Libya: Another Lost NATO War

Stephen Lendman

NATO's sole new millennium accomplishment consists of endless unwinnable wars. Coalition partners eventually tire and pull out.

America may end up isolated against raging street anger to end imperial wars and address vital neglected homeland needs. It's already happening.

The battle for Iraq continues. Afghanistan's war was lost years ago. Libya's also though political Washington, coalition partners, media scoundrels, and NATO won't admit it.

At its October 24 press briefing, NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu said:

"....(W)e all have seen the celebrations in Benghazi and across Libya as the National Transitional Council declared the full liberation of Libya. A momentous day for Libyans and for the whole region."

Fact check

Fighting rages in Benghazi, Bani Walid, Sirte, Tripoli and other cities across Libya. Jamahiriya loyalists control most territory though portions shift back and forth. Terror bombings continue daily.

Tribal leaders swear revenge for Gaddafi's assassination. Lungescu's rhetoric belies the spirit of millions of Libyans to resist until free. Alleged celebrations were staged. Official accounts of conditions are surreal, bearing no relation to reality.


Withdrawal of US Troops From Iraq Highly Suspect

Tony Cartalucci

Think-tank designs for Iran leave only Israeli attack & coaxed provocation for total war on table.

October 22, 2011 - For ten months the Obama administration has presided over the "Arab Spring," a geopolitical gambit years in the making, and executed simultaneously in multiple nations throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the beginning of 2011. The regional conflagration was stoked by a steady stream of first, denial, even feigned surprise, with covert support for US-backed opposition groups, then more overt support, and finally NATO airstrikes, weapons, training, and special operations forces lent to the rebellion in Libya and weapons and support sent to Syria's militants. These collective efforts stretching from Tunisia and leading up to Iran's doorstep serve a singular agenda -that is, to contain and ultimately overturn the reemergence of Russia as well as containing the rise of China.


What Next for Libya?

Stephen Lendman


Saif al-Islam Gaddafi (Sword of Islam) Gaddafi embodies the
hopes of a new future for Libya and the Middle East.

October 20 events didn't liberate Libya. It's the beginning, not end, of protracted struggle perhaps for years.

Muammar Gaddafi was bigger than life. His spirit inspires Libyans and others wanting freedom - not terror bombing, occupation, colonization, pillaging, exploitation, and misery.

NATO's war on Libya is one of history's great crimes. Democratic values and truth never had a chance. Responsibility to protect duplicity terrorized and massacred civilians like crazed assassins.

Terror bombing continues daily. So do unspeakable rebel rat atrocities and ravaging Libya's landscape.

NATO is a rogue killing machine. Coalition partners are complicit in mass murder. Obama, Clinton and those around them are war criminals multiple times over.

Gratuitous slaughter, mass destruction, barbarism, lawlessness, and pillaging define their agenda. Libya was raped for profit and regional dominance. No one anywhere should tolerate imperial lawlessness on a scale beyond measure.

Jamahiriya freedom fighters won't quit until their mother of all struggles is won. With or without Gaddafi, they'll go on or die trying. Libya belongs to them, not NATO. Exorcising NATO's killing machine is job one.


The Man Who Knew Too Much

David Rieff

Libyans may be celebrating the killing of Muammar al-Qaddafi, but you'd better believe that Western governments are breathing a sigh of relief themselves.

Whether the NATO countries -- who had only a few years ago welcomed Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi back into the international fold in exchange for his renouncing his chemical and nuclear weapons programs and allowing U.S. and British experts to come and help dismantle them -- played any role in what certainly appeared in first reports from the scene to have been the summary execution of the Libyan dictator will probably never be known. What the video evidence does prove is that the Libyan revolutionary forces did not find him already dead or killed by a NATO airstrike; nor does the initial claim that he was killed in "crossfire" between insurgent forces and diehard regime loyalists stand up to even the most minimal scrutiny.

NATO does acknowledge that its planes bombarded the convoy in which Qaddafi was fleeing the city of Sirte shortly before it was intercepted on the ground by the insurgents, but it has denied it even knew he was there. If that is true, and the French, British, and Americans did not try to make their own luck, then they certainly were very lucky indeed.

