Bayraktar

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~ Jihad Is Not Terrorism. Terrorism Is Not Jihad ~

In the polarized world that we currently live in, where sensational information travels faster than a tsunami, what “Jihad” really is has become lost in the storm since the Sept. 11 attacks.  The term Jihad is often defined as a “fight,” or a “holy war,” but it actually means a struggle, not just against others but against desire, ambition and human aspirations to follow what is preached by Islam. The Quran mentions “Jihad Fi Sabilillah,” or the“struggle towards the path of Allah.” As Abul Ala Maududi, the political philosopher and scholar, explains the term in his book Jihad in Islam, which was first published in Urdu in the 1960s, “Jihad should be under guidance of the Quran and Prophet’s Hadith, otherwise it is not Jihad but violence.” [The Hadith, for those who don’t know, is a written record of the Prophet’s teachings]. Maududi explains: “Jihad in Islam is not merely a ‘struggle’. It is instead a ‘struggle’ for the ‘Cause of Allah’. The ‘Cause of Allah’ is essential for the term of ‘Jihad’ in Islam. After all, the Holy Quran clearly says about Cain’s killing of Abel:

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the last prophet according to Islamic belief, also said “A believer continues to guard his Faith (and thus hopes for Allah’s Mercy) so long as he does not shed blood unjustly.” (Source: Bukhari/ Riyad-us-Saliheen) Terrorism, in fact, is completely the opposite of Jihad. Any act of violence that instills fear in the minds of innocent people is an act of terror, particularly because this fear is not a fear against anything wrong, like corruption or theft. Instead, it is a fear of the powerful who wish to become more so. Those who terrorize have forgotten that “Islam” means “peace,” and that the Holy Quran teaches tolerance towards other faiths and guides:

Yes, Islam does provide guidelines for war. But in those guidelines, the killing of women, children, the old and the weak is expressly forbidden. Even destruction of a standing crop or a tree is not allowed, as Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first Caliph, told Islamic armies:

The Prophet also said that no non-combatant can be killed by a Muslim army in any circumstances: “Do not kill any old person, any child or any woman”(Source: The collections of Abu Dawood, prominent Islamic scholar, and Maulana Wahiduzzaman, translated by the author). By Abu Zafar

~ It's Not The Koran, It's Us ~

The Corporate Media Chorus Willfully Ignores That U.S. Actions Fuels Jihad, Not Islam For a brief time after the 9/11 terror attacks, Americans could be heard asking the reasonable question: Why do these men from Middle Eastern countries (back then, mostly Saudis) hate us so much that they would give their own lives to cause us pain? Within a few weeks, the official explanation became: They hate us for our freedom, end of story.

When you follow the money, it is easy to understand why the government avoided any honest discussion of the causes of terrorism. By one estimate, U.S. taxpayers have squandered $10 trillion over four decades to protect the flow of oil on behalf of multinational corporations. The result is an empire of U.S. military bases which have garrisoned the Greater Middle East. In the Persian Gulf alone, the United States has bases in every country save Iran. 

The existence of these bases helps generate radicalism, anti-American sentiment and terrorist attacks. The drone attacks have incited even more hatred for us, which should come as little surprise. The U.S. uses drones to incinerate suspected militants (and anyone else in the vicinity) on secret evidence, but only if they are living in Muslim nations like Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq or Somalia. We don’t fly killer drones over dangerous neighborhoods in Detroit or Chicago, or in Iguala, Mexico, where 43 students were recently massacred by gang members aided by corrupt police.

There is of course no justification for a terror attack on innocents. But if our leaders truly cared as much about protecting Americans from terror as they do about protecting corporate profits, they would have an honest discussion of what’s prompting the violence.

Osama bin Laden cited the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi holy land as a motivation for the 9/11 attacks. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said the Boston marathon bombing was “retribution for the U.S. crimes against Muslims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.” Faisal Shahzad said his attempted bombing in Times Square was “retaliation for U.S. drone attacks” in Pakistan, which he had personally witnessed. The underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said that his attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner bound for Detroit was revenge for U.S. attacks on Muslims. Last month in Chicago, a teenager was arrested attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS. He explained in a letter to his parents that he was upset that he was obligated to pay taxes that would be used to kill his Muslim brothers and sisters overseas. But when the Chicago Tribune told the story, it left this fact out, instead reporting that the teen had complained about the immorality of Western society.

