#Libya : JackStraw - The PERVERTS In Power - The Torture Lovers Who Rule Us

By Chris Floyd

April 11, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- The ordeal of Fatima Bouchar, detailed by Ian Cobain in the Guardian, exemplifies the vile essence of the 'Terror War' being conducted by United States and its abject satellite, Great Britain, against large swathes of the world's population (including, increasingly, their own people). It is a case of brutal torture against an innocent, defenseless pregnant woman, whose only "crime" was to be married to a man who belonged to an organization which had long been supported by the US and UK -- until the geopolitics of oil made the group expendable. It is a tale of cowardice and cruelty, of hypocrisy and corruption, of deliberate atrocity that exacerbates the extremism it purports to combat. It is the emblem of an evil system ordered, countenanced, championed and protected at the very highest levels of the two governments -- a system that is very much still in operation today.

Bouchar was married to Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a member of a group seeking to overthrow Moamar Gadafy in Libya. For 10 years, members of the group had been given asylum in Britain and other countries. According to credible reports, they were being supported by British intelligence in their efforts to oust the Libyan dictator. Then Gadafy began negotiating his deal with George W. Bush and Tony Blair to open up Libyan oil fields to the West. Suddenly, his enemies became enemies of the West; as in Afghanistan, stalwart "freedom fighters" were transformed into "terrorists" overnight, when the agenda of the West's corporate overlords demanded it. (The same process would be reversed in 2011, after Gadafy had proved less servile than expected.)

At that point, Bouchar and her husband suddenly became bargaining chips in the backroom deal being greased in Washington, London and Tripoli. As proved by secret files and messages unearthed in Libya after Gadafy's fall, Bouchar and Belhaj were offered to Gadafy as a gift from the British, a sweetener to pave the way for his first meeting with Tony Blair -- and for the oil deals that swiftly followed.

Here is what happened to the couple in 2004 when they were detained in Thailand -- site of one of America's innumerable secret prisons -- as they tried to fly to the "friendly" confines of the UK. They were kidnapped by American agents at the behest of British intelligence. As Cobain writes:

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn't stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. "My left eye was closed when the tape was applied," she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. "But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony." The journey would last around 17 hours. ...

Belhaj says he was blindfolded, hooded, forced to wear ear defenders, and hung from hooks in his cell wall for what seemed to be hours. He says he was severely beaten. The ear defenders were removed only for him to be blasted with loud music, he says, or when he was interrogated by his US captors.

Bouchar says that when she was dragged away from her husband she feared he was going to be killed. "I thought: 'This is it.' I thought I would never see my husband again ... They took me into a cell, and they chained my left wrist to the wall and both my ankles to the floor. I could sit down but I couldn't move. There was a camera in the room, and every time I tried to move they rushed in. But there was no real communication. I wasn't questioned." Bouchar found it difficult to comprehend how she could be treated in this way: she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. "They knew I was pregnant," she says. "It was obvious." She says she was given water while chained up, but no food whatsoever. She was chained to the wall for five days. At the end of this period she was taped to the stretcher and put aboard the aircraft, unaware of where she was going or whether her husband was on board. At one point the aircraft landed, remained on the ground for a short period and then took off again. Only when it landed a second time did she hear a man grunting with pain, and realise her husband was nearby. ...

Two weeks after the couple were rendered to Libya, Tony Blair paid his first visit to the country, embracing Gaddafi and declaring that Libya had recognised "a common cause, with us, in the fight against al-Qaida extremism and terrorism". At the same time, in London, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110 million deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast. ...

As we noted here recently, these torture-renditions are by no means at an end. They thrive under the leadership of Barack Obama and David Cameron just as vigoously as they did under Bush and Blair. As Bill Blum put it last week:

Shortly after Obama's inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that "rendition" was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported: "Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States." ...

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had "left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules ... Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of 'rendition' — picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country."

Here, at least, is a promise that Obama has kept...read more

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31057.htm

#Libya : Jack Straw - The Torture Of Fatima Bouchar.

