military action against Libya

It sure includes you

Has your first novel come out yet?

I know without any doubt that his posts are useless nonsense

I will battle Anus for you... Where is my trusty rubber weeeeny...

I'd even approve of a wet noodle.

It's a semi autobigraphical piece about a snivelling coward who spends most of the time shitting his pants and crying for his mummy. He betrays his comrades so that he can be gang raped by a bunch of big men with beards. This is the happiest point in his life. When his captors get sick of him, he is cast out, and spends the rest of his life screaming bile at everyone and playing with his crayons.

That Abdel Fateh Younes, the longtime enforcer for Muammar Qaddafi whose stunning defection to the Libyan rebellion in February was an early indication of the depth of the challenge to Qaddafi's regime, is dead, you can take to the bank. General Younes had been head of the embryonic rebel army from practically the moment he'd switched sides.

As far as the rest of the story – who killed him, when, precisely where, and why – all remains murk and conjecture, created by cross-cutting rivalries within the rebellion and the often misleading and contradictory way that Libya's Transitional National Council (TNC) communicates with the press and the Libyan public.

This afternoon, reports began to trickle out of the de facto rebel capital Benghazi that Younes was variously under arrest or summoned for questioning by some other element of the rebellion. An early Al Jazeera English post said that "he is being held at an undisclosed military garrison in Benghazi. The reason behind the former minister of interior’s arrest on Thursday has not been made public." Al Jazeera reported that some of Younes's men had withdrawn from the frontlines at Brega and were heading to Benghazi to demand his release.

IN PICTURES: Libya uprising

Then Mustapha Abdul Jalil, the head of the TNC, called a press conference. He said that Younes was killed along with two colonels working with him on the road from Brega to Benghazi and, oddly, that he didn't know where their bodies were. Mr. Jalil said, and other supporters of the rebellion insistently agreed, that Younes had been killed by agents of Qaddafi. That is hard to believe given the security around the men and the earlier claims that Younes was in the process of being arrested for allegedly working as a sort of double agent, still in contact with Qaddafi's people, and, in some accounts, pilfering weapons from the rebellion to send to Tripoli.
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What really happened? It may be days before we have a clear picture, if then. But whatever happened here, there have been emerging splits in rebel ranks, and the likelihood that there could be a "war after the war" is looking greater (I have generally been skeptical about extensive fighting in the event Qaddafi loses, but have grown more pessimistic about my own opinion in recent weeks).

For now, the first major defector from the core of Qaddafi's security forces lies dead while Qaddafi, hounded by NATO airstrikes but untouched, remains in power in Tripoli.

- Rebel forces fought gunmen loyal to Muammar Gaddafi in eastern Libya on Sunday in the latest incident to undermine the insurgents' grip in territory they hold.
The clashes renewed opposition fears that Gaddafi's agents had infiltrated the area, days after the mysterious killing of the rebel military commander.
The assassination of General Abdel Fattah Younes, apparently by gunmen on his own side, has hurt the opposition just as it was winning broader international recognition and making gains against Gaddafi's forces in the Western Mountains and elsewhere.
Rebel spokesman Mahmoud Shammam said clashes had broken out when rebel forces attacked a militia that had helped some 300 Gaddafi loyalists break out of jail near Benghazi on Friday.
At least six rebels were killed in the fighting with the militia, whose members appeared to be experienced and armed with machineguns, rocket-propelled grenades and explosives.
Inside the barracks where they were holed up, rebels found more than 400 weapons, Libya's green flag and photos of Gaddafi.
"At 8 a.m., the barracks was brought under control. Thirty men surrendered and we took their weapons," Shammam told reporters. "We consider them members of the Fifth Column."
The clashes reflect growing fears within the opposition that Gaddafi loyalists are exploiting the lawlessness that prevails in the east, which is awash with weapons and armed gangs, some secular or Islamist rebels, some vigilantes and some criminals

