The Khamis Brigade Shed Massacre

[Jack by the hedge]

So the question is, is there any standard around here of what lets a theory out of the CT ghetto?

I think the question is: what makes you imagine it's in a CT ghetto? I can't recall anyone here saying your version of events is false. I think most don't have any view or any particular interest in knowing what happened. Don't imagine that's the same as their wanting not to know. It's not challenging anyone's beliefs to claim that rebels may sometimes have killed prisoners out of hand. After all it's abundantly clear that's what happened to Gadaffi himself.

Another day or two without challenge and I'm calling it won, and taking it to higher levels.

Why "won"? Nobody else is playing. If you think you can prove anything that would stand up in a court then you absolutely should take it to an appropriate authority. No need to wait.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Thanks for the thoughts, guys.

A slick new propaganda video from the massacre site, in Arabic, titled in English "What happened at Yarmouk" - and they'll tell you for real. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIOUO5GwknM

I'm still preparing the evidence - you get nervous before taking these things to people who've so far been happy to follow the war criminals' version, demanding more loyalist blood in turn for their fantasy. I might just skip over the current events forum.

Dilbert, or perhaps Asok: "I like speaking truth to power, but I don't like when it speaks back." So far it's just ignored me when I've tried e-mails to the relevant people. Any ideas, anyone, on who to take this to exactly? Usually 'take it to the authorities if you have something' is a brush-off. What about when someone's serious? The PHR I plan on, to alert them of the inadequacy of their report. Who else? The ICC? The government agency in Libya "Dr. Salim Rajub" helps run? How do you force a response if they just tune you out? Duped journos: Stuart Ramsay, Robert F. Worth, Alex Loyd, others?

 

[Caustic Logic]

Update Feb. 2

Still working on members for a group to sound (and be) bigger than I am as I (we) take this stuff public. Another reminder why:

Pro-Qaddafi ‘mass murderer’ awaits fate in Libyan jail
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/01/31/191670.html
By AFP
MISRATA LIBYA

Ibrahim Sadeq Khalifa looks like any other young Libyan, but the 20-year-old prisoner has good reason to fear for his future in the new Libya.

By his own admission, Khalifa participated in the mass killing of civilians as Tripoli was falling.

His crime, which he acknowledged in front of an AFP team touring the prison, was that he burned alive around 150 men in a garage in Tripoli as fighting raged between Qaddafi loyalists and former rebels in August last year.

“I threw grenades on them after my colleagues doused them in petrol. We then locked the garage and left. We burnt them alive,” Khalifa told AFP, of the massacre that he and four other Qaddafi soldiers carried out.

Khalifa admits that those killed by him and his comrades in the Khalit al-Farjan area of Tripoli on the afternoon of Aug. 22 were civilians.

Given what we've been over, the problems here are fairly evident. This is another version yet of the massacre no one else quite witnessed. And that's aside from the issue of torture and coercion, which can explain a confession to a fictitious (death penalty) crime. Recent revelations (BBC) of widespread torture of loyalist captives, especially in Misrata where this guy is held, many to death - NTC insistence this isn't an official government policy and they know nothing about it and might never know.

More on Dr. al Farjani, caught coaching.

Found some stuff in Arabic saying 41 people just from Zlitan alone escaped and survived the shed massacre, and a list on Facebook of 40 names of survivors, only 7 (I can recognize so far) of which I have among the 26 with available info. That could be about 60 or even more alleged escapees now all told ( I have a good size list of maybes).

But Khalifa's story implies approximately zero survived - 150 killed, locked in, burned with grenades, on the 22nd - the day before the massacre by all but three other witnesses (who also say the 22nd - Siddeq, Own, and I think "Omar"). This burning alive is only clearly described by two witnesses now (Khalifa and M. Bashir), and smoke was still rising on the 28th (cameras, they at least don't lie).

 

[Caustic Logic]

Updates, info:
- One of the victims has an unusual metal collar, perhaps from some kind of rocket, embedded in his upper left chest. No explanation for that in the rebel/accepted story.

