Rebels also said another Gadhafi son, Khamis, was likely killed last week in a battle south of Tripoli.

“We are determined to arrest and try the whole Gadhafi family, including Gadhafi himself,” Shammam said late Monday night. “We’d like to see those people coming back to Libya.”

Rebel leaders said they were not surprised to hear Algeria welcomed Gadhafi’s family. Throughout Libya’s six-month uprising, rebels have accused Algeria of providing Gadhafi with mercenaries to repress the revolt.

The departure of Gadhafi’s family was one of the strongest signs yet that the longtime leader has lost his grip on the country.

Gadhafi’s children played important roles in the country’s military and economic life. Hannibal headed the maritime transport company; Mohammed the national Olympic committee. Aisha, a lawyer, helped in the defense of toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the trial that led to his hanging.

Rebels worry that if Gadhafi is not killed or captured, he will stoke more violence.

Rebel fighters backed by an escalating NATO bombing campaign are converging on Gadhafi’s hometown of Sirte, his last major bastion of support in largely rebel-controlled Libya, amid speculation the longtime Libyan leader might be hiding there.

NATO reported hitting 22 armed vehicles, three command and control sites, four radar installations and several other targets in the Sirte area Monday. Other targets were hit in contested regions south of Sirte.

Sirte, some 250 miles (400 kilometers) east of Tripoli, is heavily militarized and shows no signs yet of surrendering. Rebels say they are trying to negotiate a takeover to avoid raging battles in the streets of the city, whose entrances are reportedly mined.

Some 150 kilometers (90 miles) west of Sirte Tuesday, about a dozen armored, gun-mounted trucks were parked at a staging ground in barren desert. A highway overpass provided some shade for rebels, most dressed in T-shirts and camouflage pants.

Ismail Shallouf, a rebel commander at the staging ground, said patrols have gone 50 kilometers (30 miles) closer to Sirte, and occasionally exchanged fire with Gadhafi fighters.

“The leadership told us to wait for now,” Shallouf said. “We don’t have any information about the negotiations. Maybe there will be an assault after Eid,” the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

Mohammed Amer, another local rebel commander, was dismissive of Gadhafi.

“Gadhafi has no more brigades left or equipment,” Amer said. “He just has mercenaries who take his money.”

A NATO officer, who asked not to be identified because of alliance rules, said on Monday there was fighting 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of Sirte. He said there are still clashes around Sirte, Bani Walid south of Misrata and Sebha further south.

In Tripoli, rebel leaders trying to set up a new government struggled with widespread shortages of water and fuel. In one neighborhood in the capital, dozens of motorists broke into a gas station Monday and filled plastic contains with fuel. Long lines formed at other gas stations.

Some residents filled containers with drinking water from large trucks, while others relied on wells. One of the water truck drivers, Ramzi Abu Shabaan, said the shortages were a small price to pay.

“I don’t care if we go without water for two months even — frizz-head is gone — it’s worth it,” using a commonly used derogatory nickname for Gadhafi.

Shops selling clothes, shoes and toys opened for the first time since the rebels entered the city Aug. 20.

Children accompanied their mothers and fathers into shops to pick clothes and toys for this week’s Muslim holiday.

“This will be the happiest Eid we celebrate,” said Munira Omar, 30 who bought her two daughters hair clips and dresses.

Darryl was severely injured. Both legs had been blown off at the knees and he lost his left arm at the elbow. Another journalist, freelance reporter Carmen Gentile, was working to stop the bleeding from the arm, fumbling with a tourniquet of his own and appearing to have a better go of it.

“How are you doing?” he shouted to me over the din of battle.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to focus. I ripped off my already tattered rubber gloves to get a better grip and started over, willing myself to be calm.

It was April 20, and although my heart was pounding like I was back in Libya, Carmen and I raced to save the life of our fallen colleague — who was really a 185-pound medical dummy clad in camo fatigues — on the back patio of the Bronx Documentary Center in New York. Next to us, two other freelancers, photographers Liam Maloney and Nicole Tung, worked on another victim. The realism was provided by stage blood (a lot of it), helmets and body armor, smoke bombs and recorded sounds of combat. Hovering over our frenzied work and making sure we didn’t miss anything fatal were medical professionals from Maine-based Wilderness Medical Associates.

“Did you flip him over? Does he have any wounds on his back?” shouted Sawyer Alberi, a spitfire of a former Army Reserve medic. Then to me: “You need to stop that bleeding.”

If there was a theme to what I’d been doing for the past three days, along with 23 other freelance reporters and photographers from around the globe, that was it — to stop the bleeding. Exactly a year before, on April 20, 2011, two of the world’s best conflict photographers — Tim Hetherington and my best friend since freshmen year of high school Chris Hondros — laid dying in the rubble of Tripoli Street in the besieged city of Misurata, Libya. A mortar round fired by Gadhafi forces had landed in their midst, and Chris had been hit in the head with shrapnel, just under the brim of his helmet, inflicting a massive brain injury from which he would die after languishing in a coma for several hours. Tim had been hit high on his leg, his femoral artery severed. It might not have been a fatal wound, but no one around him knew how to stop the bleeding. He bled to death within minutes.

The journalists in my squad stabilized Darryl and prepared him for medevac. We stripped off our bloody body armor and rotated to another exercise — stuffing absorbent gauze into a chicken carcass that was being pumped through with a continuous stream of fake blood. This was meant to simulate a wound to the groin or armpit, where the bleeding artery is too deep in the body to easily pinch off using well-aimed direct pressure. It was the sort of wound Tim had died from.

Our friends were certainly not the first reporters to be killed in combat, but they were among the first of what became a wave of deaths among highly experienced journalists in the year that followed. New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid died during a severe asthma attack while leaving Syria. Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times was killed alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik in an artillery barrage in Homs. South African freelancer Anton Hammerl, thought for weeks to have been captured and missing in Libya, was later confirmed shot and killed. Scores of journalists were captured by repressive regimes. It was, in short, a terrible year.

Especially for people who were close to those who died. A week before Chris and Tim were killed, I worked alongside them on Libya’s eastern front around Ajdabiya and Benghazi. It was extremely dangerous. We were caught in firefights, targeted by mortar fire and, in one instance, stuck for half an hour between Gadhafi forces and rebel soldiers who pounded each other with heavy artillery and machine gun fire, the shells streaking in both directions overhead. But — foolishly, in retrospect — it never occurred to me to be scared for my own well-being or that of my friends. When I left them to return home to Colorado a week before their deaths, they plotted their trip to Misurata, and I did not even consider the possibility that they wouldn’t return.

So the news, which I learned from a stranger’s Twitter post just 30 minutes after I sent Chris an email, blindsided me. Complete disbelief was my dominant emotion, mixed with a combination of guilt and shame. I’ll always wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed, if I would have changed the equation that led them to that fatal spot on Tripoli Street. Would I have talked them out of returning to a very dangerous scene that they’d been lucky to survive earlier in the day? Or would I have gone with them and been killed myself? There was nothing to be done about Chris’s injuries. But would I have known what to do to save Tim’s life?

The answer was no.

I was dangerously unprepared for the environments I’d put myself into throughout my career as a journalist, and I wasn’t alone. Most freelancers don’t have the first clue what to do if one of us is gravely wounded. We arrive in war zones fully stocked with memory cards, extra camera bodies and battery chargers, but with no knowledge about how to save our own lives or the lives of our colleagues. The first-aid kit I brought to Libya was filled with items that would have been useless in an acute trauma situation—Band-Aids and Pepto Bismol. I didn’t even know my blood type. My plan for a medical emergency was simply to hope for a quick death.

“There’s a bit of fatalism to people,” said author Sebastian Junger when we discussed this last month, marveling, as many conflict journalists have in the past year, at the vast scope of all we don’t know about how to render aid to our friends in situations where we should expect to need to do so. “There certainly was for me.”

Sebastian and Tim were close friends. The two had co-directed the documentary “Restrepo” about a group of U.S. soldiers manning a remote and dangerous outpost in Afghanistan. He was affected by Tim’s death the same way I was affected by Chris’s — although he and Tim had had a day’s worth of informal medical training from one of the “Restrepo” medics while shooting their film, he admitted that he knew next to nothing about the human body or what to do for injuries sustained in combat.

