The Libyan Puzzle in the Scramble for Africa

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-libyan-puzzle-in-the-scramble-for-africa/5355475

By Sam Muhho

As a new era in history has begun to dawn on humanity, new doors are being opened in both opportunities and also in the realms of potential threats and conflagrations. This reality has been noted most clearly in the developing affairs of Africa, a continent that is on the verge of transformation through both technology and evolving international interactions. In the face of potential progress driven by Africa’s lucrative natural resources and economic potential, an ominous threat looms above Africa, the threat of the neo-imperialist, globalist agenda which has scarred the face of humanity with its continual drive of global hegemony. This “globalist agenda” is a militarized corporatism in a neo-imperialist system operating from all sides of the western political spectrum and representing the corporate elite of Wall Street and London; no clearer was the nefarious nature of these interests shown than in the subversion of Libya two years ago in 2011.

Before delving into the demise of Libya, it is necessary to understand neo-imperialisms’ ambitions for Africa; its goal is the subjection of Africa into its orbit in order to serve as a critical lynchpin in the establishment of a unipolar world order (including ousting potential Chinese competition). The unipolar world order is the creating of a single center of global economic, political, and military power coupled with the control of international trade and the distribution of resources as is admittedly the agenda noted by Dr. Carroll Quigley in his “Tragedy and Hope” among various other publications from western corporate-financier think tanks ranging from the Council on Foreign Relations to the Brookings Institute. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also spoken of hegemonic ambitions on the part of the west to establish a unipolar order at a 2007 Munich conference.

As Libya again takes prominence again in the media with the increasing unrest even provoking a mobilization of U.S. Marines from Spain to Italy, across from Libya, hinting a potential military involvement in the already decimated state, it is important to review the foundational history of the current Libyan dilemma before the “disinfo” echo chamber of the mainstream media begins a new full-throttle propaganda blitz. The increasing urgency for this review is news headlines even alleging a “new war” in Libya because of militia rivalries.

Libya has recently been ravished by increasing internal strife and ethno-tribal divisions that was the continuation of NATO’s systematic destruction of the nation-state in 2011. In  Dr. Webster Tarpley’s “Al Qaeda: Pawns of CIA Insurrection from Libya to Yemen”, it was explained that four primary factors contributed to the Libyan “revolution” in 2011 with the primary one being racist and monarchist elements among the eastern Libyan Harabi and Obeidat tribes found in the Benghazi-Darna-Tobruk corridor who had historically resented Gaddafi for toppling the western-backed King Idris which hailed from that region. This would explain why many of the protestors in eastern Libya were photographed carrying pictures of King Idris. That is not to say that all participants in the opposition were negative elements but it cannot be denied that negative elements had been pervasive as pawns of the western subversion and even culminated in the wide presence of Al Qaeda flags in Benghazi, even atop the Benghazi courthouse, reflecting the prominent role of radical Islamist militias that will be discussed below. It is not to be forgotten that insurrectionary activity is not new in this region as Gaddafi had witnessed continuous waves of strife and militarized opposition, often propped up by the west for geopolitical purposes, and this was reflected during an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s, often with racial overtones. Tony Cartalucci in “Libya at Any Cost” documented the censored history of unrest in Libya driven by western interests:

