Arab revolts, cable leaks point to close Mossad links to Arab dictatorships

For good reason, many Israeli leaders looked with trepidation on the popular revolts throughout the Arab world that have seen Tunisia's and Egypt's dictators ousted and are forcing other regimes against the wall. It has emerged in the aftermath of the popular uprisings and from a few leaked US State Department cables that Israel's Mossad has enjoyed a close relationship with the top leaders, including the intelligence chiefs, of the former regimes of Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the monarchy in Bahrain.

According to North African press reports, the former personal bodyguard for ousted Tunisian President Zin El Abedin Ben Ali claims that Ben Ali and former first lady, Laila el Trabolsi, are fervent supporters of Israel and that Trabolsi was a Mossad agent who helped Israeli intelligence assassinate a number of Palestinian leaders exiled in Tunisia. The former bodyguard, Abdel Rahman Sobeir, made the revelations on Facebook.

After the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, it was announced that his number two, former head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate Omar Suleiman, had a close relationship with Mossad. Suleiman even enjoyed open door access into Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's office in Jerusalem. The revelations about Suleiman partly came from leaked State Department cables. Suleiman is now under investigation by Egypt's transitional military government. Suleiman, whoi assisted the CIA in its kidnapping and torture program, was so infamous as a torturer, he was called "Sheikh al Torture" by Egyptians.

Leaked State Department cables also confirmed that a close link exists between Mossad and Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and his intelligence service. Another leaked cable pointed to Israel's close covert links to Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.The United States has been supportive of the bloody crackdown by the Gulf states against domestic opposition forces, particularly by Bahrain and Oman.
Mossad's links to Saudi intelligence are also known to be close, with the two intelligence services sharing common goals vis a vis Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah, pro-Iranian elements in Hamas, and Syria. As opposition to the Saudi regime has grown, more information has been leaked out about the long-time Saudi-Israeli intelligence and security links. The Saudis sent troops to Bahrain to help its pro-Israeli king out down an opposition uprising.
WMR has previously reported on Mossad's close ties with the Moroccan government and its intelligence services and the fact that a series of U.S. ambassadors to Rabat have also been strong supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Anti-government demonstrations have also taken place throughout Morocco.

Former Israeli National Security Council chairman Uzi Arad, a one-time top Mossad agent at the Israeli embassy in Washington, was also known to have maintained close contacts with Jordanian intelligence during hnis 20-year career as a Mossad officer. Arad also maintained close ties to Egyptian intelligence during Mubarak's rule.

Lebanese military intelligence has rounded up scores of Mossad agents in Lebanon. The agents had penetrated Lebanon's military, intelligence, and telecommunications companies. Mossad also reportedly has in place a number of agents among top Syrian opposition groups. Mossad agents have also operated in force in Iraqi Kurdistan and are known to have links to top Kurdistan Regional Government officials. Iraqi Kurdistan has also been the scene of a number of anti-government demonstrations and riots.

The Israeli securtiy firm Global CST, considered to be a virtual private arm of Mossad, has reportedly been active in Libya, Algeria, and Sudan's Darfur province.

PUTTING OUT FIRE WITH GASOLINE IN LIBYA

By Susan Lindauer, former U.S. Intelligence Asset covering Libya and Iraq at the United Nations 

War doesn’t work, does it? Best case scenario, NATO's war against Libya will run 18 to 24 months unless decisive action is taken right now—this day—to end the military confrontation.

Moussa Koussa, Libya's Foreign Minister who defected to Britain on March 30, warns Libya is in danger of becoming the "New Somalia."


Violence is erupting from both sides. The ugly truth is that with every missile strike, NATO kills more and more Libyan people.


NATO cares nothing for the Saudi invasion of Bahrain, which has resulted in wide-scale disappearances of democracy activists. NATO cares nothing for the uprisings in Yemen, peppered with government snipers. Only Libya has been singled out for violent retribution. Of course, this is an oil grab. Gadhaffi challenged U.S. (and probably British) oil companies to reimburse Libya for the economic damage caused by U.N. sanctions tied to the Lockerbie bombing, which Libya had nothing to do with. The U.N. Security Council forced Libya to submit to the Lockerbie Trial and pay $2.7 billion in damages to the families of Pan Am 103, only for the U.S. to bribe witnesses with $4 million payments to testify against Libya's men at Trial.


The judicial corruption at The Hague underscored the absence of evidence against Abdelbassett Megrahi and Al-Amin Fhaima. Under the circumstances, it's hard to blame Gadhaffi for wanting to take something back for his people. The United Nations was grossly in error to apply sanctions to Libya in the first place.


But other than holding power for 42 years against a tide of popular support for fresh voices, is Gadhaffi really so bad? The Libyan people receive a cash distribution of oil revenues every year, houses, education and free health care under Gadhaffi's regime. They enjoy one of the lowest poverty rates in the world—an enviable 5 percent, an 82 percent literacy rate, and a life expectancy of 75 years, 10 percent above the world average. Yet suddenly NATO is determined to break Gadhaffi's hold on power, as if they've recently uncovered some great evil.


The facts are that an alarming number of Libyan rebels are returning from conflicts in Iraq, Chechnya, the Balkans and Afghanistan. Warfare is what they know, and they've brought it home with them. They have articulated no vision for the future. Instead, they have demonstrated an insatiable hunger for violence. No bombing is ever enough. Like tyrants they shout for more NATO bombs. They are guaranteed to destroy Libya if NATO doesn't pull the plug.


NATO has only itself to blame. By rushing to take sides, NATO has lost the ability to apply its influence to both parties, and press for a non-violent transition to power-sharing. By adopting the role of arms supplier to the rebels, NATO has ratcheted up the internal power struggle in Tripoli, which should have exhausted its objectives in a couple of weeks, if not for outside meddling.


THINK PEACE:


It doesn't have to go this way.


Thankfully, the African Union has applied its influence in Tripoli to push for a ceasefire and immediate access to humanitarian assistance for Libya's people. The Presidents of South Africa, Mali, the Congo and Mauritania achieved this victory in diplomatic sessions with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhaffi over the weekend, joined by the Chair of the African Union Commission and the Peace and Security Division.


The international community should demand that NATO accept the African Union platform immediately, whether Libya's rebels approve or not. It's NATO's responsibility to deliver the message that for the sake of the world community, there must be a truce so that political talks can resume.

International oil corporations should likewise take an honest look at their bottom line, and acknowledge that a prolonged war in Libya is guaranteed to damage oil structures and distribution mechanisms upon which oil trading depends. Any protracted Oil War will hurt their profits, too. Most unforgivably, War in Libya will harm the global economy, driving up energy and freight transportation costs at a most difficult moment.


The African Union gets NATO out of this trap. It achieves the most pressing goals of the United Nations mandate in Libya, upon which NATO has claimed authority for its air strikes.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy7sbagRV-A&feature=player_embedded
 

Doctors Without Borders and the Red Crimson would be ideal to lead humanitarian efforts. Doctors Without Borders won a Nobel Peace Prize for its commitment to high quality medical care and triage in conflict zones, while staying clear of political entanglements. For its part, the Red Crimson is the Islamic version of the Red Cross, and would be ideally sensitized to Libya's cultural lines.


It's an excellent first stage. What remains to be seen is whether a second stage will be necessary to secure the peace—That would deploy a small Peace Keeping force, probably from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt in North Africa—who share Libya's Islamic  heritage and aversion to European Occupation. North African peace keepers would have the advantage of neutrality, which NATO has sacrificed by taking sides in the conflict.


As much as it would rankle Libya's sense of sovereignty, given the rebels' history of violence, there's going to have to be some temporary peace-keeping force to divide these groups. The question is whether we do that today--- or in 18 to 24 months when the world finally acknowledges the stupidity and waste of this unnecessary war. There's going to have to be a solution at some point.


But NATO has to face up to some hard truth, too.


If elections in Libya are inevitable, then one more thing is also inevitable. It is strictly up to the Libyan people to choose their future leadership, including whether or not they want Gadhaffi or his sons to continue any role in the government. Genuine democracy demands that all comers have a right to throw their hat in the ring. Nobody has the right to stop them. The rebel forces have a very poor understanding of democracy indeed, if they expect to dictate which candidates participate in future elections.


