10/21/13 – Mel Frykberg – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, our first guest today is Mel Freitberg.
She writes for McClatchyDC.com, well, McClatchy Newspapers at McClatchyDC.com.
And right now, I believe, is reporting from the West Bank, correct?
Hi, Mel, welcome back to the show.
Thanks very much for having me.
And am I right, you're in the West Bank right now, or on it?
Yes, I am.
I'm in Ramallah.
In Ramallah, okay.
And then, do I have it right that you've been to Libya lately, or you're talking with stringers there?
I'm talking with forces on the ground there, and with friends that are there.
Okay.
And I know you were there, what, a few months back, right?
I was there, yeah, I was there last year.
Okay.
All right.
Well, so, first of all, before we even get into the kidnapping, can you tell us what you know about the president of Libya, who was kidnapped for a short time a couple weeks back there?
Yes, he's, the prime minister, just to give you an information, yeah, Ali Zaydan, saying that two members of the Libyan Congress were behind his kidnapping, and a member of the counter-criminal agency was involved in the kidnapping as well.
And when they actually kidnapped him, they took his phone away from him, and his phone was later discovered in the General National Congress building, because the whole mystery behind his kidnapping of how they'd been able to get him in the Corinthian Hotel, which I visited, and for those kidnappers to get through the security, was very strange that they'd managed to get through all that security, and apparently, his actual security detail didn't quite stop the kidnapping, because they understood it to be an official arrest, and he was actually held at the Interior Ministry, so that just goes to show how little security is in Libya, and how much infighting there is between members of the government.
Well, that's interesting, I mean, was he actually, in a way, legally arrested for a crime, and then he was set free, or that was just the glossing that they put on an attempted coup?
No, no, no.
There's been some political dispute, and I mean, he's committed no crime, but these members of the Congress, it was all unofficial, but they dissatisfied with his rule as premier, and they sort of thought that he maybe had something to do with the abduction of that al-Qaeda suspect, Anas al-Ghulibi, who was taken by the Navy SEAL team, by the U.S. Special Forces.
That was one issue that they were dissatisfied, because these guys from the Libyan government are suspected Islamist sympathizers, but also they're dissatisfied with his rule.
Right, well, so, I mean, how badly did that reflect on him, for that Delta Force raid happening on his watch?
Is it clear, do you think, over there, that he had given the Americans permission to do it?
I think that's at least what the Americans claimed, right?
They say that the Libyan government was aware of what was happening, the Libyan government denies it, rumors are that the Libyan government knew about it, but they would pretend that they didn't know about it, and then they would protest very loudly after it happened, so it's for domestic consumption that they didn't know about it, that's what the rumors are.
But, I mean, just the fact that he was able to get through all that security, because, I mean, I've been to the Carinthia Hotel, and, I mean, there's police cars patrolling the hotel, before you can even get into the hotel, there's a big, you know, you have to go through all these metal detectors, there's security guards inside the hotel, even getting into the parking lot, there's a military checkpoint there, and there's military police, three minutes away.
So, you know, just the way that they were able to get through all this and nothing happened, it was very suspicious.
The two members of Congress have denied that they were involved in it, but the member from the counter-criminal agency, he said, yes, he was involved, and he's very proud of it.
So, yeah, there's a lot of strange things happening in Libya.
And just to clarify for the audience, this is not the al-Libi that was tortured into pointing the finger at Saddam Hussein for cooperating with al-Qaeda, and it's not the al-Libi that they killed in Pakistan in June 2012 that was the reason behind the attack on the Benghazi consulate back in September 11, 2012.
This would be a third and altogether separate al-Libi, and I believe those first two were brothers, supposedly, but this is an entirely different character, accused in, I think as you said, the Africa embassy bombings in 1998.
But then they brought him, they kidnapped him and kept him on a ship at sea for a little while, apparently kind of black hole lawless territory, but then they brought him back to New York, where I guess he'd already been indicted, and now they're going to put him on trial.
So that's pretty good, right?
