Archives: Articles

 

 

 

Global Research, March 25, 2011

The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 13 No 3, March 28, 2011.

Peter Dale Scott’s Libyan Notebook

[Editor’s Note: Author’s selected quotations and analysis]

Preface

The world is facing a very unpredictable and potentially dangerous situation in North Africa and the Middle East. What began as a memorable, promising, relatively nonviolent achievement of New Politics – the Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt – has morphed very swiftly into a recrudescence of old habits: America, already mired in two decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sporadic air attacks in Yemen and Somalia, now, bombing yet another Third World Country, in this case Libya.

USS Barry launches a Tomahawk missile in support of Operation Odyssey Dawn in the Mediterranean Sea, March 19, 2011. US government handout

The initially stated aim of this bombing was to diminish Libyan civilian casualties. But many, senior figures in Washington, including President Obama, have indicated that the US is gearing up for a quite different war for regime change, one that may well be protracted and could also easily expand beyond Libya.1 If it does expand, the hope for a nonviolent transition to civilian government in Tunisia and Egypt and other Middle East nations experiencing political unrest, may be lost to a hard-edged militarization of government, especially in Egypt. All of us, not just Egyptians, have a major stake in seeing that that does not happen.

The present article does not attempt to propose solutions or a course of action for the United States and its allies, or for the people of the Middle East. It attempts rather to examine the nature of the forces that have emerged in Libya over the last four decades that are presently being played out.

To this end I have begun to compile what I call my Libyan Notebook, a collection of relevant facts that underlie the present crisis. This Notebook will be judgmental, in that I am biased towards collecting facts that the US media tend to ignore, facts that are the product in many instances of investigative reporting that cuts to the heart of power relations, deep structures, and economic interests in the region including the US, Israel, and the Arab States as these have played out over the last two decades and more. But I hope that it will be usefully objective and open-ended, permitting others to draw diverse conclusions from the same set of facts.2

I wish to begin with two ill-understood topics: I. Who Are the Libyan Opposition, and II. Where Are the Libyan Rebel Arms Coming From?

I. Who Are the Libyan Opposition

1) Historically:

“If Muammar Al Gaddafi behaved paranoid, it was for good reason. It wasn’t long after he reached the age of 27 and led a small group of junior military officers in a bloodless coup d’état against Libyan King Idris on September 1, 1969, that threats to his power and life emerged – from monarchists, Israeli Mossad, Palestinian disaffections, Saudi security, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO), British intelligence, United States antagonism and, in 1995, the most serious of all, Al Qaeda-like Libyan Islamic fighting group, known as Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya. The Colonel reacted brutally, by either expelling or killing those he feared were against him.”3

Gaddafi and Nasser in a 1969 Photo. Getty image

2) National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL)

“With the aim of overthrowing Libyan strongman Muammar Khadafy, Israel and the U.S. trained anti-Libyan rebels in a number of West and Central African countries. The Paris-based African Confidential newsletter reported on January 5th, 1989, that the US and Israel had set up a series of bases in Chad and other neighboring countries to train 2000 Libyan rebels captured by the Chad army. The group, called The National Front for the Salvation of Libya, was based in Chad.”4

“US official records indicate that funding for the Chad-based secret war against Libya also came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel and Iraq. The Saudis, for instance, donated $7m to an opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (also backed by French intelligence and the CIA). But a plan to assassinate Gadafi and take over the government on 8 May 1984 was crushed. In the following year, the US asked Egypt to invade Libya and overthrow Gadafi but President Mubarak refused. By the end of 1985, the Washington Post had exposed the plan after congressional leaders opposing it wrote in protest to President Reagan.”5

“The FNSL [National Front for the Salvation of Libya] was part of the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition held in London in 2005, and British resources are being used to support the FNSL and other ‘opposition’ in Libya…. The FNSL held its national congress in the USA in July 2007. Reports of ‘atrocities’ and civilian deaths are being channeled into the western press from operations in Washington DC, and the opposition FNSL is reportedly organizing resistance and military attacks from both inside and outside Libya.”6

3) National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO),

“The main group leading the insurrection is the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition which includes the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL). The NFSL, which is leading the violence, is a U.S.-sponsored armed militia of mostly Libyan expatriates and tribes opposed to al-Qaddafi.”7

4) Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi-Libya (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, LIFG)

“The LIFG was founded in 1995 by a group of mujahideen veterans who had fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Upon their return to Libya they grew angry about what they viewed as the corruption and impiety of the Libyan regime and formed the LIFG to create a state that would show what they believed to be the true character of the Libyan people.

The most significant LIFG attack was a 1996 attempt to assassinate Gadhafi; LIFG members led by Wadi al-Shateh threw a bomb underneath his motorcade. The group also stages guerilla-style attacks against government security forces from its mountain bases. Although most LIFG members are strictly dedicated to toppling Gadhafi, intelligence reportedly indicates that some have joined forces with al-Qaida to wage jihad against Libyan and Western interests worldwide. ….

As recently as February 2004, then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that “one of the most immediate threats [to U.S. security] is from smaller international Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from al-Qaida links. They include … the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.”8

“In recent days Libyan officials have distributed security documents giving the details of Sufiyan al-Koumi, said to be a driver for Osama bin Laden, and of another militant allegedly involved in an “Islamic emirate” in Derna, in now-liberated eastern Libya. Koumi, the documents show, was freed in September 2010 as part of a “reform and repent” initiative organised by Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son….

The LIFG, established in Afghanistan in the 1990s, has assassinated dozens of Libyan soldiers and policemen. In 2009, to mark Gaddafi’s 40 years in power, it apologised for trying to kill him and agreed to lay down its arms. MI6 [British Intelligence] has been accused in the past of supporting it. Six LIFG leaders, still in prison, disavowed their old ways and explained why fighting Gaddafi no longer constituted “legitimate” jihad. Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, another freed LIFG member, denied the official claims. “Gaddafi is trying to divide the people,” he told al-Jazeera. “He claims that there is an Islamist emirate in Derna and that I am its emir. He is taking advantage of the fact that I am a former political prisoner.”

Derna is famous as the home of a large number of suicide bombers in Iraq. It is also deeply hostile to Gaddafi. “Residents of eastern Libya in general, and Derna in particular, view the Gaddadfa (Gaddafi’s tribe) as uneducated, uncouth interlopers from an inconsequential part of the country who have ‘stolen’ the right to rule in Libya,” US diplomats were told in 2008, in a cable since released by WikiLeaks.

The last 110 members of the LIFG were freed on 16 February, the day after the Libyan uprising began. One of those released, Abdulwahab Mohammed Kayed, is the brother of Abu Yahya Al Libi, one of al Qaida’s top propagandists. Koumi fled Libya and is said to have ended up in Afghanistan working for Bin Laden. Captured in Pakistan, he was handed over to the US and sent to Guantánamo Bay in 2002. In 2009 he was sent back to Libya.9 US counter-terrorist experts have expressed concern that al-Qaida could take advantage of a political vacuum if Gaddafi is overthrown. But most analysts say that, although the Islamists’ ideology has strong resonance in eastern Libya, there is no sign that the protests are going to be hijacked by them.10

Libyan Islamic Fighting Group Members released

“Fierce clashes between [Qadhafi’s] security forces and Islamist guerrillas erupted in Benghazi in September 1995, leaving dozens killed on both sides. After weeks of intense fighting, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) formally declared its existence in a communiqué calling Qadhafi’s government “an apostate regime that has blasphemed against the faith of God Almighty” and declaring its overthrow to be “the foremost duty after faith in God.” [3] This and future LIFG communiqués were issued by Libyan Afghans who had been granted political asylum in Britain…. The involvement of the British government in the LIFG campaign against Qadhafi remains the subject of immense controversy. LIFG’s next big operation, a failed attempt to assassinate Qadhafi in February 1996 that killed several of his bodyguards, was later said to have been financed by British intelligence to the tune of $160,000, according to ex-MI5 officer David Shayler. [4] While Shayler’s allegations have not been independently confirmed, it is clear that Britain allowed LIFG to develop a base of logistical support and fundraising on its soil. At any rate, financing by bin Laden appears to have been much more important. According to one report, LIFG received up to $50,000 from the Saudi terrorist mastermind for each of its militants killed on the battlefield.” [2005]11

“Americans, Britons and the French are finding themselves as comrades in arms with the rebel Islamic Fighting Group, the most radical element in the Al Qaeda network [to bring down Gaddhafi]. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted the risks of the unholy alliance in a congressional hearing, saying that the Libyan opposition is probably more anti-American than Muammar Gaddhafi. A decade ago, this very same delusion of a Western-Islamist partnership in Kosovo, Bosnia and Chechnya ended abruptly in the 9/11 attacks.”12

“In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Mr al-Hasidi admitted that he had recruited ‘around 25’ men from the Derna area in eastern Libya to fight against coalition troops in Iraq. Some of them, he said, are ‘today are on the front lines in Adjabiya.

Mr al-Hasidi insisted his fighters ‘are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists,’ but added that the ‘members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader’.

His revelations came even as Idriss Deby Itno, Chad’s president, said al-Qaeda had managed to pillage military arsenals in the Libyan rebel zone and acquired arms, ‘including surface-to-air missiles, which were then smuggled into their sanctuaries’.

Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against ‘the foreign invasion’ in Afghanistan, before being ‘captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan’. He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008.

US and British government sources said Mr al-Hasidi was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, which killed dozens of Libyan troops in guerrilla attacks around Derna and Benghazi in 1995 and 1996.” (“Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links,” Daily Telegraph [London], March 25, 2011)

5) Transitional National Council

“A RIVAL transitional government to the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi looks set to win US and other international support as momentum builds to oust the longtime dictator.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed yesterday that the Obama administration was reaching out to opponents of Colonel Gaddafi. She said the US was willing to offer ‘any kind of assistance’ to remove him from power.

Protest leaders who have taken control in Libya’s eastern cities claim to have established a transitional “national council” that amounts to rival rule. They have called on the country’s army to join them as they prepare for an attack on the capital, Tripoli, where the Libyan leader retains control.

Confident the Libyan leader’s 42-year rule was coming to an end, Mrs Clinton said yesterday: ‘We are just at the beginning of what will follow Gaddafi.'”13

6) Facebook

“He [Omar El- Hariri, Chief of Armed Forces for the Transitional National Council] remained under close surveillance by the security forces until Feb. 17, when the revolution started. It was not initiated by prominent figures of the older generation, he said, but began spontaneously when Tunisia and Egypt inspired the youth. ‘Children of Facebook!’ he declared, in English, with a broad smile.”14

7) Oil

“Libyan rebels in Benghazi said they have created a new national oil company to replace the corporation controlled by leader Muammar Qaddafi whose assets were frozen by the United Nations Security Council.

The Transitional National Council released a statement announcing the decision made at a March 19 meeting to establish the ‘Libyan Oil Company as supervisory authority on oil production and policies in the country, based temporarily in Benghazi, and the appointment of an interim director general” of the company.

The Council also said it “designated the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and the appointment of a governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.”15

Peter Dale Scott’s Libyan Notebook

II. Where Are the Libyan Rebel Arms Coming From?

Robert Fisk, “Libya in turmoil: America’s secret plan to arm Libya’s rebels;

Obama asks Saudis to airlift weapons into Benghazi,” Independent, March 7, 2011:

“Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a “day of rage” from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington’s highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago.

Washington’s request is in line with other US military co-operation with the Saudis. The royal family in Jeddah, which was deeply involved in the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, gave immediate support to American efforts to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980 ….

But the Saudis remain the only US Arab ally strategically placed and capable of furnishing weapons to the guerrillas of Libya. Their assistance would allow Washington to disclaim any military involvement in the supply chain – even though the arms would be American and paid for by the Saudis.

The Saudis have been told that opponents of Gaddafi need anti-tank rockets and mortars as a first priority to hold off attacks by Gaddafi’s armour, and ground-to-air missiles to shoot down his fighter-bombers.

Supplies could reach Benghazi within 48 hours but they would need to be delivered to air bases in Libya or to Benghazi airport. If the guerrillas can then go on to the offensive and assault Gaddafi’s strongholds in western Libya, the political pressure on America and Nato – not least from Republican members of Congress – to establish a no-fly zone would be reduced.

US military planners have already made it clear that a zone of this kind would necessitate US air attacks on Libya’s functioning, if seriously depleted, anti-aircraft missile bases, thus bringing Washington directly into the war on the side of Gaddafi’s opponents.

For several days now, US Awacs surveillance aircraft have been flying around Libya, making constant contact with Malta air traffic control and requesting details of Libyan flight patterns, including journeys made in the past 48 hours by Gaddafi’s private jet which flew to Jordan and back to Libya just before the weekend.

Officially, Nato will only describe the presence of American Awacs planes as part of its post-9/11 Operation Active Endeavour, which has broad reach to undertake aerial counter-terrorism measures in the Middle East region.

US Awacs monitor Libya

The data from the Awacs is streamed to all Nato countries under the mission’s existing mandate. Now that Gaddafi has been reinstated as a super-terrorist in the West’s lexicon, however, the Nato mission can easily be used to search for targets of opportunity in Libya if active military operations are undertaken.

Al Jazeera English television channel last night broadcast recordings made by American aircraft to Maltese air traffic control, requesting information about Libyan flights, especially that of Gaddafi’s jet.

An American Awacs aircraft, tail number LX-N90442 could be heard contacting the Malta control tower on Saturday for information about a Libyan Dassault-Falcon 900 jet 5A-DCN on its way from Amman to Mitiga, Gaddafi’s own VIP airport.

Nato Awacs 07 is heard to say: “Do you have information on an aircraft with the Squawk 2017 position about 85 miles east of our [sic]?”

Malta air traffic control replies: “Seven, that sounds to be Falcon 900- at flight level 340, with a destination Mitiga, according to flight plan.”

But Saudi Arabia is already facing dangers from a co-ordinated day of protest by its own Shia Muslim citizens who, emboldened by the Shia uprising in the neighbouring island of Bahrain, have called for street protests against the ruling family of al-Saud on Friday.

After pouring troops and security police into the province of Qatif last week, the Saudis announced a nationwide ban on all public demonstrations.

Shia organisers claim that up to 20,000 protesters plan to demonstrate with women in the front rows to prevent the Saudi army from opening fire.

If the Saudi government accedes to America’s request to send guns and missiles to Libyan rebels, however, it would be almost impossible for President Barack Obama to condemn the kingdom for any violence against the Shias of the north-east provinces.

Thus has the Arab awakening, the demand for democracy in North Africa, the Shia revolt and the rising against Gaddafi become entangled in the space of just a few hours with US military priorities in the region. “16

“Libya rebels coordinating with West on air assault,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011

 

“Reports from the region suggest that the Saudis and Egyptians have been providing arms. Though U.S. officials could not confirm that, they say it is plausible.”17

“Egypt Said to Arm Libya Rebels,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2011:

“CAIRO-Egypt’s military has begun shipping arms over the border to Libyan rebels with Washington’s knowledge, U.S. and Libyan rebel officials said.

The shipments-mostly small arms such as assault rifles and ammunition-appear to be the first confirmed case of an outside government arming the rebel fighters. Those fighters have been losing ground for days in the face of a steady westward advance by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The Egyptian shipments are the strongest indication to date that some Arab countries are heeding Western calls to take a lead in efforts to intervene on behalf of pro-democracy rebels in their fight against Mr. Gadhafi in Libya. Washington and other Western countries have long voiced frustration with Arab states’ unwillingness to help resolve crises in their own region, even as they criticized Western powers for attempting to do so.

The shipments also follow an unusually robust diplomatic response from Arab states. There have been rare public calls for foreign military intervention in an Arab country, including a vote by the 23-member Arab League last week urging the U.N. to impose a no-fly zone over Libya.

The vote provided critical political cover to Western powers wary of intervening militarily without a broad regional and international mandate. On Thursday evening, the U.N. Security Council voted on a resolution endorsing a no-fly zone in Libya and authorizing military action in support of the rebels.

Within the council, Lebanon took a lead role drafting and circulating the draft of the resolution, which calls for “all necessary measures” to enforce a ban on flights over Libya. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar have taken the lead in offering to participate in enforcing a no-fly zone, according to U.N. diplomats.

Libyan rebel officials in Benghazi, meanwhile, have praised Qatar from the first days of the uprising, calling the small Gulf state their staunchest ally. Qatar has consistently pressed behind the scenes for tough and urgent international action behind the scenes, these officials said.

Qatari flags fly prominently in rebel-held Benghazi. After pro-Gadhafi forces retook the town of Ras Lanuf last week, Libyan state TV broadcast images of food-aid packages bearing the Qatari flag.

Anti-Gadhafi fighters in Benghazi

The White House has been reluctant to back calls from leaders in Congress for arming Libya’s rebels directly, arguing that the U.S. must first fully assess who the fighters are and what policies they will pursue if they succeeded in toppling Col. Gadhafi. U.S. officials believe the opposition includes some Islamist elements. They fear that Islamist groups hostile to the U.S. could try to hijack the opposition and take any arms that are provided.

The Egyptian weapons transfers began ‘a few days ago’ and are ongoing, according to a senior U.S. official. ‘There’s no formal U.S. policy or acknowledgement that this is going on,’ said the senior official. But ‘this is something we have knowledge of.’

Calls to Egypt’s foreign ministry and the spokesman for the prime minister seeking comment went unanswered. There is no means of reaching Egypt’s military for comment. An Egyptian official in Washington said he had no knowledge of weapon shipments.

The U.S. official also noted that the shipments appeared to come “too little, too late” to tip the military balance in favor of the rebels, who have faced an onslaught from Libyan forces backed by tanks, artillery and aircraft.

“We know the Egyptian military council is helping us, but they can’t be so visible,” said Hani Souflakis, a Libyan businessman in Cairo who has been acting as a rebel liaison with the Egyptian government since the uprising began.

“Weapons are getting through,” said Mr. Souflakis, who says he has regular contacts with Egyptian officials in Cairo and the rebel leadership in Libya. “Americans have given the green light to the Egyptians to help. The Americans don’t want to be involved in a direct level, but the Egyptians wouldn’t do it if they didn’t get the green light.”

Western officials and rebel leaders in Libya said the U.S. has wanted to avoid being seen as taking a leadership role in any military action against Mr. Gadhafi after its invasions of Iraq and Afganistan fueled anger and mistrust with Washington throughout the region.

But the U.S. stated clearly it wants Mr. Gadhafi out of power and has signaled it would support those offering help to the rebels militarily or otherwise.

A spokesman for the rebel government in Benghazi said arms shipments have begun arriving to the rebels but declined to specify where they came from.

“Our military committee is purchasing arms and arming our people. The weapons are coming, but the nature of the weapons, the amount, where it’s coming from, that has been classified,” said the spokesman, Mustafa al-Gherryani.

The U.S. official said Egypt wanted to keep the shipments covert. In public, Egypt has sought to maintain a neutral stance toward the rebel uprising in Libya. Egypt abstained during the Arab League’s vote calling for the U.N. to impose a no-fly zone on Mr. Gadhafi, according to people familiar with the internal Arab League deliberations.

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptian laborers are believed to still be in Libya.

On the other hand, the Egyptian military’s covert support for the rebels suggests that it has calculated that Mr. Gadhafi is unlikely to remain in power, at least in the eastern half of the country, and therefore Egypt is eager to begin to build good relations with the rebels.

Rebel forces in the past 24 hours appeared to make some progress fending off pro-Gadhafi forces’ assaults and have rolled out new weapons for the first time since the uprising began last month. Among them are rebel tanks that have taken up positions on the front lines in recent days. Rebels also launched fighter-jet attacks on government positions on Wednesday for the first time so far.

The tanks and fighter jets are believed to have been among the weapons seized by rebels from defected units of the Libyan army in the eastern half of the country, but they have received spare parts or trained mechanics from outside the country to help them deploy them, some rebel officials have speculated.

-Sam Dagher and Adam Entous contributed to this article.18

Benjamin Gottlieb, “Egypt Arms Libyan Rebels As Gaddafi’s Conquest Continues,” NeonTommy Annenberg Digital News, March 17, 2011:

Arms shipments from Egypt’s military have begun flowing across the border into Libya with U.S. knowledge, Libyan rebels and U.S. officials said Thursday.

Made up mostly of small arms, such as assault rifles and ammunition, the shipments are the first confirmed reports of an outside government supporting rebel fighters with weapons. Rebels have been loosing ground for days against pro-Gaddafi forces aiming to end the conflict before foreign intervention plans are finalized.

Although the U.N. approved a “no-fly zone” over Libya late Thursday, rebel forces fear that any planned foreign intervention would be too little to late.

No-Fly Zone

The shipment of arms indicated an unusually bold response by an Arab nation intervening in a conflict outside its borders. There have also been rare public decrees for the West to intervene in the conflict – the Arab League voted 23-0 last week encouraging the U.N. to impose the “no-fly zone” over Libya.

In spite of reports of arms flowing across the Egyptian boarder, Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Menha Bakhoum told Reuters that Egypt would not be involved in any military intervention in neighboring Libya.

“Egypt will not be among those Arab states. We will not be involved in any military intervention. No intervention period,” Bakhoum said.

Bakhoum was responding to comments by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said Thursday that discussions were on the table regarding Arab involvement in U.S. and European intervention in the conflict.

Clinton has said repeatedly that the U.S. desires involvement from a neighboring Arab nation in any planned intervention.

A Libyan rebel government spokesman in Benghazi, Mustafa al-Gherryani, said rebels have begun receiving arms shipments from neighboring nations, however he declined to reveal their origin.

“Our military committee is purchasing arms and arming our people. The weapons are coming, but the nature of the weapons, the amount, where it’s coming from, that has been classified,” he said.19

Yoichi Shimatsu, “Mideast Revolutions and 9-11 Intrigues Created in Qatar,” New America Media, March 1, 2011

“It may puzzle and perhaps dismay young protesters in Benghazi, Cairo and Tunisia that their democratic hopes are being manipulated by an ultra-conservative Arab elite which has underhandedly backed a surge of militant Islamist radicals across North Africa. Credible U.S. intelligence reports have cited evidence pointing to Qatar’s long-running support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and jihadist fighters returning from Afghanistan.

The links to Qatar uncovered by anti-terrorism investigators in the wake of 9-11 need to be reexamined now that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an on-and-off affiliate of Al Qaeda, has seized armories across half of the North African country. Libya’s well-stocked arsenals contain high-power explosives, rocket launchers and chemical weapons. LIFG is on the State Department’s terrorist list.

Most worrying, according to a U.S. intelligence official cited by CNN, is the probable loss of chemical weapons. The Federation of American Scientists reports that, as of 2008, only 40 percent of Libya’s mustard gas was destroyed in the second round of decommissioning. Chemical canisters along the Egyptian border were yet to be retrieved and are now presumably in the hands of armed militants.

After initially letting slip that the earliest Libyan protests were organized by the LIFG, Al Jazeera quickly changed its line to present a heavily filtered account portraying the events as ‘peaceful protests’. To explain away the gunshot deaths of Libyan soldiers during the uprising, the Qatar-based network presented a bizarre scenario of 150 dead soldiers in Libya having been executed by their officers for ‘refusing to fight’. The mysterious officers then miraculously vacated their base disappearing into thin air while surrounded by angry protesters! Off the record, one American intelligence analyst called these media claims an ‘absurdity’ and suggested instead the obvious: that the soldiers were gunned down in an armed assault by war-hardened returned militants from Iraq and Afghanistan….

According to a Congressional Research Service report of January 2008, ‘Some observers have raised questions about possible support for Al Qaeda by some Qatari citizens, including members of Qatar’s large ruling family. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Qatar’s Interior Minister provided a safe haven to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed during the mid-1990s, and press reports indicate other terrorists may have received financial support or safe haven in Qatar after September 11, 2001.’

The national security chief, Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, is further mentioned as paying for a 1995 trip by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed ‘to join the Bosnia jihad.’ The report recalls how after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, FBI officials “narrowly missed an opportunity to capture” the suspect in Qatar. ‘Former U.S. officials have since stated their belief that a high-ranking member of the Qatari government alerted him to the impending raid, allowing him to flee the country.'”20

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. Peter Dale Scott is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan.

His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Notes

1 “Defense Secretary Gates, who recently warned against any further protracted US ground war, said on March 23 that the end of military action in Libya is unknown and could last longer than a few weeks. ‘I think there are any number of possible outcomes here and no one is in a position to predict them,’ Gates told reporters in Egypt” (C-Span, March 24, 2011).

2 Interested readers may wish to consult my first exploration, “Googling ‘Revolution’ in North Africa.”

3 Dan Lieberman, “Muammar Al Gaddafi Meets His Own Rebels,” CounterCurrents.org, March 9, 2011.

4 Joel Bainerman, Inside the Covert Operations of the CIA & Israel’s Mossad (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1994), 14.

5 Richard Keeble, “The Secret War Against Libya,” MediaLens, 2002.

6 “Petroleum and Empire in North Africa. NATO Invasion of Libya Underway,” By Keith Harmon Snow, 2 March 2011.

7 Ghali Hassan, “U.S. Love Affair with Murderous Dictators and Hate for Democracy.” Axis of Logic, Mar 17, 2011.

8 Center for Defense Information, “In the Spotlight: The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),” January 18, 2005

9 Qadhafi was concerned about Al Qaeda terrorism in Libya, and in 1996 Libya became the first government to place Osama bin Laden on Interpol’s Wanted List (Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror [New York: Columbia UP, 2002], 142). Thereafter American and Libyan intelligence collaborated closely for some years against Al Qaeda. Beginning when?

10 Ian Black, “Libya rebels rejects Gaddafi’s al-Qaida spin,” Guardian, March 1, 2011.

11 Gary Gambill, “The Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Jamestown Foundation,” Terrorism Monitor, May 5, 2005,; citing Al-Hayat (London), 20 October 1995 [“communiqué”]; “The Shayler affair: The spooks, the Colonel and the jailed whistle-blower,” The Observer (London), 9 August 1998; Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: La Verite interdite (Bin Ladin: The Forbidden Truth). Cf. also Annie Machon, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 And the Shayler Affair (Book Guild Publishing, 2005) [Shayler].

12 Yoichi Shimatsu, “Attack on Libya: Why Odyssey Dawn Is Doomed,” New America Media, March 20, 2011.

13 “US reaches out to Libyan insurgents,” The Australian, March 1, 2011,

14 “How a onetime friend to Gadhafi became his rival,” Globe and Mail [Toronto], March 4, 2011.

15 Libyan Rebel Council in Benghazi Forms Oil Company to Replace Qaddafi’s,” Bloomberg, March 22, 2011.

16 Robert Fisk, “America’s secret plan to arm Libya’s rebels,” Independent, March 7, 2011.

17 “Libya rebels coordinating with West on air assault,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2011.

18 “Egypt Said to Arm Libya Rebels,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2011,

19 Benjamin Gottlieb, “Egypt Arms Libyan Rebels As Gaddafi’s Conquest Continues,” NeonTommy Annenberg Digital News, March 17, 2011.

