The American Bear

Sunshine/Lollipops

› France to Buy U.S. Drones for Mali Operation

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Two of America’s medium-altitude Reaper drones will be sold to France as backup for the country’s operations against Islamist rebels in Mali.

The news comes from the ‘Air et Cosmos’ specialist magazine, which reported online that a deal had been reached between France and the United States for the sale of two non-armed MQ-9 units.

The French air force had already deployed a European-made Harfang drone to Mali, with the country now wishing to acquire more modern models quickly, although any purchase of the US Reapers directly from the manufacturer (as was done with Harfang) is expected to delay delivery by seven months.

Related: Europe presses US on drones – not to cease, but to share

(via robotmonastery)

› Paul Kagame: I asked America to kill Congo rebel leader with drone | Guardian

Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, has rejected accusations from Washington that he was supporting a rebel leader and accused war criminal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by challenging a senior US official to send a drone to kill the wanted man.

In an interview with the Observer Magazine, Kagame said that on a visit to Washington in March he came under pressure from the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carson, to arrest Bosco Ntaganda, leader of the M23 rebels, who was wanted by the international criminal court (ICC). The US administration was increasing pressure on Kagame following a UN report claiming to have uncovered evidence showing that the Rwandan military provided weapons and other support to Ntaganda, whose forces briefly seized control of the region’s main city, Goma.

“I told him: ‘Assistant secretary of state, you support [the UN peacekeeping force] in the Congo. Such a big force, so much money. Have you failed to use that force to arrest whoever you want to arrest in Congo? Now you are turning to me, you are turning to Rwanda?’” he said. “I said that, since you are used to sending drones and gunning people down, why don’t you send a drone and get rid of him and stop this nonsense? And he just laughed. I told him: ‘I’m serious’.”

› Pentagon deploys small number of troops to war-torn Mali | The Washington Post

The Pentagon has deployed a small number of troops to Mali to support allied forces fighting there, despite repeated pledges by the Obama administration not to put “boots on the ground” in the war-torn African country.

About 10 U.S. military personnel are in Mali to provide “liaison support” to French and African troops but are not engaged in combat operations, said Lt. Col. Robert Firman, a Pentagon spokesman. Twelve others are assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Bamako, the capital, he added.

The Pentagon had previously said that it had no intention of sending troops to Mali and that it would involve itself in the conflict only at arm’s length. …

… The Obama administration has been prohibited by U.S. law from giving military aid to Mali since March 2012, when its democratically elected president was ousted in a coup. U.S. officials said they are legally [magically] permitted, however, to help French troops and forces from other African countries fighting in Mali.

Since the coup, there have been signs that some U.S. Special Operations forces have been deployed to Mali on undeclared missions. In April 2012, three U.S. soldiers were killed in a mysterious car crash in Bamako.

Last month, Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) suggested that U.S. commandos were “taking action” in Mali. At a House Armed Services Committee hearing, Kline asked Adm. William H. McRaven, the head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, whether his troops were coordinating their efforts with the French military.

“It seems to me that it might be a little awkward when you have French special operating forces taking action and presumably some of your forces taking action,” Kline said. “Otherwise, you’re going to be shooting each other.”

McRaven replied that U.S. troops were working closely with the French in Mali but did not elaborate on their mission.

… “There is very close coordination on the ground,” he said. “Tactically, of course, the U.S. forces and the French forces and the African forces that are there in Mali on the ground, there are tactical communications going on day in and day out so that we de-conflict any movement.”

France has about 4,000 troops in Mali. It is hoping to withdraw most of its soldiers by the end of the year and hand over responsibility for securing the country to a U.N. peacekeeping force. Six French soldiers have been killed in Mali since January.

The U.N. operation, which would eventually involve more than 12,000 peacekeepers, is set to begin July 1. Under a resolution approved last week by the U.N. Security Council, the mission is contingent on a further assessment of the threat posed to the peacekeepers by armed militants.

