Libya's fledging government is threatened by armed militias whose lawless behaviour risks jeopardising the country's stability and security, Amnesty International says. Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
16 Feb 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/9084999/Libya-Militias-out-of-control-says-Amnesty-International.html
A year after the first demonstrations against Col Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year dictatorship, thousands of Libyans continue to suffer from the threat of violence and misrule, with militias perpetrating widespread human rights abuses.
According to Amnesty, at least 12 people have been tortured to death in rebel prisons since September. Despite the overthrow of the regime, Libya is still ruled by the gun.
"Militias in Libya are largely out of control and the blanket impunity they enjoy only encourages further abuses and perpetuates instability and insecurity," said Donatella Rovera, a researcher for the human rights group.
"A year ago Libyans risked their lives to demand justice. Today their hopes are being jeopardised by lawless armed militias who trample human rights with impunity."
Inmates at 10 of 11 detention facilities run by the militias had been tortured, Amnesty said. Prisoners said they had been suspended with ropes and cables, beaten with plastic hoses and subjected to electric shocks.
Amnesty also accused the interim government of failing to investigate suspicious incidents, such as the deaths of 65 Gaddafi fighters whose bodies were dumped in a hotel.
The government formed from the National Transitional Council, which spearheaded the uprising against the regime, was also criticised for not intervening against the expulsion of 30,000 residents from the town of Tawargha by Misuratan fighters.
Activists from a range of human rights groups claim that armed gangs are responsible for daily atrocities. "The government should protect the rights of thousands of people who are held without formal charges or access to an attorney," said Sarah Leah Whitson, of Human Rights Watch.
Diplomats have applauded the Libyan government's efforts to prepare for elections but acknowledge that frustration with its failure to stamp its authority on the streets has grown. "There has been very slow progress in binding the various factions into a central government worthy of the name," said one Western official.
The danger that the country could fracture into zones run by militias rose this week after a group of 100 brigades from the west of the country formed a political front in opposition to the current leadership, with its fighters staging a show of force in Tripoli.
Showing posts with label Libya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Libya. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Herman Cain on Libya
When asked his position on Libya, Herman Cain replied: "Libya? Who's she? I never even touched her!!!"
Gadhafi’s Gold-money Plan Would Have Devastated Dollar
Alex Newman Friday, 11 November 2011
http://thenewamerican.com/economy/markets-mainmenu-45/9743-gadhafis-gold-money-plan-would-have-devastated-dollar
It remains unclear exactly why or how the Gadhafi regime went from “a model” and an “important ally” to the next target for regime change in a period of just a few years. But after claims of “genocide” as the justification for NATO intervention were disputed by experts, several other theories have been floated.
Oil, of course, has been mentioned frequently — Libya is Africa‘s largest oil producer. But one possible reason in particular for Gadhafi’s fall from grace has gained significant traction among analysts and segments of the non-Western media: central banking and the global monetary system.
According to more than a few observers, Gadhafi’s plan to quit selling Libyan oil in U.S. dollars — demanding payment instead in gold-backed “dinars” (a single African currency made from gold) — was the real cause. The regime, sitting on massive amounts of gold, estimated at close to 150 tons, was also pushing other African and Middle Eastern governments to follow suit.
And it literally had the potential to bring down the dollar and the world monetary system by extension, according to analysts. French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly went so far as to call Libya a “threat” to the financial security of the world. The “Insiders” were apparently panicking over Gadhafi’s plan.
"Any move such as that would certainly not be welcomed by the power elite today, who are responsible for controlling the world's central banks,” noted financial analyst Anthony Wile, editor of the free market-oriented Daily Bell, in an interview with RT. “So yes, that would certainly be something that would cause his immediate dismissal and the need for other reasons to be brought forward [for] removing him from power."
According to Wile, Gadhafi’s plan would have strengthened the whole continent of Africa in the eyes of economists backing sound money — not to mention investors. But it would have been especially devastating for the U.S. economy, the American dollar, and particularly the elite in charge of the system.
“The central banking Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing base of demand and the immediate silencing of those who would threaten its existence,” Wile noted in a piece entitled “Gaddafi Planned Gold Dinar, Now Under Attack” earlier this year. “Perhaps that is what the hurry [was] in removing Gaddafi in particular and those who might have been sympathetic to his monetary idea.”
Investor newsletters and commentaries have been buzzing for months with speculation about the link between Gadhafi’s gold dinar and the NATO-backed overthrow of the Libyan regime. Conservative analysts pounced on the potential relationship, too.
“In 2009 — in his capacity as head of the African Union — Libya's Moammar Gadhafi had proposed that the economically crippled continent adopt the ‘Gold Dinar,’” noted Ilana Mercer in an August opinion piece for WorldNetDaily. “I do not know if Col. Gadhafi continued to agitate for ditching the dollar and adopting the Gold Dinar — or if the Agitator from Chicago got wind of Gadhafi's (uncharacteristic) sanity about things monetary.”
But if Arab and African nations had begun adopting a gold-backed currency, it would have had major repercussions for debt-laden Western governments that would be far more significant than the purported “democratic” uprisings sweeping the region this year. And it would have spelled big trouble for the elite who benefit from “freshly counterfeited funny-money,” Mercer pointed out.
“Had Gadhafi sparked a gold-driven monetary revolution, he would have done well for his own people, and for the world at large,” she concluded. “A Gadhafi-driven gold revolution would have, however, imperiled the positions of central bankers and their political and media power-brokers.”
Adding credence to the theory about why Gadhafi had to be overthrown, as The New American reported in March, was the rebels’ odd decision to create a central bank to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The decision was broadcast to the world in the early weeks of the conflict.
In a statement describing a March 19 meeting, the rebel council announced, among other things, the creation of a new oil company. And more importantly: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”
The creation of a new central bank, even more so than the new national oil regime, left analysts scratching their heads. “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising,” noted Robert Wenzel in an analysis for the Economic Policy Journal. “This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences,” he added. Wenzel also noted that the uprising looked like a “major oil and money play, with the true disaffected rebels being used as puppets and cover” while the transfer of control over money and oil supplies takes place.
Other analysts, even in the mainstream press, were equally shocked. “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power?” wondered CNBC senior editor John Carney. “It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”
Similar scenarios involving the global monetary system — based on the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, backed by the fact that oil is traded in American money — have also been associated with other targets of the U.S. government. Some analysts even say a pattern is developing.
Iran, for example, is one of the few nations left in the world with a state-owned central bank. And Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, once armed by the U.S. government to make war on Iran, was threatening to start selling oil in currencies other than the dollar just prior to the Bush administration’s “regime change” mission.
While most of the establishment press in America has been silent on the issue of Gadhafi’s gold dinar scheme, in Russia, China, and the global alternative media, the theory has exploded in popularity. Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow, however, may never be known for certain — at least not publicly.
http://thenewamerican.com/economy/markets-mainmenu-45/9743-gadhafis-gold-money-plan-would-have-devastated-dollar
It remains unclear exactly why or how the Gadhafi regime went from “a model” and an “important ally” to the next target for regime change in a period of just a few years. But after claims of “genocide” as the justification for NATO intervention were disputed by experts, several other theories have been floated.
Oil, of course, has been mentioned frequently — Libya is Africa‘s largest oil producer. But one possible reason in particular for Gadhafi’s fall from grace has gained significant traction among analysts and segments of the non-Western media: central banking and the global monetary system.
According to more than a few observers, Gadhafi’s plan to quit selling Libyan oil in U.S. dollars — demanding payment instead in gold-backed “dinars” (a single African currency made from gold) — was the real cause. The regime, sitting on massive amounts of gold, estimated at close to 150 tons, was also pushing other African and Middle Eastern governments to follow suit.
And it literally had the potential to bring down the dollar and the world monetary system by extension, according to analysts. French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly went so far as to call Libya a “threat” to the financial security of the world. The “Insiders” were apparently panicking over Gadhafi’s plan.
"Any move such as that would certainly not be welcomed by the power elite today, who are responsible for controlling the world's central banks,” noted financial analyst Anthony Wile, editor of the free market-oriented Daily Bell, in an interview with RT. “So yes, that would certainly be something that would cause his immediate dismissal and the need for other reasons to be brought forward [for] removing him from power."
According to Wile, Gadhafi’s plan would have strengthened the whole continent of Africa in the eyes of economists backing sound money — not to mention investors. But it would have been especially devastating for the U.S. economy, the American dollar, and particularly the elite in charge of the system.
“The central banking Ponzi scheme requires an ever-increasing base of demand and the immediate silencing of those who would threaten its existence,” Wile noted in a piece entitled “Gaddafi Planned Gold Dinar, Now Under Attack” earlier this year. “Perhaps that is what the hurry [was] in removing Gaddafi in particular and those who might have been sympathetic to his monetary idea.”
Investor newsletters and commentaries have been buzzing for months with speculation about the link between Gadhafi’s gold dinar and the NATO-backed overthrow of the Libyan regime. Conservative analysts pounced on the potential relationship, too.
“In 2009 — in his capacity as head of the African Union — Libya's Moammar Gadhafi had proposed that the economically crippled continent adopt the ‘Gold Dinar,’” noted Ilana Mercer in an August opinion piece for WorldNetDaily. “I do not know if Col. Gadhafi continued to agitate for ditching the dollar and adopting the Gold Dinar — or if the Agitator from Chicago got wind of Gadhafi's (uncharacteristic) sanity about things monetary.”
But if Arab and African nations had begun adopting a gold-backed currency, it would have had major repercussions for debt-laden Western governments that would be far more significant than the purported “democratic” uprisings sweeping the region this year. And it would have spelled big trouble for the elite who benefit from “freshly counterfeited funny-money,” Mercer pointed out.
“Had Gadhafi sparked a gold-driven monetary revolution, he would have done well for his own people, and for the world at large,” she concluded. “A Gadhafi-driven gold revolution would have, however, imperiled the positions of central bankers and their political and media power-brokers.”