For that matter, Britain, France and Italy are poor servants of democracy, if they are encouraging such misguided philosophies. That's colonialist thinking, and there's no place for it in a modern age.

If European powers are deeply persuaded of the Libyan rebels' cause, then they should not be afraid to present a full slate of policy ideas and candidates before the Libyan people for their final decision. However European powers must accept that there are no guarantees Libya's rebel forces would win a national election.


Quite the opposite is probably true. The longer the rebels fight, the more likely they are to antagonize the Libyan people who are going to cast those ballots. That's one more excellent reason for NATO to exit this conflict as quickly as possible.


If this War goes on much longer, there's strong probability NATO will win the battle—and lose the War. The world has only to look at Iraq to see what that would mean.


For the humanitarian welfare of the Libyan people and the goal of democracy itself, we must stop this War against Libya right now.
                                                           #####
Susan Lindauer is the author of "Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq," which describes her work as an Asset covering Iraq and Libya, and her arrest on the Patriot Act shortly after requesting to testify before Congress about the CIA's advance warnings about 9/11 and a peace option in Iraq.

Comentários sobre a Síria

Por Lejeune Mirhan 

 

Já estava mais do que na hora tecermos alguns comentários sobre o que vem acontecendo na República Árabe Síria, onde presenciamos as primeiras manifestações de rua contra o presidente, Dr. Bashar El Assad. Publicamos agora esses primeiros comentários.

Síria, um país milenar

Não tenho pretensões aqui em contar a história da Síria. No entanto, um breve resumo se faz necessário. Esse é um país milenar. A cidade de Damasco, sua capital indivisível, tem mais de cinco mil anos de existência contínua. Disputa com a cidade palestina de Jericó, o aglomerado urbano mais antigo de vida continuada. Tem raízes no cristianismo muito forte. Lá um dos apóstolos de Jesus teria tido uma visão e se converteu a essa religião.

Os atuais sírios, descendem dos antigos arameus e assírios (meus antepassados são assírios da região noroeste do país). Na antiguidade clássica, essa região foi ocupada pelos Persas, de Alexandre e posteriormente virou província do Império Romano. Em 660, sob o califado omíada, a Síria é ocupada pelo império árabe e islâmico. Os cruzados cristãos europeus passam por lá por breve período tempo e organizam algumas fortalezas e constituem algumas cidades. Os turcos otomanos tomam o país em 1516, lá ficando até o fim do Império em 1918. Sua independência vem da tentativa de 1936 e depois de 1944, sendo só reconhecida em 17 de abril de 1946, considerada a data nacional mais importante do país.

Interessante registrar a forte influência que a antiga URSS teve sobre esse país, que no passado mais recente tinha o nome de República Socialista Árabe Síria. A palavra “socialista” caiu do nome do país, mas o slogan oficial do país continua sendo “unidade, liberdade, socialismo”. A França foi a potência europeia que colonizou o país, hoje com cerca de 20 milhões de habitantes.

Onda de protestos atinge o país

As ruas sírias, como as ruas árabes em geral, também clamam por mudanças. Mas, a situação desse país e do governo do presidente Dr. Bashar Al Assad tem particularidades que as distingue de outros países árabes do Oriente Médio. Aqui não se trata de defender o governo. Sabemos bem do tempo que Bashar encontra-se no poder – 11 anos! – e que suas sucessivas reeleições atingem elevadíssimos percentuais, sendo praticamente simbólicas e homologatórias. A Síria é regime de Partido único, no caso o Partido Socialista Árabe Sírio – Baath. Governam esse país desde 1963. O pai de Bashar ficou no poder de 1970 até a sua morte em 2000, quando o filho o sucedeu.

Não estou entre os que endeusam a democracia, concedendo-lhe valores universais. Cada país deve saber como encaminhar a sua democracia, a sua forma de escolha de seus governantes. Pregar hoje de forma indistinta a “derrubada de todos os ditadores” e colocar no mesmo saco o governo da Síria, de meu ponto de vista, é fazer completamente o jogo do imperialismo estadunidense.

Aliás, é bom que se registre, em uma mesma região – o Oriente Médio árabe – temos três posições completamente distintas. Na ampla maioria dos casos, trata-se de pedir mesmo a derrubada de todos os governantes monarquistas reacionários e pseudos presidentes “republicanos”. Há uma segunda posição, sobre a Líbia que não é de apoio nem a Kadafi nem aos tais “rebeldes” pró-americanos. E a terceira, é esta sobre a Síria, em defesa do governo.

O que dá o caráter de um estado, se ele é mais ou menos progressista, avançado, é o seu compromisso, sua plataforma de ação, as suas alianças internas – inclusive de classes sociais – para ver contra quem e a favor de quem age a sua estrutura governamental. Poderíamos citar aqui dezenas de governantes nos últimos dois séculos que não receberam voto nenhum de seus povos, mas foram extremamente populares. Nasser foi um deles. Nunca recebeu voto algum no tempo que governou o Egito, entre 1954 e 1970 quando morreu (ou foi morto, não se sabe ao certo). Mas, no seu enterro, pelo menos um milhão de pessoas estiveram presentes (seria hoje coisa equivalente a três milhões de pessoas, o triplo da maior manifestação reunida na Praça da Liberdade no Cairo).


Sírios comemoram o Dia da Independência, 17 de abril, com uma visita à fronteira das colinas de Golã, capturadas por Israel na Guerra dos Seis Dias, em 1967

Conheço de perto – como estudioso do mundo árabe – e muito bem, os compromissos do governo da Síria. Tem conteúdo e caráter antiimperialista nítido, bastante claro. Não conheço governo árabe nenhum em todo o OM, que dê guarida para qualquer grupo revolucionário que lute pela libertação de seus povos, como o sírio, do Partido Baath. Por fim, desconheço qual país árabe tenha dado tanta ajuda ao povo palestino e à sua luta pela libertação do jugo israelense quanto a Síria.

A Síria e seu governo têm inimigos antigos e poderosos no OM e no mundo. Entre eles estão os Estados Unidos, o Iraque (ocupado) e governado por uma maioria xiita, a Arábia Saudita, Israel e o atual e renunciante governo do Líbano, nas mãos ainda do demissionário Said Hariri, pró-EUA e amigo de Israel. Nesse sentido, é bastante possível e até provável que por trás dos que lideram protestos em algumas cidades sírias, podem estar o longo braço das agências e serviços secretos tanto de Israel quanto dos EUA.

Entendo como justas as reivindicações por reformas políticas. E tenho a convicção de que elas virão. Nunca nos esqueçamos que, tecnicamente falando, a Síria esta em guerra contra Israel desde 5 de junho de 1967, na chamada Guerra dos Seis Dias, quando os judeus tomaram-lhe as estratégicas colinas de Golãn.

A Síria forma hoje com o Irã e a Turquia, uma poderosa aliança que apoia a luta pela libertação da Palestina (com o Hamas e o Fatah) e a Independência do Líbano (com o Hezbolláh). A quem interessa quebrar essa unidade política e revolucionária? Independente de suas confissões religiosas, se cristãos, muçulmanos (xiitas e sunitas, bem como alawitas que governam a Síria), bem como comunistas e outras correntes, estão unidos tanto na Síria quanto no Líbano. Esperemos que tais forças e partidos coligados, possam se unir também no conjunto dos outros países árabes para levar adiante e até o fim, a derrota dos governos reacionários de direita aliados dos Estados Unidos e de Israel e anti-árabes.

A eventual queda do atual governo sírio e a entrada de Damasco no campo ocidental será uma imensa e significativa vitória estadunidense e imperialista. Praticamente enterra a revolução e a primavera árabe. Na verdade, podemos dizer que esse projeto já é parte de um plano de uma contra-revolução em curso que possui algumas características que vem sendo observadas na prática: 1. A invasão do Bahrein pela Arábia Saudita, com apoio americano para proteger a sede da 5ª Frota e o massacre do povo bareinita; 2. A intervenção imperial direta na Líbia para instaurar um governo aliado e subserviente aos EUA; 3. A tentativa de manipulação e o controle da revolução no Egito e na Tunísia; 4. A corrupção na revolução do Iêmen; correm tentativas de trocar o ditador Ali Saleh, há 32 anos no poder, por algum amigo dos EUA.

