It's worth noting that while the media insists that "protesters" carried out these attacks, they were actually carried out by members of Ansar al-Sharia, a militia group, that has been accused by the Libyan government of several terrorist incidents since Ghadaffi's downfall. Average Joe Libyan didn't do this anymore than some angry mob of them. The attackers simply took advantage of the opportunity that the protest created.

I think that this is more reflective of the kind of instability we see in developing nations after a regime change than it is any indication that a democratic Libya would be against our interests. In fact, the Libyan government seems to be doing everything in its power to cooperate with us.

I'm just disgusted by this whole episode. I'm disgusted by attackers, who knowingly murdered agents of diplomacy. I'm disgusted with the Americans who put together this kind of video knowing that it would cause violence, simply so that they could say "I told you so" after the blood was spilled. And I'm disgusted with politicians trying to spin this into an opportunistic attack on the White House while they're doing the best they can to deal with it. There are so many ways that this is a disgrace.

"Baseless allegations"? Like the wholesale massacre of thousands of peaceful protesters? Like his promise to roll tanks into Benghazi and kill everyone standing against him?

Don't make Ghadaffi out to be a hero. Whatever you think of affairs in Libya now, the man was a tyrant who had repeatedly demonstrated a perfect willingness to murder people who opposed him.

Okay, Vert. You wanna play ball, we'll play ball. While I will grant that independent investigations have thrown out much of the ICC's accusations against Gadaffi, there are still mountains of evidence that he abused his power and his people. Here are my problems with Voltairenet's less than expert analysis.

1. Libya was hardly the free and fair society that Voltairenet claims it. It was rated by Freedom House, an international organization dedicated to monitering individual civil liberties worldwide, labelled Libya the most restrictive and heavily censored nation in Africa, as well as labeling it one of the nine least free societies in the world in terms of civil liberties and political rights.

2. Law 75, mandated by Gadaffi himself in 1973, forbade all dissent and made forming an organized political opposition punishable by death. So the murder of political dissidents was not just something that Gadaffi did, it was something that was codified by his laws

3. Human Rights Watch documented several different incidents in which Libyan military forces indiscriminately attacked population centers because protesters existed within them. The result was thousands of people killed who had little to nothing to do with the protests.

4. In addition to indiscriminate attacks, Gadaffi's crackdown on protesters prior to the full outbreak of war was also well documented by the organization. Here's a report that details the crackdown in Benghazi, up to and including soldiers firing on unarmed protesters. Here's another for Tripoli. Here are two seperate accounts of peaceful protesters being killed by the government for doing nothing more than protesting. There are little dozens of reports just like those in their archives if you'd care to look. This is not the ICC, the UN, NATO or the US talking. These are field reports from a respected, independent human rights organization.

5. The number one watchdog organization reporting on the atrocities carried out against the Libyan people were not western at all, but Al Jazeera, the Mid East news organization known for an anti-western bias. I followed their Libya live blog every day to see the day to day reports they had from the ground. They confirmed everything the West was saying about Gadaffi. It wasn't a conflict created and exaggerated by the west. The people there saw it too.

6. Libya broke out into a wide, popular civil war. Gadaffi's regime had been losing favor for a long time, and his crackdown only added fuel to the fire. Average Libyans (shopkeepers, college students, ect.), who know far more about the affairs of Libya than you, I or any of the hacks at Voltairnet ever will, joined the rebellion because of the unjust way they felt the Libyan government had treated them with. Revolutions like that happen against people like Batista, Idris, Mubarak and King George III whose clear abuse of their people is so broadly evident that they rise en masse against it. The West may have helped them along, but thousands of Libyans who were had always stayed away from politics stood up and against Gadaffi, and that wouldn't have happened if he were the secret hero that Voltairenet claims.

7. The Libyan revolution was a mixed bag of different people who included average citizens, political power players and even some of the barbaric military elements who defected when they saw the writing on the wall. There were also pro-Islamofascist elements in there as well. Popular revolutions are never cut and dry, and yes, they committed crimes too. I don't deny that. I also don't deny that some of those people who did retain power to this day. But to throw out a positive move toward democracy because of a few unsavory elements in it is, I think, extremely short sighted, and unmindful of the difficult, gradual process that government building is.

So those are a few reasons why I disagreed with the article. Hope that wasn't too rude for you.

Drew Linky wrote:

I'm grabbing popcorn. If this is anything like the Bill Nye thread, we're in for a long series of lengthy, angry comments.

Not angry. Vert said I was rude for not addressing the substance of the article, so I obliged him. I look forward to his response.

The only one I'm angry with is a certain Republican candidate for President. Trying to claim that a statement released by a scared embassy trying to calm the waters before they were set on fire and attacked is an act of Obama's, apologizing for violence against Americans is dishonest and disgusting. I don't think anyone during this election cycle has made me as angry as Romney did today.

Vert, I was responding to the article's argument as a whole. Everything I posted was relevant. But rest assured, because I want to see you actually defend your ideas rather than just dismiss mine, I'm about halfway through a massive post in which I debate the articles you posted line by line. Again, I look forward to your response.

Vert, your excuse for not debating me sounds like a cop out. See, the general thesis of the article is that there was a NATO frame-up on the Gadaffi regime for human rights violations that never happened. It goes on to make the argument that the US decision was largely prompted for oil access, and that human rights was simply a faulty excuse. in that sense, I did response to the content of the article. But I guess that since I didn't specifically quote it, nothing I said counts. Sounds more to me like you can't hold up your own arguments, but if you really want me to dissect this article for you, I'll again oblige.

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You are simply trying to change the debate to me responding to the new pieces you put forth

Now, in the fancy school I went to when I studied political science and international relations, we called that "evidence". See, you presented the article as evidence that you were right, and I presented numerous sources that conflicted with that opinion. Oh, well...I digress

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LLHR is tied to the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), which is based in France and has ties to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). FIDH is active in many places in Africa and in activities involving the National Endowment for Democracy in the African continent. Both the FIDH and LLHR also released a joint communiqué on February 21, 2011. In the communiqué both organizations asked for the international community to “mobilize” and mention the International Criminal Court while also making a contradictory claiming that over 400 to 600 people had died since February 15, 2011. [4] This of course was about 5,500 short of the claim that 6,000 people were massacred in Benghazi. The joint letter also promoted the false view that 80% of Qaddafi’s support came from foreign mercenaries, which is something that over half a year of fighting proves as untrue.

As of February 23 Al Jazeera reported as many as 2,000 civilian deaths at the hands of security forces. The 6,000 number may have been an exaggeration by LLHR, but it hardly means that the regime was innocent of the charges laid at its feet. Here Voltairenet has made the illogical conclusion that because LLHR had claimed incorrect facts and figures, everything said a bout Gadaffi was untrue. Independent sources from NGOs to new organizations all had different figures, but they all had figures just the same. To throw out the entire case based on one group's false reports is nonsense.

The article also claims that attacks on civilians by pro government forces couldn't be verified, but as I pointed out above, there's an exhausted archive of articles doing precisely that form Human Rights Watch and several other organizations. The entire Al Jazeera liveblog was dedicated to reporting all incidents of violence against civilians. So that claim is bunk.

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Speculation is neither evidence nor grounds for starting a war with a bombing campaign that has lasted about half a year and taken many innocent civilian lives, including children and the elderly. What is important to note here is that the U.N. Security Council decided to sanction the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya on the basis of this letter and the claims of the LLHR. Not once did the U.N. Security Council and the member states pushing for war once bother to even investigate the allegations. In one session in New York City, the Indian Ambassador to the U.N. actually pointed this out when his country abstained from voting. Thus, a so-called “humanitarian war” was launched without any evidence.

Clearly there was evidence in the numerous testimonials from civilians, news agencies and groups outside of the two criticized by the article. This entire paragraph is nothing more than the same speculation that it claims to decry. The UN and NATO did not make their decisions based entirely on the claims of the LLHR, as this article would have you believe. It was not mere "speculation" that prompted the UN and NATO involvement, but a mountain of reports from literally hundreds of sources.And in any case, none of this explains the momentum or ferocity of the Libyan support of the revolution.

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The claims of the Libyan League for Human Rights (LLHR) were coordinated with the formation of the Transitional Council. This becomes clear when the close and cagey relationship of the LLHR and the Transitional Council becomes apparent. Logically, the Obama Administration and NATO had to also be a part of this.

The LLHR was founded in 1989, and its members have long been critics of the Gadaffi Regime. They were the intellectual spearhead of the criticism against him before and during the Civil War. With that in mind, it should make perfect sense that he LLHR and Transition Council formed to remove Gadaffi from power share members and connections. That's not the evidence of some grand conspiracy, as the article alleges, but rather proof that Libyans had old objections to Gadaffi that came to a head with the crackdowns.

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Dr. Mahmoud Jibril is a Libyan regime figure brought into Libyan government circles by Saif Al-Islam Qaddafi. He would undemocratically be given the position of Transitional Council prime minister. His involvement with the LLHR raises some real questions about the organization. The economist Ali Tarhouni on the other hand would become the minister for oil and finance for the Transitional Council. Tarhouni is Washington’s man in Libya. He was groomed in the United States and was present at all the major meetings about plans for regime change in Libya. As Minister of Oil and Finance the first acts he did were privatize and virtually handover Libya’s energy resources and economy to the foreign corporations and governments of the NATO-led coalition against Libya. The General-Secretary of the LLHR, Sliman Bouchuiguir, has even privately admitted that many influential members of the Transitional Council are his friends. A real question of interests arises. Yet, the secret relationship between the LLHR and the Transitional Council is far more than a question of conflict of interest. It is a question of justice and manipulation.

This section asserts fowl play because members of the Transitional Council took important positions in the transitional government. To this I reply: obviously. The people who take out a regime have a responsibility to move the nation's government forward. All of the positions mentioned above needed to exist in order to stabilize the country as it transitioned to democracy, and there's no reason whatsoever to take offense at the people who ovethrew the old regime filling them. By all rights, they should be. They changed the regime, they over see the transition. That seems simple enough, and I'm not sure exactly why this article objects to it.

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Who is Sliman Bouchuiguir?

A fine question. I had to spend some time researching it to find out myself. Apparently, as the article points out, he wrote a book called "The Use of Oil as a Political Weapon: A Case Study of the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo." In my time studying politics, I'd never heard of it, which led me to question their claim that it has "has been widely quoted and used in strategic circles in the United States". In fact, Googling the book brought me here where I learned that only 11 university libraries in North America carry it. With that in mind, I can only guess that the article's claim of its major significance is only their supposition.

I tried to Google the book more to see how any reviews of its content stacked up the essay's description of it, but all I could find in doing so was repeated copy/pastes of this exact article all on sites trying to prove that the Libyan intervention was done for oil access instead of human rights.

All I can definitively prove or disprove is that the man in question is that during the war, he was the Transitional Council's representative to Bern in Switzerland, but has since resigned from the post. Whatever beliefs he may or may not have had when he wrote the book in 1979, or whatever ideological connections he has seem fairly irrelevant to the movement as a whole, given his relatively unimportant position in it.

This is a classic tactic of wingnuts trying to make a political point: take one figure within a movement/political party, find a shady connection to ideologue and use that connection to ascribe an ideology to the movement as a whole. It's a way of discrediting a movement by prescribing fake ideas to it instead of addressing the concerns of their real ones. The Republicans tried to the same thing to Obama in 2008 by claiming that because Bill Ayers served on an education panel with Obama at one point, Obama must support terrorists because of Ayers connection to the Weather Underground. The logic was as shaky then as it is in this article, which is trying to assert that because Bouchuiguir's former academic adviser Bernard Reich had the idea of suppressing the Middle East as an economic power through the perpetuation of conflict there (which he may or may not have even believed) that whole movement is just a ploy to do exactly that. It's a gross illogical fallacy.

The next section of the article details future US plans to invade Africa. All I'll say in response to it is that is that it's patently ridiculous. The US has never given a shit about Africa. If we ever invade Africa, I will boil down every pair of shoes I own and eat them on Youtube.

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General Ham has said: “I remain confident that had the U.N. not made the decision, had the U.S. not taken the lead with great support, I’m absolutely convinced there are many, many people in Benghazi alive today who would not be [alive].” [8] This is not true and a far stretch from reality. The war has cost more lives than it could have ever saved. It has ruined a country and opened the door into Africa for a neo-colonial project.

On March 19th, just before the UN and NATO made a definitive decision to intervene, Gadaffi vowed to attack the rebels/protesters in Benghazi and show them no mercy. He had massed tanks and aircraft to do exactly that, and the only thing that stopped him was foreign intervention. Considering all of the reports that I've perviously posted and numerous others I've seen, I have no trouble believing that he not only meant the threat, but was in the process of carrying it out.

This article benefits from proposing a hypothetical that nobody can definitely disprove (even though Gadaffi himself made statements to the contrary). It does this by taking one organization's exaggerated claims, using them dismiss all accusations against the Gadaffi government and taking some very twisted logical turns to build a larger narrative that Gadaffi was innocent, and that the whole interventions was a simple play for oil across Africa and the Middle East. The entire case is built on straw man logic, red herrings that distract from the real issues at hand, demagoguery of individuals who had no major part in the broader revolutionary movement and some seriously illogical suppositions to fill in the blanks. I dismiss its case because for all these reasons, it's a really weak one.

Finally, it's worth noting that unlike in Iraq, the government of Libya was not overthrown by a foreign power. It was weakened by one, but the revolution began and ended with the people of Libya rising en masse to depose their leader. We may have dropped some bombs on some strategic targets, but it was the Libyans themselves who felt mistreated enough to rise up and take over their nation. They ceased the cities. They fought the war, they ceased the cities. The article would like you to believe that the US orchestrated the rebellion and did most of the work, but that's hardly the case. The events of the last two days are proof that US sentiment is still very low, so the idea that they could rally thousands of Libyans against their heroic leader is stupid.

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Listen, would both of you be quiet for a few minutes? This thread is about a US ambassador being killed. Your getting into an argument with each other is petty, in light of what's literally just happened today.

It's not petty at all. Ambassador Stevens fought and advocated for Libyan democracy. The attack that took his life also threatens the life of the dream that Libyans could have a say in their government, and it's because of people like Vert that it's true. If the progress that's been made in Libya is allowed to be lost, it's worse than Stevens dying for nothing. It will have meant that his death sets back the very cause that he gave his life working toward..

Vert is attempting to dismiss his work as an imperialist grab for power, and I don't think that's acceptable. I'm essentially defending his name here. When I was in college, my favorite professor once told me that although our debates seemed academic and meaningless, the decisions made in their outcome changed lives. It was about people living vs. people dying. The debate right now is whether we should run from Libyan democracy because it supposedly can't work, or double down on a commitment to make it work, and the outcome of that debate in the American public eye will determine whether or not Libyans have a chance at making their own voices heard. It's not irrelevant to the discussion at all. It is the discussion.