Establishment’s Libya War Lies Unravelling

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The lies surrounding the Obama administration’s United Nations-approved war on Libya are unravelling faster than ever. From the lies about an imminent Rwanda-style “genocide” to the falsehoods promoted surrounding the post-war attack on the U.S. government facility in Benghazi that left the American ambassador and others dead, it appears to all be coming apart at the seams.

Even senior U.S. intelligence officials and retired American generals on the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi are now speaking out. More than a few experts have now denounced, among other propaganda, the blatantly false narrative used to unconstitutionally launch the regime-change operation against strongman Moammar Gadhafi, and to essentially “switch sides” in the terror war by supporting self-declared al-Qaeda “rebels.” As a result of the propaganda and subsequent war, meanwhile, Libya has now become a terror state infested with ISIS, al-Qaeda, and more.

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In an explosive investigation by the Washington Times, close to a dozen U.S. defense and intelligence officials revealed that there was never actually any specific information to suggest that Gadhafi was planning to launch “genocide.” In fact, as The New American reported years ago citing other sources, there was abundant intelligence available that contradicted the false narrative pushed by the administration. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, currently being pushed by the establishment as a Democrat presidential candidate, relied on the claims about allegedly impending “genocide” as the essential argument for U.S. military intervention to overthrow the Libyan dictator. To do that, the Times probe revealed, she had to cast aside the concerns of top U.S. military officials, with “speculative arguments” often trumping information being reported from the ground.

In the Times exposé, Clinton was portrayed as the most rabid proponent of waging war on Gadhafi, even though, in the end, Obama reportedly made the final decision to deploy U.S. forces without any semblance of constitutional or congressional authority to do so. In March of 2011, for example, Clinton claimed that the Gadhafi regime was on the verge of unleashing “genocide” against civilians in Benghazi on par with Rwanda and Bosnia. That was despite the fact that “the information being gathered by the intelligence community was at loggerheads with claims of the main supporters for war with Libya” such as Clinton, Sen. John McCain, Sen. John Kerry, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, and Obama “adviser” Samantha Power. Clinton served a key role as propagandist in spreading claims that U.S. intelligence agencies knew to be false or grossly exaggerated.

“Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled,” Clinton said in a TV interview after the Obama administration supported the UN measure purporting to “authorize” the war. (The Constitution requires a declaration of war from Congress.) If “we were sitting here, the cries would be, ‘Why did the United States not do anything?’” After the war and the summary execution of Gadhafi by Obama administration-backed jihadist “rebels,” many of whom boasted of having fought U.S. troops in Iraq years before, Clinton could barely contain her ghoulish glee. “We came. We saw. He died,” Clinton boasted, borrowing a slightly modified version of the famous phrase attributed to Roman Emperor Julius Caesar.

Despite top Obama officials’ claims of imminent genocide, the Times report revealed that the Pentagon’s findings suggested that Gadhafi was actually unlikely to inflict large civilian casualties in his war against jihadist rebels, who viewed the tyrant as an “apostate.” Indeed, the “specific intelligence” revealed that Gadhafi had sent a relatively small force to crush the al-Qaeda-linked rebels, killing about 400 and wounding more — nothing even remotely approaching the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians killed in Rwanda and Bosnia. The intelligence gathered by U.S. officials even suggested that most civilians had already fled from Benghazi, and defense officials had direct information from an intelligence asset indicating that Gadhafi had specifically ordered that no attacks be carried out against civilians, the Times reported, citing all of the sources it spoke with. In other words, U.S. intelligence directly contradicted what Clinton, Obama, and other war proponents were claiming publicly.