Não tem grau de comparação entre a importância estratégica que tem a Líbia e a Síria no cenário do OM. Derrubar hoje Kadafi e colocar um aliado americano na líbia quase nada mudaria na região. A Líbia já era aliada americana e da Europa desde 2002. Derrubar o governo sírio poderá sim significar um profundo retrocesso nas lutas de libertação e emancipacionistas árabes.

Nunca nos esqueçamos que nosso inimigo principal continua sendo os Estados Unidos e sua política unilateral de controle de todo o mundo. Quebrar a sua hegemonia – tarefa essa em curso exatamente com a força da Revolução Árabe – deve ser parte de todos os democratas, patriotas, nacionalistas, socialistas, comunistas e religiosos daquele mundo e de todos os países.

__________



Sociólogo, Professor, Escritor e Arabista. Membro da Academia de Altos Estudos Ibero-Árabe de Lisboa e Diretor do Instituto Jerusalém do Brasil. Colunista de Oriente Médio do Portal da Fundação Maurício Grabois – FMG. Colaborador da Revista Sociologia da Editora Escala. E-mail: lejeunemgxc@uol.com.br

The CIA's "Plan B" for Peru

The CIA not only wanted to deny the presidency to Peruvian nationalist Ollanta Humala, wo was defeated in the presidential election five years ago by Wall Street favorite Alan Garcia, but wanted to ensure that dual U.S-Peruvian citizen Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former World Bank official, former Peruvian Finance Minister, and executive with arch-vulture capitalist Felix Rohatyn's Rohatyn Group investment fund in New York, beat out Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the jailed former president and CIA cypher, Alberto Fujimori. The Rohatyn Group was formed in 2003 by former JP Morgan executives.


With 80 percent of the vote counted, Fujimori held a 3 point lead over Kuczynski. The run-off election between Humala and Fujimori is scheduled for June 5.

Although he has moderated his tone since the last presidential election in 2006, Humala can be counted in the progressive Latin American leadership camp, his policies now between those of Brazilian President Dilma Roussef and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. However much he has moderated his tone and policies, Humala remains a worry to the Obama administration, which has gone beyond the Bush administration in engaging in political chicanery south-of-the-border. Obama's early support for a CIA- and Pentagon-led coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and an attempted coup against Ecuador's Rafael Correa are hallmarks of Obama's hostile Nixonian attitude toward nationalist and progressive elected governments in Latin America.

The darling of the international elites, former presidential candidate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, was quick to state that a choice between Humala, who he accuses of being "another Chavez," and Fujimori is like a choice between AIDS and terminal cancer. Kuczynski, who also served with the International Monetary Fund in Washington and Kuhn Loeb Investment Bank in New York, is the kind of candidate favored by Nobel Peace Prize-laden elitists like Vargas Llosa.


However, the CIA clearly will support "terminal cancer" over "AIDS" as it seeks to protect the interests of Wall Street and the global oligarchs. The CIA enjoyed a long history with Fujimori's father and his chief of intelligence, Vladimoro Montesinos. Both Alberto Fujimori and Montesinos are serving prison sentences in Peru for human rights violations and other crimes.

On November 8, 2005, WMR reported: "Montesinos was code named 'The Doctor' by the CIA and was well known as a facilitator for U.S. weapons smuggling and drug deals involving the Bush crime family. The CIA paid Montesinos at least $10 million between 1990 and 2000. The payments began just after the elder Bush launched his  1990 "Andean Initiative" to counter 'drug proliferation' in the region.  The Andean Initiative actually saw an expansion of coca growing fields in the region. Montesinos deposited $264 million in bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, the United States, and Panama." On September 8, 2010, WMR reported: "During his ten-year rule, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, thought to be a CIA asset, reportedly received USAID funds to put down the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru guerrilla movements."

Like Chavez, Correa, and Bolivia's President Evo Morales, Humala's main strength comes from Peru's long-disenfranchised and impoverished indigenous community. The business elite of mainly European roots, has historically opposed the rise to power of indigenous leaders in Latin America and they have received the firm backing of Western corporations and their CIA enforcers. Although former President Alejandro Toledo is of indigenous descent, he only placed fourth in the first-round because native Peruvians understand that he sold out while president to the World Bank and other capitalist contrivances. Humala edged out Toledo among the native electorate in the Peruvian highlands. Toledo only managed to garner 15 percent of the vote in the first round. 

Humala is an outspoken critic of the policies of Chile's right-wing billionaire President Sebastian Pinera, who Obama lauded in Santiago during a recent trip to Latin America.

Rather than see another progressive leader take the helm in Latin America, the CIA and its cyphers, USAID and the Soros non-governmental organizations (NGOs), will begin to pump money and other support into the campaign of right-winger Keiko Fujimori. Plan A was Kuczynski but since he was barely edged out for second place by Fujimori, Langley's money will be put on the daughter of their one-time top agent-of-influence in Peru.

BDS Blossoms Across U.S. on Palestinian Land Day!

Congratulations to us! Last week's Palestinian Land Day marked the largest global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) Day of Action to date. According to the fantastic new global BDS movement web site, the United States hosted the most actions of any country in the world. Great job to all those who participated!

Want to be inspired? Here is a tiny taste of the more than 25 fantastic events across the U.S.:

 In San Francisco, activists demonstrated and delivered a letter to the IRS to protest the tax-exempt status of the Jewish National Fund, which re-appropriated the land of Palestinian refugees whom Israel exiled in 1948 and which continues to restrict land use for Jewish Israelis only.

 There were BDS flash mobs by member groups in Chicago and New York City! The latter was taken down in what appears to be a pattern of YouTube censorship.

 The Minnesota Break the Bonds Campaign held an advocacy training at the state capitol. More than 110 activists from around the state gathered to urge their legislators to divest state funds from Israeli bonds.

 Activists delivered a letter with over 2,500 signatures to the management at 15 Bed, Bath & Beyond stores along the West Coast, asking the retail chain to discontinue sales of Ahava cosmetics and SodaStream home carbonation systems, both manufactured in illegal Israeli settlements.

 Students at the University of Arizona constructed a mock Apartheid wall to symbolize the walls in Palestine and on the U.S./Mexico border.

White House threats must be taken seriously

In yet another indication that America's democratic experiment is a thing of the past, this editor has received word from a source in a foreign intelligence agency allied with the United States that there has been talk by some within the Obama White House that this editor is under threat. What particular stories have inflamed the White House are not known but the warning conveyed by the source, who has connections within the White House, was stark in its directness: "They want to kill you."

It was perfectly clear that the phrase was not being used as a figure of speech.

That this development is being reported on April 4 is even more ironic. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Kr. was assassinated in Memphis during his mission to support striking sanitation workers in the city. Now, we have our first African-American president and a threat to kill a journalist who is most definitely not one of their favorites has been seriously discussed. 

Of course, muckraking journalists have been under threat before in America. In 1972, columnist and investigative journalist Jack Anderson had ended up very high on President Richard Nixon's infamous "enemies list." Anderson had long been a burr under the political saddle of Nixon and the president blamed Anderson for exposing a number of Nixon's corrupt activities, including the exposure in 1956 by Anderson and his boss, Drew Pearson, of a loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon's brother Donald.

In the years before the Watergate scandal broke but at a time when other various scandals in the Nixon administration began to receive the bulldog-like attention of Anderson, who succeeded Pearson as editor of the "Washington Merry-Go-Round column in 1969, there were serious discussions among Nixon aides Charles Colson and G. Gordon Liddy, as well as the CIA's Dr. Edward Gunn, an expert on poisons, about assassinating the troublesome Anderson.

Scenarios included the use of LSD or poison but Anderson's Mormon religion and the fact that he did not drink ruled out the use of poisons or LSD in his drink. Staging an automobile accident in which Anderson would be incinerated was also an option. Another scenario considered was one which would have appeared to be a random Washington, DC street mugging in which Anderson would be stabbed or have his throat slit. The plot to assassinate Anderson came to an abrupt halt as Liddy, Colson, and E. Howard Hunt, who had also been involved in the action against Anderson, were exposed in the May 1972 break-in at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.

