Peter OBORNE

Four days after the terrorist atrocity at the Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017, which killed 22 people, Jeremy Corbyn made the bravest speech of his career.

The then Labour leader went much further than the pro forma condemnations of terrorist barbarity customary in the wake of such attacks.

He raised the forbidden subject of British foreign policy. Corbyn highlighted a connection between “wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.”

This intervention was all the more remarkable because he made it in the middle of a general election campaign. At first Conservative strategists could not believe their luck.

Thinking that Corbyn had gifted them the election, Ben Wallace, then security minister (and today defence secretary), went on the offensive. He declared: “We have to be unequivocal that no amount of excuses, no amount of twisted reasoning about a foreign policy here or a foreign policy there can be an excuse.”

But the Conservative strategists were wrong. Corbyn probably rose rather than fell in the polls after his speech.

Former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn campaigning in Glasgow, December 2019. (Jeremy Corbyn, Flickr)

The British public could see the Labour leader had a point. He was echoing the explicit warning given by British intelligence to then Prime Minister Tony Blair ahead of the Iraq war in 2003:

“The threat from al-Qaeda will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq.”

In other words, there is an undeniable link between foreign adventurism and so-called blowback at home.

Politicians rarely admit this connection. Indeed, Blair refused to accept the relevance of the Iraq invasion in the aftermath of the London terrorist attacks in July 2005, which killed 56 people.

Neither Blair nor David Cameron allowed a full, independent public inquiry into the London bombings, so links to British foreign policy were never properly investigated.

Headlines outside Waterloo station after the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks on London. (CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedai Commons)

I am beginning to wonder whether the current inquiry into the Manchester Arena atrocity will duck the issue as well.

Elephant in Room

The inquiry was launched on 15 June this year. Since then Sir John Saunders, the chairman, has devoted his time to a minute examination of the response of the emergency services and security arrangements at the Manchester Arena.

But he has side-stepped the elephant in the room: Britain’s role in the downfall of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in the war of 2011.

Yet the facts are hard to ignore.

The Manchester bomber was Salman Abedi, a 22-year-old with a Libyan background whose family had fled and settled in Manchester to escape Gaddafi’s regime.

Abedi’s father, Ramadan, was a long-standing member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which was founded to overthrow Gaddafi. The primary opposition force to Gaddafi, the LIFG was until 2009 an affiliate of al-Qaeda.

In 2011, both Ramadan and a young Salman Abedi returned to Libya to fight in the civil war that toppled Gaddafi, partly thanks to a Nato bombing campaign in which the U.K. played a key role.

Salman was later known to have made repeated trips to Libya, including one shortly before his attack in Manchester.

Perhaps Salman Abedi’s links to Libya are irrelevant. It would be wrong to rule out the idea that Abedi was “radicalized” in Britain.

Yet questions abound. Questions which scream out to be asked. Questions which Saunders has so far shown little sign of examining.

Manchester Arena in 2019, two years after the bombing. (G-13114, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The first concerns Britain’s “open door policy,” which allowed Libyan exiles and British Libyan citizens, most of whom lived in Manchester, to join the 2011 uprising.

Some of these British Libyans had previously been under control orders, which subjected them to electronic tagging and required them to remain at a registered address for 16 hours a day.

Control orders are designed for the purpose of “protecting members of the public from a risk of terrorism.”

Yet in advance of the Libyan intervention, the British government had decided that the Manchester Libyans no longer posed a terrorist threat.

An article by Middle East Eye interviewed Libyans who claimed strings were pulled by Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, to allow them to travel to Libya and fight with “no questions asked.”

In other words, the U.K. was allowing individuals they suspected of involvement in terrorist activity to travel to Libya and join up with radical Islamist groups, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Why were these control orders lifted and on whose advice? What caused the government to change its mind? Were the control orders lifted in connection with the Libyan conflict – or is there some other explanation?

CCTV of Salman Abedi, the Islamist terrorist who killed 22 people in the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017.

Ministerial Accountability

Saunders has the power to call then Home Secretary Theresa May and probably her immediate predecessor Alan Johnson and ask them. He should do so.

He also needs to call Cameron, the prime minister who ordered Britain’s military intervention in 2011. We need to know whether he was advised that domestic consequences might flow from his Libyan mission.

MI5 warned in advance about the danger of bloodshed on British streets as a result of the Iraq invasion. Was a similar warning issued in private ahead of British meddling in Libya?

The inquiry also needs to hear about Britain’s relations with the LIFG, which in the 1990s seems to have been in hock with MI6, and paid by the agency to carry out an assassination attempt against Gaddafi.

When their attempts at regime change failed, the Libyan radicals fled to Manchester – sometimes called the “second capital” of Libya.

June 2010: British Prime Minister David Cameron, left, with U.S. President Barack Obama, during G-20 Summit in Toronto. (White House, Pete Souza)

After 9/11, the British state changed its approach and Gaddafi became an unexpected ally. Now, LIFG exiles in Britain were deprived of their passports.

In 2011 the LIFG came back into favor as Cameron ordered airstrikes and secretly deployed some ground troops to help local forces remove Gaddafi.

This has rarely been acknowledged. But General David Richards, then chief of the defence staff, told a parliamentary inquiry in 2016 that Britain “had a few people embedded” with rebel forces in Libya, saying that they were “in the rear areas” and “would go forward and back”.

Shouldn’t we be able to know more details about this? Who exactly did they work with? What support did they provide? Did it include armed support or training to Islamist forces?

These questions are supremely important since Abedi and his father were among those rebel forces at the time. I cannot establish whether they had been under control orders.

The questions are especially relevant because of the circumstances which applied during the British military action in Libya.

The terms of the United Nations resolution, which authorized British and French intervention, specifically prohibited sending in ground troops.

Britain mainly seems to have thrown our weight behind Islamist fighters, including the LIFG, who had a long-standing hatred of Gaddafi.

2010: Libyan President Muammar al-Gaddafi, at right, with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. (Government of Spain, Wikimedia Commons)

Some LIFG fighters in Libya in 2011 had earlier fought alongside the Islamic State of Iraq – the al-Qaeda entity which went on to establish a presence in Syria and then became Islamic State.

Put another way, Qaeda-connected forces were Britain’s boots on the ground in the war against Gaddafi.

In 2018, then Foreign Minister Alastair Burt admitted to parliament that the U.K. “likely” had contacts with “former members” of the LIFG and another Islamist group, the 17 February Martyrs Brigade, in Libya in 2011. What were these contacts?

Following the 2011 war, there are grounds for assuming that Abedi came into contact with other militant Islamist groups on his trips to Libya. There are suggestions, for example, that Abedi was trained in a camp complex run by Islamic State in Sabratha, near the border with Tunisia.

After the Gaddafi regime fell, Libya became a largely lawless country and a base for terrorism, including a launch pad for terrorist attacks in Europe.

We need to know what groups Abedi met, whether they trained him, and whether they were a danger to Britain.

And what were the true circumstances of Abedi being “rescued” by the British military in 2014, when he and other British citizens in Libya at the time were brought back to the U.K.? Why was Abedi allowed to return to Britain unhindered?

The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) should be able to shed light on this, making it frankly odd and absurd that no SIS officer seems to have been called to give evidence (an MI5 witness has been scheduled). Saunders’ inquiry will have limited credibility without SIS testimony.

What did they know about Abedi’s visits to Libya? Did SIS press for control orders to be relaxed? And the key question – what role did SIS play, exactly, in Libya in 2011?

Floral tributes to the victims of the attack in St Ann’s Square in Manchester city center. (Tomasz “odder” Kozlowski via Wikimedia Commons)

Blood Price?

Did innocent Manchester citizens pay a blood price for Britain’s cynical policy six years earlier? Was the British state itself ultimately part of the apparatus of terror which killed innocent people in Manchester?

This is why Saunders also needs to call William Hague, foreign secretary in 2011, to face forensic questioning about the relationship between the LIFG and the British state.

Did Hague understand what he was doing?

Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee later concluded he didn’t: “We have seen no evidence that the UK government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya. It may be that the UK government was unable to analyse the nature of the rebellion in Libya due to incomplete intelligence and insufficient institutional insight.”

It added: “It failed to identify the militant Islamist extremist element in the rebellion.”

But was the Foreign Office really that naïve? Did Britain blindly stumble into an alliance with terrorist forces which might later turn on it? Or did we know exactly who we were getting involved with?

Since the hearings began in September, Saunders has spent three months interrogating the emergency services, and those responsible for Arena security. I have no doubt that there are important lessons to be learnt.

However, the purpose of the Manchester inquiry is to ensure a similar catastrophe can be averted in future. That’s why Saunders should spend at least the same amount of time interrogating British foreign policy.

There is no point in his inquiry unless it asks the difficult questions the British establishment would rather avoid, and look into the underlying causes.

Some might feel that this is unfair to Saunders. These questions would have been answered if there had been a formal inquiry, as there should have been, into Cameron’s calamitous decision to intervene in Libya.

In the absence of such an inquiry it’s up to Saunders.

consortiumnews.com

Twelve countries and four international organisations were represented in Berlin, and it is notable that the event was hosted by Angela Merkel who, as with Presidents Putin and Erdogan, had refused to join in the jolly U.S.-sponsored blitzkrieg that wrecked Libya, and even more notable that NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wasn’t invited to attend. It was no doubt borne in mind that nine NATO countries conducted a total of 5488 airstrikes on Libya between 19 March and 31 October 2011, while cruise missiles were fired by the U.S. (228) and the UK (18).

Nothing was said in Berlin about the responsibility of the U.S.-NATO alliance (and other culprits including, amazingly, Sweden) for reducing Libya to the utter chaos in which it now exists. As observed at the meeting, “The conflict in Libya, the instability in the country, the external interferences, the institutional divisions, the proliferation of a vast amount of unchecked weapons and the economy of predation continue to be a threat to international peace and security” and attendees committed “to refraining from interference in the armed conflict or in the internal affairs of Libya and urge all international actors to do the same.”

It is regrettable, to put it mildly, that NATO’s U.S., UK, France and Italy, all of which were represented in Berlin, had not in 2011 “refrained from interference” in Libya, and the western media refrained from making the slightest mention of their culpability with, for example, the Washington Post recording lamely that Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi “was toppled and killed by rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and NATO intervention.”

Intervention? The word ‘intervention’ is defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as “action taken to intentionally become involved in a difficult situation in order to improve it or prevent it from getting worse” and this certainly is not what the U.S.-NATO military alliance accomplished in its seven months of bombing and rocketing all over the country. There was no improvement whatever to the situation in Libya, and the U.S.-NATO blitz led directly to its collapse in ruin and vicious civil war.

Although the heads of government of Germany, Russia, the UK, Turkey, Italy and France were at the Berlin Summit, Washington’s Trump was conspicuous by his absence which was probably just as well, because nobody knows where he stands as regards the Libya debacle. Last April, as reported by the New York Times, he “abruptly reversed American policy toward Libya, issuing a statement publicly endorsing an aspiring strongman in his battle to depose the United Nations-backed government.” Trump’s ‘strongman’ is the self-styled “Marshal” Khalifa Haftar, a former CIA asset, who is still waging war to overthrow the admittedly incompetent government of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj.

It was lunacy on the part of Trump to telephone the rebel leader and tell him, as stated by the White House, that he “recognized Field Marshal Haftar’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system”. This was directly contrary to the stance of Secretary of State Pompeo (who was in Berlin and said nothing of note) in that he had strongly criticised Haftar’s military actions.

It all comes down to oil and profits, of course, so far as western interest in Libya is concerned, and it should be borne in mind that in March 2004, when UK Prime Minister Blair paid a visit to President Gaddafi, it was reported that “Shell today marked its return to Libya after an absence of more than a decade by signing a $200 million gas exploration deal with the former pariah state.” Libya has the world’s ninth largest oil reserves, and the U.S. companies ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Marathon Oil Corporation and the Hess Company were already heavily involved in exploiting its deposits.

The country was thriving under the despot Gaddafi, who was certainly ruthless and persecuted his enemies most savagely — but life for most Libyans was comfortable and even the BBC had to admit that Gaddafi’s “particular form of socialism does provide free education, healthcare and subsidized housing and transport,” although “wages are extremely low and the wealth of the state and profits from foreign investments have only benefited a narrow elite” (which doesn’t happen anywhere else, of course). The CIA World Factbook noted that Gaddafi’s Libya had a literacy rate of 94.2%, by far the best in Africa (and better than Malaysia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia), and the World Health Organization recorded a life expectancy of 72.3 years, among the highest in the developing world.

But then Gaddafi made the mistake that cost him his country and his life.

On January 21, 2011 Reuters reported that “Muammar Gaddafi said his country and other oil exporters were looking into nationalizing foreign firms due to low oil prices.” He suggested that “oil should be owned by the State at this time, so we could better control prices by the increase or decrease in production.” His fate was sealed and his country was set on the road to chaos by a rebellion supported by NATO’s Operation Unified Protector, after which NATO proudly announced that “After seven months of operations at sea and in the air NATO has ended its mission for Libya. The Alliance’s job to protect civilians from the threat of attack is done. On his historic first visit on 31 October to the Libyan capital of Tripoli, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was proud of the part the Organization and its partners played in helping the country and the region.”

Rasmussen was joined in happy satisfaction by Ivo Daalder, U.S. Representative on the NATO Council from 2009 to 2013, and Admiral James G (‘Zorba’) Stavridis, U.S. Supreme Allied Commander Europe (the military commander of NATO) in the same period. After their war these two ninnies had a piece published in the New York Times in which they made the absurd claim that “the alliance and its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done. Most of all, they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change.”

Tell that to those who gathered at the Berlin conference to try to find a way forward from the tragic catastrophe created by these dimwits.

The way ahead is for the UN Security Council to endorse the Berlin ‘Follow-Up’ recommendations, especially noting that the conference was “one important step in a broader Libyan-led and Libyan-owned process designed to bring a decisive end to the Libyan crisis by addressing in a comprehensive manner the underlying drivers of the conflict.” The main thing is to keep NATO and Trump out of it and help Libya towards stability by pressuring Haftar and supporting moves to democratic government.

It all started in that same year of 1985, but not in Libya. She was also covering in that year the separatist war by the Tamil Tigers, to break off, from Sri Lanka (Ceylon), the far-northern and far-eastern sections of that country, so as to create an independent nation, which would be controlled by Tamils, and no longer be merely a region within the nation of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is not Tamil-majority, but is instead overwhelmingly Sinhalese population. Marie Colvin was embedded there, along with the anti-Government fighting forces, Tamil separatists, anti-Sinhalese fighters who were at war against Sri Lanka’s Government. This was a Tamil-versus-Sinhal war, and she was reporting it, from the standpoint of the separatist-Tamil rebels.

Her much-celebrated career ended 27 year later, with her own death, on 22 February 2012, in Homs Syria, while she was embedded with anti-Government forces there, who were trying to overthrow Syria’s Government, instead of to overthrow Sri Lanka’s or Libya’s Government.

In all three of those instances — from the very start, to the very the end, of her illustrious career — she was embedded along with, and her articles were in support of, anti-Government forces that the UK-US aristocracy supported, in order to break up countries that this aristocracy were hoping to ‘free’, so as to take control over them, away from the existing independent Governments there. This was her constantly recurring pattern, from her start, to her widely lionized end, as being a promoter of US-UK international empire: journalism that embraces and unquestioningly accepts and endorses imperialism, while never indicating to its audience that it has any connection whatsoever to imperialism.