And long before the Senate released its damning torture report, Al Qaeda and ISIS were using accounts of U.S. torture as a recruiting tool.

The truth about what is radicalizing Muslims to hate the West is rarely discussed in the mainstream press or in political debate. Instead, we are told by corporate-funded terror experts like the Brookings Institution’s William McCants and the Aspen Institute’s Frances Townsend that Islam is the origin of radical ideology. Anti-American jihadis supposedly learn to hate by reading the Koran and going to mosques. So one-sided is the discussion that even Bill Maher, a prominent liberal, has publicly described Islam as the “one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them.”

With the launch of our latest multi-billion-dollar war in Iraq and Syria,the United States has now bombed at least 13 countries in the Greater Middle East since 1980. 

This time, the terror experts haven’t bothered to pretend that we have a coherent plan or any chance of improving the dire situation in those countries. Still, they agree that ISIS militants’ anti-U.S. hatred originates with their Islamic faith and is unrelated to any U.S. actions.

As the novelist Upton Sinclair once observed: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Leonard C. Goodman

Image Via: VeteransToday.com

~ Ending Lives vs Saving Lives ~ Come on now, which one truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

From Pol Pot To ISIS and Our War Criminals

In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a"massive" bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything that moves".  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again.  A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon's and Kissinger's B52 bombers had gone to work as part of"Operation Menu", the west's ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors 

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war anddescribed the bombing as the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

  ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people - in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of Jihadism. Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot's "Jihadists" - seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable.  A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently, 

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and Londonwho, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity.  Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies.

  It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi population -ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein.  It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked" - from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever.  Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. "The children's vaccines", he said, "were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq - much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office - blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society's infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. 

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq.  His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. 

A study by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade,there were 500,000 "excess" deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five.  An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, "Is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it."

  In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection committee, 

When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition.  "I feel ashamed," he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. "We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we'd freeze them out."

On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the horror of Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC's Newsnight as an"apologist for Saddam". In 2003, Hain backed Blair's invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a "fringe issue".

Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support" for those "facing genocide"in Iraq and Syria. This will further "the imperative of a political solution".  Obama has the same in mind as he lifts what he calls the"restrictions" on US bombing and drone attacks. 

The day Hain's article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. 

Why not now in Iraq and Syria.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has crossed the Atlantic.  Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military, wants "boots on the ground" now.  There is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their "coalition of the willing" - notably Australia's aggressively weird Tony Abbott - as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. 

General Wesley Clark: Wars Were Planned - Attack and destroy 7 Muslim Countries In 5 Years

Last year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that "two years before the Arab spring", he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. 

A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this imperial maze.

  Together with a truce, 

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq.  With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger's latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a"key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century".  Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft".  

By John Pilger Note: I included the 2 videos, which were not part of John Pilger's article. 

~ There Is No War On Terror. There Is A War OF Terror ~

Statistically, the majority of terrorism is our terrorism, it is state terrorism. The greatest victims of terrorism are Muslims. The whole understanding of terrorism is upside down. Now there is as opposed to state terrorism,  privatized terrorism, it's very tiny. It's run by organizations like Al-Qaeda. There is a study from the University of Chicago a study that found of this privatized terrorism in the last 30-odd years, something like 20,000 people had died,  a very tiny figure compared to the millions who have died as result of state terrorism. The attacks on 9/11 were appropriated by a clique in the U.S. establishment in order to further its aims around the world. There is no war on terror. There is a war of terror. [John Pilger]

CIA Secret Wars John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13 years in the agency. John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned.

6 Million People Killed In CIA Wars Against 3rd World Countries

This is a 6:26 minute teaser

John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13 years in the agency. John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA’s secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned.

The clip is showing parts of a lecture that Stockwell gave in 1987, explaining the CIA’s secret war. A war he describes as ‘The Third World War’. Not because it is the thermonuclear exchange that is commonly meant, but because it was mainly waged against people in the third world countries. In Stockwell’s own words:

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has mounted approximately 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations of this nature, every one of them illegal and many of them “bloody and gory beyond comprehension”.

