QaDaffi Using Soldiers as Young as 12

The Libyan government is hiding the bodies of rebels that are being murdered by it in a bid to prevent the outside world from knowing how many Libyans have been killed over the last two weeks.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that after pro- Gaddafi militia shot at protesters in the western city of Tajoura, survivors said the bodies of slain protesters were dumped on pickup trucks and taken away. Relatives told the AP that they were searching for relatives to bury but could not find the bodies.

Eljahmi says officials in a hospital near Tripoli told him the bodies of Libyans killed were quickly hidden from view lest they serve as evidence of Gaddafi’s brutality.

“I didn’t just hear it from regular people, I heard it from hospital folks – doctors and nurses,” Eljahmi says. Medical staff told him that they had heard gunfire in the street, but outside the hospital, “they found a lot of blood in the middle of the street but no body.”

Nearby, medical staff found a man dead in his car and another lying on the side of the road. “The one on the side of the road, his head was blown out, his brain was next to him.”

Medical staff told Eljahmi that forces loyal to Gaddafi did everything possible to prevent the wounded from getting help. Last week, they said, gunmen entered the hospital, fired in the air, then went to the blood bank and destroyed the entire blood supply.

“These things are not reported in the media,” Eljahmi says, noting that the incidents in question happened last week when there were almost no foreign reporters in Libya.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Gadhafi is using 'soldiers' as young as 12:

IN the hospital morgue in the town of Ajdabiya, the fallen soldiers looked as young as 12 years old.

The revelation by a morgue worker came as witnesses told The Times yesterday that soldiers sent by Colonel Gaddafi to fight rebels in the neighbouring eastern oil town of Brega were no more than children. Meanwhile, captives accused of being mercenaries were paraded on the front line.

Faraj Lashrash, an English student who had joined the rebel army two days before and was manning a machine gun on a pick-up truck at the entrance to Brega, said: "It's crazy, he was using children, you know."

Read the whole thing.

I don't see the 'international community' intervening. Not with Obama in the White House.

Labels: Libyan no-fly zone, Libyan regime change, Muammar Gaddafi

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:49 PM

Civil War in Libya

It sure sounds like there's a civil war going in Libya. Here's a report from a Sky News correspondent named Alex Crawford, who is the only Western reporter in the town of Zawiyah (about 30 miles west of Tripoli - see map below and picture at top left).

The New York Times reports that the Libyan uprising has become a civil war.

Eighteen days after it began with spirited demonstrations in the eastern city of Benghazi, the Libyan uprising has veered sharply from the pattern of relatively quick and nonviolent upheavals that ousted the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt. Instead, the rebellion here appeared to have become mired in a drawn-out ground campaign between two relatively unprofessional and loosely organized forces — the Libyan Army and the rebels — that is exacting high civilian casualties and appears likely to drag on for some time.

That bloody stasis was evident on Saturday in Zawiyah, the northwestern city seized by rebels a week ago, where the government’s attacks raised puzzling questions about its strategy. For the second day in a row its forces punched into the city, then pulled back to maintain a siege from the perimeter. Hours later, they punched in and retreated again.

By the end of the day, both sides claimed control of the city.

Foreign journalists were unable to cross military checkpoints to evaluate reports of what Zawiyah residents called “a massacre.”

Witnesses there began frantic calls to journalists in Tripoli at 6 a.m. Saturday to report that soldiers of the Khamis brigade, which is named for the Qaddafi son who commands it and is considered the family’s most formidable force, had broken through the east and west gates of the city. “They are killing us,” one resident said. “They are firing on us.”

The militia attacked with tanks, heavy artillery and machine guns, witnesses said, and the explosions were clearly audible in the background. “I am watching neighbors dying unarmed in front of their homes,” one resident said. “I don’t know how many are being killed, but I know my neighborhood is being killed.”

In a telephone interview a little more than three hours after the attack began, another resident said: “Everything is burning. We don’t know from which side they are shooting us, from the buildings or from the streets. People are falling everywhere.”

The rebels, including former members of the Libyan military, returned fire. Although a death toll was impossible to determine, one resident said four of his neighbors were killed, including one who was found stripped of his clothes.

A correspondent for Sky News, a British satellite TV channel and the only foreign news organization in the city, reported seeing the militia fire on ambulances trying to remove the wounded from the streets. The reporter also said she had seen at least eight dead soldiers and five armored vehicles burning in the central square.

At 10 a.m., witnesses said, the Qaddafi forces abruptly withdrew, taking up positions in a close circle around the city.

Some rebels painted the pullout as a victory. A spokesman for the rebels told Reuters they had captured three armored personnel carriers, two tanks and a pickup truck.

