When Gadhafi was killed, Libya’s new leaders in the National Transitional Council made official statements that he had been killed in the crossfire of an ongoing gun fight. That was a lie, and when videos of Gadhafi’s capture came out, showing him being severely beaten, guns pointed to his head, and then showing his stiff corpse with a bullet hole perfectly centered in his left temple, it became all too clear that it was a lie. The autopsy report subsequently concluded that his death was the result of gun shot wounds to the head. Now Jibril and the other NTC leaders are backtracking on that whole collateral damage narrative. A fine exhibition of the first official, post-Gadhafi act of the US-supported Libyan government.
But, as it turns out, Gadhafi wasn’t the only one summarily executed by NTC fighters last week:
Fifty-three people, apparent Gaddafi supporters, seem to have been executed at a hotel in Sirte last week, Human Rights Watch said today. The hotel is in an area of the city that was under the control of anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata before the killings took place.
Human Rights Watch called on Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) to conduct an immediate and transparent investigation into the apparent mass execution and to bring those responsible to justice.
“We found 53 decomposing bodies, apparently Gaddafi supporters, at an abandoned hotel in Sirte, and some had their hands bound behind their backs when they were shot,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, who investigated the killings.
Fifty-three people. That’s a massacre. But typically, those on the international stage who face prosecutions for terrible crimes are those that Washington doesn’t like too much. In the case of the NTC, the Obama administration and their counterparts in Britain and France have an interest in making the “revolution” (read: coup) they took part in seem as if it were for democracy and the goodness of those freedom fighters they supported. So my guess is that nobody is held accountable for these crimes. Or, for that matter, for the crimes committed pre-Gadhafi execution.
