A US State Department official testified Wednesday that he was one of the last people to speak with an American ambassador before his death in Benghazi and was later demoted in retaliation for questioning how the September 11, 2012 attack was managed. - During a six-hour hearing with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Gregory Hicks told lawmakers he spoke with J. Christopher Stevens at the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Hicks said Stevens sounded frantic and communicated a quick “Greg, we’re under attack” before the call was lost. Hicks, who was in Tripoli at the time, added that he had requested air support from a US Air Force base in Aviano, Italy and later for ground troops to fend off Libyan insurgents but was denied by the State Department in both instances. Fearing their consulate would be the next to be overrun, Hicks and his aides began destroying communications equipment with an ax, according to The New York Times.

New York Times: Diplomat Says Questions Over Benghazi Led to Demotion

As I wrote about here yesterday there was a special ops unit in Tripoli on the night of the terrorist attack in Benghazi which was preparing to mobilize in order to assist the brave heroes who died that night trying to save Chris Stevens. If this team had made it to the scene it is very possible that Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods would be alive today, but that team never made it to Benghazi because it was ordered to stand down. Yesterday I wrote that I found it hard to believe anyone would ignore a direct order from the commander-in-chief during an attack which amounted to an act of war against the United States and today it is being reported that only the president–or someone acting on his behalf–could order the special ops to stand down. If this it true it means either Barack Obama is lying and he didn’t authorize all available resources to be used to thwart the attack, he himself ordered the stand down, or he told someone else (Hillary Clinton?) to order the stand down while he went to bed in order to rest before his major fundraiser in Nevada on September 12th. Now that we know this order came down from someone very high up in the Obama regime–acting on the behest of the president–the only question remaining is why was the stand down order issued?

A lost ancient Egyptian city submerged beneath the sea 1,200 years ago is starting to reveal what life was like in the legendary port of Thonis-Heracleion.

For centuries it was thought to be a legend, a city of extraordinary wealth mentioned in Homer, visited by Helen of Troy and Paris, her lover, but apparently buried under the sea. In fact, Heracleion was true, and a decade after divers began uncovering its treasures, archaeologists have produced a picture of what life was like in the city in the era of the pharaohs. The city, also called Thonis, disappeared beneath the Mediterranean around 1,200 years ago and was found during a survey of the Egyptian shore at the beginning of the last decade. Now its life at the heart of trade routes in classical times are becoming clear, with researchers forming the view that the city was the main customs hub through which all trade from Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean entered Egypt.

They have discovered the remains of more than 64 ships buried in the thick clay and sand that now covers the sea bed. Gold coins and weights made from bronze and stone have also been found, hinting at the trade that went on. Giant 16 foot statues have been uncovered and brought to the surface while archaeologists have found hundreds of smaller statues of minor gods on the sea floor. Slabs of stone inscribed in both ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian have also been brought to the surface. Dozens of small limestone sarcophagi were also recently uncovered by divers and are believed to have once contained mummified animals, put there to appease the gods.

Dr Damian Robinson, director of the Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Oxford, who is part of the team working on the site, said: “It is a major city we are excavating. “The site has amazing preservation. We are now starting to look at some of the more interesting areas within it to try to understand life there. “We are getting a rich picture of things like the trade that was going on there and the nature of the maritime economy in the Egyptian late period. There were things were coming in from Greece and the Phoenicians.

Max Ajl: Perhaps no war in recent memory has so thoroughly flummoxed the Euro-Atlantic left as the recent NATO war on Libya. Presaging what would occur as U.S. proxies carried out an assault on Syria, both a pro-war left and an anti-anti-war left started filling up socialist e-zines and broadsheets with endless explanations and tortuous justifications for why a small invasion, perhaps just a “no-fly-zone,” would be okay—so long as it didn’t grow into a larger intervention. They cracked open the door to imperialism, with the understanding that it would be watched very carefully so as to make sure that no more of it would be allowed in than was necessary to carry out its mission. The absurdity of this posture became clear when NATO immediately expanded its mandate and bombed much of Libya to smithereens, with the help of on-the-ground militia, embraced as revolutionaries by those who should have known better—and according to Maximilian Forte, could have known better, had they only looked.

