The FBI has released its full 207-page report on the deceased “Brother Leader” of Libya. (h/t Gawker)
Origins: Colonel Qaddafi’s Napalm Stocks.
The East takes most of the blame for arming Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya. By volume, this is as it should be.
But the West was deeply involved, too. A post today on the At War blog examines some of the history of the American role in arming and training — essentially creating — the military that gave rise to the Brother Leader and the coup he led in 1969.
That post touched upon something the photographs above hint at, too. The short of it? Look at the photographs. They show that Spain provided Qaddafi’s Libya with more than mortar-delivered cluster munitions. It helped him with his burning jellies, too.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS
Packaging for the igniters, and the igniters themselves. Spanish-made EMBI impact fuzes for free-fall BIN napalm bombs. By the author. Libya. 2011.
For fans of napalm and analysis of dictatorships after the fact.
Faisal Krekshi, secretary general of the Alliance of National Forces led by Mahmoud Jibril, said he was basing his results on reports by party representatives at ballot counting centers across the vast desert nation. He gave no details and the head of the election commission refused to confirm Krekshi’s announcement.
“We are all waiting and we have nothing to suggest that one party is ahead of others,” election commission chief Nouri al-Abar told reporters. He also refused to set a date for announcing the full official results.
Two other parties said the same thing about Jibril’s party winning the election — but the claims could not be verified.
» By ballot or by bullet: Threats of militia violence are the only thing expected to lower the Libyan voter turnout in their first major democratic move since Muammar Gadhafi was overthrown. In the U.S., meanwhile, voting restriction laws have been passed in over a dozen states, which might make 5 million eligible voters’ trips to the ballot box much harder this November.
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He outlived the Libyan regime: In the late 1980s, al-Megrahi, the security chief for Libyan Arab Airlines, worked covertly for Libya’s Jamahiriya Security Organization, giving him knowledge of the weaknesses that many airliners have — which allowed him to know how to place a suitcase bomb on an airliner. That plane, Pan-Am flight 103, exploded, causing the deaths of 270 people over and around Lockerbie, Scotland — one of the worst terror attacks in history. While there is some question as to whether al-Megrahi was innocent (he was linked via forensic evidence after an international manhunt), he was convicted in the bombing, which also played a role in the eventual demise of Pan Am airlines. All that would be surprising on its own — but in 2009 came another surprise, when a Scottish court allowed al-Megrahi, suffering from terminal prostate cancer, to return home to Libya. He was expected to live three months. He lived almost three years — long enough to see the demise of the Gaddafi regime which he’ll forever be associated with. (photo by Manoocher Deghati/AFP/Getty Images)
» Those missiles could most definitely be in the wrong hands: After the downfall of the Gaddafi regime, the U.S. started up a $40 million missile recovery program to help get back some of these missiles — estimated to be 20,000 total — but have only managed to recover 5,000 of them. And there are rumblings that terror groups such as Nigeria’s Boko Haram could have some of these missiles, which (though fired from the shoulder) are big enough to, say, take down a plane. The “War on Terror” changes quickly, it seems.
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Saif al-Islam Gaddafi captured alive, complete with iconic photo: With perhaps the most iconic photo to come out of a capture since Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Gaddafi’s most notorious son, fearing for his safety, gave himself up without a fight early Saturday. source
Herman Cain screws up basic question on Libya: The presidential candidate seemed to look flustered regarding one of the biggest news stories of the past six months, asked by the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Got all this stuff twirling around in my head,” he said, before twisting the issue as a “I might have handled things differently” hedge. Hand this guy a newspaper. EDIT: Updated with a less-annoying YouTube embed.
Here’s a hidden feature that shipped in...
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
It’s certainly not the way we do things. We would have liked to see Col. Gaddafi going on trial to answer for his misdeeds.British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond • Calling for an investigation into Muammar Gaddafi’s violent, bloody death on Thursday. The Libyan leader’s method of death — Human Rights Watch suggests it’s an execution that took place after the leader was detained — could cast a violent pall on the new government. Gaddafi’s wife Safiya, as you might guess, also wants an investigation. “I am proud of the bravery of my husband, Moammar Gadhafi, the holy warrior, and my sons who confronted the aggression of 40 countries over the past six months,” she told Syria-based Al-Rai TV. source (via • follow)
How far removed from the real world do you have to be to think publishing, with no warning, a graphic image of a dead or
dieingdying person covered in blood is fine? Newsweek’s Tumblr even calls the posting of the grotesque image “a necessity in an age of media-driven rumors”. [more]
A few things: Newsweek and The Atlantic are fighting two different schools of thought on this specific issue. There are groups of people that won’t be convinced unless they see this image or a similar one, and there are people who won’t ever be OK with showing an image like this, ever. You can’t — and won’t — please both.
As Wardrox writes: “I can only assume the people in charge of the Tumblr feeds for both Newsweek and The Atlantic live in some corner of an office, detached from the real world in some kind of bubble. The kind of bubble where reason and logic, common sense and common decency become warped by deadlines, hits, spin and hype.”
No, they’re not. They’re journalists. They’re people who dread these decisions. They have to make tough decisions like this all the time. (This was one of the tougher ones.) Ultimately, though, they decided they would rather be honest with their readers than to hide an important issue from view. And a lot of people liked that they presented it. And a lot of people didn’t. That’s the nature of journalism — not everyone’s going to like everything you do. When presented with the issue ourselves, we went with posting it. We dreaded it. One of our regular readers made a comment about this. We didn’t back down from the decision, but we did start a dialogue.
The news is the news. Newsweek and The Atlantic have no interest in running gruesome pictures like that all the time. They did it because the news value was extremely high. WIll everyone like it? No. But when you have a photo like that and mere moments to decide on whether something is the right choice, you have to go with your gut. That’s how journalism works. Sometimes it, unfortunately, isn’t pretty. We try to limit those moments to when it really matters.
(Source: sausage-roller)
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