Burkina Faso: Another Coup Led by U.S.-Trained Soldier
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
It turns out this guy is just a Burkinabé soldier (yes I had to look that up), who received military training from the US as part of a project to increase the capabilities of Burkina Faso's military. That's kind of like calling Kim Jong-Un a Swiss-trained dictator: technically true but misleading.
The root situation seems to be that some African countries have coups, and the plotters sometimes have intersected with US military training. You could probably write a similar article with similar innuendo targeted European universities or all kind of other things, with about equal validity.
There is nothing we know about him that is at all inconsistent with the profile of someone trained or goaded for a coup plot. They don't get directly named CIA training, they go to training facilities of the U.S. Army which coincidentally seem to produce a gigantic amount of notable figures in coups. Training by U.S. special forces is exactly the modus operandi of someone being prepared to orchestrate a coup, in fact, it's exactly what the School of the Americas nominally was.
Secondly: "who received military training from the US as part of a project to increase the capabilities of Burkina Faso's military" is underselling it. He was part of an exceptional number of U.S. military training exercises, and seemed to received outsized attention as part of them. Beyond that, this is exactly how U.S. coup training works, it's always billed as projects to increase the capabilities of the domestic military.
So is it 100% certain that he was being groomed for a coup by the US? No. The reason it's newsworthy is that he is just one out of multiple dozen people involved in coups that has received similar training regimens. It's one more case in a pattern, which makes it very newsworthy. Indeed, the article links this study: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002234331771355..., which indicates that there is a statistically significant relationship between these kinds of training exercises and coups. So the title doesn't seem misleading to me at all.
Is there strong evidence that he was "being groomed for a coup by the US", or anything to support that kind of conclusion beyond speculation and innuendo?
I'd imagine effective military training may be helpful to a coup plotter's success, but so is literacy and all kinds of other things. Where's the "newsworthy" articles about that?
> I'd imagine effective military training may be helpful to a coup plotter's success
I suggest you read the article that I and the link pointed to. It actually says the reverse. Students of US military training programs are more likely to attempt coups, but less likely to succeed at their attempt. Indeed, the probability of a coup attempt roughly doubles, while the probability of a successful coup is only increased by 50%. So clearly, your hypothesis is incorrect. The increased propensity of coups cannot be explained by increased competence leading to more success.
> Effects of military training on coup success
> Calculating the first difference of predicted probabilities from the logit regression shows an increase in the prob- ability of a successful coup of about 0.8% (Figure 7). The absolute change is smaller than that for attempts (but successful coups are rarer than attempts). The per- centage change in the predicted probability is around 150%. _Successful coups are strongly associated with IMET training and spending._ (Emphasis mine)
The fact that successful coup attempts do not go up as much as total coup attempts after US military training, does not alone to speak to whether US military training increases the success of coups.
After all, people only attempt coups if they think there is some likelihood of success. IMET training could very well increase the _perception_ of likelihood of success more than it increases _actual_ likelihood of success. Given this, even if IMET training makes a given coup attempt more likely to succeed, if more risky coup attempts are made after IMET training, the overall success rate of coups could go down after IMET training.
While my previous paragraph of texts explains that the data that you cite does not support your conclusions, I must also ask, where the data you cite comes from. I read the article that you link [0] and it says the opposite of what you say it says. Total military coups in the dataset are 110 for non-trained soldiers and 165 for trained soldiers (a 50% increase). However, _successful_ coups are 37 for non-trained soldiers and 72 for trained soldiers (a 100% increase). This information comes from Figure 2 and Figure 3 in the linked article.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002234331771355...
> Yes, the strong evidence is an ongoing 70-year-old trend of US trained military leaders plotting coups.
That is not strong evidence; that is speculation. Honestly, speculation turning into "evidence" is a hallmark of conspiracy-theory style thinking.
> The increased propensity of coups cannot be explained by increased competence leading to more success.
Then perhaps the factor is increased confidence, not increased competence.