Qaddafi was, quite simply, a man who knew too much. Taken alive, he would have almost certainly have been handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had indicted him -- along with his son, Saif al-Islam, and brother-in-law and military intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi (whereabouts unknown) -- for crimes against humanity in late June. Imagine the stir he would have made in The Hague. There, along with any number of fantasies and false accusations, he would almost certainly have revealed the extent of his intimate relations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the details of his government's collaboration with Western intelligence services in counterterrorism, with the European Union in limiting migration from Libyan shores, and in the granting of major contracts to big Western oil and construction firms.


Global Economic Crisis Deepens

Stephen Lendman

Global Depression grips world economies. Destructive polices fueled today's crisis. Conditions are fast coming to a head.

Throwing good money after bad delays decision day at the price of far greater trouble on arrival. D-Day will shake world economies. It may, in fact, be months away, perhaps in 2012.

No one knows for sure, but things that can't go on forever won't, and when they end, watch out. Ordinary people will be hurt most, much more than already.

Perhaps Greece is the canary in the coal mine. The country's bankrupt. Only its obituary isn't written. Its citizens are being impoverished. Anger rages in Athens. Revolutionary sentiment may explode any time, sending shock waves across Europe.

Trends analyst Gerald Celente says when people lose everything and have nothing else to lose, they lose it.

Greek citizens are close to losing it. Others in troubled countries aren't far behind, including in America where growing thousands rage against a system destroying their livelihoods and futures.

Fixing it demands direct action. Focusing on core issues is key, and knowing bottom-up change only is possible, never the other way. Entrenched corporate and political interests don't yield.

Sustained pressure is crucial. Today's struggle is the mother of them all. Change won't come easily or quickly. Minimally it will take years to remake what's too corrupted and broken to fix.

Ripping it down and starting over is essential. American and Eurozone workers are on their own to do it. They're in for the fight of their lives. Odds are greatly stacked against them, but the stakes are too important to back down.

Money power in private hands must change. People must get back what's rightfully theirs. America's Constitution mandates it. Enforcing it is crucial. Doing so makes everything else possible. Without it, expect failure.


Israel Arrests Palestinians While Releasing Others

Stephen Lendman

No one is safe under occupation. Middle-of-the-night arrests and detention threaten everyone. Children especially are affected. Many never recover from their ordeal. Pay less attention to what Israel says and focus on what it does daily. Palestinians call it brutalizing state terror.

In mid-October, Netanyahu's cabinet agreed to free 1,027 Palestinian political prisoners in two waves (including 27 women and nearly 300 children) in return for Hamas releasing Gilad Shalit after over five years in captivity.

Wave one is completed, freeing 477 Palestinians. In two months, phase two will release another 550. According to terms, 203 will be deported, 40 exiled overseas, and 163 expelled to Gaza.

Currently, Israel still holds over 5,000 detainees. As a result of torture, medical neglect, or assassinations, over 200 died martyrs in captivity. Another 302 are called "veteran detainees," serving 17 years or longer.

Another 136 serving 20 years or more are called "Deans of Detainees." "Generals of Patience" is a term applied to prisoners incarcerated over 25 years. As of October, they number 41.

On October 18, Ma'an News reported Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouq saying Israel agreed to lift Gaza's siege in return for releasing Shalit.

He "told Palestine TV that Israel had used Shalit as a pretext to blockade Gaza but there (were) 'unofficial agreements' to end it during talks with a German mediator."

According to Abu Marzouq, "This was confirmed in the last negotiations."

For years it's been known that security wasn't why Israel imposed it, despite disingenuous public statements. Israel blockaded Gaza in mid-2006, then hardened its siege a year later.

Despite assurances of ending it now, Israel may renege by reinterpreting terms. Many times it says one thing and does another. Its promises are hollow and disingenuous.


Morgenson And Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment: Totally Corrupt America

Paul Craig Roberts

Last March I reviewed Matt Taibbi’s important book Griftopia, an entertaining account of the through-going financial fraud that gave us the financial crisis. Taibbi shows that the US “superpower” can match any third world backwater in the magnitude of greed and fraud that is endemic in business and government. I would not be surprised if Taibbi’s book motivated the more aware participants of Occupy Wall Street.

Taibbi’s Griftopia was published last year. This year Henry Holt publishers have provided us with Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.

Morgenson and Rosner tell the story again, but with less drama and provocation. Possibly, it might be more acceptable to those gullible Americans who wrap themselves in the flag and refuse to believe that their country could ever knowingly do anything that is wrong.