Although I have attempted to pattern WMR after Anderson's and Pearson's "Merry-Go-Round" column, I do not have the luxury of newspaper syndicators or a Pulitzer Prize, all of which Anderson could rely on as firewalls between him and those in the White House who wanted to kill him.
I ran the information about the warning from the foreign intelligence source by some African-Americans in Washington who have worked with Obama White House officials. Their response was less than encouraging. The bottom line is that the White House engages in the type of "gangster politics" for which their home base of Chicago has become infamous.

Although I have taken precautions in covering post-genocide Rwanda, child trafficking in Thailand and Cambodia, the "loss" of nuclear weapons at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, the gunning down by police of CIA asset Tony Carnaby in Houston, the story of "Washington Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey, and BP's activities on the Gulf Coast in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and President Obama's and incoming Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's past activities in Chicago, those measures were temporary and lasted for as long as I was in the field.

However, I have absolutely no desire to constantly be in fear of the type of a White House-directed or -tolerated hit like that discussed by Nixon aides on Anderson who had the benefit of a degree of support from his syndicate and the newspapers who carried his column, which included The Washington Post.

Preliminary plans are being made to continue the investigative journalism of this website from a safer vantage point abroad and in an environment that provides basic protection for press freedom. 
Unfortunately, the United States is no longer a safe place for independent journalists. Today, President Obama kicked off his 2012 presidential campaign in a web video message. Without a Democratic primary challenger, it can be safely assumed that the White House will pull out every arrow in its quiver to suppress negative information about Obama. The mere fact that the announcement of Obama's re-election came on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King shows that Obama will shamelessly attach himself to the legacy of the much-revered African-American leader with whom he shares no cultural legacy of historical African-Americans with their family histories of slavery in the South and sharecropping. Nor would King, if alive today, approve of any of Obama's pro-war and pro-corporate policies.

With a second Obama term a likelihood, iIt only makes sense, therefore, that the reporting on the "new America" be conducted from a more secure location.

There is an interesting postscript to this story. Not once, during the eight years of the Bush administration, did I ever receive such a credible and direct threat. In fact, after WMR's stories about marital friction between Bush and First Lady Laura Bush received national media attention, there was a communication from a close friend of Mrs. Bush that if I laid off her marital situation, I would be given a major scoop. Knowing that no one should ever cut a deal with the Bush family or their friends, I kindly declined the offer. But whereas the Bush White House was prepared to offer a carrot, the Obama administration appears to favor the stick or another lethal weapon of choice.

Exposed: The US-Saudi Libya deal

THE ROVING EYE
Exposed: The US-Saudi Libya deal
By Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.

You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online. According to diplomatic protocol, their names cannot be disclosed. One of the diplomats said, "This is the reason why we could not support resolution 1973. We were arguing that Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were similar cases, and calling for a fact-finding mission. We maintain our official position that the resolution is not clear, and may be interpreted in a belligerent manner."

As Asia Times Online has reported, a full Arab League endorsement of a no-fly zone is a myth. Of the 22 full members, only 11 were present at the voting. Six of them were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. Syria and Algeria were against it. Saudi Arabia only had to "seduce" three other members to get the vote.

Translation: only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone. The vote was essentially a House of Saud-led operation, with Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa keen to polish his CV with Washington with an eye to become the next Egyptian President.

Thus, in the beginning, there was the great 2011 Arab revolt. Then, inexorably, came the US-Saudi counter-revolution.

Profiteers rejoice
Humanitarian imperialists will spin en masse this is a "conspiracy", as they have been spinning the bombing of Libya prevented a hypothetical massacre in Benghazi. They will be defending the House of Saud - saying it acted to squash Iranian subversion in the Gulf; obviously R2P - "responsibility to protect" does not apply to people in Bahrain. They will be heavily promoting post-Gaddafi Libya as a new - oily - human rights Mecca, complete with US intelligence assets, black ops, special forces and dodgy contractors.

Whatever they say won't alter the facts on the ground - the graphic results of the US-Saudi dirty dancing. Asia Times Online has already reported on who profits from the foreign intervention in Libya (see There's no business like war business, March 30). Players include the Pentagon (via Africom), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Saudi Arabia, the Arab League's Moussa, and Qatar. Add to the list the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, assorted weapons contractors, and the usual neo-liberal suspects eager to privatize everything in sight in the new Libya - even the water. And we're not even talking about the Western vultures hovering over the Libyan oil and gas industry.

Exposed, above all, is the astonishing hypocrisy of the Obama administration, selling a crass geopolitical coup involving northern Africa and the Persian Gulf as a humanitarian operation. As for the fact of another US war on a Muslim nation, that's just a "kinetic military action".

There's been wide speculation in both the US and across the Middle East that considering the military stalemate - and short of the "coalition of the willing" bombing the Gaddafi family to oblivion - Washington, London and Paris might settle for the control of eastern Libya; a northern African version of an oil-rich Gulf Emirate. Gaddafi would be left with a starving North Korea-style Tripolitania.

But considering the latest high-value defections from the regime, plus the desired endgame ("Gaddafi must go", in President Obama's own words), Washington, London, Paris and Riyadh won't settle for nothing but the whole kebab. Including a strategic base for both Africom and NATO.

Round up the unusual suspects
One of the side effects of the dirty US-Saudi deal is that the White House is doing all it can to make sure the Bahrain drama is buried by US media. BBC America news anchor Katty Kay at least had the decency to stress, "they would like that one [Bahrain] to go away because there's no real upside for them in supporting the rebellion by the Shi'ites."

For his part the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, showed up on al-Jazeera and said that action was needed because the Libyan people were attacked by Gaddafi. The otherwise excellent al-Jazeera journalists could have politely asked the emir whether he would send his Mirages to protect the people of Palestine from Israel, or his neighbors in Bahrain from Saudi Arabia.

The al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain is essentially a bunch of Sunni settlers who took over 230 years ago. For a great deal of the 20th century they were obliging slaves of the British empire. Modern Bahrain does not live under the specter of a push from Iran; that's an al-Khalifa (and House of Saud) myth.

Bahrainis, historically, have always rejected being part of a sort of Shi'ite nation led by Iran. The protests come a long way, and are part of a true national movement - way beyond sectarianism. No wonder the slogan in the iconic Pearl roundabout - smashed by the fearful al-Khalifa police state - was "neither Sunni nor Shi'ite; Bahraini".

What the protesters wanted was essentially a constitutional monarchy; a legitimate parliament; free and fair elections; and no more corruption. What they got instead was "bullet-friendly Bahrain" replacing "business-friendly Bahrain", and an invasion sponsored by the House of Saud.

And the repression goes on - invisible to US corporate media. Tweeters scream that everybody and his neighbor are being arrested. According to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, over 400 people are either missing or in custody, some of them "arrested at checkpoints controlled by thugs brought in from other Arab and Asian countries - they wear black masks in the streets." Even blogger Mahmood Al Yousif was arrested at 3 am, leading to fears that the same will happen to any Bahraini who has blogged, tweeted, or posted Facebook messages in favor of reform.

Globocop is on a roll
Odyssey Dawn is now over. Enter Unified Protector - led by Canadian Charles Bouchard. Translation: the Pentagon (as in Africom) transfers the "kinetic military action " to itself (as in NATO, which is nothing but the Pentagon ruling over Europe). Africom and NATO are now one.

The NATO show will include air and cruise missile strikes; a naval blockade of Libyia; and shady, unspecified ground operations to help the "rebels". Hardcore helicopter gunship raids a la AfPak - with attached "collateral damage" - should be expected.

A curious development is already visible. NATO is deliberately allowing Gaddafi forces to advance along the Mediterranean coast and repel the "rebels". There have been no surgical air strikes for quite a while.

The objective is possibly to extract political and economic concessions from the defector and Libyan exile-infested Interim National Council (INC) - a dodgy cast of characters including former Justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil, US-educated former secretary of planning Mahmoud Jibril, and former Virginia resident, new "military commander" and CIA asset Khalifa Hifter. The laudable, indigenous February 17 Youth movement - which was in the forefront of the Benghazi uprising - has been completely sidelined.

This is NATO's first African war, as Afghanistan is NATO's first Central/South Asian war. Now firmly configured as the UN's weaponized arm, Globocop NATO is on a roll implementing its "strategic concept" approved at the Lisbon summit last November (see Welcome to NATOstan, Asia Times Online, November 20, 2010).

