“A brutal, gratuitous slaying” John Robles
Interview with Rick Rozoff, the manager of the Stop NATO website and mailing list and contributing writer to www.globalresearch.ca.
How are you today, Mr. Rozoff?
Rather distressed by the news of this morning. Or yesterday morning in your case.
Ok, what is your first impression?
It was a brutal, gratuitous slaying of an almost 70-year-old man, killed after being captured. And if the intent of 216 days of NATO bombing was to kill him in the first place, which is clearly the case, with the multiple bombings of his compound in Tripoli, which in one case killed one of his sons and three grandchildren, it is clearly targeted killing and I suppose NATO can now claim success. It has got what it wanted.
President Barack Obama said that there is going to be a pull-out from Libya very soon, so in your mind does that mean the objective has been met?
Yes, it has entirely. Regime change, take-over of Africa’s largest oil reserves, the incorporation of Libya, which hitherto had been the only North African country that was not a member of NATO’s so-called Mediterranean Dialogue, into what is now according to Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen a military partnership with the North Atlantic Alliance…So in every sense their objective has been accomplished. It’s certainly nothing that is going to benefit the Libyan people.
You don’t see this as being justice for the oppressed Libyan people? I mean there are people saying that Gaddafi was a terrible guy. He killed thousands so he deserved to die.
There is just so much – what term do I want to use? – low taste, gratuitous reveling in the murder of this man, who was born 70 years ago in the very city he was murdered in on the 216th day of NATO’s bombing of his country. He was born under Italian Fascist occupation and he died under NATO occupation. I think the parallel there can’t be missed, including the fact that Italy supplied some of the warplanes that have devastated his country since the middle of March, since March 19th. If he was the monster they’ve portrayed him as being – and I invite your listeners to go to the NATO website and see some of the crude caricatures of Gaddafi they’ve posted over the last few days – wall graffiti and so forth – portraying him in a demeaning and belittling way, to further dehumanize him preparatory to murdering him.
Alright, I saw some television coverage of his naked body being thrown around like a piece of meat. I am sorry for the expression.
Yes, after they brought him to Misrata. This is sickening, barbaric and worse than barbaric treatment and it’s in a long line of similar travesties. This is true with Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, with any leader of a country that doesn’t kow-tow entirely. I am not putting all these people in the same basket. Let’s rephrase that. Any leader whose time has come according to the United States and NATO can expect death. Hussein was hanged, Gaddafi was shot. Whereas Gaddafi was considered to be – he was only nominally so, but he was considered to be – the head of state and even the head of the military, and the bombing of his private residences under the guise of their being command and control centers suggests that he was considered by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to be in charge of the Libyan military, when he was captured on Thursday his treatment was governed by the Geneva Conventions, but instead he was shot through the head and murdered. This is the new regime that is being implanted in Libya, and for all the West’s talk of the rule of law and humanitarian concerns and so forth this is a graphic image of its true intentions, just like the death of Slobodan Milosevic in a veritable dungeon in the Netherlands because he was denied proper medical treatment in Russia, and the grotesque hanging of Saddam Hussein. This is the image of the new world order, a world order in all its transparent barbarism.
What do you mean he was denied medical treatment in Russia?
Russia offered to make a deal with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to bring Slobodan Milosevic to Moscow for medical treatment, but he was denied that opportunity and he died shortly thereafter. Even more foul play may have been involved but the message is very clear.
Do you see a pattern, I am sorry to interrupt you there. Do you see a pattern here, I am sure you do, between Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and now Gaddafi? I mean, we have countries, for example, Hussein and Gaddafi, they pretty much stopped their weapons’ programs. They cooperated with the CIA, in this case from what I’ve heard, and it’s pretty much a given, Gaddafi was assisting the war on terror fight by the United States by allowing rendition flights to Libya. He stopped his weapons programs. Do you see a pattern here?
Yes, there’s a very clear pattern. That the United States and the North Atlantic allance use somebody for whatever purpose they want to and then get rid of them and kill them afterwards. Slobodan Milosevic, at political risk to himself inside at that time the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, played a role in negotiating an end to the armed hostilities in Bosnia, in gratitude for which his country was bombed for 78 days in 1999 by the United States and its NATO allies and subsequently he was left to die in prison.
He had a deal with the CIA, I think, it came out, and I think that it’s pretty much a part of the public record that he believed that he was going to be protected.
I don’t know the details about that but at the end of the day what we see is there are a lot of corpses and we see the killings of heads of state. We have to recall that again, even though he was a titular, a nominal, head of state, Muammar Gaddafi was the longest reigning leader in the world. He is was last personal link – since Fidel Castro retired as president of Cuba – between the post-World War II national liberation struggles and the emergence of new nations during the Cold War era and the post-Cold War era that issued in NATO as an international military strike force that can topple governments at will around the world. NATO boasts on its website as of today of flying over 26,000 air missions over a country of six million people, with well over 9,000 of those being combat sorties. So this monster has been unleashed over the last 20 years and Libya will not be the last country so targeted. That you can be assured of.
What do you think is going to happen next?
I don’t know if Libya is able to be put back together again. The Western powers incited regional and tribal differences in order to topple the former Gaddafi government, and believing you can put that genie back in the bottle is overly optimistic – and disingenuous. With the military commander of the National Transitional Council [Abdel Hakim Belhaj] being somebody the United States incarcerated and interrogated as part of its “extraordinary rendition” program and a former fighter in Afghanistan, past leader of the so-called Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, you have al-Qaeda elements and tribal separatists – they’ve created real pandemonium here and now they claim that they want to stabilize Libya. I don’t see it happening. At the end of the day, with the alleged no-fly zone and humanitarian intervention, NATO has transparently waged a war against a government on behalf of insurgents, period. This was clearly the intent from the beginning and now it’s proven successful.
