So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure. What if anything has Libya got in exchange for all the death and destruction that have been visited on it over the past seven and a half months?

The overthrow of Gaddafi & Co was far from being a straightforward revolution against tyranny, but the West’s latest military intervention can’t be debunked as being simply about oil. Presented by the National Transitional Council (NTC) and cheered on by the Western media as an integral part of the Arab Spring, and thus supposedly of a kind with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan drama is rather an addition to the list of Western or Western-backed wars against hostile, ‘defiant’, insufficiently ‘compliant’, or ‘rogue’ regimes: Afghanistan I (v. the Communist regime, 1979-92), Iraq I (1990-91), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (over Kosovo, 1999), Afghanistan II (v. the Taliban regime, 2001) and Iraq II (2003), to which we might, with qualifications, add the military interventions in Panama (1989-90), Sierra Leone (2000) and the Ivory Coast (2011). An older series of events we might bear in mind includes the Bay of Pigs (1961), the intervention by Western mercenaries in the Congo (1964), the British-assisted palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment.

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The African Union’s opposition to Nato’s intervention

Gaddafi’s African policy gave Libya a firm geopolitical position and consolidated its strategic hinterland while also benefiting Africa. That many African countries appreciated Libya’s contribution to the continent’s affairs was made clear by the AU’s opposition to Nato’s intervention and its sustained efforts to broker a ceasefire and negotiations between the two sides of the civil war. These efforts were dismissed with scorn by Western governments and press, with African opposition to the military intervention cynically derided as Libya’s clients doing their duty to their patron, a self-serving judgment that was unfair to South Africa in particular. That the Arab League, whose support for a no-fly zone was invoked by London, Paris and Washington to claim Arab legitimation of Nato’s intervention, had a membership almost entirely confined to Western powers’ client states was never mentioned.

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The Lockerbie bombing; how the Libyan government ‘bought peace’

Since February, it has been relentlessly asserted that the Libyan government was responsible both for the bombing of a Berlin disco on 5 April 1986 and the Lockerbie bombing on 21 December 1988. News of Gaddafi’s violent end was greeted with satisfaction by the families of the American victims of Lockerbie, understandably full of bitterness towards the man they have been assured by the US government and the press ordered the bombing of Pan Am 103. But many informed observers have long wondered about these two stories, especially Lockerbie. Jim Swire, the spokesman of UK Families Flight 103, whose daughter was killed in the bombing, has repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the official version. Hans Köchler, an Austrian jurist appointed by the UN as an independent observer at the trial, expressed concern about the way it was conducted (notably about the role of two US Justice Department officials who sat next to the Scottish prosecuting counsel throughout and appeared to be giving them instructions). Köchler described al-Megrahi’s conviction as ‘a spectacular miscarriage of justice’. Swire, who also sat through the trial, subsequently launched the Justice for Megrahi campaign. In a resumé of Gaddafi’s career shown on BBC World Service Television on the night of 20 October, John Simpson stopped well short of endorsing either charge, noting of the Berlin bombing that ‘it may or may not have been Colonel Gaddafi’s work,’ an honest formula that acknowledged the room for doubt. Of Lockerbie he remarked cautiously that Libya subsequently ‘got the full blame’, a statement that is quite true.

It is often claimed by British and American government personnel and the Western press that Libya admitted responsibility for Lockerbie in 2003-4. This is untrue. As part of the deal with Washington and London, which included Libya paying $2.7 billion to the 270 victims’ families, the Libyan government in a letter to the president of the UN Security Council stated that Libya ‘has facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103, and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials’. That this formula was agreed in negotiations between the Libyan and British (if not also American) governments was made clear when it was echoed word for word by Jack Straw in the House of Commons. The formula allowed the government to give the public the impression that Libya was indeed guilty, while also allowing Tripoli to say that it had admitted nothing of the kind. The statement does not even mention al-Megrahi by name, much less acknowledge his guilt or that of the Libyan government, and any self-respecting government would sign up to the general principle that it is responsible for the actions of its officials. Tripoli’s position was spelled out by the prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, on 24 February 2004 on the Today programme: he made it clear that the payment of compensation did not imply an admission of guilt and explained that the Libyan government had ‘bought peace’.

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The UN Security Council chooses war when no other policy has even been tried

The claim that the ‘international community’ had no choice but to intervene militarily and that the alternative was to do nothing is false. An active, practical, non-violent alternative was proposed, and deliberately rejected. The argument for a no-fly zone and then for a military intervention employing ‘all necessary measures’ was that only this could stop the regime’s repression and protect civilians. Yet many argued that the way to protect civilians was not to intensify the conflict by intervening on one side or the other, but to end it by securing a ceasefire followed by political negotiations. A number of proposals were put forward. The International Crisis Group, for instance, where I worked at the time, published a statement on 10 March arguing for a two-point initiative: (i) the formation of a contact group or committee drawn from Libya’s North African neighbours and other African states with a mandate to broker an immediate ceasefire; (ii) negotiations between the protagonists to be initiated by the contact group and aimed at replacing the current regime with a more accountable, representative and law-abiding government. This proposal was echoed by the African Union and was consistent with the views of many major non-African states – Russia, China, Brazil and India, not to mention Germany and Turkey. It was restated by the ICG in more detail (adding provision for the deployment under a UN mandate of an international peacekeeping force to secure the ceasefire) in an open letter to the UN Security Council on 16 March, the eve of the debate which concluded with the adoption of UNSC Resolution 1973. In short, before the Security Council voted to approve the military intervention, a worked-out proposal had been put forward which addressed the need to protect civilians by seeking a rapid end to the fighting, and set out the main elements of an orderly transition to a more legitimate form of government, one that would avoid the danger of an abrupt collapse into anarchy, with all it might mean for Tunisia’s revolution, the security of Libya’s other neighbours and the wider region. The imposition of a no-fly zone would be an act of war: as the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress on 2 March, it required the disabling of Libya’s air defences as an indispensable preliminary. In authorising this and ‘all necessary measures’, the Security Council was choosing war when no other policy had even been tried. Why?

Many critics of Nato’s intervention have complained that it departed from the terms of Resolution 1973 and was for that reason illegal; that the resolution authorised neither regime change nor the introduction of troops on the ground. This is a misreading. Article 4 ruled out the introduction of an occupying force. But Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations states that ‘territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army,’ a definition conserved by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. What Resolution 1973 ruled out was the introduction of a force intended to take full political and legal responsibility for the place, but that was never the intention; ground forces were indeed eventually introduced, but they have at no point accepted political or legal responsibility for anything and so fall short of the conventional definition of an occupying force. It may be that this misreading of the resolution was connived at by the governments that drafted it in order to secure the best (or least bad) tally of votes in favour on 17 March; this would of course be only one instance of the sophistry to which the metteurs en scène of intervention have resorted. And regime change was tacitly covered by the phrase ‘all necessary measures’. That this was the right way to read the resolution had already been made clear by the stentorian rhetoric of Cameron and Hague, Sarkozy and Juppé, and Obama and Clinton in advance of the Security Council vote. Since the issue was defined from the outset as protecting civilians from Gaddafi’s murderous onslaught ‘on his own people’, it followed that effective protection required the elimination of the threat, which was Gaddafi himself for as long as he was in power (subsequently revised to ‘for as long as he is in Libya’ before finally becoming ‘for as long as he is alive’). From the attitudes struck by the Western powers in the run-up to the Security Council debate, it was evident that the cleverly drafted resolution tacitly authorised a war to effect regime change. Those who subsequently said that they did not know that regime change had been authorised either did not understand the logic of events or were pretending to misunderstand in order to excuse their failure to oppose it. By inserting ‘all necessary measures’ into the resolution, London, Paris and Washington licensed themselves, with Nato as their proxy, to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted in the full knowledge that they would never be held to account, since as permanent veto-holding members of the Security Council they are above all laws.

In two respects the conduct of the Western powers and Nato did indeed appear explicitly to violate the terms of Security Council resolutions. The first instance was the repeated supply of arms to the rebellion by France, Qatar, Egypt (according to the Wall Street Journal) and no doubt various other members of the ‘coalition of the willing’ in what seemed a clear breach of the arms embargo imposed by the Security Council in Articles 9, 10 and 11 of Resolution 1970 passed on 26 February and reiterated in Articles 13, 14 and 15 of Resolution 1973. It was later explained that Resolution 1973 superseded 1970 in this respect and that the magic phrase ‘all necessary measures’ licensed the violation of the arms embargo; thus Article 4 of Resolution 1973 trumped Articles 13 to 15 of the same resolution. In this way it was arranged that any state might supply arms to the rebels while none might do so to the Libyan government, which by that time had been decreed illegitimate by London, Paris and Washington. Scarcely anyone has drawn attention to the second violation.

The efforts of the ICG and others seeking an alternative to war did not go entirely unnoticed. Apparently their proposals made some impression on the less gung-ho members of the Security Council, and so a left-handed homage was paid them by the drafters of Resolution 1973. In the final version – unlike any earlier ones – the idea of a peaceful solution was incorporated in the first two articles, which read:

[The Security Council …]

(1) Demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians; (2) Stresses the need to intensify efforts to find a solution to the crisis which responds to the legitimate demands of the Libyan people and notes the decisions of the secretary-general to send his special envoy to Libya and of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union to send its ad hoc High Level Committee to Libya with the aim of facilitating dialogue to lead to the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution.

In this way Resolution 1973 seemed to be actively envisaging a peaceful alternative as its first preference, while authorising military intervention as a fallback if a ceasefire was refused. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth.

The West rejected Gaddafi’s ceasefire because it was the last thing they wanted

Resolution 1973 was passed in New York late in the evening of 17 March. The next day, Gaddafi, whose forces were camped on the southern edge of Benghazi, announced a ceasefire in conformity with Article 1 and proposed a political dialogue in line with Article 2. What the Security Council demanded and suggested, he provided in a matter of hours. His ceasefire was immediately rejected on behalf of the NTC by a senior rebel commander, Khalifa Haftar, and dismissed by Western governments. ‘We will judge him by his actions not his words,’ David Cameron declared, implying that Gaddafi was expected to deliver a complete ceasefire by himself: that is, not only order his troops to cease fire but ensure this ceasefire was maintained indefinitely despite the fact that the NTC was refusing to reciprocate. Cameron’s comment also took no account of the fact that Article 1 of Resolution 1973 did not of course place the burden of a ceasefire exclusively on Gaddafi. No sooner had Cameron covered for the NTC’s unmistakable violation of Resolution 1973 than Obama weighed in, insisting that for Gaddafi’s ceasefire to count for anything he would (in addition to sustaining it indefinitely, single-handed, irrespective of the NTC) have to withdraw his forces not only from Benghazi but also from Misrata and from the most important towns his troops had retaken from the rebellion, Ajdabiya in the east and Zawiya in the west – in other words, he had to accept strategic defeat in advance. These conditions, which were impossible for Gaddafi to accept, were absent from Article 1.

Cameron and Obama had made clear that the last thing they wanted was a ceasefire, that the NTC could violate Article 1 of the resolution with impunity and that in doing so it would be acting with the agreement of its Security Council sponsors. Gaddafi’s first ceasefire offer came to nothing, as did his second offer of 20 March. A week later, Turkey, which had been working within the Nato framework to help organise the provision of humanitarian aid to Benghazi, announced that it had been talking to both sides and offered to broker a ceasefire. The offer was given what Ernest Bevin would have called ‘a complete ignoral’ and nothing came of it either, as nothing came of a later initiative, seeking a ceasefire and negotiations (to which Gaddafi explicitly agreed), undertaken by the African Union in April. It too was rejected out of hand by the NTC, which demanded Gaddafi’s resignation as a condition of any ceasefire. This demand went beyond even Obama’s earlier list of conditions, none of which had figured in Resolution 1973. More to the point, it was a demand that made a ceasefire impossible, since securing a ceasefire requires commanders with decisive authority over their armies, and removing Gaddafi would have meant that no one any longer had overall authority over the regime’s forces.

By incorporating the alternative non-violent policy proposals in its text, the Western war party had been pulling a confidence trick, stringing along a few undecided states to get them to vote for the resolution on 17 March: a war to the finish, violent regime change and the end of Gaddafi had been the policy from the outset. All subsequent offers of a ceasefire by Gaddafi – on 30 April, 26 May and 9 June – were treated with the same contempt.

Those who believe in ‘international law’ and are happy with wars they consider ‘legal’ may wish to make something of this. But the crucial point here has to do with the logic of events and the policy choices associated with them. In incorporating the ICG’s – or, more generally, the peace party’s – suggestions into the revised text of Resolution 1973, London, Paris and Washington deftly headed off a real debate in the Security Council, one that would have considered alternatives, at the price of making their own resolution incoherent.

London, Paris and Washington could not allow a ceasefire because it would have involved negotiations, first about peace lines, peacekeepers and so forth, and then about fundamental political differences. And all this would have subverted the possibility of the kind of regime change that interested the Western powers. The sight of representatives of the rebellion sitting down to talks with representatives of Gaddafi’s regime, Libyans talking to Libyans, would have called the demonisation of Gaddafi into question. The moment he became once more someone people talked to and negotiated with, he would in effect have been rehabilitated. And that would have ruled out violent – revolutionary? – regime change and so denied the Western powers their chance of a major intervention in North Africa’s Spring, and the whole interventionist scheme would have flopped. The logic of the demonisation of Gaddafi in late February, crowned by the referral of his alleged crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court by Resolution 1970 and then by France’s decision on 10 March to recognise the NTC as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people, meant that Gaddafi was banished for ever from the realm of international political discourse, never to be negotiated with, not even about the surrender of Tripoli when in August he offered to talk terms to spare the city further destruction, an offer once more dismissed with contempt. And this logic was preserved from start to finish, as the death toll of civilians in Tripoli and above all Sirte proves. The mission was always regime change, a truth obscured by the hullabaloo over the supposedly imminent massacre at Benghazi.

