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

[One Revelator]

Ive felt   there is much more to this than than quelling a rebellion.
Couple of examples hit me,In Past- Cambodia's killing fields,the continuing slaughter in Burma, and presently the continuing murder of demonstrators neighboring countries etc.
              Dafi didn't play the game by their rules!
Off subject, but maby relevant as to elite methods.
    Tell me if I'm off base here, JFK, it seems to me that in order for him to assend to the office of the president he must have nodded a few times for the elites. However once in he revealed his true intentions, thefor the elitists exterminated him. And NO I'm not comparing Dafi  to JFK!!!
 

The Milosevic trial in the Hague was supposed to drag on for years and, I think, some of the judges resigned in the middle of it. Milosevic may have been associated with the Rosicrucian society. This was after Kosovo, legally part of Serbia, was stolen and taken over by international banksters.

Saddam’s trial was even more interesting since there were times when his judge ordered the courtroom cleared to have private conversations with the defendant. Nobody was allowed to hear what they talked about.

Gotta wonder if these guys are really dead.

Both are examples of “go along with the program or we’ll force it to happen” from an elite POV.

Then there’s this statement from another thread

Only 5 nations are without a Rothschilds controlled Central Bank,
> Iran; N. Korea; Sudan; Cuba; and Libya.

Based on these patterns, I would expect the same planned fate for Dafi.

[bigron]

The War on Libya: Selected News Articles

By William Bowles
 
Global Research, March 28, 2011
creative-i.info 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24000


This selection is prepared by William Bowles

28 March 2011

■BBC: Libya raids hit Gaddafi hometown
■Greenleft: Libya: West�s bombs no solution
■Venezuela Analysis: Venezuela Says U.S., Allies Repeating Libya Strategy in Syria
■Greenleft: Mark Steel: Hypocritical West can�t claim to be Libya�s friend
■RT: NATO takes command in Libya, approves �No-fly plus�
■Stop Nato: Updates on Libyan war: March 28
■RT: Vengeance of the West on Gaddafi
■Global Research: Reasons and False Pretexts: Why are They Making War on Libya?
■BBC: VIDEO: Influx of Libyan immigrants to Italy
■MRZine: Yoshie Furuhashi, "Loving the Libyan Rebels"
■The Independent: One by one, the milestones on the road to Tripoli are falling
■The Independent: Fox denies being 'frozen out' of Whitehall Libya discussions
27 March 2011
■The Independent: Nato assumes control of Libya military operation
■BBC: David Miliband helps Ed on Libya
■BBC: Libyan migrants arrive in Italy
■Dandelion Salad: Gadhafi, Libya, counter-revolution, and the pack of imperialist hyenas by Fazal Rahman, Ph.D.
■SCF: Italy, Germany to table Libya plan
■SCF: UK won�t arm Libyan rebels
■No War on Libya � Communist Corresponding Society
■Morning Star: Hawks plan regime change
■Morning Star: AU plan for peace in Libya
■Global Research: Attack on Libya: Why Odyssey Dawn Is Doomed
■Morning Star: Nato warlords agree on air strike strategy
■BBC: Libyan rebels 'oil export deal'
■Creative-i.info: Libya Conflict Highlights NATO�s Imperialist Mission By Joseph Gerson
■Mathaba News: US-Led Libyan Ground Assault Planned
■Common Man News: Libya's "Operation Odyssey Dawn": Kosovo Revisited
■The Independent: Rebel gains 'change Libya dynamic'
■SCF: Libya: The Objective of "Humanitarian Bombing" is Death and Destruction
■BBC: VIDEO: Advancing rebels take key Libya towns
■Global Research: The Al Qaeda Connection: Who are we Helping in Libya? Here are Some Answers.
■Greenleft: Philippines: Muslims protest Libya bombing
■BBC: Fox brushes off Libya rift report
■Creative-i.info: Partnership of Equals By Fidel Castro Ruz
■williambowles.info: Libya Newslinks 26-27 March 2011
■The Independent: Libyan rebels capture Brega
■BBC: 'No arms' for Libya rebels - Fox
■BBC: Libyan rebels make further gains
■BBC: VIDEO: Liam Fox: Nato to take over in Libya
■Links Int'l: Libya, imperialism and ALBA
■SCF: Allied air strikes hit Gaddafi's stronghold of Sabha - Libyan state TV
■RT: Libyan opposition heads west with new victories
■Global Research: Reasons and False Pretexts: Why are They Making War on Libya?
■Links Int'l: Libya, imperialism and ALBA
■Stop Nato: Updates on Libyan War: March 27
■BBC: French jets strike Gaddafi planes
■Links Int'l: Malaysian socialists: 'Imperialist powers hands off Libya! Solidarity with people�s uprising in Libya and Arab states!
■Global Research: US-NATO warplanes strike Libyan ground forces
■Dandelion Salad: Keith Olbermann�s Special Comment: Libya, Obama, and the Five-Second Rule
■The Independent: Woman accuses Gaddafi's men of rape
■The Independent: Gaddafi forces on the run as rebels advance
26 March 2011
■BBC: Libyan rebels advance westwards
■ICH: Libyan Rebel Commander Admits his Fighters Have Al-Qaeda Links
■Global Research: Western warplanes bombed civilian targets in Libya's capital
■Global Research: US NATO bomb civilian targets in Libya
■The Independent: Libyan rebels recapture Ajdabiya 


FOR ALL ABOVE LINKS GO TO :

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24000

[shipgeek]

Satanic US Sends Ground Attack Planes To Slaughter Libyans

U.S. deploys low-flying attack planes in Libya

The U.S. military dramatically stepped up its assault on Libyan government ground forces over the weekend, launching its first missions with AC-130 flying gunships and A-10 attack aircraft designed to strike enemy ground troops and supply convoys.

The use of the aircraft, during days of heavy fighting in which the momentum seemed to swing in favor of the rebels, demonstrated how allied military forces have been drawn deeper into the chaotic fight in Libya. A mission that initially seemed to revolve around establishing a no-fly zone has become focused on halting advances by government ground forces in and around key coastal cities.

continued...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us_deploys_low_flying_attack_planes_in_libya/2011/03/26/AF9grPqB_story.html?wprss=rss_homepage

what they are doing in Libya is uttlerly disgusting

[Kilika]

If they are using A-10's and C-130's, then they have moved beyond a no-fly zone. That is clearly ground support, and the only way those kinds of assets can be used effectively is if they are being dircted from eyes on the ground. The question is then, who's eyes? I suspect it's not locals calling in close air support! That means they technically have the proverbial "boots on the ground".

So much for "no-fly zone".

[Paranoid Puppet Master]

I'm starting to feel like I've been lied to!  Next time, I'm gonna vote for the other party, I'm gonna vote for change, yeah that'll show 'em!!!

[bigron]

Middle East
Mar 30, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC30Ak01.html 
 

THE ROVING EYE

 
There's no business like war business

By Pepe Escobar


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

Lies, hypocrisy and hidden agendas. This is what United States President Barack Obama did not dwell on when explaining his Libya doctrine to America and the world. The mind boggles with so many black holes engulfing this splendid little war that is not a war (a "time-limited, scope-limited military action", as per the White House) - compounded with the inability of progressive thinking to condemn, at the same time, the ruthlessness of the Muammar Gaddafi regime and the Anglo-French-American "humanitarian" bombing.

United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 has worked like a Trojan horse, allowing the Anglo-French-American consortium - and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) - to become the UN's air force in its support of an armed uprising. Apart from having nothing to do with protecting civilians, this arrangement is absolutely illegal in terms of international law. The inbuilt endgame, as even malnourished African kids know by now, but has never been acknowledged, is regime change.

Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard of Canada, NATO's commander for Libya, may insist all he wants that the mission is purely designed to protect civilians. Yet those "innocent civilians" operating tanks and firing Kalashnikovs as part of a rag-tag wild bunch are in fact soldiers in a civil war - and the focus should be on whether NATO from now on will remain their air force, following the steps of the Anglo-French-American consortium. Incidentally, the "coalition of the wiling" fighting Libya consists of only 12 NATO members (out of 28) plus Qatar. This has absolutely nothing to do with an "international community".

The full verdict on the UN-mandated no-fly zone will have to wait for the emergence of a "rebel" government and the end of the civil war (if it ends soon). Then it will be possible to analyze how Tomahawking and bombing was ever justified; why civilians in Cyrenaica were "protected" while those in Tripoli were Tomahawked; what sort of "rebel" motley crew was "saved"; whether this whole thing was legal in the first place; how the resolution was a cover for regime change; how the love affair between the Libyan "revolutionaries" and the West may end in bloody divorce (remember Afghanistan); and which Western players stand to immensely profit from the wealth of a new, unified (or balkanized) Libya.

For the moment at least, it's quite easy to identify the profiteers.

The Pentagon

Pentagon supremo Robert Gates said this weekend, with a straight face, there are only three repressive regimes in the whole Middle East: Iran, Syria and Libya. The Pentagon is taking out the weak link - Libya. The others were always key features of the neo-conservative take-out/evil list. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, etc are model democracies.

As for this "now you see it, now you don't" war, the Pentagon is managing to fight it not once, but twice. It started with Africom - established under the George W Bush administration, beefed up under Obama, and rejected by scores of African governments, scholars and human rights organizations. Now the war is transitioning to NATO, which is essentially Pentagon rule over its European minions.

This is Africom's first African war, conducted up to now by General Carter Ham out of his headquarters in un-African Stuttgart. Africom, as Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies and political science at Syracuse University puts it, is a scam; "fundamentally a front for US military contractors like Dyncorp, MPRI and KBR operating in Africa. US military planners who benefit from the revolving door of privatization of warfare are delighted by the opportunity to give Africom credibility under the facade of the Libyan intervention."

Africom's Tomahawks also hit - metaphorically - the African Union (AU), which, unlike the Arab League, cannot be easily bought by the West. The Arab Gulf petro-monarchies all cheered the bombing - but not Egypt and Tunisia. Only five African countries are not subordinated to Africom; Libya is one of them, along with Sudan, Ivory Coast, Eritrea and Zimbabwe.

NATO

NATO's master plan is to rule the Mediterranean as a NATO lake. Under these "optics" (Pentagon speak) the Mediterranean is infinitely more important nowadays as a theater of war than AfPak.

There are only three out of 20 nations on or in the Mediterranean that are not full members of NATO or allied with its "partnership" programs: Libya, Lebanon and Syria. Make no mistake; Syria is next. Lebanon is already under a NATO blockade since 2006. Now a blockade also applies to Libya. The US - via NATO - is just about to square the circle.

Saudi Arabia

What a deal. King Abdullah gets rid of his eternal foe Gaddafi. The House of Saud - in trademark abject fashion - bends over backwards for the West's benefit. The attention of world public opinion is diverted from the Saudis invading Bahrain to smash a legitimate, peaceful, pro-democracy protest movement.

The House of Saud sold the fiction that "the Arab League" as a whole voted for a no-fly zone. That is a lie; out of 22 members, only 11 were present at the vote; six are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. The House of Saud just needed to twist the arms of three more. Syria and Algeria were against it. Translation; only nine out of 22 Arab countries voted for the no-fly zone.

Now Saudi Arabia can even order GCC head Abdulrahman al-Attiyah to say, with a straight face, "the Libyan system has lost its legitimacy." As for the "legitimate" House of Saud and the al-Khalifas in Bahrain, someone should induct them into the Humanitarian Hall of Fame.

Qatar

The hosts of the 2022 soccer World Cup sure know how to clinch a deal. Their Mirages are helping to bomb Libya while Doha gets ready to market eastern Libya oil. Qatar promptly became the first Arab nation to recognize the Libyan "rebels" as the only legitimate government of the country only one day after securing the oil marketing deal.

The 'rebels'

All the worthy democratic aspirations of the Libyan youth movement notwithstanding, the most organized opposition group happens to be the National Front for the Salvation of Libya - financed for years by the House of Saud, the CIA and French intelligence. The rebel "Interim Transitional National Council" is little else than the good ol' National Front, plus a few military defectors. This is the elite of the "innocent civilians" the "coalition" is "protecting".

Right on cue, the "Interim Transitional National Council" has got a new finance minister, US-educated economist Ali Tarhouni. He disclosed that a bunch of Western countries gave them credit backed by Libya's sovereign fund, and the British allowed them to access $1.1 billion of Gaddafi's funds. This means the Anglo-French-American consortium - and now NATO - will only pay for the bombs. As war scams go this one is priceless; the West uses Libya's own cash to finance a bunch of opportunists Libyan rebels to fight the Libyan government. And on top of it the Americans, the Brits and the French feel the love for all that bombing. Neo-cons must be kicking themselves; why couldn't former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz come up with something like this for Iraq 2003?

The French

Oh la la, this could be material for a Proustian novel. The top spring collection in Paris catwalks is the President Nicolas Sarkozy fashion show - a no-fly zone model with Mirage/Rafale air strike accessories. This fashion show was masterminded by Nouri Mesmari, Gaddafi's chief of protocol, who defected to France in October 2010. The Italian secret service leaked to selected media outlets how he did it. The role of the DGSE, the French secret service, has been more or less explained on paid website Maghreb Confidential.

Essentially, the Benghazi revolt coq au vin had been simmering since November 2010. The cooks were Mesmari, air force colonel Abdullah Gehani, and the French secret service. Mesmari was called "Libyan WikiLeak", because he spilled over virtually every one of Gaddafi's military secrets. Sarkozy loved it - furious because Gaddafi had cancelled juicy contracts to buy Rafales (to replace his Mirages now being bombed) and French-built nuclear power plants.

That explains why Sarkozy has been so gung ho into posing as the new Arab liberator, was the first leader of a European power to recognize the "rebels" (to the disgust of many at the European Union), and was the first to bomb Gaddafi's forces.

This busts open the role of shameless self-promoting philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, who's now frantically milking in the world's media that he phoned Sarkozy from Benghazi and awakened his humanitarian streak. Either Levy is a patsy, or a convenient "intellectual" cherry added to the already-prepared bombing cake.

Terminator Sarkozy is unstoppable. He has just warned every single Arab ruler that they face Libya-style bombing if they crack down on protesters. He even said that the Ivory Coast was "next". Bahrain and Yemen, of course, are exempt. As for the US, it is once again supporting a military coup (it didn't work with Omar "Sheikh al-Torture" Suleiman in Egypt; maybe it will work in Libya).

Al-Qaeda
 
The oh so convenient bogeyman resurfaces. The Anglo-French-American consortium - and now NATO - are (again) fighting alongside al-Qaeda, represented by al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQM).

Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi - who has fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan - extensively confirmed to Italian media that he had personally recruited "around 25" jihadis from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against the US in Iraq; now "they are on the front lines in Adjabiya".

This after Chad's president Idriss Deby stressed that AQM had raided military arsenals in Cyrenaica and may be now holding quite a few surface-to-air missiles. In early March, AQM publicly supported the "rebels". The ghost of Osama bin Laden must be pulling a Cheshire cat; once again he gets the Pentagon to work for him.

The water privatizers

Few in the West may know that Libya - along with Egypt - sits over the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer; that is, an ocean of extremely valuable fresh water. So yes, this "now you see it, now you don't" war is a crucial water war. Control of the aquifer is priceless - as in "rescuing" valuable natural resources from the "savages".

This Water Pipelineistan - buried underground deep in the desert along 4,000 km - is the Great Man-Made River Project (GMMRP), which Gaddafi built for $25 billion without borrowing a single cent from the IMF or the World Bank (what a bad example for the developing world). The GMMRP supplies Tripoli, Benghazi and the whole Libyan coastline. The amount of water is estimated by scientists to be the equivalent to 200 years of water flowing down the Nile.

Compare this to the so-called three sisters - Veolia (formerly Vivendi), Suez Ondeo (formerly Generale des Eaux) and Saur - the French companies that control over 40% of the global water market. All eyes must imperatively focus on whether these pipelines are bombed. An extremely possible scenario is that if they are, juicy "reconstruction" contracts will benefit France. That will be the final step to privatize all this - for the moment free - water. From shock doctrine to water doctrine.

Well, that's only a short list of profiteers - no one knows who'll get the oil - and the natural gas - in the end. Meanwhile, the (bombing) show must go on. There's no business like war business.

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/MC30Ak01.html
 

[bigron]

An Administration Out of Control

Posted By Rep. Ron Paul

On March 28, 2011 @ 11:00 pm
http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2011/03/28/an-administration-out-of-control/

To hear Rep. Ron Paul deliver this address, click here.
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/paul032811.mp3


Last week the Obama administration took the United States to war against Libya without bothering to notify Congress, much less obtain a constitutionally mandated declaration of war. In the midst of our severe economic downturn, this misadventure has already cost us hundreds of millions of dollars, and we can be sure the final price tag will be several times higher.

Why did the U.S. intervene in a civil war in a country that has neither attacked us nor poses a threat? We are told this was another humanitarian intervention, like Clinton’s 1999 war against Serbia. But as civilian victims of the U.S.-led coalition bombing continue to add up, it is getting difficult to determine whether the problem we are creating on the ground is worse than the one we were trying to solve.

Though the administration seems to be playing with semantics, calling this a “kinetic military action,” let’s be clear: this is a U.S. act of war on Libya. Imposing a no-fly zone over the air space of a sovereign nation is an act of war, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pointed out before the bombing began. That the administration hesitates to call this war, possibly due to the troubling constitutional implications, does not mean that it is not one. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution could not be clearer: the power and obligation to declare war resides solely in the U.S. Congress.

There was ample time and opportunity for the administration to consult the UN, NATO, and the Arab League before going to war, but not the U.S. Congress.

Aside from the manner in which the administration took us to war, it is also troubling that our government has taken a decisive stand for one side of an internal conflict in another sovereign country. The administration speaks out of both sides of its mouth on this, claiming that the U.S. is not attempting to overthrow the Gadhafi regime while clearly benefitting the rebels and stating that Gadhafi must leave. Does this make any sense? Gadhafi may well be every bit the “bad guy” we are told he is, but who are the rebels we are assisting? Do we have any clue? Will they bring freedom and prosperity to Libya if they are victorious? We might like to hope so, but the fact is, we don’t know. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, explained in a recent article that there is plausible reason to believe the rebels are current or former Islamist mujahedin, eager to engage in jihad. Indeed, Gadhafi has fought against Libyan Islamists for years and is seen by them as a bitter enemy. Astoundingly, it may well be that we are assisting al-Qaeda in this new war!

The costs of this terrible mistake cannot be ignored. Congress has been locked in battles over budget cuts and agonizing over ways to save money. Recent proposed spending cuts have by now been completely wiped out with this new war! Will we be rebuilding Libya 10 years from now? Will Congress simply roll over and rubber stamp more emergency spending bills for this new war as they have done in the past? We must end our participation in any attack on Libya immediately, and I have signed on to legislation that would do exactly that. Congress must assert its constitutional authority and rein in an administration clearly out of control.

http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2011/03/28/an-administration-out-of-control/

[No2NWO]

US paves way to arm Libyan rebels

Clinton tells London conference that UN security council resolution 1973 over-rode absolute prohibition of arms to Libya

Hillary Clinton has paved the way for the United States to arm the Libyan rebels by declaring that the recent UN security council resolution relaxed an arms embargo on the country.

As Libya's opposition leaders called for the international community to arm them, the secretary of state indicated that the US was considering whether to meet their demands when she talked of a "work in progress".

The US indicated on Monday night that it had not ruled out arming the rebels, though it was assumed this would take some time because of a UN arms embargo which applies to all sides in Libya.

But Clinton made clear that UN security council resolution 1973, which allowed military strikes against Muammar Gaddafi's regime, relaxed the embargo. Speaking after the conference on Libya in London, Clinton said: "It is our interpretation that [resolution] 1973 amended or overrode the absolute prohibition of arms to anyone in Libya so that there could be legitimate transfer of arms if a country were to choose to do that. We have not made that decision at this time."

Clinton's remarks came after the Libyan Transitional National Council used the London conference to issue a plea to be armed.

Mahmoud Shammam, the council's head of media, told a press conference at the Foreign Office: "We asked everybody to help us in many ways. One of them is giving our youth some real weapons.

"If you look to the reports that you have from the streets of Libya or from the cities of Libya you will see that our people have very light arms. You can see that just regular cars are fighting with machine guns. We don't have arms at all, otherwise we finish Gaddafi in a few days. But we don't have arms. We ask for the political support more than we are asking for the arms. But if we get both that would be great."

Signs of a growing international support for arming the rebels was highlighted by Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, who was the most senior Arab politician to attend the summit. Al-Thani, whose country is providing military aircraft to help patrol the no-fly zone over Libya, said: "We did not discuss [arming the rebels] – definitely [at the conference]. But our opinion is that we have to evaluate the air strikes after a while to see if it is effective to protect the people of Libya or not.

"At that time we – the international community – have to see what sort of measures [should be taken]. We are not talking about invading Libya. But we have to evaluate the situation because we cannot allow the people to suffer for so long. We have to find a way to stop this bloodshed."

The foreign secretary, William Hague, who chaired the conference, indicated that Britain may be prepared to interpret UN security resolution 1973 in the same way as Clinton. Until now, Britain has said it believes it would be illegal to arm any side in Libya. He said: "We did not discuss at the conference today arming the opposition … but this subject has been raised by the national council. But it is not part of any agreement today. The UK takes into account the UN security council resolutions on this. Those resolutions in our view apply to the whole of Libya, although it is consistent with UN security council resolution 1973 to give people aid in order to defend themselves in particular circumstances."

