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Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Gaddafi Death: Naughty Boys (& 1 Girl) Hanging A Stray Cat (10-27-11)


Russia’s NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, spoke the original reference I just paraphrased (and then some) above:
"The faces of the leaders of 'world democracies' are so happy, as if they remembered how they hanged stray cats in basements in their childhoods."
I am with the bitter Dmitry and his calling out the profound sadism on this one, NATO’s and US leaders' jubilation (and probably direct enabling) of the brutal killing of Gaddafi.
I thought we all learned in kindergarten or before that “two wrongs don’t make a right”? Apparently, the golden rule is dead and long live “might makes right”!!!
So the brutal death of Gaddafi foreshadows doomed futures for Libya and the rest of vulnerable countries of the world (those unlucky enough not to have nukes) from the barbarism-enabling Western powers!
Mr. Rogozin accuses NATO of being directly involved in the summary execution of Gaddafi as well as his son. He calls out a NATO spitting upon international law yet again.
Orwellwasright labels the media’s treatment of Gaddafi’s demise “DEATHGASM" as well as calls out the old “demonization playbook,” so useful to illegitimate shock and awe war-mongering:
It’s official: capturing someone alive and quickly executing them, then parading the corpse around on TV 24 hours is “a good thing”. It’s hard to know who the winner was, but the BBC, ITV, Sky and a number of other channels have gone all out the last few days to prove who’s the best at gloating over the murder of Gaddafi (after he was dragged through the streets and sodomized with a knife). Following the alleged “death” of bin Laden and the drone strike which killed Anwar al-Awlaki, and the many other victims of the West’s extrajudicial killings (a tactic increasingly in favour as the “War of Terror” rolls into its eleventh year) it should come as little surprise to people when, once again, the nations which claim to be the strictest adherents to the rule of law bend the rules to the point of breaking when it comes to justifying their own killings.
To be fair to those members of the public who are celebrating the death of Gaddafi, many of them have a dire understanding both of the current situation in Libya and the historical context of the Gaddafi regime. Gaddafi – like Saddam, Milosovic, Ahmadinejad and countless others before him – has been overblown as the greatest threat to humanity since (you guessed it) Hitler, a comparison which has become so overworn and debased through constant hyperbole as to become almost meaningless. It’s a routine response from those who defend the West for their crimes against humanity – we may well have killed over a million Iraqis since 2003 (not to mention the 100,000s of children who died as a direct consequence of the pre-invasion UN sanctions) but that doesn’t require any condemnation. After all, we’re the “civilized nations” who are helping to “rebuild” the backwards lands of Africa, the Middle East, and wherever else we see fit to bestow the benefits of “freedom and democracy”. Any deaths that come as a consequence of our noble mission is “utterly regrettable”; the wasteland and degradation we leave behind “good intentions gone awry”.
According to Peter Baofu in "Used and Abused: The Murder of Gaddafi, and the War Crimes of Western Powers":
... Western mainstream media did not waste time to engage in spinning the whole murder into one of bashing Gaddafi and his historical legacy, without telling the rest of the world about the Western complicity in supporting Gaddafi in all these years of dictatorial rule.
snip
In the case of the U.S., the thoughtful comment by Matthew Rothschild on October 21 is worth mentioning: "The hypocrisy of the U.S. position could hardly be greater. In 2003, the Bush Administration rehabilitated Qaddafi, who became an ally of the United States in the 'war on terror.' In fact, the CIA used Qaddafi's intelligence service to torture detainees that the U.S. sent over to Libya. The CIA 'rendered' eight or nine detainees to Qaddafi's intelligence service, and sent questions along with for the torturers to ask, according to Human Rights Watch, in an interview with Democracy Now. The CIA may even have had agents present during some of the questioning. In 2008, Condoleezza Rice visited Qaddafi in Libya. The next year, Obama shook his hand, and John McCain offered him arms. When it was convenient for Washington to support Qaddafi, it did so. When it was convenient to attack him, it did so. But the Obama administration didn't attack Bahrain when it cracked down on people fighting for democracy against that kingdom. No, Washington even let Saudi Arabia, another kingdom, invade Bahrain to help put down the nonviolent uprising."
Of course, the United States is taking its bows on the defeat of Gaddafi. A NATO enterprise supposedly but according to Pepe Escobar: “Washington paid no less than 80% of the operating costs of those dimwits at NATO (over $1 billion ....”
Peter Baofu summarizes what he sees as the five important contributions by Gaddafi to his country:
(a) He envisioned "the United States of Africa" and thus contributed to the formation of the African Union. In fact, "the African Union is basically the creation of Muammar Gaddafi, who saw it as a vessel for a stronger Africa," as reported by RT on October 20;  (b) He succeeded in holding Libya together, which, according to Shirin Sagedhi, was previously fragmented by different "tribes and ethnicities."; (c) He transformed Libya to have "one of the highest GDPs per capita in Africa and...to provide an extensive level of social security, particularly in the fields of housing and education," in a way that many sub-Saharan countries in Africa could only dream of, in the article on Libya by Wikipedia; (d) He managed to avoid being dominated by the Soviet Union or the U.S. during the Cold War by masterfully playing the Soviet Union against the U.S. without being a puppet of the former. After the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, he continued to fight against Western domination in the region and thus developed bad blood with Western powers;  (e) He overthrew the Kingdom of Libya in a bloodless military coup against King Idris in 1969 and thus brought Libya into the modern era (from monarchic feudalism).
