In case you somehow missed it: #sockpuppets offer "excellent cover and powerful deniability"

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: "The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."

He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.

Centcom said it was not targeting any US-based web sites, in English or any other language, and specifically said it was not targeting Facebook or Twitter.

Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.

Centcom's contract requires for each controller the provision of one "virtual private server" located in the United States and others appearing to be outside the US to give the impression the fake personas are real people located in different parts of the world.

It also calls for "traffic mixing", blending the persona controllers' internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that must offer "excellent cover and powerful deniability".

The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces. Since then, OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

OEV is seen by senior US commanders as a vital counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation programme. In evidence to the US Senate's armed services committee last year, General David Petraeus, then commander of Centcom, described the operation as an effort to "counter extremist ideology and propaganda and to ensure that credible voices in the region are heard". He said the US military's objective was to be "first with the truth".

This month Petraeus's successor, General James Mattis, told the same committee that OEV "supports all activities associated with degrading the enemy narrative, including web engagement and web-based product distribution capabilities".

Centcom confirmed that the $2.76m contract was awarded to Ntrepid, a newly formed corporation registered in Los Angeles. It would not disclose whether the multiple persona project is already in operation or discuss any related contracts.

Nobody was available for comment at Ntrepid.

In his evidence to the Senate committee, Gen Mattis said: "OEV seeks to disrupt recruitment and training of suicide bombers; deny safe havens for our adversaries; and counter extremist ideology and propaganda." He added that Centcom was working with "our coalition partners" to develop new techniques and tactics the US could use "to counter the adversary in the cyber domain".

According to a report by the inspector general of the US defence department in Iraq, OEV was managed by the multinational forces rather than Centcom.

Asked whether any UK military personnel had been involved in OEV, Britain's Ministry of Defence said it could find "no evidence". The MoD refused to say whether it had been involved in the development of persona management programmes, saying: "We don't comment on cyber capability."

OEV was discussed last year at a gathering of electronic warfare specialists in Washington DC, where a senior Centcom officer told delegates that its purpose was to "communicate critical messages and to counter the propaganda of our adversaries".

Persona management by the US military would face legal challenges if it were turned against citizens of the US, where a number of people engaged in sock puppetry have faced prosecution.

Last year a New York lawyer who impersonated a scholar was sentenced to jail after being convicted of "criminal impersonation" and identity theft.

It is unclear whether a persona management programme would contravene UK law. Legal experts say it could fall foul of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, which states that "a person is guilty of forgery if he makes a false instrument, with the intention that he or another shall use it to induce somebody to accept it as genuine, and by reason of so accepting it to do or not to do some act to his own or any other person's prejudice". However, this would apply only if a website or social network could be shown to have suffered "prejudice" as a result.

• This article was amended on 18 March 2011 to remove references to Facebook and Twitter, introduced during the editing process, and to add a comment from Centcom, received after publication, that it is not targeting those sites.

Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media

Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda

The Libya Intervention | The Nation

via @katrinanation

In a grim coincidence of history, Operation Odyssey Dawn, the UN-approved but American-led military campaign to establish a no-fly zone over Libya, began on March 19, exactly eight years after George W. Bush began his “shock and awe” war against Iraq.

There are many lessons to be learned from the debacle in Iraq, but one of the most important is that it was a blatant violation of international law, an unjustified, unprovoked war of aggression. The Iraqi people have paid a tragic price for the Bush administration’s disregard of global opinion, and America’s reputation was deeply tarnished. Indeed, President Obama was elected in 2008 in part to restore the country’s moral standing in the world.

In many respects, Obama seems to have learned this lesson. He resisted calls from right and left for unilateral US intervention in Libya. Instead, the White House favored a series of UN Security Council–mandated measures to weaken Muammar el-Qaddafi’s hold on power and prevent him from slaughtering his own people. It wasn’t until it was clear that those actions would fail—and the potential for a massacre of civilians had increased—that the administration began to consider military action.

Moreover, the president did what Bush did not do in 2003: he insisted there would be no US military action without Security Council approval and regional involvement, in particular from members of the Arab League. Obama also took steps to try to limit America’s military footprint and ruled out sending ground troops into Libya—indeed, the Security Council resolution explicitly forbids foreign occupation forces. The resolution also makes clear that its goal is the protection of civilians rather than regime change. Thus, the administration’s decision to support the UN action is an important defense of a multipolar world that operates according to international law.

But there is a second set of lessons from the Iraq War, relating to the costs and benefits of military action, that should raise serious concerns about the White House’s decision. First, like the Iraq War, the Libya intervention is a war of choice, undertaken by an executive acting without Congressional authorization. This is a continuation of a dangerous—and unconstitutional—precedent, one that President Obama himself opposed when he was a senator. “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” Obama said in December 2007.

Furthermore, as we should have learned from the Iraq War, the use of military force can have all kinds of unintended consequences. We may be going to war to prevent civilian casualties, but even the most prudent use of air power is incapable of doing that. The likelihood of US or coalition forces killing civilians will only increase if Qaddafi’s troops solidify their hold on Tripoli and other cities; urban warfare is notoriously messy. The UN resolution forbids foreign occupation, so what will we do if Qaddafi hangs on and the conflict settles into a grinding civil war, with all its attendant chaos and bloodshed? Mission creep seems to be an inevitable feature of this kind of intervention.

The dilemmas abound. The UN resolution calls for a cease-fire; yet rebel forces insist they will not observe it, even if Qaddafi decides to. Does this mean allied forces will be obliged to attack the rebels? The resolution also calls for an arms embargo, without excluding the opposition from that stipulation. And yet leaders and pundits among the allies are talking about supplying arms to them. The resolution does not mention regime change, and yet that is the Obama administration’s policy; how will the administration square White House policy with its UN obligations?

Perhaps most troubling of all is the flagrant hypocrisy of US pursuit of yet another Middle East military campaign, ostensibly with humanitarian goals, even as it gives weapons and diplomatic support to the corrupt royal families of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the other tin-pot tyrants of the Persian Gulf, who have banded together in savage repression of their own democratic oppositions. Consistency—never a notable virtue of US Mideast policy—would seem to demand, at the very least, an end to the Gulf arms pipeline, and diplomatic support for the people of Bahrain against the thugs of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Military “solutions” to grave humanitarian crises are tempting, but history shows that they rarely solve anything. They usually lead to more problems, deeper tragedy. Given our massive budget deficits and bloated Pentagon spending (see Robert Dreyfuss, in this issue), never has there been a better time for America to end its role as global policeman in favor of diplomatic and economic multilateralism.

Juan Cole's Open Letter to the Left on Libya

via @jricole and @katrinanation

As I expected, now that Qaddafi’s advantage in armor and heavy weapons is being neutralized by the UN allies’ air campaign, the liberation movement is regaining lost territory. Liberators took back Ajdabiya and Brega (Marsa al-Burayqa), key oil towns, on Saturday into Sunday morning, and seemed set to head further West. This rapid advance is almost certainly made possible in part by the hatred of Qaddafi among the majority of the people of these cities. The Buraiqa Basin contains much of Libya’s oil wealth, and the Transitional Government in Benghazi will soon again control 80 percent of this resource, an advantage in their struggle with Qaddafi.

I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed. I can still remember when I was a teenager how disappointed I was that Soviet tanks were allowed to put down the Prague Spring and extirpate socialism with a human face. Our multilateral world has more spaces in it for successful change and defiance of totalitarianism than did the old bipolar world of the Cold War, where the US and the USSR often deferred to each other’s sphere of influence.

The United Nations-authorized intervention in Libya has pitched ethical issues of the highest importance, and has split progressives in unfortunate ways. I hope we can have a calm and civilized discussion of the rights and wrongs here.

On the surface, the situation in Libya a week and a half ago posed a contradiction between two key principles of Left politics: supporting the ordinary people and opposing foreign domination of them. Libya’s workers and townspeople had risen up to overthrow the dictator in city after city– Tobruk, Dirna, al-Bayda, Benghazi, Ajdabiya, Misrata, Zawiya, Zuara, Zintan. Even in the capital of Tripoli, working-class neighborhoods such as Suq al-Jumah and Tajoura had chased out the secret police. In the two weeks after February 17, there was little or no sign of the protesters being armed or engaging in violence.

The libel put out by the dictator, that the 570,000 people of Misrata or the 700,000 people of Benghazi were supporters of “al-Qaeda,” was without foundation. That a handful of young Libyan men from Dirna and the surrounding area had fought in Iraq is simply irrelevant. The Sunni Arab resistance in Iraq was for the most part not accurately called ‘al-Qaeda,’ which is a propaganda term in this case. All of the countries experiencing liberation movements had sympathizers with the Sunni Iraqi resistance; in fact opinion polling shows such sympathy almost universal throughout the Sunni Arab world. All of them had at least some fundamentalist movements. That was no reason to wish the Tunisians, Egyptians, Syrians and others ill. The question is what kind of leadership was emerging in places like Benghazi. The answer is that it was simply the notables of the city. If there were an uprising against Silvio Berlusconi in Milan, it would likely unite businessmen and factory workers, Catholics and secularists. It would just be the people of Milan. A few old time members of the Red Brigades might even come out, and perhaps some organized crime figures. But to defame all Milan with them would be mere propaganda.

Then Muammar Qaddafi’s sons rallied his armored brigades and air force to bomb the civilian crowds and shoot tank shells into them. Members of the Transitional Government Council in Benghazi estimate that 8000 were killed as Qaddafi’s forces attacked and subdued Zawiya, Zuara, Ra’s Lanuf, Brega, Ajdabiya, and the working class districts of Tripoli itself, using live ammunition fired into defenseless rallies. If 8000 was an exaggeration, simply “thousands” was not, as attested by Left media such as Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! As Qaddafi’s tank brigades reached the southern districts of Benghazi, the prospect loomed of a massacre of committed rebels on a large scale.

The United Nations Security Council authorization for UN member states to intervene to forestall this massacre thus pitched the question. If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi’s destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya’s workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people. Qaddafi would have reestablished himself, with the liberation movement squashed like a bug and the country put back under secret police rule. The implications of a resurgent, angry and wounded Mad Dog, his coffers filled with oil billions, for the democracy movements on either side of Libya, in Egypt and Tunisia, could well have been pernicious.

The arguments against international intervention are not trivial, but they all did have the implication that it was all right with the world community if Qaddafi deployed tanks against innocent civilian crowds just exercising their right to peaceful assembly and to petition their government. (It simply is not true that very many of the protesters took up arms early on, though some were later forced into it by Qaddafi’s aggressive military campaign against them. There still are no trained troops to speak of on the rebel side).

Some have charged that the Libya action has a Neoconservative political odor. But the Neoconservatives hate the United Nations and wanted to destroy it. They went to war on Iraq despite the lack of UNSC authorization, in a way that clearly contravened the UN Charter. Their spokesman and briefly the ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, actually at one point denied that the United Nations even existed. The Neoconservatives loved deploying American muscle unilaterally, and rubbing it in everyone’s face. Those who would not go along were subjected to petty harassment. France, then deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz pledged, would be “punished” for declining to fall on Iraq at Washington’s whim. The Libya action, in contrast, observes all the norms of international law and multilateral consultation that the Neoconservatives despise. There is no pettiness. Germany is not ‘punished’ for not going along. Moreover, the Neoconservatives wanted to exercise primarily Anglo-American military might in the service of harming the public sector and enforced ‘shock therapy’ privatization so as to open the conquered country to Western corporate penetration. All this social engineering required boots on the ground, a land invasion and occupation. Mere limited aerial bombardment cannot effect the sort of extreme-capitalist revolution they seek. Libya 2011 is not like Iraq 2003 in any way.

Allowing the Neoconservatives to brand humanitarian intervention as always their sort of project does a grave disservice to international law and institutions, and gives them credit that they do not deserve, for things in which they do not actually believe.

The intervention in Libya was done in a legal way. It was provoked by a vote of the Arab League, including the newly liberated Egyptian and Tunisian governments. It was urged by a United Nations Security Council resolution, the gold standard for military intervention. (Contrary to what some alleged, the abstentions of Russia and China do not deprive the resolution of legitimacy or the force of law; only a veto could have done that. You can be arrested today on a law passed in the US Congress on which some members abstained from voting.)

Among reasons given by critics for rejecting the intervention are:

1. Absolute pacifism (the use of force is always wrong)

2. Absolute anti-imperialism (all interventions in world affairs by outsiders are wrong).

3. Anti-military pragmatism: a belief that no social problems can ever usefully be resolved by use of military force.

Absolute pacifists are rare, and I will just acknowledge them and move on. I personally favor an option for peace in world policy-making, where it should be the default initial position. But the peace option is trumped in my mind by the opportunity to stop a major war crime.

Leftists are not always isolationists. In the US, progressive people actually went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, forming the Lincoln Brigade. That was a foreign intervention. Leftists were happy about Churchill’s and then Roosevelt’s intervention against the Axis. To make ‘anti-imperialism’ trump all other values in a mindless way leads to frankly absurd positions. I can’t tell you how annoyed I am by the fringe left adulation for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the grounds that he is ‘anti-imperialist,’ and with an assumption that he is somehow on the Left. As the pillar of a repressive Theocratic order that puts down workers, he is a man of the far Right, and that he doesn’t like the US and Western Europe doesn’t ennoble him.

The proposition that social problems can never be resolved by military force alone may be true. But there are some problems that can’t be solved unless there is a military intervention first, since its absence would allow the destruction of the progressive forces. Those arguing that “Libyans” should settle the issue themselves are willfully ignoring the overwhelming repressive advantage given Qaddafi by his jets, helicopter gunships, and tanks; the ‘Libyans’ were being crushed inexorably. Such crushing can be effective for decades thereafter.

Assuming that NATO’s UN-authorized mission in Libya really is limited ( it is hoping for 90 days), and that a foreign military occupation is avoided, the intervention is probably a good thing on the whole, however distasteful it is to have Nicolas Sarkozy grandstanding. Of course he is not to be trusted by progressives, but he is to his dismay increasingly boxed in by international institutions, which limits the damage he could do as the bombing campaign comes to an end (Qaddafi only had 2000 tanks, many of them broken down, and it won’t be long before he has so few, and and the rebels have captured enough to level the playing field, that little further can be accomplished from the air).

Many are crying hypocrisy, citing other places an intervention could be staged or worrying that Libya sets a precedent. I don’t find those arguments persuasive. Military intervention is always selective, depending on a constellation of political will, military ability, international legitimacy and practical constraints. The humanitarian situation in Libya was fairly unique. You had a set of tank brigades willing to attack dissidents, and responsible for thousands of casualties and with the prospect of more thousands to come, where aerial intervention by the world community could make a quick and effective difference.

This situation did not obtain in the Sudan’s Darfur, where the terrain and the conflict were such that aerial intervention alone would have have been useless and only boots on the ground could have had a hope of being effective. But a whole US occupation of Iraq could not prevent Sunni-Shiite urban faction-fighting that killed tens of thousands, so even boots on the ground in Darfur’s vast expanse might have failed.

The other Arab Spring demonstrations are not comparable to Libya, because in none of them has the scale loss of life been replicated, nor has the role of armored brigades been as central, nor have the dissidents asked for intervention, nor has the Arab League. For the UN, out of the blue, to order the bombing of Deraa in Syria at the moment would accomplish nothing and would probably outrage all concerned. Bombing the tank brigades heading for Benghazi made all the difference.

That is, in Libya intervention was demanded by the people being massacred as well as by the regional powers, was authorized by the UNSC, and could practically attain its humanitarian aim of forestalling a massacre through aerial bombardment of murderous armored brigades. And, the intervention could be a limited one and still accomplish its goal.

I also don’t understand the worry about the setting of precedents. The UN Security Council is not a court, and does not function by precedent. It is a political body, and works by political will. Its members are not constrained to do elsewhere what they are doing in Libya unless they so please, and the veto of the five permanent members ensures that a resolution like 1973 will be rare. But if a precedent is indeed being set that if you rule a country and send tank brigades to murder large numbers of civilian dissidents, you will see your armor bombed to smithereens, I can’t see what is wrong with that.

Another argument is that the no-fly zone (and the no-drive zone) aimed at overthrowing Qaddafi not to protect his people from him but to open the way for US, British and French dominance of Libya’s oil wealth. This argument is bizarre. The US declined to do oil business with Libya in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, when it could have, because it had placed the country under boycott. It didn’t want access to that oil market, which was repeatedly proffered to Washington by Qaddafi then. After Qaddafi came back in from the cold in the late 1990s (for the European Union) and after 2003 (for the US), sanctions were lifted and Western oil companies flocked into the country. US companies were well represented, along with BP and the Italian firm ENI. BP signed an expensive exploration contract with Qaddafi and cannot possibly have wanted its validity put into doubt by a revolution. There is no advantage to the oil sector of removing Qaddafi. Indeed, a new government may be more difficult to deal with and may not honor Qaddafi’s commitments. There is no prospect of Western companies being allowed to own Libyan petroleum fields, which were nationalized long ago. Finally, it is not always in the interests of Big Oil to have more petroleum on the market, since that reduces the price and, potentially, company profits. A war on Libya to get more and better contracts so as to lower the world price of petroleum makes no sense in a world where the bids were already being freely let, and where high prices were producing record profits. I haven’t seen the war-for-oil argument made for Libya in a manner that makes any sense at all.

I would like to urge the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time. It is possible to reason our way through, on a case-by-case basis, to an ethical progressive position that supports the ordinary folk in their travails in places like Libya. If we just don’t care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren’t people of the Left. We should avoid making ‘foreign intervention’ an absolute taboo the way the Right makes abortion an absolute taboo if doing so makes us heartless (inflexible a priori positions often lead to heartlessness). It is now easy to forget that Winston Churchill held absolutely odious positions from a Left point of view and was an insufferable colonialist who opposed letting India go in 1947. His writings are full of racial stereotypes that are deeply offensive when read today. Some of his interventions were nevertheless noble and were almost universally supported by the Left of his day. The UN allies now rolling back Qaddafi are doing a good thing, whatever you think of some of their individual leaders.

The women fighting, organising, feeding and healing Libya’s revolution

In a bare, shabby side room in Benghazi's central courthouse, the hub of pro-democracy Libyan operations, Salwa Bugaighis talks animatedly, hardly flinching as gunshots ring out from the raucous crowds outside. They, like her, are in a mood that veers between celebration and defiance to anxiety. They flood the area of the seafront, which is littered with boards displaying caricatures of the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and stalls selling souvenirs since the eastern part of the country was liberated on February 20.

The 44-year-old lawyer, an elegant woman dressed in black trousers and jacket, her eyes neatly lined with kohl, was on the steps of the courthouse at the first protest on February 15, when a group of legal professionals and academics gathered to protest the arrest of a colleague and to call for legal reforms, including a constitution. She has barely left the building since. By February 17 the government's vicious reaction had led to calls for regime change, and just three days later rebels claimed control of the city, Libya's second largest after the capital Tripoli.

"There is so much to do," Bugaighis says as she strides down the corridor lined with graffiti, her jacket flying out behind her. "We had no idea we would get rid of Qaddafi in just a few days and we were left with nothing, no institutions at all. We had to quickly work out how to organise everything for ourselves."

For her, that means an amorphous job running logistical operations and acting as a liaison between the street and the National Transitional Council, the interim governing body led by Qaddafi's former justice minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, that heads a number of city councils around the east. This morning she has been talking to young people on the street, relaying their messages to the council's members. Later, she will meet with the military committee to discuss how to prepare Benghazi against an attack - government forces were then quickly heading east, though the new UN-imposed no-fly zone has lessened the threat - while fielding calls about arriving food shipments.

Bugaighis, a mother of three, is just one of a group of women who have been at the vanguard of Benghazi's uprising. Away from the front lines where the east's men are battling to hold off pro-Qaddafi forces, women work side-by-side with men to keep the rebels fighting, society and the economy functioning and the uprising visible.

Day jobs have been shed, replaced by a spirit of volunteerism that has led to ad hoc committees and fledgling democratic institutions. Some, like Bugaighis, are members of the organisational institutions centred in the courthouse. She is joined by her sister Iman Bugaighis, a professor-turned-spokeswoman for the rebels, and by Salwa el Deghali, the women's representative on the council. But, as was the case in Egypt and Tunisia, women were involved in the protests from the start, and Libyan women across all classes and levels of education are now playing a role from providing food to keeping up numbers in the streets, regardless of the outcome of the rebellion.

The uprising of which Bugaighis was part began with calls for protests on February 17, leading to the pro-democracy Libyans being dubbed the "February 17 rebels". But it sparked two days earlier when Fathi Terbil, a fellow lawyer, was arrested. He is representing the families of the victims of the massacre in Abu Salim, a notorious Tripoli prison where human rights organisations say some 1,200 people, mainly political prisoners, were killed after they rose up in 1996 - yet many of the wives and mothers weren't told of the deaths until 2009.