Adding credence to the theory about why Gadhafi had to be overthrown, as The New American reported in March, was the rebels’ odd decision to create a central bank to replace Gadhafi’s state-owned monetary authority. The decision was broadcast to the world in the early weeks of the conflict.
In a statement describing a March 19 meeting, the rebel council announced, among other things, the creation of a new oil company. And more importantly: “Designation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”
The creation of a new central bank, even more so than the new national oil regime, left analysts scratching their heads. “I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising,” noted Robert Wenzel in an analysis for the Economic Policy Journal. “This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences,” he added. Wenzel also noted that the uprising looked like a “major oil and money play, with the true disaffected rebels being used as puppets and cover” while the transfer of control over money and oil supplies takes place.
Other analysts, even in the mainstream press, were equally shocked. “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power?” wondered CNBC senior editor John Carney. “It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”
Similar scenarios involving the global monetary system — based on the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, backed by the fact that oil is traded in American money — have also been associated with other targets of the U.S. government. Some analysts even say a pattern is developing.
Iran, for example, is one of the few nations left in the world with a state-owned central bank. And Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein, once armed by the U.S. government to make war on Iran, was threatening to start selling oil in currencies other than the dollar just prior to the Bush administration’s “regime change” mission.
While most of the establishment press in America has been silent on the issue of Gadhafi’s gold dinar scheme, in Russia, China, and the global alternative media, the theory has exploded in popularity. Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow, however, may never be known for certain — at least not publicly.
Friday, November 18, 2011
It doesn't matter to them if it's untrue...
The Anti-Empire Report
November 1st, 2011
William Blum
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer99.html
It doesn't matter to them if it's untrue. It's a higher truth.
"We came, we saw, he died."
— US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi
Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: "We came, we saw, 3,000 died... ha-ha."
Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands ... this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, al-Jazeera) — from the declared imminence of a "bloodbath" in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn't intervene to stories of government helicopter-gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi's army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American Ambassador, as if young soldiers needed Viagra to get it up!)1
The New York Times (March 22) observed:
... 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 Los Angeles Times (April 7) added this about the rebels' media operation:
It's not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:
•No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary
•No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
•No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
•No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That's [Qaddafi's] propaganda.)
The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation, but it was the rebels' trail of lies, both of omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for "humanitarian" intervention; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can't get much more humanitarian than that. If the people of Libya prior to the NATO/US bombardment had been offered a referendum on it, can it be imagined that they would have endorsed it?
In fact, it appears rather likely that a majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi. How else could the government have held off the most powerful military forces in the world for more than seven months? Before NATO and the US laid waste to the land, Libya had the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, and highest UN Human Development Index in Africa. During the first few months of the civil war, giant rallies were held in support of the Libyan leader.2
For further discussion of why Libyans may have been motivated to support Gaddafi, have a look at this video.
If Gaddafi had been less oppressive of his political opposition over the years and had made some gestures of accommodation to them during the Arab Spring, the benevolent side of his regime might still be keeping him in power, although the world has plentiful evidence making it plain that the Western powers are not particularly concerned about political oppression except to use as an excuse for intervention when they want to; indeed, government files seized in Tripoli during the fighting show that the CIA and British intelligence worked with the Libyan government in tracking down dissidents, turning them over to Libya, and taking part in interrogations.3
In any event, many of the rebels had a religious motive for opposing the government and played dominant roles within the rebel army; previously a number of them had fought against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.4 The new Libyan regime promptly announced that Islamic sharia law would be the "basic source" of legislation, and laws that contradict "the teachings of Islam" would be nullified; there would also be a reinstitution of polygamy; the Muslim holy book, the Quran, allows men up to four wives.5
Thus, just as in Afghanistan in the 1980-90s, the United States has supported Islamic militants fighting against a secular government. The American government has imprisoned many people as "terrorists" in the United States for a lot less.
What began in Libya as "normal" civil war violence from both sides — repeated before and since by the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria without any Western military intervention at all (the US actually continues to arm the Bahrain and Yemen regimes) — was transformed by the Western propaganda machine into a serious Gaddafi genocide of innocent Libyans. Addressing the validity of this very key issue is another video, "Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no evidence". The main feature of the film is an interview with Soliman Bouchuiguir, Secretary-General, and one of the founders in 1989, of the Libyan League for Human Rights, perhaps the leading Libyan dissident group, in exile in Switzerland.
Bouchuiguir is asked several times if he can document various charges made against the Libyan leader. Where is the proof of the many rapes? The many other alleged atrocities? The more than 6,000 civilians alleged killed by Gaddafi's planes? Again and again Bouchuiguir cites the National Transitional Council as the source. Yes, that's the rebels who carried out the civil war in conjunction with the NATO/US forces. At other times Bouchuiguir speaks of "eyewitnesses": "little girls, boys who were there, whose families we know personally". After awhile, he declares that "there is no way" to document these things. This is probably true to some extent, but why, then, the UN Security Council resolution for a military intervention in Libya? Why almost eight months of bombing?
Bouchuiguir also mentions his organization's working with the National Endowment for Democracy in their effort against Gaddafi, and one has to wonder if the man has any idea that the NED was founded to be a front for the CIA. Literally.
Another source of charges against Gaddafi and his sons has been the International Criminal Court. The Court's Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is shown in this film at a news conference discussing the same question of proof of the charges. He refers to an ICC document of 77 pages which he says contains the evidence. The film displays the document's Table of Contents, which shows that pages 17-71 are not available to the public; these pages, apparently the ones containing the testimony and evidence, are marked as "redacted". In an appendix, the ICC report lists its news sources; these include Fox News, CNN, the CIA, Soliman Bouchuiguir, and the Libyan League for Human Rights. Earlier, the film had presented Bouchuiguir citing the ICC as one of his sources. The documentation is thus a closed circle.
Historical footnote: "Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture — these were the weapons of Europe's takeover" in the Mideast.6
The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to
On April 6, 2011 Moammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Obama, in which he said: "We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. ... Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair."7
Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.8 ... Then came shock and awe!
In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place shortly thereafter.9
In 1994, it was reported that the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcommander Marcos, said that "he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians." "Finally," Marcos said, "they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes."10 Yet for many years, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the training and tools needed to crush the Zapatistas.
The Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, and Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983 all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.11 The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.
In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America's help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that "the four powers" (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.12 Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some sort of communist.
America's presstitutes
Imagine that the vicious police attack of October 25 on the Occupy Oakland encampment had taken place in Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or in any other ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) ... Page One Righteous Indignation with Shocking Photos. But here's the Washington Post the next day: A three-inch story on page three with a headline: "Protesters wearing out their welcome nationwide"; no mention of the Iraqi veteran left unconscious from a police projectile making contact with his head; as to photos: just one — an Oakland police officer petting a cat that was left behind by the protesters.
And here's TV comedian Jay Leno the same night as the police attack in Oakland: "They say Moammar Gaddafi may have been one of the richest men in the world ... 200 billion dollars. With all of the billions he had, he spent very little on education or health care for his country. So I guess he was a Republican."13
The object of Leno's humor was of course the Republicans, but it served the cause of further demonizing Gaddafi and thus adding to the "justification" of America's murderous attack on Libya. If I had been one of Leno's guests sitting there, I would have turned to the audience and said: "Listen people, under Gaddafi health care and education were completely free. Wouldn't you like to have that here?"
I think that enough people in the audience would have applauded or shouted to force Leno to back off a bit from his indoctrinated, mindless remark.
And just for the record, the 200 billion dollars is not money found in Gaddafi's personal bank accounts anywhere in the world, but money belonging to the Libyan state. But why quibble? There's no business like show business.
The Iraqi Lullabye
On February 17, 2003, a month before the US bombing of Iraq began, I posted to the Internet an essay entitled "What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?" concerning the expected war. Included in this were the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, then at the American Enterprise Institute, which was one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq:
If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.
After a year of the tragic farce that was the American intervention in Iraq I could not resist. I sent Mr. Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: "I'd like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days."
I received no reply.
Has there ever been an empire that didn't tell itself and the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?
The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 20 years in a row
For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an "international pariah". We don't hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba". This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):
Year Votes (Yes-No) No Votes
1992 59-2 US, Israel
1993 88-4 US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994 101-2 US, Israel
1995 117-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996 138-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997 143-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998 157-2 US, Israel
1999 155-2 US, Israel
2000 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002 173-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003 179-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004 179-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005 182-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006 183-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007 184-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008 185-3 US, Israel, Palau
2009 187-3 US, Israel, Palau
2010 187-2 US, Israel
2011 186-2 US, Israel
Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.
How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: "The majority of Cubans support Castro ... The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. ... every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba." Mallory proposed "a line of action which ... makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."14 Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.
Notes
1.Viagra: Reuters, April 29, 2011
2.See, for example, "Million Man, Woman and Child March in Tripoli, Libya", June 20, 2011
3.The Guardian (London), September 3, 2011
4.Washington Post, September 15, 2011, "Islamists rise to fore in new Libya"
5.USA Today, October 24, 2011
6.Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies, Columbia University, Washington Post, November 11, 2007
7.Associated Press, April 6, 2011, some obvious errors in the original have been corrected
8.New York Times, November 6, 2003
9.New York Times, April 16, 2002
10.Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1994, p.7
11.Guatemala: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982), p.183; Jagan: Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (1965), p.774-9; Bishop: Associated Press, May 29, 1983, "Leftist Government Officials Visit United States"
12.The Pentagon Papers (NY Times edition, 1971), pp.4, 5, 8, 26; William Blum, Killing Hope, p.123)
13.Washington Post, October 26, 2011
14.Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885
–
William Blum is the author of:
•Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
•Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
•West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
•Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org/
Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.
To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6@aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.
Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned.
November 1st, 2011
William Blum
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer99.html
It doesn't matter to them if it's untrue. It's a higher truth.
"We came, we saw, he died."
— US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi
Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: "We came, we saw, 3,000 died... ha-ha."
Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands ... this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, al-Jazeera) — from the declared imminence of a "bloodbath" in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn't intervene to stories of government helicopter-gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi's army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American Ambassador, as if young soldiers needed Viagra to get it up!)1
The New York Times (March 22) observed:
... 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 Los Angeles Times (April 7) added this about the rebels' media operation:
It's not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:
•No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary
•No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
•No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
•No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That's [Qaddafi's] propaganda.)
The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation, but it was the rebels' trail of lies, both of omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for "humanitarian" intervention; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can't get much more humanitarian than that. If the people of Libya prior to the NATO/US bombardment had been offered a referendum on it, can it be imagined that they would have endorsed it?
In fact, it appears rather likely that a majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi. How else could the government have held off the most powerful military forces in the world for more than seven months? Before NATO and the US laid waste to the land, Libya had the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, and highest UN Human Development Index in Africa. During the first few months of the civil war, giant rallies were held in support of the Libyan leader.2
For further discussion of why Libyans may have been motivated to support Gaddafi, have a look at this video.
If Gaddafi had been less oppressive of his political opposition over the years and had made some gestures of accommodation to them during the Arab Spring, the benevolent side of his regime might still be keeping him in power, although the world has plentiful evidence making it plain that the Western powers are not particularly concerned about political oppression except to use as an excuse for intervention when they want to; indeed, government files seized in Tripoli during the fighting show that the CIA and British intelligence worked with the Libyan government in tracking down dissidents, turning them over to Libya, and taking part in interrogations.3
In any event, many of the rebels had a religious motive for opposing the government and played dominant roles within the rebel army; previously a number of them had fought against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.4 The new Libyan regime promptly announced that Islamic sharia law would be the "basic source" of legislation, and laws that contradict "the teachings of Islam" would be nullified; there would also be a reinstitution of polygamy; the Muslim holy book, the Quran, allows men up to four wives.5
Thus, just as in Afghanistan in the 1980-90s, the United States has supported Islamic militants fighting against a secular government. The American government has imprisoned many people as "terrorists" in the United States for a lot less.
What began in Libya as "normal" civil war violence from both sides — repeated before and since by the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria without any Western military intervention at all (the US actually continues to arm the Bahrain and Yemen regimes) — was transformed by the Western propaganda machine into a serious Gaddafi genocide of innocent Libyans. Addressing the validity of this very key issue is another video, "Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no evidence". The main feature of the film is an interview with Soliman Bouchuiguir, Secretary-General, and one of the founders in 1989, of the Libyan League for Human Rights, perhaps the leading Libyan dissident group, in exile in Switzerland.
Bouchuiguir is asked several times if he can document various charges made against the Libyan leader. Where is the proof of the many rapes? The many other alleged atrocities? The more than 6,000 civilians alleged killed by Gaddafi's planes? Again and again Bouchuiguir cites the National Transitional Council as the source. Yes, that's the rebels who carried out the civil war in conjunction with the NATO/US forces. At other times Bouchuiguir speaks of "eyewitnesses": "little girls, boys who were there, whose families we know personally". After awhile, he declares that "there is no way" to document these things. This is probably true to some extent, but why, then, the UN Security Council resolution for a military intervention in Libya? Why almost eight months of bombing?
Bouchuiguir also mentions his organization's working with the National Endowment for Democracy in their effort against Gaddafi, and one has to wonder if the man has any idea that the NED was founded to be a front for the CIA. Literally.
Another source of charges against Gaddafi and his sons has been the International Criminal Court. The Court's Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is shown in this film at a news conference discussing the same question of proof of the charges. He refers to an ICC document of 77 pages which he says contains the evidence. The film displays the document's Table of Contents, which shows that pages 17-71 are not available to the public; these pages, apparently the ones containing the testimony and evidence, are marked as "redacted". In an appendix, the ICC report lists its news sources; these include Fox News, CNN, the CIA, Soliman Bouchuiguir, and the Libyan League for Human Rights. Earlier, the film had presented Bouchuiguir citing the ICC as one of his sources. The documentation is thus a closed circle.
Historical footnote: "Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture — these were the weapons of Europe's takeover" in the Mideast.6
The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to
On April 6, 2011 Moammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Obama, in which he said: "We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. ... Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair."7
Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.8 ... Then came shock and awe!
In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place shortly thereafter.9
In 1994, it was reported that the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcommander Marcos, said that "he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians." "Finally," Marcos said, "they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes."10 Yet for many years, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the training and tools needed to crush the Zapatistas.
The Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, and Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983 all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.11 The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.
In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America's help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that "the four powers" (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.12 Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some sort of communist.
America's presstitutes
Imagine that the vicious police attack of October 25 on the Occupy Oakland encampment had taken place in Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or in any other ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) ... Page One Righteous Indignation with Shocking Photos. But here's the Washington Post the next day: A three-inch story on page three with a headline: "Protesters wearing out their welcome nationwide"; no mention of the Iraqi veteran left unconscious from a police projectile making contact with his head; as to photos: just one — an Oakland police officer petting a cat that was left behind by the protesters.
And here's TV comedian Jay Leno the same night as the police attack in Oakland: "They say Moammar Gaddafi may have been one of the richest men in the world ... 200 billion dollars. With all of the billions he had, he spent very little on education or health care for his country. So I guess he was a Republican."13
The object of Leno's humor was of course the Republicans, but it served the cause of further demonizing Gaddafi and thus adding to the "justification" of America's murderous attack on Libya. If I had been one of Leno's guests sitting there, I would have turned to the audience and said: "Listen people, under Gaddafi health care and education were completely free. Wouldn't you like to have that here?"
I think that enough people in the audience would have applauded or shouted to force Leno to back off a bit from his indoctrinated, mindless remark.
And just for the record, the 200 billion dollars is not money found in Gaddafi's personal bank accounts anywhere in the world, but money belonging to the Libyan state. But why quibble? There's no business like show business.
The Iraqi Lullabye
On February 17, 2003, a month before the US bombing of Iraq began, I posted to the Internet an essay entitled "What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?" concerning the expected war. Included in this were the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, then at the American Enterprise Institute, which was one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq:
If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.
After a year of the tragic farce that was the American intervention in Iraq I could not resist. I sent Mr. Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: "I'd like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days."
I received no reply.
Has there ever been an empire that didn't tell itself and the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?
The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 20 years in a row
For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an "international pariah". We don't hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba". This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):
Year Votes (Yes-No) No Votes
1992 59-2 US, Israel
1993 88-4 US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994 101-2 US, Israel
1995 117-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996 138-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997 143-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998 157-2 US, Israel
1999 155-2 US, Israel
2000 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002 173-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003 179-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004 179-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005 182-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006 183-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007 184-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008 185-3 US, Israel, Palau
2009 187-3 US, Israel, Palau
2010 187-2 US, Israel
2011 186-2 US, Israel
Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.
How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: "The majority of Cubans support Castro ... The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. ... every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba." Mallory proposed "a line of action which ... makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."14 Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.
Notes
1.Viagra: Reuters, April 29, 2011
2.See, for example, "Million Man, Woman and Child March in Tripoli, Libya", June 20, 2011
3.The Guardian (London), September 3, 2011
4.Washington Post, September 15, 2011, "Islamists rise to fore in new Libya"
5.USA Today, October 24, 2011
6.Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies, Columbia University, Washington Post, November 11, 2007
7.Associated Press, April 6, 2011, some obvious errors in the original have been corrected
8.New York Times, November 6, 2003
9.New York Times, April 16, 2002
10.Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1994, p.7
11.Guatemala: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982), p.183; Jagan: Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (1965), p.774-9; Bishop: Associated Press, May 29, 1983, "Leftist Government Officials Visit United States"
12.The Pentagon Papers (NY Times edition, 1971), pp.4, 5, 8, 26; William Blum, Killing Hope, p.123)
13.Washington Post, October 26, 2011
14.Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885
–
William Blum is the author of:
•Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
•Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
•West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
•Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org/
Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.
To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6@aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.
Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Why Libya Was Attacked
Stephen Lendman Thursday, October 27, 2011
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-libya-was-attacked.html
Obama's March 28, 2011 address at the National Defense University was true to form. It reeked of duplicity, hypocrisy, and ball-faced lies, saying:
"For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and as an advocate for human freedom."
"....(W)e are reluctant to use force to solve the world's many challenges."
"But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act. That's what happened in Libya...."
For decades, Libya was "ruled by a tyrant....He has denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized people around the world - including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents."
Substitute Washington for Libya and he got it right. America is a rogue terror state, a menacing plague on humanity.
Democratic values, human and civil rights, and rule of law principles are non-starters.
Only corporate and imperial interests matter, not equity, justice, peace on earth, and government of, by and for the people while respecting the sovereign rights of other nations.
NATO's war on Libya was planned many months in advance like all wars. Why is most important, or put another way - cui bono?
Official accounts and media scoundrels never explain. Dozens of previous articles discussed relevant issues and answers, including one summarizing what's most important. More on that below.
Historical Facts About Libya
Like most parts of Africa for centuries, European colonial powers ravaged Libya. During the 1911 Turko/Italian war, Libya was invaded and attacked. Twenty years of resistance challenged Italian colonizers.
From 1911 - 1943, Italy's occupation was brutal. Libyans never forgot. After WW II, America, Britain and France dominated the region. In 1951, they combined three distinct regions into Libya - Cyrenaica in the east, Tripolitania in the west, and Fezzan in the south.
Britain enthroned King Idriss. He let America, Britain and France retain military bases and pursue corporate interests. America's Wheelus Air Base near Tripoli dominated the Mediterranean Basin. Washington wants one or more super-bases built on Libyan land as launching pads against the region.
In 1955, Libyan oil was discovered. Three colonial powers controlled it until Gaddafi's bloodless September 1, 1969 coup, ousting King Idris. It was an anti-imperial socialist revolution. Foreign domination ended.
Gaddafi supported pan-Africanism - a United States of Africa, free from imperial domination. It was a vision shared by Marcus Garvey, Kwame Kkrumah, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, William Tubman, Gamal Abd Nasser, and others. More on that below.
He also wanted Libyans to share in the country's oil wealth, a notion foreign to America and other Western societies.
