U.S. in full spectrum War with Libya, Pentagon plans to exterminate civilians

[bigron]

Libya: A Pig in a Poke?


by Kevin Carson, April 15, 2011

http://original.antiwar.com/kevin-carson/2011/04/14/libya-a-pig-in-a-poke/

Some disconcerting facts, or at least disconcerting questions, are beginning to emerge regarding Obama’s Libyan intervention.

First of all, the Asia Times reported on April 2 that Saudi Arabia engineered an Arab League voting bloc to approve the American intervention in Libya, in return for Obama giving the Saudis a free hand to intervene in Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement — so troubling to the conservative monarchies of the Gulf — in that country.

Contrary to the myth that the Arab League endorsed Obama’s intervention, half of its members abstained. The members that did vote for it were disproportionately in Saudi Arabia’s sphere of influence. Obama got the vote he wanted because the Saudis called their chits in.

So while CNN shows all those smiling people flashing their V-for-Victory signs in Benghazi, the king of Bahrain is using a state of martial law to suppress the pro-democracy protests, with the help of 2,000 Saudi troops. No tear-jerking CNN reports there, and no highly visible State Department denunciations. Know why? Because Bahrain is a "friendly" government, and the anti-government movement is largely Shia in an area where Iran is viewed as the major "threat" to be contained.

In Noam Chomsky’s terminology, the Bahraini demonstrators aren’t "worthy victims." They aren’t being crushed by a radical pariah state that’s run afoul of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Rather, they’re an inconvenience to a government that knows how to play ball with Washington. So they’re expendable.

Maybe this is the kind of thing White House flack Robert Gibbs was talking about when he said WikiLeaks undermined U.S. efforts at "promoting democracy and open government."

Second, Thomas Mountain at Counterpunch raises some unpleasant questions about the Benghazi rebels. Benghazi, the city in Libya closest to Italy, has for years been a center of human trafficking from sub-Saharan Africa. An average of a thousand black African refugees a day pass through Benghazi in hopes of escaping to Europe. So Benghazi was the seat of an enormous complex of gangs controlling the human trafficking trade, many of them exploiting their human cargo as ruthlessly as the "coyotes" on the U.S.-Mexican border. The Gadhafi government, according to Mountain, had been unsuccessfully trying to suppress this trade for years.  As a result, the criminal underworld of Benghazi has been a prime supporter of the rebellion.

Benghazi is also home to a large number of black African guest workers who do work that Libyans regard as "dirty." Native youth, who refuse to take these jobs, are frequently unemployed and idle. So they wind up joining youth gangs that engage in racist harrassment of black African guest workers. These discontented youth were at the heart of the protest movement.

This raises some interesting questions about the reported massacre of black Africans by Benghazi militia — supposedly because black Africans were recruited as mercenaries by Gadhafi — doesn’t it? I don’t know if Thomas Mountain’s account is correct. But at least it should make us think twice when we hear the talking heads like Ed Schultz on MSNBC referring to Libyan "freedom fighters."

So once again, the lesson is: Always look for the man behind the curtain.

Originally published at the Center for a Stateless Society | licensed for reprint under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0


http://original.antiwar.com/kevin-carson/2011/04/14/libya-a-pig-in-a-poke/

[bigron]

Thursday 14 April 2011
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10428/

Attack on Libya: a war led by no one

As the various bombers of Libya disavow responsibility for the overall military mission, there’s no telling how this will end.


by Brendan O’Neill



Three weeks into the American/French/British bombardment of Libya, there’s one key question that no one seems capable of answering: who’s in charge of this so-called Western mission? Not only does the war lack a strategy and a clearly defined aim - it doesn’t even have a leader, an entity or an individual to steer it, a Lawrence of Arabia who might take charge of this new venture into Arab territory. This makes it a new, unusual and highly reckless act: a war led by no one, with no particular purpose. Leaderless and aimless, there is no natural brake to this intervention, making it highly unpredictable and potentially extremely destabilising.

The question most governments ask themselves before launching a war is ‘what do we want to achieve?’ and ‘how might we achieve it?’. Not only did the kind-of coalition on Libya fail to ask such basic questions, it didn’t even establish who was leading the charge against Gaddafi’s regime. Who’s the boss? Who’s the go-to guy? Who’s calling the shots? No one knows. This has led to a terrifying situation where, even as the war is ongoing, its various protagonists are denying responsibility for it. From America to NATO, Paris to London, none of those currently firing missiles at Libya is willing to say that it’s their war. Instead, they continually pass the buck to others. The end result is a kind of geopolitical mayhem.

For all UK foreign secretary William Hague’s claims yesterday that the coalition on Libya is ‘unified’, in truth it is deeply split even over the question of who is leading the mission. Only these various Western nations are not competing with each other to see who can take on the leadership role, as they might have done in the past; rather they’re competing to see who can avoid the leadership role.

So where radical observers were arguing three weeks ago that Washington was kickstarting a crusade against Libya in order to strengthen its alleged Empire in the Middle Eastern and Arab worlds, in fact the Obama administration announced that it was ‘scaling back its participation’ and ‘winding down’ its air campaign less than 48 hours after starting it. It outsourced military authority for Libya to NATO and political authority, or rather ‘political oversight’, to a separate body made up of members of the coalition, including ‘Arab countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which are outside NATO’. It was the most shortlived outburst of US imperialism in history.

But NATO wasn’t keen to assume authority over Libya, as the newspaper headlines of the past three weeks have testified. On 23 March, shortly after Obama announced America’s ‘scaling back’, the headlines told us: ‘NATO to take control in Libya after US, UK and France reach agreement.’ Yet two days later, on 25 March, headlines declared: ‘NATO to decide within days whether to take control of Libya military action.’ On 28 March we were told, ‘NATO may agree to take control of Libya operations soon’.

When NATO eventually did take charge, at the very end of March, it was with extreme reluctance and half-heartedness: it has since been accused by France of failing to play a ‘full leadership role’, and over the past two weeks NATO has used the excuse of bad weather and visibility in Libya to ask Washington to please consider redeploying its A-10 Thunderbolt jets and Marine AV-8 Harrier jets. It’s a request Washington had been dreading, with US officials having already ‘expressed concern that NATO could ask Washington to redeploy its aircraft’, when everyone knows that Washington is ‘keen to relinquish command of the Libya operations quickly’.

MORE

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10428/

[bigron]

04/15/2011

  The World from Berlin


'Airstrikes Alone Won't Topple Gadhafi'

AP        What now?

During their summit in Berlin, NATO foreign ministers have failed to make much progress on how to proceed with its mission in Libya. German commentators warn that a lack of resolve against Moammar Gadhafi could reveal the alliance as an impotent Cold War relic.


More Here :

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,757297,00.html#ref=nlint

[worcesteradam]

they took out that Ivory Coast guy, quietly and easily

[bigron]

In Libya, as in Iraq, “End of Combat” Means “More Combat” 


Written by Michael Tennant     
Thursday, 14 April 2011 16:31 


Truth, it has been said, is the first casualty of war. The latest evidence of the veracity of this saying: The United States supposedly stopped attacking Libya on April 4, yet since that time U.S. aircraft have continued to fly over the beleaguered nation and assault its air defenses.
 
MORE

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/7124-in-libya-as-in-iraq-end-of-combat-means-more-combat

[worcesteradam]

Globalist psyops losing the PR battle for Libya - 75% of British right wing against public ground troops deployment according to daily mail poll, many cynical comments.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1377524/Libya-war-Colonel-Gaddafi-accused-using-cluster-bombs-civilians.html

[bigron]

Middle East
Apr 20, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD20Ak02.html 
 
THE ROVING EYE


Mission regime change


By Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.
http://atimes.com/atimes/others/Pepe2011.html



How to turn a ''kinetic military action'' - which is not a war - into some sort of endgame, by bending a United Nations resolution that was allegedly passed to minimize a humanitarian threat? You write a lame op-ed. Just ask The Three Amigos - US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In a joint article published last Friday, The Three Amigos insisted they don't want to remove Libya's Muammar Gaddafi by force. But they also insist bringing democracy by bombing will continue (allegedly to protect democracy-seeking civilians). And continue they will because Gaddafi must ''go and go for good''.

So much for the original UN mandate. So much for a real ceasefire. The ''enlightened'' West and its coalition of the semi-willing does not do ceasefires, although the BRICS nations - top emerging powers Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - have officially condemned the bombing and called for a much-needed reform of the UN Security council.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev accused the minuscule coalition of the semi-willing and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of being the weaponized arm of the ''rebels''. In his words, ''the UN forces should help disengage the parties, and in any case should not assist any of the parties.''

As far as Washington, London and Paris go, that's irrelevant. So now it's official. The bombing goes until Gaddafi is removed. Welcome to Mission Regime Change.

History repeats itself

It's no surprise UN resolution 1973 reveals itself to be a farce - as much as the manufactured Libyan ''revolution'', which has essentially orchestrated by French intelligence, British MI6 and the US Central Intelligence Agency since Gaddafi's former chief of protocol, Nuri Mesmari, defected to Paris in October 2010.

Dodgy exiles abound - from the British-supported network of Prince Mohammed el-Senoussi, currently exiled in London, to Khalifa Hilter, a CIA asset until recently exiled near Langley, Virginia and self-appointed ''military commander'' of the ''rebels''.

The ''rebels'' now expect that the no-fly zone ramblingly implemented by NATO will translate - farcically - into a weapons supply channel; a 21st-century rerun of the arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, with Britain, France and Qatar playing the former starring roles of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US.

And there will be (Western) boots on the ground - sooner rather than later, as the narrative is already being spun across Atlanticist corporate media.

Next glorious chapter: a column of glorious M1 Abrams tanks taking Tripoli in chivalric mood, with the rag-tag ''revolutionaries'' showered with flowers (''If you're going / to Tripolitania / be sure to wear / some flowers in your hair''). It didn't work in Baghdad in 2003 under neo-conservative patronage; it might as well work in Tripoli under humanitarian imperialism.

With the ''rebels'' under this Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds-style spell, no wonder the African Union (AU) mission trying to establish a ceasefire floundered. What these rebels with a cause don't know is that their masters' cause prevails. They are rebels as much expendable as were the Nicaragua contras and the Afghan mujahideen.

Take me to Somalia

No wonder the apocalyptic theme of the moment is ''Somalia''. On March 2, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Libya might become ''a giant Somalia". On March 30, former foreign minister and now prized defector Moussa Koussa said he feared civil war, under which ''Libya would be a new Somalia".

The Africom, then NATO, ''humanitarian intervention'' is actually creating the conditions of a Somalia. The wall of mistrust between the Gaddafi regime and the ''rebels'' is insurmountable, bound to degenerate into a Somalia.

Gaddafi's repression of what was essentially a military coup morphed into an armed rebellion has been of course brutal. But that never warranted a definition of genocide - or was enough to justify R2P (''responsibility to protect''). By the same standard, the UN would have to vote for a NATO-enforced no fly zone if China threatened to repress an insurrection in Tibet.

And frankly, R2P enforced by bombing is a cruel, tragic joke. Even more when compared with the UN's - and NATO's - non-reaction to a real massacre, the 1991 hardcore repression by Saddam Hussein of mass rebellions in both northern and southern Iraq, when over 200,000 people were actually killed, not arguably a few thousand as in Libya.

In Iraq in 1991, Washington had vociferously incited the Shi'ites to rebel against Saddam - just as the CIA today helps the Libyan ''rebels'' against Gaddafi. Yet when push came to shove, Washington did absolutely nothing. And to top it off, a no-fly zone was in effect (the Americans lifted it so Saddam's gunships could massacre Shi'ites in peace). Farce, farce, utmost farce.

The Pentagon agenda

As far as the Pentagon is concerned, Gaddafi is a serious nuisance. He's blocking the ''progress'' of Africom; he's in charge of a strategic stretch of the Mediterranean; and he's made deals with China. As a nationalist with a pan-African streak, allowing China access to the Mediterranean, he's the ultimate scourge of Africom's agenda of militarizing Africa for American benefit. So he has to be at least isolated.

But the fall of Gaddafi is not a priority. The Pentagon would rather deal - or not deal - with a cornered Gaddafi in an impoverished Tripolitania than face a powerful, unified Libya that in the future might stand up again against Western imperialist designs. The Pentagon ''votes'' for balkanization.

For the moment, the Pentagon - via Africom and NATO - is just taking care of the Big Picture in the air and in the seas, while subcontracting possible ground operations to European minions. Things are going great - as in the partition of Sudan and the possible Somalia scenario in Libya. When the boots hit the ground they will be provided by the European minions; see the French example in the Ivory Coast.

What comes ahead may be even messier. NATO as a weaponized arm of the UN is already a fact on the ground. If NATO gets rid of Gaddafi, the next target is Syria. As much as Libya allows Chinese trade access to the southern Mediterranean, Syria allows the Russian Navy access to the eastern Mediterranean.

The Pentagon / NATO / Africom agenda is and will always remain the same. To prevent real emancipation of the Arab world. To prevent real emancipation and unity of Africa. For all his serious flaws as a ruler, Gaddafi was a bad example. With the ghastly IMF blackmailing poor African countries, Gaddafi instead financed African development projects.

This is not only about Libya - far from it. This is the message of the ruling elites in Washington - and their satrapies in London and Paris - for Africa. We're going flat out for the military subjugation of Africa, and for the control of Africa's natural resources. Keep doing deals with China, and this is what you get. With NATO as global Robocop, nothing can stop us - with or without regime change, but always under the cover of farce.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
 
 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD20Ak02.html




 

[bigron]

What Next in Libya?

by Stephen Lendman

April 19, 2011

http://uruknet.com/?p=m76984&hd=&size=1&l=e

So far, weeks of conflict produced more stalemate than resolution, policy disagreement among NATO partners, and hawkish US broadsheets like The New York Times and Washington Post calling for escalated conflict to oust Gaddafi.

In its April 14 editorial headlined, "Stop the Blame Game," The Times called for stepped up bombing, arming so-called rebels, and saying, "No political settlement in which the dictator remains in place will work. The West and its partners must be ready to maintain political, economic and military pressure until (he's) gone."

On April 16, a Washington Post editorial headlined, "The Libya stalemate," saying:

"THE CONTRADICTIONS at the heart of US policy in Libya are becoming more acute." On the one hand, Obama, France's Sarkozy, and Britain's Cameron said bombing will continue until Gaddafi's gone. On the other, Obama "acknowledged that the war between rebels and (Gaddafi's forces) is stalemated."

If he's "lucky," Gaddafi "will be betrayed and overthrown by his followers or somehow induced to step down voluntarily. We can only hope that the NATO alliance does not collapse between between now and then."

Never explaining a just cause for war (perhaps because there is none), The Times, WP, and most other major media sources want a major escalated conflict, no matter the horrific death, injury and destructive toll, including environmentally by irradiating Libya with depleted uranium bombs, missiles, shells, and high-caliber bullets, mostly killing civilians but harming everyone.

On April 15, Immanuel Wallerstein headlined his latest commentary, "The Middle East: Allies in Disarray," explaining the discord among allies and other nations, including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, India and Brazil, as well as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan on other issues. "It seems almost no one agrees with or follows the lead of the United States."

America may retain global giant status, says Wallerstein, but it's "a lumbering giant, uncertain of where it is going or how to get there."

For years, he's said America is in long-term decline. Its "measure," he now believes, "is the degree to which its erstwhile closest allies are ready both to defy its wishes and to say so publicly." It's also "the degree to which it does not feel able to state publicly what it is doing, and to insist that all is really under control." The consequence, Wallerstein thinks, is "more global anarchy," but who'll gain or lose most going forward "is a very open question."

Perhaps with less belligerence, America would retain better relations with allies, especially non-belligerent ones, using their resources productively for commerce and development, not conflict.

However, the more Washington spends on militarism, the faster it frays ties with allies and trading partners, accelerating its decline as other noted analysts besides Wallerstein believe. Eventually, perhaps all its influence will erode, especially for attacking non-belligerents for entirely unwarranted reasons.

A previous article explained that, in 2003, Gaddafi came in from the cold, became a valued Western ally, 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.

On May 16, 2006, Washington restored full diplomatic ties, 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, arranged deals with Big Oil, notably BP, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Occidental, France's Total, Italy's Eni Gas, among others. By all appearances, he joined the club, so why turn on him now?

