I can't get past this:
reviews question the detailed memory of Soraya in her 'harem'....but..enough.. let's see what you think
How did Colonel Gaddafi get away with such evil for so long?
- Thread starter christiefan915
- Start date
how catastrophically bad the Hillary Clinton-led NATO bombing of Libya was
The New York Times published two lengthy pieces this week detailing Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya. Both are important documents, and provide much insight into how, as secretary of state for the Obama administration, Clinton played a uniquely hands-on role in the war.
Sec. Clinton pressured a wary President Obama to join France and the U.K. in the war, the Times reported. Vice President Biden, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among others, opposed the war effort. Numerous government officials recalled that her hawkish enthusiasm was decisive in the “51-49 decision.”
The Times spoke of “Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world,” but did not stress that this belief is rooted in an aggressive militarism. It did quote French President Sarkozy, who fondly remembered how the secretary of state “was tough, she was bullish,” but the Times’ reporting understated Clinton’s belligerence.
At 13,000 words in length combined, the articles are important contributions to the historical record. Yet although they are critical of Clinton and her leadership in the conflict, they fail to acknowledge the crimes of U.S.-backed rebel groups, and ultimately underestimate just how disastrous the war was, just how hawkish Hillary is and just how significant this will be for the future of the United States — not to mention the future of Libya and its suffering people.
The U.S. president does not have as much control over economic and social issues as many pundits, analysts and even voters often insist. One must not forget that the head of state does not control the Congress or the judiciary. But the president does have enormous power when it comes to international affairs, diplomacy and war. This makes foreign policy one of the most crucial issues in any presidential campaign.
Clinton’s leadership in the catastrophic war in Libya should ergo constantly be at the forefront of any discussion of the presidential primary.
Throughout the campaign, Clinton has tried to have her cake and eat it too. She has flaunted her leadership in the war as a sign of her supposed foreign policy experience, yet, at the same moment, strived to distance herself from the disastrous results of said war.
Today, Libya is in ruins. The seven months of NATO bombing effectively destroyed the government and left behind a political vacuum. Much of this has been filled by extremist groups.........Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, looking back, the facts show that she did not just push for and lead the war in Libya; she even went out of her way to derail diplomacy
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/02/eve...illary_clinton_led_nato_bombing_of_libya_was/
(Salon) 3/16
The New York Times published two lengthy pieces this week detailing Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya. Both are important documents, and provide much insight into how, as secretary of state for the Obama administration, Clinton played a uniquely hands-on role in the war.
Sec. Clinton pressured a wary President Obama to join France and the U.K. in the war, the Times reported. Vice President Biden, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among others, opposed the war effort. Numerous government officials recalled that her hawkish enthusiasm was decisive in the “51-49 decision.”
The Times spoke of “Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world,” but did not stress that this belief is rooted in an aggressive militarism. It did quote French President Sarkozy, who fondly remembered how the secretary of state “was tough, she was bullish,” but the Times’ reporting understated Clinton’s belligerence.
At 13,000 words in length combined, the articles are important contributions to the historical record. Yet although they are critical of Clinton and her leadership in the conflict, they fail to acknowledge the crimes of U.S.-backed rebel groups, and ultimately underestimate just how disastrous the war was, just how hawkish Hillary is and just how significant this will be for the future of the United States — not to mention the future of Libya and its suffering people.
The U.S. president does not have as much control over economic and social issues as many pundits, analysts and even voters often insist. One must not forget that the head of state does not control the Congress or the judiciary. But the president does have enormous power when it comes to international affairs, diplomacy and war. This makes foreign policy one of the most crucial issues in any presidential campaign.
Clinton’s leadership in the catastrophic war in Libya should ergo constantly be at the forefront of any discussion of the presidential primary.
Throughout the campaign, Clinton has tried to have her cake and eat it too. She has flaunted her leadership in the war as a sign of her supposed foreign policy experience, yet, at the same moment, strived to distance herself from the disastrous results of said war.
Today, Libya is in ruins. The seven months of NATO bombing effectively destroyed the government and left behind a political vacuum. Much of this has been filled by extremist groups.........Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, looking back, the facts show that she did not just push for and lead the war in Libya; she even went out of her way to derail diplomacy
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/02/eve...illary_clinton_led_nato_bombing_of_libya_was/
(Salon) 3/16
Worse Than Benghazi,” Mizner shows how many of the excuses, especially the allegation — spread forcefully by Clinton — that Qaddafi was on the verge of carrying out genocide against his people, were largely baseless.
U.S. intelligence officials told The Washington Times that the government had “gathered no specific evidence of an impending genocide in Libya in spring 2011, undercutting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary argument for using the U.S. military to remove Col. Moammar Gadhafi from power, an event that has left his country in chaos.”
The New York Times’ lengthy stories do call “into question whether the intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.” They do also point out that Human Rights Watch reports later showed that media claims about Qaddafi’s repression of protesters, which were used to sell the war to the public, were grossly exaggerated, by an order of magnitude.
Yet the two articles devote little attention to what they acknowledge were “the rebels’ human-rights abuses.” U.S.-backed militants committed their own share of atrocities. In particular, Libyan rebels targeted dark-skinned, sub-Saharan Africans and minority groups.
Human Rights Watch warned in 2013, in the wake of the Clinton-led war, of “serious and ongoing human rights violations against inhabitants of the town of Tawergha, who are widely viewed as having supported Muammar Gaddafi.”
Tawergha’s inhabitants were mostly descendants of black slaves, and were very poor. Rebels ethnically cleansed the city of the black Libyans. Human Rights Watch reported that militant groups carried out “forced displacement of roughly 40,000 people, arbitrary detentions, torture, and killings are widespread, systematic, and sufficiently organized to be crimes against humanity.”
Moreover, there were reports that rebels put black Libyans, whom they accused of being mercenaries for Qaddafi, in cages, forcing them to eat flags and calling them “dogs.”
These horrific, racist crimes were not mentioned in the prolix New York Times pieces on Clinton’s legacy in Libya. Yet the U.S. backed many of the rebels who would go on to commit atrocities like this.
Other rebels groups who were at least indirectly supported by the U.S. have gone on to become its present enemies.
Many liberals simply assumed Clinton’s Libya escapade was a success because it led to the fall of a despot, to regime change. Qaddafi was certainly a repressive dictator. But so was Saddam Hussein, and we see few liberals eager to defend Bush’s war in Iraq. The ruins left of both countries is hard to overstate
++
whatever the book shows about Qadaffi -the AQ Dogs that replaced him had grotesque Human Rights violations -tortue
U.S. intelligence officials told The Washington Times that the government had “gathered no specific evidence of an impending genocide in Libya in spring 2011, undercutting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary argument for using the U.S. military to remove Col. Moammar Gadhafi from power, an event that has left his country in chaos.”
The New York Times’ lengthy stories do call “into question whether the intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.” They do also point out that Human Rights Watch reports later showed that media claims about Qaddafi’s repression of protesters, which were used to sell the war to the public, were grossly exaggerated, by an order of magnitude.
Yet the two articles devote little attention to what they acknowledge were “the rebels’ human-rights abuses.” U.S.-backed militants committed their own share of atrocities. In particular, Libyan rebels targeted dark-skinned, sub-Saharan Africans and minority groups.
Human Rights Watch warned in 2013, in the wake of the Clinton-led war, of “serious and ongoing human rights violations against inhabitants of the town of Tawergha, who are widely viewed as having supported Muammar Gaddafi.”
Tawergha’s inhabitants were mostly descendants of black slaves, and were very poor. Rebels ethnically cleansed the city of the black Libyans. Human Rights Watch reported that militant groups carried out “forced displacement of roughly 40,000 people, arbitrary detentions, torture, and killings are widespread, systematic, and sufficiently organized to be crimes against humanity.”
