US Military Leaders Give Details of New Africa Command

[Flabbergasted]

(K&R this. It's a lot bigger then on the surface)

By Marissa Melton
Washington
09 February 2007


The U.S. military released more details Friday about its plans for a new Africa Command center or AFRICOM. The center is going to coordinate U.S. military activities for almost all of the African continent. VOA's Marissa Melton reports.

Rear Admiral Robert Moeller told members of the foreign press in Washington Friday that the new African command center will pull together responsibilities for Africa that had formerly been divided up among U.S. Central Command in the U.S. state of Florida, U.S. Pacific Command in the Pacific island state of Hawaii, and U.S. European Command, located in Germany.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-02-09-voa77.cfm


The rest are related...




Mediawatch



US moves in Africa

By Simon Tisdall

This week's US decision to create a new Pentagon command covering Africa, known as Africom, has a certain unlovely military logic. Like Roman emperors of old, Washington's Caesars arbitrarily divide much of the world into Middle Eastern, European and Pacific domains. Now it is Africa's turn.

Practical more than imperial considerations dictated the White House move. With Gulf of Guinea countries including Nigeria and Angola projected to provide a quarter of US oil imports within a decade, with Islamist terrorism worries in the Sahel and Horn of Africa, and with China prowling for resources and markets, the US plainly feels a second wind of change is blowing, necessitating increased leverage.

Africom's advent also follows a pattern of extraordinary military expansion under President George Bush, not all of which is explained by 9/11. The American military-industrial complex that so troubled Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 has morphed into a boom business with truly global reach. It makes China's business-oriented People's Liberation Army look like a corner shop.

The Pentagon's total budget requests for the fiscal year ending September 2008 have swollen to $716.5bn (£366bn). That is more than double Clinton-era spending. In contrast, Russia will spend $31bn on defence this year and China, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an estimated $87bn. With Mr Bush as head of the police academy, the US is becoming, de facto, the self-appointed global policeman it said it never wanted to be.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=42209

Signs that new Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will appoint a U.S. citizen to run the powerful UN department of political affairs are being greeted by mounting concern among diplomats, officials and analysts.

Already a proposal by Ban to strengthen political affairs for the U.S. by adding the department of disarmament was defeated by the Non-Aligned Movement, fearful of Washington garnering too much power at the world body.



With anti-Americanism surging across the globe in the wake of U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, disquiet is spreading at the UN that an American at the helm of political affairs would create an impression that Washington rather than the UN was running UN policy.

The U.S. in charge of the political department could undermine the UN's image of neutrality, the bedrock of its political effectiveness, especially in a region like the Middle East where Washington's neutrality is questioned, analysts and diplomats say.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-lauria/us-seeks-even-more-powe_b_39413.html

also see

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=3104002&mesg_id=3104002

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=3103845&mesg_id=3103845

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=3103874&mesg_id=3103874

[BayCityProgressive]

1. Nigeria

has socialist militants that are threatening to overthrow the government and take over the oil fields. They aren't about to let another Venezuela happen.

[Flabbergasted]

2. No kidding. Just asking...Link?

[stillcool]

4. here's some ..

"We're Taking Down Seven Countries in Five Years":
A Regime Change Checklist
by Gary Leupp
January 17, 2007
Last October in a speech at the University of Alabama Gen. Wesley Clark again recounted his conversation with a general at the Pentagon in November 2001.

I said, "Are we still going to invade Iraq?" "Yes, Sir," he said, "but it's worse than that." I said, "How do you mean?" He held up this piece of paper. He said, "I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It's a, it's a five-year plan. We're going to take down seven countries in five years. We're going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we're going to come back and get Iran in five years. I said, "Is that classified, that paper?" He said, "Yes Sir." I said, "Well, don't show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about it."

This was of course just two months after 9-11, when Americans' attention was focused on al-Qaeda and preparations for an invasion of Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden lived as a guest of the Taliban.

