Admit it, our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
Scott Wharton here for LibertyStickers.com.
I made up most of them and most of those when I was mad as hell about something.
So if you hate war, empire, central banking, cops, Republicans, Democrats, gun grabbers, and status of all stripes, go to LibertyStickers.com and there's a good chance you'll find just what you need for the back of your truck.
Own a bookstore?
Sell guns at the show?
Get the wholesaler's deal.
Buy any hundred stickers and they drop down in price to a dollar apiece.
You can spread the contempt and make a little money too.
That's LibertyStickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
This is my show, Scott Wharton Show.
Check me out on TalkStreamLive.com, at NoAgendaStream.com, and at ScottWharton.org.
Keep all my interview archives there.
More than 2,800 of them now, going back to 2003.
And our next guest is Thomas Mountain.
He's my favorite reporter in Africa.
And he's got a brand new thing out here.
What the heck did I do with it?
Divide and Rule, Western Democracy in Africa.
If it's not there yet, very soon it'll be running at Counterpunch and a bunch of other places as well.
Welcome back to the show, Thomas.
How are you doing?
Hey, good to be back.
Very good to have you here.
So, America is at war and or proxy war all over Africa.
And we've talked at length in the past about Mali and especially about Somalia and Ethiopia.
But here you're bringing, there's I don't know how many countries in Africa.
What, like 35 countries in Africa or something like that?
Yeah, a lot.
So, teach us about Liberia and what the hell's going on there.
Liberia?
Well, you know, Eleanor Johnson, who is the handpicked U.N. rep that took over the country, has been there now for over one, you know, I don't know, eight or nine years.
And in the entire time that she's been president, the capital city, Monrovia, has not had running water or electricity.
And in spite of the billion, over a billion dollars in foreign aid that her country received.
So, at the last election, she ran unopposed and got the Nobel Peace Prize to boot.
So, you know, it's sort of unopposed election and that's called democracy.
Well, now, is that the State Department ran the whole thing or what?
Well, she was the U.N.
They brought her in because she'd been in Addis Ababa working for them.
As a matter of fact, the year she took off from the U.N. to campaign for the presidency of Liberia, the first time, she continued to have her salary from the U.N. the whole year.
So, obviously, that was their girl and they put her in.
And the last election, she didn't even have to have any opposition.
She was just democratically elected.
But I list her at number two on the list.
Number one on the list is of African dishonorable, African democracy dishonorable.
The number one on the list has got to go to Ethiopia, where the last election, 12 hours after the polls closed, the ethnic minority regime in power in the country announced that they'd won 99.6% of the seats in Parliament.
So, I want to warn your readers.
I wanted to warn your listeners a little bit.
You know, there was some news about a demonstration that happened a couple of weeks ago.
And the one member of Parliament that's from the opposition, the whole Parliament has one member, 99.6%.
That 0.4% is one guy.
He led a, quote-unquote, demonstration.
It was legally, the only legally allowed demonstration by the government, showing that there's actually an opposition to the government, showing that there is really democracy in Ethiopia.
Any case, number two on the list.
We talked about Liberia.
Well, wait a minute.
Let me ask you about Ethiopia a little bit more for a second here before we go on.
I mean, this is just sort of a rhetorical thing, I guess.
You can't even fake it that bad.
I mean, those are Saddam Hussein numbers, 99 point something percent.
Why not call it 80?
And then we'll still know they're lying, but come on.
I mean, it seems like they're actually maybe, you know, screwing themselves up by stealing it so badly.
You know what I mean?
Well, the election before, see, you have to look back to 2005.
There was another so-called election.
Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center was there, the rubber stamp, the whole thing.
And this is one of Jimmy Carter's dishonorable membership, the Ethiopian regime.
Again, see, Ethiopia is a country where 70 percent of the people don't have any electricity.
So how are you going to, in 12 hours after the voting closes, 80 million people are going to be able to get their votes into the center, and they're going to know who won?
But in 2005, Jimmy Carter, well, a little more than 14 hours after the polls closed, Jimmy Carter held a press conference at 8 o'clock in the morning in Addis Ababa in 2005, declared that, yes, he had 300 observers there and covering 300, they had 300 polling stations covered, mainly in the Addis Ababa region, and of the 33,000 in the country, and even though all the polls that they had, independent observers, went to the opposition, the rest of the country, the other 30,000 polling places, all overwhelmingly went to the government.
And this was announced 14 hours after the polls closed.
So Jimmy Carter was there, and he jumped on the next plane out of town, and a couple of hours after Jimmy Carter left, Addis Ababa exploded, and all the university students and high school and opposition people all were in the streets.
They ended up having to bring the Ethiopian ethnic minority death squad in and ended up killing about 500 people, and 50,000 Ethiopians got thrown into concentration camps, some of them for a couple of years, and they just crushed it brutally.
And Jimmy Carter gave his stamp and said it was free and fair.
This is the best you know of that.
Jimmy Carter is our hero of American democracy, right?
Well, I'm a fan of his agreed framework deal with North Korea, but other than that, no, I think everything he does is an absolute disaster.
And part of it is just even if he means well, the local information problem, he couldn't possibly know what the hell he's doing intervening in all these elections over there.
Well, Ethiopia is a very complex situation.
Well, look, the dictator died, though.
I mean, election in 05 or not, nobody considered him an elected president there, Melas, and now he's gone, so now who's running things?
