http://news.antiwar.com/2012/02/13/new-militia-federation-announced-in-western-libya/
The federation’s leader, Col. Mokhtar Fernana, was quick to lash out against the NATO-backed National Transitional Council (NTC), nominally the ruling government of Libya, saying it was “an attempt to hijack the revolution.”
As the nation still suffers the aftershocks from last year’s civil war, the battle lines for the next Libyan Civil War are starting to take shape today, with the announcement that some 100 militias in Western Libya are forming a new federation to demand reforms.
The federation’s leader, Col. Mokhtar Fernana, was quick to lash out against the NATO-backed National Transitional Council (NTC), nominally the ruling government of Libya, saying it was “an attempt to hijack the revolution.”The NTC’s leadership was mostly based in Eastern Libya, and trying to become a “nationwide” movement after the civil war absorbed a lot of Gadhafi regime bureaucrats, while cutting most of the Western militias out of government entirely.
Ibrahim al-Madani, one of the militia commanders who joined the federation, insisted the group will not lay down its weapons for the NTC, adding that the civil war was not “against Gadhafi but against a corrupt regime” and that they needed to be convinced the NTC was better.
and.....
http://www.debka.com/article/21738/
Intelligence experts: No proven links between Bangkok blasts and Indian, Georgian attacks
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report February 14, 2012, 11:21 PM (GMT+02:00)
A year ago, the overwhelming population of Bahrain - most of them poor, neglected Shi'ites treated as third-class citizens, but also educated Sunnis - hit the streets to demand the ruling al-Khalifas allow a minimum of democracy.
Just like Tunisia and Egypt - and unlike Libya and Syria - the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain was indigenous, legitimate, non-violent and uncontaminated by Western or Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) infiltration.
The response was a major crackdown plus a Saudi Arabian invasion over the causeway to Manama. That was the tacit result of a deal struck between the House of Saud and Washington; we give you an Arab resolution allowing you to go to the UN and then launch the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's humanitarian bombing on Libya, you leave us alone to smash this Arab Spring nonsense (see Exposed: the US-Saudi Libya deal Asia Times Online, April 2, 2011.)
The Obama administration took no time to preempt the "celebration" of Bahrain's crushed democracy push by dispatching a State Department honcho to Bahrain.
As reported by the Gulf Daily News, the so-called "Voice of Bahrain" (more like the voice of the al-Khalifas), US Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman widely praised King Hamad's steps to "diffuse tensions" - such as "the release of political prisoners, a partial cabinet reshuffle and the withdrawal of security forces".
Feltman's briefers must have been catatonic, because political prisoners remain in jail, the cabinet reshuffle is cosmetic and security forces are in overdrive repression mode. Feltman said Washington stressed "national dialogue", "made-in-Bahrain" solutions, and no foreign states "interfering in the process". Should Bahrainis follow the NATOGCC model as applied to Syria?
He also said, "Bahrainis can count on US support to back a Bahraini consensus on the way forward" and praised the "sincerity" of Crown Prince Salman, also a deputy supreme commander and conductor of the national dialogue. With friends like these, the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain hardly needs enemies.
So that's Washington's message in a nutshell; make these people stop that noise and we keep our base here to defend you and your cousins from the unwashed masses.
If women are scared, call an invasion
Real life in Bahrain is something completely different. What US corporate media calls a "tense emirate" is still under a de facto martial law. Those "released" pro-democracy protesters - hundreds of them - remain in jail. Human Rights Watch, to its credit, but still relying on understatement, says, "There has been little accountability for torture and killings - crimes in which the Bahrain Defense Force is implicated."
No accountability - in fact.
Anticipating further crackdowns related to the first anniversary of the uprising, the Health Ministry has ordered private hospitals to list to the security apparatus every single injured and wounded person; hundreds of doctors and nurses accused of treating injured protesters have been arrested over the past few months.
The army barbed wired all areas near the Pearl roundabout - where the Pearl monument was razed, the ultimate graphic metaphor of democracy smashed. Two US citizens, Huwaida Arraf and Radhika Sainath, were recently arrested in Manama during a non-violent, peaceful protest. Ayat al-Qormozi was jailed because she read out a poem criticizing King Hamad at the Pearl roundabout.
