"They were souvenirs for my kids"

We crossed from Tunsia into Libya in two battered mini vans, cases of potable water, cans of tuna and a few gallons of gasoline in back. It was a little over three months since I’d been released from Tripoli captivity. Now I was headed back in with six other journalists for the capital that had fallen days before.

We got our passports stamped with a new Libyan visa inside a container on the sand dune outskirts of Zintan. I watched the sun rise. Clare, Manu and I all vowed we’d come back. I didn’t want people to think I was crazy, and I waited months to make sure that I wasn’t. But I would have paid to return a few days earlier to see the battle of Bab Al-Aziziyah, instead of watching it from GlobalPost offices in Boston.

(photo: An African prisoner held in Tripoli in late Aug.)

Instead, I witnessed the Corinitha— Tripoli’s five-star hotel, gripped by intermittent electricity, no running water and overflowing with journalists, even camping on couches in the lobby. I met the American prisoner, Matthew Van Dyke the first night in the cavernous lobby, still in his black prison clothes and looking as gaunt and traumatized as one of the articles described him when he was freed and found wandering around Tripoli.  Matthew held in solitary for six months in cells so small you couldn’t take four paces in. He was still in a fog but I was fascinated to talk to him.

During the day I scrambled in Tripoli, trying to follow the story of black Africans who had been imprisoned following the regime’s collapse. The rebels seemed to be locking up mere illegal immigrants, Nigerians, Chadians who'd crossed into Libya without papers. 

I stumbled upon the prison where Clare, Manu and I had first been held. A rebel guard told me that Richard Peters, the voice who had prayed with us through the electrical socket, had escaped days before and was still in the neighborhood. Amazed, I asked the new guard to guide me to Richard.

When I first laid eyes on Richard, he was kind of how I had imagined him— big, outgoing, sporting a Fu Manchu, with the muscles of a SEAL warrior even in his sixties. This time he told more stories than scripture; and we talked schemes. Richard wanted to get his contracting business restarted in Tripoli. I wanted to go to Bani Walid. We broke out his Bible after lunch.

In the last months he was reduced to eating dates and fending off rats coming out of the prison drain. When he wasn’t playing an old man in front of the guards, he was doing hundreds of push ups and shadow boxing. When all the guards fled in late August, he escaped by drop kicking his cell door some 30 times. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I saw the concrete encrusted door laid Lazarus-like beside the cell.

(photo: Richard poises next to his Tripoli cell door that he broke out after six months of captivity.)

In prison Richard told us that he’d been trying to leave Libya by driving from Tripoli to Egypt, but it never made sense. The regime clearly suspected Richard of heading east to help train the rebels.

Richard even had the name of an air force defector in his belongings when he was arrested trying to leave Tripoli, but managed to crumple the slip of paper and throw it in the dirt.

When Richard busted out of the cell, with a knife fashioned out of a toilet seat, he held himself up in a room in an adjacent building. The neighborhood rebels broke the door down with guns. Richard held up the knife. They saw Gaddafi posters in his possession. Richard immediately ripped one up. “Gaddafi bad,” he proclaimed. The rebels nodded. “They were souvenirs for my kids,” he said to me.

Sirte: the final battle of the Libyan revolution

Battle for Sirte from Sept. -Oct. 2011

Occupy Wall Street protests Nov. 17

The following Occupy Wall Street events occurred in chronological order on Nov. 17 in New York City.

In the assault on Sirte, Gaddafi's last position

Inside Libya's most notorious prison

TRIPOLI, Libya — “Welcome to hell,” a Libyan prison guard told several new inmates. “This is Abu Salim.”

The words sent chills through Dr. Ahmed’s already badly beaten body. He had been helping an Al Jazeera reporting team in March, during the early days of the Libya uprising, when forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi surrounded the western city of Zawiya, capturing him and his colleagues.

After days of interrogations and torture, he was dropped under the cover of darkness in a large prison outside Tripoli known as Abu Salim. It was there, 15 years ago, that a now infamous massacre of political prisoners took place, an event that would ultimately lead to the open revolt that is now gripping the country.

It was 1996. Prisoners at Abu Salim began to riot over poor prison conditions. In response, the Gaddafi regime said it would send negotiators. Instead, it sent in a firing squad and systematically gunned down 1,200 people.

Hussein Al-Madni, 38, was there at the time.

He had been arrested for his involvement in political Islam — a movement Gaddafi long perceived as a threat to his rule — and imprisoned at Abu Salim in 1995, along with his twin brother Hassan, whose only offense was having a similar name.

More from GlobalPost: Reporter James Foley recounts his capture and imprisonment in Tripoli

Hassan was jailed in the wing where the riot took place and was taken out to the square with the others that day.

“After lining them up in a row, the soldiers used AKs and RPGs on them. Everyone was killed in one hour and 45 minutes,” Al-Madni said in an interview with GlobalPost from his home in Benghazi. “They killed adolescents, education professionals, community leaders.”

SUGGEST & VOTE45 we learn from them to put the current turmoil in...

Although he knew what happened to his twin brother, many other families were left in the dark. 

Authorities quietly buried the bodies under the prison and the prison guards acted for years as if the captives were still alive when families came to deliver food and clothes.

In 1989, Libyan internal police came to the pharmacy where Ramadan Osman, 22, had been working. They arrested him on charges of being a Muslim fundamentalist. The family learned of his arrest when a colleague dropped off the keys to the pharmacy that evening, according to his brother, Osman Faraj Osman.

The Osman family tried to visit Ramadan many times at Abu Salim. They brought care packages but never saw him face to face, and never spoke to him on the phone. After word began to leak about the massacre, Osman had a feeling his brother was dead.

The families of those killed hail mostly from the eastern city of Benghazi, what has now become the rebel capital. Frustrated by a lack of information regarding their loved ones, a group of 30 families filed a complaint in a Libyan civil court in 2007.

In 2008, in an unprecedented action, the relatives began to gather each Saturday in front of the Benghazi courthouse to demand answers.

GlobalPost Video in Benghazi: Who are the Libyan rebels?

It was these protests that laid the groundwork for the rebel movement that is now, aided by NATO, fighting Gaddafi forces and pushing toward Tripoli, the capital.

The Libyan government, anxious to rehabilitate its international image and end its longstanding diplomatic isolation, attempted to appease the families, issuing death certificates and compensation.

“After 15 years, the system just gave us a paper,” Al-Madni said. “To us, this document indicated your son or brother has no value.”

“We demanded the bodies and punishment of those responsible,” Osman said. “They offered a compensation of 200,000 dinars. We considered it a bribe to be silent.”

During the protests they held signs that read, “Subject: Collective execution, Location: Abu Salim, date: 29-6-1996.” Some carried framed photos of their missing. A girl carried a homemade poster that said, “My father, what happened to him?”

The collective call for answers began to breathe new life into the shattered families.

“We felt we broke the barrier of fear against the system,” Osman said. “I felt I refreshed the remembrance of my brother.”

The Libyan government began to photograph them during the protests and secret police followed them home. A handful were arrested and detained for days at a time. In detention, they were asked to sign a document saying they had received compensation.

“They said, just accept this money. But we refused to put our signatures to it,” said Mohammed Gouba, whose brother was also killed at Abu Salim.

GlobalPost in Benghazi: Signs of revolution in graffiti

In February, Fathi Terbil, a lawyer for the first Abu Salim families to come forward, was arrested, sparking one the largest public demonstrations in more than four decades. Hundreds joined protests in Benghazi demanding the lawyer’s release.

Terbil was eventually released, but the demonstrations didn’t stop. Instead, they grew, and began to demand an end to the Gaddafi regime altogether.

It was the beginning of a full-scale revolution.

“Our group was the first group to demand the rights for those without voices,” Al-Madni said. “You can say we were the spark for all this.”

According to former prisoners at Abu Salim, things have not changed.

When Dr. Ahmed arrived in March, he was placed in a solitary cell with no windows and given just enough bread and water to stay alive. Guards would summon him at all hours for interrogations, during which he was tortured — electrical shocks from a charged cattle prod applied to his head and groin, repeated blows to the head and whippings across his back with rubber hoses.

His experiences aren’t that different from the events that made Abu Salim internationally known, except he survived.

“There are 1,200 prisoners buried underneath you,” the guard told Dr. Ahmed upon his arrival. “So don’t even hope for escape.”

Dr. Ahmed was tortured so badly at Abu Salim that he cannot hear out of one ear and his teeth are ruined. He said he prayed as much as he could while in solitary confinement.

“That was all there was to do,” he said. “Your life was in God’s hands. I’d certainly bet Abu Salim is worse than Guantanamo.”

On his last night at Abu Salim, they brought him out of his cell and made him kneel outside in the darkness. He heard other prisoners kneeling beside him. They waited. He heard steps behind him and the charging of a rifle. Two AK-47 bullets rang past his ear.

The mock execution was his send off to another prison — Al Jadida, where treatment in communal cells much improved and he told GlobalPost this account.

In Al Jadida he reunited with other Abu Salim veterans, who cried for joy thinking he had been executed that night.

Dr. Ahmed was eventually freed and has left Libya for his own safety.

Abu Salim remains.

Editor’s note: Dr. Ahmed’s name has been changed to protect his family’s safety.

The perils of seeing your reporting used in Taliban propaganda video

How news video becomes propaganda video

Most jihadist propaganda videos out of Afghanistan and Pakistan have similar tropes — the blessings to Allah, prayerful music followed by shaky video and a long-distance explosion on what is claimed to be a U.S. convoy that kills many "infidels."

These videos have recently become more and more more sophisticated, complete with higher quality production values. In short, they appear, well, more "real."

The Taliban in Afghanistan have even begun tweeting their propaganda in the last year as they increase their media sophistication. See GlobalPost's Taliban embrace New Media: 

"Mobile phones, the internet, television — all of these were invented by the West, but Islam allows us to use it within the boundaries of our religion,” one Taliban fighter, speaking from Pakistan via Google Chat said.

This trend was epitomized by a gruesome video showing an up-close execution of 16 captured Pakistani policemen in June. They are gunned down in a row and each shot again for good measure. 

Also, it's a disturbing when your own footage is spliced into one of these videos.

A friend of mine, Simon Klingert, who's also spent months reporting in Afghanistan, sent me the link to this video today — "You can overhear your voice around 13:00," he wrote.

I couldn't resist. Watching the footage leading up to 13:00 scared the crap out of me. The insurgent fighters crouching in the mountains ready to pour RPGs down on a road that looks very similar to the treacherous highway in Kunar province that myself and a convoy of 1-101st Brigade soldiers were riding on in August 2010.

It's not the same attack of course, but (at 10:22) to see that Afghan Army vehicle disabled, stranded while RPGs continue to unload on it is gut-wrenching. A man literally cut in half is wreathing on the side of the road.

My footage is spliced next over the music (13:00) — a close-up shot of a U.S. platoon as they race to save a driver hit when a 107mm recoilless round pierced the front of their vehicle, shredding his arm in the process.

It sickened me to see how a video I thought showed the bravery and resilence of a platoon under fire, now showed the increasing effectiveness of the Taliban.

In fact, the platoon acted bravely, as you can still see, working in unison on the edge of the cliff-walled highway to stabilize a severely wounded comrade. That group, Gator Company of the 2-327th Brigade, had already lost at least eight guys to IEDs, suicide bombers and direct attacks on their base that summer.

(See the full video — A fire fight in Kunar Province.)