But other rebel supporters acknowledged that there was little evidence that they had inflicted enough damage on the militia to force the retreat. Residents said they were unable to leave and visitors, including journalists, could not enter. “If you come here you will not believe what you see,” one resident implored. “It is like a war zone.”

Around 4:00 p.m., the militia attacked again. A witness said as many as six tanks rolled through town, there were more skirmishes with the rebels, and then the tanks left as quickly as they had arrived.

“We don’t know which side they are coming from,” one witness said in a panicked phone call.

Finally, here's a map showing who controls what as of Saturday.

TPM & Ben Smith a Special Kind of Stupid

It takes a special kind of stupid to write uninformed crap like this. Leave it to an "insider" and self-inflated puffball to get this so completely and abysmally wrong. Did he bother to contact me and ask? Ha! Did he bother to contact CPAC? Ha ha! Did he read Atlas' numerous explanations as to why I hold these events at CPAC? Not a chance. He's a leftoid, he knows better.

CPAC is not holding this event. I am, with Spencer. Our dime, our film. I do this every year to inject some relevance and honesty about the jihad to clueless and compromised CPAC that is hugely attended by good Americans unaware that Keene and co. has sold them out.

Dept. of infiltration

One of the strangest moments in this year's civil war over CPAC was the charge that it had fallen under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and of sharia, something rather convincingly rebutted by new of an event tited, "The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks."

Reports TPM:

The event is a movie premiere, hosted by mosque opposition leader Pamela Geller and her partner Robert Spencer. It will be followed by "a question and action and strategy session on how to stop the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero."

UPDATE: Benny updates: Infiltration, cont'd

Nevermind; the blogger Pamela Geller's screening of a film at CPAC doesn't mean she's not worried about the inflitration of the conservative gathering by the Muslim Brotherhood:

CPAC is not holding this event. I am, with [Robert] Spencer. Our dime, our film. I do this every year to inject some relevance and honesty about the jihad to clueless and compromised CPAC that is hugely attended by good Americans unaware that Keene and co. has sold them out.

Also:

It takes a special kind of stupid to write uninformed crap like this. Leave it to an "insider" and self-inflated puffball to get this so completely and abysmally wrong.

I've asked CPAC and Geller for a bit more detail on whether they approved her event or had anything to do with it, and will update when I get hear back.

UPDATE: Geller emails that she's renting a room that CPAC has reserved, but paying the Marriott, and did it without discussing the event with CPAC, which may or may not put it on their schedule.

ALSO: CPAC's Lisa De Pasquale describes the event as "independent."

To be clear, shruggers: There are fees to both CPAC and the Marriott. And while I have issues with CPAC, and I do, I commend Lisa De Pasquale for giving me the opportunity to hold the event at CPAC, which she has done every year despite my outspoken criticism.

DePasquale rocks.

Freedom"s Unfinished Revolution

A textbook designed for high school classrooms, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction, examines one of the most contested periods in America’s history where social conflict and change shaped the national landscape for generations to come.

Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution links the Civil War to the problems and promises of the Reconstruction era, providing a broader historical context to the racial injustice and social upheavals that followed. Filled with rich primary sources—letters, speeches, photographs, engravings, novel excerpts, among others—this textbook uses critical thinking exercises and supplementary resources to help students construct historical narratives. Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution was produced by ASHP/CML, written by William Friedheim with Ronald Jackson, and published by The New Press.

Millions Will Seek Refuge from the Environment

On the Fifth Day of Civil War

The spirit of Pentecost on the fifth day of civil war

Eugene Sensenig-Dabbous / 011.May.08 / 13:00 AM

The besieged Lebanese government called yesterday for a demonstration of solidarity with the victims of the occupation of West Beirut for today, Sunday the 11^th, the second highest Christian holiday, celebrating the gift of the Holy Spirit. They called on all Lebanese to express their support for the families who had lost loved one’s to the advancing Iranian backed militias and to take a stand for democracy in Lebanon, by standing for one minute of silence at 12:00 noon.

Dima, Nour and I took the same flag we had held for hours at Martyrs’ Square on the 14^th of March, 2005 and headed down to the main secondary road leading from Hazmieh to Beirut, where her family, who is living just off Mar Elias Street, is still being held hostage, along with residents of many other predominantly Sunnis neighbourhoods, by marauding militiamen; this despite the “Opposition’s” promise that their armed forces would be removed from the streets of the capital by this morning.

