Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe is a writer and businesswoman based in New York City.Marlowe currently does research, litigation preparation and asset recovery for state, corporate and individual clients while publishing investigative journalism and cultural commentary. Her work has ranged from asset recovery to rock criticism, from exposing Cambridge Analytica to explaining why Trollope is important, but everything she does is distinguished by rigorous analysis, attention to detail, and an ability for discovering new connections. She has been called “a relentless moral essayist and a secret poet” (Luc Sante) who writes with “cool authority” (Bret Easton Ellis) and “fierce clarity” (Jonathan Lethem).

Between 2002 and 2011, Marlowe was keenly interested in insurgency, counterinsurgency and war, completing eight embeds with US troops in Afghanistan as well as more informal embeds with the Libyan rebels in 2011. She is probably the only journalist to have both lived with the family of a District Governor in Khost Province, Afghanistan, and to have rode into battle with the commander of the thuwar (revolutionaries) of Zwara, Libya.

In 2011, she made four trips to Libya to cover the revolution and war and returned twice in 2012.She quickly stumbled upon evidence of enormous corruption in government contracting. This led to her subsequent work as a consultant in asset recovery and ongoing anti-kleptocracy journalism.

Between 2002 and 2011 she traveled regularly to Afghanistan and published often on Afghanistan's politics, economy, culture and the U.S. counterinsurgency there.As a result of her experiences in eight embeds with American troops in Afghanistan beginning in August 2007, as well as visits exploring civilian life, Marlowe grew disillusioned with the official American doctrine of counterinsurgency as embraced by General Petraeus. She cautioned that Americans were approaching Afghanistan without sufficient historical sense, writing in one of her 2007 Wall Street Journal op eds, “We can do nothing about many of Afghanistan's barriers to development. For starters, 86% of its land area is non-arable. It has also never had a broad distribution of income or land. According to Afghan-Australian historian Amin Saikal, up until the early 1920s when King Amanullah gave crown lands to the poor, only 20% of peasants worked their own properties.” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118696821962695646)

Disturbed by the contrast between the reality on the ground in Afghanistan and the brilliant works of the French counterinsurgency expert David Galula (d.1967) who had greatly influenced General Petraeus’ strategy, Marlowe researched his life at the Hoover Institution and the Strategic Studies institute of the US Army War College in Carlisle, PA. Her monograph on the life and intellectual context of David Galula was published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College in summer 2010. Ms. Marlowe has also published two memoirs, How to Stop Time and The Book of Trouble, and is one of the contributors to a compilation co-edited by Greil Marcis, A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Her articles have appeared in the op –ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post and New York Post, and in the Bulwark, OCCRP, the late Weekly Standard, Daily Beast, Forbes.com, TNR.com,and many other publications. She tweets regularly (@annmarlowe)

Ms. Marlowe has been a regular guest on the John Batchelor radio show discussing Libya, Afghanistan and counterinsurgency. She has also appeared on Fox's "Happening Now", PBS’s “Ideas in Action” with Jim Glassman, VOA, RTTV, BloggingHeadsTV.com and other television programs. She has spoken at U.S. Army bases, the Army War College, U.S. State Department, the Institut d'Histoire du Temps Present in Paris, and American colleges. In 2009, she was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution and returned there for a research fellowship in 2010.

Ms. Marlowe was born in Suffern, New York in 1958 and educated at public schools in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She received her B.A. in philosophy magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1979 and studied classical philosophy there in the Ph.D. program in 1979-80. In 1984, she received an MBA in finance from Columbia University's Graduate School of Business.

Is the law coming for Erik Prince at last?

June 17th, 2023

Originally published in The Bulwork

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/is-the-law-coming-for-erik-prince-at-last

The MAGA mercenary lord faces a subpoena from federal investigators and an indictment from a small Austrian city—here’s why this matters.

ANN MARLOWE
JUN 12, 2023

Erik Prince, chairman of the Prince Group, LLC and Blackwater USA, holds up a picture showing the affect of a car bomb while testifying during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on October 2, 2007. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
ERIK PRINCE—THE COFOUNDER of the controversial private military contractor Blackwater—is one of several right-wing figures recently subpoenaed by federal prosecutors investigating a scheme to spy on progressive groups in Wyoming before the 2020 election. Meanwhile, in an unrelated development largely unnoted in the American press, Prince was indicted with four other individuals in Austria on April 20 for exporting war materials without a license back in 2014 and 2015.

