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03 April, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Stories of revolutions take a long time to be told. The tides of change currently sweeping across the Middle East – steadily rattling one kleptocratic autocrat after the next – will amaze and no doubt exhaust the energies of subsequent generations as they attempt to build a theoretical edifice against which the overpowering outburst of collective human sentiment currently being witnessed gains some veritable empirical sense of meaning.

To even the most seasoned in the art, piecing together the jigsaws is quite a delicate task. Much of the ambiguity that pertains to the political futures of Tunisia and Egypt for instance draws from a lack of clarity as regards the forces that propelled these uprisings, their political leanings, and whether or not these actors have the structural capacities to actualise their aspirations. It is thus fair to say that we are far from being in a position to present an analytical framework to comprehend the gripping dynamics of the Middle East’s uprisings.

The above said however, it is quite easy to discount some ridiculous interpretations of unfolding events that have been disseminated by decrepit monarchs and quarters that have an unvoiced proclivity to maintain the present status quo. For more than a month now, the courageous people of Bahrain have taken to the streets to voice their demands against a ruling monarchy that bears all the hallmarks of a classical mafia-like kleptocratic authoritarian dictatorship. In the face of flying bullets and unending billows of choking teargas smoke, both the young and old have descended to the streets with remarkable valour and upheld entirely peaceful methods of protest. Indeed one of the separating features of the Bahraini uprising is the ubiquitous slogan of “silmiyya, silmiyya” (peaceful, peaceful!). The narrative promoted by the ruling Al-Khalifa monarchy, neighbouring dynastic sheikhdoms and their US patrons has centred however on an entirely bogus claim of supposed Iranian interference.

In recent times, the above claim has been recycled many a time over across the Arabian Peninsula from Kuwait to Yemen. Without measuring the credibility of these claims, the mainstream media has often regurgitated accusations in spite of the most glaring contradictions. In the current context of Bahrain, the suggestion of foreign interference in the shape of an ethereal “Iran threat” (whose promotion has become Secretary of State Clinton’s single-most absorbing vocation) does not only represent a wholesale neglect of factual evidence, but in fact proceeds to insult the sacrifices of generations of Bahrainis tracing back to the birth of the nation.

The Constitutional Dream

Having formally attained independence from British rule in 1971, the political situation in Bahrain was characterised by a great deal of vibrancy and optimism. The archipelago state had witnessed organised political action throughout the British protectorate period, particularly in the decades immediately prior to independence. Precursors to the organised demands for political reform that eventually prompted the Emir to dissolve the National Assembly and brazenly violate the constitution less than two years after its promulgation could be found most notably in the mid-Fifties with the broad mobilisation achieved by the National Union Committee (NUC). The NUC represented the highest symbol of a truly nationalist reform project with demands centred upon the empowerment of an elected legislature, an end to British colonial interference, a fairer socio-economic order and a fundamental revision of state security laws.

Echoing calls made a few decades earlier, the demands raised by leading political figures shortly after independence similarly attracted a broad national, cross-sectarian constituency. The tide of political activism that swept through much of the Middle East at the time was keenly felt in Bahrain. The stoning of British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd’s, car in 1956 in protest against Britain’s continued interference in Bahraini affairs through the person of Sir Charles Belgrave, as well as regular strikes at the BAPCO petroleum refinery and organised protests during the Suez Crisis later in the same year are representative of the political mobilisation seen in Bahrain during the period. It also highlights the grassroots identification of political movements within the country with the wider Arab situation.

Bahrain’s first post-independence head of state, Emir Isa bin Salman Al-Khalifa’s, decision to dissolve the National Assembly in 1975 set the tone however for a period that came to be defined by the jockeying for power between the Emir and his sibling, Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa. According to most Bahrainis, much of the nation’s contemporary woes trace back to the birth of the nation and the unconstitutional steps undertaken by the first Emir. The popular political narrative thus begins with a great deal of discontent and mistrust towards the Al-Khalifa monarchy.

With a steady decline in the standard of living, rising unemployment and a suffocated public space resulting from years of absolute autocratic rule epitomised by the enforcement of the State Security Law of 1974, nationalist and leftist movements began a series of consultations in June 1990 to discuss the deteriorating situation in Bahrain. Leftists groups had been heavily weakened over the years due to the hard-handed crackdown by the monarchy for the industrial trade strikes of 1974.

These consultations climaxed with the formation of the People’s Petition Committee, and the open petition of October 1994 which was signed by more than 23,000 signatories. The demands set out therein underscored the primary need to restore the National Assembly, and highlighted the debilitating consequences of the Emir’s constitutional transgressions:

“The reality we now face dictates that we will fail our duty if we do not speak-out frankly to you. Your wise leadership witnesses the incorrect circumstances that our country is passing through amid the changing regional and international environment while the constitutional institution is absent. Had the banning of the National assembly been lifted, it would have enabled overcoming the negative accumulations which hinder the progress of our country. We are facing crises with dwindling opportunities and exits, the ever-worsening unemployment situation, the mounting inflation, the losses to the business sector, the problems generated by the nationality (citizenship) decrees and the prevention of many of our children from returning to their homeland. In addition, there are the laws which were enacted during the absence of the parliament which restrict the freedom of citizens and contradict the Constitution. This was accompanied by lack of freedom of expression and opinion and the total subordination of the press to the executive power. These problems, your Highness, have forced us as citizens to demand the restoration of the National Assembly, and the involvement of women in the democratic process. This could be achieved by free elections, if you decide not to recall the dissolved parliament to convene in accordance with article 65 of the Constitution…”

Akin to his reactions in 1975, the Emir now in the third-decade of his absolute rule brutally cracked down on nationalist groups and exiled leading figures including the current secretary general of Bahrain’s largest political group Al-Wifaq, Sheikh Ali Salman. Rather expectedly, the monarchy placed the finger of blame for the unrest on external forces i.e. the Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah. In order to quell the popular uprising, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia also dispatched two brigades of its National Guard (around 4,000 soldiers).

By the time of the Emir’s death in 1999, Bahrain boasted a horrendous human rights track record including widespread practise of torture under the instruction of British colonial officer Ian Henderson. The promises of reform made by the incumbent Emir Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa were partly inspired by the failure of the iron-fist policies to weigh in the discontent, and also in order to buttress his own standing against his uncle, Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman Al-Khalifa, who wielded a great deal of power acquired over three successive decades as Prime Minister; a position the latter continues to enjoy 40 years after his appointment.

The spirit of optimism was short-lived however, as the Emir reneged on his promises of meaningful reform. The “Bahrain model”, as it has condescendingly come to be known, essentially served to project an illusion of reform without altering in any substantive way, the pre-existing decision-making and power structures. Assurances made by the King in the National Action Charter (overwhelmingly supported by 98% of those who voted between 14-15 February 2002) to institute an assembly that would be elected through free and direct elections in effect gave veracity to the home-grown nature of the pro-democracy movement and its legitimate demands.

The Pearl Protests

As hundreds took to the streets on February 14 in their ‘Day of Rage’, the King’s henchmen had by then already settled on the solution of a violent suppression. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt where live ammunition was employed after a few days of protests, in Bahrain its resort was almost immediate with the first fatality, Ali Abdulhadi Mushayma, falling on the first day of protests.

The date for the protests, 14th February, was deliberately chosen to provide a clear message to the ruling Al-Khalifa family that the hollow reforms enacted as part of the National Action Charter process had been far from satisfactory. Just as with decades past, the demands of protesters drew from the fundamental frustrations of generations who aspired for real constitutional reforms and a substantive role for an elected national assembly with legislative powers.

The monarchy’s brutal resort to violence that has thus far resulted in the deaths of at least 25 innocents served to exacerbate hopes in the reform-driven process, and has in turn directed grievances at the highest symbol of the status quo, namely, the Al-Khalifa rule. In essence, the ruling family’s desire for an absolute monopoly of power presents an intractable quandary that cannot be permanently masked by the duplicitous reforms carried out since 2002. Faced with the alternative of relenting some of its power to more democratic institutions or to violently suppress the calls for change, the Al-Khalifa regime has clearly selected the latter choice.

Since the outset of protests more than a month ago, Bahrain’s phony veneer of a progressive, liberal form of rule has been crushed before the world. The systematic silencing of journalists, use of live ammunition against defenceless protesters, dozens of arbitrarily detained individuals including major political opposition figures, shameful attacks on hospitals and medical teams, and the targeting of entire villages and neighbourhoods have all served to disclose the reality of the Al-Khalifa monarchy.

The outdated tactic of brandishing the pro-democracy movement within Bahrain as foreign-backed is principally used to deflect attention from the consistent demands for constitutional reform. In this regard, the role of the US in obstructing meaningful reforms and allowing for the gross misrepresentation of the demands of the political opposition has been pivotal. For obvious geopolitical stakes, the continued hosting of the Fifth Fleet base and unequivocal support for successive US military operations stretching from the Gulf War, the Al-Khalifa monarchy has been looked upon by Washington as a key strategic ally. The hypothesized domino-effect and shared fate that connects Bahrain and Saudi Arabia also looms large, no doubt, for US and western officials.

Shortly on the heels of their participation in a seminar at the House of Lords in London to highlight the deterioration in human rights and freedoms, the detention of leading opposition figures in August 2010 was met with the blanket support of US ambassador Adam Ereli who censured them for taking their case outside the shores of Bahrain. Their subsequent torture and the wall of silence erected in the face of journalists also drew little comment from western capitals.

The developments in Bahrain in recent weeks are in fact symptomatic of the confluence of interests of local autocratic tyrannies and imperial powers who continue to hinge their hegemonic agendas to the nightmarish reigns of unpopular despots. For decades, the pre-eminence of geopolitical and energy interests in the foreign policy outlooks of the US and its allies has relegated the suffering of millions of Arabs to a footnote that merit the occasional remonstrations or hand-wringing. All the while, the warehouses of these military-autocratic establishments have been filled with western arms in deals that run into hundreds of billions of dollars.