Gaddafi's Libya must be taken out so the Mediterranean - the mare nostrum of ancient Rome - becomes a NATO lake. Libya is the only nation in northern Africa not subordinated to Africom or Centcom or any one of the myriad NATO "partnerships". The other non-NATO-related African nations are Eritrea, Sawahiri Arab Democratic Republic, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Moreover, two members of NATO's "Istanbul Cooperation Initiative" - Qatar and the United Arab Emirates - are now fighting alongside Africom/NATO for the fist time. Translation: NATO and Persian Gulf partners are fighting a war in Africa. Europe? That's too provincial. Globocop is the way to go.

According to the Obama administration's own official doublespeak, dictators who are eligible for "US outreach" - such as in Bahrain and Yemen - may relax, and get away with virtually anything. As for those eligible for "regime alteration", from Africa to the Middle East and Asia, watch out. Globocop NATO is coming to get you. With or without dirty deals.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Obama condemned by African-American and progressive coalition

Speaker after speaker, representing a broad section of African-American and progressive organizations, came together this morning at a press conference at the Newseum in Washington, DC and condemned President Obama's military attack on Libya. The press conference announced the creation of the Coalition Against The Bombing of Africa (Libya).

A spokesman for the Universal African People's Organization, which is based in St. Louis, cited Obama's military campaign against an African nation as America prepares to remember the April 4 anniversary of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis. Just a year before King's assassination, King spoke at Riverside Church in New York and said the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is the United States government." Obama stands accused by a number of African-American and progressive leaders of continuing the policy cited by King and continuing America's policy of genocide and invasions.

A spokesperson for the December 12 Movement said Obama's war against Libya represents an attempt to re-colonize Africa and that in order to accomplish the operation, Libya's Qaddafi, a champion of African independence, has to be removed.

Bob Brown, a leader of the All-Africa People's Revolutionary Party -- Guinea-Conakry (AAPRP-GC) accused the National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute, National Endowment for Democracy, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) are interfering in Africa and that Obama is advancing the agenda of the "Euro-American" banks to grab Libya's oil, Cote d'Ivoire's cocoa, and central Africa's col-tan.

Brown claimed that Obama is either a "conscious agent of the enemy of our people or is a fool. The speaker added, "my father did not arrive here like Obama's, on one of Tom Mboya's CIA airlift planes."

A Muslim-American spokesman recalled when he met Obama in Chicago, while the then-presidential candidate was seeking his group's endorsement, Obama could recite Koranic phrases in Arabic better than the foreign-born Muslim-American spokesman. The speaker stated that the majority of the Arab League does not support the U.S. and NATO military action against Libya.

The final speaker, 2008 Green Party presidential candidate and former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney slammed Obama's CIA support for the Libyan opposition, including one of its leader, Khalifa Hifter, who has spent the last 20 years living in Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the CIA. McKinney also cited this editor's previous reports on Obama's own CIA background and the links to the "company" of his family.

McKinney also decried the silence from the Congressional Black Caucus on Obama's military attack on Libya. One panelist pointed out that some members of the Black Caucus have been in power longer than Qaddafi.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan addressed the Washington press conference via telecast from Chicago's Mosque Maryam, built with a $3 million loan from Qaddafi. WMR has previously reported that Obama was infiltrated into south Chicago in 1985 from his CIA front job in New York to spy on Qaddafi-supported groups such as the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, and El Rukn gang. As president and commander-in-chief, Obama is now seen by some black Muslims of taking his revenge on Qaddafi in a more international version of Obama's street warfare with black activists during Obama's days as a shill for the CIA and FBI infiltration operations in Chicago. One African-American classmate of Obama in Harvard in 1988 told WMR that Obama regularly complained on campus about black activism.

Farrakhan said Obama asked for and received the Nation of Islam's support in his U.S. Senate campaign. Later, Obama renounced Farrakhan and his organization during a debate with Hillary Clinton.

Statement of Cynthia McKinney at the Newseum Press Conference on Libya Thursday, 31 March 2011

I am pleased to stand with my colleagues today who are outraged at Nobel Peace Laureate President Obama’s decision to wage war on Africa in Libya.  At the outset, let me state that Libya is home to tens of thousands or more of foreign students and guest workers.  The students come from Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia.  The messages I have received from concerned Africans state that these young innocent people, inaccurately labeled by the U.S. press as “black mercenaries,” have been trapped in hostile territory and are hated by the U.S.-allied Al Qaeda insurgents.  The press forgot that Libya is in Africa and that Libyans are Black!

I would also like to acknowledge the outrage of the Women International Democratic Federation of Brazil that repudiates the invasion of Libya.  They point specifically to the depressed state of women in pre-Qaddafi Libya and how women now have positions that had once been denied to them.  They note in their communiqué that the National Front of the Salvation of Libya has been financed by the C.I.A. since 1981 and that its headquarters is in Washington, D.C.

In fact, I have received messages and phone calls from people literally all over the world who are outraged at this action.   And because the media cannot be relied upon to tell the truth, I repeat the call that I received directly from Libya yesterday for international observers to go to Libya to tell the world the truth.  I would go.

Sadly, President Obama’s justification for war provides answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain, and conclusions that don’t conclude.  Reports continue to emerge of the US ties to the so-called rebel leaders:  the latest being that Khalifa Hifter, latest leader of the rebel army, spent much of the past 20 years in Langley, Virginia.  He didn’t even move to Baltimore to disguise the relationship!  Moreover, General Wesley Clarke told us that Libya was on the U.W. hitlist ten years ago!

This is nothing new.  This operation smells very much like so many other Africa operations fueled by U.S.-supported individuals who become a rebel force able to threaten an inconvenient leader who stands up to the U.S.  This particular play has been repeated in Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, and Angola and Mozambique before them.  We are not blind; we recognize this play.  And the use of depleted uranium will cause health effects for generations to come.

Pentagon Secretary Gates said “Libya is not part of our vital interest.”  Then why are we there?  Herein lies the conundrum.  President Obama has authorized secret support for its rebels in Libya, just like Miami’s Cuban community has received for decades.

Sadly, our President has chosen to spend $600 million per week in addition to other war costs at a time when the Black community is melting.  As of the most recent Economic Policy Institute study, average Black family wealth was $2,000 while that of Whites was $94,600.  President Obama has done nothing to address the disparities that have existed in this country since slavery.  Clearly, our President should focus on home and improving the lot of the people of this country before launching another war.

Finally, I must say something about the ugly hate language that is emanating more and more from Black political voices.  Any politician seeking votes by exacerbating divisions in our country does not deserve our votes.  I’m speaking specifically about the unfortunate remarks of Herman Cain who should know better.
I stand with those who support the right of self-determination of the Libyan people, including their right to resolve differences without interference from outsiders.

--
http://dignity.ning.com/
http://www.enduswars.org/
http://www.livestream.com/dignity
http://www.twitter.com/dignityaction
http://www.myspace.com/dignityaction
http://www.myspace.com/runcynthiarun
http://www.twitter.com/cynthiamckinney
http://www.facebook.com/CynthiaMcKinney
http://www.youtube.com/runcynthiarun

Silence is the deadliest weapon of mass destruction.

Libya’s Blood For Oil: The Vampire War

 

LIBYA‘S BLOOD FOR OIL: THE VAMPIRE WAR

By Susan Lindauer, former U.S. Asset who covered Libya at the United Nations from 1995 to 2003

Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don’t care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what’s really going on here?

According to the CIA, the following never happened… 

Last October, US oil giants— Chevron and Occidental Petroleum— made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi’s government. As the U.S. Asset who started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libyan diplomats, I had close ties to Libya’s U.N. Mission from 1995 to 2003. Given my long involvement in the Lockerbie saga, I have continued to enjoy special access to high level intelligence gossip on Libya.

Last summer that gossip got juicy!

About July, I started hearing that Gadhaffi was exerting heavy pressure on U.S. and British oil companies to cough up special fees and kick backs to cover the costs of Libya’s reimbursement to the families of Pan Am 103. Payment of damages for the Lockerbie bombing had been one of the chief conditions for ending U.N. sanctions on Libya that ran from 1992 until 2003. And of course the United Nations forced Gadhaffi to hand over two Libyan men for a special trial at The Hague, though everybody credible was fully conscious of Libya’s innocence in the Lockerbie affair. (Only ignorant politicians trying to score publicity points say otherwise.)

