Sirte: Reagan, Regime Change, Rapprochement(?)
Sirte was in the crosshairs of U.S. bombers well before 2011, going back more than 30 years. In 1973, Libya made a historic claim to the entire Gulf of Sirte (or Sidra) as its territorial waters, a claim that was then repeatedly challenged by the U.S. and that led to multiple military confrontations. The precursor to the European Union, the European Community, also protested Libya’s enclosure of these waters, with only Burkina Faso and Syria having recognized Libya’s claim from early on (Langford, 1987, p. 140). When Ronald Reagan came to power in the U.S., he used the Gulf of Sirte dispute as a deliberate point on which to forcefully apply pressure against Libya. The U.S. sought not to only to isolate Libya diplomatically, but to find ways of overthrowing Gaddafi (Wright, 1981-1982, p. 13). From that vantage point, “the Gulf of Sirte was tailor made for the United States:….Between 1981 and 1989, the two nations skirmished in the Gulf of Sirte at least four times” (Pollack, 2002, p. 413).
Africa, and in particular the forum provided by the Organization of African Unity, saw Reagan immediately upon entering office trying to pressure Libya’s neighbours into isolating it. Prior to the OAU summit in Nairobi in June of 1981, U.S. diplomats,
“lobbied several African member states to move motions of censure against Libya, and to shift the venue of the OAU summit meeting, as well as the presidency of the OAU for the year, from Libya to alternative sites in Senegal and Niger. A major effort combining economic and military aid, naval portcalls, the despatch of military advisers, and diplomatic pressure was focused on the Liberian government to persuade it to break relations with Libya, and expel the Libyan mission.” (Wright, 1981-1982, p. 14)
The U.S. sent two AWACS planes to Egypt to monitor Libya’s borders, “in the event of a coup d’etat that was planned for that time within Libya,” with a need to coordinate any Egyptian military support that might be sent to aid the rebels (Wright, 1981-1982, p. 15). In 1981, the U.S. shot down two Libyan fighters in the Gulf of Sirte, in what was planned as a deliberate provocation.
American officials began speaking of Gaddafi “in terms that implied their support for his downfall and death” (Wright, 1981-1982, p. 16). For example, when Reagan was asked the day after the Gulf of Sirte incident if he would “not be sorry to see Qaddafi fall,” he replied: “diplomacy would have me not answer that question;” General Alexander Haig, Reagan’s Secretary of State, referred to Gaddafi as, “a cancer that has to be removed;” then Vice President George H.W. Bush described him as an “egomaniac who would trigger World War III to make headlines;” an alleged moderate, former President Jimmy Carter spoke of Gaddafi as “subhuman,” while former President Gerald Ford said Gaddafi was a “bully” and also a “cancer;” and, not to be left out, disgraced former President Richard Nixon said Gaddafi was “more than just a desert rat,” but also “an international outlaw,” and urged an international response to Gaddafi (Wright, 1981-1982, p. 16). To cancer, subhuman, and rat, we would later add Reagan’s famous line that Gaddafi was a “mad dog”— the pattern of utter dehumanization and demonization of Gaddafi was set long before the first NATO bombs started to fall on Libya in March of 2011.
In the 1980s, virtually every terrorist attack and every alleged plan for one was blamed squarely on Libya by the Reagan administration. This included the entirely fabricated “plot” of a Libyan hit team sent to the U.S. to assassinate Reagan, or the unsubstantiated allegations that Libya was behind the Rome and Vienna airport bombings in 1985. U.S. intelligence not only acknowledged failing to find any links and, if anything, their searches took them far from Libya.
In addition to the coup attempt, coordinated with Egyptian military support as noted above, Reagan had the CIA draft a plan by the then deputy director for operations, Max Hugel, in the first two months of his administration. Various proposals were considered, ranging from disinformation and propaganda against Libya, to sabotaging Libyan oil installations, and organizing military and financial support for Libyan dissident groups in Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, and in the U.S. itself; U.S. media churned out dozens of articles and op-eds encouraging the campaign against Gaddafi; and, Tunisian and Saudi officials confirmed privately that they were “told by officials of the Reagan administration that Qaddafi would be eliminated by the end of 1981” (Wright, 1981-1982, p. 16). Among the anti-Gaddafi strategies that were used was the CIA’s creation of real and illusionary events with the goal of making Gaddafi believe “that there is a high degree of internal opposition to him in Libya” (Woodward, 1987, p. 481). A number of published accounts have already documented the CIA’s and the National Security Council’s “obsession” with Libya during Reagan’s term, its planning of covert actions and “building a set of escalating tactics designed to eliminate a political opponent defined within the Reagan administration as a threat to U.S. and Western interests.” They even went as far as trying to convince Egypt to invade Libya (Perdue, 1989, p. 54; Woodward, 1987, pps. 181-186, 409-410, 419-420).
The Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Chester Crocker, declared to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 1981 that Libya’s diplomacy was a “diplomacy of subversion” (two decades later, this became “dinar diplomacy”), aimed at subversion in Africa and in the Arab world, “a diplomacy of unprecedented obstruction to our own interests and objectives” (Wright, 1981-1982, p. 17). In all of this, Sirte was once again thrust into the centre of direct military conflict with the U.S.
In March and April 1986, the U.S. conducted two military operations in the Gulf of Sirte designed to provoke a Libyan reaction, which the U.S. could then use as justification for bombing Libyan installations. “Operation Attain Document III” (also “Operation Prairie Fire”) involving as many as three U.S. aircraft carriers, 23 other warships (other reports say 27), and 250 aircraft, finally drew a Libyan response. Sirte itself became involved when the Libyan surface-to-air missile (SA-5) battery at Sirte launched missiles at U.S. F-14 fighters (Pollack, 2002, p. 416). The U.S. fired upon Libyan naval vessels and the missile base in Sirte.
Like Barack Obama 25 years later, Reagan also did not bother to obtain the consent of Congress for his war operations against Libya, completely ignoring the War Powers Resolution (Tananbau, 1997, p. 472). Then, as now, the U.S.’ own principles of democracy and checks and balances were thrown to the curb to make way for an imperial president with a point to prove in smashing Libyan resistance. While Reagan would justify U.S. military actions as “retaliatory,” it was instead later disclosed that no matter what the Libyan response might have been, “Reagan had authorised the destruction of the Libyan missile base at Sirte right when he had given his approval for the naval exercises off Libya on March 14,” and the Pentagon itself conceded that there had been “no second round of attacks on U.S. ships before the latter unleashed their renewed attacks on the Libyan missile base and patrol boats” (Economic and Political Weekly, 1986, p. 553).
Just as was the case 25 years later, the point of U.S. military action had little to do with supporting international law; rather, the immediate goal was the same in both cases: regime change. As the former British Foreign Secretary, David Owen, put it:
“An important warning note had been served on the Libyan military— and notice I say Libyan military and not just Colonel Gaddafi —namely, that if they allowed Gaddafi unbridled power and he exercised it contrary to international law, they would face military defeat. That, in my view, is a necessary message to send, for the military elite in any country do not like humiliation and Gaddafi will be controlled or toppled, in my view, not by the masses but by the elite.” (Owen, 1987, p. 85)
Moreover, Owen regretted that the U.S. acted alone: “It would have been a far more effective demonstration to Colonel Gaddafi if other NATO nations, including particularly Britain and Italy, had sailed with the U.S. fleet,” as that would have emphasized, “collective resolve and action” (1987, p. 85). Owen must have been delighted that his wishes came true, even if not as soon as 1986.
What transpired in the 25 years that followed in supposedly altering Libyan-U.S. relations is a complex story that requires very careful documentation and analysis. It is also a story that largely lies beyond the scope of this chapter and this book, focused as it is primarily on NATO’s intervention in 2011, and its consequences, both for Libya and for the domestic politics of NATO member states. U.S. plots against Libya, and multiple coup attempts continued to occur throughout the 1980s and 1990s. International sanctions were also imposed following the passage of UN Security Council Resolutions 748 (adopted on March 31, 1992) and 883 (adopted on November 11, 1993) in response to the alleged role of Libya in the downing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and an attack on UTA 772 in 1989. Those sanctions, both financial and military, were suspended with the passage of UNSCR 1192 (in 1998), and entirely lifted in 2003 with the passage of UNSCR 1506 (UN, 2003). Libya began to take a different route, cutting ties to guerrilla movements, and facilitating investigations of these attacks, turning over suspects, and then ultimately abandoning plans for the development of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs), including nuclear weapons, in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
There was palpable American excitement in Sirte in 2004 as a seven-member delegation from the U.S. House of Representatives led by Republican Curt Weldon, along with representatives from more than a hundred countries, met with Gaddafi. Also in attendance, Senator Joseph Biden, who would later become vice president under Barack Obama. Gaddafi offered a very long explanation of what led to his conclusion, as understood by some of the delegates, that yesterday’s enemies would now be Libya’s friends. “At first, I was just listening to the speech,” said Democrat Susan Davis, “but what he [Gaddafi] was saying was so amazing that I started writing it down so I could report to my constituents. I took 24 pages of notes” (Timmerman, 2004, p. 18). Gaddafi’s address to his guests, while called “brutally self-critical,” in fact shined part of the light on Libya’s allies: Libya had reaped international isolation for the sake of supporting the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the African National Congress (ANC), but now they had each made their own separate peace, leaving Libya behind continuing to fight. Gaddafi asked rhetorically: “Are we more Irish than the Irish? Are we more Palestinian than the Palestinians?…How can [Yasser Arafat] enter the White House and we not improve our relations with the United States?” (Timmerman, 2004, p. 19). In a statement that was easily misinterpreted as a mea culpa, Gaddafi underlined the sacrifices that Libya willingly made for others: “No one separated Libya from the world community. Libya voluntarily separated itself from others….No one has imposed sanctions on us or punished us. We have punished ourselves….all these things were done for the sake of others” (Timmerman, 2004, p. 19).
Indeed, Gaddafi was a remarkable and unique exception among the whole range of modern Arab leaders, for being doggedly altruistic, for funding development programs in dozens of needy nations, for supporting national liberation struggles that had nothing to do with Islam or the Arab world, for pursuing an ideology that was original and not simply the product of received tradition or mimesis of exogenous sources, and for making Libya a presence on the world stage in a way that was completely out of proportion with its population size (for example most of the larger Caribbean nations have larger populations). One could be a fierce critic of Gaddafi, and still have the honest capability to recognize these objective realities, or, if preferring to maintain the narrative of demonization, “to give the devil his due.”
When Gaddafi turned his attention to Libya’s nuclear weapons program, his guests in Sirte claimed to be astonished that he was admitting its existence. Why did he “surrender” this program? Here one needs to pay careful attention to his words. Dismantling the nuclear weapons was “in our own interest and for our own security,” and the program was terminated because, “it was a waste of time. It cost too much money,” and besides, “if there is any aggression against Libya now, the whole world will come to defend Libya” (Timmerman, 2004, p. 19). This is also the clearest possible statement of Gaddafi’s fatal miscalculation, revealing an underlying assumption that, in the end, honour must rule international relations. That says a lot about him, and it also says a lot about NATO states. Few states will ever again call the West’s bluff on peaceful reconciliation.
Gaddafi made other practical calculations in this address that might be called his Sirte Declaration II. He clearly hoped to gain U.S. technology. In this respect, he would not throw open the doors to foreign investment, and at most he would allow joint ventures with Libyan firms, thus maintaining Libyan control. As noted above, this ultimately rankled some of the biggest U.S. transnational firms. Gaddafi was going to buy his way into elite circles. Some call it being “in bed with the west,” but one might still see this as an alternative route of what Reagan administration officials called a “diplomacy of subversion.” Indeed, Obama seems to have understood it in that manner, refusing at every possible instance any state visit with Gaddafi, anywhere (and this is from a person, who as a candidate for the presidency, vowed he would even meet and speak with the U.S.’ “enemies”).
Congressman Curt Weldon stood in Sirte and exclaimed, “We were part of history tonight. Col. Qaddafi’s statements were unequivocal. There were no ifs, ands or buts. It reminds me of the sea change that occurred when the Berlin Wall came down, or when [Boris] Yeltsin stood on top of a tank in front of the Russian White House. As startling as it is to us, we’d better take advantage of it” (Timmerman, 2004, p. 19). Here is another fatal error: few in the U.S., whether in government and even less so in the media, should ever have allowed themselves the false sense of certainty that they had understood Gaddafi as if the latter spoke plainly. The sands shift as the wind blows…there are always “ifs, ands, or buts.”
“We’d better take advantage of it,” said Weldon of Gaddafi’s “openness.” Also present, as mentioned before, was Joe Biden, clearly ready to take advantage. “I told Qaddafi there are certain basic rules to playing in the global economy,” said Biden in Sirte at a dinner with Libyan officials, “no one will invest in your country without transparency or without stability. To deliver the promise to your people is going to require significant change, not dictated by the United States but by reality” (Timmerman, 2004, p. 19). As a matter of fact, Biden would form part of the administration that would in fact dictate that change, and make regime change a reality. His remarks, typically blunt, were an open threat. Immediately, “observers in the Libyan capital” were quick to point out another “reality” that Gaddafi’s apparent openness could be exploited for vulnerability.
“[Gaddafi] appears to be more worried today about his grip on the country than ever before and is seeking to open it to Western investment to quell popular discontent with his mismanagement of the nation’s economy. Streets in Libya’s bustling downtown market remain unpaved, telephones work only periodically, and no foreign newspapers are allowed….At the same time, however, Libyan universities are graduating large numbers of well-educated young people with engineering and other degrees who are unable to find work. The potential for social unrest is very real.” (Timmerman, 2004, p. 19)
Gaddafi also found ways to take advantage of this “opening,” by insisting on Libyan national rights in new but still limited ways. Once again, Sirte would be the stage. On March 2, 2009, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi flew into Sirte, along with the diplomatic corps, for the ratification of the Libya-Italy treaty of “friendship and cooperation.” As noted by the U.S. Embassy, Belusconi apologized for what it called Italy’s “misdeeds” (colonial occupation and the slaughter of at least a third of all Libyans), and noted that Gaddafi raised his arms “in triumph and glee” (USET, 2009/3/11). The treaty committed Italy to pay Libya reparations of$200 million U.S. per year for 25 years for its “wrong-doing” (USET, 2009/3/11). Italy was keen on obtaining preference for its companies in the development projects to be funded by Libya, as well as for Libya to aid it in blocking illegal migration to Italy, which Libya had promised in the past, but as the U.S. Embassy admitted, “they have failed to do in previous iterations of migration agreements” (USET, 2009/3/11). Berlusconi also invited Gaddafi to Italy and to the G8 summit scheduled for July 2009 in L’Aquila, Abruzzo, where Gaddafi would act in his capacity as Chairman of the AU (USET, 2009/3/11).
Sirte became the venue for a series of high-level U.S. delegations that travelled to meet with Gaddafi. In each case, Gaddafi’s remarks to his visitors, and even his demeanour, ranged from interest to indifference to recriminations. One of the most persistent themes in nearly all of his discussions was his visceral hostility for Islamic extremists, Wahabis/Salafists, Saudi Arabia, and especially Al Qaeda. Another persistent theme was Gaddafi’s continual expression of what was almost regret: that Libya had opened itself up, dropped its WMD programs, participated in the Lockerbie prosecution, and yet received very little in return. He was especially keen on obtaining military technology. Once again, the view proffered by some that Gaddafi was now “in bed with the West,” is at the very least a strange view of romance.7
On August 20, 2005, Senator Richard Lugar traveled to Sirte to meet with Gaddafi, accompanied by Tim Pounds (Director for Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and North Africa at the National Security Council in Washington, DC) and other advisors and officials. Gaddafi made it clear to his visitors that “Libya had not been properly recognized and rewarded for its decisions on WMD,” and that the most appropriate rewards would be “defensive weapons to protect the country against the threat of emerging extremist regimes in its neighbors, and the application of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.” He stressed that “the greatest threat to the region came from religious extremism,” which he argued was “inextricably linked to the Saudi regime” (USET, 2005/8/31, pars. 1, 8). Lugar, for his part, chose to focus on the sorts of issues the U.S. could exploit in undermining the Libyan government— he expressed his concern about “human rights,” the fate of opposition activist Fathi al-Jahmi, and the situation concerning Bulgarian and Palestinian medics detained on charges that they had deliberately infected patients with HIV (USET, 2005/8/31).
In his remarks, Gaddafi made it clear that peaceful relations between Libya and the U.S. would also be of benefit to the U.S.: “No one benefited from confrontation in the past; everyone lost. We need to change our policies for mutual benefit” (USET, 2005/8/31). Gaddafi consistently hammered away at the fact that Libya was not benefiting as promised from dropping its WMD program and that he heard from both North Korea and Iran that “Libya’s experience is a bad example,” which meant it was a good example of why giving up such programs would be pointless. He noted that Libya had been attacked in the Arab press for being “foolish for surrendering its power and advantage without any compensation,” to which Gaddafi said, “this is true” (USET, 2005/8/31, pars. 4, 5). Libya, in fact, continued to remain on the U.S. list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” While Senator Lugar did not promise to do much to remove Libya from that list, he was keen to get the Libyans to more readily issue visas for U.S. businessmen (USET, 2005/8/31). Gaddafi also appeared to be ready to play one power bloc off against the other, as when he told Lugar that he would like to meet with President George W. Bush “about Africa and ‘the new colonialism from the East’ (i.e., growing Chinese and Indian influence in Africa)” (USET, 2005/8/31). As in many other instances, Gaddafi, as noted by the U.S. Embassy, focused his concerns on the threats coming from Wahabist extremists sponsored and encouraged by Saudi Arabia, and because Syria too was strongly resisting such extremists, the U.S. should modify its stance towards it, Gaddafi argued.
