Remember Libya?

This weekend, headlines in mainstream media were broadly proclaiming statements such as “Gadhafi regime not legitimate, world leaders say” or “US, other Western nations declare Gadhafi regime no longer legitimate.” 
According to MSNBC, “In a final statement following a meeting of the so-called Contact Group on Libya, the nations said: The “Gadhafi regime no longer has any legitimate authority in Libya,” and Gadhafi and certain members of his family must go.”

But Western powers and certainly Western media are working overtime to suppress the fact that Libyans themselves do not share this view of their leader. For better or worse, the people have spoken, and how are Libyans showing their support? To NATO? Certainly not:

As Bryan Becker said, the question of being “pro-Gadhafi” or “anti-Gadhafi” is irrelevant when it comes to supporting Libya and Libyans, and to understanding that what these NATO missions are accomplishing is the personification of cruelty, injustice and ultimate greed:

“Humanitarian war” is an oxymoron of the utmost proportions. Western military and imperial powers need to stop playing their high-stakes PR game of “monkey-in-the-middle”, pitting themselves as self-appointed “saviours” to the Libyan people against their heavily propagandized version of Gadhafi as the universal “evil-doer”. And we need to stop playing into this game. We need to turn off our televisions with their flashy news stories, rife with disinformation and lies, and look at what is really happening.

More and more people across the globe are starting to see through the lies and are turning to independent media sources (like Global Research) for their information. So you would like to know what is really happening in Libya? Here is what has slipped through the ample cracks of mainstream media: 
 

The truth behind the U.S./NATO war on Libya from ANSWER Coalition on Vimeo.

Turning the lens back on the Western world, this week US President Obama stated, “I cannot guarantee that those [Social Security, veterans and disability] checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue [of raising the government’s debt ceiling] because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it,” (Interview released by CBS 12/07/2011).

Empty coffers? And yet under NATO’s cynically-named “Operation Unified Protector”, we know that “more than 15,000 sorties have been directed against the Libyan People… since the beginning of the NATO operation” (Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 14, 2011). Clearly this comes at a very high cost to taxpayers being forced to support inflated defense funds, and an even higher cose to Libyans being killed day after day during this unjust campaign.

So while the nation with the empty coffers who “cannot guarantee” that it can support its own people is busy making dangerous and costly judgements against the world in the pursuit of oil, wealth and empire, perhaps we need to be asking the rest of the world whether they consider the US/Obama regime legitimate? If not, would that justify bringing NATO’s “humanitarian medicine” back home? 
Libyans were never given the choice to answer these questions for themselves, and now they are paying a heavy price. So when we ask, “remember Libya?”, it is a reminder that there is much more to the story than what is presented in mainstream news, which is funded by adminstrations, lobby groups and corporations interested only in presenting their side of the story.