The Fall of Libya: A Study in Hypocrisy
By Max Ajl
Gaddafi’s brutal murder at the hands of the fanatical hyenas unleashed on him by the US-led Western alliance was a cynical and cold-blooded war crime. Hillary Clinton typically and memorably joked about his killing.
Global Research, April 29, 2013
UK’s Daily Mirror, a typical media prostitute for the imperialists, whitewashing the ugliness of what they do around the world. The headlines are a complete lie. The Mirror, which usually favours Labour, pretends to be on the side of the people.
Forte is an anthropologist, and what he offers us in Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa is an ethnography of U.S. culture and the way it enabled and contributed to the destruction of Libya. It is also a meticulously documented study in hypocrisy: that of the U.S. elite, of the Gulf ruling classes who have lately welded their agenda directly onto that of the United States, and of the liberal bombardiers who emerged in the crucible of the “humanitarian” wars of the 1990s only to reemerge as cheerleaders for the destruction of another Arab country in 2011.
Finally, it is a study of the breakdown of the anti-war principles of leftists in the United States and Europe, so many of whom, for so long, sustained an infatuation with confused rebels whose leadership early on had their hand out to the U.S. empire, prepared to pay any cost—including Libya itself—to take out a leader under whom they no longer were prepared to live.
Forte begins by describing Sirte, the emblem of the new state Qadhafi—and almost literally, Qadhafi—had constructed with the post–1973 torrent of petrodollars flowing into Libyan coffers in the wake of a series of price increases which Qadhafi’s aggressive resource nationalism had played a part in securing. Sirte was, in effect, a second capital, thick with new buildings and lavished with benefits from the money which had streamed into the new Libya. Qadhafi hosted numerous convocations there, including summits for the Organization for African Unity, a new pan-African network which he played a large part in developing. Sirte was also the place where Qadhafi had chosen to summon the ConocoPhillips CEO in 2008 to criticize the way he was dealing with the company’s oil contracts in Libya.
Forte turns the fate of Sirte into a parable of the fate of Libya, as it fell under, and with, Qadhafi. Indeed, Sirte was one of the places especially targeted by the rebellious forces of the National Transition Council: Forte quotes an AP report stating that “Residents now believe the Misrata fighters intentionally destroyed Sirte, beyond the collateral damage of fighting.”
It is to that destruction that Forte turns. Against too many accounts of the attack on Libya which make far too much of the partial rapprochement between Libya and the United States in the post-Global War on Terror interlude, Forte looks back at the historically belligerent face the United States had shown Libya, especially under Reagan: bombing it repeatedly, and taking down Libyan fighter jets defending Libyan land in the Gulf of Sirte, trying to get members of the Organization for African Unity to censure Libya, and then putting in place a series of sanctions against the Libyan government. Although many of the sanctions were eventually lifted, the close U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, sponsor of the mujahideen who had attempted to assassinate Qadhafi in 1996, continued, contributing to lasting friction between the government of Libya and the government of the United States.
Forte’s contribution here is to complicate the meaning of words like “rebellion” and “revolution” too often incanted to short circuit independent thought. His method is to look at the revolt which was happening in parts of Libya and then to zoom in on Sirte, the Qadhafi stronghold, to see if indeed the revolt was taking place there. To the contrary, Forte finds that the NATO/NTC (National Transitional Council) assault on Sirte continued for months before the rebels were finally able to take control of the city. Their assault consisted of indiscriminate bombing using heavy weaponry, a fact Forte is able to establish using mainstream media reporting of the civil war.
Furthermore, Forte is able to bring to bear evidence that NATO carried out extensive war crimes during its “liberation” of Sirte, and the evidence he brings to bear is impeccable: the statements of the NATO command and the various human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, finding evidence of massacres of captured pro-Qadhafi fighters and even of civilians. Even more damning is the quotation from Georg Charpentier, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Libya, who could speak in October 2011 of the “liberation of Bani Walid and Sirte in October,” and then in another note that “Public infrastructure, housing, education and health facilities need to be rehabilitated, reconstructed, and reactivated, intense and focused reconciliation efforts also need to be encouraged.”
This and dozens of quotations like it attest to NATO’s knowledge of what it was doing: intervening on one side of a civil war, for “reconciliation” is only necessary when you have two sides, and by elevating one side to angelic revolutionaries, one is laying the groundwork for legitimizing the wholesale destruction of the other.
Another strength of the book is Forte’s account of the double standards not just of the Western states and human rights organizations but also—perhaps especially—of Al Jazeera and its inflated, not to say fabricated, accounts of atrocities and particularly the way it incited racial hatred against darker Libyans.
Forte also clearly shows that Qadhafi had what is now spitefully referred to as a “social base”—as though the modern state is merely a crime syndicate rather than tightly integrated into social reproduction. The avoidance of these questions by dominant currents of the Euro-Atlantic socialist left led to a situation in which too many no longer seem able to distinguish between riots, revolts, and revolutions.
So how did NATO go about intervening? And how did it exploit the Libyan regime’s vulnerabilities? Here Forte seems to misstep a little. He writes of the very real improvements in social welfare, under a populist rentier social contract, and links those improvements to the government. But here some more delving into the academic literature, books such as Ruth First’s or Dirk Vandewalle’s, would have been helpful. While living standards were improving, and the oil wealth was going to the hands of the Libyan people—at least in part—the deliberate “statelessness” of the Qadhafi government had created a situation within which the state was materially embedded within the society, but links between the two were one of a social rather than a civic contract. Anomie and estrangement prevailed under the later Qadhafi, and the people living under his government increasingly felt that they were not the owners of their country. Legitimate discontent grew.
