According to government officials, about 26,000 criminals — political prisoners were kept in separate facilities and remained in lockdown — were serving time when the escapes began. Almost 200 of those escapees were facing the death penalty for serious crimes, including murder.

“There was panic inside and outside the prisons,” said Dya Adin Badi, who, at the outset of protests last year, was in charge of seven detention facilities stretching from Ras Lanuf through Sirte to Misrata.

“The guards had fled. There was no security, no staff. We didn’t want a riot on our hands.”

In Tripoli, Col. Moammar Gadhafi had already begun to release prisoners in the hope, some claim, that they would join his army ranks. In other areas, instability left wardens with few options.

Badi said angry crowds began to form outside his prisons. Relatives began demanding the release of loved ones, many of whom, Badi said, were facing false or excessive sentences.

“We waited orders from Tripoli, but no word came, so we found our own solution,” he said.

The few staff that remained began releasing inmates 10 at a time. Those facing murder charges were kept in detention for another two days, as much for the protection of the public as for their own safety. But with no security, no staff, no budget and no food, Badi had no choice but to release them too.

Badi said some were reluctant to leave for fear of revenge killings. He recalled one man who begged to stay, but there was no one left to secure the building. His crime had been the murder of two children and their mother. Within two days of his release he was found dead, Badi said.

As the war escalated, it became impossible to tell how many others met the same fate.

Hundreds joined the rebel frontlines. Several climbed the ranks to become commanders. Many were killed in battle. Others simply fled, their whereabouts unknown.

With the proliferation of small arms on Libya’s streets today, the presence of escaped prisoners is a destabilizing force.

Misrata Police Chief Ibrahim Mohammed Alsherikcia said that although these criminals pose one of the biggest threats in the city, old records were destroyed when the Misrata courthouse was bombed and later occupied by Gadhafi forces, so they cannot simply re-arrest former inmates, no matter how serious the offense.

“They are now free criminals and all of them are armed,” he said.

Alsherikcia said that of those who joined the rebel ranks, many were martyred and “redeemed their sins.” But others took advantage of the war to gather weapons and continue their criminal activities. Even those who break the law again often go unpunished in a system where militia groups hold more power than police.

In a report released earlier this month, the United Nations expressed serious concerns about Libya’s developing justice system, as well as its ability to contend with past oppression.

“The judicial system suffers from the legacy of being used as a tool of repression,” the report read. “Existing Libyan laws will need to be repealed or amended. … The vast majority of detainees are still held outside the legal framework, despite efforts to centralize detentions.”

In some ways this emerging justice system mirrors that of the former regime, in which security forces “benefited from complete impunity,” the UN report said.

Since the end of the revolution, both ex-rebel militias and police have also administered their own form of justice, also in a “climate of impunity.” While members of Gadhafi forces are hunted down and imprisoned — so far without formal charges or access to legal aid — those who commit offenses from within the revolutionary forces continue to go unpunished.

The UN report did note one significant difference these days. Individuals or independent units, it said, are committing offenses instead of groups operating in a “system of brutality sanctioned by the central government.”

Abdullatef Gadour, a veteran prosecutor in the attorney general’s office who stayed on with the new government, said that while major changes are underway, much of the old judicial system would remain in place. Gadour said the Gadhafi-era laws were essentially adequate and fair.

“One of the few things Gadhafi didn’t destroy was the country’s judicial system,” he said. “Instead he came in through the back door.”

Instead of changing the system, Gadhafi simply created “exceptional courts and laws” for his own purposes, he said. These “closed-door” courts were used to try political prisoners and punish disloyalty to the regime outside of the criminal justice system.

In many cases, prisoners did not see a court at all.

“For every 10 prisoners on record maybe 100 went unnamed,” said Badi, who is now retired from Libya’s prison system. “He recorded this in the same way he kept records of the national budget; he chose which ones to report.”

Today, an estimated 8,000 members of the former regime, many of which are also unlisted and held in unofficial detention centers, face an uncertain future.

Gadour said investigations have begun, trials are being prepared and amendments to the law will take effect once the new constitution is completed. He estimates it will take around five months for the trials to begin.

Members of Gadhafi’s military will face a military court, while recruits and volunteers who fought on Gadhafi’s frontlines will be tried for murder in a civil court, even if their only victims were fighters, he said.

Killing in combat is not in violation of international laws that regulate warfare. But by national law, Gadour explained, while civilians among Libya’s rebel forces are legally allowed to kill the enemy, those who fought for the old regime will not receive the same concessions.

