Libya : A no lie zone

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who's written a number of books, including Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's United Nations. She has a different view of the intervention.

Phyllis, why are you opposed?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Solely in the military terms that we have seen this time around, we inevitably have the problem of consequences. There are humanitarian consequences. The U.S. and its allies appear to be using depleted uranium bombs in Libya, which is going to have enormous consequences for the future of Libya. We see political consequences in terms of the U.S. and its allies ending up, as they have in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, in control of the post-intervention government that gets created.

The Libyan opposition emerged in the context of the regional uprisings, in the context of the Arab Spring. But there are consequences to the choice that the Libyan opposition made, different than the choices made in other countries in the region, to take up arms very early on. They were oppressed terribly. And the response of the regime to the initial nonviolent protests was a brutal one. That was also true in several other countries. It was true in Bahrain. It was true in Yemen. It was true in the first days in Egypt. But when the Libyan opposition chose to take up arms, there are consequences to that choice. One of those consequences now is that what's desperately needed, Amy, is negotiations and an immediate ceasefire. And the United Nations, which should be in the position of being able to play the role of key global negotiator, is unable to do so in this case, because the U.N. itself has become a military participant in the now-civil war inside Libya. So the consequences have been very extreme.

AMY GOODMAN: NATO Brigadier General Mark van Uhm spoke minutes ago to reporters about NATO's success with its campaign against Gaddafi forces.

BRIGADIER GENERAL MARK VAN UHM: NATO's actions are part of a concerted campaign to degrade Gaddafi's regime's capability to harm civilians, not only now in Misurata and Ajdabiya, but in the long run, across the whole country. We are steadily degrading his command and control capability and his ability to sustain forces on the ground. We are maintaining a high operational tempo, and we adjust operations on a daily basis against what is clearly a rapidly changing environment on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: And British military officersthis is just breaking on BBCwill be sent to Libya to advise rebels fighting Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's forces. The foreign secretary of Britain, William Hague, says the contingent would advise rebels on military organization rather than how to run the combat campaign. He said the group will be deployed to the opposition stronghold of Benghazi. Phyllis Bennis?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: You know, this is exactly the kind of escalation that many of us warned against on the evening that the U.N. first passed its no-fly zone resolution that had the language "all necessary measures," that it would lead to boots on the ground. There have already been boots on the ground in the form of intelligence agencies, the CIA and others, who are already operating on the ground. Now we'll see it on a larger scale. What we're seeing is a clear commitment on the part of NATO and the U.S. for regime changeexactly what the U.N. resolution was not designed to do. And what we're hearing now is a sort of playing with words among NATO countriesthe U.K. and France, in particular, that had been the most aggressive in wanting to escalate and take an official position in support of regime change in Libyaand instead of saying, "Well, that is not within the NATO mandate or the U.N. mandate," because countries like Turkey, and as well as Germany, have played a very key role in trying to limit the mandate of the international intervention, instead they're simply saying, "We're going to go in unilaterally alongside the NATO contingent, the NATO military strike," very much what the U.S. has done historically in places like Bosnia, places like Afghanistan, places like Haiti, where it has sent interventionmilitary intervention forces, air strikes, etc., alongside international engagement.

And it not only confuses the issue of who's in chargethat's not my concern. My concern is that it leads to an inevitable escalation in the interest of those outside powerful Western countries in their effort for regime change and gaining control. In the situation in Libya, this is not like Iraq. This is not a, quote, "war for oil." Gaddafi's regime was already in bed with the U.S., with Italy, with the U.K., with France, with Western oil companies, Western governments, since his regime's rehabilitation of 2002, 2003. So the problem was not "We can't get access to Libyan oil." It's far more complex. It's part of a response to the growingthe rise of the Arab Spring and the end of the U.S.-backed dictatorships that have controlled the Arab world for the last 50 years. With the demise of that system, because of this extraordinary popular uprising of people throughout the Arab world that are saying "No more," that are overthrowing the years of fear in their countries, overthrowing dictatorships, the U.S. is now looking, along with its allies, for new ways of making sure that they will still control how that region, as a whole, will be governed. Will it be governed by pro-Western, neoliberal, pro-oil-company kinds of governments? Or will it be governed by something else that represents a very different interpretation of what democracy looks like, of what an economy should look like? These are questions that Libyans should be deciding for themselves. The problem is, when you have British ground troops and American jets and NATO forces controlling, NATO forces acting as the air strike component of the opposition in Libya, then, inevitably, when the fighting is over, you will have those forces in control.

What looks to happen, more likely than anything else right now, is the continuation of this kind of military stalemate: the country of Libya largely be divided between Gaddafi's regime maintaining control in the west with the billions of dollars that his regime has garnered over the years, and the east, where most of the oil is, with aacting as a kind of Western-U.S.-NATO-British-French protectorate under the control of a mixed group of rebels based on and reliant on and dependent on those Western forces to keep them in power.

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis, I want to thank you very much for being with us, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Among her books, Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's United Nations.

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed when they came under fire yesterday in the western Libyan city of Misurata. Hetherington and Hondros, who had covered conflict zones around the world, were part of a group of six photographers in a particularly dangerous part of Misurata. The city has become a deadly battleground between rebels and forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Hetherington was killed in the attack, and Hondras died later from his injuries.

Hetherington posted his last Twitter update the day before he was killed. He wrote, "In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO."

Two other photojournalists were injured in the blast: Michael Brown of the Corbis Agency and Guy Martin of Panos Pictures. Doctors at Misurata's Hikma Hospital said seven rebel fighters and a Ukrainian doctor were also killed in the shellings. A hundred twenty people were wounded.

Hondros received war photography's highest honor, the 2005 Robert Capa Gold Medal, for his work in Iraq. He was also a 2004 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his, quote, "powerful and courageous coverage" of unrest in [Liberia].

Hetherington co-directed the Academy Award-nominated documentary Restrepo. The documentary film, which he co-directed with author Sebastian Junger, focused on a platoon of U.S. soldiers serving in the remote and highly dangerous Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival last year. Democracy Now! covered Sundance last year. Hetherington thanked Sebastian Junger and dedicated the prize to the, quote, "Restrepo Generation."

TIM HETHERINGTON: To work with Sebastian has been just the most incredible honor. You know, we just made a great team, and he's been a rock for me emotionally, as well. I'd like to thank him. I'd like to thank my mom, as well, for putting up with what I do. And lastly, I'd like to dedicate the prize for the Restrepo Generation, to those hundreds of thousands of soldiers, men and women, that come back to this country and have become invisible. And this film is for them. Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Tim Hetherington at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival award ceremony. Sebastian Junger, his co-director, said yesterday, quote, "There is no way to express my devastation and sorrow at the death of my dear friend Tim Hetherington in Misrata, Libya. Tim was one of the most courageous and principled journalists I have ever known. The good that he accomplishedboth with his camera, and simply as a concerned person in some of the most devastated countries in the worldcannot be measured. I can't believe he is truly gone," Junger wrote.

To talk more about Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, we're joined by Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director for external relations of Human Rights Watch. Carroll worked closely with Tim, commissioning and disseminating his photos from war-torn regions. Christina Larson is with us from Washington, D.C. She's contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine. She has worked with Chris Hondros. And Mohamed Dayem is with ushe is the head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the Committee to Protect Journaliststo talk about the increasing dangers faced by reporters covering conflicts in the region.

Carroll, let's begin with you. Tell us who Tim Hetherington was.

CARROLL BOGERT: Well, he was a remarkable friend, but he was also an incredibly committed journalist. There are different kinds of journalists in our world, and Tim is a kind of journalist who is impelled to tell the story. He's not just doing a job. He's not just going to work. He would find a way to tell those stories however he could. So, whether he was on assignment for Vanity Fair or for Human Rights Watch, the important thing for Tim was to tell the stories of the people whom he met in the field. He wasn't just cruising from conflict to conflict. He wasn't a kind of swaggering war photographer who was in it for the money or the glory. He was in it to expose stories that weren't otherwise being exposed, because people wouldn't go to the kinds of places that Tim Hetherington was willing to go to. He lived for eight years in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, covering a civil war that nobody was paying attention to in the mainstream media. He was a very unusual person.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of the film for which he was nominated for an Oscar, the film he did with Sebastian Junger. It's called Restrepo.

TIM HETHERINGTON: I take you to places that you rarely get to see.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: My job is to show the world as it is.

TIM HETHERINGTON: We wanted to create this kind of very visceral war film from a soldier's perspective.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: How men cope with combat psychologically and emotionally and how society deals with war morally is really, really important. I think what's very, very simple about war is the emotional experience of it.

TIM HETHERINGTON: Take a young group of men, put them together, and this is how they are. And this is how wars have been prosecuted for millennia.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: What I wanted to do was capture their experience.

TIM HETHERINGTON: What they go through needs to be seen and needs to be digested by the American public.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: It's helpful to have a very real and honest and accurate version of what happens in combat. I want people to walk out of the cinemas thinking, "My God, I didn't know war was like that."

AMY GOODMAN: That was Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington talking about their film Restrepo. Carroll, what did you do at Human Rights Watch with Tim in terms of getting out his photographs? And when did you last speak to him? What was he trying to accomplish in Libya?

CARROLL BOGERT: Well, we assigned him to cover stories for us. We sent him to Darfur, to Chad, to Sri Lanka, to Guinea. We worked with him in a number of conflict regions. We had his two filmshis film about Liberia and his film about Afghanistanin our film festival. We mounted exhibits of his photography. Tim and I lectured on photography and human rights in various countries around the world. He was a very close partner of ours. And the kinds of issues that Tim was interested in covering are precisely the kinds of issues that Human Rights Watch is interested in raising the profile of, so we had a natural and symbiotic and very close relationship.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did he choose to go to Libya?

