The Libya thread

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Re: The Libya thread

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Sep 03, 2011 11:00 am

.

THIS IS A GREAT ARTICLE. READ IT NOW.




http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/31/ ... ibya/print

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. [This is an archive. Strictly non-commercial. Follow the link for hits to CP.]

August 31, 2011

A Victory for the Libyan People?
The Top Ten Myths in the War Against Libya


by MAXIMILIAN C. FORTE

Since Colonel Gaddafi has lost his military hold in the war against NATO and the insurgents/rebels/new regime, numerous talking heads have taken to celebrating this war as a “success”. They believe this is a “victory of the Libyan people” and that we should all be celebrating. Others proclaim victory for the “responsibility to protect,” for “humanitarian interventionism,” and condemn the “anti-imperialist left”. Some of those who claim to be “revolutionaries,” or believe they support the “Arab revolution,” somehow find it possible to sideline NATO’s role in the war, instead extolling the democratic virtues of the insurgents, glorifying their martyrdom, and magnifying their role until everything else is pushed from view. I wish to dissent from this circle of acclamation, and remind readers of the role of ideologically-motivated fabrications of “truth” that were used to justify, enable, enhance, and motivate the war against Libya—and to emphasize how damaging the practical effects of those myths have been to Libyans, and to all those who favoured peaceful, non-militarist solutions.

These top ten myths are some of the most repeated claims, by the insurgents, and/or by NATO, European leaders, the Obama administration, the mainstream media, and even the so-called “International Criminal Court”—the main actors speaking in the war against Libya. In turn, we look at some of the reasons why these claims are better seen as imperial folklore, as the myths that supported the broadest of all myths—that this war is a “humanitarian intervention,” one designed to “protect civilians”. Again, the importance of these myths lies in their wide reproduction, with little question, and to deadly effect. In addition, they threaten to severely distort the ideals of human rights and their future invocation, as well aiding in the continued militarization of Western culture and society.

1. Genocide.

Just a few days after the street protests began, on February 21 the very quick to defect Libyan deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Ibrahim Dabbashi, stated: “We are expecting a real genocide in Tripoli. The airplanes are still bringing mercenaries to the airports”. This is excellent: a myth that is composed of myths. With that statement he linked three key myths together—the role of airports (hence the need for that gateway drug of military intervention: the no-fly zone), the role of “mercenaries” (meaning, simply, black people), and the threat of “genocide” (geared toward the language of the UN’s doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect). As ham-fisted and wholly unsubstantiated as the assertion was, he was clever in cobbling together three ugly myths, one of them grounded in racist discourse and practice that endures to the present, with newer atrocities reported against black Libyan and African migrants on a daily basis. He was not alone in making these assertions. Among others like him, Soliman Bouchuiguir, president of the Libyan League for Human Rights, told Reuters on March 14 that if Gaddafi’s forces reached Benghazi, “there will be a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. That’s not the only time we would be deliberately reminded of Rwanda. Here was Lt. Gen Roméo Dallaire, the much worshipped Canadian force commander of the U.N. peacekeeping mission for Rwanda in 1994, currently an appointed senator in the Canadian Parliament and co-director of the Will to Intervene project at Concordia University. Dallaire, in a precipitous sprint to judgment, not only made repeated references to Rwanda when trying to explain Libya, he spoke of Gaddafi as “employing genocidal threats to ‘cleanse Libya house by house’”. This is one instance where selective attention to Gaddafi’s rhetorical excess was taken all too seriously, when on other occasions the powers that be are instead quick to dismiss it: U.S. State Department spokesman, Mark Toner waved away Gaddafi’s alleged threats against Europe by saying that Gaddafi is “someone who’s given to overblown rhetoric”. How very calm, by contrast, and how very convenient—because on February 23, President Obama declared that he had instructed his administration to come up with a “full range of options” to take against Gaddafi.

But “genocide” has a well established international legal definition, as seen repeatedly in the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, where genocide involves the persecution of a “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Not all violence is “genocidal”. Internecine violence is not genocide. Genocide is neither just “lots of violence” nor violence against undifferentiated civilians. What both Dabbashi, Dallaire, and others failed to do was to identify the persecuted national, ethnic, racial or religious group, and how it differed in those terms from those allegedly committing the genocide. They really ought to know better (and they do), one as a UN ambassador and the other as a much exalted expert and lecturer on genocide. This suggests that myth-making was either deliberate, or founded on prejudice.

What foreign military intervention did do, however, was to enable the actual genocidal violence that has been routinely sidelined until only very recently: the horrific violence against African migrants and black Libyans, singled out solely on the basis of their skin colour. That has proceeded without impediment, without apology, and until recently, without much notice. Indeed, the media even collaborates, rapid to assert without evidence that any captured or dead black man must be a “mercenary”. This is the genocide that the white, Western world, and those who dominate the “conversation” about Libya, have missed (and not by accident).

2. Gaddafi is “bombing his own people”.

We must remember that one of the initial reasons in rushing to impose a no-fly zone was to prevent Gaddafi from using his air force to bomb “his own people”—a distinct phrasing that echoes what was tried and tested in the demonization of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. On February 21, when the first alarmist “warnings” about “genocide” were being made by the Libyan opposition, both Al Jazeera and the BBC claimed that Gaddafi had deployed his air force against protesters—as the BBC “reported”: “Witnesses say warplanes have fired on protesters in the city”. Yet, on March 1, in a Pentagon press conference, when asked: “Do you see any evidence that he [Gaddafi] actually has fired on his own people from the air? There were reports of it, but do you have independent confirmation? If so, to what extent?” U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied, “We’ve seen the press reports, but we have no confirmation of that”. Backing him up was Admiral Mullen: “That’s correct. We’ve seen no confirmation whatsoever”.

In fact, claims that Gaddafi also used helicopters against unarmed protesters are totally unfounded, a pure fabrication based on fake claims. This is important since it was Gaddafi’s domination of Libyan air space that foreign interventionists wanted to nullify, and therefore myths of atrocities perpetrated from the air took on added value as providing an entry point for foreign military intervention that went far beyond any mandate to “protect civilians”.

David Kirpatrick of The New York Times, as early as March 21 confirmed that, “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior”. The “vastly inflated claims” are what became part of the imperial folklore surrounding events in Libya, that suited Western intervention. Rarely did the Benghazi-based journalistic crowd question or contradict their hosts.

3. Save Benghazi.

This article is being written as the Libyan opposition forces march on Sirte and Sabha, the two last remaining strongholds of the Gaddafi government, with ominous warnings to the population that they must surrender, or else. Apparently, Benghazi became somewhat of a “holy city” in the international discourse dominated by leaders of the European Union and NATO. Benghazi was the one city on earth that could not be touched. It was like sacred ground. Tripoli? Sirte? Sabha? Those can be sacrificed, as we all look on, without a hint of protest from any of the powers that be—this, even as we get the first reports of how the opposition has slaughtered people in Tripoli. Let’s turn to the Benghazi myth.

“If we waited one more day,” Barack Obama said in his March 28 address, “Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world”. In a joint letter, Obama with UK Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy asserted: “By responding immediately, our countries halted the advance of Gaddafi’s forces. The bloodbath that he had promised to inflict on the citizens of the besieged city of Benghazi has been prevented. Tens of thousands of lives have been protected”. Not only did French jets bomb a retreating column, what we saw was a very short column that included trucks and ambulances, and that clearly could have neither destroyed nor occupied Benghazi.

Other than Gaddafi’s “overblown rhetoric,” which the U.S. was quick to dismiss when it suited its purposes, there is to date still no evidence furnished that shows Benghazi would have witnessed the loss of “tens of thousands” of lives as proclaimed by Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy. This was best explained by Professor Alan J. Kuperman in “False pretense for war in Libya?”:

“The best evidence that Khadafy did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured either fully or partially—including Zawiya, Misurata, and Ajdabiya, which together have a population greater than Benghazi….Khadafy’s acts were a far cry from Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Bosnia, and other killing fields….Despite ubiquitous cellphones equipped with cameras and video, there is no graphic evidence of deliberate massacre….Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The ‘no mercy’ warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those ‘who throw their weapons away’. Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight ‘to the bitter end’”.

In a bitter irony, what evidence there is of massacres, committed by both sides, is now to be found in Tripoli in recent days, months after NATO imposed its “life-saving” military measures. Revenge killings are daily being reported with greater frequency, including the wholesale slaughter of black Libyans and African migrants by rebel forces. Another sad irony: in Benghazi, which the insurgents have held for months now, well after Gaddafi forces were repulsed, not even that has prevented violence: revenge killings have been reported there too—more under #6 below.

4. African Mercenaries.

Patrick Cockburn summarized the functional utility of the myth of the “African mercenary” and the context in which it arose: “Since February, the insurgents, often supported by foreign powers, claimed that the battle was between Gaddafi and his family on the one side and the Libyan people on the other. Their explanation for the large pro-Gaddafi forces was that they were all mercenaries, mostly from black Africa, whose only motive was money”. As he notes, black prisoners were put on display for the media (which is a violation of the Geneva Convention), but Amnesty International later found that all the prisoners had supposedly been released since none of them were fighters, but rather were undocumented workers from Mali, Chad, and west Africa. The myth was useful for the opposition to insist that this was a war between “Gaddafi and the Libyan people,” as if he had no domestic support at all—an absolute and colossal fabrication such that one would think only little children could believe a story so fantastic. The myth is also useful for cementing the intended rupture between “the new Libya” and Pan-Africanism, realigning Libya with Europe and the “modern world” which some of the opposition so explicitly crave.

The “African mercenary” myth, as put into deadly, racist practice, is a fact that paradoxically has been both documented and ignored. Months ago I provided an extensive review of the role of the mainstream media, led by Al Jazeera, as well as the seeding of social media, in creating the African mercenary myth. Among the departures from the norm of vilifying Sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans that instead documented the abuse of these civilians, were the Los Angeles Times, Human Rights Watch which found no evidence of any mercenaries at all in eastern Libya (totally contradicting the claims presented as truth by Al Arabiya and The Telegraph, among others such as TIME and The Guardian). In an extremely rare departure from the propaganda about the black mercenary threat which Al Jazeera and its journalists helped to actively disseminate, Al Jazeera produced a single report focusing on the robbing, killing, and abduction of black residents in eastern Libya (now that CBS, Channel 4, and others are noting the racism, Al Jazeera is trying to ambiguously show some interest). Finally, there is some increased recognition of these facts of media collaboration in the racist vilification of the insurgents’ civilian victims—see FAIR: “NYT Points Out ‘Racist Overtones’ in Libyan Disinformation It Helped Spread”.

