Global Research

First published on January 20, 2016

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Revelations that involve Hillary Clinton and her email scandal confirms what the real motives of the US-NATO led war on Libya to remove Muammar Gaddafi and it was not for democracy or to protect the Libyan people. It never was.

There are several reasons why Western powers want Africa under their  control besides their  appetite for natural resources and that is to keep Africa under their control. Washington and Paris want to remain a dominant power politically and economically with their currencies in place instead of Gaddafi’s idea which called for the gold dinar to replace U.S. dollars and Euros. Africa is to remain a captive market under the West because it is their corporations and special interest groups who should profit.

U.S. Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton and her email prove that the Obama and Sarkozy administrations wanted Libya’s oil, gold and silver under their  control with their puppets (or terrorists) in place after Gaddafi was removed from power. Zero Hedge linked the actual email exposing what Washington and Paris had been discussing regarding the situation in Libya:

According to sensitive information available to this these individuals, Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli. This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French.franc (CFA).

(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya

Thanks to the discovery of Clinton’s emails that revealed the truth. But dob Hillary Clinton supporters care that she was involved in the overthrow of Libya’s government for its natural resources and its gold and silver holdings? Don’t count on it. What is interesting about Clinton’s emails is that it describes what Sarkozy planned in Libya’s aftermath:

According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:

• A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,

• Increase French influence in North Africa, UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05779612 Date: 12/31/2015 UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05779612 Date: 12/31/2015.

• Improve his intemai political situation in France,

• Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,

• Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa)

The revelations on Clinton’s email not only confirm what the original motives were from the start, it shows the hypocrisy behind Washington’s quest for “spreading its democratic values” across the planet. Hillary Clinton spoke about the situation in Libya as Secretary of State in Paris, France on March 19, 2011. Here is part of what she said:

The international community came together to speak with one voice and to deliver a clear and consistent message: Colonel Qadhafi’s campaign of violence against his own people must stop. The strong votes in the United Nations Security Council underscored this unity. And now the Qadhafi forces face unambiguous terms: a ceasefire must be implemented immediately – that means all attacks against civilians must stop; troops must stop advancing on Benghazi and pull back from Adjabiya, Misrata, and Zawiya; water, electricity, and gas supplies must be turned on to all areas; humanitarian assistance must be allowed to reach the people of Libya.

Yesterday, President Obama said very clearly that if Qadhafi failed to comply with these terms, there would be consequences. Since the President spoke, there has been some talk from Tripoli of a ceasefire, but the reality on the ground tells a very different story. Colonel Qadhafi continues to defy the world. His attacks on civilians go on. Today, we have been monitoring the troubling reports of fighting around and within Benghazi itself. As President Obama also said, we have every reason to fear that, left unchecked, Qadhafi will commit unspeakable atrocities

Clinton declared that Gaddafi had a “campaign of violence against his own people” and that he “Defied the world” was a call for a US-NATO intervention. However, the actual planning stages to topple Gaddafi began shortly after the September 11th terror attacks in 2001 when former U.S. General Wesley Clark told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now that Washington planned to “take out 7 countries in 5 Years”, Libya was on that list.

Promoting “Democracy” with the Help of the Libyan rebels

Washington’s history of regime change follows the same pattern of its past interventions and orchestrated coups. Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s) such as The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) granted $118 million by the Department of State (DOS) for the ‘Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2010’ which covered North Africa and the Middle East. The DOS documents stated that “In authoritarian countries such as Iran, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, NED will assist activists in working in the available political space, and try to strengthen their institutional capacity”. The “political space” would allow Washington and their European allies to fill that space to gain economic and political advantages. The NED then enlisted the help of the ‘International Federation of Human Rights’ (Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l’Homme) or the FIDH along with the ‘Libyan League for Human Rights’ (LLHR). The NED, the FIDH and the LLHR and other U.S. funded “democracy promotion groups” or NGO’s such as the all too familiar operations of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) launched operations in Libya to manipulate and guide social movements, labor organizations, student movements, news organizations and anti-Gaddafi activists. The role of the NGO’s in Libya was designed to change the political landscape that was more aligned with Western interests. It was planned several years before Gaddafi was toppled. But that was just one part of the destabilization process.