Under his 1999 Decision No. 111, all Libyans got free healthcare, education, electricity, water, training, rehabilitation, housing assistance, disability and old-age benefits, interest-free state loans, as well as generous subsidies to study abroad, buy a new car, help couples when they marry, practically free gasoline, and more.
Literacy under Gaddafi rose from 20 - 80%. Libya's hospitals and private clinics were some of the region's best. Now they're in shambles. Some, in fact, were bombed or damaged in other fighting. NATO lied saying only military targets were attacked.
NATO's imperial strategy involves targeting civilians and vital infrastructure, including power, communications, medical care facilities, and other essential to life sites.
Before war began, Libyans had Africa's highest standard of living. According to David Blundy and Andrew Lycett's book titled, "Qaddafi and the Libyan Revolution:
http://www.amazon.com/Qaddafi-Libyan-Revolution-David-Blundy/dp/0316100420/thekonformist
"The young people are well dressed, well fed and well educated....Every Libyan gets free, and often excellent, education, medical and health services. New colleges and hospitals are impressive by any international standard."
"All Libyans have a house or a flat, a car, and most have televisions" and other conveniences. "Compared with most citizens of Third World countries, and with many (others), Libyans have it very good indeed," including decent housing or a rent-free apartment.
Gaddafi's Green Book, in fact, states, "The house is a basic need of both the individual and the family, therefore it should not be owned by others." It also covers other beneficial social policies, saying:
"Women, like men, are human beings.
....(A)ll individuals have a natural right to self-expression by any means....;
In a socialist society no person may own a private means of transportation for the purpose of renting to others, because this represents controlling the needs of others.
The democratic system is a cohesive structure whose foundation stones are firmly laid above the other (through People's Conferences and Committees). There is absolutely no conception of democratic society other than this.
No representation of the people - representation is a falsehood. The existence of parliaments underlies the absence of the people, for democracy can only exist with the presence of the people and not in the presence of representatives of the people."
Green Book ideology rejects Western-style democracy and predatory capitalism, especially neoliberal exploitation. It's one of many reasons why Gaddafi was ousted.
He provided impressive social benefits, including free land, equipment, livestock and seeds for agriculture to foster self-sufficient food production. Moreover, all basic food items were subsidized and sold through a network of "people's shops."
Moreover, since the 1960s, women had the right to vote and participate politically. They can also own and sell property independently of their husbands. Under the December 1969 Constitutional Proclamation Clause 5, they have equal status with men, including for education and employment, even though men play leading roles in society.
Until Washington and NATO blocked its approval, the UN Human Rights Council Libyan praised Gaddafi in its January 2011 "Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: Libya Arab Jamahiriya."
It said his government protected "not only political rights, but also economic, educational, social and cultural rights." It also lauded his treatment of religious minorities, and "human rights training" of its security forces.
In eight months, NATO's killing machine destroyed 42 years of achievements, benefitting all Libyans. Why else would overwhelming numbers support him?
After NATO attacked, hundreds of thousands rallied openly for him. On July 1, 95% of Tripoli's population (over a million strong) expressed support in Green Square.
Before the war, he felt safe enough to drive unprotected through Tripoli streets. Residents lined up to cheer him. Some despot!
America and other Western societies should have ones like him. Imperial wars would end. So would homelessness, hunger and human depravation. Instead, "new world order" imperialists want super-wealth and power shared only by their privileged few.
Libya is one of many targets. Others will follow to extinguish freedom everywhere if they succeed. Universal opposition needs to stop them. Failure can't be tolerated. The alternative is too grim to imagine.
Why Gaddafi Was Targeted
Information below was discussed earlier. It bears repeating now. Gaddafi's vision marked him for removal. It was just a matter of when, even though he cooperated with Western powers post-9/11 on matters of intelligence and terrorism.
Until vilified and targeted, he was welcomed in Western capitals. In 2003, he came in from the cold, became a valued Western ally, and had meetings and discussions with top officials like UK Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and others.
He also participated in the 2009 G-8 Summit in L-Aquila, Italy as Chairman of the African Union. At the time, he met and shook hands with Obama.
Moreover, ABC News interviewed him live, and on January 21, 2009, The New York Times published his op-ed headlined, "The One-State Solution" to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He called "living under one roof....the only option for a lasting peace."
On May 16, 2006, Washington restored full diplomatic relations, removing Libya from its state sponsors of terrorism list. At the time, Rice called the move:
"tangible results that flow from the historic decisions taken by Libya's leadership in 2003 to renounce terrorism and to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs....Libya is an important model as nations around the world press for changes in behavior by the Iranian and North Korean regimes."
She also praised Gaddafi's "excellent cooperation" in fighting terrorism. Moreover, he opened Libya's markets to Western interests by arranging deals with Big Oil giants BP, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Occidental, France's Total, Italy's Eni Gas and others. By all appearances, he joined the club, so why turn on him?
Though on board in some ways, he very much wasn't on others. He supported Palestinian rights, opposed Israel's occupation and Gaza's siege.
Earlier he backed anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, as well as others in Northern Ireland, Spain, and elsewhere.
He had nothing to do with downing Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Neither did Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi. Scottish judges knew he was innocent but were pressured to convict.
Gaddafi never admitted fault. He took responsibility solely to have international sanctions removed. To this day, he and al-Megrahi stand falsely accused. Likely CIA /MI6/and/or Mossad involvement is never mentioned.
America tried and failed numerous times to assassinate him, including Ronald Reagan's 1986 attempt. CIA covert efforts financed opposition groups. In 1981, they helped establish the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) and its militant wing called the Libyan National Army based in Egypt near Libya's border.
Along with US and UK Special Forces, it was directly involved in instigating insurrection last February. It wasn't homegrown. As in Syria, it was externally generated.
Gaddafi opted out of AFRICOM. It's one of nine global Pentagon commands to control Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, including its strategic energy transit routes and choke points, crucial to keep open for world economies.
All African countries participate except Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Eritrea, and Libya until now. He also backed an initiative to create a United States of Africa, whereas Washington wants easily exploitable divisions. More on that below.
Besides ranked ninth in the world with 42 billion proved barrels of oil reserves (and large amounts of gas), its untapped potential is believed much greater. Moreover, being nearly sulfur-free, it's even more valued for its extremely high quality. At issue isn't access, it's control over who develops, produces and receives it in what amounts.
In January 2009, Gaddafi wanted to nationalize Libyan oil, but his timetable faced internal resistance. According to Pravda.ru's March 25, 2011 article titled, "Reason for war? Gaddafi wanted to nationalise oil," he considered the option because of low oil prices at the time, saying:
"The oil-exporting countries should opt for nationalisation because of the rapid fall in oil prices. We must put the issue on the table and discuss it seriously. Oil should be owned by the State at this time, so we could better control prices by the increase or decrease in production."
In February 2009, he asked for public support to distribute Libya's oil wealth directly to the people. However, senior officials feared losing their jobs "due to a parallel plan by Gaddafi to rid the state of corruption." Possible capital flight was also an issue.
As a result, Libya's Popular Committee voted 468 - 64 to delay nationalization plans, even though a 251 majority viewed doing so as positive.
Note: Gaddafi didn't consider how powerful insiders manipulate all markets up or down for profit, including oil, irrespective of demand. It's brazen fraud but goes on all the time, especially on Wall Street in collusion with Washington.
Libya's Great Man-Made River (GMMR) was developing an ocean-sized aquifer beneath the desert for irrigation, human consumption, and other uses. At 2007 consumption rates, it could last 1,000 years. No wonder Gaddafi calls his Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS) the "Eighth Wonder of the World."
At issue, of course, is privatizing it, making water unaffordable for many, including most Libyans. In other words, Western predators want it exploited for maximum profits, not equitable use as a public resource.
Ellen Brown's April 13 article titled, "Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking?" raised another, easily overlooked, issue. Who controls Libya's money, the lifeblood of every economy? In 1970, Henry Kissinger said, "Control oil and you control nations. Control food and you control people." He left out money, the supreme power to control everything because without it economies collapse.
At issue is public or private control like most nations, including America under Wall Street's owned and operated Federal Reserve.
Under Gaddafi, the Central Bank of Libya was state owned. In other words, it created its own money, the Libyan Dinar, interest free to be used productively for economic growth, not speculation, profits and bonuses for predatory bankers.
However, after Washington's led NATO intervention, the privately controlled Central Bank of Benghazi was established to let Western bankers, not Libyans, run things. Money control indeed appears an important reason for intervening, perhaps most important of all.
On April 24, Manlio Dinucci's Global Research article headlined, "Financial Heist of the Century: Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF)," saying:
Besides money, oil, gas, water, and other reasons, the "Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) manages" an estimated $70 billion, "rising to more than $150 billion (including) foreign investments of the Central Bank and other bodies. But it might be more."
Confiscation gives US/NATO interests easy money for their own purposes. In fact, besides war, the business of America is grand theft in league with Western partners, Wall Street and other corporate interests.
Gaddafi promoted pan-African unity, a United States of Africa he hoped to lead against Western powers wanting balkanized easily-controlled states.
Libya was central to Africa's independence, including freedom from predatory central banks and international lending agencies, acting as loan sharks of last resort.
He also funded Africa's only communications satellite. In doing so, he saved hundreds of millions of dollars for low-cost incoming and outgoing calls.
In addition, he allocated two-thirds of the $42 billion needed to launch a public African Central Bank (HQ'd in Nigeria), an African Monetary Fund based in Cameroon, and an African Investment Bank HQ'd in Libya.
The Obama administration stole the money and prevented it. If established, it would have provided low-cost (or perhaps interest-free) loans for health, education, and other social projects, as well as vital infrastructure development in participating African states.
Washington and NATO partners destroyed his vision to rape Libya for profit and exploit its people. That imperialism's core element. Gaddafi wanted none of it. As a result, he had to go.
He advocated a new "Gold Standard," replacing dollars with gold dinars. African and Muslim states supported it to provide real monetary wealth and value, free from predatory lending agencies and depreciating fiat currencies.
