We are continuing the publication of Thierry Meyssan’s book, “Before Our Eyes “. In this installment, he examines the first half of 2011, when, with the support of the United States and the United Kingdom, the Muslim Brotherhood either became more established or assumed power in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
7- The beginnings of the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia
On August 12, 2010, President Barack Obama signed Presidential Security Directive 11 (PSD-11). He informed all embassies in the broader Middle East to prepare for “regime changes”[1]. He appointed Muslim Brotherhood members to the United States National Security Council to coordinate covert action on the ground. Washington was to implement the British plan for the “Arab Spring”. For the Brotherhood, the moment of glory had arrived.
On 17 December 2010, an all-season merchant, “Mohamed” (Tarek) Bouazizi, set himself on fire in Tunisia after the police confiscated his cart. The Brotherhood took up the case and circulated false information that the young man was an unemployed student and was beaten by a female police officer. Immediately, the men from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED, deceptive NGO of the secret services of the five Anglo-American states) bribed the family of the deceased so that they would not reveal the truth and ignited an uprising in the country. As demonstrations against unemployment and police violence followed one another, Washington asked President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali to leave the country, while MI6 organized the triumphant return from London of the Tunisian Brothers’ Guide, Rached Ghannouchi.
This was the ” Jasmine Revolution”[2]. The pattern of this regime change was based on the departure of the Shah of Iran, followed by the return of Imam Khomeiny, as well as on the colour revolutions.
Rached Ghannouchi had formed a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and attempted a coup d’état in 1987. Several times arrested and imprisoned, he went into exile in Sudan where he received the support of Hassan el-Turabi, then in Turkey where he approached Recep Tayyip Erdogan (then leader of Millî Görüs). In 1993, he was granted political asylum in Londonistan where he lived with his two wives and children.
The Anglo-Saxons helped him to improve the image of his party, the Islamic Renaissance Movement (“Ennahdha”). To allay the population’s fears regarding the Brotherhood, the NED called on its far left pawns. Moncef Marzouki, the president of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, acted as a moral guarantor. He assured that the Brothers had changed considerably and had become democrats. He was elected President of Tunisia. Ghannouchi won the parliamentary elections and succeeded in forming a government from December 2011 to August 2013. He introduced other NED pawns such as Ahmed Néjib Chebbi, a former Maoist and then Trotskyist converted by Washington. Following Hassan el-Banna’s example, Ghannouchi then formed a militia group, the Revolutionary Protection League, alongside the party, which carried out political assassinations, including that of opposition leader Chokri Belaïd.
However, despite the undeniable support of part of the Tunisian population upon its return, Ennahdha was soon outvoted. Before leaving power, Rached Ghannouchi passed tax laws aimed at ultimately ruining the secular bourgeoisie. In this way, he hoped to transform the socio-political situation in his country and return to the forefront in the near future.
In May 2016, the 10th Ennahdha Congress was staged by Innovative Communications & Strategies, a company created by MI6. Communicators reported that the party had become “civil” and separated political and religious activities. But this evolution had nothing to do with secularism, the leaders were only required to divide the work between them and not to be simultaneously elected and imam.
8- The “Arab Spring” in Egypt
On 25 January 2011, a week after President Ben Ali’s escape, Egypt’s national holiday was transformed into a demonstration against the government. The protests were organized within the traditional US framework of colour revolutions: the Serbs trained by Gene Sharp (NATO theoretician specializing in soft regime changes, that is without recourse to war[3]) and the people from the NED. Their books and brochures translated into Arabic, including instructions for events, were widely distributed from the beginning. Most of these spies were later arrested, tried, convicted and expelled.
The demonstrators were mainly mobilized by the Muslim Brotherhood, which had 15 to 20% support in the country, and by Kifaya ( Enough is Enough!), a group created by Gene Sharp. This was the “Lotus Revolution”[4]. The protests took place primarily in Cairo in Tahrir Square, but also in seven other major cities. However, that was very far from the revolutionary wave that prompted Tunisia.
