The murder of Muammar Gaddafi violated international law, principally in relation to the Third Geneva Convention of1929 and in relation to the UN Security Council Resolution #1973 of 2011.The first violation of international law concerns the Third Geneva Convention in 1929, which offers rights of protection to prisoners of war or POWs. In compliance with international law of an armed conflict when a POW is captured as for example by Nazi’s during the world war 2, special procedure should be applied, including assistance, as well as a ban on the murder of such a prisoner. Muammar was brutally tortured live on camera, then murdered by an NTC fighter, named Sanad al-Sadek al-Ureibi and his dead body was then publicly displayed as a trophy in a freezer at a shopping centre for celebration.
This criminal act of NATO, by their mercenary so called NTC fighters was brutal and barbaric. This obvious violation of the Geneva Convention is a war crime. This criminal act by NATO and its NTC fighters is not just an isolated case of Gaddafi’s murder but extended to the murder of his son and many, many others. Gaddafi’s son, Mutassim Gaddafi, was also captured alive with his father and in a video, he was also shown to be alive in custody, in a room surrounded by NATO’s armed NTC fighters and a few moments later shown to be dead with wounds to his neck and stomach.
Who then should be responsible for these criminal acts. There are more than five legal combinations;
(1) the actual individuals who abused them and pulled the triggers like Sanad al-Sadek al-Ureibi and others to be identified, (2) the commander of the particular unit of NTC fighters involved in the capture of Gaddafi and his soldiers (3) the overall NTC command (4) NATO forces and their complicit participation in the attack which led to the murders. (5) leaders of Western powers who enabled and supported the NTC mercenaries from the very start.
The UN Human Rights Office and Amnesty International are now belatedly calling for an investigation into Muammar Gaddafi’s death and what they term the unlawful killing of a prisoner. U.N. human rights spokesperson Rupert Colville said he found it very disturbing when “you see someone who has been captured alive and then you see the same person dead….Summary executions are strictly illegal under any circumstances. It’s different if someone is killed in combat….But if something else has happened, if someone is captured and then deliberately killed, then that is a very serious matter,”
The second violation of international law involves the UN Security Council Resolution #1973 of 2011, which set up a “no-fly zone” above Libya but did not authorize NATO forces to carry out an attack on any group who were fleeing from being attacked. Indeed, it was a NATO jet which fired on Gaddafi’s convoy when it was trying to flee from the onslaught. Gaddafi and his few soldiers were under attack by NTC fighters as they were fleeing Sirte in a convoy but NATO working with the NTC fighters carried out an aerial attack on Gaddafi’s convoy which directly led to Gaddafi’s capture and murder.
This also violates international law, in regard to the UN Security Council Resolution #1973, since the attack on Gaddafi’s convoy directly opposed the agreed guarantee of a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians but in this specific instance, it was not protecting the lives of civilians, because the convoy did not attack anyone and was trying to escape from the aerial bombardment by NATO and NTC fighters. Neither was there any civilians around to protect. Russia’s envoy, Dmitry Rogozin accused NATO of being “directly involved in the operation to kill the former Libyan leader,” while “apparently there were orders that oriented the military servicemen who are in Libya and that directed them to ensure the physical elimination of Gaddafi.”
Many ignorant outsiders fed with western media propaganda, are not aware of the contributions of Muammar Gaddafi to his Libyan people and the African continent in general, despite his own personal defects. Here are just five of the many important contributions by Gaddafi to his country and Africa:
(1) He has vision and worked for a United States of Africa and the African Union is essentially the creation of Muammar Gaddafi.
(2) He held Libya together, which was previously fragmented by different tribes and ethnicities.
(3) He changed Libya into having one of the highest GDPs per capita in Africa and.provided a level of social security, particularly in the fields of housing and education, in a way that Africans, Europeans and Americans could only dream of, check on Libya by Wikipedia.
(4) He managed to avoid his people being used by either the Soviet Union or the U.S. without being a puppet of either until close to the end. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he continued to fight against Western domination in the region which ultimately led to the invasion by colonial NATO powers.
(5) He originally overthrew the Kingdom of Libya in a bloodless military coup against King Idris in 1969 and brought Libya into the modern era out of monarchial feudalism.
Many more of his achievements including helping Ireland’s liberation struggle against British colonialism, as a ruler of a small country with just a few million people, allowed Gaddafi to rule for 42 years with the respect of freedom loving people worldwide. Yes, he is accused of personal vanity, abuse of power and ruthlessness but such are the failures of the human condition of a man, whose historical status in the modern era are part of social evolution. The Western mainstream corporate media are not finished spinning their version to try to destroy his historical legacy of achievements and attempt to ensure his legacy is forgotten in accordance to Western powers in their corrupt corporate propaganda media.
History will have the final say on Muammar Gaddafi as a historical figure shaping the modern history of Africa and the Middle East, despite his personal shortcomings. Meantime the war crimes of NATO, the NTC and Western powers will most assuredly continue in theri attempt to perpetuate a vicious cycle of violence and suffering while Muammar Gadaffi will remain in the hearts and minds of people, struggling for liberation from places as far away as Ireland and all over the South African continent he worked ceaselessly to unite. That is his legacy and the manner of his martrydom and brutal murder captured live on historical video ensures it !
http://humanrightsinvestigations.orgPosted on September 1, 2011 by HRI Mark
Human Rights Investigations has been repeatedly warning about the Libyan rebels and it has become increasingly clear that racism lies at the very heart of the conflict in Libya. It now clear that the rebel forces are NATO (and Qatar and UAE)’s proxy fighters on the ground. Many of these fighters have been recruited and motivated on the basis of psy-ops about African mercenaries, fired up by viagra, mass-raping women and pillaging their cities - discredited stories which have been spread and amplified by rebel commanders, NATO ministers, the media and ICC prosecutor Moreno Ocampo.
The effects of this pernicious propaganda campaign have been seen in Benghazi, Misrata and Tawergha and across the nation and are now being seen on the streets of Tripoli as rebels round up black-skinned Libyans and African guest workers, putting them into football stadiums.
Virtually all of the detainees say they are innocent migrant workers, and in most cases there is no evidence that they are lying. But that is not stopping the rebels from placing the men in facilities like the Gate of the Sea sports club, where about 200 detainees – all black – clustered on a soccer field this week, bunching against a high wall to avoid the scorching sun.
In the Khallat al-Firjan neighborhood in south Tripoli, Associated Press reporters saw rebel forces punching a dozen black men before determining they were innocent migrant workers and releasing them.
Racism lies at the heart of many of the NATO campaigns, including in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq where innocents are slaughtered in a way that simply would not be accepted if the victims were white.
NATO’s chief weapon in the Libyan conflict has been and continues to be, not Brimstone or Paveway bombs, Tornados, Typhoons or Tomahawk cruise missiles - but racism.
To appreciate the importance of racism in motivating soldiers please listen to Mike Prysner’s speech made at the 2008 Winter Soldier hearings:
Transcript:
“And I tried hard to be proud of my service but all I could feel was shame and racism could no longer mask the occupation. These were people. These were human beings. I’ve since been plagued by guilt anytime I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn’t walk and we rolled onto a stretcher, told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt anytime I see a mother with her children like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt anytime I see a young girl like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street.
”We were told we were fighting terrorists, but the real terrorist was me and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. It has long been used to justify the killing, subjugation, and torture of another people. Racism is a vital weapon deployed by this government. It is a more important weapon than a rifle, a tank, a bomber or a battleship. It is more destructive than an artillery shell, or a bunker buster, or a tomahawk missile. While all of those weapons are created and owned by this government, they are harmless without people willing to use them.
”Those who send us to war do not have to pull a trigger or lob a mortar round. They do not have to fight the war. They merely have to sell the war. They need a public who is willing to send their soldiers into harm’s way and they need soldiers who are willing to kill or be killed without question. They can spend millions on a single bomb, but that bomb only becomes a weapon when the ranks in the military are willing to follow orders to use it. They can send every last soldier anywhere on earth, but there will only be a war if soldiers are willing to fight, and the ruling class: the billionaires who profit from human suffering care only about expanding their wealth, controlling the world economy, understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression, and exploitation is in our interests. They understand that their wealth is dependent on their ability to convince the working class to die to control the market of another country. And convincing us to kill and die is based on their ability to make us think that we are somehow superior. Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, have nothing to gain from this occupation.
”The vast majority of people living in the US have nothing to gain from this occupation. In fact, not only do we have nothing to gain, but we suffer more because of it. We lose limbs, endure trauma, and give our lives. Our families have to watch flag draped coffins lowered into the earth. Millions in this country without healthcare, jobs, or access to education must watch this government squander over $450 million a day on this occupation. Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in another country to make the rich richer, and without racism soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war
”I threw families onto the street in Iraq only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country in this tragic, tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis; only to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land. But not people whose names we don’t know, and cultures we don’t understand. The enemy is people we know very well and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it’s profitable. The enemy is the CEO who lays us off our jobs when it’s profitable; it’s the insurance companies who deny us health care when it’s profitable; it’s the banks who take away our homes when it’s profitable. Our enemies are not 5000 miles away, they are right here at home. If we organize and fight with our sisters and brothers, we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world.”
2 million people in Tripoli, many of whom are Gaddafi supporters. NATO brings boat loads of rebels knowing full well a bloodbath was the only possible outcome.
Think about it. Gaddafi is gone from Tripoli. The “liberators” allegedly control Tripoli. Why is the conflict not over? Why are civilians dying, being tortured, being forced to lie in front of cameras? This should be a time for celebration if these rebels were true liberators.
Nothing on NATO news about the majority of the population of Tripoli being terrorized by terrorists. They refer to civilians as “Gaddafi loyalists”.
Norway is understandably in deep shock following the horrific shooting spree and bomb attack in Oslo last Friday 22 July. The worst terrorist atrocity in Europe since the 2004 Madrid train bombings has left the country reeling. An enormous bomb exploded somewhere within a complex of government buildings at 3.30 in the afternoon. The offices of prime minister Jens Stoltenberg appear to have been the main target, although the Oil Ministry’s building across the road was also destroyed. The blast was so powerful that windows were blown out along several blocks. Seven people were killed and many more injured by flying glass and debris. The perpetrator(s) chose a public holiday to carry out the deed, so most government employees were not working that day. But the open layout of government buildings in Norway, reflecting of the relatively open nature of Norwegian society, meant that security is very low compared to anything most countries’ citizens are used to in this totalitarian age.
In response to the media’s leading questions about this being ‘Norway’s 9/11′, the Associated Press quoted a Norwegian police official as saying that the terror attack was more like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing than the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. It’s a curious comparison to make because, as Stephen Lendman explained in an interview he gave to Press TV, the Oklahoma bombing was blamed on a right-wing extremist and his huge car bomb, but the explosives evidence later pointed to something else entirely:
There have been numerous mass shootings in recent years, but the massacre on Utoya island is the worst yet. The camp on this tiny island, which lies just 700 meters from the shore, was organised by the AUF, the youth wing of the ruling Labour Party. In fact, the island was owned by this organisation; it has held regular summer camps there for decades and is well known to Norwegians. Most of the attendees were 14 to 19 year olds with an interest in politics attending seminars, partying, taking part in debates, playing music and listening to speeches on everything from local issues to international politics. In attacking the government’s headquarters in downtown Oslo and then the gathering place of the country’s political future, those responsible have managed to pierce the beating heart of Norwegian society.
The chief suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, may have been aware that former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Bruntland was hosting a seminar at the camp that very day. He supposedly missed her by half an hour because he was held up in the heavy traffic trying to leave Oslo. Current prime minister Jens Stoltenberg personally knew many of the victims, but then, as Norway has a small population, most Norwegians probably knew someone who had been directly affected.
At this stage, it seems pretty outlandish to me that just one person could be responsible for so much carnage. Breivik is supposed to have left downtown Oslo following the explosion and travelled 38 kms to an island in a fjord that is only accessible by boat. He arrived armed to the teeth and dressed as a police officer and began shooting people with an automatic rifle and a shotgun. Doctors have said that he was using dumdum bullets, expanding rounds designed to inflict the deadliest wounds possible on victims. Most of the bodies were horrifically mutilated in this manner. I’ve read one reportthat he actually removed the tip of every bullet he took with him and injected each with pure liquid nicotine in order to cause his victims as much pain as possible:
Dr Colin Poole, from Ringriket Hospital in Honefoss, north-west of Oslo, said: “Those on the dead brought in from the island are the worst I’ve ever seen. “They are very difficult to x-ray because the bullets just shatter everything into tiny pieces.”
Survivors’ accounts about how the shooting began conflict. On the one hand surviving teenagers have reported how he gathered people around him by saying that he wanted to question them in relation to the earlier bombing in the city. But then there is the testimony of 45 year old Monica Bosei, who was known as the “mother of Utoya” and had worked at the camp for more than 20 years. She took the same boat to the island as Breivik. The UK’s Telegraphreports,
Because he was wearing a police uniform she approached him to talk about the bomb blast in Oslo but became suspicious by his evasive answers.
As soon as the boat docked she ran over to Mr Berntsen to alert him but Breivik realised that they had clocked him and shot them both immediately, Mrs Bosei, an accountant whose two daughters were also at the camp but survived, was his first victim.
Breivik’s second victim, Trond Berntsen, was an off-duty police officer assigned to security duty on the island. Brentsen was also a step-brother of Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit. Here is 15-year-old Jo Granli Kallset’s account of the opening horror:
He said ‘I am the police, there is a boat at the corner of the island’. I replied ‘Hi, we’re here,’ and two seconds later he fired on a rock in front of me. I jumped into the water. It was horrible – we were hunted down. It was a massacre, everyone was dying around me. He came up to us, he was dressed like a policeman. He had all the equipment – the walkie-talkie, the arms, everything. I swam for about an hour, and when it was nearly over, I swam towards other people who had assembled as a group and we were helped by a boat. My girlfriend, myself and two others survived.
The earlier reports about a second shooter have disappeared. So have the earlier reports about there being at least two explosions in downtown Oslo that day. The enormous damage done to Oslo’s government buildings is neatly explained by Breivik’s farming enterprises, through which he supposedly acquired copious quantities of fertiliser – 6 tonnes, in fact. Bob Ayers, former US intelligence official, points out that this quantity of fertiliser “wouldn’t have fit in one car”. Maybe there were two cars? But that might require an accomplice, something the official narrative doesn’t seem prepared to countenance. Now it’s emerged that at least two other buildings were targets, but Breivik’s lawyer won’t saywhat “things happened that day to make things turn out differently.”
VG [Norwegian newspaper] has spoken to witnesses describing another culprit who was not wearing a police uniform.
This second person who was pursuing them was around 180 centimeters tall, had thick dark hair and looked Nordic. He had a pistol in his right hand and a rifle on his back.
“I believe that there were two people who shot at us,” says Alexander Stavdal, aged 23.
The sophisticated planning that went into this took into account that only one police helicopter – covering the whole length of the country apparently – would be available to respond. Explaining why the response was so slow, Oslo Chief of Police Johan Fredriksen told reporters that they were down to just one helicopter crew because everyone else was on holiday. In fact, the helicopter circling overhead while the shooting continued was a media helicopter, which had reached the island first and captured these gruesome images of Brevik surrounded by dead bodies floating in the lake and what looks like a teenaged boy pleading for mercy:
Breivik refused to plead guilty in court, instead laying the blame for the killings on the “treason” of Norway’s ruling Labour Party in sanctioning ‘Muslim immigration’. He further described the murder of 76 people as “an act of conscience”. No wonder the lawyer assigned to represent Breivik thinks that he’s completely insane. Geir Lippestad said he was “very cold, distanced from the real world and believing that he was a warrior destined to die for the eventual salvation of European Christian values. [...] I can’t describe him because he’s not like anyone [...] this whole case has indicated that he is insane.”
With three mass shootings leaving 29 dead in the US late last week also, was there something in the air at the time? Did Breivik act alone or did he have accomplices? Could he have actually carried this out alone? Could this guy have also been involved? He is an AUF member who was also on the island that day but his suspicious behaviour and possession of a knife led to his arrest back on the mainland.
On 24 July, two masked men in military uniform shot dead a 27 year old man in his home in Sandnes, Norway. As Craig Murray points out, killings with firearms are rare in Norway, so what are the odds that this is not related to the events on 22 July?
What about the Polish man arrested in connection with the attacks? He’s supposed to have sold Breivik chemicals used to make his ‘homemade bomb’ and has since been charged with “crimes against public safety”. Once the Norwegian authorities have picked apart Breivik’s 1,500 page manifesto, they should have all the leads they need to track down who and how Breivik connected with in his dedicated planning for this attack. More on that later.
The initial claim of responsibility for the bombing(s) by yet another ‘previously unknown Islamic terror group’ – “Helpers of Global Jihad” – was followed up by headlines such as this from Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun:
They couldn’t have been any more wrong. The ‘Islamic terrorist attack’ reverted to being the work of a lone gunman, as these events often do, when it emerged that the perpetrator was a 32 year old white middle class Norwegian with extremely Islamophobic views. I mean, this guy is so right-wing that he was booted off Stormfront’s website. We’re being asked to believe that he spent a total of nine years preparing for these attacks and raised adequate funds all on his lonesome to fund his war plans. His deadly accurate sharp-shooter training is supposed to have come from playing World of Warcraft and other computer games, in between impressing fellow right-wingers with his lofty rhetoric about the pure morality of white Christian European values, defending Israel’s ‘right to exist’, and attending far-right rallies.
Breivik claims to have spent three years researching and writing a 1,500 page document titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence”. Assuming for now that it is Breivik’s work, this book is a meticulously detailed, blow-by-blow account of precisely how he went about it and reveals as psychopathic an inner landscape as you’re ever likely to read by first hand account. Based on a distinctly Israelite philosophy of ‘Hate Islam, Must Kill Muslims’, Breivik catalogues ‘Muslim crimes’, itemises every expense he had in the run-up to his ‘mission’, provides in-depth agricultural advice for growing produce, instructions on to procure weapons, uniforms and so on. Of course, nowhere does it explain why hating Islam entails killing left-leaning Norwegian teenagers, but I’ll get to that later.
In a section headed ‘Controversial principles’, Breivik writes,”Let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists.” Nevermind that the ‘multiculturalism’ they so deride, as extensively documented by Kevin MacDonald, is a product of Jewish intervention in Western society! Hmmm, maybe that is an important clue here…
Breivik wants hundreds of thousands of ‘traitors’ and ‘enablers’ (pretty much the whole intelligentsia of Europe in fact) to be executed for allowing Muslims to enter Europe, wants South Africa to be partitioned to make way for a new Boer/Afrikaner statelet, wants all Muslims deported from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, wants all Muslims deported from Europe… in fact, he wants Muslims everywhere to be deported back ‘whence they came’.
Breivik describes how he started a business, played the markets and used nine credit cards to fund the massacre. He didn’t just explain how he went about it; he recorded in excruciating detail how he procured the materials, built his bombs and staved off suspicions from neighbours, friends and local authorities. He closely studied all modern era revolutionary and militant movements, analysing what he saw as their flaws and successes. The book reads like a blueprint for engaging in terrorism and I’ve no doubt that Breivik, and whoever his handlers are, intend for others to pick up where he left off and run with it.
The book also served as Breivik’s journal in which he accounted for everything he did to prepare for the attack, from acquiring arms and fertiliser to machine parts and tailor-made badges he had embroidered on his uniforms. For such a puritan die-hard revolutionary in the name of a ‘Christian’ cause, his journal entries describing drink and drug-fuelled benders and sex with prostitutes. Harvey Cleckley’s account of the psychopath’s need to take ‘vacations into filth’ come to mind here. He apparently had plastic surgerydone to his face in the US because he felt that he looked “too feminine” (which he blamed on being raised without a father.)
These Muslims must be considered as wild animals. Do not blame the wild animals but rather the multiculturalist category A and B traitors who allowed these animals to enter our lands.
He goes on to define category A, B and C ‘traitors’, and says that they would be executed under the future regime of him and his Christian soldiers. Breivik was methodical and devout in his belief that killing people is the right thing to do. He laid out a suggested study course for his imaginary army, complete with recommended reading and links to articles and speeches. There are eerie parallels with the Joel’s Army faction of the fascist Christian Dominionism movement in the US, with which Sarah Palin is closely affiliated.
At first glance it seems bizarre that today’s most extreme right-wing authoritarians (RWAs) are vociferously supportive of Israel. Historically, contempt of Jews, actual anti-Semitism, has been central to all brands of white racist ideology. RWAs seem to have been reprogrammed since (or by?) 9/11, when hatred of Muslims was sanctioned by the authorities and proactively disseminated through all available channels. All things Zionist have become ideals and role models for the far-right. I guess that like water finding its own level, those people whose underlying tendencies are oriented towards violence, ‘creative destruction’ and domination over others, will naturally wind up supporting and reinforcing each other.
Those on the pathological spectrum, psychopaths in particular, but also RWAs in general, ‘recognise their own’. On a visit to Northern Ireland a few years ago, I saw Israeli and old Apartheid South African flags adorning the streets of British loyalist cantons. This is also why English Defence League members and Glasgow Rangers football club supporters wave Israeli flags at their gatherings. They identify with psychopathology in its most extreme manifestation. Their ideologies, supported by suitably revised propaganda material, allow them to project their woes and all the societal problems they see around them onto ‘the other’. Like Israelis, they believe they are the last line of defence of a racially and morally pure world, where the ‘old, true values’ retain their worth, surrounded by a sea of immorality – Muslims, Catholics, ‘Multiculturalists’ and so on.
I’d like to say that I can understand what motivates a psychopath like Breivik, but I really can’t. In preparing this article I found myself being drawn into this document he spent so long preparing. EDL members who have met Breivik or interacted with him online recall a ‘hypnotic‘ personality. It’s a nauseating read, so dark and unhinged from reality. Polish psychologist Andrej Lobaczewski wrote of schizoidal psychopathy in Political Ponerology:
During stable times which are ostensibly happy, albeit marked by injury to individuals and nations, doctrinaire people believe they have found a simple solution to fix such a world. Such a historical period is always characterized by an impoverished psychological world-view, a schizoidally impoverished psychological world-view thus does not stand out during such times and is accepted as legal tender. These doctrinaire individuals characteristically manifest a certain contempt with regard to moralists then preaching the need to rediscover lost human values and to develop a richer, more appropriate psychological world-view.