Let’s turn to the Austrian news first. The indictment accuses Prince of using an aircraft-customizing company in which he then held a controlling interest, the Wiener Neustadt-based Airborne Technologies, to retrofit two American cropdusters that were then to be shipped illegally overseas.

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The charges overlap 2021 United Nations allegations that Prince had in 2019 violated the U.N. arms embargo on Libya in an aborted operation called Project Opus, financed by the United Arab Emirates to the tune of $80 million in support of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, head of one of the two perpetually contesting governments in Libya. Project Opus concerned several modified aircraft—both helicopters and fixed-wing planes—including the two mentioned in the Austrian case, which were extensively militarized:

Project Opus also involved plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries, including Libyans who were EU citizens. Yes, that’s right: an American planning to murder foreigners with whom we were not at war.

The prosecution has a whiff of David and Goliath about it: Prince is a rich man with high political connections around the world, and although he has been accused of wrongdoing for decades, he has never been sanctioned or convicted of anything. Wiener Neustadt, the jurisdiction of his indictment, has just 50,000 or so inhabitants. The city was flattened by Allied bombs in World War II because a local factory made fighter aircraft, so it stands to reason that the people who live there now might have a particular attentiveness to what Prince was doing in their midst.

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In fact, prosecutors have tried to bring a case on the export charges since 2018 only to be refused by higher authorities. Perhaps a 2019 effort was stymied by Prince’s closeness to Donald Trump’s White House—Prince represented the incoming president in secret overseas meetings in the weeks before the 2017 inauguration (more on this shortly), and Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos was Trump’s secretary of education. Or perhaps the prosecution was slowed by the Austrian government, since Airborne Technologies, which is partly owned by the Austrian government, does work for some European governments—in which case, the fact that the prosecution is now proceeding suggests that it might now have the tacit approval of the Austrian state.

PRINCE, 54, IS THE BAD-BOY ex-Navy SEAL with chiseled good looks who has played soldier and spy on his inherited wealth, starting Blackwater in 1997 after leaving the Navy. He is most notorious for Blackwater employees’ 2007 Nisour Square massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians, ending in a deferred prosecution agreement and eventually a pardon for the Blackwater mercenaries by Donald Trump.

The Pentagon establishment’s hatred of mercenaries—together with what a friend of mine who knows Prince calls greed and ineptitude—have so far kept him from doing as much harm as he might. A lowlight from the last half-decade: In 2018, Prince offered his services to the U.S. government to privatize the war in Afghanistan. He called himself the Elon Musk of the privatization of war, which would be accurate if Musk employees left a trail of bodies behind them and were financed by China. In August 2021 Prince offered evacuations from Kabul at $6,500 a head. The need for evacuations was mainly from Afghans who had worked for the United States, and American veterans were at the time (and still today) desperately trying to arrange for free; it apparently did not occur to Prince that it would be more seemly for him to do likewise.

Overseas, Prince is one of the prices we pay for letting some spaces remain more or less ungoverned; at home, he’s eager to undermine the res publica by privatizing functions that are usually governmental for good reason, like peacekeeping and warfighting. His former employees include Michael Simmons, aka Michael Greene, an Oath Keeper indicted for his involvement in the January 6th insurrection. Both here and abroad, Prince’s alliances are with crooks like Steve Bannon: He supported Bannon’s fraudulent private funding of a border wall, which led to a federal trial that ended with Trump’s pardon of Bannon, though he faces state charges in 2024. Prince also donated around $150,000 to a pro-Trump PAC that made substantial payments to Bannon’s data-stealing company, Cambridge Analytica.

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The federal investigation in Wyoming in which Prince was recently subpoenaed arises out of such right-wing connections. Two years ago, the New York Times first exposed a “political infiltration operation” in which Democratic and liberal groups in Wyoming had been duped into hiring conservatives who allegedly spied on them from 2018 to 2020. Prince was reportedly central to the partnership that launched the operation; he had thought of making a primary run for U.S. Senate in 2017 in Wyoming and went to great lengths to establish the appearance of residency. Several other figures involved have also recently received federal subpoenas, including Susan Gore, a wacky heir of the Gore-Tex fortune who allegedly bankrolled the scheme, and former British spy Richard Seddon, who had worked at the right-wing group Project Veritas and had reportedly also arranged to spy on the Trump administration’s supposed internal enemies.