No evidence to suggest that a massacre was going to take place

The official version is that it was the prospect of a ‘second Srebrenica’ or even ‘another Rwanda’ in Benghazi were Gaddafi allowed to retake the city that forced the ‘international community’ (minus Russia, China, India, Brazil, Germany, Turkey et al) to act. What grounds were there for supposing that, once Gaddafi’s forces had retaken Benghazi, they would be ordered to embark on a general massacre?

Gaddafi dealt with many revolts over the years. He invariably quashed them by force and usually executed the ringleaders. The NTC and other rebel leaders had good reason to fear that once Benghazi had fallen to government troops they would be rounded up and made to pay the price. So it was natural that they should try to convince the ‘international community’ that it was not only their lives that were at stake, but those of thousands of ordinary civilians. But in retaking the towns that the uprising had briefly wrested from the government’s control, Gaddafi’s forces had committed no massacres at all; the fighting had been bitter and bloody, but there had been nothing remotely resembling the slaughter at Srebrenica, let alone in Rwanda. The only known massacre carried out during Gaddafi’s rule was the killing of some 1200 Islamist prisoners at Abu Salim prison in 1996. This was a very dark affair, and whether or not Gaddafi ordered it, it is fair to hold him responsible for it. It was therefore reasonable to be concerned about what the regime might do and how its forces would behave in Benghazi once they had retaken it, and to deter Gaddafi from ordering or allowing any excesses. But that is not what was decided. What was decided was to declare Gaddafi guilty in advance of a massacre of defenceless civilians and instigate the process of destroying his regime and him (and his family) by way of punishment of a crime he was yet to commit, and actually unlikely to commit, and to persist with this process despite his repeated offers to suspend military action.

There was no question of anything that could properly be described as ethnic cleansing or genocide in the Libyan context. All Libyans are Muslims, the majority of Arab-Berber descent, and while the small Berber-speaking minority had a grievance concerning recognition of its language and identity (its members are Ibadi, not Sunni, Muslims), this was not what the conflict was about. The conflict was not ethnic or racial but political, between defenders and opponents of the Gaddafi regime; whichever side won could be expected to deal roughly with its adversaries, but the premises for a large-scale massacre of civilians on grounds of their ethnic or racial identity were absent. All the talk about another Srebrenica or Rwanda was extreme hyperbole clearly intended to panic various governments into supporting the war party’s project of a military intervention in order to save the rebellion from imminent defeat.

February 21: the day all the important cards were dealt

Why did the panic factor work so well with international, or at any rate Western, public opinion and especially governments? It is reliably reported that Obama’s fear of being accused of allowing another Srebrenica tipped the scales in Washington when not only Robert Gates but also, initially, Hillary Clinton had resisted US involvement. I believe the answer is that Gaddafi had already been so thoroughly demonised that the wildest accusations about his likely (or, as many claimed, certain) future conduct would be believed whatever his actual behaviour. This demonisation took place on 21 February, the day all the important cards were dealt.

On 21 February the world was shocked by the news that the Gaddafi regime was using its airforce to slaughter peaceful demonstrators in Tripoli and other cities. The main purveyor of this story was al-Jazeera, but the story was quickly taken up by the Sky network, CNN, the BBC, ITN et al. Before the day was over the idea of imposing a no-fly zone on Libya was widely accepted, as was the idea of a Security Council resolution imposing sanctions and an arms embargo, freezing Libya’s assets and referring Gaddafi and his associates to the ICC on charges of crimes against humanity. Resolution 1970 was duly passed five days later and the no-fly zone proposal monopolised international discussion of the Libyan crisis from then on.

Many other things happened on 21 February. Zawiya was reported to be in chaos. The minister of justice, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, resigned. Fifty Serbian workers were attacked by looters. Canada condemned ‘the violent crackdowns on innocent demonstrators’. Two airforce pilots flew their fighters to Malta claiming they did so to avoid carrying out an order to bomb and strafe demonstrators. By late afternoon regime troops and snipers were reliably reported to be firing on crowds in Tripoli. Eighteen Korean workers were wounded when their place of work was attacked by a hundred armed men. The European Union condemned the repression, followed by Ban Ki-moon, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi. Ten Egyptians were reported to have been killed by armed men in Tobruk. William Hague, who had condemned the repression the previous day (as had Hillary Clinton), announced at a press conference that he had information that Gaddafi had fled Libya and was en route to Venezuela. The Libyan ambassador to Poland stated that defections from the armed forces as well as the government could not be stopped and Gaddafi’s days were numbered. Numerous media outlets carried the story that Libya’s largest tribe, the Warfalla, had joined the rebellion. Libya’s ambassadors to Washington, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia all resigned, and its deputy ambassador to the UN, Ibrahim Dabbashi, rounded off the day by calling a news conference at Libya’s mission in New York and claimed that Gaddafi had ‘already started the genocide against the Libyan people’ and was flying in African mercenaries. It was Dabbashi more than anyone else who, having primed his audience in this way, launched the idea that the UN should impose a no-fly zone and the ICC should investigate Gaddafi’s ‘crimes against humanity and crimes of war’.

At this point the total death toll since 15 February was 233, according to Human Rights Watch. The Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme suggested between 300 and 400 (but it also announced the same day that Sirte had fallen to the rebels). We can compare these figures with the total death toll in Tunisia (300) and Egypt (at least 846). We can also compare both HRW’s and FIDH’s figures with the death toll, plausibly estimated at between 500 and 600, of the seven days of rioting in Algeria in October 1988, when the French government rigorously refrained from making any comment on events. But the figures were beside the point on 21 February; it was impressions that counted. The impression made by the story that Gaddafi’s airforce was slaughtering peaceful protesters was huge, and it was natural to take the resignations of Abdul Jalil and the ambassadors, the flight of the two pilots, and especially Dabbashi’s dramatic declaration about genocide as corroborating al-Jazeera’s story.

Goodies and baddies (to use Tony Blair’s categories) had been clearly identified, the Western media’s outraged attention totally engaged, the Security Council urgently seized of the matter, the ICC primed to stand by, and a fundamental shift towards intervention had been made – all in a matter of hours. And quite right too, many may say. Except that the al-Jazeera story was untrue, just as the story of the Warfalla’s siding with the rebellion was untrue and Hague’s story that Gaddafi was fleeing to Caracas was untrue. And, of course, Dabbashi’s ‘genocide’ claim was histrionic rubbish which none of the organisations with an interest in the use of the term was moved to challenge.

These considerations raise awkward questions. If the reason cited by these ambassadors and other regime personnel for defecting on 21 February was false, what really prompted them to defect and make the declarations they did? What was al-Jazeera up to? And what was Hague up to? A serious history of this affair when more evidence comes to light will seek answers to these questions. But I don’t find it hard to understand that Gaddafi and his son should suddenly have resorted to such fierce rhetoric. They clearly believed that, far from confronting merely ‘innocent demonstrators’ as the Canadians had it, they were being destabilised by forces acting to a plan with international ramifications. It is possible that they were mistaken and that everything was spontaneous and accidental and a chaotic muddle; I do not pretend to know for sure. But there had been plans to destabilise their regime before, and they had grounds for thinking that they were being destabilised again. The slanted coverage in the British media in particular, notably the insistence that the regime was faced only by peaceful demonstrators when, in addition to ordinary Libyans trying to make their voices heard non-violently, it was facing politically motivated as well as random violence (e.g. the lynching of 50 alleged mercenaries in al-Baida on 19 February), was consistent with the destabilisation theory. And on the evidence I have since been able to collect, I am inclined to think that destabilisation is exactly what was happening.

In the days that followed I made efforts to check the al-Jazeera story for myself. One source I consulted was the well-regarded blog Informed Comment, maintained and updated every day by Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan. This carried a post on 21 February entitled ‘Qaddafi’s bombardments recall Mussolini’s’, which made the point that ‘in 1933-40, Italo Balbo championed aerial warfare as the best means to deal with uppity colonial populations.’ The post began: ‘The strafing and bombardment in Tripoli of civilian demonstrators by Muammar Gaddafi’s fighter jets on Monday …’, with the underlined words linking to an article by Sarah El Deeb and Maggie Michael for Associated Press published at 9 p.m. on 21 February. This article provided no corroboration of Cole’s claim that Gaddafi’s fighter jets (or any other aircraft) had strafed or bombed anyone in Tripoli or anywhere else. The same is true of every source indicated in the other items on Libya relaying the aerial onslaught story which Cole posted that same day.

I was in Egypt for most of the time, but since many journalists visiting Libya were transiting through Cairo, I made a point of asking those I could get hold of what they had picked up in the field. None of them had found any corroboration of the story. I especially remember on 18 March asking the British North Africa expert Jon Marks, just back from an extended tour of Cyrenaica (taking in Ajdabiya, Benghazi, Brega, Derna and Ras Lanuf), what he had heard about the story. He told me that no one he had spoken to had mentioned it. Four days later, on 22 March, USA Today carried a striking article by Alan Kuperman, the author of The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention and coeditor of Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention. The article, ‘Five Things the US Should Consider in Libya’, provided a powerful critique of the Nato intervention as violating the conditions that needed to be observed for a humanitarian intervention to be justified or successful. But what interested me most was his statement that ‘despite ubiquitous cellphone cameras, there are no images of genocidal violence, a claim that smacks of rebel propaganda.’ So, four weeks on, I was not alone in finding no evidence for the aerial slaughter story. I subsequently discovered that the issue had come up more than a fortnight earlier, on 2 March, in hearings in the US Congress when Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were testifying. They told Congress that they had no confirmation of reports of aircraft controlled by Gaddafi firing on citizens.

The story was untrue, just as the story that went round the world in August 1990 that Iraqi troops were slaughtering Kuwaiti babies by turning off their incubators was untrue and the claims in the sexed-up dossier on Saddam’s WMD were untrue. But as Mohammed Khider, one of the founders of the FLN, once remarked, ‘when everyone takes up a falsehood, it becomes a reality.’ The rush to regime change by war was on and could not be stopped.

The intervention tarnished every one of the principles the war party invoked to justify it. It occasioned the deaths of thousands of civilians, debased the idea of democracy, debased the idea of law and passed off a counterfeit revolution as the real thing. Two assertions that were endlessly reiterated – they were fundamental to the Western powers’ case for war – were that Gaddafi was engaged in ‘killing his own people’ and that he had ‘lost all legitimacy’, the latter presented as the corollary of the former. Both assertions involved mystifications.

‘Killing his own people’ is a hand-me-down line from the previous regime change war against Saddam Hussein. In both cases it suggested two things: that the despot was a monster and that he represented nothing in the society he ruled. It is tendentious and dishonest to say simply that Gaddafi was ‘killing his own people’; he was killing those of his people who were rebelling. He was doing in this respect what every government in history has done when faced with a rebellion. We are all free to prefer the rebels to the government in any given case. But the relative merits of the two sides aren’t the issue in such situations: the issue is the right of a state to defend itself against violent subversion. That right, once taken for granted as the corollary of sovereignty, is now compromised. Theoretically, it is qualified by certain rules. But, as we have seen, the invocation of rules (e.g. no genocide) can go together with a cynical exaggeration and distortion of the facts by other states. There are in fact no reliable rules. A state may repress a revolt if the permanent veto-holding powers on the Security Council allow it to (e.g. Bahrain, but also Sri Lanka) and not otherwise. And if a state thinks it can take this informal authorisation to defend itself as read because it is on good terms with London, Paris and Washington and is honouring all its agreements with them, as Libya was, it had better beware. Terms can change without warning from one day to the next. The matter is now arbitrary, and arbitrariness is the opposite of law.

Supporters of Gaddafi’s regime aren’t part of ‘the Libyan people’

The idea that Gaddafi represented nothing in Libyan society, that he was taking on his entire people and his people were all against him was another distortion of the facts. As we now know from the length of the war, the huge pro-Gaddafi demonstration in Tripoli on 1 July, the fierce resistance Gaddafi’s forces put up, the month it took the rebels to get anywhere at all at Bani Walid and the further month at Sirte, Gaddafi’s regime enjoyed a substantial measure of support, as the NTC did. Libyan society was divided and political division was in itself a hopeful development since it signified the end of the old political unanimity enjoined and maintained by the Jamahiriyya. In this light, the Western governments’ portrayal of ‘the Libyan people’ as uniformly ranged against Gaddafi had a sinister implication, precisely because it insinuated a new Western-sponsored unanimity back into Libyan life. This profoundly undemocratic idea followed naturally from the equally undemocratic idea that, in the absence of electoral consultation or even an opinion poll to ascertain the Libyans’ actual views, the British, French and American governments had the right and authority to determine who was part of the Libyan people and who wasn’t. No one supporting the Gaddafi regime counted. Because they were not part of ‘the Libyan people’ they could not be among the civilians to be protected, even if they were civilians as a matter of mere fact. And they were not protected; they were killed by Nato air strikes as well as by uncontrolled rebel units. The number of such civilian victims on the wrong side of the war must be many times the total death toll as of 21 February. But they don’t count, any more than the thousands of young men in Gaddafi’s army who innocently imagined that they too were part of ‘the Libyan people’ and were only doing their duty to the state counted when they were incinerated by Nato’s planes or extra-judicially executed en masse after capture, as in Sirte.

The same contempt for democratic principle characterised the repeated declarations in the West that Gaddafi had ‘lost all legitimacy’. Every state needs international recognition and to that extent depends on external sources of legitimation. But the democratic idea gives priority to national over international legitimacy. With their claim of lost legitimacy the Western powers were not only pre-empting an eventual election in Libya which would ascertain the true balance of public opinion, they were mimicking the Gaddafi regime: in the Jamahiriyya the people were liable to be trumped by the Revolution as a source of superior legitimacy.

‘If you break it, you own it,’ Colin Powell famously remarked, in order to alert the Beltway to the risks of a renewed war against Iraq. The lesson of the mess in Iraq has been learned, at least to the extent that the Western powers and Nato have repeatedly insisted that the Libyan people – the NTC and the revolutionary militias – own their revolution. So, not owning Libya after the fall of Gaddafi, Nato and London and Paris and Washington cannot be accused of breaking it or be held responsible for the debris. The result is a shadow play. The NTC occupies centre stage in Libya, but since February every key decision has been made in the Western capitals in consultation with the other, especially Arab, members of the ‘contact group’ meeting in London or Paris or Doha. It is unlikely that the structure of power and the system of decision-making which have guided the ‘revolution’ since March are going to change radically. And so unless something happens to upset the calculations that have brought Nato and the NTC this far, what will probably emerge is a system of dual power in some ways analogous to that of the Jamahiriyya itself, and similarly inimical to democratic accountability. That is, a system of formal decision-making about secondary matters acting as a façade for a separate and independent, because offshore, system of decision-making about everything that really counts (oil, gas, water, finance, trade, security, geopolitics) behind the scenes. Libya’s formal government will be a junior partner of the new Libya’s Western sponsors. This will be more of a return to the old ways of the monarchy than to those of the Jamahiriyya.

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.

• The looting, burning and emptying of the villages of al-Awaniya, Rayayinah, Zawiyat al-Bagul and Qawalish by vengeful rebels in July, as documented by Human Rights Watch.

• The bombing of Libyan state T.V. by R.A.F. fighter jets in July, which reportedly killed a number of journalists and was subsequently condemned as a war crime by Reporters Without Borders, UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists.

• The countless other civilians killed by NATO bombing raids, as reported by various new agencies and even corporate journalists themselves.

• What can only be described as the ethnic cleansing of Tawergha, a primarily black town that was emptied of it’s population (circa 30’000) by vengeful rebels in mid-August, with NATO air support. The rebels then proceeded to loot and down burn homes, kill livestock, and spray racist graffiti everywhere while vowing to never let the Tawerghans return.

• The reduction of Sirte, previously a town of 100’000 people, to a smoking ruin via a three to four week long siege. The siege encompassed daily indiscriminate bombing, the cutting off of water, food, medicine and electricity supplies, the shelling of a hospital, and widespread looting by rebels. Aid agencies described what was happening to the town as a humanitarian disaster.
• The looting, burning and emptying of Abu Hadi by vengeful rebels in early October, as documented by the L.A. Times.

• The ongoing torture in NTC detention centres, as documented by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

• The general persecution of black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans by rebel groups in Tripoli, with Human Rights Watch reporting that ‘widespread arbitrary arrests and frequent abuse have created a grave sense of fear among the city’s African population’, Amnesty International reporting that ‘black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans are at high risk of abuse by anti-Gaddafi forces’.But how much of this is going to be airbrushed out of what you might describe as the Official History – and tomorrow’s leaders will be the first draft of it – in favour of the grand but clearly fraudulent narrative of benevolent NATO protecting civilians, promoting democracy and just trying to do what’s right?

Horace Campbell reconstructs ‘the decision at the highest levels’ to execute Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and considers ‘the urgency for organising to oppose the remilitarisation of Africa.’

A picture of a damaged neighbourhood in the city of Sirte on October 28, 2011.

The inability of the Western media and other ‘information’ sources to manage the news of the execution of Colonel Gaddafi was compounded by the news, according to the New York based Human Rights Watch, that 53 supporters of the ousted regime were executed at a hotel in Sirte with their hands tied behind their backs (Huffington Post October 26, 2011). Wall-to-wall news bulletins of the demise of Colonel Gaddafi, which should have been a moment of victory for the imperial forces, have now turned into a public relations disaster and nightmare for those military planners who want to distance themselves from the gruesome details of the executions. These immoral and illegal actions by the military forces and private contractors in Libya backed by NATO were furthered with disrespect for religious and cultural traditions where the mortal remains of Gaddafi and his son, Muatassim, were kept in a meat freezer until the bodies started to decompose.

Finally a supposedly secret burial failed to resolve the tussle between those who had hijacked the body in the on-going struggle inside the National Transitional Council (NTC) between the three centers of power, Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata. The factions fear each other and they have lost the one factor that united them, hatred for Gaddafi. With fear of other factions in the NTC, the Benghazi section is calling for the United Nations Security Council to extend the mandate of the no fly zone until 31 December 2011. There are members of the UNSC such as Russia who oppose this extension. The African Union must call for the immediate end to the mandate of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.

It is now becoming clear that the Western leaders (especially those from Britain, France, Italy and the United States) used the cover of protection of civilian lives to go to Libya to carry out regime change. Gaddafi had vowed to fight to the end and he did. The destruction of Libya by NATO jets was totally unnecessary. Can the people of the West and their leaders say that Libya is now better off in October 2011 than it was in March 2011?

In a moment of revolutionary upheavals all over the world, the leaders of France, Britain and the United States intervened in Libya to divert attention from their problems and to derail the wave of revolutionary change that is now underway internationally. Italy, which is in the throes of a profound crisis, tagged along to protect its colonial heritage and oil contracts in Libya.

On Tuesday 25 October 2011 the Los Angeles Times reported that Libya had more than US$200 billion in reserves. As outlined in my article, ‘Global NATO and the Recolonisation of Africa’, it is no secret that leaders such as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy deeply want to get their hands on this money to save the banks in Europe and to save the Euro. But the crisis in the Eurozone area is too far gone and the depth of the structural and systemic crisis is too extreme to save the politicians who oversaw this military campaign inside Libya.

The NATO forces (meaning the countries of this Libya campaign) that were using international morality and international law to justify the recolonisation and destruction of Africa are now exposed. The attempt to humiliate Gaddafi was a failed effort to humiliate oppressed peoples and decent elements within the armed forces of these societies who are seeking another world. In this article, I seek to reconstruct the decision at the highest levels to execute Colonel Gaddafi and to analyse the urgency for organising to oppose the remilitarisation of Africa.

Planning for the execution of Gaddafi

When on Sunday 23 October 2011, US secretary of state Hilary Clinton said on the US television Channel NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ that she backed a proposal that the United Nations investigate Gaddafi’s death and requested that Libya’s TNC also look into the circumstances, it was clear that the execution had backfired. This was the height of hypocrisy, or what would be called a pre-emptive strike on her own reputation. Under international law and the Geneva Conventions, Hillary Clinton could be held to account for her statements in Tripoli on 18 October when she called for Gaddafi’s capture or killing.

Security planners and military strategists of the Obama Whitehouse are now cowering in shame on the fallout from the failure of the Libyan quagmire and the exposure of the bankruptcy of the US military and imperial logic.

Back in March The New York Times reported that the National Security Council of the White House had debated the execution of Colonel Gaddafi. The article, ‘Before Qaddafi’s Death, U.S. Debated His Future’, stated that the White House considered ‘The killing of Colonel Qaddafi … [as] one of the three scenarios considered last Wednesday.’ The article in the Times also said, ‘Putting the colonel on trial, either in Libya or The Hague, was one of a host of situations for which the administration planned.’

The next day Colonel Gaddafi was killed. What is being asked all over the world is why kill him? Why not put him on trial, what is it that the western leaders do not want to come out in a trial?

Gaddafi’s escape from Tripoli

Rebel fighters shoot during street fighting in the Abu Salim district in Tripoli on Aug. 25, 2011.

‘Mansour Dhao Ibrahim, one of the military leaders who survived the murder and execution of the Gaddafi entourage has revealed that Colonel Gaddafi had escaped from Tripoli to Sirte on 21 August. Reports in the international media are that the decision for Gaddafi to stay in Sirte was based on Muatassim, the colonel’s son. The report continued that Gaddafi’s son and the military entourage had ‘reasoned that the city, long known as an important pro-Qaddafi stronghold and under frequent bombardment by NATO airstrikes, was the last place anyone would look.’

In August 2011, after the capture of Tripoli by the Qatari Army, the British Special Air Service and private military contractors to Tripoli, there was euphoria at NATO headquarters. Having declared that Tripoli had been ‘liberated’, the NATO headquarters had been issuing communiqués since August that all Libya was about to be liberated. There was anxiety when there was stiff resistance in Sirte and every other day, NATO was declaring that Sirte was about to fall.

NATO, which had started the war under the pretext of responsibility ‘to protect’, had destroyed the most of Libya . From the nature of the resistance, NATO and their satellite intercepts had found out that Gaddafi was in Sirte, hence the NSC meetings and deliberations.

The New York Times’ report on the ‘Last Days of Gaddafi’ has revealed for posterity that:

‘The colonel traveled with about 10 people, including close aides and guards. Muatassim, who commanded the loyalist forces, traveled separately from his father, fearing that his own satellite phone was being tracked. Apart from a phone, which the colonel used to make frequent statements to a Syrian television station that became his official outlet, Colonel Qaddafi was largely “cut off from the world”.’

It was this satellite phone that was tracked so that when Sirte was bombed to smithereens, there was only one option left for Gaddafi, and that was to make a run to escape.

British news reports from both the Telegraph and The Independent UK since 21 August 2001 had been reporting that SAS and US Special forces were hunting for Gaddafi. British SAS forces and U.S. Special Forces had been scouring the Sirte area for Gaddafi, unable to find him.

According to these reports, when the resistance continued for two months, the British and US Special Forces on the ground disguised as Libyan NTC fighters had been coordinating the bombing campaign of Sitre. These SAS forces synchronised the bombing and one or two weeks before the execution, ‘NATO had pinpointed Gaddafi’s position after an intelligence breakthrough.’

Once the SAS and the coordinating forces confirmed Gaddafi’s position, ‘an American drone and an array of NATO eavesdropping aircraft had been trained on his Sirte stronghold to ensure he could not escape.’

This was when the debates on execution intensified and the drones were deployed to ensure that Gaddafi did not escape from Sirte.

US drones vs. French jets

Residents walks on a street covered in debris after fighting between pro and anti-Gaddafi fighters ended, in Sirte October 28, 2011.

‘About two weeks ago, as the former rebels stormed the city center, the colonel and his sons were trapped shuttling between two houses in a residential area called District No. 2. They were surrounded by hundreds of former rebels, firing at the area with heavy machine guns, rockets and mortars. “The only decision was whether to live or to die,” Mr. Dhao said. Colonel Qaddafi decided it was time to leave, and planned to flee to one of his houses nearby, where he had been born. On Thursday, a convoy of more than 40 cars was supposed to leave at about around 3 a.m.’

With the voice recognition technology picking up any call made by Gaddafi, the drones were called in when the convoy carrying Gaddafi was pinpointed by the drone.

According to The Daily Telegraph (as reported by Empire Strikes Black):

’They built up a normal pattern of life picture so that when something unusual happened this morning such as a large group of vehicles gathering together, that came across as highly unusual activity and the decision was taken to follow them and prosecute an attack.

‘Electronic warfare aircraft, either an American Rivet Joint or a French C160 Gabriel, also picked up Gaddafi’s movements as he attempted to escape.’

Hilary Clinton had flown to Tripoli on Tuesday 18 October and from The New York Times report on the debate on Gaddafi’s future, Clinton made her position clear as reported in the international media when she declared that she wanted Gaddafi killed or captured.

Was this a clear message to the Special Forces on the ground that the NATO forces wanted Gaddafi killed? The Geneva conditions explicitly stated that prisoners of war should be humanely treated. In normal situations of the rule of international law this question of the manner of the execution would be taken up under the Geneva Conventions.

‘In a Toyota Land Cruiser, Colonel Qaddafi traveled with his chief of security, a relative, the driver and Mr. Dhao. The colonel did not say much during the drive. NATO warplanes and former rebel fighters found them half an hour after they left. When a missile struck near the car, the airbags deployed, said Mr. Dhao, who was hit by shrapnel in the strike. He said he tried to escape with Colonel Qaddafi and other men, walking first to a farm, then to the main road, toward some drainage pipes. “The shelling was constant,” Mr. Dhao said, adding that he was struck by shrapnel again and fell unconscious. When he woke up, he was in the hospital.’

Sensitive to the repercussions of this attack on the convoy, the British media declared early that the RAF had not been involved in the aerial attack. With great bravado, the French took credit for firing missile that stopped the car carrying Colonel Gaddafi.

French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet revealed that a French Mirage-2000 fired a warning shot at a column of several dozen vehicles fleeing Sirte.

Managing the news of the execution of Gaddafi

An anti-Gaddafi fighter walks amidst the rubble after a NATO airstrike on one of the buildings at Ouagadougou Conference Center in Sirte October 9, 2011.

It is now known that Gaddafi was alive after the airstrike by the French jets. With the clear mandate emanating from the discussions at the highest levels, the ‘NTC forces’ were on the ground to find the wounded Gaddafi. These newspapers would have the world believe that it was by chance that these ‘NTC’ fighters happened to find the wounded Gaddafi. Thanks to cell phone technology and alternative news sources, we know that when these ‘NTC forces’ captured Gaddafi, he was alive.

There are also visual images of the humiliation of the wounded Gaddafi and then later the dead body.

Once Gaddafi was executed with a bullet to the head, the great challenge for the NATO forces was how to manage the news of the execution, with the full knowledge that there were visual images of Gadddafi alive and then dead.

This was when the disinformation planners came up with the theory that Gaddafi was killed in crossfire. But the inconsistencies from the western news sources were so blatant that it was embarrassing for the psychological warfare experts of NATO. Was it crossfire, was it stray bullet, was it an assassination? There were too many cell phone images of what transpired for the western intelligence agencies to attempt to cover the clear violation of international law.

In this disinformation effort to convince the world that Gaddafi was killed in a crossfire or by a stray bullet, events were moving too fast so NATO could not control the disinformation and lies. Throughout the war, disinformation had been central to the operations.

As Lizzie Phelan had reported for Pambazuka News and other media, NATO had been willing and able ‘to not just fabricate events but to create.’ The fabrications now failed and it was clear that the manner of the killing of Gaddafi was meant to humiliate him. One does not have to support Gaddafi to realise that this kind of killing will not lay any basis for a society free from revenge killings. The disinformation backfired – even those who opposed the antics of Gaddafi in Africa were now opposed to the wanton disregard for international law.

From all corners of the world, NATO and the US Africa Command were being condemned. Despite efforts by western news agencies to place a microphone before those who would parrot the western line, the disregard for law and the hypocrisy of those who had used the mandate of the ‘responsibility to protect’ to carry out executions were too blatant. The Russians called for an end to the NATO mission and called for the UN Security Council to end the mandate of the no fly zone. At the United Nations, Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, who has repeatedly accused NATO of exceeding its UN mandate in Libya, has called for ending the mandate of the no-fly zone on October 31. Churkin said extending the UN authorisation beyond Monday October would be ‘unrealistic.’

In Africa, even those who had been opposed to Gaddafi, especially when he called his people rats, were now seeing the real criminal actions being carried out by NATO. Former Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu condemned the killing of Gaddafi, saying mob justice and violence should always be deplored.

‘The manner of the killing of Muammar Gaddafi on Thursday totally detracts from the noble enterprise of instilling a culture of human rights and democracy in Libya… the people of Libya should have demonstrated better values than those of their erstwhile oppressor.’

The same managers of disinformation realised that this manner of the execution revealed the true nature of the NATO/AFRICOM operations so the New York Times editorialised on October 20 that:

‘But a gruesome video broadcast on Al Jazeera – apparently showing him being dragged, beaten and then, perhaps, shot to death by armed men – is deeply troubling, if it is real.

‘Libyans must resist further reprisals and channel their passion into building a united, free and productive country. If not, they risk even more chaos and suffering.’

This same newspaper did not bring out whether there was any the role of US Special Forces and the British SAS on the ground, but from all corners of the world, there were now Human Rights reports calling for an investigation into the manner of the killing. Bloggers and articulate writers were reminding the imperialists that the Third Geneva Convention clearly states (article 13): ‘Prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.’

The Fourth Geneva Convention (article 27): ‘Protected persons are entitled, in all circumstances, to respect for their persons, their honor, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs. They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of violence or threats thereof and against insults and public curiosity.’

The discovery of the 53 corpses at the Mahari hotel, and another ten dumped in a nearby reservoir reveal a glimpse of the bloodletting and indiscriminate killings.

Africans from sub-saharan Africa were being particularly targeted and the opposition to the NTC intensified all over the continent, if not over the world.

Can NATO control Libya?

A volunteer inspects houses for bodies of people killed during the conflict between rebel fighters and forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, in Sirte October 27, 2011.

From the start of the war against the peoples of Libya in March 2011, it became clear that the objective of the war was regime change. Those decent humans who had been offended by the leadership of the Libyan society calling their people rats and feared for a massacre were soon shown the reality that it was the NATO bombing that was a greater threat.

The NATO-led air campaign was launched in March under a UN mandate to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s forces trying to crush popular protests. It was clear that the objective of NATO was not to protect civilians and there was opposition to this NATO operation.

The destruction of Libya was meant to ensure greater western control over that society.

Throughout the war, the African Union spoke with one voice and called for a roadmap that would establish an inclusive government. Experience from Burundi and the work of the Nyerere and Mandela foundations point to the truth that it is in Africa where there is expertise to bring reconciliation. From the actions of the USA, France and Britain, they do not want peace and reconstruction in Libya. France continues to ensnare China in the spoils of war by promising reconstruction contracts. But if the BRICS societies support the African Union, there will be no contracts to be given out by France. National Transitional Council (NTC) Chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil would like the UNSC to extend the mandate of the no fly zone on the grounds of controlling surplus weapons. However, Jalil has no means to exercise political leadership.

The NTC is divided. Three months after Tripoli was ‘liberated’ the leaders in Benghazi are still afraid to move to Tripoli. The Misrata elements of the ‘uprising’ hijacked the body of Gadddafi and kept the body in a meat freezer in Misrata. Humiliation was piled upon total disrespect for religious and traditional customs as the bodies were made a public spectacle. When the bodies started to decompose, they could no longer keep the bodies and Gadddafi and his son were buried in the desert.

African unity cannot be halted

A view of the destroyed buildings along one of the main streets in the city of Sirte after the war October 26, 2011.

Fifty years after Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1961, we now have another gruesome execution of an African leader with the objective of halting the liberation and independence of Africa. In normal circumstances NATO commanders, United Nations personnel, point persons for the Arab League, and other imperial actors would be required to testify before an impartial enquiry in order to justify their role if any in these atrocities. It required the tenacious work of peace loving persons to ensure that Belgium and the USA were named as the murderers of Patrice Lumumba.

Today, international law can only be enforced by a new international alliance of societies that want to avoid total destructions.

In the midst of this crisis, the criminal actions carried out in Libya point to the reality that we are not in normal circumstances. How can the United Nations or NATO investigate crimes committed on their watch? Under the cover of providing security from the air for the TNC, NATO, the UN, and the other imperial actors in this campaign, granted themselves the alibi now being espoused for cold blooded murder. It is unthinkable to believe that NATO and the UN did not know what the NTC and other special forces were doing on the ground. Given the turn of events in Libya, which erupted in the cold blooded bloodletting, what seems to be emerging is some kind of sinister plot to obliterate any remnants of the former regime. There is no justification for such bloodletting. These people, including Gaddafi should have been captured and brought to trial under international law. International law cannot be exercised in a piecemeal manner to suit the whims and fancies of big powers. International law must be applied equally in all circumstances and in all areas of the world.

What has emerged in Libya is a double standard.

The same leaders who proclaim themselves as upholders of human rights applauded the humiliation and execution of Gaddafi. Decent human beings all over the world were outraged and it is now clearer that the decision to execute Gaddafi was made to silence one voice for anti-imperialism.

The execution had the opposite effect and the work for expelling foreign military forces from Africa will be now more intense.

“A determined push by Western wildcatters and big oil companies from fast-growing Asian economies such as those of China and Malaysia may change the fortunes of several countries in remoter and trickier bits of Africa once largely ignored by foreign investors. One of the most spectacular recent finds has been in Uganda. The reserves of the Albertine rift, which takes in the Ugandan and Congolese shores of Lake Albert (see map), are said to need $10 billion for development. All being well, Uganda will soon become a mid-sized producer, alongside countries such as Mexico. Foreign investment in Uganda may nearly double this year to $3 billion. The country expects to earn $2 billion a year from oil by 2015.” [The Economist]

Ugandan military UPDF personnel use swatches to disperse supporters of Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye on May 12

On Friday October 14th President Obama sent a letter to Congress informing them he was sending a small contingent of US Special Ops Forces to Uganda ostensibly on another “humanitarian mission” to advise Ugandan officials tracking down Joseph Kony the newest bogey man being used to justify US intervention, imperialism and the imposition of AFRICOM on the African continent. Just like the Orwellian doublespeak Obama used when he and the NATO warmongers  attacked Libya for “humanitarian reasons” on behalf of the international bankers supposedly to prevent Col. Mormar Kadafi from killing rebels, Obama is now sending troops into Uganda to stop another “notorious bad guy” from murdering, looting and wrecking havoc in Central Africa! This song is getting old and tired: invasion is peace, massive murder of civilians is part of the program and theft of resources is liberation. George Orwell would be so proud.

At some point in time, the US public must stop believing the mass media’s unsubstantiated assertions and start asking pointed questions like: why after twenty-five years is Joseph Kony all of a sudden such an evil force? But beyond that, stop and think a minute and look at history. Where did Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden get the weapons, military support and the knowhow the US claimed they were using to either to kill dissident Iraqis or to mastermind 9-11?  Now we are being asked to believe Joseph Kony is this monster who needs Uncle Sam to come in and bring him to justice?!  We need to ask ourselves where is Kony getting the weapons, camouflage gear, food and supplies he needed to start his reign of terror that has been going on for twenty-five years?  Did the Russians fund and supply him? Is it the Chinese or is it the West (Europeans)? Is it the US? From what the Western media says about him, and we know how reliable they are don’t we, we are supposed to believe Kony is a religious fanatic on a mission to seize power and run the country in accordance with the Ten Commandments. Hmm, except for the fighting, raping and killing he is doing, Kony could fit right in with the Christian Right in the US. He and George W. Bu$h must have a lot in common.

Police spray Ugandan opposition party leaders with coloured water during demonstrations in the capital Kampala on May 10

We are expected to believe via US media brainwashing this guy Kony stayed under the radar, getting guns ammunition, food and supplies from who knows where or out of thin air for twenty-five years then all of a sudden the US decides enough is enough, that US troops are a must and Joseph Kony is the target. Where was Uncle Sam when the Coltan Wars in Central Africa were being fought? What, you never heard of the Coltan Wars or the Congo wars? “Cellphones may have revolutionized the way we communicate, but in Central Africa their biggest legacy is war. Nearly 3 million people have died in Congo in a four-year war over coltan, a heat-resistant mineral ore widely used in cellphones, laptops and playstations. Eighty percent of the world’s coltan reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The mountainous jungle area where the coltan is mined is the battleground of what has been grimly dubbed ‘Africa’s first World War,’ pitting Congolese forces against those of six neighboring countries and numerous armed factions. The victims are mostly civilians. Starvation and disease have killed hundreds of thousands and the fighting has displaced 2 million people from their homes. Often dismissed as an ethnic war, the conflict is really over natural resources sought by foreign corporations — diamonds, tin, copper, gold, but mostly coltan” [Seeing Is Believing]

The US has been openly and clandestinely arming various ethnic groups in Africa for decades, fomenting hostilities and stoking the fires they create in order to justify selling more arms to whomever will buy them. Keep in mind the Africans  are buying the weapons on credit (with interest). This means the banksters get their cut along with the weapons manufacturers and the arms middle men and they all get paid from US tax payer dollars!! “Because many of the recipient countries remain some of the world’s poorest, the U.S. government provided around $87 million in foreign military financing loans (subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars) to cover the costs, increasing the debt burden that is already suffocating the continent. The DRC alone owes more than $150 million in outstanding DoD loans, with Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan owing another $160 million combined. These loans, accrued while corrupt dictators were serving as U.S. clients, have further contributed to the economic hardships of these nations by saddling them with unproductive military debt. In an article titled Why the U.S. Won’t Help, a Nairobi newspaper recently explained, ‘Right from the days of the Cold War, Western governments have been comfortable with a situation in which African regimes squandered meager resources on the instruments of war, borrowing from the West to finance domestic consumption. The war in the Congo and the countries involved in it are a case in point’… In 1998, the State Department licensed commercial weapons sales by U.S. manufacturers to sub-Saharan Africa worth up to $64 million, on top of the $12 million in government-to-government deliveries that year. Commercial sales to the region included 300 M16s, 236 pistols and revolvers, 3940 rifles, and 10.8 million cartridges of .22-.50 caliber ammunition. A number of the countries engaged in the Congo war were recipients of these stocks, including Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Namibia.  Congress also continues to provide only meager amounts of debt relief and development aid. Of the $370 million requested by the Clinton administration for various debt relief initiatives in FY2000, less than half – $123 million – was approved by Congress. The hypocrisy of asking Africa to develop and democratize while shrinking levels of non-military international aid and increasing weapons and training to the continent does not seem to have registered with policy-makers. To demonstrate real commitment to developing a new partnership with Africa, the U.S. needs to redirect the focus away from strengthening military capacity and toward promoting human development in Africa.” [World Policy Institute]

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame (from L-R), Britain's Minister for International Development Andrew Mitchell and Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni on July 30

On top of that the wars create instability and humanitarian crisis which gives the corporations and the Western government who serve them a pretext to come in and steal whatever it is they covet be it coltan, diamonds or in the case of Uganda, oil. Do you get the picture They are doing to Africa what they are doing in our communities here bringing in guns, and drugs fomenting strife and sitting back watching us kill each other!!!  By the way, did Obama or the mainstream media tell you oil was recently discovered in Uganda? “KAMPALA (Reuters) – Uganda expects to start refining crude oil from its fields in 2014 and the proceeds will help end the economy’s dependence on donor aid, its president said. The east African nation discovered commercial oil deposits in 2006 in the Albertine basin along its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo and reserves of about 2.5 billion barrels have been confirmed…  The country’s ministry of energy estimates the basin’s crude reserves could climb to 6 billion barrels when fully explored. Only 40 percent of the basin has so far been studied. In November last year, the ministry said a phased construction of the refinery would begin in 2012, starting with capacity for limited production to satisfy the domestic market whose demand ranges between 20,000-25,000 barrels per day.” [Reuters]

Call me a cynic but it makes sense Obama would send troops into Uganda now that they have discovered oil there; especially as the US moves to secure all the continent’s resources and prevent the Chinese from gaining another toe hold in Africa. This is how they roll. To keep us inthe dark and make us fall for their okey-doke they tell us some cock and bull story about going after a “bad guy” who they armed and supported for twenty-five years. It’s the same ol’ same ol’ only this time its being done by a “black”  president.