Schizoid characters aim to impose their own conceptual world upon other people or social groups, using relatively controlled pathological egotism and the exceptional tenacity derived from their persistent nature. They are thus eventually able to overpower another individual’s personality, which causes the latter’s behavior to turn desperately illogical. They may also exert a similar influence upon the group of people they have joined. They are psychological loners who feel better in some human organization, wherein they become zealots for some ideology, religious bigots, materialists, or adherents of an ideology with satanic features. If their activities consist of direct contact on a small social scale, their acquaintances easily perceive them to be eccentric, which limits their ponerogenic [evil-doing] role. However, if they manage to hide their own personality behind the written word, their influence may poison the minds of society in a wide scale and for a long time. [...]
Character anomalies developing as a result of brain-tissue damage behave like insidious ponerogenetic factors. As a result of the above-described features, especially the above-mentioned naivete and an inability to comprehend the crux of a matter, their influence easily anchors in human minds, traumatizing our psyches, impoverishing and deforming our thoughts and feelings, and limiting individuals and societies’ ability to use common sense and to read a psychological or moral situation accurately. This opens the door to the influence of other pathological characters who most frequently carry some inherited psychological deviations [the big kahuna psychopaths in power]; they then push the characteropathic individuals [permanently damaged humans] into the shadows and proceed with their ponerogenetic work. [...] An improved social system of the future should thus protect individuals and societies by preventing persons with the above deviations, or certain characteristics to be discussed below [inherited deviations], from any societal functions wherein the fate of other people would depend upon their behavior.
Revulsion is the normal, healthy response. But Breivik knows from his experiences with similarly oriented people that his material will ‘anchor’ in their minds. In fact, RWAs across Europe have already spoken out in support of his rabid Islamophobia, most notablya member of Berlusconi’s government in Italy:
Francesco Speroni, a leading member of the Northern League, the junior partner in Berlusconi’s conservative coalition, said: “Breivik’s ideas are in defence of western civilisation.”
Yesterday we reported that Mario Borghezi, another Northern League member and an Italian MEP, whose Freedom and Democracy group includes Ukip, had said, “One hundred per cent of Breivik’s ideas are good, in some cases extremely good. The positions of Breivik reflect the views of those movements across Europe which are winning elections.”
Breivik cited numerous well-known right-wing ‘conservative’ and pro-Zionist commentators, authors and bloggers in his screed. I’d like to think that at least some of them have done some soul-searching this past week, but then I remember that scores for introspection don’t rate too highly with RWAs. The horror of Breivik’s deeds certainly don’t seem to have affected him in any serious way, if this photo of him smirking as he left the courthouse in Oslo following his initial hearing is anything to go by:
There is little material evidence at this stage to suggest that this was anything more than the work of the deranged mind of one man. But the story doesn’t end there. Far-right extremists exist in every country and Breivik claims to have interacted with them. It doesn’t take long before you stumble across the involvement of intelligence agencies within these networks. Their role is ostensibly to monitor and infiltrate all extremist groups, from Breivik’s ‘Knights Templar’ and the EDL to al-Qaeda, but in reality, they co-opt and direct these groups towards the overarching agenda of the real instigators of revolution. These actors work by way of deception and so it’s only natural that we will not see their involvement at first glance. They remain in the shadows but if you pay attention a pattern emerges and their unmistakable thumbprints can be found wherever mayhem breaks out.
The last entry in the journal part of Breivik’s compendium is dated July 22 at 12.51. The document was sent to hundreds of far-right contactsand “7000 patriotic Facebook friends’, based mainly in England, at 14.08, less than an hour and a half before the bomb(s) went off in downtown Oslo, and from there was uploaded to file-sharing sites. This revived ‘Knights Templar organisation he claims to have been a founding member of, the PCCTS (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici – Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon), met in London in 2002. He doesn’t reveal who exactly he met except to say that his mentor’s name was ‘Richard’:
Around year 2000 I realised that the democratic struggle against the Islamisation of Europe, European multiculturalism was lost. It had gone too far. It is simply not possible to compete democratically with regimes who import millions of voters. 40 years of dialogue with the cultural Marxists/multiculturalists had ended up as a disaster. It would now only take 50-70 years before we, the Europeans are in a minority. As soon as I realised this I decided to explore alternative forms of opposition. Protesting is saying that you disagree. Resistance is saying you will put a stop to this. I decided I wanted to join the resistance movement.
However, the main problem then was that there weren’t any alternatives for me at all. There weren’t any known armed cultural conservative, or Christian, anti-Jihad movements.
An NS or racist/anti Jewish movement was completely out of the question, as they represented much of what I oppose. I came in contact with Serbian cultural conservatives through the internet. This initial contact would eventually result in my contact with several key individuals all over Europe and the forming of the group who would later establish the military order and tribunal, PCCTS, Knights Templar. I remember they did a complete screening and background check to ensure I was of the desired calibre. Two of them had reservations against inviting me due to my young age but the leader of the group insisted on my candidature. According to one of them, they were considering several hundred individuals throughout Europe for a training course. I met with them for the first time in London and later on two occasions in Balticum. I had the privilege of meeting one of the greatest living war heroes of Europe at the time, a Serbian crusader and war hero who had killed many Muslims in battle. Due to EU persecution for alleged crimes against Muslims he was living at one point in Liberia. I visited him in Monrovia once, just before the founding session in London, 2002.
I was the youngest one there, 23 years old at the time. One of the key founders instructed the rest of the group about several topics related to the goal of the organisation. I believe I scribbled down more than 50 full pages of notes regarding all possible related topics. Much of these notes are forwarded in the book 2083. It was basically a detailed long term plan on how to seize power in Western Europe. I did not fully comprehend at the time how privileged I was to be in the company of some of the most brilliant political and military tacticians of Europe. Some of us were unfamiliar with each other beforehand so I guess we all took a high risk meeting face to face. There were only 5 people in London re-founding the order and tribunal (1 by proxy) but there were around 25-30 attending in Balticum during the two sessions, individuals from all over Europe; Germany, France, Sweden, the UK, Denmark, Balticum, Benelux, Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Austria, Armenia, Lebanon and Russia. Electronic or telephonic communication was completely prohibited, before, during and after the meetings. On our last meeting it was emphasised clearly that we cut off contact indefinitely. Any type of contact with other cells was strictly prohibited.
This was not sessions were regular combat cells were created. It was more like a training course for pioneer cell commanders. We were not instructed to attack specific targets, quite the opposite. We were encouraged to rather use the information distributed to contribute to build and expand the so called “cultural conservative anti-Jihad movement, either through spreading propaganda, provide funding for the creation of new groups through various forums or by recruiting other people directly. All individuals attending the sessions learned about PCCTS, the Knights Templar but they were not specifically instructed to represent that particular order and tribunal. Everyone was encouraged but at the end, it was their own decision how they decided to manifest their resistance. A special emphasis was put on the long term nature of the struggle (50-100 years). Our task was to contribute to a long term approach and not to act prematurely. If there was a large scale attack the next 10 years it was said, we should avoid any immediate follow up attacks as it would negate the shock effect of the subsequent attacks. A large successful attack every 5-12 years was optimal depending on available forces.
This was not a stereotypical “right wing” meeting full of underprivileged racist skinheads with a short temper, but quite the opposite. Most of them were successful entrepreneurs, business or political leaders, some with families, most of them Christian conservatives but also some agnostics and even atheists. I remember it struck me how impressed I was regarding how they had set up the screening parameters (for accepting new candidates). They obviously wanted resourceful pragmatical individuals who were able to keep information away from their loved ones and who were not in any way flagged by their governments. Every one of them was supportive of a Judeo Christian Europe and did not have any reservations against cooperating with non-European Christians Hindu or Buddhist nationalists. I had or have a relatively close relationship with at least one of them, an Englishman, who became my mentor. He was the one who first described the “perfect knight” and had written the initial fundament for this compendium. I was asked, not only once but twice, by my mentor; let’s call him Richard, to write a second edition of his compendium about the new European Knighthood. As such, I spent several years to create an economic platform which would allow me to study and write a second edition. And as of now, I have spent more than three years completing this second edition. Perhaps, someone out there will be able to contribute by creating a third edition one day.
Later on in this ‘compendium’, Breivik returns to the origins of this primary ponerogenic associationand strongly hints that one of the most racist bands of brownshirts operating freely in the EU today, the English Defence League (EDL), shares foundations with his masonic sect:
I wonder sometimes if one of the EDL founders was one of the co-founders of PCCTS, I guess I’ll never know for sure. EDL is a non-violent protest organisation though but I noticed they have copied a lot from the PCCTS. Then again, it is most likely just a coincidence. I do think a lot about what happened to some of the co-founders. It’s pointless to speculate I guess but I check the news regularly to see if anything has slipped through the media blackout relating to actions launched by individual resistance fighters or the European Resistance Organisations. I may or may not have had contact with at least 2 of these co-founders since the founding. Obviously, I can’t reveal any sensitive information so the above characteristic might be what I want you to believe and not the actual truth:-).
The EDL have naturally distanced themselves from Breivik’s actions, but Breivik’s hints that the meteoric rise of this fascist Islamophobic organisation may have grown out of the same deeper network as his crusader brigade are revealing in light of what we know about the involvement of British agents co-opting and directing other protest movements in the UK. I rather suspect that in this case we’re looking at something that was created as a front to serve both British, American and Israeli intelligence to begin with:
Breivik continues:
I used to have more than 600 EDL members as Facebook friends and have spoken with tens of EDL members and leaders. In fact; I was one of the individuals who supplied them with processed ideological material (including rhetorical strategies) in the very beginning. The EDL are in fact anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-Nazi. They even have many members and leaders with non-European background (African and Asian). They have worked so hard, and continue to work hard, to keep National Socialists out of the organization, but yet they are strategically labeled as racist-fascist-Nazi-monsters by the multiculturalist authorities. The EDL, although having noble intentions are in fact dangerously naïve. EDL and KT ['PCCTS/Knights Templar'] principles can never be reconciled as we are miles apart ideologically AND organizationally. The EDL even rejects taking a stand against multiculturalism which proves that they are even more naïve than Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron who have all admitted that multiculturalism has been a failure and a disaster for Europe.
This ‘Declaration of Independence’ goes on and on like this for hundreds of pages. Such fine distinctions pointing out ideological differences between his own views, the EDL’s views and mainstream fascists’ views can’t blur the fact that they all draw their ‘anti-multiculturalist’ and Islamophobic stances from the anti-Muslim climate of fear and hysteria that has gripped the Western world since 9/11. It’s founded on the ludicrous fantasy that Muslims are taking over Europe and the US, raping and pillaging their way towards colonising the ‘free world’, all the while the US and EU governments bomb and invade more and more Muslim countries, steal their resources and institute draconian legislation which curtails civil liberties back home. Just as the Powers That Be at the time of Weimar Germany sought to convince Germans that the root of all evil lay in Jews, today we have the Powers That Be trying to convince the entire Western world that the root of all evil lies in Muslims.
KT was formed back in 2002 as a revolutionary conservative movement because we had lost hope that the democratic framework can solve Europe’s current problems. The EDL, on the other hand, IS a democratic movement. They STILL believe that the democratic system can solve Britain’s problems… This is why the EDL harshly condemns any and all revolutionary conservative movements that employ terror as a tool, such as the KT. And this is why, we, the KT view the EDL as naïve fools, wasting all their energy monkey-screaming to deaf ears while they should instead have focused on means and methods that are meaningful in regards to achieving true political change, in regards to tearing down the multiculturalist regime known as Britain. Unfortunately, the only meaningful resistance at this point in time is to use military force. So instead of monkey-screaming, they should instead focus on strategically demolishing one of the many British nuclear power plants, which effectively would completely cripple the British economy, contributing to creating an optimal climate for significant political change.
Once again, we see that Breivik’s thoughts display uncanny resemblance to the strategic thinking of Western intelligence agencies, who do precisely this: engineer terror attacks to “create an optimal climate for significant change.” Another reason for suspecting that Breivik probably did not act alone, or at the very least was being handled by his “mentor(s)”, is his constant references to other operational ‘cells’ in his organisation. Check out this entry for March 1st 2011:
Economic status (as of March 1st)
I decided to sell my dear Breitling Crosswind and my Montblanc Meisterstück pen in January in order to strengthen my operational budget. I was able to sell my Crosswind for 1800 Euro and my pen for 200 Euro.
My remaining budget is now:
In bank: 3750 Euro
In cash: 3750 Euro
Value of car: 4500 Euro
Credit (9 credit cards): 28 750 Euro
Logistical plans ahead (as of March 1st)
I will shortly convert the public listing/definition of my company from regular to agricultural. This will allow me to acquire (rent) and register a farm with accompanying fields. The fields, registered through my company, will give me a specific “farming ID number” which is a requirement for ordering large amounts of fertilizer from the national supplier.
The cover I am using is; test production of sugar beet. I have created a 10 page “business plan” for this purpose, and have familiarized myself with the related terminology. As such, I am soon ready to place “rent adds” in agricultural newspapers, with intent to rent the farm/fields.
As soon as I rent the farm; I plan to move all my equipment to the farm house and initiate the “explosive manufacturing phase”. The operation will be executed shortly after the manufacturing phase is completed. Will attempt to initiate contact with cell 8b and 8c in late March.
Remaining items/components to buy;
- Plastic sheeting: 30 Euro
- Alu/wood ramp for loading/unloading truck: 30 Euro
- Fertilizer – large 500 kg bag: 1 x CAN, 1 x N34, 1 x 0-5-17 (for show), repeat after a couple of weeks: 2000 Euro
- Sementmixer – rent or buy: 100 Euro
- Ethanol 96%, x 6L: 30 Euro
- Blue Police – flashing LED light – for one of the trucks: 150 Euro
- Face – splash proof face mask: 30 Euro
- Fork jack – for 600 kg sacks: 200 Euro
- Plastic base for 600 kg sacks (used with above): 200 Euro
- Refrigerator: 100 Euro)
- Freezer: 100 Euro)
- Fume hood: 1000 Euro, not yet decided
- Microballoons, 20 kg
- Glock 17: 700 Euro
- More ammo: 1000 Euro
- Dunnage air-bag for transport load securing (centerload.com), bought from Ebay: 100 Euro
- Straps/net for securing large load in truck, may use alu/metal profiles with screws to support
Breivik really believes that an army will rise up to replace him, so his document lays out exactly which types of uniforms future members of his PCCTS organisation should buy for which occasion, which badges to wear and which materials they should be made from. He includes mock speeches his followers should give in court when caught. He explains exactly how he developed two key chemicals used in his explosives – picric acid and DDNP – before concluding that,
there is absolutely NO GOOD REASON why anyone (unless flagged by the intelligence agency) shouldn’t be able to acquire the above materials and gear WITHOUT detection. The only thing that is holding you back is unfounded fear or laziness! Your fear for detection cannot be justified, unless you have an Islamic name<3
He signed the document as follows:
Andrew Berwick, code name “Sigurd (the Crusader)” [after Sigurd Jorsalfare, the 12th century Norwegian king] – Justiciar Knight Commander for Knights Templar Europe and one of several leaders of the National and pan-European Patriotic Resistance Movement
With the assistance from brothers and sisters in England, France, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, the US etc.
On several occasions, according to his journal, he suspected that authorities unknown were on to him because he was being tailed and watched. Despite this, he manages to succeed with his mission. Since the attacks, the Norwegian police have said that they were taken completely by surprise; they had no idea who he was and he was on no watch-list. Yet the police anti-terrorist unit apparently called out his name when they landed on the island. On pointing out this contradiction, journalists were told that police had managed to identify Breivik from CCTV footage of him at the scene of the ‘car bomb’. But the main point to be made here is that he absolutely was well-known to somebody high up the chain of command. British intelligence is known to have tracked the deadly car bomb into position during the worst terrorist atrocity in Omagh, Northern Ireland. The blast was blamed on the ‘Real IRA’, but it has since emerged that MI5 knew exactly what was in the car and did nothing to intervene.
All around, Breivik seemed to know an awful lot about how the system works, both within Norway and in general. He had particular expertise in military strategy, specialised military training, military intelligence, how to conduct special operations, and so on. He did not pick this up from playing World of Warcraft alone in his bedroom. I’m leaning towards the idea that this secret society he imagines himself to be a part of is largely a figment of his imagination, carefully fed to him by a combination of handlers, mind control techniques and the psychopath’s extreme tendency towards wishful thinking. That’s not to say that there are no other ‘cells’ across Europe and the US in the way Breivik describes. But rather than being networked together through some grand lodge of holy jesus crusaders, they’re basically just names on a database which the Powers That be can draw on, manipulate into position, then ‘turn on’. Just as ‘al Qaeda’ is.
Whether or not we find explicit state-sponsorship behind these horrific terror attacks remains to be seen. In the meantime, we can say with some certainty that both ideologically and energetically, Breivik and others behind this are joined on the spiritual front by a whole host of evil. I reckon those initial media reports saying that this was the work of ‘Islamic terrorists’ revealed the first signature of the true instigators. Joe Quinn highlightsanother ‘signature’:
The attacks in Oslo and Utoya island came 65 years, to the day, after the original Zionist terror group Irgun, bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. While all the other details strongly suggest an Israeli hand behind this particular act of inhumanity, perhaps the timing is the real Israeli ‘signature’. The bombing of the Kind David hotel was an attempt by Zionist terrorists to prevent foreign intervention in their plans for covert global domination. The attacks in Oslo and Utoya island fit the same profile.
The timing of this terrorist attack is dead interesting in light of the Norwegian government’s ongoing meetings with Palestinian leaders and the anticipated Norwegian recognition of Palestinian statehood. Norway’s Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store was to welcome Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on July 25 to show that Norway was ready to recognise a Palestinian state and to sign an agreement that would upgrade the Palestinians’ representative in Norway to ambassadorial status. Iceland’s intention to recognise a Palestinian state means it had better be on the lookout too. The day before the shootings, Store visited the Labour Youth Camp on Utoya island and was greeted by banners urging a boycott of Israel and the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state. Norwegian press reportthat he told the youngsters:
“The Palestinians must have their own state, the occupation must end, the wall must be demolished and it must happen now,” said the Foreign Minister to cheers from the audience.
“We are ready to recognize a Palestinian state. I await the actual resolution text Palestinians will promote the UN General Assembly in September.”
Author and musician Gilad Atzmon found another‘signature’:
Just one day before last Friday’s massacre in Norway, US NeoConservative David Horowitz carried an article by Joseph Klein in his Front Page magazine, entitled “The Quislings of Norway,” which might as well have provided mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik with all the motivation he needed to commit his crime.
Klein wrote a scathing article about Norway’s support for Palestinian statehood and its unilateral moves towards complete divestment of Israeli companies. Wayne Madsen highlights otherclues:
In a move that complements American and Israeli propaganda that Norway has not stepped up to the surveillance state model imposed by other Western governments, the suspicious WikiLeaks decided to release U.S. State Department cables from the U.S. embassy in Oslo that criticized Norway for not recognizing the “Al Qaeda” threat and maintaining an insufficient security apparatus to combat Islamist terrorism and Pakistani immigrants. [...]
Last November, the Norwegian government was shocked to learn that the U.S. embassy was operating a Surveillance Detection Unit in Oslo that was monitoring Norwegian citizens. [...] Just 48 hours before the bombing in Oslo, police units were engaged in a terrorist bombing exercise at the Oslo Opera House, near what would later be “ground zero.” In addition, in the days before the terrorist bombing, there was suspicious sewer work being conducted in the area near the Prime Minister’s office.
On 28 July, the Norwegian government announced that it is dropping its investigation into the illegal surveillance of Norwegian citizens by the US embassy in Oslo. They’ve decided not to file charges against the US and its embassy personnel, claiming that “they lacked evidence that any laws had in fact been broken.” Yeah, right. This caused uproar in Norway when the scandal broke because it was so blatantly illegal. But it looks like the Stoltenberg government has got the message and will now look the other way while the CIA and friends get on with their thing.
Another Oslo embassy cable highlighted US displeasure at Norway’s reluctance to play ball in their War of Terror™: US ambassador to Norway Barry White, who is Jewish and received a 2005 award from the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee, complained that the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) rejected two twelve-person British MI6 intelligence surveillance teams to monitor an ‘al Qaeda cell’ in Norway. Given the British and American intelligence agencies’ endeavours to proactively set up ‘al Qaeda cells’ in their own countries and to ‘find’ al Qaeda cells in other countries (usually by torturing confessions out of them), I can’t help but wonder if the Norwegian government said “thanks, but no thanks”, thus sending the message that it knows too well that the ‘War on Terror’ is bogus. That will not do, of course. Remember what Dubya said? “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” Now consider Obama’s statementfollowing the attacks:
“It’s a reminder that the entire international community has a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring, and that we have to work co-operatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks.”
See Norway, you work with us, then this won’t happen again, ok? New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key, who was on a state visit to Washington, DC, added:
“If it is an act of global terrorism I think it shows that no country, large or small, is immune from that risk, and that is why New Zealand plays its part in Afghanistan as we try and join others like the United States in making the world a safer place.”
Right. And what does this have to do with the fact that the killer was a lone nut Norwegian ‘Christian’? Nothing, according to the official narrative. But if we read between the lines here, it reads like a not-so-subtle hint to the Norwegian government that its plans to pull out of the slaughterfest in Libya is considered disobedient. Now John Key is a man who knows what side his bread is buttered on. He recently ensured the correct conclusions were reached in an investigation into the actions of suspected Mossad agents in Christchurch on the day of the devastating earthquake in February.
