America's First Black President Left A Legacy Of Slavery
Tragedy springs from Obama's imperial hubris and contempt for the Constitution
Barack Obama was elected president some 143 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States. As teary-eyed African-Americans watched Obama’s 2008 election night speech in Chicago’s Grant Park, none could have imagined that America’s first black president would leave his own legacy of slavery — in Africa.
However, that’s exactly what he did, thanks to a combination of imperial hubris, disregard for constitutional restraints on executive war powers, and the use of false pretenses.
In 2011, egged on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a handful of other advisors, Obama ordered a months-long series of air strikes that facilitated a NATO-backed regime change campaign that toppled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Rather than ushering in liberal democracy and prosperity, the ouster of Gaddafi left the country fractured, with two rival governments and various militias vying for power. Obama’s regime change marked the start of an ongoing era of chaos, with some of the greatest resulting evils inflicted on black Africans.
Those evils began during the war, as racism and Gaddafi’s use of sub-Saharan black mercenaries combined to spark widespread atrocities perpetrated against blacks who were seen as fair game for various atrocities including beatings, rapes and lynchings.
“We had 70-80 people from Chad working for our company,” a Turkish construction worker told BBC. “They were cut dead with pruning shears and axes, attackers saying: ‘You are providing troops for Gaddafi.’ The Sudanese were also massacred. We saw it for ourselves.”
One rebel group was glorified in roadside graffiti as “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin” — that being a reference to Libya’s black descendants of slaves, such as those who populated the town of Tawergha. Once home to 30,000 people, Tawergha was ransacked and its occupants assaulted to the point of turning it into an ethnically-cleansed ghost town.
In 2017 — six years after Gaddafi’s death — CNN captured a new and unthinkable dimension of misery being imposed on black people as a result of Obama’s regime change pursuits: The network aired video of two open-air slave auctions hosted in Libya. “Big strong boys for farm work,” said an auctioneer. One trio of blacks was purchased for $400 each.
It hasn’t stopped. Last month, the United Nations reported that a three-year investigation found “arbitrary detention, murder, rape, enslavement, sexual slavery, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance” have become a “widespread practice” in Libya.
Obama’s War Power Hypocrisy
As a candidate in 2007, Obama was clear-throated about the limits of presidential military authority, telling the Boston Globe, "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
However, as president, Obama betrayed those assurances — and violated his oath of office — by ordering the Pentagon to carry out bombing attacks on Libya without congressional authorization.
In a frontal assault on common sense, Obama’s administration disingenuously asserted that, since the engagement was limited to bombing and Libya’s military was in no position to retaliate, the United States was not engaged in “hostilities” and thus the War Powers Act didn’t apply.
While the intervention was championed by the likes of Hillary Clinton and National Security Council “humanitarian hawk” Samantha Power, many others in Obama’s administration opposed it, including then-Vice President Biden, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, national security advisor and deputy national security advisor.
According to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Obama’s decision to plunge into war in Libya was essentially a toss-up. “The president told me that it was one of the closest decisions he’d ever made, sort of 51-49,” he told Yahoo News.
Or course, as Candidate Obama had unequivocally explained, it wasn’t his decision to make.
That Obama’s decision lacked conviction — and ended up being disastrous for so many innocent people — underscores why he should have adhered to the Constitution, which requires that the deliberative, representative bodies of the House and Senate make war decisions after public debate.
Blogger's note: During the Obama/Biden reign of terror, extortion, treason, etc. I ate at a luncheonette in Newark. Usually I was the only light complexioned patron that was there. Obama was frequently referred to as a "house nigger". What that means is that he cares not about the many "field niggers", but only wants to enjoy the favor of his "masser". That was an accurate depiction by people of a darker complexion of the Kenyan half breed.
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