Instead of taking him to Morocco to be tortured, or Guantanamo Bay to be held forever?
Well, the thing is, according to him, he had actually left al-Qaeda in 96, or was it 95?
And he'd actually asked for political asylum in Britain, which he had received.
So, you know, he's like quite an old fish.
Right.
So they're saying that he probably didn't have anything to do with anything after that, but I'm not sure.
Well, I don't mean to be too cynical, but I wonder if the Americans are just trying to provoke a reaction, and he was a good target for that.
Possibly.
I see a big build-up in Italy, and they're saying, well, we've got problems to solve here.
I'm sorry, you're a straight reporter, I'm not trying to lead you down into rabbit hole territory here.
So, let's go to what life is like in Tripoli, and in Benghazi, and in the rest of Libya right now.
Is it just Mad Max over there, or does the government have a, is there a relative calm?
Well, Benghazi is an absolute mess.
They've had over 100 plea and judicial officials assassinated since the overthrow of Gaddafi.
Every week, it's practically almost every day, actually, there's another military or judicial official assassinated, and they're not sure, you know, they've said that somebody has a list of all these names of people that they want to assassinate, and there now seems to be a war between members of, it seems that there's different militias that are behind the assassinations, and it's divided between those that are supporting, those that are Islamist-leaning militia leaders, and the others who are against the Islamists.
The military police, the head of the military police was killed a couple of days ago, and then people, militiamen who were supporting him, then went and attacked the leader of the Libya Shield Movement, and so these two sides have been trying to kill the different leaders, and there doesn't seem to be anybody who's able to stop these assassinations, and the different foreign embassies or consulates that have been attacked in Benghazi, the Swedish one was attacked a couple of days ago with a bomb, then the Maltese consul was warned that his life was in danger, so he left Libya, and of course the French consul was attacked several months ago as well.
So Benghazi is really out of control.
There's stuff happening in Tripoli as well, but it's not as serious as Benghazi.
Well, and don't get me wrong, it's not like building a state is the definition of peace to me or anything, but it's an indication that there's a lack of war going on.
I mean, if there's militias fighting each other over local spoils, I guess that's kind of one thing, but if it breaks out into some kind of sectarian war or tribal war, that is a whole other level of violence, and I don't think you're saying we're there, right?
Well, these different tribes are supporting different leaders.
There are different tribes that are supporting some of the Islamists and different tribes that are supporting some of the militia leaders who are against the Islamists.
I mean, Ali Zeidan himself said Libya is not a functioning state in the sense of the word.
He himself has said that, so I don't know what's going to happen.
It just seems endless in Libya.
Well, you know, I was talking with Patrick Coburn the other day, and he was remarking about the media and the professional political class, all the pundits and whatever who got us into this thing, and how remarkable it is that they can just completely ignore it.
And then I was explaining how my fear is they'll start paying attention to it, and they'll say that, you know what, I mean, they don't even need a boogeyman as bad as Gaddafi.
They might just point at general chaos and say that only we can help, and go in there and start trying to make it better.
Which, of course, would just make it worse, but that's okay, and there's just more to do.
I think NATO has said recently that they're going to help the Libyans with security.
So I don't know how that'll work out.
It just points very badly for what will happen in Syria when you see what a mess Libya is.
And Syria's going to be an even bigger mess.
You know, with the Americans getting involved there.
Now, when we hear about the different Islamist militias in Libya, are they kind of going crazy like Saudis and cutting people's hands off and trying to, you know, we saw, for example, al-Qaeda in Iraq a lot of times would try to enforce, you know, centuries-old, real backwards ways on people, that kind of thing.
Are we seeing that sort of extremism, or just they're fighting over power?
No, but what they have been doing is the assassinations and the bombings.
They haven't been cutting hands, per se.
But don't forget, when I was in Tripoli, the Cypriots were behind a lot of attacks on Sufi shrines, where they would just blow up these different, you know, these centuries-old, very beautiful buildings with, you know, books going back centuries from Sufi scholars.