CARROLL BOGERT: Well, Libya was certainly the story of the moment, and it's a story where, as in Liberia, as in all the other conflicts that I just mentioned, civilians were really under attack. What we're seeing in Misurata today is indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations. And I'm sure Tim would want us to remind the viewers that two photojournalists have died, but hundreds and hundreds of Libyans have died in Misurata, because Gaddafi's forces are using cluster munitions, Grad rockets, which have no guidance system and, again, explode indiscriminately in civilian areas that are under attack. That's the story in Libya that Tim wanted to cover.

AMY GOODMAN: Tim Hetherington died in Libya yesterday, as did Chris Hondros. And we're also joined by Christina Larson with Foreign Policy magazine, who has worked with Chris. Christina, our condolences, as well. Can you talk about Chris, his history, what he was doing in Iraq to, most recently, in Libya? He died next to Tim Hetherington. Tim Hetherington, when he was brought to the hospital, was already dead, and Chris Hondros died in the hospital.

CHRISTINA LARSON: Right, that's correct. Chris sustained a brain injury, and he went into a coma. And they tried to revive him, but he passed away a few hours after Tim did yesterday.

Chris grew up in the small town of Fayetteville, North Carolina. He worked for a paper in North Carolina. And then, in the late '90s, he began freelancing in Kosovo and really cut his teeth as sort ofin an act of both bravery, personal bravery, and feeling like he needed to tell the story, somewhat similar to what we've heard about Tim. He was compelled to bring these images and these ideas to people who otherwise wouldn't see them, to whom war would seem like an abstraction. For the past decade or so, he's been a staff photographer for Getty Images. He has traveled more than a dozen times to Iraq. He's also traveled to Afghanistan. He worked side by side with Tim at some points in Liberia, Pakistan, many other places, Haiti recently. Chris also did some work outside of Getty, including a photo essay about Haiti earlier last year for Foreign Policy, and I worked with him on that. And I should say, we've been friends for several years, because we were both alumni of the International Reporting Project, which is a journalism fellowship based in Washington.

Heyou know, just to talk a little bit about Chris and his work and the person behind his work, I think his awards, being nominated for a Pulitzer, winning, as you mentioned, the Robert Capa Award, speak for themselves about the quality of his work. As an individual, he was compelled to get close to the action. Some photographers, you find ways to use long lenses to take pictures from a distance. But Chris always felt that he understood something different, and the pictures he showed express something different, the closer he was to what was going on. So, you know, he wasright before he fell in the mortar attack yesterday, he had sent back some really close-up shots of the rebel fighting in Libya.

Chris also was someone who hadhe was dedicated to telling stories over the long term. And that's why he kept going back to Iraq. I know that heyou know, when Iraq seemed to be on the back burner of the American conscience, it was something that he kept pushing his editors at Getty to let him do, because he felt that it was really important that we see not just how something begins, but how it plays out.

Another insight of Chris into his work was that he wanted to show not just the guns and mortar side of war, but how it affected the other people in war-torn places. So he did, for example, a really gorgeous photo essay for the Virginia Quarterly Review that was shots from a Humvee in Iraq of just street scenes in Baghdad. And this was at a timeI think these photos were taken around 2006, 2007when foreign journalists had very limited access in Baghdad. And so, the series of images was both a comment on what street life was like, but also, in that case, the sort of limited access that he had, sort of seeing things through the window of this armored vehicle. There was a real intellect and a passion behind Chris's work that I thinkthat, combined with his courage and his technical skills, really allowed him to do fabulous things.

AMY GOODMAN: And people can go to our website and see his photographs at democracynow.org. We did get a chance to interview Chris Hondros on April 5th, 2007, about the award-winning photographs he took in the northwestern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005. Chris was embedded with U.S. troops when they opened fire on a family of eight approaching a checkpoint in a car. Both parents were killed while the six children in the backseat looked on.

CHRIS HONDROS: It was in January 2005, and I was embedded with U.S. Army troops in Tal Afar in northern Iraq. I'd been sent there by the Army. I had wanted to go to Mosul, where there were some battles going on at the time, but I'd been sort of waylaid to go to Tal Afar, because you don't always get the embeds that you want in Iraq. And I was with a group of soldiers on a routine evening patrol around dusk, about 6:00 or so, after theright around the time where the curfew was held in Tal Afar, and a car on the darkened streets sort of appeared in the distance and started coming down the boulevard toward the soldiers. As is well known, you know, the soldiers don't like cars coming towards them. They fear suicide bombers and things. They weren't sure what to do. They fired a few shots. The car kept coming, and so they shot up the car. And tragically, an Iraqi family was in the car, parents and six children, and the parents were killed instantly. And I documented that event.

AMY GOODMAN: And then the children that came out of this car.

CHRIS HONDROS: Well, you know, the childrenone of the childrenI mean, the children were, of course, terrified and covered inthe blood had splattered in the car, and they were covered in blood. The soldiers realized the mistake immediately and rushed up, took the children out. They weren't sure who was injured, who was not, and they sort of evaluated the children on the sidewalk, in front there. I photographed all that. And one of the children, it turned out, had a gunshot wound, as well, and they were all transported to the local hospital and dropped off there.

JUAN GONZALEZ: A really powerful image it is, especially of one little girl with blood spattered all over her. Did the soldiers at all try to prevent you from taking any of those photos?

CHRIS HONDROS: No, they didn't, really. I mean, they were sort of in the moment, as so often happens in these situations, you know. Everybody was in the moment and doing their things, and I was photographing just sort of discreetly there just what was going on. And they never tried to stop me in any way at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Describe the little girl, this most famous image of the little girl next to a soldier's boots and weapon.

CHRIS HONDROS: Yeah. Her name, as it turns out, is Samar, Samar Hassan, and she was five years old at the time of the picture. And, you know, the soldiersthere weren't that many soldiers. It was just part of a platoon, maybe five or six, one medic for the whole thing. So the medic was one by one trying to evaluate the children to see what sort of injuries they might have had, and Samar was there just crying, you know, while one of the other children was being attended to. And she's standing next to the soldier. I think one of the reasons the photo had this sort of resonance that it does is because it has a sort of empty feeling: you know, the poor girl, all alone in the world now, just standing there in the dark, you know.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Chris Hondros on Democracy Now!, April 5th, 2007. To see the whole interview, you can go to democracynow.org, as we talk to Chris and Tim's friends. Chris actually was going to be married on April 6, 2011rather, on August 6, 2011. We're also joined by Mohamed Dayem. He is with the Committee to Protect Journalists. Put these two deaths in the bigger picture of what's happening now in Libya.

MOHAMED ABDEL DAYEM: The big picture in Libya is grim. The Committee to Protect Journalists, since the beginning of the uprising, which has slowly turned into a civil war, has documented well over 80 violations of press freedom: obviously, these two fatalities, along with two previous ones, for a total of four fatalities in Libya so far, as well as 49 detentions, about a dozen physical assaults, and confiscation of equipment and jamming of broadcast signals. And it really spans the gamut, the types of violations that have taken place against journalists in Libya.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what Gaddafi is trying to accomplish? And do you think that the arrests and the killings of the journalists are deliberately going after journalists or part of the overall attacks? So manywe don't know how many hundreds, if not thousands, of Libyans have died.

MOHAMED ABDEL DAYEM: Well, when we look at the number of detentions, for example, we see a very clear pattern, where journalists are detained at the front lines by militiamen. They're abused by those militiamen for a number of days, a short number of days, and then handed off to the political leadership in Tripoli, who then treat them with a modicum of respect and then use them as bargaining chips with the international community. And that's largely the result of the fact that the Gaddafi regime has very few other bargaining chips, and so they've decided, at some point along the line, that they're going tothey're going to detain journalists and use them to extract political concessions from the international community. And that is simply unacceptable.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does this compare to the rest of the region, Mohamed?

MOHAMED ABDEL DAYEM: Well, the Middle East and North Africa has been a terrible place for journalists to work, a very dangerous place for journalists to work. Of the 14 media fatalities documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2011 so farI'm sorry, of the 16, 12 have been in the Middle East and North Africa. So that really gives you a sense of how dangerous of a place this is relative to other parts of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what journalists can do?

MOHAMED ABDEL DAYEM: Well, many of thesemany of these journalists are veteran journalists. Tim and Chris both have worked in a couple of dozen war zones prior to this. So these are veteran journalists who know what they're doing. And we always advocate that it's really up to the journalists and their media organizations to assess the risk themselves and to determine how and where they can work and when the risk becomes too high and when they need to withdraw. We obviously always consult with those journalists and try to share our experiences with them and what we're hearing from others working in that same situation or other similar situations. But ultimately, it's really up to the individuals and the media organizations to make that call themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Carroll Bogert, your final thoughts on your friend and colleague, Tim Hetherington?

CARROLL BOGERT: You know, one of the last projects that we worked on with Tim was in Libya. Our person in the east came into possession of a trove of secret police documents that really laid bare the repressive apparatus of the Gaddafi regime. We didn't want to remove those documents from Libya, because they belong to the Libyan people, but Tim helped us to photograph hundreds and hundreds of pages of these documents. They may one day, Amy, serve as evidence at the International Criminal Court, because, as you know, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimouslyeven China and Russia votedto refer the case of Gaddafi and his circle to the International Criminal Court. So, one of Tim's last acts with us may be to help pursue and push forward a case for justice for Libya. And if and when that does happen, I think it will be part of the lasting legacy of Tim Hetherington.

AMY GOODMAN: And Christina, your final thoughts on your friend and colleague, Chris Hondros, who died soon after Tim yesterday in Misurata?

CHRISTINA LARSON: Right, well, I think TimI mean, I think ChrisChris and Tim will both be missed, not only by the people who saw their images and were impacted them by from a distance, but from the many, many people, younger journalists, that Chris mentored and gave advice to. I mean, he was truly a pillar of a community that is always in need of support and encouragement, moral and practical. And, I mean, he was just the kindest person in allowing friends to use his satellite phone and giving a hand. I know that recently when he was in Egypt covering Tahrir Square, he stuck very closely by a fellow female photojournalist, because she was being manhandled in the crowd, and he made it a point not only to do his job, but to look out for the people he was traveling with. And I just think, you know, both his professional work and his personal qualities will be a lasting inspiration to people who try, like Tim and like Chris, to show Americans and others what war really is.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you all for being with us. As you've pointed out, for Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington, the story wasn't them; it was the people they covered. They showed that in all of their work. But yesterday, they were both killed doing their work. Tim Hetherington, the Oscar-nominated director of Restrepo and photographer in so many regions of the world, he lived in Liberia for eight years. And Chris Hondros, who is the Pulitzer-nominated photographer, worked in Iraq, died in Libya.

AMY GOODMAN: To see our interview with Chris Hondros, you can go to our website, as well as our interview with Anthony Shadid, one of four Times reporters, New York Times reporters in Libya, who were captured, brutalized, but were released. That's at democracynow.org.

[Peter Lemkin]

US and others said 'no boots on the ground' in Libya....but Obama has just approved the use of [wait for it] mallprint: armed Predator Drones!

While I think Gadaffi and his mercenaries are murderous thugs.....something tells me this is going to get totally out of hand...and the USA will build yet a new military base! anta:

[Magda Hassan]

DARNA, LibyaTwo former Afghan Mujahedeen and a six-year detainee at Guantanamo Bay have stepped to the fore of this city's military campaign, training new recruits for the front and to protect the city from infiltrators loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
The presence of Islamists like these amid the opposition has raised concerns, among some fellow rebels as well as their Western allies, that the goal of some Libyan fighters in battling Col. Gadhafi is to propagate Islamist extremism.
Regional Upheaval

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Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesA rebel rested before leaving Ajdabiya, Libya, Friday.

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Abdel Hakim al-Hasady, an influential Islamic preacher and high-school teacher who spent five years at a training camp in eastern Afghanistan, oversees the recruitment, training and deployment of about 300 rebel fighters from Darna.
Mr. Hasady's field commander on the front lines is Salah al-Barrani, a former fighter from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which was formed in the 1990s by Libyan mujahedeen returning home after helping to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan and dedicated to ousting Mr. Gadhafi from power.
Sufyan Ben Qumu, a Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden's holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan, is training many of the city's rebel recruits.
Both Messrs. Hasady and Ben Qumu were picked up by Pakistani authorities after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and were turned over to the U.S. Mr. Hasady was released to Libyan custody two months later. Mr. Ben Qumu spent six years at Guantanamo Bay before he was turned over to Libyan custody in 2007.
They were both released from Libyan prisons in 2008 as part of a reconciliation with Islamists in Libya.
Islamist leaders and their contingent of followers represent a relatively small minority within the rebel cause. They have served the rebels' secular leadership with little friction. Their discipline and fighting experience is badly needed by the rebels' ragtag army.
Among his followers, Mr. Hasady has the reputation of a trained warrior who stood fearlessly at the front ranks of young protesters during the first days of the uprising.
And his discourse has become dramatically more pro-American, now that he stands in alliance with the West in a battle against Col. Gadhafi.
"Our view is starting to change of the U.S.," said Mr. Hasady. "If we hated the Americans 100%, today it is less than 50%. They have started to redeem themselves for their past mistakes by helping us to preserve the blood of our children."
Mr. Hasady also offered a reconsideration of his past approach. "No Islamist revolution has ever succeeded. Only when the whole population was included did we succeed, and that means a more inclusive ideology."
Messrs. Ben Qumu and Barrani were on the front lines and couldn't be reached for comment.
Some rebel leaders are wary of their roles. "Many of us were concerned about these people's backgrounds," said Ashour Abu Rashed, one of Darna's representatives on the rebel's provisional government body, the Transitional National Council.
"Al-Hasady told me he only wants to remove Gadhafi and will serve under the authority of the local governing councils, and so far he has been true to his word."
After the uprising began in Libya, Mr. Hasady told several journalists that he had joined the fight against the Americans during his time in Afghanistan. He now says he was misquoted and that he only settled in Afghanistan because Islamists of his ilk were unwelcome everywhere else.
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For the U.S., the situation recalls the problems that followed America's ill-fated alliance with the Afghan Mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. Many went on to al Qaeda and other violent radical Islamist groups.
Adm. James Stavridis, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's supreme allied commander in Europe, pointed to this concern when he told a Senate committee on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence has picked up "flickers" of al Qaeda among rebel groups in Libya. He also said they were a minor element among the rebels.
Col. Gadhafi has gone out of his way to paint the popular uprising against his rule as an al Qaeda plot. He has singled out Mr. Hasady and the city of Darna as the capital of an alleged Islamist emirate, a baseless claim.
Local enmity for the Libyan leader runs deep. The first uprising against Col. Gadhafi's rule took place in Darna in 1970, less than a year after he seized power. The city proudly boasts that the first political prisoner killed by the Gadhafi regime was a Darna native.
Write to Charles Levinson at charles.levinson@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...12406.html

[Magda Hassan]

April 28, 2011
[URL="http://medialens.org/index.php?option=com_acymailing&ctrl=url&urlid=222&mailid=61&subid=453"]If At First You Don't Succeed - Four Decades Of US-UK Attempts To Topple Gadafi

[/URL]Guest Media Alert by Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln

Behind a wall of silence, the US and UK have been conducting over the last four decades a massive, largely secret war against Libya often using Chad, the country lying on its southern border, as its base. The current attacks on Col. Gadafi's troops and attempts to assassinate the Libyan leader with the US deployment of unmanned drones are best seen as part of a wide-ranging and long-standing strategy by the US/UK secret states to dislodge Gadafi.
Seizing power in Libya by ousting King Idris in a 1969 coup, [1] Gadafi (who intriguingly had undertaken a military training course in England in 1966) quickly became the target of massive covert operations by the French, US, Israeli and British. Stephen Dorril (2000), in his seminal history of MI6, records how in 1971 a British plan to invade the country, release political prisoners and restore the monarchy ended in a complete flop.
Dorril reports: What became known as the "Hilton assignment" was one of MI6's last attempts at a major special operation designed to overthrow a regime opposed to British interests.' The plan to bring down Gadafi had originally been a joint MI6/CIA operation but the CIA suddenly withdrew after they concluded that although Gadaffi was anti-West, he was also anti-Soviet, which meant there could be someone a lot worse running Libya. The British disagreed' (ibid: 736).

Easy To Hate

In 1980, the head of the French secret service, Col. Alain de Gaigneronde de Marolles, resigned after a French-led plan ended in disaster when a rebellion by Libyan troops in Tobruk was rapidly suppressed (Deacon 1990: 262-264).
Throughout the early 1980s Gadafi was demonised in the mainstream US and UK media as a terrorist warlord' and prime agent of a Soviet-inspired terror network'. According to Noam Chomsky, Reagan's campaign against international terrorism' was a natural choice for the propaganda system in furtherance of its basic agenda: expansion of the state sector of the economy; transfer of resources from the poor to the rich and a more "activist" (i.e. terrorist and aggressive) foreign policy'. Such policies needed the public to be frightened into obedience by some terrible enemy'. And Libya fitted the need perfectly (Chomsky 1991: 120).
As Chomsky commented: Gadafi is easy to hate, particularly against the backdrop of rampant anti-Arab racism in the United States and the deep commitment of the educated classes, with only the rarest of exceptions, to US-Israeli rejectionism and violence. He has created an ugly and repressive society and is indeed guilty of retail terrorism, primarily against Libyans' (ibid).
In July 1981, a CIA plan to overthrow and possibly kill Gadafi was leaked to the press. At roughly the same time, Libyan hit squads were reported to have entered the United States, though this has since been revealed to have been a piece of Israeli secret service disinformation (Rusbridger 1989: 80). Joe Flynn, the infamous con man, was also able to exploit Fleet Street's fascination with the Gadafi myth. In September 1981, posing as an Athens-based arms dealer he tricked almost £3,000 out of the News of the World with his story that the Libyan leader was masterminding a secret plot to arm black revolutionary murder squads in Britain' (Lycett 1995).
Then in 1982, away from the glare of the media, Hissène Habré, with the backing of the CIA and Israeli troops (Cockburn and Cockburn 1992: 123), overthrew the Chadian government of Goukouni Wedeye. Human Rights Watch records: Under President Reagan, the United States gave covert CIA paramilitary support to help install Habré in order, according to secretary of state Alexander Haig, to "bloody Gadafi's nose".' Bob Woodward, in his semi-official history of the CIA, reveals that the Chad covert operation was the first undertaken by the new CIA chief William Casey and that throughout the decade Libya ranked almost as high as the Soviet Union as the bête noir' of the administration (Woodward 1987: 348, 363, 410-11).
A report from Amnesty, Chad: The Habré Legacy, [2] recorded massive military and financial support for Habréby the US Congress. It added: None of the documents presented to Congress and consulted by Amnesty International covering the period 1984 to 1989 make any reference to human rights violations.'
US official records indicate that funding for the Chad-based secret war against Libya also came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Iraq (Hunter 1991: 49). According to John Prades (1986: 383), the Saudis, for instance, donated $7m to an opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (also backed by French intelligence and the CIA). But a plan to assassinate Gadafi and take over the government on 8 May 1984 was crushed (Perry 1992: 165). In the following year, the US asked Egypt to invade Libya and overthrow Gadafi but President Mubarak refused (Martin and Walcott 1988: 265-6). By the end of 1985, the Washington Post had exposed the plan after congressional leaders opposing it wrote in protest to President Reagan.

