November 8, 2011

MEDIA ROOTS- As the pro-democracy ‘Arab Spring’ movement spread across North Africa and beyond, Euroamerican imperialists sent a stern message by responding with draconian violence. In Libya, US-NATO forces perpetrated crimes against humanity under the pretext of combating alleged crimes against humanity.

President Obama gloated as NATO advanced in Libya, then cheered the brutal assassination of Gaddafi, who was sodomised with a knife before being extrajudicially executed.  Soon thereafter, the U.S. corporate propaganda machine launched its coinciding media blitz selling the triumphalism of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the country.  

In a recent article, “NATO’s War Crimes in Libya,” James Petras describes how Libya’s standing with the U.S. and U.K. suddenly soured without provocation.  In fact, Euroamerican imperialists were Gaddafi supporters up until the ‘Arab Spring’ revolution toward democratic, anti-imperialist, and independent governance became contagious.  

To reassert its muscle and send a warning shot to other nations aspiring independence,  Euroamerican imperialists, via the proxy rubric of NATO, claimed to support ‘rebels’ fighting against the Gaddafi government.  And, of course, support is an understatement– NATO brutally devastated Libyan infrastructure through sea and air attacks paving the way for the so-called ‘rebels,’ which otherwise wouldn’t have stood a chance. 

These ‘rebels’ could scarcely claim popular support.  As Petras notes, the “casting of the rag-tag collection of monarchists, Islamist fundamentalists, London and Washington-based ex-pats and disaffected Gaddafi officials as ‘rebels’ is a pure case of mass media propaganda.”

Libya was made an example of by Euroamerican imperialists for many reasons. Gaddafi pursued plans for a ‘Bank of Africa,’ alternative communication systems, and long supported African unity.  Under Gaddafi, despite any demagoguery, Libya maintained the highest standard of living for any African nation. However, now smouldering after NATO’s devastation, it’s projected Libya faces a decade of reconstruction to undo the damage of being bombed back to the Stone Age. 

To be certain, Gaddafi was a complex political figure, developing from a revolutionary to a self-styled symbolic figurehead.  But one simply needs to ask why NATO forces haven’t targeted nations such as Saudi Arabia or Yemen for similar ‘humanitarian intervention’ to see through the glaring hypocrisy.

As historian Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley has explained:

“Democracy is totally irrelevant to this. This is a cynical imperialist attack aiming at the two things that the US, the British, and the French value. On the one hand the oil and on the other hand the water. And the water may turn out to be more valuable than the oil… Libya will be under IMF conditionality and that will mean the Washington consensus, deregulation, privatization, the destruction of any state-sector that remains, the destruction of any social welfare system, or social safety net, and the destruction of all of those positive things that Gaddafi had done in his regime to distribute the oil revenue to increase the general welfare.”

As in Iraq, Euroamerican imperialists stand to benefit from ‘ruin and rule’ devastation, disaster capitalism, and the years of inevitable reconstruction contracts and continued obstruction of autonomous governance. 

Messina

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JAMES PETRAS— The NATO assault formed part of a general counter-attack designed to contain and reverse the popular democratic and anti-imperialist movements which had ousted or were on the verge of overthrowing US-client dictators.

What caused the NATO countries to shift abruptly from a policy of embracing Gaddafi to launching a brutal scorched-earth invasion of Libya in a matter of months? The key is the popular uprisings, which threatened Euro-US domination. The near total destruction of Libya, a secular regime with the highest standard of living in Africa, was meant to be a lesson, a message from the imperialists to the newly aroused masses of North Africa, Asia and Latin America: The fate of Libya awaits any regime which aspires to greater independence and questions the ascendancy of Euro-American power.

NATO’s savage six-month blitz – over 30,000 air and missile assaults on Libyan civil and military institutions – was a response to those who claimed that the US and the EU were on the “decline” and that the “empire was in decay”. The radical Islamist and monarchist-led “uprising” in Benghazi during March 2011 was backed by and served as a pretext for the NATO imperial powers to extend their counter-offensive on the road to neo-colonial restoration.

