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Published time: March 08, 2013 01:17

Dozens of armed assailants stormed a private TV station in Tripoli on Thursday, abducting its owner and five staff, releasing most captives soon after. The parliament’s human rights commission has urged the interior ministry to take immediate action.

An editor at the state-owned Lana network said the attackers locked the other workers inside one office, torched the surroundings and fled with the six hostages in a jeep to an undisclosed location. They later released five people, but kept Joumaa al-Usta, the wealthy owner, captive

One of the anchors at the Alassema station where the attack took place, Mohammed al-Sharkassi, told another news network that he had also been accosted outside his workplace by “individuals who identified themselves as former rebels.” He told Libya al-Ahrar television that he would be freed if he left Tripoli immediately. He added that the rebels were angered by the channel’s editorial policies, giving no further details.

Libya al-Ahrar says the attack occurred in the afternoon. The assailants stormed the channel, entering through the windows. The Lana network added that the gunmen smashed equipment. Security forces arrived at the scene promptly after the attack.

The precise origin of the perpetrators is unknown, although a Lana editor views the attack as a response to Alassema’s persistent criticism of the rebels’ and as revenge for the channel’s coverage of the attack on the National General Congress earlier in the week, when a siege lasted for hours. The lawmakers were at work on a bill to prevent officials from the Gaddafi era from holding political posts in future.

The Alassema station has ties to Libya’s National Forces Coalition, who bested the Muslim Brotherhood in the legislative elections in July of last year. The liberal coalition’s head, Mahmoud Jibril – the country’s western-inclined ex-prime minister, masterminded the 2011 coup that ousted Muammar Gaddafi.

Since Gaddafi’s overthrow, media has flourished. But during the bloody revolution that lasted from February to October, pitting Gaddafi loyalists against rebels and NATO forces, tens of thousands lost their lives and the economy of the oil-rich country was dealt a huge blow.

NATO’s war in Libya was proclaimed as a humanitarian intervention — bombing in the name of “saving lives.” Attempts at diplomacy were stifled. Peace talks were subverted. Libya was barred from representing itself at the UN, where shadowy NGOs and “human rights” groups held full sway in propagating exaggerations, outright falsehoods, and racial fear mongering that served to sanction atrocities and ethnic cleansing in the name of democracy. The rush to war was far speedier than Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Max Forte has scrutinized the documentary history from before, during, and after the war. He argues that the war on Libya was not about human rights, nor entirely about oil, but about a larger process of militarizing U.S. relations with Africa. The development of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, or AFRICOM, was in fierce competition with Pan-Africanist initiatives such as those spearheaded by Muammar Gaddafi.

Far from the success NATO boasts about or the “high watermark” proclaimed by proponents of the “Responsibility to Protect,” this war has left the once prosperous, independent and defiant Libya in ruin, dependency and prolonged civil strife.

Slouching Towards Sirte:
NATO’s War on Libya and Africa

by Maximilian Forte

AVAILABLE TO ORDER FROM GLOBAL RESEARCH!

ISBN: 978-1-926824-52-9Year: 2012
Pages: 352 with 27 BW photos, 3 maps
Publisher: Baraka Books

Price: $24.95

CLICK TO ORDER FROM GLOBAL RESEARCH

This title is also available in E-Book format. Click here for more information.

About humanitarian imperialism, Max Forte writes:

“Desperate to finally be seen as the liberators of Arabs, rescuing poor victims with the finest of American exports (human rights), some would understandably feel compelled to exploit the suffering of others (residents fleeing Sirte) and turn that into something worthy of celebration. This is an example of the abduction process at the centre of Western, liberal humanitarianism: it can only function by first directly or indirectly creating the suffering of others, and by then seeing every hand as an outstretched hand, pleading or welcoming. We see (or imagine) helpless others, gobbling morsels of food that we hand them, brown mouths chugging down water from our plastic bottles, and we feel accomplished. Our moral might is reaffirmed by the physical plight of others. Clearly, the humanitarian relation is not a relation between equals. We are not our “brothers’ keepers” then, but rather we are more like animal keepers. Bombing for us is really just an animal management technology, and our relationship to the world remains a zoological one.” (Slouching Towards Sirte, p. 97.)

A War for Human Rights
(by Max Forte – in The Political Bouillon)

The war in Libya never happened. At least that is what one might think, considering the dearth of serious analysis and critical reflection in Canada since our participation in NATO’s bombardment campaign ended a year ago. Yet in Libya, in many ways the war is still happening…Read more..