See also:

• The Son of Africa claims a continent’s crown jewels, John Pilger, 20 October 2011
• Blood in the Mobile, 2010 documentary by Frank Piasecki Poulsen

Bloody Spring – An Interview with Fulvio Grimaldi on Libya

 By Dan Glazebrook, 17 October 2011, Source: www.counterpunch.org

Fulvio Grimaldi is the legendary Italian (and former BBC) journalist and filmmaker who shot and smuggled out video footage of the Bloody Sunday massacre from under the noses of the British army almost forty years ago. He champions a style of journalism that is passionate, that does not shy away from the graphic horror of war, and that resists the pretence of neutrality in times of barbarism. As he put it after Bloody Sunday: “…impartiality didn’t even cross our minds… we belonged to the running and screaming and falling and dying”. He has belonged to them ever since.

Now 73, he has just returned from Libya where he was making his latest film, about NATO’s neo-colonial ‘revolution’ in Libya. I caught up with him in Bristol where he was attending the film’s English premiere.

I began by asking Grimaldi how closely his recent trips to Libya matched the impression given in the mainstream media:

“Not in the least. I personally visited areas around Tripoli where Gheddafi had allegedly “bombed his own people”, but not a bomb had fallen before Nato started its attacks. And this was confirmed by Russian spy satellites. Wherever I went – only in the company of other Fact Finding officials, talking freely to people of my choice, and stopping wherever I wished – I came across multitudes of young and old, men and women, who declared themselves committed to Gheddafi. They are the people who withstood a 7 month war by 27 military powers who had promised a two-week victory, those who defended Tripoli for over a week, those who today hold out in Sirte, Bani Walid, Sabha, Kufra and in 75% of the still free national territory – against genocidal bombings, special Nato troops and mercenaries.”

This is clearly not the picture we have come to expect from the media – the play-school image of a ‘people united against a dictator’. To what does Grimaldi attribute such high levels of support for Gheddafi?: “The UN explains it in its 2010 report: Libya was the top country in Africa on their Index of Human Development: for life expectancy, education, health, housing, children, the elderly, women. Free schools and hospitals, free housing, free drinking water for everybody, modern infrastructure, the oil revenue distributed to the people – and independence and dignity.” This was what Gheddafi represented to many – and NATO’s bombing only seemed to harden these attitudes: “thousands of civilians murdered by bombs, missiles, Western terrorists and mercenary throat-cutters. What does one think the wanton destruction of all infrastructure, hospitals, schools, factories, waterpipes, homes, may have produced in the attitude of 6 million Libyans and 2 million well-treated, dignified migrant workers?”

These migrant workers have been consistently demonised as “African mercenaries” – or at best, “alleged African mercenaries” – in the Western press from even before the war started, and this wilful disinformation has continued even after an Amnesty International report comprehensively demolished the claim in July. The lie has served to obscure and justify the racial killings that have characterising the rebellion since its outbreak. I asked Grimaldi about these murders and about their willful misrepresentation: “Racism is one of the most powerful weapons in the imperialist arsenal of genocide and regime-change. The thousands of black Libyans and Africans tortured, executed and dismembered by the “rebels” testify to this. There is abundant visual and testimonial evidence for it, even in my film. As to the main-stream media and their passive followers on the left, the process of monopolisation that has taken place over the past years among publishers and networks, identifies the interests of the warmongers with that of their media. The individual journalist has the choice between complying with the agenda of his employer and its psy-op consultants, and unemployment.” Grimaldi is unsurprised by the recent Wikileaks revelation that the Director-General of Al-Jazeera was involved in what he called the “criminal manipulation of information during the whole Libyan crisis”. After all,  “Al Jazeera was the main source for war correspondents who sat with the mixed gang of Al Qaeda-Gheddafi renegades  while they proceeded to roast blacks and talk nonsense about Gheddafi and  non existent rebel-advances.”

Finally, I asked Grimaldi about NATO’s real aims in this war. He is much clearer than most about the war’s importance to the imperial project: “To rid the planet of one of the countries that rejected globalization and neoliberalism, privatization and multinational robbery. To establish Africom in Africa, for further penetration into the Continent, to establish the Greater Middle East from the Atlantic to the Gulf, to eliminate the Chinese and Russian competition for resources and strangle their oil- lifeline, to get the water of Africa’s richest sweet water reserve, and to teach a lesson to all those masses that genuinely produced the Arabic Spring.” In brief – “to expand capitalist dictatorship”. No wonder he no longer works at the BBC.

Fulvio Grimaldi’s new film “Bloody Spring” is out now.

The “Bloody Spring” trailer

Here’s the same trailer with German subtitles.

Grimaldi is currently touring Europe with this film

Here’s the next dates for Germany:

Dienstag, 18.10.2011
19.30 Uhr NÜRNBERG, “Villa Leon”,Bürgerzentrum Philipp Körber Weg
Veranstalter: Deutscher Freidenkerverband Nürnberg

Mittwoch, 19.10.2011
19 Uhr 30 HEIDELBERG, Forum am Park, Poststrasse 11
Veranstalter: Heidelberger Forum gegen Militarismus und Krieg

Donnerstag, 20.10.2011
18 Uhr FRANKFURT/MAIN
Veranstalter: Deutscher Freidenkerverband + Friedens- und Zukunftswerkstatt e.V. c/o Gewerkschaftshaus Frankfurt 60329 Frankfurt a.M, Wilhelm-Leuschner-Straße 69-77

Freitag,21.10.2011
19 Uhr 30 KÖLN, “Friedensbildungswerk”, Obermarspforten 7-11
Veranstalter : “Arbeiterfotographie” und „Aachnener Friedenspreis”

Sonntag, 23.10.2011
19 Uhr HAMBURG, B 5, Brigittenstrasse 5
Veranstalter: Marxistische Abendschule Hamburg

CANCELLED! Montag, 24.10.2011
19 Uhr BERLIN, “Haus der Demokratie und Menschenrechte” Greifswalder Strasse 4

A secret report casting doubt on the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber is to be published under a new law to be unveiled by the Scottish Government next month, when it sets out its legislative programme for Parliament.

Wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103: Nose and flight deck

The bill, to be formally announced on September 7, will enable the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) to release its 800 pages of findings on Adbel Baset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, which have remained under lock and key since they were finalised in 2007.

The SCCRC report identified six grounds for believing Megrahi may have suffered a miscarriage of justice when he was prosecuted and tried for the murder of 270 people in the atrocity.

They included doubts over pivotal aspects of the prosecution case against him, and undisclosed payments to a key prosecution witness.

The findings led to Megrahi being granted leave to launch a second appeal against his conviction and the 27-year sentence he received in 2001.

The Libyan dropped the appeal on the eve of his compassionate release from Greenock jail in 2009. Megrahi had been expected to die from terminal prostate cancer within three months of his liberation, but yesterday marked exactly two years since his return home to Tripoli.

The anniversary prompted calls from two US senators for Megrahi to be extradited to the US and returned to jail if the rebel-led transitional government in Libya finally ousts Colonel Gaddafi.

Megrahi, 59, an ex-Libyan intelligence officer who has always denied being part of the plot to bomb Pan Am 107 in December 1988, was convicted by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands.

The SNP Government has already tried and failed to make the SCCRC report public through a minor piece of legislation, but not all the parties to the case agreed, blocking its release.

It is understood the new bill will be a weightier measure, allowing the SCCRC to publish any of its reports which relate to cases where a subsequent appeal has been dropped, which includes Megrahi.

Last month the SCCRC’s chair, Jean Couper, said the organisation had “no objections, in principle, to the release of the Statement of Reasons detailing its decision” in the Megrahi case, provided the law allowed it.

The SCCRC report claims the court acted unreasonably when it concluded he had definitely bought the clothes which ended up in the suitcase carrying the airplane bomb.

Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who testified he sold Megrahi the clothes, was also found to have been paid a $2 million reward by the US government.

Although SNP ministers support release of the SCCRC findings, their publication could increase pressure to release Megrahi’s full medical notes, which ministers have repeatedly refused to allow into the public domain.

Megrahi’s continued survival yesterday led to fresh criticism of the medical advice which led to his compassionate release.

Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill told MSPs that Megrahi was being “sent home to die”. However, the Scottish Government later released files showing three months was only ever a “median survival time”, meaning Megrahi always stood a 50-50 chance of living longer.

It also emerged that Fraser never personally examined Megrahi, but used reports from four cancer and urology experts – none of whom was willing to make a prognosis – and the prison GP.

Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray called on Alex Salmond to apologise to victims’ families for releasing Megrahi on the basis of flawed advice.

A Government spokesman said: “Whether people support or oppose the decision, it was made following the due process of Scots law, we stand by it, and he is dying of terminal prostate cancer.”

Further reading.

(This article was first removed from the source site and reappeared slightly edited a day after its first publication.)

The situation in Sirte is dire. Six weeks under siege after months of aerial attacks. Children and old people dead of hunger and thirst. Water supply hit. Hospitals without medical supplies to treat the ill and injured, and then bombed by NATO. The dead lying in the streets.

Constant ‘targeted’ nightly aerial bombardment by NATO air forces. Constant ‘fire at will’ daytime attacks from ill-disciplined NTC rebels using tanks, rockets, mortars and howitzers.

In their missile-launcher-laden graffiti-decorated pick-up trucks, the rebels drive into the city edges in the morn and back out by dark, hailed as ‘freedom-fighters’ by their embedded foreign press, they more resemble armed gangs. Some are Libyan, dissatisfied with policies of their current government. A few have returned after a generation abroad with historical tribal differences to settle. Others are LIFG veterans wanting to set up a strict Islamic fundamentalism. Qatari forces, UK SAS and CIA are known to have been on the ground in Libya. The battle-hardened are Al Qaeda and mercenaries on the pay-roll of interested parties, who follow where wars lead them, so long as they are paid well to kill, and have licence to loot and rape.

How did this modern-day barbarianism ever come to be?

The specific phrases in UNSC resolution #1973, which NATO nations say permit them to conduct and support this military action in Libya, are “no-fly zone”, “all necessary measures” and “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.”

That’s it. Just a few words. Innocuous enough until NATO got their hands on them and twisted them beyond recognition.

With Orwellian duplicity, air strikes replace ‘no-fly’, war becomes a ‘necessary measure’, and killing civilians constitutes their ‘protection’. Seven months later, 25,194 NATO air sorties later, including 9,363 strike sorties, and more than 50,000 human beings are dead, civilian infrastructure is destroyed, and a sovereign nation is in crisis.

The distortion of those few words’ intended meaning was almost certainly a factor in the veto by Russia and China of the recent resolution against Syria. NATO’s actions in Libya are clearly seen to violate UNSC resolution #1973, and some member states are wary.

Oh, and the evidence that Libyan people needed protecting from imminent danger of their own government firing on them? Remembering that this pre-emptive NATO action was to “stop Gaddafi from launching a massacre of his own people.”

No evidence was ever produced.

On 1 March, two weeks after the accusations, when asked if he had seen any evidence that Gaddafi intended to fire on citizens, then US Sec of Defense Robert Gates said, “We’ve seen the press reports but we have no confirmation.” And US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen added, “That’s right. We’ve seen no confirmation whatsoever.”

So NATO attacked Libya on the basis of a press report.

Gates had some sense of what was right because he also stated that “the UN Security Council resolution provides no authorisation for the use of armed force.” Gates would be gone by June, replaced by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta.

On 31 March, as NATO strikes in support of the rebels began, more questions were asked of Gates and Mullen by the US Senate Armed Services Committee. “Was al Qaeda involved in Libya?” Mullen answered, “We haven’t seen anything, other than aspirational, from al Qaeda leadership.” Gates said that Gaddafi was “trying to ‘gen’ up the narrative that the opposition is in fact led by al Qaeda.”

When asked “Do either one of you believe that the Libyan people would stand for an al Qaeda-led Libya?” “Absolutely no evidence to support that,” said Gates, and Mullen, “No, I don’t.”

Gates, in explanation, added that “the real power in Libya is in the hands of these tribes, and even Gaddafi realises that, and I just don’t understand how it would be possible for these tribes to want to cede any of that authority to some outside crowd like al Qaeda.”

Interesting. Here we have US Sec of Defense Gates supporting what Gaddafi, rather than merely ‘realising’, has always strongly stated. Which is that in Libya the real power is in the hands of the Libyan people, in the hands of the tribes.

This fact conflicts with the ‘Gaddafi as dictator’ storyline. It seems the journalists from US, UK, France, and Qatar, who were in Tripoli until August, had read the Obama/Clinton script, rather than US Senate committee transcript. All year the foreign press have chosen to ignore the fact that the tribal peoples of Libya – what did Gates say? – “hold the real power in Libya,” and instead used any means to bolster their ‘Gaddafi as dictator’ narrative, and have thus distorted the news that has beamed into our living rooms since February. News that has formed the opinion of millions, deprived them of the truth, and so delayed the groundswell of dissent against NATO’s war on Libya.

And about al Qaeda. Gaddafi had said from the beginning that the rebels were al Qaeda led. Gates and Mullen dismissed that in March, though in vague terms.

