• bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    6 months ago

    Clinton was part of the command structure that paid for the forces that ultimately sodomized gaddafi to death with a knife. This stands out to me more than any of the other events during the Libyan civil war because I watched Clinton joke about it on daytime tv.

    Under Clinton as Secretary of State and Obama as president, America rounded up a bunch of other western countries and knocked out Libyan airfields and air defenses, which are in retrospect the thing that caused the nation to fall and directly precipitated both the much more famous 2012 attacks on both the Red Cross and CIA building in Libya and the charnel house state of Libya even six years after the war ended.

    People get hung up on the CIA building attacks when you bring up Libya and Clinton because they think you’re peddling some conspiracy theory that she wanted to reduce security at the complex so people would die, but if you zoom out just a little it becomes clear that Clinton (and Obama!) are directly responsible for aiding the groups that would ultimately end up committing war crimes during the Libyan civil war and attacking American noncombatants (not that I think it’s tragic that we lost all those CIA operatives, but one of the diplomats was just an Internet forums moderator and that crime ought to carry a sentence less than death imho).

    Remember that Clinton had a lot to answer for during the 2016 elections when Libya had open air slave markets.

    • kandoh@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Gaddafi was a bad man who killed and raped many innocent people. He would’ve used his Airforce to do exactly what Assad did and barrel bombed his own people to stay in power in the face of the Arab Spring.

      Destroying that Airforce was one of the best things Obama and Clinton did. They should’ve immediately done the same thing in Syria, if they had we’d all be in a better position right now.

      Prior to 2011, slavery and human trafficking were already major issues in Libya, though the full extent was not as widely reported. Here are some key points about slavery in Libya before the 2011 uprising:

      • Libya was a transit point for migrants from sub-Saharan Africa attempting to reach Europe, leaving them vulnerable to trafficking networks.[1]

      • The U.S. State Department’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report noted “isolated reports that women from West and Central Africa were forced into prostitution in Libya” and that “migrants from Georgia were subjected to forced labor in Libya.”[1]

      • Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented cases of migrants being arbitrarily detained, tortured, and subjected to forced labor in Libya’s detention centers before 2011.[1]

      • Libya’s laws against human trafficking were not adequately enforced, and the government did little to prosecute traffickers or protect victims prior to 2011.[1]

      • The trans-Saharan slave trade routes that passed through Libya facilitated the trafficking and exploitation of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, though the full scale is unclear due to lack of data.[2]

      So while open slave auctions were not as widely reported before 2011, the lawlessness, lack of government oversight, and Libya’s position on migration routes allowed human trafficking and exploitation of migrants to persist as major issues even under Gaddafi’s rule.[1][2] The chaos after 2011 exacerbated these pre-existing problems.

      Citations: [1] Slavery in Libya - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Libya [2] [PDF] The Social and Economic History of Slavery in Libya (1800- 1950) https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/54580088/FULL_TEXT.PDF [3] Libya’s Modern Slavery and the Politics of Denial https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/libyas-modern-slavery-and-the-politics-of-denial/ [4] The return of slavery in Libya - Grow Think Tank https://www.growthinktank.org/en/the-return-of-slavery-in-libya/ [5] High Commissioner for Refugees Calls Slavery, Other Abuses in … https://press.un.org/en/2017/sc13094.doc.htm