Erectile Drugs And Faked NATO Airstrike Casualties

NATO's "Alternate Universe" in Libya

"The Pentagon and its NATO partners are engaged in one of the most obvious and intensive propaganda ploys in their military operations against Libya since the days leading up to the "Coalition of the Willing" attack on Iraq. Suggestions that the government of Muammar Qaddafi is on its last legs and that life in Tripoli has drawn to a standstill as a result of the NATO bombing campaign are not based on reality, as any unbiased observer who has recently been in Tripoli, has witnessed…

In addition to NATO's "information war" against Libya, the corporate media press corps gathered in Tripoli, including notorious Pentagon war correspondents for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, have furthered the Pentagon's and NATO's propaganda claims by making false reports from the ground in Tripoli.

In one report from Tripoli, The Post's Simon Denyer suggests that the Libyan government was faking some casualties as being the result of NATO air strikes on civilian targets rather than merely from non-combat-related causes. That same meme was echoed by John Burns, who is running up the New York Times’s hotel tab in Tripoli reporting on the same “made-in-the-Pentagon” propaganda line. Having been to El Khadra Hospital in Tripoli, I can attest to the fact that several individuals were injured directly by NATO airstrikes, including many with shrapnel wounds to the legs, arms, and torsos.

While German Chancellor Angela Merkel was being swooned by President Barack Obama in Washington to commit German military forces to the NATO campaign against Libya, the Deutche Presse-Agentur, the German Press Agency, falsely reported from Tripoli that life in the sprawling city of some 1.3 million peoplehad ground to a halt, that schools were closed, and that stores were shuttered, as Qaddafi's forces were increasingly coming under pressure, with some units defecting.

My own account from Tripoli is that as of June 6, students of all ages were still in school, stores were open -- although some larger food markets had limited hours of operation due to NATO sanctions on goods coming into Libya by air and ship -- and that life in Tripoli continued as normal. The NATO sanctions have resulted in massive lines of cars, trucks, and taxis queued up to fill up when petrol stations receive gasoline from land routes from Tunisia or from locally-refined oil.

The NATO sanctions and their effect of the lives of Libyans living in the central government-controlled western region is a form of "collective punishment" designed to weaken the resolve of the western Libyans to support their embattled government. However, the sanctions are having the opposite effect, with even those who may have favored the replacement of the Qaddafi government, now rallying around their government leaders as NATO prepares to usher in a neo-colonial administration. With Italy a member of the NATO coalition, Libyans recall Italian atrocities committed against Libya during Rome's colonial occupation and Libyans will support Qaddafi against the Italians, French, and British, who, along with the Americans and Canadians, seek to impose a puppet regime in Tripoli."