Which is exactly what you’d expect an employee of Ron Paul to say.
Via Ron Paul Institute:
[Y]es, what happened in Kenya is a terrorist act. But for Obama to tell the rest of the story would undermine his narrative and unravel Washington’s strange relationship with the al-Qaeda affilliated al-Shabaab organization that claimed responsibility for the attack. Al-Shabaab, or “Mujahideen Youth Movement,” in fact owes its birth to US interventionism in Africa, as it sprang up from the ashes of the Islamic Courts Movement that had ruled Somalia until a US-sponsored invasion by Ethiopia destroyed the Courts Movement in 2007 and divided supporters into factions. Some decided to work with the US-supported Transitional Federal Government (TFG); others, like the al-Shabaab, decided to resist US and other foreign occupation and intervention in Somali affairs.
As globetrotting analyst Pepe Escobar points out in a highly recommended recent article, the Islamic Courts had generally stabilized Somalia and disarmed many of the militias. They were proponents of Sharia law, which the US found intolerable and labeled “terrorist,” opening the door for the brand new US Africa Command, based in Germany, to begin working on regime change.
As a nationalist and then religious-oriented group, al-Shabaab may well have been extremist in orientation and even “terrorist” in tactics, but theirs was a localized struggle. The idea that the ongoing battle over who ruled Somalia was somehow covered in the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against those who attacked the US on 9/11 is a stretch to the breaking point. But the AUMF it was — and is — that justifies Obama’s ongoing war on Africa.
HT: Adam Holland