From the invasion of Uganda to the calls for a permanent strike force in the wake of the attack on the US Consulate in Libya, the Pentagon’s African Command (Africom) seems focused on building its military footprint. In the meantime though, it’s all about web presence.
$3 million of Africom’s annual budget is dedicated to a pair of seemingly private “news” websites pushing US interests in the region, including a Somalia-focused site, sabahionline.com, which touts the merits of the US-backed Somali “transitional government” while predicting the imminent destruction of al-Shabaab. The other site, magharebia.com, is focused on northwestern Africa, touting Libya’s status in the wake of the US-backed NATO war.
Though the Pentagon’s “information war” in Iraq sparked considerable criticism, there doesn’t appear to be any interest in hiding what Africom is doing here, and the only reason they have remained more or less secret over the past 10 months is that the sites are so sparsely visited no one had even heard of them.
Africom seems quite pleased with the situation though, bragging about them in a press release today, claiming that between the two sites they manage to court 4,000 unique visitors a day, and upwards of 10,000 page reads. Considering the significant amount of money being pumped into advertising the two sites, it is hard to see this as a success, and likewise it is hard to imagine that convincing a handful of readers that Libya and Somalia are going well will do anything to make it so.
Libya was not about oil or any other natural resources.., the NATO bombardment and their support of terrorism in Libya and in Middle East (Syria) is about Africa, look at the map from central Asia to Persian gulf to entire northern Africa is the plan drown by pentagon to be militarized by the USA and NATO.
Page reads are not the same as convincing someone.
It would take a very special sort of fool to see Somalia as a success in anything.
There is no reason to think these blatant lies have convinced anyone of the propaganda they shill. The handful of visitors, if informed enough to find the sites, can only be laughing.
Well at least they are upfront about what they are on their home page. That’s more than can be said about the government propaganda outlets called the mainstream media here in the US.
The merely curious frequenting Antiwar that will click on the above links will probably double their hit count…"See, we're winning hearts and minds with all these hits, General Dingleberry."