Video Nasties.

Over the last few days I've been searching Youtube for videos of what has been going on in Libya. Most of what I've seen so far contains real life corpses and the actual moment in which real people have died. That means I won't be posting them up here because they are most certainly not suitable for work and remain as some of the most unpleasant things I've ever seen on the Internet.

Apart from that the main problem I've had is that I can't read Arabic so it would help me and everyone else in the digital community if when people upload videos to Youtube they include in the title the English name of the nearest city and the western date in the form dd/mm/yy. So for example;

"Benghazi24/02/11" "Darnah23/02/11" "Tripoli22/02/11" "Maradah21/02/11" etc.


One of the videos I have managed to see though is the famous one which shows anti-Qaddafi protesters being attacked by what are claimed to be Qaddafi's mercenaries. For me two things about this video stood out;

1. These men are not mercenaries in the sense that they are hired soldiers. They're weren't wearing any form of military dress and they were not armed with anything more dangerous then sticks and stones. In fact at one point you can see one of the anti-Qaddafi protesters shooting at them with a handgun. Most likely these men are migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa shipped in months ago to work on the oil fields as labourers and lowly security guards before being bussed into Benghazi by the oil companies.

2. They're wearing new yellow plastic construction helmets. I once famously appeared at an anti-government protest in London wearing a yellow plastic construction helmet. So I think the oil companies who unleashed these men on Benghazi gave them those helmets to give ordinary Libyans the idea that I am one of Qaddafi's mercenaries.

That is completely untrue because I am most certainly not getting paid for this. In fact by doing this I'm being forced to miss the cricket.