UN report reveals Libya as hub for arms deliveries to insurgents in Syria and Mali, fails to identify state sponsors of terrorism and elicits systemic flaws of UN System. - A report, issued by the United Nations Security Council´s group of experts who monitor an arms embargo imposed on Libya in 2011 stresses, that arms shipments which have been organized from various locations in Libya, including Misrata and Bengazi, were transferred to Syria via Turkey and northern Lebanon. The report also confirms that Libya has developed into a hub for illegal arms deliveries to insurgents in Mali and beyond. The report is stopping short of identifying those state actors, who overtly and covertly finance and arm insurgents, including internationally outlawed terrorist organizations, and state actors use of these organizations as mercenaries in unconventional warfare. The report fails to call for an investigation into the arms trade and state sponsored terrorism and reveals deep systemic problems with the UN System as a whole.

Egypt's armed forces participated in forced disappearances, torture and killings across the country – including in Cairo's Egyptian Museum – during the 2011 uprising, even as military leaders publicly declared their neutrality, according to a leaked presidential report on revolution-era crimes. - The report, submitted to President Mohamed Morsi by his own hand-picked committee in January, has yet to be made public, but a chapter seen by the Guardian implicates the military in a catalogue of crimes against civilians, beginning with their first deployment to the streets. The chapter recommends that the government investigate the highest ranks of the military to determine who was responsible. More than 1,000 people, including many prisoners, are said to have gone missing during the 18 days of the revolt. Scores turned up in Egypt's morgues, shot or bearing signs of torture. Many have simply disappeared, leaving behind desperate families who hope, at best, that their loved ones are serving prison sentences that the government does not acknowledge.

A British peer has, in explosive revelations, said that London’s spy agency MI6 murdered the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of Congo, once described as “the most important assassination of the 20th century”. - Lord David Edward Lea made the disclosure in a letter to the editor in the March 21 edition of the London Review of Books (LRB) in response to a question made in a new book published in January. The question is made by Calder Walton in his book Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Walton writes: “The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to anything. At present, we do not know”. Sir Lea wrote in his letter that

“actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do” know that Britain plotted to kill Lumumba. “It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park… She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now [capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo] Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant head of MI6 there,” Sir Lea said. “I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it’.”

As Xi arrives in Durban, the BRICS summit will announce the formation of a BRICS Development Bank with a $50 billion capital chest (China has a surplus of $3.31 trillion, a vault that will be likely be recycled through this kind of bank). But there are grave doubts about the model of the investment, coming in to promote resource extraction rather than social development. There is worry too that the new BRICS Bank, which is likely to be housed in Shanghai, will be a well-capitalized Southern version of the World Bank rather than the kind of development bank envisaged by BancoSur (before its radicalism was tempered by the Brazilian government – as pointed by Oscar Ugarteche and Eric Toussaint). The kind of regimes that now control the BRICS process are constrained by their own class projects – they favor neo-liberal policies as long as these do not discriminatorily favor the North.

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer who was one of Africa’s most widely read novelists and one of the continent’s towering men of letters, died on Thursday in Boston. He was 82. - His death was announced by Brown University, where he had been on the faculty since 2009. Besides novels, Mr. Achebe’s works included powerful essays and poignant short stories and poems rooted in the countryside and cities of his native Nigeria, before and after independence from British colonial rule. His most memorable fictional characters were buffeted and bewildered by the conflicting pulls of traditional African culture and invasive Western values. For inspiration, Mr. Achebe drew on his own family history as part of the Ibo nation of southeastern Nigeria, a people victimized by the racism of British colonial administrators and then by the brutality of military dictators from other Nigerian ethnic groups. Mr. Achebe burst onto the world literary scene with the publication in 1958 of his first novel, “Things Fall Apart,” which has sold more than 10 million copies and been translated into 45 different languages.

