Pentagon disputes coverage of Africa presence
A U.S. Air Force Lockheed C130J takes off during the Africa Aeronautics and Defense Airshow Sept. 24, 2010, at Ysterplaat Air Force Base in Cape Town, South Africa. / AFP/Getty Images
(TomDispatch) On July 12th, TomDispatch posted the latest piece in Nick Turse's "changing face of empire" series: "Obama's Scramble for Africa." It laid out in some detail the way in which the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has, in recent years, spread its influence across that continent, establishing bases and outposts, sending in special operations forces and drones, funding proxy forces on the continent, and so on. As last week ended, TomDispatch received a "letter to the editor" from Colonel Tom Davis, director of the U.S. Africa Command Office of Public Affairs, disputing in some detail a number of Turse's points. (Colonel Davis also sent a copy of the letter to the Nation Institute, which supports TomDispatch.)
As TomDispatch readers know, it's quite possible to write this editor. I read everything that arrives at TomDispatch with appreciation and answer when I can. There is, however, no "comments" section, nor a place for letters to the editor at TD. In this case, however, I found the obvious time and effort AFRICOM took to respond to the Turse piece of interest and so, today, we're posting Colonel Davis's full letter, and a response from Turse. After all, whatever highlights the changing U.S. military position in Africa, about which Americans know remarkably little, seems well worth the time and space.
Two things remain to be said: first, beneath the detailed critique and response that follows lies an obvious difference of opinion that seems worth highlighting. Like a number of other TomDispatch writers, I believe that the U.S. military should not be responsible for Planet Earth; that it is not in our interest for the Pentagon to be dividing the globe, like a giant pie, into six "slices" covering almost every inch of the planet: U.S. European Command, or EUCOM (for Europe and Russia), the U.S. Pacific Command, or PACOM (Asia), CENTCOM (the Greater Middle East and a touch of North Africa), NORTHCOM (North America), SOUTHCOM (South America and most of the Caribbean), and AFRICOM (almost all of Africa). Nor should the U.S. military be garrisoning the planet in the historically unprecedented way it does. This imperial role of ours has little or nothing to do with "defense" and creates many possibilities for future blowback. Instead, it seems far more sensible to begin to shut down or cut back radically on our vast array of global bases and outposts (rather than, as in Africa, expanding them), and downsize our global mission in a major way. AFRICOM would obviously disagree, as would the Pentagon and the Obama administration, and the results of that basic disagreement about the role of the U.S. military in the world can be seen in what follows.
Second, one of Colonel Davis's criticisms below is of a passage in my introduction to Turse's piece. "[O]nly the other day," I wrote, "it was revealed that three U.S. Army commandos in a Toyota Land Cruiser had skidded off a bridge in Mali in April. They died, all three, along with three women identified as 'Moroccan prostitutes.'" The Colonel questions the accuracy of that word "revealed," since his command had issued a brief press release on April 20th stating: "Three U.S. military members and three civilians died in a vehicle accident in Bamako, Mali today."
In the Washington Post piece I linked to, however, reporter Craig Whitlock identified the three "military members" as "U.S. Army Commandos" and those three "civilians" as "Moroccan prostitutes" and raised the following questions: "What the men were doing in the impoverished country of Mali, and why they were still there a month after the United States suspended military relations with its government, is at the crux of a mystery that officials have not fully explained even 10 weeks later." It seems to me that, if you compare the press release to the later article, "revealed" is not too strong a word. With that, let me turn the proceedings over to Colonel Davis and Nick Turse.
FROM: Colonel Tom Davis
Director, U.S. Africa Command Office of Public Affairs
Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, Germany
TO: Mr. Tom Engelhardt, Editor
Dear Mr. Engelhardt,
We read the recent article "Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon's 'New Spice Route' in Africa" with great interest. It is clear the author, Nick Turse, conducted a great deal of research, including reaching out to us, and we welcomed the opportunity to highlight U.S. Africa Command's mission and activities. However, there were several inaccuracies and misrepresentations that we would like to address. My hope is that you, through your publication, will correct the record. As a thought provoking, responsible, and professional journalist, I know that you would want to ensure all reporting was based on facts, not innuendos or misperceptions.
Below are the items U.S. Africa Command would like to address:
"They call it the New Spice Route": This was a term used informally by a few of our logistics specialists to describe the intra-theater transportation system, primarily land shipments from Djibouti, which provides logistical support for U.S. military activities in Africa. The network is officially called the AFRICOM Surface Distribution Network. However, to call it a "superpower's superhighway" is very misleading. The U.S. military cargo transported along these different transportation nodes represents only a mere fraction -- i.e., a handful of trucks per week intermixed among the thousands of others -- of the total amount of fuel, food, and equipment transported along these routes each day.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of "The United States of Fear" as well as "The End of Victory Culture," runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050." This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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Bottom line, there is absolutely no threat in Africa that meets the "clear and present danger" threshold for American military to be there at all, let alone establishing a long-term military presence there.
Anyone thinking that the US is there only for the short term is a pure sucker of the lowest order.
There is only one reason that US soldiers are in Africa, to kill people considered a hindrance to the US and multinational corporations seeking to steal the natural resources, without fair compensation to the people living where such resources are located.
I would chalk it up to simple greed if some of the posters defending the CIA's occupation of Africa actually own stock in, work for, or otherwise receive money from the multinationals who are using the CIA as a free mercenary service, on the taxpayer dime.
But what I cannot understand are the suckers who will not only receive absolutely nothing from this hostile and illegal meddling in the affairs of other sovereign states, but who will actually have their taxpayer dollars wasted in this debacle.
I find the Kony situation, for example, hypocritical to the point of hilarity.
We have baggers, who have consistently demonstrated their hatred for the "black" people in their own country, yet trying to justify the elimination of someone they say is doing great harm to the people they hate anyway.
They should be cheering Kony, for allegedly doing, in part, that which most baggers would like to do to all "black" people.
As for the president, no matter who that is, or will be, the CIA can and would assassinate that president if they deemed him to be a threat to their fiefdom, they are more powerful and more deadly than the president.
Had JFK survived, he probably would have agreed with that assertion.