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World Focus: NATO knew its intervention in Libya would create chaos
Sunday, March 22 @ 19:12:02 UTC |  ... and aid al-Qaeda-aligned Islamists
By Stephen Gowans
March 22, 2015 - gowans.wordpress.com
Canadian military intelligence knew that NATO’s March 2011 intervention in Libya would aid militant theocratic Islamists aligned with al-Qaeda and could create long-term chaos in the country, according to David Pugliese, a reporter with The Ottawa Citizen, who obtained Canadian intelligence documents.
At the time, NATO military leader, U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, denied that opposition to the secular leftist Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi was dominated by rightwing Islamist theocrats, calling the bulk of the opposition forces “responsible men and women.”
But Canadian intelligence was clear-eyed about the nature of the Libyan opposition.
Pugliese revealed that “A Canadian intelligence report written in late 2009 described the anti-Gadhafi stronghold of eastern Libya,” from which the uprising against Gaddafi erupted, “as an epicentre of Islamist extremism.”
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World Focus: Libya: Imperialism and the Left
Wednesday, September 14 @ 14:42:37 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
August 28, 2011 - gowans.wordpress.com
While the class character of regimes under siege by Western powers is often explored in analyses of imperialist interventions and is frequently invoked to justify them, it neither explains why capitalist imperialist powers intervene nor stands as a justification for their actions.
The relevant consideration in explaining why interventions occur is not the political orientation of the government under siege, nor its relations with its citizens, but whether it accommodates the profit-making interests of the dominant class in the intervening countries. Does it welcome foreign investment, allow repatriation of profits, demand little in the way of corporate income tax, open its markets, and offer abundant supplies of cheap labor and raw materials? Or does it impose high tariffs on imports, subsidize domestic production, operate state-owned enterprises (displacing opportunities for foreign-private-owned ones), force investors to take on local partners, and insist that workers be protected from desperation wages and intolerable working conditions?
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World Focus:
Friday, September 02 @ 16:40:58 UTC | By Ramzy Baroud
September 02, 2011
At a press conference in Tripoli on Aug. 26, a statement read aloud by top Libyan rebel commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj was reassuring. Just a few months ago, disorganized and leaderless rebel fighters seemed to have little chance at ousting Libyan dictator Moammar Ghaddafi and his unruly sons.
But despite vague references to “pockets of resistance” throughout Tripoli, and stiffer battles elsewhere, Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) is moving forward to extend its rule as the caretaker of Libyan affairs. In his conference, Belhadj declared full control over Tripoli, and the unification of all rebel fighter groups under the command of the military council.
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Africa Focus: End Game for Benghazi Rebels as Libyan Tribes Prepare to Weigh In?
Tuesday, August 02 @ 13:58:12 UTC | By Franklin Lamb
August 02, 2011 - counterpunch.org
Dispatch From Libya
Tripoli
On July 30, the day before this 97.5 per cent Muslim country began the holy month of Ramadan, NATO spokesperson Roland Lavoie has been lamely attempting to explain to the press at the Rexis Hotel and internationally, why NATO was forced to bomb three Tripoli TV towers at the Libyan Broadcasting Authority, killing three journalists/technicians and wounding 15 others. Like most people currently in central Tripoli, this observer was awakened at 1:50 a.m. by the first of a series of nine blasts, three of which I watched from my balcony as they happened, and which seemed to be about 800 yards away as I saw one TV tower being blown apart. On the four lanes' divided highway adjacent to my hotel and below my balcony, that runs along the sea front, I could see two cars frantically swerving left and right as they sped along, presumably trying to avoid a NATO rocket, fearing they themselves might be targeted.
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World Focus:
Wednesday, June 08 @ 15:54:21 UTC | By Glen Ford
June 08, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
“Burns’ constant dismissal of Libyan casualties has the effect of inviting more NATO bombing and more civilian deaths.”
