US and NATO murder Muammar Gaddafi

The savage killing Thursday of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi served to underscore the criminal character of the war that has been prosecuted by the US and NATO over the past eight months.
The assassination follows NATO’s more than month-long siege of Sirte, the Libyan coastal city that was Gaddafi’s hometown and a center of his support. The assault on this city of 100,000 left virtually every building smashed, with untold numbers of civilians dead, wounded and stricken by disease, as they were deprived of food, water, medical care and other basic necessities.
Gaddafi was apparently traveling in a convoy of vehicles attempting to break out of the siege after the last bastion of resistance had fallen to the NATO-backed “rebels”. NATO warplanes attacked the convoy at 8:30 a.m. Thursday morning, leaving a number of vehicles in flames and preventing it from moving forward. Then the armed anti-Gaddafi militias moved in for the kill.
The death of Gaddafi appears to have been part of a larger massacre that has reportedly claimed the lives of a number of his top aides, loyalist fighters and his two sons, Mo’tassim and Saif al-Islam.
While details of the killings remain somewhat clouded, photographs and cell phone videos released by the NATO-backed “rebels” clearly show a wounded Gaddafi struggling with his captors and shouting as he is dragged onto the back of a vehicle. His stripped and lifeless body is then shown, drenched in blood. It seems clear that having first been wounded, perhaps in the NATO air strikes, the former Libyan ruler was captured alive and then summarily executed. One photograph shows him with a bullet hole in the head.
Gaddafi’s body was then taken west to the city of Misrata, where it was reportedly dragged through the streets before being deposited in a mosque.
The fate of the body is politically significant in that it was seized by a Misrata militia faction that is operating under its own command and has no loyalty to the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council (NTC), which Washington and NATO have anointed as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Libyan people.
Thus this grisly event, which President Barack Obama hailed in the White House Rose Garden Thursday as the advent of “a new and democratic Libya,” in reality only exposes the regional and tribal fault lines that are setting the stage for a protracted period of civil war.
Both the US and France claimed credit for their roles in the murder of Gaddafi. The Pentagon asserted on Thursday that a US Predator drone had fired a Hellfire missile at the ousted Libyan leader’s convoy, while France’s defense minister said that French warplanes had bombed it.
The US and NATO had carried out repeated air strikes on Gaddafi’s compounds in Tripoli and other homes where they suspected he was hiding since shortly after the brutal air war against Libya was launched last March. One of these strikes at the end of last April claimed the lives of his youngest son and three young grandchildren.
Washington had deployed surveillance planes along with large numbers of drones in an attempt to track down Gaddafi, while US, British and French intelligence agents, special operations troops and military “contractors” operating on the ground also participated in this manhunt.Just two days before the murder of Gaddafi, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton staged an unannounced visit to Tripoli on a heavily armed military aircraft. While there, she issued a demand that Gaddafi be brought in “dead or alive”.
As the Associated Press reported, Clinton declared “in unusually blunt terms that the United States would like to see former dictator Muammar Gaddafi dead.“‘We hope he can be captured or killed soon so that you don’t have to fear him any longer’, Clinton told students and others at a town hall-style gathering in the capital city.”

