Brit suggested I write a diary to expand upon his, so I'll do so. If you haven't read his yet it's here: http://www.dailykos.com/... Some brief background. I work for a US-based non-profit organization and was in Benghazi developing a health-related proposal. A taxi driver stole my passport. Long story, but it was incredibly bad luck to lose my passport in one of the only nations on the planet without a functioning US embassy, and more than 1200km from Tripoli where there is sort of a US mission. Libya is an enormous country. To paraphrase what Gertrude Stein once said about America, "There's more of Libya where nobody is than where anybody is, and this is what makes Libya what it is."
The silver lining of all this, if there is one, is that I am in Tripoli waiting for a replacement passport, and have become an accidental witness to the celebrations at the end of this war. Follow me past the squiggle for some impressions of revolutionary Libya: