Responding to the New Yorker on Libya

This New Yorker story on Libya, while accurate in many respects, was soft on Muammar Gaddafi's son, and heir apparent, Saif.

Momahed Eljahmi set the record straight with the following letter to the editor (published in the current edition):

LIBYA's DISSIDENTS

Andrew Solomon accurately depicts Libya as a police state where Colonel Muammar Qaddafi controls all levers of power, but there is little hope that his son, Saif, will actually see through the reforms he purports to champion ("Circle of Fire," May 8th). Saif's self-described human-rights organization is funded by the state, and his human-rights record speaks for itself; his description of terrorism as "tactics" could hardly be termed a renunciation.

More space in Solomon's piece might have been devoted to those Libyan dissidents who are imprisoned or were killed because they advocated for justice and spoke the truth-such as some twelve hundred political prisoners, who were executed in June, 1996, at the Abu Sleem prison, and the journalist Daif al-Ghazal, whose mutilated body was found in Benghazi in June, 2005, and whose death still has not been investigated.