Revolutions certainly do take a long time to be told, but the time it takes for long compressed frustrations to burst out and overpower the most dictatorial reigns is almost instantaneous in comparison. For the US and its allies, the experiences in Egypt and Tunisia should be reason enough to return to the drawing books.

But more importantly, the uprising peoples of the Middle East have definitively established that the aspirations of peoples cannot forever be ignored in the equations of power. They have proven that real change can only occur in the absence of western tanks and fighter jets. To these brave men and women, the free peoples of the world owe great admiration and respect. The annals of history are lit with the sacrifices of selfless martyrs, and in recent weeks more glorious epics have been added to its volumes. Over time, many have sought to deface the most honourable sacrifices; the least we can do from afar is to ensure that these uprisings are placed within their correct historical, political and socio-economic contexts.

Ali Jawad is a political activist and member of the AhlulBayt Islamic Mission (AIM)

03 April, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Despite no legitimate provocation, Israel began terror bombing Gaza on December 27, 2008. Invasion followed, attacking innocent civilian men, women and children for over three weeks, using missiles, bombs, shells, and illegal weapons against defenseless people. Mass slaughter and destruction ensued.

Brazen crimes of war and against humanity were committed. No culpable officials were held responsible. Security Council no-fly zone protection wasn’t ordered. International community leaders approved or were silent. Washington was complicit by supplying Israel with weapons, munitions, and encouragement. Obama acts the same as Bush, waging a quartet of lawless wars and using proxies in others.

Operation Cast Lead remains one of history’s greatest crimes. Yet Israel was green-lighted to wage it with impunity, what it’s done numerous times in its history, besides terrorizing Palestinians by:

— illegal military occupation;

— collective punishment and intimidation;

— air and ground attacks;

— isolating Gaza illegally under siege;

— intermittently bombing and shooting its residents, including noncombatant farmers, fishermen and children;

— regular residential neighborhood incursions;

— bulldozing homes;

— dispossessing residents;

— land seizures;

— arbitrary arrests;

— torture as official policy, including against women and children;

— targeted assassinations;

— denying refugees their right of return;

— movement and free expression restrictions;

— violence, not peaceful coexistence;

–confrontation, not diplomacy;

— war, not peace; and

— denying Palestinian sovereignty, as well as equal justice, human rights and civil liberty protections.

Israel is a rogue terror state, a democracy in name only affording rights solely to Jews. Remember Cast Lead, one of history’s greatest crimes. Justice Richard Goldstone documented them convincingly in his 575 page report titled, “Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories: Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.”

It covered Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza siege, the impact of Israel’s West Bank military occupation, and much more, including:

— events between the “ceasefire” period from June 18, 2008 to Israel’s initiated hostilities on December 27, 2008;

— applicable international law;

— Occupied Gaza under siege;

— an overview of Cast Lead;

— obligations of both sides to protect civilians;

— indiscriminate Israeli attacks on civilians, causing many hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries;

— “the use of certain weapons;”

— attacking “the foundations of civilian life in Gaza: destruction of industrial infrastructure, food production, water installations, sewage treatment plants and housing;”

— using Palestinians as human shields;

— detention and incarceration of Gazans during the conflict;

— the IDF’s objectives and strategy;

— impact of the siege and military operations on Gazans and their human rights;

— the detention of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit;

— internal Gaza violence – Hamas v. Fatah;

— the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem;

— Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, including excessive or lethal force during demonstrations;

— Palestinians in Israeli prisons;

— Israeli violations of free movement and access rights;

— Fatah targeting Hamas supporters in the West Bank, and restricting free assembly and expression;

— rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians;

— repression of dissent, access to information, and treatment of human rights defenders in Israel;

— Israeli responses to war crimes charges;

— proceedings by Palestinian authorities;

— universal jurisdiction;

— reparations; and

— conclusions and recommendations.

It collected enough information “of a credible and reliable nature….to make a finding in fact.” It established clear evidence of crimes, determining they were deliberate or reckless. An accompanying press release said:

“(T)here is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.”

It explained that Israel falsely used the pretext of rocket attacks to attack “the people of Gaza as a whole” illegally.

A detailed discussion of Goldstone’s findings can be accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2009/09/goldstone-commission-gaza-conflict.html

Palestinian Centre for Human Rights Report Remembers Cast Lead

In its December 2010 report titled, “The Illegal Closure of the Gaza Strip: Collective Punishment of the Civilian Population,” the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) remembered Cast Lead, saying it exacerbated isolation:

— killing over 1,400 Gazans, mostly civilians;

— injuring thousands more, many seriously; and

— causing “extensive destruction of houses and civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, and industry.”

Moreover, Israel violated Security Council Resolution 1860 (January 8, 2009), calling for “full withdrawal of Israeli forces,” as well as “unimpeded humanitarian assistance” for Gazan victims. As a result, deepening crisis ensued.

On April 1, Richard Goldstone’s Washington Post op-ed headlined, “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes,” saying:

“Our report found evidence potential war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity by both Israel and Hamas.” The latter ones, in fact, were minor by comparison, responding only to Israeli provocations.

Israel’s, however, “were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where….evidence (pointed to no) other reasonable conclusion.”

Goldstone, however, softened his initial condemnation by commending Israel’s Cast Lead inquiry, ignoring how all its internal investigations whitewash crimes of war and against humanity – most recently the Gaza and May 2010 Freedom Flotilla massacres.

According to PCHR:

“Rather than uphold the rule of law, the Israeli investigative and judicial system is artfully manipulated to provide an illusion of investigative and judicial rigour, while systematically perpetuating pervasive impunity” for crimes too extreme to ignore.

Whitewash Examples

On April 29, 2009, IDF Chief of Staff, General Gabi Ashkenazi authorized publication of the findings of five military investigate teams. Unsurprisingly, they concluded that:

“(T)throughout the fighting in Gaza, the IDF operated in accordance with international law. The IDF maintained a high professional and moral level while facing an enemy that aimed to terrorize Israeli civilians whilst taking cover amidst uninvolved civilians in the the Gaza strip and using them as human shields.”

It continued at some length justifying brazen Israeli crimes of war and against humanity. In contrast, a year after hostilities ended, Human Rights Watch called Israeli attacks “indiscriminate, disproportionate (and) at times seemingly deliberate, in violation of the laws of war,” condemning IDF investigations as no “substitute for impartial and thorough investigations into laws-of-war violations” they whitewashed.

In his April 1 op-ed, Goldstone failed to explain and denounce them. Instead, he defended the indefensible.

Netanyahu’s (Jacob) Turkel commission investigation of Israel’s Freedom Flotilla massacre also produced lies, distortions, omissions, false conclusions, and exoneration of cold-blooded murder, ordered by top government and military officials who got off scot-free like Cast Lead criminals.

Specifically, it concluded that Israel’s (illegal siege) does not break international law….(and) there were clear indications that the flotilla intended to break the naval blockade….By clearly resisting capture, the Mavi Marmara had become a military objective,” despite on board activists having no weapons and offering no resistance. Saying so was a lie.

In contrast, an independent UN Human Rights Council investigation “concluded that a series of violations of international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law, were committed by the Israeli forces during the interception of the flotilla and during the detention of passengers in Israel prior to deportation.”

It added that Israel’s attack:

“was unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers.”

Also that at least six of the dead were killed by “extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions,” some shot multiple times in the head at close range.

Moreover, similar tactics were used before, during, and after Cast Lead, facts Richard Goldstone knows and should have explained instead of suggesting civilians may not have been “intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

Indeed they always are under Israel’s “Dahiya Doctrine,” targeting civilians as official policy. Named after the Beirut suburb IDF attacks destroyed in the 2006 Lebanon war, it’s how all Israeli wars are waged. IDF Northern Commander Gabi Eisenkot explained, saying:

“What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force at the heart of the enemy’s weak spot (civilians) and cause great damage and destruction. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages (towns or cities), they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

It also prioritizes damaging or destroying assets, economic interests, and centers of civilian power, requiring long-term reconstruction even though international law prohibits attacking civilians and non-military related targets. Israel spurned international law in Cast Lead, against humanitarian Flotilla activists, and in all its belligerent confrontations.

Instead of condemning this policy, Goldstone softened his criticism, contradicting his detailed findings, replicated by other reputable human rights studies, unequivocally accusing Israel of crimes of war and against humanity.

A Final Comment

On March 25, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution, urging the General Assembly address Israel’s Cast Lead impunity by asking the Security Council to request investigation, action and resolution by the International Criminal Criminal Court (ICC).

For over two years, justice for thousands of Palestinian victims has been denied. Gaza remains illegally under siege. Meaningful action is demanded. Crimes this great can’t be tolerated.

Under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council can request ICC action. Washington’s veto, of course, looms. Nonetheless, it’s high time other members demanded, shamed, and did whatever it takes to assure long-suffering Palestinians justice. Then do it for other victims of injustice instead of authorizing war on Libya when it should have acted resolutely to prevent it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

03 April, 2011

Countercurrents.org

The attack on Libya is essentially an attack on one person, Colonel Muammar Gadhafi, who is the present poster boy for evil. Every Gadhafi deed is interpreted as malevolent; every word as an untruth. The characterizations might be correct, but when the media uses spurious and contradictory statements to expose his ‘untruths,’ its rhetoric become questionable and its reports lose credibility.

Although insurrections and civil war generate mass killings and accusations of retribution, no authoritative reports confirm these occurrences in the Libyan conflict. After rebels retook several cities, reporters had entry and came up with nothing but shrill words. Estimates of casualties are contradictory and without confirmation. Never stated is how many of the deceased are fighters on both sides.

ITN News, Feb 23, 2011

Italy has said 1,000 people may have been killed in Libya after an armed uprising against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

March 04, 2011 , Businessweek by Massoud A. Derhally

The conflict in Libya between government troops and opponents of leader Muammar Qaddafi has left 6,000 people dead, the rebel forces spokesman, Colonel Abdullah Al Mahdi, said on Al Jazeera television today.

