Col Muammar Gaddafi captured - BREAKING NEWS

[Beefitarian]

I'll go easy on you and allow extra time for you to get a picture of Adolf hugging either Roosavelt or Churchill to prove your saying the same thing here.

Gadhaffi didn't attack his nieghbors and take over their area and people, he did not declare war. It's not the same even if you can't understand why. The problem here is a guy can't just be a rich dictator within his own borders anymore. Again, Nothing was done to stop him for decades.

I sort of agree with someone finally getting around to doing it but, I don't have enough information I trust to prove it was right. Something about it is not even putting him in the same catagory as Osama and Saddam. It's done so whatever but something doesn't add up here.

[Beefitarian]

JFK's father recommended that the USA join WWII on Germany's side. Is anyone here bothered by that?

Yeah a little.

[straightpilot]

Nothing was done to stop him for decades

Well, I have a pretty clear recollection of Ronald Reagan (there was someone the media loved to hate!!) dropping some bombs on Libya in 1986:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_El_Dorado_Canyon

Ronald Reagan was ridiculed and reviled world-wide for doing that. Even Britain was castigated for simply allowing the US airplanes to land there beforehand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_ ... l_response

The attack was condemned by many countries. By a vote of 79 in favor to 28 against with 33 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 41/38 which "condemns the military attack perpetrated against the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya on 15 April 1986, which constitutes a violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law."

Not popular!

[straightpilot]

Adolf hugging either Roosavelt or Churchill

Hitler did not want to go to war with England! Keep in mind that
Kaiser Wilhelm, whom you may recall was the German emperor
in WWI, was descended from the English Royal family!

Wilhelm was born on 27 January 1859 in Berlin, the eldest child of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia and Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.

In 1888, Wilhelm's father succeeded as Frederick III. He died shortly afterwards, making Wilhelm kaiser at the age of 29. Although he had previously admired the great German statesman Otto von Bismarck, within two years Wilhelm had forced his resignation. He was a strong believer in increasing the strength of the German armed forces, particularly the navy. His policies towards Britain were contradictory. He alienated Britain with his naval expansion and a policy of aggressive German colonial expansion, and also supported the Boers in their fight against the British.

But he was also closely related to the British royal family and was particularly fond of his grandmother, Queen Victoria.

That's a whole lot weirder than anything you've posted so far.

[Beefitarian]

Hitler did not want to go to war with England!

He came around though.

Nothing was done to stop him for decades

Well, I have a pretty clear recollection of Ronald Reagan (there was someone the media loved to hate!!) dropping some bombs on Libya in 1986:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_El_Dorado_Canyon

Ronald Reagan was ridiculed and reviled world-wide for doing that. Even Britain was castigated for simply allowing the US airplanes to land there beforehand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_ ... l_response

The attack was condemned by many countries. By a vote of 79 in favor to 28 against with 33 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 41/38 which "condemns the military attack perpetrated against the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya on 15 April 1986, which constitutes a violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law."

Not popular!

That's partially why I'm so uneasy about this. It used to be wrong to go in a grease these guys even though they probably deserved it.
Couple that with the pictures of him being treated like a pal by those guys. What's up with that?

[straightpilot]

pictures of him being treated like a pal by those guys. What's up with that?

I'm having trouble believing you - I think I'm being trolled, but ...

That's hardball politics. I can't believe you've never worked at a large multinational corporation where someone smiles at you in the morning, and knifes you in the back in the afternoon. That's hardball in the big leagues.

You may recall Hilter was all buddy-buddy with the Russians in WWII ... right up until he attacked them.

And the west was all buddy-buddy with the Russians during WWII ... right up until the Cold War started right after WWII.

Starting to see the pattern?

Does ANYONE here have any knowledge of recent history? Or real-world work experience?

[Beefitarian]

So, I'm trolling you and you agree there's something wrong with what happened?

[straightpilot]

Something about it is not even putting him in the same catagory as Osama

Hold on a sec. None other than "Mr Peacemaker", Jimmy Carter, had the CIA fund the taliban in Afghanistan during the Afghan-Soviet war!

On July 3, 1979, Carter signed a presidential finding authorizing funding for anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan[45] as a part of the Central Intelligence Agency program called Operation Cyclone, led by their elite Special Activities Division, which would later include the massive arming of Afghanistan's mujahideen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups that were favored by neighboring Pakistan.

A Pentagon senior official, Michael Pillsbury, successfully advocated providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan resistance, according to recent books and academic articles.

The program relied heavily on using the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as an intermediary for funds distribution, passing of weapons, military training and financial support to Afghan resistance groups. Along with funding from similar programs from Britain's MI6 and SAS, Saudi Arabia, and the People's Republic of China, the ISI armed and trained over 100,000 insurgents between 1978 and 1992

Don't you get it?

there's something wrong with what happened?

Read some history. Try to live a less sheltered life, get out of the house, and try to understand what's going on around you.

[Beefitarian]

Get what?

Kind of sounds like you're supporting the theory that the planet is being run by very bad people that no one votes for. Only you seem happy about it or something.

[straightpilot]

the planet is being run by very bad people that no one votes for

That's not a very nice thing to say about Dalton McGuinty.

I will mention that there are a whole lot of wells around here that have been contaminated by the installation of those nutty solar panel farms.

Get what?

Get out of the house. If you can't do that, read this instead:

Canadian aid worker Samantha Nutt recalls her first visit to Somalia in her book, Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies & Aid.

I arrived in Somalia, like so many aid workers before me, believing I possessed skills that might be of some use. “This is what I am trained to do. This is why I went into medicine,” I’d told myself on my departure day, as I wrote “Having a great time!” on the backs of postcards featuring hippos and giraffes at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi before boarding the plane. I postdated them and paid the saleswoman a few extra shillings to mail one every week to my parents in Toronto, who believed I was off on a Kenyan safari and not on a flight into one of the world’s most dangerous places. It was a choice that I’d made at an age when I was old enough for it to be an informed one, but still green enough to have my doubts. As a parent now, I realize how shameful and awful that was of me.)

If I’d arrived in Somalia with a degree of self-righteousness, it faded within minutes of landing, when a grenade (fortunately with its firing pin still firmly attached) rolled under my feet the first time our vehicle came to a stop. When I protested that munitions were not allowed in United Nations vehicles, the driver was quick to point out that the car no longer belonged to the UN, but I was welcome to walk to my destination (which, by any measure of UN security policy, was ill-advised). Being driven through town by a moonlighting arms trafficker did not quite fit with the role I’d imagined for myself. I was therefore not surprised to learn that during the preceding year many humanitarian agencies and aid workers operating in Somalia had concluded that they no longer had the stomach for it. Their numbers had dropped precipitously, from a peak of nearly 200 international organizations in 1992 down to 40 when I arrived in early 1995. And aid agencies discomforted by Somalia’s many compromises needed only to look to the recent Rwandan genocide for a morally defensible “exit strategy.”

Why did I head into a war zone? “Aid worker” seemed to be a logical career path for a committed humanities student who had nevertheless gone on to become a doctor (although I cannot pretend that it all makes sense to me now, even years later). I was unsettled by the human condition. I’d marched against South African apartheid as an undergraduate at McMaster University, attended peace vigils during the 1991 Gulf War, and identified health and human rights as my primary area of interest in my application to medical school. Worldwide, the single greatest impediment to peace, as I saw it then and do now, was the marginalization of women and girls, underlying absurdly high levels of maternal, child and infant mortality across Africa, Asia and parts of the Middle East. Somalia has had, for the better part of two decades, one of the highest death rates for women during childbirth in the world. I would therefore describe my involvement in the humanitarian dimension of war less as a calling and more as a collision: Once the wheels were in motion, the impact was unavoidable.

It took only one afternoon in the city of Baidoa for me to realize that I wouldn’t be saving any lives in Somalia: UNICEF was overwhelmed, underfunded and barely operational in a security climate that required us to travel with armed escorts high on drugs. My job included visiting UNICEF-supported feeding clinics to interview women about their health and collect data to calculate malnutrition rates. Not the kind of heady stuff that earns doctors their bragging rights in war zones, but necessary for proper program planning. I’d developed a series of standard questions, which my translator, Hawa, dutifully read to the women standing in line as I scribbled down their answers in my journal. The women, mostly younger than me, wore loose, bright wraps and clung to tiny, sallow infants with protruding bellies — too malnourished to cry. As they waited for their children to be seen, the women spoke to me of being incapacitated by malaria, and of being so famished and anemic that their breast milk had run dry. They talked about their husbands, sons, and brothers lost to war, and of their country plagued by violence.

