Imperialism and Terrorism

FROM WOUNDED KNEE TO IRAQ:

A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

by Dr. Zoltan Grossman

http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

(Death toll estimates from wars can be found in the Historical Atlas of the 20th Century by alphabetized places index, map series, and major casualties .)

• Country contributions

  As explained above, member countries make direct contributions to NATO in accordance with an agreed cost-sharing formula based on Gross National Income. The largest direct contributors to NATO in absolute terms are the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France.

• Different forms of direct funding

• Principle and practices of common funding at NATO

• Management and control

• Bodies involved

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Top Ten Counter-Terrorism Scandals 2010

The new year is not very old, but several recent revelations cast the the US fight against al-Qaeda (a tiny if deadly fraternity of a couple thousand fanatics spread in dozens of countries) in a bad light, if not to say a scandalous one. The entire premise of combating al-Qaeda as though it were an enemy army, using the Pentagon as the lead agency, while simultaneously militarizing the CIA, needs to be questioned. But so too do a lot of other premises about a so-called American 'Long War' with parts of the Muslim world, including drone strikes, secret bases, and torture. Worst of all, embarrassing revelations are coming out about damaging or even criminal actions and policies that can only harm any genuine counter-terrorism program.

1. Evidence is surfacing, according to Scott Horton writing in Harper's, that the supposed group suicide of three prisoners at Guantanamo in summer of 2006 may have in fact been murder--that is, they may have died of asphyxiation during aggressive interrogation that involved stuffing rags in their throats to cut off air. The explosive allegations may put further pressure on President Obama to fulfill his pledge to close the prison.

2. The FBI falsely invoked terrorism emergencies 2000 times between 2002 and 2006 to engage in illegal phone wiretapping of Americans without obtaining a warrant. The agency was using a provision of the PATRIOT act, which Bush administration officials had assured Congress would never be used for ordinary domestic cases.

3. The FBI photoshopped the face of leftist Spanish parliamentarian Gaspar Llamazares, combining it with the features of Usama Bin Laden, to produce a supposed portrait of what the aging terrorist now looks like. Spain was furious and the whole incident spoke of amateurism and stupidity in an area, counter-terrorism, where neither is desirable. Hint to the FBI: Usama Bin Laden has not produced a video message since October 2004. We may conclude that he is either badly disfigured by a strike on his position that almost succeeded, or that he is dead. You can't project his appearance forward with photoshop usefully either way.

4. George W. Bush claimed that he had misspoken when he called his 'war on terror' a 'crusade.' But it turns out that the Michigan company that makes rifle sights for the US military inscribes them with Bible verses. The capture of the US Air Force Academy by Christian fundamentalists is worrisome enough, but a Military-Evangelical Complex is truly frightening.

5. The Iraqi government that came to power under the auspices of George W. Bush is spearheading a class action suit against the Xe (then known as Blackwater) mercenary corporation for injuries its security men inflicted on Iraqis. Xe, headed by militant fundamentalist Christian, is a prime Pentagon contractor, which replicates the work of GIs but charges 12 times as much for it. The Iraqis were furious when a government case against Blackwater mercenaries for shooting up Nisour Square in Baghdad and killing over a dozen civilians collapsed because of prosecutorial misbehavior. Based on this good recommendation, the US military has brought Xe mercenaries to Pakistan where they are allegedly involved in US drone attacks on that country, further winnning hearts and minds.

6. Worse, the Pentagon is considering bringing thousands more Blackwater security men to Afghanistan. The great Rep. Jan Schakowski (D-Ill.) is introducing a bill banning the use of such mercernary firms.

7. Der Spiegel has revealed yet another CIA plot to kidnap a citizen of an allied country on suspicion of involvement in terrorism (a suspicion years of investigation by German authorities was unable later to support). Allies don't take kindly to this sort of thing. An Italian judge recently convicted 23 CIA operatives in absentia for carrying out a kidnapping in Italy.

8. It has been revealed that then British foreign minister Jack Straw wrote a letter to PM Tony Blair in 2002 warning him that a war on Iraq would be illegal, that many Labor MPs would oppose it, that Saddam was not connected to 9/11 or al-Qaeda, that Iraq likely had no weapons of mass destruction of any importance, and that there was no guarantee that the condition of Iraqis in the wake of such a war would be an improvement on their situation in 2002. The letter shows that Blair committed to the war at Crawford, TX in April 2002, even though he later repeatedly told his own MPs that no decision had been made. The letter vindicates the 'Downing Street memo' from a few months later in which the head of British intelligence complained that the decision to go to war had been made and that the intelligence was being fixed around the policy. It also shows that the mantra of the Bush administration, that all US allies had made the same errors of judgment about Iraq as had Bush-Cheney, is simply incorrect. The British foreign ministry knew better.

9. The Obama administration has been forced by an ACLU suit to release the names of the prisoners it holds at Bagram base in Afghanistan. The Obama administration maintains that these individual have no human rights at all, though some are scheduled to be tried in military tribunals. It is hard to see why Guantanamo is bad but Bagram is good. There have been allegations of torture of inmates, including of teenagers. The whole facility and its prisoners are to be turned by the US over to the Afghan government later this year.

10. The Obama administration's initial reaction to the underpants bomber was flatfooted and included forbidding children to hold teddy bears on their laps during the last hour of a flight, as well as renewed drone strikes and deeper involvement in Yemen, on the grounds that there are 300 al-Qaeda members in that craggy, inaccessible and tribally-organized country. Al-Qaeda has dug trapping pits for the US to fall into as it pursues its small, nimble foe, and the US keeps lumbering into them. The prospect of a US troop presence in Yemen provoked its council of clerics to threaten to call a jihad or holy war on the US if any attempt were made to occupy the country. The US attempted to allay such concerns with a firm statement it would not send troops, but not before the Yemenis had already gotten their backs up and anti-Americanism increased.

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History of CIA Torture: Unraveling the Web of Deceit, Part I
Military Torture, Legal Fig Leaves & Premature Exculpation...

Ernest A. Canning

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=54242

History of CIA Torture: Unraveling the Web of Deceit, Part II
Dark Beginnings, the KUBARK Torture Manual & the storied Bush-family/CIA legacy...

Ernest A. Canning

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=54249

Link: www.bradblog.com/?p=7116

:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

CIA Accused of Third Torture Prison in Europe

By Britta Sandberg

August 21, 2009 "Spiegel" -- As Americans continue to debate the torture era of the Bush administration, a new report has emerged about the alleged existence of a third secret prison used by the CIA in Europe. According to ABC News, the CIA operated a "black site" prison in Lithuania until the end of 2005.

Following reports on "black site" prisons in Poland, ABC News is now reporting that a third jail existed in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. According to the report, as many as eight prisoners were held there for at least one year.

The United States is believed to have used the third black site prison in Europe to hold high-value al-Qaida suspects after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to question them using "special interrogation techniques." These included the simulated drowning of prisoners through the practice known as waterboarding. With the development, the debate in America over government interrogation techniques and torture appears to be taking on a greater European dimension.

ABC News reports that the site wasn't closed until late 2005, after newspapers and TV stations first reported on secret prisons in Europe used by the US after the 9/11 attacks. The broadcaster cited former CIA sources either directly involved or briefed on the secret program to detain the suspected al-Qaida terrorists in Europe.

The US intelligence agency refused to comment on the report. "The CIA does not publicly discuss where facilities associated with its past detention program may or may not have been located," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told ABC News. "We simply do not comment on those types of claims, which have appeared in the press from time to time over the years. The dangers of airing such allegations are plain. These kinds of assertions could, at least potentially, expose millions of people to direct threat. That is irresponsible."

The Lithuanian government approved the secret prison because it was interested in improving its relations with the US, a former CIA agent told ABC News. The country, however, wasn't offered any incentives for its cooperation. "We didn't have to," a former intelligence official in the program said. "They were happy to have our ear."

