Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition

Cutting through the government propaganda and media lies

Libya is a small country of just over 6 million people but it possesses the largest oil reserves in all of Africa. The oil produced there is especially coveted because of its particularly high quality.

The Air Force of the United States along with Britain and France has carried out 7,459 bombing attacks since March 19. Britain, France and the United States sent special operation ground forces and commando units to direct the military operations of the so-called rebel fighters – it is a NATO- led army in the field.

The troops may be disaffected Libyans but the operation is under the control and direction of NATO commanders and western commando units who serve as “advisors.” Their new weapons and billions in funds come from the U.S. and other NATO powers that froze and seized Libya’s assets in Western banks. Their only military successes outside of Benghazi, in the far east of the country, have been exclusively based on the coordinated air and ground operations of the imperialist NATO military forces.

In military terms, Libya’s resistance to NATO is of David and Goliath proportions. U.S. military spending alone is more than ten times greater than Libya’s entire annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which was $74.2 billion in 2010, according to the CIA’s World Fact Book.

In recent weeks, the NATO military operations used surveillance-collecting drones, satellites, mounting aerial attacks and covert commando units to decapitate Libya’s military and political leadership and its command and control capabilities. Global economic sanctions meant that the country was suddenly deprived of income and secure access to goods and services needed to sustain a civilian economy over a long period.

“The cumulative effect [of NATO’s coordinated air and ground operation] not only destroyed Libya’s military infrastructure but also greatly diminished Colonel Gaddafi’s commanders to control forces, leaving even committed fighting units unable to move, resupply or coordinate operations,“ reports the New York Times in a celebratory article on August 22.

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Nahida Izzat, Exiled Palestinian

'We Shall Never Forget 9/11 -- The Kids' Book of Freedom'

On the brink of the 10th anniversary of September 11th a new children's 'graphic coloring novel' has emerged, allegedly "designed to be a tool that parents can use to help teach children about the facts surrounding 9/11. This book also describes basic freedoms in America."

In the publisher official page it declares that "a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book are donated to Bridges for Peace. A Jerusalem-based, Bible-believing Christian organization supporting Israel and building relationships between Christians and Jews worldwide through education and practical deeds expressing God's love and mercy. They presently feed 26,000 people a month of all backgrounds, have brought into the land of Israel more than 36,000 Jews and renovated more than 825 apartments of the needy and elderly in the Jerusalem area. Many are Holocaust survivors."

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Bob Carter

This is text of the speech (edited for online publication) delivered by professor Bob Carter at the “Convoy of No Confidence” protest in Canberra on August 22, 2011.

Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen.

First, my warm congratulations to every person here for coming to this gathering today. Most of you have paid your own expenses, and simply by being here you are therefore displaying great public generosity on behalf of all your fellow citizens. For, though some remain unaware of it, every single Australian man, woman and child will be hurt should a carbon dioxide tax come into being – and that hurt will be greater for the less well off, and will be imposed for no environmental benefit whatever.

Second, the organizers of this event have made it crystal clear it is a gathering at which ANY Australian, of any shape, size, colour or political inclination, can express his or her opposition to a carbon dioxide tax.

However, a meeting on the lawn of parliament house has inescapable political implications. My perspective is that of an experienced scientist - one who has spent a professional lifetime studying ancient environmental and climatic change. I therefore have nothing to say, and neither should I have anything to say, about the politics of the carbon dioxide tax. Rather, my role today is to share with you a summary of the science that should be, but actually isn’t, illuminating policy making on climate change.

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Stephen Lendman

Continuing NATO atrocities on Libyan civilians gave naked aggression a new name.

Call it what it is: Lawless, Willful, Malevolent Genocidal Gang Rape, the new supreme international crime against peace ongoing at this time.

In times of war, its legal name is Genocide - what NATO planners implemented since last March.

See for yourself. Independently produced images reveal what NATO, venal politicians, their PR manipulators, and media liars suppress or misreport.

A committed team of independent journalists, researchers and cameramen produced the Global Research.ca video accessed through this link. It's a snapshot of what Libyans endure daily under NATO terror bombings and rebel gang killings to destroy them, their futures and truth.

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William T. Hathaway

From the Book Radical Peace: People Refusing War by William T. Hathaway. Published by Trine Day 2010.

A Granny for Peace told of finding young allies in the struggle against military recruiting. Due to the Patriot Act, she wishes to remain nameless.