“Gadhafi troops targeted civilians, while (rebel forces) were defending them. That is the difference,” he said, dismissing reports by human rights groups that the rebels were also guilty of abuses.

Libya’s new justice coordinator, Jamal Bennor, said that, in time, the needed changes to Libya’s justice system would be made. But, he said, it is crucial to activate the security ministries, introduce the new constitution and hold national elections first. In time, justice will be applied equally.

“I think people still trust the law,” he said. “We are still far away from applying the law to many criminal actions, but we are not ignoring these crimes. All offenses will be investigated in time.”

Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.

We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.

Two armed trucks raced toward us from behind, filling up our back window before soaring past. This was how the rebel convoys seemed to form, like schools of fish that hunted together, but have no clear leader or command structure.

Over a small hill we saw some men, boys really, standing around a sedan. We leaped out to do some interviews. Clare asked how far away Gadhafi’s forces were. The boy said 300 meters. 300 meters? I looked at Clare. It seemed impossible. But as a precaution, we hustled off to the side of the road. A static mortar or a rocket position could have easily dialed in on us from that distance. The small convoy rolled ahead, leaving us behind in what we thought was relative safety.

We watched the rebels push forward. They weren’t 200 meters away, at the rise of the next hill, when they sped back around. We watched for a second as they beared back down on us, followed by a barrage of machine gun fire. The loudest I had ever heard. Our small group of journalists — Anton, Clare, my fellow American, and Manu, a Spanish photographer — took off running.

“We need to get to the vehicles,” Anton shouted. But the rebel trucks were retreating too fast and the ones in pursuit were firing wildly. There were two Gadhafi military pickups — tan with large machine guns mounted on the back. The trucks were overflowing with armed men.

With all the bullets flying, we pressed ourselves as close to the ground as possible. The rebels faded into the distance and the Gadhafi trucks slowed to a stop. The shooting continued. The roar of bullets overhead sounded like machines eating up metal. AK-47 rounds ripped past us from less than 50 meters.

Libya: Tripoli scenes from the uprising:

I crawled back toward Clare and Manu, who were under several small trees. The shooting intensified. We tried to speak, to yell for each other. But the bullets tearing overhead deafened everything. In a corner of my mind I hoped that we were in a cross fire, that behind us the rebels were shooting back. I crawled forward toward a larger sand dune with my camera rolling. Anton crouched in front of me. The bullets streamed directly over my helmet and shoulders. This was no crossfire. They were shooting at us, and they were shooting to kill.

“Help, help,” I heard Anton cry. His voice was weak. My mind tried to convince me of something I knew was not true. Maybe he had just fallen and twisted something. Another barrage of bullets passed over me. “Anton, are you OK?” I shouted between bursts of fire.

“No,” he said, in a much weaker voice.

****

I’ve heard journalists say that Libya was the perfect war. A reporter could get to the front line, close enough to hear the shells coming in, and back to a comfortable hotel in Benghazi, with a solid Internet connection, by evening.

But in reality, this war was anything but perfect — something I’d soon come to learn. It was a war led by confusion, abductions and an oppressive sense of the unknown. This latest spasm of the Arab Spring had none of the idealism of Tunis or Cairo. For me, it began with a rifle butt to he head, which bled into weeks of uncertainty, crushing captivity and ended, however improbably, in a four-star hotel in the besieged Libyan capital.

Along the way, between blindfolds and quiet conversations with fellow captives deep inside the country’s brutal prison system, I witnessed the last gasps of the Gadhafi regime — a corrupt and corrupted system that for more than 40 years ruled this tribal, oil-rich land.

I had done several tours as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for me, the frontlines felt natural. And I believed it was my job. But the freedom with which you could maneuver was deceptive. There was no highly-trained U.S. platoon to escort you. And the rebels were said to be some of the worst trained soldiers in the world. Most had never held a gun before the end of February, when they stormed Benghazi’s “katiba” and took them by force.

I tried to hold farther back after a few close calls — a near miss by a Girad rocket, for instance, or a tank shell ripping over the heads of Manu and I outside Ajadibya. Our ears popped. But the front kept calling.

As is common among freelancers, Clare Gillis, a 34-year-old from Connecticut, Manu Brabo, a 29-year-old from Gijon, Spain, and myself had been sharing rides and interviews together for several weeks. Anton Hammerl, a South African photographer who covered much of Africa — from the townships during Apartheid to child soldiers in the Congo — came late to our little group.