“It just occurred to me,” he said, “that it doesn’t have to be this way.”

When he learned that Tim’s injury might not have been fatal if someone had known how to apply pressure to slow his bleeding, Sebastian founded Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC), an organization that offers an intensive three-day combat medicine training course at no cost to participating journalists. Priority is given to freelancers, who compose an ever-increasing percentage of the foreign press corps in dangerous areas. Freelancers take the biggest risks in journalism, but they have the fewest resources to afford this sort of training. Most can barely afford body armor.

When I was asked to participate in the inaugural course, I wasn’t sure how I would handle it. The previous year had been spent in a daze that combined denial, grief and inertia in roughly equal proportions. I simply couldn’t get my head around the fact of Chris’s death, even though I’d seen him in his casket and helped carry him to his grave. It was as if the clock had stopped on April 20, and I was eternally stuck in the horror of that first moment of realization and disbelief. I coped by piling on more work than I could handle to avoid having to think about a future without him. I clung to the past and replayed memories incessantly, as if trying to fuse them into my brain. I was afraid of moving forward and forgetting. I started smoking again. I ignored my friends and family.

I was a wreck, and I morbidly ticked off the milestones counting down toward the one-year anniversary of his death: The day Chris texted me and asked me to go to Libya with him; the last day we were together in his Brooklyn apartment and he lectured me — almost as if he’d had some presentiment — about the trajectory of shrapnel and how small pieces can find their way into your brain even if you’re wearing a helmet; the last thing he said to me as we said goodbye in Benghazi, “We got you out of here unscathed.”

The RISC training promised to at least stop the spiraling orbit that made me feel like I was circling a drain as April 20 approached. I wasn’t the only one coping with memories and close calls. My classmates included Nicole Tung, who held vigil by Chris’s bedside in Misurata until he passed and helped get his remains on a ship bound for Benghazi; Mike Brown, who had been wounded in the same mortar blast; Jim Foley, who had been captured by Gadhafi forces with two other colleagues during the incident in which Hammerl was shot and killed; and Carmen, my partner in rescuing Darryl, who had miraculously survived being shot in the face by an RPG in Afghanistan (the warhead didn’t detonate, which is the only reason he’s alive).

I’m sure there were many other war stories I didn’t hear. There simply wasn’t time. The three-day crash course in emergency medicine didn’t leave much time for reflection. We learned how to stabilize broken limbs and how to assess for internal bleeding. We practiced “un-pretzeling” people who’ve been blown into a heap by a concussive force without further damaging their spinal columns. We were taught to recognize the signs of shock and hypothermia (even in warm climates, hypothermia is the fourth leading cause of preventable death on the battlefield). We learned how to stop arterial bleeds, apply a tourniquet and seal a sucking chest wound. We practiced CPR and rescue breathing by taking turns playing victims and rescuers in a variety of scenarios. We took the 6 train back to our Chelsea hotel sticky with fake blood and worried that the sheer volume of information being crammed into our heads would evaporate by morning.

Graduation was purposely scheduled for April 20. I expected to be more grief stricken than ever, but I found myself unexpectedly calm and energized. For the first time in a long time, I was unwilling to let grief overtake me. It is one of the primary lessons of RISC training, actually, that to dwell on the immutable past is to create peril for yourself and others. You must always be reacting to the present and preparing for the future.

At its heart, our training was about coping with wounds. I didn’t expect to bandage my own.

According to government officials, about 26,000 criminals — political prisoners were kept in separate facilities and remained in lockdown — were serving time when the escapes began. Almost 200 of those escapees were facing the death penalty for serious crimes, including murder.

“There was panic inside and outside the prisons,” said Dya Adin Badi, who, at the outset of protests last year, was in charge of seven detention facilities stretching from Ras Lanuf through Sirte to Misrata.

“The guards had fled. There was no security, no staff. We didn’t want a riot on our hands.”

In Tripoli, Col. Moammar Gadhafi had already begun to release prisoners in the hope, some claim, that they would join his army ranks. In other areas, instability left wardens with few options.

