When the war in Libya started, many young men now on the rebel front line at Misrata were so interested in computer games and mobile phones that older residents never thought they would turn into fighters. “Before the uprising, all those young men cared about was hair gel, clothes, music, mobile phones and hanging out in cafes,” said Mahmoud Askutri, a businessman who has formed and funds the 1st battalion of the Al Marsa regiment, one of the rebel units fighting here to end Muammar Gaddafi’s 41-year rule.
“But now they fight and are willing to die for a cause.”
Amid the Arab Spring protests that swept the region early this year, the people of Misrata and elsewhere in Libya demanded greater freedom, so Gaddafi sent in the troops to silence their protests.
After those troops opened fire on demonstrators, the people of Misrata rose up, initially fighting back with petrol bombs and hunting rifles.
Since then, they have wrested control of Libya’s third largest city from Gaddafi loyalists and, after mistakes that cost many lives, this army of former civilians has consolidated a front line 36 km (22 miles) west of Misrata.
They have recently encountered better trained troops and have moved forward slowly under sustained bombardment to conserve ammunition, hold territory and reduce casualties.
That they are around 10 km (six miles) east of Zlitan, the largest city between here and the capital, Tripoli, is testimony to the courage of the young men in this force.
“They treat me with great respect,” Askutri said before a visit to the men of Al Masra on the front line. “But when I see them I do not feel worthy of that respect. A few months ago they were civilians. Now they are willing to die for their freedom.”
Salah is typical of many young men on the front line here. The 20-year-old was attending medical school when the uprising started. Life was easy and he spent a lot of time playing soccer games on Playstation.
“Fifty fifty,” he says of his record on Playstation.
Sitting with a group of other young men, he says he is a big fan of FC Barcelona. A second young man shakes his head and says he likes Real Madrid, while a third looks down at the Manchester United logos embossed on his shoes and says nothing.
Salah plans to return to university after the war, as he wants to become a cardiologist.
“But first we must beat Gaddafi,” he says. “We cannot be free if we live under him.”
The United States formally recognized the rebel leadership in Libya as the country’s legitimate government on Friday. The move, made at an international gathering here to discuss the five-month-old conflict in Libya, ratcheted up the diplomatic pressure on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi amid a continuing NATO-led bombing campaign to push him from power.
At the meeting, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Colonel Qaddafi’s government no longer had any legitimacy, and that the United States would join more than 30 countries in extending diplomatic recognition to the main opposition group, known as the Transitional National Council.
“We will help the T.N.C. sustain its commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity of Libya, and we will look to it to remain steadfast in its commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms,” Mrs. Clinton said.
In an audio speech carried on Libyan television, Colonel Qaddafi appeared as determined as ever to fight on, and dismissed the recognition of the rebel government by the leading powers.
Rebels opposed to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi seized control of this village in the mountains on Wednesday, extending their hold in western Libya and inching toward a supply route to the capital that they hope to sever.
After a half-day gun battle, Colonel Qaddafi’s soldiers yielded the town in the early afternoon, firing rockets and mortars to cover their withdrawal. The ordnance exploded on the hillsides around the town with reverberating booms and plumes of dust and smoke that briefly kept the rebels away.
But the rebels flowed in behind the fleeing troops, capturing more than a dozen of them and collecting the departed soldiers’ abandoned ammunition and equipment. Soon they were refueling their cars and pickup trucks at the gas station they now held.
Qawalish changed hands while rebels elsewhere reported making progress outside of Misurata, east of the capital, Tripoli. They said they were advancing toward the city of Zlitan. Those reports could not be independently confirmed.
In the mountains, the rebels said they hoped their day signaled new momentum for a fight in western Libya that had been deadlocked for more than a week. “We are doing well,” said Sofian Alhaj, a fighter who said he was a former employee of an investment company run by Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, one of the Libyan leader’s sons. “Now we will keep going, until we are in Tripoli.”
That ambition, if realized, would most likely occur in increments. Geographically, the seizure of Qawalish marked a minor shift in the front lines. But it moved the rebels within about 35 miles of Gharyan, a small city astride a strategic highway running south from Tripoli.