› Libya faces growing Islamist threat | The Guardian

Western intervention in Libya leads to blowback in Mali, leads to intervention in Mali, leads to blowback in Libya, leads to …

Diplomats are warning of growing Islamist violence against western targets in Libya as blowback from the war in Mali, following last week’s attack on the French embassy in Tripoli.

The bomb blast that wrecked much of the embassy is seen as a reprisal by Libyan militants for the decision by Paris the day before to extend its military mission against fellow jihadists in Mali.

The Guardian has learned that jihadist groups ejected from their Timbuktu stronghold have moved north, crossing the Sahara through Algeria and Niger to Libya, fuelling a growing Islamist insurgency.

“There are established links between groups in both Mali and Libya – we know there are established routes,” said a western diplomat in Tripoli. “There is an anxiety among the political class here that Mali is blowing back on them.”

That anxiety escalated last week after militants detonated a car bomb outside the French embassy, wounding two French guards and a Libyan student, the first such attack on a western target in the Libyan capital since the end of the 2011 Arab spring revolution.

“The armed groups we are fighting are fleeing to Libya,” said Colonel Keba Sangare, commander of Mali’s army garrison in Timbuktu. “We have captured Libyans in this region, as well as Algerians, Nigerians, French and other European dual-nationals.”

continue →

Chad’s army has no ability to face the kind of guerrilla fighting that is emerging in northern Mali. Our soldiers are going to return to Chad. They have accomplished their mission

Chadian President Idriss Deby

Chad to pull its troops from war-torn Mali

Enter the UN: UN ‘considers’ peacekeeper deployment in Mali (with a ‘parallel’ fighting force similar to Côte d’Ivoire in the early aughts - I’ll leave it to you to research how well that turned out).

With chaos enveloping Mali to the west and militant groups holding sway in Libya to the north, [President Mahamadou] Issoufou frets about a possible spillover of violence into Niger. But, in an interview, he said those preoccupations would not cause his country to backslide on human rights or good governance. He also pointed to the benefits of cooperation with the U.S. military, which he invited to base ‘surveillance’ drones here.

Niger rapidly emerging as a key U.S. partner

Niger’s President Issoufou doesn’t seem to understand what “cooperation with the U.S. military” has meant historically.

“The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass … whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.”

From the Washington Post, 4/14/2013, “Niger rapidly emerges as a key U.S. partner in anti-terrorism fight in Africa”:

The Pentagon is deepening its military involvement across Africa as it confronts an expanding array of “terrorist movements” and guerrilla groups. In doing so [and following a long, historical tradition], the U.S. government has become dependent on several countries with checkered democratic records. That in turn has lessened Washington’s leverage to push those countries to practice free elections and the rule of law.

In Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, President Ismail Omar Guelleh has ruled unchallenged over his tiny country since 1999 by marginalizing political opponents and confining journalists. Still, the U.S. government has embraced Guelleh as a friend because he has allowed the Pentagon to build a major counter-terrorism base on his territory.

In Uganda, where Yoweri Museveni has served as president for 27 years, U.S. officials have objected to the persecution of gay men and lesbians and other human-rights abuses. But Washington has kept up a generous flow of foreign aid. It also pays Uganda to send troops to war-torn Somalia and lead a regional hunt for Joseph Kony, the brutal leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

In Kenya, U.S. diplomats warned there would be unspecified “consequences” if the country elected a fugitive from the International Criminal Court as its new president. Kenyans did anyway, and the Obama administration has hesitated to downgrade relations because it needs help on counter-terrorism.

Human-rights groups have also accused the U.S. government of holding its tongue about political repression in Ethiopia, another key security partner in East Africa.

“The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass,” acknowledged a senior U.S. official who specializes in Africa but spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. “Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.”

The official said the administration of former President George W. Bush took the same approach in Africa. Many U.S. diplomats and human-rights groups had hoped Obama would shift his emphasis in Africa from security to democracy, but that has not happened, the official added.

“There’s pretty much been no change at all,” the official said. “In the end, it was an almost seamless transition from Bush to Obama.”

