Month: February 2011

A truncated version from AJE:

"Citizens tried to attack the army and they were in a situation that was difficult. The army was not used to dealing with riots," he says. "Libyan citizens died and this was a tragedy.

"There is a plot against Libya. People want to create a government in Benghazi and others want to have an Islamic emirate in Bayda. All these [people] have their own plots. Of course Arab media hyped this. The fault of the Libyan media is that it did not cover this. Libya is not like Egypt, it is tribes and clans, it is not a society with parties. Everyone knows their duties and this may cause civil wars.

Libya is not Tunisia and Egypt. Libya has oil – that has united the whole of Libya. I have to be honest with you. We are all armed, even the thugs and the unemployed. At this moment in time, tanks are driven about with civilians. In Bayda you have machine guns right in the middle of the city. Many arms have been stolen.

No one will come to Libya or do any business with Libya. We will call for new media laws, civil rights, lift the stupid punishments, we will have a constitution… We will tomorrow create a new Libya. We can agree on a new national anthem, new flag, new Libya. Or be prepared for civil war.

Forget about oil. The country will be divided like North and South Korea, we will see each other through a fence. You will wait in line for months for a visa. The Libyans who live in Europe and USA, their children go to school and they want you to fight. They are comfortable. They then want to come and rule us and Libya. They want us to kill each other then come, like in Iraq."

That's a lot of shoes. AJE's indispensable live-blog reports one Libyan dissident's reaction:

He's threatening Libya and trying to play up on their fears. I don't think anyone in Libya who isn't close to the Gaddafi regime would buy anything he said. And even if there is any truth to what he said, I don't think it's any better than what the people of Libya have already been living with for the past 40 years. He promised that the country would spiral into civil war for the next 30 to 40 years, that the country's infrastructure would be ruined, hospitals and schools would no longer be functioning – but schools are already terrible, hospitals are already in bad condition.

An amateur video of a police van trying to run down a protestor:

And from Al Jazeera, a report of the mounting violence in Libya:

The violence in Benghazi spreads to the country's capital, Tripoli:

There were reports of clashes between anti-government protesters and Gaddafi supporters around the Green Square. "We are in Tripoli, there are chants [directed at Gaddafi]: 'Where are you? Where are you? Come out if you're a man," a protester told Al Jazeera on phone.

A resident told Reuters news agency that he could hear gunshots in the streets and crowds of people. "We're inside the house and the lights are out. There are gunshots in the street," the resident said by phone. "That's what I hear, gunshots and people. I can't go outside."

An expatriate worker living in the Libyan capital told Reuters: "Some anti-government demonstrators are gathering in the residential complexes. The police are dispersing them. I can also see burning cars."

More from AJE:

12:11 am: Libya's ambassador to China, Hussein Sadiq al Musrati, has just resigned on air with Al Jazeera Arabic. He called on the army to intervene, and has called all diplomatic staff to resign. He made claims about a gunfight between Gaddafi's sons and also claimed that Gaddafi may have left Libya. Al Jazeera has no confirmation of these claims.

Follow Al Jazeera's live-feed here.

(Photo: A protester shouts slogans against Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi during a demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in the Egyptian capital Cairo on February 20, 2011 in support of anti-government protesters in Libya calling for Kadhafi's ouster. By Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images)

I have just watched Qaddafi's son essentially tell the Libyan people on State TV that if the revolts, especially in the Eastern part of the country, continue, there will be a brutal crackdown, more blood will flow (credible reports are coming in of 200 killed so far), the country will be split in two, separating east and west, and that – this is where it gets surreal – the Western powers will occupy the country. The chilling threat of more violence is evidence to me that the revolt is now seriously threatening the regime. Qaddafi also used the Islamist card, although again there seems to be little evidence of the mass protests being religiously inspired.

The violence looks as if it might be the worst yet in what is now a cauldron of democratic revolt from Eastern Iran to Eastern Libya. Money NYT quote, backing up the previous reports that some of the security forces in Bengahzi had changed sides and were now with the protestors:

By Sunday, thousands of protesters had occupied a central square in front of the courthouse, which some call their Tahrir Square after the epicenter of the Egyptian revolt, and they were chanting the same slogans that echoed through the streets of Tunis and Cairo, “The people want to bring down the regime.”

By evening, two witnesses said, the protesters had stormed the security headquarters, and, these witnesses said, a few members of the security forces had defected to join the protesters.

“These young men are taking bullets in their chests to confront the tyrant,” Mr. Hadi said, speaking by phone from the siege of the security building.

But more than a thousand other members of the security forces had hardly surrendered. They were concentrated a few miles away from the courthouse in a barracks in the neighborhood of Berqa. Witnesses said young protesters were attempting suicidal attacks on the barracks with thrown rocks, stun grenades usually used for fishing, or occasionally vehicles stolen from the security forces. But the security forces responded by shooting from the cover of the fortified building, while others shot from vehicles as they cruised the side streets.

"The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) as to why this wasn't known before the false information was put into (a key intelligence estimate) sent to Congress, the president's State of the Union address and my February 5 presentation to the U.N." – Colin Powell.

CNN then notes the following:

Although the CIA was not given a chance to interview Alwan directly, and German officials had questioned some aspects of Alwan's story, his assertions were included in the material provided to Powell for his U.N. presentation.

Tyler Drumheller, who was the CIA's chief of European operations at the time, agrees that the "Curveball" information was not well-enough vetted. He says he had reservations at the time about relying on it, but that when he asked for direct CIA access to Alwan through the German intelligence service, he was rebuffed. A representative of Germany's intelligence service declined to comment.

Drumheller claims top Bush administration officials were too willing to believe Alwan's story "because that was the only piece of intelligence they had that really fit what the administration was looking at."

The question becomes: how did someone the Germans doubted and the CIA never had direct access to become the source for a factual statement by the then-secretary of state? If this was "the only piece of intelligence they had that really fit what the administration was looking at," and they knew it wasn't solid, why did they use it? Unless they had already decided to topple Saddam regardless of the evidence?

This gets to the core of the nagging question: was the Iraq war waged in good faith? We still don't really know, but put this in the evidence pile that suggests it wasn't.

Don't miss the Dish's round-up of the day's street protests from Iran to Libya. It's here.

"Invention" by Billy Collins appeared in The Atlantic in December, 1998:

Tonight the moon is a cracker,
with a bite out of it
floating in the night,

and in a week or so
according to the calendar
it will probably look

like a silver football,
and nine, maybe ten days ago
it reminded me of a thin bright claw.

But eventually —
by the end of the month,
I reckon —

it will waste away
to nothing,
nothing but stars in the sky,

and I will have a few nights
to myself,
a little time to rest my jittery pen.

(Photo: Thai buddhist monks offer prayers celebrating Magha Puja day, an important religious festival celebrated in Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos during the full moon of the third lunar month. Photo by Paula Bronstein /Getty Images).

Kyle Cupp explains:

For the most part, culture war rhetoric is aimed not at offering an effective proof for the benefit of the opposition, but in destroying the opposition. Because proof is not its aim or its concern, culture war rhetoric has no allegiance to the truth. This isn’t to say this rhetoric necessarily employs lies, but that lies are not antithetical to its purpose. Its loyalty is to whatever most effectively leads to the enemy’s defeat. It employs famine, sword, and fire and suffers nothing if it sickens, slashes, or engulfs the truth as collateral damage.