Last November, the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry accused the al-Khalifas of using "excessive force, including the extraction of forced confessions against detainees". Late January, Amnesty International called them to "investigate and account for the reports of more than a dozen deaths following tear gas use" and called Washington to "suspend transfers of tear gas and other riot control equipment to the Bahraini authorities". Saudi-backed local security relies heavily on Pakistani riot policemen - not to mention made in USA tear gas and stun grenades to disperse every single peaceful anti-government protest. Scores of senior citizens and kids have died from asphyxia after regime troops fired tear gas in residential areas and even into homes. The Saudi-backed repression even hit peaceful mourners who were attending funeral processions of protesters killed by the al-Khalifa security apparatus.
What's the fuss? This is all part of the crown prince's "national dialogue".
Yet even with the non-stop crackdown, demonstrations demanding the al-Khalifas to go happen almost daily. This was never an initial demand of the pro-democracy movement; it became one after the Saudi invasion.
And to prove for good that we're living in a Monty Python's Meaning of Life world, check this interview of King Hamad published by German weekly Der Spiegel [1].
The king says he asked the GCC to invade his country in March 2011 to protect Bahrain's "strategic installations" - "in case Iran would be more aggressive". Tehran had absolutely nothing to do with the protests - caused by a Sunni monarchy that treats the absolute majority of its indigenous subjects like the United Arab Emirates treats its South Asian guest workers.
The king also said that "our women were very scared and it is the duty of a gentleman to protect women". Perhaps instead of an invasion, torture, killings and non-stop repression, the king might have appeased his "scared women" with a state-sponsored handout of Louis Vuitton handbags.
Note
1 See Bahrain's King Says Assad Should Listen to His PeopleDer Spiegel, February 12. Pepe Escobar is the author ofGlobalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book, just out, isObama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report February 14, 2012, 11:21 PM (GMT+02:00)
Explosion in Bangkok
Notwithstanding the loud and angry Israel official contentions that the three explosions in Bangkok Tuesday Feb. 13 were part of an Iranian global terror drive, senior Israeli intelligence sources toldDEBKAfile that no connection – other than circumstantial - had been uncovered as yet between that incident and the sticky-bomb attacks on Israeli official cars in New Delhi and the Georgian capital of Tbilisi 24 hours earlier.
The wife of an Israeli official and three Indians were seriously wounded in the first attack, which Indian home minister P Chidambaram attributed to a “very well trained person.”
In contrast, the Bangkok episode stands out as bizarre and aberrant: No terrorist attack actually took place there and there is no proof that the three persons who rented an apartment in the city were preparing to attack Israelis or anyone else, although they had bomb materials with them.
Something caused those materials to blow up and all three took to their heels. One of the trio, identified by his Iranian passport as Saeib Morabi, kept the explosives with him. He threw one at a local cab driver who refused to pick him up and another device at a policeman who came to arrest him. The second bomb bounced back and blew off one of his legs.
Senior intelligence experts find this conduct incredible. A terrorist on the run would above all keep his head down and avoid attracting attention. He would certainly not start throwing bombs on busy foreign streets.
Neither would members of a terrorist cell operate use their real identities and carry genuine passports. Those passports were used to rent an apartment in Bangkok on Feb. 8.
So why did Israeli officials assert so confidently that a major terrorist attack had been planned in Bangkok as part of the Iranian global campaign? Three reasons:
1. There are no plans for retaliation;
2. Israeli counter-terror agencies failed to see the New Delhi and Tbilisi bombing attacks coming on Feb. 13 and missed the start of a fresh wave of terror;
3. They are in the dark about the source or sources of the attacks on Israeli diplomats abroad and the investigations have a long way to go.
Tuesday, Thai police declined to make any link between the three explosions Tuesday and the arrest last month of a Lebanese man in Bangkok who had links to Hizballah.
