Wednesday, November 18, 2015
africa: america's laboratory for a new kind of war
By CNu at November 18, 2015 0 comments
Labels: Obamamandian Imperative , predatory militarism , resource war , The Great Game , What Now?
the sino-american cold war in africa
AMY GOODMAN: Nick Turse, you have a chapter in your book, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, that is—its header, "An East-West Showdown: China, America, and a New Cold War in Africa." Explain.
NICK TURSE: Well, if you travel anywhere on the African continent, you’ll see that the Chinese have moved in, in a very big way, over the last decade. They’ve pursued a campaign of economic engagement across the continent, and very, very public projects. Everywhere you go, they’re building an airport, they’re building roads, they’re putting up government facilities—tangible projects that Africans can see. This is the strategy they’ve pursued to gain influence in Africa. The U.S. has gone a different route. They’ve pursued an antiterror whack-a-mole strategy, where they send small teams around the continent, they send drones. They try to tamp down terror groups and seem to only spread them around. They’ve also pumped in tremendous amounts of money, but this is to bolster African militaries with rather dubious human rights records.
AMY GOODMAN: Give us examples.
NICK TURSE: Well, you know, you can see this in Kenya. They’ve put a lot of money into training Kenyan force to act as a proxy in Somalia. But this—one, they haven’t been very successful in tamping down violence. Actually, it’s spread the violence into Kenya now. And the Kenyans have been seen by many groups as being exceptionally corrupt, conducting smuggling around the region, and also—you know, they’ve also committed human rights abuses. So—and the same thing has been seen elsewhere in Africa. Chad, we’ve pumped a lot of money into using the Chadians as proxy forces. But if you look at how Chad’s troops have operated abroad—you know, we backed Chad to go into Central African Republic, and they committed a massacre there, machine-gunned a marketplace filled with civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: And why did the U.S. back them?
NICK TURSE: Well, I think that the U.S. doesn’t want to put large numbers of its own forces on the ground, because of what’s happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. They want to fight wars on the cheap. They want to limit American casualties. But the proxies to choose from in Africa are troubling.
AMY GOODMAN: You share some startling figures. Since 2007, the U.S. has operated AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command. U.S. generals have maintained AFRICOM leaves only a "small footprint" on the continent, with just an official base in Djibouti. But you say the U.S. military is now involved in more than 90 percent of Africa’s 54 nations. The U.S. presence includes, you say, "construction, military exercises, advisory assignments, security cooperation, or training missions." But AFRICOM, you write, carried out 674 missions across the African continent last year—an average of nearly two a day, a 300 percent jump from previous years. Can you explain why these operations have expanded exponentially under President Obama?
NICK TURSE: Well, you know, I think Africa has been seen as a place of ungoverned spaces, a place that’s prone to terror. It’s ironic because when a senior Pentagon official was asked after 9/11 about the presence of transnational terror groups on the continent, he wasn’t able to come up with any. The best he could come up with was that militants in Somalia had saluted Osama bin Laden. That was the extent of it. They hadn’t actually attacked anywhere outside of Somalia. They had local grievances, and they were contained. But the U.S. got into its head that Africa was a place that could be a heartland for terrorism, so it pumped in a tremendous amount of money, sent in forces, conducted all these training operations, set up small bases around the continent—all of it to shore up the continent against terror. Instead, you look anywhere on the continent today, and you see a proliferation of terror groups—ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabab, al-Mourabitoun, Ansaru, over and over. The Pentagon won’t name all the groups that it sees as threats, but it’s somewhere around 50 that it claims are groups on the continent that are opposed to U.S. interests. They’ve just proliferated in all—in these years.
By CNu at November 18, 2015 0 comments
Labels: predatory militarism , The Great Game , What IT DO Shawty... , WW-III
What IS the U.S. interest in Africa?
NICK TURSE: Well, it’s difficult to say for sure. I think that the U.S. has viewed Africa as a place of weak governance, you know, sort of a zone that’s prone to terrorism, and that there can be a spread of terror groups on the continent if the U.S. doesn’t intervene. So, you know, there’s generally only one tool in the U.S. toolkit, and that’s a hammer. And unfortunately, then, everywhere they see nails.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you most surprised by in "The Drone Papers" that you got a hold of, a kind of—what’s been described as perhaps a second Edward Snowden, this project of The Intercept that you wrote about, particularly when it came to Africa?