Washington determined to prevent it to maintain petrodollar recycling and dollar hegemony as the world's reserve currency.
Western plans for Libya's oil excludes China and Russia. Gaddafi granted both countries concessions. What he gave, Washington wants revoked.
America, Britain, France, Italy, and other Western partners want North African resources for themselves. They also want control of sub-Saharan Africa, depriving rivals they want excluded.
In 1977, Gaddafi transformed the Libyan Republic into the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - a "state of the masses." In 1979, he established direct participatory democracy, devolving power to tribal leaders. In 1986, Libya became the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
A revolutionary leader, Gaddafi was a visionary. He wanted Libya's society based on equity, justice and fair distribution of wealth. Nasser said he represented Arab nationalism and unity.
His faults aside, Libyans supported him overwhelmingly. They still do. His spirit drives their revolutionary struggle for freedom. They won't quit until it's achieved.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-libya-was-attacked.html
Obama's March 28, 2011 address at the National Defense University was true to form. It reeked of duplicity, hypocrisy, and ball-faced lies, saying:
"For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and as an advocate for human freedom."
"....(W)e are reluctant to use force to solve the world's many challenges."
"But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act. That's what happened in Libya...."
For decades, Libya was "ruled by a tyrant....He has denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized people around the world - including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents."
Substitute Washington for Libya and he got it right. America is a rogue terror state, a menacing plague on humanity.
Democratic values, human and civil rights, and rule of law principles are non-starters.
Only corporate and imperial interests matter, not equity, justice, peace on earth, and government of, by and for the people while respecting the sovereign rights of other nations.
NATO's war on Libya was planned many months in advance like all wars. Why is most important, or put another way - cui bono?
Official accounts and media scoundrels never explain. Dozens of previous articles discussed relevant issues and answers, including one summarizing what's most important. More on that below.
Historical Facts About Libya
Like most parts of Africa for centuries, European colonial powers ravaged Libya. During the 1911 Turko/Italian war, Libya was invaded and attacked. Twenty years of resistance challenged Italian colonizers.
From 1911 - 1943, Italy's occupation was brutal. Libyans never forgot. After WW II, America, Britain and France dominated the region. In 1951, they combined three distinct regions into Libya - Cyrenaica in the east, Tripolitania in the west, and Fezzan in the south.
Britain enthroned King Idriss. He let America, Britain and France retain military bases and pursue corporate interests. America's Wheelus Air Base near Tripoli dominated the Mediterranean Basin. Washington wants one or more super-bases built on Libyan land as launching pads against the region.
In 1955, Libyan oil was discovered. Three colonial powers controlled it until Gaddafi's bloodless September 1, 1969 coup, ousting King Idris. It was an anti-imperial socialist revolution. Foreign domination ended.
Gaddafi supported pan-Africanism - a United States of Africa, free from imperial domination. It was a vision shared by Marcus Garvey, Kwame Kkrumah, Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, William Tubman, Gamal Abd Nasser, and others. More on that below.
He also wanted Libyans to share in the country's oil wealth, a notion foreign to America and other Western societies.
Under his 1999 Decision No. 111, all Libyans got free healthcare, education, electricity, water, training, rehabilitation, housing assistance, disability and old-age benefits, interest-free state loans, as well as generous subsidies to study abroad, buy a new car, help couples when they marry, practically free gasoline, and more.
Literacy under Gaddafi rose from 20 - 80%. Libya's hospitals and private clinics were some of the region's best. Now they're in shambles. Some, in fact, were bombed or damaged in other fighting. NATO lied saying only military targets were attacked.
NATO's imperial strategy involves targeting civilians and vital infrastructure, including power, communications, medical care facilities, and other essential to life sites.
Before war began, Libyans had Africa's highest standard of living. According to David Blundy and Andrew Lycett's book titled, "Qaddafi and the Libyan Revolution:
http://www.amazon.com/Qaddafi-Libyan-Revolution-David-Blundy/dp/0316100420/thekonformist
"The young people are well dressed, well fed and well educated....Every Libyan gets free, and often excellent, education, medical and health services. New colleges and hospitals are impressive by any international standard."
"All Libyans have a house or a flat, a car, and most have televisions" and other conveniences. "Compared with most citizens of Third World countries, and with many (others), Libyans have it very good indeed," including decent housing or a rent-free apartment.
Gaddafi's Green Book, in fact, states, "The house is a basic need of both the individual and the family, therefore it should not be owned by others." It also covers other beneficial social policies, saying:
"Women, like men, are human beings.
....(A)ll individuals have a natural right to self-expression by any means....;
In a socialist society no person may own a private means of transportation for the purpose of renting to others, because this represents controlling the needs of others.
The democratic system is a cohesive structure whose foundation stones are firmly laid above the other (through People's Conferences and Committees). There is absolutely no conception of democratic society other than this.
No representation of the people - representation is a falsehood. The existence of parliaments underlies the absence of the people, for democracy can only exist with the presence of the people and not in the presence of representatives of the people."
Green Book ideology rejects Western-style democracy and predatory capitalism, especially neoliberal exploitation. It's one of many reasons why Gaddafi was ousted.
He provided impressive social benefits, including free land, equipment, livestock and seeds for agriculture to foster self-sufficient food production. Moreover, all basic food items were subsidized and sold through a network of "people's shops."
Moreover, since the 1960s, women had the right to vote and participate politically. They can also own and sell property independently of their husbands. Under the December 1969 Constitutional Proclamation Clause 5, they have equal status with men, including for education and employment, even though men play leading roles in society.
Until Washington and NATO blocked its approval, the UN Human Rights Council Libyan praised Gaddafi in its January 2011 "Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: Libya Arab Jamahiriya."
It said his government protected "not only political rights, but also economic, educational, social and cultural rights." It also lauded his treatment of religious minorities, and "human rights training" of its security forces.
In eight months, NATO's killing machine destroyed 42 years of achievements, benefitting all Libyans. Why else would overwhelming numbers support him?
After NATO attacked, hundreds of thousands rallied openly for him. On July 1, 95% of Tripoli's population (over a million strong) expressed support in Green Square.
Before the war, he felt safe enough to drive unprotected through Tripoli streets. Residents lined up to cheer him. Some despot!
America and other Western societies should have ones like him. Imperial wars would end. So would homelessness, hunger and human depravation. Instead, "new world order" imperialists want super-wealth and power shared only by their privileged few.
Libya is one of many targets. Others will follow to extinguish freedom everywhere if they succeed. Universal opposition needs to stop them. Failure can't be tolerated. The alternative is too grim to imagine.
Why Gaddafi Was Targeted
Information below was discussed earlier. It bears repeating now. Gaddafi's vision marked him for removal. It was just a matter of when, even though he cooperated with Western powers post-9/11 on matters of intelligence and terrorism.
Until vilified and targeted, he was welcomed in Western capitals. In 2003, he came in from the cold, became a valued Western ally, and had meetings and discussions with top officials like UK Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and others.
He also participated in the 2009 G-8 Summit in L-Aquila, Italy as Chairman of the African Union. At the time, he met and shook hands with Obama.
Moreover, ABC News interviewed him live, and on January 21, 2009, The New York Times published his op-ed headlined, "The One-State Solution" to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He called "living under one roof....the only option for a lasting peace."
On May 16, 2006, Washington restored full diplomatic relations, removing Libya from its state sponsors of terrorism list. At the time, Rice called the move:
"tangible results that flow from the historic decisions taken by Libya's leadership in 2003 to renounce terrorism and to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs....Libya is an important model as nations around the world press for changes in behavior by the Iranian and North Korean regimes."
She also praised Gaddafi's "excellent cooperation" in fighting terrorism. Moreover, he opened Libya's markets to Western interests by arranging deals with Big Oil giants BP, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Occidental, France's Total, Italy's Eni Gas and others. By all appearances, he joined the club, so why turn on him?
Though on board in some ways, he very much wasn't on others. He supported Palestinian rights, opposed Israel's occupation and Gaza's siege.
Earlier he backed anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, as well as others in Northern Ireland, Spain, and elsewhere.
He had nothing to do with downing Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Neither did Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi. Scottish judges knew he was innocent but were pressured to convict.
Gaddafi never admitted fault. He took responsibility solely to have international sanctions removed. To this day, he and al-Megrahi stand falsely accused. Likely CIA /MI6/and/or Mossad involvement is never mentioned.
America tried and failed numerous times to assassinate him, including Ronald Reagan's 1986 attempt. CIA covert efforts financed opposition groups. In 1981, they helped establish the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) and its militant wing called the Libyan National Army based in Egypt near Libya's border.
Along with US and UK Special Forces, it was directly involved in instigating insurrection last February. It wasn't homegrown. As in Syria, it was externally generated.
Gaddafi opted out of AFRICOM. It's one of nine global Pentagon commands to control Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, including its strategic energy transit routes and choke points, crucial to keep open for world economies.
All African countries participate except Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Eritrea, and Libya until now. He also backed an initiative to create a United States of Africa, whereas Washington wants easily exploitable divisions. More on that below.
Besides ranked ninth in the world with 42 billion proved barrels of oil reserves (and large amounts of gas), its untapped potential is believed much greater. Moreover, being nearly sulfur-free, it's even more valued for its extremely high quality. At issue isn't access, it's control over who develops, produces and receives it in what amounts.
In January 2009, Gaddafi wanted to nationalize Libyan oil, but his timetable faced internal resistance. According to Pravda.ru's March 25, 2011 article titled, "Reason for war? Gaddafi wanted to nationalise oil," he considered the option because of low oil prices at the time, saying:
"The oil-exporting countries should opt for nationalisation because of the rapid fall in oil prices. We must put the issue on the table and discuss it seriously. Oil should be owned by the State at this time, so we could better control prices by the increase or decrease in production."
In February 2009, he asked for public support to distribute Libya's oil wealth directly to the people. However, senior officials feared losing their jobs "due to a parallel plan by Gaddafi to rid the state of corruption." Possible capital flight was also an issue.
