Thursday, October 6, 2011

Feeding Us the State Department and Pentagon Line on Libya?



Is the independent media movement's flagship radio-TV show Democracy Now! pushing the State Department and Pentagon line on Libya instead of "going where the silence is" and telling the truth without fear or favor? Are its Libyan correspondents embedded with the US-backed Libyan rebels to such an extent that they have minimized and failed to follow up persistent reports of ethnic cleansing in Libya or investigate whether alleged "mercenaries" ever existed or Khadaffi's "massacres" ever took place? 

Have Democracy Now's correspondents in Libya, Anjali Kamat and Sharif Abdel-Kodous minimized or avoided reporting upon the persecution of black Libyans and sub-Saharan African migrants in by US-backed Libyan rebels? Have they reported massacres that may not have happened, and mercenaries who might not have existed? Have they ignored or minimized the impact of US and NATO bombing and the presence of Saudi, Qatari and other foreign forces on the ground in Libya, also in support of the US-backed Libyan rebels? Have they simply embedded themselves with US-backed forces in Libya to pass the views of the Pentagon and State Department to us as "independent, unembedded news"?

I'm not in Libya and never have been, but people who have say the country is anywhere from a quarter to half what we would call "black" in the US. It's hard not to notice that Anjali Kamat can't find any black Libyans to talk to, and that none are visible among the US-backed Libyan rebels.
It's hard to know all of this for certain. We're over here, they're over there, and Libya is very much a war zone. 

There have been many persistent reports from too many sources have pointed to widespread persecutions of black Libyans and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. There are reports of all-black towns in Libya which have been wiped off the map by the Libyan rebels and their allies. Our own Cynthia McKinney has visited the families of some who were lynched --- hanged by jeering mobs who used their cell phones to record the ghastly spectacle. Some of the videos of these lynchings were still on YouTube as late as last week.


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