The New York Times reports: Libyan authorities have singled out Ahmed Abu Khattala, a leader of the Benghazi-based Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia, as a commander in the attack that killed the American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, last month, Libyans involved in the investigation said on Wednesday.

Witnesses at the scene of the attack on the American Mission in Benghazi have said they saw Mr. Abu Khattala leading the assault, and his personal involvement is the latest link between the attack and his brigade, Ansar al-Sharia, a puritanical militant group that wants to advance Islamic law in Libya.

The identity and motivation of the assailants has become an intense flash point in the American presidential campaign. Republicans have sought to tie the attack to Al Qaeda to counter President Obama’s claim that by killing Osama bin Laden and other leaders his administration had crippled the group; Mr. Abu Khattala and Ansar al-Sharia share Al Qaeda’s puritanism and militancy, but operate independently and focus only on Libya rather than on a global jihad against the West.

On Monday, the New York Times reported: To those on the ground, the circumstances of the attack are hardly a mystery. Most of the attackers made no effort to hide their faces or identities, and during the assault some acknowledged to a Libyan journalist working for The New York Times that they belonged to the group. And their attack drew a crowd, some of whom cheered them on, some of whom just gawked, and some of whom later looted the compound.

The fighters said at the time that they were moved to act because of the video, which had first gained attention across the region after a protest in Egypt that day. The assailants approvingly recalled a 2006 assault by local Islamists that had destroyed an Italian diplomatic mission in Benghazi over a perceived insult to the prophet. In June the group staged a similar attack against the Tunisian Consulate over a different film, according to the Congressional testimony of the American security chief at the time, Eric A. Nordstrom.

At a news conference the day after the ambassador and three other Americans were killed, a spokesman for Ansar al-Shariah praised the attack as the proper response to such an insult to Islam. “We are saluting our people for this zeal in protecting their religion, to grant victory to the prophet,” the spokesman said. “The response has to be firm.” Other Benghazi militia leaders who know the group say its leaders and ideology are all homegrown. Those leaders, including Ahmed Abu Khattala and Mohammed Ali Zahawi, fought alongside other commanders against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Their group provides social services and guards a hospital. And they openly proselytize for their brand of puritanical Islam and political vision.

They profess no interest in global fights against the West or distant battles aimed at removing American troops from the Arabian Peninsula.

Nevertheless, the group’s motivation became a source of disagreement. At last week’s Congressional hearing, Mr. Nordstrom tried to contradict lawmakers who insisted that the group was at least “loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda.”

Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, cut him off. “Don’t split words,” he said. “It is a terrorist organization.”

Some analysts argue that the White House, meanwhile, sought to play down any potential characterization of the assault as a Qaeda attack, because that would undercut its claims to have crushed Al Qaeda.

Libyan guards at the Benghazi compound and other witnesses told journalists working for The New York Times as early as Sept. 12 that the streets outside the mission were quiet in the moments before the attack had begun, without any prior protests.

Other Benghazi militia leaders who know Ansar al-Shariah say it was capable of carrying out the attack by itself with only a few hours’ planning, and as recently as June one of its leaders, Mr. Zahawi, declared that it could destroy the American Mission.

The Wall Street Journal adds: In Libya, the Americans have only a threadbare presence and thin security ties. The FBI team in Tripoli is interacting primarily with the nascent Libyan intelligence agency headed by former U.S. citizen Salem al-Hasi, a veteran Libyan political dissident who for decades lived in the Atlanta area and taught Arabic to U.S. soldiers, according to several Libyan officials.

Mr. Hasi has no direct control over the existing security bodies in Benghazi, whose commanders have forces to make arrests there. In Tripoli, meanwhile, civilian leaders are struggling to form a new government, leaving the nation without strong ministers of the interior or defense.

Other aspects of the American investigation, including the treatment of witnesses, are also generating criticism among Libyans.

Some witnesses from Benghazi have traveled at their own expense to meet with FBI investigators and share information with them. Three of these witnesses say the Americans have offered them no protection in exchange for their cooperation, prompting two of them to say they are trying to dissuade other Libyans from talking to the bureau. The FBI team has spent only a handful of hours on the ground in Benghazi, saying the city is too insecure.

For those who share Rep. Burton’s perspective, it matters little who conducted the attack since differentiating between different groups, their affiliations and their ideologies amounts, supposedly, to splitting hairs. But as the Century Foundation’s Michael Hanna pointed out to the New York Times, those who are linking the attack to al Qaeda are making “promiscuous use” of the term. “It can mean anything or nothing at all.”

The New York Times reports: In the weeks leading up to the attack last month on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, diplomats on the ground sounded increasingly urgent alarms. In a stream of diplomatic cables, embassy security officers warned their superiors at the State Department of a worsening threat from Islamic extremists, and requested that the teams of military personnel and State Department security guards who were already on duty be kept in service.

The requests were denied, but they were largely focused on extending the tours of security guards at the American Embassy in Tripoli — not at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, 400 miles away. And State Department officials testified this week during a hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that extending the tour of additional guards — a 16-member military security team — through mid-September would not have changed the bloody outcome because they were based in Tripoli, not Benghazi.

The handling of these requests has now been caught up in a sharply partisan debate over whether the Obama administration underestimated the terrorist threat in Libya. In a debate with Representative Paul D. Ryan on Thursday night, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said White House officials were not told about requests for any additional security. “We weren’t told they wanted more security again,” Mr. Biden said.

The Romney campaign on Friday pounced on the conflicting statements, accusing Mr. Biden of continuing to deny the nature of the attack. The White House scrambled to explain the apparent contradiction between Mr. Biden’s statement and the testimony from State Department officials at the House hearing.

The White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said Friday that security issues related to diplomatic posts in Libya and other countries were dealt with at the State Department, not the White House. Based on interviews with administration officials, as well as in diplomatic cables, and Congressional testimony, those security decisions appear to have been made largely by midlevel State Department security officials, and did not involve Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or her top aides.

While it is unclear what impact a handful of highly trained additional guards might have had in Benghazi were they able to deploy there, some State Department officials said it would probably not have made any difference in blunting the Sept. 11 assault from several dozen heavily armed militants.

“An attack of that kind of lethality, we’re never going to have enough guns,” Patrick F. Kennedy, under secretary of state for management, said at Wednesday’s hearing. “We are not an armed camp ready to fight it out.”

A senior administration official said that the military team, which was authorized by a directive from Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, was never intended to have an open-ended or Libya-wide mission.

“This was not a SWAT team with a DC-3 on alert to jet them off to other cities in Libya to respond to security issues,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter.

Security in Benghazi had been a growing concern for American diplomats this year. In April, the convoy of the United Nations special envoy for Libya was attacked there. In early June, a two-vehicle convoy carrying the British ambassador came under attack by rocket-propelled grenades. Militants struck the American mission with a homemade bomb, but no one was hurt. In late June, the Red Cross was attacked and the organization pulled out.

“We were the last thing on their target list to remove from Benghazi,” Lt. Col. Andrew Wood of the Utah National Guard, who was deployed in Tripoli as the leader of the American military security unit, told the House committee.

But friends and colleagues of Ambassador Stevens said he was adamant about maintaining an American presence in Benghazi, the heart of the opposition to the Qaddafi government. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: Face down on a roof inside the besieged American diplomatic compound, gunfire and flames crackling around them, the two young Libyan guards watched as several bearded men crept toward the ambassador’s residence with semiautomatic weapons and grenades strapped to their chests.

“We are finished,” one of the guards says he remembers thinking.

Both are veterans of the ragtag revolutionary forces that toppled Moammar Kadafi. Over the last year, while assigned by their militia to help protect the U.S. mission in Benghazi, the pair had been drilled by American security personnel in using their weapons, securing entrances, climbing walls and waging hand-to-hand combat.

They were the “quick reaction force” for a compound that was also protected by about five armed Americans and five Libyan civilians hired through a British firm and equipped only with electric batons and handcuffs.

But nothing, they say, had prepared them for this. They had practiced for an attack by 10 or 15 people; now there were scores of professional-looking militants who moved methodically and used well-practiced hand signals. To make matters worse on the night of Sept. 11, instead of four militiamen who were supposed to be on guard, there were only two inside the compound.

The militiamen say they initially fought back, but when one attacker lobbed a grenade into their bungalow near the compound’s entrance, they fled to the roof without their radios and with only one magazine of ammunition between them. The American security officers were nowhere in sight.

As the raid continued — eventually killing Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and another American inside the facility, and two other Americans at a separate location hours later — the two Libyans say that they survived by lying on the roof silently for about an hour, too stunned, scared and overmatched to fight back.

“We were not expecting such a massive attack,” the guard says. “We were not ready for it.”

The two militiamen, who spoke to The Times in separate interviews in the last week in Benghazi and Tripoli, the capital, say they are telling their story publicly for the first time in part because FBI investigators are raising questions about their role. One of the militiamen and a civilian guard say investigators asked them why the guards didn’t fight “to the death,” and were looking for signs that the attackers had collaborators within the militia.

The militiamen flatly deny supporting the assailants but acknowledge that their large, government-allied force, known as the Feb. 17 Martyrs Brigade, could include anti-American elements.

American officials have declined, as a matter of protocol, to discuss security arrangements at the outpost in eastern Libya . But the attack — the worst to strike a U.S. diplomatic mission since 1998 — grimly underscored the chaos in post-revolutionary Libya, where an array of heavily armed but unevenly trained militias is serving as a sort of substitute army and is responsible for virtually all security, including at diplomatic outposts. The Feb. 17 brigade is regarded as one of the more capable militias in eastern Libya.

The assault also raised questions about why Stevens, a high-value target who was known to venture into the streets, would have spent the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the Benghazi mission instead of the more fortified embassy in Tripoli.

The guards bristle at accusations that they shrank from the fight and say they had repeatedly warned American officials about flawed security arrangements.

“They called me a liar. They said we didn’t see you on the [security] cameras fighting,” says the second militiaman, who was questioned by the FBI recently in Tripoli and who, like others interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified out of fear for his safety.

“I told them that we fired our weapons in the beginning but when we got to the roof, there were 100 enemies and two of us. We could do nothing.”

The New York Times reports: The night before leaving his parents’ home in Wayne, Tex., to join the rebels trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Obaida Hitto left a bouquet of white roses for his mother, with a sterling silver locket and a note: “You’ve made me what I am. But now I need to go and do what I need to do.”

Mr. Hitto, 25, a former high school football player, deferred his plans for law school to sneak into Syria to assist the rebels by making videos and spreading information on the Internet to help their cause.

“I’m one of them,” Mr. Hitto said proudly during a recent telephone interview.

Since the early days of the uprising, Syrian rebel forces have filled their ranks with army defectors and civilians. But as the war has dragged on, and the government has made it much harder for soldiers to defect, two other groups have contributed to the opposition. There has been a rise in the number of foreign fighters, many of them Islamist extremists. But there has also been a small, though noticeable, number of men like Mr. Hitto, of Syrian descent and with Western passports, who have made the journey to join the Free Syrian Army. Experts estimate they number roughly a hundred and come from the United States, Britain, France and Canada.

Their presence is not enough to shift the tide of the battle, but they add another element of determination and complexity to a bloody landscape where loyalties and ambitions are often unclear.

“Even though he’s not fighting on the front lines, I would consider him a foreign fighter,” Aaron Y. Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said of Mr. Hitto. Mr. Zelin keeps a rough tally of foreign fighters in Syria based on news reports and Islamist postings and said the two groups together number in the thousands.

Mr. Hitto, who has extended family in Damascus, has spent five months posting videos and photographs from Deir al-Zour, sometimes very near the fighting, many marked by billowing plumes of thick smoke, the clack of gunfire and narrations that shake with an activist’s conviction and anger, delivered in an American accent. “All around us there is shooting,” he said in an Aug. 1 clip of a burning building. “The world seems to not care.” [Continue reading…]

Jason Pack and Haley Cook write: Libya’s experiment in democracy has taken another unexpected turn. On the surface, the elections to the General National Congress (GNC) last July produced a surprising victory for the “liberal” National Forces Alliance (NFA) and a fairly resounding defeat for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction party.

But when those political parties were unable to forge a national unity government, that picture changed. It became inevitable that locally elected independents, who form the majority of the Congress, would come to the fore.

On 12 September, the NFA saw its prime ministerial candidate, Mahmoud Jibril, defeated by two votes in favour of Mustafa Abushagur, the outgoing deputy prime minister.

Abushagur seemed to be a compromise candidate. He enjoyed a reputation as a good manager with moderate Islamist leanings but without party affiliation. All elements of the “anyone but Jibril” camp rallied around him: Cyrenaicans and Tripolitanians, Muslim Brothers and Misratans with loyalties to their homegrown militias. It seemed then that Abushagur was just the man to cobble together a coalition of Libya’s many factions.

And yet, when he presented his first cabinet list, it featured unexpected members of the outgoing transitional government, lacked a single candidate from the NFA, contained unknown quantities for key posts including the oil ministry, … and furthermore, it was apparent that Abushagur’s allies were favoured.

Libya has so many cities that harbour intense local sentiment and it is manifestly impossible to appease them all simultaneously. Yet protesters from Zawiya were not placated by such hard truths; they stormed the Congress building.

When the list was read out in Congress, the NFA members simply walked out. As a result, the Libyan government and Abushagur were disgraced. The authorities revealed that they did not yet have sufficient military capacity to provide adequate security for their own parliamentary offices, let alone for the complex process of disarming and demobilising the hundreds of militias. For his part, Abushagur had clearly miscalculated how his cabinet list would be received – suggesting that he was not the right man for the moment after all. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration is confronting a legal and policy dilemma that could reshape how it pursues terrorism suspects around the world as investigators try to determine who was responsible for the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi.

Should it rely on the FBI, treating the assaults on the two U.S. compounds like a regular crime for prosecution in U.S. courts? Can it depend on the dysfunctional Libyan government to take action? Or should it embrace a military option by ordering a drone strike — or sending more prisoners to Guantanamo Bay?

President Obama has vowed to “bring to justice” the killers of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. But nearly one month later, the White House has not spelled out how it plans to do so, even if it is able to identify and capture any suspects.

Each of the options is fraught with practical obstacles and political baggage. An unproductive, slow-moving investigation is complicating matters, with the FBI taking three weeks to reach the unsecured crime scene. Meanwhile, the administration has given contradictory assessments, initially suggesting the attack was committed in the heat of the moment by a mob and more recently saying it was planned by terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda.

On Tuesday, Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, is scheduled to visit Tripoli to meet with senior Libyan officials and give a high-level kick to the investigation.

The White House is not ruling out any option, an administration official said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the evolving policy, said the involvement of the FBI at this stage should not be taken as evidence that the administration plans to prosecute any suspects in U.S. courts.

More broadly, it remains uncertain whether the White House will respond to the fatal assault on the Americans in Benghazi as a criminal act or an act of war, a critical legal distinction that has gone unresolved in Washington since the other Sept. 11 attacks, in 2001. [Continue reading…]

The Telegraph reports: Libya’s parliament ousted the country’s new prime minister in a no-confidence vote on Sunday, the latest blow to hopes that the country’s factions could agree on a government charged with restoring stability after last year’s civil war.

Mustafa Abushagur was Libya’s first elected prime minister after last year’s overthrow of dictator Moammar Gadhafi. He represented an offshoot of the country’s oldest anti-Gadhafi opposition movement, and was considered a compromise candidate acceptable to both liberals and Islamists.

But his proposed Cabinet was struck down by a legislature representing dozens of divided tribes, towns, and regions across the country, many of whom feel they are owed the spoils of victory over Gadhafi. He was forced to withdraw his first ministerial line-up under pressure and his second attempt to submit one resulted in his ouster.

In a short statement on Libya al-Wataniya TV after the vote, Abushagur said he respected the decision made by the General National Congress as part of Libya’s democracy but warned of instability if it takes too long to elect his replacement.

“There should be quickness in the election of the prime minister and formation of the government so the country does not slip into a vacuum,” he said.

He had 25 days from his Sep. 12 appointment by parliament to form a Cabinet and win the legislature’s approval, but that deadline expired on Sunday. The Congress voted 125 to 44 in favor of removing him as prime minister, with 17 abstaining from voting. He had just put forth 10 names for key ministerial posts Sunday when the no-confidence vote was held.

Until a replacement can be elected by the parliament, management of Libya’s government is in the hands of the legislature.

The Congress will have to vote on a new prime minister in the coming weeks. The incoming leader will be responsible for rebuilding Libya’s army and police force and removing major pockets of support for the former regime.

On Sunday, around 1,000 people protested in the capital Tripoli outside the congressional headquarters to demand that militias operating alongside the army end a partial siege of the town of Bani Walid, considered a major stronghold of former regime loyalists. They called for a peaceful solution to the standoff that has already sent families fleeing from the town in anticipation of a strike. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Libya hopes to start implementing its new Islamic banking law by the end of the year and expects strong demand among the public for sharia-compliant financial services, Libyan central bank governor Saddek Omar Elkaber said on Monday.

The country approved an Islamic banking law in May and has been working to amend its legislation to attract foreign investment and stimulate its private sector following last year’s war that ousted Muammar Gaddafi.

“The demand is so high in Libya so we set up a higher committee for Islamic finance…Now they are working to set up a road map for Islamic finance in Libya,” Elkaber told reporters on the sidelines of an Arab central bankers’ conference in Kuwait.

Asked when Libya might be able to start implementing the rules, he said: “Hopefully very soon. Hopefully this year.”

He said the authorities envisaged several options for Islamic banking services. One would be to allow conventional banks to open branches or windows for Islamic finance; another would be permitting conventional banks to become Islamic. Libya is also looking at introducing a special licence for Islamic banking, he said.

The licensing option is still under discussion because authorities have yet to agree on capital requirements, he added.

Apparently for ideological reasons, Gaddafi did not support the development of Islamic banking, which follows religious principles such as bans on interest and pure monetary speculation.

Colum Lynch reports: Libya’s president Mohammed Magarief today contradicted American claims that the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic film, telling NBC’s Anne Curry in an interview broadcast this morning.

“It has nothing to do with this attack,” said Magarief, noting that the assailants used rocket propelled grenades and mortar fire in the attack. “It’s a preplanned act of terrorism against American citizens.”

The remarks came more than one week after Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, argued that the attack, which killed four American nationals, including U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, had been triggered by popular anger from Libyan Muslim’s offended by the film.

The Libya Herald reports: Mahmoud Jibril has said that Libya’s transition to democracy cannot succeed without an all-embracing dialogue that would include even radical Islamists with links to Al-Qaeda.

The National Forces Alliance chief made the remarks during a meeting of moderate political leaders in Cairo aimed at combining and learning from different regional experiences in the wake of the Arab Spring uprising that swept across North Africa and the Middle East last year.

The remarks come as the Government and the National Army seek to impose greater control over the myriad armed militias still operating in Libya, a process which Jibril said could not succeed unless all factions and political groups felt included in the process.

“When you are excluded from taking part in the future of your country, you may become extreme,” he said in an interview on Monday. “In a national dialogue, no one is excluded; no Salafists, no Al-Qaeda, no Ansar Al-Sharia will be excluded.”

Jibril reminded his audience that many Islamist groups played an important role in helping to topple the Qaddafi regime during last year’s revolution, and argued that they should be enticed back into civilian [life] by providing them with jobs and giving loans to small business as opposed to alienating them from Libyan society.

“The way we should deal with them is by dignifying and appreciating what they did.”

The Guardian reports: The Libyan authorities have given armed groups two days to vacate military bases and compounds as they seek to capitalise on the wave of people power that drove an Islamist militia from Benghazi at the weekend.

Jihadist militias in Derna, Libya’s Islamist stronghold, threw in the towel on Sunday, withdrawing from their stronghold and announcing they were disbanding to avoid a repeat of the scenes in Benghazi in which angry crowds sent armed gunmen fleeing. One of the routed militias was blamed for an attack on the US consulate two weeks ago that left four Americans dead including the ambassador, Chris Stevens.

The de facto head of state, Muhammad Magariaf, president of Libya’s parliament, met Benghazi politicians and security officials, anxious to fill a security vacuum that has emerged from the weekend violence, in which at least 11 people died.

“The army chief Yussef al-Mangoush and Muhammad Magariaf have ordered all illegitimate militias should be removed from compounds and hand over their weapons to the national army,” said Adel Othman al-Barasi, a spokesman for the defence ministry, according to Reuters. “A committee made up by the military police has been formed to take over the compounds and the weapons and hand these over to the army.”

AFP reports: A Libyan crackdown on lawless militias spread to the capital on Sunday after armed groups that have not been integrated into state institutions were ordered to disband and evacuate their bases.

Commander in chief Yussef al-Mangush said on his Facebook page that the armed forces had dislodged a militia from a military complex on the highway to Tripoli International Airport, arresting militiamen and confiscating their weapons.

The sound of gunfire was heard in the area at 9 am (0700 GMT) and lasted less than a minute, an AFP journalist said, but Mangush made no mention of casualties.

“We will carry out these kind of operations for the next two or three weeks until we dislodge all armed groups not under the authority of the State,” an army officer told AFP on condition of anonymity.

On Saturday, the army issued an ultimatum ordering militias and armed groups to evacuate military compounds, state property and the properties of members of the former regime in and near Tripoli, the official LANA news agency reported.

The Guardian reports: The Libyan city of Benghazi was tense after the bodies of six militiamen apparently executed after the storming of a base on the southern outskirts were discovered in a field.

The bodies were found the day after crowds marched on three militia bases, including that of Ansar al-Sharia, blamed by many in the city for the murder of the US ambassador, Chris Stevens, earlier this month. Funerals were held for nine protesters killed when crowds tried to force their way into the Rafallah al-Sahati militia base early on Saturday morning.

The militia was the only one of three to fire back when demonstrators swarmed over their bases, following a rally on Friday in which 30,000 people vowed to retake the streets of the city.

The interior minister, Fawzi Abdul Al, who was criticised for his failure to launch a full investigation of the murder of Stevens and three fellow diplomats, criticised the action of the crowds, saying the militias should have been given more time to incorporate into the official security forces.

The mood in Benghazi is one of both triumph and sorrow at the toll of dead and wounded. Mohammed El Kish, whose cousin was killed by a stray bullet more than a mile from the clashes, said: “He was not even involved in the actions, it is terrible.”

City hospitals were braced for more violence after the Rafallah al-Sahati militia reoccupied its looted base. Several hundred unarmed people gathered outside. “This is not good, they should not be here. When the funerals have finished there will be trouble,” said Ashraf Saleh.

Police remained in control of the Ansar al-Sharia compound, which is now a looted ruin. A spokesman for Ansar al-Sharia, whose units have dispersed outside the city, insisted they had withdrawn rather than confront protesters “for reasons of security”.

The chaos at the heart of Libya’s government remains, with some angry that Rafallah was attacked after it had formally been incorporated into the Libyan army. Such designations are lost on many ordinary Libyans, who say many militias from last year’s revolution have simply cut deals with ministries, enabling them to form what are in essence private armies.

The Libya Herald reports: Hundreds of protesters demanding an end to militia rule in Libya have stormed the compound of the Ansar Al-Sharia brigade, the Islamist group suspected of involvement in last week’s murder of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The demonstrators arrived at the Ansar Al-Sharia headquarters on Nasr square yesterday evening (formerly Kish square), and demanded the brigade leave immediately or the facility would be destroyed.

The brigadesmen initially pleaded that they were comparatively few in number, firing warning shots into the air, but were evicted in clashes that left several people wounded.

