Or should it be called ‘the clusterfuck of R2P Libya’ forevermore?
In his July 7, 2017 ‘Hiding US Lies About Libyan Invasion; Joe Lauria at consortium news writes that as he was doing research to answer a critic of his book on Clinton’s losing the presidential election (How I Lost), he’d delved into US mainstream media coverage of the ‘2016 British parliamentary report’ on the lies that Secretary of State Clinton and other Western leaders had told in order to justify the massive ‘humanitarian’ attack on Libya in order to stave off an ‘imminent’ genocide.
What Lauria discovered was that not only few US corporate media organizations had covered the report (pdf, 53 pages), but the ones that did covered it only in their international editions, and failed to mention any critique of the many egregious US lies. All fingers pointed to France and the UK.
“It is a black mark on the Congress’s two foreign affairs committees that neither undertook a similar inquiry (although congressional Republicans did obsess over the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which occurred about a year after the Obama administration facilitated the military overthrow and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi).
A thorough online search shows that The Nation magazine and several alternative news sites, including ConsortiumNews and Salon, appear to be the only U.S.-based media that accurately covered the blockbuster story that undermined the entire U.S. narrative for leaving Libya a failed state.”
Given that all three of the linked sites above, plus New Eastern Outlook coverage of the report quotes much of the same language from the blistering report, in the main I won’t specify which bits came from which reporters, and hope that pasting things in willy-nilly works for you.
One exception is Robert Parry’s Oct. 6, 2016 ‘The Forgotten Libyan Lessons and the Syrian War’ at consortiumnews.com, in which he wisely notes that ‘past is prologue’.
“Most intelligent Americans – Republicans as well as Democrats – now accept that they were duped into the Iraq War with disastrous consequences, but there is more uncertainty about the war on Libya in 2011 as well as the ongoing proxy war on Syria and the New Cold War showdown with Russia over Ukraine.
Today, many Democrats don’t want to admit that they have been manipulated into supporting new imperial adventures against Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Russia by the Obama administration as it pulls some of the same propaganda strings that George W. Bush’s administration did in 2002-2003.
After a frenzied media reaction to Gaddafi’s supposedly genocidal plans, Western nations argued that the world had a “responsibility to protect” Libyan civilians, a concept known as “R2P.” In haste, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution to protect civilians by imposing a “no-fly zone” over eastern Libya.
But the subsequent invasion involved U.S.-coordinated air strikes on Gaddafi’s forces and European Special Forces on the ground working with anti-Gaddafi rebels. Before long, the “no-fly zone” had expanded into a full-scale “regime change” operation, ending in the slaughter of many young Libyan soldiers and the sodomy-with-a-knife-then-murder of Gaddafi.”
Some findings of the report: (proving the tweaked old adage that ‘New Hitler’ propaganda can circle the globe three times before the truth has even had time to lace up its boots.)
The report’s findings are a devastating indictment of the leadership of then–Prime Minister David Cameron (who declined to cooperate with the committee) as well as his foreign secretary, William Hague, and defense minister, Liam Fox (who did). The report puts a stake through the heart of the reigning establishment narrative that intervention was justified because Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was about to unleash a massacre on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi—an untruth that has been endlessly repeated by the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, who was a driving force behind the intervention. The new report should—but probably will not, given the sorry state of the 2016 campaign—draw attention to Clinton’s long record of supporting military interventions in lieu of diplomacy.
“We have seen no evidence that the UK Government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya,” the report states. “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”
The Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that the British government “failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element.”
“Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence,” the Foreign Affairs Committee states clearly.
“While Muammar Gaddafi certainly threatened violence against those who took up arms against his rule, this did not necessarily translate into a threat to everyone in Benghazi,” the report continues. “In short, the scale of the threat to civilians was presented with unjustified certainty.”
On March 17, 2011, the report points out — two days before NATO began bombing — Qaddafi told rebels in Benghazi, “Throw away your weapons, exactly like your brothers in Ajdabiya and other places did. They laid down their arms and they are safe. We never pursued them at all.”