Knowing Gadhaffi as well as I do, I was convinced that he’d done it. He’d bided his time until he could extort compensation from U.S. oil companies. He’s a crafty bastard, extremely intelligent and canny. That’s exactly how he operates. And now he was taking his revenge. As expected, the U.S. was hopping mad about it. Gadhaffi wasn’t playing the game the way the Oil Bloodsuckers wanted. The Vampire of our age—the Oil Industry—roams the earth, sucking the life out of every nation to feed its thirst for profits. Only when they got to Libya, Gadhaffi took on the role of a modern-day Robin Hood, who insisted on replenishing his people for the costs they’d suffered under U.N. sanctions.

Backing up a year earlier, in August 2009 the lone Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, Abdelbasset Megrahi, won a compassionate release from Scottish prison. Ostensibly, the British government and Scottish Courts granted Megrahi’s request to die at home with dignity from advance stage cancer—in exchange for dropping a legal appeal packed with embarrassments for the European Courts. The decision to free Megrahi followed shocking revelations of corruption at the special Court of The Hague that handled the Lockerbie Trial. Prosecution witnesses confessed to receiving payments of $4 million each from the United States, in exchange for testimony against Megrahi, a mind-blowing allegation of judicial corruption.

The Lockerbie conviction was full of holes to begin with. Anybody who knows anything about terrorism in the 1980s knows the CIA got mixed up in heroin trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley during the hostage crisis in Lebanon. The Lockerbie conspiracy had been a false flag operation to kill off a joint CIA and Defense Intelligence investigation into kick backs from Islamic Jihad, in exchange for protecting the heroin transit network.

According to my own CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who’d been stationed in Lebanon and Syria at the time, the CIA had established a protected drug route from Lebanon to Europe and on to the United States. His statements support other sources that “Operation Corea” allowed Syrian drug dealers led by Monzer al-Kassar (also linked to Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal) to ship heroin to the U.S. ON Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on the hostages’ whereabouts in Lebanon. The CIA allegedly made sure that suitcases carrying heroin were not searched at customs. Nicknamed the “Godfather of Terror,” Al Kassar is now serving a prison sentence for conspiring with Colombian drug cartels to assassinate U.S. nationals.

Building up to Lockerbie, the Defense Intelligence team in Beirut, led by Maj. Charles Dennis McKee and Matthew Gannon, suspected that CIA infiltration of the heroin network might be prolonging the hostage crisis. If so, the consequence was severe. AP Reporter Terry Anderson got chained in a basement for 7 years, while 96 other high profile western hostages suffered beatings, mock executions and overall trauma. McKee’s team raised the alarms in Washington that a CIA double agent profiting from the narco-dollars might be warning the hostage takers whenever their dragnet closed in. Washington sent a fact-finding team to Lebanon to gather evidence.

On the day it was blown out of the sky, Pan Am 103 was carrying that team of CIA and FBI investigators, the CIA’s Deputy Chief assigned to Beirut, and three Defense Intelligence officers, including McKee and Gannon, on their way to Washington to deliver a report on the CIA’s role in heroin trafficking, and the impact on terrorist financing and the hostage crisis. In short, everyone with direct knowledge of CIA kickbacks from heroin trafficking died on Pan Am 103. A suitcase packed with $500,000 worth of heroin was found in the wreckage. It belonged to investigators, as proof of the corruption.

The punch line was that the U.S. State Department issued an internal travel advisory, warning that government officials should get off that specific flight on that specific day, because Pan Am 103 was expected to get bombed. That’s right, folks! The U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack. 

Unforgivably, nobody told Charles McKee or Matthew Gannon. But other military officials and diplomats got pulled off the flight—making room for a group of students from Syracuse University traveling stand by for the Christmas holidays.

It was a monstrous act! But condemning Megrahi to cover up the CIA’s role in heroin trafficking has struck many Lockerbie afficiandos as grossly unjust. Add the corruption of purchased testimony– $4 million a pop— and Megrahi’s life sentence struck a nerve of obscenity.

It struck Gadhaffi as grievously offensive, as well—The United Nations had forced Libya to fork over $2.7 billion in damages to the Lockerbie families, a rate of $10 million for every death. Once it became clear the U.S. paid two key witnesses $4 million each to commit perjury, spook gossip throughout the summer was rife that Gadhaffi had taken bold action to demand compensation from U.S. (and probably British) oil corporations operating in Libya. More than likely, Libya’s demands for kick backs and compensation extended to other European oil conglomerates as well—particularly France and Italy—who are now spearheading attacks on Libya.

I knew last summer there would be trouble. Payback would be a bitch on both sides. You don’t lock an innocent man in prison for 10 years on bogus charges of terrorism, and expect forgiveness. The United States and Britain had behaved with remarkable selfishness. You’ve got to admit that Gadhaffi’s attempt to balance the scales of justice demonstrated a flair of righteous nationalism.

Alas, Gadhaffi was playing with fire, no matter how justified his complaint. You don’t strike a tyrant without expecting a tyrant to strike back.

And that’s exactly what’s happening today.

Don’t kid yourself. This is an oil war, and it smacks of imperialist double standards. Two articles by Prof. Chossudovsky at the Global Research Centre are must reading: “Operation Libya and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa” and “Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US-NATO Attempted Coup d’Etat in Libya?” 

There is simply no justification for U.S. or NATO action against Libya. The U.N. charter acknowledges the rights of sovereign nations to put down rebellions against their own governments. Moreover, many observers have commented that plans for military intervention appear to have been much more advanced than U.S. and European leaders want to admit.

For myself, I know in my gut that war planning started months before the democratization movement kicked off throughout the Arab world—a lucky cover for U.S. and European oil policy. Perhaps too lucky.

As Chossudovsky writes, “Hundreds of US, British and French military advisers arrived in Cyrenaica, Libya’s eastern breakaway province” on February 23 and 24— seven (7) days after the start of Gadhaffi’s domestic rebellion. “The advisers, including intelligence officers, were dropped from warships and missile boats at the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk.” (DEBKAfile, US military advisers in Cyrenaica, Feb. 25, 2011) Special forces on the ground in Eastern Libya provided covert support to the rebels.” Eight British Special Forces commandos were arrested in the Benghazi region, while acting as military advisers to opposition forces, according to the Times of London.

We’re supposed to believe the United States, Britain and Europe planned, coordinated and executed a full military intervention in 7 short days— from the start of the Libyan rebellion in mid-February until military advisers appeared on the ground in Libya on February 23-24!

That’s strategically impossible.

Nothing can persuade me that Gadhaffi’s fate wasn’t decided months ago, when Chevron and Occidental Petroleum took their whining to Capitol Hill, complaining that Gadhaffi’s nationalism interfered with their oil profiteering. From that moment, military intervention was on the drawing board as surely as the Patriot Act got stuck in a drawer waiting for 9/11.

The message is simple: Challenge the oil corporations and your government and your people will pay the ultimate price: Give us your oil as cheaply as possible. Or die.

Don’t kid yourself. Nobody gives a damn about suffering in Libya or Iraq. You don’t bomb a village to save it. The U.S., Britain and NATO are the bullies of the neighborhood. The enforcers for Big Oil.
Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan have something in common. They have vast and extraordinary oil and mineral riches. As such, they are all victims of what I call the Vampire Wars. The Arab Princes get paid off, while the bloodsuckers pull the life blood out of the people. They’re scarcely able to survive in their own wealthy societies. The people and the domestic economy are kept alive to uphold the social order, but they are depleted of the nourishment of their own national wealth.

The democratization movements are sending a warning that I don’t think Big Oil, or their protectors in the U.S. and British governments understand or have figured out how to control. The Arab people are finished with this cycle of victimization. They’ve got their stakes out, and they’re starting to figure out how to strike into the heart of these Vampires, sucking the life blood out of their nations.

And woe to the wicked when they do!

