President Barack Obama said the US would not rule out arming Libyan rebels as Moamar Gaddafi's forces defied air strikes to launch fierce attacks on two fronts.

Mr Gaddafi's forces bombarded the city of Misrata in the west and pushed rebels back from Sirte and out of the town of Bin Jawad in the east.

Speaking in Washington about the prospect of arming the rebels this morning, Mr Obama said: "I'm not ruling it out. But I'm also not ruling it in. We're still making an assessment partly about what Gaddafi's forces are going to be doing."

Earlier, at a London conference of nations allied against the Libyan regime, delegates insisted there was no future for Mr Gaddafi, saying the Libyan leader had lost legitimacy and would be held accountable for his actions.

But Mr Gaddafi's forces took the upper hand in fighting on the ground, forcing rebels into a helter-skelter retreat east of Sirte and sending them fleeing from Bin Jawad, which they had recaptured at the weekend.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/30/3177231.htm

BREGA, Libya — Forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi advanced rapidly on Wednesday, seizing towns they ceded just days ago after intense allied airstrikes and hounding rebel fighters into a chaotic retreat.

Having abandoned Bin Jawwad on Tuesday and the oil town of Ras Lanuf on Wednesday, the rebels continued their eastward retreat, fleeing before the loyalists’ shelling and missile attacks from another oil town, Brega, and falling back toward the strategically located city of Ajdabiya. On Wednesday afternoon, residents of Ajdabiya were seen fleeing along the road north to Benghazi, the rebel capital and stronghold that Colonel Qaddafi’s forces reached before the allied air campaign got underway nearly two weeks ago.

There were few signs of the punishing airstrikes that reversed the loyalists’ first push eastward into rebel-held territory. But military experts said they expected the counterattack to expose Colonel Qaddafi’s forces to renewed attacks, and an American military spokesman said that coalition warplanes resumed bombing the pro-Qaddafi units on Wednesday, without specifying either the timing or locations.

“The operation is continuing and will continue throughout the transition” to NATO command, said Capt. Clint Gebke. There were 102 airstrikes over a 24-hour period ending at 12 a.m. Eastern time, according to the United States Africa Command.

But the airstrikes, such as they were, did little to reverse the momentum of the battle. On the approaches to Brega, hundreds of cars and small trucks heading east clogged the highway as rebel forces pulled back toward Ajdabiya, recaptured from loyalist troops only days ago. Some rebels said Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, pushing eastward from Ras Lanuf, were within 10 miles of Brega.

The retreating force seemed rudderless, a sea of vehicles and fighters armed with rudimentary weapons that have proved no match for Colonel Qaddafi’s better trained and better armed forces, which have intimidated the rebels with long-range shelling.

As rebels clustered at a gas station and small mosque between Brega and Ajdabiya, a single artillery shell or rocket exploded several hundred yards away, causing the rebels, who were chanting “God is great” and waving assault rifles, to jump into their vehicles and speed eastward.

A rebel military spokesman, speaking of the losses of the last two days, conceded that at Bin Jawwad and Ras Lanuf, rebel fighters had “dissolved like snow in the sand,” though he framed the retreat as a “tactical withdrawal.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/health/policy/30fda.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and make contacts with rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American officials.

While President Obama has insisted that no American ground troops join in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks and are part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help set back Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.

The C.I.A. presence comprises an unknown number of American officers who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and those who arrived more recently. In addition, current and former British officials said, dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British Tornado jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces, and missile installations, the officials said.

By meeting with rebel groups, the Americans hope to fill in gaps in understanding who the leaders are of the groups opposed Colonel Qaddafi, and what their allegiances are, according to United States government officials speaking only on condition of anonymity because the actions of C.I.A. operatives are classified. The C.I.A. has declined to comment. 

The United States and its allies in the NATO-led military intervention have scrambled over the last several weeks to gather detailed information on the location and abilities of Libyan infantry and armored forces, intelligence that normally takes months of painstaking analysis.

“We didn’t have great data,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, who handed over control of the Libya mission to NATO on Wednesday, said in an e-mail earlier this week.   “Libya hasn’t been a country we focused on a lot over past few years,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/world/africa/31intel.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Updated 25 minutes ago

At least 40 civilians have been killed in air strikes by coalition forces on Tripoli, the top Vatican official in the Libyan capital said.

"The air strikes are meant to protect civilians but they are killing dozens of civilians," said Bishop Giovanni Innocenzo Martinelli by phone.

The apostolic vicar of Tripoli cited what he called reliable sources in close contact with residents.

"In the Tajoura neighbourhood around 40 civilians were killed and a house with a family inside collapsed," he said.

"In the Buslim neighbourhood, due to the bombardments, a civilian building came down, although it is not clear how many people were inside."

NATO says it is investigating the bishop's report but had no confirmation of civilian casualties in Tripoli.

Bishop Martinelli earlier told Catholic news agency Fides the 40 civilians were killed in Buslim, but he later corrected the district to Tajoura, saying he had confused the names of the two neighbourhoods.

He said his information on the killings came from "people who work with us, who have many contacts with residents, who are on the ground and know the situation very well."

"I rule out that they could be giving me the official line on this," he said. "I have not seen it myself but these are people that I know well."

Libyan officials have taken foreign reporters to the sites of what they say were Western air strikes on Tripoli, but evidence of civilian casualties has been inconclusive.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/01/3179444.htm?section=justin

An operation billed as a humanitarian intervention in Libya by President Obama was described in starkly more military terms Thursday by the administration’s top two defense officials.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told lawmakers that continuing coalition attacks on Libyan government troops — even when they were not directly threatening civilians — would encourage senior government and military officials to break with Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and inspire more civilians to join opposition forces.

“His military, at a certain point, is going to have to face the question of whether they are prepared over time to be destroyed by these air attacks or whether they decide it’s time for him to go,” Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The testimony came amid reports that another member of Gaddafi’s inner circle had defected, boosting the spirits of the beleaguered rebels. A top Libyan Foreign Ministry official, Ali Abdel Salam al-Treki, announced his defection in a statement sent to news agencies by his nephew. British Prime Minister David Cameron and White House spokesman Jay Carney on Thursday hailed the earlier defection of Libyan Foreign Minister Musa Kusa, saying it was a sign that Gaddafi’s power was eroding.

In eastern Libya, rebels fought their way back into the key oil-refinery town of Brega but were soon forced to withdraw under heavy shelling from Gaddafi’s forces, which maintain a huge firepower advantage over the ragtag opposition army.

In his testimony, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed the rebels’ losses in recent days on the heavy cloud cover in Libya, which has prevented U.S. and allied jets from attacking Gaddafi’s ground forces.

Mullen said the sustained bombing campaign had destroyed as much as 25 percent of Gaddafi’s military arsenal and pledged that coalition forces would continue to hammer away at his ground forces.

Some of the United States’ partners have acknowledged that the initial descriptions of the intervention in Libya no longer apply. “What is happening in Libya is not a no-fly zone,” a senior European diplomat told reporters, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity. “The no-fly zone was a diplomatic thing, to get the Arabs on board. What we have in Libya is more than that.”

Although Gates said that unseating Gaddafi was not the stated goal of the military mission, he made clear that the United States and its allies intended to use military force to aid the Libyan opposition and compel Gaddafi and his inner circle to surrender.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/lawmakers-batter-gates-on-libya/2011/03/31/AFLSRdAC_print.html

There are new signs the government of Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi might be willing to compromise, as casualties in the clashes between his forces and rebels continue to mount.

But there is a big catch, with the government insisting that Mr Gaddafi himself must be allowed to stay.

It is an offer unlikely to impress the rebels or the Western countries currently enforcing a no-fly zone over the country.

