CounterPunch Diary
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN |
April 15 – 17, 2011
On closer inspection, the reports suggest something less than a medieval siege or Leningrad. Reuter’s man in Misrata could only come up with this: “A local doctor told Al Jazeera at least eight people died and seven others were wounded in the second day of intense bombardment of Misrata, a lone rebel bastion in western Libya.” The UK Independent’s Kim Sengupta did better: “The attacks started early in the morning as the residents of this besieged and battered city were starting their hours of queuing for bread…. Even by the grim standards of Misrata, the most violent battleground of this savage civil war, what happened yesterday was a cause of deep shock….At least 16 people died, and 29 were injured, almost all of them civilians – including a mother and her two young daughters.”
It’s always a cause for dismay that any civilians die in such conflicts but again, 16 fatalities fall well short of medieval catastrophe. Sengupta noted that NATO is simultaneously bombing Tripoli, though no journalists seemed to be available to report what sort of damage or casualties had been inflicted. Meanwhile the hated leader appeared to have no qualms in touring the city in an open jeep.
It seems that the rebels might actually be under the overall supervision of the international banking industry, rather than the oil majors. On March 19 they announced the “[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi.’”
CNBC senior editor John Carneyasked, “Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.”
Ellen Brown, author of the terrific Web of Debt: the Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, wrote recently about the rebels’ sophisticated financial operations in the following terms:
“And that brings us back to the puzzle of the Libyan central bank. In an article posted on the Market Oracle, Eric Encina observed: ‘One seldom mentioned fact by western politicians and media pundits: the Central Bank of Libya is 100% State Owned. . . . Currently, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Few can argue that Libya is a sovereign nation with its own great resources, able to sustain its own economic destiny. One major problem for globalist banking cartels is that in order to do business with Libya, they must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Hence, taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.’”
I’d really like to see an objective account of Qaddafi’s allocation of oil revenues versus the US’s, in terms of social improvement.
The tiny number of planes now deployed by France and Italy, after the Americans withdrew their attack aircraft and handed off the mission, displays the half-hearted nature of the intervention. (This could be the reason why the Pentagon is now saying that U.S. aircraft are again flying missions over Libya.)
Naval War College Review this last winter. Davidson was chiefly concerned with the performance (lamentable) of the military justice system in connection with episodes of friendly fire, which he defines as the accidental killing in a combat setting of one soldier by another of the same or an allied force”.
Another military military scholar, Kenneth K. Steinweg, wrote a paper, Dealing Realistically with Fratricide (Parameters, Spring 1995), estimating that 10 to 15 per cent of US casualties during the 20th century were caused by friendly fire, which equates to between 177,000 and 250,000 casualties.
Historical examples of friendly fire are so prevalent as to be characterized as normal rather than exceptional. In some cases, friendly fire was the result of inexperience and inadequate training.
For example, in 1643, during the English Civil War, poorly trained and inexperienced parliamentary infantry organised in three lines attacked a heavily fortified building held by royalist troops. Instead of the forward line firing first and then retiring to the rear to re-load while the next line in turn fired, all three fired simultaneously, effectively eliminating the front rank.
A particularly bitter case came right at the end of World War Two when RAF pilots flying Typhoons attacked four German ships in the Bay of Lubeck in the Baltic Sea, believing them to be carrying escaping SS officers.
The Typhoons sank the ships and then, under orders to spare no one, spent an hour strafing the survivors in the water, only to find later that they had machine-gunned about 10,000 Jews from the Neuengamme Camp in northern Germany.
A Medal for Shaukat
On March 11 the New York Times gave top billing to a story by Jane Perlez and Ismail Khan, headed “Pakistan Tells U.S. It Must Sharply Cut C.I.A. Activities. The second paragraph told NYT readers that “Pakistani and American officials said in interviews that the demand that the United States scale back its presence was the immediate fallout from the arrest in Pakistan of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security officer who killed two men in January during what he said was an attempt to rob him.”
The story was interesting but would have been somewhat familiar to readers of this site. Our intrepid correspondent in Lahore, Brigadier Shaukat Qadir (late of the Pakistan armed forces) had an infinitely better and more detailed story on March 22, detailing the deal struck between the top military officers of the US and Pakistan, to prompt Davis’ release.
ALEX COCKBURN—the current oldest member of the famous leftwing Cockburn clan— is a legendary media and cultural critic and founder of Counterpunch, one of the largest independent progressive sites in the English language.
To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
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