Turkey’s foreign minister recognized Libya’s rebel leaders as the country’s legitimate representatives and promised them an additional $200 million in aid during a visit Sunday.
The visit by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu marked Turkey’s strongest show of support yet for the opposition forces trying to out Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Turkey, a regional power, initially balked at the idea of military action in Libya and Turkish companies were involved in Libyan construction projects worth billions of dollars before the outbreak of an anti-Gadhafi uprising in February.
The revolt has turned into a protracted, largely deadlocked armed conflict, in which the rebels control Libya’s eastern third, while Gadhafi clings to power in the west, but has been unable to crush pockets of resistance there. As a NATO member, Turkey is now supporting the alliance’s airstrikes against targets linked to the Gadhafi regime.
Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, has delivered a telephone address through loudspeakers to thousands of supporters gathered in Tripoli’s Green Square, warning the NATO-led alliance to stop its war support or face “catastrophe”.
In the Friday speech, 100 days after NATO first entered the country, Gaddafi gave multiple warnings to foreign forces that have been militarily supporting anti-regime rebels for months, to a crowd of supporters who waved green flags and posters of the head of state.
“We advise you to retreat before you face a catastrophe… If we decide to, we are able to move to Europe like locusts, like bees,” Gaddafi said.
Addressing the West, Gaddafi warned that Libyans could take revenge on Europe for supporting of rebel forces.
Muammar Gaddafi’s fearsome security apparatus appears to be weakening in Tripoli, but it is still too powerful to risk an uprising — that is the view of Libyans who say they are part of a burgeoning underground opposition network in the capital.
The handful of activists, who spoke to Reuters journalists on condition that neither their identities nor the location of the meeting be revealed, said Gaddafi was keeping control of the city through informants, mass arrests and killings.
“No single event will bring down the regime here in Tripoli,” said one activist who goes by the name of Niz.
“And it will take time,” he added, saying more NATO bombing, a push by Libyan rebels outside the city and better coordination of the opposition inside the capital would probably be needed.
Yet Niz and others also spoke of a system of repression that was showing signs of strain, with a shortage of places to hold detainees, interrogators who do not know what questions to ask and people arrested and then released apparently at random.
That Reuters foreign journalists staying at a tightly monitored hotel were able to slip away from government minders to meet people who said they represented active opposition cells was itself a sign of disarray in the decades-old security system — a disarray NATO is counting to bring Gaddafi down eventually.
Four activists from two different opposition movements — groups which have maintained contact with foreign media for the past few months — gave an account of what they thought it would take for Gaddafi’s grip on his Tripoli stronghold to be broken.
It was an assessment that will be sobering for those in Western capitals, and in the rebel-held Libyan cities of Benghazi and Misrata, who have been hoping for a swift end to the four-month old conflict.
An uprising in Tripoli is seen by some NATO member states as the best bet for toppling the Libyan ruler after months of coalition air strikes, and rebel attacks outside the capital, failed to produce a decisive outcome.
“The rebels don’t really have a chance of breaking out from the east, making their way to Tripoli,” said Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute in London. “It will rely on some sort of urban uprising within the city itself.”
Niz said outsiders, and the eastern rebels, should be patient if they were were waiting for Tripolitanians to rise up:
“Four months is a long time for those being shelled,” he said of those under siege in Misrata and elsewhere. “It’s a long time for those being raped or tortured,” he added.
“But, objectively, it’s not a long time when you consider the regime has been in power for 42 years.”
Until a few weeks ago, the rebellious towns in the Nafusah Mountains were struggling to survive on dwindling supplies of barley, water and gas during a long siege by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s soldiers.
But after an improbable series of military victories over the past three weeks — with fewer than 100 rebel fighters killed, their military leaders say — residents of a broad area in this mountain region are celebrating virtual secession from Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya. While there have been defeats, and the Grad rockets of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces still menace the outskirts of Nalut near the Tunisian border and Yafran to the east, rebels point hopefully to the growing stability of the towns under their control as evidence of how tenuous Colonel Qaddafi’s grip may be.
“This is the new Libya,” said Anwar Fekini, a Sorbonne-educated French-Libyan lawyer, rebel organizer and local tribal leader who returned for a weekend trip to his ancestral home to strategize with local allies. “It feels good.”