It's never easy being a parent or a child. The generations always have friction between them, a conflict between the elders' need to give guidance and youths' need to find their own way. I grew up in the 1950s, when the USA was very conservative and bound by traditions. My parents' generation had grown up in the Depression amid poverty and then struggled through World War Two with its threat of death and destruction. By the time they were ready to start families, they were fixated on stability and security. They measured their progress by their possessions: buying their first car, first television, first house. Their morality centered on controlling sexuality and protecting private property. Their religion was a death cult of stern patriarchs, obedient virgins, innocent babies, and threats of eternal torture. Their deepest philosophy was, "There is no free lunch." The peak of their scientific achievement was the hydrogen bomb. Fear was their strongest emotion.

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Medea Benjamin

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was given a multi-million contract to write a book about his political career. According to Cheney’s media hype, the book, called In My Time, will have “heads exploding all over Washington.” The Darth Vader of the Bush administration offers no apologies and feels no remorse. But peace activists around the country are stealthily gearing up to visit bookstores, grab a stack of books, and deposit them where they belong—the Crime Section.

Here are ten of Cheney’s many offenses to inspire you to move Cheney’s book, and to insert these bookmarks explaining why the author of In My Time should be “doin’ time.”

1. Cheney lied; Iraqis and U.S. soldiers died. As Vice President, Cheney lied about (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) ties to the 9/11 attack as a way to justify a war with a country that never attacked us. Thanks to Cheney and company, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 American soldiers perished in a war that should never have been fought.

2. Committing War Crimes in Iraq. During the course of the Iraq war, the Bush/Cheney administration violated the Geneva Conventions by targeting civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances, and using illegal weapons, including white phosphorous, depleted uranium, and a new type of napalm.

3. War profiteering. U.S. taxpayers shelled out about three trillion dollars for the Bush/Cheney wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—a major factor in our nation’s present economic meltdown. But Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton made out like bandits, getting billions in contracts for everything from feeding troops in Iraq to constructing the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan to building the infamous Guantanamo prison. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995-2000, leaving for the VP position with a $20 million retirement package, plus millions in stock options and deferred salary. Before the Iraq War began, Halliburton was 19th on the U.S. Army's list of top contractors; with Cheney’s help, by 2003 it was number one—increasing the value of Cheney’s stocks by over 3,000%.

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Stephen Lendman

Wherever it goes, NATO slaughters, ravages, lays waste, incinerates, contaminates, devastates, conquers, colonizes, plunders, exploits, impoverishes and immiserates.

Libya is its latest victim. It's now a hellish inferno thanks to NATO and its rebel gangs, unleashed to commit mass murder with impunity. NATO calls it humanitarian intervention responsibility to protect. This is Orwellian doublespeak for war.

For Libyans, it's a war without mercy to destroy their independent state. For America, Britain and France, it's for another imperial trophy.

For Libyans, it turned their world upside down through the barrel of a gun. They call it naked aggression, mass slaughter, and turning Africa's most developed state into a dystopian nightmare. It's why people of conscience say never forgive or forget.

Watch the Libya Truth video and compare the country before and after NATO, accessed through this link.

With independent Tripoli-based voices silenced, it's hard getting accurate daily information. Nonetheless, some mainstream sources report rebel forces are committing reprisals, revenge killings, and perhaps indiscriminate murder across the city, repeating the same pattern they followed in other parts of the country.

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Bill Van Auken

More than a week after the NATO-led “rebels” invaded the Libyan capital of Tripoli, the city’s 2 million residents are facing a deepening humanitarian crisis, deprived of water, electricity, adequate food supplies and desperately needed medical care.

While the downfall of the 42-year-old regime of Col. Muammar Gaddafi has been universally proclaimed, the whereabouts of Gaddafi himself are still not known. The principal leaders of the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council (NTC)—recognized by the major powers as the “legitimate” government of Libya—have yet to set foot in Tripoli.

Sporadic fighting continues to be reported in the capital, while NATO and the insurgent forces it has sponsored are preparing for a siege of Sirte, the coastal city of 100,000 that is Gaddafi’s home town and a center of his tribe, the Gaddafas.

NATO warplanes have conducted dozens of air strikes against Sirte, which straddles the highway leading from Tripoli in the west to Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi, to the east.

The pretense that this air war is being carried out under the United Nations mandate to protect Libyan civilians has become increasingly ludicrous as US, British and French warplanes are used to pound civilian population centers to prepare the way for invading “rebel” armies.

The head of the self-appointed NTC, Mustafa Abel Jalil, told a meeting of NATO envoys in Qatar Monday that the bombings should continue because “Gaddafi is still capable of doing something awful in the last moments.” He added that the ousted Libyan leader’s “defiance of the coalition forces still poses a danger, not only for Libya but for the world.”

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Eric S. Margolis

The mighty US Navy won’t say so publicly, but it’s increasingly worried by China’s development of new anti-ship missiles. The chief worry is China’s new DF-21D whose primary target is America’s huge aircraft carriers.