Senior intelligence experts find this conduct incredible. A terrorist on the run would above all keep his head down and avoid attracting attention. He would certainly not start throwing bombs on busy foreign streets.
Neither would members of a terrorist cell operate use their real identities and carry genuine passports. Those passports were used to rent an apartment in Bangkok on Feb. 8.
So why did Israeli officials assert so confidently that a major terrorist attack had been planned in Bangkok as part of the Iranian global campaign? Three reasons:
1. There are no plans for retaliation;
2. Israeli counter-terror agencies failed to see the New Delhi and Tbilisi bombing attacks coming on Feb. 13 and missed the start of a fresh wave of terror;
3. They are in the dark about the source or sources of the attacks on Israeli diplomats abroad and the investigations have a long way to go.
Tuesday, Thai police declined to make any link between the three explosions Tuesday and the arrest last month of a Lebanese man in Bangkok who had links to Hizballah.
At first, Israeli terrorist investigators assumed Hizballah carried out the bomb attacks on diplomats in Georgia and India to mark the fourth anniversary of the death of the Lebanese Shiite group’s commander in chief Imad Moughniyeh.
They shifted ground when it was discovered that a motorcyclist had attached a magnetic bomb to the Talya Koren’s car not far from the Israeli embassy, and noted that the attack mirrored the method used in the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran.
Tuesday, Iranian spokesmen stopped denying responsibility for the incidents. Instead, Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, avoiding mention of Georgia and India, said this: “The Supreme Leader’s remarks indicate that we will never and under no circumstances back down and give in to the enemy’s threats, but we will make threats against them using appropriate mechanisms.”
He was confirming the strategy laid down at a three-way meeting in the summer of 2011 meeting between Vahidi, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah, which DEBKAfile reported at the time from its military and intelligence sources.
Tuesday, Iranian spokesmen stopped denying responsibility for the incidents. Instead, Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, avoiding mention of Georgia and India, said this: “The Supreme Leader’s remarks indicate that we will never and under no circumstances back down and give in to the enemy’s threats, but we will make threats against them using appropriate mechanisms.”
He was confirming the strategy laid down at a three-way meeting in the summer of 2011 meeting between Vahidi, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah, which DEBKAfile reported at the time from its military and intelligence sources.
and.....
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NB15Ak03.html
How poignant that the first anniversary of a true Arab pro-democracy movement in the Persian Gulf - then ruthlessly crushed - falls on February 14, when Valentine's Day is celebrated in the West. Talk about a doomed love affair.
And how does Washington honor this tragic love story? By resuming arms sales to the repressive Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain.
So just to recap; United States President Barack Obama told Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to "step aside and allow a democratic transition to proceed immediately" while King Hamad al-Khalifa gets new toys to crack down on his subversively pro-democratic subjects.
Is this a case of cognitive dissonance? Of course not; after all Syria is supported by Russia and China at the United Nations Security Council while Bahrain hosts the US's Fifth Fleet - the defender of the "free world" against those evil Iranians who want to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
And how does Washington honor this tragic love story? By resuming arms sales to the repressive Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain.
So just to recap; United States President Barack Obama told Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to "step aside and allow a democratic transition to proceed immediately" while King Hamad al-Khalifa gets new toys to crack down on his subversively pro-democratic subjects.
Is this a case of cognitive dissonance? Of course not; after all Syria is supported by Russia and China at the United Nations Security Council while Bahrain hosts the US's Fifth Fleet - the defender of the "free world" against those evil Iranians who want to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
A year ago, the overwhelming population of Bahrain - most of them poor, neglected Shi'ites treated as third-class citizens, but also educated Sunnis - hit the streets to demand the ruling al-Khalifas allow a minimum of democracy.
Just like Tunisia and Egypt - and unlike Libya and Syria - the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain was indigenous, legitimate, non-violent and uncontaminated by Western or Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) infiltration.
The response was a major crackdown plus a Saudi Arabian invasion over the causeway to Manama. That was the tacit result of a deal struck between the House of Saud and Washington; we give you an Arab resolution allowing you to go to the UN and then launch the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's humanitarian bombing on Libya, you leave us alone to smash this Arab Spring nonsense (see Exposed: the US-Saudi Libya deal Asia Times Online, April 2, 2011.)