The AP went on to note: “Until now, the US has generally avoided saying that Gaddafi should be killed.”
Yet in reality, Washington is pursuing an unconcealed policy of state murder. In this case, it has openly advocated and provided every resource to facilitate the killing of a head of state with whom the US government had established close political and commercial relations over the course of the last eight years.
The battered corpse of Gaddafi’s son Mo’tassim, who was also captured alive and then executed, was put on display in Misrata. As recently as April 2009 he was warmly welcomed to the US State Department by Hillary Clinton.In his Rose Garden speech Thursday, Obama boasted of his administration having “taken out” Al Qaeda leaders, sounding for the all world like a Mafia don, minus the charm. Among his most recent victims are two US citizens, Anwar Awlaki, the Arizona-born Yemeni-American Muslim cleric, last month and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, who was born in Denver. Both had been placed on a “kill list” by a secret National Security Council subcommittee and murdered with Hellfire missiles. Abdulrahman was blown to bits along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other friends as they ate dinner.
The killing of Gaddafi is the culmination of a criminal war that killed untold numbers of Libyans and left most of the country in ruins. This operation was launched on the pretext of protecting civilian lives, based on the trumped up claim that Gaddafi was preparing to lay siege to the eastern city of Benghazi to massacre his opponents. It has ended with NATO orchestrating a siege of Sirte, where thousands have been killed and wounded in suppressing opposition to the “rebels”.From the beginning, the entire operation has been directed at the re-colonization of North Africa and pursued on behalf of US, British, French, Italian and Dutch oil interests.
While over the past decade Gaddafi had curried favor with US, Britain, France and other Western powers, striking oil deals, arms agreements and other pacts, US imperialism and its counterparts in Europe continued to see his regime as an impediment to their aims in the region.
Among the principal concerns in Washington, London and Paris were the increasing Chinese and Russian economic interests in Libya and more generally Africa as a whole. China had developed $6.6 billion in bilateral trade, mainly in oil, while some 30,000 Chinese workers were employed in a wide range of infrastructure projects. Russia, meanwhile, had developed extensive oil deals, billions of dollars in arms sales and a $3 billion project to link Sirte and Benghazi by rail. There were also discussions on providing the Russian navy with a Mediterranean port near Benghazi.
Gaddafi had provoked the ire of the government of Nicolas Sarkozy in France with his hostility to its scheme for creating a Mediterranean Union, aimed at refurbishing French influence in the country’s former colonies and beyond. Moreover, major US and Western European energy conglomerates increasingly chafed at what they saw as tough contract terms demanded by the Gaddafi government, as well as the threat that the Russian oil company Gazprom would be given a big stake in the exploitation of the country’s reserves.
Combined with these economic and geo-strategic motives were political factors. The turn by Gaddafi toward closer relations to the West had allowed Washington and Paris to cultivate elements within his regime who were prepared to collaborate in an imperialist takeover of the country. This includes figures like Mustafa Abdul Jalil, Gaddafi’s former Justice Minister and now chairman of the NATO-backed NTC and Mahmoud Jibril, the former economics official who is chief of the NTC cabinet. With the popular upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt—on Libya’s western and eastern borders—the US and its NATO allies saw an opportunity to put into operation a plan that had been developed over some time for regime change in Libya. With agents on the ground, they moved to exploit and hijack anti-Gaddafi demonstrations and foment an armed conflict.
To prepare for a direct imperialist takeover, they followed a well-worn path, vilifying the country’s leader and promoting the idea that only outside intervention could save innocent civilians from a looming massacre.
The supposed imminent destruction of Benghazi was utilized to win support for imperialist war from a whole range of ex-lefts, liberals, academics and human rights advocates, who lent their moral and intellectual weight to an exercise in imperialist aggression and murder. Figures like University of Michigan Middle Eastern history professor Juan Cole, who had raised limited criticism of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, became enthusiastic promoters of the “humanitarian” mission of the Pentagon and NATO in Libya. Representative of an upper middle class social layer that has become a new constituency for imperialism, they were utterly compromised, politically and morally. They were untroubled by the lawlessness of the entire enterprise and the mounting evidence of the murder and torture of immigrants and black Libyans by the so-called rebels.
Their attempt to portray the regime change in Libya as a popular revolution becomes more preposterous with each passing day. The unstable puppet regime that is taking shape in Benghazi and Tripoli has been installed through relentless and massive NATO bombing, murder and the wholesale violation of international law.
Libya stands as a warning to the world. Any regime that gets in the way of US interests, runs afoul of the major corporations or fails to do the bidding of the NATO powers can be overthrown by military force, with its leaders murdered.
Already, the US media, which has staged a hideous celebration of the bloodbath outside Sirte, is braying for NATO to repeat its Libyan intervention in Syria. For her part, Clinton warned Pakistani leaders on Thursday that insufficient support for the US-war in Afghanistan would mean that they would pay “a very big price.”
There can be no doubt that future operations are on the way, with bigger wars coming into focus, posing catastrophic consequences. The Obama administration has already put Iran on notice that all options remain “on the table” in relation to a fabricated plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. And as the Libyan intervention was aimed in no small part at countering Chinese and Russian influence both in the region and globally, so China and Russia themselves are seen as future targets. The bloody events in Libya, and the economic motives underlying them, are providing a fresh lesson in the real character of imperialism. The crisis gripping world capitalism is once again posing the threat of world war. The working class can confront this threat only by mobilizing its independent political strength and rearming itself with the program of world socialist revolution to put an end to the profit system, which is the source of militarism.

