Left I on the News  

The press (and the U.S. and NATO) count on nothing more than people not paying attention. Here are two excerpts from the same article:

NATO will keep bombing Moamer Qadhafi’s forces during Ramazan in August as long as the Libyan regime continues to attack civilians during the Muslim holy month, the alliance said on Tuesday.
...In Brussels, alliance spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said: "It is hoped that the Qadhafi forces will stop attacking and threatening to attack civilians not just for Ramazan but immediately."

That's what the "alliance" spokespeople say. But what is actually happening? Hey newspeople it was right there in your own headline:

19 rebels killed in Misrata, Algeria

Even more instructive is the article:

Forces loyal to Libyan leader Moamer Qadhafi shelled rebel positions in the coastal city of Misrata overnight, killing 19 rebels and wounding 22, rebels said in a statement on Tuesday.

So the source of information about who is being killed is the "rebels." Now isn't it 100% certain that if there were any grounds on which the rebels could have claimed that the 19 dead and 22 wounded were "civilians" and not "rebels," they would have, just like the U.S. and NATO claim that everyone they kill (be it in Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere) is not a civilian? Of course they would. The plain fact of the matter is that Qaddafi forces are not "attacking and threatening to attack civilians," and that NATO's claim as to why they are continuing to attack and kill Libyans is just as bogus as their claim why they started in the first place.

And just how many Libyans have the U.S. and NATO killed? 1,108 civilians, with another 4,537 wounded, according to Libya's prosecutor-general, who "intends to prosecute NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Libyan courts for "war crimes.'" Sadly, good luck with that. And, by the way, NATO is responsible for the deaths of all the Libyans it has killed (including quite a few rebels, by the way), not just those classified as "civilians."

More NATO bombs fall on Libya, and, at least one news outlet picks a good picture to accompany their story. But the story, which is an AP story, asserts about the site which was bombed:

Government troops used the missile site outside the rebel-held port city of Misrata to fire indiscriminately on civilians in the area, NATO said.

Yes, "NATO said." But was it true? Did we get to read "...but AP could not verify this claim"? Of course not.

And again, what is the truth? Let's consult another source which is hardly likely to be sympathetic to the Libyan government - the Voice of America. Here's their story from July 5:

At least 11 Libyan rebels have been killed in clashes with pro-government forces near the opposition-held city of Misrata....more than 40 rebels have been wounded.

And July 8:

Medical sources say at least two rebels were killed in the shelling of the western city that has been under siege for months.

Now don't you think that if there were any chance they could label the dead as "civilians," they would have?

Here's one of the only sources I could find which seems to offer proof of such "indiscriminate bombing," claiming that "Day and night attacks from Grad ground-to-ground rockets claim victims indiscriminately. The hospitals are overwhelmed, attending to an average of 70 casualties a day." Really? And VOA isn't reporting that? They also report: "About 1200 of the city's inhabitants have been killed and more than 8000 injured. Hospital staff say that about 40 per cent are civilians." But who is a "civilian"? A doctor who is likely the source of the reporter's information says: "For me all of them are civilians because even those who take a gun are businessmen, engineers, students - none of us are soldiers." Well, on the one hand, he's certainly correct. Which points out why, in a civil war like this, the correct terms should be "combatants" and "non-combatants." Clearly, killing combatants, be they civilians or uniformed soldiers, is "acceptable" behavior (to the extent that any war or any killing is acceptable) and of a different character than killing non-combatants. But given that clarification, the numbers are still suspect. Obviously, some non-combatants have been killed, as always happens. But are they being killed by "indiscriminate bombing," as "NATO says"? Based even on reports from U.S. government-friendly media, I see no evidence of that.

And, as a counterpart to the picture of the Washington, D.C. demonstration which accompanies the first article linked above, here's a video of yesterday's action in San Francisco:

Via fellow blogger WIIIAI, I was alerted to an Obama press conference I somehow missed on Wednesday. One could use up a lot of electrons on picking apart what he had to say on lots of subjects, but let's concentrate on the most egregious statements - the ones on Libya (a subject which, curiously enough, was apparently not important enough to be addressed by Obama in his introduction, and only came up in the Q&A; session).

Q: There have been a lot of questions about the constitutionality -- constitutional interpretations of a few decisions you’ve made, so I’ll just simply ask: Do you believe the War Powers Act is constitutional?...

A: I’m not a Supreme Court justice so I’m not going to -- putting my constitutional law professor hat on here. Let me focus on, initially, the issue of Libya. I want to talk about the substance of Libya because there’s been all kinds of noise about process and congressional consultation and so forth.

Absolutely remarkable. To a man who was a Constitutional law professor, discussions of the Constitution and laws passed by Congress are just "noise." The Constitutional mandate for Congress to declare war is just a "process." Are we sure this man actually was a "Constitutional law professor"? I have my doubts.