The Foreign Affairs Committee adds that, when Libyan government forces retook the town of Ajdabiya in February, they did not attack civilians. Qaddafi “also attempted to appease protesters in Benghazi with an offer of development aid before finally deploying troops,” the report adds.
In another example, the report indicates that, after fighting in February and March in the city Misrata — Libya’s third-largest city, which had also been seized by rebels — just around 1 percent of people killed by the Libyan government were women or children.
“The disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians,” the committee says.
Senior British officials admitted in the Parliament investigation they did not consider Qaddafi’s actual actions, and instead called for military intervention in Libya based on his rhetoric.
In February, Qaddafi gave a heated speech threatening the rebels who had taken over cities. He said “they are a tiny few” and “a terrorist few,” and called them “rats” who “are turning Libya into the emirates of Zawahiri and bin Laden,” referencing the leaders of al-Qaeda.
At the end of his speech, Qaddafi promised “to cleanse Libya, inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alley by alley,” of these rebels. Many Western media outlets, however, implied or reported outright that his remark was meant as a threat to all protesters. An Israeli journalist popularized this line by turning it into a song called “Zenga, Zenga” (Arabic for “alleyway”). The YouTube video featuring the remixed speech was circulated throughout the world.
The report categorically states:
“….the international community turned a blind eye to the supply of weapons to the rebels. Lord Richards highlighted “the degree to which the Emiratis and the Qataris…played a major role in the success of the ground operation.” For example, Qatar supplied French Milan antitank missiles to certain rebel groups. We were told that Qatar channelled its weapons to favoured militias rather than to the rebels as a whole.”
Who were the “rebels”?
While it is largely believed that that crisis in Libya were linked to a general uprising linked with the so-called “Arab Spring”, this is far from the truth. For one thing, a general popular uprising against an autocrat regime could not possibly have descended into a pure chaos but for the involvement of foreign funded extremist groups. This is precisely what happened in Libya. The critical question, therefore, is: were the Libyan rebels really “rebels”? The report disputes the Western official narrative that it was a general uprising and that extremists got involved at some alter stage. Contrary to the official narrative, the report concludes:
“It is now clear that militant Islamist militias played a critical role in the rebellion from February 2011 onwards. They separated themselves from the rebel army, refused to take orders from non-Islamist commanders and assassinated the then leader of the rebel army, Abdel Fattah Younes.”
“Émigrés opposed to Muammar Gaddafi exploited unrest in Libya by overstating the threat to civilians and encouraging Western powers to intervene,” the report notes, summarizing Joffé’s analysis.
Pargeter added that Libyans who opposed the government exaggerated Qaddafi’s use of “mercenaries” — a term they often used as a synonym for Libyans of Sub-Saharan descent. Pargeter said that Libyans had told her, “The Africans are coming. They’re going to massacre us. Gaddafi’s sending Africans into the streets. They’re killing our families.”
“I think that that was very much amplified,” Pargeter said. This amplified myth led to extreme violence. Black Libyans were violently oppressed by Libyan rebels. The Associated Press reported in September 2011, “Rebel forces and armed civilians are rounding up thousands of black Libyans and migrants from sub-Sahara Africa.” It noted, “Virtually all of the detainees say they are innocent migrant workers.” Many were put in cages, tortured, and made to eat flags.
That the West had “turned a blind eye” to the support certain militias were receiving from Arab countries is, in fact, an indication of the Western complicity in facilitating the rise of Islamist groups in Libya. And as the report states yet again:
“We asked Lord Richards whether he knew that Abdelhakim Belhadj and other members of the al-Qaeda affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group were participating in the rebellion in March 2011. He replied that that “was a grey area”. He added that “a quorum of respectable Libyans were assuring the Foreign Office” that militant Islamist militias would not benefit from the rebellion. He acknowledged that “with the benefit of hindsight, that was wishful thinking at best.”
The Foreign Affairs Committee notes in its report that, despite its lack of intelligence, “the UK Government focused exclusively on military intervention” as a solution in Libya, ignoring available forms of political engagement and diplomacy.
