Media Manipulation: 'NATO in a hurry to wrap up war in Libya'

NATO's presence in Libya little resembles a humanitarian mission with houses, hospitals and schools being hit. But Libya prospered prior to NATO's intrusion, Yvonne Di Vito, an activist from Libyanfriends.com told RT. ­RT: You have been saying that here in Italy the news reports abut what is happening in Libya were very confusing, a lot of conflicting information there. Can you tell us what you saw and what you found?

Yvonne Di Vito: We went to Libya on the 28th July and we came back on the 7th August and we found a totally different situation because NATO was bombarding civilians. The bombings were not only carried out on military targets, but they also hit houses, hospitals, schools, television centers, and this was totally against the humanitarian reasons they said they were there for. I believe they were doing this to bring panic in the city. That's why they were bombing the things that people use daily, like places with food and essential utilities like hospitals. This was also a difficult period for Muslims because of Ramadan and that is why in the daytime they're in their houses. We went to Tripoli and to Zitan and we saw huge protests with thousands of pro-Gaddafi supporters turning out against NATO and all these demonstrations were not shown in Italy.

We also visited Tanjur and Sansur and found a lot of women that were screaming at us, asking 'Why you Italians are bombing us? What did we do to you? Why are you killing our children?' That was their main question. When we went to Zitan, the same day they bombed a house and in this house two children were killed. We tried to show the pictures of these children that were dead. But apart from us, no one else did the same. Except the things that we saw with our own eyes visiting these places that were bombed, we have so much material that press officers and journalists from Libya gave to us as testimony to all the dead from the NATO bombings. After all the things that we saw we have one question: is this a humanitarian war? Are they really helping the civilians, because I believe that all this is because of economic reasons, or at least there are other reasons that this war happened, petroleum or other things.

We also visited Libya before and what we found was a normal situation where people were fine. Differently from other countries that went through a revolution -- Libya is considered to be the Switzerland of the African continent and is very rich and schools are free for the people. Hospitals are free for the people. And the conditions for women are much better than in other Arab countries.