### END####

Reporting from New York. Anonymous may be everyone and no one, but it's not this one, according to the real Anonymous

WMR's sources who are close to the amorphous hactivist group Anonymous claim that a self-styled Hunter S. Thompson-esque journalist named Barrett Brown, who has said he is Anonymous, is actually not with the core of the loosely-knit organization, if it can even be called such.

Brown, in an interview with D Magazine, claims that he is Anonymous. "Not so," says sources close to the Anonymous who believe that the Dallas-based Brown, who has managed an interview with Michael Isikoff of NBC News, is a plant out to paint Anonymous in a negative light. In his interview with D Magazine, Brown claims to have been in contact with an official of the National Security Agency regarding Anonymous's alleged possession of the Stuxnet computer virus and he brags about how he overthrew the Tunisian government. He also talks about the fact that he was a classmate of George W. Bush's twin daughters at Preston Hollow Elementary School in Dallas and is a heroin addict and one-time fan of Ayn Rand, a maven of modern fascist ideology. 

"Brown is setting himself up as Anonymous's spokesman but he has nothing to do with the 'group,'" says a WMR source who is close to some of the bona fide hacktivists. "Consider Brown's past links to the Bush family, that he lives in Texas, and that he is a heroin user and you've got the telltale signs of a Karl Rove dirty tricks operative," added the source.

NBC News is, according to our source, working to hype Brown as Anonymous's public face to disparage Anonymous in the eyes of the public. NBC has the backing of influential people funded by major banking and financial service interests who fear Anonymous's hacking campaigns against the former Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, its Operation Payback against Visa and MasterCard in retaliation for the two credit card companies' donation blocks to WikiLeaks, and HBGary Federal for its "sock puppet" work for the Pentagon to protect the Bank of America from on-line exposure for its financial criminal activities, are to be soon turned against secretive behind-the-scenes manipulators.

One of the reasons the government is subjecting Army Private First Class Bradley Manning to torture is to force him to reveal the identities of other participants in what has been described to WMR as a deeply-embedded group of government employees, military members, and federal contractors who are intent on disrupting the government for its abridgment of the Constitution and countenance of massive financial fraud. In fact, Anonymous hackers were able to successfully penetrate computer systems at the marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, where Manning is being held in solitary confinement, thanks to passwords passed to Anonymous by sympathetic employees and military members on the Quantico base.

NBC, which is partly owned by GE, Rove, and the Council on Foreign Relations are all reacting to the threat of Anonymous. GE, Rove, the CFR, as well as the US Chamber of Commerce and wealthy financier Nat Rothschild are aware that they are within the Anonymous sights for computer disruption and potential public dicslosure of their personal communications. Rothschild reportedly incurred Anonymous's ire when he began talks with former BP CEO Tony Hayward to lead up a major Rothschild coal project in Indonesia. The threat, we are told , is real. Anonymous can rely on a network of U.S. government employees and contractors, including those within the Department of Homeland Security itself, to gain access to various computer systems and networks.

WMR is told that true to its motto, "Anonymous is Everywhere." And for that the Washington power brokers and those who control the power brokers are truly fearful.

Welcome to the new NATO quagmire

THE ROVING EYE
Welcome to the new NATO quagmire
By Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here

See also UN's 'coalition of the opposed' grows

The minute Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the Anatolia news agency, "The coalition that was formed following the Paris meeting will abandon the mission and hand it over entirely to a single command system under NATO", the issue was settled.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is about to enter the era of the double quagmire - as in Central Asia (Afghanistan) and northern Africa (Libya). And everyone thought NATO was

 
supposed to be defending Europe from the commies. Libya now is an official victim of the endless war club.

This predictable coup de theater (see Endgame: Divide, Rule and roll with the oil Asia Times Online, March 25) does not alter the fact Odyssey Dawn remains an American war. Well, not a war, according to the White House, but a "time-limited, scope-limited military action".

For the moment it's a time-limited etc conducted by General Carter Ham, out of his Africom headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany (none among 53 African countries wanted Africom). Next week it will become a time-limited etc conducted by US Admiral James Stavridis, NATO's top military commander.

For all practical purposes it's an all-American time-limited etc affair - enforced by Globocop NATO, with a handy Pentagon back up in the form of readily available "interdiction strike packages" - inimitable Pentagon speak for fighter jets loaded with missiles and ready to strike.

War by committee, revisited
As a crucial member of NATO and self-promoting preferential bridge between the West and the Muslim world, Turkey had to calibrate a very tricky strategy. The government led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan - with extensive business interests in Libya - spent the whole week making it crystal clear that the NATO mission must be totally restricted to protecting civilians, enforcing the UN arms embargo and providing humanitarian aid.

Predictably, the US and Britain were absolutely convinced that the military campaign in Libya could only be run by NATO.

The problem was how to deal with pesky France, led by neo-Napoleonic President Nicolas Sarkozy. The French government was lobbying hard for a joint Anglo-French military command - with France on top, bien sur.

The final decision spells out that NATO's huge "assets" will run the whole show on the ground, while a political committee will provide the "governance".

It's a copy of the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) arrangement in Afghanistan. (ISAF by the way does not provide much security and much less assistance). ISAF is led by NATO, and includes non-NATO countries such as Australia and New Zealand. The Libyan body will theoretically include those paragons of equality and equanimity - Gulf members of the Arab League. For the moment, that translates only into Qatar, which has pledged a huge fleet consisting of two Mirage fighter jets.

Sarkozy's argument for France to lead was that a signal should be sent that the West was not once again imposing its will over a Muslim country. As if there's much difference between NATO and a French-Anglo-Saxon committee.

But in the end Sarko dug his own tomb (where was Carla to teach her beloved Chou Chou some manners?) He treated the Turkish government like a bunch of illegal immigrants. France did not invite Turkey to last Saturday's summit in Paris which was the prelude to the war, sorry, "time-limited, scope-limited military action". Sarko wanted his Mirages to be the leading stars of the show.

Erdogan and Davutoglu saw right through it - the burning Sarko desire to launch not only the no-fly zone but his 2012 presidential re-election campaign as well. In a speech in Istanbul, Erdogan said, "I wish that those who only see oil, gold mines and underground treasures when they look in [Libya's] direction, would see the region through glasses of conscience from now on." To top it off, Sarko had made it clear numerous times that he is against Turkey's bid to join the European Union, saying it belongs in the Middle East, not Europe.

The tawdriest part of the whole spectacle is that Sarko was propelled to grab the limelight on Libya by another shameless self-promoter, French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, king of the chest-revealing white shirt, who flew to Benghazi sniffing a golden media opportunity, ingratiated himself with the "rebels", and from there called Sarko and urged him to fulfill his glorious Arab liberator destiny.

But enough of these clowns. Which leaves Turkey on the spot. Last week, at the al-Jazeera forum in Doha, Davutoglu said, "The legal status and territorial integrity of states including Libya and Yemen should be protected." Yet no one knows what NATO's ultimate designs on Libya really are.

NATO will be in charge of enforcing the no-fly zone and the arms embargo. Sooner rather than later NATO will decide that's not enough - that more air strikes on Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's forces are essential. Turkey has not signed up for that kind of action - and has already said it won't.

When the NATO secretary general, Danish right-winger Anders Fogh Rasmussen, says something like, "we must think how NATO can assist North African countries in their transition to democracy", Turkey better have an exit strategy, or at least a good explanation to the Muslim world when a deadly quagmire sets in. Otherwise, from a bridge between East and West, it will be reduced to a bridge to hell.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - The Odyssey Dawn top 10

by
Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.

War is peace. Protesters are now off-camera, missile diplomacy is on camera. Packaged in moral uprightness, Tomahawks, Typhoons, Tornados, Rafales, Mirages, B-2s and F-18s - not to mention sexy European Storm Shadow cruise missiles and possible guest star the F-22 Raptor radar-evading stealth jet - now speak the language of democracy. These "military assets", displaying their "unique capabilities", are now "protecting the Libyan people". Run for cover - or become collateral damage.

And now for our top 10 list:

10. The return of Ulysses. Operation "Odyssey Dawn"? Gotta
hand it to Pentagon ghost writers. Homer's Odyssey is the archetype of all travel writing. So Odysseus/Ulysses roams the Med again. The return of the heroes who conquered Troy is now the return of the heroes who gave you shock and awe. Benghazi is Ithaca, with Tripoli in the waiting list. Muammar Gaddafi plays the Cyclops. But who's Circe? Hillary Clinton? Homeric Ulysses was upgraded from a fishing boat to the USS Mount Whitney, the flagship of the US Navy's 6th Fleet. So one must assume that, for now, Ulysses is commander Samuel Locklear III, who's in charge of the bombing.

