Tuesday, April 05, 2011

'Toontime: Blame it on 'March Madness'

[credit: Mark Lester, Rome News-Tribune]
Wackydoodle seize: "This here's a three point play".

More: They call him 'Daffy' Qaddafi. That is a convenient tag for those who have reason to hide the truth. The CIA has plenty reasons. The world dismissed Qaddafi claims of al-Qaeda fomenting the uprising against his autocratic regime as the ravings of an unhinged dictator. Nevertheless a 2007 study by the West Point Military Academy shows there may be some truth to his apparently absurd claim. The "Harmony Project" is an analysis of 600 Al Qaeda personnel files captured by US forces in Iraq. The report allows some insight into the composition of the rebels centered in Benghazi who are fighting to overthrow Col. Qaddafi. Next to Saudi Arabia, Libya sent the most fighters into Iraq from across the Syrian boarder, despite having less than 1/4th of the Saudi Kingdom's population. Libya accounted for almost one fifth of Iraq's foreign fighters. The Libyan fighters originated from a narrow corridor along Libya's north coast between Benghazi and Tobruk, with the town of Darnah in between providing 60%. Many of their files listed "suicide bomber" as their military specialty.  Both Darnah and Benghazi are associated with extremist schools of theology and Islamic militancy according to the West Point's analysts. One group formerly named the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was in the front ranks of an Islamic uprising against the "apostate" Qaddafi government in the 90's. It is said that the rebellion in northeast Libya, the source of so many jihadists, was fomented by MI-6 and timed to coincide with the assassination of the ruler. MI-6 allegedly paid £100,000 for the contract. The assassination attempt failed, and Qaddafi crushed the rebellion in 1996. (see the Shayler Affair). In November 2007 LIFG officially joined al-Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second in command disclosed the merger in a 2008 statement.

What was called Cyrene in the days of the Roman Empire, is the home of the Harabi confederation of tribes. It is traditionally fundamentalist and monarchist. The Benghazi rebel council being supported by NATO intervention is controlled by the Harabi. This confederation suffered at Qaddafi's hands. He confiscated large amounts of tribal members' land and redistributed it to his own tribal supporters. If the United States is in fact covertly arming these same rebels through Egyptian and Saudi mediates in violation of the UN arms embargo, then it may indeed find itself confronted with a "second Afghanistan" armed with modern US weapons, just like the mad dictator said.

{1.4.11}The Libyan war has blown its UN cover story. A-10 Warthogs and AC-130 Specter gunships do not fly air superiority missions. They are advanced US ground attack weapons capable of inflicting frightening mayhem. Both have entered the Libyan civil war to support the weaker side. The US made sure it had wiggle room under the UN mandate to support the uprising directly if that became necessary, and it has. The figurehead of the Benghazi separatists is Mustafa Adbell Jalil, the former 'justice' minister, but his brain, according to international studies professor Vijay Prashad of Trinity College, Connecticut is Mahmoud Jibril, a former head of the National Economic Development Board and a University of Pittsburg Ph.D., who according to a Wikileaks' cable (09TRIPOLI386) is keen on a close relationship with the United States. The rebel forces are under the command of ex-Qaddafi colonel Khalifa Heftir who made a name for himself in Qaddafi's war against Chad. But he had a falling out with Col. Qaddafi, taking up arms against him in an insurgency run from Chad. When the pro-US government of Chad fell in 1990, Heftir retreated to--wait for it--the United States where he took up convenient residence in Vienna, Virginia, seven miles from CIA headquarters in Langley. In March 2011 Heftir flew back to Benghazi to take command of defecting troops. So, the US has its men in place, and soon it will have NATO troops on the ground plus or minus some Americans not wearing their uniforms.