No Good Guys Here

July 30, 2011 in Montana

by lizard

(Getty Images)

We will never know what would have happened in Libya had NATO not intervened. Those who think the intervention was justified will state a slaughter was stopped from happening, while some of those obnoxious skeptics may still be wondering who these rebels are, and if handing them the keys to Tripoli will mean better things for Libyans.

Unfortunately for the Rebels, there have been a few credibility issues they have had to deal with since the bombs started dropping:

The International Criminal Court (ICC) decided to issue arrest warrants for Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi, his son Seif al-Islam, and Abdullah Sanussi, the country’s intelligence chief, on Monday. The three men are wanted on charges of crimes against humanity for their roles in attacks on civilians – including peaceful demonstrators – in Tripoli, Benghazi, Misrata, and other Libyan towns.

While Western governments and the international media have seized the ICC indictment as a much-needed show of moral support for NATO’s controversial / fledgling military campaign, two of the world’s leading human rights organization – Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – have just announced that their independent, on-the-ground investigations found no credible evidence for the claim that Col. Qaddafi’s forces have used mass rape as a weapon of war. The NGO investigation did reveal that the rebels in Benghazi have repeatedly and knowingly made false claims or manufactured evidence – essentially to bolster their PR case against Col. Qaddafi.

false claims are not even the worst of it. There have been claims that Gaddafi loyalists have been lynched and beheaded, and Cynthia McKinney has sounded an alarm about Mistrata being “cleansed” by rebels of Black Libyans.

Then Gen. Abdul Fattah Younis turns up dead, killed by the side he defected to.

Alexander Cockburn has this to say:

It is surely one of the great strategic screw-ups in the history of war and intelligence analysis. In March, after the second UN Security Council resolution used by NATO to launch its bombing campaign, the predictions were that Tripoli and thus Ghadafi would fall within two or three weeks. Right and left alike, though not yrs truly, said it was a sure thing.

Yet, here the Guide still is, addressing rallies in Tripoli surrounded by a sixth of Libya’s entire population, while in the other end of the country, it seems that one faction in Benghazi, that of Mustapha Abdul Jalil, head of the rebel Transitional National Council, has just murdered Abdel Fatah Younis, commander of the Libyan rebel forces. There are various accounts, none of them attaching the slightest credence to Jalil’s faltering initial suggestions that it was Ghadafi’s guys who did it. One has Younis being taken prisoner on grounds of opening secret negotiations with Tripoli (very conceivably true), then taken to the desert and shot, along with his bodyguard of two colonels; another that he was tortured to death in Benghazi. Either way this renders moot Sen. John McCain’s letter last week to Jalil warning that credible accounts of serious human violations by the rebels were undercutting whatever support the NATO onslaught retained in Congress.

We are beginning to see some very graphic accounts and videos of the actual conduct of the rebels in torturing and executing prisoners and suspected Ghadafi loyalists in Benghazi, not to mention compulsory reimposition of the burka for women and kindred evidence of rabid fundamentalism among NATO’s clients.

Isn’t making life better for women one of the perks of “liberating” these heathen nations with our humanitarian airstrikes?

America’s foreign policy is stupid, dangerous, deceitful, and self-serving. If only it was about saving civilians. But as this non-war war drags on, it’s getting more and more difficult for the Obama administration to maintain their cover story.

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