As for Homer revised by Shakespeare, the trophy goes to chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. He told CNN Operation Odyssey Dawn "isn't about seeing him [Gaddafi] go". But then he told NBC Gaddafi could stay, as in "it's very uncertain on how this ends". No wonder no one in this Odyssey has yet claimed to be Penelope.

9. The invisible Africom. There's total radio silence about the commander of the US Africom, General Carter Ham. He's in charge of all those Tomahawks, from his office in Stuttgart, Germany; after all, none among 53 African countries offered to host Africom. After the current phase 1, the command switches from Africom to the Anglo-French duo, or to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels. Africom's main business is to guarantee the rapid deployment of "highly mobile troops" - to fight the never-extinct "war on terror", laser in on all those oil fields, try to offset China's business drive in Africa; talk about an open-ended mission. In short: Africom is about the Pentagon's militarization of Africa - suavely sold as "bringing peace and security". It's all part of the time-tested Pentagon's full spectrum dominance doctrine.

8. The R2P enigma. Top American humanitarian imperialists - or liberal hawks - include US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, and National Security Council senior directors Samantha Power and Gayle Smith. They are all suckers for R2P - "responsibility to protect", the new international norm that supposedly prevents and stops genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

R2P is still hazy. How many civilians must be killed before R2P kicks in? A few thousand? (a fair estimate of Gaddafi's victims before Odyssey Dawn). And where next for R2P? Here's a list of candidates. Yemen. Bahrain. Saudi Arabia. Israel. Uzbekistan. Ivory Coast. Sudan. Somalia. North Korea. Myanmar. Iran. Pakistan. And - remember Xinjiang and Tibet - China. Don't count on the UN to "protect" civilians in any of these destinations.

7. The new Obama doctrine, or Bush 2.0. The Obama administration turned George W Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into open-ended occupations; started an air/counter-insurgency war in Pakistan; bolstered a war in Somalia; bolstered a war in Yemen; and now started a war in Libya. The Western/Arab League war in Libya perfectly fits the new, two-pronged Obama doctrine of US outreach/regime alteration; outreach (former "regime change") for "evil dictators", alteration for "our" bastards.

That accounts for Washington desperately trying to position itself on the right side of history at least in one chapter of the great 2011 Arab revolt - amid all the geostrategic imperatives of trying to somewhat control the course of the Arab revolutions, and to keep an eye on the oil.

Gaddafi for his part labeled the US/Anglo-French bombing a "crusader aggression" and his regime's resistance, a "long war". He thus managed to mix the Pentagon with al-Qaeda in one sweep. And we always thought they were fighting each other. His Bab al-Azizia compound in Tripoli has already been bombed. At least his family is not featured in a Pentagon deck of cards - yet.

6. No R2P for Israel. In late 2008, while no one was watching, Israel bombed Gaza, killed 1,300 people, the absolute majority civilians, and destroyed at least 20,000 buildings. The UN didn't bother to invoke R2P, or impose a no-fly zone over Gaza to protect its civilians (50% of them children). Israel never respected any of countless UN Security Council resolutions. By the way, George W Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 without a UN Security Council resolution.

5. No R2P for Yemen. President Ali Abdullah Saleh is a "valuable ally" in the "war on terror" - against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); although he is the Yemeni Gaddafi, he falls into the privileged "regime alteration" category. President Barack Obama said he "strongly condemn[s]" snipers killing Yemeni civilians and says those responsible "must be held accountable". This means Saleh's government. Bit of a problem though; these are the people getting US cash and weapons to fight "terror".

4. The oh so democratic Arab League. The voting at the Arab League calling for a no-fly zone over Libya was unanimous. But at first, Algeria and Syria were strongly against it. Damascus publicly justified itself as against another Western intervention in Arab affairs.

This never deterred the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and United Arab Emirates), which lobbied hard for no-fly. American and European diplomats are desperate for the Arab League - and not NATO - to do something, like flying the odd jet and paying most of the bill to provide the illusion that the West is not attacking another Muslim country.

Washington explicitly requested that from Qatar, the UAE and Jordan. Qatar and UAE - which helped Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain - are now invoked to secure "democracy" for Libya. The UAE will support democracy with 24 Mirage 2000-9s and F-16s and Qatar with up to 6 Mirage 2000-5s.

The Arab League first warned against an "attack" on Libya - as if a no-fly zone could be imposed by broomsticks, not bombs. Then supreme opportunist Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, criticized Odyssey Dawn because of the inevitable collateral damage. And then he backtracked. No one cares, as long as the Arab League rubber stamps Odyssey Dawn to make it look like an Arab decision.

3. No R2P for Bahrain. The House of Saud invasion of Bahrain to help Sunni "cousins" the al-Khalifa dynasty - with pitiful coverage by otherwise progressive al-Jazeera - smells like a deal between the House of Saud and the emir of Qatar, which implies Washington behind it as well; the immensely corrupt and fearful House of Saud does absolutely nothing without Washington's approval. al-Jazeera reports have called for a "dialogue" between government and opposition in Bahrain; no such calls for Libya.

The GCC dictatorships are basically Pentagon annexes. Since 2007, they've bought no less than $70 billion in weapons - and counting. Libya is part of the African Union (AU). Gaddafi requested support from the AU against his internal opposition; that's exactly the same as Bahrain asking for support from the GCC. The difference is the AU did not vote for a no-fly zone - nor invaded a neighbor, a la Saudi Arabia.

The al-Khalifas in Bahrain have been so scared by the protest movement that they had to physically demolish the Pearl monument at the center of the homonymous square in Manama, with its six white curved beams topped with a huge pearl. This implies also destroying Bahrain's history; before becoming "business friendly", Bahrain was a pearl diving center. Now it's just "bullet-friendly Bahrain."

2. How good was my dictator. Just yesterday Italian Prime Minister Silvio "Bunga Bunga" Berlusconi was literally kissing Gaddafi's hand - and allowing him to pose this tent in Rome. He dropped him like a stone. Same with the Brits who were merrily selling loads of weapons to the colonel.

As for neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi was a godsend - allowing Sarko to officially pose as the new Arab nationalist hero. France in effect prohibited NATO from intervening at the start of Odyssey Dawn, so Sarko's dashing Mirages could get all the glory. Carla Bruni - who calls his husband Chou Chou - must be very impressed; who needs bunga bunga when you can actually bang, bang?

1. Democratic Saudi Arabia. To have the holy grail of medievalism and repression - the House of Saud - voting in the Arab League to bring democracy to Libya while quashing any progressive moves inside the kingdom (and invading a neighbor) will forever live in infamy as the Top Hypocrisy of the Great 2011 Arab Revolt. King Abdullah's billionaire package of "reforms", ie bribes, essentially bolster the House of Saud's two strategic pillars; the security/repression establishment (60,000 new jobs for the Interior Ministry), and the religious clerics (more money to the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice). Even if they have successfully preempted the kingdom's "Day of Rage", this proves how scared they really are.

What many don't know is that Operation Odyssey Dawn is personal - and has nothing to do with Greek heroism but Bedouin hatred. It revolves around the extremely bad blood between King Abdullah and Gaddafi since 2002, in the run-up to the war on Iraq, when Gaddafi accused Abdullah of selling out the Arab world to Washington. So this is not Operation Odyssey Dawn; it's Operation House of Saud Takes Out Gaddafi. With all the heavy lifting subcontracted to the West, of course, and the eastern Libya protesters posing as extras.

Odyssey Dawn - a "just war" - started exactly eight years after the Iraq war. In 2003, at the start of Operation Enduring Freedom - still ongoing, having "liberated" over a million Iraqis from life - George W Bush said, "American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger".

This Saturday, at the start of Operation Odyssey Dawn, Barack Obama said, "Today we are part of a broad coalition. We are answering the calls of a threatened people. And we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world."

Maybe we should call this whole thing Operation Enduring Odyssey - and send the bill to the House of Saud.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.