The noonday sun was reaching its apex and I felt light-headed. I moved towards the women at the front of the line, to an area shaded by the clinic’s canopy. I could see their babies more closely now. I reached down and placed my index finger in the palm of a small, six-month-old girl cocooned to her mother, who was next in the queue. The baby’s taut fingers were cool, her chest motionless. Dead.

My mind reeled. When had she died? While I was asking her mother inane questions about what she needed? What she needed was for her daughter to have a chance at life. Was the baby dead when I arrived and I just hadn’t noticed? How could I not notice? Suddenly, any confidence I’d had about my usefulness in the face of such misery was displaced by a sense of ineffectuality.

I looked to Hawa and asked whether she thought the mother knew her baby was dead. Hawa pressed her tongue against her front teeth and forced the air out through her lips, making a tsk sound. “She probably know, but maybe she don’t accept. And where else can she go?” As I moved my hand away from the baby, unsure what to do next, the young woman turned to speak to Hawa. I knew then by the listless tone in her voice and her gaunt, agonized expression that she understood it was too late for her child.

“She say six months ago,” Hawa translated, “after her daughter was born, her husband and her brothers leave her village to fight in the war. Her sisters bring food and collect water. Then road become unsafe. Too many guns. Boys, they shoot and kill people. They rape women. Everyone must stay home. Her animals get sick. She hungry and have no milk for baby. She feed her water and sugar. Baby get sick. She know her baby need help, but too many soldiers to travel to clinic, what can she do? The elders send message to her husband and brothers. No one come. After three weeks, her uncle trade animals for ride in truck for her and baby to get treatment. They drive at night. She held two days at checkpoint: no food, no water. Now she here, but the men that brought her say she must pay more or they won’t take her back. She have no money. She very worried. She have two other children at home.”

And so it went in Somalia. A young mother, stranded, clutching her dead baby, with two more children somewhere awaiting the same fate.

“Hawa, please tell her I am sorry.” Sorry I couldn’t do anything for her. Sorry there was no money to help her bury her child. Sorry I couldn’t pay for her ride home, or ask my driver to take her. It was against UN policy, and even if it wasn’t, he was unlikely to do me any favours. Sorry that her husband and brothers were most likely dead. Sorry we didn’t have the funding to open a clinic closer to her village so that other women could get the care they needed. Sorry that this clinic, too, would soon phase out its operations and close within a few months.

The clinic’s intake nurse appeared, dressed in navy mechanic’s coveralls. After scanning the names in his spiral-bound book, he took a pen and ruler from his breast pocket and began to draw new columns in the empty pages. Behind him, a torn UNICEF poster touted the benefits of vaccination. Hawa motioned for me to collect my things. I watched as the nurse wrote numbers in the left-hand margin where he compiled the weekly data of those waiting to be seen: “402, 403, 404 …” The line snaked around the supplementary feeding tents. Dozens more had arrived in the past hour. The women stood with their mottled, swollen feet pressed into the hot sand, ritually fanning the flies from their children’s drawn mouths. The intake nurse asked whether I’d managed to get all the information I needed. “The first woman in line over there,” I reported. “Her baby is dead.” He returned to his entries: “405, 406, 407.” Without looking at me, he said, “Doctor, if you go up to all the women standing in this line, you will find many more dead children.” With that, he ushered the young mother and her baby into the assessment room, sat her down, and lifted the lifeless infant onto a wooden exam table.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

In the face of Somalia’s insatiable violence, this was what humanitarian interventions had been reduced to: A pathetic apology for the business of war as usual. With every passing day, I increasingly felt as if I was implicated in a lie, propagating the myth of humanitarian aid as a noble response to an ignoble act. In reality, we weren’t saving Somalis from themselves, but from failed experiments in development and foreign policy.

[sky's the limit]

Something about it is not even putting him in the same catagory as Osama

Hold on a sec. None other than "Mr Peacemaker", Jimmy Carter, had the CIA fund the taliban in Afghanistan during the Afghan-Soviet war!

On July 3, 1979, Carter signed a presidential finding authorizing funding for anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan[45] as a part of the Central Intelligence Agency program called Operation Cyclone, led by their elite Special Activities Division, which would later include the massive arming of Afghanistan's mujahideen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups that were favored by neighboring Pakistan.

A Pentagon senior official, Michael Pillsbury, successfully advocated providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan resistance, according to recent books and academic articles.

