29 March 2011 18:25:47 — creative-i.info
29 March 2011
28 March 2011 — URUK Net – WSWS
The Libyan National Council, the Benghazi-based group that speaks for the rebel forces fighting the Gaddafi regime, has appointed a long-time CIA collaborator to head its military operations. The selection of Khalifa Hifter, a former colonel in the Libyan army, was reported by McClatchy Newspapers Thursday and the new military chief was interviewed by a correspondent for ABC News on Sunday night.
28 March 2011 — Global Research – World Socialist Web Site
The US and its European allies stepped up their massive bombing campaign on the side of anti-Gaddafi forces over the weekend, further exposing the pretext of a “limited, humanitarian” intervention for the supposed purpose of protecting Libyan civilians.
29 March 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation
The situation in Libya is evidently headed for a quagmire. At the moment, the vision of the situation should not be limited to the viewpoint of the Western coalition’s member countries (which remain divided over quite a few key issues and whose governments will yet endure fiery criticism over the campaign from their respective constituencies) but should encompass the wider context of the post-revolutionary Arab world.
28 March 2011 — Global Research TV
The war of intervention in Libya is yet another American illegal adventure, argues Keith Harmon Snow, an independent war correspondent.
The objective, he says, secured access to Libya’s significant oil supply, other mineral resources and defense testing.
He says the argument of humanitarianism and stopping a “warlord” was absolute nonsense. If that argument were true, he contends, there are far more brutal war criminals in African countries the US could have chosen to target.
March 28, 2011 — Media Lens
Part 2 Part One here.
As a Sunday Times leader made clear on March 20, sometimes you just have to draw a line:
‘[T]here can be no accommodation with a man like Gadaffi or any of his family who aspire to succeed him.’ (Leading article, ‘Allies need a rapid victory to outwit Gadaffi,’ Sunday Times, March 20, 2011)
Seven years earlier, Alan Massie wrote in the same newspaper:
‘The sight of Tony Blair shaking hands with Colonel Gadaffi last week will have disgusted many… One may sympathise with these sentiments but, pushing emotion aside, Blair has shown courage. It would be lovely if international politics could be conducted so you were always dealing with decent people. It might be nice if governments were able consistently to pursue the “ethical foreign policy” of which Robin Cook used to speak so enthusiastically but the world isn’t like that.’ (Massie, ‘Keeping Gadaffi close is the safest option,’ Sunday Times, March 28, 2004)
28 March, 2011 — www.killinghope.org
The words they find it very difficult to say — “civil war”.
Libya is engaged in a civil war. The United States and the European Union and NATO — The Holy Triumvirate — are intervening, bloodily, in a civil war. To overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. First The Holy Triumvirate spoke only of imposing a no-fly zone. After getting support from international bodies on that understanding they immediately began to wage war against Libyan military forces, and whoever was nearby, on a daily basis. In the world of commerce this is called “bait and switch”.
28 March 2011 — Joe Bageant: Bageant Moves On – www.fredoneverything.net
We don’t last, and there’s no warranty
Joe Bageant and Fred Reed in Ajijic, Mexico, 2008
Jocotepec, Mexico — Joe lived awhile down the lake. We would visit him of an afternoon, Vi and I, and find him, a bear of a man, bearded mountain Buddha, writing on the porch of his one-room place in Ajijic. Always he wore his old fishing vest, in which I suspect he was born, and sometimes he carried a small laptop in one of its pockets. Usually we adjourned to the living room, which was also the bedroom, dining room, and salon. He would fetch bottles of local red, or make the jalapeño martinis he invented — there was a bit of mad chemist in him — and we would talk for hours of art, music, the news, politics, and people. Especially people. Sometimes he grabbed one of the guitars from the wall and sang blues, at which he was good. I guess growing up dirt poor in West Virginia puts that kind of music in you.
Joe could fool you. He talked slow and Southern, lacked pretensions, and you could talk to him for weeks without realizing how very damned smart he was.
One day we dropped in and he said he had just found that he had cancer. It went fast. He died Saturday.
The New Dark Age 