20 Yoichi Shimatsu, “Mideast Revolutions and 9-11 Intrigues Created in Qatar,” New America Media, March 1, 2011. The al-Thani family’s protection of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is confirmed by former CIA officer Robert Baer (Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2003). Cf. Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003); Peter Lance, Triple Cross (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006), 234-37.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author’s copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: crgeditor@yahoo.com

www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to

Last Modified: 26 Mar 2011 14:56

A Palestinian activist holds Israeli bread products being sold in a shop in the West Bank town of Ramallah [EPA]

It was Egypt that got me thinking about the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement in a serious way. I was already conducting a quiet targeted boycott of settlement goods – silently reading labels at the grocery store to make sure I was not buying anything that came from over the Green Line.

I had been doing this for a long time. But, at some point, I realised that my private targeted boycott was a bit naïve. And I understood that it was not enough.

It is not just the settlements and the occupation, two sides of the same coin, which pose a serious obstacle to peace and infringe on the Palestinians’ human rights. It is everything that supports them – the government and its institutions. It is the bubble that many Israelis live in, the illusion of normality. It is the Israeli feeling that the status quo is sustainable.

And the settlements are a bit of a red herring, a convenient target for anger. Israelis must also face one of the major injustices that have resulted from their state – the nakba, the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

While BDS addresses that, among other concerns – the three principles of the movement are respect for the Palestinians’ right of return, as outlined in UN resolution 194, an end to the occupation and equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel – I remained reluctant to get involved.

I have to admit that I was frightened by the movement. I did not think it would help. I was sure that BDS would only encourage Israel to dig its heels in deeper. It will only make things worse for everyone, I reasoned.

Egypt was the tipping point for me. I was exhilarated by the images of people taking to the streets to demand change. And while the Palestine Papers prove that the government seems intent on maintaining the status quo, I know plenty of Israelis who are fed up with it.

There are mothers who do not want to send their children to the army; soldiers who resent guarding settlers. I recently spoke with a 44-year-old man – a normal guy, a father of two – who told me he wants to burn something he is so frustrated with the government and so worried about the future.

And Egypt is on many Israeli lips right now. So, what can be done to help bring it to Israeli feet? What can be done to encourage Israelis to fight for change, to fight for peace, to liberate themselves from a conflict that undermines their self-determination, their freedom?

BDS has stacked up a number of successes, which is one reason the Israeli Knesset is trying to pass a bill, known as the Boycott Law, that would effectively criminalise Israelis who join the movement, subjecting them to huge fines.

And some of those involved with BDS are already feeling an immense amount of pressure from the state.

‘Israel’s mask of democracy’

Leehee Rothschild, 26, is one of the scores of Israelis who have answered the 2005 Palestinian call for BDS. Recently her Tel Aviv apartment was raided. While the police did this under the pretense of searching for drugs, she was taken to the station for a brief interrogation that focused entirely on politics.

“The person who came to release me [from interrogation] was an intelligence officer who said that he is in charge of monitoring political activity in the Tel Aviv area,” Rothschild says. It was this officer who had requested the search warrant.

Since Operation Cast Lead, Israeli activists have reported increasing pressure from the police as well as General Security Services – known by their Hebrew acronym, Shabak.

The latter’s mandate includes, among other things, the goal of maintaining Israel as a Jewish state, making those who advocate for democracy a target.

House raids, such as the one Rothschild was subjected to, are not uncommon, nor are phone calls from the Shabak.

“Obviously [the pressure] is nothing compared to what Palestinians are going through,” Rothschild says. “But I think we’re touching a nerve.”

When asked about the proposed Boycott Law, Rothschild comments: “If the bill goes through, it will peel off, a little more, Israel’s mask of democracy.”

Tough love

As for her involvement in BDS, Rothschild remarks that she was not aware of the movement until it became a serious topic of discussion within Israel’s radical left, which she was already active in. And even after she heard about it, she did not jump onboard right away.

“I had reservations about [BDS],” Rothschild recalls. “I thought about it for a very long time and I debated it with myself and my friends.

“The main reservation I had was that the economic [aspects] would first harm the weak people in the society – the poor people – the people who have the least effect on what’s going on. But I think that the occupation is harming these people much more than the divestments can.”

Rothschild points out that state funds that are poured into “security and defence and oppressing the Palestinian people” could be better used in Israel to help those in the low socioeconomic strata.

“Another reservation I have had is that it might make the Israeli public more extremist, more fundamentalist,” Rothschild adds. “But I have to say that the road it has to go to be more extreme is very short right now.”

As an Israeli, Rothschild considers joining the BDS movement to be an act of caring. It is tough love for the country she was born and raised in.

“I hope that, for some people, it will be a slap in their face and they will wake up and see what’s going on,” Rothschild says, adding that the oppressor is oppressed, as well.

“The Israeli people are also oppressed by the occupation – they are living inside a society that is militant; that is violent; that is racist.”

‘Renouncing my privileges’

Ronnie Barkan, 34, explains that he took his first step towards the boycott 15 years ago, when he refused to complete his mandatory military service.

“There’s a lot of social pressure [in Israel],” Barkan says. “We’re raised to be soldiers from kindergarten. We’re taught that it’s our duty [to serve in the army] and you’re a parasite or traitor if you don’t want to serve.”

“What is even worse is that people are raised to be deeply racist,” he adds. “Everything is targeted at supporting [Jewish] privilege as the masters of the land. Supporting BDS means renouncing my privileges in this land and insisting on equality for all.”

Barkan likens his joining of the boycott movement to the “whites who denounced their apartheid privileges and joined the black struggle in South Africa”.

When I cringe at the “a-word,” apartheid, Barkan counters: “Israel clearly falls under the legal definition of the ‘crime of apartheid’ as defined in the Rome Statute.”

‘Never again to anybody’

Some oppose BDS because it includes recognition of the Palestinian right of return. These critics say that the demographic shift would impinge on Jewish self-determination. But Barkan argues that “the underlying foundation [of the movement] is universally recognised human rights and international law”.

He emphasises that BDS respects human rights for both Palestinians and Jews and includes proponents of a bi-national, democratic state as well as those who believe a two-state solution is the best answer to the conflict.

He also stresses that BDS is not anti-Semitic. Nor is it anti-Israeli.

“The boycott campaign is not targeting Israelis; it is targeting the criminal policies of Israel and the institutions that are complicit, not individuals,” he says.

“So let’s say an Israeli academic or musician goes abroad and he is turned away from a conference or a venue just because he’s Israeli … ” I begin to ask.

“No, no, this doesn’t fall under the [boycott guidelines],” Barkan says.

“Because that’s not a boycott. It’s racism,” I say.

“Exactly,” Barkan responds, adding that the Palestinian call for BDS is “a very responsible call” that “makes a differentiation between institutions and individuals and it is clearly a boycott of criminal institutions and their representatives”.

“Whenever there is a grey area,” he adds, “we take the gentler approach.”

Still, Barkan has faced criticism for his role in the boycott movement.

“My grandmother who went to Auschwitz tells me, ‘You can think whatever you want but don’t speak up about your politics because it’s not nice,’ I tell her, ‘You know who didn’t speak up 70 years ago.'”

Barkan adds: “I think that the main lesson to be learned from the Holocaust is ‘never again to anybody’ not ‘never again to the Jews.'”

Mya Guarnieri is a Tel Aviv-based journalist and writer.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

 

To understand Gaddafi’s power, we need to delve deeper into the cultural memory of a once colonised country

 

The Guardian,    Friday 25 March 2011

The Italian pilot Giulio Gavotti made military history in North Africa in 1911

It’s not on most people’s list of anniversaries to remember but it should be. Almost exactly one hundred years ago, the world’s first aerial bombing campaign took place – in Libya. In September 1911, desperate for an empire of their own, the Italians invaded. The Ottoman backwater had scarcely mattered to the sultans; for years it had been used chiefly as a place of exile for unfortunate political prisoners. But war propelled Libya into the headlines, the Italians’ colonial foray, triggering a chain of events that led inexorably to the first world war.

When the airman Giulio Gavotti dropped four grenades from his Taube monoplane on to the enemy outside Tripoli, little damage was done: indeed the practice of priming and then dropping live bombs by hand was nearly as hazardous to the Italian pilots as it was to the Turkish troops below. Nevertheless, a staff officer, Major Giulio Douhet, had seen enough to formulate the arguments that would make him the century’s foremost advocate of war from the skies. A decade later, Douhet argued in his classic study The Command of the Air that the sheer terror induced by mass bombing of civilian targets would shorten conflicts and save lives; outrage was thus misplaced, for total war was humane. The western way of war had been born in the north African desert.

Few remembered the Libyan victims. Indeed, the Italians had gone to war assuming the Arab population would greet them as liberators from the Ottoman yoke. By the time they realised their mistake, it was too late, and they were pinned back to the coast. Faced with a popular insurrection, they retaliated through the deliberate destruction of villages, wells and herds with force. Nearly 100,000 people were interned or deported, and thousands died of disease or malnutrition in labour camps. Italian planes once again bombed the country, this time dropping mustard gas in defiance of the 1925 Geneva protocol.

Finally, the fascist regime declared that the Libyan provinces were to become an integral part of Italy itself. A stroke of the pen turned the inhabitants into strangers in their own land, paving the way for the foundation of a new Roman empire with Italian farmer colonists. The settlers were still streaming in when the second world war turned the country into a new battlefield, littering the desert with mines that were still impeding oil exploration 20 years later.

With Mussolini’s defeat in the second world war, the entire story vanished into oblivion. the way so many other small wars fought by would-be civilisers against “savage races” had done. A new set of Great Powers took over before handing the whole problem of Libya’s future to the United Nations. Italy resurrected itself as a cold war ally of Britain and America. Postwar Italians condemned fascism’s crimes against fellow-Italians, but they forgot about the far worse crimes across the sea. No one else in Europe cared much either But in Libya the long decades of oppression could not be forgotten so easily. The Italians had devastated the old pastoral economy, and depopulated much of the land: the very term Siziliani (many of the settlers had come from Sicily) remained a term of loathing. Memories of anti-colonial resistance helped to legitimise Libya’s new British-backed king, Idris, who as head of the Sanusi order had been a figurehead for the struggle against the Italians. But such memories also helped bolster the 27-year-old Colonel Gaddafi when he accused the king of selling out to latter-day imperialism, toppled him in a coup and set up the republic that he continues to rule to this day.

From the very start of the regime, present and past merged as the anti-colonialist Gaddafi ordered British and American air bases to close and kicked out the 20,000 Italians still living in the country, nationalising their property. As his regime became more and more unpopular, so it found new uses in Libya’s history of oppression. Even as it razed the monuments of the Sanusi leadership, now seen by regime propagandists as feudal usurpers of a popular nationalist movement, so it sent researchers into the countryside as part of a vast oral history project to collect memories of the guerrilla war and Italian atrocities.

Such moves not only wrapped the regime in the heroic mantle of the anti-Italian jihad, they served geopolitical purposes too. Two years after forcing the Italians to leave, the socialist Gaddafi was inviting Italian corporations back in, turning the former colonial oppressor into Libya’s chief European business partner. And when in 2004 he sought new respectability in Europe, Italy became a crucial ally and history was part of the deal: Berlusconi apologized publicly for Italy’s past crimes, and in return, Gaddafi promised to keep Italy’s unwanted illegal migrants locked up in camps inside Libya. Visiting the country for the signing of the compensation accord in 2009, the ageing colonel posed next to Berlusconi with a photograph prominently pinned to his chest of Omar Mukhtar, a leader of the uprising whom the Italians had hanged in 1931. Buried in the treaty’s small print was Libya’s commitment in effect to divert much of the compensation money it was getting from Rome back into the pocket of Italian firms.

It is not only in Libya, of course, that the memory of colonial atrocities has provided rhetorical ammunition for nasty post-colonial regimes. The lesson here however concerns Western amnesia rather than Gaddafi’s exploitation of the past. For now those western planes are in action once again over Libyan skies, this past has become our past too; indeed it always was. The majority of Libyans may hate Gaddafi and wish him gone as quickly as possible. But they will remember what we have forgotten – that these planes are not the first, that there is a long history of overwhelming western might being deployed on north African shores, and that western power generally comes professing good intentions. If the west wishes today to underline the differences that surely exist between its intervention now and earlier ones, a precondition for persuasiveness is to familiarise ourselves with what we have forgotten, to understand why this history does matter despite everything that the Gaddafis of the world do with it, and will matter more and more the longer the regime hangs on.

 

Thu Mar 24, 2011 12:46pm GMT

CAIRO, March 24 (Reuters) – U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates assured Egypt’s military ruler of sustained American aid on Thursday, as Cairo warned that tourism revenue is nosediving in the wake of the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

Gates, on his first visit to Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, also discussed Libya with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who heads the ruling military council.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said Tantawi did not raise concerns about coalition operations in Libya but did voice worries about about violence by forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

On aid for Egypt, Morrell said: “The secretary noted of course that there are serious economic pressures in our own country. But (he said) the manner in which the Field Marshal and his military have handled this period in Egyptian history has put them in good stead back at home in America, particularly in the United States Congress.”

Gates said he “thought there was support for sustaining military support to Egypt as well as other forms of aid — economic aid,” Morrell added, citing figures from Egyptian officials that indicated revenues from tourism, a main earner, were down 75 percent.

“They are hurting economically and very much need us and others to continue to do what we can to assist them,” Morrell said. “This is a sensitive and concerning situation for them.”

Aid from the United States to Egypt has been running at about $1.5 billion a year, most of that military aid.

As Gates left his meeting with Tantawi, he said: “Anything we can do, don’t hesitate to call me.”

