Libya Mi6 CIA - "more truthful" NEWS

For your information, here a few "slightly more truthful" news (from the Guardian Ticker)

• Anti-aircraft fire and explosions shook Tripoli again tonight with reports of missile hits on ports and naval facilities to the east and in the capital itself.
• third night of air strikes against Libya, with no sign of an end in sight.
• The UN Security Council has rejected a Libyan request for an emergency meeting
• 9.07pm: Al Jazeera's correspondent in Tripoli says this evening she saw flames rising from what she was told was a Libyan naval base.
• 9.00pm: As allied missiles rain down on Libyan targets for a third successive night ...
• air strikes in Tripoli hit Gaddafi's sprawling Bab al-Aziziya complex:
• The destruction within the compound has generated questions about the objective of the military campaign, and Obama described  how the United States was leading an air assault with one set of goals while pursuing another objective on its own.
• "Our military action is in support of an international mandate from the Security Council that specifically focuses on the humanitarian threat posed by Col. Gaddafi to his people. Not only was he carrying out murders of civilians but he threatened more," the president said
• The legality of targeting Gaddafi appears to be causing differences of opinion in Britain and the US.
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/mar/21/libya-military-action-live-updates

IMHO the best article so far:

(it was written before the bombing!  How prophetic!)

The US media is steaming with righteous indignation over the awfulness of Libya's wicked Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, and is once again baying for his blood.

"On to Libya! Down with the Tyrant of Tripoli!" That's the latest hue and cry from North America's lynch mob of right wingers, jingoistic media, and neoconservative jackals. Once again there's talk of war against a small, almost defenseless nation that can't seriously fight back. What Imperial Britain used to call, "a jolly little war."

War fever over Libya is gripping the United States. After a hiatus of nine years, in which he was a useful ally to western interests, Col. Muammar Gadaffi is once again the monster we love to hate. It's damned hard trying to keep track of when we love him and when we hate him. Not so long ago he was our bosom buddy in the "war on terror." Now, he's a devil all over again.

The right thinks it sees a golden opportunity in Libya's current civil war to get rid of the unloved Gadaffi, "liberate" Libya's high-grade oil, and halt the wave uprisings now flaring across the Arab world.

We heard this same siren song about Iraq: an evil dictator oppressing his people, seas of oil, arsenals of dangerous weapon, an enemy of Israel.

Leaders of the US, Britain, France, and Germany who were happy to hold hands with Gadaffi, take his money, and buy his premium oil now suddenly brand him a monster. There is enough hypocrisy over former ally Libya to float the US 6th Fleet.

A US-British-French-Canadian invasion of Libya is sugarcoated as a humanitarian mission to rescue Libyan civilians from supposedly murderous air strikes by Gadaffi's comically inept air force, which has trouble just getting airborne. 

But hardly any mention is made in the US of the 65 Afghan civilians recently killed by a US air strike, or the nine Afghan boys collecting wood on a hillside massacred by US helicopter gunships last week

Nor about repeated US air strikes on Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen that have killed large numbers of civilians. When we do it, it's "collateral damage" and "stuff happens."

Last week, Afghanistan's US-installed leader, Hamid Karzai, demanded the US halt air strikes that are killing many civilians and provoking outrage across Afghanistan. Even Pakistan's feeble, spineless US-installed regime is also making similar demands as US drones terrorize the Northwest Frontier.

All the blazing criticism of Gadaffi seems shameless and hypocritical in light of US and NATO actions in South Asia, Yemen, and Somalia.

Meanwhile, US, British, French, and Canadian special forces are likely operating in eastern Libya, training, arming and even fighting alongside anti-Gadaffi irregular forces and jamming Tripoli's communications.

The oldest trick in the imperial playbook is to foment an uprising, then call for outside help.

This writer has reported for weeks that Britain's elite Special Air Service (SAS) has been rallying anti-Gadaffi forces in and around Benghazi, seizing desert oil installations, and helping attack pro-Gadaffi forces. Britain has stoutly denied this.

Then, oh dear! To London's monumental embarrassment, eight SAS and intelligence officers from MI6 Secret Intelligence Service were arrested in Libya. They have since departed aboard a British warship. But this contingent was only one of many active in Libya and made liars of the British government. Sticky wicket, what!