For all the ruling class and mass media euphoria, the ‘win’ over Libya, grotesque and criminal in the destruction of Libyan secular society and the ongoing brutalization of black Libyans, does not solve the profound economic crises in the EU-US. It does not affect China’s growing competitive advantages over its western competitors. It does not end US-Israeli isolation faced with an imminent world-wide recognition of Palestine as an independent state. The absence of left-wing western intellectual solidarity for independent Third World nations, evident in their support for the imperial-based mercenary “rebels” is more than compensated by the emergence of a radical new generation of left-wing activists in South Africa, Chile, Greece, Spain, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere. These are youth, whose solidarity with anti-colonial regimes is based on their own experience with exploitation, “marginalization” (unemployment) and repression at home.

Read more about NATO’s War Crimes in Libyia.

© 2011 The Official James Petras Website

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THE GUARDIAN— As the most hopeful offshoot of the “Arab spring” so far flowered this week in successful elections in Tunisia, its ugliest underside has been laid bare in Libya. That’s not only, or even mainly, about the YouTube lynching of Gaddafi, courtesy of a Nato attack on his convoy.

For the western powers, of course, the Libyan war has allowed them to regain ground lost in Tunisia and Egypt, put themselves at the heart of the upheaval sweeping the most strategically sensitive region in the world, and secure valuable new commercial advantages in an oil-rich state whose previous leadership was at best unreliable. No wonder the new British defence secretary is telling businessmen to “pack their bags” for Libya, and the US ambassador in Tripoli insists American companies are needed on a “big scale”.

But for Libyans, it has meant a loss of ownership of their own future and the effective imposition of a western-picked administration of Gaddafi defectors and US and British intelligence assets. Probably the greatest challenge to that takeover will now come from Islamist military leaders on the ground, such as the Tripoli commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj – kidnapped by MI6 to be tortured in Libya in 2004 – who have already made clear they will not be taking orders from the NTC.

What the Libyan tragedy has brutally hammered home is that foreign intervention doesn’t only strangle national freedom and self-determination – it doesn’t protect lives either.

Read more about If the Libyan war was about saving lives, it was a catastrophic failure.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited

Photo by AFP/Getty

MEDIA ROOTS- One domino falls while another globalist target awaits toppling. Before the fog of war in Libya begins to sift, the political and media establishment have already latched their tentacles onto another chess piece in the Middle East: Syria. Last week, the US slapped economic sanctions on Syria for President Bashar al-Assad’s human rights abuses, freezing assets and blocking US business in the region.

Besides the saber rattling coming from the US government and the EU, the corporate media has launched a fear mongering campaign about Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons that is all too reminiscent of the WMD propaganda preceding the Iraqi invasion. The Washington Post released an article that is riddled with exaggerations and hyperbolic scenarios about Syria’s chemical arsenal, calling it the “largest in the world, consisting of tens of tons of highly lethal chemical agents.”

Even if the reports of Syria’s stockpile of weapons are true, it’s still completely illogical to engage militarily with a country simply for harboring chemical or nuclear weapons– especially since the US has the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the entire world.

Abby

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WASHINGTON POST– In 2008, a secret State Department cable warned of a growing chemical weapons threat from a Middle Eastern country whose autocratic leader had a long history of stirring up trouble in the region. The leader, noted for his “support for terrorist organizations,” was attempting to buy technology from other countries to upgrade an already fearsome stockpile of deadly poisons, the department warned.

Read more about US Says Libyan Chemical, Nuclear Materials Secure.

© 2011 Yahoo News

Photo by Flickr user Dapper snapper

PRESS TV– A Russian official says that Libya’s ruler Muammar Gaddafi plans to blow up the capital Tripoli with missiles if revolutionaries seize the city.  In his latest televised speech on Thursday, Gaddafi said that he will not surrender to NATO forces.