It is striking to see how all of these themes persisted right into NATO’s attack against Libya in 2011— that the NATO intervention, in other words, was not an abrupt change of course, but the extension of a continuum of friction and underlying hostility. Indeed, even U.S. diplomats recognized that a significant faction of the Libyan government remained critical and hostile towards any expanded relations with the U.S., let alone “cooperation” (USET, 2009/1/15).
A year later, Congressman Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Relations Committee, made his second trip to Libya in two years, meeting with Gaddafi in Sirte during August 22-24, 2006. Lantos’ trip coincided with that of another high-ranking congressional delegate, Senator Arlen Specter, thus combining their meetings. In addition to Gaddafi, most of Libya’s highest-ranking officials were present, including Saif Gaddafi; Abdullah Senussi, Director of Military Intelligence; Musa Kusa, Director of the External Security Organization; Abdurrahman Shalgam, Secretary of the General Peoples Committee for Foreign Liaison and International Cooperation; Ahmed Fatouri, Secretary of American Affairs; and, Abdelati Obeidi, Secretary for European Affairs. The U.S. congressmen announced that Libya had been removed from the U.S. list of sponsors of terrorism, and invited Libya to increase the number of students it sent to the U.S. from the current level of 150 to 6,000 (USET, 2006/8/31a, pars. 1, 2).
Hearing of the U.S. interest in receiving more Libyan students, Gaddafi noted how the U.S.’ chosen ally, Saudi Arabia, had recently witnessed its Grand Mufti declaring that Saudi students should be barred from attending university in the U.S. From there, Gaddafi once again stressed his worry about the spread of Wahabi fundamentalism from Saudi Arabia (USET, 2006/8/31a). This topic rarely seems to have engaged U.S. officials, with this occasion being one of the exceptions. Senator Specter asked Gaddafi how the U.S. could aid Libya in dealing with terrorists. Gaddafi smiled and answered, “on the contrary, you support them; you support the Saudi royal family that funds Wahabi fundamentalists” (USET, 2006/8/31b).
On Libya-U.S. relations, Gaddafi told Specter that Libya “gave up everything and got nothing in return” (USET, 2006/8/31b). Gaddafi was about to be instructed on what he would instead get: “democracy.” Sitting there in Sirte, future site of NATO’s devastation and Gaddafi’s murder, Specter commented on the need to bring “democracy” to Libya, telling Gaddafi that “there would be democracy in Libya in the future” (USET, 2006/8/31b). In response, Gaddafi lectured Specter on the fact that Libya was “the sole country that enjoys direct democracy, we hope the U.S. becomes like Libya, it is the ultimate level of democracy where Libyans rule themselves instead of electing officials to represent them.” He also told Specter that he hoped the U.S. would one day benefit from Libya’s Jamahiriya (state of the masses) system (USET, 2006/8/31b).
It appears that Specter poisoned the meeting for himself, for as soon as he raised the issue of obtaining land in Tripoli to build a new U.S. Embassy compound, Gaddafi retorted: “maybe the Libyans heard the Embassy will be a staging ground for opposition activities and counter-Libyan movements. Maybe the Libyans don’t want a big U.S. Embassy” (USET, 2006/8/31b). The U.S. Embassy felt that Gaddafi’s comments were offered “half-seriously.” But apparently they were not, as Gaddafi continued: “people know that chanceries are for cooperation between states and diplomats shouldn’t interfere in internal affairs, but people see U.S. embassies all over the world from other angles.” This occasioned a challenge from the U.S. Embassy’s CDA. Then Senator Specter, trying to rescue a deal, turned to Suleiman Shihumi (Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the General People’s Congress) seeking his support and said a new U.S. chancery could help with job creation in Libya and thus also help re-energize its economy. In sharp response to this crass gesture of waving dollars under Libyan noses, Shihumi stated: “we have survived for thirty years without U.S. money and had no problems” (USET, 2006/8/31b). Bowing down before the West is decidedly not what Gaddafi was doing.
We should note how Gaddafi understood the dominant U.S. worldview in a statement he made just a few years before these meetings took place, back in 1999, the same year of the Sirte Declaration:
“America unfortunately treats us as if the world was the way it used to be. Americans accept that changes have taken place since the end of communism, but not in their treatment of Libya. So in the end, they take a racist and fanatical position, similar to the way Hitler treated the Jews. We feel that America is much like Hitler. We have no explanation for this, except that it is a religious, fanatical, racist position. Some analysts call this a new colonialism. But colonialism is colonialism, and it is always unjust. It is how we were treated by the Italians, Algeria by the French, India by the British. This is imperialism, and we seem to be entering a new imperialist era. The cause of our conflict with America is not that we attacked them. We have never attacked an American target. America started the aggression against us right here in the Gulf of Sirte. When we defended ourselves, they attacked us in these very tents. We were bombed by missiles in our own territorial waters. In 1986 our own children were killed. No one can bring my daughter back to me. Then Lockerbie came along. Now we’d like this chain of events to be over. But America doesn’t want to turn the page. We shall, however, show courage and be patient, and America will be the loser.” (Quoted in Viorst, 1999, p. 66)
Sirte: MI6 and Early Islamist Attacks against Gaddafi
In early March 1996, as Colonel Gaddafi travelled in a motorcade through the streets of Sirte lined with bystanders, members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) attempted to assassinate Gaddafi. They had placed a bomb under what they thought would be Gaddafi’s car, except that Gaddafi would always periodically order a convoy to stop so that he could change cars. The bomb thus exploded under the wrong car and killed several bodyguards and innocent civilian bystanders. In the gunbattle that followed, several LIFG militants were killed. The person in charge of the attack, Abd al-Muhaymen, was “a Libyan fundamentalist who had trained and fought in Afghanistan,” in support of the mujahideen against Soviet troops, and thus had “access to CIA and British intelligence operatives” who helped to organize the mujahideen. David Shayler, “a renegade MI5” British intelligence officer, claimed that MI6 (MI5’s counterpart responsible for foreign operations and counter espionage) was also behind the plot to assassinate Gaddafi and had collaborated with the LIFG (Bright, 2002/11/10; Darwish, 1998; Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada [IRBC], 1998). Two MI6 agents, Richard Bartlett and David Watson, codenamed PT16 and PT16B respectively, had overall responsibility for the operation (Bright, 2002/11/10). Credible reports by French intelligence were that the LIFG was at the time affiliated with Al Qaeda and that MI6 paid large amounts of money to what was an Al Qaeda cell (Bright, 2002/11/10). Indeed, the very first Interpol warrant issued for the arrest of Osama Bin Laden, came at the prompting of the government of Libya in March 1998 (Bright, 2002/11/10).
Muammar Gaddafi was steadfast in his condemnation of Islamic fundamentalism, as he was persistent in directly attacking Islamic militants in Libya. Years before Bin Laden became a household name in the West, Libya issued an arrest warrant for his capture. Indeed, as Libya led by Gaddafi fought against Al Qaeda years before it became public enemy number one in the U.S., Western intelligence agencies collaborated with Al Qaeda to kill Gaddafi. The meeting between Western intelligence agencies and Libyan Islamic militants would not be restricted to Sirte and would not just occur in 1996: the collaboration was renewed in the “revolution” of 2011 as NATO prepared to bomb its way toward regime change. Gaddafi’s loose remarks that the only people rising up against him in February 2011 were Al Qaeda were partially correct and rooted in precedent. While Gaddafi’s notion that his opponents were drug addicts was exaggerated, and sometimes backed up with what Western media mocked as ineffectual displays of caches of ordinary, non-prescription drugs, that notion also had some foundation in fact. Here sometimes even Western media reports would make fleeting, understated mention of rebels “rolling hash joints” as they waited to attack a Gaddafi stronghold in Bani Walid (AP, 2011/9/19). Media such as the AP, while not noting that this conformed with Gaddafi’s characterization, failed to raise the most important and immediately pertinent question: how could largely untrained forces, high on hash, be expected to fire heavy weapons anything but indiscriminately and thus endanger civilians?
In 2011, the destruction of Sirte and the destruction of Gaddafi and the Al-Fateh Revolution ended up converging. U.S. plans for the over-throw of Gaddafi did not initially take into account the possibility of the kind of unflagging resistance mounted by the residents of Sirte, which made them nearly invincible and made a mockery of notions of a “popular” and “national” uprising against a “dictator” that allegedly “all Libyans” hated.
Barack Obama and How Empire Revisited Sirte
Since Barack Obama assumed the U.S. presidency, ice crystals once again began to form on the barely thawed U.S. attitude toward Libya. What no cabinet official in Obama’s administration apparently wanted to do was to attend any event in Sirte that could symbolize a form of recognition and amicability. It was almost as if they wished to resist anything that could mitigate plans for the eventual destruction of the Al-Fateh Revolution and the defiant independence that marked Libya as led by Gaddafi.
Musa Kusa, Libya’s equivalent of a Foreign Affairs Minister, attempted to prod U.S. diplomats to lobby their seniors in Washington to send a high-level U.S. official to Sirte to attend the 40th anniversary celebrations of the 1969 revolt in 2009. Gaddafi had also personally extended an invitation to Barack Obama to attend the summit of the African Union in Sirte in July 2009 “but for some reason he could not come.” Kusa hoped for such high-level attendance because, as the U.S. Embassy understood, “it would be very meaningful to Libya and an important signal of the USG [U.S. government] commitment to the bilateral relationship.” As several Arab, African and European heads of state had already agreed to participate, “yet another rejection” from the U.S. “would not be well-received or understood” (USET, 2009/8/5). Kusa suggested that at the very least, on the margins of the meeting of the UN General Assembly in 2009, perhaps Gaddafi could meet with Obama (USET, 2009/8/5). That too never happened. When Barack Obama finally made his presence felt in Sirte, it was through a prolonged campaign of steady bombing, the nearest he came to even getting “up close and personal” with the city.
“For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and as an advocate for human freedom,” declared Barack Obama on March 28, 2011, in what already sounded as a victory speech only nine days after the first NATO bombs were dropped on Libya (see Obama, 2011/3/28, for this and subsequent quotes). Obama spoke at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, and like his predecessor, George W. Bush, he chose a captive military audience and opened with the customary militarist salute, but with a “humanitarian” veneer. “I want to begin by paying tribute to our men and women in uniform who, once again, have acted with courage, professionalism and patriotism. They have moved with incredible speed and strength. Because of them…countless lives have been saved.” Obama indeed made remarks that echoed his predecessor’s infamously premature “mission accomplished” speech about Iraq aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier. According to Obama, not only had lives been saved, but what was allegedly the primary objective of NATO’s intervention was even then declared to have been achieved: “tonight, I can report that we have stopped Qaddafi’s deadly advance.” Obama repeated the point later in his speech: “In just one month, the United States has worked with our international partners to mobilize a broad coalition, secure an international mandate to protect civilians, stop an advancing army, prevent a massacre, and establish a no-fly zone with our allies and partners.” For emphasis, Obama again stated moments later: “we’ve accomplished these objectives.” And yet again: “I want to be clear: The United States of America has done what we said we would do.”
However, Obama was not being clear. He took a new turn in his remarks: “That’s not to say that our work is complete.” Since he had established how successful the U.S. had been in accomplishing what it declared it had set out to do, the most obvious and immediate question that few media commentators bothered to ask was: then why is the bombing continuing?
Even restricted to a close and critical reading of Obama’s narrative alone, the answers to that question take the form of two pairs of themes: “protecting civilians” joined with “Gaddafi has lost legitimacy and must go;” and, “interests and values” joined with the “Arab Spring.”
Let’s begin with the first pair. Obama claimed in his March 28 speech that, “broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake,” adding, “if we tried to overthrow Qaddafi by force, our coalition would splinter.” He then reminded his audience about Iraq: “To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq….regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.” Left at that, one might be forgiven for thinking that Obama was absolutely against regime change, except that is not the case, not even according to his own statements in the very same speech. What Obama was really against was landing an occupation force plus an expensive engagement. Those are his only actual objections to “regime change,” and they are not even about regime change as such, but rather nation-building. Obama blurs together regime change and nation-building in his speech, which helps to create an illusion that he was not actually for regime change. In fact, as Obama himself asserted, “I made it clear that Qaddafi had lost the confidence of his people and the legitimacy to lead, and I said that he needed to step down from power.” He made it clear, as if he had the authority and the legitimacy to speak for all Libyans and to dictate a new government to them. This type of narrative can only ever be about one goal: regime change. Obama once more stated in his speech: “we continue to pursue the broader goal of a Libya that belongs not to a dictator, but to its people” (i.e., regime change). He added, “there is no question that Libya— and the world —would be better off with Qaddafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal,” that goal being regime change. Furthermore, Obama pledged the U.S. would work “with other nations to hasten the day when Qaddafi leaves power”: regime change. Obama sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to London to confer with allies on “supporting a transition to the future that the Libyan people deserve”: regime change. He claimed that he would pursue that goal by non-military means…and yet the bombs continued to drop, and they dropped on Gaddafi’s very own living quarters on repeated occasions. That is because regime change was one of the actual, immediate goals to which Obama himself admitted behind this increasingly tired and clumsily woven veil of deliberately foggy speech (likely the hastily negotiated product of multiple committees, agencies, and press advisers targeting disparate audiences). Later Hillary Clinton publicly revealed that the former CDA in Tripoli, Christopher Stevens, was sent back to Libya in the early days of the 2011 “revolution” to covertly work with the insurgents in order to overthrow Gaddafi (Clinton, 2012/9/12).
The “Gaddafi must go” theme can only be understood in conjunction with that of “protecting civilians.” In Obama’s speech that night, as in all subsequent NATO communiqués and press briefings, anything and everything done to overthrow Gaddafi— including targeting civilian communities that supported Gaddafi —would be justified, however incredibly, as “protecting civilians.” This fact appears in Obama’s very own remarks: “Qaddafi has not yet stepped down from power, and until he does, Libya will remain dangerous.” As Obama said, as of March 27, “NATO decided to take on the additional responsibility of protecting Libyan civilians,” an additional responsibility that went beyond the already achieved objectives which Obama led Americans to believe were the sole objectives. Even Noam Chomsky (2012/1/7) succumbed to this logic that there were “two interventions,” one to establish a no-fly zone, and the second to prolong the rebels’ war against Gaddafi. Chomsky openly supported the first, remarkably without understanding how it led to, justified, and served as the gateway to the second— UN Security Council Resolution 1973 itself listed the no-fly zone and the broader protection of civilians within the same document. Indeed, there was no such thing as “two interventions,” except as cover for poor judgment and flawed analyses that took Obama at his word.
The second pair of themes in Obama’s speech also reinforce each other. In his March 28 address, Obama never clearly defines what U.S. interests were in Libya. The fact that they should remain unspoken is not an accident or a mere oversight— nothing ever is at this level. Obama was playing a difficult game here. On the one hand, Obama could assert that the war, which his press secretary Jay Carney [Carney, 2011/3/23] and others [York, 2011/3/23] had defined as not a war but merely a “kinetic military action,” was one that served U.S. interests, possibly in an effort to quiet “isolationists” and the realpolitik crowd at home at a time of rising anti-war sentiment. On the other hand, by not specifying what those interests actually were, and by coupling his remarks with “humanitarian” concerns, Obama can claim that the U.S. was not motivated by instrumentalist strategies of gain, but rather universal, freedom-loving altruism. In waging war on Libya, the U.S. leadership also engaged in a war on language (Schell, 2011/6/21). Robert Gates, who in early 2011 was still Secretary of Defense, went on NBC’s Meet the Press and made an effort to explain, however ambiguously: “No. I don’t think it’s a vital interest for the United States, but we clearly have interests there, and it’s a part of the region which is a vital interest for the United States” (NBC, 2011/3/27). Hillary Clinton, on the same program, elaborated on those interests:
“did Libya attack us? No. They did not attack us. Do they have a very critical role in this region and do they neighbor two countries— you just mentioned one, Egypt, the other Tunisia —that are going through these extraordinary transformations and cannot afford to be destabilized by conflict on their borders? Yes. Do they have a major influence on what goes on in Europe because of everything from oil to immigration?….So, you know, let, let’s be fair here. They didn’t attack us, but what they were doing and Gadhafi’s history and the potential for the disruption and instability was very much in our interests, as Bob said, and seen by our European friends and our Arab partners as very vital to their interests.” (NBC, 2011/3/27)
This is where “interest” and controlling the events of the “Arab Spring” merge, according to Gates, Clinton, and Obama. Obama was quite direct in defining U.S. “national interest” as one that encompassed not letting Gaddafi triumph over his armed opposition: “America has an important strategic interest in preventing Qaddafi from overrunning those who oppose him,” which takes us back to regime change (Obama, 2011/3/28). This was never a “kinetic humanitarian action.” The only lives the U.S. was interested in saving were those of the insurgents, saving them so they could defeat Gaddafi.
Sirte: Toxic to Empire
“They [NATO] are trying to push the country to the brink of a civil war,” exclaimed Khaled Kaim, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Libya, “this is the objective of the coalition now, it is not to protect civilians” (Fahim et al., 2011/3/29). Libya of course continued to remain “dangerous” well past the date of Obama’s remarks, and, from the U.S. standpoint, this was especially true once they encountered Sirte’s near impregnability to insurgent advances. On March 29, 2011, the very next day after Obama gave his speech, the insurgents fighting to overthrow Gaddafi were forced to retreat and found themselves 150 kilometres from Sirte (BBC, 2011/3/29). What Western governments and media had billed as a “popular uprising” now seemed to be particularly dependent upon NATO to make any sort of headway.
