Billions in sanctioned Libyan funds from Muammar Gaddafi—meant to be given back to the Libyan people—are being stolen by secret interests from frozen accounts in Belgium.
The post Mysterious Entities Secretly Stealing Billions from ‘Frozen’ Gaddafi Accounts appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A paradigm shift in Libya could be on the horizon as the son of slain Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, confirmed that he will run for president of Libya in 2018.
Authored by Dan Glazebrook via RT.com,
Earlier that day, Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte had been occupied by Western-backed militias, following a month-long battle during which NATO and its ‘rebel’ allies pounded the city’s hospitals and homes with artillery, cut off its water and electricity, and publicly proclaimed their desire to ‘starve [the city] into submission’. The last defenders of the city, including Gaddafi, fled Sirte that morning, but their convoy was tracked and strafed by NATO jets, killing 95 people. Gaddafi escaped the wreckage but was captured shortly afterward. I will spare you the gruesome details, which the Western media gloatingly broadcast across the world as a triumphant snuff movie, suffice to say that he was tortured and eventually shot dead.
We now know, if testimony from NATO’s key Libyan ally Mahmoud Jibril is to be believed, it was a foreign agent, likely French, who delivered the fatal bullet. His death was the culmination of not only seven months of NATO aggression, but of a campaign against Gaddafi and his movement, the West had been waging for over three decades.
Yet it was also the opening salvo in a new war - a war for the militarily recolonization of Africa.
The year 2009, two years before Gaddafi’s murder, was a pivotal one for US-African relations. First, because China overtook the US as the continent’s largest trading partner; and second because Gaddafi was elected president of the African Union.
The significance of both for the decline of US influence on the continent could not be clearer. While Gaddafi was spearheading attempts to unite Africa politically, committing serious amounts of Libyan oil wealth to make this dream a reality, China was quietly smashing the West’s monopoly over export markets and investment finance. Africa no longer had to go cap-in-hand to the IMF for loans, agreeing to whatever self-defeating terms were on offer, but could turn to China - or indeed Libya - for investment. And if the US threatened to cut them off from their markets, China would happily buy up whatever was on offer. Western economic domination of Africa was under threat as never before.
The response from the West, of course, was a military one. Economic dependence on the West - rapidly being shattered by Libya and China - would be replaced by a new military dependence. If African countries would no longer come begging for Western loans, export markets, and investment finance, they would have to be put in a position where they would come begging for Western military aid.
To this end, AFRICOM - the US army’s new ‘African command’ - had been launched the previous year, but humiliatingly for George W. Bush, not a single African country would agree to host its HQ; instead, it was forced to open shop in Stuttgart, Germany. Gaddafi had led African opposition to AFRICOM, as exasperated US diplomatic memos later revealed by WikiLeaks made clear. And US pleas to African leaders to embrace AFRICOM in the ‘fight against terrorism’ fell on deaf ears.
After all, as Mutassim Gaddafi, head of Libyan security, had explained to Hillary Clinton in 2009, North Africa already had an effective security system in place, through the African Union’s ‘standby forces," on the one hand, and CEN-SAD on the other. CEN-SAD was a regional security organization of Sahel and Saharan states, with a well-functioning security system, with Libya as the lynchpin. The sophisticated Libyan-led counter-terror structure meant there was simply no need for a US military presence. The job of Western planners, then, was to create such a need.
NATO’s destruction of Libya simultaneously achieved three strategic goals for the West’s plans for military expansion in Africa. Most obviously, it removed the biggest obstacle and opponent of such expansion, Gaddafi himself. With Gaddafi gone, and with a quiescent pro-NATO puppet government in charge of Libya, there was no longer any chance that Libya would act as a powerful force against Western militarism. Quite the contrary - Libya’s new government was utterly dependent on such militarism and knew it.
Secondly, NATO’s aggression served to bring about a total collapse of the delicate but effective North African security system, which had been underpinned by Libya. And finally, NATO’s annihilation of the Libyan state effectively turned the country over to the region’s death squads and terror groups. These groups were then able to loot Libya’s military arsenals and set up training camps at their leisure, using these to expand operations right across the region.
It is no coincidence that almost all of the recent terror attacks in North Africa - not to mention Manchester - have been either prepared in Libya or perpetrated by fighters trained in Libya. Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, ISIS, Mali’s Ansar Dine, and literally dozens of others, have all greatly benefited from the destruction of Libya.
By ensuring the spread of terror groups across the region, the Western powers had magically created a demand for their military assistance which hitherto did not exist. They had literally created a protection racket for Africa.
In an excellent piece of research published last year, Nick Turse wrote how the increase in AFRICOM operations across the continent has correlated precisely with the rise in terror threats. Its growth, he said, has been accompanied by “increasing numbers of lethal terror attacks across the continent including those in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Tunisia.
In fact, data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland shows that attacks have spiked over the last decade, roughly coinciding with AFRICOM’s establishment. In 2007, just before it became an independent command, there were fewer than 400 such incidents annually in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, the number reached nearly 2,000. By AFRICOM’s own official standards, of course, this is a demonstration of a massive failure. Viewed from the perspective of the protection racket, however, it is a resounding success, with US military power smoothly reproducing the conditions for its own expansion.
This is the Africa policy Trump has now inherited. But because this policy has rarely been understood as the protection racket it really is, many commentators have, as with so many of Trump’s policies, mistakenly believed he is somehow ‘ignoring’ or ‘reversing’ the approach of his predecessors. In fact, far from abandoning this approach, Trump is escalating it with relish.
What the Trump administration is doing, as it is doing in pretty much every policy area, is stripping the previous policy of its ‘soft power’ niceties to reveal and extend the iron fist which has in fact been in the driving seat all along. Trump, with his open disdain for Africa, has effectively ended US development aid for Africa - slashing overall African aid levels by one third, and transferring responsibility for much of the rest from the Agency for International Development to the Pentagon - while openly tying aid to the advancement of “US national security objectives.”
In other words, the US has made a strategic decision to drop the carrot in favor of the stick. Given the overwhelming superiority of Chinese development assistance, this is unsurprising. The US has decided to stop trying to compete in this area, and instead to ruthlessly and unambiguously pursue the military approach which the Bush and Obama administrations had already mapped out.
To this end, Trump has stepped up drone attacks, removing the (limited) restrictions that had been in place during the Obama era. The result has been a ramping up of civilian casualties, and consequently of the resentment and hatred which fuels militant recruitment. It is unlikely to be a coincidence, for example, that the al Shabaab truck bombing that killed over 300 people in Mogadishu last weekend was carried out by a man from a town in which had suffered a major drone attack on civilians, including women and children, in August.
Indeed, a detailed study by the United Nations recently concluded that in “a majority of cases, state action appears to be the primary factor finally pushing individuals into violent extremism in Africa.” Of more than 500 former members of militant organizations interviewed for the report, 71 percent pointed to “government action,” including “killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend” as the incident that prompted them to join a group. And so the cycle continues: drone attacks breed recruitment, which produces further terror attacks, which leaves the states involved more dependent on US military support. Thus does the West create the demand for its own ‘products."
It does so in another way as well. Alexander Cockburn, in his book ‘Kill Chain," explains how the policy of ‘targeted killings’ - another Obama policy ramped up under Trump - also increases the militancy of insurgent groups. Cockburn, reporting on a discussion with US soldiers about the efficacy of targeted killings, wrote that:
“When the topic of conversation came round to ways of defeating the [roadside] bombs, everyone was in agreement. They would have charts up on the wall showing the insurgent cells they were facing, often with the names and pictures of the guys running them," Rivolo remembers. "When we asked about going after the high-value individuals and what effect it was having, they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, we killed that guy last month, and we’re getting more IEDs than ever.’ They all said the same thing, point blank: ‘[O]nce you knock them off, a day later you have a new guy who’s smarter, younger, more aggressive and is out for revenge.”’
Alex de Waal has written how this is certainly true in Somalia, where, he says, “each dead leader is followed by a more radical deputy. After a failed attempt in January 2007, the US killed Al Shabaab’s commander, Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, in a May 2008 air strike. Ayro’s successor, Ahmed Abdi Godane (alias Mukhtar Abu Zubair), was worse, affiliating the organization with Al-Qaeda. The US succeeded in assassinating Godane in September 2014. In turn, Godane was succeeded by an even more determined extremist, Ahmad Omar (Abu Ubaidah). It was presumably Omar who ordered the recent attack in Mogadishu, the worst in the country’s recent history. If targeted killing remains a central strategy of the War on Terror”, De Waal wrote, “it is set to be an endless war.”
But endless war is the whole point. For not only does it force African countries, finally freeing themselves from dependence on the IMF, into dependence on AFRICOM; it also undermines China’s blossoming relationship with Africa.
Chinese trade and investment in Africa continues to grow apace. According to the China-Africa Research Initiative at John Hopkins University, Chinese FDI stocks in Africa had risen from just two percent of the value of US stocks in 2003 to 55 percent in 2015, when they totaled $35 billion. This proportion is likely to rapidly increase, given that “Between 2009 and 2012, China’s direct investment in Africa grew at an annual rate of 20.5 percent, while levels of US FDI flows to Africa declined by $8 billion in the wake of the global financial crisis”. Chinese-African trade, meanwhile, topped $200 billion in 2015.
China’s signature ‘One Belt One Road’ policy - to which President Xi Jinping has pledged $124 billion to create global trade routes designed to facilitate $2 trillion worth of annual trade - will also help to improve African links with China. Trump’s policy toward the project was summarised by Steve Bannon, his ideological mentor, and former chief strategist in just eight words: “Let’s go screw up One Belt One Road.”
The West’s deeply destabilizing Africa policy - of simultaneously creating the conditions for armed groups to thrive while offering protection against them - goes some way toward realizing this ambitious goal. Removing Gaddafi was just the first step.
(ANTIMEDIA) — According to former secretary of state and twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump is doing war all wrong.
In an interview aired Sunday on CNN “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Clinton attacked Trump’s handling of the Iranian and North Korean situations. Specifically, Clinton said Trump’s attempts to pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal reached in 2015 basically mean “America’s word is not good.”
“Why on earth would we want two nuclear challenges in Iran and North Korea at the same time?” Clinton propositioned. “I think it’s very dangerous,” she added.
Clinton also said Trump’s position on the Iranian nuclear deal casts Iran as the victim in the situation:
“If Iran is complying, which all the evidence [suggests they are], then all of a sudden, instead of working to isolate Iran on every issue, we are giving Iran the spotlight — the aggrieved-party spotlight.”
“That makes us look foolish and small and plays right into Iranian hands,” she said.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Clinton took her criticism even further, speaking out against Trump’s saber-rattling rhetoric against North Korea. In a speech Wednesday, Clinton said Trump’s overhyped war of words with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was damaging America’s interests.
“Americans, as well as Koreans, have every right to be concerned about what path we are heading down,” she said.
“Picking fights with Kim Jong Un just puts a smile on his face,” Clinton added.
Clinton did not offer any particular solution to the current conflict, acknowledging there were no easy answers to the U.S.-North Korean stand-off. Nevertheless, she asserted that “cavalier threats to start a war are dangerous and shortsighted.”
Trump’s anti-Iranian position, particularly in relation to the 2015 nuclear deal, makes little sense politically (or even geopolitically).
Regardless, this is the same Hillary Clinton who vowed to “ring” China with defensive missiles if Beijing did not keep a lid on North Korea. It is the same Clinton who erupted into Riddler-style laughter when asked about America’s plans for going to war with Iran.
Hillary Clinton also single-handedly plunged Libya into chaos before saying “We came, we saw, he died” in a separate interview and again erupting into a fit of laughter over the death of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
She also voted for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was supportive of al-Qaeda-linked rebels in Syria. Her leaked emails showed she knew Saudi Arabia was financially sponsoring ISIS all while she accepted Saudi money on behalf of her foundation.
Trump is almost certainly doing war all wrong — not just in Hillary’s eyes — but that doesn’t mean her advice on these topics should necessarily be heeded given her vast list of criminal and violent behavior.