With the advent of the Arab Spring, that discontent found an outlet: revolt. Here Forte moves to surer ground. Disregarding narratives of a “peaceful revolt” militarized only in reluctant response to state savagery, he finds that the revolt was militarized practically from day one, with an attack on a Libyan military barracks. Forte documents that the right wing of the regime was clearly prepared to execute a coup d’état against Qadhafi, with the open assistance of France, the United States, and especially Qatar, which sent in special forces, airplanes, and gunships to ensure his rapid deposition.
Forte goes further than most other analysts of the Libyan coup d’état but at the same time not far enough. Al Jazeera, the television station owned by the Emir of Qatar and early on christened the voice of the Arab Spring, started reporting on “massacres” carried out by “black mercenaries” in Libya, starting February 17 and 18, 2011. The sourcing tended to be to anonymous activists in Benghazi or elsewhere—a script later replayed in Syria, where articles from Al Jazeera are so liberally brocaded with “activists say” to the point where little of what the article says is anything but what activists have said. Such subterfuges have escaped much of the left, and for that reason Forte’s account is laced with contempt for their gullibility with respect to opposition propaganda.
Furthermore, Forte does a very good job of pulling together the reasons the United States never liked Qadhafi—his prickliness with respect to U.S. investment, his leadership in Africa, his support of the African National Congress, and his resolute hostility to AFRICOM and U.S. bases on African soil. Far too much has been made of Qadhafi’s cozying up to the United States after 2004. What is forgotten is that the United States maintains hostility to any state-capitalist regime that is not fully integrated with and subservient to the U.S. global system, with respect both to the free flow of capital and foreign policy. On both counts, Qadhafi failed—the Heritage Foundation, which reports on what matters to the people who matter, found that Iran, Libya, and Syria have been the most “economically repressed” countries in the region—that is, the least open to U.S. investment, while far too often supporting Palestinian resistance movements, decrying normalization with Israel, giving aid to the left wing of Fateh, and other recalcitrant behavior which U.S. imperialists never forgot.
Libya offers a place to rethink dominant theories of imperialism, which have trouble accounting for the role of Western capitalist interests with respect to state-capitalist regimes, even ones implementing neoliberal economic programs or hollowing out their domestic industrial or agricultural sectors. What those theories miss is the resolute hostility of the U.S. state and ruling class to any foreign leadership which seems to be carrying out a national project.
A weakness of Forte’s book is that although he is a leftist, he is not a Marxist. So an occasion is lost to think about the ways in which the positive social transformations carried out under the Qadhafi junta also had the effect of contributing to the future downfall of Libya—for lacking a revolution within the Green Revolution, there was a counter-coup by the regime’s right wing against the populist coup d’état under which Qadhafi came to power. The left needs to understand both the benefits afforded by populist regimes and the limits they impose. The object is to understand what kind of opposition movements can arise which can both defend the gains of previous—and also deeply flawed—governments while simultaneously advancing on them, to further horizons. But these are theoretical and political problems that were with us before the destruction of Libya and will remain with us after. It is to the knowledge of this sordid event of the Euro-Atlantic left that Forte has made an important contribution, one which ought be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in and concerned about the destruction of Libya, and looking to understand more fully the next targets of empire.
SLOUCHING TOWARDS SIRTE: NATO’S WAR ON LIBYA AND AFRICA
Available to order from Global Research
Slouching Towards Sirte:
NATO’s War on Libya and Africa
- ISBN: 978-1-926824-52-9
- Year: 2012
- Pages: 352 with 27 BW photos, 3 maps
- Publisher: Baraka Books
Price: $24.95
American democracy in shambles
Barry Grey, wsws.org
With the imposition of a state of siege in Boston, a historical threshold has been crossed. For the first time ever, a major American city has been placed under the equivalent of martial law. The already frayed veneer of a stable democracy based on constitutional principles is in shreds.
On Monday, April 15, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon in the city’s center. Three people were killed and over 170 were injured, some seriously. This was a criminal act with tragic consequences. But violence, including acts of mass homicide and disasters resulting in major loss of life, is a regular feature of American society. Even as the events in Boston were unfolding, a factory explosion in Texas, to all appearances linked to safety hazards, took far more lives than the bombs detonated at the end of the marathon.
There is no precedent for the massive mobilization of military, police and intelligence forces carried out April 19 in Boston and its environs, which encompass more than 1 million people. Thousands of heavily armed police and National Guard troops occupied the streets, backed up by machine gun-mounted armored vehicles, Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters. As the WSWS noted, the scene resembled the US occupation of Baghdad.
The people were told to remain indoors while police, with automatic weapons drawn, conducted warrantless house-to-house searches. Some of those who strayed out of doors were surrounded by police and ordered to go home. The mass transit system was shut down; passenger train service along the northeastern corridor was halted; businesses, universities and other public facilities were closed.
Boston—the cradle of the American Revolution, one of the most liberal cities in one of the most liberal states in the US, the country’s premier center of higher education—was turned into an armed camp. This staggering mobilization of federal, state and local police power was deployed to track down a 19-year-old youth.
So far, there has been no protest from within the political or media establishment to the lockdown.
Following the capture of alleged bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, President Obama issued a late-night statement from the White House in which he stressed the role of his administration in the police-state mobilization, boasting that he had “directed the full resources of the federal government…to increase security as needed.” Ignoring the presumption of innocence, he referred to the captured suspect and his dead brother as “these terrorists.”
