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[Excerpt:]

"Maybe Sarah Leah Whitson should work for Vogue. Whitson who runs the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch (and who raised funds for the group in Saudi Arabia — perhaps the least free country on the planet — by bragging about her group’s work excoriating Israel), had something of a soft spot for the lunatic Libyan and his dangerous son, it seems. Less than two years ago, she wrote this intermittently starry-eyed portrayal of life in Libya (h/t NGO Monitor): The brittle atmosphere of repression has started to fracture, giving way to expanded space for discussion and debate, proposals for legislative reform, and even financial compensation for families of the hundreds of men killed in a prison riot a decade ago. And while the reform initiatives, if we dare call them that, are fragile and tenuous (skirmishes are common between the would-be reformers and a security establishment quite comfortable using its untrammeled authority), political dynamism and vibrancy are appearing in a country that was closed in every way for decades. She seems to heart Saif al-Islam, in fact"