The Great Man-Made River Project
Libya is constructing a world-class project in the middle of the dessert, but no one even knows what it really is. Some have said that, whatever it is, this project is the Eighth Wonder of the World. What is extraordinarily odd about this particular project is that it has been progressing for over 16 years, and yet it still seems to be a long way from completion.
Now, if you asked your neighbor if he ever heard of the Great Man-Made River Project in Libya, there is not much question that he will tell you, "No". This project has a price tag of $25 billion, and currently there are 12,000 foreign workers on the job from morning to night. One would think that some intelligence agency could figure out just what this project may be, but they haven’t yet told us.
Meanwhile, the Libyan’s say that they are constructing a 2,500-mile tunnel capable of carrying 7.4 million cubic yards of water a day that will stretch from Tunisia to Egypt. The Libyans say that this tunnel, which is 13 feet in diameter, is going to carry water that will make the entire Libyan Desert bloom. This in an area where the thermometer hits over 100 degrees on a cool day, and for most of the year, there is no rain at all. There is no question that Libya will eventually run out of oil, and if Colonel Mohammar Qadhafi has not found a replacement for oil revenues, or in lieu of that, put a lot of money away for a rainy day, Libya will become another place where a desert rules.
The pipe comes in sections 25 yards long, which are carried in massive trucks that seem to buckle under their enormous loads. The drilling rigs, suspended from six-story tall portable units, are capable of boring more that a quarter of a mile into the earth in their search for water. Every fifty or sixty miles, there is a break in the pipe where it flows into a massive water storage facility made of reinforced concrete, thus making it able to withstand almost any natural force. With a great deal of the infrastructure for the project already in place, one would think that the irrigation would have already begun, at least in selected spots. However, but that is not the case, making this project all the more mysterious.
In spite of Ronald Reagan having imposed a trade embargo against Libya forbidding U.S. companies or citizens from doing any business with Libya and provides for very substantial fines and long jail terms for anyone who does, American products appear everywhere in the country and American equipment is seen everywhere on the irrigation pipeline: Caterpillar Tractors, Cummings engines, Baker Hughes drilling bits, Dowell Schlumberger cementing units, Price Brothers pipe and Brown and Root brain power. So, what is really going on?
Big American Companies are not going to break the law, at least not if they thing they are going to be caught. There are ways around the Presidential Action, and for example, a subsidiary of an American company domiciled overseas could legally do the work without any particular concern. Tractors can be purchased by European companies and then legitimately resold to Libya, as the countries in Europe that are depended on Libyan oil have no such onerous restrictions.
Some who study this subject for a living contend that in dealing with Qadhafi, one is dealing with a paranoid personality who believes he will be attacked by almost anyone at almost time. We would counter that statement by saying that within the last year, Gandhi has been far more forthcoming, if only because of his surprising decision to turn over the suspects in the Lockerbie bombing to an internationally sanctioned court in the Netherlands.
Theories as to Qadhafi’s real motives in building his tunnel are legion. For example, people say that the diameter of the pipe is over twice that which would be necessary for an irrigation project. They wonder why the pipe hooks up to Libya’s chemical weapons facility located near a mountain called Tarhuna on the Mediterranean, and they cannot fathom why the chemical plant would need irrigation. They ask why the system has been so strongly reinforced, why it is big enough for tanks to roll through it and why is so deep that even some atomic weapons could not reach it, etc, etc. Military experts say that at the very least, it will give the Libyan military the ability to conceal their activities from satellite spy networks, or from just about anything else for that matter. Others say that the water storage facilities could be used to hold a company or more of troops and the food to feed them, along with the facilities to house them.
One of the most negative comments heard on the project comes from a world-class expert in the field, Paul Beaver, a reporter with Jane’s Defense Weekly, who said, "This is the first real evidence of something which has been suspected for several years. Qadhafi seems to have taken a leaf out of Kim IL Sung’s book and created a potential military arsenal underground." The fact that the general contractor on the job for the Libyan government is Dong Ah, a Korean company that has had numerous run-ins with the American government over illegally exporting items to Iran, makes a lot of people nervous. Dong Ah has already paid a $3 million fine for illegally exporting drilling equipment from the United States to Libya. They also bought anti-corrosive pipe chemicals in Texas for this project to be shipped to Libya, and they are under investigation for that matter, as well.