The New York Times correspondents reported from the scene that “Hundreds of trucks and cars carrying fighters began streaming away” (Fahim et al., 2011/3/29). The insurgents had only been able to advance to where they had thanks to NATO air cover. When still optimistic about taking Sirte quickly, one insurgent spoke to Reuters about the rapid advance: “This couldn’t have happened without NATO, they gave us big support” (Hendawi, 2011/3/28). As much as Obama had tried to blur his strategy to pursue regime change, a “blunt assessment by the American military, which is conducting the bulk of the air campaign against pro-Qaddafi forces,” concluded that “insurgent advances would be reversed quickly without continued strikes by coalition warplanes” (Fahim et al., 2011/3/29). As The New York Times noted, the “contest” for Sirte raised the question of “how the allies could justify airstrikes if, as seems to be the case, loyalist forces enjoy widespread support in the city and pose no threat to civilians” (Fahim et al., 2011/3/29).
“Sarkozy, where are you?” some rebels shouted, pleading for air strikes against Sirte as their rapid advance turned into “a panicked retreat,” and as one journalist concluded, “the rout of the rebels…illustrated how much they rely on international air power” (Lucas, 2011/3/28a). Before that, the insurgents hoped to storm Sirte itself, a stronghold of support for Gaddafi and the Al-Fateh Revolution. As if to underscore their dependency on NATO, some of the insurgents who spoke to the foreign press, such as 27-year-old Mohammed Bujildein, admitted: “if they [pro-government fighters] keep shelling like this, we’ll need airstrikes,” but nonetheless proclaimed that with international airstrikes, “we’ll be in Sirte tomorrow evening” (Lucas, 2011/3/28a). That statement would not be proven true even after several months of sustained NATO airstrikes against Sirte. In the meantime, the alleged “popular uprising” had been vanquished in most of western Libya (without any evidence of the gross, large-scale massacres of whole populations as NATO leaders claimed “would have happened” in Benghazi). In some towns and cities, there never was an uprising (Lucas, 2011/3/28a).
As for NATO “protecting civilians,” it had bombed Sirte early in the morning as early as March 27, 2011, “where most civilians are believed to support Gaddafi” (Lucas, 2011/3/28b; Lucas & Al-Shalchi, 2011/3/27; Hendawi, 2011/3/28). That some of those civilians were the intended target of NATO airstrikes is a given. NATO’s aim was to demolish any armed forces that opposed the insurgents, and as journalists found within Sirte itself on March 27, as NATO bombed the city for the first time, “it was swarming with soldiers on patrol and armed civilians, many of them wearing green bandanas that signaled their support for Gadhafi” (Lucas & Al-Shalchi, 2011/3/27, emphasis added). As the bombing of Sirte reached a crescendo in October 2011, Reuters reported residents of the city telling them, “there are no Gaddafi brigades, they are volunteers inside” (El Gamal, 2011/10/5). The Telegraph reported the same, namely that civilians had professed their loyalty to the Brother Leader (Gaddafi) and the city remained “staunchly loyalist,” quoting residents as saying that “there is no sign of an internal uprising, the civilian areas are filled with volunteers for Gaddafi” (Sherlock, 2011/9/28). Even months later, it was reported that, “many of those fleeing Sirte said that the stiff defense against revolutionary fighters who have been trying to battle their way into Sirte for three weeks is coming not from Gadhafi’s military units but from residents themselves, volunteering to take up arms” (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/4, emphasis added).
Based on quotes from insurgents that were “manning rows of rocket launchers,” we were told that “they knew they were fighting civilians, but that Sirte’s residents had ‘chosen to die’” (Sherlock, 2011/9/28). Chosen to die? How this bit of exterminationist logic failed to attract the commentary of impassioned humanitarians whose hearts bled for Benghazi is quite remarkable. By the same logic, Benghazi in March 2011 had also chosen to die. NATO had clearly chosen to “protect” some (armed) “civilians,” and not others. This actual failure to protect, and to even do the opposite, became a consistent and definiting feature of the kind of “humanitarianism” represented by NATO’s military intervention.
Sirte: Fantasy Land of the Insurgents
Also consistent was the unreliability of the National Transitional Council as a source of information. On March 28, Shamsi Abdul Mullah, a NTC spokesman, claimed that Sirte had been taken at 11:30 pm the night before. Another NTC spokesman apparently felt that a good fabrication is improved with further elaboration: the added claim was that Sirte was found to be “unarmed” and that NTC insurgents “did not encounter much resistance” (Al Jazeera, 2011/3/28). This was even as two Reuters reporters within Sirte itself, reported the exact opposite (Lucas & Al-Shalchi, 2011/3/27). These imaginative claims were dutifully supported by the one international media organization that also consistently reproduced NTC claims with little in the way of questioning: Al Jazeera.
In August, after months of fighting, NTC officials said that they would only need about ten days to capture Sirte (when two more months of the heaviest fighting instead lay ahead), and that their main goal was “liberation not blood” (Stephen & Tiron, 2011/8/28). The only “negotiations” that interested them however were about the terms of Sirte’s surrender, yet Gaddafi’s chief spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, reported that Gaddafi wanted to negotiate with the insurgents to form a transitional government (Stephen & Tiron, 2011/8/28). Indeed, at almost every stage of the conflict, Gaddafi reiterated calls for a peaceful transition, which were always rejected out of hand by the foreign-backed opposition, in favour of continued violence.
Even at the start of October, when the onslaught against Sirte was reaching its peak, a “Colonel” Ahmed Bani, speaking for the so-called “Defense Ministry” of the new regime-in-the-making, vowed that opposition forces “will be able to completely dominate Sirte in the next few days” (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/5). Weeks of fighting remained. As for “dominance,” it seems that the NTC never understood the concept in terms other than total destruction, rather than winning support.
While NATO bombing and insurgent attacks ceased almost immediately after Gaddafi was killed on October 20, 2011, it was reported that officials of Misrata’s military council claimed their forces captured Sirte on September 15, more than a month too soon, “after a day of heavy fighting” (Stephen, 2011/9/16). Instead of “heavy fighting,” Mohammed Darrat, who was another, more imaginative, spokesman for the rebel administration in Misrata, said that insurgents not only advanced into Sirte, but they had also “met minimal resistance” (McDonnell, 2011/9/16).
Sirte: Allah, Muammar, Libya— and Memory
“The only way for it [Sirte] to fall is through an internal rebellion,” said Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, chairman of the NTC, in August 2011, recognizing the fact that even months after the rebellion had started elsewhere in Libya, Sirte had yet to reject Gaddafi (Fadel, 2011/8/22). Indeed, such a rejection never came. And it still has not.
For weeks during the final NATO/NTC onslaught on Sirte that began in late August 2011, snipers held back the insurgents, “making forecasts of a quick end to the battle for Sirte look premature” (El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/6). NATO spokespersons who lacked historical knowledge and a basic understanding of the contemporary political realities of Libya called the continued resistance of Sirte “surprising” (Gamel & Al-Shaheibi, 2011/10/15). “We will love Gaddafi until death,” Sadina Muhammed declared about herself and fellow residents of Sirte (Sheridan, 2011/10/15). “What are they liberating us from? We want Moammar,” another Sirte resident shouted, standing in a group. Another warned, “Let me tell you one thing. The people of Sirte are Bedouins and the Bedouin man does not forget to avenge injustice. We will not forget what happened in Sirte. We will not forgive and will not allow anyone from Benghazi or Misrata to enter Sirte again” (Reuters, 2011/10/16).
“Only Allah, Muammar and Libya,” a truck driver in Sirte defiantly shouted toward journalists a few days after Gaddafi was killed there. He first told the same reporters that Gaddafi provided jobs and security, while NATO brought only destruction— as for the NTC, he chose to call them “rats” (AP, 2011/10/28). After losing Muammar Gaddafi, leaders of the tribe to which he belonged, the Gaddadfa (or Gaddafiya), threw their support behind his son, Saif al-Islam, who had not yet been captured (Randall, 2011/10/23). Standing over the graves of Gaddafi’s mother and other relatives, which had been emptied and desecrated by insurgents, a member of Gaddafi’s tribe told a visiting journalist: “Would you forget if someone killed your son unjustly? No you won’t forget. People here will never forget. It will be blood feuds” (El Gamal, 2011/11/4). A young girl, resident of Sirte, exclaimed to the same journalist, “We only have four things in life, do you understand me?” and then taking the journalist’s pen and notebook wrote, “Allah, Muammar, Libya. And … that’s all.” Then she explained that, “we lived in security with Muammar, we never thought we will end up living in a school. Look around you, do you see any food aid from organizations or any officials visiting us? No one” (El Gamal, 2011/11/4). The memory of Gaddafi, now the “Martyr Leader,” remained preserved in the photographs that some Sirte residents “tucked secretly among their belongings” (El Gamal, 2011/11/4).
If NATO leaders and the ranks of our op-ed punditry could imagine a turning of the tables as a “success” and as bringing freedom and democracy to Libya, it could only be by refusing to read the words that our own reporters brought back to us, sometimes printed just a few pages away from the triumphalist columns blaring imperial fantasies. Conquering Gaddafi— or more accurately, the millions who rallied behind the Al-Fateh revolution even to the last minutes of its sunset (see FIGURE 2.1)—was supposed to make us feel good. The words of Sirte’s residents should have had us worried about the shallowness of our preferred truths and about the depths of their memories, as they certainly worried the authoritarian regime led by the NTC that followed.
FIGURE 2.1 Green Square, Tripoli on July 1, 2011: a part of the immense crowd that turned out to cheer a speech by Muammar Gaddafi. (Photo courtesy of Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, all rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.)
Who Voted With Their Feet?
Of course, not all Western journalists were keen to report on the reality of Sirte’s resistance to the NATO-backed rebellion, and their continued loyalty to the Al-Fateh Revolution. In a piece of remarkably cynical and unscrupulous misrepresentation, the editorial board of The Christian Science Monitor produced an editorial on the same day that Gaddafi was brutally tortured and murdered, claiming that his end “was made possible only after thousands of civilian supporters in his hometown of Sirte deserted him;” the editorial concluded, “they voted with their feet.” Not to rest there, it continued by asserting that even while it is true that many civilians simply fled the fighting (a point which does not detain the editors any further), “both Libya’s transitional government and NATO went out of their way to hold their fire and set up a siege that would allow the people to leave.” In the editors’ eyes, this was “strategic patience” that was “driven by a reverence for life.” This, they claimed, was in “stark contrast” to Gaddafi’s threat against rebels in Benghazi, “a threat that justified NATO’s military intervention” (Christian Science Monitor, 2011/10/20).
Let us examine what was behind that alleged “strategic patience.” How was the insurgents’ and NATO’s “reverence for life” put into practice and what were the effects? How did their actual acts of war compare with a mere threat? How also did the editors at a prominent Western newspaper go about counting “votes” in a war zone? (We do not need to point out that once the opposition gained control over Benghazi in February 2011, refugees continued to pour out of that city toward the Egyptian border [Crilly, 2011/3/19; MacSwan, 2011/3/19]. Perhaps they too were voting with their feet. Or do feet only cast votes when they run in The Christian Science Monitor’s appointed direction?)
Several media reports did in fact state (with little questioning) that the insurgents laying siege to Sirte allowed civilians to flee. Both NATO and media commentators also took the fact of a city being besieged as not in itself worthy of comment, when if it had been Benghazi that was besieged it would have occasioned hyperbolic moral concern, just as it did with Misrata. After all the siege of Sirte did entail residents being cut off from food, water, electricity, fuel, and medicine (Al-Shalchi, 2011/9/18; BBC, 2011/9/27; El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/5; El Madany, 2011/9/20). These facts did little to perturb the pro-intervention Western commentators and political leaders, and the UN remained entirely mute. Among those reporting that insurgents had given civilians the opportunity to leave (on different dates) were the BBC (2011/10/7), Reuters (2011/10/1; Dziadosz, 2011/9/22), and the Associated Press (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/5).
While Reuters like others reported that the NTC called a two-day truce on October 1, 2011 to allow civilians to leave, its reporters on the ground also noted that insurgents continued their heavy rocket and mortar fire nonetheless; moreover, the strategy of the insurgents was to respond to precise sniper fire from government troops and brigades in Sirte with the far more indiscriminate and excessive use of rockets and unguided artillery (El Gamal & Logan, 2011/10/1). In another Reuters report on this so-called truce, civilians fleeing Sirte told them that, “they knew nothing of the ceasefire, and that the shooting had not stopped” (Gaynor & El Gamal, 2011/10/2). As for NATO, which The Christian Science Monitor also credits for a truce to allow civilians to flee, it did not cease bombing Sirte on either October 1 or October 2, according to its own press releases for those dates (NATO, 2011/10/1, 2011/10/2). Continuing to fight and bombard Sirte is just one way that “strategic patience” and “reverence for life” are disproven. More alarming, however, is the idea that a truce was announced, which potentially drew civilians out from their homes and therefore, with NATO jets continuing their bombings, the risk of civilian casualties increased.
It was also reported that the reason for the NTC’s so-called “truces,” purportedly to allow civilians to leave Sirte, was in fact a shortage of ammunition for insurgent forces and the NTC’s need for time to resupply them. Quoting NTC fighters on the frontline, Reuters reported that the fighters were “unable to defeat forces loyal to deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi in the city of Sirte because the country’s new rulers are failing to supply them with enough ammunition.” One fighter told the reporter that they had only been able to fire off a single Grad rocket that day (El Madany, 2011/9/20). The reported ammunition shortage was so severe that it would cause NTC forces to stop fighting for up to a week (BBC, 2011/9/22). Yet, once resupplied, NTC fighters immediately resumed their assault on Sirte: “Over the last week, fighters said they wouldn’t attack until all the city’s civilians were out. In the end, they decided to advance Saturday” (Hubbard & Al-Shalchi, 2011/9/24). Yet the NTC even twisted this to make it seem like continued fighting would in fact aid civilians. However, the only civilians that actually concerned them were those from Misrata, the home town of many of the insurgents, still stuck in Sirte: “they feared many families from Misrata that were stuck in the city were in danger, said a brigade commander, Mohammed al-Sugatri. ‘There are lots of people from Misrata who are stuck in the city living in basements. They have no food or water and many of their children are sick so we had no choice but to attack,’ he said” (Hubbard & Al-Shalchi, 2011/9/24). Only one news report juxtaposed the announcement of the truce with the NTC ammunition shortage (the real reason for the cessation of fire): “‘The only delay at the moment is they are waiting for the residents to clear out,’ Busin said today in an interview in Tripoli, the capital. The council’s fighters are also running low on ammunition for assault rifles and anti-aircraft guns, and are waiting for new supplies to arrive, he said” (Tuttle & Alexander, 2011/9/27).
At the same time of the supposed truce, NATO again continued to bomb Sirte, with British Tornados attacking targets with Paveway bombs (NATO, 2011/9/27; Tuttle & Alexander, 2011/9/27). As a matter of fact, the illusion of a NTC truce was simply to clear the way for NATO bombing in this instance: “We were ordered to leave downtown Sirte because NATO has a mission to do there. We left after 7:00 pm last night (Saturday),” an insurgent told AFP (2011/9/26). NATO then proceeded to launch a dozen airstrikes in Sirte, according to AFP. In fact, there is no evidence that NATO ever observed any sort of truce in its bombing of Sirte on any of the truce dates mentioned— this notion was entirely fabricated in the romantic narrative of The Christian Science Monitor.
The weapons used in the assault on Sirte were also of the most indiscriminate kind, a fact that evinced little moral outrage in the West and relatively little comment from Western human rights NGOs (and when comment was made, it was relatively subdued in tone). Reporters nevertheless did mention that “grad rockets, artillery and tank fire rained down” on what they assumed were these (loosely defined) “Gaddafi positions” (El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/19). “Sustained tank and mortar fire has been targeting Sirte and there are huge columns of smoke across the city,” reported the BBC, “with many buildings struck and on fire” (BBC, 2011/10/7). One insurgent commander boastingly confirmed, “we have heavy weapons— Grad launchers, tanks, rockets” (Dziadosz, 2011/9/22). These are unguided munitions that create a great deal of damage around where they strike. To make matters worse, the people firing these munitions were for the most part untrained and therefore less capable of achieving any sort of discriminate precision. Other reporters contradicted the notion that the insurgents wished to exercise care in not harming civilians: “Rebel commanders said they were rethinking their strategy of avoiding the use of heavy weapons in the city centre” (Black & Stephen, 2011/9/18). And “rethink” they did, with lust. The UN Human Rights Council’s own International Commission of Inquiry on Libya (UNHRC, 2012) reported that damage caused by the insurgents’ use of these heavy weapons “was so widespread as to be clearly indiscriminate in nature” (p. 15), repeating that in the assault on Sirte, “the scale of the destruction there and the nature of the weaponry employed indicated that the attacks were indiscriminate” (p. 16). These are documented war crimes.
The indiscriminate nature of the opposition forces’ attacks against Sirte deserve more attention because this fact belies the claim that every attempt at minimizing civilian losses was taken. “All those involved in the fighting have legal obligations to spare civilians by ending immediately the use of indiscriminate weapons like GRAD rockets, and not firing artillery and mortars into residential areas,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Middle East and North Africa Programme Deputy Director at Amnesty International (AI, 2011/10/3). AI reminded us that “international humanitarian law prohibits the use of weapons that are inherently indiscriminate or which cannot be targeted at military objectives,” and noted that the opposition fighters attacking Sirte “have been found to use GRAD rockets, which pose a lethal danger to populated areas because they are unguided” (AI, 2011/10/3). Unfortunately, AI chose to deliberately limit the critical impact of its own admonition first by reminding readers that AI had collected evidence that “Gaddafi’s forces” had committed war crimes thoughout the conflict, and second by repeating NATO’s claim that “pro-Gaddafi forces” were using civilians as “shields” in Sirte (AI, 2011/10/3), an assertion for which no evidence has ever been produced, least of all by AI. Why AI should even need to produce these criticisms of “Gaddafi forces” (choosing as always to reduce the discussion to Gaddafi) in a report on insurgents’ attacks on Sirte, shows just how uncomfortable AI has been in unveiling any kind of wrong doing by the intervention that its own directors supported in February 2011.
