BSNews Libya Analysis
News you wont find on BBC or ITN
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The Truth about Libya by Alison Banville
'Libya is among the 10 top oil producers in the world... our involvement is
justified' 'Bill Richardson, former US energy sec'
Oh yes, as Media Lens reported, sometimes the truth slips out but never fear! our mainstream media can always be relied upon to ignore it and stick religiously to a prescribed narrative which goes something like this: 'our government's foreign policy is fundamentally benign and therefore all its military interventions are humanitarian enterprises. We are the good guys, despite the odd regrettable mistake and any evidence to the contrary, no matter how glaring, will be ignored. We will report all statements by government and military sources uncritically and present them as fact.' Read more...
The Strange Calm Over Tripoli? by Franklin Lamb
Tripoli - The large gold framed portrait of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi that adorned the wall behind the reception desk of my hotel since it opened many years ago has vanished. Also gone are the 72 green flags that flew on the white poles which have also been removed. It’s not polite to inquire of the skeleton staff about who removed these items because the act of removal could become very serious offenses depending on the final outcome here. But, my friend Ismail, manning the front desk, just grinned at me when I commented on the hotel's fine new mirror that hangs in the leader’s space. Read more...
Libya: the manufacture of consent by Jody McIntyre
Almost 1300 people have been killed in Libya in the past 24 hours; almost equal to the death toll of the brutal, three-week Israeli Operation Cast Lead massacre in Gaza. In the case of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in cities across the world to demonstrate, but now, we celebrate for Tripoli. Read more...
Libya’s Blood For Oil: The Vampire War By Susan Lindauer
Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don’t care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what’s really going on here? Read more...
The Truth About the Situation in Libya By Brian Becker
Cutting through the government propaganda and media lies
Libya is a small country of just over 6 million people but it possesses the largest oil reserves in all of Africa. The oil produced there is especially coveted because of its particularly high quality.
The Air Force of the United States along with Britain and France has carried out 7,459 bombing attacks since March 19. Britain, France and the United States sent special operation ground forces and commando units to direct the military operations of the so-called rebel fighters – it is a NATO- led army in the field. Read more...
NATO powers have long history of massacres in Africa
The real reasons they want regime change in Libya
The following is adapted from a speech given by Jeff Bigelow, on behalf of the ANSWER Coalition, at an Aug. 19 meeting in St. Louis organized to oppose the war on Libya.
As indicated in the opening remarks, this meeting is a commemoration of the life of Marcus Garvey who was born just about on this day—on August 17 in 1887 and it’s a meeting that represents a re-dedication of our commitment to the struggle today. Read more...
What’s Next for Libya? by Mike Raddie 26 Aug 2011
What next for Libya? Anyone not tuned into the mainstream media will easily be able to answer this. First, this conflict is far from over so we’re almost certain to see more causalities as western ground troops flood into the country at the request of the ITNC. The news from independent journalists and unreported on BBC and ITN, is that the rebels, comprised mainly of Erick Prince’s private army of mercenaries, known as Reflex Responses or R2, are already coming under sustained pressure from Gaddafi forces and armed citizens prepared to fight for their country. It’s unlikely that western military planners would wish for a quick victory since protracted civil war is especially profitable for arms manufacturers and dealers in the west and for their allies and conduits in Israel and the gulf states. Read more...
Never Forgive, Never Forget by Stephen Lendman 28 Aug 2011
After covering Libya's rape since last winter in dozens of articles, no forgiving or forgetting is possible for one of history's great crimes.
Nor is ignoring those responsible, condemning them forthrightly, and explaining why all wars are waged.
NATO outdid Orwell on this one, killing truth by calling war the responsibility to protect - by terrorising, attacking, and slaughtering civilians like psychopathic assassins.
As a result, honest historians will redefine barbarism to explain NATO's savagery. It includes ongoing crimes of war and against humanity for the most malevolent reasons.
When is war not war? It's when committing cold-blooded murder is called the right thing. When major media scoundrels cheerlead it, and when most people believe it because they're too indifferent, uncaring or lazy to learn the truth.
NATO's rape of Libya is too ugly for proper words to describe. Only honest images can do it, and lots of them. Read more...
Libya and the Shameless Rewriting of History by Brendan O’Neil 1 Sept 2011
The repackaging of NATO’s reckless intervention as a clever war for liberty would make Orwell’s Ministry of Truth beam with pride.
