Benghazi Attack = Tahloob” (Arabic for “Gaddafi loyalists”) did it.

[Steven Gaal]

Benghazi Attack = Tahloob” (Arabic for “Gaddafi loyalists”) did it.

Benghazi Attack. Libya’s Green Resistance Did It… And NATO Powers Are Covering Up

US Ambassador’s Killing Had Nothing to Do With Al Qaeda, Islamist Blowback or Anti-Islamic Video

The NATO powers and the bureaucrats they installed in Libya want you to think that all 5.6 million Libyans are happy that NATO and its proxy terrorists destroyed Libya, a country which under Gaddafi had the highest standard of living in Africa.

They want you to think that NATO brought “freedom and democracy” to Libya, not chaos and death.

They want you to think that there is no Green Resistance to the NATO imperialists or NATO’s Islamist allies in Benghazi.

In reality, the Resistance has been increasingly active since shortly after the murder of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011, as will be shown below. They strike any NATO target they can, and they execute key Libyans who betrayed Gaddafi and sided with NATO. The Benghazi incident was merely their latest blow against what they see as NATO’s illegal occupation of their country.

Everyone in Libya knows about the Green Resistance, whose members are called “Tahloob” (Arabic for “Gaddafi loyalists”). The denial only happens outside of Libya, by the NATO powers and their dutiful Western mainstream media.

Because of this denial, and because most of the world’s people have forgotten about Libya, the internet is filled with blind guesses, unfounded claims, and ridiculous counterclaims regarding the Benghazi incident last week in which US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and at least three other American personnel were killed. And the NATO lie factory is operating at full blast.

CLAIMS, COUNTER-CLAIMS AND DISINFORMATION

The Obama regime says “protesters” irate over an anti-Islam video did it.

The NATO-installed bureaucrats in Libya say that “foreign extremists” did it.

US Congressmen say “Al Qaeda did it”. So does CNN, as well as the alternative media web site Prison Planet, which denounces any reference to the Green Resistance as “absurd”. (1)

Media outlets, such as the UK Guardian, say “an organized terror network did it”.

Turkey’s government says “Syria’s Assad did it”.

Israel says “Hezbollah did it”.

The Sunni monarchs of the Gulf Cooperation Council oil sheikdoms say “Iran did it”.

Even reputable alternative media writers and progressive bloggers have attributed the attack to “the Benghazi Islamists”, and that this is “blowback from imperialism”.

Wikileaks says the attack happened because the US had backed Britain’s threat to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London and remove Julian Assange. (2)

Some media outlets claim that “Al Qaeda” carried out the attack in revenge for the supposed death in Pakistan (by US drone strike on 4 June 2012) of Libyan-born Abu Yahya Al Libi (aka Hassan Mohammed Qaid) who was supposedly a key aide to Osama bin Laden, and was supposedly the “number two man” in Al Qaeda.

This claim is nonsense, since Al Qaeda has been a group of mercenaries employed by Washington and London since 1980. President Reagan called them “heroes” and “freedom fighters”. The US and Britain sends its Al Qaeda mercenaries to the Balkans, Libya, Syria, Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, and other places that NATO wants to infiltrate, destroy or destabilize.

NATO pays Ayman Al Zawahiri, the so-called leader of the Al Qaeda mercenaries, to advance NATO imperialism by recording videos and audio-tapes; over 60 of them so far. Zawahiri repeatedly called for the death of Gaddafi, and now he repeatedly calls for the death of Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad. He also calls for Pakistanis to support the Taliban, in order to make the world think the Taliban still exists. He sometimes records in English, and his true identity and whereabouts are a NATO secret. On 11 September 2012, in commemoration of 9/11, he released a video that eulogized Abu Yahya Al Libi, the one supposedly killed by a US drone in June. This “eulogy” had nothing to do with the Benghazi incident, which happened later that night on Tuesday 11 September.

Some claim that Salafists carried out the fatal attack on the US premises. This is more nonsense, since Salafists are NATO allies. Salafists and Wahhabists connote a strict, literalist, and puritanical approach to Islam. They are mainly associated with Saudi Arabia’s feudal style of Islam, and they were allied with NATO against Gaddafi. Now they are allied with NATO against Assad, Iran, Hezbollah, and Shiites generally.

An example of Salafists in Libya is the Ansar Al Sharia – a blanket term for various militias that want to apply strict Sharia law in Libya. Its members are pro-NATO and anti-Green Resistance. They had no reason to attack the US government site in Benghazi which had been instrumental in galvanizing the Islamist insurgency to topple the Gaddafi government, beginning at least from March 2011 and under the supervision of the late Christopher Stevens. Stevens was Washington’s point man in Benghazi and is known to have cultivated strong ties with the Islamists.

In short, it does not make sense that such Benghazi contacts would have wanted or have been motivated to kill their American paymaster.

The most obvious explanation is that cadres – the Green Resistance – loyal to Gaddafi and in opposition to the NATO-imposed regime carried out the attack. NATO and its Libyan quislings don’t want to admit this subversive reality. The fact of a resistance – a potent and growing resistance at that – has to be denied, erased from the record.

TIMING

It was a mere coincidence that the Benghazi attack happened on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11. The Green Resistance was angry that Abdullah Al Senoussi (Gaddafi’s chief of intelligence) had been arrested upon his arrival at Nouakchott airport in Mauritania on 17 March 2012. Then, six days before the Benghazi attack, Mauritania extradited Senoussi to Libya for trial by the NATO-installed bureaucrats.

