Libya's and the West's crooked governments alike released prisoners (originally posted March 23, 2011)

“BP faced a new outcry Thursday about whether the Scottish and British governments sought to smooth BP's oil exploration contract talks with Libya by releasing prisoners, including the man convicted of bombing the Pan Am plane that went down over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The bombing killed 270 people, including 189 Americans..” - Steven Mufson, Washington Post, July 16, 2010

Dear friends,

The chaos that is going on right now in Libya is directly tied to the greed of the major Western governments, including the US and Israel (for whom the US continues to fight as a proxy), and their multinational corporate sponsors, along with the Khadafy regime. Exacerbating the whole mess is the release of prisoners, often murderers and drug thugs, by the Libyan government to undermine any genuine protest that may be occuring there.

To be sure, that practice of using criminals as cannon fodder is hardly either new or unfamiliar to Western powers especially. For example, about British settlements like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Charlotte M. Waters wrote, "The colonies were used too as dumping ground for prisoners and undesirables generally, in spite of protests from the colonists. Criminals, prisoners of war, and inconvenient Irish were thus got rid of. Royalist prisoners after Worcester shared the fate with 2,000 Irish girls and boys deported by order of the Government. Kidnapping was not uncommon. Such emigrants were sold by auction..." (Waters, An Economic History of England).

Only a couple of years ago, British Petroleum (BP...remember them?)needed to cut a deal with the Libya government, regarding oil exploration opportunities. Part of the bargain was for the oil giant to obtain the release of one of Libya’s heroes, a man who had been convicted and was serving a life sentence for the air plane bombing over Lockerbee Scotland that killed almost 300 people, mostly Americans. Forget about the “War on Terror”. Business is business. Right? Right.

But where were all of the loudmouth right-wingers who love to boast about their unmatchable “patriotism” all of the time? Apparently, they all caught laryngitis together. In the Washington Post just last year (7/16/10), in an article called “Libyan controversy adds to BP's woes”, staff writer Steven Mufson reported: BP faced a new outcry Thursday about whether the Scottish and British governments sought to smooth BP's oil exploration contract talks with Libya by releasing prisoners, including the man convicted of bombing the Pan Am plane that went down over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The bombing killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.

Additionally, quoting a confidential source, Mufson went on to say how the Obama administration fit in with all of this: The Libya deal was done with the full blessing of the U.S. government, said the source, who sought anonymity to preserve his business relationships. There was always a policy of no surprises with the U.S. government.

The released murderers and drug thugs who were mentioned earlier have no plans for doing anything but what they have been known to do. They wouldn’t be interested in creating a civil society, even if they knew how to. Anarchy – not the Khadafy regime or the Western governments and their corporate sponsors - rules in Libya right now. That makes perfect sense. After all, this is about greed. And as I’ve said so many times before, greed is always bad, because greed is always short-sighted, from the cheating spouse to BP, the nuclear power plant owners, and so many other “free market” and “free enterprise” hooligans. As our dear brother Macolm X insisted: The guys runnin’ this place ain’t nothin’ but Jesse James, Frank James, and the Whatchumacallit brothers.

G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXSCLIlh17o