Our original Libyan misadventure - War Room - Salon.com: Back then, Thomas Jefferson, another president with a penchant for soaring rhetoric and cool calculation, occupied the White House. The reigning tyrant in Tripoli was Pasha Yusuf Karamanli, whose hands were as bloody as Gadhafi's; he'd seized the throne by murdering one brother and, by some accounts, their father, and banishing his other elder brother Hamet. Under Yusuf, as under Gadhafi, Libya became the most troublesome state in a troubled region -- the Barbary Coast, so called after the red-bearded Turkish captain Barbarossa, who drove the Spanish out of North Africa in the early 1500s. From Libya to Morocco, the successors to Barbarossa's corsairs now thrived on piracy, seizing ships and crews for ransom or extorting protection-money "tribute" to let them pass.