Does anyone have a good link on Ghadafi's crimes?
I'm not being flippant, I'd just like a good run down.
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by brekin » Sat Oct 22, 2011 3:32 am
by AlicetheKurious » Sat Oct 22, 2011 4:36 am
by AlicetheKurious » Sat Oct 22, 2011 4:40 am
by semper occultus » Sat Oct 22, 2011 5:16 am
by Searcher08 » Sat Oct 22, 2011 9:15 am
semper occultus wrote:....holy mother of god Mac....I won't reproduce that appalling Scum front-page
there may be justification for the world being able to see & understand Ghadaffi's fate but this is exploiting it basically as prurient gloating snuff-porn & couched in the language of same :
"he begged for his life"
"rot in hell"
...sound just like the video-nasties that came out in the 80's ....
by Simulist » Sat Oct 22, 2011 1:01 pm
AlicetheKurious wrote:Doesn't she look, well, post-coital?
by seemslikeadream » Sat Oct 22, 2011 5:56 pm
brekin wrote:Does anyone have a good link on Ghadafi's crimes?
I'm not being flippant, I'd just like a good run down.
by seemslikeadream » Sat Oct 22, 2011 6:15 pm
Over a million Sierra Leoneans and Liberian were killed as a result of the Gaddafi induced war. Gaddafi did train, finance and encourage the deadly rebel groups Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.
Swinging between sanity and insanity, Gaddafi came to the agonizing conclusion that he has caused irreparable damages to some Africans and decided to give some sort of financial aid.
Gibril Koroma, the Sierra Leonean publisher of the Vancouver, British Columbia based thepatrioticvanguard.com, making the case for Sierra Leonean victims wrote that, “A couple of years ago, Gaddafi realized he had hurt Africa too much and he started what he may have considered a reconciliation process by giving away millions of dollars in raw cash and all sorts of other gifts like cars and tractors to African leaders. He has also been financing the United States of Africa project scheduled to kick off by 2017.”
But the real victims of Gaddafi’s atrocities – amputations, murders, raping, maiming and mutilations – the ordinary, innocent Sierra Leoneans and Liberians did not receive any of what Gibril Koroma indicated. Now is the time for them to get their compensations direct from Gaddafi’s looted billions. Their case is as reasonable and human as US Congressman Brad Sherman’s arguments for NATO.
The Sierra Leonean journalist and academic Aroun Rashid Deen, currently a doctoral candidate at New York University, in making the case for Gaddafi to pay compensation to Sierra Leonean and Liberian fatalities, argued that “Muammar Gaddafi was the mastermind and key financier of the brutal war that left hundreds of thousands dead in Sierra Leone in West Africa in the 1990s. The war would not have happened in the first place had it not been for the desire of the Libyan leader to punish the government of Sierra Leone for what he regarded as its siding with the West in the 1980’s when Gaddafi was at loggerhead with particularly the United States and Britain.
“It was also part of Gaddafi’s broader agenda including his geopolitical ambition to destabilize much of West Africa and establish satellite states in the region to be headed by puppet regimes that will be doing his biddings. The decade-long war ripped Sierra Leone apart. Thousands of its victims, whose arms and limbs were chopped off by rebels, were reduced to paupers, roaming the streets as beggars in Freetown and other cities. Children as young as a day old were also among those whose arms and limbs were hacked off by Gaddafi’s rebels. Pregnant women, too, were disemboweled with delight in their display of ghastly brutality.”
by seemslikeadream » Sat Oct 22, 2011 6:57 pm
Libya and the World of Oil
Monday 4 April 2011
by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed
Last month, at the international tribunal on crimes during the civil war in Sierra Leone, the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor came to an end.
The chief prosecutor, U.S. law professor David Crane, informed The Times of London that the case was incomplete: The prosecutors intended to charge Moammar Gadhafi, who, Crane said, “was ultimately responsible for the mutilation, maiming and/or murder of 1.2 million people.”
But the charge was not to be. The U.S., U.K. and others intervened to block it. Asked why, Crane said, “Welcome to the world of oil.”
Demand justice for victims of sexual violence in Sierra Leone
Demand justice for victims of sexual violence in Sierra Leone
Despite the widespread and systematic use of rape and other sexual violence in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002, the government has failed to provide reparations to the women effected by these crimes.
Overall estimates are that 250,00 women and girls (33 per cent of the female population) were subjected to rape, sexual slavery and other crimes of violence during the conflict between 1991 and 2002.
All parties to the conflict committed these crimes - Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded: "it is clear that there were deliberate policies systematically to target women and girls and systematically to rape and sexually violate them".