The racist targeting and killing of black Libyans and Sub-Saharan Africans continues to the present. Patrick Cockburn and Kim Sengupta speak of the recently discovered mass of “rotting bodies of 30 men, almost all black and many handcuffed, slaughtered as they lay on stretchers and even in an ambulance in central Tripoli”. Even while showing us video of hundreds of bodies in the Abu Salim hospital, the BBC dares not remark on the fact that most of those are clearly black people, and even wonders about who might have killed them. This is not a question for the anti-Gaddafi forces interviewed by Sengupta: “‘Come and see. These are blacks, Africans, hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries,’ shouted Ahmed Bin Sabri, lifting the tent flap to show the body of one dead patient, his grey T-shirt stained dark red with blood, the saline pipe running into his arm black with flies. Why had an injured man receiving treatment been executed?” Recent reports reveal the insurgents engaging in ethnic cleansing against black Libyans in Tawergha, the insurgents calling themselves “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin,” vowing that in the “new Libya” black people from Tawergha would be barred from health care and schooling in nearby Misrata, from which black Libyans had already been expelled by the insurgents. Currently, Human Rights Watch has reported: “Dark-skinned Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans face particular risks because rebel forces and other armed groups have often considered them pro-Gadhafi mercenaries from other African countries. We’ve seen violent attacks and killings of these people in areas where the National Transitional Council took control”. Amnesty International has also just reported on the disproportionate detention of black Africans in rebel-controlled Az-Zawiya, as well as the targeting of unarmed, migrant farm workers. Reports continue to mount as this is being written, with other human rights groups finding evidence of the insurgents targeting Sub-Saharan African migrant workers. As the chair of the African Union, Jean Ping, recently stated: “NTC seems to confuse black people with mercenaries. All blacks are mercenaries. If you do that, it means (that the) one-third of the population of Libya, which is black, is also mercenaries. They are killing people, normal workers, mistreating them”. (To read more, please consult the list of recent reports that I have compiled.)

The “African mercenary” myth continues to be one of the most vicious of all the myths, and the most racist. Even in recent days, newspapers such as the Boston Globe uncritically and unquestioningly show photographs of black victims or black detainees with the immediate assertion that they must be mercenaries, despite the absence of any evidence. Instead we are usually provided with casual assertions that Gaddafi is “known to have” recruited Africans from other nations in the past, without even bothering to find out if those shown in the photos are black Libyans. The lynching of both black Libyans and Sub-Saharan African migrant workers has been continuous, and has neither received any expression of even nominal concern by the U.S. and NATO members, nor has it aroused the interest of the so-called “International Criminal Court”. There is as little chance of there being any justice for the victims as there is of anyone putting a stop to these heinous crimes that clearly constitute a case of ethnic cleansing. The media, only now, is becoming more conscious of the need to cover these crimes, having glossed them over for months.

5. Viagra-fueled Mass Rape.

The reported crimes and human rights violations of the Gaddafi regime are awful enough as they are that one has to wonder why anyone would need to invent stories, such as that of Gaddafi’s troops, with erections powered by Viagra, going on a rape spree. Perhaps it was peddled because it’s the kind of story that “captures the imagination of traumatized publics”. This story was taken so seriously that some people started writing to Pfizer to get it to stop selling Viagra to Libya, since its product was allegedly being used as a weapon of war. People who otherwise should know better, set out to deliberately misinform the international public.

The Viagra story was first disseminated by Al Jazeera, in collaboration with its rebel partners, favoured by the Qatari regime that funds Al Jazeera. It was then redistributed by almost all other major Western news media.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, appeared before the world media to say that there was “evidence” that Gaddafi distributed Viagra to his troops in order “to enhance the possibility to rape” and that Gaddafi ordered the rape of hundreds of women. Moreno-Ocampo insisted: “We are getting information that Qaddafi himself decided to rape” and that “we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government”. He also exclaimed that Viagra is “like a machete,” and that “Viagra is a tool of massive rape”.

In a startling declaration to the UN Security Council, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice also asserted that Gaddafi was supplying his troops with Viagra to encourage mass rape. She offered no evidence whatsoever to back up her claim. Indeed, U.S. military and intelligence sources flatly contradicted Rice, telling NBC News that “there is no evidence that Libyan military forces are being given Viagra and engaging in systematic rape against women in rebel areas”. Rice is a liberal interventionist who was one of those to persuade Obama to intervene in Libya. She utilized this myth because it helped her make the case at the UN that there was no “moral equivalence” between Gaddafi’s human rights abuses and those of the insurgents.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also declared that “Gadhafi’s security forces and other groups in the region are trying to divide the people by using violence against women and rape as tools of war, and the United States condemns this in the strongest possible terms”. She added that she was “deeply concerned” by these reports of “wide-scale rape”. (She has, thus far, said nothing at all about the rebels’ racist lynchings.)

By June 10, Cherif Bassiouni, who is leading a UN rights inquiry into the situation in Libya, suggested that the Viagra and mass rape claim was part of a “massive hysteria”. Indeed, both sides in the war have made the same allegations against each other. Bassiouni also told the press of a case of “a woman who claimed to have sent out 70,000 questionnaires and received 60,000 responses, of which 259 reported sexual abuse”. However, his teams asked for those questionnaires, they never received them—“But she’s going around the world telling everybody about it…so now she got that information to Ocampo and Ocampo is convinced that here we have a potential 259 women who have responded to the fact that they have been sexually abused,” Bassiouni said. He also pointed out that it “did not appear to be credible that the woman was able to send out 70,000 questionnaires in March when the postal service was not functioning”. In fact, Bassiouni’s team “uncovered only four alleged cases” of rape and sexual abuse: “Can we draw a conclusion that there is a systematic policy of rape? In my opinion we can’t”. In addition to the UN, Amnesty International’s Donatella Rovera said in an interview with the French daily Libération, that Amnesty had “not found cases of rape….Not only have we not met any victims, but we have not even met any persons who have met victims. As for the boxes of Viagra that Gaddafi is supposed to have had distributed, they were found intact near tanks that were completely burnt out”.

However, this did not stop some news manufacturers from trying to maintain the rape claims, in modified form. The BBC went on to add another layer just a few days after Bassiouni humiliated the ICC and the media: the BBC now claimed that rape victims in Libya faced “honour killings”. This is news to the few Libyans I know, who never heard of honour killings in their country. The scholarly literature on Libya turns up little or nothing on this phenomenon in Libya. The honour killings myth serves a useful purpose for keeping the mass rape claim on life support: it suggests that women would not come forward and give evidence, out of shame. Also just a few days after Bassiouni spoke, Libyan insurgents, in collaboration with CNN, made a last-ditch effort to save the rape allegations: they presented a cell phone with a rape video on it, claiming it belonged to a government soldier. The men shown in the video are in civilian clothes. There is no evidence of Viagra. There is no date on the video and we have no idea who recorded it or where. Those presenting the cell phone claimed that many other videos existed, but they were conveniently being destroyed to preserve the “honour” of the victims.

6. Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

Having asserted, wrongly as we saw, that Libya faced impending “genocide” at the hands of Gaddafi’s forces, it became easier for Western powers to invoke the UN’s 2005 doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. Meanwhile, it is not at all clear that by the time the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 that the violence in Libya had even reached the levels seen in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen. The most common refrain used against critics of the selectivity of this supposed “humanitarian interventionism” is that just because the West cannot intervene everywhere does not mean it should not intervene in Libya. Maybe…but that still does not explain why Libya was the chosen target. This is a critical point because some of the earliest critiques of R2P voiced at the UN raised the issue of selectivity, of who gets to decide, and why some crises where civilians are targeted (say, Gaza) are essentially ignored, while others receive maximum concern, and whether R2P served as the new fig leaf for hegemonic geopolitics.

The myth at work here is that foreign military intervention was guided by humanitarian concerns. To make the myth work, one has to willfully ignore at least three key realities. One thus has to ignore the new scramble for Africa, where Chinese interests are seen as competing with the West for access to resources and political influence, something that AFRICOM is meant to challenge. Gaddafi challenged AFRICOM’s intent to establish military bases in Africa. AFRICOM has since become directly involved in the Libya intervention and specifically “Operation Odyssey Dawn”. Horace Campbell argued that “U.S. involvement in the Libyan bombing is being turned into a public relations ploy for AFRICOM” and an “opportunity to give AFRICOM credibility under the facade of the Libyan intervention”. In addition, Gaddafi’s power and influence on the continent had also been increasing, through aid, investment, and a range of projects designed to lessen African dependency on the West and to challenge Western multilateral institutions by building African unity—rendering him a rival to U.S. interests. Secondly, one has to ignore not just the anxiety of Western oil interests over Gaddafi’s “resource nationalism” (threatening to take back what oil companies had gained), an anxiety now clearly manifest in the European corporate rush into Libya to scoop up the spoils of victory—but one has to also ignore the apprehension over what Gaddafi was doing with those oil revenues in supporting greater African economic independence, and for historically backing national liberation movements that challenged Western hegemony. Thirdly, one has to also ignore the fear in Washington that the U.S. was losing a grip on the course of the so-called “Arab revolution”. How one can stack up these realities, and match them against ambiguous and partial “humanitarian” concerns, and then conclude that, yes, human rights is what mattered most, seems entirely implausible and unconvincing—especially with the atrocious track record of NATO and U.S. human rights violations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and before that Kosovo and Serbia. The humanitarian angle is simply neither credible nor even minimally logical.

If R2P is seen as founded on moral hypocrisy and contradiction—now definitively revealed—it will become much harder in the future to cry wolf again and expect to get a respectful hearing. This is especially the case since little in the way of diplomacy and peaceful negotiation preceded the military intervention—while Obama is accused by some of having been slow to react, this was if anything a rush to war, on a pace that by very far surpassed Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Not only do we know from the African Union about how its efforts to establish a peaceful transition were impeded, but Dennis Kucinich also reveals that he received reports that a peaceful settlement was at hand, only to be “scuttled by State Department officials”. These are absolutely critical violations of the R2P doctrine, showing how those ideals could instead be used for a practice that involved a hasty march to war, and war aimed at regime change (which is itself a violation of international law).

That R2P served as a justifying myth that often achieved the opposite of its stated aims, is no longer a surprise. I am not even speaking here of the role of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in bombing Libya and aiding the insurgents—even as they backed Saudi military intervention to crush the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain, nor of the ugly pall cast on an intervention led by the likes of unchallenged abusers of human rights who have committed war crimes with impunity in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I am taking a narrower approach—such as the documented cases where NATO not only willfully failed to protect civilians in Libya, but it even deliberately and knowingly targeted them in a manner that constitutes terrorism by most official definitions used by Western governments.

NATO admitted to deliberately targeting Libya’s state television, killing three civilian reporters, in a move condemned by international journalist federations as a direct violation of a 2006 Security Council resolution banning attacks on journalists. A U.S. Apache helicopter—in a repeat of the infamous killings shown in the Collateral Murder video—gunned down civilians in the central square of Zawiya, killing the brother of the information minister among others. Taking a fairly liberal notion of what constitutes “command and control facilities,” NATO targeted a civilian residential space resulting in the deaths of some of Gaddafi’s family members, including three grandchildren. As if to protect the myth of “protecting civilians” and the unconscionable contradiction of a “war for human rights,” the major news media often kept silent about civilian deaths caused by NATO bombardments. R2P has been invisible when it comes to civilians targeted by NATO.

In terms of the failure to protect civilians, in a manner that is actually an international criminal offense, we have the numerous reports of NATO ships ignoring the distress calls of refugee boats in the Mediterranean that were fleeing Libya. In May, 61 African refugees died on a single vessel, despite making contact with vessels belonging to NATO member states. In a repeat of the situation, dozens died in early August on another vessel. In fact, on NATO’s watch, at least 1,500 refugees fleeing Libya have died at sea since the war began. They were mostly Sub-Saharan Africans, and they died in multiples of the death toll suffered by Benghazi during the protests. R2P was utterly absent for these people.

NATO has developed a peculiar terminological twist for Libya, designed to absolve the rebels of any role in perpetrating crimes against civilians, and abdicating its so-called responsibility to protect. Throughout the war, spokespersons for NATO and for the U.S. and European governments consistently portrayed all of the actions of Gaddafi’s forces as “threatening civilians,” even when engaged in either defensive actions, or combat against armed opponents. For example, this week the NATO spokesperson, Roland Lavoie, “appeared to struggle to explain how NATO strikes were protecting civilians at this stage in the conflict. Asked about NATO’s assertion that it hit 22 armed vehicles near Sirte on Monday, he was unable to say how the vehicles were threatening civilians, or whether they were in motion or parked”.

By protecting the rebels, in the same breath as they spoke of protecting civilians, it is clear that NATO intended for us to see Gaddafi’s armed opponents as mere civilians. Interestingly, in Afghanistan, where NATO and the U.S. fund, train, and arm the Karzai regime in attacking “his own people” (like they do in Pakistan), the armed opponents are consistently labeled “terrorists” or “insurgents”—even if the majority of them are civilians who have never served in any official standing army. They are insurgents in Afghanistan, and their deaths at the hands of NATO are listed separately from the tallies for civilian casualties. By some magic, in Libya, they are all “civilians”. In response to the announcement of the UN Security Council voting for military intervention, a volunteer translator for Western reporters in Tripoli made this key observation: “Civilians holding guns, and you want to protect them? It’s a joke. We are the civilians. What about us?”

NATO has provided a shield for the insurgents in Libya to victimize unarmed civilians in areas they came to occupy. There was no hint of any “responsibility to protect” in these cases. NATO assisted the rebels in starving Tripoli of supplies, subjecting its civilian population to a siege that deprived them of water, food, medicine, and fuel. When Gaddafi was accused of doing this to Misrata, the international media were quick to cite this as a war crime. Save Misrata, kill Tripoli—whatever you want to label such “logic,” humanitarian is not an acceptable option. Leaving aside the documented crimes by the insurgents against black Libyans and African migrant workers, the insurgents were also found by Human Rights Watch to have engaged in “looting, arson, and abuse of civilians in [four] recently captured towns in western Libya”. In Benghazi, which the insurgents have held for months now, revenge killings have been reported by The New York Times as late as this May, and by Amnesty International in late June and faulted the insurgents’ National Transitional Council. The responsibility to protect? It now sounds like something deserving wild mockery.

7. Gaddafi—the Demon.

Depending on your perspective, either Gaddafi is a heroic revolutionary, and thus the demonization by the West is extreme, or Gaddafi is a really bad man, in which case the demonization is unnecessary and absurd. The myth here is that the history of Gaddafi’s power was marked only by atrocity—he is thoroughly evil, without any redeeming qualities, and anyone accused of being a “Gaddafi supporter” should somehow feel more ashamed than those who openly support NATO. This is binary absolutism at its worst—virtually no one made allowance for the possibility that some might neither support Gaddafi, the insurgents, nor NATO. Everyone was to be forced into one of those camps, no exceptions allowed. What resulted was a phony debate, dominated by fanatics of one side or another. Missed in the discussion, recognition of the obvious: however much Gaddafi had been “in bed” with the West over the past decade, his forces were now fighting against a NATO-driven take over of his country.

The other result was the impoverishment of historical consciousness, and the degradation of more complex appreciations of the full breadth of the Gaddafi record. This would help explain why some would not rush to condemn and disown the man (without having to resort to crude and infantile caricaturing of their motivations). While even Glenn Greenwald feels the need to dutifully insert, “No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi,” I have known decent human beings in Nicaragua, Trinidad, Dominica, and among the Mohawks in Montreal who very much appreciate Gaddafi’s support—not to mention his support for various national liberation movements, including the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Gaddafi’s regime has many faces: some are seen by his domestic opponents, others are seen by recipients of his aid, and others were smiled at by the likes of Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy, Condoleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. There are many faces, and they are all simultaneously real. Some refuse to “disown” Gaddafi, to “apologize” for his friendship towards them, no matter how distasteful, indecent, and embarrassing other “progressives” may find him. That needs to be respected, instead of this now fashionable bullying and gang banging that reduces a range of positions to one juvenile accusation: “you support a dictator”. Ironically, we support many dictators, with our very own tax dollars, and we routinely offer no apologies for this fact.

Speaking of the breadth of Gaddafi’s record, that ought to resist simplistic, revisionist reduction, some might care to note that even now, the U.S. State Department’s webpage on Libya still points to a Library of Congress Country Study on Libya that features some of the Gaddafi government’s many social welfare achievements over the years in the areas of medical care, public housing, and education. In addition, Libyans have the highest literacy rate in Africa (see UNDP, p. 171) and Libya is the only continental African nation to rank “high” in the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Even the BBC recognized these achievements:

“Women in Libya are free to work and to dress as they like, subject to family constraints. Life expectancy is in the seventies. And per capita income—while not as high as could be expected given Libya’s oil wealth and relatively small population of 6.5m—is estimated at $12,000 (£9,000), according to the World Bank. Illiteracy has been almost wiped out, as has homelessness—a chronic problem in the pre-Gaddafi era, where corrugated iron shacks dotted many urban centres around the country”.

So if one supports health care, does that mean one supports dictatorship? And if “the dictator” funds public housing and subsidizes incomes, do we simply erase those facts from our memory?

8. Freedom Fighters—the Angels.

The complement to the demonization of Gaddafi was the angelization of the “rebels”. My aim here is not to counter the myth by way of inversion, and demonizing all of Gaddafi’s opponents, who have many serious and legitimate grievances, and in large numbers have clearly had more than they can bear. I am instead interested in how “we,” in the North Atlantic part of the equation, construct them in ways that suit our intervention. One standard way, repeated in different ways across a range of media and by U.S. government spokespersons, can be seen in this New York Times’ depiction of the rebels as “secular-minded professionals—lawyers, academics, businesspeople—who talk about democracy, transparency, human rights and the rule of law”. The listing of professions familiar to the American middle class which respects them, is meant to inspire a shared sense of identification between readers and the Libyan opposition, especially when we recall that it is on the Gaddafi side where the forces of darkness dwell: the main “professions” we find are torturer, terrorist, and African mercenary.

For many weeks it was almost impossible to get reporters embedded with the rebel National Transitional Council in Benghazi to even begin to provide a description of who constituted the anti-Gaddafi movement, if it was one organization or many groups, what their agendas were, and so forth. The subtle leitmotif in the reports was one that cast the rebellion as entirely spontaneous and indigenous—which may be true, in part, and it may also be an oversimplification. Among the reports that significantly complicated the picture were those that discussed the CIA ties to the insurgents (for more, see this, this, this, and that); others highlighted the role of the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and USAID, which have been active in Libya since 2005; those that detailed the role of various expatriate groups; and, reports of the active role of “radical Islamist” militias embedded within the overall insurgency, with some pointing to Al Qaeda connections.

Some feel a definite need for being on the side of “the good guys,” especially as neither Iraq nor Afghanistan offer any such sense of righteous vindication. Americans want the world to see them as doing good, as being not only indispensable, but also irreproachable. They could wish for nothing better than being seen as atoning for their sins in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a special moment, where the bad guy can safely be the other once again. A world that is safe for America is a world that is unsafe for evil. Marching band, baton twirlers, Anderson Cooper, confetti—we get it.

9. Victory for the Libyan People.

To say that the current turn in Libya represents a victory by the Libyan people in charting their own destiny is, at best, an oversimplification that masks the range of interests involved since the beginning in shaping and determining the course of events on the ground, and that ignores the fact that for much of the war Gaddafi was able to rely on a solid base of popular support. As early as February 25, a mere week after the start of the first street protests, Nicolas Sarkozy had already determined that Gaddafi “must go”. By February 28, David Cameron began working on a proposal for a no-fly zone—these statements and decisions were made without any attempt at dialogue and diplomacy. By March 30, The New York Times reported that for “several weeks” CIA operatives had been working inside Libya, which would mean they were there from mid-February, that is, when the protests began—they were then joined inside Libya by “dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers”. The NYT also reported in the same article that “several weeks” before (again, around mid-February), President Obama Several “signed a secret finding authorizing the CIA to provide arms and other support to Libyan rebels,” with that “other support” entailing a range of possible “covert actions”. USAID had already deployed a team to Libya by early March. At the end of March, Obama publicly stated that the objective was to depose Gaddafi. In terribly suspicious wording, “a senior U.S. official said the administration had hoped that the Libyan uprising would evolve ‘organically,’ like those in Tunisia and Egypt, without need for foreign intervention”—which sounds like exactly the kind of statement one makes when something begins in a fashion that is not “organic” and when comparing events in Libya as marked by a potential legitimacy deficit when compared to those of Tunisia and Egypt. Yet on March 14 the NTC’s Abdel Hafeez Goga asserted, “We are capable of controlling all of Libya, but only after the no-fly zone is imposed”—which is still not the case even six months later.

In recent days it has also been revealed that what the rebel leadership swore it would oppose—“foreign boots on the ground”—is in fact a reality confirmed by NATO: “Special forces troops from Britain, France, Jordan and Qatar on the ground in Libya have stepped up operations in Tripoli and other cities in recent days to help rebel forces as they conducted their final advance on the Gadhafi regime”. This, and other summaries, are only scratching the surface of the range of external support provided to the rebels. The myth here is that of the nationalist, self-sufficient rebel, fueled entirely by popular support.

At the moment, war supporters are proclaiming the intervention a “success”. It should be noted that there was another case where an air campaign, deployed to support local armed militia on the ground, aided by U.S. covert military operatives, also succeeded in deposing another regime, and even much more quickly. That case was Afghanistan. Success.

10. Defeat for “the Left”.

As if reenacting the pattern of articles condemning “the left” that came out in the wake of the Iran election protests in 2009 (see as examples Hamid Dabashi and Slavoj Žižek), the war in Libya once again seemed to have presented an opportunity to target the left, as if this was topmost on the agenda—as if “the left” was the problem to be addressed. Here we see articles, in various states of intellectual and political disrepair, by Juan Cole (see some of the rebuttals: “The case of Professor Juan Cole,” “An open letter to Professor Juan Cole: A reply to a slander,” “Professor Cole ‘answers’ WSWS on Libya: An admission of intellectual and political bankruptcy”), Gilbert Achcar (and this especially), Immanuel Wallerstein, and Helena Sheehan who seemingly arrived at some of her most critical conclusions at the airport at the end of her very first visit to Tripoli.