According to Chinese sources, the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) has recently become operational in limited numbers. Originally developed for submarines, the DF-21D is said to have a range of 2,700km and at least some capability to strike moving targets.

China’s military is hard at work on satellites, long-range backscatter radar, submarines, and drones that can identify moving naval targets up to 3,000 km distance. These overlapping sensors will provide accurate, real-time targeting data for the DF-21D and other shorter-ranged sea, air and land-based anti-ship missiles.

The US Navy insists its carriers are not threatened by any of China’s new missiles and retain their freedom of action off China. But the DF-21D can cover the entire South China Sea, including Taiwan.

This could be extremely bad news for the US Navy, which deploys 11 aircraft carrier groups that enable the US to project power around the globe.

Batteries of DF-21D’s based safely inland may keep the US Navy far off China’s coasts, isolate Taiwan, and threaten US bases in Japan, Okinawa and Guam. In fact, the mere existence of the DF-21D’s and their deployment in sizeable numbers may be enough to keep US carriers at least 2,000 km from China’s coasts, thus beyond the useful range of the carrier’s strike aircraft.

As a writer on naval affairs, I’ve long been convinced that big attack aircraft carriers are going the way of the battleship. At around 100,000 tons, they are huge targets, high in the water, easily detected at long range by radar and infrared sensors. Each US attack carrier carries close to one million gallons of aviation fuel plus hundreds of tons of munitions.

The US Navy made carrier operations into a high science during World War II. The USN was famed for its brilliant damage-control techniques that prevented the loss of many US warships during WWII.

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Stephen Lendman

Libyan rebel loots Tripoli - View it yourself! These images don't lie, but NATO's are fake ones, produced in Doha, Qatar and perhaps elsewhere on Hollywood sound stages.

For months, NATO marauders and rebel killers gang raped Libya - murdering, destroying, ravaging on the pretense of protecting.

On August 22, Obama, a duplicitous unindicted war criminal, described the above images as "basic and joyful longing for human freedom."

On August 25, Secretary of State Clinton, another unindicted war criminal, said "(t)he events in Libya this week have heartened the world."

Let them and their conspiratorial allies go to Tripoli, Brega, Misrata and other ravaged Libyan cities and see for themselves. Let them view streets filled with mangled corpses, blood, agony on the face of the living, destruction everywhere in sight, and human misery beyond what scales can measure. Let them see firsthand the fruits of their victory. Let them taste, smell, and witness Tripoli's growing humanitarian disaster.

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Patrick Martin

A series of reports from journalists on the ground in Tripoli have provided evidence of mass killings by the NATO-backed forces in the Libyan civil war. These reports, which appear in publications largely supportive of the US-NATO intervention to overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, further expose the fraudulent claim that the imperialist war against Libya is driven by humanitarian motives and the desire to protect civilian lives.

The Washington Post carried a prominent report Saturday, headlined, “Revenge Killings Mount in Libya, Extrajudicial Attacks by Rebels Cast Shadow Over New Freedom.” The headline refers to the contradiction between the claims by the National Transitional Council (NTC), the new NATO-backed regime in Libya, as well as the Obama administration that what is taking place is a new birth of freedom in Libya and the reality of politically directed and in some cases racially motivated slaughter.

Post reporter Simon Denyer asserts that Gaddafi’s troops “executed scores or even hundreds of political prisoners this week, even as victorious rebel fighters appear to have carried out their own abuses.” He cites the testimony of Diana Eltahawy, Libya researcher for Amnesty International, who “described a record of abuse, torture and the extrajudicial killing of captured pro-Gaddafi fighters that has followed the rebels from east to west as they have taken over the country.”

The reporter himself saw five Gaddafi soldiers wounded and dying in a field hospital now patrolled by the “rebels,” without receiving food, water or medical attention, and 15 bodies, mainly of black Africans presumed to be Gaddafi supporters, left to rot in the sun outside the Bab al-Aziziyah compound where much of Gaddafi’s family lived. According to Denyer, “not all of them looked like ordinary battlefield deaths. Two dead men lay face down on the grass, their hands bound behind their backs with plastic cuffs.”

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Nahida Izzat, Exiled Palestinian

As we have seen too often, Jewish-Zionists are acting as a spearhead of the genocidal war against Muslims, they continue to stir up hatred, fear-mongering and catastrophic wars against Islam and Muslims.

So it's not surprising to watch them shedding off all integrity as they pose as "intellectuals", "historians", experts and think-tanks" while persisting in their efforts to poison the world with lies, fabrications and deceit in the name of "security", foreign policy, or "research".

