If it merely and magically turns out that the president chose 16 pathological liars and felons as his closest advisers, he’s off the hook. He’s fine. If he actually took part in committing crimes, that’s a whole different thing. … Read More
An Interview With Barack Obama About The IRS Scandal, AP Phone Records And Benghazi
Does Barack Obama have any idea what is going on in the government that he is supposedly running? Scandals are erupting all around him, and he supposedly was not aware that any wrongdoing had taken place in any of those instances … Read More
‘Chaos and destabilization as a way to maintain control in Libya’
Libya is in turmoil, as was evident in the latest deadly blast in the city of Benghazi on May 13. As all hell breaks loose and armed militias run amok, Western diplomats are pulling out of a chaos they had helped create. Freeman discusses their pullout and further Mid-East strategy with RT.RT: British and American embassies are withdrawing some of their staff from Libya right now, so why the powers who actually helped to topple Colonel Gaddafi are feeling vulnerable in Tripoli?Lawrence Freeman: They created a monster that they can no longer control, and it’s turning against them in a way that was absolutely foreseeable. The fact hath the Tony Blair policy which Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy followed implementing – the overthrow of Gaddafi in August 2011 – created this condition which was understandable, anyone could’ve known what was going to happen. We worked directly with Al Qaeda militias all throughout Benghazi and other parts of Libya, so now it’s become ungovernable. So even the people who initiated the mess have to leave to protect themselves because nobody will protect them and the situation is completely out of control.RT: And who is behind the violence – one particular group, or are there various elements?LF: Well, there are various militias. The largest umbrella group is the Islamic Fighting Group, which – if not a part of – is completely one with Al Qaeda. This grouping was at war with Gaddafi and he was trying to defeat them. And we carried out the most idiotic policy, which was to work with these groups to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. And this goes all the way back to the policy that Tony Blair had in 1999 for the Iraq war: “if we want to get rid of leaders, we’re going to have a regime change”. And this fellow, Blair, is probably the biggest criminal on the planet right now. And Obama – because he’s carried out these policies – is in deep, deep trouble in his own second term in the US.RT: What about the political situation in Libya? Is the current government incompetent or just simply unable to control the violence, and why isn’t it getting help from Western powers?LF: The government, really, has been removed. They passed this law that said that anybody in the last 30-40 years that had any role in the former Libyan government had to be removed. So, basically, we’ve created the closest thing yet to an Al Qaeda controlled state. And these fools in the West are now planning and thinking of doing the same thing in Syria. Except for military-political leadership from the United States, from people like former Defense Secretary Gates, current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, we would be in war already in Syria, and it would look like Libya, except several orders of magnitude worse.RT: Of course some would say that those who kicked off the situation in Libya should go back and sort it out and get the country back on track. After all they were responsible. So is another intervention simply not realistic?LF: No. I don’t think there’s going to be another intervention. I think there are some people in the British circles who want to see uncontrollable states, who want to see people die, who want to see genocide. And this thing has already spread: the fall of Gaddafi was directly related to the toppling of northern Mali and the coup in Bamako. And there are articles and reports which I’ve known for months, that the Boko Haram have received weapons via Mali and others, from Gaddafi’s weapon caches. So we’re seeing the destabilization of the whole Sahel and North and West Africa, as well as Gaddafi. Whether you say it was done by ignorance or by intention. I say – both.RT: But why is it that you’re creating rogue states run by Islamic fundamentalists who are anti-Western, creating a hotbed of militia threatening the region and the rest of the world? Why the intention to create such chaos?LF: You have an alliance of British royal family, the Saudi royal family…and they would rather see chaos and destabilization as a way to maintain control than allow sovereign nation states to exercise their rights. They’ll have more power if there’s un-governability than if there are actually stable nations. And this is increasingly the sign of the times as this financial crisis is careening out of control, especially throughout the European sector. The transatlantic regions are in a state of such dire collapse that war and chaos are looking more and more like their alternative survival.RT: The oil company BP has decided to pull some of its staff out. Does this mean that international ambitions to exploit resources there are failing? Because, after all, many are claiming that oil was the reason for the Western intervention.LF: I never thought it was oil. I think oil plays a role, I think resources play a role. But from my standpoint, my own historical view of things, it’s much more the age-old imperialist, colonialist policy of having weak nation-states that are easy to manipulate and govern. … Read More
Egyptian security forces thwart Al-Qaeda embassy bombing – interior ministry
