Free Republic

Fighters from the western mountain city of Zintan control the airport. The fighters from Misurata guard the central bank, the port and the prime minister’s office, where their graffiti has relabeled the historic plaza “Misurata Square.” Berbers from the mountain town Yafran took charge of the city’s central square, where they spray-painted “Yafran Revolutionaries.” A week after rebels broke into Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s former stronghold, much of its territory remains divided into fiefs, each controlled by quasi-independent brigades representing different geographic areas of the country. And the spray paint they use to mark their territory tells the story of a...

Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- Hundreds of Islamist militants were among the prisoners freed from a notorious Tripoli prison this week, according to a former Libyan jihadist. The freed militants had been imprisoned in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison by Moammar Gadhafi's regime during the height of the insurgency in Iraq, according to Noman Benotman, once a senior figure in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Benotman said he believes as many as 600 militants may have been among the prison population at Abu Salim. It's not known how many prisoners were held in the vast facility. Human Rights Watch said Gadhafi's prisons...

Speaking to RT today live from Brazil, Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar said that an al-Qaeda asset is now leading the military of rebel-controlled Libya. According to Escobar, Abdelhakim Belhadj, who commanded a military offensive in Libya over the weekend, has become the de facto commander of the Tripoli armed forces. Belhadj has also, says Escobar, was trained in Afghanistan by a “very hardcore Islamist Libyan group.” Escobar says that Taliban-linked sources overseas have confirmed Belhadj as the new commander. In the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA began tracking Belhadj, who was eventually captured in Malaysia in 2003. Escobar says...

Sen. John McCain said that as Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi faces an "inevitable" end, the U.S. should concern itself with helping contain weapons from Qaddafi's arsenal. "We've got to secure these weapons depots," the Arizona Republican said on CBS' "The Early Show" Tuesday. "that have huge, huge numbers of weapons, and apparently mustard gas and other weapons of mass destruction."

Executive Summary:In the absence of police and government security forces, al-Qaeda-sympathetic movements, including al-Shabaab al-Islam (The Youth of Islam), have formed in the Sinai Peninsula. The demands of these Salafi-Jihadist groups reflect both local and regional concerns. Among their demands are calls for a full implementation of Shari’a, the revocation of Egypt’s treaties with Israel, the establishment of an Islamic Emirate in the Sinai and Egyptian military intervention against Israel on behalf of the Palestinians in Gaza. Despite a statement proclaiming the establishment of al-Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula, core al-Qaeda has not yet acknowledged this new chapter of the...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Libya has become a new source of smuggled weaponry for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a senior Israeli official said on Thursday. With eastern Libya largely held by rebels who rose up against Muammar Gaddafi in February, arms were being brought across the border, through neighboring Egypt, to the Islamist Hamas-ruled territory, Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon said. "Weapons are available in Libya as a result of the unstable situation there, and Hamas has exploited it to buy weapons from Libyan smugglers," he told foreign journalists in a briefing, without elaborating on the kind of munitions involved.

Rebels in the mountains in Libya's west have looted and damaged four towns seized since last month from the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, part of a series of abuses and apparent reprisals against suspected loyalists that have chased residents of these towns away, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. The looting included many businesses and at least two medical centers that, like the towns, are now deserted and bare. Rebel fighters also beat people suspected of being loyalists and burned their homes, the organization said. The towns that have suffered the abuses are Qawalish, which rebels seized last week, Awaniya,...

Lieutenant General John Allen told the Senate Armed Services Committee today that the Afghanistan decision President Obama announced last week was not among the range of options the military provided to the commander in chief. Allen’s testimony directly contradicts claims from senior Obama administration officials from a background briefing before the president’s announcement. In response to questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Allen testified that Obama’s decision on the pace and size of Afghanistan withdrawals was “a more aggressive option than that which was presented.” Graham pressed him. “My question is: Was that a option?” Allen: “It was not.” Allen's...

NAPLES — As NATO bombs began to rain on Libya in March, President Obama and other Western leaders assured their war-weary publics that the campaign to protect civilians from Moammar Gaddafi’s crackdown would be over within weeks. Now the coalition’s springtime incursion has stretched to summer and Gaddafi’s resilience has startled the leaders who committed to the operation. Calls are growing to end it even as NATO pleads for more time. As the campaign enters its fourth month, NATO officials insist that it is succeeding and that Gaddafi will become the Arab Spring’s third casualty. But that will happen, they...