It’s become apparent in recent months that Gaddafi was telling the truth again. More camera-shy than the youthful rebels, the al Qaeda contingent is nevertheless a huge presence. They are led by Abdel Hakim Belhadj, an al Qaeda affiliate and Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) leader who had “close relationships” and trained with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The LIFG is still included on both UK and US lists of terrorist organisations. Belhadj is now the NTC’s new official chief military commander.

Rehabilitated in the western press and approved by NATO though Belhadj may be, Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen got one more thing right. The Libyan people don’t want a bar of anyone associated with al Qaeda leading them in any capacity. Nor do they trust Belhadj’s LIFG background. Libya is 97 per cent Islamic, and though other religions are allowed to practise freely (though not proselytize), one group not tolerated by law in Libya is militant Islamic fundamentalism.

For months now buried in the official records, Gates and Mullen’s take on Libya is, well, just not politically correct. Despite the evidence of ‘mission creep’, NATO leaders seem determined to bet against a future Nuremberg-style war crime action against them, and continue to pound the city of Sirte by night, to ‘break the ground’ for their daytime sniper-fodder ‘relief team.’

During a two day so-called truce in early October the Red Cross tried to enter Sirte to provide humanitarian aid. On the first day they managed to visit a hospital on the southern outskirts, bringing in a few needed supplies, but the hospital came under NTC rebel attack, and they were not able to inspect the whole building let alone get into the city proper and visit other areas.

On the second day the Red Cross tried to take two large aid trucks into the city. But the rebels began firing and so the Red Cross backed up quickly and abandoned their attempt. Preventing access for aid, another war crime.

Forever announcing their ‘final’ assault on Sirte, the NTC rebels have not yet quite managed to achieve it. NATO is now firing missiles from helicopters onto the city. They continue their murderous siege of 135,000 people, maybe more people because many from other towns months ago sought harbour in Sirte, maybe fewer because many have died or fled. Whatever the number, the people of Sirte are defending themselves and their city against NATO’s military might.

The United Nations community is being tested. On whether the international member nations have the moral courage to stand up to the powerful NATO nations, point out the illegality of the war on Libya, and insist that their ambassadors take that message to the UN. Meanwhile Gaddafi is proven right yet again, when he observed years ago that the UN did not provide fair treatment for its smaller and less powerful member nations. On this matter, I’d rather he could be proved wrong.

NTC fighters prevent the Red Cross from entering Sirte

The coastal Libyan city of Sirte is under ferocious bombardment from NATO in the air, and militia fighters aligned with the National Transitional Council (NTC) on the ground. Tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped in the area, and are being subjected to indiscriminate rocket, mortar and missile attacks. The military operation has also involved a prolonged blockade—denying residents access to basic supplies, including food, water, medicine and fuel—that has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis.

Numerous reports have emerged from civilians who have managed to flee Sirte in recent days about NATO bombs destroying homes and other civilian buildings and infrastructure.

Ashiq Hussein, an immigrant Pakistani electrician who escaped with 11 of his family members, told AFP: “NATO struck one big building, Imarat Tamim, two days ago, with 12 or 13 bombs. The whole building with nearly 600 flats is razed to the ground now… Two of my neighbours died yesterday in a NATO bomb which hit their home. Maybe they have information that on rooftops there were Gaddafi men… But a lot of civilian buildings were getting hit. Also the incoming shells from NTC forces were hitting civilian homes.”

NATO war planes are conducting continual operations in the air above Sirte, carrying out reconnaissance and bombing operations and also dropping leaflets demanding that civilians leave the city and pro-Gaddafi fighters surrender. According to official figures released in Brussels, 78 strike sorties were carried out last Saturday and Sunday, with all but two of the confirmed “key hits” occurring in Sirte.

The American, British and French governments spearheading the bombardment are guilty of war crimes. What is unfolding in Sirte has again put paid to the “humanitarian” pretext for the regime change campaign in Libya that was driven by the predatory economic and geo-strategic calculations of the US and European powers. NATO figures now make little pretence that their operation has anything to do with “saving lives” in Libya. The people of Sirte are being subjected to a collective punishment for their hostility toward NATO and the NTC, with the brutal military operation serving as a warning to people throughout Libya and the region against any resistance to the agenda being advanced by Washington, London and Paris.

Around 100,000 people live in Sirte, located about halfway between the Libyan capital of Tripoli and the eastern city of Benghazi. It remains unclear how many are left, but the number is certainly in the tens of thousands. The situation there is already critical. The population has not had access to running water and a regular electricity supply since August. Child malnutrition has been reported and there are increasing incidents of sanitation-related diseases, including diarrhoea.

Dr Siraj Assouri, who was in Sirte last weekend, told the Guardian that basic medical supplies had run out and people were resorting to drinking contaminated water to survive. “There is no medicine for heart disease or blood pressure, or baby milk or nappies,” he explained. “There is very little water that is drinkable. The water is contaminated with waste oil.”

Reuters interviewed Al-Sadiq, who said he had run the dialysis unit at Sirte’s main hospital. He explained: “Doctors start operating, then the power goes. They have a few litres of fuel for the generators, then the lights go out when they operate. I saw a child of 14 die on the operating table because the power went out during the operation.”

Mohammed Shnaq, a biochemist who fled the hospital on Sunday, added: “It’s a catastrophe. Patients are dying every day for need of oxygen.”

NTC gunmen enforcing the siege of Sirte have deliberately created the humanitarian crisis by refusing to allow supplies into the city. A group of International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) workers entered Sirte on Saturday to deliver body bags and war wounded kits, but was unable to enter the hospital because it came under fire from the NTC.

ICRC team leader Hichem Khadhraoui told AFP: “Several rockets landed within the hospital buildings while we were there. We saw a lot of indiscriminate fire. I don’t know where it was coming from.” Khadhraoui added that his team members “were surprised” by the attack, because they had “contacted all parties to say we were going in.”

The incident appears to have been another premeditated war crime carried out by NTC forces. Al Jazeera reported that “NTC fighters are unhappy with the ICRC for delivering supplies to the town rather than evacuating wounded people and searching for disappeared residents.”

NTC fighters prevent the Red Cross from entering Sirte

On Saturday, NTC chief Mustafa Abdel Jalil announced a two-day “humanitarian” ceasefire, supposedly to allow more civilians to evacuate. Yet the attack on Sirte’s hospital occurred during this so-called ceasefire, while journalists on the city’s outskirts reported no let up in the militias’ indiscriminate mortar and rocket fire. On Saturday, according to AFP, two children and two adults were killed when their vehicle, which was leaving Sirte, was hit by a rocket, apparently fired by NTC militia. The children “were torn to pieces,” Dr Ahmed Abu Oud, a field medic on the western side of Sirte, said. “They collected the body parts in bags.”

The declared “ceasefire”—which was accepted as good coin by much of the US and European media—was clearly motivated by propaganda considerations. NATO and NTC forces are preparing their alibis for the civilian killings for which they will be responsible in the final offensive on Sirte. Having supposedly given time for civilians to flee, all those left in the city will be regarded as legitimate targets by NTC fighters.

A similar campaign was waged in the lead up to the US assault of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November-December 2004. After demanding that civilians flee, the commanders of the 10,000 US troops and marines who invaded the city regarded everyone still there, especially men, as justifiable targets. The entire urban centre became a free-fire zone, while civilian buildings were systematically levelled as a means of killing snipers and other anti-occupation fighters. Similarly in Sirte, snipers have played an important role in pushing TNC militia out of the city centre.

Those left in Sirte include the most vulnerable layers of the population. One fleeing resident told the BBC that “those left behind were either too badly injured to leave, or lacked cars and petrol.” Petrol reportedly costs 600 dinars, or about $450, for 20 litres. Mohammed Dahab, a 30-year-old engineer who was born in Sudan but has lived in Sirte since he was 5, told Spiegel Online: “The only ones left are the poor, including many African foreigners.”

The African immigrant and dark-skinned Libyan community in Sirte has been swollen by a recent influx of refugees from neighbouring Tawargha. The town of about 10,000 people was entirely depopulated by NTC militiamen who went on a racist rampage after they captured it in August.

Fears among Sirte residents of similar reprisal attacks are well-founded. When NTC fighters fought their way into the Sirte district of Bouhadi yesterday, a Reuters correspondent reported that they set a house on fire belonging to someone allegedly close to Gaddafi. In other houses, the reporter added: “Some helped themselves to belongings. NTC pickup trucks drove from the area loaded with carpets, clothes and furniture. One NTC vehicle had a table football game in the back.”

(End of the original article.)

CNN showed footage of a Red Cross convoy being forced by rebel gunfire to turn around:

TeleSUR’s Diego Marín is in Sirte and reports that the Red Cross confirmed that the city’s main hospital was actually bombed by NATO. He also witnessed how the NTC actively hindered the Red Cross from reaching the city:

An Ukrainian doctor and many patients were hurt during the NATO bombing of the Ibn Sina hospital:

Sirte’s main hospital is overwhelmed with casualites:

More casualties (very explicit):

A bombed out school in Sirte:

Current pictures from the so-called “February 17th revolution” that flies the same flag as the Idris monarchy.

Can you spot the difference?

What’s taking place in Libya these days isn’t a revolution, it’s an unpopular insurgency which has already cost 50,000 lives and destroyed much of Libya’s infrastructure.

Read the Top Ten Myths in the War Against Libya.

Gadaffi supporters: Bodies of civilians lie on the ground inside a field hospital. One person has been murdered in his hospital bed. Another appears to be that of a teenager. Abu Salim, Tripoli, 25 Aug 2011. (Reuters/Anis Mili)

@LibyanLiberal's profile picture

One of a few pro-Gaddafi tweeps reporting from Tripoli is @LibyanLiberal, whose tweets are very informative and give a dramatic picture of the chaos and fights that are taking place in the capital of Libya.

This is an archive of all of LibyanLiberal’s tweets starting from August 17, just three days before the rebel’s heavy assault on Tripoli started, up until Monday.

Mon Aug 29

• 00:07
  More tweets from #libya when our connection is safe again. to the fronts , to the victory.
• 00:06
  @Itjentije sorry brother we didnt reach that area we move leswhere i cant tell where. we left from buslim last night.
• 00:04
  sooner or later the colonialists will be defeated. none will stay in #libya soil. may i live till that day and die the next.
• 00:03
  Rebels in #tripoli #libya dont know who is who, some groups infiltrate their ranks and march with them now to #sirte.
• 00:01
  i wil say only this #libya #tripoli most of people that bear the rebel flag are just scared.rebels are non libyan so we know who we kill.

Sun Aug 28

• 23:59
  We get some good news in short waves for other areas in #libya. the mage is not the fake image of #cnn #bbc #aj
• 23:58
  our group of rsistance counts already 134, i wonder if the rebels vanish with this number how many will be left? #libya #tripoli #nato
• 23:57
  #libya Tripoli the rebels left a small force only inside the city. we wait for bani walid to come to us
• 23:55
  #libya the water was distributed only in gargaresh and dahmani. other areas have no water. in a while we will kill for water.
• 23:54
  we have no choise its us or them now. they dont stop killing and raiding in houses. many areas of tripoli resist. we will not fall.
• 23:53
  The deads in Tripoli are rising and rising.We ambush now convoys of rebels and exterminate them without mercy. #libya
• 23:52
  #Libya days of disaster in tripoli, seems that only some satelite antenas and hacks keep us connected with the world.

Sat Aug 27

• 14:47
  Hiding till night comes.then we go out for one night of warfare. i see my teets dont appear in twtter timeline in general propablaby US hack
• 12:01
  We are not afraid of death we are mujaheed. but our kids should survive. #Libya #NATO #Tripoli #islam #gaddafi #syrte ( please all retweet)
• 12:00
  Appeal to all people in the tweeter. save the women and children of the people who resist NATO, rebels are killing and rape them.
• 11:59
  NATO is planning to exterminate every resist in Tripoli by cutting the water and forcing us to starve and die.if we go out rebels snipes us.
• 11:57
  Why to surrender to rebels if you know they will kill you after the cameramen of CNN and BBC leave? this is pathetic.
• 11:56
  tired and the supplies are cut, we will die all here.we are surrounded and ready to face martyrdom. nato will not get us. nor the rebels.
• 11:55
  From 690 proisoners escaped buslim yesterday 540 were al qaeda members. bravo to obomber idiot. bush was better.
• 11:55
  The fact i dont understand is why NATO and USA are grouping wth al qaeda and they dont fight against them. most rebels al qaeda.
• 11:54
  Many traitors, many traitors in the middle class and the upper class,they just after the money, they are dogs nato servants.
• 11:52
  we hope that bani walid and sirte and sebha and the touareg come and liberate tripoli. soon we will know if hope still alive.
• 11:51
  we need to make guerilla war now.hunt the traitors down hiding all day. but its okey, we are mujaheed now. we hope though.
• 11:50
  I dont fear that i am black, i feel proud about the colour of your skin. rebels are killing everyone black.
• 11:49
  Still no water. they do that only to make us come out in streets and kill us like sheeps. most blacks of tripoli are slaughtered already.
• 11:48
  One more day in Buslim.there was a carnage yesterday. all the mass of rebels attacked buslim, killed people in hospital. many deaths.