Norway is one of the few remaining socialist countries on the planet. I realise that this may be misunderstood by many, so let’s frame it in this way: by socialist, I mean that the Norwegian population’s self-organisation is largely governed by adherence to the humane principles of justice, equality and freedom – in the original meaning of those words, not the new meanings that have been inserted by the psychopaths which dominate international institutions and nearly all governments. The country has a very high standard of living compared with other European countries and a strongly integrated welfare system. It remains outside of EU control, is self-sufficient in terms of energy resources and most raw materials, and positions itself as a broker of peace in the international arena. Their security services are few in number and police the streets unarmed. Their central banker can wander to the store to pick up some groceries without having to watch his back because he placed ordinary Norwegians under the international banking cartel’s control of debt.This event has shown that Norway is susceptible to the ponerological influence of pathological factors like everywhere else, yet it seems to me that the rule of normal man still retains its power in Norway to a far greater extent than most countries, particularly those in the West which are beholden to the Zionist agenda for world revolution and global domination. I should also explain here what I understand by ‘Zionism’. I’m not just talking about the Israeli state’s regional imperialism in the Middle East. I’m thinking more along the lines of what Douglas Reed described in The Controversy of Zion. Not a world controlled by Jews – far from it. Rather, an ‘ideology’ that is so attractive to psychological deviants of every stripe in every country and culture because it thinly veils that which anchors in the minds of all the Breiviks out there, an insatiable thirst for power and domination over others, something that is so alien to humanity.Zionism is the ideology of psychopaths, their clarion call to fulfilling what they see as their rightful place as the Master Race. Participatory democracy, as Norwegians teach and live it, is humanitarian, inclusive and just. In this lies the true ‘clash of civilizations’. It is not about one race or one religion against another. It is a clash of ideologies which by and large orbit around two poles of existence. Zionism currently has the upper hand in this battle because it can draw on resources – knowledge in particular – which expand way above and beyond even the riches of Norway. There won’t be a level playing field upon which we can defend humanity from these attacks until we inoculate ourselves with the knowledge that will give us awareness of the true nature of the beast.
It is the slimy, amoral, soulless, gutless wonders of NATO trying to project their own personal cowardice onto a man whom, frankly they are not fit to lick the dust off of the bottom of his shoe.
by Lisa_KarpovaPravda.RuPart of the massive mainstream media campaign of lies and disinformation is the attempt to declare that Muammar Gaddafi is going to agree to go off somewhere into exile, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
It is the slimy, amoral, soulless, gutless wonders of NATO trying to project their own personal cowardice onto a man whom, frankly they are not fit to lick the dust off of the bottom of his shoe.
Evil people like those of NATO are always incapable of seeing the personal qualities of others, those that they themselves never possessed. It takes a certain kind of person to murder a child, to destroy a way of life, to irradiate an environment for upwards of 4 billion years with depleted uranium. To insanely conduct well over ten thousand bombing missions like a crazed lunatic on an overdose of amphetamines.
The last idiot corporate media rant goes as follows:
“…according to the Sunday Times, European officials have cooked up a plan to banish him to Malabo. It’s a question of Equatorial Guinea making him a serious offer, a source told the paper. We think that he might accept it.”
The most ridiculous thing I ever heard, at least since the Venezuela story. Naturally, Colonel Gaddafi categorically rejects any such plan.
The international community also needs to be put on notice as to its responsibilities towards UN Resolutions 1970 and 1973. The main thrust of action for those resolutions was for the protection of civilian life in Libya. This must not be forgotten.
Given the following statistics, action against NATO is called for.
From March 19th until July 8th, 1,108 Libyans were killed by the attacks of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and 4,537 were injured, of whom 717 were seriously injured, reports the Ministry of Health in Libya and reported by TeleSUR special envoy on the North African country, Rolando Segura, through their social network account on Twitter.
The resolution authorises “all necessary measures” (that is military action) to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack. Repeating, “all necessary measures.”
Therefore, the international community is put on notice that since deaths, injuries and destruction to civilian infrastruture are being caused by NATO, countries should begin to implement plans to provide the government of Libya with all means of air defense weapons, as well as other weapons designed for self defense, in order to prevent further NATO attacks.
This has translated from a short war of conquest to a war of desperation. NATO has not and will not achieve its objective of conquest. NATO is now a wounded beast, dangerous because it is dying and striking out, just for the sake of striking out and killing and destroying whatever it can without regard to international law.
They murdered the son and young grandchildren of Muammar Gaddafi, as well as the family of one of Libya’s heroes, that included children.
“I never knew garbage could fly.”
“Yes, indeed, look at those NATO nazi planes.”
The world needs to do more than seethe with contempt and hatred for NATO and its murderous blitzkrieg.
It is immoral for any country to stand idly by and not provide Libya with all means of self defense in the most expeditious manner possible. Get those S-300s rolling! If your country fails to act, then you are equally responsible for the murder of civilians in Libya.
Colonialism is dead. NATO has lost the war. There will be no regime change, but free and fair elections, including giving the people of Libya the choice to continue with the current government. Their wishes are the priority.
Now is the time for healing and restoration. Libya will defend itself until a ceasefire is declared, with no preconditions of surrender by the people of Libya to the Hitlerite nazis of NATO.
This war must end like the last big war, with the utter defeat of fascism and the hanging of war criminals. Wash your necks, Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron. However, you may also choose the gunshot to the mouth in the bunker scene as well. Especially you, Monsieur Napolean.
One of the motives for the war against Libya is to stop the development of the black continent, to enable the setting up of an AfriCom military base in Cyrenaica and to begin the colonial exploitation of Africa for the benefit of the United States.
In order to understand this hidden agenda, Voltaire Network interviewed Mohamed Siala, Co-operation Minister and Manager of Libya’s sovereign wealth fund.
MATHABA NOTE: This interview of Mohamed Siala, Co-operation Minister and Manager of Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, includes details of the breadth and depth of many of the massive economic development projects, sponsored by the Libyan Jamahiriya, that were being conducted before NATO began its war of aggression and genocide on Libya. If, up to now, you have been puzzled as to why the European countries, Australia, Canda, the U.S., etc., are attacking Libya so viciously, this article will reveal, with total clarity, precisely why they are attacking Libya.
It also reveals precisely why the number one man on earth that they fear is Brother Leader Colonel Muammar Omo Ju Omo Lo Gaddafi. You will see, when reading the article, that this is no mere hyperbole; no exaggeration: Libya is a powerhouse that, through hard work — not empty ideological propaganda–and serious on-the-ground, strategic economic development throughout Africa, was moving fast to create the continent of Africa, in time, as the most powerful continent on earth–a prospect that, for Euro-Western minds, is nothing less than their worse nightmare. This is a long-time fear that goes back to their intellectual mentor and “prophet,” Harvard-based Dr. Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote the book, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy in 1920, warning the “white” world of the coming powerful development of the non-”white” world, and of the “white” world’s coming loss of power, if the “white” world did not act to thwart the rise of the non-”white” world. Stoddard warned:
“The emancipation of brown, Islamic North Africa would inevitably send a sympathetic thrill through every portion of the Dark Continent and would stir both Mohammedan and pagan negroes against white rule.” (You can read The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy for free.)
The “white” neo-colonialists and imperialists of today have not forgotten the warning of their intellectual mentor, Dr. Lothrop Stoddard. And the “sympathic thrill” that Stoddard warned/predicted has already been sent out to every portion of Africa, just as Dr. Stoddard had predicted and feared. And the source of that sympathic thrill, coming out of North Africa, is none other than Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, known and loved all throughout Africa as Omo Ju Omo Lo, “the best of the children of Mother Africa.”
When reading the article, it also becomes crystal clear that Libya, under Colonel Gaddafi, was fast becoming a global economic power house, outside of the economic control of the Euro-Western countries. The Euro-Western nations saw the handwriting on the wall, and decided that it was time to attempt to thwart the progress of the Libyan giant. Mr. Siala, states that, “The Westerners want to maintain Africa in a situation where it will only export raw products and commodities,” rather than develop those raw products for use in Africa and for final export as final goods. Mr. Siala goes on to say,
“For example, when the coffee grown in Uganda is exported to Germany where it is marketed, the surplus remains in Germany. [But] we have funded installations for coffee roasting, grinding and packaging [inside Uganda]. The remuneration for Ugandans went up from 20% to 80%. Needless to say, our policy is conflicting with that of the Europeans. That is an understatement.” Mr. Siala says that Libya also funds rice fields in Uganda, “up to 32 million dollars per project, creating each time 100,000 jobs.”
One project he didn’t mention is the satellite project which freed Africa from a yearly bill of $500,000,000 to Europe, a project intiated by Colonel Gaddafi, and one that infuriated Europe, because Gaddafi had deprived Europe of half-a-billion dollars a year of African money. These are the reasons why, in the Western “news” media, Gaddafi has been consistently described, throughout the years, as “a major thorn in the side of the West.”
Power, greed, racism are all a few of the reasons that NATO is trying to destroy Libya. But their biggest fear–their very biggest fear–is a united Africa–the traditional fear of the “white” nations, as outlined by their intellectual guide, Dr. Lothrop Stoddard. And Colonel Gaddafi is the only African leader today that is calling for a United States of Africa.
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War against Libya: An economic catastrophe for Africa and Europe
One of the motives for the war against Libya is to stop the development of the black continent, to enable the setting up of an AfriCom military base in Cyrenaica and to begin the colonial exploitation of Africa for the benefit of the United States. In order to understand this hidden agenda, Voltaire Network interviewed Mohamed Siala, Co-operation Minister and Manager of Libya’s sovereign wealth fund.
******************************
Voltaire Network: Your country is gas and oil rich. The Libyan Investment Authority manages an accumulated capital estimated at 70 billion dollars. What use are you making of this bonanza?
Mohamed Siala: We possess a significant amount of resources, but they are non renewable. We have therefore set up the Libyan Investment Authority to protect the wealth of future generations, following Norway’s example. A portion of these funds are dedicated to the development of Africa. This means that 6 billion dollars have been invested in African development shares, i.e. agriculture, tourism, commerce, mines, etc…
The remaining funds have been invested in various sectors, countries, currencies all over the world, including the USA and Germany. This, unfortunately, is what enabled them to freeze our assets.
Voltaire Network: Technically, how was the freeze carried out?
Mohamed Siala: The assets freeze is governed by the banking regulations of the country where they are invested. The rule is that they block our bank accounts, but we sometimes can get them unblocked if we take the litigation to the UN Claims Committee and provided we can prove they were destined for specific uses. For example, I have just pleaded for the unfreezing of funds earmarked to pay scholarships to 1200 students that we sent to Malysia. We are trying to do the same for everything that relates to social allowances or the hospitalization expenses of our citizens abroad.
We are sometimes allowed to use funds to buy food or medicine. This is, in principle, our right but many are refusing to unfreeze the necessary funds or are dragging their feet. For example, the Italian State rejects any use of our assets. In Germany, while the State authorizes their use for humanitarian purposes, it is sometimes the banks that refuse to unfreeze the necessary funds. The interpretations of the resolution are entirely different depending on each State. What we demand is a clear rule: what is permitted is authorised and what is not is forbidden. Right now, the interpretation is political and might prevails over right.
Voltaire Network : Is this the only problem your are facing in terms of supplies?
Mohamed Siala : We also have to face the maritime blockade put in place by NATO with no legal basis. Supplies are forbidden or delayed, that includes foodstuff. They are particularly intent on preventing our oil deliveries even if this is not envisaged by the relevant UN resolutions. We’ve had an oil tank stuck in Malta waiting for one month. For each ship, the double use of its cargo is questioned. Oil is destined for civilian vehicles, but NATO objects that it can also be used for army vehicles. We argue that they cannot prohibit its use for ambulances, etc. Anyhow, since the beginning of the conflict, they have prevented all oil deliveries. Now, we depend on foreign refineries for about one third of our supplies. Hence, our present shortage. Theoretically, they are only allowed to inspect the ships to make sure they do not transport arms. In reality, what NATO is enacting is an illegal maritime blockade.
Russian and Chinese ships have been ordered to make a U turn. Their respective States must file a claim before the UN Sanctions Committee to discuss the interpretation of the resolutions. It is an endless and dissuasive procedure. No legal basis allows NATO to behave like this. It abuses its authority, confident that it will go unpunished.
We, however, manage to supply ourselves by land, but this is laughable. It takes one month to truck what can be unloaded in our harbours in one day.
Voltaire Network: Your country has been heavily engaged in infrastructure building, namely the colossal Man-Made River irrigation and water works. Which projects do you currently have in the pipeline?
Mohammad Siala: There is a railway running across the whole of North Africa with the exception of Libya. We would like to complete it so as to achieve a greater integration in the regional economy and energise it. The Chinese are building the Tunisia-Syrte section. The Russians are in charge of the Syrte-Benghazi stretch. Negotiations with Italy were underway for the Benghazi-Egypt connection as well as for the locomotives. Also, we are constructing a North-South transcontinental railroad, starting with the Libya-Chad (N’Djamena) line. These are major investments with an international scope. We thought the G8 would help. It had promised to do so, but nothing came.
We are fierce when it comes to business, and we have used the bidding process to oblige providers to bring down their prices. When Putin came here, he agreed to align the rates of Russian enterprises on those of their Chinese competitors, thus enabling us to diversify the our choice of partners.
Voltaire Network: Now that the country is at war, what is going to happen to these projects ?
All these projects have been interrupted with the freezing of our assets. However, we are continuing with the bidding procedures for the construction of railway lines as we are confident the war is temporary and that works will start again. We are getting ready to proceed with the contracts temporarily interrupted for reasons of “force majeure.”
The war has brought desperation to our partners. The Chinese had signed up for 20 billion worth of contracts here, the Turks 12 billion. Then, come the Italians, the Russians and the French. It was not in their interest to let this aggression take place, and even less to be part of it. Most likely, some of them must have been bribed in compensation, but we don’t know much about it. Some hope to make better profits by conquering our country and helping themselves to reconstruction contracts.
Voltaire Network: What are the consequences of your assets freeze for Africa?
Mohammad Siala: By freezing our assets, NATO also halted our development activities in Africa. The continent can only export raw products. We are investing in Africa so that these products can be processed in Africa and commercialized by Africans. We want to create jobs and keep the surplus in Africa. On one hand, Europeans applaud us as this policy dries out migration fluxes. On the other hand, they are against it since it means having to give up colonial exploitation.
The Westerners want to maintain Africa in a situation where it will only export raw products and commodities.
For example, when the coffee grown in Uganda is exported to Germany where it is marketed, the surplus remains in Germany. We have funded installations for coffee roasting, grinding and packaging. The remuneration for Ugandans went up from 20% to 80%. Needless to say, our policy is conflicting with that of the Europeans. That is an understatement.
We are funding rice fields in Mozambique and Liberia, up to 32 million dollars per project, creating each time 100,000 jobs. We focus on food self-sufficiency for each African state first and on exportation markets second. There is no doubt we are entering into conflict with those who produce and export rice, especially if speculation is at stake.
We are also building roads, for example from Libya across Niger. We have already linked Sudan to Eritrea thus changing drastically the regional economy and opening new development opportunities. It is now possible to ensure the transportation of goods by road and by sea.
Voltaire Network: Can we say that Libya is short on diplomatic alliances but that you have elaborated economic alliances that are protecting you? Can we talk of investment diplomacy?
Mohammad Siala: Yes.
For example, we are funding the construction by the Chinese companies of a 50 million-dollar, 32 Km, canal in Mali for the irrigation of agricultural areas. The freeze of our assets halts important agricultural projects in this country. If this goes on, a food problem will arise quickly and the populations will revert to and speed up migration towards Europe. Finally, Europeans cannot afford to stop our development efforts on the continent. There is no alternative to our policy.
Voltaire Network: Are you using a mechanism enabling you to pay for your orders on the international market in spite of the freeze of your assets?Your country is attacked; I am of course thinking of the purchase of arms and munitions.
Mohammad Siala: We have been resisting for four and a half months. We drew the lessons from the embargo and were ready right from the first day. A lot of States are observing us and are taking similar measures to also protect themselves against imperialism.
The Coalition of the Willing had come to Libya to spare civilians from Gaddafi’s murderous madness. Four months later, the Libyan crowds have deserted “Liberated Benghazi” and are staging gigantic anti-NATO demonstrations. Confronted with an unexpected political reality, the Atlantic armada has been left without a strategy. The Italians have started to pull out while the French are seeking an exit.
The Libyan Government was counting on the presence of 1 million people on 1 July 2011, in Tripoli, to protest against NATO. To the surprise of the authorities as much as for NATO, 1.7 million turned out.
111 days after the beginning of the intervention in Libya, no military solution is in sight and there is a consensus among experts that time is on the Libyan government’s side, barring a fluke or the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi.
On July 7th, the Italian cabinet halved their country’s involvement in the war effort and withdrew its helicopter-carrier. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi declared he had always been against the conflict, but was compelled by Parliament to participate.
On July 10th, French Defense Minister Gérard Longuet referred to a political solution that would involve Gaddafi’s removal to “another room of his palace with another title.” Considering there is no palace left, the first condition is purely rhetorical; as for the second, nobody can make heads or tails of it and it was probably a pathetic way out.
The political and social structures in Libya stem from the authoctonous culture and are beyond the compehension of many Westerners. They are composed of a one-chamber system of participative democracy – which is particularly effective at the local level – in conjunction with a tribal forum, which is devoid of any legislative power but serves to integrate clan solidarities into political life. To this structure must be added “Leader” figure who exerts no legal power, only moral authority. No one is compelled to obey him, but the majority of the people do, just as they would spontaneously obey a senior member of their own family. On the whole, the political system runs smoothly and people display no fear of the police, except on occasions such as a coup attempt or the Abou Salim prison riot, both of which were violently repressed.
Such clarifications ought to shed light on the preposterous character of the war objectives set forth by the Coalition of the Willing.
Officially, the intervention of the Coalition was carried out in compliance with a Security Council decision to protect civilian victims from a massive crackdown. However, at present, the Libyan people are convinced that such a crackdown never took place and that the Libyan air force never attacked any residential area either in Benghazi or in Tripoli. That portion of the population who believed at first the information relayed through international television networks now thinks very differently. In the meantime, people have had the chance to obtain direct testimonies from family and friends scattered throughout the country and have reached the conclusion that it was all a disinformation campaign.
On this and other issues, world opinion is divided between those who believe the US version and those who do not. As far as I am concerned, I currently reside in a Tripoli neighborhood reputed for its hostility towards Gaddafi, which allegedly revolted against him and was bombarded by the national air force at the beginning of the conflict. I am in a position to attest that there is absolutely no evidence of such events … except for a charred vehicle. The only signs of any bombings concern government buildings which were destroyed by NATO missiles at a later stage.
Be that as it may, the principal NATO leaders have openly evoked another aim of this war, which certain members of the Coalition appear reluctant to endorse: Col. Gaddafi’s resignation, a euphemism for “regime change“. This has opened the door to a realm of confusion. On one hand, such a requirement has no legal foundation under the relevant UN resolutions nor is it in any way linked to the declared objective of protecting civilian populations. On the other hand, Col. Gaddafi’s resignation is neither here nor there since he does not exercise an institutional function, but only a moral authority derived from the social, and not political, structures. Finally, by what right are NATO members standing in the way of a democratic process and pretend to decide for the Libyan people that one of its leaders must be removed?
This confusion in fact reveals that the war is driven by unavowed motives which are not shared by all the members of the Coalition of the Willing.
The principle of simultaneously attacking Libya and Syria was rubberstamped by the US Government in the week that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was publicly announced for the first time by John Bolton, then Under-Secretary of State, in his 6 May 2002 speech entitled “Beyond the Axis of Evil“. It was also subsequently confirmed by General Wesley Clark during a famous television interview on 2 March 2007, during which the former NATO chief presented the list of countries slated for successive US attacks over the coming years.
Within the framework of their strategy for “Remodeling the Greater Middle East“, the Straussians [1] had planned to start by attacking Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, then to extend the remodeling process to the Levant and North Africa by attacking Libya, Syria and Lebanon and, in the third stage, to take on Somalia and Sudan with a view to remodeling East Africa.
The attack against Iran having been deferred for obvious military considerations, they fast-forwarded to the second stage irrespective of the events in Benghazi, whether real or imaginary. The Coalition of the Willing is bogged down in an adventure that it did not want and which escapes its control.
The US strategy, put on track by France and the United Kingdom – again partners like in the good old days of the Suez expedition –, rests on a particularly acute analysis of the Libyan tribal system. Knowing that the members of certain tribes – particularly the Warfalla – had been barred from occupying high-ranking positions ever since the aborted coup of 1993, NATO was to fuel their frustrations, arm and use them as a lever to overthrow the regime and put in place a pro-western government. According to Silvio Berlusconi, during a meeting of allied members held on 19 March, Messrs. Sarkozy and Cameron allegedly stated that “the war would come to an end when, as was anticipated, the Tripoli population would rise up against the current regime“.
This strategy reached its zenith on 27 April when 61 tribal chiefs launched an appeal in favor of the National Transitional Council. It should be noted that already then it was no longer of question of massacres actually attributed to the “regime“, both in Beghazi and Tripoli, but of its intention to perpetrate them. The cosigners of the appeal thanked France and the European Union for having prevented a carnage foretold, not for having halted one in the making.
Since the appeal, in a continuous and uninterrupted manner, the tribes in the opposition have rallied around the government of Tripoli and their respective chiefs have vowed allegiance to Muammar Gaddafi in public. In reality, this process had already started much earlier and was showcased on 8 March when the all the tribal chief went to pay tribute to the Libyan leader at the Hotel Rixos, in the midst of western journalists transformed into human shields and dumbfounded by this new provocation.
This situation can easily be explained : Gaddafi’s internal opposition had no motive for overthrowing the regime before the Benghazi incidents. The 27 April appeal was based on information that the authors now realize was tainted. As a result, each of them has joined the government in the struggle against foreign aggression. According to the Islamic culture, those rebels who demonstrated their sincerity were automatically pardoned and incorporated in the national forces.
For the purposes of this analysis, it makes no difference whether the repressive methods attributed to the Gaddafi regime is a historical fact or a fabrication of western propaganda. What matters is to know what is the stance of the Libyans as a soverign people at present.
At this point, a reminder about the balance of political power is called for. The National Transitional Council (NTC) has been incapable of constituting a social base. Its provisional capital Benghazi used to be a city of 800 000 inhabitants. In February, hundreds of thousands turned out to celebrate its creation. Today, the “city liberated by the rebels” and “protected by NATO” is virtually a lifeless agglomeration with barely 15 000 inhabitants left, most of whom are people who don’t have the means to leave. The Benghazis did not flee the fighting; they fled from the new regime.