Reaching the main road, we realized that we were standing in front of the Shi’ia Higher Council building, recently renovated after the last Civil War, but still not in use, vacated except for a few recruits from the Lebanese Army who had the morning shift guarding this impressive massive stone structure. They lazily watched on as Dima unrolled the flag she had so proudly held during the Cedar Revolution, which freed us of Syrian occupation, but has failed to provide full independence to the Arab world’s only existing democracy.

In honor of the occasion, Nour was wearing her brand new labour solidarity bib, “An owie to one, is an owie to all!” a kiddy take on the anarcho-syndicalist slogan “An injury to one, is an injury to all,” which we had just ordered for her from Northland Posters .

We thought this appropriate because this whole “situation” was supposedly to be about the impoverished Lebanese workers and middle class, an issue nobody is talking about anymore.

We were the only ones on the streets of this residential area, who were taking part in this demo. After the moment of silence, we walked around our new neighbourhood, which seemed oblivious to the suffering that was going on just down the hill. There were no Lebanese flags hanging from the balconies, none of our Christian neighbours taking a stand for democracy and in honour of those who had been killed over the last five days of fighting. A car full of fashionably dressed young women did stop and ask for directs. They were curious about the flag; when we explained it was in support of occupied West Beirut they exclaimed “How cute!” When Dima added that is was also in honour of the largely civilian victims of the siege, including three members of her own family, they sobered up and expressed their condolences and drove off.

What I only found out a few hours after I wrote my first open letter is that a male cousin of Dima’s father has lost his wife and two of his four sons in the battle for Beirut. They lived just around the corner from our former Mohammed el Hout Street apartment, in Ras al Nabeh, and had divided up the family in two cars in order to flee the approaching Hezbollah and Amal forces. A RPG hit the car the mother was driving, killing her immediately and mortally wounding her son. As two of their adults sons ran to help them they were mowed down in cold blood by the Shi’ia militias. It is important to note here that there was no TV footage shown of the civilian casualties and the names of the victims have not yet been made public.

As you probably have heard, fighting has now spread throughout the country. In Tripoli and Akkar in the north, Sunnis are fighting and killing Alawites and vice versa. Hezbollah and the Druze PSP have been settling scores in the Chouf Mountains just east of Beirut, including heavy shelling. Muslim-on-Muslim, Sunni-Shi’ia violence has broken out in the ancient cities of Sidon and Tyre in the south and the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border. The way it looks now, things will be getting a lot worse before they get any better; the dieing continues. To date, the minority Christian population and the Palestinians have managed to stay out of the fighting. However, with would-be president General Michel Auon gloating on TV yesterday about the successful siege of Beirut having “put the cart back on the right track” and that we can now return to business as usual, it seems to be only a matter of time before his predominantly Maronite Free Patriotic Movement starts taking some flack from the utterly humiliated Sunni and Druze population.

One final political note, in closing, about the new confessionalism that has started showing itself over the last few days. During yesterday’s press corps demo in solidarity with the Future journalists, whose pro-Hariri TV, radio and newspaper outlets were sacked and burned by the militias, the regionally renowned television talk show host, Zaven Kouyoumdjian, stated publicly that he had given up on his anti-confessionalist stance and realized, because of the events in Beirut, that one can only count on one’s own confession. People are now being forced, many times against their will, back into their religiously dominated sectarian camps for protection. This has often heartbreaking personal consequences.

I close with an email I received from one of my Sunni students, who fled to her village immediately before the worst fighting broke out.

When we arrived home I went to my room and called my boyfriend to tell him that I arrived home. He answered my call and was happy that I’m safe at home, I asked him why you didn’t contact me in the last 24 hours and why you didn’t answer my calls, he said that he was busy preparing for war, and I was like what are you talking about, he said yes Al Said Hassan Nasrallah said it in his speech, those who will hurt us we’ll cut their hands and all what he said….(I’m sure you heard his speech).

I’ve been with my boyfriend over 2 years, we never talked politics because he didn’t like politics, and he used to tell me that it’s a big game that you and me are not able to understand. But today he called me “you Sunni”………….
For those of you reading this from outside the country and who are religiously inclined, pray that the Holy Spirit might fill the combatants and give them the strength to find their way out of this entanglement.

Faith in the power of the Holy Spirit does unite us all here in the region, Jews, Christians and Muslims. To my knowledge, the only mention of Hezbollah in the Koran is in reference to those strengthened by the Spirit of God. In all three Abrahamic traditions God instructs us to return good for evil and that through his Spirit we will find the strength to overcome both fear and hate.

58:22 It is they in whose hearts He has inscribed faith, and whom He has strength­ened with His Spirit, and whom He will admit into gardens through which running waters flow, there to abide. Well pleased is God with them, and well pleased are they with Him. They are the party of God (Hezbollah). It is they, the party of God, who will reach a happy state!