Though Western media and much of the entire world have long forgotten about Libya, we never will. While the Nobel Peace Prize winning "humanitarian" minded architect of the 2011 US-NATO intervention (and author of Libya"s current hell) continues to pen his presidential memoir in the midst of an epic retirement tour of yachts, golf courses, and hidden celebrity islands, Libya still burns out of control.
As we"ve recently noted, the mass flow of migrants and asylum seeking refugees is not going away and remains a political flashpoint for European front line countries reeling from the immigrant wave. In an updated situation report on Libya issued earlier this summer, the United Nation"s World Food Program (WFP) published some shocking numbers:
Civilians in Libya continue to suffer as a result of conflict, insecurity, political instability and a collapsing economy. According to the 2017 Humanitarian Response Plan, 1.3 million people are in need of emergency humanitarian assistance.
July 2017 UN figures. Source: UN World Food Program (WFP)
This means 20% of the entire Libyan population (estimated at 6.4 million according to the UN) is still in dire need of basic necessities of life such as food and housing. The WFP further notes on its main Libya page that Africa"s fourth largest country enjoyed economic stability and independence until 2011 - the year Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered at the hands of NATO sponsored militants (bold emphasis is WFP"s):
At that time Libya, as one of the world’s most prolific oil-producing nations, maintained large trade surpluses. Although the country’s oil wealth did not percolate down to the wages of ordinary citizens, until 2011 the cost of food at household level was offset to some extent by a welfare state that offered free education and healthcare. Now, the country has a trade deficit and is gripped by a civil war opposing tribal groups, Islamist groups, various other militias and administration forces.
Libya’s population is suffering a major humanitarian crisis. This involves poverty, insecurity, gender-based violence, mass displacement, shortages of food and cash in banks, and frequent power cuts.
In 2010, a year before the NATO war, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) assigned a Human Development Index (HDI) ranking of 53 to Libya (out of 169 countries ranked, Libya ranked highest on the African continent). The HDI is a composite statistic which measures comparative quality of life around the world with regard to education, lifespan, wages, and general standard of living. For example, Libya ranked above Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa for multiple years running through 2010 and was categorized as having "High Human Development". Libya has now fallen to 102 in the world according to the UN"s 2016 HDI report.
Right up until the eve of NATO"s air campaign against the Libyan state, international media outlets understood and acknowledged the country"s high human development rankings, though it later became inconvenient to present the empirical data. A February 2011 BBC report summarized as follows:
During Muammar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule, Libya has made great strides socially and economically thanks to its vast oil income, but tribes and clans continue to be part of the demographic landscape.
Women in Libya are free to work and to dress as they like, subject to family constraints. Life expectancy is in the seventies. And per capita income – while not as high as could be expected given Libya’s oil wealth and relatively small population of 6.5m – is estimated at $12,000 (£9,000), according to the World Bank.
Illiteracy has been almost wiped out, as has homelessness – a chronic problem in the pre-Gaddafi era, where corrugated iron shacks dotted many urban centres around the country.
Libya went from an HDI ranking of 53 (with an HDI Value shown above) in 2010 to 102 in 2016. The UN identifies 2011 as the beginning of a continuing "mass displacement" of Libyans as the country remains in war-torn chaos. Chart source: Actualitix.
World Bank GNI numbers through 2016.
The 2011 war and aftermath essentially created a failed state with a once economically independent population now turned largely dependent on foreign aid and relief. Now considered to be at "emergency levels" of need, prior to NATO intervention Libya was not even on the WFP"s radar:
Before the crisis, the World Food Programme (WFP) had a minimal presence in Libya, with the country operating only as a logistics corridor between Sudan and Chad.
How"s that for "Arab Spring" blossoming of democracy, freedom, and prosperity courtesy of France, Britain, and the US?
Via Wiki Commons, "History of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi" Gross Domestic Product (based on Purchasing Power Parity methodology)
Not surprisingly, as of this week there are still "respected" members of the press willing to defend regime change experiments and "democracy promotion" abroad while quoting Iraq War architects like Elliot Abrams (thankfully Trump nixed him for a State Dept. position). They will perpetually live on in their own fanciful unreality while filling up columns in places like the Washington Post.