Is there a single figurehead?
At the same time, you know who else died?
The Somali pirates died.
When Melas got sick and died, all this piracy disappeared.
It's a coincidence.
I'd written in the past about how Melas and how he's getting paid off by the pirates, and that's why he kept all these navies from coming ashore and tracking down the ransoms after they'd been delivered and, you know, seeking vengeance with their cruise missiles and drones and commando squads.
No, they were hardly doing any of that.
They knew exactly by remote control where everybody was taking their money after they paid them off, and yet they never went ashore because the pirates were paying off Melas and Ali.
Melas and Ali dies, and all of a sudden, guess what?
Piracy stops in the Horn of Africa.
Big coincidence, right?
Any case.
Well, but so now when we talked right around the time of his death, of course we had fun talking about how much the new national security adviser, Susan Rice, loved him and all that kind of thing, but you also said that you had heard that there was a gigantic militia of more or less the people of Ethiopia were rising up and they were going to come and dislodge what was left of the government because it was so dependent on Melas himself that without him the whole thing was going to fall apart, right?
Well, yeah, you know, actually things have really slowed down in Ethiopia.
I mean, at this time last year there were huge demonstrations when the African Union came in.
There was like one of the South African correspondents who covered the African Union meeting in Addis Ababa.
This is when Melas was sick and didn't show up, right?
And he'd been in Tahrir Square at the height of the Egyptian revolution, and he got caught up in the middle of a demonstration trying to get to the AU headquarters and said that the crowd he saw there of Ethiopians in Addis Ababa during the AU meeting last year was rivaled or exceeded that he'd seen in Tahrir Square.
So things were really hot last year, and militarily too.
I documented at least three division-scale attacks by Ethiopia into Eritrea across the border.
A division is 5,000 men.
So this is what I know of, right?
Three division-scale attacks from Ethiopia into Eritrea last year, 2012.
So there was a lot of military tension.
There was a big rebel army that was very active, and then everything's really quieted down.
And now the Ethiopian prime minister said, oh, we want to have peace with Eritrea about six months back or something.
And, you know, there's been interesting easings of the U.S.
The Americans now put their consul back in Osama.
We didn't even have a consul, let alone an ambassador here.
And they're allowing high-level Eritrean diplomats, who are specifically by name banned from traveling in the U.S. by U.N. sanctions, have been allowed to travel and tour in the United States.
It's pretty amazing.
So I don't know.
It's like I think there's some Americans are sort of having to face up to things might not be going their way.
Maybe they ought to be looking for a plan B.
But I don't know.
You know, it's very calm.
I don't see there's what's going on in Ethiopia.
There hasn't been the major demonstrations.
The Muslims haven't been going out in large numbers like last year.
And the fighting, the armed guerrilla groups have, like, for example, in the Gambela, which I've never actually written about in western Ethiopia, where all their oil is, you know, the rebels there are quite quiet.
I mean, they have been fighting quite a bit.
The situation in the southeast in Ogaden actually still remains very critical, food and medical aid blockade and a major death squad action.
The death squads are driving out all the inhabitants around the areas where the Chinese have discovered large quantities of natural gas, so they want to go back in there.
But, you know, the interesting thing is, you know, China rarely does anything really stupid in Africa.
But when it comes to Ethiopia, the Chinese seem to be, like, sometimes I can't, I don't think they know what the hell they're doing.
In 2007, they went into the Ogaden on the southeastern part of Ethiopia.
Now, is that where the Oromos live, the kind of ethnic minority there?
These are the Somalis there.
The Oromos live to the west and to the south.
This is to the east, to the south, next to Somalia.
These are actually ethnic Somalis.
They call themselves the Ogadenis.
And the Chinese went in and started drilling for gas there after being repeatedly warned by the guerrilla army called the Ogaden National Liberation Front that's been fighting for independence from Ethiopia for some time now.
Now, the Chinese have been warned.
They didn't pay any attention.
The guerrillas attacked them and killed a dozen Chinese along with a couple hundred Ethiopian army.
And it set off a huge crisis where the Melesenari regime in power in Ethiopia kicked out all the Red Cross, the International Blockers Without Borders, and any independent observers are expelled.
So you could come in and start getting, putting the iron fist and scorched earth policy and the genocidal starvation food aid, medical aid blockade.
Well, you know, the Chinese are now talking about building a $3 billion railroad from the capital of Addis Ababa all the way down to the port of Djibouti.
And if you look on a map, you see that this railroad is going to have to eventually pass through one way or another, one of or both of two ethnic groups, one called the Afars, the famous Afar desert where the first human was found, Lucy, and then through the Ogaden, which is where the Somalis live.
And railroads are notoriously vulnerable to sabotage.
And the Chinese are going to, and both of these areas are active counterinsurgencies, particularly the Ogaden.
But five years ago, a bunch of British diplomats decided to go down to the Afar desert and look at all these geological wonders of the separation of the Afar.
It's eventually going to be the Afar Sea there.
And they got kidnapped by a bunch of Afar rebels there.
And the Egyptians had to intercede and get them to release them.
But, you know, there's been all this insurgency and back and forth and claims of terrorism and all this.
And you're going to build a railroad through the middle of this?
The Chinese are going to do this, invest $3 billion on it.
Close enough for government work, you know.
But get this, Brazil's coming in too.
Brazil's going to build a railroad from the Addis Ababa out into the middle of the Ogaden where Ethiopia's got a billion barrels of oil.