And they were sort of destroying graveyards, shrines, etc.
So, and there were cases where they were actually going around enforcing women to cover their hair.
And I think there's just a couple, today or yesterday, a woman's beautician shop in Benghazi was attacked.
They've had a couple of cases like in Gaza, where salons and beautician shops are attacked by Islamists because they see them as sort of corrupt and westerned.
I'm not aware of chopping of hands, from what I've heard, no.
I've heard about that.
Yeah.
Oh, and by the way, I didn't mean to imply that I had read that anywhere, either.
I just, I wonder about, you know, because obviously in Syria and in Iraq, we've got some reports of some pretty extreme things.
You know, the banning of smoking, and just, you know, pretty totalitarian ways.
And in fact, really the kind of things that turned the locals against them pretty fast, as we saw in Iraq.
They overreached really quickly, as far as their authority over the Sunni population of Iraq, and they paid for it, too.
Yeah.
Well, that's one of the problems in Benghazi, is that there are a lot of Islamists there, but also the general population is against the Islamists.
As we saw, you know, when Chris Stevens was killed, it was, you know, a big protest against the killing.
So that's also an element with the militias, and probably playing into the assassinations that are going on with, as I said, over a hundred military and judicial assassinated, leads assassinated.
And now, I guess I'm curious, can you describe at all, do you know, how deeply integrated groups like Ansar al-Sharia and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and others are into the actual government in Tripoli?
Because I remember, and this could be wrong, but there were at least some reports from the attack on the oil facility in Algeria, that the clothing and the weaponry that the, you know, quote-unquote terrorists had there, came from the Libyan government.
I know that there are definitely members that are sympathetic to the Islamists, but a lot of the weapons that are coming from Libya and are flooding different areas, like Mali, I mean, they're even coming into Egypt, and they're reaching Gaza as well, are not officially from the Libyan government.
Although there are members, as I say, of the government that are sympathetic, a lot of them is just, a lot of the weapons is just, are very illegal.
Although I also seem to remember, the Libyan government is giving a lot of money to the Syrian rebels.
They were giving a huge amount of money to the Syrian rebels.
So, it's so, I mean, to know exactly who's doing what there, it's just, it's just very unclear.
And then, do you know anything of the fate of the blacks?
Because, and I mean, I don't mean that in the politically correct way, the blacks, but I mean the blacks of Libya, because apparently the war was fought for the Libyan branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and they had gone, at least back in 2011, we heard some horror stories about what was happening to darker-skinned Africans in Libya, and then the journalism on that subject has just completely fallen off.
Um, I, I, it was, I know when I was there, I was visiting some Tewerigans who come from that city of, you know, black-skinned Libyans who allegedly were, you know, fighting with Gaddafi, and one doesn't know whether they were pressured into fighting with Gaddafi or whether they generally sympathized with him, but that town of Teweriga was just totally destroyed and ethnically cleansed of Tewerigans, and they had subsequently fled to refugee camps in Tripoli and elsewhere.
And a lot of them, when I went to the refugee camps there, they were actually scared to walk in the, to leave the refugee camps and go around Tripoli because they would be, they would be picked up by these different militias.
It was a very, very strong anti-black African sentiment from certain sections of the, um, of, of, of the, of the revolutionaries and that.
But while I was in Tripoli as well, I also saw a lot of the militia guys themselves were actually dark-skinned, um, um, Libyans.
And, you know, I would basically see, you know, dark-skinned Libyans in the street married to lighter-skinned Libyans.
Again, it was just from, it's not correct to say all Libyans were against them, but there was certainly a section who, especially from Misrata, because there was a lot of problems between Misrata and Tewerigan.
I know the Misrata militias were very, um, instrumental in a lot of the atrocities carried out against dark-skinned Libyans.
But it sounds like you think it's sort of died down since then, at least.
It hasn't made the news a lot since then.
And I haven't heard the human rights organization saying a lot about it.
