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Tripoli – The most prominent son of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi claimed Wednesday that the regime is forging a secret alliance with radical Islamists among the Libyan rebels. Saif al Islam Qaddafi, a London School of Economics graduate, gave an hour-long interview to the New York Times in a Tripoli hotel in which he said the more liberal-minded members of the opposition would escape or be killed. "We will do it together. Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?" he said, wearing traditional dress, sporting a new beard and fingering prayer beads. His comments marked a reversal of...

BENGHAZI, Libya (AP) -- Libyan rebel leaders said Sunday their forces hunted down and clashed with supporters of Moammar Gadhafi who had been posing as rebel fighters to infiltrate the opposition's eastern stronghold. The overnight battle killed four from each side and added to a sense of crisis within the rebel movement.

When the Libyan intelligence agent convicted of the 1988 deadly bombing of Pan Am flight 103 was freed from a Scottish jail in 2009, he supposedly had just 90 days to live, thanks to advanced prostate cancer. In fact, that medical prognosis formed the basis for his release “on compassionate grounds.” But, yesterday, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi — the man a Scottish court of law found responsible for the deaths of 270 people — put in an appearance at a pro-Qaddafi rally, outraging the British government and reviving the debate of whether he should have been released in the first place....

France appeared on Tuesday to have persuaded Britain to support a shift in attitude toward Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, suggesting that he could be allowed to remain in Libya in return for giving up power in a broader deal including a cease-fire. In talks in London late Monday, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, met his French counterpart, Alain Juppé, who said last week that “one of the scenarios” to resolve the conflict in Libya “is that he stays in Libya on one condition, which I repeat: that he very clearly steps aside from Libyan political life.” Previously, Britain had insisted...

Bar the shouting, the war in Libya virtually ended Thursday morning, July 14, when US President Barack Obama called Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to hand Moscow the lead role in negotiations with Muammar Qaddafi for ending the conflict - provided only that the Libyan ruler steps down in favor of a transitional administration. The US president thus accepted the Russian-Libyan formula for ending the war over the heads of the NATO chiefs who rejected it when they met Russian leaders at the Black Sea resort of Sochi last week... ...By the time Obama had decided to call Medvedev, individual governments...

"The colonel [Qaddafi] is sending signals that he is prepared to relinquish power in exchange for security guarantees," Kommersant quoted the official as saying, according to Reuters. (See original report in Russian here.) Other countries have already said they're willing to provide the guarantees.

A defiant Muammar al-Qaddafi threatened Friday to carry out attacks in Europe against "homes, offices, families," unless NATO halts its campaign of airstrikes against his regime in Libya. The Libyan leader, sought by the International Criminal Court for a brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters, delivered the warning in a telephone message played to thousands of supporters gathered in the main square of the capital Tripoli. It was one of the largest pro-government rallies in recent months, signaling that Qaddafi can still muster significant support. A green cloth, several hundred meters long and held aloft by supporters, snaked above the crowd...

A new report from two French think tanks concludes that jihadists have played a predominant role in the eastern-Libyan rebellion against the rule of Moammar Qaddafi, and that “true democrats” represent only a minority in the rebellion. The report, furthermore, calls into question the justifications given for Western military intervention in Libya, arguing that they are largely based on media exaggerations and “outright disinformation.” The sponsors of the report are the Paris-based International Center for Research and Study on Terrorism and Aide to Victims of Terrorism (CIRET-AVT) and the French Center for Research on Intelligence (CF2R). The organizations sent a...

A military missile site was the intended target of the strike but one weapon could not be accounted for, Nato said, admitting there may have been a weapons system failure. The air strike is thought to have been carried out by French jets. Nine people, including a mother and father and at least two toddlers, died in the blast at a three-storey building, Libyan officials said. Journalists saw the body of a woman removed from the rubble in the early hours of yesterday and the bodies of casualties at a hospital. The nationality of planes operating in the area at...

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has written to members of Congress thanking them for criticizing President Obama last week over his involvement in the NATO-led military campaign in Libya. “I want to express my sincere gratitude for your thoughtful discussion of the issues,” Colonel Qaddafi wrote in the letter, a copy of which was supplied to The New York Times by a person seeking to defend the administration’s policy. “We are confident that history will see the wisdom of your country in debating these issues.” Colonel Qaddafi did not refer specifically to a resolution passed by the House that rebuked the administration...

A U.N. resolution justifies the targeting of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, a senior NATO military official with operational knowledge of the Libya mission told CNN Thursday. NATO has been ramping up pressure on the regime, employing helicopters last weekend for the first time against Gadhafi's military vehicles, equipment and forces. Explosions are heard often in Tripoli, evidence of allied air strikes. NATO began bombing Libya on March 31, under a U.N. mandate to protect civilians during the fighting between government forces and rebels who have seized most of eastern Libya.

Libyan rebels accused of arbitrary arrests, torture ... and because the rebels do not clearly distinguish between civilian detainees and... At least one person is thought to have died while in the custody of Libyan rebels, Human Rights Watch said in its report.

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe says South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon were “naive” to vote for a United Nations Security Council resolution which has been used by Western countries to carry out a sustained bombardment of Libya. “Our African countries were naïve, absolutely naïve, to vote with the West when the West had its interests, you know, its own motives ... ulterior motives,” Mugabe said in an interview published on Friday. “These motives include wanting to re-occupy our countries. They are in search of our resources, in search of political control. It's now the reversal of the freedoms that we attained through...

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi's wife Safia and daughter Aisha, have fled to Tunisia and are living in a hotel on the island of Djerba, according to the Al Jazeera. Aisha's husband has also been wounded in conflict with opposition forces. This comes after news that Libya's oil minister, Shukri Ghanem, also fled the country for Tunisia. Libyan officials deny Ghanem ran and insist he is on a diplomatic trip. An air strike three weeks ago killed Qaddafi's youngest son and three of his grandchildren. NATO led forces continue their assault against the Libyan leader that began in late March.

Perhaps the most compelling argument for supporting the U.S. government in using military force when no state of war exists is the “humanitarian war” argument. As much as “humanitarian war” sounds like an oxymoron, the argument is actually grounded in good intentions. It asserts that all human beings, regardless of what country they were born in, have the same right to freedom as U.S. citizens. Therefore, when the people of another nation are being oppressed, the U.S. government should step in and fight to defend them. This is the argument being used for the latest overseas war. At first glance,...

Back in February, weeks before NATO launched its Libyan bombing campaign but after the Tripoli regime had slaughtered hundreds of civilians, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega phoned Muammar Qaddafi multiple times to express his support. Speaking publicly, Ortega declared that the bloodstained despot was “waging a great battle.” Then, in late March, with the NATO war well underway, Qaddafi tapped former Nicaraguan foreign minister Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann (who served under Ortega’s Sandinista dictatorship during the 1980s) to be Libya’s new ambassador to the United Nations. So it wasn’t terribly surprising last month when WikiLeaks released a pair of U.S. diplomatic cables...

TRIPOLI, Libya -- Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi escaped a NATO missile strike in Tripoli that killed one of his sons and three young grandchildren, a government spokesman said early Sunday. Hours later, Qaddafi's forces shelled a besieged rebel port in a sign that the airstrike had not forced a change in regime tactics. Though the deaths could not be independently verified, NATO's attack on a Qaddafi family compound in a residential area of Tripoli late Saturday signaled escalating pressure on the Libyan leader who has tried to crush an armed rebellion that erupted in mid-February.

Almost got Qaddafi!

Pro-Gaddafi forces fired shells into the town of Dehiba, damaging buildings and injuring at least one resident, and a group of them drove into the town in a truck, local people and a Reuters photographer in the town said. The Libyan government troops were pursuing anti-Gaddafi rebels from the restive Western Mountains region of Libya who fled into Tunisia in the past few days after Gaddafi forces overran the border post the rebels had earlier seized. "There were lots of clashes in the town this morning. Lots of gunshots. The Tunisian military clashed with Gaddafi's forces ... Some of Gaddafi's...

~ EXCERPT ~This is terrible news.  And important to note the details are still sketchy. But there are reports that photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros have been killed in Libya.The news was first posted on fellow photographer Andre Liohn's Facebook page.  Liohn is reportedly at the hospital. Hetherington was nominated for a Oscar this year for the documentary Restrepo which he co-directed with journalist Sebastian Junger.Chris Hondros is a Pulitzer-Prize nominated war photographer whose work has appeared in the NYT, Newsweek, and the Economist, to name a few. The two were reportedly covering the fighting in Misrata.  Yesterday Hetherington tweeted:...