Flights Between Secret Prisons

The Lithuanian Embassy in Washington has denied the existence of a secret prison in the Baltic state. However ABC News claims to have seen flight logs that document flights between the various secret prisons in Lithuania, Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Morocco.

"We've known for a long time that there had to be a third site in Eastern Europe," John Sifton of the New York-based human rights organization One World Research told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But unfortunately we never knew where it was."

Sifton has also obtained records which show flights to Lithuania, mainly in 2004 and 2005. Aircraft belonging to the company Richmor Aviation, which has been proven to have carried out flights on behalf of the CIA and which has repeatedly come under suspicion of transporting prisoners for the intelligence agency, landed in Vilnius on several occasions. "Admittedly that is not proof, but it is at least a significant piece of evidence," says Swifton.

Additionally, a cargo plane with the number N8213G, which also belongs to one of the CIA's partner companies, is alleged to have flown to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. One theory is that the cargo plane may have been bringing food and other supplies to the black site. However, aircraft did not always fly directly to Vilnius -- some flights also took place via Poland.

A Gulfstream jet with the tail number N379P, known as one of the so-called "torture taxis" used to carry out renditions, often landed at the small Szymany military airport in the northeast of Poland. The Americans maintained a secret prison about an hour's drive away from Szymany, where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described architect of the 9/11 attacks was held, among other prisoners. In March 2003 alone, Mohammed was subjected to exactly 183 incidences of water boarding -- an average of eight times a day. The Polish secret service is alleged to have put 20 of its own agents at the CIA's disposal. A Warsaw prosecutor has been investigating the former Polish government for abuse of authority for over a year.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later told a team from the International Red Cross, who questioned him in late 2006, that he thought he had probably been held prisoner in Poland. "I think the country was Poland," he said, according to the Red Cross report. "I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had (an) e-mail address ending in '.pl'. The central-heating system was an old-style one that I would expect only to see in countries of the former communist system."

If the allegations against Lithuania are confirmed, it could lead to further investigations. Like Poland and Romania, Lithuania has signed the United Nations' Convention Against Torture.

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The CIA's Post-torture Profits

Architects of a shameful chapter in the agency's history now reap rich rewards in the private sector. They must be held to account

By Tim Shorrock

August 25, 2009 "The Guardian" --  Monday's release of the long-awaited CIA report on the agency's role in torture and interrogation brought me back to 1967, when I was a high school student opposed to the Vietnam war. Angry that my history teacher was only presenting the official story, I persuaded her to allow my class to read Vietnam! Vietnam!, a powerful indictment of the war by the British reporter Felix Greene. It was filled with disturbing images, including a haunting photograph of a Vietnamese fighter being waterboarded while American soldiers looked on. But my teacher and fellow students dismissed the book as propaganda, preferring instead the sanitised version of the war provided by the US government.

The CIA report, however, is the official word on the Bush-Cheney "war on terror". In gruesome detail, it shows how untrained CIA interrogators and private contractors, blessed by their superiors, inflicted detainees captured in the Middle East with "enhanced interrogation techniques" that ran the gamut from mock executions to threats to kill family members to waterboarding. While the intelligence provided important details about al-Qaida and some information about possible attacks, the report concluded that the interrogations violated US commitments to human rights and showed that the CIA "failed to provide adequate staffing, guidance and support" to those involved.

CIA director Leon Panetta attempted to downplay those findings by saying that "the challenge is not the battles of yesterday, but those of today and tomorrow". But we know from the American experience that is not true: as in Vietnam, we must come to grips with the fact that using the ends to justify the means has destroyed thousands of lives and stirred deep hatred for the US.

Curiously, there is a reference to the American cold war past in the CIA report. After Vietnam, it said, US interest in interrogation faded, only to re-emerge with US intervention in Central America as a way to "foster foreign liaison relationships" - presumably with the anti-communist governments such as El Salvador and Guatemala. But in the mid-1980s, after two CIA officers were investigated for killing a detainee - in a country blacked out in the report - the agency said it ended its so-called "human resource exploitation" programme.

Attorney general Eric Holder has now appointed a prosecutor to examine the dozen or so cases where the CIA believes US laws were broken after 9/11. But the prosecutor's mandate is narrowly defined, and will not cover those who acted "in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance" provided by the White House through the justice department. If so, that is a travesty: the plan eliminates those most responsible, including the justice department lawyers who wrote the CIA guidance under the tutelage of the president, George Bush, the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the CIA director, George Tenet.

Adding insult to injury, some of those responsible have been rewarded with lucrative careers in the private sector. Tenet, for example, is making millions of dollars in the intelligence business, including as a board member for defence contractor QinetiQ. And Jose Rodriguez, the former director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service who ordered the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, works with former CIA director Mike Hayden at the oddly named National Interest Security Company, an intelligence contractor. It's shameful that people responsible for one of America's darkest chapters are so richly rewarded.

Back in 1967, Greene dedicated his Vietnam book to American opponents of the war who had "affirmed for all the world to see what is best and most humane in the American tradition". We can restore that tradition by seeking justice for the officials who violated America's trust in its constitution and basic human rights. It's the least we can do for our democracy.

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Terrorists
By Thomas Hubbard

Foreigners send agents, surveillance
to photograph your land, spy on your peoples
strategize against your national defenses
map the resources under your earth
determine profits to be taken
from you and your children
foment unrest in your streets, destroy your culture.

Foreigners send their corporations
to take your natural resources
they manipulate your government
they set up puppet leaders who
impose odious rules on you
give away your national property
they install shipping and pipelines
to carry off your wealth leaving you with crumbs.

Foreigners send their missionaries to convert your children in the guise of "helping" you
they violate your religion in the streets of your town
they build their churches on the land of your father
they teach their ways to your children
in schools built on your land.

Foreigners send death across your skies
not just one or two explosions, no, countless explosions, bombs smart, dumb, clustered
dropping from airplanes, delivered by missiles
killing, maiming, destroying, flattening whole cities spreading ruin over your countryside.

Foreigners send helicopters, tanks
to spread death in your streets
they tear down every place of shelter
they defile your places of worship
bring ruin to your institutions
pollute the water you drink, spoil the air you breathe
dump their sewage where they please
then ridicule your suffering.

Foreigners send their armies to murder your neighbors
they abuse your families; they kick down your doors
they enter your house and drag grown men outside
they threaten with assault rifles
they curse your women and children
they spread your belongings in the street.

When you fight back, when you resist with whatever
side-arms, home-made booby traps
any antiquated weapons you can carry
when you hate them,
when you show them a minute fraction of the suffering they spread
then they imprison you for questioning and torture.

They call you a terrorist because you defend yourself
against impossible odds, rifles against tanks, and
occasionally, when their attention lapses
you give them what they have given you
and they cry out that you are unfair, you are monsters,
you are inhuman, you are terrorists.

They did the same to my people.
They do the same to any people who are not like them,
who will not be enslaved, who will not be dispossessed,
who will not suffer corporate filth
to over-run, suck dry and ruin the land, the country.

They call it "spreading freedom."
They call it "Democracy."
In private, they call it "huge profits," and
laugh as they count the money.

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 America's Bloody Hands
By John Burl Smith

Following a secret order of the Supreme Court of Honduras issued on June 26, 2009, President Manuel Zelaya was arrested in a predawn raid.  Soldiers stormed the presidential residence while Zelaya slept, took him to an air field, loaded him on the presidential jet and dispatched him to San José, Costa Rica.  Roberto Micheletti was sworn in as President and declared a so-called "state of exception," which suspended civil liberties.  Dozens of officials, including the Foreign Minister, were rounded up, as the coup plotters consolidated power.

