US officials downplay concerns as Libyan Islamists 'warn' their secular counterparts

"The Obama administration and European allies congratulated the Libyan people as Libya's interim rulers declared formal victory ....  underneath the surface festivities, it seems that some forces aligned with Libya's interim leaders may be mimicking brutal aspects of the unmourned Gadhafi's repressive style...
Investigators with the international human rights advocacy group Human Rights Watch reported Monday that they had discovered the dead bodies of 53 Gadhafi supporters apparently executed with their hands tied behind their backs at an abandoned hotel in Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte.
Meanwhile, Global Post reported that its analysis of video images of Gadhafi taken before his execution last Thursday apparently shows him being sodomized by a member of Libyan National Transition Council forces wielding a weapon.
The allegation came as the bodies of Gadhafi and his son Mo'tassim were put on public display in a cold storage facility for two days in the Libyan city of Misrata.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton--who on a visit earlier last week to Libya expressed the wish that Gadhafi be captured or killed--said on the Sunday talk shows that it would be appropriate for Libyan authorities to pursue an investigation of Gadhafi's death.

 'Just yesterday'

Libya's interim rulers took up the suggestion ... But past such pledges--to investigate, for instance, how the Libyan rebels' military commander Abdel Fattah Younes was assassinated in July,  apparently at the hands of one Islamist militant rebel faction--have so far gone nowhere.
In the meantime, Western officials got another stiff reminder Sunday that Libya's victorious rebels plan to steer the country toward greater public observance of Islam.  Libya's interim leader Abdul-Jalil pledged at Sunday's festivities commemorating the successful struggle to topple Gadhafi that Islamic Sharia law would be the basis of the new government....
His comments "reflected not only the chairman's personal religious conservatism and the country's, but also the rising influence of Islamists among the former rebels," Nossiter and Fahim wrote. "The Islamists, who include some influential militia commanders, have warned that they will not permit their secular counterparts in a new government to sideline them." "Any law that violates sharia is null and void legally," Abdul-Jalil said ...
Abdul-Jalil's pronouncements are already provoking sharp rebukes from feminists and teir progressive-minded sympathizers  in LIbya. "It's shocking and insulting to state, after thousands of Libyans have paid for freedom with their lives, that the priority of the new leadership is to allow men to marry in secret," a Libyan feminist who gave only her first name Rim told the AFP's Martelli. "We did not slay Goliath so that we now live under the Inquisition."
The specter of Islamist rule is provoking "feelings of pain and bitterness among women who sacrificed so many martyrs," Adelrahman al-Shatr, a Libyan opposition politician, told the AFP. "By abolishing the marriage law, women lose the right to keep the family home if they divorce. It is a disaster for Libyan women."
Former American officials who have worked in the North African nation tend to downplay concerns ...  They also contend that Libya which under Gadhafi had made cultural strides toward secular modernity, is not fertile recruiting ground for Islamist extremism.
But Abdul-Jalil's pronouncements Sunday indicate a continuing struggle for influence between Islamist militant and more secular factions of Libya's anti-Gadhafi forces.
And documents found in Gadhafi's seized intelligence ministry in August support previous reporting that showed the CIA was long concerned about al-Qaida links to factions of anti-Gadhafi militants, including the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Indeed, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a top anti-Gadhafi rebel who has become a leading figure in the post-Gadhafi leadership in Tripoli, told reporters in September that he was arrested in Thailand in 2004, tortured under interrogation by the CIA,  .... In the short term, however, the United States, like much of the rest of the world, is focusing mainly on Libya's achievement in toppling a long-ruling dictator--with the assistance of NATO air-power...."