On the contrary, the “Gaddafi regime” was capable of mobilizing 1.7 million people for a rally in Tripoli on 1 July and has recently pledged to get involved in the organization of regional demonstrations every Friday. Last week, more than 400 000 rallied in Sabha (in the South) and a similar crowd was expected to gather in Az Yawiyah (in the West). It should be noted that these demonstrations are staged against NATO which has so far killed more than one thousand of their compatriots, destroyed the country’s non-oil infrastructures and stopped all supplies through a naval blockade. They center around the support for Gaddafi as an anti-colonialist leader, but don’t necessarily signify a retroactive approval of all his policies.
In the final analysis, the Libyan people have pronounced themselves. For them, NATO did not come to protect them but to conquer their country. It is Gaddafi who protects them against Western aggression.
Under the circumstances, NATO is devoid of a strategy. Not even a “Plan B”. Nothing. NTC defections are so massive that, according to most experts, the number of “rebel forces” has dropped to between 800 and 1 000 combatants, armed to the teeth by NATO, but incapable of playing a significant role in the absence of popular support. It is very likely that there are more NATO Special Forces commandos on the ground than the number of Libyan combatants they are supposed to oversee.
The Italian retreat and the declarations of the French Defense Minister are not surprising. In spite of its military fire power without precedent in History, the NATO armada has lost this war. Not on the military level of course, but because it forgot that “war is the continuation of politics by other means” and that it was off the mark politically. The shrieks from Washington, which readily reprimanded the French minister who refuses to lose face, will not make the slightest difference.
In this photo taken on a government-organized tour, people take part in a rally as seen through a window from a partially destroyed government building that was damaged during fighting with rebel forces earlier in the year, in the town of Zawiya, roughly 50 km (30 miles) west of Tripoli, Libya, Saturday, July 16, 2011
July 16, 2011
ZAWIYA, Libya (AP) — Libya’s embattled leader Moammar Gadhafi said Saturday his country will never surrender in the face of assaults by rebels and a NATO air campaign.
In an audio address directed at the city of Zawiya where thousands demonstrated their support, Gadhafi promised that Libya would keep fighting.
“After we gave our children as martyrs, we can’t backtrack, or surrender or give up or move an inch,” he said, his voice booming over loudspeakers in the center of town. “Rest assured in your tombs, our martyrs, we will not betray you ever.”
The speech was the third in as many days, each addressing inhabitants of a town under his control while thousands chanted their support for the country’s leader of the past 41 years.
In his speech, also broadcast on national television, Gadhafi said the NATO airstrikes on Libya must stop to save civilian lives.
The rally was staged in the center of Zawiya, a city once under rebel control in the early weeks of the revolt against Gadhafi’s rule and only taken back after a brutal battle.
The center of the city still bore scars of the fighting, with burned out and shattered buildings overlooking the cheering crowds swathed in green, Libya’s national color.
“Here is Zawiya. Where are the … traitors and the agents that you depended on? Where are those you bought with your money, you brainwashed?” he asked, addressing NATO.
“Zawiya can’t be ruled by agents, non-believers, and traitors who are seeking help from the cross,” he added.
The speeches and rallies come after Libya’s main opposition group was recognized by more than 30 nations, including the U.S., as Libya’s legitimate government.
Friday’s decision potentially frees up billions of dollars in cash that the rebels urgently need.
Libya’s civil war has fallen into a stalemate since the mass uprising seeking to oust ruler Gadhafi broke out in mid-February. Rebels have set up an interim administration in the eastern city of Benghazi and seized control of the port city of Misrata and much of the western Nafusa mountain range.
Gadhafi controls the rest from his stronghold in the capital Tripoli.
But rebel forces — mostly volunteers armed with captured weapons — have failed to make significant advances recently, even with NATO bombing Gadhafi’s troops under a U.N. mandate to protect civilians.
On Saturday 10 rebels were killed in their latest advance on the strategic oil town of Brega. Rebel fighters said they were sweeping the outskirts for land mines so they could move in.
Rebels have been trying to take the town with its large gas and oil storage facilities for weeks.
Libyan long-time ruler Muammar Gaddafi remains defiant, saying his regime will not collapse under pressure from NATO airstrikes.
“The regime in Libya will not fall — it is based on the people, not on Gaddafi. NATO is wrong if it thinks it can topple the regime of this country,” Gaddafi was quoted by AFP as saying on Friday.
He made the remarks in an audio message relayed to thousands of supporters in Sabha, some 750 kilometers (450 miles) south of Tripoli.
“This gathering of more than a million people is a new message to Europe, to the crusaders and colonialists: the regime does not belong to Gaddafi, it is the people’s regime and the people will not give up an inch of its land or bow down to invaders” Gaddafi added.
The Libyan ruler once again threatened to carry out retaliatory attacks on Europe for waging a war against Libya but stated a chance will be given to European countries to “come to their senses.”
He reiterated that resistance is the only option in front of Libyans and urged NATO to halt attacks on his troops. He added that the fate of Libyan people should be left to their own decisions.
Gaddafi said the Western powers seeking to exploit Libya’s oil are creating trouble for the Libyan people.
(RussiaToday) – Moscow has raised concern over France supplying weapons to Libyan rebels and over ambigious interpretations of the UN Security Council resolution on Libya. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has also once again said that the sides in the Syrian conflict should resolve their differences through dialogue only. Investigative journalist Webster Tarpley, who’s in Tripoli, shared his views with RT.
(RussiaToday) – Libya is simply the most recent issue, but look at the 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan and the 50,000 in Iraq, not to mention even more under the radar in Pakistan. Still, the NATO assault is continuing in Libya and 72% of Americans, according to the polls, are tired of all the military initiatives the US is involved with and think the country should withdraw.
All of this during such tough times for the country’s economy while jobs are cut, yet the Pentagon’s budgets is growing.RT blogger and US was veteran Jake Diliberto joins Kristine Frazao in the studio to share his experience and opinion on what’s going on inside and outside the country.
Published: 31 May, 2011, 14:28 Kabul: Kabul on May 31, 2011 (AFP Photo / Shah Marai)
Kabul: Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks during a press conference at the Presidential palace in Kabul on May 31, 2011 (AFP Photo / Shah Marai)
The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, warned that Kabul may view the NATO-led coalition as an occupying force, recalling the Afghan people’s experience in dealing with occupants, unless NATO stops killing civilians. The harsh words came on Tuesday in response to an aerial strike, which killed at least nine people in the southern Helmand province last week, most of them children. “NATO must learn that air strikes on Afghan homes are not allowed and that Afghan people have no tolerance for that anymore,” Karzai told reporters at a news conference in Kabul. “If they don’t stop air strikes on Afghan homes, their presence in Afghanistan will be considered as an occupying force and against the will of the Afghani people.” Karzai stressed that he had warned the NATO command after similar incidents “a hundred times” and that the situation must now change. NATO responded to Karzai’s statements on Tuesday, saying the aerial strikes will not stop because “they continue to be necessary,” Associated Press reported. Spokeswoman for the alliance Oana Lungescu said the Afghan president’s concerns are taken very seriously and that NATO makes every effort to avoid civilian casualties. Earlier on Monday the command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) expressed its condolences over the civilian deaths in the Saturday air strike. Major General John Toolan, ISAF commander for south-western Afghanistan, stressed that the strike was aimed at a compound, where Taliban gunmen were hiding and that presence of civilians there was not known to the NATO troops until after the attack. The ISAF routinely uses air strikes in their anti-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. The tactics helps the coalition minimize its own casualties, but occasionally leads to civilian deaths. Both Kabul and Islamabad have been increasingly vocal about their citizens dying in NATO’s bombings.
The over 8-year war/occupation in Iraq, based on false pretenses, has cost the lives of 4,452 U.S. soldiers and over a million Iraqi civilians.
Among them were Samar Hassan’s parents. A front page article in the New York Times (5/7/11) read “The image of Samar, then 5 years old, screaming and splattered in blood after American soldiers opened fire on her family’s car in the northern town of Tal Afar in January 2005, illuminated the horror of civilian casualties.” Now 12-year-old Samar lives on the outskirts of Mosul with relatives. The trauma left Samar and her siblings wounded psychologically. Ali, Samar’s brother-in-law, said, “I’ve taken them many times to the hospital, where they get pills” for emotional problems.
He says Samar’s 8-year-old brother, Muhammad, talks to himself when he is alone. “When we go out and see a family, they get sad,” he said. Sometimes he finds the children in a room together, crying. “When they remember the accident, it’s like they just died.”
Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division for Human Rights Watch, remembers crying when she first saw the photo in a newspaper, and having to explain the image to her children.
“At the time, I thought it captured perfectly the horrors of the war that was not really understood by Americans,” she said. “Everything in that girl’s face symbolized what I felt all Iraqis must feel.” She added, “I wonder what life will be like for this girl?”
Samar had never seen the picture until this week, but she said she understood that it showed the world “the sad thing that is happening in Iraq.”
Near the end of the interview, she pointed to a family photograph on the wall. “I always dream about my father and mother and brother,” she said.
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The International Criminal Court chief prosecutor has announced that he is seeking the arrest of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for crimes against humanity, purporting to have evidence of his “widespread and systematic attacks on unarmed Libyan civilians”. In the second chapter of his study on the War on Libya, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya dismantles the double standards and media fabrications that helped to sell the war, the same ones which are now likely to constitute the “evidence” for the ICC charges being brought against Gaddafi.
The starting epicentre of the violence in Libya was Benghazi, which is located within the boundaries of the coastal region of Cyrenaica or Barqa. [1] According to the U.S. government’s own sources:
On the evening of February 15, [2011] the […] demonstrations began when several hundred people gathered in front of the Benghazi police headquarters to protest the arrest of attorney and human rights activist Fethi Tarbel. As the February 17 [2011] “day of rage” neared, protests escalated in Benghazi and other cities despite reported police attempts at dispersion with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons. There were multiple reports of protestors setting police and other government buildings on fire. [2]
The maelstrom irrupted in Benghazi after a group of protesters rushed a local barrack to take the weapons in the armoury. When this happened, the Libyan forces in the local garrison reacted by firing upon the protesters. From there the situation in Benghazi and Libya escalated and things spiralled out of control.
A pause is in order and has to be taken here. This is where critical analysis is needed. There are two ways to perceive the events in Benghazi. One perspective is from the standpoint of a revolutionary and the other is from the perspective of the state and the soldiers. If all biases are put aside both perspectives will have their adherents.
It must be stated that the Libyan authorities for years have oppressed political opposition and that all humans have a natural right to resist tyranny. [3] On the other hand it has to be understood that in any country, including the United States and Britain, soldiers and security forces will fire on any of their own citizens that attack a military or police compound with the intention of taking its arms. [4] In this sense the events in Libya and Egypt, as well as the reaction of the U.S. and the E.U., can also be contrasted against one another.
The legitimacy of these actions can be argued over and questioned from both sides. The point here is not the legitimacy of what happened. The point here is that it must be emphasized clearly that all the governments that criticized Tripoli are hypocritical. These governments are hypocritical, because they would respond very similarly, if not identically, had this occurred in one of their states. These same governments would also support any country that would have reacted like this had that country been a proxy or ally. This is why the violence in Bahrain, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia are ignored and Israel is given a green light for its crimes against humanity.
There is no monopoly on violence at the level of the state. The Kent State University Massacre of May 4, 1970, when peaceful anti-war student protesters in Ohio were killed by the U.S. National Guard, is proof of this. One only needs to look at the reactions of the White House, London, and the E.U. towards the atrocities in Bahrain against an unarmed civilian population fighting for elementary human rights to see how phony their crocodile tears and postures are. It is also the U.S. that arranged for the Al-Sauds to intervene militarily into Bahrain and to militarily suppress the Bahraini people.
Double-Standards about Libya and Bahrain and other Arab Dictatorships
In Egypt, the U.S. and the E.U. called for restraint from both the protesters and the Mubarak regime and asked for both sides to negotiate with one another. The calls for restraint were pure hypocrisy. The U.S. and the E.U. made the calls for restraint to both sides even though the Egyptian protesters were unarmed and peaceful and the Mubarak regime was the side that was using violence and was the solely armed party for most the conflict. Calls of restraint should have been made only to the Egyptian regime and not to the predominately peaceful unarmed protesters. The cases in Bahrain and Tunisia are not much different either.
A totally different attitude has been applied by the U.S. and the E.U. to Libya than the attitude that has been applied to Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the corrupt Palestinian Authority. No sanctions were applied against the authorities in Bahrain by the U.S. and the E.U. when the Bahraini military without warning blatantly attacked peaceful protesters in Manama’s Pearl Square. The Bahraini protesters were completely peaceful, but this did not stop the ruling Al-Khalifas from ordering indiscriminate live firings on the crowds of Bahraini protesters.
In Bahrain a reign of terror and murder has been unleashed on the Bahraini people by the Al-Khalifas and the Al-Sauds, which has merely been ignored by the E.U. and Washington. A whole population is being systematically terrorized by an unwanted, hated, and foreign-imposed ruling family. Hospitals and children have been brutally attacked. Doctors and union leaders have been killed. Mosques have been bulldozed to the ground and an entire population has been put into detention. Bahrain is a second Palestine. Ironically, the Al-Khalifas have been thanked by Washington, NATO, and the leaders of the E.U. for joining the coalition against the Libyans. The Al-Khalifa regime has also been presented by the U.S. and the E.U. as a model Arab government.
In a blatant act of hypocrisy, the regimes of the Arab petro-sheikhdoms, which pushed forward an Arab League demand for a no-fly zone over Libya, have been presented as stewards and representatives of the Arab masses by Hillary Clinton and E.U. leaders. [5] How are they representatives of the Arab peoples, Arab choices, or even Arab popular opinion? The Arab Gulf (Khaliji) emirs are the anti-thesis of popular representation.
In reality these Arab sheikhdoms are a few individuals who act as they like and are not representative of any of the views of their own citizens in any way. So it is extremely phony and two-faced when Hillary Clinton, Monsieur Sarkozy, and David Cameron present these Arab sheikdoms as representing the Arab people and of Arab positions. These Arab despots are not the representatives of the sentiments of Arabdom, they only represent themselves and repress real Arab sentiments.
In contrast to the verbal condemnations and sanctions against Libya, no actions were taken against the Al-Khalifas in Bahrain. While the jet attack claims against Libyans were fabricated, the evidence of indiscriminate firing on protesters – including by tanks – were verified by video footage from within Bahrain and by human rights groups. The reactions to Bahrain and Libya and the media reports about both Arab countries have been diametrically opposed.
Double-Standards about Mercenaries
Most of the forces used by the Al-Khalifahs in Bahrain are foreigners and mercenaries. This includes foreign military personnel from both Jordan and Saudi Arabia. As mentioned earlier, the Al-Sauds even sent military reinforcements to Bahrain to crush the civilian protests. Yet, there has been a systematic and exaggerated emphasis placed on Qaddafi’s foreign mercenaries. Has the use of foreign mercenaries in Bahrain been highlighted? The answer is no.
Moreover, the U.S., Britain, France, and their allies are no in any position based on moral grounds to criticize Tripoli for using mercenaries. All these powers actively and openly use and employ mercenaries – far more than Libya – under the terminologies of private contractors or security firms. Britain even has a whole brigade of mercenaries, the Brigade of Gurkhas, which even trains with U.S. forces. The French Foreign Legion is also a group of foreign soldiers employed by Paris. Washington itself is the largest employer of mercenaries and bounty hunters on the planet.
This is also the reason that the sixth section of the U.N. sanctions resolution 1970 (Peace and Security in Africa) passed against Tripoli by the U.N. Security Council specifically prevents mercenaries from countries that are not signatories to the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) from being prosecuted. [6] Additionally, this is tied to British and U.S. plans to send an army of mercenaries into Libya as part of their future ground operations. Resolution 1970’s Article 6 states:
Decides that nationals, current or former officials or personnel from a State outside the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya which is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of that State for all alleged acts or omissions arising out of or related to operations in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya established or authorized by the Council, unless such exclusive jurisdiction has been expressly waived by the State[.] [7]
The Daily Telegraph in Britain has also pointed this out too in an informative news commentary that exposes the double-standards being applied under the name of international justice and humanitarianism. It is as follows:
The key paragraph said that anyone from a non-ICC country alleged to have committed crimes in Libya would “be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction” of their own country. It was inserted despite Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, saying that all those “who slaughter civilians” would “be held personally accountable”.
Speaking to reporters outside the council chamber, Gerard Araud, the French UN ambassador, described the paragraph as “a red line for the United States”, meaning American diplomats had been ordered by their bosses in Washington to secure it. “It was a deal-breaker, and that’s the reason we accepted this text to have the unanimity of the council,” said [Gerard] Araud. [8]
Resolution 1970 also puts an arms embargo on Tripoli and makes a whole set of demands from Libya that none of the other Arab states that are oppressing their populations have been asked to comply with. Even when reports of killings by government forces were being made, nothing of the sort was applied to Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, or Bahrain.
In another case of double-standards and a mockery, the Arab League has also suspended Libya from the pan-Arab organization due to the use of violence. The majority of the members of the Arab League, from the Palestinian Authority to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have brutally used violence against peaceful protesters even while they were criticizing Libya. When other Arab leaders are also using force to suppress their own citizens they are being given a platform by the U.S. and the E.U. to spurn Libya. Using a phrase used by Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iraqis to describe the behaviour of the Arab sheikhdoms and presidential dictatorships against there countries, it can be said that another “Arab conspiracy” is taking place. Libya is being betrayed, just as the corrupt heads of the members of the Arab League betrayed Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.
Fuelling the Flames: Arming Both Sides
In Libya, the U.S. and its E.U. partners are fanning the flames of sedition. A prolonged civil war is in their interest. It allows them to weaken Libya as a state and it has allowed them to manipulate global public opinion in a managed discourse favouring interventionism. Both deception and the tactics of divide and conquer are at play. Simply stated, the U.S. and the E.U. are playing both sides. They have provided material support to both sides. They first supported Qaddafi through military hardware and training that lasted up until the start of 2011, while they now support the forces opposed to Qaddafi. If they refer to Libya as a “killing field” then it should be pointed it out that it is a “killing field” that they created and made possible.
Washington has had a hand in all of the violence in Libya. Neither the Bush Jr. Administration nor the Obama Administration have shied away from training the Libyan military:
For FY2010, the Obama Administration requested $350,000 in International Military Education and Training (IMET) funding for Libya to “support education and training of Libyan security forces, creating vital linkages with Libyan officers after a 35-year break in contact.” Participation in the IMET program also makes the Libyan government eligible to purchase additional U.S. military training at a reduced cost. The Bush Administration’s FY2009 request for IMET funding indicated that “the Government of Libya would pay for additional training and education with national funds.” However, no IMET funding was provided in FY2009, according to State Department budget documents.
The Obama Administration also requested Foreign Military Financing assistance for Libya for the first time in FY2010, with the goal of providing assistance to the Libyan Air Force in developing its air transport capabilities and to the Libyan Coast Guard in improving its coastal patrol and search and rescue operations. FY2011 FMF assistance is being requested to support Libyan participation in a program that assists countries seeking to maintain and upgrade their U.S.-made C-130 air transport fleets. [9]
London’s arms sales to Qaddafi’s government have also been significant: “According to the Department for Business Innovation [and] Skills (BIS), £181.7 million (Dh1.09 billion)-worth of arms export licences were granted from [Britain] to Libya in the third quarter of 2010 — up from £22 million in second quarter.” [10] On the basis of the agreements between Tony Blair and Colonel Qaddafi, Britain was even training members of the Libyan police force, including a major and a brigadier, at Huddersfield University in West Yorkshire during the start of the conflict in Libya. [11]
The double-standards being applied by these powers are visible in every nuance and fabric of their actions. The Associated Press (AP) unwittingly points this out in a report summing up the London Conference on Libya:
Muammar Gaddafi and Franco Frattini in friendlier times.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said negotiations on securing Gadhafi’s exit were being conducted with “absolute discretion” and that there were options on the table that hadn’t yet been formalized.
“What is indispensable is that there be countries that are willing to welcome Gadhafi and his family, obviously to end this situation which otherwise could go on for some time,” he said.
Frattini had said earlier that he hoped some nation would offer a proposal.
But the Italian diplomat insisted there was no option of immunity for Gadhafi. “We cannot promise him a ‘safe-conduct’ pass,” he stressed. [12]
While condemning Qaddafi, saying that he will have no “immunity,” they also are talking about a “safe-haven” where he will be immune. Furthermore, while the British have said that they know very little about the Transitional Council in Benghazi, Admiral James Stavridis has told the U.S. Armed Service Committee that he is, either as the head of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) or NATO, very well aware of the composure of the opposition. [13] This is contradictory; in this case London says one thing, but the head of military operations for NATO says something else.
At the same time the U.S., Britain, and their allies have left open an option to even betray the Transitional Council. This is typical foreign policy behaviour for London, Washington, and their allies. William Hague has hinted about this: “‘We [meaning Britain, the U.S., and their allies] must never be complacent about the way events like this could turn out,’ Hague said. ‘If things go wrong in the region on a sustained basis, there could be new opportunities for terrorism or extremism.’” [14] Thus, the spectre of Al-Qaeda and its ties to the Transitional Council is starting to emerge in the picture and discourse.
The Propaganda War: Media Distortion about Libya
Perception management has been used to start the war against Libya and to garnish support for the aggression against Libya. This is part of a tradition that the Pentagon and NATO have followed. All the major wars the U.S. has fought in have involved major media lies. In Vietnam there was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in Yugoslavia the claims of ethnic genocide, in Afghanistan the tragic events of 9/11 (September 11, 2011), and in Iraq the lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and cooperation between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden. The mainstream media has been the first line of attack in these wars of aggression.