Straw In The Stink by Craig Murray


The Mail on Sunday is doing a very good job on the odious Jack Straw’s involvement in torture and persecution. I think that at last the truth has entered the established narrative. There is a little box in the report about my own evidence to Scotland Yard. I will type it out here as the Mail’s box format here is not internet searchable:

“Torture” Evidence Handed to the Yard

Further pressure was piled on Jack Straw last night over the “rendition” of Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhadj after sensitive documents were handed to Scotland tard detectives.
Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, passed the documents to police as part of the inquiry into the behaviour of Ministers and intelligence officials over the detention of Mr Belhadj in Bangkok in March 2004.
The opponent of Colonel Gadaffi was flown to Tripoli, where he claims he was tortured.

Mr Straw, who was Foreign Secretary at the time, has denied ever condoning the use of torture to extract information.
But the documents appear to cast doubt on that position.
One memo, headed “Uzbekistan: Intelligence Possibly Obtained Under Torture” contains minutes of a meeting Mr Murray held with senior Foreign and Commonwealth officials on March 8, 2003 to discuss his concern that the UK could be in breach of international law by possessing intelligence obtained by torture.

The minute, dated March 10 2003, quoted Linda Duffield, then the FCO’s Director of Wider Europe, apparently justifying the use of such material as part of the fight against terrorism....read more


http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/04/straw-in-the-stink/

#Libya :Warplanes bombed #Tripoli unidentified (April 20, 2012)

 http://bit.ly/I12tDw

ALGERIA ISP / Selon Akhbar Elmokawama Libya, des informations de la salle des opérations du CNT à Tripoli,

 transmises par un résistant que les rebelles se sont entrainé hier soir à Tripoli simulant une chute de Tripoli. Ils ont placé plusieurs groupes de rebelles dans des coins stratégiques de Tripoli pour sauver la ville rapidement.

Des avions de guerre non identifiés ont bombardé une des régions de Tripoli et des armes anti-aériennes ont ripostés.

Les organisateurs du congrès de la fédération de Barca ont décidé de remettre l'ancienne constitution de 1951 et d'activer l'article 188 qui annonce que Benghazi et Tripoli sont sont les capitales de la Libye.

#Libya :Abdelbaset al Megrahi On The Verge Of Death.

By Nafissa Assed.

Tripoli, 18 April:

Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, is said to be near the end of his life.  His family reports that he is now in a coma.

This TV grab from the Channel Four news website shows Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi in his hospital bed in Tripoli on August 30, 2009. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

The decision caused a great deal of anger in the UK and in the US — and it has not abated.

Libyan doctors say they have kept him alive with a brand-new hormone-based cancer drug called Abiraterone. This drug wasn’t even available in the UK where it was developed at the time he was released, but it had been hugely successful in clinical trials.  Although it is been almost three years since he was released, Al-Megrahi is still breathing but he is barely alive at the moment. His son Khlaled said last week: “My father is on his last breath.”

A close relative of Al-Megrahi told Libya Herald today that Al-Megrahi was rushed to Tripoli Medical Centre hospital last Wednesday, 11 April, after he fell unconscious and went into a coma. He spent three days at the hospital, receiving a blood transfusion, but the doctors released him yesterday and confirmed to the family that his health conditions are worsening quickly and his days are numbered. “Even if he is still breathing, he is clinically dead,” the doctors at the center told his family.

Al-Megrahi not only suffers from prostate cancer, he is also diabetic and has serious blood pressure issues, which are extra factors to his state of  health. That was the reason, his family said, why he kept falling in and out of coma at his house in Tripoli.  Last Saturday, 15 April, his family Tripoli was reported saying that they didn’t think he would make it next time.

Libya Herald phoned another close member of his family today, asking if it were possible to see  him, but he reported: “His doctors insist that no visitors be allowed into his room anymore; even his sons or any other family member cannot go to his room, due to his terribly weak immune system. His sons and family members only greet him through the window of his room”.

Al-Megrahi has been totally unconscious for over a week now —since last Wednesday, the day he was last hospitalised. His relative said: “He never stayed unconscious for that long”.

According to the family members, Al-Megrahi is being taken care of by his sister and his wife. They are the only two people who go into his room to feed and take care of him.  When he has been and hospitalized, one of his brothers stays with him. His family says it has refused to have any private nursing care at home for him.

http://www.libyaherald.com/abdelbaset-al-megrahi-on-the-verge-of-death/

#Libya: #Sarkozy Backpedals On Nuclear Help For Libya.

President and UMP party candidate for the 2012 French presidential elections Nicolas Sarkozy is cheered on by supporters as he arrives at a campaign rally in Arras, northern France on April 18. (Reuters)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy backpedalled from a denial and acknowledged on Wednesday that he had discussions with Muammar Gaddafi about selling a nuclear reactor to Libya some four years before Paris helped topple the late dictator in 2011.

France's readiness to provide a reactor to Gaddafi's Libya has become a hot issue ahead of the election, eclipsing Sarkozy's key role in helping drive the dictator from power last year, which he frequently portrays as one of his achievements.

Trailing in opinion polls four days from the first round of a presidential election, Sarkozy had said on Tuesday there was "never any question" of selling a reactor, denying an allegation from the former head of French nuclear group Areva.

Labelling the accusation on Wednesday as "grotesque," Sarkozy said only a seawater desalination plant had been under consideration in 2007, although he conceded that it would have required a reactor to meet its power needs.

"This project remained at the stage of a project because several months later Gaddafi descended into a folly of destruction," Sarkozy said in an interview with BFM TV.

"There was never the shadow of a possibility of it being made a reality."

However, Libya's popular uprising began much later, not until early 2011, and in the meantime Gaddafi made a state visit to Paris in December 2007 during which France agreed to help Libya build a desalination plant powered by a nuclear reactor, according to remarks by Sarkozy at the time.

"Could current or past Libya have the right to a seawater desalination plant with French technology to run the turbines?

The answer is yes," Sarkozy said.

"It was in line with all international rules, there was never any mystery."

http://www.emirates247.com/news/world/sarkozy-backpedals-on-nuclear-help-for-libya-2012-04-19-1.454721

#Libya : Jack Straw And The Torture Of Fatima Bouchar

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn’t stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. “My left eye was closed when the tape was applied,” she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. “But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony.” The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinary rendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar’s case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar’s husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.


This year, the Crown Prosecution Service announced police had launched an investigation into the “alleged rendition and alleged ill-treatment” of Bouchar and Belhaj, and a second operation in which a Libyan family of six were flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons.

It appears inevitable that Scotland Yard’s detectives will want to question the man who was foreign secretary at the time – Jack Straw.

Ten years before Bouchar’s abduction and rendition, many of her husband’s associates had been permitted to settle in Britain. These men were members of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah fi-Libya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an organisation formed in the early 1990s and dedicated to Gaddafi’s removal. The LIFG was not banned in the UK, and its members appear to have found the country a convenient place to gather and raise funds. There were even reports – officially denied – that MI6 encouraged the LIFG in an unsuccessful attempt on the dictator’s life.
But from 2002 the UK ceased to be such a safe haven for the LIFG. The US and UK governments were beginning to repair their relations with Gaddafi, a rapprochement that would soon see him abandon his WMD programme and open his country’s oil and gas reserves to western corporations....read more

http://aseerun.org/2012/04/10/will-fatima-bouchars-nightmare-hold-us-uk-accountable-for-extraordinary-renditions/

Libya : Syria - CIA And The Protected Suitcase Theory

A theory for which no evidence has been produced suggests that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had set up a protected drug route from Europe to the United States—allegedly called Operation Corea—which allowed Syrian drug dealers, led by Monzer al-Kassar (who was involved with Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal) to ship heroin to the U.S. using Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on Palestinian groups based in Syria.

The CIA allegedly protected the suitcases containing the drugs and made sure they were not searched. On the day of the bombing, as the theory goes, terrorists exchanged suitcases: one with drugs for one with a bomb.

Another version of this theory is that the CIA knew in advance this exchange would take place but let it happen anyway, because the protected drugs route was a rogue operation, and the American intelligence officers on PA 103 – Matthew Gannon and Maj. Charles McKee – had found out about it, and were on their way to Washington to tell their superiors.

The former version of the protected-suitcase theory was suggested in October 1989 by Yuval Aviv, the owner of Interfor Inc., a private investigation company based on Madison Avenue, New York. Aviv was a former Mossad officer who led the "wrath of god" team that assassinated a number of Palestinians who were believed to have been responsible for a massacre in 1972, when 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were killed by the Black September Palestinian group in Munich.  Aviv sold his story to Canadian journalist George Jonas, who published it in 1984 as Vengeance, later made into a movie entitled The Sword of Gideon and in 2005 used as the basis for Stephen Spielberg's movie Munich.

After PA 103, Aviv was employed by Pan Am as their lead investigator for the bombing. He submitted a report (the Interfor report) in October 1989, blaming the bombing on a CIA-protected drugs route (Barrons December 17, 1989). This scenario provided Pan Am with a credible defense against claims for compensation by relatives of victims, since, if the U.S. government had helped the bomb bypass Pan Am's security, the airline could hardly have been held liable. The Interfor report alleged inter alia that Khalid Jafaar, a Lebanese-American passenger with links to Hezbollah, had unwittingly brought the bomb on board thinking he was carrying drugs on behalf of Syrian drug dealers he supposedly worked for. However, the New York court, which heard the civil case lodged by the U.S. relatives, rejected the Interfor allegations for lack of evidence. Aviv was never interviewed by either the Scottish police or the FBI in connection with PA 103.

In 1990 the protected-suitcase theory was given a new lease of life by Lester Coleman in his book Trail of the Octopus. Coleman by his own admission was a self-proclaimed former freelance journalist-turned-informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Cyprus. Coleman claimed to have seen Khalid Jafaar in the DEA office in Nicosia, Cyprus once again implying that Jafaar was a drugs mule, but this time for the DEA instead of Syrian drug dealers.

Despite no evidence being advanced to support Coleman's claims, the theory gained some credence when British journalist Paul Foot wrote a glowing review of Coleman's book for the London Review of Books. But on March 31, 2004—four months before his death—Foot reverted to the orthodox Iran/PFLP-GC theory in an article he wrote for The Guardian entitled "Lockerbie's dirty secret."

A 1994 documentary film The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie, which included interviews with Lester Coleman and Yuval Aviv, seemed to favour a hybrid version embracing both the CIA-protected suitcase and the drugs mule versions of the theory. Shortly after the film was broadcast by Channel 4 television on May 11, 1995 Aviv was indicted on fraud charges. Aviv was quick to claim that these were trumped-up charges, and in due course they were dropped.

#Libya:Jack Straw faces legal action over Libya rendition claims

Libyan commander Abdel Hakim Belhaj takes legal action against former foreign secretary, alleging complicity in his torture

Jack Straw: civil action seeks to examine former foreign secretary's role in Belhaj's return to Libya. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

Ian Cobain

A former Libyan dissident who was abducted and flown to one of Muammar Gaddafi's prisons in a so-called rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 has started legal proceedings against Jack Straw, who was British foreign secretary at the time.

Lawyers representing Abdel Hakim Belhaj confirmed on Wednesday they had served papers on Straw alleging his complicity in the torture that Belhaj subsequently suffered, as well as misfeasance in public office.

Straw is already facing the prospect of being questioned by Scotland Yard detectives after an announcement by the Crown Prosecution Service earlier this year that a criminal investigation was being launched into the rendition operation.

Belhaj and his wife are alleging that Straw was complicit in the "torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, batteries and assaults" that they say were perpetrated on them by Thai and US agents, as well as Libyan authorities.

They are seeking damages from Straw for the trauma they suffered.

Documents discovered in an abandoned Libyan government office last September outlined the role that MI6 – and in particular its head of counterterrorism, Mark Allen – played in providing the intelligence that allowed the CIA to detain Belhaj and his pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, in Bangkok in March 2004.

Last week, Bouchar told the Guardian how she was chained to a wall for five days in a secret prison in Bangkok before being taped from head to foot and secured to a stretcher for the 17-hour flight to Tripoli.

Significantly, MI6 did not deny involvement when the documents were discovered: instead, well-placed Whitehall sources insisted the agency's actions were part of "ministerially authorised government policy".

There were reports at the weekend that MI6 confronted Straw with evidence that he was the minister who personally authorised the operation. This is said to have happened after Straw gave a radio interview last year in which he sought to distance himself from the affair, telling listeners that "no foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time".

Those reports triggered the decision by Belhaj's lawyers to serve legal papers on the former foreign secretary. Those papers also demand that Straw disclose documents relating to the rendition of a second Libyan dissident, Sami al-Saadi, who was abducted and flown to Libya a few days after Belhaj, along with his wife and four children.

Although Belhaj's lawyers have already launched proceedings against the British government, the latest action is against Straw personally, and is thought to be the first time proceedings of this kind have been taken against a former foreign secretary.

Sapna Malik of the London law firm firm Leigh Day said: "We have said all along that liability must follow the chain of command. These latest revelations bring us closer to that goal. If the former foreign secretary does not now own up to his role in this extraordinary affair, he will need to face the prospect of trying to defend his position in court."

Cori Crider of the legal charity Reprieve, which is also representing the two men, said: "When scandals like this break, the political paymasters almost never face the music. For once, there's a chance things might be different.

"We've said from the start that the minister responsible for this mess needed to admit their role. Now that we seem to know who it was, it's time for Jack Straw to account – and atone – for what he did."

Contacted on Wednesday, Straw said he had nothing to add to comments he made during the radio interview.

MI6 regularly requests foreign secretaries to "disapply" UK law in order to protect its officers from being prosecuted or sued in the UK as a result of their operations overseas.

The authorisations can be signed only by secretaries of state, and do not offer any protection for those politicians.

Last week, Tony Blair also faced renewed questions about the abduction of Belhaj and his wife. He replied that he had "no recollection" of the matter.

http://m.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/apr/18/jack-straw-libya-rendition?cat=politics&type=article

#Libya : #Lockerbie Revisited - People & Power

#Libya: The British Cover Up - How Many Civilians Did Britain Slaughter In Libya.

In an interview with Radio 4 on 2 September 2011, UK Prime Minister David Cameron claimed the UK conducted 20 per cent of all Nato strike sorties in Libya. He said: "Britain performed 1,600 of those, so around a fifth of strike sorties and I think that is punching, as it were, at our weight or even above our weight."

Funeral in Majer of civilians killed by NATO airstrikes on 8 August 2011.

Sometime late last August 8, NATO warplanes flying from Europe arrived over the Libyan farming village of Majer, where forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi were withdrawing and anti-Qaddafi forces were claiming ground.
Civilians were in motion, too — seeking pockets of safety away from the roaming sides, neither of which fought with precision or clear rules.


This is the type of situation in which air support can be especially risky and in which, even with a careful calculus of modern target planning, mistakes are likely.


The aircraft that night have never been publicly identified by NATO, which has treated their origins and nationalities as strict military secrets.


From the standpoint of public accountability and civilian control of the military, this position serves as a kind of case study in the costs of withholding unpleasant facts, effectively denying civilians and taxpayers of NATO’s member nations their responsibility to assess their military services’ performance — a task that is difficult enough in an allied operation, under which the roles and responsibilities of each nation’s forces can be hard to map.


Shortly before midnight, those as yet unidentified aviators released several laser-guided 500-pound bombs. The first bombs destroyed a house crowded with families. The next bombs destroyed two more. Then the aircraft struck again, survivors and local doctors say, dropping high-explosive ordnance on Libyans who had rushed to the victims’ aid.


