What the military will say to a reporter and what is said behind closed doors are two very different things – especially when it comes to the U.S. military in Africa. Nick Turse Read Quote
Whether I’m trying to figure out what the U.S. military is doing in Latin America or Africa, Afghanistan or Qatar, the response is remarkably uniform – obstruction and obfuscation, hurdles and hindrances. In short, the good old-fashioned military runaround. Nick Turse Read Quote
Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11. Nick Turse Read Quote
Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world. Nick Turse Read Quote
Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep – not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day. Nick Turse Read Quote
The U.S. has taken an active role in wars from Libya to the Central African Republic, sent special ops forces into countries from Somalia to South Sudan, conducted airstrikes and abduction missions, even put boots on the ground in countries where it pledged it would not. Nick Turse Read Quote
If the present is any guide, government-sanctioned, counterfeit history is in your future. Nick Turse Read Quote
The thing that really struck me was how many firms that we think of as strictly civilian had ties to the Pentagon. Companies like Apple, Starbucks, Oakley the sunglasses manufacturer. Even Google, and a lot of big corporations like PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, and Nestle, that you don’t normally think of as defense contractors. Nick Turse Read Quote
U.S. failures when it comes to the Gulf of Guinea are many: a failure to address the longstanding concerns of a government watchdog agency, a failure to effectively combat piracy despite an outlay of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and a failure to confront corrupt African leaders who enable piracy in the first place. Nick Turse Read Quote
The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military’s elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road. Nick Turse Read Quote
