U.S. downplays concerns as Libya’s post-Gadhafi rulers call for Islamic law
10 min read
A cell phone photo of Moammar Gadhafi in Sirte Oct. 20, 2011. (Philippe Desmazes/Global Post)By Laura Rozen | The Envoy
The Obama administration and European allies congratulated the Libyan people as Libya’s interim rulers declared formal victory in their nine-month struggle against the recently killed strongman Moammer Gadhafi on Sunday.
Still, underneath the surface festivities, it seems that some forces aligned with Libya’s interim leaders may be mimicking brutal aspects of the unmourned Gadhafi’s repressive style, even as they seek to distance themselves from his legacy.
Investigators with the international human rights advocacy group Human Rights Watch reported Monday that they had discovered the dead bodies of 53 Gadhafi supporters apparently executed with their hands tied behind their backs at an abandoned hotel in Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte.
Meanwhile, Global Post reported that its analysis of video images of Gadhafi taken before his execution last Thursday apparently shows him being sodomized by a member of Libyan National Transition Council forces wielding a weapon.
The allegation came as the bodies of Gadhafi and his son Mo’tassim were put on public display in a cold storage facility for two days in the Libyan city of Misrata.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton–who on a visit earlier last week to Libya expressed the wish that Gadhafi be captured or killed–said on the Sunday talk shows that it would be appropriate for Libyan authorities to pursue an investigation of Gadhafi’s death.
Libya’s interim rulers took up the suggestion on Monday, saying they would proceed with such an investigation, the New York Times reported.
“In response to international calls, we have started to put in place a commission tasked with investigating the circumstances of Muammar Qaddafi’s death in the clash with his circle as he was being captured,” Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the National Transition Council, told journalists in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi Monday, the Times’ Adam Nossiter and Rick Gladstone reported.
But past such pledges–to investigate, for instance, how the Libyan rebels’ military commander Abdel Fattah Younes was assassinated in July, apparently at the hands of one Islamist militant rebel faction–have so far gone nowhere.
In the meantime, Western officials got another stiff reminder Sunday that Libya’s victorious rebels plan to steer the country toward greater public observance of Islam. Libya’s interim leader Abdul-Jalil pledged at Sunday’s festivities commemorating the successful struggle to topple Gadhafi that Islamic Sharia law would be the basis of the new government.
“We are an Islamic country,” Abdul-Jalil told crowds celebrating in Benghazi Sunday, the Times reported. “We take the Islamic religion as the core of our new government. The constitution will be based on our Islamic religion.”
Abdul-Jalil promised that “Islamic banks would be established in the new Libya,” the Times’ Nossiter and Kareem Fahim reported. “He also talked of lifting restrictions on the number of women Libyan men can marry.”
His comments “reflected not only the chairman’s personal religious conservatism and the country’s, but also the rising influence of Islamists among the former rebels,” Nossiter and Fahim wrote. “The Islamists, who include some influential militia commanders, have warned that they will not permit their secular counterparts in a new government to sideline them.”
“Any law that violates sharia is null and void legally,” Abdul-Jalil said, according to Agence France Press’s Simon Martelli, who added that the NTC leader specifically referenced plans to void Gadhafi’s former ban on polygamy. “The law of divorce and marriage . . . . This law is contrary to sharia and it is stopped.”
Abdul-Jalil’s pronouncements are already provoking sharp rebukes from feminists and teir progressive-minded sympathizers in LIbya. “It’s shocking and insulting to state, after thousands of Libyans have paid for freedom with their lives, that the priority of the new leadership is to allow men to marry in secret,” a Libyan feminist who gave only her first name Rim told the AFP’s Martelli. “We did not slay Goliath so that we now live under the Inquisition.”
The specter of Islamist rule is provoking “feelings of pain and bitterness among women who sacrificed so many martyrs,” Adelrahman al-Shatr, a Libyan opposition politician, told the AFP. “By abolishing the marriage law, women lose the right to keep the family home if they divorce. It is a disaster for Libyan women.”