In between her Sri Lankan start and her Syrian end, she prominently reported several times from Libya, likewise from the standpoint of opponents of that independent nation’s Government. Libya had previously been a vassal state of Turkey (Ottoman Empire), then of Italy (Italian Empire), then was an ‘independent’ nation within the UK-US Empire. And, then, finally — as a result of Libya’s Revolution, which was led by Gaddafi in 1969 — Libya actually did win its independence. Gaddafi became killed in 2011, from forces that had been unleashed by the US-UK Empire and France. That successful assassination happened on 20 October 2011, and America’s Secretary of State promptly and publicly exulted about it, by bragging “We came, we saw, he died — ha ha ha!.”(The Democratic National Committee and its duped voters rewarded her with their Presidential nomination five years later in 2016 because she was ‘the most experienced candidate’, having had lots of such disastrous ‘experiences’, which the duped voters were misled to think to have been an asset, instead of a liability.) Thus, ‘democracy’ was finally being brought to Libyans, by that country’s former foreign imperial masters, plus their agents, Al Qaeda and other local proxy-forces against Gaddafi.

What all of Colvin’s reporting exemplified was ‘journalism’ by a ‘reporter’ who is embedded along with the fighting forces that were being propagandized for by her own nation’s aristocracy — and, though she was American, she was in the employ of American vassals, UK aristocrats. This US-UK aristocracy wanted those countries to become either broken up, or else taken over by themselves entirely; and she was a ‘journalistic’ agent for that, though she was unaware of the fact, and was actually proud of her work, because of her obliviousness to the broader and deeper reality around her.

Here are some crucial details of her career-highlights, in this regard:

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The Tamil Tigers constituted the fighting force of Sri Lanka’s 18% minority of the Sri Lankan population who were 74%-majority Sinhals. Ceylon’s (Sri Lanka’s) Sinhal population had been ruled by the British Empire through that 18% minority of Tamils as UK’s local agents, until Sri Lanka (Ceylon) was finally released from British bondage, and won independence in 1946, when the British Empire was breaking up.

A key Sri Lankan law that passed in 1956, the Sinhala Only Act, made Sinhalese language replace the British-imposed English language as Sri Lanka’s official language. Though the Tamil language had never been Sri Lanka’s official language, many Tamils, who had been accustomed to ruling the land for their British masters, were infuriated that the ‘inferior’ Sinhal people now ruled the land. One of those Sinhals was their own leading aristocrat, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the progressive who became elected Prime Minister in 1956 and won passage of the Sinhala Only Act and of other laws to actually end British control, but he was assassinated in 1959 by a Buddhist monk because Bandaranaike had just then signed an agreement with the leader of the main Tamil party to bring some degree of local autonomy to the Tamil minority, who were concentrated in the far north and far east. Bandaranaike’s wife, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, was then elected as Prime Minister in 1960, and she not only tried to increase political participation by Buddhists, but she firmly established democratic socialism (or progressivism) as the Government’s policy. But then, the Marxist (dictatorial socialist) Lanka Sama Samaja Party eroded popular support for her government, which became resoundingly defeated in the general election of 1965. Sirimovo became re-elected back into power in 1970. However, her Government’s support of Buddhism and of the Sinhalese language alienated the country’s large Tamil minority, 80% of whom are Hindu (the others: 13% Muslim, 2% Christian, 2% Sikh, and only .8% Buddhist). By contrast, 93% of Sinhals are Buddhist. According to the US Library of Congress in 1988, “93 percent of the Sinhala speakers were Buddhists, and 99.5 percent of the Buddhists in Sri Lanka spoke Sinhala.” (By contrast, the entirety of Sri Lanka is 70% Buddhist, 13% Hindu, 10% Muslim, and 7% Christian — very different from the Tamils.) So: Sri Lanka’s political split was along religious lines — mainly Tamil Hindus versus Sinhal Buddhists — in addition to being along tribal lines; and the Tamils represented, in both respects, supporters of the Hindu caste-system, and of the former British aristocracy, which are America’s vassals, against the Sri Lankan public.

In 1976, the militant separatist Tamil Tigers were born, basically as a reaction against the 1946 freeing of that country from its former colonial British masters.

Starting in 1985, the Tamil Tigers “forcibly occupied more than 35,000 acres of Muslim residential, agricultural and cattle farming land. The government did nothing to help Muslims regain their properties based on title deeds, government permits or the paddy cultivation register. During the ethnic conflict in 1983, 1985, and 1990, more than 12,700 Muslim families were chased out by” the Tiger forces. Wikipedia’s article “Expulsion of Muslims from the Northern province by LTTE” calls the October 1990 portion of that sequence an “ethnic cleansing,” of Muslims, from the north Sri Lankan, Tiger-controlled, city of Chavakachcheri.

Colvin’s ‘news’-‘reports’ were strongly pro-Tamil, anti-Sinhal, but she seems to have known nothing about the country from which she was reporting (at war), and to have cared even less about it. (She even said [12:00-] “The history, and the ability to put into context anything in a war … It didn’t mean anything,” because “it never happens the way you think it’s going to.” She exhibited no interest whatsoever in understanding the background of a war. To her, for example, the war in Chechnya was simply bombings by Russia, “an indiscriminate bombing of Chechen villages,” and she had no curiosity as to why whatever was occurring was actually happening.) Instead, she was obsessed by, and focused only on, the immense suffering that civilians on the US-UK-backed side experienced. Of course, the owner of her newspaper, Rupert Murdoch, probably knew the historical background in this former British colony of Sri Lanka, but her employers never told her about that, and she apparently never asked them about it. They simply couldn’t find any other journalist who was stupid enough to do their bidding in their bosses’ former Empire and who was willing, indeed eager, to accept the pay that they offered to do it. This well-intentioned, but willingly ignorant, employee lost an eye — and was nearly killed — because of her being embedded there, with what were actually (though she never knew it) UK proxy-forces. She thought that she was helping ‘the good guys’ (Tamils) in a war against ‘the bad guys’ (the Government). She was the archetypal star-‘journalist’, having faith in ‘our’ side. She is beloved, by her ‘journalistic’ colleagues, as if she hadn’t been merely the empire’s most effective war-propagandist.

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In 2011, in Libya, she was accepted again into Gaddafi’s tent for an interview, even though she despised him as one of the ‘bad’ guys. (This doesn’t mean “bad” as Hillary Clinton was bad, but instead ‘bad’ as one of the Clinton-Biden-Obama regime’s many victims who all were ‘bad’, in her view. And, of course, the US-UK aristocracy are all ‘good’, in that view: the imperialists’ view.)

In 2012, in Syria, at the conflict in Homs, she was telecasting to CNN, and other TV networks, regarding how evil Bashar al-Assad was for bombing the enclaves there that, in fact, were cooperating with Al Qaeda (though Colvin didn’t report that they were such). It was on 22 February 2012, and Britain’s Telegraph  bannered “Marie Colvin: Britain summons Syria ambassador over killing.” This newspaper reported: “In her broadcasts on Tuesday night, Colvin had accused the Syrian Army of perpetrating the ‘complete and utter lie that they are only targeting terrorists.’ Describing what was happening as ‘absolutely sickening’, Colvin said: ‘The Syrian army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.’” When the US and UK had done more-widespread, entire-city, bombings in World War II, it was fine, in this view; but, now, when Syria’s Government were doing more-targeted versions of that, in order to prevent a takeover of Syria by the US, and a subsequent hand-over of Syria to the Sauds, it wasn’t okay. And, of course, the Western ‘press’-corps, of US-UK invasion-propagandists, place Colvin upon a pedestal, as having constituted the ‘ideal’ ‘ war journalist’.

That’s one way of interpreting wars and international relations — the way that Colvin memorialized.

An excellent docudrama movie about Marie Colvin’s reporting from Sri Lanka in 1985, and Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2012, is the November 2018 “A Private War”. It provides an honest portrayal of her. (Some incompetent critics downgraded the movie because of what actually were deficiencies — basically Colvin’s stupidity and shallowness — in the real person herself. Other incompetent critics, such as at the neoconservative Washington Post, praised it largely because they shared Colvin’s neoconservatism. It’s just an honest, and very skillfully done, biopic.) On the basis of its strictly cinematic values, I consider it a superb film.

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The opposite way — the anti-imperialist viewpoint — of reporting about war and international relations, has been embodied, to cite two prime authentic journalists — NOT propagandists (such as Colvin was) — by Vanessa Beeley, and also by Eva Bartlett. Both of these authentically great reporters have also covered the war in Syria. Here, from them, is this opposite way of interpreting war and international relations:

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“Western media lies about Syria exposed (Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett)”

VIDEO, 19 mins., Eva Bartlett, 10 December 2016, U.N.

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https://www.rt.com

“‘They know that we know they are liars, they keep lying’: West’s war propaganda on Ghouta crescendos”

Eva Bartlett, on 21 March 2018

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“Vanessa Beeley, Eva Bartlett & Patrick Henningsen Exposes the White Helmets”

VIDEO, 27 mins., 7 October 2016, rt.com

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21stcenturywire.com

“Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception – Part I”

Vanessa Beeley, 23 October 2015

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21stcenturywire.com

“Part II – Syria’s White Helmets: War By Way of Deception ~ ‘Moderate Executioners’”

Vanessa Beeley, 28 October 2015

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21stcenturywire.com

“WHO ARE SYRIA’S WHITE HELMETS (terrorist linked)?”

Vanessa Beeley, 21 June 2016

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21stcenturywire.com

“EXCLUSIVE: The REAL Syria Civil Defence Exposes Fake ‘White Helmets’ as Terrorist-Linked Imposters”

Vanessa Beeley, 23 September 2016

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mintpressnews.com

“Faux Humanitarian Irwin Cotler, the White Helmets, and the Whitewashing of an Appalling Agenda”

Vanessa Beeley, 1 August 2019

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Those journalists DON’T win awards from the Foreign Press Association, etc., and AREN’T hired by mainstream ‘news’ media, but they are vastly superior to the ones who do.

Fighters for Libya’s interim government rejoice after a tactical victory back in 2011. Creative Commons

Eight years after the start of the US-led military intervention to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi and promote “stability,” Libya is still wracked by civil war. Ironically, the violence over the next few days has forced the US to evacuate its remaining forces—there for diplomatic security and counterterrorism—from the volatile country.

Ever since the collapse of the old regime and Gaddafi’s violent death in 2011, Libya has been split among rival militias, and since 2014 it has had two would-be national governments. The government based in Tripoli now enjoys international recognition and some Western support, while the government in the eastern Libyan city of Tobruk has benefited from the support of Egypt, the Saudis, and the United Arab Emirates.

The leader of the Tobruk government’s forces, Khalifa Haftar, is a former exile (at one point in the US, reportedly backed by, and maintaining ties to the CIA ) who returned to Libya during the 2011 war and served as the head of the new army under the first post-Gaddafi government. Haftar broke with them in 2014, and he has been engaged in a fight to take control of eastern Libya and to oppose the government in Tripoli ever since. Over the last few months, his forces have seized the oil fields in the south of the country. Libya’s long-running civil war escalated sharply in the last week as Haftar launched a surprise offensive against Tripoli in an attempt to seize the national capital. His aggressive move has been met with widespread condemnation, from the UN, the US, and the EU, and it has driven the rival western militias to band together in opposition to him.

Borzou Daragahi reported on the fighting earlier this week:

A military offensive by a Libyan warlord against the country’s capital has done what years of negotiations and talks have failed to do – unite the country’s powerful western militias in an all-out effort to defend Tripoli.

Already at least 41 people have been killed and dozens more injured in clashes inside and outside of the capital, as the UN and EU struggled to put an end to the conflict that has pitted the country’s two main armed alliances against each other for control of the city of 1.2 million.

A “national conference” had been scheduled to take place next week to try to negotiate a political settlement, but Haftar’s abrupt decision to assault the capital has put an end to that for the foreseeable future. Libya has been unstable and chaotic since the US-led regime change effort collapsed the old government and left the country’s many militias vying for power, but conditions have lately grown even worse. Foreign powers have been treating Libya as their playground for the last eight years, and with Haftar’s offensive, we can see evidence of the increasingly baleful regional influence of his Egyptian, Saudi, and Emirati patrons. Haftar met with Saudi King Salman in Riyadh on March 27, and both the Saudi and Egyptian governments appear to have given him their blessing for this attack. As Tarek Megerisi put it in a recent article on Haftar and the civil war: “Haftar’s ascension has been driven by foreign powers whose understanding of Libya is skewed and whose interests are at odds with that of the Libyan population and many states dependent on Libya’s stability.”

Security conditions in the country have deteriorated so quickly over the last few weeks that American forces based in western Libya were evacuated at the start of the week. The US is currently fighting one of its many unauthorized wars in Libya, and it has cooperated with the Tripoli government against the local ISIS affiliate for the last several years. The US has so far not joined the fighting against Haftar’s forces. The Trump administration has publicly criticized the new offensive and called on Haftar to halt the attack, but it is doubtful that the US will do anything more than that.

Haftar’s offensive isn’t likely to be successful, and could end up costing him his recent gains:

Whatever the outcome of the latest battle, the continuation of the war is certain to deepen the misery of Libya’s civilian population. Eight years later, Libya is still living with the instability and violence that resulted from US-backed regime change made possible by Western intervention. Like many other such interventions, the Libyan war has left behind a legacy of upheaval and destruction. The civilians that supposedly benefited will be living with the consequences for years and probably decades to come.

theamericanconservative.com

Influential US Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Marco Rubio has tweeted a blatant death threat and incitement of violence against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. As of this writing the post has 13 thousand shares and counting.

The tweet consists of a “before” and “after” photo of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who in 2011 was mutilated to death in the streets following a US-led NATO intervention in Libya which was launched on false humanitarian pretexts. The first photo depicts Gaddafi alive and confident with a smile on his face, the second depicts him covered in blood following his capture by a militia group minutes before his death.

Senator Rubio has been Capitol Hill’s single most virulent advocate of US interventionism in Venezuela, and has been tweeting about it constantly. Since Washington’s bogus “humanitarian aid” delivery sparked violence on the borders of Colombia and Brazil, as it was intended to, Rubio has cranked his interventionist cheerleading up to eleven. The fact that Maduro would not allow a government that is openly staging a coup in Venezuela to hand a large unchecked delivery over to opposition factions within that very nation has been used to sell a narrative that Venezuela’s Evil Dictator is deliberately cutting off aid to a needy populace, which was of course planned. This narrative has been helped along by highly suspicious photo-friendly fires, and has been injected into mainstream consciousness with hysterical urgency by the likes of Rubio, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and the entire Trump administration. And it is completely false.

Firstly, Maduro is not refusing humanitarian aid for his people. Only an idiot would believe that the latest Official Bad Guy (who coincidentally happens to be sitting on top of the largest oil reserves on earth) is intentionally starving and depriving his people, and anyone who makes such claims should have to explain how they make that work in their minds. What’s the idea behind that, exactly? Is he starving them all and cutting them off from medical supplies because he hates them? Is he trying to kill everyone in Venezuela so that he can have the entire country to himself? Does he have some strange sexual fetish for the slow starvation of an entire citizenry? How specifically does this work?

In reality, Maduro has been accepting aid from everywhere except from the government that is openly staging a coup in his country in gross violation of its national sovereignty. Just last week Caracas accepted 933 tons of food and medical supplies from China, Cuba, India and Turkey, and Russia has shipped in 300 tons of aid on its own.

Secondly, the paltry $20 million in food, medical and hygiene supplies sent via USAID pales in comparison to the $30 million per day the new US oil embargo will be costing Venezuelans this year. If the US wanted to help the Venezuelan people, the best thing it could do is end its crushing economic warfare upon them, which experts say has made economic recovery all but impossible. Believing the CIA/CNN narrative that US sanctions only impact a nation’s leadership is dumber than believing that US bombs only kill bad guys; former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas has said that US-led sanctions are killing Venezuelans and could be tried under international law as crimes against humanity. The best way for the US to help Venezuelans would be to cease all interventionism and end its economic warfare upon them.