One of those "prominent" personalities is Joe Lieberman, a close friend of the extremist supremacist group Chabad, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs who declared recently that U.S. Should Cut Social Security to Pay for Fighting ‘The Islamist Extremists’:

"We’re at war with Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11 and will be for a long time to come"

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Bill Van Auken

The Nuremberg trials after the Second World War established aggressive war as the “supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

NATO’s assault on Libya, a criminal imperialist war from its outset more than five months ago, has descended into an exercise in out-and-out murder as special forces operatives and intelligence agents hunt down Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

From the beginning, the central objectives of this war have been to seize control of Libya’s oil reserves, the largest on the African continent, and carry out an imperialist show of force as a means of suppressing and diverting the mass popular movements that only months earlier had toppled the US- and NATO-backed regimes of Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia.

“Operation United Protector,” as NATO dubbed its military onslaught, would have been more accurately described as “Operation Imperialist Gang Rape.” The US, Britain, France and Italy, each pursuing its own interests in Libya and the broader region, managed to unite for the common purpose of “regime-change.”

To achieve this aim, NATO warplanes carried out over 20,000 sorties, destroying schools, hospitals and homes and slaughtering untold numbers of Libyan soldiers, many of them young conscripts.

Flouting the terms of the United Nations resolution authorizing “all means necessary” to protect civilians, NATO powers, including the US, France and Britain, sent in special forces troops, military contractor mercenaries and intelligence agents to arm, organize and lead the so-called “rebels,” whose primary function was to draw out Libyan government forces so they could be annihilated from the air.

The pretense that this was a war to protect civilians has been exposed as a moral obscenity, with the death toll in Tripoli alone climbing into the thousands and NATO bombs and missiles continuing to fall in heavily populated areas.

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Stephen Lendman

After covering Libya's rape since last winter in dozens of articles, no forgiving or forgetting is possible for one of history's great crimes.

Nor is ignoring those responsible, condemning them forthrightly, and explaining why all wars are waged.

NATO outdid Orwell on this one, killing truth by calling war the responsibility to protect - by terrorizing, attacking, and slaughtering civilians like psychopathic assassins.

As a result, honest historians will redefine barbarism to explain NATO's savagery. It includes ongoing crimes of war and against humanity for the most malevolent reasons.

When is war not war? It's when committing cold-blooded murder is called the right thing. When major media scoundrels cheerlead it, and when most people believe it because they're too indifferent, uncaring or lazy to learn the truth.

NATO's rape of Libya is too ugly for proper words to describe. Only honest images can do it, and lots of them.

Instead, the Big Lie substitutes for honest journalism, especially on television where real (not fake) visuals can show mangled bodies, mass destruction, and other evidence of NATO crimes.

Where civilian deaths can be shown graphically in living color. Where responsibility can be placed where it belongs. Where right and wrong can best be explained. Where repetition can arouse public outrage. Where proper analysis in advance perhaps can prevent all wars.

None are liberating, lawful, or virtuous. All are shamelessly exploitive. Libya's one of the worst - unscrupulously benefitting powerful interests criminally, ruthlessly, and diabolically.

It doesn't get any worse than that. Ask Lybians. They'll explain.

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Stephen Lendman

In his new article headlined, "9/11 After A Decade: Have We Learned Anything?" Paul Craig Roberts said:

"Today Americans are unsafe, not because of terrorists and domestic extremists, but because they have lost their civil liberties and no protection from unaccountable government power."

So have millions under occupation and/or attack by US/NATO forces, terrorizing them in the name of "democracy" to "set them free."

America is a global terror state. For decades, it's menaced humanity's survival by imperial wars for wealth and power, not liberation or democratic values. All US administrations reviled them, notably Obama's, including at home. Under him, "unaccountable government power" terrorizes globally.

It's a truism that where large energy reserves exist, America has imperial plans to control them. Libya is now ground zero. US-led NATO assassins invaded to menace, intimidate, kill, plunder, and cause out-of-control chaos, notably in Tripoli, the struggle's current epicenter.

On August 16, Michel Chossudovsky's article headlined, "The Pentagon's 'Salvador Option:' The Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria," saying:

Reports suggest the use of "thousands of Islamist 'freedom fighters,' reminiscent of the enlistment of Mujahideen to wage the CIA's jihad (holy war)" against Soviet Russia in Afghanistan.

Chossudovsky wrote about possible plans

"to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. [The Turkish army would] "house, train, and send them to Syria. Thousands of similar elements are in Libya.

On August 20, independent journalist Thierry Meyssan said NATO debarked large numbers of jihadi forces with heavy weapons on Tripoli's coast. Special forces led them. Violence and mass killing followed. It still rages, slaughtering hundreds, perhaps thousands, and wounding many more.

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