All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Joe Dyke.
He is the Senior Investigator at airwars.org with our friend Chris Woods over there.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Joe?
Yeah, great.
Thanks for having me on.
It's great to be here.
Great to have you here.
And especially on the event of these two really important pieces that you have published recently here.
One of them is in foreignpolicy.com and the other is in the Guardian, pardon me, the independent, independent.co.uk about the war in Libya 10 years ago.
First of all, let's talk about the politics of this thing from the independent, the secret talks that nearly saved Gaddafi.
And this is about an effort by the Norwegians to work out a peace agreement.
And as I understand it, if I read you right here, these talks were before the war broke out, before the UN Security Council resolution was passed and could have thwarted the entire thing.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Well, not quite.
It's kind of somewhere in between.
So, you know, to go back to this, you know, we were looking at the whole conflict of 2011.
And whilst I was doing some research into this, I came across a thing called the Peterson Review, which, you know, somebody told me that I should read it, which is the Norwegian government did a review of all activities that they were involved in with regard to the 2011 war.
And in that there was some kind of references, it's only in Norwegian, so I had to Google translate a lot of it, and there were some references to these negotiations, etc., that they've led.
And I looked it up and there'd been almost, there'd been a couple of articles written about it in Norwegian, but and then I kind of started tracking down the people who were involved.
And then, and really what came about was that, so from the very beginning, you are correct that right at the beginning of the war, the Norwegians had decided that they wanted to also pursue a political track.
So they had before, before the uprising or the protests on the streets were going on, but NATO had not yet intervened.
And they had sent two very senior diplomats to, to Tripoli to negotiate.
And in fact, those two senior diplomats were in the room with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi when he found out that the United Nations had just bombed, voted to bomb or to start a campaign of bombing.
And so, so that, you know, I spoke to kind of off record some of some of those diplomats and then, and then kind of got an understanding of what happened and the people that were involved and et cetera.
And then really, so what happened was those diplomats then had to be rushed out of Libya, but the Norwegian government continued to do these talks.
And then six weeks into the war, sorry, eight weeks into the war, eight weeks into the NATO bombing campaign even, sorry, the, the, they brought together some of the, the very senior opposition figure and some very senior regime figures, Gaddafi regime figures in Oslo for kind of secret talks, which were not revealed at the time and they were not actually, there was nothing mentioned of them for several years after the, the, the, the war ended.
And basically these Norwegian diplomats went back into hammering out a final deal or what they thought was a pretty good deal whereby Gaddafi would step down, but be allowed to, you know, not, not be prosecuted, get some kind of immunity.
But in the process, hundreds of civilians, you know, the, the war would end and hundreds of civilian lives would be saved.
And then essentially the, the, so I, you can read it in the article, but I, you know, I managed to convince the then Norwegian foreign minister to, to talk me through this.
And he said, you know, we had this deal that we thought was pretty good, not, you know, not, there were some issues to be sorted and there was quite a lot of, you know, there was some gaps between the sides, but we thought it was the basis of a potential negotiations.
We took it to the British, the French and the Americans, and particularly the French and the British were, were not interested, were, they just kind of were interested in a, there wasn't much interest in a negotiated solution to the conflict at that point, either in Paris or London.
All right.
So there's a lot here now.
In fact, let's start with that latest point there.
I think you say in the article, and there's not much detail on this particular point, and I don't know how much was revealed to you, but you say in here that when the British and the French were kind of overruling this, and this is at the eight week point, the second part when they're negotiating in Norway, that your understanding was that Hillary Clinton and the American State Department were actually interested in pursuing this.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the, that's specifically what, what Stora said.
He had been briefing the Americans throughout this process.
And this was the ex, this is the former foreign minister you're talking about?
Yes, exactly.
The former foreign minister of, of Norway.
Yeah.
He was now the leader of the Norwegian, Norway's, he's leader of the opposition in Norway.
So he's still an active politician.
So, but yeah, that, that is what he said that essentially we, that the, the Americans, partly because if you remember, this was a war that Obama was kind of reluctant to be part of, you know, they, they had this leading from behind phrase where actually, you know, half of his cabinet, Robert Gates, et cetera, was deeply against and half, and half was in favor of Hillary Clinton and a couple of others.
