“Neither
the intervention decision nor the regime
change decision was an
intelligence-heavy decision,” said one
senior intelligence official directly
involved with the administration’s
decision-making, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. “People weren’t
on the edge of their seats, intelligence
wasn’t driving the decision one way or
another.”
Instead
of relying on the Defense Department or
the intelligence community for analysis,
officials told The Times, the
White House trusted
Mrs. Clinton’s charge, which was
then supported by Ambassador to the
United Nations Susan E. Rice and
National Security Council member
Samantha Power, as reason enough for
war.
“Susan
Rice was involved in the Rwanda crisis
in 1994, Samantha Power wrote very
moving books about what happened in
Rwanda, and Hillary Clinton was also in
the background of that crisis as well,”
said Allen Lynch, a professor of
international relations at the
University of Virginia. “I think they
have all carried this with them as a
kind of guilt complex.”
Humanitarian crisis was not imminent
In 2003,
Gadhafi agreed to dismantle his
weapons of mass destruction and denounce
terrorism to re-establish relations with
the West. He later made reparations to
the families of those who died in the
bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over
Lockerbie, Scotland.
News
media frequently described the apparent
transformation as
Libya “coming in from the cold.”
Still, he
ruled
Libya with an iron grip, and by
February 2011 civil war raged throughout
the country. Loyalist forces mobilized
tanks and troops toward Benghazi,
creating a panicked mass exodus of
civilians toward Egypt.
Mrs. Clinton
met with Libyan rebel spokesman Mahmoud
Jibril in the Paris Westin hotel in
mid-March so she could vet the rebel
cause to unseat
Gadhafi. Forty-five minutes after
speaking with Mr. Jibril,
Mrs. Clinton was convinced that a
military intervention was needed.
“I talked
extensively about the dreams of a
democratic civil state where all Libyans
are equal a political participatory
system with no exclusions of any
Libyans, even the followers of
Gadhafi who did not commit crimes
against the Libyan people, and how the
international community should protect
civilians from a possible genocide like
the one [that] took place in Rwanda,”
Mr. Jibril told The Times. “I felt by
the end of the meeting, I passed the
test. Benghazi was saved.”
So on
March 17, 2011, the U.S. supported U.N.
Security Council Resolution 1973 for
military intervention in
Libya to help protect its people
from
Gadhafi’s forthcoming march on
Benghazi, where he threatened he would
“show no mercy” to resisters.
“In this
particular country —
Libya — at this particular moment,
we were faced with the prospect of
violence on a horrific scale,” Mr. Obama
declared in an address to the nation on
March 28. “We had a unique ability to
stop that violence: An international
mandate for action, a broad coalition
prepared to join us, the support of Arab
countries and a plea for help from the
Libyan people themselves.”
Yet Human
Rights Watch did not see the
humanitarian crisis as imminent.
“At that
point, we did not see the imminence of
massacres that would rise to
genocidelike levels,” said Sarah Leah
Whitson, executive director of the
Middle East and North Africa division
for Human Rights Watch. “Gadhafi’s
forces killed hundreds of overwhelmingly
unarmed protesters. There were threats
of Libyan forces approaching Benghazi,
but we didn’t feel that rose to the
level of imminent genocidelike
atrocities.”
Instead,
she said, the U.S. government was trying
to be at the forefront of the Arab
Spring, when many dictator-led countries
were turning to democracy.
“I think
the dynamic for the U.S. government was:
Things are changing fast, Tunisia has
fallen, Egypt has fallen, and we’d
better be on the front of this,
supporting a new government and not
being seen as supporting the old
government,” Ms. Whitson said.
Clinton
blocks
Gadhafi outreach
On the
day the
U.N. resolution was passed,
Mrs. Clinton ordered a general
within the
Pentagon to refuse to take a call
with
Gadhafi’s son
Seif and other high-level members
within the regime, to help negotiate a
resolution, the secret recordings
reveal.
A day
later, on March 18,
Gadhafi called for a cease-fire,
another action the administration
dismissed.
Soon, a
call was set up between the former U.S.
ambassador to
Libya, Gene Cretz, and
Gadhafi confidant Mohammed Ismael
during which Mr. Ismael confirmed that
the regime’s highest-ranking generals
were under orders not to fire upon
protesters.
“I told
him we were not targeting civilians and
Seif told him that,” Mr. Ismael told
The Times in an telephone interview this
month, recounting the fateful
conversation.
While
Mrs. Clinton urged the
Pentagon to cease its communications
with the Gadhafi regime, the
intelligence asset working with the
Joint Chiefs remained in contact for
months afterward.
“Everything I am getting from the
State Department is that they do not
care about being part of this. Secretary
Clinton does not want to negotiate
at all,” the
Pentagon intelligence asset told
Seif Gadhafi and his adviser on the
recordings.
Communication was so torn between the
Libyan regime and the
State Department that they had no
point of contact within the department
to even communicate whether they were
willing to accept the
U.N.’s mandates, former Libyan
officials said.
