From Protest to Genocide in Libya

Yesterday was the day Muammar Qaddafi crossed the line from repression to genocide.  Yesterday was the day he ordered the Libyan  air force to attack thousands of unarmed protesters and  at least two pilots flew their planes to the island of Malta and asked for asylum instead. 

Yesterday was also the day an amateur video surfaced on YouTube that showed the charred remains  of Libyan soldiers who refused to fire on their fellow citizens. They were burned to a crisp in their barracks for their  scruples.  I saw it first on the Al Jazeera English live feed    It's pretty graphic and profoundly shocking.

 That same feed showed various Libyan ambassadors quitting their posts and  various Libyan expats calling for the ouster of the regime.  Ibrahim Dabbashi,  deputy ambassador to the UN publicly pleaded with Qadddafi to step down and begged the international community to intervene.

There are two possible responses by a despotic regime to a threat to its power.  We saw one in Iran last year and another recently in Tunisia and Egypt.  The sad fact is, that with enough force, a brutal regime like that of Iran, can put down any uprising and it looks like Qaddafi is willing to do whatever it takes to hang on. Qaddafi is not only a dictator, he is a  psychopath-- brutal and wily. We are only now seeing the true face of the regime and the evil that the nation of Libya has been living with for more than forty years.

There is not much time.  Things are unfolding very quickly.  Yesterday the situation moved from protest to genocide.  If the civilized world does not intervene in some meaningful way, who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Tweeting the Revolution

This is my third day of tweeting the aftermath of the elections in Iran and the experience is just blowing me away.

On Sunday, Twitter had the news long before TV and the amount of info that was being shared online, albeit without vetting, was just amazing. I won't mention the names of the Tweeters in Iran for security reasons, but picture this.

I'm in New Jersey, reading tweets from an Iranian student sitting with a laptop on a balcony in an apartment building in Tehran. I'm getting a blow by blow of what's going on in the street below. Iranians in New York and London are tweeting reports from their friends and relatives in Tehran. Demonstrations are being set up in front of Iranian embassies all over the world on Twitter. Links to Youtube and Flickr give me up to the minute graphic images to chew on. Meanwhile, CNN is re-running a report from Iran filed hours earlier by Christiane Amanpour. Let's see-- Twitter or CNN? It's a no brainer. It was a watershed moment in the world of communication not unlike CNN's coverage of the first Gulf War. The gap was so great, we will never be the same again.

By yesterday, half of the Twitterverse had green icons, in solidarity with the Iranian people. Efforts to block twitter and silence the Iranian twitterers were being countered by internet saavy geeks and hackers all over the world. Demonstrations were increasing. Tension was mounting. CNN was scrambling and the beat went on.

Last night I read an interesting blogpost laying out the proposition that the whole thing was a well planned Israeli effort to destabilize Iran by delegitimizing the election. You can read the whole post here and decide for yourself whether it is truth or disinformation. Whatever it is, it made me stop and think.Not only is the situation in Iran a watershed moment in the world of politics and a sea change in communication techniques, it might also be a new wrinkle in espionage.

Whatever is happening and whatever the truth is, it is big. Very big. The world will never be the same again and as events unfold, we may just find ourselves tweeting more than one revolution.