So it was quite divisive within his own administration.
So there was a feeling that if he could get out of it relatively quickly, that was something that they would be interested in pursuing.
And there, then the, whereas the British, British and the French were always seen as much tougher, much more hard line that Gaddafi had to go.
And that once they had the United Nations resolution, they had no real interest in looking for a negotiated solution.
Now they would both deny that, you know, Cameron, as he said, Cameron says in his autobiography that he offered Gaddafi an option and that Gaddafi wasn't listening.
And there, there is certainly an element to which we don't know whether Gaddafi would definitely have taken this deal.
But it is quite interesting that, you know, a very senior and you have to remember, Norway was one of the eight NATO countries that was carrying out an active bombing campaign at the time of these negotiations.
So, you know, a very senior politician who was involved in that process is, is saying essentially that the British and the French were not interested and that they're what?
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting.
I'm not sure if you're aware of this reporting from a couple of years ago now in The Washington Times.
It was Riddell and I forgot the other guy's name, it was a pair of reporters did this series about how the DIA or well, the DOD, I guess, and I should define it more broadly as some defense officials and CIA officials apparently were negotiating with Saif Gaddafi and something along the lines of the peace proposal that you described here, where the old man would step down or would be kicked upstairs to essentially a do nothing role and the son Saif would take over.
And then the way it was even written about at the time was that this particular son of Gaddafi truly was interested in creating a much more democratic state.
I'm sure not one that would, where he would lose power and influence right away.
But was, was already, you know, before this ever even happened, was really interested in, you know, bringing great change to Libya once he inherited the power from his father that he'd been educated in Britain and was, you know, really interested in this kind of stuff and was leaning all that way anyway.
And that CIA, and this was the real irony of it, the CIA and DOD, which especially the military in the form of AFRICOM and the rest who had a huge incentive to push for this war that they were actually trying to stop it.
Apparently even Carter Ham, the, who was at that time, the brand new head of the brand new AFRICOM was saying, at least let's find a way to stop this war early.
You know, this is after the war had was, had was already underway.
But then in that story, it was Hillary Clinton and the State Department that vetoed it every time.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't speak specifically to that, but as you said, we, it is, it is documented that Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power were particularly strong in, in their support.
You know, they were the people that convinced Obama, you know, which he documents in his autobiography, the new one.
He documents that process by which he essentially came to this leading from behind conclusion.
So there is, you know, there is a lot of documentation around that.
And in fact, you know, the Norwegian approach was not the only approach.
If you look at, there is a WikiLeaks Hillary Clinton email in which she documents a number of different negotiated approaches, the most prominent being the African Union, which was a very public one.
But the thing is, is that really the rest of them didn't get very far, partly because they were so public.
And so, you know, they were unable, you know, no rebel at that time could be seen to be sitting down with the Gaddafi regime.
Right.
Right.
And so the African Union really didn't get very far in eight months of negotiation.
Whereas this Norwegian one, because Oslo has that network and infrastructure for, because it's where they negotiated the Israeli-Palestinian agreements, et cetera, et cetera, that they had a network and an infrastructure for bringing people in for secret talks where people could discuss things and where maybe you could come to a deal that otherwise you wouldn't have been able to.
Hey, I'll check it out.
The Libertarian Institute, that's me and my friends, have published three great books this year.
The first is No Quarter, The Ravings of William Norman Grigg.
He was the best one of us.
Now he's gone, but this great collection is a truly fitting legacy for his fight for freedom.
I know you'll love it.
Then there's Coming to Palestine by the great Sheldon Richman.
It's a collection of 40 important essays he's written over the years about the truth behind the Israel-Palestine conflict.
You'll learn so much and highly value this definitive libertarian take on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the reality of their brutal occupation.
Last but not least is The Great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004-2019.
Interview transcripts of all of my interviews of the good doctor over the years on all the wars, money, taxes, the police state, and more.
So how do you like that?
Pretty good, right?
You can find them all at LibertarianInstitute.org slash books.
Thanks.