1980′s: US-CIA backed National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) made multiple attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and initiate armed rebellion throughout Libya.
1990′s: Noman Benotman and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) wage a campaign of terror against Qaddafi with Osama Bin Laden’s assistance.
1994: LIFG kills 2 German anti-terrorism agents. Qaddafi seeks arrest warrant for Osama Bin Laden in connection to the attack but is blocked by MI6 who was concurrently aiding the LIFG.
2003: Upon Qaddafi’s abandonment of WMD programs, Libya’s collaboration with MI6 & the CIA to identify and expose the LIFG networks begins, giving Western intelligence a windfall of information regarding the group. Ironically this information would give Western nations an entire army to rebuild and turn against Qaddafi in 2011.
2005: NFSL’s Ibrahim Sahad founds the National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO) in London England.
2011: Early February, the London based NCLO calls for a Libyan “Day of Rage,” beginning the “February 17th revolution.”
2011: Late February, NFSL/NCLO’s Ibrahim Sahad is leading opposition rhetoric, literally in front of the White House in Washington D.C. Calls for no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi is strafing “unarmed protesters” with warplanes.
2011: Late February, Senators Lieberman and McCain and UK PM David Cameron call for providing air cover for Libyan rebels as well as providing them additional arms.
2011: Early March; it is revealed UK SAS special forces are already operating inside Libya
2011: Mid-March; UN adopts no-fly zone over Libya, including air strikes. Immediately, the mission is changed from “protecting civilians” to “ousting Qaddafi.” Egypt violates the arms embargo of UN r.1973 with Washington’s full knowledge by supplying Libyan rebels with weapons, while Al Qaeda’s ties to the rebels are admitted by everyone including the rebels themselves.
2011: Late April; Documented evidence is revealed that Libya’s rebels are conducting a barbaric campaign, employing extrajudicial killings, indiscriminate military force, child-soldiers, landmines, and torture. New York Times blames a lack of support.
2011: Late April, early May; Followed by calls to assassinate Qaddafi, ordnance crash into his son’s home killing him and 3 of Qaddafi’s grandchildren. NATO concurrently seeks a new UN resolution authorizing ground troops while aggressor states seek to release seized Libyan assets to the rebels

This tribally-based resentment that categorized much of the violence in 2011 contributed to racially-driven atrocities committed against Libyan blacks that make up a third of the Libyan population and inhabit the western regions including the Fezzan tribes of the Libyan southwest. Dr. Webster Tarpley also documented the prominent role of Al Qaeda mercenaries in the Libyan conflict whose nest in eastern Libya had been a world-leading nurturing ground for extremism according to the US Military Academy at West Point’s “Combating Terrorism Center” (CTC) 2007 reports on foreign fighters in Iraq. The key rebel city of Darna, for example, was commandeered by a rebel terrorist triumvirate featuring Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, formerly of the Al Qaeda-tied “Libyan Islamic Fighting Group” (LIFG), who fought against NATO forces in Afghanistan. At his side were Sufian bin-Kumu, Osama bin Laden’s former chauffeur and an inmate at Guantánamo Bay for six years, as well as al-Barrani who is also a devoted member of LIFG.

Tarpley does an excellent job in demonstrating how such figures were not atypical but were the norm in a region that was the world’s “terrorist capital” according to the CTC. It is also disturbing to note the desperate attempts at damage control by the CTC in the wake of NATO’s disastrous intervention where previously documented facts were purposefully obscured and spun to cover NATO’s illegitimacy. Tarpley also documented the role of western assets such as the Libyan National Salvation Front as well as the French-assisted defection of top-Qaddafi associate Nouri Mesmari in 2010 who would later collaborate with the west in fomenting military mutinies against Gaddafi in northeast Libya.

Being the only African nation to rank as “high” on the Human Development Index and boasting a highly developed infrastructure, Libya under Gaddafi has become the globalists’ geopolitical gateway into Africa. To the detriment of all free humanity, this gateway has been trampled down by the illegal NATO war on Libya which revolved around verified propaganda regarding Libya leader Muammar Gaddafi’s alleged atrocities, a misrepresentation of the Libyan rebels, and a complete media blackout regarding geopolitical forces at play. These claims would culminate in international myths spun around Gaddafi who was claimed to be bombing his people, hiring African mercenaries, and staging mass rapes to terrorize opposition as the official dogmas justifying NATO’s aggression.

 Integral to the narrative justifying NATO’s intervention revolved around painting Gaddafi as a brutal tyranny launching a bloody crackdown against a “peaceful” movement with a host other atrocities ranging from hiring African mercenaries, using the air force against protestors, staging mass rapes, and threatening “genocide” against Benghazi. The NATO narrative of the revolution being the noble Libyan masses rising up against Gaddafi and his mercenaries was painted most clearly in the early March 14, 2011 Reuters article titled, “Libyan jets bomb rebels, France pushes for no-fly zone.” In this typical mainstream media report, rhetorical justification is given for the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine in sanctioning a no-fly zone in Libya based on the tired narrative of Gaddafi using air power to brutally suppress what is seen as an indigenous uprising, seeming to be heading down the pathos becoming a “tragedy for Libya.” A warning for an upcoming bloodbath against Gaddafi was sounded. Interestingly, even the “Independent” would later publish an article debunking this, pointing out the unreliability and factually-depraved basis for this propaganda among other accusations levied against Gaddafi. This baseless propaganda, already having poisoned western perception of what happened in Libya, would later be supplemented with reports involving the role of alleged mercenaries and mass rapes to whip up justification for intervention.