Obama: And throughout this process we consulted with Congress. We’ve had 10 hearings on it. We’ve sent reams of information about what the operations are. I’ve had all the members of Congress over to talk about it.

Not only is he unfamiliar with the Constitution, apparently he's unfamiliar with the English language as well. Congressional hearings are not "consultation." Sending information to Congress is not "consultation." Talking to members of Congress could potentially be "consultation," if the members of Congress were allowed to talk back and if what they had to say had the slightest effect whatsoever. However the Constitution and the War Powers Act don't require "consultation." They require Congress to authorize the war.

Now, when you look at the history of the War Powers resolution, it came up after the Vietnam War in which we had half-a-million soldiers there, tens of thousands of lives lost, hundreds of billions of dollars spent -- and Congress said, you know what, we don’t want something like that happening again. So if you’re going to start getting us into those kinds of commitments you’ve got to consult with Congress beforehand.

A straight-out lie about the War Powers Resolution. Regardless of how you interpret the "meaning of Congress," the WPR doesn't say the President has to "consult" with Congress. It says they have to authorize his actions.

Muammar Qaddafi, who, prior to Osama bin Laden, was responsible for more American deaths than just about anybody on the planet, was threatening to massacre his people.

First of all, Qaddafi threatened to crush an armed rebellion, which every government in the world would do, not to "massacre his people." Second of all, "more Americans than just about anybody"? Really? Hitler comes to mind. So do George Bush and his fellow conspirators, who were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama himself is responsible for the deaths of more than a thousand Americans who he has kept fighting in Afghanistan. I could also mention the American health "care" system, which is responsible for the deaths of 18,000 (some estimates are higher) Americans every single year.

And as part of an international coalition, under a U.N. mandate that is almost unprecedented, we went in and took out air defense systems so that an international coalition could provide a no-fly zone, could protect -- provide humanitarian protection to the people on the ground.

The entire operation, dropping hundreds of bombs and missiles a day on Libya, summed up as "providing a no-fly zone." Please, Barack, the American people are naive, but not that naive. Everyone in the world knows the operation is way beyond a "no-fly zone." But you'd still like to maintain that fiction, apparently.

And as a consequence, we’ve protected thousands of people in Libya.

"Protected" hundreds of them from the hazards of breathing by putting them safely in their graves, including small children. Some people will say that that number is not proven, and it could be less. No doubt that's true. But the "thousands" that Obama claims the U.S. has protected (in the sense that he's using the word) is entirely unproven and unknowable, pure conjecture.

What we’ve seen is reports of troops engaging in horrible acts, including potentially using rape as a weapon of war.

Obama resorts to the same dodge that I wrote about the other day when the U.S. Ambassador to Libya claimed to have seen "reports" that up to 30,000 people had died. "Seeing reports" means almost less than nothing, and Obama even dodges a second time with the word "potentially." And whatever the ICC says, that rape charge is as bogus as they come.

Multiple times today I heard about how a "Nigerian man" had passed through TSA and boarded a plane with a boarding pass belonging to someone else. I'll leave the discussion of the security issues concerned to others. I want to note another problem: the man is actually a U.S. citizen, not a "Nigerian." Do you suppose if he were an Irish-American instead of a Nigerian-American, the press would have described him as "Irish"? No, me neither.

Michelle Bachmann, who's running for the Republican nomination for President, has developed a bit of a reputation for having a loose relationship with the truth, some not so serious (it was mass murderer John Wayne Gacy who lived in her hometown, not movie hero John Wayne), and some more serious (claiming the Obama administration has issued one new drilling permit since coming into office, when the actual number is more than 200). But when AP decided to "fact-check" her on these and other statements, one thing was particularly interesting - her claim that a NATO airstrike in Libya had killed between 10,000 and 30,000 people!

Putting aside from the obvious (no single airstrike has killed that many people since Nagasaki as far as I know), let's assume she misspoke and meant "NATO airstrikes" rather than "a NATO airstrike." So why did she make such a claim? Because she's opposed to the intervention (probably just to distinguish herself from Obama and score political points), and wants to make the intervention look as bad as possible. AP's fact-check notes that the basis for her absurd statement was clearly a statement made by "the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, [who] said in late April that U.S. officials have seen reports that 10,000 to 30,000 people may have died in Moammar Gadhafi's crackdown on protesters and the fighting between rebels and pro-government forces." In other words, total deaths in the civil war.

And, to AP's (minor) credit, it does go on to "fact-check" Ambassador Cretz, when it writes "it is hard to know if that is true." I'll say. Ambassador Cretz carefully couches his statement in the old "People say..." language. He's "seen reports," you see, and quite possibly he has. Of course "reports" by themselves have no credibility, a fact I've been emphasizing with respect to Wikipedia, whose disclosures primarily consist of "reports," some true, some not. Bush & Co. claimed they "had reports" that Saddam Hussein was buying yellowcake in Niger, and that they "had reports" that agents of Al Qaeda had met with Iraqi government officials, and the Obama administration "has reports" that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Merely because someone writes a report about some rumor they've heard does not make it true!