Clinton cautioned that no decision had yet been made on arming the rebels as she said the first priority was to provide financial support for the Transitional National Council.

"We have not made any decision about arming the rebels or providing any arms transfers. So there has not been any need to discuss that at this point. We did discuss non-lethal assistance. We discussed ways of trying to enable the Transitional National Council to meet a lot of their financial needs and how we can do that through the international community given the challenges that sanctions pose, but recognising that they are going to need funds to keep going."

Clinton had earlier warned that coalition military action in Libya will continue until Gaddafi complies with the terms of UN security council resolution 1973. "We have prevented a potential massacre," the secretary of state told the conference.

"This coalition military action will continue until Gaddafi fully complies with the terms of 1973, ceases his attacks on civilians, pulls his troops back from places they have forcibly entered and allows key services and humanitarian assistance to reach all civilians.

Clinton and Hague also indicated that the US and Britain accept that Gaddafi may be able to escape into exile.

Clinton said: "As the Arab League has said, it is obvious to everyone that Gaddafi has lost the legitimacy to lead. We believe he must go … he will have to make a decision and that decision, so far as we aware, has not yet been made … a political resolution could include him leaving the country."

Hague said: "We of course support the reference to the international criminal court. We are not engaged in the United Kingdom in looking for somewhere for him to go. That doesn't exclude others doing so."

The Qatari prime minister admitted that Arab countries are not making a big enough contribution to the military action. Al-Thani said: "I agree the Arab involvement is not so big or not so concrete. But at least there are some Arab countries participating physically and some Arab countries participating at the conference here in London. I hope it will increase. I hope the Arab League has in the future a mechanism to do these things. This is an internal Arab problem. Unfortunately we could not do it by ourselves."

David Cameron opened the conference with a warning that Gaddafi is still in "flagrant breach" of the UN resolution and is allowing civilians to bleed to death in the streets of Misrata.

Cameron said Gaddafi's behaviour in Misrata showed the need for military action, which had averted a massacre and saved Benghazi. The prime minister underlined his message by giving a vivid account of the battle in Misrata as he addressed more than 40 foreign ministers and representatives of international organisations gathered at Lancaster House.

He said: "Gaddafi is using snipers to shoot [the people of Misrata] down and let them bleed to death in the street. He has cut off food, water and electricity to starve them into submission. He continues to be in flagrant breach of the UN security council resolution. That is why there has been such widespread support amongst the Libyan people – and in the wider Arab world – for the military action we are taking. It has saved lives, and it is saving lives."

Cameron, who convened the conference as Nato prepared to assume command of the military campaign from the US, said the conference was designed to help create a peaceful Libya as he set out three goals for the meeting:

• Reaffirm the international community's commitment to UN security council resolution 1973, which allowed for "all necessary measures" to protect civilians in Libya. This has allowed for the imposition of a no-fly zone, the enforcement of an arms embargo and air strikes to protect civilians.

• Ensure that humanitarian aid is delivered to the Libyan people.

• Help the Libyan people plan for their future once the conflict is over. The prime minister announced that a contact group would be established to help monitor the transition. This will consist of the EU, the UN, the Arab League, the African Union, and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

Libya's Transitional National Council was consulted, though this was on an informal basis because countries such as Britain are unable to recognise it as the formal representative of Libya. Cameron, who met Mahmoud Jabril, the council's special envoy on Tuesday, hailed a "vision for a democratic Libya" set out by the council.

The prime minister reached out to the Arab world by making clear that rebuilding the symbols of Islam, destroyed in the recent fighting, would be at the heart of the reconstruction of Libya. "When the fighting is over, we will need to put right the damage that Gaddafi has inflicted. Repairing the hospitals ruined by shells, rebuilding the homes demolished by Gaddafi's tank rounds and restoring the mosques and minarets smashed by his barbarity."

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, announced that his special envoy, Abdelilah Mohamed al-Khatib, would travel to Libya after the conference to talk to both sides. The secretary general indicated that the two sides were guilty of human rights abuses. "We continue to receive deeply disturbing reports about the lack of protection of civilians, including various abuses of human rights by the parties to the conflict," he said.

Story and video: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/29/arms-libya-rebels

[bigron]

NATO Chief Opens The Door to Libya Ground Troops


By Spencer Ackerman

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27790.htm

March 29, 2011 "Wired" --  The mantra, from President Obama on down, is that ground forces are totally ruled out for Libya. After all, the United Nations Security Council Resolution authorizing the war explicitly rules out any “occupation” forces. But leave it to the top military officer of NATO, which takes over the war on Wednesday, to add an asterisk to that ban.
During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island asked Adm. James Stavridis about NATO putting forces into “post-Gadhafi” Libya to make sure the country doesn’t fall apart. Stavridis said he “wouldn’t say NATO’s considering it yet.” But because of NATO’s history of putting peacekeepers in the Balkans — as pictured above — “the possibility of a stabilization regime exists.”

So welcome to a new possible “endgame” for Libya. Western troops patrolling Libya’s cities during a a shaky transition after Moammar Gadhafi’s regime has fallen, however that’s supposed to happen. Thousands of NATO troops patrolled Bosnia and Kosovo’s tense streets for years. And Iraq and Afghanistan taught the U.S. and NATO very dearly that fierce insurgent conflict can follow the end of a brutal regime. In fact, it’s the moments after the regime falls that can be the most dangerous of all — especially if well-intentioned foreign troops become an object of local resentment.

In fact, Stavridis told Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma that he saw “flickers of intelligence” indicating “al-Qaeda [and] Hezbollah” have fighters amongst the Libyan rebels. The Supreme Allied Commander of NATO noted that the leadership of the rebels are “responsible men and women struggling against Col. Gadhafi” and couldn’t say if the terrorist element in the opposition is “significant.” But the U.S. knows precious little about who the Libyan rebels are.

The new prospect of NATO force on the ground in Libya seemed to alarm Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who got Stavridis to say that there’s “no discussion of the insertion of ground troops” in NATO circles. (And “to my knowledge” there aren’t troops there now, he said.) But Stavridis told Reed that the memory of the long NATO peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans is “in everyone’s mind.”

President Obama boasted about the rapidity with which the U.S. and its allies got involved in Libya. Some defense wonks, like Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, criticized Obama’s team for not exhibiting diligent planning before Operation Odyssey Dawn began. Obama didn’t signal an endgame in his Monday speech, just vowing not to use any ground forces to get there.

That was exactly what President Clinton promised in Bosnia — right before sending 20,000 U.S. soldiers to enforce the 1995 Balkans peace deal. Because of the U.S.’ commitments to NATO and NATO’s commitments to enforcing the peace accord, U.S. peacekeepers ended up staying there for a decade. That history may be weighing on officers in Europe, but the Obama administration doesn’t seem to be so troubled.

Update, 12:08 p.m.: Stavridis argued that it’s “premature” to talk about an exit strategy for Libya. And as a way of underscoring NATO’s resolve, he reminded senators that nearly 12 years after NATO’s Kosovo air war, there are still 5000 peacekeepers in Kosovo, including 700 Americans.

Update, 12:33 p.m.: Got a question about the difference between Stavridis’ two jobs — chief of U.S. European Command and NATO military leader — as it applies to Libya? Check out a blog post Stavridis wrote about it on Monday.

Update, 2:25 p.m.: I asked Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, about sending ground troops during a post-Gadhafi phase. Any such “international peacekeeping force” would have to occur “through the United Nations, as well as the structures we’re setting up in NATO,” and would require an “assessment of what the security needs are in post-Gadhafi Libya,” he said. But as for a U.S. contribution, “I would rule it out for the time being. … the U.S. has no plans, we’re not doing any planning to have any boots on the ground in any fashion.”

   
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27790.htm

[bigron]

 

Obama Raises American Hypocrisy To A Higher Level



By Paul Craig Roberts


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27783.htm

March 29, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- What does the world think? Obama has been using air strikes and drones against civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and probably Somalia. In his March 28 speech, Obama justified his air strikes against Libya on the grounds that the embattled ruler, Gadhafi, was using air strikes to put down a rebellion.

Gadhafi has been a black hat for as long as I can remember. If we believe the adage that “where there is smoke there is fire,” Gadhafi is probably not a nice fellow. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that the current US president and the predecessor Bush/Cheney regime have murdered many times more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than Gadhafi has murdered in Libya.

Moreover, Gadhafi is putting down a rebellion against state authority as presently constituted, but Obama and Bush/Cheney initiated wars of aggression based entirely on lies and deception.

Yet Gadhafi is being demonized, and Bush/Cheney/Obama are sitting on their high horse draped in cloaks of morality. Obama described himself as saving Libyans from violence while Obama himself murders Afghans, Pakistanis, and whomever else.

Indeed, the Obama regime has been torturing a US soldier, Bradley Manning, for having a moral conscience. America has degenerated to the point where having a moral conscience is evidence of anti-Americanism and “terrorist activity.”

The Bush/Cheney/Obama wars of naked aggression have bankrupted America. Joseph Stiglitz, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that the money wasted on the Iraq war could have been used to fix America’s Social Security problem for half a century. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/28/iraq.afghanistan Instead, the money was used to boost the obscene profits of the armament industry.

The obscene wars of aggression, the obscene profits of the offshoring corporations, and the obscene bailouts of the rich financial gangsters have left the American public with
annual budget deficits of approximately $1.5 trillion. These deficits are being covered by printing money. Sooner or later, the printing presses will cause the US dollar to collapse and domestic inflation to explode. Social Security benefits will be wiped out by inflation rising more rapidly than the cost-of-living adjustments. If America survives, no one will be left but the mega-rich. Unless there is a violent revolution.

Alternatively, if the Federal Reserve puts the brake on monetary expansion, interest rates will rise, sending the economy into a deeper depression.

Washington, focused on its newest war, is oblivious to America’s peril. As Stiglitz notes, the costs of the Iraq war alone could have kept every foreclosed family in their home, provided health care for every American child, and wiped out the student loans of graduates who cannot find jobs because they have been outsoured to foreigners. However, the great democratic elected government of “the world’s only superpower” prefers to murder Muslims in order to enhance the profits of the military/security complex. More money is spent violating the constitutional rights of American air travelers than is spent in behalf of the needy.

The moral authority of the West is rapidly collapsing. When Russia, Asia, and South America look at Europe, Australia and Canada, they see American puppet states that contribute troops to the aggressive wars of the Empire. The French president, the British prime minister, the “president” of Georgia, and the rest are merely functionaries of the American Empire. The puppet rulers routinely sell out the interests and welfare of their peoples in behalf of American hegemony. And they are well rewarded for their service. One year out of office former British prime minister Tony Blair had a net worth of $30 million.

In his war against Libya, Obama has taken America one step further into Caesarism. Obama did Bush one step better and did not even bother to get congressional authorization for his attack on Libya. Obama claimed that his moral authority trumped the US Constitution. The hypocrisy reeks. How the public stands it, I do not know:
“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and--more profoundly--our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

This from the Great Moral Leader who every day murders civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and now Libya and who turns a blind eye when “the
great democracy in the Middle East,” Israel, murders more Palestinians.

The American president, whose drones and air force slaughter civilians every day of the year went on to say Libya stands alone in presenting the world with “the prospect of violence on a horrific scale.” Obviously, Obama thinks that one million dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, and an unknown number of murdered Afghans is just a small thing.

The rest of Obama’s speech showed a person more capable of DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink than Big Brother and the denizens of George Orwell’s 1984.

How does a person as totally absurd as Obama expect to be taken seriously?
 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27783.htm
 

[bigron]

Obama on Libya: Defending the Indefensible


by Stephen Lendman


http://uruknet.com/?p=m76373&hd=&size=1&l=e

March 30, 2011

Obama's March 28 television address wreaked of hypocrisy, lies and disdain for basic democratic values, making an indefensible case for naked aggression against a non-belligerent country. America's media approved.

On March 28, New Times writer Helene Cooper headlined, "Obama Cites Limits of US Role in Libya," saying:

Obama "defended the American-led military assault in Libya on Monday, saying it was in the national interest of the United States to stop a potential massacre that would have 'stained the conscience of the world,' " even though no threat existed until:

-- Washington showed up with co-belligerents France and Britain;

-- beginning in 2010, armed and funded so-called "rebels" who, in fact, are cutthroat killers, rapists and marauders, terrorizing every area they control, including their Benghazi stronghold; and

-- support them with daily "shock and awe" terror attacks, causing increasing numbers of deaths and injuries, as well as destruction and contamination of all areas struck by depleted uranium bombs, missiles and shells, spreading radiation over wide areas.

Despite Pentagon denials, conservative estimates put civilian deaths at over 100, besides combatants killed and unknown numbers murdered by rebel allies. Since March 19 air attacks began, nearly 1,500 sorties have been flown, that number to rise exponentially as daily strikes continue under US command, running all NATO operations under AFRICOM's General Carter Ham. Alleged new commander, Canada's Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, is his subordinate, a Pentagon figurehead.

The alleged handover is fabricated. NATO is code language for America/the Pentagon. Obama lied announcing otherwise, saying Washington's role will be limited to stop potential "slaughter and mass graves" in Benghazi. In fact, he supports and/or ignores rebel terror killings against defenseless civilians, making him complicit in their crimes, besides widespread ones caused by NATO, America's missile. US attacks, in fact, will continue throughout the campaign, perhaps lasting months at an enormous cost, besides hundreds of billions annually in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Making an indefensible case, Obama said:

"For more than four decades, the Libyan people have been ruled by a tyrant - Muammar Gaddafi," ignoring the numerous regional and global ones America supports, including rogue Israeli regimes, lawlessly terrorizing Palestinians for over six decades with generous US support and funding.

Addressing the issue, Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser, Denis McDonough, said:

"I think it's very important that we see each of these instances....in the region as unique. We don't get very hung up on the question of precedent....because we don't make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent. We make them based on how we can best advance our interests in the region."

Precisely true on the last point. However, policy decisions are very consistent. Allies are supported whether despots or democrats. Outliers are opposed, even benign ones posing no threat to America or neighbors. The rule of law is a non-starter. So are democratic values, "principles of justice and human dignity."

Only imperial aims matter, especially resource and human exploitation adventurism for money and power. For generations, they've guided US policies, notably since WW II, at home and abroad.

Yet pseudo-left apologists back Obama's Libya war, its faux "humanitarian intervention" to save lives, including darling of the left Rachel Maddow, defending the indefensible, pretending Obama's different from Bush when, in fact, he's worse, waging four, not two wars.

He also:

-- supports others in Palestine, Yemen and Somalia;

-- operates US Special Forces in at least 75 countries globally;

-- backs killing US citizens abroad lawlessly;

-- endorses holding detainees indefinitely without charge;

-- practices torture as official US policy; and

-- backs the worst of despotic states, notably in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt under a military junta, Algeria under a military dictatorship (Abdelaziz Bouteflika more figurehead than president), other GCC states, besides others in Africa, Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Yet Maddow and other faux liberals call Obama a peace president. No matter how great the body count, she's firm saying "he appears to be walking more of that walk as well as talking that talk."

He indeed talks plenty while letting imperial forces reign death and destruction on non-belligerent nations, spends hundreds of billions of dollars, then claims we're too broke to address vital homeland needs, especially social ones and crumbling infrastructure.

Cheerleading Print Media Support

For decades, The York Times endorsed all US imperial wars, the tradition maintained on March 28 in an editorial headlined, "President Obama and Libya," saying:

Obama "made the right, albeit belated, decision to join with allies to try to stop (Gaddafi) from slaughtering thousands of Libyans," despite clear evidence that Washington, France, Britain and rebel killers initiated attacks. Love or hate him, Gaddafi justifiably responded in self defense.

However, despite Obama's willful deception and lies, The Times claimed he "made a strong case for why America needed to intervene in this fight - and why that did not always mean it should intervene in others," notably against subservient despots, no matter how much "violence on a horrific scale" they cause.

"Most important," said The Times, Obama "vowed that there would be no American ground troops in this fight." A previous article explained otherwise, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/03/us-led-libyan-ground-a
ssault-planned.html

Numerous reports, in fact, suggest a ground assault is planned for late April-early May if air and rebel attacks don't oust Gaddafi, what most experts believe unlikely.

On March 28, New York Times writers Kareem Fahim and David Kirkpatrick suggested as much, headlining "Rebel Advance Halted Outside Qaddafi's Hometown," saying:

"....the American military warned on Monday that the insurgents' rapid advances could quickly be reversed without continued coalition air support," quoting General Ham saying more, in fact, may be needed, stopping short of suggesting ground forces deployed offshore will invade.

Whatever lies ahead, no matter how bloody and destructive, The Times insisted Obama "made the right choice to act."

So did the Washington Post, its editorial opinion headlined, "Mr. Obama and Libya: Where's the strategy to preserve success?" saying:

Obama "was right to act, and he deserves the credit that he claimed....He was right" saying "we must stand alongside those who believe in the same core principles of freedom and nonviolence," ones, in fact, America spurns at home and abroad, especially during direct or proxy imperial wars.

On March 29, a Wall Street Journal editorial headlined, "Obama, Libya and the GOP," saying:

Obama "made a substantial case for his Libya intervention, (and) we welcome the effort....The credibility of US power is essential to maintaining our influence in a Middle East that is erupting in popular revolt against decades of injustice," much, in fact, America caused.

US media opinions mostly expressed support. The Los Angeles Times said "no one can complain that he didn't make a thoughtful, compelling case for his decision to intervene." The Philadelphia Daily News endorsed "the Obama Doctrine....a rationale for the use of US force, (his Monday speech perhaps) the beginning of a saner foreign policy."

The Chicago Tribune wondered whether a "humanitarian mission (set) a precedent that will be used to demand American involvement in other places." The Boston Globe endorsed his "swift Libyan intervention (wrongly calling it) the first time Obama has ordered US troops into a new conflict, (then saying it's) a key test of his presidency and a moment that allowed him to delineate his most comprehensive vision yet for America's role in the world and the role of the military abroad."

According to the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies' (CSIS) Stephen Flanagan, Obama "laid the beginnings of an Obama doctrine. He said that there are instances where our safety is not immediately threatened but our interests and values are, and in those cases....we will act, particularly when we can act with a broad international coalition" of willing co-belligerents plus others bullied and/or bribed to join or endorse imperial aggression against another targeted country.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) on "Public TV's Libya Limits"

America's Public Television (PBS) and National Public Radio rely heavily on government and corporate funds. As a result, they provide managed news like major media networks, suppressing hard truths on vital issues.

PBS' Libya reporting is instructive, FAIR saying:

"Over the past two weeks, the (flagship) NewsHour has featured an array of current and former military and government officials in discussion segments - leaving little room for antiwar voices, US foreign policy critics and legal experts."

NPR and PBS are similar, supporting state and corporate policies throughout their histories, depriving listeners and viewers of real news, information and opinions on vital issues.

The 1967 Carnegie Commission report (creating PBS) envisioned a "forum for debate and controversy (to) provide a voice for groups in the community that may be otherwise unheard." NPR's founding mandate was similar, yet both operations represent power, money and privilege, not popular interests they were established to serve.

A Final Comment

In his book "The Next Decade," Stratfor Global Intelligence founder George Friedman "consider(s) the relation of the American empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic('s)" survival, given its addiction to war and abandonment of the Constitution's Article 1, Section 8 provision letting Congress alone declare it. It was last done on December 8, 1941 against Japan.

As a result, seven US decades of wars have been lawless. Moreover, no nation may attack another except in self-defense or until the Security Council acts - lawfully according to the UN Charter. In authorizing a no-fly zone (an act of war), SC members acted illegally, brazenly violating international law, letting America and co-belligerents France and Britain wage imperial war against a nation posing no threat to them or neighboring states.

Friedman stressed the importance of congressional declarations of war, "requir(ing) meticulous attention to the law and proprieties." However, he stopped short of addressing international law or explaining the Constitution's Supremacy Clause. Under it, every treaty America ratifies automatically becomes US law, the UN Charter, of course, included. No congressional or presidential act may contravene it, what, in fact, happens regularly, especially on matters of war.

As a result, in a recent interview, University of Illinois Professor of International Law Francis Boyle was blunt, calling Obama's war on Libya "plunder and aggression, (the) first major outright power grab by the United States and the major colonial, imperial powers against Africa in the 21st century." For sure, it's not the last.

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=m76373&hd=&size=1&l=e


 

[No2NWO]

The ‘Mercs for Libyan Rebels’ Drumbeat Begins

We were mostly speculating last week when we mused about a plan for mercenaries to help the Libyan rebels defeat Moammar Gadhafi. But now a professor at the Naval Academy thinks it’s not such a bad idea.

Deane-Peter Baker, a private-security expert and professor at Annapolis, fears the same “stalemate” that Adm. James Stavridis warned about in Senate testimony on Wednesday. And if NATO ground troops are off the table, it’s time to “outsource the problem,” he writes in a new Baltimore Sun op-ed.

The U.S. should “provide the necessary funding for the rebels to secure the services of one or more of the private companies that could supply the necessary expertise and logistical support to turn the rebel rabble into a genuine fighting force,” Baker argues.

Good luck finding them. The president of the International Peace Operations Association, which advocates for private security firms, says companies aren’t looking to do business with the rebels because it’s arguably illegal under the United Nations resolution authorizing the war.