Well, let's go back to the beginning here because I guess we're talking about the, what you mentioned, eight weeks in this sort of second attempt.
But in this first attempt, I mean, picture this everybody, it's in the article, you can read it, independent.co.uk, the secret talks that nearly saved Gaddafi.
We've got Norwegian diplomats, as you mentioned, they're a member of NATO, America's military alliance.
They were part of this war on the American side, and their diplomats were in Tripoli talking with Gaddafi's son and his people at the time that the UN Security Council passed the resolution authorizing the start of the war.
And then these diplomats had to be essentially smuggled, hustled in secret out of the country before the bombs started falling.
Did you have any information specifically about communication between the Norwegians and the Americans, or for that matter, the British and French, or even the Russians who also sit on the UN Security Council at that time that like, hey, everybody hold your horses, we're in the middle of negotiating here?
And in other words, were they, they knew good and well that the Norwegians were in the middle of trying to negotiate, and possibly were they trying to prevent that from succeeding by going ahead and passing the UN resolution when they did?
I don't think you can argue that really, partly because the Norwegians hadn't really told anyone at this stage.
Really?
You know, the Norwegians had these people because they were invited in at the invitation of Saif al-Islam and people around him.
So the Gaddafi regime reached out to the Norwegians saying, we would be interested in a conversation.
Why don't you send some people to us?
So maybe we can assume that the Americans must have known, but we can't assume that we know that the Norwegians did not tell them, this is what we're doing, please give us time to do it.
Yeah.
So, you know, the Norwegians did keep the Americans updated throughout the process.
I don't know exactly at what point that began.
So it may be that they didn't, they didn't have that conversation.
They didn't, you know, really, this was a kind of, if you remember, that was a very chaotic time.
There was, you know, the Gaddafi forces were closing in on Benghazi.
There was fears of a, you know, a new massacre, you know, the Gaddafi forces were going to take over and kill a lot of civilians and fighters as well.
And so the Norwegians, I suspect, you know, they just kind of, they just went there, went that particular route, because that is what Norway's place historically in the Middle East has been.
It is the place that allows people to have private conversations.
They do facilitate this, you know, because they're outside the European Union, they have relations, they can have relations, for example, with Hamas in Gaza, etc.
So they have that role.
So I suspect that they were there trying to see whether there was this opening.
And then Storre himself, the Norwegian foreign minister, described the kind of very panicked, stressful couple of days where he had two very senior diplomats in a city that was about to be bombed by aircraft, including Norwegian aircraft.
And then they eventually get them across to Tunis and they get them home, yeah.
Well and so now let's talk about this other piece, too.
It's a good segue in here.
Foreignpolicy.com, NATO killed civilians in Libya and must face responsibility.
But let's talk about that impending massacre in Benghazi.
Barack Obama said, I want everybody to picture Charlotte, North Carolina, a city of 700,000 people.
And imagine Qaddafi coming and killing them all.
That's what's about to happen in Benghazi.
He's about to kill 700,000 people if we don't stop him.
It'll be a genocide, like Rwanda.
But then, I'm sorry, I had to laugh out loud, literally, not like in the internet terminology, when I read this article, where the high end estimate of total killed by Qaddafi's forces is 1,999.
Yeah.
I mean, not to play that down, because I'm an individualist.
And for each of those 2,000 individuals, that's a real tragedy.
But does it not directly put the lie to the accusation that Qaddafi had decided to commit genocide against the eastern half of his own nation that he'd ruled since, what, 1962 or something?
Yeah, 42 years.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to comment specifically on, you know, those, undoubtedly, you know, the Qaddafi regime had lost a lot of territory and had retaken territory on the way to Benghazi.
We now know that they didn't kill, when they, the territory that they did retake, they didn't kill as many people as perhaps was feared at the time.
It certainly doesn't mean that they wouldn't have done something in Benghazi, and it also certainly doesn't mean that the fear wasn't there.
Whether that fear was justified, whether there was a misunderstanding, is a different matter somewhat.
But there was a genuine fear amongst the kind of international community that there could be a massacre.
Perhaps, as you said, those fears might have been misplaced or overplayed.
