01/05/16 – Brad Hoff – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Brad Hoff from levantreport.com.
Welcome back to the show, Brad.
How are you?
Great to be back on, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Very happy to have you here.
Great new piece at levantreport.com.
It'll be running tomorrow on antiwar.com.
New Hillary emails.
Reveal propaganda, executions, and the coveting of Libyan oil and gold.
That's, again, levantreport.com and tomorrow at antiwar.com.
And, yeah, boy, I'll tell you what.
What a story.
You went digging through a new batch of emails, and you make it really easy for me.
Admissions of rebel war crimes.
Special ops trainers.
Al-Qaeda.
Western nations and Libyan oil.
The absurd Viagra mass rape story.
And the Frank and Qaddafi's gold.
So thanks so much for doing all my work and making me not have to reread the thing and take good notes.
Let's start with rebel war crimes.
What did you find about rebel war crimes in the latest batch of Hillary emails, Brad?
Well, sure.
I guess there's not a whole lot to do on New Year's morning because, of course, the State Department decided it would dump its last Hillary Clinton email release on about 5 p.m.
New Year's Eve, hoping no one would go through them.
And so far, mainstream media like CNN, they're just covering all kinds of silly little aspects of the emails, like how Hillary looks in certain Facebook photos or State Department gossip.
Daily Caller actually picked up on the Viagra story.
Associated Press was the first to hit upon this amazing oil and gold email, which we'll talk about later.
But there was a detail I uncovered while sifting through these that I didn't think would be covered by mainstream media because it requires some context that they would fail to give the public.
It's a March 27, 2011 email.
It's an intelligence brief sent by close Hillary advisor Sidney Blumenthal, who's like, I don't know, his own one-man behind-the-scenes PI, intelligence-gatherer, fixer, long-time fixer, advisor for the Clintons.
So he emails Hillary with an intelligence update, and this is in the midst of the Libya conflict.
And he tells her that a rebel commander he was close to, speaking in strict confidence, told him that rebel militias in Libya continue, here's a quote, continue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries captured in the fighting.
And of course, if you look back at all the European reporting and international reporting at that time, foreign mercenaries is but a euphemism used within the rebel opposition for black Libyans as well as sub-Saharan African migrants, and potentially over a million to a couple of million in Libya out of the six million total population.
Hey, this is a very important point.
And people should know that, you know, this is corroborated back in time, back at the time.
You know, nothing that Brad just said is groundbreaking.
It's what we already know, that this was the rumor behind all the pogroms against the blacks in Libya, was that, you know, hey, if Qaddafi had a few Tuareg mercenaries working for him in his private Gestapo, then therefore every non-Arab or non-Berber in the country is somehow a mercenary working for Qaddafi.
And what a bunch of crap on its face, but that was the prevailing wisdom among the rebel death squads who were doing the massacring and the ethnic cleansing.
And that was the story back then in 2011 and 12, and there's just no dispute about it.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just want to make sure that people know that that's not just something that you're coming up with here.
Right, you're right.
And everything I covered in this particular article, as you stated, has long been exhaustively documented.
I think yesterday you were talking to Gareth Porter about the big Washington Times series about Libya.
And so a lot of this is well known, but now we have yet more internal State Department proof, straight up to Secretary Hillary Clinton, who knew all of this was going on.
And yet continued, and her policies continued to encourage it.
But let me just quickly read from Human Rights Watch later that summer.
And Human Rights Watch is politically compromised itself, because it's not neutral.
But this is from Human Rights Watch's Fred Abrahams, and it was very clear at the time what foreign mercenaries meant.
Again, foreign mercenaries being described as being subject to field executions in this Hillary Clinton email.
Abrahams said, dark-skinned Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans face particular risks because rebel forces and other armed groups have often considered them pro-Gaddafi mercenaries from other African countries.
We've seen violent attacks and killings of these people in areas where the National Transitional Council took control.
And there's actually a lot of documentation on how the NTC, which was actually hand-picked by the West as a provisional government for the first year into the conflict and after Gaddafi's fall, we do know that their policies right away were very anti-migrant African, anti-black Libyan.
This community had long been scapegoated by Libyans for economic problems Libya had gone through after 2000.
Because Gaddafi was kind of this pro-African union, pan-Africanist, open borders type guy.
His dream of pan-Arabism had kind of died, and he made himself into a kind of pro-Africa, pan-African guy.
