Obama is under attack over the uncertain future and cost of the Libya operation, writes LARA MARLOWE
PRESIDENT BARACK Obama cut short the last stop of his five-day Latin American tour yesterday to return to Washington, where he is under attack for the cost and uncertain future of the Libyan intervention.
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments estimates the Libyan operation could cost the US up to $300 million (€212 million) per week, at a time when budget cuts are the leading partisan issue.
Mr Obama reportedly wants to end US participation in the air war before Congress reconvenes next Monday, and hopes that at the weekend the US will be able to hand command of the operation to what defence secretary Robert Gates called "Nato's command-and-control machinery without it being a Nato mission and without a Nato flag".
Secretary of state Hillary Clinton told ABC television the administration had heard of "people close to" Col Muammar Gadafy sniffing out an exit strategy. "We would encourage that," Mrs Clinton said.
At a press conference in El Salvador on Tuesday, Mr Obama argued that the Libyan war was "in America's national interest" because "a brutal dictator is threatening his people".
The New York Timesyesterday published a harrowing account of that brutality, written by four of its journalists who were held by Libyan soldiers from March 15th until March 22nd.
The journalists are Anthony Shadid, the paper's Beirut bureau chief, who has won two Pulitzer prizes, photographers Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks, and reporter and videographer Stephen Farrell.
The journalists were heading for the frontline town of Ajdabiya when they were warned by motorists that Gadafy's forces had entered the city. They turned back towards Benghazi, and ran into a government checkpoint. Their first inclination was to speed through, but a soldier flung open the driver's door, shouting "Journalists!"
The driver, Mohammed, is feared to have been killed. Addario later saw a body on the ground near their car. "We still don't know whether that was Mohammed," the journalists said. "We fear that it was . . . If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us."
As the journalists were pulled from their car, the checkpoint came under rebel attack. They ran through gunfire towards a house, where they found a woman and a crying infant. Libyan soldiers caught the journalists, beat them, bound them with cloth, shoelaces, wire and cable. "You're the translator," a soldier screamed at Shadid. "You're the spy!"
"At that moment . . . none of us thought we were going to live," the journalists wrote. One soldier said "Shoot them!" in Arabic, but another insisted: "You can't. They're Americans." Two days later, when a soldier yelled in Farrell's ear, "Down, down USA!" Farrell replied, "I'm not American. I'm Irish." "Down, down Ireland!" the soldier shouted back.
During their first night in captivity, the journalists were held in pick-up trucks, but were allowed to lie on the ground each time the unit came under rebel attack. "The rebels and the army, or militia, didn't seem separated by all that much. They were really gangs of young men with guns, each convinced of each other's evil," they wrote.
A second, more vicious, group seized the journalists in the early hours of March 16th. They were beaten again. Addario was groped and a laughing soldier tried to shove a bayonet into Farrell's posterior.
A man called "the sheikh" told Hicks: "You have a beautiful head. I'm going to remove it and put it on mine. I'm going to cut it off."
A soldier caressed Addario's face as he told her: "You might die tonight. Maybe, maybe not."
The journalists were driven "like trophies of war" to Gadafy's home town of Sirte. "Over the years, all of us had seen men detained, blindfolded and handcuffed at places like Abu Ghraib, or corralled after some operation in Iraq or Afghanistan," they wrote. "For the first time, we felt what it was like to be disoriented by a blindfold, to have plastic cuffs dig into your wrists."
They endured the worst treatment on their third day of captivity, in a jail in Sirte. Shadid's interrogator told him: "Don't you know you could be killed here and no one would ever know?"
As they waited for a military plane to Tripoli, Hicks was slapped and punched, Shadid was hit with a rifle butt and Addario was groped a second time.
In Tripoli, the journalists were held in a military intelligence compound, and treated better. They heard explosions when the war started on Saturday, and fought boredom by reading the Shakespeare plays they found in their cell. An official from the Libyan foreign ministry quoted Yeats to them, "Those that I fight I do not hate/Those that I guard I do not love."
Turkish diplomats negotiated their release and accompanied them to the border.