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New Hillary
Emails Reveal Propaganda, Executions, Coveting
Libyan Oil and Gold
By Brad Hoff
January 06,
2015 "Information
Clearing House"
- The New Year’s Eve release of over 3000 new
Hillary Clinton emails from the State Department has
CNN
abuzz over gossipy text messages, the “who gets
to ride with Hillary” selection process set up by
her staff, and how a “cute” Hillary photo fared on
Facebook.
But
historians of the 2011 NATO war in Libya will be
sure to notice a few of the truly explosive
confirmations contained in the
new emails: admissions of rebel war crimes,
special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the
start of protests, Al Qaeda embedded in the U.S.
backed opposition, Western nations jockeying for
access to Libyan oil, the nefarious origins of the
absurd Viagra mass rape claim, and concern over
Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves threatening
European currency.
Hillary’s Death Squads
A March 27,
2011 intelligence
brief on Libya, sent by long time close adviser
to the Clintons and Hillary’s unofficial
intelligence gatherer, Sidney Blumenthal, contains
clear evidence of war crimes on the part of
NATO-backed rebels. Citing a rebel commander source
“speaking in strict confidence” Blumenthal reports
to Hillary [emphasis mine]:
Under
attack from allied Air and Naval forces, the
Libyan Army troops have begun to desert to the
rebel side in increasing numbers. The rebels are
making an effort to greet these troops as fellow
Libyans, in an effort to encourage additional
defections.
(Source
Comment: Speaking in strict confidence, one
rebel commander stated that his troops
continue to summarily execute all foreign
mercenaries captured in the fighting…).
While the
illegality of extra-judicial killings is easy to
recognize (groups engaged in such are conventionally
termed “death squads”), the sinister reality behind
the “foreign mercenaries” reference might not be as
immediately evident to most.
While over
the decades Gaddafi was known to make use of
European and other international security and
infrastructural contractors, there is no evidence to
suggest that these were targeted by the Libyan
rebels.
There is
however, ample
documentation by journalists, academics, and
human rights groups demonstrating that black Libyan
civilians and sub-Saharan contract workers, a
population favored by Gaddafi in his pro-African
Union policies, were targets of “racial cleansing”
by rebels who saw black Libyans as tied closely with
the regime.[1]
Black
Libyans were commonly branded as “foreign
mercenaries” by the rebel opposition for their
perceived general loyalty to Gaddafi as a community
and subjected to torture, executions, and their
towns “liberated” by ethnic cleansing. This is
demonstrated in the most well-documented example of
Tawergha, an entire town of 30,000 black and
“dark-skinned” Libyans which vanished by August 2011
after its takeover by NATO-backed NTC Misratan
brigades.
These
attacks were well-known as late as 2012 and often
filmed, as this
report from The Telegraph confirms:
After
Muammar Gaddafi was killed, hundreds of
migrant workers from neighboring states were
imprisoned by fighters allied to the new
interim authorities. They accuse the black
Africans of having been mercenaries for the
late ruler. Thousands of sub-Saharan
Africans have been rounded up since Gaddafi
fell in August.
It appears
that Clinton was getting personally briefed on
the battlefield crimes of her beloved
anti-Gaddafi fighters long before some of the
worst of these genocidal crimes took place.
Al-Qaeda and Western Special Forces Inside Libya
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.”
The Threat
of Libya’s Oil and Gold to French Interests
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 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.
The Ease
of Floating Crude Propaganda
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.
BRAD HOFF is
Managing Editor of Levant Report. He is a former
Marine and has taught ancient and modern history
at various schools across Texas – both at the
college and high school levels. Brad has lived
and traveled extensively throughout the Middle
East, spending most of his time in Syria prior
to the 2011 uprising.
http://levantreport.com
Note
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[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.
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