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 former dictator Muammar Gaddafi being killed or captured.
Machon says even though Gaddafi was an odious dictator and 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.”