FIGRD presents:DemocracyNow!
Updated Video

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“We’re Witnessing the Violent Lashings of a Dying Beast”: Libyan Novelist Hisham Matar on Gaddafi’s Brutal Crackdown in Libya
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Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, vows not to leave the country as opposition protesters take control of key cities. After a week of demonstrations, thousands of protesters have been killed or injured by pro-Gaddafi police and hired mercenaries, and more than a thousand people are missing. For more on Libya, we are joined from London by Hisham Matar, a renowned Libyan novelist. He is the son of a prominent Libyan dissident, and he is currently helping to run an ad hoc news desk informing the Western media of events occurring in Libya. “The world now is watching a massacre, and history will hold the international community responsible,” Matar says, "not only because we are watching a dictatorship, an unelected dictatorship, massacring its own people, but we are watching a dictatorship that the world has profited from close relations with.” [includes rush transcript]
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"People Have Finally Found Their Voice”: Democracy Now!’s Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Egypt After Mubarak
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Democracy Now! senior producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous is back from Egypt after several weeks reporting on the uprising against the U.S.-backed President Hosni Mubarak. “I find it amazing that the whole world watched Egypt do this," Kouddous says. “Egypt is exporting democracy to the United States.” [includes rush transcript]
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Arrest of CIA Agent Sheds Light on American Covert War in Pakistan, Straining U.S.-Pakistani Relations
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U.S. officials have admitted an American detained in Pakistan for the murder of two men was a CIA agent and a former employee of the private security firm Blackwater, now called Xe Services. Up until Monday, the Obama administration had insisted Raymond Davis was a diplomat who had acted in self-defense. The arrest of Davis has soured relations between the United States and Pakistan and revealed a web of covert U.S. operations inside the country, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. The Guardian of London first reported Davis’s CIA link on Sunday and noted that many U.S. news outlets knew about his connection to the CIA but did not report on it at the request of U.S. officials. We speak with Declan Walsh, the Pakistan correspondent for The Guardian, who first broke the story. [includes rush transcript]