And one other thing I would say is that we are careful to say that, in our numbers, in our methodology, that that 1,999 is likely, almost certainly, an underestimate, because NATO incidents were very, very well documented at the time.
So there remains documentation, you know, we have rebuilt this data set, essentially, But on the margin of error there, this is not a genocide against a civilian population.
And I understand what you're saying.
I think it's fair to say that, yes, someone must have believed in this, but I would say most of the people who believed that were the victims of lies by the American government telling them to believe it.
But how in the world are we supposed to believe now that Obama's National Security Council then really thought he was going to murder every civilian in Benghazi?
That was a lie.
They were being manipulative.
They were jerking our chain to start a war.
At least, you've got to concede, if some people believed it, some people were cynical liars pretending to believe it.
Yeah, I mean, you also have to remember, you know, this is a period where I was focusing mostly on Syria.
We were getting very limited information out of this.
And I can see, I can completely understand your perspective.
I also think that in hindsight, it is easy to, you know, things are always easier in hindsight.
And at the time, perhaps it wasn't as clear.
Well, as you said, Obama's government was very divided.
Hillary and Power and Rice and a couple others wanted to do it.
But the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Advisor, and I'm not so sure about the deputy, I bet Rhodes was bad on it.
But Danilian was against it, Gates was against it.
And was it Dempsey was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time said not to do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But what you can say is that definitively, you know, the meetings that Hillary had in Paris with senior members of what became the NTC then had a significant impact on her and her willingness to intervene, you know, where she went from being kind of more on the fence to being we have to do this is and, you know, whether whether she was being systematic, whether she was being misled, and in the scale and etc, is is a is a matter, you know, she sat down in Paris, with senior NTC figures, and basically came out of that meeting convinced that the United States had to be involved.
Yeah, single 45 minute meeting with this guy, Jabril, the which compare that to Ahmed Chalabi working for, you know, eight years, 10 years straight on the neoconservatives in DC, to get everyone on board for reinvading Iraq.
This guy, the Libyan Chalabi meets with Hillary Clinton for 45 minutes.
And she's like, All right, let's do it.
I'm sure it's gonna be great.
This one guy that I just met said it's gonna be great.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, it is it is a case where you do have to, you know, as we said in the Norwegian, in the independent article, the French and the British, particularly were more bullish than the Americans in this case, as you said, like, you know, the if you there was less of this debate in the United Kingdom, and certainly in the French, you know, Sarkozy was full on, let's get involved, etc.
So so, you know, it is it isn't, in my opinion, anyway, it's not a case of the United States saying, Okay, let's do this.
And everyone else falling in line.
Oh, agree.
Yeah.
But at the same time, if the United States has said we're not getting involved, then realistically, France and the UK may not, you know, may not have had, they certainly would have had a much more difficult time, right?
A perfect analogy to the war in Yemen, too, right?
Yep.
It's leading from behind.
All right.
But it couldn't happen without us.
There's no question about that, really, you know, absolutely right there.
Hey, you guys, Scott here over the next few years, I'm going to be more and more involved in Libertarian Party politics.
But I can't put that stuff out on the Libertarian Institute feed, because of the 501c3 rules and all that.
Got to keep them separated.
So interestingly enough, paradoxically enough, if you want to learn all about the Libertarian Party stuff that I'm involved in and listen to those interviews, you're going to have to sign up to the scotthorton.org feed.
And if you want to just listen to good old foreign policy stuff, and not have to worry about all this LP stuff, then you go ahead and subscribe to the show at the Libertarian Institute, and it will be LP politics free for you there.
We'd like to thank you for your support.
All right, now, you know, this is an important part of the story, too.
I got to admit, I'm impressed.
What can I say?
The NATO coalition killed less than 1,000 civilians in that entire nine month long air campaign.
Is that really correct?
Yeah.
I mean, so Libya is, you know, if you look at our monitoring of Libya overall, you know, we have monitored every airstrike as air wars.
We have monitored every airstrike since 2012.
And civilian harm in Libya is quite low.
And there's a bunch of reasons for that in general.
And obviously, this, as you said, every civilian loss is a tragedy.
But compare it to Syria, for example, you know, it is relatively low.
