How Did 3 American Commandos and 3 Moroccan Women End Up Dead at the Bottom of the Niger River? [View all]

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http://www.thenation.com/article/204849/how-did-3-american-commandos-and-3-moroccan-women-end-dead-bottom-niger-river



Inside the shadowy operations of the US Africa Command.

How Did 3 American Commandos and 3 Moroccan Women End Up Dead at the Bottom of the Niger River?
Nick Turse
April 21, 2015

~snip~

A Command With Something to Hide

In the years since, US Africa Command or AFRICOM, which is responsible for military operations on that continent, has remained remarkably silent about this shadowy incident in a country that had recently seen its democratically elected president deposed in a coup led by an American-trained officer, a country with which the United States had suspended military relations a month earlier. It was, to say the least, strange. But it wasn’t the first time US military personnel died under murky circumstances in Africa, nor the first (or last) time the specter of untoward behavior led to a criminal investigation. In fact, as American military operations have ramped up across Africa, reaching a record 674 missions in 2014, reports of excessive drinking, sex with prostitutes, drug use, sexual assaults, and other forms of violence by AFRICOM personnel have escalated, even though many of them have been kept under wraps for weeks or months, sometimes even for years.

“Our military is built on a reputation of enduring core values that are at the heart of our character,” Major (then Brigadier) General Wayne Grigsby Jr., the former chief of AFRICOM’s subordinate command, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), wrote in an address to troops last year. “Part of belonging to this elite team is living by our core values and professionalism every day. Incorporating those values into everything we do is called our profession of arms.”

But legal documents, Pentagon reports, and criminal investigation files, many of them obtained by TomDispatch through dozens of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and never before revealed, demonstrate that AFRICOM personnel have all too regularly behaved in ways at odds with those “core values.” The squeaky clean image the command projects through news releases, official testimony before Congress, and mainstream media articles—often by cherry-picked journalists who are granted access to otherwise unavailable personnel and locales—doesn’t hold up to inspection.

“As a citizen and soldier, I appreciate how important it is to have an informed public that helps to provide accountable governance and is also important in the preservation of the trust between a military and a society and nation it serves,” AFRICOM Commander General David Rodriguez said at a press conference last year. Checking out these revelations of misdeeds with AFRICOM’S media office to determine just how representative they are, however, has proven impossible.

..

Read the article to find out the how.