He delicately accepted an aging Belgian rifle from two gray-haired rebel fighters, just for safekeeping.
The Nafusah Mountains have emerged as a strategically significant front in the battle for Libya, in part because the rebels there are closest to Colonel Qaddafi’s stronghold in the capital, Tripoli, and in part because they have the potential to cut off vital supply lines from the border. And though barely trained and few in number — one rebel leader estimated that there were about 2,000 armed fighters — they have used their knowledge of the terrain and the sympathies of much of the local population to expand their territory as the fighting around Benghazi to the east and Misurata on the central coast has moved toward a stalemate.
France is providing weapons to Libyan rebels in the Western Mountains in an effort to help them push on to Muammar Gaddafi’s stronghold in the Libyan capital Tripoli, Le Figaro newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Citing unidentified sources, Le Figaro said France had parachuted “large amounts” of weapons, including rocket launchers, assault rifles, machine guns and anti-tank missiles into the Jebel Nafusa region.
The decision to send arms without consulting its NATO partners was “because there was no other way to proceed,” a senior source was quoted as saying.
The House of Representatives refused to either endorse or curtail U.S. involvement in Libya, delivering a mixed message Friday that highlighted deep divisions surrounding the issue.
By an overwhelming margin, lawmakers refused to sanction U.S. participation in a NATO campaign of airstrikes in the North African country, a vote that amounted to a rare, bipartisan rebuke of a president’s foreign policy during an active military conflict.
Minutes later, however, a Republican-led effort to try to curb financial support for U.S. involvement also failed. A majority of Democrats and a group of Republicans rejected the bill to cut funding for combat activities — surprising GOP leaders, who tailored the bill at the last minute to suit the rank and file.
Both measures were largely symbolic. The first measure, which would have authorized U.S. involvement, was not expected to pass the Republican-led House, where fiscal conservatives and “tea party” freshmen have expressed increased skepticism about stretching the military thin.
The second bill, to cut off funding, had virtually no chance of passing the Senate, much less garnering a presidential signature.
GOP leaders framed the vote as an attempt to rein in the president, who decided not to seek authorization under the 1973 War Powers Act for U.S. participation in a NATO military effort.
Human rights organisations have cast doubt on claims of mass rape and other abuses perpetrated by forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, which have been widely used to justify Nato’s war in Libya.
Nato leaders, opposition groups and the media have produced a stream of stories since the start of the insurrection on 15 February, claiming the Gaddafi regime has ordered mass rapes, used foreign mercenaries and employed helicopters against civilian protesters.
An investigation by Amnesty International has failed to find evidence for these human rights violations and in many cases has discredited or cast doubt on them. It also found indications that on several occasions the rebels in Benghazi appeared to have knowingly made false claims or manufactured evidence.
The findings by the investigators appear to be at odds with the views of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who two weeks ago told a press conference that “we have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government. Apparently he [Colonel Gaddafi] used it to punish people.”
New U.S. intelligence shows Col. Moammar Gadhafi is “seriously considering” fleeing Tripoli for a more secure location outside the capital, according to U.S. officials, raising the prospect that the Libyan leader’s hold on power is increasingly fragile.
The intelligence depicts a Libyan leader who “doesn’t feel safe anymore” in Tripoli because of stepped-up strikes by North Atlantic Treaty Organization aircraft and by battlefield gains by rebel forces, according to a senior U.S. national-security official briefed on the recent reports that the intelligence community has shared with the White House and other agencies.
The timing behind any possible move isn’t known and doesn’t appear to be imminent, a U.S. official said. Such intelligence has been seen before, although with less intensity. U.S. intelligence agencies have seen no indications that Col. Gadhafi intends to leave the country, the officials said.
Nonetheless, U.S. officials believe military pressure on Tripoli in recent days has prompted Col. Gadhafi to seek safer ground, after more than three months of allied attacks. Col. Gadhafi has several residences and other facilities outside Tripoli to which he could relocate, said a senior U.S. defense official.
Ali Al-Isawi, the vice president of the executive office of Libya’s Transitional National Council in Benghazi, writes:
The world knows there is no future for democracy in Libya while Kadafi remains in power. The Libyan opposition’s Transitional National Council, recognized by more than a dozen European nations, is generally considered the only legitimate ruling interim authority in Libya until stability can be restored and full, free elections can be held.
Despite some assistance from many countries, the council is finding it increasingly difficult to provide essential services as the conflict drags on. The council must provide for residents and displaced people in the eastern half of the country, where it is in authority, and it must coordinate humanitarian aid and medical supplies for besieged areas, such as Misurata, and in refugee camps along Libya’s borders.
The council was unable to pay the May salaries for employees in the public sector. We have purchased fuel on credit. Medical supplies are at a critically low level. We have no drugs available for cancer, heart and kidney patients or for those suffering from psychological ailments. Anesthesia supplies are running low as the conflict creates major casualties in need of immediate treatment and care.
It is a familiar pattern in a government of checks and balances: members of Congress almost instinctively criticize the foreign adventures of a president from the opposite party.
But the current imbroglio in Congress over the American involvement in Libya exposes a deep and unusual foreign policy schism within the Republican Party, driven in large part by a Tea Party-infused House whose members are more fiscally conservative, particularly constitutionalist, less internationalist and, in many cases, too young to have been politically influenced by the cold war that informed the more established members of the party.
The divisions came to the fore on Tuesday when Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, introduced a measure with Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, to offer President Obama official Congressional authorization for the Libyan operation.
The legislation is an effort to blunt a series of House measures expected to seek to cut off financing for the operations in Libya as early as Thursday.
In introducing it, Mr. McCain chastised House Republicans for seeking to end the Libya mission. “Is this the time for Americans to tell all of these different audiences that our heart is not in this,” Mr. McCain said, “that we have neither the will nor the capability to see this mission through, that we will abandon our closest friends and allies on a whim? These are questions every member of Congress needs to think about long and hard, especially my Republican colleagues.”
House members of both parties and various political stripes seemed undaunted. Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democrat of Ohio, will offer an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill to deny money for operations in Libya, as will Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, a Republican freshman.
Italy on Wednesday called for an immediate halt to hostilities in Libya to allow humanitarian aid to reach the population in the strife-torn country, while NATO defended the credibility of its air war after a bomb misfired killing civilians.
On the diplomatic front, China said it recognises Libya’s opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) as an “important dialogue partner.”
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini warned on Tuesday that NATO’s credibility was “at risk” following the civilian casualties, and urged it to ensure it was not providing ammunition to Kadhafi’s propaganda war.
Frattini followed up his comments in a speech on Wednesday to the lower house of parliament in Rome.
“With regard to NATO, it is fair to ask for increasingly detailed information on results as well as precise guidelines on the dramatic errors involving civilians,” he said.
The comments came after NATO admitted a bomb misfired in Tripoli at the weekend, killing nine people according to Moamer Kadhafi’s regime.
Sens. John McCain and John Kerry introduced a resolution Tuesday that would give President Barack Obama the green light to continue limited military operations in Libya.
The language of the proposal has more teeth than the “sense of the Senate” resolution McCain and Kerry rolled out last month, which was merely a symbolic gesture backing the Libya effort. The latest plan would authorize U.S. operations in Libya but expires after one year and would make clear that the Senate agrees there is no need or desire to put boots on the ground in the North African nation.
“The Senate has been silent for too long on U.S. military operations in Libya,” McCain said on the chamber floor.
“It is time for the Senate to act. It is time to authorize the president’s use of force, whether he thinks he needs it or not. And it is time to send a message to our allies, to [Muammar Qadhafi] and to his opponents in Libya who are fighting for their freedom that there is strong bipartisan support in the Senate, and among the American people, for staying the course in Libya until we succeed.”
The White House has officially declared that what’s happening in Libya is not “hostilities.”
But at the Pentagon, officials have decided it’s unsafe enough there to give troops extra pay for serving in “imminent danger.”
The Defense Department decided in April to pay an extra $225 a month in “imminent danger pay” to service members who fly planes over Libya or serve on ships within 110 nautical miles of its shores.