Thirdly, there’s not actually anything stopping the US from giving the aid shipment it claims it wants to deliver to Russia, China, Turkey or India, for example, and having them deliver it. It could do the same with the UN or the Red Cross. There are many ways in which the US government which claims to care so much about the Venezuelan people could get its “humanitarian aid” to them which does not include highly provocative deliveries via military craft and aggressive stand-offs at Venezuelan border towns. The fact that Washington refuses to take those routes is an admission that the goal was always provocation and never humanitarianism.

Marco Rubio does not give a shit about the Venezuelan people. Like all Capitol Hill war whores, he only cares about advancing the hegemony of the US-centralized empire. Rubio endorsed the overthrow of both Gaddafi and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in 2011; now half a million are dead in Syria as a result of the empire’s failed regime change intervention there, and the “humanitarian intervention” in Libya created a humanitarian catastrophe where people are openly sold as slaves.

“I was just in Venezuela where I heard many people voice fears that the US wants to turn their country into another Libya,” journalist Aaron Maté reported in response to Rubio’s tweet. “I’d say their concerns are well-founded.”

This is the face of the US regime change intervention in Venezuela, everyone. Donald Trump, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, and a war pig senator who calls for the torturous lynching of the leader of a sovereign nation. Whenever someone supports any part of this coup agenda, this is the side that they are standing on. This is the flag that they are flying.

Everyone knows on some level that the US government has a consistent and indisputable track record of lying about the leaders of nations in geopolitically crucial strategic locations when they refuse to bow to the demands of US interests. No matter how many Venezuelans you tell me you’ve talked to, how evil you tell me Maduro is, how awesome you tell me Trump is, or how bad you tell me socialism is, this will still be true. And you know that it is true. Stop compartmentalizing away from facts you know to be true and turn and face the reality of what’s going on here.

medium.com

The UN Security Council said it deplored the Islamic State’s “heinous and cowardly terrorist attack… in Tripoli on 25 December 2018” and expressed “deepest sympathy and condolences to the families of the victims, as well as to the Libyan people and Government of National Accord, and wished a speedy and full recovery to those who were injured.”

It is laudable that the Security Council should express such sentiments, but if Libya was not “fractured by a six-year civil war”, there would be no need for sympathy from anyone.

The cause of the catastrophe in Libya in Libya was the seven month US-NATO blitzkrieg from March to October 2011 in which thousands of bombs and rockets rained down on that unfortunate land which was governed by President Muammar Ghaddafi whom the West was determined to overthrow by assisting a rebel movement. In Ghaddafi’s Libya, as detailed by the World Health Organisation the government provided “comprehensive health care including promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative services to all citizens free of charge through primary health care units, health centres and district hospitals.” Life expectancy was 75 years (as against 66 in India; 71 in Egypt; 59 in South Africa), and the CIA World Factbook noted that there was a literacy rate of 94.2% which was higher than in Malaysia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

Ghaddafi was far from being a saint. He dealt with his enemies in the most brutal fashion and was guilty of numerous offences against humanity. But so were (and are) many others like that around the world whose countries are not subject to US sanctions or seven months of strikes by US-NATO planes and missiles.

The US-NATO blitz was successful, and Gaddafi was overthrown and captured by rebel forces, whereupon, as reported, “the increasingly desperate and terrified 69-year-old Gaddafi was thrown on to the front of a white car bonnet, his blood-soaked head locked between the knees of a militiaman… He slipped off the bonnet, his ravaged body unable to cope with the constant battering.” Then, as can be seen in a particularly horrible video, he was beaten mercilessly, sodomised with a bayonet, and murdered.

When she was informed of this, the news caused the United States Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, to giggle and announce with a laugh that “We came. We saw. He died.”

Trump is the worst president in US history, but at least we have been spared the global ascendancy of a person who cackles with mirth when being told that someone had been murdered.

In any event, Libya was reduced to chaos amid the Clinton cackles, just as is happening in Venezuela at the moment. Its leader, Maduro, is not unlike Gaddafi in many ways, being ruthless and arrogant, and there is no doubt the country has suffered under his regime — but it has suffered a great deal more because of vicious sanctions imposed by Washington, just as happened in Libya.

The United Nations Human Rights Council is not regarded favourably by Washington’s sanctioneers, simply because it points out the negative side of sanctions, in that it is always ordinary people who suffer — and especially the poor, the deprived, the sick, the lame, all those whom Trump says he loves. At a Prayer Breakfast in the White House on 7 February he declared that “America is a nation that believes in redemption” and that religious faith “transforms lives, heals communities and lifts up the forgotten,” which, as with almost everything he says, was a load of hypocritical garbage.

These US sanctions have caused untold suffering. As Al Jazeera reported on 8 February, “a hospital… has said 14 children have died this week following an outbreak of amoebiasis, a form of dysentery transmitted by contaminated food or water. Dozens of other children infected by the disease cannot receive adequate treatment due to a lack of medical supplies.” And on it goes, just as it did in Libya and pre-invasion Iraq which had suffered similarly evil sanctions for so many years.

The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has urged everyone involved in the Venezuela crisis to “lower tensions” and begin speaking to each other, but there was no possibility that anyone would listen to him, least of all those intent on the overthrow of Maduro. The UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures as affecting human rights, Idriss Jazairy (an admirable and highly intelligent person), stated on 31 January that “coercion” by the US (without naming it) is a “violation of all norms of international law.” He said flatly that “Sanctions which can lead to starvation and medical shortages are not the answer to the crisis in Venezuela… precipitating an economic and humanitarian crisis . . . is not a foundation for the peaceful settlement of disputes.”

But Washington doesn’t want a peaceful settlement of disputes, least of all, at the moment, in Venezuela. It wants to ensure that there is suffering, in order that Maduro can be overthrown by those whom it has deprived of the basic necessities of life. Further, it wants its own man to be at the Top.

So — enter Mr Juan Guaidó, a minor politician in Venezuela’s parliament.

According to the Wall Street Journal on 25 January, “The night before Juan Guaidó declared himself interim president of Venezuela, the opposition leader received a phone call from Vice President Mike Pence. Mr Pence pledged that the US would back Mr. Guaidó if he seized the reins of government from Nicolás Maduro by invoking a clause in the South American country’s constitution, a senior administration official said.”

As the New York Times noted on 8 February, “Mr. Trump said the oil sanctions were meant to punish Mr. Maduro for human rights violations and force him to cede power to Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader whom the United States has recognized as the rightful Venezuelan president.”

The entire “revolution” has been engineered from Washington, but at least, this time, they haven’t gone in with rockets and bombs. There is no doubt that Washington will win, and that Maduro will leave in one way or another.

And my advice to him is : don’t wait too long before you give up and get out. Otherwise, Maduro, baby, They’ll Come. They’ll See. And You’ll Die.

Photo: Flickr

The combative Sarkozy, who was known as Mr Bling-Bling for his lavish lifestyle, is being investigated by French prosecutors for taking $60 million in illicit bribes from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The money was allegedly used to bankroll Sarkozy’s presidential election campaign in 2007.

It is increasingly suspected that covering up the money-trail was a primary motive for why then President Sarkozy became the main architect for the NATO bombing campaign on Libya in 2011. That military onslaught led to regime change and the murder of Gaddafi by NATO-backed militants.

During the region-wide Arab Spring uprisings in early 2011, relatively minor protests in eastern Libya against Gaddafi’s rule were blown up by the US and European NATO states. In retrospect, the manipulation of events in Libya by NATO powers bears a striking similarity to the same ploy for regime change that nearly unfolded in Syria.

France’s President Sarkozy was the chief advocate for sanctions on Libya during February 2011, and for a NATO no-fly zone over the country to supposedly prevent Gaddafi’s forces “massacring” the Western-lionized uprising in Benghazi.

It was Sarkozy who, along with Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, galvanized the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to join in the plan for NATO military intervention in Libya. On March 17, 2011, the United Nations Security Council mandated a NATO no-fly zone. Russia and China were blindsided. The so-called humanitarian “right to protect” turned into a seven-month NATO blitz on Libya.

On October 20, 2011, Colonel Gaddafi was lynched by a mob in his hometown of Sirte after his fleeing convoy was bombed by NATO warplanes. He was dragged from a roadside drain by the mob who then beat him to death. One militant thrust a knife up his anus. Clinton notoriously gloated over Gaddafi’s gruesome death recorded in a macabre video. There have also been unconfirmed reports that French military intelligence operative were present on the ground among the frenzied killers.

Seven years later, the once stable and developed North African country is still reeling in chaos from internecine tribal conflict and a hotbed for Islamist terror groups, with no functioning central government. NATO created a failed state which is destabilizing Europe as a conduit for mass migration of desperate people from all over Africa.

The bitter irony is that Nicolas Sarkozy in the early 2000s was a principal Western political figure who participated in the apparent rehabilitation of the former Libyan “wild child” – the revolutionary Col Muammar Gaddafi who seized power in 1969. Gaddafi – also nicknamed “Mad Dog” by the Americans – had been the bane of Western imperialism for decades, supporting various revolutionary groups, such as the Irish Republican Army against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Gaddafi eventually tried to normalize relations with the Western powers, giving up his country’s weapons programs. The brutal US-led war disposing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in 2003 may have been a factor in swaying Gaddafi to placate the Western powers.

During the French presidency of Jacques Chirac (2002-2007), Sarkozy was the finance minister, as well as interior minister. It was Sarkozy who acted as the mediator to restore commercial links with Libya and apparently to rehabilitate Gaddafi as a Libyan leader acceptable to Western powers. Britain’s Tony Blair was another supposed peace tribune. In the end, Gaddafi was disposed of like Saddam.

When Sarkozy made a bid for the presidency in 2007, it is alleged that Gaddafi funneled up to €50 million ($60m) to Sarkozy for his election campaign. Soon after gaining the Élysée Palace, Gaddafi was hosted in Paris by President Sarkozy, where the maverick Libyan leader was permitted to pitch his Bedouin tent on the grounds of a landmark luxury hotel.

However, the smiles, handshakes and bonhomie would soon turn sour.

Sarkozy denies the claims that he received money from Gaddafi. Last week, he said he was determined to clear his name. Tellingly, the former French head of state – the only French president ever to be held in custody – contended that there was “no physical evidence” against him. It was a strange formulation of words.

Still, the claims against him are formidable. The allegations of graft first surfaced in March 2011 when Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, angrily demanded that Sarkozy give back the alleged Libyan donations for his earlier election campaign. Sail al-Islam made the claim around the time of the UNSC resolution being passed and the beginning of the NATO bombing campaign.

But it’s not just Gaddafi’s family making claims against Sarkozy. Libya’s former oil minister Shukri Ghanem also noted in his diary that massive payments were made to Sarkozy in 2007. French prosecutors are believed to be in possession of the diary. Suspiciously, in 2012, Ghanem was found drowned in the River Danube in Vienna.

The money trail was also corroborated by Libya’s former state wealth fund manager Bashir Saleh. He was known as “Gaddafi’s banker”.

Then in November 2016, a French-Lebanese businessman named Ziad Takieddine told French media that he personally acted as the courier transporting suitcases of cash from Libya to Paris during 2007, where he says he delivered up to $5 million to Sarkozy at the ministry of interior.

Sarkozy (63) dismisses the charges as emanating from bitter former associates of Gaddafi.

Nevertheless, the stench of corruption is hard to dispel. Since the end of his presidency in 2012, Sarkozy and members of his former inner-circle have been investigated in multiple other corruption probes. He is currently awaiting trial over the Bygmalion scandal in which he is accused of misusing up to €20 million in public funds for his failed re-election campaign in 2012.

If the investigation over Libyan money embezzlement goes to trial, Sarkozy could be facing five years in jail if found guilty.

If he does go to prison, some might say that Mr Bling-Bling gets off light considering the trail of death and destruction in his wake. Because the potentially bigger scandal is that Sarkozy mobilized an illegal NATO war on Libya in 2011 which led to the murder of its head of state.

During that blitzkrieg on Libya, NATO carried out some 26,500 bombing sorties over seven months. To put that in perspective, recent figures show that the Saudi-led bombing campaign on Yemen has carried out 16,000 sorties over three years.

Notably too, of the 19 nations that participated in the pulverizing of Libya, it was the French who most prominently led the highest number of air strikes. French warplanes were responsible for some 35 per cent of all attacks.

What happened in Libya was a veritable war of aggression – a supreme war crime. America’s Obama and Clinton, as well as Britain’s Cameron, are certainly foremost subjects for war crimes prosecution. But the chief culprit for NATO’s devastation of Libya is Nicolas Sarkozy.

If he thinks 48 hours of police questioning in Paris last week over corruption is “hell”, Sarkozy should spare a thought for the thousands of innocent lives he obliterated over his money-grubbing schemes.

NATO’s 2011 war on Libya was unanimously sold across the West as a necessary humanitarian operation against the proverbial evil dictator (Hillary Clinton: “We came, we saw, he died.”). Russia and China were firmly against it.

Now, in a stunning historical reversal, the ghost of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seems to have come back to haunt former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the self-described superstar of that R2P (“responsibility to protect”) spectacular.

The “Colonel Sarko bombshell” exploded on Wednesday evening: he had been placed under formal investigation for passive corruption, illegal campaign financing, and misappropriation of Libyan state funds.

Sarkozy spent the whole of Tuesday, from 8am until midnight, answering questions in police custody from crack investigators specialized in corruption, tax evasion and money laundering. He was allowed to sleep at home but had to be back the next morning, up until the early evening. He was finally released on bail.

“Formal investigation,” under French law, means there is “serious and/or consistent evidence” hinting at involvement in a crime. The next step could be a trial, but the whole investigation could also reach a dead end.

Sarkozy has been the target of no fewer than 10 different investigations so far – seven of them still ongoing.

The French establishment, predictably, is livid. An array of mostly center-right politicians swanned on to political talk shows to support the former president and emphasize “presumption of innocence.” Quite the opposite of the Salisbury spy gambit, where the Kremlin and President Putin have been swiftly condemned, evidence-free.

Sarkozy, widely derided by progressives as “King Sarko” during his tenure, is suspected of having financed his 2007 presidential campaign with Gaddafi funds.

In November 2016, Takiedinne admitted he brought in person to the French Interior Ministry several suitcases full of cash prepared by Tripoli, totaling 5 million euros

And the evidence, in this case, does exist. Among other explosive pieces, an official Libyan document, obtained through an investigation conducted by the French website Mediapart, proves Gaddafi handed over no less than 50 million euros to Sarkozy’s campaign.

That was almost double the legal French campaign funding of 21 million euros at the time. The alleged funds would also have infringed regulations against foreign electoral campaign interference and the sources of campaign contributions.

The key go-between in the whole operation was Franco-Algerian weapons dealer Ziad Takiedinne, who in 2005 and 2007 organized visits by Sarko and his cohorts to Libya. A Libyan bank and a German bank account were also part of the scheme.

Former Libyan PM Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi confirmed the document and the financing are all true.

Way before that, there had been confirmation by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi’s former director of military intelligence, as well as in notebooks belonging to Libya’s former oil minister, Choukri Ghanem, who mysteriously drowned in Vienna in April 2012.

In November 2016, Takiedinne himself – the man who introduced Sarko to Gaddafi – admitted he brought in person to the French Interior Ministry several suitcases full of cash prepared by Tripoli, totaling 5 million euros. He said he was given the money by Sanoussi.