Gaddafi family members murdered by US and NATO

By James Cogan

The killing of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s youngest son and three grandchildren are political murders for which British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and US President Barack Obama are directly responsible. They sanctioned the missile attack on a private residence in Tripoli at which Gaddafi and members of his family had gathered on Saturday night. Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, 29, was the Libyan leader’s youngest son and a man who was not considered a member of the Libyan government. Gaddafi family friends have reported that the slain children were aged between 12 months and four-years-old.

Following the missile strike, the British commander of NATO’s military operation in Libya, Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard, issued a statement that was as perfunctory as it was deceitful: “We regret all loss of life, especially the innocent civilians being harmed as a result of the ongoing conflict.”

In an equally mendacious statement, Cameron sought to maintain the political fiction that the attack on the one-storey residence was permissible under the terms of UN Resolution 1973. The missile strike, he claimed, was aimed at “preventing a loss of life by targeting Gaddafi’s war-making machine. That is obviously tanks and guns and rocket launchers, but also command-and-control as well.”

Cameron, on the advice of his lawyers, referred to the private residence as a “command-and-control” centre in order to evade the charge that Muammar Gaddafi had been targeted by the missile strike. The targeting of a specific individual is an assassination and, even in war, may be defined as a criminal act. The attempt to kill Gaddafi, however, is taking place without either a declaration of war by the US and European powers against Libya, or even the invocation of the provisions of the War Powers Act by the Obama administration.

It is 35 years since the US Church Report disavowed assassination and revived the long-held position of the United States government, stretching back to the American Revolution, that it was not only a criminal and barbaric policy, but a reckless one that would legitimise every government seeking to assassinate the political leadership of rival states. After close to two decades of near continuous war to offset the economic and political decline of US imperialism, all such restraints and reservations have been repudiated.

Leading American politicians, contemptuous of the legalities of the issue, brazenly call for the Libyan leader’s killing. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, in an interview on Fox News on Sunday morning, again declared: “Wherever Gaddafi goes, he is a legitimate military target.” With this statement, the American senator enshrined murder as official state policy.

Barely seven hours before the attack that killed Gaddafi’s son and grandchildren, NATO aircraft had pounded targets in Tripoli where they thought the Libyan leader was making a live television address to call for a ceasefire. On April 24, a compound where NATO intelligence clearly believed Gaddafi was located was reduced to rubble, killing three civilians.

Gaddafi’s death has become the overriding objective of the US and NATO war on Libya. The initial strategy of the assault, which began on March 19, has abjectly failed. Air strikes have slaughtered hundreds of Libyan soldiers and civilians but they have not, as was confidently expected in imperialist circles, triggered the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. On the ground, the pro-NATO Transitional National Council based in the eastern city of Benghazi has proven incapable of making advances against, let alone defeating, Gaddafi’s military forces.

The frustration and even desperation of the major powers is embodied in the inane belief that Gaddafi’s death will end all resistance and enable the so-called “rebels”―a collection of former Gaddafi ministers, CIA assets and Islamic fundamentalists―to assume power over the country unchallenged and serve as a loyal puppet regime.

On the part of the American political and military establishment, the sadistic desire to kill Gaddafi is in line with its treatment of the leaders of a number of countries that have become the target of US military aggression. All have been dealt with in the most vindictive fashion.

Panama’s strongman Manuel Noriega―a former CIA asset―was hauled to the US following the US invasion in 1989, tried for drug offences, imprisoned until 2007 and then transferred to France for another trial and seven years imprisonment.