- The UN Human Rights Council has released its report on horrible things in Libya, both sides, mostly loyalist, they decided. They cover this massacre like most do. They now say 106 died, 51 survived, from among 157. Nearly one in three people lived, few injuries, no messed up faces or anything, from a close-up assault with AK47s and grenades in a confined space. Possible, barely. True, not.

- On Aug 23 conquest, a Reurters reporter, after talking with involved fighters, reported as fact:

“the base … was overrun on Tuesday [the 23rd], the day much of Tripoli fell to a rebel advance.”

- Saad Basir reports on the reaction of the Zintan fighters he was with:

“…[T]he group received a phone call from another rebel group that caused the typically chatty and jovial fighters to go silent. I was told that a mass execution had taken place, but was not told anything else. The rebels were unwilling to engage in conversation or discuss the subject further as we cautiously rushed to the site.
[…]
Upon arriving, Mustafa made inquiries about what had happened from rebel forces outside the gates. He and other members of his unit then refused to enter. “I don’t want to remember that I [also] killed people,” he said, and promptly left. Confused by the comment, and not fully comprehending the situation, I walked in.


Updates, action: I've started a small (so far) group called Citizen's Investigation into War Crimes in Libya(CIWCL). No website or anything yet, four members, two other signatories.

I'm working on a big report, 66 pages ATM, on this massacre, to start with. A 6-page interim summary of findings is done and has been sent, so far, to:
- Physicians for Human Rights, routed to their research staff
- International Criminal Court, office of the prosecutor
- Amnesty International

Others will be hit up soon.

That's probably all we can do. Make it so they can't say "we never heard of that info." It was sent right to them. From there, they'll probably fail (vis a vis the truth) like usual. Must stick to script, that's how the free world seems to work. Need oil and lies, constant supplies.

 

[Caustic Logic]

The Big Progress Report: Done.

Goodness did I ever put off bumping this thread. Some of the points above and before have been discarded or modified, and others came up. A while back now I finished and published the report. Check out the cover:

(hope that comes out small not huge)
Now if you don't want to slog through the sources I refer to here, you can peruse a 152-page report instead (PDF available here). That includes ten pages of sources, and whole tedious lists that can be skimmed or skipped. Hell, the whole thing can be just skipped, and will be by most people.

Our fakers analysis got quite dense at the end. Dr. Salem and Bashir feature in this really interesting and underrated video I made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ9Mo6geOxQ

Right after making that, the soldier "Ibrahim" at the center of the first part came into focus as being just as fake:
http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2012/05/shed-massacre-witnesses-executioner.html

All of these have been overly fake, obviously fake, in my opinion. Why, I don't know. Then our Dr. Salem was dragged from Tripoli Medical Center and detained by a shady NTC security force, accused of Gaddafi loyalty, and beaten 'til a testicle was reportedly ruptured. They told him to keep quiet, but he contacted the Guardian.
http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2012/05/see-through-salem-arrested.html

Incidentally, he was arrested May 17, four days after I posted that video, two days after first exposing the soldier. A connection seems reasonably possible.

Then finally our co-star Bashir was seen with a broken arm, surrounded by more than 30 "survivors" we've never seen before, congregated at the crime scene apparently around June.
http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2012/07/yarmouk-class-of-11.html

Anyway, considering mostly the report, including all of this except the last... I say conspiracy theory proven enough to chalk one up for 'some of them pan out.'

 

[Caustic Logic]

Are you aware of the effect fire has on the posture of corpses, particularly the position of the arms, due to muscle contracture?

BTW, after some more picture-staring, I can say what the fire did here. It mostly has affected/contracted muscles on backs and the backs of legs. All the bodies laid face-up curl backwards, heads back, chest out, ribs splayed. Those laid face down curl back too, legs often up in a yoga pose, heads upright, arms kind of neutral, really.

The one body does have a skull, but I think it's just laid there at the wrong angle.

 

[jargon buster]

Goodness did I ever put off bumping this thread.

