US may have helped foil a coup against Gambia's dictator Yahya Jammeh

By: Armin Rosen

The Washington Post just published a definitive account of the events surrounding the December 2014 coup in Gambia.
And it casts an unflattering light on the US's role in the failed attempt at overthrowing the country's long-serving dictator.

Gambia is a country of 1.5 million people and is less than half the size of Connecticut. It has no critical natural resources, and is considered peripheral to vital US interests. The coup changed that, if only temporarily.

The plot against president Yahya Jammeh, who took power in a 1994 coup, was hatched on US soil, by American- Gambian dual citizens, including 3 US military veterans, one of them a former platoon leader during the Iraq War who was killed during the assault on State House in Bangui on December 30, 2014.

This made the plotters subject to US criminal prosecution under the Neutrality Act, an 18th century law which prohibits prohibits individuals in the US from conspiring to overthrow governments with which the US is not at war.

The US's jurisdictional reach turned a coup in a small and obscure nation into a potential policy dilemma. The plotters were attempting to overthrow one of the most oppressive leaders on earth. In addition to running an absolute dictatorship, Jammeh has threatened to slit the throats of homosexuals and cultivated ties with US geopolitical rivals like Iran and Venezuela.

America isn't in a state of war with Jammeh, but few would seriously argue that he's any kind of friend to the United States.

The Washington Post report gives the fullest picture yet of how the US handled the situation. Faced with a group of US citizens plotting against an unjust regime in a country far removed from US geopolitical objectives, the US government sided against the conspirators even before the failed plot was executed, but without apprehending any of them or directly warning the Gambian government of what was in store.

Instead, the US, whose law enforcement agencies had been tracking some of the plotters, may have tried to hamper their travel by looping in a neighboring state through which some of the conspirators were planning on transiting.

According to the Post, "the State Department alerted authorities in a West African country near Gambia that" a US-based exiled Gambian general who served as head of the coup's military planning was "returning to the region in hopes that local officials could intercept him and prevent any possible bloodshed." The FBI had already been monitoring this plotter, who was actually visited by federal agents before he left for West Africa in December of 2014.

There were other signs that the US government was on to the coup plot: One plotter who had traveled to West Africa in early December received a phone call from a federal agent "asking where he was."

The Post reports that the US avoided drawing the Gambian government into its handling of the impending coup, out of fear that Jammeh would use the information of a coming putsch as a pretext for an internal crackdown.
But the Post reports that Jammeh may have had some kind of advanced warning of the plot, since the Gambian government effectively concealed the fact that State House was far more heavily protected than the putschists believed it to be.

As the Post puts it, "hints surfaced that Gambian officials had received a tip that a plot was afoot."