04/22/15 – Nick Turse – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest today is Nick Terse.
He's the managing editor of TomDispatch.com.
That's Tom Englehart's great site that features so many great writers on so many important things.
We run virtually all of it under Tom Englehart's name at AntiWar.com.
He's got this neat little thing where he, or Nick, but usually Tom, they write kind of an introductory essay and then the essay.
And so you get kind of a twofer.
It's always really good stuff.
And Nick Terse, he's the managing editor there with Tom.
And he's the author of the book, The Complex, which is the military-industrial complex, except it has so many hyphens and things in it now that we had to shorten it to just The Complex.
And then also Kill Anything That Moves, which is all based on army documents of their investigations of war crimes during the war in Vietnam.
So real game changer, a very important book.
You heard Seymour Hersh talking very good about it on the show just a couple of weeks back.
And now he's got a brand new one, the one you didn't even know that you've been waiting for, Tomorrow's Battlefield, U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa.
And here are two very recent articles at TomDispatch.com about it, the U.S. military's battlefield of tomorrow and AFRICOM behaving badly, which is running today at AntiWar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Nick.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me on.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Very important work that you're doing.
It's the Africa pivot, I guess, the American invasion.
Can you kind of give us, first of all, a kind of overall picture for how many nations are on the continent of Africa anyway?
I know it scores and scores.
And then how many of those have American involvement and how might we conceive of that involvement in most cases or some?
Sure.
You'd think it's actually an easy question to answer, how many nations?
It's 53 or 54, depending on how you count.
There's Western Sahara, which isn't quite a nation, but it's a disputed territory.
So 53 or 54.
And I wanted to figure out exactly how many nations that U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM, which is the geographic command that's responsible for the U.S. military in the continent, how many they were involved with.
And so I asked AFRICOM and they wouldn't tell me.
And I had to set about piecing it together on my own.
This was, I guess, last year in an investigation for Tom Dispatch.
And I came up with a number that it's at least 49 of the 53 or 54 African countries.
So we're talking about a significant majority of the countries on the continent the U.S. military is involved in.
All right.
And now what kind of involvement?
What does that really mean?
Well, that's also something else that's difficult to find answers to.
If you ask AFRICOM what they're doing on the continent, they give you an answer that sounds like some cross between the Peace Corps and Doctors Without Borders, that they're engaged only in humanitarian operations, in digging water wells, building schools, setting up hospitals.
And they do do some of that.
But, you know, if you look at all the things they're up to over these last few years, there's a lot more than that.
There's, of course, the coalition war in Libya.
They battled pirates off the coast of Somalia, carried out targeted killings also in Somalia, backed French and African proxies in Mali.
They did the same thing in Central African Republic.
They coordinated operations to find, fix, and destroy Joseph Kony's warrants resistance army in Congo, South Sudan, and Central African Republic.
They've run drone surveillance missions against Boko Haram in Nigeria, backed proxy forces in Somalia, carried out special ops missions in Mali and Tunisia, night raids in Somalia, kidnap missions in Libya.
And they've tried to train forces in just about all the countries on the continent.
So it's really been a boom time for Africa.
All right.
So, yeah, boom for them in the most literal way and good times for the U.S. army.
They they found a way to stay globally engaged, is how they put it in defense news.
Well, we got jobs.
We got to do something with them.
All right.
So let's go back to the one that I know nothing about, which is American covert ops or whatever military missions going on under whatever auspices in Tunisia.
Can you elaborate about that?
Well, it's very tough to get a fix on exactly what they've done in Tunisia.
I figured this out by listening closely to what some special ops folks from a very secret unit called Naval Special Warfare Unit 10 or NSW-10 that operates on the continent.
They were I was able to get a recording of a change of command ceremony that was carried out a couple of years ago, and they talked about the operations there.
So we know that they were naval forces.
NSW-10 is usually made up of Navy SEALs and the various naval support units that help the SEALs operate.
I would guess that it's probably training missions.
This is mostly what's done on the continent, but it's very opaque, very tough to figure out exactly what they're doing.
All right.