Ogaden, I should say, not Ethiopia.
The Ogaden's got a billion barrels of oil and some of the best agricultural land where they're evicting, planning on the process of evicting hundreds of thousands of the Anawak people from their land so that they can sell the Ethiopian regime, can sell the land to, or at least the land to Saudi billionaire investors who grow food, rice, and other things to export from Ethiopia to help them with their balance of payment.
The interesting thing about Ethiopia, in 2010, the head of the IMF in Addis Ababa let slip in an interview, and I'm sure he regretted that, that Ethiopia exported $1.7 billion every year.
It imported $8.7 billion.
So every year there's a $7 billion balance of trade payments that Ethiopia had to come up with just to keep their country going, which meant that the Western, mainly the Western countries, were covering $7 billion a year of Ethiopian aid.
Now the next largest recipient is Israel at $3 billion, and then Egypt at $1.5 billion.
Today I've estimated that Ethiopia, because that was in 2010, today Ethiopia I'm estimating is getting $9 billion in Western aid, which is double the amount that Egypt and Israel are getting combined.
That's one of the best-kept secrets in the world.
The Israelis get a hell of a lot more than $3 billion if you count all the military and civilian aid together.
Israel doesn't even accept a lot of the military aid they're getting.
They have so much stockpile of weapons, they turn down a whole bunch of the billions that's actually budgeted for them.
They give the rest to the Chinese.
Now wait a minute, we've got to switch gears here a little bit, because I want to talk with you about Somalia for a second, and Libya too, and we're halfway through here.
We've got until the bottom of the hour.
Well, actually, maybe we could go a little over time if you can.
But anyway, I want to talk about Somalia because here's the thing.
I read Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill, and hell, I don't guess I ever will get him on the show then, but he does a lot of great work on Somalia in there, and tells a story about how America ruined everything from 2001 on and created the crisis they claimed to fight all the way through, etc., etc.
He does really good on that.
But man, here's the part that really got me, and I just wondered, did you already know this?
That on page 222, Scahill writes that the Americans planned, when they sponsored the Ethiopian proxy army sock puppet invasion of Christmas 2006 to overthrow the Islamic Court's union, that they planned all along to keep Sheikh Sharif as the president.
They said something like, well, you know, it would be preferable if he was weakened, instead of surrounded by these other powerful Islamic Court's union guys.
But anyway, so in other words, they killed a quarter of a million people, if you count all those that died in the famine because the war had ruined their economy so the economy could not buffer and protect them from the weather at all.
They did all that for absolutely nothing.
That Condoleezza Rice didn't cry uncle in 2008 and say, okay, okay, we're on our way out, we have to make a deal, so go ahead and you can still be the government if you want, Sheikh Sharif.
That was the plan all along.
Thomas, did you know that?
Well, you know, I've shared many a cappuccino with Sheikh Sharif here in Asmara from when he was driven.
I moved here in 2006, so he was driven out at the end of 2006 and where did he come?
He came to Asmara.
So there was one wireless Internet cafe that was the lobby of the old Imperial Hotel, that's where I used to have to go every morning, and there was Sheikh Sharif coming back and forth from what became the founding convention of the alliance for the reliberation of Somalia.
So, you know, I mean, Sheikh Sharif was, you know, he was on the most wanted list.
He was the international wanted list.
He was on the, you know, Al Qaeda-linked terrorist that was going to be, you know, targeted.
These days he'd be a target for a drone strike.
But the idea that Sheikh Sharif was the U.S. first pick is not a new idea.
When he immediately dumped the alliance for the reliberation of Somalia and flew off one day to Djibouti where the hand-picked parliament elected him the new president, there had been a lot of suspicion that he may have been America's boy, because that's one of the reasons why Sheikh Alwais, who was the real power behind Sheikh Sharif, Sheikh Sharif was just a school teacher in a madrasa somewhere, a pretty unknown guy.
Sheikh Alwais, who was a senior member of the Klan, picked him and put him in front because Sheikh Alwais had a long history going back to Black Hawk Down of antagonism with America.
He didn't want to be out front, so he put Sheikh Sharif out there.
Any case, you know, this is a long, complicated story.
I just kind of wanted to warn you all about Jeremy Scahill because, you know, he went into his little trip into Mogadishu, which was vetted by the CIA.
He didn't get in there without getting approved by the CIA.
And he went in there and made a big hue about, oh, they have some secret base there, right when there was beginnings of a massive starvation not only in Somalia but in the Ogaden in southeast Ethiopia, the worst drought in 60 years.
This is a period where 250,000 Somali refugees died of starvation.
We're not even talking about how many hundred thousands more died in the 10 million or more Somali population in the Ogaden and in northern Kenya.
So there's massive starvation.
It wasn't only sub-Somalis.
It may well have been a quarter million more starved to death.
Jeremy Scahill never once mentioned any of this.
Instead, he talked about some CIA new building in Mogadishu, which we'd all heard about.
It was no big news.
He'd been doing it for a while.
So the fact that he got into Mogadishu and could ride around and see everything in there, it's like Mogadishu has been, you know what I'm saying?
Well, here's the thing.
I hear you, but here's what I'll say in his defense on that.
I don't know exactly whether he had mentioned the weather and the hunger situation whatsoever, but I know that it may have been old news to you, but when he wrote the CIA's secret sites in Somalia, that was breaking news over here in the Western Hemisphere, that the CIA and the JSOC were torturing people.
He's a smokescreen.
He takes things off in another direction.
This huge crime is going on.
This is genocide.
It's a food aid blockade and a medical aid blockade.
The Red Cross and the— Oh, I don't see it that way.
I mean, I could under— I would accept your criticism if it's just that, boy, did he miss the point, but if it was that he broke the story on the secret prison just to distract from the famine or something like that, I don't think so.
And, in fact, if you read his other piece, never mind the book, which is 500 pages, but if you read his piece, Blowback in Somalia, it's really a step-by-step about how this is all America's fault from the very get-go after September 11th, that they went and picked this fight and the CIA picked this fight in every way.
The one thing he never mentions, for example, he never mentions the role of Eritrea in all this.
You see, and all of this Somali resistance, Sheikh Sharif, and all this union of Islamic courts basically came out from efforts and support that were mediated through the Eritrean Code Council.
Eritrea has a long history of intervening, going way back to 1990, when, before Eritrea had even won their independence, they were publicly credited by both sides, North and South, and bringing them both to the negotiation table to bring peace between Yemen, the reunification of Yemen, was actually Eritrean efforts.
The whole South-North Sudan peace deal that was originally signed in 2004 between John Graham and Omar al-Bashir and that was hijacked, the Navasha agreement in Kenya that the U.S. put the whole South Sudan referendum in, which was never in the original deal, was worked out here in Eritrea.
And the whole situation in Somalia was all basically put together.
The Union of Islamic Courts has a long history of working closely with Eritreans to try to come up with a moderate solution to the Somali problem.
Jeremy Scahill never mentions any of this.
So, I mean, from, you know, I understand that he comes off like a muckraker when actually all he is is a dustraker.
All right.
Well, that's fair enough, Chris.
It's a substantive criticism anyway.
I'll tell you, this is the first time I've ever said this in public, too.
And I've never written this publicly, and this is the first time I've said it in public.
After his trip to Mogadishu, I really watched him closely for a while, and I took analysis.
See, for example, Jeremy Scahill didn't do this, but other people like him.
They used to hue and cry that there was a genocide in the Darfur, starting about 2006, 2007.
Especially in 2007, when the real genocide had been started in Ethiopia, in the Ogaden.
They kicked out all the Red Cross.
Well, in Iraq.
Well, yeah, see, 2007, the Ethiopians expelled the Red Cross and the Dakarzal borders from southern Ethiopia, and there was a drought going on at the time in the Ogaden.
Well, the worst of the fighting in Darfur was in 2004 and 2005.
Yeah, and that was all over by 2006, 2007.
So this whole story got raised about, oh, the genocide, and I saw the same people.
It wasn't Jeremy Scahill, even though he did write about the alleged Darfur genocide.
He wasn't one of the leaders, but he was out there talking about that, too.
So when you go and look at these people, what role they played in creating smoke screens in the past, they come out smelling really rather rancid.
So that's why when I said, I didn't speak for a while, because I'd been looking at this character for a while, because I really wasn't that familiar with his work.
A lot of this stuff is sensational stuff about Yemen.
When you really talk to people, they don't really know at all what's going on in Yemen.
And, you know, I'm from Syria, which is like cousins to the Yemenis.
So, you know, the regions of Yemen have a long history together.
So, you know, a lot of times these guys come off as very sensationalists, but when you really see behind the scenes, there's actually real big crimes going on, and they're not writing about it.
I mean, the Ogaden is still like, you know, Graham's written about some of it recently.
Well, look, I mean, the difference there is JSOC isn't flying by in a C-130 machine gunning the people in Ogaden, and they are in Mogadishu.
And that's the story that Scahill's after is what's JSOC and CIA doing as far as on the ground in the war and who they're backing in Somalia rather than every imperial activity on the continent.
I mean, he doesn't even talk about Iran in the book at all because it's not part of the war against the jihadists or whatever by JSOC and CIA, which is what he's looking at.
Scahill came to Somalia, to Mogadishu.
I had written in counterpunch and predicted that all these people were going to starve to death.
I predicted that because I'd looked at the budget and said there was only 10 cents a day per refugee.
Well, HRW was good on it, too.
I mean, Leslie Lefkow was telling me on the show back in 2000 and, jeez, 7, 8, 9, 10, that people, that civilian refugees are in terrible crisis.
She told me there were a million people on the brink of starvation back in 2010 or maybe 9.
In 2008, when Gail Smith and what's her protégé, John Prendergrass, with the Enough Project, were raising the whole hue and cry about the Ogaden, using words like scorched earth and food aid blockade.
2008, then all of a sudden they completely shut up, and Gail Smith comes on board with the Obama campaign.
Now we've got Gail Smith's little sister, Susan Rice.
Susan Rice was Madeleine Albright's goddaughter, literally.
Susan Rice's father is the famous economics professor, one of the first quote-unquote black professors in the Ivy League that was an economics professor that was very close to Madeleine Albright.
Madeleine Albright actually godfathered Susan Rice.
Susan Rice's big sister is Gail Smith, who's Barack Obama's senior intelligence advisor in the White House on African and foreign aid.
She's right there in a special seat on the National Security Council.
And in Bill Clinton's time under Anthony Lake, Gail Smith was the African desk head when Susan Rice was the assistant secretary of state for Africa back in Bill Clinton's day.