In Libya, we find ourselves faced with a more classic, '90s-style intervention. The background could not be more stark: A courageous rebellion against a brutal and unbalanced 40-year dictatorship was inspired by the nearby uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Unlike the dictators of those countries, Muammar Qaddafi gave no thought to stepping down. The rebels armed themselves and began to march toward Tripoli, capturing several towns on the way. They carried Kalashnikovs and RPGs. Qaddafi's days were numbered! But his army had jets, and tanks, and heavy artillery. Once it began a counteroffensive, the rebels proved powerless. They retreated and retreated, until Qaddafi's forces reached the outskirts of Benghazi, the largest city in the Libyan east and the heart of the rebellion. Qaddafi took to the radio. "It's over," he told the rebels. "We are coming tonight. Prepare yourselves. We will find you in your closets. We will show no mercy and no pity." People on the ground began to predict the massacre of Benghazi. They even used the word genocide, if only to disclaim it: "Not a slaughter amounting to genocide," clarified the New York Review of Books, "but almost certainly a bloodbath." (And what was the exact word these exquisite splitters of hairs had in mind for the killing resulting from NATO bombardment?) The New Yorker's understated Jon Lee Anderson was in Benghazi as Qaddafi's army approached. He had been watching the hapless rebels for weeks, growing increasingly alarmed at their inadequate arms and training. Now artillery could be heard on the edge of town; in the city's lone functioning Internet cafe the young people updated their Facebook profiles. Social media weren't going to help them now. "The war was finally coming to Benghazi," Anderson wrote.
And then it didn't. NATO jets swooped in, forcing Qaddafi's army back. Benghazi was saved. Nor was it a unilateral mission. The Arab League had sought the intervention; none other than Lebanon, home of Hezbollah (still furious at Qaddafi for the "disappearing" of a Lebanese Shiite chief in the late '70s), sponsored the resolution in the U.N. Security Council. The White House had the finesse to "lead from behind," as they put it. And the rebels, having taken several cities in the first weeks of the uprising, had established what international law calls "belligerent rights"—they were a force that could claim some legitimacy both inside and outside the country. Many of the arguments that should have given pause to American policymakers before the Iraq war, and to some extent during the Kosovo bombing, were moot here. This intervention was U.N.-approved, and seemed to emerge from a genuine concern for the casualties that would have ensued had Qaddafi's forces been allowed to proceed into Benghazi. (A more realpolitik consideration was to place the U.S., belatedly, on the side of the Arab Spring; we would be less resented as the old enabler of Mubarak if we were also the new foe of Qaddafi.) Ryan Lizza's New Yorker article describing the days leading up to Obama's decision for war singled out Samantha Power, senior director for multilateral affairs on Obama's National Security Council, as one of the motors for the intervention. America was finally choosing values over money.
And yet somehow it gave one a toothache—like the toothache Vronsky had at the end of Anna Karenina, when he went off to Belgrade to humanitarianly aid the Orthodox Christians in their uprising against the Turks. Wars waged by the U.S. are inevitably imperialist; that is part of the toothache. But are they also irredeemably so? Can the local good—the protection of these people or that city—never outweigh the global problem that human rights are, at best, invoked inconsistently and hypocritically, and at worst to excuse any and every war? Humanitarian warfare, clearly bad in principle, often looks good from the standpoint of a particular people at a particular moment, when they are threatened with death. And so the temperamental opponent of intervention can come to feel that while in general he opposes this kind of thing, well, in this case he guesses he supports it—and in that case too, and the next one. He can come to feel like somebody who has principles only for the sake of suspending them. This was the real cause of the toothache—it was déjà vu all over again. In general, you reject humanitarian war—but have you ever met one you didn't initially like? For liberals or leftists who neither automatically support nor automatically oppose all interventions, the Libya war has prompted something paradoxical: mixed feelings in especially pure form. Here the humanitarian motive for intervening has seemed more genuine and decisive than in any prior case. And the chances of doing real good looked favorable. Yet we've got to stop doing these things