Evidence of indiscriminate attacks is obviously clearly etched into the faces of almost all of Sirte’s buildings as witnessed on the cover of this book. Beneath that, more facts emerge to show that the opposition forces could not have spared civilians given the way they fought. For one, the insurgents frequently fired on each other without knowing— in one such “friendly fire” incident, the insurgents killed fifteen of their own (Gillette, 2011/10/19). Second, while many of the fighters were feted in the international press for being doctors, students, lawyers, etc., it also meant that many lacked the requisite training in how to use their weapons and would not likely have been able to exercise much care in firing them. Indeed, numerous news videos show insurgent forces letting off long bursts of heavy machine gun fire, sprayed down a street, or insurgents raising their assault rifles over the tops of walls and firing blindly or firing rockets into a city but without any advance spotters on the ground to direct the fire. The lack of knowledge on how to use their weapons often backfired on insurgents. Two Reuters reporters personally witnessed “one fighter blow his own head off and kill a comrade while handling a rocket propelled grenade,” and in another incident, “a fighter wounded himself and another fighter after losing control of his machinegun” (Dziadosz & Golovnina, 2011/9/22). In another case, “one fighter nearly shot himself when he fired a celebratory round into the side of the barrel of a captured tank, sending the bullet ricocheting,” while another group, “fired a Grad missile into a lamppost during a battle, knocking off the light and sending the rocket crashing to the ground about a hundred meters away from their position.” Unreassuringly, the reporter tells us that the insurgents “coordinate” airstrikes with NATO, “whose jets frequently roar overhead” (Dziadosz, 2011/9/22). On the other hand, this same NATO claimed not to have anyone on the ground guiding its targeting (AFP, 2011/12/15), and also boasted of gathering targeting data from Twitter (Norton-Taylor & Hopkins, 2011/6/15; Smith, 2011/6/14). (Such assertions pose a lose-lose situation for NATO propaganda, which was amateurish at best during this campaign: if the claims are correct, they indict NATO targeters for firing with little reliable information on their targets, thus failing to protect civilians; if incorrect, it means that what NATO destroyed, it did so deliberately, knowing that civilians could be killed.)
There is again the issue of the nature of the weapons used in civilian areas by the insurgents, which included tanks, anti-aircraft guns that fire large caliber rounds, and heavy artillery (Gamel & Al-Shaheibi, 2011/10/15). As Abdul Hadi Doghman, commander of the insurgent Dat al-Ramal brigade, told Reuters: “We are going to engage them with tanks and heavy artillery first, after that we will send in the pick-up trucks with anti-aircraft guns, then the infantry” (El Gamal & Gaynor 2011/10/14). Reporters witnessed insurgents using six Russian-built 130-mm cannons away in the desert, firing dozens of shells an hour into Sirte. Ashiq Hussein, a Sirte resident, explained that “the incoming shells from NTC forces were hitting civilian homes. They are missing their targets and often hit civilian homes” (Sky News, 2011/10/2). Others saw insurgents on a hillside from where “they sent rockets and tank shells raining down on the city” (Sherlock, 2011/9/28). Other Sirte residents reported, “they’re shelling constantly. There’s indiscriminate fire within individual neighborhoods” (Maclean, 2011/9/29). Finally, when it comes to the act of being indiscriminate and showing little “reverence for life,” the question of intent is raised. As one resident fleeing Sirte emphasized, “the rebels from Misrata say they will destroy Sirte because Misrata was destroyed” (El Gamal, 2011/10/5), which would mean being “indiscriminate” by design, done to produce the maximum damage possible (for which there is abundant visual evidence).
The insurgents’ “reverence for life” was questioned even by some Western reporters working for anti-Gaddafi media such as the BBC. Wyre Davies reported: “This is almost a scorched earth policy. The pro-Gaddafi fighters defending this city won’t surrender, so Sirte is being systematically destroyed, block by block. Fighting is intense, incredibly destructive, and almost mind-numbing” (quoted in O’Connor, 2011/10/19). Reporting live, Davies commented: “When all else fails, blast the heck out of the place you’re trying to take— current NTC thinking in Sirte. Intense shelling again today,” followed by “Retribution in Sirte. Some NTC fighters deliberately burn houses in Gaddafi’s home town.”8 Reporters for The Telegraph described Sirte as a “squalid ruin” reminiscent of “the grimmest scenes from Grozny” (quoted in O’Connor, 2011/10/19). The insurgents’ alleged “restraint” was questioned by other mainstream Western reporters: “the attacking forces clearly feel no need for restraint in bombarding the Gaddafi loyalists….The revolutionaries have been firing purloined antiaircraft guns and artillery at apartment buildings where pro-Gaddafi snipers have holed up, causing heavy damage” (Sheridan, 2011/10/15).
When NTC fighters allowed civilians to leave, they used the opportunity to search their vehicles to establish whether or not they were “Gaddafi loyalists” (Dziadosz & Golovnina, 2011/9/22). Rather than simply being “allowed” to flee, civilians had to go through checkpoints established by NTC forces, so that even this became part of a military strategy rather than respect for international humanitarian law (Hubbard & Al-Shalchi, 2011/9/24). What some Sirte residents openly told journalists at those checkpoints is very illuminating: “This so-called revolution is not worth it,” said Moussa Ahmed, “But we can’t say anything now; when we meet the revolutionaries we have to hide our feelings” (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/4). The reporter found, “a palpable dislike between those fleeing and the fighters searching through their belongings” (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/4). Other reporters also found that, “NTC fighters manning the checkpoints made no secret of their disdain for the residents of a city which was so privileged under the ousted regime and where loyalty to the ousted Kadhafis ran deep” (Mulholland, 2011/10/4). Others also reported that “the fleeing residents viewed the checkpoints with fear and suspicion, and many remained unsympathetic to the rebel side”— an elderly woman spoke angrily at a checkpoint guard: “Since the 19th [of] March when NATO started bombing we have been living in hell,” and her fearful husband asked her to be quiet (Sherlock, 2011/9/28). NTC fighter Mohammed Shahomi, looking at Sirte residents at a checkpoint, told a reporter: “They are all Kadhafi loyalists. You think they are leaving because they believe in the revolution? They are just scared” (Mulholland, 2011/10/4). Apparently Shahomi had not read The Christian Science Monitor. There is also some evidence to suggest that those fleeing civilians who were wounded in crossfire may have been detained at the checkpoints. As one NTC fighter said, “we also check for people with bullet injuries, because that means they likely were fighting for Gadhafi” (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/4).
If The Christian Science Monitor misled some of its readers into believing the spin about NTC fighters’ patience and reverence for life, the notion that Sirte’s residents engaged in an approximation of a rebellion against Gaddafi by “voting with their feet,” would prove even less tenable, not to say inexcusably cynical. “It was my sick mother and father who made me get out of Sirte. Look at my father, he is a sick man, how can I take care of him like that. Look at the kids’ faces, they had diarrhoea and were sick because of the water and lack of food.” He was asked to explain why he left Sirte with his family, but it is interesting to note that the very question itself (a reporter searching for signs of anti-Gaddafi dissent among those fleeing for their lives) and the answer would disappoint any loyal reader of The Christian Science Monitor (El Gamal, 2011/10/2). “I am not scared. I am hungry,” another fleeing resident said (Logan & El Gamal, 2011/9/30). While reporting on families flowing out of Sirte, others indicated that those fleeing were “unbowed in their deep distrust of the revolutionaries trying to crush this bastion of the old regime,” and that if anything, “the fleeing residents were a sign of how resistance to Libya’s new rulers remains entrenched” (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/4). Halima Salem asked, “How can it be that Libyans are doing this to us? Aren’t we the same people? I feel bad for our army….They were honorable men with high morals. And now this chaos” (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/4). “Fear of the NTC fighters” also kept some Sirte residents from leaving (Mulholland, 2011/10/4). Some fled Sirte and then some also returned as well: “We refuse to leave, we don’t want to suffer… We would rather die here than leave our houses and suffer” (El Gamal, 2011/10/5). Others “didn’t want to leave. Some people are scared of being slaughtered by the rebels” (El Gamal, 2011/10/5).
Even for readers restricted to only reading Western mainstream media reports, The Christian Science Monitor’s claims are revealed to be both outlandish and callous. Desperate to finally be seen as the liberators of Arabs, rescuing poor victims with the finest of American exports (human rights), some would understandably feel compelled to exploit the suffering of others (residents fleeing Sirte) and turn that into something worthy of celebration. This is an example of the abduction process at the centre of Western, liberal humanitarianism: it can only function by first directly or indirectly creating the suffering of others, and by then seeing every hand as an outstretched hand, pleading or welcoming. We see (or imagine) helpless others, gobbling morsels of food that we hand them, brown mouths chugging down water from our plastic bottles, and we feel accomplished. Our moral might is reaffirmed by the physical plight of others. Clearly, the humanitarian relation is not a relation between equals. We are not our “brothers’ keepers” then, but rather we are more like animal keepers. Bombing for us is really just an animal management technology, and our relationship to the world remains a zoological one.
That the NTC could ever be cast as “revolutionary” is thus also remarkable, and meant to bewilder Western audiences. The NTC found use for NATO, even if just out of cynical, cold, instrumentalist calculation, but the fact remains that they helped to reinforce and revitalize the zoology of imperialism. There is nothing revolutionary about being neo-colonial, and aiding empire. That is not revolution: it is restoration.
War Crimes: Civilians Targeted in NATO Attacks
One of the dominant myths about NATO’s military intervention in Libya is that it was intended to “protect civilians,” a topic touched upon above, and to which we will return throughout. NATO escalated its bombing of Sirte at the end of August 2011, as the final assault on the city began. While Gaddafi’s government had been removed from Tripoli, and the government’s defences began to shrink, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said, “I think fighting has to end” for NATO to stop bombing (Mulholland, 2011/10/4). Similarly, French Defence Minister Gerard Longuet said the airstrikes would not cease “until all remaining pockets of resistance are suppressed and the new government asks for them to end” (Lekic, 2011/10/6). UK Prime Minister David Cameron, using words now rendered sinister and macabre, also stated: “We must keep on with the NATO mission until civilians are all protected and until this work is finished” (McDonnell, 2011/9/16). Even after more than 9,600 strike missions and the near complete destruction of Sirte, British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond told BBC radio that NATO would decide when the mission is “complete” and “once we are satisfied that there is no further threat to the Libyan civilians and the Libyans are content, NATO will then arrange to wind up the operation” (Lekic, 2011/10/21). (That Hammond could presume to speak about “no further threat” to civilians, when NATO was the prime threat in government strongholds, and that it could then decide which Libyans could speak as being “content,” is a good example of how an amoral vacuum, filled with Orwellian doublespeak, has become institutionalized and normalized in NATO’s political leadership.)
Yet all of NATO’s stipulated conditions for ceasing operations had been satisfied already by Septemner (NATO, 2011/4/14). Even in going beyond the actual UN resolution authorizing military intervention, Obama only listed the following: “Qaddafi must stop his troops from advancing on Benghazi, [and] pull them back from Ajdabiya, Misrata, and Zawiya”— Sirte was never mentioned (Obama, 2011/3/18). In fact, Sirte was specifically not listed by NATO as one of the places from which Libyan government forces were to have withdrawn, which was also an extra condition imposed by NATO that went beyond anything authorized by the UN. None of the so-called “Gaddafi strongholds” are listed as areas of NATO concern (NATO, 2011/4/14), which is only logical since the Libyan government would pose no threat to its own bastions of support. NATO nonetheless continued to bomb those very cities in the name of “protecting civilians,” even months after the conditions listed had been satisified. When NATO and the insurgents it backed then proceeded to target Sirte, Bani Walid, and other strongholds, they in fact created a threat to civilians where none existed before— and there was nobody to protect the residents of Sirte from NATO and their local allies, other than what remained of the so-called “Gaddafi forces.”
With what Western media and NATO members claimed was the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, all of NATO’s stated objectives had been achieved (NATO, 2011/4/14). Yet, as NATO was bombing Sirte on August 30, 2011, the NATO spokesperson, Roland Lavoie, “appeared to struggle to explain how NATO strikes were protecting civilians at this stage in the conflict. Asked about NATO’s assertion that it hit 22 armed vehicles near Sirte, he was unable to say how the vehicles were threatening civilians, or whether they were in motion or parked” (Laub & Schemm, 2011/8/30). Also highly suspect, given that Obama had declared the successful achievement of a no-fly zone back in March, was NATO’s claim to be striking radars and anti-aircraft sites in Sirte as late as five months after Obama’s declaration, when these would have necessarily been the first sites to be destroyed. Either NATO failed to do what was necessary to declare that a no-fly zone had been imposed (which by itself would be a striking find) or its targets in Sirte were not what NATO claimed them to be (NATO, 2011/8/28, 2011/8/30).
With limited resources and little international concern over the plight of Sirte, two separate international investigations have strikingly documented the exact same war crimes perpetrated by NATO in the bombing of Sirte. In particular, the following action reported by NATO in unremarkable terms became one focus of attention. From NATO’s media update concerning its strike sorties on September 15, 2011, we were told: “Key Hits 15 SEPTEMBER: In the vicinity of Sirte: 1 Military Storage Facility, 2 Armed Vehicles, 1 Tank, 4 Multiple Rocket Launchers, 8 Air Missile Systems” (NATO, 2011/9/15). The mention of “2 Armed Vehicles” says nothing of course about civilian deaths, and might seem unremarkable.
First, the Independent Civil Society Mission to Libya, which was established by the Arab Organization for Human Rights (AOHR) in cooperation with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and the International Legal Assistance Consortium (ILAC), conducted an investigation in Sirte on November 21, 2011 (see FFM, 2012). The Mission interviewed two principal witnesses in Zone 2, “a western residential area in Sirte which was one of the last holdouts of Gaddafi supporters in the country.” These two witnesses reported “a NATO attack which resulted in the death of 57-59 individuals, of whom approximately 47 were civilian.” (FFM, 2012, p. 44). The Mission “found these witnesses to be credible, and their report was confirmed by unrelated witnesses” (FFM, 2012, p. 45). According to their reports, on September 15, 2011, insurgents seized control of the western part of Sirte but were subsequently driven out in a counterattack. Two jeeps— the two armed vehicles listed by NATO —which were fitted with weapons and held five combatants each, took a postion on an open road with the beach to one side and houses to the other. Just after sunset, but with some light remaining, NATO aircraft destroyed the two jeeps with one missile each. In an attempt to rescue survivors and retrieve the dead a large crowd of civilians flocked to the scene— witnesses affirmed that the crowd was exclusively civilian. Almost five minutes after the first attack on the jeeps, a third missile was fired at the area killing 47 of the civilians present. The Mission itself observed “three impact craters with blast patterns in the street which were consistent with an air attack from the south” (FFM, 2012, p. 45).
There is little reason to doubt that NATO deliberately committed the attack knowing that civilians would be the ones to die. This strategy, known as “double tapping,” is used by the U.S. commonly in drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. It targets both rescuers and often mourners at funerals for the victims as well. Moreover, this has been amply documented by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) in a series of damning, not to say repulsive, documentary reports of such attacks, including ones occurring at the time this book was being written (see BIJ, 2012/2/4, 2012/6/4). These attacks on civilians have been legitimated within the Obama administration with the redefinition of “civilian”, such that all males of combat age can be redefined as combatants and thus legitimate targets (BIJ, 2012/5/29). These are indisputable war crimes and they also meet most definitions of terrorism. The Independent Civil Society Mission to Libya explained that it was aware “that missiles fired from an aerial platform are typically fired ‘eyes-on’. This means that, at the time of firing, NATO forces should have had the target area under visual observation” (FFM, 2012, p. 45). We see similar attacks against unarmed, civilian rescuers tending to the wounded in the now infamous “Collateral Murder” video released via WikiLeaks— the pattern of U.S. forces deliberately attacking civilians is evident and available for all to see.
While NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen asserted, “I can tell you that no target was approved or attacked if we had any evidence or reason to believe that civilians were at risk” (NATO, 2012/3/5), that is precisely what NATO forces did in another case, in the town of Majer, 160 km east of Tripoli on August 8, 2011. This has now been abundantly documented by news media, pro-intervention human rights bodies such as Human Rights Watch (HRW), and a UN Commission of International Inquiry on Libya. In this case, according to HRW, NATO not only struck a farming compound where not a shred of evidence for any military activity was ever found, it then struck a second time as civilian rescuers came to look for survivors.
“A second strike outside one of the compounds killed and wounded civilians who witnesses said were searching for victims. The infrared system used by the bomb deployed should have indicated to the pilot the presence of many people on the ground. If the pilot was unable to determine that those people were combatants, then the strike should have been canceled or diverted.” (Human Rights Watch [HRW], 2012/5/14; see also HRW, 2012, pps. 27-32 and Garlasco, 2012/6/11)
Raji Sourani, head of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, who took part in the Mission later stated that, “we have reason to think that there were some war crimes perpetrated” (Shabi, 2012/1/19). Rather than investigate the matter further or call for some accountability from NATO (which absolutely denied that there were any civilian casualties whatsoever), UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon instead adamantly insisted, “Security Council resolution 1973, I believe, was strictly enforced within the limit, within the mandate” (Shabi, 2012/1/19). The very same body that claimed to be outraged by human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, and war crimes when Gaddafi was fully in power, now turned a complete blind eye to the those killed as a result of UNSCR 1973, without any accountability, without apology, and without a moment’s pause to understand the extraordinary hypocrisy that would thoroughly discredit all Western concerns for protecting civilians. “Protecting civilians” is an ideological weapon of war.
