We are continuing the publication of Thierry Meyssan’s new book, « Right Before Our Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies ». In this episode, he takes us back to the first semester of 2011, during which, supported by the United States and the United Kingdom, the Muslim Brotherhood approached or won power in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

This article is an extract from the book Fake wars and big lies. See Contents.

In 2011, Ben Ali (Tunisia), Kadhafi (Libya) and Moubarak (Egypt) were three heads of state at the orders of Washington (Kadhafi since his change of policy in 2003, and the two others had always been US vassals). Despite their service record, they were swept aside for the benefit of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The beginnings of the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia

On 12 August 2010, President Barack Obama signed Presidential Security Directive n° 11 (PSD-11). He ordered all his embassies in the Greater Middle East to prepare for « régime changes » [1]. He nominated the Muslim Brotherhood to the US National Security Council, to coordinate secret actions on the ground. Washington was going to implement the British plan for the « Arab Spring ». For the Brotherhood, the hour of glory had arrived.

On 17 December 2010, a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire after the police had seized his wheelbarrow. The Brotherhood seized on the affair and circulated false information that the young man was an unemployed university student, and that he had been slapped by a female police agent. Immediately, men from the National Endowment for Democracy (or NED, the fake NGO run by the secret services of the five Anglo-Saxon states) paid the dead man’s family so that they would not reveal the truth, and began to foment a revolt throughout the country. A series of demonstrations against unemployment and police violence followed, and Washington asked President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali to leave the country, while MI6 organised the triumphal return from London of the Guide of the Tunisian Brotherhood, Rached Ghannouchi.

This was the “Jasmine Revolution” [2]. The plan for this régime change borrowed both from the abdication of the Shah of Iran, followed by the return of Imam Khomeini, and from the technique of colour revolutions.

Rached Ghannouchi had created a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and attempted a coup d’etat in 1987. Arrested and imprisoned several times, he took exile in Sudan, where he was offered the support of Hassan al-Turabi, then in Turkey, where he became close to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (then the director of Millî Görüş). In 1993, he obtained political asylum in Londonistan, where he lived with his two wives and their children.

Two personalities who claimed to be « anti-American » - Moncef Marzouki (extreme left, working for the NED - USA) and Rached Ghannouchi (Muslim Brotherhood, working for the Westminster Foundation - UK).

The « League for the Protection of the Revolution » (LPR) is the Tunisian equivalent of the Egyptian « Secret Wing ». Its head, Ihmed Deghij, received instructions from Rached Ghannouchi concerning the personalities to be eliminated.

The Anglo-Saxons helped him to improve the image of his party, the Movement of Islamic Tendency, renaming it the Renaissance Movement (“Ennahdha”). In order to soothe the population’s fear of the Brotherhood, the NED called on its extreme left-wing puppets. Moncef Marzouki, President of the Arab Committee for Human Rights, offered moral sanction. He claimed that the Brotherhood had truly changed, and had become democrats. He was elected President of Tunisia. Ghannouchi won the general election and managed to form a government between December 2011 and August 2013. He nominated other puppets from the NED, like Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, ex-Maoist, then Trotskyist, converted by Washington. Following the example of Hassan al-Banna, Ghannouchi formed a militia within the party, the “Leagues for the Protection of the Tunisian Revolution”, which proceeded with political assassinations, including that of the leader of the opposition, Chokri Belaid.

However, despite conclusive support from part of the Tunisian population when he returned, his party soon sank into the minority. Before leaving power, Rached Ghannouchi forced a vote on the tax code which was aimed, in the long term, at ruining the secular bourgeoisie. He hoped in this way to transform his country’s social structure and return once again to the front of the stage.

In May 2016, the 10th congress of Ennahdha was organised by Innovative Communications & Strategies, a company created by MI6. The speakers gave assurances that the party had become “civil,” with a separation of political and religious activities. But this had no connection with secularism, it simply required a division of labor between members, who must refrain from being both an elected official and an Imam at the same time.

