Het verhaal dat Hillary Clinton de vernietiging van Libië doordrukte, gebruik makend van al die leugens, wordt bevestigd door vele gesprekken tussen Muammar en Saif Ghadaffi enerzijds en Congres lid Dennis Kucinich en ook heel hoge militairen.
Exclusive: Secret tapes undermine Hillary Clinton on Libyan war
Joint Chiefs, key lawmaker held own talks with Moammar Gadhafi regime
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Origineel: Washington Times.
Top Pentagon officials and a senior Democrat in Congress so distrusted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2011 march to war in Libya that they opened their own diplomatic channels with the Gadhafi regime in an effort to halt the escalating crisis, according to secret audio recordings recovered from Tripoli.
The
tapes, reviewed by The Washington Times and authenticated by the participants,
chronicle U.S. officials’ unfiltered conversations with Col. Moammar
Gadhafi’s son and a top Libyan leader, including criticisms that Mrs. Clinton had
developed tunnel vision and led the U.S. into an unnecessary war without
adequately weighing the intelligence community’s concerns.
“You
should see these internal State Department reports
that are produced in the State Department that
go out to the Congress. They’re just full of stupid, stupid facts,” an American
intermediary specifically dispatched by the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the
Gadhafi regime in July 2011, saying the State Department was
controlling what intelligence would be reported to U.S. officials.
At the
time, the Gadhafi regime was fighting a civil war that grew out of the Arab
Spring, battling Islamist-backed rebels who wanted to dethrone the longtime
dictator. Mrs. Clinton argued
that Gadhafi might
engage in genocide and create a humanitarian crisis and ultimately persuaded
President Obama,NATO allies
and the United Nations to
authorize military intervention.
Gadhafi’s
son and heir apparent, Seif Gadhafi,
told American officials in the secret conversations that he was worried Mrs. Clinton was
using false pretenses to justify unseating his father and insisted that the
regime had no intention of harming a mass of civilians. He compared Mrs. Clinton’s
campaign for war to that of the George W. Bush administration’s now debunked
weapons of mass destruction accusations, which were used to lobby Congress to
invade Iraq,
the tapes show.
“It was
like the WMDs in Iraq.
It was based on a false report,” Gadhafi said
in a May 2011 phone call to Rep. Dennis J.
Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat serving at the time. “Libyan airplanes
bombing demonstrators, Libyan airplanes bombing districts in Tripoli, Libyan army
killed thousands, etc., etc., and now the whole world found there is no single
evidence that such things happened in Libya.”
Seif Gadhafi also
warned that many of the U.S.-supported armed rebels were “not freedom fighters”
but rather jihadists whom he described as “gangsters and terrorists.”
“And
now you have NATO supporting
them with ships, with airplanes, helicopters, arms, training, communication,”
he said in one recorded conversation with U.S. officials. “We ask the American
government send a fact-finding mission to Libya. I want you to see
everything with your own eyes.”
The surreptitiously taped conversations reveal an extraordinary departure
from traditional policy, in which the U.S. government speaks to foreign
governments with one voice coordinated by the State Department.
Instead,
the tapes show that the Pentagon’s senior
uniformed leadership and a congressman from Mrs. Clinton’s
own party conveyed sentiments to the Libyan regime that undercut or conflicted
with the secretary of state’s own message at the time.
“If
this story is true, it would be highly unusual for the Pentagon to conduct a
separate set of diplomatic negotiations, given the way we operated when I was
secretary of state,” James A. Baker III, who served under President George H.W.
Bush, told The Times. “In our administration, the president made sure that we
all sang from the same hymnal.”
Mr. Kucinich,
who challenged Mrs. Clinton and
Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, acknowledged that
he undertook his own conversations with the Gadhafi regime. He said he feared Mrs. Clinton was
using emotion to sell a war against Libya that wasn’t
warranted, and he wanted to get all the information he could to share with his
congressional colleagues.
“I had
facts that indicated America was headed once again into an intervention that
was going to be disastrous,” Mr. Kucinich told
The Times. “What was being said at the State Department —
if you look at the charge at the time — it wasn’t so much about what happened
as it was about what would happen. So there was a distortion of events that
were occurring in Libya to
justify an intervention which was essentially wrong and illegal.”
Mr. Kucinich wrote
a letter to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton in
August explaining his communications in a last-ditch effort to stop the war.
