In his reaction to a recent NATO bombing, Moussa Ibrahim, Gaddafi’s cousin and as of now "Minister of Truth”, said that one of the buildings hit was an anti-corruption office where files implicating members of the newly formed Transitional National Council, were being kept. Thanks to him, we now know why Libya was always rated at the bottom of the corruption index by Transparency International.
The ministry of Truth is of course not a Gaddafi invention. Before him, “Big Brother”, the famous George Orwell character in “1984”, knew of its virtues and methodically practiced it. However, it may be so that Gaddafi is now raising it to new dimensions. As the rebellion swept Libya and the regime struggled to contain it, Gaddafi kept assuring the world that all Libyans loved him and that he was only facing a handful of Al-Qaeda elements aided by drugged and hallucinated kids. Many in the Arab World joked that their people may need some of those hallucination drugs that Gaddafi was talking about. Addressing Libyans in one of his recent ramblings about prospects for him leaving office, Gaddafi reiterated his standard reply that he has not held any office in Libya since 1977 and that if he did, he would have thrown his resignation in their faces. Before finishing his speech however, he threatened to crush all opposition “rats” challenging his rule, alley by alley or “Zanga-Zanga”, as he famously put it.
There was also the episode of an earlier NATO bombing of one of Gaddafi’s command and control centers in Tripoli. Again, according to the ministry of truth, one of his sons, Saif Al-Arab and three grandchildren were presumably killed. Now, Saif Al-Arab is a shady character and not a lot is known about him. This much we know about him from Spiegel. In 2006, he was living in Munich and reportedly scuffled with a night club bouncer for forcibly removing his girlfriend who was stripping on the dance floor. Despite the orchestrated funeral, many Libyans refuse to buy the story, discrediting it as simply a ploy by Gaddafi to misinform and attract sympathy from his followers. In the aftermath of the raid ordered by Reagan on his headquarters in Tripoli in 1986, Gaddafi had thrown out a similar story about an adopted daughter, claiming she was killed. Even then, many people did not believe it.
As NATO intensified its air campaign against his heavy armor, Gaddafi resorted to a new tactic, using troops in civilian cars, pickup trucks and buses. In order to camouflage his military moves, his ministry of truth started drumming up stories about busloads of tribal leaders and imams, allegedly on “peace missions” to cities and towns out of government control. Not long before, the regime was threatening to annihilate these very cities, in particular Benghazi and Misrata for daring to fight for freedom. As his command and control capacity took a severe blow by NATO, Gaddafi had to resort to coded messages to contact his field units. The state Libyan TV, mouthpiece of his ministry of truth, delivered these under the guise of voodoo magic sessions performed by a certain Dr Shakeer, a familiar and loathed public face of the regime.
Since he came to office, Gaddafi occasionally took liberty to deliver other statements of truth, even if they were not always easy to authenticate. In order to convince simple Libyans that they enjoyed democracy, he claimed the Greek word somehow had to do with similarly sounding Arabic words which imply “sitting on chairs”. He also went on record claiming that the name Obama actually came from the Arabic name Abu Omama and that the word "desert" somehow refers to his hometown Sirte. Last but not least, he claimed that long ago, a certain Sheikh Zubeir had emigrated to England to become known as no less than the famous Shakespeare.
