Here.
I have always thought that all of these wars were all about the money.
I remember in the run-up to that stupid Gulf War in 1991, I was arguing with my mechanic.
“It’s all about the money!” I said. “And the oil!”
My mechanic winked at me. “They all are.”
I checked him. “All wars are all about money?”
He shrugged his shoulders cynically. “Of course they are.”
That’s pretty sickening, isn’t it? You guys wonder why we socialists hate capitalism. Maybe now you are starting to get it.
So the French went to war to:
- Stop Ghaddafi’s Gold Dinar project, which was a threat France’s franc, which is used as reserve currency of choice (fiat currency) in Africa.
- Obtain (steal) Libya’s oil.
- Assert French domination over the region (French imperialism)
- Gain support for Sarkozy domestically (Bill Clinton wag to dog move).
- Assert French military power (by menacing Africa via French imperialism).
- Prevent Ghaddafi from gaining influence in what the French see as Francophone Africa.
Though the French-proposed U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 claimed the no-fly zone implemented over Libya was to protect civilians, an April 2011 email [archived here] sent to Hillary with the subject line “France’s client and Qaddafi’s gold” tells of less noble ambitions.
The email identifies French President Nicholas Sarkozy as leading the attack on Libya with five specific purposes in mind: to obtain Libyan oil, ensure French influence in the region, increase Sarkozy’s reputation domestically, assert French military power, and to prevent Gaddafi’s influence in what is considered “Francophone Africa.”
Most astounding is the lengthy section delineating the huge threat that Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves, estimated at “143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver,” posed to the French franc (CFA) circulating as a prime African currency. In place of the noble sounding “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine fed to the public, there is this “confidential” explanation of what was really driving the war [emphasis mine]:
This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).
(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.)
Though this internal email aims to summarize the motivating factors driving France’s (and by implication NATO’s) intervention in Libya, it is interesting to note that saving civilian lives is conspicuously absent from the briefing.
Instead, the great fear reported is that Libya might lead North Africa into a high degree of economic independence with a new pan-African currency.
French intelligence “discovered” a Libyan initiative to freely compete with European currency through a local alternative, and this had to be subverted through military aggression.
British, French and Egyptian special forces were on the ground almost immediately after the protests started (just like in Syria) training the Libyan rebels, already packed with fighters from Al Qaeda, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) – basically Libyan Al Qaeda – and other Salafist jihadis. US emails show that we knew full well that the Libyan rebels we were supporting and arming with a seemingly endless supply of small arms flowing across the Egyptian border had strong Al Qaeda links, but we kept supporting them and supplying them anyway.
The same intelligence email from Sydney Blumenthal also confirms what has become a well-known theme of Western supported insurgencies in the Middle East: the contradiction of special forces training militias that are simultaneously suspected of links to Al Qaeda.
Blumenthal relates that “an extremely sensitive source” confirmed that British, French, and Egyptian special operations units were training Libyan militants along the Egyptian-Libyan border, as well as in Benghazi suburbs.
While analysts have long speculated as to the “when and where” of Western ground troop presence in the Libyan War, this email serves as definitive proof that special forces were on the ground only within a month of the earliest protests which broke out in the middle to end of February 2011 in Benghazi.
By March 27 of what was commonly assumed a simple “popular uprising” external special operatives were already “overseeing the transfer of weapons and supplies to the rebels” including “a seemingly endless supply of AK47 assault rifles and ammunition.”
Yet only a few paragraphs after this admission, caution is voiced about the very militias these Western special forces were training because of concern that, “radical/terrorist groups such as the Libyan Fighting Groups and Al Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) are infiltrating the NLC and its military command.”
Of course, the war propaganda lies started up almost immediately,and the American people fell for all of them, just like they always do. Suckers!
The first lie was that Ghaddafi was supplying his troops with huge supplies of Viagra so they could go on a mass rape campaign against enemy civilians (that he was using rape as a weapon of war). This lie, started by the Libyan rebels, was quickly debunked, but the mass media and the US government continued promoting it for a long time. The origin of the mas rape lie appears to have been with DNC sleazeball Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary’s intelligence aide at the time.
An equally weird charge was that Ghaddafi was places dead bodies in civilian areas in as a staged PR hoax to accuse the Coalition of killing Libyan civilians. Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense, quickly said that the Pentagon had verified the hoaxed bodies story was true. No evidence has ever surfaced that the staged body hoax story was true. The ridiculous mass rape lie was soon parroted by Hillary’s henchwoman Samantha “humanitarian bomber” Power. Incredibly, Susan Rice, another Hillary acolyte, stood up in front of the UN Security Council and charged Libya with war crimes based on the mass rape lie.
Early in the Libyan conflict Secretary of State Clinton formally accused Gaddafi and his army of using mass rape as a tool of war. Though numerous international organizations, like Amnesty International, quickly debunked these claims, the charges were uncritically echoed by Western politicians and major media.
It seemed no matter how bizarre the conspiracy theory, as long as it painted Gaddafi and his supporters as monsters, and so long as it served the cause of prolonged military action in Libya, it was deemed credible by network news.
Two foremost examples are referenced in the latest batch of emails: the sensational claim that Gaddafi issued Viagra to his troops for mass rape, and the claim that bodies were “staged” by the Libyan government at NATO bombing sites to give the appearance of the Western coalition bombing civilians.
In a late March 2011 email, Blumenthal confesses to Hillary that,
I communicated more than a week ago on this story—Qaddafi placing bodies to create PR stunts about supposed civilian casualties as a result of Allied bombing—though underlining it was a rumor. But now, as you know, Robert gates gives credence to it. (See story below.)
Sources now say, again rumor (that is, this information comes from the rebel side and is unconfirmed independently by Western intelligence), that Qaddafi has adopted a rape policy and has even distributed Viagra to troops. The incident at the Tripoli press conference involving a woman claiming to be raped is likely to be part of a much larger outrage. Will seek further confirmation.
Not only did Defense Secretary Robert Gates promote his bizarre “staged bodies” theory on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” but the even stranger Viagra rape fiction made international headlines as U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice made a formal charge against Libya in front of the UN Security Council.
What this new email confirms is that not only was the State Department aware of the spurious nature of what Blumenthal calls “rumors” originating solely with the rebels, but did nothing to stop false information from rising to top officials who then gave them “credence.”
It appears, furthermore, that the Viagra mass rape hoax likely originated with Sidney Blumenthal himself.
Note
[1] The most comprehensive and well-documented study of the plight of black Libyans is contained in Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (publ. 2012, Baraka Books) by Maximilian Forte, Professor Anthropology and Sociology at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec.
This article was originally published at the Levant Report.