In regards to Iraq, the U.S. government brought a false witness to the U.S. Congress who while pretending to be a Kuwaiti nurse testified that Iraqi soldiers threw 312 Kuwaiti babies out of incubators to die. [15] This was used to galvanize public opinion in the U.S. in order to go to war with Iraq in 1991. The infamous Nurse Nayirah testimony was given by Nijrah (Nayirah) Al-Sabah the daughter of the Kuwaiti envoy to Washington. She was even given acting lessons by a public relations (P.R.) firm before her false testimony, which George H. Bush Sr. referred to when justifying going to war with Iraq. [16]
The Fabricated Jet Attacks on Civilians
At the end of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was demonized after he put down rebellions that were instigated by the U.S. and its allies. Now Qaddafi is presented like Saddam Hussein as a monster killing his own people. The justification for establishing the no-fly zones over Libya, which in effect was a smokescreen for launching an undeclared war, were the media claims that Libyan military jets were attacking civilian protesters. The Financial Times is worth quoting to illustrate how the media claims were used to argue for military intervention by NATO leaders:
“We must not tolerate this regime using military force [referring to the the jet attacks] against its own people,” David Cameron, [the British] prime minister, said. “In that context I have asked the Ministry of Defence and the Chief of the Defence Staff to work with our allies on plans for a military no-fly zone.” [17]
U.S. and E.U. officials made hard verbal condemnations against Colonel Qaddafi when these reports about jets firing on protesters were made. There is nothing that corroborates this. The reports turned out to be false like the claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These types of criminal fabrications should not be allowed to go unpunished either.
The Russian military was monitoring Libya from space and saw no signs of jet attacks on civilians. [18] No satellite evidence even showed damage caused by jets. Nor was one piece of video evidence produced about this, while all sorts of footage had been coming out of Libya. The Pentagon, the E.U., and NATO all had access to the same satellite technology and intelligence to verify if such attacks were made, which means that they knew the reports were false.
Libyan military planes only got involved later on during the conflict during missions to bomb ammunition depots to prevent the rebels from getting arms. This was fairly later in the conflict and after the media claims were made that jets were firing on protesters. Libyan air power was also virtually non-existent before and after the foreign intervention. Admiral Locklear, who is the U.S. Navy commander that led the attacks at the onset of the war, even told reporters that “[Libya’s] air force before coalition operations was ‘not in good repair,’ and that [Libya’s] tactical capability consisted of several dozen helicopters.” Despite this reality, Libyan air power was systematically portrayed as a major threat to Libyan civilians.
Who is behind the Massacres and Acts of Brutality in Libya?
Stories were also presented that Libyan forces were killing individuals from within their own ranks that refused to fight. Video evidence from within Libya actually proved that video footage presented alongside these reports about Libya was spun. It was not the Libyan forces that killed these men, but elements within the Libyan opposition. Videos showing torture and brutal treatment of civilians, including a small boy, by elements from within the rebel fighters are also appearing.
The Salvador option is being used in Libya. Speculatively, these elements were probably working as foreign agents. Footage has surfaced of a small boy in a Libyan hospital being helped by doctors after he was tortured. The doctors are looking at the little boy who has a thin pole shoved through his body, going through from near his penis all the way through to his left shoulder. The video demonstrates something very important. What happened to the little boy was not the work of any laymen. These were individuals who had to be trained in torture, because of the way the pole was sent through the body of the little boy who was not killed by the incision. This points to actors outside of Libya. These cases of torture resemble the brutal cases and murders that were being carried out in El Salvador and later in Anglo-American occupied Iraq.
British “undercover soldiers” caught driving booby trapped car – Basra (Iraq), 19 September 2005.
It has to also be emphasized that Britain sent commandos into Iraq that were disguised as local Arabs to bomb local mosques and areas with civilians in order to create sectarian fighting amongst the Iraqis. [19] It is not beyond the realm of possibility that this is also being replicated amongst the Libyans and other Arab peoples in order to divide them and to fuel civil strife. Nor should the doctored pictures made by Britain and the U.S. about Iraqis greeting Anglo-American forces as liberators be forgotten either.
The Racist Victimization of Black Libyans by the Mainstream Media
Although Qaddafi has used mercenaries from Europe and Africa, racist and exaggerated reports about mercenaries were inseminated globally about the so-called “African mercenaries.” Many members of the Libyan military and the Libyan general population were presented as foreigners from other African countries. In reality, many Libyans are black-skinned.
Being an Arab does not ascribe one to any particular phenotype or physical look, because it is the use of the Arabic language that defines the Arab identity. Arabs can be black-skinned or of a Mediterranean complexion or of a fair-skinned complexion with blond hair. The same is true about being a Berber. This is also very true of all Libyans and other North Africans.
Black Libyan soldier murdered by the rebels.
In Libya many Libyans are black-skinned. They are not foreigners or mercenaries. Amongst the Negroid Libyans are the Haratins (Harratins) and the Tuareg people (Kel Tamajaq or Kel Tamashq) in the south. These Libyans are as Libyan as the other inhabitants of the country. Although there are foreign mercenaries in Libya, what the outside media managed to do was present footage of some of these black-skinned Libyans serving in the Libyan military and police forces under the label of foreign mercenaries. This was done to demonize Qaddafi and to create an atmosphere for intervention, because Qaddafi was presented as killing his people with a massive army of African mercenaries. In additions, the plight and murder of the scores of “Black Libyans” or foreign workers from sub-Sahara(n) Africa, which in many cases were barbarically decapitated and mutilated, have been ignored and not even covered by the same media outlets that talked about Qaddafi using African mercenaries.
Misinformation about the Momentum of Anti-Qaddafi Protests
Leading up to the war on Libya, all sorts of inaccurate reports were made by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Sky News, CNN, and other major networks. For example Al Jazeera reported that Shokri Ghanem, a top energy official in Libya, had fled Libya, but Reuters confirmed that this was not true. [20] Ghamen protested to Al Jazeera’s misreporting in an interview with Reuters: “‘This is not true, I am in my office and I will be on TV in a few minutes’ Ghamen said by telephone.” [21]
At the very outset of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq the North America media almost daily that U.S. tanks were at near the gates of Baghdad. Something similar has been reported about Libya in regards to the anti-Qaddafi protests. Incorrect reports were also made about cities that had fallen, but in reality old videos were being aired or footage of other Libyan cities were being shown on network television.
Other reports claimed that there was major fighting in Tripoli and parts of it had fallen, when Tripoli was actually peaceful for days. Later on, the words “claim” and “claimed” were systematically used when these reports were made in an effort to vindicate distorted or incorrect information. On February 26, 2011 reports were made claiming that all the main Libyan cities where no longer under the control of the Libyan government. This was false. Cities like Sabha (in central Libya), Sirte/Surt (on the coastal mid-point of Libya), Ghat (on the southern border with Algeria), Al-Jufra, Al-Azizya (close to Tripoli), and Tripoli itself were all under the control of Qaddafi’s government. [22] Overall the original coverage of the events in Libya grossly blew the violence out of proportion in order to justify the agenda of foreign intervention. Like the case of Iraq, with time the people of the world will realize this, but will there those who helped create these fabricated reports be held accountable for starting and supporting a war?
The Propaganda War within Libya
It should, however, be cautioned that a propaganda war is being fought by multiple sides. The U.S. and its allies have not held the solitary monopoly on propaganda. There are four major sides to the media war. The Libyan government in Tripoli and the Benghazi-based Transitional Council have also been involved in “perception management.” Aside from the foreign-based mainstream media there are two distinct sides of the media war within Libya. At the start of the NATO intervention in North Africa, the Libyan government in Tripoli reported that French and Qatari fighter jets were shot down. The Libyan government exhibited on Jamahiriya News what it claimed were three downed French and two downed Qatari pilots. The news came during the opening salvos of the war and it was brief and was never discussed afterward. [23] Additionally, the Libyan government and the Libyan Jamahiriya Broadcasting Corporation also tried to present the capture of an Italian civilian vessel as a military victory by Libya against Italy and NATO.
The Transitional Council too has been waging an intense propaganda war. With the help of Qatar the Transitional Council has established its own television and news channel. [24] This is how the Los Angeles Times described the news sources run by the Transitional Council:
“It’s not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [Mohammed G.] Fannoush [the former librarian who runs the media for the Transitional Council] helpfully pointed out [in his own words], there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:
“No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary (at least until the tyrant in Tripoli is deposed).
No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That’s [Qaddafi’s] propaganda.)” [25]
Moreover, Fannoush himself as the head of the opposition media acknowledged to the Los Angeles Times that the media in Benghazi serves as a mouthpiece for the Transitional Council. [26] The New York Times, which has predominately been supportive of the Transitional Council has been more blunt about the Transitional Council’s credibility: “[L]ike the chiefs of the Libyan state news media, the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric [acts].” [27]
The Transitional Council’s forces have even detained and interrogated Russian journalists. This is because of the generally unfavourable coverage of the NATO war in Libya by Russian journalists. Two reporters from Komsomolskaya Pravda and three television journalists from NTV, which is owned by Gazprom, were abducted and released in early-April 2011 by the Transitional Council. [28]
The Transitional Council Leadership Always Supported Military Intervention
Contradicting statements are not only being made by the U.S. government and Western European governments. The self-appointed figures of the Benghazi-based Transitional Council opposed to Qaddafi are also making contradictory statements. The Transitional Council has been described as being similar to Qaddafi’s regime, because “the operation around the rebel council is rife with family ties.” [29] Moreover, the Transitional Council’s claims against Qaddafi are also similar to those made by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress against Saddam Hussein.
Take for example the position of General Abdul Fatah Al-Yunis (Al-Younis), Qaddafi’s interior minister who defected. General Al-Yunis has said: “[H]e believed that the [W]est should be ready to launch airstrikes against Colonel Gaddafi’s palace in Tripoli to prevent him [from] attacking the Libyan people with chemical weapons or causing terrible casualties in some other way. He [also said that he] was also in favour of establishing an international no-fly zone as soon as possible.” [30]
More importantly, there is a huge divide between the Transitional Council and the Libyans they purportedly represent. In Benghazi and its environs there were English posters and signs in English intended for foreing media cameras, saying “No Foreign Intervention,” “Libyan People Can Manage it Alone,” and “No To Foreign Military Intervention” as a message representing popular sentiment amongst the Libyan people on the anti-Qaddafi side. Wide sentiment against the U.S. and Britain in particular also existed in Benghazi and the region of Barqa.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Libya
Despite what media sources from outside Libya were claiming at the outset of the revolt in Libya, Qaddafi’s back was not against the wall. He controlled most the country and a majority of the population, specifically in the western and southern parts of Libya, still supported him for a multitude of reasons. Hereto, Qaddafi still has wide support within the security and military apparatus of his country, not to mention his own tribe, militias, and the common people of Tripoli.
According to this author, the media has also distored Qaddafi’s latest message about being “in a place they can’t reach him.” He was not referring to a physical place; he was talking about the hearts of the Libyan people.
What the war against Libya has done is widen Qaddafi’s base of support. Patriotism has been a huge factor. Many good people who opposed Qaddafi at one point or another have united and locked ranks with Qaddafi and his regime. They have done this, because they believe that they have to stand united to save Libya from falling prey to the U.S. and its coalition and becoming a new and divided colony. To them Qaddafi is not the real target; Libya and Africa are the real targets.
In a manner of speaking the good, the bad, and the ugly have been united under the Libyan regime’s ranks. This is also one of the reasons that the Pentagon and Brussels are working to make sure that internal divisions in Libya are continuously fuelled. They will use the Libyan people against one another to divide Libya.
The Libyan people have been led into a trap and they are being misled. It must also be pointed out that the good, the bad, and the ugly have also gathered together on the Benghazi-based opposition side led by the Transitional Council.
The enemy’s of genuine freedom and of the Libyan people have taken advantage of the situation in Libya. There is plenty of blame to go around in Libya, but its people must not fight one another. Libya collectively and as a whole lost the moment violence started. Nor can the Libyans let foreigners settle their differences. Any solution must be an internal one without any foreign interference.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Canadian-based sociologist and scholar. Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG), specializing in geopolitical and strategic issues..
CAIRO—As the battle for Libya rages on—with the country’s economic heartland, Misrata, being the scene of some of the uprising’s fiercest fighting—experts are warning that a “Balkanization” of Libya is possible if the U.S. and NATO opt to exploit loopholes in U.N. Resolution 1973 by arming the opposition.
In the region, “Muammar Gadhafi was advocating for the African Union (AU) to be independent instead of being subservient to the EU and the U.S. by pushing for the African Development Bank (ADB) and replacing the Franc with an African currency,” Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, research associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) specializing on the Middle East and Central Asia, told IPS. “Realistically, the Libyan intervention is an attack on the African continent by cutting its head off. They don’t just want to ‘Balkanize’—fragment and divide—Libya, they want to ‘Balkanize’ the entire continent.”
“Now the West has rediscovered that Gadhafi is a dictator and a tyrant, they are prepared to take action against his regime, under U.N. Resolution 1973, which is primarily concerned with the protection of civilians. The irony is that NATO is now using EU weaponry to bomb some of the same weaponry it had sold to him earlier,” Kaye Stearman, media coordinator with the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), told IPS.
In response, former British ambassador to Libya Richard Dalton told IPS that “NATO has no strategic interests in Libya or elsewhere beyond what is stated in the North Atlantic Treaty as amplified by publicly announced decisions of the NATO Council. Its concern in Libya is the implementation of UNSC 1973.”
“The EU wants to see stability, prosperity, and good government in all its neighbours,” Dalton emphasized.
According to U.N. Resolution 1973, which authorized action to protect Libyan civilians, all member states must ensure strict implementation of the arms embargo established by paragraphs 9 and 10 of the previous Resolution 1970.
Geographically, Libya is a gateway from North to Central Africa and is positioned between Eastern and Western Africa. Human rights advocates warn that by arming opposition groups, tribal conflict could spill outside of Libya’s borders. This would also be in direct violation of the U.N. mandate, they say.
“Some EU countries are also considering whether to supply arms to the anti-Gadhafi rebels, which could increase future instability. This can have unforeseen long-term consequences, which can bring great harm to societies and militate against peace-building,” says Stearman.
One example of how this has played out in the past, Stearman explains, is the U.S. arming of “mujahideen ‘freedom’ forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 1990s, which actively prolonged conflicts, led to the growth of armed extremists, including local and foreign Taliban forces, the proliferation of a warlord-based society, and the thwarting of the growth of civil society. In addition, the same weaponry supplied by the U.S. was later used against U.S. and allied forces.”
During the Potsdam Conference in 1945—at the end of the Second World War—the Soviet Union, Britain, and the U.S. came to an impasse over the fate of seized Italian colonies in Libya. The U.S. wanted a U.N. trusteeship, but the Soviet Union suggested various provincial trusteeships, with Tripolitania under its command, Fezzan under France, and Cyrenaica under Britain.
That history is repeating itself now with the U.S. and the EU not only looking to divide Libya under two administrations in Tripoli and Benghazi, but also to eliminate a key competitor that had visions of uniting Africa, Nazemroaya said.
Libya and China were rapidly becoming key energy partners as Beijing positioned itself to be the third-largest buyer of Libyan oil—with more than 50 investment projects in the works.
Analysts like Asia Times reporter and author of Obama Does Globalistan Pepe Escobar point out that China has taken a serious hit with the recent unrest in North Africa. Its new contracts in Libya totalling $18 billion have declined by nearly 53 percent—this was the aim of U.S. Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) strategic policy to minimize China’s economic interest in Africa.
AFRICOM, headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, is responsible for U.S. military activities in 53 African nations.
The U.S. badly wanted a base in Africa, and the Libyan intervention has “now provided the opening,” Escobar told IPS. “AFRICOM’s participation is the Pentagon’s strategy to counter Chinese investments in Africa.”
Escobar says that at the 2010 Lisbon Summit of leaders of NATO governments the agenda was “total domination of the Mediterranean and the establishment of a NATO ‘lake’… Gadhafi’s business dealings with China irked Brussels, Paris, London, and, of course, Washington.”
In recent days, Libya’s opposition claim to have gained an upper hand by seizing control of the besieged city of Misrata, whose strategic seaport has been a key lifeline for humanitarian aid missions evacuating migrants and refugees fleeing the violence.
However, Nazemroaya points out that Misrata—which could be likened to a Shanghai on the African continent—is an important industrial and trade base for Libya and Africa that would be a major economic prize should the opposition maintain control.
“Misrata is a very important industrial city and economic heartland. Qasr Ahmed, which is located 250 kilometers east of Tripoli, is a commercial port, and the main headquarters for the Libyan Iron and Steel Company (Lisco) that exports over 60 percent of its products with nearly 50 percent going to markets in Italy and Spain,” Nazemroaya said. “Furthermore, the Libyan National Oil Company—which is one of the top 20 energy companies worldwide—is also based there. Privatization is happening under the guise of a foreign peacekeeping mission, which is why the EU wants to send soldiers.”
“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations…Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter.” UN Charter – 1: Purposes and Principles http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml
The vultures wheel over Libya beside the drones but roasted carrion is not their usual feast. The flag of the Kingdom of Libya is being waved in victory. The jubilant rebels have decided on discretion rather than valour. The charred skeletons of the government tank crew have been left below and cannot join the party. Perhaps the celebrants know that the ‘coalition’ dispense U238 as liberally as their illusory democracy.
The royalist flag raised in victory before the human remnants are removed
The vultures scent the sweet crude and see all that easy land for US bases banished by Ghaddafi.
These predators are being assisted, as per usual, by the State Broadcaster (BBC) with Channel 4 close behind.
Tanks are being ‘taken out’ but never, never are the crews within mentioned by the news readers.
The significance of these olive skinned humans are as grains of sand. But it is over in a flash. ‘So humane, so why refer to the brothers and the fathers?’ A millisecond or two after the armour is punctured by uranium depleted of U235 alone, the fireball cremates the crew within a few more milliseconds.
The minute solid particles resulting from combustion of the U238 with its infinite half life of 4.5 billion years rise in the thermals above the blistered tank. Some will settle, and some will stay in the air at all levels, eventually dispersing in every direction. Inhalation will ensure the most intimate contact with the cells of all mammals. The ionizing radiation of the germ cells in ovary or testis will lead to birth deformity as witnessed as an epidemic by the mothers and doctors in Fallujah.
The plans for the evisceration of Libya were long laid by the vultures. The myxoma virus of the blackest of black propaganda is being squirted into the nervous systems of homo non-sapiens to allow many to believe the process is benign. ‘We are aiding revolution and saving Arabs from themselves’. The State Broadcaster leads the mega-wattage and is fed by serried ranks of able liars in the FCO, the Downing Street Media Unit and the Ministry of ‘Defence’. Lying has is now our heavy industry in blood soaked Albion.
The joint statement of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy – “For that transition to succeed, Colonel Ghaddafi must go, and go for good. At that point, the United Nations and its members should help the Libyan people as they rebuild where Ghaddafi has destroyed — to repair homes and hospitals, ….” http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article2986866.ece Did they say rebuild the hospitals and medical services that 12 years of sanctions and Shock and Aweing destroyed in Iraq?
Every evil allegation is heaped on Muamar and his army. Three cluster bombs were used in Misrata. The allegation was backed up by Human Rights Watch but its chief executive, Kenneth Roth, has already shown his partisanship towards the ‘rabbles’. ‘The Security Council has at last lived up to its duty’.
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/03/18/security-council-has-last-lived-its-duty Bouckaert, another HRW representative, had given weight to the alleged gang rape of Eman Al-Obeidi. This distressed lady had aired her claim before a room full of foreign journalists. Channel 4 showed the segment two nights running. It would be unusual for such a terrible crime to take place in a nation where 97% are Muslims, and rare also for the victim to shout about it to a crowd. How did Bouckaert come to an opinion on Eman?
As for the three cluster bombs read this by Craig Murray. Our ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan, who ‘outed’ the most grotesque torture of devout Muslims for ‘intelligence’ which flowed to Langley and thence to MI6, records how the US has the largest stocks of cluster bombs and that it has resisted joining the cluster bomb ban. The UK, with its usual treachery, has signed but agrees to hold stocks for the US on this sceptred isle. The use of thousands by ‘Israel’ on the Lebanese people in 2006 is not recalled by the UK media. http://craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/04/clusters-of-hypocrisy/
This morning, the funereal sounding Orla Guerin, spoke of one hundred rebel injuries and several deaths. Again the government forces and civilians had no mention. Death and injury is not their lot. She said that they were ‘exhausted by death’ in Misrata. The pilots of the British Typhoons, Tornadoes and French Mirages were not exhausted so by death. Their very accurate ‘fire and forget’ missiles erased only concrete and metal. Thus there are no loyal Libyan deaths.
The State Broadcaster has been very selective in its news dissemination. Aware that our premier liar has promised ‘no boots on the ground’, it has been careful to maintain that illusion. There has been no national news of ‘deployment’. (They are good on sanitary words – ‘ in theatre’, ‘operational tasking’ These are fragments of the public school lexicon of killing.) But here, in the South West of England, BBC Southwest has been spilling the beans. It reckons that almost every local will know warships have been embarking Royal Marines in Plymouth. However, we were told they were going in case ‘humanitarian help’ was needed in Libya and, rather darkly, for the possible evacuation of UK citizens from other Middle Eastern countries in event of disturbance or similar. The video showed troops loading humanitarian rocket launchers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-12995065
The MoD said the newly-formed Response Force Task Group (RFTG) would be taking part in multi-national amphibious exercises in the Mediterranean and later in the Indian Ocean.
HMS Albion, Type 23 frigate HMS Sutherland, and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Cardigan Bay were sailing as the lead element of the RFTG, which is held at “very high readiness” to respond to “unexpected global events”.
HMS Albion, a landing platform dock capable of carrying more than 600 people, left Devonport just after 0800 BST 14 April. A closer look at Albion at sea -
Task group commander, Cmdr John Kingwell, said: “Cougar 11 is an important opportunity to develop international inter-operability and build long-term defence relationships, and for the RFTG to demonstrate operational contingent capability.” (We are used to gold braid bullshit.)
The MoD said the ships and troops from Taunton-based 40 Commando would be there “to develop and demonstrate contingent capability for UK defence – in effect, the ability to respond to short-notice tasking across a diverse range of defence activities such as disaster relief, humanitarian aid, or amphibious operations”.
Cdr Rob Dunn said: “I am proud of my ship’s company. They went about their duty and carried out all I asked of them in the most professional way.
“They are naturally satisfied that they carried out an operational tasking using our Tomahawk land attack missiles weapon system, which does not happen very often, but for which they are highly trained and prepared for at any time.”
Whilst ships, men and ammunition were rapidly loaded at Devonport Plymouth, Royal Fleet Auxiliary Largs Bay was loading at Hythe dock in Southampton Water.