NICK TURSE: Well, I think it’s really just how far the proliferation of drone bases has spread on the continent. You know, I’ve been looking at this for years, but "The Drone Papers" drove home to me just how integral drones have become to the U.S. way of warfare on the continent. You know, I think this feeds into President Obama’s strategy, trying to get away from large-footprint interventions, you know, the disasters that we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s leaned heavily now on special operations forces and on drones. And so, I think that’s probably the most surprising aspect.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of the reports that we get here, you basically—there’s either news about Boko Haram or al-Shabab or the disintegration, continuing disintegration, of Libya. To what extent have these special operations focused on these areas, and to what extent have they had any success?
NICK TURSE: Well, I think that Libya is actually a—it’s a great example of the best intentions gone awry by the U.S. The U.S. joined a coalition war to oust dictator Muammar Gaddafi. And I think that it was seen as a great success. Gaddafi fell, and it seemed like U.S. policies had played out just as they were drawn up in Washington. Instead, though, we saw that Libya has descended into chaos, and it’s been a nightmare for the Libyan people ever since—a complete catastrophe.
And it then had a tendency to spread across the continent. Gaddafi had Tuaregs from Mali who worked for him. They were elite troops. As his regime was falling, the Tuaregs raided his weapons stores, and they moved into Mali, into their traditional homeland, to carve out their own nation there. When they did that, the U.S.-backed military in Mali, that we had been training for years, began to disintegrate. That’s when the U.S.-trained officer decided that he could do a better job, overthrew the democratically elected government. But he proved no better at fighting the Tuaregs than the government he overthrew. As a result, Islamist rebels came in and pushed out his forces and the Tuaregs, and were making great gains in the country, looked poised to take it over.
The U.S. decided to intervene again, another military intervention. We backed the French and an African force to go in and stop the Islamists. We were able to, with these proxies—which is the preferred method of warfare on the African continent—arrest the Islamists’ advance, but now Mali has descended into a low-level insurgency. And it’s been like this for several years now. The weapons that the Tuaregs originally had were taken by the Islamists and have now spread across the continent. You can find those weapons in the hands of Boko Haram now, even as far away as Sinai in Egypt. So, now, the U.S. has seen this as a way to stop the spread of militancy, but I think when you look, you see it just has spread it.
By CNu at November 18, 2015 0 comments
Labels: American Original , Naked Emperor , predatory militarism , The Great Game , What Now?
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
stir this pot and you'll wind up licking the spoon...,
Why France?
By CNu at November 17, 2015 0 comments
Labels: also sprach zarathustra , play-at-your-level , stay-in-your-lane , unintended consequences , WW-III
old blokes drop knowledge on the great game and how it and YOU get played...,
"There always has to be a 'madman' in the Middle East," explains Jeremy Salt, when asked why we constantly hear that 'Bashar al-Assad has to go'? Of course Bashar al-Assad is not really mad. Jeremy explains how the west, in its long exploitation of the Middle East, has invented crises that it then pretends to help with, and these tend to feature a 'madman' whom the people have to be saved from. In reaction Middle Eastern governments tend to be defensive and authoritarian, in order to survive constant foreign interference. Even if Bashar went, the Syrian state would remain the same. Salt gives a fluent history of how the west has used the Middle East, and how western politicians expected to knock Syria over easily, but underestimated it. All they have done is weaken it and assorted armed and dangerous groups including ISIS have risen up through the cracks they have created. But many Syrians really like Bashar al-Assad and think he is their best chance for reform. (See the third part in this series, "Has the Syrian president killed more than ISIS and other questions," to hear about how al-Assad is actually legally elected and had brought in reforms prior to the current crisis.) Petty asks about beheading and the role of religion and Islam in today's crisis. Salt agrees that Islam has been taken over by conservatives and extremists, but precises that this is a political ideological take-over that has little to do with Islamic religious base.
By CNu at November 17, 2015 0 comments
Labels: History's Mysteries , Living Memory , predatory militarism , The Great Game , The Hardline , truth
Monday, November 16, 2015
shameless false flag in paris fleeing forward into ___________?
Possibly believable evidence will be presented that the Paris attacks were real terrorist attacks. However, what do refugees have to gain from making themselves unwelcome with acts of violence committed against the host country, and where do refugees in France obtain automatic weapons and bombs? Indeed, where would the French themselves obtain them?
The millions of refugees from Washington’s wars who are overrunning Europe are bringing to the forefront of European politics the anti-EU nationalists parties, such as Pegida in Germany, Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party, and Marine Le Pen’s National Front Party in France. These anti-EU political parties are also anti-immigrant political parties.
The latest French poll shows that, as a result of the refugees from Washington’s wars, Marine Le Pen has come out on top of the candidates for the next French presidential election.