This, says Bugaighis, was the final straw. "For 42 years we have not been able to say what we want," she says. But small fires - fuelled by Benghazi's lawyers, many of them women - were burning long before. In September last year, Bugaighis and others took to the streets when the head of the legal union - a Qaddafi appointment - failed to step down long after the end of his term.

"We took chairs and tables outside and held our meeting there," says Bugaighis. "Everyone in Libya was talking about it because such actions are - were - rare here." Now the lawyers are trying to give some semblance of order to the vacuum that resulted, guiding the formation of a governing structure. "We are presenting our services to the population," she says. "We have no political experience, but I think we are doing a great job."

Liberating Benghazi was no easy task. According to Benghazi's medical committee at least 228 civlians were killed and 1,932 wounded in the struggle for this city of one million people. Many were shot by snipers from the Kateeba barracks, the base of one of Qaddafi's extensive groups of security and military apparatus. Rebel fighters rapidly filled Benghazi's hopitals as the fighting intensified.

Doctor Jasmine Sherif, 27, says she never imagined she would be treating patients with such extreme injuries a year after she graduated from Garyounis University in Benghazi. For several days and nights she has not left Benghazi's Al Hawaree Hospital. When her duties as a doctor end, she volunteers to do nursing care, changing dressings and running bags of blood between wards.

Many of the nurses were foreign and fled the country as the violence broke out, leading to a shortage of staff. Today Sherif is treating Ibrahim Imraja, a young man of 21. He came in with a bullet in his head and one that went through his back, cutting his spinal cord between two lumbar vertebrae. He will never walk again, Sherif says. Others have come in with limbs missing. She fears something similar - or worse - will happen to her brother, who is fighting, but says she encouraged him to go.

"We have broken through the fear barrier," she says. "I see people my age dying every day. It is so hard, but we must keep Libya free and that involves sacrifice."

Engaged to a fellow doctor, she has no idea when or if they will wed. When she went to study medicine, it was a path to a better life.

"There is some discrimination against women in our personal life, but at work I am equal," she says. "This means I can at least help to make people strong and hope we have enough people to face Qaddafi's forces. I am sure there is worse to come."

Thousands of Libya's women such as Sherif are in position to help after having received a good education thanks to people such as Mufeeda al Masri, a rotund, jovial 50-year-old. Back in 2008 al Masri decided that girls needed more access to education, and she founded Al Irtiqua ("progress" in Arabic) school. Today that school, located in a sunny central courtyard in Benghazi, has been transformed into a mass kitchen churning out over 1,000 meals a day to feed the rebels on the front line. The school's clinic has become a food store where sacks of potatoes slump against the wall, and classrooms have been turned into makeshift kitchens with desks used as work surfaces. Huge metal pots dot the floor as children run around the women's legs. Since the first delivery on February 20, the school has been full every day with more than 100 women peeling, chopping, cooking and packing rice, chicken and salad into aluminium containers. Others slice rolls, as many as 4,000 a day, passing them along a human conveyor belt to be filled and wrapped. From school pupils to widows of the Abu Salim massacre, the women work from morning until late afternoon when trucks arrives to ferry the food to the front.

"The day I saw the bloodshed at Kateeba I decided I had to do something to support the revolution," says al Masri. Her husband was a colonel in the air force and defected, refusing to fight for Qaddafi against the rebels. Support has been easy, she says: a steady flow of people come with food and monetary donations. Businessmen hand over wads of cash, she says, pulling a fistful of banknotes from her pocket, and small children proffer the remains of their savings. Preparations are interrupted by phone calls. One woman receives a call from her son at the front - the rebels have pushed back Qaddafi's forces. Trilling breaks out as the women celebrate the news. But they are aware the victories may be only temporary, though the no-fly zone now has renewed their hopes.

"We will do this until we die," says Najwa Sahly, a 51-year-old biology teacher whose husband, a professor of chemistry, was killed in Abu Salim. "I have lost my husband, what more do I have to be afraid of?"

Others who have sons and husbands on the front lines know they have a lot to lose. Khiria Abdul Salam, 42, spends half the day protesting and praying outside courthouse - flooded with as many women as men - and the other half propped up against a cushion in her living room glued to the Al Jazeera news channel. In her simple house on the fifth floor of a run-down area a 10-minute drive along the sea front from central Benghazi, there is a semblance of normality: her two daughters play, she cooks, relatives come in to ask for news. But she is afraid. Her husband went out on the first day to protest and she knew he would join the fighters. Abdul Salam says she has not heard from her husband since he left for the front three weeks ago.