So maybe there has been some improvement, or maybe people have just, I don't know, got so tired of Libya being such a mess, and there's so much trouble going on there, and they're now focusing on what's going on with Syria.
So I'm not 100% certain.
Right.
Yeah, on to the next war.
And on to the next one.
All right.
Well, and speaking of which, let's talk about what's going on in the Sinai.
You've got some great journalism about Egypt's renewed military dictatorships cracked down there.
Yeah, they, um, the largest ground offenses in the Sinai, the largest Egyptian domestic offenses since the 1973 war with Egypt.
The military is still carrying on with large-scale, you know, arrests.
But exactly what is going on is hard to know, because the Egyptian military is, like, cracking it down on foreign journalists.
Foreign journalists are not allowed to go into the area, and even Egyptian journalists are struggling to get in.
So it's very difficult to know exactly what is going on.
But human rights organizations say the stuff is leaking out, is that the Egyptian military is carrying out some atrocities.
They are indiscriminately targeting people on occasion.
They've arrested hundreds and hundreds of people.
But as I was saying, exactly what is going on, because some, you know, even some foreigners have been caught in the area.
And because they've had a laptop on them and a map on them, which is fairly normal stuff to have if you're a journalist, they've been arrested.
So the operations are continuing.
But they're not stopping these people in the Sinai.
These people in the Sinai are really, really angry.
And they're carrying out more attacks against the Egyptian military.
So that's another situation that doesn't seem that's going to be solved by force alone.
And now, so what is it with them?
That just happens to be a stronghold of strong Muslim Brotherhood support, or someone else?
They are strong Muslim Brotherhood supporters, because under the, not all of them, but what has to happen is that the Egyptian, current Egyptian government, military-installed government, has alienated a lot of the tribes in the Sinai.
When Mubarak was in power, Hosni Mubarak, he withheld a lot of privileges and power from the Sinai people.
They weren't politically involved, and they were also very deprived economically.
So they began, they were against Hosni Mubarak's regime, and they became smuggling for economic reasons, and also felt very politically cut off from Cairo.
And of course, Mubarak's security forces was very brutal against the people in the Sinai, and that alienated them even more.
When Morsi got into power, he was more sympathetic to their situation, and because they were more, a lot of them were Islamists, they had a better situation.
They were not as alienated, and there wasn't the degree of political persecution that there was under Mubarak, and that there is currently under the present government.
And so when he was overthrown, they were very angry about it, as Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the rest of the country.
And now that the military is cracking down on them again, and they are, a lot of them are extreme Islamists as well, they are now fighting each other again, and as I say, that's a situation that's just really difficult to control, because the Sinai is so open, it's so large, and it's so poor, and to just control that area completely, the Egyptian military is going to have to have huge resources there on a permanent basis.
And you know, speaking of which, is the support for the Muslim Brotherhood, is it very geographically centered?
I mean, not just in the Sinai, but in other places in Egypt, is it more, you know, the cities of the Democrats, and out in the countries where the Republicans live, sort of thing, like it is in the States, or how does that work exactly?
I mean, I know that they were the only ones prepared to win when it came to election time.
Yeah, it's kind of a breakdown, because although there are a lot of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, a lot of them who are educated, they tend to get more of their supporters from the rural people who are less educated, because about 60% more of the Egyptian population is illiterate.
And in Upper East as well, there is strong support for the Muslim Brotherhood, so a large section of their supporters come from the more rural, illiterate, uneducated people, although a lot of the leaders and the intellectuals in Cairo are also supporting the Brotherhood, but they're more of a minority.
Well, so now that the dictatorship has overthrown and outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood and rounded up all its leaders and all of that kind of thing, I mean, obviously we talked about the Sinai and the unrest there, but what about all those people in the countryside who were Muslim Brotherhood supporters?
Are they just grinning and bearing it and back to the same old thing, or is this...
I mean, wouldn't it be horrible to see after a couple of years since the overthrow of Mubarak for this to now devolve into some kind of civil war?
I mean, I don't guess the Muslim Brotherhood is very well armed, but it seems like...