I am not suggesting that Morgenson and Rosner pull their punches. To the contrary, the authors deliver enough knockouts to be contenders with Taibbi as world champions in exposing the reckless fraud that the US financial sector and its regulators now epitomize.

The financial crisis, which is very much still with us, did not result from accident or miscalculation; neither did it result because of a flaw in Alan Greenspan’s theory, as he told Congress when a feeble effort was made to hold him accountable. It was the intentional result of people motivated by short-term profits who wanted to get theirs and get out.

As Reckless Endangerment shows, fraud characterized every stage of the process from the fraudulent borrower incomes and credit scores that mortgage issuers gave to unqualified buyers, through the securitization of the mortgages and their triple-A investment grade ratings by the rating agencies (Standard & Poor’s especially, but also Moody’s and Fitch) to the investment banks that sold what the banks knew was junk to investors around the world as investment grade securities. Indeed, Goldman Sachs was simultaneously betting against the mortgage derivatives that it was selling to clients.

Investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, which once considered it a matter of honor to represent the interests of customers, took advantage of the trust that had been built up in the past to commit fraud against customers in order to advance the banks’ short-term profits and the out-sized multi-million dollar managerial bonuses that these fraudulent profits produced.


Israeli Settlement Construction Jeopardizes Palestinian Statehood Plans

Stephen Lendman

Palestinians want and deserve long denied full UN de jure membership and official statehood recognition, including all rights granted other members.

On September 23, Abbas formally petitioned the Security Council. Normally it reviews applications for a maximum 35 days. Whether or not America vetos Palestine's bid is irrelevant. It solely recommends. Only the General Assembly admits new members.

Abbas can petition it through the 1950 Uniting for Peace Resolution 377 for an up or down two-thirds member vote to override potential Security Council rejection or inaction.

More than enough GA support assures what could have been gotten days ago regardless of Security Council members do or don't do.

On September 26, informal discussions began. No quick decision is expected. Washington plans obstruction, delay, and subversion, hoping to scuttle the idea entirely.

On October 21, new Council members were elected by secret ballot. In January, Pakistan, Morocco, Togo and Guatemala will replace Brazil, Lebanon, Nigeria, Gabon, Bosnia. After a second round vote, either Azerbaijan or Slovenia will join them.

Palestinian officials claim support from nine Council members, enough to force Washington to veto. If resolution isn't achieved before January, slippage is certain as Pakistan, Morocco and Guatemala most likely will back America.


Thank God for the Jewish Chronicle!

Gilad Atzmon


An editorial in the London Jewish Chronicle in 1896 anti-
cipates little hope for the scheme to create a Jewish State.

As always, the London Jewish Chronicle (JC) is providing us with an accurate insight into Jewish influence within the media and beyond. The JC is desperate to stop my book, The Wandering Who? -- and it is also foolish enough to disclose its tactics, openly revealing to us the pressure which some elements within the Jewish community are willing to mount on Britain’s leading newspapers and other outlets.

This weekend The JC seems to be particularly frustrated, explaining to their concerned readers that “Britain's largest book distribution database company has said it cannot withdraw The Wandering Who unless the title is found to have breached race hate legislation”

And yet, it seems that no one in the Jewish Chronicle has read the book, or any of my writing -- otherwise it is hard to explain why the JC keep labeling me as an ‘anti-Semite’ or a ‘racist’. Had the JC actually bothered to read my writing or taken the time to follow my speeches and debates, they would have realised that there is no trace of ‘racism’ or ‘anti-Semitism’ in my work: yes, I am critical of Jewish politics; yes I am an opponent of Jewish political power, and yes, I follow my duties as a humanist to expose Jewish identity politics for what it really is. This fact alone may explain why my book is supported by respected humanists and some of the most distinguished academics, all of whom are held in high regard in their fields and beyond.

The JC complains that “in the book Atzmon discusses his belief that ‘the Holocaust religion was well-established’ before the Nazis carried out aspects of the Shoah including the Final Solution and Kristallnacht.”

The JC is absolutely correct here. That is exactly what I am discussing. And yet, the question is, what is wrong with doing so? Is it racist or anti-Semitic? And indeed, I also insist that trauma is inherent to Jewish Culture.


The US and Gaddafi: The murderer calls for an investigation of the crime

Bill Van Auken

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton solemnly announced Sunday that Washington “strongly supports” an independent investigation into the barbaric murder of Libya’s deposed head of state Muammar Gaddafi. - What exactly is it that Ms. Clinton wants investigated that she doesn’t already know?