There seems to be some confusion over roles and identities. There is no homogeneous left, nor ideological agreement among anti-imperialists (which includes conservatives and libertarians, among anarchists and Marxists). Nor was the “anti-imperialist left” in any position to either do real harm on the ground, as is the case of the actual protagonists. There was little chance of the anti-interventionists in influencing foreign policy, which took shape in Washington before any of the serious critiques against intervention were published. These points suggest that at least some of the critiques are moved by concerns that go beyond Libya, and that even have very little to do with Libya ultimately. The most common accusation is that the anti-imperialist left is somehow coddling a dictator. The argument is that this is based on a flawed analysis—in criticizing the position of Hugo Chávez, Wallerstein says Chávez’s analysis is deeply flawed, and offers this among the criticisms: “The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s analysis is that there is not going to be any significant military involvement of the western world in Libya” (yes, read it again). Indeed, many of the counterarguments deployed against the anti-interventionist left echo or wholly reproduce the top myths that were dismantled above, that get their geopolitical analysis almost entirely wrong, and that pursue politics focused in part on personality and events of the day. This also shows us the deep poverty of politics premised primarily on simplistic and one-sided ideas of “human rights” and “protection” (see Richard Falk’s critique), and the success of the new military humanism in siphoning off the energies of the left. And a question persists: if those opposed to intervention were faulted for providing a moral shield for “dictatorship” (as if imperialism was not itself a global dictatorship), what about those humanitarians who have backed the rise of xenophobic and racist militants who by so many accounts engage in ethnic cleansing? Does it mean that the pro-interventionist crowd is racist? Do they even object to the racism? So far, I have heard only silence from those quarters.

The agenda in brow-beating the anti-imperialist straw man masks an effort to curb dissent against an unnecessary war that has prolonged and widened human suffering; advanced the cause of war corporatists, transnational firms, and neoliberals; destroyed the legitimacy of multilateral institutions that were once openly committed to peace in international relations; violated international law and human rights; witnessed the rise of racist violence; empowered the imperial state to justify its continued expansion; violated domestic laws; and reduced the discourse of humanitarianism to a clutch of simplistic slogans, reactionary impulses, and formulaic policies that privilege war as a first option. Really, the left is the problem here?


Maximilian Forte is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His website can be found at http://openanthropology.org/ as can his previous articles on Libya and other facets of imperialism.





http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/30/ ... -cia/print

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. [This is an archive. Strictly non-commercial. Follow the link for hits to CP.]

August 30, 2011

"Democracy Now?"
Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA


by JOHN WALSH


Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted. And that has been the case for some time for the Professor from Michigan. After warning of the “difficulties” with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with burning kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of “humanitarian imperialism.”

Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: “I remain (Emphasis mine.) convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.” Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was “worth it”? Cole has called the Afghan War “the right war at the right time” and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.

Cole claims to be a man of the left and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning “expert” on the war on Libya. This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the “left” and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country? Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’s version of the “left.” Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya has been fine and dandy. But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war?

Miraculously, Cole got just the rehabilitation he needed to continue with this vital propaganda function when it was disclosed by the New York Times on June 15 that he was the object of a White House inquiry way back in 2005 in Bush time. The source and reason for this leak and the publication of it by the NYT at this time, so many years later, should be of great interest, but they are unknown. Within a week of the Times piece Cole was accorded a hero’s welcome on Democracy Now, as he appeared with retired CIA agent Glenn Carle who had served 23 years in the clandestine services of the CIA in part as an “interrogator.” Carl had just retired from the CIA at the time of the White House request and was at the time employed at the National Intelligence Council, which authors the National Intelligence Estimate.

It hit this listener like a ton of bricks when it was disclosed in Goodman’s interview that Cole was a long time “consultant” for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and other agencies. Here is what nearly caused me to keel over when I heard it (From the Democracy Now transcript.):

AMY GOODMAN: So, did you know Professor Cole or know of him at the time you were asked? And can you go on from there? What happened when you said you wouldn’t do this? And who was it who demanded this information from you, said that you should get information?

GLENN CARLE: Well, I did know Professor Cole. He was one of a large number of experts of diverse views that the National Intelligence Council and my office and the CIA respectively consult with to challenge our assumptions and understand the trends and issues on our various portfolios. So I knew him that way. And it was sensible, in that sense, that the White House turned to my office to inquire about him, because we were the ones, at least one of the ones—I don’t know all of Mr. Cole’s work—who had consulted with him. (Emphases mine.)

That seems like strange toil for a man of the “left.” But were the consultations long drawn out and the association with the CIA a deep one? It would appear so. Again from the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the way James Risen (the NYT reporter) writes it, he says, “Mr. Carle said [that] sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. [Mr.] Low and [Mr.] Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, [Mr.] Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear [that] he wanted [Mr.] Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled [his] boss saying, ‘The White House wants to get him.’”

GLENN CARLE: Well, that’s substantially correct. The one nuance, perhaps, I would point out is there’s a difference between collecting information actively, going out and running an operation, say, to find out things about Mr. Cole, or providing information known through interactions. (Emphasis mine.) I would characterize it more as the latter.

And later in the interview Carle continues:

On the whole, Professor Cole and I are in agreement. The distinction I make is it wasn’t publicly known information that was requested; it was information that officers knew of a personal nature about Professor Cole, which is much more disturbing. There was no direct request that I’m aware, in the two instances of which I have knowledge, for the officers actively to seek and obtain, to conduct—for me to go out and follow Professor Cole. But if I knew lifestyle questions or so on, to pass those along. (Emphasis mine.)That’s how I—which is totally unacceptable.

It would seem then that the interaction between the CIA operatives and Cole was long standing and sufficiently intimate that the CIA spooks could be expected to know things about Cole’s lifestyle and personal life. It is not that anyone should give two figs about Cole’s personal life which is more than likely is every bit as boring as he claims. But his relationship with the CIA is of interest since he is an unreconstructed hawk. What was remarkable to me at the time is that Goodman did not pick up on any of this. Did she know before of Cole’s connections? Was not this the wrong man to have as a “frequent guest,” in Goodman’s words, on the situation in the Middle East?

This is not to claim that Cole is on a mission for the CIA to convince the left to support the imperial wars, most notably at the moment the war on Libya. Nor is this a claim that the revelation about the White House seeking information on Cole was a contrived psyops effort to rehabilitate Cole so that he could continue such a mission. That cannot be claimed, because there is as yet no evidence for it. But information flows two ways in any consultation, and it is even possible that Cole was being loaded with war-friendly information in hopes he would transmit it.

Cole is anxious to promote himself as a man of the left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya. At one point he says to Goodman (3/29), “We are people of the left. We care about the ordinary people. We care about workers.” It is strange that a man who claims such views dismisses as irrelevant the progress that has come to the people of Libya under Gaddafi, dictator or not. (Indeed what brought Gaddafi down was not that he was a dictator but that he was not our dictator.) In fact Libya has the highest score of all African countries on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and with Tunisia and Morocco the second highest level of literacy. The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide.

Whither the Left on the Question of Intervention?

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk. But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion. One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole prowar. It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention. Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort. Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate? That is a strange choice indeed.

This writer does not get to listen to Democracy Now every day. But I have not heard a full-throated denunciation of the war on Libya from host or guests. Certainly according to a search on the DN web site, Cynthia McKinney did not appear as a guest nor Ramsey Clark after their courageous fact finding tour to Libya. There was only one all out denunciation of the war – on the day when the guests were Rev. Jesse Jackson and Vincent Harding who was King’s speechwriter on the famous speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967 in which King condemned the U.S. war on Vietnam. Jackson and the wise and keenly intelligent Harding were there not to discuss Libya but to discuss the MLK Jr. monument. Nonetheless Jackson and Harding made clear that they did not like the U.S. war in Libya one bit, nor the militarism it entails.

If one reads CounterPunch.org, Antiwar.com or The American Conservative, one knows that one is reading those who are anti-interventionist on the basis of principle. With Democracy Now and kindred progressive outlets, it’s all too clear where a big chunk of the so-called “left” stands, especially since the advent of Obama. In his superb little book Humanitarian Imperialism Jean Bricmont criticizes much of the left for falling prey to advocacy of wars, supposedly based on good intentions. And Alexander Cockburn has often pointed out that many progressives are actually quite fond of “humanitarian” interventionism. Both here and in Europe this fondness seems to be especially true of Obama’s latest war, the war on Libya . It is little wonder that the “progressives” are losing their antiwar following to Ron Paul and the Libertarians who are consistent and principled on the issue of anti-interventionism.

Democracy Now, quo vadis? Wherever you are heading, you would do well to travel without Juan Cole and his friends.


John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com After wading through Cole’s loose prose and dubious logic to write this essay, the author suspects that the rejection of Cole by the Yale faculty was the result of considerations that had little to do with neocon Bush/Cheney operatives.



We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The Libya thread

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Sep 03, 2011 12:37 pm

.

Okay, now in fairness for having put the Walsh article about Cole here, I'll cross-post Cole's response from the Cole thread, posted by barracuda.

Qaddafi was a CIA Asset

Just yesterday Juan Cole wrote:Human Rights Watch found documents in Libya after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi that it passed on to the Wall Street Journal, which is analyzing them. The WSJ reported today that the documents show that Qaddafi developed so warm a relationship with George W. Bush that Bush sent people he had kidnapped (“rendition”) to Libya to be “questioned” by Libya’s goons, and almost certainly to be tortured. The formal paperwork asked Libya to observe human rights, but Bush’s office also sent over a list of specific questions it wanted the Libyan interrogators to ask. Qaddafi also gave permission to the CIA from 2004 to establish a formal presence in the country.

Qaddafi had been on the outs with the West for decades, but was rehabilitated once he gave up his ‘weapons of mass destruction’ programs (Qaddafi had no unconventional weapons, and no obvious ability to develop them, so his turning over to Bush of a few rotting diagrams that had been buried was hardly a big deal.

I have been going blue in the face pointing out that Muammar Qaddafi is not a progressive person, and that in fact his regime was in its last decades a helpmeet to the international status quo powers.

Now it turns out that Qaddafi was hand in glove with Bush regarding “interrogation” of the prisoners sent him from Washington.

Alexander Cockburn’s outfit has been trying to smear me by suggesting that I had some sort of relationship with the CIA, when all I ever did was give talks in Washington at think tanks to which analysts came to listen; when you speak to the public you speak to all kinds of people. I never was a direct consultant and never had a contract or employment with the agency itself. I spoke to a wide range of USG personnel in those talks in Washington in the Bush years, including the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and even local police officers, and the intelligence analysts were just part of the audience.

In fact, we now know that the Bush administration was upset that I was given a hearing in Washington and was influential with the analysts, and asked the CIA to spy on me and attempt to destroy my reputation.