So what is the truth? How many people have been killed in Libya, and by whom? This site contains a very interesting comparison of the wide variety of claims that have been made, claims which range from the low hundreds to more than 10,000 (by the way, none as high as the 30,000 claimed by Cretz). Those claims themselves are quite revealing. The high estimate of 10,000 was made on February 24, very early in the conflict, by "informed sources on the ICC," with no actual source or indication of where that number came from given. The article claims that of those 10,000, "at least 2,000" were in Benghazi, which begs the question of where the other 8,000 deaths occurred. Surely not in Tripoli (although there were certainly some deaths there), where 8,000 deaths would hardly be undocumented. And even the deaths in Benghazi are questionable. Why? Because according to this article, "the main city of Benghazi and several other Libyan cities have been conquered by the revolutionary forces." So a mere seven days after protests had started, the second largest city was in the hands of the rebels, but 2,000 deaths had happened in those seven days? This can hardly be considered credible.

Wikipedia contains one of the few sources of actual information, a table of reported fatalities (rather than the vague claims of people like the U.S. Ambassador). And what do they tell us? For example, in Benghazi, in the period February 17–20, 332-479 rebels deaths were reported, and 163 deaths of government forces. Quite clearly a battle was going on as early as the very first days of the revolt, and not a one-sided battle either. Through June 26, Wikipedia tallies reports of 2,384-3,084 opposition members/fighters (including some civilian supporters) and 1,425-1,673 Gaddafi loyalists have been killed. Again, evidence of a civil war, and again hardly a one-sided war.

Wikipedia also summarizes reports of 3,452-3,461 reported civilians killed by June 20, 2011. Of those, 856 are the reported deaths from the NATO bombing campaign. Another 1,472 are deaths of refugees fleeing the country whose boats sunk on the way to Italy. The vast majority of those were Black Africans fleeing the racist pogroms being carried out by the "revolutionaries" in Benghazi. All of these numbers must be taken as rough figures only. But taking them at least as roughly accurate, this means that 2,338 out of 3,450 civilian deaths (67%) have come either at the hands of NATO (not literally the hands, of course, NATO doesn't get its actual hands dirty) or as a result of the actions of the rebels.

All in all, there have been up to 8,500 deaths in Libya, including deaths of forces engaged in combat on both sides, as well as civilians killed (or whose deaths were caused) by both sides. Quite a few deaths, obviously. But not at all to be confused with "the number of innocent civilians killed by the Gaddafi regime," which is the impression that the U.S. government and the corporate media would like to leave in order to justify the U.S./NATO intervention.

Why is this important? Michelle Bachmann is just a bonehead (ok, she's more than that, but for this discussion only). But statements like the ones from the U.S. Ambassador to Crete, dutifully repeated in the corporate media and definitely not fact-checked, were no boneheaded mistakes. They were deliberate statements designed to give credibility to the "Gaddafi is committing and/or about to commit genocide and we need to start bombing to prevent it" argument. In actual fact, no such thing was happening or was likely about to happen. There was most certainly a civil war in progress. Some civilians were certainly killed by both sides, some deliberately, some "collateral damage." Nothing which would have remotely justified a U.N. resolution or NATO intervention, if the facts hadn't been distorted from the very start.

From AFP, with emphasis added:

Hundreds of activists are preparing to board aid ships bound for Gaza this week in defiance of an Israeli blockade and UN warnings and in spite of the violent end to an operation last year which left nine dead.
...
Nine Turks died when Israeli forces seized the Mavi Marmara.

They just died. No one killed them. Might have been heart attacks, for all we know.

AP is no better:

The warning reflected Israeli jitters about the international flotilla, which comes just over a year after a similar mission ended in the deaths of nine Turkish activists in clashes with Israeli naval commandos.

A little better; at least there were Israeli forces involved in "clashes." You know, the kind where one side is firing guns and the other side is trying to grab the guys with the guns. Not a word about how those activists died. Perhaps they slipped overboard and drowned in the midst of these "clashes." The reader will never know they were shot, some at point-blank range, some in the back, by Israeli commandos. Killed. Executed.

Who knows how the nine Turkish activists died? Actually AFP and AP know, but they're not telling.

Update: CNN's take:

The flotilla is meant to commemorate the one-year anniversary of a similar flotilla that resulted in a clash in international waters with Israeli navy commandos that left nine people -- including an American citizen -- dead.

Hell, from CNN, we might even imagine that some of those nine people were Israeli commandos. After all, it was a "clash."

Why is it that Congress is so eager to question the President's decisions when it comes to his Constitutionally mandated responsibilities (being Commander-in-Chief and hence having the final word about such things as troop levels), but so uneager to question his decisions when it comes to going to war in the first place, a responsibility the Constitution assigns to them?