The coup d'etat in Honduras raised the specter of a time when America rode roughshod over the western hemisphere through the infamous School of the Americas (SOA) and the CIA. A throwback to "Cold War" "domino thinking," the Honduran coup was strangely reminiscent of the US backed 1955 Guatemalan coup.  It bears the earmarks of that bygone era, most notable among this dastardly duo's dirty deeds are the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the 1965 US occupation of the Dominican Republic, the 1966 Green Beret intervention in Guatemala, the 1973 US-backed coup d'etat in Chile, Operation Condor launched by the US in 1975 to install and back military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, the well-documented dirty wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua paid for by official US cocaine-trafficking in the 1980s, the 1983 US invasion of Grenada, the 1987 US military "drug war" intervention in Bolivia, the 1988 US-backed electoral fraud in Mexico,
  the US invasion of Panama in 1989, the ongoing multi-billion dollar US Colombia intervention that began in 2000, the 2002 US-backed coup attempt in Venezuela, the 2004 US-backed coup in Haiti, the 2006 US backed electoral fraud in Mexico, and currently Plan Mexico in 2008.

The aforementioned events earned the School of the Americas the title "school of coups"  in Latin America.  Whenever there are massacres, cases of torture or other human rights abuses, a direct connection to the SOA has been documented. For this reason the Georgia-based US military school's name has been changed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).  As the SOA, it trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, many of  which became some of the most infamous dictators, "death squad" leaders and others charged with torture and human rights abuses to date.  The CIA is the actuary, developing plots, recruiting principles and funding operations.  Honduras has over 50 graduates of SOA which have been intimately involved in coups, assassinations and human rights abuses.

For instance, 1975 SOA graduate Gen. Juan Melgar Castro became the military dictator of Honduras.  During 1980-1982  another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, headed the dictatorial regime.  He intensified repression and murder through the infamous Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America.

Leader of the coup, Gen. Romeo  Vásquez Velásquez, commander of the armed forces, is really the man running the country.  Gen. Velásquez trained at the SOA at least twice -- in 1976 and 1984. His chief accomplice in the coup, Air Force Gen. Luis Javier Prince, trained at SOA in 1996.  Gen. Suazo played a key role in the crisis by overseeing the thief of opinion poll ballot boxes and hiding them on an air base. The Air Force also held Zelaya on one of its bases until he was sent to Costa Rica.

An additional 88 Hondurans were scheduled for training this year at WHINSEC, formerly SOA, which graduated over 400 Hondurans from 2001-2008 and five of these students are a part of the military clique running the country.  However, if their training occurs, it will violate the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act which requires the US military to cease all aid and training to any country that has undergone a military coup.

Moreover, a very important bill, HR 2567 is before Congress that will suspend all operations at the school and authorize a full investigation into its past activities and its hundreds of graduates who have been involved in atrocities and coups.  Going back to the 1950s, eleven dictators have trained at the SOA.  Whenever there's been a coup, like the one in Honduras, a direct connection to the SOA has been documented. 

President Obama must support this bill, if his pledge to improve Latin American relations at  the Summit of the Americas meant anything.  But, rather than reversing Bush's decision to reactivate the Navy's Fourth Fleet in the Caribbean, there is legislation in Congress to expand the military's role in South America. 

President Obama has the power through an executive order to shut down America's school of coups and assassins which has America hands so bloody.  Mr. Obama should realize that as president when a country sets up operations to assassinate foreign leaders that same operation can be turned on him. (Sources:www.cbsnews.com, www.allgov.com, www.democracynow.org  and http://dprogram.net/)


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Bit of History
Salvador Allende Gossens (1908-1973)

The son of Salvador Allende Castro and Laura Gossens, Salvador Allende was born June 26, 1908 in Valparaíso, Chile.  With a long tradition of political involvement in progressive and liberal causes, his family belonged to the Chilean upper-class.  His father and uncles participated in the reformist efforts of the Radical Party in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  His grandfather founded one of the first lay schools in Chile when the Catholic Church claimed hegemony over education. The family also had roots in Chilean freemasonry; Allende's grandfather, a physician, served as a Most Serene Grand Master of the Masonic Order.

After graduating from Liceo Eduardo de la Barra high school in Valparaíso, Allende earned a medical degree in 1926 from the University of Chile.  He qualified as a surgeon in 1932.

While working for the public health service (1933), Allende published Higiene Mental y Delincuencia (Crime and Mental Hygiene) and helped create the Socialist Party of Chile.  He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies (1937) and served as Minister of Health in the Popular Front government elected in 1938 on the slogan "Bread, a Roof and Work!"  Allende was general secretary of the Popular Front, which was renamed  Democratic Alliance,  from 1943 to 1970. He married Hortensia Bussi with whom he had three daughters.

While serving as Minister of Health, Allende wrote La Realidad Médico Social de Chile (The social and medical reality of Chile).  In 1945, he became senator for the Valdivia, Llanquihue, Chiloé, Aisén and Magallanes provinces; then for Tarapacá and Antofagasta in 1953; for Aconcagua and Valparaíso in 1961; and once more for Chiloé, Aisén and Magallanes in 1969.  Allende became president of the Chilean Senate in 1966.  During his senate tenure, Allende consistently defended the interests of the working classes, attacked capitalism and imperialism, defended the Cuban Revolution, and vocally supported the guerrilla movements in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Allende ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1952, 1958 and 1964.  His socialist beliefs and friendship with Cuban president Fidel Castro made him unpopular with successive  US administrations from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon; they believed there was a danger of Chile becoming a communist state and joining the Soviet Union's sphere of influence.   While Allende had close ties to the Chilean Communist Party from the outset of his political career, he publicly condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).  He later made Chile the first government in the Americas to recognize the People's Republic of China (1971).

In the 1970 presidential election, the Communist Party appointed him as the alternate for its own candidate, the world-renowned poet Pablo Neruda.  Allende won the Chilean presidential election as leader of the Unidad Popular ("Popular Unity") coalition.  He received a narrow plurality of 36.2 percent.  Since no candidate obtained a popular vote majority, the Chilean Constitution required Congress to choose one of the two candidates with the highest number of votes as the winner.  Tradition called for Congress to select the candidate with the highest popular vote.

On October 20, while the senate was in negotiations between the Christian Democrats and the Popular Unity, General René Schneider, Commander in Chief of the Chilean Army, was shot, and later died, while resisting a kidnap attempt by a group led by General Roberto Viaux. The kidnaping plan had been supported by the CIA, although U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger claimed the plans were ordered postponed at the last moment.  However, the evidence showed CIA director Richard Helms followed orders directly from President Nixon to do whatever was necessary in order "to get rid of him," referring to Allende.  Nixon gave Helms a blank check in ridding Chile of Allende's presence and "making the economy scream."

A defender of the "constitutionalist" doctrine that the army's role be exclusively professional, General Schneider saw the army's role as solely to protect the country's sovereignty and not interfere in politics.  For a time, after his death, which met with widespread disapproval,  military opposition to Allende ended.  Parliament selected him to the presidency on October 24.
    On November 3, 1970, Allende assumed the presidency after signing a Statute of Constitutional Guarantees proposed by the Christian Democrats in return for their support in Congress.  Upon assuming power, Allende began to carry out his platform of implementing a socialist program called La vía chilena al socialismo ("the Chilean Path to Socialism"). This included nationalization of large-scale industries (notably copper mining and banking), and government administration of the health care system, educational system (With the help of an American Educator, Jane A. Hobson-Gonzalez from Kokomo, Indiana), a program of free milk for children in the schools and shanty towns of Chile, and an expansion of the land seizure and redistribution already begun under his predecessor Eduardo Frei Montalva, who had nationalized between one-fifth and one-quarter of all the properties listed for takeover). 