~ US Navy Autonomous Swarm Boats ~ A fleet of U.S. Navy boats approached an enemy vessel like sharks circling their prey.  Iin this case, part of an exercise conducted by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), the boats operated without any direct human control: they acted as a robot boat swarm. The tests on Virginia’s James River this past summer represented the first large-scale military demonstration of a swarm of autonomous boats designed to overwhelm enemies. This capability points to a future where the U.S. Navy and other militaries may deploy underwater, surface, and flying robotic vehicles to defend themselves or attack a hostile force. “What’s new about the James River test was having five USVs [unmanned surface vessels] operating together with no humans on board,” said Robert Brizzolara, an ONR program manager. In the test, five robot boats practiced an escort mission that involved protecting a main ship against possible attackers. To command the boats, the Navy use a system called the Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS). The system not only steered the autonomous boats but also coordinated its actions with other vehicles—a larger group of manned and remotely-controlled vessels.

~ The Black Knight Transformer Drone ~ The military's newest drone is a hybrid "heli-truck." Called the Black Knight Transformer, the drone is capable of carrying more than 4,000 pounds in payload, is able to travel over land on truck wheels, and comes with an attachable boat hull. RT's Lindsay France takes a look at the new vehicle.

~ Give It Up For The Troops ~

Comedian: Tom Simmons

~ US Military Secret Ops Revealed ~

U.S. Military Averages More Than A Mission A Day In Africa

 Saharan Express is a typical exercise that biennially pairs U.S. forces with members of the navies and coast guards of around a dozen mostly African countries. Operations include Juniper Micron and Echo Casemate, missions focused on aiding French and African interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic.  Other “security cooperation” activities include the State Partnership Program, which teams African military forces with U.S. National Guard units and the State Department-funded Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program through which U.S. military mentors and advisors provide equipment and instruction to African units.

Many military-to-military activities and advisory missions are carried out by soldiers from the Army’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, as part of a “regionally aligned forces” effort that farms out specially trained U.S. troops to geographic combatant commands, like AFRICOM.  Other training engagements are carried out by units from across the service branches, including Africa Partnership Station 13 whose U.S. naval personnel and Marines teach skills such as patrolling procedures and hand-to-hand combat techniques.  Meanwhile, members of the Air Force recently provided assistance to Nigerian troops in areas ranging from logistics to airlift support to public affairs.

Previously undisclosed U.S. Army Africa records reveal a 94% increase in all activities by Army personnel from 2011 to 2013, including a 174% surge in State Partnership missions (from 34 to 93) and a 436% jump in Advise-and-Assist activities including ACOTA missions (from 11 to 59).  Last year, according to a December 2013 document, these efforts involved everything from teaching Kenyan troops how to use Raven surveillance drones and helping Algerian forces field new mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, or MRAPS, to training Chadian and Guinean infantrymen and aiding France’s ongoing interventions in West and Central Africa.

AFRICOM spokesman Benjamin Benson refused to offer further details about these activities. “We do training with a lot of different countries in Africa,” he told me.  When I asked if he had a number on those “different countries,” he replied, “No, I don’t.”  He ignored repeated written requests for further information.  But a cache of records detailing deployments by members of just the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, from June through December 2013, highlights the sheer size, scope, and sweep of U.S. training missions.

June saw members of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team deployed to Niger, Uganda, Ghana, and on two separate missions to Malawi; in July, troops from the team traveled to Burundi, Mauritania, Niger, Uganda, and South Africa; August deployments included the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa, Niger, two missions in Malawi, and three to Uganda; September saw activities in Chad, Togo, Cameroon, Ghana, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Uganda, and Malawi; in October, members of the unit headed for Guinea and South Africa; November’s deployments consisted of Lesotho, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Guinea; while December’s schedule consisted of activities in South Sudan, Cameroon, and Uganda, according to the documents.  All told, the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division carried out 128 separate “activities” in 28 African countries during all of 2013.

The records obtained by TomDispatch also indicate that U.S. Army Africa took part in almost 80% of all AFRICOM activities on the continent in 2013, averaging more than one mission per day.  Preliminary projections for 2014 suggest a similar pace this year -- 418 activities were already planned out by mid-December 2013 -- including anticipated increases in the number of operations and train-and-equip missions.

