Tag: Libya

Lie To Me

Barack Obama recently issued an executive order imposing a wave of sanctions against Libya, not only freezing Libyan assets, but barring Americans from having business dealings with Libyan banks.

So raise your hand if you knew that the United States has been extending billions of dollars in aid to Qaddafi and to the Central Bank of Libya, through a Libyan-owned subsidiary bank operating out of Bahrain. And raise your hand if you knew that, just a week or so after Obama’s executive order, the U.S. Treasury Department quietly issued an order exempting this and other Libyan-owned banks to continue operating without sanction.

More: Why is the Fed Bailing Out Qaddafi?, Matt Taibbi, April 01, 2011

US Libya Intervention Is Aggression

Glen Ford, co-founder of the Black Agenda Report and author of The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of the Grenada Invasion, talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the Libya “humanitarian intervention” by the US, the UK, France and the other “coalition” member countries, with his analysis of the causes and goals of the intervention, saying that…

…it is an imperial assault. We don’t need to lose sight of the forest just because individual trees are acting this way and that. What we’re seeing is a unified Euro-American assault on a major oil producer. But the context must include what people are calling the “Arab Spring”, this Arab nationalist reawakening. And that had Washington and all the smaller imperial capitals very, very confused and off-balance. They desperately wanted to find some way that they could appropriate to themselves some part of the Arab reawakening. Libya has provided that opportunity to them, or they have provided themselves with the opportunity to somehow identify with rising Arab nationalist forces, which they will of course call democratic, even though if they come to power in Libya it will be by force of United States and European arms.

[snip]

They targeted [Gaddafi] because they had the opportunity. They also, as I said earlier, were desperately seeking a way to put themselves on the right side of the Arab reawakening, and this was an opportunity. As well, it was what the Saudi’s wanted. It’s well known, it’s been known for a very long time, that the Saudi leadership and Gaddafi were at knife’s edge. Gaddafi liked to bait them and, well, badmouth them, and kings and monarchs don’t like that. So it was an opportunity to take him out. And just because he was collaborating with the United States and the Europeans, collaborating with AFRICOM in terms of operations to find al-Qaeda, just because he was doing that does not mean he was considered reliable. What the imperialists want is a regime that will totally open up the country to Western corporate penetration. They cannot tolerate independence of any kind. They can’t tolerate any nationalism except their own French nationalism or United States nationalism. And that’s why they’re so off balance with his reawakening of Arab nationalism.



Real News Network – April 5, 2011

US Libya Intervention Is Aggression

Glen Ford: The US intervention does not have humanitarian objectives

…full transcript follows…

The US, Saudi Deal over Libya


You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a “yes” vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya – the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online. According to diplomatic protocol, their names cannot be disclosed. One of the diplomats said, “This is the reason why we could not support resolution 1973. We were arguing that Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were similar cases, and calling for a fact-finding mission. We maintain our official position that the resolution is not clear, and may be interpreted in a belligerent manner.”

As Asia Times Online has reported, a full Arab League endorsement of a no-fly zone is a myth. Of the 22 full members, only 11 were present at the voting. Six of them were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. Syria and Algeria were against it. Saudi Arabia only had to “seduce” three other members to get the vote.

Translation: only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone. The vote was essentially a House of Saud-led operation, with Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa keen to polish his CV with Washington with an eye to become the next Egyptian President.

Thus, in the beginning, there was the great 2011 Arab revolt. Then, inexorably, came the US-Saudi counter-revolution.

More… from Pepe Escobar today

“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”

Ronald Reagan once claimed that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’

But of course that senile stooge for Big Money got it wrong. The nine most terrifying words in any language are…

“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”

Soldier2

My update of the Reagan Doctrine (insofar as that senile stooge ever had a “doctrine,” or even an idea, except stooging for Big Money) occurred to me when Baghdad was selected as the worst city in the world on the Mercer 2010 Quality of Life Survey.

After seven years of beneficent American occupation!

And Baghdad had to beat out some real humdingers among messed up cities to win that prize!

More messed up than Khartoum?

SUDAN/

You betcha!

Baghdad copy

This was reminiscent of some recent headlines from Afghanistan, selected by Save the Children as the worst place in the world to be born. The worst place to be a mother! The worst place to be a child!

afghan_children_poor

After nine long years of American “assistance!”

And now it’s Libya’s turn to hear those terrifying words…

“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”

And isn’t it just too fucking perfect that Obama can send that message from everybody’s favorite guided missile destroyer… the USS Barry!

ss-110331-libya-07_ss_full

The guided-missile destroyer USS Barry launches a Tomahawk cruise missile from the ship’s bow in the Mediterranean Sea on March 29. Barry is currently supporting Joint Task Force (JTF) Odyssey Dawn as part of the international response to the unrest in Libya.