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’. Read more...
Nations Sanitize Libya Lingo For the War Weary by Charles Lewis 1 Sept 2011
On March 19, a coalition of nations allied with rebel fighters in Libya to help drive Muammar Gaddafi from power. NATO forces, including Britain, France, Canada and the United States began with sorties, a naval blockade and the firing of deadly Tomahawk cruise missiles.
On that day, all became participants in a bloody fight, putting their military forces at risk and adding to the carnage already taking place on the ground.
Yet, with rare exception, their leaders did everything possible to avoid the word that made it clear what they had got themselves and their citizens into — a war.
They have reached for every euphemism possible — “military action,” “use of force,” “mission,” “operation,” “conflict,” “intervention” and “responsibility to protect” have all acted as stand-ins for “war.”. Read more...
Key Lockerbie Witness Admits Perjury by Susan Landauer 17 Sept 2011
The Lockerbie Affair has taken yet another extraordinary twist. On Friday August 31st, I received from Edwin Bollier, head of the Zurich-based MeBo AG, a copy of a German original of an Affidavit.
The document is dated July 18th 2007 and signed by who worked as an electronic engineer at MeBo from 1978 to 1994. I have scrutinized the document carefully and concluded that I have no reason to doubt its authenticity or the truthfulness of its content.
Lumpert was a key witness (N° 550) at the Camp Zeist trial, where a three Judges panel convicted a Libyan citizen of murdering 270 persons who died in the bombing of ”Pan Am Flight 103″ over Lockerbie.
In his testimony, Lumpert stated that of the 3 pieces of hand-made prototypes MST-13 Timer PC-Boards, the third MST-13 PC-Board was broken and [he] had thrown it away.”In his Affidavit, certified by Officer Walter Wieland, Lumpert admits having committed perjury.
“I confirm today on July 18th 2007, that I stole the third hand-manufactured MST-13 Timer PC-Board consisting of 8 layers of fibre-glass from MEBO Ltd. and gave it without permission on June 22nd 1989 to a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case,”
Lumpert wrote. (The identity of the official is known.)
It did not escape me that the MST-13 fragment shown [at the Lockerbie trial] on the police photograph No PT/35(b) came from the non-operational MST-13 prototype PC-board that I had stolen,” Lumpert added.
“I am sorry for the consequences of my silence at that time, for the innocent Libyan Mr. Abdelbaset Al Megrahi sentenced to life imprisonment, and for the country of Libya.“ Read more...
US to Deploy More Military Forces in Libya by PressTV 28 Sept 2011
According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, the United States is preparing to deploy additional forces on the ground in Libya to "secure conventional arms storage sites" as well as to try to track down missing surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).
In the wake of the opposition invasion of Tripoli, large arms depots across the western half of the nation were looted, and it is estimated that some 20,000 shoulder-launched SAMs were among what had gone missing, many of them wound up on the arms markets in neighbouring nations. Antiwar
HIGHLIGHTS
Currently the U.S. State Department has one official on the ground in Libya, as well as five contractors who specialise in "explosive ordinance disposal", all working with the Transitional National Council to find the looted missiles, White House spokesperson Jay Carney told reporters. ABC News
"We expect to deploy additional personnel to assist the TNC as they expand efforts to secure conventional arms storage sites," Carney said. "We're obviously at a governmental level -- both State Department and at the UN and elsewhere -- working with the TNC on this." ABC News Read more...
In the wake of the opposition invasion of Tripoli, large arms depots across the western half of the nation were looted, and it is estimated that some 20,000 shoulder-launched SAMs were among what had gone missing, many of them wound up on the arms markets in neighbouring nations. Antiwar
HIGHLIGHTS
Currently the U.S. State Department has one official on the ground in Libya, as well as five contractors who specialise in "explosive ordinance disposal", all working with the Transitional National Council to find the looted missiles, White House spokesperson Jay Carney told reporters. ABC News
"We expect to deploy additional personnel to assist the TNC as they expand efforts to secure conventional arms storage sites," Carney said. "We're obviously at a governmental level -- both State Department and at the UN and elsewhere -- working with the TNC on this." ABC News Read more...
How Al Qaeda men came to power in Libya by Thierry Meyssan 2 Oct 2011
Voltaire Network has received letters from many readers enquiring about Al-Qaeda in Libya. To respond to them, Thierry Meyssan has assembled the main data available on the issue. The facts confirm his analysis, defended since the events of September 11, that Al Qaeda is a hotbed of mercenaries used by the United States to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Iraq, and now Libya, Syria and Yemen.