Despite the widespread and systematic use of rape and other sexual violence, the government has failed to provide reparations to the women effected by these crimes.
by AlicetheKurious » Sun Oct 23, 2011 6:52 am
In 1998, President Clinton sent Jesse Jackson as his special envoy to Liberia and Sierra Leone, which is next door and was in the midst of one of the great horrors of the 20th century. You may remember the army of mostly young boys, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), who went around raping and chopping off people's arms and legs. African and world opinion was enraged against the RUF, which was committed to protecting the diamond mines they controlled.
Taylor was an indispensable ally and supporter of the RUF and Jesse Jackson was a friend of his. Jackson wasn't sent there to hound Taylor about his widespread human rights violations. Instead, in June 1999, he and other US officials drafted entire sections of an accord that made RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, vice president of Sierra Leone and, according to the July 24, 2000 New Republic, gave him control over the diamond mines, the country's major source of wealth. Link
Maurice Tempelsman is one of the top funders of the Democratic Party who has funded Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, the MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all hidden by the Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily. Link
WHERE DO HILLARY’S DIAMONDS COME FROM?
Belgian-born Maurice Tempelsman has a long and bloody history in Africa. When Congo’s first Premier, Patrice Lumumba, pledged to return diamond wealth back to the newly independent Congo in the early 60’s, Tempelsman, who began with De Beers in the 1950’s, helped engineer the coup d’etat that consolidated the dictatorship of 29 year-old Colonel Mobutu, and the coup against Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah; diamonds were at stake in each. [18]
“I believe this was the beginning of what we now know of as conflict diamonds in the Congo,” says blood diamond expert Janine Roberts. “From then on diamonds would be extensively used to discreetly fund wars, coups, repression and dictatorships, in Africa.” [19] “Tempelsman’s role in the confluence of public policy and private profit as a middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel may have shaped every major U.S. covert action in Africa since the early 1950s. Declassified memos and cables between former U.S. presidents and State Department officials over the last four decades directly linked Tempelsman to the destabilization of Zaire/Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Rwanda and Ghana.”[20]
For over 35 years Maurice and son Leon Tempelsman worked the diamond connection behind the repression of Mobutu Sese Seko and his Israeli-trained shock troops. Now, 47 years later, the Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind three companies: Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and Lazare Kaplan International; LKI supplies Tiffany’s and Cartier’s. A client of Adelai Stevenson’s law firm during the first Congo crises (1960-1970), Tempelsman later hired Lawrence Devlin, a CIA station chief responsible for covert operations in Katanga, to maintain the Mobutu diamond/cobalt connections into the late 1980’s.
Tempelsman’s capacity to sway governments and leverage markets is unrivaled. In 2002, Tempelsman offered Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma an $80 million interest free “loan” to bridge Namibia's budgetary shortfall against future sales of Namibia’s gemstones.[21]
Namibia is the leading producer of offshore deep sea diamonds, through DeBeers and Diamond Fields, and South Africa second. Offshore diamond mining has expanded to Papua New Guinea and New Zealand waters, and global mining investors call it the “new gold rush,” but scientists compare deep-sea dredging to destroying an eco-system as complex as a tropical rain forest. Specialized deep-sea crawler vessels like DeBeers “The Peace in Africa” reflect the expertise of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.[22] Maurice Tempelsman is an honorary trustee and an honorary member of the corporation of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.[23]
Tempelsman is the deep pockets of the Democratic party, a regular supporter of the campaigns of John Kerry (D); Ed Royce (R); Tom Daschle (D); Barack Obama (D); Maxine Waters (D); John Rockefeller (D); Richard Gephardt (D); Howard Wolpe (D); Patrick (D) and Edward Kennedy (D); and the 1988 win of George H.W. Bush. Tempelsman also exploited ties with Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security adviser, who intervened at the U.S. Export-Import Bank on Tempelsman’s behalf. [24]
Tempelsman contributed some $500,000 to Clinton for president, and he is backing Hillary (D). He traveled at Clinton’s side on the 1998 Presidential Africa tour—along with National Security Council staffer John Prendergast, now an International Crises Group “expert” and leading “Save Darfur!” cheerleader. The Clinton’s Botswana visit was not about an Okavango Delta wildlife reserve safari. Botswana’s President Mogae attended the 1999 Attracting Capital to Africa Summit in Houston (TX), organized by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), the “who’s who” of multinational corporations.[25] CCA chairman Maurice Tempelsman organized the summit, where 10 African heads of state met with half of Clinton's Cabinet and 200 corporate representatives.[26] Tempelsman and the CCA organized the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Africa in 2001, featuring DRC President Joseph Kabila, coordinated with an Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) meeting involving President G. W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Maurice Tempelsman was Jackie O’Nassis Kennedy’s lover and he reportedly courted Madeline Albright. Tempelsman is Chairman of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist pressure group that claims it “works closely with the Israeli military.” [27] He sits on the boards of nationalist American think tanks that also seat Madeleine Albright. As Vice-Chairman of Lazare Kaplan International, Tempelsman’s annual base pay is $458,833, with a bonus of $80,000; as principal director/shareholder in Leon Tempelsman and Sons he gets a comparable amount again. SEC filings show that LKI directors are high-rolling Zionist lawyers and investment bankers: one director belongs to the law firm that represented President Kennedy—another Tempelsman friend. LKI is also connected to the euphemistically named United States Agency for International Development (USAID).[28] Selling to the U.S. Diamond Stockpile and to his private profits, Tempelsman companies have plundered tens of billions of diamond dollars from Congo/Zaire—alone—in the past five decades.