ALTHOUGH PRINCE IS A SELF-PROCLAIMED patriot, he has long suckled at the teat of authoritarian countries like China and the United Arab Emirates whose interests are not those of the United States or the West more generally. Giving him a chunk of governmental work to privatize means getting someone else’s foreign policy along with it—and they might be more canny than he is.

For example, Prince’s Hong Kong-based Frontier Services Group, specializing in aiding the Chinese with security and logistics in African nations, is partly owned by a Chinese state-owned investment fund, CITIC (Prince resigned as CEO in 2021 but retains stock). FSG has operated in South Sudan, including an unsuccessful effort to sell the nascent government the same two planes modified by Airborne in 2014 and later meant for Haftar. (Blackwater was fined by the U.S. State Department for violations in South Sudan.)

In China itself, FSG boasts of having trained five thousand Chinese soldiers, and it set up a training school in Xinjiang, the restive region known for central government repression of the Uyghur minority.

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Erik Prince is hardly alone on the MAGA right in preaching ultra-patriotism while practicing something altogether different for profit. He shares this hypocrisy with Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, and many of their associates, like Tom Barrack, Elliott Broidy, and George Nader. Consider the mysterious January 2017 “Seychelles meeting” organized by UAE ruler Mohammed bin Zayed (“MBZ”) with a Russian banker. (I unpacked Prince’s participation in the meeting in this 2018 article.) Was it an effort to establish a back channel for Trump to the Kremlin? Barrack, the chair of Trump’s inaugural committee, and Broidy, a top Republican fundraiser, were both subsequently prosecuted for allegedly being unregistered foreign agents; Barrack was acquitted, Broidy convicted. (Nader, MAGA’s favorite pedophile, was convicted for campaign finance violations.)

Prince’s ties to the UAE have been widely reported. They began in the aftermath of the Nisour Square massacre, with Prince offering his services in 2009 to ruler MBZ to create a palace guard—to protect him from any local Arab Spring—and a force that fought in the horrific civil war in Yemen. He became a trusted MBZ pilot fish.

And in Libya, it was the UAE policy of supporting Field Marshal Haftar that Prince was executing. Prince was working under the indulgent eye of the Trump administration in 2019, so Project Opus was barely concealed. According to a 2021 article when Opus was exposed by the U.N. report, its mercenaries “had offices, bank accounts and shell companies in the Emirates.” The United States could have shut all this down with a phone call; the UAE is a titular ally. Insiders say the CIA in fact made that call, stopping the planes.

Prince faces up to five years in prison if he is extradited and convicted; you cannot be tried in absentia in Austria. So wish those plucky Austrian prosecutors luck.

Posted in Afghanistan, Libya, The Arab Revolt, Islam, Iraq War, War on Terror, anti-kleptocracy | Comments Off

ChatGPT is dangerous — but not in the way you think

February 10th, 2023

Originally published in the New York post February 5 2023 https://nypost.com/2023/02/05/chatgpt-is-dangerous-but-not-in-the-way-you-think/?utm_source=twitter_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons

There’s a reason the phrase is “artificial intelligence,” not “artificial sensibility” or “artificial personality.” Intelligence is the easier human attribute to copy and surpass. Spending some time playing with the chatbot ChatGPT clarifies the difference and why it matters.

Some worry about bad actors using apps like ChatGPT to efficiently create disinformation or mashups of discredited conspiracy theories. Others look at the remarkable facility of the free app, introduced in November, and fear a near-future where it’s indistinguishable from a human, passing the Turing test and heralding “the singularity” of countless sci-fi stories.

No less than Elon Musk hinted at this in tweeting, “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.” But Musk, like fellow least-popular Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founded OpenAI, which developed and owns ChatGPT.

Neither threat is a big danger, for the same reason something else is: the possible proliferation of junk prose without the feeling of a narrator — a personality or sensibility — behind it. If we start feeding our young on it, it’ll have consequences far worse than a potato-chip-and-soda diet.

Ironically, and fortunately, AIs will force us to unpack what’s special about human narration.