At The Libyan Tunisian Border: Few Libyans Fleeing Libya?

In a video report from McClatchy News, Shashank Bengali reports on the situation at one western Libya/Tunisia border crossing, describing a scene of very few people – mostly non-Libyan migrant workers – leaving Libya, with most who are crossing calling the situation internally in Libya “fine”. What seems to be unclear is why not many Libyan nationals are leaving if conditions in the country are as bad as depicted in western media:



McClatchy via Real News Network – March 28, 2011

Report From Libyan Tunisian Border

Shashank Bengali: At crossing few Libyans going into Tunisia, most exiting are migrant workers.

…transcript follows…

S02E08: The Situation in Libya

cross-posted from Main Street Insider

We gave you a sneak preview of this episode on Thursday. This week we examine the details of the no-fly zone over Libya established on March 17th. Though there has been wide speculation about what is not allowed under this resolution, the truth is that the only thing expressly forbidden is an occupation. After that, any action that the Security Council deems necessary to protect civilians or benefit the Libyan people could be approved.

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – “I Have Here in My Hand a List of…”

Note: I kept getting errors about text being corrupted while trying to post the complete diary.  This is only half the diary.  There are many more sections and editorial cartoons in this diary that I posted over at Daily Kos.

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette



Peter King – Ghost of Hearings Past by Taylor Jones, Politicalcartoons.com, Buy this cartoon

The Curious Libya ‘opposition’

Who exactly are these rebels we’re supporting?

A short quote from a very exhaustive annotated article:

The so-called Libyan opposition itself is a hodge-podge mix of political opportunists, ex-CIA-trained Mujahideen guerillas such as Abdel Hakim al-Hasidi of the so-called Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who openly admits to close ties to al-Qaeda going back to Afghanistan.12 That certainly raises the level of incredibility of Washington’s most bizarre military crusade of recent times.

As well, the opposition includes former senior Gaddafi regime members who saw greener grass on the US, British and French-backed opposition side, and outright cutthroats who, encouraged by Washington, London or Paris smelled the chance to grab control of one of the richest lands on Earth.

Their “opposition,” unlike in Tunisia or elsewhere, was never “non-violent.” It was an armed revolt from the git-go, a war of tribe against tribe, not of surging aspirations for democracy. NATO member countries are being told by Washington to back one band of tyrants to oust another whose agenda does not comply with what the Pentagon calls Full Spectrum Dominance.

Who’s in that mirror?

Greenwald suggests that the equation “Obama = Bush” is a “banal expression of indisputable fact.”  Why not attack Yemeni tyrants? Bahrain?  Indeed, the Saudis?  He rhetorically asks.

(Heh.  My cognitive indeedyeum is exhausted from absolute impregnation.  My imaginary shrink long ago recommended an Indeedy-otomy (to the Ottomanth power!).)

IOZ, on the other leg, clutches the problem in his barely-civilized dewclaws, pretty much ignoring the whole “war for oil” banalities of indisputable, polydactyl heft, and jack-knifes into the relatively virgin snow-drift of the current ice-cold season to pluck a perhaps more deeply, ever-burrowing, nutritive-and-crunchy-if-intestinally-waste-filled rodent of truth: that “the roots of our narcissism drink from a deep well of insecurity that requires we constantly blow shit up lest we admit to human limitations.”

In either case, we are blotted and defamed by the distances between what can be and what is.

We can’t decide whether the Hubble telescope is preferable to depleted uranium cyclops babies, because we fear not being able to afford the Hubble without tortured cyclops babies from Omelas.

In our dwindling, guttering humanity, there remain big hearts and minds amenable to reason and empathy, dignity approaching our capacities for reason and empathy.

Cheers to you.

UN Security Council Resolution 1973

cross-posted from Main Street Insider

There has been a lot of talk in recent days about just what exactly is allowed under the United Nations Security Council resolution issuing a no-fly zone over Libya. We want to make sure everyone has a clear grasp of what this resolution, S/Res/1973 (2011), actually does, so we are giving a sneak preview of next week’s episode by releasing the one-page summary. The video for this episode will be available on Monday.

Special Comment: Libya, Obama and the Five-Second Rule

The Official Not-For-Profit Blog of Keith Olbermann



Keith Olbermann

FOK News Channel

foknewschannel.com

Humanitarian Intervention My Ass

It wasn’t me. I had no part of it. I was nowhere near the place. I was on the other side of town at the time. I tried to tell them it was not a good idea and that they shouldn’t try it, but they just wouldn’t listen.




(Reuters) – Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.

“I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet,” Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.

Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world’s problems, warned that water supplies on Earth were drying up.

“Careful! Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts,” Chavez said, sipping from a glass of water.

He added that the West’s attacks on Libya were about water and oil reserves.

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