In the meantime, everyone who could be interviewed for information regarding Libya’s intent has been questioned, and there are few solid answers. For the moment, let us assume that Qadhafi has created a mixed-use pipeline that can be used for irrigation, along with the storage and transportation of war material and personnel. Whatever it is, it is certainly "the Mother of All Pipelines" and is large enough to hold two simultaneous titles, until we know better. It is the longest irrigation tunnel on the face of the earth, and it is the most expensive military installation ever created, or possibly neither.
Dear friends
I have read your articles and comments and I was fascinated by your great awareness by our Arab world but also I was astonished by the massive misunderstanding that governs your minds, everyone of you is supposing that Muslims are a big group of terrorists and tough minded people who doesn’t see anything but war against the infidels (Kuffar). Well this is entirely wrong and your method of thinking is entirely out of logic because in every society the people are classified into types there is the liberals, the conservatives, the secularists and also there is the group of people, which you call the Terrorists. Here you fall in the big mistake, which is putting the whole people of the Islamic world in one group, which is the terrorist group. I am one of the Muslims and I don’t believe in Osama Bin Laden and I consider him and all his fellows as traitors to the Islamic and Arab communities because he uses the force and violence but also I condemn the United States and Israel using of force and violence. Gorge Bush and Areal Sharon and Osama Bin Laden all of them have failed to use the peaceful negotiations and instead they shifted to the use of power and military attacks. If we considered Bush a terrorist we cannot consider all the American people like him and the same role should be applied to Osama Bin Laden and Muslims.
I am a devoted Muslim who do my five daily prayers and go to the Mosque but I have never been agreeable with any call for the use of violence against the others who don’t agree with us, and the majority of our people are just like me. We want to live in peace and to love each other, and we want justice.
In addition I want to correct some common errors in your thinking ;
1- Concerning the Pakistan nuclear weapons, it has never come to our thought that their atomic bombs are Islamic ones facing the Christian atomic bomb. I consider this type of thinking very childish because Pakistan has developed its nukes in response to the Indian threats and not to help the other Islamic world countries and all of us know that in the field of international affairs things doesn’t go like this “Islamic bomb facing Christian bomb” this is so funny.
2- Some persons say that Egypt and Libya are both building tunnels to hide their weapons of mass destruction, well we all know that people who say that are watching a lot of science fiction movies because Egypt and Libya are both heavily loaded with debts and massive internal problems and they both cannot afford such costs, besides the Libyan Egyptian relations are not stable enough to make the Egyptian officials felling safe in dealing in such serious stuffs. You shouldn’t repeat the same error twice you have assumed and Iraq is possessing WMD and you destroyed the whole country for searching those weapons and finally you didn’t find any, so please be sure about what you are saying and don’t just accuse the people haphazardly.
3- I have read comments from some persons saying that Pakistan are going to sell nukes to both Saudia and Libya, this could kill me from laugh.
The stupid American invasion of Iraq has damaged its picture in our minds and raised hate towards the American administration in the Islamic world; we don’t want to repeat this tragedy again.
Comments by
Mohammed Kotb
kotbmohammed@hotmail.com
Egypt has devised a concealment and deception program that exceeds that of North Korea's, intelligence operatives say. Many of the Egyptian missile and WMD programs are based in the Sahara and huge Western deserts between Egypt and Libya. The two countries have built a series of tunnels along the Egyptian-Libyan border. The tunnels conceal development and production of North Korean missiles and nuclear weapons components from the prying eyes of Israeli and U.S. spy satellites. North Korea reportedly built the tunnel network... Thousands of North Korean workers are building a reinforced concrete tunnel that is 1,300 feet underground and can't be destroyed even by U.S. nuclear weapons. Or, at least that is the hope by Egypt and the Libyans. The presence of so many North Korean as well as Filipinos in Libya has not been easy to hide. That's where the deception comes in. Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi has told Western guests that the laborers are going to build a 2,000-mile tunnel from Egypt to Tunisia in what the colonel calls the "Great Man-Made River Project."