|
There isn't a Biggest Story for Today, yet.
|
|  |
|
War on Libya: Libya: Imperialism and the Left
|
|
By Stephen Gowans
August 28, 2011 - gowans.wordpress.com
While the class character of regimes under siege by Western powers is often explored in analyses of imperialist interventions and is frequently invoked to justify them, it neither explains why capitalist imperialist powers intervene nor stands as a justification for their actions.
The relevant consideration in explaining why interventions occur is not the political orientation of the government under siege, nor its relations with its citizens, but whether it accommodates the profit-making interests of the dominant class in the intervening countries. Does it welcome foreign investment, allow repatriation of profits, demand little in the way of corporate income tax, open its markets, and offer abundant supplies of cheap labor and raw materials? Or does it impose high tariffs on imports, subsidize domestic production, operate state-owned enterprises (displacing opportunities for foreign-private-owned ones), force investors to take on local partners, and insist that workers be protected from desperation wages and intolerable working conditions?
|
|
War on Libya: Libya’s Next Fight: Overcoming Western Designs
|
|
By Ramzy Baroud
September 02, 2011
At a press conference in Tripoli on Aug. 26, a statement read aloud by top Libyan rebel commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj was reassuring. Just a few months ago, disorganized and leaderless rebel fighters seemed to have little chance at ousting Libyan dictator Moammar Ghaddafi and his unruly sons.
But despite vague references to “pockets of resistance” throughout Tripoli, and stiffer battles elsewhere, Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) is moving forward to extend its rule as the caretaker of Libyan affairs. In his conference, Belhadj declared full control over Tripoli, and the unification of all rebel fighter groups under the command of the military council.
|
|
War on Libya: End Game for Benghazi Rebels as Libyan Tribes Prepare to Weigh In?
|
|
By Franklin Lamb
August 02, 2011 - counterpunch.org
Dispatch From Libya
Tripoli
On July 30, the day before this 97.5 per cent Muslim country began the holy month of Ramadan, NATO spokesperson Roland Lavoie has been lamely attempting to explain to the press at the Rexis Hotel and internationally, why NATO was forced to bomb three Tripoli TV towers at the Libyan Broadcasting Authority, killing three journalists/technicians and wounding 15 others. Like most people currently in central Tripoli, this observer was awakened at 1:50 a.m. by the first of a series of nine blasts, three of which I watched from my balcony as they happened, and which seemed to be about 800 yards away as I saw one TV tower being blown apart. On the four lanes' divided highway adjacent to my hotel and below my balcony, that runs along the sea front, I could see two cars frantically swerving left and right as they sped along, presumably trying to avoid a NATO rocket, fearing they themselves might be targeted.
According to NATO spokesperson Lavoie, allowing Libya’s population to watch government TV, and by implication, to hear terrorist public service announcements concerning subjects as gasoline availability, food distribution for Ramadan, updates on areas to be avoided due to recent NATO bombing, prayers and lectures by Sheiks on moral and religious subjects during Ramadan or see the Prayer Times chart posted on government TV, during this month of fasting, plus children’s programs and normal programming, had to stop immediately.
|
|
War on Libya: Lapdogging for the US: Libya, Canada's Other Ugly War
|
|
By Murray Dobbin
June 22, 2011 - counterpunch.org
NATO members, including Canada, are continuing their bombing campaign against Libya in a war that may just break the record for the casual breaking of international law, and lying about the motives for the war. There is no mandate to engage in "regime change" yet everyone, including the Harper government, openly admit that that is, in fact, what they are doing.
Canada has stated that only the removal of Gadhafi will satisfy NATO. Note that the goal is to satisfy not the United Nations -- which gave a mandate to protect civilians from the Libyan government's attacks -- but NATO, that alliance whose mandate is supposed to be the mutual self-defense of nations of the North Atlantic.
|
|
War on Libya: Corporate Media's Capital Crimes Against Libya - and Humanity
|
|
By Glen Ford
June 08, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
"Burns' constant dismissal of Libyan casualties has the effect of inviting more NATO bombing and more civilian deaths."
Every day, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Congo and now Libya, the U.S. corporate media commit crimes against humanity that are equal to the crimes perpetrated by the United States government. As facilitators of those crimes – through ceaseless propaganda, lies and demonization of those targeted by the United States – the corporate media are just as guilty of the grossest human rights violations as the government they serve. The New York Times and the rest of the howling corporate propagandists that call themselves journalists behave no differently than the German newspaper publisher Julius Streicher, who was hanged for his media crimes against humanity in October, 1946.
|
|
War on Libya: Libya: NATO's War Of Aggression Against A Sovereign African State
|
|
by Obi Nwakanma
June 5, 2011 - globalresearch.ca
The use of Western troops in Africa – particularly in the case of France – the use of its paratroopers, first in Ivory Coast, and now in Libya, represents a new strategic declaration of war against Africa, the African interest, and the African continent. In NATO’s disregard of AU, there is without doubt a remanifestation of that ontological disease of the Western mind that regards Africa as simply a place without history and without agency.
France and Great Britain, leading a NATO alliance, are effectively at war in Libya on the pretext of a United Nations’ mandate. The United States, led the early charge against Libya’s Ghadaffi from the air, but has taken something of a back seat, and allowed Britain and France to continue what can now be considered a war of aggression against a sovereign African state, far beyond the mandate of the UN.
|
|
War on Libya: NATO: Free Africa from the Africans!
|
|
By Glen Ford
June 02, 2011 - BlackAgendaReport.com.
As far as the United States and Europe are concerned, Africans have nothing to say about what happens in Africa. South African President Jacob Zuma made a second trip to Libya this week, on behalf of the African Union, seeking a diplomatic end to NATO’s war against Mouammar Gaddafi’s government. Just as with a previous African Union peace keeping mission, back in early April, Col. Gaddafi agreed to the peace plan. And just as before, the so-called rebels and their American and European bosses refused even to consider a cease fire. As has been obvious from the beginning of this “humanitarian” farce, the Great White Fathers of Europe and the “Wall Street mascot” from the United States, as Obama has been called, will be satisfied with nothing less than regime change in Libya – and to Hell with what Africans think!
|
|
War on Libya: How NATO Killed Qaddafi Family Members
|
|
Anatomy of a Murder
By Cynthia McKinney
June 01, 2011 - counterpunch.org
Tripoli.
How many times must a parent bury a child?
In the case of Muammar Qaddafi it's not only twice: once for his daughter,
murdered by the United States bombing on his home in 1986, and again on 30 April 2011 when his youngest son, Saif al Arab, but yet again for three young children, grandbabies of Muammar Qaddafi killed along with Saif at the family home.
Now, I watched Cindy Sheehan as she bared her soul before us in her grief; I cried when Cindy cried. Now, how must Qaddafi and his wife feel? And the people of Libya, parents of all the nation's children gone too soon. I don't even want to imagine.
|
|
War on Libya: Dispatch From Tripoli: NATO's Feast of Blood
|
|
By Cynthia McKinney
May 24, 2011 - counterpunch.org
Tripoli.
While serving on the House International Relations Committee from 1993 to 2003, it became clear to me that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was an anachronism. Founded in 1945 at the end of World War II, NATO was founded by the United States in response to the Soviet Union's survival as a Communist state. NATO was the U.S. insurance policy that capitalist ownership and domination of European, Asian, and African economies would continue. This also would ensure the survival of the then-extant global apartheid.
NATO is a collective security pact wherein member states pledge that an attack upon one is an attack against all. Therefore, should the Soviet Union have attacked any European Member State, the United States military shield would be activated. The Soviet Response was the Warsaw Pact that maintained a "cordon sanitaire" around the Russian Heartland should NATO ever attack. Thus, the world was broken into blocs which gave rise to the "Cold War."
|
|
War on Libya: Libya: Where is the AU?
|
|
By Farirai Chubvu
May 16, 2011 - The Herald
"IT'S like having someone break into your house, rape your wife and kill your dog while you remain glued to the TV set as if nothing is happening.
"Where the hell is the African Union when Nato openly announces plans to kill Muammar Gaddafi, arms the rebels, provide them with air power and siphon Libyan oil at will?"
This post, which I picked on the social networking site, Facebook; aptly captures the lethargy shown by the African Union as far as Nato's destabilisation of Libya is concerned.
|
|
War on Libya: Killing Gaddafi's Grandbabies
|
|
By Glen Ford
May 05, 2011 - blackagendareport.com
“These modern Crusaders require ritual bloodletting before expropriating the lands and goods of their victims.”
The ceremonial slaughter of Moammar Gaddafi and his family lurches forward like some savage white cult ritual. Death to the demon and his seed! shout the priests, banshees and ice-smile oracles of the U.S. corporate media. The American (or “western”) manifest mission must be sanctified in the blood of caricatures. Like the Christ-crazed hordes that surged out of Europe’s far western dankness to annihilate whole cities of strangers – including tens of thousands of fellow Christians that did not speak, eat or smell as the French and English did – these modern Crusaders require ritual bloodletting before expropriating the lands and goods of their victims.
When the Arab world awoke at the beginning of the year, the highly paid presenters and rapid-vapid quippers of CNN and competing reality-creation companies were caught pitifully mission-less. Absent direction from the official scenario-producers at the White House and the State Department, there could be no coherent newsreader script, no simple theme for quipping. But direction would not be forthcoming from the Obama administration until a way could be found to put the U.S. on the “right” side of the Arab Awakening.
|
|
War on Libya: West on guard against the outbreak of peace in Libya
|
|
Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy sent a message to the African Union in their jointly written April 14 op-ed: They’ll block any attempt to negotiate peace in Libya that doesn’t include Gaddafi’s ouster and the opening of Libya’s economy.
By Stephen Gowans
April 23, 2011 - gowans.wordpress.com
On April 14 US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote an op-ed titled "Libya's pathway to peace". Appearing in the International Herald Tribune and two other newspapers, the op-ed set out US, British and French goals for Libya.
One would be peace, but the pathway was to be Gaddafi's exit, and his replacement by the Benghazi rebels.
While not presented as such, the op-ed was in fact a rejection of an African Union proposal for a negotiated settlement.
|
|
War on Libya: Libyan Rebels: Dependent Minions of U.S. and Europe
|
|
By Glen Ford
April 15, 2011 - BlackAgendaReport.com
"What kind of revolution – what kind of Arab nationalism – is it, that begs for intervention and close air support from the imperial super-power?"
The rebels in Benghazi have rejected an African Union delegation proposal for a ceasefire in Libya – a plan that was accepted by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi over the weekend. The reaction in Benghazi was no surprise. The five heads of state from Mauritania, Mali, Congo-Brazzaville, Uganda and South Africa would have been chased down the streets and lynched by mobs had the western news media not been watching, so rabid is the anti-black hysteria whipped up by the rebel political leadership. If anyone needs protection in rebel-held Libya, it is people with dark skin, hundreds of whom have been murdered for no offense other than their color. Spokesmen for the rebel transitional council claim to be fighting phantom Black African armies, mirages that do not exist – a despicable use of race as a tool of war.
|
|
War on Libya: David Cameron's gift of war and racism, to them and us
|
|
By John Pilger
April 08, 2011 - johnpilger.com
The Euro-American attack on Libya has nothing to do with protecting anyone; only the terminally naive believe such nonsense. It is the West's response to popular uprisings in strategic, resource-rich regions of the world and the beginning of a war of attrition against the new imperial rival, China.
President Barack Obama's historical distinction is now guaranteed. He is America's first black president to invade Africa. His assault on Libya is run by the US Africa Command, which was set up in 2007 to secure the continent's lucrative natural resources from Africa's impoverished people and the rapidly spreading commercial influence of China. Libya, along with Angola and Nigeria, is China's principal source of oil. As American, British and French planes currently incinerate both "bad" and "good" Libyans, the evacuation of 30,000 Chinese workers is under way, perhaps permanently. Statements by western officials and media that a "deranged and criminal Colonel Gaddafi" is planning "genocide" against his own people still await evidence. This is reminiscent of fraudulent claims that required "humanitarian intervention" in Kosovo, the final dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the biggest US military base in Europe.
|
|
War on Libya: What Is Behind The Libyan Defections?
|
|
By Gregory Elich
April 06, 2011 - Global Research
Much has been made of the defection of several Libyan officials to the West. We are told that the Muammar Qaddafi is losing support even within his inner circle, and the defections underscore the success of the NATO mission. The Libyan government's days are numbered, it is averred.
The latest defections, by Libyan foreign minister and former intelligence chief Moussa Koussa, and Libyan UN representative Ali Abdessalam Treki, may not have been quite as spontaneous as Western officials would have us to think.
"I don't believe that [Koussa] necessarily decided on his own," observes former CIA officer Emile Nakleh. "I judge that intensive behind-the-scenes contacts must have been occurring between him and Western - people from the West, let's say. I would be appalled, frankly, if our intelligence services and our government had not attempted to contact him and encourage him to leave." (1)
And indeed, that was the case, as both U.S. and British intelligence agents were in regular contact with Koussa in the days leading up to his departure from Libya.(2)
|
| |
|
There is a problem right now with this block.
|
|
