The short article, Out of Libya's Shadows: A Source Reveals His Real Identity, by VIVIENNE WALT, Time World, Sept. 01, 2011,
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2091496,00.html#ixzz1WlekcYzk
is composed almost entirely of:
Unverified Comments;
Dubious Facts;
Apparent Exaggerations;
Obvious Contradictions.
and is awkwardly, written with a plethora of style, punctuation and grammatical errors.
A similar article (different name, different events, different hero, no proof of anything) by New York Times reporter, Nicholas Kristoff, September 3, 2011, A Libyan Prisoner Lives to Tell His Story contained the same elements that questioned the TIME story - no verification, manufacture of a hero, implausible events, inconsistencies, contradictions and obvious exaggerations. It might be valid, but the NYT story seems more fabricated than the TIME story.
Here is the TIME WORLD article with comments in red.
For months I called him only "Mr. Utah," a reference to the years he lived in Ogden. The nickname helped us communicate in one of the most paranoid countries in the world: Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. (Is it paranoid to take severe precautions when being bombed by NATO?) But this week I picked up the phone, dialed Mr. Utah's number and said: "Hello, Taher!" ( Was it that easy to call Libya in August?) The greeting might not sound like much. But in Libya, like much else these days, it is liberating.
When I first met Taher Belhaj, 59, in March, just a few weeks into the revolution, he barely said hello. ( Shouldn't the author make some mention to the new reader of how they met?) We stood at our prearranged meeting spot in downtown Tripoli, while he scanned the narrow street, his eyes darting side to side, looking for signs of surveillance, before whispering, "Walk with me." So I did. For an hour, we wandered through the narrow lanes off what was then Green Square, as he whispered the terrifying details ( What terrifying details?) of his life in the oil-refinery town of Zawiyah, 30 miles west of the capital. "Mr. Utah" and I continued talking in low tones in a dark corner of a cafe downtown, where I ducked into the toilet several times, in order to scribble notes out of sight from prying eyes. ( Note the mysterious tone. What prying eyes?) His account, published on time.com - in which he was named Ahmed - was a rare first-hand (rare?) description of the horrors which regular Libyans ( Who are the irregular Libyans?) were experiencing as a result of Gaddafi's violent crackdown against the uprising. ( Shouldn't there be a referenced link to the previous article?)
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