“I have
been contacted by an intermediary in Libya who has
indicated that President Muammar Gadhafi is willing to negotiate an end to the
conflict under conditions which would seem to favor Administration policy,” Mr. Kucinich wrote
on Aug. 24.
Neither
the White House nor
the State Department responded
to his letter, he said.
A
spokesman for Mrs. Clinton declined
to provide any comment about the recordings.
The State Department also
declined to answer questions about separate contacts from the Pentagon and Mr. Kucinich with
the Gadhafi regime, but said the goal of Mrs. Clinton and
Mr. Obama was regime change in Libya.
“U.S.
policy during the revolution supported regime change through peaceful means, in
line with UNSCR 1973 policy and NATO mission
goals,” the State Department said.
“We consistently emphasized at the time that Moammar Gadhafi had
to step down and leave Libya as an essential
component of the transition.”
‘President
is not getting accurate information’
Both
inside and outside the Obama administration, Mrs. Clinton was
among the most vocal early proponents of using U.S. military force to unseat Gadhafi.
Joining her in making the case were French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Sen. John
McCain, Arizona Republican, and her successor as secretary of state, John F.
Kerry.
Mrs. Clinton’s
main argument was that Gadhafi was
about to engage in a genocide against civilians in Benghazi, where the rebels
held their center of power. But defense intelligence officials could not
corroborate those concerns and in fact assessed that Gadhafi was
unlikely to risk world outrage by inflicting mass casualties, officials told
The Times. As a result, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strongly opposed Mrs. Clinton’s
recommendation to use force.
If Mrs. Clinton runs
for president next year, her style of leadership as it relates to foreign
policy will be viewed through the one war that she personally championed as
secretary of state. Among the key questions every candidate faces is how they
will assess U.S. intelligence and solicit the advice of the military
leadership.
Numerous
U.S. officials interviewed by The Times confirmed that Mrs. Clinton,
and not Mr. Obama, led the charge to use NATO military
force to unseat Gadhafi as Libya’s leader and that
she repeatedly dismissed the warnings offered by career military and
intelligence officials.
In the
recovered recordings, a U.S. intelligence liaison working for the Pentagon told a Gadhafi aide
that Mr. Obama privately informed members of Congress that Libya “is all
Secretary Clinton’s
matter” and that the nation’s highest-ranking generals were concerned that the
president was being misinformed.
The Pentagon liaison
indicated on the tapes that Army Gen. Charles H. Jacoby Jr., a top aide to Adm.
Mullen, “does not trust the reports that are coming out of the State Department and
CIA, but there’s nothing he can do about it.”
In one
conversation to the Libyans, the American intelligence asset said, “I can tell
you that the president is not getting accurate information, so at some point
someone has to get accurate information to him. I think about a way through
former Secretary Gates or maybe to Adm. Mullen to get him information”
The
recordings are consistent with what many high-ranking intelligence, military
and academic sources told The Times:
Mrs. Clinton was
headstrong to enter the Libyan crisis, ignoring the Pentagon’s warnings that
no U.S. interests were at stake and regional stability could be threatened.
Instead, she relied heavily on the assurances of the Libyan rebels and her own
memory of Rwanda, where U.S. inaction may have led to the genocide of at least
500,000 people.
“Neither
the intervention decision nor the regime change decision was an
intelligence-heavy decision,” said one senior intelligence official directly
involved with the administration’s decision-making, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity. “People weren’t on the edge of their seats, intelligence wasn’t
driving the decision one way or another.”
Instead
of relying on the Defense Department or the intelligence community for
analysis, officials told The Times, the White House trusted Mrs. Clinton’s
charge, which was then supported by Ambassador to the United Nations Susan
E. Rice and National Security Council member Samantha Power, as reason enough
for war.
“Susan
Rice was involved in the Rwanda crisis in 1994, Samantha Power wrote very
moving books about what happened in Rwanda, and Hillary Clinton was also in the
background of that crisis as well,” said Allen Lynch, a professor of
international relations at the University of Virginia. “I think they have all
carried this with them as a kind of guilt complex.”
Humanitarian
crisis was not imminent
In
2003, Gadhafi agreed
to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction and denounce terrorism to
re-establish relations with the West. He later made reparations to the families
of those who died in the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
News
media frequently described the apparent transformation as Libya “coming in from
the cold.”