Obama’s Justice Department quickly announced that it would not read the suspect his “Miranda right” to remain silent and obtain legal counsel before speaking to police investigators. It would instead question the seriously injured youth “extensively” not just on matters related directly to public safety, but more broadly on “intelligence matters.” This sets a precedent for denying these rights to anyone arrested under antiterrorism statutes, which, under Obama, has already included political dissidents such as Occupy Wall Street and anti-NATO protesters.
Encouraged by the police-military mobilization, Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain and New York Congressman Peter King, all of whom have close ties to the military and intelligence agencies, demanded that Tsarnaev be declared an enemy combatant and turned over to the military.
The events in Boston have laid bare the modus operandi for the establishment of dictatorial forms of rule in the US. One or another violent act carried out by disoriented or disaffected individuals, perhaps with the help of elements within the state, is declared a terrorist event. A state of siege is imposed suspending democratic rights and establishing military-police control.
So deeply implicated are all of the organs of the state in these plans that little in the outer trappings of political life would have to be changed. It would not be necessary to overthrow the president or shut down Congress. These institutions would readily play their assigned role, and the imposition of a military dictatorship would be sanctioned by the US Supreme Court.
The media would simply continue to do what it normally does—functioning as a de facto arm of the state and providing the necessary pretexts, while whipping up the requisite fear and panic within the public.
The very fact that the entire establishment agrees that democratic norms cannot be maintained in the face of violence by a handful of people testifies to the advanced stage of the breakdown of American democracy.
So disproportionate was the scale of the response to the actual level of the threat that the conclusion cannot be avoided that the Boston bombings were the pretext for, not the cause of, the lockdown. The police-state mobilization was the culmination of more than a decade of intensive planning and the ceaseless buildup of the repressive forces of the state since 9/11, carried out under the cover of the “war on terror.”
The operation is not an expression of strength or confidence on the part of the American ruling class. On the contrary, it reflects the near panic of the corporate-financial elite in the face of mounting social discontent, exacerbated by extreme nervousness over the precarious state of global financial markets. What haunts the ruling class is not the fear of a terrorist attack, but dread of a new financial collapse, with the likely consequence of massive social upheavals.
The breakdown of American democracy has profound causes, the first of which is the staggering level of social inequality. Democracy cannot be maintained when the richest 5 percent of the population controls over 60 percent of the wealth. In the moves to police-military dictatorship, the forms of rule are coming into conformance with the underlying social reality of American capitalism.
Another fundamental cause of the crisis of democracy is the eruption of US militarism. The power of the military/intelligence apparatus has grown immensely, particularly since the end of the Soviet Union, as the American ruling class has turned to military aggression as a means of offsetting the decline in its global economic position. The professional military, segregated from society at large and hostile to it, has acquired ever-greater influence over political affairs and civilian authority. As always, imperialist war is incompatible with democracy.
American liberalism as a distinct political tendency has ceased to exist. The lining up of the Democratic Party behind the “war on terror,” and the external aggression and internal repression carried out in its name, has made clear that there is no section of the ruling elite that will defend democratic rights. The Obama administration, which has expanded the right-wing, antidemocratic policies of the Bush administration, is without question the most reactionary in US history.
As always, the filthiest role is played by the media and its leading personnel. From day one, they turned the airwaves into a continual rumor mill, making one unsubstantiated claim after another in an effort to sow fear and panic and justify the police-state measures being taken. They readily agreed to self-censor their reports in accordance with the demands of the police agencies. As CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, son of the former Democratic governor of New York and brother of the state’s current governor, told viewers, “We’ve only been showing the feeds that authorities are comfortable with.”
The media seeks to create an aura of popular support for martial law-type measures. But the initial confusion will give way to mounting disquiet. The abrupt shift in the forms of rule will create opposition in the population, above all in the working class.
The appropriate conclusions need to be drawn. Social inequality and war—the inevitable outcome of capitalism—are incompatible with democracy. One or the other—capitalism or democracy—must go. That is the issue confronting the working class.
Barry Grey is a senior political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site, an information resource of the Social Equality Party.
North Korea or the United States: Who is a Threat to Global Security?
North Korea lost thirty percent of its population as a result of US led bombings in the 1950s.
North Korea and her “cartoonish” leaders are—on the surface—a central casting villain for the American propaganda mills. Insular, incomprehensible to most, ostensibly bellicose, North Korea unwittingly plays into the hands of our master manipulators and warmongers.
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, April 05, 2013
Theme: Crimes against Humanity / In-depth Report: NORTH KOREA
Most people in America consider North Korea as an inherently aggressive nation and a threat to global security. Media disinformation sustains North Korea as a “rogue state”. The history of the Korean war and its devastating consequences are rarely mentioned. America is portrayed as the victim rather than the aggressor.
North Korea lost thirty percent of its population as a result of US led bombings in the 1950s.
US military sources confirm that 20 percent of North Korea’s population was killed off over a three year period of intensive bombings:
“After destroying North Korea’s 78 cities and thousands of her villages, and killing countless numbers of her civilians, [General] LeMay remarked, “Over a period of three years or so we killed off – what – twenty percent of the population.”
It is now believed that the population north of the imposed 38th Parallel lost nearly a third its population of 8 – 9 million people during the 37-month long “hot” war, 1950 – 1953, perhaps an unprecedented percentage of mortality suffered by one nation due to the belligerence of another.” (See War Veteran Brian Willson. Korea and the Axis of Evil, Global Research, April, 2002)
Official South Korean government sources estimate North Korean civilian deaths at 1,550,000.