One day before the Benghazi attack, the NATO puppets put two senior Gaddafi loyalists on trial, accusing them of wasting public money by paying $2.7 billion to families of people killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The two Gaddafi loyalists are Abdul Ati Al Obeidi (who had been Gaddafi’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Head of State) and Mohammed Zwai (former Secretary General of the General People’s Congress – that is, head of the legislature under Gaddafi).

Also, Baghdadi Ali Mahmudi had been Secretary of the General People’s Committee (that is, Prime Minister) under Gaddafi, but escaped from Tripoli on 21 August 2011 as NATO-backed terrorists swept into the city. Mahmudi was arrested in Tunisia for illegal border entry and jailed for six months until his charges were overturned on appeal. On 24 June 2012, Tunisia’s Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali (acting on NATO orders) suddenly had Mahmudi re-arrested and sent back to the NATO puppets in Tripoli, who promptly imprisoned Mahmudi.

Tunisia’s Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali is pro-NATO, and a friend of American hawkish senators McCain and Lieberman. His re-arrest and extradition of Mahmudi angered Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki, who denounced the extradition as illegal, and it also enraged the Libyan Green Resistance. (3)

As for US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, he had promoted Libya’s destruction, having arrived in Benghazi in April 2011 for that purpose, and remained there throughout the NATO seven-month aerial bombardment of Libya. His job was to coordinate the NATO-backed terrorists.

After Libya was destroyed, Stevens had used a Tripoli hotel as his base, since the Green Resistance had burned down the US embassy in the capital, Tripoli. When the Resistance tried to kill him with a car bomb outside the hotel, Stevens moved to the villas in Benghazi, a city in the east of the country whose inhabitants tend to be pro-US and which has long been a hotbed of Islamist jihadis, many of them furnishing the ranks of NATO’s Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s and later Al Qaeda. (4)

That was over a year ago. (Stevens formally became Obama’s ambassador to Libya in May 2012.)

Stevens was outgoing, and had so underestimated the Green Resistance that he enjoyed jogging in the streets of Benghazi and elsewhere in Libya. (5)

Everyone knew that he and his American staff were present. One figure among the pro-NATO terrorists, Ahmed Al Abbar, says of Stevens: “He was loved by everybody [that is, in Benghazi]”. (6)

Stevens’ popularity with the Benghazi traitors added to the fury of the Green Resistance when they eventually attacked the US site in Benghazi.

Thus, contrary to claims by Western media outlets such as the British Independent, there were no “major security breeches,” and no “mystery” about the attack. All such claims are red herrings designed to distract from the reality of the Green Resistance.

THEY ALL ADMITTED THE TRUTH AT FIRST

The morning after the Benghazi attack, on 12 September, the NATO puppets unwittingly admitted the truth about the “Tahloob” (Green Resistance), and whined that NATO was not doing enough to help crush it. Libyan Deputy Interior Minister Wanis Al Sharif admitted this in a Benghazi news conference, which was later broadcast on Al Jazeera television. (7) (8) (29)

Libya’s Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib also admitted it, as did Libya’s President Mohammed El-Megarif, as well as Ali Aujali, Libya’s Ambassador to Washington, plus Ibrahim Dabbashi, Libya’s ambassador to the UN. All of them said that Gaddafi loyalists had attacked the US site in Benghazi. They would quickly change their change tune under pressure from their NATO masters.

Back on 24 August 2012, Time magazine had noted that Gaddafi “still commands silent admiration in many parts of Libya”. The article quoted President El-Magariaf as saying: “We know that Gaddafi loyalists are behind these bombings [since the overthrow of Gaddafi]. In the last few months, the security services have intensified their campaign against Bani Walid and Tarhuna.” (9)

Bani Walid is a loyalist stronghold whose people held key positions in Gaddafi’s security services. It was also the last city outside of Gaddafi’s birthplace of Sirte to fall to NATO-backed terrorists on 23 January 2012. Magariaf is from Benghazi, and spent 30 years in the US being groomed for the time when NATO would destroy Libya. On 9 August 2012, NATO installed him as Libya’s head of state after an “election”. Magariaf is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is aligned with NATO.

The initial admissions of the truth about the Green Resistance were made on the morning after the attack. Within hours, however, all top Libyan officials, acting under NATO orders, changed their tune, merely calling the attackers “foreign extremists”. Magariaf, the president installed by NATO, went to Benghazi three days after the attack, and declared that “Al Qaeda did it”. (10)

One bureaucrat who would not adopt the NATO spin was Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib, who continued to insist that Gaddafi loyalists were the perpetrators. Therefore, NATO dismissed him as Libya’s prime minister, and replaced him with Mustafa Abushagur, the day after the Benghazi incident. Abushagur had lived most of his life in the USA, and had always been an enemy of Gaddafi. Like so many other US-installed bureaucrats, he had returned to Benghazi in May 2011 during the NATO-instigated insurgency.

Some alternative news outlets acknowledge the truth about the Green Resistance, for example, the Inter Press News Service, which is a non-profit outlet.

IPS spoke with armed Gaddafi loyalists who vowed that they will step up their fight. Government sources alternately claim the perpetrators are former Gaddafi loyalists or Islamists. Further confusion arises from a government clampdown on the dissemination of information in the local media, and by Libyan security forces preventing foreign journalists from covering the scenes of attacks first-hand, or taking pictures. (11)

The Libyan bureaucrats’ clampdown on media information is understandable, since they want to hamper solidarity with the Green Resistance.