So how delicious is it that those who supported Qaddafi, or opposed practical steps to keep him from slaughtering the protest movement (such as A. Cockburn and his hatchet man John Walsh), were de facto allies of the CIA themselves– and not just allies of the analysts, who try to understand the intelligence, but allies of the guys doing “rendition,” i.e. kidnapping suspects off the street and having them “interrogated.”
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: The Libya thread

Postby Stephen Morgan » Mon Sep 05, 2011 8:03 am

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 05, 2011 10:30 am

Libya: Here We Go Again
Posted on Sep 5, 2011

By Chris Hedges

Here we go again. The cheering crowds. The deposed dictator. The encomiums to freedom and liberty. The American military as savior. You would think we would have learned in Afghanistan or Iraq. But I guess not. I am waiting for a trucked-in crowd to rejoice as a Gadhafi statue is toppled and Barack Obama lands on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit to announce “Mission Accomplished.” War, as long as you view it through the distorted lens of the corporate media, is not only entertaining, but allows us to confuse state power with personal power. It permits us to wallow in unchecked self-exaltation. We are a nation that loves to love itself.

I know enough of Libya, a country I covered for many years as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, to assure you that the chaos and bloodletting have only begun. Moammar Gadhafi, during one of my lengthy interviews with him under a green Bedouin tent in the sprawling Bab al-Aziziya army barracks in Tripoli, once proposed marrying one of his sons to Chelsea Clinton as a way of mending fences with the United States. He is as insane as he appears and as dangerous. But we should never have become the air force, trainers, suppliers, special forces and enablers of rival tribal factions, goons under the old regime and Islamists that are divided among themselves by deep animosities and a long history of violent conflict.

Stopping Gadhafi forces from entering Benghazi six months ago, which I supported, was one thing. Embroiling ourselves in a civil war was another. And to do it Obama blithely shredded the Constitution and bypassed Congress in violation of the War Powers Resolution. Not that the rule of law matters much in Washington. The dark reasoning of George W. Bush’s administration was that the threat of terrorism and national security gave the executive branch the right to ignore all legal restraints. The Obama administration has made this disregard for law bipartisan. Obama assured us when this started that it was not about “regime change.” But this promise proved as empty as the ones he made during his presidential campaign. He has ruthlessly prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where military planners speak of a continued U.S. presence for the next couple of decades. He has greatly expanded our proxy wars, which rely heavily on drone and missile attacks, as well as clandestine operations, in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Add a few more countries and we will set the entire region alight.

The NATO airstrikes on the city of Sirte expose the hypocrisy of our “humanitarian” intervention in Libya. Sirte is the last Gadhafi stronghold and the home to Gadhafi’s tribe. The armed Libyan factions within the rebel alliance are waiting like panting hound dogs outside the city limits. They are determined, once the airstrikes are over, not only to rid the world of Gadhafi but all those within his tribe who benefited from his 42-year rule. The besieging of Sirte by NATO warplanes, which are dropping huge iron fragmentation bombs that will kill scores if not hundreds of innocents, mocks the justification for intervention laid out in a United Nations Security Council resolution. The U.N., when this began six months ago, authorized “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” We have, as always happens in war, become the monster we sought to defeat. We destroy in order to save. Libya’s ruling National Transitional Council estimates that the number of Libyans killed in the last six months, including civilians and combatants, has exceeded 50,000. Our intervention, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, has probably claimed more victims than those killed by the former regime. But this intervention, like the others, was never, despite all the high-blown rhetoric surrounding it, about protecting or saving Libyan lives. It was about the domination of oil fields by Western corporations.

Once the Libyans realize what the Iraqis and Afghans have bitterly discovered—that we have no interest in democracy, that our primary goal is appropriating their natural resources as cheaply as possible and that we will sacrifice large numbers of people to maintain our divine right to the world’s diminishing supply of fossil fuel—they will hate us the way we deserve to be hated. Libya has the ninth largest oil reserves in the world, which is why we react with moral outrage and military resolve when Gadhafi attacks his citizens, but ignore the nightmare in the Congo, where things for the average Congolese are far, far worse. It is why the puppets in the National Transitional Council have promised to oust China and Brazil from the Libyan oil fields and turn them over to Western companies. The unequivocal message we deliver daily through huge explosions and death across the occupied Middle East is: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

History is replete with conquering forces being cheered when they arrive, whether during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine in World War II, the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon or our own arrival in Baghdad, and then rapidly mutating from liberator to despised enemy. And once our seizure of Libyan oil becomes clear it will only ramp up the jihadist hatred for America that has spread like wildfire across the Middle East. We are recruiting the next generation of 9/11 hijackers, all waiting for their chance to do to us what we are doing to them.

As W.H. Auden understood:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

The force used by the occupier to displace the old regime always makes sure the new regime is supine and complaint. The National Transitional Council, made up of former Gadhafi loyalists, Islamists and tribal leaders, many of whom detest each other, will be the West’s vehicle for the reconfiguration of Libya. Libya will return to being the colony it was before Gadhafi and the other young officers in 1969 ousted King Idris, who among other concessions had let Standard Oil write Libya’s petroleum laws. Gadhafi’s defiance of Western commercial interests, which saw the nationalization of foreign banks and foreign companies, along with the oil industry, as well as the closure of U.S. and British air bases, will be reversed. The despotic and collapsed or collapsing regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria once found their revolutionary legitimacy in the pan-Arabism of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. But these regimes fell victim to their own corruption, decay and brutality. None were worth defending. Their disintegration, however, heralds a return of the corporate and imperial power that spawned figures like Nasser and will spawn his radical 21st century counterparts.

The vendettas in Libya have already begun. Government buildings in Tripoli have been looted, although not on the scale seen in Baghdad. Poor black sub-Saharan African immigrant workers have been beaten and killed. Suspected Gadhafi loyalists or spies have been tortured and assassinated. These eye-for-an-eye killings will, I fear, get worse. The National Transitional Council has announced that it opposes the presence in Libya of U.N. military observers and police, despite widespread atrocities committed by Gadhafi loyalists. The observers and police have been offered to help quell the chaos, train new security forces and provide independent verification of what is happening inside Libya. But just as Gadhafi preferred to do dirty work in secret, so will the new regime. It is an old truism, one I witnessed repeatedly in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, that yesterday’s victims rapidly become today’s victimizers.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby Metric Pringle » Mon Sep 05, 2011 11:52 am

Where Gaddaffi went...



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Re: The Libya thread

Postby 2012 Countdown » Tue Sep 06, 2011 1:46 pm

Libyan convoy with gold, cash crossed to Niger-NTC

Tue Sep 6, 2011 11:09am GMT

BENGHAZI, Libya, Sept 6 (Reuters) - Loyalists of ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi crossed into Niger late on Monday in a convoy of vehicles, carrying gold and cash, officials from Libya's interim ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) said on Tuesday.

"Late last night, 10 vehicles carrying gold, euros and dollars crossed from Jufra into Niger with the help of Tuaregs from the Niger tribe," Fathis Baja, head of the NTC committee for political and international affairs, told Reuters.
Tuaregs are nomadic people who live on both sides of the frontier.

NTC spokesman Abdel Hafiz Ghoga confirmed the convoy had crossed into Niger and said it was carrying money taken from a branch of the Central Bank of Libya in Gaddafi's birthplace Sirte, one of the few towns still in his supporters' hands.

"They took the money from the central bank in Sirte," Ghoga, said.

French and Niger military sources have told Reuters a convoy of scores of Libyan army vehicles crossed into Niger late on Monday.

The NTC officials could not comment on those reports, and it was not immediately clear whether they were referring to the same convoy or describing a separate incident.

The whereabouts of the 69-year-old Gaddafi remain a mystery. He has broadcast defiance since being forced into hiding two weeks ago, and has vowed to die fighting on Libyan soil.

(Reporting by Emma Farge; Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Peter Graff)
---
http://af.reuters.com/article/libyaNews ... BQ20110906

====

Also came across this, worth a watch, imo, fwiw-

The real reason why the west want Gaddafi dead.
George Carlin ~ "Its called 'The American Dream', because you have to be asleep to believe it."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby Nordic » Thu Sep 08, 2011 2:46 am

http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2011/09 ... e-corpses/

It occurred to me that illegal overthrows of countries is now sorta like the Apollo missions. The first was met with great fanfare, like "I don't believe we just did that!!" (except the moon missions were positive, the Iraq invasion the exact opposite).

Now as time goes by we're like "hm, looks like we overthrew another country. Wonder who'll be next? SQUIRREL!"



“Free Tripoli” – just don’t mention the corpses
By Lizzie Phelan | Pravda | September 6, 2011

The war on Libya has not only been a war that has vindicated NATO’s claim to the most powerful military force on earth, capable of imposing its will through sheer aggression wherever it sees fit, but it has also been a war that has reasserted the western mainstream media’s power to not just fabricate events but to create.

The first media victory was when it got away with claiming that Gaddafi’s government was attacking it’s own citizens in Tripoli from the air, a claim which formed part of the pretext for NATO’s intervention and also served to create panic and anger amongst the city’s residents. No one was held to account when later Russian intelligence satellites and visits from independent observers to the areas alleged to have been targeted, revealed no evidence that such attacks had taken place.

One of the most powerful lies was churned out by none other than British Foreign Secretary William Hague who claimed in the first days of the crisis that Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela. The Libyan government admitted repeatedly that their media was wholly incompetent and unable to provide alternative information at the time, with the result that the people of Libya like the rest of the world believed the claims that were being made. In this instance the result was to create a sense even amongst his traditional support base that they had been abandoned and betrayed. Of course Mr Hague made no apology for such irresponsible remarks when soon after Gaddafi showed his face in the streets of Tripoli.

More recently, the BBC has yet to apologise for using blatantly fake footage from a demonstration in India claiming it was in Tripoli’s Green Square, as part of their evidence that the city had fallen.

Such fabrications continued throughout the six months, as the media reported that areas had been “captured” by the rebels, when in reality, these areas had been blitzed from the air and the sea by NATO rockets with the sole aim of destroying any threat of resistance to its allies the rebels.

As the alliance bombed the rebels’ path to Tripoli, on its way massacring at least 85 civilians in the Zlitan town of Majer, the leaders of hundreds of the country’s tribes, including the largest, Wafalla, Tarhouna, Washafana and Zlitan, reasserted their determination to defend their areas, and to descend on Tripoli should it come under threat.

Meanwhile, the masses of men and women of Tripoli who turned out in rallies against the rebels, felt confident that should the rebels show up in their city they would be able to defeat them with the arms that Gaddafi’s government had been issuing to them since the beginning of the crisis.

Now many of those people have been massacred, have fled or are in hiding. They may or may not have underestimated the ruthless might of NATO, but the media’s narrative that Tripoli fell without resistance is contested by the fact that it took the massacre of thousands and at least five days to establish tentative TNC control of the capital as well as by eyewitnesses accounts of what happened during those five days and beyond.