Long lines of refugees fleeing from Yongdong on 26 July 1950. The day before, hundreds of refugees
were massacred by U.S. soldiers and warplanes at bridge at No Gun Ri, eight miles away.
Long lines of refugees fleeing from Yongdong on 26 July 1950. The day before, hundreds of refugees
were massacred by U.S. soldiers and warplanes at bridge at No Gun Ri, eight miles away.
During The Second World War the United Kingdom lost 0.94% of its population, France lost 1.35%, China lost 1.89% and the US lost 0.32%.
During the Korean war, North Korea lost 30 % of its population. In the words of General Curtis Lemay:
There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders. (emphasis added)
Reflect for a few minutes on these figures: If a foreign power had bombed the US and America had lost thirty percent of its population as result of foreign aggression, Americans across the land would certainly be aware of the threat to their national security emanating from this unnamed foreign power.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the North Koreans, who lost 30 percent of their population as a result of 37 months of relentless US bombings.
From their standpoint, the US is the threat to Global Security.
Their country was destroyed. Town and villages were bombed. General Curtis Lemay acknowledges that “[we] eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.”
There is not a single family in North Korea which has not lost a loved one.
Everyone I talked with, dozens and dozens of folks, lost one if not many more family members during the war, especially from the continuous bombing, much of it incendiary and napalm, deliberately dropped on virtually every space in the country. “Every means of communication, every installation, factory, city, and village” was ordered bombed by General MacArthur in the fall of 1950. It never stopped until the day of the armistice on July 27, 1953. (See War Veteran Brian Willson. Korea and the Axis of Evil, Global Research, April, 2002)
For the people of North Korea, in their inner consciousness as human beings, the aggressor, which inflicted more than two million deaths on a country of 8-9 million (1950s) is the United States of America.
These facts continue to be concealed by the Western media to sustain the “Axis of Evil” legend, which portrays North Korea as a threat and “rogue state”, to be condemned by the “international community”.
Genocide is defined under the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) as the
“the deliberate and systematic destruction of, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group”. Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
What is at stake is an act of genocide committed by the US. During the Korean War an entire civilian population was the target of deliberate and relentless bombings, with a view to destroying and killing a national group, which constitutes an act of genocide under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Articles by:
About the author:
Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca website. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism”(2005). His most recent book is entitled Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. He can be reached at crgeditor@yahoo.com
Terrorism with a “Human Face”: The History of America’s Death Squads
The Salvadoran death squads spared no one, not even US religious. Under the criminal Ronald Reagan four nuns were raped and murdered, obviously as a warning to other “meddling” Americans. UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick famously declared that it was all “their fault.” Thanks to the media’s unwillingness to expose the true nature of Reagan’s regime, and the Right’s permanent noise machine, most Americans still think Ronald Reagan one of the greatest presidents ever. —Eds.
The recruitment of death squads is part of a well established US military-intelligence agenda. There is a long and gruesome US history of covert funding and support of terror brigades and targeted assassinations going back to the Vietnam war.
As government forces continue to confront the self-proclaimed “Free Syrian Army” (FSA), the historical roots of the West’s covert war on Syria –which has resulted in countless atrocities– must be fully revealed.
From the outset in March 2011, the US and its allies have supported the formation of death squads and the incursion of terrorist brigades in a carefully planned undertaking.
The recruitment and training of terror brigades in both Iraq and Syria was modeled on the “Salvador Option”, a “terrorist model” of mass killings by US sponsored death squads in Central America. It was first applied in El Salvador, in the heyday of resistance against the military dictatorship, resulting in an estimated 75,000 deaths.
The formation of death squads in Syria builds upon the history and experience of US sponsored terror brigades in Iraq, under the Pentagon’s “counterinsurgency” program.
The Establishment of Death Squads in Iraq
John Negroponte, a diplomatic vulture well versed in the sordid arts of counter-revolution, mass assassinations, and organized sedition. An unindicted war criminal by any standard.
US sponsored death squads were recruited in Iraq starting in 2004-2005 in an initiative launched under the helm of the US Ambassador John Negroponte, [image: right] who was dispatched to Baghdad by the US State Department in June 2004.
Negroponte was the “man for the job”. As US Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. Negroponte played a key role in supporting and supervising the Nicaraguan Contras based in Honduras as well as overseeing the activities of the Honduran military death squads.
“Under the rule of General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, Honduras’s military government was both a close ally of the Reagan administration and was “disappearing” dozens of political opponents in classic death squad fashion.”
In January 2005, the Pentagon, confirmed that it was considering:
” forming hit squads of Kurdish and Shia fighters to target leaders of the Iraqi insurgency [Resistance] in a strategic shift borrowed from the American struggle against left-wing guerrillas in Central America 20 years ago”.
Under the so-called “El Salvador option”, Iraqi and American forces would be sent to kill or kidnap insurgency leaders, even in Syria, where some are thought to shelter. …
Hit squads would be controversial and would probably be kept secret.
The experience of the so-called “death squads” in Central America remains raw for many even now and helped to sully the image of the United States in the region.
Then, the Reagan Administration funded and trained teams of nationalist forces to neutralise Salvadorean rebel leaders and sympathisers. …
John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Baghdad, had a front-row seat at the time as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85.
Death squads were a brutal feature of Latin American politics of the time. …
In the early 1980s President Reagan’s Administration funded and helped to train Nicaraguan contras based in Honduras with the aim of ousting Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. The Contras were equipped using money from illegal American arms sales to Iran, a scandal that could have toppled Mr Reagan.