The program relied heavily on using the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as an intermediary for funds distribution, passing of weapons, military training and financial support to Afghan resistance groups. Along with funding from similar programs from Britain's MI6 and SAS, Saudi Arabia, and the People's Republic of China, the ISI armed and trained over 100,000 insurgents between 1978 and 1992

Don't you get it?

there's something wrong with what happened?

Read some history. Try to live a less sheltered life, get out of the house, and try to understand what's going on around you.

Actually, there was no such thing as the Taliban as you know it in those days, and the mujahideen were a very different kettle of fish in any event. The mujahideen (a collection of northern tribes) were also the only guys fighting the rise of the Talib movement (from the south, mainly Kandahar province) in the early 90's when American and Saudi support disappeared after the Soviets left. Just so you have the facts.

stl

[Changes in Latitudes]

Just checked on liveleak to see what the Colonel is up to today...Chillin' with his homies from what I can tell.

[Beefitarian]

Sanders or Gadhafi?

[Colonel Sanders]

No one can resist my

[Dash-Ate]

Libya before and after NATO's WMD attack on citizens.
A modern peaceful country reduced ruins, looting, WMD deaths, and now DEBT.
Ditto for Iraq.





With Italy's prime minister ! Good buddies.

[cdnpilot77]

Libya before and after NATO's WMD attack on citizens.
A modern peaceful country reduced ruins, looting, WMD deaths, and now DEBT.
Ditto for Iraq.





With Italy's prime minister ! Good buddies.

So are you saying Gaddafi was good for Libya and its people?

[Beefitarian]

Those pictures are missinformation. I know that may be an un altered image but someone wants me to get emotional about it.

[Mig29]

So are you saying Gaddafi was good for Libya and its people?

Yes, he was better (not ideal) then these clowns looting his country and the foreigners who are behind all this, waiting to suck all their oil for free!

Maybe you are missing the point here....even if I am wrong, it's not our job or right to decide who should rule in a sovereign country that we are not even citizenship of. Especially it doesn't give us the right to bomb their country and people! Yeah, you will say they are Gaddafi's solders, but after all they were Libyan army solders protecting their country from an outside attack and you can't blame them for putting up the fight.

[cdnpilot77]

Even though the Libyan people asked for our intervention? The difference between Libya and Syria is that Libya's revolutionaries requested our help as they had no defence to the government slaughtering the citizens. The Syrians have not.

[Mig29]

And you believe that just because news networks said so?

Afghanis were freedom fighters when they fought Soviets, then few decades lather those same fighters are terrorist because they fought against US.

Kosovo "Liberation" Army was officially on U.S. State Department list as a terrorist organization financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and funds supplied from Islamic countries and individuals, including Osama bin Laden. But when Yugoslav army put up a fight against them defending it's sovereign right, the same KLA became again freedom fighter, backed by US.

When will people learn to think for themselves?

[grimey]

Yea Dash, there's no way it was the civil war that did any of that damage.

[Beefitarian]

There's parts of Lybia that are really nice. I have not been able to see them because it's been a dangerous place for foriegners. Maybe that can change now that Gadhafi is gone. I'm sure he needed to be removed, not sure about killed but for sure taken out of office. I don't know maybe there was no other way to do that.

[grimey]

And you believe that just because news networks said so?

Afghanis were freedom fighters when they fought Soviets, then few decades lather those same fighters are terrorist because they fought against US.

Kosovo "Liberation" Army was officially on U.S. State Department list as a terrorist organization financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and funds supplied from Islamic countries and individuals, including Osama bin Laden. But when Yugoslav army put up a fight against them defending it's sovereign right, the same KLA became again freedom fighter, backed by US.

When will people learn to think for themselves?

It's wrong to support or oppose people based on their actions and present circumstances? Sorry, didn't get that memo.

[grimey]

Libya might end up being a better place without Gaddafi, but more likely it'll end up like the Balkans, Somalia, or Afghanistan. Fucked up with no cohesive or effective government, or in a long term civil war ending in the country being partitioned. Having a dictator in place is unpleasant, but often it's better than overthrowing him and bringing about anarchy.

[Beefitarian]

Libya might end up being a better place without Gaddafi, but more likely it'll end up like the Balkans, Somalia, or Afghanistan. Fucked up with no cohesive or effective government, or in a long term civil war ending in the country being partitioned. Having a dictator in place is unpleasant, but often it's better than overthrowing him and bringing about anarchy.

I'm worried this will be true. Have you heard there are some countries pulling their embassys and declaring Lybia a "territory without a government."