Media Disconfirmation

When is an ‘NGO’ not an NGO?

2012-02-17T11:28:00.000-08:00

Media with Conceience
15 February 2012
By Richard Falk

Two judges leading an investigation into US-funded NGOs have not backed down despite US pressure

Twists and Turns Beneath the Cairo Skies

A confusing controversy between the United States and Egypt is unfolding. It has already raised tensions in the relationship between the two countries to a level that has not existed for decades. It results from moves by the military government in Cairo to go forward with the criminal prosecution of 43 foreigners, including 19 Americans, for unlawfully carrying on the work of unlicensed public interest organizations that improperly, according to Egyptian law, depend for their budget on foreign funding. Much has been made in American press coverage that one of the Americans charged happens to be Sam LaHood, son of the present American Secretary of Transportation, adopting a tone that seems to imply that at least one connected by blood to an important government official deserves immunity from prosecution.

Washington has responded with high minded and high profile expressions of consternation, including a warning from Hilary Clinton that the annual aid package for Egypt of $1.5 billion (of which $1.3 billion goes to the military) is in jeopardy unless the case against these NGO workers is dropped and their challenged organizations are allowed to carry on with their work of promoting democracy in Egypt. And indeed the U.S. Congress may yet refuse to authorize the release of these funds unless the State Department is willing to certify that Egypt is progressing toward greater democratization. President Obama has indicated his intention to continue with the aid at past levels, given the importance of Egypt in relation to American Middle Eastern interests, but as in so many other instances, he may give way if the pressure mounts. The outcome is not yet clear as an ultra-nationalistic Congress may yet thwart Obama’s seemingly more sensible response to what should have been treated as a tempest in a teapot, but for reasons to be discussed, has instead become a cause celebre.

The Americans charged are on the payroll of three organizations: International Republican Institute (IRI), Democratic National Institute (DNI), and Freedom House. The first two organizations get all of their funding from the U.S. Government, and were originally founded in 1983 after Ronald Reagan’s speech to the British Parliament in which he urged that help be given to build the democratic infrastructure of newly independent countries in the non-Western world put forward as a Cold War counter-measure to the continuing appeal of Marxist ideologies. From the moment of their founding IRI and DNI were abundantly funded by annual multi-million grants from Congress, either directly or by way of such governmental entities as the U.S. Assistance for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy. IRI and DNI claim to be non-partisan yet both are explicitly affiliated with each of the two political parties dominant in the United States, with boards, staffs, and consultants drawn overwhelmingly from former government workers and officials who are associated with these two American political parties. The ideological and governmental character of the two organizations is epitomized by the nature of their leadership. Madeline Albright, Secretary of State during the Clinton presidency, is chair of the DNI Board, while former Republican presidential candidate and currently a prominent senator, John McCain, holds the same position in the IRI. Freedom House, the third main organization that is the target of the Egyptian crackdown also depends for more than 80% of its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy and is similarly rooted in American party politics. It was founded in 1941 as a bipartisan initiative during the Cold War by two stalwarts of their respective political parties, Wendell Wilkie and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Against this background the protests from Washington and the media assessments of the controversy seem willfully misleading. Since when does Washington become so agitated on behalf of NGOs under attack in a foreign country? Even mainstream eyebrows should have been raised sky high when Martin Demsey, currently the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, while visiting Cairo was reported to have interceded with his military counterparts on behalf of these Americans made subject to a travel ban and faced with the threat of prosecution. When was the last time you can recall an American military commander interceding on behalf of a genuine NGO? To paraphrase Bob Dylan, ‘the answer my friends, is never.’ So even the most naïve among us should be asking ‘what is really going on here?’

The spokespersons for the organizations treat the allegations as a simple case of interference with the activities of apolitical and benevolent NGOs innocently engaged in helping Egyptians receive needed training and guidance with respect to democratic practices, especially those relating to elections and the rule of law. Substantively such claims seem more or less true at present, at least here in Egypt. Sometimes these entities are even referred to by the media as ‘civil society institutions,’ which reflects, at best, a woeful state of unknowing, or worse, deliberate deception. Whatever one thinks of the activities of these actors, it is simply false to conceive of them as ‘nongovernmental’ or as emanations of civil society. It would be more responsive to their nature if such entities were described as ‘informal governmental organizations.’ (IGOs)

It is hardly surprising that a more honest label is avoided as its use would call attention to the problematic character of the undertakings: namely, disguised intrusions by a foreign government in the internal politics of a foreign country with fragile domestic institutions of government by way of behavior that poses at the very least a potential threat to its political independence. With such an altered interpretation of the controversy assumes a different character. It becomes quite understandable for the Egyptian government seeking to move beyond its authoritarian past to feel the need to tame these Trojan Horses outfitted by Washington. It would seem sensible and prudent for Egypt to insist that such organizations, and especially those associated with the U.S. Government, be registered and properly licensed in Egypt as a minimum precondition for receiving permission to carry on their activities in the country, especially on matters as sensitive as are elections, political parties, and the shaping of the legal system. Surely the United States, despite its long uninterrupted stable record of constitutional governance, would not even consider allowing such ‘assistance’ from abroad. If it had been proposed by, say, Sweden, an offer of help with democracy would have been immediately rebuffed, and rudely dismissed as an insult to the sovereignty of the United States despite Sweden being a geopolitical midget and U.S. being the gorilla on the global stage.

And these Washington shrieks of wounded innocence, as if Cairo had no grounds whatsoever for concern, are either the memory lapses of a senile bureaucracy or totally disingenuous. In the past it has been well documented that IRI and DNI were active in promoting the destabilization of foreign governments that were deemed to be hostile to the then American foreign policy agenda. The Reagan presidency made no secret of its commitment to lend all means of support to political movements dedicated to the overthrow of left-leaning governments in Latin America and Asia. The most notorious instances involving the use of IRI to destabilize a foreign government is well known among students of American interventionist diplomacy. For instance IRI funds were extensively distributes to anti-regime forces to get rid of the Aristide government in Haiti, part of a dynamic that did lead to a coup in 2004 that brought to power reactionary political forces that were welcomed and seemed far more congenial to Washington’s ideas of ‘good governance’ at the time. IRI was openly self-congratulatory about its role in engineering a successful effort to strengthen ‘center and center/right’ political parties in Poland several years ago, which amounts to a virtual confession of interference with the dynamics of Polish self-determination.

Although spokespersons for these organizations piously claim in their responses to these recent Egyptian moves against them to respect the sovereignty of the countries within which they operate, and especially so in Egypt. Even if these claims are generally true, ample grounds remain for suspicion and regulation, if not exclusion, on the part of a territorial government. An insistence upon proper regulation seems entirely reasonable if due account is taken of the numerous instances of covert and overt intervention by the United States in the political life of non-Western countries.

Against such a background, several conclusions follow: first, the individuals being charged by Egypt are not working for genuine NGOs or civil society institutions, but are acting on behalf of informal government organizations or IGOs; secondly, the specific organizations being targeted, especially the DNI and IRI are overtly ideological in their makeup, funding base, and orientation; and thirdly, there exist compelling grounds for a non-Western government to regulate or exclude such political actors when due account is taken of a long American record of interventionary diplomacy. Thus the Washington posture of outrage seems entirely inappropriate once the actions of the Egyptian government are contextually interpreted.

Yet the full story is not so simple or one-sided. It needs to be remembered that the Egyptian governing process in the year since the uprising that led to the collapse of the Mubarak regime has been controlled by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAP), which is widely believed by the Egyptian public to be responsible for a wave of repressive violence associated with its fears that some democratic demands are threatening their position and interests in the country. A variety of severe abuses of civilian society have been convincingly attributed to the military. As well the military is responsible for a series of harsh moves against dissenters who blog or otherwise act in a manner deemed critical of military rule. In effect, the Egyptian government, although admittedly long concerned about these spurious NGOs operating within its territory even during the period of Mubarak rule, is itself seemingly disingenuous, using the licensing and funding technicalities as a pretext for a wholesale crackdown on dissent and human rights so as to discipline and intimidate a resurgent civil society and a radical opposition movement that remains committed to realizing the democratic promise of the Arab Spring.

There is another seemingly strange part of the puzzle. Would we not expect the United States to side the Egyptian military with which it worked in close harmony during the Mubarak period. Why would Washington not welcome this apparent slide toward Mubarakism without Mubarak? Was this not America’s preferred outcome in Egypt all along, being the only outcome that would allow Washington to be confident that the new Egypt would not rock the Israeli boat or otherwise disturb American interests in the region. There is no disclosure of U.S. motives at this time for its present seemingly pro-democracy approach, but there are grounds for thinking Washington may be reacting to the success of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nour (Salafi) Party in the Egyptian parliamentary elections and even more so to the apparent collaboration between these parties and the SCAF in planning Egypt’s immediate political future. In such a setting it seems plausible that sharpening state/society tensions in Egypt by siding with the democratic opposition would keep alive the possibility of a secular governing process less threatening to U.S./Israeli interests, as well as inducing Egypt itself to adopt a cautious approach to democratic reform. Maybe there are different explanations more hidden from view, but what seems clear is that both governmental in this kafuffle have dirty hands and are fencing in the dark at this point, that is, mounting arguments and counter-arguments that obscure rather than reveal their true motivations.

In the end, Egypt, along with other countries, is likely to be far better off if it prohibits American IGOs from operating freely within its national territorial space, especially if their supposed mandate is to promote democracy as defined and funded by Washington. This is not to say that Egyptians would not be far better off if the SCAF allowed civilian rule to emerge in the country and acted in a manner respectful of human rights and democratic values. In other words what is at stake in this seemingly trivial controversy lies hidden by the smokescreens relied upon by both sides in the dispute: weighty matters of governance and democracy that could determine whether the remarkable glories of the Arab Spring mutate in the direction of a dreary Egyptian Autumn, or even Winter.

Violence against Indians was central to British rule, and the courts served as its instruments.

2012-02-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

Racist violence

A.G. NOORANI
Frontline May 2011

DURING the Quit India Movement, the Chief Justice of the Federal Court, Sir Maurice Gwyer, consistently ruled in favour of the citizen, to the dismay of the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. But this is only one truth. There are two others which complete the picture. Not all the judges in colonial India were fair and impartial, as Tilak's trials for sedition and Bhagat Singh's trial for murder revealed. The Privy Council acted as a form of colonial control and systematically reversed Gwyer's rulings.

Lower down came the crimes against Indians committed by British planters, paupers, soldiers and sailors. The offenders were tried by white judges and white juries after white policemen had cooked up the case in their favour. It is this aspect of the British record on justice in India that Prof. Elizabeth Kolsky of Villanova University exposes in her work with meticulous documentation and cogent analyses. It is a product of 10 years of research and writing.

There was the celebrated trial of indigo planter William Orby Hunter in the late 19th century. He had tortured three of his female servants, who were discovered with their noses, ears, and hair cut off, their genitals mutilated, and their feet fettered in iron chains. He was sentenced to pay a nominal fine and immediately set free. Racial violence was a constant and constituent element of British dominance in India. “This book examines how quotidian acts of violence simultaneously menaced and maintained British power in India from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. Physical violence was an intrinsic feature of imperial rule. This fact is widely acknowledged but narrowly explored, particularly in the Indian historiography. Although the archive is replete with incidents of Britons murdering, maiming, and assaulting Indians – and getting away with it – white violence remains one of the empire's most closely guarded secrets.”

The book ferrets out those secrets. Indians do not bother to recall those crimes. The absence of rancour among Indians towards the British is but right, but we tend to let some historians get away with their glosses on Britain's revolting record. The noted writer Akilesh Mittal, for one, never ceases to remind us of the prosperity in India before the British arrived. They exploited India into poverty.

“By focussing on crimes committed by a mostly forgotten cast of European characters – planters, paupers, soldiers, and seamen – this study demonstrates that violence was an endemic rather than ephemeral part of British colonial rule in India.” Violence against Indians was central to British rule, and the courts served as its instruments. Tilak remarked, “The goddess of British Justice, though blind, is able to distinguish unmistakably black from white.”

There was continuous tension between the rule of law, which did exist, and its breaches, which were not uncommon. The book is based on a detailed examination of cases that illustrate the contradiction and what the author rightly calls “the persistent significance of race in British India”. Worse than the officials were the non-official European community, a pillar of the Raj. “While British tea, indigo, and coffee planters in India provided critical financial returns to the colonial government, their drunk, disorderly, and murderous conduct both presented a serious law-and-order problem and also was an embarrassment to the ‘right sorts' of official Britons.” The author highlights their misbehaviour and its condonation by the British rulers.

“What outraged Indian journalists and nationalists in the late nineteenth century was not simply the fact of white violence but its handling in the criminal courts. Race had a clear, obvious, and ongoing influence over legal decision-making as Britons accused of assaulting and murdering Indians were booked on lesser (if any) criminal charges, which resulted in little to no punishment. Contrary to David Cannadine's controversial claim that rank and status were more important in the empire than race, British police, judges, and juries in India routinely collaborated across the hierarchies of class to buttress the racial basis of colonial dominance.” Racially abusive language accompanied the violence. Violence was not an exceptional “but an ordinary part of British rule in the subcontinent”. The abuse in India was typical of British colonial rule everywhere.

In general, British democracy has been better than others at concealing the brutal way its state functions.

2012-02-16T20:19:00.000-08:00

A short history of British torture
Submitted by WorldRevolution
December 5, 2005

When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails and where Cheney has been labelled the ‘Vice President for Torture’. In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques.
Interrogation in Northern Ireland

Between 1971 and ‘75 more than 2000 people were interned without trial by the state in Northern Ireland. Picked up without having any charges laid, or knowing when they were going to be released, detainees were subject to all sorts of treatments, some coming under the heading of ‘interrogation in depth’. Apart from prolonged sessions of oppressive questioning, serious threats, wrist bending, choking and beatings, there were instances of internees being forced to run naked over broken glass and being thrown, tied and hooded, out of helicopters a few feet above the ground. The ‘five techniques’ at the centre of the interrogators’ work were: sensory deprivation through being hooded (often while naked); being forced to stand against walls (sometimes for over 20 hours and even for more than 40); being subjected to continuous noise (from machinery such as generators or compressors for periods of up to 6 or 7 days); deprivation of food and water; sleep deprivation for periods of up to week. Relays of interrogation teams were used against the victims.

The British state tried to discredit reports of torture. Stories were fed to the media about injuries being self-inflicted - “one hard-line Provisional was given large whiskies and a box of king-size cigarettes for punching himself in both eyes” (Daily Telegraph, 31/10/77). There were indeed instances of self-harm, but these were either suicide attempts or done with the hope of being transferred to hospital accommodation.

Then the press said that any measures were justified if they helped to ‘prevent violence’. They contrasted “ripping out fingernails, beating people with steel rods and applying electric shocks to their genitalia” (Daily Telegraph 3/9/76), examples of “outright brutality”, with the measures used in Northern Ireland.

In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights said that the techniques Britain had used caused “intense physical and mental suffering and … acute psychiatric disturbance”, but that while this was “inhuman and degrading treatment” it didn’t amount to torture. This was a victory for the British state because it was keen to use means that would cause the maximum distress to the victim with the minimum external evidence. They had been previously referred to the European Court over torture in Cyprus, but in fact British interrogators had been using various combinations of the ‘five techniques’ for a long time. When the army and RUC approached Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, for formal approval “They told him that the ‘in-depth’ techniques they planned to use were those the army had used … many times before when Britain was faced with insurgencies in her colonies, including Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, the British Cameroons, Brunei, British Guyana, Aden, Borneo, Malaysia and the Persian Gulf” (Provos The IRA and Sinn Fein Peter Taylor).

By any means deemed necessary

British intervention in the Malayan ‘emergency’ in the 1950s has been held up as a model of suppression and ‘counter-insurgency’. Apart from the camps established, the murder squads, use of rigid food controls, burning down villages and the imposition of emergency regulations, the use of torture was an integral part of British operations. With 650,000 people uprooted and ‘resettled’ in New Villages, or put in concentration camps, there was also a programme of ‘re-education’.

British action in Kenya in the 1950s also showed what British civilisation was prepared to do. At various times over 90,000 ‘suspects’ were imprisoned, in either detention camps or ‘protected villages’. At one point Nairobi (population 110,000) was emptied, with 16,500 then detained and 2,500 expelled to reserves. Assaults and violence, often to the point of death, were extensive. As in Malaya, ‘rehabilitation’ was one of the goals of the operation. More than 1000 people were hanged, using a mobile gallows that was taken round the country. Overall, maybe 100-150,000 died through exhaustion, disease, starvation and systematic brutality.

Recent revelations in The Guardian (12/11/5) concerned a secret torture centre, the “London Cage”, that operated between July 1940 and September 1948. Three houses in Kensington were used to interrogate some 3500 German officers, soldiers and civilians. Still in use for three years after the end of the war, interrogation included beatings, being forced to stand to attention for up to 26 hours, threats of execution or unnecessary surgery, starvation, sleep deprivation, dousings with cold water etc. “In one complaint lodged at the National Archives, a 27-year-old German journalist being held at this camp said he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. And not once, he said, did they treat him as badly as the British.”

No exceptions

There is a continuity in the British state’s actions. The Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the ‘London Cage’ received an OBE for his interrogation work in the First World War. In the 1950s there were reports of Britain experimenting with drugs, surgery and torture with a view to designing techniques that would be effective but look harmless. In the 1970s thousands of army officers and senior civil servants were trained to use psychological techniques for security purposes. Inevitably, the truth about current activities is not in the public domain.

In general, British democracy has been better than others at concealing the brutal way its state functions. Anything that is exposed is denied or dismissed as being an isolated excess. In France the extensive use of torture in the war in Algeria was publicised as part of a battle between different factions of the ruling class. Victims had hoses inserted in their mouths and their stomachs filled with water, electrodes were put on genitals, heads were immersed in water. During the Battle of Algiers 3-4000 people ‘disappeared’: fatal victims of French torture techniques.

Although France, and more recently the US in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, have been less successful than Britain in keeping their actions under wraps, all these democracies use the most brutal methods of interrogation and detention. They also learn from each other’s activities, most notably in Vietnam, where the US drew on British experience in Malaya as much as earlier French experience in Indo-China. Any government can talk about ‘human rights’, but every capitalist state will use any means at its disposal in war or to enforce its social order.

The international campaign against Evo Morales

2012-02-16T04:17:00.000-08:00

Opinion

The imperialist strategy is to employ the corporate media and NGOs to create the legitimacy they need to create conditions of instability in a sovereign country.

Cory Morningstar
Cambio (in Spanish)

"Al-Jazeera, which began as a credible news agency, has become the prostitute of international journalism, as believable as a fool alienated scribbles on the walls of a football stadium. Of what is really happening in Syria informed in the coming days, and meanwhile, we will tell the story of Libya, which may not be seen on Al-Jazeera, nor in the British liar Waste Corporation [BBC], its friend and bed partner. " Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey, Pravda.Ru, in his article The West, Syria and Libya.

It's no secret that Al Jazeera has become a fundamental tool of propaganda to serve the imperialist powers in destabilization campaigns that expand at a rate unprecedented throughout the world. What is perhaps less known is the destabilization campaign organized against Bolivian President Evo Morales, which he avoided and successfully passed in late 2011, when the media reported several deaths, including a baby, all of which resulted be a complete fabrication.

The destabilization campaign strategically focused on an issue commonly known as the Tipnis (Indian Country and Isiboro Secure National Park), an environmentally sensitive area, where most of the people want a road that provides access to health care public, and education.

The road also represents liberation and autonomy for the people of one of the poorest countries in Latin America, which fights for his process of change under the pressure of the minority group of the Indigenous Confederation of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB), hidden behind the green flag. It should be noted that Morales gave to each of the demands of Cidob, including intangibility that had called his "advisers" from overseas, which led to one of the Indians said in disbelief, "We're screwed." The intangibility makes Tipnis untouchable, so now other groups are demanding that legislation be reversed.

Destabilization on the pretext of humanitarian intervention

Appearing live on Al Jazeera, the author Juan Carlos Zambrana Marchetti (correspondent change in the U.S.) put the record straight. He explained that the campaign of destabilization against Evo Morales is led by US-funded NGOs (including Democracy Center, Amazon Watch and Avaaz). The sponsors of the major NGOs are leading the effort to destabilize include USAID, NED, Open Society Institute (George Soros) and various Rockefeller, to name a few. In addition, these donors have invested heavily in REDD, a program sponsored by Avaaz and lots of corporate environmental organizations. This is a false solution to climate crisis, rather, contains a high degree of climate racism which the ALBA countries and continue to oppose vehemently Morales

Morales's leadership, based on a vision to serve the people of Bolivia to escape the clutches of imperialism, is a model that threatens the entire industrialized world system of capitalism and oligarchy who serves him. The corporate-funded NGOs are conceived and financed (sometimes simply co-opted) as an integral tool to protect the system ... similar to the role of corporate media.

The imperialist powers use the same strategy over and over again. Libya is a good example and the most recent. NGOs were absolutely central to the destabilization and invasion of Libya, a country with no debt and with the highest living standards in Africa. Few know that Gaddafi was a guest of honor at Columbia University in 2006, to discuss and share, knowledge and vision of Libya in the "direct democracy" (based on the Green Paper), a conference was broadcast live.

"Capital is more than happy to enlist mainstream movement (environmentalist) as a partner in the management of nature. Major environmental groups offer comfort to triple capital: as legitimation, reminding the world that the system works, as control over popular dissent, a sponge that absorbs and constrains the ecological anxiety in the population, and as a rationalization, a Governor useful to introduce some control and protect the system from its worst tendencies, while ensuring the orderly flow of profits. " Joel Kovel.

The imperialist strategy is to employ the corporate media and NGOs to create the necessary legitimacy to conduct destabilization. When there are internal differences, infiltrate the organizations using the NGOs funded by large corporations to foster division. The motto is divide and conquer using mercenaries financed by the imperialist states to create conflict where and when deemed necessary. Also, use the mass media and NGOs to ensure that the public see the destabilization campaign through the lens, or under the guise of humanitarian intervention to bring "democracy" the people. Where the opportunity presents itself, use the illusion of a spontaneous uprising. (This has become the favorite strategy through US-funded groups like Otpor! And others who prey on vulnerable young people with good intentions.)

Yes, the imperialists will carry the illusion of "democracy" white man's ethnic countries with natural resources, bombing them to pieces if necessary to gain control of those resources, or to crush a union model and strengthening resistance to colonial rule. A union such as Libya, under the leadership of Gaddafi, was successfully achieved for the liberation of the nations of Africa, or the countries of ALBA and Celac (Community of Latin American and Caribbean), which away from dependence on the U.S. dollar, representing a threat to the imperialist powers.

Gaddafi sought to introduce the gold dinar Africa, before he was brutally murdered and a beautiful country was devastated. Under the pretext of "humanitarian intervention", about 100,000 people were killed, men, women and children, while foreign interests are stealing and looting every last drop of the wealth of Libya, both monetary and cultural and ecological.

Bolivia is and will remain a country of people who desperately fighting for their autonomy and resist imperialism, against all odds. The question is whether we, as citizens of industrialized countries serve the imperialists choose to support his agenda, or we will respect the Bolivian people, confident that you can better manage the difficult process of change without foreign interference.

(*) Cory Morningstar is a well known Canadian activist for environmental justice. His articles have appeared in Political Context, The Wrong Kind of Green, Canadians for Climate Change, Counter Currents, Climate & Capitalism, Huntington News and others.

Who pulls the Strings at the BBC?

2012-02-12T06:41:00.000-08:00

We are kept informed by the BBC of developments in Libya, in Iran and now in Syria, with the purpose of preparation for war.

Posted on February 11, 2012
by Pam Field at the NEW LEFT
BIAS AND THE BBC

The BBC should be an important voice, not least because we, the people own it- and its users, ( so that’s us again) – fund it. We would hope to be able to trust it to provide quality educational material and to keep us informed about what is happening in the world, and honest and accurate reporting.

Today, rather than report on Ed Miliband’s letter to the House of Lords about the Health Bill, the BBC bombards us with articles about the Falklands, Syria and disgruntled Christians.

So what is happening at the BBC? We are kept well informed about the goings-on in the Falkland Islands. Is that a co-incidence in that as I remember it was the flag-waving and cheering of the departing ships, which led to a recovery for Margaret Thatcher in 1982 when the public-service cuts were hitting hard?

The BBC inform us of the coming-and-goings of managers of football clubs, and then about complaints from Christians about being marginalised. I am unsure as to why the BBC should be a voice for religious groups – isn’t that what churches are for?

While all this is going on, the most unpopular policies in recent years go unreported by the BBC, and by much of the Press.

HEALTH AND WELFARE

The Health Service Reform Bill amounts to privatisation of the National Health Service as the most unpopular policy in sixty years. It is the duty of the BBC to keep us informed, and News is being stifled. Why?

Neither of the Coalition parties have an overall majority, and, despite campaigning to protect the NHS, the Tory-led Coalition are railroading through privatisation of the health service at great cost to the British people, in terms of health, loss of assets and skills. Both Coalition parties must be held responsible for the destruction of the NHS.

While the Independent reports the cost of 600 million pounds, as a result of the redundancies from NHS cuts, the BBC do not. While the Guardian and the Scottish Herald briefly reported of The Spartacus Report and Disability Living Allowance and Welfare “Reform”, the BBC did not. While Sky News reports that Ed Miliband, Leader of the Labour Party, has written to the House of Lords asking it to drop the Health Bill, the BBC do not. It is the responsibility of the BBC to report and represent the Leader of the Opposition, the Government ensures its activities are reported as they wish them to be.

THE GLOBAL ISSUE

We are kept informed by the BBC of developments in Libya, in Iran and now in Syria, with the purpose of preparation for war. On Think Left CJ Stone writes of Manufacturing Consent for the Invasion of Iran. The media consensus is to ensure that the US and its allies can depend of governments of the world to open up markets to foreign investment – in other words to multinationals and through the global market ensure that the very rich remain rich and powerful, no matter how much poverty and starvation there is, or no matter what permanent damage to the planet results. Dr Tristan Learoyd’s (Think Left) article on the aftermath of the war in Libya questions whether the Libyan people face really freedoms or that of another tyrant, global unbridled capitalism.

The BBC are consistently failing to report accurately, if at all. They are failing to inform and to educate. Lies and propaganda cloak the facts.

The lack of BBC’s challenging reporting questioning the government’s viewpoint can be shown in their reporting of George Osborne’s agreement with the Swiss banks. The type of language used and the tone of delivery invited certainty in the desirability of this decision. The only caveat referred to was that because the agreement did not come into force until 2013, there was still plenty of time for the secret bank holdings to be moved to somewhere where no tax would be liable!

There was absolutely no recognition, acknowledgement or questioning of the Coalition government’s thinking or motivation in making this settlement. Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK makes clear why the ramifications of this deal should have been discussed:

To say that this is a quite extraordinary act by the UK government massively understates the irresponsibility of what they have agreed.

The UK is apparently going to accept settlement for past tax at around 30% of the assets held in a Swiss account. That might be reasonable if the funds placed in Switzerland had been taxed in the UK before being deposited in Switzerland and it was only the income on those funds that had been evaded since then. But what we know for sure is that most money held in Switzerland got their illicitly – it was not taxed before its arrival in the Alps. It’s tax evaded money.

As a result we would now expect 40% tax (at least) on the capital in all these accounts in Switzerland as a matter of course plus a 100% penalty that might reasonably be charged in a case of deliberate tax evasion (meaning in total 80% of the capital balance should be paid to settle the tax originally evaded) and then there is of course interest due on the late payment plus tax due on the income earned since. Nothing less than 100% is due on these balances – wiping them out of course – and anything else is a scandalous underpayment.

But George Osborne is not going to demand that sum. He’s instead going to accept a tiny part of what is owing. Richard Murphy(Tax Research UK)

In spite of these charges, there was no counterbalance on the BBC, to George Osborne’s extraordinary claim to be ‘cracking down on tax cheats’. But then again there all too rarely seems to be any serious attempt to question government explanation.

The importance of the Swiss settlement is that it is a significant part of a larger process, the ‘shadow economy’ of tax havens which has been so meticulously exposed by Nick Shaxton in his book “Treasure islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world.’ However, as Nick Shaxton himself described with surprise, in May 2011, ‘the BBC, the heart of British media, doesn’t seem interested.’

‘The argument at the heart of Treasure Islands is about as big as it gets. This really is the hitherto untold story of globalisation. This really is the dark heart of the global economy.’

‘With trillions of dollars – literally trillions – being cycled through this libertarian, anti-democratic system, stripping away taxation, financial regulation, criminal laws, and so on, bending and distorting markets and global capital flows in powerful ways that no economist could ever explain using current models. With Britain, as I mentioned, slap bang in the middle of it all.’

‘Nobody has said, … that there isn’t a gigantic global network of British tax havens quietly hoovering up trillions and funnelling them to the City of London. Nobody has said the City Corporation isn’t this utterly bizarre, ancient and massively powerful organisation at the heart of Britain and the British establishment. Nobody has accused me of making gross factual mistakes, distorting the historical or statistical record, or anything like that. The FT, for instance calls it “meticulously researched.’

‘…. the BBC is shirking on its responsibility to inform and to educate.’

THE DANGER IS LOSS OF FREEDOM

John Christensen was so disturbed by his interview with Evan Davis on the Today program that he wrote an open letter asking why

The frustration of Shaxton and Christensen with the BBC is increasingly being voiced on comment threads. For example:

“Richard, might I ask an unrelated question?

What do you think of the BBC’s current financial coverage? Do you think it is extensive, honesty, penetrating? Is it reflective of the real turmoil and double-dealing taking place in the City of London, or is it supine and obfuscatory? I was stunned to find that the BBC had dedicated part of its website to asking which ‘cuts’ people felt the government should make; and this in spite of the fact that the banks had been handed trillions of pounds of taxpayers money? No mention was made of the fact that the private debt of the the banking sector was transferred to the public’s balance sheet – nor was there any mention that this private debt crisis, because it was shirted onto the public balance sheet, helped to trigger a fiscal and thence sovereign debt crisis! Do you think we are seeing honest reporting of events? If not, how do you think we can go about solving this problem?

Thanks,

Jonah.”

‘The price of freedom is eternal vigilance’ which means democracy requires us having access to information which we’re not getting from the BBC.

Inventing Reality : Michael Parenti

“Even if the [media] does not mold our every opinion, it does mold our opinion visibility; it can frame the perceptual limits around which our opinions take shape. Here may lie the most important effect of the news media: they set the agenda for the rest of us, choosing what to emphasize and what to ignore or suppress, in effect, organizing much of our political world for us. The media may not always be able to tell us what to think, but they are strikingly successful in telling us what to think about … the media teach us tunnel vision conditioning us to perceive the problems of society as isolated particulars, thereby stunting our critical vision. Larger casualties are reduced to immediately distinct events, while the linkages of wealth, power and policy go unreported or are buried under a congestion of surface impressions and personalities.

In sum, the media set the limits on public discourse.

They may not always mold opinion, but they do not always have to. It is enough that they create opinion visibility, giving legitimacy to certain views and illegitimacy to others … This power to determine the issue agenda, the information flow, and the parameters of political debate so that it extends from ultra-right to no further than moderate center is, if not total, still totally awesome.”

And so, eventually we know and believe only that which what we are permitted, because that is what suits the powers that be. In generations to come, history can be rewritten if it is allowed to be. Eventually we become nothing but zombies walking around with a false reality.

The Snake Behind the Arab Spring

2012-02-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

By Elias Akleh
Media With Concience
14 November 2011

Due to its important geopolitical location (linking Asian, African and European continents) and to its diversified rich natural resources the indigenous inhabitants of the Middle Eastern region had been subjected to multi-forms of colonial campaigns since the beginning of ancient times. These inhabitants were subjected to ruthless military occupations, genocides, persecutions, oppressions, enslavements, and ethnic cleansing. Yet the people never surrendered nor gave up. They struggled for their freedom and independence and fought all colonial powers one after the other. Since the beginning of 2011 we are witnessing their latest regionally-sweeping fight against local ruling regimes that are subservient to foreign powers. This has become known as the Arab Spring. Unfortunately, like all their previous struggles, there is a poisonous snake in the background, which covertly is directing and orchestrating this Arab Spring to reap its fruits for itself.

Their most previous sweeping struggle, similar to the present Arab Spring, was the famous Arab Revolt of June 1916 kicking the colonial Ottoman Empire, known as the “Sick Man”, out of the whole Middle East. The poisonous snake then was the United Kingdom, who pledged to recognize Arab independence throughout the whole Middle East if they join the British in their fight against the Ottoman Empire; an ally to Germany during WWI. This pledge was officiated through what is known as McMahon/Hussein Correspondence (1915 through 1916). Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Arthur McMahon was the British High Commissioner in Egypt from 1915 to 1917 and Hussein bin Ali was the Sharif of Mecca. The British confirmed their pledge, again, through the January 1918 letter by Sir Mark Sykes carried by British Commander David Hogarth to Hussein. British weapons were shipped to Arab fighters through T.E. Lawrence (known as Lawrence of Arabia), who also coordinated the war efforts between the two parties. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire the British broke their pledge to Sharif Hussein. According to their May 16th 1917 secret Sykes-Picot Agreement they divided the Middle East into French and British colonies, and according to their Balfour Declaration, November 2nd 1917, they promised Palestine to the Zionists. Sharif Hussein was ousted from Mecca to exile by the British supported Abdul-Aziz bin Saud, who established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The military struggle continued within each separate Arab state until independence was achieved. Before quitting and leaving their Arab colonies, France and Great Britain raised some of their local cronies to become heads of states in order to keep the country dependent on the occupier economically, politically and even culturally. Some of the Arab countries, especially in Northern Africa, still use the occupier’s language next to Arabic as a main daily language.

There exists in the world a very wealthy and very influential group of people; the wealthiest 1%; a Power Elite, who exerts tremendous influence on world events. This Power Elite value themselves above all other nations. They had developed a kind of political theology that exalts them as the elite of all elites, the divinely chosen group, the architects of this world, the crafters of all religious, political and social ideologies, and the destroyers and builders of nations. It gives them the right and the duty to move nations and lead them into reshaping their political regimes through revolutions and wars to make these nations subservient to their own agenda. They spend their days drawing global projects and dedicate all their resources for their execution. They were responsible for all major wars around the world, for revolutions in many countries, for economical crises and for most major events in the history of this world. Through their wealth they control heads of states, all media outlets, military and intelligence organizations, and the world economy. Looking at the present global financial crises affecting many countries, one could not help but ask: who is this debtor, wealthy enough to hold many countries and their whole economies in his debt?

This is not any longer the farfetched conspiracy theory they are trying to ridicule those who try to expose it. It is a fact. After all a conspiracy is defined as “evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more people”.

For those who doubt that nations could be blindly and irrationally driven to acts against their own national interests and welfare, I would like to remind them of the drastic opposing effects of the famous speeches given by Brutus Albinus and Mark Antony to the Roman citizens after the assassination of Julius Caesar. The Romans, won by Brutus’ speech, were immediately converted against him within few minutes by Mark Antony’s speech. The famous proverb states that “people are just like a ball kicked from one corner of the field to the other by politicians.” Thus the political term “the ball is in one politician’s court.”

Iraq, Syria and Iran were the main obstacles to the Power Elite’s primary colonial Zionist Project of establishing Greater Israel to control the Middle Eastern region. The Power Elite came up with the “New Middle East” and “fighting global terrorism” projects to augment their Zionist Project. Intending to move southward they started with the occupation and destruction of Iraq. Although the Iraqi occupation was carried out under the banner of weapons of mass destruction and spreading the American democracy, it was faced with huge global political opposition not to mention the large financial expenses.

After failing to manipulate the IAEA and UN to isolate and to break the Iran/Syria ally, who supports Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas in their resistance against Israeli occupation and expansion, the Power Elite came up with the perfect scheme of “New Order through Chaos” erroneously dubbed, later on, as the Arab Spring. It involves revolution from within to topple the ruling regime and to incite conflict and struggle between the different religious and ethnic groups to divide and to weaken the country in order to make it easier for them to interfere, under the pretence of protecting minorities and/or of economic aid, to virtually control and re-organize the country. This way the Power Elite would present itself as an ally rather than an occupier, would gain the approval of the international community, would sidetrack all global political opposition and criticism, and would avoid the huge expenses incurred by the revolution. Their first attempt during 2009 Iranian election failed to topple the regime due to the relatively small size of demonstrators. A proven precedent with a strong credibility was needed to convince larger masses into revolting. The Power Elite was ready for a “controlled sacrifice” in order to win the ultimate prize, similar to a chess player, who is ready to sacrifice his queen in order to check-mate his opponent’s king. The goal is a controlled election in an American style democracy in some of the “non-friendly” Middle Eastern countries.

Tunisian Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was the first sacrifice. Tunisia was a French colony from 1883 to 1956 when Habib Bourguiba established the Republic of Tunisia. Bourguiba made the fatal mistake of nationalizing foreign land holdings and Christian religious institutions. This infuriated the Italians, who brokered what is known as the “medical coup d’état” deposing Bourguiba and installing the head of security forces, Ben Ali, in his place. This was declared to a 1999 Parliamentary Committee by Fulvio Martini, former head of Italian military secret service (SISMI). Ben Ali was perfect local foreign puppet. He has French and American military and intelligence training. He had close working relationship with Bush’s (Junior) administration and was a partner in fighting the so called global terrorism through the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative.

Contrary to the claimed cause for the 2010/11 Tunisian Revolt its economy was considered the best in the African continent and was projected to even improve in the coming years. The 2010-2011 Global Competitive Report (Davos World Economic Forum) ranked Tunisia as first in Africa and 32nd out of 132 globally. In an attempt to fight potential terrorism through economic assistance Ben Ali established a National Solidarity Fund that slashed Tunisia’s poverty from 7.4% in 1990 to 3.8% in 2005. The Oxford Business Group stated that Tunisia’s economy was likely to grow starting with 2008 due to its diversified industries.

Tunisia was chosen for its vulnerability to the West. Its security intelligence was penetrated through its cooperation in NATO’s Operation Active Endeavor, and its military and economy were compromised through the American military and economic assistance programs. Although the Power Elite supports its local puppet rulers they also support, to a lesser extent, opposition groups just in case the ruler gets out of line they would use the opposition groups to get rid of him.

The revolution started with Wikileaks exposing the large extent of Ben Ali’s corruption. When Mohammed Bouazizi lit himself aflame the opposition groups were already primed for mass demonstrations. As the head of state, and through bribery, Ben Ali could have sent the army and thugs to crush the demonstrators, as we have seen in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. The country’s army chief withdrew his support to Ben Ali after his consultation with the Obama’s administration as was rumored. Ben Ali flew out to Saudi Arabia that has become known as the refuge for all deposed dictators of the region.

The many political parties formed before the Tunisian election is an indicative of the prevalent division and confusion among the people. The inexperienced Ennahda Islamist Party, who won the October 23rd election, could become a very easy prey to foreign long experienced political interference and to economical manipulation.

Egypt was the litmus test that would propel the rest of the Arab nations, particularly Syrians, into revolting against their ruling regimes. Hosni Mubarak was chosen for he was the most hated, although very influential, Arab leader of the most important Arab country. He was hated by his people for his tyranny, his oppression, his corruption, and his cheap privatization of Egyptian natural resources to foreign investors among many others. He was hated by the majority of Arab nations for his pro-American/Israeli foreign policies, for supporting the American invasion of Iraq, for his opposition to the democratically elected Palestinian Hamas, for his sabotage to all inter-Palestinian reconciliation efforts, for his partnership with Israeli Gaza siege, for his opposition to Hezbollah’s and Hamas’ armed resistance against Israeli occupation, and for his support to Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah and Israel’s 2009 war against Gaza. He was the queen to be sacrificed in the chess game.

“US groups helped nurture Arab Uprisings” was the title of an article in New York Times, which exposed that young Egyptian activists had received technical training on the use of social networking and mobile technology, and were financed by American groups such as International Republican Institute, National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, National Endowment for Democracy and Project on Middle East Democracy.

It is inconceivable that Mubarak, the wealthy ruthless head of state for thirty years and with long history in military service, did not have any loyal subjects in the army, who would help him crush the demonstrators. For the last thirty years the Egyptian army had been virtually armed, trained, and financed by the US. The army did not crush the protesters because there were strict orders not to do so. Comparatively the same army had crushed protesters and even opened live fire at them after the revolution (Maspero Massacre of 9th October, here and here). The Supreme Counsel of the Armed Forces, who seized power after the revolution, had re-instated the emergency laws and is slapping in military courts prison sentences to young activists, who started the revolution. This Counsel stood watching thugs attacking and destroying many government buildings. The latest attack this month was on the Supreme Court while judges were in a meeting. Egypt now is divided with religious conflicts (Christian Copts vs Muslims) and non-functioning government.

The American chosen next president is already primed and ready for the proper time to grab presidency. As for Mubarak, he had served the American/Israeli interest well for the last thirty years and would not be let off empty handed. According to Egyptian weekly “Alanbaa Aldawlia” the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE) organization, with 14 million members and specializes in the monitoring of money laundering schemes, had reported to the FBI that for 10% commission President Obama and 17 other American officials, including both former presidents Bush (father & son), Hillary Clinton, James Baker and others, with the cooperation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a high manager of Deutche Bank in France, had been involved in the money laundering of Mubarak’s $700 Billion from Deutche Bank, Barclays Bank and HSBC Bank, to Israel’s Bank Leumi and other banks in China and Taiwan. According to Anat Levin, the branch manager of Israeli Bank Haboalim-Swiss branch, she was authorized by the Israeli government to transfer $20 Billion from Mubarak’s account to Saudi King Abdulla Abd El-Aziz’s account and to UAE president Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s account. The weekly also reported that Christine Legarde, while still French Minister of Economic Affairs, had submitted a report to the Interpol requesting thorough investigation into the management of Deutche Bank in France.

Libyan revolution was actually a civil war brokered by Western powers (US, UK, and France) and some Arab Gulf countries (Egypt, UAE, and Qatar). After paying reparations for Lockerbie bombing, abandoning his nuclear program, and giving Western energy companies (Royal Dutch Shell and BP) access to Libyan oil fields in 2004, Gaddafi had ended enmity with the West. Although he had a type of grandeur illusions Gaddafi attempted in the past to unite Arab countries, and upon failing he recently attempted to create an African Union which threatened the re-colonization plan of Africa by AFRICOM. The decision to get rid of Gaddafi, once and for all, came when he vowed to expel Western energy companies from the country and replace them with oil firms from China, India and Russia. Gaddafi’s second fatal mistake was his plan to convince African and Muslim counties to create a new currency, the gold dinar, to rival the American Dollar and the European Euro, in oil trade.

Libyan revolution was totally militarized. It was revealed that Egypt and Qatar were the main arms suppliers to the Libyan rebels. Under American pressure Arab League urged UN to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, and Qatar offered to cover all expenses of NATO forces to bomb alleged Gaddafi’s forces. Libyan rebels were civilians without any military training and were no match for Gaddafi’s well-trained and well-equipped army. It was revealed by Walter Fauntroy, member of US House of Representatives, that while in a self-sanctioned peace mission to Libya, he witnessed French and Danish troops coordinating NATO bombings and raiding Libyan villages, and giving the credit to Libyan rebels. At the end Gaddafi was ordered murdered rather than captured for fear of exposing all his shady dealings with the West.

Two unplanned products of the Arab Spring were the Yemeni and Bahraini revolutions. These are genuine popular peaceful revolutions against Yemeni Saleh’s 33 years oppressive rule, and against Al Khalifa family virtual 191 years rule. The two countries have strategic locations in the region and are of important interest to the American Administration. Yemen is located on the southern entrance of the Red Sea, through which all east/west marine traffic passes. Citing the October 2000 USS Cole bombing, the 2008 attacks on US embassy, and the October 2010 bomb packages incidents, allegedly linked to Anwar al-Awlaki, as proof of Al Qaeda in Yemen, Obama’s administration and Saudi Arabia justified sending money, arms and troops to help Saleh fight terrorists, and to crush the 10 months old demonstrations

The US has possibly the largest marine/air force base in Bahrain, where the Fifth Fleet provides support to all war ships of the US Naval Forces Central Command (USNACENT) to patrol the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. To keep the status quo in Bahrain Obama’s administration encouraged Gulf States to send the Peninsula Shield Force to Bahrain to crush the demonstrators. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE were happy to oblige and send their troops to Bahrain.

Syria is the main target; the prize; the king to be checked-mate. With American money and with the cooperation of some Arab officials, paid operatives incited some Syrian citizens, motivated by ethnic and religious background, to demonstrate in the streets demanding reform and regime change. These demonstrations took place in the easy accessible small towns on the borders of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. Yet these demonstrations were dwarfed by millions of other Syrian citizens who demonstrated in major cities in support of the regime. To intensify the conflict these operatives, dressed in Syrian army outfits, started killing some citizens and accusing the Syrian police and army, and at the same time attack police and army personnel to force them into the defensive.

Compared to Tunisian, Egyptian, Yemeni and Bahraini peaceful demonstrations, Syrian demonstrations are totally armed with heavy weapons; machine guns, propelled missiles, anti-tank RPG, mines and heavy explosives, and are directed and orchestrated by military experts from other neighboring Arab countries as exposed by Al-Alam and Syrian TVs.

Heavy weapons and military experts were smuggled in through Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, as reported by the Lebanese Arabic Assafir. Turkey had also played a major role in pressuring Syria and had harbored and encouraged armed Syrian rebels called Free Syrian Army. In successive televised interviews the former Lebanese MP Nasser Kandil had exposed in details including names, dates, and places, the conspiracy of destroying Syria as a country not just a regime change. The Saudi Bandar Ben Sultan (dubbed Bandar Bush by the Bush family) was named as a major conspirator with the Americans against Syria. It was reported that He was arrested in Syria while under cover smuggling money and weapons to Syrian operatives. It was also exposed that the American Ambassador Robert Ford and French Ambassador Eric Chevallier (in Arabic) to Syria had smuggled sophisticated satellite communication and surveillance equipment to the Syrian rebels some of which were seized by Syrian police.

Media outlets had also been manipulated to pressure Syrian government and to inflame the demonstrators. After gaining credibility in reporting Tunisian, Egyptian, and Libyan revolutions Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia TV channels had almost totally ignored the 99% popular Bahraini peaceful demonstrations and concentrated on Syrian demonstrators, less than 40% of the population, in a biased unconfirmed and more hostile reporting against the Syrian government. Every Thursday one could notice heightened reports about civilian casualties and ruthless attacks of the Syrian army in an attempt to incite more people to join Friday demonstrators. Syrian news would top every news broadcast even though there might be more important news in the region. Al-Jazeera repeated broadcasting phone video clips of the same demonstrations from different angles, and of alleged civilian victims, some of these clips proved to be of old Iraqi troops abusing citizens. The victims were always reported as civilians while there was no mention of Syrian soldiers being killed. Unlike Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, and Yemeni army defectors shown on TV declaring support to the people, the media failed to show one Syrian army defector while they keep announcing wide defection. Al-Jazeera had established a special war room planning anti-Syrian propaganda as reported by some Al-Jazeera’s prime reporters and directors such as Ghassan Ben Jeddo and Luna Al-Shibl among many others (Arabnews in Arabic), who submitted their resignation in protest of such unprofessional politically biased reporting.

The US and France, particularly, had pushed for many harsh sanctions against Syria through the UN. Fortunately they could not obtain a military interference under the excuse of protecting Syrian citizens, as was done in Libya, because of the Russian and Chinese veto threat. So the Arab League, a Western tool, was pushed to play pressuring active role in Syria. It seems that many Arab leaders, especially Gulf leaders, who cynically call for democratic regime in Syria, have forgotten that they, themselves, employ family autocratic dictatorships in their own countries. Despite this fact the Syrian government had accepted the Arab League plan. The oppositional Syrian National Council rejected the plan and intensified its violence against the Syrian army inviting harsh retaliation. So the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership and threatened economic and political sanctions. Such are illegal actions contradicting the constitution of the Arab League that had never made a decision benefiting any Arab state, but legalized the many Western military interference in the Middle East such as in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, and Libya. We should mention here that the Arab League had refused to receive a petition from the slaughtered Bahraini people requesting protection. Thousands of people within different Arab states demonstrated against the decision of Arab League in front of Qatar’s and Saudi Arabia’s embassies.

It has become obvious that the Syrian oppositional groups are divided and have different aspirations some of them are conflicting and confusing. This division and confusion are due to the background of each oppositional group. The Western paid groups are armed seeking violent regime change and call for foreign interference the same as in Libya. The genuine oppositional groups reject any foreign interference fearing the same fate of Libya, and seek drastic reform through dialogue.

To obtain peace, real democracy and prosperity in the Arab World, ALL the present Arab leaders and regimes need to be abolished, starting east with the Gulf States all the way west to the Pacific Ocean through the northern Arab states of Africa. This would give a chance for an Arab Union to develop under one real democratic regime with one united economy. Such a strong Arab Union would rebalance global power and put an end to Western re-colonization schemes of the Middle East.

We should remember that permanent changes happen through the evolution of human consciousness not through violent destructive revolutions.

Western Media's call to war agains Iran

2012-02-12T05:22:00.000-08:00

The return of the Keyboard Warriors
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times February 12, 2012

Waiting for the end of the world,
Waiting for the end of the world,
Waiting for the end of the world.
Dear Lord, I sincerely hope you're coming
‘cause you really started something.

Elvis Costello, Waiting for the end of the world

Be afraid. Be very afraid. The Return of the Keyboard Warriors - a prized Return of the Living Dead spin-off - is at hand. From Republican chicken hawks to public intellectuals, right-wing America is erupting in renewed neo-conservative revolt. The year 2012 is the new 2002; Iran is the new Iraq. Whatever the highway - real men go to Tehran via Damascus, or real men go to Tehran

non-stop - they want a war, and they want it now.

Go ahead and jump
Exhibit A is an op-ed piece at the Wall Street Journal - similar to countless others popping up virtually everyday not only in this Masters of the Universe vehicle but also in the Washington Post and myriad rags across "Western civilization".

The festival of fallacies ranges from the usual "diplomacy has run its course" to "the sanctions are too late" - culminating in the right-wing weapon of choice; "Iran is within a year of getting to the point when it will be able to assemble a bomb essentially at will." Why bother to follow what the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is doing, not to mention the National Intelligence Estimates released by the US intelligence community?

And why not add imperial disdain tinged with racism, as in "Iran is a Third World country that can't even protect its own scientists in the heart of Tehran". Of course not; they are being killed by the Iranian terror group Mujahideen-e-Khalq, merrily trained, financed and armed by Israel's Mossad, as US corporate media has just discovered. [2] Everybody in Iran has known this for months.

As a climax, still another fallacy - "the Islamic Republic means to destroy Israel" - unveils the real agenda; "the broader goal of ending the regime." Oh, if we could only have our Persian gendarme of the Gulf back.

This is what passes for geopolitical analysis in Rupert Murdoch-controlled US corporate media - read and relinked daily by the Masters of the Universe. Scary monsters, super freaks
Exhibit B is an op-ed piece at Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, signed by Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard, senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.

Recently, I actually took the trouble of reading Ferguson's latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, during my favorite West-to-Rest flight, the 16-hour New York to Hong Kong (from the American century to the Asian century).

Ferguson sets out to refute the reasons why Israel should not attack Iran. He assumes "the Saudis stand ready to pump out additional supplies" of oil (wrong). He assumes a "military humiliation" will lead the regime in Tehran to collapse (wrong). He claims that Tehran will not "become a sober, calculating disciple of the realist school of diplomacy ... because it has finally acquired weapons of mass destruction" (multiple wrong; Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is very sober and calculating, and he has banned nuclear weapons as anti-Islamic).

Former US vice president Dick Cheney would have been proud to hire Ferguson as an apparatchik, as he states that "preventive war can be a lesser evil" and duly advocates "creative destruction".

Ferguson ranks Israel as "the most easterly outpost of Western civilization"; not bad for an isolated, supremacist theocracy/ethnocracy armed with at least 200 (undeclared) nuclear weapons whose favorite sport is to terrorize Palestinians and now Iranian scientists. Talk about a sponsor of terror state springing from the womb of "Western civilization".

Ferguson's toxic fusion of arrogance and ignorance - about the Middle East, about Persian culture, about Asia, about the nuclear issue, about the oil industry, about, in fact, "the Rest" - would be just innocuous hadn't he be hailed as a top public intellectual. The best thing about his piece are actually the comments, ranging from "I'm shocked that a research fellow at Jesus College would advocate the bombing of Muslims" to "What's with all these Brits that look to the USA as a platform to re-inflate their dreams of Empire?"

If this is what passes for intellectual analysis in the upper strata of the Anglo-American axis, no wonder the whole business of Empire is doomed.

Far more insidious than The Invasion of the Keyboard Warriors is its effect on the warrior-in-chief, US President Barack Obama. Recently, Obama has been conducting product placement for Robert Kagan's new book, The World America Made. Kagan, a neo-con stalwart, advises Mitt Romney - who may, or may not, become the Republican presidential nominee, assuming he wins over the visceral repulsion he provokes in extreme right-wing circles.

As Andrew Levine from the Institute for Policy Studies has shrewdly observed, Obama the neo-con may be a very clever move to pre-empt Mitt and win even more votes. But it may be an exercise in transparency, as Obama, even before his State of the Union address, has been reciting Kagan to the letter, as in forget Asia, this will be another American century, and I will be at the helm; thus remember, it is I that coined the only change you can believe in.

And that's when this really becomes a scary movie; if Obama the neo-con concludes that to get to his new, dominant American century first he needs to do some vacuum-cleaning in Southwest Asia, blowback or not, he'll do it - to the delight of the Keyboard Warrior brigade.

The Insidious Role of the Western media in Syria

2012-02-12T05:12:00.000-08:00

From

SYRIA: NATO's Next "Humanitarian" War?

by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
The role of the US-NATO-Israel military alliance in triggering an armed insurrection is not addressed by the Western media. Moreover, several "progressive voices" have accepted the "NATO consensus" at face value. The role of CIA-MI6 covert intelligence operations in support of armed groups is simply not mentioned. Salafist paramilitary groups involved in terrorist acts, are, according to reports, supported covertly by Israeli intelligence (Mossad). The Muslim Brotherhood has been supported by Turkey, as well as by MI6, Britain's Secret Service (SIS) since the 1950s
More generally, the Western media has misled public opinion on the nature of the Arab protest movement by failing to address the support provided by the US State Department as well as US foundations (including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)) to selected pro-US opposition groups.
Known and documented, the U.S. State Department "has been been funding opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad, since 2006. (U.S. admits funding Syrian opposition - World - CBC News April 18, 2011).
The protest movement in Syria was upheld by the media as part of the "Arab Spring", presented to public opinion as a pro-democracy protest movement which spread spontaneously from Egypt and the Maghreb to the Mashriq. There is reason to believe, however, that events in Syria, however, were planned well in advance in coordination with the process of regime change in other Arab countries including Egypt and Tunisia.
The outbreak of the protest movement in the southern border city of Daraa was carefully timed to follow the events in Tunisia and Egypt.
In chorus they have described recent events in Syria as a "peaceful protest movement" directed against the government of Bashar Al Assad, when the evidence amply confirms that Islamic paramilitary groups are involved in terrorist acts. These same Islamic groups have infiltrated the protest rallies.
Western media distortions abound. Large "pro-government" rallies (including photographs) are casually presented as "evidence" of a mass anti-government protest movement. The reports on casualties are based on unconfirmed "eye-witness reports" or on Syrian opposition sources in exile. The London based Syria Observatory for Human Rights are profusely quoted by the Western media as a "reliable source" with the usual disclaimers. Israeli news sources, while avoiding the issue of an armed insurgency, tacitly acknowledge that Syrian forces are being confronted by an organized professional paramilitary.
The absence of verifiable data, has not prevented the Western media from putting forth "authoritative figures" on the number of casualties. What are the sources of this data? Who is responsible for the casualties?

Media curtain blinds Americans from imperial war against Middle East

2012-02-12T04:58:00.000-08:00

By Hansook Oh and Katherine ONeill
February 7th, 2012
Daily Sundial

A truly democratic nation must rely on journalism to provide accurate information to its citizens so they can make decisions and analysis based on fact, not on sensational hype or rumor. In the globalized world we live in today, where technology allows the spread of information to have more transnational impact, an accurate and fair media is crucial to the stabilization and progress of the human race.

In the case of the “Arab Spring,” a succession of violent uprisings in the Middle East (with the exception of the primarily peaceful regime change in Tunisia), mainstream media outlets from both the West and the Middle East failed to provide the Arab people and the rest of the world with truly accurate, un-biased reporting. This undermines peaceful efforts for change and distracts the world from human rights violations in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Israel. Whether purposeful or not, the media have played the role of propagandists for NATO, Israel, and some Arab governments who do not care about the plight of people, but are engaging in an imperial war for power and gain.

Honey Al-Sayed, host of Al-Madina radio in Syria and a Middle Eastern media ambassador to the U.S., was present in Damascus since the violence began in other parts of the country and left to Kuwait after the violence reached the Syrian capitol.

Al-Sayed is not a hard news journalist and her show, rated number one is Syria, is mostly centered on entertainment, popular culture and lifestyle. However, she expects news media to follow a strict ethical integrity, especially when reporting in a time of crisis, but feels that media have done a poor job in giving Syrians and the world the truth.

“You’re not supposed to be biased,” Al-Sayed said. “You’re supposed to be telling the truth, not falsifying the truth.”

Al-Sayed said that some foreign and Arab media have been actively agitating the Syrian people to violently revolt.

“What they did is they caused more bloodshed,” Al-Sayed said. “When you repeatedly bring out shots of a lot of bloody events… and you add to it a little bit of drama and exaggeration, you push more people to want to take revenge. It’s as if they [media] are saying, ‘go in the streets, look what your government is doing to you’ instead of simply stating the truth.”

Covering only opposition efforts against the Syrian government’s tanks oversimplifies the Syrian conflict to that of one between an evil regime and innocent protestors fighting for democracy. In reality, the opposition is fragmented between peaceful protestors, armed gangs, the Muslim Brotherhood, and various religious sects with no cohesion for a new vision for the country.
Lynn El-Boukhari, 24, who lives in Damascus and has no connection to the media, said she does not trust the local Arab or international media because they have not presented the reality of Syria.

“They’re all broadcasting the situation in Syria according to their own opinions, no matter what the truth is,” Boukhari said through Facebook. “Only God knows the truth, but what I’m sure about is that there are terrorists in Syria and there is killing by the Syrian army… but no one knows who they’re killing and under what conditions.”
Boukhari’s personal knowledge as a citizen undermines the foreign media’s demonization of president Bashar Al-Assad as a detached, ruthless dictator who has an evil agenda to destroy his own country.

“I know that there’s an order by the president to only shoot armed people, but not a fatal shot,” said Boukhari. “I know many guys who have been arrested during demonstrations and some more than once, stayed in custody for a week or two and then were released and unharmed. And later, some have met the president Bashar Assad and again, no one hurt them. The president knew they were out on demonstrations against him.”

Why both Arab and Western media have been playing the devil’s advocate in the Middle East is a complicated question and almost no one is willing to answer it. What is happening in Syria is similar to what happened in Libya, where NATO forces and NATO-backed rebels were able to invade and destroy an entire country with the help of the media’s false reporting and omission of facts.

Lizzie Phelan, an independent journalist from the United Kingdom, spoke at the United Nations last August about what she saw in Libya when Tripoli fell to rebels. In a Youtube video documenting her speech in August, Phelan explained how the media never showed the fight of the Libyans to protect their country from NATO and their allegiance to their leader, Moammar Gaddafi.

“This has been an incredible media war leading to the criminalization of the Libyan government and Gaddafi,” Phelan said. “The media said there were thousands of people waiting to be killed in Benghazi, but they never showed us any evidence. They said that 6,000 people were killed by the government—human rights organizations have confirmed that approximately 250 have died from both sides. They said that the Libyan government were attacking the people from the air and Russian satellite intelligence has shown us that this was impossible.

“Instead we saw videos of Black Libyans and other Black Africans being lynched in public squares by NATO’s ground troops, the rebels, with scores of people filming on their mobile phones and western special forces looking on.”

Perhaps the most disturbing betrayal of journalistic ethics has been committed by Al Jazeera, the most popular Middle Eastern news Web site and broadcast channel in the Arab and Western world. Phelan criticized Al Jazeera’s coverage of the conquering of Libya and the coverage of Syria as ridiculously unethical.

“The spectacular U-turn from Al Jazeera, being a somewhat critical voice of imperialism’s wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, to being an open facilitator against Libya, Syria and even now the progressive nations of Latin America was perhaps the greatest propaganda trick I have seen in my lifetime,” Phelan said.

This turnabout from Al Jazeera may be because Qatar, a small but powerful Arab League country, owns the news network. According to a New York Times story published yesterday, “Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, became the first Arab leader to propose military intervention to halt the killing in Syria.” Qatar’s government also sent aircraft and special forces to Libya, aiding in the demise of the Gaddafi government.

Phelan recently spent time in Syria working on a documentary. In a video interview with the New York Times, Phelan explained that a similar NATO war is also taking place there, hidden under the illusion of “revolution” put out by the media. Phelan wrote out her full answers to the NY Times’ questions on Black Star News’ website.

“This documentary will actually expose how if it was not for such media, the crisis in Syria would have been over before it started and the people of Syria would be living in peace now,” Phelan wrote. “The difference with journalists from mainstream media in NATO and GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries is that they come with an agenda, and that agenda is to cover what they call is a “revolution” happening inside Syria and to give substance to the false claims that the Syrian government is a threat to the Syrian people.”

The mainstream media has hijacked the story of the Arab people and has put innocent lives in danger. Mainstream media have sensationalized and romanticized the conflicts in Libya, Egypt and Syria, distracting international attention from the brutal massacres which continue to take place in Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine.

“No one cares anymore if the president stays or steps down,” Boukhari said. “It’s a matter of who wins the argument and who gets the cake.”

Gaddafi: The murderous western touch

2011-11-26T17:45:00.000-08:00

Thursday, 27 October 2011
Herald SA

So now Muammar Gaddafi has died; apparently after being incapacitated by the fire power of US drones and French gunship bombers, and left to face a very primitively ruthless death at the hands of the NATO led rebels.

Jurist Special Guest Columnist and international lawyer Curtis Doebbler has indicated that the killing of Gaddafi was a violation of The Third Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, was a crime of aggression and also constituted the use of excessive force; in as much as it was a clear violation to the right to life, besides being in violation of Resolution 1973 which sought to protect civilians; not to bomb fleeing people as what happened to Gaddafi's convoy.

To some Barack Obama has emerged as the number one champion of the West's anti-terrorism war. Ironically Obama has teamed up with Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda to take over Libya, leading to his drones incapacitating Gaddafi from the air so that his Al-Qaeda allies could summarily execute the defenceless and unarmed Gaddafi and his son, among others.
Obama now commands a remarkably bloody record - killing thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, killing Arch Terrorist Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, arming and backing Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan rebels all the way from Benghazi to Sirte, via Tripoli; killing over 50 000 Libyan civilians in the process, grazing down Sirte and Bani Walid so they submit to the Al-Qaeda thugs calling themselves the National Transitional

Council; and subsequently getting himself the trophy of Gaddafi's battered body.
Now the global witch-hunt for terrorists has reached remarkably impressive levels, with Gaddafi's death eliciting cheers for Obama and his sidekicks from brainwashed and hapless global citizens. It is somehow hard not to cheer the smart and fast speaking Obama even when he is announcing a murder act under his command. The man comes across like a genius.
The brainwashing of the global masses is so deep that a heartless and hell-hailing monster like France's Nicolas Sarkozy can also boast of admirers. This writer treats the barbaric murder of Gaddafi and all other callous and murderous Western schemes as purely satanic; apparently exposing the maggoty and inherently evil forces behind Western imperialism and white supremacy. No apologies.

The manhunt for Gaddafi was clearly not part of effecting a no fly zone, the pretext by which Western powers entered Libya, ostensibly to protect civilians they baselessly said were about to be wiped out by Gaddafi. The manhunt was undoubtedly orchestrated by the same people who founded and executed slavery on us Africans, the very people who occupied our continent by the power of colonial conquest, the people who brought to humanity two world wars, the people who helped create a murderous Zionist Israel, and the very people who today preside over a predatory imperialistic system.
The whole NATO operation in Libya cannot be separated from the work of those who founded the American constitution, and the so-called American exceptionalism. This is why Hillary Clinton brazenly bragged about her role in ordering the murdering of Gaddafi, declaring with a cruel laugh "We came, we saw, and he died."

The she-devil could have aptly put it like "We came, we bombed, and he died." Dear reader, you have to understand the language of this piece in the context of the invasion of a sovereign country that has suffered so much loss of civilian lives at the hands of foreigner aggressors reputed with a murderous history based on racial supremacy.
There are a number of reasons that makes it impossible for this writer to join the celebration over the death of Col Gaddafi, and supporting the man himself is not one of them. Col Gaddafi courted Westerners in the last years of his reign, and the revolution of Zimbabwe was not served well by this rather treacherous behaviour. In fact Gaddafi had as many admirable traits as he had deplorable ones, like supporting liberation movements, while trying the Arabisation scheme in Sudan, or supporting the British-sponsored Idi Amin in Uganda, even when the dictator was waging a war against Tanzania.

He is the same Gaddafi who helped train our own freedom fighters during Zimbabwe's war for independence, and the same Gaddafi who turned Libya into one of the richest countries on this planet from the second poorest country when he took over power. Talk of 42 years of massive economic progression and tightly controlled political monopoly of power.

The first reason I cannot and will not celebrate the death of Gaddafi is perhaps the fact that I am a cynic and somewhat a political pessimist by nature. Secondly, I hail from an international relations training background, and also from a media background. As such I am what you would charitably call an expert in the knowledge of how brainwashed this world is.

It is not easy to make someone like this writer an easy target of mass deception tactics; often sugar coated in humanitarianism; the rhetoric on democracy, liberties and freedoms; or any of the hoopla around which rivals and enemies of Western politicians are derided and denounced. This writer is a discerner and not only a listener to Western political voices. The third reason is I am an ideological creation that is allergic to imperialistic values and whatever they are meant to stand for. No sane person from the African continent can admire imperialism. Simply put, I believe monopoly capitalism practised at the expense of weaker nations is a program designed from the depths of hell, and by its very nature it is the number one crime against humanity. It is imperialism that breeds devil incarnates like Nicolas Sarkozy, and it is imperialism that deceives humanity to the point of elevating such a heartless murderer to the level of a liberator. Dear reader, if your idea of democracy has got anything to do with the actions of NATO in Libya over the last eight months, then this writer has got bad news for you. You are simply confusing sugar-coated imperialistic aggression for democracy and such an error is fatalistic by definition.