AAP March 10, 2011

At least 400 people have died and 2,000 been wounded in eastern Libya since the uprising broke out against Muammar Gaddafi, medics told reporters in the rebels’ Benghazi base. “There have been 400 dead since the beginning in Derna, Baida, Brega, Benghazi, Ras Lanuf and Bin Jawad,” Salah Jabar, a medical coordinator for cities held by the rebels in the east, told reporters.

Paul Wolfowitz , former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, without citing or being asked sources, volunteered on CNN, March 21, 2011 that “at least 8000 dead, equivalent to 500,000 in the United States ,” have been killed.

CNN lost credibility with its one-sided commentaries and reports .

Arwa Damon, the CNN reporter in eastern Libya, wearing the Arab keffiyeh to give her legitimacy, never presented interviews, always stated to the camera what she heard, and quoted rumors that soon grew into facts. As one example, her presentation of only having heard that Gadaffi soldiers asked civilians to come out and then shoot them soon became a fact and yet had no conformation from other reporters.

A typical unconfirmed report which trusts the words of a partial person. Note how the reporter transcribes one resident’s words to become ‘residents.’

“Residents painted a grim picture of the situation in Misrata.

The situation here is very bad. Tanks started shelling the town this morning,” a resident called Mohammed told Reuters by telephone from outside the city’s hospital, adding: “Snipers are taking part in the operation too. A civilian car was destroyed killing three children on board, the oldest is aged 13 years.”

Nic Robertson, CNN reporter in eastern Libya , after being shown shrapnel at the Gadhafi compound, related that it looks like a missile, smells like a missile, tastes like a missile but couldn’t say it’s a coalition missile. Robertson did confirm Fox News duplicity, in which a Foxie reporter intimated Libya was attempting to using reporters as human shields. “The idea that we were some kind of human shields is nuts,” Robertson said. “I mean, if they had actually been there — Steve Harrigan, the correspondent here, is somebody I’ve known for many years — I see him more times at breakfast than I see him out on trips with government officials here.”

Constant appearances on CNN of Fouad Ajami, a neocon Hawk, an outspoken supporter of the Iraq War, and a commentator who actually credited the Egyptian Revolution and Tunisian Revolution to the Iraq War and Bush’s advocacy of democracy, skewed the CNN reporting.

Then there is the case of Journalists being detained . Headlines have:

Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality

March 22, 2011 , New York Times

Nothing but the usual scare techniques in headlines, but on inside pages:

“But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink.”

CNN stressed “the journalists had a chilling account.”

Here were journalists in a foreign nation with no visa and reporting as an enemy of the state. If they were correspondents from Al Jazeera, wandering the United States with no entry visa and apprehended in a sensitive area, how would they be treated? In 2003, the US military shelled the Basra hotel, where Al Jazeera journalists were the only guests. One of their Iraq correspondents, Tareq Ayoub, was killed a few days later in Baghdad .

The reports favorable to Gadhafi always contain a question or doubt .

“Thousands of ordinary Libyans had poured into the compound on Saturday, willingly, it seemed, and with great enthusiasm. Gaddafi supporters denounced the strike as barbarous

They had come to express their solidarity with their leader. Young men chanted rhythmic slogans of support; women said they loved Muammar Gaddafi; old men said he was their brother and their father.They had come to show that if he was to die, they were ready to die with him.There seemed no doubting their sincerity. But how representative are they ?”

“We cannot know what is in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of Tripoli citizens who do not join these spontaneous demonstrations of devotion. The true sentiment of Tripoli , in the current atmosphere, is unknowable .”

“One Tripoli resident – who did not want to be identified for his own safety – describes the latest scenes in the capital.

Life goes on, but under the surface there is tension.

Information is coming through at a snail’s pace due to heavy surveillance of modern communications.

On the ground, people and families only exchange tales when they meet in person .

As for the claims made by the Libyan opposition abroad of a fighter jet suicide attack on Col Gaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia compound that evening – it’s unlikely, but who knows? The rumour around town is that some even saw smoke rising from the compound.”

Greetings are always done with fake smiles .”

All this topped by CNN’s Elliot Spitzer comment: Stop the genocide!

Not a verified case of retribution after Gadhafi forces recaptured cities and no known case of internment in Tripoli . Where is the genocide?

Another “report.”

“One resident said an attempt by government forces to take control of the city center had been fought off by rebels but that afterwards pro-Gadhafi forces started indiscriminate shelling of Misrata’s port and the city center.”

“They used tanks, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and other projectiles to hit the city today. It was a random and very intense bombardment,” a rebel spokesman called Sami told Reuters by telephone. “We no longer recognize the place. The destruction cannot be described.”

“The pro-Gadhafi soldiers who made it inside the city through Tripoli Street are pillaging the place, the shops, even homes, and destroying everything in the process. They are targeting everyone, including civilians’ homes. I don’t know what to say, may Allah help us,” he said.

CNN international correspondent Frederik Pleitgen traveled to Misrata, and obtained an exclusive look at “a city of fear, uncertainty and human suffering.” Plietgen mentioned hearing one shell fall near the port and his photos show limited damages, more like Watts after a riot. One photo showed rebels firing an anti-tank missile at a tank, which must have done some structural damage.

CNN’s video on http://www.mediaite.com/online/ drew these comments.

“Wonder if they came under fire from Quadaffi or Al Queda?”

“Are such journalists “war profiteers” since they get richer and become even more famous because of these wars?”

“Maybe the sniper forgot he was in Misrata and not Fallujah.”

“It was probably Phil Griffin taking aim at CNN since neither one of them can catch Fox News.”

Dan Lieberman is the editor of Alternative Insight, a monthly web based newsletter.

He can be reached at alternativeinsight@earthlink.net

31 March, 2011        Countercurrents.org

Cards on the table. I’ve been a “truther” since early 2002 when I came across the first major challenge to the official 9/11 story in the shape of the wonderful “Hunt the Boeing” site created by French researcher Thierry Meyssan. Until then I’d accepted the standard “Left” version of the government account – that a group of daring Muslims acting on behalf of the victims of US foreign policy had struck back at the great tyrant. The photographic and other evidence presented by Meyssan demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that whatever it was that had caused the damage to the Pentagon, it certainly wasn’t a large Boeing jet. If the government’s story was a lie on that major point, then the whole story was brought into question. I knew at once that I had to find out as much as I could about the event which everyone was saying had “changed the world”.

At first, like many early “truthers”, I thought I was alone. I knew no-one who shared my new understanding. It was only much later that I discovered that there was a global movement dedicated to 9/11 truth. Since 2002 I’ve read dozens of books and thousands of pages of Internet content and watched hundreds of hours of video on the subject of state-sponsored false-flag terrorism of the sort which gave us the large-scale terrorist attacks of 2001 (New York and Washington), 2002 (Bali), 2003 (Istanbul), 2004 (Madrid), 2005 (London), 2006 (Mumbai) etc., all allegedly planned and executed by “Islamic fundamentalist” groups (routinely said to be “linked to al-Qaeda”). Later on (when the myth of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism was firmly anchored in the public mind) came the string of alleged plots and thwarted bombing attempts, often involving “lone nut” patsies of the Richard Reid and Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab variety.

What I learned convinced me of the reality of false-flag terrorism, which is a tactic as old as the hills. Hitler used it, first to gain power and then to provide the pretext for the invasion of Poland which launched WWII. Agencies of the Western powers, chiefly the CIA and MI6, used it in Europe from the late ‘60s to the early ‘80s, blaming the murders of some 500 civilians on “communists” when in fact they were carried out by right-wing paramilitary forces trained and armed by the CIA and MI6, working to NATO. More people were killed and injured in the Bologna station attack on August 3rd, 1980 than in the underground and bus bombings in London nearly 25 years later, yet Bologna is almost forgotten. The lie – the false attribution to communists – held until 1990, when “Operation Gladio” was exposed in the Italian parliament. Subsequent investigations revealed that the paramilitary groups had existed in some 17 European countries, with the knowing complicity of most of the governments.

The “lone nut” concept had already been seeded by the JFK assassination, now almost universally recognized as an “inside job”, even if not officially admitted. After Oswald, false-flag terrorism and the “lone nut” fiction reappear in the guise of Timothy McVeigh’s supposed single-handed destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Unfortunately for the official story, the authoritative report by explosives expert Brigadier General Benton K. Partin, USAF (Ret.) proved that McVeigh’s truck bomb only damaged the facade; the extensive internal damage to the building could only have been caused by explosives planted within the building. An office microphone records two explosions – and a chance aerial photo of a nearby secret army compound reveals a parked Ryder truck identical to the one McVeigh used. From there we move on to the first bombing attack on the WTC in 1993, where during the Clinton presidency the myth of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism begins to be exploited within America. (The “war on terror” really begins with Clinton, not George Bush). There is now conclusive proof of FBI complicity in the 1993 affair, but the propaganda fiction of a an Islamic attack on America persisted, creating fertile ground for public acceptance of the “Big Lie” of 9/11.

Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories, hit the headlines just recently. He’d committed the cardinal sin of expressing doubts about the official story of 9/11 in a personal blog. The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, rushed to condemn him and demanded he be sacked. UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, joined in, saying that Falk’s remarks were “an affront to the memory of the more than 3000 people who died in that tragic attack”. Someone needs to remind the Secretary-General of the affront which gullible acceptance and repetition of the official lie of 9/11 causes to the memory of the more than 3 million dead and mutilated Afghan, Iraqi and now Pakistani men, women and children sacrificed on the altar of neo-imperialism as a direct consequence of the phoney ‘war on terror’ – based on the lie of 9/11 and the other false-flag crimes perpetrated for and/or by agencies of western governments.

Falk had referred eloquently to “the sort of awkward gaps and contradictions in the official explanations that David Ray Griffin (and other devoted scholars of high integrity) have been documenting in book after book ever since 2001. What may be more distressing than the apparent cover-up is the eerie silence of the mainstream media, unwilling to acknowledge the well-evidenced doubts about the official version of the events: an al Qaeda operation with no foreknowledge by government officials. Is this silence a manifestation of fear or co-option, or part of an equally disturbing filter of self-censorship? Whatever it is, the result is the withering away of a participatory citizenry and the erosion of legitimate constitutional government. The forms persist, but the content is missing.”

