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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,...

A French minister said on Sunday it was time for Libya's rebels to negotiate with Muammar Gaddafi's government, but Washington said it stood firm in its belief that the Libyan leader cannot stay in power. The diverging messages from two leading members of the Western coalition opposing Gaddafi hinted at the strain the alliance is under after more than three months of air strikes that have cost billions of dollars and failed to produce the swift outcome its backers had expected. French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet signaled growing impatience with the progress of the conflict when he said the rebels...

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) -- A defiant Moammar Gadhafi 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 brutally crushing an uprising against him, delivered the warning in an audio message played to thousands of supporters gathered in the main square of the capital Tripoli.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that arming Libyan rebels was a "crude violation" of a U.N. Security Council resolution that imposed a comprehensive arms embargo on Libya from February. "We asked our French colleagues today whether reports that weapons from France were delivered to Libyan rebels correspond with reality," Lavrov told journalists. "If this is confirmed, it is a very crude violation of U.N. Security Council resolution 1970, which was adopted by consensus." France became the first NATO country on Wednesday to openly acknowledge arming rebels seeking to topple Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who...

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...

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...

Did Obama Overstep In Libya? Noted Lawyer David Rivkin Has Answer International law expert to host Federalist Society teleforum on Libyan debate Published on June 21, 2011 by Brent Baldwin (OfficialWire) WASHINGTON, D.C. (USA) OfficialWire PR News Bureau 1 Constitutional lawyer David Rivkin Former White House lawyer, David B. Rivkin, Jr. has written extensively about the powers granted to presidents by the U.S. Constitution. Rivkin, the lawyer who successfully initiated the constitutional debate on the 2010 Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”), has achieved renown as one of the nation’s “staunchest defenders of the Constitution.” His legal opinions stem not from a...

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...

Republican Senator John McCain today ripped into the current crop of GOP candidates, accusing them of breaking with the party's traditions by preaching 'isolationism.' Mr McCain, the Republican candidate in the 2008 presidential elections, said if former President Ronald Reagan were still alive he would have been disappointed in last week's Republican presidential debate in which candidates voiced impatience with U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya. Mr McCain told ABC's This Week: 'He would be saying: "That's not the Republican Party of the 20th century, and now the 21st century. That is not the Republican Party that...

Over at the Lawfare blog, Jack Goldsmith has some thoughts on the Obama administration’s war powers argument. Whatever you think of the War Powers Act, Goldsmith’s second point is of particular interest: The Administration argues that its operation is legitimated and limited by the U.N. Security Council Resolution. It does not really explain why it thinks this. But in any event, the “no danger to troops” theory, combined with the heavy reliance on the Security Council Resolution, suggest that the Administration is creating a principle of unilateral presidential war power for U.N.-sponsored interventions from a distance. In practice, this principle...

Provoked by renewed daylight NATO bombing of his capital, Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy raged against the alliance yesterday, screaming his message and daring Western forces to keep it up. Khadafy spoke in a telephone call that was piped through loudspeakers to a few thousand people demonstrating in Tripoli’s Green Square at the end of a day when NATO intensified bombing runs across the capital. State television carried the Khadafy message live, then repeated it a few minutes later. “NATO will be defeated,’’ he yelled in a hoarse, agitated voice. “They will pull out in defeat.’’ The sound of automatic weapons...

President Barack Obama decided he could continue the air war in Libya without congressional approval despite rulings to the contrary from Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers, according to published reports.

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...

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...

President Barack Obama has launched a third war in a Muslim country, expanded the war in Afghanistan and is continuing many of the national security policies of former President George W. Bush, including keeping Guantanamo open, indefinite detentions of enemy combatants, rendition and military trials. Civilians continue to be killed by U.S. and NATO military forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And, in just the last few days, photos have begun to be released of atrocious crimes against Afghan civilians, allegedly committed last year by American soldiers. Nevertheless, most of the Obama administration’s Left-wing supporters are still in the fold, remaining...

Key Dem: Attacks on Libya 'because of oil'By Michael O'Brien - 03/21/11 01:30 PM ET The United States military action against Libya is motivated by a desire for affordable and accessible oil, a top Democrat on environmental issues said Monday. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said that he agreed with President Obama's decision to launch, along with allies, attacks against Libya and its leader, Moammar Gadhafi. But Markey said the attacks were primarily motivated by oil. "We are in Libya because of oil," Markey said on MSNBC. "It all goes back to...

The grotesque extremes to which Muammar Qaddafi has gone to threaten the people of Libya—and to act on those threats—have left the self-proclaimed “king of kings” with few defenders in northern Africa, the Middle East or the international community. Even among frequent critics of US interventions abroad, there is disgust with Qaddafi, and with the palpable disdain he has expressed for the legitimate aspirations of his own people.So it is that the advocacy for military intervention has spread far beyond the usual circle of neoconservative hawks.The circumstance is made easier by the fact that the bombing of Libya by US...