The two have spoken more than a half dozen times by telephone since the crisis erupted.

 

 

24 March 2011

New Islamic Directions

Some days before the U.S.-led intervention in Libya began; I was forwarded a copy of an open letter directed to President Barack Obama urging him to work in concert with U.S. allies, NATO, and the United Nations to immediately impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The organizers, a group of courageous individuals risking their lives to assist the rebel cause, were collecting the signatures of scholars and academics from the around the world, especially those studying Islam and the Middle East.

After considerable deliberation, I decided not to add my signature to the letter because I could not lend my support to this particular plea to President Obama. I believed that even a limited U.S.-led intervention would still be an intervention, and I was troubled that it would take on a life of its own once it began—something that the League of Arab States, whose vote helped legitimize western intervention, now realizes.

Still, my decision may be perceived as an unpopular one, not least because the Libyan rebels themselves called for—and have now received—military assistance from the West. This call has been consistently echoed since the initial gains of the rebels were rolled back by a punishing counteroffensive by pro-Qaddafi forces. It was further intensified as Libyan government forces were poised to attack the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.

One constant refrain accompanying this rebel call has been the insistence that, “We do not want any boots on the ground.” This qualification is understandable as “boots on the ground” could imply that the forces battling the Qaddafi loyalists, far from being revolutionaries ushering in a new dawn for their country, are nothing more than the junior partners in a US-led invasion of another Muslim country. I contend that the bombs we see today raining down upon Libya could well serve the purpose of boots in this regard. They could serve to delegitimize the Libyan revolutionaries.

The Inconsistent Pattern of US Interventions

Should the U.S.-led bombing campaign accomplish its objective, a result that is far from certain, the rebels will not be credited with saving Benghazi. Rather, U.S., French, and British bombs and missiles will have saved the city, possibly only temporarily. The history books will not record a Stalingrad-like rebel defense of Benghazi. They may well record the U.S.-led intervention as the event that consolidated the idea that the United States, under the legality provided by a United Nations resolution, can, unilaterally, or in collaboration with its western allies, militarily intervene in the affairs of a sovereign nation that poses no military threat to America in order to stave off a humanitarian disaster.

This idea would be welcomed by many were not its implementation to date so tellingly inconsistent. There has been no direct western intervention in the Congo, the scene of the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster in recent history. When the people of Gaza were being pulverized by the Israeli Defense Forces, there was no intervention. Even in Darfur, the scene of an awful humanitarian crisis where the rebel forces once enjoyed immense popular support in the West, there has been no western military intervention. Similarly, in Somalia, which three years ago was the scene of a grave humanitarian catastrophe, there was no intervention. In fact, the American-encouraged Ethiopian invasion of Somalia helped precipitate that disaster. It should be clear from these examples that the protection of civilian life is not an operative principle in US foreign policy.

The current intervention in Libya establishes a dangerous precedent in the context of the popular uprisings sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. If we accept intervention in Libya, what prevents us from accepting intervention in places like Iran? If demonstrators in Iran are violently suppressed by the regime tomorrow, what consistent moral argument can we forward to prevent an American or Israeli-led attack to pacify an Iranian regime deemed to be threatening its civilian population? The assessment of the circumstances of what qualifies for intervention will become arbitrary and will make a mockery of international law.

Moreover, direct foreign intervention in Libya will likely lead to far more civilian deaths than would have occurred had the conflict remain a strictly Libyan affair. The ongoing bombing has already resulted in civilian deaths. This number will likely rise dramatically as the campaign is expanded to include civilian infrastructure deemed critical to the survival of Qaddafi’s regime, such as electrical generation stations, communication infrastructure, factories, and other installations more likely to be located near civilian neighborhoods.

Yet more civilian casualties could result in the aftermath of the bombing campaign, when the desire for revenge by Qaddafi loyalists will likely lead to blind and bitter reprisals against civilians thought to be supportive of the rebels. The columns of burned out tanks, personnel carriers, pickup trucks, and other vehicles conveying Qaddafi loyalists towards Benghazi were not driven by robots. They were manned by human beings with friends, relatives, and tribesmen who will not take kindly to their deaths via western projectiles.

Finally, there is no guarantee that Qaddafi’s forces will be repulsed by the rebels, even with western assistance. If a lengthy stalemate ensues, we can easily see Libya follow in the footsteps of the Congo, Darfur, and Somalia as it experiences its own war-related humanitarian crisis. Should such a stalemate be broken by a full-fledged western invasion and occupation of Libya? No one claims to want that. However, it is a prospect that has to now be realistically entertained in aftermath of the ongoing western intervention.

If Not for the People, Then Why?

If, as I am arguing, the U.S.-led intervention in Libya is not ultimately intended to protect civilians then what might the real motive be? For the United States, the answer is clear. President Obama said unequivocally that Qaddafi must go, making regime change the ultimate American objective. It is clear that way the conflict in Libya has unfolded provides an avenue for the United States to initiate a policy calling for the ouster of Qaddafi.

Why would the ouster of Qaddafi be such a high priority for the United States? One reason could be that Qaddafi has been leading a Pan-African movement under the auspices of the African Union, similar to the unification effort spearheaded by Hugo Chavez in South America. Libya’s oil revenues have played a large role in supporting Qaddafi’s African initiative, which aims for Africa’s economic empowerment by breaking the vestiges of European economic control of Africa. This is a key reason why Qaddafi enjoys varying degrees of popularity in what is sometimes called “Black Africa.”

Qaddafi’s Pan-African effort coincides with the rising economic role of China in Africa. Since 2001, trade between Africa and China has increased from $10 billion to more than $110 billion. The United States has noticed the growing influence of Libya and China in Africa and has responded, in part, by establishing a new American military command for Africa (AFRICOM) in 2006. A critical objective of AFRICOM is to unite the continent’s 53 countries into a unified, pro-American strategic and economic zone, which would involve both regime changes and “humanitarian” interventions to stabilize the continent. Some critics of U.S. policy in Africa say the ultimate objective of AFRICOM is to ensure that America—and not China—becomes the principal foreign beneficiary of Africa’s tremendous wealth.

To date, no African nation has agreed to serve as the hosting country for AFRICOM’s primary base. All of that could change with the emergence of a post-Qaddafi regime in Libya that owes its existence to the US-led intervention. It should be noted that Libya was the home of Wheelus Air Base, the largest American military installation in Africa, before the coup orchestrated by Qaddafi against King Idris in 1969.

While nationalization significantly curtailed the development of Libya’s petroleum and gas resources, Qaddafi has sought to expand exploration and production in partnership with major western oil companies in recent years. The Libyan national oil company, however, still controls the terms of trade, which most western companies view as prohibitive. Western energy companies consider Libya a risky investment climate and are seeking better terms from the Libyan regime. Optimal terms could only be obtained by something similar to an “Iraq oil law,” which remains unlikely in Libya while the Qaddafi-led regime is in power. A regime change is likely viewed by many foreign firms as a means to completely opening up access to Libya’s petrochemical resources.

For France, the conflict in Libya offers an opportunity to reassert its control over Niger’s uranium deposits, a critical goal for a country that relies on nuclear power as its primary source of electricity. For decades, France had a monopoly over Niger’s uranium production. Today, France still imports 40% of its uranium from Niger, where it is currently completing the world’s largest uranium mine.

A recent development that has raised the concern of the French and the Americans has been an effort on the part of Iran to gain access to Niger’s uranium. Although this Iranian initiative was terminated in 2010, the current conflict in Libya provides France with an opportunity to reestablish its control over Niger’s uranium, and to rekindle its neocolonial ambitions elsewhere in Central Africa, particularly in Chad, which like Niger, is a former French colony.

Libya, which has lengthy borders with both Niger and Chad, has been steadily seeking to expand its influence to the south. The French have always been wary of Qaddafi’s ambitions in the region, and have intervened to save anti-Qaddafi forces in Chad, Libya’s southern neighbor, several times between 1978 and 1986. Hence, we should not be surprised to see France eagerly intervening in Libya. One could also see the French intervention as a means to gain easy access to Chad’s proven oil reserves of 1 billion barrels, although this likely would not be the most important factor motivating the French. In any case, with the elimination of Qaddafi, France would have an unhindered hand in the region.

For Britain, intervention in Libya can be seen as no more than a repetition of her involvement in Iraq—tagging along to lend an aura of multilateralism to what is essentially a US-led initiative—and the possibility of an expanded role for BP in the energy sector of a post-Qaddafi Libya. Britain could also use Libya as a springboard for expanded trade relations in Africa. However, it is difficult to argue that such a prospect would be a major consideration in undertaking a risky intervention.

British Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his French counterpart, President Nicolas Sarkozy, who have both vocally echoed Obama’s call for the ouster of Qaddafi, can be viewed as using military action as a means to bolster their waning popularity. Sarkozy is the least popular French president since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958, and Cameron has orchestrated the deepest budget cuts in modern British history. Both have received a boost in the polls in the immediate aftermath of the western intervention in Libya, but if the conflict is a prolonged one, they may both suffer politically.

Finally, one of the unspoken motivations for European intervention in Libya is xenophobic. The faster Libya becomes stable, the less chance there will be of a massive flow of brown-skinned North African refugees streaming into Europe, especially the southern European nations such as Italy and France.

No Easy Answers

Whatever the motivation, the western military intervention has already gone beyond the establishment of a no-fly zone, and Libya has already suffered civilian casualties as a result of the ongoing bombing. The experience in Iraq has shown that a no-fly zone can actually strengthen the targeted regime. In some eyes, the presence of western bombs raining down on Libyan targets has already transformed Qaddafi from villain to victim, further shoring up the support he has among certain segments of the Libyan population.

To assume that Qaddafi has no support in Libya, an assertion we have heard frequently in recent weeks, is false and potentially deadly. Qaddafi has support among ideologically motivated Arab nationalists, socialists, and many anti-Muslim “progressives.” Many of the poorest segments of Libya’s society, although not attaining a lifestyle anywhere close to that found in some of the oil-rich Persian Gulf Emirates, have experienced improving living standards under Qaddafi and support him. Furthermore, he can mobilize an army of supporters from neighboring African states to the south where many have benefited from his largess.

We should expect that Qaddafi will see the western attack as an existential threat, not just to his regime, but to his very life, and we should expect him to fight doggedly to the end. Under such circumstances history has taught us to expect the unexpected. Libya will likely prove no exception in this regard.

For these reasons, I do not believe western intervention in Libya is solely motivated by humanitarian concerns, nor do I believe it will succeed. I cannot support it. However, I do not want my lack of support for the U.S.-led intervention to be viewed as a lack of support for those segments of the Libyan population who have suffered from Qaddafi’s abuses. It is not constructive to frame the conflict in draconian, zero sum terms, where opposition to the US-led intervention automatically translates into support for Qaddafi.

I have many close friends with family members who are living in abject fear while barricaded in their homes in Tripoli and other Libyan cities. I am well aware of the grave danger they and many other people in Libya face. Still, I reiterate that I am against the current wars and interventions of the American military. These campaigns do not enhance the security of the United States. Rather, they create the conditions that lead more people to desire to harm America, and as has been demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere, they create conditions that eventually lead to great loss of civilian life and widespread suffering.

So what about the segments of the population in Libya facing the fury of Qaddafi’s loyalists? Now that much of the regime’s armor and aircraft have been destroyed, there should be an immediate call for the cessation of all bombing missions by western powers. All warring parties in Libya should accept an immediate ceasefire. The United Nations, League of Arab States and the African Union should send in a joint peacekeeping force to maintain the ceasefire. Furthermore, the countries that are currently spending millions of dollars to bomb Libya should be be encouraged to make equal or exceeding commitments in humanitarian aid to assist the growing number of displaced individuals. Finally, a national referendum could either affirm Qaddafi’s “Jamahiriyya” or create a constitutional committee charged with drafting a new constitution. If the support for Qaddafi is as weak as it is claimed, the rebels should welcome such a proposal.

Many will argue that these proposed measures are unrealistic. That may well be the case. But, I believe it is unrealistic to expect positive results from the intervention of western powers that have long histories of pursuing goals, objectives, and strategies that first and foremost serve their own interests. I hope that I am wrong.

“ALL NECESSARY MEANS”

 

Vienna, 28 March 2011

On Saturday, 26 March 2011, the President of the International Progress Organization sent the following Memorandum to the President of the Security Council and to the Secretary-General of the United Nations:

Memorandum by the President of the International Progress Organization on Security Council resolution 1973 (2011) and its implementation by a “coalition of the willing” under the leadership of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

Vienna, 26 March 2011

On 17 March 2011 the United Nations Security Council adopted a binding resolution with the stated goal to protect civilians in the domestic conflict in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Although the “concurring votes” of the permanent members are required under Article 27(3) of the UN Charter for all decisions on other than procedural matters, the decision, adopted without the consent of China and Russia, is considered legally valid since it has become customary among United Nations member states to treat abstention as consent.

In order to meet the requirement of Article 39 of the Charter for the imposition of coercive measures, including the use of force, the Council has determined that the “situation” of domestic conflict in Libya constitutes a threat to international peace and security. In contravention to the provisions of Articles 42ff of the Charter related to the collective enforcement of resolutions by the Council itself, operative paragraphs 4 and 8 of the resolution authorize all Member States, individually or through regional organizations or arrangements, to undertake “all necessary measures” for the protection of civilians and for the enforcement of a so-called “no fly zone” in the airspace of Libya.