Okay, so now you've got Gail Smith and Susan Rice both sitting in the White House every morning with the president.
Okay, and both of them are long-time Africa hands.
Gail Smith, in particular, is personally responsible for the rise of Melissinawi going way back to 1980.
Gail Smith was a mistress of Melissinawi's TPLF cadre called Jamaica.
You've got people in the highest levels of the White House, Obama's ear.
Gail Smith, after Tony Lake, was Obama's senior foreign policy advisor, along with Susan Rice and Samantha Powers, in the pre-election period before the 2008 election by Obama, right?
So you've got people in the White House that are really deep, deep, deep historically in evilness in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa at the very highest levels of the government.
Okay, now, why is that so?
Why is the Horn of Africa represented with such a long history right there next to Obama?
I mean, is that just some coincidence?
Or is it the fact that now that the Americans are recognizing that the Horn of Africa is now, along with the Suez Canal, one of the most critically strategic areas in the world, that all the trade between the world's major trade partners, Europe and Asia, passes through the Horn of Africa as well as the Suez Canal, right, every day?
You know, what's funny about that, though, is it doesn't matter whose regime rules Yemen, Somalia, or Egypt, for that matter.
Nobody's stopping America from trading through that canal.
And if anybody tried, we would just carpet-bomb them off the face of the earth, and they know that.
So it doesn't really matter who runs any of those countries, I don't think.
Well, you know, the thing is, like, the Baobab Mandeb, the Gate of Tears between the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, actually, you know, it's a bit like the Gulf of Hormuz, the Straits of Hormuz in Iran.
You could put landmines out there.
You can do a lot of things that could really cause a lot of headaches.
And you could do it with a lot of just little fishing boats and things.
I mean, that place there is a, you know, it's not, it potentially could be a major headache.
I mean, just these Somali pirates were giving them a headache, and that wasn't even anything organized.
You know, just lone wolves out there making their payoff to the local mafias who, Somali warlords who paid off Melissinos.
So, you know, that place, actually, it's like the Suez Canal.
You know what I mean?
You block the Suez Canal, it's oof.
Yeah, I'm just saying nobody could block it for more than a little while, that's all.
But hang on right there.
Is it okay if I keep you a little bit longer today?
Pardon?
Yeah, I think my batteries on my phone are still working, so yeah.
All right, good deal.
I'll try to keep you another ten minutes or so because I want to ask you all about Libya.
Everybody, it's Thomas Mountain.
He writes for Counterpunch.
He reports from Eritrea, and he's on the line from there right now.
And we'll be right back after this to talk about what's going on in Libya and Mali and who knows what from there.
Lots of JSOC, lots of wars in Africa.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Thanks for listening.
And thanks to Thomas Mountain, Counterpuncher, for staying on the phone with us through the break.
Do another little half a segment here anyway.
Thomas, tell us about what the hell is going on in Libya lately, would you, please?
Okay, well, just, you know, some of your listeners may be new, and I just wanted to give them a brief little background about the real story about Libya.
You know, I had an article entitled, Libya War Lies Worse Than Iraq, where I basically outlined what other people had discovered, which was, one, that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and the U.N. Special Investigator had all said that, no, they couldn't find a single woman in Libya who had been raped.
Now, we had everybody from Susan Rice to the head of the ICC saying that Gaddafi was handing out Viagra to his troops to go out and rape thousands of Libyan women.
No, they couldn't find a single woman that had been raped.
Okay, complete fabrication.
Secondly, thousands of African mercenaries were not only fighting for Gaddafi, but were actually raping the women.
You know, we can thank Al Jazeera for that one, Hoda the Hoodlum, who's Al Jazeera's lead girl, on the story.
Well, they couldn't find a single African, couldn't confirm a single African mercenary for Gaddafi.
And third, and this was the clincher, there wasn't a single case where an aircraft bombed any civilians or anybody by Gaddafi in Benghazi or anywhere.
So the whole no-fly zone was a complete fabrication.
Nobody had ever bombed anybody.
None of Gaddafi's forces had ever bombed anybody.
Okay, so the whole thing was a big fabrication.
And so if you need to understand that, now we're going to understand what's happening now.
NATO came in and bombed, I don't know, I've estimated based on 10,000 bombing runs and four bombs, a bombing run, that's 40,000 bombs over Libya in a period of about, you know...
Anyway, let me stop you for a second there.
Thomas, let me stop you there for a second.
Now, clearly Obama announced that we had to do the war because 100,000 people will die, he promises, because he says, Gaddafi says that he's going to kill every man, woman, and child in Benghazi, and Obama claimed, why, that's a city the size of Charlotte, and we've got to save them, and all that.
So I'm with you there, but when you say Gaddafi didn't bomb anybody at all, I'm wondering if you can refer me to some really nice footnotes for that, because my understanding was, he sure as hell was bombing some people, maybe it was the people who were attacking him, and he was acting like any government would in that situation, but you're telling me that there was no regime violence whatsoever at that time?
Well, according to Donatello Rivello, who was the Amnesty International rep who arrived on the ground in Benghazi the week the rebellion broke out, and she was there for the first two months or three months of the rebellion.
She has said that she could not document a single case where any helicopter, gunship, or jet pilots bombed anybody in Benghazi.
And she even estimated that the total death toll in the first month of the uprising, up until the point where the no-fly zone was instituted and NATO started bombing Libya, was only 110 people, and that included Gaddafi supporters.
