The corporate media has, once again, been caught acting as stenographers for the CIA-backed Libyan Interim National Transitional Council by echoing the rebel reports that Seif al Islam and Muhammad Qaddafi, two of Muammar Qaddafi’s sons, were captured. Seif and Muhammad were not captured and Seif has taken reporters around parts of Tripoli still held by Qaddafi forces. Tripoli has not fallen to the rebels.
The corporate media’s coverage of the Libyan rebels has, for the entirety of the NATO campaign against Libya, been noted for its one-sided coverage of the war. In the case of Libya, Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar, a NATO coalition partner in the war against Libya, has joined the BBC, France 24, Deustche Welle, and the US news networks in acting as virtual propaganda arms for the Libyan rebels, who have made the types of false claims that are reminiscent of “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam’s spokesman in Iraq, and Ahmad Chalabi, the con-artist who spoke to the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague also reported the sons’ capture, which makes practically every decision the ICC has made on trials of former leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, DR Congo, and Liberia subject to extreme suspicion.
In the record of the CIA’s sordid operations in the Middle East, Operation Desert Storm led to Operation Iraqi Freedom and finally, Operation Mermaid Dawn, the capture of Tripoli by Libyan rebel forces. One of the casualties of Mermaid Dawn will be the continued secrecy of the power politics that led to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and now NATO’s proxies’ invasion and occupation of Libya.
