our neighbors.”

Kelly said that Americans should not “take what is today accepted as right and wrong” and apply it to history.

“It shows you how much of a lack of appreciation of history and what history is. I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which in 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first, back in those days, and now it’s different today,” Kelly told Ingraham.

“But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil war,” he added. “And men of women of good faith on both sides made their stand, where their conscience had them make their stand.”

Watch part of the interview via Fox News. Ingraham asks about the church at the 5:30 mark.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/j ... compromise



yea I hear everyone is the same...there is no difference ...there are people and then there are fucking racists and their leader is the president

Image

Outnumbered and outgunned, US troops got separated in Niger ambush
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/27/politics/ ... index.html


Niger Ambush Reignites Senate Debate Over Authorization Of Military Force
http://www.npr.org/2017/10/30/560826204 ... tary-force


Mattis, Tillerson say new war authorization legislation "not legally required"
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/matti ... e-updates/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Niger another nameless war

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 31, 2017 12:09 pm

Ta-Nehisi Coates Schools John Kelly On History Of Civil War And ‘Compromise’

After White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on Monday night said that the Civil War was the result of “the lack of an ability to compromise” and called Confederal Gen. Robert E. Lee an “honorable man,” author Ta-Nehisi Coates tore into Kelly on Twitter.

Coates (pictured above) argued that in the years leading up to the Civil War, as well as after the Civil War, American leaders made several compromises in an attempt to win over slave owners.

Regarding John Kelly's creationist theorizing on Lee and the Civil War, its worth pointing out a few things.

Notion that Civil War resulted from a lack of compromise is belied by all the compromises made on enslavement from America's founding.

I mean, like, it's called The three fifths compromise for a reason. But it doesn't stand alone. Missouri Compromise. Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Lincoln's own platform was a compromise. Lincoln was not an abolitionist. He proposed to limit slavery's expansion, not end it.

During the Civil War, Lincoln repeatedly sought to compromise by paying reparations--to slaveholders--and shipping blacks out the country.

Image

Explicit compromises don't even get at it. Historian James McPherson points to implicit compromises with slavery.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ee/529038/

Spirit of "compromise" continued--Lincoln asked only 10 percent of voters in rebel states to sign loyalty oath for readmission to Union.

"Compromise" continued long after Lincoln's death. Compromise of 1877 led to explicit White Supremacist rule in the South for a century.

As historian David Blight pointed out "compromise" with white supremacy was how the country achieved reunion.

Shocking that someone charged with defending their country, in some profound way, does not comprehend the country they claim to defend.

Coates also criticized Kelly for arguing that we should not apply today’s standards to the past and for calling Lee “honorable.”


Notion that we are putting today's standards on the past is, in itself, racist--implies only white, slave-holding, opinions matter.

Majority of people living in Mississippi in 1860 were black. They knew, in their own time, that enslavement was wrong.

Half the people living in states like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama enslaved--knew full well that enslavement was dead wrong.

Praising Bobby Lee as an honorable man is just sad. Like some kid insisting his deadbeat dad is actually a secret agent away on a mission.

Image


As @AdamSerwer points out Lee wasn't some agnostic pressed into War. He was a dude who thought torture was cool.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ee/529038/

Image

Lee didn't prosecute the war with no regard for White supremacy, his army that kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery.


You do have to get these guys were the worst of America.

Image

They did not merely want to preserve the right to own people, they wanted to expand that right.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... er/396482/

Been a lot of hemming and hawing over the term "white supremacist." Fools who won't be satisfied until Trump literally lynches someone.

But, like, when the "adult in the room" believes a war for slavery was honorable...

Believes that the torturer of humans, vendor of people, who led that war was honorable...

When that dude portrays a sitting member of Congress as some shucking and jiving hustler...

When he sticks by that portrayal of a black women, in the face of clear video evidence, when he has so descended into the dream...

You really do see the effect of white supremacy.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/t ... -civil-war



Historians respond to John F. Kelly’s Civil War remarks: ‘Strange,’ ‘sad,’ ‘wrong’
By Philip Bump October 31 at 10:49 AM

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly speaks to the media during the daily briefing at the White House on Oct. 19. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly was the guest for the premiere of Laura Ingraham’s new show on Fox News Monday night. During the interview, he outlined a view of the history of the Civil War that historians described as “strange,” “highly provocative,” “dangerous” and “kind of depressing.”

Kelly was asked about the decision of a church in Alexandria to remove plaques honoring George Washington and Robert E. Lee.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days. Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

“That statement could have been given by [former Confederate general] Jubal Early in 1880,” said Stephanie McCurry, professor of history at Columbia University and author of “Confederate Reckoning: Politics and Power in the Civil War South.”

“What’s so strange about this statement is how closely it tracks or resembles the view of the Civil War that the South had finally got the nation to embrace by the early 20th century,” she said. “It’s the Jim Crow version of the causes of the Civil War. I mean, it tracks all of the major talking points of this pro-Confederate view of the Civil War.”

Kelly makes several points. That Lee was honorable. That fighting for state was more important than fighting for country. That a lack of compromise led to the war. That good people on both sides were fighting for conscientious reasons. Both McCurry and David Blight, professor of history at Yale University and author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” broadly reject all of these arguments.

“This is profound ignorance, that’s what one has to say first, at least of pretty basic things about the American historical narrative,” Blight said. “I mean, it’s one thing to hear it from Trump who, let’s be honest, just really doesn’t know any history and has demonstrated it over and over and over. But Gen. Kelly has a long history in the American military.”

Blight described Kelly’s argument in similar terms as McCurry — an “old reconciliationist narrative” about the Civil War that, in the last half-century or so has “just been exploded” by historical research since.

The idea that compromise might have been possible was rejected out of hand by both McCurry and Blight.

“It was not about slavery, it was about honorable men fighting for honorable causes?” McCurry said. “Well, what was the cause? . . . In 1861, they were very clear on what the causes of the war were. The reason there was no compromise possible was that people in the country could not agree over the wisdom of the continued and expanding enslavement of millions of African Americans.”

There were a number of compromises on slavery that led up to the Civil War, from the drafting of the Constitution to the addition of new states to the Union.

“Any serious person who knows anything about this,” Blight said, “can look at the late 1850s and then the secession crisis and know that they tried all kinds of compromise measures during the secession winter, and nothing worked. Nothing was viable.”

“All of these compromises were about creating a division where slavery already existed and where for a time they conceded that the Constitution shackled them in their ability to attack it,” McCurry said. Before the war, the strategy for dealing with slavery was to contain it. By 1860, she said, the North’s economic success and expanding population and the South’s loss of representation in national politics put slavery at risk. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 allowed Southern slaveholders — who had $4 billion in wealth in the form of enslaved people, McCurry said — to argue that the threat to slavery was imminent.

“In 1861, compromise wasn’t possible because some Southerners just wanted out. They wanted a separate nation where they could protect slavery into the indefinite future,” McCurry said. “That’s what they said when they seceded. That’s what they said in their constitution when they wrote one.”

Kelly’s framework is “also rooted, frankly, in a Lost Cause mentality that swept over American culture in the wake of the war, swept over Northerners,” Blight said, “this idea that good and honorable men of the South were pushed aside and exploited by the ‘fanatical’ — ironically — first Republican Party.”

Blight noted that Lee wasn’t simply defending his home state of Virginia against Northern aggression.

“Of course we yearn for compromise, we yearn for civility, we yearn for some common ground,” he added. “But, look, Robert E. Lee was not a compromiser. He chose treason.”

“The best of the Lee biographies show that Lee was a Confederate nationalist,” Blight said. “He knew what he was fighting for.”

Both historians, though, held particular disdain for the idea that putting state over nation was the essence of the fight.

“My God, where does he get that from?” Blight asked. “That denies the very reason to be, the essential reason for the existence of the original Republican Party, which formed in the 1850s to stop the expansion of slavery and ended up developing a political ideology that threatened the South because they really were going to cordon off slavery.”

“This idea that state came first? No, it didn’t!” he said. “The Northern people rallied around stopping secession! This comment is so patently wrong.”

“It’s one thing to say Lee chose state over country,” McCurry said. “What [Kelly] says is that was his country. That would be news to 350,000 Union war dead.”

“It’s just so absurd,” Blight said. “It’s just so sad. It’s just so disappointing that generations of history have been written to explode all of this and yet millions of people — serious people; experienced, serious people and now people with tremendous power — have grown up believing all this.”

There was, however, a small silver lining.

“This Trump-era ignorance and misuse of history is forcing historians — and I think this is a good thing — to use words like ‘truth’ and ‘right or wrong,’ ” Blight said. “In the academy we get very caught up in relativism and whether we can be objective and so on, and that’s a real argument.”

“But there are some things that are just not true,” he said. “And we’ve got to point that out.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pol ... fb5073e73f
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