The Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, accompanied his father and older brothers to Libya at the age of 16 for "jihad" against the secular-leaning government of Moammar Gadhafi during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's grand plan to hand the Middle East over to the Muslim Brotherhood to "end extremism." The CIA and Pentagon armed and trained various jihadist groups, including the Tripoli Brigade. The actual salaries of the fighters were paid for by the "Gulf States," which translates into Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Salman, his brothers and their father, Ramadan Abedi, fought in a unit of the Tripoli Brigade that eventually secured Tripoli from the Libyan armed forces. Ramadan Abedi was an experienced military man, having served as an officer in Gadhafi's internal security service until the 1990s. He returned with his sons to fight in the NATO-supported overthrow of the Libyan government.

In support of the various jihadi brigades such as the one in which the Abedi family served, NATO flew more than 26,000 sorties and operated B-2 bombers from U.S. bases for bombing runs. The cost of military operations by the United States alone was well over $1 billion not including "black budget" funds used by the CIA and DIA. Numerous naval ships from NATO nations were used in the war on Libya. In just one day the United States fired 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles in support of the jihadist groups, costing about $1 million each.

Fighters such as the Abedi family had a lot of support from NATO, including thousands of air strikes by the United Kingdom in the fight to overthrow the Gahdafi government. British SAS were on the ground in eastern Libya prior to the onset of the air campaign and assisted "rebel" ground forces.

Oddly, one of the commanders of the Tripoli Brigade to which the Abedi family belonged had gone through a CIA "rendition" from Thailand and was handed over to Gadhafi's intelligence services and imprisoned. Abdel Hakim Belhadj, one of the Abedi family's commanders, spent seven years in Tripoli's notorious Abu Selim prison, where he says he was regularly tortured.

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The commander claims that he and his wife, Fatima Bouchar, were grabbed by the CIA in Thailand and flown by way of a U.K.-controlled airbase to be handed over to Libyan authorities. His crime in Libya was fighting with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in the 1990s to oust Gadhafi. That group of Libyan jihadists was originally armed, trained and funded by the CIA to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After fighting for the United States against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, most of the men returned to Libya to fight for a Shariah-compliant government there.

Confused yet?

To sum up: The CIA trained and armed a group of Libyan fighters to wage war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When they returned to Libya to fight against Gadhafi, the CIA turned against them and sided with the regime. Later, under Obama/Clinton leadership, the CIA helped empty the Libyan prisons of jihadists so they could fight against the same regime the CIA had once protected. Many of those senior jihadists became the leaders of the Tripoli Brigade that the Abedi family of the Manchester bomber fought with against the Gadhafi government.

With me on this? It gets confusing because there have been cases in Syria, for example, in which the CIA changed sides literally in the middle of a battle.

The Tripoli Brigade's current commander, Mahdi al-Harati, is an Irish citizen, which is probably why the group has an English Facebook page. Many of those who fought jihad against the Gadhafi regime were European citizens, mostly from the United Kingdom. Because there is no functional government in Libya today, the Tripoli Brigade is still active there, as are most of the various militias formed in 2011 by the United States and the Gulf State nations, such as Saudi Arabia.

The United States currently pretends that there is a functional government in Libya, although the capital, Tripoli, is split up among numerous militias, including the Radaa militia, which arrested and is holding Hashem and Ramadan Abedi, the brother and father of the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi.

Radaa means "deterrence" in Arabic. Radaa is one of many armed Libyan militias resulting from the power vacuum caused by the disbanding of the secular government system by the ill-fated Obama/Clinton campaign to unseat authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and replace them with democracies. The Radaa militia claims that Ramadan Abedi had confessed to being associated with al-Qaida. The questioning techniques were not discussed.

Radaa was allegedly organized originally to combat drug and alcohol sales. Often those selling alcohol or drugs are sentenced to death in a militia trial. Alcohol and drugs are "haram" under Islamic Shariah law; thus it is obvious that Radaa is just another face of radical Islam, perhaps not as vile as al-Qaida.

The various militias battling it out for control of Libya are, at their core, at some extreme end or the other of Islam. The Tripoli Brigade and the Radaa militia are just two of many Gadhafi warned the West about. He also warned of the invasion of Europe by jihadists, such as those in the Abedi family who brought jihad and death to concertgoers in Manchester.

In 2011 Gadhafi warned then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in two separate phone conversations, that removing him (Gadhafi) would lead to an al-Qaida takeover and begin an invasion of Europe by radical jihadists. The transcripts of the calls are actually available.

Although much success has been proclaimed in the "war on terror" by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the reality is far different. The United States and its NATO and Islamist Gulf State allies have made the disease of jihad more infectious and spread it across the world. The American strategic concept of arming the "enemy of our enemy" does not work when both combatants have an equal hatred for democracy. What the United States has accomplished during two decades of interventionist doctrine is the destruction of several functional nations that were no threat to Americans, and the formation of terrorists groups bent upon the destruction of the West and the establishment of Shariah-compliant governments worldwide.