Mounting evidence of CIA ties to Libyan rebels By Patrick Martin
4 April 2011 Numerous
press reports over the weekend add to the evidence that the Libyan
rebels fighting the regime of Muammar Gaddafi are under the direction of
American intelligence agencies. Despite the repeated claims by Obama
administration officials that the rebels are a largely unknown quantity,
it is becoming increasingly clear that key military leaders of the
anti-Gaddafi campaign are well known to the US government and have
longstanding relations with the CIA.
For better than two weeks
there had been a virtual ban in the US media on reporting the name of
Khalifa Haftar, the long-time CIA collaborator who was appointed chief
rebel commander March 17, on the eve of the US-NATO bombing campaign
against Libya. Only the regional McClatchy Newspapers chain reported
Haftar’s appointment, and ABC News ran a brief interview with him on
March 27. Otherwise, silence prevailed.
This de facto censorship
abruptly ended April 1, when a right-wing US think tank, the Jamestown
Foundation, published a lengthy study of Haftar’s background and record,
which was cited extensively by Reuters news service, and then more widely in
the US and British media.
The
Jamestown Foundation report declared: “Today as Colonel Haftar finally
returns to the battlefields of North Africa with the objective of
toppling Gaddafi, his former co-conspirator from Libya’s 1969 coup, he
may stand as the best liaison for the United States and allied NATO
forces in dealing with Libya’s unruly rebels.”
The Jamestown
study noted Haftar’s role in organizing the Libyan National Army (LNA),
which he founded “on June 21, 1988 with strong backing from the Central
Intelligence Agency,” and cites a 1991 interview with him “conducted in
an LNA camp in rural Virginia.” Not only did the CIA sponsor and fund
the LNA, it engineered the entry of LNA officers and men into the United
States where they established a training camp.
Reuters added,
using a variant spelling of the name, that it has “repeatedly asked for
an interview with Hefta but he could not immediately be contacted.” The
news service added, “The CIA declined to comment” on its relationship to
the former Libyan military leader. Other references to Haftar’s role appeared
in the online blog of the New Yorker magazine, in Africa Confidential, on
National Public Radio, the British daily Guardian, and in the Independent on
Sunday, another British newspaper.
The Independent
column, headlined “The Shady Men Backed by the West to Displace
Gaddafi,” described the Libyan rebel commanders as follows: “The careers
of several make them sound like characters out of the more sinister
Graham Greene novels. They include men such as Colonel Khalifa Haftar,
former commander of the Libyan army in Chad who was captured and changed
sides in 1988, setting up the anti-Gaddafi Libyan National Army
reportedly with CIA and Saudi backing. For the last 20 years, he has
been living quietly in Virginia before returning to Benghazi to lead the
fight against Gaddafi.”
Finally, the Washington Post’s
Sunday edition carried several references to Haftar, including a
front-page article profiling the divisions within the rebel military
leadership. “Khalifa Haftar, a former army colonel who recently returned
to Libya after living for many years in Falls Church, was initially
hailed by the Transitional National Council as a leader who could help
discipline the new army and train its largely volunteer ranks,” Post reporter
Tara Bahrampour wrote.
She
then quoted TNC and rebel military spokesmen giving conflicting
accounts, one saying Haftar had been removed from command, the other
saying he remained in control of the military. A spokesman for the TNC,
asked to explain the conflict in light of its earlier announcement of
Haftar’s appointment, said, “This is the position of the council today.
The situation is fluid.... The political viewpoints change frequently.”
Walter Pincus, the Post’s
long-time reporter on intelligence activities, himself a former CIA
informer in the National Student Association, described Haftar as “a
former Libyan army colonel who for years commanded the Libyan National
Army (LNA), an anti-Gaddafi group.” The article
said Haftar had “established the LNA, allegedly with backing from the
CIA and Saudi elements.” It continued: “In 1996, he was reported to have
been behind an alleged uprising in eastern Libya. By that time, he was
already settled with his family in Falls Church.”
According to
Pincus, “a senior intelligence official,” asked about the Libyan
commander’s connection to the CIA, “said it was policy not to discuss
such issues.”
The informal blackout on Haftar’s identity and CIA
connections still continues on the American television networks and in
the pages of the New York Times—a newspaper that openly admits
its subservience to the US military/intelligence apparatus. But the
significance of the weekend press reports is unmistakable: the Libyan
rebel military is not the independent organ of a popular uprising
against the Gaddafi dictatorship, but rather the creature of American
imperialism, the most reactionary political force on the planet.
The dubious character of the Libyan rebels was further underscored in a
remarkable profile published Saturday by the Wall Street Journal
of three Libyans who had fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and
were now playing major roles in the rebel military effort. Two of the
three had been in US custody as alleged Al Qaeda operatives and one
spent six years at Guantanamo Bay before being turned over to the
Gaddafi regime in 2007. The three men are: Abdel Hakim
al-Hasady, described as “an influential Islamic preacher and high school
teacher who spent five years at a training camp in eastern Afghanistan”
and now “oversees the recruitment, training and deployment of about 300
rebel fighters from Darna,” a city in eastern LibyaSalah al-Barrani, “a former
fighter from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG,” who is Hasady’s field
commanderSufyan
Ben Qumu, “a Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden’s
holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in
Afghanistan,” and who “is training many of the city’s rebel recruits.” Hasady
and Ben Qumu were arrested by Pakistani security after the US invasion
of Afghanistan in 2001 and turned over to the US. Hasady was transferred
to Libyan custody two months later, while Ben Qumu was moved to
Guantanamo and held there until 2007, when he, too, was sent to a Libyan
prison. The Gaddafi regime released both men in 2008, at a time when
US-Libya collaboration in the “war on terror” was at its height. Such an
action would certainly have been checked with Washington.
The
former Al Qaeda warrior was quite willing to speak to the leading US
business newspaper, which reported, “his discourse has become
dramatically more pro-American.” He told the Journal, “If we
hated the Americans 100 percent, today it is less than 50 percent. They
have started to redeem themselves for their past mistakes.…”
Whether
these individuals are Al Qaeda operatives who were “turned” by their
American captors or have simply changed allegiance under changed
circumstances is unclear. But their role in the Libyan opposition
further undermines the longstanding propaganda of the US government
about the supposedly unbridgeable gulf between Al Qaeda and American
imperialism.
For a decade, the US government, under Bush and now
Obama, has used the terrorist actions of Al Qaeda and its alleged
supporters as a pretext for one military intervention after another in
the Muslim world—Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, the
Philippines, Indonesia and now Libya.
There has long been reason
to doubt the “war on terror” narrative, not least the fact that Al Qaeda
was effectively created by the CIA through its activities in recruiting
and mobilizing radical Islamists to go to Afghanistan in the 1980s and
join the mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet army there. Many of
the 9/11 suicide hijackers were known to the CIA as Al Qaeda operatives,
and in some cases under active surveillance, but were nonetheless
allowed to enter the country, receive training at US flight schools and
carry out the terrorist attacks.
An incident during a hearing
Thursday before the House Armed Services Committee demonstrates the
sensitivity of the US government concerning the links between US
intelligence services and Al Qaeda. Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman
questioned a witness, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, about
the role of Abdel Hakim al-Hasady. Steinberg refused to discuss the
matter, suggesting it could be taken up only in a closed-door session
where US covert operations are regularly reviewed.
https://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/liby-a04.shtml
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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