A report by online news source ‘France24’ reported on the complexities of the Libyan Islamist fighters who joined the anti-Gaddafi rebels. We need to look back to the early 1990’s where the Gaddafi ordered a crackdown on radical Islamists in eastern part of Libya. But according to Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam his father had made deals with his radical Islamic rebels who were originally his arch enemies. There is even speculation that infighting between the radical Islamic factions and the Libyan rebels known as the ‘National Transitional Council (NTC)’ were involved in the “killing of the top Libyan rebel commander, General Abdel Fattah Younes, in the rebel capital of Benghazi.” The France24 report quoted what Ali Tarhouni, the NTC oil minister on the situation within the ranks of the ‘Abu Obeida Ibn al-Jarah brigade’ and who was actually behind the murder of Younes which complicated matters for the opposition:

Ali Tarhouni, the NTC’s oil minister, told reporters that Younes was murdered by “renegade” members of the Abu Obeida Ibn al-Jarah brigade. Named after one of the Prophet Mohammed’s companions and most successful military commanders, the Abu Obeida Ibn al-Jarah brigade is an Islamist faction that is one of at least 30 semi-independent militias operating in rebel-held eastern Libya, according to Noman Bentoman, a senior analyst at the London-based counter-extremism think tank, the Quilliam Foundation.

“The military structure of the Libyan rebels has two elements,” Bentoman explained in a phone interview with FRANCE 24. “There are the professional soldiers under the National Liberation Army, of which General Younes was the supreme commander. The Obeida Ibn al-Jarah brigade is not part of the National Liberation Army. They’re operating as what you would call ‘independent revolutionaries”

What complicated the situation among the Libyan rebels was the number of “independent revolutionary groups” who had slightly different agendas although they had one goal in common, to remove Gaddafi from power. France24 reported the following on what Noman Bentoman had said about various groups joining the Libyan rebels:

Bentoman was a former commander in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a jihadist group that emerged in the early 1990s among Libyans who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and then returned to Libya, where they waged a violent insurgency against Gaddafi’s regime. Once close to Osama bin Laden and senior al Qaeda leaders, Bentoman quit the LIFG shortly after the 9/11 attacks and is now a prominent critic of Islamist violence

According to Bentoman, the LIFG disbanded in August 2009, but during the current uprising it has regrouped under a new name: Al-Haraka Al-Islamiya Al Libiya Lit-Tahghir, or the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change. Many of the new group’s leaders and members, Bentoman notes, have now joined the Libyan rebels

Pepe Escobar, a journalist for the Asia Times wrote an article in 2011 titled ‘How al-Qaeda got to rule in Tripoli’ explained how al-Qaeda became part of the anti-Gaddafi forces:

His name is Abdelhakim Belhaj. Some in the Middle East might have, but few in the West and across the world would have heard of him. Time to catch up. Because the story of how an al-Qaeda asset turned out to be the top Libyan military commander in still war-torn Tripoli is bound to shatter – once again – that wilderness of mirrors that is the “war on terror”, as well as deeply compromising the carefully constructed propaganda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) “humanitarian” intervention in Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi’s fortress of Bab-al-Aziziyah was essentially invaded and conquered last week by Belhaj’s men – who were at the forefront of a militia of Berbers from the mountains southwest of Tripoli. The militia is the so-called Tripoli Brigade, trained in secret for two months by US Special Forces. This turned out to be the rebels’ most effective militia in six months of tribal/civil war.  Already last Tuesday, Belhaj was gloating on how the battle was won, with Gaddafi forces escaping “like rats” (note that’s the same metaphor used by Gaddafi himself to designate the rebels).

Abdelhakim Belhaj, aka Abu Abdallah al-Sadek, is a Libyan jihadi. Born in May 1966, he honed his skills with the mujahideen in the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. He’s the founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and its de facto emir – with Khaled Chrif and Sami Saadi as his deputies. After the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996, the LIFG kept two training camps in Afghanistan; one of them, 30 kilometers north of Kabul – run by Abu Yahya – was strictly for al-Qaeda-linked jihadis. After 9/11, Belhaj moved to Pakistan and also to Iraq, where he befriended none other than ultra-nasty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – all this before al-Qaeda in Iraq pledged its allegiance to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and turbo-charged its gruesome practices. In Iraq, Libyans happened to be the largest foreign Sunni jihadi contingent, only losing to the Saudis. Moreover, Libyan jihadis have always been superstars in the top echelons of “historic” al-Qaeda – from Abu Faraj al-Libi (military commander until his arrest in 2005, now lingering as one of 16 high-value detainees in the US detention center at Guantanamo) to Abu al-Laith al-Libi (another military commander, killed in Pakistan in early 2008)

Escobar’s analysis gives you an idea on how the anti-Gaddafi rebels were formed under the auspices of Washington’s control grid. Another factor was the Western media propaganda against Gaddafi, one particular article was published on March 21st, 2011 by the New York Times which claimed that the rebels were comprised of “secular-minded professionals” who wanted democracy and human rights:

The behavior of the fledgling rebel government in Benghazi so far offers few clues to the rebels’ true nature. Their governing council is composed of secular-minded professionals — lawyers, academics, businesspeople — who talk about democracy, transparency, human rights and the rule of law. But their commitment to those principles is just now being tested as they confront the specter of potential Qaddafi spies in their midst, either with rough tribal justice or a more measured legal process

And of course the people of the West believed the propaganda. They also believed that Gaddafi handed out “Viagra” to his troops to rape women according to the London-based ‘The Guardian’ newspaper on June 11th, 2011:

Luis Moreno-Ocampo told reporters at the UN in New York last night there were strong indications that hundreds of women had been raped in the Libyan government clampdown on the popular uprising and that Gaddafi had ordered the violations as a form of punishment.

The prosecutor said there was even evidence that the government had been handing out doses of Viagra to soldiers to encourage sexual attacks. Moreno-Ocampo said rape was a new tactic for the Libyan regime. “That’s why we had doubts at the beginning, but now we are more convinced. Apparently, [Gaddafi] decided to punish, using rape”

The claims of Gaddafi’s troops using Viagra to rape women because they disagreed with Gaddafi’s policies was absurd. Cherif Bassiouni, who was the lead UN human rights investigator, had told the press that claims of rape by Viagra induced Libyan soldiers was a “massive hysteria” according to Australia’s Herald Sun. The report also said that Bassiouni mentioned 70,000 questionnaires distributed by a woman to rape victims who supposedly received 60,000 responses, but Bassiouni never received the questionnaires:

The investigator also cited the case of a woman who claimed to have sent out 70,000 questionnaires and received 60,000 responses, of which 259 reported sexual abuse. However, when the investigators asked for these questionnaires, they never received them

Reuters reported in 2011 what Bassiouni’s team actually uncovered:

His team uncovered only four alleged cases — Eman Al-Obaidi who claimed she was gang-raped by pro-government militiamen and three women in Misrata who said they had been sexually abused. “Can we draw a conclusion that there is a systematic policy of rape? In my opinion we can’t,” Bassiouni said. “For the time being, the numbers are very limited”

Western propaganda was another element that instigated the removal of Gaddafi. The MSM was the cheerleader for the US-NATO intervention in Libya from the start. NGO’s, various elements of the Libyan rebels with Al-Qaeda in the mix and Western propaganda all had a hand in the death of Gaddafi. Washington and Paris were behind the civil war between the Gaddafi forces and the Libyan rebels from the start.

Chaos in Libya and “Conspiracy Theories”

Libya was Africa’s most developed country and was completely destroyed. Massive terror attacks and murders persist. Libya is a training ground for potential future terrorists. Last year, the Washington Times published an interesting story on Libya’s chaos titled ‘Hillary Clinton says Libya chaos shows consequences of U.S. withdrawal from unstable places’ which does mention Bill Roggio, editor of ‘The Long War Journal’ which is funded and published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, DC which said that “The administration provided military assistance to overthrow the government in 2011 and has since provided nothing concrete to deal with the problems on the ground.” Roggio went on further to say that critics of the Obama administration say Libya’s intervention to overthrow Gaddafi and replace him with terrorists is of course, a “conspiracy theory”:

The worst part of the situation, Mr. Roggio said, is that Washington’s inaction in Libya has provided ammunition for some of the most radical critiques of the Obama administration’s overall policy toward the Middle East.

“We overthrow the regime, jihadists take control of various areas and the country becomes a basket case,” he said. “It’s amazing how we’re now playing into those narratives that feed conspiracy theories that the U.S. actually supports the overthrow of governments and then supplants them with jihadist groups. “They are conspiracy theories,” Mr. Roggio said. “What is truly going on is shortsightedness in U.S. policy and a failure to understand who’s who on the ground, which groups are operating, and then the lack of political heft on the ground to get involved”

Well, Hillary Clinton’s exposed emails and proof that other elements including the fieldwork of the NGO’s and US intelligence prove that Mr. Roggio is wrong. Libya’s war was basically about its natural resources (oil and gas reserves) and its gold and silver holdings with the possibility that a sovereign nation in Africa can free its people from the West and that is not what Western powers want. They want the Libyan people and all of Africa to live in debt peonage while exploiting their resources. Gaddafi was going to change that arrangement.

Historically speaking, since the West (Europe and the US) has conquered and exploited Africa, not too many nations within the continent have actually benefitted and that even holds true today. Libya had gold, silver and oil to change the dynamics that challenged the US dollar and Euro hegemony in Africa and that would have added another dilemma for the establishment.

The Libyan invasion was not to protect the people as Clinton once claimed; it was about overthrowing Gaddafi and confiscating Libya’s vast wealth.

But according to Roggio, it’s all a “conspiracy theory”. The ultra-rich will get rich even by stealing if they have to, and that is something empires past and present do well.

One thing is certain: Hillary Clinton’s emails are documents that historical revisionists will not be able to rewrite what Washington and its European allies were after all along in Libya and it was not democracy.