British Tories’ expensive Libyan war

This video, recorded in Britain, says about itself:

06 April, 2011

When a revolution takes place in a country – it is the business of the people in that country to conduct the revolution, believes anti-war activist John Reese from Stop the War Coalition.

­“My point about the western intervention would be this: I do not think that they did intervene in order to assist a revolutionary process, I think they intervened in order to get control of the revolutionary process.”

The people coming to the fore of the Libyan opposition “were trained in the west, have links with the west and western security services and would not have come to the top had the west not intervened,” evaluated Reese.

Reese says The Transitional National Council that was formed in Benghazi was a democratic structure representing local people, but when the western powers intervened, the leadership of the council became selected from among the people who have the ear of the west, “therefore the whole democratic process of representing the Libyan people became distorted… the whole principle of popular democratic revolution becomes corroded, corrupted and demeaned by the intervention of the western powers.”

By Joe Mount in Britain:

Costs of UK’s colonial war in Libya spiral

7 October 2011

A leading defense expert has tallied the real costs of the UK’s seven-month-old military intervention in Libya. The sum spent so far vastly outstrips previous claims of UK ministers, confirming that the expenses of the imperialist intervention have been deliberately concealed.

According to the figures compiled by Defense Analysis editor Francis Tulsa, the war has cost around £1.75 billion so far. This cautious estimate for extra military expenditures in Libya up to the end of August is seven times greater than the figure stated by Defence Secretary Liam Fox this summer.

The claim that this vast sum is being expended out of humanitarian concern for the Libyan masses is aimed at concealing the deployment of the military firepower of Britain and other western powers against the Libyan people. The coastal city of Sirte is under massive rocket and missile bombardment by NATO. Its residents—subject to a prolonged blockade of food, water and medicine—have been told to leave the city, creating a refugee crisis. Through such terror, the western powers aim to seize control of Libya’s oil reserves and establish a strategic base in North Africa.

Tusa is a military journalist, with ties to the Ministry of Defence. Speaking to the Guardian newspaper, he said that “where there has been any doubt, I have underestimated rather than overestimated in my calculations.”

Major assault on Sirte: here.

The crisis in Sirte underscores the grotesque nature of the claims made by the NATO powers and their political cheerleaders that the war on Libya was a “humanitarian” intervention: here.

Sirte’s fall to usher in mass repression by Libya’s National Transitional Council: here.

Amnesty International: ‘Detention abuses staining the new Libya’: here. And here.

Troops swarmed through Tripoli over the weekend, setting up checkpoints and searching houses after violence erupted in the Abu Salim neighbourhood on Friday: here.

The recent closure of the refugee camp on the Italian island of Lampedusa will lead to more deaths added to the list of hundreds who have died trying to escape war-torn Libya: here.

An opponent of the Gadaffi regime who was “rendered” along with his wife and children to Libya by British security services in 2004 is to sue the British government: here.

Britain: Was Jack Straw involved in rendition and torture of Libyan man? Here.