The ragtag opposition army has once again faced off against pro-Gaddafi forces in several areas of the country and there are reports rebels have made advances on the oil town of Brega in the east.

Rebels fighters claim an air strike destroyed two government military vehicles in Brega, where rebels have clashed with Mr Gaddafi's forces for five days.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/05/3183161.htm?section=justin

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But the real story behind all the kerfuffle:

European leaders have been criticised for the selective humanitarian impulses that impelled them to turn against their erstwhile ally Colonel Gaddafi, while remaining passive in the face of the repression of pro-democracy protests in Yemen or Bahrain. Libyan oil has been cited as one of the main reasons for this discrepancy.

But there is another aspect of European hypocrisy and double-standards in dealing with the Libyan dictator that has received less attention ­ namely Libya's crucial role as a barrier against Europe's unwanted immigrants.

With a possible endgame in the Libyan civil war now beginning to emerge, with Gaddafi sending his envoy Abdelati al-Obeidi to Greece to discuss a way out of the conflict, it is worth reminding ourselves of the extent of such cooperation.

For more than a decade the booming Libyan economy has been a destination for legal and illegal migrants from Africa and even further afield in Bangladesh and China. The extended Libyan coast has also been a springboard for undocumented migration into Europe.

Following Tony Blair's famous kiss in 2004, Gaddafi entered into a series of agreements with the European Union and individual governments, in which Libya effectively became a co-partner in enforcing Europe's 'externalised' border controls.

Joint naval patrols with Italy; laws penalising illegal immigration; a crackdown on 'people smugglers'; new detention centres and deportation procedures; readmission agreements on migrants intercepted at sea ­ all these developments reflected Libya's new willingness to cooperate with Europe's exclusionary agenda and many of them were part-financed by the EU and Italy.

By John Simpson World Affairs Editor, BBC News, Tripoli

"This is our country," said Saif al-Islam, Col Muammar Gaddafi's son, in a BBC interview late on Monday night. "You want us to leave? To go where?"

"To Zimbabwe?" I asked. "To Uganda?" He laughed: "Excuse me, no."

"To Venezuela?" "Ha, ha, ha." "Not going?" "Of course not."

Given the apparent determination of Saif al-Islam to hang on in Tripoli, we could be some way from the final stages of the Libyan crisis.

...

Col Gaddafi knows that no-one will judge him and reward him for his democratic credentials. The defection of Moussa Koussa ought to have been an embarrassment to Libya.

Instead, in his BBC interview, Saif al-Islam used the rather effective tool of bland denial. Moussa Koussa was just an old and sick man who needed treatment in Britain, and made up stories to get himself political asylum.

In the same way, he presented the war as being one between the whole Libyan nation and a few armed militiamen, many of whom are, he says, influenced by Islamic extremists.

...

Until one side can defeat the other, it looks as though Libya will stay divided between east and west.

And some of the richest oil installations lie, tantalisingly enough, right on the front line.

British prime minister David Cameron and US president Barack Obama have issued a joint news conference in London, stressing the need for Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi to be removed from power.

The two leaders met against a backdrop of a stalemate in the three-month conflict, with Gaddafi hanging on to power despite a NATO air campaign launched to protect civilians and attack Libyan government targets.

They have predicted Gaddafi will ultimately leave power and Mr Cameron has not denied the British military is considering using its attack helicopters against Libyan targets to increase the heat on Gaddafi.

"We will be looking at all the options for turning up that pressure," Mr Cameron said when asked about the helicopters.

"It is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Gaddafi still in power - he must go."

And Mr Obama has given no sign that the US or UK are willing to return to the lead firepower role it adopted at the start of the Libya operation before handing over to NATO in March.

He ruled out deploying ground forces in Libya and says air power is making a huge difference, despite conceding it would be a slow process.

"Ultimately this is going to be a slow, steady process in which we are able to wear down the regime," Mr Obama.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/25/3227107.htm