Doha, Qatar, 28 November 2011: Gaddafi: The End Game is a series of three documentaries about the Libyan revolution, premiering on Thursday 8 December 2011 on Al Jazeera English.
Produced and directed by Anne Reevell (Moonbeam Films) and executive produced by Oscar, Emmy and BAFTA winner Jon Blair, Gaddafi: The End Game follows a group of revolutionaries from exile in the UK all the way to Tripoli and tells the inside story of the fall of Gaddafi’s brutal regime from the lips of the insiders, defectors and military advisers who made it happen.
“It’s very rare that you get a ringside seat in history,” says Anne. “I was lucky enough to see a revolution through the eyes of a remarkable group of people.”
The series kicks off with a two-part documentary, The Long Road to Tripoli, which tells the story of 30-year-old Ibrahim El-Mayet and his father Abduladim as they take a convoy of ambulances from the UK across Europe, through Tunisia, and into the Western Mountains of Libya, where they meet up with Abdelbasset Issa, a property developer from Croydon on the outskirts of London, whose group they help arm and train for the final assault on Tripoli. The film provides a unique insight into how Libya’s ad-hoc army of committed amateurs toppled a dictatorship.
Anne also filmed behind-the-scenes with the political leadership in waiting in Tunisia and interviewed Dr Abdurrahim El-Keib, the man who has now become Libya’s Prime Minister, on the night that he heard the news that Tripoli’s rebellion had begun.
Anne says, “When the February 17th uprising began, the Libyan diaspora struggled with what it meant for them and how they should react. Was it a false dawn? Was it safe to openly support it? How far should they go in helping? Was their help welcome? Was their exile about to end and at what cost? I was able to film with a small group of Libyans from the UK and got to know them well. Gradually, as the months passed, their determination that Gaddafi must go transformed them into revolutionaries. This film is the story of that journey, its effect on them and their ideal of being part of building a new country. It tells the story of the revolution and of the people they meet on the way. It’s a story of gathering momentum, change, courage and hope, which follows the main characters all the way to the newly liberated Martyrs’ Square in Tripoli.”
In the third episode, State of Denial, Anne had exclusive access to the key British and Libyan players who planned the war against Gaddafi in London and Libya.
“The disintegration of the Gaddafi regime in Libya surprised and confused the world – not because it happened in the first place, but because Gaddafi’s government remained convinced it could prevail – despite defections, NATO airstrikes and a popular mass uprising,” says Anne.
Using the oral diary of a Tripoli-based insider in almost daily contact with Anne, as well as interviews with the UK prime minister’s senior adviser on Libya and leading figures in Benghazi and Tripoli, State of Denial explores the demise of Gaddafi’s power base and charts the twists and turns of a regime in denial.
It examines the extent of cooperation between the Libyan military and the British even before February 17th’s rebellion, revealing that many of the defectors were, in effect, “sleepers” waiting for their moment to come. “Everyone looks at the pictures of Blair and Gaddafi embracing,” saysAnne. “What they don’t see are the handshakes between military advisers who later work together to bring down the regime.”
The Long Road to Tripoli (part one) screens on Al Jazeera English from 8 December 2011 at the following times GMT: Thursday, 20h00; Friday, 12h00; Saturday, 01h00; Sunday, 06h00; Monday, 20h00; Tuesday, 12h00, Wednesday, 01h00; and Thursday 15 December 2011 at 06h00.
The Long Road to Tripoli (part two) screens on Al Jazeera English from 15 December 2011 at the following times GMT: Thursday, 20h00; Friday, 12h00; Saturday, 01h00; Sunday, 06h00; Monday, 20h00; Tuesday, 12h00, Wednesday, 01h00; and Thursday 22 December 2011 at 06h00.
State of Denial screens on Al Jazeera English from 22 December 2011 at the following times GMT: Thursday, 20h00; Friday, 12h00; Saturday, 01h00; Sunday, 06h00; Monday, 20h00; Tuesday, 12h00, Wednesday, 01h00; and Thursday 29 December 2011 at 06h00.
For more information, visit http://english.aljazeera.net.
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http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Perspectives_1/article_8401.shtml
The U.S. and U.N.’s Complicity and Hypocrisy in the
Assassination of Gadhafi
By Jackie Muhammad
(FinalCall.com) – “I was an economic hit man (EHM), part of an elite corps of modern day ‘hired guns’ who promote the interests of big corporations and certain sectors of the U.S. government. …. Although we EHMs work in many ways, our most common task is to identify countries with resources our corporations covet. Then we seduce, bribe, and extort their leaders into exploiting their own people—accepting loans the countries can never repay, privatizing their national assets, legalizing the destruction of fragile environments, and finally selling those coveted resources to our corporations at bargain prices. When the leaders resist, they are overthrown or assassinated by CIA-sponsored jackals.”
