...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Originally it was a mutual defense pact directed against an expansionist Soviet Union. In later years it evolved into a mechanism for picking the American pocket while criticizing the style of the American pants...
aircraft hit Tripoli on Tuesday in the most sustained bombardment of the Libyan capital since Western forces began air strikes in March.
By Tuesday afternoon, war planes were striking different parts of the city several times an hour, hour after hour, rattling windows and sending clouds of grey smoke into the sky, a Rooters correspondent in the centre of the city said.
The Libyan government attributed earlier blasts to NATO air strikes on military compounds in the capital, a day after rebels drove Muammar
Qadaffy's forces out of a western town.Bombs have been striking the city every few hours since Monday, at a steadily increasing pace. On Tuesday they began before 11:00am (5:00am ET) and were continuing five hours later.
Air strikes were previously rarer and usually at night.
Some of the bombs appeared to hit in the vicinity of Qadaffy's vast Bab al-Aziziya residential compound.
A Libyan official, speaking over a loudspeaker in a hotel where foreign journalists stay under government supervision, said some strikes had hit the Popular Guard compound and the Revolutionary Guard compound, giving no comment on casualties.
A NATO military official in Naples, headquarters of the alliance's Libya operation, confirmed the current strikes were the heaviest on Tripoli so far.
"Definitely there are more strikes going into Tripoli than there have been in the past ... This is just to increase the pressure on the Qadaffy regime and it's been going on like this for a couple of days now ..."
"The targets we are striking are the same types as ... in the past -- command and control, ammunition storage, vehicle storage -- any function or system the Qadaffy regime can use to attack civilians."
Libyan TV said late on Monday NATO had bombed the al-Karama neighbourhood and a civilian telecommunications station.
NATO said it hit a military "command and control target."
Further east, Qadaffy's troops and the rebels have been in stalemate for weeks, neither able to hold territory on a road between Ajdabiyah, which Qadaffy's forces shelled on Monday, and the Qadaffy-held oil town of Brega further west.
Rebels control the east of Libya, the western city of Misrata and the range of mountains near the border with Tunisia. They have been unable to advance on the capital against Qadaffy's better-equipped forces, despite NATO air strikes.