Thrilled To Blitz

Frustrated in its covert attempts to topple Gadafi, the US government's strategy suddenly shifted. In March 1986, US planes patrolling the Gulf of Sidra were reported to have been attacked by Libyan missiles. But Noam Chomsky suggests this incident was a provocation enabling US forces to sink several Libyan boats, killing more than 50 Libyans and, it was hoped, to incite Gadafi to acts of terror against Americans, as was subsequently claimed' (Chomsky op cit: 124). In the following month, the US responded with a military strike on key Libyan targets. The attack was widely condemned. James Adams (1987: 372) quotes a British intelligence source: Although we allowed the raid there was a general feeling that America had become uncontrollable and unless we did something Reagan would be even more violent the next time.'
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was perhaps hoping for an action-replay of the Falklands factor when she gave the US permission to fly F-111 attack jets from bases in East Anglia to bomb Libyan targets. Also, according to Annie Machon, Mrs Thatcher was anxious for revenge' after the shooting of W.P.C. Fletcher during a demonstration by Libyan oppositionists outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984 (Machon 2005: 104). It was an archetypal move of the secret state: only a select few in her cabinet were involved in the decision. Yet the attack appeared to win little support from the public. Harris, Gallup and MORI all showed substantial majorities opposed.
Much of the UK mainstream press, however, responded with jingoistic jubilation. The Sun's front page screamed: Thrilled to blitz: Bombing Gadaffi was my greatest day, says US airman.' The Mirror concluded: What was the alternative? In what other way was Colonel Gadafi to be forced to understand that he had a price to pay for his terrorism?'; The Times: The greatest threat to Western freedoms may be the Soviet Union but that does not make the USSR the only threat. The growth of terrorist states must be curbed while it can be curbed. The risks of extension of the conflict must be minimised. And in this case it would appear that it has been.' The Star's front page proclaimed: Reagan was right.' In the Sunday Telegraph, of 1 June, columnist Paul Johnson denounced the distasteful whiff of pure cowardice in the air' as the wimps' raised doubts about the US bombing of terrorist bases' in Libya.
But there was an intriguing mediacentric dimension to the mission as the BBC, transformed into the enemy within' of the vulnerable state, was to come under some considerable attack from the Conservative government over its coverage of the attacks. Though most of the press responded ecstatically to Britain's role in the bombing, all their contrived jingoism could not hide the fact that the raid failed to capture the imagination of important elements of the elite. Opposition even came from cabinet members.
The BBC became the perfect scapegoat. Kate Adie's on-the-spot reports could not fail to mention the casualties (Sebba 1994: 266-7). Many of the main targets were missed. Four 2,000lb bombs fell on the suburb of Bin Ghashir, causing far more devastation than any terrorist' bomb could ever achieve. Even so, Norman Tebbitt, chairman of the Conservative Party, engaged in a highly personalised attack on Adie. Yet there was an air of theatre about the whole event. Adie was one of the most trusted BBC correspondents. And both government and BBC could benefit from the spat. The Tory right, on the ascendancy at the time, and ever hasty to criticise the BBC it so desperately wanted privatised as the enemy within', was satisfied and the BBC, who stuck by their star reporter throughout the attacks, could appear to be courageously defending media freedom. Amidst the many contradictions and complexities of modern-day politics, mediacentric elements are put to many diverse uses by (usually competing) factions in the ruling elites.
According to US academic Douglas Kellner, the bombing was a manufactured crisis, staged as a media event and co-ordinated to coincide with the beginning of the 7 pm news in the US (Kellner 1990: 138). Two hours later President Reagan went on network television to justify the raid. Chomsky also argues that the attack was the first bombing in history staged for prime-time television' (Chomsky op cit: 127). Administration press conferences soon after the raid ensured total domination of the propaganda system during the crucial early hours'. Chomsky continues: One might argue that the administration took a gamble in this transparent public relations operation, since journalists could have asked some difficult questions. But the White House was justly confident that nothing untoward would occur and its faith in the servility of the media proved to be entirely warranted.'
Yet the main purpose of the raid was to kill the Libyan President dubbed a mad dog' by Reagan. David Yallop quotes a member of the United States Air Force intelligence unit who took part in the pre-raid briefing': Nine of 18 F-111s that left from the UK were specifically briefed to bomb Gadafi's residence inside the barracks where he was living with his family' (Yallop 1994: 713). In the event, the first bomb to drop on Tripoli hit Gadafi's home killing Hana, his adopted daughter aged 15 months while his eight other children and wife Safiya were all hospitalised, some with serious injuries. The president escaped. David Blundy and Andrew Lycett report (1987: 22):
The attack on Gadafi's Aziziya compound was a military failure. Gadafi himself was deep underground. The administration building, where he lives, was missed by two bombs which fell thirty yards away, knocking out the windows but doing no structural damage. The tennis courts received two direct hits and a bomb fell outside the front door of the building where Gadafi's family lives. Blasts tore through the small bedrooms to the right of the living room, injuring two of Gadafi's sons and killing his fifteen-month old adopted daughter, Hana. Hana was publicly acknowledged only in death. During interviews only a month before Gadafi had said, sadly, that he had only one daughter, eight-year-old Aisha, and wished that he had more. He did not say that his wife had adopted a baby girl ten months before.
Consider the outrage in the Western media if a relative of Reagan had been killed by a Libyan bomb. There was no such outrage over the Libyan deaths. In November, the UN General Assembly passed a motion condemning the raid. Interestingly, Israel was one of the few countries to back the US over the raid. Yet when the Israeli representative came to justify his country's stance, he used evidence of Gadafi's alleged commitment to terrorism taken from the German mass-selling newspaper Bild am Sonntag and the London-based Daily Telegraph (Yallop op cit: 695).
Following the April 1986 attack, reports of US military action against Libya disappeared from the media. But away from the media glare, the CIA launched by far its most extensive effort yet to spark an anti-Gadafi coup. A secret army was recruited from among the many Libyans captured in border battles with Chad during the 1980s (Perry op cit: 166). And, as concern grew in MI6 over Gadafi's alleged plans to develop chemical weapons, Britain funded various opposition groups in Libya including the London-based Libyan National Movement.
Then in 1990, with the crisis in the Gulf developing, French troops helped oust Habré and install Idriss Déby as the new president in a secret operation. The French government had tired of Habré's genocidal policies while the Bush administration decided not to frustrate France's objectives in exchange for their co-operation in the war against Iraq. Yet even under Déby the abuses of civil rights by government forces have continued.[3]
Attempts to oust Gadafi also continued. David Shayler, a former MI5 agent, even alleged that MI6 were involved in a plot in 1996 to assassinate the Libyan leader (Hunter op cit). His motorcade was attacked by dissidents with Kalashnikovs and rocket grenades but while Gadafi escaped six bystanders were killed. Shayler claimed MI6 paid the Islamic Fighting group £100,000 to carry out the attack (see Dorril op cit: 793-794; Machon op cit: 172; Jaber 2010).
Following Libya's decision after the 9/11 US terrorist attacks to build closer ties with the West and renounce all efforts to develop nuclear weapons, UN sanctions against the country were lifted in 2003. The demonisation of Col. Gadafi predictably declined and members of the political, financial and academic British elite lined up to welcome the Libyan leader back into the international community'.
The recent rising against the authoritarian Gadafi regime has changed all that. And the Western elites (assisted by a compliant mainstream media) are seizing the new opportunities in their increasingly desperate attempts to eliminate the Libyan leader.
Notes


[1] The role of the CIA in the coup is disputed. Blundy and Lycett (1987: 69) report the former Libyan Prime Minister, Abdul Hamid Bakoush, saying: The Americans had contacts with Gadaffi through the embassy in Tripoli. They encouraged him to take over. There were dozens of CIA operatives in Libya at that time and they knew what was going on. The Americans were frightened of the senior officers and the intelligentsia in Libya because they thought that these people were independent and could not be run as puppets.' But Blundy and Lycett add (ibid): Bakoush's refusal to give names that might corroborate his theory does not help his credibility.'

[2] See http://www.amnesty.org/fr/library/asset/AFR20/004/2001/fr/2343f1a0-d902-11dd-ad8c-f3d4445c118e/afr200042001en.html, accessed on 1 May 2010

[3] See http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/chad/report-2010, accessed on 1 January 2011

References

Adams, James (1987) Secret armies: The full story of SAS, Delta Force and Spetsnaz, London: Hutchinson
Blundy, David and Lycett, Andrew (1987) Qaddafi and the Libyan revolution, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Chomsky, Noam (1991) Pirates and emperors, Montreal/New York: Black Rose Books
Cockburn, Alexander and Cockburn, Leslie (1992) Dangerous liaison: The inside story of US-Israeli covert relationship, London: Bodley Head
Deacon, Richard (1990) The French secret service, Grafton Books: London
Dorril, Stephen (2000) MI6: Fifty years of special operations, London: Fourth Estate
Hunter, Jane (1991) Dismantling the war on Libya, Covert Action Information Bulletin, summer pp 47-51
Jaber, Hala (2010) Libyans thwart Fletcher inquiry, Sunday Times, 19 September
Kellner, Douglas (1990) Television and the crisis of democracy, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press
Lycett, Andrew (1995) I study my targets. I find out what makes them tick, Independent, 22 June
Machon, Annie (2005) Spies, lies and whistleblowers, Lewes, East Sussex: The Book Guild
Martin, David and Walcott, John (1988) Best laid plans: The inside story of America's war against terrorism, New York: Harper and Row
Perry, Mark (1992) Eclipse: The last days of the CIA, New York: William Morrow and Company
Prades, John (1986) President's secret wars: CIA and Pentagon covert operations from World War II through Iranscan, New York: William Morrow
Rusbridger, James (1989) The intelligence game: Illusions and delusions of international espionage, London: Bodley Head
Sebba, Anna (1994) Battling for news: The rise of the woman reporter, London: Hodder and Stoughton
Woodward, Bob (1987) Veil: The secret wars of the CIA, London: Simon Schuster
Yallop, David (1994) To the ends of the earth: The hunt for the Jackal, London: Corgi





This Alert is Archived here:
If At First You Don't Succeed - Four Decades Of US-UK Attempts To Topple Gadafi

[Magda Hassan]

As the United States and its allies get deeper into the confrontation with Qaddafi in Libya, it's worth stepping back to consider what is actually taking placeand why.
We've been told very little about the rebels seeking to supplant the dictator. But one in particular deserves our attention. General Khalifa Hifter, the latest person to head the rebel forces.
There's been little effort to look at Hifter's background. One notable exception was the work of the always-diligent McClatchy Newspapers, which briefly inquired about his background in late March. That report does not seem to have generated much additional digging by other news organizations.

