EYEWITNESS REPORTS FROM MCKINNEY DELEGATION IN LIBYA DAY 8

 

EYEWITNESS: Dedon Kamathi Returns from Libya and Reports (radio interview above).

 

DeDon Kamathi has just returned from a tour of Libya with former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. He is interviewed by Askia Muhammad of The Final Call, on WPFW-FM Radio in Washington D.C. as posted above.

WAR IN LIBYA HAS BEEN U.S. PROJECT ALL ALONG

Click on http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/183967.html  to hear interview with Don DeBar

American journalist Don DeBar says the Libyan war has been a “U.S. Project” all along.

DeBar told Press TV’s U.S. Desk that there has been an attempt to position the war on Libya “as being not an American military activity but rather one of NATO. However, the majority of the resources are either directly owned by the United States or were financed by the U.S.”

The anti-War activist said the Libyan “operation is being conducted under the direction of the United States.”

DeBar said “the expenditure in the Libyan war can be spent to stimulate the American economy for job development and things that are desperately needed” in America.

Washington has resorted to cutting education and “all kinds of basic safety net programs” all the while “starting wars just about everywhere,” he added.

DeBar said the U.S. is maintaining military bases in over 100 countries. “Yet they’re expanding the money that is going to the military” in the face of all the bad economic data that is coming in.

RS/SM/HJ

Libya says Nato air raids ‘killed 700 civilians’ by end of May 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13611132 

31 May 2011 Last updated at 19:06 ET

The Libyan government says NATO air raids have killed more than 700 civilians since bombing began in March.

Spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said more than 4,000 people had been wounded, but gave no evidence to confirm his figures.

NATO has denied killing large numbers of civilians, saying its air strikes are to protect Libyans from Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.

Four powerful explosions were felt in the centre of Tripoli on Tuesday night, Libyan state media reported.

Planes were heard flying over the capital, but it was not possible to determine the targets of the raids.

Speaking at a news conference in Tripoli, Mr Ibrahim accused Nato of killing and injuring hundreds of Libyan citizens.

“Since March 19, and up to May 26, there have been 718 martyrs among civilians and 4,067 wounded – 433 of them seriously,” Mr Ibrahim said.

He said the figures did not include military casualties.

Foreign reporters in Tripoli have not been shown evidence of mass civilian casualties.

Asked why not, Mr Ibrahim said casualties had not been concentrated near the capital but scattered across the country.

He also denied that South African President Jacob Zuma, who met Col Gaddafi in Tripoli on Monday, had discussed an “exit strategy” with the Libyan leader.

“If Gaddafi goes, the security valve will disappear. His departure would be the worst case scenario for Libya,” he told reporters.

Moussa Ibrahim denied that Col Gaddafi had discussed a strategy for his departure

A statement released by Mr Zuma’s office after he returned to Pretoria said Mr Gaddafi would not leave Libya, despite growing international pressure.

“Col Gaddafi called for an end to the bombings to enable a Libyan dialogue,” the statement read.

“He emphasised that he was not prepared to leave his country, despite the difficulties.”

After initially backing NATO’s involvement, Mr Zuma and the African Union have called for a halt to air strikes, arguing that Nato has overstepped its UN mandate to protect civilians.

Both Libyan rebels and Nato have refused to accept a ceasefire until Col Gaddafi agrees to step down.

On Tuesday, Italy’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said that Gaddafi’s regime was “finished”, during a visit to the rebel capital Benghazi, in eastern Libya.

“He [Gaddafi] must leave office, he must leave the country,” Mr Frattini told a joint news conference with Ali al-Essawi, the rebels’ foreign affairs chief.

“His aides have left, he has no international support, the G8 leaders reject him, he must go.”

NATO’s “ALTERNATE UNIVERSE” IN LIBYA

The Pentagon and its NATO partners are engaged in one of the most obvious and intensive propaganda ploys in their military operations against Libya since the days leading up to the “Coalition of the Willing” attack on Iraq.

By Wayne MADSEN

(USA) 08.JUN.2011

http://www.mathaba.net/news/libya

Suggestions that the government of Muammar Qaddafi is on its last legs and that life in Tripoli has drawn to a standstill as a result of the NATO bombing campaign are not based on reality, as any unbiased observer who has recently been in Tripoli, has witnessed…

In addition to NATO’s “information war” against Libya, the corporate media press corps gathered in Tripoli, including notorious Pentagon war correspondents for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, have furthered the Pentagon’s and NATO’s propaganda claims by making false reports from the ground in Tripoli.