Investigators, who have been in possession of new evidence for several weeks now, are also convinced they have managed to clarify the role of another go-between, Alexandre Djouhri, who lived in Switzerland and connected with the former secretary-general of the Elysee Palace, Claude Gueant. Gueant is also being formally investigated for fiscal fraud.

Everyone in France still remembers King Sarko posing as the Liberator of Libya – and fiercely disputing the title with the shameless, self-promoting, fake “philosopher” Bernard-Henri Levy, a.k.a. BHL.

In September 2011, I outlined for Asia Times – see, for instance, here and here – the myriad reasons why Gaddafi had to go, most of them related to precise French geoeconomic interests and King Sarko’s dreams of cross-Mediterranean glory (“We have aligned with the Arab people in their aspiration for freedom”).

Turns out it’s the Colonel that may have actually made the (faux) King.

atimes.com

These slave-markets that blossomed into existence soon after we invaded, can be added to all the other destructions of Libya, and of Iraq, and of Syria, and of Honduras, and of many other nations, that the US military has destroyed. This publicly supported mass-murdering operation against the residents of foreign countries — the US military establishment that Americans supremely respect — has been enforcing US Government policies abroad, and it wouldn’t function unless the same aristocracy that owns the weapons-makers controls also the government that orders it to perpetrate such evils as these invasions. (Furthermore, in addition to America’s outright invasions of countries that never invaded us, there have also been CIA coups destroying yet more such countries, as in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Honduras 2009, and Ukraine 2014, just to mention the most prominent ones. The US empire doesn’t function only by direct military means: the US military-industrial complex is a many-faceted beast, including the CIA etc. The actual annual budget for it is now around a trillion dollars.)

Here’s an excerpt from the CNN report about this Libyan slavery that the US and its allies have produced:

Carrying concealed cameras into a property outside the capital of Tripoli last month, we witness a dozen people go "under the hammer" in the space of six or seven minutes.

"Does anybody need a digger? This is a digger, a big strong man, he'll dig," the salesman, dressed in camouflage gear, says. "What am I bid, what am I bid?"

Buyers raise their hands as the price rises, "500, 550, 600, 650 …" Within minutes it is all over and the men, utterly resigned to their fate, are being handed over to their new "masters."

After the auction, we met two of the men who had been sold. They were so traumatized by what they'd been through that they could not speak, and so scared that they were suspicious of everyone they met.

This was a predictable result even before our invasion, just as was predictable there the numberless hundreds of thousands of refugees from the chaos that would be produced by America’s (and America’s allies) killing Muammar Gaddafi (of which Hillary Clinton was so proud) and destroying his anti-jihadist government (which had served his nation so vastly better than its conquerors have done). The guilt for this slavery doesn’t rest only with the leader of the US alliance; but it does rest mainly with that, because, as Barack Obama himself said, on 28 May 2014, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation,” which means that every other nation is “dispensable,” in his eyes. Even his successor, Trump, hasn’t yet said anything so blatantly evil as that. Of course, it’s natural that a country which can tolerate such leaders will be viewed worldwide as “the greatest threat to peace in the world,” as the US is, in fact, viewed.

The anti-Black racism of the jihadists who took control in many parts of the resulting failed state in Libya, was well-known even ahead of time, amongst Western policymakers, but these invaders didn’t give a damn about it, nor about the general conequences the invasion would have for Libyans. Gaddafi had been sympathetic to Blacks, and some of them thrived under his leadership. As even the AP reported under the headline "Libyan rebels round up black Africans" on 1 September 2011:

Gadhafi's Libya welcomed hundreds of thousands of black Africans looking for work in recent decades. Many young citizens of Mali and Niger who flocked to Libya in the 1970s and 1980s were recruited into an "Islamic Legion" modeled on the French Foreign Legion. In addition, Gadhafi's military recruited heavily from black tribes in Libya's south.

As a result, people with roots in sub-Saharan Africa and black Libyan citizens have been targeted by rebel forces.

The US CIA and other US-regime propaganda such as the ‘news’media, said about this round-up of Blacks, that these people were being targeted by the ‘freedom fighters’ because they were Gaddafi’s ‘mercenaries’ (who were supposedly hated by the Libyan public); but, on 27 September 2011, a Fordham University professor who specialized in the subject, Carina Ray, published an article, “Gaddafi and the Mercenary Myth”, blasting that lie, which had ‘justified’ our invasion. She explained that, “The mercenary myth was successful in galvanizing popular support for the rebels because it contained a tiny of kernel of truth. More importantly, it tapped into the smoldering resentment that many [white Arab] Libyans harbored against Gaddafi's gradual shift away from the [white] Arab world in favor of [Black] Africa.” She was (however obtusely) saying that Gaddafi’s public expression of sympathy and respect for Africa’s Blacks was extraordinarily courageous in mainly white Arabia. As Americans ought to know but many don’t, being anti-racist in any deeply racist culture requires extraordinary courage.

AlJazeera’s 7 July 2013 report “Confronting anti-black racism in the Arab world” was especially direct, and thorough:

Gaddafi's role

The late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi understood this and he used his power and wealth to try to redeem our shared history. He was the first Arab leader to apologise on behalf of Arab peoples to our [Black] African brothers and sisters for the Arab slave trade and the Arab role in the European slave trade.

He funnelled money into the African Union and used Libya's wealth to empower the African continent and promote pan-Africanism. He was a force of reconciliation, socialism, and empowerment for both African and Arab peoples. Gaddafi's actions threatened to renew African-Arab reconciliation and alliances similar to that which occurred at the height of the Non-Aligned Movement during the presidencies of Jamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.

Thus, NATO's urgency to prevent "massacres" and "slaughter" in Libya was manufactured and sold wholesale.

The official US Government and ‘news’media story-line about the CIA-generated ‘Arab Spring’ was even more mythological regarding Libya than it was regarding any other Arab country except for Syria (where it’s been just one lie after another).

The sad fact is that America, in the years after World War II, has gradually been taken over by fascists, both Republican and Democratic, and one of the worst was Barack Obama whose regime invaded Libya, but another was his heir-apparent and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton; and another of them turns out to have been their fascist opponent, Donald Trump; so that it’s a fascist monopoly controlling the two competing fascist Parties, one being liberal-fascist (called “neoliberal”), and the other being conservative-fascist (called “neoconservative”) — a multi-Party (but one aristocracy) dictatorship. It’s a place where “bipartisan” refers to anything that’s wanted both by conservative billionaires and by liberal billionaires, instead of merely by one or the other type of billionaires. (“Bipartisan” here doesn’t mean anything like serving the public; it instead refers to factions within the aristocracy.)

Any ‘moral authority’ that the US Government once did have is dead now, killed by the same international-fascist group (called the West’s international “Deep State,” and consisting actually of all billionaires in the US and in its allied, vassal, aristocracies). Mussolini proudly called this basic system, in its original embodiment, “corporationism”, which he used as a synonym for “fascism.” Mussolini, of course, was, as Hitler and Hirohito were, a conservative fascist. Liberal fascism (the liberal half of neoliberalism-neoconservatism) rose only after World War II, as the pathway for the now-discredited conservative form of fascism ultimately to win by becoming ‘liberal’. But now even the conservative form of fascism is again becoming ‘respectable’, as, simply, “conservative.”

Another liberal fascist, besides America’s Obama and the Clintons, was the UK’s Tony Blair, who had joined the US in invading Iraq in 2003, and who didn’t go inactive after he left office in 2007. He actually participated along with the Conservative fascist David Cameron in the UK’s decision to invade Libya; and, on 7 January 2016, Britain’s Guardian headlined “Gaddafi warned Blair his ousting would 'open door' to jihadis”and reported:

In the first call, at 11.15am on 25 February 2011, Gaddafi gave a warning in part borne out by future events: “They [jihadis] want to control the Mediterranean and then they will attack Europe.”