The thrust of the Pentagon proposal in Iraq, … is to follow that model …
It is unclear whether the main aim of the missions would be to assassinate the rebels or kidnap them and take them away for interrogation. Any mission in Syria would probably be undertaken by US Special Forces.
Nor is it clear who would take responsibility for such a programme — the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency. Such covert operations have traditionally been run by the CIA at arm’s length from the administration in power, giving US officials the ability to deny knowledge of it. (El Salvador-style ‘death squads’ to be deployed by US against Iraq militants – Times Online, January 10, 2005, emphasis added)
While the stated objective of the “Iraq Salvador Option” was to “take out the insurgency”, in practice the US sponsored terror brigades were involved in routine killings of civilians with a view to fomenting sectarian violence. In turn, the CIA and MI6 were overseeing “Al Qaeda in Iraq” units involved in targeted assassinations directed against the Shiite population. Of significance, the death squads were integrated and advised by undercover US Special Forces.
Robert Stephen Ford –subsequently appointed US Ambassador to Syria– was part of Negroponte’s team in Baghdad in 2004-2005. In January 2004, he was dispatched as U.S. representative to the Shiite city of Najaf which was the stronghold of the Mahdi army, with which he made preliminary contacts.
In January 2005, Robert S. Ford’s was appointed Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at the US Embassy under the helm of Ambassador John Negroponte. He was not only part of the inner team, he was Negroponte’s partner in setting up the Salvador Option. Some of the groundwork had been established in Najaf prior to Ford’s transfer to Baghdad.
John Negroponte and Robert Stephen Ford were put in charge of recruiting the Iraqi death squads. While Negroponte coordinated the operation from his office at the US Embassy, Robert S. Ford, who was fluent in both Arabic and Turkish, was entrusted with the task of establishing strategic contacts with Shiite and Kurdish militia groups outside the “Green Zone”.
Two other embassy officials, namely Henry Ensher (Ford’s Deputy) and a younger official in the political section, Jeffrey Beals, played an important role in the team “talking to a range of Iraqis, including extremists”. (See The New Yorker, March 26, 2007). Another key individual in Negroponte’s team was James Franklin Jeffrey, America’s ambassador to Albania (2002-2004). In 2010, Jeffrey was appointed US Ambassador to Iraq (2010-2012).
Negroponte also brought into the team one of his former collaborators Colonel James Steele (ret) from his Honduras heyday:
Under the “Salvador Option,” “Negroponte had assistance from his colleague from his days in Central America during the 1980′s, Ret. Col James Steele. Steele, whose title in Baghdad was Counselor for Iraqi Security Forces supervised the selection and training of members of the Badr Organization and Mehdi Army, the two largest Shi’ite militias in Iraq, in order to target the leadership and support networks of a primarily Sunni resistance. Planned or not, these death squads promptly spiralled out of control to become the leading cause of death in Iraq.
Intentional or not, the scores of tortured, mutilated bodies which turn up on the streets of Baghdad each day are generated by the death squads whose impetus was John Negroponte. And it is this U.S.-backed sectarian violence which largely led to the hell-disaster that Iraq is today. (Dahr Jamail, Managing Escalation: Negroponte and Bush’s New Iraq Team,. Antiwar.com, January 7, 2007)
“Colonel Steele (left) was responsible, according to Rep. Dennis Kucinich for implementing “a plan in El Salvador under which tens of thousands Salvadorans “disappeared” or were murdered, including Archbishop Oscar Romero and four American nuns.”
Upon his appointment to Baghdad, Colonel Steele was assigned to a counter-insurgency unit known as the “Special Police Commando” under the Iraqi Interior Ministry” (See ACN, Havana, June 14, 2006)
Reports confirm that “the US military turned over many prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the interior ministry’s special commandos” which so happened to be under supervision of Colonel Steele:
“US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing,” while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said. An interview conducted by Maass [of the New York Times] in 2005 at the improvised prison, accompanied by the Wolf Brigade’s US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.” (Ibid, emphasis added)
Another notorious figure who played a role in Iraq’s counter-insurgency program was Former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik [image: Bernie Kerik in Baghdad Police Academy with body guards] who in 2007 was indicted in federal court on 16 felony charges.
Kerik had been appointed by the Bush administration at the outset of the occupation in 2003 to assist in the organization and training of the Iraqi Police force. During his short stint in 2003, Bernie Kerik –who took on the position of interim Minister of the Interior– worked towards organizing terror units within the Iraqi Police force: “Dispatched to Iraq to whip Iraqi security forces into shape, Kerik dubbed himself the “interim interior minister of Iraq.” British police advisors called him the “Baghdad terminator,” (Salon, December 9, 2004, emphasis added)
Under Negroponte’s helm at the US Embassy in Baghdad, a wave of covert civilian killings and targeted assassinations had been unleashed. Engineers, medical doctors, scientists and intellectuals were also targeted.
Author and geopolitical analyst Max Fuller has documented in detail the atrocities committed under the US sponsored counterinsurgency program.
The appearance of death squads was first highlighted in May this year [2005], …dozens of bodies were found casually disposed … in vacant areas around Baghdad. All of the victims had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head and many of them also showed signs of having been brutally tortured. …
The evidence was sufficiently compelling for the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a leading Sunni organisation, to issue public statements in which they accused the security forces attached to the Ministry of the Interior as well as the Badr Brigade, the former armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), of being behind the killings. They also accused the Ministry of the Interior of conducting state terrorism (Financial Times).