Under Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the US blocked financial aid to Chile and other Third World countries that nationalized industries. Anaconda and Kennecott mining companies and International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) were among the US enterprises with property in Chile.  The IMF ceased to aid Chile.  Its people suffered, amplifying internal divisions.  Industrialists and landowners frustrated reform. Factory and farm workers protested the slow pace of the new programs.  Others blamed Allende's reforms for the high inflation rate. 

On September 11, 1973, US-backed forces trained at the School of the Americas (SOA) overthrew Chile's government, killing Allende.  The coup suspended constitutional government.  Under General Augusto Pinochet, the junta arrested, tortured and killed more than 30,000 Chileans in a matter of months.  On September 26, 1973, SOA graduates killed Allende's exiled foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his aide, Ronnie Moffitt, a few blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C.  (Sources:  http://en.wikipedia.org/ and www.answers.com)

The Link Between War and Big Finance

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Liberal Imperialism
Goodies and Baddies: A History of 'Humanitarian Intervention'

By Adam Curtis

April 04, 2011 "BBC" --  28 March 2011  -- The idea of "humanitarian intervention" which is behind the decision to attack in Libya is one of the central beliefs of our age.

It divides people. Some see it as a noble, disinterested use of Western power. Others see it as a smokescreen for a latter-day liberal imperialism.

I want to tell the story of how this idea originated and how it has grown up to possess the minds of a generation of liberal men and women in Europe and America.

It is the story of a generation who became disenchanted with traditional power politics. They thought they could leap over the old corrupt structures of power and connect directly with the innocent victims of war around the world.

It was a grand utopian project that began in the mid-60s in Africa and flourished and spread across the world. But in the 1990s it became corrupted by the very thing it was supposed to have transcended - western power politics.

And the idea seemed to have died in horror in a bombing of a hotel in Baghdad in 2003.

What we now see is the return of that dream in a ghostly, half-hearted form - where the confidence and hopes have been replaced by a nervous anxiety.

This modern phase of humanitarian intervention begins in 1968 with the Biafran war. It is a fascinating moment because it is where the framework - the contemporary filter through which we now perceive all humanitarian tragedies - was first constructed.

The Eastern part of Nigeria had declared independence and called their new state Biafra. In response the Nigerian army attacked the rebel government. Things went very badly for the Biafrans, but no-one in the West cared. While the British government happily sold lots of arms to the Nigerians.

But then the Biafran government found a very odd Public Relations firm in Geneva, called MarkPress who set out to change the way people in Europe saw the war.

I have discovered a great documentary in the BBC archive which tells what then happened. It is shot inside the PR company's offices and interviews the men running the campaign.

It shows how they turned a war that people saw simply as a political conflict in a faraway land into something heart-wrenching and dramatic.

It became a moral battle between evil politicians in Nigeria - aided by cynical and corrupt politicians in London who were selling the arms - and the innocent victims of the starvation caused by the war.

Here is an extract.

The British newspapers went for it in a big way. And a new movement grew up. It was driven by moral outrage, fuelled by a disgust with the old British political class who were prolonging the suffering through arms sales.

Celebrities joined in. They held a 48 hour fast in Piccadilly Circus over Christmas. Here are some frame grabs from the news report. The one that shows what was really happening is the placard that says BATTLE OF BRITAIN 1940 - BIAFRA '69.

The conflict was being fitted to the template that was going to define the whole movement. It was the Good War. A justified resistance against evil to protect the innocent wherever they were being threatened in the world.

Just like the struggle against fascism in the Second World War.

But Biafra also revealed the terrible dangers of this simplified view of wars - dangers that would always haunt the humanitarian movement.

Here is an extract from a very good Timewatch programme about Biafra made in the early 90s. It has journalists telling how they took what Biafra's PR agency had started - and went much further. They created the new image that was going to define the future coverage of all these humanitarian crises - the starving child.

But the programme also makes a strong case that the aid that resulted from the wave of sympathy that these images created had a terrible unforeseen consequence. It prolonged a futile war for a further 18 months - and thus contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Many in the aid agencies have denied this. But the programme includes the rebel Biafran leader, Colonel Ojukwu, saying clearly that he used the hard currency he got from the agencies to buy the weapons he needed to continue fighting.

Out of Biafra was going to come a new idea of how to save the world. And the man who would create it was a young French doctor called Bernard Kouchner.

Kouchner had worked for the Red Cross in Biafra, but he had become disgusted by the Red Cross' refusal to publicise the genocide created by the Nigerian government.

Just as the Red Cross hadn't revealed the horrors they saw in World War Two in the Nazi concentration camps because they insisted on being "neutral"

Kouchner resigned and went back to Paris where he founded a new humanitarian organisation called Medecins Sans Frontieres. Being neutral, Kouchner said, really meant being complicit in the horror. And MSF would never be complicit. It was on the side of the innocent victims.

Here is Kouchner explaining what he did

Kouchner - and many of the others who founded MSF - had been Marxist or Maoist revolutionaries, but they had become disenchanted with those utopian visions. And what they were doing was reworking the politics of third world liberation into a new form.

It was a type of liberation that they believed went beyond the politics of left and right and instead was about saving individuals from the horrors of totalitarianism whether that came from the right or the left.

They weren't going to be neutral. They were going to take sides. But it was the side of the victims - because they were neutral.

Their first slogan was "There are no good and bad victims". 

And in 1979 Kouchner dramatically demonstrated this belief. He hired a ship to go and rescue the Vietnamese boat people who were fleeing the communist regime who now ruled Vietnam.

The left - and many liberals - were shocked. Because these were "bad victims". Victims of the noble anti-imperialists who had defeated America.

But Joan Baez supported him.

Here is part of a film made in the early 1980 that tells the story of his rescue of the boat people. It was filmed on the ship Kouchner hired. You also get a very good sense of Kouchner's drive and his beliefs.

There is a great scene as the MSF ship arrives on a tiny Island. The Europeans stride weeping onto the jetty as they are applauded as heroes by the thousands of boat people stranded on the island.

At the same time as the humanitarian movement was rising up, so too were the new despots that were going to become some of the main targets for this new idealism.

Many of them - like Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gadaffi - were also, in a strange way, products of the failure of the Communist dream. Like Kouchner they too were trying to rework revolutionary theory - but in their case with horrific results.

I have found a sort of fly-on-the-wall documentary made in 1976 which follows Muammar Gadaffi around as he goes about ruling Libya.

One highlight is a section with his mother and father who still live in a tent out in the desert. Mrs Gadaffi explains how her son has insisted that they must remain living in their old tent until every other Libyan is properly housed in a modern apartment.

I wonder if they ever got out.

The documentary makes it clear how repressive and brutal Gadaffi's regime is. How he has locked up and tortured thousands of his opponents.

But then it takes a fascinating turn. The interviewer asks Gadaffi to explain why he has sent Libyan troops to fight with the Palestinians against Israel, and why he has sent in Libyan agents to try and overthrow President Sadat of Egypt.

In response Gadaffi launches into an explanation that countries like Libya have a duty to intervene in other nations where the ordinary people are being oppressed by autocrats or oppressive governments - and help free them. That includes helping to liberate Egypt and Tunisia.

But it also means, he says, that politicians like him are justified in intervening in Northern Ireland to help the Provisional IRA. Because they are oppressed by the British government

They too are victims.

What Gadaffi was arguing was a strange mirror image of the theory that Kouchner and the other ex-leftists in Europe were developing.

For they too were heading towards the idea of "armed intervention".

In the 1980s the humanitarian movement was flourishing - above all in Afghanistan. But in Afghanistan the movement also came up against a big political problem.

Men and women from what was now called "the doctors' movement" went in over the mountains to help the victims of the Soviet attacks. They were brave and daring and they saved the lives of many Afghan civilians.