Speaking of double standards, the Brits, who have been howling about Somali pirates, grabbed a Libya-bound freighter laden with Libyan currency in the finest tradition of Sir Henry Morgan. Washington is trying to put the grabbers on Libya's $70 billion sovereign wealth fund. The age of piracy is not dead.

Attention all despots and tyrants: you are well advised to follow the example of big time drug dealers in the 1970's and 80's. Put your moolah in Russian banks, where it is safe from US authorities. China will also be a safe haven for flight money and swag. 


Meanwhile, Libya is sinking into civil war. The tribes of eastern Libya, and the city of Benghazi, have always been opposed to Gadaffi and to western Libya. British intelligence has been active in Benghazi for thirty years, stirring up anti-Gadaffi sentiment and trying to subvert his rule.

In 1998, Britain's MI6 mounted an unsuccessful attempt in Benghazi to murder Gadaffi with a car bomb because of his support for the IRA. Many civilians died. Now, the Brits have gone into high gear, apparently trying to reassert London's influence over its former oil-rich former colony.

Libya is very fragile and appears to be coming apart at the seams as its civil war spreads. It only became a unitary state in 1951 when its three independent regions, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan were merged.

Eastern Libya is the home of one of the most important historic Arab liberation movements, the Senoussi, who in the early 20th century, came close to pushing the French and Spaniards out of North Africa.

As regional and tribal civil war flares, oil-hungry foreign power sharks circle Libya, just as Col. Gadaffi warned. Libya may end up be splintered by outside intervention, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. "Divide et impera," as the Romans said, divide and rule.

Having learned nothing from America's trillion-dollar apiece fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington's national security circles are eager to invade Libya. Plans to attack Iran and/or Pakistan have been postponed. Libya's oil riches are too good to pass up.

However, some voices of reason are still heard in Washington. Our cautious, seasoned defense secretary, Robert Gates, stated his very strong opposition to any no-fly zone and/or ground invasion of Libya, warning the US can't risk or afford a third major war when 40% of every dollar spent by the US government is being borrowed from China or Japan.

Former CIA chief Gates is quite right. A no-fly zone would soon draw the US into ground combat and into the midst of a confusing tribal conflict no one in Washington understands. This is precisely what happened in Afghanistan, where America found itself in the middle of a civil war between its Communist-dominated Tajik/Uzbek allies and the majority Pashtun.

The supposed "cakewalk" in Iraq turned into a quagmire tying down 50,000 US troops costing $1 trillion to date. The US is now getting ever deeper involved in conflicts in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan's Northwest Frontier, and, most lately, Djibouti.

For now, Tehran is breathing easy thanks to Col. Gadaffi.

Another person who must be relishing this spectacle is the elusive Osama bin Laden (assuming he is alive). Bin Laden's primary goal is overthrowing US-backed autocratic regimes across the Muslim world. Attacking western targets that supported them was only secondary.

Col. Gadaffi was not totally wrong when he blamed al-Qaida for Libya's uprising. Bin Laden was not pulling the strings of Libya's rebellion, but al-Qaida's revolutionary philosophy and anti-western jihad certainly inspired many young people from Morocco to Bangladesh.

That's Washington's big problem. Invading Libya will intensify the fires burning in the Arab world and create yet another anti-western jihad.

This is exactly Osama bin Laden's strategy: draw the bull in the china shop – US into many small wars in the Muslim world – and so bleed it dry. So far, the US has been cooperating with Osama's master plan.

Caution over Libya is strongly advised. We have had enough fools charging in where knowledgeable men fear to tread.
March 8, 2011



Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday likened the UN Security Council resolution supporting military action in Libya to medieval calls for crusades.

"The resolution is defective and flawed," Mr. Putin told workers at a Russian ballistic missile factory. "It allows everything. It resembles medieval calls for crusades."

Mr. Putin said that interference in other countries' internal affairs has become a trend in U.S. foreign policy and that the events in Libya indicated that Russia should strengthen its own defence capabilities.