Moreover, there were reports that rebels put black Libyans, whom they accused of being mercenaries for Qaddafi, in cages, forcing them to eat flags and calling them “dogs.”
These horrific, racist crimes were not mentioned in the prolix New York Times pieces on Clinton’s legacy in Libya. Yet the U.S. backed many of the rebels who would go on to commit atrocities like this.
Other rebels groups who were at least indirectly supported by the U.S. have gone on to become its present enemies.
Many liberals simply assumed Clinton’s Libya escapade was a success because it led to the fall of a despot, to regime change. Qaddafi was certainly a repressive dictator. But so was Saddam Hussein, and we see few liberals eager to defend Bush’s war in Iraq. The ruins left of both countries is hard to overstate
++
whatever the book shows about Qadaffi -the AQ Dogs that replaced him had grotesque Human Rights violations -tortue
cancel2 2022
Canceled
The war was right, leaving Libya to its own devices after was wrong.
Sent from my LENOVO Lenovo K50-t5 Using Ez Forum for Android
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
hasn't it always been a Muslim country?.......
as to Gaddafi I guess it boils down to whether he had changed or not......I don't doubt you can verify everything in the OP as fact.....but we would also need to know WHEN those things happened......and is it true, as Rice said, that he changed after 2003......
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
so you're saying that you weren't really upset about the Gaddafi described in the OP after all......
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
he was taken off the watch list because, as stated, he had changed.....as for Cuba, it was taken off the watch list because the approach we had tried for 65 years hadn't worked......nothing has changed about Cuba.......
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
but not enough for a regime change according to Chrispy.....
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
oh gosh.......you mean we don't do it based primarily on what's in it for Greenland?......
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
Darla's bare breast is a burden you must bear......
It would have taken "boots" level of Iraq to be successful regime change....oh wait..
Taft2016
Verified User
Not exactly.
We re-established relations with Cuba because after 65 years we finally elected a POTUS who was simpatico with Marxism.
Taft2016
Verified User
Evidence suggests the breast in question is stimulating enough to keep a bum ticker beating, yet not thrilling enough to stop said ticker.
Therefore, a rather non-descript breast.
The Return,’ a Son’s Pained Search for a Missing Father
Toward the end of this eloquent memoir, Hisham Matar quotes these words, spoken by Odysseus’ son Telemachus in “The Odyssey”:
I wish at least I had some happy man
as father, growing old in his own house —
but unknown death and silence are the fate
of him…
Mr. Matar has spent his entire adult life grappling with that same sense of loss and uncertainty about the fate of his missing father. Jaballa Matar was a leading Libyan dissident who was kidnapped in 1990 by agents working for Muammar el-Qaddafi, that country’s dictator, and sent to the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Friends and political supporters risked their lives to smuggle out the occasional letter from him, but after a couple of years, those letters stopped.
The younger Mr. Matar did not know whether his father died in a 1996 prison massacre that took the lives of some 1,200 people; whether he was tortured or beaten to death in some grim interrogation room; or whether, miraculously, he had managed to escape or survive. After Qaddafi was toppled in 2011, Mr. Matar, who had been living abroad in exile, traveled back to his family’s homeland to try to find out what happened. This is the story he tells in “The Return.”
Mr. Matar is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, “In the Country of Men” and “Anatomy of a Disappearance,” which also deal with loss and separation and the shadow of a powerful activist father. Here, in “The Return,” he writes with both a novelist’s eye for physical and emotional detail, and a reporter’s tactile sense of place and time. The prose is precise, economical, chiseled; the narrative elliptical, almost musical, cutting back and forth in time between the near present, Mr. Matar’s childhood memories of growing up in Libya, and pieced-together accounts of his father’s work as an opposition leader and his imprisonment.