So this claim that there was 10,000 people who had been killed that first month was a complete fabrication.
According to Amnesty International rep who was on the ground, who was fluent in Arabic, and not only that, but her report was confirmed by Human Rights Watch and the UN Special Investigator.
And I'm here to tell you that Amnesty came on my show, plugging the war.
They were pro-war as an organization anyway.
That's right.
And they still came out and said, well, they actually, Patrick Colburn of the Independent interviewed Donatello Rivello, and after he broke the story, Amnesty pulled her and would not allow her to do any more interviews after Patrick broke the story.
So you're right about Amnesty, but one of their people was honest and reliable and did their job and exposed what was really going on.
And Human Rights Watch was forced to back them up, and UN Special Investigator for Libya backed the report up as well.
Boy, am I glad I asked that follow-up question.
Okay, please go on.
Okay, so now we have that NATO intervenes and starts bombing Libya based on a complete fabrication.
Okay, no-fly zone to protect civilians.
And what does NATO do?
They drop 40,000 bombs on Libya over the course of the year, up until Qaddafi's final death.
40,000 bombs.
If two people got killed per bomb, we're talking about 80,000 dead Libyans.
Insert alone, they're supposed to have killed over 10,000 people.
We don't know because many of them are still buried in buildings that nobody can go in because they're unsafe from bombing, apartment buildings.
So 80,000 dead Libyans by this war, and basically the mopping up operation was left to the likes of a guy named Belhadj, who was not only Al-Qaeda in North Africa, but he was high-ranking Al-Qaeda in Iraq and was in charge.
One of his jobs was to recruit suicide bombers to slaughter Shia pilgrims.
And this guy, now he's a big hero and he's a Democrat.
He fought American Afghanistan, too, yeah.
Yeah, see, and I've actually written an article, Libya as an Ex-Somalia, and I wrote it last year because it was pretty clear that that's where Libya was headed.
Libya's got a lot of parallels to Somalia.
Both countries were colonized by the Italians.
Neither country ever had a history of being united as a country.
There was always Benghazi and there was Tripoli, and they had their own kingdoms historically.
Same thing with Somalia.
Somalia never had its own king, never had a central government.
It was an extended tribal thing based upon sheikhs and high sheikhs.
So both were united by Somalia, by Italian colonization.
And then after World War II, both were sort of set out with their own leaders, and it became Siyed Barre in Somalia and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
So, you know, the thing about Libya is, you know, a lot of people have said this, but a lot of your newer viewers may be new to this, and I just wanted to touch on it real quick.
Libya set up a bank, an African development bank, and they put something like $40 billion into an American bank account, $40 billion into a U.S. bank account to show the Americans their good faith that they were going to replace the IMF and the World Bank as the lender of choice for low-interest or interest-free loans for Africa.
In other words, billions of dollars is going to be invested in South African energy infrastructure, into transportation, railroads across Africa, north and south and east and west, and, you know, docks and ports, and low-interest or interest-free loans.
So the IMF and World Bank is going to be kicked out, and I think personally that's probably what brought the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi.
You know what I mean?
He'd show me the money, you know what I mean?
He could talk about all his rhetoric and this and that, but it comes down to the point that if you're going to kick out the IMF and World Bank, you're a serious threat.
You've got to go.
Right.
So that's what NATO did, and they got rid of him.
I mean, he fought, they fought.
I wrote an article about this heroic, one of these great heroic defenses they fought in Syrac, where for weeks and weeks and months, the NATO just bombed them, and they sent the rebels forward, and the fighter defenders of Syrac would come out and drive back the rebels, and NATO would come in and just pulverize the defenders.
And it gradually, they just, you know, destroyed the whole city.
They were living in caves, and then they made a fighting breakout.
They'd actually escaped from the city, and then NATO bombed them to a crisp, and that was the end of Omar Qaddafi.
So even the very end of it all, it was like NATO that saved the fighters, and even Qaddafi would have got away into the desert if it wasn't for NATO.
But, you know, it's almost a drama.
Someday it'll make a great film sort of like Mukhtar, the famous Libyan patriot that fought against the Italians when the Italians colonized the place, and he lost.
You know, he didn't win either.
The Italians ended up hanging him.
Well, Qaddafi ended up getting killed too, but, you know, that's sort of Libyan, tragic Libyan history.
I'll tell you the truth.
Libya is a very backward society, a very conservative Arab society.
Basically up until Qaddafi's time, it was a tribal society.
Everybody lived in the desert, you know, were pastoralist and nomadic.
Qaddafi made this big change, and yet the very traditional, you know, tribal community, like you find in Saudi even, was very predominant in Libya, and Libya had serious problems with racism.
You know, Libyans, like many of the Arabs, don't see dirty work as something they're going to do.
That's work of Africans, black Africans.
So they brought in a lot of people to do their dirty work, and there was a lot of internal contradictions in the country.
In 1987, and I could tell that was, you know, going on when I was there with the first U.S. peace delegation to commemorate the first anniversary of the 86th bombing of Libya.
Even then, when we were traveling around the city for a couple weeks as guests of the English department of the Tripoli University, I could tell from talking to the kids that even they were talking openly about the backward nature of the Libyan society.
And, you know, Qaddafi tried to push it, but he couldn't because it's just too strong, and it all broke out tribally when the West came in and bombed the central government into ruins.