In the second call, at 3.25pm the same day, the Libyan leader said: “We are not fighting them, they are attacking us. I want to tell you the truth. It is not a difficult situation at all. The story is simply this: an organisation has laid down sleeping cells in north Africa. Called the al-Qaida organisation in north Africa … The sleeping cells in Libya are similar to dormant cells in America before 9/11.” …

Crispin Blunt [from the Conservative side, of UK’s fascist Government, opposite the liberal side, Blair’s Labour Party], said: “The transcripts supplied by Mr Blair provide a new insight into the private views of Colonel Gaddafi as his dictatorship began to crumble around him. The failure to follow Mr Blair’s calls to ‘keep the lines open’ and for these early conversations to initiate any peaceful compromise continue to reverberate.”

Being itself a fascist newspaper though of a liberal bent (i.e., more neoliberal than neoconservative), the Guardian’s reporter went on to refer to “Gaddafi’s otherwise delusional take on international affairs” — as if Blair’s and Cameron’s, and Obama’s, and Clinton’s, weren’t actually even more delusional (or else just plain greedy, for more wealth and power — and far more harmful) than Gaddafi.

Like CNN, however, the Guardian avoided discussing anything that might reasonably explain (or make sense of) these evil results of Western leaders of ‘democracies’ — such as, for example, that these nations are no longer actually democracies at all (except in the superficial vestigial senses) but are instead ruled by aristocracies who control the government and treat it as an extension of their financial investments (especially the military ones). The more that the military is used, the more that the military firms they invest in will boom; and this is the only type of investment whose returns depend virtually entirely upon the government (and its allied governments) to be the market for its products and services. So, what US President Dwight Eisenhower had in 1961 hypocritically called and warned against as the “military-industrial complex” (but which his own Administration had served) now actually leads America and its allies, because this portion of their portfolios (“military” and “aerospace”) demands ever-increased national ‘defense’ spending and thus an ever-increasing military-industrial complex. In the US, we see this especially with the Republicans’ obsession to skyrocket ‘defense’ expenditures while simultaneously slashing non-‘defense’ expenditures.

Here’s the neoliberal neoconservative Hillary Clinton’s advisor and buddy Sidney Blumenthal, emailing to his master Hillary, on 2 April 2011, priorto the murder of Gaddafi, in a revealing note about what these conquerors’ real interests in the affair actually were (but only about their allies’ greed, not about that of their liberal hypocritical sanctimonious selves — even liberal psychopaths are quite willing to recognize their allies’ paychopathy):

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foia.state.gov

From: sbwhoeop Sent: Saturday, April 2, 2011 10:44 PM To: Subject: H: France's client & Q's gold. Sid Attachments: hrc memo France's client & Q's gold 040211.docx; hrc memo France's client & Q's gold 040211.docx CONFIDENTIAL April 2, 2011

For: Hillary From: Sid Re: France's client & Qaddafi's gold 

1. A high ranking official on the National Libyan Council (NLC) states that factions have developed within it. In part this reflects the cultivation by France in particular of clients among the rebels. General Abdelfateh Younis is the leading figure closest to the French, who are believed to have made payments of an unknown amount to him. Younis has told others on the NLC that the French have promised they will provide military trainers and arms. So far the men and materiel have not made an appearance. Instead, a few "risk assessment analysts" wielding clipboards have come and gone. Jabril, Jalil and others are impatient. It is understood that France has clear economic interests at stake. Sarkozy's occasional emissary, the intellectual self-promoter Bernard Henri-Levy, is considered by those in the NLC who have dealt with him as a semi-useful, semi-joke figure. 

2. Rumors swept the NLC upper echelon this week that Qaddafi may be dead or maybe not. 

3. Qaddafi has nearly bottomless financial resources to continue indefinitely, according to the latest report we have received: 

On April 2, 2011 sources with access to advisors to Salt al-Islam Qaddafi stated in strictest confidence that while the freezing of Libya's foreign bank accounts presents Muammar Qaddafi with serious challenges, his ability to equip and maintain his armed forces and intelligence services remains intact. According to sensitive information available to this these individuals, Qaddafi's government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli. 

This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French.franc (CFA). 

(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy's plans are driven by the following issues: 

a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production, 

b. Increase French influence in North Africa,

c. Improve his intemai political situation in France, 

d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world, 

e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi's long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa) 

On the afternoon of April 1, an individual with access to the National Libyan Council (NLC) stated in private that senior officials of the NLC believe that the rebel military forces are beginning to show signs of improved discipline and fighting spirit under some of the new military commanders, including Colonel Khalifha Haftar, the former commander of the antiQaddafi forces in the Libyan National Army (LNA). According to these sources, units defecting from Qaddafi's force are also taking a greater role in the fighting on behalf of the rebels.

——

(General Haftar, though Blumenthal didn’t mention it — since Hillary already knew this — was a Washingtonian who had been born in Libya and whom the CIA had assisted in his previous unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Gaddafi.) 

If that’s not “fascist,” then what is?

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Henry A. Wallace understood fascism better than perhaps any other progressive did in the 1940s. He was FDR’s Vice President and intended successor, but the Democratic Party’s money-lords managed to replace him in 1944 by the manipulable Harry Truman as the V.P. on the 1944 Democratic Presidential ticket, notwithstanding FDR’s strong opposition to that switch. A major reason why FDR wanted Wallace to stay and to become FDR’s successor (besides Wallace's having exceptionally high approval-ratings from the public — far higher than did Truman) was that Wallace understood the fascist enemy far better than did Truman or any other of FDR’s subsequent successors; so, here’s the opening of Wallace’s extended essay about fascism:

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web.archive.org

Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace

The Danger of American Fascism

An article in the New York Times, April 9, 1944.

From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

• On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

• What is a fascist?

• How many fascists have we?

• How dangerous are they?

• A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

• The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

• The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

• If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

• American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery. [This seems to describe presciently the Trump coalition.]

• The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism [which wasn’t true under FDR but did become so under Eisenhower]. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

• Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

• Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness” ceases. …

—— 

That described the situation before it happened, at least as well as any ordinary historian would describe it after it happened. And that’s how we have gotten to where we are today.

Before we had invaded and destroyed Libya, it was one of the highest-income and most equalitarian and least-tribal nations in Africa, with good quality socialized health care for everyone; but, that’s all gone now; and the response of the US Government to the resulting failed state there is to block admission of the resulting refugees; and the response of European governments is to let these refugees drown in the Mediterranean in preference to adding them to the millions that US-led invasions have also caused to flood into Europe, from Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere. NATO is destroying Europe, and invasions like this are just one way it’s happening.

None of this would have happened without American leadership.

Europeans thus might have even more justifications to detest the US Government than Americans do. However, for some reason, they still don’t abandon NATO — maybe it’s because the people in control of each of these vassal-nations are likewise heavily invested in companies such as Lockheed Martin and BAE, which need ever-increasing growth in order to please their investors; so, perpetual war for perpetual peace is good for their aristocracies’ perpetual profits. But, Trump demands that Europe’s populations nevertheless should contribute even more to the US military alliance NATO than is currently the case. America’s many military bases there might thus be considered a certain type of profitable military occupation, by the global imperial power, especially because that occupation isn’t shrinking, it’s expanding: war-equipment and -services are a growth-industry, even for firms such as Google and Amazon. 

As long as that uniform European acceptance of NATO continues, Europe will continue to fall apart, and to decline, and the relative advantage will thus go to the megalith on the other side of the Atlantic, the occupying power itself; that is, the US aristocracy.

——

So, slavery, in Libya or anywhere, is the result of the flowering of fascist values; but the publics everywhere — and not only slaves — suffer from those values. Unfortunately, fascism rose like the phoenix from the ashes of defeat after WW II, to its victory today. “Fascism” became successfully re-branded as “neoliberalism” and as “neoconservatism.” Slavery is just one of the many ways that it’s happening.

To see how the American public responded to CNN’s blockbuster report about these slave-markets, just read the comments about it at reddit.