What is particularly interesting about the recent attack on Falk (originating in a Zionist organisation in Switzerland) is that his views were already well-known. The Journal published an article by him in November 2008, in which he expressed similar doubts about the official story. He wrote: “Any close student of 9/11 is aware of the many serious discrepancies between the official version of what took place and the actual happenings on that fateful day in 2001. David Ray Griffin and others have analyzed and assessed these discrepancies in such an objective and compelling fashion that only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book, and that the public should move on to address the problems of the day. […] For democratic government to work, citizens must never refrain from seeking answers to the most difficult questions. Here, what is at stake is enormous.”

Willful ignorance is a charge that can be leveled at Bill Moyers, whose address to the History Makers conference I came across recently. I want to make it clear right away that if I single out Moyers’ speech for criticism here it is simply because it came my way just when I was beginning to collect information for this article. I’d never heard of Moyers before. In this context, Moyers stands for the many thousands of others – journalists, media personalities, academics and politicians in particular – whose willful ignorance of and failure to investigate the facts has sustained the 9/11 myth, making them, too – morally and even in law – accomplices after the fact in the death and destruction wrought in its name. Particularly dismaying in this context is the acceptance of the official fiction by the majority of those on the Left – especially such high-profile spokespersons as Noam Chomsky – whose sentimental attachment to the idea, mentioned above, of “the little people” striking back at the great tyrant, appears to blind them to the facts.

The widespread public acceptance of the murderous illegal wars, of larger and larger so-called “defense” budgets and of the menacing spread of American military bases around the world hinges on the myth of a global “fundamentalist Islamic terrorism” which purportedly threatens the West both culturally and religiously. On the back of an alleged “radicalization of Muslim youth” in the UK (based on the lie of a “homegrown terror network” responsible for the London bombings and multifarious other “terrorist plots”), Prime Minister David Cameron recently declared that “multiculturalism has failed” i.e. in practice that the state has the right and duty to impose cultural homogenization on ethnic minorities. The 9/11 London Project Foundation was recently set up in London. A monument made of steel girders from the World Trade Center will be erected to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 this year and a major educational programme will be launched “to teach schoolchildren about the terrorist attack” i.e. to inculcate the official version. This is serious Orwellian propaganda.

Ignorance, whether willful or not, is no defense against the law. I have met American college students who to my amazement had never before come across anyone who challenged the official story of 9/11 (‘what an astonishingly sheltered life’, I thought); they were completely unaware of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Nonetheless, in law even this seemingly blameless ignorance would constitute no defense. Willful ignorance, on the other hand, is culpable ignorance. It means that the person is aware, in this instance, of the challenge to the official account but chooses not to examine the facts which the challengers present to falsify that account. Bizarrely, Moyers quotes the very research which explains his own ‘willful ignorance’: research showing that when misinformed people are exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely change their minds. In fact, they often become even more strongly set in their beliefs. While “most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence, we often base our opinions on our beliefs …and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they better fit with our preconceptions”.

In Moyers’ own words: “So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths”. What is one to say about someone who can stand before a large group of his peers and, without apparent embarrassment, tell them not to do precisely what he himself does routinely – a “do as I say, not as I do” approach which smacks, if not of hypocrisy, then of gross self-deception.

Equally, the legitimate charge Moyers levels at “America” in the title of his address – that the country “can’t deal with reality” – is a cap that fits him to perfection, though it would seem that for this purpose Moyers sees himself as being part of some other America – the preserve of a minority of heroic ‘speakers of truth to power’ like himself, based on self-congratulatory examples of earlier investigative journalism. But clearly, truth-seeking can be a very selective enterprise, especially if certain taboo subjects carry the awful risk of public condemnation, loss of reputation and prestige, and perhaps even a severe threat to one’s continued existence on the planet. Steering clear of major controversy is a far safer path.

In his address Moyers worries about disinformation – a reasonable worry. But the examples he gives are strange. There’s hardly a shortage of examples of right-wing and establishment disinformation/propaganda – just about everything administrations (whether Republican or Democrat, Tory or Labour, there’s little difference) and the corporate-controlled media put out is tainted: lies about the justifications for the illegal wars, lies about Saddam Hussein’s links to 9/11, lies about the death toll in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, lies about the economy, lies about “democracy and freedom”, lies about the safety of prescribed drugs (they kill anywhere between 100,000 and half a million Americans every year), lies about the causes of global warming. The list is endless. Moyers could have taken the present administration to task for its broken promises (more lies), its escalation of the Pentagon budget and its repetition of the blatant lie that the Afghan war is about preventing “the terrorists” from hitting America again. But no: his only charge of disinformation by the Right reads like an ingratiating defense of Obama against what are – against the background of his complicity in multiple war crimes – the relatively trivial accusations of a faked birth certificate and an allegedly false claim to be a Christian.

By contrast, Moyers reserves his real venom for the 9/11 Truth Movement, which (quoting the “independent” journalist Robert Parry) he charges with having thrown out “all the evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it”. He follows this with the equally baseless claim by Parry that the Movement used “long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence [and] cherry-picked a few supposed “anomalies” to build an “inside job” story line. What Moyers would have us believe is not so far removed from Big Brother’s (the Orwellian one) 2+2=5. The 9/11 Truth Movement, brimful of people of great courage and integrity – qualities in extremely short supply in the media world to which Bill Moyers belongs – stands accused, not of being merely mistaken, but of deliberate disinformation, of knowingly telling a Grand Lie to deceive the public. This is pure Orwell, the reversal of truth portrayed in his “1984”, epitomized in the Ministry of Truth’s three slogans: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”. It’s also perhaps payback time for Moyers – a chance to hit back at people in the Truth Movement who have criticized him for failing to publicize the well-evidenced case for an “inside job”. But I think there is more to it than that. I think there is a good likelihood that Moyers has volunteered – or been coopted – as a gatekeeper for the official lie; the lie the administration is desperate to defend.

Moyers claims that he “never met anyone – philosopher or physicist, historian, artist, writer, scientist, entrepreneur or social critic – who didn’t teach me something I hadn’t known, something that enlarged my life”. I suspect he took great pains to avoid people like David Ray Griffin, Richard Gage and Webster Tarpley – knowing that what they had to teach would seriously disturb his equanimity and trouble his conscience. Better to ignore them.

He also claims that the 9/11 Truth Movement’s story “never took hold in the public mind”. The phrase suggests that almost no-one believes the “inside job” story. It’s true that political and mainstream media silence and disinformation – the repetition of a lie until it becomes an apparent truth – has kept most Americans in the dark about 9/11. But a 2007 Zogby poll showed just under 5% of the population believing that members of the US government “actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attack”. Five percent doesn’t sound like very much, but in the USA it equates to some 11 million people – that’s an awful lot of disbelievers in the official account. In the same poll, a large majority of 67% said that the 9/11 Commission should have investigated the collapse of WTC 7. An earlier Zogby poll in New York revealed 49% of city residents believing that individuals in the US government knew in advance of the planned attacks. In 2009, 80,000 New York citizens signed the petition for a referendum on instituting an independent commission of enquiry into the mysterious collapse of WTC 7 – a core part of the Truth Movement’s case. The city council rejected the petition; it went to appeal; the judge rejected the appeal, but his astonishing “Building what?” remark became a new spur for the NYCCAN campaign to awaken people to the manifest controlled demolition collapse of Building 7, a fact which threatens to bring down the whole crumbling edifice of the official lie.

A Times/CBS poll in 2006 had only 16% of American respondents believing that the Bush administration told the truth about what it knew prior to 9/11. A January 2011 poll in Germany has a mere 10.5% believing the US government told the whole truth about 9/11. Canadians appear to be far less gullible than their US neighbours: a September 2006 poll showed 22% convinced that the 9/11 attacks had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden and were in fact a plot by influential Americans.

The truth is that more and more people are becoming convinced from the facts that 9/11 was an “inside job”. As one of the outstanding Truth Movement researchers, A. K. Dewdney – the man who proved that the phone calls alleged to have been made from the “hijacked planes” could not have happened and must, therefore, have been faked – wrote:

“ There are now literally hundreds of 9/11 websites, most by individuals or groups wanting to make a contribution. Among these sites is one where “standing up to be counted” is the main function. The website called Patriots Question 9/11 now [as of Feb. 2011] features over 3170 professionals, complete with photographs and brief statements of understanding regarding 9/11. The professionals include scientists of every kind (many well-recognized in their fields), engineers, airline pilots, high-ranking military personnel, intelligence officers, experts in forensics and explosives, experts in Islam, scholars, highly placed (former) government officials, and others. Every week the site gathers another dozen or so such individuals. In fact the rate of growth is itself growing, as more and more people examine the evidence and realize that things are not at all the way they thought they were. This all takes place against a background revealed by reputable polls; about half of US citizens now regard 9/11 (and subsequent “terrorist” attacks) with deep suspicion. Some think that Bush allowed the attacks to happen, others (like the mainstream at the Patriots site) understand them as false flag operations”. The Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth site (www.ae911truth.org) lists 1452 verified professionals and 11,377 other supporters who have signed a petition demanding that Congress institute a truly independent investigation.

Four years ago the FBI officially admitted that a) the reason that 9/11 did not figure on Osama bin Laden’s terrorism charge sheet was because the agency had no firm evidence linking him to 9/11; and b) that all but two of the supposed 15 phone calls allegedly made from the “hijacked planes” did not, after all, happen. Dewdney’s research had proven conclusively that cellphone calls could not be made at cruising altitude and speed. The FBI had then changed its story to say that most of the calls had been made from seatback phones, only for later research to discover that no seatback phones were fitted to the planes involved – hence the FBI climbdown to the “only two calls” position: these two supposedly occurring at low altitude. Crucially, the FBI admitted that the calls Barbara Olson was alleged to have made to her husband – the calls which created the “boxcutter” myth – did not after all take place. The film “UA93” is pure fiction.

