WikiLeaks News:
When Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade was booed by hundreds of voters as he cast his ballot Sunday in an election the controversial incumbent hopes will elect him to serve a third term in office, it capped more than a month of popular protests by opposition candidates and their supporters against what many have called a "constitutional coup" by supporters of the corrupt regime.
| Follow #OccupyNigeria on twitter for the latest news. |
”Out of Africa always comes something new” wrote the Roman historian Pliny, (23-79 A.D.) With Mummar Qaddafi gone from Libyan, this old adage will almost certainly gain new meaning because Qaddafi was not only the dictator who ruled Libya with the whip for 40 years, he was a major power in African affairs. He sought to unify Africa under his leadership and saw himself as "King of all the African tribes." Well, with the kickoff of Occupy Nigeria, we are seeing something new in Africa today.
Uploaded by AnonymousNigeria on January 9, 2012
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, 160 million people or 1 in 6 Africans live in Nigeria, so any movement there is bound to have a big impact on the whole continent. Could this have anything to do with Qaddafi's recent demise and the success of the revolution in Libya? These are the main questions I wish to touch upon in this article. But first a quick update for those that have not been glued to news out of Africa all day.
3 people were killed and at least another 20 were injured as Nigerian state security used tear gas and rubber bullets and finally resorted to live ammunition in attempts to suppress mass protests in Lagos and other major cities in Nigeria. Except for the rallies, the streets were eerily empty, and shops and businesses closed as most of the country was brought to a grinding halt by a nationwide general strike which its organizers have named "Occupy Nigeria."
This is a "WikiLeaks News Update", a daily news update of stories that are obviously related to WikiLeaks and also freedom of information, transparency, cybersecurity, and freedom of expression. All the times are GMT.
>> Updates on WikiLeaks news from #wlfind twitter hashtag (as curated by @wikileaks):
* Absolutely extraordinary cable on Indian extrajudicial assassinations 'encounter killings'.
* Georgia expresses concern over 2010 increase in Russian arms shipments to Armenia.
* WikiLeaks Cable Shows US Embassy Believed Jakarta Election Was ‘Rigged’.
* Tantawi sucking up to centcom in 2006, said "simple" Egyptians don't understand benefits of US-Egypt relationship.
10:35 PM Muammar Gaddafi was a key financier of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military wing and offered support to terrorist groups world wide.
Excerpt of a U.S. diplomatic cable from 1991:
"On rare occasions the Libyans have used couriers to deliver money to terrorist organizations; the transfer usually occurs in a third country"
This is a "WikiLeaks News Update", a daily news update of stories that are obviously related to WikiLeaks and also freedom of information, transparency, cybersecurity, and freedom of expression. All the times are GMT.
10:45 PM WikiLeaks will make 'several important announcements' via twitter.
So far, a confirmation that the claimed Domscheit-Berg destroyed leaks include the videos of a major US atrocity in Afghanistan. Likely referring to footage of the Garani massacre.
09:05 PM The United States attempted to send a group of 22 Uyghur Guantanamo Bay detainees to El Salvador, cables dating from the 2005-2007 period show. The group had been found innocent of terrorist charges. There were at least two resettlement requests to which the Antonio Saca presidency responded negatively.
Additionally, Mario Rivera, an official of El Salvador’s Ministry of External Relations, is cited in one of the cables, on the subject of Guantanamo. According to Rivera the country understood the necessity and respected the right of the U.S. to keep individuals detained in Guantanamo Bay.
Ahmed went missing in Tripoli near the very beginning of the uprising. His family now believes that he was arrested on February 22 and taken to the notorious Adu Salim prison with many others. At the time they assumed he had been shot dead and disappeared by soldiers, mercenaries or one of Qaddafi's security services, like so many others.
So when a member of one Qaddafi's revolutionary committees told Ahmed's father, "We have your son, he is being held at Abu Salim prison. If your family does not come out to demonstrate on Friday you will never see your son again.", they paid him no never-mind and an extended clan of around 50 adult males and family refused to attend the rally. A few hours after the rally Ahmed's still warm body was dumped outside the family home with two bullets in his head.
Many other families received similar threats. "We did not think it was possible that he (Ahmed) was still alive, we thought the guy was just making threats," said Mohammed, Ahmed's uncle who was interview by AFP.