Mrs. Clinton
eventually named Mr. Cretz as the
official U.S. point of contact for the
Gadhafi regime. Mr. Cretz, the former
ambassador to
Libya, was removed from the country
in 2010 amid Libyan anger over
derogatory comments he made regarding
Gadhafi released by Wikileaks. As a
result, Mr. Cretz was not trusted or
liked by the family.
Shutting
the Gadhafis out of the conversation
allowed
Mrs. Clinton to pursue a solitary
point of view, said a senior
Pentagon official directly involved
with the intervention.
“The
decision to invade [Libya]
had already been made, so everything
coming out of the
State Department at that time was to
reinforce that decision,” the official
explained, speaking only on the
condition of anonymity for fear of
retribution.
As a
result, the
Pentagon went its own way and
established communications with
Seif Gadhafi through one of his
friends, a U.S. businessman, who acted
as an intermediary. The goal was to
identify a clear path and strategy
forward in
Libya — something that wasn’t
articulated by the
White House or
State Department at the time,
officials said.
“Our big
thing was: ‘What’s a good way out of
this, what’s a bridge to post-Gadhafi
conflict once the military stops and the
civilians take over, what’s it going to
look like?’” said a senior military
official involved in the planning, who
requested anonymity. “We had a hard time
coming up with that because once again
nobody knew what the lay of the clans
and stuff was going to be.
“The
impression we got from both the
businessman and from Seif was that the
situation is bad, but this [NATO
intervention] is even worse,” the
official said, confirming the sentiments
expressed on the audio recordings. “All
of these things don’t have to happen
this way, and it will be better for
Libya in the long run both
economically and politically if they
didn’t.”
Pentagon
looks for a way out
The
Pentagon wasn’t alone in questioning
the intervention.
The week
the
U.N. resolution authorizing military
force was passed, Sen. Jim Webb,
Virginia Democrat, expressed his own
concerns.
“We have
a military operation that’s been put to
play, but we do not have a clear
diplomatic policy or clear statement of
foreign policy. We know we don’t like
the Gadhafi regime, but we do not have a
picture of who the opposition movement
really is. We got a vote from the
Security Council but we had five key
abstentions in that vote.”
Five of
the 15 countries on the U.N. Security
Council abstained from voting on the
decision in
Libya because they had concerns that
the
NATO intervention would make things
worse.
Mrs. Clinton worked to avoid having
them exercise their veto by personally
calling representatives from Security
Council member states.
Germany
and Brazil published statements on March
18, 2011, explaining their reasons for
abstention.
“We
weighed the risks of a military
operation as a whole, not just for
Libya but, of course, also with
respect to the consequences for the
entire region and that is why we
abstained,” Germany said.
Brazil
wrote, “We are not convinced that the
use of force as contemplated in the
present resolution will lead to the
realization of our most important
objective — the immediate end of
violence and the protection of
civilians.
We are
also concerned that such measures may
have the unintended effect of
exacerbating tensions on the ground and
causing more harm than good to the very
same civilians we are committed to
protecting.”
Sergey
Ivanovich Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador
to the U.S., told The Times that history
has proved those concerns correct.
“The U.N.
Security Council resolution on
Libya was meant to create a no-fly
zone to prevent bombing of civilians,”
said Mr. Kislyak. “NATO
countries that participated in this
intervention were supposed to patrol the
area. However, in a short amount of time
the
NATO flights — initially meant to
stop violence on the ground — went far
beyond the scope of the Security
Council-mandated task and created even
more violence in
Libya.”
On March
19, the U.S. military, supported by
France and Britain, fired off more than
110 Tomahawk missiles, hitting about 20
Libyan air and missile defense targets.
Within weeks, a
NATO airstrike killed one of
Gaddafi’s sons and three grandsons at
their the family’s
Tripoli compound, sparking debate
about whether the colonel and his family
were legitimate targets under the
U.N. resolution.
Mr.
Gates, the defense secretary, said the
compound was targeted because it
included command-and-control facilities.
Even
after the conflict began, U.S. military
leaders kept looking for a way out and a
way to avoid the power vacuum that would
be left in the region if
Gadhafi fell.
As the
intelligence asset working with the
Joint Chiefs kept his contacts going,
one U.S. general made an attempt to
negotiate directly with his Libyan
military counterparts, according to
interviews conducted by The Times with
officials directly familiar with the
overture.
Army Gen.
Carter Ham, the head of the U.S. African
Command, sought to set up a 72-hour
truce with the regime, according to an
intermediary called in to help.
Retired
Navy Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, who was
acting as a business consultant in
Libya at the time, said he was
approached by senior Libyan military
leaders to propose the truce. He took
the plan to Lt. Col. Brian Linvill, the
U.S. AFRICOM point of contact for
Libya. Col. Linvill passed the
proposal to Gen. Ham, who agreed to
participate.