He came around, but not entirely. Washington wants total subservience, useful puppets saluting when given orders. Gaddafi's "transgressions" include refusing to join AFRICOM, America's newest command for total control of the continent and Mediterranean Basin. All African countries participate except Sudan (now balkanized), Zimbabwe (an outlier), Ivory Coast (after regime change), Eritrea (likely on the hit list), and Libya, heading for conquest, colonization, and control of its wealth and resources, including perhaps its unreported most important ones.

An earlier article explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/04/libyas-great-man-made-
river.html

Besides its better known resources, profiteers covet Libya's ocean-sized aquifer, the world's largest fossil water system with enough of it to last 1,000 years at 2007 consumption levels. Oil is replaceable, not fresh water, making it all the more valuable, especially in private hands to sell at inflated prices, shutting out low-income Libyans from their source of life and sustenance, including for irrigation.

Money control is another issue as financial writer Ellen Brown explained in her article suggesting Libya's more about banking than oil. Controlling its money, that is, under a privatized central bank, (the newly formed Central Bank of Benghazi), replacing the state-owned Central Bank of Libya, creating its own money interest free for productive economic growth, not profits and bonuses for vulture bankers.

Money control alone got Gaddafi targeted for removal, Washington and key co-belligerents choosing their time to do it, a process now ongoing as a Washington-led NATO imperial exercise.

On April 15, a joint letter from key co-belligerents America, Britain and France affirmed escalated war until Gaddafi's gone, masquerading as "humanitarian intervention." Saying it's "impossible to imagine a future for Libya with (him) in power," it dismissed alternative outcomes as "betrayal."

Frayed relations aside, expanded Washington-led imperialism may leave Obama as vulnerable as Sarkozy, his latest approval rating at record lows and sinking.

On April 11, France 24 International News said one year before 2012 presidential and legislative elections, he "stands at a mere 20%." His party is split over his imperial policy in Libya and Ivory Coast, instead of focusing state resources on domestic needs during the current economic crisis.

Perhaps Obama's turn is next, handing trillions of dollars to Wall Street and spending more on militarism and imperial wars than the rest of the world combined, while slashing desperately needed social spending when it's most needed. Eventually voters will react when their pain threshold is reached and surpassed, creating a new battleground at home for change.

With Americans neglected in time of crisis, imagine an anyone but Obama campaign in 2012, a scenario another war won't change when majorities want current ones ended to devote more attention domestically.

Gaddafi's Unreported Agenda

As despots go, he's not all bad. Under his 1999 Decision No. 111, all Libyans get free healthcare, education, training, rehabilitation, housing assistance, disability and old-age benefits, interest-free state loans, subsidies to study abroad and for couples when they marry, and practically free gasoline. Moreover, Libya's hospitals and private clinics are some of the region's best.

Overall, though affected by poverty and unemployment like elsewhere, Libyans achieved the highest African standard of living because Gaddafi used oil revenues for economic development. According to "Qaddafi and the Libyan Revolution:"

"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 socially beneficial policies and says:

-- "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 democracy and capitalism, especially neoliberal exploitation, another reason for wanting Gaddafi ousted.

Under him, Libyans get impressive social benefits. Also free use of land for agriculture to foster self-sufficiency in food production. Moreover, all basic food items are subsidized and sold through a network of "people's shops."

In addition, 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 have a leading role in society.

The UN Human Rights Council Libyan Report

On January 4, 2011, its "Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: Libya Arab Jamahiriya" said Gaddafi's government protected "not only political rights, but also economic, educational, social and cultural rights." It also praised his treatment of religious minorities, and "human rights training" of its security forces.

Had Washington and NATO not intervened, it would have been overwhelmingly approved. Now it's postponed, pending conflict resolution that either way may require reassessing internal conditions in a country deeply scared by imperial war.

A Final Comment

In his new book, "The Face of Imperialism," Michal Parenti defines it as:

"(T)he process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country. In short, empires do not just pursue power for power's sake. There are real material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over....The intervention is intended to enrich the investors and keep the world safe for them."

Claiming humanitarian, national security, nation building, or other motives is deceitful subterfuge. It's used to enlist public support for imperial conquest, plunder and control by replacing despots or democrats with useful puppets who know retaining power requires saluting and following orders.

Libya is a Washington-led NATO project for greater regional dominance, the rights and welfare of its citizens to be sacrificed for the interests of capital. It's how the dirty game always works but never gets explained frankly, truthfully and openly so people everywhere know who wins, who loses and why.

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://uruknet.com/?p=m76984&hd=&size=1&l=e



 

[bigron]

From Waco to Libya: 18 Years of Humanitarian Mass Murder


by Anthony Gregory


April 19, 2011

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory210.html

"The Davidian cult in Waco was dealt with by armored vehicles," remarked Muammar Gaddafi in February, defending his own crackdowns in light of the U.S. government’s. April 19 marks eighteen years since the end of the Waco siege and exactly one month since Obama began bombing Libya. Now that the federal government is again shedding blood in the name of humanitarianism, we might reflect on how it obtains legitimacy for its most brazen acts of violence.

Long ago, when governments slaughtered the enemy merely for being different and thus subhuman or for occupying desired territory, such crude rationales satisfied the states’ agents and subjects. The modern democratic state, however, employs more sophisticated propaganda when it burns, gasses, shoots, and bombs people including civilians. There is always the excuse of security: the targeted people pose a threat. When this argument seems tenuous, it is well complemented by that most insidious of pretenses: The killing is done for the good of others. It is an act of kindness. The American empire, like the Roman and British before it, inflicts violence to civilize and rescue those in need.

Along these lines even the unparalleled mass death of World War II has been vindicated. Since then most U.S. killing sprees have been directed against Hitler’s ghost. Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic were both compared to the Nazi ruler. So were David Koresh and Muammar Gaddafi.

Killing Children to Stop Child Abuse

In the case of Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidian church at Mount Carmel, Texas, the comparisons to Hitler were especially strained. Yet everything about the siege just outside Waco, aside from its humanitarian rationale, seems to have been forgotten. Sure, the religious group was "stockpiling weapons." One of them was a legal arms dealer. But why didn’t the cops just arrest Koresh while he was hanging out around town? He was an integrated member of the community. Local law enforcement befriended him. The feds were given intimate access to the Davidians’ home – even enjoying a stint on their firing range with Koresh – and he welcomed them to inspect the property. The raid commenced on February 28, 1993, not out of anything approaching necessity, but because the ATF wanted to look good for the cameras. "Operation Showtime" was the name of the long-planned attack on the Davidian home. Its main purpose: to overcome the bad publicity the agency had suffered over allegations of sexual harrassment and racism.

The feds had constructed a model of the Davidian home where they rehearsed the raid, whose planning began late in the George H.W. Bush administration. But the raid went horribly wrong. The Davidians fought back – apparently in self-defense, which is why when the ATF ran out of bullets, the Davidians ceased fire, and let the agents leave their property in peace.

Soon enough the domestic siege looked militaristic even by modern American standards. It was full-out psychological warfare: The FBI took over and cut off the Davidians’ access to the press, to water, to phone calls with relatives or lawyers. They blasted recordings of loud, obnoxious music and the sounds of animals being slaughtered. They shone bright lights upon the home all night. They called it a hostage situation, but people trying to leave the building were typically met with flash-bang grenades thrown at them by the feds.

The siege ended on April 19, 1993, after the FBI spent hours pumping flammable and poisonous CS gas into the area where women and children had gone for safety. Then the Bureau rammed a tank and launched incendiary devices into the home. The Davidians also had Coleman lanterns in nearly every room, which could have easily fallen over in the chaos, and various combustible chemicals stored in the gymnasium. Although Clinton blamed the Davidians for starting the fire, the flames erupted in a manner consistent with the tank’s collision into the building. There is no credible evidence that the Davidians were planning a mass suicide by fire, and all the survivors have denied that they were. As researcher Carol Moore put it, "There is no doubt that Mount Carmel was systematically turned into a fire trap.  The only question is, was it done through criminal negligence or with intention to commit mass murder?"

Some survivors convicted in the mockery of a trial have only been out of prison since 2007. Within government, however, no one even had his wrist slapped. Most Americans assume that the government was negligent at worst, and that even this can be forgiven, since the FBI, with military assistance, was attempting a rescue of the innocent. You see, as we’ve been reminded many times, David Koresh was molesting children.

The first argument behind this accusation concerns Koresh’s multiple young wives. Jack Harwell, the Sheriff of McLennan County, explained why we should not excuse the raid on this basis:

To this day, we don't have a case that we can make against Vernon Howell [David Koresh] or anyone else for child abuse even though the news media here and other people were saying this is what happened. A man from Australia said this is what happened. But we can never get them to give us anything more that just "we know that’s what happened." You have to have proof to go into court . . . Keep in mind, too, that most of the girls who were involved were at least 14 years old and 14-year-olds get married with parental consent. So if their parents were there and letting things happen in the way of sexual activities and what have you with their 14-year-old kids, you have common law husbands and wives. Uh, I don't say that I agree with that and that I approve of it. But at the same time, if parents are there and they're giving parental consent, we have a problem with that in making a case.

There are more serious allegations of abuse, but they too are questionable. On the first day of the 1995 Congressional hearings on Waco, Democrats attempting to whitewash the Clinton administration’s conduct brought out Kiri Jewell, who accused Koresh of having molested her when she was ten. No charges of this nature had been pressed against Koresh. However, during the standoff, Jewell, who was not living at Mount Carmel at the time, had appeared on The Phil Donahue Show while her dad pitched their story to the television networks. On the show, she said she expected to be one of Koresh's wives at age 13. In another public statement, she said that while living with the Davidians she never expected to live past 12.

Despite all this, Jewell’s testimony forever colored the mainstream perception of the Branch Davidian Church as a cult of child molestation, which somehow is supposed to make the federal killing less objectionable. The public assumes these allegations are true and no due process is necessary to conclude that the FBI, a heroic if flawed institution, swept in to stop a monster from abusing minors. Presumably, had those children not been gassed, suffocated and burnt to death, they along with the surviving kids would have been exposed to Koresh’s torment. This narrative is hardly questioned now and it was hardly questioned then: Not only should we believe all of the government’s accusations about Koresh, but those charges somehow mitigate what happened in 1993 when more American civilians died at the hands of the federal government than in any confrontation since Wounded Knee.

Bombing Libyans to Save Libyans

Eighteen years after the flames of Waco, we again see the federal government killing in the name of human rights. Practically no one questions the utilitarian calculus of this altruistic butchery. Most critiques of the Libya war concern strategic prudence, legal issues, or the fiscal price tag.

Should we leave unchallenged the characterization of Obama and NATO as protectors of the innocent? In particular, we hear that Operation Odyssey Dawn prevented Gaddafi from massacring large numbers of civilians in Benghazi. Almost everyone takes it for granted.

To be sure, Gaddafi is a dictator and thug, who indeed killed hundreds of rebels before U.S. cruise missiles hit Tripoli. But would have he slaughtered tens or even hundreds of thousands, as was suggested and claimed, if not for Obama’s intervention? Stephen Walt shares his compelling doubts:

Although everyone recognizes that Qaddafi is a brutal ruler, his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured, and his violent threats to wreak vengeance on Benghazi were directed at those who continued to resist his rule, not at innocent bystanders. There is no question that Qaddafi is a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities, but the threat of a bloodbath that would "[stain] the conscience of the world" (as Obama put it) was slight.

Other scholars have questioned Obama’s propaganda. University of Texas associate professor Alan Kuperman notes that Gaddafi "did not massacre civilians in any of the other big cities he captured – Zawiya, Misrata, Ajdabiya – which together have a population equal to Benghazi." Human Rights Watch has recently released casualty figures on Misrata that bolster his point. Kuperman writes:

Misurata’s population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people – including combatants – have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22 – less than 3 percent – are women. If Khadafy were indiscriminately targeting civilians, women would comprise about half the casualties. . .

Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The "no mercy" warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya’s leader promised amnesty for those "who throw their weapons away." Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight "to the bitter end."

Paul Miller, who served on Bush and Obama’s National Security Councils, intones that far from a genocidal clash, we are looking at a "Libyan civil war. . . between a tyrant and his cronies on one side, and a collection of tribes, movements, and ideologists (including Islamists) on the other." (Incidentally, these opponents of Gadhafi’s regime, like practically all other insurgent allies of the CIA, are far from the angelic freedom fighters that the U.S. implies. Their leader outright admits connections between his group and al-Qaeda, which has offered his rebels aid. The U.S. went to war with Iraq boasting of Saddam’s fictitious ties to al-Qaeda, a connection that was "proven" on the tortured testimony of Libyan al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. But unlike Saddam, America’s allies in the struggle against Gaddafi are probably tied to these Islamist killers.)

In any event, let us concede for argument’s sake that Gaddafi is precisely as diabolical as is claimed, and the dictator indeed wishes to wipe out as many innocents as possible just for the sake of it. Or let’s assume this was a reasonable inference when the NATO bombing began. Time and again we have been reminded that Benghazi is home to over half a million people. But does a large population mean they’d all be vulnerable? Let us recall that Gaddafi is not Harry Truman. He has no nukes. As Seumas Milne put it: "Given that [Gaddafi’s] ramshackle forces were unable to fully retake towns like Misurata or even Ajdabiya when the rebels were on the back foot, the idea that they would have been able to overrun an armed and hostile city of 700,000 people any time soon seems far-fetched." Whereas the citizens of Benghazi have arms, like the civilians at Waco, they far outnumber Gaddafi’s forces, unlike the Branch Davidians against the FBI. Even if he wished to commit a Waco-like massacre of a whole city, Gaddafi had more effective limits on his killing than does the U.S. government.

The notion that U.S. bombs stopped Gaddafi’s murder of many thousands is more than dubious, and it was at the time the bombings began. Even if we believed the questionable claims about his intention to commit such an act, it is not clear how he was supposed to have succeeded. Yet simply by starting a war and saying it was to protect the innocent, Obama shifted public support of intervention against Libya from about 25% to about 60%.

Putting aside the suspicious claims of Gaddafi’s impending civilian massacre, we might wonder how many civilians Obama and company have actually killed in Libya. The NATO governments shrug off any reports of such casualties or deny them outright. Like its predecessor the Obama administration doesn’t do body counts. What’s more, the U.S. intervention most likely "magnifies the threat to civilians in Libya, and beyond," Kuperman argues, citing the Balkans in the 1990s and showing that foreign bombs often exacerbate ethnic cleansing and civilian massacres.

Indeed, U.S. involvement appears to have prolonged the bloodshed in Libya. Although Obama denied the goal was regime change, he now says Gaddafi must step down to end the war. Gaddafi has offered a ceasefire to the rebels, who rejected it, probably knowing that the U.S. will support them so long as they resist until the regime is toppled.

People can freely argue that U.S. intervention has preempted Gaddafi’s impending genocide, but the burden should be on them to prove it, and as with Kosovo, they have not done so. To the contrary, Gaddafi has seemingly focused his violence on the rebels, whereas the U.S. central state is not always so discriminating. At Waco, dozens of children were snuffed out. In Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of innocents have died in wars based on lies. In Obama’s drone attacks in Pakistan, ten civilians die for every "militant" killed, even according to moderate estimates by very mainstream sources. That these "militants" are a threat to the United States government is never demonstrated, but let’s assume they are. The ratio of unarmed, innocent bystanders to belligerents killed by the United States is higher than that of which Gaddafi is guilty in Misurata.

Why do people believe the U.S. government’s propaganda about Libya when every single major military intervention it has conducted has exacerbated the problems on the ground or at least added to the death toll directly? Why is the mere assertion that a massacre is being averted a license for the U.S. to drop at least hundreds of bombs?

18 Years of Murderous Salvation

The American belief in benevolent mass murder is not a partisan disposition. Most liberals and conservatives alike take it for granted that, while the federal government’s armed agents sometimes act recklessly or carry out mistaken orders, their acts should never be seen as murder. The assumption is nearly universal that Obama, Bush and Clinton, whatever their partisan opponents might think, are not mass murderers in the mold of Gaddafi, or cult leaders along the lines of Koresh, when in fact our presidents are far worse than either of these men in terms of cultish power as well as sheer body count. All three of these chief executives, and many before them, have commanded the loyalty of far more subordinates willing to die on their orders than Koresh ever could, and have extinguished more innocent lives than Gaddafi ever did.

Waco and Libya are only the first and latest examples of U.S. humanitarian atrocities in the post-Cold War era. In both situations, we see the U.S. government leaving behind rubble and death, and the chattering classes agreeing that Washington has the innocents’ best interests at heart, even as it imposes sanctions on civilians or cuts them off from water, disregarding the very humanity of the victims of Uncle Sam’s explosions. When D.C. kills it is never seen as when others, whether private American citizens or foreign despots, do it.

When a private religious separatist allegedly molests children, it is an excuse for gassing children to death. But when the federal government molests children it is merely airport security. When a foreign dictator is allegedly about to kill tens of thousands of innocents, it is an excuse for another non-defensive U.S. presidential war. But when the U.S. government kills millions though sanctions, chemical warfare, conventional bombings and depleted uranium, it is simply the mainstream foreign policy consensus at work.

It is particularly hard to cut through these double standards when left-liberal presidents kill, as both sides of the spectrum benefit from pretending that these politicians are less trigger-happy than the conservatives. Yet Clinton and Obama have both revealed themselves to be as bloodthirsty as the Bushes before them.

Whether using the military to police the world or militarizing the police here at home, the federal government’s favorite activity appears to be killing. Thanks to the domestic precedent of Waco and the foreign-policy traditions of the last few presidents, there are now essentially no limits on the power of Washington to kill men, women and children, at home and abroad, and get away with it in the court of public opinion. Nothing gives the executive branch the free hand to snuff out human life like the promise of humanitarian salvation.




April 19, 2011

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is a research analyst at the Independent Institute. He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

 http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory210.html

[bigron]

Published 21:16 19.04.11
Latest update 21:16 19.04.11


NATO says it cannot stop shelling of Libyan city of Misrata


Britain to send advisory team to opposition forces in Banghazi but will not supply weapons to rebels; EU proposes deploying armed force to ensure delivery of humanitarian supplies; World Food Program already bringing food for 50,000 people.

By The Associated Press

MUCH MORE

http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/nato-says-it-cannot-stop-shelling-of-libyan-city-of-misrata-1.356796

[bigron]

Libya faces risk of "prolonged conflict": Italian expert


by Silvia Marchetti


http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2011-04/19/c_13836439.htm


ROME, April 19, 2011 (Xinhua) -- The Libyan crisis faces the risk of turning into a "prolonged conflict" which will end up splitting the country in two, a leading Italian expert said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

"I see no immediate solution to the conflict between NATO forces and the Libyan rebels on one side, and Muammar Gaddafi on the other. The ongoing civil war is fated to become an internal cancer that will destroy territorial unity and lead to a partition," Giuseppe Sacco, a professor of international relations at the Rome-based Luiss University said.

According to Sacco, Gaddafi will not easily surrender and will fight till the very end, while rebels of the Transitional National Council (TNC) will pursue a tough resistance. However, the rebels will not be able to oust Gaddafi from the country on their own.

"The rebels are militarily fragile and Gaddafi is strong and still enjoys wide territorial support. Why should he step down from power and go into exile when his regime has not collapsed yet? Since the defection of his foreign minister, nobody else of his entourage has abandoned him," Sacco said.

The only way to definitely defeat Gaddafi would be through intensified NATO military action, but that would clash with international diplomatic concerns and the rising divergent interests of the allies, the professor said.

"The best solution (for the West) would be that Gaddafi is killed during a raid, which sounds quite unrealistic for two reasons: first, it's hard to locate where he actually is; and second the rising opposition from the BRICS countries hinders the intensification of the military operations," he said.

In his view, the NATO operation was a form of new colonialism and the raids could not continue forever. World nations knew this well and they must be careful in not pushing it too far. Their intervention was justified by the many civilians allegedly killed by Gaddafi, but "are we sure there were really so many thousands of deaths as the Western media has reported?" he said.

The professor therefore ruled out the possibility that Western countries might sell weapons to the rebels or deploy ground troops. A possible exit strategy from the crisis would be through intense negotiations, which, however, would simply lead to "a division of territory and natural resources between the TNC and Gaddafi, monitored by the interests of Western nations."

Sacco also expressed doubt about the support and legitimacy of the recognition of the TNC by several Western nations, including Italy.

Three different components made up the rebel movement and needed to be considered separately when referring to the Libyan rebels, Sacco said.

"It is not true that all these rebels are friends of the West," he said.


http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2011-04/19/c_13836439.htm


 

[bigron]

Western Coalition: Air Operation may turn into Ground Operation

by Garibov Konstantin

Libyan rebels. Photo: AFP


Voice of Russia, April 20, 2011

http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/04/20/49211540.html

The West has already started its invasion of Libya and a ground coalition operation would merely be the next step. Russian experts have come to this conclusion in the wake of the EU’s readiness to send ground troops to Libya to support the UN humanitarian mission in Tripoli.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has said that the EU is ready to send up to 1000 troops into the battle zone.

There have already been media reports that NATO countries are developing a plan for a ground operation in Libya. It may begin at the end of April or in early May. At the same time, the Western coalition stresses that the operation would only start after the UN files the respective request. France, Italy and the UK are ready to take part, but Germany is not.

The head of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Oriental Studies Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Filonik, considers the EU’s intentions to guard the UN humanitarian convoy a precursor to a ground operation.

"Such a turn of events cannot be ruled out and indirect indicators support this. You could consider the disembarkation of troops from ships the start of the ground operation. They are not just doing things on the Libyan coast, they are penetrating deeper inside the country to carry out some sort of reconnaissance. Perhaps they are seeking out contacts with the local elite and with authoritative figures, who may provide support in the future."

On Tuesday, the UK announced that it will send its military advisors to Benghazi to provide consultations to the National Transitional Council, which France, Britain, Italy and Qatar have recognized as the legitimate government. This is nothing other than a de-facto involvement in the civil war on the opposition’s side, contrary to the UN mandate, says Alexei Podtserob, an expert at the Oriental Studies Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"We have the NATO countries staging an intervention in Libya. They are taking part in military action on the side of the opposition: rather than enforcing a no-fly zone, they are bombing the equipment and facilities of the Libyan troops. Against this background, the West’s assurances of the Libya-bound ground troops only escorting the humanitarian convoys look cynical and deceitful."

Russian political analyst Alexei Malashenko supposes that while the EU is formally talking about escorting humanitarian cargoes, in practice this will become a confrontation with those who obstruct their delivery. And the death of someone from the European military or the UN will become a reason to start a ground operation.

French politicians, who are calling for a speedy resolution of the Libyan problem, are more and more often saying that it would be good to sort Gaddafi out not just in the sky, but also on land and at sea. Furthermore, the Libyan opposition says NATO isn’t doing enough. This is yet more temptation to switch into ground operation mode, given that Gaddafi’s use of women and children as shields in air raids ties the allies’ hands.

However, the UN Security Council never set the goal to change the regime in Libya, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently reminded. "Thus those who are essentially using the adopted resolution to justify this cause are violating the mandate approved by the Security Council," – the diplomat emphasized. The problem is that seeing such a position from the West, the oppositional forces in Libya are refusing to sit down for talks, which is why Moscow urges the UN SC to encourage dialogue, not confrontation. Lavrov is sure that only Libyan political and public leaders can decide how they will live in their own country moving forward.
 
http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/04/20/49211540.html

[bigron]

Euro-American Land Invasion of Libya Imminent

By Glenn Greenwald

BAR, April 20, 2011

As if hard-wired for theft of other people's lands, the European Union is preparing to put thousands of its once-and-forever colonial boots on the ground in Libya. "The mass ground onslaught may well commence with the imminent deployment of the European Union’s so-called 'battle groups' – multinational military units of about 1,500 men each." Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi, who had earlier offered to accept some humanitarian assistance in Misrata, vowed to fight any foreign soldiers on Libyan territory.


MORE

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/euro-american-land-invasion-libya-imminent





 

[bigron]

The Libyan mission is creeping, no doubt

With Britain sending a 'military liaison advisory team' to Libya, how many more boots on the ground will follow?

 
by Simon Tisdall guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 19 April 2011 16.14 BST


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/19/libya-mission-military-advisory-team

[ghost hacked]

Most of us knew that ground troops would be used. But we were called crazy.

This is Iraq 2.0 but the time scale will be compressed.

[Paranoid Puppet Master]

NATO asks Libya's neighbors for assistance in fight against Gaddafi
Topic: International sanctions against Gaddafi regime



Libya
© AFP/ Mahmud Hams
17:12 21/04/2011

Western powers involved in a military operation in Libya have asked the country's neighbors for help in defending rebels against President Muammar Gaddafi's regime, Algeria's Elkhabar paper reported on Thursday.

The paper said the NATO-led coalition asked for assistance after admitting that it had underestimated the combat capability of Gaddafi's troops.

NATO asked Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Niger and Chad to close their borders to high-ranking officials and other representatives of Gaddafi's regime, and prevent imports of military and dual purpose products, including four-wheel drives.

The paper also said that the United States had asked Algeria for permission to use Algerian airspace for NATO military and transport aircraft in case of a possible ground military operation.

more:
http://en.rian.ru/world/20110421/163633415.html

[bigron]

Obama OKs use of armed drone aircraft in Libya

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, ROBERT BURNS

April 21, 2011

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42708159/ns/politics#

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has approved the use of armed drones in Libya, authorizing U.S. airstrikes against ground forces for the first time since America turned control of the operation over to NATO on April 4.

It also is the first time that drones will have been used for airstrikes since the conflict began on March 19, although they have routinely been flying surveillance missions, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters at a Pentagon briefing Thursday.

He said the United States will provide up to two 24-hour combat air patrols each day by the unmanned Predators.

Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the drones can help counteract the pro-Moammar Gadhafi forces' tactic of traveling in civilian vehicles that make it difficult to distinguish them from rebel forces.

"What they will bring that is unique to the conflict is their ability to get down lower, therefore to be able to get better visibility on targets that have started to dig themselves into defensive positions," Cartwright said. "They are uniquely suited for urban areas."
 
MORE

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42708159/ns/politics#

[bigron]

Mission Creep in Libya


by Stephen Lendman


April 21, 2011

http://uruknet.com/?p=m77035&hd=&size=1&l=e

Escalated intervention keeps incrementally building toward sending combat troops against Gaddafi, French and UK leaders signaling what may, in fact, have been planned all along, perhaps including US marines. More on that below.

On April 16, New York Times writer Rod Nordland admitted what's already known headlining, "Libyan Rebels Say They're Being Sent Weapons," saying:

Interviewed by Al Arabiya on Saturday, rebel military leader General Abdel Gattah Younas said "his forces had received weapons supplies from unidentified nations that supported their uprising." National Transitional Council spokesman Mustafa Gheriani confirmed it without naming sources thought to be Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and NATO members directly.

Gheriani also said that rebels had "professional training centers," adding:

"We have a lot of people being trained, real professional training, that we don't talk to the world about."

On April 19, RTT News Global Financial Newswires headlined, "French Lawmaker Calls for Deployment of Ground Troops in Libya," saying:

Axel Poniatowski, French Parliament foreign affairs committee chairman, recommended "deploy(ing) ground troops in Libya to guide the ongoing airstrikes being carried out." Warning that operations could get bogged down, he said:

"The exclusive use of air power, as imposed on us by UN Security Council Resolution 1973, has proved its limitations in the face of targets that are mobile and hard to track. Without information from the ground, coalition planes are flying blind and increasing the risk of friendly fire incidents."

On April 19, the London Independent headlined, "Army experts to mention Libya rebels," saying:

"British Army officers are being sent to Libya to advise rebels fighting (Gaddafi's) forces. The UK group will be deployed to the opposition stronghold of Benghazi (in) a mentoring role to help leaders co-ordinating attacks on (his) army."

Foreign Secretary William Hague called those sent "legitimate political interlocutors," saying, "Our officers will not be involved in training or arming the opposition's fighting forces. Nor will they be involved in the planning or execution of the NTC's military operations or in the provision of any other form of operational military advice."

Ruling out a ground invasion, he admitted that additional SAS raids were possible, complementing others along with CIA and MI 6 intelligence operatives in Libya perhaps for months ahead of planned intervention, arming, funding and training rebel insurgents.

Usually described as experts, consultants and advisors, mission creep has been evident for weeks, a process begun in fall 2010 or earlier. Moreover, on March 25, London Daily Mail writers David Williams and Tim Shipman said before bombing began "it was revealed that hundreds of British special forces troops have been deployed deep inside Libya targeting (Gaddafi's) forces - and more are on standby."

On April 20, New York Times writers Alan Cowell and Ravi Somaiya headlined, "France and Italy Will Also Send Advisors to Libya Rebels," saying:

Both governments confirmed "they would join Britain in sending a small number of military liaison officers to support" Libyan insurgents, without Security Council authorization.

On April 18, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's permanent NATO envoy, warned about serious Resolution 1973 violations, saying:

"We have information that certain European states are acting more and more on the side of the Libyan rebels. We request a halt to the violation of the UN Security Council resolution, especially its clause imposing an embargo on arms supplies to the conflict zones....No one has ever succeeded in extinguishing a fire with kerosene."

On April 19, RT.com headlined "Libyan relief effort feared guise for ground invasion," saying:

EU nations "plan to send up to 1,000 troops to Libya to convoy humanitarian aid," despite Russia warning about an invasion disguised as relief. Planned earlier in April, EUFOR Libya won't engage in direct combat unless attacked, said Michael Mann, spokesman EU High Representative Catherine Aston, yet expect them to have a very fluid mandate, escalating mission creep on any pretext or none at all.

In addition, US-led NATO forces may intervene to aid insurgents or engage directly in combat, according to AFRICOM General Carter Ham in early April testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying:

Air attacks produced stalemate, not resolution, and insurgents stand little chance of defeating Gaddafi on their own. As a result, he admitted consideration being given to direct engagement, saying his "personal view at this point would be that (it's) probably not the ideal circumstance" because of the regional reaction to another American-led land war. But he's not ruling it out, suggesting a pretext will be contrived to justify it.

According to former UK Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell, PM Cameron's "words need careful interpretation." Saying '(w)e're not occupying, we're not invading,' only "implies large numbers of troops being in Libya for a substantial period of time. (Cameron's) answer could imply military assistance or support at a much lower level, designed to stiffen the resolve and improve the quality of the rebel effort."

Or it may be planned escalation toward NATO assuming full operational control, including directly engaging Gaddafi's forces.

It's well known, though unreported in America, that US and UK elements have been active on the ground for weeks, perhaps months. Ahead look for fabricated reasons to send larger numbers openly for combat, not humanitarian or other reasons, despite disclaimers to the contrary. Once there, they'll fight to replace Gaddafi with a puppet leader serving Western interests, not Libyans. As a result, Libya's Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim said:

"If there is any deployment of any armed personnel on Libyan ground, there will be fighting. The Libyan government will not take it as a humanitarian mission. It will be taken as a military mission."

RT and the Boston Globe also said Obama exaggerated the humanitarian threat to justify Libya intervention, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW) data on Misurata, saying Gaddafi isn't massacring civilians. He's targeting insurgents attacking his forces.

University of Texas Professor Alan Kuperman agreed, saying there's no evidence he's targeting civilians. However, they're "caught in the middle. We didn't stop a bloodbath but we are prolonging and perpetuating the suffering of civilians in Libya." Other analysts agree, including former State Department official and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass saying earlier in April:

"There (have) been no reports of large-scale massacres in Libya (so far), and Libyan society is not divided along a single or defining fault line. Gaddafi (sees) rebels as enemies for political reasons, not for their ethnic or tribal associations....(T)here is no evidence of which I am aware that civilians (have been) targeted on a large scale."

Obama lied saying:

"We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

In fact, no humanitarian crisis existed until Washington's led NATO campaign began. According to Kuperman, "If Gaddafi were trying to massacre civilians there would be thousands killed, not a couple of hundred." Moreover, he only railed against insurgents, saying he'd show them no mercy unless they disengaged from fighting.

On April 19, London Guardian writer Harriet Sherwood headlined, "Gaddafi violence against Libya civilians exaggerated, says British group," explaining they found "no evidence of dissent and accuse(d) western media of bias toward NATO military action."

Comprised of academics, human rights activists, lawyers, one doctor, and independent journalists, their group, called British Civilians for Peace in Libya, expressed outrage over another imperial war by "the biggest military force in the world," Washington's-led NATO.

Moreover, they "witnessed substantial support for (Gaddafi's) government by broad sections of society." They also expressed outrage over distorted Western reporting, especially from Britain, calling it one-sided and manipulative for "failing in their duty to report the conflict truthfully." In fact, "(s)ome of the reports from Benghazi and Misurata are totally one-sided," they said.

