Rebel claim another key oil city in Libya

[Chris]

Al-Brega, Libya (CNN) -- Libyan rebels continued their westward advance Sunday, claiming that they gained operational control of another key city, Ras Lanuf.

Rebel forces told CNN that forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi pulled back from the city, but CNN has not yet independently confirmed the claim.

If true, it would signify that the rebel forces have reclaimed all of the territory they lost to Gadhafi's forces at the start of the war. The opposition comeback was paved in part by coalition airstrikes designed to stop the killings of civilians, and that have hit Gadhafi's forces.

Earlier Sunday, the rebels appeared to have taken control of the key oil town of al-Brega, a CNN team on the scene observed.

Some opposition fighters focused on securing the city's entrance Sunday while others traveled in trucks heading west, encountering little resistance along the way.

Rebels claim another key oil city in Libya - CNN.com

 

[waltky]

Who ya s'posed to believe?...

Libya ‘Not a Vital National Interest to the United States,’ Defense Secretary Gates Says
Monday, March 28, 2011 - "Do you think Libya posed an actual or imminent threat to the United States?" Defense Secretary Robert Gates was asked Sunday on the ABC News program "This Week."

"No, no," Gates replied to ABC’s Jake Tapper. "It was not -- it was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest -- and it was an interest for all of the reasons Secretary Clinton talked about -- the engagement of the Arabs, the engagement of the Europeans, the general humanitarian question that was at stake. Gates said there was another consideration the administration took into account in using military force against the Gaddafi regime -- the revolutions both east and west of Libya, in Egypt and Tunisia: "So you had a potentially significantly destabilizing event taking place in Libya that put at risk potentially the revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, appearing with Gates on "This Week" with Gates, added that every decision the administration could have made regarding Libya had "plusses and minuses." Clinton painted a slaughter scenario as justification for Obama initiating hostilities in Libya, something he did with United Nations authorization but not congressional authorization.

"Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled and, as Bob (Gates) said, either with nowhere to go or overwhelming Egypt while it's in its own difficult transition. And we were sitting here, the cries would be, why did the United States not do anything? Why -- how could you stand by when, you know, France and the United Kingdom and other Europeans and the Arab League and your Arab partners were saying you've got to do something."

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Crisis in Libya Too Urgent to Wait for Congress, White House Says
Friday, March 25, 2011 – The U.S. intervention into the Libyan civil war is constitutional even without congressional authorization, the White House spokesman said Friday.

Further, had President Barack Obama waited for Congress to return from recess, more Libyans would have been murdered by the regime of Libyan dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters. “It is well within, as he described and others described, well within the president’s constitutional authority to take this military action,” Carney said. “The list of precedents is quite long. But he believes that consultation with Congress is important and wants to hear their thoughts about the mission, about the situation in Libya and about our overall policy there.”

As a candidate for president, Obama told The Boston Globe in an article published Dec. 20, 2007 the president must seek authorization by Congress before taking military action. “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 told the newspaper. The constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress.

President George Washington, part of the Constitutional Convention, believed in a limited role for the executive branch in declaring war. Washington declined to take military action in response to the Chickamauga Indians in 1792 without the approval of Congress, citing that for the president to take such action would be monarchial. “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure,” Washington said.

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