There was yet another international investigation of the matter by Amnesty International (AI), itself a party to the original intervention in Libya which it called for and supported. AI’s investigation took place in January and February 2012, thus roughly two months after the Mission discussed above, with parallel missions and reports by Human Rights Watch, The New York Times, and a UN Commission of International Inquiry. One of the locations AI visited was Sirte. AI only documented nine named civilian deaths in Sirte— it is not apparent that the previous Mission sought to name the 47 civilians killed in the September 15, 2011 missile strikes; however AI did acknowledge that, “additional incidents of civilian casualties have been reported to have occurred in circumstances where it has been difficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians. For example, Amnesty International was told by residents in Sirte that on September 15, 2011, NATO strikes killed several members of al-Gaddafi forces in their two vehicles, as well as more than 40 civilians, most of whom had rushed to the scene after the first vehicle was struck” (AI, 2012b, p. 6). There was no apparent attempt by AI to name these civilians. AI thus creates two separate counts— one, that is exceptionally small, and appears more credible because the dead are named, and another, much larger figure, that is mentioned only secondarily and less prominently, and is made to appear less documented. Moreover, AI adds an alibi for NATO forces by noting above “circumstances where it has been difficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians.” AI thus does two things: it corroborates the report by the Independent Civil Society Mission to Libya, by reporting the same findings months later without any change; but it also does more to downplay the number and significance of the September 15 NATO attack.
Amnesty International did however document additional civilian deaths in Sirte for other dates, with much more work remaining to be done. AI reported that on September 16, 2011, several airstrikes targeted a large apartment building in Sirte containing roughly ninety apartments and “at least two residents were killed” (AI, 2012b, pps. 13-14; also HRW, 2012, pps. 50-53). NATO does not even list an apartment building as one of its targets, preferring instead to produce a list that NATO hoped would be taken at face value: “Key Hits 16 SEPTEMBER: In the vicinity of Sirte: 5 Command and Control Nodes, 3 Radar Systems, 4 Armed Vehicles, 8 Air Missile Systems” (NATO, 2011/9/16).
In addition, on September 25, 2011, just before dawn, NATO carried out an airstrike against the home of Salem Diyab, in Sirte, killing four children and three women— the apparent target was Mosbah Ahmed Diyab, a Brigadier-General, but “who lived in another area of the city.” AI concluded: “If this civilian house was targeted because it was believed that Mosbah Ahmed Diyab was present, NATO should have made sure it had information on the presence of any civilians there. The fact that at least seven civilians were in the home should have been reason enough to cancel or delay the attack out of concern that it would have been disproportionate” (AI, 2012b, p. 15; see also HRW, 2012, pps. 47-50). Unfortunately, some readers of the report might have needed AI to tell them the obvious: if this attack targeted so-called “command and control” and produced multiple civilian deaths, we can expect that other “military” targets listed by NATO could also entail civilian casualties. Once more, NATO misrepresented events by not indicating that it was deliberately targeting civilian structures: “Key Hits 25 SEPTEMBER: In the vicinity of Sirte: 1 command and control node [the Diyab home?], 2 ammunition/vehicle storage facility, 1 radar facility, 1 multiple rocket launcher, 1 military support vehicle, 1 artillery piece, 1 ammunition storage facility” (NATO, 2011/9/25).
The New York Times collaborated with Amnesty International in investigating reports of NATO’s civilian casualties in Sirte, and unearthed further accounts, while acknowledging that what they did uncover was not in any way a complete account for all casualties of NATO. “It was the anti-Gaddafi forces who endangered civilians they suspected of having sympathies for the dying government,” the Times reported, based on accounts from Sirte residents (Chivers & Schmitt, 2011/12/18). Then they reported the following account, worth quoting in full as it speaks to so many of the actualities of NATO’s practice that rendered NATO’s humanitarian claims to be largely false:
“On a recent afternoon, Mahmoud Zarog Massoud, his hand swollen with an infection from a wound, wandered the broken shell of a seven-story apartment building in Surt [Sirte], which was struck in mid-September. His apartment furniture had been blown about by the blast. He approached the kitchen, where, he said, he and his wife had just broken their Ramadan fast when ordnance hit. ‘We were not thinking NATO would attack our home,’ he said. Judging by the damage and munitions’ remains, a bomb with a delayed fuze struck another wing of the building, burrowed into another apartment and exploded, blasting walls outward. Debris flew across the courtyard and through his kitchen’s balcony door. His wife, Aisha Abdujodil, was killed, both her arms severed, he said. Bloodstains still marked the floor and walls.” (Chivers & Schmitt, 2011/12/18)
NATO, of course, never reported facts such as these when their spokespersons addressed the press. However, when “provided written questions, NATO declined to comment” on its strikes against civilian homes (Chivers & Schmitt, 2011/12/18).
Aside from the international investigations presented above, numerous media reports during the course of fighting in Sirte cited many more cases of civilians killed by NATO strikes. Civilians fleeing Sirte blamed both NATO bombing and NTC shelling for killing civilians and destroying buildings in the city (El Gamal & Logan, 2011/10/1; El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/5). One man affirmed that his 11-year-old son was killed by NATO rockets, and said he knew of similar attacks that to him appeared random (El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/6). Some ended up sleeping in the streets out of fear that their homes could be bombed: “Abdul-Wahab said he had been sleeping in the streets with his family after a NATO airstrike hit a building next to his house, making him fear his home could also be struck” (Logan & El Gamal, 2011/9/30). Another resident reported that NATO struck an apartment building with 12 or 13 bombs: “The whole building with nearly 600 flats is razed to the ground now” (Sky News, 2011/10/2). Others also pointed out that “a lot of civilian buildings were getting hit,” and one reported, “two of my neighbours died yesterday in a NATO bomb which hit their home” (Sky News, 2011/10/2). Civilians pouring out of Sirte told other reporters that NATO “hit all kinds of buildings: schools, hospitals;” one man said he had lost six members of his family in the bombings, and angrily declared: “NATO bombing is killing civilians. Where is the United Nations? Where is the Muslim world to stop this genocide of the people of Sirte?” (Coglan, 2011/9/27). One analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in London explained that NATO lacked sufficient intelligence to allow it to pinpoint targets in Sirte without endangering civilians (Pawlak, 2011/9/30). The BBC’s Wyre Davies, reporting live from the ground, pointed to NATO airstrikes in Sirte and commented: “Risky strategy with civilians trapped in the city.”9
“NATO has brought destruction, and the revolution has brought destruction,” an angry resident of Sirte told reporters (El Gamal, 2011/10/5). “Paving the way” for the start of the final offensive against Sirte, NATO flew more than 130 strike sorties at the end of August (Crilly & Evans, 2011/8/26). Sirte’s residents, trying to defend themselves from an armed takeover, and from the kinds of atrocities insurgents committed in other towns they took, NATO somehow managed to twist even this into a threat: “This is an extremely desperate and dangerous remnant of a former regime and they are obviously trying to disrupt the fact that the Libyan people have started to take responsibility for their own country” (Crilly & Evans, 2011/8/26). In just three days, since insurgents first entered Sirte itself on September 15, 2011, NATO bombed 39 targets including what it claimed were “command centres, vehicles and missile sites;” meanwhile, the insurgents themselves began their attack on the Ouagadougou Conference Centre, site of African Union meetings, actively defended by forces supporting the government (Black & Stephen, 2011/9/18). In a period of three weeks, NATO struck 296 targets in Sirte— and that was before the final month of bombings (Stephen, 2011/9/16). Even the enthusiastically pro-NTC Tony Birtley of Al Jazeera (which itself played the lead role in promoting outright falsehoods pushed by the NTC) could not help himself from remarking that Sirte had, “taken such a bombardment in the last 13 days. Nothing could survive in here for very long” (AJE, 2011/10/20).
While there is likely no chance of NATO leaders and officers being held accountable, a proper accounting of what we supported and what the consequences have been is needed. Too many reports, including by the most prominent international human rights agencies, draw a thick distinction between civilian casualties caused by NATO and those caused by the insurgents. Yet the two frequently acted in concert, especially in the last months of the war to overthrow Gaddafi (Libya effectively remained at war past October 2011). The civilian casualties caused by insurgent military actions were facilitated and enabled by NATO’s support and cover. Moreover, NATO’s civilian casualties go far beyond the immediate victims of its bombings and missile strikes. They should be understood to include all victims that were produced by NATO escalating, widening, and prolonging an armed conflict that seemed certain to come to an end in March 2011, before NATO intervened to support the insurgents.
Liberal Intervention and the Myth of “Protecting Civilians”
The key to understanding “liberal intervention” is that its rhetoric is what is most identifiably liberal about it: individual freedoms, universal human rights, civil liberties, etc. There is otherwise nothing that is liberal about its practice, its intent, the projects it defends, the fog of squalid moral dualism that surrounds it or the Orwellian torture it inflicts upon language. In practice, such intervention is as scandalous in its propagation of atrocities as any other military blitzkrieg under any other name— it commits “shock and awe,” but it does not necessarily have the bad sense to parade spokesmen before cameras to celebrate the shock and awe. The bloodlust was kept to a minimum in speeches by NATO leaders during the bombing campaign, and the use of spectacle-making bomb-cam videos was also relatively minimal when compared to previous NATO campaigns or U.S. assaults on Iraq. While the aesthetics of the public performance may not have been as ghoulish as under George W. Bush, the imperial language of authoritative command, of declaring this or that as “unacceptable,” or “non-negotiable,” and instructing foreign leaders that they “must go” because a U.S. President has decided that they have lost “legitimacy,” is exactly the same. As we will see, there were also awful moments of rejoicing in brutal murder— the paradox of cheap façades is that their maintenance costs can prove to be too expensive. Behind the practice of feel-good, look-good “protection of civilians,” we find the desire if not the plan to either suppress or annihilate all opposition, civilian or not.
The residents of Sirte would not be forgiven for genuinely supporting the Al-Fateh Revolution and the leadership of Gaddafi. NATO provided both the air support and special forces needed for the insurgents to beat Sirte into submission— in this supposed popular revolution for freedom and democracy, Sirte’s residents did not have the option to choose what suited them best. Surrender or die, this is what “democracy” meant when visited on Sirte. The insurgents were allowed to freely move tanks into place to surround and then enter Sirte, yet any attempt by government forces to move as much as a jeep, as we read above, was met with an instantaneous volley of NATO missiles, both against the jeep and against any civilian rescuers. The mere fact of Sirte remaining defiant was in and of itself deemed to be “threatening civilians”— even when it was masses of armed civilians that defended the city. As Craig Murray (former UK diplomat) explained, NATO “in effect declared being in Gadaffi’s political camp a capital offence” (Murray, 2011/8/26). He also noted the text of UNSCR 1973, which had the following as the top aims of the Security Council:
“Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, [the Security Council]
“1. Demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians;
“2. Stresses the need to intensify efforts to find a solution to the crisis which responds to the legitimate demands of the Libyan people and notes the decisions of the Secretary-General to send his Special Envoy to Libya and of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union to send its ad hoc High-Level Committee to Libya with the aim of facilitating dialogue to lead to the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution.” (United Nations Security Council [UNSC], 2011/3/17, emphasis added)
As for “liberal intervention,” Craig Murray’s understanding is that it does not even exist and is instead the opposite: “highly selective neo-imperial wars aimed at ensuring [political]… client control of key physical resources” (Murray, 2011/8/26). It does exist, however, not just as the idealistic fantasy-scape populated by the emotions of momentary puritans, but also as imperial warfare that binds to it various neo-colonial underlings. To say that liberal intervention does not exist is to say one took it too seriously, on its own terms.
“The city of Sirte is the worst affected area in the country,” the African Press Organization (APO) reported, speaking of the unexploded ordnance that still littered Sirte months after NATO’s campaign formally ended. The work of the International Committee for the Red Cross in trying to remove these explosives still remained (2012/2/16). Clearly, the ICRC, like Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), Amnesty International, and numerous Western news agencies, was aware that Sirte had been so pulverized that the damage itself had a momentum, continuing well past NATO’s pilots return home to heroes’ welcomes. What about the UN whose senior officials so actively courted the Libyan opposition and pressed for military intervention? There was Georg Charpentier, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Libya, who spoke of “the liberation of Bani Walid and Sirte in October,” and after personally visiting Sirte in January, 2012, celebrated the return of 60 percent of those who fled the city (even while there were no consistent estimates of how many had left). Yet Charpentier’s own remarks betrayed what “liberation” UN-style looks like, with his enumeration of just some of Sirte’s needs which indicated what had been demolished: “Public infrastructure, housing, education and health facilities need to be rehabilitated, reconstructed and reactivated, intense and focused reconciliation efforts also need to be encouraged” (UN, 2012/1/5).
Occasionally we heard from the “protected civilians” of Sirte once they returned to their homes. There was Aisha, a 52-year-old widow and mother of seven children from Sirte who found herself stuck outside of the city during the fighting with one of her sons. When she finally managed to return home she found that “her house had been completely burned down and her six other children were dead” (APO, 2012/2/16). One will not find such testimonies, even in the speeches of Barack Obama who likes to sprinkle his chilling demands and inopportune triumphalism with occasional ornamental quotes from suitable Libyans. One will not read such facts in any NATO press release either— NATO continues to firmly maintain that there were no confirmed civilian casualties (NATO, 2012/3/5). The problem is not that this is not “liberal intervention,” the problem is that it is exactly that.
Let us recall some of what we learned about the consequences of NATO “protecting civilians” in Sirte. The bodies were strewn everywhere. An AFP reporter entering Sirte almost immediately after the climax of fighting found relief workers preparing to bury more than 175 bodies covered with white sheets and spotted another 25 charred bodies nearby (Bastian, 2011/10/23). Another saw more than sixty dead in body bags in a field near where a NATO jet and U.S. predator drone struck at Gaddafi’s convoy as it attempted to leave Sirte (Pizzey, 2011/10/23). The Al-Mahari hotel close to the centre of Sirte was found riddled with holes from artillery and small weapons fire while an “overpowering odour” emerged, as the reporter came across “60 corpses…rotting on the lawn. Many of the victims have been killed execution-style, a bullet to the head. Some have been bound hand and foot” (Bastian, 2011/10/23). Just days after NATO ceased its bombings, the International Committee for the Red Cross entered Sirte. The ICRC on its own found 200 corpses during its visit (ICRC, 2011/10/27).
The story of Ibn Sina hospital in Sirte also illustrates the real nature of NATO “protection” and the then NTC-aligned rebels’ much touted “reverence for life.” To be clear, Ibn Sina hospital served wounded civilians in Sirte and fighters injured in defending the city. There is therefore little logic and no evidence to support any conspiratorial argument that “Gaddafi forces” would target their own hospital; moreover, the documented use of indiscriminate heavy weapons fire pertains almost exclusively to the NTC insurgents, especially in the final six weeks of the assault on Sirte. Médecins Sans Frontières reported that Ibn Sina hospital had suffered grave damage. Barbara Frederick, MSF emergency coordinator, reported: “Ibn Sina Hospital came under fire and was attacked. An explosion destroyed an operating room and most of the windows were damaged. As a result of the fighting over the last few weeks, patients had to be moved into the hallways.” The hospital also had neither water nor electricity with obvious implications for surgeries (MSF, 2011/10/19; see also MSF, 2011/10/14). Indeed, medical workers reported that “people wounded in fighting…are dying on the operating table because fuel for the hospital generator has run out.” One recounted to Reuters: “I saw a child of 14 die on the operating table because the power went out during the operation” (Gaynor & El Gamal, 2011/10/2). A biochemist at the hospital, Mohammed Shnaq, told journalists: “It’s a catastrophe. Patients are dying every day for need of oxygen” (Gaynor & El Gamal, 2011/10/2). Elderly patients were also reported to be dying from severe malnutrition (El Gamal & Logan, 2011/10/1). The Red Cross found only a few doctors left in the hospital, which was “packed with civilians from the neighbourhood, including many women and small children” (El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/6). One estimate was that around 200 patients remained inside the hospital (El Gamal & Logan, 2011/10/1). There were also reports that the insurgents deliberately shelled the hospital in order to prevent a Red Cross team from delivering medical supplies, and that an artillery shell hit the roof of the hospital (O’Connor, 2011/10/19). Another report said that the Red Cross team saw the water tower of the hospital being hit and damaged (El Gamal & Logan, 2011/10/1).
For a Western public long fed a diet of “incubator baby” horror stories from the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, to endless tales of Syrian government forces deliberately targeting children for massacres and tortures, one must wonder what accounts for the sudden silence when actual children die either at the hands of our forces or indirectly because we bomb one side in a grisly civil war. When it came to protecting civilians at Ibn Sina, NATO was not quite as silent as it should have been: the thuds and explosions of its bombs could be heard all around by people inside the hospital. Where it was silent was on any expression of concern for how its actions threatened Sirte’s civilians.
Where were UN officials whose organization did so much to promote foreign military intervention in Libyan affairs? In all fairness, UN aid workers did try to reach Sirte in late September (Logan & El Gamal, 2011/9/30). The problem was that UN aid workers were not permitted to enter Sirte, “for security reasons” (Evans, 2011/9/26). Somebody must have been restricting their movements in particular, especially as journalists were somehow entering Sirte. Those who supposedly claimed the right to protect civilians, with all their reverence for life, were blocking food and medical supplies from reaching the besieged residents of Sirte— this in itself is a war crime. Panos Moumtzis, the UN’s humanitarian aid coordinator for Libya, “made no direct comment when asked if there was concern over continuing NATO strikes against populated areas still held by forces loyal to the deposed leader” (Evans, 2011/9/26). He made no comment, even though his own agency was being blocked from upholding the very resolution that the Security Council had passed. Over and over again we have seen how the so-called “responsibility to protect” endorsed by Western interventionists played out in Libya, and Sirte has been the touchstone revealing the truths of Western humanitarianism.
Liberating Sirte: Massacres, Looting, Torture, Racism
The spectacle of an imagined massacre in Benghazi seemed enough to provoke shrill “humanitarian” outcries from Western liberals and large elements of the establishment left, not to mention various human rights organizations and large parts of the mainstream media supplying the necessary choir of pleas to “do something.” This choir was amplified by the calls of various self-designated “socialists” and “human rights activists” in Egypt, who by then had captured the media’s attention as representatives of the “Arab Spring.” The choir had first been mobilized, and then capitalized upon by the political leaderships of the dominant NATO member states with representation in the UN Security Council. Yet the only massacre to have occurred anywhere near Benghazi was the massacre of innocent black African migrant workers and black Libyans falsely accused of being “mercenaries,” and the massacre of a small, retreating column of government forces, which was a smaller-scale reenactment of the gruesome “highway of death” that we saw with the slaughter of Iraqis retreating from Kuwait in the first Gulf War. The “new Libya” is keen on retribution, revenge, and hunting down every possible figure that might be associated with Gaddafi. Yet even after the archives of the national intelligence headquarters had been thoroughly ransacked by the NTC, it is instructive to note that nobody has produced a single name of a military officer in command of any part of an alleged plan for a massacre in Benghazi. No names of military units, no data on their size and the munitions they were allotted, nor any evidence at all about an actual campaign to mount a wide-scale slaughter in Benghazi have been produced. Large campaigns in large state bureaucracies where word of mouth is an entirely ineffective communication medium necessarily produce large numbers of plans, orders, and logistical reorganization, and thus documents. It is almost entirely as a religious act of faith, a leap of the imagination, that one faces demands to believe that a massacre in Benghazi would have happened.
But what is it about the actual massacres— real, documented massacres —that took place in Sirte that failed to move the same body of shrieking outrage? Had Benghazi suddenly become untouchable, holy ground for Western liberals so that all else could be sacrificed for it? Or is it that, behind the feigned concern for absolute strangers on the other side of the planet, what really mattered was making use of any weapon, ideological or military, to overthrow a long-established thorn in the side of the West? Why did Sirte matter less, when its massacres were not of the fictive kind?
“We found 53 decomposing bodies, apparently Gaddafi supporters, at an abandoned hotel in Sirte, and some had their hands bound behind their backs when they were shot,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. Executing prisoners is a war crime. The bodies of the 53 were clustered together on the grass in the sea-view garden of the Hotel Mahari in Zone 2 (District 2) of Sirte. The area, according to witnesses interviewed by HRW, was occupied by insurgents from Misrata, with five brigades taking the trouble to even sign the names of their units on the walls of the hotel. The blood on the grass beneath the bodies, as well as bullet holes in the ground, suggest that these prisoners were shot in that location, and the similar state of decomposition suggested the same time of execution: “some of the bodies had their hands tied behind their backs with plastic ties. Others had bandages over serious wounds, suggesting they had been treated for other injuries prior to their deaths” (HRW, 2011/10/23, 2011/10/24). Amnesty International reported that the number killed at the Mahari was 65 and that they were found on the grounds of the hotel on October 23, 2011, which at the time served as the base for opposition fighters in Sirte.
“Some of the bodies had their hands tied behind their back and many had been shot in the head. Video footage taken by opposition fighters themselves on 20 October 2011 shows them hitting, insulting, threatening to kill and spitting at a group of 29 men in their custody, many of whom were found dead on 23 October 2011 at the hotel. One of the opposition fighters is heard saying ‘take them all and kill them’. Among the 29 men seen in the video in the custody of the opposition fighters are civilian residents of Area 2 of Sirte and men from other parts of Libya, some of them longtime residents of Sirte and some who may have been volunteers with al-Gaddafi forces.” (AI, 2012a, p. 39)
Ibrahim Beitelmal, a spokesman for the Misrata military council, denied these claims but he then produced multiple stories to support his denials. He said the dead were probably executed by their own comrades (thus suggesting they were not civilians, and evading the fact that opposition forces controlled the area); then he suggested the executions were probably done just to “blacken the image” of the insurgents; and then he said civilians were allowed to leave so those remaining must have been “hardcore loyalists.” This twisted series of justifications seemed to evolve and mutate before the spokesman could finish a single sentence. However, a university professor in Sirte, Zarouk Abdullah, put all such claims into serious doubt when he attested to the killing of his brother, Hisham, a civilian who stayed behind in Sirte to protect his family only to be arbitrarily rounded up by the insurgents and executed along with others at the hotel (AP, 2011/10/28).
At another site, HRW found the bodies of another ten people who had been executed and then dumped in a water reservoir. At a third site, near where Gaddafi had been captured, HRW found another set of bodies of as many as ten people who had been executed (HRW, 2011/10/23).
As HRW pointed out about war crimes:
“Violence of any kind, and in particular murder, inflicted during an armed conflict on combatants who have laid down their arms or are in detention, is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC has jurisdiction in Libya for all crimes within its mandate committed since February 15, 2011. Under the court’s treaty, criminal liability applies to both those who physically commit the crimes and to senior officials, including those who give the orders and those in a position of command who should have been aware of the abuses but failed to prevent them or to report or prosecute those responsible.” (HRW, 2011/10/23)
To date, however, the ICC has issued not a single charge or indictment for anyone in the new regime to hold them accountable for these war crimes, in obvious contravention of its own mission and UNSCR 1973. Once more, the cry to prosecute war crimes has been entirely one-sided and merely a tool for advancing regime change. HRW merely issuing these reminders is a way of politely reproducing a game where those targeted by empire are made accountable for human rights abuses, where the vanquished are tried, and where the victors are issued reminders and pleas for further investigation. For some, this may create an illusion of balance. Instead, it is a form of inoculation.
Days after the capture and murder of Gaddafi, bodies continued to be discovered, up to 500 people including civilians and fighters in just the few days that had transpired in Sirte alone (Milne, 2011/10/26). CBS reported that “nearly 300 bodies, many of them with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head, have been collected from across Sirte and buried in a mass grave. It also reported on a graveyard with no names, only numbers, “572 so far and counting” (Pizzey, 2011/10/25).
In that graveyard, CBS was told that most of the dead were “mercenaries” (which typically meant that they were black— either black Libyans, or migrant African workers, presumed to be Gaddafi supporters and summarily apprehended for the colour of their skin). We are told that “local officials freely admit that some were summarily executed,” and in the words of insurgent Sheikh Fathie Dariez, “there was no mercy for foreign mercenaries” which suggests that prisoners were executed (Pizzey, 2011/10/25). Ali Tarhouni, the NTC’s so-called oil minister, said that considering what the NTC fighters had suffered, “I am amazed at their self-restraint;” while CBS’ Allen Pizzey remarked: “the evidence indicates that little restraint was shown” (2011/10/25). The numbers presented above do not include massacre sites elsewhere in Libya, nor the growing mountain of evidence furnished by agencies such as AI and HRW of mass abductions, detention, torture, and murder committed by the forces that NATO backed in the name of protecting civilians.
What is more striking is that even while few have ever produced a total for the number of people allegedly killed by the Libyan government prior to the February 2011 uprising— and there is considerable dispute of how many were killed in the weeks leading up to NATO’s intervention —there is no doubt that Libya has not witnessed mass slaughter on such a scale, with atrocities committed by all sides, since the time of Italian colonization. For an international regime that espouses the “responsibility to protect,” violence in Libya was far from stopped because of NATO’s military campaign: it was vastly increased, and increased to a degree that anything one may believe of Gaddafi’s human rights records would pale by comparison.
In addition to massacres of prisoners in Sirte, anti-government militias (wrongly presumed by the media early on as all being “NTC forces”) also committed torture. Amnesty International, visiting in January and February 2012, interviewed “scores of victims of torture,” in several cities and towns, including Sirte.
“Detainees told Amnesty International that they had been suspended in contorted positions; beaten for hours with whips, cables, plastic hoses, metal chains and bars, and wooden sticks; and given electric shocks with live wires and taser-like electro-shock weapons. The patterns of injury observed were consistent with their testimonies. Medical reports confirmed the use of torture on several detainees who had died.” (AI, 2012a, p. 6)
Formerly host of many international meetings, Sirte— even now that it has been devastated —has become home to some of Libya’s newest class of citizens: internal refugees. Thousands of persons from the villages of Tomina and Kararim were barred from returning to their homes by the new authorities in and around Misrata; moreover, their homes in those villages continued to be openly burned and looted into February 2012 (HRW, 2012/2/21). Both villages had been occupied by government forces during the war, and then evacuated, which appears to have led Misrata authorities to engage in guilt by association and thus assume that everyone in those villages was a partisan for the government of Muammar Gaddafi. Residents of the villages relocated to several other locations in April and May 2011, including Sirte, where they remain stuck. Their properties have effectively been expropriated; they are largely the innocent victims of war who are being punished even further.
Looting was also a defining feature of what many insurgents actually meant by “liberating” Sirte. “Are you coming to liberate the city or to steal from it?” was the rhetorical question posed by a Sirte resident (Randall, 2011/10/23). Starting in Abu Hadi, a centre of the Gaddadfa tribe about 16 kilometres south from downtown Sirte, reporters found that many of the homes had been broken into and looted: “After capturing this hamlet…revolutionary fighters have gone on a vengeance spree, looting and burning homes and making off with gold, furniture and even automobiles” (Al-Shalchi, 2011/10/5). “What’s happening in Sirte is revenge, not liberation. When someone comes and takes your personal car and destroys your home, this is not liberation” said Abu Anas, a Sirte resident, on returning home. Many more also accused the insurgents of “demolishing and looting homes, shops and public buildings” (Randall, 2011/10/23). Mohammed, another Sirte resident said to Reuters: “Some revolutionaries passed by us when we were sitting outside the house and told us ‘wait, you didn’t see anything yet’,” (2011/10/16). While NTC forces stated that they were only checking homes for weapons, what Reuters reporters witnessed was starkly different.
“Reuters reporters saw many of them roaming the streets of Sirte with chairs, tires and computers on the backs of their pickup trucks. Brand new BMW and Toyota cars were seen being driven away by the fighters and being towed outside of the city. One fighter tried to push a white Porsche car up a street as another drove a looted beach buggy nearby. In another incident witnessed by Reuters, a group of fighters fired machine guns at an iron safe in an electronics shop. After 15 minutes of shooting, during which they considered trying a hand grenade, they finally opened it. It was empty.” (Reuters, 2011/10/16)
Likewise, reporters from the Associated Press TV, “said they saw trucks loaded with everything from tractors and heavy machinery to rugs, freezers, furniture and other household goods being driven off” by insurgents (BBC, 2011/10/16). More reporters witnessed looting, and recorded testimony from Sirte residents of their homes having been destroyed by insurgents unhappy that they did not find much to loot.
“Liberation” in Sirte took on another set of meanings as both racist attacks by insurgents against black victims and the effects of ethnic cleansing were both felt there. After Misrata insurgents completely depopulated the town of Tawargha (also Tawergha), inhabited mostly by black Libyans, a number of the surviving refugees ended up in Sirte before it too was devastated. “It’s about the color of the skin. That’s why they have problems with Tawargha,” said Samia Taher, “a light-skinned Libyan woman born in Illinois” who married into a Tawergha family (Dziadosz, 2011/9/30). Reuters found a group of 135 Tawarghans in Sirte. Finding themselves in the centre of wholesale destruction— “we’re in the middle of a battle here in Sirte,” as one said —many questioned the values of the so-called “revolution”: “All this and you’re calling for freedom? What kind of freedom are you seeking?” (Dziadosz, 2011/9/30). Only non-Tawarghans fleeing Sirte were allowed to temporarily settle in Tawargha, which reveals the desire for ethnic cleansing. “To avoid the recurrence of any future problems, we should separate the two groups,” said a Misrata man named Saleh as he stood by an apartment block housing non-Tawarghans (Dziadosz, 2011/9/30).
Near Sirte, where fleeing residents sought medical attention, insurgents blocked them and gave priority to fighters from Misrata. Three medical workers told Human Rights Watch, “the de facto director of the makeshift hospital between Sirte and Heisha…told the staff to treat Misrata fighters ahead of everyone else, including ahead of ‘Tawerghans, people who are black, civilians from Sirte, Gaddafi soldiers, and women. Basically anyone not from Misrata’” (HRW, 2011/10/30). A physician said that guards blocked a pregnant woman from travelling to a hospital in Misrata. “The rebels call us rats and say we will never go back,” he told HRW, consistent with other reports that Tawarghans were essentially blocked from travelling either to Tawargha, Misrata, or even Tripoli (HRW, 2011/10/30). When detained in compounds guarded by insurgent fighters from Misrata, many Tawarghans reported being beaten and tortured (AI, 2012a, p. 19).
Save Benghazi, Slay Sirte: Under Cover of Humanitarian Intervention
“And when Qaddafi and his forces started going city to city, town by town, to brutalize men, women and children, the world refused to stand idly by.
“Faced with the potential of mass atrocities— and a call for help from the Libyan people —the United States and our friends and allies stopped Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks. A coalition that included the United States, NATO and Arab nations persevered through the summer to protect Libyan civilians.” (Obama, 2011/10/20)
Save Misrata, slay Sirte. Protect Benghazi, pound Sirte— how the label “humanitarian” comes to be applied in such cases defies logic. That is because myth is not designed to be tested by logic. Leaving aside the documented crimes by the insurgents against black Libyans and African migrant workers, the insurgents were also found by Human Rights Watch to have engaged in “looting, arson, and abuse of civilians in [four] recently captured towns in western Libya” (HRW, 2011/7/13). In Benghazi, which the insurgents have held for months now, revenge killings have been reported by The New York Times as late as May 2011 (Fahim, 2011/5/10), and by Amnesty International (2011/6/23) in late June 2011, with the insurgents’ NTC clearly faulted by AI.
The tables were turned, and Sirte, under the umbrella of foreign intervention, actually became what Western opinion leaders imagined would have befallen Benghazi without foreign intervention. Yet few could be heard invoking the new UN norm, the “responsibility to protect” (R2P). Had NATO really committed itself to simply protecting civilians, NATO would have bombed armed forces on both sides of the conflict, and the result would have been a political stalemate, which the Western interventionists were obviously not prepared to accept. NATO would also have taken greater care not to target civilian infrastructure and civilian rescue workers. This adventure was never about “stopping the killing of civilians;” it was instead about who would get to do so with impunity.
“We destroy in order to save,” writes Chris Hedges (2011/9/5), and the bombing of Sirte “mocks the justification for intervention.” Hedges adds: “Our intervention, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, has probably claimed more victims than those killed by the former regime. But this intervention, like the others, was never, despite all the high-blown rhetoric surrounding it, about protecting or saving Libyan lives. It was about the domination of oil fields by Western corporations.” Hedges, a veteran Middle East correspondent for The New York Times turned peace activist, was also one of those who initially supported foreign intervention in Libya. Hedges may now say, “you would think we would have learned in Afghanistan or Iraq. But I guess not,” but as he admits, “stopping Gadhafi forces from entering Benghazi six months ago,” was something “which I supported.” Throughout this debacle, anti-imperialism has been scourged as if it were a threat greater than the West’s global military domination, as if anti-imperialism had given us any of the horrors of war witnessed thus far this century. Anti-imperialism was treated in public debate in North America as the province of political lepers: right-wing isolationists and libertarians in the U.S. and Marxists in Latin America. European socialists and columnists for Al Jazeera consistently excoriated the Latin American left for failing to put “democracy” and “human rights” ahead of anti-imperialism. One must wonder where these stalwarts of structurally adjusted, neoliberal socialism now find either democracy or human rights in the ashes of Sirte.
Goal No. 1: Regime Change
Up to this point a catalogue of human rights abuses, atrocities, and war crimes perpetrated against civilians and armed forces that supported the Libyan government has been presented. That catalogue of details is, the reader will agree, already extensive without being comprehensive, and it focuses exclusively on Sirte. When the description is expanded to encompass Benghazi, the mountains of western Libya, and so forth, the reign of terror suffered by civilians both during the war and then after NATO formally ceased operations on October 31, 2011 inescapably makes a lie of claims of Western humanitarian concern in backing and conducting this war. The almost unanimous opinion now is that NATO exceeded the UN mandate in its pursuit of regime change. Moreover, it is regime change that makes the most sense given the evidence and given the historical context of Libya’s relations with the West from colonial times to the new imperial present. Nevertheless, the Obama administration and NATO’s public faces such as Rasmussen consistently denied that regime change was a goal. Regime change continues to be a violation of international law, just as the assassination of foreign heads of state continues to be prohibited by U.S. law. That both sets of laws could be dismissed reaffirms the realities at work, namely those of a global dictatorship led by an imperial president (Canestaro, 2003; de Zayas, 2012; EO12333, 1981, 2.11; Palmer, 2005/5/1; Payandeh, 2012; UN, 1948a, Art. 2, par. 4).
As early as February 25, 2011, a little over a week after the first street protests against the Libyan government erupted, “President Obama, David Cameron, President Sarkozy of France and Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, discussed ways to remove the Libyan dictator” (Fletcher & Haynes, 2011/2/25). Then on February 26 Obama publicly declared that Gaddafi had “lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right for his country by leaving now.” He then pronounced that the instability in Libya was an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and foreign policy— words needed to justify military action (AP, 2011/2/26). Obama repeated this on March 3 (Lee, 2011/3/3). Obama was backed up in a separate statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who declared at the end of February, “Gadhafi has lost the confidence of his people and he should go without further bloodshed and violence. The Libyan people deserve a government that is responsive to their aspirations and that protects their universally recognized human rights” (AP, 2011/2/26). Nicolas Sarkozy had already determined that Gaddafi “must go” and wanted to see the West working to remove him (Times, 2011/2/26). As early as February 28 UK Prime Minister David Cameron began working on a proposal for a no-fly zone (MacDonald, 2011/3/1).