He did a lot of things to improve the region, but for this reason it created a lot of resentment between your Arab-Libyans and especially migrant workers.
There were a lot of sub-Saharan Africans engaged in all of Gaddafi's grand construction projects.
This created some conflict in terms of who gets what jobs, as well as the amount of money he's sending to other countries, which created some economic resentment.
So that's some of the context to this.
I want to mention real quick too that people can look up, and it sounds insane, but if you just look up, RT covered it at the time, filmed it at the time, black Libyans rounded up and kept in cages at the zoo, taunted with Libyan flags, shoved down their throats, and being abused, shown on Russian TV there.
It was not disputed at the time or anything as being fake Russian propaganda or anything like that.
I'd also refer you to David Ender's reporting for McClatchy Newspapers at the time, where he interviewed many, many victims of mass rapes at the refugee camp, where the rebels would come in the middle of the night and round up the women and hold them at gunpoint and rape them.
And unlike all the scare stories about Gaddafi, this was David Ender who vetted them himself, a real journalist on the ground, not a bunch of rumor mongering by Max Blumenthal's dad about Viagra being passed out to a mass army of rapists.
And this unbelievable, as a war tactic, they're stopping the killings so that they can rape in the middle of battles.
Right.
Yeah, that was one of the most outlandish claims of any war of the past decade or so.
And of course, there's a lot of outlandish claims.
But the big Gaddafi-Viagra-fueled mass rape story, I remember CNN devoting a lot of time to it, a lot of time to it.
I remember listening to right wing AM radio in L.A. where the guy's saying, even Susan Rice says that it's true.
So that's how you know that it is.
Yeah, and we've had a lot of documentation on this story and that long ago, human rights groups debunked the whole thing.
I mean, people on the ground debunking it.
But what this latest email release confirms, it seems, is that it actually originated with Max Blumenthal.
He knowingly took these bizarre...
Sidney or Max?
I'm sorry?
The father, right?
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I apologize.
Sidney Blumenthal.
Yeah, so it seems that whatever outlandish, bizarre conspiracy theory floating around the Libyan opposition rumor mill, as long as it painted Gaddafi and his supporters as absolute monsters, and so long as it served the cause of yet another intervention, network news just took it on its face.
So yeah, it seems like the new information here is that the whole bizarre hoax did originate with Blumenthal, as well as Hillary Clinton itself, because of course this was floated up, as you said, to Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, who actually presented it at the UN Security Council.
The International Criminal Court was looking into it, and other bizarre stories as well that were floated by Blumenthal, and I'm assuming Hillary herself.
It's an interesting little study, isn't it, in how something so absurd...
Well, it's the big lie kind of thing, right?
The immediate presumption is, well, God, that must be true, because nobody would tell such a stupid lie.
So, you know, it's just like the cops framing up that guy in the Netflix documentary.
Come on, what do you think, that the cops would do that?
Yeah, of course they would, but it just seems incredible.
And so, you know, if mass Viagra rape sounds incredible, then making up a story like that is even more so.
Exactly, and I linked all the new released emails in the article, and people just need to go read this for themselves, because it is, in a dark kind of way, entertaining reading unto itself to see what really goes on behind the halls of power, so to speak.
And I also blame big media.
I blame mainstream media in part for some of the things, some of the atrocities that happened against people accused of being Gaddafi loyalists in Libya, because, you know, it's the same story with Syria, as you know.
Mainstream media relies exclusively on these opposition spokesmen, not even really knowing who they are.
No fact-checking, no verification.
You know, whatever an opposition rebel spokesman says, the media ran with it.
It's the case with Libya, it's the case of Syria, as you said, no matter how bizarre the story.
And the whole quote-unquote foreign mercenaries rumor, again, foreign mercenaries which were linked by the opposition to black Libyans and sub-Saharan migrant workers, this was a story 100% fed from the ranks of the rebel opposition, and it was just echoed in international media to the point where people really began to associate any black Libyan with a Gaddafi sniper, a Gaddafi killer, a pro-Gaddafi insurgent, and this just was absolutely false.
And it led to acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, you know, that wiped out entire towns, like this city near Misrata called Tarwerga, a town of 25,000 to 30,000 mostly black and quote-unquote dark-skinned Libyans.
The town entirely vanished by August 2011, and this is really well documented by the BBC, Amnesty International, aid organizations, and sadly it wasn't really covered much in American press.