The “Arab Spring” in Egypt

On 25 January 2011, just one week after President Ben Ali had fled, the Egyptian national holiday was transformed into a demonstration against the authorities. The protests were supervised by the US team traditionally used for colour revolutions – the Serbs trained by Gene Sharp (a NATO theorist specialised in non-violent régime change, in other words, without recourse to war [3]) and the men from NED. Their books and brochures, translated into Arabic, including the rules for demonstrations, were widely distributed from the first day. Most of the spies were arrested later, and judged, condemned, then expelled. The demonstrators were mainly mobilised by the Muslim Brotherhood, who enjoyed the support of 15% to 20% of the population throughout the country, and also by Kifaya (“That’s enough!”), a group created by Gene Sharp. This was the “Lotus Revolution” [4]. The protests took place mainly in Cairo, on Tahrir Square, but also in the seven other major cities. Yet it was very different from the revolutionary wave which had swamped Tunisia.

The Brotherhood used weapons right from the start. On Tahrir Square, they moved their wounded into a mosque which was fully equipped to provide them with first aid. The TV channels of the petro-dictatorships – al-Jazeera for Qatar, and al-Arabiya for Saudi Arabia – called for the overthrow of the régime, and carried live broadcasts which gave out strategic information. The United States called on the ex-Director of the Atomic Energy Agency, Nobel Peace Prize-winner and President of the National Association for Change, Mohamed El-Baradei. He had been honoured for calming the anger of Hans Blix, who, in the name of the UN, had denounced the lies that the Bush administration used to justify the war against Iraq. For more than a year, El-Baradei presided over a coalition created on the model of the Damascus Declaration – a reasonable text, signatories from all sides, plus the Muslim Brotherhood, whose own programme was in reality totally opposed to that of the platform.

For the spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Essam Elarian, the Camp David Agreement meant little, the essential task was to criminalise homosexuality.

Finally, the Brotherhood was the first Egyptian organisation to call for the overthrow of the régime. The television channels of all the member states of NATO and the Gulf Cooperation Council predicted the flight of President Hosni Mubarak. President Obama’s special envoy, ambassador Frank Wisner (Nicolas Sarkozy’s father-in-law by marriage), first of all pretended to support Mubarak, then pretended to withdraw and hide behind the crowd. He pressed Mubarak to resign. Finally, after two weeks of rioting and demonstrations gathering up to a million people, Mubarak gave in. However, the United States wanted to change the Constitution before putting the Brotherhood in power. Power was therefore retained, temporarily, in the hands of the army. Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi presided over the military committee which administered current affairs. He nominated a Commission of 7 members, two of whom were Muslim Brothers. Indeed, it was one of these, judge Tariq Al-Bishri, who presided over the work of the Commission.

However, the Brotherhood held demonstrations every Friday after prayers at the mosques, and continued lynching Coptic Christians, without the police interfering.

No to Revolution in Bahrain and Yemen

Although the Yemenite culture has nothing in common with North Africa, other than the Arabic language, an important dispute had been troubling Bahrain and Yemen for months. Revolutionary fervor had unexpectedly spilled over from Tunisia and Egypt, an unwelcome development for the Empire. Bahrain harboured the 5th US Fleet and controlled maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf, while Yemen and Djibouti controlled the entrance and exit of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

The reigning Sunni dynasty in Bahrain feared that the popular revolt could overthrow the monarchy, and automatically blamed Iran for organising it. Indeed, in 1981, an Iraqi Shiite ayatollah had attempted to export Imam Khomeini’s revolution and topple the puppet régime which had been set up by the British upon independence in 1971. Perhaps 70 to 80% of the Bahraini population is Shiite, and they have many grievances, including the destruction of their mosques and lack of representation in the Sunni-dominated government, in addition to the economic and political grievances shared with ordinary Sunnis, who also joined the protests.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited the area and authorised Saudi Arabia to nip these authentic revolutions in the bud. The repression was directed by Prince Nayef. He belonged to the Sudairi clan, as did Prince Bandar, although Nayef was his elder, and Bandar was only the son of a slave. The sharing of roles between the two men was clear – the uncle would maintain order by repressing popular movements, while the nephew would destabilise States by organising terrorism. They only needed to know which states were to receive which treatment [5].

