Libya

For those of us who have been arguing for years that senior officials and lawyers in the Bush administration must be held accountable for the torture program they introduced and used in their “war on terror,” last week was a very interesting week indeed, as developments took place in Strasbourg, in London and in Washington [...]

This week, Abdel Hakim Belhadj (aka Belhaj), a Libyan military commander and rebel leader, who is the head of the Tripoli Military Council and the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, initiated legal proceedings against the British government and the security forces for their key role in his illegal abduction, rendition and barbaric [...]

With Libya’s former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in hiding, the uprising against his 42-year rule that began on February 15, and that, almost since it began, has been contentiously supported by NATO, has finally succeeded in providing a shadowy glimpse of a new life for the Libyan people. Huge difficulties lie ahead — preventing recriminatory horrors [...]

The gulf between what’s happening on the ground in the Middle East and the way it is perceived by the US intelligence services — as well as the gulf between how critics perceive America’s counterterrorism policies in the Middle East, and how those policies are perceived by US intelligence — were recently exposed in an [...]

Colonel Gaddafi has long demonstrated a fundamental disregard for the life of the Libyan people. Not content with murdering 1,200 prisoners in the Abu Salim prison massacre in June 1996, he then allowed men like Fouad Assad ben Omran, who recently spoke to Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News, to make the journey to the [...]

The news — mostly bad, occasionally uplifting — is so relentless on so many fronts at present that I missed this extraordinary article on the Guardian‘s Comment is free on Tuesday by a Libyan blogger, writing under the pseudonym Muhammad min Libya, who not only urged foreign forces not to intervene in Libya’s revolution, with [...]

Reporting from Benghazi for Channel 4 News, reporter Lindsey Hilsum has just met family members of some of the prisoners killed in the notorious Abu Salim prison massacre on June 29, 1996, when an estimated 1,200 prisoners were killed in just a few hours by Colonel Gaddafi’s forces. The massacre — the single biggest outrage [...]

On Friday, I spoke for the first time with the libertarian radio host Ernest Hancock, on his show Freedom’s Phoenix, about the revolution in Libya, following the publication of my recent articles, Revolution in Libya: Protestors Respond to Gaddafi’s Murderous Backlash with Remarkable Courage; US and UK Look Like the Hypocrites They Are, The Year [...]

Outside Libya, as the third sustained revolution to engulf North Africa — and the bloodiest by far — continues to rage, some reactions are predictable. The world’s powerbrokers are fretting about the increased price of oil and evacating their workers, and President Obama’s response has been sensibly muted, unlike that of David Cameron, who, like [...]

“Now people are dying we’ve got nothing else to live for. What needs to happen is for the killing to stop. But that won’t happen until he [Gaddafi] is out. We just want to be able to live like human beings. Nothing will happen until protests really kick off in Tripoli, the capital. It’s like [...]