Former American officials who have worked in the North African nation tend to downplay concerns that Libya’s post-Gadhafi rulers plan to institute extreme, Taliban-style restrictions on expression, women’s dress code and behavior, stressing that there’s a broad range of interpretations of Islamic law. They also contend that Libya which under Gadhafi had made cultural strides toward secular modernity, is not fertile recruiting ground for Islamist extremism.
But Abdul-Jalil’s pronouncements Sunday indicate a continuing struggle for influence between Islamist militant and more secular factions of Libya’s anti-Gadhafi forces.
And documents found in Gadhafi’s seized intelligence ministry in August support previous reporting that showed the CIA was long concerned about al-Qaida links to factions of anti-Gadhafi militants, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Indeed, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a top anti-Gadhafi rebel who has become a leading figure in the post-Gadhafi leadership in Tripoli, told reporters in September that he was arrested in Thailand in 2004, tortured under interrogation by the CIA, before he was rendered back to Gadhafi’s Libya. (Belhaj strongly denied any allegiance to al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden.) U.S. officials have also acknowledged concerns about the possibility that Gadhafi’s huge stockpile of surface-to-air missiles and other weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists, including al Qaida’s north African affiliate, al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which has been active in Libya.
In the short term, however, the United States, like much of the rest of the world, is focusing mainly on Libya’s achievement in toppling a long-ruling dictator–with the assistance of NATO air-power. “On behalf of the American people, I congratulate the people of Libya on today’s historic declaration of liberation,” President Obama said in a statement Sunday. “After four decades of brutal dictatorship and eight months of deadly conflict, the Libyan people can now celebrate their freedom and the beginning of a new era of promise.” Libya’s transition authorities must now turn “their attention to the political transition ahead,” he urged.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/u-downplays-concerns-libya-post-gadhafi-rulers-call-182959670.html
Graphic pictures mark coverage of Gadhafi death
By DAVID BAUDER – AP Television Writer | AP – Fri, Oct 21, 2011
This video frame grab image taken from Libyan TV, purports to show former Libyan …
NEW YORK (AP) — An opposition figure provided Al Jazeera with cellphone video of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s violent death on Thursday, testing media organizations around the world on their capacity for showing gruesome pictures.
In the first shaky video viewers saw, Gadhafi was on the ground bloodied, either dead or near death. Other video and even more graphic still pictures emerged throughout the day. One of the most chilling images from the Al Arabiya network depicted a bloody and dazed Gadhafi walking toward a car, then shouting as he struggled with revolutionary fighters; it wasn’t clear how quickly he died after that scene.
Al Jazeera showed its video at 8:46 a.m. EDT on Thursday and it was swiftly picked up by other organizations before official word came that the longtime dictator was dead.
“It’s pretty chilling video when you think of it — that they got him alive and now he’s dead,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said.
Al Jazeera obtained and aired the video nearly two hours after reporting that Gadhafi was dead, network spokesman Osama Saeed said. It was obtained by Al Jazeera reporter Tony Birtley in Sirte, Libya.
“It was nothing more complicated than a lot of people running around and he was there,” Saeed said. “People were wanting to give footage to reporters.”
Producers at Al Jazeera were confident that the video depicted Gadhafi primarily because Al Jazeera had already reported from multiple sources that he had been killed, he said.
Before showing video footage, The Associated Press first ran still images taken from the Al Jazeera video, its editors confident of the veracity of the images because AP editors had carefully examined the full video, spokesman Paul Colford said. The ease with which photos can be doctored has made news organizations careful about distributing images.
The AP also provided its members with video obtained from Arab television networks and the AP’s own sources.
The Al Jazeera video was used quickly on U.S. cable news networks CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. Al Jazeera had no problem with others running their video, as long as credit was given, Saeed said. Some rivals asked for permission, others didn’t, he said.
Broadcast networks also used the video in special reports on Gadhafi’s death that interrupted daytime programming. ABC did not air video until a short special report with President Obama’s statement shortly after 2 p.m. EDT. ABC later preceded the Gadhafi pictures with a warning from anchor George Stephanopolous: “I warn you that it is graphic and gruesome.”
Despite the content, “these images are the very definition of news,” Jeffrey Schneider, ABC News spokesman, said.
NBC similarly aired video of Gadhafi being led to a vehicle and then briefly showed his corpse in a special report. Network officials carefully vetted the material for appropriateness, David McCormick, NBC News vice president for standards, said.
“We want to give our audience the most accurate reports possible without crossing a line into offensive or unnecessarily graphic material,” he said. “We feel the footage that has aired has met those boundaries, and we’re constantly in touch with producers about what is and is not acceptable.”
Still, the presence of the pictures ignited a debate among news consumers about how much of Gadhafi’s final moments should be shown.
“It’s enough to know the world is rid of a brutal, oppressive dictator,” said Carlos Galindo-Elvira, an executive at a nonprofit agency in Phoenix. “The Libyan people can now move forward. The world is not made into a better place by displaying the graphic photos of his demise.”
Bradley McRoberts, a college student from New Haven, Conn., said that if the news media didn’t use the pictures, they would be censoring history.
“We must always err on the side of openness in journalism, even in times when the images are grotesque,” McRoberts said. “Understandably, there should be a warning presented before these images or videos are shown. If someone chooses not to look, that is their choice. It should not be the decision of the news organization.”
Many websites that prominently carried the news gave viewers a choice about whether they wanted to see images or not. At the top of The New York Times’ website, there was a slide show that began with a picture of a revolutionary fighter outside the drain pipe where Gadhafi apparently hid. A visitor needed to click through a series of nine celebratory shots and archive photos of Gadhafi before reaching a black slide with the warning: “The following is a graphic image said to show Colonel Gadhafi’s corpse.” Another click was required to see a picture of the Libyan leader, his eyes closed, and face and fatigues bloodied.
The home page for MSNBC’s website carried four pictures, none showing Gadhafi’s body, but visitors were provided a link to graphic video. A BBC slide show offered three file photos of Gadhafi alive and two of Libyans celebrating his death.
However, viewers who went to Al Arabiya’s website were met first with a large picture of a dead Gadhafi’s face contorted and bloodied. It then switched to another bloody photo without a visitor needing to do anything but watch.
The AP received an email from medical student Amin Demerdash from Cairo, Egypt, with a simple message: “Stop it. We have seen enough already.”
Meanwhile, there was some tension between American journalists and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was in Pakistan on Thursday after visiting Tripoli, Libya, earlier in the week.
During its coverage of Gadhafi’s death, some American networks aired footage of Clinton that had been shot during breaks in a series of interviews she gave to TV reporters traveling with her in Pakistan. Clinton was handed a Blackberry during one break to read news of Gadhafi’s reported capture, and she said, “Wow.” She quickly noted that the report was unconfirmed and there had been similar reports in the past that had turned out to be false.
CBS News’ website ran a different clip of Clinton, before another interview began, in which she was apparently joking about the story. “We came, we saw, he died,” she said, laughing.
Philippe Reines, an aide to Clinton, said he had complained to the traveling network representatives that filming Clinton in between the interviews was a breach of protocol. They wouldn’t show her applying makeup before an interview, for example, even if cameras were set up.
“I think it’s outside the bounds of the relationships we have with our traveling press corps,” he said.
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NBC and MSNBC are controlled by Comcast Corp.; CNN is a unit of Time Warner Inc.; Fox is owned by News Corp.; ABC is a unit of The Walt Disney Co.; CBS is a subsidiary of CBS Corp.
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AP National Security Writer Mathew Lee contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/graphic-pictures-mark-coverage-gadhafi-death-222122899.html
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