If your source of information over Libya has been the BBC "world service" or any of the mainstream Western media, again this writer has bad news for you. You have been lied to, misled, deceived, manipulated, cheated, brainwashed; and you have to work extremely hard to sieve the information so as to differentiate grain from chaff.

As a matter of principle and by the definition of personality this writer did not cheer American forces when they announced they had killed Osama bin Laden, and neither does he cheer them for ending the life of Muammar Gaddafi.
This writer does not count Obama a hero of whatever magnitude, just like it is increasingly becoming hard to keep counting Nicolas Sarkozy among humans.

The man is proving to be simply a heartless beast walking on two legs. His British sidekick David Cameron comes along as a beautiful looking angel from the Devil's kingdom. Libyan atrocities committed by NATO and its Al-Qaeda allies stink to high heavens, and they speak strongly on the characters of Sarkozy and Cameron. Displaying dead bodies in a shopping centre is something that infuriates the Devil himself, yet these

Allah preaching goons reckon its laudable conduct.
These views are figurative descriptions purely based on intellectual opinion from an angered writer. Let us start with Barack Obama, a man fitting so well into Malcolm X's "house nigger" description, dutifully doing

Uncle Sam's dirty work at home and abroad.

It is a fact that Obama has not used his eloquence and oratory skills to say anything tangible about racism in the United States, or about the deplorable conditions of the African American. Africa we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

The BBC: NATO’s media partner-in-crime

2011-11-08T05:04:00.000-08:00

25 October 2011
By William Bowles

Well they’ve finally silenced Muammar Gaddafi, the man the BBC calls “an oddball until the end”. The manner of his capture and death seems not to bother the BBC but then who cares about ‘oddballs’?

The video, with commentary by the BBC’s chief foreign ~~correspondent~~ propagandist for NATO John Simpson,

“looks back at the life of a man who “remained a one-off, an oddball right until the end”. — BBC News, 20 October 2011

Attacked by NATO jets, then tortured and shot in cold blood in front of jubilant ‘rebels’, all Simpson has to offer is the perpetuation of racist Western myths about the Arabs, about the ‘other’. Disgusting stuff but totally in tune with BBC’s role as NATO’s media partner.

Other commentators however, had a somewhat different take on events, for example:

“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,’ Russian envoy to NATO and the leader of the Congress of Russian Communities, Dmitry Rogozin, described how the West treated the cold-blooded murder of Moammur Gaddafi.” — ‘Envoy slams ‘sadistic’ triumphalism‘, RT, 22 October 2011

Hence the BBC’s focus on Gaddafi the ‘oddball’ and the ‘last of the buffoon dictators’, anything to dehumanize the man, all the better to justify his murder.

Meanwhile, back in TV-land the BBC’s ‘coverage’ of Gaddafi’s death veered wildly, first in one direction and then in another as it attempted to adjust its wobbly spin on things. Strikingly, not a single story questions the nature of his capture and subsequent murder, and the role NATO played in Gaddafi’s murder is hinted at in only two pieces on the 20 October (see below).

(Earliest to latest)

20 October 2011
Fallen hero of Libya’s final battle (obviously not about Gaddafi but about the ‘heroic’ rebels focusing on a Brit who had joined the ‘rebels’, got shot and died)

VIDEO: Libyan forces ‘capture Gaddafi’ (12:37pm replete with talk that most were glad that “the hated dictator” had been caught and according to the text, “Deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has been captured and wounded in both legs, the National Transitional Council has said” though it’s not stated in the video).

VIDEO: Libyan TV announces Gaddafi ‘capture’ (13:01) (NTC TV announcement of Gaddafi’s capture “Libyan TV’s news presenter thanked God as he announced the reports that Col Muammar Gaddafi had been captured by rebels in Sirte.”)

Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi ‘killed’ (22:01) This is the most disingenuous of the BBC’s propaganda blitz on behalf of NATO replete with the allegation that Gaddafi had a “golden gun” when he was captured, an allegation that disappeared almost immediately just like the ‘African mercenaries’ and ‘bombing of civilians’ disinfo that acted as the justification for unleashing the Dogs of War on defenceless Libya.

This is one of only two references to a NATO attack on Gaddafi’s convoy and it’s pretty much a NATO press release rehashed:

“Nato, which has been running a bombing campaign in Libya for months, said it had carried out an air strike earlier on Thursday.
“French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet said French jets had fired warning shots to halt a convoy carrying Col Gaddafi as it tried to flee Sirte.
“He said Libyan fighters had then descended and taken the colonel.”

It then quotes Mr Jibril (ex)leader of the NTC who alleged that,

“When the car [with Gaddafi onboard and already wounded] was moving it was caught in crossfire between the revolutionaries and Gaddafi forces in which he was hit by a bullet in the head,” said Mr Jibril, quoting from the report.

Not content with presenting this allegation as news, the piece presents us with some of the other allegations doing the rounds, though the piece opened with the ‘crossfire’ version of Gaddafi’s murder, obviously the preferred one coming as it did from the NTC itself.

“Acting Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril announced the death, and later said the colonel had been killed in a crossfire between Gaddafi loyalists and fighters from the transitional authorities.”

But just to be on the safe side, the BBC gives us some alternate endings to choose from later in the piece:

“Earlier, some NTC fighters gave a different account of the colonel’s death, saying he had been shot when he tried to escape.
“One NTC fighter told the BBC that he found Col Gaddafi hiding in a hole, and the former leader had begged him not to shoot.
“The fighter showed reporters a golden pistol he said he had taken from Col Gaddafi.
“Arabic TV channels showed images of troops surrounding two large drainage pipes where the reporters said Col Gaddafi was found.

None of which were true but the last fabrication about Gaddafi being found in a drain with its echoes of the image of Saddam Hussein down a hole made the headlines first, such is the power of the BBC to shape our take on events. The BBC even ran the footage as ‘news’.

Later on the same day, another BBC ~~correspondent~~ propagandist for NATO, Jeremy Bowen allegedly explains in‘How Gaddafi’s power collapsed‘ that the rebels, “helped” by NATO bombing overthrew Gaddafi.

Finally at 11pm, almost eleven hours after its first report, the BBC ran this story on its main news titled ‘Gaddafi’s demise: End of a dictator‘ which opens,”[Gaddafi] was found cowering in a storm drain after his convoy was attacked by NATO jets” though the voiceover tells us that he was found in a ditch and once more repeats the fabrication of (ex)-Acting Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril that “the colonel had been killed in a crossfire between Gaddafi loyalists and fighters from the transitional authorities.”

Amazingly, the fact that the cellphone video shows Gaddafi, covered in blood and alive in the back of a pickup truck being kicked around and struggling, seems not to bother the BBC, allegedly anal about attention to detail. But who cares, what dramatic footage even if it’s only 2 megapixels-worth?

Three days later (23/10/11) the BBC ran a story titled, ‘Does new video provide clues as to who killed Gaddafi?‘ In it we are shown a Libyan ‘rebel’ surrounded by his mates who announce that this is the man who shot Gaddafi through the head, waving the pistol around. But the BBC, now in a bind over its punting of the “crossfire” story from day one leaves the last word to (ex) Acting Prime Minister Jibril who states once again that Gaddafi was “killed in crossfire”.

Thus the much-vaunted BBC, famed for its ‘impartiality’ is now quite happy to run barely legible footage shot on a cellphone, throw in a quote from the (ex) acting-prime minister and call it the truth.

Killing Gaddafi - Media Lens

2011-11-08T04:55:00.000-08:00

October 27, 2011

Media Lens

In response to the torture and summary execution of an injured, blood-soaked, helpless human being, the front page of one British newspaper read:

'Mad Dog Put Down.'

The title of an article in the Sun declared: ‘Dead dog.’ (October 24, 2011)

The Daily Star reported that Gaddafi's son Mutassim had been filmed smoking a cigarette and drinking water shortly after being captured. The paper took up the story:

‘But in graphic images that have baffled UN investigators, he is then shown dead, lying next to Mad Dog, with bullet holes in his neck and stomach.’

In his report, ‘Mad Dog’ was the name journalist Gary Nicks used to refer to the executed Libyan leader. Nicks continued: ‘New footage emerged yesterday of Mad Dog’s dying words to a baying mob.’

Gaddafi and his son were not the only victims of the mob. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that between six and ten people appeared to have been executed at the scene of the Libyan leader’s capture. Around 95 bodies were found in the immediate vicinity, many of them victims of Nato airstrikes. In fact, it is clear that Nato, with the assistance of special forces(although ground troops were strictly forbidden by UN resolution 1973), had maintained a no-drive zone around Sirte: a crucial factor facilitating the murder of Gaddafi.

CBS reported 572 bodies ‘and counting’ in Sirte, including 300, ‘many of them with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head’, collected and buried in a mass grave.

HRW reported the massacre of 53 people by anti-Gaddafi fighters at the Mahara hotel in Sirte. Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at HRW, commented on the atrocity:

‘This latest massacre seems part of a trend of killings, looting, and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law.’

The BBC covered the massacre on its News at Ten (October 24). Wyre Davies reported:

'Some say Gaddafi's home town is where transitional government forces took their revenge; collective punishment for Gaddafi's own crimes. A vivid and graphic example of that in Sirte today. The bodies of 53 Gaddafi supporters, discovered shot with their hands tied.'

The segment lasted 20 seconds, with commentary on the massacre and footage of the bodies lasting 10 seconds. As one surviving resident of Sirteasked:

‘What would people in Europe and America say if Gaddafi was doing this?’

The answer is hardly in doubt - wall-to-wall coverage and volcanic outrage. Gaddafi was certainly a vicious tyrant responsible for gross human rights abuses. But callous indifference to human suffering was supposed to be the reason he was so beyond the pale, so unlike ‘us’.

Channel 4 anchor Matt Frei responded to the massacre in a style familiar from his years as the BBC’s Washington correspondent:

‘You could say even about this regime, this government, that they don’t have a second chance to make a first impression. So just how worried are they?’

When ‘our side’ is responsible, even a massacre becomes, first and foremost, a PR problem.

The response from Ian Black, the liberal Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, to the torture and extrajudicial killing of Gaddafi was a stark: ‘good riddance’.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, giggled with CBS journalists as shejoked about Gaddafi’s murder:

‘We came, we saw, he died.’

Incongruous laughter appears to be a trait.

British prime minister David Cameron also found mirth amid the gore in a speech celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali:

‘Obviously, Diwali being the festival of a triumph of good over evil, and also celebrating the death of a devil [audience laughter], perhaps there’s a little resonance in what I’m saying tonight.’ (BBC News at Ten, October 20, 2011)

One of our regular message board posters, Chris Shaw, expressed his ‘despair and horror at the footage of a 69 year old man being beaten, tortured and murdered by a mob’ (Media Lens message board, October 24, 2011). The natural response of a feeling human being, one might think. By contrast, Andrew Gilligan wrote in the Telegraph: ‘the one thing Gaddafi retained to the very end was his ability to put on a show… [His] demise was as box-office as his 42-year rule’.

We suspect that most journalists are not actually unfeeling brutes. They are conformists wary of the high price they can be made to pay for even the suspicion that they might be 'apologists' for an official enemy. A risk that has increased markedly in our age of 'political convergence', deprived as it is of any established mainstream political dissent.

Cameron's First Military Victory

As ever, the broadcast media rushed to vindicate their warrior-leaders. Indeed, on August 22, the BBC’s deputy political editor, James Landale, was a month early in describing Downing Street’s satisfaction ‘that all David Cameron's critics, who said that this couldn't be done - that aerial bombardment would not work - have been proved wrong’. (Landale, BBC News at Six, August 22, 2011)

Last week, Landale’s senior colleague, Nick Robinson, brought viewers up to date, assuring them that Downing Street 'will see this, I'm sure, as a triumphant end'. (News at Six, October 20, 2011) Robinson added:

‘Libya was David Cameron’s first war. Colonel Gaddafi his first foe. Today, his first real taste of military victory.’

We are living in strange times when a senior BBC journalist can portray the fighting of endless wars as the normal way of things, as though Cameron had taken some kind of prime ministerial rite of initiation.

In an interview with new UK defence secretary, Philip Hammond, BBC ‘rottweiler’ John Humphrys asked:

'What apart from a sort of moral glow – and there’s nothing wrong with that – have we got out of it?' (Humphrys to Hammond, BBC Radio 4 Today, October 21, 2011; go to 3:13)

The BBC’s chief political correspondent, Norman Smith, commented:

‘I imagine, privately, David Cameron must surely feel vindicated because the Libyan enterprise was a big political risk.’ (BBC News online, 16:34, October 21, 2011)

As ever, an ostensibly neutral BBC reporter endorsed what he was supposed only to be reporting: Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’. How could he possibly feel otherwise?

In Washington, the BBC’s Ian Pannell thought hard and joined the mainstream herd:

‘I think President Obama is feeling that his foreign policy strategy has been vindicated - that his critics have been proven wrong.’ (BBC News online, 16:44, October 21, 2011)

An editorial in the Telegraph agreed:

'His death vindicates the swift action of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in halting the attack on Benghazi and supporting the rebellion.'

A Tweet from someone called Micah Zenko made more sense to us:

'Qaddafi summarily executed is apt conclusion to false narrative of Libya intervention. No arms embargo, selective NFZ, boots on the ground.'

Zenko might also have mentioned the unnoticed irony that UN resolution 1973, which authorised the misnamed ‘no-fly zone’, was among other things: ‘Condemning... torture and summary executions.’

As though concluding a bed-time story, the Guardian’s Simon Tisdallcommented:

‘The Arab spring had claimed another infamous scalp. The risky western intervention had worked. And Libya was liberated at last.’

Andrew Grice, political editor of the Independent, applauded:

‘Mr Cameron took risks on Libya – but they paid off… Mr Cameron proved the doubters wrong… By calling Libya right, Mr Cameron invites a neat contrast with Tony Blair.’

Murdoch’s Times observed that only the ‘political courage’ of Sarkozy and Cameron had prevented disaster at ‘the beginning of another genocide’. (Leading article, ‘Death of a Dictator,' The Times, October 21, 2011)

In Murdoch’s grim fantasy world, any nation obstructing Western corporate control is, by happy coincidence, either perpetrating or planning ‘genocide’.

Jesus And Buddha - Hang Your Heads In Shame!

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once commented on a striking feature of modern propaganda:

‘It's been largely based on denigrating somebody over there and saying we've got to go in and knock them out. The main awakening of the human spirit is in compassion and the main function of propaganda is to suppress compassion, knock it out. Well, it's in public journalism all the time now, too.’ (Campbell, The Hero's Journey, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p.220)

Compassion is a threat because it is politically incorrect, resistant to robotic demonising by the cheerleaders of hate. Compassion is a spontaneous trembling of the heart based on an awareness of shared humanity, shared suffering, shared Being. And yet, even the normally insightful Glenn Greenwald, clearly appalled by the murders in Libya, reminded readers of something he had previously written:

‘No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi, just as none harbored any for Saddam.’

We Tweeted him: ‘Jesus and Buddha hang your heads in shame!’

Greenwald replied: ‘I had this debate when I first wrote that - it doesn't mean you don't object to what's done to them: they're just not sympathetic.’

How easily we forget that compassion - even for a vicious, hated enemy -has long been recognised as one of the highest, most precious achievements of human civilisation. As the Buddhist sage Je Gampopa commented:

'Those who are hurt by others in return for the goodness they show them, yet, despite this, still act beneficially towards them, are the finest humans in the world: people who can return good for bad.' (Gampopa, Gems of Dharma, Jewels of Freedom, Altea, 1994, p.155)

Does anyone doubt that a Jesus or a Buddha would not merely have harboured sympathy for Gaddafi but would have intervened to save his life? And who would dare claim that doing so would make them ‘apologists’ for tyranny?

Philosopher A.C. Grayling sounded a rare note of dissent:

‘In accepting the pragmatic case for shooting malefactors, just as we shoot mad dogs, we state that we do not wish to pay the high cost of living according to law and civil liberties. We champion our Western principles about the rule of law and the rights of individuals, we thus say, only until they become a burden and an inconvenience; and, when they do, we summarily shoot people in the head instead.’

The ‘inconvenience’ requires explanation. In truth, if they are to survive, ‘Third World’ leaders are most often obliged to prioritise Western corporate interests over the needs of local people (see our discussion of John Perkins’ book ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’ ). This rankles with the victims of course, and so Western clients typically have numerous skeletons in their human rights cupboard – hidden with Western military, financial and diplomatic help. These skeletons can be brought to light in a moment, if the client strays. A compliant media is always on hand to declare the crimes 'Hitlerian', ‘genocidal’, 'exceptional', and surely justifying whatever violent measures Western governments deem fit for the preservation of civilisation: in reality, the preservation of their control of the target nation.

In the rush to celebrate Cameron’s ‘first taste of military victory,’ the UK media ignored or downplayed a whole host of problems with the war, including:

- The fact that even establishment think tanks like the International Crisis Group reported that Nato and the ‘rebel’ Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), rather than the Gaddafi regime, had rejected all peace initiatives out of hand:

'UNSC resolution 1973 emphatically called for a ceasefire, yet every proposal for a ceasefire put forward by the Qaddafi regime or by third parties so far has been rejected by the TNC as well as by the Western governments most closely associated with the NATO military campaign... neither the TNC nor NATO has made a ceasefire proposal of its own and there has yet to be a meaningful attempt to test Qaddafi's seriousness or pose conditions on acceptance that would subject a putative ceasefire to effective independent supervision'. (ICG, Popular Protest In North Africa and the Middle East, (V): Making Sense of Libya, Middle East/North Africa Report N°107 – 6 June 2011, pp.28-29)

- The fact that there was no UN mandate for regime change, even though this was very obviously Nato’s illegal aim.

- The striking lack of evidence - not least from other towns recaptured by pro-government forces - that Gaddafi planned to commit a massacre in Benghazi.

- ‘Rebel’ estimates of 50,000 dead as a result of the war as far back as the end of August. The Guardian's Seumas Milne is a rare, honest voice in notingthat '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'. Milne added: 'if the purpose of western intervention in Libya's civil war was to "protect civilians" and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure'.

- The bombing of Libyan state TV by British aircraft in July, which reportedly killed a number of journalists and was condemned as a war crime byReporters Without Borders, UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists.

- The reduction of Sirte, previously a city of 100,000 people, to a smoking ruin as a result of several weeks of siege. The assault included daily indiscriminate bombing, the cutting off of water, food, medicine and electricity supplies, the shelling of a hospital, widespread looting and massacres. Aid agencies described how the attack had created a humanitarian crisis.

- The widespread racist persecution of black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans by anti-Gaddafi forces. Amnesty International reported that 'black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans are at high risk of abuse by anti-Gaddafi forces'. (Many thanks to Peter, for providing much of this list on the Media Lens message board. A longer list is archived here)

Any horrors to come are likely to be reported in brief as the media eye swivels inexorably towards the next target of 'humanitarian intervention'.

RT : Rights to remain silent: US quiet on Libyan human rights

2011-11-08T04:50:00.000-08:00

Libya's post-Gaddafi world is showing a lurch towards radical Islam, with strict Sharia law and Al-Qaeda flags in evidence there. But are the US and NATO truly concerned about it?

It doesn’t matter to them if it’s untrue. It’s a higher truth.

2011-11-08T04:38:00.000-08:00

The Anti-Empire Report
November 1st, 2011
“We came, we saw, he died.”

— US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi

Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: “We came, we saw, 3,000 died … ha- ha.”

Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands … this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, al-Jazeera) — from the declared imminence of a “bloodbath” in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn’t intervene to stories of government helicopter-gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi’s army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American Ambassador, as if young soldiers needed Viagra to get it up!)¹

The New York Times (March 22) observed:

… the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.

The Los Angeles Times (April 7) added this about the rebels’ media operation:

It’s not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:

No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary
No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That’s [Qaddafi's] propaganda

The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation, but it was the rebels’ trail of lies, both of omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for “humanitarian” intervention; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can’t get much more humanitarian than that. If the people of Libya prior to the NATO/US bombardment had been offered a referendum on it, can it be imagined that they would have endorsed it?

In fact, it appears rather likely that a majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi. How else could the government have held off the most powerful military forces in the world for more than seven months? Before NATO and the US laid waste to the land, Libya had the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, and highest UN Human Development Index in Africa. During the first few months of the civil war, giant rallies were held in support of the Libyan leader.²

For further discussion of why Libyans may have been motivated to support Gaddafi, have a look at this video.

If Gaddafi had been less oppressive of his political opposition over the years and had made some gestures of accommodation to them during the Arab Spring, the benevolent side of his regime might still be keeping him in power, although the world has plentiful evidence making it plain that the Western powers are not particularly concerned about political oppression except to use as an excuse for intervention when they want to; indeed, government files seized in Tripoli during the fighting show that the CIA and British intelligence worked with the Libyan government in tracking down dissidents, turning them over to Libya, and taking part in interrogations.³

In any event, many of the rebels had a religious motive for opposing the government and played dominant roles within the rebel army; previously a number of them had fought against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁴ The new Libyan regime promptly announced that Islamic sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation, and laws that contradict “the teachings of Islam” would be nullified; there would also be a reinstitution of polygamy; the Muslim holy book, the Quran, allows men up to four wives.⁵

Thus, just as in Afghanistan in the 1980-90s, the United States has supported Islamic militants fighting against a secular government. The American government has imprisoned many people as “terrorists” in the United States for a lot less.

What began in Libya as “normal” civil war violence from both sides — repeated before and since by the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria without any Western military intervention at all (the US actually continues to arm the Bahrain and Yemen regimes) — was transformed by the Western propaganda machine into a serious Gaddafi genocide of innocent Libyans. Addressing the validity of this very key issue is another video, “Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no evidence“. The main feature of the film is an interview with Soliman Bouchuiguir, Secretary-General, and one of the founders in 1989, of the Libyan League for Human Rights, perhaps the leading Libyan dissident group, in exile in Switzerland.

Bouchuiguir is asked several times if he can document various charges made against the Libyan leader. Where is the proof of the many rapes? The many other alleged atrocities? The more than 6,000 civilians alleged killed by Gaddafi’s planes? Again and again Bouchuiguir cites the National Transitional Council as the source. Yes, that’s the rebels who carried out the civil war in conjunction with the NATO/US forces. At other times Bouchuiguir speaks of “eyewitnesses”: “little girls, boys who were there, whose families we know personally”. After awhile, he declares that “there is no way” to document these things. This is probably true to some extent, but why, then, the UN Security Council resolution for a military intervention in Libya? Why almost eight months of bombing?