The ever-insightful Adam Curtis characterized the state of unreality under which most in the West still live when he concluded a 2012 post-mortem analysis on Libya - a very fitting conclusion to the still unfolding yet already forgotten about story of NATO"s dirty little "humanitarian" war:
The question at the heart of this whole story is - Who was the ventriloquist? And who was the dummy?
Maybe we were the dummy? By allowing perception management with its simplifications, falsehoods and exaggerations to create a simplified vision of the world - we fell into a fake universe of certainty when really we were just watching a pantomime.
And now as the Arab Spring unfolds and reveals the true chaos and messiness of the real world - above all the horror of what is happening in Syria - we find ourselves completely unable to understand it or even know what to do. So those stories get ignored while we follow others with clearer and more simplified dramas which have what seem to be obvious goodies and baddies - thank god for Iran, North Korea and Jimmy Savile.
It is unlikely that even the hard empirical data will awaken either neocons or liberal interventionists from their pantomime regime change fantasies.
October 20 marked the fifth anniversary of Muammar Gaddafi’s sodomized-related death – US imperial viciousness responsible for his murder and destruction Africa’s most developed, socially responsible nation.
Endless violence and chaos replaced a society safe and fit to live in. Gaddafi provided Libyans with important benefits Americans can’t imagine. More on this below.
Hillary orchestrated war to eliminate him, wanting US-controlled puppet governance replacing Libyan sovereign independence.
In early 2011, made-in-the-USA protests preceded US-led NATO terror-bombing, indiscriminately massacring civilians, creating charnel house conditions.
Endless violence continues daily, exacerbated by ISIS fighters infesting parts of the country, Washington supporting them with funding, weapons and other material aid.
Obama and Hillary wanted Gaddafi eliminated for instituting policies all nations should embrace. Previous articles discussed them.
He supported pan-Africanism, a United States of Africa free from imperial domination. He wanted Libyans sharing in the country’s oil wealth, a notion foreign to America and other Western powers.
Under his 1999 Decision No. 111, all Libyans got free healthcare, education, electricity, water, training, rehabilitation, housing assistance, disability and old-age benefits, interest-free state loans, as well as generous subsidies to study abroad, buy a new car, help couples when they marry, practically free gasoline, and more.
Literacy under Gaddafi rose from 20 – 80%. Libya’s hospitals and private clinics were some of the region’s best. Now they’re in shambles.
Vital public services he provided no longer exist. Pre-war, Libyans had African’s highest standard of living. Homelessness was nonexistent.
Gaddafi believed all Libyans had a right to a home or rent-free apartment, notions unheard of in the West.
He rejected farcical Western-style money-controlled democracy (sic), deplored crony capitalism and neoliberal harshness.
During his tenure, women had the right to vote, participate politically, as well as own and sell property independently of their husbands.
Clause 5 of Libya’s 1969 Constitution granted them equal status with men, notably for education and employment.
In January 2011, weeks before US-led NATO naked aggression began, the UN Human Rights Council praised Gaddafi for instituting and supporting important political, economic, education, social and cultural rights.
He called his Great Man-Made River (GMMR) development of an ocean-sized aquifer beneath Libya’s sands the “Eighth Wonder of the World” – wanting all Libyans sharing in its benefits.
Washington and rogue Western partners wanted it privatized for exclusive corporate gain.
Under Gaddafi, the Central Bank of Libya was state-owned, the interest-free Libyan dinar used for productive economic growth, not speculation, profits and bonuses for predatory bankers.
He funded Africa’s only communications satellite, saving hundreds of millions of dollars for low-cost incoming and outgoing calls.
He provided two-thirds of the $42 billion needed to launch a public African Central Bank, Monetary Fund and Investment Bank.
He supported a new gold standard, replacing dollars with gold dinars, aiming to provide real monetary wealth and value, free from predatory Western lending agencies.
Washington wants dollar hegemony, maintaining it as the world’s reserve currency, an agenda challenged by Russia, China and other nations, increasingly trading bilaterally in their own currencies.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin is threatened. Neocons infesting Washington want regime change. His redoubtable leadership prevents it.
Will nuclear war on Russia follow Hillary’s ascension to power next year? Will the unthinkable become reality?
