LIBYA BOMBSHELL: Obama Overruled Two Top Lawyers, Who Told Him War Must Be Terminated

Joe Weisenthal
Business Insider
June 18, 2011

This week several members of Congress challenged Obama on the legality of the Libya war, given that actions have exceeded the 90 day period during which The White House doesn’t need Congressional authority for military action under the War Powers Act.

The White House response: We don’t need Congressional approval because this is not technically a hostile action (because we don’t have ground troops in Libya).

Tonight the NYT has a major bombshell: Two top lawyers — Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — told The White House otherwise.

Even Attorney General Eric Holder sided with Krass.

But Rather than heed their advice, he instead went with two lawyers with views more favorable to him: Bob Bauer (who is internal at The White House), and State Department advisor Harold Koh.

This is striking:

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

No doubt this will only embolden the bi-partisan group of Congressmen who think the war at this point is illegal.

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And of course one can only imagine how news like this would have gone down under the Bush administration.

All that being said, Obama does have the support of serious lawyers, and he himself was a constitutional lawyer, so the idea that just because Johnson and Krass opposed this decision doesn’t in itself end it.

But this is still tough.

For some context, see this American Conservative story (from last June) on the war philosophy of Harold Koh, a renowned liberal legal scholar who also has a history of justifying hostile activity.

At the end of March, Harold Koh, top lawyer at the State Department, used his keynote address at the annual confab of the American Society for International Law to make an announcement: the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to kill suspected terrorists is legal. The drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan are lawful because, Koh delineated, they are done only in national self-defense, their proportionality is always precisely calibrated, and they carefully discriminate civilians from combatants.

There’s both more and less to it than that, but the legal argument itself is of minor importance. What matters is that Koh said it. Harold Hongju Koh: renowned human rights advocate; leading theorist of international law (which, the ASIL conventioneers would happily have told you, is much more civilized than mere national law); until last year dean of Yale Law School and therefore unofficial pope of the American legal system, and former director of the school’s Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights; Obama appointee accused by Glenn Beck and likeminded screamers of wanting to smuggle Sharia law into U.S. courts. All of which is to say, if a liberal lion like Harold Koh says drone strikes are lawful, what more do you need to know?

Read the whole story at The American Conservative >

devis

‘NATO bombs civilians!’ — Cynthia McKinney from Tripoli with truth

RT
June 14, 2011

Former US congresswoman and presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney told RT she went to Libya because she wanted to know the truth.

CmsMadeSimple

Alex Jones: Al-Qaeda created by CIA

Alex Jones: Al-Qaeda created by CIA

 

RT
You Tube
March 29, 2011

There is an increasing pressure from lawmakers in Washington, as well as from the American public for President Obama to be more specific in the strategy for Libya. Radio host Alex Jones however argues there is more to it than an American/Obama agenda. He compared the situation with the US missions in Iraq, Rwanda and Serbia, where, he alleged, Al-Qaeda was created by the CIA and used to fight Serbs all as a part of an overall globalist agenda of the New World Order.

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Lindsey Williams to Break Bombshell Info on Alex Jones Show

Infowars.com
February 21, 2011

On the Alex Jones Show tomorrow, pastor Lindsey Williams will reveal new bombshell information detailing the plans of the globalists revealed to him by his inside sources. The new information will dwarf anything Williams has revealed in the past. The new revelations deal with the death of the dollar, exploding energy prices, and the engineered onset of order out of chaos revolution worldwide.

Pastor Williams’ revelations have turned out to be uncannily accurate in the past. In December, he told Alex Jones he was told by two of this longtime friends, both retired top executives of major oil producers, that the price of crude oil was slated to move to $150-200 per barrel in the short term.

The turmoil in Libya sent the price of premium crude oil in London soaring above $105 a barrel recently, the highest level in two and a half years. Economists are predicting gas prices will takeoff because of instability in the Middle East. Some say drivers could be paying $5 a gallon for gas by late summer.

Mr. Williams states the global elite plan to kill the dollar and bring the once great United States to its knees and reduce it to third world status.

The Alex Jones Show airs from 11 to 2 PM CST and can be heard via streaming audio at infowars.com and on syndicated radio stations around the country.

Please tell your friends to tune it. This promises to be one of Alex Jones’ most important broadcasts.

Gaddafi’s Israel Threat Linked To Libya Riots?

Gaddafi’s Israel Threat Linked To Libya Riots?

 

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
February 21, 2011

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Is it merely a coincidence that less than a week after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi threatened Israel by calling on Palestinians to capitalize on the wave of popular uprisings in the Middle East by massing peacefully on the borders of the Zionist state, his own regime is teetering on the brink of extinction following massive anti-government riots in Benghazi and Tripoli?

On Sunday last week, Gaddafi urged the Arab world to revolt against Israel during a speech on state television.

“Fleets of boats should take Palestinians … and wait by the Palestinian shores until the problem is resolved,” Gaddafi said. “This is a time of popular revolutions.”

“We need to create a problem for the world. This is not a declaration of war. This is a call for peace,” he said in a speech given to mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohamed, a holy day in the Islamic calendar,” reported Reuters.

Low and behold, just days after Gaddafi’s very bold threat to seize on the wave of revolutions as a means of toppling Israel, Gaddafi himself is forced to flee Tripoli as protesters burn down government buildings and take control of entire cities. This tells you an awful lot about who is really behind the wave of revolutions sweeping the region – the US military industrial-complex that kick-started them in the first place.

Despite moves under the previous Blair government to normalize relations with Gaddafi, British Prime Minister David Cameron called the Libyan government’s crackdown “appalling” during a surprise visit to Egypt today.

It seems as though the new world order hierarchy has now got all its ducks in a row as part of a massive propaganda and destabilization assault aimed at Libya in an effort to hijack the revolution and steer its outcome to suit their interests, just as has unfolded in Egypt where a gaggle of NGO’s and globalist forces have swooped in to feed off the vacuum of power left by Hosni Mubarak’s ousting.

Gaddafi’s very public threat to Israel was undoubtedly one of the primary factors that sealed his fate and made him a target of the contrived color revolutions now sweeping the region.

In his speech today, Gaddafi’s son Sayf al-Islam vowed that his father and security forces would fight “until the last bullet” to uphold their regime, blaming the revolt on outside forces and chastising the global media for exaggerating the brutality of the government response.

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As Tony Cartalucci writes in his piece entitled, Libya Conquered in the Dark, the establishment media is once again manufacturing the narrative behind the protests in Libya. Given the scant amount of credible information coming out of the country, talking heads have hastily made parallels to Egypt and Tunisia, a red flag in and of itself given that both these uprisings involved the manipulative hand of the US military-industrial complex.

“Libya is next in a long line of nations in the Middle East being destabilized and facing a Western-backed regime change. With the corporate owned mainstream media performing breathtaking acts of propagandizing, the US State Department’s army of bloggers coordinating Libya’s uprising on the ground, and nearly zero confirmed reports coming out, it seems the large North African nation is being dismembered entirely in the dark,” writes Cartalucci, adding that the whole process seems to be focused around isolating China and Russia.

As we have documented, western support for the wave of revolts is also about creating a pretext to topple Iran by camouflaging a sustained destabilization campaign that has dragged on for years in the cloak of authentic, people-powered color revolutions.

As regional expert Adrian Salbuchi highlights in the Russia Today clip above, demonstrators seem to have a poor grasp of the powerful global interests that are driving the protests, and how they could end up in a worse situation than what they began with.

While there undoubtedly a myriad of genuine grievances fueling the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, including soaring food prices and high unemployment, in the case of Egypt the elimination of U.S. puppet Hosni Mubarak has only resulted in a military dictatorship taking the reigns of power. As far back as December 2008, the US Embassy was aware of plans to overthrow Mubarak in 2011 and had begun secretly funding rebel leaders to spearhead the campaign.

“I believe we are seeing the destabilization of all the regimes in the area beginning with Tunisia moving to Egypt, but unfortunately I think the intended result of this is to see it take place in your country of Iran. I think that is the end result that they [Western countries] want to see take place is regime change in countries that are unfavorable to Israel and the US,” geopolitical analyst Mark Glenn tells Press TV.

Glenn points out that the same conditions that made Egypt and Tunisia ripe for revolutions are absent in Libya, GDP growth is good and the economy is doing well.

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What’s happening in Libya represents, “Another color revolution that’s been backed and pushed by [George] Soros and other economic interests tied to political interests in the west,” remarks Glenn, adding that all the revolutions have been uncharacteristically (for a genuine grass roots revolution) leaderless, allowing western forces to pick up the pieces by offering financial “assistance” to whatever form of government takes over, hijacking the aftermath and reshaping the international order in their own image.

“No matter who comes to power they are already over a barrel; they’re being held by the throat by these western financial interests who are going to dictate terms to these new governments,” warns Glenn, adding that whether or not the revolutions were genuine to begin with, they will always be thwarted by succumbing to this process.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.

Libya defiant as hundreds of protesters feared dead

Libya defiant as hundreds of protesters feared dead

Ian Black
Guardian
February 20, 2011

Libya is defying growing international condemnation of a bloody crackdown that saw troops and mercenaries firing at unarmed demonstrators as the death toll rose to more than 200.

The most violent scenes so far of the wave of protests sweeping the Arab world were seen in its most repressive country as Muammar Gaddafi appeared to be relying on brute force to crush what began last week as peaceful protests but may now threaten his 41-year rule.

Tensions eased in the Gulf state of Bahrain after troops withdrew from a square in central Manama occupied by Shia protesters. Thousands of security personnel were deployed in the Iranian capital, Tehran, to forestall an opposition rally. Elsewhere in the region unrest hit Yemen, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait and Algeria.

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