Right now, my cats have more personality than ChatGPT, probably because being embodied and subject to pain and pleasure creates what we perceive as personality, however basic. The app can write music, lyrics and code — but not distinctive English.

ChatGPT prose is like stage scenery: windows into nothing, walls an inch thick. Experimenting with the app suggests there’s no there there.

Reading a good writer, or sometimes a bad one, you feel a personality behind the words, even in an essay on a scientific question. It goes to reading’s heart.

When asked why they read fiction, people often say, “To relax.” More reflective sorts may add, “and to experience life from other perspectives.” What we overlook and never name is what makes these things possible: the felt presence of another being behind the narration. So far, there’s been little reason to think this being wouldn’t be human.

We humans need to spend hours a day with our kind to flourish, and some books, read at some times, can give us this experience more effectively than being with our families or friends. It’s what makes books a balm for loneliness and part of a humane education. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent, if not necessarily in good company, practicing receptivity to others, learning to hear rhythm and text and subtext.

Reading’s not the only way to become acculturated, but it’s a very efficient one. That’s one reason early-reading programs are a key intervention in impoverished communities — and why overscheduling kids with organized activities is not necessarily producing smarter or more humane grownups. They would be better off reading. As long as a human has written what they read.

We feel the personal presence in the driest nonfiction, where even tepid expressions like “We must not forget” or “This is a misunderstanding” remind us emotions are at play. Passionate essayists, of course, use a very different, urgent language — AI hate speech won’t compare.

Narrative’s individual nature ought to be obvious. Writers have tics and style signatures that identify their prose (and catch plagiarists). These idiosyncrasies are nothing less than their life histories.

Start with a writer’s parents, birthplace, childhood. Someone might have absorbed Ciceronian cadences in high-school Latin or gospel-preaching’s rhythms from childhood church or both. Add a professor who insisted on minimal adjectives, a friend who was a Shakespearean actor. Finally, the writer’s mood that day.

How would you tell ChatGPT to imitate this set of unpredictable interactions? History has formed the writer’s personality over years. AI-generated prose lacks this; it’s like expecting to make a 12-year-old Pomerol overnight.

The app is good at imitating styles — a high-probability combination of words — and it’ll get better. It will sound more and more like what you ask it to imitate, whether Borat or the King James Bible. But it won’t sound like the self it doesn’t have.

The bright spot is that the singularity and its accompanying worries aren’t close at all. Some argue it’s just a matter of time. But a transcendent personality, with the layers of influences that make an appealing narrator, isn’t going to emerge from more and more repetitions of a search function, any more than wine will come out when you cut a grape into bits. It’s a different thing entirely.

The dark specter for now is the threat of floods of almost-free junk prose, the equivalent of industrial junk food or fashion but cheaper. A few hundred years ago in the West, everyone wore hand-spun cloth and hand-sewn clothing. Now only the super-rich do. Will our society embrace AI-generated prose as the literary equivalent of mass fast fashion, a cheap substitute that everyone uses occasionally? Will we come to see human-made prose as a luxury like couture clothes?

This will have grave consequences not only for the already-precarious incomes of human writers but for the education of young humans, who will not read much for fun — or turn out the same.

Posted in Music and Cultural Criticism | Comments Off

Why does EU tolerate Libya’s smuggler kingpin as migrants drown? (2015)

January 7th, 2023

originally published in Asia Times October 16, 2015 – reposted here in 2023 because unfortunately the smuggling continues despite the arrest of Fahmi Slim and some of his associates

http://www.atimes.com/article/eu-turns-blind-eye-to-fuel-for-arms-smuggling-as-migrants-drown/

later reprinted on Hudson Institute website: https://www.hudson.org/research/11795-eu-turns-blind-eye-to-fuel-for-arms-smuggling-as-migrants-drown

Zwara, the westernmost town on the Libyan coast, boasts turquoise water, endless sand beaches, and delicious fresh fish. You can even sit at a beach café at night and have an espresso while gazing at the Mediterranean. Over the course of several visits in 2011-12, it seemed the most Europeanized place in Libya. But for the last three months, local sources complain that the fish stores have been empty: every fishing boat is involved in human trafficking instead. And photos of corpses of drowned migrants on those endless beaches have shocked the conscience of the world. On Sept. 19th alone, almost 4,800 migrants were rescued off Libya. An estimated 130,000 have crossed from Libya to Europe this year to date, mainly from Subsaharan Africa.