Baofu also acknowledges Gaddafi’s failures, his personal vanity, his ruthlessness. But he asks if anyone can point to a world leader with a similar “historical status” that does not have such a reputation, REALISTICALLY speaking, i.e., subtracting deluded American “we wear the white hats and are never in the wrong exceptionalism.”
Orwellwasright on Gaddafi’s Libya:
In 2009, Libya sat at the top of the table for Africa on the Human Development Index. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Libya “has made strides in public health and, since 1980, child mortality rates have dropped from 70 per thousand live births to 19 in 2009. Life expectancy has risen from 61 to 74 years of age during the same span of years.” ...
snip
It’s interesting to note how the BBC reported on Gaddafi’s Great Man Made River Project back in March 2006, a time when he was in favour with the West. Quite rightly, the BBC used phrases such as, “it is impossible not to be impressed with the scale of the project,” and “It is hard to fault the Libyans on their commitment. They estimate that when the Great Man-Made River is completed, they will have spent almost $20bn. So far, that money has bought 5,000km of pipeline that can transport 6.5 million cubic metres of water a day from over 1,000 desert wells. As a result, Libya is now a world leader in hydrological engineering, and it wants to export its expertise to other African and Middle-Eastern countries facing the same problems with their water.” It is the world’s largest irrigation project.
Or rather, it was. In July of 2011, NATO bombed the pipeline, adding to the expanding list of war crimes committed by the organization whose mission in Libya was based on the “responsiblity to protect” civilians. Some estimate that in the region of 30,000 people have been killed since NATO began attacking Libya in March, and there is clear evidence that the destruction of the water supply is far from the only contravention of the laws of war committed by NATO in Libya. None of which should come as a surprise: as with all of NATO’s previous “interventions”, schools, hospitals, electric power stations, basic infrastructure and built up civilian districts have taken heavy losses and often been reduced to rubble, ready for the IMF to enter the fray with reconstruction packages – this is where the real looting begins.
It’s nothing new: back in April 2000, Michel Chossudovsky observed the similarities between an IMF take over of a country through the use of Structural Readjustment Programs and the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, and the take over of a country through the use of NATO forces: “… there’s a good deal of coordination between the IMF and NATO. You saw it in Kosovo. The IMF and the World Bank had set up a postwar economic plan including free market reforms well before the onset of bombing. They work together. If a country refuses IMF intervention, NATO steps in, or NATO and various covert agencies, and they create the proper conditions for IMF programs to be imposed … Sometimes war creates the conditions, and then the economic institutions come in and pick up the pieces. Or conversely the IMF itself does the destabilizing …”
snip
In Libya the jackals and wolves have performed their task and the country is now open to pillaging by Western corporations – it took no time at all before British businessmen were told: “pack your bags” and head to the ruined North African nation to squabble over the spoils. It remains to be seen who the major players will be, but if the Iraq war is anything to go by, we can expect to see further soaring profits for the likes of Halliburton, Bechtel, numerous private military contractors such as Xe Corporation, defence contractors such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin as well as the ubiquitous presence of the major energy cartels.
Pepe Escobar’s prediction of what Libya is in for:
Welcome to the new Libya. Intolerant Islamist militias will turn the lives of Libyan women into a living hell. Hundreds of thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans - those who could not escape - will be ruthlessly persecuted. Libya's natural wealth will be plundered. That collection of anti-aircraft missiles appropriated by Islamists will be a supremely convincing reason for the "war on terror" in northern Africa to become eternal. There will be blood - civil war blood, because Tripolitania will refuse to be ruled by backward Cyrenaica.
Escobar also calls out the mendacious world leaders and their sadistic triumphalsim:
So congratulations to the "international community" - which as everyone knows is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This community, at least, loved the outcome. The European Union (EU) hailed "the end of an era of despotism" - when up to virtually Thursday they were caressing the helm of Gaddafi's gowns; now they are falling over themselves in editorials about the 42-year reign of a "buffoon".
Gaddafi would have been a most inconvenient guest of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as he would have relished recalling all the hand-kissing, the warm embraces and the juicy deals the West was begging to clinch after he was promoted from "Mad Dog" (Ronald Reagan) to "our bastard". He would also relish detailing all the shady backgrounds of those opportunists now posing as "revolutionaries" and "democrats".
As for the concept of international law, it lies in a drain as filthy as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Iraqi dictator Saddam at least got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner. Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a territorial invasion of Pakistan. Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out with a mix of air war and assassination.
snip
As the top four BRIC members knew it even before the voting of UN Resolution 1973, it was about NATO ruling the Mediterranean as a NATO lake, it was about Africom's war against China and setting up a key strategic base, it was about the French and the Brits getting juicy contracts to exploit Libya's natural resources to their benefit, it was about the West setting the narrative of the Arab Spring after they had been caught napping in Tunisia and Egypt.
Jackals and/or wolves and/or bad boys' and 1 girl's club "stray cat hangers" all. May they be seen for what they are through the veil of craven, corporate Western media.

