The Corbett Report, h/t to LRC
The Libya Intervention
The WMD story blew up in the neocons’ face shortly after the war, but by that time they had already succeeded in their plan to reshape the Middle East. But for the would-be controllers of public opinion, a valuable lesson was learned: “Human rights” and “protecting the innocent” is a more effective lie to sell to the public to motivate them for war. So when it came time to sell the war on Libya to the public, the UN-backed, NATO-led aggressors once again donned the cloak of “human rights” by turning to none other than the UN’s Human Rights Council.
The process that launched the intervention was begun by a coalition of 70 non-governmental organizations, which issued a joint letter urging the UN to suspend Libya from the Human Rights Council and for the Security Council to invoke the so-called “responsibility to protect” principle in protecting the Libyan people from alleged atrocities being committed by the Libyan government.
In a special session on the issue on February 25th, 2011, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution affirming the NGOs’ recommendations. The resolution was adopted without a vote.
The Security Council immediately passed resolutions 1970 and 1973, authorizing the establishment of a “no-fly zone on Libyan military aviation” for the “protection of civilians” and the “delivery of humanitarian assistance.” Three days later, using the resolution as its justification, the US, UK and France began bombing the population of Libya.
Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court’s Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, began working on the legal basis for the invasion. He drafted the request for the Court’s judges to issue an arrest warrant for Gaddafi for crimes against humanity. Although NATO forces were already engaged in an invasion of the country on the basis of undocumented allegations by a group of NGOs, Moreno-Ocampo’s request was not issued until May 16th.
On June 28th, the day after the judges agreed to issue the warrant, Moreno-Ocampo participated in a press conference in which one reporter asked about the evidence that Gaddafi had ever engaged in the atrocities he was accused of.
LUIS MORENO-OCAMPO: I advise you to read the application of the prosecutor’s office. Many pages. I think it was 77 pages. We describe in detail the facts. Most of it is public and the judges also decided on the evidence. So of course we are prosecutors and judges, so we rely on facts, so we prove the crimes. That’s what we did.
SOURCE: Lies behind the “Humanitarian War” in Libya: There is no evidence! (Part 2), NATO Crimes In Libya
Although the document that Moreno-Ocampo urges the public to read to understand the evidence of Gaddafi’s crimes is indeed public, and is 77 pages long, the version made available to the public has been heavily redacted. In fact, of the 77 pages, 54 of them have been redacted, comprising the entire section of the document dealing with the evidence for the charges themselves.
The most sickening part of this war lie is just how obvious it was. No one involved in this charade cared about the well-being of the Libyan people. Not the press, not the politicians, not the ICC prosecutors. And as a result, today, seven years after the destruction of Libya at the hands of the United Nations-sanctioned NATO “saviours,” open-air slave markets are running in the country that the human rights crusaders once pretended to care about.