Tag: Libya

NATO’s decision to intervene in Libya on humanitarian grounds has become an alarming and revealing assessment of America’s understanding of war. The way the “established” media portrayed the Libyan conflict, and its subsequent reception, illustrates our society’s failure to recognize how the power dynamics of plutocratic governance shape our realities.

The people of the world need to know that the corporate media is fabricating a massif of lies concerning the on-the-ground facts of the illegal war against the people of Libya by American and NATO forces. News reports represent Qaddafi as a hated and unpopular leader. Yet he has struggled harder than any Western leader to champion the rights of the poor and abolish racism against Black people. I wish the world could see the universal support of the young people for their government.

Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan delivered a scathing statement on the relentless bombing of Libya by NATO forces at a press conference held at United Nations Plaza Hotel Millennium in New York City on Wednesday, June 15, 2011.

Speculation has been rife that ammunition used by the U.S. and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) contain “depleted” uranium. What to make of these stories?

Despite the ongoing silence of the international press on the ground here in Libya, there is clear evidence that civilian targets have been hit and Libyan civilians injured and killed.

The NATO war against Libya is not a humanitarian endeavor. It is a blatant war of aggression and a violation of international law. Tripoli’s Nasser University was bombed. University staff were injured and killed. There is no justification for this.

In the CIA kick-started war on Libya, The New York Times report Monday by John F. Burns, calling Libyan civilian casualties “propaganda,” does not square with a series of WBAIX in-hospital interviews.

It is now 1:10 in the afternoon and as the daily life in Tripoli unfolds that includes teachers, staff and children at school, shopkeepers working in their businesses, streetsweepers sweeping the streets, people moving to and fro in cars, on bicycles and on foot, Tripoli has thus far since around 11:00 up to now, received at least 29 bombs. These bombs and missiles are not falling in empty spaces. Tripoli is a major metropolitan city of about 2 million people.

On April 4, the Haitian government announced that Michel Martelly won the recent fraudulent “elections” imposed on Haiti by the United States, France and Canada, the so-called “international community,” and sanctioned by the United Nations. Haiti now finds itself at a crossroads.

While thousands of mostly Black migrant workers fleeing the rebels' anti-Black racism are trapped in refugee camps on the Tunisian border, aid workers lounge in tourist hotels, Tripoli endures nightly bombings and the DIGNITY Delegation visits the Qaddafis' home hit on April 30 by bunker buster bombs fired from a U.S. warplane. Their son Seif and three small grandchildren were killed in the airstrike aimed at Col. Qaddafi, who was in the yard tending to animals in the children's petting zoo.

Gerald Perreira has lived and worked in Libya as an organizer and journalist and has been giving regular reports to Block Report Radio and the San Francisco Bay View newspaper. It is important to develop our own media and experts who can speak from an African perspective.

Today, independent journalists from across the United States departed on a truth-telling, fact-finding mission to Libya as debate in Congress on a resolution requiring an end to U.S. involvement was sidelined because it could actually have passed.

I visited the residence of the Qaddafi family, bombed to smithereens by NATO. For a leader, the house seemed small in comparison, say, to the former Clinton family home in Chappaqua or the Obama family home. It was a small house in a typical residential area in Tripoli, surrounded by dozens of other family homes.

How wonderful to be at a conference (the International Conference on Global Alliance Against Terrorism for a Just Peace in Tehran, Iran) where the word “love” is used; we are here because we love humankind. We are here from all corners of the earth; we are against terrorism; we want peace.

Last night’s NATO rocket attack on Tripoli is inexplicable. A civilian metropolitan area of around 2 million people, Tripoli sustained 22 to 25 bombings last night, rattling and breaking windows and glass and shaking the foundation of my hotel. The sky flashed red with explosions and more rockets from NATO jets cut through low clouds before exploding. I could taste the thick dust stirred up by the exploded bombs. I immediately thought about the depleted uranium munitions reportedly being used here – along with white phosphorus.

The rationale for the U.S. intervention in Libya is to protect vulnerable civilians from mass slaughter by the Libyan regime. Why has the U.S. has pursued a military path to “protect” civilians in Libya, when there is a far greater humanitarian crisis unfolding in the heart of Africa, in the Congo. President Obama has the diplomatic tools at his disposal to help alleviate the human suffering in the Congo but has not used them. Watch the videos and sign the petition.

Under the guise of a humanitarian mission, NATO and the combined militaries of the U.S., England and France are stealing Libya's sovereign wealth and resources. President Obama has already frozen US$30 billion that belongs to the Libyan Central Bank to inject into the U.S. economy.

It is a measure of how powerful the U.S. military is – and how poor the media is – that the nation wages war against peoples and countries it knows nothing about. How many of us know that many of the rebels in Libya don’t want democracy but the old kingdom restored?

Growing evidence suggests the West, led by France, engineered a political and military coup in Cote d’Ivoire to re-colonize that country. The president of Gambia says, "Western neo-colonialist sponsored agents in Africa ... are ready to walk on thousands of dead bodies to the presidency."

“All of our institutions have failed us if they do not use their power and act against this crime against humanity being carried out in Africa today. I received a call this morning from an Ivorian friend who calls it genocide what Sarkozy’s troops are doing there. Blood, blood, everywhere. Depleted uranium in Libya. Generations to come will suffer the health effects. We must try to stop President Obama. He has the power to say no. So far, he is good at saying yes to all the wrong people. So we must do more than we think we can. Anything less places more blood on everyone’s hands.” - Cynthia McKinney