Gaddafi was captured Thursday while fleeing his hometown of Sirte. Over the previous month Sirte had been under continuous NATO bombardment and a brutal siege by the so-called “rebels” that destroyed the city and claimed untold numbers of civilian dead and wounded.

His convoy, detected by US spy planes, was attacked first by an American Predator drone aircraft, operated by remote control from an airbase in Nevada. An American AWAC surveillance aircraft then called in French fighter jets, which dropped two 500-pound bombs on the vehicles in which Colonel Gaddafi and his entourage were fleeing.

The air strikes left dozens dead and the Libyan leader wounded. He was then hunted down by the NATO-backed “rebels,” who were operating together with “advisors” from the SAS British special forces.

Gaddafi’s final moments have been recorded in a number of jumpy videos filmed on his attackers’ cell phones. They show a wounded Gaddafi shouting and feebly resisting a mob of frenzied militiamen who are taunting and attacking him, while screaming “Allahu Akbar”—“God is greatest.” He is dragged, kicked and beaten bloody with guns and fists before being thrown onto the hood of a vehicle. Footage shows a gun placed to his head and then his body on the pavement, blood pouring from the back of his skull.

As one member of the NATO-backed National Transitional Council (NTC) based in Benghazi has succinctly stated, “They beat him very harshly, and then they killed him.”


QE4: Forgive the Students

Ellen Brown

Among the demands of the Wall Street protesters is student debt forgiveness—a debt “jubilee.” Occupy Philly has a “Student Loan Jubilee Working Group,” and other groups are studying the issue. Commentators say debt forgiveness is impossible. Who would foot the bill? But there is one deep pocket that could pull it off—the Federal Reserve. In its first quantitative easing program (QE1), the Fed removed $1.3 trillion in toxic assets from the books of Wall Street banks. For QE4, it could remove $1 trillion in toxic debt from the backs of millions of students.

The economy would only be the better for it, as was shown by the G.I. Bill, which provided virtually-free higher education for returning veterans, along with low-interest loans for housing and business. The G.I. Bill had a sevenfold return. It was one of the best investments Congress ever made.

There are arguments against a complete student debt write-off, including that it would reward private universities that are already charging too much, and it would unfairly exclude other forms of debt from relief. But the point here is that it could be done, and it (or some similar form of consumer “jubilee”) would represent a significant stimulus to the economy.


Class War in America

Stephen Lendman

Class war raged for decades. Business and America's super-rich always win. In his 1925 short story titled "Rich Boy," F. Scott Fitzgerald said:

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early...They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we.."

"Even when they enter deep into our world....they still think that that they are better than we are. They are different."

In his article, titled "The Truth About 'Class War' in America," economist Richard Wolff said:

"The last 50 years have indeed seen continuous class warfare in and over federal economic policies."

Corporate giants and America's super-rich waged war against working Americans and won. Notably since the 1970s, "(b)usiness and its allies shifted most of its federal tax burden onto individuals."

Since WW II, tax rates on super-rich Americans fell from 91% to 35% today. Obama's deficit cutters want it lowered to 24% along with eliminating some deductions with loopholes to compensate and save others. Moreover, they want the top corporate tax rate slashed from 35% to 26%.

Many corporate giants, in fact, pay minimal or no taxes. Some, like General Electric, get generous rebates in highly profitable years. They game the system, benefitting form tax laws they write. American workers lose out from greater than ever burdens on them.

Obama schemers also want deeper Medicare cuts, higher Medicaid co-pays, and Social Security's retirement age raised to 69 with lower cost-of-living increases. Privately they want Wall Street to control it to suck out maximum profits, then shut it down entirely. In addition, they want home mortgage interest and tax-free employer provided health insurance capped or ended. They represent business and super-rich elites. America's middle class is targeted for extinction.


The US power grab in Africa

Pepe Escobar

Beware of strangers bearing gifts. Post-modern Amazon and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally landed in Tripoli - on a military jet - to lavish praise on the dodgy Transitional National Council (TNC), those opportunists/defectors/Islamists formerly known as "North Atlantic Treaty Organization rebels".

Clinton was greeted on Tuesday "on the soil of free Libya" (her words) by what the New York Times quaintly described as an "irregular militia" (translation: a heavily armed gang that is already raising hell against other heavily armed gangs), before meeting TNC chairman Mustafa Abdel-NATO (formerly known as Jalil).