Not long enough IMO.
I thought you had realised and accepted that people do bad things in times or conflict and decided to concentrate on something constructive with your time, alas no.

 

[uke2se]

Are you planning on selling your report on Amazon, or is this going to be sent to some official body? If so, who and what do you expect to come of it?

 

[Caustic Logic]

Not long enough IMO.
I thought you had realised and accepted that people do bad things in times or conflict and decided to concentrate on something constructive with your time, alas no.

"People do bad things," huh? Does it matter which people or to whom, when we're dropping bombs on one side because the other =side blamed them? Ever lived or died in a "humanitarian" warzone? No? That explains your flippant attitude from a remote location.

Are you planning on selling your report on Amazon, or is this going to be sent to some official body? If so, who and what do you expect to come of it?

Sell? Ha! I made sure PHR was aware, and a few others. Not much interest from the public yet (surprise!). However, the anniversary of the massacre is coming up and I'm sure there'll be new articles and attention I hope to capitalize on. Until now, I had more ambitious plans I've been too tired, sidetracked, or whatever to follow up on.

There'll be a second report I'm working on now about the hospital massacre in Abu Salim. That's another 'who cares' bad thing that happens when we decide to "protect" people, and the freedom fighters against the brutal regime slaughter 160 or so people inside a hospital.

The main thing I hope to do now is add anything I can to the growing case for not toppling the government in Syria, and not again opening the way for these 'who cares' atrocities. Because there, it will be ethnic cleansing against Alawites, not Africans and Black Libyans. They've sown the mythology, blaming the "Shabiha" for their own massacres, and got clerics saying it's okay to kill even the women and children of these monsters, since everyone hates Alawites.

 

[uke2se]

"People do bad things," huh? Does it matter which people or to whom, when we're dropping bombs on one side because the other =side blamed them? Ever lived or died in a "humanitarian" warzone? No? That explains your flippant attitude from a remote location.



Sell? Ha! I made sure PHR was aware, and a few others. Not much interest from the public yet (surprise!). However, the anniversary of the massacre is coming up and I'm sure there'll be new articles and attention I hope to capitalize on. Until now, I had more ambitious plans I've been too tired, sidetracked, or whatever to follow up on.

There'll be a second report I'm working on now about the hospital massacre in Abu Salim. That's another 'who cares' bad thing that happens when we decide to "protect" people, and the freedom fighters against the brutal regime slaughter 160 or so people inside a hospital.

The main thing I hope to do now is add anything I can to the growing case for not toppling the government in Syria, and not again opening the way for these 'who cares' atrocities. Because there, it will be ethnic cleansing against Alawites, not Africans and Black Libyans. They've sown the mythology, blaming the "Shabiha" for their own massacres, and got clerics saying it's okay to kill even the women and children of these monsters, since everyone hates Alawites.

What does massacres in Libya have to do with Syria? In Syria we have a situation were a truly despicable regime is being opposed by an pretty despicable rebellion. The people are caught in between. As the UN has had their hands tied behind their backs by self serving interests from Russia and China, making a case for "not toppling the government in Syria" would mean persuading the leaders of the rebellion to lay down their arms. Somehow I think you'll have some trouble doing that.

 

[Caustic Logic]

What does massacres in Libya have to do with Syria? In Syria we have a situation were a truly despicable regime is being opposed by an pretty despicable rebellion. The people are caught in between. As the UN has had their hands tied behind their backs by self serving interests from Russia and China, making a case for "not toppling the government in Syria" would mean persuading the leaders of the rebellion to lay down their arms. Somehow I think you'll have some trouble doing that.

Hand-tying also happens in New York, where the UN gets its bread buttered, and they haven''t yet managed to tell the West to stuff it. Yankee Moon is always moaning about the gov't doing this, or doing that, based on "activists say," just like in Libya.

Some of the same people. Many of the same tactics, especially in their propaganda (consider the Libyan approach to getting a regime blamed for sniping little kids in Misrata, compared to the FSA's adaptation for Homs - both articles by me). The same kind of spoiled-rotten unaccountability ...

And, depending... a lot of that "truly despicable" regime's alleged actions ... like the kid shot in Homs, and the Houla massacre with its own apparently fake witnesses ... are up in the air. And so is the relative despicability of the two sides.

If Western decision-makers realized how likely it is the rebels harbor and facilitate false-flagging child slashers, blame perhaps fictional Alawite militias, and lay the groundwork for a post-war genocide, and they had any ethics, well - that's less on the government, less reason for unease letting them win this, and those who've been helping the rebels could stop the following:
- weapons and fighters transited, trained, housed, and supplied from Turkey
- Open assistance from the "government"of Libya, who recognize the SNC as Syria's legit rulers
- Cash payments from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere
- Political enabling with one-sided rhetoric from Washington et al. insisting the rebels must win eventually, and open discussion of how to make that happen, various action following those ideas...
- politically-motivated sanctions, attacks on the state (finances, trade, travel, media, military) anything possible to squeeze them
- attempts at precipitating outright war (Turkey's jet "over international waters" trick)
- the rest of the bag of tricks we should be quite familiar with by now.

This genocide is easy to prevent - just let the Syrians deal with this.

Now how to counter the deep imprint of the propaganda machine turning those tricks, that's another story.

 

[Caustic Logic]

By the way, I'm not seeing many viewers from here checking out the report. Maybe one. It's not that hard, and it's an interesting read. You could check the intro part, scan the table of contents and see if a section sounds interesting. One bizarre, concentrated miniature of some of the types of discrepancy and illogic of the main subject is covered in section 1.4. Even that's a little long to read all through, but a half-reading skim should let you see how friggin' weird our democracy proxies and their versions of reality can get.

 

[uke2se]

Hand-tying also happens in New York, where the UN gets its bread buttered, and they haven''t yet managed to tell the West to stuff it. Yankee Moon is always moaning about the gov't doing this, or doing that, based on "activists say," just like in Libya.

Some of the same people. Many of the same tactics, especially in their propaganda (consider the Libyan approach to getting a regime blamed for sniping little kids in Misrata, compared to the FSA's adaptation for Homs - both articles by me). The same kind of spoiled-rotten unaccountability ...

And, depending... a lot of that "truly despicable" regime's alleged actions ... like the kid shot in Homs, and the Houla massacre with its own apparently fake witnesses ... are up in the air. And so is the relative despicability of the two sides.

If Western decision-makers realized how likely it is the rebels harbor and facilitate false-flagging child slashers, blame perhaps fictional Alawite militias, and lay the groundwork for a post-war genocide, and they had any ethics, well - that's less on the government, less reason for unease letting them win this, and those who've been helping the rebels could stop the following:
- weapons and fighters transited, trained, housed, and supplied from Turkey
- Open assistance from the "government"of Libya, who recognize the SNC as Syria's legit rulers
- Cash payments from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere
- Political enabling with one-sided rhetoric from Washington et al. insisting the rebels must win eventually, and open discussion of how to make that happen, various action following those ideas...
- politically-motivated sanctions, attacks on the state (finances, trade, travel, media, military) anything possible to squeeze them
- attempts at precipitating outright war (Turkey's jet "over international waters" trick)
- the rest of the bag of tricks we should be quite familiar with by now.

This genocide is easy to prevent - just let the Syrians deal with this.

Now how to counter the deep imprint of the propaganda machine turning those tricks, that's another story.

I really don't think you can honestly positively assert that there's going to be a genocide if the rebels win.

The West generally support the rebels because we see them as fighting for democracy - something that isn't true for all the rebels. To me, the situation in Syria is a lose-lose situation. I believe the UN should send peace-keepers to protect the civilians that are dying in droves. This mission should be extended to rebuilding after the war is over, to prevent any genocides or ethnic cleansing, among other reasons. Such a mission would undermine the authority of the Syrian regime, and will thus be blocked by Russia and China. I hate this kind of politicking, as it gambles with peoples' lives for no good reason.

I still don't see why a massacre in Libya is pertinent to the situation in Syria. The two nations are quite far apart.

 

[jargon buster]

By the way, I'm not seeing many viewers from here checking out the report.

I did tell you earlier...

And quite possibly so does everyone else, unfortunatly for you no one really cares.
It only seems to matter to you who killed them, they are dead, someone killed them, you cant do anything about it.

You really need to let it go.

 

[Caustic Logic]

I did tell you earlier...

Oh, sorry, that subtle message must've gotten mixed in with tour othercomments to where I didn't notice it. Once it's a rebel crime, no one cares, huh? What a friggin' shock. Before that, people were saying (not anyone here):

There are places in the world, like Srebrenica in Bosnia, like Hama in Syria, where the ghosts of death linger long after the event. You smell them and you see them even before you arrive: these are haunted places. In a small field, part of the compound, belonging to the 32nd Brigade, a guard leads me to a corrugated-iron warehouse, terra-cotta colored, about 30 feet by 50 feet. I’m not so far away when I begin to feel a familiar sensation: something evil happened here.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/16/libya-gaddafi-s-reign-of-terror.html

After reading this, she should issue a new article saying

Oh, the rebels did it? Well hey, that's war. Sorry, no evil here - that's reserved for regimes disfavored by the state dep't. Otherwise, we don't believe in evil.

I realize I've been sort of uptight about this, especially early on in the thread, and have put, if anything too much energy into this project. But now, ideally, one of us would let go of our chosen mission. It ain't gonna be me. So maybe a few more rounds? Your call.

 

[Caustic Logic]

I still don't see why a massacre in Libya is pertinent to the situation in Syria. The two nations are quite far apart.

Some fair thoughts in the middle, a partial response to the last: Not far apart enough. A quick boat ride and you can have all the top people and (hundreds? thousands?) of members of the Belhaj-LIFG-Al Qaeda Tripoli Brigades fighting, reported dead, not dead and still fighting, inside Syria. From the horse's mouth:
https://www.facebook.com/Tripoli.Brigade

 

[uke2se]

Some fair thoughts in the middle, a partial response to the last: Not far apart enough. A quick boat ride and you can have all the top people and (hundreds? thousands?) of members of the Belhaj-LIFG-Al Qaeda Tripoli Brigades fighting, reported dead, not dead and still fighting, inside Syria. From the horse's mouth:
https://www.facebook.com/Tripoli.Brigade

I don't understand the connection. Are you saying the people who perpetrated the massacre in Libya are (as in, positively) now going to Syria to perpetrate another massacre?

I must say, your posts are kind of hard to understand. I get the feeling you are having trouble actually spelling out what you mean. Perhaps I'd have an easier time understand the connections you point out if you drop this whole passive aggressive thing you've got going.

 

[jargon buster]

Ever lived or died in a "humanitarian" warzone? No?

No, have you?

Once it's a rebel crime, no one cares, huh? What a friggin' shock. Before that, people were saying (not anyone here):

Correct, no one cares on here, maybe you should post your findings on "daily beast", have you done that yet?

But now, ideally, one of us would let go of our chosen mission. It ain't gonna be me.

Im not on a mission, I have already said I couldn't care less at least twice.
You carry on your lone crusade by all means, after all it's only your time thats being wasted.

 

[Robrob]

and it's too tedious to pull all the sources/links together.

/thread.

 

[Caustic Logic]

/thread.

Is there anything you're actually trying to say with that? The final report cited over 230 sources. I'm not sure how many. In January, I didn't pull together all those on the dozens of witnesses, as I linked to the info I collected and distilled from those sources, which no one read anyway?

Attacking this argument here... what is the argument, Robrob? Thanks.

No, have you?

No, but I chose to care about a place where many people have, and you've chosen to call it boring, once the dictator was bagged. One of those is the lazy attitude of the victorious armchair warrior, the other isn't.

Im not on a mission, I have already said I couldn't care less at least twice.

Yeah, at least twice. It's seemed almost mission-level for you. That's what I meant - your intense interest is letting me know how uninterested you, and "everyone here," are. It's sort of interesting, really.