Weiss maintained that there was no better example of NGOs traffic [ king ] in realpolitik . . . than Human Rights Watch s kid-gloved and self-interested approach to Libya in the past several years . He complained that on Whitson's watch HRW was not acting as a tribune for . . . voices in dire need such as Fathi al-Jahmi, and that her citation of al-Jahmi in an essay was especially cynical since her organization had refrained from drawing attention to his case before his demise . HRW had declined to call for an independent investigation into Fathi s death, and his brother, Mohammed al-Jahmi, suspected that HRW was wary of barracking Qaddafi at precisely the moment that Whitson was limning an interlude of mild but encouraging perestroika in a totalitarian country . Weiss criticized Whitson harshly for believing that the son and heir of Qaddafi could have been inextricable from the police state his father founded, and for not mentioning in her glowing Foreign Policy article about Libya the four dictatorial red lines that, as Saif al-Islam openly acknowledged, he would not allow to be crossed, one of those lines being explicit criticism of his father.