Anyone following America's media, especially on television, can verify what Project Censored calls a "truth emergency," whether on Libya or any other important world or national issue.

Questionable Reports of Cluster Bombs Used

Reports in The New York Times, the London Guardian, other Western broadsheets, and Al Jazeera, among others, claim Gaddafi is using munitions banned by over 100 countries, but not America or Israel freely using them in combat to cause mass casualties, even after cessation of hostilities.

Moreover, throughout the Libyan conflict, Al Jazeera has shown disturbing pro-insurgent, anti-Gaddafi bias instead of accurately reporting verifiable facts on the ground only, not speculation or willful propaganda so common in Western media.

Besides questionable accounts of cluster bombs (what Gaddafi's military categorically denies saying they have none), its April 19 report headlined, "Libya death toll 'reaches 10,000' " based solely on what insurgent leaders claim.

In fact, Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna in Benghazi said:

"Given the intensity of the conflict, it doesn't come as surprise. We have focused on areas like Misurata, where the humanitarian crisis is well documented. However, it is happening throughout Libya, the full extent of the crisis is not known and there is no real idea of" total casualties, omitting any responsibility for intense, daily US-led NATO bombing with depleted uranium munitions irradiating northern parts of the country, assuring future epidemic-level health problems everywhere these weapons are used.

Moreover, five weeks of heavy NATO bombing, exceeding 100 daily sorties, including against non-military targets, caused most civilian casualties - what neither Western media or Al Jazeera report, nor hazardous DU radiation dangers.

Overall, Al Jazeera's Libya misreporting has been deceitful, functioning more as a propaganda arm for Washington, NATO and insurgents, indistinguishable from US and other western media, representing planned imperial destruction, pillaging, and colonization of another non-belligerent country.

In late March, moreover, Front Page writer Mohammed al-Kibsi accused Al Jazeera of other misreporting for airing old Iraqi prisoner abuse video, broadcast by Al-Arabiya in 2007, in fabricating news about Yemen.

Yet it was aired repeatedly, claiming it showed Yemeni Central Security forces torturing protesters. Later admitting its mistake, Al Jazeera blamed a technical error and apologized, too late to undue the damage to those blamed and its own reputation, badly tarnished by frequent misreporting on the region, despite other worthy efforts that built it as a reliable broadcaster. That now is very much in question.

A Final Comment

In a personal email, independent Eritrea-based journalist Thomas Mountain explained human trafficking in Benghazi, saying:

It's "back in business....Benghazi to Malta was the route the human trafficking racket (took) between North Africa and Europe," exploiting millions of refugees in countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya and others.

It was longstanding for years until "Gaddafi and (Italy's) Berlusconi sat down together and (largely shut down) the Benghazi based human trafficking mob."

So how was it reinvigorated? "(Y)ou can thank NATO," operating like in Kosovo and other Balkan countries "selling body parts" in the late 1990s.

"It is hard to imagine" that Gaddafi can now defeat co-belligerents America, UK and France. "Yet....some believe" doing so is the only way to stop human trafficking once and for all.

Mountain is the only Horn of Africa-based Western journalist. In 1987, he was also a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya.

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://uruknet.com/?p=m77035&hd=&size=1&l=e

[yon]

McCain lauds anti-Gadhafi force during Libya visit (AP) April 22,2011
By SEBASTIAN ABBOT, Associated Press – 2 hrs 27 mins ago

BENGHAZI, Libya – "U.S. Sen. John McCain, one of the strongest proponents in Congress of the American military intervention in Libya, said Friday that Libyan rebels fighting Moammar Gadhafi's troops are his heroes..........."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110422/ap_on_re_mi_ea/mccain_libya

Maybe this is why honest John never brought up the birth certificate. Republicans love war too

[2Revolutions]

Kissinger Calls For US Ground Invasion Of Libya

http://www.infowars.com/kissinger-calls-for-us-ground-invasion-of-libya/

Despite the fact that the United States is embroiled in three major conflicts and can barely service its own gigantic debt, with Standard and Poor this week indicating the US will soon lose its triple-A credit rating, top globalist and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently told fellow elitists at three different globalist confabs that the US needs to launch a ground invasion of Libya and keep the war running for at least another year.

According to veteran Bilderberg journalist Jim Tucker, whose sources have proven routinely accurate in leaking discussion topics shared by globalists at their regular meetings, Kissinger gave almost the exact same speech at three different conferences over the past two weeks, firstly during an April 8-10 get-together at the George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs, then at an Aspen Institute session on “Values and Diplomacy” at the National Cathedral, and finally during the Bretton Woods II conference in New Hampshire.

[bigron]

Libya: No Lie Zone Needed

by Yohannan Chemerapally

April 22, 2011

http://pd.cpim.org/2011/0424_pd/04242011_19.html

THE imposition of a "no fly zone" (nfz) over Libya as the government forces were on the verge of taking over Benghazi has prolonged the tribal war that has engulfed the North African nation. The US led NATO forces as expected have gone far beyond what the UNSC has prescribed. Their aerial attacks and covert ground activities are now entirely focussed on regime change. Among the first targets to be attacked was the residential compound of the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. The British foreign secretary, Liam Fox, actually told the media that it was acceptable for the Libyan leader to be targeted for liquidation provided that there was not too much collateral damage. In the mean time, Libyan tanks and armoury along the route from Tripoli to Benghazi were taken out in a "turkey shoot", reminiscent of the carnage of retreating Iraqi soldiers by the US air force after a cease fire was announced during the first Gulf War. After the UNSC nfz resolution was passed the Libyan government had announced a cease fire and Libyan tanks had started retreating to their bases. This however did not prevent NATO planes from targeting them.

On the first day of the attacks, the US gunships fired 110 Tomahawk missiles, each costing a million dollars. US B-2 bombers also dropped 45 1000 kg bombs in the first 24 hours. These massive bombs along with the Cruise missiles launched by the British and French forces, all contained depleted uranium warheads. The US led wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq have provided evidence of the long term harmful effects of the depleted uranium on the local population. The European parliament has repeatedly called for a moratorium on the use of weapons containing depleted uranium but France and Britain have repeatedly refused calls for a ban. The bombings had allowed the rag tag rebel army, now being trained by the British and French, to once again break out of Benghazi and temporarily take over key oil producing centres.

CRUDE COLONIAL STYLE INTERVENTION

A counter-attack by the government forces in late March put the rebels in reverse gear, making them scamper back to their Benghazi redoubt. Gen Carter F Ham, the chief of the Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), who is in overall charge of the NATO operations, admitted in the last week of March that it was western airpower that has prevented the defeat of the Benghazi rebels. Western airpower is now focussed solely on the Libyan military. There are no pretensions whatsoever that NATO is waging its war to protect civilian lives. In fact by March end, western media reports have confirmed that more than a hundred civilians have been killed as a result of NATO bombings. Interestingly, after the NATO bombardment started, there have not been any anti-Gaddafi demonstrations outside Tripoli, an indication perhaps that the crude colonial style intervention of the West has once again united the Libyan people.
Evidence is now emerging that those who took part in the violent uprising in Benghazi in late February had the covert backing of western intelligence agencies. The Obama administration has admitted that CIA operatives have been helping the rebels for weeks. Saudi Arabia and Israel were among the countries which supplied arms to the rebels at the behest of Washington. In the last week of March, the Libyan National Council, the Benghazi based group leading the western backed attempts to overthrow the Gaddafi government, announced that a long term CIA asset is the commander of the rebel forces. Khalifa Hilfer, a former senior Libyan army officer, had defected to the US in the early nineties. The Washington Post described Col Hilfer as a "leader of a contra-style group based in the United States called the Libyan National Army. It is a group similar to the "contra" terror group financed by the Reagan administration in the eighties to de-stabilise the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. According to a book Manipulations Africaine published by Le Monde Diplomatique, Hilfer and many anti-Gaddafi military officials who had defected following the war in Chad in the late eighties were later relocated in the US by the CIA. The main anti-government group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, has been financed by the House of Saud, the CIA and the French.

The "interim transitional national council" propped up by the West consists of notorious Libyan characters who have been in the pay of various governments. They have over the years been trying to overthrow the Libyan government. The interim council has now been allowed access to the Libyan government’s funds frozen in February by the West. This also means that the rebels will have to pay for the military campaign which the West has launched on their behalf. It is clear that the goal of the US is to replace Gaddafi with a more pliant authoritarian ruler. But with credible reports emerging that Al Qaeda members had played an important role in the Benghazi, some senior Pentagon officials have started having doubts about the civil war they have helped engineer.

US Admiral James Stavridis admitted to the presence of al Qaeda elements in the Libyan uprising. A senior Qaeda leader, Anwar al-Awlaki has written that the events in Libya and other Arab countries have been "a moment of elation for the mujahideen". He wrote that the West seems to be unaware "of the upsurge of mujahideen activity in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Arabia, Algeria and Morocco". The Algerian foreign ministry has warned that the unfolding events in Libya "could be considered as an extra chance given to terrorists". The statement went on to warn that "an earthquake is going to be created by the abundance of weapons in the region, that will not only affect the Libyans but all neighbouring countries, and in particular Algeria". The president of neighbouring Chad, Idris Deby has said the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has taken advantage of the situation and pillaged sophisticated weaponry, including surface to air missiles, from Libyan army arsenals. "This is very serious. The AQIM is becoming a genuine army, the best equipped in the region", Deby said. But according to many experts on the region, the AQIM’s growing clout will give NATO countries an additional excuse to put military boots on the ground to strengthen their stranglehold on the lucrative hydro-carbon sector in the region.

American officials were aware from the outset that the conflict in Libya was essentially a tribal one and different from the democratic upheavals going on in the other parts of the Arab world. The uprising in Benghazi had started with the hanging of six policemen by the rebels. Whatever the outcome, many American analysts believe, tribal passions have been aroused once again as the East of the country battles the West. Though command of the Libyan war has been officially passed over from US to NATO, it is Washington that will have the final decisive say. The majority of the bombing missions are being carried out by the US air force and navy. President Barack Obama in a speech delivered on March 28 explicitly stated the blueprint he had in mind for Libya, "We will deny the regime arms, cut off its supply of cash, assist the opposition and assist the other nations to hasten the day Gaddafi leaves power".

EYE ON LUCRATIVE OIL CONTRACTS

The message to Gaddafi is that he should stop defending himself and allow the NATO backed rebels to march into Tripoli. With Gaddafi showing no such inclination, Obama has further upped the ante by announcing that Washington is now considering openly arming the rebel fighters. Though Obama has promised that there will be no American boots on the ground in Libya, covert American military activity seems to have already started. The US defense secretary, Robert Gates told the US Congress on March 31 that training and assisting the rebel forces should be left to other countries. He specifically stated that no American troops will be deployed in Libya as long as he was in charge of the Pentagon. But the British government has no such qualms. It has now officially announced that it is sending military "advisers" to help the so called rebels.

The junior team of Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron have been making their own separate threats to the Libyan government. In a joint letter, they demanded that Gaddafi "give up power immediately". At the same time, they urged officials loyal to him to defect. The Libyan foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, is among the growing list of senior officials who have left the government. Moussa was a long serving intelligence chief and had played a key role in bringing about Gaddafi's rapprochement with the West. The French and British have their eye on lucrative oil contracts and multi-billion defence deals. The French government was particularly upset when Gaddafi did not opt for French Rafale fighter jets and nuclear power stations despite being received with full state honours at the Elysee Palace after the Libyan leader was welcomed back into the western fold. Three of the top military officials who had accompanied Gaddafi on his official visit to France had defected to the opposition in Benghazi as soon as the uprising began.

The French and the British, at one point seemed determined to get the job of getting rid of Gaddafi all by themselves so as to deny their other western partners lucrative contracts in a client state that they hope to create. France was the first country to recognise the rump rebel government in Benghazi as "the only representative of the Libyan people". This recognition violated all established diplomatic norms. Arab diplomats say that the French declaration was equivalent to a declaration of war against a sovereign country as France sought to replace a legitimate government. "The French have arrived at an 'Opium Wars’ formula with Gaddafi’s Libya being punished for not buying Rafale jets and Areva nuclear plants", said a diplomat from the region. But despite the best efforts of Sarkozy and Cameron, the mysterious rebel group that had emerged overnight in Benghazi was on the verge of a humiliating defeat. That was when UNSC Resolution 1973 was conjured up and NATO’s "Operation Enduring Dawn" was launched with the US, instead of the French, calling the shots. Only 12 NATO members are participating in the war against Libya. Germany, the most influential European NATO member, has opted out of the Libyan war.



http://pd.cpim.org/2011/0424_pd/04242011_19.html





 

[bigron]

Libya: Use of Depleted Uranium, Partition and Regional Risks

by Farouk James

In the wake of NATO's imposition of the 'no-fly zone' over Libya on 31 March, there is serious scepticism around the United States Pentagon's denial of the use of depleted uranium (DU), writes Farouk James. With the US, the UK and France now calling for a full-scale invasion, James writes, the veto powers of the UN Security Council's permanent members should be called into question once again.

April 22, 2011

http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/201104220220.html

On the night of 17 March 2011, holding its 6,498th meeting, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 (UNSCR-1973), approving a 'no-fly zone' (NFZ) over Libya, authorising all necessary measures to protect civilians by a vote of 10 in favour with 5 abstentions.

Most interesting to note was the fact that the five abstentions included two permanent veto-wielding member states (China and Russia), and three non-permanent states (Brazil, Germany and India), who coincidentally are vying for permanent seats in the Security Council. Most notably, the fact that the five members of the Security Council who are also members of an economic group of large emerging markets with the acronym BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) all happened to be on the Security Council at the same time is either a coincidence or a very bizarre occurrence.

NATO took on the role of imposing the NFZ over Libya on Thursday 31 March 2011, despite internal divisions among member states of NATO, most notably Turkey and Germany, and the daily flights and bombings continued unabated since then. UNSCR-1973 has provided the political and legal rationale for NATO bombing operations over Libya, with thousands of civilians killed and many more injured as a result of the daily bombings.

The NATO war against the sovereign government of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya proves that this is not a humanitarian war but one that is protecting the West's interests in and around the oilfields mostly located in the eastern part of Libya, effectively partitioning the country contrary to international law and UNSCR-1973. The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has now called for an immediate cessation of hostilities by all sides, including NATO, who are now openly backing the rebels with the sole intention of pushing out the legitimate government in Libya at any cost.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement that the Libyan armed forces had used cluster bombs in Misrata. The Libyan government has denied these charges and challenged HRW to prove them; most interestingly no casualties from cluster bombs have been confirmed in Misrata. Disturbingly, depleted uranium weapons have been used in Libya, both by the USA and subsequently by NATO upon assuming command and control of the NFZ responsibilities.

The United States Pentagon's denial of use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons has been met with scepticism, especially considering USAF A-10 warthog tank-buster aircraft deployed over Libya and given that the United States has a long history of only admitting to deploying DU radioactive material months or years after it has been used. Based on news video footage, it is more than likely that depleted uranium has been used more widely than originally thought since the USA has launched shells, bombs and cruise missiles containing depleted uranium in the past in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The use of DU weapons when the USA destroyed the city of Fallujah in Iraq reveals that there have been horrendous health conditions resulting from the US military deployment of these materials. Fallujah represented a stronghold of resistance to the US forces' invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003-04. High rates of infections, birth defects and cancers have been reported that are the direct result of the use of DU weapons.

In addition, regionally the conflict in Libya could have a devastating effect in Niger and Mali where the nomadic Tuareg peoples in the Sahara Desert regions of northern Niger and Mali and southern Libya have been involved in a spate of kidnappings and armed uprisings known as the 'Tuareg rebellion'. This is especially dangerous for northern Niger; this is where the town of Arlit, an industrial town, is located in the Agadez region, where uranium is mined by French companies in two large uranium mines (Arlit and Akouta).

Arlit was the subject of the Niger uranium forgeries when President George W. Bush, in the build-up to the (illegal) Iraq war, in his 2003 State of the Union address stated, '[t]he British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,' when it was alleged that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase 'yellowcake' uranium powder from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. These 16 words and the intelligence in this regard were later found to be baseless and rubbished by US intelligence agencies, albeit too late for innocent Iraqis who lost their lives over a lie during the war years.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who travelled to Niger to investigate the Iraq/yellowcake plot, concluded that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place, thus clearing Saddam Hussein of any re-starting of Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programme. Ambassador Wilson was punished for this by the outing of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent, allegedly by an official working in the then vice-president Dick Cheney's Oofice in the White House, which was also the plot of the movie 'Fair Game' released in 2010.