“The
Libyans would stop all combat operations
and withdraw all military forces to the
outskirts of the cities and assume a
defensive posture. Then to insure the
credibility with the international
community, the Libyans would accept
recipients from the African Union to
make sure the truce was honored,” Mr.
Kubic said, describing the offers.
“[Gadhafi]
came back and said he was willing to
step down and permit a transition
government, but he had two conditions,”
Mr. Kubic said. “First was to insure
there was a military force left over
after he left
Libya capable to go after al Qaeda.
Secondly, he wanted to have the
sanctions against him and his family and
those loyal to him lifted and free
passage. At that point in time,
everybody thought that was reasonable.”
But not
the
State Department.
Gen. Ham
was ordered to stand down two days after
the negotiation began, Mr. Kubic said.
The orders were given at the behest of
the
State Department, according to those
familiar with the plan in the
Pentagon. Gen. Ham declined to
comment when questioned by The Times.
“If their
goal was to get
Gadhafi out of power, then why not
give a 72-hour truce a try?” Mr. Kubic
asked. “It wasn’t enough to get him out
of power; they wanted him dead.”
Libyan
officials were willing to negotiate a
departure from power but felt the
continued
NATO bombings were forcing the
regime into combat to defend itself, the
recordings indicated.
“If they
put us in a corner, we have no choice
but to fight until the end,” Mr. Ismael
said on one of the recordings. “What
more can they do? Bomb us with a nuclear
bomb? They have done everything.”
Under
immense foreign firepower, the Gadhafi
regime’s grip on
Libya began to slip in early April
and the rebels’ resolve was
strengthened.
Gadhafi pleaded with the U.S. to
stop the
NATO airstrikes.
Regime change real agenda
Indeed,
the U.S. position in
Libya had changed. First, it was
presented to the public as way to stop
an impending humanitarian crisis but
evolved into expelling the Gadhafis.
CIA
Director Leon E. Panetta says in his
book “Worthy Fights” that the goal of
the Libyan conflict was for regime
change. Mr. Panetta wrote that at the
end of his first week as secretary of
defense in July 2011, he visited
Iraq and Afghanistan “for both
substance and symbolism.”
“In
Afghanistan I misstated our position on
how fast we’d be bringing troops home,
and I said what everyone in Washington
knew, but we couldn’t officially
acknowledge: That our goal in
Libya was regime change.”
But that
wasn’t the official war cry.
Instead:
“It was ‘We’re worried a humanitarian
crisis might occur,’” said a senior
military official, reflecting on the
conflict. “Once you’ve got everybody
nodding up and down on that, watch out
because you can justify almost anything
under the auspices of working to prevent
a humanitarian crisis.
Gadhafi had enough craziness about
him, the rest of the world nodded on.”
But they
might not be so quick to approve again,
officials say.
“It may
be impossible to get the same kind of
resolution in similar circumstances, and
we already saw that in Syria where the
Russians were very suspicious when
Western powers went to the
U.N.,” said Richard Northern, who
served as the British ambassador to
Libya during part of the conflict.
“Anything the Western powers did in the
Middle East is now viewed by the
Russians with suspicion, and it will
probably reduce the level of authority
they’re willing to give in connection to
humanitarian crises.”
Mr. Kucinich,
who took several steps to end the war in
Libya, said he is sickened about
what transpired.
He
sponsored a June 3 resolution in the
House of Representatives to end the
Libyan war, but Republican support for
the bill was diluted after Speaker John
A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, proposed a
softer alternative resolution demanding
that the president justify his case for
war within 14 days.
“There
was a distortion of events that were
occurring in
Libya to justify an intervention
which was essentially wrong and illegal
because [the administration] gained the
support of the U.N. Security Council
through misrepresentation,” said
Mr. Kucinich. “The die was cast
there for the overthrow of the Gadhafi
government. The die was cast. They
weren’t looking for any information.
“What’s
interesting about all this is, if you
listen to Seif Gaddafi’s account, even
as they were being bombed they still
trusted America, which really says a
lot,” said
Mr. Kucinich. “It says a lot about
how people who are being bombed through
the covert involvement or backdoor
involvement of the U.S. will still trust
the U.S. It’s heart-breaking, really. It
really breaks your heart when you see
trust that is so cynically manipulated.”
In
August,
Gadhafi’s compound in
Tripoli was overrun, signaling the
end of his 42-year reign and forcing him
into hiding. Two months later,
Gadhafi, 69, was killed in his
hometown of Sirte. His son Seif was
captured by the Zintan tribe and remains
in solitary confinement in a Zintan
prison cell.
Since
Gadhafi was removed from power,
Libya has been in a constant state
of chaos, with factional infighting and
no uniting leader. On Tuesday, an attack
on a luxury hotel in
Tripoli killed nine people,
including one American. A group calling
itself the Islamic State-Tripoli
Province took responsibility for the
attack, indicating a growing presence of
anti-American terrorist groups within
the country.
SEE ALSO: Listen to the
tapes: Intel undercuts Hillary Clinton’s
primary argument for Libya military
action
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