The new leader of Libya's opposition military spent the past two decades in suburban Virginia but felt compelled even in his late-60s to return to the battlefield in his homeland, according to people who know him.
Khalifa Hifter was once a top military officer for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, but after a disastrous military adventure in Chad in the late 1980s, Hifter switched to the anti-Gadhafi opposition. In the early 1990s, he moved to suburban Virginia, where he established a life but maintained ties to anti-Gadhafi groups.
Late last week, Hifter was appointed to lead the rebel army, which has been in chaos for weeks. He is the third such leader in less than a month, and rebels interviewed in Libya openly voiced distrust for the most recent leader, Abdel Fatah Younes, who had been at Gadhafi's side until just a month ago.
At a news conference Thursday, the rebel's military spokesman said Younes will stay as Hifter's chief of staff, and added that the army such as it is would need "weeks" of training.
According to Abdel Salam Badr of Richmond, Va., who said he has known Hifter all his life including back in Libya Hifter whose name is sometimes spelled Haftar, Hefter or Huftur was motivated by his intense anti-Gadhafi feelings.
"Libyans every single one of them they hate that guy so much they will do whatever it takes," Badr said in an interview Saturday. "Khalifa has a personal grudge against Gadhafi… That was his purpose in life."
According to Badr and another friend in the U.S., a Georgia-based Libyan activist named Salem alHasi, Hifter left for Libya two weeks ago.
alHasi, who said Hifter was once his superior in the opposition's military wing, said he and Hifter talked in mid-February about the possibility that Gadhafi would use force on protesters.
"He made the decision he had to go inside Libya," alHasi said Saturday. "With his military experience, and with his strong relationship with officers on many levels of rank, he decided to go and see the possibility of participating in the military effort against Gadhafi."
He added that Hifter is very popular among members of the Libyan army, "and he is the most experienced person in the whole Libyan army." He acted out of a sense of "national responsibility," alHasi said.
"This responsibility no one can take care of but him," alHasi said. "I know very well that the Libyan army especially in the eastern part is in desperate need of his presence."
Omar Elkeddi, a Libyan expatriate journalist based in Holland, said in an interview that the opposition forces are getting more organized than they were at the beginning up the uprising. Hifter, he said, is "very professional, very distinguished," and commands great respect.
Since coming to the United States in the early 1990s, Hifter lived in suburban Virginia outside Washington, D.C. Badr said he was unsure exactly what Hifter did to support himself, and that Hifter primarily focused on helping his large family.

So a former Qaddafi general who switches sides is admitted to the United States, puts down roots in Virginia outside Washington, D.C. and then somehow supports his family in a manner that mystifies a fellow who has known Hifter his whole life. Hmm.
The likelihood that Hifter was brought in to be some kind of asset is pretty high. Just as figures like Ahmed Chalabi were cultivated for a post-Saddam Iraq, Hifter may have played a similar role as American intelligence prepared for a chance in Libya.
We do need to ask to what extent the Libyan uprising is a proxy battle, with the United States far more involved that it would care to admit. Certainly, Qaddafi has been on the "to-remove" list for a very long time. But after something of a rapprochement, he again became a major irritant in recent years.
As the New York Times reported, almost in an aside,

In 2009, top aides to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi called together 15 executives from global energy companies operating in Libya's oil fields and issued an extraordinary demand: Shell out the money for his country's $1.5 billion bill for its role in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 and other terrorist attacks.
If the companies did not comply, the Libyan officials warned, there would be "serious consequences" for their oil leases, according to a State Department summary of the meeting.
…The episode and others like it, the officials said, reflect a Libyan culture rife with corruption, kickbacks, strong-arm tactics and political patronage since the United States reopened trade with Colonel Qaddafi's government in 2004. As American and international oil companies, telecommunications firms and contractors moved into the Libyan market, they discovered that Colonel Qaddafi or his loyalists often sought to extract millions of dollars in "signing bonuses" and "consultancy contracts" or insisted that the strongman's sons get a piece of the action through shotgun partnerships.

Unfortunately, items like the McClatchy piece and the above extract from a longerTimes piece are rarely patched together into a larger analysis of what is going on.
More detailed examinations of the complex history and interests in play are usually relegated to little-known blogs. For example, the Irish author and journalist Ed Moloney writes about President Obama's decision to authorize the deployment of CIA agents on the ground in Libya, and notes

…The rebels are by themselves incapable of dislodging Gaddafi. The allies' no-fly zone, cruise missile strikes and bombing missions may be sufficient to deny Gaddafi a victory over his rebel opponents but it cannot assure success for the rebels.
Slowly but surely Obama and his French and British allies are being sucked into direct involvement in yet another project to secure regime change in a Muslim country. The next stage will be to give the rebels sophisticated weapons in the hope this can reverse their decline. The rebels will have to be trained of course, the training must take place in Libya and the trainers will have to be protected, in Libya, by NATO soldiers. Slowly but surely the prohibition against "boots on the ground" will be erased. If, as seems very possible, the acquisition of modern weaponry fails to transform the rebels' fortunes the only remaining option will be to send NATO troops in against Gaddafi. Failure to remove Gaddafi means a humiliating defeat for Obama and his allies and in the end NATO may have little alternative but to fight on Libyan soil.
…President Obama's motives in ordering the bombing of Gaddafi's forces may well have been driven by humanitarian concerns but the appointment of Khalifa Heftir to lead the armed uprising in the oil-rich North African republic, is a reminder that there is a long and tangled history of secret American efforts to oust the Libyan ruler.
Heftir's elevation also signals that Obama's intervention in Libya is now not just about saving civilian lives but is aimed at removing Gaddafi from power, a mission begun a quarter of a century before by a President regarded as an American Conservative icon and supposedly the polar opposite, politically, of the White House's current resident.
The story of Khalifa Heftir's entanglement with the CIA begins with the election to the White House of Ronald Reagan in 1980 amid gradually worsening relations with Gaddafi's Libya and a growing obsession on the part of Reagan and his allies with removing the Libyan leader.

Here the story becomes complicated, with lots of names and dates and countries involved. If you don't have the time or inclination to go further, that's understandable. The key thing is to appreciate that, as the saying goes, past is prologue. Without understanding what came before, we have no real idea what is happening now, and why. In any case, here's the back story, which itself is presumably rife with spin and manipulation, and deserves further investigation (the role of Bob Woodward as a principal reporter on these issues, for example, means that the narrative itself may be strategicsee this and this for more on Woodward's work.)