Brendan Stone interviews Max Forte as he discusses his book SLOUCHING TOWARDS SIRTE

Praise, Reviews

“Slouching Towards Sirte is a penetrating critique, not only of the NATO intervention in Libya, but of the concept of humanitarian intervention and imperialism in our time. It is the definitive treatment of NATO’s war on Libya. It is difficult to imagine it will be surpassed.”
-Stephen Gowans, What’s Left, Read More

“Forte’s allegations that NATO’s war was manufactured by liberal interventionists and “iPad imperialists” whose agenda to disrupt African independence and execute regime change under the “fig leaf” of saving lives are chilling—and persuasive. So too is the timeline of events between the start of the protests and the propagandist hysteria promulgated online. Even though Forte couches descriptions of Gaddafi in amorphous, guarded language, he isn’t an apologist. In this provocative and unabashedly direct book, Forte speaks truth to power.”
-ForeWord Reviews, January 4, 2013, read full review…

The Public Archive identified Slouching Towards Sirte as one of 10 Books for 2012 on its Black Radical Reading List.

Maximilian C. Forte is a professor of anthropology in Montreal, Canada. He teaches courses in the field of political anthropology dealing with “the new imperialism,” Indigenous resistance movements and philosophies, theories and histories of colonialism, and critiques of the mass media. Max is a founding member of Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.

Slouching Towards Sirte:
NATO’s War on Libya and Africa

by Maximilian Forte

ISBN: 978-1-926824-52-9

Year: 2012

Pages: 352 with 27 BW photos, 3 maps

Publisher: Baraka Books

Price: $24.95

CLICK TO ORDER FROM GLOBAL RESEARCH

The British Royal Navy Type 23 frigate HMS Westminster (Reuters / Darrin Zammit Lupi)

Amid an undeclared arms race among European defense contractors to reequip Libya’s armed forces, Britain is sending a Royal Navy war ship to Tripoli to act as a floating show room for security firms.

A British government agency, UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), is organizing an arms fair on a Royal Navy frigate, which will dock in Tripoli, Libya at the beginning of April.

UKTI has so far refused to disclose exactly what businesses will be there and what gear they will be showcasing.

“There is a scramble among European arms firms to sell to Libya with the Italians and French leading the way. In 2001 before the imposition of the arms embargo, EU countries had approved licenses to Libya worth 34 million euro,” Kaye Stearman, Media Co-ordinator for the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) told RT.

UKTI describes the event on its website as “an opportunity for UK defense and security to promote equipment and services to the Libyan navy aboard a Royal Navy vessel in Tripoli” and that it hoped to “attract key senior military personal from the Libyan government”.

A UN arms embargo is still in place and with the UK Foreign Office describing Libya as a “country of concern” with regard to its human rights abuses; Britain is restricted in terms of what it can sell. Sir John Stanley, who chairs the committees of arms export control, has said he expects the government to adhere to the criteria of arms export licenses.

UKTI has said that no weapons will be offered for sale and the Libyans will be offered specialist equipment for port security, such as inflatable dinghies or uniforms.

However, Stearman believes that the sale of arms is the ultimate priority of the event.

“When an arms company takes part in an arms fair or exhibition, it is with the expectation of sales, and it is hard to believe that the only equipment on sale will relate to security,” she said.

The exhibition appears to be part of a wider policy by the UK government of a strategy to foster relations with countries where Britain has security and business interests.

In the past the UKTO listed Libya as a “priority market” for UK arms sales, which were openly sold to Gaddafi’s regime before the uprising against him. There was also a Libyan delegation at the Farnborough Air Show in July 2012, which showcased British aerospace defense equipment such as the Typhoon fighter jet.

Speaking at the Farnborough airshow last year Chris Baker, the operations director of UKTI’s defense arm, said the UKTI was looking at Libya’s border and maritime security and “at rebuilding their defense infrastructure” and “getting their air force back on its feet from scratch”.

By March 2011 British companies had won £62 million ($95.8 million) worth of arms exports to Gaddafi since the arms embargo on Libya was lifted in October 2004. Since the fall of Gaddafi, Britain has also offered to train Libya’s army and police.

But prominent Libyans have raised concerns that the race to win defense contract could end up with weapons falling into the wrong hands, in a country which is already awash with weapons and where security is a major issue.

“I can’t see the point in having this kind of exhibition in Libya now. One of our problems is that there are arms everywhere,” Hassan el-Amin, who is chair of the congress communications committee, and lived in Britain for 28 years, told the Guardian.

Barry Gardiner, Labour MP for Brent North, said he was not against Britain having a strong arms industry, which exports worldwide, but questioned the timing of the fair and was saddened by the UKTI attempting to establish a relationship with a country in terms of arms when Britain has so many other things for sale.