But the U.S. is finding convenient workarounds inside those U.N. authorities. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. has the flexibility under it to arm the rebels. Maybe next the Obama administration will assert that, ahem, “trainers” can flow in to Benghazi too. After all, someone’s got to teach the rebels how to use the weapons they’d get from the West.

And if the U.S. doesn’t want to send in ground troops — whether for political reasons or because of military overstretch — that leaves the “ultimate volunteers,” as Baker calls the mercs. Let’s see if his call catches on at the Pentagon or at NATO.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/the-mercs-for-libyan-rebels-drumbeat-begins/

[Kilika]

Private contractor armies is nothing new to Africa. You can be sure there's been some contractors on the ground for several days now.

[bigron]

You Lie, Mr. President

About Libya, and much else

by Justin Raimondo, March 30, 2011



http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/03/29/you-lie-mr-president/

[bigron]

The Conquest of Africa: NATO Wages War On Third Continent

By Rick Rozoff
 
Global Research, March 31, 2011
Stop NATO - 2011-03-30
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24057

At its summit in Lisbon, Portugal last November the North Atlantic Treaty Organization adopted its first strategic concept for the 21st century, one in keeping with its expansion into not only a pan-European but a self-styled international military force.

In addition to subordinating all of Europe to a U.S.-dominated interceptor missile system, complementing the new U.S. Cyber Command in waging cyberwarfare defensive and offensive, and erasing whatever distinction remained between NATO and European Union military functions on the continent and globally, the world's only military bloc endorsed the nearly ten-year-old war in Afghanistan as its prime mission and affirmed its commitment to ongoing operations in the Balkans.

Almost all of the approximately 150,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan are currently under the command of the NATO-run International Security Assistance Force, which is also conducting deadly helicopter gunship raids and artillery attacks inside neighboring Pakistan.

The war in South Asia is NATO's first armed conflict outside Europe and its first ground war. Its bombing campaign in Bosnia in 1995 and 78-day air war against Yugoslavia four years later were its first hostile military actions.

NATO is now waging a war in a third continent, Africa
 
MORE

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24057

[bigron]

Obama’s North African War Face

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

BAR, March 31, 2011

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-north-african-war-face

Whatever happens to Moammar Gaddafi, an independent Libya is not on the U.S. agenda. "Obama hopes to 'stabilize’ Libya under indirect U.S. dominion through a kind of protectorate involving various 'international’ entities, on the Haitian model." The president’s doctrine of "humanitarian" warfare – like his rhetoric – is merely a sweetened derivative of George Bush’s more crudely presented policies. "In the final analysis, Euro-American hegemony means crushing the aspirations of all Arabs in the sand."


"Imperialism’s refreshed Obama-face is looking more than ever like a grotesque Halloween mask, and he knows it."

In Libya, Barack Obama now faces the central contradiction of his presidency: How to accomplish George Bush’s strategic objective, to wrest back America’s post-Soviet global supremacy – a goal Obama has always, and openly, shared – while avoiding becoming embroiled in another Bush-style "dumb war." This was the trick that Obama promised he alone was equipped to pull off by adorning the U.S. empire with a new, engaging, articulate, colored "face."

Obama strains to maintain that prefabricated face in the midst of an explosive and wholly unexpected political earthquake in the Arab world. The United States, as we wrote on March 23, "wants desperately to position itself on the 'right’ side" of the unfolding Arab Reawakening and, if possible, to "appropriate to itself a section of the 'Arab revolt.’" Having found – and helped create – that opportunity in Libya, the Americans and their European co-conspirators rushed in with a reenactment of George Bush’s "Shock and Awe" – a "full spectrum dominance" assault involving hundreds of cruise missiles that reminded even Moammar Gaddafi’s worst enemies that, in the final analysis, Euro-American hegemony means crushing the aspirations of all Arabs in the sand.

As the U.S. discovered in 2003, "Shock and Awe" repels as much as it impresses. Like the Bush Middle East/Western Asia offensive that initially targeted over 30 governments for overthrow (including Libya) but got bogged down in Iraq, Obama and the French and British are in danger of having "reached too far." Imperialism’s refreshed Obama-face is looking more than ever like a grotesque Halloween mask, and he knows it.

"The Americans and their European co-conspirators rushed in with a reenactment of George Bush’s 'Shock and Awe.’"

The president’s Monday press conference was an effort to reposition the United States, and to readjust his own face to the Arab world. The lull that followed in "coalition" air strikes on Gaddafi forces, which allowed battered Libyan units to retake ground briefly held by the highly disorganized and foreign-dependent rebels, could serve as a means for the U.S. to squeeze the bravado out of the Benghazi-based fighters – a kind of discipline by denial. Despite the West’s boundless praise for these purportedly democratic "freedom fighters," the imperial plan does not include allowing them – whoever they are – to form a regime with authority over the country. More cautious elements within the Obama administration may have arrived at an accommodation with NATO member Turkey, whose own interests in the region are incompatible with those of the British and French – and, ultimately, the United States.

Obama acknowledged that the all-out assault on Libya too overtly resembles Bush-style regime change: "To be blunt," he said, "we went down that road in Iraq…. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya." Yet, regime change is a defining privilege of imperialism and, therefore, Obama reiterated that the American position is that Gaddafi must go.

The contradiction, which causes Obama grief in Manifest Destiny America, is exponentially more acute in the midst of the Arab Re-Awakening. The president’s carefully crafted language indicates that Obama hopes to "stabilize" Libya under indirect U.S. dominion through a kind of protectorate involving various "international" entities, on the Haitian model. The key paragraph is:

"Gaddafi has not yet stepped down from power, and until he does, Libya will remain dangerous. Moreover, even after Gaddafi does leave power, forty years of tyranny has left Libya fractured and without strong civil institutions. The transition to a legitimate government that is responsive to the Libyan people will be a difficult task. And while the United States will do our part to help, it will be a task for the international community, and – more importantly – a task for the Libyan people themselves."

"Obama hopes to draw an illusory line between his and Bush’s worldviews, that will be palatable to a new an emboldened Arab audience."

This is not a formula for rule by the Benghazi crowd, whose Islamist elements are indigestible, if not anathema, to U.S. policymakers and image-spinners. It is a rationale for a long, Haiti-like occupation under a compliant United Nations or improvised multi-national façade. Arab nationalism cannot be allowed free rein anywhere, since imperial rule abhors all nationalisms but its own.

Since the campaign days, Obama has struggled to infuse his deceptive rhetoric – which is really all that separates him from Bush – with the language of "Responsibility to Protect," or R2P. Cloaked in the cynical camouflage of "humanitarian" objectives, Obama hopes to draw an illusory line between his and Bush’s worldviews, that will be palatable to a new an emboldened Arab audience. It is a doomed mission, not only because of the inherent contradictions between Arab aspirations and imperial dominance, but because American rulers are incapable of speaking to a warlike U.S. nationalism and addressing Arab aspirations at the same time. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the top U.S. diplomat, cannot even maintain the discipline of a consistent lie. She admitted that widespread bloodletting by Gaddafi’s forces was a fantasy and invention:

"I know that the nightly news cannot cover a humanitarian crisis that thankfully did not happen, but it is important to remember that many, many Libyans are safer today because the international community took action."

There was no humanitarian crisis, and it will become increasingly impossible to frame the Euro-American assault in North Africa as anything other than an imperial offensive, designed to keep the Arab world in its place and to usurp African sovereignty over the continent’s resources.

Obama’s "face" is melting.




BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

 
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama%E2%80%99s-north-african-war-face

[bigron]

Attack of the Cruise Missile Liberals


by Margaret Kimberley

BAR, March 31, 2011

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-attack-cruise-missile-liberals

Americans are warlike – as long as they think they can be victorious. These nominal Democrats and Republicans "differ only on who they want to see doing the dominating." Today, a Black Democrat is the head killer in charge, allowing the likes of Ed Schultz, Bill Maher and Juan Cole to endorse the criminal assault on Libya. When the chips are down, fraudulent anti-war liberals show their true racist, Manifest Destiny-loving colors. "The true anti-war movement must reawaken itself and hit the streets in the hundreds of thousands."


"The desire for America to dominate the rest of the world is prevalent among most of its citizens, regardless of party affiliation."

Peace loving Americans are few and far between. The vast majority of our citizens see nothing wrong with their government killing masses of people as long as the rationale sounds high minded and noble.

The love of bloodshed is generally connected with the right wing in this country, but nothing could be further from the truth. The desire for America to dominate the rest of the world is prevalent among most of its citizens, regardless of party affiliation. Those citizens differ only on who they want to see doing the dominating. Republicans are ecstatic when a Republican president drops bombs, sends drones on killing missions or occupies other nations. Democrats are equally enthusiastic when one of their own does the same.

Democratic party reaction to President Obama’s military intervention in Libya is but the latest example of the American propensity to exult over government sponsored violence. Obama, like George W. Bush before him, claims that his intervention, no-fly zone, peace mission (take your pick) is being conducted only for the most humanitarian of purposes. The dead bodies belie the claims of dogooderism but those words have a distinct power for people in this country and will always be used as a pretext for someone dying somewhere on the planet.

"The belief in white American superiority effects and infects every policy discussion in this nation."

The legacy of Manifest Destiny and the belief in white American superiority effects and infects every policy discussion in this nation. The equation of goodness and rightness with white America holds sway very strongly and sadly not just for white people either. The willingness to see white behavior as normative means that foreign policy decisions get a pass precisely at the moment when resistance and skepticism are needed.

No, Barack Obama isn’t white, but he may as well be. He is president precisely because he assured voters that he would not change the complexion of their belief systems. If he didn’t fulfill the deeply ingrained belief that might makes right as long as America, a country thought of as white, is in charge of world affairs, he would never have become the president.

The United States attack on Libya has brought out the worst in this phenomenon. Liberals are gleeful that conservative icon Newt Gingrich backtracked on supporting intervention until the Democratic president actually intervened, but Gingrich is no different than they are.

We now have MSNBC television host Ed Schultz proclaiming "Support for Obama’s Invasion of Libya." Never mind that Obama has taken great pains to claim that the bombing will be of limited duration and that ground troops will not have a presence there. Schultz seems to be ahead of the president on this one, but his show of support is telling in revealing the true support for American motivations in its interventions abroad. Likewise Juan Cole in an "Open Letter to the Left on Libya" dismisses criticism of the intervention thusly. "I would like to urge the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time," and adds, "We should avoid making 'foreign intervention’ an absolute taboo . . ."

"Barack Obama isn’t white, but he may as well be."

Foreign interventions conducted by the United States should be taboo. Our system is not designed to be in any way humanitarian. Its motives are to say the least suspect and no matter how evil its enemies are made out to be, the evidence of past history should make us suspicious of the arguments in favor of war.

The liberal hawks, like Obama, have no concern for Libyan civilians who are enduring bombing, and exposure to depleted uranium shells which create cancers and birth defects for years to come. This is not conjecture, but has been seen in Iraq and ought to be a reason for anyone who claims to be on the "left" to oppose the actions which bring it to pass.

The true anti-war activist, not just anti-Republican activist, has to raise its voice. The true anti-war movement must reawaken itself and hit the streets in the hundreds of thousands, just as they did in 2003 before the invasion of Iraq. That moment can be recreated, and in a deeper, more honest way, now that a Democrat is the head killer in charge.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-attack-cruise-missile-liberals

 

[Protean]

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24049



America's Planned Nuclear Attack on Libya

by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, March 30, 2011

A war on Libya has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon for more than 20 years. Using nukes against Libya was first envisaged in 1997. 

On April 14th 1986, Ronald Reagan ordered a series of bombings directed against Libya under "Operation El Dorado Canyon", in reprisal for an alleged Libya sponsored terrorist bombing of a Berlin discotheque. The pretext was fabricated. During these air raids, which were condemned by both France and Italy, Qadhafi's residence was bombed killing his younger daughter.


Barely acknowledged by the Western media, a planned attack on Libya using nuclear weapons, had been contemplated by the Clinton Administration in 1997, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The Department of Defense had developed a new generation of bunker buster tactical nuclear weapons for use in the Middle East and Central Asia:

    "Military officials and leaders of America's nuclear weapon laboratories [had] urged the US to develop a new generation of precision low-yield nuclear weapons... which could be used in conventional conflicts with third-world nations." (Federation of American Scientists, 2001, emphasis added)

The B61-11 earth-penetrating weapon with a nuclear warhead had not been tested. It was part of the B61 series, coupled with a so-called "low yield" nuclear warhead. According to US military sources: "If used in North Korea, the radioactive fallout [of the B61-11] could drift over nearby countries such as Japan." (B61-11 Earth-Penetrating Weapon, Globalsecurity.org). The B61-11 earth-penetrating version of the B61 was configured initially to have a "low" 10 kiloton yield, 66.6 percent of a Hiroshima bomb, for post-Cold War battlefield operations in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Pentagon's Plan to Nuke Libya

The B61-11 tactical nuclear weapon was slated by the Pentagon to be used in 1997 against the "Qadhafi regime":

    "Senior Pentagon officials ignited controversy last April [1997] by suggesting that the earth-penetrating [nuclear] weapon would soon be available for possible use against a suspected underground chemical factory being built by Libya at Tarhunah. This thinly-veiled threat came just eleven days after the United States signed the African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty, designed to prohibit signatories from using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against any other signatory, including Libya." (David Muller, Penetrator N-Bombs, International Action Center, 1997)

Tarbunah has a population of more than 200,000 people, men, women and children. It is about 60 km East of Tripoli. Had this "humanitarian bomb" (with a "yield" or explosive capacity of two-thirds of a Hiroshima bomb) been launched on this "suspected" WMD facility, it would have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, not to mention the nuclear fallout...

Full article here--
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24049

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'CIA trying to destabilize Africa'

An interview with Abayomi Azikiwi, Editor of Pan-African News Wire, frmo Detroit, MI.

Fri Apr 1, 2011 6:35PM

An interview with Abayomi Azikiwi, Editor of Pan-African News Wire, from Detroit, MI.

The CIA and British Special Forces are secretly supporting Libyan rebels involved in ground operations to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi's regime and to setup another US-backed government.

Press TV interviewed Editor of Pan-African News Wire Abayomi Azikiwi who believes that the United States and other Western countries, under the guise of a humanitarian effort, are justifying the war in Libya in order to preserve their economic and military policies in the Middle East.

The following is a transcript of the interview with Azikiwi.

HERE :

http://presstv.com/detail/172638.html

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PanAm103/Lockerbie crash - was rogue Syrian drug lords working for CIA, not Qaddafi of Libya
--W. Tarpley & Susan Lindauer

Susan Lindauer, a journalist and author specializing on American interventions, has never believed the allied forces intervened in Libya out of humanitarian reasons. It is a war for oil which was prepared long ago, Lindauer argues - anyone who cared about the Libyan people would stop immediately.

A WAR FOR OIL
RT Interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fUxVgxj0vc

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Middle East
Apr 6, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD06Ak03.html 

 
Libyan waiting game favors Gaddafi


By Victor Kotsev


TEL AVIV - The Western "military option" in Libya has turned into a military fashion show of questionable merit. In order to believe this, we need not take the word of American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense officials - many of whom, such as Pentagon chief Robert Gates and NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, have been singing the "there is no military solution" refrain practically since the beginning of the intervention.

Nor do we really need to believe the analysts who have sought to explain what the show is really about. It is enough to look at all the "covert" and "diplomatic" developments of the last few days, which would add up to a benign farcical soap opera if it wasn't for the very real suffering of people on the ground.

Unable to penetrate or take out Muammar Gaddafi's military, last week the allies orchestrated a few political defections - most notably by the Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa - which they then drummed up as major successes. As US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted in a United States Senate hearing, their strategy for removing the Libyan leader devolved into a vague hope that someone within his own regime takes him out; they seem to be zeroing in on a rift between Gaddafi's sons that has been going on for some years, and there is a theoretical chance they will succeed, yet the likelihood that their own "coalition of the willing" will fracture before that happens, is even greater.

The "game" has become ugly to the point that even pretences of transparency and honesty are being abandoned. A disinformation campaign, tailored to the short attention span and lack of genuine interest of Western audiences, is in full gear. Today's promises are forgotten tomorrow or twisted beyond recognition.

Officially, NATO is not coordinating air strikes with the rebels, nor is it arming them, nor are there any special forces on the ground - until further notice, which, of course, would apply retroactively. The rebels - whose "pro-democratic" government, dominated by former regime officials, Central Intelligence Agency assets and freelance opportunists, is arguably the greatest mystification of all - maintained until a few days ago that their only Western adviser was "Google Earth". Correspondents on the ground may wonder where, all of a sudden, they are getting all the rockets that they previously did not have - what rockets?

It is true that NATO has a long history of disinformation campaigns to draw on. Even the ratio of Western claims to realistic estimates of casualties screams "Serbia": consider, for example, the 100,000 Albanian deaths in Kosovo, which subsequently turned out to be closer to 3,000. [1] Then consider the following statistics on Libya which Asia Times Online uncovered: American officials claimed that as many as 50,000-100,000 lives had been saved by the operation, based on roughly 2,000 casualties by March 25. [2]

What is less clear is how the alliance, unable to beat Gaddafi in the field where it has a definite advantage (military hardware), hopes to take him down in a game that he undoubtedly owns. The Libyan leader is a master of double-talk and disinformation - so much so that he has long been branded as "irrational" and even "crazy". His many ceasefire announcements, which he never intended to keep, are just a small example of this. In an environment where it is impossible to tell truth from lies, he would not simply thrive; he could even rehabilitate himself, much in the manner of a Shakespearean fool whose insanity mirrors that of the world around him and who ultimately speaks truth to power.

The standoff on the ground is quickly turning into a stalemate and a game of waiting for whose camp will fall apart first. Both are showing signs of stress, and Western media are eager to announce that (to quote The New York Times) "At least two sons of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi are proposing a resolution to the Libyan conflict that would entail pushing their father aside to make way for a transition to a constitutional democracy ... "

Indeed, there is a long-standing rivalry between Gaddafi's sons, four of whom are at the center of the intrigue. Saif al-Islam, on the one hand, is playing the reformer, possibly supported by his brother Saadi. Motassem and Khamis, on the other hand, are aligned with the so-called hardliners. According to a number of sources, Saif al-Islam's prolonged stay in London was in fact a form of exile, designed to keep him away while Gaddafi Senior sought to engineer Motassem's succession to the country's leadership.

It is hard to believe that these rifts disappeared all of a sudden, but once the rebellion started, they were quickly put on the back burner. Saif al-Islam became one of the faces of the regime, to the dismay of the West, and especially of the London School of Economics where he received his PhD. [3] Motassem and Khamis, meanwhile, worked tirelessly on the military front, as commanders of Gaddafi's crack troops.

One of the reasons why Moussa Koussa's defection is unlikely to prove as severe a blow to the Libyan government as British officials have claimed is that at the height of the uprising, Gaddafi reshuffled his entire apparatus, placing extraordinary power in the hands of his sons and relatives. The regime that Koussa is familiar with is not necessarily the same regime that exists now; if anybody is in a position to oust the colonel, it is his sons, and this is why rifts among them are much more important than other political defections.

However, despite the precedent of a coup organized by Motassem some years ago, it is unlikely that any of Gaddafi's sons will turn on his father. Not only would this defy time-honored traditions of patriarchal loyalty, it would be a political suicide. Under the current circumstances, it would mean an end to the family's rule in Libya; moreover, reports have it, Gaddafi Snr has concentrated most of the wealth in his hands, and any son who defies him will be left without financial resources to draw on.

The most likely explanation of the reports is that all the statements coming from Gaddafi's sons are made with their father's authorization. Gaddafi, in a sense, is playing a game of good cop and bad cop with his enemies, a game designed to soften the military pressure and to win sufficient time to sow discord among NATO and the rebels. To this end can also be interpreted promises that (according to a Reuters report from Monday night) "The Libyan government says it's ready to hold elections, a referendum or any other reform to its political system."

It seems only a matter of time before the diverse alliance - exponentially more diverse than the Gaddafi camp - splits at the seams. As prestigious American think-tank Stratfor observes, "The unity of the rebels, in short, is based upon a common desire to oust the longtime Libyan leader."

Two vague camps already appear to be forming in the anti-Gaddafi coalition. The rebels are supported by Britain and France in their demand that the Libyan leader and his family depart from power, while the United States and some of the other allies are progressively getting cold feet. The Obama administration already sought to extricate itself from a combat role in Libya over the weekend, but was forced to reconsider, ostensibly for 48 hours, "due to poor weather conditions" that hampered operations by the rest of the NATO allies. Translation: if America leaves, Britain and France are lost.

The American prevarications can also be interpreted as a strategy to put pressure on the rebels and on the European allies to accept a ceasefire; after the disastrous offensive against Gaddafi last week, it became clear that the opposition simply isn't up to the task of defeating the government forces. [4] On the other hand, however, the rebels refused a ceasefire on any realistic terms, insisting instead that the government withdraws its forces and allows "peaceful" protests. Over the weekend, they even sent their best troops to the frontline near Brega, most likely hoping to show the world that they still have a fighting chance. The show failed miserably: the best they could do, assisted by NATO air strikes, was hold the line.

