Gadhafi to ABC's Amanpour: 'Why Would I Leave Libya?'

Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi laughed outright when Christiane Amanpour of ABC News' "This Week" asked him on Monday if he would leave his country.

"Would anyone leave his homeland?" Gadhafi said. "Why would I leave Libya?"

Amanpour, along with BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen and a reporter from the Sunday Times of London, interviewed Gadhafi at a restaurant in Tripoli.

The Libyan leader appeared to be unaware of the demonstrations in the streets against him.

"They love me," Gadhafi said. "All my people with me, they love me. They will die to protect me, my people."

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said in response to the interview: "It sounds, just frankly, delusional. And when he can laugh in talking to American and international journalists while he is slaughtering his own people, it only underscores how unfit he is to lead and how disconnected he is from reality." Click play to watch video:


"It make all the more important the urgent steps that we have taken over the course of the last week on a national basis as well as the steps that we've taken collectively through the United Nations and the Security Council," Rice said.

The United States has frozen $30 billion in Libyan assets, the Treasury Department said Monday. The European Union has also imposed sanctions.

In the interview Monday, Amanpour asked Gadhafi how he could say his people loved him when crowds in the streets of Benghazi were saying they opposed him.

He replied: "It's Al-Qaeda. They went into military bases and seized arms and they're terrorizing the people. The people who had the weapons were youngsters. They're starting to lay down their weapons now, as the drugs Al Qaeda gave them wear off."

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