With all the rebel offensives and retreats along the coastal highway, we felt we had to get to the front every few days or risk completely losing track of the story. So on April 5, we headed out.

Our plan was to try to get a sense of who was really controlling Brega, a strategic oil town that had been the scene of some of the most deadly fighting since the uprising began several months earlier. A rebel general told us that if the rebels took Brega, they would hold it without advancing right away, thus learning from earlier mistakes where they stretched themselves too thin and were forced into whole scale retreats.

But Brega was dangerous. Manu and I had been caught in heavy shelling outside the town days before. I had seen two shells bounce off the ground a hundred meters away. A rebel was killed by shrapnel to the head in the truck Manu and I had leaped into for escape. We went with them to the hospital, hugged the bawling comrades afterwards and shot some eerie photos of them washing blood off their grenades.

Still, Brega was where the front was, so we woke up early to beat the crush of reporters. The four of us went in a Mercedes van piloted by a teen. We stopped at the only manned checkpoint some 20 kilometers outside town, where a crowd of the usual disheveled men, many of them teens, milled about waiting for the real fighters to assemble. We got out into the early sunshine and told our driver he could leave us there. It was just after 10 a.m.

We waited. Usually, with shouts of “Allah Akbar,” a convoy would push ahead, and we’d jump into one of the rebel vehicles heading to the front.

The red minibus started moving and we hustled on. It drove ahead with us as its only passengers, the young driver and his friend in front looked nervously from side to side. We stopped after a kilometer to inspect two smoldering pickup trucks, blackened crisps in the road. It appeared to have been a rebel ambush.

“Hit by a Sam 7,” Anton said pointing out the expended launcher and wire guidance system leading to the cindered vehicles. I took note of his wealth of knowledge. He’d been forced to join the South African infantry as a young man and hadn’t relished it.

****

The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent. The terrifying reality grabbed hold of me. The soldiers firing probably didn’t know that we were reporters. Rebels didn’t dress in regular uniforms and many were often not even armed. I had to surrender or we’d all be gunned down.

I leaped up from where my head had been buried in the sand to face the group of wild men shooting uncontrollably — it seemed our only hope. I held up my hands and yelled, “Sahafa! Sahafa!” It was one of the few Arabic words I knew. It means “journalist.” I walked slowly toward them.

There were three or four skinny, Arab-looking soldiers carrying AK-47s and a larger, darker one to the right. My eyes drifted toward Anton as I stumbled past the dune ahead of me. He was lying face down in the sand, his body askew, cameras still strapped around his shoulders, his legs splayed out.

As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head. My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47. All my instincts for self-preservation gathered within me. I went completely limp and complacent. The adrenaline was coursing so heavily through my body. I felt no pain.

I was thrown into the back of one of the pickup trucks. An Army boot pushed my face onto the floor. I glanced back and saw Manu and Clare being pulled off the ground.

A crazed looking soldier looked down and jeered at me in English, “You go on patrol! You go on patrol!” as if he knew exactly what we’d been trying to do. A cell phone was pushed close to my face. A picture was snapped. “Gadhafi Meia Meia,” a younger one said, thumping his chest, “Gadhafi 100 percent.” These words terrified me. After weeks of being with rebels who said things like, “Fuck Gadhafi,” with regular consistency, we had now found ourselves with the other side, the ones who had pledged their dying allegiance to the country’s dictatorial leader of more than four decades.

Clare and Manu were also forced down into the bed of the truck. Manu was face down and Clare, pushed against his side, was facing me. I looked at her for the first time. She had a purpled eye. She saw blood running from my scalp.

“Jim, are you OK?” she said, pleadingly. I nodded, and took stock of the blood pooling in the back of the truck. With a boot again on my face, my hands were bound behind me with a plastic cord. We sped away from the scene.

You can read Part 2 of James Foley’s story here.

From the Times:

To a colorful group of Americans — the Washington terrorism expert, the veteran C.I.A. officer, the Republican operative, the Kansas City lawyer — the Libyan gambit last March looked like a rare business opportunity.

Even as NATO bombed Libya, the Americans offered to make Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi their client — and charge him a hefty consulting fee. Their price: a $10 million retainer before beginning negotiations with Colonel Qaddafi’s representatives.

…

The other American partners were Neil S. Alpert, who had worked for the Republican National Committee and the pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Randell K. Wood, a Kansas City, Mo., lawyer who has represented Libyan officials and organizations since the 1980s.