Well, now this goes back to, one of the first things that you talked about there was this rumor, whether there was a kernel of truth to it or not, I don't know, but the rumor at least was that, you know, I guess the military was completely impotent because Qaddafi was afraid of giving them enough power to overthrow him, but he just had kind of his own little personal Gestapo guards, loyal to him only kind of guys, and the rumor was that they were all mercs from sub-Saharan Africa.
And so then that became just like this widespread meme, or I don't know what you'd call it, where like every black in Libya is a bad guy, is a former regimist, is a mercenary.
It doesn't matter whether we're talking about a 14-year-old girl or not.
They're all just a bunch of mercenaries working for Qaddafi, and so revenge on them.
And some of the early reports at the end of 2011 and into the beginning of 2012 were of blacks being rounded up.
Our friend David Enders, who reports for McClatchy from Syria these days, documented these women being raped in the refugee camps.
Russian television filmed blacks being rounded up and jailed in cages at the zoo and bound with Libyan flags stuffed down their throat and all this kind of stuff.
And it's like the rise of the Libyan Ku Klux Klan and then blackout.
And nobody's ever heard another word out of there since then, whatever happened to the racial pogroms, anything?
It's halfway through 2013 now.
Well, you know, I had an article at the time entitled Obama Supports Lynching Africans in Libya about how, because I'd actually, there was a lot of, we knew of retrainers that worked in Libya.
They went and disappeared, and then we learned later on that they'd been lynched by these racist militias that the NATO bombardment unleashed.
Yeah, I've been calling them the Imperial Grand Wizard of the Libyan Ku Klux Klan.
Well, you see, there are black Libyans, and then there are Libyans that became naturalized, that had come up from Chad and the conflicts in not only Chad but Niger and even in Mauritania, where there had been Touaregs and other people that had been oppressed.
And Gaddafi was quite generous in opening his doors to a lot of these people and giving them citizenship and giving them, building places for them to resettle, decent places to live with schools and hospitals and clinics.
And this was always sort of resentment on the part of some of the more working class and lumpenproletariat Libyans who never really got what they thought was really theirs due.
See, the Libyans sort of had an attitude that their job when they graduated from school was to be a boss in an office, and they weren't going to work their way up from the bottom like everybody else in the world has to do, right?
So Gaddafi had a real problem with these young people.
They didn't think they had to go out and work their way up from the bottom because their lives had always been very well taken care of.
They'd go to school, university free.
Their families get a stipend when they're going to university.
When they're getting married, the Libyan government gave them $50,000, and they got married, plus $3,000 in square feet of land to build a house on, and all that sort of stuff, free cement to build your house with.
If you qualified to go outside for an education, they paid your way, and they gave you $1,700 a month, and all that sort of stuff.
The Libyans were very well treated.
Of all the exile movements in the world, the percentage of the country, Libyans outside, after Saudis really, are one of the lowest numbers of actual Libyans in exile.
There's not that many Libyans out there.
Most Libyans stayed home because it was too easy in their country.
Outside, you had to work.
Libya has a tradition of being kind of spoiled and kind of racist, and then the whole society gets bombed to smithereens by 40,000 high-explosive weapons, and all of a sudden, all these strictures that are holding the society apart fall apart, and it's back to being a tribal society.
It's very similar to what happened to Somalia, a tribal society.
Now you've got Saif al-Islam held by the Zintan people, and then Belhaj, who Saif got out of jail, made the deal.
He promised not to be a bad guy anymore, which he immediately broke.
He's got a soft spot for Saif al-Islam because Saif saved his life, really.
So they're going to put Saif al-Islam on trial, but there's a lot of things going on there.
It's tribal dynamics, and there's a lot of talk about, oh, we've got democracy and this and that, and the army, and then the army opens fire, kills 31 people, protesting the fact that it's not really the army there in Benghazi.
It's just the same old militias calling themselves army, still acting like a militia.
Everybody wants the real militia broken down.
And they just opened fire and killed 31 people.
You know, it's like, hey, just like a hiccup in the international news.
You know what I'm saying?
Right.
Well, look, you know, the Americans, my fear is that all this is just a prescription for, well, we have to intervene more now to make sure that the guys we help win don't really win because look how horrible they are.
And even though we've just proven in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can't create a national army out of different sects.
We can create a Shia army or we can create a Hazara army, but we can't create one that incorporates everybody.
Well, there's almost 2 million barrels of oil that they're pumping, plus they've got the under Mediterranean gas pipeline running again full 100 percent into Italy.
So all the energy reserves are all being exploited dramatically, but there doesn't seem to be any money to rebuild the country.
Libya is 2 million barrels a day.
That's just for oil.
We're talking about the $200 million a day, plus they're pumping gas out there.
They're talking about close to $300 million a day.
You're talking $6 billion a month.
How come Libya is still a disaster zone?
Where's all that money going?
You know what I'm saying?
And what about the $40 billion that Qaddafi put outside for the Arab Development Pact?
You know what I'm saying?
This is like tens of billions of dollars that there's just no accountability for, and nobody outside is bothering to even talk about this anymore.
Wait a second.
Where's this $200 million a day, and yet Libya, everybody doesn't have work and the hospitals haven't been rebuilt?
They've got to send people outside to get treatment.
Wait a second.
On the question of the racial pogroms, do you have any kind of estimated numbers of death tolls?
I mean, whatever happened to the survivors?