This information has been public since 2006 – but only on the Web. Not one single newspaper or TV channel has publicized it – encouraging the willful ignorance which enables Bill Moyers, for example, to claim that the “truthers” story is disproved by “contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes” and “confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity”. Like the phone calls, the Osama “confession tape” is an obvious forgery. Osama probably died as long ago as late 2001 of the kidney disease which had taken him for treatment to the American hospital in Dubai just two months before 9/11, and where he was visited by the local CIA agent (at a time when he was the world’s Number One wanted man – anyone smell a rat here?). Osama was a useful bogeyman as long as he was alive – and even for years afterwards. But his credibility as the 9/11 “mastermind” wore increasingly thin, so he eventually had to be replaced – by the zombified KSM, waterboarded into confession 183 times in a single month (that’s 6 times a day on average). Is this the evidence Bill Moyers would have us believe proves al-Qaeda involvement? Is he implicitly endorsing torture?

I’ve struggled to find reasons for the willful ignorance of those who ought to know better. I don’t believe there are any “good” reasons for a deliberate refusal to at least engage with the facts the Truth Movement has revealed and I’m convinced that anyone who approaches those facts with an open mind cannot fail to be persuaded of the truth they reveal. Richard Falk suggests that fear, co-option and self-censorship play a decisive role. Some fear – for personal safety, for example – is legitimate. There is certainly evidence that the same agencies suspected of having been involved in the major “terrorist” incidents have no compunction about “neutralising” people who might spill the beans – like the British weapons expert Dr. David Kelly.

Falk also suggests “a widely shared fear of what sinister forces might lie beneath the unturned stones of a full and honest investigation of 9/11”. The possibility that a government allegedly committed to freedom and democracy colluded in murdering its own citizens, and those of many other nations, ‘merely’ to provide the pretext for its imperialist ambitions in the Middle East and for launching a never-ending bogus “war on terror” (the main purpose of which was to create the new external enemy to replace the largely fictitious Communist threat which had evaporated in 1990) was simply too appalling to countenance. If this truth were ever admitted, it would be end of American supremacy. America would become a pariah nation, despised and reviled – as Germany and Japan were after WWII.

Americans would hang their heads in shame for generations. Is this what Moyers and the other deniers fear – a fear which makes them turn on the messengers of the terrible truth? Do they hope that they, and America, can escape the consequences of the awful crime, and of their willing complicity in it – a complicity which, in international law, makes them equally guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide? Do they believe that, by assisting in blocking the truth, they can somehow help America and Americans to “get away with it”? Or perhaps their fear is that good Americans – those who already know the truth and the many others who would be outraged once the truth was told – would rise up not only against the administration but also against those “gatekeepers” such as Moyers who helped to preserve the lie?

Of course, it’s not just America and Americans, even if 9/11 is the event which “changed the world” by setting a new standard for state and personal criminality. Precisely because they appeared to have gotten away with it, other corrupt governments and their vicious secret services and venal military followed suit, heaping crime upon crime, with the death and mutilation of millions of innocents on their collective hands.

There is no future for a world which is complicit with a lie out of fear for its own psychological and material comfort – especially when the lie has brought death and misery to so many. It has always been the case in history that decadent empires – empires which had become fat and lazy and corrupt – no matter how powerful, were swept away by relatively unsophisticated hordes from ‘more primitive’ cultures. 2011 was said by many to be a year of change. Perhaps the revolutions we are witnessing in North Africa are the start of a tsunami of popular revolt against corrupt and evil regimes which will spread to the West.

Let me finish by quoting Bill Moyers again, from his speech to the National Conference for Media Reform in 2005. The message is powerful and entirely valid – but I have to number Mr. Moyers among those who, despite claiming to do the opposite, share and promote the “orthodoxy” which he rightly identifies as the great threat to democracy:

“An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy – or worse”.

Despite the pretense of radicalism, the evidence is that Moyers remains wedded to an orthodoxy: the orthodoxy of the American dream, from which he does not wish to be awoken. It’s perhaps significant that he told the History Makers audience: “I’ve never really had to grow up”. Growing up can be painful, but it’s preferable to living with a lie.

Paul Carline

Scotland

30/03/2011

1 On the morning of September 11, 2001, Top Secret Military Specialist April Gallop was ordered by her supervisor to go directly to work at the Pentagon, before dropping off her ten-week-old son Elisha at day care. Amazingly, the infant was given immediate security clearance upon arrival.The instant Gallop turned on her computer an enormous explosion blew her out of her chair, knocking her momentarily unconscious.

Escaping through the hole reportedly made by Flight 77, she saw no signs of an aircraft – no seats, luggage, metal, or human remains. Her watch (and other clocks nearby) had stopped at 9:30-9:31 a.m., seven minutes before the Pentagon was allegedly struck at 9:38 a.m.

Gallop was briefed by officials not to tell her story in public; she also received an email from a Fox News reporter who had been told by the Pentagon not to interview her.

Gallop now believes that officials within the Bush Administration conspired to destroy the Twin Towers of the WTC and WTC7 – the third building brought down at 5.20 pm that day – with pre-placed explosives.

On April 5th, 2011, at 11 am, at the Federal Courthouse at 141 Church Street, New Haven, Connecticut, the case of Gallop v. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Myers will be heard by the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

Supposed Retraction

03 April, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Writing in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone claims that, had the Goldstone Commission known in 2009 what it knows now, its report would have “probably” been different.  Specifically, he writes, the Commission most likely wouldn’t have concluded that Israel had a policy of intentionally targeting civilians ( Washington Post ).

Not surprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu has jumped all over this, claiming that this op-ed exonerates Israel of all wrongdoing in Operation Cast Lead. He added: “The fact that Goldstone changed his mind must lead to the shelving of the [Goldstone] Report once and for all” ( Haaretz ).

There’s just one problem with all this: the Goldstone Report never claimed that Israel had a policy of intentionally targeting civilians.  As Yaniv Reich writes, “This is a red-herring; nobody seriously believes there is a high-level policy to murder civilians.  The actual issue is that ‘these incidents indicate that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population’ (Goldstone report, pp. 16).  This low threshold was an intentional policy, as has been confirmed by dozens of soldiers’ and officers’ statements” ( Mondoweiss ).

So, despite what Netanyahu has claimed, Goldstone has not actually retracted any of the allegations of war crimes made by the Goldstone Commission, officially called the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.  It should also be pointed out that the other members of the Commission—Christine Chinkin, Hina Jilani, and Colonel Desmond Travers—continue to stand by the Report’s findings.

All of which means that Israel still stands accused of committing several war crimes—among them, using civilians as human shields, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, and conducting indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.

Goldstone proceeds to praise Israel for conducting investigations into “over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza.”  But the UN Committee of Independent Experts, which was charged with following up on the Goldstone Report, has reported that Israel has not adequately investigated many of the allegations made by the Goldstone Commission. Most significantly, “there is no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead” ( Committee of Independent Experts ).

In his op-ed, Goldstone mentions one, just one, specific allegation made by the Goldstone Commission which he believes should be retracted: “[T]he most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Samouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack.”

As proof that the IDF didn’t target civilians in this instance, Goldstone simply states that an IDF investigation concluded that it didn’t target civilians.  Needless to say, this argument is highly flawed.  Both the Goldstone Commission and the Committee of Experts concluded that, for obvious reasons, Israel cannot be expected to conduct an unbiased investigation into its own affairs ( Goldstone Report ).

It’s also worth mentioning that the Committee of Experts doesn’t share Goldstone’s conclusion here.  First, the Committee states that, as far as it knows, Israel has not completed its investigation of the massacre.  Second, the Committee notes that, according to an October 2010 Haaretz report, although the commander who authorized the missile attack claimed that he had not been informed that civilians were present, several air force officers had in fact warned him that “there could be civilians in the area” ( Haaretz ).

Richard Goldstone’s motives in writing this op-ed are completely irrelevant.  What matters is the evidence.  And the evidence—documented not just by the Goldstone Commission, but also by the Arab League , Breaking the Silence , Amnesty International , and Human Rights Watch —indicates that Israel committed numerous war crimes in Operation Cast Lead.

Don Emmerich is writer and peace activist . His political writings can be found at http://donemmerich.blogspot.com/

 01 April, 2011 Countercurrents.org

A dear friend of mine from Gaza told me that he hadn’t slept for days. “I am so worried about Egypt, I have only been feeding on cigarettes and coffee.” My friend and I talked for hours that day in early February. We talked about Tahrir Square, about the courage of ordinary Egyptians and about Hosni Mubarak’s many attempts to co-opt the people’s revolution. We were so consumed by the turmoil in Egypt that neither of us even mentioned Gaza.

The siege on Gaza – and on the whole of Palestine – is a constant factor that unites most Palestinians. However, the genuine solidarity that the people of the Gaza Strip felt when Egyptians took to the streets on January 25 surpassed even the political urgency around the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Ordinary Gazans danced the night away when Mubarak was removed from power on February 18. Although lifting the siege is a Palestinian priority, those who raised Egyptian flags, shed tears and subsisted on coffee and cigarettes for nearly three weeks were hardly making the connection between the siege and Mubarak. While Mubarak was loathed to the core – his decision to block the Rafah border at a critical time victimized thousands – the bond that united Egypt to Palestine runs much deeper than the sins of a senile dictator, or even a terrible siege.

The story, in fact, starts well before 1948, the year of the Palestinian Nakba. Egypt and Palestine have for long reflected the state of the other: in defeat and triumph, in despair and hope. The valiant youth of Egypt are now the harbingers of hope for their country, for Palestine and for the entire region, although things haven’t always been so promising.

Al-Nakba represented heartbreak to the collective conscious of Arabs, but Palestinians and Egyptians were affected the most.