MASS DENIAL

Regarding the Benghazi incident, the mass denial begins with basic facts. For example, most people refer to “the US consulate,” when in reality the US site in Benghazi was not an embassy or a consulate, or even a “compound”. It was a collection of villas (that is, a gated community) privately owned by one Mohammad Al Bishari, who was leasing the villas to US State Department personnel. (12)

Collectively the villas were what the US State Department calls an “interim facility”. It had a level of security known as “simple lock and key,” meaning it had no bulletproof glass, reinforced doors, US Marines, or other features common to embassies and consulates. (In Mexico, for example, Washington has an embassy and 22 consulates, but in Libya the US government had only a single embassy in Tripoli – and then, after the NATO bombardment campaign, used the Benghazi villas.)

The corporate media falsely use the term “US consulate” to make it seem that “terrorists attacked US sovereignty”. This justifies the “war on terror,” plus the past destruction of Libya.

Furthermore, the Obama regime calls the privately owned group of villas a “compound” in order to make it seem that the (non-existent) “protesters” brazenly stormed a fortress similar to the massive US embassy complex in Baghdad.

THERE WERE NO PROTESTERS IN BENGHAZI

The White House claims that protesters against that anti-Muslim video “spontaneously” attacked the so-called “consulate.” In reality there were no protesters anywhere in Benghazi at the time of the attack. When Fox News questioned US officials about this, the officials admitted the truth. (13)

Nonetheless, the Obama administration/regime continues to insist that “protesters did it”. This lie not only conceals the Green Resistance; it also makes Muslims all seem irrational and blood-lusting, thereby justifying imperialist aggression (that is, the “war on terror”).

The absence of protesters was confirmed by one of the eight Libyans guarding the private group of villas used by Ambassador Stevens and his staff. The eyewitness, aged 27, is being treated in a hospital for five shrapnel wounds in one leg, and two bullet wounds in the other. He asked that his name be withheld, and that the hospital not be identified, for fear that “militants” (that is, the Green Resistance) would track him down and kill him.

Of the eight Libyan security guards, the eyewitness and four others had been hired by a British firm. The remaining three were members of Libya’s 17th of February Brigade, a group of pro-NATO terrorists formed at the start of the NATO campaign to destroy Gaddafi and Libyan society.

In an interview with McClatchy news service last Thursday (13 September 2012) the eyewitness said there were no protesters at all.

“The Americans would have left if there had been protesters, but there wasn’t a single ant. The area was totally quiet until about 9:35 pm, when as many as 125 men attacked with machine guns, grenades, RPGs, and anti-aircraft weapons. They threw grenades into the villas, wounding me and knocking me down. Then they stormed through the facility’s main gate, moving from villa to villa.”

That does not sound like a “spontaneous protest” against a blasphemous B-movie that suddenly appeared on the internet, as the White House and others claim; rather, it was a sharply executed military strike that must have been planned meticulously well in advance.

The eyewitness managed to escape by telling one of the attackers that he was only a gardener in the gated community. His account is consistent with that of Mohammad Al Bishari, who owns the villas, and was leasing them to the US government. Bishari gave his own account on 12 September, the day after the attack. (12)

Ambassador Stevens was overcome by “severe asphyxia” (smoke inhalation), and was still alive after the attack. Pro-US Libyans in Benghazi carried him to the Benghazi Medical center, where he died later in the night. (14)

RESISTANCE GROWS

NATO destroyed Libya and reduced its people to poverty and violence. In the post-destruction chaos, there are family feuds and inter-militia rivalries. There are long-standing disputes over land, plus long-standing friction between Arabs and Berbers.

However, we shall focus on Resistance attacks against NATO targets, and Resistance assassinations of Libyan figures that betrayed Gaddafi and sided with NATO. The following are only some of the “scores”.

On 18 March 2012, in the Tripoli neighborhood of Abu Salim (a pro-Gaddafi stronghold) local members of the Green Resistance had a shoot-out with a pro-NATO militia group from Zintan led by one Mohammed El-Rebay. (Zintan is a province in Libya’s western mountains.) The Resistance managed to kill one of the Zintan terrorists, who had been using a Tripoli school as their base. (15)

In April 2012, the Resistance detonated a roadside bomb beside a UN convoy that included Ian Martin, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative for Libya. (16)

On 29 April 2012, the lifeless body of Shukri Ghanem, Gaddafi’s former oil minister, was found floating in the River Danube. In May 2011, Ghanem had joined NATO, and went off to reside in London and then Vienna. (17)

On 2 May 2012, the Green Resistance claimed responsibility for assassinating General Albarrani Shkal, a former military governor of Tripoli who had demobilized the 38,000 men of his guard and opened the gates of Tripoli to foreign troops during Operation Mermaid Dawn, the sacking of Tripoli that began on 20 August 2011. (Tripoli’s nickname is “The Mermaid”.) (18)

On 15 May 2012, Khaled Abu Salah, a candidate for the Constituent Assembly controlled by NATO, was assassinated near the oasis town of Ubari in southwest Libya. (19)

On 22 May 2012, a rocket-propelled grenade targeted the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Benghazi, but caused only structural damage to the premises. The ICRC is headquartered in Geneva, and its foreign offices are often used as cover by Western intelligence agencies, such as MI6 or the CIA.

On 26 May 2012, Mukhtar Fernana, head of the Military Council for the Western Region, survived an assassination attempt.

On 5 June 2012, the Resistance detonated a bomb in front of the US-operated building in Tripoli, damaging its gates.

On 11 June 2012, in Benghazi’s al-Rabha neighborhood, the Resistance fired an RPG at a convoy that carried British Ambassador Dominic Asquith, wounding two of his bodyguards. (20)

Back in July 2011, Abdel-Fattah Younis, the former Qaddafi loyalist turned “rebel” military commander, was assassinated. On 22 June 2012, the judge investigating the death of Younis was himself assassinated in Benghazi.

