Bill Van Auken

Nearly six months after securing a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a no-fly zone in Libya and the use of “all necessary measures… to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack,” the US and its NATO allies, former colonial powers, are mounting a barbaric siege of a major population center that threatens to produce civilian casualties on a mass scale.

In their breathless promotion of the “final battle” to realize the real US-NATO aim in Libya—regime-change—few in the Western media have bothered to consider the fact that the major imperialist powers are carrying out precisely the kind of act they claimed their war was designed to prevent.

Gaddafi’s troops were marching on Benghazi, the world was told, and only a “humanitarian” intervention by NATO could save the city’s innocent population. Now the “rebels” are encircling Sirte, led by British and Qatari special forces troops, intelligence operatives and mercenary military contractors, while the city’s population is being pounded by NATO bombs and cut off from food, fuel and all basic supplies.

The sheer contempt shown by the US and the Western European powers for legality and world public opinion is breathtaking. The pretense that NATO is acting under the terms of the UN resolution that provided a fig leaf for its intervention is more than absurd; it has become obscene.

One has to go back to the crimes of the fascist powers in the 1930s and 1940s to search for parallels to such a siege: the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, the siege of Leningrad and the Warsaw Ghetto.

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Stephen Lendman

Unreserved admiration for The Butcher of Sabra & Shatila...

Lawless extremists infest Congress like crabgrass besets lawns. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R. FL) is one of the worst.

She once supported assassinating Fidel Castro, telling the Miami Herald: "If someone were to do it, I wouldn't be crying."

She also endorses US imperial wars, police state laws, corporate empowerment, tax cuts for the rich, laying waste to Libya, perhaps a second Bay of Pigs, and Israeli lawlessness, while, at the same, opposing Palestinian statehood.

On August 30, (with 57 co-sponsors) she introduced

"HR 2829: To promote transparency, accountability, and reform within the United Nation system, and for other purposes."

It's also called the "United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act of 2011."

The bill was referred to the House Foreign Affairs committee she heads, one of many examples of deplorable governance in America, letting criminals, extremists, and racists run it. No wonder the business of America is war, ravaging countries throughout North Africa/the Middle East/and Central Asia, while, at the same time, supporting the world's most despotic, venal regimes. Israel is one of many, committing slow-motion genocide against millions of Palestinians under occupation. Ros-Lehtinen apparently approves, besides wanting to deny their right to statehood and full de jure UN membership.

In September, that may change as the Palestinian Authority (PA) will ask the General Assembly for full status recognition. Washington and Israel oppose it. So does Ros-Lehtinen.

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Glen Ford

While NATO has proven its capacity to kill thousands of Libyan soldiers from the skies, it has failed to convey respectability to the marauding "rebels" under its wing, posing as freedom fighters. The latter, however, should not get too used to their spot in the limelight, which is sure to wane when their usefulness as NATO stooges eventually dries up. Meanwhile, for this author, the incinerated bodies of her soldiers have already secured Libya’s place in history.

The story is not over – not by a long shot – but the saga of the Libyan resistance to the superpower might of the United States and its degenerate European neocolonial allies will surely occupy a very special place in history.

For five months, beginning March 19, the armed forces of a small country of six million people dared to defy the most advanced weapons systems on the planet, on terrain with virtually no cover, against an enemy capable of killing whatever could be seen from the sky or electronically sensed. Night and day, the eyes of the Euro-American war machine looked down from space on the Libyan soldiers’ positions, with the aim of incinerating them. And yet, the Libyan armed forces maintained their unit integrity and personal honor, with a heroism reminiscent of the loyalist soldiers of the Spanish Republic under siege by German, Italian and homegrown fascists, in the late 1930s.

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Stephen Lendman

When NATO intervenes, massacres, mass destruction, and indescribable human misery follow. Libya is its latest trophy. Judge for yourself. View another snapshot of the "new Libya".

Once Africa's most developed country, it's now a horrific charnal house. No one knows the true toll or ever will, but minimally it includes tens of thousands dead, multiples more injured, vast destruction across large parts of the country, terrified millions not knowing what's next, imperial occupation, plunder of Libya's resources, and continued conflict and violence like Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a result, expect Libya to boil for years, and why not with recruited rebel gangs enlisted to reign terror. Many are members of the Al Qaeda linked Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), terrorists opposed to Gaddafi since the mid-1990s.

On December 8, 2004, the US Treasury Department designated LIFG a Foreign Terrorist Organization, saying it:

"threatens global safety and stability through the use of violence and its ideological alliance with (Al Qaeda) and other brutal terrorists organizations."

Directed on the ground by US, UK, Qatari, and Jordanian special forces, insurgents also include untrained Libyans and civilians from regional countries, as well as recruited members of Gaddafi's military. Appointed top military commander last March, Khalifa Hifter is in charge, a man who spent two decades in suburban Virginia, about 20 miles from CIA headquarters. In fact, since the 1980s, he's been an anti-Gaddafi CIA asset. Now he's directing paramilitary killers terrorizing areas they control, exposing Washington's contempt for human life and welfare everywhere, including at home.

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