EQUIPO NIZKOR |
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26Apr11
NATO Observes Easter By Intensifying Bombardment Of Libya
As it has done daily since it assumed control of the air war and naval blockade against Libya on March 31, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on April 25 posted on its website a report on the number and nature of air missions flown by warplanes assigned to it over Libya the preceding day.
The North Atlantic Alliance flew 143 sorties on April 24, of which 62 were described as strike sorties; that is, air deployments involved in the dropping of bombs and firing of missiles. As of the above date, NATO aircraft had flown a total of 3,725 sorties and 1,550 strike sorties since the Western military bloc took command of the war against Libya from U.S. Africa Command’s Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn. By April 25 the figures had risen to almost 4,000 and over 1,600, respectively.
April 24 was Easter Sunday, this year on the same date for Western Christendom and Orthodox Christianity. The most sacred day on the calendar for two billion Christians.
France, Britain and other NATO powers in fact bombed Libya throughout Holy Week, during which 848 total air missions and 501 strike sorties were flown.
On Easter Sunday, when almost a third of humanity celebrated the resurrection of the Prince of Peace, NATO acknowledged bombing government targets in and near the cities of Misrata, Sirte, Mizdah and Zintan.
Hours later NATO warplanes bombed the residence of Muammar Gaddafi, wounding 45 people, 15 seriously.
Three days before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the Netherlands and, invoking the U.S. and NATO war against Yugoslavia twelve years earlier, said:
“We’ve been at this a relatively short period of time. I would remind you that the United States and other partners bombed targets in Serbia for 78 days.”
She confirmed what some at the time – like Isaiah and St. John the Baptist voices in the wilderness, prophets without honor in their own lands and time – warned would become the precedent it has: That in being permitted to launch an unprovoked war against a European nation for the first time since Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy did the same from 1939-1941, the U.S. and NATO would be given license to employ the model in other parts of the world, as they have done to different degrees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and now Libya.
In 1999 leading Western and Eastern Christian church leaders urged Clinton’s husband and his NATO allies to halt the bombing of Yugoslavia on both Gregorian and Julian Easter, April 4 and 11, to no avail.
Clinton’s assertion that bombing any targeted nation on Earth for at least 78 days is sanctioned by the Yugoslav precedent, incidentally, was made on Holy Thursday, which commemorates the day before Jesus’s crucifixion during the final hours of which Jesus warned one of his followers to “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”
The leaders of the NATO states that have bombed and fired cruises missiles into Libya for almost forty days all profess to be Christians, at least – particularly in the U.S. – making much of their religiosity during election years. The type that American author Ambrose Bierce, member of an organization that begs to be revived in the 21st century, the Anti-Imperialist League formed at the advent of America’s emergence as a global military power in 1898, described in his Devil’s Dictionary as:
“One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”
And violence. War.
For members of the Western political elite laws, conventions, principles, morality and commandments are for suckers, for losers; applied solely to the comparatively weak and powerless but never to themselves who are beyond good and evil, transcending constraints and limitations imposed on the rest of the human race. Empire-building is an amoral enterprise ne plus ultra.
The Gospel of St. Matthew records Jesus making another comment that Hillary Clinton, her commander-in-chief Barack Obama and their British, French and other NATO allies have evidently never bothered to acquaint themselves with: Judge not, that ye be not judged.
After French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s troops and helicopter gunships attacked the government of then-incumbent Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo, leading to his capture and humiliation by French troops on April 11, Clinton delivered herself of this pronouncement:
“This transition sends a strong signal to dictators and tyrants throughout the region and around the world. They may not disregard the voice of their own people in free and fair elections, and there will be consequences for those who cling to power.”
Of late the self-anointed would-be universal tyrannicide has, directly or through her spokesman Mark Toner, issued equally magisterial and undisguised threats against nations like Belarus and, with increasing frequency and ominous overtones, Syria.
The U.S. and its NATO allies have been at war in each of the eleven years of the new century, the new millennium – the longest continuous period of combat in the history of both – with not only no indication of the war cycle ever ending but with every assurance that it is now a permanent state of affairs.
As with the last ten Easter Sundays, Washington and Brussels are laying the groundwork for future bombing campaigns, ground operations and military occupations for succeeding ones ad aeternum or until the Second Coming, according to one’s lights.
[Source: By Rick Rozoff, Stop Nato, Chicago, 26Apr11]
 | This document has been published on 04May11 by the Equipo Nizkor and Derechos Human Rights. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. |