That means the Pentagon has decided that troops in those places are “subject to the threat of physical harm or imminent danger because of civil insurrection, civil war, terrorism or wartime conditions.” There are no U.S. ground troops in Libya.
President Obama declared last week that the three-month-old Libyan campaign should not be considered “hostilities.” That word is important, because it’s used in the 1973 War Powers Resolution: Presidents must obtain congressional authorization within a certain period after sending U.S. forces “into hostilities.”
Obama’s reasoning was that he did not need that authorization because U.S. forces were playing a largely supportive and logistical role, and because Libyan defenses are so battered they pose little danger. U.S. drones are still carrying out some strikes against Libyan targets.
Republicans are facing a widening fissure over the U.S. role on the world stage as party leaders decide whether to confront President Obama this week over his policy toward Libya.
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other congressional Republican leaders have said that U.S. involvement in NATO’s bombing campaign, which hit the 90-day mark Sunday, violates the War Powers Act. The House could seek to cut off money for the war as it takes up the annual Pentagon spending bill this week.
Several of the party’s potential presidential candidates have called for the U.S. to quit the fight in Libya and questioned the depth of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
Other Republicans have begun pushing back, criticizing what they see as a growing isolationist agenda within the party. The result is that Republicans, once relatively unified on foreign policy issues, now have a division that parallels the long-standing split in Democratic ranks.
Since the United States handed control of the air war in Libya to NATO in early April, American warplanes have struck at Libyan air defenses about 60 times, and remotely operated drones have fired missiles at Libyan forces about 30 times, according to military officials.
The most recent strike from a piloted United States aircraft was on Saturday, and the most recent strike from an American drone was on Wednesday, the officials said.
While the Obama administration has regularly acknowledged that American forces have continued to take part in some of the strike sorties, few details about their scope and frequency have been made public.
The unclassified portion of material about Libya that the White House sent to Congress last week, for example, said “American strikes are limited to the suppression of enemy air defense and occasional strikes by unmanned Predator” drones, but included no numbers for such strikes.
Reports that a guard at the hotel housing foreign journalists here had been fatally shot sent a tremor of anxiety through the Qaddafi government’s media operation on Monday.
While Qaddafi loyalists said the guard accidentally shot himself with his own weapon while eating a late dinner at the end of the hotel two days earlier, at least two people working for the government said on the condition of anonymity that he was killed by rebel snipers.
The guard had been assigned to protect a prominent state television commentator known for his outspoken criticism of the rebels. The commentator, Yousef Shakeer, had taken refuge with his family inside the safety of the hotel because of rebel death threats against him.
In a brief interview, Mr. Shakeer said the government had identified his would-be assassin as a past member of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group, a jihadist group that dates back years, and he affirmed the government’s account that the guard accidentally shot himself on Saturday night.
While the details of the shooting could not be confirmed, it came amid growing reports of episodes of violence between local rebels challenging the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and his security forces. Some Tripoli residents said Monday that the sense of danger from the ground was compounding the effect of the escalation of NATO strikes from above.
To run short of fuel, as Field-Marshal Rommel discovered in 1942, can be fatal to a military campaign in north Africa. Thanks to NATO’s aerial bombardment, Muammar Qaddafi has few tanks left to seize up but his regime is running on empty. His military forces, now deploying civilian vehicles on the front line in the hope of confusing NATO’s pilots, have priority in using the gasoline and diesel still available to the colonel. But it may soon run out.
A litre of fuel in the capital now sells for more than $8, about 50 times the price in Benghazi, the rebel stronghold in the east. Some lines of cars at Tripoli’s petrol stations now stretch for more than a mile, with drivers taking turns to keep watch over cars left in queues overnight. Thieves scour the capital for vehicles that still have fuel in their tanks.
Limited supplies exist. A trickle of oil from fields in the regime-held south-west feeds the refinery at Zawiya, on the coast near Tripoli. Aerial surveillance shows heat coming from the plant but it is probably operating at no more than 30% of its capacity of 120,000 barrels a day (b/d). On June 12th rebels tried to capture the town but were repulsed by artillery. If Colonel Qaddafi were to lose Zawiya and its refinery, the game would probably be up.
Libya said 15 people including three children were killed in a NATO air strike Monday, although the Western alliance denied responsibility a day after it admitted causing civilian deaths in Tripoli.
The government spokesman accused NATO of a “cowardly terrorist act which cannot be justified” as journalists were shown damaged buildings on the sprawling estate of a veteran comrade of Moamer Kadhafi west of the capital and nine corpses, as well as body parts including one of a child.
But the alliance insisted no aircraft under its command had been operating in the Sorman area, 70 kilometres (45 miles) from Tripoli.
“We strongly deny that this thing in Sorman is us,” a NATO official in Brussels said on condition of anonymity. “We have not been operating there.”
An overwhelming number of voters believe the United States is involved in too many foreign conflicts and should pull back its troops, according to a new poll conducted for The Hill.
Seventy-two percent of those polled said the United States is fighting in too many places, with only 16 percent saying the current level of engagement represented an appropriate level. Twelve percent said they weren’t sure.
Voters also do not think having U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has made the country safer, according to the poll.
Thirty-seven percent said the continued presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan makes no impact on national security, while another 17 percent said it makes the United States less safe. By contrast, 36 percent said the United States is safer because forces are in Afghanistan.
[T]he Qaddafi dictatorship is unusual for its lack of rigor and efficiency. In Libya, at least in the two-thirds of the country not yet lost to the rebels, a dictatorship that has all the standard instruments of suppression and fear seems in some measure to have lost the power to command the fealty of its citizens. This seems true not just in areas controlled by the rebels, and not alone in the areas of Tripoli like Tajura, Souk al-Juma and Feshloom that were fountainheads of the uprising’s early weeks and where an active underground survived the sustained use of live fire against protesters in February and early March. Now it seems broadly true among the population at large.
Over several weeks in Tripoli, it has been commonplace to encounter, at random, Libyans ready to speak openly of their contempt for Colonel Qaddafi, and enthusiastically about NATO’s ability to bomb targets associated with the most sensitive strongholds of the government. To be sure, there were others, in many places, who offered a ritual defense of him, and a loathing of the rebels. But the much more common response — in bookshops and cafes, in hospitals and hotels, and in the mosques and souks that crowd the winding alleyways of the old Ottoman heart of Tripoli down by the city’s ancient port — was to hail the day when the Libyan leader would be consigned to what Trotsky called the dustbin of history.
There was, for example, an educated, English-speaking young man, Muhammad (not his real name, for his own protection), who met this reporter as he sauntered along an alleyway in the Medina, not far from the hole-in-the-wall store where he sells vegetables while hoping for a better job. Smoking a cigarette, he reacted dismissively as a pickup truck packed with pro-Qaddafi demonstrators drove past on one of the few drivable passageways through the district, shouting the Libyan leader’s name, waving placards bearing his image and hoisting automatic rifles in the air. “They pay them 10 dinars a day to do that,” he said. “It means nothing.” Asked what outcome he would favor, he smiled. “Like Martin Luther King, I have a dream, a dream for Libya,” he said. “Victory is coming. With Qaddafi gone, everything will be O.K.”
Libyan officials say a number of civilians have been killed in a NATO air strike in eastern Tripoli in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Reporters were taken by Libyan government officials to a residential area in the city’s Arada neighbourhood and saw a body pulled out of the rubble of a destroyed building.
“There was intentional and deliberate targeting of the civilian houses,” Khaled Kaim, Libya’s deputy foreign minister, said.
“This is another sign of the brutality of the West.”
There were heaps of rubble and chunks of shattered concrete at the scene, which a large crowd of what appeared to be local residents were helping to clear.
Rebels waging a drawn-out war to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi have run out of money, their oil chief said on Saturday, and he accused the West of failing to keep its promises of urgent financial aid.
His comments came as cracks were appearing in the NATO alliance over its 3-month bombing campaign against Gaddafi, with some allies showing mission fatigue and the United States accusing some European allies of failing to pull their weight.
The rebels have made several gains in the past few weeks, but remain far from seizing their ultimate prize — Gaddafi’s powerbase of Tripoli and its hinterland — despite air support from the world’s most powerful military alliance.