Seldom had the hypocrisy and contradictions of imperialist policy been more evident. The grip of a Sunni minority dictatorship would be imposed against a real popular uprising in Bahrain, while a fake uprising was to be armed against a popular government, nominally headed by a member of the Alawite minority in Syria. Bahrain would be occupied by 5,000 Saudi military police indefinitely, along with 7,000 US troops stationed at the US Naval Base in Bahrain, the peninsula of the two seas.

The “Arab Spring” in Libya

While Washington had planned to overthrow of the governments of Ben Ali and Mubarak without waging war, the situation was very different in Libya and Syria, ruled by the revolutionaries Gaddafi and Assad.

After having taught the petro-dictators how to speak “PC”, after having reorganised Al-Jazeera and set up US companies in Libya, Brother Mahmoud Jibril became the leader of the « revolution » against the régime for which he had been working the day before.

At the beginning of February 2011, in Cairo, while Hosni Mubarak was still President of Egypt, the CIA launched the next phase of the operations. A meeting was held with representatives of several power centers, such as the NED (Republican senator John McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman), France (Bernard-Henri Levy), and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Libyan delegation was led by Brother Mahmud Jibril (the man who had trained the Gulf leaders and reorganised al-Jazeera). He entered the meeting as the number two of the Jamahiriya government, Libya’s head of planning and economic development and a protégé of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. On his way out, his new job was … head of the opposition to the “dictatorship”. He did not return to his luxurious offices in Tripoli, but landed in Benghazi, in Cyrenaica. The Syrian delegation included Anas al-Abdeh (founder of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights) and his brother Malik al-Abdeh (director of Barada TV, an anti-Syrian channel financed by the CIA). Washington gave instructions to begin the civil wars in Libya and in Syria both at the same time.

On 15 February, Fathi Terbil, attorney for the victims of the 1996 massacre at Abu Salim prison, ran through the city of Benghazi claiming that the local prison was on fire, and calling for help to free the prisoners. He was briefly arrested and freed the same day. The next day, 16 February, still in Benghazi, rioters attacked three police stations, the buildings of Internal Security and the offices of the Prosecutor. The police killed 6 people while defending the armoury of Internal Security. Meanwhile, in Al-Bayda, between Benghazi and the Egyptian border, other rioters also attacked police stations and Internal Security. They took the Hussein Al-Jawf barracks and the air force base of Al-Abraq. They captured a large quantity of weapons, beat the guards and hanged a soldier. Other less spectacular incidents took place, in coordinated fashion, in seven other towns [6].

These attackers claimed to be members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, (LIFG-al-Qaeda) [7]. They were all members or ex-members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Two of their commanders had been brainwashed in Guantánamo according to the techniques of professors Albert D. Biderman and Martin Seligman [8].

At the end of the 1990’s, on the demand of MI6, the LIFG had made four attempts to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi and establish a guerrilla warfare operation in the Fezzan mountains. They were bitterly opposed by General Abdel Fattah Younès, who forced them to flee the country. Since the attacks of 2001, LIFG has figured on the list of terrorist organisations established by Committee 1267 of the UN, but still maintained an office in London, under the protection of MI6.

The new head of LIFG, Abdelhakim Belhaj, who fought in Afghanistan alongside Osama Bin Laden, and also in Iraq, had been arrested in Malaysia in 2004, then transferred to a secret CIA prison in Thailand, where he was subjected to truth serum and torture. After an agreement between the United States and Libya, he was sent back to Libya, where he was again tortured, this time by British agents, in Abu Salim prison. In 2007, the LIFG and al-Qaeda joined forces.

However, in the context of negotiations with the United States during the period 2008-2010, Saif el-Islam Gaddafi (as naïve as he was idealistic) had negotiated a truce between the Jamahiriya and the LIFG (al-Qaeda). Belhaj had published a long document, entitled “Corrective Studies”, in which he admitted that he had committed an error by calling for a jihad against co-religionists in a Muslim country. In three successive waves, all the members of al-Qaeda were amnestied and freed on the sole condition that they renounce violence in writing. Of 1,800 jihadists, only a hundred or so refused the agreement and preferred to stay in prison. As soon as he was freed, Abdelhakim Belhaj left Libya and settled in Qatar. They all managed to return to Libya without attracting attention.