From the beginning of the fighting in Tripoli on August 20th when I and 35 other journalists became trapped inside the Rixos hotel, it was virtually impossible to get a clear idea of what was happening on the streets outside. Throughout that period the sounds of bombs, gunfire and other heavy weaponry was almost non-stop, with shrapnel and bullets occasionally making their way inside the hotel. But like the rest of the world, the only information we had, apart from the odd moments of communication with contacts inside the city, was from the mainstream international media.

Since my release, I have begun to collate information from residents in the capital in the absence of information from sources which are recognized internationally as “independent”. The following report is based on these accounts and the sources identity must be kept confidential due to the systematic targeting of anyone who betrays disloyalty to the rebels, which as I experienced myself, includes challenging their version of events in the media.

On the first day, rebels from sleeper cells inside Tripoli emerged and began attacking checkpoints manned by Libyan special forces. As is the pattern with their advance into areas on the way to the capital they faced a swift initial defeat. But the first images emerging around the world of the rebels inside Tripoli NATO ensured it would not be short lived. The organisation sanctioned to “protect civilians”, rapidly moved to bomb all checkpoints in the densely packed city. The vast majority of these were manned by volunteers – ie ordinary citizens that had been armed with Kalashnikovs since the beginning of the crisis – so that the rebels could easily move into the city by sea and by road. (see attached image of mother and 17 year old daughter, both volunteers manning checkpoint in Tripoli.)

This was followed by masses of youth and other residents in the capital pouring into the streets to defend their city as they had pledged to do during mass rallies.

The following day, NATO responded with intensified aggression. Eyewitnesses report that during this day, the broadcasting station in Tripoli was bombed, killing dozens. Shortly after the rebels claimed control of Libyan TV and the international media dutifully repeated the claim, blocking any mention of how the takeover had occurred.

Adding to the media’s campaign of confusion, reports of Gaddafi’s sons being caught and that Gaddafi along with other family members had fled the country continued to beam out of televisions across the world.

Having become accustomed to such psychological operations designed to weaken the people’s support for the government by making them believe it had betrayed them, masses defied the reports and marched to Green Square. From inside the Rixos, during the short periods when phone access was revived, my contacts in the city who were in Green Square at the time, informed me that Muammar Gaddafi had been seen driving through the city in his army fatigues urging people to remain strong and not be deceived by the west’s relentless propaganda. This has since been reported by further contact with other residents who were in the streets at the time.

Following relentless bombardment, the masses were pushed back to Gaddafi’s compound Bab al-Azizia where they resisted the rebels’ advance for a further 24 hours. It was during this time that Saif al-Islam, who until then the media and International Criminal Court had been insisting was captured and arrested, showed up at the Rixos hotel where we were trapped. Calm and confident, he took out a group of journalists to Bab al-Azizia where upon their return, they confirmed seeing thousands in and around the compound waving the green flag, including as the tribes had pledged, from their people across the country.

But like the peaceful march in the western mountains on July 24th which was attacked by NATO and the rebels, the masses in Bab al-Azizia were broken up by NATO bombing an entrance for the rebels and attacks by Apache gunships.

The same fate was visited upon gatherings in Green Square. Bab al-Azizia alone was reported to have been bombed 63 times during that time.

With both Green Square and Bab-Alzizia now in control of the rebels, the resistance continued in areas like Tripoli’s poorest neighbourhood Abu Saleem, which a few weeks previously had held a mass demonstration against the NATO aggression and in support of the Jamahiriya. Fighting against the rebels also raged on in Salah Eldeen and El Hadba.

Armed with Kalashnikovs and Rocket Propelled Grenades, the citizens of these areas fighting 8,000 kg bombs, Apache gunships, US, European and UAE special forces and the rebels laden with NATO’s sophisticated weaponry, became part of the carnage and piles of bodies were reported to line the streets.

Since then, any area known to have supported Gaddafi has reportedly been bombed or been subjected to homes and apartments being burnt and looted. And even the mainstream media has been unable to ignore the systematic targeting and lynching of anyone with black skin. It is widely known that Gaddafi’s opponents deeply loathed his rhetoric and policies in support of Black Africa.

With Sirt, Sabha and Beni Walid being amongst the last areas still flying the green flag high, the rebels claim to be giving these a deadline before they resort to a “military response”, implying that in the meantime, a non-military avenue will be pursued. Yet again, the media fail to highlight that the rebels’ ally, NATO, has been openly bombing these areas.

The same media has unquestioningly swallowed NATO’s line that the targets have been exclusively “Gaddafi’s forces”, in the face of evidence before their very eyes to the contrary and in the absence of any independent investigation into the death toll of the 30,000 bombs estimated to have been dropped over the past six months.

The last concrete figures on the second day of fighting put the death toll in 12 hours of fighting in Tripoli alone at 1,300 with 900 injured. Far from Tripoli falling without resistance these figures suggest that Tripoli fell with the masses resisting being massacred.

As in Zlitan, Zawiya and elsewhere, the same atrocities as those committed in Tripoli, are being carried out in Beni Walid and Sirt with the complete silent complicity of journalists and “independent” observers on the ground. This is “free Libya”, so long as the thousands of dead and in hiding upon which it is based goes unmentioned.
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby Elihu » Wed Sep 14, 2011 11:39 am

But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Sep 14, 2011 1:11 pm


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/09/13/v ... cerns.html

McClatchy Washington Bureau

Posted on Tue, Sep. 13, 2011

Empty village raises concerns about fate of black Libyans

Image
Tawergha used to be a city filled with black non-Arab Libyans. Rebel forces emptied the town after they seized Tripoli and residents have yet to return. | David Enders / MCT

David Enders | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: September 13, 2011 07:33:41 PM

TAWERGHA, Libya — This town was once home to thousands of mostly black non-Arab residents. Now, the only manmade sound is a generator that powers a small militia checkpoint, where rebels say the town is a "closed military area."

What happened to the residents of Tawergha appears to be another sign that despite the rebel leadership's pledges that they'll exact no revenge on supporters of deposed dictator Moammar Gadhafi, Libya's new rulers often are dealing harshly with the country's black residents.

According to Tawergha residents, rebel soldiers from Misrata forced them from their homes on Aug. 15 when they took control of the town. The residents were then apparently driven out of a pair of refugee camps in Tripoli over this past weekend.

"The Misrata people are still looking for black people," said Hassan, a Tawergha resident who's now sheltering in a third camp in Janzour, six miles east of Tripoli. "One of the men who came to this camp told me my brother was killed yesterday by the revolutionaries."

On Tuesday, Amnesty International issued a report on human rights issues in Libya that included claims that the rebels had abused prisoners, conducted revenge killings and removed pro-Gadhafi fighters from hospitals.

Dalia Eltahawy, an Amnesty researcher, said the Tawerghis "are certainly a very vulnerable group and need to be protected." She called on the rebel leadership to "investigate and bring people to justice" for those abuses "to avoid a culture of impunity."


But rebel leaders, in their response, made no mention of Tawergha, though they promised to "move quickly ... to make sure similar abuses are avoided in areas of continued conflict such as Bani Walid and Sirte."

"While the Amnesty report is overwhelmingly filled with the horrific abuses and killings by the Gadhafi regime, there are a small number of incidents involving those opposed to Gadhafi," the rebels' ruling National Transitional Council said in a statement. "The NTC strongly condemns any abuses perpetrated by either side."


There's no doubt that until last month, Tawergha was used by Gadhafi forces as a base from which to fire artillery into Misrata, which lies about 25 miles north.

Misratans say, however, that Tawergha's involvement on Gadhafi's side went deeper: Many of the village's residents openly participated in an offensive against Misrata that left more than 1,000 dead and as many missing, they say.

"Look on YouTube and you will see hundreds of Tawerghi men saying, 'We're coming to get you, Misrata,'" said Ahmed Sawehli, a psychiatrist in Misrata. "They shot the videos themselves with their cellphones."

The Tawerghis do not deny that some from the town fought for Gadhafi, but they say they are victims of a pre-existing racism in Libya that has manifested itself violently during the revolution.

The evidence that the rebels' pursuit of the Tawerghis did not end with the collapse of the Gadhafi regime is visible, both in the emptiness of this village and that of the camps to which the residents fled.

At one, in a Turkish-owned industrial complex in the Salah al Deen neighborhood of southern Tripoli, a man looting metal from the complex simply said that the Tawerghis had "gone to Niger," the country that borders Libya on the south where some Gadhafi supporters, including the deposed dictator's son Saadi, have fled.

Abandoned blankets and mattresses littered the area, and laundry still hung drying. Aside from some extinguished cooking fires and piles of trash, there was little else to suggest human habitation.

Lafy Mohammed, whose house is across the road from the complex, said that on Saturday a group of revolutionary militiamen from Misrata, 120 miles east of Tripoli, had come to the camp and evicted its tenants.

"They arrested about 25 of the men," Mohammed said. "They were shooting in the air and hitting them with their rifle butts."

"They took the women, old men and children out in trucks," he said.


Mohammed said that it was not the first time the revolutionaries from Misrata had come after the people in the camp.

"A week ago they were here, but (the people in the neighborhood) begged them to leave them alone," Mohammed said.

Mohammed said some of the Tawerghis may have been taken to another nearby camp, in a Brazilian-owned industrial complex. On Tuesday, that camp was empty as well, with the gate locked.

Reached by phone at the camp in Janzour, Hassan, who did not want his last name used, said he had escaped from the Brazilian company camp on Saturday, when it, too, was raided. He said about 1,000 Tawerghis were now at the Janzour camp.

"They arrested 35 men, but they let me go because I was with my family," Hassan said. He blamed a brigade of fighters from Misrata.


In Tawergha, the rebel commander said his men had orders not to allow any of the residents back in. He also said that unexploded ordnance remained in the area, though none was readily apparent.


Most homes and buildings in the area appeared to have been damaged in the fighting, and a half-dozen appeared to have been ransacked. The main road into the village was blocked with earthen berms. Signs marking the way to the village appeared to have been destroyed.

On the only sign remaining "Tawergha" had been painted over with the words "New Misrata."


On one wall in Tawergha, graffiti referred to the town's residents as "abeed," a slur for blacks.


(Enders is a McClatchy special correspondent.)


MORE FROM MCCLATCHY

African women say rebels raped them in Libyan camp

Libyan rebels face test as they deal with hundreds of pro-Gadhafi suspects

At cemetery for Gadhafi fighters, grisly work goes on


McClatchy Newspapers 2011

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Re: The Libya thread

Postby StarmanSkye » Wed Sep 14, 2011 3:21 pm

Thanks for the VERY enlightening links, Elihu;

I just HAD to repost the following commentary written in response to the first post cited by Elihu in the Daily Bell "New Libya Will Be Islamic" that underscores several critical points, ie. that Ghadaffi was NOT part of the ruling Government (so western media claims of him being a 'Dictator' can be seen for the outrageous lies they are) and how well-ruled by Representatives of the Citizens Councils it was with emphasis on social justice, public institutions, economic opportunities and equitable distribution of fiscal resources. Which, being so well-governed in meeting the actual needs of its citizens without a predatory central banking system and committed to promoting a united Pan-African development and self-sufficiency partnership was an affront to western/European greed and venality -- its SO much more than just about oil.