By supporting for 14 years Washington’s neoconservative wars for US hegemony over the Middle East, establishment European governments eroded their electoral support. European peoples want to be French, German, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, British. They do not want their countries to be a diverse Tower of Babel created by millions of refugees from Washington’s wars.
To remain a nationality unto themselves is what Pegida, Farage, and Le Pen offer the voters.
Realizing its vulnerability, it is entirely possible that the French Establishment made a decision to protect its hold on power with a false flag attack that would allow the Establishment to close France’s borders and, thereby, deprive Marine Le Pen of her main political issue.
They’re strategically timed, most often for what’s planned to follow. Post-9/11 horrors are well documented. America declared still ongoing war on humanity.
The 9/11 incident provided a treasure trove of giveaways showing what happened was other than the official narrative. The most obvious was how could a handful of terrorists outwit America’s 16 intelligence agencies, including sophisticated NSA eavesdropping on anyone or anything suspicious back then?
No evidence implicated Al Qaeda. Nothing to this day – yet claims persist. Without verifiable hard facts, they’re specious.
The official 9/11 story was beginning-to-end contradictions and Big Lies – still supported by media scoundrels as gospel despite volumes of evidence proving otherwise.
By CNu at November 16, 2015 0 comments
Labels: agenda , deceiver , Deep State , elite , establishment
political corruption conspicuously obvious to the casual observer...,
In the hours before the CBS debate, Sanders' campaign team fought with CBS not to make foreign policy and national security the entire focus of the debate. And they succeeded, getting the network to dedicate only the first half hour to those topics.When the debate began, the first prompt was for each candidate to give a one-minute opening statement specifically on the attack in Paris. Sanders' response to this was pretty simple: he dedicated two sentences to the attack and spent the rest of it talking about American economic inequality. He made no transition and no attempt to link the two.
By CNu at November 16, 2015 0 comments
Labels: big don special , Tard Bidnis , What IT DO Shawty...
like her master the vampire squid itself, granny goodness is incapable of shame...,
CLINTON: Oh, wait a minute, senator. You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors -- most of them small. And I'm very proud that for the first time a majority of my donors are women, 60 percent.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: So I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.
By CNu at November 16, 2015 0 comments
Labels: banksterism , global system of 1% supremacy , Granny Goodness , shameless
david brooks $120,000 vacation...,
By CNu at November 16, 2015 0 comments
Labels: global system of 1% supremacy , hegemony , shameless
Sunday, November 15, 2015
highest paid public employee orchestrated university’s entry into the wealthiest and most powerful football conference
He also is the highest-paid public employee in Missouri; a shrewd negotiator, he receives an annual salary of more than $4 million. He helped orchestrate the university’s entry in 2012 into the Southeastern Conference, the most powerful and wealthiest college football conference in the nation.
Refusing to stand by his players would have been unwise.
“He didn’t have any choice,” said Lorenzo Williams, a former defensive tackle and team captain and a great admirer of Mr. Pinkel’s. “If black players aren’t comfortable here, he’s basically standing against them. How many black recruits is he going to attract?”
Mr. Pinkel’s seeming endorsement of the protests played less well with some alumni and supporters. Had the Tigers canceled their game Saturday night in Kansas City, Mo., the university would have had to pay $1 million to its opponent, Brigham Young.
By early evening Friday, a couple of hours after the coach announced his coming resignation, Vice Chancellor Thomas S. Hiles sent out an email in hopes of mollifying alumni.
“We have heard from many of you, across the spectrum of viewpoints,” he said. “We want to acknowledge your concerns, expressions of support and anger.”
There is the never incidental question of the team’s won-loss record. After a string of successful seasons, and 10 bowl games in 14 years, the Tigers were 4-5 entering the Brigham Young game.
Mr. Pinkel did not help himself last week by conveying a visible discomfort with his king-toppling of the university president. On a sports-radio show last week, he backpedaled.
Why did he send out the tweet on Sunday expressing solidarity not just with the players but with the protesting student group?
That, he replied, was a mistake.
“I have somebody who tweets for me a lot to get info out, and that person should not have put that hashtag on,” he said.
What’s your view on the resignation of the president and chancellor?
“That is something the university systems did,” he said. “That was secondary to me supporting my players.”
Did these administrators become collateral damage?
“You can describe it any way you want to do it.”
By CNu at November 15, 2015 0 comments
Labels: culture of competence , Strict Father , What IT DO Shawty...