Fri Aug 26

• 13:48
  @VAVA_VIVA_LIBYA i need to go back to the fight. you are american so please dont talk about libya and who s libyan. JIHAD.
• 13:34
  @LevantineA most of the people in the ranks of gangs in Tripoli are not arabs they are Aamazigh berbers from Zintan and mountains.
• 13:26
  And spread the message leader and sons are located in the tripoli area defending and leading the fights. they did not flee as MSM claim.
• 13:26
  inscallah victory is at hand and we will have glory or martydom.we the mujaheed.its now jihad against nato.
• 13:25
  i coant ype more things. too much blood. civilians killed in all rebel held areas and people are afraid like scared childs.
• 13:24
  when rebels came close they exacuted the captives and then starting shooting randmoly at houses near abu saleem (2/2)
• 13:24
  need sleep but i cant sleep. we see rebels last night from 200 meters distance holding captives as shields. we didnt shoot at them (1/2)
• 13:23
  We hold firm in areas of east and south tripoli. we have problem near the coast only. we hope to victory.
• 13:21
  Whoever says leader is away. i tell him. leader is in Tripoli leading the fight. saw him last night while iftar.
• 13:20
  Leader and sons are leading us. they come with us in many fronts. we hope for victory. we dont want the berbers to burn Tripoli.
• 13:19
  We hope for the popeple to come and join us. but the rebels kill ayone that tries to come into areas we control.leader is here with us.
• 13:18
  Rebels steal , kill , rape, and leave people unburried. this is crime and certaintly not something that a muslim do. they are kaffur.
• 13:18
  the bodies of dead people are rotting iunder the sun. many unburied. this is not muslim rebels are not muslims.
• 13:17
  I see my tweets dont appear in twitter tielines. but its okey truth is alwayts showed. victory and steadfast.
• 13:16
  we know where the Atman Mlegta is located. tday we will go for him by any cost. Zintani that came to tripoli to rape and kill and loot.
• 13:14
  someone called me last night and told me in bf there are photos of rebels abusing black Libyan like me and capture and execute them.
• 13:13
  We hold in many areas of Tripoli , but more and more people are forced to go out of their homes and used as shields by rebels.
• 13:11
  I saw that nato admitted the round forces i was talking about. hope all raise a jihad now and the great imam if mekka calls for one.
• 13:11
  Last night some group of rebels entered Abu salim, none left, the situation is hard, water is cut in our district,rebels cut it.
• 13:09
  Abu saleem, we still hold despite the rummors all night clashes near the green square,we reach near corinthia hotel but got back.

Thu Aug 25

• 11:31
  Last tweet for today,while waiting martydom or victory,spread the message NATO bombing civilians in Abu saleem because they hold green flags
• 11:30
  Sad but I dont believe that serbs will survive, the rebels are lunatics in loose. they rape kill and loot everything with NATO aircover.
• 11:29
  Captured serbs are in the airport we try penetrate there. but nato overs the perimeter.
• 11:28
  May allah alow me to survicve one more day to save more lives, please spread the messsage, NATO is bombing Abu saleem ,killing civilians.
• 11:27
  STOP the nato bombing and we will manage to win. else we will be massacred by the NATO pilots. but its okey its martyrdom.
• 11:27
  i dont know how uch we will hold a horde of rebels with heavy weapons bomb abu saleem and same does nato .
• 11:26
  Where is that UN to stop the NATO bombing on scivilians of Abu saleem? why none cares? where are the arabs?
• 11:26
  nerves on tense. the resistance to nato and collaorators is hard. They bomb every possition. many bombs not rockets huge bombs.
• 11:25
  Call reporters to get stages in High Landanous and see the bodies before the rebels remove them. why nothing about the rebel crimes?
• 11:24
  This is not islam this s racism of usa KKK ,the rebels dnt rase allah only the americans.many carrying the rebel flag bear the american also
• 11:23
  90 per cent of people are locked behind their doors especially black skinned. the rebels calling all black Kaffour and shoot them on sight.
• 11:22
  some asking me for videos we dknt have cameras or phones we are not actors we are mujaheed.massacre from rebels in Tripoli.
• 11:22
  I saw a rebel raping a 10 yo girl. another holdng the girl. both rebels were shot, they dont deserve life.
• 11:19
  We killed 2 rapists and saved a girl last night behing enemy lines. A lot of not Libyans in the ranks of rebels. White like norvegian.
• 11:18
  The rebels kill anyone that is on a list with pro-gaddafi people. they have killing platoons.
• 11:18
  Last night we went behind enemy lines in high landanous to save a group of hostages. many houses looted in rebel areas. panic everywhere.
• 11:17
  Abu salim . heroic mujaheeds. we are ready to accept death now. nato bombs with cluster bombs from F-16.many dead.

Wed Aug 24

• 15:20
  Anddont say army did the crimes once again.hope i am here tommorw, may Allah guide my arm in fight to kill the traitors.Victory or Martyrdom
• 15:19
  Last tweet for today. Journos say the truth. show the dead civilians and the raped women in streets that lay dead and naked.
• 15:18
  Army contros most of tripoli but because nato boats the rebels are in ports and coastal road where they poze for videos.
• 15:17
  Nato provides cover with artilery from ships in the rebels that come with boats in High Landanous coastal street. if they stop we win.
• 15:16
  Martyrdom for many people but no fear. i bring i my mind the suras and forget war. long night and i tired. need sleep, iftar and back to war
• 15:16
  Seems that the victory is near. we talked about peace and negotiations but rebels want blood.i asked captured rebel why? and he spit my face
• 15:14
  Army has steadfast and there are thousands of mjaheeds in the streets. some problems in areas with traitors. Like High Landanous
• 15:13
  Last night i said 1000 french army. it was proved to be former Foreing legion guided by some nato officials.Heard nato confirmed my news.
• 15:12
  I saw hundrends of dead bodies both army and rebels. many civilian women and kids dead too. many houses looted.
• 15:12
  I saw Seif last night in front line. steadfast in Libyan loyal army units in all tripoli.we are ready to die. none comes near abu salim.
• 15:10
  Iam in friends house will make as fast as i can here.I am safe. all night fights in Dahmani,now back for some rest and then drive back again
• 15:09
  Tripoli…. afternoon sound of airplanes since morning. I am in Abu Saleem.I can assure you that things in tripoli not like media says.

Tue Aug 23

• 21:47
  MY NEXT TWEET WILL BE AFTER VICTORY. IF MARTYRDOM PRAY FOR MY SOUL.
• 21:46
  Once in a mans life there is a moment where he should prove that has values. My time is now. For allah for Libya for mouamar. TO THE FRONT.
• 21:45
  More than 1000 foreing special forces deployin to the coastal road under warship artilery cover. I will go to defent my country.
• 20:31
  BEN BELLA the pride of Algeria says that rebels are the modern slaves.
• 20:30
  Algerian people are raising Jihad cause of French troops attacking Tripoli.
• 20:28
  French troops landed on the coastal highway of Tripoli!!!!!! URGENT!!!!!
• 20:02
  @FemmeRebelle just give some hours till morning and you will see . dont be so furious. patience.
• 19:54
  VIVA PRESIDENTE HUGO CHAVES.
• 19:50
  @4thegenerations if tommorow i prove right will you say that you are mistaken? would you?
• 19:46
  Oh forgot to tell you that benghazi declared themselfs an emirate. and will dissban NTC and sharia will be impossed.
• 19:44
  There is fear of capret bombing in Tripoli tonght from B-52.
• 19:43
  Gadafi spoke in the radio. everything is fine. in Janjour and tanjoura only some fights.
• 19:43
  if there were rebels in the green square as aj says i personally could take those 50 out. its a joke video.
• 19:41
  For a proof of my words in some hours reporters from Rixos will be taken on a goverment tour like last night. dont worry situation control.
• 19:40
  first of all aj footage and rt footage of green square and babzizia are fake . Tripoli streets are full green .
• 19:39
  Okey sorry for delay tweets. i had to install Progamm TOR in order to be able to have internet. you know what this means.
• 19:38
  @blorpy speaking? from where? probably a record? is aj reliable? lol
• 19:21
  @TheNewsBlotter @mchancecnn lol celebrations ? and the green army in streets? what is this a joke?
• 19:20
  @frontlineclub @faithcnn @mchancecnn pffff hat white flags what rios hotel. wait some hours and see the tour in tripoli like last night.
• 15:48
  @papiliono24 why to be conserned i understand tonjoura not 100 per cent controlled and all the rebels mass in one area now,end is near.
• 15:44
  @Chris_Sedlmair let them claim.as they claimed they captured saif.
• 15:32
  Libyan army killed al qaeda comander and exterminated the whole so called tripoli battalion of rebels… are these rebels the most trained?
• 15:24
  The head of the armed rebels killed in Tripoli. al qaudeas Abdel hakem bel hadj ( 18+ photo) http://t.co/l9CDgFH
• 11:49
  No phonelines in tripoli for today ( mobile or landlne) only internet. lets see now the rebels calling and giving info! LOL
• 11:48
  Rebel pocket of resistance in the area Bab Bengasir is exterminated.
• 11:45
  @EmmaWilson1 @BBC_WHYS when i am able i will post tweets about the reality. you can follow me, as you see i post real news.
• 11:44
  @londonmoan who told you someone killed a doctor? maybe your al qaeda friends? Libya army never kill innocent.
• 11:42
  @robcrilly they didnt confirmed a rumor they claimed falce because they wanted the countries to recorgnize them and break libyan steadfast.
• 08:04
  10 am GMT! the proud volunteers of the trbes and the simple people of Tripoli will gather in Green Square to celebrate the victory.
• 07:59
  Zliten. 248 rebels dead i the past 24 hours, Brega still remains the tomb of the benghazian traitors.Sebha is clean and edited.
• 07:58
  Info about Tripoli. some nato bombing in empty space in a desperate effort to break morale. some clashes in Tanjoura.Nothing special.
• 07:54
  @HodaAH he was not captured.. your friends of TNC just messed up their propaganda. come on be a good reporter speak the thuth.
• 02:01
  @alihashem_AJA you are not journalist. you are just a murderer a war monger and a payed cia agent.
• 01:54
  @HodaAH saif appears to the crowds outside rixos. alah ou akbar.
• 01:52
  @IbnOmar2005 @curioustip none from army guards the rixos hotel just 5 thousand armed tribe volunteers.
• 00:48
  كل قنوات الدعارة و الدعاية والعمالة مصدومة من ظهور سيف………تفوه عليكم يا صناع الفتن يا مواخير
• 00:40
  Saif was asked about the fact that the National Criminal Court wants him he answered : “screw them”
• 00:35
  @Soknia none was captured … just you are losing. i am in tripoli and can see the reality. some of you only in tajoura.
• 00:30
  http://t.co/teue8Vv MOUSTAFA ABDEL JALIL CONFIRMOING THE ARREST OF SAIF LAST NIGHT !!! AHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHA REBELS WILL CRUSHED.
• 00:24
  ABDEL JALIL TOLD ALL THE WORLD THEY ARRESTED SAIF. SCUH A LIAR AND WANTS TO RULE A STATE?
• 00:21
  SO NOW TELL ME WHO WAS SAYING FOR FIRST MOMENT THAT THE SITUATION IS DIFFERENT? WHO INSIDE TRIPOLI GAVE RIGHT INFO? THANK YOU MY FOLLOWERS.
• 00:20
  @cswift2 ICC has no touch with reality. they live in another world. this is why they issued warrants.
• 00:19
  @Libyan4life maube because they were never captured. is that enough forr you?

