Metal Reviews

Just 20 percent of Americans now support continued U.S. military action in Libya, a new low — down from 26 percent in June and 24 percent in July, a new Rasmussen Reports poll reveals.

A glimpse of Gaddafi possessions, looted by rebels:



Last time I've seen this was in a GTA video game. This is ridiculous.

The druglords in México are quite fund of gold and gilded weapons. I like them.

You can't denied the beauty of a gilded AK-47.

So, what's next for you imperialistic euros and gringos? North Korea? Iran?

I won't miss Gaddafi one bit.

The US$30 billion frozen by Mr Obama belong to the Libyan Central Bank and had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation - the African Investment Bank in Syrte, Libya, the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaounde with a US$42 billion capital fund and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc [the name of two currencies used in Africa which are guaranteed by the French treasury] through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last 50 years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi

Interesting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ced-racism

Say hello to the new boss...

Good article.

I'm surprised that journalists have only now started to take this into account.

From the start there's been footage of black men in Libya being violently assaulted by rebels, including beatings and putting knives up to their throats.

And early on, there were reports of black prisoners being executed or disappearing from Benghazi gaols.

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Also it's interesting that this gets blamed on lack of civil society. I think it's more of an Arab sense of racial superiority. After all Libyan Arab attitudes to Black Libyans is the same as the attitude of Arab Sudanese to their black counterparts.

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — Libya's Moammar Gadhafi is charging that the NATO alliance is trying to occupy his country and steal its oil.

The top Libyan rebel military commander in Tripoli, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, dropped something of a bombshell in an interview with the New York Times yesterday: In 2004, he said, two CIA agents tortured him in Thailand and then "rendered" him to Libya. From that point on, he maintains, he was held in solitary confinement for the next six years.

"Yes, [Belhaj] said, he was detained by Malaysian officials in 2004 on arrival at the Kuala Lumpur airport, where he was subjected to extraordinary rendition on behalf of the United States, and sent to Thailand," the New York Times' Rod Norland writes. "In Bangkok, Mr. Belhaj said, he was tortured for a few days by two people he said were CIA agents, and then, worse, they repatriated him to Libya, where he was thrown into solitary confinement for six years."

Now, Belhaj heads the Libyan rebels' military committee for restoring order in the capital of Tripoli.

A spokeswoman for the CIA told The Envoy Thursday the agency declined to comment on Belhaj's allegations.

But the allegations point to the challenge facing Western diplomatic officials in Libya: How much does the West know about the influential faction of the Libyan rebels with past Islamist jihadi ties? And how will such ties affect the effort to safeguard U.S. interests in a post-Gadhafi Libya?

The scholar Omar Ashour summed up the dilemma in an article this week about his interviews with Belhaj: "Does his prominent role mean that jihadists are set to exploit the fall of Qadhafi's regime?"
Belhaj, known as "Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq" in jihadi circles, is the previous commander of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), "a jihad organization with historical links to al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Egyptian al-Jihad organization," Ashour, an academic at the University of Exeter and Brookings Doha Center, explained in an article at Foreign Policy this week.

The paramilitary Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, established in 1990, "led a three-year, low-level insurgency ... in eastern Libya and tried three times to assassinate Qadhafi in 1995 and 1996," Ashour wrote. After Gadhafi mostly crushed the group in 1998, "most of its leaders and members fled and joined forces with the Taliban in Afghanistan," where they pledged loyalty to Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, "Belhaj and most of the LIFG leaders fled that country as well, only to be arrested in 2004 by the CIA and then handed over to Qadhafi's regime, following interrogations in Thailand and Hong Kong." Belhaj was then imprisoned in Libya for six years in brutal conditions. Following his release in 2010, he participated in several "reconciliation" conferences between the Gadhafi regime and anti-Gadhafi Islamist militants, spearheaded by Gadhafi's son and onetime heir apparent Seif al-Islam. Ashour attended those panels as an observer.

Last week, Belhaj led the rebels' seizure of Gadhafi's Tripoli compound. But as Belhaj exulted that "the tyrant fled," he also "repeatedly called for enhancing security, protecting property, ending vendettas, and building a new Libya," Ashour observed.

Algerian security forces had seized 157 different types of munitions ranging from missile-launchers to bullets.

It said serial numbers and stamps indicated the materiel was manufactured in France and Britain between 2008 and 2011.