Short ‘n’ Stubby: Ms. Manx senses a theme developing…

Being the astute kitty she is, Ms. Manx noticed something while she was looking for more stuff on Libya over the past week. Here’s her round-up…can you tell what the theme is?

Wired has a shocker about how the Libyan conflict is loaded with psy-ops…and they’ve been recorded, too! The Stumpy Cat is not too surprised by this; after all, this war had to be sold somehow. But she thinks it’s just great that someone went to the trouble to find out just how heavily marketed it’s been.

Meanwhile, at Canadian Dimension, Murray Dobbin has a scathing piece up that echoes, rather uncannily, my own thoughts on Libya.

And Miller-McCune finds it singularly interesting that the same European countries now leading the anti-Gaddafi campaign against Libya, are the very ones that sold him all those weapons they’re now wringing their collective hands about.

Meanwhile, The Nation waxes unusually euphemistic about the so-called “liberal hawks”, calling them “innocent”. Ms. Manx thinks ignorant would be a better word, preferably prefaced with fucking.

Bless Yansoon, then, for being more direct about the matter, and not shying away from heavily loaded words like blackmail, and for also saying that “the West is not innocent, nor is it impartial. Its interests are not those of the Libyan revolution, but aimed at guaranteeing a series of deals made by Gaddafi to the West.” It also mentions the weapons deals reference by Miller-McCune, this time bringing up the US’s contributions to the now-infamous Gaddafi arsenal. But the most damning passage, I think, is this:

Western powers have from the beginning made it difficult for the revolution to succeed on its own terms. Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC), the body that grew out of the revolution, made a series on simple demands in the first days of the uprising. Western governments refused to accept these until certain “guarantees” were in place.

The rebels asked for the recognition of the Transitional National Council; they demanded access to the billions in sequestrated regime funds in order to buy weapons and other crucial supplies; and they demanded an immediate halt to the “mercenary flights” that provided the regime with its foot soldiers.

The answer they received was an unequivocal No. The West declared that they did not recognize “governments”, only countries. They refused to block the mercenary flights as these “security contractors” play an important role in other conflicts — such as Iraq and Afghanistan. They objected to any weapons sales as they feared that these could fall into the hands of “Islamist terrorists”, and they refused to release the funds on “legal grounds”.

Instead Western powers put a number of conditions on a revolution. They demanded that any future Libyan government would abide by all contracts signed by the Gaddafi regime. These contracts, including “generous” oil concession, had to be honored without question. Western powers demanded that the strict repression of “Islamist movements” would remain, and that Libya would maintain its role as a guardian against the migration of Africans into southern Europe.

Ms. Manx ventures that all the psy-ops mentioned by Wired also play into this somehow. Ya think, kittycat?

And at Global Research, Peter Dale Scott has been asking the taboo question as to who these Libyan rebels really are, and finding some disturbing answers. Would we in the west support this war if we heard all this openly talked about on CNN, instead of being spoon-fed the usual chicken noodle “news”? Ms. Manx doubts it very much. Which, again, makes Wired‘s psy-ops story that much more relevant.

Further to the topic of the media and its subtle (or not-so-) spoon-feeding of opinions and bullshit disguised as news, we get this neat little item from the Columbia Journalism Review, that tracks exactly when the word dictator gets trotted out. By some strange coincidence, it’s usually when some western leader or other (not naming any names, it doesn’t matter anyway) has arbitrarily decided that it’s time to get the war drums a-pounding against said leader, who used to be more or less acceptable until he did something which demonstrated him to be less than tame. This strategy, Ms. Manx notes, is applicable not only to Gaddafi, but to virtually any un-tame president of an oil-producing country, anywhere. Which no doubt explains a lot about how the democratically elected president of Venezuela keeps getting that label slapped unfairly on his little brown ass, too.

Meanwhile, Uruknet notes that the spectre of “depleted” uranium weapons is once again rearing its ugly, cancerous head. Which just has Ms. Manx shaking hers. Clearly, nobody has learned fuck-all from Iraq.

And finally, for a bit of comic relief, check out what Ms. Manx found at Raw Story on Newt Gingrich. Also, enjoy the picture of him and his lovely wife and her platinum football helmet. Ms. Manx cattily hopes that thing is good against radiation!