Mon Aug 22

• 18:55
  @alihashem_AJA well when we win this war i promise to myself to find you and hold you accountable of this propaganda.
• 18:49
  @Luka_Ristic yes but rebels are pushed from nato to come down to tripoli from mountains and coastal road. but army is victorious.
• 18:37
  I received the news that Saif al Islam is leading the army in Tanjoura area seems the gangs are too far from the city.
• 18:35
  Back from gargaleesh. all area till there full or dead bodies of gangs. i went till janjour near frontline. army morale is high.
• 16:06
  I am going to drive to gargalesh. to see how the station is there. steadfast and glory.
• 15:35
  @red_rogers @sixarts @LVview @diceylee808 CHECK BBC REBELS ARE SEVERAL KM AWAY FROM TRIPOLI!!! ITS bbc not me!
• 15:35
  BBC CONFIRMS THE ADVANCE OF LOYAL FORCES! CONFIRMS THE NEWS I TOLD YOU 10 HOURS EARLIER. GOOD THEY REMEMBER TO SPEAK TRUTH!
• 14:05
  @HodaAH tommorow wen we are victorious you are invited to tripoli to post the reality.soon wou will not be able to refuse the truth.
• 14:00
  Tripoli center is calm. nato led rebels are crushed in GaRGALEESH . the justice will prevail.
• 13:57
  @HodaAH traitors for once again. traitors of africa faranonites.
• 11:56
  News from Tripoli. rebels come from all west mountain. but they face death. they pass through gargalesh in order to face death 2km away.
• 08:38
  @STWuk well wait the day to over to see who lost and who won.
• 08:37
  @benzidrine i challenge you to show pic of saif arrested. you have nothing you just want to break the morale of the east front.
• 08:23
  Nato orchistrated a false take over of Tripoli together with jazeera. but now things seem not to fit them Tripoli people took the guns.
• 08:23
  @nilsonf58 more and more rebels vcame in the trap to face certain death. the Amazinghs from mountain west faced the death in Tripoli.
• 08:20
  Everywhere in tripoli rebel sympathizers that came out in the streets last night are now running to hide. ost of them now hold green flags.
• 08:20
  Tripoli. situation is controlled by army and moujahedeen forces. seems that the rebels are stunned by the mass determination of Libya people
• 08:19
  @matthewwprice hello mr price. do you like that Libyan army controls tripoli again? you false claimed rebels controling the city.
• 02:45
  @flairbrush @StopBombing no they came as crusader helpers.its not gaddafi or NTC its islam against crusaders now.
• 02:44
  criminal gangs are now attacking the Libyan embassy in tunis.
• 02:43
  @HodaAH sister they didnt dissapeared they got out to clean their city.
• 02:42
  @Jonny_Hallam do you see any regime change? no you dont because gaddafi is winning.
• 02:42
  @JomanaCNN hello. why you tweet lies? is this some sort of fetichism? or you feel importand by liying?
• 02:40
  What is cnn says now? that the rebels fled from green square after entering for 10 minutes? are we serious?
• 02:26
  @StopBombing 200-300 rebels came near the green square from sea. exterminated from first hours.
• 02:23
  @RafaCCS i dontk now who has credibility i see that jazeera report lies nd other report the reports of jazeera.
• 02:23
  @StopBombing heavy bombing in suq al juma and janjour. all day from 9 am in the morning.inscallah now areas safe.
• 02:21
  200 people from all the areas of tripoli are now heading with aif and saadi and mohhammad in the green square. i will join them i think.
• 02:17
  tommorow a new era probably in media world without any credibility for CNN BBc and AJ , it will be nice to see that.
• 02:11
  @MideastReports nato will be efeated and thank you for defeding tripoli. soon there will be footage of tripoli without rebels.
• 02:07
  Saif Gaddafi , Muhammed Gaddafi with the Masses in the Green Square . THIS IS THE ANSWER TO THE CRUSADERS. NATO IS DEFEATED!
• 02:07
  @kristin_scribe http://t.co/QFM30RU HERE YOU GO SISTER. PLEASE SPREAD THE VIDEO. THANK YOU.
• 02:04
  THE MITIGA AIR BASE , AREA SALLAH ADEEN AREA AIN ZARA AREA ABU SALEEM, AREA BAB AZIZIYAH , AREA SOUQ AL JUMA . NO REBELS PRESENT!!!!
• 02:03
  GADDAFI SPEAKING ON TV RIGHT NOW.
• 02:03
  http://t.co/QFM30RU VIDEO WITH DATE PROOF FROM TRIPOLI TODAY!!!LIVE FROM LIBYAN TV!! WHAT ELSE YOU WANT? WHERE ARE REBELS?
• 02:00
  http://t.co/QFM30RU VIDEO WITH DATE PROOF FROM BAB AZIZIYAH. PLEASE TWEET !! ( NOT RETWEET ) TWEET THE LINK!
• 01:57
  SAIF AND MOUHAMMAD GADDAFI WILL ATTEND A RALLY THAT WILL BE TRANSMITTED LIVE… SO STAY TUNED IN SATELITE JAMAHIRIYA.
• 01:51
  ليست هذه معركه للدفاع عن معمر القذافي بل معركه للدفاع عن الإسلام ولهذا لا يمكن ان ينتصر الصليب القذر على الاسلام
• 01:50
  Sorry for absent from pc. some nato bombing and jamings didnt allow me to use it until now. may the day that comes to be glorious.
• 01:48
  @devilsavocato unfortunately for him.the people hold pickets with date written. and tv studios are okey. one more lie from nato and rebels.
• 01:47
  in the morning hours inscallah there will be video with date proof from green square also.seems nato has lost this war.
• 01:46
  some sporadic fire from the port but nothing special. serems some people made a scenery in hollywood or something.
• 01:45
  Walked near the green square 40 minutes ago. everything was calm. i didnt see any move on the streets and no rebels.
• 01:45
  sad for sky news al jamahiryia tv has people with plates with date written to prove date!!!!!!!!!! so stop the lies. !!!

Sun Aug 21

• 19:30
  as for brother leader, al jamahiryiya channel broadcasted some earlier footage ith him and kalasnikof. inscallah victory tonight.
• 19:29
  تم دحر الجرذان الخونة والعملاء الى خارج تاجوراء ,,لبيك يا قايد وتمام سيدي
• 19:26
  Janjour now is beeing cleaned from terrorist rebels and nato collaborators. god is great. god is great.
• 19:25
  @Jon_Leary inscallah soon. you know its war brother.
• 19:01
  جحافل خرجت من جميع المناطق ورفلى وترهونة دخلوا طرابلس الان ليطهروها بيت بيت … هما هلها هما خالاصين وحلها..
• 18:49
  Tarhouna area is calm and al lies. please all retweet that my sister told me on phone 10 minutes ago! URGENT RETWEET.

Sun Aug 21

• 18:19
  @NiZiLanDa if you are in libya come in dahmani so we can meet. i challenge you.
• 18:15
  @nihonmama read the noble quran. you never turn against your leader except he disrespect religion.its okey you are not muslim to understand.
• 18:12
  يا قاتل يا مقتول…..القائد يحمل بندقيته وينطلق للجبهه …الله اكبر الله اكبر
• 18:10
  @NiZiLanDa MOUAMAR AL GADDAFI ON THE FIELD NOW. LEADER IN THE SIDE OF PEOPLE!!!
• 18:10
  @liberatelibya MOUAMAR AL GADDAFI ON THE FIELD NOW. LEADER IN THE SIDE OF PEOPLE!!!
• 18:10
  @nilsonf58 MOUAMAR AL GADDAFI ON THE FIELD NOW. LEADER IN THE SIDE OF PEOPLE!!!
• 18:10
  @nihonmama MOUAMAR AL GADDAFI ON THE FIELD NOW. LEADER IN THE SIDE OF PEOPLE!!!
• 18:07
  MOUAMAR AL GADDAFI ON THE FIELD NOW. LEADER IN THE SIDE OF PEOPLE!!!
• 17:54
  @mchancecnn GOOD! THIS SHOULD BE DONE LONG TIME AGO TO STOP YOUR LIES!
• 17:50
  @nilsonf58 some rebels in tajoura exterminated.some rebels in port by boat exterminated.
• 17:50
  @nihonmama you are retweeting war and kill tweets. check your timeline.
• 17:48
  @mchancecnn you should have been kicked out long time ago. dont worry time is coming.
• 17:47
  الله أكبر و إن شاء الله ينصر معمر القذافي على الخونة و العملاء في هذه الليالي المباركة..
• 17:45
  الجيش الليبي على النصر مصمم ولا تراجع ولا استسلام النصر او الشهاده
  الى الامام الى الامام
• 17:44
  Libyan army to victory is determined not retreat no surrender, victory or martyrdom.
• 17:43
  Next stop of the holy crawl is janjour and then confortation with the rebels south of zawiyah. tonight we will be victorious.
• 17:43
  @nihonmama @Reuters thousands and thousands. you prove to be a warmonger at the end. moujahedeen army will clean libya.
• 17:41
  REPORTERS IN RIXOS transmiting lies. tajoura already clean.Rebels in port exterminated. friday market clean already. march contrinues.
• 12:30
  Tripoli situation. everything calm. some burned tyres from come rebel cells. nothing more. everything is under control.

Sat Aug 20

• 17:18
  BBC says that shortly before the rebel forces had fled Brega and incurred heavy losses …
• 16:05
  @nilsonf58 http://t.co/CjcYpab this is the situation in every inch of libyan soil. this is a real video not the AJE or CNN.
• 16:03
  @nilsonf58 zawiyah is pro , zliten is pro. do you want to see the reality on ground? in a video ?
• 15:58
  @nilsonf58 pro G , in the last 5 days more than 500 rebels found death and 1000 wounded.
• 15:46
  Rebels try to push in brega 50 dead 100 wounded , brega area 40-18 is a hell this moment.
• 14:03
  near the city of Zliten AJE cameraman was shooted on head.
• 13:50
  News from the ground ( real ones ) 2. 70 rebels captured south of Al Zawiyah, more than 45 rebels dead in todays fights in new Brega.
• 13:49
  News from ground ( real ones) In tiji libyan army captured a battalion of rebels after one day battle.Dafniyah 4 rebel commanders captured
• 13:46
  @matthewwprice so for a moment BBC decided to speak the truth about the situation on the ground? what else does bbc report from Zliten?
• 10:22
  @LibyaFactCheck @ShamsusNYC can you count how many times the same claim? 18times or 16? i have lost count about false news for Brega.
• 10:21
  http://t.co/9Osph2u can anyone of the rebel supporters explain to me what is this video? i assume not.

Fri Aug 19

• 20:44
  @papiliono24 check the video it shows people pray and hen jumpts to benghazi and shows people funeral. where is gharyan?
• 20:31
  @MikePrysner @BrotherAustin @lizziephelan @GazaYBO @SydWalker @pslweb thank you.
• 19:37
  http://t.co/VJLKqpz source for this article is a rebel source. wow what a reliable source. anyways another more fake report from the rebels
• 15:37
  Reports of fighting between rebels and libya army in Zliten false. its just bombings from nato to break the morale of the heroic people.
• 15:36
  NATO crusader destroyed 10 buildings in the center of Zliten and kill dozens of civilians now in the heavy bombardment of the city.

Thu Aug 18

• 23:34
  Nato is bombing heavily tripoli this very moment.
• 22:24
  @devilsavocato can you explain please?
• 20:10
  @matthewwprice NATO BOMBED LEPTIS MAGNA ONCE AGAIN! 15 MINUTES AGO!!!! CAN THE UNESCO OR UN OR SOMEONE DO ANYTHING ABOUT THAT?
• 20:09
  NATO BOMBED LEPTIS MAGNA ONCE AGAIN! 15 MINUTES AGO!!!! CAN THE UNESCO OR UN OR SOMEONE DO ANYTHING ABOUT THAT?
• 20:09
  @pdanahar NATO BOMBED LEPTIS MAGNA ONCE AGAIN! 15 MINUTES AGO!!!! CAN THE UNESCO OR UN OR SOMEONE DO ANYTHING ABOUT THAT?
• 19:24
  @pdanahar because you know nothing about Mousa Ibrahim stop insulting him. do you know his tribe? or his background? stop insulting.
• 16:54
  @matthewwprice listen you report lies and try to make a bad impression about Libya and goverment. you are guest in Libya please respect.
• 15:51
  @matthewwprice the talk with opposition is something you have made up from your mind. peace means the defeat of terrorism.
• 11:52
  http://t.co/oE9Nrb9
  ordinary libyan people talking about the crimes of nato. english language.
• 11:17
  @nihonmama @simmjazeera yes they came some month ago and killed many people. they did that in order to fear my tribe but we took misrata now
• 00:42
  @matthewwprice do you have a link where he says we lost it. and thats it ? as you reported? your report said Ly gov admitted loss of Gharyan
• 00:41
  http://t.co/udUjWNq the best video until now from libya crisis.same crew will go to fil in misrata. ins allah.
• 00:26
  @matthewwprice http://t.co/udUjWNq give this link to your fellows in the salt fields after misrata to report the truth.
• 00:25
  @matthewwprice you its not that, mousa said that gharyan we regained full control, he never said that we lost it as you reported.!! face it.

Wed Aug 17

• 22:11
  @matthewwprice so will you reply about your lie?or you will still say someone told you? exposed for one more time that you wrk for UK gov.
• 20:16
  @matthewwprice http://t.co/yfsGpmf this was what mousa said about gharyan! you claimed we lost it. so you lie! proof video!you serve UK!
• 20:16
  @matthewwprice http://t.co/yfsGpmf this was what mousa said about gharyan! you claimed we lost it. so you lie! proof video!
• 20:14
  @Jonny_Hallam @carolv27 http://t.co/yfsGpmf this was what mousa said about gharyan! you claimed we lost it. so you lie! proof video!
• 20:08
  @ZeinakhodrAljaz make a true report for once.#Zawiyah power plant was hit by NATO planes.also power in libya is from GAS and rebel rpg=fire.
• 20:05
  Brigadier general Faraj Al-(e)rafi,commander of Hassan Jaber battalion,killed along with 17 of members of his battalion near Ajdabiya
• 19:24
  @prince1287 make a search. in youtube. with the terms NATO Zliten crime and you will see what the bobs do to Libya. kill infants and women.
• 19:10
  Nato bombed the detain camp in subartha where rebel prisoners were help. unkown number of dead rebels.they want to hide the id of rebels.
• 19:00
  @matthewwprice you reported lies yesterday. so why to invited to conference?to spread more lies?as for Badr it was al jawsh 17rebels dead.
• 13:01
  @ShababLibya this is a lie. how can i have internet without electrical power? another more lie from you.
• 12:07
  @ZeinakhodrAljaz so practicaly Libyan army controls Zawiyah. what kind of slave reporter are you? sorry to say. go get a shampoo.
• 11:51
  IN TUNISIA THE REBELS MAKE TEAMS TO RECRUIT PEOPLE TO FIGHT AGAINST LIBYAN GOVERMENT! URGENT! SOMEONE HELP THIS THING TO STOP!
• 11:49
  @Saricito the damage is medium. but if you hit ancient stone is permanent. bigger damage in sabartha theater.
• 11:30
  @ShababLibya you released criminals from the prisons and they kill the innocent people of #Surman ? they cut their heads in public!!!
• 11:28
  @Saricito well hopefully if thngs are peacefull i can upload a video when a friend comes from the front. airplane bomb in the ruins.
• 09:33
  In the morning the rebels that control half #Surman executed by beheading 35 goverment employers,and some family of Kwehldi!!! where is UN?
• 00:48
  also in mountain west some more news to come till the morning hours. supposely huge news.Zawiyah still has some pockets of rebel teams.
• 00:47
  News and developments. in some hours Misrata will be shown with date proof on Libyan state tv. sabartha is quiet some fights in surman.