The Police Commandos as well as the Wolf Brigade were overseen by the US counterinsurgency program in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior:
The Police Commandos were formed under the experienced tutelage and oversight of veteran US counterinsurgency fighters, and from the outset conducted joint-force operations with elite and highly secretive US special-forces units (Reuters, National Review Online).
…A key figure in the development of the Special Police Commandos was James Steele, a former US Army special forces operative who cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military mission in El Salvador at the height of that country’s civil war. …
Another US contributor was the same Steven Casteel who as the most senior US advisor within the Interior Ministry brushed off serious and well-substantiated accusations of appalling human right violations as ‘rumor and innuendo’. Like Steele, Casteel gained considerable experience in Latin America, in his case participating in the hunt for the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar in Colombia’s Drugs Wars of the 1990s …
Casteel’s background is significant because this kind of intelligence-gathering support role and the production of death lists are characteristic of US involvement in counterinsurgency programs and constitute the underlying thread in what can appear to be random, disjointed killing sprees.
Such centrally planned genocides are entirely consistent with what is taking place in Iraq today [2005] …It is also consistent with what little we know about the Special Police Commandos, which was tailored to provide the Interior Ministry with a special-forces strike capability (US Department of Defense). In keeping with such a role, the Police Commando headquarters has become the hub of a nationwide command, control, communications, computer and intelligence operations centre, courtesy of the US. (Max Fuller, op cit)
This initial groundwork established under Negroponte in 2005 was implemented under his successor Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. Robert Stephen Ford ensured the continuity of the project prior to his appointment as US Ambassador to Algeria in 2006, as well as upon his return to Baghdad as Deputy Chief of Mission in 2008.
Operation “Syrian Contras”: Learning from the Iraqi Experience
The gruesome Iraqi version of the “Salvador Option” under the helm of Ambassador John Negroponte has served as a “role model” for setting up the “Free Syrian Army” Contras. Robert Stephen Ford was, no doubt, involved in the implementation of the Syrian Contras project, following his reassignment to Baghdad as Deputy Head of Mission in 2008.
The objective in Syria was to create factional divisions between Sunni, Alawite, Shiite, Kurds, Druze and Christians. While the Syrian context is entirely different to that of Iraq, there are striking similarities with regard to the procedures whereby the killings and atrocities were conducted.
A report published by Der Spiegel pertaining to atrocities committed in the Syrian city of Homs confirms an organized sectarian process of mass-murder and extra-judicial killings comparable to that conducted by the US sponsored death squads in Iraq.
People in Homs were routinely categorized as “prisoners” (Shia, Alawite) and “traitors”. The “traitors” are Sunni civilians within the rebel occupied urban area, who express their disagreement or opposition to the rule of terror of the Free Syrian Army (FSA):
“Since last summer [2011], we have executed slightly fewer than 150 men, which represents about 20 percent of our prisoners,”says Abu Rami. … But the executioners of Homs have been busier with traitors within their own ranks than with prisoners of war. “If we catch a Sunni spying, or if a citizen betrays the revolution, we make it quick,” says the fighter. According to Abu Rami, Hussein’s burial brigade has put between 200 and 250 traitors to death since the beginning of the uprising.” (Der Spiegel, March 30, 2012)
The project required an initial program of recruitment and training of mercenaries. Death squads including Lebanese and Jordanian Salafist units entered Syria’s southern border with Jordan in mid-March 2011. Much of the groundwork was already in place prior to Robert Stephen Ford’s arrival in Damascus in January 2011.
Ford’s appointment as Ambassador to Syria was announced in early 2010. Diplomatic relations had been cut in 2005 following the Rafick Hariri assassination, which Washington blamed on Syria. Ford arrived in Damascus barely two months before the onset of the insurgency.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA)
Washington and its allies replicated in Syria the essential features of the “Iraq Salvador Option”, leading to the creation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and its various terrorist factions including the Al Qaeda affiliated Al Nusra brigades.
While the creation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) was announced in June 2011, the recruitment and training of foreign mercenaries was initiated at a much an earlier period.
In many regards, the Free Syrian Army is a smokescreen. It is upheld by the Western media as a bona fide military entity established as a result of mass defections from government forces. The number of defectors, however, was neither significant nor sufficient to establish a coherent military structure with command and control functions.
The FSA is not a professional military entity, rather it is a loose network of separate terrorist brigades, which in turn are made up of numerous paramilitary cells operating in different parts of the country.
Each of these terrorist organizations operates independently. The FSA does not effectively exercise command and control functions including liaison with these diverse paramilitary entities. The latter are controlled by US-NATO sponsored special forces and intelligence operatives which are embedded within the ranks of selected terrorist formations.
These (highly trained) Special forces on the ground (many of whom are employees of private security companies) are routinely in contact with US-NATO and allied military/intelligence command units (including Turkey). These embedded Special Forces are, no doubt, also involved in the carefully planned bomb attacks directed against government buildings, military compounds, etc.
The death squads are mercenaries trained and recruited by the US, NATO, its Persian Gulf GCC allies as well as Turkey. They are overseen by allied special forces (including British SAS and French Parachutistes), and private security companies on contract to NATO and the Pentagon. In this regard, reports confirm the arrest by the Syrian government of some 200-300 private security company employeeswho had integrated rebel ranks.