A ceasefire would allow the West to save face, to pile more soft pressure on Gaddafi, and also to train and arm rebel forces. According to an Al-Jazeera report:

In the east, which is largely free of the regime's control, rebels are reportedly receiving specialized training from US and Egyptian forces, although the US has denied that claim ... A rebel fighter and former teacher who asked to remain anonymous told Al-Jazeera that he had received training from Egyptian and American "special forces" at a "secret facility" in the east ... "He told us that on Thursday night a new shipment of Katyusha rockets had been sent into eastern Libya from Egypt. He didn't say they were sourced from Egypt, but that was their route through," our correspondent said.

However, if the end goal is to oust the Libyan leader, this is a risky move. International backlash against the campaign is mounting, and once stopped, it would be hard to resume it. The best NATO can realistically hope for is a division of Libya, similar to that of Bosnia or Serbia and Kosovo.

This would embarrass seriously Britain and France, who have staked much - most importantly, oil and prestige - on the departure of Gaddafi. Moreover, it would give the colonel an opportunity to consolidate his grip on the western part of the country and to purge his government of any potentially weak links. He is making steady progress on Misrata, the third-largest Libyan city and only major rebel stronghold in the west, and, according to a report by Asharq Alawsat, he put down a "small" officers' revolt on Friday.

Gaddafi is actively exploring additional rifts inside the Western alliance, specifically by courting Greece and Turkey - two longstanding rivals - at the same time. On Sunday, his deputy foreign minister, Abdel Ati al-Obeidi, visited Greece. "The Libyan envoy wanted to convey that his country has the intention to negotiate," a Greek official told Al-Jazeera subsequently. "We don't think that there can be a military solution to this crisis."

The next day, the same Libyan official was in Turkey, negotiating a ceasefire. Turkish officials have been saying more or less the same as the Greeks, but they angered Gaddafi by calling on him to step down, and subsequently by sending a hospital ship to Misrata accompanied by warships and fighter planes. The colonel likely wanted to remind them that, if they persist, he can trim Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ambitions to play a pivotal role in the Arab world by allying with his Balkan rival.

Greece, afflicted with an unprecedented economic crisis, would find it hard to refuse a Libyan offer of cheap oil. It could probably count on tacit support from its other major economic backer, Germany (which refused to take part in the air campaign and abstained at the United Nations Security Council on resolution 1973).

The Libyan opposition is less than thrilled at the news of talks. "People in the eastern city of Benghazi are angered by the talk of negotiations. They continue to stand resolute in their call for Muammar Gaddafi and his entire family to leave power," Al-Jazeera reported on Tuesday. Yet, the rebels are beyond doubt unable to keep fighting on their own; apart for being disorganized, according to reports, they are desperate for money, and this is most likely their motivation to pursue a far-fetched deal to sell the oil they hold in store via Qatar. [5] They are currently completely at the mercy of their Western patrons.

The behavior of the NATO allies will depend to a certain extent on their undeclared objectives, and largely on the back-stage bargaining that is beyond doubt going on frantically. Asia Times Online's Pepe Escobar has already fleshed out many of their "business" goals. [6] Suffice it to add the findings of a recent Reuters report:

"This is turning into the best shop window for competing aircraft for years. More even than in Iraq in 2003," says Francis Tusa, editor of UK-based Defense Analysis. "You are seeing for the first time on an operation the Typhoon and the Rafale up against each other, and both countries want to place an emphasis on exports. France is particularly desperate to sell the Rafale." ... The Libyan operation to enforce UN resolution 1973 coincides with a new arms race - a surge of demand in the $60 billion a year global fighter market and the arrival of a new generation of equipment in the air and at sea.

It is uncertain what shape the final compromise will take, but time seems to be on the side of Gaddafi. Militarily, he can keep spinning out his Maoist tactics, while politically, he only has to survive long enough to see the corpse of his enemies' unity floating downstream on the proverbial river. From that point until a conquest of Benghazi, it is only a short march.

Notes
1. Serb killings 'exaggerated' by west, Guardian, August 18, 2000.
2. Syrian sauce for the Chinese gander, Asia Times Online, March 25, 2011.
3. LSE investigates Gaddafi's son plagiarism claims, BBC, March 1, 2011.
4. Colonel Gaddafi goes Mao, Asia Times Online, March 30, 2011.
5. Libyan Rebels Want to Trade Oil for Guns, 0, Wired, April 1, 2011.
6. There's no business like war business, Asia Times Online, March 29, 2011.

Victor Kotsev is a journalist and political analyst based in Tel Aviv
 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD06Ak03.html




 

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"Our Man in Tripoli":

US-NATO Sponsored Islamic Terrorists Integrate Libya's Pro-Democracy Opposition



by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky


April 4, 2011
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24096


Concepts are Turned Upside Down: The US-NATO military alliance is supporting a rebellion integrated by Islamic terrorists, in the name of the "War on Terrorism"...


There are various factions within the Libyan opposition: Royalists, defectors from the Qadhafi regime including the Minister of Justice and more recently the Foreign Minister, Moussa Koussa, members of the Libyan Armed Forces, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) and the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO) which acts as an umbrella organization.   

Rarely acknowledged by the Western media, Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi Libya, the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), is an integral part of the Libyan Opposition.

The Libyan Interim Council does not constitute a clearly defined entity. It is based on the representation from newly created local councils established to "manage daily life in the liberated cities and villages". (The Libyan Interim National Council » The Council’s statement)

Opposition forces are in large part made up of an untrained civilian militia, former members of the Libyan armed forces, together with the trained paramilitary Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).

The Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which is aligned with Al Qaeda, is in the frontline of the armed insurrection.
 
READ MUCH MORE HERE

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24096

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Libya


by Frank Scott

April 4, 2011



The rationale for our latest foreign murder campaign is the ridiculous notion that because Gaddafi is an undemocratic semi-tyrant we have the right to interfere in the affairs of a nation which may very well soon be run by a full tyrant if, and when, Gaddafi is replaced. And then only by having the rebels assisted from outside Libya if they hadn’t already been organized from outside Libya. Clearly, some Libyans hate his guts, but some love him, and as for those who hate him, how odd is it that a leader is hated by some of his people?

Face it, if someone had put a bullet through Bush’s empty head – or now, through Obama’s supposedly full one – there would be great joy experienced by many Americans, whether they’d show it in public or not. And neither of those two servants of corporate capital and Israel are demonic tyrants, except in the feverish minds of their most fanatic detractors.

CONTINUE HERE

http://uruknet.com/?p=m76546&hd=&size=1&l=e



 

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Remember Libya: One of History's Terror Bombing Victims


by Stephen Lendman


April 5, 2011

http://uruknet.com/?p=m76551&hd=&size=1&l=e

Like Cast Lead against Gaza, Odyssey Dawn is criminal imperial war, willfully attacking non-combatants and civilian targets, including vital infrastructure, hospitals, non-military airports and buildings, ports, power generating facilities, and other sites unrelated to military necessity.

These and more besides so-called rebels killing hundreds on the ground, targeting anyone thought to be pro-Gaddafi, including African guest workers there for employment, not political allegiance.

In his article titled, "Libya and Obama's Defense of the 'Rebel Uprising,' " James Petras said:

Libyans see rebels as "invaders, breaking doors, blowing up homes and arresting and accusing local leaders of being 'fifth columnists' for Gaddafi. (They) and their imperial mentors have targeted the entire civilian economy, bombed Libyan cities, cut trade and commercial networks, blocked the delivery of subsidized food and welfare to the poor, caused the suspension of schools and forced hundreds of thousands of foreign professionals, teachers, doctors and skilled contract workers to flee."

These are Obama's freedom fighters - cutthroat killers, armed, funded and now trained by US and UK Special Forces, as well as CIA and MI 6 intelligence operatives. Besides earlier reports of their presence along with British and Egyptian commandos, London Independent writers Kim Sengupta and David Randall headlined (on April 3), "Western military advisers become visible in Benghazi," saying:

Mission creep is clearly visible, "usually described as experts, consultants and advisors" showing up in the rebel stronghold, downplaying their presence when spotted. Whatever their numbers and mandate, can many more be far behind in the early stages of a protracted, bloody conflict!

So far, shock and awe bombing leads it, killing scores, perhaps hundreds, more. Daily the numbers mount. Even independent and surprising reports confirm it.

In fact, Libya's top Vatican representative, Bishop Giovanni Innocenzo Martinelli, told Agenzia Fides, the Vatican news service:

"The so-called humanitarian air raids have taken the lives of dozens of civilians in various areas of Tripoli" alone. "Of particular concern, in the district of Buslim, a building collapsed because of the bombing killing 40 people. Yesterday I reported that the bombing had affected some hospitals, albeit directly. I can now confirm that one of these hospitals is in Misda," about 100 miles south of Tripoli.

In other interviews, Martelli cited numerous civilian deaths and injuries, "confirmed to me by people who have lost loved ones" from bombings. Civilian areas are hugely impacted, often willfully, other times because bombs and missiles can't distinguish between military and non-combatant targets.

Moreover, US rules of engagement (ROE) authorize war crimes. In Iraq, orders were to kill all military age males. In Afghanistan, drone and ground attacks kill civilians daily, often willfully, bogusly claiming insurgent kills. War is hell, especially on civilians.

When nations wage them, especially America, liberation, humanitarian intervention, and protecting civilian lives aren't part of strategic planning. Quite the opposite, in fact. Civilians and non-military targets are willfully attacked, taking a shocking, little reported toll, focusing largely on vilifying adversaries as justification for imperial, aggressive wars.

Yet doing it violates international and US law, including US Army Field Manual (FM) 27-10 standards, incorporating the Nuremberg Principles, Judgment and Charter, as well as The Law of Land Warfare (1956):

-- FM's paragraph 498 states that any person, military or civilian, who commits a crime under international law is responsible for it and may be punished;

-- paragraph 499 defines a war crime;

-- paragraph 500 refers to a conspiracy, attempts to commit it, and complicity with respect to international crimes;

-- paragraph 509 denies the defense of superior orders in the commission of a crime; and

-- paragraph 510 denies the defense of an "act of state," absolving them.

Two points are key:

-- these provisions apply to all US military and civilian personnel, including top commanders, the Secretary of Defense, his subordinates, and the President and Vice President of the United States; and

-- under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause (Article VI, paragraph 2), all international laws and treaties are the "supreme Law of the Land."

Nonetheless, US combat operations are always lawless, in direct violation of US and international law. Strategic bombing, in fact, involves destroying an adversary's economic and military capability. Terror bombing is another matter. It's against civilians to intimidate, break their morale, cause panic, weaken an enemy's will to fight, and inflict mass casualties and punishment.

Yet Geneva and other international laws forbid targeting civilians. The Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention) states:

-- Article 25: "The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited."

-- Article 26: "The officer in command of an attacking force must, before commencing a bombardment, except in cases of assault, do all in his power to warn the authorities."

Article 27: "In sieges and bombardments, all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes."

The besieged should visibly indicate these buildings or places, notifying an adversary beforehand.

Fourth Geneva also protects civilians in times of war. It prohibits any type violence against them, requiring treatment for those sick and wounded. In September 1938, a League of Nations unanimous resolution prohibited the:

"bombardment of cities, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings not in the immediate neighborhood of the operations of land forces....In cases where (legitimate targets) are so situated, (aircraft) must abstain from bombardment" if this action indiscriminately affects civilians.

The 1945 Nuremberg Principles prohibit "crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity." These include "inhumane acts committed against any civilian populations, before or during the war," including indiscriminate killing and "wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity."

The 1968 General Assembly Resolution on Human Rights prohibits attacks against civilian populations. America does it repeatedly - by land, sea and terror bombings.

Examples of US. Terror Bombings

During WW II, US air forces bombed Tokyo several times with incendiaries. On April 18, 1942, four months after Pearl Harbor, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle led a raid. It did little damage but proved Tokyo was vulnerable to attacks.

On February 24, 1945, 174 planes firebombed Toyko, destroying one square mile of the city. Two weeks later on March 9, 279 bombers demolished 16 square city miles, killing an estimated, 100,000 civilians, injuring many more, leaving over one million homeless. About five dozen other Japanese cities were also firebombed, at a time most structures in the country were wooden and easily consumed. For what reason?

In early 1945, Japan sent peace feelers. Moreover, two days before the February Yalta Conference, Douglas MacArthur sent Roosevelt a 40-page summary of its terms. They were near-unconditional. The Japanese agreed to an occupation, ending hostilities, surrendering its arms, removing its troops from occupied territories, submitting to criminal war trials, and allowing its industries to be regulated. In return, they only wanted their Emperor retained in an honorable capacity.

Roosevelt spurned the offer. So did Truman. In March, Tokyo was firebombed, then in August atomic bombs were used for the first time against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though Japan was negotiating surrender. In fact, top US officials knew doing so had no bearing on the war's outcome. It was effectively over, so why use them?

Based on Truman's papers, nuclear bombs were diplomatic weapons against Soviet Russia, to let Washington dictate post-war terms, give America a strategic Cold War advantage, and get a leg up exploiting regional resources. Human rights and lives never enter into this calculus. Moreover, America now claims a unilateral right to use nuclear and other terror weapons preemptively, including against non-nuclear, non-belligerent states for whatever reasons cited, whether or not true.

Post-WW II, neither Soviet Russia, China, or other countries threatened America. Creating adversaries is always for imperial and profiteering advantage, so slaughtering millions of North Koreans very much furthered those aims, even though they responded to repeated U-S influenced Republic of Korea (ROK) provocations. Later came millions of Southeast Asians.

Gabriel Kolko wrote the definitive history of the Vietnam war in his 1985 book: "Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience." He saw America's invention as a predictable consequence of its ambition, strengths, weaknesses, and quest for world dominance.

Nonetheless, it miscalculated. Vietnamese tired of colonial rule, so communists in the North gained control. They won peasant loyalty by promising more equal land distribution. In addition, their top leaders were intellectuals. They planned well and were patient. The contrast in the South was stark. America installed the authoritarian Ngo Dinh Diem regime to build a strong army, crush opposition, and serve Washington reliably.

From the 1950s, military advisors were supplied, escalated under Kennedy, then accelerated when Lyndon Johnson became president. After the bogus August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, war began to establish client regimes and military bases across East and South Asia, to encircle China, and crush nationalist anti-imperial movements.

Operation Rolling Thunder continued from February 1965 through October 1968. For 44 months, over one millions tons of ordnance were used in targeted and indiscriminate bombings. It aimed to destroy North Vietnam's economy and curtail help reaching National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) resistance in the South.

Over the course of the war, eight million tons of bombs were dropped from 1965 - 73, threefold the amount in WW II, amounting to 300 tons for every Vietnamese man, woman, and child.

As in Korea, napalm was also used with other incendiary devices. In addition, terror weapons like anti-personnel cluster bombs spewed thousands of metal pellets hitting everything in their path, plus indiscriminate land mines still claiming lives.

From 1961 to 1971, the dioxin-containing defoliant Agent Orange was used as well, mainly in the South, Cambodia and Laos. Millions of gallons were sprayed with devastating human consequences. It's one of the most toxic known substances, a potent carcinogenic human immune system suppressant. It accumulates in adipose tissue and the liver, alters living cell genetic structures, causes congenital disorders and birth defects, and contributes to diseases like cancer and type two diabetes.

These consequences were never considered nor the effects of expanded spraying to destroy vital food crops like rice. Also in 1970, US forces conducted Operation Tailwind, using sarin nerve gas in Laos, causing many deaths, including civilians. Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Joint Chiefs Chairman, confirmed it on CNN in 1998. Then under Pentagon pressure, CNN retracted the report, fired its award-winning journalist Peter Arnett and co-producers April Oliver and Jack Smith because they refused to disavow it.

The Indochinese war also engulfed Cambodia and Laos. From March 1969 through May 1970, Nixon ordered secret bombings (without consulting Congress) to destroy North Vietnam and Viet Cong sanctuaries. Around 3,500 sorties caused 600,000 Cambodian deaths, mostly civilians, helping the marginal Khmer Rouge rise to power in 1975. Over 500,000 tons of ordnance were until August 1973. Over 25,000 US ground forces also invaded. They destroyed dozens of towns, villages and hamlets, killing many thousands more, mostly peasants, guilty of living in the wrong country at the wrong time.

A second 1962 Geneva Accord recognized Laos as a neutral country, banning foreign military personnel. The reality on the ground was different. From 1964 - 1973, America dropped over two million tons of ordnance during 580,000 sorties - the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, round-the-clock for nine years. The aim was to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and target the Pathet Lao government and North Vietnamese Army in control of the country's eastern provinces.

Secret bombings again used terror weapons, including napalm, white phosphorous and cluster bombs - leaving millions of unexploded bomblets in fields, roads, forests, villages, and rivers. Laos had a population of about 6.5 million. About one-third of it was either killed, injured, or displaced. Overall, Southeast Asia's wars killed about three to four million, inflicted vast destruction, and caused incalculable human suffering to this day.

Fast forward to Iraq from 1991 to now. Shock and awe Gulf and 2003 bombings destroying:

-- power plants;

-- dams;

-- water purification facilities;

-- sewage treatment and disposal systems;

-- telephone and other communications;

-- hospitals;

-- mosques;

-- thousands of homes, apartments and other dwellings;

-- irrigation sites;

-- food processing, storage and distribution facilities;

-- hotels and retail establishments;

-- transportation infrastructure;

-- oil wells, pipelines, refineries and storage tanks;

-- chemical plants;

-- factories and other commercial operations;

-- government buildings;

-- schools;

-- historical sites; and

-- other non-military related targets.

Twice, virtually everything needed for normal functioning was destroyed or heavily damaged. Moreover, since 1991, the combination of war, sanctions, disease and depravation killed millions or Iraqi civilians, mostly children, turning the "cradle of civilization" into dystopian hell.

In 1999, it struck Serbia-Kosovo. Muslims were called defenseless victims, Serbs genocidal monsters in preparation for America's first-led NATO imperial war, to dominate the Balkans and be a model for future aggressions against nations not fully acceding to US interests.

To that time, the attack's ferocity was unprecedented, given the destructiveness of modern weapons and technology.

Nearly everything was attacked, causing massive destruction and disruption, including:

-- known or suspected military sites and targets;

-- power plants;

-- factories;

-- transportation;

-- telecommunications facilities;

-- vital infrastructure including roads, bridges and rail lines;

-- fuel depots;

-- schools;

-- a TV station;

-- the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade;

-- hospitals;

-- government offices;

-- churches;

-- historical landmarks; and

-- more in cities and villages throughout the country.

An estimated $100 billion in damage was inflicted. A humanitarian disaster resulted. Environmental contamination was extensive. Large numbers were killed, injured or displaced. Two million people lost their livelihoods. Many their homes and communities and for most their futures from what America planned and implemented jointly with NATO.

Moreover, America, NATO and international community leaders still support the organized crime-connected KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) government and its leader Hashim Thaci, a thug, now prime minister since January 2008. Under him, Kosovo as it was no longer exists. Afghanistan was next.

The same story repeated, begun four weeks after 9/11, though planned many months earlier. It's now America's longest war, still ongoing, and won't end until Washington tires and leaves, perhaps because of exhausting resources to pursue all its imperial conflicts.

So far, they still rage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya, besides allied with Israel against Palestine, as well as proxy wars in Somalia, Central Africa, Yemen, Bahrain, Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, wherever America targets, and at home against Muslims, Latino immigrants, and working Americans.

A Final Comment

Obama is America's latest warrior president, criminally culpable like his predecessors, a man International Law Professor Francis Boyle wants impeached, and is drafting papers to do it for lawlessly bombing Libya, and readying US forces to invade.

Ralph Nader also wants him impeached for committing war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. March 18 on Democracy Now, (one day before Libya bombing began) he said:

"Why don't we say what's on the minds of many legal experts that the Obama administration is committing war crimes, and if Bush should have been impeached, Obama should be impeached. (Bush officials) were considered war criminals by many people. Now, Barack Obama is committing the same crimes. In fact, worse ones in Afghanistan. Innocents are being slaughtered. We are creating more enemies. He is violating international (and US) law."

He's now compounding it in Libya. He pledged peace, expanded wars, and broke every major campaign promise, solely serving corporate and imperial interests. His terror wars affect humanity, including at home.

With nearly two years in his term remaining, he may destroy it before a second one unless impeachment removes him first, followed by International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecution for crimes of war and against humanity. It's the permanent tribunal to do it - so far with power but no teeth, to let rogue leaders get away with murder, the worst of them in Washington under both parties.

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=m76551&hd=&size=1&l=e









 

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Humanitarian Interventionism by the Numbers


by Philip Giraldi, April 07, 2011

http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/04/06/humanitarian-interventionism-by-the-numbers/

If there was any doubt about why the United States is involved in an increasingly messy military engagement in Libya, President Barack Obama cleared the air in his speech on March 29th.  The US has no vital interest at stake but is involved in a humanitarian mission, to save innocent lives, akin to the Balkan enterprise of the 1990s.  Other evidence provided by top administration officials suggests that the ultimate intention is to replace Muammar Gadhafi, in other words regime change, similar to the military action that removed Saddam Hussein from Iraq.