Bouchuiguir also mentions his organization’s working with the National Endowment for Democracy in their effort against Gaddafi, and one has to wonder if the man has any idea that the NED was founded to be a front for the CIA. Literally.

Another source of charges against Gaddafi and his sons has been the International Criminal Court. The Court’s Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is shown in this film at a news conference discussing the same question of proof of the charges. He refers to an ICC document of 77 pages which he says contains the evidence. The film displays the document’s Table of Contents, which shows that pages 17-71 are not available to the public; these pages, apparently the ones containing the testimony and evidence, are marked as “redacted”. In an appendix, the ICC report lists its news sources; these include Fox News, CNN, the CIA, Soliman Bouchuiguir, and the Libyan League for Human Rights. Earlier, the film had presented Bouchuiguir citing the ICC as one of his sources. The documentation is thus a closed circle.

Historical footnote: “Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture — these were the weapons of Europe’s takeover” in the Mideast.⁶

The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to

On April 6, 2011 Moammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Obama, in which he said: “We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. … Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair.”⁷

Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.⁸ … Then came shock and awe!

In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place shortly thereafter.⁹

In 1994, it was reported that the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcommander Marcos, said that “he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians.” “Finally,” Marcos said, “they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes.”¹⁰ Yet for many years, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the training and tools needed to crush the Zapatistas.

The Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, and Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983 all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.¹¹ The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.

In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America’s help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that “the four powers” (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.¹² Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some sort of communist.

America’s presstitutes

Imagine that the vicious police attack of October 25 on the Occupy Oakland encampment had taken place in Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or in any other ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) … Page One Righteous Indignation with Shocking Photos. But here’s the Washington Post the next day: A three-inch story on page three with a headline: “Protesters wearing out their welcome nationwide”; no mention of the Iraqi veteran left unconscious from a police projectile making contact with his head; as to photos: just one — an Oakland police officer petting a cat that was left behind by the protesters.

And here’s TV comedian Jay Leno the same night as the police attack in Oakland: “They say Moammar Gaddafi may have been one of the richest men in the world … 200 billion dollars. With all of the billions he had, he spent very little on education or health care for his country. So I guess he was a Republican.”¹³

The object of Leno’s humor was of course the Republicans, but it served the cause of further demonizing Gaddafi and thus adding to the “justification” of America’s murderous attack on Libya. If I had been one of Leno’s guests sitting there, I would have turned to the audience and said: “Listen people, under Gaddafi health care and education were completely free. Wouldn’t you like to have that here?”

I think that enough people in the audience would have applauded or shouted to force Leno to back off a bit from his indoctrinated, mindless remark.

And just for the record, the 200 billion dollars is not money found in Gaddafi’s personal bank accounts anywhere in the world, but money belonging to the Libyan state. But why quibble? There’s no business like show business.

The Iraqi Lullabye

On February 17, 2003, a month before the US bombing of Iraq began, I posted to the Internet an essay entitled “What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?” concerning the expected war. Included in this were the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, then at the American Enterprise Institute, which was one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq:

If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

After a year of the tragic farce that was the American intervention in Iraq I could not resist. I sent Mr. Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: “I’d like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days.”

I received no reply.

Has there ever been an empire that didn’t tell itself and the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?

The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 20 years in a row

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):

Year	Votes (Yes-No)	No Votes
1992	59-2	US, Israel
1993	88-4	US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994	101-2	US, Israel
1995	117-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996	138-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997	143-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998	157-2	US, Israel
1999	155-2	US, Israel
2000	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002	173-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003	179-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004	179-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005	182-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006	183-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007	184-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008	185-3	US, Israel, Palau
2009	187-3	US, Israel, Palau
2010	187-2	US, Israel
2011	186-2	US, Israel

Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.

How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁴ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.

Notes

Viagra: Reuters, April 29, 2011 ^?
See, for example, “Million Man, Woman and Child March in Tripoli, Libya”, June 20, 2011^?
The Guardian (London), September 3, 2011 ^?
Washington Post, September 15, 2011, “Islamists rise to fore in new Libya” ^?
USA Today, October 24, 2011 ^?
Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies, Columbia University, Washington Post, November 11, 2007 ^?
Associated Press, April 6, 2011, some obvious errors in the original have been corrected ^?
New York Times, November 6, 2003 ^?
New York Times, April 16, 2002 ^?
Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1994, p.7 ^?
Guatemala: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982), p.183; Jagan: Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (1965), p.774-9; Bishop:Associated Press, May 29, 1983, “Leftist Government Officials Visit United States” ^?
The Pentagon Papers (NY Times edition, 1971), pp.4, 5, 8, 26; William Blum, Killing Hope, p.123) ^?
Washington Post, October 26, 2011 ^?
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885 ^?

The West is hijacking Arab revolutions to the benefit of Islamists

2011-11-08T04:27:00.000-08:00

Sunday, 30 October 2011
Raghida Dergham
Al arabya

While the West speaks of the necessity of accepting the results of the democratic process, in terms of Islamists coming to power in the Arab region, there are increased suspicions regarding the goals pursued by the West in its new policy of rapprochement with the Islamist movement, in what is a striking effort at undermining modern, secular and liberal movements. The three North African countries in which revolutions of change have taken place, are witnessing a transitional process that is noteworthy, not just in domestic and local terms, but also in terms of the roles played by foreign forces, both regional and international.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is trying to hijack the youth’s revolution with the help of the West. This is while bearing in mind that Egypt is considered to be the “command center” for the Muslim Brotherhood’s network in different Arab countries. The followers of the Ennahda in Tunisia are wrapping their message with moderation as they prepare to hijack the democracy that Tunisia’s youth dream of, while being met by applause and encouragement from the West in the name of the “fairness” of the electoral process. Libya, where the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) is in a “marriage of convenience” with Islamist rebels, has become a hub of extremism and lawlessness, with a plethora of military aid being collected by an assortment of armed Islamists who aim to exclude others from power. In Yemen, where a struggle for power rages on, a war is taking place between extremism and a harsher and more violent brand of extremism, with so-called “moderate Islam” in the middle as a means of salvation, even as the latter’s ideology remains neither modern nor liberal, and is rather lacking when it comes to the fundamentals of democracy and equality. In Syria, where the battle for freedom is at its most difficult phase, the youths of the revolution fear what could very much be under discussion behind the scenes between the West and the Islamist movements, in terms of collaboration and of strengthening the Islamists’ hold on power, in a clear bid to hijack the revolution of a youth that aspires to freedom in its every sense, not to yet another brand of tyranny and authoritarianism.

Yet despite increasing talk and concern over the unnatural relationship between the West and Islamist movements in the Arab region, there is growing insistence among the region’s enlightened and modern youths that they will not allow this relationship to direct their lives and dictate their course. It would thus be more logical for the West to listen carefully to what is happening at the youths’ scene, as well as on the traditional secularist and modernist scenes, and to realize the danger of what it is doing for these elements and the road to change brought about by the Arab Spring.

The obsession of some Westerners with the so-called “Turkish model” of “moderate Islam,” able to rule with discipline and democracy, seems naïve, essentially because of its assumption that such a model can automatically be applied on the Arab scene, without carefully considering the different background and conditions that exist in Turkey and the Arab countries. There is also some naivety in assuming than the “Iranian model” of religious autocratic rule that oppresses people, forbids pluralism and turns power into tyranny, can be excluded as a possibility.

What the movements of modernity, freedom and democracy in the Arab region fear is the replication of the Iranian experience and its revival on the Arab scene. What took place in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution is that the Mullahs hijacked it, excluded the youths from it and monopolized power in the “Islamic Republic” of Iran for more than 30 years.

Perhaps the West purposely encouraged what happened to Iran and its exceptional civilization by taking it back to the Dark Ages, to live in seclusion and isolation as a result of the tyranny of the Mullahs. Perhaps taking Iran more than 50 years back in time was a Western goal, which would explain their encouragement for the peaceful nature of this revolution to be hijacked. It should be stressed here that it was Iran’s 1979 revolution that sparked, throughout the Arab region, the movement of reverting to social rigidity instead of modernity and advancement. The environment created by the rule of the Mullahs in Iran led to restricting efforts in neighboring Arab Gulf region, which became unable to embrace modernity for fear of its repercussions and consequences.

In fact, hawkishness gained more ground in the Arab Gulf as a means of containing religious extremism. Thus sectarianism increased hand in hand with extremism, and the whole region became thoroughly consumed by the struggle of religions, away from the social development necessary to accompany the structural development represented by buildings, installations and other basic infrastructure.

The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) play numerous roles, sometimes in concordance, and sometimes in contradiction and mutual opposition. The common denominator among them is preserving the monarchy and keeping the Arab Spring far from the Gulf region with a certain extent of reform, which could either be costly for the regimes or for their relationship with Islamists – be they moderates or extremists. What is even more noteworthy is what is being said about the Islamic Republic of Iran, in terms of its occasional support of groups allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, which it sees as a means to weaken the influence of Saudi Arabia in the region.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the United Arab Emirates is supporting the movement closest to modernism in Libya, by providing support in the form of training the police force and strengthening it with equipment. This is while Qatar supports Islamist movements with training and weapons, which undermines the ability of “non-Islamists” to compete for power, and in fact leads to excluding them from power. Regarding Syria, on the other hand, the UAE is worried about what regional interference could lead to, and fears what reaches the extent of preparing for after the revolution. This is why it hesitates to support the Syrian opposition despite its desire – which it has in fact sometimes acted on – to provide some support to non-Islamist forces.

GCC countries always have Iran on their mind, as it does them, especially through the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the many dimensions of the relationship between Sunnis and Shiites. Examining how the West’s policies have evolved regarding this aspect in particular, would require greater space and a more in-depth study. Yet it is noteworthy that former US President George W. Bush strengthened the standing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its influence and its regional ambitions of hegemony, through his war in Iraq. As for the current President, Barack Obama, he seems to be in the process of strengthening “moderate Islam,” specifically among Sunnis, for it to be the means to confront both Sunni and Shiite extremism, in a policy of attracting “moderate Islam” even at the cost of undermining the forces of modernity, advancement and secularism, and pulling the rug from under their feet. This policy of Obama’s is no less dangerous than that of Bush. They both played the sectarian card at the expense of secularism, and they both adopted policies that lead to weakening the forces of moderation and strengthening the forces of extremism, regardless of whether it is “moderate extremism”, as it at the end of the day is based on the ideology of monopolizing power and not separating religion and state.

Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian judge, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, addressed the women of the Arab awakening at the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France, and said: Do not repeat our mistake. She said that the separation of religion and state is the only guarantee of democracy, not because the flaw lies in the Sharia itself, but because it can be interpreted by men who want more domination, and who view democracy as an enemy of their monopoly, one that takes away powers they have hijacked and purposely kept women away from.

At the same conference, the Yemeni participant, a friend of Tawakel Karman, the first Arab woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, said that Tawakel is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and that, compared to the “Salafists,” this group represents moderation itself, as well as salvation. This is an opinion which seems to have been embraced by the West, strengthened and driven forward amid the applause of Islamist movements that present themselves as the alternative moderation, blocking the way for movements of modernity by mounting the steed of democracy, most likely on a single path from which there is no return. They are inflating themselves and their size, and entering into a temporary marriage with the West – which in their opinion is naïve – a marriage of convenience that is to their benefit as long as it breaks the back of secularists and modernists. In truth, the Democratic US Administration is not the only one encouraging Islamist movements to take such a course, as there are also some Republicans like Senator John McCain. McCain made sure to address Islamists from the rostrum of the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea during a seminar on the American-Arab relationship, calling for respecting their rights to power, and thereby sending two messages: one to Islamists under the headline “we are with you,” and the other to the modernists under the headline “we do not care about you.”

There are two schools of thought that do not agree with the opinion that there is no escape from accepting the movements of “moderate Islam” because they have been victorious in the revolutions and base themselves on the change brought by the Arab Spring. Those two schools do not agree that the Arab Spring is the spring of Islamists, and they do not agree to the claim that they are the makers of the Arab awakening or spring. These two schools want to stop the Islamists from hijacking the Arab Awakening and climbing to power with the help of the West, whether the latter is naïve or ill-intentioned.

One school says: let the Islamists rule the Arab region, as this is an opportunity to prove their failure at controlling a people that does not want them. Those affiliated with this school point to Hamas and the Palestinian people’s reactions to it, in not accepting it and Islamist rule. They believe that the Arab people will defeat Islamist movements, and that they will fail. Then the modernists will return nearly victorious and welcomed by the people, and things will move forward. This then is an opportunity to prove the sure failure of Islamists, so let them fail.

The other school says: the greatest mistake is for the modernists to dwindle and withdraw from the battle now, because the Islamists reaching power will consolidate their rule for decades, not years. We must therefore immediately demand a transitional phase that would give these movements the opportunity to organize into political parties and enter the elections.

This is while bearing in mind that the only organized party is that of the Islamists, having been the only opposition movement under the former rulers. Those who are of this opinion insist on yielding neither to the cunning of the Islamists nor to the naivety of the West, and on launching an awareness campaign for world public opinion about Islamists and Western governments hijacking the Arab Spring in order to exclude the modernists, young and old equally.

It would be more logical for Western capitals to hear and to listen closely, because their partnership in hijacking the Arab youth’s ambitions of freedom, pluralism, democracy and modernity will come at high cost for them – not just for the path of change that has emerged from the soul of the youths of the Arab Spring.

How convieneint: Clinton says U.S. ready to work with Islamist groups

American media and the Libyan Lie.

2011-11-08T03:38:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has a fluff piece entitled Sleeping in Gaddafi's Bedroom.

The 'reporter' describes as "a friend" a Libyan air force deserter "who used to be one of Gaddafi's Colonels in the Libyan Air force before fleeing." Apparently the 'reporter's' mother likes plunder too: "My mum would love a set of Gaddafi's tea cups," the 'reporter' tells us.

Hidden in the article is the fact that the villa was in fact rarely used by Gaddafi and is in fact not too luxurious, with fake leather sofas and a "tacky chandelier" and a lawn with sprinklers.

"I slept like a self-assured dictator" in Gaddafi's bed, this reporter tells us in closing.

Not to be outdone the Washington post has this ridiculous headline: Libyan women savor new freedoms after revolution.

In reality, sharia is being imposed, polygamy is being reinstated, the veil is becoming mandatory.

Meanwhile other media are more honest:

Residents said brigades from faraway Misrata had appeared at their doorstep a week ago, breaking into people's homes and looking for Gaddafi loyalists.

Dozens of young men have disappeared and four have been killed in detention, said Al Koni Salem Mohammad, the uncle of one of those killed.

Speaking at a mourning ceremony on the edge of town, he shook with grief as he showed the death certificate listing "electric shocks" as a cause of death. He said the body had been dumped outside the detention centre with its tongue and genitals cut off.

"After all this, our children and the children of our children will never be with this revolution," he said, bursting into tears and shaking his fist, as other men in traditional dress sat in the shade of a tent set up for the mourning period.

"If this does not stop there will be a reaction. Any build-up of pressure leads to an explosion ... There is a lot of anger. Doesn't the government have an army to handle this?"

Or this from the Australian.

"Mafia," says the member of the family who fought as a rebel, describing the behaviour of the militias. "This is just like the mafia in Colombia or Russia," he says. "Gaddafi was horrible, but I never knew of him capturing the relative of somebody if they could not find the person they wanted. They would have just kept looking. And I never heard of them threatening to take children."

The man who escaped from the rebels has returned home but fears they will return. He says he knows of one case where a man was taken away on suspicion he had been a Gaddafi supporter and was then beaten to death. The rebels telephoned his parents the next day to say the man had become ill in custody and died.

At present, however, revenge clearly prevails over rehabilitation. There is a growing list of human rights abuses by the Misratah brigades.

The latest atrocity linked to the rebels is the discovery of 53 bodies of Gaddafi fighters on the lawns of a hotel in Sirte, Gaddafi's home town and the place where he was captured. The bodies were found with their hands tied and gunshots to the head.

In one case the rebels beat to death a mentally ill man because he would not - or could not - give them the password of a walkie-talkie he was carrying. In another case, an African man was whipped as he was forced to run around a courtyard, then told to climb a pole while shouting, "Monkey needs a banana".

One pregnant woman who went for a check-up was told at the government-run hospital: "We don't treat Tawerghans here."

-------------------

Meanwhile the darlings of NATO are shooting up hospitals.

Africom and the 21st Century colonial war regime

2011-11-06T13:31:00.000-08:00

2011 April 18
Richard Brenneman

In the old days, the militaries of Europe and the United States [remember Cuba and the Philippines?] were dispatched to foreign lands to overthrow regimes and popular movements intent of maintaining real national sovereignty.

Invariably, corporations followed.

Perhaps the bloodiest of colonial rulers was Leopold II, the Belgian monarch who took the Congo as his personal fiefdom in 1885, ruthlessly exploiting its inhabitants to run his rubber plantations.

Before his death in 1908, Leopold was responsible of upwards of five million deaths, with some estimates running as high as 21.5 million, all of them sacrificed for the profits of corporations in which the monarch personally owned the majority interest.

While it’s still available [until 29 April], we recommend you watch this 2003 Belgian documentary, White King, Red Rubber, Black Death for an account of one of the darkest and least known holocausts of modern times, one which may have dwarfed the murderous records of Hitler and Stalin.

And the war was about one simple thing: Exploitation of natural resources.

It was a later European leader, Adolf Hitler, who summed up the colonialist imperative: “To-day war is nothing but a struggle for the riches of nature. By virtue of an inherent law, these riches belong to him who conquers them.”

Today, the colonial imperative is thriving, as should be abundantly clear from even a cursory perusal of the WikiLeaks cables, which reveal the State Departments of both Republican and Democratic administrations are equally intent on forcing other lands to open up their borders to American corporations.

Africom is America’s newest imperial tool, created under the impetus of Air Force Gen. Chuck Wald, the same four star who directed the air war against Afghanistan in the opening round of the Bush/Obama endless wars.

Wald was also the driving force behind the Pentagon’s agrofuel program, which aims to create vast amounts of crop-derived fuels to keep America’s war machine, well, booming.

The Iraq war, after all was all about oil. Even John McCain, Dubya’s senatorial stalwart, acknowledged back during his presidential campaign in 2008:

“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will — that will then prevent us — that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

And as Alan Greenspan famously confirmed, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

So let’s stop pretending that what we’re seeing play out in Africa these days has anything to do with “freedom” and “humanitarian needs.” It’s significant to note that targets of Western “intervention” tend to control critical resources.

Libya boasts the world’s finest light, sweet crude oil. Afghanistan holds trillions in natural resources as well as the geography needed for critical pipelines. And of course there was Iraq.

Now back to Africom, this from The East African back in January [via Ayyaantuu Oromiyaa]:

The incoming head of the US Africa Command has promised to consider African countries as part of a review of where Africom’s headquarters should be situated.

“I think we ought to consider locations on the continent of Africa,” Gen Carter Ham told a US Senate panel that was assessing his appointment in November.

Gen Ham was chosen by President Barack Obama to succeed Africom’s first commander, Gen William Ward, who recently visited Tanzania and Rwanda on a “farewell tour.”

Gen Ward is credited with having partly soothed the suspicions with which many African leaders have viewed Africom since its inception four years ago.

Liberia is the only African nation that has publicly offered to host Africom.

Misgivings among Africans about the command’s purposes caused the Pentagon to scrap initial plans to locate Africom’s headquarters on the continent. It has been based in Stuttgart, Germany, for the past three years.

“Some Africans worry that the move represents a neo-colonial effort to dominate the region militarily,” the US Congress’ research arm said in a recent report reviewing Africom’s creation and current status.

“Reports of US air strikes in Somalia in recent years and US support for Ethiopia’s military intervention there have added to those concerns,” the report noted. “Many view US counter-terrorism efforts in Africa with skepticism, and there appears to be a widespread belief that the new command’s primary goals will be to hunt terrorists and to secure US access to African oil.”

Read the rest.

And remember: The Congressional report was written well before the eruptions in North Africa and Mideast, which haven’t done much to reassure Africans about America’s real intentions.

Now consider this from Horace Campbell, writing 15 March n the independent African Pambazuka News:

The Western bombardment of Gaddafi’s forces in Libya has become an opportunistic public relations ploy for the United States Africa Command (Africom) and a new inroad for US military stronghold on the continent. This involvement of Africom in the bombardment is now serving to expose the contradictions and deceit that have surrounded the formation of this combatant command, which is a front for military humanitarian assistance to Africa in coordination with the US Department of State and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Attempts by the US to re-militarize its engagement with Africa is extremely dangerous, given the fact that the US does not have any positive or credible tradition of genuine assistance to freedom fighters and liberation movements in Africa.

The US was complicit in the planning of the murder of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, after which they propped up the monstrous dictator Mobutu Sese Seko who raped and pillaged the country and established a recursive process of war, rape, plunder, corruption, and brutality which the Congo still suffers from till today. Jonas Savimbi was sponsored by the US to cause destabilization and terror in Angola. The US gave military, material and moral support to the apartheid regime in South Africa while anti-apartheid freedom fighters, including Nelson Mandela, were designated as terrorists. It was only in 2008 that the US Congress passed a bill to remove Mandela’s name from the terrorist watch list). The US has yet to tell the truth about how Charles Taylor escaped from its prison custody in Massachusetts to go destabilize Liberia. Young people who are recruited for the US military and deployed to Africom may not know much about the notorious history of US military involvement in Africa. The military top brass take advantage of this ignorance among the young folks.

Just as the US military carried out psychological warfare against US senators, one of the tasks of Africom is to rain down psychological warfare on Africans. Built in this subtle psychological warfare is the concept of the hierarchy of human beings and the superiority of the capitalist mode of production and ideas of Christian fundamentalism. It is on this front that we find a section of the US military known as the “Crusaders.”

Read the rest.

And consider this from another African source, Dr. Kwame Osei writing at Modern Ghana News:

With the ongoing civil war in Ivory Coast seemingly close to an end it is appropriate to tell the REAL untold story of the crisis in Ivory Coast and inform our readers of the REAL issue(s) behind the situation in the country.

I have heard many commentators on this subject and the bulk of them rant about the fact that the situation in the Ivory Coast is about elections that were supposedly won by Alassane Ouattara and that he is “the internationally recognized president of Ivory Coast” and that Laurent Gbagbo refuses to stand down because he thinks he won the elections – this in itself is flawed because according to a report from a US senate committee that went to Ivory Coast to monitor the elections complained of voter irregularities in areas that were pro-Ouattara

However the deception about the elections is the line that the western media is peddling and experience informs us that when it comes to the western media and Afrika we must be very circumspect of the agenda of the western media who have nothing but disdain for Afrikan people.

