The Dying Sahara

US Imperialism and Terror in Africa

Jeremy Keenan

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781849648271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Washington's expansion of the War on Terror to the African continent substantiated claims that the U.S. fabricated terrorism in order to justify their military campaign. This book chronicles the effect of this warmongering and the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy of terror and instability in the Sahara. Beginning in 2004, with what local people called the US 'invasion' of the Sahel, the book shows how repressive, authoritarian regimes - cashing in on US terrorism 'rents' - provoked Tuareg rebellions in both Niger and Mali, caused a new narco-trafficking branch of Al-Qaeda and created instability in a region the size of western Europe. Exposing the suspected complicity of the World Bank, the tumult caused by US's new new combatant African command (AFRICOM), and the chilling tactics used to perpetuate the myth that Africa is a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, Jeremy Keenan proves his resolve to 'defeat the lie'.

1

P2OG: A LONG HISTORY OF FALSE-FLAG TERRORISM

El Para’s Kidnapping of 32 European Tourists

At 5.34 a.m. Baghdad time on 20 March 2003, the US commenced its military invasion of Iraq. In the preceding few weeks, 32 European tourists, in seven separate parties, had disappeared in one of the most remote corners of Algeria’s Saharan desert. The two events were not entirely unrelated.

The region where the tourists disappeared, known as the Piste des Tombeaux (Graveyard Piste) because of the numerous prehistoric tombs scattered along its way, became the Sahara’s Bermuda Triangle: the tourists had disappeared into thin air. For weeks, there were no clear leads on what had happened to them. Rumours and theories abounded. Gradually, however, the evidence, such as it was, pointed towards their having been taken hostage by Islamic extremists belonging to Algeria’s Groupe Salafiste pour le Prédication et le Combat (GSPC), renamed al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in 2007. The leader of the kidnappers was Abderrazak Lamari. Sometimes known as Amari Saifi, or a dozen other aliases, he was usually referred to by his nom de guerre, El Para, a name derived from his time as a parachutist in the Algerian army.

The hostages were held in two groups. One group of 17 was released on 13 May after an Algerian army assault on the kidnappers’ hideout in Gharis, an isolated range in southern Algeria’s mountainous region of Ahaggar. The 15 members of the other group had been held captive in Tamelrik, part of another range on the northern edge of Ahaggar some 300 kilometres to the east of Gharis. After the release of the first group, those who had been held in Tamelrik were taken on a tortuous, weaving journey by their captors, estimated at some 3,000 kilometres, to the remote desert regions of northern Mali where they were finally released on 18 August after the alleged payment of a €5 million ransom.

Even before this second group of hostages had been released, the Bush administration had branded El Para as Osama bin Laden’s ‘man in the Sahara’ and identified the Sahara as a new front in its ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT). After four months in Mali, El Para and his 60 or so terrorists, who had recruited about 15 helpers while in Mali, were driven out of their desert retreats somewhere in the region to the north of Timbuktu and around the Adrar-n-Iforas mountains of north-eastern Mali and reportedly chased by a combination of Malian, Nigerien and Algerian forces, assisted by US Special Forces and aerial reconnaissance, across the desert tracts of north-eastern Mali, the Aïr mountains and Ténéré desert of northern Niger and on into the Tibesti mountains of northern Chad. There, in the first week of March 2004, forces of the Chadian regular army, supported by US aerial reconnaissance, were said to have surrounded them. Forty-three of El Para’s men were reportedly killed in the ensuing battle, with El Para and a handful of followers escaping the carnage, only to fall into the hands of Chadian rebels.

With El Para holed up in Chad, Washington was not short of hyperbole, imagination or downright lies in portraying this new terrorist threat as having spread right across the wastelands of the Sahel, as the southern ‘shore’ of the Sahara is known in Arabic, from Mauritania in the west, through the little known desert lands of Mali, Niger and southern Algeria, to the Tibesti mountains of Chad, with, beyond them, the Sudan, Somalia and, across the waters, the ‘Talibanised’ lands of Afghanistan and the debacle that was Iraq.

Whether the ‘El Para story’ was real or fabricated, the Generals of the US’s European Command (EUCOM), based in Stuttgart but charged with responsibility for most of Africa, were quick to seize the opportunities presented by this new threat. Marine Corps General James (Jim) Jones, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), the Commander of EUCOM and from January 2009 until November 2010 President Obama’s National Security Advisor (NSA), talked enthusiastically about constructing a ‘family of bases’ across Africa. His Deputy Commander, with responsibility for Africa, the gung-ho Air Force General Charles Wald, described the Sahara as a ‘swamp of terror’, a ‘terrorist infestation’ which ‘we need to drain’.¹ Back at the White House, press officers described the Sahara as ‘a magnet for terrorists’. Within proverbial minutes of El Para’s flight across the Sahel becoming public knowledge, Western intelligence and diplomatic sources were claiming to be finding the fingerprints of this new terrorist threat everywhere. For instance, it took only a few days after the Madrid train bombings for that atrocity to be linked to al-Qaeda groups lurking deep in the Sahara.² Western intelligence-security services warned that al-Qaeda bases hidden deep in the world’s largest desert could launch terrorist attacks on Europe.

