We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

The US Hand in Libya’s Tragedy

Click here to access article by Robert Parry from ConsortiumNews.

From listening/viewing mainstream media, I learned only about African migrants losing their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. So, I wondered why Parry's focus is on Libyan chaos and the need for Libyans to escape. I've spent that past 20 minutes trying to find out the origins of the African migrants. The earliest report I came across was from the NY Times which reported the sinking on Sunday the 19th of April. This report briefly alluded that such boats were coming from Libya, but only made vague reference to the migrants' origins.
The fatal shipwreck may prove to be the Mediterranean’s deadliest migrant disaster ever and is only the latest tragedy in Europe’s migration crisis. Warmer spring weather has unleashed a torrent of smuggler boats, mostly from Libya, bearing migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa, often fleeing war and poverty for a foothold in Europe.
Subsequent reports failed to list any migrants from Libya and abandoned any context which might lead to the chaos in Libya and adjacent areas of north Africa; instead the reports focused on the larger problem of Africa migrants and the loss of lives at sea, the efforts of European authorities to control the problem, the arrest of boat officials on human smuggling charges. Furthermore almost all of the reports failed to disclose that this latest tragedy involved a boat which had sailed from Tripoli, Libya. Here is a typical report of the origins of drowned migrants and the focus on the problem of human smuggling:
In Rome, the prime ministers of Italy and Malta on Monday called for targeted, nonmilitary intervention against Libya’s human traffickers.

This year’s death toll in the Mediterranean Sea is thought to have already surpassed 1,500 victims — a drastic spike from the same period last year. With the arrival of warmer weather, the number of migrants on smuggling boats has risen sharply, with more than 11,000 people being rescued during the first 17 days of April. Migrants also now seem to be coming from a larger geographic area — from Bangladesh and Afghanistan in Asia; Syria and Iraq in the Middle East; and African nations such as Gambia, Somalia, Mali and Eritrea.
So, how does one account for the rather uniform context-missing, distorted coverage by Western media? It seems to me that this coverage can only be explained by some kind of deliberate control of media by politically oriented agents. Indeed there is evidence to support a "conspiracy theory" that the likely suspect are agents of the CIA installed in newsrooms of major news agencies: see this, this, this, this, this, and directly from the 1975 CIA's horse's mouth, CIA director William Colby before a Senate committee: