President Barack Obama’s much-heralded “Africa Leaders’ Summit,” held in Washington, DC amid an epidemic of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa, was a grandiose photo opportunity for African leaders and corporate tycoons eager to further the exploitation of the African continent. Although Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma canceled their trips to Washington in order to deal with the Ebola epidemic ravaging their nations, other African leaders were happy to rub shoulders with American billionaire businessmen and senior officers of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) . . .
AFRICOM has become the corporate centurions for U.S. oil and mining companies and other natural resource exploiters to ensure that Africa’s vast reserves of oil, diamonds, platinum, gold, uranium, and columbite-tantalite (col-tan) remain in Western, particularly American and Israeli, hands.
American plans to dominate Africa’s oil and precious metals markets is the reason why Hunter Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden, was present at the White House state dinner for the African leaders. The younger Biden is a member of the board of Ukrainian-Israeli business mogul’s Burisma Holdings, Ltd., which is not only involved in oil drilling and natural gas “fracking” in Ukraine but has its sights set on lucrative natural gas and oil fields in Africa. It also helps that another Burisma board member, Devon Archer, is a close personal friend and Yale roommate of Christopher Heinz, the stepson of Secretary of State John Kerry.
Bloomberg News chief and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also at the White House state dinner, along with a number of other Bloomberg corporate officials. Bloomberg has the power, through his media empire, to make or break African governments and their economies. Complementing Bloomberg’s presence was a number of other actual and potential exploiters of Africa, including Richard Blum, the head of the vulture capitalist firms CB Richard Ellis, Newbridge Capital, and Blum Capital, and, more importantly, the husband of Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein; Jack Rosen, the chairman of the American Jewish Congress; David Rubinstein, the co-founder of the powerful Carlyle Group; and Stephen Schwarzmann, the president and chief executive officer of the Rothschild family-connected Blackstone Group.
Also present at the state dinner were five individuals who are able, with one phone call, to foment the next “themed revolution” in Africa or anywhere else in the world for that matter: National Security Adviser Susan Rice; UN ambassador Samantha Power and her husband, the master of disinformation campaigns, former White House “information czar” Cass Sunstein; General David Rodriguez, the commander of AFRICOM; and John Prendergast, the public face of the Central Intelligence Agency’s destabilization campaigns in Africa using Prendergast’s celebrity friends, actors George Clooney and Angelina Jolie. These individuals, using a combination of Hollywood-led propaganda techniques, military involvement, and co-option of human rights groups to advocate a “responsibility to protect” or “R2P,” have successfully undermined the governments of Sudan, Eritrea, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Kenya.
Africa’s use by the West as a “playground” for military, bio-medical field testing, and cockamamie economic schemes has been the rule rather than the exception. Much of this back room dealing is exposed in this writer’s book, “Decade of Death: Secret Wars and Genocide in Africa: 1993-2003.”
Rice and Prendergast have had their bloody hands in the Sudan conflict for years. In July 2005, Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) chief John Garang was killed in the crash of a Belarusian-supplied helicopter belonging to Ugandan President and U.S. military ally Yoweri Museveni. Rice and her sorority of “Africa strongman fans” preferred to use certain African dictators, particularly Museveni, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, and Garang, as pass-through agents in America’s attempt to oust Sudanese President Omar Bashir from power in Khartoum. Rice’s hatred for Bashir has bordered on pathological. Bashir was one of only a few African leaders not invited to Obama’s “Africa fest” at the White House.
Suspiciously, Museveni immediately clamped down on the Ugandan press after it speculated that Garang was killed in a carefully-planned conspiracy. Garang had just spent nearly two days at Museveni’s rural estate and after the chopper went missing, Museveni’s government remained mum about the circumstances of Garang’s disappearance. After Garang’s body was recovered from the crash site, Museveni, without permission from Khartoum, flew into Yei, Sudan, in order to view Garang’s corpse. Then Museveni sought to stoke conspiracy claims by suggesting that Garang’s plane might have been shot down. Museveni was clearly attempting to implicate Sudan. It is also suspicious that the United States sent investigators to the crash site. Washington had no role in the affair other than its possible involvement in the aerial assassination. The helicopter was Russian-made (therefore Russian investigators appeared on the scene). In addition, other principal players—Uganda, Sudan, and Kenya (the latter brokered the Sudan peace accord that resulted in the nation splitting in two)—all sent investigators.
