by Ellen Brown
The brief visit of
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred
to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in
a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan
leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.
But the victory lap, write Scott
Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times, was premature. Libya was
relegated to the back burner by the State Department, “as the country dissolved
into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling
the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a
Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.”
US-NATO intervention was allegedly
undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human
rights organizations questioned
the claims after finding a lack
of evidence. Today, however, verifiable atrocities are occurring. As Dan
Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post, “the human rights situation in Libya
is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees [including children] languish in
prisons without proper judicial review,’ and ‘kidnappings and targeted killings
are rampant’.”
Before 2011, Libya had
achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil,
its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from
one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical
treatment were
free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated
in an original
system of local democracy. The country boasted the world’s largest
irrigation system, the Great
Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the cities
and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this model
throughout Africa.
But that was before US-NATO
forces bombed
the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on the country. Today the situation
is so dire that President Obama has asked his advisors to draw up options
including a
new military front in Libya, and the Defense Department is reportedly
standing ready with “the full spectrum of military operations required.”
The Secretary of State’s
victory lap was indeed premature, if what we’re talking about is the officially
stated goal of humanitarian intervention. But her newly-released emails reveal
another agenda behind the Libyan war; and this one, it seems, was achieved.
Mission Accomplished?
Of the 3,000 emails released
from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, about a
third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the attorney who
defended her husband in the Monica Lewinsky case. One
of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, reads in part:
Qaddafi’s government
holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver . . . . This gold
was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used
to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan
was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative
to the French franc (CFA).
In a “source comment,” the
original declassified email adds:
According to knowledgeable
individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion.
French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current
rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President
Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According
to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:
1 A desire to gain a
greater share of Libya oil production,
2 Increase French influence in
North Africa,
3 Improve his internal
political situation in France,
4 Provide the French military
with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
5 Address the concern of his
advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant
power in Francophone Africa
Conspicuously absent is any
mention of humanitarian concerns. The objectives are money, power and oil.
Other explosive confirmations
in the newly-published emails are detailed by investigative
journalist Robert Parry. They include admissions of rebel war crimes, of
special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, and of Al
Qaeda embedded in the US-backed opposition. Key propaganda themes for violent
intervention are acknowledged to be mere rumors. Parry suggests they may have
originated with Blumenthal himself. They include the bizarre claim that Qaddafi
had a “rape policy” involving passing Viagra out to his troops, a charge later
raised by UN Ambassador Susan Rice in a UN presentation. Parry asks
rhetorically:
So do you think it would it be
easier for the Obama administration to rally American support behind this
“regime change” by explaining how the French wanted to steal Libya’s wealth and
maintain French neocolonial influence over Africa – or would Americans respond
better to propaganda themes about Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops so
they could rape more women while his snipers targeted innocent children? Bingo!
Toppling the Global Financial
Scheme
Qaddafi’s threatened attempt
to establish an independent African currency was not taken lightly by Western
interests. In 2011, Sarkozy reportedly called the Libyan leader a threat
to the financial security of the world. How could this tiny country of six
million people pose such a threat? First some background.
It is banks, not governments,
that create most of the money in Western economies, as the Bank of
England recently acknowledged. This has been going on for centuries,
through the process called “fractional reserve” lending. Originally, the
reserves were in gold. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt replaced
gold domestically with central bank-created reserves, but gold remained the
reserve currency internationally.
In 1944, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,
to unify this bank-created money system globally. An IMF ruling said that no
paper money could have gold backing. A money supply created privately as debt
at interest requires a continual supply of debtors; and over the next half
century, most developing countries wound up in debt to the IMF.
The loans came with strings attached, including “structural adjustment”
policies involving austerity measures and privatization of public assets.
After 1944, the US dollar
traded interchangeably with gold as global reserve currency. When the US was no
longer able to maintain the dollar’s gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal
with OPEC to “back” the dollar with oil, creating the
“petro-dollar.” Oil would be sold only in US dollars, which would be
deposited in Wall Street and other international banks.
In 2001, dissatisfied with the
shrinking value of the dollars that OPEC was getting for its oil, Iraq’s Saddam
Hussein broke the pact and sold oil in euros. Regime change swiftly followed,
accompanied by widespread destruction of the country.
In Libya, Qaddafi also broke
the pact; but he did more than just sell his oil in another currency.
As these developments are detailed
by blogger Denise Rhyne:
For decades, Libya and other
African countries had been attempting to create a pan-African gold
standard. Libya’s al-Qadhafi and other heads of African States had wanted
an independent, pan-African, “hard currency.”
Under al-Qadhafi’s leadership,
African nations had convened at least twice for monetary unification. The
countries discussed the possibility of using the Libyan dinar and the silver
dirham as the only possible money to buy African oil.
Until the recent US/NATO
invasion, the gold dinar was issued by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL).
The Libyan bank was 100% state owned and independent. Foreigners
had to go through the CBL to do business with Libya. The Central Bank of
Libya issued the dinar, using the country’s 143.8 tons of gold.
Libya’s Qadhafi (African Union 2009 Chair)
conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign States of Africa with one
gold currency (United States of Africa). In 2004, a pan-African
Parliament (53 nations) laid plans for the African Economic Community –
with a single gold currency by 2023.
African oil-producing nations
were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for oil/gas.
Showing What is Possible
Qaddafi had done more than
organize an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated that financial
independence could be achieved. His greatest infrastructure project, the Great
Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the
$33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt,
through Libya’s own state-owned bank.
That could explain why this
critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. NATO
not only bombed the pipeline but finished off the project by bombing the
factory producing the pipes necessary to repair it. Crippling a civilian
irrigation system serving up to 70% of the population hardly looks like
humanitarian intervention. Rather, as Canadian Professor Maximilian Forte put
it in his heavily researched book Slouching
Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa:
[T]he goal of US military
intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network
of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African
self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic
ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US.
Mystery Solved
Hilary Clinton’s emails shed
light on another enigma remarked on by early commentators. Why, within weeks of
initiating fighting, did the rebels set up their own central bank? Robert
Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy Journal in 2011:
This suggests we have a bit
more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some
pretty sophisticated influences. I have never before heard of a central bank
being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising.
It was all highly suspicious,
but as Alex
Newman concluded in a November 2011 article:
Whether salvaging central
banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for
Gadhafi’s overthrow . . . may never be known for certain – at least not
publicly.
There the matter would have
remained – suspicious but unverified like so many stories of fraud and
corruption – but for the publication of Hillary Clinton’s emails after an FBI
probe. They add substantial weight to Newman’s suspicions: violent intervention
was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about the security of
global banking, money and oil.
Ellen Brown is an attorney,
founder of the Public Banking
Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores
successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles
are at EllenBrown.com.
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