07/17/12 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

Now to our first guest, it's the great Patrick Coburn, writing this time for Counterpunch.
He's the author of the book, Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite revival and the future of Iraq, something very close to that, the struggle for Iraq.
And of course, he writes for The Independent in London, Middle East correspondent for The Independent in London.
This piece is at his brother Alexander Coburn's site, counterpunch.org.
It's called A Legacy of Hatred.
Can Libya's new leaders curb the violent militias?
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, thank you.
Well, very good.
I'm happy to hear that.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Very important article here.
I urge people to go and take a good look at it.
It's about the aftermath of the regime change in Libya.
It's not like one faction really, I guess, took over the government that existed.
The government that existed completely fell apart.
And now it's just roving bands of militias, some of them fighting each other, some of them not, but none of them really amounting to a state there.
Is that basically the situation?
Well, yeah, you have different groups competing for power.
You've just had an election there, which, you know, people were encouraged by because it was a real election, you know.
But I think yesterday we had the head of their Olympic committee kidnapped on a road near, on a main road, you know, so you have this sort of mixture of constitutional politics and militia rule.
You know, they're the militias that took part in the war are still very powerful.
They, you know, there are more prisoners, but even the government says that the militias hold more prisoners about 4000 than the government does.
The so, you know, you still have this militia, militias with their own detention camps, detention camps, where torture isn't just common, it's invariable.
You have these camps are full of people who made confessions, which of course they did, because they've, they've been tortured.
And this is now very well documented by Amnesty International.
This hasn't been much noticed in the, in the media coverage of Libya.
But, you know, there, this is, they've, there's absolutely compelling evidence that torture is commonplace.
And there's no signs of it being reduced.
And it ironic, I interviewed a guy from Amnesty who was so gung ho for the war to stop that monster Qaddafi.
Now they're the only ones even reporting on the aftermath.
Yeah, I mean, to their credit, I think that, you know, the one I remember at the beginning of the war, you know, when the international media was extraordinarily gung ho for the war, and the rebels were all painted as white hats, and Qaddafi's people all as very black hats, and very little negative stuff was being reported.
And, you know, atrocity stories, like the story of the mass rape by Libyan government forces, the, which were completely the Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and the UN team found absolutely no evidence for.
But this was very widely reported originally by CNN and other media.
When it was, the story was discredited, they hardly gave it a mention.
Right.
Yeah, it was funny.
I remember listening to a right wing AM radio host saying, even Susan Rice, the left wing black lady UN ambassador says this is true.
So you know, it's true.
Yeah, it's sort of, you know, that sort of story, you know, that it's amazing how it takes off.
I mean, the mass rape story, the evidence for it was, there was a woman who said she'd distributed 70,000 questionnaires in wartime Libya, 60,000 replies, you wouldn't get that even in the most peaceable place.
And a substantial number of women said they'd been raped by government soldiers.
Then the, when people like Amnesty went to this woman said, you know, could they see any of her questionnaires?
No, she didn't have any anymore.
Could they meet any of the women who said they'd been raped?
No, she'd lost touch with them.
You know, so they eventually, I think all concluded that the story was a concoction.
But I remember an interview with the same woman on CNN, which is, you know, absolutely bowing and scraping in front of her and taking every word that was said as gospel.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't, I don't blame Libyans who were, you know, anti Gaddafi in the middle of a war of indulging in a bit of black propaganda.
That's the nature of war.
What I do blame is the media for going along with this.
I think this is very culpable.
That doesn't have to mean you're pro-Gaddafi.
It doesn't, you know, you can be very anti-Gaddafi, but you do have to report both sides of this.
Right.
Well, they pretty clearly had decided that they needed a good enough pretext and they even, I mean, they resorted to taking Gaddafi's promise that, oh, I will hunt down all your rebels and kill you.
And took that and twisted it to mean that he had threatened to kill every man, woman and child in Benghazi if we don't stop him.
And that was the pretext that they use was just some flimsy lie like that.
But they needed some kind of outrage to say that this was worth the American people's treasure, not our lives.
Yeah, I think it's sort of this sort of manipulation of the atrocities.
I mean, there was some sort of, you know, even more sort of striking than the atrocity of this story about mass rape.
I'm sorry, we got one right there.
We'll be right back to talk more about Libya with Patrick Coburn.
Counterpunch.org.
Can Libya's new leaders curb the violent militias?
Sorry, Patrick, hard break.
We'll be right back, y'all.
Ron Paul calls on Romney to release more tax returns.
That's funny.
All right.
We're talking with Patrick Coburn.
What happened?
You said they had a real election.
I think you called it.
Is that so?
Huh?
Yeah, they had a real election.
You know, people voted for it.
But, you know, as people should remember, I think from Iraq, you know, election day is the day that people should remember, I think, from Iraq, you know, elections don't solve things by themselves.
You know, they're not the only thing that decides the distribution of power.
You know, for instance, the militias in Libya we were talking about, well, I think it was in May that the National Transitional Council decided they had total immunity from, you know, anybody taking action against them.
Now, so you have a lot of heavily armed guys who have total immunity, who can kind of do what they wanted.