In the 80s, the CIA instigated Awatha al-Zuwawi to create an agency in Libya to recruit mercenaries for the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. As from 1986, recruits were trained in the Salman al-Farisi Libyan camp in Pakistan, under the authority of anti-Communist billionaire Osama bin Laden.
When bin Laden moved to Sudan, the Libyan jihadists followed him there, and regrouped in a compound of their own. In 1994, Osama bin Laden dispatched Libyan jihadists back to their country to kill Muammar Gaddafi and reverse the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Read more...
UN DONE The 66th Session of the General Assembly. Reflections by Dr. Christof Lehmann 28 Sept 2011
I expect most 'papers will feature at least one leader column about the life and death of Muammar Gadaffi, with an overview of the last seven months of conflict in Libya in general. Here are a few of the things you might expect them to mention:
The fact that U.N.S.C.R. 1973 demanded an immediate ceasefire, with even Establishment think tanks like the International Crisis Group saying (p.28) that it was NATO and the NTC, rather than the Gadaffi regime, who were rejecting all such ceasefire attempts out of hand.
The fact that there was no mandate for regime change, even though this is what the NATO action was clearly aimed at. Read more...
Libya Central Bank Looks to IMF Amid Cash Crisis by Jessica Donati and Ali Shuaib 3 Nov 2011
TRIPOLI (Reuters) – Libya’s acute cash crisis is set to get worse and its banking system requires a complete overhaul that will be guided by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the central bank’s recently appointed governor said.
Saddek Omar Elkaber told Reuters in an interview that just $1.5 billion out of around $170 billion of Libyan assets abroad had been unfrozen, and with the first delivery of the war-torn country’s new banknotes still nearly two months away, the liquidity crisis was far from over.
“The first shipment will arrive at the end of December… We are going to have to manage the liquidity problem until then,” Elkaber said earlier this week.
Elkaber, previously deputy CEO at the Arab Banking Corporation in London, replaced Gassem Azzoz as head of the central bank a month ago, officials of the governing National Transitional Council said. Read more...
“Sahel” in Arabic means “coast” or “shoreline”. Unless one was present 5000 years ago when, according to anthropologists, our planets first cultivation of crops began in this then lush, but now semiarid region where temperatures reach 125 degrees F, and only camels and an assortment of creatures can sniff out water sources, it seems an odd geographical name place for this up-to-450 miles wide swatch of baked sand that runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.
Yet, when standing along its edge, the Sahel does have the appearance of a sort of dividing shoreline between the endless sands of the Sahara and the savannah grasses to the south. Parts of Mali, Algeria, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, all along the Libyan border fall within this supposed no man’s land.
Today the Sahel is providing protection, weapons gathering and storage facilities, sites for training camps, and hideouts as well as a generally formidable base for those working to organize the growing Libyan Liberation Front (LLF). The aim of the LLF is to liberate Libya from what it considers NATO-installed colonial puppets.
The Sahel region is only one of multiple locations which are becoming active as the Libyan counter revolution, led by members of the Gadahfi and Wafalla tribes, make preparations for the next phase of resistance. Read more...
Libya: Nato to be investigated by ICC for war crimes by Damien McElroy 2 Nov 2011
NATO forces are to be investigated by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes during the Libyan conflict.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court’s chief prosecutor, told the United Nations yesterday that Nato troops would be investigated alongside rebel soldiers and regime forces for alleged breaches of the laws of war during the battle to overthrow Col Muammar Gaddafi.
As well as the original charges that Gaddafi and his close family perpetrated attacks on Libyan civilians, there are a series of complaints about the Western alliance and its allies in the National Transitional Council (NTC) under consideration.
“There are allegations of crimes committed by Nato forces, allegations of crimes committed by NTC-related forces … as well as allegations of additional crimes committed by pro-Gaddafi forces,” said Mr Moreno-Ocampo. “`These allegations will be examined impartially and independently by the prosecution.”
In the last weeks of the war, the Gaddafi regime alleged that 85 civilians were killed in a Nato air strike near the front line town of Ziltan. Khaled Hemidi, a regime general, filed a lawsuit before a Belgian civil court in Brussels accusing Nato of killing his wife and three children in an air strike on June 20 near the town of Surman. Read more...