An "Up-date" to this commentary is published below (from CounterPunch.org).
Extra commentary by me...the real story follows.
Ellen Brown has been sending me her latest articles for
several years and over that period of time I’ve begun to rely on her expertise
(not always agreeing) in matters of finance and banking. She
is the author of several books including a best seller, “The Web of Debt”; she
is also an attorney and the founder of the Public Banking Institute. Her latest article, “Exposing the Libyan Agenda: A Closer Look at Hillary's Emails
That other story is all about
Obama; a story not covered by the MSM.
The validity of the story may be in question but no-one has yet to deny
it. The title, “Russia “Shocked” Over $18 Billion Iran
Payment To Obama After Failed US-Backed Saudi Coup”
was published back in 2009.
So why should anyone make a big
deal out of Iran giving Obama eighteen billion dollars when it is widely known
(outside the MSM) that Obama is one of Iran’s best friends. The reason I brought this up was that
supposedly, then President Medvedev of Russia, let it be known that the $18
billion was transferred to Obama’s “personal account”… Wow! That should be
enough to at least make the late night news casts over at CNN or NBC… Even if
it wasn’t true, they at least could have made a denial or some other
explanation. ~ Norman E. Hooben
See also: Hillary Clinton’s Globalism – Get Rich Off the World
See also: QOTD at bottom of this page.
See also: Hillary Clinton’s Globalism – Get Rich Off the World
See also: QOTD at bottom of this page.
 |
| Provided by Storm'n Norm'n |
By Ellen Brown
Critics have long questioned
why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton's recently
published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people from a
dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.
Critics have long
questioned why violent intervention was necessary in Libya. Hillary Clinton's
recently published emails confirm that it was less about protecting the people
from a dictator than about money, banking, and preventing African economic sovereignty.
The brief visit of
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred
to by the media as a "victory lap." "We came, we saw, he
died!" she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the
capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.
But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times,
was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department,
"as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would
destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the
Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now
desperately trying to contain."
US-NATO intervention was
allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities;
but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. Today, however, verifiable
atrocities are occurring. As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post,
"the human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as 'thousands of
detainees [including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial
review,' and 'kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant'."
Before 2011, Libya had
achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil,
its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from
one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical
treatment were free; having a home was considered a human
right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The country
boasted the world's largest irrigation system, the Great
Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the
cities and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this
model throughout Africa.
But that was before US-NATO
forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on
the country. Today the situation is so dire that President Obama has asked his
advisors to draw up options including a new military front in Libya, and the Defense
Department is reportedly standing ready with "the full spectrum of
military operations required."
The Secretary of State's
victory lap was indeed premature, if what we're talking about is the officially
stated goal of humanitarian intervention. But her newly-released emails reveal
another agenda behind the Libyan war; and this one, it seems, was achieved.
Mission Accomplished?
Of the 3,000 emails
released from Hillary Clinton's private email server in late December 2015,
about a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the attorney
who defended her husband in the Monica Lewinsky case. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, reads
in part:
Qaddafi's government holds
143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver . . . . This gold was
accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used
to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan
was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative
to the French franc (CFA).
In a "source
comment," the original declassified email adds:
According to knowledgeable
individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion.
French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current
rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President
Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According
to these individuals Sarkozy's plans are driven by the following issues:
A desire to gain a greater
share of Libya oil production,
Increase French influence
in North Africa,Improve his internal political situation in France,
Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
Address the concern of his
advisors over Qaddafi's long term plans to supplant France as the dominant
power in Francophone Africa
Conspicuously absent is any
mention of humanitarian concerns. The objectives are money, power and oil.
Other explosive
confirmations in the newly-published emails are detailed by investigative journalist Robert Parry. They
include admissions of rebel war crimes, of special ops trainers inside Libya
from nearly the start of protests, and of Al Qaeda embedded in the US-backed
opposition. Key propaganda themes for violent intervention are acknowledged to
be mere rumors. Parry suggests they may have originated with Blumenthal
himself. They include the bizarre claim that Qaddafi had a "rape
policy" involving passing Viagra out to his troops, a charge later raised
by UN Ambassador Susan Rice in a UN presentation. Parry asks rhetorically:
So do you think it would it
be easier for the Obama administration to rally American support behind this
"regime change" by explaining how the French wanted to steal Libya's
wealth and maintain French neocolonial influence over Africa -- or would
Americans respond better to propaganda themes about Gaddafi passing out Viagra
to his troops so they could rape more women while his snipers targeted innocent
children? Bingo!
Toppling the Global
Financial Scheme
Qaddafi's threatened
attempt to establish an independent African currency was not taken lightly by
Western interests. In 2011, Sarkozy reportedly called the Libyan leader a threat to the financial security of the world.
How could this tiny country of six million people pose such a threat? First
some background.
It is banks, not
governments, that create most of the money in Western economies, as the Bank of
England recently acknowledged. This has been going on for
centuries, through the process called "fractional reserve" lending.
Originally, the reserves were in gold. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt
replaced gold domestically with central bank-created reserves, but gold
remained the reserve currency internationally.
In 1944, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,
to unify this bank-created money system globally. An IMF ruling said that no
paper money could have gold backing. A money supply created privately as debt
at interest requires a continual supply of debtors; and over the next half
century, most developing countries wound up in debt to the IMF. The loans came with strings
attached, including "structural adjustment" policies involving
austerity measures and privatization of public assets.
After 1944, the US dollar
traded interchangeably with gold as global reserve currency. When the US was no
longer able to maintain the dollar's gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal
with OPEC to "back" the dollar with oil, creating the
"petro-dollar." Oil would be sold only in US dollars, which would be
deposited in Wall Street and other international banks.
In 2001, dissatisfied with
the shrinking value of the dollars that OPEC was getting for its oil, Iraq's
Saddam Hussein broke the pact and sold oil in euros. Regime change swiftly
followed, accompanied by widespread destruction of the country.
In Libya, Qaddafi also
broke the pact; but he did more than just sell his oil in another currency.
As these developments are detailed by blogger Denise Rhyne:
For decades, Libya and
other African countries had been attempting to create a pan-African gold
standard. Libya's al-Qadhafi and other heads of African States had wanted an
independent, pan-African, "hard currency."
Under al-Qadhafi's
leadership, African nations had convened at least twice for monetary
unification. The countries discussed the possibility of using the Libyan dinar
and the silver dirham as the only possible money to buy African oil.
Until the recent US/NATO
invasion, the gold dinar was issued by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL). The
Libyan bank was 100% state owned and independent. Foreigners had to go through
the CBL to do business with Libya. The Central Bank of Libya issued the dinar,
using the country's 143.8 tons of gold.
Libya's Qadhafi (African
Union 2009 Chair) conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign
States of Africa with one gold currency (United States of Africa). In
2004, a pan-African Parliament (53 nations) laid plans for the African
Economic Community -- with a single gold currency by 2023.
African oil-producing
nations were planning to abandon the petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for
oil/gas.
Showing What Is Possible
Qaddafi had done more than
organize an African monetary coup. He had demonstrated that financial
independence could be achieved. His greatest infrastructure project, the Great
Man-made River, was turning arid regions into a breadbasket for Libya; and the
$33 billion project was being funded interest-free without foreign debt,
through Libya's own state-owned bank.
That could explain why this
critical piece of infrastructure was destroyed in 2011. NATO not only bombed the pipeline but finished
off the project by bombing the factory producing the pipes necessary to repair
it. Crippling a civilian irrigation system serving up to 70% of the population
hardly looks like humanitarian intervention. Rather, as Canadian Professor
Maximilian Forte put it in his heavily researched book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa:
[T]he goal of US military
intervention was to disrupt an emerging pattern of independence and a network
of collaboration within Africa that would facilitate increased African
self-reliance. This is at odds with the geostrategic and political economic
ambitions of extra-continental European powers, namely the US.
Mystery Solved
Hilary Clinton's emails
shed light on another enigma remarked on by early commentators. Why, within
weeks of initiating fighting, did the rebels set up their own central bank? Robert Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy
Journal in 2011:
This suggests we have a bit
more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some
pretty sophisticated influences. I have never before heard of a central bank
being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising.
It was all highly
suspicious, but as Alex Newman concluded in a November 2011 article:
Whether salvaging central
banking and the corrupt global monetary system were truly among the reasons for
Gadhafi's overthrow . . . may never be known for certain -- at least not
publicly.
There the matter would have
remained -- suspicious but unverified like so many stories of fraud and
corruption -- but for the publication of Hillary Clinton's emails after an FBI
probe. They add substantial weight to Newman's suspicions: violent intervention
was not chiefly about the security of the people. It was about the security of
global banking, money and oil.
Submitters
Bio:
Ellen
Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of
twelve books including the best-selling WEB OF DEBT. In THE PUBLIC BANK
SOLUTION, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models
historically and globally. Her websites are http://EllenBrown.com,
http://PublicBankSolution.com, and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.