What has been the result? NATO almost immediately expanded the concept of "civilian protection" granted in the U.N. resolution to include regime change—what safety could there be for the rebels if Qaddafi stayed in power? Again, it was hard to argue: Qaddafi was a maniac and a murderer. But Qaddafi held on. One of his residences was bombed, killing a son and several grandchildren, and still he held on. The rebels, while increasing in number and confidence, did not suddenly transform themselves into a well-armed, well-trained fighting force, and militarily a stalemate ensued. Here we were again: An idea that on the face of it was reasonable, and in a certain way "humane," was leading to further deaths, further damage to a country's infrastructure, and a political situation in which the rebels, emboldened by the NATO jets (and, eventually, attack helicopters), refused to negotiate until Qaddafi was gone. Meanwhile the International Criminal Court, the pride and joy of the liberal interventionists, filed suit against Qaddafi for crimes against humanity, thereby putting him beyond the pale. How could you negotiate with someone with nothing to lose? So a nonmilitary solution to a conflict that, Obama said, would be a matter of "days, not weeks," is, as of this writing, further away than ever, even after five months of bombing.
All this could simply be regretted as a well-intentioned plan not working well enough. But that issue of abrogated sovereignty cuts both ways—the American people are supposed to be sovereign, too. The Obama White House's attitude in this has been telling. Not only has Obama failed to seek congressional approval; his lawyers filed a laughable legal brief that argued that America was not even at war. As congressional Republicans correctly pointed out, the administration could not be serious! What could explain this fealty to the letter of international law, and utter contempt for the president's duty to get his wars through Congress?
The answer, it seems to us, can be found in the work of the humanitarian hawks; they have turned the world into a morality play, a ceaseless battle of good versus evil. In Power and the Idealists, his ambivalent farewell to the moralism of the generation of 1968, Paul Berman traced this worldview to the 1960s student left. Born too late to fight Nazis the way their parents did, idealistic young leftists in the prosperous countries of the West looked for Nazis where they could: in university administrations, in American carpet bombers, in the colonialist Israeli state. Even as they grew older and wiser, the hunt for Nazis continued, and continued; in 1999, it led them into Kosovo, and in 2003 it led some of them into the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. Berman was the most perceptive analyst of the humanitarian hawk mindset; Samantha Power was its most compelling exemplar. There are only three kinds of people in her A Problem From Hell: evildoers (Hitler, Pol Pot, Milosevic); saints (Raphael Lemkin, Jan Karski, George McGovern, Peter Galbraith); and cowards (everyone else). You're either with Power or with Pol Pot. The word evil is sprinkled liberally throughout the text (35 appearances), as are slaughter (65), mass murder (25), bloodbath (13), and massacre (99). The function of these words—as well as the word genocide, to whose propagation the book is partly devoted—is to place the evil people beyond the pale of politics, of negotiation, of human intercourse. Would you shake hands with a mass murderer? With the invocation of the word genocide, we move into some other sphere of human relations. Thought, strategy, negotiation shut down; there is only right and wrong, only fight or flight. Which is precisely, in fact, the point.
A politics this morally coercive may explain why a president who is a former law professor, and who came to power with the mandate to restore the rule of law, would so brazenly ignore the Constitution. But a politics this morally coercive is not a politics at all.

At least 50,000 people -- both civilians and combatants -- have been killed in Libya's six-month war to oust strongman Moammar Gadhafi, a rebel military commander told CNN Tuesday.
The grim number was culled from death tolls reported in battle zones -- including Benghazi, Misrata, Tripoli and the Nafusa Mountains -- as well as from accounts from agencies such as the Red Cross, said Hisham Abu Hajer, the Tripoli Brigades coordinator.

TRIPOLI, Libya — Documents unearthed from the archives of Libya’s security service show the former government deeply worried about an Islamist threat to the regime, concerns that reverberated this week as veteran jihadists claimed credit for leading last week’s rebel takeover of Tripoli.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post, reveal new details about ousted leader Moammar Gaddafi’s years-long campaign to eradicate Islamic militants who he perceived as plotting his overthrow. Gaddafi’s powerful Interior Security Agency kept close tabs on hundreds of Libyan Islamists, including some who had been fighting against United States forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.



In the records, Libyan security officials elaborately map the movements of suspected al-Qaeda fighters and regularly share information on Islamist cells with foreign intelligence agencies.

“We have to fight these people,” one security official, Abu Mounir, argues in a 2006 document, part of a trove found in the agency’s Tripoli headquarters. In an indication of close cooperation with Americans on counterterrorism, he proposes urging Gaddafi to “press the Americans on pushing these governments to take harsher action.
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.Gaddafi and his son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi often emphasized the role of Islamists in order to drive a wedge between the Libyan opposition and the West.