On 28 July 2012, Suleiman Buzraidah was killed in a drive-by shooting while he was en route to a Benghazi mosque. Buzraidah had been a military intelligence official under Gaddafi, but betrayed him to join the NATO-backed terrorists. (21)

On 29 July 2012, Khalifa Belqasim Haftar narrowly survived an assassination attempt. Formerly one of Gaddafi’s army commanders, in 1988 he betrayed Gaddafi and lived for 23 years under US government protection near CIA headquarters in Virginia. He returned to Libya during the NATO-led insurgency, hoping that after Gaddafi’s death, he would be made commander-in-chief of the Libyan military (controlled by NATO). However, he had to settle for third place in the hierarchy, and was given the rank of Lt. General before the Resistance caught up with him.

Last month was an especially active four weeks for the Resistance. Security buildings and hotels in Benghazi were rocked by bomb attacks and attempted attacks. Foreign diplomatic staff and embassies were targeted. US embassy staff in Tripoli escaped an attempted carjacking.

On 10 August 2012, eight Resistance members escaped from the Al Fornaj prison in Tripoli after a coordinated attack. Gunmen in pickup trucks outside the prison shot at security guards, while prisoners inside set sections of the prison on fire and managed to overpower a number of guards. This was the third Resistance attack on the prison since the murder of Gaddafi. (22)

On 18 August 2012, the Green Resistance detonated a car bomb outside the Four Seasons Hotel on Omar Al Mukhtar Street in Tripoli. The target was a vehicle being used by Benghazi security officials (installed by NATO) who were staying at the hotel. (22)

Afterwards, the NATO-installed bureaucrats sent heavily armed soldiers to prevent photographs being taken, and to forbid journalists from entering the area, so that word of the Green Resistance would not get out. A Libyan interior ministry official refused to comment further. (22)

The following day, the Resistance set off more car bombs in Tripoli. One bomb was near the administrative offices of the Interior Ministry (controlled by the NATO powers). Two other car bombs exploded minutes later near the former headquarters of a women’s police academy, which NATO now uses for interrogation and detentions. (The latter two bombs killed two passersby.)

The next day in Benghazi (20 August 2012) Resistance members tossed a bomb into the car of Abdel Hamid Refaii, the first secretary of the Egyptian Embassy. This was outside Refaii’s house. However, the assassination bid failed.

The day after that, the then Libyan Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib condemned the Green Resistance in a televised speech, saying: “Desperate and malicious forces among the supporters of the former regime are trying to create tension, send Libya backwards to violence, and sabotage the country’s political process.” (23)

Tripoli’s security chief, Col Mahmoud Sherif, said Gaddafi loyalists were responsible for the spate of violent attacks. He ordered the arrest of 32 suspected Resistance members for interrogation. (24)

Indeed, the police in Tripoli (who now work for the NATO powers) are constantly occupied with defusing car bombs set by the Resistance. (25)

After the Resistance bombing of the former headquarters of a women’s police academy, the NATO puppets sent soldiers to raid a farm where Resistance members were holed up. Several of the Gaddafi loyalists were killed.

One of the members who survived was alleged to have set up sleeper cells in Libya and to have been criss-crossing the border with Tunisia from where he and several comrades were smuggling weapons into Libya for the Resistance. (26)

On 23 August 2012, Abdelmenom Al Hur, official spokesperson for the Supreme Security Committee, installed by NATO, held a press conference in which he admitted that Gaddafi loyalists had penetrated many official security units. He said that a whole barracks full of heavy armaments was under the control of a pro-Gaddafi cell that he called the Awfia Brigade. (The group’s members call themselves the “Martyr Gaddafi Brigade”.) The same Resistance brigade had briefly occupied Tripoli International Airport back in June 2012.

After the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens on 11 September 2012, the Resistance managed to shut down the Benina airport in Benghazi, which the US military was using as a drone base. (27)

With the Resistance firing at US drones, the airport had become unsafe. A Turkish Afriqiyah Airlines flight with 121 people onboard was forced to turn back to Istanbul. (28)

CONCLUSION

The foregoing is only a partial list of Resistance activity over the past year, which has dramatically increased during the last three months, reaching a crescendo in August, and leading to the death of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens last week.

The NATO powers had shifted their focus to destroying Syria, and on continuing their preparations to destroy Iran, while letting their Tripoli bureaucrats handle the Green Resistance in Libya. Now, however, the NATO powers realize that Libya is far from subjugated and that they are being seriously tasked with crushing the Resistance before it gains critical mass.

Marines, drones, and warships have been sent to quash the Gaddafi loyalists – but how to find them? Even the FBI declined to “investigate” the latest attack in Benghazi, realizing that it would be pointless.

Libya presents Washington with another Afghan nightmare – only perhaps worse. If US drones start blasting Libyans, and the US military rounds up tens of thousands of suspected loyalists, then the Resistance can only become stronger. Of Libya’s 5.6 million people, only one in 10 (that is, the population of the eastern city of Benghazi) welcomed the NATO bondage and destruction of their country.

Meanwhile, the NATO powers do not want the Western public to realize any of this awkward truth. They want you to think that all Libyans are happy under NATO’s “liberation” with their Islamist terrorist proxies. Some 50,000 Libyans lost their lives due to NATO’s bombing and ground campaign during 2011. And for what? Only for a Resistance to rise up to illustrate to the world that Libyans had their country stolen from them by NATO powers in a criminal war of aggression.

The more the Libyan Green Resistance gains strength and challenges the NATO-imposed regime, the more clear it becomes that the Western governments and their media lied in their pretexts of “responsibility to protect (R2P)” human rights and democracy. Recall that these were the pretexts invoked by the NATO powers to justify setting up No-Fly Zones in Libya in March 2011. (The same pretexts are again being reiterated with regard to Syria.)

But, as the growing Resistance illustrates, the Western powers did not “liberate” Libya; they invaded a sovereign country and killed massively to execute their real, criminal agenda of regime change and theft of oil resources. Now the people of Libya are resisting this criminal conquest. And that damning truth has to be expunged at all costs.

Before the Benghazi incident, the corporate media had occasionally mentioned Gaddafi loyalists. After the incident, all such mention has suddenly ceased. The media say that “extremists” attacked the US site in Benghazi. Or “Al Qaeda” or “Islamists” or “terrorists,” or “protesters” – anyone but the Resistance.

Not true. The Green Resistance lives, and furthermore it is only getting started.

==========================================================

Mark Robertson is a political analyst based in Mexico City quatloos.x@gmail.com

Finian Cunningham is a freelance journalist based in East Africa cunninghamfinian@gmail.com

==========================================================

Notes

1)http://www.prisonpla...-loyalists.html

(2)http://www.telegraph...ssy-attack.html

(3)http://www.aljazeera...5853340329.html

(4)http://www.nytimes.c...&ref=middleeast

(5)http://www.reuters.c...E88B13B20120913

(6)http://www.sfgate.co...p#ixzz26t2Xx6Zi

(7)http://www.reuters.c...E88B0K920120912

(8)http://www.aljazeera...2108737726.html

(9)http://world.time.co...ts-behind-them/

(10)http://www.thedailyb...s-in-libya.html

(11)http://www.ipsnews.n...sts-up-in-arms/

(12)http://www.examiner....re-attack-began

(13)http://www.foxnews.c...n-on-consulate/

(14)http://www.cbsnews.c...evere-asphyxia/

(15)http://rt.com/news/l...-loyalists-857/

(16)http://www.tunisia-l...rity-questions/

(17)http://libyanfreepre...een-resistance/

(18)http://www.voltairen...tling-of-scores

(19)http://www.tunisia-l...-filing-to-run/

(20)http://www.reuters.c...E85A0TV20120611

(21)http://menasassociat...m-failures.html

(22)http://www.ipsnews.n...sts-up-in-arms/

(23)http://www.tunisia-l...rity-questions/

(24)http://www.guardian....ld-blasts-libya

(25)http://jn1.tv/breaki...n-benghazi.html

(26)http://www.ipsnews.n...sts-up-in-arms/

27)http://articles.chic...s-libyan-rebels

(28)http://www.turkishwe...urns-home-.html

(29)http://en-maktoob.ne...-104805571.html

Edited September 22, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

Long on speculation, short on documentation.

[Steven Gaal]

FIRST CORRECT STORY, THEN THE COVERUP

THEY ALL ADMITTED THE TRUTH AT FIRST

The morning after the Benghazi attack, on 12 September, the NATO puppets unwittingly admitted the truth about the “Tahloob” (Green Resistance), and whined that NATO was not doing enough to help crush it. Libyan Deputy Interior Minister Wanis Al Sharif admitted this in a Benghazi news conference, which was later broadcast on Al Jazeera television. (7) (8) (29)

Libya’s Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib also admitted it, as did Libya’s President Mohammed El-Megarif, as well as Ali Aujali, Libya’s Ambassador to Washington, plus Ibrahim Dabbashi, Libya’s ambassador to the UN. All of them said that Gaddafi loyalists had attacked the US site in Benghazi. They would quickly change their change tune under pressure from their NATO masters.

################################################

On 23 August 2012, Abdelmenom Al Hur, official spokesperson for the Supreme Security Committee, installed by NATO, held a press conference in which he admitted that Gaddafi loyalists had penetrated many official security units. He said that a whole barracks full of heavy armaments was under the control of a pro-Gaddafi cell that he called the Awfia Brigade. (The group’s members call themselves the “Martyr Gaddafi Brigade”.) The same Resistance brigade had briefly occupied Tripoli International Airport back in June 2012.

After the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens on 11 September 2012, the Resistance managed to shut down the Benina airport in Benghazi, which the US military was using as a drone base. (27)

With the Resistance firing at US drones, the airport had become unsafe. A Turkish Afriqiyah Airlines flight with 121 people onboard was forced to turn back to Istanbul. (28)

CONCLUSION

The foregoing is only a partial list of Resistance activity over the past year, which has dramatically increased during the last three months, reaching a crescendo in August, and leading to the death of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens last week.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

No evidence was presented that the initial reports rather than the later ones were more accurate. There is no reason to cover this up, groups don't need widespread support to carry out terrorist attacks.

[Steven Gaal]

They want you to think that NATO brought “freedom and democracy” to Libya, not chaos and death.

KEY PHRASE OF ENTIRE ARTICLE, REASON FOR COVERUP

[Len Colby]

The authors' think this indicates widespread support for Kadaffy. Actually it's worse from a PR standpoint to blame Islamists because NATO helped enable them.

[Steven Gaal]

The Summer of Muslim Discontent: It’s Not “The Amateur Film” Stupid!

James Petras

The so-called “Arab Spring:” is a distant and bitter memory to those who fought and struggled for a better world, not to speak of the thousands who lost, life and limb. In its place, throughout the Muslim world, a new wave of reactionaries, corrupt and servile politicians have taken the reins of power buttressed by the same military, secret police and judicial power who sustained the previous rulers.[2]

* * *

Introduction

Death and destruction is rampant, poverty and misery has multiplied, law and order has broken down, retrograde thugs have seized political power, where previously they were a marginal force. Living standards have plunged, cities are devastated and commerce is paralyzed. And presiding over this “Arab Winter” are the Western powers, the US and EU, – with the aid of the despotic Gulf absolutist monarchies, their Turkish ally and a motley army of mercenary Islamic terrorists and their would-be exile spokespeople.