From the beginning, the Brothers used weapons. In Tahrir Square, they took their wounded back to a mosque fully equipped to give them first aid. The television channels of the Qatari petro-dictators, Al-Jazeera, and Saudi Arabian, Al-Arabiya, called for the regime to be overthrown and broadcast strategic information live. The United States brought back the former director of the Atomic Energy Agency, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed El-Baradei, president of the National Association for Change. El-Baradei was honoured for successfully calming the fervour of Hans Blix, who denounced the Bush administration’s lies on behalf of the United Nations to justify the war against Iraq. For more than a year, he has headed a coalition created on the model of the Damascus Declaration: a workable document, signatories from all sides, plus the Muslim Brotherhood, whose programme was in reality totally opposed to the one of the platform.
For the Muslim Brotherhood spokesman in Egypt, Essam Elarian (right), the urgency is to criminalize homosexuality, regardless of the Camp David Accords.
In short, the Brotherhood is the first Egyptian organization to call for the overthrow of the regime. Television stations in all NATO and Gulf Cooperation Council member states were predicting President Hosni Mubarak’s possible escape. While President Obama’s special envoy, Ambassador Frank Wisner Jr. (Nicolas Sarkozy’s stepfather by marriage), pretended first to support Mubarak, then to rally behind the crowd. He urged him to withdraw. In the end, after two weeks of riots and a demonstration of a million people, Mubarak was ordered by Washington to surrender and resign. However, the United States intended to change the Constitution before putting the Brothers in power. The latter therefore remained temporarily in the hands of the army. Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi was Chairman of the Military Committee, which administered current affairs. He appointed a Constituent Commission of seven members, including two Muslim Brothers. One of them, Judge Tareq Al-Bishri, presided over the proceedings.
But the Brotherhood held demonstrations every Friday after leaving mosques and carried out lynchings of Coptic Christians without police intervention.
9- No colour revolution in Bahrain and Yemen
While Yemeni culture is completely different from that of North Africa, apart from the common use of the same language, a major dispute plagued Bahrain and Yemen for several months. The concomitant events in Tunisia and Egypt may obscure the situation. Bahrain hosted the Fifth US Fleet and controlled maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf, while Yemen together with Djibouti controlled the entry and exit of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
The ruling dynasty feared that a popular revolt would overthrow the monarchy and by reaction accused Iran of organizing it. Indeed, in 1981, an Iraqi ayatollah (Shiite) tried to export Imam Khomeini’s revolution and to overthrow the puppet regime set up by the British during the 1971 Independence.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went there and authorized Saudi Arabia to nip these authentic revolutions in the bud. The repression was led by Prince Naif. He belonged to the Sudeiris clan, like Prince Bandar, although Naif was his elder and Bandar was only the son of a slave. The division of roles between the two men was clear: the uncle maintained order by repressing popular movements, while the nephew destabilized States by organizing terrorism. The important thing was to distinguish clearly between the countries in which they operated[5].
10- Arab Spring in Libya
If Washington had planned the overthrow of the allied administrations of Ben Ali and Mubarak without resorting to war, the same cannot be said for Libya and Syria, ruled by the revolutionaries al-Qaddafi and Assad.
After teaching democratic language to petro-dictators, reorganizing Al-Jazeera and setting up US companies in Libya, Mahmoud Jibril (left) became the leader of the “revolution” against the government he had been serving a day before.
At the beginning of February, while Hosni Mubarak was still President of Egypt, the CIA organized the launch of the next phase of operations in Cairo. A meeting brought together various stakeholders, including the NED (represented by Republican Senator John McCain and Democrat Joe Liberman), France (represented by Bernard-Henri Lévy), and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Libyan delegation was led by Mahmoud Jibril. He entered the room as number 2 of the Jamahiriya government, but came out as… the leader of the opposition to the “dictatorship”. He did not return to his luxurious office in Tripoli, but went to Benghazi, Cyrenaica. The Syrian delegation included Anas Al-Abdeh (founder of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights) and his brother Malik Al-Abdeh (director of BaradaTV, an anti-Syrian television station funded by the CIA and the State Department). Washington gave instructions to initiate civil wars in both Libya and Syria.