“I think it is deeply regrettable that the first thing the UK should be trying to export to a country recovering from a conflict situation is arms. It would be much better if we were offering them support in other ways such as helping to rebuild their infrastructure,” Gardiner told RT.

Stearman also voiced concern that the UKTI has not released a date for the exhibition or said which companies will be attending and said that “part of the reason for the lack of information about this event, is that the government would be embarrassed by a more high profile event”.

A survey carried out by the Sunday Times in 2011found that 77% of the British public felt it was wrong to sell arms to Gaddafi’s regime.

“What is needed in Libya are efforts to demilitarize and invest in civil infrastructure,” said Stearman.

Libya is set to mark the second anniversary of an uprising that toppled former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan announced on Saturday that the government had taken a series of security measures for the event, which is due to take place on Sunday.

A number of checkpoints have been set up across the streets in the capital, Tripoli, and the eastern city of Benghazi, which is Libya’s second largest city and the hub of the revolution.

Earlier this week, the Libyan prime minister announced a four-day closure of the country’s borders with Egypt and Tunisia.

Meanwhile, the opposition has called for demonstrations across the country. It says the government has failed to rebuild Libya, which still lacks a permanent constitution.

Libyans rose up against Gaddafi’s four-decade rule in February 2011 and deposed him in August 2011.

The deposed Libyan ruler died of injuries sustained during his capture on October 20, 2011, by the National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters in the northern city of Sirte - his hometown.

NT/MRS/HSN

Benghazigate’ continues to unravel, and the man who’s front and center at this week’s Washington DC hearings is now being blamed for the villa siege last September…

According to a new investigative book published by two former US special operations soldiers, and serialised exclusively in yesterday’s Daily Mail, former CIA Director, David Petraeus, was blackmailed by two senior CIA officers into resigning and was made to publicly admit to his affair with intelligence operative Paula Broadwell. Of course, this angle of the story will surely drive book sales, but it’s not the most significant revelation in the story…

Drone-Master J: John Brennan

In their book which is due to be release tomorrow entitled, Benghazi: The Definitive Report, authors Jack Murphy (Army Green Beret) and co-author Brandon Webb (Navy SEAL and friend of Glen Doherty who died in the Benghazi siege) also revealed that ‘Drone-Master J’, John O. Brennan - President Barack Obama’s current CIA Director nominee who was the President’s own deputy NSA advisor at the time, had been authorizing covert ‘unilateral operations outside of the traditional command structure’, using the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) across Libya and North Africa. It is Brennan’s black ops that are said to have prompted retaliation inside Libya that led to the September 11 Benghazi compound siege that killed four Americans, including ‘Ambassador’ Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

It’s worth noting here that the Benghazi siege was initially blamed by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and the entire US media and the BBC at the time – on a highly deceptive YouTube film entitled, “The Innocence of Muslims”. That was the first stages of the cover-up.

So, according to the new book, it’s John O. Brennan who was the architect of events that led to the debacle known as Benghazigate? Apparently, yes, but not quite…

Murphy and Webb’s book, although very hard-hitting and well-researched, through what the authors describe as “a vast network of military insiders and intelligence officers to uncover the ‘untold’ story behind the attacks”,focuses on the Petraeus Affair, but only provides surface detail on the actual nature of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s mission there in Libya.

Nor do the authors explain that the compound in question was not an “Embassy” in Benghazi as the Obama White House first referred to it, nor was it a “US Consulate”, or a “CIA safe house” as came to be known in later reports. Susanne Posel of OccupyCorporatism.com, reports what is more likely to be the real story:

“In Benghazi, Stevens stayed at a gated-villa, leased by the US State Department from a local man named Mohammad al-Bishari. The villa in Benghazi was not a US Embassy, diplomatic mission or extension of the embassy. In fact, the nearest US Embassy is Tripoli. This location housed Stevens where he spoke with the NTC, a defaco-government in Libya that assisted the US in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Stevens had previously been designated as a special representative to the NTC during the US-controlled Libyan revolution. To mask Stevens new role, he was given US Ambassador status by Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, and stationed in Tripoli.

Bishari has confirmed that Stevens would stay at the villa when he met with the NTC. Stevens’ mission in Benghazi was to gather intelligence for the CIA “conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.”

Hand in the honey pot: Petraeus and Broadwell.

According to The Mail story, Petraeus’s ousters were,’high-level career officers on the CIA who got the ball rolling on the investigation’. The Mail exclusive goes on to explain how the Petraeus story unfolded and triggered a ‘palace coup’:

“The authors say that senior intelligence officers working on the 7th floor of Central Intelligence headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used their political clout to ensure that the FBI investigated the former Army general’s personal life.

They then told Petraeus that they would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t admit the affair and resign.

‘It was well known to Petraeus’s Personal Security Detachment (bodyguards) that he and Broadwell were having an affair. He wasn’t the only high-ranking Agency head or general engaged in extramarital relations, but when the 7th floor wanted Petraeus out, they cashed in their chips,’ Webb and Murphy write.

The book continues: ‘The reality of the situation is that high-ranking CIA officers had already discovered the affair by consulting with Petraeus’s PSD and then found a way to initiate an FBI investigation in order to create a string of evidence and an investigative trail that led to the information they already had—in other words, an official investigation that could be used to force Petraeus to resign.’

… Senior officials were furious over the way he had been running the agency since he was appointed in September 2011… He was turning the agency’s focus from intelligence gathering and analysis to paramilitary operations, including drone strikes.”

What they reveal about the Petraeus scandal is that the sensational extramarital affair was deployed in the media in order to keep the public distracted from the real story.

Chris Stevens and CIA gun-running

According to the Daily Mail, Webb and Murphy’s book does document that “Stevens likely helped consolidate as many weapons as possible after the war to safeguard them, at which point Brennan exported them overseas to start another conflict”.

Although both authors, who run a website called SOFREP.com - a news site written and edited by current and former members of the special operations community, appear to be ‘well-positioned’ to access classified insider information about events and a ‘vast network’ of contacts in the game, they could have gone a lot deeper into what are now mainstream allegations: that Chris Stevens was CIA point man for running illegal guns out of Libya via Turkey into Syria for the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Even Kentucky Senator Rand Paul challenged Hillary Clinton on these charges, but was stonewalled by the outgoing Secretary of State.

The book says that Stevens was aiding John Brennan in highly illegal international gun-running, a fact alone that should (in theory, anyway) kill Brennan in the CIA directorate conformation hearings this week in Washington DC. It’s amazing how this aspect of the story is given a back seat to a sex scandal – which makes us suspicious of this book, and its peculiar timing.

Posel also explains Stevens role as CIA gun-runner:

“Some of Stevens’ deals for arms can be realized in the artillery and weapons being funneled to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Syria who are fighting the proxy war for the US. Stevens became the “liaison” between US-sponsored terrorist factions and the movement of arms to Syria to assist the FSA.

Shipments to the FSA have come from Saudi Arabia where the Salafi terrorists originated and the Partisans of Sharia is used to further subversive interests. Thanks to the US, the Saudi government and Stevens, the FSA are the most heavily armed state-sponsored jihadist group in the Middle East.

In reality, Islamic terrorist factions that work with the US were employed by the Saudi Arabian government to take out one of Petraeus’ CIA spies. That spy’s name was J. Christopher Stevens.”

Author, former SEAL Brandon Webb

Author, former Ranger Jack Murphy

Chemical Weapons to Syria

The other obvious and very big aspect of this story which they also miss, is the very visible thread which first appeared in early Dec 2012 of reports ‘chemical weapons in Syria’, and these are likely to have originated in Libya – in the form of Gadaffi’s aging chemical weapons stocks being smuggled out of Libya and into the hands of the FSA in Syria… in order to blame Syria Assad government for using “chemical weapons against his own people”.

In late December, the US intelligence community, via the US General Console in Istanbul, Turkey, appears to have set-up the thread for the Assad chemical weapons story to go public, but quickly began to back track on this talking point, practically abandoning it altogether in the end.

In ‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report’, it does appear that the authors have opened up the door to some incredible and perhaps crucial insights into events surrounding Benghazigate – and their book will make a big media splash but it seems like black-ops ‘insiders’ Murphy and Webb missed the biggest story in all of this – which just happens to be the very scandal that would certainly bring down the Obama Administration in one swoop. Amazing how these events are borne out - and not borne out in the media, as the case may be.

More and more these days, we see an endless parade of ex-Navy SEAL and ex-Special Ops commando authors – who may very well have a great black book when comes to inside info but they are not journalists, and in some cases their relationship to the special operations world may be a little too close for comfort to consider them objective and independent investigators.

To authors Murphy and Webb, you cannot call it a “Definitive Report” a few months after the event. It’s a bit cock-sure, to be sure.

We’re waiting for the sequel, the book which blows the lid on the real story.

Until then, this might just be a ‘controlled media detonation’.
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‘Benghazi: The Definitive Report,’ written by Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy, is published by William Morrow Company, an imprint of HarperCollins. It will be available for download in ebook format on Tuesday.