It has been reported that the demonstrators released four prisoners inside the base and carried away weapons found inside whilst chanting “Libya, Libya” and “No more Al-Qaeda”.

Part of the compound was set alight by the demonstrators before the national army arrived and took control of the scene.

Members of Ansar Al-Sharia were also confronted at Al-Jalaa hospital, where they operate as guards, and told either to leave or face the use of force.

An administrator at the hospital subsequently told the Libya Herald that all of the Ansar Al-Sharia brigadesmen had fled.

Ansar Al-Sharia have reportedly put out a statement accusing those involved of being drunk and on drugs, a claim that has been likened by local people to one formally issued by Muammar Qaddafi against the revolutionaries as a means of discrediting them.

Protesters also took control of a base belonging to the Abu Salim Brigade in Benghazi as well as the headquarters of the Rafallah Al-Sahati brigade, located at a farm in Hawari district, some 15 kilometres from Benghazi’s city centre.

At least four people were reported to have been killed and 40 wounded in clashes at the Rafallah Al-Sahati base, according to AFP, and there are also reports of prisoners being released inside that facility.

Leaders of the Islamist brigade, which is notionally under the control of the Ministry of Defence, accused Qaddafi loyalists of instigating the violence and said they had video evidence to prove it.

The events follow an unprecedented demonstration in Benghazi earlier in the day, when an estimated 30,000 people participated in a rally calling for the disbanding of militias and the establishment of a regular army and police force.

Time magazine adds: The militia and Islamist phenomenon exists in other parts of the country. But Libyans there will find it harder to replicate Benghazi’s example. The city of Misrata with its dozens of militias is a state onto itself, running several prisons and preventing foreigners from entering. The city of Zintan has equally powerful brigades and has refused to turn over Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam to the national government. In both towns the brigades are admired for their role in the revolution and do not suffer from the militia backlash that has become widespread in Benghazi in the wake of the consulate attack. And as long as such brigades retain their societal support, it will be a long time before the scenes in Benghazi will be repeated in other parts of Libya.

Louis Klarevas writes: After days of holding back, the White House on Thursday labeled the Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi a “terrorist attack.” The incident, which involved heavy gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), killed four Americans including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens. Highlighting the suspected presence of militia and terrorist elements in Libya, White House spokesperson Jay Carney told the press corps, “It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack.”

The declaration comes one day after Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), told a Senate committee that — despite the absence of “specific intelligence that there was a significant advanced planning or coordination for this attack” — the four Americans “were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy.”

It all sounds like common sense, right?

But there’s just one problem with these statements: All acts of terrorism, by federal statute, require premeditation. If, as Carney acknowledged, there is “no information at this point to suggest that this is a significantly pre-planned attack,” then the plotting criterion has not been met. No premeditation, no terrorism. [Continue reading…]

The Libya Herald reports: The Ansar Al-Sharia brigade has declared its intention to organise a mass protest in Benghazi’s Shajara Square this Friday, putting it on a collision course with a previously announced march to commemorate the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens, which is to be held at the same location.

The Islamist militia, which has been accused of complicity in last week’s fatal assault on the US Consulate in Benghazi, appears to have chosen the location deliberately, with both marches set to be held around 5pm following Friday prayers.

Organisers of the “Save Benghazi” rally, one of several slated to be held around the country on Friday, say they fear that almost inevitable confrontations could turn violent and have condemned the move.

“Ansar Al-Sharia have done this deliberately”, said Bilal Bettamir, one of the organisers of the rally to commemorate the fallen ambassador.

“We have been planning our march for the past week, and they made their decision yesterday. They knew all about it”.

Bettamir says that in addition to highlighting their opposition to the consulate attacks, the “Save Benghazi” rally will be calling for the disbanding of militias, both in law and in practice, and the development of a regular army and police. They will also be demonstrating for freedom of expression, he says, and for religious moderation.

“Ansar Al-Sharia have said that their rally is to be in the name of the Prophet”, Bettamir said. “But we are all Muslims and they should not be trying to hijack the Prophet like this. It is a huge issue”. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, the Herald also reports: Police in Benghazi are defying the Government in Tripoli by refusing to serve under Colonel Salah Doghman, the man appointed to take over security in the city following last week’s fatal attack on the US Consulate.

Doghman is due to replace Wanis Al-Sharif, the deputy minister with responsibility for eastern Libya, and Hussein Ahmedia, Benghazi’s chief of police, both of whom were sacked last week over their handling of the crisis.

“These are very dangerous circumstances,” Doghman told the Reuters news agency.

“When you go to police headquarters, you will find there are no police. The people in charge are not at their desks. They have refused to let me take up my job.”

Doghman said he had been directly instructed by Interior Minister Fawzi Abdelal to take over responsibility for the two posts, and that the de facto mutiny by the Benghazi police threatened to undermine the authority of the government.

Abigail Hauslohner reports: Hussein Abu Hameida, the head of security in Libya’s second-largest city, was sacked this week over the attack on the U.S. consulate here that killed the ambassador and three other Americans. But he says he’s not going anywhere.

On the night of Sept. 11, he says, his police were outnumbered and outgunned by the attackers. The blame, he says, belongs not on his own shoulders, but with the central government for its failure to rein in Libya’s powerful postwar militias.

“There has been no strategy in place to remove the weapons from the streets,” Abu Hameida said Wednesday in the sprawling, high-ceilinged chamber that serves as his office in Benghazi’s national security headquarters. “There has been no strategy to contain these [militias] and to move them into either the police or the army.”

Nearly a year after Libyan rebels killed Moammar Gaddafi, ushering in a new democratic era, Libya’s central government still exercises so little authority here in the eastern part of the country that Abu Hameida sees little peril in refusing an order from the Interior Ministry in Tripoli that he step down from his post.

Libyan officials have blamed foreign fighters for the Benghazi assault. On Wednesday, Matthew G. Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, called it a “terrorist attack” and said there is evidence that those involved came from extremist groups in eastern Libya and from affiliates of al-Qaeda.

For many here, last week’s violence underscored the security vacuum left by Libya’s anemic central authority. With a far weaker police force than existed before the revolution, people in Benghazi have become “self-disciplining,” said Fatima Aguila, a local English teacher. “We govern ourselves.” Residents go about their daily business, help each other to resolve tribal disputes and continue to stop at stoplights, she said.

But in lawless Libya, weapons also carry clout. Well-armed bands of former rebel fighters make up more than 200 militias nationwide, according to an Atlantic Council study released last week. Some militias claim to have been absorbed, at least symbolically, into the ranks of Libya’s Tripoli-based Interior Ministry and military, but ground-level security is often uncoordinated, decentralized and lacks a hierarchy.

In many cases, including in Benghazi and in the western mountain town of Zintan where Libya’s highest-profile prisoner, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, is being held, the militias hold considerably more sway — and arms — than the Interior Ministry’s police force.

The New York Times reports: An amateur video that surfaced Sunday appears to show a crowd removing the motionless body of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens from a window of the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, after it was attacked last week by Islamist militants, adding new details to reports that Mr. Stevens had died of smoke inhalation while locked in a safe room.

The video emerged as a new disagreement broke out between the recently named president of the Libyan Parliament and American officials over whether the attack was planned and whether Al Qaeda had a role.

Labeled the work of Fahd al-Bakkosh, the video centers on what appears to be the same tall, narrow window that witnesses have described as Mr. Stevens’s last exit. The witnesses said residents drawn to the scene had forced open the window and found Mr. Stevens behind a locked iron gate, pulled him out and taken him to the hospital. In the video, none say anything that shows ill will.

“I swear, he’s dead,” one Libyan says, peering in.

“Bring him out, man! Bring him out,” another says.

“The man is alive. Move out of the way,” others shout. “Just bring him out, man.”

“Move, move, he is still alive!”

“Alive, Alive! God is great,” the crowd erupts, while someone calls to bring Mr. Stevens to a car.

Mr. Stevens was taken to a hospital, where a doctor tried to revive him, but said he was all but dead on arrival.