What is now very obvious is that the USA, the UK and France are calling for a full-scale and unabated invasion of Libya à la Iraq, or, boots on the ground. This has implications for the civilians in cities who support their legitimate government and Colonel Gaddafi, since it is being seen as a popular uprising when in effect it is confined to a few 'rebellious types', in the city of Benghazi. The SAS (Special Air Service) and French Special Forces have been operating in the eastern part of Libya since the beginning and now mercenaries are being recruited at an alarming rate, all being told of imminent deployment and action in Libya, contrary to UNSCR-1973.

The United Nations Security Council mandate has been a dinosaur, originally set up after the Second World War, with five permanent Security Council members (China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA) with veto powers. Until and unless the United Nations General Assembly takes decisive action to abolish the permanent seats structure and veto powers and expand the number of members to reflect the continents, the Security Council will continue to serve the privileged few nations while the rest are increasingly at risk of being 'legally and legitimately' bombed, invaded and occupied under the United Nations Security Council auspices.

Farouk James is an activist and observer of UN Security Council activities in terms of Peace-keeping Operations and Aid Agencies activities during periods of disasters, famine and conflict. Also monitors the activities of Mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, having investigated the activities of Custer-Battles LLC, a Defence Contractor who had embezzled Millions of US Dollars in Iraq.

 
http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/201104220220.html

[bigron]

The War in Libya: Race, "Humanitarianism," and the Media


By Maximilian Forte


April 24, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- Firing for Media Effect: Setting the "African" Agenda

READ THIS VERY IMPORTANT ARTICLE HERE :

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27957.htm

[bigron]

Weekend Edition
April 22 - 24, 2011
http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney04222011.html

Obama Takes the Cape

Pakistanizing the Libyan War


By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Barcelona.

Taking the Cape is a time-honored term of art used in the Pentagon for luring your opponent into going for your solution, especially when it is not in his or her best interest.  The analogy is to waving the red cape in front of the bull.  While the psychological game of the dazzle and the stroke has been perfected in the Pentagon as a means for winning its domestic budget wars, the American military has been far less successful in beating its adversaries in a game that goes back to at least the time of Sun Tzu.  Consider please the following

On Thursday, April 22, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced President Obama approved the initiation of drone strikes in Libya.  The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Cartwright claimed the drones were "uniquely suited" for attacks in urban areas because they can fly lower and get better visibility of targets, presumably, than pilots's eyeballs in airplanes.  Gates went on to claim drone strikes Libya would be done for "humanitarian reasons."

In other words, someone has sold Obama on Pakistaning the Libyan War, i.e., pursuing a military strategy of relying on drone attacks to a destroy an adversary hiding in the environmental background.  What is astonishing is that Obama took the cape, despite the fact that only 12 days earlier, a  report in the Los Angeles Times by David Cloud illustrated once again the absurdity of Cartwright's and Gates' claims. 

Cloud's report is worthy of very careful study, because it is loaded with all sorts of unexplored ramifications -- none of them good.  Using actual transcripts of conversations among drone operators, David Cloud revealed the sinister psychological effects that so-called precision bombing and techno war has on its American participants.  Their sterile dialogue shows vividly how the idea of precision techno warfare fought from a safe distance desensitizes our "warriors" to the bloody physical effects of their actions on the people they are maiming, and killing and the property they are destroying.  There is no bravery or soldierly honor or spirit of self sacrifice among the bravado of the drone operators safely ensconced in Creech AFB, Nevada; they are simply cogs in a dysfunctional dehumanizing machine.  That dysfunction is revealed by the complete absence in their dialogues of any psychological appreciation of their "adversary." Nor is there even hint of a desire to make such an appreciation.  Consider for example, the emptiness in the following dialogue reported by Cloud:

The Afghans unfolded what looked like blankets and kneeled. "They're praying. They are praying," said the Predator's camera operator, seated near the pilot.

By now, the Predator crew was sure that the men were Taliban. "This is definitely it, this is their force," the cameraman said. "Praying? I mean, seriously, that's what they do."

"They're gonna do something nefarious," the crew's intelligence coordinator chimed in.

The lack of inquisitiveness into the mind of the enemy stands in stark contrast to the Pentagon's subtle psychological appreciation of its domestic adversaries (in this case the hapless President Obama, but also his predecessors reaching back to President Kennedy, as well as members of Congress) that has been so successful in waging and winning its budget battles to extract money from the American people.

Extreme psychological one-sidedness on our side is nothing new in our military operations, however.  It has been a central feature of the American way of techno war for a very long time.  Indeed, the theory of the adversary being merely a physical set of targets (a dehumanized set of critical nodes devoid of any mental agility or moral strength) that can be defeated by simply by identifying and physically destroying these nodes is a doctrine that has been evolving and becoming more extreme since the development of daylight precision "strategic" bombardment doctrine by the US Army Corps in the 1930s.  In WWII one set of critical nodes was the ball bearing factories, for example; today in Pakistan the critical nodes are Taliban and al Qaeda leadership targets (of course, history has shown repeatedly that the enemy is adaptable and so-call critical nodes can be worked around or replaced again and again).  In Libya, we may have reached a new low, however.  God only knows what a critical nodes are in the oxymoronic case of humanitarian attacks, other than assassinating Qaddafi. In fact as Patrick Cockburn has shown, we don't even know who our allies among the Libyans are, and some may well be former anti-American Islamists.  Nevertheless, once again, the fallacious presumptions of techno war are coming into full flower.

At the center of the theory of techno war is the comforting idea that precision bombardment (in WWII, via the technical wizardry of the Norden bombsight and the blind bombing systems like the H2X radar) would enable us to attack precision "military targets" deep in hostile territory while avoiding  destruction of civilian lives and property.  In fact, many of its proponents claimed, absurdly as it turned out, that daylight precision bombing of Germany would save lives by obviating the need a land invasion of Europe.   The drone coupled with precision guided weapons merely evolves this original mentality to a new  level of recklessness, because its gripping effect on the our psychology further disconnects the killer, sitting in his air conditioned operations center thousands of miles away from the killed, from the consequences of the killers actions. 

This clinical detachment creates the illusion that war is cleaner and easier to fight from our perspective -- civilian deaths become morally acceptable because they are merely accidents of good intentions. The clinical term "collateral damage" says it all.  Cloud closes his report by describing the American apologies and financial payoffs to family survivors of civilians we inadvertently killed -- although given the emptiness of the dialogue revealed by Cloud, the idea of these deaths are collateral damage of a  precision killing machine approaches the bizarre, to put it charitably.

On the other hand, the idea that financial payoff of a few thousand dollars fits the dehumanizing model of techno war, because it ignores the mental and moral dimensions of war.

In this case, the psychological natures of Pashtun concepts of honor and the Pashtun warrior ethos guarantee that financial payoffs will not mitigate their thirst for revenge, which will last for generations.  But such psychological considerations have no place in the mechanistic mindset of techno war that views the adversary as a mere collection of physical targets and rationalizes civilian deaths as being unfortunate accidents of good intentions.

The illusions of techno war are very soothing to its generalissimos like Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and its accompanying video games provide a great distraction to an American public being impoverished by government policies to redistribute wealth to the super rich. Moreover, by making war at a distance easier to prosecute and less painless to us (at least in the short term), the fallacies of techno war set the stage for our current state of perpetual war.  Continuous small wars, or the threat of such wars, are necessary to prop up the sclerotic cold-war military - industrial - congressional complex, or MICC (see my essay The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War).  Perpetual small wars, or the threat thereof, create a never ending demand for the MICC's high-tech, war-losing products, which are legacies of the now defunct Cold War, but without which the MICC could not survive in the post-cold war era.  Keeping MICC budgets at cold war levels and higher also serves to reinforce the government policies to redistribute wealth to the rich and super rich. 

And that is why, every time the techno strategy fails to deliver on its promises, as it did with strategic bombing in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the first Iraq War, Kosovo, the Second Iraq  War, Afghanistan, and now in Libya, the solution is not a serious "lessons-learned" examination of why it did not deliver its promises of a quick clean victories, but instead, the solution is always the same: to recommend spending even more money for more expensive and complex versions of the same old idea, i.e., more and better sensors, more and better guidance systems, and more and better command, control, communications, computer, and intelligence systems.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney04222011.html









 

[bigron]

Financial Heist of the Century:

Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF)

By Manlio Dinucci

Global Research, April 24, 2011
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24479
Il Manifesto (translated from Italian) - 2011-04-22


The objective of the war against Libya is not just its oil reserves (now estimated at 60 billion barrels), which are the greatest in Africa and whose extraction costs are among the lowest in the world, nor the natural gas reserves of which are estimated at about 1,500 billion cubic meters. In the crosshairs of "willing" of the operation “Unified Protector” there are sovereign wealth funds, capital that the Libyan state has invested abroad.


The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) manages sovereign wealth funds estimated at about $70 billion U.S., rising to more than $150 billion if you include foreign investments of the Central Bank and other bodies. But it might be more. Even if they are lower than those of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, Libyan sovereign wealth funds have been characterized by their rapid growth. When LIA was established in 2006, it had $40 billion at its disposal. In just five years, LIA has invested over one hundred companies in North Africa, Asia, Europe, the U.S. and South America: holding, banking, real estate, industries, oil companies and others.


In Italy, the main Libyan investments are those in UniCredit Bank (of which LIA and the Libyan Central Bank hold 7.5 percent), Finmeccanica (2 percent) and ENI (1 percent), these and other investments (including 7.5 percent of the Juventus Football Club) have a significance not as much economically (they amount to some $5.4 billion) as politically.


Libya, after Washington removed it from the blacklist of “rogue states,” has sought to carve out a space at the international level focusing on "diplomacy of sovereign wealth funds." Once the U.S. and the EU lifted the embargo in 2004 and the big oil companies returned to the country, Tripoli was able to maintain a trade surplus of about $30 billion per year which was used largely to make foreign investments. The management of sovereign funds has however created a new mechanism of power and corruption in the hands of ministers and senior officials, which probably in part escaped the control of the Gadhafi himself: This is confirmed by the fact that, in 2009, he proposed that the 30 billion in oil revenues go "directly to the Libyan people." This aggravated the fractures within the Libyan government.


U.S. and European ruling circles focused on these funds, so that before carrying out a military attack on Libya to get their hands on its energy wealth, they took over the Libyan sovereign wealth funds. Facilitating this operation is the representative of the Libyan Investment Authority, Mohamed Layas himself: as revealed in a cable published by WikiLeaks. On January 20 Layas informed the U.S. ambassador in Tripoli that LIA had deposited $32 billion in U.S. banks. Five weeks later, on February 28, the U.S. Treasury “froze” these accounts. According to official statements, this is "the largest sum ever blocked in the United States," which Washington held "in trust for the future of Libya." It will in fact serve as an injection of capital into the U.S. economy, which is more and more in debt. A few days later, the EU "froze" around 45 billion Euros of Libyan funds.


The assault on the Libyan sovereign wealth funds will have a particularly strong impact in Africa. There, the Libyan Arab African Investment Company had invested in over 25 countries, 22 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and was planning to increase the investments over the next five years, especially in mining, manufacturing, tourism and telecommunications. The Libyan investments have been crucial in the implementation of the first telecommunications satellite Rascom (Regional African Satellite Communications Organization), which entered into orbit in August 2010, allowing African countries to begin to become independent from the U.S. and European satellite networks, with an annual savings of hundreds of millions of dollars.


Even more important were the Libyan investment in the implementation of three financial institutions launched by the African Union: the African Investment Bank, based in Tripoli, the African Monetary Fund, based in Yaoundé (Cameroon), the African Central Bank, with Based in Abuja (Nigeria). The development of these bodies would enable African countries to escape the control of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, tools of neo-colonial domination, and would mark the end of the CFA franc, the currency that 14 former French colonies are forced to use. Freezing Libyan funds deals a strong blow to the entire project. The weapons used by "the willing" are not only those in the military action called “Unified Protector.”


Il Manifesto, April 22, 2011


Translated from Italian by John Catalinotto
 
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24479

[bigron]

US senators call for Gaddafi’s assassination

By James Cogan


WSWS, April 25, 2011

http://uruknet.com/?p=m77135&hd=&size=1&l=e

Senior leaders of the US Congress used appearances on CNN’s "State of the Union" program yesterday to brazenly call for the assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and a major escalation of air strikes to achieve the war’s real aim—the installation of a compliant puppet regime.

Five weeks of bombing have failed to bring about Gaddafi’s downfall, primarily due to continued support for the government in the capital Tripoli and the military and political weakness of the anti-Gaddafi forces based in the eastern city of Benghazi. Opposition fighters have made no significant gains in the east of the country and pro-government troops have maintained a siege of the opposition-held western city of Misrata, despite almost daily NATO bombardments.

The clear signs of a military stalemate, and a ruthless insistence that it be broken, dominate the discussion within the US establishment. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN: "Right now there’s just not enough momentum by the rebels... So my recommendation to NATO and the administration is to cut the head of the snake off. Go to Tripoli, start bombing Gaddafi’s inner circle, their compounds, their military headquarters."

Graham repeated the widespread demand in the US establishment for the Obama administration to deploy AC-130 gunships for operations against the pro-Gaddafi Libyan forces. AC-130s are armed with a rapid-fire, five-barrel 25mm Gatling gun, a 40mm cannon, and a 105mm howitzer. They are designed to blanket an area with explosions and bullets and devastate vehicles and personnel―and any civilians who happen to be caught up in the fire. They have been used with murderous effect in Afghanistan and Iraq, including documented massacres of civilians.

Graham dismissed CNN host Candy Crowley’s observation that attacks on targets in heavily-populated areas of Tripoli were not covered by the UN resolution that provides a legal fig leaf for the war. "The goal is to get rid of Gaddafi," he said. "The people around Gaddafi need to wake up every day wondering 'will this be my last?’ The military commanders supporting Gaddafi should be pounded. So I would not let the UN mandate stop what is the right thing to do."

Republican Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, who visited Benghazi last Friday to meet with members of the opposition Transitional National Council, called for the immediate US recognition of the rebel body so that money and armaments could be sent. McCain declared that the former Gaddafi ministers, CIA-linked figures and Islamists who are known to be in the council "represent the legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people."

As well as demanding stepped-up efforts to train and arm the anti-Gaddafi forces to wage their civil war, McCain insisted that US air power such as AC-130s and Apache gunships be deployed in "a heavier way."

In response to Graham’s call for assassination, McCain expressed general agreement with targeting the Libyan leader, but declared US strategy had to be based on "winning the battle on the ground" not on "a chance of taking him out with a lucky air strike."

Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman—the one-time vice presidential candidate of the Democratic Party—joined the campaign for escalation and echoed Graham’s call to assassinate Gaddafi. NATO, he declared, "has got to start thinking about whether they want to more directly target Gaddafi and his family." Lieberman cynically declared that the UN resolution justified a policy of assassination on the grounds it would "protect the civilian population."

The blatant advocacy of war crimes to remove Gaddafi from power stems inexorably from the criminal motives of the war itself. From the beginning, it was driven by the neo-colonial ambitions of France, Britain and the US to gain domination over Libya’s lucrative oil resources at the expense of rivals such as China and Russia. Five weeks after the bombing began and with no end in sight, the mounting frustration in Washington is fuelling calls to drown all resistance in blood.

One motivation is the impact on world oil prices of the virtual shutdown of Libya’s oil exports. Fighting and bombing around major oil and gas facilities have also caused damage to infrastructure. Fields held by the Benghazi rebels are predicted to be out of production for the next four weeks, forcing them to rely on donations of fuel from Qatar.

The Obama administration and its NATO allies have already moved to significantly escalate the assault on Libya. Britain, France and Italy have begun dispatching "trainers" to Benghazi to assist the opposition forces―a first step toward the eventual deployment of ground forces.

On Saturday, the first attack on Libyan government troops was carried out by an unmanned US Predator drone, which President Obama ordered deployed last week. A vehicle-mounted rocket launcher in Misrata was reportedly destroyed by a Hellfire missile. At least two Predators will be kept flying over Libya 24 hours a day.

On Sunday, British Foreign Secretary William Hague refused to rule out a NATO decision to deploy the Predators to attempt to assassinate Gaddafi. Hague declared: "Who and what is a legitimate target depends on how they behave."

Efforts to kill Gaddafi or his family members appear to be already taking place. Among a number of sites bombed in Tripoli over the weekend was a bunker complex near the Libyan leader’s compound. Three people were reportedly killed. CNN reported that a major ammunition dump was bombed and that "air strikes went on for the better part of the night."

Last week, NATO commander General Charles Bouchard warned civilians to keep away from alleged military targets. The attacks are deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure however. The Libyan news agency reported on the weekend that NATO aircraft bombed water supply and sewage systems in the Gaddafi-held towns of al-Khums and Sirte. During the 1999 NATO air war against Yugoslavia, power plants, roads, rail lines and water systems were bombed to terrorise the civilian population.

Reports from Misrata, where heavy fighting has been taking place, indicate that large numbers of Libyan soldiers were killed on the weekend by NATO attacks. An opposition fighter boasted that 30 tanks had been destroyed, along with a convoy of four-wheel drives. A journalist for the British Guardian reported seeing at least six burnt-out tank in a district of the city where government troops retreated on Saturday.

While opposition commanders are insisting the city is under their control, their positions were heavily shelled on Sunday from the city outskirts, killing and wounding a number of people. Desperate to break the current military stalemate, NATO aircraft are continuing to attack government forces in the area.


http://uruknet.com/?p=m77135&hd=&size=1&l=e


 

[bigron]

Middle East
Apr 27, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD27Ak01.html 
   
THE ROVING EYE

AfPak comes to Africa

By Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.
http://atimes.com/atimes/others/Pepe2011.html


Be it liberal hawk or neo-conservative interventionism, one's got to love the proficient American way of techno war. Just as quite a few insider circles in Washington - and London - had been making a lot of noise for ramping up Western interventionism in Libya, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this Monday hit Muammar Gaddafi's Bab al-Azizya compound in Tripoli for the second time in five weeks.

NATO insists it was not targeting the colonel - but a "communications center" inside the compound. Right; as if United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 authorized bombing Gaddafi's compound as a means of "protecting civilians".

This "kinetic activity" took place after former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger had been hammering his endgame for Libya on at least three different occasions; at George Washington University's Elliot School of International Affairs; at an Aspen Institute session on "Values and Diplomacy", also in Washington; and at the Bretton Woods II conference in New Hampshire.

Kissinger's plan: invade Libya and keep this thing going until at least the spring of 2012. The (wacky) agenda; keep MENA (Middle East/Northern Africa) in total disarray as a diversionist tactic/pretext for Washington to attack Iran on behalf of Israel - to the benefit of the military-industrial complex. Maybe prospective US presidential candidate Field Marshall von Trump - aka the Donald - should command the invasion.

Gaddafi is the perfect villain for this Anglo-French-American farce unworthy of French playwright Georges Feydeau. For all his dictatorial megalomania, Gaddafi is a committed pan-African - a fierce defender of African unity. Libya was not in debt to international bankers. It did not borrow cash from the International Monetary Fund for any "structural adjustment". It used oil money for social services - including the Great Man Made River project, and investment/aid to sub-Saharan countries. Its independent central bank was not manipulated by the Western financial system. All in all a very bad example for the developing world.

Breaking up Libya would be just the hors d'oeuvres for breaking up other parts of Africa where China has sizable investments. Yes, because if Western boots hit the ground in northern Africa, the "footprint" will reach the Sahel - which is already in turbulence; Mali and Niger are receiving weapons from the "rebels" in Libya that are ending up in the hands of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). The powers that be in Algeria and Morocco - where pro-democracy protests continue non-stop - are already freaking out.

All these variables should be kept on close watch. For the moment, this spring's humanitarian blockbuster has got to be The Drones of Libya - another Pentagon/White House/State Department co-production straight out of Hollywood, sorry, Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

Bring on the humanitarian drones

Why haven't they thought about this before; an army of drones (only five for the moment, based in southern Italy) instead of boots on the ground. Pentagon chief Robert Gates actually claimed the drones will strike Libya for "humanitarian reasons" (any hint of irony was as invisible as a drone camera). Gates had already misled the US Congress a few weeks ago, saying that the US role in Libya would end once NATO was in command.

So now it's time to crank-up that X-Box; time for the "cubicle warriors" to raise hell by dragging a mouse. Here's American techno war at its best; bring on the kids who grew up playing video games to fight - virtually - in the desert; the system's controls after all are modeled after video games.

Here are some things the Hellfire missiles will be up against in Libya. A gross domestic product per capita of US$14,192; unemployment benefits of around $730 a month; nurses being paid $1,000 a month; no major taxes; free education and medicine; interest-free loans for buying a car and an apartment. Quite a few unemployed Americans wouldn't mind a one-way ticket to Tripoli.

The attack of the drones is on so Washington may pretend it's not by any means expanding its "kinetic military action" - which is not a war. Kissinger was right on at least one count after all: President Barack Obama has made a bet on this air war to run through 2012 and feed on his re-election.

Then there's that pesky "collateral damage" issue (Who cares? Drones can fly 24 hours straight and provide, in Pentagon newspeak, "extended persistence"). Gaddafi's military has already morphed into civilians and are melting away Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh-style. Obama's Vietnam looms - what with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying this is "certainly moving toward a stalemate".

Stalemate (and "collateral damage") as in AfPak; at least 25 people were killed by a Predator in Mir Ali, 35 kilometers east of Miranshah, in the North Waziristan tribal area - just as the arrival of the drones was hailed by the Libyan "rebels". Enterprising Gaddafi-related forces - and tribals - anyway are already busy working on their Pakistani-inspired shoot-a-Predator techniques, as in groups of four people placed apart using rocket-propelled grenades.

What a pity Northrop Grumman still cannot deploy its mighty X-47B - a lean, mean killer drone which was launched last February with its own Blue Oyster Cult-ish music video (see here ). The killer will only be available in 2013 - after War-o-Bama gets re-elected.

Meanwhile, a clean video game war will run with a few "morally acceptable" accidents (as in "collateral damage"). And here operation Odyssey Dawn comes back full circle. The US is back where it feels most comfortable - not playing Ulysses in the Mediterranean, but playing Zeus from above, with Predators instead of thunderbolts.

A super fresh, old-school, throw down, futuristic dance contest remix of Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice would now be in order. Featuring, instead of Christopher Walken, a Pixar-designed dancing drone. And as master of ceremonies, Field Marshall von Trump, finally free to invade and take the oil. Didn't work in Iraq. Might as well work in Libya.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD27Ak01.html



 
 
 

[shipgeek]

I hate them!

Muck Globalistan!!

 

[bigron]

US, NATO attempt assassination of Gaddafi

BY Bill Van Auken

WSWS, April 26, 2011

http://uruknet.com/?p=m77163&hd=&size=1&l=e

With the attack Monday morning on the Bab al-Azizyah complex in Tripoli, the US-NATO war on Libya has entered a criminal new phase that incorporates the policy of state-organized assassination.

Two large precision-guided bombs reduced buildings in the complex to rubble. Libyan officials reported three people killed and 45 wounded, 15 of them critically.

This was the third such attack on the complex where Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi lives and works. The compound was hit by a cruise missile fired from a British submarine on March 20, the second day of the US-NATO assault, and again on April 23, when warplanes struck a parking lot just outside of Bab al-Azizyah that reportedly was above an underground bunker.

With each strike, the objective is ever more naked: the murder of Gaddafi and members of his family.

The building struck on Monday housed the Libyan leader’s offices and library and a meeting room where earlier this month he had held talks with South African President Jacob Zuma and other African leaders on an African Union proposal for a ceasefire in Libya’s ongoing civil war. The proposal was quickly quashed by the US-NATO alliance and the so-called rebels who are being backed by the US and Europe.

Despite claiming legitimacy for their military actions on the basis of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorizes "all necessary measures" to protect civilians, Washington, London and Paris have made no secret of the fact that their real aim is "regime change," i.e., the imposition of a puppet government that will be more subservient to their interests (and those of the energy conglomerates) than the Gaddafi regime. To that end, they are prepared to carry out whatever bloodletting is required.

After five weeks of bombing, and with the US military command claiming to have "attrited"—in plain English, slaughtered—up to 40 percent of the military forces loyal to Gaddafi, they appear no closer to realizing their aim. The "rebels," a fractious coalition of ex-Gaddafi officials, aging CIA "assets" and Islamists, have proven wholly incapable of advancing west toward Tripoli. Moreover, the openly stated hopes of the imperialist powers that the bombs and missiles dropped on Tripoli would trigger a palace coup resulting in Gaddafi’s ouster have gone unanswered.

Last week, the top US uniformed military commander, Adm. Mike Mullen, warned that the US-led intervention in Libya was "moving towards stalemate."

The Obama administration and its European accomplices, increasingly frustrated by the failure of their tactics, are not willing to accept such an outcome. This is what has placed the policy of assassination at the center of their calculations.

Mullen’s warning was accompanied by the announcement that armed US Predator drones have been deployed over Libya. The pilotless warplanes have been employed with ever growing frequency by the Obama administration to carry out its dirty war against the population on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Pakistan’s Conflict Monitoring Center in Islamabad has documented 2,200 civilian deaths over the past five years from drone attacks.

The CIA and its apologists defend the drone attacks as remote control extrajudicial executions of "terrorists," simply dismissing evidence of the horrific civilian death toll. Now, these same methods are being employed in Libya under the pretext of protecting civilian lives.

Meanwhile, within official Washington, there has been a steady drumbeat for Gaddafi’s assassination, with leading US senators going on television talk shows and sounding as if they had cribbed their remarks from the script of "The Godfather."

Thus, one program had Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services committee demanding that the US-led intervention "cut the head of the snake off" and urging, in reference to Gaddafi, "Let’s get this guy gone."

What is striking is that such language evokes not a hint of disagreement, much less protest, from within the US political establishment and the corporate-controlled media.

One would hardly guess that such methods mark a fateful shift from what had long been considered essential tenets of international law. While the assassination of foreign rulers as a tool of statecraft was well known in the Middle Ages, from the 18th century and the dawn of the bourgeois revolutions it was regarded as beyond the pale.

There were, of course, wholly pragmatic considerations, among them the fear of "chickens coming home to roost," with the resort to assassination by leaders of major powers legitimizing the practice and creating the conditions for someone to murder them as well. There was also the calculation by those with the world’s more powerful militaries that the use of assassination would tend to level the playing field with their less well-armed rivals.

But there were also, particularly in the history of the United States, other arguments, rooted in principles of democracy.

Thomas Jefferson in a 1789 letter to James Madison described assassination as one of the "legitimate principles in the dark ages which intervened between ancient and modern civilizations, but exploded and was held in just horror in the eighteenth century."

The US Army’s code of conduct signed by Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War in 1863 warned that "civilized nations look with horror upon" the method of assassinating one’s enemies, regarding such practices as "relapses into barbarism."

This prevailing attitude toward assassination—defined as "treacherous killing"—was written into the international laws of war adopted at the Hague Convention of 1907 and has been continued in largely the same form in subsequent treaties and conventions.

As recently as 1976, the Church Committee, which conducted the US Senate investigations into the CIA’s organization of assassination plots against world leaders ranging from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, concluded that this bloody practice "violates moral precepts fundamental to our way of life…[and] traditional American notions of fair play."

Today, the outlook expressed in the committee’s reports seems, in the context of official discourse in Washington, as anachronistic as if it had been written in the 18th century.

After nearly a decade of the so-called "war on terror," begun by Bush and escalated under Obama, assassination—together with wars of aggression, torture, extraordinary rendition, detention without charges—has become just one more accepted tool of American foreign policy.

Indeed, the executive order issued in the wake of the Church Committee probe that barred US-sponsored assassinations was overridden by the Bush administration in the name of eliminating alleged terrorists—a right to kill that has been extended under the Obama administration to US citizens. Now, the case is being made that assassination is a legitimate tool for pursuing "humanitarian" missions or whatever other pretext is invented for imperialist looting.

The ongoing war in Libya marks a further escalation in the criminalization of the American ruling elite, which extols the methods of murder and thuggery to achieve its aims abroad while relying on financial swindling, political fraud and state intimidation to enforce its interests at home.

Its open embrace of assassination stands as a stark warning. There is no section of the financial and corporate oligarchy that rules the United States that maintains the slightest adherence to democratic principles. Under conditions of an unrelenting crisis of the world capitalist system, combined with an unprecedented polarization between its obscene accumulation of wealth and the increasingly desperate conditions facing masses of workers, it is compelled to defend its class rule through the use of unrestrained violence.

The struggle against war and the fight against the increasingly grave threats to democratic rights within the US itself can be waged only through the independent political mobilization of the working class in its own party, fighting for workers’ power and the socialist transformation of society.

Bill Van Auken

http://uruknet.com/?p=m77163&hd=&size=1&l=e





 

[worcesteradam]

Few have ever heard of  “The Bernard Lewis Project”.   

Professor Lewis first unveiled his project in the Bilderberg Meeting in Baden, Austria, on April 27-29, 1979. He formally proposed the fragmentation and balkanization of Iran along regional, ethnic and linguistic lines especially among the Arabs of Khuzestan (the Al-Ahwaz project), the Baluchis (the Pakhtunistan project), the Kurds (the Greater Kurdistan project) and the Azerbaijanis (the Greater Azerbaijan Project).

Dreyfus and LeMarc (see References, p. 157) provide a very succinct summary of the plan’s methodology:

“According to Lewis, the British should encourage rebellions for national autonomy by the minorities such as the Lebanese Druze, Baluchis, Azerbaiajni Turks, Syrian Alawites, the Copts of Ethiopia, Sudanese mystical sects, Arabian tribes…the goal is the break-up of the Middle East into a mosaic of competing ministates and the weakening of the sovereignty of existing republics and kingdoms…spark a series of breakaway movements by Iran’s Kurds, Azeris, baluchis, and Arabs…these independence movements, in turn would represent dire threats to Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan and other neighbouring states.”

http://www.rozanehmagazine.com/NoveDec05/AZPartVI.html

[bigron]

Video: Putin: Who gave NATO right to kill Gaddafi?


RussiaToday



April 26, 2011



Who gave coalition forces in Libya the right to eliminate Gaddafi? That's the question Vladimir Putin's been asking, during an official visit to Denmark. The Russian Premier also said NATO's effectively joined one of the warring sides in the conflict. And more responsible action should be taken instead.

WATCH VIDEO HERE

http://uruknet.com/?p=m77168&hd=&size=1&l=e
 

[bigron]

Libya: "The Price of Freedom"

Highest Standard of Living in Africa

by Joachim Guilliard

April 27, 2011

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24518

Translation from German by John Catalinotto

Original article: Libyen – Überlegungen zum drohenden „Preis der Freiheit"

Libya has the highest living standard in Africa. The "United Nations Development Program (UNDP) confirms that the country has excellent prospects for achieving United Nations development goals by 2015. NATO's war will have already dashed those hopes. A collapse like the one in Iraq now threatens the country.

There has been little reaching the European public in the past few years about Libya, whose relationship with the West had normalized. European leaders met with their Libyan counterpart Muammar al-Gadhafi often and business flourished. In the course of preparation for war, the country was suddenly transformed into the most evil dictatorship. Even many war opponents accepted this characterization as their own and now want to overthrow the "tyrant."

But if Libyan society can really be reduced to the "revolutionary leader" Gadhafi in Libya, is the situation really worse than in a hundred other countries and are there not many more factors that determine the living conditions of a country, besides Western-style "freedoms"?

For Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, the "degree of repression" in Libya is not "more pervasive and severe" than in other authoritarian countries. Even according to Amnesty International's country reports of human rights conditions, that of Libya differs little from many other countries; regarding the Arab allies in the NATO war alliance, such as Saudi Arabia, it is even much worse.

The UN Human Rights Council has praised the country in its latest report on the "universal periodic review" of Libya, which was made late last year, even for its progress on human rights. Many countries -- including Venezuela and Cuba, but also Australia and Canada -- raised in their statements some aspects that still deserve special mention. (See also UN Praised Libya's Human Rights Record, Mathaba, April 8, 2011)

For the Western media, this report, whose final debate has now been shifted abruptly from March to June, is a scandal (for them it’s the result of there being many "less civilized" members of the Human Rights Council, those from the world’s South). But what these countries did was to view living conditions from a different perspective, one that places a strong emphasis on the realization of social rights, i.e., the satisfaction of basic needs, including adequate income, food, housing, health care and education.