It is obvious that the delegation of virtually unlimited authority to interested parties and regional groups – as has become customary since the Gulf War resolutions of 1990/1991 – is not only incompatible with the United Nations Charter, but with the international rule of law as such. Although the provisions of Articles 43ff of the Charter for the making available to the Security Council of armed forces and national air force contingents have remained dead letter and the Military Staff Committee has never become operational, the Security Council can under no circumstances authorize a use of force the extent and form of which is solely at the discretion of those parties that volunteer to intervene on behalf of the UN. The procedures outlined in the operative paragraphs of resolution 1973 (2011), and their implementation by the interested parties, including NATO, contradict the doctrine of collective security which is the foundation of the provisions of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter in several important respects:

1.      The notion “all necessary measures” – which interested member states are invited to take “to protect civilians” (Par. 4) and “to enforce compliance with the ban on flights” (Par. 8) – is not only vague but also totally undefined. In a context of international power politics, imprecise terms will unavoidably be interpreted according to the self-interest of the intervening parties and, thus, can never be the basis of legally justified action. Such terms have often been used as pretext for a virtually unrestrained use of force.

2.      The lack of a precise definition of the term “all necessary measures” makes it impossible, a principio, to ascertain the compatibility and commensurability of the adopted measures with the goals stated in the resolution. This effectively guarantees interested states and groups of states, as well as their political and military leaders, to act outside a framework of checks and balances, and with total impunity.

3.      To “authorize” states to use “all necessary means” in the enforcement of a legally binding resolution is an invitation to an 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. The fact that the Security Council adopted the same approach earlier, namely in resolution 678 (1990), dealing with the situation between Iraq and Kuwait, does not justify the present action in the domestic conflict situation in Libya.

4.      The interpretation of the term “all necessary means” by two senior members of the British Government, shortly after the adoption of the resolution, is evidence of the problems caused by the use of an undefined term, and in particular of the abuses of power this invites. Both, the Secretaries of Defense and Foreign Affairs explicitly declined to exclude the targeted killing of the Libyan leader as one of the possible “measures” authorized under the text of resolution 1973 (2011). Although they did not repeat these views in later statements, and the British Prime Minister did not support their interpretation of “all necessary measures,” the Pandora’s box has now been opened.

5.      The characterization of the resolution by the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation as “defective and flawed” insofar as it “allows everything” and “resembles medieval calls for crusades,” was very much to the point. Shocking as this assessment may be for the self-appointed guardians of mankind and representatives of the so-called “international community,” a procedure by which a country’s leadership is declared an international outlaw, and everyone (state or regional group) is invited to join in the battle in whichever way he pleases indeed resembles the rationale of the crusades. However, a medieval hostis declaration has no room in modern international law. International vigilantism and a humanitarian free-for-all are elements of anarchy and belong in a pre-modern system of imperial powers, as it existed before the abrogation of the jus ad bellum.

6.      In the context of Chapter VII enforcement measures, including the use of armed force, the formula “all necessary measures” effectively invites unilateral action by the self-appointed members of a “coalition of the willing,” something which not only gradually subverts, but perverts the United Nations’ rationale of collective security in the service of an undeclared imperialist agenda, hidden behind humanitarian motives such as those proclaimed under the slogan of the “Responsibility to Protect” (a set of principles adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, which seems to have replaced the earlier phraseology of “humanitarian intervention”).

7.      The ban on the use of force according to Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter will become totally meaningless if, by way of a Chapter VII resolution, every member state can effectively use force in pursuit of an abstract goal in a unilateral manner, and without any checks and balances.

8.      The stated goal of the “protection of civilians” has been implemented by interested member states, first and foremost the former colonial powers in North Africa in tandem with the United States, in a way that has caused even more deaths among innocent civilians.

9.      Contrary to the purposes of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the implementation of resolution 1973 (2011) by interested parties has led to an increased threat to international security instead of containing it. What was essentially a domestic conflict, resulting from an armed uprising, has now become an international one. By intervening in a domestic conflict situation on the side of one party, the states that undertook to enforce the resolution, individually and through NATO, have further fuelled the conflict and brought about a situation that may lead to the disintegration of Libya, with the prospect of long-term instability in the entire North African and Mediterranean region.

10.  The involvement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as coordinating entity for the enforcement of the flight ban and, eventually, all military operations in Libya has further complicated the international dimension of the conflict. NATO is a mutual defense pact of European states, including Turkey, and two North American states. Even if in the disguise of “crisis response operations” and noble humanitarian motives, offensive action in North Africa – outside the treaty area – will further threaten international peace and security. NATO’s involvement as a regional organization, albeit not representing the concerned Arab and North African regions, also testifies to the dangers of the general authorization formula in resolution 1973 (2011). NATO certainly represents a spectrum of interests that is totally different from that of the concerned region. In view of its composition and political agenda, it is totally inappropriate for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to act as the exclusive enforcer of Chapter VII resolutions of the Security Council.

11.  By deciding to “protect civilians” in Libya while not acting in comparable situations of uprisings in Bahrain and Yemen, the Security Council has obviously chosen a policy of double standards that seems to be determined by the strategic and economic interests of the intervening countries.

12.  In an act of utmost hypocrisy, the intervening countries hide their vested interests behind the stated humanitarian goal of resolution 1973 (2011). Under the cover of the “Responsibility to Protect,” which the Secretary-General of the United Nations evoked as rationale of the resolution, an effectively unilateral use of force has taken hold, amounting to military measures that, as acts of war on the side of one party in a domestic conflict, go far beyond the stated goals of the resolution and are carried out with total impunity and without sufficient checks and balances. Due to the authorization formula of “all necessary means,” the Security Council has made itself a mere bystander. Because of the voting provision of Article 27(3) of the UN Charter, the authorization cannot be cancelled without the consent of those permanent members that have succeeded in inserting it into the resolution.

13.   It is to be recalled that operative paragraph 6 of resolution 1970 (2011) by which the Security Council has referred the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court (ICC), provides for a kind of “preventive impunity” for all officials and personnel from countries militarily intervening in Libya in so far as they will, in spite of the referral decision under Article 13(b) of the Rome Statute, not be subjected to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This approach, which amounts to an effective amendment of the Rome Statute of the ICC, for which the Security Council has no authority, again reveals the predominance of political considerations over those of justice or human rights.

14.  In line with the Security Council’s tendency, since the end of the Cold War, to arrogate powers not given to it in the Charter, and to broaden its mandate as global “administrator of justice,” resolution 1973 (2011) appears to have further widened the scope of action on the basis of Chapter VII so as to include the protection of the civilian population in situations of domestic conflict. However, if the Council aspires to be an enforcer of rights and an arbiter in domestic conflicts, it will have to abide by the basic principles of the rule of law, first and foremost the exclusion of arbitrariness in the enforcement of the law. As long as it encourages member states to act as they please, allowing them to further their own national interests in the disguise of enforcement action on behalf of the United Nations, the Security Council’s practice will itself constitute a threat to international peace and security.

15.  In view of the legal contradictions resulting from the authorization of the use of “all necessary measures” under Chapter VII resolutions of the Security Council, impacting on the very legitimacy of the world organization as an agent of collective security, the member states in the United Nations General Assembly should consider to seek an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice according to Article 96(1) of the Charter.

 

25 March, 2011

The horrible manner in which Ahmed Farhan, a 29-year-old Bahraini youth, met his death, as seen in a spine-chilling video clip on Youtube, tells of why there should be an immediate stop to the use of brutal firepower against peaceful protesters in the Middle East.

Farhan was shot in the head from a helicopter, the bullet splitting his skull and dividing his brain into segments like an orange. A doctor at the scene had to hold together the four parts of Farhan’s head in his hands so as to put him to rest and give his corpse a semblance of normality. Watching the video clip could give viewers nightmares for days. Such brutal action by the state is inhuman and sheer arrogance of power.

The various characteristics of unrest across the Middle East show the difference of manner with which the regimes are responding to protests. Unlike Egypt, the governments of Yemen, Bahrain and Libya have employed brutal firepower to silence the peaceful protesters. The more authoritarian and stronger a regime, the more aggressive and brutal its treatment of protesters.

So we have to ask why, after implementing a no-fly zone in Libya, have Western powers not done the same in Yemen and Bahrain, which are also engaged in brutal violence against their citizens; why this discrimination?

Furthermore, Turkey, the foremost democracy in the Muslim world and a Nato ally, was not invited to the Paris talks on Libya. To enforce a no-fly zone in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen, a southward-partnered coalition comprising countries such as Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil, and India would have been a more credible international operation.

All the protests in the Middle East have the same objectives, being based on a desire for freedom, democracy, human and food security and gender equality – the very values the West supports. So why this discrimination in the West’s response? Is it still all about oil and their fear of the “bogeymen”, the Islamist Jihadists? Mu’ammar Gadhafi has often changed the nature of his relationship with the West in the last four decades, hence it seems easier to punish him like a naughty child, pampered sometimes with carrots and shown the stick at other times. Gadhafi is not a big liability for the West in the way that the other oil monarchies are, for access to Libyan oil will continue under any Libyan regime.

Since their emergence as post-colonial powers, all the Middle Eastern regimes have destroyed or curbed the rise of opposition, either in the name of Islam or Arab culture. But if Islam is against democracy, then why is it still welcomed and functioning in Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan? And why do most modern Muslim political philosophers see a commensurability between the Quranic advice that Muslims conduct their affairs through mutual consultation (Quran: 42:38), and legislature? If Islam and democracy are incompatible, as claimed by the monarchies and dictatorships, then why are they hiding behind the fig leaf of invented religious and cultural excuses that serve the interests of political elites and their cronies at the cost of their own citizenry? And by the way, the early caliphs of Islamic polity were no monarchs.

At the present juncture, it seems that the oil monarchies of the Gulf will not go down easily, and nor are they ready for genuine political change. They refuse to become constitutional monarchies, instead employing religio-political rhetoric emphasising that they are still searching for an Islamic model based on their culture. This is turning a blind eye to/ignoring centuries of Islamic political philosophy in which Muslim political thinkers have vigorously argued for shura – a consultative model for Islamic political functioning. Nor are they ready to opt for public referenda to determine what type of political set-up their populaces want. It seems strange that in this day and age when several regimes have been toppled or succumbed to people power, the oil monarchies are not ready for a civilian political option – that they can go scot-free with no international repercussions.

Furthermore, when two of my previous articles for The Nation cited the above-mentioned countries as examples of Muslim democracies, I received nearly identical responses from several Western readers. They hold that these Muslim democracies are “not democratic enough” from the point of view of Western liberal political philosophy. It must be reiterated here that “democracy” is a contested term. Thailand’s democracy has been described as that of a rice-eating people. There are other similar non-Western definitions of democracy, just as there are of secularism. Hence, Muslims are also free to come up with their version of democracy – as long as it adheres to the objectives of open political participation, freedom and accountability.

The emerging Shi’a-Sunni conflict in Bahrain is going to have serious implications for intra-Muslim relations across the Middle East and the world. The rise of Iran after its Islamic revolution of 1979, followed by the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the emergence of Iraq as the first Arab Shi’a state after the American invasion has definitely divided the Middle East into Sunni and Shi’a zones. This development has immense implications for Arab Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Lebanon with their Shi’a minorities. It has divided the Middle East into Sunni and Shi’a zones. The Sunni zone comprises Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states, while the Shi’a zone includes Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This division and the emergence of Shi’a protest in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia is not only unsettling for the Middle East but will also have repercussions for other Muslim communities in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and also Southeast Asia. The onset of Sunni-Shi’a tension with potential for conflict and violence as seen before will only complicate the situation, because there is a historical absence of intra-Muslim dialogue amidst mutual Sunni-Shi’a religious distrust.

Amidst all the ongoing bloodshed in the Middle East, the post-Islamist face of the protest which emerged in Tunisia and Egypt led by unemployed youth and the dissatisfied middle-class is being obscured and brutally suppressed by regimes who want to last forever and are not open to the democratic alternative. But the face of the Middle East is changing; it is no longer the “old” Middle East.

It is time to discard the false assumption of Islamic exception to democracy, for the democratic option has never been made available to the Middle Eastern populace, either during the colonial or the post-colonial era. And it seems strange that while in the past it was Islamists who were the targets of state oppression, now it is post-Islamists who are becoming the victims of similar brutal repression. This offers convenient fodder for jihadist propagandists to make their case once again.

Is the cycle repeating itself? Is this the end of the democracy season in the Middle East? Is there a way to end the decades’ old post-colonial political morass in the Middle East, or is it always about oil and other interests? Have Ahmed Farhan and thousands of others to die in vain?

Dr Imtiyaz Yusuf is Professor of Islamics and Religion at Assumption University’s Graduate School of Philosophy and Religion.

 

 

 

MARCH 27, 2011 Rollingstone.com

How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon

Cpl. Jeremy Morlock with Staff Sgt. David Bram

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company’s 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields.

To provide perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw compounds. Then they set out on foot. Local villagers were suspected of supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S. troops. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy positions. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight: destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water; bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes; young kids eager for candy and money. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. The insurgents, for their part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a distance with IEDs.

While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the unit until they reached the far edge of the village. There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. “The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it,” one of the men later told Army investigators.

The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution.

He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on his face was welcoming. “He was not a threat,” Morlock later confessed.

Morlock and Holmes called to him in Pashto as he walked toward them, ordering him to stop. The boy did as he was told. He stood still.

The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun.

Mudin buckled, went down face first onto the ground. His cap toppled off. A pool of blood congealed by his head.

The loud report of the guns echoed all around the sleepy farming village. The sound of such unexpected gunfire typically triggers an emergency response in other soldiers, sending them into full battle mode. Yet when the shots rang out, some soldiers didn’t seem especially alarmed, even when the radio began to squawk. It was Morlock, agitated, screaming that he had come under attack. On a nearby hill, Spc. Adam Winfield turned to his friend, Pfc. Ashton Moore, and explained that it probably wasn’t a real combat situation. It was more likely a staged killing, he said – a plan the guys had hatched to take out an unarmed Afghan without getting caught.