As a result, Libya's Popular Committee voted 468 - 64 to delay nationalization plans, even though a 251 majority viewed doing so as positive.
Note: Gaddafi didn't consider how powerful insiders manipulate all markets up or down for profit, including oil, irrespective of demand. It's brazen fraud but goes on all the time, especially on Wall Street in collusion with Washington.
Libya's Great Man-Made River (GMMR) was developing an ocean-sized aquifer beneath the desert for irrigation, human consumption, and other uses. At 2007 consumption rates, it could last 1,000 years. No wonder Gaddafi calls his Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS) the "Eighth Wonder of the World."
At issue, of course, is privatizing it, making water unaffordable for many, including most Libyans. In other words, Western predators want it exploited for maximum profits, not equitable use as a public resource.
Ellen Brown's April 13 article titled, "Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking?" raised another, easily overlooked, issue. Who controls Libya's money, the lifeblood of every economy? In 1970, Henry Kissinger said, "Control oil and you control nations. Control food and you control people." He left out money, the supreme power to control everything because without it economies collapse.
At issue is public or private control like most nations, including America under Wall Street's owned and operated Federal Reserve.
Under Gaddafi, the Central Bank of Libya was state owned. In other words, it created its own money, the Libyan Dinar, interest free to be used productively for economic growth, not speculation, profits and bonuses for predatory bankers.
However, after Washington's led NATO intervention, the privately controlled Central Bank of Benghazi was established to let Western bankers, not Libyans, run things. Money control indeed appears an important reason for intervening, perhaps most important of all.
On April 24, Manlio Dinucci's Global Research article headlined, "Financial Heist of the Century: Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF)," saying:
Besides money, oil, gas, water, and other reasons, the "Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) manages" an estimated $70 billion, "rising to more than $150 billion (including) foreign investments of the Central Bank and other bodies. But it might be more."
Confiscation gives US/NATO interests easy money for their own purposes. In fact, besides war, the business of America is grand theft in league with Western partners, Wall Street and other corporate interests.
Gaddafi promoted pan-African unity, a United States of Africa he hoped to lead against Western powers wanting balkanized easily-controlled states.
Libya was central to Africa's independence, including freedom from predatory central banks and international lending agencies, acting as loan sharks of last resort.
He also funded Africa's only communications satellite. In doing so, he saved hundreds of millions of dollars for low-cost incoming and outgoing calls.
In addition, he allocated two-thirds of the $42 billion needed to launch a public African Central Bank (HQ'd in Nigeria), an African Monetary Fund based in Cameroon, and an African Investment Bank HQ'd in Libya.
The Obama administration stole the money and prevented it. If established, it would have provided low-cost (or perhaps interest-free) loans for health, education, and other social projects, as well as vital infrastructure development in participating African states.
Washington and NATO partners destroyed his vision to rape Libya for profit and exploit its people. That imperialism's core element. Gaddafi wanted none of it. As a result, he had to go.
He advocated a new "Gold Standard," replacing dollars with gold dinars. African and Muslim states supported it to provide real monetary wealth and value, free from predatory lending agencies and depreciating fiat currencies.
Washington determined to prevent it to maintain petrodollar recycling and dollar hegemony as the world's reserve currency.
Western plans for Libya's oil excludes China and Russia. Gaddafi granted both countries concessions. What he gave, Washington wants revoked.
America, Britain, France, Italy, and other Western partners want North African resources for themselves. They also want control of sub-Saharan Africa, depriving rivals they want excluded.
In 1977, Gaddafi transformed the Libyan Republic into the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya - a "state of the masses." In 1979, he established direct participatory democracy, devolving power to tribal leaders. In 1986, Libya became the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
A revolutionary leader, Gaddafi was a visionary. He wanted Libya's society based on equity, justice and fair distribution of wealth. Nasser said he represented Arab nationalism and unity.
His faults aside, Libyans supported him overwhelmingly. They still do. His spirit drives their revolutionary struggle for freedom. They won't quit until it's achieved.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Massacres in Libya
From the BBC:
The bodies of 53 Gaddafi loyalists have been found at a hotel in the Libyan city of Sirte after apparently being executed, a human rights group says.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the victims - some of whom had their hands bound - died about a week ago.
It is the latest accusation of atrocities in Libya committed by both sides during the eight-month conflict.
Libya's new rulers have denied any involvement in abuses and have urged Libyans to forego reprisal attacks...
Bodies of Gaddafi supporters 'found executed' in Sirte
24 October 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15428360
The bodies of 53 Gaddafi loyalists have been found at a hotel in the Libyan city of Sirte after apparently being executed, a human rights group says.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the victims - some of whom had their hands bound - died about a week ago.
It is the latest accusation of atrocities in Libya committed by both sides during the eight-month conflict.
Libya's new rulers have denied any involvement in abuses and have urged Libyans to forego reprisal attacks...
Bodies of Gaddafi supporters 'found executed' in Sirte
24 October 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15428360
16 Things Libya Will Never See Again
Posted by Saya on October 24, 2011
http://www.disinfo.com/2011/10/16-things-libya-will-never-see-again
1.There is no electricity bill in Libya; electricity is free for all its citizens.
2.There is no interest on loans, banks in Libya are state-owned and loans given to all its citizens at zero percent interest by law.
3.Having a home considered a human right in Libya.
4.All newlyweds in Libya receive $60,000 dinar (U.S.$50,000) by the government to buy their first apartment so to help start up the family.
5.Education and medical treatments are free in Libya. Before Gaddafi only 25 percent of Libyans were literate. Today, the figure is 83 percent.
6.Should Libyans want to take up farming career, they would receive farming land, a farming house, equipments, seeds and livestock to kickstart their farms are all for free.
7.If Libyans cannot find the education or medical facilities they need, the government funds them to go abroad, for it is not only paid for, but they get a U.S.$2,300/month for accommodation and car allowance.
8.If a Libyan buys a car, the government subsidizes 50 percent of the price.
9.The price of petrol in Libya is $0.14 per liter.
10.Libya has no external debt and its reserves amounting to $150 billion are now frozen globally.
11.If a Libyan is unable to get employment after graduation the state would pay the average salary of the profession, as if he or she is employed, until employment is found.
12.A portion of every Libyan oil sale is credited directly to the bank accounts of all Libyan citizens.
13.A mother who gives birth to a child receive U.S.$5,000.
14.40 loaves of bread in Libya costs $0.15.
15.25 percent of Libyans have a university degree.
16.Gaddafi carried out the world’s largest irrigation project, known as the Great Manmade River project, to make water readily available throughout the desert country.
http://www.disinfo.com/2011/10/16-things-libya-will-never-see-again
1.There is no electricity bill in Libya; electricity is free for all its citizens.
2.There is no interest on loans, banks in Libya are state-owned and loans given to all its citizens at zero percent interest by law.
3.Having a home considered a human right in Libya.
4.All newlyweds in Libya receive $60,000 dinar (U.S.$50,000) by the government to buy their first apartment so to help start up the family.
5.Education and medical treatments are free in Libya. Before Gaddafi only 25 percent of Libyans were literate. Today, the figure is 83 percent.
6.Should Libyans want to take up farming career, they would receive farming land, a farming house, equipments, seeds and livestock to kickstart their farms are all for free.
7.If Libyans cannot find the education or medical facilities they need, the government funds them to go abroad, for it is not only paid for, but they get a U.S.$2,300/month for accommodation and car allowance.
8.If a Libyan buys a car, the government subsidizes 50 percent of the price.
9.The price of petrol in Libya is $0.14 per liter.
10.Libya has no external debt and its reserves amounting to $150 billion are now frozen globally.
11.If a Libyan is unable to get employment after graduation the state would pay the average salary of the profession, as if he or she is employed, until employment is found.
12.A portion of every Libyan oil sale is credited directly to the bank accounts of all Libyan citizens.
13.A mother who gives birth to a child receive U.S.$5,000.
14.40 loaves of bread in Libya costs $0.15.
15.25 percent of Libyans have a university degree.
16.Gaddafi carried out the world’s largest irrigation project, known as the Great Manmade River project, to make water readily available throughout the desert country.
Our moral decline
Blood-lust in the streets of Libya suffices for justice
Patrick Henningsen
Infowars.com
October 20, 2011
http://www.infowars.com/decline-of-western-civilization-blood-lust-in-the-streets-of-libya-suffices-for-justice/
It appears that Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi may have been handed down his final verdict by NATO rebels, but it’s perhaps an even more bloody awful fate already suffered by a morally detached western civilization.
The man who liberated his country from the tyrannical monarchy of King Idris back in 1969… was tried and sentenced by bullet today.
Gaddafi modeled himself after Omar Mukhtar, The Lion of the Desert, the only other man who has led a genuine, independent Libyan resistance, fighting against a brutal Italian colonization in 1927. Yet, our media tell us it’s just another dead tyrant.
This has become the new narrative in the US and western Europe now, where foreign leaders and other non-state actors with brown skin are given lengthy trials through press briefings by suited politicians in places like Washington, London and Paris, echoed by the corporate media until an antagonist is born for public consumption.
Following the White House’s comical staged hoax of SEAL Team 6's gallant raid on long-dead Osama bin Laden, and with no evidence to show it actually happened other than President Obama’s TV speeches- we get the next public assassination. After all, Obama’s far-fetched tale of the bin-Laden mission somehow vindicated all those innocent lives ruined by US incarceration and outright torture of thousands of young men since the War on Terror officially began in 2001.
Al Jazeera will no doubt play the shaky cell phone video of the man being stripped and dragged through the streets of Sirte by the NATO rebel mob. Somehow they believe, Gaddafi’s brutal post-mortem will vindicate their careless efforts and somehow make right the thousands of innocents who have perished- so that Libya can finally become part of the globalist, debt-based, neoliberal economic IMF system.
The west and its banking elite have nothing left to plunder other than middle class pension funds and incomes, so it is relying on countries in the east and south in order to refill its sadly diminishing coffers.