"He worked for 20 years for the army before becoming a guard for a company. He earns 250LYD (Dh735) a month and his two grown-up sons have no work. That is why he went," she says. The couple wed through a traditional, arranged marriage 21 years ago, then the norm in Libyan society. They have three sons and two daughters.

"He was good to me, a good person," she says, crying softly. She knows soon her two elder sons - 18 and 19 - will go, too. So far they haven't as they have no military expertise. But as the rebels lose bodies they are becoming an increasingly ragtag bunch. Young boys have been heading to the front lines, eager to help counter Qaddafi's superior firepower with sheer numbers.

In front of the Benghazi courthouse, Abdul Salam is joined by many like her. A small area of the pavement is cordoned off for women, with men milling around behind. In a covered area, older women sit huddled in blankets, and some pray on rugs with the tricolour - the national flag from before Qaddafi took power and that now flies proudly across the east - laid out at the head. Women wander over to the wall of photographs of those killed in Abu Salim, or at posters of Mahdi Ziu. Ziu is one of the heroes of Bengahzi's liberation, however long it may last. A father, he drove his car loaded with gas cylinders into the Kateeba gates on February 20, breaking the government forces' protection; a pivotal moment in the battle for the city.

The mood changes almost daily. During protests, the women are defiant, some speaking from the window on the upper floor of the courthouse to the crowds below. On days when the rebels advance, they approach journalists in panic, telling stories of the children they fear Qaddafi's forces will kill if they retake Benghazi. Threats are going round. Text messages - the two mobile phone companies are owned by the Qaddafi family - have been received saying only "Soon".

Around the crowds, marshals in fluorescent jackets distribute water and food. One, Rosanna Ramadan, 23, thrusts bottles into outstretched hands. An English student at Garyounis University, she is now volunteering in order to keep the women on the streets.

"Women want to have their voice heard so we have a special area to make sure everyone is comfortable enough to come out," she says. But the protests have broken down barriers in a way never seen before. Girls say they are allowed out until late and are working together with men. "We all have the same ideas and are one right now," says Ramadan. "I think this will transform the lot for women afterwards when all of Libya is free."

The transformation has occurred in the home, too. Suzanne Himmi, 35, says she has found her voice and her way of helping the revolution. The former housewife and mother of five came out to protest on the first days because "my father-in-law died in prison and many more of my relatives have been hurt by Qaddafi". Living close to the courthouse, she was witness to everything that was happening. "I decided to write it down and collect people's stories," she says. Now she writes daily for the newspaper Libya, one of the new media outlets to pop up in Benghazi.

"It is important that people know what is going on so they are not scared," says Himmi. From tales of what the rebels are facing on the front lines to how locals in Benghazi are reacting, writing came naturally to her, she says. "I had, like everyone else, a fire inside. And writing is my way of letting it out."

Women have also assisted media that have flooded in. Journalists arriving in Benghazi were met with a slick operation: within hours they were registered and paired with a local fixer equipped with a car and a command of English.

"When journalists started coming we realised we had a responsibility to look after them because they were key to telling the world what was going on," says Najla el Mangoush, a 35-year-old divorced mother of two who switched jobs from being a legal adviser to working as a media assistant in the Ouzu Hotel, a hub for rebels and journalists. Born in the UK, she and a number of colleagues gathered together to form one of Benghazi's many volunteer committees, this one to work with the media. Manghoush says she has barely seen her two daughters, Gaida, 10, and Raghad, five, since the uprising. But they are used to it, she adds. A lawyer like Bugaighis before the uprising, she worked mornings as a legal adviser at the Benghazi Medical Centre, a public hospital, and afternoons as a lecturer in criminal law at Garyounis University. Poverty, she says, is one of the reasons why so many of Benghazi's women work - and why so many joined the uprising. Earning just 300LYD a month at her regular job, she had to take a second.

"This is one of the reasons Benghazi fell," says Manghoush. "Both men and women, educated and not, were being humiliated. Now we are all rebuilding it together."



The comments and developments described here are representative of the situation in Benghazi before the UN-imposed no-fly zone began on March 19. They may not reflect the current, changing climate.