Thierry Meyssan
Voltairenet.org

Mohamed Siala receiving the Voltaire Network team of investigators.
© Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya / Réseau Voltaire

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.

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Paul Craig Roberts

There’s an old English ditty, "a young lady of Kent," that ends with these lines:

"...She knew what it meant
- but she went!"

Eight years after she went, Strauss-Kahn’s French accuser says she didn’t know what it meant. If what I have read about the charge of attempted rape now being brought against Strauss-Kahn in France is correct, eight years ago a young French woman agreed to meet Strauss-Kahn alone in an apartment that was not his address. She claims that, despite her protests, Strauss-Kahn persisted in sexually aggressive behavior. She construes, or perhaps misconstrues, his behavior as attempted rape.

If the woman’s account is true, there is an innocent interpretation. By agreeing to the meeting, she sent a signal that she did not intend to send and which Strauss-Kahn interpreted, or misinterpreted, to mean that she was sexually available.

If this is the story, a French court would realize that, however frightening it was for the young woman, it was a misunderstanding and not an attempted rape. Strauss-Kahn would be guilty of boorish behavior, but this is not yet a crime.

French skepticism would explain why the charge lay dormant for eight years and came to life on the heels of the New York case, which has now fallen apart. The certainty with which the New York police, prosecutor, and American media initially treated Strauss-Kahn’s guilt created credibility for the French woman’s accusation. Certainly, the prospect of Strauss-Kahn’s conviction on the New York charges would give a French lawyer more confidence in the French woman’s story.

I offer this not as an excuse for Strauss-Kahn, who is much too horny for his own good, but as an innocent explanation of an event that also has non-innocent explanations.

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Stephen Lendman

Americans are the last to catch on. Too often, in fact, they never do or realize one sitting government is as lawless as others. It's true despite a failed state's rotting stench permeating everywhere across the world, planning perhaps to blow it up to save it.

On July 3, Peter Dale Scott told Progressive Radio News Hour listeners what he fears most. He repeated it in a July 4 email, citing a Paul Joseph Watson Infowars.com article, accessed through this link.

Using information from DEBKAfile, a Jerusalem-based intelligence site with close Mossad ties (providing commentary and analysis on regional terrorism, intelligence, security, military and political affairs), he discussed a frightening prospect. More on it below.

Founded in June 2000, DEBKA calls itself independent, "pioneer(ing) intensive news coverage and analysis of global (Islamic, not Israeli, US, or other Western) terror before it hits" front pages.

Calling its reports "not infallible," Scott said its information deserves attention because some past predictions proved true. Specifically, he cited their June 25, 2003 story that

"The Americans are secretly building two giant intelligence facilities in Iraq at a cost of some half a billion dollars."

Doing so and more makes it

"seem that America is now indeed acting as recklessly and idiotically as Britain and France did in the (1956) Suez crisis...."

On air and in his email, Scott wondered whether

"Washington failed to take into account the reaction of Russia and China (the way Britain in 1956 insanely" didn't bank on America's response at the time). "Or is (America) counting on its (nuclear superiority) to deal with any problems in that area."

Disturbingly, top US officials include extremists who think brute force solutions work best, even high risk ones like nuclear war or simultaneously waging too many conventional ones.

Scott told Progressive Radio News Hour listeners that he's warned for months about Libya being a flashpoint for escalated general war, similar to how WW I began.

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Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

Sheikh Raed Salah leads Israel's Islamic Movement, the political
importance of which has risen in recent years. (S. Scheiner/AP)

The arrest by the British authorities last week of Sheikh Rae'd Salah, one of the prominent leaders of Israel's 1.7 million-strong Palestinian community, is a real affront to the most elementary considerations of justice. It is also an indelible shame that should continue to haunt the British justice system for a long time to come.

Far from being motivated by any real violations of the law, the arrest seemed to have been prompted by a vindictive complaint by pro-Israeli Zionist circles in the British capital. Ultimately, the real motive behind the arrest is to silence one of the most outspoken defendants of Palestinian rights, the very man the Israeli intelligence has been persecuting, vilifying and even trying to assassinate.

I am not talking about someone I don't know. Since the late 1980s, I have met Ra'ed Salah many times. I visited him at his home in Um al-Fahm and I attended his lectures. And from my acquaintance with the man, I can solemnly attest to his honesty, religiosity, rectitude and clean credentials. He is a man who would rather be morally straight than politically correct, he wouldn't flinch from telling the truth (as he sees it) for fear of undesirable public reaction.

Sheikh Ra'ed Salah is therefore a man of sublime principles. He feels he is morally obliged to speak up against oppression, especially Israel's pornographic oppression that is meted out to his own people on both sides of the Green Line, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as Israel.

He does belong to that special category of people, which encompasses great men and women, who stand up in the face of power, throwing their moral weight on the side of the weak, the persecuted and the helpless.

Hence, ascribing racism to this man is an insult to truth, which can only be made by irredeemable ignoramuses or malicious liars.

Needless to say, the Israeli intelligence made every conceivable effort to vilify and incriminate, even criminalize, Sheikh Salah.

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Adnan Al-Daini

Communication has become the art of the sound bite; infuriating, though that is, it is the reality of the world we inhabit. S/he who is good at simplifying a complicated issue, but keeps the essence of it is the one who will reach the widest audience. 

The left and progressives are too clever by half [*]. They get the complexities, but are loath to simplify for fear of losing some strands of the argument.  Liberal progressive writers use their experience and knowledge combined with findings from other sources in an enterprise of intellectual rigour to back up their theses and conclusions. However, it is important that these conclusions and ideas are then distilled into easily digestible chunks, and presented in a way that resonate with the experiences and struggles of the ordinary voter, to whom politics is not such a passion.  Alas, this does not happen.  Progressives seem to me to be writing for each other with little regard to keeping an eye on a wider audience.

The right have always been able to appeal to the basest instincts of human nature in a way that chimes with the aspirations of the many. Take, for example, the issue of the savage cuts in government spending that are being advocated by the right on both sides of the Atlantic; it is presented in the guise of a “family finances” argument.  As a family, “wouldn’t you want to pay your debts and live within your means”? - is a very appealing argument.

Note that when the right and like-minded groups talk about cutting government spending even further, they are not talking about cuts in spending on wars and its destructive machinery. Oh no, they are talking about cutting it from the meagre amounts given to the disabled, the poor, the unemployed, those most vulnerable in our society. They never talk about priorities in spending; they never talk about the obscene income gap between the ultra rich and the poor.

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

No dogma, no doctrine, no parties, no political poltroonery; just one plank in this platform: I'm for the poor.

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