The same treatment was given to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Like Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden, he worked hand in hand with America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6 in order to help western intelligence agencies achieve their operational goals, and thus the foreign policy objectives of the US, Great Britain and Israel. Grainy cell phone videos of Saddam’s circus execution somehow vindicated those in the west who liquidated so many innocent Iraqi lives since 1991, and arguably before.
This is the new trend in dispensing due process, in a declining western civilization where blood-lust suffices for justice.
After the protracted media trials of both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, globalist power-brokers will never allow their war criminals to stand trial and spill the beans on all their dirty little secrets.
Over the last few decades, both Americans and western Europeans have become well-trained media consumers, and absorb their talking points much in the same way that grade school children dutifully repeat after their teachers and walk in single file. As adults, their teachers are CNN, FOX, the BBC, and the newest addition to the state information corps, US CENTCOM’s own Al Jazeera. None of them have any genuine moral or ethical perspective left in their editorial vision. The corporate networks will reserve any real humanitarian compassion for a handful of trapped miners, baby seals, missing Caucasian children and Amanda Knox.
Our new teachers have taught the dutifully-minded among us that when the mob labels a head of state or non-state actor as a tyrant, then regime change must take place, and that this man deserves to die. They have taught us that one dead US soldier is worth more in headlines than 100 dead brown skinned Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, or Libyans- women and children included. That is the overwhelming power of the 21st century media.
Will Libya have anything near the stability it enjoyed over the last 30 years? Will its people enjoy the mountain of state benefits available to them under the Gaddafi rein? Will Libyans be able to retain ownership of their country’s bounty of natural resources, and see the state reinvesting its profits back into their country for the benefit of future generations?
History has taught us that the answer to each and every one of these questions is of course… no.
History has written all over the sands of the Maghreb of North Africa, and Libya in particular. It has always been under the thumb of one empire or another- from the Romans, the Spanish, the Vatican’s Knights of Malta, the Ottomans, and Mussolini’s Italy.
Libya’s first brush with America came in the early 19th century, when war broke out between the United States and what was then referred to as Tripolitania, in what came to be known as the Barbary Wars. Only this time around the Barbary pirates are on the other side of the fighting, and they are known the world over by the name of ‘NATO’.
It’s only fitting that this latest chapter of history should be written as follows…
It was clear from day one that the Anglo-American empire, along with its clients like Qatar, were actively supporting and planning to bring destablization to the country. From the very first days of the civil war in Janurary 2011, before the shell casings had even hit the ground, western envoys and consultants worked with known al-Qaida fighters and criminals in Libya to form a new NTC government, a new central bank and a new state oil holding company. NATO were deployed to give brutal air support to these new gangs of rebel paramilitaries, and for nearly 10 months, both those groups killed, tortured, raped and looted everything in their path.
Meanwhile, offshore transnational corporations from the US, Europe and Qatar carved up the country’s assets. Months followed years of instability, infighting and acts of internal retribution followed. The poor became poorer, the rich became richer, organized crime blossomed and thousands of middle class Libyans were allowed to immigrate to the UK, France and Italy.
This would come to be known as Libya’s liberation.
What it means
The UN issued the citation, and NATO came in with the tow truck. Make no mistake, in the real world, NATO is the USA and the USA is NATO. It’s a politically correct way of using military force without being seen to be acting alone as an imperial aggressor. But what about the NTC’s death squads, the theft, the rape, the torture and destruction of citizens’ property, business, and whole lives?
To pass the buck a little further, NATO’s goals and end-game is handed over to Libya’s NTC, this way everyone’s asses are covered.
Politicans in Washington, London and Paris should be proud. They got everything they wanted, and with no dirt under their nails.
If no one in the US, UK, France, the UN or NATO’s technicians of death are held accountable for the sacking and looting of Libya- the crime of the 21st century, then expect that they will simply move forward, and do it again, and again. So who’s next? Syria?
There is no more moral highground, no more western values, no beliefs to use as a back-stop for western civilization.
Was Gaddafi guilty? Is that it, a bullet? He will never be afforded the same trial that anyone reading this article would expect as their god-given right. So what makes any among us believe that we deserve any of these so-called rights?
Who are we kidding?
Patrick Henningsen
Infowars.com
October 20, 2011
http://www.infowars.com/decline-of-western-civilization-blood-lust-in-the-streets-of-libya-suffices-for-justice/
It appears that Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi may have been handed down his final verdict by NATO rebels, but it’s perhaps an even more bloody awful fate already suffered by a morally detached western civilization.
The man who liberated his country from the tyrannical monarchy of King Idris back in 1969… was tried and sentenced by bullet today.
Gaddafi modeled himself after Omar Mukhtar, The Lion of the Desert, the only other man who has led a genuine, independent Libyan resistance, fighting against a brutal Italian colonization in 1927. Yet, our media tell us it’s just another dead tyrant.
This has become the new narrative in the US and western Europe now, where foreign leaders and other non-state actors with brown skin are given lengthy trials through press briefings by suited politicians in places like Washington, London and Paris, echoed by the corporate media until an antagonist is born for public consumption.
Following the White House’s comical staged hoax of SEAL Team 6's gallant raid on long-dead Osama bin Laden, and with no evidence to show it actually happened other than President Obama’s TV speeches- we get the next public assassination. After all, Obama’s far-fetched tale of the bin-Laden mission somehow vindicated all those innocent lives ruined by US incarceration and outright torture of thousands of young men since the War on Terror officially began in 2001.
Al Jazeera will no doubt play the shaky cell phone video of the man being stripped and dragged through the streets of Sirte by the NATO rebel mob. Somehow they believe, Gaddafi’s brutal post-mortem will vindicate their careless efforts and somehow make right the thousands of innocents who have perished- so that Libya can finally become part of the globalist, debt-based, neoliberal economic IMF system.
The west and its banking elite have nothing left to plunder other than middle class pension funds and incomes, so it is relying on countries in the east and south in order to refill its sadly diminishing coffers.
The same treatment was given to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Like Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden, he worked hand in hand with America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6 in order to help western intelligence agencies achieve their operational goals, and thus the foreign policy objectives of the US, Great Britain and Israel. Grainy cell phone videos of Saddam’s circus execution somehow vindicated those in the west who liquidated so many innocent Iraqi lives since 1991, and arguably before.
This is the new trend in dispensing due process, in a declining western civilization where blood-lust suffices for justice.
After the protracted media trials of both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, globalist power-brokers will never allow their war criminals to stand trial and spill the beans on all their dirty little secrets.
Over the last few decades, both Americans and western Europeans have become well-trained media consumers, and absorb their talking points much in the same way that grade school children dutifully repeat after their teachers and walk in single file. As adults, their teachers are CNN, FOX, the BBC, and the newest addition to the state information corps, US CENTCOM’s own Al Jazeera. None of them have any genuine moral or ethical perspective left in their editorial vision. The corporate networks will reserve any real humanitarian compassion for a handful of trapped miners, baby seals, missing Caucasian children and Amanda Knox.
Our new teachers have taught the dutifully-minded among us that when the mob labels a head of state or non-state actor as a tyrant, then regime change must take place, and that this man deserves to die. They have taught us that one dead US soldier is worth more in headlines than 100 dead brown skinned Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, or Libyans- women and children included. That is the overwhelming power of the 21st century media.
Will Libya have anything near the stability it enjoyed over the last 30 years? Will its people enjoy the mountain of state benefits available to them under the Gaddafi rein? Will Libyans be able to retain ownership of their country’s bounty of natural resources, and see the state reinvesting its profits back into their country for the benefit of future generations?
History has taught us that the answer to each and every one of these questions is of course… no.
History has written all over the sands of the Maghreb of North Africa, and Libya in particular. It has always been under the thumb of one empire or another- from the Romans, the Spanish, the Vatican’s Knights of Malta, the Ottomans, and Mussolini’s Italy.
Libya’s first brush with America came in the early 19th century, when war broke out between the United States and what was then referred to as Tripolitania, in what came to be known as the Barbary Wars. Only this time around the Barbary pirates are on the other side of the fighting, and they are known the world over by the name of ‘NATO’.
It’s only fitting that this latest chapter of history should be written as follows…
It was clear from day one that the Anglo-American empire, along with its clients like Qatar, were actively supporting and planning to bring destablization to the country. From the very first days of the civil war in Janurary 2011, before the shell casings had even hit the ground, western envoys and consultants worked with known al-Qaida fighters and criminals in Libya to form a new NTC government, a new central bank and a new state oil holding company. NATO were deployed to give brutal air support to these new gangs of rebel paramilitaries, and for nearly 10 months, both those groups killed, tortured, raped and looted everything in their path.
Meanwhile, offshore transnational corporations from the US, Europe and Qatar carved up the country’s assets. Months followed years of instability, infighting and acts of internal retribution followed. The poor became poorer, the rich became richer, organized crime blossomed and thousands of middle class Libyans were allowed to immigrate to the UK, France and Italy.
This would come to be known as Libya’s liberation.
What it means
The UN issued the citation, and NATO came in with the tow truck. Make no mistake, in the real world, NATO is the USA and the USA is NATO. It’s a politically correct way of using military force without being seen to be acting alone as an imperial aggressor. But what about the NTC’s death squads, the theft, the rape, the torture and destruction of citizens’ property, business, and whole lives?
To pass the buck a little further, NATO’s goals and end-game is handed over to Libya’s NTC, this way everyone’s asses are covered.
Politicans in Washington, London and Paris should be proud. They got everything they wanted, and with no dirt under their nails.
If no one in the US, UK, France, the UN or NATO’s technicians of death are held accountable for the sacking and looting of Libya- the crime of the 21st century, then expect that they will simply move forward, and do it again, and again. So who’s next? Syria?
There is no more moral highground, no more western values, no beliefs to use as a back-stop for western civilization.
Was Gaddafi guilty? Is that it, a bullet? He will never be afforded the same trial that anyone reading this article would expect as their god-given right. So what makes any among us believe that we deserve any of these so-called rights?
Who are we kidding?
The Seven Weirdest Things About Moammar Gadhafi
Or, as The Konformist would like to put it, the seven coolest things about him...