Why did Gadhafi have to die? He had to die in order to prevent his revolutionary philosophy from taking hold in Africa, particularly among its youth. He had to die in order to prevent the unification of the financial resources he controlled from being united with his revolutionary philosophy.
(From the book “Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded—and What We Need to Do to Remake Them” by John Perkins.) America’s foreign policy towards Africa has been the height of hypocrisy for at least the last 100 years. Many of Africa’s leaders, if they do not comply with the wishes of the Government of the United States, are either made compliant through bribes and threats, or they are killed. Such was the fate of Col. Muammar Gadhafi.
From the Congo with the murder of Patrice Lumumba to the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana to the abandonment of the people of Liberia after the overthrow of President Tolbert during the bloody coup in the 80s, examples proliferate throughout the continent of Africa of political leaders who refused to bow to the wishes of America and the Western powers.
The same fate has been visited upon Muslim leaders in Asia and the Middle East. For example, President Sukarno of Indonesia, President Muhammad Mossadegh of Iran and President Allende of Chile were all democratically elected by their people and summarily overthrown or murdered by the American CIA. These assassinations and coup d’états were orchestrated, in many cases, by the secretaries of state. The most notorious was Dr. Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger’s foreign policy initiatives led to the racist support of the Portuguese in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea- Bissau; the White South Africans during the Apartheid period; Rhodesia (before it became Zimbabwe), as well as other colonial powers that occupied African nations. These oppressive regimes led to the death of millions of Africans. Many consider Kissinger a war criminal, and some, like the Swiss, have sought to have him arrested for crimes committed against humanity.
The current U.S. Secretary of State is Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had openly called for the assassination of Col. Gadhafi . Mrs. Clinton gives a more feminine touch to the same deadly policies of Dr. Kissinger. When the youth revolt in Egypt and the liberation movement in Bahrain evolved, Mrs. Clinton called for restraint on the part of the security personnel and for anti-government protestors to express themselves peacefully. In March Mrs. Clinton told the citizens and leadership that “violence is not the answer” to resolve the political turmoil of the “Arab Spring.” At the same time, however, she was planning and advocating the violent death of Gadhafi .
When the African Union intervened and sought a more humane approach to the conflict in Libya, she dismissed them as if they were her children. At a meeting in Ethiopia she warned the 54-nation organization to “defriend the dictator” and hinted that the potential fate of Gadhafi could befall them.
The rationale given by the U.N. and the U.S. for removing Col. Gadhafi from his seat of power was that he was a “dictator” who “tortured” and “oppressed” his people and that the country needed to become a democracy. Hilary Clinton twisted the arms of the members of the Arab league to force them to ask for the creation of a U.N.-sponsored “No-Fly Zone.” The only problem, however, is that Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, and other members of the Arab League are not Jeffersonian democracies—they are totalitarian dictatorships, and they are all guilty of torture. The United States is also guilty of torture and has used a program called “extraordinary renditions,” transferring prisoners of war to other nations, to circumvent international laws, to have them tortured in other nations. What hypocrisy! The U.N. knows this but does nothing about it.
Free and open elections are not a part of the fabric of these countries. All of these Arab countries have used force to suppress their own people, and the weapons of suppression are all purchased from the United States. But because they are considered an “ally” of the U.S. and the American controlled U.N., both turn a blind eye to the oppression and torture that takes place in these nations. They are literally allowed to get away with murder. Therefore, should the U.N. sponsor a “No-Fly Zone” over these nations and free the oppressed Shiites of Bahrain, for example?
Gadhafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction and became an ally of the United States and a partner in the so called war on terror against Al-Qaeda. Once he outlived his usefulness, however, they sought to dispose of him.
The U.S. verbally talks about its support for the democratization of Africa, but it not only props up but puts into office some of the worst dictators the African continent has ever seen. Because Gadhafi did not play that cynical game, the U.S. Government assassinated him. The methodology used is to first have the media assassinate the character of the leader. Then the people are led to believe the leader has deceived them. The physical assassination of the leader follows after the corporate media have prepared the people for the death of their leader through the use of their poison pens.
America’s hypocritical foreign policy toward the African nation of Libya is just the latest manifestation of this process. According to the U.N. mandate, the Libyan operation was composed of three objectives: an arms embargo, a no-fly zone, and the protection of civilians from attack or the threat of attack. Under no circumstance did the U.N. authorize the assassination of the head of state, destruction of the country’s infrastructure and the killing of up to 50,000 people. The excuse the U.S. and NATO gave for going into Libya was primarily “humanitarian.”
The real reason was to kill the head of state. The excuse and justification for intervention were hypocritical.
