Stephen Lendman

America's media, Britain's state-controlled BBC, other Western sources, and Al Jazeera are spreading unverified or false reports on Libya's uprising.

On February 25, writer Madhi Darius Nazemroaya, a Middle East/Central Asian specialist, based on reliable in-country contacts, headlined an important article,

"Libya: Is Washington Pushing for Civil War to Justify a US-NATO Military Intervention?"

Access it through this link.

For greater readership, this article covers key information in it. Its entirety explains much about what's ongoing - what major media accounts misreport or suppress, especially television reaching large audiences, presenting distorted managed news. It shouldn't surprise. Representing powerful interests, carefully filtered sanitized reporting substitutes for the real kind.

Gaddafi indisputably is despotic, governing by "fear and cronyism," treating Libya as his "private estate," and spawning "an entire hierarchy of corrupt officials," disdainful of popular interests.

Nonetheless, something is "(r)otten in the so-called 'Jamahiriya' (state of the masses) of Libya." Popular anger is justified and real. At issue is whether it's spontaneous or externally generated, and, if so, by whom and for what reasons.

Western powers, especially America, gladly support despots. They only fall into disfavor by forgetting who's boss. Mubarak forgot. So did Gaddafi, long targeted for removal despite rapprochement with America and Western nations. As a result, in-country reports lack credibility without verifiable proof. Much of it is lacking.

At issue is removing an outlier while keeping his regime intact, one friendly to Washington and Western interests. Acquiescence assures support for the world's most ruthless tyrants. Straying gets them in trouble. Gaddafi strayed, leaving him vulnerable for removal.

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Stephen Lendman

[A demonstrator holds up a picture of ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide during a protest against Haiti's President Rene Preval in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Monday Feb. 7, 2011 (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)]

He's lived in exile since US marines forcefully ousted him at gunpoint on February 29, 2004. Efforts to help him return followed, what he's wanted for eight years today, the anniversary of his abduction.

On February 25, San Francisco's Bay View and other publications ran attorney Walter Riley's article titled, "Prominent anti-apartheid movement veterans call on South African government to assist Aristide in returning to Haiti now," saying:

Noted figures wrote "South African President Jacob Zuma an open letter 'in hopes that (he'll) assist' former (President) Aristide and his family (return) to Haiti 'as soon as possible.' " Among them were:

● Randall Robinson, Trans Africa Forum's founder;
● Jesse Jackson;
● Danny Glover;
● British MP John McDonnell;
● Dick Gregory;
● Jack Healey, Human Rights Action Center's founder and director;
● Jack Heyman of San Francisco's International Longshore and Warehouse Union, who refused to unload ships with South African goods in the 1980s;
● Selma James, widow of famed author/historian/essayist CLR James, one of his notable books titled, "The Black Jacobins" about Haiti's liberating revolution;
● Massachusetts State Representative Byron Rushing;
● Women of Color/Global Women's Strike's Margaret Prescod; and
● civil rights attorney Walter Riley, Haiti Emergency Relief Fund (HERF) chairman and John George Democratic Club co-chair.

Their letter in part read:

"We write in the hopes that you can assist the Aristides in making their transition as soon as possible. The situation in Haiti remains dire, and the Aristides have expressed their willingness to help Haiti rebuild, through education initiatives and in other desperately-needed areas. Many people in Haiti have been greatly inspired by the news of the issuance of (his) passport..."

Delaying his return would be a major

"disappointment to a people that have already experienced a long list of tragedies, disasters, and heartbreak....(We) support the efforts of the South African government to assist President Aristide and his family in quickly returning home. And we hope to see (him) in Haiti very soon."

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Vincent Di Stefano

Castle Bravo thermonuclear hydrogen bomb (Wikipedia/DOE)

Remembering Rongelap

While the colours of the rising sun were beginning to play over the skies of a still Pacific morning on the first day of March 1954, a second sun suddenly and furiously erupted from Namu Island in the Bikini atoll. It was the fiery fruition of the determination of Hungarian physicist Edward Teller to gift the world with a weapon as powerful as the sun itself, a weapon based on the fusion of hydrogen atoms.

Within one second of that infernal detonation, an immense fireball 7 kilometres in diameter had formed. In less than a minute, the fireball had risen to a height of 14 kilometres. Eight minutes later, the fiery cloud had billowed out to a height of 40 kilometres and had spread out over a distance of 100 kilometres. Even so, it continued expanding outwards at a rate of more than six kilometres a minute. Beneath this unearthly fury, the Bikini atoll had been riven in two by a gaping crater two kilometres wide and 60 metres deep.

The clever men who had worked so hard to create such a weapon were well pleased. The 80,000 inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, in which the Bikini atoll was situated, were to suffer for generations to come. And the world was thereafter blighted by a new destructive energy that was to be claimed by powerful military establishments around the world.

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