No, we also hadn’t heard of it.

We learn from this article by Terry Jeffrey that it was the anti-Gaddafi rebel force. Some of its savages, we reckon, including al-Qaeda members, murdered US Ambassador Stevens in Banghazi last month.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they made it clear that the only time the president would have the authority to use military force without prior authorization from Congress was when, as James Madison recorded in his notes from the Constitutional Convention, it was necessary to “repel sudden attacks.”

It was thus fittingly symbolic that when Barack Obama announced he had ordered the U.S. military to intervene in Libya’s civil war, he did not do so from the Oval Office or the well of the U.S. House of Representatives, but from the capital city of Brazil.

In that speech, delivered March 19, 2011, Obama repeatedly used the first-person pronoun, I, in explaining who had decided America would intervene in Libya.

“Today I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a limited military action in Libya in support of an international effort to protect Libyan civilians,” Obama said. “I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice, and it’s not a choice that I make lightly,” said Obama.

On what authority had I, Barack Obama, taken America into war?

“In this effort, the United States is acting with a broad coalition that is committed to enforcing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, which calls for the protection of the Libyan people,” Obama said from Brazil. …

The U.N. Security Council’s permanent members include not only the United States, France and Great Britain, but also Russia and the People’s Republic of China, which, according to Obama’s State Department, is still governed by communists. In 2011, the Security Council also included Bosnia and Herzegovina, Columbia and Gabon, Nigeria and Lebanon, Portugal and South Africa, and the government of Brazil, which hosted Obama’s war announcement.

Obama’s case was plain: The governments of these nations – not the constitutionally elected representatives of the American people – had given him authority to decide whether America would go to war in Libya, and he had decided America would go to war in Libya. …

But what did Obama know about the revolutionary forces in Libya, the so-called “thuwar”, before he ordered the U.S. military to take up their cause? What sort of prudential analysis had he done about the potential aftermath of this intervention? What consideration had he given to who would restore order and security in Libya and how they would do it? Why did he believe a truly representative government in Libya was likely let alone possible? …

We now know that the revolutionary forces in Libya started committing war crimes even before Obama ordered the U.S. military to intervene on their behalf.

On March 2, the U.N. International Commission of Inquiry on Libya  published its report on human rights violations there. “The Commission received reports of executions by the thuwar  …  War crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by thuwar and that breaches of international human rights law continue to occur in a climate of impunity, … acts of extra-judicial executions, torture, enforced disappearance, indiscriminate attacks and pillage. [But] no investigations have been carried out into any violations committed by the thuwar.”

Had Obama followed the U.S. Constitution and sought congressional authorization for his use of force in Libya, the members of Congress who voted for such an authorization would have shared the responsibility for what that intervention helped bring about. As it is, the responsibility for exceeding his constitutional authority and intervening in a civil war he did not understand lies solely and deservedly with Obama himself.

At least insofar as he is answerable to the American people. But he could claim that the UN was the Big Chief who gave the orders. If he did, he would be confessing that he is a mere lackey of that appalling institution. He does not confess it. He does what he always does in a crisis: nothing. And he knows the mainstream media will protect his inaction by reporting almost nothing about the horrific events in Libya.

Here the thuwar introduces itself. No need to watch all of it. It’s just a loud unjustified boast. That lot would never have won the fight against Gaddafi without American and European intervention. Obama made their triumphalism possible. For which they have had their revenge on Obama’s ambassador. 

We have spoken of the Three Harpies of the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice (see our post, A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011). They wanted America to intervene militarily in the Libyan civil war “to protect civilians”, and they got their way, so the US is involved in a costly and ineffective engagement, along with ramshackle NATO; and Libyan civilians continue to be displaced, injured, and killed, often by the “protective” operations of the US and NATO – or the US in NATO, say, since the administration pretends that it has withdrawn from the fray.

Today we liken the three women to three witches, cooking up a lethal brew of global socialism, pro-Islamism, and anti-Americanism, in a steaming pot of self-righteous sentimentality.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a disciple of the Communist Revolutionary Saul Alinsky, is the most powerful of them by reason of her position in the administration. But she’s probably not the equal of the other two in gathering venomous ideas.

Samantha Power runs Obama’s “Office of Human Rights” and has written a book about genocide. It’s a long grope for a definition of the word. She believes, as the left generally does, that America should only go to war as an act of altruism, never to protect its own interests such as securing oil supplies or punishing attackers, and whenever possible as an instrument of the UN.

As for Susan Rice, the current US ambassador to that evil institution, here’s an account of her by Rick Moran from Front Page:

President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, has long been an advocate for weakening American sovereignty in order to benefit the UN and its anti-American agenda. It is a policy known as “engagement,” where the United States subsumes its own vital interests, abandons its traditional role of leadership in the world community, and … pushes the process of “subcontracting American national security” to the UN.