“The Return” is, at once, a suspenseful detective story about a writer investigating his father’s fate at the hands of a brutal dictatorship, and a son’s efforts to come to terms with his father’s ghost, who has haunted more than half his life by his absence. It’s the story of Mr. Matar’s complicated feelings about his adult life in London: both “the guilt of having lived a free life” and his attempts to use that freedom to petition various governments and human rights organizations for information about his father and imprisoned relatives. And it’s a story about exile, about how Mr. Matar; his brother, Ziad; and their mother strove to create new lives for themselves abroad — they fled Libya in 1979 — and about Mr. Matar’s struggles to “live away from places and people I love.” “Joseph Brodsky was right,” he writes. “So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured.”
This is just one of the emotions Mr. Matar experiences during a return trip to Libya in 2012. There, he talks with relatives and his father’s friends, many of whom spent years in prison, where they were tortured and starved of hope and sunlight. He hears about the elaborate methods prisoners used to survive and communicate in prison, and he is given hints of what his father must have endured in Abu Salim. He wonders how his father was changed by his imprisonment, and how he might have been altered or reduced.
The stories he recounts are harrowing. His uncle Hmad, an aspiring playwright, and cousin Ali, an economics student, ended up spending two decades in Qaddafi’s prisons. His uncle Mahmoud maintained his love of literature during his 21 years in Abu Salim by jotting poems on both sides of a thin pillowcase that he sewed into the waistband of his underwear for safekeeping. His cousin Izzo, who had been studying to become a civil engineer, was killed by a sniper during the Libyan revolution, and Izzo’s older brother, Hamed, was wounded but insisted on returning to the front.
Mr. Matar’s visit to Libya in early 2012 occurred during “a precious window” of time when justice and democracy and the rule of law seemed within reach. But things swiftly unraveled as rivalries between heavily armed militias escalated, and the Islamic State gained a foothold in the chaos.
“The dead would mount,” Mr. Matar writes. “Universities and schools would close. Hospitals would become only partially operative. The situation would get so grim that the unimaginable would happen: People would come to long for the days of Qaddafi.”
Mr. Matar’s account of the suffering in Libya — under Qaddafi, and now, in the violent aftermath of the revolution — reads like a microcosm of what the Middle East has experienced as the democratic hopes fostered by the Arab Spring have crashed and burned in one country after another. At the same time, “The Return” stands as a haunting memoir about one family, and one son’s Telemachus-like search for his father.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/b...edCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article
Toward the end of this eloquent memoir, Hisham Matar quotes these words, spoken by Odysseus’ son Telemachus in “The Odyssey”:
I wish at least I had some happy man
as father, growing old in his own house —
but unknown death and silence are the fate
of him…
Mr. Matar has spent his entire adult life grappling with that same sense of loss and uncertainty about the fate of his missing father. Jaballa Matar was a leading Libyan dissident who was kidnapped in 1990 by agents working for Muammar el-Qaddafi, that country’s dictator, and sent to the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Friends and political supporters risked their lives to smuggle out the occasional letter from him, but after a couple of years, those letters stopped.
The younger Mr. Matar did not know whether his father died in a 1996 prison massacre that took the lives of some 1,200 people; whether he was tortured or beaten to death in some grim interrogation room; or whether, miraculously, he had managed to escape or survive. After Qaddafi was toppled in 2011, Mr. Matar, who had been living abroad in exile, traveled back to his family’s homeland to try to find out what happened. This is the story he tells in “The Return.”
Mr. Matar is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, “In the Country of Men” and “Anatomy of a Disappearance,” which also deal with loss and separation and the shadow of a powerful activist father. Here, in “The Return,” he writes with both a novelist’s eye for physical and emotional detail, and a reporter’s tactile sense of place and time. The prose is precise, economical, chiseled; the narrative elliptical, almost musical, cutting back and forth in time between the near present, Mr. Matar’s childhood memories of growing up in Libya, and pieced-together accounts of his father’s work as an opposition leader and his imprisonment.
