Thread: Why U.S. military in Uganda? Soros fingerprints all over it

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Why U.S. military in Uganda? Soros fingerprints all over it

Obama's billionaire friend has interests in African country's oil

Posted: October 15, 2011
4:30 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2011 WND
several links on this post

After President Barack Obama announced earlier this week that he would be sending American troops into Uganda, WND uncovered billionaire activist George Soros' ties both to the political pressure behind the decision and to the African nation's fledgling oil industry.

Soros sits on the executive board of an influential "crisis management organization" that recently recommended the U.S. deploy a special advisory military team to Uganda to help with operations and run an intelligence platform, a recommendation Obama's action seems to fulfill.

The president emeritus of that organization, the International Crisis Group, is also the principal author of "Responsibility to Protect," the military doctrine used by Obama to justify the U.S.-led NATO campaign in Libya.

Soros' own Open Society Institute is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect, a doctrine that has been cited many times by activists urging intervention in Uganda.

Authors and advisers of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, including a center founded and led by Samantha Power, the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights, also helped to found the International Criminal Court.

Several of the doctrine's main founders also sit on boards with Soros, who is a major proponent of the doctrine.

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Soros also maintains close ties to oil interests in Uganda. His organizations have been leading efforts purportedly to facilitate more transparency in Uganda's oil industry, which is being tightly controlled by the country's leadership.

Soros' hand in Ugandan oil industry

Oil exploration began in Uganda's northwestern Lake Albert basin nearly a decade ago, with initial strikes being made in 2006.

Uganda's Energy Ministry estimates the country has over 2 billion barrels of oil, with some estimates going as high as 6 billion barrels. Production is set to begin in 2015, delayed from 2013 in part because the country has not put in place a regulatory framework for the oil industry.

A 2008 national oil and gas policy, proposed with aid from a Soros-funded group, was supposed to be a general road map for the handling and use of the oil. However, the policy's recommendations have been largely ignored, with critics accusing Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni of corruption and of tightening his grip on the African country's emerging oil sector.

Soros himself has been closely tied to oil and other interests in Uganda.

In 2008, the Soros-funded Revenue Watch Institute brought together stakeholders from Uganda and other East African countries to discuss critical governance issues, including the formation of what became Uganda's national oil and gas policy.

Also in 2008, the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, a grantee of the Soros-funded Revenue Watch, helped established the Publish What You Pay Coalition of Uganda, or PWYP, which was purportedly launched to coordinate and streamline the efforts of the government in promoting transparency and accountability in the oil sector.

Also, a steering committee was formed for PWYP Uganda to develop an agenda for implementing the oil advocacy initiatives and a constitution to guide PWYP's oil work.

PWYP has since 2006 hosted a number of training workshops in Uganda purportedly to promote contract transparency in Uganda's oil sector.

PWYP is directly funded by Soros' Open Society as well as the the Soros-funded Revenue Watch Institute. PWYP international is actually hosted by the Open Society Foundation in London.

The billionaire's Open Society Institute, meanwhile, runs numerous offices in Uganda. It maintains a country manager in Uganda, as well as the Open Society Initiative for East Africa, which supports work in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

The Open Society Institute runs a Ugandan Youth Action Fund, which states its mission is to "identify, inspire, and support small groups of dedicated young people who can mobilize and influence large numbers of their peers to promote open society ideals."

U.S. troops to Uganda

Obama yesterday notified House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, that he plans to send about 100 military personnel, mostly Special Operations Forces, to central Africa. The first troops reportedly arrived in Uganda on Wednesday.

The U.S. mission will be to advise forces seeking to kill or capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA. Kony is accused of major human rights atrocities. He is on the U.S. terrorist list and is wanted by the International Criminal Court.

In a letter on Friday, Obama announced the initial team of U.S. military personnel "with appropriate combat equipment" deployed to Uganda on Wednesday. Other forces deploying include "a second combat-equipped team and associated headquarters, communications and logistics personnel."

"Our forces will provide information, advice and assistance to select partner nation forces," he said.

Both conservatives and liberals have raised questions about whether military involvement in Uganda advances U.S. interests.

Writing in The Atlantic yesterday, Max Fisher noted the Obama administration last year approved special forces bases and operations across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia.

"But those operations, large and small, target terrorist groups and rogue states that threaten the U.S. – something the Lord's Resistance Army could not possibly do," he wrote.

"It's difficult to find a U.S. interest at stake in the Lord's Resistance Army's campaign of violence," continued Fisher. "It's possible that there's some immediate U.S. interest at stake we can't obviously see."

Bill Roggio, the managing editor of The Long War Journal, referred to the Obama administration's stated rationale for sending troops "puzzling," claiming the LRA does not present a national security threat to the U.S. – "despite what President Obama said."

Tea-party-backed presidential candidate Michele Bachmann also questioned the wisdom of Obama's move to send U.S. troops to Uganda.

