July , 2011 -- CIA dusts off old blueprint for Libya in post-Qaddafi era....
The involvement of the ex-royal family of Libya in the Interim National Transitional Council of Libya restores the status quo ante for Libya as envisaged by the CIA in 1955.
A formerly Top Secret CIA National Intelligence Digest, dated April 1, 1955, provides the blueprint for how the CIA viewed Libya when King Idris, ousted in a 1969 coup by Muammar Qaddafi, ruled over the country. The document points out the stark differences in the 1950s between Tripolitania, which now is the base for Qaddafi's support, and Cyrenaica, where the INTC has established dominion with the help of NATO, the Gulf states, and Salafist guerrillas who once fought with Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan.
The CIA document points to the "cleavage between the Cyrenaicans, who presently dominate the federal government, and the more advanced and numerous Tripolitanians, who constitute two-thirds of the population." The Tripolitanians only achieved political parity in Libya after Qaddafi's coup and the later establishment of the Libyan "Jamahiriya."
The CIA was thrilled that under Idris, Libya played "only a secondary role" in the Arab League and was not at the forefront of the League's anti-Israel pronouncements or North African nationalism.
CIA support for Idris's regime was also based on the U.S.-Libyan air base agreements, which permitted the U.S. Air Force to establish a B-52 base at Wheelus field, near Tripoli. Qaddafi ordered the base out in 1969. The CIA document states: "US-Libyan air base agreements will provide Libya $40 million over the 20-year period of the agreement, with $4 million to be paid for the use of the base each year from 1954 through 1960, and one million dollars annually thereafter." The document also refers to a "small number of French troops in the Fezzan." The Fezzan is Libya's third province in the southern Sahel region where Qaddafi's forces and the rebels are currently vying for control. The largely black Libyans who populate the province are strongly pro-Qaddafi considering the anti-black racialist underpinnings of the INTC.
The CIA saw Libya's dependence on Western aid as a lever that the West was able to use to maintain influence over Libya: "Libya has to rely almost wholly upon foreign financial aid and technical assistance in order to carry out even a minimum development program. The UK at present provides over $10 million annually to Libya, which also receives some technical aid from the UN and the US."
The CIA also saw the transformation of Libya from a constitutional to an absolute monarchy as a way for the West to maintain its influence over the country "provided King Idris remains on the throne." The CIA analysis points out that Idris's death "might be followed by a period of intrigue during which the kingdom might be dismembered." Such "intrigue," as the document points out, "might impede, but almost certainly would not preclude, use of Libyan bases by the US and UK." The CIA predicted that after the Suez affair, the UK "might increase its interest in Libyan affairs" by stationing in Libya "some troops formerly in the Suez Zone." The CIA also reported that "King Idris has indicated that he would prefer the US to assume the role of 'protector.'"
As for France, the CIA concluded "because of strong resentment over French influence in the province of Fezzan and French repression in Morocco and Tunisia, relations with France will continue to be poor."
The backing of the INTC by the Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also has a basis in Turkish relations with the Libyan monarchy in the 1950s. The CIA document states that "Libya has recently developed diplomatic and military connections with Turkey. Further growth of Turkish influence would probably help to strengthen Libya's pro-Western orientation."
After the Qaddafi coup in 1969, the CIA used Libyan monarchists to stage a coup against the Libyan leader. In 1970, a nephew of Idris used a 8,000-man mercenary force assembled in Chad to invade and overthrow the Qaddafi government. Eleven coup plotters, including two former prime ministers, were arrested by Qaddafi's government and the coup and invasion plot failed. The monarchist coup plotters were financed and armed by the CIA.
In the late 1970s, the CIA changed course and several CIA agents were involved in a covert operation to provide Qaddafi with weapons and such "terrorist" implements as exploding lamps, ashtrays, coat hangars, teapots, according to a September 12, 1981, report in The Washington Post. The bombs were constructed at a hidden desert laboratory located in the one-time Winter Palace of King Idris. The CIA operation included CIA veteran Edwin P. Wilson and Frank E. Terpil. Wilson and Terpil were later convicted of criminal conspiracy in providing weapons to Libya but Wilson was later released from prison after it was discovered that the CIA itself conspired with the Justice Department to convict Wilson and Terpil as a method to provide "plausible deniability" for the CIA's involvement in the scheme and that Wilson was a victim of prosecutorial misconduct by the chief federal prosecutors, E. Lawrence Barcella and Carol E. Bruce.
The Post report cited two top-level former officials of the U.S. government as being involved with Wilson and Terpil: Paul Cyr, a former chief congressional liaison for the Army Materiel Command who became a top Washington lobbyist for the Federal Energy Administration, and William Weisenburger, a longtime CIA engineer who was fired by CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1977 for "assisting Wilson in constructing 10 prototype delayed-action timers for use in bombs in Libyan terrorist programs." Weisenburger later claimed that he had been "duped" by Wilson. Cyr ran behind-the-lines commando operations for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, during World War II.
Wilson's Libyan support operations were run by a network of front companies from offices located at 1425 K Street in Washington, DC. Wilson recruited as his secretary Eula Harper, the wife of John Henry Harper, an explosives expert for the CIA. Federal prosecutors maintained that Wilson's network included "former Central Intelligence Agency personnel, military special forces personnel, and U.S. corporations." However, it was later discovered that the Wilson operation, in fact, had the blessing of clandestine services officials of the CIA.
Prosecutors provided the following quote from Wilson gained from immunized grand jury testimony: "You know, the colonel [Qaddafi] may sometimes have some young colonels or something that are getting out of line that he wants to send a present to."
July , 2011 -- The politics of rape war crimes....
The unsubstantiated charge that military officers loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi presided over mass rapes of civilian women caught up in the Libyan civil war and has descended into political grandstanding by a top United Nations war crimes prosecutor, a UN human rights representative, and a group of U.S. State Department and White House officials. On April 28, two days before President Obama authorized U.S. warplanes and missiles to try to assassinate Qaddafi at Qaddafi's son's residence in Tripoli, Obama's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, provided a puzzled UN Security Council with "intelligence" that Qaddafi's troops were being issued the male sexual enhancement drug Viagra and were committing rapes of Libyan civilian women.
Rice's "intelligence" turned out not to be from CIA sources or National Security Agency intercepts of Libyan communications, but from the pages of the London-based tabloid, The Daily Mirror, the paper once edited by Piers Morgan, the celebrity gossip hound who took over host duties on Larry King's tabloid TV show on CNN.
Pentagon officials quickly discounted Rice's allegations, emphasizing that there was no intelligence that rape was being used as a weapon against either Libyan women or underage females, as has been the case in a number of other African nations mired in civil wars and insurgencies.
Rice also used the occasion of the UN Security Council meeting to charge that Iranian troops were helping Syria to quell anti-regime street demonstrations. Again, Rice offered no proof for her allegations to the chagrin of other UN Security Council representatives.
The global corporate media blindly ignored Rice's fable, save for a report from NBC News and a few other reports in newspapers like The Guardian. Rice's fable ranked alongside other war-time tall tales as the charge in 1990 that Saddam Hussein's invading troops had thrown babies in incubators on maternity room floors in a Kuwaiti hospital, Saddam Hussein attempting to obtain yellow cake uranium from Niger, and the charge that Saddam Hussein conspired with Al Qaeda to pull off the 9/11 attack on the United States.
Rice's bogus intelligence barrage was accomplished through close coordination with International Criminal Court chief prosecutor, Argentinean lawyer Luis Moreno Ocampo and senior staff of the ICC's Office of Prosecutor (OTP); Margot Wallstrom, the UN Secretary General's Special Envoy on Sexual Violence in Conflict, a Swedish Social Democratic politician and a much disliked European Commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communication Policy who was also called the EU's "Propaganda Commissioner;" Samantha Power, a top U.S. National Security Council foreign policy adviser to President Obama; and Dr. Cass Sunstein, Power's husband and the chief of the White House Office of Information Regulatory Affairs, who is also known as Obama's "information and propaganda czar."
And it was a propaganda campaign, as evidences by Sunstein's documented policy of "cognitive infiltration" of Internet websites and the media, that ensured that the Qaddafi troops and Viagra story went virtually unchallenged by major corporate news media outlets. Libyan officials in Tripoli told this editor in June that they had never before witnessed such a disinformation campaign in the international media, particularly with regard to central government Libyan troops raping Libyan women.
Ocampo, who has served as the ICC's chief prosecutor since 2003, said he was pursuing adding the Viagra distribution and rape charge to a list of other criminals charges issued against Qaddafi and his son, Seif al Islam al-Qaddafi, by the ICC. However, Ocampo, Rice, Power, and Wallstrom had the wrong suspect in the Viagra allegation. It was, in fact, the CIA that had distributed Viagra to Afghan warlords in return for fealty to Washington. The rapes by those using Viagra had occurred not in Libya, but far way in Afghanistan. It was Al Jazeera that originally aired video showing Viagra pill packages stamped with the Pfizer logo, the manufacturer of Viagra, that were allegedly retrieved from tanks and other military vehicles abandoned by Qaddafi's forces.
Al Jazeera has become a virtual propaganda arm for the NATO offensive against Libya and the news network's patron, the government of Qatar, is a member of the NATO coalition attacking Libya and an ally of the rebel government in Benghazi. It is not name-brand drugs, but generics, that dominated the Libyan pharmaceutical black market. Similar reports that Libyan rebels were relying on weapons seized from Libyan armories were belied by the fact that the rebels were using newly un-crated Fabrique National (FN) weapons calibered for NATO ammunition rounds. the Libyan army solely used Soviet-era weaponry, including Kalashnikov rifles.
Ocampo's charge about Viagra and raoe by Qaddafi's forces was also discounted by Cherif Bassiouni, UN Human Rights Council's chief investigator for Libyan human rights abuses. Bassiouni and a U.S. State and Justice Department legal adviser said that Ocampo was engaged in a "mass hysteria" campaign. Human Rights Watch also weighed in with skepticism about the Viagra claim. However, Human Rights Watch did document in a report how Libyan rebels were abusing Libyan civilians, something that was ignored by Ocampo and the ICC, which solely had Qaddafi and his officials in its legal gun sights.
As it turns out, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is not the only international organization official who has been charged with sexually abusing an African national, in Strauss-Kahn's case, Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean chambermaid at a Manhattan hotel.
Although his career was marked by prosecutions of Argentinean military members who took part in the "Dirty War" carried out by successive Argentine military juntas, Ocampo has been described as an "ambulance chaser" attorney, more interested in fame than in bringing Argentinean human rights abusers to justice. Ocampo represented some unpopular figures in Argentina, including Catholic priest Julio Grassi, charged with sexually abusing young boys, and former Argentine Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo, who was charged with fraud during the collapse of Argentina's economy. Moreno was accused of the intimidation and bribery of, as well as physical attacks on, key witnesses.
In October 2006, Christian Palme, the OTP's Public Information Adviser and a former intelligence analyst for Swedish military intelligence and a journalist for UPI and various Swedish media outlets, charged in an internal OTP memo that Ocampo "committed serious misconduct," to wit, "committing the crime of rape, or sexual assault, or sexual coercion, or sexual abuse" of a South African journalist a little over a year-and-a-half earlier. The alleged assault by Ocampo took place at the Lord Charles Hotel in South Africa's Western Cape province, near Cape Town. Ocampo had allegedly seized the journalist's house and car keys and refused to return them unless she agreed to have sex with the ICC's chief prosecutor. Ocampo has been at the forefront of rape investigations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Uganda, and Sudan, as well as Libya, and a number of African officials have been jailed in The Hague on charges that include mass rape of African women and girls.
Ocampo was speaking at the Transitional Justice and Human Security Conference along with Sadako Ogata, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees; Juan Mendez, the President of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and a UN special adviser for prevention of genocide; and Dr. Alex Boraine, chairperson of the ICTJ and an adviser to the International Freedom Center, which is also bankrolled by George Soros. ICTJ is partly funded by Soros's Open Society Institute. Other sponsors of the conference included the Soros-linked Foundation to Promote an Open Society, in addition to the CIA-linked Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
As Palme wrote in his report, Ocampo benefited from South Africa's problematic rape investigations by law enforcement. Palme wrote: "It is significant that the incident in Moreno-Ocampo’s guest suite in Lord Charles Hotel in Somerset West on 28 March 2005 took place in South Africa, a state where there are widespread problems with the manner in which the justice system deals with rape allegations. Representative community-based surveys have found that in the 17-48 age group there are 2070 incidents of rape or attempted rape per 100,000 women per year in South Africa. However, only 240 such incidents per 100,000 women per year, or just one case out of nine, are reported to the police."
ICC judges exonerated Ocampo and ordered destroyed all transcripts of conversations between Palme and Ocampo's official spokesperson, Yves Sorokobi. Ocampo fired Palme for "serious misconduct." The ICC's Disciplinary Advisory Board reversed Palme's dismissal following an appeal of the decision. Ocampo disregarded the board and Palme filed a second appeal with the International Labor Organization's Administrative Tribunal. Ocampo was found by the tribunal to have put the journalist in a position where she had no other recourse but to have intercourse with Ocampo and ruled that Ocampo had breached due process by firing Palme and ordered the ICC to pay Palme €248,000 in restitution. Human Rights Watch criticized Ocampo and the ICC for the treatment of Palme. However, Palme changed the subject by indicting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes. Among the charges were that Bashir's forces had committed rape in Darfur. Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) also charged that Ocampo was manufacturing charges against Bashir that related to genocide against Darfuris.
In fact, Ocampo was charged by Palme and others with routinely destroying critical evidence in war crimes cases. As the case of Viagra and Libya, it is clear that when Ocampo cannot manufacture or destroy evidence, he clearly creates it from whole cloth. Ocampo has been charged by many former OTP officials with running a virtual dictatorship inside the prosecutor's office.
Ocampo's arrest warrants for Bashir and Qaddafi have been roundly criticized by many current and former ICC officials, as well as by diplomats responsible for sensitive negotiations involving the governments in Khartoum and Tripoli. Nevertheless, Ocampo remains in his job and is given high marks by the usual "suspects," the neo-conservative media that continuously hones a pro-Israeli and pro-U.S. line....
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