The legacy of imperial intervention in the Muslim world during the first decade of the 21^st century, in terms of lives lost, in people displaced, in economies destroyed, in perpetual warfare, exceeds any previous decade, including 19^th and 20^th century colonial conquests. Much of the latest Western mayhem and violence has been compressed in the period dubbed the “Arab Spring” between 2011 – 2012. Moreover, the worst is to come. The Western overseers have gained strategic positions of power in some countries( Egypt ), are engaged in prolonged ruinous wars in others ( Syria ) and are preparing for even bigger and more destructive military intervention in still others ( Iran ).

The “Winter of Muslim Discontent” covers an entire arc from Pakistan , Afghanistan in South Asia, through the Gulf region and the Middle East to North Africa . In the throes of the worst economic crises to hit the West since the 1930’s, the Western imperialist regimes have squeezed their people, mobilized personnel, arms and money to engage in simultaneous wars in five regions and two continents – in pursuit of overthrowing political adversaries and installing clients, even if it results in the destruction of the economy and uprooting of millions.

Let us begin with Egypt , where the Arab Spring has become a case study in the making of the New Imperial Order in the Muslim world. To attribute the mass violent rebellions across two continents and two dozen Muslim countries to a US made film which desecrates the Prophet Mohammed is the height of superficiality. At most the film was the trigger that set off deeply rooted hostilities resulting from two decades of US led ravaging and destruction of the Muslim world and more particularly, rage flows from Washington ’s crude intervention against the promise of the Arab Spring.

Egypt: The Making of a Client State

From day one, in February 2011, Washington sought in every way to prop up the Mubarak dictatorship as thousands of protestors fighting for freedom were killed, wounded or jailed in the major plazas and streets of Egypt . When Mubarak was forced out of power, Washington sought to retain its influence by turning to his Generals, and backed the military junta which seized power. As the military dictatorship became the target of huge pro-democracy demonstrations, Washington backed a political power sharing agreement between the dominant pro-Western neo-liberal sector of the Muslim Brotherhood and the military, excluding any but the most superficial democratic and socio-economic reforms demanded by the poor and the working and middle classes.

With the election of President Mohamed Morsi, Washington secured the most fervent advocate of savage “free market” capitalism and the second best (after Mubarak) advocate of retaining Egypt’s status as a US client state in the Middle East. Morsi, following in the footsteps of Mubarak and in accordance with the Washington and Tel Aviv, closed the trade routes between Gaza and Sinai, traveled to the Non-Aligned Movement in Teheran to deliver the Saudi-Gulf message calling for support of the Western backed armed mercenaries ravaging Syria . Later he announced plans to privatize publicly-owned enterprises, reduce the deficit via elimination of basic subsidies to the poor, de-regulate the economy to increase the flow of foreign capital and end labor strikes^[3]. As a reward for his servility and to ease the process of remaking Egypt as a pliable Western client state, Washington, Saudi Arabia, the IMF, Qatar and the EU have offered Morsi over $20 billion in loans, debt relief and grants^[4]. Morsi’s rule depends on playing the ‘spiritual card’ to retain the support of the impoverished Muslim masses, while pursuing a staunch neo-liberal economic strategy and neo-colonial foreign policy.

Given the recent revolutionary pro-democracy and nationalist fervor, Morsi looks for ways to deflect rising socio-economic discontent with his neo-liberal economic policies by adopting an apparently pious Muslim posture – condemning “the film” ridiculing the Prophet and tolerating assaults on the US Embassy in Cairo … which angered Clinton and Obama, who expect total subservience, especially toward the symbols and substance of everything US^[5].

From Morsi’s perspective, a one day blow-off of steam aimed at the US Embassy, was the price for his larger agenda of putting an end to the revolutionary democratic and nationalist aspirations of the masses who overthrew Mubarak, especially when Morsi has every intention of “continuing his (Mubarek’s) economic agenda with a stated policy to battle corruption”^[6]. Egyptian Muslim and secular populace are profoundly disenchanted with the Brotherhoods betrayal of their promises of welfare, jobs, prosperity and nationalist foreign policy .The “film” served as a “legitimate pretext” to unify their forces: the protest against “the film” was in reality about the larger socio-economic and political cleavages emerging and the tremendous boost in US influence in Morsi’s Egypt .

Libya

The Obama regime led the aerial and maritime war that devastated Libya ’s economy, destroyed its national integrity and allowed a plethora of foreign and domestic terrorist fundamentalist groups to seize control over vast regions of the country^[7]. Washington and the UE parachuted a motley group of client ex-pats into government – without any supporting state institutions. The Islamic fundamentalists, the clans, the gangs, the tribalists, monarchists and dozens of other local warlords who the EU and Washington funded, armed and imported to overthrow Gadhafi did much more – they destroyed the entire fabric of organized civil society, the state and public authority. In the face of a Hobbesian chaotic world of warring fiefdoms, many people turned to their primary groups – family, clan, religious authorities, which could offer some minimum protection in the home, street and workplace. The assault on the US consulate was only one of thousands of violent assaults against property and national, regional and local authorities^[8]. The very police, military and ministries are infiltrated by competing armed religious and secular factions seeking to secure scarce oil revenues for their particular group.

The Consulate protest and the assassination of the US Ambassador and Special Forces was merely the most publicized act of murderous violence spawned by the US and EU military intervention. They thought, either out of total ignorance, arrogance or naiveté that they could arm the fundamentalists to do the dirty work of killing off Gadhafi and once their “mission was completed”, they could be discarded like a used condom (or shipped off to Syria as shock troops) and could be replaced by neo-liberal technocrats who would run the country as a Western client state: turning the oil fields to EU and US oil companies. Instead Washington and the EU have alienated all sections of Libya society: the millions of beneficiaries of stable secure, secular and prosperous Gadhafi ruled Libya ; the mass of armed Muslim fanatics who demand a fundamentalist state and feel their sacrifices have been pushed aside; the warlords and contrabandists of arms, who demand respect for their territorial acquisitions^[9]. And above all the vast majority of all Libyans who have been impoverished by the war and who looked on with indifference or satisfaction as the armed gangs bombed the US Consulate. The violent protest over the amateur film denigrating the Prophet was clearly the pretext for a vast accumulation of popular and elite grievances which resulted from armed Western intervention.

Yemen

The seizure of the US Embassy in Yemen follows 33 years of US arming and financial backing of the brutal Ali Abdullah Saleh dictatorship, months of drone warfare and the repression of mass peaceful protests. The on-going pro-democracy movement in Yemen , which attained massive proportions, has been blocked by US-Saudi intervention and has left in its wake thousands of dead, wounded and jailed Yemenese citizens. The seizure of the US Embassy, ostensibly over “the film”, had far deeper and more comprehensive causes: popular discontent with the decades-long US-Yemen alliance and a phony US-promoted “democratic transition”. As in Egypt , Tunisia , as well as in Yemen – personnel changes are designed to sacrifice the incumbent dictator in order to save the client state apparatus (police, military, judiciary) which is the mainstay of US and Saudi power in the Gulf region. In all the “transitions” the US and EU rely on pliable and servile Muslim politicians to harness religious beliefs to their neo-liberal and pro-imperial policies.

Tunisia

In the case of Tunisia , the Washington-EU leveraged the Islamic Ennahda party in power in order to abort the pro-democracy transformation. They subsequently heavily subsidized the “free-market” Moncef Marzouki regime which has totally ignored the basic demands which led to the uprising: mass unemployment, the concentration of wealth and subservience to EU-US foreign policy especially with regard to Palestine , Libya and Syria . The Islamic regime and party played the usual double game of condemning “the film” and smashing the protest, knowing full well that the street protest could ignite a much more significant demonstration against the regime’s total neglect of the original democratic socio-economic agenda.

Somalia and Sudan

Massive violent protests and attacks against the US embassy have taken place in Somalia and the Sudan . Washington has been deeply and directly militarily involved in Somalia for over two decades, shifting from a failed marine occupation to financing African military surrogates, including Ethiopia , Kenya and Uganda . They also engage in drone aerial assaults. As a result of US military intervention, Somalia is a divided, destroyed and destitute country, where piracy flourishes and three quarters of its people are refugees. The “film protests” are merely the tip of an ongoing national liberation war pitting radical Islamists against Western backed surrogates and the “moderate” Muslim puppet Sharif Sheik Ahmed regime.

Sudan is the site of a massive protest and violent attack on the US and European embassies. The ruling elite in the Sudan, subject to US and UE sanctions and a Washington-Tel Aviv-UE funded and armed separatist movement in the oil rich southern Sudan, signed off on an accord which reduced its oil revenues by eighty percent. As a result of Sudan ’s appeasement of the Western separatist surrogate, living standards in Khartoum have plunged, inflation is rife, unemployment is increasing and the regime has turned its guns from the separatists to its own people. The attacks on the US Embassy have more to do with the division and impoverishment of the country than with “the film”. At most the latter served as a ‘trigger’ to ignite the profound frustration against a regime which once upheld the national integrity of the country and of late sacrificed its natural wealth to gain favor with Washington .

Pakistan

Pakistan was the site of mass popular protests in its urban centers as well as in the northeastern periphery. The embassy attacks and flag burning reflect an ongoing and deepening resentment against more than a decade of US ground and aerial intrusions, violating Pakistanian sovereignty. The drone bombing of dozens of ‘tribal villages’ has aroused the rage of millions. The US war waged against Islamic strongholds, its armed intrusion to capture bin Laden and its billion-dollar funding of massive Pakistan military sweeps has led to thousands of deaths and millions of refugees. Pakistan is a country seething with anger and deep hostility to anything associated with the USA . The film merely fed into the cauldron of growing militant, religious and nationalist discontent. This convicted felon, the pro-US President Zarda and his gestures of protest over the film have no credibility: He is marking time before he is ousted.

Lesser protests of “the film” took place in Malaysia , Indonesia , Nigeria and elsewhere where the US has been less ubiquitous in interfering in the military and political order.

The size, scope and violence of the protests against “the film” are highly correlated with the depth, destruction and destitution directly linked to US military and political intervention.

Conclusion

Faced with a sharp and militant backlash to its on-going counter-revolutionary offensive in the Muslim world, Washington is demanding that its ‘new’ Muslim clients increase “security” – strengthen the police state and crack down on mass protest movements^[10]. Washington is once again on the defensive.

The shifting relations of power, between popular movements and the US-EU, have once again become more acute.

In the first phase, Washington and its EU allies were caught by surprise and severely challenged by the mass pro-democracy movements which overthrew or threatened their client rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere – what was dubbed the “Arab Spring”.

The second phase was the Western reaction to countermand, to halt and reverse the popular pro-democracy movement, via alliances with malleable Islamic leaders ( Egypt , Tunisia and Yemen ) and by launching and escalating armed struggles via Islamic extremists in Libya and Syria . They also buttressed the despotic royal regimes in the Gulf.

Barely a few months later the neo-colonial clients, imposed by the US and EU, revealed its fragile foundations: The fraudulent “transitions” produced servile, rulers incapable and unwilling to address the socio-economic demands of the pro-democracy movements.