___________________________________________
___________________________________________
Up-date : Source CounterPunch.org
The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to
Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We
came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the
capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.
But the victory lap, write Scott Shane and Jo Becker in the New York Times,
was premature. Libya was relegated to the back burner by the State Department,
“as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would
destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the
Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now
desperately trying to contain.”
US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian
grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence. Today, however, verifiable
atrocities are occurring. As Dan Kovalik wrote in the Huffington Post, “the
human rights situation in Libya is a disaster, as ‘thousands of detainees
[including children] languish in prisons without proper judicial review,’ and
‘kidnappings and targeted killings are rampant’.”
Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its
own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned
bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the
richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a
human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The
country boasted the world’s largest irrigation system, the
Great Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to
the cities and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread
this model throughout Africa.
But that was before US-NATO forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc
on the country. Today the situation is so dire that President Obama has asked
his advisors to draw up options including a new military front in Libya, and the Defense
Department is reportedly standing ready with “the full spectrum of military
operations required.”
The Secretary of State’s victory lap was indeed premature, if
what we’re talking about is the officially stated goal of humanitarian
intervention. But her newly-released emails reveal another agenda behind the
Libyan war; and this one, it seems, was achieved.
Mission Accomplished?
Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private
email server in late December 2015, about a third were from her close
confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the attorney who defended her husband in the
Monica Lewinsky case. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011,
reads in part:
Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar
amount in silver . . . . This gold was accumulated prior to the current
rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African
currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide
the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French
franc (CFA).
In a “source comment,” the original declassified email adds:
According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and
silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers
discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was
one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to
commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s
plans are driven by the following issues:
1 A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil
production,
2 Increase French influence in North Africa,
3 Improve his internal political situation in France,
4 Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert
its position in the world,
5 Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term
plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa
Conspicuously absent is any mention of humanitarian concerns.
The objectives are money, power and oil.
Other explosive confirmations in the newly-published emails are
detailed by investigative journalist Robert Parry. They
include admissions of rebel war crimes, of special ops trainers inside Libya
from nearly the start of protests, and of Al Qaeda embedded in the US-backed
opposition. Key propaganda themes for violent intervention are acknowledged to
be mere rumors. Parry suggests they may have originated with Blumenthal
himself. They include the bizarre claim that Qaddafi had a “rape policy”
involving passing Viagra out to his troops, a charge later raised by UN
Ambassador Susan Rice in a UN presentation. Parry asks rhetorically:
So do you think it would it be easier for the Obama
administration to rally American support behind this “regime change” by
explaining how the French wanted to steal Libya’s wealth and maintain French
neocolonial influence over Africa – or would Americans respond better to
propaganda themes about Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops so they could
rape more women while his snipers targeted innocent children? Bingo!
Toppling the Global Financial Scheme
Qaddafi’s threatened attempt to establish an independent African
currency was not taken lightly by Western interests. In 2011, Sarkozy
reportedly called the Libyan leader a threat to the financial security of the world.
How could this tiny country of six million people pose such a threat? First
some background.
It is banks, not governments, that create most of the money in
Western economies, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged. This
has been going on for centuries, through the process called “fractional
reserve” lending. Originally, the reserves were in gold. In 1933,
President Franklin Roosevelt replaced gold domestically with central
bank-created reserves, but gold remained the reserve currency internationally.
In 1944, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were
created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to unify this bank-created money
system globally. An IMF ruling said that no paper money could have gold
backing. A money supply created privately as debt at interest requires a
continual supply of debtors; and over the next half century, most developing
countries wound up in debt to the IMF. The loans came with
strings attached, including “structural adjustment” policies involving
austerity measures and privatization of public assets.
After 1944, the US dollar traded interchangeably with gold as
global reserve currency. When the US was no longer able to maintain the
dollar’s gold backing, in the 1970s it made a deal with OPEC to “back” the
dollar with oil, creating the “petro-dollar.” Oil would be sold only
in US dollars, which would be deposited in Wall Street and other international
banks.
In 2001, dissatisfied with the shrinking value of the dollars
that OPEC was getting for its oil, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein broke the pact and
sold oil in euros. Regime change swiftly followed, accompanied by widespread
destruction of the country.
In Libya, Qaddafi also broke the pact; but he did more than just
sell his oil in another currency.
As these developments are detailed by blogger Denise Rhyne:
For decades, Libya and other African countries had been
attempting to create a pan-African gold standard. Libya’s al-Qadhafi
and other heads of African States had wanted an independent, pan-African, “hard
currency.”
Under al-Qadhafi’s leadership, African nations had convened at
least twice for monetary unification. The countries discussed the
possibility of using the Libyan dinar and the silver dirham as the only possible
money to buy African oil.
Until the recent US/NATO invasion, the gold dinar was issued
by the Central Bank of Libya (CBL). The Libyan bank was 100% state owned
and independent. Foreigners had to go through the CBL to do business with
Libya. The Central Bank of Libya issued the dinar, using the country’s
143.8 tons of gold.
Libya’s Qadhafi (African Union 2009 Chair)
conceived and financed a plan to unify the sovereign States of Africa with one
gold currency (United States of Africa). In 2004, a pan-African
Parliament (53 nations) laid plans for the African Economic Community –
with a single gold currency by 2023.
African oil-producing nations were planning to abandon the
petro-dollar, and demand gold payment for oil/gas.
Showing What is Possible
Qaddafi had done more than organize an African monetary coup. He
had demonstrated that financial independence could be achieved. His greatest
infrastructure project, the Great Man-made River, was turning arid regions into
a breadbasket for Libya; and the $33 billion project was being funded
interest-free without foreign debt, through Libya’s own state-owned bank.
That could explain why this critical piece of infrastructure was
destroyed in 2011. NATO not only bombed the pipeline but finished
off the project by bombing the factory producing the pipes necessary to repair
it. Crippling a civilian irrigation system serving up to 70% of the population
hardly looks like humanitarian intervention. Rather, as Canadian Professor
Maximilian Forte put it in his heavily researched book Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa:
[T]he goal of US military intervention was to disrupt an
emerging pattern of independence and a network of collaboration within Africa
that would facilitate increased African self-reliance. This is at odds with the
geostrategic and political economic ambitions of extra-continental European
powers, namely the US.
Mystery Solved
Hilary Clinton’s emails shed light on another enigma remarked on
by early commentators. Why, within weeks of initiating fighting, did the rebels
set up their own central bank? Robert Wenzel wrote in The Economic Policy
Journal in 2011:
This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels
running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences. I have
never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks
out of a popular uprising.
It was all highly suspicious, but as Alex Newman concluded in a November 2011
article:
Whether salvaging central banking and the corrupt global
monetary system were truly among the reasons for Gadhafi’s overthrow . . . may
never be known for certain – at least not publicly.
There the matter would have remained – suspicious but unverified
like so many stories of fraud and corruption – but for the publication of
Hillary Clinton’s emails after an FBI probe. They add substantial weight to
Newman’s suspicions: violent intervention was not chiefly about the security of
the people. It was about the security of global banking, money and oil.
___________________________________________
Quote of the day...from Doug Ross Journal
QOTD: "If you think you are smarter than every foreign-policy expert in the room, any room, then it is tempting to make up your own grand strategy. That is what Obama has done, to an extent that even his critics underestimate. There is no “Obama doctrine”; rather, we see here a full-blown revolution in American foreign policy. And this revolution can be summed up as follows: The foes shall become friends, and the friends foes.
In the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia are out, Iran is in. Similarly, in the Far East, China is out, Vietnam is in. As for a special relationship, the president would rather have one with Cuba than Britain. Nothing could better illustrate the extent of Barack Obama’s repudiation of the “foreign-policy establishment.”
Yet grand strategies are judged by their consequences, not by their intentions, and in the Middle East—not to mention North Africa and parts of South Asia—the consequences are not looking pretty.
If the arc of history is in fact bending toward Islamic extremism, sectarian conflict, networks of terrorism, and regional nuclear-arms races, then the 44th president will turn out to have been rather less smart than the foreign-policy establishment he so loftily disdains." --Niall Ferguson
In the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia are out, Iran is in. Similarly, in the Far East, China is out, Vietnam is in. As for a special relationship, the president would rather have one with Cuba than Britain. Nothing could better illustrate the extent of Barack Obama’s repudiation of the “foreign-policy establishment.”
Yet grand strategies are judged by their consequences, not by their intentions, and in the Middle East—not to mention North Africa and parts of South Asia—the consequences are not looking pretty.
If the arc of history is in fact bending toward Islamic extremism, sectarian conflict, networks of terrorism, and regional nuclear-arms races, then the 44th president will turn out to have been rather less smart than the foreign-policy establishment he so loftily disdains." --Niall Ferguson
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