Yeah, I mean, and just think about the alternative reality where it was.
Hey, look, everybody, Obama and Hillary, they went over through Gaddafi, and look what happened.
They empowered the Libyan KKK in their massive Rosewood massacre.
I mean, that's, you know, Obama as Grand Dragon.
They didn't even have to say oops.
They didn't even have to explain it away because it wasn't even reported at all.
Yeah, I think this is probably the most under- and unreported story of this whole affair, and I would strongly recommend two books, one by a Canadian anthropologist named Maximilien Forte.
It's called Flouching Toward Sirte, NATO's War on Libya and Africa, and he's got this exhaustive documentation, the genocidal policies of rebel militants against Libya's black community.
I'd also recommend if people want to look more into the oil and gold issue, you know, as well as the idea that— Well, wait.
Let's get back to the oil and gold thing in a second here.
Sure, sure.
Actually, we went through the break, and I want to make sure the live audience has a chance to hear that whole discussion as well today here.
But let me go back to the special ops trainers, Western intervention in the country beginning when— Oh, wait.
You know what?
Actually, hold that one because I wanted to ask one based off of the last discussion, which was is there anything—you didn't mention it in here or anything— but is there anything that you noticed in this new batch of emails or any of these emails you've gone digging through that discuss the Tuaregs and the spreading of the war to Mali when Gaddafi's actual hired mercenary, Tuaregs, went home in defeat but brought their weapons with them?
Then that's what turned their—you know, they had basically a pseudo kind of autonomy from the south, but with all their new weapons, they decided to wage a war for independence, which then ended up, of course, being hijacked by the jihadists and turning into the Mali War of 2013 and all of that.
But I wonder if anyone is warning Hillary in any of these emails that like, geez, boss, the war's already blowing back and spreading on down into Mali here.
No, you're exactly right.
I didn't see anything, and I was looking for very particular search words and keywords, and that's not something I searched.
You're exactly right, though.
But, you know, I don't know that they would care because all of this helps the increased presence and influence of AFRICOM, frankly.
Right, of course.
Yeah, and hey, they got new drone bases going in in Cameroon.
They got troops in Cameroon, new drone bases in Chad and in Niger, so no doubt about it.
No one says Gaddafi was a good guy, but one thing he had going for him was this idea of political and economic independence, and this was seen as a big threat.
And the first thing that happened after the National Transition Council was put into power after Gaddafi's being on the run and his field execution, the first thing that happened was AFRICOM established a major presence in at least four new African countries.
So, you know, I don't know that Hillary and her ilk would really even care about the resulting domino effect of the intervention she led.
But you're exactly right about Mali, and of course the region continues to be just in chaos and a mess, which is another thing politicians and the media have completely ignored.
In my hypothetical, I phrased it all wrong.
It should have been more like, good news, boss, the war is already spreading on down to Mali.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
All right, so now we want to talk all about the gold and the independence, as you were mentioning.
But first, talk to me about what you learned here about the special ops in the very beginning of Western NATO military intervention on the ground.
Because, well, and the real question is, this is before or after the UN resolution.
Yeah, the same email that talks about the summary executions of so-called foreign mercenaries talks about the presence of Western special forces inside Libya.
Within less than a month of the initial protest taking place, and you can read it in black and white, it's right there.
Talk about British, French, as well as Egyptian, and we know of course Egypt has always just been a sort of extension of the American military.
But they were training, already training, anti-Qaddafi fighters along the Egyptian-Libyan border.
We're talking, you know, the Hillary email identifies this has taken place within less than a month.
We're talking the very first protests that broke out in mid-February.
And there's mention of training happening in the Benghazi suburbs.
This is incredibly early.
You know, analysts have long known there were special ops trainers.
Well, help me on the timeline.
This is how early compared to the story of the impending Benghazi massacre and the overt intervention by NATO air power.
Well, I want to say the very first recorded protests in Benghazi is something like February 15th, February 17th of 2011.
This email was sent March 27th, and the email speaks as if this training has been, is now entrenched and has been going on for some time.
And so, you know, there wasn't really a big, you know, a kind of, you know, city-to-city uprising that was much reported in international media, you know, to the latter half of February.
And here we have Blumenthal in this intelligence update in the latter half of March saying, yeah, we got special forces, British, French especially, training these guys.
So that's very early.
That seems very, very early.
And then at that point, are they also saying, is it Blumenthal telling her that, yeah, and it seems like there's just no denying that these are al-Qaeda guys?
At that point, he's voicing concern, admitting that, quote, radical terrorist groups such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb are infiltrating the National Libyan Council and its militias and its military command.
Yeah, so at the same time, he's acknowledging special ops guys are training these militants.
He's also saying, yeah, we know al-Qaeda is infiltrating them, and it's the same story, and this has been, well, better documented, you know, in multiple stories since then.
But this seems very, very early by anyone's estimation.
There was a lot of speculation as to how early the so-called, you know, popular uprising, you know, got militarized and got Western special ops trainers on the ground.
But one quote from the same email says that these special operatives were, quote, overseeing the transfer of weapons and supplies to the rebels, including a seemingly endless supply of AK-47 assault rifles and ammunition.
So again, we see a militarization of this.
We're talking within weeks after any protest, and not just that, but special ops on the ground in Benghazi suburbs overseeing a, quote, seemingly endless supply of AK-47 assault rifles.
That's quite early.
And identifying them as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a.k.a. the Libyan veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq from the last war.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And it's just like that other email about Syria where the guy says, hey, boss, look, al-Qaeda is on our side in this one.
And it's a news story about Ayman al-Zawahiri endorsing the revolution in Syria.
And the famous CBS clip of her saying, are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria, comes just a couple of days later.
And that's her excuse for not doing more.
She admits that that's who she would be at least in effect fighting for.
Exactly.
And, yeah, these emails just offer more proof that they were very much in the know, very much in the know as to as to what direction this and what direction this whole thing would go.
OK, now back to the real back to the real motives here, because we say that till the end.
But now I'm afraid we're going to run out of time.
Tell me about Qaddafi's gold and what's it to Sarkozy?
Well, yeah, of course, Libya has always been very resource rich, which is probably why we hear about Libya in the news.
And and there was an intervention there in the first place as opposed to some sub-Saharan African country.
But there's this astounding email that people should should should go see.
And my article is from April 2011, another Intel brief from Blumenthal.
We know that the French were instrumental in proposing U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, the no fly zone.
And of course, the big claim was, oh, protecting civilians.
We care about Libyans.
But this particular email, this particular Intel brief identifies French President Sarkozy's real motives.
And it talks about wanting to cut into Libyan oil, Libyan French influence in North Africa, eyeing Qaddafi's gold.
Nowhere in it do I don't even think the word civilians comes up in the email, which is meant to be a summary of what is driving France and NATO in Libya.
But the focal point is talk of Qaddafi's 143 tons of gold bullion, as well as a similar amount of silver.
And there's a direct quote that says in the email, according to knowledgeable individuals, this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than seven billion dollars.
French Intel officers discovered the plan to introduce a gold back African dinar, which was seen as a as a threat to the French franc in the region.
And the email actually says, quote, This was one of the factors that influenced President Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.
Propping up demand for the French franc.
Yes, exactly.
But don't they have euros there?
They sell francs?
And I suppose the I suppose it's a particular it's a particular type of African currency.
It's called it's the French franc and the initials are CFA.
It's one of the prime currencies, I guess, in North Africa and all the old French colonial areas of Africa.
And that's an actual term that's used over and over again in this email.
Francophone Africa.
Right.
We can't have we can't have someone asserting independent influence.
And this document reads like just an old school, you know, 19th century Africa scramble for Africa colonial document.
It's amazing.
People just need to go sit and read it.
It's pretty mind blowing.
So forget the high minded responsibility to protect doctrine.
It's just old fashioned greed and it's currency wars.
And it's the threat of Gaddafi's gold and his big, you know, Pan-African Union type projects.
Yep.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, Brad.
Great work here.
Well, thanks, Scott.
Enjoy talking about it.
People just need to read these documents.
Pretty mind blowing.
All the links are there.
Yes, sir.
Mainstream media is downplaying it all.
But gosh, just go read this gold, this document about France and Gaddafi's gold.
It's unreal.
I'm going to read it right now.
Thanks very much, Brad.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thank you, Scott.
All right.
So that's the great Brad Hoff is over at Levant Report dot com.
Great piece of journalism here.
New Hillary emails reveal propaganda executions and the coveting of Libyan oil and gold.
We barely got to talk about the oil at all.
Right.
Go and read it.
It's at Levant Report dot com.
It'll be on antiwar dot com tomorrow.
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