ASMARA, Eritrea—The lies used to justify the NATO war against Libya have surpassed those created to justify the invasion of Iraq. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both had honest observers on the ground for months following the rebellion in eastern Libya and both have repudiated every major charge used to justify the NATO war on Libya.

According to the Amnesty observer, who is fluent in Arabic, there is not one confirmed instance of rape by the pro-Gadaffi fighters, not even a doctor who knew of one. All the Viagra mass rape stories were fabrications.

Amnesty could not verify a single “African mercenary” fighting for Gaddafi story, and the highly charged international satellite television accounts of African mercenaries raping women that were used to panic much of the eastern Libyan population into fleeing their homes were fabrications.

There were no confirmed accounts of helicopter gunships attacking civilians and no jet fighters bombing people, which completely invalidates any justification for the No-Fly Zone inSecurity Council resolution used as an excuse for NATO to launch its attacks on Libya.

After three months on the ground in rebel-controlled territory, the Amnesty investigator could only confirm 110 deaths in Benghazi which included Gadaffi supporters.

Only 110 dead in Benghazi? Wait a minute, we were told thousands had died there, ten thousand even. No, only 110 lost their lives including pro-government people.

No rapes, no African mercenaries, no helicopter gunships or bombers, and only 110 deaths prior to the launch of the NATO bombing campaign; every claim was based on a lie.

Today, according to the Libyan Red Crescent Society, over 1,100 civilians have been killed by NATO bombs, including over 400 women and children. Over 6,000 Libyan civilians have been injured or wounded by the bombing, many very seriously.

Compared to the war on Iraq, these numbers are tiny, but the reasons for the Libyan war have no merit in any form.

Saddam Hussein was evil, he invaded his neighbors in wars that killed up to a million. He used weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the form of poison gas on both his neighbors and his own people, killing tens of thousands. He was brutal and corrupt and when American tanks rolled into Iraq, the Iraqi people refused to fight for him, simply putting down their weapons and going home.

Libya under Col. Gadaffi hasn’t invaded their neighbors. Gadaffi never used WMD on anyone, let alone his own people. As for Gadaffi being brutal, in Libya’s neighbor, Algeria, the Algerian military fought a counterinsurgency for a decade in the 1990s that witnessed the deaths of some 200,000 Algerians. Now that is brutal and nothing anywhere near this has happened in Libya.

In Egypt and Tunisia, Western puppets like Mubarak and Ben Ali had almost no support amongst their people with few, if any, willing to fight and die to defend them.

The majority of the Libyan people are rallying behind the Libyan government and “the leader,” Muammar Gadaffi, with over one million people demonstrating in support on July 1 in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Thousands of Libyan youth are on the front lines fighting the rebels and ,despite thousands of NATO air strikes, authentic journalists on the ground in western Libya report their morale remains high.

In Egypt, the popular explosion that resulted in the army seizing power from Mubarak began in the very poorest neighborhoods in Cairo and other Egyptian cities where the price of basic food items, like bread, sugar and cooking oil, had skyrocketed and led to widespread hunger. In many parts of Egypt’s poor neighborhoods, gasoline/benzene is easier to find then clean drinking water. Medical care and education is only for those with the money to pay for it. Life for the people of Tunisia is not that much better.

In contrast, the Libyan people have the longest life expectancy in the Arab world. The Libyan people have the best, free public health system in the Arab world. The Libyan people have the best, free public education system in the Arab world. Most Libyan families own their own home and most Libyan families own their own automobile. Libya is so much better off than its neighbors that every year tens of thousands of Egyptians and Tunisians migrated to Libya to earn money to feed their families, doing the dirty work the Libyan people refused to do.

When it comes to how Gadaffi oversaw a dramatic rise in the standard of living for the Libyan people, despite decades of UN inSecurity Council sanctions against the Libyan economy, honest observers acknowledge that Gadaffi stands head and shoulders above the kings, sheiks, emirs and various dictators who rule the rest of the Arab world.

So why did NATO launch this war against Libya?

First of all, Gadaffi was on the verge of creating a new banking system that was going to put the IMF, World Bank and assorted other Western banksters out of business in Africa. No more predatory Western loans used to cripple African economies, instead, a $42 billion dollar African Investment Bank would be supplying major loans at little or even zero interest rates.

LIbya has funded major infrastructure projects across Africa that have begun to link up African economies and break the perpetual dependency on the Western countries for imports have been taking place. Here in Eritrea the new road connecting Eritrea and Sudan is just one small example.

What seems to have finally tipped the balance in favor of direct Western military intervention was the reported demand by Gadaffi that the USA oil companies, which have long been major players in the Libyan petroleum industry, were going to have to compensate Libya to the tune of tens of billions of dollars for the damage done to the Libyan economy by the USA instigated “Lockerbie Bombing” sanctions imposed by the UN inSecurity Council throughout the 1990s into early 2000s. This is based on the unearthing of evidence that the CIA paid millions of dollars to witnesses in the Lockerbie Bombing trial to change their stories to implicate Libya which was used as the basis for the very damaging UN sanctions against Libya. The government of the USA lied and damaged Libya so the USA oil companies were going to have to pay up to cover the cost of their government’s actions. Not hard to see why Gadaffi had to go, is it?

Add the fact that Gadaffi had signaled clearly that he saw both Libya’s and Africa’s future economic development linked more to China and Russia rather than the west and it was just a matter of time before the CIA’s contingency plan to overthrow the Libyan government was put on the front burner.

NATO’s war against Libya has much more in common with NATO’s Kosovo war against Serbia. But one still cannot compare Gadaffi to Saddam or even the much smaller criminals in the Serbian leadership. The Libyan War lies are worse than Iraq.

Stay tuned to Inteprid Report for more news that the so-called free press in the West refuses to cover.

Thomas C. Mountain is the only independent western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He was a member of the 1st US Peace Delegation to Libya in 1987.