CIA interfering in Somalia's secret war and mucking it up again!

Hi Folks,

I came across this article in the Chigago Tribune Which I find extremely disturbing but not all that surprising.

I know Somalia has been having problems for years, but I previously failed to see the U.S involvement in inflaming the situation.

It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and—according to Isse and civil rights activists—secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids' success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)

It seems the good old CIA is interfering in another country and completely messing it up yet again. I thought the CIA was charged with protecting the US not grooming another generation of anti-US extremists!

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."

And it seems Guantanomo Bay and rendition flights aren't the only place the US uses to conveniently ignore human rights

"I captured Isse for the Americans," said Mohamed Afrah Qanyare. "The Americans contracted us to do certain things, and we did them. Isse put up resistance so we shot him. But he survived."

A scar-faced warlord in a business suit, Qanyare is a member of Somalia's weak transitional government. Today he divides his days between lawless Mogadishu and luxury hotels in Nairobi.

But four years ago, his militia helped form the kernel of a CIA-created mercenary force called the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in Somalia. The unit cobbled together some of the world's most violent, wily and unreliable clan militias—including gangs that had attacked U.S. forces in the early 1990s—to confront a rising tide of Islamic militancy in Somalia's anarchic capital.

The Somalis on the CIA payroll engaged in a grim tit-for-tat exchange of kidnappings and assassinations with extremists. And Isse was one of their catches.

He was wounded in a CIA-ordered raid on his Mogadishu safe house in June 2004, according to Qanyare and Matt Bryden, one of the world's leading scholars of the Somali insurgency. They say Isse was then loaded aboard a U.S. military helicopter summoned by satellite phone and was flown, bleeding, to an offshore U.S. vessel.

I predict Somalia will be the next Afghan, but far worse. At least Afghanistan is under the watch of the world, unlike Somalia where the US government can seemingly do as it pleases and unfortunately the bumbling bunch of fools at the CIA never seem to learn from their mistakes. If Obama already knows something about this I'm sure his nights are a little more restless at the thought of inheriting this mess from the previous incompetent government!

Tell people about Somalia folks, for their sakes and ours!

Cheers

Robbie

Hi Mods...

I'm surprised there's not even a single comment on this, have I put it in the wrong place?? If so where and how can it be moved?

Cheers

Robbie

Nothing new here mate, well not to me, the us has been involved here fora a long long time.

The US has been using private military contractors to build bases throughout the region right down to the Congo, and was intimately involved in the Rawanda massacre (which is now being aimed at the french and german secret services).

The US has been using both Rawanda and Uganda as fronts in surpressing transgressions across their borders as a means to acquire HUGE swaths of resources. Primarily coltan.

It is a bitter pill to swallow however america is just as guilty as europe in the rape of africa - from siera leonne to nigeria.

cheers.