Qaddafi: 'My People Love Me'
ABC News' Christiane Amanpour reports:
I interviewed Col. Moammar Gadhafi this evening, when he told me he could not step down because he is not a president or king, and denied there were demonstrations against him anywhere in Libya.
"My people love me. They would die for me," he said.
We conducted the interview at a restaurant in the Corniche, a coastal road on Tripoli's Mediterranean coast. Gadhafi, wearing sunglasses and dressed in a brown tribal dress, drove up in a small convoy of sedans, got out and greeted us. The longtime leader seemed not to be surrounded by huge amounts of security.
Gadhafi said he wanted to speak to the press to get the truth out, and he spent more than an hour with us trying to put forth his side of the story.
Lbya's longtime leader laughed when I asked him whether he would step down in response to calls against violence by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama. He invited the United Nations and any other organization to come to Libya and do a "fact finding mission" and questioned how they could freeze assets, impose sanctions and an arms embargo, and implement a travel ban based purely on media reports alone.
The current uprising is the most serious challenge posed to Gadhafi's leadership since he came to power in 1969.
Gadhafi's version of the truth seemed to be at odds with what people have been talking about and reporting here, and he does not seem to fully comprehend the drama and the magnitude of whats going on around him.
He said he would not be leaving Libya, and denied -- in very strong terms -- using any force against his people. I asked him several times about reports that aerial bombardments had been used against protesters, but Gadhafi said they did not happen and that they had only bombed military and ammunition depots.
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