THE
LIBYAN REVOLUTION
PART 1
By
Dr. Stanley Monteith
July 18, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
"The appalling thing in the French Revolution is not the tumult but the design. Through all the fire and smoke we perceive the evidence of calculating organization. The managers remain studiously concealed and masked; but there is no doubt about their presence from the first."
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, best known as Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution.
"What is still more extraordinary is that a powerful organization that was formed to disseminate the theory and practice of communism should today devote half its resources to destroying the evil it has done with the other half it shows us the first authentic disseminations of subversive doctrines, frightened by their success, now concocting the antidote and the poison in the same laboratory."
French parliamentarian and free market advocate Frederic Bastiat, 1848.[1]
Like dozens of other despots, Muamar Gadhaffi was brought to power with the help of the CIA. He was a young, charismatic, ambitious mid-level military officer blessed with telegenic looks when the CIA talent-scouted him in the late 1960s.[2]
For reasons not obvious to those of us outside the inner sanctum (if that word can properly be used to describe the lair of a degenerate cabal) of the Anglo-American elite, when Libya's King Idris died in 1969, it was decided to allow Washington to take over from London as Libya's colonial master. For whatever reason, however, Gadhaffi proved to be less pliant than expected. He went "rogue" very early, drifting from Anglo-American control into a very loose orbit around the Soviet Union. Ironically - or perhaps not - this was the greatest service he could have rendered to the Anglo-American elite: Gadhaffi was much more useful as a Soviet-allied international terrorist than he could ever have been as another of the CIA's kennel-fed lapdog rulers.
Like so many other Arab dictators, Gadhaffi had huge oil reserves and a secret police apparatus that was built by MI6 and the CIA and perfected by the KGB. For decades Gadhaffi entrenched himself deeply in power, becoming a cinematic caricature of the Arab "Big Man" ruler.
Like so many other rulers in the region, Gadhaffi's military was of little use beyond the borders of the country he afflicted; it was an instrument of domestic suppression, useful primarily for slaughtering domestic rivals or the occasional foray into Chad. His terrorist network was somewhat more substantial, as the retaliation bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988 demonstrated. But the regime in Tripoli, although poisonous, was never a global menace. During the Reagan era, the U.S. Navy twice confronted Libyan forces in the Gulf of Sidra, blowing Tripoli's sluggish Soviet-provided MiGs from the sky like overweight clay pigeons.
In March of 1986, President Reagan ordered an airstrike against Libya in retaliation for its suspected role in a terrorist bombing at a Berlin disco frequented by U.S. servicemen. One element of that operation was an attack on Gadhaffi's residence that resulted in the death of his adopted infant daughter; at the time of the attack, the Libyan dictator was asleep under the stars just a few hundred feet from ground zero. That action was hailed as a remedy for Gadhaffi's' sponsorship of terrorism - until the devastating terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103 just two and a half years later.
In 2003, following a decade and a half in which Washington and Tripoli had little to do with each other, the Bush administration rehabilitated Gadhaffi, proclaiming that his regime was now an ally in the "Global War on Terrorism." A relatively modest but substantial amount of direct military aid began to flow into Libya from the U.S. Government, and the Pentagon began to sponsor training of Gadhaffi's officer corps. [3] As late as 2009, Gadhaffi was in good graces with the most bellicose elements of Washington's ruling elite. Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, who would later endorse the present war with Libya, was personally involved in helping arrange military assistance for the northern African regime.[4]
Of even greater interest is the relationship between Gadhaffi's banking system and the Federal Reserve - the institution that is at or near the depraved heart of the Brotherhood of Darkness.
Several years ago, Bloomberg News Service filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the Fed to disclose the recipients of loans issued by the Central Bank's discount window in a supposed effort to shore up the collapsing financial system in 2008. Among the fascinating details they discovered was a very chummy relationship between the Fed and Gadhaffi's central bank:
"Arab Banking Corp., the lender part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya, used a New York branch to get 73 loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve in the 18 months after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed.
The bank, then 29 percent-owned by the Libyan state, had aggregate borrowings in that period of $35 billion -- while the largest single loan amount outstanding was $1.2 billion in July 2009, according to Fed data released yesterday. In October 2008, when lending to financial institutions by the central bank's so-called discount window peaked at $111 billion, Arab Banking took repeated loans totaling more than $2 billion."[5]
During the same period, the Bush administration requested - but did not secure - a large subsidy for the Libyan military by way of the Foreign Military Financing Assistance Program. The Obama administration increased that request - but this was, once again, an initiative that began under George W. Bush.[6]
All of this is a familiar Washington routine when dealing with its pet dictators: The build-up to the take-down. Apparently, Gadhaffi - who has ruled for more than four decades - has served his purpose, and the Power Elite decided to stage a war to wring the last full measure of usefulness out of this asset. This is why an armed "resistance" group "suddenly" materialized in Libya - led by the improbably named Khalifa Hifter, a former top military adviser to Gadhaffi who defected in the late 1980s following the disastrous invasion of Chad. Since that time, Hifter has been living in suburban Virginia, not far from his handlers at Langley.[7]
If that entirely predictable development weren't enough to give the game away, this one should do the trick: The "ragtag rebel force" headquartered in Benghazi somehow managed to set up a new Libyan central bank and national oil company, despite engaging in a desperate, life-and-death struggle with the nation's entrenched autocrat.[8]
The rebel army organized to fight Gadhaffi draws heavily from jihadist veterans of combat against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Veteran foreign affairs correspondent David Wood observes that "on a per capita basis, no country sent more young fighters into Iraq to kill Americans than Libya -- and almost all of them came from eastern Libya, the center of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion that the United States and others now have vowed to protect, according to internal al Qaeda documents uncovered by U.S. intelligence."