Back at the wall, soldiers arriving on the scene found the body and the bloodstains on the ground. Morlock and Holmes were crouched by the wall, looking excited. When a staff sergeant asked them what had happened, Morlock said the boy had been about to attack them with a grenade. “We had to shoot the guy,” he said.

It was an unlikely story: a lone Taliban fighter, armed with only a grenade, attempting to ambush a platoon in broad daylight, let alone in an area that offered no cover or concealment. Even the top officer on the scene, Capt. Patrick Mitchell, thought there was something strange about Morlock’s story. “I just thought it was weird that someone would come up and throw a grenade at us,” Mitchell later told investigators.

But Mitchell did not order his men to render aid to Mudin, whom he believed might still be alive, and possibly a threat. Instead, he ordered Staff Sgt. Kris Sprague to “make sure” the boy was dead. Sprague raised his rifle and fired twice.

As the soldiers milled around the body, a local elder who had been working in the poppy field came forward and accused Morlock and Holmes of murder. Pointing to Morlock, he said that the soldier, not the boy, had thrown the grenade. Morlock and the other soldiers ignored him.

To identify the body, the soldiers fetched the village elder who had been speaking to the officers that morning. But by tragic coincidence, the elder turned out to be the father of the slain boy. His moment of grief-stricken recognition, when he saw his son lying in a pool of blood, was later recounted in the flat prose of an official Army report. “The father was very upset,” the report noted.

The father’s grief did nothing to interrupt the pumped-up mood that had broken out among the soldiers. Following the routine Army procedure required after every battlefield death, they cut off the dead boy’s clothes and stripped him naked to check for identifying tattoos. Next they scanned his iris and fingerprints, using a portable biometric scanner.

Then, in a break with protocol, the soldiers began taking photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. Holding a cigarette rakishly in one hand, Holmes posed for the camera with Mudin’s bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing the boy’s head by the hair as if it were a trophy deer. Morlock made sure to get a similar memento.

No one seemed more pleased by the kill than Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the platoon’s popular and hard-charging squad leader. “It was like another day at the office for him,” one soldier recalls. Gibbs started “messing around with the kid,” moving his arms and mouth and “acting like the kid was talking.” Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears, he reportedly sliced off the dead boy’s pinky finger and gave it to Holmes, as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.

According to his fellow soldiers, Holmes took to carrying the finger with him in a zip-lock bag. “He wanted to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out,” one of his friends would later report. “He was proud of his finger.”

After the killing, the soldiers involved in Mudin’s death were not disciplined or punished in any way. Emboldened, the platoon went on a shooting spree over the next four months that claimed the lives of at least three more innocent civilians. When the killings finally became public last summer, the Army moved aggressively to frame the incidents as the work of a “rogue unit” operating completely on its own, without the knowledge of its superiors. Military prosecutors swiftly charged five low-ranking soldiers with murder, and the Pentagon clamped down on any information about the killings. Soldiers in Bravo Company were barred from giving interviews, and lawyers for the accused say their clients faced harsh treatment if they spoke to the press, including solitary confinement. No officers were charged.

But a review of internal Army records and investigative files obtained by Rolling Stone, including dozens of interviews with members of Bravo Company compiled by military investigators, indicates that the dozen infantrymen being portrayed as members of a secretive “kill team” were operating out in the open, in plain view of the rest of the company. Far from being clandestine, as the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by “pretty much the whole platoon,” according to one soldier who complained about them. Staged killings were an open topic of conversation, and at least one soldier from another battalion in the 3,800-man Stryker Brigade participated in attacks on unarmed civilians. “The platoon has a reputation,” a whistle-blower named Pfc. Justin Stoner told the Army Criminal Investigation Command. “They have had a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it.”

From the start, the questionable nature of the killings was on the radar of senior Army leadership. Within days of the first murder, Rolling Stone has learned, Mudin’s uncle descended on the gates of FOB Ramrod, along with 20 villagers from La Mohammad Kalay, to demand an investigation. “They were sitting at our front door,” recalls Lt. Col. David Abrahams, the battalion’s second in command. During a four-hour meeting with Mudin’s uncle, Abrahams was informed that several children in the village had seen Mudin killed by soldiers from 3rd Platoon. The battalion chief ordered the soldiers to be reinterviewed, but Abrahams found “no inconsistencies in their story,” and the matter was dropped. “It was cut and dry to us at the time,” Abrahams recalls.

Other officers were also in a position to question the murders. Neither 3rd Platoon’s commander, Capt. Matthew Quiggle, nor 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay has been held accountable for their unit’s actions, despite their repeated failure to report killings that they had ample reason to regard as suspicious. In fact, supervising the murderous platoon, or even having knowledge of the crimes, seems to have been no impediment to career advancement. Ligsay has actually been promoted to captain, and a sergeant who joined the platoon in April became a team leader even though he “found out about the murders from the beginning,” according to a soldier who cooperated with the Army investigation.

Indeed, it would have been hard not to know about the murders, given that the soldiers of 3rd Platoon took scores of photographs chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals,” one soldier explained to investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.” One photo shows a hand missing a finger. Another depicts a severed head being maneuvered with a stick, and still more show bloody body parts, blown-apart legs, mutilated torsos. Several show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view.

In many of the photos it is unclear whether the bodies are civilians or Taliban, and it is possible that the unidentified deaths involved no illegal acts by U.S. soldiers. But it is a violation of Army standards to take such photos of the dead, let alone share them with others. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.

The collection also includes several videos shot by U.S. troops. In a jumpy, 30-minute clip titled “Motorcycle Kill,” soldiers believed to be with another battalion in the Stryker Brigade gun down two Afghans on a motorcycle who may have been armed. One of the most chilling files shows two Afghans suspected of planting an IED being blown up in an airstrike. Shot through thermal imaging, the grainy footage has been edited into a music video, complete with a rock soundtrack and a title card that reads ‘death zone.’

Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos – an effort that reached the highest levels of both governments. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai were reportedly briefed on the photos as early as May, and the military launched a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. Investigators in Afghanistan searched the hard drives and confiscated the computers of more than a dozen soldiers, ordering them to delete any provocative images. The Army Criminal Investigation Command also sent agents fanning out across America to the homes of soldiers and their relatives, gathering up every copy of the files they could find. The message was clear: What happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan.

By suppressing the photos, however, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In one image, two dead Afghans have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a road. A sign – handwritten on cardboard from a discarded box of rations – hangs around their necks. It reads “Taliban are Dead.” The Pentagon says it is investigating the photos, but insists that there is little more investigators can do to identify the men. “It’s a mystery,” says a Pentagon spokesman. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure they know where to take it next. All we have is two apparently dead Afghans handcuffed to each other against a mile marker. We don’t know much beyond that. For all we know, those two guys may have been killed by the Taliban for being sympathizers.”

But such statements suggest that the Pentagon isn’t following every lead. A Stryker vehicle in the photos, for example, bears identifying marks that are clearly visible in the image. And according to a source in Bravo Company, who spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity, the two unarmed men in the photos were killed by soldiers from another platoon, which has not yet been implicated in the scandal.

“Those were some innocent farmers that got killed,” the source says. “Their standard operating procedure after killing dudes was to drag them up to the side of the highway.”

Army prosecutors insist that blame for the killings rests with a soldier near the bottom of the Stryker Brigade’s totem pole: Calvin Gibbs, a three-tour veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who served as a squad leader in 3rd Platoon. Morlock and five soldiers charged with lesser crimes have pleaded guilty in exchange for testifying against Gibbs, who faces life in prison for three counts of premeditated murder.

The 26-year-old staff sergeant has been widely portrayed as a sociopath of Mansonesque proportions, a crazed killer with a “pure hatred for all Afghans” who was detested and feared by those around him. But the portrait omits evidence that the Army’s own investigators gathered from soldiers in Bravo Company. “Gibbs is very well-liked in the platoon by his seniors, peers and subordinates alike,” Spc. Adam Kelly reported, adding that Gibbs was “one of the best NCOs I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with in my military career. I believe that because of his experience, more people came back alive and uninjured than would have without him having been part of the platoon.” Another soldier described Gibbs as an “upbeat guy, very funny. He was one of those guys you could talk to about anything and he would make you feel better about the situation.”

At six-feet-four and 220 pounds, Gibbs could certainly intimidate those around him. Growing up in a devout Mormon family in Billings, Montana, he had dropped out of high school to get an equivalency degree and enlist in the Army. He plunged into soldiering, accumulating a slew of medals in Iraq, where the line between legitimate self-defense and civilian deaths was often blurry at best. In 2004, Gibbs and other soldiers allegedly fired on an unarmed Iraqi family near Kirkuk, killing two adults and a child. The incident, which was not prosecuted at the time, is now under investigation by the Army.

Before he joined Bravo Company in November 2009, Gibbs worked on the personal security detail for one of the top commanders in Afghanistan, a controversial, outspoken colonel named Harry Tunnell. Tunnell, who at the time was the commander of 5th Stryker Brigade, openly mocked the military’s approach to counterinsurgency – which emphasizes the need to win the support of local civilians – as better suited to a “social scientist.” “Political correctness dictates that we cannot talk about the oppressive measures employed during successful counterinsurgency campaigns,” he wrote. Tunnell also pushed his men to go after “guerrilla hunter killers,” insisting that the enemy “must be attacked relentlessly.”

When Gibbs left Tunnell’s detail and arrived at the front, he quickly became an extreme version of a relentless attacker. After he took command, Gibbs put a pirate flag on his tent. “Hey, brother,” he told a friend. “Come down to the line and we’ll find someone to kill.” A tattoo on his left shin featured a pair of crossed rifles offset by six skulls. Three of the skulls, colored in red, represented his kills in Iraq. The others, in blue, were from Afghanistan.

By the time Gibbs arrived, morale in the Stryker Brigade had hit rock bottom. Only four months earlier, the unit had been deployed to Afghanistan amid a chorus of optimism about its eight-wheeled armored vehicles, a technological advancement that was supposed to move infantry to the battlefield more quickly and securely, enabling U.S. troops to better strike against the Taliban. By December, however, those hopes had dissolved. The Taliban had forced the Strykers off the roads simply by increasing the size and explosive force of their IEDs, and the brigade had suffered terrible casualties; one battalion had lost more soldiers in action than any since the start of the war. Gibbs, in fact, had been brought in after a squad leader had his legs blown off by an IED.

The soldiers were bored and shellshocked and angry. They had been sent to Afghanistan as part of a new advance guard on a mission to track down the Taliban, but the enemy was nowhere to be found. “To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference between local nationals and combatants,” one soldier later confessed. During the unit’s first six months in Afghanistan, the Taliban evaded almost every patrol that 3rd Platoon sent out. Frustrations ran so high that when the unit came across the body of an insurgent killed by a helicopter gunship in November 2009, one soldier took out a hunting knife and stabbed the corpse. According to another soldier, Gibbs began playing with a pair of scissors near the dead man’s hands. “I wonder if these can cut off a finger?” Gibbs asked.

The Pentagon’s top command, rather than addressing the morale problems, actually held up the brigade as a media-worthy example of progress in the war. The month after the helicopter incident – only four weeks before the killings began – the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, paid a heavily publicized visit to the area. The military’s strategy of counterinsurgency, he reminded members of 5th Stryker Brigade, required them to win hearts and minds by protecting the population. “If we’re killing local civilians,” he cautioned, “we’re going to strategically lose.”

Gibbs had a different idea about how to breathe new life into 3rd Platoon. Not long after he arrived, he explained to his fellow soldiers that they didn’t have to wait passively to be attacked by the enemy’s IEDs. They could strike back by hitting people in towns known to be sympathetic to the Taliban. “Gibbs told everyone about this scenario by pitching it – by saying that all these Afghans were savages, and we had just lost one of our squad leaders because his legs got blown off by an IED,” Morlock recalled. Killing an Afghan – any Afghan – became a way to avenge the loss.

The members of Bravo Company began to talk incessantly about killing Afghans as they went about their daily chores, got stoned or relaxed over a game of Warhammer. One idea, proposed half in jest, was to throw candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shoot the children who came running to pick up the sweets. According to one soldier, they also talked about a second scenario in which they “would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over.” Another elaborate plan involved waiting for an IED attack, then using the explosion as an excuse to kill civilians. That way, the soldiers reasoned, “you could shoot anyone in the general area and get away with it.”

“We were operating in such bad places and not being able to do anything about it,” Morlock said in a phone interview from the jail at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. “I guess that’s why we started taking things into our own hands.”

After killing the Afghan boy at La Mohammad Kalay, members of 3rd Platoon were jubilant. “They were high-fiving each other about having killed the guy,” one soldier recalled. They put the corpse in a black body bag and stowed it on top of their Stryker for the ride back to FOB Ramrod. No sooner had they arrived at the base than they were recounting the tale to soldiers they barely knew.

A few hours after the shooting, during a routine checkup at the base’s clinic, Holmes and Morlock bragged about having killed an insurgent to Alyssa Reilly, a fair-skinned, blond medic who was popular among the men in the unit. Reilly later paid the soldiers a social visit, and they all sat around playing spades. When it came time for their wager, Morlock and Holmes said they would bet a finger. Then they tossed the finger that Gibbs had sliced from Mudin’s body on the card pile. “I thought it was gross,” Reilly told investigators.