Conditions in Congo today are Leopoldian. Some Congolese earn as little as $2 a month working like slaves for Western companies. In a recent study, Medicins Sans Frontieres found conditions surveyed across Congo beyond “emergency” and into “catastrophic” classification. Since the war ended in 2003, conditions—in terms of mortality and access to health care—have deteriorated. People die of malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition, tuberculosis, measles, and the inability to seek or receive treatment. Conditions in peaceful areas of DRC remain worse than most war zones in the world.[29] Mortality in Eastern DRC remained over 1000 people per day in April 2007.[30]
...
Maurice Tempelsman chairs the International Advisory Council at the Harvard AIDS Institute (HAI) of the School of Public Health. HAI partners with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program (USMHRP), a program whose said purpose is to develop vaccines and AIDS prevention for U.S. Military servicemen.[33] Tempelsman’s involvement in covert actions and interventions flags this program as cover for clandestine biowarfare in “emerging” countries.
When contacted, Robert Rotberg praised the Kimberley Process as a “remarkable achievement” and he dismissed any conflict of interest between Tempelsman and the Kimberley initiatives. “We invited Maurice Tempelsman to the [2001] conference, but he chose not to come.” Asked about the U.S. Government diamond stockpile, Robert Rotberg indicated that its existence “is news to me.” The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency controls the national diamond stockpiles: some 3.1 million carats are held at the Defense National Stockpile Centers.[34] Pressed further about Tempelsman, Rotberg replied. “There is no contact between this side of the Charles river and that side. This is not a conspiracy, the real problem is not Maurice Tempelsman: the biggest problem is that the U.S. Treasury has been really slow to put [Kimberley] structures in place.” [35]
Maurice Tempelsman and Robert Rotberg are members of the Council on Foreign Relations. No contact between them? From 1999 to 2002 the CFR sponsored a series of panels titled “Roundtable on Private Capital Flows to Sub-Saharan Africa.” The panels’ director was Mahesh Kotecha and Chair was Maurice Tempelsman. At the time, Tempelsman was funding the CFR’s Africa Program. Panelists included Walter Kansteiner, Robert Rotberg, Frank Wisner and Botswana’s President Festus Mogae. The Vice President of Botswana, Lt. General S.K.I Khama, is on the board of U.S.-based Conservation International, a corporate “conservation” organization whose tiny smokescreen “ecotourism” project is used to tout their support in helping the San Bushmen.[36] Conservation International directors include Louis Cabot, whose Cabot Corporation benefited from the plunder of columbium-tantalite (coltan) from Congo.
The Kotecha family is directly involved with illegal networks pillaging coltan from Congo.
Walter Kansteiner—National Security Council African Affairs director under Clinton—is today director of Moto Gold, a company involved in Congo’s blood-drenched Ituri region, and the Kansteiner family of Chicago trades in coltan.[37] Walter Kansteiner was the U.S. President’s “personal representative” to the G-8 Africa Process, and he is a founding principal of the Scowcroft Group, under Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser to G. H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford. Kansteiner also works for the Center for Strategic and International Studies Africa Policy Advisory Panel.[38]
Panelist Frank Wisner was also on the National Security Council under Clinton. Wisner’s co-directors of the American International Group include: Marshall Cohen, a director of the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation and Canadian Government Official; Harvard Professor Martin Stuart Feldstein; Clinton Cabinet members William Cohen and Richard Holbrooke; and Carla Hills, NAFTA negotiator and director of Chevron-Texaco and the International Crises Group, a flak organization active in all Africa’s hotspots.
