Originally posted at TomDispatch.
It hardly matters where you look. There are the nearly million-and-a-half weapons
that the Pentagon shipped to war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. As a recent
study shows, it evidently lost complete track of hundreds
of thousands of them, many of which seem to have simply gone on the open
market in countries where buyers are unlikely to be the crew of our dreams.
Or there’s the $6.5
trillion (that is not a misprint) that the accountants for a single service,
the U.S. Army, seem to have lost track of in 2015. Or there’s the simple
fact that the Pentagon is utterly incapable
of conducting a successful audit of itself or, on a minor note, that its officials
can’t even keep
track of which of their underlings go to strip clubs, “adult entertainment
establishments,” and casinos on the taxpayer dollar. You could say that,
though it swallows up at least $600 billion-plus a year of our money, it’s
an organization that seems remarkably comfortable knowing remarkably little
about itself (which means of course that you know next to nothing about it).
This should, of course, be unacceptable in a democracy. But coverage
of the Pentagon and its stupendously wasteful ways, not to speak of oversight
of its financial dealings, is in remarkably short supply in our world. That
should be surprising, given this country’s 800
military bases around the world, the planet it largely
arms, and the fact that its special operations forces have been active in
up to 135
countries a year. What it does, and where and how it does it, given its
reach and its power, plays a not-insignificant role in determining what transpires
on this conflicted planet of ours.
This is why I regularly find it amazing, even unnerving, that, in a world of
monster media organizations, covering what the U.S. military does in Africa
– and it does more
and more
there – has largely been left to Nick Turse of TomDispatch. He’s
been reporting
on that military’s “pivot” to Africa for years now and, with
the rarest
of exceptions,
he’s done so in a remarkably lonely fashion. How can this be? It obviously
matters what our military is doing – especially in a world where, it seems,
the more it enters a region, the more terror outfits spread and flourish in
that same region. Call it happenstance if you wish, but as for me, I would prefer
that Americans knew regularly and in some detail what exactly was being done
in our name in the world. ~ Tom
Mission Impossible: Keeping Track of U.S. Special
Ops in Africa
By Nick Turse
Sometimes the real news is in the details – or even in the discrepancies.
Take, for instance, missions by America’s most elite troops in Africa.
It was September 2014. The sky was bright and clear and ice blue as the camouflage-clad…