On Sept. 28, the European Union Naval Force for the Mediterranean (EUNav) announced that on October 7 it would begin “Operation Sophia” to intercept smugglers’ ships and capture their crews, escalating from the current policy of merely tracking them. EU authorities have identified 17 Libyan boats involved in the trade. It is likely most if not all belong to citizens of Zwara.

One question is why the EU authorities made an advance announcement that gives the ship owners time to switch to other vessels. Another is why the announcement was made just as the summer smuggling season draws to a close.

The biggest question is why the EU ignores the fact that migrant smuggling is just one part of the activities of a well-funded mafia that includes not only the expected Libyan citizens, but also EU citizens.

The EU has mainly turned a blind eye to the trade that brings weapons and ammunition into Zwara for the jihadi coalition controlling Western Libya, Libya Dawn, and takes subsidized Libyan diesel fuel in exchange. By perpetuating the Libyan civil war, this trade also takes lives.

A liter of diesel fuel costs about .10 Libyan dinar or .065 euro in Libya, but upwards of a euro in Malta or elsewhere in southern Europe. The UN has banned both sides of the trade, but the EU doesn’t pay attention very often. (See this recent case of a boat impounded by Greece with weapons aboard)

On Oct. 12, the Libyan Central Bank decided to lift the subsidy on diesel and other subsidized goods in the interest of slowing the hemorrhage of cash out of the country. Fuel represents 70 – 80% of the $9 billion Libya has been spending annually on discounted goods.

Anything that will stop the flow of weapons to Libya Dawn is a good thing. They are an unsavory lot, closely linked to Ansar al Sharia in Benghazi, the listed terror group that took part in the killing of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 12 2012. There is hard evidence that Libya Dawn funds the Benghazi Revolutionaries Shura Council, the umbrella group of terrorists that includes Ansar. Libya Dawn regularly sends shipments of weapons and ammunition by sea from Tripoli to Benghazi to re-supply Ansar and other terror groups, including IS, who are fighting the Libyan National Army there. The internationally recognized Libyan government is based in the eastern cities of Bayda and Tobruk and controls the east and some of the south; Libya Dawn controls Tripoli and most of the coast from Misrata to the Tunisian border, including Zwara.

To this day, despite its financing of Ansar and its complicity in the smuggling trades, the UN and EU consider Libya Dawn as a legitimate negotiating partner in peace talks with the internationally recognized government. And it looks to many Libyans as though the EU does not want to act against the diesel smuggling and arms trafficking that allows the human smugglers the space to operate.

“The Italians want to stop this migrant business,” said a Zwara citizen, “Bashir,” who is one of a small group who are discreetly acting against the smugglers. “But they don’t care about the other smuggling. We want to stop all! I have met with people from Italian embassy (to Libya, now situated in Tunis) five or six times. They know the names of all the smugglers.”

As Bashir (real name withheld to protect him) and others explain, a group of interlinked crime families, similar to Italian Mafia families and including ties to them, handles human trafficking, diesel smuggling, drug smuggling, and weapons importation. The kingpins have to be taken down — otherwise, people who specialize in human trafficking will just shift to cocaine or weapons or alcohol smuggling for awhile. (Diesel smuggling is the only business that requires specialized ships.) Tolerating one kind of smuggling is like allowing an American Mafia family to continue to control illegal gambling and drug dealing, but to crack down only on prostitution. But many Zwara people think the Europeans don’t really care about any illicit commerce, except that which deposits unwanted migrants on their shores.

As evidence for this, Bashir points to the fact that Zwara’s smuggling king is a shareholder in and a director of a Malta company, and Malta is an EU country.

The smuggling kingpin is Fahmi Slim Mousa Ben Khalifa, aka Fahmi Slim. Slim, a dark-skinned Zwara native said to be about 45, served a few years of a 15-year sentence for drug smuggling in Gaddafi days before the revolution opened the prisons. Now he is so powerful that part of the harbor in Zwara is known simply as “Fahmi Slim’s harbor.” While he is not directly involved with human smuggling currently, locals say that he works with some of the human smugglers in other illegal ventures.