Also in this regard the situation in Libya is, from the point of view of corruption and high youth unemployment, thoroughly unsatisfactory. Compared with other countries, however, the Libyans are still in good shape and have a lot to lose from the NATO intervention. Although the media often refers to youth unemployment of 15 to 30 percent, it does not mention that in Libya, in contrast to other countries, all have their subsistence guaranteed.

The relatively high standard of living also explains why Gadhafi definitely still has support in the country -- particularly, according to Libya expert Andreas Dittmann, among the older generations, who remember the old days.

"In Libya, there may be millions who dislike Gaddafi but like much of what he accomplished," according to the famous Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung (The West's War Against Gadhafi - Yet another long-lasting, tragic crime against humanity, IPS, Global Research , April 6, 2011)

Sanctions and low oil prices slowed development

When in 1969 the U.S. and the British-backed King Idris was overthrown, Libya was still a poor, undeveloped country weighed down by its colonial past despite ongoing oil exports that began in 1961. The gradual nationalization of oil production allowed for accelerated economic development and rapid improvements in living conditions.

With the sharp fall in oil prices 1985-2001, this development came to a standstill. The 1993 UN-imposed sanctions enormously aggravated Libya’s economic difficulties. The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita declined from $6,600 in 1990 to $3,600 in 2002 (World Bank, World Development Indicators) and has grown only after the lifting of UN sanctions in September 2003. (The United States lifted its unilateral sanctions in stages from 2004 until June 2006.)

In 2008, the GDP per capita, expressed in purchasing power, according to UNDP Database, reached $16,200 U.S. (For comparison, the GDP of Egypt was in the same year $5,900, that of Algeria and Tunisia $8,000. Saudi Arabia had a GDP of about $24,000, Kuwait and Qatar of $72,000 and $51,500 dollars respectively.)

The economic sanctions blocked the modernization of Libya’s infrastructure and in especially brought all development plans, besides in the petroleum industry also in others, to a virtual standstill. (Jean-Pierre Sereni, The subtleties of Libyan crude, Le Monde diplomatique, April 8, 2011, free version at Counterpunch)

The economic decline accordingly slowed the development also in social sectors. In the measure of its "Human Development Index" (HDI), which investigates the root values of some basic indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and literacy development to evaluate the living standard of a country, Libya also slumped in the mid-1990s from 67th to 73rd place.

High standard of living achieved

After government revenue, supported by rising oil prices, richly flowed once more, living conditions have clearly improved. The country now ranks 53rd on the HDI index, better than all other African countries and also better than the richer and Western-backed Saudi Arabia. Using "Government subsidies in health, agriculture and food imports," along with "a simultaneous increase in household income," could "extreme poverty" be virtually eliminated, stated the UNDP in its monitor of the millennium development goals of the UN. (Millennium Development Goals: Goal 1 - Goal 8, UNDP Libya Office)

The life expectancy rose to 74.5 years and is now the highest in Africa. It is now almost one and a half years higher than in Saudi Arabia, which was the reverse of the situation in 1980 (UNDP Database) The infant mortality rate declined to 17 deaths per 1,000 births and is not nearly as high as in Algeria (41) and also lower than in Saudi Arabia (21). (WHO, Global Health Indicators 2010) Libya is also ahead in the care of pregnant women and the reduction of maternal mortality. Malaria was eradicated completely.

According to the UNDP, a lack of human resources in health care still presents a problem, but "the gradual reintegration of the country into the international economy after the lifting of sanctions" is leading "to better availability of health care. The government provides all citizens with free health care and achieved high coverage in the most basic health areas."

The illiteracy rate dropped to 11.6 percent in Libya, and is well below that of Egypt (33.6 percent), Algeria (27.4 percent), Tunisia (22 percent) and Saudi Arabia (14.5 percent). (See Human Development Report 2010)

The UNDP-calculated Education Index, which in addition to literacy also includes the number of pupils in secondary schools and university students, is even higher than that of small super-rich emirates Kuwait and Qatar, which can hardly be compared with the Arab territorial states. (See UNDP, Arab Human Development Report 2009 and UNDP, Human Development Report 2009)

The UNDP certified that Libya has also made "a significant progress in gender equality," particularly in the fields of education and health, while there is still much to do regarding representation in politics and the economy. With a relative low "index of gender inequality" the UNDP places the country in the Human Development Report 2010 concerning gender equality at rank 52 and thus also well ahead of Egypt (ranked 108), Algeria (70), Tunisia (56), Saudi Arabia (ranked 128) and Qatar (94). Even Argentina (ranked 60) seems worse in this regard.

In view of these achievements, the positive Human Rights assessment of developments in Libya should hardly be a surprise.

The example of Iraq

In 1980, Iraq also had a relatively high living standard, even higher than that of Libya. This collapsed massively under the murderous UN embargo [1990-2003]. Their "liberation" from Saddam Hussein then toppled Iraqi society completely into the abyss. The collapse is still going on.

Millions of Iraqis are starving, and the lack of food is still increasing. Half of the nearly 30 million people are now living in extreme poverty. Some 55 percent have no clean drinking water, 80 percent are not connected to the sewage system. Electricity is available only an hour here, an hour there; the once good health and education systems are flattened. Had the development of the conditions in the 1980s continued, the infant mortality rate would now well below 20 per 1000 births. In fact, according to a study by the aid agency Save the Children, by 2005 it had increased to 125. Iraq had been recognized by UNESCO in 1987 for its education system; illiteracy had been almost eliminated. Now, the illiteracy rate has already increased to over 25 percent in some areas it is already 40-50 percent among women. In general, Iraqi women have lost their once very good position in society. According to UNDP's index, they fell to the level of Saudi Arabia. (See Iraq - The Forgotten Occupation)

There is no reason to assume that a "regime change" in Libya enforced by the NATO states would come out much better for the country (not to mention a long civil war and partition of the country altogether). Finally, the attacking forces and their agenda is almost identical and in many ways the leadership of the insurgency resembles the Iraqis that the U.S. set up in the government there -- that is, radical Islamic organizations and pro-Western, neo-liberal advocates of a complete opening to imperialism, and privatization of the economy of the country.

Note

Wikipedia is only partially useful regarding access to statistical data. As soon as it is playing a role in a current political debate, there is a danger of manipulation.  After David Rothscum published on Feb. 23, 2011 his article, "The World Cheers As The CIA Libya Plunges Into Chaos" published in which he and others wrote that living in Libya, a lower percentage of people below the poverty line than in the Netherlands, the information in the Wikipedia article "List of countries by percentage of population living in poverty" to which Rothscum referred were changed. According to the Article-History on Feb. 15 a value of 7.4 percent could be found, since March 6 a reference is made in a footnote, without any listing of a source, that "around a third of the Libyans live at or below the national poverty line."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24518







 

[bigron]

UK to deploy troops on Libyan border

Thu Apr 28, 2011 11:15AM



British Defense Secretary Liam FoxBritish Defense Secretary Liam Fox has announced plans to deploy British troops on the Libyan border with Tunisia.


In a parliamentary session on Wednesday, Fox claimed the British troops will be dispatched to the border to enforce “safe havens” for more than 30,000 civilian refugees fleeing from attacks by Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi's troops, the Independent reported.

He also asserted that the troop deployment would be within the terms of a UN resolution authorizing military action in Libya

MORE

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/177138.html

[bigron]

'NATO serving own interests in Libya' (VIDEO)


Thu Apr 28, 2011 9:5AM


NATO's military campaign in Libya is serving the interests of member states of the Western military alliance and not those of the Libyan people, says a political analyst.


“I think it [NATO's aerial campaign] is working but according to the wishes and interests of the leading countries of the NATO, specifically the US, Britain, France, and lately Italy. It sounds very much like a colonial operation really,” said writer and journalist Adel Lofty in a Press TV interview on Wednesday.

Recounting the economic interests of the Western alliance countries, Lofty said that NATO member states can win lucrative deals when the bombings come to an end in Libya.

ARTICLE & VIDEO

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/177125.html

[bigron]

Trying 'Shock and Awe' in Libya

By Robert Parry

 

Consortium News, April 27, 2011

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/042711.html

Having laughed off Libyan government peace feelers, Official Washington is now beating the drum for a new round of "shock and awe" bombings and close-combat air strikes to "finish the job" of ousting Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

Typically, this Washington debate is being framed as a series of choices for President Barack Obama and NATO: one, abandon the current campaign of air strikes and let Gaddafi prevail; two, continue the conflict at its current pace and accept a stalemate; or three, commit more military resources to "win."

The neoconservative-dominated opinion circles of Washington are almost unanimous in their determination to push Obama and NATO to adopt option three. It is a consensus not seen since almost all these same Serious People supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, which started off with the "shock and awe" bombing that was supposed to solve everything.

Left out of today’s Libyan debate is any consideration of building on the African Union’s proposal for a ceasefire and a transition to democracy with Gaddafi on the sidelines. Gaddafi’s embattled regime agreed to those terms, but the plan was spurned by anti-Gaddafi rebels and doesn’t even rate a mention when the "options" are listed in the Big Media.

Besides taking a page from Bush’s "shock and awe" playbook, the Smart Talk in Washington also suggests modeling "regime change" in Libya after NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Those NATO strikes against the capital of Belgrade inflicted hundreds of civilian deaths, with estimates ranging from about 500 to more than 1,200, including the killing of 16 people working at the Serb TV station.

NATO generals justified their bombing of Serb TV on the premise that "enemy propaganda" is a legitimate target in wartime, even if the station’s personnel were unarmed and defenseless. Since then, the intentional targeting of civilian TV and radio stations has become part of Western military doctrine when trying to overthrow Arab and Third World regimes.

The Serbian model is now being applied to Libya with the blessings of senior military officials who participated in that campaign. For instance, Gen. John P. Jumper, who commanded U.S. Air Force units over Serbia, told the New York Times that bombing high-profile institutional sites in Belgrade proved more effective than the destruction of Serbian tanks and other military targets.

"It was when we went in and began to disturb important and symbolic sites in Belgrade and began to bring to a halt the middle-class life in Belgrade, that [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic’s own people began to turn on him," Jumper said.

Now, Jumper said a similar approach is being pursued in Libya. This week, NATO planes bombed Libya’s capital of Tripoli briefly knocking Libyan TV off the air and blasting Gaddafi’s personal residence (although NATO insisted that the raid wasn’t an assassination attempt, wink-wink).

In other words, the anti-Serb air campaign, which was estimated to kill four Serb civilians for every Serb soldier slain, is now becoming the model for NATO's military strategy in Libya.

Contradicting a Mandate

One might think the application of the Serbian model to Libya would raise red flags in the U.S. news media since it suggests that NATO may end up killing large numbers of civilians under a United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

However, led by the Washington Post and the New York Times, major U.S. news outlets have ignored this obvious contradiction. Instead, there’s a renewed excitement over the prospect of a new "shock and awe" bombing of an "enemy" country that’s been stripped of its air defenses.

In influential U.S. opinion circles, it’s pro-war propaganda all the time. Indeed, the New York Times seems to publish only editorials and essays favoring an expanded conflict.

Dominating the Times op-ed page on Tuesday was a call from retired Army Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik to "finish the job" in Libya.

Dubik, who served in the Iraq War and is now a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, framed the debate in a way to make escalation and victory the only "responsible" choice. He also projected a long-term U.S. and NATO presence in Libya after Gaddafi’s defeat.

"If Colonel Qaddafi falls, the United States and NATO will have a responsibility to help shape the postwar order, including providing security to prevent a liberated Libya from sinking into chaos," Dubik wrote. "Washington must start planning and preparing for this complex and expensive contingency and muster the substantial political will required to see it through."

In other words, we’re looking at another U.S./NATO occupation of a "liberated" Arab or Muslim country.

What’s also clear from the U.S. news coverage is that the Times editors and other opinion-shapers are engaged in Dubik’s important first step, building the "political will" for this new war and future occupation by excluding any serious questions about the wisdom of the desired course.

The Times on Wednesday published another pro-war op-ed – focusing on Gaddafi’s supposed failure to provide quality milk to his countrymen. Meanwhile, there has been zero reexamination of a key rationale for U.S. participation in the war, Gaddafi’s alleged guilt in the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

"The blood of Americans is on [Gaddafi’s] hands because he was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103," declared Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, after a recent trip to rebel-held Benghazi during which McCain joined the call for a larger U.S. military role.

The Times and other leading U.S. news outlets also treat Libya’s guilt as a flat fact, but the case actually remains murky.

In 2001, a Scottish court did convict Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi for the bombing which killed 270 people. But the judgment appears to have been more a political compromise than an act of justice. One of the judges told Dartmouth government professor Dirk Vandewalle about "enormous pressure put on the court to get a conviction."

Megrahi’s conviction assuaged the understandable human desire to see someone punished for such a heinous crime, albeit a possibly innocent man.

Reopening a Terror Case

In 2007, after the testimony of a key government witness was discredited, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to reconsider the conviction as a grave miscarriage of justice. However, that review was proceeding slowly in 2009 when Scottish authorities released Megrahi on humanitarian grounds, after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

Megrahi dropped his appeal in order to gain the early release, but that doesn’t mean he was guilty. He has continued to assert his innocence and an objective press corps would reflect the doubts regarding his conviction.

The Scottish court’s purported reason for finding Megrahi guilty – while acquitting his co-defendant Lamin Khalifa Fhimah – was the testimony of Toni Gauci, owner of a clothing store in Malta who allegedly sold Megrahi a shirt, the remnants of which were found with the shards of the suitcase that contained the bomb.

The rest of the case rested on a theory that Megrahi put the luggage on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to a connecting flight to London, where it was transferred onto Pan Am 103 bound for New York, a decidedly unlikely way to undertake an act of terrorism given all the random variables involved.

Megrahi would have had to assume that three separate airport security systems – at Malta, Frankfort and London – would fail to give any serious scrutiny to an unaccompanied suitcase or to detect the bomb despite security officials being on the lookout for just such a threat.

As historian William Blum recounted in a Consortiumnews.com article after Megrahi’s 2001 conviction, "The case for the suitcase's hypothetical travels must also deal with the fact that, according to Air Malta, all the documented luggage on KM180 was collected by passengers in Frankfurt and did not continue in transit to London, and that two Pan Am on-duty officials in Frankfurt testified that no unaccompanied luggage was introduced onto Pan Am 103A, the feeder flight to London."

There also were problems with Gauci’s belated identification of Megrahi as the shirt-buyer a decade after the fact. Gauci had made contradictory IDs and had earlier given a physical description that didn’t match Megrahi. Gauci reportedly received a $2 million reward for his testimony and then moved to Australia, where he went into retirement.

In 2007, the Scottish review panel decided to reconsider Megrahi’s conviction after concluding that Gauci’s testimony was unbelievable. And without Gauci’s testimony, the case against Megrahi was virtually the same as the case against his co-defendant who was acquitted.

However, after Megrahi’s conviction in 2001, more international pressure was put on Libya, which was then regarded as the archetypal "rogue" state. Indeed, it was to get onerous economic sanctions lifted that Libya took "responsibility" for the Pan Am attack and paid reparations to the victims' families even as Libyan officials continued to deny guilt.

Yet, despite these doubts about the Pan Am 103 case, the U.S. news media continues to treat Libya’s guilt as a flat fact.

A Defector Questioned

Earlier this month, there was some excitement over the possibility that Gaddafi would be fingered as the Pan Am 103 mastermind by a high-level defector, former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa, who was believed to be in charge of Libyan intelligence in 1988.

Moussa Koussa was questioned by Scottish authorities but apparently shed little new light on the case and was allowed to go free after the interview. Very quickly the press interest over Moussa Koussa faded away.

Yet, as the clamor now builds in Official Washington for an escalation of U.S. participation in the war – and as the Pan Am 103 case is cited over and over as justification – there has been no serious reexamination of the mystery, only the repetition of Libya’s assumed guilt.

Looking across the landscape of the U.S. news media, it is hard to find any major voice suggesting peace negotiations with Gaddafi’s government or even advocating that the sincerity of its acceptance of the African Union’s plan for a cease-fire and democratic reforms should be put to the test.

Instead, virtually all the talking heads are armchair warriors, with the neoconservative editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times again leading the way by condemning Obama’s decision to minimize U.S. military participation.

 "If his real aim were to plunge NATO into a political crisis, or to exhaust the air forces and military budgets of Britain and France — which are doing most of the bombing — this would be a brilliant strategy. As it is, it is impossible to understand," the Post wrote on April 17:.