The dock is supplied by its own railway so the munitions are kept away from the proles who pay for them. BBC South also kept the public in ignorance of happenings in Hythe. There is only a village nearby, and the oil refinery of course!
These benign activities are all to do with Operation Cougar at the perfidious Albion end. They are alleged to have been 2 years in the planning. One function, according to the Ministry of Truth and ‘Defence’, is “preventing conflict.” ‘ These units have now deployed and have been selected for their ability to remain on task for as long as is required.’ “More units will sail to join the lead elements later this year.”
The very big supremo of the NATO ‘peace keeping’ and civilian saving force is Canadian Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard. He has studied ‘defence’ in the US of A and it shows.
“The head of Nato in Libya, Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard, said Col Gaddafi’s forces had employed what he called underhand and immoral tactics in their seven-week drive to dislodge the rebels from the city.
‘Inside the city it’s a very difficult tough situation. The Gaddafi forces have taken their uniforms off, they’re hiding on rooftops of mosques, hospitals, schools, that’s where their heavy equipment is positioned, near mosques, near schools, and they’re shielding themselves with women and children.
So when people ask me why aren’t you doing something, well I’m not going to lower to his level. I’m not going to do the kind of warfare that he’s doing. My job’s to help the population,” he said, in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.”
We can visualise there are at least 50 vessels standing for freedom in the eastern Mediterranean, including at least one USS nuclear powered and nuclear armed aircraft carrier. There will be at least 10 submarines.
The buzzard sees the humans crawling on the earth below and he mews
“What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle;
Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile?” Heber
The cuckoo is quiet and sitting tight. But the wires are busy – Bibi to Hillary to ‘I am a Zionist’ Cameron to Sarkozy. Bibi knows of fellow ‘Israeli’ Oded Yinon who in the 80′s studied how the Arab entities might be destabilized and divided into digestible pieces. (See Ralph Schoenman’s ‘The Hidden History of Zionism’ Chapter 12. It is most revealing.) So things are going pretty well.
The actual axis of evil is very busy. One pole, the dominant one, is in Tel Aviv. The other pole is Washington. In the middle is London, and now Paris.
London gives the axis propriety with all the flummery. It also gives its cunning and its historical knowledge of imperialism. The power shifts backward and forward along that axis as busily as those jets carrying the psychopaths who pull the triggers.
Whilst Colonel Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi waits for his high explosive execution, (NATO bombed a bunker in central Tripoli last night) read his long, coherent speech to that sham of shams, the United Nations.
That UN was formed in some sort of hope after yet another war to end wars. Have Cameron, Sarkozy, Obama and the rest of the murderous gang read this?
“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations…Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter.”
As the operation in Libya closes in on its first month, coalition members are swearing to push further until Colonel Gaddafi goes, despite the UN no-fly zone resolution only allowing NATO involvement to secure humanitarian protection.
The gamesmanship is making many countries increasingly uneasy. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned at the beginning of the week that Libya risks total collapse and reiterated Russia’s position that to restore order in the North African country, those parties involved need to be acting in strict accordance with the international resolutions.
Russia and China both have the right of veto when it comes to resolutions of the UN Security Council. Though they have not used this right over the last month they abstained from the vote and have not been participating in the operation.
There have been some concerns as to whether NATO is acting beyond the boundaries of UN Resolution 1973.
“The UN Security Council’s resolution must be fulfilled in accordance with the wording and meaning, not with the free interpretation of some states. Because we voted for a no-fly zone to stop the escalation of the conflict so that we can separate the two sides, but what we are having now is a military operation. It may not be on the ground yet but it is certainly going up above,” President Medvedev stated this week. “A number of countries were taking part and then NATO stepped in. But the resolution does not say a word about it.”
On Friday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was visiting Berlin for a Russia-NATO conference where Libya was naturally on the agenda. Lavrov reiterated much of what President Medvedev said earlier, clarifying again the Russian stance on the issue and making it clear that it is not the resolution [1973] itself that is the problem, but the way it is being implemented that raises questions.
“Today we witness that some NATO actions in Libya are exceeding the framework defined by the UN Security Council. It is already being discussed that UN Resolution 1973 could also be used for ground operations,” Lavrov declared.
“The resolution does not provide for such actions and does not approve them, nor does the UN deal support regime change in Libya,” admonished the Russian foreign minister.
NATO’s methods in Libya are also prompting questions over how far they could extend the operation.
Thousands of Americans have staged a protest rally in New York City to voice concerns over US war and foreign policies as well as the economy and the persisting reduction of social programs.
Scores of peace, labor and community activists took to the streets of the major commercial city on Saturday to call for peace and solidarity with Muslims and an end to US wars abroad, a Press TV correspondent reported.
“I am sick and tired of the elite trying to rule the country, the elite that is only one percent (of the society), ruling the country and getting us into wars that we do not need. Not paying their fair share of taxes while we suffer cutbacks in social programs,” a demonstrator said.
The protesters called on Washington to create more job opportunities in a bid to revive the fragile US economy.
More than 500 organizations also came together from communities across the US to call for an end to government harassment of Muslim immigrants and people of color.
They also called for the restoration of peace and democracy.
Demonstrators shouted “Intifada, Intifada,” an Arabic word meaning uprising and resistance. It is most commonly used as a term for popular resistance against oppression.
During the event, keynote speakers stressed that it was time to end US support for the illegal occupation of Palestine and the war in Libya.
“We are one with the people of Egypt, of Yemen, of Palestine. We are one in opposing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are one with the five million people of Libya…” said Vinie Burrows, an American activist.
The participants in the event stressed that the march was about building unity between the antiwar movement and the Muslim community and to challenge Islamophobia.
~ From Press TV 4/10/11.
The Libyan war has the French, of all people, in the forefront, with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s smug, self-satisfied face mugging for the camera as French fighter jets scream in the skies over Tripoli. The French, who sat out the Iraq war with haughty disdain, are now even more eager than the Americans to get into the thick of it: Sarkozy, in trouble at home, is hoping to distract critics from France’s ever-worsening domestic economic woes and his own party’s diminishing electoral prospects, with a good old-fashioned dollop of Napoleonic tonic. France – once again thrusting into North Africa in search of its formerimperialglory! It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the Ugly American.
If the insufferable Sarkozy isn’t enough to make you vow never to eat French fries again, then the man behind Sarkozy’s grandstanding, Bernard Henri-Lévy, the French “public intellectual” and renowned phony, will push you over the edge into outright Francophobia. As the New York Timesreports:
“It was Mr. Lévy, by his own still undisputed account, who brought top members of the Libyan opposition — the Interim Transitional National Council — from Benghazi to Paris to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy on March 10, who suggested the unprecedented French recognition of the council as the legitimate government of Libya and who warned Mr. Sarkozy that unless he acted, ‘there will be a massacre in Benghazi, a bloodbath, and the blood of the people of Benghazi will stain the flag of France.’”
Henri-Lévy is famous for … well, it’s not exactly clear. During the 1980s, he and a few of his French commie-socialist comrades excitedly announced that Marxism – which they had previously upheld as a glorious human experiment in idealism – was a Bad Thing. What Stalin’s crimes, committed half a century earlier, hadn’t revealed, the dictates of intellectual fashion and economic opportunity readily unveiled.
Yes, the French have their neocons, too, with BHL—as he’s known – leading the pack. Like his Americanbrethren, BHL combines political polemics with entrepreneurship and has wound up the world’s richest “philosopher,” with inherited assets of his own to which he greatly added to thanks to his political connections.
As questions are raised about the wisdom of Western intervention, the Pepe Le Pew of the War Party is perturbed, and he’s taken to the pages of the Huffington Post – home base for practically all the world’s phony “intellectuals” and empty-headed celebrities – to defend his baby:
“Ah yes. This war began less than a month ago, and already the Norpois, the leaden-footed proponents of salon diplomacy, well-versed in Munich-speak, have raised their heads again and, once over their initial astonishment, have taken up their favorite refrain: what are we doing, involved in this business?”
Leaving aside the pretentious allusion to Proust – the signature conceit of the “literary” French intellectual – notice how easily he reverts to the familiar lexicon of the neocons: “Munich-speak”? We’re not two weeks into this war, and already the War Party’s myrmidons are likening Gadhafi to Hitler! To the neocons, whatever their national origin, it’s always 1939: there’s always a Hitler somewhere in the world, and it’s our responsibility to stop him – which is why we need to spend more on the military than all other nations on earth combined. And if a target country just happens to be strategically located, or sits atop considerable oil reserves, well then who are we to look a gift horse in the mouth?
That’s a good point, however, about our “initial astonishment” at the Libyan intervention: I have to admit to being taken by surprise, because, as low as my opinion may be of President Obama, it was never that low. I never thought he would fall for Henri-Lévy’s line of guff, as regurgitated by the Three Harpies of the Libyan Apocalypse.
Well, then, what are we doing involved in this business?
“First of all, war aims. The ‘true’ aims of this war. And what if the allies had a ‘secret agenda’ and, in particular, “oil”. The imbeciles! The too-clever-for-their-own-good who, eternally seeking the hidden side of things, ultimately fail to see what is right there under their own eyes! Namely, that, oil for oil, there was one simple means to ensure control over Libyan oil, and that means was to touch nothing, to change nothing, and to go on dealing with Gadhafi, as they have for decades. Sarkozy, Cameron, Obama may be capable, like all politicians, of all the cynicism one likes. But concerning this affair, why not have the elementary honesty to recognize their share of sincerity?”
This is nonsensical. BHL may know his Proust, but he likely failed Economics 101. Go here and look at this map of foreign oil concessions in Libya, which are heavily concentrated in the rebellious eastern half of the country. Gadhafi made the British pay a huge price for their oil concessions: as British planes bomb Libyan air defenses – and a few civilians, too – does anyone think the rebels won’t give British Petroleum a better deal than Gadhafi ever would? And the French, who seem to have been largely left out of the Libyan oil rush, will certainly demand their share of the spoils.
Economics is not BHL’s strong point: you know how those French intellectuals are! Well, then, perhaps he’s better at military strategy, a favorite pastime of our neocon laptop bombardiers. On second thought, maybe not:
“Then, the length of this war. The way it has of ‘getting stuck’ in the sands of the Libyan desert, when we had hoped it would be short and sweet. Once again, grotesque. Unutterable bad faith. For–quite apart from the fact that four weeks is nothing compared to the decade of the Afghan war or the ten weeks of that of Kosovo–there is a reason, only one, that operations are lasting beyond the successful rescue of Benghazi. And this reason is the strategy of a Gadhafi who has hunkered down in the bunkers of his other cities, turning their inhabitants into human shields.”
A favorite neocon strategy: hyperbole. The opposition is not merely wrong, it is “grotesque.” These are not victims of error, but purveyors of “unutterable bad faith.” All for asking why it’s taking so long! BHL isn’t quite himself, it seems, unless he’s in a state of High Moral Dudgeon, but his passion let slip a telling detail. That he’s comparing an operation that was supposed to continue for “days, not weeks,” as the President put it, to the decade-long Afghan conflict merely confirms our worst fears about this latest adventure in world-saving: that an ambiguously defined mission, which is already expanding well beyond its original mandate, has every prospect of becoming a long term commitment.
“At that point, there are two strategies possible. Either blow up the crowd, in which case, yes, things will go swiftly (and it’s no surprise to see the butcher of Chechnya, Vladimir Putin, in the front ranks of those who think things are dragging on). Or else look out for the lives of civilians, not losing sight of the fact that the international community has provided a mandate to protect them, the civilians, and that it will take the time it will take. (To deny that, one must be drugged on quick solutions, drunk with the urge for immediacy, or, worse, irresponsible.)”
BHL never acknowledges what is apparent to even a casual observer of the Libyan events: that Gadhafi has real support in the country, especially in the area around Tripoli. After all, it isn’t just mercenaries fighting on his behalf: his fellow tribesmen and their allies, as well as Gadhafi’s personal followers and the beneficiaries of the regime, are apparently rallying to his cause. This is the reason why it hasn’t been a quick victory for the rebels. But to BHL, the “literary” intellectual, who references Proust instead of anything related to the reality of Libya, this is inadmissible because it ruins the narrative, the tall tale he’s telling himself and his audience about the demonic despot versus the virtuous rebels.
His third argument is just another neocon ploy: the old “straw man” strategem. BHL tells us that some people are criticizing the rebels for their “amateurism,” and then goes on for a good paragraph using this “criticism” to valorize them and make the case for arming and training them. “Indigent bastards!, they say. Good for nothings! Short hitters!” Who is the author of such slanderous epithets? Perhaps he means Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who, when asked, didn’t put very much store in the rebels’ military prowess – but so what?
“Fourth objection, the National Council of Transition. After all, what do we know of this Council of ‘nebulous’ outlines? And wasn’t France jumping the gun a bit in recognizing it? There again, it takes a lot of nerve to think so. And there’s something profoundly perverse in this way of depicting who knows what occult power–an Angkar as in Cambodia, the black box of a Libya not as free as it professes to be–and in this way of spreading doubt and insinuating, in reality, the worst. For the members of the Council are well known. Their biographies are transparent. They are either those who have earned a price on their heads in Tripoli for rallying to the cause, whose respective political itineraries are known to all, or men who are new but who speak to whomever openly. But it’s true that, to set this supposed mystery to rest, one must take the trouble to go to Benghazi….”
Emtting clouds of obfuscatory rhetoric like a squid under attack, BHL resorts to the familiar abuse of his opponents: they aren’t just “perverse,” they are “profoundly perverse.” Those ingrates “have a lot of nerve” to even ask questions about just who the UN and the NATO powers are throwing their weight behind. Because, after all, “the members of the Council are well-known.” To whom are they well-known, exactly? Well, it turns out, “to set this supposed mystery to rest one must take the trouble to go to Benghazi”!
Now that’s a dirty trick. He makes us read all the way to the end of that tortured paragraph before getting to the punchline – some “humanitarian”!
Reality, however, once again departs from BHL’s preferred narrative, because the biography of, say, Col. Khalifa Haftar, the US-supported self-proclaimed “commander” of the Libyan rebel forces, is far from “transparent” – especially regarding his capture during the war with Chad, an event which seems to have conicided with his remarkable political turnaround. The most well known rebel leaders are former officials of the Gadhafi regime, who supported him loyally for many years and only saw the light when it looked like the regime was finished – a record that may indeed be transparent, but is hardly admirable.
“And then, Al-Qaeda. Ah! Al-Qaeda. On the pretext that, among the foreign jihadis who once left to fight in Iraq were a small majority of Libyans, one concludes that there would be a majority of jihadis at the heart of today’s Free Libya. The sophism, in this case, is not only perverse, it is despicable. And it’s the same abjectness, by the way, that, fifteen years ago at Sarajevo, inferred the probable birth of a fundamentalist State in the heart of Europe–and therefore the necessity to let Bosnia in its entirety die–from the presence of a handful of Iranians in the 7th corps of the Bosnian army. In this case, the truth is simple. It is possible that a few jihadis have infiltrated Derna or Benghazi. It is probably a rule that such sleeper agents profit from the chaos of war to reinforce their position. But it is a lie, accredited for the time being only by hazy statements backed by a Gaddafism which is in dire straits and fresh out of arguments, that they have a significant role in the ranks of the insurgents.”
Getting past the name-calling – his opponents are, once again, “perverse,” and even “despicable” – the fact-free nature of BHL’s “argument” is readily apparent. To begin with, it wasn’t just the Iranians who were fighting on the side of the Bosnians and Kosovars during the Balkan wars: al-Qaeda sent a brigade to fight for the KLA during the Kosovo war, and continues to be a presence in the region. Furthermore, BHL doesn’t even mention the ample evidence that Al-Qaeda had its best recruiting success in Libya, although he does mention the town of Derna, where many fighters who fought US troops in Iraq hailed from.
Aside from this, however, to say that bin Laden’s boys do not now play a significant role in the Libyan insurgency is not to rule it out as a distinct possibility. As the only seasoned fighters, except for defecting Libyan soldiers, they are bound to acquire some renown and authority on account of their military experience. I am not one who believes, as some do, that the rebellion is the brainchild of Osama bin Laden. Yet, given the evidence, it is rational to raise the question of al-Qaeda’s influence – unless you’re a myth-maker, a spinner of ready-to-wear narratives, in which case it’s better not to ask too many questions.
“I would add,” says BHL, that
“The best way of delivering Libya into the hands of chaos would be to abandon in mid-river those we have encouraged to ford it, giving in, at the last minute, to the sirens who would convince us to save what can be saved of the Gadhafi regime. He, really, is not only a butcher of civilians, a patent hater of the West and of democratic values, the declared enemy of the Arab–and, tomorrow, the African–spring, but a world class champion, all categories included, of terrorism. More than ever, this man should beat it.”
“This man should beat it”?
Either the Huffington Post needs to get a new translator, or else BHL is going all “cool” and “trendy” on us by riffing on a Michael Jackson tune.
The author’s stylistic idiosyncrasies aside, however, his arguments are oddly familiar: now that we’ve already gotten involved, the West can’t just leave. The neocons made – and continue to make – the same argument when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan. Heck, they sang the same song as the Vietnam war came to a bloody and chaotic close: we can’t leave our heroic allies in the lurch!
Ho Chi Minh was, no doubt, a butcher of civilians – although the US surpassed him in that regard – and also “a patent hater of the West and of democratic values,” but that war was a mistake from the beginning – just like this one. In that conflict, too, we helped one side in a civil war which had divided the country into two de facto independent states, one totalitarian and the other “free.” That war, too, started out small, with military aid and “advisers,” eventually expanding into a presence of hundreds of thousands of troops and a long drawn out conflict that ended in disaster – as this one will if we follow the course laid out by BHL and the War Party.
A word about BHL: this guy is supposed to be a “public intellectual,” but what kind of “intellectual” gets bamboozled by an obvious hoax such as this? Read and laugh at the pretensions of this champion phony.
The Hidden Evil (The financial elite’s covert war against the civilian population)
Isn’t she beautiful ?
Revolution ( in the US a constitutional right )
The 1776 Declaration of Independence stated that when a long train of abuses by those in power evidence a design to reduce the rights of people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the peoples right, in fact their duty to engage in a revolution.
……………………
and ….. JFK in his own words !
In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:
“No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment.”
Abraham Lincoln said, just before his assassination:
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country...Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Hmmmm.
“Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten”. Cree Indian Prophecy
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What would you do if your 3-year old son was stricken with brain cancer? Most parents wouldn't think twice about bringing their child to a mainstream doctor, only to undergo modern-day cancer 'treatments' such as chemotherapy. This is what one father, Mike Hyde, from Montana did when his 3 year old was diagnosed with brain cancer, but the fath […]
Trio accused of making petrol bombs and plotting attacks, but supporters say suspect materials were beer-making kit. Three protesters arrested in a late-night raid days before the start of this weekend's 60-nation NATO summit in Chicago have been charged with terrorism for possession of explosive devices, police and their attorney have said. The men hav […]
Chicago, Illinois -- Nan Wigmore brought her walker and packed her sign, "Grateful Great Grandmas Circle The Wagons, Support Occupy," and rode on a bus for some three days, sleeping in the same clothes, to make it to the NATO protests in Chicago. The 75-year-old from Portland, Ore., says she couldn't imagine being anywhere else despite the dis […]
Midwestern rural communities are being devastated by energy companies searching for a form of sand to use in their destructive fracking operations elsewhere in rural America.
Not all politicians are created equal. And not all are treated equally. Therein lies an issue deserving a closer look: whether vulnerable Democrats are targeted for destruction.
Much like the NATO summit, the system is set up not to spread wealth but to preserve and protect it, not to relieve chaos but to contain and punish it.
Bill Moyers talks to Simon Johnson, once chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and now MIT professor, about the (possible) fall of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan.
Rahm Emanuel runs Chicago like he ran the Obama White House: with an iron fist and a foul mouth – and the NATO summit, being held in the Windy City, is the perfect occasion for him to demonstrate just how “tough” he can be. “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean [...]
A three-judge panel has rejected evidence that could help clear Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi of terrorism charges, causing Hashemi's team of lawyers to quit the case in protest. Meanwhile, at least two Iraqis were killed and eight more were wounded.
Hopes by Iran hawks here to get the U.S. Congress to wield the threat of a U.S. military attack on the Islamic Republic on the eve of next week’s critical negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program appear to have fallen unexpectedly short. While the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Thursday to reject "any U.S. policy that [...]
I strongly oppose H Res 568, a resolution "expressing the sense of the House of Representatives regarding the importance of preventing the Government of Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability." Once again we see on the "suspension" calendar, which is customarily reserved for non-controversial legislation, a resolution designed t […]
On what is now the 17th day of our walk from Madison to Chicago, the number 165 does not seem to encapsulate all the progress we have made. We are 17 days and 165 miles away from the day I drove into Madison, where news arrived that Air Force One had descended on pre-dawn Kabul [...]
The Report of the The International Commission of Inquiry on Libya has been issued and provides some interesting reading. A few initial comments: Tawerghans – to be ‘wiped off the face of the planet’ The report supports Human Rights Investigation’s position regarding the crimes committed against the Tawerghans. The report confirms our […]
According to NATO figures, coalition aircraft delivered 415 key strikes on the town of Sirte between Sunday 28th August and Thursday 20th October. We have compared this to the bombing of Guernica and other comparisons have been made to the widely condemned levelling of Grozny. In addition, the rebels, described in NATO circles as a [...]
Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi was reportedly captured and shot dead 20 October. As the evidence below shows the Libyan leader and his son Mutassim were summarily executed by the rebels, sharing the fate of so many Libyans in this conflict. NATO involvement NATO have said that a French jet bombed 2 military vehicles in a convoy leaving the area [...]
التطهير الُعرقي و الإبادة الجماعيّة و التورخا هيومن رايتس إينفستيخاشيون (HRI) تُتابٍع عن كثب الوضع في منطقة ا”لتورخا”، وهنا نلفتُ معاً المعلومات، ونجِدُ، ، استناداً إلى تقارير الشهود والصحافيين والعاملين في مجال حقوق الإنسان ، بأنّ حالة ا”لتورخا” ليست مُجرد حالة تطهير عُرقي ولكن وفقاً للتعريف القانوني، إِبادة جماعيّة. HRI لديها مخاو […]
Below is a repost from Craig Murray’s excellent blog . Craig, has a very clear knowledge of the Karimov regime as he was British Ambassador there from 2002 to 2004. Uzbekistan is a state with widespread torture, kidnapping, murder, rape by the police, financial corruption, religious persecution, censorship, and other human rights abuses. In 2002, accor […]
The background to the video and image below is the ongoing bombardment of Sirte by NATO aircraft in support of the rebel brigades who are indiscriminately firing tank, mortar and artillery shells into this urban, civilian-populated area. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has refused to comment on why NATO is not fulfilling its UN mandate [...]
The Nobel Peace Prize has long been a nonsense and has been accused of being a kind of tool of Norwegian foreign policy. Who can forget the farcical scenes as Barack Obama was awarded the prize (about which Martin Luther King would have had a few things to say) or that it was once awarded to Henry Kissinger, or that Mahatma [...]
A major thread running through the story of the Libyan conflict has been the information war – propaganda spread by intelligence agencies, military, media and political groups designed to encourage hatred, conflict, war, foreign intervention, death and destruction. One sad aspect of the propaganda war has been the role played by Amnesty International a […]
As is now well documented, the rebellion in Libya began with violent attacks on police stations, such as this one in Al-Bayda where people locked inside were reportedly burnt to death: An intensive propaganda campaign systematically distorted the facts on the ground, including in particular allegations that the Libyan airforce was bombing peaceful protestors […]
Human Rights Investigations has been following the situation of the Tawergha closely and here we draw the information together and find, based on the reports of witnesses, journalists and human rights workers, the situation of the Tawergha is not just one of ethnic cleansing but, according to the legal definition, genocide. HRI has grave concerns, not only f […]
President Barack Hussein Obama made a speech in Cairo in June 2009, which was widely hailed as marking a new beginning; as the great speech of a true humanitarian and worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Here are some key passages from that profound, deep and moving speech, which gave hope to the people of [...]
On Saturday 17th September, as reported by Al Jazeera, Ahmed Bani, the interim government’s military spokesman, said gave army personnel still loyal to Gaddafi a last chance to join the ranks of former rebel fighters: “The soldiers and officers who will not heed this last call will be accused of high treason.” The invocation of [...]
NATO arrives everywhere violently. Chicago was no exception. During summit activities, city cops are enforcers. They specialize in serving wealth, power, and imperial interests. more...
Another entry from USA in The GREEN WALL Activist Contest 2012. Write in a public place WWW.GREENCHARTER.COM and send us photos of evidence showing before and after, and we will publish it here more...
Photo: Police hit and run a man as wide spread police violence against peaceful anti-war protesters takes shape ahead of NATO military summit in Chicago more...
Failure to uphold international laws has allowed nations like the US to get away with crimes against humanity, writes Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia (photo, right, with Mathaba News founder and editor, left) more...
Israel`s long known open secret is its formidable nuclear arsenal. Less is known about its chemical and biological weapons (CBW) capability. Mathaba Analyst Stephen Lendman takes a look. more...
DAMASCUS, (SANA) – Russia, as a creditor of the UN World Food Program, decided to dedicate the majority of its remaining contributions to the Program for sending urgent humanitarian relief to Syria
DUBAI, (SANA)- A militant group called 'al-Nusra Front', which is connected with al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing which targeted the city of Deir Ezzor, eastern Syria, that killed nine people and injured more than 100 others
MOSCOW, (SANA) – The Syrian community in Russia condemned on Sunday the terrorist attacks witnessed in Syria, the latest of which was the terrorist bombing in Deir Ezzor province, stressing that these attacks will not defeat the determination of the Syrian people.
MOSCOW, (SANA) – Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that during the G8 Summit in Camp David, Russia adhered to its stance which states that the situation in Syria cannot be resolved through exerting pressure via force or otherwise on the Syria government
CAMP DAVID, U.S, (SANA)- The Group of 8 Summit called on all sides in Syria to immediately halt violence and carry out the plan of the UN envoy Kofi Annan
MOSCOW, (SANA)- Russia on Friday expressed condemnation of the terrorist attempt that targeted the international observers in Syria, saying it was aimed at foiling the plan of the UN envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan
PROVINCES, (SANA)- Head of the UN observer mission to Syria, Gen. Robert Mood, said on Friday the mission is working at finding a successful way to be deployed in Syria thanks to the advanced level of cooperation by the Syrian government, the UN Presidency and the contributor countries
TUNIS, (SANA) – Tunisian authorities on Friday admitted that there are Tunisian citizens who were killed or arrested in Syria, and that they were members of the armed terrorist groups
[ PIC 21/05/2012 - 09:37 AM ] NABLUS, (PIC)– Israeli occupation forces (IOF) arrested seven Palestinian citizens in the West Bank at dawn Monday including a 70-year-old man in Nablus, local sources said. Eyewitnesses told the PIC reporter in Nablus city that IOF soldiers stormed the city before dawn and withdrew after taking away four [...]
Maan News Agency | May 21, 2012 (updated) BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — An Israeli human rights group released footage on Sunday of settlers firing on Nablus-village a day earlier, and called on Israel’s military to investigate the assailants, as well as the army’s role. Settlers entered Asira al-Qibliya on Saturday and threw rocks at propertie […]
LIVE BLOG ▶ PALESTINIANS ON HUNGER STRIKE | #PalHunger LIVE BLOG ▶ Commemorating 64 Years of Catastrophe in Palestine | #Nakba64 LIVE BLOG ▶ Israel Attacks Gaza May 17, 2012 & lies about it | #GazaUnderAttack continuous updated آخر الأخبار والتحديثات May 21, 2012 | 23382 Days Since Al-Nakba & Gaza has been under siege [...]
[ PIC 20/05/2012 - 08:45 PM ] THE HAGUE (PIC)– The Palestinian community in the Netherlands held, on Saturday, a conference to mark the 64th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba in the capital Amsterdam, with the participation of the former PM of Netherlands, Dries van Agt, and with a large presence of the Palestinian community [...]
Al-Qassam Website | 21-05-2012,08:37 Al Qassam website (PressTV) – Palestinian refugees want their next generation to go back home to a free “Palestinian state” and to build their country themselves, a young Palestinian refugee tells Press TV. The comment comes as Palestinians commemorated the 64th anniversary of Nakba Day on May 15; when over 750,000 […]
Monday May 21, 2012 03:31 by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC Palestinian medical sources reported Sunday that a Palestinian youth was injured near the Etzion Israeli settlement, between Bethlehem and Hebron in the occupied West Bank. The soldiers then stepped on his palms to pose for pictures as the resident continued to bleed. Salah Sghayyar – [...]
[ PIC 20/05/2012 - 08:06 PM ] OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (PIC)– A Palestinian researcher revealed that more than two thirds of Jerusalemites owe money to the Israeli occupation’s different organs and departments. The Jerusalemite activist and researcher, Fakhri Abu Diab, said that Israeli official data showed that there are over 43 thousand debt files in […]
LIVE BLOG ▶ PALESTINIANS ON HUNGER STRIKE | #PalHunger LIVE BLOG ▶ Commemorating 64 Years of Catastrophe in Palestine | #Nakba64 LIVE BLOG ▶ Israel Attacks Gaza May 17, 2012 & lies about it | #GazaUnderAttack continuous updated آخر الأخبار والتحديثات May 20, 2012 | 23381 Days Since Al-Nakba & Gaza has been under siege [...]
[ PIC 20/05/2012 - 05:44 PM ] AL-KHALIL, (PIC)– A Palestinian teen was seriously injured near Gush Etzion settlement to the north of Al-Khalil after Israeli occupation forces (IOF) fired at him. Medical sources said that the 17-year-old youth Salah Zaghir was seriously wounded in his abdomen after an Israeli soldier fired at him near [...]
[ PIC 20/05/2012 - 05:52 PM ] GAZA, (PIC)– Spokesman of Hamas in Gaza Fawzi Barhoum has charged that the Jewish settlers’ storming of the Aqsa mosque on Sunday fell in line with the religious war waged by the Israeli occupation government against the Palestinian people. Barhoum told the PIC that the repeated visits by [...]
Qom, May 21, IRNA – Official in charge of Qom International Airport project Nasir Nassiri says the Airport will become operational by February 11, 2013.-1391/03/01-17:50
Tehran, May 21, IRNA – Vice-President for International Affaires Ali Saeedlu and Turkish Minister in charge of Planning and Programming Judat Yilmaz on Monday stressed expansion of Tehran-Ankara economic cooperation at bilateral, regional and international levels.-1391/03/01-17:48
Tehran, May 21, IRNA - Iranian Ambassador to Baghdad Hassan Danaeifar on Monday said Iraq is prepared from logistically, security and administrative points of view to host talks between Iran and G5+1 in Baghdad.-1391/03/01-17:26
Tehran, May 21, IRNA – Director General of the Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukio Amano met and conferred with Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Fereydoun Abbassi here on Monday.-1391/03/01-17:13
New Delhi, May 21, IRNA – Terming the cultural relations between India and Iran as “extensive” and “uninterrupted”, an Indian scholar Monday emphasized the need to further strengthen the ties between the two nations.-1391/03/01-16:06
Mahshahr, Khuzestan Prov, May 21, IRNA – Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here on Monday that the Iranian nation is well capable of reaching the industrial and scientific peaks in the world.-1391/03/01-13:17
Tehran, May 21, IRNA — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his message on the International Day for Biological Diversity, May 22, 2012, while warning that between 30 and 35 per cent of critical marine environments are estimated to have been destroyed called for national and international actions to preserve marine biodiversity.-1391/03/01-11:24
Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has stressed the importance of efforts to promote bilateral cooperation with Turkey, considering the great potential of the two countries.
In Egypt, tens of activists and journalists have held a one-day hunger strike, calling for the release of political prisoners and an end to military trials, Press TV reports.
A senior Iranian lawmaker says Tehran’s negotiators should try to get the West to remove anti-Iran sanctions in the upcoming talks with major world powers in Baghdad.
Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Fereydoun Abbasi has stressed the importance of more effective cooperation between Tehran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
A riot has left at least one prison guard dead and eight other people wounded at a private-run jail in the US state of Mississippi, American officials say.
The UK government has failed to stop Afghanistan’s deadly heroin trade, a pledge former Prime Minister Tony Blair made when he was making the case for invasion of the country.
The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.
The dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination... Eventually all major regions of the World will be affected.
The Economic Collapse | During an appearance on Meet The Press on Sunday, Jim Cramer of CNBC boldly predicted that "financial anarchy" is coming to Europe.
The American Dream | With the way that things are heading in this country, it is not surprising that there are approximately 3 million preppers in the United States today.
The horror stories about the Transportation Security Administration are indisputable. In the post 911 environment, civil liberties routinely ignored or eliminated, become a mere memory in a country that once prided itself as the beacon of freedom for the entire world. The TSA is part of the Department of Homeland Security. FEMA, the Federal Emergency [...]
When Cohen attempts to bond with his protagonist Dictator Aladeen, he actually speaks in his mother tongue, Hebrew. Cohen speaks Hebrew because Aladeen is not an Arab dictator, he is actually an Israeli patriot like Cohen himself.
By Dr. Ismail Salami In an organized act of brutality, a number of US soldiers went on a house-to-house shooting spree in Zangabad village, Kandahar in March and massacred 16 people including nine children while they were sleeping and all Washington had to say were a few words of condolence and apology nonchalantly strung together [...]
There is much to both question and criticize about NATO but primary is the fact that America has created an international organization that is not answerable to international or constitutional laws and is still mired in a cold war mentality.
My Recent Comment on Prof. Richard Falk's Blog Highlighting the Failures of the Mainstream Media to Cover the Hunger Strike Aimed a Calling Attention to Israel's Violations of the Universal Human Rights of Palestinians.
Russian Aurora has discharged a preemptive salvo against the Atlantic freedom vultures in America, which have camped out at sweet home Chicago. No, it wasn’t another Bolshevik mutiny at the legendary cruiser in St Petersburg; it was an audacious Russian think tank, Institute for Foreign Policy Research & Initiatives, www.invissin.ru that boarded ritzy Ma […]
Fed Prez Who Owns Over $1 Million in Gold Greek Bailout May Have to Be $19.7 Billion Higher Greece misses another bailout deadline - Reuters Foreclosure deal deadline arrives, not all states are...
Video - Sen. Rand Paul on the Senate Floor - Jan. 31, 2012 This law is approximately 40 years overdue, and it took a neophyte Senator to be the first to propose such legislation in the history of...
Video - Nigel Farage - Feb. 1, 2012 Transcript "Well, Congratulations everybody. Davud Cameron had you worried for a bit. You thought he was even a eurosceptic. But it's okay, you had a quiet word...
Counterfeit Value Derivatives: Follow the Bouncing Ball Bailout Battle - The IMF vs. Germany Summary of Bernanke's testimony before Congress Bernanke: Deficit reduction must be top priority 47...
In the matter of the Scarborough Shoal mess, the Philippines started it and the infamous Chinese nine-dash line encompassing almost the entire South China Sea looks like an audacious claim drawn from an appetite for aggression. A closer look reveals that there is some genuine method to Beijing's madness, and a chance that gas and greed, rather than inte […]
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization hopes that If you can't beat them in Pashtunistan, you can at least corral them in the home of the blues, with NATO's Chicago summit planned to instill in members the "common values" behind drone warfare and base expansion. As riot police lock down the city, some partners likely fear they've mar […]
Hopes by Iran hawks for the United States Congress to provide enough ammunition to threaten Iran with a military strike on the eve of critical talks over Tehran's nuclear program have fallen unexpectedly short. The House has retracted its talons, while over in the Senate a new sanctions bill was blocked by Republicans because it wasn't sufficiently […]
The possibility of direct talks between the United States and Iran emerged in January when new sanctions gave the White House political cover to revert to a policy of engagement. However, Tehran's profound mistrust of American sincerity hampers progress. The only sensible way forward is to let bygones be bygones and work through an intermediary such as […]
China's refusal to use its leverage as North Korea's friend and protector to halt its provocations strengthens the United States alliance system that Beijing considers a tool of encirclement. As Pyongyang blithely continues with missile launches and other acts that undermine China in the international arena, it seems hard to image a policy more dam […]
What the US Can Learn from China by Ann Lee This book forces the reader to confront China's growth in the midst of America's decline, drawing attention to the reasons US politics became too self-serving, too short-sighted and too partisan. The author doesn't argue the Chinese approach is flawless, but she does hold up China's single-minde […]
The transition to a new constitution and the rule of law cannot be achieved overnight (South Africa's model constitution was seven years in the making). Yet the rush to get Nepal's new code into shape has been seemly, with the result that it will not have legitimacy, simply because politicians have failed to hear the dissenting voices of the people […]
Western opinion has largely greeted China's early attempts at innovation with skepticism. Yet companies such as Tsing Capital and Chrysalix Venture Capital are discovering entrepreneurs whose concepts represent a potential next wave of innovative technologies that could impact the world. - Benjamin A Shobert
The United States is to permit investment by US companies in Myanmar, while a ban will remain on imports from the still largely military-run country. Critics say the move is too early, with armed conflict still raging in the north, and will inevitably benefit human-rights abusers.- Carey L Biron
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now officially worth close to US$20 billion after successfully bringing off the initial public offering for his young social network site. Fans keen to grab a piece of the company may have to pay 50% more than the initial price when the shares start trading Friday. Martin J Young surveys the week's developments in com […]
The Israeli government has been plunged into unprecedented panic by claims that the number of African migrants entering the country via Egypt is increasingly out of control. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the migrants a "serious national threat to the character of the Zionist state". At the beginning of Sunday's cabinet meeting, Neta […]
The Secretary General of the Arab League, Dr. Nabil Al-Arabi, arrived in Sudan on Sunday for discussions with President Omar Al-Bashir and senior Sudanese officials. The agenda will cover the crisis with South Sudan and the latest political and security developments in Darfur. A press release from the Arab League revealed that Al-Arabi had a meeting on Frida […]
South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) has pulled the plug on the Israeli deputy ambassador to South Africa, Yaakov Finkelstein. This is yet another blow to Israel-South Africa relations that have recently become tense. Finkelstein was due to speak at UKZN later on today, Monday (21 May 2012), but yesterday afternoon, UKZN's Deputy Vice […]
EXCLUSIVE PICTURES Schoolgirls from the Muhammad Tufaha School in Nablus have held a craft exhibition under the title "Flowers of Spring", which featured their work from across the academic year. The exhibition was supervised by craft instructor Maha Al-Qadomi and was attended by local officials, parents and students. Many of the exhibits underline […]
Recently, millions of Egyptians crowded round TV sets in Cairo to watch two presidential candidates debate their country's future. For citizens more used to having a political system imposed on them than joining in the discussion, they seem to have adapted quickly. Cheers and applause broke out as the candidates each exploited their opponent's weak […]
Introduction The status of prisoners of war is a very complicated issue in international humanitarian law. Many people think - wrongly - that all of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are to be considered as prisoners of war. International humanitarian law, in particular the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and its protocols, gives a very precise defi […]
khalid@memonitor.org.uk (Dr Abdulrahman Muhammad Ali)
Love it or hate it, the BBC is perhaps the most powerful media institution in the world. Not even the Murdoch empire in its heyday matched the scale and impact of the BBC's operations. Yet, in the last week, it has suffered two embarrassing setbacks in the aftermath of which its funders, the British public, are entitled to a change of policy. For almost […]
A group of illegal Jewish settlers, accompanied by an Israeli government minister and a number of members of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), broke into the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque on Thursday morning, 17 May, amid a state of alert and while being heavily guarded by Israeli occupation forces. Mahmoud Abu Atta, a spokesman for the Al-Aqsa for Endowment […]
A poll conducted by the BBC World Service has ranked Israel in third place among the worst countries in the world, keeping company with North Korea and only just ahead of Iran and Pakistan. The results of the global poll, organised by the BBC and covering 22 countries, showed that Israel stands among the countries with the most negative influence on the worl […]
A report on Israel radio has revealed that manifestations of racial discrimination are widespread across Israeli society. The racism is particularly evident between Jews and Arabs, but there is also evidence of racism between Jews themselves and against African refugees who come to work in Israel. The report noted instances of attempted arson attacks on buil […]
Reports indicate a single suicide bomber who detonated powerful explosives amid a crowd of soldiers rehearsing for an upcoming parade in Yemen's capital city of Sanaa left at least 96 dead and perhaps 300 or more wounded. "We are hearing reports that 96 people were killed and many more injured. There have been requests for blood donations and the d […]
The City of Chicago has filed charges against three Occupy activists, Jared Chase, Brent Beterly, and Brian Jacob Church, including possession of explosives or incendiary devices, material support for terrorism, and conspiracy. Chicago police during anti-NATO protests. (photo: Mikasi) read more
The local press was quickly at the scene but Twitter broke the story first. Though the hour was late, Yemen’s social media was still very much awake. A US drone’s missiles had just slammed into a convoy of vehicles in a remote part of Yemen, killing three alleged militants. read more
See below for livestream and Twitter updates... Thousands of protesters are in Chicago today for a "People's G8" in a call led by National Nurses United (NNU) to demand an economy for the 99% and heal the "financial traumas faced by real people at the hands of Wall Street." read more […]
Today, the Cornucopia Institute released a report titled The Organic Watergate, revealing widespread corruption in the USDA's organic food monitoring panel -- the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). read more
Updated: 6:15 p.m. EST with a clarified quote*. In the seemingly endless war over abortion rights in America, battles are waged in legislatures, in courts and, most recently, on the Internet. The strategy of using abortion-related keywords to send a woman searching the web for abortion information More...
On Monday, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski announced changes that would modernize the agency’s Lifeline program to give greater broadband Internet access to low-income Americans. Lifeline has traditionally provided “discounts on one basic monthly telephone service (wireline or wireless) for qualified subscribers.” While announci […]
Sangeeta Ghosh, assistant corporate counsel for Kent County, Mich., says should the 51-year-old man charged in two cases of failing to disclose his HIV-positive status to sexual partners make bail, the county is prepared to ask a court to force him to take antiretroviral medications. “The county is More...
Former Michigan state Rep. Jack Hoogendyk is likely to announce next week that he will challenge Congressman Fred Upton (R-St. Joseph) in the GOP primary in August. Hoogendyk unsuccessfully challenged Upton for the seat two years ago, when he was able to garner only 43 percent of the vote, More...
The Foundation for Government Accountability debuted a new website Monday — an online database of the salaries of Florida’s public employees: FloridaOpenGov.org. The website is almost a replica of a project by Foundation President Tarren Bragdon at his last place of employment, the Maine Heritage Policy Center. More...
Going to court may be “the best way” to resolve a dispute over water rights between the U.S. Forest Service and the National Ski Areas Association, according to a former Forest Service ski area permit coordinator. “Frankly, litigation may be the best way forward on this issue,” Ed Ryerson More...
Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has blocked the state’s Personhood affiliate from introducing a bill that would define life from the moment of conception, on the grounds that it is “too vague” as written. Though “fetal personhood” measures across the country have been criticized for that very reason, Personhood Arkansas More...
With the beginning of session only days away, Florida legislators have been busy filing a slew of anti-abortion bills. Add yet another to the list: a measure outlawing race- and gender-based abortions. The bill was filed by state Rep. Scott Plakon, R-Longwood. House Bill 1327, or the “Susan B. More...
Kalley King Yanta, a former anchor for a Minneapolis-based television station and an anti-abortion-rights activist, has joined the Minnesota for Marriage group to anchor videos intended to convince Minnesotans to vote for the anti-gay-marriage amendment on the ballot in 2012. The videos — and Yanta — have come under More...
An alleged admission by a 51-year-old Comstock Park, Mich., man that he attempted to infect hundreds of people with HIV through unprotected sexual activity and needle-sharing has sparked a media feeding frenzy, which HIV activists and legal experts have roundly censured as “sensationalist.” In spite of the national condemnation, More...
[allAfrica.com] Lesotho has seen political violence flare ahead of May 26 elections, with the opposition claiming that dirty tricks have undercut their turnouts.
[New Vision] The Commander of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) Gen. Carter F. Ham has stated that he is confident the Lord's Resistance Army chief, Joseph Kony will be brought to justice.
[Capital FM] Malabo - The government of Equatorial Guinea's Prime Minister Ignacio Milam Tang resigned in line with a constitutional reform approved in November, the country's communications minister said on Friday.
