Libya in Anarchy Two Years after NATO Humanitarian Liberation

By F. William Engdahl
Global Research

In 2011 when Muhammar Qaddafi refused to leave quietly as ruler of Libya, the Obama Administration, hiding behind the skirts of the French, launched a ferocious bombing campaign and a “No Fly” zone over the country to aid the so-called fighters for democracy.

The US lied to Russia and China with help of the (US-friendly) Gulf Cooperation Council about the Security Council Resolution on Libya and used it to illegally justify the war. The doctrine, “responsibility to protect” was used instead, the same doctrine Obama wants to use in Syria. It’s useful top look at Libya two years after the NATO humanitarian intervention.

9/11: Who Really Benefited? Fact and Not Fiction

By Captain America
Global Research

Global Research Editor’s Note:

We bring to the attention of our readers this provocative review of the strategic and corporate interests behind 9/11 including Wall Street, the Texas oil companies and the defense contractors.

The statements in this article are corroborated by numerous studies, books, news articles and research reports published since September 2001.

In the course of almost ten years, Global Research has conducted a detailed review and analysis of the 9/11 attacks, focusing on their broad implications as well as their historical significance. See our 9/11 and the War on Terrorism Dossier.

Libya in Pictures: What Lamestream Media Does Not Tell You

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research

Mirage fighters, F16 fighters, B-2 Stealth bombers, 15,000 NATO air sorties. the bombing of thousands of civilian targets.. NATO is said to be coming to the rescue of the Libyan people. That is what we are being told.

Western journalists have quite deliberately distorted what is happening inside Libya. They have upheld NATO as an instrument of peace and democratization. They have endorsed an illegal and criminal war. They are instruments of US-NATO propaganda.

Global Research’s Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya reporting from Tripoli refutes the media consensus which uphold’s NATO’s humanitarian mandate. He provides us with a review of the mass rallies directed against NATO including extensive photographic evidence. ~Michel Chossudovsky

TRIPOLI. Friday of July 1, 2011 like many other Fridays has seen huge rallies in Tripoli’s Green Square.

NATO’s ‘Alternate Universe’ in Libya

By Wayne Madsen
Strategic Culture Foundation

The Pentagon and its NATO partners are engaged in one of the most obvious and intensive propaganda ploys in their military operations against Libya since the days leading up to the “Coalition of the Willing” attack on Iraq. Suggestions that the government of Muammar Qaddafi is on its last legs and that life in Tripoli has drawn to a standstill as a result of the NATO bombing campaign are not based on reality, as any unbiased observer who has recently been in Tripoli, has witnessed…

NATO has adopted Israeli-like “collective punishment” tactics for the people of government-controlled Libya. Fuel sanctions have resulted in long lines for gasoline in Tripoli, like these taxis (at the right) queued up for gasoline after shipments arrive at petrol stations. Credit: Wayne Madsen in Tripoli.

In addition to NATO’s “information war” against Libya, the corporate media press corps gathered in Tripoli, including notorious Pentagon war correspondents for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, have furthered the Pentagon’s and NATO’s propaganda claims by making false reports from the ground in Tripoli.

Latin America Shakes Off the US Yoke

By Mark Weisbrot
The Guardian

On Thursday, the United States expelled the ambassador from Ecuador, in retaliation for Wednesday’s expulsion of the US ambassador from Ecuador. This now leaves the United States without ambassadorial relations in three South American countries – Bolivia and Venezuela being the other two – thus surpassing the Bush administration in its diplomatic problems in the region.

US Ambassador Heather Hodges was declared “persona non grata” and asked to leave Ecuador “as soon as possible”, after a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks showed her saying some disparaging things about Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa. In the cable, she alleges that President Correa had knowledge of corruption by a former head of the national police.

Although the Bush administration intervened in the internal affairs of countries such as Bolivia and even Brazil, it was somewhat better at keeping its “eyes on the prize” and avoiding fights that would distract from its main goal. The prize, of course, is Venezuela – home to the largest oil reserves in the world, estimated by the US Geological Survey at 500bn barrels. Washington’s goal there for the last decade has been regime change. The Bush team understood that the more they fought with other countries in the region, the less credible would be their public relations story that Venezuela was the problem.

Libya’s Blood for Oil: The Vampire War

By Susan Lindauer
Former U.S. Asset who covered Libya at the United Nations from 1995 to 2003

Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don’t care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what’s really going on here?

According to the CIA, the following never happened…

Last October, US oil giants— Chevron and Occidental Petroleum— made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi’s government.  As the U.S. Asset who started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libyan diplomats, I had close ties to Libya’s U.N. Mission from 1995 to 2003. Given my long involvement in the Lockerbie saga, I have continued to enjoy special access to high level intelligence gossip on Libya.

Last summer that gossip got juicy.

Libya: The Zionist Dragon and the Drums of War

The Zionist Dragon; seen here, looking to feast on Lebanon. It now seeks to destroy Libya.

By Jonathan Azaziah
Mask of Zion

It’s happening all over again. Do you hear them? You must be able to. The deaf, those incapable of hearing the sounds of serenity and calamity since birth, could hear them due to their almost wretched loudness. What? What you ask? The drums of war of course. And the drummers are composing their iniquitous cacophony from the same locations that they always do. Tel Aviv. Washington D.C. London, the City of London to be most precise. The audience for their bloodthirsty melody this time around? Libya. Their previous audiences included the ravaged nation of Afghanistan and the devastated nation of Iraq.