According to the so-called Sinjar documents - a collection of al-Qaeda notes captured in that Iraqi city by Special Forces troops in 2007 - hundreds of Islamic volunteers flocked to Iraq in 2006-2007. Roughly twenty percent came from eastern Libya.
"On a per capita basis, that's more than twice as many than came from any other Arabic-speaking country, amounting to what the counter terrorism center called a Libyan 'surge' of young men eager to kill Americans," Wood points out. This isn't the first time Washington was covertly allied with Libyan jihadists, he continues: "The informal alliance with violent Islamist extremist elements is a coming-home of sorts for the United States, which initially fought on the same side as the Libyan fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s, battling the Soviet Union" - at a time when Gadhaffi's regime was supposedly controlled by Moscow.[9]
The U.S. has essentially become the air force of a hard-core militant Islamic insurgency in Libya. This parallels the last multilateral "humanitarian" war carried out by Washington - the 78-day NATO-led terror bombing of Serbia, in which the United States attacked a socialist-ruled Christian country in order to compel it to surrender sovereign territory to the control of an Islamo-Leninist terrorist outfit called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Under United Nations supervision, the KLA was transformed from a squalid pack of nominally Islamic (but ideologically Marxist) pimps, dope peddlers, and black market organ smugglers into the "legitimate" government of Kosovo - a province that has been an organic part of Serbia for centuries.[10]
In fact, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the most bloodthirsty commentators in the entire Establishment-aligned punditocracy, made the Kosovo parallel explicit in a March 16 Wall Street Journal op-ed column, writing that it would be possible to "deliver the same kind of potent combined-armed punch that drove the Serbs out of Kosovo when NATO aircraft supported ground operations by the Kosovo Liberation Army."[11]
As was the case in Kosovo, the CIA has been on the ground organizing, training, and aiding the Islamist rebels in Libya long before the announced presidential decision to commit the U.S. government to war on their behalf.
According to the New York Times, this is actually a joint venture between the intelligence assets of Washington and London: "In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency's station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations...." [12] This is very similar to the kind of on-the-ground support provided to the KLA leading up to, and during, the NATO assault on Serbia.
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Perhaps the most important parallel between the Clinton-era war on Serbia and the Obama administration's Libyan war is the fact that at no time did the president seek congressional authorization of any kind - let alone a formal declaration of war, which the Constitution explicitly demands as a non-negotiable prerequisite for conducting military operations abroad.
In fact, this has been standard operating procedure for Washington since December 1945, when Congress enacted the United Nations Participation Act - a standing declaration of war supposedly authorizing the president to commit American military personnel to combat overseas as dictated by our supposed "obligations" to the UN and its affiliates.[13]
We’ll discuss this in greater detail next time.
Click here for part -----> 1, 2,
Footnotes:
1.
George Charles Roche III, Frederic Bastiat: A Man Apart (New Rochelle:
Arlington House, 1971) page 116.
2.
"Gadaffi:
Crazy Like a Fox," Eric Margolis, Feruary 28, 2001.
3.
"Gadhafi's Military: Trained and Armed by Uncle Sam," Salon,
March 23, 2011
4.
Confidential diplomatic cable for the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, August
19, 2009.
5.
"Libyan-Owned Bank Drew at least $5 billion from Fed." Bloomberg
News, March 31, 2011.
6.
"Libya: Background and U.S. Relations," by Christopher M.
Blanchard, Middle East Analyst, Congressional Research Service, August
3, 2009.
7.
"Libyan Rebel Leader Spent Much of the Past 20 years in Surburban
Virginia," McClatchy Newspaper, March 26, 2011
8.
"Libyan Rebel Council Creates Oil Company to Replace Qadafi's,"
Bloomberg News, March 22, 2001.
9.
"Anti-American Extremists Among Libyan Rebels U.S. has Vowed to
Protect," David Wood, The Huffington Post, March 21, 2011.
10.
For
a useful overview and summary of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.
11.
Max Boot, "It's Not Too Late to Save Libya," Wall Street Journal,
March 16, 2001
12.
"CIA Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes and Meet Rebels," New
York Times, March 30, 2011.
13.
See the Yale University Study "A
Decade of American Foreign Policy 1941-1949 United Nations Participation
Act, December 20, 1945."
� 2011 Dr. Stanley Monteith - All Rights Reserved
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