The U.K. report also exposed how the original goal of protecting civilians merged seamlessly into a “regime change” war. The report said:
“The combination of coalition airpower with the supply of arms, intelligence and personnel to the rebels guaranteed the military defeat of the Gaddafi regime. On 20 March 2011, for example, Muammar Gaddafi’s forces retreated some 40 miles from Benghazi following attacks by French aircraft. If the primary object of the coalition intervention was the urgent need to protect civilians in Benghazi, then this objective was achieved in less than 24 hours.
“The basis for intervention: did it change? We questioned why NATO conducted air operations across Libya between April and October 2011 when it had secured the protection of civilians in Benghazi in March 2011. … We asked [former chief of defense staff] Lord Richards whether the object of British policy in Libya was civilian protection or regime change. He told us that ‘one thing morphed almost ineluctably into the other’ as the campaign developed its own momentum. … The UK’s intervention in Libya was reactive and did not comprise action in pursuit of a strategic objective. This meant that a limited intervention to protect civilians drifted into a policy of regime change by military means.”
This is consistent with reporting by The Washington Times, which found that Qaddafi’s son Saif had hoped to negotiate a ceasefire with the U.S. government. Saif Qaddafi quietly opened up communications with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened and asked the Pentagon to stop talking to the Libyan government. “Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all,” a U.S. intelligence official told Saif.
The report states:
“When the then Prime Minister David Cameron sought and received parliamentary approval for military intervention in Libya on 21 March 2011, he assured the House of Commons that the object of the intervention was not regime change. In April 2011, however, he signed a joint letter with United States President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy setting out their collective pursuit of “a future without Gaddafi”.
Spreading Disorder
There was also the consequence of the Libyan conflict, spreading disorder around the region because Libyan military stockpiles were plundered. The report said: “Libya purchased some £30 billion [or about $38 billion] of weapons and ammunition between 1969 and 2010. Many of those munitions were not issued to the Libyan Army and were instead stored in warehouses. After the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, some weapons and ammunition remained in Libya, where they fell into the hands of the militias. Other Libyan weapons and ammunition were trafficked across North and West Africa and the Middle East.
“The United Nations Panel of Experts appointed to examine the impact of Resolution 1973 identified the presence of ex-Libyan weapons in Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Gaza, Mali, Niger, Tunisia and Syria. The panel concluded that ‘arms originating from Libya have significantly reinforced the military capacity of terrorist groups operating in Algeria, Egypt, Mali and Tunisia.’ …
“The international community’s inability to secure weapons abandoned by the Gaddafi regime fuelled instability in Libya and enabled and increased terrorism across North and West Africa and the Middle East. The UK Government correctly identified the need to secure weapons immediately after the 2011 Libyan civil war, but it and its international partners took insufficient action to achieve that objective. However, it is probable that none of the states that intervened in Libya would have been prepared to commit the necessary military and political resources to secure stocks of weapons and ammunition. That consideration should have informed their calculation to intervene.”
The report also notes that the primary reasons France pushed for military intervention in Libya were Qaddafi’s “nearly bottomless financial resources,” the Libyan leader’s plans to create an alternative currency to the French franc in Africa, “Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa” and the desire to “Increase French influence in North Africa.”
Explaining France’s motivations, the report cites an April 2011 email to the U.S.’s then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton which noted that “Qaddafi has nearly bottomless financial resources to continue indefinitely.”
“Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver,” Clinton’s assistant Sidney Blumenthal wrote, citing “sources with access to advisors to Saif al-Islam Qaddafi,” Muammar Qaddafi’s son.”
[wd here: given that one of SoS Clinton’s first actions in Libya was to create a central bank, I’ve always wondered where all the gold and silver are by now.]
This gold “was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar,” Blumenthal said, citing “knowledgeable individuals.” He added, “This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc.”
This bit from The Guardian is almost too much to bear:
“It concurs with Barack Obama’s assessment that the intervention was “a shitshow”, and repeats the US president’s claim that France and Britain lost interest in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown. The findings are also likely to be seized on by Donald Trump, who has tried to undermine Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy credentials by repeatedly condemning her handling of the Libyan intervention in 2011, when she was US secretary of state.”
Obomba paraphrased: “See, it was them guys, the Frog and the Brit; me and the Three Harpies had a fantastic post-Gaddafi plan!”
“And it worked!”
Lauria again:
“Hillary Clinton, who according to leaked emails was the architect of the attack on Libya, said four days earlier: “When the Libyan people sought to realize their democratic aspirations, they were met by extreme violence from their own government.”
Sen. John Kerry, at the time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chimed in: “Time is running out for the Libyan people. The world needs to respond immediately.”
Mustafa Abdul Jalil, head of a transitional council that the U.S., U.K. and France recognized as the legitimate Libyan government, pleaded for a no-fly zone. The University of Pittsburgh–educated Jalil was playing the same game as Ahmed Chalabi had in Iraq. They both sought U.S. military might to bring them to power. He said that if Gaddafi’s forces reached Benghazi they would kill “half a million” people. “If there is no no-fly zone imposed on Qadhafi’s regime, and his ships are not checked, we will have a catastrophe in Libya.”
He concludes:
“Downplaying or omitting the adversary’s side of the story is a classic case of Americans explaining a foreign people to other Americans without giving a voice to those people, whether they be Russians, Palestinians, Syrians, Serbs, Iranians or North Koreans. Depriving a people of their voice dehumanizes them, making it easier to go to war against them.
One can only conclude that U.S. corporate media’s mission is not to tell all sides of an international story, or report news critical of U.S. foreign policy, but instead to push an agenda supporting U.S. interests abroad. That’s not journalism. That’s instead the job Winston Smith did.”
We were reminded recently that Kim Jong Un understands the cautionary tales of Saddam and Gadaffi having given up their weapons of mass destruction. ‘The Disarmament of Libya’, wikipedia.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
two or so weeks until it’s nothing but standing ovations for trump for bringing democracy back to VZ. adios Maduro. do not doubt for one second your enemies will gladly sodomize you to death, too, and cackle gleefully about it on US television.
yes, sigh. id been collecting ugly links for yet…another Vz post, but i hope it’s not by way of an autopsy of the coup when i do. and o, sodomization might be the least of it, goddam. gotta kill those almost socialist nations, but…maduro may have screwed up lately in a a final economic plea to save his administration. but oh, the media lies are so rampant. neoliberals must rule VZ.
@cordeliers
Fascist coup attempt in Venezuela to enter new phase tomorrow. “Zero Hour” language suggests this is the big push. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/17/venezuela-opposition-vote-reject-maduro-constitution-plan
‘The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power.’
~malcolm x
i’ll answer other comments later; i’ve been up since 2:30, and after pasting in this unhoy mess…i need to try for some zleeep, blessed zleeeep.
What was left out is the critical role of Qatar and its on-the-scene reportage from Libya in setting the media view of what was going on in Libya for the US and UK. Al Jazeera acting in this war as William Randolph Hearst acted in the Spanish American War. Even the attempts of Americans to get better international coverage ran afoul of the fact that Al Jazeera had the agenda of Qatar, which at that moment meant the Moslem Brotherhood then inching toward power in Egypt as the Tahrir Square movement was about to declare victory and Mubarak was about to step down. The preparation through a cable TV/internet information war is something that someone should go back and look at. Searching Twitter during the early days of the war for “Libya” will likely smoke out some sock-puppets and bots that weren’t quite as well recognized six years ago.
Remember the context. Sarkozy of France was running for re-election. The “Arab Spring” had started waves of refugees into Europe (especially France) seeking political asylum, most likely starting with the most affluent emigres. France was in the midst of its controversy over dress codes seeking to forcibly integrate Muslims into French culture. When Libya erupted, the waves of refugees became a flood from Libya to Italy. Italy was overwhelmed and began passing the refugees on to France. By the time Sarkozy was running against Hollande and LePen, Sarkozy was using Islamaphobia as a campaign message and Hollande was flirting with doing the same. What brought the discussion to a head was (1) defection of two Libyan fighter aircraft to Italy, where the pilots were debiefed by EU officials and supposedly told about Gadhafi’s to his air force. (Which Gadhafi is a subject for historians.) (2) The deputy ambassador to the UN denounced Gadhafi’s actions and in an impassioned speech to the General Assembly asked the UN’s help “to protect the Libyan people”. He repeated his remarks to the UN Human Rights Commission, which voted statement calling for Gadhafi’s restraint and kicking the bureaucratic action to the UN Security Council where US-UK-France’s proposal was passed with Russia and China abstaining. Within minutes of the vote, the French imposition of the no-fly zone around Benghazi began. Within two days the US “suppression of Libyan air defenses” began and was completed. The news coverage was the usual US media “shock-and-awe” Tomahawk launches from ships until President Obama and the DoD told them to cut it out. US military press briefings then dropped from sight. This was not to be a “US war” (TM).
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera was setting expectations that Algeria and Morocco would join the “Arab Spring” bandwagon as Syria erupted out of violence in Deraa and Homs into “peaceful demonstrations” in Damascus and Hama (site of the Hama Massacre in 1982 during the Moslem Brotherhood uprising). Then it was Egypt, Syria, Libya in the news rotation every night, with occasional coverage of Yemen and Bahrain. But Qatar of course was quiet.
In 2011, Republicans obsessed over the move to take down Gadhafi only because it was not a Republican President doing it. And the national security state Republicans were afraid that Obama would not hit Gadhafi hard enough (collateral damage included). In the celebrating that “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead”, engaging in revisionism about who was positioned where is not going to be helpful to unwinding the trend of perpetual war. The Democratic part of the national security state was outlive it’s Democrats are weak on defense rap by being more decisive and in the end more brutal. Clinton apparently did what the national security state wanted; some of the key figures campaigned for her based on Libya among other things. The Congressional Republicans weren’t wearing love beads and singing Kum Bah Yah during this exercise. They were fight fans in the stands unsatisfied with the carnage.
But there is lots more going on likely to come out about the way the war was a “fukkery” and tied into Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo and subsequent line of diplomacy.
thanks for additions, thd. some of the coverage back in the day actually did mention how al jazeera coverage set the tone; it’s my error that i’d leff it out,, of course. perhaps it came after some of this:
“Lord Richards highlighted “the degree to which the Emiratis and the Qataris…played a major role in the success of the ground operation.” For example, Qatar supplied French Milan antitank missiles to certain rebel groups. We were told that Qatar channeled its weapons to favoured militias rather than to the rebels as a whole.”
and yes, there was plenty of speculation that sarkozy’s re-election was related to his leading the charge. but i hadn’t remembered the pilots’ defection at all. did you leave a word out of this that would have made your meaning more clear? “..where the pilots were debriefed by EU officials and supposedly told about Gadhafi’s to his air force.”
you may remember, and i wasn’t able to find it. as to the arab league voting to ask for a no-fly zone to great cheers from the O administration, (later regretting it) . as i’d remembered it, the league could barely summon a quorum, and there were large hints that plenty of carrots and sticks produced the vote. i vaguely remember that once the french began bombing,, O at least pretended to be pissed, but i always reckoned that was just weird CYA stuff. wasn’t it dubbed ‘leading R2P from behind’?
more soon; i slept hard for an hour and my brain’s a little mushy from lack of zzzzz’s.
The left out word was “orders”.
Yes, the Arab League so voted to put pressure on China and Russia at the UN.
I think O was pissed at the US military PR plan that went in all shock-and-awe and bigfooted Americans. That got quickly dialed back to mostly visible Libyans, occasionally visible French ordnance hitting the ground from airplanes, and the US and UK on the downlow.
thanks, and i should have been able to figure out the missing word now that you’ve named it. anyhoo, what an ungodly mess libya is now.
so…you’re really makin’ me earn my wages, eh? here it is, from salon, ben gag norton (and it’s good):
“Moreover, Alison Pargeter, the Libya specialist, told the committee, “I also think the Arab media played a very important role here.”