Badi said angry crowds began to form outside his prisons. Relatives began demanding the release of loved ones, many of whom, Badi said, were facing false or excessive sentences.

“We waited orders from Tripoli, but no word came, so we found our own solution,” he said.

The few staff that remained began releasing inmates 10 at a time. Those facing murder charges were kept in detention for another two days, as much for the protection of the public as for their own safety. But with no security, no staff, no budget and no food, Badi had no choice but to release them too.

Badi said some were reluctant to leave for fear of revenge killings. He recalled one man who begged to stay, but there was no one left to secure the building. His crime had been the murder of two children and their mother. Within two days of his release he was found dead, Badi said.

As the war escalated, it became impossible to tell how many others met the same fate.

Hundreds joined the rebel frontlines. Several climbed the ranks to become commanders. Many were killed in battle. Others simply fled, their whereabouts unknown.

With the proliferation of small arms on Libya’s streets today, the presence of escaped prisoners is a destabilizing force.

Misrata Police Chief Ibrahim Mohammed Alsherikcia said that although these criminals pose one of the biggest threats in the city, old records were destroyed when the Misrata courthouse was bombed and later occupied by Gadhafi forces, so they cannot simply re-arrest former inmates, no matter how serious the offense.

“They are now free criminals and all of them are armed,” he said.

Alsherikcia said that of those who joined the rebel ranks, many were martyred and “redeemed their sins.” But others took advantage of the war to gather weapons and continue their criminal activities. Even those who break the law again often go unpunished in a system where militia groups hold more power than police.

In a report released earlier this month, the United Nations expressed serious concerns about Libya’s developing justice system, as well as its ability to contend with past oppression.

“The judicial system suffers from the legacy of being used as a tool of repression,” the report read. “Existing Libyan laws will need to be repealed or amended. … The vast majority of detainees are still held outside the legal framework, despite efforts to centralize detentions.”

In some ways this emerging justice system mirrors that of the former regime, in which security forces “benefited from complete impunity,” the UN report said.

Since the end of the revolution, both ex-rebel militias and police have also administered their own form of justice, also in a “climate of impunity.” While members of Gadhafi forces are hunted down and imprisoned — so far without formal charges or access to legal aid — those who commit offenses from within the revolutionary forces continue to go unpunished.

The UN report did note one significant difference these days. Individuals or independent units, it said, are committing offenses instead of groups operating in a “system of brutality sanctioned by the central government.”

Abdullatef Gadour, a veteran prosecutor in the attorney general’s office who stayed on with the new government, said that while major changes are underway, much of the old judicial system would remain in place. Gadour said the Gadhafi-era laws were essentially adequate and fair.

“One of the few things Gadhafi didn’t destroy was the country’s judicial system,” he said. “Instead he came in through the back door.”

Instead of changing the system, Gadhafi simply created “exceptional courts and laws” for his own purposes, he said. These “closed-door” courts were used to try political prisoners and punish disloyalty to the regime outside of the criminal justice system.

In many cases, prisoners did not see a court at all.

“For every 10 prisoners on record maybe 100 went unnamed,” said Badi, who is now retired from Libya’s prison system. “He recorded this in the same way he kept records of the national budget; he chose which ones to report.”

Today, an estimated 8,000 members of the former regime, many of which are also unlisted and held in unofficial detention centers, face an uncertain future.

Gadour said investigations have begun, trials are being prepared and amendments to the law will take effect once the new constitution is completed. He estimates it will take around five months for the trials to begin.

Members of Gadhafi’s military will face a military court, while recruits and volunteers who fought on Gadhafi’s frontlines will be tried for murder in a civil court, even if their only victims were fighters, he said.

Killing in combat is not in violation of international laws that regulate warfare. But by national law, Gadour explained, while civilians among Libya’s rebel forces are legally allowed to kill the enemy, those who fought for the old regime will not receive the same concessions.

“Gadhafi troops targeted civilians, while (rebel forces) were defending them. That is the difference,” he said, dismissing reports by human rights groups that the rebels were also guilty of abuses.

Libya’s new justice coordinator, Jamal Bennor, said that, in time, the needed changes to Libya’s justice system would be made. But, he said, it is crucial to activate the security ministries, introduce the new constitution and hold national elections first. In time, justice will be applied equally.

