In the early 2000’s, the Bush Administration made a disastrous decision to put all of these warlords on the CIA payroll and they came up with this name called The Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism. I tracked down some of these warlords when I was in Somalia and in Kenya. They, basically, had them acting as an assassination squad. Most Somalia experts said that there were no more than a dozen Al Qaeda-connected individuals in Somalia right after 9/11. So, the CIA hires these warlords ostensibly to go in and hunt these people down. Well, they end up murdering vast numbers of people who were imams or religious scholars, and in some cases, I was told that they would literally like chop peoples heads off and then bring them to their American liaison and say this is so and so, and I’ve killed them.
So, you have this utterly thuggish collection of warlords murdering people and doing so, they believed, with the backing of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world. That sparked, then, a revolt against the warlords. So, what happened was that these coalitions of religious figures from different regions of Somalia formed something called the Islamic Courts Union, and basically it was 12 Sharia courts, meaning that there were 12 regional authorities who had imposed some version of law in the areas that they controlled. They came together and united as one body and they started to pool their resources in an effort to overthrow the CIA’s warlords from Mogadishu.
There was a 13th unofficial member of the Islamic Courts Union and that was Harakat al-Shabaab Mujahideen which is al-Shabaab. So, at al-Shabaab that was the only faction within the Islamic Courts Union that had any presence of foreign fighters, and they were the least powerful, they had the least credibility in Somalia, the least visibility. So, when Islamic Courts Union took Mogadishu they expelled the CIA warlords, they imposed a brutal but effective form of governance on Mogadishu, effective in the sense that it stabilized the city. Crime rates plummeted, they reopened the ports. There were also all sorts of vicious, violent punishments meted out against people who violated what they perceived to be the tenets of Islamic Sharia law. almost everyone except probably Bush-era officials would agree that it was the only moment from the time Siad Barre’s regime fell in the early-1990’s until 2006 that there was anything vaguely representing stability in Mogadishu.
The CIA’s warlords are kicked out, the Islamic Courts Union is in control. The U.S. then covertly partners with the Ethiopian dictatorship and Ethiopia launches an overt invasion of Somalia to overthrow of Islamic Courts Union. The fact that they were called Islamic probably — you know, Bush is like batting a ball of yarn in the back while Dick Cheney is running the country and they hear Islamic and it’s like, oh, we got to overthrow them. So, I mean, that’s basically what happened. It was this knee-jerk reaction. If you actually look at the people who made up the Islamic Courts Union, there was a mishmash of people. Yes, there were people who were extremists, but most of them were not. Most of the them were people that more closely represent the Taliban Government, not the Taliban movement, but the Taliban Government. I mean, it’s, by all standards a brutal form of government, but, these were not people who wanted to attack the United States at all. There was no U.S. interest in doing this except this for except for knee-jerk sort of neo-con reactionary politics.
So, they overthrow that government and then JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA use the cover of this over-invasion to go in and start hunting people, and they want to take out all of the leaders of the Islamic Courts Union. They are looking for people who were attacked — involved with the 98 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and they start this assassination campaign. They use drones and they’re using AC-130 gun ships, and basically the Islamic Courts Union is totally dismantled.
Somalia then returns or reverts to this state of brutality and civil war, and you then have the Ethiopians committing rape, murdering civilians, torturing peoples, setting up their own prisons, rendering people back to Ethiopia, it becomes an utter disaster. What ends up happening is that Shabaab, this group of relative nobodies for so many years, who were sort of on the periphery of this movement, start to say, well, we will be the vanguard in the fight against the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion, and we will take up arms we will defend Somalia. And they started mixing together the ideas and rhetoric of Osama bin Laden with a sort of Somali nationalist politics and end up getting a tremendous amount of support because they were the only people fighting. So, what happened there, I mean, this is incredible, is that Osama bin Laden tried to take credit for the Black Hawk Down incident in the early 1990’s, and it was a complete lie. They had nothing to do with it. Maybe there was some people that were — could reasonable be called jihadists that were involved with that, but, it was not Osama bin Laden’s plot, and yet, Osama bin Laden tried to take responsibility for it. 18 U.S. soldiers were killed. thousands and thousands of Somalis were killed. It is basically one of the only things most people know about Somalia, was Black Hawk Down. Most people don’t even know. It is like when we talk about the Vietnam War, people know that there were 65,000 U.S. troops killed. Do people know that multimillion Vietnamese were killed? It’s the same with the Black Hawk Down incident. I mean, thousands of Somalis were butchered in the aftermath of that.
