Introduction by
Nick Turse
On the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services there is a list of rights belonging to all Americans. Chief among them: Freedom to express yourself. Abdiwali Warsame must have taken them literally. Two days after he became a U.S. citizen, he created a rollicking news and opinion website covering his native Somalia. It became popular with many Somalis and Somali-Americans, but also attracted attention from other quarters. As Craig Whitlock recently revealed in the Washington Post, Warsame was, according to public records and interviews, soon "caught up in a shadowy Defense Department counterpropaganda operation."
Warsame’s website became a clearinghouse for articles from various points of view (including his own fundamentalist Muslim beliefs), but with emphasis on strong opposition to U.S.-backed military interventions in Somalia, and the contention that al-Shabab militants are freedom fighters, not terrorists. This, in turn, attracted the attention of the U.S.-based Navanti Group, which was “working as a subcontractor for the Special Operations Command to help conduct ‘information operations to engage local populations and counter nefarious influences’ in Africa and Europe.” As part of a sophisticated military effort aimed at manipulating news stories and social media around the world, Navanti compiled a dossier on Warsame, even though the military is legally barred from carrying out psychological operations at home. (Navanti claimed it believed Warsame was based overseas; Whitlock’s reporting indicates otherwise.) The military contractor eventually sent a copy of its files to the FBI, whose agents soon showed up on Warsame's doorstep.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website says Americans are bound by “the shared values of freedom [and] liberty” and that “naturalized citizens are... an important part of our democracy.” Today, this rings about as true as a thump on the side of an empty dumpster. Abdiwali Warsame is just one of millions of people -- Americans and foreigners -- who have found themselves monitored in some way by the U.S. military over the years.
No one knows this long history of shadowy military surveillance better than TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, author of Policing America’s Empire, among other works. For decades, McCoy has been shedding light on some of the darkest aspects of government malfeasance from drug trafficking to spying to torture. Today, he offers a chilling tour of military surveillance efforts from the turn of the twentieth century to a near future even more dystopian than our present -- a world in which we’re all liable to end up like Abdiwali Warsame. - Nick Turse
Read Alfred W. McCoy's latest at Tom's Dispatch.
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