But they also helped the Mujaheddin. Under the theory of the humanitarian movement this was fine. The Mujaheddin were resisting the Soviet totalitarianism. They were victims fighting back so it was morally right to help them.

But others didn't see it that way.

Here is video of the trial in Kabul in 1983 of a French doctor who had been captured by the Afghan army.

He is called Philippe Augoyard. He worked for Aide Medicale Internationale - which was another version of MSF. The trial is absurd - and in the tradition of all communist show trials the doctor reads out a "confession" and admits to "working with the counter-revolutionary bandits".

But there is also another part of his confession that was both true and embarrassing for all the ex-Marxists and Maoists in the humanitarian movement. The mujaheddin they were helping were backed, funded and armed by the Americans.

Which meant they were helping American global imperialism.

Incidentally, the video is shot by my hero. He is a cameraman called Erik Durschmied. He is the best cameraman who has ever worked for the BBC - and I am constantly using his stuff in my films.

But then a group of French philosophers came to the rescue. They came up with a theory that said it wasn't bad to work with American military power. In fact, if the humanitarians could harness America's armed might, they could use it to change the world in a revolutionary way.

The philosophers were led by another ex-Maoist called Andre Glucksmann. He had turned against the left and had developed his own theory which he called "anti-totalitariansm". Here is a picture of Glucksmann relaxing in 1978.

Getty Images/Roger Viollet

But he wasn't alone. Glucksmann was part of a group of intellectuals that rose up in France in the late 1970s called the New Philosophers. They saw Bernard Kouchner as an action hero putting their ideas into practice. Another prominent one was the glamorous Bernard-Henri Levy. Here he is with an interesting haircut.

Corbis/Richard Melloul

Glucksmann put it in stark terms. Everything that oppressed people around the world he called "Auschwitz". Even famines were called "Auschwitz".

It was the ghost of the Second World War again.

Glucksmann then said that people with power had a right to intervene in other societies to prevent "Auschwitzes". And that included using American power.

Maybe, he said, power exercised by the strong was not always oppression. If it was used decently it could liberate the oppressed.

And - Glucksmann said - this didn't just mean medical help. It included "armed resistance".

And then came the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995 - which seemed to prove Glucksmann's theory in a dramatic way.

When the Bosnian crisis began in 1992 humanitarian groups and the UN came in to try and help the victims of Serb aggression.

But they quickly began to realise they were being used by western governments as a way of containing a crisis that the politicians did not want to get involved with.

The journalist David Rieff wrote

"The idea was simple, coarse and brutal. Instead of political action backed by the credible threat of military force, the Western powers would substitute a massive humanitarian effort to alleviate the worst consequences of a conflict they wanted to contain

'Containment through charity' was the way one UN official put it."

And then at Srebrenica thousands of civilians gathered together in the enclave - believing they were under international protection. But when the Serbian troops led by General Mladic marched in, the UN troops did nothing. The promise of protection had simply made it easier for the Serbs to kill over 8,000 people.

Here is an extract from a brilliant Panorama programme about the massacre. It includes notorious footage shot by a Serb cameraman on the day of the massacre. It is notorious because he allegedly edited out shots that show evidence of the killings.

But you get a sense from the footage of the impotence of the UN Dutch soldiers. It is the record of a terrible moment of moral failure.

It begins with thousands of Bosnians fleeing Srebrenica for what they think is the safety of the UN camp outside town.

One of the UN's special envoys in Bosnia, Jose Maria Mendiluce realised that Glucksmann was right:

"You don't reply to fascism with relief supplies. Only if we stop being neutral  between murderers and victims, if we decide to back Bosnia's fight for life against the fascist horror of ethnic cleansing, shall we be able to contribute to the survival of the remnants of that country and of our own dignity."

And then a few months later American air power - under the command of NATO - was used to force the Serbs to negotiate a peace. Almost no-one disagreed. It was a Good War in which the left-wing humanitarians were now allied with their old imperialist enemy - America.

Out of Srebrenica came a strange new hybrid - a humanitarian militarism. And in the 1990s it rose up to capture the imagination of a generation on the left in Europe.

Ever since the collapse of the left in the early 1980s they had been searching for a new vision of how to change the world for the better. Now they found it - a humanitarianism that had the power to right wrongs around the world rather than just alleviate them.

It even had French philosophers behind it.

And one of that generation who was most entranced was Tony Blair, and in 1999 he took this humanitarianism to its moment of greatest triumph.

Here are the rushes of Tony Blair arriving to a hero's welcome in Kosovo in May 1999. Blair had persuaded a reluctant President Clinton to join in a NATO bombing campaign to stop Serbian atrocities in Kosovo and had stuck with it even when it seemed to be failing.

Blair's arrival and his speech at a Kosovan refugee camp on the Macedonian border is an extraordinary scene. It is also a very important moment in recent history. Watch Blair's face closely as he walks through the adoring crowd chanting "Tony, Tony, Tony" and you understand some of why he would take Britain to war in Iraq four years later.

It is also eerily reminiscent of Kouchner and the other doctors arriving on the South Sea Island to rescue the Vietnamese Boat people exactly twenty years before.

It was also a moment of triumph for Bernard Kouchner. He became the head of the interim administration in Kosovo - and he set out to create a new democracy.

Many of his staff were leftist revolutionaries from 1968. Even one of the NATO commanders had fought on the streets of Paris.

But Kouchner quickly discovered that victims could be very bad. There was an extraordinary range of ethnic groups in Kosovo.

There were:
Muslim Albanians
Orthodox Serbs
Roman Catholic Serbs
Serbian-speaking Muslim Egyptians
Albanian-speaking Muslim Gypsies - Ashkalis
Albanian-speaking Christian Gypsies - Goranis
And even - Pro-Serbian Turkish-speaking Turks

They all had vendettas with each other - which meant that they were both victims and horrible victimizers at the same time.

It began to be obvious that getting rid of evil didn't always lead to the simple triumph of goodness.

Which became horribly clear in Iraq in 2003.

Kouchner and many of the other humanitarian interventionists were wary of backing the invasion. They distrusted the Bush administration and suspected they and their ideas were being used as cover. But they also believed in removing Saddam Hussein because it was a chance to liberate millions of people from the oppression of a "fascist" tyrant.

Following the invasion many of those who had worked under Kouchner in Kosovo went to Baghdad to set up the United Nations presence there. They were led by another humanitarian, a Brazilian ex-leftist from the 1960s, Sergio Viero de Mello.

They set up their operations in the Canal Street Hotel in Baghdad. But then on August 19th - in the middle of a press conference - this happened.

A vast truck bomb had been driven right under the window of Sergio de Mello's office. He and 21 others were killed.

No one knows for sure who was behind the bombing but it was clear that de Mello and the humanitarians had been deliberately targeted.

Many in the humanitarian-intervention movement saw the Canal Hotel bombing as the beginning of the end of their dream. Because it dramatically illustrated how naive they had been.

The movement had begun back in Biafra because a group of young idealists wanted to escape from the old corrupt power politics. To do this they had simplified the world into a moral struggle between good and evil.

They believed that if they could destroy the evil - by liberating victims from oppression by despots - then what would result would be, automatically, good.

But the problem with this simple view was that it meant they had no critical framework by which to judge the "victims" they were helping. And the Baghdad bombing made it clear that some of the victims were very bad indeed - and that the humanitarians' actions might actually have helped unleash another kind of evil.

The same truth has become obvious in Kosovo too.

Last year a Swiss prosecutor produced a report for the Council of Europe which alleged that the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci was not only a mafia boss, a murderer and a drug dealer, and alleged that he was also involved with a group that killed Serbian prisoners and then sold their organs for illegal transplants.