Full-scale exercises, each involving U.S. Army troops and members of the militaries of multiple African countries, are also slated to rise from 14 to 20 in 2014, according to the documents.  So far, AFRICOM has released information on 11 named exercises scheduled for this year.  These include African Lion in Morocco, Eastern Accord in Uganda, Western Accord in Senegal, Central Accord in Cameroon, and Southern Accord in Malawi, all of which include a field training component and serve as a capstone event for the prior year’s military-to-military programs.  AFRICOM will also conduct at least three maritime security exercises, including Cutlass Express off the coast of East Africa, Obangame Express in the Gulf of Guinea, and Saharan Express in the waters off Senegal and the Cape Verde islands, as well as its annual Africa Endeavor exercise, which is designed to promote “information sharing” and facilitate standardized communications procedures within African militaries.

Additionally, U.S. and African Special Operations forces will carry out an exercise codenamed Silent Warrior 2014 in Germany and have already completed Flintlock 2014 (since 2005, an annual event).  As part of Flintlock 2014, more than 1,000 troops from 18 nations, including Burkina Faso, Canada, Chad, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Senegal, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and the host nation of Niger, carried out counterterror training on the outskirts of Niamey, the capital, as well as at small bases in Tahoua, Agadez, and Diffa.  “Although Flintlock is considered an exercise, it is really an extension of ongoing training, engagement, and operations that help prepare our close Africa partners in the fight against extremism and the enemies that threaten peace, stability, and regional security,” said Colonel Kenneth Sipperly, the commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahel, during the Flintlock opening ceremony.

Locations, Locations, Locations

A 2013 investigation by TomDispatch analyzing official documents and open source information revealed that the U.S. military was involved with at least 49 of the 54 nations on the African continent during 2012 and 2013 in activities that ranged from special ops raids to the training of proxy forces.  A map produced late last year by U.S. Army Africa bolsters the findings, indicating its troops had conducted or planned to conduct “activities” in all African “countries” during the 2013 fiscal year except for Western Sahara (a disputed territory in the Maghreb region of North Africa), Guinea Bissau, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe.  Egypt is considered outside of AFRICOM’s area of operations, but did see U.S. military activity in 2013, as didSomalia, which now also hosts a small team of U.S. advisors.  Other documents indicate Army troops actually deployed to São Tomé and Príncipe, a country that regularly conducts activities with the U.S. Navy.

AFRICOM is adamant that the U.S. military has only one base on the continent: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.  Official documents examined by TomDispatch, however, make reference to bases by other names: forward operating sites, or FOSes (long-term locations); cooperative security locations, or CSLs (through which small numbers of U.S. troops periodically rotate); and contingency locations, or CLs (which are used only during ongoing missions).

AFRICOM has repeatedly denied requests by TomDispatch for further information on the numbers or locations of FOSes, CSLs, and CLs, but official documents produced in 2012 make reference to seven cooperative security locations, including one in Entebbe, Uganda, a location from which U.S. contractors have flown secret surveillance missions, according to an investigation by the Washington Post.  Information released earlier this year by the military also makes references to at least nine “forward operating locations,” or FOLs in Africa.

We Know Not What They Do

“What We Are Doing,” the title of a December 2013 military document obtained by TomDispatch, offers answers to questions that AFRICOM has long sought to avoid and provides information the command has worked to keep under wraps.  So much else, however, remains in the shadows.

From 2008 to 2013, the number of missions, exercises, operations, and other activities under AFRICOM’s purview has skyrocketed from 172 to 546, but little substantive information has been made public about what exactly most of these missions involved and just who U.S. forces have trained.  Since 2011, U.S. Army Africa alone has taken part in close to 1,000 “activities” across the continent, but independent reporters have only been on hand for a tiny fraction of them, so there are limits to what we can know about them beyond military talking points and official news releases for a relative few of these missions.  Only later did it become clear that the United States extensively mentored the military officer who overthrew Mali’s elected government in 2012, and that the U.S. trained a Congolese commando battalion implicated by the United Nations in mass rapes and otheratrocities during that same year, to cite two examples.

Since its inception, U.S. Africa Command has consistently downplayed its role on the continent.  Meanwhile, far from the press or the public, the officers running its secret operations have privately been calling Africa “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”

After years in the dark, we now know just how “extremely active” -- to use General David Rodriguez’s phrase -- AFRICOM has been and how rapidly the tempo of its missions has increased.  It remains to be seen just what else we don't know about U.S. Africa Command’s exponentially expanding operations.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.  A 2014 Izzy Award winner, his pieces have appeared in theNew York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, at the BBC and regularlyat TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Timesbestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (just out in paperback).

~ Map Of Active US Military Ops In Africa ~

Thirteen nations – stretching from the Horn of Africa to Mali’s western border – already house U.S. troops involved in “actual military operations.” Their presence is widely considered part of an expanding “shadow war against al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups” in the region – and the American people know very little about it.

Like many wars throughout history, this one is starting small. Troop numbers remain low, and intelligence operations are housed mainly in small airbases constructed in the past seven years. They emphasize spy missions: Many involve aircraft disguised as private planes, and are equipped with full-motion sensors that track infrared heat patterns, record video and pick up radio and cellphone signals. At least 12 such bases have been built since 2007.

Things have been quiet thus far, but the U.S. has a troubled history of conducting proxy wars throughout Africa. Since 9/11 alone, American covert operations have contributed to violence and destabilization in Mali, the Central African Republic and Libya, among others. Without the level of pomp and troop involvement as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces can now subtly influence Africa’s political landscape as they see fit, while evading public scrutiny.

This should worry us. Despite their operations’ relative tameness nowadays – if launching drone strikes and fighting proxy wars can be considered “tame” – U.S. military intervention on the continent has rarely been without negative consequences. It’s grown increasingly important to remember this when calling for intervention in African affairs: Whatever Band-Aid effect Americans may have now, the long-term impact will be felt almost exclusively by the people who actually live there.

Remaining vigilant as our troops amass in growing numbers might be one of the few ways to avoid creating more problems we’re ill equipped to fix. The beginning of that process is education.

To that end, here’s a brief rundown of recent U.S. military activities and outposts in Sub-Saharan Africa:

Burkina Faso. Base established 2007 in Ouagadougou, launches spy planes to police and patrol the Islamic Maghreb.

Congo. Troops stationed in Congo to aid the search for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

Central African Republic. Part of the broader search for the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Chad. 80 troops deployed May 21 to search for the kidnapped Nigerian girls.

Djibouti. Home to Camp Lemonnier, a full-blown military base that houses 4,000 troops and has a $1.4 billion expansion plan in the works. Also faces allegations of being used as a “black site” where terrorism suspects are tortured. A congressional investigation into the issue has yet to be declassified.

Ethiopia. Airport annex used to house Reaper drones flown over East Africa since 2011.

Kenya. Multiple bases, including Manda Bay (used to launch drone strikes) and Camp Simba, home to 60 military personnel since 2013.

Mali. Troops sent in 2013 to aid French and African forces in wartime, though the White House insisted they were not directly engaged in combat.

Niger. Drone base since 2013, also houses 100 military intelligence personnel.

Nigeria. Troops deployed to aid the search for the kidnapped girls earlier this month.

Somalia. Fewer than two dozen troops deployed for “training and advising” purposes in 2014.

South Sudan. Forty-five military personnel deployed to protect U.S. citizens and property in 2013.

Uganda. Launches surveillance aircraft out of a base in Entebbe, mostly used to search for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

(Zak Cheney-Rice)

~ Steampunk Fledermaus - SteamBat ~

“Chiroptera Steampunkus”

My new steampunk recon drone. Still working on the radio control…

By SteamWorker

~ Confessions Of A Former Drone Warrior ~

Imagine this: killing more than 1,500 enemies in war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield. That was Brandon Bryant’s life. He was a drone sensor operator responsible for tracking and killing militants halfway around the world from where the trigger was pulled, a ground control station in the U.S. states of Nevada and New Mexico.

Grainy black-and-white videos like this one give us a bird’s eye view of this new form of warfare. This attack, for instance, took place on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan back in 2008.

Bryant spent years helping to unleash such drones on militants and admits that he fears that one of his attacks may have, in fact, killed a child. Eventually he became so disillusioned with the career that he turned down a hefty bonus to continue.

He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. Now Bryant is opening up about it all, giving the world a window into the windowless bunker where he spent the past several years and revealing new details about America’s top secret and controversial drone program.