But some of those same tactics appear to be creeping into the efforts of the opposition here as it seeks to stamp out lingering loyalty to Kadafi. Rebel forces are detaining anyone suspected of serving or assisting the Kadafi regime, locking them up in the same prisons once used to detain and torture Kadafi’s opponents.

For a month, gangs of young gunmen have roamed the city, rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies.

Over the last several days, the opposition has begun rounding up men accused of fighting as mercenaries for Kadafi’s militias as government forces pushed toward Benghazi. It has launched nightly manhunts for about 8,000 people named as government operatives in secret police files seized after internal security operatives fled in the face of the rebellion that ended Kadafi’s control of eastern Libya last month.

“We know who they are,” said Abdelhafed Ghoga, the chief opposition spokesman. He called them “people with bloodstained hands” and “enemies of the revolution.”

Any suspected Kadafi loyalist or spy who does not surrender, Ghoga warned, will face revolutionary “justice.” ~Los Angeles Times

It isn’t surprising that the rebels are seeking retribution against members of the regime, and the harassment and detention of blacks and migrant workers that is taking place is one of the ugly aspects of a civil war in which Gaddafi has been relying on foreign mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa. As we all understand, “revolutionary justice” is an old code for extra-judicial killings that are usually based on little more than suspicion. It may be that some of the people the rebels have captured really are working for Gaddafi, and it is also possible that these people are carrying out old vendettas or taking out frustrations on people that are even more vulnerable than they are. The story continues:

Human Rights Watch has described a concerted campaign in which thousands of men have been driven from their homes in eastern Libya and beaten or arrested.

Unfortunately, this sort of indiscriminate retribution and score-settling is a common feature of civil wars, but that just makes it that much harder to understand what purpose is served by reinforcing a rebel movement that we don’t understand in a country whose civil war is of no concern to us. Kristof was boasting that the rebels are receiving arms shipments from abroad, because supporters of the Libyan war continue give priority to the political cause of the rebels over the humanitarian needs of the population. It is clear that the major intervening powers are going to look the other way as the arms embargo is violated, but that makes sense mainly if they want to keep the civil war going, which has very little to do with helping the civilian population.

P.S. The rebels may be receiving arms from abroad, but if their record over the last few weeks is any indication these may not be very useful:

To date the Shabaab has wasted at least three times the ordnance than it has fired in anger by shooting into the air in celebration of often non-existent victories. It has blown up guns by using the wrong type of ammunition, crashed its few tanks into each other and shot down two of its own planes.

As time goes by, the Libyan war begins to seem more like a bad remake of Stargate than anything else.

Update: The New York Times has a story on the weaknesses of the rebels:

After the uprising, the rebels stumbled as they tried to organize. They did a poor job of defining themselves when Libyans and the outside world tried to figure out what they stood for. And now, as they try to defeat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s armed forces and militias, they will have to rely on allied airstrikes and young men with guns because the army that rebel military leaders bragged about consists of only about 1,000 trained men.

Michael Cohen comments:

What this suggests to me is that unlike the situation in Afghanistan in which the US was able to work hand-in-hand with a proxy army to dislodge the Taliban from power, there simply isn’t a rebel force on the ground in Libya that has the military chops to unseat Gaddafi.