Slobodan Milosevic―once a favourite of the major powers―was charged with war crimes following the 1999 US and NATO war on Yugoslavia and died in prison while on trial in The Hague.

The Taliban’s elderly leader, Mullah Omar, who the US sought out for talks during the 1990s over the construction of pipelines, has been in hiding and on a “kill-on-sight” list since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who Washington actively backed during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, was hauled before a kangaroo court and hung in a lynch mob manner. His sons were killed and their mutilated bodies displayed like trophies.

Gaddafi himself has lived a large part of his life under the threat of assassination by US or allied intelligence agencies. Within weeks of the military coup that brought him to power in 1969, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger advised “covert action” to eliminate him. British intelligence reportedly attempted to kill him in 1971. The Reagan administration ordered a massive bombardment of his personal residence in 1986―an action that resulted in the death of a child and numerous civilians. Britain’s MI6 reportedly tried to murder the Libyan leader in 1996. There were more than likely other attempts that have never become public.

The efforts to kill Gaddafi ceased in the 2000s after his regime reached a rapprochement with Washington and he became viewed as a useful economic and political collaborator of the US and its allies. Now that he is once again considered an obstacle to advancing imperialist interests in North Africa and the Middle East, Washington’s vast intelligence apparatus has been unleashed to hunt him down and take his life.

A tremendous element of recklessness exists in the actions of the US government. For all its claims to be waging a “war on terrorism”, the mass killings, torture, repression and assassinations over which it has presided have created a legacy of hatred that will not be easily extinguished. It is precisely these conditions that create the breeding ground for desperate and disorientated acts of retaliation, with unpredictable and potentially terrible consequences.

Libyan Crisis: Hidden motives behind coalition

 Adapted From : Africa news

The Western coalition involved in the military offensive in Libya have continued their air strikes despite calls by a section of the international community for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of negotiations between the parties involved in the crisis. With the backing of the United States, France, United Kingdom and Spain, it has now become obvious that the Western powers are pursuing a hidden agenda in their attempt to decimate Libya under the cover of the UN Resolution 1973. Analysts say the coalition forces have deliberately slanted the UN resolution to unleash mass destruction, not only on Libyan arsenals, but also the country’s entire economic infrastructure.

The resolution, for which 10 countries voted in favor, zero against, and five abstentions, authorizes member states “to take all necessary measures… to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamhariya, including Benghazi, while excluding an occupation force.” There are indications that although the insurgents, whom France has vowed to enthrone in Libya, may not understand the challenges they will have to face, once they come to power. They will have to preserve the independence of the country and this will work against 'the hidden agenda' and spark a future attack even with the insurgents in power. Promises of financial support to enable them rebuild Libya may be pouring in from the Western powers, analysts say this cannot come without the insurgents paying 'a price for it'. They say that France, in the forefront of attempts to destroy Libya, should draw a lesson from the post-war race for Iraqi oil during which the Washington shoved Paris aside. On Libya, 'France threw caution to the wind', catching the European Union unawares, exploiting the naivety of the Arab League and brushing aside, with disdain, concerns expressed by the African Union with its 'pioneering' action over Tripoli and other Libyan cities.

Libyan oil, one of the most refined in the world, is the main motivation behind the action of the Western powers.
Its economic independence has long made even the most powerful Western country jealous. It is therefore not surprising that a very clear text of the UN Resolution (which said 'excluding an occupation force'), could be misinterpreted to suit their purpose. Forecasters say France plans to propose, to its new leaders, the establishment of a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild 'Libya after Gadhafi'. Expectedly, the Western media are backing this venture, using phrases like “Africa once again fails to enter History” or “We know what this AU panel is capable of” in their one-sided write ups on the real situation in Libya. The truth about the real motivation behind the actions in Libya could manifest itself, thanks to the digital era, in the social media of facebook, Twitters and Wikileaks. Declarations of “Gadhafi must step down“, “Kadhafi has lost legitimacy”, by Washington and Paris, do not conform with the basic democratic rules which stipulate that no country has the right to determine what happens in another country.