In 1948, Arab armies entered into a halfhearted battle in Palestine. They were under-equipped, with only a limited mandate provided by self-serving leaderships. Most Palestinian villages were already depopulated by Zionist militias. The local resistance was mercilessly smashed, and the roads out of Palestine were filled with weary refugees. The Arabs were defeated. Ordinary Egyptians fumed as their Palestinian brethren were humiliated and Palestine was lost.

The defeat in 1948 led to serious introspection in Egyptian society. The internal crises, the poverty and the lack of social justice could no longer be ignored. Following the defeat of the Egyptian army in the south of Palestine, Egypt quickly descended into turmoil, and was on the verge of revolution. There was little in the way of funds to be channeled to Gaza’s sizeable refugee population. Much of Egypt’s wealth was squandered by King Farouk on his own family. Indeed, the misery in Gaza was an extension of the suffering in Egypt, and in some strange way, the failed Egyptian military intervention in southern Palestine had much to do with the revolution that followed in Egypt in 1952.

Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who toppled the monarchy and became Egypt’s president, was an officer in the Egyptian army in 1948. He crossed into Gaza from Sinai by train in order to defend Palestine. He was stationed in Fallujah, a village located to the north of Gaza. His unit repeatedly tried to recapture some of the lost areas in the south, even when military wisdom pointed to the unfeasibility of such an effort. When it was discovered that many Egyptian army units were being supplied with purposely-flawed weapons, shockwaves spread throughout the army, but it was not enough to demoralize Nasser and a few Egyptian soldiers. They stayed in the Fallujah pocket for weeks, and their resistance became the stuff of legend.

The building in which Nasser and his unit stayed still stands in today’s Israel. It is surrounded by fences, like a surrealistic piece of living art. Nasser returned to Egypt after a territorial swap – Fallujah for the small town of Beit Hanoun, north of Gaza, which was under Israeli control at the time. Bitterness, anger and grief accompanied him on his way back to Cairo, also through Gaza.

Nasser marched to Cairo, and in 1952, along with a few army officers, he overthrew the king and his government. Palestine was cited by Nasser as a key reason behind his rebellion. The defeat of Palestine had signified all the ills that afflicted Egypt under the King and his royal family.

Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, saw in Nasser a hero and liberator. And why wouldn’t they? He was the man they waved to as he passed by Gaza with his fellow officers following the Fallujah battle. It was a rare moment of pride and hope when the officers crossed with their weapons, and huge crowds of refugees flooded the streets to greet them. The refugees adored Nasser and they placed framed photographs of him in their tents and mud houses.

This is merely one episode to demonstrate the intrinsic, almost organic relationship between Egypt and Palestine. The relationship withstood many difficult events that followed, including the defeat of 1967 (where the rest of historic Palestine was lost), the death of Nasser, and the signing of the Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel. Saddat was an anomaly, Palestinians argued. Camp David was the exception, they said. Mubarak was not Egypt. Indeed, the siege was seen as dishonoring a legacy that Palestinians are determined to remember with fondness. Egypt stands for shared history, for heroism and sacrifice.

On March 24, the Middle East Monitor reported that Egyptian Foreign Minister, Dr Nabil El Arabi had sent a message to his counterpart in Gaza a few days earlier. In the letter he stated that lifting the Israeli-imposed siege of Gaza – supported by the discredited Mubarak regime – was a priority for the new government in Cairo: “We are acting to open the border at Rafah and facilitate an easing of life for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

El Arabi’s position is consistent with the wishes of the Egyptian people, a position that was necessitated by the historic solidarity between both nations. It is for similar reasons that Palestinians didn’t get much sleep for 18 days, a period of waiting that culminated in a rare moment of joy when Egyptians won their freedom. In that moment, Gaza was Cairo, Egypt was Palestine, and both peoples were one.

– Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), available on Amazon.com.

01 April, 2011

WSWS.org

The United States and Britain are pursuing efforts to incite an internal coup against the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi, while at the same time deploying CIA agents and military special operations forces to bolster the flagging military fortunes of the anti-Gaddafi rebel forces.

The two-track policy became evident with the highly publicized defections of Moussa Koussa, the Libyan foreign minister and former intelligence chief, who fled to Britain late Wednesday, and Ali Abdessalam Treki, the former foreign minister and U.N. General Assembly president, who announced his defection Thursday in postings on several opposition web sites.

Al Jazeera, reporting rumors circulating in Tripoli, said that a number of other top officials were believed to be negotiating terms for defection, including intelligence chief Abuzed Omar Durda, Mohammed Zwei, the Secretary of the General People’s Congress, the country’ s parliament, oil minister Shokri Ghanem, and Deputy Foreign Minister Abdulati Al Obeidi, who accompanied Moussa Koussa to Tunis on the trip that led to his flight to Britain.

The list of names was supplied to Al Jazeera and to several British newspapers by British government officials, in a transparent effort to provoke a political crisis within the Gaddafi regime and offset the impact of the military setbacks suffered by the Libyan rebels over the last two days.

The full list of names was published by the British liberal newspaper The Independent, which has enthusiastically backed the war on Libya (and which published a column in its Friday edition calling for Gaddafi’s assassination).

The Independent and the Guardian, another pro-war British newspaper, also gave front-page treatment to claims by British government officials that they are negotiating with Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, on the terms of Gaddafi’s own removal from power.

British foreign minister William Hague claimed the defection of Moussa Koussa showed that the Gaddafi regime “is fragmented, under pressure and crumbling from within.” He continued, “Moussa Koussa is one of the most senior members of the Qaddafi regime and has been my channel of communication to the regime in recent weeks.”

The Obama administration also hailed the Koussa defection. A spokesman for the US National Security Council said Koussa “can help provide critical intelligence about Gaddafi’s current state of mind and military plans.”

Numerous US officials, including Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, and Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, have suggested that the ouster of Gaddafi by his own inner circle would provide the fastest way out of the crisis.

Despite the attempts by the Obama administration and its European allies, with the assistance of the media, to portray the Gaddafi regime as uniquely monstrous, the predatory aims of the US-NATO intervention would be served by a political coup that would merely remove Gaddafi and perhaps his sons.

Washington and London are then quite prepared to scrap the propaganda barrage about massacres of civilians and claims of “genocide” and do a deal with Gaddafi’s closest aides to secure imperialist interests in Libya.

There would be little difference between such a post-Gaddafi cabal in Tripoli and the leadership of the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, the Libyan rebel group recognized by France and backed by the US and Britain. The TNC is headed by two former Gaddafi aides, interior minister Abdel Fattah Younis and justice minister Mustafa Mohamed al-Jalil.

Official Washington was engaged in intense internal discussions Wednesday and Thursday over the evident disarray of the rebel military forces and what could be done about it. There were closed-door briefings for House and Senate committees, given by top military and intelligence officials.

Intelligence officials confirmed press reports that CIA operatives have been on the ground in eastern Libya for the past two weeks and that President Obama secretly authorized covert operations to provide intelligence and technical assistance to the rebel forces.

The Los Angeles Times reported Thursday, “The CIA has been in rebel-held areas of Libya since shortly after the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Tripoli, was evacuated in February, U.S. officials say. Agency officials have been meeting with rebels to learn more about them, and in some cases they are providing them with information about Kadafi’s forces. The CIA officers in Libya are part of a contingent of operatives from Western nations.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that the intelligence agents were playing a direct tactical military role, writing, “The Central Intelligence Agency has placed covert operatives on the ground in parts of Libya, feeding intelligence on ground targets to the U.S. military and coalition forces for airstrikes and reaching out to rebels aligned against Col. Moammar Gadhafi, officials say.”

The deployment of CIA agents is widely regarded as a transitional step, to be followed by such measures as the use of Predator drones, and the dispatch of American special forces, which would be portrayed by the Obama administration as not violating its pledge of no military “boots on the ground.”

That pledge, too, is likely to be scrapped on one pretext or another. The NATO commander, Admiral James Stavridis, seemed to hint as much at a congressional hearing when he suggested that as part of the resolution of the Libyan crisis, “the possibility of a stabilization regime exists.” He was referring to the US-backed stabilization force deployed in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, which included ground forces from the US and NATO countries.

British special forces are already on the ground, according to the National Journal. The Washington-based magazine reported Thursday, “There are no U.S. military personnel on the ground in Libya yet, though the United Kingdom, America’s closest battlefield ally, has several dozen Special Air Service commandoes and M16 agents already operating there.”

The magazine added: “a U.S. military official said that British special forces troops have provided on-the-ground targeting information for NATO airstrikes. A covert British unit, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, has been tasked to operationally ‘prepare the battlefield.’ A second U.S. military official said that Britain also had teams of personnel from the SAS, one of its most elite special-operations units, and MI6 operating inside Libya.”

The Washington Post explained the CIA intervention in eastern Libya as an effort to gather more information about the Libyan rebels. It cited “a senior administration official” who told the newspaper “we know well” some of the leaders in Benghazi.

This is a remarkable understatement, given that the top commander of the rebel forces, General Khalifa Hifter, is a longtime CIA collaborator who defected from the Gaddafi regime in 1987 and lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC for the past 20 years. He returned to Libya last month and was named to head the rebel military effort on March 14.

The Post has not published Hifter’s name since he was named the top rebel commander, a silence shared by the New York Times and the bulk of the American corporate media. This political censorship is aimed at concealing from the American people the fact that the man now commanding the anti-Gaddafi forces is a veteran CIA asset who the Post itself once described (in 1996) as the head of a “contra-style group” run by the CIA.

Philippines

Published in Business World

31 March – 1 April 2011

The US-NATO military intervention in Libya is being justified by invoking UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011) authorizing all Member States to undertake “all necessary measures” for the protection of civilians and for the enforcement of a “no fly zone” in Libya’s airspace.

It is supposedly based on the Security Council’s determination, in accordance with Article 39 of the UN Charter, that the Libyan conflict constitutes a threat to international peace and security necessitating the imposition of coercive measures, including the use of force, by all member states.

