speaker, i rise to warn this body of the deteriorating conditions in the african country of nyjer and to give rise to the concern of service members and contractors, more than 1,000 of them right now are functionally being held hostage in nyjer. they are being used as pawns during a negotiation that's left america at the bended knee of third world criminals and thugs, as our troops seek medicine and freshwater and troop rotations. how did we get here? well, it started back in march of 2023. secretary of state anthony blinken went to niger and proclaimed that it was a model of resilience. a platform for great democracy, it would be where america would execute its africa strategy. one year later, almost to the day, there was a coup in niger and guess who overthrew the government that we said was the great model of resilience? people we trained. we trained the coup leaders to go throw out the democratically elected government of nijer and i know this will surprise you but after that occur, they say they want our bases that u.s. taxpayers have poured more than $1 billion into, gone. they