A year before Reagan's election a Libyan mob, imitating Iranian revolutionaries, burned down the US embassy in Tripoli and diplomatic relations were suspended. Two years later the Libyan embassy in Washington was closed down while US and Libyan jets skirmished over the Gulf of Sidra, which Gaddafi claimed to be part of Libya's territorial waters.
Later in 1981 American press reports claimed that Libyan hit squads had been sent to the US to assassinate Reagan, shots were fired at the US ambassador to France while the ambassador to Italy was withdrawn after a plot to kidnap him was uncovered. After explosives were found in musical equipment at a US embassy sponsored dance in Khartoum, Sudan, Reagan ordered a travel ban and ordered all Americans out of Libya.
In 1983 there were more air skirmishes off the Libyan coast; two years later five US citizens were killed by bombs planted at Rome and Vienna airports and US officials blamed Libya. The worst clashes came in 1986, beginning with more air skirmishes over the Gulf of Sidra and the destruction of Libyan SAM sites by American missiles. In April a bomb exploded at the LaBelle nightclub in Berlin, a bar frequented by off-duty American servicemen. Three people were killed, two of whom were US soldiers and of the 200 wounded, sixty were American citizens. President Reagan blamed Libya and on April 15th, some 100 US aircraft, many flying out of bases in the UK, bombed Libyan bases and military complexes. The Libyans said that 70 people were killed in the attacks which also targeted Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli, killing his adopted infant daughter, Hana. One account claimed that nine of the jets had been directed to blast Gaddafi's compound in a clear attempt to kill him.
By the mid-1980's, the Reagan administration and the CIA believed that Gaddafi was supporting terrorist groups or helping fellow radical states throughout the globe. In a November 3rd, 1985 article for theWashington Post, Bob Woodward listed the countries where Gaddafi was said by the White House to be active. They included Chad, Tunisia, Sudan, Iran, Syria, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon and Iraq. Gaddafi was also supporting the IRA in Northern Ireland and significantly stepped up supplies of arms and cash to the group after a British policewoman was shot dead and diplomats expelled following a confrontation and lengthy siege at the Libyan embassy in London in 1984.
In May 1984, less than a month after the London embassy siege, gunmen launched rocket and gun attacks against the Tripoli army barracks where Gaddafi's family compound was located. The initial assault was repulsed and most of the insurgents killed when Libyan tanks shelled the building overlooking the barracks where the gunmen had taken refuge. It was though the most serious challenge to Gaddafi's hold on power in Libya, made all the more threatening by the fact that it had happened on his doorstep.
The attack was claimed by a group calling itself the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), composed of anti-Gaddafi exiles, some of them supporters of the Idris monarchy overthrown in the 1969 revolution. Claims that the NFSL was at that time supported by US intelligence derive some support from a leak to American newspapers a few days before the attack in Tripoli that President Reagan had recently signed a new directive authorizing US agencies to "take the offensive" against international terrorism by mounting retaliatory or pre-emptive attacks. But the Americans were, at this stage, not directly involved in supporting the exile group's activities.
The NFSL was getting aid mostly from Saudi Arabia whose ruling family despised Gaddafi after he had accused them of defiling holy Islamic sites in their country but also from Egypt and Tunisia in whose internal affairs Gaddafi had meddled. Sudan was another sponsor. Gaddafi had tried to foment an uprising against its pro-Western leadership and in response Sudan supplied the NFSL with bases from which the May 1984 attack was planned.
The Sudanese, according to one account, kept the CIA informed of the plot. CIA Director, William Casey, was heartened by the attack even though it had failed and renewed his efforts to persuade Reagan to authorize specific covert action against the Libyan leader. Casey is said to have remarked: "It proves for the first time that Libyans are willing to die to get rid of that bastard" (p. 85). From thereon the NFSL was put on the CIA's payroll.
It was after the unsuccessful effort to kill Gaddafi in his Tripoli compound that Reagan took the intelligence offensive. Bob Woodward revealed Reagan's move, first in the Washington Post (November 3rd, 1985) and then in his account of Reagan's secret wars in his book Veil, published in 1987. A secret presidential directive, which Woodward was able to quote, signaled that the exile groups like NFSL would be an important weapon wielded in this campaign against the Libyan leader: "…the exile groups, if supported to a substantial degree, could soon begin an intermittent campaign of sabotage and violence which could prompt further challenges to Qaddafi's authority."
The Reagan directive had listed ten options for action against Gaddafi, which ranged from regime change to economic sanctions, although it was obvious that the operation could only be judged a success if Gaddafi was dislodged: "…no course of action short of stimulating Qaddafi's fall will bring any significant and enduring change in Libyan policies", the document read.
The former French colony of Chad on Libya's southern border had already been a major battleground in the war between Reagan and Gaddafi and after the 1984 bid to kill the Libyan dictator it assumed even greater importance. Chad had gained independence from France in 1960 but its history for many years thereafter has been one of coups and civil wars, often sponsored by foreign powers using Chad as an arena for their rivalry.
Libyan interest and activity in Chad pre-dated Gaddafi's 1969 revolution and centered on a piece of land in Northern Chad called the Aouzou Strip which is rich in uranium and other rare minerals. Gaddafi formed an alliance with the government of Goukouni Wedeye who allowed the Libyans to occupy the strip but in 1982 Wedeye was overthrown by Hissene Habre who was backed by the CIA and by French troops.
Hebre's was a brutal regime. During the eight years of his leadership some 40,000 people were estimated to have died in detention or executed. Human Rights Watch observed: "Under President Reagan, the United States gave covert CIA paramilitary support to help install Habre in order, according to secretary of state, Alexander Haig, to bloody Gadafi's nose'". Bob Woodward wrote in Veil that the Chadian coup was William Casey's first covert operation as head of the CIA.
During the years following Habre's coup, Gaddafi's army and the forces of the Chad government, the CIA and French intelligence clashed repeatedly. In March 1987 a force of some 600-700 Libyan soldiers under the command of General Khalifa Haftir was captured and imprisoned. Gaddafi disowned Heftir, presumably in anger at his capture, and the former Libyan General then defected to the major Libyan opposition group, the NFSL.
A Congressional Research Service report of December 1996 namedHeftir as the head of the NFSL's military wing, the Libyan National Army. After he joined the exile group, the CRS report added, Heftir began "preparing an army to march on Libya".The NFSL, the CSR said, is in exile "with many of its members in the United States."
In 1990 French troops helped to oust Habre and installed Idriss Debry to replace him. According to one account the French had grown weary of Habre's genocidal policies while the new resident in the White House, George H W Bush did not have the same interest as Reagan had in using Chad as a proxy to damage Gaddafi even though the Libyan leader formed an alliance with Debry.
A New York Times report of May 1991 shed more light on the CIA's sponsorship of Heftir's men. "They were trained" it said, "by American intelligence officials in sabotage and other guerilla skills, officials said, at a base near Ndjamena, the Chadian capital. The plan to use the exiles fit neatly into the Reagan administration's eagerness to topple Colonel Qaddafi".
Following the fall of Habre, Gaddafi demanded that the new government hand over Heftir's men but instead Debry allowed the Americans to fly them to Zaire. There Libyan officials were given access to the men and about half agreed to return to Libya. The remainder refused, saying they feared for their lives if they went back home. When US financial aid offered to Zaire for giving the rebels refuge failed to materialise they were expelled and sent to Kenya.
Eventually the Kenyans said the men were no longer welcome and the United States agreed to bring them to America where they were admitted to the US refugee programme. A State Department spokesman said the men would have "access to normal resettlement assistance, including English-language and vocational training and, if necessary, financial and medical assistance." According to one report the remnants of Heftir's army were dispersed to all fifty states.
That was not, however, the end of the Libyan National Army. In March 1996, Heftir returned to Libya and took part in an uprising against Gaddafi. Details of what happened are scant but theWashington Post reported from Egypt on March 26th that travelers from Libya had spoken of "unrest today in Jabal Akhdar mountains of eastern Libya and said armed rebels may have joined escaped prisoners in an uprising against the government….and that its leader is Col. Khalifa Haftar, of a contra-style group based in the United States called the Libyan National Army, the travelers said."
The report continued: "The travelers, whose accounts could not be confirmed independently, said they heard that the death toll had risen to 23 in five days of fighting between security forces and rebels, including men who escaped from Benghazi prison thursday and then fled into the eastern mountains."
What part the CIA played in the failed uprising and whether the then US president, Bill Clinton had given the operation his approval are not known. By coincidence or not, three months later, Gaddafi's forces killed some 1200 political prisoners being held in Benghazi's Abu Simal jail. It was the arrest of the lawyer representing many of the prisoners' families that sparked the February 17th uprising against Gaddafi and with it, the return of Khalifa Heftir.

As usual, the back story is complex. Valuable strategic resources abound. There are no good guys. And, as usual, the reporting that commands most of our attention just isn't very good at helping us understand what is really going on.
The consequences of an uninformed public….well, we know what those are.
http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/04/22/the-cia...-in-libya/

[Ed Jewett]

The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=24542

The present NATO campaign against Gaddafi in Libya has given rise to great confusion, both among those waging this ineffective campaign, and among those observing it. Many whose opinions I normally respect see this as a necessary war against a villain though some choose to see Gaddafi as the villain, and others point to Obama.

My own take on this war, on the other hand, is that it is both ill-conceived and dangerous -- a threat to the interests of Libyans, Americans, the Middle East and conceivably the entire world. Beneath the professed concern about the safety of Libyan civilians lies a deeper concern that is barely acknowledged: the West's defense of the present global petrodollar economy, now in decline..

The confusion in Washington, matched by the absence of discussion of an overriding strategic motive for American involvement, is symptomatic of the fact that the American century is ending, and ending in a way that is both predictable in the long run, and simultaneously erratic and out of control in its details.

Confusion in Washington and in NATO

With respect to Libya's upheaval itself, opinions in Washington range from that of John McCain, who has allegedly called on NATO to provide "every apparent means of assistance, minus ground troops," in overthrowing Gaddafi,1 to Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who has expressed deep concern about even passing out arms to a group of fighters we do not know well.2

We have seen the same confusion throughout the Middle East. In Egypt a coalition of non-governmental elements helped prepare for the nonviolent revolution in that country, while former US Ambassador Frank Wisner, Jr., flew to Egypt to persuade Mubarak to cling to power. Meanwhile in countries that used to be of major interest to the US, like Jordan and Yemen, it is hard to discern any coherent American policy at all.

In NATO too there is confusion that occasionally threatens to break into open discord. Of the 28 NATO members, only 14 are involved at all in the Libyan campaign, and only six are involved in the air war. Of these only three countries the U.S., Britain, and France, are offering tactical air support to the rebels on the ground. When many NATO countries froze the bank accounts of Gaddafi and his immediate supporters, the US, in an unpublicized and dubious move, froze the entire $30 billion of Libyan government funds to which it has access. (Of this, more later.) Germany, the most powerful NATO nation after America, abstained on the UN Security Council resolution; and its foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, has since said, "We will not see a military solution, but a political solution."3

Such chaos would have been unthinkable in the high period of US dominance. Obama appears paralyzed by the gap between his declared objective the removal of Gaddafi from power and the means available to him, given the nation's costly involvement in two wars, and his domestic priorities.

To understand America's and NATO's confusion over Libya, one must look at other phenomena:

Standard & Poor's warning of an imminent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating

the unprecedented rise in the price of gold to over $1500 an ounce

the gridlock in American politics over federal and state deficits and what to do about them



In the midst of the Libyan challenge to what remains of American hegemony, and in part as a direct consequence of America's confused strategy in Libya, the price of oil has hit $112 a barrel. This price increase threatens to slow or even reverse America's faltering economic recovery, and demonstrates one of the many ways in which the Libyan war is not serving American national interests.