(William) Cohen Group partners include former top Pentagon officers, White House officials, U.K. Lords, NATO Chiefs, and directors of Lockheed Martin and Dyncorp. Note that Dyncorp director Mark Ronald was previously President/CEO of BAE Systems.[39] Another Cohen Group director, Gen. (ret.) Paul Kern, participated in operations in Rwanda and Zaire. Frank Wisner’s father was CIA director of the Office of Policy Coordination, an early covert operations bureau; Operation Mockingbird, designed to infiltrate and control the U.S. media, was one of theirs. Frank Wisner—a USAID and state department official in Vietnam—was involved with the black-operations Pheonix assassinations program.[40]
Tempelsman’s affiliation with Robert Rotberg at the CFR explains the absence of any mention of Tempelsman or his diamond interests in the Kimberly-related conferences, policies and papers that came out of the Kennedy School. Seven Harvard professionals, including Michael Ignatief, and Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer for her whitewash of the U.S.-backed coup in Rwanda,[41] took part in the 2001 Kennedy School conference that led to Diamonds in Peace and War, the report that whitewashed Maurice Tempelsman’s involvement. Link
by seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 23, 2011 8:18 am
AlicetheKurious wrote:I hate to break it to you, slad, but even if you take all these accusations at face value, Muammar al-Qaddafi wasn't tangoing all by his little old self down in Africa, in Sierra Leone or elsewhere. Nor was he assassinated because of his involvement in human rights violations. The obscene Hillary Clinton, who coyly confirmed that Qaddafi was lynched on her direct orders, doesn't give a shit about human rights, especially if they stand in the way of her own interests. Indeed, she is herself (along with her husband and several US presidents) little more than an front-man for individuals who are neck-deep in the blood of innocent people in Africa and all over the world.
In other words, Qaddafi was eliminated by the same people who are directly responsible for atrocities and genocide and enslavement of people all over Africa, but who know that they are immune from justice and will never be tried, let alone beaten to a bloody pulp before being shot by a mob. Those who carried out the lynching and obeyed Clinton's orders were not democrats or freedom fighters, but depraved, drug-addled mercenaries hired by imperial powers to do their dirty work. The ensuing orgy of blood-lust that degraded all who witnessed it was orchestrated by the same media that dubbed the carpet-bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as "wars of liberation".
None of this serves justice, let alone herald a new era of respect for human rights and freedom, for Libyans or for Africans in general. On the contrary: Qaddafi's murder marks the takeover of this oil-rich country and its people by monsters compared to whom he was a f*cking saint.In 1998, President Clinton sent Jesse Jackson as his special envoy to Liberia and Sierra Leone, which is next door and was in the midst of one of the great horrors of the 20th century. You may remember the army of mostly young boys, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), who went around raping and chopping off people's arms and legs. African and world opinion was enraged against the RUF, which was committed to protecting the diamond mines they controlled.
Taylor was an indispensable ally and supporter of the RUF and Jesse Jackson was a friend of his. Jackson wasn't sent there to hound Taylor about his widespread human rights violations. Instead, in June 1999, he and other US officials drafted entire sections of an accord that made RUF leader, Foday Sankoh, vice president of Sierra Leone and, according to the July 24, 2000 New Republic, gave him control over the diamond mines, the country's major source of wealth. LinkMaurice Tempelsman is one of the top funders of the Democratic Party who has funded Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Templesman was the unofficial ambassador to the Congo (Zaire) for years, but a new Israeli-American tycoon has replaced him. In the world of bling bling and bling bang, some things change, some stay the same. The CIA, the MOSSAD, the big mining companies, the offshore accounts and weapons deals—all hidden by the Western media. The holocaust in Central Africa has claimed some six to ten million people in Congo since 1996, with 1500 people dying daily. LinkWHERE DO HILLARY’S DIAMONDS COME FROM?
Belgian-born Maurice Tempelsman has a long and bloody history in Africa. When Congo’s first Premier, Patrice Lumumba, pledged to return diamond wealth back to the newly independent Congo in the early 60’s, Tempelsman, who began with De Beers in the 1950’s, helped engineer the coup d’etat that consolidated the dictatorship of 29 year-old Colonel Mobutu, and the coup against Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah; diamonds were at stake in each. [18]
“I believe this was the beginning of what we now know of as conflict diamonds in the Congo,” says blood diamond expert Janine Roberts. “From then on diamonds would be extensively used to discreetly fund wars, coups, repression and dictatorships, in Africa.” [19] “Tempelsman’s role in the confluence of public policy and private profit as a middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel may have shaped every major U.S. covert action in Africa since the early 1950s. Declassified memos and cables between former U.S. presidents and State Department officials over the last four decades directly linked Tempelsman to the destabilization of Zaire/Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Rwanda and Ghana.”[20]
For over 35 years Maurice and son Leon Tempelsman worked the diamond connection behind the repression of Mobutu Sese Seko and his Israeli-trained shock troops. Now, 47 years later, the Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind three companies: Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and Lazare Kaplan International; LKI supplies Tiffany’s and Cartier’s. A client of Adelai Stevenson’s law firm during the first Congo crises (1960-1970), Tempelsman later hired Lawrence Devlin, a CIA station chief responsible for covert operations in Katanga, to maintain the Mobutu diamond/cobalt connections into the late 1980’s.