Did they go home to somewhere else or did the violence finally calm down or any kind of?
I need closure on this story, man.
Well, you know, the problem is it's still going on.
There are refugee camps where the racist militias are still going in and terrorizing the African and the Tuareg or the black populations there that were driven from their homes, whether they're naturalized or basically black Libyans.
Their homes have been there.
There's several hundred thousand of them in villages that were just destroyed by the racist militias, and they're like living in fear.
They come in and they kidnap the men, these racist militias, and they disappear and never see them again.
It's ongoing.
It's not over.
The racist pogroms that are going on in Libya are continuing to this day.
Can you recommend for me some good footnotes of where I can keep up with this stuff?
Who's writing about this regularly?
Well, you know, the last stuff I heard was like a year ago about, you know, how the refugee camps, the West has just, you know, it's all disappeared.
When I'm talking about the racist pogroms going on in these refugee camps, that was going on a year ago.
But I'm hearing reports from people that I know that, you know, I mean, there's, I've got a long background as people that have family in Libya, and they tell me stories about how, you know, they're trying to get them out of Libya because they're in refugee camps and all the men have disappeared and the women are petrified.
You're hearing these reports up until now.
It's ongoing.
So, I mean, it's like, but of course it's disappeared out of the, you know, the Western media.
But, you know, the interesting thing is that, you know, the Salafists, you know, that's a code word, Salafists, that's a code word.
It really means Wahhabi.
And there's a growing Wahhabi influence in Libya that's taking up arms and, you know, openly attacking the Western interest there.
So, you know, this whole situation in Libya, you know, politically it could get out of hand, but as long as the oils keep pumping, nobody in the West is really going to get worried about it.
The oil is all pumping.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We've got to go.
You have no idea.
I have no idea how expensive it is to call your retreat.
To your listeners, you know, to your listeners, man, you guys got to step forward and have support to show.
There's very few people like Scott Horton out there doing a really professional job in covering these big crimes.
So, you know, give what you can, man.
I know times are hard in America.
Hey, thanks for saying that.
I appreciate that very much.
Okay.
Ciao.
All right, everybody.
Thanks again.
Talk to you soon.
Everybody, that's the great Thomas Mountain.
He lives in Eritrea.
And mostly you can find him at Counterpunch, but you can find him all over the place.
His latest one, certainly you'll be able to find this at Counterpunch tomorrow if it's not already there.
It's Divide and Rule, Western Democracy in Africa.
All right.
Now, so here's my schtick for RockyMountainMiners.com.
RockyMountainMiners.com, they sell the Prospector, which is out of the box, ready to go.
It's a litecoin miner.
It's a new cryptocurrency like bitcoins.
They say it's sort of like silver to bitcoin gold in a way, but there is a hard limit on the number of litecoins that will ever be created.
So if you want to get in on the ground floor with these and mine as many as you can, you could do that at RockyMountainMiners.com.
Learn all about litecoins.
I think this stuff is cool.
I'm totally for it.
I think that these new digital cryptocurrency things are the wave of the future, man, and I'm into it.
But I suggest that you read as many pages as you possibly can online and off and learn as much as you can about cryptocurrencies and decide if you're into this kind of thing.
You may already know that you are for sure.
Well, go and check out RockyMountainMiners.com.
Call them.
Email them.
They'll work with you.
They'll talk to you.
They'll answer all your questions.
And if you use promo code ScottHortonShow, you get $100 off the Prospector Litecoin Miner.
Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights.
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from SecurityEdition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from SecurityEdition.com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet.
It's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's SecurityEdition.com.
And don't forget their great Fourth Amendment socks.
Hey, guys, I got his laptop.
Over at AIPAC, the leaders of the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., they're constantly proclaiming unrivaled influence on Capitol Hill.
And they should be proud.
The NRA and AARP's efforts make them look like puppy dogs in comparison to the campaigns of intimidation regularly run by the neoconservatives and Israel-firsters against their political enemies.
But the Israel lobby does not remain unopposed.
At the Council for the National Interest, they put America first, insisting on an end to the empire's unjustified support for Israel's aggression against its neighbors and those whose land it occupies, and pushing back against the lobby's determined campaign in favor of U.S. attacks against Israel's enemies.
CNI also does groundbreaking work on the trouble with evangelical Christian Zionism and neocon-engineered Islamophobia in drumming up support for this costly and counterproductive policy.
Please help support the efforts of the Council for the National Interest to create a peaceful, pro-American foreign policy.
Just go to councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
And thanks.
Hey, y'all, Scott Wharton here for The Future of Freedom, the journal of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Every month, Plum Line Individualist Editor Sheldon Richman brings you important news and opinions on policy by heroic FFF President Jacob Hornberger, hard-hitting journalist-columnist James Bovard, and others from the best of the libertarian movement.
The Future of Freedom tackles the most important issues facing our country, from the bankrupt and insane welfare and regulatory states, to foreign wars and empire, the dismal state of our economy, and ongoing assaults on civil liberties.
This society needs peace and freedom for prosperity to prevail.
Subscribe to The Future of Freedom in print for just $25 a year, or online for $15 a year at fff.org/subscribe.
And hurry up, because this summer they'll be running my articles about the wars in Libya, Syria, and Somalia in The Future of Freedom, too.
That's fff.org/subscribe for The Future of Freedom.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
The Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas.
So Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money, and then be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scott horton dot org.