Now there's a pretty big civil war going on in Libya with, I guess, two major sides and then a bunch of smaller sides as well.
And I guess the assumption is, although it is disputed, that Haftar, the guy who's not the Islamist now, used to back the Islamists back in 2011, way back then, but now supposedly the Haftar, the secularist who lived in Virginia for 30 years or 20 years or so, is now at least presumably the American puppet there.
Can you tell us what SOCOM and JSOC and the Army and whoever else are up to there?
Again, it's difficult to figure this out.
The US, I talk about in the book, Tomorrow's Battlefield, I talk about how they had grand plans of building their own sort of standalone militia, this general purpose force that they were going to train.
And they were going to do some of that training in Libya, then some of it off the continent.
Bulgaria was one of the places.
They talked about the Canary Islands for a time.
And this effort just was a complete crash and burn operation.
It never really got off the ground.
And I think it's actually very lucky for Libya because the last thing that was needed, I think, was raiding the current militia forces to create a new militia trained off the continent and then being sent back in.
Instead, the Europeans took the lead on this.
And those operations also fell apart.
The Italians tried it and the militia members that they trained were sent back to Libya and then just bled back into the militias they had come from.
In the UK, they tried these training ops and there were a whole bunch of sexual assaults that took place around the training operation area by Libyan militiamen and then also assaults of the Libyans there.
The whole operation was scrapped.
There was also a, I write about a little bit in the book, a special operations training effort inside of Libya where the training base that U.S. special ops forces had set up was raided by what were alternately called terrorist forces or militia forces who stole U.S. weapons, U.S. advanced night vision goggles and the lasers that are used for targeting use with those goggles and made off with all that weaponry.
The U.S. abandoned that effort and then ceded that training base to a militia which took it over and now uses it.
It's very tough to get a handle on exactly what the U.S. military is up to there right now.
I think they've really scaled back their forces because it's been such a devastating defeat for them there.
Yeah, it sounds like they make some tentative moves and nothing ever works out.
No.
They're very severely burnt from Iraq War II and I guess they can see it would take an Iraq War II level effort and then that still wouldn't work.
So, hey, they're not trying to go that far so far.
I don't know.
I like that.
Hang on one sec.
It's Nick Turse.
We'll be right back, y'all.
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Hey, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm online with Nick Turse.
He's got a brand new book coming out.
It just came out.
Tomorrow's Battlefield, U.S. proxy wars and secret ops in Africa.
And he's the best journalist by far that I know of covering the American, mostly special forces invasion of Africa, limited ops in unlimited places, I guess, and a lot of training going on.
I wanted to mention, though, real quick that I was watching this thing on CNN about the veteran suicide hotlines.
And one of the clips is of the guy that answers the phone saying, you know, a lot of these guys I get, they call in when they're Vietnam veterans and he goes, think about what that's like to be ordered to kill anything that moves.
And then you're a 17 year old kid and you're in with your unit and you're afraid and you're trying to fit in and do what you're ordered to do.
And your orders are to kill anything that moves.
And then when something moves, it's a family and you waste them.
And then you have to live with that for the rest of your life.
And these are the guys who are calling into the suicide hotline.
Those are their words, as told by the guy answering the help line phone.
They're trying to talk them down from slitting their own throat or whatever because of what the American politicians had them do over there, as documented in this great book.
It's just a little bit of hearsay, but a little bit of cooperation for the thesis of the story you tell in the book by that name, Kill Anything That Moves, that won the Izzy Award and the American Book Award.
And like I mentioned, that Seymour Hersh endorsed on this show just a few weeks back.
So when it comes to the invasion of Africa, where we left off was some special ops and attempts to train up and get their feet wet somehow intervening in Libya.
And they can't seem to quite figure out a way to do it other than kill the dictator for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia.
After that, they're fresh out of ideas.
Is that basically what you're telling me here?
Well, unfortunately, this is stock and trade for the U.S. military.
They do know how to destroy things.
They do know how to kill people.
But they're always, at least since World War II, they've been unable to turn all that destructive power into anything close to actual victory.
They're just ham-handed in all their attempts.
And they never seem to be able to foresee where these operations are going, even if so many of us can see the writing on the wall as soon as they begin bombing.
Well, again, back to that Defense News quote.
What they're looking for is to stay engaged.
They need something to do.
It doesn't necessarily have to have a resolution to it.
It just has to be a thing, basically, since they don't have Iraq to go to anymore.
Well, that was a quote from a year and a half ago before they had Iraq to go back to.
But still, they're not going back in these kind of numbers.
And I think that Africa was really seen as a growth area.
When it looked like the Iraq War was over and Afghanistan would be winding down, the Pentagon really took a close look at Africa and saw it as a place that was ripe for expansion.
And this is something that I reported on last week at Tom Dispatch.
When the command became independent, its own command in 2008, it inherited about 172 operations, training exercises, and activities, which is a lot.
We're talking about one mission every two days.
But since then, the number of missions has just exploded.
It's now off the charts.
I found out that last year, they carried out 674 military missions on the continent.
So we're talking about almost two missions a day.
It's a 300% jump in operations since 2008.
And it really demonstrates that Africa is a growth area for the Pentagon.
Now, how much of that is drone wars and covert wars in Somalia?
Well, Somalia does factor in a great deal.
We've got proxy forces fighting there.
The Washington Post did a nice job of disclosing that actually there's been special ops forces on the ground there for years, although they've said that all U.S. boots had been pulled out of Somalia some time ago.
So you have special ops teams on the ground.
You have proxy forces there.
Every so often, SEALs go in for night raids and then drone operations.
So it's a significant amount of activity on the continent.
Yeah, and now al-Shabaab is kind of on the comeback, I read lately.
And there was obviously the attack in Kenya, which I don't know how much a reflection of strength that attack is necessarily, but they're not gone.
So that's a war that they'll continue to fight, I guess.
Yeah, you know, when you look back right after 9-11, you know, the military started talking about an expansion into Africa, a need to do it.
And a Pentagon official was questioned rather intensely by a pool of reporters about this.
And under questioning, he had to admit that the Somali fighters of al-Shabaab were probably the strongest Islamic militants on a continent at that time, but that they really hadn't conducted any operations outside of Somalia, that it was a very localized group.
And aside from, you know, expressing support for bin Laden verbally, they really hadn't been involved in any kind of global operations and not even anything regional.
But now if you look, you know, al-Shabaab, ever since the US began focusing its efforts on there, backing militias, backing proxy African forces, using drone operations, using, you know, assassination night raids, this type of thing, it's just caused al-Shabaab to expand.
And since that time, they've gone into Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, they've made threats elsewhere on the continent.
It's really been a growth time for al-Shabaab at the same time that the US has ramped up its efforts.
And you can see this across the continent, wherever the US has focused its efforts on a local militant group, it's had the effect of expanding the reach of that group, allowing the group to expand its fighting force.
It's just been a recruiting boom.
And, you know, it's again and again, you see that the US intentions, you know, they continue to go bust, that whatever they tried to do, the opposite has happened.
Yeah, well, and so one of the major consequences, of course, of the Libya war was to chase that conflict into northern Mali, where first the Tuaregs who had sided with Qaddafi wanted more than autonomy, they wanted independence, that started the war, then the jihadists came, and I guess, you know, pushed them to the side, and started a war and went all the way to the south.
And so therefore provoking the French intervention there, but don't tell me that the Americans have been involved in Mali all along too, Nick.
Unfortunately, I have to tell you they were, you know, Mali was seen as a bulwark for US counter-terror efforts after 9-11.
You know, they really focused a lot of time and energy and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the training effort there.
And, you know, if you take a close look at who overthrew the government in Mali, it was a US trained officer.
So I guess the training now had some positive effects for him, but not for Mali.
After he overthrew the government, though, you know, his forces were unable to deal with either the Tuaregs or the Islamist movement there, and were quickly pushed aside.
And, you know, that precipitated the French response, which the US backed, the US provided logistical support, they provided refueling, a lot of aerial operations were conducted by the US.
And they also trained up African troops to send into there.
You know, Chad has been one of the forces that the US has used as a main proxy on the continent.
And they trained up Chadian troops and sent them in there.
And Chad took some casualties and then announced that it was leaving.
They said that they weren't equipped to fight a guerrilla war.
And those Chadian forces that we'd spent all that time and money to act as our proxies on the battlefield, they ran from the fight in Mali.
So it's just been one disaster after another, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars were really because of the hundreds of millions of dollars, I think that were poured in.
And now, you know, it sounds just too convenient for the war party, Nick, but I think I've read this in some pretty credible journalism that really Boko Haram and the jihadists met up in Mali back in 2013, I guess.
And they really did hand over some weapons and some training and some tactics and, you know, improve the fighting skill of Boko Haram, who then went back to Nigeria and became a worse problem.
And then so now, I guess I have to assume that with all the all the American interests in Nigeria, that the American Special Forces are helping with that one, right?
Yeah, if you know, American Special Ops have been active in Nigeria for a long time now.
And you're absolutely right.
You know, the the Toregs had worked for Gaddafi, they were his hired guns.
And when his regime was falling, they looted his his weapons stores, took all those weapons into Mali.
And, you know, eventually, those weapons have gotten into the hands of Boko Haram, who was working with with the group Ansar al-Din in Mali, they exchanged weapons exchanged tactics, it was, you know, Mali provided a great training ground for for Boko Haram, to then, you know, take, you know, take the know how back to Nigeria, where they've been, you know, scourged in that country.
And this is, it's, it's happened all, you know, over and over again.
And Mali really has been a clearinghouse for a lot of the militant groups and in the region.
And, you know, some of them, some of them flowed out of Libya into Mali, use Mali as a place where they could train up, and then head back into Libya.
So it's also become a, you know, a terror transit point.
And this was a, you know, a country that the US really saw as one of the strongest in the region.
And, you know, one that would provide, you know, a solid base to fight terrorists in the region.
Instead, it really turned into a terrorist training ground.
All right, now, I'm sorry, I'm already keeping you a minute over time.
If you got to go, that's cool.
But I was gonna say, if you if you could give us a word about the latest AFRICOM behaving badly, where the soldiers are, you know, treating the whole continent like one big Saigon and just out whoring around and having a good time.
Yeah, sure.
You know, this is the latest piece up at Tom Dispatch right now.
And, you know, I spent a couple of years trying to figure out exactly what was going on there.
I knew that there was criminal activity and what you might call untoward behavior going on on the continent.
And AFRICOM wouldn't talk about it at all.
But I see, you know, a story or two bubble up into the news.
And I want to know more.
So I filed, you know, dozens and dozens of freedom of Information Act requests.
And I was able to get a hold of, you know, many thousands of pages of documents to try and piece together a story, at least to give us a hint of what's happening there.
You know, what I found were cases of rape, sexual assault, drinking and drug binges that led to soldiers being shot and wounded, some of them even dying and in various incidents, you know, from one end of the continent to the other.
Cases in which many members of various units in Djibouti and Ethiopia were patronizing prostitutes, reports of arson, larceny, graft, drunken disorderly conduct, a whole raft of crimes.
AFRICOM, during my reporting, wouldn't talk to me at all.
No, so I could never get a sense of exactly how representative, you know, the materials that I found are.
But it really points to a major problem on the continent.
And I hope to be able to figure out one day exactly how big a problem it is.
But just from the documents I've found, I think it shows that, you know, things are even worse in Africa than, you know, even I had thought.
Man.
All right.
Well, listen, Tom said the book is on its way.
I can't wait to read it.
And I'll just have you know that me and the listeners here, we're your biggest fans.
You do very important work here on this subject, Nick, and I really appreciate your time on the show as well.
Thanks so much, Scott.
I appreciate you having me on today.
All right, y'all.
That's Nick Terse.
And the last two very important articles, you can find them both at Antiwar.com or at TomDispatch.com.
The U.S. military's battlefield of tomorrow and AFRICOM behaving badly.
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Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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