Every day, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Congo and now Libya, the U.S. corporate media commit crimes against humanity that are equal to the crimes perpetrated by the United States government. As facilitators of those crimes – through ceaseless propaganda, lies and demonization of those targeted by the United States – the corporate media are just as guilty of the grossest human rights violations as the government they serve. The New York Times and the rest of the howling corporate propagandists that call themselves journalists behave no differently than the German newspaper publisher Julius Streicher, who was hanged for his media crimes against humanity in October, 1946.
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World Focus: Libya: NATO's War Of Aggression Against A Sovereign African State
Monday, June 06 @ 00:36:27 UTC | by Obi Nwakanma
June 5, 2011 - globalresearch.ca
The use of Western troops in Africa – particularly in the case of France – the use of its paratroopers, first in Ivory Coast, and now in Libya, represents a new strategic declaration of war against Africa, the African interest, and the African continent. In NATO’s disregard of AU, there is without doubt a remanifestation of that ontological disease of the Western mind that regards Africa as simply a place without history and without agency.
France and Great Britain, leading a NATO alliance, are effectively at war in Libya on the pretext of a United Nations’ mandate. The United States, led the early charge against Libya’s Ghadaffi from the air, but has taken something of a back seat, and allowed Britain and France to continue what can now be considered a war of aggression against a sovereign African state, far beyond the mandate of the UN.
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World Focus: NATO: Free Africa from the Africans!
Thursday, June 02 @ 22:39:23 UTC | By Glen Ford
June 02, 2011 - BlackAgendaReport.com.
As far as the United States and Europe are concerned, Africans have nothing to say about what happens in Africa. South African President Jacob Zuma made a second trip to Libya this week, on behalf of the African Uni0n, seeking a diplomatic end to NATO’s war against Mouammar Gaddafi’s government. Just as with a previous African Uni0n peace keeping mission, back in early April, Col. Gaddafi agreed to the peace plan. And just as before, the so-called rebels and their American and European bosses refused even to consider a cease fire. As has been obvious from the beginning of this “humanitarian” farce, the Great White Fathers of Europe and the “Wall Street mascot” from the United States, as Obama has been called, will be satisfied with nothing less than regime change in Libya – and to Hell with what Africans think!
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World Focus: How NATO Killed Qaddafi Family Members
Wednesday, June 01 @ 18:03:12 UTC | Anatomy of a Murder
By Cynthia McKinney
June 01, 2011 - counterpunch.org
Tripoli.
How many times must a parent bury a child?
In the case of Muammar Qaddafi it's not only twice: once for his daughter,
murdered by the United States bombing on his home in 1986, and again on 30 April 2011 when his youngest son, Saif al Arab, but yet again for three young children, grandbabies of Muammar Qaddafi killed along with Saif at the family home.
Now, I watched Cindy Sheehan as she bared her soul before us in her grief; I cried when Cindy cried. Now, how must Qaddafi and his wife feel? And the people of Libya, parents of all the nation's children gone too soon. I don't even want to imagine.
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World Focus: Libya: Where is the AU?
Tuesday, May 17 @ 11:32:51 UTC | By Farirai Chubvu
May 16, 2011 - The Herald
"IT'S like having someone break into your house, rape your wife and kill your dog while you remain glued to the TV set as if nothing is happening.
"Where the hell is the African Uni0n when Nato openly announces plans to kill Muammar Gaddafi, arms the rebels, provide them with air power and siphon Libyan oil at will?"
This post, which I picked on the social networking site, Facebook; aptly captures the lethargy shown by the African Uni0n as far as Nato's destabilisation of Libya is concerned.
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World Focus: Obama's bizarre way of protecting Libyans
Sunday, May 08 @ 15:17:36 UTC | By Tafataona P Mahoso
May 08, 2011 - herald.co.zw
ON Thursday April 21 2011, African Uni0n Commission Chairperson Jean Ping met US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington DC over the matter of the Nato war of aggression against Libya.
Ping did not announce anything but Clinton claimed that from then on the US and Nato would be following behind the African Uni0n in order to end the war and bring peace to Libya.
Clinton was not convincing. The US-Nato war on Libya is itself an attack on the AU and AU resolutions.