She singled out Al Jazeera, a Qatari news outlet, and Al Arabiya, a Saudi outlet, for spreading unsubstantiated stories about Qaddafi and the Libyan government. These news outlets “were really hamming everything up, and it turned out not to be true,” she said.”
but in the link in the op that noted this: “The report disputes the Western official narrative that it was a general uprising and that extremists got involved at some alter stage’ was from neo; the link goes to brookings, via vox. ‘Everyone says the Libya intervention was a failure. They’re wrong.’, and hoo, boy, is it an alter stage, whatever that means. ;-) cloud cuckoo land? neo also said tht 400,000 people were displaced from libya.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/04/12/everyone-says-the-libya-intervention-was-a-failure-theyre-wrong/
i found the pilots defection story w/ this from reuters: ““The two said they decided to fly to Malta after being ordered to bomb anti-government protesters in Libya’s second largest city of Benghazi, the sources said”. sounds to me more like the biggest baddest story of the woman running into the press room and telling them that gaddafi was supplying condoms and viagra to his troops so they’d rape all the women. debunked of course, although i forget whose daughter she turned out to be in the end. but oh, yes, the arguments over that were epic.
“
thanks for all that, both of you. I caught two minutes of Charlie every Rose is really thorny on pbs last night, some egghead or pseudo-bright journo w/ CR coaching him on his talking points: “Qatar is trying to punch above its weight.” so is Turkey, I suppose? w/its troops in Qatar? I think trump is on to something w/this wrasslin’ thing. send the libs into conniptions, have adobe photoshop make trump take out Charlie Rose, who only ever punches way above his weight. woe is him to see what he sees and spout such incoherent, irrelevant, obfuscating, dangerous propaganda.
since we are quoting the tempest, it would be fun to see mikey pence or capo don trump or schumer or warren or after-bern or bezos as the royals, the nobility in act 1, scene 1. toss ’em overbroad and look! they drown just like everybody else.
way-ull, if they drown like everybody else…it means they weren’t witches. ;-) by the by, you may have seen reports (wsws?) that liz warren want more troops for afghanistan. go lizzie.
but ha on a photoshop of herr T takin’ out the mostest smartest, mostest pinnacleist of the self-adulating renaissance man.
got a date to be a hummus production line now; chickpeas are all cooked up an cooled, all the other ingredients are standing at attention waiting for me to give them their marching orders…into the food processor. but for now, while i was searching for more on a few of the lies, obfuscations, etc. on libya, i came across this from 2011; wish i’d seen it back in the day. even a scan says it’s gold, including competing media stores even back then. the many links in heading 8 to cia fronts looks great. more soon, i hope. been looking at VZ for too many hours already today; ay yi yi.
Maximilian Forte’s August 2011 ‘The Top Ten Myths in the War Against Libya’, counterpunch
And the premier fukking Family of burning Bushs : https://jackpineradicals.com/boards/topic/hillary-clintons-role-model-poppy-bush/
ha! she’s such a populist economic champion, too. and herbert walker lost cuz: ‘read my lips, no new taxes!’?
but shhhhh: don’t tell bruce! no moar PNAC: ‘Neocons Enlist in Anti-Trump #Resistance’, July 15, 2017, consortium news, james carden
“The Alliance,” reads the statement, “will work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.”
why are we in Afghanistan? think there’s a relation b/n imperial policy & opium? how about we ask all the depressed & anxious people in this country where they get their addictions from? if your answer was, “my doctor,” then uncle sam has some ACA for you! all this sturm und drang over this ACA turd. that our gov’t is in Afghanistan in order to create addiction as part of imperial policy is crazy talk. facts are stupid things. and hey, addicts make great fodder – for prisons. and we are defoliating Columbia & flooding mexico w/guns in order to do what again w/cocaine? probably not arming iran this time around, just something equally as stupid & vile. manufacturing a drug crisis from the misery of the population is big business.
“which Darth is in charge of the Death Star???” I don’t know, some variation on Darth Shopping Maul? buy Elon, buy clean coal, whatever you do, buy & save.
music today, in order to be truthful, must communicate directly the experience of suffering – Mephistopheles, in Mann’s Faust. no more happy songs. no owls this morning. how will we know if the owls are or are not what they seem if they are all dead?
What manner of thing is a crocodile?