If the name Neil Alpert sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because he played a role in the string of RNC scandals and embarrassments that led to the downfall of (now MSNBC analyst) Michael Steele last year.

With the RNC already facing allegations of gross mismanagement, Steele hired Alpert as a “special assistant for finance,” Politics Daily reported in April 2010.

This was problematic because just a few years before, Alpert had been ousted as the chair of the D.C. Baseball PAC after he was caught using the group’s bank accounts as his “personal piggy bank.” The political action committee’s mission was to bring Major League baseball back to Washington.

As I reported at the time, Alpert used the PAC’s debit card at gas stations, a cheesecake restaurant, Chick-Fil-A, and a Washington nightclub called LOVE. Alpert denied wrongdoing in the case, but Washington’s Office of Campaign Finance slapped him with a fine. Read the details of that saga here.

But it’s also true that polygamy doesn’t happen in a cultural vacuum — it’s different in reality than it is in theory.

It’s critical to understand the specific context in this case. Contrary to many reports, it isn’t that polygamy was previously illegal in Libya – it’s just that it came with serious restrictions. As Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has written about legal issues surrounding plural marriage, tells me, “The fact that the [former] polygamy rules in Libya, which require consent of the first wife given in front of a judge and the showing by the man of an affirmative need for an additional wife, has resulted in relatively low rates of polygamy is telling,” she says. “Wives clearly do not support polygamy in large numbers and must have some power to refuse consent.” Returning to unrestricted polygamy “would deprive women of any control over their husbands’ acquisition of multiple wives and reduce their intra-family power, as well their power in society,” Grossman says.

Moving from the specific to the general, it’s true that copious research has demonstrated the negative social impacts associated with polygamy (which almost always manifests as polygyny, a man taking multiple wives, and not the other way around). Many of these findings were summarized in a report that anthropologist Joseph Henrich presented in testimony during a Supreme Court case challenging Canada’s ban on polygamy. The chief problem introduced by the practice, at least when it is widely adopted, is that it creates “a pool of low-status men” whose potential wives go to “high status, wealthy men,” he argues. An unmarried male underclass is associated with greater crime – including rape and kidnapping of women — and generally leads men “to seek to exercise more control over the choices of women,” from what they wear to whom they date.

Polygyny also tends to lead to women — nay, girls — marrying younger and younger; at the same time, the age gap between husbands and wives expands dramatically. It’s also associated with lesser paternal investment in children, as the father’s resources are spread thin. An additional upshot of that is that it “may reduce national wealth (GDP) per capita both because of the manner in which male efforts are shifted to obtaining more wives and because of the increase in female fertility,” Henrich writes. He says that “monogamy seems to redirect male motivations in ways that generate lower crime rates, greater GDP per capita, and better outcomes for children” and goes so far as to argue that monogamous marriage “may have created the conditions for the emergence of democracy and political equality.” (I spoke with Henrich at length about this for my series on monogamy.)

As a philosophical thought exercise, there is a totally reasonable debate to be had over whether these many issues can be addressed independently, instead of by criminalizing the practice of polygamy. The question of how to strike a balance between preventing harm and defending personal freedom is a tricky one. In this case, though, it’s neither tricky nor an issue of balance: Abdul-Jalil has moved to overturn a law that guarded against harm while also defending freedom of choice.

“With regards to Gadhafi, we do not wait for anybody to tell us,” said Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, the deputy chief of the National Transitional Council, to the al-Arabiya satellite channel, according to the Guardian.

“We had already launched an investigation. we have issued a code of ethics in handling of prisoners of war. I am sure that was an individual act and not an act of revolutionaries or the national army. Whoever is responsible for that [Gaddafi's killing] will be judged and given a fair trial.”

The Guardian reports that the investigation may prove to be unwelcome in Misrata, which is where the rebels who captured Gadhafi in Sirte are based.

“Why are they even asking this question?” said Ibrahim Beit al-Mal, Misrata’s military chief. “He was caught and he was killed. would he have given us the same? Of course.”

In a leaked video days after Gadhafi’s capture, a rebel fighter who identified himself as Senad el-Sadik el-Ureybi, said that he had shot and killed Gadhafi.

“We grabbed him. I hit him in the face,” the fighter said in Arabic in the video, reports UPI. “Some fighters wanted to take him away and that’s when I shot him twice, in the head and in the chest.”

The National Transitional Council’s statement comes after cell phone video, obtained by GlobalPost, showed the wounded former leader being sodomized with a stick or knife.