Oh wait, they did : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute...:
"Despite Carter's worries about the school's training materials, he believed that the international military education and training provided by the School of the Americas, among other institutions, was critical to furthering "the national interests of the United States".[24] He considered the training conducted in Panama to be essential because it enhanced American "access to the politically influential leadership" of the Panamanian National Guard and instilled in its personnel "attitudes favorable to the United States".[24] Further, he believed the training served to "increase respect for United States foreign policy goals and the United States concept of military-civilian relationships at the national level".[24]"
It's a simple fact that the US provided training in order to exert power over Latin American fact, by admission. The real conspiracy theory is that for some reason, despite the same effects, operations in Africa don't have the same intent.
>> Yes, the strong evidence is an ongoing 70-year-old trend of US trained military leaders plotting coups.
> No, it is strong evidence. In fact, there is no stronger evidence possible, short of the US coming out and saying, yes, we are training them to put our tendrils into their state.
Sorry dude, you just don't have strong evidence. I don't think you even understand what strong evidence is.
You're also moving goalposts. We started talking about the US supposedly orchestrating coups, but now you're just offering quotes about "access to the politically influential leadership" and "instilling attitudes favorable to the United States," which does not at all imply the former.
At this point, you're putting the bar of evidence so high that nothing short of a complete admission is evidence. It's not. U.S. officials admitting they want to instill favourable attitudes in foreign military leadership as well as admitting they know that these activities increase the number of coups is strong evidence. It's not incontrovertible, but nothing short of an admission could be any stronger.
This article also conveniently leaves out what the "popular protests" are about, which the last time I read on this topic was the Taliban bombarding their country and the President doing very little. So, are coups ever acceptable?
Specially since this has happened a lot of occasions before[1], in places like Chile and around the Americas too.
Are we going to ignore what Operation Condor was ? Interestingly enough you could do something like this NOT with European universities but with Ivy league Universities and Mexican corrupt presidents.
This should make us ask questions about American institutions instead of yelling. Muh Cuntspiracy!!
Don't be a glowie friend, and ask questions about amercians institutions and their overlord interests. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
Do it - you’ll find it’s more a factor of the times than anything else
Out of 65 presidents 4 have Ivy league studies [1]
De la Madrid 1982-1988 - Harvard - Lawyer Salinas 1988-1994 - Yale - Economist Zedillo 1994-2000 - Yale - Economist Calderon 2006-2012 - Harvard - Lawyer
Were any of them corrupted by their Ivy league schools ?
[1] https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Gobernantes_de_México_...
My guess is it's large enough that the odds a coup includes US-trained elements becomes a coin toss.
Many US foreign military training is also aimed specifically at organising coups. See for example the School of the Americas, now known as the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation". As Joseph P. Kennedy himself put it:
> The U.S. Army School of the Americas is a school that has run more dictators than any other school in the history of the world.
What is interesting is, among all military members who are trained by foreign governments, how many of the US-trained ones go on to stage coups vs those trained by other nations?
Along these lines, there is a very disturbing pattern.
The US has a lot of (eroding) institutional infrastructure to reduce the chances of it happening at home, and throughout the republic some have expressed an interest or tried, most notably during the US civil war when about a third of the West Point graduate generals who fought were on the Confederate side. The the coup plot in 1933 the very general the plotters wanted to recruit blocked it.
https://www.justsecurity.org/44479/tangled-history-confedera...
It's possible that other nations do this, and certainly some of the colonial European powers did in the past, but no one does it on the scale that we do.
A reasonable guess would be that the objective of the training program was combating Islamic extremism / terrorism, as this aligns with US interests in the region.
Either way the conclusion that this he was directed by the US is not supported by the facts in the article.
I can't help thinking that voting is a better way to select leaders. It's too bad we haven't invested in some sort of training in democracy.
I don't think the problem is the lack of training in democracy. I think the problem is the powerful forces opposed to democracy. When he assassinated Sankara, Blaise Compaoré represented the interests of imperialists.
Colonialism never ended.