Washington DC, March 24, 2011 — The current military attack on Libya has been motivated by UN Security Council resolution 1973 with the need to protect civilians. Statements by President Obama, British Prime Minister Cameron, French President Sarkozy, and other leaders have stressed the humanitarian nature of the intervention, which is said to aim at preventing a massacre of pro-democracy forces and human rights advocates by the Qaddafi regime. But at the same time, many commentators have voiced anxiety because of the mystery which surrounds the anti-Qaddafi transitional government which emerged at the beginning of March in the city of Benghazi, located in the Cyrenaica district of north-eastern Libya. This government has already been recognized by France and Portugal as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people. The rebel council seems to be composed of just over 30 delegates, many of whom are enveloped in obscurity. In addition, the names of more than a dozen members of the rebel council are being kept secret, allegedly to protect them from the vengeance of Qaddafi. But there may be other reasons for the anonymity of these figures. Despite much uncertainty, the United Nations and its several key NATO countries, including the United States, have rushed forward to assist the armed forces of this rebel regime with air strikes, leading to the loss of one or two coalition aircraft and the prospect of heavier losses to come, especially if there should be an invasion. It is high time that American and European publics learned something more about this rebel regime which is supposed to represent a democratic and humanitarian alternative to Gaddafi. The rebels are clearly not civilians, but an armed force. What kind of an armed force? Since many of the rebel leaders are so difficult to research from afar, and since a sociological profile of the rebels cannot be done on the ground in the midst of warfare, perhaps the typical methods of social history can be called on for help. Is there a way for us to gain deeper insight into the climate of opinion which prevails in such northeastern Libyan cities as Benghazi, Tobruk, and Darnah, the main population centers of the rebellion? It turns out that there is, in the form of a December 2007 West Point study examining the background of foreign guerrilla fighters — jihadis or mujahedin, including suicide bombers — crossing the Syrian border into Iraq during the 2006-2007 timeframe, under the auspices of the international terrorist organization Al Qaeda. This study is based on a mass of about 600 Al Qaeda personnel files which were captured by US forces in the fall of 2007, and analyzed at West Point using a methodology which we will discuss after having presented the main findings. The resulting study1 permits us to make important findings about the mentality and belief structures of the northeastern Libyan population that is furnishing the basis for the rebellion, permitting important conclusions about the political nature of the anti-Qaddafi revolt in these areas. The most striking finding which emerges from the West Point study is that the corridor which goes from Benghazi to Tobruk, passing through the city of Darnah (also transliterated as Derna) them represents one of the greatest concentrations of jihadi terrorists to be found anywhere in the world, and by some measures can be regarded as the leading source of suicide bombers anywhere on the planet. Darnah, with one terrorist fighter sent into Iraq to kill Americans for every 1,000 to 1,500 persons of population, emerges as suicide bomber heaven, easily surpassing the closest competitor, which was Riyad, Saudi Arabia. According to West Point authors Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman, Saudi Arabia took first place as regards absolute numbers of jihadis sent to combat the United States and other coalition members in Iraq during the time frame in question. Libya, a country less than one fourth as populous, took second place. Saudi Arabia sent 41% of the fighters. According to Felter and Fishman, “Libya was the next most common country of origin, with 18.8% (112) of the fighters listing their nationality stating they hailed from Libya.” Other much larger countries were far behind: “Syria, Yemen, and Algeria were the next most common origin countries with 8.2% (49), 8.1% (48), and 7.2% (43), respectively. Moroccans accounted for 6.1% (36) of the records and Jordanians 1.9% (11).”2 This means that almost one fifth of the foreign fighters entering Iraq across the Syrian border came from Libya, a country of just over 6 million people. A higher proportion of Libyans were interested in fighting in Iraq than any other country contributing mujahedin. Felter and Fishman point out: “Almost 19 percent of the fighters in the Sinjar Records came from Libya alone. Furthermore, Libya contributed far more fighters per capita than any other nationality in the Sinjar Records, including Saudi Arabia.” (See the chart from the West Point report, page 9)3 But since the Al Qaeda personnel files contain the residence or hometown of the foreign fighters in question, we can determine that the desire to travel to Iraq to kill Americans was not evenly distributed across Libya, but was highly concentrated precisely in those areas around Benghazi which are today the epicenters of the revolt against Colonel Gaddafi which the US, Britain, France, and others are so eagerly supporting. As Daya Gamage of the Asia Tribune comments in a recent article on the West Point study, “…alarmingly for Western policymakers, most of the fighters came from eastern Libya, the center of the current uprising against Muammar el-Qaddafi. The eastern Libyan city of Darnah sent more fighters to Iraq than any other single city or town, according to the West Point report. It noted that 52 militants came to Iraq from Darnah, a city of just 80,000 people (the second-largest source of fighters was Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which has a population of more than 4 million). Benghazi, the capital of Libya’s provisional government declared by the anti-Qaddafi rebels, sent in 21 fighters, again a disproportionate number of the whole.”4 Obscure Darnah edged out metropolitan Riyadh by 52 fighters to 51. Qaddafi’s stronghold of Tripoli, by contrast, barely shows up in the statistics at all. (See chart from West Point report, page 12) What explains this extraordinary concentration of anti-American fighters in Benghazi and Darnah? The answer seems related to extremist schools of theology and politics which flourished in these areas. As the West Point report notes: “Both Darnah and Benghazi have long been associated with Islamic militancy in Libya.” These areas are in theological and tribal conflict with the central government of Colonel Gaddafi, in addition to being politically opposed to him. Whether such a theological conflict is worth the deaths of still more American and European soldiers is a question which needs urgently to be answered. Felter and Fishman remark that “The vast majority of Libyan fighters that included their hometown in the Sinjar Records resided in the country’s northeast, particularly the coastal cities of Darnah 60.2% (52) and Benghazi 23.9% (21). Both Darnah and Benghazi have long been associated with Islamic militancy in Libya, in particular for an uprising by Islamist organizations in the mid-1990s. The Libyan government blamed the uprising on ‘infiltrators from the Sudan and Egypt’ and one group—the Libyan Fighting Group (jama-ah al-libiyah al-muqatilah)—claimed to have Afghan veterans in its ranks. The Libyan uprisings became extraordinarily violent.”5 Continue reading The CIA’s Libya Rebels: The Same Terrorists who Killed US, NATO Troops in Iraq Washington DC, March 19 – Late today US and British cruise missiles joined with French and other NATO combat aircraft in Operation Odyssey Dawn/Operation Ellamy, a neo-imperialist bombing attack under fake humanitarian cover against the sovereign state of Libya. Acting under UN Security Council resolution 1973, US naval forces in the Mediterranean on Saturday night local time fired 112 cruise missiles at targets which the Pentagon claimed were related to Libya’s air defense system. But Mohammed al-Zawi, the Secretary General of the Libyan Parliament, told a Tripoli press conference that the “barbaric armed attack” and “savage aggression” had hit residential areas and office buildings as well as military targets, filling the hospitals of Tripoli and Misurata with civilian victims. Zawi accused the foreign powers of acting to protect a rebel leadership which contains notorious terrorist elements. The Libyan government repeated its request for the UN to send international observers to report objectively on events in Libya. The attacking forces are expected to deploy more cruise missiles, Predator drones, and bombers, seeking to destroy the Libyan air defense system as a prelude to the systematic decimation of Libyan ground units. International observers have noted that US intelligence about Libya may be substandard, and that many cruise missiles may indeed have struck non-military targets. Libya had responded to the UN vote by declaring a cease-fire, but Obama and Cameron brushed that aside. On Saturday, France 24 and al-Jazeera of Qatar, international propaganda networks hyping the attacks, broadcast hysterical reports of Qaddafi’s forces allegedly attacking the rebel stronghold of Bengazi. They showed a picture of a jet fighter being shot down and claimed this proved Qaddafi was defying the UN by keeping up his air strikes. It later turned out that the destroyed plane had belonged to the rebel air force. Such coverage provided justification for the bombing attacks starting a few hours later. The parallels to the Kuwait incubator babies hoax of 1990 were evident. Qaddafi loyalists said Saturday’s fighting was caused by rebel assaults on government lines in the hopes of provoking an air attack, plus local residents defending themselves against the rebels. Continue reading Obama’s Bay of Pigs in Libya: Imperialist Aggression Shreds UN Charter Washington DC, March 15, 2011 – In the late winter of 2011, governments were for a few weeks falling like bowling pins all across the Middle East and far beyond. We are witnessing a massive orgy of deliberate destabilizations of previous client regimes on the part of the CIA, the State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the various NGOs and foundations which follow their lead. This has taken the form of a mad rampage of attempted color revolutions, people power coups, putsches by camarillas of generals, and incipient civil wars in such countries as Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others, with the tremors being felt as far away as Belarus and China. This tsunami of coups was signaled by three waves of document dumps by the “Wikileaks” limited hangout operation of the Anglo-American intelligence community, and has been supported and encouraged by the Obama regime up to the limits of what the traffic would bear in each case. During the most recent days, the time of the Libyan civil war, the old Suez 1956 coalition of aggressive and unreconstructed British and French neo-colonialists has also reemerged as a strange historical atavism. The Anglo-American Empire is now undergoing a collapse phase, although not caused by debt as claimed by the reactionary academic and imperialist planner Niall Ferguson at the “Aspen Ideas Festival” last July – a gathering where calls were raised for an immediate attack on Iran.1 The overthrow of existing governments and the breakup of existing national states, wherever possible, is intended to put the brakes on this collapse by preventing the national states from taking timely political action to save themselves from the imperialist shipwreck by defecting to other power centers, reversing existing alliances. The Anglo-American plan is for a super-national empire over the planet, with a neo-feudal war of all against all on the ground. The current goal of London and Washington is to stop a jailbreak by their former clients. Since the beginning of the end of the USSR in about 1980, the Middle East has been a unipolar Anglo-American show. The past 30 years of US-UK hegemony have been an historical oddity. Today, the Middle East is reverting to its more typical multi-polar complexion, with a revival of Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Turkish, and other interests – making a better deal for the Arabs more likely than under the recent Anglo-American-Israeli power monopoly. The current CIA destabilizations are supposed to abort this return of multipolarity to the Middle East. In my books Obama the Postmodern Coup: the Making of a Manchurian Candidate (April 2008) and Barack H. Obama: the Unauthorized Biography (August 2008) I warned that the next phase of US imperialism under Obama would rely increasingly on subversion, destabilization, color revolutions, soft power, mass manipulation, CIA people power coups, and postmodern putsches. A color revolution was attempted by the CIA in Iran in the summer of 2009, and ended in failure. Similar color revolutions were attempted during 2010 in Italy (the purple revolution), Macedonia, Thailand, and Belarus, among others. Now, with much of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe under CIA attack, the thesis of my 2008 books is definitively confirmed. The CIA limited hangout operation known as Wikileaks has just launched an attack against the president of Indonesia for bribery and corruption, signaling that a CIA attack will soon be under way against Jakarta as well. The current destabilization spree is a singular historical event. The French Revolution of 1789 was thoroughly fomented by Great Britain through economic warfare against France combined with the subversive activities of British intelligence chief Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Romilly of the Jacobin propaganda mill located on the palatial Bowood estate of Lord Shelburne in England. The 1848 wave of revolutions across Europe was organized and detonated by the British using the radical nationalists of Giuseppe Mazzini and the followers of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin against the authoritarian Holy Alliance governments of Prussia, Russia, and Metternich’s Austria. In 1989, Anglo-American intelligence worked hard to overthrow the Warsaw Pact Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But in each of these cases, it was an imperial power which was seeking to destabilize one or more of its rival or enemy states. Today, the large majority of the Middle East and other nations which have been destabilized would have to be classed as clients, allies, or partners of the United States and the British. We can call figures like Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Saleh of Yemen the satraps of viceroys of the current empire. Qaddafi qualifies too, although he has been a more recalcitrant vassal. The shocker this time around is that Washington and London are attacking their own assets. So what is happening? Continue reading Behind the 2011 Orgy of Destabilizations: Pre-Emptive Coups by the CIA to Halt an Exodus of US Satraps and Viceroys Leading to a Multipolar World Webster G. Tarpley on The Alex Jones Show2007 West Point Study Shows Benghazi-Darnah-Tobruk Area was a World Leader in Al Qaeda Suicide Bomber Recruitment
Darnah, northeast Libya: World Capital of Jihadis
Benghazi, Darnah Among Top Four Centers of Terrorist Recruitment; These Are Heroes of Democracy UN, NATO, US are Bombing Libya to Protect; 2007 West Point Combating Terrorism Center Study Proves the Case
Qaddafi resistance leads Obama to shift from color revolution charade to NATO aggression in Libya to save CIA rebel militia; UN Charter a dead letter; Command and control chaos as Italy rejects French-British command, Arab puppets reject NATO command; Craven Obama seeks low profile; Goal for Libya is tribal/warlord breakup on model of Sudan, Yemen, Serbia; Egypt protesters turn against imperialists; Putin likens war to “medieval crusade”
The Threatened Return of a Multi-Polar Middle East
Thursday, 31 March 2011
“Serpents, thirst, heat, and sand … Libya alone can present a multitude of woes that it would beseem men to fly from.”
Lucan, Pharsalia
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
March 24, 2011
Download West Point Study (pdf)
Webster G. Tarpley on The Alex Jones Show
March 22, 2011
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
March 21, 2011
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
March 19, 2011
Tarpley at anti-war rally at the White House, Washington DC, March 19, 2011
Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
March 15, 2011
1848: Giuseppe Mazzini, agent of the British Admiralty
Today: Carl Gershman, President of the Natiional Endowment for Democracy
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