Russia, a veto-wielding permanent Security Council member, abstained from the vote on Thursday in which the council authorized a no-fly zone over Libya and "all necessary measures" to protect civilians against Gaddafi's forces.

China's most important political newspaper ratcheted up the country's criticism of Western airstrikes against Libya on Monday, comparing them to the U.S.-led invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Communist Party's flagship newspaper, The People's Daily, said in a commentary that the United States and its allies are violating international rules and that in places like Iraq "the unspeakable suffering of its people are a mirror and a warning."

Aerial bombing victim -- rawa.org

AMY GOODMAN: It's interesting that this takes place on the anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Absolutely. And there are extraordinary, dangerous parallels here, both to the 2003 invasion of Iraq eight years ago, also to the 1991 U.S. war against Iraq, where you have more of a parallel of the U.S. bribing and threatening and punishing other countries to force a vote in the U.N. Security Council to bring a veneer of legality, even though there was no real legitimacy, just as they did this time. You had, in this case, a vote of 10 in favor and five abstentions; no one voted against. And one of the big issues, of course, is why Russia and China, who both were against this resolution, did not vote against it, which would have stopped it, would have vetoed it; why South Africa voted for it; why Brazil, Germany and India abstained, rather than voting against. There are some very serious questions here about what kind of pressure might have been brought to bear on those governments to arrange that kind of a vote.

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis, talk about the role of the Arab League and the African Union.

PHYLLIS BENNIS: Both of them played a very key role in making this happen. This was an interesting situation, Amy, where, unlike 1991, the U.S. was not initially in favor of establishing a U.N.-based no-fly zone over Libya. There was a fear among some, particularly in the military in the U.S., that a no-fly zone alone wouldn't be enough, that they wouldn't be able to do their job. And so, for some, they said, "Well, we shouldn't endorse it." The position of Hillary Clinton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, Samantha Power, others in and around the State Department, said, "Well, in that case, let's get a different resolution. Let's get a resolution that goes way beyond a no-fly zone." And to do that, we can only do it with legitimacy, according to President Obama's own view, if we have the Arab League and African support.

As a result, they went to the Arab League, were able to get the Arab League to support a rather vague resolution before the U.N. voted, that said there should be a no-fly zone. It was very cautious, and it made a lot of caveats about how there should be no foreign troops on the ground, no real foreign intervention, but it did support a no-fly zone. The African Union was far more reticent, and ultimately it became clear that the African Union was not going to sign on, so we heard a shift in the position of the U.S. administration, where all of a sudden we were no longer hearing that we need Arab and African support. We were just hearing, "We need Arab support," because that's what they knew they could get. They did not get the Arab—sorry, the African Union on board.

And indeed, as you mentioned, since the bombardment began, which of course has gone way beyond a no-fly zone, as according to the U.N. resolution, the African Union has tried to send a delegation to Libya to begin negotiations between the two sides. The U.N. refused to give them permission. It's not clear who was in that position of authority to authorize or not authorize—and in this case, refuse to authorize—the African Union delegation from going to Libya.

The position of the Arab League has shifted, as well. As you mentioned, the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, the Egyptian, has said that what the U.S. and the French and the Brits have done has gone way beyond the no-fly zone that the Arab League supported, even though Libya—sorry, even though Lebanon, as a member of the Security Council, the only Arab member of the Council, voted in the name of the Arab group, the Arab League itself, saying that they supported the U.N. resolution, which of course called for military strikes far beyond a no-fly zone. So, right now, the U.S., the French, the Brits, along with several other European countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy—are carrying out a military attack on Libya without support from either Arab or African forces.

AMY GOODMAN: What's their goal, Phyllis, finally?

PHYLLIS BENNIS: This is the big question. There's no question that the political goal is the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi. The U.N. resolution is very clear that the only use of military force can be for the protection of civilians, not for the ouster of anyone. So there have been separate statements—we want Gaddafi out, Gaddafi has lost legitimacy, etc.—statements that seem to indicate that even negotiations might not be acceptable, but the official position of the military is we are there to protect civilians. How that's going to happen if bombing raids continue on Libyan cities is a very big question.

AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis, thank you very much for joining us