In its groundbreaking report, headlined “Hillary Clinton’s ‘WMD’ moment: U.S. intelligence saw false narrative in Libya,” the Times also noted that the American intelligence community was not the only source that had serious concerns surrounding Clinton’s Libya claims. The Pentagon and anti-war Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who argued that Obama’s UN-backed war was an “impeachable offense” because the president failed to obtain permission from Congress, actually sent an emissary to discuss the narrative with Gadhafi officials. “It was like the WMDs in Iraq. It was based on a false report,” the late despot’s son, Seif Gadhafi, said in a secretly recorded call in 2011 with Rep. Kucinich. “Libyan airplanes bombing demonstrators, Libyan airplanes bombing districts in Tripoli, Libyan army killed thousands, etc., etc., and now the whole world found there is no single evidence that such things happened in Libya.”

Indeed, as The New American magazine reported after Gadhafi was killed, that was all very clear years ago. Academics who looked at the situation confirmed it, as did Russian media reports citing aerial intelligence and other information. Other even more outlandish claims — Ambassador Rice, for example, claimed Gadhafi had given his soldiers “Viagra” to go on a “rape spree” — had crumbled long before then, with even U.S. intelligence officials discrediting the claims. “Evidence is now in that President Barack Obama grossly exaggerated the humanitarian threat to justify military action in Libya,” noted University of Texas public affairs professor Alan Kuperman, an expert on humanitarian intervention, in a piece for the Boston Globe. He reiterated his findings in the Times article.

Before the investigative piece by the Times, WND interviewed members of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi and exposed other wide-ranging problems with the establishment’s Libya deception. Among other concerns, they found that Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in a terror attack in Benghazi, was actually managing a secret gun-running operation from the compound that came under assault. Much like the “Fast and Furious” scheme arming Mexican drug cartels, the administration’s gun-trafficking to jihadists was never authorized by Congress. In an interim report on Benghazi under the banner “Changing sides in the War on Terror,” the commission noted that the administration “was fully aware of and facilitating the delivery of weapons to the Al Qaeda-dominated rebel militias throughout the 2011 rebellion.” A U.S. citizen could be held by the military indefinitely for such a crime under existing statutes.

As The New American and numerous other sources were reporting almost from the start of the conflict, the rebels actually made no secret of their al-Qaeda affiliations. According to comments made to WND by the commission’s Clare Lopez, a former career operations officer with the CIA who now serves as vice president for research at the Center for Security Policy, Obama’s ambassador was “facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-related militia in Libya.” Incredibly, Stevens was reportedly coordinating with, among others, Abdelhakim Belhadj, the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which the U.S. military had previously identified as an al-Qaeda organization. The Muslim Brotherhood was also crucial. After the death of Gadhafi, Ambassador Stevens was busy running weapons from Libya to al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Syria for a “regime change” mission against despot Bashar al-Assad, Lopez confirmed. The fruits of that scheme are now clear to see.

Unsurprisingly, Clinton’s prospective opponents in 2016 are already lambasting her over Libya, with Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a leading GOP prospective presidential contender, referring to it as “Hillary’s War.” “I think there was a rush headlong toward war in Libya and [the State Department and the administration] weren’t listening to anyone saying anything otherwise, including the Defense Department and intelligence communities, who were saying, ‘Hold on a minute. This may not be a good idea,’” Paul was quoted as saying by the Times. “Hillary’s judgment has to be questioned. Her eagerness for war in Libya should preclude her from being considered the next commander in chief.” Whether there will be accountability for any of the officials involved in embroiling U.S. troops in a war on behalf of jihadists against a former terror-war ally, all without any lawful authority to do so, remains to be seen.

As The New American reported last month, Libya is still descending further into the abyss following the Obama-Clinton-UN “regime-change” scheme. It has now essentially become a terror state, with groups ranging from the Islamic State (ISIS) to al-Qaeda openly roaming the capital and operating training centers across large swaths of the nation under their control. Libya today, following what analysts and even former U.S. generals described as Obama “switching sides” in the terror war, also features multiple self-styled “governments” battling each other for control over the ruins and traumatized survivors. Amid the chaos, it has become open season on Christians and journalists, too. And as the rationale for the war is exposed as completely fraudulent — not even considering the lack of any authority to wage it — the American people now have some serious questions to ask themselves, and their politicians.

Photo of Hillary Clinton: AP Images

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected]

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