Al-Qaeda Rules in 'Liberated' Libya
Saturday April 26, 2014
How's liberated Libya doing these days? As Eli Lake of the Daily Beast reported this past week, a secretive military base established by US special forces to train their Libyan counterparts to fight terrorism has been overtaken...by terrorists!
How is it possible that an al-Qaeda associated group took over a US-secured base in Libya, where the fight was supposedly against terrorism? The answer is that the US had long been working with al-Qaeda to foment a coup against Gaddafi. It should be of little shock, then, that after the "liberation" of Libya islamic extremism rather than liberal democracy broke out all over.
As we also learned this week, to overthrow Gaddafi in Libya, the US had actually "switched sides" and armed al-Qaeda, begining in Benghazi, to be the boots on the ground for the overthrow.
That was the conclusion of a group of former CIA and military officers who just issued a report on the 2011 US attack on Libya and the attack on Benghazi that occured just over one year later.
As the Daily Mail quoted one of the group members:
'The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,' Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline.
In the process, millions of dollars worth of weapons were shipped to jihadists fighting to overthrow another secular strongman in Assad's Syria.
So in both Libya and later in Syria, the US has switched sides and fought with al-Qaeda. Does the "war on terror" even make any sense anymore?