Vol. 75/No. 33      September 19, 2011

The “friends of Libya” conference was convened by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose air forces—with essential surveillance support and munitions supplied by Washington—conducted the bulk of NATO’s airstrikes against Libya after U.S. planes and missiles had knocked out Gadhafi’s air defenses. Representatives of 63 countries attended.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé said French companies should get special treatment. “You know this operation in Libya costs a lot,” he told RTL radio. It’s only “fair and logical” for the new Libyan regime to give preference “to those who helped it.”

Libya has Africa’s largest oil reserves. It was producing 1.6 million barrels a day prior to the civil war that began in February, when the flow slowed to a trickle. More than 90 percent of Libyan government revenues come from oil and gas production.

France’s Total oil company is seeking to rapidly resume production. Italy’s ENI, the largest foreign oil company in Libya, says it will reopen its natural gas pipeline to Italy in October.

NATO is maintaining its air assault on areas controlled by Gadhafi loyalists. In Paris Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made clear that mission will continue.

Clinton also called for Libya’s National Transitional Council to reimprison Abdel-Baset al-Megrahi, sentenced to life in prison by a Scottish court for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In 1999 Gadhafi—seeking better relations with the imperialist rulers in Washington and London—turned over al-Megrahi to the British government.

In 2009 Scottish authorities released al-Megrahi, saying he had been diagnosed to die of prostate cancer within three months. A year later London’s justice minister admitted having considered British oil giant BP’s proposal to return al-Megrahi to Libya to curry favor with Gadhafi for a $900 million offshore oil-and-gas exploration deal. The Labour Party minister claimed this had nothing to do with the subsequent “compassionate release.”

National Transitional Council leaders have rejected extraditing al-Megrahi, who says he is innocent. “We will not hand over any Libyan citizen to the West,” Mohammed al-Alagi, the council’s justice minister, told BBC News.

New documents have come to light detailing collaboration by the CIA and British MI6 with the Gadhafi regime in spying on and torturing detainees. They indicate that Tripoli was one of the regimes the CIA used for so-called rendition operations, whereby “terror” suspects were sent to other countries to be tortured.

The files, found in Libya’s External Security agency headquarters in Tripoli by journalists and Human Rights Watch staff, cover operations between 2002 and 2007. “The CIA reportedly sent terror suspects to Libya for interrogation, while MI6 passed details of exiled Gaddafi opponents to Tripoli,” reported BBC News.

The relationship with Gadhafi’s regime was so close, noted the Wall Street Journal, that the CIA moved to establish “a permanent presence” in Libya in 2004, according to a note by Stephen Kappes, a CIA official then working with Libya’s top spy chief, Moussa Koussa.

One document details the CIA’s work in a March 2004 rendition of Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, now head of the rebel’s military council in Tripoli. Belhaj, then known as Abdullah al-Sadiq, was a leader of the anti-Gadhafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

The Gadhafi regime asked the CIA to capture Belhaj and send him to Libya. Two days later a CIA officer faxed Tripoli saying Belhaj and his pregnant wife would be intercepted in Malaysia and put on a British Airways flight to London with a stop in Bangkok.

Belhaj told the media he was tortured by CIA agents at a secret prison before being returned to Libya.  
 
 
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