The secret Sahel appropriations
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The secret Sahel appropriations are a category of American spending John Kiriakou says the public is not told about, raised in the middle of his argument that the United States has no need to spend what it spends on defence.

The comparison

Kiriakou prefaces the point with what he calls a statistic he promises not to overuse: the American defence budget is now bigger than those of the next nine largest countries combined, he lists China, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Japan among them, and the United States still spends more. His question is what all of it is meant to prepare for.

The money

One answer, he says, is money nobody is supposed to know about. This is all supposed to be a big secret, Kiriakou says, but the United States is pumping billions of dollars into Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Conakry and Guinea-Bissau.

He asks for what reason, and answers his own question: the French problem. Why, he asks, are the French not pumping their own money into those countries, and why does it always have to be the United States?

The secrecy objection

The sharper of his two objections is not to the spending but to its concealment. Why, he asks, is it a secret, do the American taxpayers not have the right to know where their money is going, and to decide whether that is an appropriate expenditure? His own answer is that he would say yes.

The complaint connects to his separate prediction that renewed jihadist activity and the drug trade will draw CIA and special forces involvement into the region, and that the American public will not be told about that either, set out in CIA attention to West Africa.

See also

- CIA attention to West Africa
- The West Africa cocaine route
- Permanent wartime economy
- The Paris rifle serial number