“I think people still trust the law,” he said. “We are still far away from applying the law to many criminal actions, but we are not ignoring these crimes. All offenses will be investigated in time.”

Our goal was to learn, and then report, who was in control of Brega.

We were getting nervous. We knew the boys driving were scouting the road ahead, and maybe on their own initiative. Anton, the most experienced journalist in the group, mumbled something about it being risky. We could feel our guts begin to tighten. Manu and I looked at each other. But said nothing.

Two armed trucks raced toward us from behind, filling up our back window before soaring past. This was how the rebel convoys seemed to form, like schools of fish that hunted together, but have no clear leader or command structure.

Over a small hill we saw some men, boys really, standing around a sedan. We leaped out to do some interviews. Clare asked how far away Gadhafi’s forces were. The boy said 300 meters. 300 meters? I looked at Clare. It seemed impossible. But as a precaution, we hustled off to the side of the road. A static mortar or a rocket position could have easily dialed in on us from that distance. The small convoy rolled ahead, leaving us behind in what we thought was relative safety.

We watched the rebels push forward. They weren’t 200 meters away, at the rise of the next hill, when they sped back around. We watched for a second as they beared back down on us, followed by a barrage of machine gun fire. The loudest I had ever heard. Our small group of journalists — Anton, Clare, my fellow American, and Manu, a Spanish photographer — took off running.

“We need to get to the vehicles,” Anton shouted. But the rebel trucks were retreating too fast and the ones in pursuit were firing wildly. There were two Gadhafi military pickups — tan with large machine guns mounted on the back. The trucks were overflowing with armed men.

With all the bullets flying, we pressed ourselves as close to the ground as possible. The rebels faded into the distance and the Gadhafi trucks slowed to a stop. The shooting continued. The roar of bullets overhead sounded like machines eating up metal. AK-47 rounds ripped past us from less than 50 meters.

Libya: Tripoli scenes from the uprising:

I crawled back toward Clare and Manu, who were under several small trees. The shooting intensified. We tried to speak, to yell for each other. But the bullets tearing overhead deafened everything. In a corner of my mind I hoped that we were in a cross fire, that behind us the rebels were shooting back. I crawled forward toward a larger sand dune with my camera rolling. Anton crouched in front of me. The bullets streamed directly over my helmet and shoulders. This was no crossfire. They were shooting at us, and they were shooting to kill.

“Help, help,” I heard Anton cry. His voice was weak. My mind tried to convince me of something I knew was not true. Maybe he had just fallen and twisted something. Another barrage of bullets passed over me. “Anton, are you OK?” I shouted between bursts of fire.

“No,” he said, in a much weaker voice.

****

I’ve heard journalists say that Libya was the perfect war. A reporter could get to the front line, close enough to hear the shells coming in, and back to a comfortable hotel in Benghazi, with a solid Internet connection, by evening.

But in reality, this war was anything but perfect — something I’d soon come to learn. It was a war led by confusion, abductions and an oppressive sense of the unknown. This latest spasm of the Arab Spring had none of the idealism of Tunis or Cairo. For me, it began with a rifle butt to he head, which bled into weeks of uncertainty, crushing captivity and ended, however improbably, in a four-star hotel in the besieged Libyan capital.

Along the way, between blindfolds and quiet conversations with fellow captives deep inside the country’s brutal prison system, I witnessed the last gasps of the Gadhafi regime — a corrupt and corrupted system that for more than 40 years ruled this tribal, oil-rich land.

I had done several tours as an embedded reporter with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for me, the frontlines felt natural. And I believed it was my job. But the freedom with which you could maneuver was deceptive. There was no highly-trained U.S. platoon to escort you. And the rebels were said to be some of the worst trained soldiers in the world. Most had never held a gun before the end of February, when they stormed Benghazi’s “katiba” and took them by force.

I tried to hold farther back after a few close calls — a near miss by a Girad rocket, for instance, or a tank shell ripping over the heads of Manu and I outside Ajadibya. Our ears popped. But the front kept calling.