“We are running out of everything. It’s a complete failure. Either they (Western nations) don’t understand or they don’t care. Nothing has materialized yet. And I really mean nothing,” rebel oil chief Ali Tarhouni said in an interview with Reuters.
Thousands of documents that reveal in chilling detail orders from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s senior generals to bombard and starve the people of Misrata have been gathered by war crimes investigators and are being kept at a secret location at the besieged Libyan port.
The documents, some of which the Observer has seen, will form damning evidence in any future war crimes trial of the Libyan leader at the International Criminal Court. The court’s prosecutors are expected to travel to the city to view the documents once the daily bombardments have ceased.
One document shows the commanding general of government forces instructing his units to starve Misrata’s population during the four-month siege. The order, from Youssef Ahmed Basheer Abu Hajar, states bluntly: “It is absolutely forbidden for supply cars, fuel and other services to enter the city of Misrata from all gates and checkpoints.” Another document instructs army units to hunt down wounded rebel fighters, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Plans to bombard the city are also in the archive, say investigators, who also claim they have a message from Gaddafi relayed to the troops ordering that Misrata be obliterated and the “blue sea turned red” with the blood of the inhabitants. The documents are expected to form a crucial element of any trial against Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and his intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi if, as is expected, ICC judges confirm indictments for war crimes and crimes against humanity that are demanded by its chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo.
President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.
Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.
But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.
Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.
A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said there had been “a full airing of views within the administration and a robust process” that led Mr. Obama to his view that the Libya campaign was not covered by a provision of the War Powers Resolution that requires presidents to halt unauthorized hostilities after 60 days.
“It should come as no surprise that there would be some disagreements, even within an administration, regarding the application of a statute that is nearly 40 years old to a unique and evolving conflict,” Mr. Schultz said. “Those disagreements are ordinary and healthy.”
Still, the disclosure that key figures on the administration’s legal team disagreed with Mr. Obama’s legal view could fuel restiveness in Congress, where lawmakers from both parties this week strongly criticized the White House’s contention that the president could continue the Libya campaign without their authorization because the campaign was not “hostilities.”
“There’s no outcry in the country to say ‘comply with the War Powers Act,’ outside of academia.” That’s what Senator John McCain told Foreign Policy in an interview a few weeks ago. How quickly things change. With House Speaker John Boehner presenting an ultimatum for administration compliance with the War Powers Act, and Congressional GOP leaders hinting at defunding the campaign, the demand that the Obama administration obtain Congressional authorization for the operation in Libya has suddenly become front page news. A full-scale battle over Presidential authority looms.
The administration should have secured authorization for the Libya campaign early on, to put it on solid legal and bipartisan political footing. Congressional oversight is as important for the Obama administration as it was during the Bush administration — a point which applies to Libya just as it does to drone strikes and global counter-terrorism operations. They probably didn’t do so because they (correctly) expected that a Congressional resolution authorizing the Libya campaign would come to the President’s desk with riders attached repealing health care reform, reinstating Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and abolishing Medicare. But politics shouldn’t be allowed to outweigh the importance of effective Congressional oversight and respecting the rule of law.
Beyond the political jockeying, however, the sudden burst of attention to Libya should be an opportunity for the public to take a fresh look at what is actually happening in Libya. This is a good time to realize that the war in Libya was very much worth fighting and that it is moving in a positive direction. A massacre was averted, all the trends favor the rebels, the emerging National Transitional Council is an unusually impressive government in waiting, and a positive endgame is in sight. This is a war of which the administration should be proud, not one to be hidden away from public or Congressional view.
I supported the intervention in Libya reluctantly, in the face of strong evidence of in impending humanitarian catastrophe and an unprecedented, intense Arab public demand for Western action. I believe fully that the NATO intervention prevented a major massacre in Benghazi, which would have guaranteed the survival of the Qaddafi regime. The retaliation campaign which followed the regime’s survival would have been bloodier still. There would have been a chilling effect across the region, encouraging violent repression and demoralizing challengers. And the impact on America’s image in the region of failing to act and allowing the massacre would have been profound. Many of the same people (in the Arab world and in the U.S.) who now lambaste Obama for intervening would have been editorializing about his betrayal of his promises to the Muslims of the world and his indifference to Muslim lives.
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