In one report from Tripoli, The Post’s Simon Denyer suggests that the Libyan government was faking some casualties as being the result of NATO air strikes on civilian targets rather than merely from non-combat-related causes. That same meme was echoed by John Burns, who is running up the New York Times’s hotel tab in Tripoli reporting on the same “made-in-the-Pentagon” propaganda line. Having been to El Khadra Hospital in Tripoli, I can attest to the fact that several individuals were injured directly by NATO airstrikes, including many with shrapnel wounds to the legs, arms, and torsos.

While German Chancellor Angela Merkel was being swooned by President Barack Obama in Washington to commit German military forces to the NATO campaign against Libya, the Deutche Presse-Agentur, the German Press Agency, falsely reported from Tripoli that life in the sprawling city of some 1.3 million peoplehad ground to a halt, that schools were closed, and that stores were shuttered, as Qaddafi’s forces were increasingly coming under pressure, with some units defecting.

My own account from Tripoli is that as of June 6, students of all ages were still in school, stores were open — although some larger food markets had limited hours of operation due to NATO sanctions on goods coming into Libya by air and ship — and that life in Tripoli continued as normal. The NATO sanctions have resulted in massive lines of cars, trucks, and taxis queued up to fill up when petrol stations receive gasoline from land routes from Tunisia or from locally-refined oil.

The NATO sanctions and their effect of the lives of Libyans living in the central government-controlled western region is a form of “collective punishment” designed to weaken the resolve of the western Libyans to support their embattled government. However, the sanctions are having the opposite effect, with even those who may have favored the replacement of the Qaddafi government, now rallying around their government leaders as NATO prepares to usher in a neo-colonial administration. With Italy a member of the NATO coalition, Libyans recall Italian atrocities committed against Libya during Rome’s colonial occupation and Libyans will support Qaddafi against the Italians, French, and British, who, along with the Americans and Canadians, seek to impose a puppet regime in Tripoli.

Western Libyans in contact with their relatives in Benghazi, the eastern city under control of the Interim National Transition Council made up of figures of exiled opposition groups, long-supported by the CIA, Britain’s MI-6, and the French Direction General de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), recent defectors from Qaddafi’s government, and extremist Wahhabi Salafist elements encourages and supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, report how life has changed under the rebels. Women in cities like Derna, which is under the control of Salafist veterans of the “Al Qaeda” operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, including some released from U.S. detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are afraid to leave their homes because the Salafists have imposed extremist Islamic codes on women appearing in public without the veil. Under Qaddafi, there were no restrictions on what women or men could wear in public. However, men cannot have beards in their Libyan passport photographs. The possession of Libyan passports bearing photographs of bearded Salafist leaders in the rebel movement indicate they have been issued fake passports by the rebel authorities in Benghazi.

Civil servants, including teachers, in the rebel-held east have not been paid after rebel leaders looted the Central Bank of Libya in Benghazi of 900 million Libyan dinars and $500.5 million in U.S. cash. Although the central government in Tripoli would like to help Libyan citizens in the east, there is no way for payments to be transmitted to the idled civil servants, as well as pensioners and those families who received $500 per month under Libya’s oil revenue sharing program. The Libyan rebel “finance minister” Ali Tarhouni is believed to be a longtime CIA asset and it was he who planned the theft of the cash from the safe vault of the Central Bank in Benghazi, carried out with the assistance of a CIA-supplied safecracker from the United Arab Emirates.

A number of Libyan ministers who defected from the government to the rebels were known to be opposed to Qaddafi’s policy of sharing revenue with the Libyan people and were more interested in fattening their own bank accounts and investment portfolios. It is not coincidental, therefore, that one of the first targets of the NATO warplanes was the office in Tripoli responsible for conducting an investigation of fraud of senior government officials. Many of the officials under investigation for fraud and corruption, including senior Qaddafi ministers, are now top officials of the Interim National Transition Council, recognized by France, Italy, Britain, and other NATO countries as the “legitimate” government of Libya. Western nations are already cutting deals with rebel leaders for new oil concessions that will place the interests of Big Oil over those of the Libyan masses.

The good news is that the fraud and corruption files in the building struck by NATO were backed up in a secure location and that these files will be used as evidence to indict the defectors who now serve on the Interim Council. The ministers and senior advisers implicated in corruption include former Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the nominal and ineffectual leader of the rebel interim council; Mahmoud Jibril, the U.S.-trained former Planning Minister and head of the Economic Development Board who is acting as prime minister of the rebel “Libyan Republic,” Dr. Ali el-Essawi, the Trade and Industry Minister and former ambassador to India who is also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,Interior Minister Abdul Fatah Yunis and a close friend of Qaddafi, and former Libyan intelligence chief and Foreign Minister Musa Kusa, another close friend of Qaddafi who was also the CIA’s point man in the agency’s “extraordinary rendition” and kidnapping program in Libya.

Ironically, some of the very same jihadists and Muslim extremists who were targets of the CIA’s torture and rendition program are now fighting with the rebels in the east, and in the case of Derna, have established a Taliban-like “Islamic emirate.”

As for the French support for the Libyan rebels, there is evidence that French President Ncolas Sarkozy and Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher friend of alleged New York hotel sexual predator and former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, supported the rebels to permit Israel to extend its influence in Libya to offset  Tel Aviv’s losses in Egypt. There have been credible reports that Levy, an early supporter of the Libyan rebels, convinced them during a recent visit to Benghazi, to permit Israel to establish a military base in eastern Cyrenaica on a 30-year lease. In return for the base, Israel would exert its power in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome to have NATO step up its military campaign in Libya and Israel would covertly provide the rebels with specialized military and intelligence assistance. Just after Levy’s shuttle diplomacy between Benghazi and Jerusalem, where he met with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, NATO committed helicopter gunships for the first time to its Libya campaign.

There has been no mention of the Israeli involvement in Libya in the New York Times, Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times, which is not surprising considering the pro-Israeli leanings of the ownership of those newspapers.            

There has been no mention by the Western media, in their zeal to promote the Pentagon and NATO line, that some Libyan rebels acceded to the government’s offer of an amnesty if the rebels gave up their weapons. After rebels handed over their weapons in Misrata and in the western mountains, NATO increased its bombings of the two regions.

Corporate media “war correspondents” travel in a pack, and whether they are American, British, French, German,. Canadian, or Italian, merely ape the line of the western military. In the case of Libya, the corporate war reporters hype the rebel successes while their counterparts at the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli jump on every chance to paint the Libyan government as disingenuous and exaggerating NATO collateral damage. However, this reporter witnessed the results of a NATO airstrike in a residential neighborhood of Tripoli that killed five people, including Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Arab Qaddafi and Colonel Qaddafi’s three grandchildren. Neighboring homes, located only a block from the embassy of Ivory Coast, were also severely damaged in the NATO attack. 

Other corporate media reports out of Benghazi suggested rebel victories in the western part of Libya, in towns along the main highway route from Tripoli to the Tunisian border. Having traveled the route on June 6, this reporter can attest that there were no signs of any rebel presence, with every town and city between Tripoli and the border flying the green flag of the Jamahiriyah. There were no flags flying of the former feudal royalist regime, the flag used by the rebels, from Tripoli to Tunisia. The only gunfire heard in the region was from Tunisian troops called in to quell black African worker refugees from the fighting in Libya crossing back and forth across the unguarded border near the actual border crossing stations.

The Libyan government has set up a phone number of Tunisia that promises displaced workers housing and financial support if they return to Libya. The rebels attacked several black African workers from sub-Saharan and Pan-Sahel countries merely because of the color of their skin. Several workers were killed and wounded and many black African women, including the wives and daughters of the guest workers, were raped by the rebels. Yet, there has been very little reported about the Arab-on-black violence by the rebels in the corporate media, ever anxious to cover for the Pentagon, CIA, White House, and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Neither is there mention of the disposal of the bodies of the victims of rebel violence: the mass burning of bodies of victims to erase any trace of crimes against humanity committed by the U.S.-  and NATO-backed rebel forces.

It has been said many times that in war the first casualty is the truth. However, journalists have a duty to report the truth regardless of the whims of their governments. As we have seen in Libya, and before, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, Darfur, Rwanda, Somalia, and Yemen, modern-day corporate journalists are mere stenographers for their corporate masters who, in turn, control the puppet strings for the marionettes in Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin.