A rather weird piece in the NYT reports on earlier discussions in the White House about what to do with Gaddhafi:
Last Wednesday evening, the White House convened a 90-minute meeting to tackle a looming, delicate question: What should be done with the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, if he were captured alive, either in Libya or in a neighboring country?
Less than 24 hours later, the debate was moot. Colonel Qaddafi was dead, after being pulled alive from a drain pipe and succumbing later to gunshot wounds.
"Succumbing to gunshot wounds" is a quite evading expression for a direct pistol shot into the head and another into the heart of Gaddhafi after he was captured alive, only lightly wounded, and after he was sodomized.
There is also an issue with the timeline here. The NYT piece puts the discussion about what to do with Gaddhafi to Wednesday the 19th. But the White House decision was already announced on Tuesday the 18th by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Tripoli:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton encouraged the country's unsteady new leadership to commit to a democratic future free of retribution, and acknowledged in unusually blunt terms that the United States would like to see former dictator Moammar Gadhafi dead.
"We hope he can be captured or killed soon so that you don't have to fear him any longer," Clinton told students and others at a town hall-style gathering in the capital city.
Indeed the NYT piece seems to be an after-the-fact whitewash, based on the typical anonymous senior officials, of what really happened.
From the very beginning this was about regime change and the earlier attacks on Gaddhafi compounds by NATO bombers were clear attempts to kill him. Not one of the three stooges, Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama, wanted Gaddhafi to stand in court and tell about all the cooperation and money he provided to them. There never was a serious discussion about "what to do with Gaddhafi." They wanted him dead all along.
Meanwhile, as anticipated, the situation in Libya is getting worse. The revolutionaries are now doing away with their pro-western attitude, the "western" face Mahmoud Jibril resigned, and start to show their real face:
In his landmark speech on Sunday announcing the liberation of the country from the rule of Col Muammer Gaddafi, Libya’s provisional leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil vowed to suspend the law requiring a man to obtain permission from his first wife before marrying a second one and to outlaw interest on loans in accord with fundamentalist Islamic rules.
The declarations, major legal changes which did not appear to be within his authority as leader of a self-declared government, shocked many.
Well, what did those "many" believe what those rebel fighters in Libya were about? That they were motivated by religion was visible in many of the video clips from the rebels side in which each shot was accompanied by Allahu aqbar shoutings.
[T]he statements sparked a minor furore, especially among women activists. Others considered the entire tone of the speech and the day’s ceremony a gratuitous slap in the face to women, not one of whom took to the podium to speak during the commemoration.
The women of Libya can now thank those three American feminists, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, who launched this war on them that will now push them back into a medieval role model.
Mr Abdul-Jalil’s comments on banking also struck some as strange, given the country’s need for foreign investment. “There are good intentions to regulate all banking law,” he said. “We especially seek to establish Islamic banks that don’t deal with interest and abolish all banking interests in the future according to Islamic tradition.” Interest, he said, “creates disease and hatred among people”.
The IMF and Worldbank bankers will hate such talk. But their is no reason why they should be involved in Libya at all. Libya is rich, it does not need foreign investment. Thanks to Gaddhafi tens of billions of Libya's money are parked in its national wealth fund and can be repatriated and invested into what the country needs. Now watch how the "western" powers will try their best to prevent that. Indebted countries are easier to control than those who have lots of money available to them and controlling Libya is what they want.
The news from Tripoli isn't good either:
[T]he capital, in particular, has become a patchwork of armed fiefdoms, as wannabe power brokers backed by hometown militias made up of former clerks, students and engineers battle with each other and with natives of Tripoli for the spoils of war, a slice of the country's wealth and a share of political power – all of it, in their way of looking, up for grabs.
Kidnappings and disappearances are the new currency in the swelling conflict, with outright shootings a tactic of last resort. The creeping mayhem is fuelled by an infusion of weapons that has turned Tripoli into a virtual armoury.
Welcome to the post-revolutionary hell. If you think Baghdad 2006 was bad welcome to Tripoli 2012. It may well become worse.