And one of the cases, you know, it's a big cases of whole communities, you know, there's a whole town south of Misrata, Tuarga, which had 40,000, 41,000 people in it.
I mean, these are mostly, these are basically black Libyans, but I mean, have always lived there.
They were deemed by the militias in Misrata to have supported Qaddafi.
And they drove them out and destroyed this city.
You know, the city is just for buildings, you know, with where the windows were, there are sort of blasted holes in the walls, 40,000 people are in jail or they're in camps, you know, that's an awful lot of people.
And the supposed government either can't do anything or doesn't do anything.
Well, when you have very big stuff like that, but you have small stuff too, you know, there's a guy on the beach, according to Amnesty, in Tripoli, and militia men were firing their guns in the air near his cafe, it was on the beach, and he protested.
And the next thing he knew, they grabbed him and beaten him after death and fired a RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade into his cafe, blowing it up.
So you have this sort of militia violence at all levels.
I mean, the person who carried out this, one of the researchers who carried out this study for Amnesty on present-day Libya made a sort of telling remark to me.
She said, you know, it's difficult to get people to notice what's happening in Libya because, you know, the overwhelming desire of a government, of the foreigners, of the foreign government and media is to portray Libya as a success story.
And stuff that goes against that just really doesn't get publicized.
Yeah, they just rather ignore it.
Now, do you have any kind of ballpark estimate of how many different warring militias there are, or the major ones?
And is it just tribal differences, or it's other groups too, because you have former government people?
Militias everywhere, Scott, tend to be, I remember in Beirut, you know, they tend to start, you know, as community defenders or defending their street, you know.
But once they're off their own territory, or once, you know, after they've been in business for a bit, you know, if nobody's, they tend to sort of set up in business for themselves, you know.
I mean, the late Anthony Shadid of the New York Times, I remember just before he died, he was in Misrata, and he estimated there were 250 militias in Misrata alone, which is the third biggest city in Libya.
I don't know how many others there are, you know, sometimes these, these militias fight each other.
And I don't, I just don't think anybody knows, but often these are street gangs with guns, and sometimes they're much bigger, you know, and sometimes they're very heavily equipped and represent a whole tribe or a whole, you know, a whole sort of city area.
But, you know, they don't seem to be getting any weaker election or no election.
Right.
Well, now, when you talk about a real election around here, not that this is the highest of values to me, but anyway, the way it supposedly works is that when you lose an election, you go along with that, because better luck next time, and it'll work out, and the other side won't be allowed to go too far against you anyway, and that kind of thing.
We don't usually have a war over the Democrats losing to the Republicans, and, you know, the state government, for example, or that kind of thing.
But because that's our tradition is that we kind of respect the results of elections, even ones that we know are rigged, we just kind of go along rather than have the disruption, you know.
But as you cited Iraq, we had an election there in 2005, and that simply hardened all the lines for the coming civil war and made everything worse.
I wonder whether you think that's the more likely result of this election here in Libya.
I haven't quite seen yet.
I mean, what happens is, you know, people have to agree the rules of the game.
Once they've really agreed the rules of the game, as in the US or various other countries, then, you know, you can have an election and win or lose.
It doesn't actually lead to a sort of guns in the street.
But if people haven't agreed the rules of the game, then, you know, having people who've lost the election say, oh, you know, well, we never agreed to this as a way of distributing power.
Now, in Iraq, the election actually provoked a civil war, really.
In Libya, difficult to say, you know, but I think what one can say about Libya at the moment, you know, there's a degree of violence, which is unreported in the outside world, except by the human rights organizations.
And it is, you know, I find it striking that stories that would have been, you know, you would have found in the newspapers 20 years ago now, and the human rights organization used to lag behind.
Now it tends to be the human rights organizations and some newspapers that lag behind, or the media in general.
I think that's partly the weakening of the media, of less newspapers that carry out their own investigations and less media, which has the guts to go against conventional wisdom.
Yeah, well, one of the big problems there is people are used to the media covering something if it's worth covering.
And so if they're not, people just assume that I guess everything's quiet and worked out well over there.
And that's maybe the end of that story.
Yeah, I think it's, you know, I remember in particular in 2008 in Iraq, you know, I thought the great success of General Petraeus' surge in Iraq was he persuaded the people who run the US media, mostly in New York, that nothing much was happening.
I remember, you know, one of the networks, I think it may have been ABC, that guy's there saying, you know, we haven't been on air for 50 days, you know, and you'd say, but hold on a minute, you know, they're shooting all over the city, this idea that Iraq is at peace, you know, is baloney.
And they say, sure, we know that.
But, you know, the guys we answer to don't know that they've been persuaded opposite, but this new story is dead, the war is over.
And, you know, so I think that, you know, so then it comes as a tremendous, you know, just like it came as a surprise in 2005 and six, that the war in Iraq wasn't over.
And the media is very sort of poor, particularly television, I think, at reporting what everybody knows on the ground, including their own reporters, that is exact opposite to what their governments are saying.
Right?
Well, I know from, you know, doing this show during that time that there were very few people, there was you and Gareth Porter and Robert Dreyfus, and a very small handful of reporters who really understood that, you know, who made up the Iraqi National Alliance, and what were their histories?
