**America's First Black President Left A Legacy Of Slavery**

America's First Black President Left A Legacy Of Slavery

_Authored by Brian McGlinchey via starkrealities.substack.com_ (https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/americas-first-black-president-left)

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.

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**In Feb. 2011, Obama announces he's directed his administration to prepare a "full range of options" for a US response to Libyan unrest**(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters) (?itok=cQ0jjtAf)

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 (https://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2011/07/07/libya-ethnic-cleansing/)_. **“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 (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/30/libya-spectacular-revolution-disgraced-racism) 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 (https://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2011/09/26/libya-ethnic-cleansing-tawargha-genocide/) 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: The network aired video (https://youtu.be/2S2qtGisT34) 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.

?itok=o_bEjnqL (?itok=o_bEjnqL)**Nigerian Sunday Iabarot shows the scar he says he received when he was branded by his captors**(Lynsey Addario for (?itok=o_bEjnqL)TIME (https://time.com/longform/african-slave-trade/))

It hasn’t stopped. Last month, the United Nations reported (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/03/libya-urgent-action-needed-remedy-deteriorating-human-rights-situation-un) 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 (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/mar/23/barack-obama/barack-obamas-libya-intervention-flip-flop-what-he/) 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 authorizati…

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/americas-first-black-president-left-legacy-slavery