Friday, March 12, 2004
Fact Following Fiction?
I don't follow African affairs all that closely, but the recent grounding of an American plane with 60+ men and a large cache of weapons aboard has piqued my interest.0 comments
Thanks to Josh Marshall for following the story and making me even more curious about it.
It seems that this was planned to be a coup d'e-bucks. A coup-for-hire operation.
Here's the African press on it.
What I'm starting to piece together is:
This truly has the appearance of a Joel Silver, Golan-Globus paramilitary, "last score," buddy movie, possibly with Robert DeNiro, Chuck Norris, and your typical Dirty Dozen cast of fading and rising stars.
There's every indication that this is an ad-hoc group of CIA- and MI5-connected corporate paramilitaries with special forces experience in an array of African countries. Some seem to have worked together often through the many battles to destabilize Zimbabwe (the former Rhodesia) and Angola, and many were in South Africa's special forces units supporting the pro-aparteid government, and they seem to have reunited for one big score ($5 million down; $5 million when the job is done) by flying in to the capital of Equatorial Guinea, taking over the radio station and abducting the country's leader. They'd then fly him to Spain (haven't they suffered enough?) and fly back with the new despot leader. Thanks all around, the final payments made, off everyone goes, spending money and lying on the beach until the next adventure.
But dropping a purported $186,000 on armaments may have given them too much visibility.
Or, maybe Robert Novack found out about it.
In any event, this time they got caught. And, due to their activities trying to oust him from Zimbabwe over the years, it looks like an unstable, and now vengeful, Robert Mugabe is planning to set all their heads on pikes. Of course, he's saying lots of PC things about pan-African duty and friendship, fighting terrorism (the new Mom and apple pie), etc., but it's more of a "Welcome. I've got you; you're mine; and now it's Miller time!"
I think we can look forward to mass executions all around coming out of this. No intelligence agency will want to touch this (unless some friendship-addled operative wants to "leave no mercenary behind") and every U.S., European and African government will be very publically supportive of freeing the world from the stain of terrorism.
In essence, these guys are toast.
Play the music.
Roll the credits.
Movie over.
posted by Gotham 7:02 PM
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