[Reader-list] War Propaganda

[A. Mani]

From: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26084


War Propaganda: Libya and the End of Western Illusions

by Thierry Meyssan

	
Global Research, August 20, 2011
Voltaire Network

Five months into the bombing campaign, it is no longer possible to
believe the initial official version of the events and the massacres
attributed to the "Gaddafi regime". Moreover, it is now essential to
take into account Libya’s legal and diplomatic rebuttal, highlighting
the crimes against peace committed by television propaganda, the war
crimes perpetrated by NATO military forces, and the crimes against
humanity sponsored by political leaders of the Atlantic Alliance.

Just under half of Europeans still support the war against Libya.
Their position is based on erroneous information. They still believe,
in fact, that in February the "Gaddafi regime" crushed the protests in
Benghazi with brutal force and bombed civilian districts in Tripoli,
while the Colonel himself was warning of "rivers of blood" if his
compatriots continued to challenge his authority.

During my two months’ investigation on the ground, I was able to
verify that these accusations were pure propaganda intoxication,
designed by the NATO powers to create the conditions for war, and
relayed around the world by their television media, in particular
Al-Jazeera, CNN, BBC and France24.

However, the reader who doesn’t know where he stands on this issue and
who - despite the brainwashing of September 11 and Saddam Hussein’s
weapons of mass destruction - is reluctant to accept that the United
States, France, the UK and Qatar were actually capable of fabricating
such lies, will be able to forge an opinion over time. NATO, the
largest military coalition in history, has failed after five months of
bombardments to overthrow the one it designated as a "tyrant." Every
Friday, a large demonstration in support of the regime is organized in
a different city and all experts are unanimous in considering that
Colonel Gaddafi enjoys at least 90% of popular support in Tripolitania
and 70% across the entire country, including the "rebel" areas. These
are people who every single day put up with the blockade, aerial
bombardments and ground fighting. Never would they be defending with
their flesh and blood someone who committed against them the crimes of
which he has been accused by the "international community." The
difference between those in the West who believe that Gaddafi is a
tyrant who fired on his own people, and those in Libya who believe
that he is a hero of the anti-imperialist struggle, is that the former
live in an illusion created by TV propaganda, whereas the others are
exposed to the concrete reality on the ground.

That said, there is a second illusion to which the West has succumbed
- and in the "Western" camp I now include not only Israel, where it
has always claimed to belong, but also the monarchies of the Gulf
Cooperation Council and Turkey which, though of Eastern culture, have
chosen to embrace it -, the illusion to think that it is still
possible to devastate a country and kill its people without legal
consequences. It is true that, until now, international justice has
been the justice of the victors or the powerful. One may recall the
Nazi official who heckled the judges at Nuremberg telling them that if
the Reich had won the war, the judges would have been the Nazis while
those held accountable for the war crimes would have been the Allies.

More recently, we saw how NATO used the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to try to justify post facto that
the war in Kosovo was "the first humanitarian war in History,"
according to the expression employed by Tony Blair. Or again, how the
Special Tribunal for Lebanon was used in an attempt to overthrow the
Syrian government, then to decapitate the Lebanese Hezbollah, and
probably soon to accuse the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Not to
mention, the International Criminal Court, the secular arm of the
European colonial powers in Africa.

However, the development of instruments and organs of international
justice throughout the twentieth century has gradually established an
international order with which the superpowers themselves will have to
comply or which they will have to sabotage in order to escape their
responsibilities. In the case of Libya, the violations of
international law are countless. The main ones, presented below, were
established by the Provisional Technical Committee, a Libyan
ministerial coordination organ, and expounded at various press
conferences by the legal adviser to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, French
attorney Marcel Ceccaldi [1].

TV channels which, under the leadership of their respective
Governments, have manufactured false information to lead to war, are
guilty of "crimes against peace", as defined by the relevant UN
General Assembly resolutions in the aftermath of World War II [2]. The
journalist-propagandists should be considered even more culpable than
the military who perpetrated war crimes or crimes against humanity, to
the extent that none of these crimes would have been possible without
the one that preceded them: the "crime against peace."

The political leaders of the Atlantic Alliance, who diverted the
object and purpose of Resolution 1973 to engage in a war of aggression
against a sovereign state, are personally responsible before
international justice. Indeed, according to the jurisprudence
established by the Tokyo Court following the Second World War, crimes
cannot be ascribed to either States or organizations, but to
individuals. Plundering the assets of a state, establishing a naval
blockade and bombing infrastructure to cause people to suffer,
attacking an army inside its barracks and ordering the assassination
of enemy leaders or, failing this, terrorizing them by murdering their
families, all amount to war crimes. Their systematic perpetration, as
is the case today, constitutes a crime against humanity. This crime is
imprescriptible, which means that Messrs. Obama, Sarkozy, Cameron and
Al-Thani will be pursued by the law for the rest of their lives.

NATO, as an organization, is legally responsible for the material and
human damage of this war. The law leaves no room for doubt that the
organization must pay, even though it will surely try to invoke a
privilege of jurisdiction to dodge its responsibilities. It will be up
to the Alliance to decide how the bill for the conflict should be
split among Member States, even though some of them may be on the
verge of bankruptcy. This will be followed by disastrous economic
consequences for their peoples, guilty of having endorsed such crimes.
In a democracy, no one can claim to be innocent of the crimes
committed in its name.

International justice will have to address more specifically the case
of the Sarkozy "administration" - I use this Anglicism here to
underscore the fact that the French president has been piloting his
Government’s policy directly, without going through his prime
minister. Indeed, France has played a central role in preparing for
this war since October 2010 by organizing a failed military coup and
then, as early as November 2010, by planning with the United Kingdom
the bombing of Libya and the landing of ground troops on its soil,
which was then believed to be feasible, and finally by actively
conspiring in the lethal unrest in Benghazi which led to the war.

In addition, France, more than any other power, has deployed Special
Forces on the ground - without uniforms, no doubt - and violated the
arms embargo by supplying the insurgents, either directly or through
Qatari airplanes. Not to mention that France has violated the UN
freeze of Libyan assets, funnelling part of the fabulous cash from the
Libyan Sovereign Fund to the CNT puppets, to the detriment of the
Libyan people who wanted to guarantee the well-being of their children
in the face of oil depletion.

These gentlemen from NATO, who hoped to escape international justice
by crushing their victim, Libya, in a few short days so that it would
not survive to pursue them, will be disenchanted. Libya is still
there. She is filing complaints with the International Criminal Court,
the Belgian courts (whose jurisdiction NATO falls under), the European
Court of Justice, and the national courts of aggressor states. She is
undertaking steps before the Council of Human Rights in Geneva, the
Security Council and General Assembly of the United Nations. It will
be not be possible for the big powers to extinguish these fires all at
once. Worse, the arguments they will use to evade a court will
ricochet against them in another court. In a few weeks or months, if
they have not succeeded in destroying Tripoli, they will have no other
way out to avoid humiliating convictions than to negotiate the
withdrawal of the complaints at a very high price.

Notes

[1] Putting an end to the confusion that prevailed at the beginning of
the war when various departments hired lawyers for different
disorderly proceedings, Libya has appointed Marcel Ceccaldi in July to
oversee all proceedings.

[2] “Journalists who engage in war propaganda must be held
accountable”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 16 August 2011

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A. Mani



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