"Outside his [i.e., Gaddafi's; see below] Bab al-Aziziya compound, which rebels captured, there was another grim scene -- one that suggested mass, execution-style killings of civilians. About two dozen bodies -- some with their hands bound by plastic ties and with bullet wounds to the head -- lay scattered on grassy lots in an area where Qaddafi sympathizers had camped out for months. The identities of the dead were unclear, but they were in all likelihood activists who had set up an impromptu tent city in solidarity with Qaddafi in defiance of the NATO bombing campaign. Five or six bodies were in a tent erected on a roundabout that had served as a field clinic. One still had an IV [sic] in his arm, and another body was completely charred, its legs missing. The body of a doctor, in his green hospital gown, was found dumped in the canal."As I recall, NATO entry into the Libyan civil war was justified for the sake of preventing massacre, specifically that of the rebels who were then bottled up in Benghazi. It seems that what the Western intervention has really done is substitute one bloodbath for another.
Some might say that such atrocities, though regrettable, are a price worth paying for the sake of supposedly bringing "democracy" to Libya. I, on the other hand, have never seen the point of helping to end the regime of Gaddafi (this being probably the most accurate spelling of his name). He was a tyrannical ruler, but not a jihadist; it has been reported that "Libyan rebel hierarchy mostly constitutes members from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group—a organization on the US State Department's list of foreign terrorists," which means that Gaddafi's overthrow is actually undesirable in relation to the War upon Terror. (This doesn't mean that we ought to have propped him up, but merely that we ought to have adhered to the limits in the UN Security Council's "no-fly zone" resolution, which authorized military action only for the immediate purpose of preventing an humanitarian crisis; see the above paragraph.) President Yo'Mama's (see the list of domanisms) de-facto commitment of our forces to the anti-Gaddafi cause, thus effectively aiding the opposite side in the battle with terrorism, may well be remembered as the worst of all his blunders.
