“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians: 6:12.)
What a decade it has been for assassinations, liquidations, exterminations – for State terrorism led by the Land of the Free. Summary executions include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. On 5th February 2003, General Colin Powell stating that he headed a deadly terrorist network within Iraq – just six weeks before the US headed a deadly terrorist network, in an illegal invasion, which entirely destroyed Iraq.
On 7th June 2006, at Hibhib, near Baquba, al-Zarqawi was killed by two five hundred pound bombs, dropped by USAF F-16 jets, killing five others including his wife and child. Legality, trying in law those accused of wrong doing, is, seemingly, so yesterday.
President Saddam Hussein and some of his sovereign government were subject to a kangaroo Court, laughable had it not shamed and disgraced the word “legal” at every level.Then he was lynched.
Osama bin Laden’s alleged death, with still unaccounted for others, was another blot on legality and humanity, with his body seemingly summarily disposed of as shark food. Why observe religious and legal niceties, when they may, in turn, preserve forensic, legal evidence?
Hilary Clinton and her partners in crime, were, of course, shown “watching” this gruesome slaying, by illegal immigrants, who had entered ally Pakistan, without bothering to request permission for air space or passge. It then had to be admitted there was in fact no transmission from a video, previously said to be screened from one of the assassins helmets. Hollywood meets Capitol Hill?
Subsequently this tasteless, part fictional scenario with Ms Clinton’s hand over her mouth, feigning personal “shock and awe” was, the gullible were informed, due to “an allergy.”
Her repellent performance on CBS( i ) shortly after Quaddafi’s death, assassination, execution, street dragging – early days for the exact sequence of another bloody illegality, was Madam Clinton for real. She near punched the air, roared with laughter and announced:
“We came, we saw, he died.”
“Did this have anything to do with your visit?” (On 18th October) She was asked
“Nnn …” Then: “I’m sure it did.” Grin.
During her brief trip she had stated: “We hope he [Col Gaddafi] can be captured or killed soon …”
Arguably, not since Madeleine Albright, when US Ambassador to the United Nations (“… avowed to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”) stated that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were: “A hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it”(60 Minutes,12th May 1996) has such abhorrent, shaming filth been spewed over the air waves.
But then, the UN was the vehicle for the silent killing fields which were the strangulating thirteen year embargo on Iraq. The silence on thirteen years of illegal, unsanctioned bombing by the US/UK. Then this last March, they endorsed UNSCR 1973, which became the completely overt mass murders of Libyans in a seven month (and ongoing) “humanitarian” blitzkrieg.
In the UK, the newspapers did their best to vie with Clinton’s sewer rhetoric. Seldom has a bloody, illegal, apparent summary execution, assassination of a Head of State, been more tastelessly lauded.
“ Bullet in the Head – That’s for Lockerbie” (The Sun.) Apart from their excursion to the literary drainage pipes, they Sun apparently neither attended the trial, or have registered the deep legal concerns surrounding the Lockerbie verdict. “End of a Tyrant” trumpeted TheIndependent, of whom a little more is expected. “Tyrant Showed no Mercy, Shot by Rebels”, celebrated The Mirror. “Gaddafi’s Death: Key Moments”; MSN was in trash movie mode.
“Death of a Tyrant”, is the choice of many, with The Star perhaps managing to plunge to an all time journalistic depth with: “Mad Dog Put Down.”
NATO’s depraved allies in the “New Libya” are – in defiance of all decency , and of any religion, especially Islam – displaying his body, and that of his son Mutassim (37) naked to the waist, in freezers, in a meat store in Misrata, inviting souvenir photographs.
It is a pitiless, shocking re-run of the display of the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons, Qusay and Uday, also summarily executed, rather than being treated in accordance with the law, as prisoners of war, along with Hussein’s fifteen year old grand son, courtesy US troops in Mosul, northern Iraq.
Islam is specific as to rituals for the deceased: “After the soul leaves the body, eyes must be closed” (Colonel Quaddafi’s were not for considerable time, according to pictures) “when the soul is taken, the eyesight follows.” The washing must follow specific procedure and then body fully covered, including the head and face. Necrophilic tourism is not an option – and bodes a sinister future if indicative of the values of those now seemingly holding power, legally or otherwise.
