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| Libya |
Πηγή: Eurasia Review
By Horace G. Campbell
Nov 18 2012
Carter Ham has been removed as head of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM). General Petraeus resigned from the CIA on November 9. Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette was reassigned on October 26 as the commander of the USS John C. Stennis strike group. These three changes at the top of the US military establishment are all related to the failed NATO intervention in North Africa and the subsequent war and killings that have been unleashed by militias in Libya, especially in Benghazi. These changes exposed the new autonomy and war fighting capabilities that were being experimented where the CIA and the leaders of the military command structures such as AFRICOM and Central Command (CENTCOM) made policy independent of the executive branch and civilian leadership. This experiment shattered with devastating consequences for the entire military apparatus ensnaring generals, financial speculators, media specialists on the military and politicians.
On October 18, 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that President Obama will nominate General David Rodriguez to succeed General Carter Ham as commander of U.S. Africa Command. Carter Ham had taken over as commander of AFRICOM from General William ‘Kip’ Ward on March 8, 2011 and had been placed before the international news as the person in charge of the NATO-led intervention in Libya, when it was assumed that the intervention would be over in one month. This war dragged on for more than one year, and a year later, after the NATO forces announced ‘success’ in Libya, the battles with the sponsored militias led to the killing of the US Ambassador to Libya on September 11, 2012. One month after the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, (one State Department high tech specialist and two CIA operatives) in the US ‘facility’ in Benghazi, the internal investigations into the US military response led to the nomination of General David Rodriquez. If and when David Rodriquez is confirmed by the US Senate, AFRICOM will have been led by three different commanders in less than four years.
Two days after Barack Obama was re-elected the President of the United States, on November 9, it was announced that General David Petraeus, a retired four-star general and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was resigning from his position. David H. Petraeus, who had courted the press and academia to build a reputation as a successful soldier-scholar, resigned suddenly as C.I.A. director after evidence of an extramarital affair began to come into the public arena. Inside Washington, the extramarital affair was an open secret that there was a relationship with the biographer who had written, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. This book was published in January 2012 and when Paula Broadwell appeared on the Daily Show in January to promote her biography of General Petraeus, she was full of innuendo so that those who could read the subtext of her message could discern what she was attempting to communicate. The corporate media reported that the extramarital affair had been uncovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and that it reflected ‘poor judgment’ on the part of the general. Between October 18, when the Commander of Africom was relieved, and November 9, when General Petraeus resigned, there had been a major effort to present information on Benghazi that would influence the outcome of the presidential elections of November 6. In military parlance, this effort of the neo-conservatives to place responsibility for the Benghazi debacle on the White House would have been a military information operation. The very close and intimate relationship between the US media, academia and the military had been refined in the new war fighting template that had been experimented since the passing of the Patriot Act and the integration between the media, high tech companies and robotic unmanned weapons of death, called drones. In this war fighting template, grand failures such as the complete fiasco in Iraq and the massive drug war in Afghanistan had been covered up with journalists and academics serving the interests of one branch of the military. This cover-up has been buttressed by partisan accounts of the role of differing Generals. The most recent book, by Thomas Ricks, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, was one representation of the new embrace between the media and sections of the military establishment. In that book, numerous generals were critiqued for their incompetence and lack of vision. Tom Ricks was joining an argument that many of these Generals should have been fired. Of General Petraeus, Tom Ricks was full of praise noting that, Petraeus showed ‘ real independence of thought … he is an adaptive general.’ In that book, Petraeus was one with good judgment while others such as Tommy Franks and General Casey were compared to General William Westmoreland, poster general of failure in Vietnam.
The double speak and web of sex/intrigue/corruption in the military is now blown wide open for the world to see where generals such as John Allen, Commander of the US military in Afghanistan who was supposed to be in the midst of a war, had time and space to send 20-30,000 pages of email to Jill Kelley, the woman in Tampa, Florida, who was seen by. General Petraeus’s mistress as a rival for his attentions. Media hype about ‘inappropriate communication’ with Jill Kelley cannot divert attention from the realities of the current state of warfare and insecurity in Libya where over 50,000 have lost their lives, since NATO intervened with the ’responsibility to protect.’
For the peoples of Libya, the United Nations and the peace community, this unfolding Petraeus scandal is of particular interest because of the close relationships between the oil companies, western intelligence/military agencies and the marauding militias that are now coercing Libyan citizens. The failure of the counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan had now come out in Libya. It is All in. When the information about the attack on the US ‘facility’ in Benghazi was first brought to light, there had been confusion. Was the space that was attacked a ‘consulate,’ a State Department ‘facility, ’a CIA safe house, or indeed a prison for captured militias? This confusion took attention away from the reality that elements in the military had formulated a policy to align with certain militia groups in Eastern Libya and that these militias (sometimes called jihadists) had in the past been linked to groups that the US called ‘terrorist organizations.’ France, the CIA, and the AFRICOM had aligned with these jihadists to destabilize Libya, freeze billions of dollars of assets, execute Gaddafi and kept the alliance going using Libya as a rear base in the current drive for regime-change in Syria.
The Republicans had sought to benefit from the confusion and disinformation that had been spun by the intelligence and the military about what were the real causes of the death of the ambassador in Benghazi. There had been hearings called before the Republican-controlled Congress, the State Department issued statements, the CIA issued a timeline of the events in Benghazi on the night of September 11 and the conservative media sought to politicise the events to present a picture of incompetence on the part of the Obamas Administration. With every press release and timeline that was presented there was information that posed new questions about the rot and web of corruption of the US military. After General David Petraeus resigned, it was reported in the US press that he had travelled to Libya at the end of October to carry out his own investigation (some would say cover-up). No sooner had this information came out than it was revealed that the CIA had been holding Libyan militias as prisoners in the CIA annex in Benghazi. This information, which was delivered by Paula Broadwell in a speech before the University of Denver on October 26, deepened the intrigue about what was going on in Libya.
Petraeus had been the commander of the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan at a moment in the history of the United States when military information operations were as important as weapons. According to the US military doctrine in this new kind of warfare there had been the struggle to control the narrative. The US military could never control the narrative on Africa because the history of white supremacy and chauvinism precluded a clear understanding of the dynamics of self-determination in Africa. In the ten years of the absolute failures of the US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, this effort to control the narrative had involved a massive disinformation campaign against US citizens. In the specific case of Libya, the corporate media had presented the ‘end of the war’ as a victory for the forces of NATO. The truth was never divulged that there is still fighting going on in Libya with the most recent battles at Bani Walid an explicit statement on the ongoing war.
This ‘successful’ NATO intervention had been sold as the narrative until the death of Ambassador Stevens unfolded the layered nature of the war. Between the removal of General Carter Ham and the resignation of General Petraeus there had been the replacement of Rear Adm. Charles M. Gaouette as the commander of the USS John C. Stennis strike group. The full back story relating to Petraeus and Libya is still unfolding, but for this week we want to focus on how structures, such as the US Africa command, sought to function in a world as if the Command was a parallel government with its own access to AID resources, financing, health providers, private military contractors, and access to aircraft carrier strike groups such as the John Stennis. This was a military and intelligence integration, independent of the executive that was out of control and establishing policy.