On 17 February, 2011, the Brotherhood organised a protest in Benghazi, in memory of the 13 people who had died at the Italian Consulate there during the demonstration against the Danish Mohamed cartoons in 2006. A vicious rumour had been spread by Hizb ut-Tahrir, a media group of the Muslim Brotherhood that agitates for the Caliphate, that Muammar Gaddafi himself was behind the blasphemous cartooning, in league with an ally of the US and Israel, the Italian Northern League. This fake news was widely believed in Benghazi. At the anniversary the demonstration went from bad to worse than before, with 14 people killed and shot, both police and demonstrators. One may conjecture that the shooters were most likely special forces provocateurs, as this is the very template of an insurgency sparked by death squad snipers shooting from the roofs at both sides during a public demonstration. Such was precisely the starting gun for the Syria insurgency a month later, and on the Maidan in Kiev, three years afterwards.

The Muslim Brotherhood distributed the new flag that they wanted for Libya – it was that of ex-King Idriss and British colonisation.

This massacre was the beginning of the “revolution”. In reality, the demonstrators were not seeking to overthrow the Jamahiriya, but to proclaim the independence of Cyrenaica. So, in Benghazi, tens of thousands of flags of King Idris (1889-1983) were distributed. Modern Libya is composed of three provinces of the Ottoman Empire (Tripolitania in the west, Fezzan in the southwest, and Cyrenaica in the east); it has only been a single country since 1951. Cyrenaica was governed between 1946 and 1969 by the Senussi monarchy – a Wahhabi family supported by the Saudis – who extended their power across all of Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi promised to “spring rivers of blood” to save his population from the Islamists. In Geneva, an association created by the NED, the Libyan League for Human Rights, took these declarations out of context and inverted them in the Western Press as threats against the Libyan People. It asserted that Gaddafi was bombing Tripoli. The League itself was an empty shell which housed the men who were chosen to become future Ministers of the country after the NATO invasion.

Mahmoud Jibril reorganised Al-Jazeera in 2005, transforming it into the Muslim Brotherhood channel. This was the news channel that perpetuated the myth of a surviving Ben Laden. Jibril’s spiritual guide, Sheikh Youssef Al-Qaradâwî, hosted a weekly programme during which he called for the assassination of Mouamar Kadhafi.

On 21 February, on al-Jazeera, sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa ordering the Libyan military to save their people by assassinating Muammar Gaddafi.

The Security Council, basing its work on that of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva – which had auditioned the League and the Libyan ambassador – and at the request of the Gulf Cooperation Council, authorised the use of force to protect the population from the dictator.

The commander of AfriCom, General Carter Ham, hit the roof when the Pentagon ordered him to coordinate with the LIFG (al-Qaeda). How could he work in Libya with the same people he was fighting in Iraq, combatants who had killed GI’s? He was immediately relieved of his concerns, and replaced by the commander of EuCom and NATO, Admiral James Stavridis.

30 of the 38 Navy Seals (here seen in training) who had participated in the pretended killing of Oussama Ben Laden in Pakistan died in various accidents in the weeks following this operation.

Intermission: on 1 May 2011, Barack Obama announced that in Abbottabad, Pakistan, US Navy Seal Team 6 had eliminated Osama Bin Laden, of whom we had seen no credible life signs for almost 10 years. This announcement closed the al-Qaeda file, and made it possible to recast the jihadists as allies of the United States, just like in the good old days of the wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chechnya and Kosovo. “Bin Laden’s body” was buried at sea, far offshore from prying eyes [9].

For six months, the Libyan front line remained unchanged. The LIFG controlled Benghazi and proclaimed an Islamic emirate in the town of Derna, the hotbed of extremism where most of its members originated. In order to terrorise the Libyans, LIFG death squads would kidnap people at random. Their bodies would be found later, dismembered, their limbs scattered in the streets. The jihadists had originally been normal people, but they were put on a regime of natural and synthetic drugs which made them lose all sensitivity. They were then able to commit atrocities without being aware of what they were doing.

The CIA, which suddenly needed large quantities of Captagon – an amphetamine derivative – contacted the Mafia capo, Boyko Borissov. As the Bulgarian Prime Minister he holds the presidency of the European Council for the first half of 2018. Borissov is an ex-bodyguard who joined the Security Insurance Company, one of the major Mafia organisations in the Balkans. This company has a number of clandestine laboratories which produce the drug for German sports professionals. Borissov manufactures these miracle pills by the ton, to be ingested while smoking haschich [10].

General Abdel Fattah Younès defected and joined the “revolutionaries”. At least, this is the story that was circulated in the West. In reality, he remained in the service of the Jamahiriya at the same time as becoming the head of the armed forces of independent Cyrenaica. The Islamists, who remembered his actions against them a decade earlier, lost no time in discovering that he was still in contact with Saif el-Islam Gaddafi. They laid a trap for him, killed him, burned him and devoured part of his corpse.

Emir Hamad of Qatar hoped to get rid of the Jamahiriya and install the new power structure, as he had done with the unconstitutional President of Lebanon. While NATO settled for airborne intervention, Qatar built an airstrip in the desert and landed men and equipment there. But the population of Fezzan and Tripolitania remained loyal to the Jamahiriya and its Guide.

When NATO rained a deluge of fire on Tripoli, in August, Qatar massed Special Forces and unloaded its tanks in Tunisia. These thousands of men were of course not Qataris, but mercenaries – mainly Colombian – trained by Academi (ex-Blackwater Xe) in the United Arab Emirates. They joined al-Qaeda (now once again the good guys, even though they were still considered as terrorists by the UN) in Tripoli, dressed and hooded in black, so that their eyes could not be seen.

Only two groups of Libyans participated in the taking of Tripoli – the fighters from Misrata, under the command of Turkey, and the Tripoli Brigade (al-Qaeda – LIFG), commanded by the Irishman Mahdi al-Harati, and supervised by regular officers from the French army.

On the proposition of NATO, Abdelhakim Belhaj (centre), the head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) or the Libyan branch of Al-Qaïda, became the military governor of Tripoli. Mahdi al-Harati (left), whom President Erdogan came to congratulate during the Freedom Flotilla in Gaza, is now his assistant.

Even before Muammar Gaddafi had been lynched, a provisional government was formed by Washington. We note the presence of all the “heroes” of this story – under the presidency of Moustafa Abdul Jalil (who had covered up the torture of the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor), Mahmud Jibril (who taught the Emirs of the Gulf, reorganised Al-Jazeera and underwent metamorphosis in the February meeting in Cairo), and Fathi Terbil (who launched the “revolution” in Benghazi). The head of the LIFG and world ex-number 3 of al-Qaeda, Abdelhakim Belhaj (implicated in the attacks on Atocha train station in Madrid), was named as “military governor of Tripoli”.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Pete Kimberley

This book is available in English langage.

[1] “Obama’s low-key strategy for the Middle East”, David Ignatius, Washington Post, March 6, 2011. “Identifiying the enemy: radical islamist terror”, Statement by Peter Hoekstra, House Committe on Homeland Security, United States House of Representatives, September 22, 2016.

[2] “Washington facing the ire of the Tunisian people”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 25 January 2011.

[3] “The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence according to the CIA”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 4 January 2005.

[4] The International Dimensions of Democratization in Egypt: The Limits of Externally-Induced Change, Gamal M. Selim, Springer (2015).

[5] “The Middle East counter-revolution”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Komsomolskaïa Pravda (Russia) , Voltaire Network, 26 May 2011.

[6] Rapport de la Mission d’enquête sur la crise actuelle en Libye, FFC (2011).

[7] “Once NATO enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan, now NATO allies in Libya”, by Webster G. Tarpley, Voltaire Network, 24 May 2011.

[8] “The secret behind Guantánamo”, by Thierry Meyssan, Оdnako (Russia) , Voltaire Network, 20 May 2010.

[9] “Reflections on the official announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 8 May 2011.

[10] “How Bulgaria supplied drugs and weapons to Al-Qaïda and Daesh”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 4 January 2016.