At the time I wrote — "It always amazes me how brave these guys are... Pvt. Jon Duran and Jesse Townsend were able to remove their severely wounded driver and wrap a tourniquet around his arm despite suffering smoke inhalation and concussions."

The idea that these men acted bravely doesn't discount the effectiveness of the Talib attack, nor why both sides might be proud to show the video. This is the reality of war.

Libyan rebels attempt to retake Brega

 (Photo: Rebels fire outside Brega, Anton Hammerl. See Hammerl's Libyan photos at FP.)


The last time I was in Brega was the worst day of my life.

I and two other journalists were captured in Brega and our dear friend and colleague, Anton Hammerl, was senselessly cut down by Gaddafi troops' gunfire.

Our loss had an additional senselessness because since April 5, the day we were captured, not much has changed in Brega. It remains an embattled oil town in eastern Libya where fighting continues. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's forces have held the strategic town on the Mediterranean for months. The Libyan rebels claimed they were planning to retake it, but they just haven't had the manpower or weaponry. 

The day before we were captured, an opposition general told us their plan was to take and hold their forces at Brega, to prevent Gaddafi from once again collapsing their lines back to the rebel capital of Benghazi, where NATO air strikes clearly saved the city in mid-March.

Bloody Brega offensive

Finally this weekend, perhaps bolstered by a full U.S. recognition and the promise of hundreds of millions in frozen funds to help their fledgling volunteers, the rebels advanced on Brega in earnest. They were met by heavy shelling today. Ten rebel fighters were killed, according to AP, and 172 have been wounded in the last few days, many from landmines, according to doctors at the nearest functioning hospital in Ajdabiya. It's unclear how many government forces were killed, although four were said to have been captured.

These are extraordinary casualty numbers and a sure sign that an estimated 3,000 Gaddafi troops will not abandon Brega. If it falls to the rebels, the coastal highway opens up to Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte.  

But first it seems, the rebels will have to deal with a devil's array of booby traps and dug in loyalists. According to reports, the offensive started when rebel forces approached Brega late Friday, only to find landmines and trenches filled with flammable liquid. Two hundred and fifty mines have been found so far, the AP reported.

Gaddafi's troops are most likely shelling from hilltop positions. The fact that you can't tell where the whistling explosions are coming from induces mind-numbing terror especially in the ill-trained. So retreats and then cautious advances along the 50 or so miles of road between Brega and Ajdabiya, a no-man's-land reportedly off limits to journalists, will go on for days and weeks. 

"We are advancing and we are very close to Brega," said Mustafa al-Sagezli, a member of the rebel's revolutionary military council, adding that Gaddafi's troops had fallen back to positions inside the town, according to the AFP.

Sounds eerily familiar

I've heard comments like this from rebel spokesmen before. I know firsthand that Gaddafi's forces are bunkered down inside Brega and have commandeered civilian houses. We were tied up and taken to a civilian house in Brega the day we were captured. Brega was abandoned of civilians, and the loyalist troops treated it as "their" town.  Later that afternoon we were blindfolded and shuttled west, through dozens of checkpoints to Sirte.

Luckily for the rebels, NATO is back on, or rather flying over, the scene. "We were very close to Brega at around three in the morning," a wounded 19-year old told the AFP. "Then we got instructions from NATO to fall back..."

NATO said on Friday it hit one tank, and up to 12 armed vehicles around the town, AFP reported.  

'Thank Allah,' the rebels must be saying. But the air strikes can come few and far between, and the pilots seem to wait for a massing of heavy Gaddafi armor that is less and less visible, as those vehicles are destroyed.

Meanwhile, the slaughter below continues.

If the rebels take Brega, it would represent a breakthrough on a front that has become a true stalemate in this five-month-old conflict, and both parties know this.

For me it's personal. We believe Gaddafi forces surreptitiously buried our colleague somewhere outside Brega. If Brega is taken, there's some chance that his body could be found and some hope for closure for his family. Inshallah.