Asia Times Editor’s note: an official of an international agency confirms that Fahmi Slim is involved in fuel-smuggling activities in Libya and is known to French, Maltese and Italian authorities as a person of interest.

The EU could put pressure on Slim and anyone he controls easily: Fahmi Slim is a partner in and director of the Maltese corporation ADJ Trading Ltd. ADJ, under its old name of ADJ Swordfish, also owns a tanker called Basbosa Star that has a history of movements that suggest diesel smuggling. As Zwara does not have an oil terminal – the nearest one is in Zawia, 100km east – any tankers that call at its port are ipso facto suspect. Asia Times editors have seen evidence linking the Basbosa Star and its sister ship, the tanker Amazigh F, in suspicious activity.

Now, new documents1 also show Slim’s name on a ship that is being sold with the permission of the Tripoli-based Libya Dawn anti-government. The ship, carrying the IMO number 7900522, was impounded in Misrata, Libya for diesel smuggling years ago, in 2008 or 2009. It remained in Misrata harbor even after Gaddafi’s fall, slowly decaying, until this spring, when the Libya Dawn coalition that controls Misrata decided it wanted the ship — now derelict — removed.

The vessel is shown on the shipping website Equasis as owned by one “Benkhalifa FSM” since May 22 2015. That is Fahmi Slim’s full legal name. Each ship has a unique IMO number from build to scrap, so it is an important way to identify ships after name changes. On Equasis, the name of the vessel numbered 7900522 is given as Tiuboda 1. Tiuboda is near Zwara, and Fahmi Slim is chairman of a Libyan company named Tiuboda Oil Services, #41992.

On another shipping website, Fleetmon.com, the IMO number 7900522 is associated with the name Troodos – owned by an obscure Spanish company, AlvarGonzalez SA, using a Georgian flag (5). This appears to be the owner from the time when the ship was impounded.

Currently the ship is being marketed by a Mr Albarasi. He showed a prospective Libyan buyer a three page contract from the Tripoli Ministry of Transportation, stating that he, Emrajaa Embarek Abdul Hamid, bought the ship from the deputy Minister of Transportation, one Abdul Alatef Mahmod Ben Amer. On the first page, the document states that the Acting Minister gave permission for the sale on March 30, 2015.

Reached by Viber and responding to written questions in Arabic, Mr Albarasi said he is the sole owner, that “he owns it according to a contract made with Ports and Marine Transportation” and that “nobody else has anything to do with the ship.” He also wrote, “Troodos is the name of the ship.”

Then, on Sept. 19, reached through the prospective buyer who asked not to be identified, Mr Albarasi admitted that although he had bought the ship from the Tripoli ministry, his partner, one Abdulkarim Nassraat, later sold it to Fahmi Slim, who is now the owner. (Equasis shows Slim bought the ship on May 22.) Zwara sources identify Mr Nassraat as a Zwara native. Note that the sale occurred while the Troodos/Tiuboda 1 was still a derelict ship, unable to move under its own power. This makes it look very much like a “wash” sale.

One piece of Tripoli Port (Lebanon) paperwork –in English – locates the ship, under its Fahmi Slim-registered name of Tiuboda 1, in Tripoli, Lebanon harbor on July 15, “coming from Malta.” Mr Albarasi explained in Arabic, “The ship was towed from Misrata to Malta and the engines were maintained there.” He says the vessel is currently in Beirut obtaining an inspection.

If the EU wants to put pressure on those who have the power to stop human trafficking in Zwara, Fahmi Slim is an excellent place to begin. Why was his ship allowed in Maltese waters? Why is his Maltese company allowed to conduct business? The sale of the “Troodos/Tiuboda 1” to Mr Albarasi and its sale barely two months later to Fahmi Slim suggests that the Tripoli anti-government works hand in glove with Slim. In this instance as in others, Libya Dawn behaves more like a criminal enterprise than a government. Isn’t it time for the EU to bring its formidable soft power to bear to stop these needless deaths by stopping the money flows to the smugglers?

1 ADJFahmiBenKhalifaAppointedDirector ↝
2 Fahmi Slim’s full legal name ↝
3 AlvarGonzalez SA ↝

Posted in Libya, The Arab Revolt, Islam, Iraq War, War on Terror | Comments Off

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