Morlock was particularly eager to volunteer the truth to his fellow soldiers, evidently unconcerned about how they would react to his having murdered an unarmed Afghan. The same evening he shot Mudin, several members of Bravo Company convened in the privacy of a Stryker vehicle for a nightcap of hashish, a common activity among the unit. Hash supplied by Afghan translators was a major part of the daily lives of many soldiers; they smoked up constantly, getting high in their vehicles, their housing units, even porta-potties. Now, in the tanklike interior of the Stryker, surrounded by its mesh of wires and periscopes and thermal-imaging computers, Morlock passed the hash and recounted the killing in detail, even explaining how he had been careful not to leave the grenade’s spoon and pin on the ground, where they might have been used as evidence that a U.S. weapon had been involved in the attack. For the same reason, he’d also been careful to brush away traces of white explosive powder around Mudin’s body.

Before the military found itself short of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid whom the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track. In those days, he was constantly in trouble: getting drunk and into fights, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a serious car accident. Even after he joined the Army, Morlock continued to get into trouble. In 2009, a month before he deployed to Afghanistan, he was charged with disorderly conduct after burning his wife with a cigarette. After he arrived in Afghanistan, he did any drug he could get his hands on: opium, hash, Ambien, amitriptyline, flexeril, phenergan, codeine, trazodone.

As Morlock bragged about the killing, word of the murder spread back home to families and friends. Soldiers e-mailed photos to their buddies and talked about the killing during visits home. On February 14th, three months before the Army launched its investigation, Spc. Adam Winfield sent a Facebook message to his father, Chris, back in Cape Coral, Florida. A skinny, bookish 21-year-old, Winfield was pissed off at being disciplined by Gibbs. “There are people in my platoon that have gotten away with murder,” he told his father. “Everyone pretty much knows it was staged. . . . They all don’t care.” Winfield added that the victim was “some innocent guy about my age, just farming.”

During Facebook chats, Winfield continued to keep his father in the loop. “Adam told me that he heard the group was planning on another murder involving an innocent Afghanistan man,” Chris Winfield, himself a veteran, later told investigators. “They were going to kill him and drop an AK-47 on him to make it look like he was the bad guy.” Alarmed, the elder Winfield called the command center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and told the sergeant on duty what was going on. But according to Winfield, the sergeant simply shrugged it off, telling him that “stuff like that happens” and that “it would be sorted out when Adam got home.” Tragically, commanders at the base did nothing to follow up on the report.

Back in Afghanistan, Winfield was having second thoughts about reporting the incident. He believed the killings were wrong, but he had finally earned a place in the “circle of trust” erected by Gibbs, who had started off thinking of him as too “weak” to belong to the kill team. Reversing course, he begged his father to stop contacting the Army, saying that he feared for his life. Winfield said Gibbs had warned him that if he told anyone about the murder, he would “go home in a body bag.” His father agreed to keep the matter quiet.

Given the lack of response from their superiors, the soldiers of 3rd Platoon now believed they could kill with impunity – provided they planted “drop weapons” at the scene to frame their victims as enemy combatants. The presence of a weapon virtually guaranteed that a shooting would be considered a legitimate kill, even under the stricter rules of engagement the military had implemented as a key element of counterinsurgency. A drop weapon was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. And in the chaotic war zone, they were easy to find.

The military keeps close track of the weapons and ammunition it issues to soldiers, carefully documenting every grenade exploded, every magazine expended. So Gibbs made it his business to gather “off the books” weapons through a variety of channels. He got friendly with guys in the Afghan National Police and tried to trade them porn magazines in exchange for rocket-propelled grenades; he cajoled other units to give him munitions; he scrounged for broken and discarded UXO – unexploded ordnance – until he had collected a motley arsenal of random weaponry, old frag grenades, bent RPG tails, duct-taped claymore mines, C-4, mortar rounds. His best find was a working AK-47 with a folding butt stock and two magazines, which he pulled from the wreckage of an Afghan National Police vehicle that had been blown up near the base’s gate. Gibbs placed the AK-47 and the magazines in a metal box in one of the Strykers. Later, a corporal named Emmitt Quintal discovered the gun and wondered what it was doing there. As he recalled, Staff Sgt. David Bram “sat me down and explained to me that it was basically to cover our ass if anything happened.”

Two weeks after the murder of Gul Mudin, something did.

It was the night of January 27th and the platoon was driving along the highway near their forward operating base. Suddenly, through their thermal imaging, they spotted a human heat signature on the side of the road – a potentially suspicious sign, since the Taliban often operate at night, using the cover of darkness to plant IEDs.

The patrol stopped 100 yards away from the man, and a handful of soldiers and an interpreter got out of their vehicles. They could see that the man was crouched down, or curled up like a ball close to the ground. As they approached, the man stood up and held his arms in front of his chest. To the soldiers, the motion was either an indication that he was cold, or that he was hiding a suicide-bomb vest.

Shouting to the man in Pashto, the soldiers illuminated him with intense, high-power spotlights and ordered him to lift up his shirt. But the man began to pace back and forth in the blinding white light, ignoring their calls. “He was acting strange,” recalls a soldier. For several minutes the man shuffled around as the soldiers fired warning shots at him. The bullets skipped around him.

Then – ignoring the warnings – the man began walking toward the troops. “Fire!” someone yelled. Gibbs opened fire, followed by at least five other soldiers. In the course of a few seconds, they expended approximately 40 rounds.

The man’s body lay on the ground. He turned out to be completely unarmed. According to official statements made by several soldiers, he also appears to have been deaf or mentally disabled. Above his beard, a large portion of his skull was missing, blown away by the hail of bullets. Spc. Michael Wagnon collected a piece of the skull and kept it as a trophy.

It was the team’s second killing of an unarmed man in as many weeks, and the second time they violated a body. But rather than investigate the shooting, the platoon’s officers concentrated on trying to justify it. When 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay radioed Capt. Matthew Quiggle, the platoon’s commanding officer, and informed him that the same unit had shot an unarmed Afghan male, the captain was furious. “He strongly believed that we had illegitimately killed a local national,” recalls Quintal.

Quiggle ordered Ligsay to search until they found a weapon. “Lt. Ligsay was pretty freaked out,” Quintal recalls. “He was positive he was going to lose his job.” For the next hour the platoon swept the area with their flashlights looking for weapons, but they couldn’t find anything.

Then Staff Sgt. Bram ordered Quintal to hand him the AK-47 magazine that Gibbs had stowed in the metal box in the Stryker. A private named Justin Stoner passed it down. A few minutes later, a voice called out in the darkness. “Sir!” Bram yelled. “I think I found something.”

Lt. Ligsay walked up and saw the black magazine lying on the ground. He called it in, and the platoon breathed a sigh of relief. The members of the kill team knew it was a drop magazine, but it turned the shooting into a legitimate kill.

“The incident was staged to look like he may have had a weapon,” Stoner told investigators. “Basically, what we did was a desperate search to justify killing this guy. But in reality he was just some old, deaf, retarded guy. We basically executed this man.”

Under the rules of engagement, however, the U.S. military still considers the man responsible for his own death. Because he ignored the platoon’s warnings and moved in their direction, no one has been charged in his killing – even though the Army now knows he was gunned down by soldiers intent on shooting unarmed civilians for sport.

Within a month, according to the Army, Gibbs executed another civilian and planted a weapon on the body. It was during Operation Kodak Moment, a routine mission to photograph and compile a database of the male residents of a village called Kari Kheyl. On February 22nd, the day of the mission, Gibbs hid the AK-47 he had stolen from the Afghan National Police in a black assault pack. As the platoon made its way through the village, he went to the hut of Marach Agha, a man he suspected of belonging to the Taliban, and ordered him outside.

First Gibbs fired the AK-47 into a nearby wall and dropped the weapon at Agha’s feet. Then he shot the man at close range with his M4 rifle. Morlock and Wagnon followed up with a few rounds of their own. With the scene staged to his satisfaction, Gibbs called in a report.

Staff Sgt. Sprague was one of the first to respond. Gibbs claimed that he had turned a corner and spotted the man, who had fired at him with the AK-47, only to have the rifle jam. But when Sprague picked up the Kalashnikov, it seemed to be in perfect operating condition. A short time later, as he walked down a dusty alley in the village, Sprague himself came under attack from small-arms fire. He responded instinctively by squeezing the trigger on the AK-47 – and the gun fired “with no problems at all.”

Sprague reported the discrepancy to Lt. Ligsay. When the body was identified, relatives also reported that Agha was a deeply religious man who would never have taken up arms. He “did not know how to use an AK-47,” they told Ligsay. Once again, however, no action was taken, nor was Gibbs disciplined.

With their commanding officers repeatedly failing to investigate, the kill team was starting to feel invulnerable. To encourage soldiers in other units to target unarmed civilians, Gibbs had given one of the “off the books” grenades he had scrounged to a friend from another battalion, Staff Sgt. Robert Stevens. “It showed up in a box on my desk,” recalled Stevens, a senior medic. “When I opened the box, I saw a grenade canister, which had a grenade in it and a dirty green sock.” Figuring the sock was some kind of joke, Stevens threw it away. Later, when he saw Gibbs, he mentioned getting the grenade.

“Did you get the other thing?” Gibbs asked.

“What, the sock?” Stevens said.

“No, what was in the sock,” Gibbs replied.

Inside the sock, Gibbs had placed a severed human finger.

Stevens got the message. On March 10th, as his convoy was driving down Highway 1, the central road connecting Kandahar to the north, Stevens stuck his head out of his Stryker’s open hatch and tossed the grenade. It detonated a few seconds later than he had anticipated, and when it blew, it thudded into the vehicle. Stevens immediately began firing at a nearby compound of huts, yelling at another platoon member to do the same. “Get the fuck up, Morgan!” he screamed. “Let’s go, shoot!”

No casualties were reported from the incident, but it earned Stevens an Army Commendation Medal and a Combat Medical Badge. Stevens later admitted that he had concocted the ambush not only because he wanted to get rid of the illegal grenade but because he “wanted to hook up the guys in the company” with their Combat Infantryman Badges, 14 of which were awarded in the aftermath of the shooting. All of the awards were revoked when the Army learned the attack had been faked.

The assault staged by Stevens suggested a new way to target Afghan civilians. In addition to approaching targets on foot, Gibbs decided to use his Stryker as a shooting platform, affording greater mobility with the protection of armor. In a perverse twist, the vehicle that had proved ineffective at combating the Taliban was about to be turned on the very people it was supposed to defend.

On March 18th, during a maintenance run to Kandahar Airfield, the unit drove past a populated area of the city. According to one soldier, Gibbs opened the hatch of the moving Stryker and tossed out a grenade. As it exploded with a loud bang, shrapnel hit the Stryker. “RPG!” Gibbs shouted. “RPG!” Sgt. Darren Jones, who had discussed faking attacks with Gibbs, opened fire indiscriminately on the local residents, who frantically scrambled to avoid the incoming rounds. Gibbs raised his M4 and laid down fire as well.

There is no way to know how many, if any, casualties resulted from the fusillade. Lt. Ligsay, who was in the same Stryker with Gibbs and Jones, maintains that he mistakenly believed the attack to be genuine and ordered the convoy to keep moving. The platoon did not return to the area to conduct a battle damage assessment, and no charges were ever filed in the incident.

A few weeks later, sometime in late March or early April, members of 3rd Platoon fired on unarmed civilians twice on the same day, indicating a growing sense of their own invincibility. Five soldiers were part of a patrol in a grape field in the Zhari District when they spotted three unarmed men. According to Stevens, Gibbs ordered the soldiers to open fire, even though the men were standing erect and posed no threat. All five soldiers fired their weapons at the men, but they managed to escape unscathed. Gibbs was not pleased. “He mentioned that we needed to work on our accuracy,” Stevens recalled, “because it did not appear that anyone was hurt.”

That same evening, while manning a guard tower overlooking a field in the Zhari District, soldiers from 3rd Platoon were directly told not to shoot at an elderly farmer who had been granted permission to work his land nearby. Despite the warning, two soldiers reportedly shot at the farmer as if he were an armed combatant. They once again failed to hit their target, but the officer in charge was furious. “This farmer has never been a problem,” he later told investigators. “He’s 60 to 70 years old.”

One morning that spring, Gibbs approached Morlock flashing what looked like a small metal pineapple. “Hey, man, I’ve got this Russian grenade,” he said. Gibbs added that the weapon would be the perfect tool to fake another attack, since the Taliban were known to carry Russian explosives. Morlock liked the idea. The night before, talking with a bunch of soldiers outside their bunk rooms, he had announced that he was looking to kill another haji, a pejorative term that U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan use for Muslims. One soldier who took part in the conversation dismissed it as idle talk. “I didn’t really think anything of it,” he told investigators, “because soldiers say stuff like that all the time.”

The morning of May 2nd, the platoon was on a routine patrol in a village called Qualaday, a few miles from base. Following standard procedure, the unit’s leaders entered a house to talk with a man who had previously been arrested for having an IED. That inadvertently left the rest of the platoon free to roam the village looking for targets, without having to worry about an officer’s supervision.

Outside the house, Morlock was overheard instructing Winfield in how a grenade explodes, cautioning him to remain on the ground during the blast. Then the two soldiers moved off with Gibbs. Nearby, in a compound filled with children, they picked out a man with a white beard and escorted him outside. “He seemed friendly,” Winfield recalled. “He didn’t seem to have any sort of animosity toward us.”

Gibbs turned to his men. “You guys want to wax this guy or what?” he asked. Morlock and Winfield agreed that the man seemed perfect.

Gibbs walked the Afghan to a nearby ditch and forced him to his knees, ordering him to stay that way. Then he positioned Morlock and Winfield in a prone position behind a small berm no more than 10 feet away. “To be honest,” Morlock later told investigators, “me and Winfield thought we were going to frag ourselves, ’cause we were so fucking close.”