VERY similiar NATO-coordinated takedown of Libya with the west's economic and politically-motivated dismantling of Yugoslavia because its vibrant & progressive alternative to the Central Bank model of predatory capitalism was too incompatable with it. Besides providing the ugly embarrassment of showing-up what an abysmal cock-up the corrupt & mismanaged western system is, subordinating citizen needs WAY after the elite's own.

Reading about the horrific toll of pro-Ghadaffi supporters most who were ordinary non-combatant citizens bomb-targetted by NATO, it struck me how outrageously perverted and criminal things are when the bodies that OUGHT to be the guarantors of civilized rule of law and justice, the united nations and International Criminbal Courts, have essentially become the legitimizing authority, in the pocket-of and aiding-and-abetting the war-crime perpetrators, ie. US, Italy, France & England under NATO.

And it looks like the same system of using the organizing magnet-principle of Muslim Brotherhood thoroughly coopted by the western powers to disseminate the same divide-and-rule program of ever-widening war and violence will be visited upon ever greater numbers of states in Africa -- the better to place them firmly under the thumb of the western managing elites (to pillage and plunder them more efficiently)????

(The Daily Bell article the following appends is VERY well worth reading. I haven't read the Khomeini one yet but i suspect it'll be as insightful and spot-on as well.)

Heart-breaking, and
It
Just
Boggles ...

*****

--quote--
Posted by David_Robertson on 09/14/11 02:04 PM

@DB "Gaddafi simply did NOT run an Islamic Republic; he ran a kind of secular republic with Islamic overtones."

The governing structure of Libya is not a republic at all. This is one point I was making. The People's Committees and the People's Congresses are the main features of the governing structure. There is an administration with a Prime Minister but they are ultimately accountable to the People's Congresses which are made up of representatives from the People's Committees that are made up of the people.

Qadhafi has no official role at all so to call him a dictator is completely misleading. He does not "run" the country. He has a symbolic role as the founder of the Great Jamahiriya but he is not involved in the running of the country. He makes suggestions and proposals to the People's Congresses just like any other citizen and his most recent proposal to give half the oil revenues directly to the people was voted down by quite a margin. Personally I believe Qadhafi made this proposal to deal with allegations of corruption in the administration which as I said operates independently of Qadhafi.

His thinking appears to be evolving into a more direct distribution of the nation's wealth rather than the somewhat paternalistic structure he espoused in the beginning. This form of political and economic structure is quite unique in the world and is well worth looking into especially for small nations. In its most recent incarnation it bears a very close resemblance to the kind of structure that I have personally conceived as being the most beneficial for everyone that is based upon a biblical model. It is a real departure from the kinds of political and economic structures we are accustomed to and this is why it is often pejoratively misrepresented by the controlled media and indeed virtually everyone else.

There is religious toleration to a high degree I believe but most of the population are Muslims and the law follows the sharia as I said. I believe the law courts are administered according to the sharia and the Green Charter. I would be very surprised to find that they were not since these are the founding principles of the nation.

The most visibly important aspect of this society is the economic one. Education is free as is the health services. If a university course is only available abroad then this is paid for by the administration and includes travel expenses and all other support. It would seem that these services are restricted to Libyans and that immigrants and migrant workers do not receive them. There is no restriction on anyone leaving the country and the right to bear arms is written into the constitution i.e. the Green Charter. Doesn't sound much like a tyranny, police state or dictatorship to me.

Qadhafi created the Great Man Made River from a giant aquifer discovered under the desert in the south of the country. Over twenty years of enormous building works the water has been carried in pipes to all parts of the country beginning first in the farmland of Benghazi and it has ended at Tripoli. This is the source of irrigation for farming and Libya had become self supporting in food production and I understand it was becoming a threat to the vegetable and fruit farming exports of Israel. The land is owned by the people not individuals but individuals may work the land in perpetuity so long as they are producing crops and they are given grants by the administration to set up their farms.

Most Libyans appear to be entrepreneurs or professionals and there are few if any regulations governing business apart from the usual sharia stipulations against theft and fraud. Every couple receives a grant of $50,000 on marriage and individuals receive $20,000 to start a business. The money to support these initiatives comes from the oil revenues and this I believe is one of the bones of contention with the Western companies.

I checked on the economic condition of Libya on the CIA Fact Book before the rebellion and it was robustly healthy. They had no public debt to speak of and a healthy budget surplus. They had I believe $150 billion in foreign assets and no foreign debt. These assets were seized by the kleptocrats and will be used to pay for the reconstruction of the infrastructure, homes, businesses, schools and hospitals they have destroyed. Libya was not in the global central banking network having their own national central bank run along Islamic lines with no interest loans.

All in all I believe that Libya has been better run than any country in the world including Switzerland. It is this independence that has brought about the latest attack by the monarchists, islamists controlled by CAZAB and of course the world bully NATO. Propelling these attacks are all the usual actuating factors so familiar to human actions: greed, power lust, blood lust, envy, resentment and pride.
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Sep 15, 2011 3:26 pm



http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/15/ ... tion/print

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.

September 15, 2011
Pompous Rhetoric and Realpolitik
Power Politics, NATO, and the Libyan Intervention


by DAVID N. GIBBS


The recent NATO intervention against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya has been a considerable source of contention among many on the left, with self-proclaimed progressives, most notably Juan Cole, openly supporting this military action.

The intervention clearly exceeded the parameters originally set forth by UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorized the international use of force to establish a “no fly” zone over Libya and to protect civilians; the UN resolution made no mention of regime change or government overthrow, though this clearly was NATO’s main objective from the beginning. The Security Council also called for a Libyan arms embargo, a stipulation that NATO has ignored by arming the Libyan rebels. The intervention has not only violated international law, but US law as well: The Obama administration’s decision to participate in the war was undertaken with no congressional authorization over an extended period, thus violating the provisions of the 1973 War Powers Resolution. The intervention has been an extended exercise in illegality. Supporters of the war seem willing to overlook these legal shortcomings because of the “higher purpose” of the intervening powers. In light of this perception, a clear-eyed examination of NATO’s interests is essential.

The first NATO interest was to use the Libya intervention as a showcase for European weaponry, in order to increase overseas arms sales. While arms sales were certainly not the only motive for the intervention, this was at least one of the motives. Manufacturers of the French Rafale fighter, the Swedish Gripen, and the multinational Typhoon all sought to impress international arms purchasers with the quality of these planes in the Libyan intervention. The intervention was, in the words of a Reuters headline “a showcase in the new arms race.”

With regard to arms sales, the French government of Nicolas Sarkozy has played an especially interesting role, in using the Libya campaign to sell the Rafale fighter. Let us consider the plane’s history: Developed at great expense by the French government and the Dassault corporation, the Rafale had been produced on the assumption that overseas sales would offset some of the cost. After all, France had a long history as one of the world’s more cynical arms merchants, and previous classes of fighter planes were excellent export items, with sales to numerous states (including ironically enough the Gaddafi regime in Libya, which was a major purchaser of French equipment during the 1970s). Despite this history, the Rafale itself was initially a failure, with no export orders at all, despite strenuous efforts. The French were trying to sell the plane to Gaddafi as late as 2010, though unsuccessfully. In January 2011 – just before the anti-Gaddafi bombing campaign began –the Rafale was called “The French Fighter Jet that No One Wants.”

Then, the Libyan intervention took place, with France playing the leading role, and with the Rafale as the featured weapons system. Indeed, Rafales were the very first aircraft to engage Gaddafi’s forces, which led some analysts to wonder whether the operation was “an advertisement for the Dassault Rafale fighter jet,” in the words of Foreign Policy magazine. It seems safe to assume that the Rafale’s export prospects have improved considerably, thanks to the Libya campaign. No doubt France and other European states are especially eager for arms sales to offset rising unemployment associated with the lingering effects of the 2007-2009 recession. The old fashioned idea of military Keynesianism remains relevant, in light of the weakness of the economic recovery.

Another factor in the Libyan intervention was the budgetary dilemmas associated with the European militaries. Due to reduced revenues, resulting from the recession, several European states have experienced revenue shortfalls, and their governments have responded with massive budget cutting, most notably in Great Britain. These budget cuts have had an especially severe impact on the UK’s Royal Navy. With the decommissioning of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and all remaining carrier-based aircraft by late 2010, the Navy ceased to have any operational combat aircraft for the first time in decades, and could play no direct role in the aerial bombardment of Gaddafi’s Libya. The Royal Navy no doubt felt the state of affairs to be a humiliation, and they sought to use the Libya intervention as an opportunity to protest the cuts — apparently with some success. Shortly after the Libya bombing campaign commenced, there was open discussion in the British press that the naval cuts had been a mistake and needed to be reconsidered.

In addition, the Royal Air Force gained political benefits from the intervention. According to the BBC, “The crisis in Libya and recent events across the Middle East may well help the RAF… The RAF had feared losing more of its Tornado GR4 fleet in order to save up to £300m a year and may now be able to argue a stronger case for keeping them on.” The Libya intervention thus helped to create a political environment that was more conducive to military spending. Progressives who support this intervention must realize that they are making it easier to justify militarism and military spending more generally, in both Europe and the United States.

And finally, there is the question of oil, which clearly constituted the most important interest of all. Libya is a sizable oil producer, with the world’s ninth largest reserves. Several of the world’s major oil companies have invested in Libya, including ENI of Italy, Total of France, Conoco-Phillips of the US, and BP of Britain, among many others. At the time of the popular uprising against Gaddafi, there was considerable anxiety in oil circles about the possibility of generalized political breakdown and chaos, with attendant threats to oil supplies and investments. This concern was noted repeatedly in the world oil and business press. In February 2011, for example, the International Oil Daily reported: “The shockwaves from the violence engulfing Libya have hit the oil industry hard. Not only have they sent oil prices soaring to near two-and-a-half-year highs, but there are also reports that all ports and refineries are no longer operating – and signs that he expected spiral or production shut-ins has begun as oil industry staff continue to leave the country as and when they can.”

More generally, there exists widespread anxiety about the unrest sweeping across the Arab world, including the very valuable Persian Gulf, and the dangers that these events pose for Western oil supplies. It seems likely that the oil companies have welcomed the Western military intervention as a stabilizing factor for Libyan oil; and also as a show of force for the whole Arab world, to demonstrate that the Western powers still exert control. It should be noted that Western corporations have long relied on military interventions by their home governments to protect or open up investment opportunities overseas, and it seems likely that Libya is the latest illustration of this basic corporate tendency.[1]

And oil may have had additional influences on the Libyan intervention. It appears that the Total company of France was seeking to take advantage of France’s leading role in the intervention, in order to augment its participation in Libyan oil, once the conflict was ended; and to do so at the expense of oil companies from other countries (notably Italy) that played less of a role in the intervention. According to Oil and Gas News: “ENI’s dominant position in Libya’s oil sector could be undermined by Italy’s hesitant backing for pro-rebel foreign military intervention, paving the way for a greater say for France’s Total and possibly UK [oil] groups.” Of course, a full analysis of oil interests in this intervention must await further release of information. But the information that is already available suggests that oil was a factor in the decision making process that led to intervention in this case.