Obama could have made a plausible case for removing Gadhafi based on imminent threat.  Gadhafi has been a major state supporter of terrorism, no doubt about it, and he did down both American and French commercial airliners in 1988 and 1989, resulting in major loss of life.  He also ordered his agents to bomb a club frequented by American soldiers in Berlin in 1986, killing three, and resulting in a punitive attack by US military aircraft on Tripoli.  Though the United States has come to terms with Libya and its regime it is indisputable that Gadhafi is a murderous thug and he is eminently capable of resorting to the terrorism card if he feels his interests demand it.  Now that he has been condemned by the UN and attacked by NATO, he almost certainly will again exploit his considerable financial resources to fund terrorism.  But President Barack Obama did not cite the danger posed by Gadhafi and instead chose to emphasize the humanitarian aspect of a US military intervention.

Recall for a moment that when Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1991 there were tales of Iraqi soldiers hurling infants out of incubators.  Additional atrocities were described tearfully by a young woman who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.  Almost everything being reported about the bloodthirsty Iraqis turned out to be false, deliberately so, to make the case for war.  In light of the deliberate deception that has been part and parcel of every American intervention anywhere since the end of the Second World War, how can anyone believe the official narrative?  Why should anyone assume that Muammar Gadhafi will decide to slaughter his own people, particularly since he has a major interest in making the rebellion to his rule go away, an unlikely outcome if he engages in wholesale massacres.

Most Americans would accept that there will be times when our country must use its armed forces as an instrument of foreign policy, but this is not one of those moments.  Gadhafi posed no imminent threat to anyone but his own people and it is far from clear whether he was in fact poised to kill large numbers of them in some kind of paroxysm of revenge for the rebellion against his authority.  And the problem with humanitarian intervention as a concept is that it opens the door to more of the same wherever there are violations of fundamental rights.  It is perhaps necessary to step back and establish some sort of metric for intervention, but attempting to do so produces some odd results.  When should one intervene on humanitarian grounds and what are the numbers of deaths required to trigger some kind of United States response?

Many countries are not shy about massacring civilians.  The United States has itself killed tens of thousands of them in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Even accepting that Gadhafi might have killed some hundreds of Libyans, he is not exactly unique.  Protesters have recently been met by force in a number of countries in the Arab world, to include Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria and there have been large numbers of fatalities.  How does the United States make a decision whether or not to intervene in those places to save lives?  Is the decision based on the number of deaths, the types of deaths, or, one suspects, the relationship of Washington with whoever is in charge in the respective countries?  Gadhafi was a convenient fall guy and it now appears that President Bashar Assad of Syria is possibly also being set up, but is there any chance that Washington will pull the plug on its support of the Kings of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?

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http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/04/06/humanitarian-interventionism-by-the-numbers/

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Trust Obama?


We have to, because his “war powers” have no effective bounds

by Brian Doherty | April 6, 2011

http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/06/trust-obama

Last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tried to get the Senate to adopt candidate Barack Obama’s core principle of presidential warmaking powers.

Paul added an amendment to a bill that would adopt as the “sense of the Senate” the following quote from candidate Obama: “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was having none of it, refusing to let the bill come to a vote. Sen. Paul wrote him a letter explaining why it was so important, which read in part:

"The motion Senator Paul made has the vote as the pending business in the Senate, ready for a vote at any time. He did not ask for extended debate…

It will be the only 30 minutes spent on discussing and voting on whether or not the President has the power under the Constitution to attack another country without congressional authorization.

We believe the answer is that he does not. We also believe Congress has an obligation to stand up and declare whether or not we intend to hold the President to his constitutional oath…..

Voting for whether or not to send our sons and daughters to war is the most important and most difficult decision we should ever make as a nation and as senators. We do not take this responsibility lightly, and we believe the Senate is abdicating its responsibility at this very moment.

The bombing and military action against the Libyan government will be two weeks old by the time we return to session next week. That means congressional debate on this war is two weeks overdue."


Yesterday the Senate did vote—90-10—to table the proposal. It was, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who was one of the 90, “too cute by half” to even rhetorically hold the president to either the views he was elected on, or to the Constitution. Paul said, of congressional pusillanimity on their warmaking powers, "The new motto of Congress appears to be, ‘Tread on me. Please, tread on me.’”

Not that it would have mattered to the Obama administration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had already told Congress that the executive would not feel constrained by any attempt by Congress to assert its authority. She magnanimously offered, though, for the legislative branch to become part of the team—“the administration welcomes the support of Congress in whatever form that they want to express that support."

The president can’t wage this war in Libya legally. The Constitution prohibits it, giving the power to start non-defensive wars unequivocally to Congress. So, theoretically, does the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR), even though it's far more forgiving of executive power than the Constitution


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http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/06/trust-obama

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The Battle against Gadhafi

NATO Fears War without End in Libya

By Carsten Volkery
4/7/11
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,755616,00.html#ref=nlint

AP
Rebel fighters in the town of Brega. Their leaders have demanded more air strikes from NATO.

The front in Libya is barely moving as the country remains split between rebels and Gadhafi's troops. The rebels are complaining of not receiving enough air support, but NATO is hardly in a position to ramp it up after the withdrawal of US fighter jets. The resulting stalemate underscores the lack of a clear strategy for the allies in Libya.

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,755616,00.html#ref=nlint

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Middle East
Apr 9, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD09Ak01.html 
 
THE ROVING EYE


Let me bomb you in peace

By Pepe Escobar

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


If former Pentagon supremo Donald "known unknown" Rumsfeld were still in business, he'd be grumbling that Libya presents no bombable targets - as in Afghanistan in 2001. As far as United States quagmires go, Libya is bigger than Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. But any possible "targets" concentrate in a few cities along the Mediterranean coast.

The Barack Obama-launched Tomahawking of Muammar Gaddafi's forces (and a few installations) is over; now it's up to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to impose the "kinetic military action" (White House newspeak) and thus force "regime change". And in perfect Tag Heuer time, disaster has set. NATO would love to bomb everything in sight shock and awe-style - but they can't. They can't even pinpoint Gaddafi's forces on their screens.

You don't remain in power over four decades in a developing country without learning a military trick or two from illustrious predecessors such as China's Mao Zedong and Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh - not to mention bunglers such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq. After learning the lesson of having his tanks like sitting ducks in the desert bombed at will by the "coalition of the willing" (a few NATO members plus Qatar), Gaddafi is now fighting light-armor guerrilla style against the "rebels".

NATO's response has been more predictable than those everyday multilingual stalemates in Brussels; hurling accusations that Gaddafi is using human shields - as in his tanks in Misrata being "dispersed" across town and inside the perimeter. Translation: NATO's Tornado/Rafale air war is useless, unless you can bomb a tank column resplendent in the desert sun.

If NATO is angry, that motley crew known as the "rebels" is even angrier - accusing NATO of being incapable of carpet-bombing their own cities. This proves that the "rebels" themselves - who are practically begging for the West to do the dirty work - also don't give a damn about "collateral damage" among their own. One thing is certain; if NATO did what the "rebels" wanted it to do, collateral damage would be horrific. And European public opinion would pull the plug on this "kinetic" regime change action.
The circus is one more instance of how this war that is not a war is in fact a farce. The French and the British especially have bought their own hype that Gaddafi's regime is crumbling. They have also bought their own hype that this mixed bag of former Gaddafi loyalists, dodgy exiles, al-Qaeda-linked jihadis, business opportunists and true youthful revolutionaries have a political and militarily coherence, and are truly representative of the whole of Libya.

Religare Capital Markets in London gamed a few weeks ago that a stalemate in Libya had a 75% probability (with Brent crude reaching US$130 a barrel). Seems like Arab liberator French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his cohort British Prime Minister David Cameron are not on their reading list.

Thus the new, non-NATO-centric bright idea - former British special forces training the rebels to become a lean, mean, fighting machine, as if this could be accomplished in days or weeks, before there's a ceasefire.

The war that in fact no one wants except Sarko and Cameron is fizzling out like a ghastly remake of The Three Stooges (bidding is open for nominating the third stooge). That's what you get when you take sides in an African civil war where even the "good guys" are murkier than the waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The Obama administration/Pentagon condominium has removed all its state-of-the-art hardware from the field. Mission creep is the name of the game.

At least in Serbia, NATO knew what it was doing. It supported a "liberation army" (UCK) infested with murderers and drug dealers; it even bombed state companies (not private), cluster bombs and depleted uranium included, so multinational corporations could step in; and had the Pentagon set up a huge military base (Camp Bondsteel) to police its protectorate.

United Nations resolution 1973 theoretically does not allow NATO to go that far. The Western members of this "coalition of the willing", the Brits and the French foremost, not to mention the Pentagon, pray there will be, at the end of the tunnel, plenty of oil and a strategic Africom/NATO base in northern Africa. But there's no guarantee.

The last hope for sanity in all this mess is Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proposed his version of a roadmap for peace - calling for humanitarian aid corridors and steps toward democracy. Turkey is talking equally to both sides - and is not openly preaching regime change. The road map will be discussed by a few Europeans, the US, a few US client states in the Middle East and a few international bodies next Wednesday in Qatar - which, as we reported, is deeply involved in guiding the "transition" in Libya.

Let's wait. As it stands, any road map will beat bombed-out NATO.




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/MD09Ak01.html

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Mercenaries could help Libya’s rag-tag rebels: UK generals


ANI

http://truthdive.com/2011/04/07/Mercenaries-could-help-Libya-s-rag-tag-rebels-UK-generals.html

London, Apr. 7, 2011 (ANI): Mercenaries could be drafted into Libya to help rebel forces because British military chiefs believe the war against Colonel Gaddafi cannot be won with air strikes alone.

According to the Daily Mail, senior commanders have told David Cameron that the rebels lack the numbers and the organisation to oust the dictator without fresh arms supplies and professional military expertise.

As a result, they have proposed drafting in highly-paid 'dogs of war’ to train and lead the opposition forces towards the capital Tripoli in a battle to end the military stalemate.

The calculation is that it would not be necessary to take Tripoli to force Gaddafi into exile. If the rebels were on his doorstep he would have to negotiate a ceasefire and political solution on the opposition’s terms. (ANI)

 
http://truthdive.com/2011/04/07/Mercenaries-could-help-Libya-s-rag-tag-rebels-UK-generals.html

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We Are Not Being Told The Truth About Libya


By Johann Hari

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27842.htm

April 07, 2011 "Huffington Post" - - Most of us have a low feeling that we are not being told the real reasons for the war in Libya. David Cameron's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of the region's dictators selling them the most high-tech weapons of repression available. Nicholas Sarkozy's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to offer urgent aid to the Tunisian tyrant in crushing his people. Barack Obama's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to refuse to trim the billions in aid going to Hosni Mubarak and his murderous secret police, and for his Vice-President to declare: "I would not refer to him as a dictator."
This isn't the distant past. This is a few months ago. Yet now we are told that these people have turned into the armed wing of Amnesty International. They are bombing Libya because they can't bear for innocent people to be tyrannized, by the tyrants they were arming and funding for years. As Obama put it: "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different." There was a time, a decade ago, when I took this rhetoric at face value. But I can't now, because I have looked too deeply into the real actions behind the honeyed words.

The best guide through this confusion is to look at two other wars our government is currently deeply involved in -- because they show that the claims made for this bombing campaign can't be true.

Imagine a distant leader killed over 2,000 innocent people, and his military commanders responded to evidence they were civilians by joking that the victims "were not the local men's glee club." Imagine one of the innocent survivors appeared on television, amidst the body parts of his son and brother, and pleaded: "Please. We are human beings. Help us. Don't let them do this." Imagine polling from the attacked country showed that 90 percent of the people there said civilians are the main victims and they desperately want it to stop. Imagine there was then a huge natural flood, and the leader responded by ramping up the attacks. Imagine the country's most respected democratic and liberal voices were warning that these attacks seriously risked causing the transfer of nuclear material to jihadi groups.

Surely, if we meant what we say about Libya, we would be doing anything to stop such behavior? Wouldn't we be imposing a No Fly Zone, or even invading?

Yet, in this instance, we would have to be imposing a No Fly Zone on our own governments. Since 2004, the US -- with European support -- has been sending unmanned robot-planes into Pakistan to illegally bomb its territory in precisely this way. Barack Obama has massively intensified this policy.

His administration claims they are killing al Qaeda. But there are several flaws in this argument. The intelligence guiding their bombs about who is actually a jihadi is so poor that, for six months, they held top-level negotiations with a man who claimed to be the head of the Taliban -- only for him to later admit he was a random Pakistani grocer who knew nothing about the organization. He just wanted some baksheesh. The US's own former senior military advisors admit that even when the intel is accurate, for every one jihadi they kill, as many as fifty innocent people die. And almost everyone in Pakistan believes these attacks are actually increasing the number of jihadis, by making young men so angry at the killing of their families they queue to sign up.

The country's leading nuclear scientist, Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, warns me it is even more dangerous still. He says there is a significant danger that these attacks are spreading so much rage and hatred through the country that it materially increases the chances of the people guarding the country's nuclear weapons smuggling fissile material out to jihadi groups.

So one of the country's best writers and activists, Fatima Bhutto, tells me: "In Pakistan, when we hear Obama's rhetoric on Libya, we can only laugh. If he was worried about the pointless massacre of innocent civilians, there would an easy first step for him -- stop doing it yourself, in my country."
 
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 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27842.htm

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David Cameron's Gift of War and Racism, to Them and Us


By John Pilger

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27844.htm

April 08, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- The Euro-American attack on Libya has nothing to do with protecting anyone; only the terminally naive believe such nonsense. It is the West’s response to popular uprisings in strategic, resource-rich regions of the world and the beginning of a war of attrition against the new imperial rival, China.

President Barack Obama’s historical distinction is now guaranteed. He is America’s first black president to invade Africa. His assault on Libya is run by the US Africa Command, which was set up in 2007 to secure the continent’s lucrative natural resources from Africa’s impoverished people and the rapidly spreading commercial influence of China. Libya, along with Angola and Nigeria, is China’s principal source of oil. As American, British and French planes currently incinerate both “bad” and “good” Libyans, the evacuation of 30,000 Chinese workers is under way, perhaps permanently. Statements by western officials and media that a “deranged and criminal Colonel Gaddafi” is planning “genocide” against his own people still await evidence. This is reminiscent of fraudulent claims that required “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo, the final dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the biggest US military base in Europe.

The detail is also familiar. The Libyan “pro-democracy rebels” are reportedly commanded by Colonel Khalifa Haftar who, according to a study by the US Jamestown Foundation, set up the Libyan National Army in 1988 “with strong backing from the Central Intelligence Agency”. For the past 20 years, Colonel Haftar has been living not far from Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA, which also provides him with a training camp. The Mujihadeen, which produced al-Qaida, and the Iraqi National Congress, which scripted the Bush/Blair lies about Iraq, were sponsored in the same time-honoured way, in leafy Langley.

Libya’s other “rebel” leaders include Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi’s justice minister until February, and General Abdel-Fattah Younes, who ran Gaddafi’s interior ministry: both with formidable reputations for savagely putting down dissent. There is a civil and tribal war in Libya, which includes popular outrage against Gaddafi’s human rights record. However, it is Libya’s independence, not the nature of its regime, that is intolerable to the west in a region of vassals; and this hostility has barely changed in the 42 years since Gaddafi overthrew the feudal king Idris, one the more odious tyrants backed by the west. With his Bedouin hyperbole and bizarre ways, Gaddafi has long made an ideal “mad dog” (Daily Mirror), now requiring heroic US, French and British pilots to bomb urban areas in Tripoli, including a maternity hospital and a cardiac centre. The last US bombing in 1986 managed to kill his adopted daughter.

What the US, British and French hope to achieve is the opposite of a people’s liberation. In undermining efforts Libya’s genuine democrats and nationalists to free their country from both a dictator and those corrupted by foreign demands, the sound and fury from Washington, London and Paris has succeeded in dimming the memory of January’s days of hope in Tunis and Cairo and distracted many, who had taken heart, from the task of ensuring that their gains are not stolen quietly. On 23 March, the US-backed Egyptian military issued a decree barring all strikes and protests. This was barely reported in the west. With Gaddafi now the accredited demon, Israel, the real canker, can continue its wholesale land theft and expulsions. Facebook has come under Zionist pressure to remove a page calling for a full scale Palestinian uprising - a “Third Intifada” - on 15 May.

None of this should surprise. History suggests nothing less than the kind of machination revealed by two senior diplomats at the United Nations, who spoke to the Asia Times. Demanding to know why the UN never ordered a fact-finding mission to Libya instead of an attack, they were told that a deal had been done between the White House and Saudi Arabia. A US “coalition” would “take out” the recalcitrant Gaddafi if the Saudis put down the popular uprising in Bahrain. The latter has been accomplished, and the bloodied King of Bahrain will be a guest at the Royal Wedding in London.

The embodiment of this reaction is David Cameron, whose only real job has been as PR man to the television industry’s asset stripper, Michael Green. Cameron was in the Gulf selling arms to the British-invented tyrannies when people rose up against Yemen’s Abdullah Saleh; on 18 March, Saleh’s regime murdered 52 demonstrators. Cameron said nothing of value. Yemen is “one of ours”, as the British Foreign Office likes to say. In February, Cameron revealed himself in an attack on what he called “state multi-culturalism” - the code for Muslims. He said, “We need a lot less of the past tolerance of recent years.” He was applauded by Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s fascist National Front. “It is exactly this kind of statement that has barred us from public life for 30 years,” she told the Financial Times. “I can only congratulate him.”

At its most rapacious, the British empire produced David Camerons in job lots. Unlike many of the Victorian “civilisers”, today’s sedentary Westminster warriors - throw in William Hague, Liam Fox and the treacherous Nick Clegg - have never been touched by the suffering and bloodshed which, at remove in culture and distance, are the consequences of their utterances and actions. With their faintly trivial, always contemptuous air, they are cowards abroad, as they are at home. War and racism and the destruction of Britain’s hard-won social democracy are their gift. Remember that when you next take to the streets in your hundreds of thousands, as you must.


www.johnpilger.com

===============
 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27844.htm


 

[worcesteradam]

Exposing the Libyan Link by Seymour M. Hersh (NY Times – June 21, 1981)

Five years ago, two former operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency made a deal with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to supply the Libyan strongman with explosives for huge sums of cash. They also hired former Green Berets to set up a secret training school to teach the Libyans the latest techniques in assassination and international terrorism. As a cover for these operations, the two men, Edwin P. Wilson and Frank E. Terpil, operated several seemingly legitimate export companies. To head one such company, they hired another former C.I.A. employee, Kevin P. Mulcahy. For a long time, Mulcahy let himself believe that the entire operation was really part of an unofficial but approved American intelligence operation being carried out by an ”old-boy” network of former Government workers, intelligence agents and Green Berets with strong and lasting connections to Washington officialdom. In this, the second of a two-part series, Mulcahy discovers that the Qaddafi connection is illegal and not an intelligence operation, and, at considerable personal risk, goes first to the C.I.A. and then to the F.B.I. Seymour M. Hersh, a former reporter for The New York Times, is at work on a book about Henry Kissinger to be published by Summit Books. By Seymour M. Hersh hortly before midnight on a muggy Washington Sunday in September 1976, Kevin P. Mulcahy, a former C.I.A. analyst who was then in the export business, telephoned the duty officer at agency headquarters in McLean, Va. ”There are problems overseas,” Mulcahy said without elaboration, and he had to talk immediately to the agency’s assistant to the deputy director of clandestine operations.

Mulcahy would wait for a return call.

The call came within the hour. On the telephone was Theodore G. Shackley, one of the most influential men in the C.I.A. Mulcahy had a disturbing tale to tell. The firm of which he was president had agreed to sell the hardware of terrorism – explosives and delayed-action timers – to Libya’s Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Moreover, the firm had also agreed to set up a training school to teach Libyans the latest in the techniques of terrorism and political assassination. Only days before, Mulcahy told Shackley, he had been ordered to purchase an American-made Redeye missile, a weapon capable of shooting down a commercial airliner, for delivery to the Libyan ruler. Mulcahy’s two business partners, Edwin P. Wilson and Frank E. Terpil, who had brought Mulcahy into the firm, were themselves former C.I.A. operatives.

Now, on the telephone, Mulcahy asked Shackley: ”Is this a C.I.A. operation or not?” Shackley was noncommittal, and Mulcahy now knew that his worst suspicions were correct: The Wilson-Terpil operations did not have the sanction of the C.I.A. He knew that in the close-knit world of Government intelligence word would somehow get back within days to Mulcahy’s partners that he had gone to the authorities. So he quickly went into hiding, disguising his appearance and using a false name. But he anticipated that his partners and their associates would be quickly seized, convicted and imprisoned. He expected this would happen not only for his own well-being, but also to stop an operation he believed inimical to the national-security interests of his country and to world peace.

But things did not work out that way. The Federal law-enforcement agencies eventually became enmeshed in a long series of bureaucratic rivalries and intrigues that hampered and delayed the investigation. There was another complication: a lack of Federal statutes that expressly barred acts of terrorism by Americans abroad.