“The Return” is, at once, a suspenseful detective story about a writer investigating his father’s fate at the hands of a brutal dictatorship, and a son’s efforts to come to terms with his father’s ghost, who has haunted more than half his life by his absence. It’s the story of Mr. Matar’s complicated feelings about his adult life in London: both “the guilt of having lived a free life” and his attempts to use that freedom to petition various governments and human rights organizations for information about his father and imprisoned relatives. And it’s a story about exile, about how Mr. Matar; his brother, Ziad; and their mother strove to create new lives for themselves abroad — they fled Libya in 1979 — and about Mr. Matar’s struggles to “live away from places and people I love.” “Joseph Brodsky was right,” he writes. “So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured.”
This is just one of the emotions Mr. Matar experiences during a return trip to Libya in 2012. There, he talks with relatives and his father’s friends, many of whom spent years in prison, where they were tortured and starved of hope and sunlight. He hears about the elaborate methods prisoners used to survive and communicate in prison, and he is given hints of what his father must have endured in Abu Salim. He wonders how his father was changed by his imprisonment, and how he might have been altered or reduced.
The stories he recounts are harrowing. His uncle Hmad, an aspiring playwright, and cousin Ali, an economics student, ended up spending two decades in Qaddafi’s prisons. His uncle Mahmoud maintained his love of literature during his 21 years in Abu Salim by jotting poems on both sides of a thin pillowcase that he sewed into the waistband of his underwear for safekeeping. His cousin Izzo, who had been studying to become a civil engineer, was killed by a sniper during the Libyan revolution, and Izzo’s older brother, Hamed, was wounded but insisted on returning to the front.
Mr. Matar’s visit to Libya in early 2012 occurred during “a precious window” of time when justice and democracy and the rule of law seemed within reach. But things swiftly unraveled as rivalries between heavily armed militias escalated, and the Islamic State gained a foothold in the chaos.
“The dead would mount,” Mr. Matar writes. “Universities and schools would close. Hospitals would become only partially operative. The situation would get so grim that the unimaginable would happen: People would come to long for the days of Qaddafi.”
Mr. Matar’s account of the suffering in Libya — under Qaddafi, and now, in the violent aftermath of the revolution — reads like a microcosm of what the Middle East has experienced as the democratic hopes fostered by the Arab Spring have crashed and burned in one country after another. At the same time, “The Return” stands as a haunting memoir about one family, and one son’s Telemachus-like search for his father.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/b...edCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article
Ha....funny stuff......join the majority of the Conservatives that this happens to on a regular basis, Darla.
And thanks to Rune that proves my point.....
Cry me a river. At least 95% of the groans I got were from Truth Detector and Chopped Liver.
*boggle* Cons hate Shari'ah Law. Isn't that why bush was always bloviating about bringing freedom and democracy to the ME?
No, you're saying that. I was against the Libya attack just as I was about Iraq. It's just ironic how cons could make a case for one but not the other when both guys were evil dictators.
Gosh, you think we should just attack countries who have something we want, as in might makes right?
Muammar Gaddafi war crimes files revealed
From an article dated June 2011.
"Thousands of documents that reveal in chilling detail orders from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's senior generals to bombard and starve the people of Misrata have been gathered by war crimes investigators and are being kept at a secret location at the besieged Libyan port. The documents, some of which the Observer has seen, will form damning evidence in any future war crimes trial of the Libyan leader at the International Criminal Court. The court's prosecutors are expected to travel to the city to view the documents once the daily bombardments have ceased.
One document shows the commanding general of government forces instructing his units to starve Misrata's population during the four-month siege. The order, from Youssef Ahmed Basheer Abu Hajar, states bluntly: "It is absolutely forbidden for supply cars, fuel and other services to enter the city of Misrata from all gates and checkpoints." Another document instructs army units to hunt down wounded rebel fighters, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Plans to bombard the city are also in the archive, say investigators, who also claim they have a message from Gaddafi relayed to the troops ordering that Misrata be obliterated and the "blue sea turned red" with the blood of the inhabitants. The documents are expected to form a crucial element of any trial against Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and his intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi if, as is expected, ICC judges confirm indictments for war crimes and crimes against humanity that are demanded by its chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo.