Tempelsman’s capacity to sway governments and leverage markets is unrivaled. In 2002, Tempelsman offered Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma an $80 million interest free “loan” to bridge Namibia's budgetary shortfall against future sales of Namibia’s gemstones.[21]
Namibia is the leading producer of offshore deep sea diamonds, through DeBeers and Diamond Fields, and South Africa second. Offshore diamond mining has expanded to Papua New Guinea and New Zealand waters, and global mining investors call it the “new gold rush,” but scientists compare deep-sea dredging to destroying an eco-system as complex as a tropical rain forest. Specialized deep-sea crawler vessels like DeBeers “The Peace in Africa” reflect the expertise of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.[22] Maurice Tempelsman is an honorary trustee and an honorary member of the corporation of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.[23]
Tempelsman is the deep pockets of the Democratic party, a regular supporter of the campaigns of John Kerry (D); Ed Royce (R); Tom Daschle (D); Barack Obama (D); Maxine Waters (D); John Rockefeller (D); Richard Gephardt (D); Howard Wolpe (D); Patrick (D) and Edward Kennedy (D); and the 1988 win of George H.W. Bush. Tempelsman also exploited ties with Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security adviser, who intervened at the U.S. Export-Import Bank on Tempelsman’s behalf. [24]
Tempelsman contributed some $500,000 to Clinton for president, and he is backing Hillary (D). He traveled at Clinton’s side on the 1998 Presidential Africa tour—along with National Security Council staffer John Prendergast, now an International Crises Group “expert” and leading “Save Darfur!” cheerleader. The Clinton’s Botswana visit was not about an Okavango Delta wildlife reserve safari. Botswana’s President Mogae attended the 1999 Attracting Capital to Africa Summit in Houston (TX), organized by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), the “who’s who” of multinational corporations.[25] CCA chairman Maurice Tempelsman organized the summit, where 10 African heads of state met with half of Clinton's Cabinet and 200 corporate representatives.[26] Tempelsman and the CCA organized the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Africa in 2001, featuring DRC President Joseph Kabila, coordinated with an Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) meeting involving President G. W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Maurice Tempelsman was Jackie O’Nassis Kennedy’s lover and he reportedly courted Madeline Albright. Tempelsman is Chairman of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist pressure group that claims it “works closely with the Israeli military.” [27] He sits on the boards of nationalist American think tanks that also seat Madeleine Albright. As Vice-Chairman of Lazare Kaplan International, Tempelsman’s annual base pay is $458,833, with a bonus of $80,000; as principal director/shareholder in Leon Tempelsman and Sons he gets a comparable amount again. SEC filings show that LKI directors are high-rolling Zionist lawyers and investment bankers: one director belongs to the law firm that represented President Kennedy—another Tempelsman friend. LKI is also connected to the euphemistically named United States Agency for International Development (USAID).[28] Selling to the U.S. Diamond Stockpile and to his private profits, Tempelsman companies have plundered tens of billions of diamond dollars from Congo/Zaire—alone—in the past five decades.
Conditions in Congo today are Leopoldian. Some Congolese earn as little as $2 a month working like slaves for Western companies. In a recent study, Medicins Sans Frontieres found conditions surveyed across Congo beyond “emergency” and into “catastrophic” classification. Since the war ended in 2003, conditions—in terms of mortality and access to health care—have deteriorated. People die of malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition, tuberculosis, measles, and the inability to seek or receive treatment. Conditions in peaceful areas of DRC remain worse than most war zones in the world.[29] Mortality in Eastern DRC remained over 1000 people per day in April 2007.[30]
...
Maurice Tempelsman chairs the International Advisory Council at the Harvard AIDS Institute (HAI) of the School of Public Health. HAI partners with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program (USMHRP), a program whose said purpose is to develop vaccines and AIDS prevention for U.S. Military servicemen.[33] Tempelsman’s involvement in covert actions and interventions flags this program as cover for clandestine biowarfare in “emerging” countries.
When contacted, Robert Rotberg praised the Kimberley Process as a “remarkable achievement” and he dismissed any conflict of interest between Tempelsman and the Kimberley initiatives. “We invited Maurice Tempelsman to the [2001] conference, but he chose not to come.” Asked about the U.S. Government diamond stockpile, Robert Rotberg indicated that its existence “is news to me.” The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency controls the national diamond stockpiles: some 3.1 million carats are held at the Defense National Stockpile Centers.[34] Pressed further about Tempelsman, Rotberg replied. “There is no contact between this side of the Charles river and that side. This is not a conspiracy, the real problem is not Maurice Tempelsman: the biggest problem is that the U.S. Treasury has been really slow to put [Kimberley] structures in place.” [35]
Maurice Tempelsman and Robert Rotberg are members of the Council on Foreign Relations. No contact between them? From 1999 to 2002 the CFR sponsored a series of panels titled “Roundtable on Private Capital Flows to Sub-Saharan Africa.” The panels’ director was Mahesh Kotecha and Chair was Maurice Tempelsman. At the time, Tempelsman was funding the CFR’s Africa Program. Panelists included Walter Kansteiner, Robert Rotberg, Frank Wisner and Botswana’s President Festus Mogae. The Vice President of Botswana, Lt. General S.K.I Khama, is on the board of U.S.-based Conservation International, a corporate “conservation” organization whose tiny smokescreen “ecotourism” project is used to tout their support in helping the San Bushmen.[36] Conservation International directors include Louis Cabot, whose Cabot Corporation benefited from the plunder of columbium-tantalite (coltan) from Congo.