Then, on Friday April 22, US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates announced that President Obama had just authorised the US Airforce to deploy "predators" (also called drones) in Libya, in order to enable Nato forces to take out certain strategic installations and, to murder members of critical Libyan administration and defence units without the aggressors incurring any causalities.
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World Focus: Killing Gaddafi's Grandbabies
Thursday, May 05 @ 19:44:48 UTC | By Glen Ford
May 05, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
“These modern Crusaders require ritual bloodletting before expropriating the lands and goods of their victims.”
The ceremonial slaughter of Moammar Gaddafi and his family lurches forward like some savage white cult ritual. Death to the demon and his seed! shout the priests, banshees and ice-smile oracles of the U.S. corporate media. The American (or “western”) manifest mission must be sanctified in the blood of caricatures. Like the Christ-crazed hordes that surged out of Europe’s far western dankness to annihilate whole cities of strangers – including tens of thousands of fellow Christians that did not speak, eat or smell as the French and English did – these modern Crusaders require ritual bloodletting before expropriating the lands and goods of their victims.
When the Arab world awoke at the beginning of the year, the highly paid presenters and rapid-vapid quippers of CNN and competing reality-creation companies were caught pitifully mission-less. Absent direction from the official scenario-producers at the White House and the State Department, there could be no coherent newsreader script, no simple theme for quipping. But direction would not be forthcoming from the Obama administration until a way could be found to put the U.S. on the “right” side of the Arab Awakening.
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World Focus:
Wednesday, May 04 @ 07:07:25 UTC | By Stephen Gowans
May 04, 2011 - gowans.wordpress.com
“The narrative we want to come out of this is that the Libyan people overthrew a dictator, not that we came in and toppled a despot,” said Stephen J. Hadley, a former national security adviser to President George W. Bush.
“And that’s the problem with going after command and control if it results in the death of Qaddafi, because what we really want him to do is for him to leave or to die at a Libyan hand, not an American hand,” said Mr. Hadley, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union.” (1)
To explain the 2000 overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict promotes the very same narrative Hadley wants for Libya.
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World Focus: Anti-Empire Report: How Stupid is Condoleezza Rice?
Tuesday, May 03 @ 13:13:47 UTC | By William Blum
May 03, 2011
On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of "war criminal" and "torturer". (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can't Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: "Aren't you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?" She also threw in another line that's become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that's used when all other arguments fail: "The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God."
My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that "you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God." ... The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem.
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World Focus: US Rethinks Strategy: War as Opportunity in Libya
Wednesday, April 27 @ 22:00:44 UTC | By Ramzy Baroud
April 27, 2011
The brutality of Libyan leader Moammar Ghaddafi, and his refusal to concede power, is costing Libya much more than innocent lives. The country is now also facing a possible loss of future independence and sovereignty. From its early days, the Libyan revolt seemed to take a difference course than those of other Arab countries. It represented a window of opportunity for the United States and its western allies to reposition themselves, slowly but surely, around a conflict that promised grueling and bloodier times ahead.
A visit by Republican Senator John McCain to Benghazi on April 22, was described by a CNN online report as “a major morale boast” for the Libyan rebels. His arrival followed a US decision to deploy predator drones to Libya , thus promising a greater American role in the war. According to McCain, drones are not enough, and more will be needed to break the “significant degree of stalemate.” He described Benghazi as a “powerful and hopeful example of what a free Libya can be.”
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World Focus: West on guard against the outbreak of peace in Libya
Sunday, April 24 @ 17:44:16 UTC | Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy sent a message to the African Uni0n in their jointly written April 14 op-ed: They’ll block any attempt to negotiate peace in Libya that doesn’t include Gaddafi’s ouster and the opening of Libya’s economy.
By Stephen Gowans
April 23, 2011 - gowans.wordpress.com
On April 14 US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote an op-ed titled "Libya's pathway to peace". Appearing in the International Herald Tribune and two other newspapers, the op-ed set out US, British and French goals for Libya.
One would be peace, but the pathway was to be Gaddafi's exit, and his replacement by the Benghazi rebels.
While not presented as such, the op-ed was in fact a rejection of an African Uni0n proposal for a negotiated settlement.
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