In March 2011, prominent NATO leaders again publicly endorsed the overthrow of Gaddafi as their goal. Hillary Clinton told reporters that “Gadhafi has lost the legitimacy to lead, so we believe he must go. We’re working with the international community to try to achieve that outcome” (Lucas, 2011/3/28). French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet told France-Inter radio that both the UK and France believed that the NATO campaign “must obtain more” than the end of shooting at civilians (Lucas, 2011/3/28). While the NTC’s Mahmoud Shammam, attempted to save face by saying, “we are not asking for any non-Libyan to come and change the regime,” it’s not clear that NATO was waiting for such an invitation (Lucas, 2011/3/28). If the NTC had genuinely taken a nationalist position, of the kind historically supported by most Libyans, it would have been more careful: inviting NATO to fight is inviting NATO’s own agenda, which goes well beyond Libyans’ freedom to hold picket signs. In terribly suspicious wording, “a senior U.S. official said the administration had hoped that the Libyan uprising would evolve ‘organically,’ like those in Tunisia and Egypt, without need for foreign intervention” (Richter, 2011/3/18). This sounds like exactly the kind of statement made when something begins in a fashion that is not “organic” and when events in Libya are evaluated as marked by a potential legitimacy deficit and lack of critical mass. The statement also suggests that if the uprising did not evolve “organically,” that the U.S. would then intervene. The U.S. intervened.
By October 2011 official denials about the pursuit of regime change stopped. It was officials within the Obama administration itself who told The New York Times, “the killing of Colonel Qaddafi…was one of the three scenarios considered” at a 90-minute meeting on October 19, 2011, just a day before Gaddafi was in fact killed (Landler, 2011/10/24). In addition, French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet stated, “as for Gaddafi…as long as he disappears from the stage, that would be important, but not enough. The NTC wants to capture him, and one can understand that.” This is an obvious statement of support for one side, with the aim of overthrowing Gaddafi (Reuters, 2011/10/6). Finally, on a “surprise” visit to Tripoli (Figs. 2.2, 2.3), where she laid down the general features of a new Libyan government, Hillary Clinton said about Gaddafi: “we hope he can be captured or killed soon, so you don’t have to fear him any longer” (AP, 2011/10/19). Two days later, Gaddafi was both captured and murdered. That NATO should cease its mission to “protect civilians” precisely when it had participated in the execution of Gaddafi, whose murder was made possible by NATO’s intervention and came about as a result of NATO airstrikes, is a telling chronological fact. NATO’s bombings ceased immediately on the same day, and within days the operation as a whole was formally ended. Meanwhile, the new regime continues to threaten civilians seen as pro-Gaddafi with arbitrary detention, abduction, ethnic cleansing, torture, and outright execution.
The quick dispatch of military and other government personnel to Libya, as early as February 2011 itself further substantiates the fact that from very early on Western powers were determined to use the façade of local protests as cover for their overthrowing Gaddafi and the Al-Fateh Revolution. By the end of March, The New York Times reported that for “several weeks” CIA operatives had already been working inside Libya, which would mean they were there from mid-February, that is, roughly when the protests began or very soon after. They were then joined inside Libya by “dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers” (Mazetti & Schmitt, 2011/3/30). The NYT also reported that “several weeks” before (again, around mid-February), President Obama “signed a secret finding authorizing the CIA to provide arms and other support to Libyan rebels” (Mazetti & Schmitt, 2011/3/30), with that “other support” entailing a range of possible “covert actions” (Thomas, 2011/3/30; Reuters, 2011/3/30). USAID had already deployed a team to Libya by early March (DipNote, 2011/3/10; Lee, 2011/3/3).
|
FIGURE 2.2 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton disembarks from a U.S. Air Force transport in Tripoli on October 18, 2011. (Source: U.S. Department of State.) |
|
|
|
FIGURE 2.3 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greets grateful rebel militia commanders on her arrival in Tripoli on October 18, 2011. (Source: U.S. Department of State.) |
Then of course there is Mahmoud Jibril, the former interim prime minister of Libya, appointed by the NTC, who served for many of the critical months during NATO’s war as the NTC’s international ambassador at large. Gaddafi was “killed based on a request by a certain foreign power” that wanted the dictator to be “silent forever,” Jibril said in an interview (Krause-Jackson & Alexander, 2011/11/14). Jibril told the reporters that had Gaddafi ever been taken alive, “too many secrets could have been discovered… He [Gaddafi] was the black box of the whole country. He had too many wheelings and dealings with too many leaders in the world. With him, unfortunately, a lot of information is gone.” Speaking of Libya, post-NATO, Jibril added: “every foreign power you can think of is trying to look after its own interests in Libya. No one is excluded. This is the name of the game. This is politics. Countries have interests in Libya and everybody is looking out for their own.” Jibril also said that Qatar as the “most obvious” example of foreign intervention, given that it trained and supplied rebel fighters with weapons, provided humanitarian aid and at least$100 million in loans, and its jets helped enforce the UN-imposed no-fly zone. Qatar also had hundreds of its own troops on the ground and on the frontlines (Black, 2011/10/26).
Finally, there are the concrete actions designed to achieve regime change, taking us full circle by reintroducing the lawless nature of U.S. efforts to overthrow Gaddafi. NATO repeatedly launched missile strikes and bombings aimed at both Gaddafi, his living quarters, and members of his family, killing one of his sons and three of his grandchildren on May 1, 2011. We are also reminded that, “as early as 1969, as Henry Kissinger revealed in his memoirs, discussions were held within the U.S. government about covert action to assassinate Gaddafi, largely because of his radical Arab nationalism, his interference with U.S.-Saudi control over OPEC oil policies and his closing down of the Pentagon’s biggest airbase on the African continent [Wheelus]” (Van Auken, 2011/10/24). As we know from the outset of this chapter, there was a long history of intervention under the Reagan administration designed to overthrow Gaddafi as well as collaboration between the U.K.’s MI6 and Libyan jihadists in trying to kill Gaddafi.
Hunting for Gaddafi in Sirte
“As a matter of policy, NATO does not target individuals.” So read the press release from NATO (2011/10/20, p. 2) on the day of Gaddafi’s capture and murder after his convoy was first struck by NATO, which acknowledged that it struck 11 “armed vehicles” in Sirte (p. 2). By the end of October NATO had completed a total of 9,634 strike sorties against Libyan targets, out of a total of 26,156 sorties overall as part of what it called “Operation Unified Protector” (p. 2). On other occasions too NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen would emphasize that Muammar Gaddafi “is not the target of our operation” (Reuters, 2011/10/5; Thomet & Lamloum, 2011/10/31). He claimed it was solely about protecting civilians, and yet everywhere Gaddafi happened to be was automatically cited as in and of itself a threat to civilians. Likewise, Marine Col. David Laplan insisted that NATO’s mission was not about hunting down individuals. Yet, at the same time British Defense Secretary Liam Fox was telling reporters that NATO intelligence and reconnaissance assets were being used to try to “hunt down” Gadhafi (Al-Shalchi, 2011/8/25).
The following is NATO’s account of its strikes against Gaddafi’s convoy. At approximately 8:30 a.m. on October 20, 2011, NATO aircraft,
“struck 11 armed military vehicles which were part of a larger group of approximately 75 vehicles manoeuvring in the vicinity of Sirte. These vehicles were leaving Sirte at high speed and were attempting to force their way around the outskirts of the city. The vehicles had a substantial amount of mounted weapons and ammunition, posing a significant threat to the local civilian population.” (p. 2)
NATO did not elaborate on how exactly a convoy leaving the scene of battle, and fleeing from fire, was posing a threat to the local civilian population, especially since all sources acknowledged the reality that the local population was firmly behind Gaddafi. The assertion makes no sense. NATO claimed that its aircraft attacked in order to “reduce the threat;” “initially, only one vehicle was destroyed, which disrupted the convoy and resulted in many vehicles dispersing and changing direction.” Unsatisfied with the results, NATO aircraft attacked again: “a group of approximately 20 vehicles continued at great speed to proceed in a southerly direction, due west of Sirte, and continuing to pose a significant threat. NATO again engaged these vehicles with another air asset. The post strike assessment revealed that approximately 10 pro-Qadhafi vehicles were destroyed or damaged” (p. 2). In coming to that determination, NATO claimed to have not known before the strike that the vehicles were “pro-Gaddafi” (Lekic, 2011/10/21), but that it was determined from a “post-strike assessment,” based on “open sources and Allied intelligence.” NATO routinely denied having any forces on the ground so it is highly peculiar that it would admit to the fact of Allied intelligence on the ground. This was underscored quickly: “NATO does not divulge specific information on national assets involved in operations” (p. 2). The question arises: if NATO had intelligence operatives on the ground, as it is clearly stating it did, how credible is it that NATO would not have known that the convoy was carrying Gaddafi, considering the constant aerial surveillance?
Let us pause on the claims that NATO did not target individuals, that the Alliance did not seek to assassinate Gaddafi, and furthermore that it did not even know of Gaddafi’s whereabouts. In addition to early critical analyses (e.g. Campbell, 2011/10/27; Dembélé, 2011/10/27), the available information we now have strongly suggests that such claims are either false or highly questionable. If we deem NATO’s claims to be false, then NATO’s determination to advance such claims would have to be the result of a commitment to carry out regime change— in the most brutal, direct, and personalized sense. This is well out of line with the UN mandate, in violation of the UN Charter, and in violation of U.S. law, which would be applicable to U.S. involvement in the operations. It would, however, be in keeping with a decades-long history of U.S. efforts to overthrow Gaddafi. It would also be yet another indictment of the imperial uses to which the idea of “protecting civilians” had lent itself.
First, we know that NATO aircraft had already targeted Gaddafi’s home in Sirte:
“His home, surrounded by a sprawling farm on the edge of Sirte, lies in ruins. The buckled walls and gaping holes in the ceiling are mute testimony to the ferocity of the bombardment of this, the nerve-centre of Gaddafi’s eccentric and violent regime. You can wander through the labyrinth of rooms, and down into the network of concrete bunkers under the house, blown open by Nato bombs.” (Head, 2012/2/9)
Notwithstanding the BBC correspondent’s ironic use of language to describe Gaddafi’s regime, while he was in the middle of describing NATO’s immense violence, it is clear that NATO knew where Gaddafi’s home was, and then proceeded to bomb that home to pieces. No explanation was produced about how the home posed a threat to civilians, in a stronghold of determined support for Gaddafi.
Second, intelligence agencies, journalists, and insurgent commanders, and officials of the new NTC regime had at different points deduced or confirmed Muammar Gaddafi’s presence in Sirte during the final weeks of fighting, making it very unlikely that NATO could not have known his whereabouts. As NATO had previously identified top levels of the Libyan government as “command and control,” there is no reason to believe it would not have followed Gaddafi’s movements with keen interest, even if we take NATO’s claims on their own terms. STRATFOR Global Intelligence, a private intelligence and analysis firm, in fact reported as early as August that French intelligence sources knew that Gaddafi had moved to Sirte after he left Tripoli as the insurgents overran defences (Friedman, 2011/8/30). In September, news sources were openly speculating that Gaddafi was likely in Sirte, or his other bastion of staunch support, Bani Walid (BBC, 2011/9/27; Stephen, 2011/9/16). By early October a military spokesman for the NTC regime claimed that Gaddafi’s son, Muatassim, was “hiding” in a hospital in Sirte (El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/5). A little later, officials in the new NTC regime claimed that Muatassim had been captured in Sirte; and indeed, if not then true, it would later become a fact (El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/14). As reporters noted before Gaddafi was killed, Zone 2 (District 2) in the northwestern part of Sirte, “had still yet to fall despite overwhelming firepower ranged against it,” and “such defiance has led rebel commanders to conclude it must contain high-level regime figures including Muatassim, son of Col. Gaddafi, and perhaps Abu Bakr Yunis, former defence minister” (Farmer & Sherlock, 2011/10/15). What a fascinatingly precise “guess.” They were correct, on all three counts.
Whether that information actually came from NATO intelligence or was relayed to them, we are safe in assuming that this was communicated between NATO and the NTC. As Mansour Dao, a member of Gaddafi’s clan and his chief guard later confirmed, fighters in Sirte were led by Gaddafi’s son, Muatassim, who with 350 men (at most) was able to fend off thousands of insurgents for several weeks (AP, 2011/10/25). Other sources also reported that the NTC rebels deduced from the stiff resistance— defying two months of attempts to capture Sirte —that this indicated the presence of Muammar Gaddafi himself: “Why else would a sniper try to take on a tank?” asked Jafar Al Sharif, a rebel tank commander (El Gamal & Gaynor, 2011/10/19).
Third, there are credible claims of active U.S. and other NATO involvement in the planning and execution of Gaddafi’s murder. We have already noted how Gaddafi’s capture and killing occurred less than two days after Hillary Clinton arrived in Tripoli, where she publicly approved of Gaddafi being captured or killed and appeared to be calling for that. Beyond that, however, certain powers with knowledge of U.S. operations affirmed U.S. involvement. Russia’s then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin specifically highlighted the role of U.S. drones and Special Forces (Osborn & Spillius, 2011/12/15). After Putin described the televised images of Gaddafi’s final moments as “horrible, disgusting scenes,” he pointedly stated:
“Is that democracy? Who did this? Drones, including those of the U.S., struck his motorcade and then commandos, who were not supposed to be there, called for the so-called opposition and militants by the radio, and he was killed without an investigation or trial.” (Tkachenko, 2011/12/15)10
Yet the response of the Pentagon, which was to immediately dismiss Putin’s statement as “ludicrous,” is itself a statement that does little to increase the credibility of U.S. official sources. Captain John Kirby, spokesman for U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, stated that, “the assertion that U.S. special operations forces were involved in the killing of Colonel Gaddafi is ludicrous” (AFP, 2011/12/15). Then going further in his denial he added, “we did not have American boots on the ground in the Libya operation” (Osborn & Spillius, 2011/12/15). It is very curious that the Pentagon should deny the presence of U.S. forces on the ground in Libya when, as detailed in the previous section, the U.S. president assigned the CIA to work in Libya along with British MI6 and special forces. As early as February 2011 small groups of CIA agents were already on the ground, to “gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels,” joined by more later, as well as by the British SAS, SBS, and MI6 (Mazetti & Schmitt, 2011/3/30). This is also why NATO denials that its forces could not “confirm” civilian casualties for lack of agents on the ground are entirely false.
Fourth, we have some indication that the U.S. government contracted its own mercenaries (euphemistically called “private security contractors”) in Libya based on hacked emails from STRATFOR, which were published by WikiLeaks and others. Here we speak specifically of Jamie F. Smith, former director of Blackwater and currently CEO of another “security firm,” SCG International. SCG International was itself contracted to protect NTC members and to train insurgents in Libya (Kelley, 2012/3/20). STRATFOR’s Anya Alfano described Smith as a “US Govt security contractor on US Govt assignment in Libya;” and in an internal email dated October 20, 2011, STRATFOR staff exchanged the following:
“From source in Sirte who took part: He (Gaddafi) was killed while trying to escape via a drainage pipe in Sirte by Misratah brigade. Along with him was his def minister (dead) and his son Muatassim (dead). All the bodies have been taken to city of Misratah.” (Al Akhbar, 2012)
Given the growing privatization, subcontracting and outsourcing of U.S. military and intelligence work, which has grown exponentially since September 11, 2001, it is entirely credible and makes perfect sense that intelligence was being gathered by STRATFOR (whose clients include every major U.S. national security agency) and that covert work was being done by SCG International (Al-Saadi, 2012/3/19).
Fifth, official sources themselves detailed how the U.S. was involved in Gaddafi’s capture and killing. The day after Gaddafi’s murder, Panetta himself admitted: “it was a U.S. drone combined with the other NATO planes that fired on the convoy” that carried Gaddafi (Tkachenko, 2011/12/15). For some, this would be enough to indict the U.S. for being actively involved in Gaddafi’s murder. However, we have even more information on the wider scope of U.S. involvement. Confirming much of what has been said thus far, an exposé published by The Telegraph (Harding, 2011/10/20) based on intelligence sources detailed the ways that NATO tracked Gaddafi. According to the report, Gaddafi had been under surveillance by NATO forces for a week prior to his killing, after an intelligence breakthrough allowed NATO to pinpoint his location— apparently, Gaddafi made the mistake of breaking his rigid rule of telephone silence on one occasion, using a mobile or satellite phone. A U.S. drone plus an “array of NATO eavesdroping aircraft” had been trained on Gaddafi’s location in Sirte, “to ensure he could not escape”— no pretense here of “protecting civilians,” his escape was in and of itself something NATO would not permit. Contrary to U.S. and NATO official denials, “MI6 agents and CIA officers on the ground were also providing intelligence and it is believed that Gaddafi was given a code name in the same way that US forces used the name Geronimo during the operation to kill Osama bin Laden” (Harding, 2011/10/20). Indeed, since Gaddafi had left Tripoli in late August 2011, “intelligence services have been searching for Gaddafi across Libya and beyond using agents, special forces and eavesdropping equipment” (Harding, 2011/10/20). French drones and U.S. Predator drones staked out the centre of Sirte for several weeks: “They built up a normal pattern of life picture so that when something unusual happened this morning such as a large group of vehicles gathering together, that came across as highly unusual activity and the decision was taken to follow them and prosecute an attack” (Harding, 2011/10/20). French and U.S. electronic warfare aircraft thus picked up Gaddafi’s movements as he attempted to escape. A U.S. Predator drone, flown out of Sicily and controlled via satellite from Creech air force base near Las Vegas, Nevada, “struck the convoy with a number of Hellfire anti-tank missiles,” and then moments later French jets “most likely Rafales, swept in, targeting the vehicles with 500lb Paveway bombs or highly accurate £600,000 AASM munitions” (Harding, 2011/10/20).
