The US and Gaddafi: The murderer calls for an
investigation of the crime
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton solemnly announced Sunday
that Washington “strongly supports” an independent investigation
into the barbaric murder of Libya’s deposed head of state Muammar
Gaddafi.
What exactly is it that Ms. Clinton wants investigated that she
doesn’t already know?
Gaddafi was captured Thursday while fleeing his hometown of Sirte.
Over the previous month Sirte had been under continuous NATO
bombardment and a brutal siege by the so-called “rebels” that
destroyed the city and claimed untold numbers of civilian dead and
wounded.
His convoy, detected by US spy planes, was attacked first by an
American Predator drone aircraft, operated by remote control from
an airbase in Nevada. An American AWAC surveillance aircraft then
called in French fighter jets, which dropped two 500-pound bombs on
the vehicles in which Colonel Gaddafi and his entourage were
fleeing.
The air strikes left dozens dead and the Libyan leader wounded. He
was then hunted down by the NATO-backed “rebels,” who were
operating together with “advisors” from the SAS British special
forces.
Gaddafi’s final moments have been recorded in a number of jumpy
videos filmed on his attackers’ cell phones. They show a wounded
Gaddafi shouting and feebly resisting a mob of frenzied militiamen
who are taunting and attacking him, while screaming “Allahu
Akbar”—“God is greatest.” He is dragged, kicked and beaten bloody
with guns and fists before being thrown onto the hood of a vehicle.
Footage shows a gun placed to his head and then his body on the
pavement, blood pouring from the back of his skull.
As one member of the NATO-backed National Transitional Council
(NTC) based in Benghazi has succinctly stated, “They beat him very
harshly, and then they killed him.”
Asked by ABC’s Christiane Amanpour for her “gut reaction” to the
hideous cell phone videos, Clinton responded, “Well, Christine, you
know, obviously, no one wants to see any human being in that
condition.”
Clinton’s statements were clearly well rehearsed, aimed at
assuaging the worldwide revulsion over the footage of Gaddafi’s
lynching. As for her “gut reaction,” that was revealed on the day
of the killing itself, when she laughingly told a reporter, “We
came, we saw, he died.”
Indeed, barely 48 hours before the lynching of Gaddafi, the US
secretary of state had flown into Tripoli, where she declared that
the Libyan leader should be “captured or killed” as soon as
possible.
This was hardly an offhand comment. The entire eight-month US-NATO
war against Libya has been waged with the aim of “regime change,”
ousting Gaddafi and installing a client regime that would more
pliantly do the bidding of Washington and its NATO allies, along
with the Western energy conglomerates.
Utilizing the popular upheavals in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt as
a cover, the US and its allies deliberately fomented armed
confrontation in Libya and then sought to drum up support and
secure UN sanction for intervention on the phony pretext of
protecting civilian lives.
Under this “humanitarian” banner they waged a relentless and
criminal air war against the oil-rich North African country, while
repeatedly staging missile strikes and bombings targeting Gaddafi
and his family. A NATO missile strike on a Gaddafi residence in
Tripoli on May 1 killed one of Gaddafi’s sons and three
grandchildren. All of American and NATO technical resources were
trained on Libya in an effort to locate the Libyan leader and kill
him.
Nor was this the first such effort. As early as 1969, as Henry
Kissinger revealed in his memoirs, discussions were held within the
US government about covert action to assassinate Gaddafi, largely
because of his radical Arab nationalism, his interference with
US-Saudi control over OPEC oil policies and his closing down of the
Pentagon’s biggest airbase on the African continent. In 1986, the
Reagan administration carried out the US bombing of Gaddafi’s
Tripoli compound. And, in the 1990s, Britain’s intelligence
service, MI6, conspired with Islamist elements in a bid to kill
him.
While Gaddafi had, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution,
sought to accommodate himself to the West, foreswearing “weapons of
mass destruction” and actively collaborating in the US “global war
on terror,” the imperialist powers neither forgave nor forgot his
earlier offenses.
For Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration to call for an
investigation of the killing of Gaddafi goes well beyond cynicism.
It is as if the Eisenhower administration had demanded an
investigation of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, or the Nixon
White House called for an international probe of the death of
Salvador Allende.
The main difference is that in those days it was the CIA that was
known as “Murder, Inc.” because of its clandestine operations. Now
the US government as a whole openly and unabashedly embraces
assassination as a principal tool of foreign policy.
On three occasions in less than six months, President Obama has
paraded before the television cameras to announce unlawful
killings. Last May it was the liquidation of Osama bin Laden, who
was shot to death, unarmed, by US special operations troops. In
September came the assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki,
in Yemen by means of a Hellfire missile. Killed in the attack was a
second US citizen, Samir Khan. Now Obama has claimed credit for the
lynching of Gaddafi.
Countless others have been similarly murdered with less fanfare in
Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Two weeks after the killing
of Awlaki, a Hellfire missile claimed the life of his 16-year-old
son, Abdulrahman, like his father an American-born US citizen. This
attack, which killed eight others, most of them also minors, went
virtually unreported in the American mass media.
Instead, media pundits debate whether these “foreign policy
successes” will help the president’s reelection bid, with Obama
presumably running on his record as “assassin-in-chief,” approving
“kill lists” drawn up by a secret committee that has effectively
become a new extra-constitutional branch of the US government.
The
savage murder of Muammar Gaddafi is emblematic of an utterly
lawless and violent policy on the part of the American ruling
elite, which is desperately seeking to offset the economic decline
of American capitalism by means of an endless series of wars and
provocations aimed at seizing control of vital resources and
markets.
With good reason, Obama and Hillary Clinton believe they have
nothing to fear from an investigation of Gaddafi’s murder by the
United Nations or the International Criminal Court. Nevertheless,
the reckless attempt to reimpose colonialism in the Middle East and
North Africa will not resolve, but will only deepen, the insoluble
economic and social contradictions and crisis of American and world
capitalism.
This crisis is bringing the working class internationally into
struggle and creating the conditions for a revolutionary settling
of accounts with the crimes of US imperialism.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/pers-o24.shtml