Well, the thing is that they're arresting people all over the country.
I mean, thousands and thousands of people have been arrested, so it's not just happening in Cairo.
And, I mean, at the moment it's a little bit quiet.
I mean, in Cairo there's been some protests by students at other universities, which is very pro-Muslim Brotherhood, but it's kind of quiet at the moment.
But the Muslim Brotherhood is not going to let the situation lie, and I think their motive is to...
Because what the Egyptian government now is trying to restore stability and say that the problems are over and the country's going to go back to normal.
And the Muslim Brotherhood is not just going to let the situation lie, and I think they are trying to actually bring their supporters onto the street because they actually do use the clashes and the results as a kind of a weapon to show that they're being persecuted, which they are to a large degree, but also that people don't forget what has happened to Mursi.
And they're using the victimhood of all these people that have been killed, the Muslim Brotherhood people that were killed by their military and that.
They are using that as a way of keeping their story alive and not letting the situation lie.
So they will try to...
I think that the leadership is a bit cynical in that way, in that they will try to get their supporters in the street to provoke clashes.
I mean, one can argue quite justifiably that they have every right to be angry and that what happened to Mursi was not right, but actually encouraging their supporters to go out into the streets and confront the military when they know what's going to happen is kind of cynical in a way.
Yeah, well, people ought to be careful whose marching orders they follow when it comes to stuff like that, yeah.
But you can see why it makes sense from their point of view to play it up for the cameras, you know.
It's all they've got, right, is the idea of some kind of outside pressure there, I guess.
I'm not sure if the Muslim Brotherhood is...
Because they were involved in the 80s in actual attacks on tourists and that.
I'm not sure if they're going to go underground and take up arms again.
That's another aspect that has to be watched.
It may happen.
I don't know.
Well, there has been, what, one big car bombing, right?
And that had everybody biting their fingernails, like, oh no, maybe now is the start of this.
Yeah, but that wasn't by the Muslim Brotherhood.
It was by other groups.
And there's been regular bombings in the Sinai against military targets and, of course, some Christian targets as well.
But that wasn't actually the Muslim Brotherhood.
By the way, back to Sinai for a second there.
Is there any truth to the idea that it's al-Qaeda guys there?
Because, of course, that's what the TV says, if they mention it at all.
As far as I know, yes.
There are al-Qaeda elements there.
I mean, even in Ghazni, there are some al-Qaeda elements.
This is the whole thing.
With the Libyan war, there are al-Qaeda elements there.
And in Mali, there are al-Qaeda elements.
And they are getting arms from Islamists in Libya, and a huge amount of arms that are now going from Libya to surrounding neighboring countries after Gaddafi's warehouses and that were looted.
There definitely is elements of al-Qaeda in the Sinai.
I mean, they actually fly the al-Qaeda flag.
Even if they're not directly linked to al-Qaeda, they are groups with similar ideologies.
Yeah, sworn allegiances.
Well, so, a few years ago, in the Gaza Strip, Hamas went and had a big battle and killed a bunch of these guys and said, no way are we going to tolerate your presence in the Gaza Strip.
What about that?
Is that still happening?
They are still there.
Jaysh al-Sunni and Sunni al-Islam, those groups are still there, but they're basically being kept under control by Hamas.
I mean, these groups are really, really radical, because Hamas doesn't want another Israeli military operation against them, because these little groups tend to...
The Egyptians are saying and the Israelis are saying, and I think there's some truth in what they're saying, that these radical elements in Gaza are actually cooperating with the radicals in the Sinai as well.
All right, well, I'm sorry that I've got to stop you, but thank you very much for your time on the show, Mel.
I sure do appreciate it.
All right.
Good talking to you.
Okay, thanks.
Everybody, that's Mel Freichberg.
She writes for McClatchy Newspapers and McClatchyDC.com.
They're syndicated all over the place.
And you can find some stuff by her for IPSNews.net, too.
Anthony Gregory, and so many more.
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