“The Libyan Premier [Baghdadi al-Mahmudi] told me: if the rebels seize the city, we will cover it with missiles and blow it up,” Russia’s special envoy to Libya Mikhail Margelov told Russian newspaper Izvestia on Thursday.

“I imagine that the Gaddafi regime does have such a suicidal plan,” Margelov added.
He said that Gaddafi still had plentiful supplies of missiles and ammunition.

The Russian envoy met with the Libyan prime minister on June 16 in Tripoli after holding talks in Benghazi earlier the same month.

Read more about ‘Gaddafi Has Suicide Plan for Tripoli’.

© 2011 PressTV

Photo by Flickr user EuanSlorach

GUARDIAN– This week, I am sponsoring legislation in the United States Congress that will end US military involvement in Libya for the following reasons:

First, the war is illegal under the United States constitution and our War Powers Act, because only the US Congress has the authority to declare war and the president has been unable to show that the US faced an imminent threat from Libya. The president even ignored his top legal advisers at the Pentagon and the department of justice who insisted he needed congressional approval before bombing Libya.

Second, the war has reached a stalemate and is unwinnable without the deployment of Nato ground troops, effectively an invasion of Libya. The whole operation was terribly ill-considered from the beginning. While Nato supports the Benghazi-based opposition (situated in the oil-rich north-east), there is little evidence that the opposition has support of the majority of Libyans. The leading opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (which had reportedly been backed by the CIA in the 1980s), should never have launched an armed civil war against the government if they had no chance absent a massive Nato air campaign and the introduction of Nato troops. Their reckless actions, encouraged by western political, military and intelligence interests, created the humanitarian crisis that was then used to justify the Nato war campaign.

Third, the United States cannot afford it. The US cost of the mission is projected to soon reach more than $1bn, and we are already engaged in massive cutbacks of civil services for our own people.

It is not surprising that a majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents alike think the US should not be involved in Libya.

Read full article about US Must End Illegal War in Libya Now.

Written by Dennis Kucinich

© 2011 Guardian

Photo by Flickr user BRQ Network

SALON– The growing controversy over President Obama’s illegal waging of war in Libya got much bigger last night with Charlie Savage’s New York Times scoop.  He reveals that top administration lawyers —  Attorney General Eric Holder, OLC Chief Caroline Krass, and DoD General Counsel Jeh Johnson — all told Obama that his latest, widely panned excuse for waging war without Congressional approval (that it does not rise to the level of “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution (WPR)) was invalid and that such authorization was legally required after 60 days: itself a generous intepretation of the President’s war powers.  But Obama rejected those views and (with the support of administration lawyers in lesser positions:  his White House counsel and long-time political operative Robert Bauer and State Department “legal adviser” Harold Koh) publicly claimed that the WPR does not apply to Libya.

As Savage notes, it is, in particular, “extraordinarily rare” for a President “to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice.”  Just imagine if George Bush had waged a war that his own Attorney General, OLC Chief, and DoD General Counsel all insisted was illegal (and did so by pointing to the fact that his White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and a legal adviser at State agreed with him).  One need not imagine this, though, because there is very telling actual parallel to this lawless episode:

In 2007, former Bush Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about an amazing event.  Bush’s then-Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, had blocked Comey from testifying for two years — once Democrats took over Congress, that obstruction was no longer possible — and it quickly became apparent why Gonzales was so desperate to suppress these events.

Comey explained that, in 2004, shortly after he became Deputy AG, he reviewed the NSA eavesdropping program Bush had ordered back in 2001 and concluded it was illegal.  Other top administration lawyers — including Attorney General John Ashcroft and OLC Chief Jack Goldsmith — agreed with Comey, and told the White House they would no longer certify the program’s legality.  It was then that Bush dispatched Gonzales and Andy Card to Ashcroft’s hospital room to try to extract an approval from the very sick Attorney General, but, from his sickbed, Ashcroft refused to overrule Comey.

Read full article about Obama Rejects Top Lawyers’ Legal Views on Libya.

Written by Glenn Greenwald