They represent a landmark in international justice because no significant war crimes trial in the short history of international courts has had access to documents directly implicating the lead players in the commission of war crimes.
"From what we have here, the case is already proved," Khalid Alwafi, a Misrata war crimes investigator, told the Observer. "All the evidence is here. Signed and stamped." The documents have yet to be revealed to the ICC, according to the 60-strong team of Libyan lawyers who brave daily shelling to collect evidence from the city. "We are ready to show them to the ICC," said Alwafi. "They are free to contact us."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/18/muammar-gaddafi-war-crimes-files
From an article dated June 2011.
"Thousands of documents that reveal in chilling detail orders from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's senior generals to bombard and starve the people of Misrata have been gathered by war crimes investigators and are being kept at a secret location at the besieged Libyan port. The documents, some of which the Observer has seen, will form damning evidence in any future war crimes trial of the Libyan leader at the International Criminal Court. The court's prosecutors are expected to travel to the city to view the documents once the daily bombardments have ceased.
One document shows the commanding general of government forces instructing his units to starve Misrata's population during the four-month siege. The order, from Youssef Ahmed Basheer Abu Hajar, states bluntly: "It is absolutely forbidden for supply cars, fuel and other services to enter the city of Misrata from all gates and checkpoints." Another document instructs army units to hunt down wounded rebel fighters, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Plans to bombard the city are also in the archive, say investigators, who also claim they have a message from Gaddafi relayed to the troops ordering that Misrata be obliterated and the "blue sea turned red" with the blood of the inhabitants. The documents are expected to form a crucial element of any trial against Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and his intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi if, as is expected, ICC judges confirm indictments for war crimes and crimes against humanity that are demanded by its chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo.
They represent a landmark in international justice because no significant war crimes trial in the short history of international courts has had access to documents directly implicating the lead players in the commission of war crimes.
"From what we have here, the case is already proved," Khalid Alwafi, a Misrata war crimes investigator, told the Observer. "All the evidence is here. Signed and stamped." The documents have yet to be revealed to the ICC, according to the 60-strong team of Libyan lawyers who brave daily shelling to collect evidence from the city. "We are ready to show them to the ICC," said Alwafi. "They are free to contact us."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/18/muammar-gaddafi-war-crimes-files
the Observer is an editorial arm of the Guardian.
During and after the 2011 "humanitarian war" there was much pinned on the larger aspect that "qadaffi is a dictator" to justify the destruction of Libya by the west - especially since the so call "massacre" by Libyan pilots in Bengazi never happened.
Libya: Nato strike 'kills rebels' in Misrata
Nato has yet to find an answer to the Libyan dictator's defiance, with missiles continuing to fall on Misrata.
Misrata has been the scene of intense fighting because of its strategically crucial port.
Rebel fighters, backed by Nato air strikes, claim they have driven back soldiers loyal to Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13223197
^ example of one of many "humanitarian bombings" ( airstrikes) by NATO on a Libyan city.
During and after the 2011 "humanitarian war" there was much pinned on the larger aspect that "qadaffi is a dictator" to justify the destruction of Libya by the west - especially since the so call "massacre" by Libyan pilots in Bengazi never happened.
Libya: Nato strike 'kills rebels' in Misrata
Nato has yet to find an answer to the Libyan dictator's defiance, with missiles continuing to fall on Misrata.
Misrata has been the scene of intense fighting because of its strategically crucial port.
Rebel fighters, backed by Nato air strikes, claim they have driven back soldiers loyal to Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13223197
^ example of one of many "humanitarian bombings" ( airstrikes) by NATO on a Libyan city.