Still,
he ruled Libya with
an iron grip, and by February 2011 civil war raged throughout the country.
Loyalist forces mobilized tanks and troops toward Benghazi, creating a panicked
mass exodus of civilians toward Egypt.
Mrs. Clinton met
with Libyan rebel spokesman Mahmoud Jibril in the Paris Westin hotel in
mid-March so she could vet the rebel cause to unseat Gadhafi.
Forty-five minutes after speaking with Mr. Jibril, Mrs. Clinton was
convinced that a military intervention was needed.
“I
talked extensively about the dreams of a democratic civil state where all
Libyans are equal a political participatory system with no exclusions of any
Libyans, even the followers of Gadhafi who
did not commit crimes against the Libyan people, and how the international
community should protect civilians from a possible genocide like the one [that]
took place in Rwanda,” Mr. Jibril told The Times. “I felt by the end of the
meeting, I passed the test. Benghazi was saved.”
So on
March 17, 2011, the U.S. supported U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 for
military intervention in Libya to help protect
its people from Gadhafi’s
forthcoming march on Benghazi, where he threatened he would “show no mercy” to
resisters.
“In
this particular country — Libya — at this
particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific
scale,” Mr. Obama declared in an address to the nation on March 28. “We had a
unique ability to stop that violence: An international mandate for action, a
broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries and a plea
for help from the Libyan people themselves.”
Yet
Human Rights Watch did not see the humanitarian crisis as imminent.
“At
that point, we did not see the imminence of massacres that would rise to
genocidelike levels,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the Middle
East and North Africa division for Human Rights Watch. “Gadhafi’s
forces killed hundreds of overwhelmingly unarmed protesters. There were threats
of Libyan forces approaching Benghazi, but we didn’t feel that rose to the
level of imminent genocidelike atrocities.”
Instead,
she said, the U.S. government was trying to be at the forefront of the Arab
Spring, when many dictator-led countries were turning to democracy.
“I
think the dynamic for the U.S. government was: Things are changing fast,
Tunisia has fallen, Egypt has fallen, and we’d better be on the front of this,
supporting a new government and not being seen as supporting the old
government,” Ms. Whitson said.
On the
day the U.N. resolution
was passed, Mrs. Clinton ordered
a general within the Pentagon to refuse to
take a call with Gadhafi’s
son Seif and
other high-level members within the regime, to help negotiate a resolution, the
secret recordings reveal.
A day
later, on March 18, Gadhafi called
for a cease-fire, another action the administration dismissed.
Soon, a
call was set up between the former U.S. ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, and Gadhafi confidant
Mohammed Ismael during which Mr. Ismael confirmed that the regime’s
highest-ranking generals were under orders not to fire upon protesters.
“I told
him we were not targeting civilians and Seif told
him that,” Mr. Ismael told The Times in an telephone interview this month,
recounting the fateful conversation.
While Mrs. Clinton urged
the Pentagon to
cease its communications with the Gadhafi regime, the intelligence asset
working with the Joint Chiefs remained in contact for months afterward.
“Everything
I am getting from the State Department is
that they do not care about being part of this. Secretary Clinton does
not want to negotiate at all,” the Pentagon intelligence
asset told Seif Gadhafi and
his adviser on the recordings.
Communication
was so torn between the Libyan regime and the State Department that
they had no point of contact within the department to even communicate whether
they were willing to accept the U.N.’s
mandates, former Libyan officials said.
Mrs. Clinton eventually
named Mr. Cretz as the official U.S. point of contact for the Gadhafi regime.
Mr. Cretz, the former ambassador to Libya, was removed from
the country in 2010 amid Libyan anger over derogatory comments he made
regarding Gadhafi released
by Wikileaks. As a result, Mr. Cretz was not trusted or liked by the family.
Shutting
the Gadhafis out of the conversation allowed Mrs. Clinton to
pursue a solitary point of view, said a senior Pentagon official
directly involved with the intervention.
“The
decision to invade [Libya]
had already been made, so everything coming out of the State Department at
that time was to reinforce that decision,” the official explained, speaking
only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
As a
result, the Pentagon went
its own way and established communications with Seif Gadhafi through
one of his friends, a U.S. businessman, who acted as an intermediary. The goal
was to identify a clear path and strategy forward in Libya — something
that wasn’t articulated by the White House or State Department at
the time, officials said.