Mulcahy found himself in limbo, not a fugitive from justice but, in a sense, a captive of it. Over the coming months, there were no quick arrests. And while he was in hiding, Wilson and Terpil were steadily expanding the scope of their operations inside Libya. They arranged for illegal shipment of more than 40,000 pounds of explosives to Libya and continued to recruit former Green Berets and Government ordnance experts for their training school. Qaddafi is believed to have relied on the American-provided materiel and training in his efforts to expand his influence in the Middle East and North Africa, including the invasion earlier this year of neighboring Chad. The Libyan ruler is suspected, too, of having ordered the political assassination of 10 or more of his political enemies living in exile, with the aid, in at least one case, of Wilson and Terpil. It would be four years before the two men would be indicted by the United States Attorney’s office in Washington on charges that included illegal export of explosives as well as conspiracy and solicitation to commit murder. They are both at large to this day. As a result, Mulcahy has now, in frustration, decided to tell his story publicly for the first time. evin Mulcahy’s business partnership began to unravel in Europe in late August 1976 after he was ordered by his partners to purchase the Redeye missile for Qaddafi. He then left Wilson and Terpil and flew to Washington to find out all that his company, Inter-Technology, was doing in Libya. After he arrived, he went to the company offices and went through the files. It was what he found there – documents marked ”secret” which he, the firm’s president, had never seen – that led him to call the C.I.A. duty officer. There were contracts and correspondence which explicitly defined the corporation’s ostensible business dealings with Libya as cover operations, and which contained forgeries of Mulcahy’s signature.

The documents outlined a 26-week ”training program for intelligence and security officers in the field of espionage, sabotage and general psychological warfare,” and one page said the program’s emphasis would be ”placed on the design, manufacture, implementation and detonation of explosive devices.” Mulcahy further learned that his partners had proposed to Qaddafi that the first graduates of the terrorist school demonstrate their skills by blowing up an Aramco pipeline in Saudi Arabia.

Mulcahy knew he was in trouble. Wilson and Terpil, he says, ”had set me up beautifully. By then, I was in deep enough, and I knew they had me. I picked up an ashtray from Frank’s desk, threw it across the room, and broke a lamp.”

As president of the company, he knew he could be held criminally responsible for its activities, and, he says, ”I had to think – what the hell do I do now? I had to find out. Was this a C.I.A. operation or not? Did it involve national security? I still wanted to think there was a possibility that Ed and Frank were acting on behalf of the C.I.A. If it was a C.I.A. operation, I had two options – continue to do it, or get out. If it wasn’t C.I.A., then I could make up my mind: Do I want to make a lot of money or do I get out and take my chances?”

He knew only too well the dangers. A few months earlier, Terpil had passed a message to Wilson, through Mulcahy, reporting that ”the hit’s been taken care of.” Mulcahy learned from the talkative Terpil that Wilson felt he had been cheated six or seven years earlier by a merchant in Paris on a transaction involving British woolen uniforms in storage in Nova Scotia. The ”hit” referred to by Terpil apparently was a bomb that went off under the mer-chant’s auto, severely injuring his wife, who apparently was alone.

Kevin Mulcahy’s initial belief was that Wilson and Terpil were operating with the full sanction of the C.I.A. He had been told the exported explosives and other materials were to be used to clear mines planted in Libya’s harbors and battlefields during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Mulcahy clearly wanted to believe the cover story. His own allegiance to the C.I.A. was deep; he had worked for the agency as an intelligence analyst in the 1960′s, and his father had begun working there in 1947, the year it was chartered. In 1968, Mulcahy resigned to take a job in the electronics industry, and in 1976 Ed Wilson offered him a high-paying position in his export company. Mulcahy knew Wilson had served with credit in the C.I.A.; knew he was widely respected by his former agency associates, and was led to believe that important ties still existed.

Indeed, one night, not long after Mulcahy joined the business, Wilson took him to Theodore Shackley’s home. Shackley later said he welcomed such visits from Wilson because they produced useful intelligence. Among other things, Mulcahy recalls, Wilson and Shackley discussed Wilson’s forthcoming visit to Libya for a meeting with Qaddafi. Wilson’s main purpose for the meeting, however, Mulcahy says, was to seek Shackley’s intervention in the granting of a Government export license for a pending sale of high-grade communications gear, whose export was about to be disapproved by the State Department. It is not clear what significance Shackley gave to the visit, but Mulcahy certainly thought he understood the point: that the export business was covertly approved by the C.I.A.

After Mulcahy’s alarming discovery in his company’s files, he knew he needed help, that he had to talk to someone. ”My first instinct was not to hurt anybody,” he says. ”If it was a C.I.A. operation, I didn’t want to blow it by exposing it to an outsider or to some underling at the agency. I felt there was no one I could safely talk to about what I had found.” So he turned to Shackley. If the Wilson-Terpil operation was C.I.A., Mulcahy knew he could discuss it with Shackley without jeopardizing it.

But while waiting for Shackley to return his call, Mulcahy also telephoned an old family friend who worked in the C.I.A.’s Office of Security, and asked him to come over and review the Inter-Technology documents. ”My thought was that no matter what Shackley decided to do, or not do, I wanted someone else in the agency to be aware of the Libyan operation,” Mulcahy recalls. ”I wanted a second reporting source.”

Mulcahy’s family friend was particularly concerned that there was evidence linking Patry E. Loomis and William Weisenburger with the Wilson operation; Loomis and Weisenburger still were on active duty with the C.I.A. The Office of Security official suggested that Mulcahy report his information to the F.B.I. He did so with a sense of betrayal: Nothing in his life had prepared him to be disloyal to for-mer colleagues and associates, particularly in an agency so closely tied to the life of his family. It was that loyalty, perhaps, so widespread throughout the C.I.A., that enabled Wilson and Terpil to operate so openly for so long.

On the very day that he began talking to the Government, Mulcahy received a message from Wilson, who was still overseas: ”He told me to ‘shut up, just knock it off.’ He’ll explain everything when he returns.”

A secretary at Inter-Technology later passed an explicit warning to Mulcahy: ”She knew it was not a C.I.A. operation and she said, ‘Ed is going to kill you.’ ” Mulcahy decided to go underground. He armed himself with an M-16 rifle and spent three weeks camping, shifting campsites every evening. Presently, he moved to a small town in the Shenandoah Valley and established a new identity for himself, with a birth certificate, driver’s license, passport and credit card, and took a job as a drug and alcoholism counselor. A few years earlier Mulcahy had successfully overcome a drinking problem with the aid of such counsel. e also began talking extensively to Federal agents from six investigatory agencies, traveling at his own expense to Washington as often as three days a week. The F.B.I. assigned a group of agents to the case, and Mulcahy was encouraged. ”They said they needed more stuff and we started going through all the paperwork I had. I was drawing diagrams for them, giving them organizational charts, the details of possible political payoffs. I gave them a long statement, agreeing that I would continue to cooperate with them as long as I would never have to testify publicly against Wilson and Terpil, and that my name would never be mentioned in the press. I knew these guys were looking for me. I was afraid of them. They had called members of my family and the woman I was seeing, trying to locate me.” A constant fear was the safety of his two sons, both of whom live in the Washington area with Mulcahy’s former wife and had visited Wilson’s farm.

Meanwhile, the Government received unsolicited first-hand corroboration of his allegations. In early October 1976, John Henry Harper, a former C.I.A. bomb technician who had been hired by Ed Wilson, returned from Libya and, after learning of Mulcahy’s defection, went to the C.I.A. where he, too, described the program that Wilson and Terpil were setting up for Qaddafi. Harper said that he and his fellow Americans had constructed a laboratory and were manufacturing assassination bombs disguised as rock formations, ashtrays, lamps and tea kettles.

Wilson and Terpil also hired three Cubans who had worked for the C.I.A. to carry out an assassination on behalf of Qaddafi. Wilson paid the three men $30,000 in expenses with a personal check drawn on his account in a Middleburg, Va., bank. Instead of carrying out their assignment, the Cubans returned from Europe and reported to the C.I.A.; they told the agency that they had initially believed that their assassination target would be the international terrorist Carlos Ramirez, known to police as the Jackal, the man who planned the 1972 Olympics massacre at Munich. However, after meeting in Geneva with Wilson, the Cubans said they learned that the target would be Umar Abdullah Muhayshi, a Libyan defector who had plotted to overthrow Qaddafi’s regime. The Cubans refused the assignment and returned to the United States. All of this information was made known to the Federal investigators by the C.I.A.

At about this time, Shackley was ordered by a superior to draft a memorandum of his late-night telephone conversation with Mulcahy, about which he had never made a formal report, senior C.I.A. officials discovered. Now Shackley depicted Mulcahy as being irrational, paranoid, alcoholic and an unreliable informant. A copy of the Shackley memorandum eventually was provided to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington and to Federal investigators. Shackley’s suggestion – that Mulcahy was not in full control of his faculties – would be taken at face value by many over the next few months. Mulcahy remains hurt and bitter today about the memorandum. ”It was a cheap shot to use my past illness, for which I’d long been treated, to discredit me.”

Wilson and Terpil continued to expand their operations inside Libya. Those in their employ included Pat Loomis, who was still under assignment with the C.I.A. as a liaison officer between its headquarters and its overseas stations; Loomis and others began meeting with Green Berets near the John F. Kennedy Special Forces training center at Fort Bragg, N.C., and urg- ing them to retire from the military and join the operations in Libya. In those contacts, the Green Berets later told a Federal grand jury, there once again was the suggestion that everything had been sanctioned by the agency.

Evidence in the Wilson-Terpil case had been forwarded by the F.B.I. to the Foreign Agents Registration section of the Department of Justice. Complicating the F.B.I.’s investigation was the fact that there are no Federal laws prohibiting the aiding and abetting of terrorist or presumed terrorist activities outside the United States. There was yet another factor that obviously inhibited the initial investigation and made the Wilson-Terpil case seem less urgent; this was the political assassination in September 1976 of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean Ambassador to the United States. Solving Letelier’s murder, which took place in downtown Washington, became a high priority of the United States Attorney’s office in Washington, draining off manpower and the emotional energy of the staff.

The tension began to build for Mulcahy. He seemed to be unable to get anyone in the Federal Government to share his concern about the vital importance of rapidly stopping the flow of timers and explosives to Libya. Mulcahy knew that assassination weapons were being made in Libya by late 1976; there could be blood on his – and America’s – hands before long. Wilson and Terpil had responded to Mulcahy’s accusations by hiring prominent defense attorneys and depicting Mulcahy as an alcoholic Vietnam veteran for whom they had showed compassion by giving him a job – only to learn that he was unstable and irrational.

In April 1977, a report in The Washington Post on the Justice Department’s pending investigation of Wilson’s ties to Libya brought the matter to the attention of Stansfield Turner, the newly apppointed C.I.A. director. Turner moved to take personal charge of an inquiry into the Wilson operations and quickly learned of Mulcahy’s charges. The C.I.A. director then called in Pat Loomis and Bill Weisenburger (two active-duty employees who were moonlighting with Wilson and Terpil), questioned them and fired them. He also ordered a shake-up in the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, replacing Ted Shackley and his immediate superior, William Wells. ”They were both nice guys,” Turner says, ”but not right for the job.” He will not elaborate. The C.I.A. director further had a directive posted in the agency’s headquarters and sent to every office abroad warning that no employee was to associate with Ed Wilson.

What Turner did not do was call in Kevin Mulcahy. If he had, he might have learned the extent of Wilson’s contacts in Libya and that Wilson’s access inside the C.I.A. transcended Loomis and Weisenburger. Turner also might have learned that the clandestineoperations division had been warned that Wilson was attempting to arrange a political assassination on behalf of Qaddafi, as the Cubans had told the C.I.A. control officers. Moreover, no one in the agency seems to have bothered to inform Turner of John Harper’s account of the weapons laboratory and training programs in Libya undertaken by Wilson and Terpil. The failure of the lower-level officials of the C.I.A. to report fully to Stansfield Turner does not mean that Wilson’s activities were approved of or endorsed in any way, but it does reveal an astonishing and not fully understood modus vivendi of the intelligence business: The primary loyalty of the men in the clandestine service was to Ed Wilson, their former colleague and associate and not to the new Director of Central Intelligence, who was viewed as an outsider who could not understand the mentality of an operative in the field. Kevin Mulcahy had violated the code.

Shipments of explosives for use in terror weapons continued to flow into Libya, and a second generation of timers – far more sophisticated than the first group shipped in 1976 -began arriving in Tripoli. Ed Wilson, with his charm and his C.I.A. expertise, had struck up a warm personal friendship with Qaddafi and he emerged by the end of 1977 as the man in charge. Frank Terpil became disenchanted with his reduced role -and the reduced personal profits – and began spending less time in Libya. Terpil eventually moved on to Uganda, where he received a $3.2 million contract to provide arms, explosives and torture devices, among other things, to the regime of Idi Amin.

Wilson’s contacts with Jerome S. Brower, a California explosives manufacturer, intensified during this period and Brower – who had supplied the first shipment of explosives to Libya in the summer of 1976 -began recruiting bomb experts for the Wilson operations. Federal authorities learned later that two of the experts recruited by Brower – Robert E. Swallow and Dennis J. Wilson (no relation to Ed Wilson) – were civilian Navy employees at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert in California, where some of the Navy’s and C.I.A.’s most sensitive ordnance research is conducted. Swallow and Dennis Wilson, Federal authorities say, spent their annual leave in 1977 on site at Ed Wilson’s training camp in Tripoli. Both men returned to their Government jobs without informing anyone about what was going on in Libya. The men are now under investigation by the United States Attorney’s office.

Not everyone kept his peace. One of the Green Berets reported to military intelligence that he had been approached by Loomis. In another case, as later told to a Federal grand jury, a former Green Beret who had worked in the Wilson-Terpil operations in Libya was extensively debriefed by military intelligence upon his return and referred to the F.B.I. for further questioning. None of these reports seemed to make any difference: The F.B.I. investigation continued at a slow pace; Wilson and Terpil continued their terrorist-supply operations, and Mulcahy continued to hide and to worry every time he started his car.

By mid-1977, Mulcahy had been hired to design and implement a residential treatment program for alcoholics and drug addicts in suburban Washington. But his past association with Wilson and Terpil continued to be a major part of his life, and he began to be annoyed with the F.B.I., not only by the slowness of its investigation, but also by the manner of some of the agents. ”I was sick and tired of talking to the F.B.I. We had a falling out. They kept me totally in the dark about what they were doing, but began to accuse me of holding out on them.” Mulcahy particularly was angered by the agents’ insensitivity: ”They would walk into our treatment center unannounced, right into the middle of the house, looking like Mutt and Jeff, with their trench coats on and their collars turned up.” Such visits inevitably alarmed the patients in the center, many of whom had unresolved problems with the law, and some began to view Mulcahy as a Government informant or under investigation himself.

Mulcahy had no illusions about his status inside the C.I.A. that summer. He had telephoned the Office of Security to see if the agency would provide some protection in case Wilson and Terpil decided to move against him. ”They flatly refused,” Mulcahy recalls. ”It was almost like I was a turncoat. I felt it was National Igloo Week.”

In December 1977, after more than a year of inquiry, the Foreign Agents Registration Office of the Justice Department concluded that Wilson and Terpil, despite conducting ”nefarious” business activities, had violated no American laws. They wrote pro forma notes, known as letters of declination, to the United States Attorney’s offices in Alexandria, Va., and Washington, recommending that the case be dropped. A copy of the letter was shown to Eugene M. Propper, an aggressive assistant United States Attorney who was then directing the Letelier prosecution in Washington. Propper had interviewed Wilson briefly the previous April, and Wilson emphatically denied any involvement in the sale of the timers to Libya; it was a lie that Propper vividly recalled when the Justice Department sought to drop the case. Propper learned that the Justice Department attorneys had relied solely on F.B.I. interviews in their investigation and he thought he could ask better questions and get better answers if he could bring witnesses before a grand jury.

The key was Mulcahy, who reluctantly agreed now to testify – taking a step he had vowed he would never do. ”I liked Gene,” Mulcahy recalls. ”He’s an impressive guy, so I said, ‘All right, I’ll go before the grand jury, but I’m not going into court and testify publicly against these guys.’ I gave the grand jury everything I had” – Propper was doing the questioning – ”and I did it without immunity. What I was telling them was the truth. If I did something wrong I was willing to pay for it.’ ” Federal officials acknowledged in recent interviews that Mulcahy’s grand-jury appearance provided the core of the subsequent indictments.

They also said that Mulcahy had little to fear in refusing immunity. ”Kevin wasn’t a criminal,” one Federal official said. ”He was just doing what his employer wanted.” Mulcahy had committed technical violations of the Munitions Control Act, the official added, but the United States Attorney’s office viewed them as not prosecutable. ”What we had on Kevin showed that he had not done anything to bother anybody,” one official said.

Mulcahy spent much of 1978 working intensely with lawyers in the United States Attorney’s office. Still nothing happened, and by the end of year, he wanted out: ”The whole thing was a farce as far as I was concerned; no one was telling me what was coming down and yet I know that Wilson and Terpil were still doing business in Libya.” He was reassured somewhat, he says, when a Federal official told him that Government authorities had visited Wilson at his farm in Virginia and graphically warned Wilson of reprisal in case anything happened to Mulcahy or his children. ”It made me feel better,” Mulcahy says. ”The Feds paid a visit to Ed late in the night, and told him that if anything happened, they would come looking for him.”

Federal officials subsequently explained that the delay in obtaining indictments did not reflect adversely on Mulcahy or his testimony, but resulted from a basic gap in the law, which does not specifically make it a crime to use American equipment and know-how to further terrorism overseas – as long as no overt acts are done in the United States. Wilson and Terpil were careful, as much as possible, to strike their business deals out of the country. When Eugene Propper initially began his investigation, the jurisdiction of the United States Attorney’s office was limited because of the lack of statutes. Though there was evidence through the Cubans that Wilson and Terpil had conspired with Qaddafi to assassinate one of his political enemies, solicitation to commit murder – that is, asking or hiring someone else to do the killing – is not a Federal crime, and there was no criminal statute in the District of Columbia barring such solicitation.

Propper got an inspiration. He had discovered in prosecuting an earlier case that any crime in the Maryland code not in conflict with the District of Columbia code could be charged in Washington, since the District of Columbia had adopted all of its criminal law from Maryland in 1801. Using that precedent, Propper was able to investigate Wilson and Terpil on solicitation charges in the District of Columbia. Another provision in the Washington code also enabled Propper to make the solicitation charge a Federal violation. So the United States Attorney’s office had its jurisdiction after all, but, once again, there were problems. The Letelier case was going to trial and Propper and a chief aide, E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., were unable to handle both cases at the same time.

By this time, Mulcahy had become deeply embittered, especially toward the F.B.I., which, he said, ”never assigned Special status to this case – which means that the agents assigned to it are working exclusively on it. At first, the F.B.I. didn’t believe me,” Mulcahy insists. ”Every person they interviewed supported Wilson’s and Terpil’s cover story and made me look like a guy with a wild tale to tell. Then if I ever asked the F.B.I. anything, one agent would look at the other to decide whether they could answer the question. It was a one-way street and I felt I couldn’t help them anymore without some kind of dialogue, without their willingness to tell me what they wanted and what they didn’t know.”

Officially, the F.B.I. does not comment on pending investigations, but one agent who did spend much time on the case disputed Mulcahy’s assessment in an interview. ”Kevin is very impatient,” the agent said. ”He thinks he can give us some facts one day and we should begin making arrests on the next.” ”He doesn’t understand the complexity of the case and the fact that no one is exactly cooperating with us. It’s been a long drawn-out affair, trying to get some of these witnesses to give us a straight line. This is not a very easy case to make. We had to start from the beginning, and I think it’s very unfair to criticize us or the United States Attorney’s office. We’ve been working hard on this for a long time.” Other Federal officials, however, echoed Mulcahy in raising questions about the Justice Department’s decision not to give the case higher priority, which would have meant the authorization of more F.B.I. agents for field work. Even now, only one agent in Washington is assigned to monitor developments in the case, and he was pulled off that for months early this year to handle background investigations of pending Reagan Administration appointments.

A major development, in Mulcahy’s view, came in mid-1978, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms assigned a new two-man team to the case. Richard Wadsworth and Richard Pedersen decided early in their investigation that Mulcahy was telling the truth. Now, for the first time, Mulcahy believed that he had someone inside the investigation with whom he could communicate. Mulcahy agreed to cooperate in an undercover investigation with Pedersen and Wadsworth, aimed at gathering first-hand evidence of Wilson’s illegal weapons dealings in Washington – the kind of specific evidence that seemed essential to a prosecution. The operation failed after five months, but the B.A.T.F. agents developed a close relationship with Mulcahy and learned vast amounts about the way Wilson operated, information and insight that later helped them crack the case.

Mulcahy continued to live in low profile, routinely changing his appearance. His fears were compounded late one night when he saw a truck owned by one of Wilson’s trusted associates parked across the street from his home. Mulcahy fled the scene and stayed away from the area for two days. ”It was over three years and I wanted out again,” he said, ”and so I disappeared – just went to Arizona under another name and worked in the construction business.”

Meanwhile, Wilson and Terpil began spending some of the money they were earning. By the end of 1978, they had purchased more than $4 million of real estate in the United States and England, paying in cash. They spent another million dollars for a hotel in Crewe, England, and a town house in London’s posh Lancaster Mews. Federal authorities believed the hotel was to serve as a stop on an underground railway for terrorists. By that time, Qaddafi had set up ”hit teams” that began to terrorize the Libyan exile community in Europe. At least 10 of Qaddafi’s political enemies were assassinated by the gunmen, who later would have access to the hotel to hide from authorities.

