Who Is Grubbier-- France's Ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy Or L.A.'s Ex-Sheriff Lee Baca? How About Mississippi Nutcase Chris McDaniel?

What's wrong with voters who allow themselves to be suckered by conservative politicians?

I was listening to an amazing broadcast on KCRW the other night. It was a discussion between an anchor who didn't know it was amazing and a beat reporter who was just as clueless. The reporter was babbling to the anchor about how 6 officials of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department were convicted of obstructing a federal probe into violence against inmates in county jails. She reported that they could get long prison sentences-- like 15 years or more-- but that no one thought they would because, well you know… sheriffs, service, good guys, all that. Well, of course. But that wasn't nuthin' compared to what came next. Everyone in L.A. knows that this leads right to the corrupt, disgraced ex-Sheriff, Lee Baca. But another word you could use to describe Baca along with "corrupt" and "disgraced" would be "connected." The reporter acknowledged the case could easily implicate Baca but that prosecuting him wasn't just a matter of justice but also "a matter of politics" and decisions would have to be made "outside of California." The dumbbell anchor didn't hear anything weird or untoward or worth following up on. OK.

U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr. said that the 6 criminals "participated in a scheme to thwart a federal grand jury investigation into violations of basic constitutional rights guaranteed to both prisoners and visitors to county jails… While an overwhelming majority of law enforcement officials serve with honor and dignity, these defendants tarnished the badge by acting on the false belief that they were above the law." Yes, above the law, like Lee Baca and like "we" seem to expect our public officials to all perceive themselves. Wednesday morning Brett Logiurato, reporting for Business Insider explained how Mississippi Tea Party extremist Chris McDaniel, a state Senator representing a stretch of south Mississippi skirting US 59 south of Laurel, is now raising money for himself by claiming he has a case against the winner, Senator Thad Cochran. Presumably there are teabaggers who find this credible enough to contribute.

A source on the Cochran campaign fired back in a conversation with Business Insider Wednesday, in which the source dismissed McDaniel as a "clinically diagnosable narcissist" and a scam artist.

"The guy is basically Joel Osteen," the source said of McDaniel in a phone interview Wednesday morning. "He's such a phony, and he's taking advantage of these people to stay in the spotlight. This is such a publicity stunt. He can't stand the fact that he lost… Chris McDaniel is a trial lawyer, and he’s acting like one. He’s throwing out false flags and things that just aren’t true, and trying to get them into the news stream… All this is is a candidate who's a total egomaniac-- I really believe he is a clinically diagnosable narcissist. This is all about him and his 15 minutes in the spotlight. The second he concedes, the circus moves on."

The good news, though, is that this kind of sociopathic behavior isn't unique to conservative politicians in America. Let's take a look at what's going down with an especially slimy conservative politician in France, defeated ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy. French TV is reporting that his political ambitions have dimmed. That's because he was arrested on corruption charges, taking illegal campaign money (around $200,000 in CASH) from a shriveled up and senile L'Oréal billionairess, Liliane Bettencourt, who preferred paying bribes to paying taxes. At the time, Sarkozy had also taken a $65 million bribe from Gaddafi. ("During this investigation, French magistrates wire-tapped conversations between Sarkozy and his lawyer and made 'unsettling' discoveries.") He's been planning on running again in 2017.

It is the first time since 1958-- the beginning of the Fifth Republic-- that a French former president has been taken into police custody. He is, however, not the first to face a judge. His mentor in politics, Jacques Chirac, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for embezzlement.

…To cut a long story short, Sarkozy is alleged to have built a network of informants within the judiciary and the court of cassation who kept him and his lawyers informed of the progress of the Bettencourt investigations and every other sensitive dossier he might be linked to. The former president and his lawyer, who appeared to know that their phone was bugged by the investigative judges, resorted to buying pre-paid mobile phones under fake names. As a result, Sarkozy, his lawyer and two judges from the court of cassation were taken into police custody for questioning on Monday and Tuesday and have now been put under investigation for "abuse of power." Investigators also want to find out if Sarkozy promised top-level jobs in exchange of confidential information.

Sarkozy may well end up being released. However, if nothing else, this new episode is shedding some more light on "le système Sarkozy." Here is a president who never hesitated to call high civil servants in order to grill them and obtain confidential information. Le Monde revealed yesterday how Sarkozy, by calling and interrogating the head of intelligence service on the Gaddafi investigation, put such a senior civil servant in an untenable position.

Robert Scheer proposes "We know everything but learn nothing" as a slogan for our "intelligence" agencies

"As The New York Times stated, the Benghazi incident has been billed as "the most significant attack on United States property in 11 years, since Sept. 11, 2001," an event that launched the much-ballyhooed war on terror. But as with that attack 11 years earlier, the perps turned out to be people the U.S. secret agencies had once trusted. . . .

"We have left it to the secret state agents to determine the nature of our enemies, "the evil doers," and never dare to question how often their "evidence" gets it wrong. "

-- Robert Scheer, in his first 2014 column, "NSA,
Benghazi and the Monsters of Our Own Creation"

by Ken

"Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi" was one of Noah's cases in point last night in Part 2 of "A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy," his 2013 "Year in Review" (which began Monday, and continues tonight at 6pm PT/9pm ET).

In Republikook world, President Obama supposedly either let the storming of the embassy happen or encouraged it, maybe with his supersecret Muslim underground decoder ring, or something. One thing Republicans won't tell you is that it was they who voted in Congress to withdraw security funding for our embassies. Nice goin', a-holes. Since then we've had madman Rep. Darrell Issa, doing his best Joe McCarthy imitation, running hearing after hearing after hearing, wasting mountains of our taxpayer dollars on some insane attempt to build an impeachment-worthy case against the president.  Again, people died, so let's exploit it! Ain't that the Republican way?

Now one of our most prized BS detector-rejectors, Robert Scheer, looks at the extent to which the Benghazi disaster, like many others of modern times, was produced by products of our own creation. He begins by asking, "If we are so smart why are we so dumb?," explaining, "I am referring to the 'intelligence' that our spy agencies have gathered at great cost in both massive secret black box budgets and, much more important, the surrender of our personal freedom to the snooping eyes of our modern surveillance state."

Bob is one of those writers I hate the try to ellipsize or paraphrase, so here is his case as he himself makes it:

"We know everything but learn nothing" would be an honest slogan for the NSA, CIA and lesser-known spy agencies that specialize in leading us so dangerously astray. For all of their massive intrusion into the personal lives of individuals throughout the world, it is difficult to recall a time when the "intelligence" they collected provided such myopic policy insight.

Take the revelations in The New York Times’ exhaustive six-part investigation published Saturday demonstrating that the devastating 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was an intelligence disaster. The Times "turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault" that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Instead, a local militia leader on the side of the U.S.-supported insurrection in Libya with no known affiliation with al-Qaida is a prime suspect, and he and others allegedly responsible were not on the radar screen of the 20-person CIA station in Benghazi because they were part of the insurgency the U.S. supported.

As for the vast collection of phone and email intercepts maintained by U.S. spy agencies, it turned up only one bit of information, a phone call from someone involved in the mob attacking the U.S. post. He called a friend elsewhere in Africa who allegedly knew some folks in al-Qaida, but the friend "sounded astonished" at the news from Libya, "suggesting he had no prior knowledge of the assault," according to U.S. officials. In short, the only evidence turned up by the vast spying apparatus was evidence that inconveniently contradicted the al-Qaida connection, so it was not made public.

As The New York Times stated, the Benghazi incident has been billed as "the most significant attack on United States property in 11 years, since Sept. 11, 2001," an event that launched the much-ballyhooed war on terror. But as with that attack 11 years earlier, the perps turned out to be people the U.S. secret agencies had once trusted. The enemy here was not al-Qaida, but rather a homegrown menace empowered by foreign intervention. "The attack was led," the Times reported, "by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistic support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi."

These monsters of our own creation continually haunt us. It was, after all, the United States under both Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan that recruited and armed the anti-Soviet Muslim fanatics who later morphed into Osama bin Laden’s gang. Reagan even embraced them as "freedom fighters" in official ceremonies. So too did the U.S. recently rally an army of fundamentalists to oppose the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.

Gadhafi, like Hussein in Iraq and Assad in Syria, was a defanged dictator and -- inconvenient to the U.S. anti-terrorism narrative -- like his fellow secular dictators, an avowed enemy of al-Qaida. But that did not stop the regime change ideologues in the U.S. government from meddling once again in a society that they could barely comprehend. As The New York Times summarized the origins of the Benghazi debacle:

The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies.

We have left it to the secret state agents to determine the nature of our enemies, "the evil doers," and never dare to question how often their "evidence" gets it wrong. In the process, debates about foreign policy are hijacked by those with access to secret information, be it Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or Iran’s threat to the stability of the Mideast. This last is the source of greatest irrationality in the war on terror that has committed the U.S. to the side of Sunni fanatics financed by Saudi Arabia in a war against anyone the Saudi theocracy holds in contempt.

Just this week, the Saudi government pledged $3 billion to support the government of Lebanon in its confrontation with Hezbollah. That follows a $5 billion gift to the military dictators of Egypt who overthrew a democratically elected government whose Sunni leadership did not sufficiently cater to Saudi dictates. Then there are this year’s foreign aid bribes of $1 billion to Jordan, $3.25 billion to Yemen, $1.25 billion to Morocco and $750 million to Tunisia to docilely follow the decrees of the Saudi theocracy.

The idiocy of anti-terrorism as a substitute for foreign policy is that Saudi Arabia, the one nation most accurately described as a breeding ground for terrorism, gets to play an outsized role, along with outlier Israel, in deciding U.S. policy for the entire region. If people dare dissent, say any Americans who loathe having their taxes committed in this way, they can be branded as soft on terror. If they go online and express such a view, will they too be picked up in the NSA’s catch-a-spy network?

The excuse is that this sacrifice of our freedom will make us more secure, as in the misnamed "National Security Agency," by knowing more about our "enemies." But the record is unmistakably the opposite, that this relinquishing of privacy and transparency has stifled genuine public debate about the goals of our policy and left us both stupid and weak.

Ironically, the Republikooks are sort of right when they point a finger at President Obama, but not for any of the "reasons" they impute. No, the problem is that this president has continued a nightmarish tradition of misguided "security policy."

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The Cult Of Celebrity-- This Is No Apologia For Qadaffi

My friend Cynthia is a very fit great-grandmother. Yesterday she told me she has more sympathy for John Kasich's dead Bengal tigers than for Qadaffi, whose corpse was then on display for tourists in a meat freezer at a suburban Misrata shopping mall. I'm afraid Cynthia-- and myself-- are in a minority. "Let them eat cake," notwithstanding, Marie Antoinette, is largely viewed as a sympathetic victim these days, at least in America. And even Tsar Nicholas II has been partially rehabilitated in the public consciousness-- even more successfully than the Bush Regime (with more than a little help from Los Tres Nosy Amigos, McCain, Graham and Lieberman). Me and Cynthia... no tears for the creatures of the night.

Every day thousands of impoverished parents around the world lose a child so someone from Jamie Johnson's film can buy another new handbag or Porsche. If I think about the indignity of Qadaffi's lynching, it'll be far down that list of millions of people who have suffered at the hands of powermad tyrants and avarice-driven billionaires like him.

The grisly spectacle of Muammar Gaddafi's death and posthumous career as Misrata's most popular body art exhibit may not have been very edifying, and news that the deposed dictator of Libya has been quietly buried at a secret desert location has to be welcome. Let's hope the disposal of his decaying remains does bring an end to the surreal story that started with ambiguous video images-- was he dead or alive?-- and culminated with shots... of celebratory people eager to view the bodies of Gaddafi and his son Mutassim in a cold storage unit, surrounding the corpse to photograph it on their phones.

But nothing in the photographs of Gaddafi wounded, dead, dragged through the streets, and finally on display, rotting in public, has been anything like as disgusting as the thoroughly hypocritical and self-deceiving international reaction to these pictures. Libyans did what they probably had to do. Their western supporters have moaned and groaned at the realities of war with no apparent understanding that through Nato we are participants in this conflict and so share its inevitable moral complexities.

First our media rushed the confusing visual evidence of Gaddafi's capture on to websites and into print. Then, as the reality that he was dead became clear, it worried about the ethics of so openly displaying photographs and video of a corpse.

Meanwhile global agencies expressed concern over the mystery of Gaddafi's killing. Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) came under pressure to hold a proper inquiry, and evidence of more executions in the last days of fighting was sternly announced. By the time Gaddafi's body was said to be finally heading for desert burial, the manner and imagery of his death threatened to absorb the larger story of Libya's liberation.

The Arab spring became The Autumn of the Patriarch, as his dead body haunted the new era. No wonder a Libyan was quoted as saying he has given more trouble dead than alive. Yet the main trouble dead Gaddafi has given is to expose the fundamental shallowness and sentimentality of the western democracies' support for Arab revolution and in particular our military intervention in Libya.

To get upset by photographs of the dead Gaddafi is to pretend we did not know we went to war at all. It is to fantasise that our own role is so just and proper and decent that it is not bloody at all.

Why is the modern western world so obsessed with the idea of a "just war," which goes back to the medieval theology of Thomas Aquinas? In the 21st century we keep trying to re-enact some fantasy of a war that is utterly righteous, and from which we emerge with no guilt on our hands-- not even the killing of a brutal dictator. Gaddafi should have gone on trial at The Hague, we wail. He should have been decorously imprisoned and politely handed over to international war crimes judges. It's complete nonsense. We totally forget the fact that Nato planes blasted his Tripoli control centres with every chance of killing him. If a French or British raid just happened to have blown him to bits, would we be wringing our hands?

The stench of doublethink is more noxious than any vapour emerging from the meat store in Misrata. When I look at this photograph what do I see? War. War and nothing else. How many times do we need to be told that war is hell? The phrase has lost all meaning for us. Think about what hell is. Hell, in paintings by Bosch, is chaos. It is meaningless, monstrous, and lacks any place of safety or redemption. This picture of Gaddafi dead is a day in the life of hell, also known as war: a corpse photographed for souvenirs, displayed to satisfy the oppressed, in a moment of violent gratification. When Nato intervened in Libya what we see in this picture was probably the best-- not the worst-- outcome on offer. And we should be grimly glad of it. What fantasy makes us long for some impossibly dignified and humane end to a bloody conflict?

...[F]or once, with the death of Gaddafi, we have seen the face of war, washed in blood, bathed in cruelty. The horrible and haunting pictures of his last moments and his public exhibition simply show us, for once, what the wars of our time and all times look like. If we don't like what we see we must stop this foolish pretense that war, however "just", can ever be anything but a brutal mess.

A couple years ago Roland and I rented a jeep and drove through the wilds of Mali. It seemed like the two most popular names we found were Barack Obama, the just-elected president of the United States and Muammar Qadaffi, the de facto ruler of Libya who was showering sub-Saharan Africa with some of his country's oil wealth. I took the photo on the right in Timbuktu. It's Roland, at one of the main sites of the fabled town (which is now being engulfed by the Sahara), pointing to a street sign: rue Guide Mouamar El Kaddafi. I'm not sure how well Obama has fared in Mali public opinion-wise, but in Qadaffi's case... it's a decidedly mixed bag.

Muammar Gaddafi once declared Timbuktu his favourite Malian town, but as the Libyan leader is besieged by Nato forces at home, his property and projects in the ancient city are crumbling.

In 2006, the Libyan leader made himself an Imam of Timbuktu during Mouloud, the celebration of the Prophet Mohammed's birthday which draws thousands of pilgrims to a famed mosque in the northwestern desert city.

He then paid for hundreds of Africans, including heads of state, to come to Timbuktu on Libyan aircraft and pray with him in a stadium of the town he publically declared his favourite.

This Gaddafi-esque ostentation is a thing of the past as the embattled leader is bombarded daily by Nato forces in Tripoli, mandated to enforce a no-fly zone and protect civilians in a four-month popular uprising against his regime.

Gaddafi’s residence stretches over several hectares in the north of the desert town, once a renowned intellectual and religious centre during the 15th and 16th centuries, helping to spread Islam throughout Africa.

A small rubbish dump has built up outside the main entrance of his estate.

"We will remove the rubbish tomorrow. Since Gaddafi’s problems, three Libyans who kept watch over his property have left," explains a guard who quickly scuttles off when he learns he is speaking to a journalist.

Through a screen, the dusty interior is visible as hundreds of date palms, flown in specially from Libya, and eucalyptus trees wilt in the heat. A large motor-pump in the middle of the poorly-maintained lawn obviously long out of commission.

Before disappearing the menacing guard orders AFP to see "the Libyan boss" for any information about Gaddafi’s regime in Timbuktu. He is staying in a Libyan-owned hotel which has cost millions of euros and is still not complete.

An envoy sent by Gaddafi to oversee the construction disappeared as soon as he heard his leader was in trouble, several sources said.

"The Libyan people will win. I am part of the team which watches over Libyan interests in Timbuktu," says the mustachioed "boss" at the half-built hotel.

A major retailer in the city, speaking on condition of anonymity, is not a fan of the Libyan leader.

"Gaddafi is a megalomaniac. When his corrupt entourage come here you always have to give them false invoices."

Another one of Gaddafi’s projects, a water canal completed in 2007 and meant to divert water from the Niger river to Timbuktu, is dry and silted up.

"Now that Gaddafi’s has problems, the canal risks having problems too," says a concerned Mohamed Iddi, member of the Timbuktu Association of Young Muslims.

He says he feels the absence of the Libyan leader in his wallet.

"Here in Timbuktu, there are dozens of schools and Koranic masters who earn a monthly subsidy from Libya. In the new situation we don't know where this money will come from.

"Do not think it is because Gaddafi supports us financially that he is supported in his stand-off against the West. It is because he is a Muslim like us, and he is a victim of an unfair attack," says Iddi.

Timbuktu, like other towns in Mali including the capital Bamako, has held marches in support of Gaddafi.

Nor is Mali the only African country with fond-- if mixed-- memories of Qadaffi. Many see him as a benefactor who was martyred by the West.

Moammar Gadhafi's regime poured tens of billions of dollars into some of Africa's poorest countries. Even when he came to visit, the eccentric Libyan leader won admiration for handing out money to beggars on the streets.

"Other heads of state just drive past here in their limousines. Gadhafi stopped, pushed away his bodyguards and shook our hands," said Cherno Diallo, standing Monday beside hundreds of caged birds he sells near a Libyan-funded hotel. "Gadhafi's death has touched every Malian, every single one of us. We're all upset."

While Western powers heralded Gadhafi's demise, many Africans were gathering at mosques built with Gadhafi's money to mourn the man they consider an anti-imperialist martyr and benefactor.

Critics, though, note this image is at odds with Gadhafi's history of backing some of Africa's most brutal rebel leaders and dictators. Gadhafi sent 600 troops to support Uganda's much-hated Idi Amin in the final throes of his dictatorship.

And Gadhafi-funded rebels supported by former Liberian leader Charles Taylor forcibly recruited children and chopped off limbs of their victims during Sierra Leone's civil war.

"Is Gadhafi's life more important than many thousands of people that have been killed during the war in these two countries?" asked one shopkeeper in the tiny West African country of Gambia, who spoke on condition of anonymity fearing recrimination.

Some analysts estimate that the Gadhafi regime invested more than $150 billion in foreign countries, most of it into impoverished African nations.

"Gadhafi was a true revolutionary who focused on improving the lives of the underdeveloped countries," said Sheik Muthal Bin-Muslim, from the Gadhafi mosque in Sierra Leone's capital that was built with Libyan funds. Muslim worshippers were planning an all-night vigil in honor of the slain Libyan leader.

...Gadhafi's influence even extended to Africa's largest economy: The Libyan leader supported the African National Congress when it was fighting racist white rule, and remained close to Nelson Mandela after the anti-apartheid icon became South Africa's first black president.

Current President Jacob Zuma also was one of the most outspoken critics of the NATO airstrikes in Libya, and he told reporters he thought Gadhafi should have been captured and tried, not executed.

The ANC Youth League described Gadhafi as an "anti-imperialist martyr" and a "brave soldier and fighter against the recolonization of the African continent."

For many of Gadhafi's supporters, the military operation to oust him was another example of the Western interference and neocolonialism that he railed against.

Will The CIA Use Twitter, Google And Facebook Against Us? Scientists Need To Listen To More Neil Young

Done in by a satellite phone

I admit that I felt a tinge of embarrassment Saturday comparing the weak tea passing as coverage of the end of Qaddafi in our newspaper of record and what the Brits found in The Guardian. Can't we do anything right anymore? In answer, specifically regarding the New York Times, an old friend sent me a scant-remarked upon article in that paper from a week or so ago, Government Aims to Build a 'Data Eye in the Sky', something at least as important as how brutally Qadaffi suffered before being put out of his misery with a bullet to the brain (and the dick).

The Times reported that "social scientists"-- just conger up who pays these "social scientists"-- "are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet-- Web searches and Twitter messages, Facebook and blog posts, the digital location trails generated by billions of cellphones" to predict the future.

The most optimistic researchers believe that these storehouses of “big data” will for the first time reveal sociological laws of human behavior-- enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena.

...The government is showing interest in the idea. This summer a little-known intelligence agency began seeking ideas from academic social scientists and corporations for ways to automatically scan the Internet in 21 Latin American countries for “big data,” according to a research proposal being circulated by the agency. The three-year experiment, to begin in April, is being financed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa (pronounced eye-AR-puh), part of the office of the director of national intelligence.

The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption and movement of populations. It will use publicly accessible data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries.

It is intended to be an entirely automated system, a “data eye in the sky” without human intervention, according to the program proposal. The research would not be limited to political and economic events, but would also explore the ability to predict pandemics and other types of widespread contagion, something that has been pursued independently by civilian researchers and by companies like Google.

Some social scientists and advocates of privacy rights are deeply skeptical of the project, saying it evokes queasy memories of Total Information Awareness, a post-9/11 Pentagon program that proposed hunting for potential attackers by identifying patterns in vast collections of public and private data: telephone calling records, e-mail, travel data, visa and passport information, and credit card transactions.

“I have Total Information Awareness flashbacks when things like this happen,” said David Price, an anthropologist at St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Wash., who has written about cooperation between social scientists and intelligence agencies. “On the one hand it’s understandable for a nation-state to want to track things like the outbreak of a pandemic, but I have to wonder about the total automation of this and what productive will come of it.”

Iarpa officials declined to discuss the research program, saying they are prohibited from giving interviews until contract awards are made later this year.

A similar project by their military sister organization, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, aims to automatically identify insurgent social networks in Afghanistan.

In its most recent budget proposal, the defense agency argues that its analysis can expose terrorist cells and other stateless groups by tracking their meetings, rehearsals and sharing of material and money transfers.

So far there have been only scattered examples of the potential of mining social media. Last year HP Labs researchers used Twitter data to accurately predict box office revenues of Hollywood movies. In August, the National Science Foundation approved funds for research in using social media like Twitter and Facebook to assess earthquake damage in real time.

...Some scientists are skeptical. They cite the Pentagon’s ill-fated Project Camelot in the 1960s, which also explored the possibility that social science could predict political and economic events, but was canceled in the face of widespread criticism by scholars.

The project focused on Chile, with the goal of developing methods for anticipating “violent changes” and offering ways of averting possible rebellions. It led to an uproar among social scientists, who argued that the study would compromise their professional ethics.

In recent years, however, academic opposition to military financing of research has faded... But advocates of privacy rights worry that public data and the related techniques developed in the new Iarpa project will be adapted for clandestine “total information” operations.

“These techniques are double-edged,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group based in Washington. “They can be used as easily against political opponents in the United States as they can against threats from foreign countries.” ... [T]he ease of acquiring and manipulating huge data sets charting Internet behavior causes many researchers to warn that the data mining technologies may be quickly outrunning the ability of scientists to think through questions of privacy and ethics.

This used to be called integrity. That's been obliterated and corrupted by money and other forms of lust. In the music business. what credible artist would have ever seriously considered lending his or her music to a commercial? Today there are virtually no artists that don't. The Neil Young video for "This Note's For You" (rare in its unedited state, below) was actually totally banned by MTV before popular pressure forced them to start running it. Much to the chagrin of many MTV executives, it won MTV's 1989 Best Video of the Year on their award show.

The Qaddafi Regime And The Bush Regime-- Together Forever In Crimes Against Humanity

Lately we've been covering the overthrow of Libya's government by the CIA from the perspective of how they overthrew governments they deemed "unfriendly" in Iran, Guatemala, Ecuador, Chile, etc. Before Bush left office, however, the CIA had a very good reason to keep Qaddafi in power: rendition and torture, the kind of rendition and torture that Cheney was on TV celebrating last weekend.

Very embarrassing documents have been discovered by Human Rights Watch and the British Independent newspaper's journalists that reveal close intelligence relationship between the United States, the UK and Libya during the so-called War on Terror.

The secret files reveal that the secret services of the UK, MI6 and the United States, the CIA had a regular dialogue with their counterparts in Libyan Intelligence, in particular with the former Libyan foreign minister and head of Libya's intelligence service, Mussa Kussa who defected days after the outbreak of the uprising that ousted the Libyan dictator Muammar Al Qathafi from power.

Mussa Kussa, who have long been accused by Rights groups of involvement in atrocities, had called on the UK to arrest him at the time, but after first defecting to the UK, he later flew on to Qatar.

Short story-- in return for Qaddafi's thugs torturing people the CIA decided needed rough treatment, the CIA handed over information on anti-Qaddafi dissidents. "In its report about the Human Rights Watch's discovery, the BBC goes on to say that the papers outline the rendition of several suspects, including one that Human Rights Watch has identified as Abdel Hakim Belhaj, known in the documents as Abdullah al-Sadiq, who is now the military commander of the rebel forces in Tripoli." Oops!

Although this isn't getting much coverage in the U.S., the NY Times mentioned it over the sleepy Labor Day Weekend. It wasn't information that came totally out of the blue and a CIA propagandist excused the whole thing as legitimate. “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats.” See? What's a little crimes against humanity between ruling elite types?

Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the files left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation was much more extensive than generally known with both the C.I.A. and its British equivalent, MI-6.

Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the Americans for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi about renouncing unconventional weapons.

...One document in the C.I.A. binder said operatives were “in a position to deliver Shaykh Musa to your physical custody, similar to what we have done with other senior L.I.F.G. members in the recent past.” The reference was to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was dedicated to the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi, and which American officials believed had ties to Al Qaeda.

When Libyans asked to be sent Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, another member of the group, a case officer wrote back on March 4, 2004, that “we are committed to developing this relationship for the benefit of both our services,” and promised to do their best to locate him, according to a document in the C.I.A. binder.

Two days later, an officer faxed the Libyans to say that Mr. Sadiq and his pregnant wife were planning to fly into Malaysia, and the authorities there agreed to put them on a British Airways flight to London that would stop in Bangkok. “We are planning to take control of the pair in Bangkok and place them on our aircraft for a flight to your country,” the case officer wrote.

That's the guy who's now running the show for the "rebels" in Tripoli, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who says a couple of CIA thugs also tortured him while he was in Bangkok before they sent him off to Qaddafi. No wonder McCain was sucking up to Qaddafi. This crap is right up his alley. One has to wonder if, when he brought his gay little South Carolina sidekick with him to meet Muammar if they let Lindsay have his way with any of the hapless captives. Plenty more papers yet to be translated.


Predictably enough, Saturday's Wall Street Journal just loved In My Time, Dick Cheney's entirely self-serving memoir. If you don't even get beyond the title of Paul Gigot's grotesque and entirely ideological apologia, you find out that "Cheney was relentless and unapologetic in pursuit of his policy goals-- and Americans are safer for it." What more would anyone need to know?

On Guantánamo, interrogations, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wiretapping without a warrant, and the rest of the Bush antiterror architecture, he marshals familiar arguments and claims vindication.

He has a strong case, aided in no small part by the Obama administration. One virtue of Barack Obama's victory in 2008 is that it has put a Democratic stamp on the war on terror. In every particular except for interrogations, Mr. Obama has either embraced or been forced to accept substantially the policies that the Bush administration devised... Mr. Obama may not want to admit it, but his success against al Qaeda owes more to Dick Cheney than it does to his own campaign agenda.

Hard to understand why Gigot and his cronies hate Obama so much. He is, after all, just keeping Cheney's flame alive throughout the world.

Qaddafi, Libya... Some Other Sides Of The Story

Everybody's happy, happy, happy that the Qaddafi's have been overthrown, right? I mean, once it became public, however that happened, that he was personally behind the Lockerbie bombing-- like someone didn't already know that?-- he had to be deposed. And deposed he was, primarily by the CIA, the U.S. military and the NATO allies. Over the past couple weeks I've been trying to draw comparisons-- imperfect as they are-- between the U.S. overthrowing Qaddafi and the CIA activities that toppled legitimate governments "we" (meaning corporate America) disagreed with in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and Ecuador. I left out how the CIA toppled governments in Australia, Italy, Greece and even England. And now I see there are other people thinking along the same lines... like the fine folks at the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA. Don't laugh.

Qaddafi's overthrow and the victory of the "rebel" forces is being presented by the U.S. rulers, their European imperialist allies-- including Britain, France, and Italy-- and their media mouthpieces as a big victory for the people, a triumph of "democracy" over tyranny, and a vindication of their "humanitarian" military intervention in Libya.  

As the anti-Qaddafi forces took over Tripoli, President Barack Obama stated, "The people of Libya are showing that the universal pursuit of dignity and freedom is far stronger than the iron fist of a dictator... The future of Libya is now in the hands of the Libyan people."