Confusion about Libya has been evident in Washington from the outset, particularly since Secretary of State Clinton advocated a no-fly policy, President Obama said he wanted it as an option, and Secretary of Defense Gates warned against it.4 The result has been a series of interim measures, during which Obama has justified a limited U.S. response by pointing to America's demanding commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet with a stalemate prevailing in Libya itself, a series of further gradual escalations are being contemplated, from the provision of arms, funds, and advisers to the rebels, to the introduction of mercenaries or even foreign troops. The American scenario begins to look more and morelike Vietnam, where the war also began modestly with the introduction of covert operators followed by military advisers.

I have to confess that on March 17 I myself was of two minds about UN Security Council 1973, which ostensibly established a no-fly zone in Libya for the protection of civilians. But since then it has become apparent that the threat to rebels from Gaddafi's troops and rhetoric was in fact far less than was perceived at the time. To quote Prof. Alan J. Kuperman,

. . . President Barack Obama grossly exaggerated the humanitarian threat to justify military action in Libya. The president claimed that intervention was necessary to prevent a "bloodbath'' in Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city and last rebel stronghold. But Human Rights Watch has released data on Misurata, the next-biggest city in Libya and scene of protracted fighting, revealing that Moammar Khadafy is not deliberately massacring civilians but rather narrowly targeting the armed rebels who fight against his government. Misurata's population is roughly 400,000. In nearly two months of war, only 257 people including combatants have died there. Of the 949 wounded, only 22 less than 3 percent are women…. Nor did Khadafy ever threaten civilian massacre in Benghazi, as Obama alleged. The "no mercy'' warning, of March 17, targeted rebels only, as reported by The New York Times, which noted that Libya's leader promised amnesty for those "who throw their weapons away.'' Khadafy even offered the rebels an escape route and open border to Egypt, to avoid a fight "to the bitter end.''5


The record of ongoing US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that we should expect a heavy human toll if the current stalemate in Libya either continues or escalates further.

The Role in this War of Oil and Financial Interests

In American War Machine, I wrote how

By a seemingly inevitable dialectic,… prosperity in some major states fostered expansion, and expansion in dominant states created increasing income disparity.6 In this process the dominant state itself was changed, as its public services were progressively impoverished, in order to strengthen security arrangements benefiting a few while oppressing many.7

Thus, for many years the foreign affairs of England in Asia came to be conducted in large part by the East India Company…. Similarly, the American company Aramco, representing a consortium of the oil majors Esso, Mobil, Socal, and Texaco, conducted its own foreign policy in Arabia, with private connections to the CIA and FBI.8…

In this way Britain and America inherited policies that, when adopted by the metropolitan states, became inimical to public order and safety.9

In the final stages of hegemonic power, one sees more and more naked intervention for narrow interests, abandoning earlier efforts towards creating stable international institutions. Consider the role of the conspiratorial Jameson Raid into the South African Boer Republic in late 1895, a raid, devised to further the economic interests of Cecil Rhodes, which helped to induce Britain's Second Boer War.10 Or consider the Anglo-French conspiracy with Israel in 1956, in an absurd vain attempt to retain control of the Suez Canal.

Then consider the lobbying efforts of the oil majors as factors in the U.S. war in Vietnam (1961), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003).11 Although the role of oil companies in America's Libyan involvement remains obscure, it is a virtual certainty that Cheney's Energy Task Force Meetings discussed not just Iraq's but Libya's under-explored oil reserves, estimated to be around 41 billion barrels, or about a third of Iraq's.12

Afterwards some in Washington expected a swift victory in Iraq would be followed by similar US attacks on Libya and Iran. General Wesley Clark told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now four years ago that soon after 9/11 a general in the Pentagon informed him that several countries would be attacked by the U.S. military. The list included Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.13 In May of 2003 John Gibson, chief executive of Halliburton's Energy Service Group, told International Oil Daily in an interview, ""We hope Iraq will be the first domino and that Libya and Iran will follow. We don't like being kept out of markets because it gives our competitors an unfair advantage,"14

It is also a matter of public record that the UN no-fly resolution 1973 of March 17 followed shortly on Gaddafi's public threat of March 2 to throw western oil companies out of Libya, and his invitation on March 14 to Chinese, Russian, and Indian firms to produce Libyan oil in their place.15 Significantly China, Russia, and India (joined by their BRICS ally Brazil), all abstained on UN Resolution 1973.

The issue of oil is closely intertwined with that of the dollar, because the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency depends largely on OPEC's decision to denominate the dollar as the currency for OPEC oil purchases. Today's petrodollar economy dates back to two secret agreements with the Saudisin the 1970s for the recycling of petrodollars back into the US economy. The first of these deals assured a special and on-going Saudi stake in the health of the US dollar; the second secured continuing Saudi support for the pricing of all OPEC oil in dollars. These two deals assured that the US economy would not be impoverished by OPEC oil price hikes. Since then the heaviest burden has been borne instead by the economies of less developed countries, who need to purchase dollars for their oil supplies.16

As Ellen Brown has pointed out, first Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for dollars, shortly before each country was attacked.

Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted that "[s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept Euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.."

According to a Russian article titled "Bombing of Lybia - Punishment for Qaddafi for His Attempt to Refuse US Dollar," Qaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the dollar and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Qaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. … The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union, with French president Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Qaddafi continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.

And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed:

One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned.... Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.17

Libya not only has oil. According to the IMF, its central bank has nearly 144 tons of gold in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS [Bank of International Settlements], the IMF and their rules.18

Gaddafi's recent proposal to introduce a gold dinar for Africa revives the notion of an Islamic gold dinar floated in 2003 by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, as well as by some Islamist movements.19 The notion, which contravenes IMF rules and is designed to bypass them, has had trouble getting started. But today the countries stocking more and more gold rather than dollars include not just Libya and Iran, but also China, Russia, and India.20

The Stake of France in Terminating Gaddafi's African Initiatives

The initiative for the air attacks appears to have come initially from France, with early support from Britain. If Qaddafi were to succeed in creating an African Union backed by Libya's currency and gold reserves, France, still the predominant economic power in most of its former Central African colonies, would be the chief loser. Indeed, a report from Dennis Kucinich in America has corroborated the claim of Franco Bechis in Italy, transmitted by VoltaireNet in France, that "plans to spark the Benghazi rebellion were initiated by French intelligence services in November 2010."21

If the idea to attack Libya originated with France, Obama moved swiftly to support French plans to frustrate Gaddafi's African initiative with his unilateral declaration of a national emergency in order to freeze all of the Bank of Libya's $30 billion of funds to which America had access. (This was misleadingly reported in the U.S. press as a freeze of the funds of "Colonel Qaddafi, his children and family, and senior members of the Libyan government."22 But in fact the second section of Obama's decree explicitly targeted "All property and interests… of the Government of Libya, its agencies, instrumentalities, and controlled entities, and the Central Bank of Libya."23) While the U.S. has actively used financial weapons in recent years, the $30-billion seizure, "the largest amount ever to be frozen by a U.S. sanctions order," had one precedent, the arguably illegal and certainly conspiratorial seizure of Iranian assets in 1979 on behalf of the threatened Chase Manhattan Bank.24

The consequences of the $30-billion freeze for Africa, as well as for Libya, have been spelled out by an African observer:

The US$30 billion frozen by Mr Obama belong to the Libyan Central Bank and had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation the African Investment Bank in Syrte, Libya, the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaounde with a US$42 billion capital fund and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi.25

This same observer spells out her reasons for believing that Gaddafi's plans for Africa have been more benign than the West's:

It began in 1992, when 45 African nations established RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization) so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs in the continent. This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual US$500 million fee pocketed by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations, including those within the same country.

An African satellite only cost a onetime payment of US$400 million and the continent no longer had to pay a US$500 million annual lease. Which banker wouldn't finance such a project? But the problem remained how can slaves, seeking to free themselves from their master's exploitation ask the master's help to achieve that freedom? Not surprisingly, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the USA, Europe only made vague promises for 14 years. Gaddafi put an end to these futile pleas to the western benefactors' with their exorbitant interest rates. The Libyan guide put US$300 million on the table; the African Development Bank added US$50 million more and the West African Development Bank a further US$27 million and that's how Africa got its first communications satellite on 26 December 2007.26

I am not in a position to corroborate all of her claims. But, for these and other reasons, I am persuaded that western actions in Libya have been designed to frustrate Gaddafi's plans for an authentically post-colonial Africa, not just his threatened actions against the rebels in Benghazi.

Conclusion

I conclude from all this confusion and misrepresentation that America is losing its ability to enforce and maintain peace, either by itself or with its nominal allies. I would submit that, if only to stabilize and reduce oil prices, it is in America's best interest now to join with Ban Ki-Moon and the Pope in pressing for an immediate cease-fire in Libya. Negotiating a cease-fire will certainly present problems, but the probable alternative to ending this conflict is the nightmare of watching it inexorably escalate.America has been there before with tragic consequences. We do not want to see similar casualties incurred for the sake of anunjust petrodollar system whose days may be numbered anyway.

At stake is not just America's relation to Libya, but to China. The whole of Africa is an area where the west and the BRIC countries will both be investing. A resource-hungry China alone is expected to invest on a scale of $50 billion a year by 2015, a figure (funded by America's trade deficit with China) which the West cannot match.27 Whether east and west can coexist peacefully in Africa in the future will depend on the west's learning to accept a gradual diminution of its influence there, without resorting to deceitful stratagems (reminiscent of the Anglo-French Suez stratagem of 1956) in order to maintain it.