“Almost seamless”

› Africa: Imperialism’s High Mark of Conquest in the 21st Century | Glen Ford

At present, nothing stands in the way of the militarization and occupation of Africa by the United States and its junior imperialist partners. Every global and multinational organization of any consequence on the continent has been suborned to the service of the neocolonial military project. AFRICOM, the United States Military Command in Africa, has become the headquarters of recolonization, augmented by the militaries of NATO and legitimized by the African Union, itself, and the global credentials of the United Nations.

It is vital to note this great feat of imperialism and international white supremacy reached its zenith during first term of the Obama administration, which roughly coincides with the birth of AFRICOM, in 2008. Imperialism with a Black face has been fantastically successful, in Africa. In fact, Africa is U.S imperialism’s only generalized success story of the 21st century, to date.

Bizarrely costumed in the garb of “human rights” interveners, the greatest genociders and enslavers in human history – Europe and its superpower offspring, the United States – have nearly completed their reconquest of the African continent. Only a few patches of land are free of their military entanglements and treaties – notably, Zimbabwe and tiny Eritrea, among the few nations on the African continent that have not yet been absorbed into the AFRICOM matrix.

The United Nations and the African Union have become mere annexes of the AFRICOM military complex, under the fictitious banner of human rights.

The African Union definitively sold itself to the Devil in Somalia, where an AU-accredited force of almost 20,000 troops fights a U.S. and European Union-armed and -financed war to subjugate the Somali nation. The greatest crime of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is now in the process of being sanitized, globalized, and Pan-Africanized in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since 1996, under Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, the United States has armed and financed the de facto annexation and bloody depopulation of the mineral rich eastern Congo. U.S. client states Uganda and Rwanda turned the eastern provinces of Congo into a vast killing field that has, so far, claimed the lives of 6 million people – the greatest holocaust since World War Two. All the while, successive U.S. administrations shielded their Ugandan and Rwandan hirelings from international censure – even as nearly 20,000 United Nations troops were stationed in the killing fields.

But eventually, Rwanda and Uganda’s role in the carnage could no longer be hidden. Now the United States – the superpower overlord of the Congolese genocide – drapes itself in the clothing of humanitarian savior of the Congo. It has pushed through the United Nations Security Council the creation of a new, 3,000-man force to aggressively intervene in Congo. Like the United Nations-African Union force in Somalia, the UN Congo “intervention brigade” will not move an inch without U.S. arms, training, and supervision. The U.S., which has choreographed the Congolese genocide for the past 17 years, will now pose as the great peacemaker and life-giver, through the offices of the United Nations and participating African countries. And the bought and paid for governments of the continent will bow, and applaud, and then bow again.

› U.N. Approves "Offensive" Capability for Peacekeeping Ops in DRC

The U.N. Security Council has approved a new military force to launch operations against rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The force’s mandate is unprecedented in explicitly assigning “offensive” capability to a peacekeeping force under the United Nations. The force would target the rebel M23 and other groups operating in the DRC’s border regions with Rwanda and Uganda.

More:
U.N. Approves New Force to Pursue Congo’s Rebels

With a shiny new drone base in Niger and a magical, law-erasing Terrorist designation, the Obama administration is ready to start killing people in Mali and elsewhere in West Africa

Via the Washington Post, Drone base in Niger gives U.S. a strategic foothold in West Africa, 3/21/2013:

Since taking office in 2009, President Obama has relied heavily on drones for operations, both declared and covert, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. U.S. drones also fly from allied bases in Turkey, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines.

Now, they are becoming a fixture in Africa. The U.S. military has built a major drone hub in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, and flies unarmed Reaper drones from Ethiopia. Until recently, it conducted reconnaissance flights over East Africa from the island nation of the Seychelles.

The Predator drones in Niger, a landlocked and dirt-poor country, give the Pentagon a strategic foothold in West Africa. Niger shares a long border with Mali, where an al-Qaeda affiliate and other Islamist groups have taken root. Niger also borders Libya and Nigeria, which are also struggling to contain armed extremist movements.

