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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Libya and Human Rights

by Robert L. Gisel



It will be interesting to see how Ghadafi's regime explains away this latest Human Rights violation to break out in the news. A woman is taken from her car at a checkpoint by Ghadafi Loyalists then apparently held captive, raped repeatedly and beaten. When she finally gets free she rushed to reporters and foreign correspondents in the state arranged hotel to get the message to someone fearing there would be more of the same with no protections from the meyhem. The cat is out of the bag.

So much was revealed in this one incident. First off, she felt she had to rush to the reporters and reach the international press or she would simply disappear for weeks or years. Such fears are not an exclusive of Ghadafi's Libya as our own Homeland Security has been known to do that.

The first response is to kidnap her again, after the Ghadafi undercover police pretending to be hotel staff bludgeon press corps members, smashing their cameras and recorders, who were trying to protect her. You can only call it kidnapping as she is taken by force in obvious violation of rights -- hers and her would be protectors.

Then they attempt a smear campaign of the girl to claim she is insane, a drunk, and a prostitute. Get this: she is actually post graduate law student studying in Tripoli. This is the wrong person to try to exploit.

There was even an attempt to bribe her family to persuade her to recant the charges. The official stance now seems to be that the rapists are being investigated, that this is a criminal matter rather than political, and that some of the suspected rapists are filing counter suit for slander. That's rich. Then again, the state sponsored smear campaign is not slander, evidently, while the covey of undercover "hotel staff" who rushed to get this gal away from the press wasn't political, evidently.

What makes this possible is a major weakness of Human Rights bills needing to be bolstered, that and unchecked criminal behavior bolstered by a lawless totalitarian regime. Anything declared to be a matter of state security, including the labeling of acts and persons as terrorist, in the opinion of the declarer, is considered outside the realm of Human Rights. As soon as one is deemed terrorist by state police organisms, rights are suspended with unreasonable seizure, no Miranda rights, no legal representation nor swift and juried justice. Whether the organization is like the NSA, Homeland Security, the Libyan spy agency Jamahiriya Security Organization, MI-5, the Mossad, SBU, China's MSS, or the Congo's DGSE this above-the-law think is justified as protection of state security. Don't buy it.

Look at the kidnappings that landed up in Quantico. Several hundred of those detainees for years were there as innocents or with so little or no probable cause they were let go. For instance, an innocent farmer whose only crime was to be a mistaken identity was held captive for two years. This the problem with omnipotent powers given to state security -- they can be opinionated, and opinions are not fact. Then there are no checks and balances to correct the injustice when they are wrong.

The 007 mentality has been long glorified by James bond movies and the like where innocents are not locked up or killed. It is simple Hollywood; all those who work for the bad guys and those who work for the good guys. The truth is most secret intelligence agencies mean business, each from it's own viewpoint is well intended and charged with high purpose, meaning it can do no wrong.

Ghadafi's intelligence people are muffing it badly. The hilariuous part is it appears like a B-List movie, a poor one at that, of what they think they should be doing as "that is the way US intelligence does it".

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