American military expansion in Africa: deliberate effort to keep the public in the shadows

[bananas]

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-us-militarys-best-kept-secret/

The US Military’s Best-Kept Secret

For years, American military expansion in Africa has gone largely unnoticed, thanks to a deliberate effort to keep the public in the shadows.

By Nick Turse YESTERDAY 1:26 PM

In the shadows of what was once called the “Dark Continent,” a scramble has come and gone. If you heard nothing about it, that was by design. But look hard enough and—north to south, east to west—you’ll find the fruits of that effort: a network of bases, compounds, and other sites whose sum total exceeds the number of nations on the continent. For a military that has stumbled from Iraq to Afghanistan and suffered setbacks from Libya to Syria, it’s a rare can-do triumph. In remote locales, behind fences and beyond the gaze of prying eyes, the US military has built an extensive archipelago of African outposts, transforming the continent, experts say, into a laboratory for a new kind of war.

So how many US military bases are there in Africa? It’s a simple question with a simple answer. For years, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) gave a stock response: one. Camp Lemonnier in the tiny, sun-bleached nation of Djibouti was America’s only acknowledged “base” on the continent. It wasn’t true, of course, because there were camps, compounds, installations, and facilities elsewhere, but the military leaned hard on semantics.

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[polly7]

1. Just one of the reasons Qaddafi had to go. nt.

[mwrguy]

2. Imperialism marches on

[Gumboot]

3. Huge props to The Nation for its ongoing coverage of this story.

There isn't a word about it anywhere else, surprise surprise.