[…] U.S. officials have acknowledged that they could use lethal force under certain circumstances. Last month, Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that the U.S. military had designated “a handful of high-value individuals” [i.e added them to the “kill list” or “disposition matrix”] in North Africa for their suspected connections [“associates of associates”] to al-Qaeda, making them potential targets for capture or killing.

The Pentagon declined to say exactly how many Predator aircraft it has sent to Niger or how long it intends to keep them there. But there are signs that the U.S. military wants to establish a long-term presence in West Africa.

And via U.S. News and World Report, Terrorist Classification Could Prompt Mali Drone War, 3/21/2013:

The United States might be [is] poised to ramp up its presence in Mali in the coming weeks following news Thursday that it has classified one of the militant groups fighting there as terrorists.

The State Department’s decision to add Ansar al Dine to its list of terrorist organizations [magically] grants the U.S. the political and legal authority to pursue directly the [associates of associates of] al-Qaida affiliate, says J. Peter Pham, a senior advisor to U.S. Africa Command.

The move is an “important housekeeping detail” for the U.S., which is prohibited by [US] law from intervening militarily in Mali after rebels successfully overthrew the democratically elected leader a year ago.

“We continue humanitarian assistance to Mali, but we certainly can’t engage in direct military assistance with the Malian military, which was behind the coup,” says Pham, an Africa expert with the Atlantic Council. “It [magically] provides the basis [that] as a designated terrorist organization, U.S. military and intelligence resources can be brought to assist those fighting Ansar al-Dine.” [i.e. flying robots can now be used to kill them].

thepeoplesrecord:

Tunisia’s biggest protest since the Arab Spring
March 18, 2013

Thousands of people took to the streets of the Tunisian capital demanding to end the rule of the Islamist government, which they accuse of assassinating prominent secular politician, Chokri Belaid.

The March 16 demonstration is the biggest in a series of protest events, which took place in the country after Belaid was shot dead outside his home exactly 40 days ago.

The rallies already lead to Tunisian Prime Minister, Hamadi Jebali, resigning from his position on March 14. Fellow member of the ruling Islamist Ennahda party, Ali Larayedh, who came in as a replacement, has formed a new coalition government with independents in key ministries.

But the move wasn’t enough to calm the people as they chanted “Ennahda go”, “The people want a new revolution” and “The people want to bring down the regime” during their demonstration on Saturday.

Belaid’s family accuse Ennahda of murder, but the ruling Tunisian party denies any involvement. With nobody claiming responsibility for the crime, police are saying that the assassin was a radical Salafist Islamist.

”They killed Chokri but they cannot kill the values of freedom defended by him,” Belaid’s widow Basma said in front of her husband’s grave on Saturday.

Belaid’s liberal nine-party Popular Front bloc has only three seats in Tunisia’s parliament, but it speaks for many people, who fear that the religious radicals would deprive them of freedoms won in the Arab spring.

Despite not playing a major role in the Jasmine Revolution, which toppled president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, it’s the Islamists, who took power in the country though a general election.

The protests didn’t prevent Ennahda party chairman, Rashid Ghannouchi, from holding talks with a visiting European Union delegation, headed by the European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy, Stefan Fule.

“Ennahda Movement supports the deepening of relations with the European Union on the basis of common interests and mutual respect,” Ghannouchi is cited as saying on the Muslim Brotherhood’s official website. “Ennahda Movement wants to take Tunisia out of this transitional period in the shortest time, after the approval of the country’s new Constitution which should establish democracy, uphold the rule of law and guarantee freedoms.”

For his part, Fule insisted that the EU are also ready for cooperation with Tunisia, adding that it supports the democratic transition process and legitimacy in the North-African country.

“The European Union (EU) remains confident in the capacity of the Tunisian political leaders to find efficient solutions to the political, economic and social challenges faced by Tunisia in this transition period”, he said.

Good relations with Europe are essential for Tunisia, which – unlike neighboring Libya and Algeria – lacks vast oil and gas resources, relying on tourism as one of the main sources of income.

Source

(via randomactsofchaos)