The US’s military commanders went out of their way to alert Europe to the threat of terrorist activity from North Africa. They pointed explicitly to the bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia in 2002, suicide bombings in Casablanca that had killed 33 innocent civilians and wounded more than 100 in May 2003, the arrest of al-Qaeda suspects in Morocco and the abduction of the 32 tourists in Algeria. They warned of terrorists from Afghanistan and Pakistan swarming across the vast ungoverned and desolate regions of the Sahara desert, as they described them, and turning the region, Europe’s back door, into another Afghanistan. The GSPC, so the US warned, had already emerged in Europe as an al-Qaeda recruiting organisation and in North Africa it sought nothing less than the overthrow of the Algerian and Mauritanian governments.

* * *

The Dark Sahara

I was in the Ahaggar region of the Algerian Sahara when the 32 tourists were abducted, as well as for much of the time that they were held in captivity. I was also in the region when El Para and his men were reportedly being chased across the Sahel. Neither I nor many of the local Tuareg peoples, with whom I was living at the time, recognised the literally terrifying image of the Sahara that the Bush administration and its military commanders were portraying to the world.

I was able to record and document almost all that happened in these regions of the Sahara and Sahel at that time. The Dark Sahara,³ the prequel to this volume, recounts in detail what happened to the 32 hostages and how both I and my Tuareg companions became increasingly suspicious and aware of the role played in the kidnapping by Algeria’s mukhabarat (police state), especially the ‘dirty tricks’ department of its intelligence and security service, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS). As the evidence documented in The Dark Sahara makes abundantly clear, the operation simply could not have been undertaken without the facilitation of the DRS.

Indeed, as François Gèze and Salima Mellah of Algeria-Watch, Algeria’s respected human rights organisation, concluded:

We have undertaken an in depth enquiry into the affair of the European hostages in the Sahara. A close study of the facts shows that there is no other explanation for this operation than the directing of the hostage-taking by the DRS, the Algerian army’s secret service.⁴

As this volume reveals, with the passage of time, further evidence of the DRS’s fabrication and orchestration of terrorism in the Sahara and Sahel regions has come to light.

The evidence my Tuareg companions and I gathered at that time, which is documented in The Dark Sahara, indicated that El Para was not merely a DRS agent, but perhaps also a US Green Beret trained at Fort Bragg in the 1990s. Indeed, The Dark Sahara pointed overwhelmingly to collusion between the US and Algeria’s DRS in the 2003 abduction of the 32 tourists, thus providing the Bush administration with its justification for its launch of a Sahara-Sahelian front, or what became known as a ‘second front’ in the GWOT in Africa.

However, although the evidence of US-Algerian collusion in the fabrication of terrorism presented in The Dark Sahara was strong, it lacked, as some critics pointed out, the ‘smoking gun’. It is difficult, indeed, sometime almost impossible, to ‘prove a negative’. In the case of the alleged chase of El Para’s group of ‘terrorists’ into Chad in March 2004 and the battle at Wour in which 43 were allegedly killed, the only evidence that the battle took place is that the US military said it happened. No evidence has ever been provided by the US to actually confirm that the battle took place and that 43 GSPC terrorists were killed. Given Washington’s long and extensively documented record of support for state terrorism on almost every continent, along with the US government’s brazen record of dissembling and downright lying, Washington’s word that something happened is certainly not ‘proof’. Nor is it likely that Donald Rumsfeld’s Department would have left a written confession of its activities in the region. Indeed, as this volume spells out, the US has continued to collaborate with Algeria’s DRS in the fabrication and orchestration of terrorist activities in the region.

Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)

What I should have documented in The Dark Sahara, but did not, simply because I was unaware of it until after the book had gone to press, was how the El Para operation fitted into the US’s long history of supporting state terrorists (and dictators) and creating false-flag incidents to justify military intervention. There is, in fact, a direct link between El Para’s operation in the Sahara and the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in the form of a plan which was put into operation under Rumsfeld’s direction in the third quarter of 2002. That is not to credit Rumsfeld with any great novelty for the plan. The precursor of the plan that was put into operation with El Para in 2003 had actually been conceived by the Joint Chiefs of Staff precisely 40 years earlier. Its origin stemmed directly from the US’s ‘Bay of Pigs’ disaster in 1961, when a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-trained force of Cuban exiles, with the support of US government armed forces, attempted unsuccessfully to invade Cuba and overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. The invading force, which landed at the Bay of Pigs, was all but wiped out by Castro’s forces within three days.

In the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the Chairmanship of General Lyman Lemnitzer, drew up plans, codenamed ‘Operation Northwoods’, to justify a US military invasion of Cuba. The plan, described as ‘the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government’,⁵ was written with the approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presented to President John Kennedy’s Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, on 13 March 1962. Entitled ‘Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS [top secret])’,⁶ Operation Northwoods proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war that the Joint Chiefs of Staff intended to launch against Cuba. It called on the CIA and other operatives to undertake a range of atrocities:

Innocent civilians were to be shot on American streets; boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba were to be sunk on the high seas; a wave of violent terrorism was to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war against Fidel Castro’s Cuba.⁷

The plan was ultimately rejected by President Kennedy. Operation Northwoods remained ‘classified’ and unknown to the American public until declassified and disclosed by the National Security Archive and the investigative journalist James Bamford in April 2001.⁸ In 2002, 40 years after the Northwoods plan was presented to Robert McNamara, a not dissimilar plan was presented to Donald Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board (DSB).⁹ Excerpts of the DSB’s ‘Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism’ were revealed on 16 August 2002,¹⁰ with Pamela Hess,¹¹ William Arkin¹² and David Isenberg,¹³ amongst others, publishing further details and analysis of the plan. The DSB recommended the creation of a ‘Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group’, a covert organisation which would carry out secret missions to ‘stimulate reactions’ among terrorist groups by provoking them into undertaking violent acts that would expose them to ‘counterattack’ by US forces, along with other operations which, through the US military penetration of terrorist groups and the recruitment of local peoples, would dupe them into conducting ‘combat operations, or even terrorist activities’.¹⁴

The existence of the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, or P2OG as it became known, raises huge questions about all terrorist actions since 2002. In short, how many terrorist incidents, such as the Madrid and London bombings in March 2004 and July 2005 respectively, as well as the GWOT’s Sahara-Sahel front, were perhaps linked either directly or indirectly to this programme? We do not know, although Andrew Cockburn’s¹⁵ and Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed’s¹⁶ investigations, in 2008 and 2009 respectively, indicate that the GWOT may not be as straightforward as the US and other Western countries would like their publics to believe. For example, in May 2008, George Bush was reported to have signed a secret finding authorising and requesting some $400 million funding for terrorist groups across much of the Middle East–Afghanistan region in a covert offensive directed ultimately against the Iranian regime. An initial outlay of $300 million was approved by Congress with bipartisan support.¹⁷

One of the most detailed investigations into contemporary terrorism is that undertaken by Nafeez Ahmed, the author of such in-depth investigations as The War on Freedom,¹⁸ Behind the War on Terror,¹⁹ The War on Truth²⁰ and the The London Bombings.²¹ In Nafeez Ahmed’s recent investigation of false-flag operations,²² he states that the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh²³ was told by a Pentagon advisor that the Algerian (El Para) operation was a pilot for the new Pentagon covert P2OG programme.

The timing of the developments between Washington and the Algerian Sahara are significant. The P2OG programme ‘leak’ came on 16 August 2002, 16 days after Marion E. (Spike) Bowman,²⁴ Deputy General Counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), presented crucial evidence to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in regard to proposed amendments concerning the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Until Bowman’s evidence, the US intelligence community was anxious about working too closely with their Algerian counterparts for fear that they would pass sensitive information to Palestinian organisations. However, Bowman’s statement, in which he presented the background and nature of what the FBI called the ‘International Jihad Movement’, dispelled many of the anxieties in Washington about collaborating with the Algerians by showing how close Algeria was to the US in its fight against al-Qaeda and terrorism.

During the course of the next two months, false-flag terrorism incidents were planned for the Algerian Sahara. The first attempt to fabricate terrorism in the region was not El Para’s operation in February–March 2003, but an attempt to hijack and abduct four Swiss tourists on 18 October 2002 near Arak in southern Algeria. However, the operation, which I described in The Dark Sahara, was botched and the tourists escaped.²⁵

There is no ‘smoking gun’ to show the US Department of Defense was involved in the Arak operation. I was in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Timeline
• Maps
• 1 P2OG: A Long History of False-Flag Terrorism
• 2 The US Invasion of the Sahara-Sahel
• 3 Repression and Terrorism Rents
• 4 Footing the Bill: Did the World Bank Fund State Terrorism?
• 5 Putting the GWOT Back on Track
• 6 New Tuareg Rebellions
• 7 Uranium Goes Critical: Why the Tuareg Took Up Arms
• 8 The Fifth Anniversary of 2003: Another Kidnap
• 9 The Creation of AFRICOM
• 10 The Future Ground Zero
• 11 Perfidious Albion: The Murder of Edwin Dyer
• 12 Drugs and the Threat of Western Intervention
• 13 Al-Qaeda in the West for the West
• 14 ‘Washing the Mountain’: Desert Borders, Corruption and the DRS
• 15 Sarkozy Declares War on al-Qaeda
• 16 Opening the Gates of Hell
• 17 The Past Catches Up: Pressure on Algeria
• 18 The Arab Spring and Gaddafi Intervene
• 19 War Crime?
• 20 Preparing for the ‘Long War’
• Notes
• Index