As is common among freelancers, Clare Gillis, a 34-year-old from Connecticut, Manu Brabo, a 29-year-old from Gijon, Spain, and myself had been sharing rides and interviews together for several weeks. Anton Hammerl, a South African photographer who covered much of Africa — from the townships during Apartheid to child soldiers in the Congo — came late to our little group.

With all the rebel offensives and retreats along the coastal highway, we felt we had to get to the front every few days or risk completely losing track of the story. So on April 5, we headed out.

Our plan was to try to get a sense of who was really controlling Brega, a strategic oil town that had been the scene of some of the most deadly fighting since the uprising began several months earlier. A rebel general told us that if the rebels took Brega, they would hold it without advancing right away, thus learning from earlier mistakes where they stretched themselves too thin and were forced into whole scale retreats.

But Brega was dangerous. Manu and I had been caught in heavy shelling outside the town days before. I had seen two shells bounce off the ground a hundred meters away. A rebel was killed by shrapnel to the head in the truck Manu and I had leaped into for escape. We went with them to the hospital, hugged the bawling comrades afterwards and shot some eerie photos of them washing blood off their grenades.

Still, Brega was where the front was, so we woke up early to beat the crush of reporters. The four of us went in a Mercedes van piloted by a teen. We stopped at the only manned checkpoint some 20 kilometers outside town, where a crowd of the usual disheveled men, many of them teens, milled about waiting for the real fighters to assemble. We got out into the early sunshine and told our driver he could leave us there. It was just after 10 a.m.

We waited. Usually, with shouts of “Allah Akbar,” a convoy would push ahead, and we’d jump into one of the rebel vehicles heading to the front.

The red minibus started moving and we hustled on. It drove ahead with us as its only passengers, the young driver and his friend in front looked nervously from side to side. We stopped after a kilometer to inspect two smoldering pickup trucks, blackened crisps in the road. It appeared to have been a rebel ambush.

“Hit by a Sam 7,” Anton said pointing out the expended launcher and wire guidance system leading to the cindered vehicles. I took note of his wealth of knowledge. He’d been forced to join the South African infantry as a young man and hadn’t relished it.

****

The firing continued all around us. The men had gotten out of their vehicles and were now approaching. “Anton!” I shouted again. He was silent. The terrifying reality grabbed hold of me. The soldiers firing probably didn’t know that we were reporters. Rebels didn’t dress in regular uniforms and many were often not even armed. I had to surrender or we’d all be gunned down.

I leaped up from where my head had been buried in the sand to face the group of wild men shooting uncontrollably — it seemed our only hope. I held up my hands and yelled, “Sahafa! Sahafa!” It was one of the few Arabic words I knew. It means “journalist.” I walked slowly toward them.

There were three or four skinny, Arab-looking soldiers carrying AK-47s and a larger, darker one to the right. My eyes drifted toward Anton as I stumbled past the dune ahead of me. He was lying face down in the sand, his body askew, cameras still strapped around his shoulders, his legs splayed out.

As soon as I reached the soldiers, the dark one slammed me across the chin with the butt end of his AK-47. I dropped my camera. He smashed his rifle down on my head. My helmet and Oakley sunglasses were thrown off and he punched me in the eye. Another one crushed my head several more times with an AK-47. All my instincts for self-preservation gathered within me. I went completely limp and complacent. The adrenaline was coursing so heavily through my body. I felt no pain.

I was thrown into the back of one of the pickup trucks. An Army boot pushed my face onto the floor. I glanced back and saw Manu and Clare being pulled off the ground.

A crazed looking soldier looked down and jeered at me in English, “You go on patrol! You go on patrol!” as if he knew exactly what we’d been trying to do. A cell phone was pushed close to my face. A picture was snapped. “Gadhafi Meia Meia,” a younger one said, thumping his chest, “Gadhafi 100 percent.” These words terrified me. After weeks of being with rebels who said things like, “Fuck Gadhafi,” with regular consistency, we had now found ourselves with the other side, the ones who had pledged their dying allegiance to the country’s dictatorial leader of more than four decades.

Clare and Manu were also forced down into the bed of the truck. Manu was face down and Clare, pushed against his side, was facing me. I looked at her for the first time. She had a purpled eye. She saw blood running from my scalp.

