‘NATO has bombed Libya back to Stone Age’
Former MI5 agent Annie Machon says that the US wants to reinforce the myths that public has been told about NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ intervention, while Libya is being bombed beyond the point of no return.
During her visit to Libya, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has used unusually blunt terms to describe what the United States wants to see happen in Libya, namely the country's former leader Muammar Gaddafi being killed or captured.Machon says even though Gaddafi was a thorn in the side of Western countries for three decades, for the majority of Libyans their quality of life was perfectly fine. “They’ve had free education, free health, they could study abroad. When they got married they got a certain amount of money. So they were rather the envy of many other citizens of African countries. Now, of course, since NATO’s humanitarian intervention the infrastructure of their country has been bombed back to the Stone Age. They will not have the same quality of life. Women probably will not have the same degree of emancipation under any new transitional government. The national wealth is probably going to be siphoned off by Western corporations. Perhaps the standard of living in Libya might have been slightly higher than it perhaps is now in America and the UK with the recession,” she said.Machon agrees the US have been quite unashamed in their statements about wanting regime change in Libya, which she believes is highly illegal. “It is also interesting to see that they are saying this openly when, of course, in the 1990s they were trying to assassinate him covertly through proxy organizations in Libya,” she said. NATO countries have sent advisors to Libya and Machon believes that it was done to insure that humanitarian aid and human rights are upheld. However that might prove to be difficult. She says that nobody seems to be really trying to protect civilians in Benghazi or Sirte. Advisors or not, “Libya is descending into one awful mess.”“Let’s not forget that the UN sanctions change of heart was put in place now on very dubious moral grounds – unsubstantiated rumors of genocide in Benghazi,”she argued. “[Advisors] are probably going there to try and help, but what’s been going on in places like Sirte has been breathtaking hypocrisy. NATO goes in to bomb Gaddafi’s regime out of existence because they are threatening civilians in Benghazi. And now we are looking at a whole range of human rights abuses.”
Meanwhile, for Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire website, the desired result of US intervention – to see Gaddafi killed or captured, as stated by Hillary Clinton – was also not “surprising.” “The policy of targeted assassination is very much a part of US foreign policy,” Azikiwe told RT. “Gaddafi was also targeted for the last eight months for assassination…They put it out broadly with the international community that they want to, in fact, assassinate Gaddafi.”And Clinton’s latest visit to Libya was “designed to bolster the NTC government there,” Azikiwe believes.
An eyewitness of NATO atrocities in Libya, Ali Alkasih, has recently returned from the besieged town of Sirte. He says the humanitarian situation is dire there and ordinary Libyans are tired of it, but if they were given a choice they would still prefer Gaddafi to the American presence.“There is no water there, no medication, they don’t have even oxygen in the hospitals,” he told RT. “I have seen the situation in Sirte, I can assure you it is a disaster. It is a catastrophe. The international law or the international community came with the Resolution 1973, as they said, to protect civilians, but this is not happening at the moment."“Most of the Libyans would rather live peacefully than having NATO or Gaddafi. We don’t want neither Gaddafi, nor NATO [sic]. If the solution was NATO, than Gaddafi is better, our life was better [[under Gaddafi]],” concluded Alkasih.
