http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/opinion/11iht-edwheatcroft11.html
The Obama administration has ordered the Pentagon and CIA to draw a "line in the sand" to prevent the popular overthrow of other U.S. client dictatorial regimes in North Africa and the Middle East. The order comes after a New York Times report that Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates covertly supported Obama's envoy Frank Wisner, Jr's message of support and encouragement for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak before his ouster by the Egyptian military following the democratic opposition uprising in Egypt.
Using the CIA's and Mossad's contrived constructs of two "straw-man" terrorist organizations -- Al- Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) -- created to justify U.S. military and security support for the oil states of the Arabian peninsula and U.S. natural gas interests in the Sahel region, the Pentagon has stepped up military support for Yemen's dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh and Algerian leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
Under the rubric of the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP), the United States, with the cooperation of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to Algeria's security police and military. The TSCTP was formerly known as the Pan-Sahel Initiative. The Algerian security police have used U.S.-supplied lethal military and non-lethal crowd control equipment, including night-vision equipment, armored high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles, global positioning systems, and secure radios, to forcibly put down pro-democracy protesters in Algiers who want the Bouteflika regime to follow in the steps of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and resign. Similarly, in Egypt, security police used U.S.-supplied tear gas and canisters on pro-democracy demonstrators.
Among the chief suppliers of military and security equipment to Algeria are Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, AM General, and Northrop Grumman.
In neighboring Morocco, TSCTP military assistance, including that provided through International Military Training and Education (IMET) programs, has been used to put down demonstrators in Western Sahara, illegally occupied by Morocco, who support the POLISARIO liberation movement. U.S. and neocon propagandists have falsely accused POLISARIO of links with AQIM. Tuareg liberation movements across the Sahara are also accused by the Pentagon and its neocon operatives of having ties to AQIM. However, the charges are a ruse to protect the operations of U.S. and other western natural gas and oil operations in the Sahara, particularly in southern Algeria where the United States has helped set up a regional military command center.
The events in Tunisia and Egypt have also brought out protesters in Morocco who want a curtailment of the powers of Morocco's pro-U.S./Israeli monarchy but who face a military and security force armed to the teeth by the United States and Israel....
U.S. military training for North Africa's autocratic regimes is provided annually during the Pentagon's OPERATION FLINTLOCK military exercise. Last year's exercise, conducted from May 3 to 22, included military forces from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Niger, Chad, and Nigeria. French and British troops also participated in the operation. Another Pentagon program that is involved in providing security assistance to the Algerian regime is Operation Active Endeavor.
U.S. Special Forces reportedly maintain a permanent presence in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania where they support local military operations against groups accused of being allied with AQIM and another insurgent group, now thought to be very few in numbers -- the Salafist movement and an Islamist group accused of having links to Al-Qaeda. The Salafist movement in Algeria, GSPC, was announced by Al-Qaeda's Egyptian number two man, Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, to have merged with Al- Qaeda on September 11, 2006, creating AQIM. The announcement appears to have been another U.S. and Israeli intelligence-contrived ruse to justify stepping up U.S. military and intelligence support for the regimes in Algiers, Tunis, Rabat, and Nouakchott. In fact, many of the Islamist "militants" arrested by local military and police forces in the Sahel region and accused of being AQIM and Salafist "terrorists" are merely small-time criminals involved in smuggling drugs and weapons across poorly-protected national borders.
One of the chief Pentagon supporters for U.S. client-dictators across the Sahel to the Horn of Africa is Vicki Huddleston, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for African Affairs, who maintains particularly close connections to Algeria's military and security hierarchy, including Defense Minister-Delegate Abdelmalek Guenaizia and African and Maghreb Affairs Minister Abdelkader Messahel.
Details of Huddleston's October 2009 meeting in Algiers with senior Algerian officials remain shrouded in secrecy, according to the Algerian newspaper Liberté in an October 20, 2009 article. However, many in the Algerian opposition believe that Huddleston was discussing the establishment of permanent U.S. military bases in Algeria. Huddleston also had a meeting at the Algerian Defense Ministry at which "military and technical cooperation" was discussed. A prior visit by officers of the US European Command to Algiers concentrated on the training of Algerian intelligence, special security police, and gendarmes by Pentagon-and CIA-supplied instructors. There were also reports that Saudi Arabia covertly financed the purchase from the United States of armored security vehicles by Algeria and Mauritania for use against anti-regime activists...
Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, a known supporter of Israeli interests, also has established close ties with Algeria's leaders, notably Foreign Minister Ahmed Ouyahia. Just as with Israel's special relationship with Egypt's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, Tel Aviv has established close links with the leaders of other Arab dictatorships, including Algeria, using trusted American interlocutors like Jeffrey CIA Feltman and Huddleston. Huddleston has a long resume that includes past postings in locations where the CIA has been engaged in major covert activities: she was George W. Bush's head of the US Interests Section in Havana in 2002 where she was engaged in anti-Castro activities and ambassador to Ethiopia, where she helped provide political and military support to that nation's dictator Meles Zenawi.
As with Algeria, the Pentagon has been supplying the Saleh regime in Yemen with massive amounts of military and security hardware. US Special Operations forces have been training Yemeni security forces who have targeted Shi'a Zaidi tribal members in north Yemen and South Yemeni secessionist forces in the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, a formerly socialist nation that was forcibly kept within Yemen in a 1994 civil war, a war in which the Clinton administration provided north Yemeni forces with military hardware and satellite and communication intelligence.
The Pentagon has justified its $150 million in military and security assistance to Yemen for fiscal year 2010 by claiming it is needed to fight "AQAP," another CIA- and Mossad-constructed "Al-Qaeda" franchise. The Pentagon has doubled military assistance to Yemen for fiscal year 2011 to $250 million. The assistance, which almost mirrors that given to the Algerian regime, includes night-vision equipment, armored vehicles, Humvees, Huey helicopters, and communications and Internet surveillance systems. Yemeni forces have used their U.S.-supplied military hardware and training to brutally suppress pro-democracy demonstrations in Sanaa, Aden, and other cities in the country.
While the Obama administration offers platitudes to the pro-democracy wave sweeping the Arab world, the military assistance provided by the Pentagon and CIA to repressive regimes speaks for itself. The last-ditch efforts by the Pentagon, State Department, and CIA to save the Mubarak regime in its final days will be repeated in Algiers, Sanaa, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Riyadh, Manama and the capitals of other U.S. client states in the North Africa and Middle East region....While US/Israeli Psyops will be rekindled in Iran with "tweeting" Gucci revolutionaries in a vain attempt at destabilizing Iran...
FY 2011 official US military assistance to client dictatorships in North Africa and Middle East
Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP) $20,000,000
IMET - Algeria $ 950,000
IMET - Yemen $ 1,100,000
Foreign Military Financing - Yemen $ 35,000,000
Yemen for fiscal year 2011 - $250 million
Obama seething over Clinton, Biden, and Gates backroom foreign policy....
Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, according to a New York Times report, backed the naming of Wisner, a long-time CIA agent-of-influence who has operated under State Department official cover as a diplomat for decades, is a close personal friend of Egyptian ex-President Hosni Mubarak, a relationship developed when Wisner served as President Reagan's ambassador to Cairo.
Obama, according to our sources, was unaware of Wisner's close ties to Mubarak and was shocked to discover that Clinton, Biden, and Gates were aware that Wisner was offering lightly-conditional U.S. support to Mubarak, while Obama was urging a quick transition of power. It was the vote of confidence in Mubarak from the trio of Clinton, Biden, and Gates that delayed, for an entire day, Mubarak's previously-reported departure from office. Mubarak was given the false impression by Wisner that the Egyptian leader had the full support of Clinton, Biden, and Gates and, therefore, the president also. It was not the case.
It turns out that Clinton, Biden, and Gates were following the dictates of key players in the pro-Mubarak Israel Lobby in Washington and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York rather than from the policy-makers in the office of the President. We have also learned that Obama is scaling back Biden's involvement in fundamental foreign policy issues, preferring his interaction with key foreign governments, especially those in the Middle East, to be limited to public diplomacy and social functions.
Gates has announced he is leaving his post during 2011, however, Obama now needs Gates's continued support to shepherd a Defense budget, minus key pet weapons systems, through a hawkish Republican House of Representatives.
However, it is Mrs. Clinton who has earned Obama's focused anger. The White House was shocked when Wisner, after having returned from Cairo, told the Munich Security Conference by a video-link from New York that a temporarily leadership role for Mubarak was required during the transition phase in Egypt. Wisner also echoed the views of the Israel Lobby that America's primary position in post-Mubarak Egypt was a firm commitment to the peace treaty with Israel and freezing out the Muslim Brotherhood from any political power. Except for the peace treaty issue, Wisner's comments largely contradicted Obama's policy but reflected those of Clinton, Biden, and Gates.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told a news conference: "Former Ambassador Wisner is not an employee of the government . . . his views on who should or shouldn't be the head of Egypt don't represent the views of our administration." But unbeknown to Obama and Gibbs, Wisner's views did represent those of a significant faction of the administration.
