Euphemisms and Deception

By Adel – PeaceMaker
January 06, 2010

The United States military operations in Central Africa, from which programs pursuing economic, political and military dominance are projected into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda. Kenya and Ethiopia have served as U.S. bases from which Special Operations Command (SOCOM) forces have been striking out and penetrating Somalia. Somalia offers the perfect route through which to pump out Ethiopian oil secured, for by the genocide of the native population. Yet this genocide is off the radar of the "Stop Genocide!" coalitions and their extensive Genocide Intervention forces precisely because the government of Ethiopia is a U.S./U.K./Israeli client state.

Back in the 1990’s, the U.S. military’s Operation Restore Hope was never a "humanitarian" mission in Somalia: that was the cover story provided by the Pentagon and peddled by the mainstream media. The story peddled the idea of an African "peacekeeping" force (to include Uganda, Nigeria and South African troops) to quell violence in Somalia is absurd; the possibility of this being raised only underscores the extent to which the general public is so easily sold on the language of euphemisms and deception.

The United States abandoned Operation Restore Hope in Somalia immediately after the fiasco of October 03, 1993 (the U.S. raid on Mogadishu in Somalia, in which 18 soldiers and over 1000 Somali militia and civilians killed with 3000-4000 injured, of which the majority was civilians). From that point on nothing the Americans did was meant directly to affect the situation on the ground; everything was aimed at minimizing negative political fallout back home until they packed up and left five months later.

Two weeks after the American departure, a plane was shot down in Kigali, Rwanda, killing the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and setting off what may be the worst concentrated massacre in human history. Journalists followed the events. Money followed the news. And the Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) followed the money. Somalia was forgotten.

The American public has been completely misinformed about the role that the their government played in shooting down the plane in Rwanda, in 1994, and the double presidential assassinations that sparked the "genocide" there, and wiped clean the public memory of the massive media deceptions on Somalia.

While the Pentagon have for some years now been running a covert intervention in Somalia, the absence of any coverage at all by the Anglo-American or European press is not surprising. There has been nothing to inform the American public of the illegal shipments of cash and/or weapons funneled to factions on the ground in Somalia.

And now the U.S. is back in Somalia trumpeting the ubiquitous threat of Islamic Jihad. But it doesn’t even matter: most people are completely unaware that the U.S. is involved and naively accept the propaganda peddling Somalia’s latest misfortune as a war between African (Ethiopia and Somalia) nations.

In its coverage on Somalia, the Western press mentioned nothing about the private military companies and SOCOM operations that occurred throughout 2006, or of SOCOM covert operations training for Ethiopian troops at Camp United in Hurso, Ethiopia, both of which laid the groundwork for the escalated invasion of December 2006. It was a U.S. military invasion backed by Ethiopia, and not an Ethiopian invasion "given a green light" by the U.S.

The United States has major military alliances with Nigeria and South Africa as well, each serving to further the corporate military agenda. Nigeria is the most notable story in media whiteout, where the petroleum companies are waging a sustained and low-intensity genocide against the indigenous peoples of the Niger River Delta (Shell Oil began operations in the Niger River Delta in 1958 and they have given nothing back except suffering and violence).

In 2006, Israeli defense conglomerate Aeronautic Defense Systems Ltd. secured a controversial $276 million contract to supply Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs)—aerial robotic drones for surveillance and attack—to be used by the Nigerian military against people fighting for their survival against genocide in the oil-producing Niger Delta region.

Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI)—a mercenary firm founded by 32 retired U.S. generals—has been training the Nigerian military. Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root, and with the involvement of French and Japanese companies, has been caught red-handed bribing Nigerian officials for petroleum-related contracts.

The suggestion, therefore, that the U.S. military’s Operation Restore Hope was a "humanitarian" mission in Somalia or the African "peacekeeping" force in Somalia is absurd and the possibility of these being raised only underscores the extent to which the general public is so easily sold on the language of euphemisms and deception. This is an example of shameless propaganda, as simplistic and misleading in its attention to the geopolitical realities in Somalia.