Time Magazine refers to this policy — without a hint of irony — as “leading from the back.” … Her vision of what the US’s role in the world should be … includes an open hostility to the state of Israel, a dangerous reliance on the UN to keep Iran from going nuclear, as well as the world body’s inexplicable granting Tehran membership on the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. …

While one expects a UN ambassador to be an advocate for internationalism, Rice slipped the bounds of reason and waxed poetic in her testimony about the importance of the United Nations to our national security. … Rice claimed that … “the U.N. promotes universal values Americans hold dear.” …

That statement is nonsense. It is beyond rhetorical excess and enters the sublime milieu of self-delusion. Unless she believes that America “holds dear” values like racism, anti-Semitism, corruption, sexism, child rape, and a host of other execrable hallmarks of United Nations actions and policies, then she is either naive or willfully blind to the true nature of the UN. …

In one of the most extraordinary statements ever made by an American official about Israel, Rice bitterly complained last February about having to veto a Security Council resolution condemning Israel and its settlement policy. She deliberately undercut the impact of the veto by saying, “For more than four decades, [Israeli settlement activity] has undermined security … corroded hopes for peace and security … it violates international commitments and threatens prospects for peace.” During her testimony last week, Rice reiterated that sentiment, adding “Israeli settlement activity is illegitimate.”

What angered Rice was that the Security Council vote was 14-1, with countries like Great Britain, France, and Russia co-sponsoring the Palestinian-inspired condemnation. To Rice’s and the administration’s way of thinking, going against international “consensus” — even if inimical to US interests — was a blow to their strategy of “engagement.”

Rice’s statements before the committee on the UN’s massively hypocritical selections for the Human Rights Council can only be termed bizarre. The HRC features such stellar advocates for human rights as Angola, China, Cuba, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia — a rogue’s gallery of thuggish states. After acknowledging that it is difficult to find nations that have good human rights records to serve on the council, Rice seemed proud of the fact that US opposition had kept Iran off the HRC. She chalked that “success” up to the fact that the United States had agreed to join the HRC rather than refuse to participate in such a farce.

What Rice didn’t mention was that in order to get Iran to withdraw its application for membership on the HRC, Washington agreed not to raise a stink when the fundamentalist Islamic Republic that mandates stoning women for adultery wanted to join the Commission on the Status of Women. With no objection from the US, Iran was duly elected to the commission.

Instead of Iran joining the HRC, Libya got the slot. How this can be termed a “success” takes pretzel-like logic — something Rice appears to excel at. …

Rice’s thinking on terrorism has also heavily influenced administration policy. In 1996, she advised President Clinton not to accept Sudan’s offer to turn over Osama Bin Laden because Sudan’s human rights record was so wretched, she thought we shouldn’t have anything to do with them.

Refusing to contaminate her idealistic beliefs with the ample evidence that has been produced to the contrary, Susan holds fast to her conviction that the “cause of terrorism” is “poverty”.

Her steadfast belief that poverty, not radical Islamist ideology, is responsible for terrorism has upended 20 years of American anti-terrorism policy. Rice is the inspiration behind the Obama administration’s de-emphasizing military action against terrorists, while looking for ways to address the “root causes” of the violence. …

It is Rice’s solution to what she considers the “real” causes of terrorism that is of great concern. She supports the transfer of nearly $100 billion every year to UN’s Millennium Development Project for redistribution to poorer nations and their kleptocrat leaders. How this will address the problem of “poverty” in poor countries never seems to get explained. The history of aid to these nations is that the elites end up with most of it while precious little trickles down to the masses. Rice ignores this history — and the reality that America doesn’t have $100 billion for such a cockamamie scheme. …

What isn’t generally known is her advocacy for unilateral American action in cases where the UN fails to act. Along with Samantha Power, the president’s national security advisor, Rice is responsible for pushing through the Security Council a strong resolution authorizing military force against Gaddafi. But when it comes to Darfur and other potential hot spots where the UN refuses to act, Rice has advocated that America go it alone to prevent a humanitarian disaster. … She has … suggested that the US should contribute a percentage of its military to a UN force, under UN command, to intervene where humanitarian crises threaten disaster.

This goes far beyond what most would advocate for when it comes to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. But it is one more indication that Susan Rice casually sets aside the interests of her own country in order to cater to the whims and capricious agenda of a world body that has proven itself an enemy of the United States.

Because the left hates individual freedom, it hates America. It wants the UN to become the world’s governing body and redistribute wealth from the developed countries to the rest. And it’s making progress towards achieving its terrible aims. The thugocracies that have a permanent seat on its Security Council – Russia and China – are no longer restrained by Western powers. France and Britain are ghosts of the powers they used to be. And as Susan Rice represents an American leadership that does not like America, it looks as if Turtle Bay could actually become the capital of the whole-earth hell that the international left dreams of …

… unless the United States again, and soon, has strong wise men governing it, and they have the will to abolish the United Nations.

The UN must be destroyed!