Hashim Thaci denies all the allegations

And it has also been alleged that Mr Thaci rigged the recent elections "on an industrial scale"

Samantha Power was a journalist in Bosnia and a close friend of Sergio Viera de Mello. She is now a Special Assistant to President Obama. Power is a passionate advocate of humanitarian intervention - and by all accounts she is the person who most persuaded a reluctant President Obama to intervene in Libya.

Associated Press/Charles Dharapak

And Bernard Kouchner also supports the Libyan intervention.

But there is a general wariness and nervousness about the return of the old dream of armed intervention. Above all because we realise that humanitarian interventionism offers us no political way to judge who it is we are helping in Libya - and thus what the real consequences of our actions might be.

Even if one's instincts are to help those fighting Gadaffi, it is no longer enough just to see it as a struggle of goodies against baddies. For it is precisely that simplification that has led to unreal fantasies about who we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fantasies that persist today, and which our leaders still cling to - because they give the illusion that we are in control.

But the French philosophers are still very vocal. Here is Bernard-Henri Levy on Newsnight claiming he helped persuade President Sarkozy to intervene in Libya.

As you watch him - you get a sense that you are looking at something rather odd, a simplification of the world that was very much a product of a strange moment in history.

Rather like Mr Levy's hair-style.

 _

US/NATO’S Fascist Wars

You didn´t have to be clairvoyant to foresee what I wrote with great detail in three Reflection Articles I published on the CubaDebate website between February 21 and March 3: “The NATO Plan Is to Occupy Libya,” “The Cynical Danse Macabre,” and “NATO´s Inevitable War.”

Not even the fascist leaders of Germany and Italy were so blatantly shameless regarding the Spanish Civil War unleashed in 1936, an event that maybe a lot of people have been recalling over these past days.

Almost 75 years to the day have passed since then, but nothing that has happened over the last 75 centuries, or even 75 millenniums of human life on our planet can compare.

Sometimes it seems that those of us who serenely voice our opinions on these issues are exaggerating. I dare say that we have actually been naive to assume that we all should be aware of the deception or colossal ignorance that humanity has been dragged into.

In 1936 there was an intense clash between two systems and ideologies of more or less equal military power.

The arms back then seemed more like toys compared with today´s weapons. Humanity´s survival was not threatened despite the destructive power and the locally lethal force deployed. Entire cities and even nations could have been virtually destroyed. But never was the human race, in its totality, at risk of being exterminated several times over for the stupid and suicidal power developed by modern science and technology.

With these current realities in mind, it is embarrassing to read the continuous news reports on the use of powerful laser-guided rockets with 100% accuracy, fighter-bombers that go twice the speed of light, potent explosives that blow apart uranium-hardened metals that have an everlasting effect on the inhabitants and their descendants.

Cuba stated its position regarding the internal situation in Libya at the meeting in Geneva. Without hesitating, Cuba defended the idea of a political solution to the conflict in Libya and was categorically opposed to any foreign military intervention. In a world where the alliance between the United States and the developed capitalist powers of Europe increasingly take hold of the people´s resources and fruits of their labor, any honest citizen, whatever their standpoint to the government, would be opposed to a foreign military intervention in their country.

But most absurd about the current situation is the fact that before the brutal war broke out in Northern Africa, in another region of the world, nearly 10 000 kilometers away, a nuclear accident had occurred in one of the most populated areas of the world following a tsunami caused by a 9.0 earthquake, which has already cost a hard-working nation like Japan nearly 30 000 lives. Such accident would have not occurred 75 years before.

In Haiti, a poor and underdeveloped country, a nearly 7.0 quake according to the Richter scale, caused over 300 000 deaths, countless people wounded and hundreds of thousands harmed.

However, what was terribly tragic in Japan was the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant, whose consequences are still to be assessed. I will only recall some of the main stories published by the news agencies:

ANSA.- Fukushima 1 nuclear plant is releasing “extremely high and potentially lethal radiations,” said Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the US nuclear entity.

EFE.- The nuclear threat stemming from the serious situation at a Japanese plant, following the earthquake, has triggered security revisions in atomic plants around the world and has made some countries paralyze their plans.

Reuters.- Japan’s devastating earthquake and deepening nuclear crisis could result in losses of up to $200 billion for Japanese economy, but the global impact remains hard to gauge.

EFE.- The deterioration of one reactor after another at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear center continued to feed fears of a pending nuclear disaster as desperate attempts to control a radioactive leak did nothing to provide even a glimmer of hope.

AFP.- Japan´s Emperor Akihito expressed concern about the unpredictable character of the nuclear crisis hitting Japan following the quake and tsunami that killed thousands of people and left 500 000 homeless. New quake reported in the Tokyo area.

There are reports talking about even more concerning issues.

Some refer to the presence of toxic radioactive iodine in Tokyo´s drinking water, which doubles the tolerable amount that can be consumed by the smallest children in the Japanese capital. One of these reports says that the stocks of bottled water are shrinking in Tokyo, a city located in a prefecture at more than 200 kilometers from Fukushima.

This series of circumstances poses a dramatic situation on our world. I can express freely my views on the war in Libya.

I do not share political or religious views with the leader of that country. I am a Marxist-Leninist and a follower of Marti, as I have already said.

I see Libya as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement and a sovereign State of the nearly 200 members of the United Nations.

Never, a large or small country, in this case with only 5 million inhabitants, was the victim of such a brutal attack by the air force of a militaristic organization with thousands of fighter-bombers, more than 100 submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, and sufficient arsenal to destroy the planet many times over. Our species had never encountered this situation and there had been nothing similar 75 years ago, when the Nazi bombers attacked targets in Spain.

Now, however, the criminal and discredited NATO will write a “beautiful” little story about its “humanitarian” bombing.

If Gaddafi honors the traditions of his people and decides to fight to the last breath, as he has promised, together with the Libyans who are facing the worst bombing a country has ever suffered, NATO and its criminal projects will sink into the mire of shame.

The people respect and believe in men who fulfill their duty.

More than 50 years ago, when the United States killed more than a hundred Cubans with the explosion of merchant ship “La Coubre” our people proclaimed “Patria o Muerte.” (Homeland or Death). They have fulfilled this, and have always been determined to keep their word.

“Anyone who tries to seize Cuba,” said the most glorious fighter in our history-”will only gather the dust of her soil soaked in blood.”

I beg you to excuse the frankness with which I address the issue.

28 March 2011
8:14 p.m.

http://monthlyreview.org/castro/2011/03/28/natos-fascist-war/#more-822

Chris Adams

"... Qaddafi’s government remains in “flagrant breach” of the UN resolution... fighting in Misurata, a city seized by rebels now under a counterassault by loyalist forces..."

                 By whatever name, under whatever president and pretexts, U.S. imperialist led wars all serve National Security state terrorist global domination agenda
Most of even the fiercest political critics continue promoting 'personalized-presidential-electoral-politics instead of exposing their critical capitalist system- stabilizing function. Obama too was hired primarily to sell, execute and enforce the bipartisn ruling class National Security agenda drawn up by finance capitals foundations, thinktanks & academics. Framing the unspeakable and limitless horrors arising from - and attempting to resolve - contradictions inherent in capitalism's exploitive and oppressive nature to individual politicians/policies serves our enemy by perpetuating paralyzing obfuscation.

Liz Burbank

http://www.burbankdigest.com/node/348

The Los Angeles Times reports that the CIA is coordinating with the anti-Gadaffi rebels. A close reading indicates that they are not only ingratiating the rebels they are also assessing them on behalf of the Obama administration.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cia-libya-20110331,0,4151799.story

__________________________________________________________________________________

A CIA commander for the Libyan rebels
28 March 2011
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/pers-m28.shtml

The Libyan National Council, the Benghazi-based group that speaks for the rebel forces fighting the Gaddafi regime, has appointed a long-time CIA collaborator to head its military operations. The selection of Khalifa Hifter, a former colonel in the Libyan army, was reported by McClatchy Newspapers Thursday and the new military chief was interviewed by a correspondent for ABC News on Sunday night.

