"I used to be optimistic, even in the darkest days," Fanoush says. "My brother was hanged in the streets. We were always determined to get rid of Gaddafi but we worried it would take 20 years or more.   Now things are changing immensely, and quickly."

Underpinning his confidence in the future is a demographic quirk, an unexpected consequence of dictatorship. "Unintentionally, Gaddafi did us a great favour by emptying the country of its people. We have 100,000 intellectuals, professionals and young people who left Libya to live and work all over the world. They have expertise in so many areas and now they're coming back." I recall a cigarette break on the road to Benghazi when a Libyan stranger offered to translate for an impromptu conversation with a rebel soldier manning a checkpoint. He was a PhD student studying biology from Sheffield.

 

To tread the corridors of provisional power in Benghazi is to encounter an inspiring corps of Western-educated doctors and lawyers, engineers, human rights activists, businessmen, former political prisoners. Unlike in Iraq, where fears of the returning diaspora's venality were all too often justified in displays of brazen klepto-cracy, so far the attitude towards the stream of exiles appears overwhelmingly positive. If revolutions could be won on goodwill alone, this one would have triumphed already.

Dr Abdulkadr al Gnein, a hyperactive Danny DeVito lookalike, returned from   Ottawa a year ago, sensing the end of the Gaddafi regime. Nowadays he's busy helping fund the opposition, setting up a humanitarian NGO, arranging medical supplies and assisting the media. 

He says Gaddafi crossed a "red line" with Iman al Obeidi, the law student who burst into the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli and publicly declared she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi's men. "Women and children are sacred here. This united everyone in Libya against Gaddafi. Every free city in the west accepts the Council is the legitimate government of Libya. We won't be split."

We meet in a VIP suite in Al Fadhil Palace, where members of the NTC gather daily. Acres of white sheets on a kingsize bed. A tasselfest of sumptuous soft furnishings. Every bit of furniture in sight is covered in the sparkling decoration so beloved of Arab furniture designers. It is as far removed from his prison cell as possible.