The Jabhat Al Nusra Front
The Al Nusra Front –which is said to be affiliated to Al Qaeda– is described as the most effective “opposition” rebel fighting group, responsible for several of the high profile bomb attacks. Portrayed as an enemy of America (on the State Department list of terrorist organizations), Al Nusra operations, nonetheless, bear the fingerprints of US paramilitary training, terror tactics and weapons systems. The atrocities committed against civilians by Al Nusra (funded covertly by US-NATO) are similar to those undertaken by the US sponsored death squads in Iraq.
In the words of Al Nusra leader Abu Adnan in Aleppo: “Jabhat al-Nusra does count Syrian veterans of the Iraq war among its numbers, men who bring expertise — especially the manufacture of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — to the front in Syria.”
As in Iraq, factional violence and ethnic cleansing were actively promoted. In Syria, the Alawite, Shiite and Christian communities have been the target of the US-NATO sponsored death squads. The Alawite and the Christian community are the main targets of the assassination program. Confirmed by the Vatican News Service:
Christians in Aleppo are victims of death and destruction due to the fighting which for months, has been affecting the city. The Christian neighborhoods, in recent times, have been hit by rebel forces fighting against the regular army and this has caused an exodus of civilians.
Some groups in the rugged opposition, where there are also jiahadist groups, “fire on Christian houses and buildings, to force occupants to escape and then take possession [ethnic cleansing] (Agenzia Fides. Vatican News, October 19, 2012)
“The Sunni Salafist militants – says the Bishop – continue to commit crimes against civilians, or to recruit fighters with force. The fanatical Sunni extremists are fighting a holy war proudly, especially against the Alawites. When terrorists seek to control the religious identity of a suspect, they ask him to cite the genealogies dating back to Moses. And they ask to recite a prayer that the Alawites removed. The Alawites have no chance to get out alive.” (Agenzia Fides 04/06/2012)
Reports confirm the influx of Salafist and Al Qaeda affiliated death squads as well as brigades under the auspices of the Muslim Brotherhood into Syria from the inception of the insurgency in March 2011.
Moreover, reminiscent of the enlistment of the Mujahideen to wage the CIA’s jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war, NATO and the Turkish High command, according to Israeli intelligence sources, had initiated”
“a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011).
Private Security Companies and the Recruitment of Mercenaries
According to reports, private security companies operating out of Gulf States are involved in the recruiting and training of mercenaries.
Although not specifically earmarked for the recruitment of mercenaries directed against Syria, reports point to the creation of training camps in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
In Zayed Military City (UAE), “a secret army is in the making” operated by Xe Services, formerly Blackwater. The UAE deal to establish a military camp for the training of mercenaries was signed in July 2010, nine months before the onslaught of the wars in Libya and Syria.
In recent developments, security companies on contract to NATO and the Pentagon are involved in training “opposition” death squads in the use of chemical weapons:
“The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday. ( CNN Report, December 9, 2012)
The names of the companies involved were not revealed.
Behind Closed Doors at the US State Department
Robert Stephen Ford was part of a small team at the US State Department team which oversaw the recruitment and training of terrorist brigades, together with Derek Chollet and Frederic C. Hof, a former business partner of Richard Armitage, who served as Washington’s “special coordinator on Syria”. Derek Chollet has recently been appointed to the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (ISA).
This team operated under the helm of (former) Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman.
Feltman’s team was in close liaison with the process of recruitment and training of mercenaries out of Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Libya (courtesy of the post-Gaddafi regime, which dispatched six hundred Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) troops to Syria, via Turkey in the months following the September 2011 collapse of the Gaddafi government).
Assistant Secretary of State Feltman was in contact with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, and Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim. He was also in charge of a Doha-based office for “special security coordination” pertaining to Syria, which included representatives from Western and GCC intelligence agencies well as a representative from Libya. Prince Bandar bin Sultan. a prominent and controversial member of Saudi intelligence was part of this group. (See Press Tv, May 12, 2012).
In June 2012, Jeffrey Feltman (image: Left) was appointed UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, a strategic position which, in practice, consists in setting the UN agenda (on behalf of Washington) on issues pertaining to “Conflict Resolution” in various “political hot spots” around the world (including Somalia, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Mali). In a bitter irony, the countries for UN “conflict resolution” are those which are the target of US covert operations.
In liaison with the US State Department, NATO and his GCC handlers in Doha and Riyadh, Feltman is Washington’s man behind UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahmi’s “Peace Proposal”.
Meanwhile, while paying lip service to the UN Peace initiative, the US and NATO have speeded up the process of recruitment and training of mercenaries in response to the heavy casualties incurred by “opposition” rebel forces.
The US proposed “end game” in Syria is not regime change, but the destruction of Syria as a Nation State.
The deployment of “opposition” death squads with a mandate to kill civilians is part of this criminal undertaking.
“Terrorism with a Human Face” is upheld by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which constitutes a mouthpiece for NATO “Humanitarian Interventions” under the doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P).
The atrocities committed by the US-NATO death squads are casually blamed on the government of Bashar Al Assad. According to UN Human Rights Council High Commissioner Navi Pillay:
“This massive loss of life could have been avoided if the Syrian Government had chosen to take a different path than one of ruthless suppression of what were initially peaceful and legitimate protests by unarmed civilians,” (quoted in Stephen Lendman, UN Human Rights Report on Syria: Camouflage of US-NATO Sponsored Massacres, Global Research, January 3, 2012)
Washington’s “unspeakable objective” consists in breaking up Syria as a sovereign nation –along ethnic and religious lines– into several separate and “independent” political entities.
