There is strong evidence that NATO carried out war crimes in its eight-month war for regime-change in Libya, according to a report released Thursday by Middle East human rights groups.
The United Nations resolution authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians was utilized as the justification for military actions against civilian targets in which many Libyans were killed and wounded, according to the groups’ investigation.
The report is based upon a fact-finding mission to Libya conducted by the Arab Organization for Human Rights, together with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the International Legal Assistance Consortium. The investigators conducted extensive interviews with victims of war crimes as well as witnesses and Libyan officials. The mission carried out on-site field investigations in and around Tripoli, Zawiya, Sibrata, Khoms, Zliten, Misrata, Tawergha and Sirte.
While the investigation concluded that the government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi used excessive force against protesters, the report also states: “There does not appear to have been a clear demarcation between peaceful protests and armed opposition, and the Mission received credible information indicating that protestors took up arms in the early stages of the revolution.”
In terms of NATO’s role, the report cites evidence that in addition to NATO air strikes, the US-led alliance deployed troops on the ground, which coordinated the offensive of the so-called “rebels” with the bombing campaign......
Among civilian sites visited by the mission that had been struck by NATO bombs and missiles were schools and colleges, a Zliten regional food warehouse, the Office of the Administrative Controller in Tripoli, and private homes.
The mission found its strongest evidence of war crimes in the coastal city of Sirte, a center of support for Gaddafi, which was the last major area to fall to the NATO-backed forces.
It cites a September 15, 2011 incident in which NATO warplanes struck two jeeps guarding a coastal road, killing or wounding 10 pro-Gaddafi fighters. When residents of the area came out of their homes to help the wounded and retrieve the bodies of the dead, the NATO warplanes struck again, firing a third missile into the crowd. Approximately 50 civilians were killed in the attack.
The report also detailed war crimes by the NATO-backed “rebels.” In addition to summary executions of alleged pro-Gaddafi fighters, witnesses provided reports of “indiscriminate and retaliatory murders, including the ‘slaughter’ (i.e., throat slitting) of former combatants.”
The mission reported on visits to detention centers holding individuals charged in many cases with nothing more than having supported the Gaddafi regime......
The report focuses, in particular, on the treatment of black African immigrant workers and black Libyans, who have been indiscriminately rounded up and charged as “mercenaries.”......
Emblematic of this racially fueled repression is the fate of Tawergha, a town which formerly had a population of about 30,000. Approximately 38 miles east of Misrata, Tawergha was a former slave-trading post settled by freed slaves, and consequently the majority of its inhabitants were black........
The report quotes a senior Libyan military commander who “confirmed that a number of other ‘loyalist’ villages throughout Libya had met a similar fate.”
“We have reason to think that there were some war crimes perpetrated” by NATO, Raji Sourani, the head of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights told the British Independent newspaper. The mission’s report noted that the effort to determine the scale of these crimes was hindered by the “apparent desire” among the anti-Gaddafi elements who have taken control “to protect NATO, or avoid any direct or indirect criticism.”......
While the International Criminal Court [ICC] last week granted Libya’s National Transitional Council a two-week extension on its deadline to provide the international court with a report on the conditions under which the murdered Libyan leader’s son, Saif al-Islam, is being held and whether he will be turned over to the international court, [ICC chief prosecutor Luis] Moreno-Campo has given no further indication that the ICC is pursuing charges related to NATO’s war crimes or the lynching of Gaddafi.

A report from Amnesty International details widespread torture in the prisons and makeshift detention facilities in Libya, under the auspices of the regime established by the US-NATO war that overthrew and murdered Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. In at least 12 cases, prisoners were tortured to death, the group found.
The preliminary findings by Amnesty were reported late last month, while the investigation was being conducted. Amnesty delegates interviewed detainees and torture victims throughout January and early February, with the detailed results released February 15.
The savage practices documented by Amnesty investigators include beatings with whips, cables, metal chains and wooden sticks, electric shocks, extraction of fingernails, and rape. Militia fighters conducted these attacks brazenly, in some cases continuing to abuse prisoners while human rights advocates were present.
According to the Amnesty report, the National Transitional Council, installed by the imperialist powers, has not conducted a single investigation into the torture and abuse of prisoners, and the militias have uncontested authority to do as they please. No one has been arrested or prosecuted for war crimes except those who were on the losing side in the civil war, fighting for the ousted regime of Gaddafi.
The report declares, “The failure of the authorities to even begin to investigate with a view to bringing to justice former anti-Gaddafi fighters responsible for war crimes during the conflict and human rights abuses has perpetuated the climate of impunity for such crimes.”
The report makes clear the political motivation for the violent repression.......
Some 2,400 detainees are acknowledged at prisons controlled by the NTC, but many thousands more are held by the official Libyan military and by police and militia units operating entirely outside of any legal structure. Arrests continue unabated, despite a series of reports since the beginning of this year by Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and now Amnesty.
This well-documented brutality and murder is grounds for indicting on war crimes charges, not only the NTC leaders, but their imperialist masters—President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and the rest of the NATO gangsters who bombed Libya mercilessly for eight months and armed and organized the “rebel” forces under the leadership of mercenaries and agents of the right-wing oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf.
It also exposes the criminal character of the support for the US-NATO intervention in Libya by middle-class “left” organizations in the United States and Europe, who enthusiastically embraced the “human rights” pretext offered by the Obama administration and its NATO partners........
The report gives details on some of the 12 deaths by torture in custody, men ranging in age from 26 to 62, including a factory worker, a school director, a former policemen, a former army colonel and a former Libyan ambassador to France. Other killings include a violent assault on a protest by displaced Tawargha refugees, in which several children were among the half dozen victims.
There are also cases of extrajudicial execution, besides the murder of Gaddafi and his son Mu’tassim when they were captured outside Sirte October 20. Three days after that, the bodies of 65 men were found in and around the Mahari Hotel in Sirte, which had been the base of operations for NTC fighters attacking the city. Some of these bodies had their hands tied behind their backs and many had been shot in the head. There has been no investigation of this apparent mass execution.

Following a declaration of autonomy by [a conference of] tribal and militia leaders in oil-rich eastern Libya, the head of the Tripoli-based National Transitional Council (NTC) has threatened the use of “force” to prevent the country’s partition along regional lines.
Nearly five months after the lynch-mob murder of Libya’s former leader, Col. Muammar Gaddafi, and NATO’s declaration of victory in its war for regime change, the confrontation between Tripoli and Benghazi, the eastern city where the autonomy decision was taken, raises the specter of civil war.
In a televised address Wednesday from the city of Misrata, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the chairman of the NTC, categorically rejected the autonomy bid.
“We are not prepared to divide Libya,” he said. “They should know that there are infiltrators and remnants of the Gaddafi regime trying to exploit them now and we are ready to deter them, even with force.”
At a press conference in Tripoli, Jalil charged unnamed Arab states with funding “sedition” in Libya. “Some sister Arab nations unfortunately are supporting and financing this sedition that is happening in the east,” he declared.
Jalil, a former minister of justice in the Gaddafi government, went on to declare the NTC “the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people” and Tripoli Libya’s “eternal capital.”
Earlier, the NTC’s interim prime minister, Abdel Rahim al-Kib, also rejected any move towards a federated state in Libya, declaring, “We don't want to go back 50 years."
The unstated reference was to the reactionary and corrupt regime of King Idris, which governed Libya until its overthrow by the Nasserite-inspired Free Officers Movement, led by Gaddafi [In 1969].....
The connection between Idris’s reign and the separatist movement in the east is very direct. The former king ruled a federated monarchy in which the imperialist powers and foreign corporations dominated. The states—Cyrenaica in the east, Tripolitana in the west and Fezzan in the south, territorial jurisdictions inherited from Italian fascist rule and before that the Ottoman Empire—had as much power as the central government. Idris himself resided in Benghazi and considered himself first and foremost the ruler of Cyrenaica.
Sheikh Ahmed Zubair al-Senussi emerged from the conference in Benghazi as the choice of the 3,000 assembled tribal, militia and political representatives for chief of a new interim council of Cyrenaica, or Barqa, as it is known in Arabic. The stated goal of the new council is to revive the constitution of 1951 imposed under Idris.
Al-Senussi, who is a member of the NTC, is also the grand-nephew of the deposed king. He insisted that the autonomy declaration was not a matter of “sedition” and that the Benghazi council had no interest in changing the country’s flag or national anthem and would leave foreign policy to the NTC in Tripoli.
However, in an interview with CNN from Benghazi, al-Senussi said that “social things” should be left in the hands of local governments, including health and education.
Under the Gaddafi regime, a significant portion of the country’s oil wealth was channeled into the provision of free health care and education for all Libyans. The proposal to turn these sectors over to regional authorities inside Libya represents a direct threat to the well-being of the majority of the population, particularly when couched in the program of an eastern Libya autonomy movement..........
The autonomy declaration in Benghazi is widely seen as a step toward grabbing control over the region’s energy wealth, which would entail choking off resources for the rest of Libya.
The move to create an autonomous government based in Benghazi is part of a broader fracturing of Libya along regional lines. Over 100 separate tribal and city-based militias—the forces which NATO backed with arms, advisers and aerial bombardments in the war to overthrow Gaddafi—control much of the country. The NTC, while installed by the US and NATO as the official government, has proven incapable of exerting its control even over the capital, Tripoli, where the main airport and major government buildings remain under militia control.
While the NTC’s Jalil blames the threatened splintering of Libya alternatively on unnamed Arab regimes and pro-Gaddafi infiltrators, the more obvious culprits are the US, NATO and the Western European powers. Their seven-month war last year succeeded in destroying the Libyan state and much of the country’s infrastructure, while claiming tens of thousands of lives.
The aim of this imperialist intervention was to turn the clock back half a century to the conditions that existed under King Idris, imposing unfettered control over the country’s oil wealth and turning Libya once again into a base for imperialist interventions throughout the region.
The fracturing of Libya along regional lines would facilitate these neo-colonial aims. It also threatens a renewed eruption of civil war and yet another round of bloodletting resulting from a war of aggression waged under the pretext of protecting civilian lives.