It is nothing of the sort. The unfolding events in Libya are primarily the result of a U.S.-NATO military, political, and economic assault on Qaddafi’s forces, stretching over months.  

The day the Tripoli fell to the anti-Qaddafi forces, the New York Times reported:

"Through Saturday, NATO and its allies had flown 7,459 strike missions, or sorties, attacking thousands of targets, from individual rocket launchers to major military headquarters. The cumulative effect not only destroyed Libya's military infrastructure but also greatly diminished the ability of Colonel Qaddafi's commanders to control forces, leaving even committed fighting units unable to move, resupply or coordinate operations." ("Sharper Surveillance and NATO Coordination Helped Rebels Race to Capital," August 22)

This assault has had not been about liberating Libya or ensuring self-determination for the nation of Libya. Instead, it has been aimed at strengthening imperialism's grip on Libya... [T]he day after Tripoli fell, the New York Times carried an article headlined, "Scramble Begins for Access to Libya's Oil."

It wasn't that big a war. I saw a CNN news crawl yesterday that said it's estimated that 50,000 Libyans died. And I guess that doesn't count the African workers who are all over the country who seem to be meeting a bad fate at the hands of "our" pals. Even a reporter who is totally buying into the "magnificence" (his word) of the battle to free themselves from the tyrant, observed that the whole enterprise has been marred by racism.

"This is a bad time to be a black man in Libya," reported Alex Thomson on Channel 4 News on Sunday. Elsewhere, Kim Sengupta reported for the Independent on the 30 bodies lying decomposing in Tripoli. The majority of them, allegedly mercenaries for Muammar Gaddafi, were black. They had been killed at a makeshift hospital, some on stretchers, some in an ambulance. "Libyan people don't like people with dark skins," a militiaman explained in reference to the arrests of black men.

The basis of this is rumours, disseminated early in the rebellion, of African mercenaries being unleashed on the opposition. Amnesty International's Donatella Rivera was among researchers who examined this allegation and found no evidence for it. Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch similarly had not "identified one mercenary" among the scores of men being arrested and falsely labelled by journalists as such.

Lurking behind this is racism. Libya is an African nation-- however, the term "Africans" is used in Libya to reference the country's black minority. The Amnesty International researcher Diana Eltahawy says that the rebels taking control of Libya have tapped into "existing xenophobia." The New York Times refers to "racist overtones," but sometimes the racism is explicit. A rebel slogan painted in Misrata during the fighting salutes "the brigade for purging slaves, black skin." A consequence of this racism has been mass arrests of black men, and gruesome killings – just some of the various atrocities that human rights organisations blame rebels for. The racialisation of this conflict does not end with hatred of "Africans." Graffiti by rebels frequently depicted Gaddafi as a demonic Jew.

...The dominance of relatively conservative elites and the absence of countervailing pressures skewed the politics of the rebellion. We hear of "the masses," and "solidarity." But masses can be addressed on many grounds-- some reactionary. There are also many bases for solidarity-- some exclusionary. The scapegoating of black workers makes sense from the perspective of elites. For them, Libya was not a society divided on class lines from which many of them had profited. It was united against a usurper inhabiting an alien compound and surviving through foreign power. Instead, the more success Gaddafi had in stabilising his regime, the more the explanation for this relied on the claim that "Gaddafi is killing us with his Africans."

A further, unavoidable twist is the alliance with Nato. The February revolt involved hundreds of thousands of people across Libya. By early March the movement was in retreat, overseas special forces were entering Libya, and senior figures in the rebellion called for external intervention. Initially isolated, they gained credibility as Gaddafi gained ground. As a result, the initiative passed from a very large popular base to a relatively small number of armed fighters under the direction of the NTC and Nato. It was the rebel army that subsequently took the lead in persecuting black workers.

Under different conditions, perhaps, unity between the oppressed was possible. But this would probably have required a more radical alliance, one as potentially perilous for those now grooming themselves for office as for Gaddafi. As it is, the success of the rebels contains a tragic defeat. The original emancipatory impulse of February 17 lies, for now, among the corpses of "Africans" in Tripoli.

At least they didn't infect them with syphilis. I mean who would ever do something like that? (The Washington Post story gets all the facts out there except that this was done by a gang of Nazis brought here by domestic fascists in the OSS straight from experimenting on Jews and other captives in the concentration camps. They did lots of experiments in the U.S. and for the U.S.) Off topic... let's get back to Libya. Actually we're going to turn to Africa News for a completely different perspective than the one we're hearing from corporate media cheerleaders for the Military Industrial Complex. I'm not claiming it's a more valid perspective; it's just another perspective to the one we all know-- or should know by now-- is completely compromised and devoid of anything beyond slick propaganda.

Libya's destruction, a victory for the west; a defeat for ordinary Libyans. The suffering of Libyans has just begun. For there can never be true liberation when your oppressor is the one who defines what your freedom should be. The ousting of Colonel Gaddafi, Libyan leader for 42 years, by the rebels backed western forces especially NATO is indeed a victory for the west whose fixation on Gaddafi's Libya has become worrisome.

It’s definitely not a victory for ordinary Libyans who would continue to suffer a lot of nervous strain and shock after the destruction. Neither is it a victory for the rebels who have been in excess jubilation since capturing Gaddafi’s official residence. “We are free,” they proclaimed in wild happiness.

But they have forgotten one important thing: that they are now slaves to all the countries that helped them kick out Gaddafi.

Apparently the rebels are not ordinary Libyan but a group of people who want the share of the oil with the help of foreign forces. Gaddafi’s main crime may be the fact that he refused to let the west control Libya’s resources, hence he must be eliminated by all possible means.

In their euphoria and in their haste to get rid of him, they forgot that none of the countries that backed them has the interest of Libyans at heart. Let them for once re-visit Iraq.

...Gaddafi should have known that neither America nor its allies forget and forgive. He should have known that the oil in his background is enough to eliminate him by all means. He should have learnt a lesson from Iraq, a nation destroyed by Obama's predecessor on the pretense that the late Iraqi leader possessed Weapon of Mass Destruction which turned out to be a ruse.

It was simply a ploy by Mr. Bush to invade the oil rich nation. There is always an excuse to invade certain countries especially when the rulers of such countries refused to be a stooge.

Earlier this morning author and investigative journalist Russ Baker was asking for some transparency about U.S. intervention in Libya. He's already written about the growing doubts about Libya's complicity in Lockerbie and looking at the American role in the "liberation" of the country... well, like many of us, he smells a rat.

It’s true that Qaddafi, like many-- perhaps a majority of-- rulers in his region, was a thug and a brute, if at times a comical figure. But one doesn’t need to be an apologist for him-- nor deny the satisfaction of seeing the citizenry joyously celebrating his ouster-- to demand some honesty about the motives behind his removal. Especially when it comes to our own government’s role in funding it, and thus every American’s unwitting participation in that action.

Let’s start with the official justification for NATO’s launch of its bombing campaign-- for without that campaign, it’s highly improbable the rebels could ever have toppled Qaddafi. We were told from the beginning that the major purpose of what was to be very limited bombing-- indeed, its sole purpose-- was to protect those Libyan civilians rebelling against an oppressive regime from massive retaliation by Qaddafi. Perhaps because of NATO’s initial intervention, the feared Qaddafi-sponsored, genocidal bloodletting never did occur. (At least, not beyond the military actions one would expect a government to take when facing a civil war:  after all, remember General Sherman’s “scorched earth” policy in the US Civil War?). However, protecting civilians apparently didn’t generate sufficient public support for intervention, so we started to hear about other purported reasons for it.  Qaddafi was encouraging his soldiers to…commit mass rape! And giving them Viagra! And condoms!

You can’t make this sort of thing up. And yet that’s just what the NATO crew did-- made it up. The media, always glad to have a “sexy” story, especially a sick sexy story, even a sick sexy story with no evidence to back it up, covered this ad nauseum, but never bothered to find out if it was true.

...Qaddafi should never be seen as a victim-- indeed, he has always been sleazy and monstrous in various ways. But the US and its allies appear to have cared little about this, while being deeply  troubled by his role as a fly in the geopolitical ointment. A look at the long and complex historical relationship between Qaddafi and the West begins to explain the true reason he had to go. It also dovetails perfectly with a growing body of indications that Western elites encouraged and even provoked the uprising-- while tapping into deep discontent with the dictator.

Qaddafi has long been a thorn in the side of the West’s oil industry and their national security apparatus. In the early 1970s he worked closely with Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer in thwarting the ambitions of the oil majors. He was a leader in the boycott of Israel and often cozied up to the Soviet Union.

...What the media has so relentlessly characterized as the “spontaneous uprising” of February 2011 was hardly spontaneous. It began even before the Arab Spring itself commenced in Tunisia during December of last year—and it was orchestrated by the West.

...Khalifa Hifter, a former Libyan army officer, had spent the past two decades living just down the road from CIA headquarters, with no apparent source of income.  In 1996, while a resident of Vienna, Virginia, he organized a Benghazi-based revolt that failed. When the current uprising was sputtering in March, CIA sent Hifter in to take command.

When the rebels were being routed, the United Nations Security Council approved a no-fly order for Qaddafi. The NATO bombing began almost immediately, under the “humanitarian” label.
Before long, other European countries had covert elements in Libya. The British paper, The Guardian, has just reported the role of British special forces in coordinating the rebels on the ground. This was denied by the UK government . But then another British paper, The Telegraph, cited UK defense sources saying special forces had been in Libya already for weeks, i.e., since early August.)

Hopefully they won't attack Algeria next-- for it's oil... I mean for giving the Qaddafi family shelter. Interesting video below, although the filmmakers seem a little hung up with the Rothschilds.

How We Ever Gonna Know What Happened In Libya? From Our TVs?

Many cute tweets about the fall of the House of Qaddafi over the weekend. That was one of the cutest. But the toppling on Qaddafi wasn't Democratic policy or Republican policy. It was American policy. Unraveling what that means exactly is to face some harsh realities about our own country. Sunday-- and this really was just a coincidence-- we posted about the CIA overthrowing the legitimate, popular, elected government of Iran in 1953 and how that set up a model for violent international operations for decades. In those days the U.S. was always overthrowing good guys-- national heroes who were trying to make life better for their people, Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran, Jacobo Árbenz, president of Guatemala, the year after the "success" in Iran, Patrice Lumumba, President of the Congo in 1961, Salvador Allende, president of Chile, a decade later. In the interim the CIA took a hand in government changes in less dramatic, less violent ways all over the world, including Greece, Italy, Japan, Australia, England, Congo... Let me quote from Glen Yeadon's book, Nazi Hydra in America:

At the end of the Second World War the US had the chance to grab the brass ring of liberty and present it to the world as a gift. Instead lead by a small cabal of Wall Street sharks and rich industrialists we were plunged into a cesspool of repression and became the spawning grounds for the fourth Reich. From earlier chapters it was shown that fascism was the end product of a capitalistic society that government failures are started by midlevel officials And finally for any revolution to be successful it requires the control over the 3Ms: the military, the media and money. This chapter has established the relationship between the CIA and money in the form of a revolving door between Wall Street and the CIA and the manipulation of the free press by the CIA as well as its close ties to Nazi war criminals. In short the CIA is a danger to the future liberty of not only US citizens but to the world. Its an agency that has served its purposes and needs to be broken into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds as JFK threaten to do after his reelection.

What does this have to do with Libya, clearly a popular uprising against a terrible dictator? Or so it appears on our TVs. Is Qaddafi's oppression of his people-- the ostensible reason for U.S. and NATO intervention-- as bad, even nearly as bad, as what our good friend King Hamid is doing to his people in Bahrain? The brutal repression in Syria by Assad makes Qaddafi look almost benevolent.

Half a year ago, the CIA was no longer plotting to remove Qaddafi. They were on the ground removing Qaddafi. In March the NY Times, always, always, always an integral part of all U.S. imperialistic moves anywhere in the world, was reporting that the CIA had "inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American officials."

While President Obama has insisted that no American military ground troops participate in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.

In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations, the officials said.

American officials hope that similar information gathered by American intelligence officers-- including the location of Colonel Qaddafi’s munitions depots and the clusters of government troops inside towns-- might help weaken Libya’s military enough to encourage defections within its ranks.

In addition, the American spies are meeting with rebels to try to fill in gaps in understanding who their leaders are and the allegiances of the groups opposed to Colonel Qaddafi, said United States government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the activities.  American officials cautioned, though, that the Western operatives were not directing the actions of rebel forces.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

Lotta oil in Libya. Just a coincidence, I'm sure, as the U.S. continues its unending crusade to bring democracy to every part of the world, other than Florida or Waukesha County, Wisconsin. Libya's popular uprising has every hallmark of a CIA operation. Expect bodies. If you want to find the conventional wisdom here, just put on your TV... any channel, and you'll hear how Americans are being conditioned to look at what just happened in Libya. Instead let's turn to Steve Clemons at The Atlantic: "Like Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein was also a horrendous thug whose arbitrary and brutal rule resulted in the deaths of vast numbers of his own citizens..." But Clemons didn't reprocess a CIA press handout. He says he gets "the euphoria that is sweeping amongst those who had a hand in toppling a 42-year old regime" but he definitely buys into what David Cameron is trying to sell as "a Libyan-led and Libyan-owned process with broad international support."

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The fall of Moammer Qaddafi -- whose bizarre antics ranging from rambling nonsense speeches he'd give at the UN General Assembly to his proposal to "abolish Switzerland" to his personal-digs at other Arab leaders-- could easily excite anyone who spent any time studying this tormenting figure.

...I was skeptical of the Libyan intervention by the US and the rest-- but the Tuesday night when President Obama authorized action, I expressed cautious support, understanding that the humanitarian costs of letting the siege of Benghazi unfold outweighed other factors.  The US military raised concerns about managing a limited conflict where the authorization for action might lead to a long drawn-out stalemate with Qaddafi, who eventually might be able to dig himself a back door of support with nations like Russia, China, Brazil and India. 

The Pentagon's counsel in this case was important-- because the scenario the military sketched out could have come to pass-- and the impact on America's credibility would have been negative. 

As it turns out, the combination of intelligence support provided by the US, the technical and financial and logistics support provided behind the scenes by Qatar and the UAE, the military interventions by French and British forces, and more helped give the Libyan rebels an opportunity to regroup after early setbacks and push Qaddafi's forces back steadily and firmly to the battle inside Tripoli that we saw last night.  A key part of the success were the Berbers organizing their village militias west of Tripoli and pushing towards Qaddafi from one direction while the Benghazi-based rebels pushed from the other-- putting Tripoli in a vise.

Barack Obama's gamble in providing limited support for a conflict, in which other countries played lead roles, now seems like a winning move.  It's hard to replicate the conditions of Libya in other cases because Qaddafi had a habit of making unnecessary enemies-- most importantly in the Arab League, whose vote in favor of imposing a No Fly Zone over Libya was the trigger that led to everything else that has been possible.

...What Obama's intervention accomplished was giving Libyans an opportunity to own the outcome.  Obama kept the US military footprint relatively small-- occasionally getting involved in unhelpful Western posturing that took the cameras off the Libyan rebels and putting them on the West-- but on the whole, Obama kept his game to one of trying to tilt the odds, not guarantee outcomes.

This is the same kind of approach that the international community needs to take as Libya takes its next steps.  Give support, technical counsel and advice if asked, but be respectful of the process that is now going to have to evolve inside Libya to include many players and groups that have been excluded from power for decades.

That means being there if needed-- but as Cameron implied, not making Libya's next steps about us-- but rather making sure that the leaders of the next government control their own reigns.

Sounds far-fetched in light of the post-World War II history of U.S./CIA intervention in other countries. You don't rememeber? A few random thoughts-- again via Yeadon-- about our neighborly agenda in Guatemala... if you can take it:

In 1953 the CIA also intervened in Guatemala, and regarded the action as a success. For what reasons they regarded the operation as success can be only guess at for what followed was a bloody civil war that lasted 36 years. Once again this intervention fits the model perfectly. The legally elected government of Arbenz was reform minded. The center piece of his reforms was land reform. In an overwhelmingly rural nation only 2.2% of the population owned 70% of the land. Prior to the 1944 revolution and ousting of the dictatorship of Ubico, the army was used to rope farm labors together for delivery to low-land farms where they were kept as debt slaves. The expropriation of large uncultivated tracts of land to landless peasants, improvement in the rights of unions and other social reforms were hurting the bottom line of United Fruit. Arbenz even constructed a port on the Atlantic to compete against the port controlled by United Fruit, likewise a public hydro-electric plant was constructed for the same reasons.

The position of United Fruit inside Guatemala was essentially one of a country within a country. United Fruit owned the country's telephone and telegraph systems, administered the country's only Atlantic port, monopolized banana exports and a subsidiary owned the rail system. In the US United Fruit had close ties to the Dulles brothers, various state department officials, congressmen and the US Ambassador to the UN. The former CIA Director, Wlater Bedell Smith was seeking an executive position with United Fruit at the same time he was planing the Guatemala coup. He later was named to the board of directors of United Fruit.

The first plan to oust Arbenz was given by Truman as a response to Guatemala receiving arms from Czechoslovakia and the implied communism threat but was canceled. After the election of Eisenhower the plan was put into effect. The Guatemala coup also provides and ideal example of how the CIA manipulates the American opinion. After first being tried in Guatemala this technique has been employed throughout South America. It involves the CIA planting an article in the foreign press the article is then picked up by the news wires and newspapers in other countries. Besides the obvious multiplier effect upon the potential audience it has the appearance of an independent world opinion. Incidentally it was the same tactic that Bush tried to use against Clinton in the 1992 election.

The immediate after effects of the coup was draconian, within four months 72,000 was labeled as communist, many who were tortured and murdered. It is known that the U.S. Ambassador John Peurifoy had a long list of names of leaders that the successor government was to assassinate. Agrarian reform was stopped and the land already expropriated was given back to United Fruit. Union leaders turned up dead. Three quarters of the population was disenfranchised by barring illiterates from the polls and all political parties, unions and peasant organizations were outlawed...

The blood bath and carnage that followed for the next 36 years can only be described as horrific A genocidal war was carried on against the native Indians. Murders, kidnappings and disappearances became widespread and everyday occurrences as right wing death squads roamed the countryside. The report on Guatemala as a first step to reconciliation states that the army is blamed for over 200,000 deaths and disappearances. Below are some extracts from that report:

"Of the 42,000 deaths investigated in the report, the army was found to be responsible for 93 percent. Three percent were the work of the leftist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, and 4 percent were unresolved. The report found that 29,000 of the investigated deaths involved summary executions.

Most of the victims were civilians and Mayan Indians... [T]he government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations."

It was "clearly genocide and a planned strategy against the civilian population," said Christian Tomuschat, a German citizen who heads the three-member commission. "Government forces... blindly pursued the anti-communist fight, without respecting any legal principle or even the most elemental ethical or religious values."

In 626 massacres, the report found that government forces "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their dwellings, livestock and crops." The guerrillas were blamed for 32 such massacres, the report said."

Guatemala also provides us with the first example of the right wing death squads that have became so much a part of South American politics. Those death squads and the dictators that employ them are products of the CIA-Military intelligence system of the US. They lead directly to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

So grubby compared to President Obama soaring, idealism last night:

Tonight, the momentum against the Qadhafi regime has reached a tipping point. Tripoli is slipping from the grasp of a tyrant. The Qadhafi regime is showing signs of collapsing. The people of Libya are showing that the universal pursuit of dignity and freedom is far stronger than the iron fist of a dictator.

The surest way for the bloodshed to end is simple: Moammar Qadhafi and his regime need to recognize that their rule has come to an end. Qadhafi needs to acknowledge the reality that he no longer controls Libya. He needs to relinquish power once and for all. Meanwhile, the United States has recognized the Transitional National Council as the legitimate governing authority in Libya. At this pivotal and historic time, the TNC should continue to demonstrate the leadership that is necessary to steer the country through a transition by respecting the rights of the people of Libya, avoiding civilian casualties, protecting the institutions of the Libyan state, and pursuing a transition to democracy that is just and inclusive for all of the people of Libya. A season of conflict must lead to one of peace.

The future of Libya is now in the hands of the Libyan people. Going forward, the United States will continue to stay in close coordination with the TNC. We will continue to insist that the basic rights of the Libyan people are respected. And we will continue to work with our allies and partners in the international community to protect the people of Libya, and to support a peaceful transition to democracy.

McCain and Lindsey Graham-- where was Lieberman?-- released this statement yesterday: "Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi, but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower." I'm sure either would have preferred nukes, of course. Dennis Kucinich had a very different perspective last week.

In March of this year, the US, France, Britain and their North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies launched military operations in Libya under the guise of a "humanitarian intervention." US diplomats and world leaders carelessly voiced unsubstantiated claims of an impending massacre in Benghazi. You hear no such appeals to humanity while NATO, in the name of the rebels (whoever they are), prepares to lay siege to Tripoli, a city of nearly 2 million people.

Libyan rebels are now advancing on the capital city of Tripoli with the aid of NATO strikes; this is sure to result in a real bloodbath, as opposed to the one that was conjured in Benghazi this past winter. NATO is assisting rebels who are blocking food, water and medical supplies from coming into the capital city, and is stopping those who need advanced medical care from travelling to Tunisia to access it. NATO is bombing power stations, creating blackouts, and using Apache helicopters to attack Libyan police checkpoints to clear roads for rebels to advance.

Regardless of whether Muammar Gaddafi is ousted in coming days, the war against Libya has seen countless violations of United Nations security council resolutions (UNSCRs) by NATO and UN member states. The funnelling of weapons (now being air-dropped) to Libyan rebels was, from the beginning of the conflict, in clear violation of UNSCR 1970. The use of military force on behalf of the rebels, in an attempt to impose regime change, has undermined international law and damaged the credibility of the United Nations. Countless innocent civilians have been killed, and NATO air strikes continue to place many at great risk.

So much for the humanitarian-inspired UNSCR 1973 as a means to protect civilians. The people of Libya cannot take another month of such humanitarian intervention.

The leading donor nations of NATO-- the US, France and Great Britain-- have been free to prosecute war under the cloak of this faceless, bureaucratic, alphabet security agency, now multinational war machine, which can violate UN resolutions and kill innocent civilians with impunity. War crimes trials are only for losers. The prospective conquerors, the western powers and their rebel proxies, will then expect to be able to assert control over Libya's vast oil and natural gas reserves.