Previous transitions of global dominance have been marked by wars, by revolutions, or by both together. The final emergence through two World Wars of American hegemony over British hegemony was a transition between two powers that were essentially allied, and culturally close. The whole world has an immense stake in ensuring that the difficult transition to a post-US hegemonic order will be achieved as peacefully as possible.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. He is currently Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). This article is published in partnership with the Asia Pacific Journal.

His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Notes

1 "McCain calls for stronger NATO campaign," monstersandcritics.com, April 22, 2011, link.

2 Ed Hornick, "Arming Libyan Rebels: Should U.S. Do It?" CNN, March 31, 2011.

3 "Countries Agree to Try to Transfer Some of Qaddafi's Assets to Libyan Rebels," New York Times, April 13, 2011, link.

4 "President Obama Wants Options as Pentagon Issues Warnings About Libyan No-Fly Zone," ABC News, March 3, 2011, link. Earlier, on February 25, Gates warned that the U.S. should avoid future land wars like those it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, but should not forget the difficult lessons it has learned from those conflicts.

"In my opinion, any future Defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it," Gates said in a speech to cadets at West Point" (Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2011, link).

5 Alan J. Kuperman, "False Pretense for War in Libya?" Boston Globe, April 14, 2011.

6 America's income disparity, as measured by its Gini coefficient, is now among the highest in the world, along with Brazil, Mexico, and China. See Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, 38, 103; Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse (New York: Dutton, 2006), 159.

7 This is the subject of my book The Road to 9/11, 49.

8 Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 213.

9 Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 32. One could cite also the experience of the French Third Republic and the Banque de l'Indochine or the Netherlands and the Dutch East India Company.

10 Elizabeth Longford, Jameson's Raid: The Prelude to the Boer War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982); The Jameson Raid: a centennial retrospective (Houghton, South Africa: Brenthurst Press, 1996).

11 Wikileak documents from October and November 2002 reveal that Washington was making deals with oil companies prior to the Iraq invasion, and that the British government lobbied on behalf of BP's being included in the deals (Paul Bignell, "Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq," Independent (London), April 19, 2011).

12 Reuters, March 23, 2011.

13 Saman Mohammadi, "The Humanitarian Empire May Strike Syria Next, Followed By Lebanon And Iran," OpEdNews.com, March 31, 2011.

14 "Halliburton Eager for Work Across the Mideast," International Oil Daily, May 7, 2003.

15 "Gaddafi offers Libyan oil production to India, Russia, China," Agence France-Presse, March 14, 2011, link.

16 Peter Dale Scott, "Bush's Deep Reasons for War on Iraq: Oil, Petrodollars, and the OPEC Euro Question"; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 41-42: "From these developments emerged the twin phenomena, underlying 9/11, of triumphalist US unilateralism on the one hand, and global third-world indebtedness on the other. The secret deals increased US-Saudi interdependence at the expense of the international comity which had been the base for US prosperity since World War II." Cf. Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 37.

17 "Globalists Target 100% State Owned Central Bank of Libya." Link.

18 Ellen Brown, "Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking," Reader Supported News, April 15, 2011.

19 Peter Dale Scott, "Bush's Deep Reasons for War on Iraq: Oil, Petrodollars, and the OPEC Euro Question"; citing "Islamic Gold Dinar Will Minimize Dependency on US Dollar," Malaysian Times, April 19, 2003.

20 "Gold key to financing Gaddafi struggle," Financial Times, March 21, 2011, link.

21 Franco Bechis, "French plans to topple Gaddafi on track since last November," VoltaireNet, March 25, 2011. Cf. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, "November 2010 War Games: Southern Mistral' Air Attack against Dictatorship in a Fictitious Country called Southland,'" Global Research, April 15, 2011, link; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 19, 2011.

22 New York Times, February 27, 2011.

23 Executive Order of February 25, 2011, citing International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, seizes all Libyan Govt assets, February 25, 2011, link. The authority granted to the President by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act "may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose" (50 U.S.C. 1701).

24 "Billions Of Libyan Assets Frozen," Tropic Post, March 8, 2011, link ("largest amount"); Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 80-89 (Iranian assets).

25 "Letter from an African Woman, Not Libyan, On Qaddafi Contribution to Continent-wide African Progress , Oggetto: ASSOCIAZIONE CASA AFRICA LA LIBIA DI GHEDDAFI HA OFFERTO A TUTTA L'AFRICA LA PRIMA RIVOLUZIONE DEI TEMPI MODERNI," Vermont Commons, April 21, 2011, link. Cf. Manlio Dinucci, "Financial Heist of the Century: Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF)," Global Research, April 24, 2011, link.

26 Ibid. Cf. "The Inauguration of the African Satellite Control Center," Libya Times, September 28, 2009, link; Jean-Paul Pougala, "The lies behind the West's war on Libya," Pambazuka.org, April 14, 2011.

27 Leslie Hook, "China's future in Africa, after Libya," blogs.ft.com, March 4, 2011 ($50 billion). The U.S trade deficit with China in 2010 was $273 billion.

[Peter Lemkin]

As always, a very important and thoughtful piece - with some interesting new information to consider as the deeper reasons for what was, is, and will be 'going on' by PDS!

[Ed Jewett]

World Bank Linked Moreno Ocampo to Present War Crimes "Evidence" to UN

Posted on May 4, 2011 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton

Back in March, Moreno Ocampo was charged with coming up with some war-crimes evidence to use against Moammar Gadhafi were the need to arise. Seems like after killing 3 of Gadhafi's grand kids in an attempted illegal assassination bombing this past weekend, the Obama administration is calling their World Bank linked trump card into play.

Moreno Ocampo is scheduled to speak to the UN security council today. He is reportedly going to provide "proof" that Gadhafi is committing war crimes and various other crimes against humanity. Moammar just buried his civilian son and 3 grandchildren yesterday, all killed by a NATO airstrike that targeted his son's home in a residential district of Tripoli.

"Saif al-Arab was killed in a NATO airstrike on his home on Saturday evening, along with a friend and three of Gaddafi's grandchildren, ages 6 months to 2 years, Libya's government says. They were the children of Gaddafi's sons Mohammed and Hannibal and of his daughter, Aisha." Washington Post
Ocampo " has acted as a consultant to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the United Nations"… "He defended several controversial figures, including Diego Maradona, former economics minister Domingo Cavallo, and a priest accused of sexually abusing minors"

When Ocampo first took the job on March 24th of this year, he stated that he was already "100% sure" of Gadhafi's guilt.

A second meeting of the Libyan Contact Group, a multinational assembly of globalist leaders dedicated to changing the regime in Libya, is taking place this week as well. Various topics are on the table but it seems like the main issue is going back to the UN security council and getting them to change resolution 1973 so that they can use their ground forces to invade Libya. Globalist lap-dog Hillary Clinton will be holding court with various world leaders making deals and planning the liquidation of Libyan assets for all those who sign on.

"Secretary of State Hilary Clinton will conduct a series of bilateral meetings, including with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, President Giorgio Napolitano, and Foreign Minister Franco Frattini during the three-day meeting that begins on Wednesday." RTT News

With the bin Laden distraction well under way, the globalist agenda is rolling right along in the Middle East.

Filed under: Globalization, Scott Creighton, Globalist Clinton Scum, Globalist Skank Watch, Fake Libyan Revolution | 2 Comments »

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2011/05/...nce-to-un/

[Peter Lemkin]

The Gold Dinar: Saving the world economy from Gaddafi
Global Research, May 5, 2011

Some believe it is about protecting civilians, others say it is about oil, but some are convinced intervention in Libya is all about Gaddafi's plan to introduce the gold dinar, a single African currency made from gold, a true sharing of the wealth.

CLICK TO VIEW VIDEO

"It's one of these things that you have to plan almost in secret, because as soon as you say you're going to change over from the dollar to something else, you're going to be targeted," says Ministry of Peace founder Dr James Thring. "There were two conferences on this, in 1986 and 2000, organized by Gaddafi. Everybody was interested, most countries in Africa were keen."

Gaddafi did not give up. In the months leading up to the military intervention, he called on African and Muslim nations to join together to create this new currency that would rival the dollar and euro. They would sell oil and other resources around the world only for gold dinars.

It is an idea that would shift the economic balance of the world.

A country's wealth would depend on how much gold it had and not how many dollars it traded. And Libya has 144 tons of gold. The UK, for example, has twice as much, but ten times the population.

"If Gaddafi had an intent to try to re-price his oil or whatever else the country was selling on the global market and accept something else as a currency or maybe launch a gold dinar currency, any move such as that would certainly not be welcomed by the power elite today, who are responsible for controlling the world's central banks," says Anthony Wile, founder and chief editor of the Daily Bell.

"So yes, that would certainly be something that would cause his immediate dismissal and the need for other reasons to be brought forward from moving him from power."

And it has happened before.

In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars. Some say sanctions and an invasion followed because the Americans were desperate to prevent OPEC from transferring oil trading in all its member countries to the euro.

A gold dinar would have had serious consequences for the world financial system, but may also have empowered the people of Africa, something black activists say the US wants to avoid at all costs.

"The US have denied self-determination to Africans inside the US, so we are not surprised by anything the US would do to hinder the self-determination of Africans on the continent," says Cynthia Ann McKinney, a former US Congresswoman.

The UK's gold is kept in a secure vault somewhere in the depths of the Bank of England. As in most developed countries, there is not enough to go around.

But that is not the case in countries like Libya and many of the Gulf States.
A gold dinar would have given oil-rich African and Middle Eastern countries the power to turn around to their energy-hungry customers and say: "Sorry, the price has gone up, and we want gold."

Some say the US and its NATO allies literally could not afford to let that happen.