The third phase of the struggle now pits a more complex scenario than the earlier “binary conflict” of dictatorship versus democracy. Today we witness conflicts between neo-liberal Islamists in power against secular and Muslim trade unionists and the poor fundamentalist Muslims fighting for the US (Syria) and against the US (Libya) while secular (Syria) and Islamist (Iran) regimes joining forces facing Western-backed Islamist mercenaries and nuclear-armed Jewish threats. Whether it is Pakistan , Somalia or the Sudan – wherever the US has gained client states it has imposed war policies that impoverish the masses.

The Islamic terrain of struggles for both the imperial powers and the popular masses reflects the discrediting and decimation of secular rulers and popular civil society organizations. The religious institutions have become the refuge, the cloak and the war cry of the dispossessed and the property classes.

A careful study of the two decades of US and EU wars in the Muslim world, finds little evidence of “corporate” oil influence in the conduct of imperial wars. Instead they are essentially imperial military wars. What we see everywhere is the large scale destruction of the means of production; the massive dis-accumulation of capital; the massive displacement of millions of productive workers, scientists and engineers who produce wealth. What investors are going to make large scale, long term investments in Afghanistan , Yemen , Somalia , Syria and Libya when their property and lives are in danger from bands of warring ethno-religious warlords armed and trained by US Special Forces?

Big investors do not confide in the stability of corrupt, servile, unpopular client regimes buttressed by the US and EU. Investors count ten lost years in Iraq at a cost of billions in oil profits. The US was not at war for oil as some benighted leftist pundits claim.

Military imperialism has led to ruin and rule followed by ruin and run. The only, and obvious beneficiary of the Western wars on the Muslim countries, is the Jewish state of Israel , whose billionaire political influentials and political acolytes in the Pentagon, Treasury, National Security Council, Congress and the US mass media designed and promoted these disastrous wars against the Muslim world. Most recently they have promoted the US counter-attack, turning the ‘Arab Spring’ into a ‘Muslim Summer of Discontent’.

There is and there will be no closure on the wars as long as Israel claims supremacy in the Arab world. The US , is and will be, in permanent war with the Muslim world as long as its foreign policy and political structures are influenced by the Israeli-Zionist power configuration.

No empire prior to the US has sustained such huge financial losses and gained so little in economic rewards. No previous empire has destroyed so many countries without establishing a single viable productive colonial or neo-colonial regime .Yet to read and hear from our most prominent journalists that the massive, widespread and violent Muslim protests against the symbols and substance of US imperial power are about an “amateur film defaming the prophet” boggles the mind. The pundits ignore the fact that mass unrest and anti-imperial assaults preceded and will follow the ‘film’ incident. A decade of savaging a dozen countries and dislocating tens of millions from Libya to Pakistan , passing through Somalia , Syria , Iraq , Pakistan and Yemen has left an indelible mark on the consciousness of those who suffered and those who struggle and especially among the new generation of pro-democracy fighters who will not accept the roll back of their Arab Spring.

The world-wide protest is not merely opposed to “the film” and the mediocre anti-Muslim reactionaries who produced it, but of the entire political and cultural Islamophobic ambience in the US which nurtures this kind of film. Beginning with the massive round-up of thousands of innocent Muslims by uber-Zionist Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, continuing with the FBI surveillance and infiltration of hundreds of mosques and following the Zionist sponsored rabble rousing campaign in New York City against a cultural center and the purge of a highly respected Arab-American educator; and the rabid weekly anti-Moslem Christian-Zionist rants to 40 million US followers; and the AIPAC-promoted US Treasury appointments, and subsequent sanctions against independent Muslim countries, Muslims have a solid bases for believing that Islamophobia is embedded in US culture. No thoughtful Muslim in the world believes the film was an aberration since Hollywood ’s pro-Israel film and TV moguls have always demonized and grotesquely caricatured Muslims, portraying them as blood-thirsty villains, ignorant barbarians and worthless playboy sheiks.

Obama’s sending of the Marines and warships to defend the missions merely reinforces the image and reality that the US presence in the Muslim world is based on force and arms. There are no critical reflections in US political circles on the larger cultural and political issues involved at home and abroad which arouse the passion and rage now spreading to 20 Muslim nations and beyond.

Islamophobia is not simply an attitude of a minority of marginal extremists, it is part and parcel of policies engaging in large scale on-going wars against a dozen Muslim nations, in policing millions of US Muslims and in arming a Jewish state engaged in uprooting Palestinians and threatening to bomb 75 million Iranian Muslims.

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Notes

^[1] FT Reporters, “Rage at Amateur Film Spreads”, Financial Times, 9/14/12, p. 2.

^[2]James Petras, The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack, ( Atlanta : Clarity Press 2012) 2md Edition

^[3] Borgou Daragahi, “Investment Drive Aims to Boost US Influence in Morsi’s Egypt ” FT 9/10/12, p. 4.

^[4]ibid

^[5]FT 9/13/12, p. 10.

^[6]FT 9/10/12, p. 10

^[7]FT 9/13/12, p. 11

^[8]FT 9/13/12, p. 4

^[9] Mel Frykberg, “Consulate Attack was just the Latest in Rising Violence in Libya ” McClatchy Washington Bureau, 9/12/12.

^[10] FT 9/14/12, p. 2. Roula “Fool ya” Khalef a reliable mouthpiece of the US echoes Clinton ’s commands in her diatribe “Islamist Leaders (sic) have power and Responsibility to Defuse Tensions”

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About the Author

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Steven Gaal

[Len Colby]

Long on speculation, short on documentation.