It's pitiful, but scarcely surprising. After all the endless disclosures of Nato's lies concerning its onslaughts on the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, and the hundreds of postmortems and official inquiries into the propaganda blitz before the attack on Iraq in 2003, the Western press is more gullible regarding Libya, less inclined to question official claims than in those earlier failures. The bar was already low, but now that those supposed lessons have been acknowledged and ignored, it has been lowered even further. Who can argue with a straight face that UN Resolution 1973, passed on March 17, permits efforts to assassinate Gaddafi by bombs and missiles or escalations in the arsenal of regime change, such as the deployment of British Apache helicopters or the intense bombing of Tripoli on Tuesday? A hundred years from now this UN/Nato intervention will be seen as a shameless imperial enterprise in the old style, with the increasingly ridiculous rationale of a mission "to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas", as hollow as the self-righteous British claims that the conquest of India was primarily about saving widows from suttee. In the past few weeks we have had amply documented records of ferocious repression across the Middle East. There are body counts and vivid reports out of Syria. The violence that finally prompted President Saleh's flight from Yemen to Saudi Arabia was relayed in graphic reportage. Admittedly, the US press has been less energetic in relaying the savageries being inflicted on erstwhile democracy-seekers in Bahrain, thus reflecting the desire of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton that the topic not be mentioned. Whereas 'Libya' appears at least 14 times in the three major declarations issued at the recent G8 summit in Deauville, and 'Syria' 12 times, 'Bahrain' appears not at all. Contrast these detailed reports with the amazing vagueness of news stories coming out of Libya. Here, remember, we have a regime accused in Resolution 1973 of "widespread and systematic attacks... against the civilian population [that] may amount to crimes against humanity." We have a press corps and insurgents ready and eager to report anything discreditable to the Gaddafi regime. Yet since mid-February the reporting out of Libya has had a striking lack of persuasive documentation of butcheries or abuses commensurate with the language lavished on the regime's presumptive conduct. Though human rights groups have furnished some detailed accounts of specific repressions, time and again one reads vague phrases like "thousands reportedly killed by Gaddafi's mercenaries" or Gaddafi "massacring his own people," delivered without the slightest effort to furnish supporting evidence. This is not said out of any singular respect for Gaddafi. But it was the second-hand allegation of fearsome massacres that drove both news coverage and UN activities - particularly in the early stage, when UN Resolution 1970 was adopted, calling for sanctions and the referral of Gaddafi's closest circle to the International Criminal Court, for an investigation, which Louis Moreno-Ocampo almost immediately agreed to do on March 3. News reports in mid-March, such as those by McClatchy reporters Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and Shashank Bengali, contain no claims of anything approaching a "crime against humanity," the allegation Filed under: Libya, Colonel Gaddafi, Gaddafi war crimes, Arab Spring Bahrain, War crimes, Syria, Nato Libya, Libya Nato, Libya bombing, Alexander Cockburn, Invasion, US foreign policy, Barack Obama LibyaLibya: does Nato have any pretext for its onslaught?
JUNE 9, 2011
Read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/80092,news-comment,news-politics,alexander-cockburn-wheres-the-evidence-of-gaddafis-war-crimes-in-libya?DCMP=NLC-daily#ixzz1OnkSpxLV
Thursday, 9 June 2011
Amid the allegations of rape and butchery – where is the supporting documentation?
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