The Kotecha family is directly involved with illegal networks pillaging coltan from Congo.
Walter Kansteiner—National Security Council African Affairs director under Clinton—is today director of Moto Gold, a company involved in Congo’s blood-drenched Ituri region, and the Kansteiner family of Chicago trades in coltan.[37] Walter Kansteiner was the U.S. President’s “personal representative” to the G-8 Africa Process, and he is a founding principal of the Scowcroft Group, under Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Adviser to G. H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford. Kansteiner also works for the Center for Strategic and International Studies Africa Policy Advisory Panel.[38]
Panelist Frank Wisner was also on the National Security Council under Clinton. Wisner’s co-directors of the American International Group include: Marshall Cohen, a director of the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation and Canadian Government Official; Harvard Professor Martin Stuart Feldstein; Clinton Cabinet members William Cohen and Richard Holbrooke; and Carla Hills, NAFTA negotiator and director of Chevron-Texaco and the International Crises Group, a flak organization active in all Africa’s hotspots.
(William) Cohen Group partners include former top Pentagon officers, White House officials, U.K. Lords, NATO Chiefs, and directors of Lockheed Martin and Dyncorp. Note that Dyncorp director Mark Ronald was previously President/CEO of BAE Systems.[39] Another Cohen Group director, Gen. (ret.) Paul Kern, participated in operations in Rwanda and Zaire. Frank Wisner’s father was CIA director of the Office of Policy Coordination, an early covert operations bureau; Operation Mockingbird, designed to infiltrate and control the U.S. media, was one of theirs. Frank Wisner—a USAID and state department official in Vietnam—was involved with the black-operations Pheonix assassinations program.[40]
Tempelsman’s affiliation with Robert Rotberg at the CFR explains the absence of any mention of Tempelsman or his diamond interests in the Kimberly-related conferences, policies and papers that came out of the Kennedy School. Seven Harvard professionals, including Michael Ignatief, and Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer for her whitewash of the U.S.-backed coup in Rwanda,[41] took part in the 2001 Kennedy School conference that led to Diamonds in Peace and War, the report that whitewashed Maurice Tempelsman’s involvement. Link
Moammar Gadhafi, R.I.P.
Will the Libyan dictator have the last laugh?
by Justin Raimondo, October 21, 2011
The grisly scenes of Gadhafi’s body being dragged through the streets of Sirte, and the unseemly celebrations of the Libyan dictator’s death in the Western media, are enough to make any decent person wince. Yes, he was a brutal dictator, and I hold no brief for him or his works, but is this kind of savagery really what we want to see in the “new” Libya?
Whether or not we want it, it is coming: the crew in charge of that unfortunate nation is no better, and perhaps worse, than Gadhafi. The fate of the rebels’ former commander-in-chief, Abdul Fatah Younis, prefigures a revolution that eats its own, and the ferocity of that revolutionary fervor is hardly abated.
Gadhafi loyalists include the largest tribe in the country, and after the smoke clears and the new regime extends its grip over dissident pockets of resistance, nostalgia for the relatively peaceful days of Gadhafi’s reign is more than likely to set in. Worse, the arsenals of the Libyan military have been systematically looted, with missiles and other sophisticated weaponry falling into the hands of radical Islamist militias. These militias are not fringe elements in the Libyan revolution, but rather they are in charge, with one of their number taking the place of the slain Younis as head of the rebel “armed forces.”
Indeed, the rebels’ military leadership consists largely of members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which is still prominently featured on our official list of designated terrorist organizations. Now we are allied with them — under a new name, the “National Transitional Council” – and US taxpayer dollars are pouring into their coffers. That money will be used to consolidate the rebels’ rule, a regime that promises to be every bit as repressive as the one that preceded it – albeit friendly, at least at first, to its Western sponsors.