Source: ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/International/weirdest-things-moammar-gadhafi/story?id=14779142
1. The "Bulletproof" Tent: When Gadhafi was at home in Tripoli, he lived in a well fortified compound with a complex system of escape tunnels. But when he travelled abroad, this "Bedouin" brought a bit of the desert with him, camping out in the world's capitals. The tent was so heavy it needed to be flown on a separate plane, wherever the dictator travelled. To complete the Arabian Nights theme, Gadhafi often would tether a camel or two outside.
2. All-Female Virgin Bodyguard Retinue: They apparently weren't around when Gadhafi needed them most on Thursday, but the eccentric dictator was historically protected by 40 well trained bodyguards – all of them women. The bodyguards, called "Amazons," were all reportedly virgins who took a vow of chastity upon joining the dictator's retinue. The women, trained at an all-female military academy, were handpicked by Gadhafi. They wore elaborate uniforms, as well as makeup and high-heeled combat boots.
3. His "Voluptuous" Ukrainian Nurse: For a decade, Galyna Kolotnytska, a Ukrainian nurse often described in the press as "voluptuous," was regularly seen at the dictator's side. Kolotnytska was described in a leaked diplomatic cable as one of Gadhafi's closest aides and was rumored to have a romantic relationship with him. Several other Ukrainian women served as nurses and they all referred to him as "Papa" or "Daddy."
4. Crush on Condoleezza Rice: In 2007, Gadhafi called former Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice his "darling black African woman" and on a 2008 visit she made to Tripoli, the dictator gave her $200,000 worth of gifts, including a ring and a lute. But it wasn't until rebels stormed his Tripoli compound that the depths of the dictator's infatuation were exposed. There among Gadhafi's belongings was a carefully composed photo album made up of dozens of images of no one but Rice.
5. Fear of Flying and Elevators: Part of the reason Gadhafi loved travelling with that tent of his was because he was worried about lodging in a hotel where he'd have to ride an elevator. According to leaked diplomatic cables, the Libyan didn't like heights much either, and would only climb to a height of 35 steps. He therefore wasn't much of a fan of flying, refusing to travel by air for more than eight hours at a time. When he would travel to New York of the U.N.'s annual general assembly, he would spend a night in Portugal on the way to the U.S.
6. Bunga Bunga: In 2010, one of Gadhafi's most eccentric pastimes was exposed by Italian prosecutors investigating Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. A 17-year-old prostitute named Karima el-Mahroug, better known as Ruby Heartstealer, revealed that she had been invited to an orgy, called a "bunga bunga." "Silvio told me that he'd copied that formula from Muammar Gadhafi," she told prosecutors according to La Repubblica. "It's a ritual of [Gadhafi's] African harem."
7. An Eclectic Wardrobe: In those photos of world leaders standing shoulder to shoulder on the sidelines of this or that international forum, Gadhafi was always the easiest to pick out. His wardrobe was an eclectic mix of ornate military uniforms, Miami Vice style leisure suits, and Bedouin robes. Gadhafi, who pushed for a pan-African federation of nations, often decorated his outfits with images of the African continent. He'd sport safari shirts printed with an Africa pattern, or wear garish pins or necklaces of the continent.
Source: ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/International/weirdest-things-moammar-gadhafi/story?id=14779142
1. The "Bulletproof" Tent: When Gadhafi was at home in Tripoli, he lived in a well fortified compound with a complex system of escape tunnels. But when he travelled abroad, this "Bedouin" brought a bit of the desert with him, camping out in the world's capitals. The tent was so heavy it needed to be flown on a separate plane, wherever the dictator travelled. To complete the Arabian Nights theme, Gadhafi often would tether a camel or two outside.
2. All-Female Virgin Bodyguard Retinue: They apparently weren't around when Gadhafi needed them most on Thursday, but the eccentric dictator was historically protected by 40 well trained bodyguards – all of them women. The bodyguards, called "Amazons," were all reportedly virgins who took a vow of chastity upon joining the dictator's retinue. The women, trained at an all-female military academy, were handpicked by Gadhafi. They wore elaborate uniforms, as well as makeup and high-heeled combat boots.
3. His "Voluptuous" Ukrainian Nurse: For a decade, Galyna Kolotnytska, a Ukrainian nurse often described in the press as "voluptuous," was regularly seen at the dictator's side. Kolotnytska was described in a leaked diplomatic cable as one of Gadhafi's closest aides and was rumored to have a romantic relationship with him. Several other Ukrainian women served as nurses and they all referred to him as "Papa" or "Daddy."
4. Crush on Condoleezza Rice: In 2007, Gadhafi called former Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice his "darling black African woman" and on a 2008 visit she made to Tripoli, the dictator gave her $200,000 worth of gifts, including a ring and a lute. But it wasn't until rebels stormed his Tripoli compound that the depths of the dictator's infatuation were exposed. There among Gadhafi's belongings was a carefully composed photo album made up of dozens of images of no one but Rice.
5. Fear of Flying and Elevators: Part of the reason Gadhafi loved travelling with that tent of his was because he was worried about lodging in a hotel where he'd have to ride an elevator. According to leaked diplomatic cables, the Libyan didn't like heights much either, and would only climb to a height of 35 steps. He therefore wasn't much of a fan of flying, refusing to travel by air for more than eight hours at a time. When he would travel to New York of the U.N.'s annual general assembly, he would spend a night in Portugal on the way to the U.S.
6. Bunga Bunga: In 2010, one of Gadhafi's most eccentric pastimes was exposed by Italian prosecutors investigating Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. A 17-year-old prostitute named Karima el-Mahroug, better known as Ruby Heartstealer, revealed that she had been invited to an orgy, called a "bunga bunga." "Silvio told me that he'd copied that formula from Muammar Gadhafi," she told prosecutors according to La Repubblica. "It's a ritual of [Gadhafi's] African harem."
7. An Eclectic Wardrobe: In those photos of world leaders standing shoulder to shoulder on the sidelines of this or that international forum, Gadhafi was always the easiest to pick out. His wardrobe was an eclectic mix of ornate military uniforms, Miami Vice style leisure suits, and Bedouin robes. Gadhafi, who pushed for a pan-African federation of nations, often decorated his outfits with images of the African continent. He'd sport safari shirts printed with an Africa pattern, or wear garish pins or necklaces of the continent.
The Son of Africa claims a continent’s crown jewels
John Pilger
20 October 2011
http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-son-of-africa-claims-a-continents-crown-jewels
On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only "engage" for "self-defence", says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.
Obama's decision is described in the press as "highly unusual" and "surprising", even "weird". It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and "protect" Indonesia, which President Nixon called "the region's richest hoard of natural resources... the greatest prize". Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America's subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually "self defence" or "humanitarian", words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.
In Africa, says Obama, the "humanitarian mission" is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord's resistance Army (LRA), which "has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa". This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa's most venal tyrant.
Obama's other justification also invites satire. This is the "national security of the United States". The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has few than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US "national security" usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda's "president-for-life" Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military "aid" - including Obama's favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America's latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.
However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American "threat". When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, "Asymmetric threats ... asymmetric threats". These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.
Africa is China's success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa's greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China's most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and Nato backed the "rebels" with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning "genocide" in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west's "humanitarian intervention" was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the "rebel" National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya's gross national oil production "in exchange" (the term used) for "total and permanent" French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in "liberated" Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: "We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!"
The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the "scramble for Africa" at the end of the 19th century.
Like the "victory" in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified "pro-Gaddafi" fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, "celebrate". According to General Petraeus, there is now a war "of perception... conducted continuously through the news media".
For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s "defence strategy" plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.
That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the "Son of Africa", is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in 'Black Skin, White Masks', what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.
20 October 2011
http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-son-of-africa-claims-a-continents-crown-jewels
On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only "engage" for "self-defence", says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.
Obama's decision is described in the press as "highly unusual" and "surprising", even "weird". It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and "protect" Indonesia, which President Nixon called "the region's richest hoard of natural resources... the greatest prize". Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America's subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually "self defence" or "humanitarian", words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.
In Africa, says Obama, the "humanitarian mission" is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord's resistance Army (LRA), which "has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa". This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa's most venal tyrant.
Obama's other justification also invites satire. This is the "national security of the United States". The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has few than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US "national security" usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda's "president-for-life" Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military "aid" - including Obama's favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America's latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.
However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American "threat". When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, "Asymmetric threats ... asymmetric threats". These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.
Africa is China's success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa's greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China's most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and Nato backed the "rebels" with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning "genocide" in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west's "humanitarian intervention" was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the "rebel" National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya's gross national oil production "in exchange" (the term used) for "total and permanent" French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in "liberated" Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: "We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!"
The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the "scramble for Africa" at the end of the 19th century.
Like the "victory" in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified "pro-Gaddafi" fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, "celebrate". According to General Petraeus, there is now a war "of perception... conducted continuously through the news media".
For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s "defence strategy" plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.
That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the "Son of Africa", is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in 'Black Skin, White Masks', what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.
RIP Kadaffi
Disinfo.com had the best summary report we could find:
Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi died of wounds suffered on Thursday as fighters battling to complete an eight-month-old uprising against his rule overran his hometown Sirte, Libya’s interim rulers said.
His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte, is the most dramatic single development in the Arab Spring revolts that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and threatened the grip on power of the leaders of Syria and Yemen.
“He (Gaddafi) was also hit in his head,” National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”
Mlegta told Reuters earlier that Gaddafi, who was in his late 60s, was captured and wounded in both legs at dawn on Thursday as he tried to flee in a convoy which NATO warplanes attacked. He said he had been taken away by an ambulance.
There was no independent confirmation of his remarks.
An anti-Gaddafi fighter said Gaddafi had been found hiding in a hole in the ground and had said “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot” to the men who grabbed him...
Muammar Gaddafi Is Dead
Posted by majestic on October 20, 2011
http://www.disinfo.com/2011/10/muammar-gaddafi-is-dead
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