The U.S. Government was never interested in the humanitarian interests of the Arab/Afro Asiatic people in that part of the world. They were disposable; they were collateral damage.
If the U.S. were interested in the Arab humanity, it would not have killed between 600,000 and 700,000 Iraqis (according to the British medical journal Lancet and independent studies done by Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with MIT) on the basis of a lie. Iraq never attacked America on 9/11. However, President George Bush, forsaking advice from the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, attacked Iraq. The result, as predicted by the Minister, is that the U.S. will leave that country in ignominy, its treasury depleted. Over 4,400 American soldiers were killed and more than 30,000 wounded. Many who have returned are mentally and physically impaired, and have an escalated divorce and suicide rate.
The literacy rate in Libya is higher than the literacy rate of the Black inhabitants of Georgia. Nearly 40 percent of Black and Hispanic youths fail to graduate on time in Georgia, and 42 million American adults can’t read. Add to that the poverty rate in South Carolina, for example, which exceeds the poverty rate of Libya. So in order to relieve the nation of its crises in education, employment and poverty, maybe we needed to send our youths and adults to Libya to be educated and employed.
Gadhafi was not an eccentric tyrant: he was one of the most progressive leaders and thinkers in Africa. Following in the footsteps of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, the Continent’s premier Pan-Africanist, and Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the great Arab leader, friend of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and the region’s top Pan-Arabist thinker, Gadhafi combined the philosophies of both giants. His call for the United States of Africa was revolutionary.
Incredibly, America was so hell-bent on killing Gadhafi that the amount of money spent on trying to kill the sovereign head of the independent nation of Libya exceeds the total amount of money the U.S. spent in “foreign aid” to all of Southern Africa.
The alleged threat of Gadhafi harming his own people was not the trigger that sparked NATO to attack his country—that was a ruse. Gadhafi ’s crime was his exposing the hypocrisy of the West and Europe’s and America’s desire to take control of Africa’s natural resources and his espousing revolutionary ideas to free Africa of White racist hegemony.
Gadhafi gave Africa a vision of a united Continent—the United States of Africa. Such a philosophy was a threat to Europe, the United States and, according to Paul Wolfowitz, the former President of the World Bank and former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Israel is threatened by that philosophy as well. So why did Gadhafi have to die? He had to die in order to prevent his revolutionary philosophy from taking hold in Africa, particularly among its youth. He had to die in order to prevent the unification of the financial resources he controlled from being united with his revolutionary philosophy.
The U.S. persuaded the Chinese and the Russians to support their attack on Libya by their refusal to veto the American-, British- and French-led initiative, Resolution 1973. China is a Communist dictatorship and they usually support the interest of the African nations against the West. But China is so economically tied to America in commercial and economic ventures that it has abandoned its moral bearings. The Chinese could have vetoed the actions of the Americans had they been a true friend and not hypocrites themselves.
One of the charges leveled against Gadhafi was that he oppressed his people. Are not the Chinese guilty of the same accusations? Why is it that we no longer discuss the Tiananmen Square Massacre? Are not the Chinese guilty of oppressing and torturing millions of Chinese Muslims, the Uighur in East Turkestan, as well as the Tibetan Buddhists?
The Russians were purported to be the “friends” of Gadhafi, but they too abandoned him at the insistence of the State Department. Not only do they oppress the Chechen minority, but they have also committed genocide against the Chechens. Russia has become a third-world police state with nuclear weapons. It no longer is the world power it once was. They shook hands with Gadhafi in public, and stabbed him in the back behind closed doors. Russia is considered to be one of the most oppressive countries in the world, and their complicity with America condemned Gadhafi to death. Russia abandoned its “friend” and watched him become a martyr.
Gadhafi wanted weapons for the same reason other nations want weapons—to protect the citizens of his nation. Some of the stockpile of weapons included weapons of mass destruction. England, France, the U.S., Israel, Russia and others have such weapons. So why are some nations allowed to join the Nuclear Proliferation Club and others are not? Why the hypocrisy? America dominates the world today because she has a nuclear stockpile. If Gadhafi had not given up his arsenal, maybe he would be alive today and hypocrisy would not be an issue.
The prescription given in John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man worked to perfection in Libya. When they failed to shake Gadhafi ’s faith, they castigated him in the media; when he failed to be made into a compliant tool of NATO and America, they sent in the CIA to do to him what was done to African and Asian leaders for the past century. The question now is who is next on the economic hit list?
(Jackie Muhammad is a former presidential appointee, member of the Oxford Round Table, educator, youth-trainer and businessman. He can be reached at jacrb519@aol [dot] com.)
“….their determination that Gaddafi must go transformed them into revolutionaries.” Who are they in this article? Who’s determination? Are we talking about the Tuareg of Libya who were slaughtered, raped and murdered by the CIA and NATO?