It is what it is. And its tears are wet.-antony & cleopatra
well, lizzie warren didn’t say ‘more troops for more opium’ exactly, “peoples’ patience might run out eventually…”. mccrankypants was predictable: gotta show the world we can win after 16 years else who will believe we have the strongest military, tra la la.
wonder if that brain tumor was part of what made him so belligerent and crazy? what a relief it was to know that HRWB had alz for so long, as in: ‘don’t cry for me, argentina’. yes, the bartok is an homage to…pain.
“A solution needs to have a military angle, but also an economic and diplomatic plan. It needs to involve domestic political reconciliation, and it needs to be regional in nature.” warren endorses the Kissinger-esque, McCain-approved “we’ll bomb them into peace talks” approach to Afghanistan, while spouting such deeplinger thoughts as “a solution” must be regional & multi-faceted. cuz like you know Afghanistan is like you know a region & stuff. w/lots of stuff, like, happening. and stuff. lots of strands to keep her in head. she’s pretty clear in her enthusiasm for more bloodshed. don’t you feel more smarter listening to her prattle on about nothing? does she have beliefs? or just poses she adopts for election time?
let’s not draw any conclusions from the limits of acceptable political discourse of now candidate for life liz warren. something tells me some of her other enthusiasms will not be quite so energy-infused as her interest in increasing the military’s MOAB-sized “footprint” in Afghanistan. or VZ, or Syria, or anywhere else.
wifi’s up again, but for how long? a few hours ago i’d tried to make a comment akin to: yes, warren rehearsing to be commander-in chief twaddle, a few other sentences, and ‘will someone please read my new VZ coup diary?’ wifi blew out as i clicked submit.
electrical storms from the north and south converging here, the civil war of lightning. i’ll need to shut down again in a minute, lest…being online attracts the attention of the gods of fire and light.
I read it.
civility as the masquerade of barbarity: we have the Hallmark channel gushing tear duct of the week show over McCain getting cancer (like Tom Jones said, it happens all the time). But any suggestion that such sympathy is a complete perversion when spent on this walking toxic waste dump of a man of whom the best thing that could be said is that he might have been a good man if he’d spent every day of his life in tiger cages being tortured by the Vietnamese*. am I being too harsh? mr. dumped his first wife in similar circumstances? what is being too harsh for this animated pile of dung, this shit golem parading as a person?
*a stereotype of POW’s in Vietnam? too many “Deer Hunter” movies?
how odd that my comment made it thru. but i hold no pity for him, and am always disgusted by all the virtue signaling paens to pity for war criminals and the like. i’m glad i haven’t seen the programming, and i reckon twitter is full of selfies w/ mccrankypants. ‘let’s give him some love and heal him.’ is there a #johnmcainstumor yet?
oh, bother. i’d thought i’d read some words like “he sang like a canary…” but i couldn’t remember where i’d read them. anyhoo, i just found them again on my favorite tankie’s twitter account pointing to st.clair/cockburn’s reprise, ‘war criminal or hero’. can’t say i’m looking forward to reading it, but…i will read it as i can make time. and maybe you already have.
oh and let’s all remember that poor tumor this a.m. being stuck in McCain’s “brain” cannot be easy.
Gawd, you should have seen Daily Kos during that time, and it was led by none other than Meteor Blades, who has a step daughter or some such thing from Libya so he supposedly had a personal interest. They ate that up and were vehemently pro- war against the “dictator” Gaddafi. There was this guy named Clay Claiborne who regularly posted corporate media propaganda about the Libya war in I was literally the only one pushing back. I remember a couple of his diaries making the rec list and I was the only one giving it a flag. In retrospect, that was fucking amazing. Claiborne eventually got banned because his shit was too extreme, showing what dupes the entire site was, and I followed not long after because it was too much to fight.
hey, old hippies peace, nice to see you. yep, i had quite a few rows over it back in the day myself, and ended up vacating a website that i was co-adminisrating (administering?) over it all. add juan cole (informed comment) to the list of mega-supporters, iirc he had a gurlfriend there who ‘told him the truth’ of gadaffi. he has since denied ever having been such a cheerleader, though. courage of convictions, see?
never read at Kos much, but i do remember the name meteor blades. let’s go see what he’s up to, okay? oh, lookie! the Power! ;-)