Whistleblower: Libya "Vampire War" is About Oil, Lockerbie and CIA Heroin Op
By Susan Lindauer, former U.S. Asset who covered Libya at the United Nations from 1995 to 2003
Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don't care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what's really going on here?
According to the CIA, the following never happened"
Last October, US oil giants-- Chevron and Occidental Petroleum-- made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi's government. As the U.S. Asset who started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libyan diplomats, I had close ties to Libya's U.N. Mission from 1995 to 2003. Given my long involvement in the Lockerbie saga, I have continued to enjoy special access to high level intelligence gossip on Libya.
Last summer that gossip got juicy!
About July, I started hearing that Gadhaffi was exerting heavy pressure on U.S. and British oil companies to cough up special fees and kick backs to cover the costs of Libya's reimbursement to the families of Pan Am 103. Payment of damages for the Lockerbie bombing had been one of the chief conditions for ending U.N. sanctions on Libya that ran from 1992 until 2003. And of course the United Nations forced Gadhaffi to hand over two Libyan men for a special trial at The Hague, though everybody credible was fully conscious of Libya's innocence in the Lockerbie affair. (Only ignorant politicians trying to score publicity points say otherwise.)
Knowing Gadhaffi as well as I do, I was convinced that he'd done it. He'd bided his time until he could extort compensation from U.S. oil companies. He's a crafty leader, extremely intelligent and canny. That's exactly how he operates. And now he was taking his revenge. As expected, the U.S. was hopping mad about it. Gadhaffi wasn't playing the game the way the Oil Bloodsuckers wanted. The Vampire of our age--the Oil Industry--roams the earth, sucking the life out of every nation to feed its thirst for profits. Only when they got to Libya, Gadhaffi took on the role of a modern-day Robin Hood, who insisted on replenishing his people for the costs they'd suffered under U.N. sanctions.
Backing up a year earlier, in August 2009 the lone Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, Abdelbasset Megrahi, won a compassionate release from Scottish prison. Ostensibly, the British government and Scottish Courts granted Megrahi's request to die at home with dignity from advance stage cancer--in exchange for dropping a legal appeal packed with embarrassments for the European Courts. The decision to free Megrahi followed shocking revelations of corruption at the special Court of The Hague that handled the Lockerbie Trial. Prosecution witnesses confessed to receiving payments of $4 million each from the United States, in exchange for testimony against Megrahi, a mind-blowing allegation of judicial corruption.
The Lockerbie conviction was full of holes to begin with. Anybody who knows anything about terrorism in the 1980s knows the CIA got mixed up in heroin trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley during the hostage crisis in Lebanon. The Lockerbie conspiracy had been a false flag operation to kill off a joint CIA and Defense Intelligence investigation into kick backs from Islamic Jihad, in exchange for protecting the heroin transit network.
According to my own CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who'd been stationed in Lebanon and Syria at the time, the CIA had established a protected drug route from Lebanon to Europe and on to the United States. His statements support other sources that "Operation Corea" allowed Syrian drug dealers led by Monzer al-Kassar (also linked to Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal) to ship heroin to the U.S. ON Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on the hostages' whereabouts in Lebanon. The CIA allegedly made sure that suitcases carrying heroin were not searched at customs. Nicknamed the "Godfather of Terror," Al Kassar is now serving a prison sentence for conspiring with Colombian drug cartels to assassinate U.S. nationals.
Building up to Lockerbie, the Defense Intelligence team in Beirut, led by Maj. Charles Dennis McKee and Matthew Gannon, suspected that CIA infiltration of the heroin network might be prolonging the hostage crisis. If so, the consequence was severe. AP Reporter Terry Anderson got chained in a basement for 7 years, while 96 other high profile western hostages suffered beatings, mock executions and overall trauma. McKee's team raised the alarms in Washington that a CIA double agent profiting from the narco-dollars might be warning the hostage takers whenever their dragnet closed in. Washington sent a fact-finding team to Lebanon to gather evidence.
On the day it was blown out of the sky, Pan Am 103 was carrying that team of CIA and FBI investigators, the CIA's Deputy Chief assigned to Beirut, and three Defense Intelligence officers, including McKee and Gannon, on their way to Washington to deliver a report on the CIA's role in heroin trafficking, and the impact on terrorist financing and the hostage crisis. In short, everyone with direct knowledge of CIA kickbacks from heroin trafficking died on Pan Am 103. A suitcase packed with $500,000 worth of heroin was found in the wreckage. It belonged to investigators, as proof of the corruption.
The punch line was that the U.S. State Department issued an internal travel advisory, warning that government officials should get off that specific flight on that specific day, because Pan Am 103 was expected to get bombed. That's right, folks! The U.S. had prior knowledge of the attack.
Unforgivably, nobody told Charles McKee or Matthew Gannon. But other military officials and diplomats got pulled off the flight--making room for a group of students from Syracuse University traveling stand by for the Christmas holidays.
It was a monstrous act! But condemning Megrahi to cover up the CIA's role in heroin trafficking has struck many Lockerbie afficiandos as grossly unjust. Add the corruption of purchased testimony-- $4 million a pop-- and Megrahi's life sentence struck a nerve of obscenity.
It struck Gadhaffi as grievously offensive, as well--The United Nations had forced Libya to fork over $2.7 billion in damages to the Lockerbie families, a rate of $10 million for every death. Once it became clear the U.S. paid two key witnesses $4 million each to commit perjury, spook gossip throughout the summer was rife that Gadhaffi had taken bold action to demand compensation from U.S. (and probably British) oil corporations operating in Libya. More than likely, Libya's demands for kick backs and compensation extended to other European oil conglomerates as well--particularly France and Italy--who are now spearheading attacks on Libya.
I knew last summer there would be trouble. Payback would be a b--tch on both sides. You don't lock an innocent man in prison for 10 years on bogus charges of terrorism, and expect forgiveness. The United States and Britain had behaved with remarkable selfishness. You've got to admit that Gadhaffi's attempt to balance the scales of justice demonstrated a flair of righteous nationalism.
Alas, Gadhaffi was playing with fire, no matter how justified his complaint. You don't strike a tyrant without expecting a tyrant to strike back.
And that's exactly what's happening today.
Don't kid yourself. This is an oil war, and it smacks of imperialist double standards. Two articles by Prof. Chossudovsky at the Global Research Centre are must reading: "Operation Libya and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa" and "Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya?"
There is simply no justification for U.S. or NATO action against Libya. The U.N. charter acknowledges the rights of sovereign nations to put down rebellions against their own governments. Moreover, many observers have commented that plans for military intervention appear to have been much more advanced than U.S. and European leaders want to admit.
For myself, I know in my gut that war planning started months before the democratization movement kicked off throughout the Arab world--a lucky cover for U.S. and European oil policy. Perhaps too lucky.
As Chossudovsky writes, "Hundreds of US, British and French military advisers arrived in Cyrenaica, Libya's eastern breakaway province" on February 23 and 24-- seven (7) days after the start of Gadhaffi's domestic rebellion. "The advisers, including intelligence officers, were dropped from warships and missile boats at the coastal towns of Benghazi and Tobruk." (DEBKAfile, US military advisers in Cyrenaica, Feb. 25, 2011) Special forces on the ground in Eastern Libya provided covert support to the rebels." Eight British Special Forces commandos were arrested in the Benghazi region, while acting as military advisers to opposition forces, according to the Times of London.
We're supposed to believe the United States, Britain and Europe planned, coordinated and executed a full military intervention in 7 short days-- from the start of the Libyan rebellion in mid-February until military advisers appeared on the ground in Libya on February 23-24!
That's strategically impossible.
Nothing can persuade me that Gadhaffi's fate wasn't decided months ago, when Chevron and Occidental Petroleum took their whining to Capitol Hill, complaining that Gadhaffi's nationalism interfered with their oil profiteering. From that moment, military intervention was on the drawing board as surely as the Patriot Act got stuck in a drawer waiting for 9/11.
The message is simple: Challenge the oil corporations and your government and your people will pay the ultimate price: Give us your oil as cheaply as possible. Or die.
Don't kid yourself. Nobody gives a damn about suffering in Libya or Iraq. You don't bomb a village to save it. The U.S., Britain and NATO are the bullies of the neighborhood. The enforcers for Big Oil.
Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan have something in common. They have vast and extraordinary oil and mineral riches. As such, they are all victims of what I call the Vampire Wars. The Arab Princes get paid off, while the bloodsuckers pull the life blood out of the people. They're scarcely able to survive in their own wealthy societies. The people and the domestic economy are kept alive to uphold the social order, but they are depleted of the nourishment of their own national wealth.
The democratization movements are sending a warning that I don't think Big Oil, or their protectors in the U.S. and British governments understand or have figured out how to control. The Arab people are finished with this cycle of victimization. They've got their stakes out, and they're starting to figure out how to strike into the heart of these Vampires, sucking the life blood out of their nations.
And woe to the wicked when they do!
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Susan Lindauer was a U.S. Asset and one of the very first non-Arab Americans indicted on the Patriot Act, accused of acting as an "Iraqi Agent" for opposing the War. She was imprisoned on Carswell Air Force Base for a year without a trial, while the U.S. government reinvented Pre-War Intelligence and the success of anti-terrorism policy, which had been the focus of her work.
Former U.S. Intelligence Asset, Susan Lindauer covered Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria/Hezbollah from 1993 to 2003. She is the author of "Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq."
U.S. Considers Ground Troops In Libya As War Reaches Stalemate
NBC reported: "The use of an international ground force is a possible plan to bolster the Libyan rebels, [Army General Carter] Ham said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
Asked whether the U.S. would provide troops, Ham said, 'I suspect there might be some consideration of that. My personal view at this point would be that that's probably not the ideal circumstance, again for the regional reaction that having American boots on the ground would entail.'"
President Obama has consistently said that American troops are not an option, though the general's testimony clearly undermines those statements. It has been reported for weeks, however, that Libyan rebels do not have the equipment or the training to overcome Gaddafi's army.
The New York Times reported: "The rebel military, as it sometimes called, is not really a military at all. What is visible in battle here is less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising."
With battle reaching a plateau, diplomacy offers a way out of a protracted war, the AFP reported:
The key Western powers involved in the Libyan conflict were throwing their energies Wednesday into negotiating a solution, as the war between government and rebel forces dug deeper into a stalemate.
The United States, France and Britain are reaching out to both the rebels and, indirectly, to officials in Moamer Kadhafi's regime, looking for a way to bring them together in talks, officials for both sides said.
Envoys from those countries were in the opposition stronghold of Benghazi holding talks with rebel leaders, and Turkey -- the only Muslim member of NATO -- was maintaining communication with Kadhafi's circle.
But there was as yet no agreement on opening negotiations, with both sides imposing conditions.
The Wall Street Journal said the rebels have bolstered their credibility on the international stage by pursuing diplomatic relationships with the U.S. and others:
U.S. envoy Chris Stevens, a former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, met with members of the rebels' provisional government in talks both sides said were aimed at giving the Americans a better sense of the opposition leadership and how the U.S. can help them.
Hafiz Abdel Goga, a member of the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, said the council hoped the talks would lead to U.S. recognition of the rebel government, which has been formally recognized only by France, Qatar and Italy.
Rebel leaders have criticized NATO for its handling of the aerial attacks, especially now that evidence has emerged that multiple convoys of rebel troops have mistakenly been bombed by NATO jets. NATO, meanwhile, has continued to request American assistance in its Libya operations.
It appears the U.S. is being drawn deeper and deeper into a conflict that had been billed as a few-day endeavor.
Libya: the mission keeps on creeping
There is a whiff of panic about Cameron and Hague's strategy on Libya. To say it has been clueless is almost to be too kind
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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 April 2011 13.08 BST
- Article history
Since the beginning of the crisis in Libya there has been a whiff of panic about the diplomatic, humanitarian and military strategy pursued by the government of David Cameron. Acting on media reports of the bombing of peaceful demonstrations and widespread atrocities allegedly carried out by mercenaries – not all of which proved to be true – Britain pushed for sanctions against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi at the UN.
What followed next was a half-baked and ill-conceived air campaign to protect civilians, officially, but unofficially to ensure the removal of Gaddafi and his regime.
In purely military terms, it was ill-considered for several reasons.
Analysis of the stability of the regime, applied by officials and politicians to the crisis, has been woefully lacking. People have bought into the hype that the regime – particularly in the country's west – is more fragile than it is.
The same analysts have bought into another kind of hype as well – that which has described the rebels as a politically and militarily coherent entity that was nationally representative.
Now, confronted with the prospect of stalemate on the battlefield between the regime's forces, which have begun guarding their military assets from coalition air attacks, and a weak and disorganised opposition stalled in the desert, the same officials are pushing another bright idea.
This time the notion is that ex-British special forces trainers can – in perhaps no more than a month – transform the rebels into a proper fighting force. Not to win on the battlefield, it has to be said.
Certainly not to conquer Tripoli, which even Whitehall's bright sparks now recognise is a pipe dream.
No, their function would be to help the rebels break out of their power base in the east to apply sufficient pressure so that the ceasefire, when it comes, would be a ceasefire not on Gaddafi's terms – an increasing risk – but one that would insist on his departure.
To add to the sense of unreality surrounding the latest proposal to emerge from out of Whitehall, these British mercenaries would be paid for by Arab countries so as not to give the impression that somehow British soldiers – or ex-soldiers – were fighting Gaddafi loyalists at the British government's behest.
While it is clear that the serious events in Libya, where the regime targeted civilians demanding a more open and representative society, requires a strong international response, the tactics employed so far have been incoherent and muddled, the coalition riven by dangerous disagreements.
Amid all this, to say British strategy has been clueless is almost to be too kind. Cameron and William Hague have rushed into a potentially drawn-out air campaign with a principal partner – the US – which has little interest in fighting this war, and which has now removed most of its military assets from the battle.
With the aircraft necessary to prosecute the campaign – US Warthogs and Spectre gunships – departed, the air strategy, effective at first in grounding Libya's airforce and halting its armour, suddenly looks increasingly toothless. This not least because the coalition's allegedly "protective" campaign does not allow it to take measures to force the regime change that it really desires.
With a real lack of appetite for the use of foreign ground forces and no great enthusiasm either for arming the rebels, the room for manoeuvre for breaking any stalemate was always going to be tiny.
What is required now is realism, not least in the weak justification of the training plan through comparisons with the support given by the west to the Afghan Northern Alliance before the fall of the Taliban. The Northern Alliance, unlike Libya's rebels, was a reasonably cohesive, well-motivated and experienced force.
There is another comparison that has occasionally emerged in the last few weeks in support of the training argument. In November 1994, a then little-known organisation took on the contract – encouraged by the US government – to train Croatia's demoralised armed forces, which had been badly mauled by Serb opponents.
That company was MPRI and 10 months later – not a month, it should be noted – Croatian forces routed the Serbs in the Krajina duringOperation Storm, which led both to a huge refugee crisis and saw human rights abuses committed.
There is an expression for what is happening in Libya today – it is "mission creep" – in a mission that is dangerously ill defined and ambiguous, that with each move appears to throw its hand in ever more closely with a fractured opposition whose ability to govern meaningfully, even in Benghazi, remains open to question.
It is right that we protect those who cannot protect themselves.
What has not been debated is whether, as is increasingly becoming obvious, we should be taking sides in a civil war, and clumsily at that.
