No hope for Libya: Part II

Congress, Charlene Lamb told US lawmakers that the intelligence compound depended on the militia in Benghazi known as the 17th February Brigade. Lamb, Deputy assistant secretary State Depart­ment’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, told Congress on October 10 that in terms of armed secu­rity personnel, there were five Diplomatic Security agents on the com­pound on September 11.
“There were also three members of the Libyan 17th February Brigade” — a reference to the Libyans hired to guard the American compound.
The third level was the jockeying between French, British, Italian and US oil companies over political domi­nance in Benghazi. Traditionally, the Italians had been a force on the ground in Libya, but during the NATO oper­ations French, British and WE operatives muscled out the Italians as junior partners in the impe­rial operation.
These factors did not come out in the hearings, but what did come out was the inter-agency conflicts between the State Department and the Central Intelli­gence Agency. The US military has kept quiet as these inter-agency squabbles were played out on C Span.
Even before the hearings, Eric Nordstrom had engaged in a media battle to place his stamp on the events lead­ing up to the death of the ambassador. In his testimony, the regional security officer who served about 10 months in Libya, said he sought to obtain more agents and to extend a mission for the security site team in Libya.
There was in fact need for security, but as the diary of ambassador Stevens showed, he was opposed to the pres­ence of official State Department personnel because of the integration of the private contractors, the intelligence operatives and the militias.
Earlier in June there had been an attack on the intelli­gence facility that was called a “consulate,” a June 6 bomb attack on the Benghazi consulate, a June 11 rocket-pro­pelled grenade attack on a convoy carrying Britain’s ambassador to Libya and an August 27 State Department travel warning noting the threat of car bombings and assassinations in Tripoli and Benghazi.
However, despite these attacks Stevens argued to the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security that the matter of security should not be entrusted in the hands the Marines who usually guarded US diplomatic estab­lishments. Stevens took this decision to “show faith in Libya’s new leaders,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which wrote: “Officials say Mr Stevens person­ally advised against having marines posted at the embassy in Tripoli, apparently to avoid a militarised US presence.”
While the media was hailing ambassador Stevens as a hero, the first major inclination of the depth of intrigue was the struggle between CNN and the State Depart­ment over the contents of the diary of ambas­sador Stevens. This diary and the appointment calen­dar, which was picked up by journalists, were found by journalists and parts of this diary which exposed the multiple roles of Stevens were aired on CNN.
This same network had been complicit in the disinfor­mation during the war, but in the current rat­ings com­petition, CNN did not wait for clearance before expos­ing the activities of Stevens as documented by Stevens him­self. These revelations displeased the State Depart­ment.
While Stevens was given a public tribute by pres­ident Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, the three other US personnel who succumbed to the attack on September 11 were buried quietly so that the local papers from their towns would not raise questions about what they were doing in Benghazi.
When Stevens was killed, the US representa­tive to the United Nations, Susan Rice, stated that the killings took place in the context of the international demonstrations over the obnoxious video about the prophet Mohammed. Soon afterwards it became clearer that the attack on Beng­hazi was not related to the international demonstra­tions, but in relation to the inter-militia warfare in Beng­hazi.
The Republican can­didate for president, Mitt Romney pounced on this dis­parity of the facts and the Republican controlled Congress called hearings to embarrass presi­dent Obama. However, no sooner were the hearings in ses­sion before the Republican lawmak­ers found out that they were opening a can of worms, exposing the extent of the CIA operations in Libya.
Very early in the hear­ings, Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) was the first to unmask the role of the CIA. “Point of order! Point of order!” he called out as a State Depart­ment security official, seated in front of an aerial photo of the US facilities in Benghazi, described the night of the attack. “We’re getting into classified issues that deal with sources and methods that would be totally inappropri­ate in an open forum such as this.”
The State Department official then retorted that the information being presented was available on commer­cial sites and easily retrievable through Google Earth maps. The State Department revealed that the material was unclassified; bring out to the US public the differ­ences between the CIA and the State Department. “I totally object to the use of that photo,” Chaffetz contin­ued. He went on to say that “I was told specifically while I was in Libya I could not and should not ever talk about what you’re showing here today.”
After Representative Chaffetz alerted the world that something valuable was in the photo, the chairman, Dar­rell Issa (R-California), attempted to close the barn door after the horses had been out. “I would direct that that chart be taken down,” he said, although it already had been on C-SPAN. “In this hearing room, we’re not going to point out details of what may still in fact be a facility of the United States government or more facili­ties.”
Dana Milbank from the insider beltway media poked fun on the CIA and how they were outed in the hear­ings. In an article posted on Huffingtonpost, he wrote:
“In their questioning and in the public testimony they invited, the lawmakers managed to disclose, with­out ever mentioning Langley directly, that there was a seven-member ‘rapid response force’ in the compound the State Department was calling an annex. One of the State Department security officials was forced to acknowledge that ‘not necessarily all of the security people’ at the Beng­hazi compounds ‘fell under my direct operational con­trol.’
“And whose control might they have fallen under? Well, presumably it’s the ‘other government agency’ or ‘other government entity’ the lawmakers and witnesses referred to; Issa informed the public that this agency was not the FBI.” The operations of the CIA in Libya had backfired. The plan of the Republicans to make political capital out of this incident had backfired and the entire world was brought closer to the multiple roles of the US mili­tary, private contractors, intelligence operatives and oil companies in Libya.
The number of CIA operatives in Benghazi was also a revelation to the “provisional” government in Libya. When the US evacuated their personnel from Beng­hazi, the Libyans were surprised and wanted greater accounta­bility from the US about their operations.
However, for the US intelligence community, the major question was damage control. “It’s a catastrophic intelli­gence loss,” a US official who had been stationed in Libya told the New York Times. “We got our eyes poked out.” Robert Fisk of the Independent drew the linkages between the NATO intervention in Libya and the esca­lating war in Syria, warning the West of the dangers of its duplicity in the Middle East and North Africa.
Writing after the death of ambassador Stevens, Fisk commented that: “The United States supported the opposition against Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, helped Saudi Arabia and Qatar pour cash and weapons to the militias and had now reaped the whirlwind. America’s Libyan ‘friends’ had turned against them, murdered US ambas­sador Stevens and his colleagues in Benghazi and started an Al-Qaeda-led anti-American protest movement that had consumed the Muslim world.”
Fisk quoted from one of his friends in Syria who was warning against the current escalation of the war: “You know, we’re all sorry about Christopher Stevens. This kind of thing is terrible and he was a good friend to Syria — he understood the Arabs.”
This bite is now being felt even in the halls of the US Congress as the Congressional hearings backfired on the Republicans who had hoped to make political capital out of the events in Benghazi because what is emerging from the Press reports is that the CIA agency was not merely conducting covert surveillance on the Islamists based in eastern Libya, but providing them with direct aid and coordinating their operations with the current war in Syria.
Libya is again dominating the news as the US govern­ment is forced to juggle lies and disinformation. There are now at least seven new books that detail the quagmire of the NATO intervention. Members of the BRICS soci­eties had been angry over the manipulation of the Responsibility to Protect resolution. The anger of Brazil, Russia, India and China must be turned into concrete support for the peoples of Africa and Libya by pressuring the USA and NATO to expel the private contractors and intelligence operatives who are now using Libya as one of the rear bases for the war in Syria.
African people everywhere are mindful of how the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 heralded the start of World War II. The slow and escalating wars across North Africa and the Middle East pose great dangers to humans everywhere. — Pambazuka News.

This is the second and last part of Horace Campbell’s story of Libya published last week.