War, classically defined, is a state of armed, hostile conflict between nations. But the war of the drummers is different. Their war, in their minds, is waged on children of a lesser God. Women of a lesser state of being. Men of a lesser right. Their war is mass murder of unarmed innocents, occupation, theft of land and resources, desecration and dehumanization. Their war is genocide. These drummers sometimes appear to be of an otherworldly nature; vampires from movies produced in the dregs of the morally destructive institution known as Hollywood. Their aim is to remain. Remain as the sole holders of the globe; the lone controllers; the only existing cabal of masters and elders, who will govern masses of cattle.

Latin America condemns US/UN invasion of Libya

Bolivia’s Morales demands Obama forfeit his Nobel Prize

By Efe – Agency
Los Tiempos
(Partly Translated by Bolivia Weekly)

As US President Obama visits neighboring Chile, Bolivian president Morales has called on the Nobel committee to strip him of his peace prize and has called for the United Nations (ONU in Spanish) to be renamed “ONI,” The United Nations of Invaders.

“If the Nobel Peace Prize committee was to dignify this prize, they should revoke it from the US President,” said Morales at a press conference. Morales himself received the $50,000 “Gaddadi Human Rights Prize” before becoming the Bolivian president and said that the world should ask itself if Obama is defending peace or provoking massacres.

Morales said that the United Nations was bombing hospitals and schools on the pretext of savings lives. He said that the Libya invasion was just a pretext to invade and take Libya’s natural resources.

“How is it that a Nobel Peace Prize winner heads a groups of gangsters to assault and invade? This is not part of the defense of human rights, nor the rights of self determination of peoples.”

Selective Nature of US/UN Intervention

By Sasha Simic
Letters at The Guardian

Israel bombed Gaza at the end of 2008 in a brutal action which killed 1,300 people and destroyed 20,000 buildings, there was no question of the US allowing the UN to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza to protect its people, 50% of which are children. Those who support the UN security council’s authorisation of a no-fly zone over Libya (Britain, France and US line up for air strikes against Gaddafi, 18 March) need to reflect on the selective nature of UN intervention throughout the world and in the Middle East in particular.

The UN will not be intervening in the Libyan revolution to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s brutality. It will go in to further the interests of the world’s major powers in the region. It will be an imperialist action, not a humanitarian one. After the bloodshed it produced in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan, the doctrine of “humanitarian military intervention” should be discredited beyond rehabilitation. The west is a major source of the problems of the Middle East and north Africa. It’s not part of the solution, even when its troops wear blue helmets.

UN Security Council approves US war on Libya

By Cindy Sheehan

Just hours ago, the UN Security Council led by the US has backed the use of “all necessary measures” against the oil rich country of Libya–including no fly zones.

The UN once again proves to be a toady of the hegemon and the globalists who want to drain this planet dry of every drop of crude oil at any and all costs to the native populations of the countries that have the misfortune to be on top of vast reserves of crude oil.

With the scandalous excuse of “protecting” civilians, we all know that the US-UN no fly zone and sanctions against Iraq caused the deaths of at least 1.5 million (expendable to the profiteers) Iraqis between the two US invasions.

Israel, US and Iran: An environmental perspective

Depleted uranium bombs

By Peter Eyre
Palestine Telegraph

In my last column, I reviewed the military implications if the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran. I will now discuss the types of weapons likely to be used and the catastrophic contamination of the entire Middle East region and the world that would result should they be foolish enough to proceed.

As with the “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad, many missiles are likely to be fired from naval vessels located in the north of the Persian Gulf. Many of these missiles contain uranium components and would form part of an initial attack on the nuclear facilities in Iran.

The Real Top 10 News Stories of the Past Decade

By Robert Freeman

The media are awash with talking heads bloviating about the top stories of the last decade. The wired-in society. The growth of organic food. The new frugality. This is the ritual that reveals their true function in the culture: pacification. It’s their way of signaling the masses that Bigger Thinkers are looking after things, so go back to your Wii or Survivor or Facebook reveries.

The amazing thing is how little is ever mentioned about the stories that really mattered, those that affected the very nature of our society, its institutions, and the relation of the people to their state and society. Those stories paint a picture of danger, of a people who have lost control of their government and the corporations that own it. But you’ll hear nary a word about such difficult truths from any storyteller in the conventional media.

So here, in no particular order, are my Top Ten Stories of the Naughties, the ones that really matter.

Welcome to Orwell’s world

By John Pilger

Obama’s lies over the Afghanistan war remind us of the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”

The Devil’s Excrement: Can oil-rich countries avoid the resource curse?

By Moisés Naim

Oil is a curse. Natural gas, copper, and diamonds are also bad for a country’s health. Hence, an insight that is as powerful as it is counterintuitive: Poor but resource-rich countries tend to be underdeveloped not despite their hydrocarbon and mineral riches butbecause of their resource wealth. One way or another, oil — or gold or zinc — makes you poor. This fact is hard to believe, and exceptions such as Norway and the United States are often used to argue that oil and prosperity can indeed go together.

A Little Girl in Kabul

by Normon Solomon

Guljumma, seven years old, with her father Wakil Tawos Khan, at the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 in Kabul on August 31, 2009. Last year, an air attack by the US military struck their home in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. She lost an arm in the bombing. (Photo: Reese Erlich)

Yesterday, I met a little girl named Guljumma. She’s seven years old, and she lives in Kabul at a place called Helmand Refugee Camp District 5.

Guljumma talked about what happened one morning last year when she was sleeping at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5 AM, bombs exploded. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

Afghanistan: The Explanations Don’t Stack Up

From the 2008 film, Opium War

By Michael Brull

Our war in Afghanistan is usually justified as an anti-terrorist mission or a nation-building exercise. But neither of these explanations is actually true.