"Mr. Obama appears less intent on ousting Mr. Gaddafi or ensuring NATO’s success than in proving an ideological point — that the United States need not take the lead in a military operation that does not involve vital U.S. interests.

"How else to explain his decision to deny NATO the two most effective ground attack airplanes in the world — the AC-130 and A-10 Warthog — which exist only in the U.S. Air Force and which were attacking Mr. Gaddafi’s tanks and artillery until April 4?"

The New York Times has been equally adamant about seeing the AC-130s and A-10 Warthogs put back into action mowing down Libyan troops loyal to Gaddafi. "Mr. Obama should authorize [the ground-attack planes] to fly again under NATO command," the Times declared on April 14, reiterating a demand that the editors had made just a week earlier.

Yet, if NATO’s real goal is to minimize civilian casualties, Western countries might want to think twice about taking sides in what is shaping up as an ugly tribal war. They might even give peace a chance, rather than replay the civilian bombings in Belgrade or the "shock and awe" over Iraq.

[For more on these topics, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book set for the discount price of only $19. For details, click here.]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/042711.html










 

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The Undead Chicken

Thursday 28 April 2011
http://www.truthout.org/undead-chicken/1304012352

by: John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus


Muammar Gaddafi is the undead chicken. Bashar al-Assad of Syria and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain are the unscared monkeys.

The United States has shaped its policy toward the evolving situation in the Middle East according to the Chinese proverb of "killing the chicken to scare the monkey." The Obama administration has intervened in the conflict in Libya with the apparent goal of punishing Gaddafi for cracking down on the emerging protest movement back in February. This intervention was designed to send a message to other autocrats in the region: don't fire on your unarmed opposition — or else.

But the United States and its allies are having problems with the "or else" part of the equation. Despite going beyond a no-fly zone, they have only struck a glancing blow against Gaddafi. The chicken is bleeding, but it hasn't yet flown the coop. Rebel forces have regained their edge in the key city of Misurata, but Gaddafi's air strikes have alsoknocked out oil productionin the rebel-held zone for a month. There are voices inside NATO calling for more: more US involvement, a surge in air strikes, even boots on the ground. The talk of where to send Gaddafi into exilehas shiftedto how to handle him if he survives the onslaught.

The Obama administration continues to insist that the mission is all about protecting civilians, not instigating regime change. But that position has become ever more difficult to maintain, especially with the recent introduction of unmanned drones and their dubious record of killing large numbers of civilians in Pakistan. In Vietnam, we destroyed villages to save them; in Libya, are we killing civilians to save them? Or is US policy, as in Kosovo, more about protecting US soldiers by dispensing death from a distance? Humanitarian intervention is not a dinner party, as Mao Zedong might have said under the circumstances. It's not for the squeamish. And monkeys are not scared by chickens that have only been roughed up.

In Syria and Bahrain, the authorities may well be under siege, but the unfolding of the Libya scenario has not prompted them to step down, institute major reforms, or otherwise demonstrate their fear of outside pressure.

In Bahrain, for instance, Washington has given the ruling al-Khalifa family little more than a slap on the wrist. Since the protests began in February, the government has cracked down hard. Government forces killed more than 20 protestors; severalhave died under suspicious circumstancesin custody; more than 30 medical personnelhave simply disappeared. "US pressure was crucial in advancing democratic revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, but Washington has been far from helpful for Gulf protesters," writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Richard Javad Heydarian inThe Economics of the Arab Spring. "This has reinforced many protesters' views of the United States as a staunch supporter of oppressive regimes rather than a democracy promoter."

In addition to hosting the US Navy's Fifth Fleet — and thereby holding it hostage — Bahrain has spooked Washington by identifying the hand of Iran behind the opposition's activities. "With reference to Iran's alleged covert intelligence activities in Bahrain, the leader of the National Unity Gathering party, Shaykh Abd-al-Latif al-Mahmud went so far as to claim that the Iranian charge d'affaires himself was distributing weapons to Shi’a protesters in Manama," writes FPIF contributor Bernd Kaussler inGulf of Mistrust.

In Syria, Assad knows that the Obama administration is not going to take on yet another military intervention, particularly in a country that could easily disintegrate into a nasty civil war. Even Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), the Hill's greatest champion of military intervention in Libya,is not calling for something similarin Syria. The Syrian government has already killed several hundred protestors and sealed off the city of Dara'a, where major protests began. As a result, the Obama administration is considering targeted sanctions. But even pulling the ambassador from Damascus is not yet on the table. If the demonstrators eventually dislodge Assad or his family or the Alawite minority that rules the country, it will not likely be because of a no-fly zone or similar military action. The most that the United States has done is fund an anti-government TV station. After all, Washington is not even sure that it wants Assad gone, since thealternatives might be less palatable.

Those who hope that the Arab Spring will turn into an Arab Summer can take some heart from the turn of events in Yemen. Readers ofDexter Filkins' in-depth piece on Yemenin The New Yorker might come away with the impression that President Ali Abdullah Saleh could retain power forever through a mixture of brutality, pay-offs, and careful manipulation of a variety of après-moi-le-deluge threats including an emboldened al-Qaeda and a Somali-like failed state. And yet, even as Assad was sending in the tanks in Dara'a and Gaddafi was battling the rebels in Misurata, Saleh offered to meet a key opposition demand by stepping down. The catch is that hewants immunity from prosecution. The opposition, however, wants to see Saleh on trial, and who can blame them? Poles had to stomach a transition period with the much-reviled Wojciech Jaruzelski as president in 1989. In contrast, Egyptians have had the distinct pleasure of seeing Mubarak and sons go to prison. The Yemenis were aiming for an Egyptian solution but itnow appears that they are settlingfor a Polish one.

Saleh's sudden vulnerability stems largely from the courageous efforts of the opposition movement. He certainly didn't learn the lesson of Libya, which was that a tyrant can oppress his people, stand up to the international community, and live to rule another day. Like his fellow authoritarians in Syria and Bahrain, Muammar Gaddafi is not yet taking the golden parachute option. By maintaining his status as an undead chicken, he aims to make a monkey out of the Obama administration.

From Asia to Latin America

Shortly before the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, a crisis hit the Japan section at the State Department. Kevin Maher, head of the Japan desk, was quoted in the Japanese press saying some very unflattering things about Okinawa and Okinawans. Maher resigned but has recently claimed that the quotes were fabricated. FPIF contributor David Vine was present at the meeting with American University students where Maher made his comments, and he corroborates the reports that Maher called Okinawans "lazy" and "extortionists."

"Among the many ironies in Maher's words was his characterization of Okinawans as extortionists when US negotiators like Maher have long pressed the Japanese government for larger and larger contributions to support the US military presence in East Asia," Vine writes inSmearing Japan.

While the United States tries to mend fences with Japan, China is increasing its influence in Latin America. Chinese trade with the region has skyrocketed, and it has extended considerable aid as well. But China too has met with some of the same accusations of arrogance that the United States has in Asia. "Despite the strides that China has made in the region, countries remain apprehensive," writes FPIF contributor Sebastian Castaneda inChinese Take-Over of South America?"The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables highlighted the level of suspicion. One Colombian trade representative based in Beijing noted that his country would not be 'walked all over' by China 'like Africa.' A Mexican official stated that 'we don't want to be China's next Africa.'"

Mexico, meanwhile, is being rocked by wave after wave of drug-related murders. The Mexican government has long accused the United States of lax gun laws that encourage the flow of weapons south. Now it turns out that the US government itself has been secretly sending guns to drug cartels in Mexico.

"The operation, called 'Fast and Furious,' was run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona," explains FPIF columnist Laura Carlsen inObama's Mexicogate?"ATF sanctioned the purchase of weapons in US gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.”

http://www.truthout.org/undead-chicken/1304012352

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25 years ago—The first US attempt to murder Gaddafi

By Patrick Martin


WSWS, April 28, 2011

http://uruknet.com/?p=m77231&hd=&size=1&l=e

Describing the NATO airstrikes on the residence of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the New York Times reported, "The NATO campaign, some officials said, arose in part from an analysis of Colonel Gaddafi’s reaction to the bombing of Tripoli that was ordered by President Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago."

It is worth reviewing that act of American aggression, carried out by a conservative Republican president, because it bears uncanny similarities, in both military methods and media lies, to the contemporary actions of a Democratic president hailed by the liberals.

In his book El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War with Qaddafi (Naval Institute Press, 2003), Joseph L. Stanik gives a detailed picture of the 1986 attacks on Tripoli and Benghazi that were the culmination of a protracted campaign of destabilization waged against the Libyan regime.

Reagan decided on the air strikes in response to the Libyan role in the April 5, 1986 bombing of a West Berlin disco, in which two American off-duty soldiers were killed. Libyan agents organized the attack, which was carried out by two Palestinian men and the German wife of one of the Palestinians, who actually planted the bomb.

US military planners drew up a list of targets in the two main Libyan cities, including military as well as "terrorist training" sites, and adding key government installations as well, on the theory—embraced 25 years later by the Obama administration and NATO—that all government facilities play a role in communications to and within the military.

Reagan’s operatives, like Obama’s, included the Bab al-Aziziyah compound as a potential target for bombing, knowing that Gaddafi and many of his family members resided there.

According to Stanik’s book, Reagan personally selected Bab al-Aziziyah to be the main focus of the attack. He quotes Admiral William Crowe, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the effect that "there was strong sentiment for psychological purposes that we should do something to his personal compound and get his communications center and headquarters."

Lt. Col. Oliver North, a member of the National Security Council at the time, recalled the deliberations, which included the same type of cynical hairsplitting about assassinating Gaddafi offered this week by officials of NATO and the Obama administration.

"Killing him was never part of our plan. On the other hand, we certainly made no attempt to protect him from our bombs. By law, we couldn’t specifically target him. But if Gaddafi happened to be in the vicinity of the Aziziyah Barracks in downtown Tripoli when the bombs started to fall, nobody would have shed any tears." (Stanik, p. 152)

White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes had even prepared a statement in the event that Gaddafi was killed in the attack, calling his death "a fortunate by-product of our act of self-defense" (ibid).

Unfortunately for the Air Force pilots assigned the mission to bomb Gaddafi’s residence, the desire to kill Gaddafi outweighed the recommendations of the military planners, who allotted six warplanes to each of the three targets in Tripoli.

Reagan personally ordered the Pentagon to shift three planes from the Tripoli military airfield to the Bab al-Aziziyah compound, increasing the number of planes to nine, including two specifically targeting Gaddafi’s residence.

Stanik observes—with the professional military man’s distaste for micromanagement by politicians—"Assigning two planes to attack Gaddafi’s headquarters-residence building certainly increased the chances of killing or wounding Gaddafi, but that was not the mission’s objective."

Moreover, it endangered the pilots and was described as a "gross tactical error" by the Air Force mission planners.

Since the planes were to attack in succession, separated by 60- to 90-second intervals, the overloading of planes on Bab al-Aziziyah meant that the last of the nine would not hit the target until eight to ten minutes had elapsed, giving Libyan anti-aircraft forces ample time to recover from the initial surprise and open fire.

The result was that one of the later-arriving jets was shot down, with the loss of both airmen, who ejected into the Mediterranean Sea and were drowned.

While the American media depicted the raid as a brilliant success, only two of the nine planes that attacked Bab al-Aziziyah actually struck the compound, with the rest forced to abort because of mechanical difficulties or lack of visibility, while one dropped its load elsewhere over Tripoli, killing civilians and hitting the French and several other Western embassies. All told, 37 Libyans were killed and 93 wounded, the majority of them civilians.

Overall, of the 18 planes dispatched against Tripoli, six aborted, one was shot down, seven missed their targets and, Stanik concludes, "only four put their bombs directly on or very near their aim points."

http://uruknet.com/?p=m77231&hd=&size=1&l=e




 

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Drones of Disaster

BY Frank Scott



April 29, 2011
http://legalienate.blogspot.com/2011/04/drones-of-disaster.html

Having sent one of it’s most lethal drone weapons to Libya in the person of Senator McCain, the U.S. more firmly established its murderous bias in a civil war it has promoted and possibly helped organize. The frequency of propaganda reports telling of Kaddafi personally slaughtering great masses of "his own people" – as though anyone but Libyans would be suffering in a civil war - may indicate what passes for debate in ruling power circles:

Should we kill even more Libyans, or slightly fewer Libyans?

But the slaughter continues, with the mental state of the American people almost as great a victim as the future state of the Libyans. In truth, the struggle being waged concerns continued western financial domination of the world and not simply the localized murders at the behest of private international capital.

After the initial assault on consciousness, alternative sources of information helped slightly tone down the worst excesses of western mind management. But it continues to distort, misinform and lie about a situation bloodier because of western interference. When hostilities were apparent between the government and its opponents, instead of the United Nations operating in a peace keeping capacity and separating combatants, the puppet institution went in with guns blazing. The lie of atrocities prevented by western military intervention has become the truth of atrocities caused by western military intervention. A death toll previously alleged but with no evidence of its reality has become the reality of a death toll hardly reported at all, unless victims can be blamed on the personal identification that westerners have become habituated to: a demonic monster who is single handedly killing his people, and doing this while under assault from western powers and barely avoiding assassination. So far.

Left unreported by most media are murders of black Africans by the rebels, conveniently rationalized as the killing of mercenaries hired by the evil dictator to kill his own people. The fact of Kaddafi’s popularity among many black Africans not totally owned or controlled by western colonial powers is avoided and the racial hatreds of some Libyans for blacks isn’t mentioned at all. Of course, the half white American chief executive with an African father should not be expected to do anything but represent his system, and certainly not express critical thought let alone compassion for what some might call his paternal ancestors. His job is to maintain the domain of private capital, not change it, and this latest calamity may help more people to understand that fact and end their religious faith in his representing any form of change beyond the cosmetic.

While criticism of the Libyan attack is growing on the edges of society, the center seems totally disposed to kill more people and cover the atrocity with stories of ending another in a series of dictatorships, all with some things in common even if they took different paths to arrive at the same point. That being a desire to have a measure of public rather than exclusively private control of national wealth, whether that wealth was based on what comes out of the earth or, more important, what comes out of a bank.

While spreading stories of their pending slaughter, the rebels of Libya were somehow able to form a private bank, with the aid of their European puppeteers, as well as their own oil company. It must have been very difficult for them to accomplish this task while experiencing genocide and other media created assaults from the wicked dictator who had resisted such financial changes and in fact led his country in the opposite direction. Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, the free world president of change we can believe in - assuming we believe in tooth fairies and the Easter bunny – asserted his leadership in making war in Libya in order to "maintain the flow of commerce", said flow assuming the current of an economic tsunami in most of the world and resisted by growing numbers of earth inhabitants though hardly by their rulers. The president has let it be known that he will need billions to run for reelection and his owners are already at work collecting that sum and selecting suitably imbecilic opponents that even he can beat. Already, a particularly dumb billionaire has entered the race in order to make Sarah Palin seem intellectual by comparison and we can expect far more members of the opposition flat earth society to enter the race for superintendent of the collapsing structure. They have nothing to lose, but we face further calamity the longer this mob is allowed to stake out a future of more profits for them, with greater loss for mother earth and us.

Kaddafi’s shortcomings as a leader are or may be a problem for some Libyans, but they are none of the business of the western powers that are trying to destroy an independent attempt on the part of a nation once a member of the European slave and colonial class. The supposedly evil dictator’s popularity among many back Africans has to do with his attempts at unifying Africa and moving towards its independence from and equality with the fading great powers. That fading is a fact of life, but the faders are not going gracefully. They continue to endanger any notion of democracy and social justice as they behave like bloody maniacs, all the while claiming to support humanity, freedom and the dignity of the common people. We may be lucky that a judgmental and righteous old testament god does not rule or we might all be consumed in an enormous earthquake and holocaust that would leave nothing as evidence we’d ever been here. Luckily, that is not the case and we have the capacity to transform our world before it is destroyed by out of control forces. In order to do that, we have to stop believing myths about an alleged dictator in Libya, and most especially about an alleged liberator in the USA.

http://legalienate.blogspot.com/2011/04/drones-of-disaster.html


 

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Map of Libya Oil Exports


1.55 million barrles a day


 
Global Research, April 30, 2011
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24560
AFP 

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Gaddafi: Libya Ready To Enter Ceasefire


Sky News

April 30, 2011

VIDEO & ARTICLE HERE

http://uruknet.com/?p=m77284&hd=&size=1&l=e