That said it is very simplistic to say that the situation in Ivory Coast is solely as a result of undisputed elections and is giving the public a much skewed view of the actual situation.

The REAL issue behind the current impasse in the Ivory Coast is a battle relating to French imperialism and control of the Ivory Coast. What this actually means in reality is that on one hand you have Gbagbo who is against French imperialism in Ivory Coast and championing the cause of Pan-Afrikanism and on the other hand you have Ouattara who one could say is very accommodating to safeguarding French interests in Ivory Coast.

Read the rest.

And consider this from James Petras, Bartle Professor [Emeritus] of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York:

According to a US Congressional Research Service Study published in November 2010, Washington has dispatched anywhere between hundreds and several thousand combat troops, dozens of fighter planes and warships to buttress client dictatorships or to unseat adversarial regimes in dozens of countries, almost on a yearly bases. The record shows the US armed forces intervened 46 times prior to the current Libyan wars. The countries suffering one or more US military intervention include the Congo, Zaine, Libya, Chad, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ruanda, Liberia, Central African Republic, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea. The only progressive intervention was in Egypt under Eisenhower who forced the Israeli-French-English forces to withdraw from the Suez in 1956. Between the mid 1950’s to the end of the 1970’s, only 4 overt military operations were recorded, though large scale proxy and clandestine military operations were pervasive. Under Reagan-Bush Sr. (1980-1991) military intervention accelerated, rising to 8, not counting the large scale clandestine ‘special forces’ and proxy wars in Southern Africa. Under the Clinton regime, US militarized imperialism in Africa took off. Between 1992 and 2000, 17 armed incursions took place, including a large scale invasion of Somalia and military backing for the Ruanda genocidal regime. Clinton intervened in Liberia, Gabon, Congo and Sierra Leone to prop up a long standing stooge regime. He bombed the Sudan and dispatched military personnel to Kenya and Ethiopia to back proxy clients assaulting Somalia. Under Bush Jr. 15 US military interventions took place, mainly in Central and East Africa. The Obama regime’s invasion and bombing of Libya is a continuation of a longstanding imperial practice designed to enhance US power via the installation of client regimes, the establishment of military bases and the training and indoctrination of African mercenary forces dubbed “collaborative partners”. There is no question that there is a rising tide of imperial militarism in the US over the past several decades.

Read the rest.

But all we hear in our media, endlessly repeated, is that we’re bombing to bring freedom.

Finally, one last take on Libya, again from Pambazuka News [14 April], this time by Jean-Paul Pougala:

For most Africans, Gaddafi is a generous man, a humanist, known for his unselfish support for the struggle against the racist regime in South Africa. If he had been an egotist, he wouldn’t have risked the wrath of the West to help the ANC both militarily and financially in the fight against apartheid. This was why Mandela, soon after his release from 27 years in jail, decided to break the UN embargo and travel to Libya on 23 October 1997. For five long years, no plane could touch down in Libya because of the embargo. One needed to take a plane to the Tunisian city of Jerba and continue by road for five hours to reach Ben Gardane, cross the border and continue on a desert road for three hours before reaching Tripoli. The other solution was to go through Malta, and take a night ferry on ill-maintained boats to the Libyan coast. A hellish journey for a whole people, simply to punish one man.

Mandela didn’t mince his words when the former US president Bill Clinton said the visit was an ‘unwelcome’ one – ‘No country can claim to be the policeman of the world and no state can dictate to another what it should do’. He added – ‘Those that yesterday were friends of our enemies have the gall today to tell me not to visit my brother Gaddafi, they are advising us to be ungrateful and forget our friends of the past.’

Indeed, the West still considered the South African racists to be their brothers who needed to be protected. That’s why the members of the ANC, including Nelson Mandela, were considered to be dangerous terrorists. It was only on 2 July 2008, that the US Congress finally voted a law to remove the name of Nelson Mandela and his ANC comrades from their black list, not because they realised how stupid that list was but because they wanted to mark Mandela’s 90th birthday. If the West was truly sorry for its past support for Mandela’s enemies and really sincere when they name streets and places after him, how can they continue to wage war against someone who helped Mandela and his people to be victorious, Gaddafi?

Read the rest.

AFRICOM: The U.S. Militarization of Africa

2011-11-06T13:26:00.000-08:00

By Olayiwola Abegunrin
CAS
December 2007

President George W. Bush approved a Pentagon plan in January 2007 to set up Africa Command Center, to be known as AFRICOM. According to the plan, the Command Center is set to complete and go into service by the end of September 2008. The United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates revealed the new plans as he addressed the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on the defense spending President Bush proposed in his 2008 budget submitted to the Congress that, “The main purposes of the Africa Command Center would be to fight the war on terror, cooperation, provide humanitarian aid, building partnership capability, oversee security, defense support to non-military missions, and if directed, military training operations designed to help local governments.”

The U.S. had initially reportedly intended to build AFRICOM in Algeria but it was turned down, thus, it had to relocate it to Stuttgart, Germany for the time being. African countries hold that U.S. has harbored with ulterior motives. Mohamed Bedjaoui, the Algerian Minister of State and Foreign Affairs, “questioned that why no one had ever proposed for any anti-terror cooperation with Algeria in the 1990s when terrorist violence went on rampant and wrought great havoc?” Africans are suspicious of the U.S. intentions. Majority of Africans believe that the aim of the U.S. for the Africa Command Center is to protect its potential oil interests in Africa. Second reason is that U.S. is worried about current rapid increased economic and diplomatic competition from China in Africa.

AFRICOM is an example of U.S. military expansion in the name of the war on terrorism, when it is in fact designed to secure Africa’s resources and ensure American interests on the continent. AFRICOM represents a policy of U.S. military-driven expansionism that will only enhance political instability, conflict, and the deterioration of state security in Africa. This is a project that most African countries have rejected to be located on their soil. African leaders are opposed to U.S. permanent military command bases/installations on African soil. Early (September 2007) this year the Southern African Development Community (SADC) member states defense ministers have decided that no member states would host AFRICOM. Nigeria, Ghana, Libya and Morocco have joined in opposing AFRICOM in Africa. However, Liberian Government has accepted to host AFRICOM on her soil. Of course we should not be surprised that President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia has accepted to host AFRICOM, after all Liberia is the American stepchild in Africa. AFRICOM is a deadly project to accept for any African country that wants peace and stability. Accepting this project would be a recipe to intensify anti-Americanism and for Al-Qaeda to make that African country a target of terrorist attack. AFRICOM would destabilize an already fragile continent, which would be forced to engage with U.S. interests on military terms.

Militarization of Africa with the U.S. designed so-called AFRICOM is not the solution to Africa’s problem. What African countries need is development of their own institutions for security, political and economic independence; massive infusion of foreign direct investment, fair equitable trade, access to U.S. markets, and for U.S. to decrease/or total removal of agricultural subsidies, debt relief and improved Official Development Assistance tailored towards the development aspirations of (recipient countries) African countries and not AFRICOM that will only lead to militarizing the continent.

What has President Bush’s current policy in Somalia achieved but chaos and more disasters for the Somali people? AFRICOM is another U.S. strategy of recolonization of Africa through the so-called military assistance to the continent. The age of gun-boat diplomacy is over. Africans do not need this in this twenty-first century.

About the Author

Olayiwola Abegunrin is a lecturer in Political Science at Howard University.

AFRICOM: Wrong for Liberia, Disastrous for Africa

2011-11-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

By Ezekiel Pajibo and Emira Woods. Edited by John Feffer,

July 26, 2007, FPIF

Just two months after U.S. aerial bombardments began in Somalia, the Bush administration solidified its militaristic engagement with Africa. In February 2007, the Department of Defense announced the creation of a new U.S. Africa Command infrastructure, code name AFRICOM, to “coordinate all U.S. military and security interests throughout the continent.”

“This new command will strengthen our security cooperation with Africa,” President Bush said in a White House statement, “and create new opportunities to bolster the capabilities of our partners in Africa.” Ordering that AFRICOM be created by September 30, 2008, Bush said “Africa Command will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa.”

The general assumption of this policy is that prioritizing security through a unilateral framework will somehow bring health, education, and development to Africa. In this way, the Department of Defense presents itself as the best architect and arbiter of U.S. Africa policy. According to Navy Rear Admiral Robert Moeller, director of the AFRICOM transition team, “By creating AFRICOM, the Defense Department will be able to coordinate better its own activities in Africa as well as help coordinate the work of other U.S. government agencies, particularly the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

Competition for Resources

This military-driven U.S. engagement with Africa reflects the desperation of the Bush administration to control the increasingly strategic natural resources on the African continent, especially oil, gas, and uranium. With increased competition from China, among other countries, for those resources, the United States wants above all else to strengthen its foothold in resource-rich regions of Africa.

Nigeria is the fifth largest exporter of oil to the United States. The West Africa region currently provides nearly 20% of the U.S. supply of hydrocarbons, up from 15% just five years ago and well on the way to a 25 share forecast for 2015. While the Bush administration endlessly beats the drums for its “global war on terror,” the rise of AFRICOM underscores that the real interests of neoconservatives has less to do with al-Qaeda than with more access and control of extractive industries, particularly oil.

Responsibility for operations on the African continent is currently divided among three distinct Commands: U.S. European Command, which has responsibility for nearly 43 African countries; U.S. Central Command, which has responsibility for Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, and Kenya; and U.S. Pacific Command, which has responsibility for Madagascar, the Seychelles, and the countries off the coast of the Indian Ocean. Until December 2006 when the United States began to assist Ethiopia in its invasion of Somalia, all three existing Commands have maintained a relatively low-key presence, often using elite special operations forces to train, equip, and work alongside national militaries.

A new Africa Command, based potentially in or near oil-rich West Africa would consolidate these existing operations while also bringing international engagement, from development to diplomacy, even more in line with U.S. military objectives.

AFRICOM in Liberia?

AFRICOM’s first public links with the West African country of Liberia was through a Washington Post op-ed written by the African- American businessman Robert L. Johnson, "Liberia's Moment of Opportunity." Forcefully endorsing AFRICOM, Johnson urged that it be based in Liberia. Then came an unprecedented allAfrica.com guest column from Liberia’s president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, “AFRICOM Can Help Governments Willing To Help Themselves,” touting AFRICOM’s potential to “help” Africa “develop a stable environment in which civil society can flourish and the quality of life for Africans can be improved.”

Despite these high-profile endorsements, the consolidation and expansion of U.S. military power on the African continent is misguided and could lead to disastrous outcomes.

Liberia's 26-year descent into chaos started when the Reagan administration prioritized military engagement and funneled military hardware, training, and financing to the regime of the ruthless dictator Samuel K. Doe. This military "aid," seen as “soft power” at that time, built the machinery of repression that led to the deaths of an estimated 250,000 Liberians.

Basing AFRICOM in Liberia will put Liberians at risk now and into the future. Liberia’s national threat level will dramatically increase as the country becomes a target of those interested in attacking U.S. assets. This will severely jeopardize Liberia’s national security interests while creating new problems for the country’s fragile peace and its nascent democracy.

Liberia has already given the Bush administration the exclusive role of restructuring its armed forces. The private U.S. military contractor DYNCORP has been carrying out this function. After more than two years in Liberia and an estimated $800,000 budget allocated, DYNCORP has not only failed to train the 2,000 men it was contracted to train, it has also not engaged Liberia’s Legislature or its civil society in defining the nature, content, or character of the new army. DYNCORP allotted itself the prerogative to determine the number of men/women to be trained and the kind of training it would conduct, exclusively infantry training, even though Liberia had not elaborated a national security plan or developed a comprehensive military doctrine. In fact, the creation of Liberia’s new army has been the responsibility of another sovereign state, the United States, in total disregard to Liberia’s constitution, which empowers the legislature to raise the national army.

This pattern of abuse and incompetence with the U.S. military and its surrogate contractors suggests that if AFRICOM is based in Liberia, the Bush administration will have an unacceptable amount of power to dictate Liberia’s security interests and orchestrate how the country manages those interests. By placing a military base in Liberia, the United States could systematically interfere in Liberian politics in order to ensure that those who succeed in obtaining power are subservient to U.S. national security and other interests. If this is not neo-colonialism, then what is?

Perhaps the South Africans will be the loudest voices on the continent in opposition to AFRICOM. Recent media reports spotlight growing tensions in U.S.-South Africa relations over AFRICOM. The U.S. ambassador to South Africa, Eric Bost, complained that South Africa’s defense minister Mosiuoa Lekota, was not responding to embassy requests to meet General Kip Ward, the recently nominated first commander of AFRICOM.

Opposing AFRICOM

The Bush administration’s new obsession with AFRICOM and its militaristic approach has many malign consequences. It increases U.S. interference in the affairs of Africa. It brings more military hardware to a continent that already has too much. By helping to build machineries of repression, these policies reinforce undemocratic practices and reward leaders responsive not to the interests or needs of their people but to the demands and dictates of U.S. military agents. Making military force a higher priority than development and diplomacy creates an imbalance that can encourage irresponsible regimes to use U.S. sourced military might to oppress their own people, now or potentially in the future. These fatally flawed policies create instability, foment tensions, and lead to a less secure world.

What Africa needs least is U.S. military expansion on the continent (and elsewhere in the world). What Africa needs most is its own mechanism to respond to peacemaking priorities. Fifty years ago, Kwame Nkrumah sounded the clarion call for a “United States of Africa.” One central feature of his call was for an Africa Military High Command. Today, as the African Union deliberates continental governance, there couldn’t be a better time to reject U.S. military expansion and push forward African responses to Africa’s priorities.

Long suffering the effects of militaristic "assistance" from the United States, Liberia would be the worst possible base for AFRICOM. But there are no good locations for such a poorly conceived project. Africa does not need AFRICOM.

Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

2011-09-02T21:32:00.000-07:00

AUGUST 30, 2011
"Democracy Now?"
by JOHN WALSH

Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted. And that has been the case for some time for the Professor from Michigan. After warning of the “difficulties” with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with burning kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of “humanitarian imperialism.”

Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: “I remain (Emphasis mine.) convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.” Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was “worth it”? Cole has called the Afghan War “the right war at the right time” and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.

Cole claims to be a man of the left and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning “expert” on the war on Libya. This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the “left” and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country? Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’s version of the “left.” Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya has been fine and dandy. But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war?

Miraculously, Cole got just the rehabilitation he needed to continue with this vital propaganda function when it was disclosed by the New York Times on June 15 that he was the object of a White House inquiry way back in 2005 in Bush time. The source and reason for this leak and the publication of it by the NYT at this time, so many years later, should be of great interest, but they are unknown. Within a week of the Times piece Cole was accorded a hero’s welcome on Democracy Now, as he appeared with retired CIA agent Glenn Carle who had served 23 years in the clandestine services of the CIA in part as an “interrogator.” Carl had just retired from the CIA at the time of the White House request and was at the time employed at the National Intelligence Council, which authors the National Intelligence Estimate.

It hit this listener like a ton of bricks when it was disclosed in Goodman’s interview that Cole was a long time “consultant” for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and other agencies. Here is what nearly caused me to keel over when I heard it (From the Democracy Now transcript.):

AMY GOODMAN: So, did you know Professor Cole or know of him at the time you were asked? And can you go on from there? What happened when you said you wouldn’t do this? And who was it who demanded this information from you, said that you should get information?

GLENN CARLE: Well, I did know Professor Cole. He was one of a large number of experts of diverse views that the National Intelligence Council and my office and the CIA respectively consult with to challenge our assumptions and understand the trends and issues on our various portfolios. So I knew him that way. And it was sensible, in that sense, that the White House turned to my office to inquire about him, because we were the ones, at least one of the ones—I don’t know all of Mr. Cole’s work—who had consulted with him. (Emphases mine.)

That seems like strange toil for a man of the “left.” But were the consultations long drawn out and the association with the CIA a deep one? It would appear so. Again from the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the way James Risen (the NYT reporter) writes it, he says, “Mr. Carle said [that] sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. [Mr.] Low and [Mr.] Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, [Mr.] Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear [that] he wanted [Mr.] Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled [his] boss saying, ‘The White House wants to get him.’”

GLENN CARLE: Well, that’s substantially correct. The one nuance, perhaps, I would point out is there’s a difference between collecting information actively, going out and running an operation, say, to find out things about Mr. Cole, or providing information known through interactions. (Emphasis mine.) I would characterize it more as the latter.

And later in the interview Carle continues:

On the whole, Professor Cole and I are in agreement. The distinction I make is it wasn’t publicly known information that was requested; it was information that officers knew of a personal nature about Professor Cole, which is much more disturbing. There was no direct request that I’m aware, in the two instances of which I have knowledge, for the officers actively to seek and obtain, to conduct—for me to go out and follow Professor Cole. But if I knew lifestyle questions or so on, to pass those along. (Emphasis mine.)That’s how I—which is totally unacceptable.

It would seem then that the interaction between the CIA operatives and Cole was long standing and sufficiently intimate that the CIA spooks could be expected to know things about Cole’s lifestyle and personal life. It is not that anyone should give two figs about Cole’s personal life which is more than likely is every bit as boring as he claims. But his relationship with the CIA is of interest since he is an unreconstructed hawk. What was remarkable to me at the time is that Goodman did not pick up on any of this. Did she know before of Cole’s connections? Was not this the wrong man to have as a “frequent guest,” in Goodman’s words, on the situation in the Middle East?

This is not to claim that Cole is on a mission for the CIA to convince the left to support the imperial wars, most notably at the moment the war on Libya. Nor is this a claim that the revelation about the White House seeking information on Cole was a contrived psyops effort to rehabilitate Cole so that he could continue such a mission. That cannot be claimed, because there is as yet no evidence for it. But information flows two ways in any consultation, and it is even possible that Cole was being loaded with war-friendly information in hopes he would transmit it.

Cole is anxious to promote himself as a man of the left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya. At one point he says to Goodman (3/29), “We are people of the left. We care about the ordinary people. We care about workers.” It is strange that a man who claims such views dismisses as irrelevant the progress that has come to the people of Libya under Gaddafi, dictator or not. (Indeed what brought Gaddafi down was not that he was a dictator but that he was not our dictator.) In fact Libya has the highest score of all African countries on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and with Tunisia and Morocco the second highest level of literacy. The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide.

Whither the Left on the Question of Intervention?

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk. But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion. One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole prowar. It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention. Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort. Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate? That is a strange choice indeed.

This writer does not get to listen to Democracy Now every day. But I have not heard a full-throated denunciation of the war on Libya from host or guests. Certainly according to a search on the DN web site, Cynthia McKinney did not appear as a guest nor Ramsey Clark after their courageous fact finding tour to Libya. There was only one all out denunciation of the war – on the day when the guests were Rev. Jesse Jackson and Vincent Harding who was King’s speechwriter on the famous speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967 in which King condemned the U.S. war on Vietnam. Jackson and the wise and keenly intelligent Harding were there not to discuss Libya but to discuss the MLK Jr. monument. Nonetheless Jackson and Harding made clear that they did not like the U.S. war in Libya one bit, nor the militarism it entails.

If one reads CounterPunch.org, Antiwar.com or The American Conservative, one knows that one is reading those who are anti-interventionist on the basis of principle. With Democracy Now and kindred progressive outlets, it’s all too clear where a big chunk of the so-called “left” stands, especially since the advent of Obama. In his superb little book Humanitarian Imperialism Jean Bricmont criticizes much of the left for falling prey to advocacy of wars, supposedly based on good intentions. And Alexander Cockburn has often pointed out that many progressives are actually quite fond of “humanitarian” interventionism. Both here and in Europe this fondness seems to be especially true of Obama’s latest war, the war on Libya . It is little wonder that the “progressives” are losing their antiwar following to Ron Paul and the Libertarians who are consistent and principled on the issue of anti-interventionism.

Democracy Now, quo vadis? Wherever you are heading, you would do well to travel without Juan Cole and his friends.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com After wading through Cole’s loose prose and dubious logic to write this essay, the author suspects that the rejection of Cole by the Yale faculty was the result of considerations that had little to do with neocon Bush/Cheney operatives.

Libya - The return of colonialist bondage

2011-09-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

Hakeem Babalola,
AfricaNews

Tuesday 30 August 2011

Libya's destruction, a victory for the west; a defeat for ordinary Libyans.
The suffering of Libyans has just begun. For there can never be true liberation when your oppressor is the one who defines what your freedom should be. The ousting of Colonel Gaddafi, Libyan leader for 42 years, by the rebels backed western forces especially NATO is indeed a victory for the west whose fixation on Gaddafi's Libya has become worrisome.

It’s definitely not a victory for ordinary Libyans who would continue to suffer a lot of nervous strain and shock after the destruction. Neither is it a victory for the rebels who have been in excess jubilation since capturing Gaddafi’s official residence. “We are free,” they proclaimed in wild happiness.

But they have forgotten one important thing: that they are now slaves to all the countries that helped them kick out Gaddafi.

Apparently the rebels are not ordinary Libyan but a group of people who want the share of the oil with the help of foreign forces. Gaddafi’s main crime may be the fact that he refused to let the west control Libya’s resources, hence he must be eliminated by all possible means.

In their euphoria and in their haste to get rid of him, they forgot that none of the countries that backed them has the interest of Libyans at heart. Let them for once re-visit Iraq.

Gaddafi's mistake

As for Gaddafi, nothing lasts forever. The man should have known that 42 years of single-handedly ruling or administering a nation is more than too long. There is no doubting the fact that Gaddafi always means well for Libya unlike America, Britain, France, NATO, UN and other bereaved organisations claiming to love Libya more than God loves the Israelites. Ok I detest dynasty rule, and this seems to be Gaddafi`s undoing. A nation can never be the personal property of any man or group.

He should have relinquished power at a point in time and becomes the Father of the Nation or something similar. At 70 and having ruled for 42 years, Gaddafi should have embraced the uprising tactically no matter how painful it might be – at least to prevent his own legacy which the west actually wants to destroy.

But then power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely. He should have known that America, Britain, France and others still consider themselves as the Alpha and Omega of this world – the owner of our earth.

And so they cannot tolerate any opposition from an Arab-African in the spirit of Gaddafi. This man should have realised he was not fighting the "rats" within his own environment but "desperate and hungry lions" outside his environment who have surreptitiously waited to devour him. Perhaps Gaddafi should have been more careful, especially when his colleagues in the African Union (AU) do not like his gut.