The US share of the war against Libya has probably exceeded the $1bn mark. This extraordinary amount of money for an intervention that Americans were told would last "days not weeks" could only be explained by looking at the war as an investment, and at control over Libya's wealth as an opportunity to make a return on that investment. Cynical? Then tell me why else we are at war in Libya.

The victors write the history:

Targeting War Criminals

Not Bush, not Cheney, but war criminals nonetheless

When someone's small grandchildren are killed in a war it always seems especially tragic. And it happens every single day in every single war. It's horrifying and it's part of what drives me crazy about national leaders almost never facing war crimes tribunals. I was mortified that Qaddafi's 29-year old son Saif al-Arab, a non-combatant, and 3 pre-teen grandsons of Qaddafi's were killed in a NATO air strike aimed at taking out Qaddafi last week. But... better his family than anyone else's in Libya. All my life I've been a tremendous fan of regicide and like an anonymous editorialist in the Guardian this week, if for different reasons, I feel that Qaddafi is indeed a legitimate target. The author, "Alaa al-Ameri" (supposedly "a British-Libyan economist and writer") has a more twisted theory of why than I do.

Gaddafi is not a head of state. He is a warlord in control of a personal army that he has tasked with the mass killing and terrorising of Libyans for the crime of wishing to live as free human beings. There is no meaningful Libyan government structure or decision-making body besides Gaddafi himself and his sons.

Which logic or legal principle underlies the notion that while militia in the act of aggression against a civilian population may be attacked, the leader of that militia-- actively engaged in directing the violence-- is off limits? What claim to special rights and privileges can be made by a man who uses rape as a weapon of war? Which principle of international law would be eroded by his death?

...If Gaddafi has lost family members due to Nato bombing, there is only one man to blame – Gaddafi. He funds, arms and directs the horrific violence that his forces have inflicted on the Libyan people simply for desiring to be free. He could stop the violence today but chooses not to. Instead he uses even the death of his son as a tool to serve his own political interests.

Sounds like the "British-Libyan economist and writer" is penning some propaganda for David Cameron's government. I doubt Cameron would approve of my rationale for why Qaddafi is a legitimate target. All aggressive war makers should be, especially heads of countries. Let's try it out for 5 or 6 decades and see if it tamps down violence. Really... what do we have to lose?

Last week we took a look at Lu Chuan's soon-to-be-released (in the U.S.) film City Of Life And Death, about the massacre in/of Nanking by Japanese invaders in 1937. Bad enough that something like 50,000 women were systematically raped by Japanese soldiers-- some estimates say it was closer to 100,000-- but as many as 300,000 men, women and children were butchered, some for sport. Much like George W. Bush did at the onset of the unprovoked aggression against Iraq, "Emperor" Hirohito announced that the Imperial Army was not subject to war crimes laws. Although that didn't stand up after Japan was defeated, Hirohito was never brought to justice. And neither was the mastermind of one of the greatest war crimes in history, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, who issued the order to kill all captives. In fact, Asaka was granted immunity by the victorious Americans because of his status as a member of the royal family (who the Americans hoped to use as conservative bulwarks against godless Communism).

This week, no one-- at least no one in the West-- is claiming Osama bin-Laden was due any kind of immunity from cold-blooded execution. He was not firing at the soldiers who entered his home on a kill mission" and he was killed, quite deliberately, while unarmed. I would have preferred a trial but I'm a huge advocate of the death penalty-- especially for war criminals.

Meanwhile, bin-Laden's senior commanders are said to be on the run in Pakistan. Is the ISI trying to shield them or some of them? Or will some be sacrificed to save the Pakistanis further embarrassment? There are at least a dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders the U.S. would like to dump into the sea next to bin-Laden.

1. Ayman al-Zawahri. Egyptian. Age 59-- Osama bin Laden's deputy and current operational commander of al-Qaeda, according to the United States State department. Went into hiding with Bin Laden during the US invasion of Afghanistan and managed to survive a US air strike that targeted him in a Pakistani tribal region in January 2006. There is a $25 million reward on his head.

2. Saif al-Adel. Egyptian. Age around 50-- Thought to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, even perhaps the organisation's military chief. He was thought to be in prison in Iran, but has now almost certainly been released and has returned to North Waziristan in Pakistan. There is a $5 million reward on his head.

3. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. Kuwaiti. Age 45-- Al-Qaida spokesman and radical preacher. Detained in Iran in 2003 but released and allowed to leave the country in 2010, according to Kuwait media. Suspected of having rejoined Bin Laden in Pakistan and is still at large.

4. Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah. Egyptian. Age late 40s--- Wanted for the 1998 series of bombings on US embassies in East Africa. Member of al-Qaeda's top council. According to US intelligence he fled Nairobi in 1998 and went to Pakistan, where he may remain at large. He may also be in Iran.

5. Adnan al-Shukri Juma. Saudi. 35-- A younger member of al-Qaeda, Shukri Juma may have risen up the ranks because of the loss of more senior members. He spent time living in the US and may have been behind a failed attempt on the New York subway system. He may be in charge of operations for North America and is thought to be in Waziristan.

6. Rashid Rauf. Dual British Pakistani citizenship. Age around 34-- Rauf is suspected of involvement in the failed attempt in 2006 to blow up aircraft leaving from London Heathrow with liquid explosives. He escaped from Pakistani custody in December 2007 and was reportedly killed by a US drone attack in Pakistan in November 2008. But his family have denied his death and some sources believe he remains at large.

7. Ilyas Kashmiri. Pakistani. Age 47-- Kashmiri is one of the most important figures rising up al-Qaeda's ranks. A one-eyed, red-bearded guerrilla warfare expert, he is thought to have masterminded some of the deadliest attacks in India and Pakistan. He is also the commander of Brigade 313, a unit that is sometimes described as al-Qaeda's Pakistani arm, sometimes as a special combat task force, and sometimes as an independent jihadi unit.

8. Hakimullah Mehsud. Pakistani. Age 32-- Hakimullah Mehsud is the leader of the Tehrik-I-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) movement, which has been described as having a symbiotic relationship with al-Qaeda by the US.

"TTP draws ideological guidance from al-Qaeda while al-Qaeda relies on the TTP for safe haven in the Pashtun areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border," said Daniel Benjamin, a US counterterrorism chief. An aggressive field commander, Mehsud was thought to be killed by a drone attack in January 2010, but subsequent videos proved he survived the attack.

9. Ghulam Mustafa. Pakistani. 40-- Very little has been reported of Mustafa since he was released by Pakistan in 2006. Before then he was thought to be al-Qaeda's chief in Pakistan. However, he was never formally charged or handed over to the US and has quietly disappeared from view. He may have left al-Qaeda, tainted by suspicion of co-operation with Pakistani intelligence.

10. Abu Yahya al-Libi. Libyan. Age 47-- A high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, Libi escaped from an American prison in Afghanistan and is thought to have subsequently survived a US drone strike in Pakistan in 2009. He is considered to be "the scholar" of al-Qaeda and often takes on the role of a preacher. He has released a number of videotaped sermons.

11. Anas al-Liby (also known as Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Raghie), Libyan. Age late 40s-- Charged by the US with involvement in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Has a $5 million reward on his head. Has worked as a computer specialist for al-Qaeda.

12. Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Nationality and age unknown--- the leader of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI, or the Movement of Islamic Holy War), is an alleged member of al-Qaeda who was released by Pakistan from custody last December. He was reported to have trained 3,500 operatives in Afghanistan shortly before the US invasion.