President Clinton ended up pulling the Army Rangers and the whole U.S. presence out of Somalia, but they were hunting Mohamed Farrah Aidid, this warlord, who had basically destroyed Mogadishu and created the situation where you have the civil war in Somalia. The point I’m getting at here is that al-Shabaab was largely a non-player in Somalia and al-Qaeda had almost no presence there. And the U.S., by backing these warlords and then overthrowing the Islamic Courts Union made the very force that they claim to be trying to fight the most powerful force in Somalia.
initially, it started with a sort of knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. The fact was that there were major terrorist events that happened as a result of Somalia’s lawless situation. There were people being harbored in Somalia that were involved with the 1998 embassy bombings. I think that Rumsfeld and Cheney, early on after 9/11 developed this program called Next Steps, and they were citing all these countries that they intended to go into, and Somalia was on the early list of countries. And you had the State Department, Colin Powell and others, cautioning against it, and saying we shouldn’t go in here, but there were people in the Pentagon who wanted to run the deck all over the world and wanted to send people in there.
there are natural resources. It has the largest coastline of any nation in Africa. There is a very, potentially lucrative fishing industry that exists there. It is part of why you see the rise of piracy, is that European and other shipping companies are coming in they’re dumping the Somali waters. But, also Illegal fishing is happening all the time. When people eat lobster and they are told it is Kenyan lobster, it almost certainly is actually from the Somali coastline or from the Somali waters. So, I don’t think there is some nefarious conspiracy behind the scenes, but Somalia — if Somalia was a stabilized country, there is tremendous natural resources and wealth in Somalia. but, I think it has more to do with this narrow U.S. view of terrorism being this epic global threat and reacting in that way constantly or consistently.
US have this huge counter terrorism base that they’ve built at the airport in Mogadishu and they’re paying Somali thugs, basically, to go out and do the bidding of the United States. So, we are basically back to where we are when Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney and others decided to start arming and backing warlords. It is just — Somalia is just in utter hell and it’s some of the greatest suffering on planet Earth and the U.S. has played a very significant role in destabilizing Somalia for many, many years.
During President Obama’s at the U.N. General assembly, my jaw sort of hit the floor. He basically came out and said the United States is an imperialist nation and we are going to do whatever we need to conquer areas to take resources from around the world. I mean, it was a really naked sort of declaration of imperialism, and I don’t use that word lightly, but it really is. I mean, he pushed back against the Russians when he came out and said I believe America is an exceptional nation. He then defended the Gulf War and basically said that the motivation behind it was about oil and said we are going to continue to take such actions in pursuit of securing natural resources for ourselves and our allies. I mean, this was a pretty incredible and bold declaration he was making, especially given the way that he has tried to portray himself around the world. On the other hand, you know, remember what happened right before Obama took the stage is that the president of Brazil got up, and she herself is a former political prisoner who was abused and targeted in a different lifetime, and she gets up and just blasts the United States over the NSA spy program around the world.
It was such a major scandal that the president canceled her state dinner with President Obama. This was not just like sitting in the Oval Office or something. This is a thing where they create a huge menu and they invite all these people and it was meant to sort of secure this relationship of these 2 huge western hemisphere powers. Brazil is a rising power in the western hemisphere and this was to be a very important moment in the history of relations between the U.S. and Brazil and for the Brazilians to cancel it just shows you the severity of this scandal. I mean, all around the world right now in the aftermath of the Wiki leaks, cables being revealed, now you have the Edward Snowden documents. People around the world have access to documentation that in some cases is bolstering what people already thought was going on, but in other cases it is revealing the extent of dirty tricks that the United States is playing on other nations around the world, not to mention its own citizens.
We are at this moment where President Obama appears at the U.N. and only made passing reference really to the NSA scandal. My understanding is that he was in the car when the President of Brazil was speaking and I don’t know if he heard her speech or not. Maybe they already had access to it because they are all up in her e-mails; but at the end of the day you have this democratic president who won the Nobel Peace Prize who then goes and stands in front of the United Nations and basically stakes out a neo-con vision of American foreign policy and owns it and kind of wraps it in this cloak of democratic legitimacy. I think when we look back at Obama’s legacy, this is going to have been a very significant period in U.S. history where the ideals of very sort of radical right wing forces were solidified and continued under Mr. Constitutional Law Professor, Nobel Peace Prize Winner. It is really kind of devastating what is going on right now and I think if you take the long view of it or you step back and look at it and don’t just see the tress but look at the forest, President Obama has been a forceful, fierce defending of empire and I think that is going to be the enduring legacy of his presidency is that he was an empire president.
The drone strike both in Yemen and in Pakistan the U.S. is continuing forward with its not so covert war and I think, remember President Obama in May gave this big speech at the National Defense University where he owned the fact that they had killed 4 American citizens and then asserted that the United States is going to continue to do this, this is going to go on and on. This isn’t stopping any time soon.
– source democracynow.org
Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation. He is the producer and writer of the documentary film, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield,” and also the author of the book by the same name. This weekend the film has its South American premiere at the Rio International Film Festival in Brazil. On October 15, Dirty Wars will be released in the United States via Netflix and iTunes, as well as on DVD.