U.S. LIABLE FOR CIVILIAN DEATHS IN LIBYA

Interview with Don DeBar, anti-war activist & Journalist in New York  

Tue Aug 23, 2011 8:14AM GMT

Press TV: How do you see the events that have been taking place in Libya? It seems that they have changed very rapidly and when we talk to a lot of our people on the ground in Tripoli, they were also quite taken aback at the speed of which everything changed in Tripoli especially.

Don DeBar

Don DeBar: Well, I was fortunate enough to be in touch. I have been up all night as a matter of fact in touch with people on the ground in Tripoli who somehow were able to stay on the internet and stay in touch. Almost all of the reporting that is coming from there is coming from inside a hotel that the reporters cannot leave. One reporter was shot at trying to post a press sign out.

Several have been threatened by the western journalists in the building with death. There was an article published calling for the killing of a French journalist from a website in France and Lizzie Phelan who you have featured here before.

Protest against U.S./NATO war on Libya at White House, July 12/Photo Askia Muhammad: Final Call

So the information itself, a lot of it, is coming from the people pointing a camera out the window of the hotel and the information that has come to me from some of the people on the ground there including Lizzie Phelan has come from calling around the contacts that they have nurtured in Tripoli over the last month that she has been there and reports from different neighborhoods and those reports were quite different.

Keep in mind that since Friday the western media has been saying that Gaddafi left the country. They were reporting him in Tunisia on Friday afternoon on NBC and this was paraded in the western media all weekend. Now today again somehow he is back in Tripoli and they are trying to find him and they have arrested his sons and so the information itself suspects.

But this entire war, people have to think about this fact: the United States has been funding this and conducting the bulk of the military operations here and anyone on the ground, anywhere where the United States has their guns pointed, including Tehran that takes comfort on the fact that the United States is about to achieve a military victory in Libya should really reconsider that position and think about what is the next step going to be for this type of policy which, believe me, has a map. They expressed Tehran as a destination now for the last 20 to 25 years.

So I would be mostly concerned about what does this mean for the people that these guns are being pointed at next and I would question every report you are hearing out of Tripoli right now that says that they are in charge because they have been saying it for days before there was anyone there.

The last point is that the reports that we got were that the people that had come into Tripoli from the outside with arms were actually Qataris and they have been in there with their own commanders running this operation and I am told that there are many dead Qataris on the ground in Tripoli.

Press TV: Don DeBar, you mentioned as far as the role of the media. Let’s expand on this in general. How do you see the role in general, especially in this situation that is taking place in Tripoli from the beginning till today as far as the role of the mainstream media and how they have reported the events that have taken place?

Don DeBar: OK, the enabling rhetorical point is that this is a popular uprising against Gaddafi and from there it was that the government is brutalizing protesters including with aerial bombardment and that was the enabling narrative for resolutions 1970 and 1973 out of the United Nations Security Council.

Now the Russians, who have conducted satellite surveillance of planet Earth because they have been prepared for 50 years for a nuclear strike from the United States, said on specific dates that the charges will delineate it that Gaddafi had attacked his people from the air. Here are the photographs. There are no planes in the air, there were no area of activities conducted whatsoever.

This has not made the media in the west at all including on programs like Democracy Now and on Aljazeera which has carried a progressive radio networks that you cannot believe that in the United States.

In addition to that, it was reported in the Pakistan Observer, the English language daily in Pakistan, on February 25 that there were US, UK and French troops that landed in Benghazi from Indian naval vessels on the 23 and 24 of February.

Now this is in advance of the UN Security Council Resolutions and that also has never been reported and I personally reported both that and the Russian intelligence information and the program Democracy Now for example and other progressive media outlets here and even I hear from them that they set it up as a straw man to shoot down, let alone actually report these things that were reported elsewhere including from government officials, the foreign minister and defense minister of Russia.

So the media has been not just deficient but in my mind active and complicit with this effort by NATO to take the oil of Libya and to establish for anyone that does not do what the United States tells them, you are next.

Press TV: If the Gaddafi regime has totally fallen or will fall, how likely is it that the Libyan people will actually go further towards independence and be freer people as a lot of them who have been in the streets and they have been showing some of them today? What is the likely scenario in your perspective?

Don DeBar: The likely scenario is colonialism and the reason for the invasion of Libya is that Libya was one of the places organizing against colonialism of the continent of Africa.

This is the second stop for AFRICOM [Africa Command]. The first direct stop for AFRICOM under Obama’s regime, AFRICOM came online about two months before he was elected but after code of law where they carried the elected president out of the country at gunpoint, the French did, the former colonial power, this episode began and if you want to believe Nelson Mandela, Libya played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa and Muammar Gaddafi in particular played a major role in doing that. He has been active in building a communication infrastructure and a financial infrastructure owned by Africa in Africa.

The people of Libya, by the way, went from being the poorest people on the planet in 1969 by every objective measure to having the highest standard of living in Africa and one of the highest standards of living in the Muslim world [is that] housing is owned by the people free of any mortgages, everyone, it is a human right there under the law and the entire education system and free healthcare.