 In reality, such a narrative was factually bankrupt as masterfully documented by Maximillain Forte in his “Top Ten Myths in the War Against Libya” which directly nails the illegitimacy of the NATO campaign. While Gaddafi is certainly no saint and while many groups did have legitimate grievances against him, he nonetheless had a solid support base in Libya while the rebels were overall lacking legitimacy and were being driven by Islamist radicals, exiled politicians with globalist ties, and decades of ethnically-based tension. Gaddafi had invested heavily into the infrastructure and the social structure of his country, bringing the country to nearly eradicating illiteracy and also combating homelessness which had previously been a constant problem. Women rights were also championed as women in Libya were allowed to study and work where they desired as even BBC noted.

While Gaddafi had invested in infrastructure, the globalists sought to offset this by asserting their presence in Libya through both the destruction of its infrastructure and seeking to bring Libya into their economic orbit. There was a concerted effort to undermine Gaddafi’s agenda of building a united, strong, and self-sufficient African community and strengthening African multilateral institutions. Furthermore, Libya provided a gateway into Africa for the Pentagon’s “AFRICOM” to undermine and oust Chinese economic interests on the African continent which were a major challenge for western corporate interests’ access to resources and economic hegemony. Another key point was Gaddafi’s goal of creating a single, gold-based, African currency called the “gold dinar” with which he planned to trade African oil for. This would have conflicted directly with western corporate and banking interests and their international fiat monetary system upon which the IMF and their “casino economy” is built. Countries’ purchasing power would be determined by the amount of gold they had as opposed to fiat paper currency that made no substantial backing.

 Regarding the specific claims of Gaddafi’s atrocities as parroted by the mainstream media, Forte gives many insights that help dismantle the myths behind the “humanitarian” war. For example, the claims of air strikes by Gaddafi are noted to have been a fabrication peddled by the BBC and Al Jazeera. The claims were completely unfounded and based on fake claims. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Mullen would admit during a Pentagon press conference that they had seen no confirmation of such reports. David Kirpatrick of the New York Times would be cited by Forte as admitting that, “the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories…and making vastly inflated claims about his [Gaddafi’s] behavior”.

 The claims of African mercenaries, integral to portraying Gaddafi as being on one side against Libya as a whole, were perhaps the most atrocious and racist of the myths, sprung from the rebels’ own tribal animosities towards indigenous Africans in Libya and migrant African workers that were common throughout the country. Human Rights Watch would claim that it found no evidence at all of African mercenaries in eastern Libya where the rebellion and fighting were centered and even noted that Gaddafi had attempted to end discrimination against these people, contradicting, as Forte noted, the rabid claims made throughout the mainstream press including Time Magazine, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. The Los Angeles Times also found no evidence of such mercenaries with the New York Times even pointing out the “racist overtones” involved in the conflict and the disinformation they helped spread. Amnesty International would later confirm that “mercenaries” put on display by the rebels had been undocumented African migrant workers and noted things like rampant discrimination and disproportionate detention of black Libyans in Az-Zawiya. Mainstream media and Al Jazeera would attempt to cover its crimes by pointing out, though briefly, the reality that Africans in Libya were being subjected to lootings, abduction, and killing by the rebels. All of this, of course, in light of the fact that Africans were an integral part of Libyan society, making up 33% of the population. A severe crime never to be forgotten is the ethnic cleansing of the beautiful black Libyan town of Tawargha, previously inhabited by 35,000 people, expelled by racist militants calling themselves, “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin.”Another crime was the systemic slaughter of blacks in western Libya by the eastern rebels advancing on Tripoli (see here as well).

Another hysteria peddled by the media revolved around Gaddafi’s alleged planning of mass rapes, often blamed on nonexistent “mercenaries, which was then used by the media to help garner sympathy to the rebels. The source for these claims, also adequately exposed by Forte, began with Al Jazeera, a propaganda outlet for the Wall Street-London backed Qatari regime, claiming that Gaddafi had distributed Viagra to his troops and ordered them to use rape against those who opposed him. These claims were then redistributed throughout the media and found their way to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo would later fraudulently claim that Gaddafi had ordered the rape of hundreds of women and that Gaddafi had personally ordered Viagra to be distributed. U.S. ambassador Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton would also make these allegations (see Forte’s article).

In reality, a UN rights inquiry in Libya headed by Cherif Bassiouni would find these claims a baseless “mass hysteria.” Bassiouni told of a woman to “claimed to have sent out over 70,000 questionnaires and received 60,000 responses, of which 259 reported sexual abuse.” Bassiouni would ask to see these questionnaires, but never receive them, casting doubt on the narrative. It was pointed out that it seems improbable that 70,000 questionnaires were sent out in March considering the fact that the postal service wasn’t working. Bassiouni whose team would uncover only 4 cases of sexual abuse in their study. The boxes of Viagra that Gaddafi supposedly distributed were found fully intact right next to burnt-out tanks, indicating staged propaganda (Forte). Further confirming this is Amnesty International and who further shamed the imperialist establishment and thoroughly shattered this lie. According to the “Independent”, “Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty, who was in Libya for three months after the start of the uprising, says that “we have not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped”.

The most disingenuous claim peddled by the media to justify the Libyan war was the “save Benghazi” crusade. While it is true that Gaddafi had employed “overblown” rhetoric threatening to fight from house to house and “squash the cockroaches”, the media emphasizing these claims admits the radical-extremists nature of the hordes fighting among the rebels. The same media would also disregard Gaddafi’s “overblown” rhetoric when it was convenient to do so but attached to the Benghazi narrative as it seemingly gave justification for NATO to intervene. There is no evidence that Gaddafi had genocide planned as he only made the charges to the armed groups causing upheaval in the east of the country and even offered them amnesty and an open passage into Egypt across the border to avoid bloodshed. Professor Alan J. Kuperman exposed the propaganda talking-points of this argument, citing as evidence for the fact that Gaddafi had no genocide planned the reality that he did not perpetuate it in areas that he had captured fully or partially from the rebels including Zawiya, Mistrata, and Ajdabiya.

 The very actions of NATO itself would discredit the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine employed to justify NATO’s intervention as NATO would be directly responsible for the deaths of countless civilians. NATO would gun down civilians in the central square of Zawiya and “taking a fairly liberal definition of command and control” facilities by targeting a residential district, killing some of Gaddafi’s family members and three of his grandchildren. NATO was also responsible for targeting Libya’s state television, killing three civilian journalists and earning condemnation by international journalist federations (see Forte’s article).

 NATO oversaw the death of 1,500 refugees fleeing Libya by sea, mostly sub-Saharan Africans, the same people who were baselessly demonized as mercenaries. NATO would ignore their distress calls even though refugees would make contact with vessels belonging to NATO members. NATO also would launch numerous unjustifiable strikes against Libya furthering the damage toll. Above all, NATO was giving cover to rebels who were perpetuating verifiable genocide against cities, such as Sirte, with NATO backing and airstrikes to order, cutting off electricity, food, and water and using bombardment against civilians. Under this blueprint of destruction, scores of people would die in multiples of what was happening initially in Benghazi against armed rebel gangs which Gaddafi was fighting making a mockery out of the pre-text used to justify their globalist, faux-humanitarian war in the first place (Forte).

NATO and the globalist war on Libya was one bankrupt of any moral grounding or political justification. It was a war born of compromised interests that sought not the liberation of an oppressed people but rather the pillages of Libya which would later serve as a gateway into the heart of Africa. While the globalists attempt to sell their wars as moral and for the betterment of the world, they are at heart driven only by a desire to spread hegemony and consolidate control, with the ultimate goal being global hegemony. Any attempt to invoke a moral cover should be shunned in light of the barrage of fake atrocities attributed to Gaddafi and complementing crimes by NATO, best captured in the lies regarding Gaddafi massacring his people, hiring mercenaries, and staging mass rapes among other echo chamber distortions. Only when we tear down the media’s curtain of deception can we better understand the events at play and position ourselves intellectually to combat globalist imperialism which seeks to subvert us all.