“Jim, are you OK?” she said, pleadingly. I nodded, and took stock of the blood pooling in the back of the truck. With a boot again on my face, my hands were bound behind me with a plastic cord. We sped away from the scene.

You can read Part 2 of James Foley’s story here.

From the Times:

To a colorful group of Americans — the Washington terrorism expert, the veteran C.I.A. officer, the Republican operative, the Kansas City lawyer — the Libyan gambit last March looked like a rare business opportunity.

Even as NATO bombed Libya, the Americans offered to make Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi their client — and charge him a hefty consulting fee. Their price: a $10 million retainer before beginning negotiations with Colonel Qaddafi’s representatives.

…

The other American partners were Neil S. Alpert, who had worked for the Republican National Committee and the pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Randell K. Wood, a Kansas City, Mo., lawyer who has represented Libyan officials and organizations since the 1980s.

If the name Neil Alpert sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because he played a role in the string of RNC scandals and embarrassments that led to the downfall of (now MSNBC analyst) Michael Steele last year.

With the RNC already facing allegations of gross mismanagement, Steele hired Alpert as a “special assistant for finance,” Politics Daily reported in April 2010.

This was problematic because just a few years before, Alpert had been ousted as the chair of the D.C. Baseball PAC after he was caught using the group’s bank accounts as his “personal piggy bank.” The political action committee’s mission was to bring Major League baseball back to Washington.

As I reported at the time, Alpert used the PAC’s debit card at gas stations, a cheesecake restaurant, Chick-Fil-A, and a Washington nightclub called LOVE. Alpert denied wrongdoing in the case, but Washington’s Office of Campaign Finance slapped him with a fine. Read the details of that saga here.

But it’s also true that polygamy doesn’t happen in a cultural vacuum — it’s different in reality than it is in theory.

It’s critical to understand the specific context in this case. Contrary to many reports, it isn’t that polygamy was previously illegal in Libya – it’s just that it came with serious restrictions. As Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has written about legal issues surrounding plural marriage, tells me, “The fact that the [former] polygamy rules in Libya, which require consent of the first wife given in front of a judge and the showing by the man of an affirmative need for an additional wife, has resulted in relatively low rates of polygamy is telling,” she says. “Wives clearly do not support polygamy in large numbers and must have some power to refuse consent.” Returning to unrestricted polygamy “would deprive women of any control over their husbands’ acquisition of multiple wives and reduce their intra-family power, as well their power in society,” Grossman says.

Moving from the specific to the general, it’s true that copious research has demonstrated the negative social impacts associated with polygamy (which almost always manifests as polygyny, a man taking multiple wives, and not the other way around). Many of these findings were summarized in a report that anthropologist Joseph Henrich presented in testimony during a Supreme Court case challenging Canada’s ban on polygamy. The chief problem introduced by the practice, at least when it is widely adopted, is that it creates “a pool of low-status men” whose potential wives go to “high status, wealthy men,” he argues. An unmarried male underclass is associated with greater crime – including rape and kidnapping of women — and generally leads men “to seek to exercise more control over the choices of women,” from what they wear to whom they date.

Polygyny also tends to lead to women — nay, girls — marrying younger and younger; at the same time, the age gap between husbands and wives expands dramatically. It’s also associated with lesser paternal investment in children, as the father’s resources are spread thin. An additional upshot of that is that it “may reduce national wealth (GDP) per capita both because of the manner in which male efforts are shifted to obtaining more wives and because of the increase in female fertility,” Henrich writes. He says that “monogamy seems to redirect male motivations in ways that generate lower crime rates, greater GDP per capita, and better outcomes for children” and goes so far as to argue that monogamous marriage “may have created the conditions for the emergence of democracy and political equality.” (I spoke with Henrich at length about this for my series on monogamy.)

As a philosophical thought exercise, there is a totally reasonable debate to be had over whether these many issues can be addressed independently, instead of by criminalizing the practice of polygamy. The question of how to strike a balance between preventing harm and defending personal freedom is a tricky one. In this case, though, it’s neither tricky nor an issue of balance: Abdul-Jalil has moved to overturn a law that guarded against harm while also defending freedom of choice.