Sunday, October 07, 2012

Did the leader of France kill Gaddafi?

Wow. If you think I have a weakness for conspiratorial scenarios, check out the U.K.'s Daily Mail. The headline: "Gaddafi was killed by French secret serviceman on orders of Nicolas Sarkozy, sources claim." 
A French secret serviceman acting on the express orders of Nicolas Sarkozy is suspected of murdering Colonel Gaddafi, it was sensationally claimed today.

He is said to have infiltrated a violent mob mutilating the captured Libyan dictator last year and shot him in the head.

The motive, according to well-placed sources in the North African country, was to stop Gaddafi being interrogated about his highly suspicious links with Sarkozy, who was President of France at the time.
Earlier this year, a somewhat sensationalistic French news site called Mediapart accused Sarkozy of taking a $65 million campaign donation from Gaddafi in 2007. There was even a Libyan document, bearing a 2006 date stamp, which gave details of the deal. An infuriated Sarkozy labeled this document a forgery and made lawsuit noises against the site, although I don't think anything further came of the matter.

So the question now facing us comes to this: If the Gaddafi/Sarkozy link is just a concoction, then why would Mediapart, the U.K. Daily Mail, and this unnamed Libyan source all try to convey a false impression?

Oddly enough, the Daily Mail published a story in October, 2011 identifying the man who killed Gaddafi. Actually, the name of the killer is not given, although his face is shown. There's something rather fishy about the 2011 story -- it reminds me of some of the less-believable reports we got in the very early days of the Iraq war. But the latest piece in the Daily Mail is also very, very iffy.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

When the Colonel was killed i remember thinking that it looked like he had been finished by an operative, and my guess was to prevent him talking. Whether it was france, the uk or the us i dont know

Harry

Stephen Morgan said...

The Mail has a reputation for just making stuff up. Nick Davies' "Flat Earth News" offers many examples and an insider's opinion that it's something they do systematically and intentionally.

As to this story, why bother to shoot him in the head when he's already being "mutilated" by a "violent mob"?

Anonymous said...

Most versions of his death at the time show him bleeding from a head would and alive having been taken by the mob. They had video footage of someone who looked very much like him sitting on a car surrounded by a crowing mob, and bleeding.

He then manages to wind up dead sometime later. Crowd must have turned even nastier or perhaps something else? Doesnt prove anything but awfully convenient for anyone who had done business with him.

Harry

b said...

Agreed that both pieces are fishy. But the Daily Mail piece of 25 Oct 2011 doesn't identify the man who killed Gaddafi; it reports a young man's boasting that he did, and it shows his image while maintaining distance on his claims. They got the story from the Russia Today video, which also maintains distance. But of course it's images and especially moving ones that count.

The Libyan elite had already agreed to hand the economy over, and Gaddafi must have been involved in this. The war happened because certain forces specifically wanted war. Ditto in Georgia.

Anonymous said...

Please state your current belief on the actual date and cause of Osama Bin Laden's death, Joseph.