Five years and two months have passed. The plan to "take down" all those countries is behind schedule, and has even been modified somewhat. Libya has left the target list due to Muammar Qaddafi's agreement to dismantle his WMD programs in 2003. (Bush has tried to take credit for that, although patient British diplomacy deserves more credit. During Anglo-American negotiations with Libya the British were so disgusted with John Bolton's behavior they asked that Bush's envoy be removed from the talks.) But the U.S. did indeed take down Iraq, and all the other countries listed remain in the crosshairs.http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan07/Leupp17.htm

Blood Oil
Could a bunch of Nigerian militants in speedboats bring about a U.S. recession? Blowing up facilities and taking hostages, they are wreaking havoc on the oil production of America's fifth-largest supplier. Deep in the Niger-delta swamps, the author meets the nightmarish result of four decades of corruption.
by Sebastian Junger February 2007

On June 23, 2005, a group of high-ranking government officials were convened in a ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., to respond to a simulated crisis in the global oil supply. The event was called "Oil ShockWave," and it was organized by public-interest groups concerned with energy policy and national security. Among those seated beneath a wall-size map of the world were two former heads of the C.I.A., the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The scenario they were handed was this:

Civil conflict breaks out in northern Nigeria—an area rife with Islamic militancy and religious violence—and the Nigerian Army is forced to intervene. The situation deteriorates, and international oil companies decide to end operations in the oil-rich Niger River delta, resulting in a loss of 800,000 barrels a day on the world market. Since Nigerian oil is classified as "light sweet crude," meaning that it requires very little refining, this makes it a particularly painful loss to the American market. Concurrently, in this scenario, a cold wave sweeping across the Northern Hemisphere boosts global demand by 800,000 barrels a day. Because global oil production is already functioning at close to maximum capacity (around 84 million barrels a day), small disruptions in supply shudder through the system very quickly. A net deficit of almost two million barrels a day is a significant shock to the market, and the price of a barrel of oil rapidly goes to more than $80.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Nigerians are asked about these problems, few can offer more than anger and despair—or the promise of violence. A typical Nigerian reaction came from President Owei, the Ijaw priest who tried to help with our first trip into the creeks. Owei is the head of an organization that promotes Ijaw rights and protects their communities in the delta. At first, my questions just provoked a torrent of indignation. "The people of the Niger delta don't need theory—they need practical things," he declared. "We need to be made to feel like human beings. There is an economic blockade of the Niger delta—they don't want money to flow here. With the wealth that Nigeria has, the whole nation should have roads and free education."

Owei lives in the great, seething slum of Bundu-Waterside, on the outskirts of Port Harcourt. Bundu-Waterside is a community built literally atop garbage and mud. High tide and raw sewage continually threaten to rise up over the thresholds of its thousands of plank-and-corrugated-iron shacks. People are packed into Bundu-Waterside with such desperate ingenuity that almost every human activity—cooking, fighting, eating, sleeping, defecating—seems to be observable from almost anywhere at any given moment. When I met with Owei, he and several of his assistants were seated on a wooden bench beneath a canopy of corrugated iron that serves as an open-air community center. Young boys swam in the tidal muck while, a few feet away, other young boys squatted to relieve themselves. Every 20 minutes or so, an oil-company helicopter thumped past on its way to one of the offshore rigs.

"The Niger-delta people are the new world power," Owei informed me solemnly. "I don't have a bulletproof vest, but I can drink acid. Can you drink acid? I can drink acid. We are a world power. We are waiting. We want to live in peace because God is peaceful, but the rest of the world is building armaments while they wait for Jesus. I don't know."
http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/nvs/blood-oil-8.html

http://www.zmag.org/racewatch/africawatch.cfm

[IndianaGreen]

3. Remember what happened to Rome?

It is happening to us!

Two lost wars in 6-years is not enough for this group of happy warriors, as long as they are not the ones being send to battle.

[teryang]

5. Here is a detailed summary of US colonization moves in Africa

Very worthwhile read:


http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20SN20070207&articleId=4717

Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?
The New Old "Humanitarian" Warfare in Africa


by Keith Harmon Snow

Excepts don't do this phenomenal piece justice.

It's long. there is a wealth of revealing information concerning the interlocking directorates of so called "foreign aid" groups, NGOs and their corporate, government, and military connections, their geopolitical schemes and objectives, and the connection to war crimes and ethnic cleansing and genocide in Africa.

This piece is a great introduction to the US operations to control African resources, agriculture, and populations.

The tactics, the melding of so called humanitarian foreign aid with US economic and military objectives, the state agencies, US corporations, UN agencies, NGOs, covert operations, fronts, military aid, US mercenaries, proxy armies from Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, ...genocidal invasions, illegal bombings, incessant hypocritical propaganda, etc., all to obtain control of Africa's natural resources and governments for US corporations.

A litany of death in pursuit of lucre and power. Colonial imperialism in full bloom but cleverly disguised for the benefit of gullible Americans.

[ContraBass Black]

6. Because it wasn't enough when they sabotaged civil engineering projects

Financed by the Russians and Chinese and overthrew governments in the 70's and 80's.