Hifter’s arrival in Benghazi was first reported by Al Jazeera on March 14, followed by a flattering portrait in the virulently pro-war British tabloid the Daily Mail on March 19. The Daily Mail described Hifter as one of the “two military stars of the revolution” who “had recently returned from exile in America to lend the rebel ground forces some tactical coherence.” The newspaper did not refer to his CIA connections.

McClatchy Newspapers published a profile of Hifter on Sunday. Headlined “New Rebel Leader Spent Much of Past 20 years in Suburban Virginia,” the article notes that he was once a top commander for the Gaddafi regime, until “a disastrous military adventure in Chad in the late 1980s.”

Hifter then went over to the anti-Gaddafi opposition, eventually emigrating to the United States, where he lived until two weeks ago when he returned to Libya to take command in Benghazi.

The McClatchy profile concluded, “Since coming to the United States in the early 1990s, Hifter lived in suburban Virginia outside Washington, DC.” It cited a friend who “said he was unsure exactly what Hifter did to support himself, and that Hifter primarily focused on helping his large family.”

To those who can read between the lines, this profile is a thinly disguised indication of Hifter’s role as a CIA operative. How else does a high-ranking former Libyan military commander enter the United States in the early 1990s, only a few years after the Lockerbie bombing, and then settle near the US capital, except with the permission and active assistance of US intelligence agencies? Hifter actually lived in Vienna, Virginia, about five miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, for two decades.

The agency was very familiar with Hifter’s military and political work. A Washington Post report of March 26, 1996 describes an armed rebellion against Gaddafi in Libya and uses a variant spelling of his name. The article cites witnesses to the rebellion who report that “its leader is Col. Khalifa Haftar, of a contra-style group based in the United States called the Libyan National Army.”

The comparison is to the “contra” terrorist forces financed and armed by the US government in the 1980s against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scandal, which rocked the Reagan administration in 1986-87, involved the exposure of illegal US arms sales to Iran, with the proceeds used to finance the contras in defiance of a congressional ban. Congressional Democrats covered up the scandal and rejected calls to impeach Reagan for sponsoring the flagrantly illegal activities of a cabal of former intelligence operatives and White House aides.

A 2001 book, Manipulations africaines, published by Le Monde diplomatique, traces the CIA connection even further back, to 1987, reporting that Hifter, then a colonel in Gaddafi’s army, was captured fighting in Chad in a Libyan-backed rebellion against the US-backed government of Hissène Habré. He defected to the Libyan National Salvation Front (LNSF), the principal anti-Gaddafi group, which had the backing of the American CIA. He organized his own militia, which operated in Chad until Habré was overthrown by a French-supported rival, Idriss Déby, in 1990.

According to this book, “the Haftar force, created and financed by the CIA in Chad, vanished into thin air with the help of the CIA shortly after the government was overthrown by Idriss Déby.” The book also cites a Congressional Research Service report of December 19, 1996 that the US government was providing financial and military aid to the LNSF and that a number of LNSF members were relocated to the United States.

This information is available to anyone who conducts even a cursory Internet search, but it has not been reported by the corporate-controlled media in the United States, except in the dispatch from McClatchy, which avoids any reference to the CIA. None of the television networks, busily lauding the “freedom fighters” of eastern Libya, has bothered to report that these forces are now commanded by a longtime collaborator of US intelligence services.

Nor have the liberal and “left” enthusiasts of the US-European intervention in Libya taken note. They are too busy hailing the Obama administration for its multilateral and “consultative” approach to war, supposedly so different from the unilateral and “cowboy” approach of the Bush administration in Iraq. That the result is the same—death and destruction raining down on the population, the trampling of the sovereignty and independence of a former colonial country—means nothing to these apologists for imperialism.

The role of Hifter, aptly described 15 years ago as the leader of a “contra-style group,” demonstrates the real class forces at work in the Libyan tragedy. Whatever genuine popular opposition was expressed in the initial revolt against the corrupt Gaddafi dictatorship, the rebellion has been hijacked by imperialism.

The US and European intervention in Libya is aimed not at bringing “democracy” and “freedom,” but at installing in power stooges of the CIA who will rule just as brutally as Gaddafi, while allowing the imperialist powers to loot the country’s oil resources and use Libya as a base of operations against the popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.

Patrick Martin

..................................................................

Saturday, March 26, 2011
Libyan rebel leader spent much of past 20 years in suburban Virginia
By Chris Adams | McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/26/111109/new-rebel-leader-spent-much-of.html

WASHINGTON - The new leader of Libya's opposition military spent the past two decades in suburban Virginia but felt compelled — even in his late-60s — to return to the battlefield in his homeland, according to people who know him.

Khalifa Hifter was once a top military officer for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, but after a disastrous military adventure in Chad in the late 1980s, Hifter switched to the anti-Gadhafi opposition. In the early 1990s, he moved to suburban Virginia, where he established a life but maintained ties to anti-Gadhafi groups.

Late last week, Hifter was appointed to lead the rebel army, which has been in chaos for weeks. He is the third such leader in less than a month, and rebels interviewed in Libya openly voiced distrust for the most recent leader, Abdel Fatah Younes, who had been at Gadhafi's side until just a month ago.

At a news conference Thursday, the rebel's military spokesman said Younes will stay as Hifter's chief of staff, and added that the army — such as it is — would need "weeks" of training.

According to Abdel Salam Badr of Richmond, Va., who said he has known Hifter all his life — including back in Libya — Hifter -- whose name is sometimes spelled Haftar, Hefter or Huftur -- was motivated by his intense anti-Gadhafi feelings.

"Libyans — every single one of them — they hate that guy so much they will do whatever it takes," Badr said in an interview Saturday. "Khalifa has a personal grudge against Gadhafi... That was his purpose in life."

According to Badr and another friend in the U.S., a Georgia-based Libyan activist named Salem alHasi, Hifter left for Libya two weeks ago.

alHasi, who said Hifter was once his superior in the opposition's military wing, said he and Hifter talked in mid-February about the possibility that Gadhafi would use force on protesters.

"He made the decision he had to go inside Libya," alHasi said Saturday. "With his military experience, and with his strong relationship with officers on many levels of rank, he decided to go and see the possibility of participating in the military effort against Gadhafi."

He added that Hifter is very popular among members of the Libyan army, "and he is the most experienced person in the whole Libyan army." He acted out of a sense of "national responsibility," alHasi said.

"This responsibility no one can take care of but him," alHasi said. "I know very well that the Libyan army especially in the eastern part is in desperate need of his presence."

Omar Elkeddi, a Libyan expatriate journalist based in Holland, said in an interview that the opposition forces are getting more organized than they were at the beginning up the uprising. Hifter, he said, is "very professional, very distinguished," and commands great respect.

Since coming to the United States in the early 1990s, Hifter lived in suburban Virginia outside Washington, D.C. Badr said he was unsure exactly what Hifter did to support himself, and that Hifter primarily focused on helping his large family.

.................................................................

Loving the Libyan Rebels
by Yoshie Furuhashi
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/furuhashi270311.html

The multinational empire has come up with a great deal for itself: using Libya's own money to finance the Libyan rebels to fight against Libya. Ali Tarhouni, a US-educated economist
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/world/africa/24minister.html
who just got appointed "finance minister" of the rebel "Interim Transitional National Council," explains the deal:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g3a3gGpFyxPAadBByhJBoUdJ2igg

"Right now, there is no immediate crisis kind of need for cash. We have some liquidity that allows us to do the basic things," he said, such as paying salaries and immediate needs.

He added that many countries have agreed to provide credit backed by the Libyan sovereign fund, and the British government has also agreed to give the rebels access to 1.4 billion dinars ($1.1 billion) that London did not send to Gadhafi.

