by Scott Creighton
I noticed the other day that the NGO behind the Kony 2012 campaign, Invisible Children, doesn’t publish in their financial statements where their funding has been coming from. Just check out their “financials” page and pull up their 2011 statement and you will quickly see they don’t include that information.
They recently had a huge increase in funding from somewhere (according to their numbers they increased their operating budget from 2010 to 2011 by a multiplier of 6 (roughly a million per year to 6 million)
Since Invisible Children seems to support putting boots on the ground in Africa and therefore AFRICOM (U.S. military control over the continent) I decided to look at AFRICOM’s website for a little more information. This is what I found in a PDF (U.S. Military Support to African Efforts to Counter the Lord’s Resistance Army) on the front page of their website:
The role of the U.S. military
It is widely recognized that there is no purely military solution to the efforts of African security and administrative officials from throughout the region to protect the civilian population from the threat posed by Joseph Kony and the LRA. The U.S. military role is in support of a combined effort that involves the U.S. embassies in the affected countries, U.S. Agency for International Development’s programs, as well as contributions from nongovernmental organizations.
Looks like their financial boondoggle happened to neatly dovetail into the same year that AFRICOM was given the green light to expand their reach into other nations in Africa. AFRICOM mentions that they are getting help from USAID “programs” to this end and as we all know, USAID is just a front organization for the CIA.
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