There were other inconsistencies with Garang’s death. Seventeen bodies were recovered from the crash site yet the passenger manifest only listed 14. The United Nations confirmed 17 bodies. There were reports that Rwandan intelligence agents had sneaked on board the helicopter and may have been involved in a “hit” on Garang. What is more suspicious are reports that Garang’s helicopter landed at Old Entebbe Airport to pick up additional “passengers” after it departed Museveni’s ranch home on its way back to Sudan. Old Entebbe Airport has, for quite some time, been a base for U.S. Special Forces, the CIA, and P-3 Orion naval surveillance planes operating in East Africa.
But the most dramatic revelation was that present at Garang’s meeting with Museveni were the ambassadors of the United States and the Netherlands and the British High Commissioner to Uganda. These three nations were involved, through Royal Dutch Shell and other oil companies, in exploration in the Great Lakes Region.
U.S.Ambassador Jimmy Kolker, a graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota, facilitated a close relationship between Museveni and then-Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman (who won his Senate seat largely as a result of the suspicious plane crash that killed Senator Paul Wellstone). Joke Brandt, the Dutch ambassador, was affiliated with the globalist and Shell Oil-linked Netherlands Institute for International Relations (“Clingendael”). There were reports that Garang argued with Museveni and the Western ambassadors over oil and mineral exploration rights in South Sudan, especially after the nation achieved its independence from Khartoum. Garang turned out to be no pushover for Museveni and the American, British, and Dutch envoys. With a PhD in economics, Garang understood the worth of Sudan’s natural resources and what was an equitable share for his people. As a graduate of the commander’s course at Fort Benning, Georgia, Garang was also familiar with the connections between U.S. and British covert and overt Special Forces in the region and Western oil companies and mining firms. For Garang, having such knowledge may have earned him a death sentence and it appears that Susan Rice was more than willing to throw her old friend off of a cliff in order to protect the interests of Western oil companies in South Sudan.
One can only wonder what Rice and South Sudan’s cowboy hat-wearing President, Salva Kiir Mayardit, discussed at the state dinner on the South Lawn of the White House. There were strong rumors in South Sudan that Kiir, the vice president under Garang, had something to do with Garang’s death. Rice was certainly not as upset over Garang’s death as she was with the 2012 sudden heart attack that killed Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi, who Rice eulogized at his Addis Ababa funeral as “brilliant” and “uncommonly wise.”
Rice, who is married to Canadian television news producer Ian Cameron, is strongly rumored to have had more than a mere professional relationship with her African dictator friends. After the sudden death of her old friend Garang, Rice immediately struck up a close friendship with Kiir. However, Rice had much less tolerance for Kiir’s former vice president Riek Machar, who, after being fired by Kiir, launched a bloody rebellion against South Sudan’s government. For Rice, South Sudan has been her personal playground and it is a country that would not even exist had it not been for the personal stake in its independence displayed by Rice and her friends, including Prendergast, Power, Clooney, Jolie, as well as Rice’s godmother, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Africa faces a dismal future as the forces of vulture capitalism, amateur state craft—as displayed by the likes of Rice and Power, and militarized U.S. diplomacy coalesce to determine Africa’s fate. The worst facet of this Africa policy was on full display among the “glitterati” of Washington, DC, at the Africa Summit and White House state dinner. The back room machinations that involved U.S. relations with South Sudan over the years is easily mirrored in U.S. relations with other countries on the continent, relations that are determined more by commercial and military interests than by any commitment to human rights and economic development.
This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