And there are reasons for that, partly because it's quite a small population.
It's quite, it's a very large territory.
There's not so many, with the exceptions of Tripoli, there's not so many heavily built up areas, which is, you know, where you end up with lots of knock on killings and, you know, if you, like Mosul and Raqqa is where you have thousands of killings, where the U.S. led coalition against ISIS, etc.
What I would say is yes, but at the same time, it is absolutely clear, and the United Nations came to this, that NATO made significant efforts to avoid killing civilians, and the United Nations report, which documented some of those civilian killings, that same report actually said that it was a precise and largely accurate campaign.
You know, we are talking, you know, somewhere between 200 and 400 in our documentation, which is higher than what the United Nations documented at the time.
But yes, it's not, it was, you know, they, and, you know, NATO officials that I spoke to said that, you know, many, many potential targets were ruled out, many potential, many missions that were launched were canceled when civilians became, you know, when it was revealed that civilians were nearby, etc.
So it was a campaign where they took significant efforts to avoid killing civilians.
And I guess the combatants really were just that far away from civilians most of the time, rather than embedded among them in ways that we've seen in some of these other theories.
And I'm sorry, we're just so short on time here, Joe, but I just wanted to give you a chance to bring up that, or well, I'll bring it up, you talk about it.
You're not sitting here justifying this, you're just being a scientist and giving us the best numbers that you have.
It sounds, it could sound as though it's an apology that, oh, wow, look at how accurate we are with these bombs, that we can have a whole war and kill so few civilians relatively.
But in the consequences here, you do talk about the ethnic cleansing, as they call it, of the town of Tawerga, and then the 10 year civil war that's reigned ever since then.
The news is they're claiming there's a new unity government there now, although I'm not sure who it's unity between exactly.
But there has been chaos, and even, you know, it has contributed in large measure to the refugee crisis of the last decade, as well as even the very Obama friendly CNN has documented the literal reinstitution of chattel slavery in Libya.
And so this has been an absolute catastrophe for this country.
There's no question about that, I don't think.
No, I mean, just one thing about NATO.
I mean, whilst I said that, you know, they did take measures to reduce civilian casualties, we show in the article that when they killed civilian casualties, the measures was completely almost non-existent to recognize that.
So we documented, you know, and they really haven't documented.
To this day, NATO does not accept that it killed any civilians.
So you know, I just wanted to just quickly make that clear that, you know, we spoke to many of the families who are 10 years on and are still looking.
We spoke to a man who spent his entire life savings going to Brussels to try and raise a court case against NATO to get them to pay for the medical bills of all his family members who had been injured.
And he'd lost, he'd also lost three, five family members.
And at the same time, we found out that NATO knew which member state was responsible and had not revealed that and refused to reveal that.
That is an important part, the diffusion of responsibility.
Well, we know the NATO coalition did it, but that could be any number of countries, air forces that dropped that bomb, but we can't tell you that.
It's nobody's fault because it's everybody's.
And we specifically, you know, we did a Freedom of Information request to all eight NATO member states regarding these five or six key incidents, asking 10 years on, and we asked them both through a Freedom of Information request.
And you know, we went to the front facing of the military and said, we, these are the changes that have happened in the last 10 years.
By and large, militaries now accept when they have killed, you know, Western militaries to a certain extent.
Some of them have started to accept when they kill civilians.
We went to them both publicly that way and through the Freedom of Information request saying, look, just tell us whether you killed these civilians so that the, whether you were responsible for this individual strike, Norway and Denmark gave us responses and the rest basically said no.
So that includes the United States, the UK and Britain and France.
And I'm so sorry, I got to leave it right here, Joe, but thank you so much for coming on the show.
And you and Chris Woods and Air Wars do such great work.
And we're all so grateful for it.
I would love to come on anytime.
Okay, great.
Thank you so much for your time.
All right, you guys, that's Joe Dyke, airwars.org.
They count every one of these things, man, I'm telling you.
Bombing by bombing by bombing.
NATO killed civilians in Libya.
It's time to admit it.
That's foreignpolicy.com and the secret talks that nearly saved Qaddafi at the independent.co.uk.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, airwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
