That woman’s account of being raped by 15 Libyan government militiamen

I am struck, reading the harrowing account of Iman al-Obaidi, the woman who burst into the hotel where journalists are staying in Tripoli and insisted on telling how she was raped, beaten and humiliated by 15 government militiamen, that there is a fundamental human need to bear witness, to tell the world what happened.

I think we could do a better job of enabling this to happen, of collecting and archiving such information. By we, I mean as humans, not necessarily as a government. I also think that the proliferation of technology that takes photographs, such as cell phones, should provide a bit of deterrence to acts such as these — not much, but every bit helps.