Despite local resistance, America has set up a sophisticated military telecoms system covering more than three-quarters of the globe in the Mediterranean island of Sicily. The facility enables control of remotely piloted drones, missiles and nuclear weapons, making it the mother of all weapons of mass destruction. It affords the Pentagon eyes and ears all over Africa and the Middle East.

The atrocious war in Congo is tied to the huge appetite in the west for strategic minerals essential to the electronics and military industries. The criminal regimes in Uganda and Rwanda sponsor proxy militias whose violence facilitates the smuggling of these minerals through the two African nations.