There are several lessons to be learned from this episode. The first is directed at those anti-American despots still left standing in the region, and it is this: make no concessions. Gadhafi, it will be recalled, had his Great Reconciliation with the Western powers, earning Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s imprimatur in the process – and look where it landed him. This lesson is not lost on Bashar al-Assad, the beleaguered Syrian dictator, nor is it lost on pro-American despots, like the King of Bahrain, the Saudis, and any of the other pro-Western crowned thugs who lord it over their long-oppressed peoples. What these royals have learned from the example of Gadhafi’s – and Mubarak’s – fall is not to expect any help from Washington if they suddenly find themselves hiding in a drain pipe. Quite the contrary: they can fully expect to feel the wrath of the West, as it sides with the rebels and calls in its drones to rain death from the skies.
As the rulers of Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the sheikdoms of the Gulf contemplate the full meaning of the events in Libya and Egypt, one can easily imagine them making arrangements for a quick escape.
To our cynical and ruthless policymakers, however, such considerations are merely a side issue. The real significance of our foray into Libya is that it signals the advent of a new African initiative, the thrusting of American power into the heart of the dark continent. With military bases in Djibouti, and now Ethiopia, Africa is the latest addition to several new fronts in our endless “war on terrorism.”
Ambition, ideology, and opportunity are taking us ever-deeper into a region that has been inexplicably neglected by US policy planners: the Obama administration apparently seeks to rectify that, and rather quickly, with a contingent of US special forces being sent to Uganda, purportedly in order to rescue the country from the grip of a crazed “Christian” guerrilla army. It’s just a coincidence that this intervention – and the subsequent flow of “foreign aid” dollars – will prop up the increasingly unpopular rule of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, in power since 1986.
Museveni is a “former” Marxist revolutionary, who received military training from the Soviet-backed Frelimo guerrilla army: he wrote his student thesis on Franz Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence. A political survivor, he rose to the top of the anti-Amin “liberation” front, and after a series of coups and counter-coups, became president in 1986. In the 2006 elections, Museveni’s main opponent was arrested and charged with treason and rape. The brazen manner in which Museveni routinely steals elections has come under heavy criticism from the European Union, as well as from those members of the Ugandan opposition not sitting in jail. His rule has been pockmarked by various regional insurgencies, with the “Lord’s Resistance Army” the least of them. Under the pretext of fighting these "Christian" cultists, Museveni’s security forces will be strengthened and aid money will pour in.
Somalia has long been a focus of US “anti-terrorism” efforts, and the latest development on that front is the establishment of several military bases in the region, including in Ethiopia, where our ally is yet another “former” Marxist-Leninist despot and election thief who rules the country with an iron fist. Like Museveni’s Uganda, President Meles Zenawi‘s Ethiopia is riven with dozens of regional insurgencies, as religious and tribal minorities try to assert some measure of independence against a distant and tyrannical central government in Addis Ababa. US aid and political support is essential to maintaining Zenawi’s power, which has faced several serious challenges. Ominously, Zenawi’s expansionist dreams of a “Greater Ethiopia” extend into Somalia, where the regional Ethiopian-supported “government” of Puntland provides a base for further military incursions.
The historic rivalry between Ethiopia and Eritrea – a dirt-poor desolate strip of land between Ethiopia and the Red Sea – will come into play as the US military is thrust into Africa, and “Africom” – the US military’s African command – assumes an increasingly important role in the Empire’s war plans. Eritrea occupies a strategically important location: across the narrowest part of the Red Sea lies Yemen, the latest target of our stepped-up drone war.
America’s renewed interest in the region bodes ill for the Eritreans. Eritrea fought a long war series of wars against Ethiopian invaders, and in spite of support for the Ethiopians from both the US and the Soviet Union, the feisty Eritreans beat back every attempt by Addis Ababa to absorb the region. They finally won their independence in the 1980s, when a UN plebiscite installed the present government – a neo-Marxist one-party dictatorship. If Africom isn’t already looking at Eritrea the way a vulture looks down on a lion stalking a gazelle, then somebody isn’t doing their job.
Gadhafi comes from the same generation of “Third World” despots who came to power in the post-colonial period and played footsie with the Soviet Union in part to offset a long history of Western domination. Most of these were military men, and avowed “socialists,” although their versions of Marxist theology often differed from orthodoxy the way Mormonism deviates from Protestantism. These bonapartist regimes eventually entered a period of sclerosis, and reified into tools of tribal dominance and outright kleptocracy, with some monarchist flourishes thrown in for good measure. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, those who survived made their peace with the West, as did Gadhafi. Spoon fed by Western “aid” and “development” programs, the corrupto-crats grew fat while the people starved – and seethed.
You could almost hear the sigh of relief coming from Western capitals as news of Gadhafi’s unceremonious death spread around the world. Apparently captured alive, as this video shows, he was almost immediately killed by his captors, who then dragged his body through the streets of Sirte, which had been the last loyalist holdout. That a US drone first attacked Gadhafi’s convoy, and so gave the rebels the opportunity to make short work of him, is a telling detail. Odds are that NATO was tracking him, and in communication with rebels on the ground: whether they gave the direct order to off the Libyan leader matters little. What matters is that only God will judge him, and the trial will be private. The idea of Gadhafi in the dock at the International Tribunal in the Hague, testifying to his dealings with Western bigwigs over the years, is not something our leaders looked forward to.