The premise is grounded on the following claims that have yet to be irrefutably established: (1) the Kaddafi regime is that of a brutal, fascist despot despised by his own people; (2) the opposition to the Kaddafi regime embodies the demands and aspirations of the Libyan people and is supported by them; and (3) the unarmed, peaceful protest actions against the government were being met with unacceptable force allegedly “amounting to crimes against humanity”.

Assuming for the sake of argument that Kaddafi is as authoritarian and as repressive as the US, France, the United Kingdom, some Arab countries as well as international media want us to believe, the fact is that many such regimes have enjoyed the unwavering political and economic support from the US and EU countries, allowing them to overstay despite widespread social discontent and organized dissent.

In the face of these regimes’ bloody, strong-arm measures to tamp down the mass unrest and popular uprisings threatening their rule, there are no moves to impose on these regimes international sanctions of any kind much less armed intervention.

A more credible explanation is that the US-NATO interventionists all have their oil rigs pumping out thousands of barrels of oil and gas daily from the Libyan fields. To cite only the major players and their oil corporations, we have the US (Exxon-Mobil, Conoco Phillips, Marathon, Hess and Occidental), France (Total), UK (British Petroleum), Spain (Respol), Netherlands (Royal Dutch Shell), Italy (Eni), and Norway (Statoil).

Interestingly, Kaddafi reportedly announced in January 2009 a plan to nationalize Libyan oil, raising fears that the share of oil production by US and European corporations would be reduced, if not totally eliminated. The plan however was temporarily blocked by senior Libyan officials who felt the moves were too drastic, and proposed that the nationalization be postponed.

UNSC Resolution 1973 itself deserves more critical study.  Prof. Hans Kochler, president of the International Progress Organization which has consultative status with the UN, has submitted a memorandum to the UN Secretary-General denouncing it as “international vigilantism and a humanitarian free-for-all”.

Kochler says that the vague and completely undefined term “all necessary measures’’ can and will be interpreted according to the self-interest of the intervening parties.  This invites the “arbitrary and arrogant exercise of power and makes the commitment of the United Nations Organization to the international rule of law void of any meaning.”

What is even more ironic is that a closer look at the UN structures and system reveals what realpolitik democracy it practices:  the truly representative General Assembly has no teeth to enforce its resolutions, while all the real power resides in the Security Council, which consists of a minority of five self-appointed permanent members (each one with absolute veto power) and ten temporary lesser members chosen on rotating basis.

Within weeks the Security Council was persuaded to shift from its earlier Resolution 1970 (2011) adopting a travel ban and asset freeze on Kaddafi, his family members and other high officials of his regime and an arms embargo to Resolution 1973 (2011) or outright military intervention.  This is also highly questionable.

Consider that it was generally conceded that the actual situation inside Libya could not be reliably ascertained at the time and even up to now.  Reports of civilian casualties, the outcomes of see-saw battles between government forces and the rebels as well as the nature and strength of the motley groups that were fighting the Kaddafi regime could not be independently verified.

The truth is there are alternative assessments of Kaddafi’s almost four decades of rule in Libya that cast further doubt on his touted propensity to massacre his own people.  For one, he used income from nationalized oil production to raise the living standards of Libyans way above that in the rest of Africa, considerably higher than in feudal Saudi Arabia which has vastly bigger oil reserves and revenues and generally higher than in the rest of the developing world.

He was generous in his political and financial support for national liberation movements and governments in Africa and Latin America that emerged from colonial struggles before he zoomed to the top of the list as a “rogue” regime targeted for assassination, subversion, foreign-sponsored rebellion, and outright bombardment. Thereafter he was forced to be more circumspect and even to backtrack in his support.

After the Iraq invasion in 2003, Kaddafi tried to ward off further threatened aggression by making big concessions to the imperialists. He opened the economy to foreign banks and corporations; he agreed to IMF demands for “structural adjustment,” privatizing many state-owned enterprises and cutting state subsidies on necessities like food and fuel.

As to the anti-Kaddafi groups depicted by the intervening powers and international media as part and parcel of the democratic winds sweeping the North African and Arab regions but not much more, a close, hard look reveals disturbing information.

The National Front for the Salvation of Libya was reportedly formed and trained by the US and Britain from Libyan soldiers captured by the Chad army, with funding also coming from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Syria. It was involved in attempts to assassinate Kaddafi in the 1980s. It took part in the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition in London in 2005, which is now the umbrella formation of the rebels in Benghazi.

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (Al-Jama’a Islamiyyah al-Mugatilah bi-Libya) is an Islamic fundamentalist group with links to Al Qaeda.  Like the Abu Sayyaf and counterparts in other countries, it consists of former mujahedeen who fought in Afghanistan, trained and funded by the US CIA. It has also been reportedly involved in several assassination attempts on Kaddafi as well as on other Libyan officials, soldiers and policemen. The LIFG is in the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.

With the justification for military intervention and its UN fig leaf of legitimation brought under serious doubt, it becomes crystal clear that what is taking place in Libya today is big powers intervention into the internal affairs of a sovereign country in order to depose a regime not to their liking.

This has spawned more casualties among the civilian population.

This will lead to a prolongation of the armed conflict, greater economic dislocation and hardships for Libyans and foreign workers, and the worsening of political turmoil and social tensions.  It could lead to partitioning the country into pro-Kaddafi West and anti-Kaddafi East and foreign control over Libya’s oil and gas resources.

There is no guarantee, not even a clear prospect, that any regime change will result in a better life for the Libyan people. On the contrary, foreign intervention has deprived the Libyan people of their right to determine their own destiny.

History is replete with examples of societies being plundered and destroyed by foreign powers imposing their values and will in the name of humanitarianism, civilization, progress and democracy.   There is no iota of evidence that Libya’s case will be an exception.

04 April, 2011

WSWS.org

Numerous press reports over the weekend add to the evidence that the Libyan rebels fighting the regime of Muammar Gaddafi are under the direction of American intelligence agencies. Despite the repeated claims by Obama administration officials that the rebels are a largely unknown quantity, it is becoming increasingly clear that key military leaders of the anti-Gaddafi campaign are well known to the US government and have longstanding relations with the CIA.

For better than two weeks there had been a virtual ban in the US media on reporting the name of Khalifa Haftar, the long-time CIA collaborator who was appointed chief rebel commander March 17, on the eve of the US-NATO bombing campaign against Libya. Only the regional McClatchy Newspapers chain reported Haftar’s appointment, and ABC News ran a brief interview with him on March 27. Otherwise, silence prevailed.

This de facto censorship abruptly ended April 1, when a right-wing US think tank, the Jamestown Foundation, published a lengthy study of Haftar’s background and record, which was cited extensively by Reuters news service, and then more widely in the US and British media.

The Jamestown Foundation report declared: “Today as Colonel Haftar finally returns to the battlefields of North Africa with the objective of toppling Gaddafi, his former co-conspirator from Libya’s 1969 coup, he may stand as the best liaison for the United States and allied NATO forces in dealing with Libya’s unruly rebels.”

The Jamestown study noted Haftar’s role in organizing the Libyan National Army (LNA), which he founded “on June 21, 1988 with strong backing from the Central Intelligence Agency,” and cites a 1991 interview with him “conducted in an LNA camp in rural Virginia.” Not only did the CIA sponsor and fund the LNA, it engineered the entry of LNA officers and men into the United States where they established a training camp.

Reuters added, using a variant spelling of the name, that it has “repeatedly asked for an interview with Hefta but he could not immediately be contacted.” The news service added, “The CIA declined to comment” on its relationship to the former Libyan military leader.

Other references to Haftar’s role appeared in the online blog of the New Yorker magazine, in Africa Confidential, on National Public Radio, the British daily Guardian, and in the Independent on Sunday, another British newspaper.

The Independent column, headlined “The Shady Men Backed by the West to Displace Gaddafi,” described the Libyan rebel commanders as follows: “The careers of several make them sound like characters out of the more sinister Graham Greene novels. They include men such as Colonel Khalifa Haftar, former commander of the Libyan army in Chad who was captured and changed sides in 1988, setting up the anti-Gaddafi Libyan National Army reportedly with CIA and Saudi backing. For the last 20 years, he has been living quietly in Virginia before returning to Benghazi to lead the fight against Gaddafi.”

Finally, the Washington Post’s Sunday edition carried several references to Haftar, including a front-page article profiling the divisions within the rebel military leadership. “Khalifa Haftar, a former army colonel who recently returned to Libya after living for many years in Falls Church, was initially hailed by the Transitional National Council as a leader who could help discipline the new army and train its largely volunteer ranks,” Post reporter Tara Bahrampour wrote.

She then quoted TNC and rebel military spokesmen giving conflicting accounts, one saying Haftar had been removed from command, the other saying he remained in control of the military. A spokesman for the TNC, asked to explain the conflict in light of its earlier announcement of Haftar’s appointment, said, “This is the position of the council today. The situation is fluid…. The political viewpoints change frequently.”

Walter Pincus, the Post’s long-time reporter on intelligence activities, himself a former CIA informer in the National Student Association, described Haftar as “a former Libyan army colonel who for years commanded the Libyan National Army (LNA), an anti-Gaddafi group.” The article said Haftar had “established the LNA, allegedly with backing from the CIA and Saudi elements.” It continued: “In 1996, he was reported to have been behind an alleged uprising in eastern Libya. By that time, he was already settled with his family in Falls Church.”

According to Pincus, “a senior intelligence official,” asked about the Libyan commander’s connection to the CIA, “said it was policy not to discuss such issues.”

The informal blackout on Haftar’s identity and CIA connections still continues on the American television networks and in the pages of the New York Times—a newspaper that openly admits its subservience to the US military/intelligence apparatus. But the significance of the weekend press reports is unmistakable: the Libyan rebel military is not the independent organ of a popular uprising against the Gaddafi dictatorship, but rather the creature of American imperialism, the most reactionary political force on the planet.

