The United States is expecting to take action in the coming days against Libya to pressure the North African state to respect the rights and actions of its people, U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said on Thursday.

"We expect to take action in the coming days, but it takes time to fully access and also make sure that in whatever actions that we take we believe they're most likely to be successful in putting pressure on the Libyan government to respect, you know, the rights and actions of their people," Crowley told reporters at the department.

"We are consulting broadly about steps that we can take. I'm not going to prejudge decisions that have yet to be made, but there's a lot of action going on across the government," he said at a regular press briefing. "We have a wide range of tools, you know -- financial sanctions, multilateral actions -- and we're considering all of them."

He refused to rule in military option, saying only that the military is "fully involved" in the discussions and doing its own thinking about options that can be presented to President Barack Obama.

In his first public speech on Libya on Wednesday, Obama said that the country must stop violence against protesters and that he has asked his administration to "prepare the full range of options that we have to respond to this crisis."

Libyan protesters took to the streets last week in a bid to put an end to the 41-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi, plunging the nation into chaos and bloodshed. So far, hundreds of people have been killed in the clashes.