Open Letter to President of USA and Prime Minister of India

Jeff Knaebel- 72, Recently died in India

From: Jeff Knaebel, Moral Sovereign - January 2011 


Subject: My Final Satyagraha for Nonviolence and Freedom

For a long time the Government of the USA (“USG”) has been the world's leading merchant of death and destruction.  Throughout my entire lifetime of 72 years the USG has been committing horrible crimes against humanity and all life. The sustained systematic psychopathic practices of the USG have launched humanity on a path to extinction.  Mahatma Gandhi said upon the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that unless we adopted a nonviolent way of life, it spelled the suicide of the human species.  Daily he is being proven correct.

As a citizen-slave of the USG I have been coerced to pay taxes which are then employed in bloody wars of aggression and coercive international economic practices which exploit weaker peoples whose lives, cultures, and ecologies are destroyed in the process.  While dwelling in the land of my birth I was not permitted to withdraw from citizenship and the concomitant complicity in mass murder which USG citizenship entailed.  Therefore I chose to come to India, and eventually decided to renounce my USG citizenship, and to destroy my United States passport and other government identity documents at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, New Delhi on 19 June 2009.

I acted in protest of government denial of my right to exist as a natural human living with respect for all life and answering to my own conscience.  By requirement of identification and travel documents and permits both the USG and the Government of India (“GOI”) mark me as a piece of property to be regulated and controlled as the human equivalent of a dog on a leash.  By my self-directed death I demonstrate my refusal to be the slave of either government.

To the Prime Minister of India (GOI), I refer the attached letter of 20 October 2010 from the General Counsel of The World Service Authority, which cites the violations by GOI of my human rights under the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and International Law.

The GOI, acting through its police and the orders of its Supreme Court, has prohibited my freedom of movement and has denied me access to shelter pursuant to threat of FIR against any person who would host me.  In thus pronouncing me to be an illegal human being, the GOI has denied my right to exist.  A person cannot survive without freedom of movement and shelter.

My petition for Statelessness, denied by your Supreme Court, was based upon the clear fact that to change citizenship would only be to change the name of my slave master, for the GOI engages in many life-destroying and murderous actions against its own citizens, and also seeks "Strategic Partnership" with the war criminal USG.

By my death I send my answer to the rulers of the Corporate State who value property and profit more than human life and the life of Earth herself.  In refusing to live as a slave I also extend to both of you my metta-karuna (compassion and loving-kindness), for if one examines deeply he will find that the corporate master is more tightly bound than the slave, for the slaves are powerless to come out of it, while the Powers That Be have free will that they fail to exercise because of addictive enslavement to power.  For the corporate rulers, the power to manipulate and control other people has become an end in itself.  They will no longer control me. 

My wish for you is that you come to see the intrinsic evil of the governments which you head, and resign from your official positions, understanding that the people need no institutionally imposed 'leaders.'

My campaign of Satyagraha has made it clear for all to see that under law and practice of both USG and GOI, a person striving for nonviolence at even the most rudimentary levels of non-support of killing is denied by law the right to exist.  It is not by the laws of the Corporate State that humanity will find peace and justice, for such law is conceived in the womb of greed and implemented through the violence of power.

I give my life to the cause of nonviolence.  I wish not to live under coercion to support the cruel inhumanity of either of your governments.  I wish not to live under control of governments who possess neither the wisdom, nor the virtue, nor the right to exercise power over human life.

Only through fellow-feeling and loving-kindness can mankind survive on our small and crowded planet. We must share this Earth equally and with respect among all.  I have acted out of love to try to send a warning to my fellowmen, and I send to each of you my sincere feelings of kindness and my prayers for your peace, happiness and harmony.

May peace and goodwill prevail among all men. May you both abide in well-being,

 Signed - Jeff Knaebel 

Busy in Exam

dear all,

i know you are following my blog and thinking why he is not uploading any articles?
i am very much busy these days for the prepration of exams. Its starting from the day after tomorrow. so most probably i will be away from the internete and bloging.

appology for that

regards,

ramesh