There may be worse to come. Seizing the illegal precedent which has been set by the disposal of Osama bin Laden’s bullet ridden remains, by the body snatching killers in Afghanistan, there is talk of burying Libya’s Head of State at sea. As bin Laden, it would get rid of the evidence. Dead men don’t talk of past deals, commitments, betrayals – and disappeared ones leave no forensic evidence of seemingly, a murderering mob of NATO-facilitated thugs.
Will pressure for the body to be handed over to his tribe, tempt another disgraceful act? That Tribe have issued this statement: “We call on the UN, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and Amnesty International, to force the [National] Transitional Council to hand over the martyrs’ bodies to our tribe in Sirte and to allow them to perform their burial ceremony in accordance with Islamic customs and rules.”
Further pressure is building from the UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur, is adament: “The Geneva conventions are very clear that when prisoners are taken they may not be executed willfully and if that was the case then we are dealing with a war crime, something that should be tried”, he told Al Jazeera. (21st October 2011.)
One eye witness allegations of Colonel Quaddafi’s death hardly seems to meet with Geneva Convention criteria: “ … he was being beaten, kicked, with rifle butts, boots. He looked confused … he was saying ‘help me, help me’, but his voice was really strained, he was croaking. A few of us were around him, we thought we should get him somewhere we could question him about the others. But he was then taken away in a wave of people and then there were shots.”
There are more similarities between Iraq and Libya. Two leaders who took over countries crippled by colonialism and turned them in to thriving, largely well developed nations, with high quality free health care, education, living standards.
In threatened crisis, US Presidents and their Administrations cower in hidden bunkers deep in mountains, British Prime Ministers and their Cabinet, and ranking officials, are not renowned as front line operators either. Indeed, the speed with which the British and American Ambassadors and their staff left Libya, at the first sign of trouble was pathetic – and nationally humiliating.
Both Saddam and his sons said they would never leave their countries and would die there. They did. Colonel Quaddafi did the same. Saddam faced out “Shock and Awe”, Quaddafi twenty six thousand Nato sorties and over nine thousand six hundred strike missions, in seven months; sixty eight strikes, seemingly, round Sirte, on the day he was killed near there. What ever their failings, their courage was towering.
Saddam lost his sons and grandchild and never saw his surviving family before he died. Quaddafi lost three grand children and three sons, and a fourth died with him. After the deaths, the Western media sneered because he failed to appear on the air waves for a few days.
However, the rats are crawling back on to the deck of the remains of the ship. On 21st October, Britain’s replacement Defence Minister – his predecessor got in to a little local difficulty – Phillip Hammond, announced that the UK had presented a license to drill for oil request, to the National Transitional Council, far less than twenty four hours after the announcement of Quaddafi’s death. Further:
“Libya is a relatively wealthy country with oil reserves, and I expect there will be opportunities for British and other companies to get involved in the reconstruction of Libya.
“I would expect British companies, even British sales directors, (to be) packing their suitcases and looking to get out to Libya and take part in the reconstruction of that country as soon as they can”, he said. (Independent, 22nd October 2011.)
When the US Ambassador, Gene Cretz, ran the Stars and Stripes up over the American Embassy in Tripoli, at it’s re-opening ceremony on 22nd September, he remarked: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libya’s natural resources.”
There have been many reports of Predator drones over Libya, these last seven months. Seems there may be even more predators on the ground.
On Sunday 23rd October, 2011, the non-elected insurgents (sorry, National Transitional Council) are to declare Libya’s “liberation.”
The day marks the centenary of an Italian pilot becoming the first to use aircraft in war, taking off from Libya to observe Turkish troops in the Turko-Italian war. (23rd October 1911.)
Ironically it also marks the fist meeting of the UN General Assembly (23rd October 1946) a body which has strayed so far from its fine, stated, aspirations.
Drone: “Person who lives off the work of others.” (Oxford Dictionary.)
UPDATE: As I finish this, it is being announced that Colonel Quaddafi’s body will be returned to his family for burial. It is indeed, if disgustingly belatedly so incumbent upon the “authorities” to do so. We will see.
i. i. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlz3-OzcExI&feature=youtube_gdata