The dubious character of the Libyan rebels was further underscored in a remarkable profile published Saturday by the Wall Street Journal of three Libyans who had fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and were now playing major roles in the rebel military effort. Two of the three had been in US custody as alleged Al Qaeda operatives and one spent six years at Guantanamo Bay before being turned over to the Gaddafi regime in 2007. The three men are:

>> Abdel Hakim al-Hasady, described as “an influential Islamic preacher and high school teacher who spent five years at a training camp in eastern Afghanistan” and now “oversees the recruitment, training and deployment of about 300 rebel fighters from Darna,” a city in eastern Libya

>> Salah al-Barrani, “a former fighter from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG,” who is Hasady’s field commander

>> Sufyan Ben Qumu, “a Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden’s holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan,” and who “is training many of the city’s rebel recruits.”

Hasady and Ben Qumu were arrested by Pakistani security after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and turned over to the US. Hasady was transferred to Libyan custody two months later, while Ben Qumu was moved to Guantanamo and held there until 2007, when he, too, was sent to a Libyan prison. The Gaddafi regime released both men in 2008, at a time when US-Libya collaboration in the “war on terror” was at its height. Such an action would certainly have been checked with Washington

The former Al Qaeda warrior was quite willing to speak to the leading US business newspaper, which reported, “his discourse has become dramatically more pro-American.” He told the Journal, “If we hated the Americans 100 percent, today it is less than 50 percent. They have started to redeem themselves for their past mistakes.…”

Whether these individuals are Al Qaeda operatives who were “turned” by their American captors or have simply changed allegiance under changed circumstances is unclear. But their role in the Libyan opposition further undermines the longstanding propaganda of the US government about the supposedly unbridgeable gulf between Al Qaeda and American imperialism.

For a decade, the US government, under Bush and now Obama, has used the terrorist actions of Al Qaeda and its alleged supporters as a pretext for one military intervention after another in the Muslim world—Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia and now Libya.

There has long been reason to doubt the “war on terror” narrative, not least the fact that Al Qaeda was effectively created by the CIA through its activities in recruiting and mobilizing radical Islamists to go to Afghanistan in the 1980s and join the mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet army there. Many of the 9/11 suicide hijackers were known to the CIA as Al Qaeda operatives, and in some cases under active surveillance, but were nonetheless allowed to enter the country, receive training at US flight schools and carry out the terrorist attacks.

An incident during a hearing Thursday before the House Armed Services Committee demonstrates the sensitivity of the US government concerning the links between US intelligence services and Al Qaeda. Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman questioned a witness, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, about the role of Abdel Hakim al-Hasady. Steinberg refused to discuss the matter, suggesting it could be taken up only in a closed-door session where US covert operations are regularly reviewed.

04 April, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Over the past two weeks Libya has been subjected to the most brutal imperial air, sea and land assault in its modern history. Thousands of bombs and missiles, launched from American and European submarines, warships and fighter planes, are destroying Libyan military bases, airports, roads, ports, oil depots, artillery emplacements, tanks, armored carriers, planes and troop concentrations. Dozens of CIA and SAS special forces have been training, advising and mapping targets for the so-called Libyan ‘rebels’ engaged in a civil war against the Gaddafi government, its armed forces, popular militias and civilian supporters (NY Times 3/30/11).

Despite this massive military support and their imperial ‘allies’ total control of Libya’s sky and coastline, the ‘rebels’ have proven incapable of mobilizing village or town support and are in retreat after being confronted by the Libyan government’s highly motivated troops and village militias (Al Jazeera 3/30/11).

One of the most flimsy excuse for this inglorious rebel retreat offered by the Cameron-Obama-Sarkozy ‘coalition’, echoed by the mass media, is that their Libyan ‘clients’ are “outgunned” (Financial Times, 3/29/11). Obviously Obama and company don’t count the scores of jets, dozens of warships and submarines, the hundreds of daily attacks and the thousands of bombs dropped on the Libyan government since the start of Western imperial intervention. Direct military intervention of 20 major and minor foreign military powers, savaging the sovereign Libyan state, as well as scores of political accomplices in the United Nations do not contribute to any military advantage for the imperial clients – according to the daily pro-rebel propaganda. The Los Angeles Times (March 31, 2011), however described how “…many rebels in gun-mounted trucks turned and fled…even though their heavy machine guns and antiaircraft guns seemed a match for any similar government vehicle.” Indeed, no ‘rebel’ force in recent history has received such sustained military support from so many imperial powers in their confrontation with an established regime. Nevertheless, the ‘rebel’ forces on the front lines are in full retreat, fleeing in disarray and thoroughly disgusted with their ‘rebel’ generals and ministers back in Benghazi. Meanwhile the ‘rebel’ leaders, in elegant suits and tailored uniforms, answer the ‘call to battle’ by attending ‘summits’ in London where ‘liberation strategy’ consists of their appeal before the mass media for imperial ground troops (The Independent (London) (3/31/11).

Morale among the frontline ‘rebels’ is low: According to credible reports from the battlefront at Ajdabiya, “Rebels …complained that their erstwhile commanders were nowhere to be found. They griped about comrades who fled to the relative safety of Benghazi…(they complained that) forces in Benghazi monopolized 400 donated field radios and 400 more…satellite phones intended for the battlefield…(mostly) rebels say commanders rarely visit the battlefield and exercise little authority because many fighters do not trust them“(Los Angeles Times, 3/31/2011). Apparently ‘Twitters’ don’t work on the battlefield.

The decisive issues in a the civil war are not weapons, training or leadership, although certainly these factors are important: The basic difference between the military capability of the pro-government Libyan forces and the Libyan ‘rebels’, backed by both Western imperialists and ‘progressives,’ lies in their motivation, values and material advances. Western imperialist intervention has heightened national consciousness among the Libyan people, who now view their confrontation with the anti-Gaddafi ‘rebels’ as a fight to defend their homeland from foreign air and sea power and puppet land troops – a powerful incentive for any people or army. The opposite is true for the ‘rebels’, whose leaders have surrendered their national identity and depend entirely on imperialist military intervention to put them in power. What rank and file ‘rebel’ fighters are going to risk their lives, fighting their own compatriots, just to place their country under an imperialist or neo-colonial rule?

Finally Western journalists’ accounts are coming to light of village and town pro-government militias repelling these ‘rebels’ and even how “a busload of (Libyan) women suddenly emerged (from one village)…and began cheering as though they supported the rebels…” drawing the Western-backed rebels into a deadly ambush set by their pro-government husbands and neighbors (Globe and Mail (Canada)3/28/11 and McClatchy News Service, 3/29/11).

The ‘rebels’, who enter their villages, are seen as invaders, breaking doors, blowing up homes and arresting and accusing local leaders of being ‘fifth columnists’ for Gaddafi. The threat of military ‘rebel’ occupation, the arrest and abuse of local authorities and the disruption of highly valued family, clan and local community relations have motivated local Libyan militias and fighters to attack the Western-backed ‘rebels’. The ‘rebels’ are regarded as ‘outsiders’ in terms of regional and clan allegiances; by trampling on local mores, the ‘rebels’ now find themselves in ‘hostile’ territory. What ‘rebel’ fighter would be willing to die defending hostile terrain? Such ‘rebels’ have only to call on foreign air-power to ‘liberate’ the pro-government village for them.

The Western media, unable to grasp these material advances by the pro-government forces, attribute popular backing of Gaddafi to ‘coercion’ or ‘co-optation’, relying on ‘rebel’ claims that ‘everybody is secretly opposed to the regime’. There is another material reality, which is conveniently ignored: The Gaddafi regime has effectively used the country’s oil wealth to build a vast network of public schools, hospitals and clinics. Libyans have the highest per capita income in Africa at $14,900 per annum (Financial Times, 4/2/11. Tens of thousands of low-income Libyan students have received scholarships to study at home and overseas. The urban infrastructure has been modernized, agriculture is subsidized and small-scale producers and manufacturers receive government credit. Gaddafi has overseen these effective programs, in addition to enriching his own clan/family. On the other hand, the Libyan rebels and their imperial mentors have targeted the entire civilian economy, bombed Libyan cities, cut trade and commercial networks, blocked the delivery of subsidized food and welfare to the poor, caused the suspension of schools and forced hundreds of thousands of foreign professionals, teachers, doctors and skilled contract workers to flee.

Libyans, who might otherwise resent Gaddafi’s long autocratic tenure in office, are now faced with the choice between supporting an advanced, functioning welfare state or a foreign-directed military conquest. Many have chosen, quite rationally, to stand with the regime.

The debacle of the imperial-backed ‘rebel’ forces, despite their immense technical-military advantage, is due to the quisling leadership, their role as ‘internal colonialists’ invading local communities and above all their wanton destruction of a social-welfare system which has benefited millions of ordinary Libyans for two generations. The failure of the ‘rebels’ to advance, despite the massive support of imperial air and sea power, means that the US-France-Britain ‘coalition’ will have to escalate its intervention beyond sending special forces, advisers and CIA assassination teams. Given Obama-Clinton’s stated objective of ‘regime change’, there will be no choice but to introduce imperialist troops, send large-scale shipments of armored carriers and tanks, and increase the use of the highly destructive depleted uranium munitions.

No doubt Obama, the most public face of ‘humanitarian armed intervention’ in Africa, will recite bigger and more grotesque lies, as Libyan villagers and townspeople fall victims to his imperial juggernaut. Washington’s ‘first black Chief Executive’ will earn history’s infamy as the US President responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of black Libyans and mass expulsion of millions of sub-Saharan African workers employed under the current regime (Globe and Mail 3/28/11).

No doubt, Anglo-American progressives and leftists will continue to debate (in ‘civilized tones’) the pros and cons of this ‘intervention’, following in the footsteps of their predecessors, the French Socialists and US New Dealers from the 1930′s, who once debated the pros and cons of supporting Republican Spain… While Hitler and Mussolini bombed the republic on behalf of the ‘rebel’ fascist forces under General Franco who upheld the Falangist banner of ‘Family, Church and Civilization’ – a fascist prototype for Obama’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ on behalf of his ‘rebels’.

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles. His latest book is War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America