Gaddafi should have known that neither America nor its allies forget and forgive. He should have known that the oil in his background is enough to eliminate him by all means. He should have learnt a lesson from Iraq, a nation destroyed by Obama's predecessor on the pretence that the late Iraqi leader possessed Weapon of Mass Destruction which turned out to be a ruse.

It was simply a ploy by Mr. Bush to invade the oil rich nation. There is always an excuse to invade certain countries especially when the rulers of such countries refused to be a stooge.

Attacking a sovereign nation

I have stopped worrying each time the American or British or French government issues public propaganda justifying the need to attack Iraq or Afghanistan or Ivory Coast or Libya etc in order to protect the people.

I have stopped worrying because it is now obvious to me that this so-called "developed nations" must use ideas or statements often exaggerated or false intended for a political cause.

They need to sound as people oriented leaders to gain the much needed support otherwise they become irrelevant. They must use the empty rhetoric of politicians as an excuse to justify the partial occupation - of less powerful nations - especially Africa.

One wonders why United Nations has not ordered the attack on North Korea! And why it is so easy to bombard Libya under the pretext of protecting the civilians in that region. Even though more than 20,000 have lost their lives in the civil war, what’s coming out of people like David Cameron of Britain, Hilary Clinton of America and others is disturbing.

“I pledge support for a new era,” says Mrs Clinton, US Secretary of State. In what I consider a sinister statement, Mr Cameron says we would like to see Gaddafi punished for his crimes, adding: “We need a swift transition to a democratic and inclusive Libya,”

Inclusive Libya? Is it that necessary to include Libya in Libya’s affairs? Ah, to include the Libyan people is to further disrupt the agenda of a purpose. Let America, Britain and France take over Libya completely and divide it among themselves. For this would be the true picture of the main objective. Libyans and Africans in general aren’t capable of taking care of themselves hence the need to bombard every independent African State.

Rhapsody of Gaddafi's elimination

In February, the trouble barely started in Libya when America, France and Britain began to campaign for Gaddafi's exist. Their rhapsody of Gaddafi’s elimination was so soon then that it backfired; because discern minds wanted to know why these three countries were so fixated on Libya. Is it because like Iraq, it is an oil producing nation? Why was it so easy for these three countries to back the rebels? Did they know beforehand that Libya was to face uprising? What was behind their open support for the rebels? Why did they start freezing Libya's asset immediately the trouble started?

Can any African nation freezes Britain or US assets in any circumstance? What happened in Libya at that time was just unfolding but these nations had gone to town calling for the head of Gaddafi, saying he was killing his people. Will American or British or French government fold its arm if a group of rebels come together to topple the government?

"Oyinbo" always right mentality

I suppose it is easy for the western countries to attack or occupy African continent because they have mastered the art of colluding with African rulers. African people it seems hate their own image. Majority still probably believe that "Oyinbo" is always right.

This mental slavery is reoccurring in different forms: it may be the process of "protecting the people of Africa" from their dictators (as if there are no dictators elsewhere) whenever it pleases the western countries to destroy any African nation of their choice. Can't they leave African people to fight for ourselves? Or are we forever tied to their apron?

Destroy and build doctrine

It is interesting how easy our so-called intellectuals often blame their own rulers without asking the occupiers to leave Africa alone. Sad as it is, it's amusing many African intellectuals are yet to understand the game – the game of destroy and build. Let them go read "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein. That book reveals America’s brutal tactics in dealing with whomever or whatever nation it wants to deal with.

Africa has to be destroyed to enrich the western nations who are always the benefactor of such destruction.

Thereafter they would send their businessmen to get the contract to rebuild. The notorious International Monetary Fund (IMF) would offer to loan in order to further enslave the "protected civilians" even the country at large. Of course with the collaboration of the locals – governments included – whose thinking faculty is all about money.

How long will it take Africans to realise that no other nation or continent – no matter how powerful or rich – would sincerely volunteer to help Africa develop, or help build Africa? Each man to his own problem! It’s only Africans that can genuinely build Africa if we want. I salute Germany, Russia, China and others who have been diplomatic cautious and not aggressive in this regard.

Probing NATO forces

There has always been a double standard policy by the international organisations. Why is NATO spear-heading/spear-headed the attack on Libya while creating the impression that the rebels are acting on their own in the attacks in Tripoli? I agree with South Africa's deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe who has called for probe against possible human rights violations committed by NATO forces in Libya.

Reports have it that NATO conducted 46 strikes sorties in area around Tripoli. The question is whether the (court) will have the wherewithal to unearth that information and bring those who are responsible to book, including the NATO commanders on the ground.

NATO says target is not to kill Gaddafi and that it’s not coordinating with National Transition Council. Oh, really? Did NATO back the rebels with intelligence, logistics, ammunitions, training and aerial cover or not? Is this a violation of the letter and spirit of the UN charter or not? NATO nations clearly contravened UN arms embargo on Libya

Disappointing United Nations

As for the United Nations, the organisation has achieved very little in terms of solving conflicts around the world. It is hard to see what is united in United Nations. Why is the organisation always sending what it calls “Humanitarian Aid” only after the damaged might have been done?

I think the UN should cultivate the habit of preventing conflicts – by all means possible rather than sending aids. The United Nations seems to be failing in its responsibility to inspire peace among nations. The presence of UN since its inception in 1945 should have made the world a living place to live. Unfortunately, nations have been divided more than united. Perhaps this organisation needs to change tactics.

The UN resolution should be to protect and not to take side. On what principle did the UN back the rebels? Malam El-Rufai of Nigeria puts it succinctly: The swiftness at which the UN passes resolutions that water the grounds for the West's intervention in any country is directly proportional to the oil reserves in that country, as well as history of past grudges. The United Nations must not be seen as a partial or stooge of certain powerful countries.

Where is the African Union & Arab League?

African Union? The AU is becoming embarrassment. It’s supposed to be the mouth piece of Africa but has since become useless since the destruction started in Libya. The organisation is so much in slumber that foreign organisations like European Union had to take charge, dictating the pace of the uprising.

AU has further tarnished its image and disgraced the whole of Africa by not being the one in charge of an affair concerning its member state. It doesn’t matter its tactical approach, saying it will not “explicitly recognised the rebels”. Whatever that means! Arab League on the other hand is quick to say it is in “full solidarity with the rebels”. The position of these two important organisations added to the impunity with which the western countries violate Libya’s sovereignty.

Libyan rebels as stooges

My heartfelt sympathy goes to the Libyan people. Sure, people are always the victims in this circumstance. How can the rebels claim victory when it’s obvious the western countries fought the war? The rebels should have done it alone without the help of outsiders. By so doing they committed the same crime they accused Gaddafi of. The rebels like their foreign counterparts are misleading the people by claiming they’re fighting people's fight. I don't believe this.

The rebels are definitely fighting for their own share of the resources. Any insurgence that allows foreigners to attack own country cannot come clean of doing it for the same people they kill. How would they tell these nations to leave after they had helped them win the war? These "hegemonic" nations have come to stay and position themselves for contracts. Of course this is normal after spending a lot to help win the war. It’s the name of the game.

Period

Lindsay German says Libya won’t be able to get rid of pro-west government. Ms German, Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition, London, adds that “rebels will form western imposed government”. The rebels in their murky acceleration for revenge or getting rid of Gaddafi disregarded post war trauma on the people and therefore committed the same crime they accused Gaddafi of. The rebels know quite alright that accepting the west to help fight Gaddafi’s forces would have adverse effect on Libya and its people. Yet no one cares.

Gaddafi and the western press

Gaddafi may not be as bad as being painted by the western press whose bias reporting about the uprising is alarming. Accordingly, every atrocity committed during the uprising is done by Gaddafi’s forces while the rebels are considered innocent. It is Gaddafi and not the rebels that destroyed Libya. It is Gaddafi forces that killed civilians and not the rebels.

Personally despite Gaddafi’s shortcomings, I prefer him to other African rulers who often cringe before America and Britain. For instance, I would choose Gaddafi’s eccentric and dictatorship over Hosni Mubarak and Olusegun Obasanjo’s conventional and “democratic” rule.

When you report in a war that one side is killing its people then the discerning minds of course would like to know what happens to the other side. Is the other side fighting to embrace? The way the international media reported and reporting the happenings in Libya is one-sided which is regrettable.

Gaddafi is not as bad as is being painted by the west. He is much better than many African rulers who are in the good book of America and co. Mubarak who is now facing charges of corruption and murder in a country he once ruled for example enjoyed America’s backing and patronage for more than thirty years until the last moment. However if there’s evidence that Gaddafi killed his own people randomly, then of course he will have to face the charges

National Transitional Council

What is the principle behind the National Transitional Council when in fact many former aids of Gaddafi who had defected may constitute NTC? I predict that NTC will soon run into trouble. And I predict that whatever they do to Gaddafi is what they too will get. But before then, let them be cautious in dealing with the west.

The west obviously is concerned with their own interest. For instance, they have started telling us that Pro-revolt foreign states will get contract to re-build Libya, meaning China, Germany and Russia to lose out because they did not support the revolt. We are told that NTC needs 300 billion euro to rebuild Libya. The money of course would go back the west whose citizens will get most of the contracts. Most importantly, the National Transitional Council should ask itself when last America or Britain or France invited African forces to help them deal with their internal problems!

True liberation

True freedom will come only if each African country can confront its own tyrants without the help of outsiders whose aim would always to turn Africa into a “burning volcano and a fire under the feet of invaders”. For me, the rebels’ proclamation of freedom simply because the west helped them destroy their country is false freedom never to be celebrated. It is bondage in freedom. Libya will now be ruled by their oppressors pretending to be friends. Iraq and Afghanistan are two examples.

Libya like Iraq will never be the same and that is the crux of the matter. Libya’s destruction is a victory for the west; a defeat for ordinary Libyans. Sure Gaddafi has made mistakes but neither a monster nor a mad dog as being painted by several American presidents.

As for me even with his non-conformity, he is not as bad as most jejune African leaders who conform to code of conduct. Gaddafi usually speaks his mind at the UN General Assembly meeting unlike other African representatives who just nod their heads in agreement with the so-called superpowers. Such “being-my-self” attitude is enough to mark him out as the enemy.

Attacking a sovereign nation is the hallmark of destroy and build principle employed by the west especially America to pave way for a stooge government in the African region. It is unfortunate that the international journalists allow themselves to be used in this regard.

I consider NATO’s involvement; even UN as double standard. I believe passionately that the west cannot and will never give Africa and its people true freedom. It is Africans that can liberate themselves without outside help. How long will it take? That is what I don’t know.

Libya And The World We Live In

2011-09-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

"Why are you attacking us? Why are you killing our children? Why are you destroying our infrastructure?"
– Television address by Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi, April 30, 2011

By William Blum

September 01, 2011

A few hours later NATO hit a target in Tripoli, killing Gaddafi's 29-year-old son Saif al-Arab, three of Gaddafi's grandchildren, all under twelve years of age, and several friends and neighbors.

In his TV address, Gaddafi had appealed to the NATO nations for a cease-fire and negotiations after six weeks of bombings and cruise missile attacks against his country.

Well, let's see if we can derive some understanding of the complex Libyan turmoil.

The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO and the European Union — recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like "humanitarian".

If The Holy Triumvirate decides that it doesn't want to overthrow the government in Syria or in Egypt or Tunisia or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Jordan, no matter how cruel, oppressive, or religiously intolerant those governments are with their people, no matter how much they impoverish and torture their people, no matter how many protesters they shoot dead in their Freedom Square, the Triumvirate will simply not overthrow them.

If the Triumvirate decides that it wants to overthrow the government of Libya, though that government is secular and has used its oil wealth for the benefit of the people of Libya and Africa perhaps more than any government in all of Africa and the Middle East, but keeps insisting over the years on challenging the Triumvirate's imperial ambitions in Africa and raising its demands on the Triumvirate's oil companies, then the Triumvirate will simply overthrow the government of Libya.

If the Triumvirate wants to punish Gaddafi and his sons it will arrange with the Triumvirate's friends at the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for them.

If the Triumvirate doesn't want to punish the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan it will simply not ask the ICC to issue arrest warrants for them. Ever since the Court first formed in 1998, the United States has refused to ratify it and has done its best to denigrate it and throw barriers in its way because Washington is concerned that American officials might one day be indicted for their many war crimes and crimes against humanity. Bill Richardson, as US ambassador to the UN, said to the world in 1998 that the United States should be exempt from the court's prosecution because it has "special global responsibilities". But this doesn't stop the United States from using the Court when it suits the purposes of American foreign policy.

If the Triumvirate wants to support a rebel military force to overthrow the government of Libya then it does not matter how fanatically religious, al-Qaeda-related,1 executing-beheading-torturing, monarchist, or factionally split various groups of that rebel force are at times, the Triumvirate will support it, as it did certain forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hope that after victory the Libyan force will not turn out as jihadist as it did in Afghanistan, or as fratricidal as in Iraq. One potential source of conflict within the rebels, and within the country if ruled by them, is that a constitutional declaration made by the rebel council states that, while guaranteeing democracy and the rights of non-Muslims, "Islam is the religion of the state and the principle source of legislation in Islamic Jurisprudence."

Adding to the list of the rebels' charming qualities we have the Amnesty International report that the rebels have been conducting mass arrests of black people across the nation, terming all of them "foreign mercenaries" but with growing evidence that a large number were simply migrant workers. Reported Reuters (August 29): "On Saturday, reporters saw the putrefying bodies of 22 men of African origin on a Tripoli beach. Volunteers who had come to bury them said they were mercenaries whom rebels had shot dead." To complete this portrait of the West's newest darlings we have this report from The Independent of London (August 27): "The killings were pitiless. They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came."

If the Triumvirate's propaganda is clever enough and deceptive enough and paints a graphic picture of Gaddafi-initiated high tragedy in Libya, many American and European progressives will insist that though they never, ever support imperialism they're making an exception this time because ...

The Libyan people are being saved from a "massacre", both actual and potential. This massacre, however, seems to have been grossly exaggerated by the Triumvirate, al Jazeera TV, and that station's owner, the government of Qatar; and nothing approaching reputable evidence of a massacre has been offered, neither a mass grave or anything else; the massacre stories appear to be on a par with the Viagra-rape stories spread by al Jazeera (the Fox News of the Libyan uprising). Qatar, it should be noted, has played an active military role in the civil war on the side of NATO. It should be further noted that the main massacre in Libya has been six months of daily Triumvirate bombing, killing an unknown number of people and ruining much of the infrastructure. Michigan U. Prof. Juan Cole, the quintessential true-believer in the good intentions of American foreign policy who nevertheless manages to have a regular voice in progressive media, recently wrote that "Qaddafi was not a man to compromise ... his military machine would mow down the revolutionaries if it were allowed to." Is that clear, class? We all know of course that Sarkozy, Obama, and Cameron made compromises without end in their devastation of Libya; they didn't, for example, use any nuclear weapons.
The United Nations gave its approval for military intervention; i.e., the leading members of the Triumvirate gave their approval, after Russia and China cowardly abstained instead of exercising their veto power; (perhaps hoping to receive the same courtesy from the US, UK and France when Russia or China is the aggressor nation).
The people of Libya are being "liberated", whatever in the world that means, now or in the future. Gaddafi is a "dictator" they insist. That may indeed be the proper term to use for the man, but it must still be asked: Is he a relatively benevolent dictator or is he the other kind so favored by Washington? It must also be asked: Since the United States has habitually supported dictators for the entire past century, why not this one?

The Triumvirate, and its fawning media, would have the world believe that what's happened in Libya is just another example of the Arab Spring, a popular uprising by non-violent protestors against a dictator for the proverbial freedom and democracy, spreading spontaneously from Tunisia and Egypt, which sandwich Libya. But there are several reasons to question this analysis in favor of seeing the Libyan rebels' uprising as a planned and violent attempt to take power in behalf of their own political movement, however heterogeneous that movement might appear to be in its early stage. For example:

They soon began flying the flag of the monarchy that Gaddafi had overthrown
They were an armed and violent rebellion almost from the beginning; within a few days, we could read of "citizens armed with weapons seized from army bases"3 and of "the policemen who had participated in the clash were caught and hanged by protesters"4 Their revolt took place not in the capital but in the heart of the country's oil region; they then began oil production and declared that foreign countries would be rewarded oil-wise in relation to how much each country aided their cause

They soon set up a Central Bank, a rather bizarre thing for a protest movement
International support came quickly, even beforehand, from Qatar and al Jazeera to the CIA and French intelligence
The notion that a leader does not have the right to put down an armed rebellion against the state is too absurd to discuss.

Not very long ago, Iraq and Libya were the two most modern and secular states in the Mideast/North Africa world with perhaps the highest standards of living in the region. Then the United States of America came along and saw fit to make a basket case of each one. The desire to get rid of Gaddafi had been building for years; the Libyan leader had never been a reliable pawn; then the Arab Spring provided the excellent opportunity and cover. As to Why? Take your pick of the following:

Gaddafi's plans to conduct Libya's trading in Africa in raw materials and oil in a new currency — the gold African dinar, a change that could have delivered a serious blow to the US's dominant position in the world economy. (In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars; sanctions and an invasion followed.) For further discussion see here.
A host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: "We've got a big image problem down there. ... Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don't trust the US."5
An American military base to replace the one closed down by Gaddafi after he took power in 1969. There's only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It'll perhaps be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.
Another example of NATO desperate to find a raison d'être for its existence since the end of the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact.

Gaddafi's role in creating the African Union. The corporate bosses never like it when their wage slaves set up a union. The Libyan leader has also supported a United States of Africa for he knows that an Africa of 54 independent states will continue to be picked off one by one and abused and exploited by the members of the Triumvirate. Gaddafi has moreover demanded greater power for smaller countries in the United Nations.

The claim by Gaddafi's son, Saif el Islam, that Libya had helped to fund Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign6 could have humiliated the French president and explain his obsessiveness and haste in wanting to be seen as playing the major role in implementing the "no fly zone" and other measures against Gaddafi. A contributing factor may have been the fact that France has been weakened in its former colonies and neo-colonies in Africa and the Middle East, due in part to Gaddafi's influence.
Gaddafi has been an outstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause and critic of Israeli policies; and on occasion has taken other African and Arab countries, as well as the West, to task for their not matching his policies or rhetoric; one more reason for his lack of popularity amongst world leaders of all stripes.

In January, 2009, Gaddafi made known that he was considering nationalizing the foreign oil companies in Libya. He also has another bargaining chip: the prospect of utilizing Russian, Chinese and Indian oil companies. During the current period of hostilities, he invited these countries to make up for lost production. But such scenarios will now not take place. The Triumvirate will instead seek to privatize the National Oil Corporation, transferring Libya's oil wealth into foreign hands.

The American Empire is troubled by any threat to its hegemony. In the present historical period the empire is concerned mainly with Russia and China. China has extensive energy investments and construction investments in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The average American neither knows nor cares about this. The average American imperialist cares greatly, if for no other reason than in this time of rising demands for cuts to the military budget it's vital that powerful "enemies" be named and maintained.

For yet more reasons, see the article "Why Regime Change in Libya?" by Ismael Hossein-zadeh, and the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks — Wikileaks reference 07TRIPOLI967 11-15-07 (includes a complaint about Libyan "resource nationalism")

A word from the man the world's mightiest military powers have been trying to kill

"Recollections of My Life", written by Col. Muammar Gaddafi, April 8, 2011, excerpts:

Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "capitalism," but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer, so, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following his path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us ... I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it. ... In the West, some have called me "mad", "crazy". They know the truth but continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip.

The state of our beloved capitalist system, early 21st century

I pay attention to the fat content of my food, so I was pleased to find a can of Pam canola oil cooking spray that had 0 grams fat per serving. Great, can't do better than zero fat, can you? I used it often for a few months ... until one day I took a closer look at the "Nutrition Facts" ... Yes, it said 0 grams fat per serving. A serving. How big was that? Let's see ... "Serving Size about 1/4 second spray" ... Hmmm, how does one press down on a button for 1/4 second? Is it humanly possible? Even the manufacturer had to say "about". I had been taken. My hat is off to you Capitalist Robber Barons — You're good!

The Dow Jones industrial average of blue-chip stocks fell 635 points on Monday August 8.

On Tuesday it rose by 430 points.

Wednesday, the market, in its infinite wisdom, decided to fall again; this time by 520 points.

And on Thursday ... yes, it rose once again, by 423 points.

The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions.

Upon such marvels of mankind countless people build careers, others wager their life savings, philanthropic foundations and universities risk much of their endowments, and conservative sages deliver sermons to the world on the wisdom and sacredness of the free market.

Main Street is the climax of civilization.
That this Ford car might stand in front of
the Bon Ton store, Hannibal invaded Rome
and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters.
– Sinclair Lewis, "Main Street", 1920

Do the economic fundamentals really change dramatically overnight? Or is our economic system as psycho as our foreign policy? The Washington Post's senior economic columnist, Steven Pearlstein, wrote on August 14th of the four days described above: "I suppose there are some schnooks who actually believe that those wild swings in stock prices last week represented sober and serious concerns by thoughtful, sophisticated investors about the Treasury debt downgrade or European sovereign debt or a slowdown in global growth. But surely such perceptions don't radically change each afternoon between 2 and 4:30, when the market averages last week were gyrating out of control."

Last month "Pope Benedict XVI denounced the profit-at-all-cost mentality that he says is behind Europe's economic crisis" as he arrived in hard-hit Spain. "The economy doesn't function with market self-regulation but needs an ethical reason to work for mankind," he declared. "Man must be at the center of the economy, and the economy cannot be measured only by maximization of profit but rather according to the common good."8

"I am a Marxist," said the Dalai Lama last year. Marxism has "moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits."

"I don't believe in anything," said Barack Obama. "At least not really strongly." (No, I made that one up.)

Perhaps the worst outcome of the United States "winning the Cold War" is that countless progressive people think there's no alternative to the capitalist system. Seventy years of anti-communist education and media stamped in people's minds a lasting association between socialism and what the Soviet Union called communism. Socialism meant a dictatorship, it meant Stalinist repression, a suffocating "command economy", no freedom of enterprise, no freedom to change jobs, few avenues for personal expression, and other similar truths and untruths. This is a set of beliefs clung to even amongst many Americans opposed to US foreign policy. No matter how bad the economy is, Americans think, the only alternative available is something called "communism", and they know how awful that is.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party USA has endorsed Barack Obama for re-election.