[cross-posted on correntewire and sacramento for democracy] 
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29540.htm

MORE INFO RE Seamus Milne:

"The grisly killing of the Libyan despot after his captors had sodomised him with a knife, was certainly a war crime. But many inside and outside Libya doubtless also felt it was an understandable act of revenge after years of regime violence. Perhaps that was Hillary Clinton's reaction, when she joked about it on camera, until global revulsion pushed the US to call for an investigation.

"As the reality of what western media have hailed as Libya's "liberation" becomes clearer, however, the butchering of Gaddafi has been revealed as only a reflection of a much bigger picture. On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch reported the discovery of 53 bodies, military and civilian, in Gaddafi's last stronghold of Sirte, apparently executed – with their hands tied – by former rebel militia.

"Its investigator in Libya, Peter Bouckaert, told me yesterday that more bodies are continuing to be discovered in Sirte, where evidence suggests about 500 people, civilians and fighters, have been killed in the last 10 days alone by shooting, shelling and Nato bombing.

"That has followed a two month-long siege and indiscriminate bombardment of a city of 100,000 which has been reduced to a Grozny-like state of destruction by newly triumphant rebel troops with Nato air and special-forces support.

"And these massacre sites are only the latest of many such discoveries. Amnesty International has now produced compendious evidence of mass abduction and detention, beating and routine torture, killings and atrocities by the rebel militias Britain, France and the US have backed for the last eight months – supposedly to stop exactly those kind of crimes being committed by the Gaddafi regime.

"Throughout that time African migrants and black Libyans have been subject to a relentless racist campaign of mass detention, lynchings and atrocities on the usually unfounded basis that they have been loyalist mercenaries. Such attacks continue, says Bouckaert, who witnessed militias from Misrata this week burning homes in Tawerga so that the town's predominantly black population – accused of backing Gaddafi – will be unable to return.

"All the while, Nato leaders and cheerleading media have turned a blind eye to such horrors as they boast of a triumph of freedom and murmur about the need for restraint. But it is now absolutely clear that, if the purpose of western intervention in Libya's civil war was to "protect civilians" and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure.

snip

"What is now known, however, is that while the death toll in Libya when Nato intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure. Estimates of the numbers of dead over the last eight months – as Nato leaders vetoed ceasefires and negotiations – range from 10,000 up to 50,000. The National Transitional Council puts the losses at 30,000 dead and 50,000 wounded.

"Of those, uncounted thousands will be civilians, including those killed by Nato bombing and Nato-backed forces on the ground. These figures dwarf the death tolls in this year's other most bloody Arab uprisings, in Syria and Yemen. Nato has not protected civilians in Libya – it has multiplied the number of their deaths, while losing not a single soldier of its own.

"For the western powers, of course, the Libyan war has allowed them to regain ground lost in Tunisia and Egypt, put themselves at the heart of the upheaval sweeping the most strategically sensitive region in the world, and secure valuable new commercial advantages in an oil-rich state whose previous leadership was at best unreliable. No wonder the new British defence secretary is telling businessmen to "pack their bags" for Libya, and the US ambassador in Tripoli insists American companies are needed on a "big scale".

"But for Libyans, it has meant a loss of ownership of their own future and the effective imposition of a western-picked administration of Gaddafi defectors and US and British intelligence assets. Probably the greatest challenge to that takeover will now come from Islamist military leaders on the ground, such as the Tripoli commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj – kidnapped by MI6 to be tortured in Libya in 2004 – who have already made clear they will not be taking orders from the NTC.

snip

"What the Libyan tragedy has brutally hammered home is that foreign intervention doesn't only strangle national freedom and self-determination – it doesn't protect lives either."

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