1. ] Whatever his revolutionary pretensions were in the past, in the last eight years Mummar Qaddafi has become a compliant, if somewhat unorthodox, third world ruler in the world imperialist system. The changes in the stance of his regime since 2004 are unmistakable. His rapprochement with the EU and even the US after Bush sent Biden to Tripoli on Air Force Two has been well documented elsewhere, as has been his association with Richard Perle and Goldman Sachs. He has joined the IMF, allowed western oil companies to directly exploit Libyan fields and privatized hundreds of key public enterprises. In spite of all the drama of the past, it should be clear to all that the Mummar Qaddafi of 2011 is one that has made his peace with the imperialists and they with him. Contrary to what the Qaddafi supporters would have you believe, there has not been a continuous momentum for imperialist regime change in Libya for the past 40 years.
Former congresswomen and Green Party presidential candidate has just returned from a fact finding mission to Libya. While there she talked [YouTube 03:31] with a Qaddafi supporter in the hospital after being injured by US/NATO bombing. He said "People in Germany have Hitler. People in Italy have Mussolini. It does not matter if they are good or not; they have [a] hero. Why [not] let us have [a] hero? We like him [Qaddafi]." McKinney responded "yeah, right."
The ANSWER Coalition sponsored nationwide speaking tour of Cynthia McKinney: Eyewitness Libya started in Los Angeles on Saturday, 18 June 2011. This was at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church on Wilshire where many progressive events take place. Almost two hundred people showed up. Among them was a group of about two dozen Libyans and Libyan-Americans, some of which clearly associated themselves with the Free Libya movement, the tricolor flag of the Libyan opposition was much in evidence not only as flags but as hats, scarfs and jackets. All these Libyans were clearly anti-Qaddafi.
Dueling resolutions from Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner and Democratic House Representative Dennis Kucinich sparked a debate in Congress. The debate centered around the War Powers Act, the US Constitution and whether President Obama had violated the law by taking the United States into a war in Libya.
The Kucinich Resolution (H.R. Con. Res. 251) aimed to direct the president, pursuant to the War Powers Act, to remove all troops from Libya within fifteen days after the resolution was adopted. It was an attempt to force Congress to exercise the authority that it has under the Constitution to decide when and where troops are deployed for wars and whether or not wars should be launched.
In contrast, the Boehner Resolution (H.R. Con. Res. 292) was offered by Speaker Boehner to take the wind out of the sails of the growing bipartisan movement, consisting of anti-war Democrats and anti-interventionist Republicans, who were ready to assert Congress’ legislative authority and oppose the further expansion of the Executive by the Obama Administration that has taken place as a result of the Libya War.
The resolution brought by Rep. Kucinich failed 148-265. Speaker Boehner’s resolution passed 268-145.
The National Security Archive has, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to force the release of the CIA's "Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation." The lawsuit charges the CIA has "wrongfully withheld" a multi-volume study the Archive requested in 2005 that is "the most important and substantive CIA-produced study of this episode."
Director of the Archive's Cuba Documentation Project Peter Kornbluh has called on the CIA to release the report under President Barack Obama's Executive Order 13526 , which states that "no information may remain classified indefinitely." (Of course, denying FOIA requests doesn't mean documents will be classified indefinitely. It just means they aren't getting released now.)
One might wonder, how long does this have to go on before someone goes ahead and declassifies the material? What is the government hiding? Is there any chance someone will just leak the report to WikiLeaks and end this travesty?
The Bay of Pigs invasion is an episode in US foreign policy that is considered to be a sham. Beyond that, it's unclear what has been learned from the incident.
They are starting to celebrate in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi as the news of the decisions taken at the meeting of the Libya International Contact Group earlier today in Doha, Qatar began to filter in. They see most of the decisions taken are supportive of their struggle to overthrow the 42 year old regime of Mummar Gaddafi and they expect that soon many more nations will join France and Qatar in recognizing the Transitional National Council as the sole legitimate government of Libya.
At the end of the one day summit, the group issued a statement calling for Gaddafi to step down. "Gaddafi and his regime has lost all legitimacy and he must leave power allowing the Libyan people to determine their own future," it said. The meeting which was hosted by Qatar and chaired by British Foreign Secretary William Hague and the Qatari prime minister, Hamed bin Jassem included representatives of NATO countries, Middle East and African countries and a number of international organizations. Ban ki Moon represented the United Nations. At this meeting were representatives of the Transitional National Council that has emerged as the leadership of the Libyan rebels. For many in the contact group it was their first opportunity to meet with the rebel leadership. Also in Qatar, ahead of the talks was Moussa Koussa, Libya's former foreign minister who became the most prominent member of Gaddafi's regime to deflect when he fled to London last month. Just how he got to Doha and what he was doing there remains something of a mystery. He had no formal role in the summit and the opposition Transitional Nation Council said they had no connection to him but he was reported to be having some meetings outside the summit.