Nigerian Tribune: BREAKING NEWS! Chinua Achebe is dead
NPR Blog: Chinua Achebe, Nigerian Author Of 'Things Fall Apart,' Dies
AllAfrica: Nigeria: Prof Chinua Achebe is Dead

Zimbabwean police are interrogating young children (aged 4-6) at school about whether their parents have radios. The police are confiscating wind up radios in night time raids. - Villagers in Lupane revealed that the police have been visiting schools and asking little children in Grade 0 and Grade 1(aged between 4 and 6 years) whether their parents own or listen to any radios. This follows reports that suspected state security agents on Tuesday raided several homesteads at Mpofu village in the Gwampa area and confiscated the wind-up radios. Speaking to SW Radio Africa one villager who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said the police have been going to schools, writing down names, and then visiting those suspected of owning the radios by night. She said although the agents will be wearing civilian clothes, the villagers know it is the police since they have been announcing their ban on radios. Our source said she suspects the police are aware of the popularity of shortwave radios in the area, hence they are now confiscating them. “The police have been announcing that villagers should not be in possession of these radios. Their reason is that we listen to news broadcasts from outside the country which criticise ZANU PF.

The US military's Special Operations commander is asking lawmakers to lift restrictions that keep American forces from training foreign units with records of human rights violations. He says the US needs to engage such forces "more than ever before." - The restrictions, written by Democratic Vermont Senator Jim Leahy, ban funding that would be used to train foreign military units if they are linked - through credible evidence - to serious human rights violations.

France [says] it will start withdrawing its troops from Mali by April, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Thursday. - "From April, we will start decreasing the number of troops engaged in Mali," Fabius stated. However, "This does not mean that we will go overnight," he added. The military campaign in the Ifoghas mountain range, the stronghold of extremist fighters in northern Mali will end "within weeks," the French top diplomat said. Asked if al-Qaeda main figures Abou Zeid and Mokhtar Belmokhtar were killed in fighting, the French minister said "many leaders were among the hundreds of terrorists who have been killed during the operation," without giving accurate details on their identities.

Stars and Stripes: Pentagon Deploying More Marines, Green Berets To Africa

The Air Force’s new presence in West Africa that began in late February has around 100 airmen deployed to Niamey, the southwestern region of Niger. - The airmen “provide support for intelligence collection and will also facilitate intelligence sharing with French forces conducting operations in Mali, and with other partners in the region,” President Obama wrote in a Feb. 22 letter to Congress. Included is a team of Air Force Security Forces to protect U.S. resources, personnel and interests in the region, all with Niger’s authorization, said Africa Command spokesman Thomas Sanders. The deployment [allegedly] is an effort “to promote regional stability.”

Bill Van Auken: Washington steps up Africa intervention
Wayne Madsen: Obama’s Military Presence in Niger: Uranium Control and Tuareg Suppression

Israel has deported at least 1,000 Sudanese on ‘voluntary leave,’ Haaretz reported. The UN Refugee agency said it was not informed of the move, and that the deportees were forced to return to Sudan where visiting or living in Israel is a crime. - The repatriation was reportedly carried out secretly over the last few months through a third country. The UN high commissioner for refugees claimed he had no knowledge of the deportations, and that the repatriation was likely not voluntary because there is no “free will from inside a prison,” the newspaper reported. On Wednesday, the same UN high commissioner for refugees demanded that Israel gives an explanation for the secret deportations. No response was immediately given by either Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Interior Minister, Eli Yishai.

■ The massive stepping-up of arms supplies to the Gulf States by Germany reflects the geo-strategic interests of German imperialism, which is increasingly acting with military aggression to satisfy its hunger for raw materials and to impose its own interests against those of its rivals. ■ Last week, the financial daily Handelsblatt published an article headlined “Expedition raw materials: Germany's new course”, which laid out German imperialism’s new doctrine. The article states that German industry and government agree that the “securing of raw materials” is a “strategic theme for German foreign policy”. Securing them must also involve the use of “instruments of security and military policy”, the paper wrote. Handelsblatt placed the arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, in this context.

The return of German imperialism
German industry, government planning for resource wars
German government decides on long-term military deployment in Mali

At least 13 Chadian soldiers have been killed in fighting in northern Mali, the heaviest casualties sustained by French-led African troops since the launch of a military campaign against rebels last month, Chad's army has said. - Sixty-five rebel fighters were also killed in the clashes that began before midday on Friday in the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains near the border with Algeria. "The provisional toll is ... on the enemy's side, five vehicles destroyed and 65 terrorists killed," said a statement from the army general staff read on state radio. "We deplore the deaths of 13 of our valiant soldiers." Earlier this month, Chad deployed 1,800 soldiers in the northern city of Kidal to secure what had been the rebels' last urban stronghold, putting itself in the frontline in the fight against the rebels. Tuaregs in the north, who have long sought greater autonomy, rebelled against the federal government and swept across northern Mali in April last year, taking advantage of a power vacuum left by a military coup.

