Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Neither the mentor of Sayf Al-Islam nor the Bin Ladenite dude will bring democracy to Libya

"A plan approved Sunday by Libya's transitional leadership team to bring rebel fighters under civilian authority has stoked tension between the new civilian leadership and the rebel commander whose troops patrol the city.   The dispute involves two of post-revolutionary Libya's best-known figures — Mahmoud Jibril, who serves as a kind of interim prime minister, and Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, Tripoli's top rebel military leader. Their differing backgrounds give some hint of the diversity of leadership in the new Libya.   Jibril is a U.S.-educated technocrat who spent the civil war in the relative safety of the eastern city of Benghazi. Belhaj is a front-line commander and former mujahedin in Afghanistan who says he was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA and turned over to the forces of Moammar Kadafi, who jailed him for six years."