Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Information dotted everywhere … and getting connected?

Thursday, March 11, 2010

PRESS PREDICTIONS COME TRUE very easily sometimes. I’m on record as being loath to make them, especially at the turn of a year. But on December 31st, 2009 I did nevertheless presage a few (pretty obvious) news events for 2010.

One was an Oscar nomination – though not outright victory, just to emphasize the limits to my soothsaying – for Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker as best picture. Another was a US Special Forces-backed assault on Islamic jihadists in that under-reported theater of war, Somalia.

Well now, three months into the year, the flow of information has quickened, and very clear media flags are being raised all over the place about the imminence of such an operation. Connecting all these dots is not hard.

General William Ward (above left) head of the US Military’s Africa Command, told a Senate hearing two days ago that a push to retake the capital, Mogadishu, was "a work in progress".

The main thrust, it’s widely accepted, will be an all-out offensive by the US-backed, but wobbly, Somali government, helped by the African Union’s “peacekeeping” mission in the country. In addition, General Ward alluded to “something that we would look to do in support”.

General Ward’s deliberately opaque language connects up with much clearer words from – naturally – an unnamed but evidently senior US official who spoke to The New York Times five days ago. He had talked of American covert forces providing the “support” that General Ward was later to mention.

“What you’re likely to see is airstrikes and Special Ops moving in, hitting and getting out”, said the official – who “was not authorized to speak publicly” to quote the Times’ standard, and rather coy, phrasing. (That always sounds terribly faux-naif to me; are we really expected to believe the speaker is talking without permission?)

Happy to be on the record, of course, was General Mohamed Gelle Kahiye, the new chief of Somalia’s military. Referring to drones flying over jihadi-held areas, he said “It’s the Americans. They’re helping us.”

 

  

 

You can follow this column on TWITTER – by clicking HERE 

 

EVERY WEEK THE CONNECTICUT NPR STATION, WHDD, AIRS A

DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN, with program host MARSHALL MILES

       - Broadcast on Fridays at 7.35am, Saturdays at 4.45pm and Sundays at 6.45pm.

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE

 

CONVENIENTLY, JUST AT THE TIME the US will need some international “cover”, in the form of wider agreement on its justifications for armed intervention in Somalia, there’s been a leak – again, perhaps unsurprisingly, to The New York Times – of a United Nations report commissioned for its Security Council.

With little information that’s really new, the humanitarian efforts in Somalia handled by the UN’s World Food Program are portrayed in the report as suffering all the usual problems of local corruption, skimming, and misdirection.

But this time it’s the Islamic jihadists, notably Al-Qaeda’s local allies Al-Shabaab, who are firmly blamed for half of the international community’s food supplies not reaching the starving population that needs them. (As well, that is, as corrupt contractors and feckless local UN staff, who get their own share of blame as well.)

The report red-flags the fact that 80 percent of the WFP’s transportation contracts are in the hands of just three Somali businessmen, all connected to some degree with the Islamist forces.

The report doesn’t mention this, but American officials now stress in their daily talking-points that Al-Shabaab has been demanding a $20,000 “protection” shake-down from the WFP every few months, and insisting that the agency replace its female employees with men.

In the Obama Administration’s view, it seems like plenty of reasons are mounting for aggressive steps “to turn around some of the instability and lack of governance that we've experienced”, to use General Ward’s words on Capitol Hill.

It may take a lot more than this, though, to persuade an American public that probably still associates Somalia with the “Black Hawk Down” episode of 1993, and the dragging of 18 American corpses through the streets, which led to the Clinton Administration’s hasty exit from the country.



OTHER DOTS ARE CONNECTING UP. Some are odd and tenuous, but nonetheless telling - about Somalia’s role in the wider world of Islamist extremism.

American media have been understandable taken by the new - but inevitable - phenomenon of a home-grown, female jihadist allegedly at work within the US. Mug-shots of Colleen LaRose (above right) a.k.a. “Jihad Jane” from (quite literally) a Pennsylvania Main Street, have peppered front pages, TV back-projections and news websites, together with “backgrounders” about her reported role in recruiting terrorists.

LaRose is also being charged – though the details are not spelled out in her indictment – with involvement in a plot to kill Swedish conceptual artist and sometime cartoonist Lars Vilks, in concert with seven Muslim men and women who were arrested earlier this week in Ireland.

Vilks’ drawing of the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog had enraged much Muslim opinion, and prompted a $100,000 bounty to be placed on his head by Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Speaking from the “panic room” in his home at a now-secret location, Vilks is telling journalists that he had received two threats on his life over the phone, originating in Somalia.

The caller reminded him of the ax-attack on his fellow cartoonist, the Dane Kurt Westergaard – who had portrayed the Prophet with a bomb in his turban. Police officers alerted by Westergaard managed to shoot and disable that attacker. His name has still not been officially released (since the New Year’s Day murder attempt) but he is known to be a 28-year old Somali.

According to Jakob Scharf, the head of Denmark's intelligence service PET, the Somali has “close relations to the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab and Al-Qaeda leaders in eastern Africa”.

Danish reporters are working on a story that this same Somali attacker was involved in a plot to kill Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her East African visit last August.

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -