Reply #17: W. mntns beg for NATO, NATO hits Gaddafi compound + aftermath, will G. go in bang or whimper?

[joshcryer]

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/05/21/libya.small.towns/">Libyan begs NATO to save his small town
The man in front of me clasping a new satellite telephone tells me he has an urgent message. He's just received a call from his hometown warning him Moammar Gadhafi's forces are on the verge of overrunning it and he's desperate for NATO to do something about it.

Mohammed, as he wants to be known, is a middle-aged, middle-class professional.

He says he walked out of al Galaa, population 16,000, under cover of darkness three weeks ago on a harrowing two-night trek to break the siege and bring word of their suffering. It's been his mission ever since, and tonight is no exception.

"The shelling has increased," he tells me.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/22/us-libya-idUSTRE7270JP20110522?feedType=RSS&">NATO strikes near Gaddafi's Tripoli compound
NATO staged an airstrike near Muammar Gaddafi's compound in Tripoli late on Saturday, and an opposition website said Libyan government forces shelled residential areas outside the rebel-held city of Misrata.

Libyan officials said the alliance had attacked close to Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah complex, and Reuters Television pictures showed a column of smoke rising over the capital.

However, there was no immediate word on what the target of the attack was, and reporters escorted by Libyan officials were unable to get close to the site.

http://www.libyafeb17.com/2011/05/aftermath-of-nato-hitting-the-intelligence-buildings-in-tripoli/">Aftermath of NATO hitting ministry and intelligence buildings in Tripoli
Sky News reporter Mark Stone attests to the accuracy of NATO air strikes. “One thing that strikes me as we see bomb sites is the level of accuracy of the NATO weapons. Building hit, building metres away untouched,” he said on Twitter. Whether the strikes are right or wrong, they seem to be hitting their designated targets. “Yesterday at the port, we saw small (50m) military boats destroyed, and yet the harbour which they were moored to undamaged.”

Journalists at the Rixos Hotel were taken on Saturday to the bomed “Ministry of Oversight & Inspection”, which is supposedly the “anti-corruption ministry” according to the Libyan regime. The journalists spent one hour there observing the damage. “We found the remains of what we believe was a JDAM bomb in the wreckage of the Ministry,” Mark Stone writes.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8527894/Tripoli-despatch-Will-Gaddafi-go-with-a-whimper-or-a-bang.html">Tripoli despatch: Will Gaddafi go with a whimper or a bang?
At 2am last Thursday, it sounded like curtains for Muammar Gaddafi. Enormous volleys of gunfire broke out across Tripoli, and around the hotel where the foreign press is forced to stay. Armed men charged past in pickup trucks, firing their weapons and wildly honking their horns. Was this the "Saddam statue moment" that Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron have been longing for?

But then it became clear that the flags flying from the trucks were a regime-friendly green, and the pictures taped to the windscreens were of a certain colonel only too familiar to Tripoli residents.

Libya's state television informed us that this late-night outbreak of spontaneous public joy had erupted to celebrate a pro-Gaddafi demonstration in the rebel capital of Benghazi. "We are one country again," shouted one of the hundreds of ecstatic loyalists gathered in Tripoli's city centre, as he sprayed the sky with bullets.