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SECRET HISTORY OF
THE LIBYAN UPRISING
Posted on Apr 4, 2011
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| U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Marc I. Lane |
By Barry Lando
What you’re probably going to read someday: U.N. Resolution 1973 authorized action to create a no-fly zone in Libya. It did not authorize the use of foreign troops on the ground. President Barack Obama seemed to accept that limitation when he made his famous “no U.S. boots on the ground” declaration—a statement that has been repeated by every U.S. spokesman since. Since Obama’s declaration however, it has been learned that, in fact, for several weeks CIA operatives have been active in Libya. They are there supposedly to find targets for the missile and rocket attacks of the U.S. and its allies, as well as to get some idea of who the opposition is that Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy et al. have chosen to support.
The joke was those CIA types are not wearing boots, but sneakers.
Recently we learned, via Al-Jazeera English, that there is a secret training site in eastern Libya where U.S. and Egyptian special forces are giving basic weapons training to selected rebels. Those rebels are also now receiving more sophisticated weapons. You can be sure those U.S. advisers are wearing boots.
That report was long expected. For when the secret history of this current struggle is written (there are already several books in the works), we will almost certainly learn that, despite Obama’s public protestations, he was advised before launching his Libyan adventure that U.S. “advisers” would more than likely also be needed.
Revelations will probably also make it clear that President Obama was told that those U.S. advisers could not just be limited to instructing the rebels how to fire their weapons, but would also have to train them and give them basic military skills. And it probably won’t stop there.
Those advisers are probably also—behind the scenes—already filling key command roles: advising the rebels when and how to advance, either directly or in liaison with special forces from other countries with boots on the ground in Libya, everyone doing his best to maintain the fiction that those “advisers” aren’t there. And that the rebels are calling their own shots.
For those American spooks and troops are not alone.
According to other reports, special “Smash Squads” from Britain’s famed SAS have also been on the ground in Libya for several weeks now pursuing similar missions.
Perhaps they’re the same SAS teams that Britain supposedly dispatched to train Moammar Gadhafi’s special forces a year or so back—part of the warming of relations between the two countries.
And considering the determination of Sarkozy to push for the original attacks, reports that elite French troops are also on the ground in Libya are almost certainly true as well.
The above would mesh with an unconfirmed report from a Pakistani newspaperclaiming: “According to an exclusive report confirmed by a Libyan diplomat in the region, the three Western states have landed their special forces troops in Cyrinacia and are now setting up their bases and training centres to reinforce the rebel forces who are resisting pro-Gadhafi forces in several adjoining areas.
“A Libyan official who requested not to be identified said that the U.S. and British military gurus were sent on Feb. 23 and 24 through American and French warships and small naval boats off Libyan ports of Benghazi and Tobruk.”
Which brings us to the declaration of an American military official briefing the press. When he was asked whether the coalition forces communicate with the rebels in Libya, he said no. “Regarding coordination with rebel forces, nothing. Our mission is to protect civilians,” said the official. “It’s not about the rebels, this is about protection of civilians,” he added.
>via: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/secret_history_of_the_libyan_upri...
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The Libyan Stalemate
Anonymous:
There was not that kind of widespread support for the protests in Benghazi, and even Zintan. If there had been so, we would not be in this kind of military stalemate, where the West is even considering a proposal for some kind of Saif [Gaddafi] type government. That is intolerable. There was not the kind of revolutionary turn in Libya [as opposed what happened in Egypt and Tunisia], and the leadership in Benghazi hastened a script that was written in a different accent. Of course Gaddafi said he would use violence. All States do that. That was to be expected. It is what happened in Yemen yesterday, with snipers killing at least 15 in Sanaa. The question is not what the State promises but who the leadership of a rebellion reads the tea leaves. I’m afraid they read it prematurely, and then in desperation had to call for air strikes–at the same time as their own leadership was usurped by CIA assets and so on. A very sad situation.
Separately also click here, here, here and here for more analyses.
>via: http://africasacountry.com/2011/04/05/the-libyan-stalemate/