Now the NATO-crats can turn their attention to the problem of how to hold the country together in the post-Gadhafi era, while maintaining tight control over whatever gang rises to the top. Libya, like the “countries” in the rest of Africa, is an artificial construct, the creation of Western colonial powers as they carved up the continent. It actually consists of at least three separate entities — Tripolitania to the west, Cyrenaica to the east, and an interior province peopled by nomads and black Tuaregs – each with its own distinct history and character. Uniting these regions by fiat ensures the future of Libya under the heel of yet another strongman, albeit one less eccentric and more reliably pro-Western than his predecessor. It seems a near certainty Libya will be deemed as yet unready for national elections, and one should expect the National Transitional Council will drop the “transitional” and simply declare itself to be the one and only legitimate government.
That this proclamation will be met with widespread resistance is also a near certainty, because Libya is afflicted with the same problem that besets the entire African continent – the illegitimacy of present-day national borders.
These borders are the outcome of decades of intra-mural battles between the European colonial powers, and bear little relationship to tribal and ethnic realities on the ground. As such, Africa is a tinderbox of inter-state rivalries and political and cultural tensions, which the spark of US intervention could very well set aflame.
As we wade into the Africa savannahs, and inject Special Forces into the Ugandan jungles, we will seek allies where we can find them – and create them where none exist. Like our British forebears, we’ll “take up the White man’s burden,” and fool ourselves into believing it’s all in the name of a vague “humanitarianism.” How long before the arbiters of Political Correctness deem opposition to US imperialism in Africa to be “racist”? Not long, I assure you.
As this administration tries to pick winners and losers in a place we know nothing about – and cannot know enough to do anything but harm – they’re bound to wind up with the African equivalent of Solyndra. From Libya to Uganda, the story is sure to be the same: all our efforts will amount to creating more chaos than order, fostering dependency instead of development. In short, like all government programs, the Obama administration’s plans for Africa are inevitably doomed to achieve the exact opposite of their intended result.
In Libya, where we are supporting and succoring an Islamist gang, we are seeing the first fruits of this seriously misguided policy. Gadhafi himself warned against the Islamist element in the rebel hierarchy: as we barbarically “celebrate” the bloody death of a ruthless and slightly wacky dictator, we would do well to wonder if he might one day have the last laugh.
by MacCruiskeen » Sun Oct 23, 2011 1:40 pm
seemslikeadream wrote:What is Madman of Tripoli's fate?
by seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 23, 2011 2:15 pm
MacCruiskeen wrote:seemslikeadream wrote:What is Madman of Tripoli's fate?
You can see it in very graphic detail here:
(Don't be ashamed, SLAD - enjoy.)
by AlicetheKurious » Sun Oct 23, 2011 3:43 pm
Justin Raimondo wrote:From Libya to Uganda, the story is sure to be the same: all our efforts will amount to creating more chaos than order, fostering dependency instead of development. In short, like all government programs, the Obama administration’s plans for Africa are inevitably doomed to achieve the exact opposite of their intended result.
In Libya, where we are supporting and succoring an Islamist gang, we are seeing the first fruits of this seriously misguided policy. Gadhafi himself warned against the Islamist element in the rebel hierarchy: as we barbarically “celebrate” the bloody death of a ruthless and slightly wacky dictator, we would do well to wonder if he might one day have the last laugh.
Libya, like the “countries” in the rest of Africa, is an artificial construct, the creation of Western colonial powers as they carved up the continent. It actually consists of at least three separate entities — Tripolitania to the west, Cyrenaica to the east, and an interior province peopled by nomads and black Tuaregs – each with its own distinct history and character. Uniting these regions by fiat ensures the future of Libya under the heel of yet another strongman, albeit one less eccentric and more reliably pro-Western than his predecessor.
by lupercal » Sun Oct 23, 2011 5:07 pm
seemslikeadream wrote:
From BBC
>> Learn more about War Crimes in Libya, watch a slideshow, and view the timeline
Despite NATO’s subsequent air campaign to protect Libyan civilians, untold thousands have suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of Qaddafi forces since the uprising began.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) gathered evidence of war crimes in Misrata, western Libya in June 2011, shortly after rebel forces liberated the coastal city.
The rule of law must be the bedrock of a new and free Libya. As the Transitional National Council charts a new course for the country in a post-Qaddafi era, it must ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice and held to account for their abuses.
seemslikeadream wrote:Libya and the World of Oil
Monday 4 April 2011
by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed
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