Another factor in the investigation of Wilson was his continued high-level political lobbying in the United States, which revolved around the social use of his estate in Virginia. By the mid-1970′s, Wilson was regularly throwing parties and offering hunting excursions at the estate, where senior members of the Carter Administration mingled with influential politicians and members of the intelligence community. Ted Shackley was also one of the guests. ”The name of the game is legitimacy,” one Federal official said. ”Ed Wilson brings three guys from the C.I.A. and Carter’s man brings two senators. Everybody’s legitimizing everybody else.”

”Every place we went,” the official added, ”Ed Wilson popped up – not on the surface, but if you looked far enough, it led to Wilson.”

In early June 1979, the United States Attorney’s office told Wadsworth and Pedersen of the B.A.T.F. that there was not enough evidence to charge Wilson and Terpil with illegally exporting explosives to Libya. The Government had no evidence that any explosives had in fact been shipped to Libya without the proper licenses and without accurate labeling and bills of lading, which are required to insure proper storage of the materials during shipment. All of the witnesses interviewed by the F.B.I. had stuck to the cover story in connection with the shipments to Libya; as far as they were concerned, all that Inter-Technology had undertaken was a contract with the Libyan Government to manufacture timers for use in mine-clearing operations. No explosives had been shipped, the witnesses claimed. Rick Wadsworth decided to make one final effort to find evidence of the shipment before bowing out of the case. He spent most of the Memorial Day weekend in the Federal courthouse in downtown Washington reviewing all of the documents and testimony. He found a work sheet buried in the files that had been turned over by Mulcahy to the F.B.I. in 1976. The work sheet with Brower’s handwriting on it stemmed from the meeting in August 1976 at which the California manufacturer agreed to ship RDX (cyclotrimethylene trinitramine) and the other explosives, suspended in 55-gallon drums, to Libya.

At this point, Eugene Propper was in the process of resigning from the United States Attorney’s office to practice law in Washington and write a book on the Letelier case; Lawrence Barcella suddenly found himself in charge of the Wilson-Terpil case. Barcella agreed, after being shown the work sheet, to permit Wadsworth and Pedersen to fly to California and interview Brower once again. Wadsworth and Pedersen had discovered that the work sheet, on which Brower had listed the type and weights of the explosives ordered by Wilson and Terpil, precisely matched the bills of lading for a shipment of explosives that week from Brower’s factory. The Government now had its evidence.

Over the next year, however, Brower stubbornly continued to insist that he knew nothing about illegal activity in the United States. In two appearances before the Federal grand jury in Washington, he denied that the conspiracy meeting in August 1976, as described by Mulcahy, ever took place. But the evidence, in his own handwriting, proved to be overwhelming and Brower eventually agreed to cooperate with the prosecutors in return for dismissal of all but one of the charges against him – conspiring to ship explosives with the intent to use unlawfully. When he did testify in late 1980, Brower acknowledged that Mulcahy was right; that there had been a key meeting in August which resulted in the initial shipment of the timers and explosives to Libya. He is now serving a four-month prison sentence.

Mulcahy describes Pedersen and Wadsworth as the heroes in the case that no one in the Federal Government seemed to want: ”They worked on their own time, in their own cars, because they knew there was truth in what I was telling them. What they didn’t have was proof. … They were constantly being told to close the investigation, but they told their superiors that if they wanted it closed, they could sign the file shut themselves.”

Mulcahy says now he believes that the laggard pace of the prosecution was not due to a Government cover-up but rather – more frustrating – was the result of bureaucratic inefficiency, rivalries, petty jealousies and what he saw as ”a simple lack of commitment” in the United States Attorney’s office. He says, too, that the F.B.I., the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Customs Service were reluctant to share information with one another at a time when Wilson and Terpil were continuing to expand their involvement in Libya: ”My most vital concern was that Wilson’s and Terpil’s activities eventually would result in a lot of deaths in the United States. Only then would the full resources of the United States Attorney’s office be committed.”

The revolving door in the United States courthouse was still another complication. Carol Bruce was assigned to the case in 1979. It was her first assignment to a major crime, and she began, as her predecessors had, by reviewing the files and spending hours with Mulcahy. He was encouraged once again: ”She was like a breath of fresh air. She understood the case and grasped its importance.” Coming to it late had an advantage; Carol Bruce was able to add objectivity to what had evolved into an emotional dispute and series of competitions among the investigative agencies. ”She came in with a chain saw,” Mulcahy says, ”and got things on track again.” In late 1979, Carol Bruce and Mulcahy had lunch, and the young prosecutor explained to Mulcahy that he had to continue to cooperate, and that he had to testify publicly against Wilson and Terpil at a trial. If he continued to insist that he would not do so, she warned, he could be indicted himself for his technical violations of the law as president of Inter-Technology.

The grand jury was convened and witnesses again started to come in for questioning. Seymour Glanzer, Wilson’s attorney, made clear that he would involve the C.I.A. as a major component in his client’s defense if the Government chose to indict Wilson. At one point, Federal officials said, Glanzer seemed to suggest that he would offer the prosecutors valuable information about the Letelier case in return for the dropping of charges against Wilson. The prosecutors also were offered a chance to interrogate Wilson in Europe, but they refused to do so and insisted that any plea bargaining would have to include a jail term. Glanzer, asked for his view of the matter, said, ”I can’t comment on the Federal prosecutors’ thought processes, and I’m not commenting on mine.” In late December

1979, Frank Terpil and an accomplice were arrested in New York in the culmination of a secret operation in which two New York City undercover detectives posed as Latin American revolutionaries anxious to purchase any kind of weapons. The investigation, led by the office of Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, accumulated hours of taped conversations involving Terpil, who was trying to impress, as usual. In one tape, Terpil bragged of his ability to sell any weapons, including missiles, and told of his team of former Green Beret experts who were willing to travel anywhere to train terrorists. By then, Wilson’s and Terpil’s team had been at work for more than three years in Libya. The New York evidence was shared with Washington, and was considered essential – although much of what Terpil revealed had already been provided to the Government by Mulcahy. ”I heard Frank was singing like a bird,” Mulcahy says.

Terpil was charged shortly after his arrest with illegal weapons possession. Some of the New York authorities who handled the Terpil investigation privately raised questions about the slow pace of the Federal inquiry in Washington. ”This is one time,” said one senior official in New York, ”that I’d want to be appointed as a special prosecutor (in Washington) or an assistant United States Attorney for about six months.” His obvious point was that the Washington case against Wilson and Terpil should have been handled much more expeditiously. The New York official acknowledged, however, that the case in Washington had been severely hampered by a ”lack of help from the investigative agencies.”

In April 1980, four months after the arrests in New York, Wilson, Terpil and Brower finally were indicted by a Federal grand jury in Washington. Terpil, who had been released on bond after pleading not guilty in the New York case, was arrested a few days later by Wadsworth and Pedersen at the Secret Service training academy in suburban Maryland. At the time, characteristically, Terpil was attending an industrial-security show, looking for equipment that he could sell overseas. The Federal indictment centered around conspiracy charges stemming from the August 1976 meeting in the office of Inter-Technology, as depicted in Mulcahy’s grand-jury testimony. The indictment also accused Wilson and Terpil of conspiring to assassinate the Libyan dissident. Mulcahy’s relief over the indictments was short-lived, however, because a Federal magistrate subsequently reduced Terpil’s bond from $500,000 to $75,000, of which only $15,000 had to be put up in cash. ”To me, it was the most absurd thing in the world,” Mulcahy recalls. ”I knew he was going to split – I knew him, his life style, the fact that he had at least six different passports.” Mulcahy also knew that Wilson and Terpil had been quietly disguising their ownership of their business ventures and properties in the United States to avoid Federal seizure. ”I took the reduced bond as a reflection of the importance the Government attached to this case – a $15,000 cash bond when millions of dollars and the resources of the Libyan Government were at his disposal.”

On Sept. 3, 1980, more than four months after his indictment in Washington and the day before he was to begin trial on the New York charges, Terpil fled to Europe.

With Terpil jumping bond, and Wilson choosing to remain abroad as a fugitive, Mulcahy concluded that it was time to get out. He had accomplished very little by his four years of cooperation. So he moved to the Middle West.

There were questions that still disturbed him. ”Why didn’t the C.I.A. cooperate fully and aggressively with the United States Attorney’s office? Why didn’t the Government ask the agency for its assistance in locating and apprehending Wilson and Terpil? Why wasn’t a combined Federal task force set up to coordinate the investigation? Why wasn’t a special prosecutor used? Why did the F.B.I. give this case such low priority? Where are we going to find Qaddafi’s bombs in the future? What does it take – short of a big body count – to get the attention of the Congress and the White House to a potentially lethal situation? What is the responsibility of the United States to the world in a case like this?”

Mulcahy returned to Washington late last year ready to end his own involvement with the prosecutors. ”I had been forced to live a lie,” he says. ”I had often lived under an assumed name, with a car and a business registered in other people’s names.” By that time, Mulcahy had set up a successful construction business, specializing in historical restorations. He began research for a book on his experiences, but that did not solve what he viewed as his immediate problem: ”How to exorcise my entire involvement with the case.” What he learned in early 1981 convinced him that it was time to take a step he had not contemplated before – going to the news media. A former C.I.A. colleague – Mulcahy will not say who – told him that Wilson and Jerome Brower had conspired in late 1977 to ship 40,000 pounds of C4 plastique to Libya, the largest illegal shipment of explosives known to Federal investigators. Mulcahy later confirmed that what he had heard was true -the shipments had been made from a Texas airport in the fall of 1977, aboard a chartered DC-8 cargo jet. An employee of one of Wilson’s firms, Around World Shipping and Chartering, of Houston, Tex., was known to have been involved.

Brower and his California company had made a profit of $1 million on the C4 shipment alone, Mulcahy was told. ”What I felt was absolute horror,” Mulcahy recalls. ”I was horrified that they could have shipped explosives in that quantity, involving as many people as they did – lawyers from two different states, commercial airlines, commercial freight forwarding companies – and not have been detected. There had to be a cast of characters of more than 10 people, including pilots and the companies that sold the C4. When I learned of it, the shipment was more than three years old and the F.B.I. and the United States Attorney’s office were fully aware of it. Yet no one had been charged, or even called before a grand jury. That was the final factor in my decision to go public. The only option left to me was the press.”

In interviews a few weeks ago, prosecutors at the United States Attorney’s office declared that the case still was open and that more indictments would be issued before the end of summer, expanding the ranks of those known to have been involved in the Wilson-Terpil operations. Some former C.I.A. officials, among them Ted Shackley, are known to have been talking with the prosecutors, and apparently have been shedding new light on Wilson’s connection – or lack of connection – to the agency. Meanwhile, Frank Terpil was tried in absentia by New York City authorities on 10 conspiracy and weapons charges, found guilty and sentenced, June 8, to 17 2/3 to 53 years in prison, the maximum.

Mulcahy believes the Government is now focusing its attention on the lesser lights who flitted about the Wilson-Terpil operations. He knows that Wilson operated in Washington so freely because of his ability to reach into the top layer of Government and Congress; because of his connections in a city where connections are so important. Mulcahy also knows that Wilson and Terpil are not the only former C.I.A. and military men selling information and materiel to the highest bidder. Most important, Mulcahy believes that the United States Attorney’s office in Washington was guilty of what he calls ”Government complicity by omission” by not demanding that Federal agencies, at the very least, cut off the flow of men and terrorist equipment to Libya.

Mulcahy remains a believer: He believes in the value and importance of the C.I.A. and the due process of the American judicial system. ”The system can work,” he says, ”but it can’t work unless the people who are the system put it to work.” If he had it to do again, he says, ”I know I wouldn’t have approached any Government agencies. I would have taken every document I had to the White House or hand-delivered them to the most responsible journalist I could find. I’d never go to a Government agency again – because of the way I was treated, the lack of commitment and the half-truths that I’ve heard for the last five years.”

Edwin Wilson could not be reached for comment. Someone who answered the telephone at his office in Tripoli declined to give his name and hung up when asked to take a message.

Despite the formal disavowal by the C.I.A., Wilson remains an outsider who knows a great deal about secret American intelligence activities. Last August, four months after his indictment, he was seized by officials in Malta and held in custody for more than three days. Somehow, before he could be turned over to American authorities for extradition to Washington, he managed to flee, flying from Malta to Heathrow Airport near London on his revoked passport. Federal officials now suspect a $10,000 payoff through a laundered bank account was made in Malta on Wilson’s behalf. There are those in Washington who believe that, even today, there are some elements in the C.I.A. who protected Wilson in Malta and will continue to shield him.

http://ce399fascism.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/exposing-the-libyan-link-by-seymour-hersh-ny-times-june-21-1981/

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Middle East
Apr 14, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak01.html 
 
THE ROVING EYE


Libya: Ceasefire or bust


By Pepe Escobar

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


The so-called Libya contact group - that euphemism defining the minute Western/Gulf emirates "coalition of the willing" - meets in Doha, Qatar, ahead of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ministerial meetings in Berlin, amid an atmosphere of downright farce.

Former Libyan foreign minister and current defector to Britain Moussa Koussa is a stalwart of the Qatar meeting, trying to convince the "rebels" of the Interim National Council (INC) that the only possible solution for the moment implies Colonel Muammar Gaddafi remaining in power.

That also happens to be exactly what mediator Turkey is saying. No wonder the "rebels" and their sponsors - the dashing Arab liberator Anglo-French couple President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister David Cameron - are fuming, and puzzled.

The head of the African Union (AU) mission to Libya, South African President Jacob Zuma - whose country is the only member of the BRICS group that supported United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 (Brazil, Russia, India and China abstained) - was convinced that Gaddafi had embraced the AU road map, which started with a ceasefire. But there has been no ceasefire so far. The wall of mistrust between Gaddafi and the rebels/NATO tandem has reached Himalayan proportions. NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen keeps stressing Gaddafi "does not keep his promises". Gaddafi is not fool enough to stop fighting while NATO may keep on bombing.

As for the United States, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - who along with her Amazon warriors, envoy to the UN Susan Rice and National Security Council aide Samantha Power, forced this sorry adventure on a reluctant White House - now also stress a ceasefire (but always with inbuilt "regime change").

It's quite useful to compare the AU approach - developed by South Africa, Uganda, Mali, Mauritania and Congo-Brazzaville - with NATO's. Once there's a ceasefire respected by both sides, there's the establishment of humanitarian corridors; civilians, local and foreigners (especially African migrant workers) can be protected; and a national political dialogue may start, meeting "the legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people for democracy".

The INC is in no position to dictate its terms to Gaddafi. There's certainly a risk of a ceasefire reached after the current stalemate crystallizing a balkanization of Libya - east and west. But virtually no Libyans seem to want to embrace that possibility. The AU is simply being pragmatic. Libya - along with Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa - finances 75% of the AU budget.

Gaddafi is friendly with the majority of the 53-member AU; Mauritania, Mali and Congo-Brazzaville, for instance, benefited from a lot of Libyan investment (in fact, no less than 31 African countries did).

On top of it the mediators are Africans - not neo-colonial Europeans. South Africa's Zuma would be the first to viscerally repudiate an Anglo-French-dominated Libya. There was ample suspicion about Zuma's motives when South Africa voted for UN resolution 1973. Anyway, the fact is now Zuma says what the top four BRICS plus Germany were saying before the vote; this Anglo-French-drafted resolution is open-ended. And it opens the door to the West just deposing any African leader they fancy, whenever they want it.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has also been instrumental in this mediation. He considers Gaddafi a true nationalist - and as most of his African peers, not to mention in the Middle East and across the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the developing world, they all favor nationalists compared to foreign puppets a la INC.

Community values

The AU mediation finally shatters the myth of the "international community" fighting the same old demonized "evil dictator" figure in Libya. Unless one considers the "international community" as comprised of seven members among the 28-member NATO (France, Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the US), plus those two paragons of democracy in the Persian Gulf, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

"Regime change" (which is not part of the UN resolution) does have support; but only in Washington, London, Paris and Benghazi.

Now compare the realism of the AU position - similar to Turkey's - with the pathetic squabbling between the Anglo-French and NATO. London and Paris want NATO to go on a mad bombing spree - as if NATO bombs could be programmed to only decimate pro-Gaddafi Libyans.

Coming from two political midgets such as British Foreign Secretary William Hague and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, that's no surprise. For its part, NATO's Brigadier-General Mark van Uhm tried to spin it in Brussels, warning - correctly - that Gaddafi's forces adapted to the air strikes by favoring "hit-and-run tactics by motorized columns of pickup trucks to wear out opposition forces psychologically rather than gain ground".

So NATO acknowledges it just can't shock and awe the enemy without provoking a genocide. And the grown ups in the picture are the Africans - who have come up with a plausible endgame. Only Paris, Rome and Doha have recognized the INC as the de facto Libyan government (can't resist the comparison with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE being the only ones to recognize the Taliban.)

It's telling that Washington at least has been more realistic. Now it's up to the Central Intelligence Agency-infested, opportunist-laden, marginally al-Qaeda-linked "rebels", and their Anglo-French sponsors, to wake up and smell the Arabica coffee.

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/MD14Ak01.html


 

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Middle East
Apr 14, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak04.html 
 
The blame game is on in Libya

By Victor Kotsev


TEL AVIV - If anyone had remaining doubts about the fog of war that descended on Libya in the last weeks, the confused bickering that has completely taken over more recently should clear those.

More cynical - or astute - observers claim that the whole thing was a masquerade from the start, a cover for a full-scale Arab counter-revolution or even a diversion of world attention from more pressing global problems such as the disaster in Japan, the financial crisis and the rattled international system.

Others blame the situation on glaring incompetence. While some of the former claims make sense as well, evidence of the latter is overwhelming, and incompetence does not exclude conspiracy.

Some of the latest news from Libya is that France and Britain are accusing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of not doing enough. "NATO must play its role fully. It wanted to take the lead in operations, we accepted that," French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Tuesday.

It looks like the blame game is in full swing. First the United States, which was instrumental in starting the bombing campaign, dumped Libya on its European allies led by Britain and France. Now, the latter two are trying to avoid responsibility for the debacle by pointing a finger at NATO (as if they, alongside the US, did not comprise a major part of the alliance).

The rest of the world has a much more convincing case for dodging the blame, even though hardly any leader's conscience is clear. Russia, for example, arguably helped the West get bogged down in Libya in order to serve its own narrow interests. [1]

The French are clearly unnerved. If French President Nicolas Sarkozy hoped he would resemble former British premier Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands in 1982 and pull a domestic comeback by a daring military operation, [2] his ambitions are about to end, to use a line by T S Eliot, "not with a bang but a whimper."

The military campaign is rapidly turning into a dead end ("stalemate" being the euphemism of the day), and a host of other powers ranging from the African Union to Turkey to Europe's economic leader, Germany, are vying to cut British and French ambitions down to size by imposing a ceasefire.

So upset are the French that they vented their anger on Ivory Coast's former president, Laurent Gbagbo, whom their special forces allegedly arrested on Tuesday. In Ivory Coast, just like in Libya, air strikes and limited "humanitarian" interventions failed to do the trick, yet Gbagbo was more vulnerable and easier to pin down than Gaddafi, and his arrest gave Sarkozy a minor opportunity to save face.
 
MORE

 http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD14Ak04.html

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Middle East
Apr 15, 2011 
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MD15Ak01.html 
 
THE ROVING EYE

Fatal Tomahawk attraction
 
By Pepe Escobar


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

You won't settle for some Eurovision chick when you actually paid to watch The Rolling Stones. That's what the "international community" - as in the Anglo-French Arab liberator couple plus the Libyan "rebels" - is demanding; either the Pentagon bombs the hell out of Muammar Gaddafi's forces, or we want our money back (as in eastern Libyan oil marketed by Qatar).

As expected, the meeting of the innocuously named but totally gung-ho "Libya contact group" in Doha was short on content and very long on farce. The top of the pops was the offer of a sequel to the International Monetary Fund (IMF); an International Rebel Fund (IRF) so that the motley crew of Gaddafi defectors, dodgy exiles, al-Qaeda linked Islamists and Central Intelligence Agency-trained armed demonstrators can actually fight as a cohesive unit.

The problem is how to shower the "rebels" with these IRF funds in a manner that is consistent with United Nations resolution 1973. Arguably London, Paris and Doha will say this is part of the "all necessary measures" text in the resolution, and hope to get away with it.

Is this a shoddy revival of the UN oil-for-food program that was a counterbalance to the UN sanctions against the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq? It is - especially because Anglo-French diplomats en masse are saying it isn't.

Bomb us to freedom

The Doha meeting was chaired by Qatar Prime Minister Hamed bin Jassem and Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague. The most important character in the meeting was a no-show; former Libyan foreign minister turned high-profile defector Mousa Koussa. The Qataris welcomed him, but the "rebels" vetoed him.

As for the pitiful Hague, he said, once again, "The vast majority of the world agrees that Gaddafi must go." This "vast majority" is exactly comprised of the governments of Britain and France, plus other four North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members bombing Libya, plus Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That's it.

Both the governments of British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are lost in space because nobody wants their war. Italian Prime Minister Silvio "Bunga Bunga" Berlusconi's government refuses to bomb Gaddafi's forces. Same with Belgium. Germany will only contribute on the humanitarian front. NATO is embroiled in a monster catfight - even with secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen shrieking about their fabulous record of over 2,000 sorties. Cameron and the neo-Napoleonic Sarko are begging for NATO to "increase the momentum".