The results, by the available evidence, were a horror. By the time NATO’s planes departed, at least 34 people had been killed, many of them women and small children, according to investigations by journalists, human-rights organizations and the United Nations. At least three dozen more people were wounded.


IN a report quietly made public early this month, a United Nations commission pointedly noted that after examining the destruction in Majer, interviewing survivors, reviewing documents and conducting an analysis of satellite imagery from before and after the attack, it found no evidence that “the site had a military purpose.”


It added that “it seems clear that those killed were all civilians.”


The commission recommended that NATO investigate this bloody occurrence (and several others that have been ferreted out in the face of repeated official denials) and follow its own practices in Afghanistan for taking responsibility for civilian casualties and making compensation payments.


Then a well-established pattern repeated itself. NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the alliance had examined the allegations of civilian casualties and, essentially, had nothing to account for. “This review process has confirmed that the targets we struck were legitimate military targets,” he said.


NATO presented no evidence supporting this claim. Instead, it has declined repeated requests — including from survivors — to release weapons-systems video or other material demonstrating that anyone but civilians was present where and when the bombs struck.


In previous statements, Mr. Rasmussen had said that there were no “confirmed” civilian casualties caused by NATO in the entire war. That ringing denial overlooked two points: NATO’s definition of a “confirmed casualty” is a casualty that has been investigated by NATO; and because the alliance has refused to look into credible allegations of the scores of civilian deaths that independent investigations have found it caused, it is impossible for the official tally to rise above zero.


The questions surrounding NATO’s attacks in Majer — the worst known case of the alliance’s causing civilian casualties in its campaign to protect civilians — are not just at the center of the struggle for a more complete sense of a complicated air campaign.
As more voices, including that of Senator John McCain, call for airstrikes against government forces in Syria, extending the principle of Responsibility to Protect to include another conflict, here is a straightforward matter of tactical importance. Learning from the mistakes in Libya could save lives in the next war and do much to help air forces fine-tune their training ahead of future campaigns.


In this context, it is important to remember that the United Nations did not cast the killings in Majer as war crimes, as it did many of the killings in Libya by pro- and anti-Qaddafi forces. Rather, impartial investigators largely agree that NATO painstakingly tried, within the limits of a war where almost all of the airstrikes were made without the help of tactical air controllers on the ground, to minimize risks to civilians.


The violence that killed civilians seems to have stemmed from assumptions, not intent. NATO statements make it clear it believed that the buildings leveled that night housed a loyalist command node. What led to such assumptions? What might have prevented these assumptions or tested them more fully before the ordnance was released? These are grounds for thoughtful reflection and study.


Was this a case of pilot error? Did one arm of the alliance’s effort — say, the intelligence analysts in Italy — select a target that aircraft from another nation were then sent, unaware of the analysts’ mistake, to destroy?


And this is where the questions run deeper. At issue is the commitment to an idea central to Western military thought: civilian control of the military. NATO’s refusal to identify the member state behind the Majer strikes has reduced the public’s ability to wrestle with difficult matters of the efficacy and limits of modern air power or to examine how it might be applied more carefully.


Among the alliance’s members, no one seriously questions the theory that military forces should fall under civilian political control. But in practice, it is difficult for the public of each member state to engage with these questions when NATO and the military forces that operate under its umbrella have refused to identify which countries’ forces were involved in any particular operation. (And yet in Afghanistan, NATO routinely identifies the nationality of forces participating in operations.)


The practice, when asked, is to refer enquirers to each participating nation’s military command, which, almost invariably, refers enquirers back to NATO — a loop that leads nowhere.


This means there is limited public review of, and even awareness of, lethal occurrences, even one as bloody as the strikes in Majer.

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/middle-east-and-north-africa/1291-the-cover-up-how-many-civilians-did-britain-slaughter-in-libya

#Libya : #Gaddafi Was NOT A Dictator - The War On Africa

http://ozyism.blogspot.co.nz/2011/08/top-five-myths-in-war-against-libya.html

#Libya #Syria #Iran #Kuwait #Bahrain #Yemen