Image from Reuters
A delegation of the African Union met today with Muammar Gadhafi and South African president Jacob Zuma announced "We have completed our mission with the brother leader, and the brother leader's delegation has accepted the road map as presented by us." The AU mission, is headed by Mauritanian president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz and also includes, according to Al Jazeera, "Amadou Toumani Toure, Denis Sassou Nguessou and Yoweri Museveni - respectively the presidents of Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda." Since Denis Sassou Nguessou is the president of the Republic of Congo and the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo is Joseph Kabila, and both are members of the AU, it is unclear who the fifth country is. As reported on WL Central on March 20, the same delegation had earlier condemned the violence in Libya, but at that point the AFP unhelpfully referred to the fifth country as "the Congo". The Guardian says it is the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), and further says Uganda's foreign minister attended, not the president.
The agreement apparently calls for: a ceasefire and protection of civilians, humanitarian aid for Libyans and foreign workers - "especially Africans", dialogue between the two sides, an inclusive transitional period, and political reforms which "meet the aspirations of the Libyan people". The delegation will meet the anti-Gaddafi forces tomorrow and if they also agree, it will remain to be seen whether this cease fire is obeyed more than the one imposed by the United Nations was.
The UK's Independent is reporting from an Eritrean priest who tracks migrants across the Mediterranean that the bodies of murdered African migrants have been washing ashore in Libya. Father Mussie Zerai, who is in Rome, says that his contacts in Tripoli have seen five bodies in a hospital that are thought to be part of a group of approximately 335 predominantly Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees who have been missing since a few hours after departing Tajura on March 22 in a boat driven by a smuggler. “There are five bodies in total, two women, two boys and an Egyptian who we believe was the boat’s captain. Their bodies have gunshot wounds in them. Somebody shot them after they left Libya. ... This is a murky affair which must be investigated.” Father Zerai is quoted as saying.
A relative of two of the passengers reported them missing to Father’s Zerai’s organisation, Agenzia Habeshia, and human rights organization Everyone Group who say they immediately alerted the authorities to ask for patrols to be sent into international waters and requested the intervention of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. “This morning, after two weeks of inaction and indifference from the authorities and international institutions, we heard from Don Mussie Zerai that the bodies of those migrants, riddled with bullets, are being washed ashore,” Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro and Dario Picciau, co-presidents of the international humanitarian organization EveryOne Group reported. “It would appear that the boat carrying the refugees was attacked in the Mediterranean, and that the shots were so rapid that the migrants did not have time to sound the alarm with the satellite phone they’d taken on board."
Amidst the cacophony of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Libya perpetrated by forces loyal to Muammar Gadaffi - which this writer finds unbearable - (and for which the command principle at least holds him ultimately responsible) including murders, torture, bombing and artillery destruction of civilian infrastructure and the like, the case of Eman al Obaidi stands alone as one of particular importance as well as nauseating repugnance.
Firstly we must acknowledge the presumption of innocence within the particular context of Eman’s allegations. This was brought to my attention by a tweet from Bianca Jagger who said on 28th March:
I have the most enormous respect for Bianca Jagger and found her vehement statement on this matter appropriate on the face of the circumstances in the arena of probabilities but not necessarily in the arena of presumptive law. In one respect the presumption needed further explanation: the LA Times headlines clearly were missing some nuance in that their traditional headline using the word ‘alleged” implicitly acknowledged the presumption, but they erred in not commenting contextually – the probability arena.
Aftenposten: FARYAB: A VIEW FROM MAIMANA
"Governor Shafaq, local Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) leaders, PRT Maimana military and civilian representatives all regard insurgency as the principal challenge facing Faryab province. They express their strongest concerns about Ghormach district, but see the entire "Pashtun belt," stretching northeast along the Turkmenistan border as a haven for anti-government fighters both the ideologically-motivated warriors and the "$10 a day" combatants simply seeking a paycheck. The weak performance of the Afghan Border Police (ABP) and the absence of Turkmenistan forces close to the border facilitate insurgent activity in this corridor. The Governor and the Afghan National Police (ANP) Chief favor the establishment of militias to enhance the counterinsurgency effort. From a governance and development perspective, Faryab presents a fragmented picture: a "Lone Ranger" Governor, a self-styled reformer with little confidence in other government officials; a newly-elected Provincial Council unsure of its role; and line ministry officials with differing approaches to incorporating popular wishes into the province's development plans."