On 15 February, Mr. Fathi Terbil, lawyer for the families of the victims of the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre, visited the city of Benghazi, asserting that the local prison was on fire and calling for the release of the prisoners. He was briefly arrested and released the same day. The next day on February 16th, still in Benghazi, rioters attacked three police stations, the Internal Security and the Prosecutor’s offices. Defending the Internal Security armoury, police killed six assailants. Meanwhile, in El-Beïda, between Benghazi and the Egyptian border, other rioters also attacked police stations and Internal Security offices. They took the Hussein Al-Jawf barracks and the Al-Abrag military airbase. They seized a large quantity of weapons, assaulted the guards and hung a soldier. Other, less spectacular incidents occur in a coordinated manner in seven other cities[6].
These attackers claimed to be from the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya (LIFG-Al-Qaeda)[7]. They were all members or former members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Two of their leaders were brainwashed at Guantánamo under the techniques of Professors Albert D. Biderman and Martin Seligman[8]. In the late 1990s, the LIFG made four attempts to assassinate Muammar Qaddafi at the request of MI6 and established a guerrilla group in the Fezzan Mountains. General Abdel Fattah Younés fought against them, forcing them to leave the country. Since the 2001 attacks, the LIFG had been included on the list of terrorist organizations drawn up by the UN 1267 Committee, at the same time as it had an office in London, under the protection of MI6.
The new head of the LIFG, Abdelhakim Belhaj, who fought in Afghanistan alongside Osama bin Laden and in Iraq, was arrested in Malaysia in 2004 and then transferred to a secret CIA prison in Thailand where he was subjected to truth serum and tortured. An agreement between the United States and Libya allowed him to be sent back to Libya where he was again tortured, this time by British agents, at Abu Salim prison. In 2007, the LIFG and Al Qaeda merged. However, in the context of negotiations with the United States during the period 2008-2010, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi had negotiated a truce between the Jamahiriya and the LIFG (Al-Qaeda). He published a lengthy paper, The Remedial Studies, in which he admitted that he had made a mistake in calling for jihad against co-religionists in a Muslim country. In three successive waves, all members of al-Qaeda were pardoned and released on the sole condition that they renounce violence on paper. Out of 1,800 jihadists, only about 100 rejected this agreement and preferred to remain in prison. Upon his release, Abdelhakim Belhaj left Libya and settled in Qatar. All managed to return to Libya without attracting attention.
On February 17, 2011, the Brothers convened a rally in Benghazi in memory of the 13 deaths that occurred during the demonstration against the Italian Consulate in 2006. According to the organizers, it was Muammar Qaddafi who, with the help of the Italian Northern League, set up the “Mohammed Cartoons” affair at the time. The meeting got out of hand. There were 14 deaths among demonstrators and police officers.
This was the beginning of the “revolution”. In reality, the protesters were not seeking to overthrow the Jamahiriya, but to proclaim Cyrenaica’s independence. In Benghazi, for example, tens of thousands of flags of King Idriss (1889-1983) were distributed. Modern Libya had consisted of three provinces of the Ottoman Empire that had only formed a single country since 1951. Cyrenaica was governed from 1946 to 1969 by the Senussi monarchy – a Wahhabi family supported by the Saudis – which extended its power throughout Libya.
Muammar Qaddafi pledged to “spill rivers of blood” to save his population from Islamists. In Geneva, an association created by the NED, the Libyan League for Human Rights, took these statements out of context and presented them to the Western press as a threat against the Libyan people. It asserted that he was bombing Tripoli. In reality, the League was an empty shell bringing together the country’s future ministers after the NATO invasion.
On 21 February, Sheikh Youssef Al-Qaradâwî launched a fatwa on Al-Jazeera ordering the Libyan military to save their people by murdering Muammar Qaddafi.
The Security Council, based on the work of the Geneva Human Rights Council – which had held hearings with the League and the Libyan ambassador – and at the request of the Gulf Cooperation Council, authorized the use of force to protect the population from the “dictator”.
General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, whose blood turned when the Pentagon ordered him to coordinate with the LIFG (Al Qaeda). How exactly can one work in Libya with the people we are fighting in Iraq who have killed GIs? He was immediately dismissed from his position in favour of the Commander of EuCOM and NATO, Admiral James Stavridis.
In between: On May 1, 2011, Barack Obama announced that in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Navy Seals Commando 6 had eliminated Osama Bin Laden from whom there had been no credible news for almost 10 years. This announcement concluded the Al Qaeda file and rebranded jihadists as allies of the United States, just like in the good old days of the wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chechnya and Kosovo. Bin Laden’s body was submerged in the high seas[9].
For six months, the Libyan front line remained unchanged. The LIFG controlled Benghazi and proclaimed an Islamic Emirate in Derna, the city from which the majority of its members came. To terrorize the Libyans, it randomly abducted citizens. Their bodies were later found skinned, their limbs scattered in the streets. Jihadists are initially normal people, and are forced to consume a mixture of natural and synthetic drugs that causes them to lose all feeling. They can then commit atrocities without being conscious of it. The CIA suddenly needed large quantities of Captagon – an amphetamine derivative – requested the Bulgarian Prime Minister, mafia leader Boïko Borissov – who would preside over the European Council in 2018. He was a former bodyguard who joined the Security Insurance Company, one of the two major mafia organizations in the Balkans. This company had clandestine laboratories that produced this drug for German athletes. Borisov would provide the miracle pills per ton, which would be taken while smoking hashish[10].
General Abdel Fattah Younés joined the “revolutionaries”. At least that is what was said in the West. In reality, he remained in the service of the Jamahiriya while becoming the head of the independent Cyrenaica forces. The Islamists, who remembered his action against them a decade earlier, soon discovered that he was still in contact with Saif al-Islam Qaddafi. They ambushed him, murdered him, burned him and devoured part of his body.
Emir Hamad of Qatar hoped to put an end to the Jamahiriya and install new rule as he had already done with Lebanon’s unconstitutional president. While NATO intervened by air, Qatar deployed a field airport in the desert and landed men and equipment. But the population of Fezzan and Tripolitania remained loyal to the Jamahiriya and its Leader.
When NATO brought a barrage of fire to Tripoli in August, Qatar massed Special Forces and landed tanks in Tunisia. These thousands of men were of course not Qataris, but mercenaries – mainly Colombians – trained by the Academy (ex-Blackwater/Xe) in the United Arab Emirates. They join Al Qaeda (considered terrorist by the UN) in Tripoli, clothed and hooded in black, so that only their eyes could be seen.
Only two Libyan groups participated in the capture of Tripoli, the Misrata fighters, who obeyed Turkey, and the LIFG. The Tripoli (Al Qaeda) brigade was commanded by the Irish-Turkish-Libyan Mahdi Al-Harati and supervised by regular officers of the French army.
Even before Muammar Qaddafi was lynched, a provisional government was formed by Washington. We can find all the protagonists of this story: under the presidency of Mustafa Abdel Jalil (who covered the torture of Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor), Mahmoud Jibril (who trained the Gulf emirs, reorganized Al-Jazeera and participated in the Cairo meeting in February), Fathi Terbil (who launched the “revolution” in Benghazi). The head of the LIFG and former No. 3 in Al Qaeda, Abdelhakim Belhaj (involved in the attacks at Atocha station in Madrid), was appointed “Tripoli’s military governor”.
Notes:
1] “Obama’s low-key strategy for the Middle East”, David Ignatius, Washington Post, March 6, 2011. “Identifiying the enemy: radical Islamist terror”, Statement by Peter Hoekstra, House Committe on Homeland Security, United States House of Representatives, September 22, 2016.
2] “Washington facing the wrath of the Tunisian people”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 23 January 2011.
3] “The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence CIA version”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 4 June 2007.
4] The International Dimensions of Democratization in Egypt: The Limits of Externally-Induced Change, Gamal M. Selim, Springer (2015).
5] “Counter-revolution in the Middle East”, by Thierry Meyssan, Komsomolskaya Pravda (Russia), Voltaire Network, 11 May 2011.
6] Report of the Fact-Finding Mission on the Current Crisis in Libya, CTF (2011).
7] “NATO Enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Allies in Libya”, by Webster G. Tarpley, Voltaire Network, 21 May 2011.
8] “The Secret of Guantánamo”, by Thierry Meyssan, Оdnako (Russia), Voltaire Network, 28 October 2009.
9] “Reflections on the official announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 4 May 2011.
10] “How Bulgaria provided drugs and weapons to Al Qaeda and Daesh”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 4 January 2016.