With everyone in position, Gibbs took cover behind a low wall and chucked a grenade toward the Afghan. “All right, dude, wax this guy!” he shouted. “Kill this guy, kill this guy!”

As the grenade went off, Morlock and Winfield opened fire. Morlock got off several rounds with his M4. Winfield, who was armed with the more powerful SAW machine gun, squeezed off a burst that lasted for three to five seconds.

Gibbs shouted for Morlock to proceed with the next stage of the plan. “Get up there and plant that fucking grenade!”

The man lay where he had fallen. One of his feet had been blown off by the blast; his other leg was missing below the knee. Morlock ran up and dropped the Russian pineapple grenade near the dead man’s hand. Gibbs walked up to the body, stood directly over it, and fired twice into the man’s head, shattering the jaw.

Later, when the scene had calmed down – after soldiers had pushed away the dead man’s wife and children, who were screaming, hysterical with grief, and Morlock had spun the story to the higher-ups – Gibbs took out a pair of medical shears and cut off the corpse’s left pinky finger, which he kept for himself. Then, wearing a surgical glove, he reached into the dead man’s mouth, pulled out a tooth and handed it to Winfield.

Winfield held the tooth for a while. Then he tossed it aside, leaving it behind on the ground at Qualaday.

This time, though, the villagers refused to be placated. The dead man, it turned out, was a peaceful cleric named Mullah Allah Dad. Two days later, the murder provoked an uproar at a districtwide council attended by Capt. Quiggle, the unit’s commanding officer. The district leader launched into a blistering attack of the platoon. “He pretty much told us that we planted the grenade in order to shoot the guy,” recalled 1st Lt. Stefan Moye, who escorted Quiggle to the meeting.

But the next day, instead of launching an inquiry into the platoon’s behavior, Quiggle dispatched Moye to the scene of the shooting to do damage control. With Gibbs hovering nearby, the lieutenant found two elderly villagers who claimed to have seen Mullah Allah Dad with a grenade. Relieved, Moye urged them to spread the word. “This is the type of stuff that the Taliban likes to use against us and try to recruit people to fight against us,” he said.

His mission accomplished, Moye left the village feeling that the platoon could return to its usual rhythms. “After that,” he said, “everything was normal.”

Things might have remained “normal,” and the killings might have continued, if it hadn’t been for what began as a trivial spat between bunkmates. Around midnight, the same evening that Moye returned from pacifying village elders, Pfc. Stoner walked into the company’s tactical operations center to register a complaint. Stoner, who had helped plant the AK-47 magazine on the civilian murdered by the highway, said he was sick and tired of other soldiers in the unit using his room as “a smoke shack for hash.” Worried that the lingering odor would get him busted, he had asked them to find another place to get stoned. They had refused, pausing only to remove the battery from the room’s smoke detector.

“They baked the room many times until it stank constantly,” Stoner said. “I was worried for my own job.” Emphasizing that he wasn’t a snitch, Stoner told the sergeant on duty that he didn’t want to get his fellow soldiers in trouble. Then, growing emotional, he mentioned that “he and a bunch of other guys had executed a local national out on Highway 1.” The sergeant didn’t take the story seriously enough to report it up the chain of command. “I thought he was just upset and needed to talk to someone about the incident,” he later recalled. Instead of alerting his superiors about the murder allegation, the sergeant simply assured Stoner that the matter of hash smoking in his room would be handled quietly, and that his identity would be kept confidential.

But discretion wasn’t exactly the unit’s strong suit. By the next day, everyone knew that Stoner had ratted them out. “Everyone began to panic,” Quintal recalls. Gibbs, who didn’t care for hashish, gathered members of the kill team in his room. “We need to address the situation with Stoner,” he reportedly said. “Snitches get stitches.”

On May 6th, Gibbs and six other soldiers descended on Stoner’s room, locking the door behind them, and attacked Stoner while he was sitting on his bed. Grabbing him by the throat, they dragged him to the floor and piled on, striking him hard but taking care to avoid blows to the face that might leave visible bruises. “I’ve been in the Army four years,” Morlock said as he pummeled Stoner in the stomach. “How could you do this to me?” Before leaving, they struck Stoner in the crotch and spit in his face.

A few hours later, Gibbs and Morlock returned to Stoner’s room. As Stoner sat on his bed, still dazed from the assault, Morlock explained that the beating would not happen again, so long as Stoner kept his mouth shut “from fucking now on.” If Stoner were disloyal again, Gibbs warned, he would be killed the next time he went out on patrol. “It’s too easy,” he added, explaining that he could hide Stoner’s body in a Hesco barrier, one of the temporary structures used to fortify U.S. positions.

Then Gibbs reached into his pocket and took out a bit of cloth. Unfolding it, he tossed two severed fingers on the floor, with bits of skin still hanging off the bone. If Stoner didn’t want to end up like “that guy,” Morlock said, he better “shut the hell up.” After all, he added, he “already had enough practice” at killing people.

Stoner had no doubt that Morlock would follow through on the threat. “Basically, I do believe that Morlock would kill me if he had the chance,” he said later.

But the beating proved to be the kill team’s undoing. When a physician’s assistant examined Stoner the next day, she saw the angry red welts covering his body. She also saw the large tattoo across Stoner’s back. In gothic type, beneath a grinning red skull flanked by two grim reapers, it read:

what if im not the hero

what if im the bad guy

Stoner was sent to talk to Army investigators. In the course of recounting the assault, he described how Gibbs had thrown the severed fingers on the floor. The investigators pressed him about how Gibbs came by the fingers. Stoner told them it was because the platoon had killed a lot of innocent people.

At that point, the investigators asked Stoner to start from the beginning. When had the platoon killed innocent people? Bit by bit, Stoner laid out the whole history, naming names and places and times.

As other members of the platoon were called in and interviewed, many confirmed Stoner’s account and described the shootings for investigators. Morlock, who proved particularly gregarious, agreed to speak on videotape. Relaxed and unconcerned in front of the camera, he nonchalantly described the kills in detail.

Morlock’s confession kicked off an intense search for evidence. When the Army’s investigators were dispatched to FOB Ramrod, they went straight to the top of a Hesco barrier near Gibbs’ housing unit. Right where Morlock said it would be, they found the bottom of a plastic water bottle containing two pieces of cloth. Inside each piece of cloth was a severed human finger. But then a strange thing happened. When investigators compared prints of the two fingers to those in the company’s database, the prints didn’t match up. Either the records were screwed up, which was quite possible, or there were more dead guys out there who were unaccounted for.

Last week, on March 23rd, Morlock was sentenced to 24 years in prison after agreeing to testify against Gibbs. “The Army wants Gibbs,” says one defense lawyer. “They want to throw him in jail and move on.” Gibbs insists that all three killings he took part in were “legitimate combat engagements.” Three other low-level soldiers facing murder charges – Winfield, Holmes and Wagnon – also maintain their innocence. As for the other men in Bravo Company, five have already been convicted of lesser crimes, including drug use, stabbing a corpse and beating up Stoner, and two more face related charges. In December, Staff Sgt. Stevens was sentenced to nine months in prison after agreeing to testify against Gibbs. He was stripped to the lowest service rank – private E-1 – but over the protests of military prosecutors, he was allowed to remain in the Army.

So far, though, no officers or senior officials have been charged in either the murders or the cover-up. Last October, the Army quietly launched a separate investigation, guided by Brig. Gen. Stephen Twitty, into the critical question of officer accountability. But the findings of that inquiry, which was concluded last month, have been kept secret – and the Army refuses to say whether it has disciplined or demoted any of the commanders responsible for 3rd Platoon. Even if the commanding officers were not co-conspirators or accomplices in the crimes, they repeatedly ignored clear warning signs and allowed a lethally racist attitude to pervade their unit. Indeed, the resentment of Afghans was so commonplace among soldiers in the platoon that when Morlock found himself being questioned by Army investigators, he expressed no pity or remorse about the murders.

Toward the end of Morlock’s interview, the conversation turned to the mindset that had allowed the killings to occur. “None of us in the platoon – the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant – no one gives a fuck about these people,” Morlock said.

Then he leaned back in his chair and yawned, summing up the way his superiors viewed the people of Afghanistan. “Some shit goes down,” he said, “you’re gonna get a pat on the back from your platoon sergeant: Good job. Fuck ’em.”

Published: 28 March, 2011

Qatar has become the first Arab country to recognise Libya’s rebel national council as the representative of the North African nation, easing the way for the opposition to profit from oil sales on global markets.

Over the past two days, rebels have seized control of the bulk of Libya’s oil industry – including the country’s largest oilfields in the so-called Sirte basin and the main terminals – as they have pushed back Muammer Gaddafi’s forces with the assistance of Nato air strikes.

A Libyan opposition leader said that Qatar had also agreed to sell oil on its behalf in international markets – although Qatari officials were on Monday unavailable to comment on any such deal. But Washington made clear that opposition oil sales need not be subject to the sanctions imposed on Libya.

However, US Treasury officials cautioned that the rebels would have to create a payment mechanism that did not involve the Gaddafi-controlled National Oil Company, the central bank or any other government institutions.

The Qatari news agency said that the national council, which until now has only been recognised by France, had “practically become the representative of Libya and its people”.

Interactive: The fighting in Libya

The current situation in the fighting between opposition fighters and forces loyal to Col Muammer Gaddafi

Doha is already providing an economic lifeline to the rebels, supplying them with petrol, diesel and cooking gas and helping to avert a fuel crisis.

Libya’s oil production has dropped to a trickle from a pre-crisis level of 1.6m barrels a day, triggering a price rally in global oil markets and forcing Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, to boost its production to offset the shortfall.

Opposition officials said they could boost production to about 400,000 b/d. At current prices of $115 per barrel, the exports would be worth $1.4bn a month.

Ali Tarhouni, a rebel official in charge of economic and oil matters, said Libya’s opposition could return to the global market within weeks. “We contacted the oil company of Qatar and thankfully they agreed to take all the oil that we wish to export and market this oil for us,” he told reporters in Benghazi.

But Lawrence Eagles, head of oil research at JPMorgan, said there were still significant “operational constraints” for the return of Libyan oil exports.

“Although fighting in and around the key export infrastructure has diminished, as opposition forces continue to make gains, it remains far from clear as to the operational readiness of vessels to dock at Libyan ports and the status of onshore facilities to load oil,” he said.

Western oil traders are unlikely to start buying oil from the rebels as soon as the legality of the move becomes clear, analysts said. Moreover, some of the largest buyers of Libyan oil, including Eni of Italy, Total of France and Repsol YPF of Spain, have operations in both the rebel-controlled east and the Gaddafi regime-controlled west, potentially deterring them from buying the rebels’ crude.

But developing nations such as China and India, which in the past had bought Libyan oil in relatively large quantities, could move faster, analysts said.

Foreign ministers from 35 countries will meet in London Tuesday to discuss Libya’s future amid hopes that the African Union will provide Col Gaddafi with an exit from Libya by offering asylum.

28 March 2011

 

 

Science and environment correspondent, BBC News

China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 – far earlier than expected.

That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy.

The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback.

An analysis of published research – one of the key measures of scientific effort – reveals an “especially striking” rise by Chinese science.

The study, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, charts the challenge to the traditional dominance of the United States, Europe and Japan.

The figures are based on the papers published in recognised international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier.

In 1996, the first year of the analysis, the US published 292,513 papers – more than 10 times China’s 25,474.

By 2008, the US total had increased very slightly to 316,317 while China’s had surged more than seven-fold to 184,080.

Previous estimates for the rate of expansion of Chinese science had suggested that China might overtake the US sometime after 2020.

But this study shows that China, after displacing the UK as the world’s second leading producer of research, could go on to overtake America in as little as two years’ time.

“Projections vary, but a simple linear interpretation of Elsevier’s publishing data suggests that this could take place as early as 2013,” it says.

Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, chair of the report, said he was “not surprised” by this increase because of China’s massive boost to investment in R&D.

Chinese spending has grown by 20% per year since 1999, now reaching over $100bn, and as many as 1.5 million science and engineering students graduated from Chinese universities in 2006.

“I think this is positive, of great benefit, though some might see it as a threat and it does serve as a wake-up call for us not to become complacent.”

The report stresses that American research output will not decline in absolute terms and raises the possibility of countries like Japan and France rising to meet the Chinese challenge.

“But the potential for China to match American output in terms of sheer numbers in the near to medium term is clear.”

Quality questions

The authors describe “dramatic” changes in the global scientific landscape and warn that this has implications for a nation’s competitiveness.

According to the report, “The scientific league tables are not just about prestige – they are a barometer of a country’s ability to compete on the world stage”.

Along with the growth of the Chinese economy, this is yet another indicator of China’s extraordinarily rapid rise as a global force.

However the report points out that a growing volume of research publications does not necessarily mean in increase in quality.

One key indicator of the value of any research is the number of times it is quoted by other scientists in their work.

Although China has risen in the “citation” rankings, its performance on this measure lags behind its investment and publication rate.

“It will take some time for the absolute output of emerging nations to challenge the rate at which this research is referenced by the international scientific community.”

The UK’s scientific papers are still the second most-cited in the world, after the US.

Dr Cong Cao, associate professor at Nottingham University’s School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, agrees with the assessment that the quantity of China’s science is yet not matched by its quality.

A sociologist originally from Shanghai, Dr Cao told the BBC: “There are many millions of graduates but they are mandated to publish so the numbers are high.

“It will take many years for some of the research to catch up to Western standards.”

As to China’s motivation, Dr Cao believes that there is a determination not to be dependent on foreign know-how – and to reclaim the country’s historic role as a global leader in technology.