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
– Frederic Bastiat, (1801-1850) French economist, statesman, and author

Notes

For example, see: The Telegraph (London), August 30, 2011: "Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi's regime." There is a plethora of other reports detailing the ties between the rebels and radical Islamist groups.
Washington Post, August 31, 2011
McClatchy Newspapers, February 20, 2011
Wikipedia, Timeline of the 2011 Libyan civil war, February 19, 2011
The Guardian (London), June 25, 2007
The Guardian (London), March 16, 2011
Reuters, January 21, 2009
Associated Press, August 11, 2011
Agence France Presse, May 21, 2010
"Yikes! Look who just endorsed Obama for 4 more years", WorldNetDaily, August 3 2011

Libya and the shameless rewriting of history

2011-09-02T07:23:00.000-07:00

The repackaging of NATO’s reckless intervention as a clever war for liberty would make Orwell’s Ministry of Truth beam with pride.

By Brendan O’Neill
Spiked

September 01, 2011 "Spiked" -- Not since Winston Smith found himself in the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, rewriting old newspaper articles on behalf of Big Brother, has there been such an overnight perversion of history as there has been in relation to NATO’s intervention in Libya. Now that the rebels have taken Tripoli, NATO’s bombing campaign is being presented to us as an adroit intervention, which was designed to achieve precisely the glorious scenes we’re watching on our TV screens. In truth, it was an incoherent act of clueless militarism, which is only now being repackaged, in true Minitrue fashion, as an initiative that ‘played an indispensable role in the liberation of Tripoli’.

Normally it takes a few years for history to be rewritten; with Libya it happened in days. No sooner had rebel soldiers arrived at Gaddafi’s compound than the NATO campaign launched in March was being rewritten as a cogent assault. Commentators desperate to resuscitate the idea of ‘humanitarian intervention’, and NATO leaders determined to crib some benefits from their Libya venture, took to their lecterns to tell us that their aims had been achieved and they had ‘salvaged the principle of liberal interventionism from the geopolitical dustbin’. In order to sustain these bizarre claims, they’ve had to put the real truth about NATO’s campaign into a memory hole and invent a whole new ‘truth’.

Over the past few days every aspect of NATO’s bombing campaign has been, as Winston Smith might put it, ‘falsified’. Since everybody now seems to have forgotten the events of just five months ago, it is worth reminding ourselves of the true character of NATO’s intervention in Libya. It was incoherent from the get-go, overseen by a continually fraying and deeply divided Western ‘alliance’ and with no serious war aim beyond being seen to bomb an evil dictator. It was cowardly, where all alliance members wanted to appear to be Doing Something while actually doing as little as possible. This was especially true of the US, which stayed firmly on the backseat of the anti-Gaddafi alliance. And it was reckless, revealing that military action detached from strategy, unanchored by end goals, can easily spin out of control.

Yet now, courtesy of the Ministry of Truthers, these deep moral flaws and political failings are being reinterpreted as brilliant stratagems. So the determination of Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama to present their bombing of Libya, not as a Western initiative but rather as a UN-approved act of uber-multilateralism, is now depicted as a brilliant, oh-so-sly decision that massively aided the rebellion by giving the impression that it was more an organic uprising than a power play aided by ‘evil’ Western outsiders. Commentators write about the West’s adoption of ‘humility’ as a ‘strategic device’. They claim the downplaying of America’s role in the setting up of the anti-Gaddafi alliance in March was designed to enhance the likelihood of success. As one observer now claims, ‘It suited everyone for America to appear to take a backseat. It suited the uprising.’

Here, the profound crisis of identity of the West, its increasing inability to project any kind of mission into the international sphere, is refashioned as the knowing adoption of ‘humility’, designed to boost Western influence in tyranny-ruled lands. In truth, the West-in-denial nature of the anti-Gaddafi alliance, where NATO presented its campaign as a non-American, non-gung-ho initiative, spoke to the corrosion of American authority in international affairs and to the post-Iraq moral paralysis of that entity once known as ‘the West’. So in March, it was reported that Washington was being distanced from the alliance and that Cameron was desperately seeking Arab League backing, in order to make sure ‘this did not look like a Western initiative’. It was shamefacedness about what the West is seen to represent today, and a recognition that American authority is now way more divisive than it was during the Cold War, which gave rise to this orgy of Western sheepishness.

Yet now, the moral hollowness and political incoherence of Western institutions revealed during the formation of the anti-Gaddafi alliance are being presented as clever disguises, designed to boost the fortunes of the rebels. Indeed, since the rebels took Tripoli, some observers have even started claiming that we’re witnessing the emergence of a ‘new era in US foreign policy’, a new ‘model for intervention’. According to Fareed Zakaria of CNN, it might have looked as if Obama’s approach was ‘too multilateral and lacked cohesiveness’, what with his decision to withdraw his fighter planes just 48 hours after the intervention started in March, but actually that was all part of a brilliant new strategy called ‘leading from behind’. Others sing the praises of ‘Obama’s light-footprint approach’, claiming that his strategy of ‘limited engagement’ has now produced a ‘nuanced victory’ in Libya. Here, disarray is repackaged as deftness, and a ‘model’ is retrospectively projected on to the mayhem that reigned during the creation and launch of NATO’s mission.

Likewise, the risk-aversion and commitment-phobia of the venture are being rehashed as superb strategies. So America’s insistence that its involvement in Libya would be ‘time-limited and scope-limited’, and Britain and France’s refusal to entertain the idea of posting troops in Libya, are apparently not signs of their almost pathological unwillingness to do anything that might incur a high moral or existential cost, but rather reflect their discovery, through careful analysis, of the fact that ‘intervention lite’ is the best way to shape world affairs. We’re told that the taking of Tripoli is a success for the new ‘model for intervention’, where the focus is, in the words of one commentator, ‘strike from the skies but keep Western boots off the ground, [as a way of] doing the right thing and ridding the world of a horrible dictator’.

Where the Ministry of Truth’s topsy-turvy slogan was ‘Ignorance is strength’, the Libya lobby’s rallying cry could be: ‘Cowardice is courage.’ In refashioning the risk-aversion of Western powers as a coherent strategy, a choice made by governments that have forensically worked out the best way to reshape nations, these Minitrue cheerleaders of NATO overlook the profound paralysis of the West and its armies today. The ‘no boots’ rule in relation to Libya sprang, not from clever strategic vision, but from the pusillanimous nature of modern governments, which are keen to intervene in foreign states’ affairs (for the perceived PR benefit of appearing tough) yet which want to avoid devoting life, limb or even much time to such interventions. The no-boots rule really speaks to a deep, conflictual trend in modern politics: our rulers, lacking any meaningful legitimacy at home, feel the urge to seek political purpose in foreign theatres – yet their very lack of legitimacy, their moral disarray, means that their foreign ventures are cautious, fearful things.

The part of the NATO campaign that has received the most thorough Minitrue makeover is the bombing of recent days. These raids are being reimagined as the final and decisive acts of a West determined to get rid of Gaddafi and install a new government. NATO’s ‘meticulously targeted’ assaults have created a ‘pathway’ for the rebels, we’re told. In truth, NATO’s latest outburst is best seen, not as the creator of new opportunities for the rebels, but rather as an opportunist stab by NATO forces to make political mileage from the disintegration of the Gaddafi regime. The decisive event in Libya in recent weeks has been the further corrosion of Gaddafi’s authority – and NATO is responding to that rather than having consciously brought it about.

Far from dealing a fatal blow to Gaddafi or providing a golden opportunity to the rebels, NATO’s bombing has been primarily reactive – to the internal combustion of Gaddafi’s writ. That is why this military venture has lasted six months, despite the fact that it consists of massive Western forces rallied against the isolated has-been Gaddafi: because NATO has adopted the role of observing and reacting to events rather than determining them. Thus only when it became clear even to faraway military observers that Gaddafi’s authority was beyond repair did NATO decide to up the ante. The recent bombs were less about achieving ‘pathways’ for a rebel takeover and more an attempt by NATO leaders to derive some political benefits from the slow-burning chaos in Libya, through firing PR missiles at a country whose authoritarian government had disintegrated.

The Ministry of Truthers are repackaging a reckless, strategy-free campaign launched by a deeply divided NATO as the principled act of super-clever men who have now liberated Libya. You’d never know from this Minitrue makeover that this apparently brilliant mission came close to collapse many times, as everyone from Obama to Berlusconi wondered out loud if it should be called off. What we’re witnessing is the shameless projection of active decision-making on to what was in fact a passive, decadent venture driven by PR imperatives rather than political vision. What really happened in Libya is that Gaddafi’s regime fell apart – yet now everyone is reading history backwards and locating this falling apart in the decisions made and actions taken by Western leaders. It’s not hard to see why they’re indulging in this falsification of history: it allows Cameron to pose as ‘brave but not bombastic’, and it allows laptop bombardiers to claim they were right about the wonderfulness of Western intervention. For these self-serving reasons, the buffoonish entry of cowardly NATO forces into a conflict involving a ridiculous dictator is hysterically talked up as a modern-day Normandy.

There’s one difference between the rewriting of the Libya venture and what went on in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Our history-warpers haven’t actually physically destroyed all the evidence showing that the bombing of Libya was in fact a reckless and vain military venture (and there’s mountains of such evidence). They don’t have to. Their powers of self-delusion are so strong, and the critical climate surrounding ‘humanitarian intervention’ so weak, that they simply need to magic up a few flimsy myths and, hey presto, the past is forgotten.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.

Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy

2011-08-31T06:50:00.002-07:00

by William Blum

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate -- the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.
Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name -- The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.
It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.
Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental" -- part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.
"We should not have to do this kind of work covertly," said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60's, and that's why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that's why the endowment was created."{1}
And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."{2)
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations.
In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of numerous foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, computers, faxes, copiers, automobiles, and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED typically refers to the media it supports as "independent" despite the fact that these media are on the US payroll.
NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A free-market economy is equated with democracy, reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment in their economy are emphasized.
From 1994 to 1996, NED awarded 15 grants, totaling more than $2,500,000, to the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organization used by the CIA for decades to subvert progressive labor unions.{3} AIFLD's work within Third World unions typically involved a considerable educational effort very similar to the basic NED philosophy described above. The description of one of the 1996 NED grants to AIFLD includes as one its objectives: "build union-management cooperation".{4} Like many things that NED says, this sounds innocuous, if not positive, but these in fact are ideological code words meaning "keep the labor agitation down ... don't rock the status-quo boat". The relationship between NED and AIFLD very well captures the CIA origins of the Endowment.{5}
NED has funded centrist and rightist labor organizations to help them oppose those unions which were too militantly pro-worker. This has taken place in France, Portugal and Spain amongst many other places. In France, during the 1983-4 period, NED supported a "trade union-like organization for professors and students" to counter "left-wing organizations of professors". To this end it funded a series of seminars and the publication of posters, books and pamphlets such as "Subversion and the Theology of Revolution" and "Neutralism or Liberty".{6} ("Neutralism" here refers to being unaligned in the cold war.)
NED describes one of its 1997-98 programs thusly: "To identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative change ... [and] to develop strategies for private sector growth."{7} Critics of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a socialist, were supported by NED grants for years.{8}
In short, NED's programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order's economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy.

Interference in elections
NED's Statement of Principles and Objectives, adopted in 1984, asserts that "No Endowment funds may be used to finance the campaigns of candidates for public office." But the ways to circumvent the spirit of such a prohibition are not difficult to come up with; as with American elections, there's "hard money" and there's "soft money".
As described in the "Elections" and "Interventions" chapters, NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996; helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992; and worked to defeat the candidate for prime minister of Slovakia in 2002 who was out of favor in Washington. And from 1999 to 2004, NED heavily funded members of the opposition to President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to subvert his rule and to support a referendum to unseat him.
Additionally, in the 1990s and afterward, NED supported a coalition of groups in Haiti known as the Democratic Convergence, who were united in their opposition to Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his progressive ideology, while he was in and out of the office of the president.{9}
The Endowment has made its weight felt in the electoral-political process in numerous other countries.
NED would have the world believe that it's only teaching the ABCs of democracy and elections to people who don't know them, but in virtually all the countries named above, in whose electoral process NED intervened, there had already been free and fair elections held. The problem, from NED's point of view, is that the elections had been won by political parties not on NED's favorites list.
The Endowment maintains that it's engaged in "opposition building" and "encouraging pluralism". "We support people who otherwise do not have a voice in their political system," said Louisa Coan, a NED program officer.{10} But NED hasn't provided aid to foster progressive or leftist opposition in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Eastern Europe -- or, for that matter, in the United States -- even though these groups are hard pressed for funds and to make themselves heard. Cuban dissident groups and media are heavily supported however.
NED's reports carry on endlessly about "democracy", but at best it's a modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers-that-be or the way-things-are, unless of course it's in a place like Cuba.
The Endowment played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's shadowy "Project Democracy" network, which privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally charming activities. At one point in 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED "run Project Democracy".{11} This was an exaggeration; it would have been more correct to say that NED was the public arm of Project Democracy, while North ran the covert end of things. In any event, the statement caused much less of a stir than if -- as in an earlier period -- it had been revealed that it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous operation.
NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to fight the leftist insurgency in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding a host of private organizations, including unions and the media.{12} This was a replica of a typical CIA operation of pre-NED days.
And between 1990 and 1992, the Endowment donated a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers' money to the Cuban-American National Foundation, the ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group. The CANF, in turn, financed Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific and pitiless terrorists of modern times, who had been involved in the blowing up of a Cuban airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, he was involved in a series of bomb explosions in Havana hotels,{13} and in 2000 imprisoned in Panama when he was part of a group planning to assassinate Fidel Castro with explosives while the Cuban leader was speaking before a large crowd, although eventually, the group was tried on lesser charges.
The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization.{14}

NOTES
1. The New York Times, June 1, 1986
2. Washington Post, September 22, 1991
3. NED Annual Reports, 1994-96.
4. NED Annual Report, 1996, p.39
5. For further information on AIFLD, see: Tom Barry, et al., The Other Side of Paradise: Foreign Control in the Caribbean (Grove Press, NY, 1984), see AIFLD in index; Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), chapter 6; Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America (monograph, San Jose, California, 1974) passim; The Sunday Times (London), October 27, 1974, p.15-16
6. NED Annual Report, November 18, 1983 to September 30, 1984, p.21
7. NED Annual Report, 1998, p.35
8. See NED annual reports of the 1990s.
9. Council on Hemispheric Affairs (Washington, DC), press release, June 13, 2002, www.coha.org; Washington Post, November 18, 2003; NED Annual Report, 1998, p.53; Haiti Progres (Port-au-Prince, Haiti), May 13-19, 1998
10. New York Times, March 31, 1997, p.11
11. Washington Post, February 16, 1987; also see New York Times, February 15, 1987, p.1
12. San Francisco Examiner, July 21, 1985, p.1
13. New York Times, July 13, 1998
14. For a detailed discussion of NED, in addition to the sources named above, see: William I. Robinson, A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (Westview Press, Colorado, 1992), passim

Dr. Denise Horn: Foreign Funding as a Strategy for Manipulation

2011-08-31T06:45:00.000-07:00

Sujata Tuladhar
TUFTS Fletcher
Date: March 10, 2008

“Powerful states do engage in exploitation of NGO networks and are very specific about it,” stated Dr. Denise Horn, Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Northeastern University.

At a talk entitled “NGO Funding and the Manipulation of Civil Society within Transitional States” organized by the Boston Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at The Fletcher School on February 19th, Dr. Horn discussed the development of a new international trend in which hegemonic states use funding for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a tool to control social agenda. The event was co-sponsored by Global Women, a student group at The Fletcher School that invites speakers and sponsors a mentoring program.

Using case studies from Moldova and Estonia, Dr. Horn established three main findings. First, she described how foreign countries help establish the rules for civil society. They can delineate the boundaries of the issues they identify as being important. An outstanding example is that of the United States, which through NGO funding, has significantly contributed to the emergence of a particular notion of democracy and the process of democratization. Only aspects of democracy valuable to US foreign policy have been funded. “Because the US has a lot of power and a lot of money to invest in democracy programs and policy, they get to determine what democracy looks like and what policies are democratic.”

Her second finding is that “foreign donors frame the debate within civil society and domestic politics by focusing on particular issues and funding local NGOs willing to support those targeted issues.” For instance, US-funded programs focus on free and fair elections, promote multi-party participation, encourage women in political parties and free market reforms as part of the process of democratization. NGOs who do not subscribe to these means of democratization are not funded, thus reducing their voice in political discourse.

Through analysis of the ‘requests for proposals’ published by donors and the proposals written in response to them, Dr. Horn also found that “because foreign funding can shape the language of the projects that develop, it shapes the way individuals perceive themselves vis-à-vis civil society and the state through the programs and social campaigns that are implemented by local NGOs.”

For instance, Moldova received heavy funding for programs dealing with human trafficking. The US approaches trafficking as an economic problem alone and thus fails to address the social and economic underpinning of the issue. Therefore, resulting programs focused on providing women with economic skills without understanding why women participate in trafficking in the first place. Similarly, in Estonia, US funding concentrated on domestic violence. As a result, people claiming to be victims or perpetrators of domestic abuse rose significantly.

Dr. Horn went on to elaborate that the decision of donor states such as the US to engage in funding NGOs is, in fact, a strategy to fulfill their respective national interests. Through funding NGOs, they shape what kind of civil society networks emerge, which will in turn serve their foreign policies. For instance, the US encourages countries to democratize because it believes that states that believe in the American notion of democracy are more responsive to US foreign policy. Most often, civil society is leveraged for such interventions because it serves as a less threatening approach.

How far this strategy has reached and whether or not other big states are also following similar strategies is a question yet to be answered. However, with a growing number of research studies like the one Dr. Horn pursues, there is bound to be a growing pool of knowledge on this issue soon.

NGOs: the West’s soft instrument for hegemonic policies

2011-08-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

By Tahir Mahmoud

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become an important political tool in the hands of the West. Like the word “aid”, the NGOs (they also use the alias non-profit organizations) are used to penetrate and undermine other societies, especially in the Muslim world. Looked at superficially, the concept of NGOs may appear practical and beneficial, but the manner in which they are used by the US and the West in general is not only a distortion of their original aim but borders on the scandalous.

The role of US-backed NGOs was best summarized by Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy who stated in a 1991 Washington Post article: “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In order to be able to identify which NGOs are used as political instruments there is need to examine their links with state institutions, their operational modes and the sources of their funding.

It was US President John F. Kennedy (1961–63) who pioneered the politicization of NGOs when he US established the Peace Corps in 1961. Even though the Peace Corps is a government organization, its concept and model were later used to establish several other NGOs backed by the US government. The so-called Peace Corps sends American “volunteers” to promote “the understanding of Americans abroad.” The Peace Corps was the answer to the Soviet Union’s grass roots activism in Latin America and Africa. In 1981 anti-communist training was provided to Peace Corps volunteers and the US government hired Dean Coston Associates, a consulting firm, to train volunteers to undermine communist efforts by presenting communism in a negative light. However, since the Peace Corps is known as a governmental organization it does not always succeed in portraying its agenda or policies as unbiased. It seems that this weakness in the Peace Corps was first realized by US President Ronald Reagan who helped establish another NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), in 1983, in order to promote “democracy.” NED is directly financed by the US Congress and has played an important role in advancing US interests in different parts of the world to the detriment of local populations. In the mid-1980s, the NED openly backed Manuel Noriega in Panama and the anti-Castro groups in order to advance US hegemony in Central America. Today through so called grants, the NED finances several anti-Islamic groups that work to sabotage the Islamic system of governance in Iran.

Since the 1980s, the US has adopted a more sophisticated approach to advancing its agenda through NGOs. One contemporary example of “NGO” work is the involvement of the Open Society Institute (OSI) in the so-called “Rose Revolution” in Georgia which brought to power a staunchly pro-US government. Instead of being directly involved, the US government remained in the background by using individuals such as George Soros, the billionaire financier, who funds the OSI. Organizations such as the OSI are given political and economic space to operate independently as long as their work does not impede US global designs at the strategic level. This provides the US a way to implement certain policies without taking official responsibility and therefore cannot be held directly liable politically, socially, economically and in some cases even legally.

The operational mode of US-backed NGOs is quite simple. They finance so-called projects and programs in many impoverished countries where the ruling system does little to improve the life of its citizens. Such brutal and corrupt regimes are sustained in power by the US itself; examples of Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Pakistan readily come to mind. In such cases it becomes easy for foreign NGOs to attract the local population to cooperate with it because the alternative is often unemployment and starvation. By providing even minimum services which the local government should have but does not provide, US-backed NGOs project themselves as benefactors of people. This garners support for them among local populations.

Western NGOs skilfully exploit the unpopularity of corrupt regimes in order to further the foreign policy objectives of their own governments. Since foreign NGOs have the money to implement vital projects, many local NGOs which are sincere in improving the conditions in their own countries become vulnerable to manipulation by receiving grants from outsiders. Lack of funding forces local NGOs in the developing world to surrender their integrity and lose their identity as truly non-governmental bodies since they become the extended arm of foreign governments.

Apart from NGOs that focus on social services, there are several so-called think-tanks and foundations that play an important role in policy formulation and implementation. The US has the world’s largest number of think-tanks which not only serve as policy formulation institutions, but also as a staffing center for the US government to recruit experts from various fields. Think-tanks and foundations became incorporated into the “non-governmental” scheme of the US government in the early 1900s. While foundations deal mainly with financing individuals and organizations, think-tanks are supposed to provide a non-biased second opinion. However, even though think-tanks claim to provide alternative perspectives they often promote policies that benefit their financiers. RAND Corporation, one of the leading US think-tanks, established in 1945 right after the Second World War by the commander of the US Air Force, General Henry H. Arnold, offers a good example. In 2008, RAND spent $230.07 million on research. Many RAND studies directly or indirectly advocated large military spending and in particular spending on the air force. The US Air Force contributed $42 million to RAND in the same year.

The so-called NGOs that are financed by the US government are an important part of US policy to advance its hegemonic goals. It is likely that during the presidency of Barack Obama the NGO sector may be used even more frequently as a tool of US foreign policy. In 2009 Obama openly proclaimed that Americans cannot only rely on their military and need a “civilian national security which is as well trained and funded.” Since NGOs often play a positive role in a society’s development, serious thought must be given to how best to protect NGOs from government manipulation. The best way to do this would be by making the NGOs less dependent on direct governmental funding. One way would be to establish an independent international fund for supplementary NGO funding.