State Department Fails to Vet or Monitor Military Aid to Egypt
15th May 2016
According to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, the State Department also fails to consistently conduct legally-required review of the Egyptian forces that are supplied and trained by the U.S.
The U.S. government has sent Egypt more than $6.4 billion in military aid since 2011, which has been used to purchase F-16 jets, Apache helicopters, tanks, explosives, and police equipment.
The U.S. government has bankrolled the Egyptian military for decades, propping up the rule of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. But the aid was widely criticized after 2013, when a military coup deposed Egypt’s new democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi. To skirt a law banning aid to coup regimes, the State Department has refused to call what happened a “coup.”