AUDIO: The truth about the situation in Libya

This audio interview with Brian Becker, National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition, was featured on Law and Disorder Radio on Aug. 29. Click below to play the audio interview.

Libya, a country of 6 million people possesses the largest of Africa’s oil reserves. It’s oil is of a particular high quality. Since March 19 2011 the Air Force of Britain, France and the United States have conducted nearly 7500 bombing attacks. Meanwhile,  ground forces made up of special operations and commando units are NATO led and direct the military operations of the so called rebel forces.  In his recent article titled "The Truth About the Situation in Libya: Cutting Through the Government Propaganda and Media Lies," ANSWER Coalition National Coordinator Brian Becker lays out the history and facts about the ongoing Libya invasion.

Brian Becker:

  • Unfortunately there’s a large number of people who have accommodated themselves to a full scale demonization to the targeted government, the government in this case Qaddafi and Libya.
  • Targeted comprehensively by the corporate sponsored media in the United States, in Britain and France. The United States, Britain and France the former colonizers and slave traders of Africa, always assigned their bombing missions, invasions a noble cause. 
  • They characterized the targeted government as having threatened a full scale massacre in Benghazi. There was no proof offered of that.  The propaganda campaign is always part of the overall war effort.
  • Qaddafi came to power in 1969, he immediately evicted the (US)Air Force base and the two British bases that were the dominant powers inside of Libya.
  • The National Transition Council, the group that is fighting Qaddafi, and is sponsored by NATO,  their first act when they formed a government coming into being was to invite those same powers to begin bombing the country.
  • In 2004 after the invasion of Iraq, George W Bush and the European powers there ended the sanctions on Libya.
  • Libya attempted to accommodate itself to the western powers.
  • He was a player, they don’t want players, they want puppets.
  • He let the companies come in but he kept irritating and annoying them.
  • In the recent months we’ve seen demonstrations of hundreds and thousands of Libyans, maybe as many as a million gathering in Green Square against the bombing of Tripoli.
  • Not all of them were with Qaddafi, some of them were but they nonetheless were against the bombing of their city by a foreign power.
  • In the last days, there’s been a psychological war to over throw the government in Tripoli.
  • What we don’t see is NATO carried out 7,500 bombing missions many of them against military formations of the Qaddafi government, many against civilian and communication centers.
  •  Why don’t they start bombing Saudi Arabia? There’s no elections in Saudi Arabia, women can’t drive cars in Saudi Arabia, the punishment for women committing adultery is stoning to death. There’s no protest in Saudi Arabia because they’re met with torture, imprisonment and execution.
  • Why because the Saudi government functions a proxy, puppet client regime of the United States.
  • If you watch TV or read US media you’d think there was 40 years of dark grim dictatorship with nothing good, the nightmare is finally ending.
  • There was mass illiteracy in 1969, today 92 percent of the people are literate.  Life expectancy of Libyans today is 77 years old. The entire operation is a NATO operation. 
  • The slogan of self determination has no credibility except in that struggle against imperialism.
  • In World War I when that war was about to end, there was a secret treaty called the The Sykes–Picot Treaty.  What that treaty showed was despite the utterances of self determination at that time by Woodrow Wilson and the other western leaders, that these powers were secretly dividing the spoils of war.
  • If this operation in Libya succeeds, the use of foreign military forces and intelligence forces, and drone aircraft and military operations, the same tactics will be applied to countries deemed to independent of the dictates in Washington.
  • Because its Obama and not the Republicans, too many progressive anti-war normally active people are sitting on the sidelines, watching, wondering rather than building the kind of militant anti-war movement in the United States that says to the people of the world

Guest – Brian Becker, National Coordinator for the Answer Coalition, he’s also been a central organizer of the mass anti-war demonstrations that have taken place in Washington, D.C. over the past decade.


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