For U.S. intelligence services, the man who led the rebel assault on Tripoli, and is now the de facto military governor of the capital, is an old acquaintance. The CIA had tracked down the accused jihadist, and eventually captured him in Malaysia in 2003. The agency is believed to have then transferred him, in total silence, to a “top secret” prison in Bangkok.
At that time, Abdel Hakim Belhadj, identified under the name of Abu Abdallah al-Sadek, born May 1, 1966, was already known for his long history as a jihad operative. This career began in 1988 in Afghanistan, like many other Islamist activists.
However if the CIA wanted him, it’s first because he was one of the founders, and even the “emir” of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a small highly radical organization, which prior to Sept. 11 had two secret training camps in Afghanistan. The CIA was extremely interested in one of them, Shahid Cheikh Abu Yahya, about 19 miles north of Kabul, where the LIFG welcomed volunteers who had links with Al Qaeda.
Osama Bin Laden’s organization had many Libyans among its leading members, including Abu al-Laith al-Libi, one of Al-Qaeda’s military chiefs who was killed in Afghanistan in 2008. In 2007, the LIFG was given the seal of approval by Ayman al Zawahiri, then Al-Qaeda’s number two, and current successor of Bin Laden at the helm of the network. The LIFG then called on Libyans to rebel against Gaddafi, the U.S. and the other “infidels” of the West.
After Afghanistan, Belhadj traveled to Pakistan and Iraq. In Iraq, where the Libyans are the second most numerous group of Islamist volunteers after the Saudis, he was said to be close to Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda’s chief in that country until his death in 2006. In Bangkok, in 2004, after having long been questioned and possibly tortured by the CIA, he was handed over to the Libyan secret services.
From jail to uprising
In 2009, the Libyan regime, under the direction of Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son and heir apparent, initiated an unexpected policy of reconciliation with the LIFG. The leaders of the group then published a 417-page document called “the corrective studies” (in French “les études correctrices”), in which they stated that holy war against Gaddafi was outlawed, since it was only allowed in Muslim countries that had been invaded (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine).
The document may have been a way to avoid further torture. Nevertheless, it eventually allowed Belhadj to get out of prison -- and he didn’t keep his word for long. Indeed, he joined the rebel forces and took the lead of the movement in western Libya to lead them to victory in Tripoli.
Has Belhadj distanced himself from Al-Qaeda? It’s a thorny question when considering that the man has already perjured himself twice. It’s difficult not to see him involved in the recent murder of former Ministry of Interior Abdul Fatah Younis who had rejoined the rebels. According to a Libyan expert, the explanation is rather clear. “Younis used to lead the special forces and he conducted a merciless battle against the LIFG between 1990 and 1995 in eastern Libya.”
It is thus no accident that former members of the LIFG now hold the most important military jobs: Belhadj in Tripoli, Ismail al-Salabi in Benghazi, Abdel Hakim al-Assadi in Derna. Among the members of the Libyan National Transitional Council, one can find Ali Salabi. In 2009, on behalf of Saif al-Islam, he was the one who handled negotiations on the release of LIFG prisoners in exchange for them renoucing armed operations. Events in Libya have come full circle indeed!

The CIA and MI6 apparently trusted their Libyan counterparts enough to offer detailed information on Arabs outside of Libya upon request by Libyan authorities — even when the U.S. and British intelligence agencies did not see the specified individuals as threats. In one note dated Feb. 23, 2004, Libya seems to have requested information on a Kuwaiti individual. The CIA doesn't see him as posing any danger, it says. But it provides detailed information on that man's role in Kuwaiti politics anyway.
The CIA also apparently provided their Libyan counterparts with intelligence on specific Libyans that they were interested in, so as to facilitate their capture. The intelligence appears to include lists of Libyan phone numbers attached to specific suspect names, aliases, passport and their suspected locations.
(See photos of life in Benghazi during wartime.)
And the CIA seemed to have shared other intelligence too with the Libyans, ranging from information on packages intercepted in Turkey that allegedly carried Tunisian passports to profiles of "key North Africans" in Pakistan and Afghanistan to details between meetings of the Swedish Security Service and a Libyan contact code named "Joseph."
Files in Arabic detaile


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2091653,00.html#ixzz1WpxvPIX4

The National Transitional Council (CNT) will be moving to Tripoli after the liberation of the whole country, said, Monday, Sept. 5, his vice president, Abdel Hafiz Ghoga. The body of the rebellion Libyan and reversed his decision to leave his stronghold in Benghazi as early as this week, as announced by its president, Mustafa Abdeljalil Friday.

Al-Qaeda's north African branch has acquired a stockpile of weapons in Libya, including surface-to-air missiles that are threatening air travel, the EU's counter-terrorism coordinator said Monday.
Due to the turmoil in Libya, members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have "gained access to weapons, either small arms or machine-guns, or certain surface-to-air missiles which are extremely dangerous because they pose a risk to flights over the territory," said Gilles de Kerchove.
At a news conference marking the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States, de Kerchove said that while the threat of strikes by mainstream Al-Qaeda followers had decreased, AQIM was taking root both on the Arab peninsula and in Africa, posing a mounting threat.
"It is a group that is Africanising and seeking to extend its area of influence," he said.