"When it comes to sending our brave men and women into foreign nations, we have to first demonstrate a vital American national interest before we send our troops in," she said at a campaign stop yesterday in Iowa.

Soros group: Send military advisors to Uganda

In April 2010 Soros' International Crisis Group, or ICG, released a report sent to the White House and key lawmakers advising the U.S. military run special operations in Uganda to seek Kony's capture.

The report states, "To the U.S. government: Deploy a team to the theatre of operations to run an intelligence platform that centralizes all operational information from the Ugandan and other armies, as well as the U.N. and civilian networks, and provides analysis to the Ugandans to better target military operations."

Since 2008 the U.S. has been providing financial aid in the form of military equipment to Uganda and the other regional countries to fight Kony's LRA, but Obama's new deployment escalates the direct U.S. involvement.

Soros sits in the ICG's executive board along with Samuel Berger, Bill Clinton's former national security advisor; George J. Mitchell, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader who served as a Mideast envoy to both Obama and President Bush; and Javier Solana, a socialist activist who is NATO's former secretary-general as well as the former foreign affairs minister of Spain.

Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is the ICG's senior advisor.

The ICG's president emeritus is Gareth Evans, who, together with activist Ramesh Thakur, is the original founder of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, with the duo even coining the term "responsibility to protect."

Both Evans and Thakur serve as advisory board members of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, the main group pushing the doctrine.

As WND first exposed, Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect.

Soros' Open Society is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Government sponsors include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda and the U.K.

Samantha Power, Arafat deputy

Meanwhile, a closer look at the Soros-funded Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect is telling. Board members of the group include former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Ireland President Mary Robinson and South African activist Desmond Tutu. Robinson and Tutu have recently made solidarity visits to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as members of a group called The Elders, which includes former President Jimmy Carter.

WND was first to report the committee that devised the Responsibility to Protect doctrine included Arab League Secretary General Amre Moussa as well as Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.

Also, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy has a seat on the advisory board of the 2001 commission that originally founded Responsibility to Protect. The commission is called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It invented the term "responsibility to protect" while defining its guidelines.

The Carr Center is a research center concerned with human rights located at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Samantha Power, the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights, was Carr's founding executive director and headed the institute at the time it advised in the founding of Responsibility to Protect.

With Power's center on the advisory board, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty first defined the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

Power reportedly heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the decision to bomb Libya, widely regarded as test of Responsibility to Protect in action.

In his address to the nation in April explaining the NATO campaign in Libya, Obama cited the doctrine as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya.

Responsibility to Protect, or Responsibility to Act, as cited by Obama, is a set of principles, now backed by the United Nations, based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege, but a responsibility that can be revoked if a country is accused of "war crimes," "genocide," "crimes against humanity" or "ethnic cleansing."

The term "war crimes" has at times been indiscriminately used by various United Nations-backed international bodies, including the International Criminal Court, or ICC, which applied it to Israeli anti-terror operations in the Gaza Strip. There has been fear the ICC could be used to prosecute U.S. troops who commit alleged "war crimes" overseas.

Soros: Right to 'penetrate nation-states'

Soros himself outlined the fundamentals of Responsibility to Protect in a 2004 Foreign Policy magazine article titled "The People's Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World's Most Vulnerable Populations."

In the article Soros said, "True sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments."

"If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified," Soros wrote. "By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states' borders to protect the rights of citizens.

"In particular," he continued, "the principle of the people's sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict."

'One World Order'

The Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, meanwhile, works in partnership with the World Federalist Movement, a group that promotes democratized global institutions with plenary constitutional power. The Movement is a main coordinator and member of Responsibility to Protect Center.

WND reported that Responsibility doctrine founder Thakur recently advocated for a "global rebalancing" and "international redistribution" to create a "New World Order."

In a piece last March in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, "Toward a new world order," Thakur wrote, "Westerners must change lifestyles and support international redistribution."

He was referring to a United Nations-brokered international climate treaty in which he argued, "Developing countries must reorient growth in cleaner and greener directions."

In the opinion piece, Thakur then discussed recent military engagements and how the financial crisis has impacted the U.S.

"The West's bullying approach to developing nations won't work anymore – global power is shifting to Asia," he wrote. "A much-needed global moral rebalancing is in train."

Thakur continued: "Westerners have lost their previous capacity to set standards and rules of behavior for the world. Unless they recognize this reality, there is little prospect of making significant progress in deadlocked international negotiations."

Thakur contended "the demonstration of the limits to U.S. and NATO power in Iraq and Afghanistan has left many less fearful of 'superior' Western power."

With research by Brenda J. Elliott

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=356321

D.C. is nothing more than a International Crime Syndicate that uses our Nations wealth to finance our Armed Forces that are used to Confiscate other Nations Resourses that are given to Oligarks

Mexico ~ Oil (ATF Gun Runner) used to distabilize Mexico so that the Oil can be taken... just wait... its coming / Drug Trafficing is picking up and there is no fence for a reason

Libya ~ Oil will now be taken; a Central Bank Installed in Record Time; Gold GONE ... Moderate Government replaced by Radical Extreamists

Iraq ~ Oil ... lots and lots of Oil

Afghanistan ~ Precious Metals / Poppy Fields Galore / Oil Pipeline

Georgia ~ Oil Pipeline

Iranian ~ Oil

Pakistan ~ GWOT

Egypt ~ Moderate Government replaced by Radical Extreamists

Serbia ~ Kosovo taken from Serbia by NATO is now replaced by a Muslim government

Syria ~ GWOT

Uganda ~ Oil / Precious Metals / Gem Capital of the world

Rawanda ~ Sorry ... no oil / no precious Metals / No Invasion .. we will not intervein

That war mongering kite

Obama pushes US military into African conflict

By Mark S. Smith and Bradley Klapper
October 17, 2011 6:21 am

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States is venturing into one of Africa's bloodiest conflicts, sending about 100 U.S. troops to central Africa to support a years-long fight against a guerrilla group accused of horrific atrocities.

The Obama administration said the troops will advise, not engage in combat, unless forced to defend themselves.

In a letter to Congress, President Barack Obama said Friday that the troops will assist local forces in a long-running battle against the Lord's Resistance Army, considered one of Africa's most ruthless rebel groups, and help to hunt down its notorious leader, Joseph Kony.

The first of the troops arrived in Uganda on Wednesday, the White House said, and others will be sent to South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

While the size of the U.S. footprint is small, Obama's announcement represents a highly unusual intervention for the United States. Although some American troops are based in Djibouti and small groups of soldiers have been deployed to Somalia, the U.S. traditionally has been reluctant to commit forces to help African nations put down insurgencies.

It demonstrates the Obama administration's escalating attention to and fears about security risks in Africa, including terror networks, piracy and unstable nations. The move was intended to show some engagement to lessen the impact of one of the worst protracted wars in Africa.

Obama declared his decision to send troops as in keeping with the national security interests of the United States. The White House announced it in a low-key fashion, releasing the Obama notification and justification of the troop deployment that the president sent to congressional leaders.

Pentagon officials said the bulk of the deployment will be of special operations troops, who will provide security and combat training to African units. The move raises the profile of U.S. involvement on the continent - and represents an apparent victory for administration officials who have argued for more robust intervention in humanitarian crises.

The change in policy could reflect the long-standing concerns of a number of high-ranking Obama advisers left scarred by the U.S. failure in the 1990s to intervene to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the belated action to finally halt the violence in Bosnia. For a current parallel, the Lord's Resistance Army's 24-year campaign of rebellion, rape and murder represents one of the world's worst human rights crises today.

Coming off the administration's successful, if limited, intervention in Libya, the Uganda deployment represents a continued effort by Obama to use military force for humanitarian protection in areas where atrocities are occurring. Sending 100 troops may not be significant in terms of military numbers, but the composition of the force gives the United States a new counterterrorism foothold in a region of the world with terrorist networks, pirates and unstable nations.

A special forces unit can be highly effective beyond what the number of soldiers might suggest. They are highly skilled in disrupting insurgency networks by discovering where rebels are based and how they procure guns, money and other logistical support.

The Lord's Resistance Army has been pushing westward since it began its attacks years go, and the administration and human rights groups say its atrocities have left thousands dead and have put as many as 300,000 Africans to flight. They have charged the group with seizing children to bolster its ranks of soldiers and sometimes forcing them to become sex slaves.

Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court under a 2005 warrant for crimes against humanity in his native Uganda. A self-styled prophet, who mixes Christian mysticism with politics, he is believed hiding along the Sudan-Congo border.

Most of the troops will deploy to regional capitals to work with government officials and military commanders on countering the rebels and protecting civilians, Pentagon officials said.

In recent months, the administration has stepped up its support for Uganda, which has played a key role in battling extremists in Somalia.

In June, the Pentagon moved to send nearly $45 million in military equipment to Uganda and Burundi. The aid included four small drones, body armor and night-vision and communications gear and is being used in the fight against al-Shabab, an al-Qaida-linked group that U.S. officials see as an increasing threat and that African peace-keeping troops in Somalia have been battling to suppress.

At the State Department, officials portrayed the new troop deployment as part of a larger anti-LRA strategy that dates to the Bush administration but also includes legislation passed by Congress this year.

Col. Felix Kulayigye, Uganda's military spokesman, said of the troops: "We are aware that they are coming. We are happy about it. We look forward to working with them and eliminating Kony and his fighters."

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Associated Press writers Ben Feller, Matthew Lee, Lolita C. Baldor, Erica Werner and Donna Cassata in Washington and Godfrey Olukya in Kampala, Uganda, contributed to this report

http://www.gopusa.com/news/2011/10/17/o ... bscriber=1