Another report suggested that more than one Predator drone circled above Sirte, each capable of maintaining flight for 18 hours and each equipped with surveillance and attack capabilities (Farmer, 2011/10/22). Gaddafi’s convoy was spotted leaving, and that fact alone, namely that he was leaving, was followed by a command to one of the remote Predator pilots to open fire on Gaddafi’s convoy. There is no mention of any supposed threat assessment involving local civilians. NATO AWACs planes over the Mediterranean “took control of the battle and warned two French jets that a loyalist convoy was attempting to leave Sirte” (Farmer, 2011/10/22). Those jets then struck the convoy a second time. As we learned later, the fact that it was “French jets” does not mean that they were flown by the French air force. The source for this was Barack Obama himself: “In fact, American pilots even flew French fighter jets off a French aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. Allies don’t get any closer than that” (Obama, 2011/11/4; see also Miles, 2011/11/4).
In fact, several sources in reports produced by numerous prominent Western news media confirmed that the intelligence and special forces of NATO member states were on the ground actively hunting for Gaddafi for many weeks throughout the campaign. On the ground, on the day of the attack, what appeared to some journalists as a “wild” and “chaotic” situation, “had, in fact, been foreseen by the British SAS and their special forces allies, who were advising the NTC forces” (Farmer, 2011/10/22). British military sources told The Sunday Telegraph that “small teams of SAS soldiers on the ground in Sirte” had warned NTC forces throughout the siege of Sirte to be on the lookout for “fleeing loyalists.” Indeed, the much applauded move by the NTC to allow people to flee Sirte only rarely mentioned that it was a slow, controlled exit that served a surveillance function: “Assisted by other special forces— in particular the Qataris, with whom the SAS have a long relationship dating back 20 years —the SAS tried to impress on the Libyans the need to cover all escape routes….the SAS urged the NTC leaders to move their troops to exit points across the city and close their stranglehold” (Farmer, 2011/10/22).
In addition, NATO powers had forces on the ground hunting for Gaddafi many weeks prior to the attack in Sirte. Again The Telegraph reported that, “as a £1 million bounty was placed on Gaddafi’s head, soldiers from 22 SAS Regiment began guiding rebel soldiers after being ordered in by David Cameron.” This came from Defence sources, which also stated that the SAS had been in Libya for several weeks before the date of the report (placing their arrival in early July 2011 at the latest) and that it played “a key role in coordinating the fall of Tripoli” (Harding et al., 2011/8/24). SAS commandos “dressed in Arab civilian clothing” and “carrying the same weapons as the rebels,” were ordered to begin hunting for Gaddafi as soon as Tripoli fell (Harding et al., 2011/8/24). British troops on the ground in Libya became somewhat of an open secret in the UK (UKSF News, 2011/10/25), regardless of what Rasmussen said.
British forces in fact were on the ground in Libya as far back as March 2011. One British report was that “hundreds of British special forces troops [SAS, SBS, and SFSG] have been deployed deep inside Libya targeting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.” An estimated 350 troops were already engaged in covert operations, with 250 of those on the ground from before the launch of the first air strikes to establish a no-fly zone on March 19, 2011, some as many as a month beforehand (Williams & Shipman, 2011/3/25). That fact would place British covert forces on the ground in Libya just days after the first street protests erupted in February. A little earlier even, another British news report revealed that “hundreds of British SAS soldiers have been operating with rebel groups inside Libya for three weeks” (Mirror, 2011/3/20). A separate British news report, which came out earlier still, related the fact that U.S. sources had disclosed that British SAS commandos had been in Libya already for about ten days (Winnett & Watt, 2011/3/2), thus placing their presence in Libya from around February 20, either before or at the very same time as Cameron and Sarkozy began to call for military intervention in Libya, publicly. In private, they had already taken their steps, and must have made the decision to send forces and prepare for their expedition even earlier than that. This suggests the possibility that Western powers were at least waiting for the first opportunity to intervene in Libya to commit regime change under the cover of a local uprising and without any hesitation to ponder what if any real threats to civilians there might have been. Protecting civilians, human rights records, local protests, all worked to provide the necessary media fig leaves. This is not to suggest that the local uprising was somehow not authentic and without grounding in long-brewing local grievances. It is to suggest that while there may not have been a “conspiracy,” something even better undeniably unfolded: a convergence of interests and actors, a surfeit of opportunism, and a seemingly uninterrupted supply of tactical mistakes, knowledge gaps, and conceit on Gaddafi’s side.
It was not just U.S. and British forces that were on the ground in Libya, but Qatari troops as well (Black, 2011/10/26). Indeed, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, head of the NTC, praised Qatar for “having planned the battles that paved the way for victory” (Black, 2011/10/26), and said the Qataris were “a major partner in all the battles we fought” (Al Arabiya, 2011/10/26). Qatar, for its part, officially confirmed the nation had sent troops to Libya. The Qatari chief-of-staff, Major-General Hamad bin Ali al-Atiya, said: “We were among them and the numbers of Qataris on the ground were hundreds in every region. Training and communications had been in Qatari hands. Qatar…supervised the rebels’ plans because they are civilians and did not have enough military experience. We acted as the link between the rebels and Nato forces” (Al Arabiya, 2011/10/26; Black, 2011/10/26). Qatar trained Libyan insurgents within Libya itself and back in Doha, and gave$400 million to the insurgents (Black, 2011/10/26). In the assault on Tripoli, and even on Gaddafi’s own compound, “Qatari special forces were seen on the frontline” (Black, 2011/10/26). It is interesting to note that in the videos of the actual capture and killing of Muammar Gaddafi in Sirte, many viewers have spotted troops dressed unlike any of the Libyan insurgents and not in Libyan military uniforms, rather they were wearing U.S.-style helmets and flak jackets, and were right up front and among the insurgents grabbing and beating Gaddafi.11
Sixth, Mahmoud Jibril himself, the NTC’s former interim prime minister and now a key political leader in Libya whose party won more seats than others in the July 2012 elections, has gone on the record and stated that a “foreign agent,” who was “mixed in with the revolutionaries,” was responsible for killing Gaddafi. Rami El Obeidi, the former head of foreign intelligence for the NTC, also backed up Jibril, and said the agent who assassinated Gaddafi was French. The accusation is that French president Sarkozy wanted to see Gaddafi terminated, rather than tried, so as to effectively cancel a debt and protect his own reputation. According to these allegations, Sarkozy feared that in any prospective trial Gaddafi might reveal that he had spent millions of dollars in getting Sarkozy elected (see Al Arabiya, 2012/10/1; Blomfield et al., 2012/9/30; Cremonesi, 2012/9/29). 12
Finally, in making the case that NATO’s deliberate and knowing targeting of Gaddafi, which is itself a war crime (Bosco, 2011/10/24), and the ensuing assassination of a captive Gaddafi (also a war crime) was a planned part of U.S.-directed regime change, we have the words of none other than retired U.S. General Wesley Clark. Former commander of NATO’s Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO from 1997 to 2000, General Clark was also a former candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. Moreover, Gen. Clark generally supported the war against Libya. This is what he had to say in a public address on October 3, 2007, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
“I came back to the Pentagon about six weeks later [after Afghanistan was attacked in 2001] and I saw the same officer [from the Joint Staff] and I said, ‘Why, why haven’t we attacked Iraq? Are we still gonna attack Iraq?’ [and] he said: ‘Aw sir, it’s worse than that’. He said…he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk, he said, ‘I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office, it says we’re gonna attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re gonna start with Iraq and then we’re gonna move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. I said, Seven countries in five years. I said: ‘Is that a classified memo?’ He said, ‘Yes sir!’ I said, ‘Well don’t show it to me,’ he was about to show it to me, ‘because I want to talk about it’.” (FORA.tv, 2007/10/3, emphasis added)13
Celebration at the Safari Club
“We came, we saw, he died!”— a jubilant, laughing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton triumphantly shouted in front of a reporter, moments after hearing of Gaddafi’s death. Ghoulish, chilling, and perverse was this utterly remorseless display of how bloodthirsty U.S. power can be, coming immediately as scenes of Gaddafi’s brutal murder were flashed across screens around the world, bloodied, sodomized with a knife, beaten, shot and then put on public display as his body rotted next to Muatassim, only to then be secretly buried in an unmarked grave. (The NTC wanted to control which public reactions to Gaddafi’s death could be allowed, clearly fearing that sanguine triumphalism, gory revenge, and inhumane voyeurism might not exhaust all possible options.) “Wow!” Hillary Clinton had breathlessly muttered before cameras, as she checked her Blackberry and read the first news of Gaddafi’s capture. She excitedly shared the news with aides and reporters then visibly restrained her joy by admitting that many times before these unconfirmed reports coming from the NTC had been misleading. This was later followed by her imitation of a Roman conqueror. Asked by a reporter if her visit to Tripoli might have had something to do with Gaddafi’s death, Clinton chuckled and said, “I’m sure it did” (Daly, 2011/10/20).14
In a war that saw many role reversals, where Fox News featured numerous reports and commentaries critical of the war while Al Jazeera supported and aided the insurgency, Hillary Clinton might not have expected Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, to ask her if she regretted her gleeful comment now that some legal experts were calling Gaddafi’s killing a war crime. Wallace had to ask the question twice. Finally, Clinton replied: “I’m not going to comment on that” (Fox, 2011/10/23).
As a Fox News headline, “Obama Brandishes another Scalp,” reminded us, 2011 was a year in which Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, went on an international execution binge (Stirewalt, 2011/10/21). In addition to Gaddafi, the U.S. targeted and murdered American citizens, the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son; then Osama Bin Laden, shot in the face and dumped in the ocean; and, not to mention dozens of victims of drone strikes. With all of the gravitas that does not come from cordially chit-chatting with a welcoming late-night comedian, Obama told Jay Leno of The Tonight Show that obviously nobody likes to see someone come to an end like Gaddafi’s (that is, apart from his own Secretary of State), but then he celebrated the good news of the murder by saying what a “strong message” it sent to dictators about human rights (Huffington Post, 2011/10/25). No comment, however, from any celebrity host in the U.S. news-entertaintment industry about what the public should expect as the rightful outcome for those who command a global dictatorship currently conducting several wars simultaneously across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, while never being held accountable for war crimes, torture, arbitrary detention, and unlawful executions (even when their own citizens are the target). This is the humanitarian moment in late Western empire, where the gloss of human rights is quickly applied like Revlon and is even more easily smeared.
Sounding like little more than a dull reenactment of Ronald Reagan, Obama pompously intoned: “Today, the government of Libya announced the death of Muammar Qaddafi. This marks the end of a long and painful chapter for the people of Libya, who now have the opportunity to determine their own destiny in a new and democratic Libya.” However, rest assured, the U.S. would hover over Libya: “But the United States, together with the international community, is committed to the Libyan people. You have won your revolution. And now, we will be a partner as you forge a future that provides dignity, freedom and opportunity.” No longer was it necessary to repeat the worn lines from the act of “protecting civilians”— Obama’s speech contained not a word of that. Instead, Obama exulted in regime change: the “rebuke” to “Gaddafi’s dictatorship,” the “revolution” that “broke the regime’s back,” the “dark shadow” now lifted, making abundantly clear what the desired outcome had been for the U.S. all along, just as Obama had stated from the outset of the intervention, even prior to military action (Obama, 2011/10/20).
Neither imperious pontification nor vain swaggering was exclusively an American performance. “Relieved and very happy” is how German Chancellor Angela Merkel pronounced herself at the news of Gaddafi’s death, then moralizing: “Finally the way is free for a political rebirth for peace” (Satter, 2011/10/21). UK Prime Minister David Cameron called Gaddafi’s death a chance for a “democratic future” for Libya— except, of course, for those who supported Gaddafi —and then Cameron decided to revive issues that the UK had buried for many years as it sought lucrative business contracts in Libya pre-2011. “I think today is a day to remember all of Colonel Gaddafi’s victims,” Cameron added, “from those who died in connection with the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, to Yvonne Fletcher in a London street, and obviously all the victims of IRA terrorism who died through their use of Libyan Semtex” (Farmer & Henderson, 2011/10/20). Suddenly, the “victims” mattered again, but only some: the far greater number of Libyan victims of British bombing merited no mention.
Here we might also remember some of the earlier cheers of vanquish that came from both Cameron and French President Sarkozy as they visited Benghazi in September 2011, as Sirte was being bombed toward ruin. Cameron told the supplicants assembled in Benghazi, “your city was an inspiration to the world” (McDonnell, 2011/9/16)— not being clear about who or what in the world was inspired by Benghazi, other than it being a useful pretext for NATO’s bombing. “It’s great to be here in free Benghazi and in free Libya,” shouted Cameron over the chants of Benghazi’s grateful; Sarkozy “beamed” at chants of “One, two, three; Merci Sarkozy!” possibly wishing he could substitute Benghazi for the French voters who soon after ousted him from office. Cameron and Sarkozy then held NTC chairman Mustafa Abdul Jalil’s arms aloft “like a victorious boxer” (Logan & Farge, 2011/9/16). About Gaddafi’s death, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon called it an “historic moment” (BBC, 2011/10/20). The European Union said Gaddafi’s killing “marks the end of an era of despotism and repression from which the Libyan people have suffered for too long”— as if there was something about a bloody mob rampage in a city of ruins that should inspire such romantic lyrics (AJE, 2011/10/20). Predictably, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called the bombing campaign a “positive story” and “a successful chapter in NATO’s history” (Sheridan, 2011/10/15; Thomet & Lamloum, 2011/10/31). Al Jazeera’s Tony Birtley, an enthusiast of the NTC whose reports rarely even pretended at impartiality, said while in Sirte itself that Libyans were celebrating the beginning of a “new Libya” and that “this is bringing a form of closure” (AJE, 2011/10/20). Of course one also says this about funerals. Finally, among some of the celebrated Egyptian bloggers and journalists of Egypt we find the self-described “revolutionary socialist” Hossam Hamalawy, who lent his words of support to the Western media in celebrating NATO’s overthrow of Gaddafi: “This will signal the death of the idea that Arab leaders are invincible,” and, concerning the gory slaughter of Gaddafi, he added, “all this will bring down the red line that we can’t get these guys” (Gillette & Gamel, 20110/20). But who is this “we”?
“We have been waiting for this moment for a long time,” said Mahmoud Jibril, the NTC-appointed prime minister of the new interim government, adding “Muammar Gaddafi is dead.” This was before he expressed buyer’s remorse and confessed that foreign powers actively sought to kill Gaddafi. The NTC’s Abdel Hafez Ghoga proclaimed Gaddafi’s death was “the end of tyranny and dictatorship” and that Gaddafi had “met his fate” (ironically, a few weeks later a mob in Benghazi also set upon Ghoga, and months later regime defectors were still being eliminated). Mahmoud Shammam, the NTC’s chief spokesman, called it “the day of real liberation” (Fahim et al. 2011/10/20). Jalil, the NTC’s chairman, had earlier said that NATO allies could expect preferential treatment in return for their help in ending Gaddafi’s rule: “As a faithful Muslim people, we will appreciate these efforts and they will have priority within a framework of transparency” (Logan & Farge, 2011/9/16). “On behalf of the Libyan people, we express our appreciation and gratitude to the alliance, both the NATO alliance and Arab countries and friends. Thank you for that effort, which achieved victory for us,” Jalil said in giving obvious credit to NATO (Thomet & Lamloum, 2011/10/31).
Jalil then went over the top for NATO saying that “it was very accurate in the way that civilians were not affected”— civilians not affected —which then allowed Rasmussen, then visiting Jalil, to say that, “on one occasion we publicly declared that we could not exclude the possibility that we might have caused civilian casualties but the follow up investigation couldn’t confirm that” (Thomet & Lamloum, 2011/10/31). Except that there never was any NATO investigation. Indeed a game was set by NATO and the NTC where NATO would say it would only investigate civilian casualties at the request of the NTC-appointed interim government “of Libya,” which for its part denied any civilian casualties at all. In fact, the cold cynicism of the narrative, its inherent unbelievability directly and vividly confronted by the realities of places like Sirte, succeeded in turning off more people in the opinion-shaping sectors of the international public and making them quieter about endorsing “humanitarian intervention.”
One of the few dissenting voices reported by the Western media, in relation to Gaddafi’s murder, was that of President Hugo Chávez Frías of Venezuela. He stated: “They murdered him….We will remember (Gaddafi) all our lives as a great fighter, a revolutionary and a martyr” (Satter, 2011/10/21). As a committed anti-imperialist, and someone who directly experienced a U.S.-supported coup using local Venezuelan opposition elements, regardless of his popular victories in free and fair elections, Chávez needs to be heard more in the North American mainstream media.
Even if one believes the worst of Gaddafi, the best that could then be said about what followed in Libya is that one “brutal dictator” had been replaced by thousands of smaller dictators with an apparently bottomless bloodlust and thirst for personal power. The glee would prove to be shortlived, almost immediately. For many there would never be any glee at all, as they were abducted from their homes and streets and found themselves in prison, without charge, subjected to the most heinous torture.
To summarize, for a wide array of reasons, Sirte was central to the story of post-colonial Libya, the seat of the leader of the Al-Fateh Revolution, the focus of international attention, and the climax of NATO’s war, which was pursued to effect regime change as part of a broader strategy. Now it is time to examine more closely what that broader strategy was, how it was shaped, and what it aimed to accomplish beyond Gaddafi the person. We have established that “human rights” was neither the reason nor part of the character of NATO’s intervention, and that nothing about any regime’s record could justify such an assault as NATO’s. Later, we will examine the manipulations of “human rights” by Western powers, international organizations, and local political entrepreneurs in search of international sympathy.