As for the "rebels", the Pentagon crush couldn't be more self-evident. According to spokesman Mahmud Shamman, "When the Americans were involved the mission was very active and it was more leaning toward protecting civilians." Nothing is sexier than a Tomahawk in action. The "rebels" are going to Washington to lobby the Barack Obama administration. Shades of Afghan mujahideen visiting Ronald "freedom fighter" Reagan in the mid-1980s, anyone?

In the desperate search for "greater ground strike capability overall", the "rebels" have learned it's the Pentagon's way or the (Mediterranean) highway (in reverse). This translates as A-10 Thunderbolt tankbusters and AC-130 Specter gunships - which nobody (France, Britain, NATO, not to mention Qatar) has. Bets are off on whether the "rebels" will convince the White House to release the bats.

Not that the Pentagon has vanished from Libya. On the contrary. Six F-16s and five navy EA-18G Growler electronic attack planes - based in Italy - have been handed over to NATO. They've been busy bombing mobile surface-to-air missile targets last week. But what the "rebels" really want is the A-10s and the AC-130s.

Enlist the French patsy
 
The blah blah blah on Libya is increasingly sounding like a shabby version of Dancing with the Stars where no one gets the boot - except common sense. Now it's Cairo's turn - with UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, outgoing Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa (the opportunist who wants to become the next Egyptian president), African Union (AU) chairman Jean Ping and the toothless European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Lady Ashton attending. At least in Cairo they'll be - in theory - discussing the sound Turkish road map for peace, which is similar to the AU's.

As for the credibility of the "rebels" and their Interim National Council (INC), it has been reduced to grains of sand in the Libyan desert. By allowing the Anglo-French couple to hijack their "revolution" - which was conceived in Paris in late 2010, as Asia Times Online reported - and by imploring NATO and now the Pentagon to bomb their country to kingdom come, they have lost not only their credibility but their moral authority.

And on top of it they have allowed London, Paris, a few other European capitals and - the height of debasing hypocrisy - Doha and Abu Dhabi to pose as carriers of the white man's burden, teaching northern African "barbarians" how to settle their own problems.

And while we're at it, there is a practical solution the Libyan contact group has not yet considered. Why not dispatch self-promoting peacock, French "philosopher" Bernard Henri-Levy (known locally as BHL), who's been busy selling the idea he convinced neo-Napoleonic Sarko to become the new Arab liberator, to be the new "rebel" military commander?

BHL would have to abdicate his millionaire holiday home in Morocco, not to mention holding court at the Cafe de Flore in Paris to a gaggle of fawning media in his trademark, corny, open-chested white Charvet shirt. Let's see if the peacock knows how to play an "engaged public intellectual" for real.

No, he's too chicken for it - because now that this nasty, little, made-in-France civil war is going south, all BHL does (along with Sarko's minions) is whine about other countries, the US included, not pitching in. This would be tragic if it was not simply pathetic - confirming every global stereotype of how bad the French can be.

As for the "rebels", forget about dignity and sovereignty. Never underestimate the sex appeal of an actionable Tomahawk.

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/MD15Ak01.html

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Are We A Morally Dumb Nation?

by Aleksandar Jokic

April 13, 2011

http://uruknet.com/?p=m76826&hd=&size=1&l=e

The US is bombing yet another country: Libya. Now the US is doing it legally, with Security Council authorization. The main justification is couched in moral terms: "to protect civilians." However, neither can the UN issue indulgences for aggression of one country against another nor is the idea of bombing people in order to save them morally defensible. Hence, both the legal and moral presumptions of the operation "Odyssey Dawn" are indefensible. Let me explain.

Anyone who has ever formulated a moral judgment recognizes as its main feature that what is said to be right or wrong, just or unjust, fair or unfair in a particular situation must be so in any sufficiently similar situation. One who does not recognize this, in technical terminology of moral philosophy, is being "morally dumb" or a "moral idiot". Sir Peter Strawson, a celebrated 20thcentury British philosopher, had developed the notion of a "moral idiot" in his influential essay "Freedom and Resentment" to refer to agents who fail to be responsive to moral reasons or persons lacking morally appropriate affect. I use the phrase "morally dumb" to indicate persons who fail to realize that universalization is the main characteristic of moral judgments. Hence, if it is wrong for person A to kill civilians, then it is wrong for any other party to do so. Operation "Odyssey Dawn" involves slamming ordinance at targets throughout Libya, and has already killed hundreds of civilians. This should not be a surprise. The 1999 US-lead NATO aggression against Yugoslavia (without UN approval) killed over three thousand civilians. At the same time the operation "Allied Force" killed five hundred Yugoslav Army soldiers. Clearly, these sorts of operations are much more deadly for civilians than the alleged "military" targets. Furthermore, proof that the Qaddafi regime was slaughtering civilians was slender at best. Why would they? Be that as it may, this straw-man claim certainly cannot justify that instead of Qaddafi our military should be killing Libyan civilians. If we do not understand this, we are a morally dumb nation.

Essentially, the main objectives of the UN Charter were to outlaw aggression and foster the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. In the case of Resolution 1973, the Security Council acted without factual information as a mere instrument of Western powers rushing to authorize a "no-fly zone" which the US already interprets as a license to wage all-out war against Libya. The latter now results in a novel ideological construal called "responsibility to protect," which provides a way to obliterate the principle of noninterference and decriminalizes aggression--held by the Nuremberg judgment to be the "supreme international crime." As such, it is contrary to the foundations of the UN system, and in this instance, exceeded the formal jurisdiction of the Security Council, which has always been limited to threats to international peace and security.

Once the UN becomes the organization for issuing indulgences for imperial aggression by the US and its vassals against nations rich in resources—oil, gas, ores, arable lands and clean water—it should no longer remain in operation. The continued existence of the UN would only serve to fakelegitimacy of certain decisions to go to war; in effect, it would decriminalize aggression. Consequently, once the UN becomes its contrary, the distributor of "permissions" for US aggressions, it should simply shut down.

Aleksandar Jokic is a professor at Portland State University where he teaches courses in moral philosophy and international justice.

http://uruknet.com/?p=m76826&hd=&size=1&l=e



 

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Libya: The Law is Clear - It is Illegal to Arm the "Rebels"

By Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27880.htm

April 13, 2011 "Pravda" -- The law is the law, and it is crystal clear. Under the UN Charter and Resolutions 1970 and 1973 it would be illegal for any entity to arm the "rebels" in Libya and in so doing, this would constitute a breach of international law, leaving the perpetrators open to criminal liability. And has anyone researched the history of the "rebel" movement?

The legal principle which governs international law

The legal principle of the UN Charter is to avoid war and to ensure peace; that is why any act of aggression outside the specific scope of a Resolution must necessarily pass by a separate Resolution in the UN Security Council. Since the scope of the resolutions covering Libya - UNSC Resolutions 1970 (2011) and 1973 (2011) - do not include the supply of weaponry to the "rebel" cause in Libya - but instead prohibit it and cover attacks on civilians, then under no circumstances whatsoever would it be admissible, acceptable or legal for any entity to supply weapons or train the "rebels" against the Libyan authorities.

Definition of a civilian

Let us now turn to the definition of a civilian: someone who is not an active member of the military, police or a belligerent group. For this reason, men in uniforms, sporting weapons are not civilians and for this reason if such persons use violence against the Libyan armed forces, then any counter-attack by such forces cannot be deemed to be an attack against civilians.

UNSC Resolution 1970 (2011)

Paragraph 9 prohibits the supply of weapons to Libya:

"9. Decides that all Member States shall immediately take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, from or through their territories or by their nationals, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related materiel of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary equipment, and spare parts for the aforementioned, and technical assistance, training, financial or other assistance, related to military activities or the provision, maintenance or use of any arms and related materiel, including the provision of armed mercenary personnel whether or not originating in their territories,..."43870.jpeg

UNSC Resolution 1973 (2011)

There is nothing whatsoever in this document which contradicts the scope of Resolution 1970 above. For a start, its introduction is very clear about the need to commit to the territorial integrity of Libya:

"Reaffirming its strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,"

Paragraph 4 does not contradict Paragraph 9 of Resolution 1970 on the supply of weaponry. It does not state anywhere that the terms are revoked or annulled. The insinuation that it does is a puerile and very devious attempt to twist around what is very clear under international law. The expression "all necessary measures" is qualified and restricted to the protection of civilians:

"4. Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, and acting in cooperation with the Secretary-General, to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,"

and "notwithstanding" does not mean "substituting". It means "in spite of" in the context of "in conjunction with" and not "in contradiction of"; otherwise it would be necessary to state clearly that the terms and conditions of Paragraph 9 of UNSC Resolution 1970 (2011) are revoked, annulled, substituted or replaced. This not being the case, the argument that 1973 allows such supply or weaponry is an indication of the malice of those politicians who propose it and certainly does not constitute a legal basis for action.

Paragraph 8 reiterates the expression "all necessary measures" but qualifies this as pertaining to a ban on flights:

"8. Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General and the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, to take all necessary measures to enforce compliance with the ban on flights imposed by paragraph 6 above,"

Finally, the reference by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that 1973 substitutes 1970 is as much an unadulterated, barefaced lie as the claim that she went into a war zone in the Balkans under fire. The expression "replace" indeed reiterates the implementation of the arms embargo and adds the provision for inspection of sea or air vessels.

"13. Decides that paragraph 11 of resolution 1970 (2011) shall be replaced by the following paragraph : "Calls upon all Member States, in particular States of the region, acting nationally or through regional organisations or arrangements, in order to ensure strict implementation of the arms embargo established by paragraphs 9 and 10 of resolution 1970 (2011), to inspect in their territory, including seaports and airports, and on the high seas, vessels and aircraft bound to or from the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, if the State concerned has information that provides reasonable grounds to believe that the cargo contains items the supply, sale, transfer or export of which is prohibited by paragraphs 9 or 10 of resolution 1970 (2011) as modified by this resolution, including the provision of armed mercenary personnel, calls upon all flag States of such vessels and aircraft to cooperate with such inspections and authorises Member States to use all measures commensurate to the specific circumstances to carry out such inspections;".

As we see, the legal question is perfectly simple to follow and is very clear to see.

Bombing attacks

43871.jpegAs for the bombing attacks, the scope of the law is to prevent attacks on civilians, therefore attacking Libyan government forces against the "rebels" constitutes a breach of the Resolution and is therefore a beach of international law, leaving the perpetrators liable to prosecution for criminal liability for war crimes.

Under these precepts, I hereby accuse Messrs Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Juppé, David Cameron and William Hague of war crimes for the deployment of military equipment against forces which were not attacking civilians.

Is the world going to stand back yet again as we have another illegal war based upon lies and propaganda and nonsense, or is someone going to take action and nip this in the bud, bringing a case against these perpetrators and hauling these criminals and murderers before the proper legal instances where they belong?

And just before we finish, Google up the Al Qaeda connection to the leader of the rebels, his history in fighting against the USA and British in Afghanistan, the legacy of the Benghazi bombers in Iraq and the history of the fighters themselves. This proves just how incompetent the above-mentioned are to perform their roles as Heads of Government and Diplomacy.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
 
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27880.htm

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Contact Group meeting in Doha plans imperialist carve-up of Libya

By Alex Lantier

WSWS, April 14, 2011

http://uruknet.com/?p=m76827&hd=&size=1&l=e

The Contact Group, an assembly of foreign ministers from Western and Arab countries backing the Benghazi-based Libyan rebels of the Interim Transitional National Council (INC), met yesterday in Doha, Qatar. The meeting highlighted the INC’s role as a stooge of the imperialist powers, particularly the US, Britain and France, who are promoting it as their proxy force in a bitter civil war in Libya.

Qatar and Britain hosted the conference, with British Foreign Secretary William Hague issuing a statement in the early evening demanding that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi step down as Libyan head of state. Hague declared, "Gaddafi and his regime have lost all legitimacy and he must leave power."

The conference praised the continued bombing of Libya by NATO forces, declaring: "These have exerted significant pressure on Gaddafi, protected civilians, including Benghazi, from violent attack and averted a humanitarian disaster."

The conference also agreed to fund the INC: "Participants agreed that a Temporary Financial Mechanism could provide a method for the INC and international community to manage revenue to assist with short-term financial requirements and structural needs in Libya."

INC member Mahmoud Chammam called on the US government to "liberate the funds" of the Gaddafi regime—that is, an estimated $30 billion of Libyan oil earnings held by Western banks. Normally used to pay for Libyan social spending and public sector workers’ salaries, these funds would be stolen by the major banks to pay for INC weapons and supplies.

The INC hijacked parts of Libya’s cell phone network yesterday with assistance and equipment provided by the US and Persian Gulf countries. The network was originally run by Huawei, a Chinese company that refused to assist the INC. Chinese companies have a number of infrastructure contracts with Gaddafi and stand to lose large sums if a Western-dominated INC regime in Libya cancels these contracts.

INC representatives in Doha refused to meet with Gaddafi’s former foreign minister, Musa Kusa, who had traveled to Doha. Kusa asked that "all parties concerned prevent Libya from collapsing into civil war," warning that it could become a "new Somalia."

As reports from inside Libya made clear, the country is already in a civil war, and the attacks of the NATO powers aim not to protect the Libyan population but to exterminate as large a part as possible of the Libyan armed forces. NATO announced yesterday that it had destroyed 16 Libyan tanks, an anti-aircraft gun and a pick-up truck in air raids the day before. British officials said their Eurofighter-Typhoons dropped 1,000-pound bombs on Libyan tanks yesterday.

Amid a continuing standoff between small groups of rebels backed by NATO air power and the regular Libyan forces, NATO bombed Tripoli, Misurata, Al-Aziziya and Syrte. Fighting continued in Ajdabiya, a critical logistical choke point south of the oil port of Brega, which is reportedly still held by pro-Gaddafi forces.

Launched under the pretense of averting a humanitarian disaster, the war is reportedly becoming one itself. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that up to 3.6 million people, or roughly 60 percent of the population, might need humanitarian aid. Ban estimated that a further 330,000 people have fled their homes inside Libya.

The UN High Commission for Refugees estimated that a further 498,000 people (8 percent of the pre-war population) had fled Libya, with 236,000 fleeing to Tunisia, nearly 200,000 to Egypt, and smaller numbers going to Algeria, Chad, and Niger.

These figures could be cynically exploited to justify plans for escalating the war and introducing Western ground troops into Libya—that is, invading the country. The European Union publicly made such proposals on April 10 with a plan to send over a thousand troops nominally to escort humanitarian aid destined for Misurata.

The major imperialist powers continued to vie for influence and connections to the INC—a narrow clique of former Gaddafi regime officials, Islamists and foreign intelligence assets through which the Western powers aim to transform Libya into a de facto colony.

Britain and France, the countries that initially pressed hardest for the war, criticized the US and Germany. The US has scaled back its role in the fighting, amid fears that weapons provided to the INC might fall into the hands of Al Qaeda. Germany abstained in the United Nations Security Council vote on UN Resolution 1973, passed to sanction war with Libya.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé criticized NATO as not sufficiently aggressive in backing the rebels militarily since the US withdrew fighter planes that had been providing close air support for the INC. "It’s not enough," he said. "NATO must play its role fully. It wanted to take the lead in operations."

British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy met last night in Paris for a "working dinner" that was reportedly dedicated exclusively to the war in Libya. There was no public statement on the content of their discussions.

Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborne attacked Germany’s abstention in comments to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, noting that it made it appear that Europe was divided between "belligerents and do-gooders."

With its troops deployed in the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, Berlin is hardly a "do-gooder." However, the war has highlighted one undeniable reality: Britain, France and the US rushed to war against Libya, using right-wing forces as their proxy to take over the country and prevent the spread of the mass popular protests that have shaken Tunisia, Egypt and other North African countries.

The stooge forces in the leadership of the INC opposition include rebel military leader Khalifa Hiftar, who spoke to the Washington Post on April 12, confirming his close connections to the CIA. (See: A CIA commander for the Libyan rebels). A former officer who fled from Libya in 1987 and lived for years in northern Virginia, near CIA headquarters, he is reportedly vying for leadership of the INC’s small military forces with Abdul Fattah Younis, Gaddafi’s former interior minister.

He said, "I used to lead the biggest force in eastern Libya; I’m known amongst the people and to the United States. Throughout the years, I’ve been waiting to seize a moment like this."

The Post added, "Before he left his Falls Church home in mid-March, Hifter said, he was contacted by the CIA and the US ambassador to Libya as officials in Washington, keen to find out what they could about the opposition, learned of his plans to return."

Washington is continuing its active negotiations with the INC. State Department sources announced yesterday that Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg and US congressmen would meet today with Majmud Jibril, foreign affairs chief for the Transitional Council. Jibril and the former Libyan ambassador to Washington, Ali Aujali, are also scheduled to meet the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to its chairman, John Kerry.

 
http://uruknet.com/?p=m76827&hd=&size=1&l=e

[bigron]

LIBYA: Selected Articles, Reports and Analysis


Libya newslinks 12-13 April 2011

By William Bowles


Global Research, April 14, 2011
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24313

creative-i.info 


13 April 2011

■ICH: Libya All About Oil, Or Central Banking?
■The Independent: UK stepping up aid to Libya rebels
■RT: Alliance has not been slow in Libya � NATO chief
■BBC: VIDEO: Blair defends political past on Libya
■BBC: Blair defends Gaddafi meeting
■BBC: Rebels demand cash aid
■Dissident Voice: The UN Resolution and Libya�s �Rebels�
■Global Research: Divisions at European Union Summit on Libyan Intervention
■MRZine: Victor Nieto, "Imperialist Revolution in Libya" (Cartoon)
■The Independent: Keep the Libya pressure up, urges William Hague
■Libyan Rebels: Dependent Minions of U.S. and Europe
■RT: "Delaying UK defense cuts will bring disaster quicker"
■The Independent: Video: Hague on Libya
■SCF: Libya contact group meets in Qatar
■BBC: Hague: No UK 'timescale' in Libya
■RT: BRICS gets stronger voice as old powers caught up in crises and conflicts
■The Independent: William Hague to attend key Libya talks
■Consortium News: Will NATO's War in Libya Save Lives?
■BBC: Ministers to hold talks on Libya
■RT: Libya out of control � Medvedev
■Ministers to hold talks on Libya
■BBC: VIDEO: Libyan talks amid stalemate
■BBC: Miliband warns of 'forgotten war'
■China Matters: Does Abdul Halim Khaddam Have Anything to Do with What's Going on in Syria?
■SCF: Quarreling Over Libya Hits NATO
■SCF: Italy says Libyan rebels ask for weapons
■Stop NATO News: April 12, 2011
■The Independent: Deadly struggle for survival is waged in west of Libya
■The Independent: Hague calls for alliance to step up efforts to destroy regime's weapons
■The Independent: Tripoli's secretive rebels lose faith in battle with Gaddafi
12 April 2011

■BBC: Shifting reality
■RT: NATO using depleted uranium in Libya
■Mathaba News: America's Permanent War Agenda: Military Keynesianism on Steroids
■Mathaba News: Remember Libya: One of History's Terror Bombing Victims
■SCF: NATO strikes hit civilian targets in Libya
■Moussa Koussa 'transit lounge' warning
■Morning Star: Rebels reject AU Libya deal
■dissident Voice: The U.S.-NATO War Against Libya
■Morning Star: Let's ditch imperialist thinking and follow Dutch example
■The Independent: Moussa Koussa travelling to Doha meetings
■SCF: African Union urges Libyan rebels to cooperate
■SCF: U.K. foreign secretary wants bigger NATO role in Libya
■SCF: Obama's Re-Election Bid: A Peacemaker or the Author of World War III?
■Stop Nato: Updates on Libyan war: April 12 


FOR ABOVE LINKS GO TO :

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24313

[bigron]

U.S., allies see Libyan rebels in hopeless disarray

By Mark Hosenball and Phil Stewart

April 14, 2011
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/14/us-libya-usa-rebels-idUSTRE73D68S20110414


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Too little is known about Libya's rebels and they remain too fragmented for the United States to get seriously involved in organizing or training them, let alone arming them, U.S. and European officials say.

U.S. and allied intelligence agencies believe NATO's no-fly zone and air strikes will be effective in stopping Muammar Gaddafi's forces from killing civilians and dislodging rebels from strongholds like Benghazi, the officials say.

But the more the intelligence agencies learn about rebel forces, the more they appear to be hopelessly disorganized and incapable of coalescing in the foreseeable future.

U.S. government experts believe the state of the opposition is so grave that it could take years to organize, arm and train them into a fighting force strong enough to drive Gaddafi from power and set up a working government.

The realistic outlook, U.S. and European officials said, is for an indefinite stalemate between the rebels -- supported by NATO air power -- and Gaddafi's forces.

"At this point neither side is able to defeat the other and neither appears willing to compromise," said one U.S. official who follows the Libyan conflict closely.

"The opposition needs time to do what they need to do -- forming a government, bringing together key opposition figures, getting on the same page and building a new generation of leaders," the official said.

There is no sign the CIA or any other U.S. agency is organizing arms supplies for the rebels. But U.S. officials say privately that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are willing to provide weapons and other support to Gaddafi's foes.

There are "indications" that Qatar has begun to supply some easy-to-use weapons, including shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets, to the opposition, a U.S. official said on Thursday. Qatar's Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani was meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday.

MORE

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/14/us-libya-usa-rebels-idUSTRE73D68S20110414