[Oxfam] As the Camp David G8 Summit winds down, international agency Oxfam criticized G8 leaders for failing to renew measurable funding and policy commitments to help address global food security. Leaders were unwilling to continue current efforts to invest in developing country agriculture, even as they set a new goal of helping 50 million people lift them […]
[Garowe Online] Mogadishu - Multiple explosions in Mogadishu's busy Bakara market and another blast in east Mogadishu killed 8 and injured more than 15 on Saturday, Radio Garowe reports.
[Daily News] SOME 35 NGOs have teamed up to petition the government, urging it to allocate adequate budget for maternal and newborn health during the 2012/2013 financial year.
[Aswat Masriya] Cairo - Campaign of presidential candidate Hisham Bastawisi denied reports that he may withdraw for another candidate, insisting on his intention to run the race until the end.
[UN News] The United Nations envoy in Somalia, Augustine P. Mahiga, today expressed concern over recent violent clashes in the northern city of Hargeisa, located in Somaliland, between Somaliland security forces and citizens which allegedly resulted in the deaths on both sides.
[Sudan Tribune] Khartoum - The chairman of the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP) saw little change in Khartoum's position regarding the resumption of negotiations with Juba during his talks today with Sudanese president Omer Hassan al-Bashir.
[HRW] Johannesburg - Angolan security forces frequently abuse irregular migrants during expulsions from Angola, including sexual violence and other degrading and inhuman treatment, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
Summer is weeks away, but the fall book season has already started."Buzz Books 2012" is a free e-book that came out Monday (Tuesday Jakarta time) and features excerpts from 33 upcoming works, ...
Actor Gary Sinise is keeping a promise to help raise money for a southwest Virginia Marine who lost his limbs in Afghanistan.The star who played disabled Vietnam War veteran Lt. Dan in "Forrest Gump" ...
The government needed to accommodate the aspirations of certain civilian groups concerning the Lady Gaga concert in Jakarta that had been scheduled to take place on June 3 at the Bung Karno Stadium, ...
Vocational school students of SMKN 3 Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara, have managed to assemble 2,000 laptops for fellow students in schools throughout the region since 2009.The students have worked with ...
The government will accurately describe its human rights record in a report to be given to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) later this week, a top Palace official says.“The Office of ...
Contrary to her controversial and eye-catching image, Lady Gaga is actually very modest, according to a representative from local concert promoter Big Daddy Entertainment.“For instance, she ...
Local Internet and multimedia service provider PT Indosat Mega Media (IM2) plans to expand its market into the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) segment for future growth.IM2 president director ...
With uncertainty surrounding US singer Lady Gaga’s upcoming concert scheduled in Jakarta, it has been rumored that her promoter has switched the venue to Bali instead. Bali officials, however, ...
The Indonesian national futsal team is ready to compete in the 2012 Asia Cup in Dubai, which will run from May 25 to June 1."We began training in April. Our team is ready to compete and to do their ...
Tangerang regency police (Polresta Tangerang) have arrested two of the seven members of Pitam Kuning, a gang that has allegedly been involved in a number of armed robberies targeting minimarkets ...
A spokesperson from the Israel Foreign Ministry refuted an Anatolia news agency news report which said the Israeli president has requested permission to deploy at least 20,000 soldiers to Greek Cyprus in exchange for building a gas terminal on the island.
A suicide bomber infiltrated a military parade rehearsal in Yemen's capital Sanaa on Monday, killing at least 63 people in the bloodiest single attack in the city in recent years of instability.
A group of masked assailants threw a Molotov cocktail onto a public bus along the Taksim-Osmanbey route when the bus stopped at a red light near the Okmeydanı Şark Kahvesi, setting the bus on fire, in İstanbul's Şişli district on Sunday.
Six teenagers attending a picnic organized by a district Quran course drowned over the weekend in İskenderun, Hatay, when they were swept away by strong currents after going for a swim in the sea.
Turkish-Iraqi ties have been further strained after the burning of a Turkish flag during a protest near the Turkish Consulate General in Basra on Saturday and threats by protesters against Turkish firms operating in the city.
Residents of a Beirut suburb fired heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades at each other on Sunday, the latest violence to raise fears that Syria's turmoil was spilling over the border into its neighbour.
A special ops team officer was killed and five other security personnel were wounded in a clash with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the Kulp district of Diyarbakır province on Monday.
Turkish police on Monday detained three people, including two Turks, for their suspected involvement in a plot to abduct a defected Syrian colonel who fled to Turkey.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrived in Pakistan's capital city Islamabad late on Sunday as the formal guest of his Pakistani counterpart, Yousuf Raza Gilani.
Syria briefly closed its Bab al-Hawa border gate with Turkey on Saturday, apparently because of a military operation carried out by Syrian troops against a village near the border.
Former member of the Egyptian Brotherhood Abolfotoh leads in the presidential elections held by Egyptian embassies abroad, according to partial results.
Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said economic activity would likely slump by another 0.3 percent between April and June, further fuelling doubts about the country's ability to get a grip on in its finances and nurse an ailing banking sector back to health.
Facebook Inc shares fell below their $38 issue price in premarket trading today as support from underwriters of the initial public offering dissipated after its debut on Friday.
European shares bounced back from five-month lows today as investors bought into some stocks and sectors that had been particularly badly hit in the previous week's sell-off.
NATO leaders will endorse plans to hand over combat command in Afghanistan by mid-2013 and seek practical progress in opening routes to bring an international army of more than 130,000 back home from an unpopular, resource-draining war.
French prosecutors said today they had opened an inquiry into allegations of group rape by Dominique Strauss-Kahn and three friends, as part of an investigation into his ties to a suspected prostitution ring in the northern city of Lille.
French President Francois Hollande and like-minded euro zone leaders are expected to promote the idea of mutualised European debt at an informal summit in Brussels this week, increasing pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to drop her opposition to the proposal.
British nuke submarine HMS Talent was dispatched last night to the Malvinas Islands with Tomahawk warheads on what could be a warning signal to Argentina, according to UK’s sensationalist tabloid The Sun.
Venezuela's economy grew 5.6% in the first quarter of 2012 confirmed planning and finance minister Jorge Giordani and Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV) president Nelson Merentes on Thursday. read more
A German news website has revealed that the German government has been pushing for Eurozone countries to adopt a more active role in backing the current Venezuelan opposition coalition, the Roundtable of Democratic Unity (MUD), in the run up to this year’s presidential elections. read more
A total of 312,725 international tourists have visited Venezuela between January and April 2012, a figure which represents almost a 50% increase compared with the same period last year. read more
The government has revealed that there are about 3.7 million independent workers in Venezuela who could potentially benefit from the reforms to the Law on Social Security in Venezuela, enacted on April 21 by President Hugo Chávez. read more
Government representatives and private media have said opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles’ campaign is “stagnating” as he fails to gain support, while journalists also marched yesterday protesting violent attacks committed against them by Capriles’ supporters. read more
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez returned to Venezuela on Friday night, announcing a successful conclusion to his radiotherapy treatment in Cuba and his intention to return to the frontline of Venezuelan politics. Meanwhile, polls show him extending his advantage over rival Henrique Capriles Radonski. read more […]
Venezuelan alternative news website Aporrea.org reached its tenth anniversary today, marking a milestone in Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. read more
The Canadian Boat to Gaza, in cooperation, with international initiatives in the US, Australia and other countries, is launching a new initiative to challenge the illegal and inhumane Israeli blockade of Gaza, the only Mediterranean port closed to shipping. This new initiative: Gaza’s Ark, will build a boat in Gaza, using existing resources. A crew of intern […]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (London, May 4, 2012) Last summer, “Omer” posted a video saying he had been turned down as a passenger on board one of Free Gaza’s boats because he is gay. Within a few days, he was discovered to be a fake, apparently recording his statement coordinated with the Israeli government press office. Yesterday, Jon Ronson from the Guardian, f […]
April 11, 2012 During the Israeli “Operation Cast Lead” in Dec. 2008 – Jan. 2009, Dr. Gilbert was one of only two outside doctors in Gaza. Last week the International Criminal Court, to the protests of Amnesty International and other groups, stated it would not issue prosecutions for the Israeli Operation. Recently Gilbert, co-author of “Eyes in Gaza,” retur […]
I spent the early afternoon at a demonstration attended by several thousand people. The Hamas authorities refused to allow the people to march to the border, and clashes broke out with the police. .When we finally found a way to get around the Hamas cordon, we found shabob (Kids from roughly the age of 12 to 25) at Erez Crossing. They were throwing stones a […]
We don't usualy post blogs, but this one from Audacity of Hope passenger, Johnny Barber, is eloquent and timely. He is currently in Gaza as a photojournalist and puts a face and a family to the murdered men, women and children from last week. http://onebrightpearl-jb.blogspot.fr/2012/03/hey-will-never-beg.html
How long before South Africans are accused of being anti-Semites? South Africa to ban labeling West Bank settlement products as 'made in Israel', Amira Hass Minister of Trade and Industry says South Africa recognizes the State of Israel only within … Continue reading →
Inspired by the donkeys of the Gaza zoo, Israeli architect Malkit Shoshan exposes the inhumanities of Zionism in a Dutch exhibit that has stirred critics across Europe
Time magazine crowns Benjamin Netanyahu in its latest cover article, although he comes across as the leader of a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Suspect linked to rape of two women in north Israel on Sunday surrenders to officers near his home; attorney of man suspected of aiding to alleged rapists says alibi solid
During Knesset session on wave of violence, Commander Aharon Aksol says employing foreign migrants would curb phenomenon. MK Danon: Solution is simple – deportation
Palestinian cell indicted in attempted kidnapping of Yael Shahak and 8-year-old daughter, now she recalls incident: 'Look in his eyes changed and he became crazed'
Robert ScheerEven after it was known that Jamie Dimon’s bank blew more than $2 billion, Barack Obama still had praise for the intellect of his political backer.
The EditorsThe president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage is a testament to the generations of activists who waged a brave and often lonely battle for gay rights.
Chris MooneyPolitical watchdogs like PolitiFact and the Washington Post's "Fact-Checker" are accused of favoring Democrats—but it is the facts themselves that have a liberal bias.
Nato has told AFP that a US warship in the Mediterranean armed with interceptor missiles and a radar system in Turkey have come under Nato command out of a base in Rammstein, Germany. The move is phase one of a Europe-based missile shield system to be fully operational by 2018.
Nato should consider opening up its Partnership for Peace scheme to post-Arab-Spring democracies, writes Jos Boonstra.Related StoriesEU takes aim at Israeli settler productsObama presses EU leaders on growth
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen may lose her parliamentary seat to far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon in next month's parliamentary elections. An Ifop-Fiducial poll showed Le Pen would win 34% of first round votes to 29% for Melenchon but would be beaten 55-45% in the 17 June second round.
Denmark is planning to label products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, foreign minister Villy Søvndal told Politiken Friday. In a similar move, South Africa's trade ministry Saturday said Israeli products made on Palestinian land must be marked "Made in Occupied Palestinian Territories." Israel described the move as "racist. […]
Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi was awarded the European Union's Media Prize at this year’s film festival in Cannes. The 60,000 euro prize is meant to help fund his next film.
More than 20,000 people demonstrated in Frankfurt on Sunday against austerity measures in Europe and the power of banks. Activists from the ”Occupy Frankfurt” set up tents outside the European Central Bank’s headquarter after police cleared out an earlier encampment at the same place last week.
French leader Hollande has said he will call for joint eurozone debt at Wednesday's EU summit, despite German opposition.Related StoriesGreece struggling to manage asylum seekersEuropean Commission should be EU government, says GermanyObama presses EU leaders on growth
A weekend summit of G8 leaders stressed the need for the eurozone to focus on keeping Greece inside the euro. But plans are reportedly being drafted to deal with its potential exit.Related StoriesEuropean Commission should be EU government, says GermanyHollande to confront Merkel on eurobonds at EU summit[Opinion] Nato: Do what you do best
Turkey Thursday accused Israeli airplanes of violating the airspace of northern Cyprus - recognised only by Turkey. Ankara said the Israeli plan was driven off by Turkish fighter planes. The incident happened on Monday and comes as Turkey and Israel's relations have soured recently.
The space agency Nasa is training a team of astronauts to land on asteroids after a three million mile journey – dwarfing the mere 239,000 miles travelled to the moon. The mission, planned for the next decade, would land on an asteroid travelling at more than 50,000 miles an hour. The astronauts will drive vehicles [...]
The European banking industry has suffered another crushing blow after Moody’s ratings agency downgraded the credit ratings of 16 Spanish banks, citing the weakened government’s ability to support some banks. The agency downgraded the long-term debt and deposit ratings by one to three notches for 16 Spanish banks and Santander UK PLC, a UK-domiciled subsidia […]
NASA’s Kepler space telescope has recorded the number of superflares or enormous releases of magnetic energy that can damage a nearby orbiting planet. According to the report published in the journal Nature, superflares are much less frequent on slow-rotating stars like our Sun. The biggest recorded flare on the Sun happened on September 1, 1859 [...]
For the first time in US history, racial and ethnic minorities outnumber its white majority – white births make up fewer than half the children born in the country, according to the US Census Bureau. The new 2011 census, which was made public on Thursday, reveals non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 per cent of all [...]
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has warned the West against launching ‘hasty wars’, which may increase regional tensions and even trigger a nuclear war. “Sometimes these [military] actions — which undermine state sovereignty — could result in a fully-fledged regional war, and even — although I do not want to scare anyone […]
New poll results released on Monday showed former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich on top of the GOP field and benefiting from the exit of Herman Cain from the presidential campaign.
Egyptian Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzouri has completed the line-up of the new cabinet, state TV reported Monday. Ganzouri led the Egyptian gov't under the Mubarak regime from Jan. 1996 to Oct. 1999.
The most senior security policy adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron told a committee of the Houses of Parliament on Monday that it was highly unlikely that there would be any British military intervention in Syria.
Obama Monday urged Republican lawmakers in Congress to join Democrats and approve the extension of payroll tax cuts next year to revive the U.S. economy.
Abbas announced Monday that the Palestinians are ready to present their visions concerning all the permanent status issues to end the conflict with Israel.
Europe's powerhouses France and Germany agreed Monday on a series of reforms aimed at changing the European Union (EU) treaty to impose tough control of eurozone budgets.
Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) announced Monday that the ruling United Russia party won 49.54 percent of the votes after 95.71 percent of the ballots were counted.
Syria has responded positively to the Arab League (AL) protocol on an observer mission, but proposed "minor amendments" to the plan, a foreign ministry spokesman said Monday.
Pakistan said on Monday that it wants solid outcome of Bonn Conference on the future of Afghanistan to promote peace and reconciliation in the war- shattered country.
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny on Sunday called for tougher measures for next year's budget, reminding the public that the country is running a deficit of 16 billion euros (21.46 billion U.S. dollars).
Seit 2007 habe ich gezögert von folgendem zu berichten und meine damalige Einsicht immer wieder verdrängt. Aber irgendwann kommt alles Verdrängte an die Oberfläche. Zunächst einmal wird dem aufmerksamen Leser aufgefallen sein, daß ich in meiner Besprechung des skandalösen Begleitbandes zu OROP Wüste den zweiten Teil des Büchleins, der von Richard Blasband zu […]
Einer der brillantesten Wissenschaftler, Rassenkundler und Kenner der jüdischen Geschichte: Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (* 9. September 1855 in Portsmouth, England; † 9. Januar 1927 in Bayreuth) war ein Schriftsteller, Verfasser zahlreicher populärwissenschaftlicher Werke, unter anderem zu Richard Wagner, Immanuel Kant und Johann […]
Um den Tag der energetischen Wurzel des Neuanfanges mitgestalten zu können, gibt es viele Möglichkeiten… Die Intuition einer lieben Leserin brachte uns auf die Idee, Orte ausfindig zu machen, die Pfingstsonntag um 14:30 Uhr durchaus eine Reise wert sind! Für den Süden Deutschlands sind zwei Orte zu nennen, an denen wir Pfingstsonntag um 14:30 Uhr [...] […]
Grausamer Drogenkrieg in Mexiko: Im Norden des Landes wurden 23 Tote gefunden. Mehrere Leichen hingen von einer Autobahnbrücke, die Köpfe der anderen Opfer lagen vor einem Rathaus. Neue Gewaltexzesse im mexikanischen Drogenkrieg: 23 Tote sind in der Grenzstadt Nuevo Laredo in Nordmexiko entdeckt worden. Neun Menschen hingen am Freitag von einer Autobahnbrück […]
Der Sozialist Hollande setzt mit der 30prozentigen Kürzung ebenso ein Zeichen wie die konservative Kanzlerin mit der 5,7prozentigen Erhöhung Es ist eine symbolische Geste, wenn der frisch gewählte französische Präsident Hollande sich und seinen Ministern zu Beginn schon einmal eine 30prozentige Gehaltskürzung verordnet. Gleichwohl setzt die neue Regierung da […]
Blockupy – Erfolg oder Niederlage? Mehr als 25.000 Menschen sollen heute (gestern) in der Frankfurter Innenstadt nach Veranstalterangaben gegen die Politik der EU-Troika demonstriert haben Das Spektrum der Demonstranten reichte von Gewerkschaften, der Linkspartei, Attac bis den außerparlamentarischen Bündnissen Ums Ganze und der Interventionistischen L […]
Der Dreiteiler basiert auf dem Roman “Joseph Balsamo” von Alexandre Dumas Abenteurer, Hochstapler, Magier, Goldmacher, Geisterbeschwörer – “Graf” Cagliostro suchte im 18. Jahrhundert fast alle Hauptstädte und Höfe Europas heim. Im Jahre 1791 wurde er von der Inquisition verurteilt und verschwand bis an sein Lebensende hinter Ker […]
Wir verlangen, dass wir genau wie die Frauen mit einem Tag geehrt werden, da wir ständig Opfer von Missbrauch, Demütigungen, verbalen, physischen und sexuellen Attacken sind. Außerdem muss folgendes beachtet werden: Wer ist der Einzige der sich traut, alles aufzuessen, was ihm vorgesetzt wird, ohne zu mucksen ? Der selbstlose Mann ! Wer hebt die [...]
Dokumentation: Die Rede von Parkschützer Matthias von Herrmann auf der heutigen 124. Montagsdemonstration der Stuttgarter Bürgerbewegung für den Kopfbahnhof und gegen das verkehrsindustrielle Umbauprogramm "Stuttgart 21" (S21).
Rund 500 Demonstranten versammelten sich vor dem Haus des Bürgermeisters von Chicago Rahm Emanuel, um gegen die kürzliche Schliessung der psychiatrischen Kliniken als Teil einer Reihe von Kundgebungen und Märsche zeitgleich mit einem NATO-Gipfel zu protestieren. Die Menschen hatten Transparente mitgebracht mit den Slogans “food not bombs”, “seize the peace” […]
Griechenland: Nachdem vorher der Botschafter der Berliner Republik in Athen, Wolfgang Dold, und der deutsche EU-Parlamentspräsident Martin Schulz (SPD/SPE) bei ihm rausgeschlichen kamen, hat der Vorsitzende der Koalition der Radikalen SYRIZA, Alexis Tsipras, auch dem britischen "Guardian" eine Audienz gegeben. Auszüge des Interviews im Wortlaut: […]
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society warnte am 17.Mai davor, dass Paul Watson in Costa Rica nicht sicher ist und um sein Leben fürchten muss. Die taiwanesische Haifang-Mafia hat seit Jahren ein Kopfgeld in Höhe von 20.000 Dollar auf den Captain ausgesetzt. “Wir wissen, dass der Arm der taiwanesischen Fischerei-Mafia nicht nur bis zur illegalen Fischerei in Cost […]
Sie hat nichts mit dem Ereignis zu tun, das ihm den Namen gab: Die riesige Rallye für Frieden , an deren Ende die Ermordung Yitzhak Rabins war. Diese Rallye war in jeder Hinsicht anders. Es war ein fröhliches Ereignis. Dutzende von NGOs, viele von ihnen klein, einige von ihnen etwas größer, jede mit einer anderen Agenda, kamen zusammen, um den sozialen Prote […]
Heute hat Angela Mutti Merkel versucht, ihrem griechischen Volk ein Referendum zu geben.. Leider gab es da ein kleines Mißverständnis. Dabei will sie nur ständig das Beste. Und zwar mit Zinsen. Heute hat also Mutti – wer würde ihr schon was antun? Einfach abwählen?! Niemals! Ihr Muttimörder! – dem griechischen Volk ein Referendum über blühende [. […]
Videos und updates In ganz Frankfurt und Randgebiete ist das Recht auf Bewegungsfreiheit, Meinungsäusserungen und Pressefreiheit ausser Kraft gesetzt, denn die Repressalien der Polizei erstrecken sich auf Kontrollen und Platzverweise für alle Besucher, einschliesslich Touristen und Einwohner. Auch am heutigen Freitag kamen tausende Menschen in die Innenstadt […]
Liedermacher Konstantin Wecker auf dem Paulsplatz zu den Blockupy-Protesten: Wecker: “Begräbnis demokratischer Rechte” Livestreams und updates von den “Bloccupy”-Protesten. Ohrfeige nach Karlsruhe aus der Main-Metropole: die Bürger verhalten sich wie Bürger, die zur Verteidigung der Verfassung sowie für das Gemeinwohl der Gesellschaft […]
Mit diesem 565 Seiten umfassenden Gesetz wäre ein Freibrief durch einen kurzen Paragraf in Statut 1021 für das Militär in Kraft getreten, jeden Bürger auf unbestimmte Zeit ohne ein ordentliches Gerichtsverfahren zu inhaftieren, dem vorgeworfen wird, wissentlich oder unwissentlich Unterstützung des Terrorismus zu leisten.
For FY2010, the Obama Administration requested $350,000 in International Military Education and Training (IMET) funding for Libya to “support education and training of Libyan security forces, creating vital linkages with Libyan officers after a 35-year break in contact.” Participation in the IMET program also makes the Libyan government eligible to purchase additional U.S. military training at a reduced cost. The Bush Administration’s FY2009 request for IMET funding indicated that “the Government of Libya would pay for additional training and education with national funds.” However, no IMET funding was provided in FY2009, according to State Department budget documents.