Saturday, November 14, 2015
capitalist power and the control of social creativity
By CNu at November 14, 2015 0 comments
Labels: Peak Capitalism , wake-up!
first casualty of the mizzou mandingo rebellion?
By CNu at November 14, 2015 0 comments
Labels: doesn't end well , institutional deconstruction , sum'n not right
Friday, November 13, 2015
not even maoists retain the testicular fortitude to openly profess maoism...,
By CNu at November 13, 2015 0 comments
Labels: essence , ethology , killer-ape , musical chairs , not gonna happen...
not even gonna lie, watching the cathedral self-destruct this week has been SCHA-WEET!!!
By CNu at November 13, 2015 0 comments
Labels: Cathedral , FAIL , niggaHertz
Thursday, November 12, 2015
thank gawd they had a freshly mothballed archon close to hand to simmer the pot down...,
By CNu at November 12, 2015 0 comments
Labels: A Kneegrow Said It
the anti-mandingo: big enough to play football, but too sweet to bust a grape....,
By CNu at November 12, 2015 0 comments
Labels: Cathedral , feminization , niggaHertz , not a good look
discussion? no! I just want to talk about my pain and you better shutup and listen, or else!
With Kansas City to the west and St. Louis to the east, the state has two urban hubs that account for most of the state’s black residents, about 12 percent of the population. The rest of the state is overwhelmingly rural and white. Both blacks and whites are underrepresented at the university compared with the demographics of the entire state. Eight percent of students are black, while nearly 80 percent are white, compared with about 84 percent of the state.
Educational outcomes at the university have also not always been equal. While about 83 percent of black freshmen return for their sophomore year, nearly 88 percent of whites and 94 percent of Asians do. And black students have the lowest graduation rate of all races, less than 55 percent, compared with 71 percent for whites.
“There’s a culture shock, each group of new students who come in,” said Scott N. Brooks, an associate professor in black studies and sociology at Missouri.
Before coming to the University of Missouri, Ms. Gray said she did not usually view people through a racial lens because her high school was diverse. But her freshman year changed that.
It is not just black students who complain of cultural isolation.
“I can absolutely see why some students would feel uncomfortable on campus, because as a student coming from a small rural community, I’ve felt like I didn’t belong on this campus,” said Lauren Reagan, a white senior from Jonesburg, a town of about 745 people in eastern Missouri. “It can be hard to find people with the same values and beliefs that understand you.”
Ian Paris, the head of the university’s chapter of Young Americans for Liberty, a libertarian group, described a confrontation recently when he was signing up students to support Senator Rand Paul in a campus plaza. A group of activists protesting the administration’s handling of racial tensions came onto the plaza shouting their message through a megaphone.
When Mr. Paris complained to a friend about the activists, one of the demonstrators overheard him and told them to “take their white privilege and leave,” Mr. Paris said. A loud argument ensued.
By CNu at November 12, 2015 0 comments
Labels: feminization , niggaHertz
oh me, oh my.., how did the real concerned student 1950 ever make it?!?!?!?
By CNu at November 12, 2015 0 comments
Labels: A Kneegrow Said It , Living Memory , The Hardline
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
meanwhile, on the non-BLM, no-mandingo side of the occupy 2.0 protest movement...,
By CNu at November 11, 2015 0 comments
Labels: 99% , austerity , Collapse Casualties , doesn't end well
mandingos
While there’s no historical record of black gladiator fights in the U.S., this hasn’t stopped the sport from appearing again and again in popular culture. The 1975 blaxploitation film Mandingo, which Tarantino has cited as “one of [his] favorite movies,” is about a slave named Mede who is trained by his owner to fight to the death in bare-knuckle boxing against other slaves. That film was inspired by the book of the same name by dog-breeder-turned-novelist Kyle Onstott. (The term Mandingoitself comes from the name of a cultural and ethnic group in West Africa, who speak the Manding languages.) There is at least one other cinematic example of the fighting, in Mandingo’s sequel, Drum.
Slaves were sometimes sent to fight for their owners; it just wasn’t to the death. Tom Molineaux was a Virginia slave who won his freedom—and, for his owner, $100,000—after winning a match against another slave. He went on to become the first black American to compete for the heavyweight championship when he fought the white champion Tom Cribb in England in 1810. (He lost.) According to Frederick Douglass, wrestling and boxing for sport, like festivals around holidays, were “among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.”
By CNu at November 11, 2015 0 comments
Labels: American Original , History's Mysteries , political theatre
Trash Israeli Professional Boxer Spitting On And Beating On Kids At UCLA...,
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