The bulk of the US gifts - US$40 million - on top of the $135 million already disbursed since February (most of it military "aid") is for a missile scramble conducted by "contractors" (ie mercenaries) trying to track the tsunami of mobile anti-aircraft rockets that by now are already conveniently ensconced in secret Islamist warehouses.

Clinton told students at the University of Tripoli, "We are on your side." She could not possibly connect the dots and note that the shabab (young people) who started demonstrating against Muammar Gaddafi in February have absolutely nothing to do with the TNC's opportunists/defectors/Islamists who hijacked the protests. But she did have time to unveil another US foreign policy "secret" - that the US wants Gaddafi "dead or alive", George W Bush-style (or as the beneficiary of targeted assassination, Barack Obama-style).


How the West won Libya

Pepe Escobar

They are fighting over the carcass as vultures. The French Ministry of Defense said they got him with a Rafale fighter jet firing over his convoy. The Pentagon said they got him with a Predator firing a Hellfire missile. After a wounded Colonel Muammar Gaddafi sought refuge in a filthy drain underneath a highway - an eerie echo of Saddam Hussein's "hole" - he was found by Transitional National Council (TNC) "rebels". And then duly executed.

Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a Libyan doctor who accompanied Gaddafi's body in an ambulance and examined it, said he died from two bullets, one to the chest, one to the head.

The TNC - which has peddled lies, lies and more lies for months - swears he died in "crossfire". It may have been a mob. It may have been Mohammad al-Bibi, a 20-year-old sporting a New York Yankees baseball cap who posed to the whole world brandishing Gaddafi's golden pistol; his ticket perhaps to collect the hefty $20 million dangled as the bounty for Gaddafi "dead or alive".

It gets curioser and curioser when one remembers that this is exactly what US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her lightning visit to Tripoli, had announced less than 48 hours before; Gaddafi should be "captured or killed". The Fairy Queenie satisfied Clinton's wishes, who learned about it by watching the screen of a BlackBerry - and reacting with the semantic earthquake "Wow!"

To the winners, the spoils. They all did it; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Pentagon and the TNC. From the minute a United Nations resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya became a green card to regime change, plan A was always to capture and kill him. Targeted assassination; that's Barack Obama administration official policy. There was no plan B.


US and NATO murder Muammar Gaddafi

Bill Van Auken

The savage killing Thursday of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi served to underscore the criminal character of the war that has been prosecuted by the US and NATO over the past eight months. From the beginning, the entire operation has been directed at the re-colonization of North Africa and pursued on behalf of US, British, French, Italian and Dutch oil interests.

The assassination follows NATO’s more than month-long siege of Sirte, the Libyan coastal city that was Gaddafi’s hometown and a center of his support. The assault on this city of 100,000 left virtually every building smashed, with untold numbers of civilians dead, wounded and stricken by disease, as they were deprived of food, water, medical care and other basic necessities.

Gaddafi was apparently traveling in a convoy of vehicles attempting to break out of the siege after the last bastion of resistance had fallen to the NATO-backed “rebels”. NATO warplanes attacked the convoy at 8:30 a.m. Thursday morning, leaving a number of vehicles in flames and preventing it from moving forward. Then the armed anti-Gaddafi militias moved in for the kill.

The death of Gaddafi appears to have been part of a larger massacre that has reportedly claimed the lives of a number of his top aides, loyalist fighters and his two sons, Mo’tassim and Saif al-Islam.

While details of the killings remain somewhat clouded, photographs and cell phone videos released by the NATO-backed “rebels” clearly show a wounded Gaddafi struggling with his captors and shouting as he is dragged onto the back of a vehicle. His stripped and lifeless body is then shown, drenched in blood. It seems clear that having first been wounded, perhaps in the NATO air strikes, the former Libyan ruler was captured alive and then summarily executed. One photograph shows him with a bullet hole in the head.

Gaddafi’s body was then taken west to the city of Misrata, where it was reportedly dragged through the streets before being deposited in a mosque.

The fate of the body is politically significant in that it was seized by a Misrata militia faction that is operating under its own command and has no loyalty to the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council (NTC), which Washington and NATO have anointed as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Libyan people.

Thus this grisly event, which President Barack Obama hailed in the White House Rose Garden Thursday as the advent of “a new and democratic Libya,” in reality only exposes the regional and tribal fault lines that are setting the stage for a protracted period of civil war.


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