{"id":203650,"date":"2015-11-26T16:16:20","date_gmt":"2015-11-26T16:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/americas-empire-of-african-bases-spreads\/"},"modified":"2015-11-27T22:32:31","modified_gmt":"2015-11-27T22:32:31","slug":"americas-empire-of-african-bases-spreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/americas-empire-of-african-bases-spreads\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Empire of African Bases Spreads"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In the shadows of what was once called the \u201cdark continent,\u201d a scramble has come and gone. If you heard nothing about it, that was by design. But look hard enough and\u2013north to south, east to west\u2013you\u2019ll 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\u2019s a rare can-do triumph. In remote locales, behind fences and beyond the gaze of prying eyes, the U.S. military has built an extensive archipelago of African outposts, transforming the continent, experts say, into a laboratory for a new kind of war.<\/p>\n

So how many U.S. military bases are there in Africa? It\u2019s a simple question with a simple answer. For years, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) gave a stock response<\/a>: one. Camp Lemonnier in the tiny, sun-bleached nation of Djibouti was America\u2019s only acknowledged \u201cbase\u201d on the continent.\u00a0It wasn\u2019t true, of course, because there were camps, compounds, installations, and facilities elsewhere, but the military leaned hard on semantics.<\/p>\n

Take a look at the Pentagon\u2019s official list of bases, however, and the number grows.\u00a0The 2015 report on the Department of Defense\u2019s global property portfolio lists Camp Lemonnier and three other deep-rooted sites on or near the continent:\u00a0U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit No. 3<\/a>, a medical research facility in Cairo, Egypt, that was established in 1946; Ascension Auxiliary Airfield, a spacecraft tracking station and airfield located 1,000 miles off the coast of West Africa that has been used by the U.S. since 1957; and warehouses at the airport and seaport in Mombasa, Kenya, that were built in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s only the beginning, not the end of the matter.\u00a0For years, various reporters<\/a>\u00a0have shed light on hush-hush\u00a0outposts<\/a>\u2013most of them built, upgraded, or expanded since 9\/11\u2013dotting the continent, including so-called cooperative security locations<\/a>\u00a0(CSLs). Earlier this year, AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez\u00a0disclosed<\/a>\u00a0that there were actually 11 such sites.\u00a0Again, devoted AFRICOM-watchers knew that this, too, was just the start of a larger story, but when I asked Africa Command for a list of bases, camps and other sites, as I periodically have done, I was treated like a sap.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn all, AFRICOM has access to 11 CSLs across Africa. Of course, we have one major military facility on the continent: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti,\u201d Anthony Falvo, AFRICOM\u2019s Public Affairs chief, told me.\u00a0Falvo was peddling numbers that both he and I know perfectly well are, at best, misleading. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the most troubling aspects of our military policy in Africa, and overseas generally, that the military can\u2019t be, and seems totally resistant to being, honest and transparent about what it\u2019s doing,\u201d says David Vine, author of\u00a0Base Nation<\/em><\/a>: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Research by\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>indicates that in recent years the U.S. military has, in fact, developed a remarkably extensive network of more than 60 outposts and access points in Africa.\u00a0Some are currently being utilized, some are held in reserve, and some may be shuttered.\u00a0These bases, camps, compounds, port facilities, fuel bunkers, and other sites can be found in at least 34 countries\u2013more than 60 percent of the nations on the continent\u2013many of them\u00a0corrupt<\/a>, repressive<\/a>\u00a0states<\/a>\u00a0with\u00a0poor<\/a>\u00a0human rights<\/a>\u00a0records.\u00a0The U.S. also operates \u201cOffices of Security Cooperation and Defense Attach\u00c3\u00a9 Offices in approximately 38 [African] nations,\u201d according to Falvo, and has struck close to 30 agreements to use international airports in Africa as refueling centers.<\/p>\n

There is no reason to believe that even this represents a complete accounting of America\u2019s growing archipelago of African outposts.\u00a0Although it\u2019s possible that a few sites are being counted twice due to AFRICOM\u2019s failure to provide basic information or clarification, the list\u00a0TomDispatch<\/em>\u00a0has developed indicates that the U.S. military has created a network of bases that goes far beyond what AFRICOM has disclosed to the American public, let alone to Africans.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"U.S.<\/p>\n

AFRICOM\u2019s Base Bonanza<\/strong><\/p>\n

When AFRICOM became an independent command in 2008, Camp Lemonnier was reportedly still one of the few American outposts on the continent.\u00a0In the years since, the U.S. has embarked on nothing short of a building boom\u2013even if the command is loath to refer to it in those terms.\u00a0As a result, it\u2019s now able to carry out increasing numbers of overt and covert missions, from training exercises to drone assassinations.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the shadows of what was once called the \u201cdark continent,\u201d a scramble has come and gone. If you heard nothing about it, that was by design. But look hard enough and\u2013north to south, east to west\u2013you\u2019ll find the fruits of that effort: a network of bases, compounds, and other sites whose sum total exceeds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":203651,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-203650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}