While Holder didn’t pull any triggers, the Department of Justice was involved in Gunwalker from the beginning. A detective assembles a crime’s “history” by collecting and examining evidence, which eventually leads him to the perpetrator. When sufficient evidence points to a reasoned conclusion, perpetrators are arrested and prosecuted in court. Crimes consist of means, motive, and opportunity. So it is with ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, also known as “Gunwalker.” Violent crimes committed with Gunwalker firearms Besides Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder, “Mexican officials estimate 150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns.” This indicates...

During the Bush administra­tion, when the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel got into the habit of rationalizing whatever the president wanted to do, Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen dreamed of an OLC that was willing to “say no to the president.” It turns out we have such an OLC now. Unfortunately, as Barack Obama’s defense of his unauthorized war in Libya shows, we do not have a president who is willing to take no for an answer. While running for president, Obama criticized George W. Bush’s lawless unilateralism in areas such as torture, warrantless surveillance and detention of...

NATO air strikes killed nine civilians in the Arada neighbourhood of Tripoli, which is a known anti-Gaddafi stronghold, the regime said Sunday. The incident occurred a day after the government accused NATO of specifically targeting civilians. AFP - NATO said Sunday it was investigating Libyan claims that nine civilians, two of them of toddlers, were killed in an alliance air raid... Libyan government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim told AFP that a NATO air strike on a residential district of Tripoli early on Sunday killed nine people... Earlier in the day, journalists had been shown the bodies of five people, one of...

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...

Charlie Savage has the amazing story that 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.” The Acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Caroline Krass, and the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, Jeh Johnson, advised the President that military activities in Libya constituted “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution and thus Section 5(b) of the WPR required him to terminate or scale back the mission after May...

Reflecting frustration at NATO's inability to achieve quick results in a campaign some had forecast would be over in days or weeks, the U.S. defense secretary rounded on European allies last week for failing to back the mission the alliance took over in late March. "The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country," Robert Gates said, "yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference." Now it's not only bombs, but the planes to...

The Obama administration is spending almost $9.5 million every single day to blow things up in Libya because the president has determined that is in the country's national interest, this country's national interest, not Libya's. You may not have noticed the $392,542 flowing out of the national treasury every hour, day and night, since those first $1.5 million Tomahawks flashed from the launch tubes back on March 19. But Libya's dictator Moammar Kadafi has. Not enough to quit, mind you, because he can hide while his troops do the dying and killing. Kadafi's military might has been degraded sufficiently by...

Video at link. (CNSNews.com) - Louis Fisher, a scholar in residence at the Constitution Project who served for 40 years as a constitutional law expert at the Library of Congress, says Americans and members of Congress should understand that President Barack Obama committed a “very grave offense” against the Constitution in taking military action in Libya without congressional authorization. “I am not going to recommend that the House Judiciary Committee hold impeachment hearings, but I would like members of Congress and the public to say that nothing would be more impeachable than a President who takes the country to war...

The White House is telling Congress that President Obama has the legal authority to continue American participation in the NATO-led air war in Libya, even though lawmakers have not authorized it. In a broader package of materials the Obama administration is sending to Congress on Wednesday defending its Libya policy, the White House, for the first time, offers lawmakers and the public an argument for why Mr. Obama has not been violating the War Powers Resolution since May 20. On that day, the Vietnam-era law’s 60-day deadline for terminating unauthorized hostilities appeared to pass. But the White House argued that...

ISLAMABAD: The US has established contacts with Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar to negotiate an end to the conflict in Afghanistan, a media report said on Tuesday. Abdul Haqiq, a former Afghan Taliban spokesman who used the alias Mohammad Hanif, played a key role in helping Washington reach out to Mullah Omar, The Express Tribune newspaper quoted a source as saying. Haqiq was arrested by US and Afghan intelligence agents in Afghanistan in June 2007. He was one of the high profile Afghan Taliban spokesmen along with Yousuf Ahmadi, appointed after chief spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi was arrested in...

Libyan women and girls who become pregnant through rape risk being murdered by their own families in so-called "honour killings", according to aid workers. Rape is a sensitive topic worldwide, but in this country it is even more of a taboo. "In Libya when rape occurs, it seems to be a whole village or town which is seen to be dishonoured," says Arafat Jamal of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. Libyan charities say they are getting reports that in the west of the country, which is particularly conservative, Col Muammar Gaddafi's forces have tended to rape women and girls in...