Stephen Lendman: UNESCO Peace Prize to a War Criminal - On February 21, the UN News Centre headlined "French President François Hollande awarded UNESCO peace prize." It's for his "valuable contribution to peace and stability in Africa." He's gone all out to wreck it. He's waging lawless imperial aggression. He's slaughtering innocent civilians. He's committing crimes of war and against humanity.

Deutsche Welle: Chadian troops battle Islamists in northern Mali
El País: Malí: nuevos combates, más militares
Le Monde: De nouveaux combats dans le nord du Mali
Le Monde: Pour le Quai d'Orsay, l'Afrique est une zone "rouge"
RFI: Mali : violents accrochages entre les Touaregs du MNLA et un groupe armé
Barry Grey: US deploys troops, drones to Niger
Zero Hedge: Obama Dispatches 100 US Troops To Niger To “Support Predator Drone Base”

Earlier this week, France sent its special forces to Cameroon in search of seven French tourists who were kidnapped in the north of the country on Tuesday. Paris accused the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram of being behind the abduction. On Thursday, the kidnapped tourists were reportedly found alive in an abandoned house in Nigeria. France – whose presence in Africa used to be rather strong – still has several military bases and hundreds of troops on the continent. In the past several years, Paris’ has intensified its activity in former colonies. First, there was its mission in the Ivory Coast. And in January this year, France launched a military operation in Mali to help the local government fight Islamist rebels. Finally, this week its troops entered northern Cameroon. RT asked Ken Stone from Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War if French involvement in West Africa has become a trend.

On Monday, 18 February 2013, a military exercise with participation of 19 European, Arab, and African nations began in Mauritania. Among the participating nations are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO/OTAN. The initiative for the exercise was taken among growing concerns about a possible spill over of the war in neighboring Mali into Mauritania. The exercise raises concerns about the possibility that Mauritania will fall victim to the recent years French / NATO pivot in Central and Northern Africa. According to a high-ranking Mauritanian military source, Colonel Tayeb Ould Ibrahim, the 19 nations military exercise will benefit the country by improving the performance of the Mauritanian army. Mauritania has over the last months witnessed increased activities by Salafist organizations and militants with ties to Al Qaeda.

An American Senator says the United States is likely to play a more active military role in Mali, where a French-led war is raging, after the West African country holds elections. - The four-member delegation from the US Senate and House of Representatives met with French and African military officials as well as Mali's interim President Dioncounda Traore in the capital, Bamako. The US has been providing intelligence, transport and mid-air refueling to France since it started its military campaign in Mali last month. The US law prohibited direct assistance to Mali's armed forces because of last year's military coup, led by a US-trained Malian army captain, who toppled the country’s elected government. Earlier on Monday, the European Union formally approved a military training mission to aid the French-led war in Mali.

Wall Street Journal: U.S. to Expand Role in Africa
PressTV: EU approves 500-strong military mission in Mali
The Guardian: UK troops to be sent to Mali
Christof Lehmann: EU "Stability Fund" releases 20 Million to Mali for Joint European-African Economic Suicide

Military missions into West Africa are to secure the free flow of natural resources out of Africa to the global markets. As soon as sovereign nations are in governmental/legislative staging plans of nationalizing sectors of their economy (resource nationalism)—– the potential of internal protests/riots increase ( influence by western clandestine operations), military interventions/airstrikes, coup d’états, economic warfare, …..etc. Global Energy and Resource Wars can’t be denied. Related Article: Russian Military Chief Predicts Resource Wars Soon

F. William Engdahl: The War in Mali and AFRICOM’s Agenda: Target China - The Mali operation is but the tip of a huge African iceberg. AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s US Africa Command was signed into existence by President George W. Bush in late 2007. Its prime purpose was to counter the dramatically growing Chinese economic and political influence across Africa. Alarm bells went off in Washington in October 2006 when the Chinese President hosted an historic Beijing summit, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), which brought nearly fifty African heads of state and ministers to the Chinese capital.