“Our
big thing was: ‘What’s a good way out of this, what’s a bridge to post-Gadhafi conflict
once the military stops and the civilians take over, what’s it going to look
like?’” said a senior military official involved in the planning, who requested
anonymity. “We had a hard time coming up with that because once again nobody
knew what the lay of the clans and stuff was going to be.
“The
impression we got from both the businessman and from Seif was that the
situation is bad, but this [NATO intervention]
is even worse,” the official said, confirming the sentiments expressed on the
audio recordings. “All of these things don’t have to happen this way, and it
will be better for Libya in
the long run both economically and politically if they didn’t.”
Pentagon looks for a
way out
The Pentagon wasn’t alone
in questioning the intervention.
The
week the U.N. resolution
authorizing military force was passed, Sen. Jim Webb, Virginia Democrat,
expressed his own concerns.
“We
have a military operation that’s been put to play, but we do not have a clear
diplomatic policy or clear statement of foreign policy. We know we don’t like
the Gadhafi regime, but we do not have a picture of who the opposition movement
really is. We got a vote from the Security Council but we had five key
abstentions in that vote.”
Five of
the 15 countries on the U.N. Security Council abstained from voting on the
decision in Libya because
they had concerns that the NATO intervention
would make things worse. Mrs. Clinton worked
to avoid having them exercise their veto by personally calling representatives
from Security Council member states.
Germany
and Brazil published statements on March 18, 2011, explaining their reasons for
abstention.
“We
weighed the risks of a military operation as a whole, not just for Libya but, of course,
also with respect to the consequences for the entire region and that is why we
abstained,” Germany said.
Brazil
wrote, “We are not convinced that the use of force as contemplated in the
present resolution will lead to the realization of our most important objective
— the immediate end of violence and the protection of civilians.
We are
also concerned that such measures may have the unintended effect of
exacerbating tensions on the ground and causing more harm than good to the very
same civilians we are committed to protecting.”
Sergey
Ivanovich Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., told The Times that history
has proved those concerns correct.
“The
U.N. Security Council resolution on Libya was meant to
create a no-fly zone to prevent bombing of civilians,” said Mr. Kislyak. “NATO countries
that participated in this intervention were supposed to patrol the area.
However, in a short amount of time the NATO flights
— initially meant to stop violence on the ground — went far beyond the scope of
the Security Council-mandated task and created even more violence in Libya.”
On
March 19, the U.S. military, supported by France and Britain, fired off more
than 110 Tomahawk missiles, hitting about 20 Libyan air and missile defense
targets. Within weeks, a NATO airstrike
killed one of Gaddafi’s sons and three grandsons at their the family’s Tripoli compound,
sparking debate about whether the colonel and his family were legitimate
targets under the U.N. resolution.
Mr.
Gates, the defense secretary, said the compound was targeted because it
included command-and-control facilities.
Even
after the conflict began, U.S. military leaders kept looking for a way out and
a way to avoid the power vacuum that would be left in the region if Gadhafi fell.
As the
intelligence asset working with the Joint Chiefs kept his contacts going, one
U.S. general made an attempt to negotiate directly with his Libyan military
counterparts, according to interviews conducted by The Times with officials
directly familiar with the overture.
Army
Gen. Carter Ham, the head of the U.S. African Command, sought to set up a
72-hour truce with the regime, according to an intermediary called in to help.
Retired
Navy Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, who was acting as a business consultant in Libya at the time,
said he was approached by senior Libyan military leaders to propose the truce.
He took the plan to Lt. Col. Brian Linvill, the U.S. AFRICOM point of contact
for Libya.
Col. Linvill passed the proposal to Gen. Ham, who agreed to participate.
“The
Libyans would stop all combat operations and withdraw all military forces to
the outskirts of the cities and assume a defensive posture. Then to insure the
credibility with the international community, the Libyans would accept
recipients from the African Union to make sure the truce was honored,” Mr.
Kubic said, describing the offers.
“[Gadhafi]
came back and said he was willing to step down and permit a transition
government, but he had two conditions,” Mr. Kubic said. “First was to insure
there was a military force left over after he left Libya capable to go
after al Qaeda. Secondly, he wanted to have the sanctions against him and his
family and those loyal to him lifted and free passage. At that point in time,
everybody thought that was reasonable.”