The author is funding editor of Global Research.com
Jorge Bergoglio’s sinful role in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA: This 30 March, 1976, file photo shows Argentine Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla (C) being sworn in as president in Buenos Aires, following the 24 March coup. Workers’ unions, human rights groups and activist will organize marches 24 March, the 25th anniversary of the coup, to denounce the junta that began Argentina’s “dirty war.” Coup leaders Admiral Eduardo Emilio Massera is at left and Brig. Gen. Orlando Ramon Agosti is right. The Argentine generals took over about three years after their Chilean counterpart, Augusto Pinochet, overthrew Pres. Allende in Chile, in a putsch similarly supported by the US. The policy of seeding military dictatorships in South America—Operation Condor—was organized in Washington.
Buenos Aires – As Pope Francis takes his place as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, his participation in Argentina’s US-backed ‘Dirty War’ is sure to come under increased scrutiny.
From 1976 until 1983, Argentina was governed by a series of US-backed military dictators who ruled with iron fists and crushed the regime’s opponents, many of them students, trade unionists, journalists and leftists. Kidnapping, torture, murder by death squads anddisappearances characterized this brutal ‘Dirty War,’ and many of the leading perpetrators, including two junta leaders and the military dictator Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, were trained by the United States in kidnapping, torture, assassination and democracy suppression at the School of the Americas in Panama. As many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during this horrific period, and many children and babies were stolen from parents imprisoned in concentration camps or murdered by the regime.
During this harrowing period, the Argentine Catholic church was shamefully silent in the face of horrific atrocities. Argentine priests offered communion and support to the perpetrators of these crimes, even after the execution of two bishops, including Enrique Angelelli, and numerous priests. Worse, leading church figures were complicit in the regime’s abuses. One priest, Father Christian von Wernich, was a former police chaplain later sentenced to life in prison for involvement in seven murders, 42 kidnappings and 31 cases of torture during the ‘Dirty War.’ At his trial, witnesses testified how the priest used his position to gain their trust before passing information to police, who tortured victims– sometimes in von Wernich’s presence– and sometimes killed them.
Senior military commanders who justified the regime’s appalling practice of dumping drugged and tortured ‘Dirty War’ prisoners into the sea from airplanes, known as ‘death flights,’ told participants that the Church sanctioned the missions as “a Christian form of death.”
“We have much to be sorry for,” Father Ruben Capitanio told the New York Times in 2007. “The attitude of the Church was scandalously close to the dictatorship to such an extent that I would say it was of a sinful degree.”
So exactly what role did Jorge Bergoglio play in his country’s brutal seven-year military dictatorship?
A 1995 lawsuit filed by a human rights lawyer alleges that Bergoglio, who was leading the local Jesuit community by the time the military junta seized power in 1976, was involved in the kidnapping of two of his fellow Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who were tortured by navy personnel before being dumped in a field, drugged and semi-naked, five months later.
At the time, Bergoglio was the superior in the Society of Jesus of Argentina. According to El Silencio (Silence), a book by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina’s most respected investigative journalists, Bergoglio urged the two priests, who were strong believers in liberation theology, to stop visiting Buenos Aires slums where they worked to improve the lives of some of the country’s poorest people. After the priests refused, Bergoglio allegedly stopped protecting them, leading to their arrest and torture. According to the Associated Press, Yorio accused Bergoglio of “effectively handing [the priests] over to death squads.”
Despite his alleged role in the Jesuits’ imprisonment, Bergoglio did eventually take action to secure their release. His intervention and appeal to the vicious junta leader Jorge Videla quite likely saved their lives.
But that wasn’t the only time Bergoglio allegedly cooperated with the regime. According to Verbitsky, he also hid political prisoners from a delegation of visiting international monitors from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.
Bergoglio was also silent in the wake of Father Angelelli’s assassination, even as other leading Argentine clergy condemned the murder. He was quick, however, to hail the slain priest as a “martyr” years later in more democratic times.
once said of Bergoglio. “It shows him to be opposed to all innovation in the church and above all, during the dictatorship, it shows he was very cozy with the dictatorship.”
Human rights attorney Myriam Bregman told the AP that “the dictatorship could not have operated [so brutally] without this key support.”
Bergoglio is also a proven liar when it comes to his personal knowledge of the regime’s atrocities. In 1977, the De le Cuadra family, which lost five members, including a pregnant woman, to state security forces, appealed to the Jesuit leadership in Rome for desperately-needed protection. According to the Associated Press, the Jesuits in turn urged Bergoglio to help the family. Bergoglio assigned an underling to the case, who returned with a note from a colonel stating that the slain woman, who like many other ‘Dirty War’ victims was kept alive just long enough so that she could give birth, had her baby given to a family “too important” to remove it from. The colonel’s letter is written proof that Bergoglio knew about the regime’s practice of stealing babies from its victims, yet the archbishop testified in 2010 that he had no knowledge of stolen babies until after the military regime fell.
“Bergoglio has a very cowardly attitude when it comes to something so terrible as the theft of babies,” Estela de la Cuadra, daughter of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo founder Alicia de la Cuadra, told the AP.
Under Bergoglio’s later leadership as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the church apologized for its abject failure to protect its flock. But he also refused to appear in open court to answer questions about his role in the ‘Dirty War’ oppression– twice, and when he finally did appear in 2010, his answers– some of which, like the denial of knowledge of stolen babies– left many human rights advocates extremely dissatisfied.
“He doesn’t face this reality and it doesn’t bother him,” de la Cuadra said. “The question is how to save his name, save himself. But he can’t keep these allegations from reaching the public. The people know who he is.”