This way, the empire's expenses will be limited to the costs of bombing, etc., which are shared among its members anyway. If all goes well, the Barack Obama administration, for instance, might even manage to avoid having to seek a supplemental in the short term
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/initial-costs-of-libyan-intervention-on-low-end-of-analysts-estimates/
(that is, if the highly suspect rebel leaders don't pocket much of the money themselves, failing to pay their retainers, as has happened many times in cases like this). A splendid little war perfect for the age of austerity.

But the member of the empire getting the most out of this war for now is probably not the power elite of the United States but the ruling class of the Gulf states. Libya is straight up gold for them: doing Libya in pleases the West; but more importantly it helps deflect attention away from their joint repression of intifadas at home, especially the big one in Bahrain. And on top of it all, some of them apparently stand to make some money: "Rebels Say Qatar Ready to Market East Libyan Oil," according to Reuters today.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/27/us-libya-rebels-oil-idUSTRE72Q1ON20110327
Sweet crude in return for Al Jazeera's war propaganda and Qatar's participation in the war itself. There is no business like war business.

That the Libyan rebels love the empire and vice versa is quite clear by now. This is how Nicholas D. Kristof describes just how much the Libyan rebels love the Americans for bombing their own country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/opinion/24kristof.html

This may be a first for the Arab world: An American airman who bailed out over Libya was rescued from his hiding place in a sheep pen by villagers who hugged him, served him juice and thanked him effusively for bombing their country.

Even though some villagers were hit by American shrapnel, one gamely told an Associated Press reporter that he bore no grudges. Then, on Wednesday in Benghazi, the major city in eastern Libya whose streets would almost certainly be running with blood now if it weren't for the American-led military intervention, residents held a "thank you rally."

What remains mysterious is why so many leftists, Arabs, and Iranians, secular or religious, reformist or revolutionary, in the West or in the axis of resistance fell deeply and blindly in love with the Libyan rebels. No matter how much they love the rebels (who remain "revolutionaries" in the eyes of the slaves of love), there is no evidence whatsoever that the rebels love them or what they stand for. There wasn't even a hint of flirtation in that direction, in fact. To be sure, the Libyan rebels' marriage to the empire may eventually end in a bitter divorce, but, if Afghanistan and other precedents like it are any indication, such a divorce is unlikely to lead to a rebound affair with anything remotely in the interest of the unrequited lovers of the Libyan rebels.

In recent days, though, I have noticed that the propaganda machine of the Islamic Republic of Iran began to change tack on Libya. Maybe the Iranian establishment finally realized that the Libyan rebels aren't pro-Iranian. In contrast, leftists and Hezbollah, perhaps more selflessly idealistic than Iranian officials, have yet to ask that crucial question of international solidarity, which unlike charity is always a two-way street: Are the rebels for us or against us?

* * *

Postscript

Khalifa Hifter, chosen by the rebel "National Council"
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/26/111109/new-rebel-leader-spent-much-of.html
to lead the rebel army, has now been revealed as a defector turned CIA operative, a man who was wrong when pro-Gaddafi, wronger still since then.

Yoshie Furuhashi is Editor of MRZine.

....................................................................

A war of Western imperialism?
Backing of Libyan rebels apparently aims to clean up West's image across the Arab world.
Ahmed Moor Last Modified: 28 Mar 2011 13:09
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/201132472924305721.html

There is a lot about the Western intervention in Libya that could go wrong – and it remains to be seen whether bombing Gaddafi and his mercenaries is a good decision.

However, large numbers of people around the world appear to support the objectives of the anti-regime forces. Also, the indigenous resistance movement – which requested help – would have been annihilated in the absence of those air strikes.

George Bush's legacy of destruction extends beyond the piles of brick, flesh and mortar that we have been tallying for a decade now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More than any other figure in the post-war 20th century, the last American president did more to erode the gains in legitimacy made by supranational institutions and their proponents.

After the Iraq war, the United Nations began to be perceived as a US rubberstamp body – or worse – as a meaningless exercise in bureaucracy.

The UN can only function legitimately through consensus (or consensus-lite) decision-making and it was clear that the US was strong-arming weaker states in 2003.

George Bush and the neoconservatives hijacked the legitimate language of consensus-based intervention for their own ill use.

So activists are not wrong to react cynically when they hear that language today; I don't believe that bombing Gaddafi is a humanitarian gesture.

But George Bush should not be allowed to delegitimise the mechanisms – which are distinct from the language – of global intervention in situations that offend human rights and dignity.

Today, many people agree that the situation in Libya is horrifying. Furthermore, the Libyan rebels requested aid from the outside world.

Those two conditions alone do not justify intervention but they are crucial components of a legitimate international decision to employ force.

What is a successful intervention?

The question of what a successful intervention means is a very important one. At the very least, it means taking a back seat and supporting the rebels in the capacity that they desire.

It also means not attempting to install a new government that's pliant and subordinate to the West. Compromise on these two principles will quickly diminish the legitimacy of the campaign against Gaddafi.

Many people have argued that the intervention is a Western imperialist project. Here, it is worth remembering that Western powers were already in control of Libya's oil when the revolution began.

Muammar Gaddafi was as much "our guy" as Hosni Mubarak. Condoleezza Rice personally visited Libya and met with Gaddafi in 2008.

The following year Tony Blair pushed for the release of the Lockerbie bomber to secure a sweetheart deal with the Libyan regime (although it was Gordon Brown who did the releasing).

Western powers would have been much better served by backing Gaddafi if oil was their object.

There is an alternative imperialism argument: that the intervention is really a push to consolidate Western control over Libyan resources. But, without intervention the rebels would have most certainly been annihilated by Gaddafi's superior forces.

So why back the losing horse? How can Western powers be sure they can succeed in creating a more agreeable government? Would not they go with the devil they know, especially when he is already their devil?

Finally, any government that takes shape in Libya in the future will have to address the basic issues that fueled the popular uprising there in the first place.

Gaddafi is an imperial stooge and a new imperial government will ensure that the underlying conditions will not go away.

Spreading goodwill, avoiding oil price spikes

So what's motivating the Western powers into projecting their power into Libya? And why is the West not intervening in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Yemen?

The potential benefit of successfully backing the rebels will be an increase in goodwill across the Arab world directed at the West. It is not clear if that is a realistic expectation, but it is one appears to motivate Western leaders.

Meanwhile, the cost of attacking Gaddafi and his mercenaries in a limited way, and supplying the rebels with arms is relatively low. It is not clear if the cost is actually low, but it's likely that it is perceived that way since the intervention is already underway.

In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the opposite is true. The American president Barack Obama will seek reelection, so it is in his interest to prevent the global economy from stagnating then shrinking.

A successful revolution in Bahrain may destabilise Saudi Arabia which would drive the price of oil up which could cause the US economy to stall. It is just not a risk worth taking for him.

Probably, fears of an insurgent Iran – legitimate or not – play into his calculations as well. That's because most Bahrainis are Shias.

Likewise, Yemen permits the Americans to pursue Al Qaeda affiliates in that country. That goes directly to Obama's security credentials.

If Yemen lapses, Obama will be accused, rightly or wrongly, of permitting terrorist sympathizers to take control in yet another Middle Eastern country. And the 2012 election campaign is already underway.

Intervention in Libya could turn out badly in a many different and unforeseen ways. And imperialism and neoliberal "reforms" – which are a problem in that country – did not arrive with the revolution; they preceded it.

We can aspire towards helping young Libyans reform their society to make it more democratic, just and anti-imperialist. But before they can do that they must survive Gaddafi's pulverizing onslaught. And that's something that the Western offensive gives them a chance of doing.

Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian-American freelance journalist living in Beirut. He was born in the Gaza strip, Palestine. He is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and The Guardian.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.