But what about the claim that NATO’s intervention is based on moralistic concerns about Gaddafi’s repression and human rights abuses? While there is no doubt that Gaddafi is a tyrant, it is implausible to argue that this was a major motivation for the NATO intervention. The problem is that France, the United States and the UK maintained close relations with Gaddafi, until his hold on power became doubtful due to mass uprising against him. It is important to note that the NATO relationship with Gaddafi was not one of mere diplomatic cordiality, but it extended to such sensitive issues as the sales of advanced military equipment and intelligence collaboration. We have already discussed the French efforts to sell him arms. In addition, the US and British intelligence services worked closely with the Libyans in the distasteful process of “extraordinary rendition,” whereby suspected terrorists would be transported overseas, for interrogation and torture by Libyan operatives. The Western warmth toward the Gaddafi dictatorship also included US, British, French, and Italian oil companies, which established strong relationships with Gaddafi. The warmth extended even to British universities: The London School of Economics accepted a sizable donation from the Gaddafi family, which was eager to buy legitimacy. This donation attracted little public criticism – until NATO began preparing to intervene in early 2011 and the donation suddenly became a source of embarrassment. From the United States, the Monitor Group consultancy arranged for prestigious public figures to travel to Libya and meet with Gaddafi. The invited guests included Richard Perle and Francis Fukuyama– and their Libyan trips elicited criticism only after Gaddafi was confronted with mass insurrection. Previously, Gaddafi was a perfectly respectable “statesman” for key members of the US and European elite.

In short, the NATO states broke with Gaddafi very suddenly, in response to a mass discontent, which raised doubts about his long term viability as a diplomatic partner and arms purchaser. The remarkable suddenness of the Western break with Gaddafi makes this break appear hypocritical and opportunistic, rather than morally based.

Overall, the Libyan intervention appears as just another iteration in the familiar – if revolting — idea of realpolitik, whereby Western states pursue their narrow self interests, and then justify their actions through pompous rhetoric. Those of us with critical minds should not be fooled or deluded by this rhetoric.

David N. Gibbs is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Arizona. He can be reached at dgibbs@arizona.edu.

Notes.

[i] Regarding past instances where corporations favored overseas intervention as a means to protect trade and investments, see Ben Baack, Ben and Edward Ray, “The Political Economy of the Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 2, 1985. During the 1999 NATO intervention against Serbia, Barron’s noted how investors were strongly supportive of the intervention, presumably because the successful NATO show of force had an important demonstration effect, which served to protect Western investments on a world-wide basis. See Alan Abelson, “Up and Down on Wall Street: Gun Boat Rally,” Barron’s, March 29, 1999. Corporate support was also apparent in the 1992 intervention in Somalia, where the Conoco oil was a strong supporter of military action. See David N. Gibbs, “Realpolitik and Humanitarian Intervention: The Case of Somalia,” International Politics 37, no. 1, 2000, dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/sites/dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/files/somalia.pdf.
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby Elihu » Thu Sep 15, 2011 4:39 pm

the UN resolution made no mention of regime change or government overthrow, though this clearly was NATO’s main objective from the beginning.

okay, good start,where are you going with this?
The problem is that France, the United States and the UK maintained close relations with Gaddafi, until his hold on power became doubtful due to mass uprising against him.
ahhh! it's a circle jerk.
...just another iteration in the familiar ...Those of us with critical minds should not be fooled or deluded by this rhetoric.
no, but you are going to lay there and take it...
But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” John 16:33
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Mon Sep 19, 2011 11:58 am

Riddle Me This: Paper of Record Puzzled by Death Count Claims
Written by Chris Floyd
Sunday, 18 September 2011 22:35


The New York Times puzzles and puzzles until its puzzler is sore, but it still can't figure out the deep, deep mystery addressed by this recent story: "Libya Counts More Martyrs Than Bodies."

The Paper of Record -- primus inter pares of the national press, shaper and sifter of the zeitgeist itself -- struggles for 27 whole paragraphs in its Sept. 16 story, trying to account somehow for the vast discrepancy between the "martyr count" claimed by Libya's NATO-nudged rebels and the actual number of bodies found so far in the wake of the conflict.

Rebel leaders claim that the dastardly minions of Moamar Gadafy killed well nigh 50,000 innocent people in the dictator's paroxysm of berserkery to preserve his brutal rule. But, the Times notes, "in the country's morgues, the war dead registered from both sides in each area are mostly in the hundreds, not the thousands. And those who ware still missing total as few as 1,000, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross."

The Times doesn't bother to add up the various regional body counts it throws around in the story, but a very rough estimate from this rigorous and detailed reporting would put the overall death total somewhere around 5,000 or so. Yet over and over, NATO's new nabobs in Libya declare that tens of thousands of people were killed by government forces in the conflict.

(We know, of course, that not a single innocent person was killed by NATO bombs and missiles in the relentless barrage of humanitarian ordnance the Western alliance heaped on Libya during the many months of fighting. NATO bombs are programmed with super-secret computer chips that can detect a person's ideological aroma and will kill only those isolated individuals who stink of evil, while enveloping all innocent bystanders with a protective foam that keeps them safe, shines their shoes and moisturizes their skin at the same time.)

The Times chews over this discrepancy at great length, quoting rebel leaders (at great length), and making several references to "well-documented war crimes by the Gadafy regime (while finding room for only the briefest, barest mention, after 20 paragraphs, of another well-documented war crime: the "ethnic cleansing" of black immigrants by the rebels, including mass murder).

But still, despite bringing all the professional firepower of higher journalism to bear on the question, the Times can simply find "no explanation" for the gap between the new nabob's numbers and the actual death count.

Poor little newspaper. Poor little fond, foolish pollyanna. Oh, how it rends the heart to shatter such sweet, trusting, adorable innocence. But what can one do? The cosseted little lamb must learn the sad truth sometime. And so, in sorrow, we beckon the Times to toddle toward us, so we can whisper, gently, in its delicate ear:

"The rebels are lying, sweetheart. They're using false, inflated numbers because it makes them look better and their enemies look worse. Oh, please don't cry. That's just the way it is in the wicked world of grown-ups. Leaders lie -- constantly, continually, incessantly, obsessively -- to serve their own purposes."

Now, you know and I know that the Times knows that the rebel leaders are lying about the death count. But you know and I know that the Times also knows that it cannot come out and state this plain fact in a plain fashion. The rebel leaders are still under the aegis of imperial favor; thus their credibility cannot yet be directly contradicted by our court scribes and chroniclers. If and when the rebels lose this favor -- if their Islamist faction comes too publicly to the fore, say, or, even worse, if the oil deals with their "Western partners" aren't sweet enough -- why then, we will hear in no uncertain terms what a great pack of rotten liars they all are, and always have been.

But until that time, the Unshakeable Somnolence of America will not be disturbed by any such plain truths.




"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

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Re: The Libya thread

Postby Jeff » Tue Sep 27, 2011 9:23 am

More staying somewhere we don't belong until some ill-defined job is done. (Though, FWIW, glad to see the NDP on the right side of this.)

Canada extends military mission to Libya

Gadhafi loyalists remain a threat, defence minister says of the three-month extension

By Lee Berthiaume
Postmedia News September 27, 2011

Despite questions about the costs to date, Canadian pilots and sailors will be patrolling Libya's skies and coast for up to three more months after Conservative and Liberal MPs agreed Monday to extend Canada's role in the NATO-led mission.

The government did not need to ask Parliament to extend the mission as cabinet can approve military deployments on its own. There was never any real question of the result as the Conservatives have a majority in the House.

In explaining why the government supported the mission extension, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said to end Canada's involvement would jeopardize the progress that has been achieved in Libya as forces loyal to former president Moammar Gadhafi remain a threat.

"Canada was in at the beginning," he said, "and we should be there until the job is done. Canada has never shirked a responsibility and we cannot do so now."

Canada deployed fighter jets, surveillance and refuelling aircraft and a navy frigate to participate in the NATO mission in March after the UN approved an arms embargo and no-fly zone to protect civilians from forces loyal to Gadhafi.

The original three-month mission was extended in June and was to expire today.

...

In voicing his party's support for the extension, Liberal leader Bob Rae said Canada made a commitment to see the mission to the end.

"We go in with the United Nations and NATO and that is when we come out," he said. "That is how we do things. That is what builds the credibility of this country."

...

While the Conservatives and Liberals supported the extension, the NDP did not, arguing the government had abandoned the spirit of the original UN resolution allowing international intervention in Libya by taking sides in a civil war instead of simply protecting civilians.

...


http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Canada ... story.html
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Re: The Libya thread

Postby Byrne » Wed Oct 05, 2011 10:51 am

From The Sunday Times
April 6, 2008
Mercenary past of UK oil tycoon Tony Buckingham

Tony Buckingham is a man whose unusual career put him at the epicentre of the trade in arms and soldiers that were shipped into war-torn African states during the 1990s. He was a partner in controversial South African-based mercenary provider Executive Outcomes. And with Colonel Tim Spicer, he was one of the leading figures in Sandline International, which provided mercenaries, training and arms that were employed by the government of Papua New Guinea to quell an uprising. In other words, Buckingham was involved with the most prominent names in the 1990s world of mercenary soldiers. Now Buckingham, 56, has quietly secured a London listing for a £750m company, Heritage Oil, which he founded.
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http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article3688336.ece


The Associated Press October 4, 2011, 4:22AM ET
UK firm buys control of Libyan oil field company

LONDON

British company Heritage Oil PLC said Tuesday that it has acquired a controlling interest in a Libyan company licensed to provide oil field services including offshore and land-based drilling.

Heritage said it paid $19.5 million for a 51 percent stake in Sahara Oil Services Holdings Ltd. Heritage said the acquisition will allow it to play a significant role in Libya's oil and gas industry.

Sahara Oil Services was established in 2009 and is based in Benghazi.

Heritage established a base in Benghazi this year and has been dealing with senior members of the National Transitional Council, the company said.

Richard Griffith, analyst at Evolution Securities, said the move "could prove to be a very shrewd investment" by the company.

Heritage Oil shares, however, were down 2.9 percent at 217.8 pence in early trading on the London Stock Exchange.

The company's CEO Tony Buckingham said they are "well placed to play a significant role in the future oil and gas industry in Libya."

"This acquisition is consistent with Heritage's first mover strategy of entering regions with vast hydrocarbon wealth where we have a strategic advantage," Buckingham said.

Heritage has exploration projects in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malta, Pakistan, Tanzania and Mali, and a producing property in Russia.
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http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9Q5C4O81.htm
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