“The interior ministry was able to direct a qualitative blow to a terrorist cell which was planning to carry out suicide attacks against vital, important and foreign establishments,” declared Ibrahim, who did not specify which country was to be targeted by the attack. He did, however, say that the extremists planned to use either a car stuffed with explosives, or a remotely detonated home-made device to carry out the terrorist act.Ibrahim said the three suspects were captured with 10 kilograms of ammonium nitrate – an ingredient in explosives – and a computer containing bomb-making instructions.The minister told journalists at a Cairo press conference that the radical Islamists had been in contact with Al-Qaeda in Algeria, Pakistan and on the Syrian-Turkish border, where their contact is monitoring the inflow of jihadists into the war-torn country. Ibrahim claimed one of the suspects also traveled to combat training camps in Iran and Pakistan.A lawyer for the three men has told local Al-Ahram website that the charges against them were “fabricated.”Ibrahim stated that the men shared the same contact, a man called Kurdi Dawud al-Assadi, as the ‘Nasr City Cell’ – another group of suspected terrorists currently on trial. Al-Assadi reportedly told the men to contact members of the cell, who are accused of involvement in the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi on September 11 last year, as well as preparing a host of embassy attacks.Ibrahim denied that the spate of arrests constituted a systematic Al-Qaeda presence in the country whose security apparatus has been weakened through the upheaval of the past two years. Nonetheless, radical Islamist attacks in the deserted region of Sinai have occurred intermittently over the past months. The Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists there also launched two rockets at the Israeli city of Eilat from their base on the peninsula last month.The authorities also failed to maintain security, when the US embassy in Egypt was breached and the US flag burnt by a crowd protesting the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ video last year.The current leader of Al-Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, is himself an Egyptian by birth (though has spent large stretches of his life outside the country) and has masterminded previous attacks in his homeland. … Read More
‘Life for most Libyans is worse than it was under Gaddafi’
The US State Department said that it has “approved the ordered departure of non-emergency personnel from Libya.” It said that the US embassy in Tripoli would continue to remain “open and functioning.”A spokesman for the Foreign Office said that Britain’s embassy is temporarily withdrawing a small number of staff – most of which “work in support of government ministries which have been affected by recent developments.”Those “recent developments” refer to an increase in violence which was sparked after two ex-rebels besieged two ministries last month over a law that would ban officials who served under former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.Since then, gunmen have surrounded the Libyan foreign embassy and Benghazi has been the target of bomb attacks which left a police station damaged. Mark Almond, an international relations professor at Turkey’s Bilkent University, says the violence is largely to do with the country’s chaotic state, as well as a power struggle regarding who should control the country’s oil and gas industry.RT: The UK issued a warning to British nationals back in January, advising them to stay away from Benghazi. It’s now withdrawing its staff. Why are tensions on the rise now, as opposed to what was happening in January? What’s changed?Mark Almond: I think there has just been a constant level of trouble. Partly what we’re seeing are deep divisions between Libyan revolutionaries who Britain and other NATO countries supported. There’s a power struggle over who should control the Libyan state and particularly the country’s oil and gas resources.Effectively, there’s a battle between the roles of the young men who do the fighting and the older people – some of whom emigrated from Libya in the years of Gaddafi’s rule and some who changed sides from Gaddafi quite recently. And there’s a real struggle over who should be running the central government, the regional government, and whose finger should be in the oil and gas pie.RT: There was a recent car bomb attack on the French embassy, one American ambassador was killed. Militias are blocking access to embassies. What’s the international community doing to curb these incidents?MA: Well this is basically a dilemma they can’t really resolve. After all, by bombing Libya, they helped to create a situation where armed groups came to power and certainly have local domination. And there are of course groups that may be welcoming NATO bombers but are in fact quite serious anti-Western Muslim fundamentalist groups. So they don’t regard necessarily the continued presence of western embassies, the British, French, or American ones, as something that they’d like to see in a liberated – as they would see it – Libya.There’s also the problem that perhaps various promises were made to people who NATO needed at the time, who feel they’ve been cheated a bit. This is one of the suspicions about the fate of American Ambassador Chris Stevens – that he had been dealing with the armed groups, that he was probably also helping to facilitate support for Syrian rebels and somehow or another he got mixed up with the wrong crew.RT: It appears a lot of the violence has been focused on police stations and foreigners. Why is that?MA: Well of course insofar as any kind of law and order can be restored, you’d have to have some form of police. So those people who don’t like being put under control are very angry about that. And foreigners, too, are seen as being the people who are pushing particular Libyans into positions of power and influence, including in the oil and gas industry. Remember we’re talking about a country whose economy is overwhelmingly dependent upon export products so there’s an enormous amount of corruption and competition regarding who should get hold of those assets inside Libya and, I’m afraid, outside Libya.RT: Just two years ago, the UK lobbied for military intervention in Libya. Was that a good decision?MA: I think it was a terrible decision. I’m afraid if Colonel Gaddafi had suppressed the opposition in March 2011, possibly hundreds of people would have died. Perhaps as many as 30,000 have died since, and the country is in a deep state of disorder and uncertainty. Life for most Libyans is worse than it was under Colonel Gaddafi. And of course Gaddafi’s regime was supposed by the Western countries to be the bad regime. Anything must be better, we were told. But now we see that it’s not so clear. … Read More