Aftenposten: LIBYAN REACTION TO AQ-LIFG MERGER
Libya is not Iraq but on Monday, March 28, 2011, US President Barack Obama delivered an address that aimed to brand a pre-emptive war and sell it to the American people. Obama sought to justify intervention into Libya by making the case that it was in America’s interest to act and if action had not been taken a mass atrocity could have taken place.
Few would probably dispute the accuracy of Obama’s explanation of events that have unfolded in accurate. Although the narrative explicitly serves the Western powers that have mounted an intervention, it is all true that Gaddafi launched a military campaign against his own people, attacked hospitals and ambulances, arrested, sexually assaulted and killed journalists, choked of fuel and food supplies, shut off water to Misratah, cities, shelled mosques and apartments, and used jets and helicopters to unleash air assaults on Libyans. It is true that a major humanitarian crisis was erupting, one that human rights organizations that handle refugees were struggling to prevent from worsening.
The “rebels” (that should not be regarded as one homogenous group of people) in Benghazi did face an onslaught from Gaddafi’s forces. Some of the “rebels” did in fact want Western powers to intervene. And so, a UN Security Council Resolution was obtained giving the US, European Union countries and others permission to take action.
The Libyan foreign intervention will pass from the US led force to NATO command, led by Canadian General Charles Bouchard, with the transition completing "within 48 hours".
The anti-Gaddafi forces are once more moving west at a rapid pace, currently claiming to control Sirte, the home of Muammar Gaddafi. Shamsi Abdul Molah, a spokesman for the opposition's National Council, told Al Jazeera that opposition forces had moved into the city at approximately 11.30pm Sunday night. Now AFP is reporting nine powerful explosions heard in Sirte.
Al Jazeera has reported that anti Gaddafi forces are now in control of Bin Jawad, Ras Lanuf, Uqayla, Brega and Ajdabiya, and they say Gaddafi forces are retreating and surrendering each town without a fight. Anti-Gaddafi forces expect a major battle in Tripoli, where Muammar Gaddafi was reported to be Sunday night, since they did not meet with one in Sirte. Fighting broke out again in Misurata, which has been heavily attacked from the air by French and British forces. Air strikes were also reported on Tripoli, Tarhunah, Sabha and Sirte.
With a military intervention by Western powers underway to supposedly protect Libyan civilians from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, one might wonder what Gaddafi’s next move might be. His behavior during speeches prior to the intervention demonstrated Gaddafi is an erratic individual. He has suggested he would enlist the help of al-Qaeda to prevent Libyans from driving him from power. He has also said “I have not yet ordered the use of force, not yet ordered one bullet to be fired…when I do, everything will burn.”
Is Gaddafi a leader that would use chemical weapons (i.e. mustard gas) on his people?
US State Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks show the US has worked with other countries to ensure that Libya abandoned its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. It offered incentives for Libya to cooperate. But, cables that have been released suggest a slight possibility that Gaddafi still has chemical weapons materials.
One cable released details a visit by UK chemical weapons experts early in July 2008. They met Dr. Ahmed Hesnawy, the government of Libya’s (GOL) chief interlocutor on chemical weapons issues. One of the experts, Chris Rampling, stresses “the need for greater transparency from the GOL as to the reasons that conversion of the Rabta Chemical Weapons Production Facility (CWPF) from chemical weapons to pharmaceuticals production had been delayed.”
NOMINATE MOHAMMED NABBOUS FOR 2011 CNN HERO
Mo Nabbous is thought by many to be the most inspiring journalist we have seen in a very long time. We feel that he ought to be a CNN 2011 hero. Please go here to nominate him.
Everyday People Changing the World
From Wikipedia: NPR social media strategist Andy Carvin called Nabbous "the face of Libyan citizen journalism;" Nabbous was the primary contact of many international media outlets looking for information regarding the situation in Libya.[citation needed] Nabbous was also the founder of the independent internet tv station in Libya: Libya Alhurra TV, broadcasting on Livestream.com.
Nabbous' online news station, Libya Alhurra TV, was the only broadcast coming out of Benghazi when Muammar Gaddafi shut down internet lines when the February 2011 uprising began.[4] Using an illegal satellite connection, Nabbous was able to bypass government blocks on internet in order to broadcast live images from Benghazi across the world. As the independent voice for a Libyan population during the 2011 Libyan uprising, Der Spiegel reporter Clemens Höges called Nabbous "the man who just might be the most important person in the revolution."
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