The Obama administration took no time to preempt the "celebration" of Bahrain's crushed democracy push by dispatching a State Department honcho to Bahrain.
As reported by the Gulf Daily News, the so-called "Voice of Bahrain" (more like the voice of the al-Khalifas), US Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman widely praised King Hamad's steps to "diffuse tensions" - such as "the release of political prisoners, a partial cabinet reshuffle and the withdrawal of security forces".
Feltman's briefers must have been catatonic, because political prisoners remain in jail, the cabinet reshuffle is cosmetic and security forces are in overdrive repression mode. Feltman said Washington stressed "national dialogue", "made-in-Bahrain" solutions, and no foreign states "interfering in the process". Should Bahrainis follow the NATOGCC model as applied to Syria?
He also said, "Bahrainis can count on US support to back a Bahraini consensus on the way forward" and praised the "sincerity" of Crown Prince Salman, also a deputy supreme commander and conductor of the national dialogue. With friends like these, the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain hardly needs enemies.
So that's Washington's message in a nutshell; make these people stop that noise and we keep our base here to defend you and your cousins from the unwashed masses.
If women are scared, call an invasion
Real life in Bahrain is something completely different. What US corporate media calls a "tense emirate" is still under a de facto martial law. Those "released" pro-democracy protesters - hundreds of them - remain in jail. Human Rights Watch, to its credit, but still relying on understatement, says, "There has been little accountability for torture and killings - crimes in which the Bahrain Defense Force is implicated."
No accountability - in fact.
Anticipating further crackdowns related to the first anniversary of the uprising, the Health Ministry has ordered private hospitals to list to the security apparatus every single injured and wounded person; hundreds of doctors and nurses accused of treating injured protesters have been arrested over the past few months.
The army barbed wired all areas near the Pearl roundabout - where the Pearl monument was razed, the ultimate graphic metaphor of democracy smashed. Two US citizens, Huwaida Arraf and Radhika Sainath, were recently arrested in Manama during a non-violent, peaceful protest. Ayat al-Qormozi was jailed because she read out a poem criticizing King Hamad at the Pearl roundabout.
Last November, the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry accused the al-Khalifas of using "excessive force, including the extraction of forced confessions against detainees". Late January, Amnesty International called them to "investigate and account for the reports of more than a dozen deaths following tear gas use" and called Washington to "suspend transfers of tear gas and other riot control equipment to the Bahraini authorities". Saudi-backed local security relies heavily on Pakistani riot policemen - not to mention made in USA tear gas and stun grenades to disperse every single peaceful anti-government protest. Scores of senior citizens and kids have died from asphyxia after regime troops fired tear gas in residential areas and even into homes. The Saudi-backed repression even hit peaceful mourners who were attending funeral processions of protesters killed by the al-Khalifa security apparatus.
What's the fuss? This is all part of the crown prince's "national dialogue".
Yet even with the non-stop crackdown, demonstrations demanding the al-Khalifas to go happen almost daily. This was never an initial demand of the pro-democracy movement; it became one after the Saudi invasion.
And to prove for good that we're living in a Monty Python's Meaning of Life world, check this interview of King Hamad published by German weekly Der Spiegel [1].
The king says he asked the GCC to invade his country in March 2011 to protect Bahrain's "strategic installations" - "in case Iran would be more aggressive". Tehran had absolutely nothing to do with the protests - caused by a Sunni monarchy that treats the absolute majority of its indigenous subjects like the United Arab Emirates treats its South Asian guest workers.
The king also said that "our women were very scared and it is the duty of a gentleman to protect women". Perhaps instead of an invasion, torture, killings and non-stop repression, the king might have appeased his "scared women" with a state-sponsored handout of Louis Vuitton handbags.
Note
1 See Bahrain's King Says Assad Should Listen to His PeopleDer Spiegel, February 12. Pepe Escobar is the author ofGlobalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book, just out, isObama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
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