But not
the State Department.
Gen.
Ham was ordered to stand down two days after the negotiation began, Mr. Kubic
said. The orders were given at the behest of the State Department,
according to those familiar with the plan in the Pentagon. Gen. Ham
declined to comment when questioned by The Times.
“If
their goal was to get Gadhafi out
of power, then why not give a 72-hour truce a try?” Mr. Kubic asked. “It wasn’t
enough to get him out of power; they wanted him dead.”
Libyan
officials were willing to negotiate a departure from power but felt the
continued NATO bombings
were forcing the regime into combat to defend itself, the recordings indicated.
“If
they put us in a corner, we have no choice but to fight until the end,” Mr.
Ismael said on one of the recordings. “What more can they do? Bomb us with a
nuclear bomb? They have done everything.”
Under
immense foreign firepower, the Gadhafi regime’s grip on Libya began to slip
in early April and the rebels’ resolve was strengthened. Gadhafi pleaded
with the U.S. to stop the NATO airstrikes.
Regime
change real agenda
Indeed,
the U.S. position in Libya had
changed. First, it was presented to the public as way to stop an impending
humanitarian crisis but evolved into expelling the Gadhafis.
CIA
Director Leon E. Panetta says in his book “Worthy Fights” that the goal of the
Libyan conflict was for regime change. Mr. Panetta wrote that at the end of his
first week as secretary of defense in July 2011, he visited Iraq and Afghanistan
“for both substance and symbolism.”
“In
Afghanistan I misstated our position on how fast we’d be bringing troops home,
and I said what everyone in Washington knew, but we couldn’t officially
acknowledge: That our goal in Libya was regime
change.”
But
that wasn’t the official war cry.
Instead:
“It was ‘We’re worried a humanitarian crisis might occur,’” said a senior
military official, reflecting on the conflict. “Once you’ve got everybody
nodding up and down on that, watch out because you can justify almost anything
under the auspices of working to prevent a humanitarian crisis. Gadhafihad
enough craziness about him, the rest of the world nodded on.”
But
they might not be so quick to approve again, officials say.
“It may
be impossible to get the same kind of resolution in similar circumstances, and
we already saw that in Syria where the Russians were very suspicious when
Western powers went to the U.N.,”
said Richard Northern, who served as the British ambassador to Libya during part of
the conflict. “Anything the Western powers did in the Middle East is now viewed
by the Russians with suspicion, and it will probably reduce the level of
authority they’re willing to give in connection to humanitarian crises.”
Mr. Kucinich,
who took several steps to end the war in Libya, said he is sickened
about what transpired.
He
sponsored a June 3 resolution in the House of Representatives to end the Libyan
war, but Republican support for the bill was diluted after Speaker John A.
Boehner, Ohio Republican, proposed a softer alternative resolution demanding
that the president justify his case for war within 14 days.
“There
was a distortion of events that were occurring in Libya to justify an
intervention which was essentially wrong and illegal because [the
administration] gained the support of the U.N. Security Council through
misrepresentation,” said Mr. Kucinich.
“The die was cast there for the overthrow of the Gadhafi government. The die
was cast. They weren’t looking for any information.
“What’s
interesting about all this is, if you listen to Seif Gaddafi’s account, even as
they were being bombed they still trusted America, which really says a lot,”
said Mr. Kucinich.
“It says a lot about how people who are being bombed through the covert
involvement or backdoor involvement of the U.S. will still trust the U.S. It’s
heart-breaking, really. It really breaks your heart when you see trust that is
so cynically manipulated.”
In
August, Gadhafi’s
compound in Tripoli was
overrun, signaling the end of his 42-year reign and forcing him into hiding.
Two months later, Gadhafi,
69, was killed in his hometown of Sirte. His son Seif was captured by the
Zintan tribe and remains in solitary confinement in a Zintan prison cell.
Since Gadhafi was
removed from power, Libya has
been in a constant state of chaos, with factional infighting and no uniting
leader. On Tuesday, an attack on a luxury hotel in Tripoli killed nine
people, including one American. A group calling itself the Islamic
State-Tripoli Province took responsibility for the attack, indicating a growing
presence of anti-American terrorist groups within the country.
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