Africa: U.S. Military Steps Up ‘Sustained Engagement’ With Africa

July 15th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

U.S. Marines simulate a riot during a crowd control training exercise with soldiers from Burkina Faso

AllAfrica.com
13 July 2012

A stepped-up role for the American military, which has been the subject of widespread discussion and debate since the establishment of the U.S. Africa Command (Africom) in 2008, has been getting more U.S. press attention in recent weeks.

“The U.S. military is expanding its secret intelligence operations across Africa,” the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reported last month in the first of a series of ground-breaking articles. Whitlock described “a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts from the fringes of the Sahara to jungle terrain along the equator, according to documents and people involved in the project.” Some State Department officials have “reservations about the militarisation of U.S. foreign policy on the continent,” Craig reported, fearing the “potential for creating a popular backlash.”

“Keep your eye on Africa” journalist Nick Turse writes in an investigative examination called America’s Shadow Wars in Africa posted this week on the blog TomDispatch.com and cross-posted on Huffington Post. “The U.S. military is going to make news there for years to come.”

A 43-page report last year by the Congressional Research Service concluded that Africom’s rising profile and large budget could lead Congress to “exert its oversight authority to monitor the command’s operations to ensure that they support, rather than guide, U.S. political, economic, and social objectives for the continent.”

The Africom commander, Gen. Carter F. Ham, describes the command’s reach in much more modest terms. The United States is not planning “a large, permanent military presence in the continent of Africa,” he said in a lengthy presentation on June 26 to a two-week seminar for senior African security-sector experts. Instead, he said, there is and will continue to be a “small, temporary presence of U.S. military personnel” in various parts of Africa, as needed to meet contingencies.

Also last month in an AllAfrica interview with Reed Kramer, Ambassador Anthony Holmes, the deputy Africom commander for civilian-military activities, outlined what he describes as a ‘concerted’ American effort to strengthen the capacity of African militaries to handle their own security, using a ’by, with and through’ approach’.