The secret talks that nearly saved Gaddafi

The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University – has issued a report which undermines the established narrative of the war in Libya, laying bare the cold, hard reality of what Libya was at the outset of the war, what really happened in the early days, and what Libya has become today. Of course, responsibility for the tragic and lasting effects of that war should be laid at the feet of Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, and the other participants, in addition to those media outlets and NGOs that deliberately spread lies about the reality on the ground in Libya. All must be held accountable.

Contrary to Western media reports, Qaddafi did not initiate Libya’s violence by targeting peaceful protesters. The United Nations and Amnesty International have documented that in all four Libyan cities initially consumed by civil conflict in mid-February 2011—Benghazi, Al Bayda, Tripoli, and Misurata—violence was actually initiated by the protesters. The government responded to the rebels militarily but never intentionally targeted civilians or resorted to “indiscriminate” force, as Western media broadcast. Early press accounts exaggerated the death toll by a factor of ten, citing “more than 2,000 deaths” in Benghazi during the initial days of the uprising, whereas Human Rights Watch (HRW) later documented only 233 deaths across all of Libya in that period.

However, the hitherto suppressed truth is that it was the violent “protesters” (who should rightly be referred to as terrorists within the protests) who actually initiated the violence, using protesters as human shields.


Secondly, the notion that Gadhafi’s forces intentionally targeted civilians has been thoroughly debunked. Quite the contrary, the evidence now shows that Gaddafi went to great lengths to make sure that no civilians were harmed in the counter-terrorism operation as can be evidenced by the fact that “Qaddafi avoided targeting civilians…HRW reports that of the 949 people wounded [in Misrata] in the rebellion’s initial seven weeks, only 30 were women or children, meaning that Qaddafi’s forces focused narrowly on combatants.” Rather than ordering the wanton killing of civilians, Gaddafi attempted to maintain discipline among his forces such that they could stamp out insurgency with as little collateral damage as possible.

Third is the simple fact that all death tolls reported by the media leading up to the war were not only inaccurate, but wildly exaggerated beyond the parameters of “margin of error.” In fact, by overestimating the death toll by a factor of ten,

NATO forces were clearly engaged in an air war to destroy the military and political institutions of the Gaddafi government, rather than simply protecting civilians and providing support to rebels. Indeed, the NATO forces became the primary driver of the campaign against Gaddafi, allowing the rebels to take territory and, I might add, carry out their massacres of civilians.

Human rights Watch noted /specifically the forced displacement of the Tawergha ethnic group.

Naturally, these revelations came much too late to save the many innocent black Libyans, particularly in the Fezzan province, who were slaughtered by the rebels backed by US-NATO.

When NATO intervened in mid-March 2011, Qaddafi already had regained control of most of Libya, while the rebels were retreating rapidly toward Egypt. Thus, the conflict was about to end, barely six weeks after it started, at a toll of about 1,000 dead, including soldiers, rebels, and civilians caught in the crossfire. By intervening, NATO enabled the rebels to resume their attack, which prolonged the war for another seven months and caused at least 7,000 more deaths.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International should face serious investigations into criminal negligence, or at least gross misconduct, in terms of their dissemination of lies – lies which were used as the prime justification for the war in terms of how it was sold to the people. Is it a crime to inflate by 1000% casualty figures, the end result of which is a justification for war? If not, it should be, as without such propaganda, the war could never have been sold to the public.

Democracy Now is at the top of the list of guilty organizations. As Bruce Dixon, Managing Editor of Black Agenda Report, wrote at the height of the war: So like every other Western reporter, Anjali Kamat [Democracy Now’s Libya correspondent] never saw any “mercenaries,” just their oversized bullets. She never saw any mass graves of the hundreds or thousands allegedly killed by Khadaffi’s “heavy machine gun fire” either, or that would be on Democracy Now too.
It’s not. Nobody’s located the thousands of wounded survivors either, that must have been the result of shooting into crowds killing hundreds of people, and none of this has stopped Democracy Now from carrying the story just like Fox News or CNN or MSNBC…Something is really wrong with this picture. We have to wonder whether, at least as far as the war in Libya goes, whether Democracy Now is simply feeding us the line of corporate media, the Pentagon and the State Department rather than fulfilling the role of unembedded, independent journalists.

As Dixon points out, Democracy Now exhibited at the very least poor journalistic practice, and at worst, served as the left flank of the imperial propaganda machine. By faithfully reporting the “facts”, which have now been utterly discredited, Kamat and Democracy Now primed the pump of left progressive support for “humanitarian” war.

So too did Al Jazeera In fact, insiders have told me that a wave of resignations, forced resignations, and firings at Al Jazeera coincided with the refusal by some of the more principled journalists to suppress the truth of what was happening in Libya.


that Gaddafi’s soldiers were systematically raping women in Benghazi, and that they had been issued Viagra by their commanding officers. This claim, repeated by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay, and many others has since been debunked, with absolutely zero evidence ever surfacing to substantiate the allegation.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
https://journal-neo.org/2014/06/22/the-truth-of-libya-finally-goes-mainstream/

Not a big fan of Gaddafi. Besides, as the article states, his own people took care of the issue.