And what did it all mean?
You know, what did the Purple Fingers win?
And, and who was fighting for what most of the media coverage could only be, well, a bomb went off, but we have no idea who might have done it or why, because, you know, they refused to read you, really, they didn't understand the context of any of it.
Yeah, I mean, what often happens in these cases, you know, it's not actually the reporters on the ground often have a pretty good idea, very good idea what's happening.
I mean, Baghdad, you could hardly mistake it, you know, but it's the people they answer to.
In Libya, I thought the reporters on the ground were more culpable.
One of the things that added to it in Libya, of course, was Al Jazeera, which, you know, previously I thought was pretty good, but when it came to Libya, it became pretty well the propaganda arm of the rebels, same thing in Syria.
And, you know, the became a sort of instrument of the foreign policy of Qatar, the country that funds Al Jazeera and where it's based.
Indeed, you could see they were reporting every sort of negative story.
And, and some of these things pretty horrific, for instance, Amnesty produced a at one point early on, but at an important point when people were deciding what to do about Libya, the rebels said that eight bodies, bodies of eight government soldiers have been found, they've been executed because they tried to change sides and join the rebel side.
That story was widely publicized.
Sometime later, Amnesty found a video, a film of these same eight government soldiers who'd been captured by the rebels, and were being interrogated and were alive.
So the only people who could have shot them were the rebels themselves, you know.
So you get sort of, you know, propaganda stories like that, you know, did the rebels shoot them because they wanted to produce a bit of black propaganda and blame it on the government, you know, so this, this stuff gets very nasty.
And now you talked about the racial pogrom there, is that continuing?
Because it was, I guess, what, a couple of months ago?
Our team, and this is a story that you would think, I guess, in any other circumstances, any other power had done this regime change, and this was one of the results of it, this would be the biggest story in the world in New York and DC.
I mean, sure, yeah, I mean, you see, you know, let's say that, you know, in Syria, if you know, a whole time, well, let's take Homs, you know, you know, the government is shelling Homs, a lot of people flying, this is very heavily publicized, I see it every day.
But, you know, who knows the fact that there's a whole city that's been destroyed or 40,000 people in Libya.
You know, this is one, Libya was always pretty racist, because, you know, a lot of the workers were black Africans, a lot of Libyans are black.
Then, during the war, you again had this propaganda story of saying that the, you know, how come Gaddafi was still, his forces were still fighting under NATO air attack, because they're all mercenaries from Central and West Africa.
And this story, again, was very widely publicized.
Now, there were a few guys they'd recruited from Mali and elsewhere, but maybe a few hundred.
And the vast majority of these guys, as soon as Gaddafi fell, anybody who was black on the streets of Tripoli or Benghazi was instantly being picked up and arrested.
A lot of them are still in jail.
A lot of them have been, you know, tortured, you know, when they got out of jail, you know, and very sort of nasty business as a widely circulated film in Libya.
People watching YouTube, if they look for it, I think it's 14 black Libyan prisoners who are being forced to eat the the old Libyan flag, physically eat it, you know, so they're all gagging and so forth.
Yeah, that was what I was going to mention.
It's on RT there is in that footage, they're being force fed the flag, they're locked up, they're in a zoo.
Yeah, that's right, you know.
And, you know, first of all, the media have gone elsewhere from Libya, so it's not that much reported full stop.
And when it is, you know, a lot of it is still the same old stuff.
So, you know, while in Iraq, I didn't, I don't think you could really blame the individual reporters.
I think in Libya, you could.
In fact, it got so bad that the BBC commissioned a sort of independent report.
I think it was an internal report on its own, you know, its own coverage of Libya, which decided that it'd been very, I think they decided it was very unanalytical, it didn't go very deep.
So, you know, there was self criticism there, and they did something about it.
And I do notice that the BBC coverage of Syria is much more careful when it's puts on YouTube stuff, they say this is alleged, this is the evidence for this, but we go, this is second hand evidence, they're much more careful than CNN or any of the other foreign channels.
Well, still even passing it on when it's unconfirmed.
It does have some impact, something that has had impact in Britain.
Yeah, well, that's good to hear that, you know, they're doing a bit better.
Although when somebody like the BBC passes on a picture or YouTube, or something, and they did have that fake picture of the Syrian massacre there, a month or so ago.
But you know, when they put, even if they say, well, it's second hand, they also they're the BBC.
So it becomes firsthand from them.
Sure, yeah.
As soon as you start doing that, and do that repeatedly, you know, you're giving, you're saying you're underwriting the authenticity of what you're showing.
Now, listen, I'm sorry, Patrick, we're way over time here, I gotta let you go.
But I really appreciate your time on the show.
As always, it's been great.
And I hope I can talk with you about Syria and Afghanistan and the rest of these wars soon.
Anytime Scott.
Okay, appreciate it.
Talk to you later.
All right, everybody, that's Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
This one is at counterpunch.org.
Can Libya's new leaders curb the violent militias?
Great read.
Check it out. counterpunch.org.
We'll be right back.