March 24 Updates on Libyan War and Mideast Protests

Here is video of what Jonathan Miller of Britain’s Channel 4 News calls, “another regime own goal,” the latest puzzling media tour for the foreign press arranged by the Qaddafi government on Thursday:

As Mr. Miller explains in the report, Libyan government minders continue to promise, day after day, to present foreign journalists with evidence of civilian casualties from the international airstrikes, only to show them something completely different.

The Lede’s coverage of the war in Libya and protests movements across North Africa and the Middle East will continue on Friday. In the meantime, please visit the homepage of NYTimes.com for new developments and to read reports from my colleagues in the region.

Thanks for your comments and tips.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, told The Associated Press on Thursday that he is “100 percent” certain that his investigation will lead to charges of crimes against humanity against members of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government.

The prosecutor’s team is collecting videos, photos and other evidence of crimes in six incidents of what he called the “massive shooting of civilians” by the security forces in Tripoli, Benghazi and other Libyan cities.

Mr. Moreno-Ocampo added that the speed of his investigation is partly due to technology. “Technology is reducing the distance between people in Libya and people in the [rest of the] world,” the Argentine prosecutor said. “Journalists showing the killing of civilians in Libya created this willingness to intervene.”

In an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News on Thursday, a spokesman for Colonel Qaddafi’s government, Musa Ibrahim, was asked if he is concerned about being a possible target of a war crimes investigation.

A Syrian blogger and human rights activist who writes on Twitter as wissamtarif reports: “Six Syrian citizens have been detained arbitrarily” on Thursday, since Bouthaina Shaaban, an adviser to President Bashar al-Assad, promised reforms.

After Ms. Shaaban’s appearance, Syrian state television announced the release of some prominent political prisoners. Another blogger, who writes on Twitter as Silmya Silmya, observed: “So they released prisoners to have space for new ones.”

Here is video of the presidential adviser, Ms. Shaaban, attacking the foreign press during the news conference at which she announced the reforms, in response to a question from Lina Sinjab of BBC World:

On the eve of what will likely be another day of protest in several countries in the Middle East, a Bahraini blogger has just posted a harrowing account of his attempt to get information from the authorities about his uncle, who was detained during the recent crackdown on dissent.

The blogger, who writes as Angry Arabiya, explained in a series of Twitter updates on Thursday evening how he spent his day (the updates have been edited to remove Twitter shorthand and punctuation):

I went to meet my uncle’s wife. I hadn’t been able to meet her since my uncle’s arrest. Three days after my uncle’s arrest, I found his wife still scared and still shaking. She showed me bruises on her body. I was in shock. They look like the bruises on martyrs’ bodies, black and blue bruises on her arms and legs.

After they arrested my uncle, they put guns to her 11-year-old twin boys’ heads, and told them they were going to shoot them.

Then they came upstairs where she slept with her daughters and nieces. They put a gun to her 10-year-old old niece’s head to get her out of bed. They pushed and threw all the children in a corner and started pulling my uncle’s wife [by] her hair from one room to another.

Kept asking her about her nephew. When she told them she didn’t know where he was, they threw her on the ground and started beating her.

My uncle’s wife: “5 men stood around me while I was on the ground. I was getting punched, slapped and kicked from all directions.” She said they used very bad language that she could never repeat.

My uncle’s wife broke down and started crying as she explained what happened. “They’re animals, even animals could never be so cruel…. all I could think about while I was getting beaten was my children. They can kill me and my husband, as long as they leave my children…. I’m so worried about Ruqaya, she is only 6 and she won’t stop crying, she keeps coming to my bed to check my bruises and ask me if I’m ok.”

My uncle’s wife is still in shock, she kept saying “what should I do if they come again, what if they take my children?”

I asked what she knew of my uncle, she said they’ve heard from other detainees that hes in Riffa police station. Otherwise she knows nothing. Nobody has even asked about my uncle yet, fearing they too will get arrested the minute they put foot in a police station.

So I went to Riffa police station (with a journalist) to ask about my uncle. At the police station, it felt like they were shocked anyone would ask about their arrested relatives and they tried to scare me. Stood in a room between four police, they had big smiles on their faces and told me “do you know what national safety law is? Anyone can be arrested.”

I said: “People have rights. You have to have a warrant when you arrest someone, he should meet a lawyer and contact his family. You cant just kidnap people.”

Policeman replied: “Who are you to talk to me like that! Have RESPECT!” I was surprised since I said nothing disrespectful. He made a short phone call and said, “your uncle’s not here!” I said, “then where is he? Tell me where to go look for him?”

Policeman turned to the other police and said very loudly” “There’s a lot of rape going around these days.” They started laughing. I pretended I didn’t hear their threat. Then they asked me for my full name and cpr number.

I was in the police station for more than an hour, most of the time they’re looking for all my info on their computers. Police then told me, “military has your uncle, why don’t you go check with them,” and started laughing.

They indirectly threatened me, interrogated me about my uncle’s political involvement and got all my info. But told me nothing about my uncle.

This has been a horrible day, to say the least. Will protest tomorrow with my brothers. Every day they convince us more why they must be overthrown.

Depite the apparent willingness of some Syrian bloggers to put their trust in the government of President Bashar al-Assad, Reuters reports that thousands of protesters have returned to the main mosque in the southern city of Dara’a to chant “revolution,” on Thursday.

A few minutes earlier, a blogger who uses the name SyrianWoman, wrote: “BBC Arabic confirms now that security forces withdrew completely from Omari mosque and people are celebrating that.” But, she added, an eyewitness in Dara’a told the BBC that people in the town were not sure they can trust the government’s promises after the massacre that took place there just one day ago.

Lina Sinjab, a BBC correspondent in Syria, reports on Twitter that the government has released some recently arrested political prisoners, hours after it announced reforms:

Among the prisoners released was Loay Hussein, a writer and human rights activist who was jailed from 1984 to 1991, and recently taken his home near Damascus. Mazen Darwish, the head of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, detained on Wednesday, was also released.

Ahmed Ramadan, a Syrian journalist who covered the revolution in Egypt for an independent Egyptian newspaper, notes on Twitter that, according to Syrian television, the president has ordered the release of everyone detained over the recent protests.

He also noted, with joy, a report from Al Arabiya that Syrian security forces are withdrawing from Dara’a, the southern town where protesters were killed in a violent crackdown on Wednesday.

A short time later, Reuters reported that Syrian security forces had withdrawn from the mosque in Dara’a that had been a center of the protests, which they seized in a deadly raid early on Wednesday.

A blogger who writes as Arabzy added a few minutes ago: “Must admit, overwhelmed with how fast reform took place. Within the last hours, prisoners are freed, and now forces are pulling out.”

Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters on Thursday that NATO members have resolved their dispute over the aims of the military campaign in Libya and command of the mission will be handed over to the alliance within days, Reuters reports.

“Compromise has been reached in principle in a very short time,” Mr. Davutoglu said. “The operation will be handed over to NATO completely.”

As Ian Traynor reported for The Guardian on Thursday, both Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul have been heavily critical of the leading role played by France in the campaign against Libyan government forces so far.

Using incendiary language directed at France in a speech in Istanbul, Erdogan said: “I wish that those who only see oil, gold mines and underground treasures when they look in [Libya's] direction, would see the region through glasses of conscience from now on.”

President Gül reinforced the Turkish view that France and others were being driven primarily by economic interests. “The aim [of the air campaign] is not the liberation of the Libyan people,” he said. “There are hidden agendas and different interests.”

Earlier on Thursday, Turkey’s parliament “approved a government decision to join a NATO naval operation to enforce a UN-sanctioned arms embargo off Libya,” according to the Anatolia news agency.

Seraj Elalem, a Libyan blogger, points on Twitter to video shot in Benghazi on Wednesday that shows captured government fighters being presented to the international media and a demonstration in support of the international air campaign.

In this clip, posted on the Web site Alive in Libya, several of the captured fighters say that they are originally from other Africa countries:

Near the end of this Al Jazeera report, one of the Libyan fighters who was captured said that he was compelled to fight: “if anyone refused to open fire, they said they’d kill them or burn them alive and we saw with out own eyes, they kill soldiers who refuse to fight.”

This video shows a demonstration in support of the international airstrikes in Benghazi, with signs thanking the United States, Britain, France, Arab nations and NATO, and condemning Russia:

The Alive in Libya site also includes interesting interviews, with English subtitles, in which two engineers and a businessman explain why they took up arms against the regime.

As my colleagues David Kirkpatrick, Elisabeth Bumiller and Alan Cowell report, the French Defense Ministry confirmed in a statement posted online that one of its jets did carry out a strike on a Libyan government plane, “which was operating in violation of resolution 1973,” on Thursday.

The statement explains that a French Rafale fighter jet fired on the Libyan warplane, which had flown over the besieged city of Misurata. The Libyan plane was hit with a missile from the French jet shortly after it landed at the Misurata airbase.

In a television interview last week, just before the start of the international military action against Libya, one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam, complained that France was being hypocritical, saying: “Sarkozy, one month ago, he did invite me, he sent me an official letter to go there, he wants to convince me to buy the Rafale, the air fighter, the aircraft. He was like a pussy cat, yeah he was so nice.”

At a news conference addressing the unrest in the southern Syrian town of Dara’a on Wednesday, Bouthaina Shabaan, a political adviser to President Bashar al-Assad, attacked the international media for using video posted on YouTube in reports on the town.

Although the foreign press has not been allowed to visit the scene of the unrest, Ms. Shabaan, speaking in English, attacked international broadcasters for airing video posted online by activists on Wednesday. She seemed particularly agitated by two clips said to have been filmed outside a mosque in Dara’a, which was stormed by the security forces in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

When she was asked by a reporter about the fact that residents of the town have told news agencies that the death toll was higher than the official figure of 10, Ms. Shabaan replied heatedly:

Our Syrian government television has verified the exact figures. The problem is with some media organs who wanted to exaggerate the figures, who wanted to exaggerate what happened. And I want to refer to one news item that was on BBC on CNN on many news– that accused the security forces of attacking the mosque while they were not able to show ten people near the mosque, in fact they were not able to show anything around the mosque or even a mosque.

So there was a lot of exaggerations and many unspecified things, that were said randomly by news media and we could see that they were not willing to take the news as it exactly was. Our television, our media organ, they have their credibility.

And I was talking to some of the media men this morning, and some of them said even when we said to them [international news organizations] something, they would not believe us. They would believe somebody sitting in London or in Paris or in Washington because that’s what they want to believe, but they don’t want to believe a media man who is in Dara’a, who is not a governmental man, by the way, and who is giving them the news. So I would use this opportunity to ask all media, all over the world, to try and be honest to the news and to the events. By the way, the events are happening in Syria, therefore, it’s Syrian television who tells the truth, nobody else.

Ahmed Al Omran, a Saudi blogger studying journalism in New York, responded on Twitter: “Your restrict media access to your country, then complain that the media is exaggerating. That’s kinda dumb, don’t you think?”

As Al Jazeera reports, Ms. Shaaban “blamed the unrest on outside agitators. Shaaban told reporters that 10 people were killed on Wednesday in what she called an attempt to target Syria because it supports resistance against Israel.”

She said, “What is being targeted is Syria’s position, Syria’s security and ability to be a pillar of resistance against Zionism and US schemes.”

The presidential adviser also claimed that the government has no objection to peaceful protests, but said that protesters in Dara’a had attacked the security forces.

Speaking at a news conference on Syrian state television minutes ago, a government spokesperson, Bouthaina Shaaban, insisted that President Bashar al-Assad had not ordered the shooting of protesters in the southern town of Dara’a on Wednesday. She also blamed the foreign press for engaging in a “conspiracy” against Syria and making “a lot of exaggerations” about the unrest there. “It is Syrian television that tells the truth, nobody else,” Ms. Shaaban said.

Given the severe restrictions on independent reporting in Syria, international media organizations have been forced to rely, in part, on eyewitness accounts and video posted online by residents of Dara’a to get a sense of the bloody crackdown on protesters there.

As Ms. Shaaban spoke, Jon Williams, the BBC News international editor, responded on Twitter: “Maybe they’d like to give us visas so we can see ourselves.”

On Thursday, Reuters reported that a medical official in the town said that dozens of protesters were killed during Wednesday’s crackdown in Dara’a:

The main hospital in the southern Syrian city of Dara’a has received the bodies of at least 37 protesters who were killed in a confrontation with security forces, a hospital official said Thursday.

Security forces opened fire on hundreds of youths at the northern entrance to Dara’a Wednesday afternoon, according to witnesses, in a dramatic escalation of nearly a week of protests in which at least 44 civilians have been killed since Friday.

Ms. Shaaban also said that, although the president had issued orders barring the shooting of protesters, “some mistakes” could have been made. “These things can happen, and possibly it did happen,” that protesters were shot, despite the president’s orders, she said.

One Syrian blogger, who writes as Seleucid on Twitter, observed: “Of course the claim that the higher authorities are innocent from Daraa bloodshed is a big fat lie. But it’s a lie the Syrians will believe.”

In her statement, Ms. Shaaban promised that the government would listen to the demands of the people of Dara’a, consider lifting the country’s state of emergency and “give more freedom to the people.”

In response to a question from a Syrian reporter, who praised the government decisions as “brave,” Ms. Shaaban said that reforms would begin, “today.”

Following airstrikes on Tripoli, the Libyan capital, on Wednesday night, reporters from Reuters were taken to a morgue in the city and shown the bodies of 18 men government officials claimed were civilian casualties.

The news agency reports:

“They are civilians. They are not guilty of anything,” said morgue worker Abdel Salaam. His associates, wearing surgical masks to ease the stench of death, rolled some bodies into numbered refrigeration units.

A Libyan official said some were civilians and the others soldiers who died on Wednesday night during attacks on several parts of Tripoli, Muammar Qaddafi’s biggest remaining stronghold. Some were burned beyond recognition.

In an interview on Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned satellite broadcaster, a man who said he was a doctor in Tripoli said that the fact that the morgue workers were wearing masks to block the smell of decay was an indication that the people had been dead for more than a few hours. The caller claimed that he had seen, during his work at a hospital in the capital, the bodies of protesters who were killed in recent weeks by the security forces. These bodies were kept by the regime, the caller said, and were now being presented to the media as evidence of civilian casualties.

It is impossible to verify the man’s claims, but his interview was translated and subtitled by a blogger who writes on Twitter as TasnimQ and posted online a short time ago.

Libyan state television is currently airing live video of what it described as a funeral for civilians killed in coalition airstrikes. From the scene, Nic Robertson of CNN notes that the crowd is no more than a couple of hundred, in a city of well over a million. He adds that reporters from the foreign press corps have been unable to find any immediate relatives of the deceased at the funeral.

Martha Raddatz of ABC News reports thay Libya’s government “challenged the allies’ no-fly zone for the first time today,” flying a plane over the besieged rebel-held town of Misurata, “where it was quickly shot down by French fighter jets.”

The source of the report was not stated, but Ms. Raddatz added that the plane was a single-engine Galeb jet.

Earlier on Thursday, Reuters reported that the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said: “The destruction of Qaddafi’s military capacity is a matter of days or weeks, certainly not months.” He added: “The process going on in the Arab world is irreversible. People’s aspirations must be taken into consideration everywhere, including in Saudi Arabia.”

In a post on his blog last week, before the military action was approved by the United Nations Security Council, Mr. Juppé had argued that “our honor,” was at stake. He wrote:

It is not enough to proclaim, as almost all the major democracies have, that “Qaddafi must go.” We must give ourselves the means to effectively assist those who took up arms against his dictatorship.

Legal and financial sanctions agreed to by the United Nations and the European Union are useful. But we know they only give results after several months. Now there is urgency. [...]

It has often happened in our contemporary history that the weakness of democracies leaves the field open to dictators. It’s not too late to put the lie to that rule.

Witnesses said that about 20,000 Syrians, chanting “God! Syria! Freedom!” marched on Thursday in the southern town of Dera’a, as nine protesters killed by the security forces one day earlier were buried, Reuters reports.

Residents who spoke to the news agency also said that the protesters in the Dara’a cemetery chanted, “The blood of martyrs is not spilled in waste!”

According to Mohammad Al Abdallah, a Syrian blogger who has been living in Washington since 2009, the mourners also chanted: “We are your men Syria. We will bring freedom.”

The blogger also reported on Twitter that, “Security agents are visiting schools planning for pro-gov demonstration tomorrow under the threat of arrest if not joining.”

Wednesday’s deadly crackdown by the security forces began with a raid on a mosque in Dara’a that has been at the center of protests since last week.

On Wednesday, a Syrian television report on the violence at the mosque showed what authorities said were weapons and money seized there. That report was scoffed at as bad fiction by opposition activists and Syrian bloggers.

This video, uploaded to the DaraaNews YouTube channel on Thursday, is said to show what was going on inside the mosque in recent days, a protest: