March 1, 2011 - A look back at Libya
publication date: Mar 1, 2011
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March 1, 2011 - A look back at Libya
In October 2009, this editor accompanied a U.S. delegation to an international conference in Tripoli, Libya that was sponsored by Muammar Qaddafi's "World Green Book Supporters Society." From the minute the U.S. delegation arrived at Tripoli's international airport, we were "handled" in a friendly but unmistakably suspicious manner by members of Qaddafi's Jamahiriyah Security Organization (JSO), Libya's intelligence agency.
Except for a few forays into the neighborhood surrounding out seaside hotel, every excursion out of the area was organized with JSO "tour guides" and "conference liaison officials" ever-present.
As news begins to filter out of Libya about many "disappeared" Libyans, it is noteworthy to relate what one Tripoli taxi driver whispered to me in October 2009, "You know, many people disappear here in Libya." The hushed words continue to echo in my ears. Although Qaddafi and his Green Book advocates repeated their claims that Libya was some sort of "people's democracy" where local, regional, and national committees exercised political power,it was clear that with "The Leader's" image appearing on every highway, bi-way, and street corner, Libya was nothing of the sort. And in a tell-tale sign of a dictatorship, almost no Libyan on the streets of Tripoli smiled. They were clearly afraid of other Libyans and foreigners alike.
We are re-publishing the WMR report filed from Tripoli:
October 29-30, 2009 -- Libya at the brink of a major opening to the West
Libya is on the verge of a major opening to the West in a manner not seen since the years before the collapse of communism in Europe. That is the sense captured by the editor during a recent visit to Tripoli, the capital of the country that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi dubbed long ago the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya."
Qaddafi, once considered a pariah in the West, is now at the helm of a nation that is seeing an unprecedented construction boom and foreign investment since the incremental lifting of an international embargo on the country beginning in 2003. Qaddafi accepted responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103. However, while this editor was in Tripoli, news broke that the Scottish case against Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, freed from a Scottish prison after his conviction and jailing for carrying out the bombing, was in doubt over tainted evidence used to convict the former Libyan intelligence officer. Lamen Khalifa Fhimayh, Megrahi's colleague who was also charged in the plane bombing, was acquitted of all charges in the case.
Megrahi dropped his appeal of his conviction before the Scottish government agreed to release him because of his diagnosis of prostate cancer. Sky News, a Rupert Murdoch-owned TV news network, erroneously reported that Megrahi had died in Libya after news of the tainted evidence was first reported. Libya demanded an apology from Sky News for the false report.
The Tripoli Post reported on October 24 that Member of the Scottish Parliament Christine Grahame said a tiny fragment of the timer, known as PT-35, allegedly used in the bombing of Pan Am 103 had been taken by Scottish police out of Scottish judicial custody to Siemens in Munich in April 1990. Siemens has a long and on-going close relationship with U.S. intelligence, including the National Security Agency and CIA. A senior FBI investigator at the time of the original investigation, Dick Marquise, said the PT-35 fragment was also taken to the United States and the FBI's crime laboratory. PT-35 was said to have been found in pieces of clothing bought in Malta and the shaky evidence was used to convict Megrahi. The presence of the PT-35 fragment at the scandal-ridden FBI crime laboratory lends weight to Megrahi's contention that critical evidence was suppressed in his trial.
The PT-35 device was sent to the FBI's crime laboratory on 22 June, 1990. In September 1995, Frederic Whitehurst, an FBI chemist at the crime laboratory, accused the FBI of pressuring laboratory scientists to skew tests and commit perjury in order to win convictions in hundreds of questionable cases, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on 1995, the mail bombing campaign directed against Democratic federal judges and civil rights leaders in the late 1980s. The latter campaign killed U.S. Judge Robert Vance in Alabama.
U.S. intelligence intercepts of Iranian communications revealed that it was Iran, not Libya, that ordered the downing of PanAm 103 in retaliation for the shootdown on July 3, 1988 of an IranAir Airbus by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf. Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) intelligence corroborated the U.S. intelligence report. Ayatollah Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, a former Iranian Interior Minister, paid the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) $10 million to carry out the retaliatory bombing. The late ABC News reporter Pierre Salinger told this editor in 1993 that the payment by Iran for the bomb constructed in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley was traced from Tehran through a Greek bank to the PFLP-GC's account in Damascus, Syria. The bomb was placed on a flight from Larnaca Airport in Cyprus to Frankfurt where it was then placed in a feeder flight to London's Heathrow Airport and on to Pan Am 103.
Former CIA officer Robert Baer agreed that Iran, not Libya, carried out the Pan Am 103 bombing and that Megrahi was freed partly because the Libyan's appeal would show the world how the United States and Britain manipulatd the Scottish judicial system to convict the wrong man.
There is another reason why Megrahi's conviction was important for the United States. In 1989, newly-elected President George H. W. Bush was aleady planning his war against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Bush calculated that he would need Syria's support in the attack on Iraq and, at the very least, Iran's neutrality. Bush secured both in Operation Desert Storm. Bush and the CIA, including his CIA director Robert Gates, decided that another country had to be found to assign blame for the PanAm 103 bombing.
Libya, under Qaddafi, had been a burr under the saddle of the Reagan administration. In 1986, the Reagan-Bush administration falsely claimed that Libya bombed a discotheque in West Berlin frequented by U.S. soldiers. There is ample evidence that the attack was a Mossad false flag operation designed to place Libya in the U.S. cross-hairs. In 1986, U.S. forces attacked Tripoli and killed Qaddafi's adopted daughter in the process. Qaddafi also was a target in the attack, a violation of Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the assassination of foreign leaders.
Qaddafi had also, thanks to propaganda written by CIA-funded counterterrorism "expert" Claire Sterling, been falsely linked to a "Terror International" network that, among other plans, included a plan to dispatch Carlos the Jackal, also known as Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, to the United States to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Although low-ranking CIA analysts dismissed Sterling's book as bunk, CIA director William Casey, Robert Gates, and the Pentagon neocon hawks around Richard Perle heartily endorsed it.
Other neocon propaganda also pushed the theory that Libya had, with its Soviet-armed military and Soviet bases, become Western Europe's own "Cuba." Stering also pushed the notion that eastern European Communist governments, including those of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the German Democratic Republic, were actively supporting the terrorist network run out of Libya.
The Bush administration concocted a false flag scenario that permitted Pan Am 103's attack to be carried out by the PFLP-GC with Qaddafi and his intelligence agents ending up as the accused. Syria would help Bush in his attack on Iraq and Iran would remain steadfastly neutral. In other words: Bush won, Syria's Hafez al Assad, who was able to send Syrian troops into Lebanon to occupy that nation, won, Iran won, and Qaddafi lost.
Qaddafi's hosting last week in Tripoli of his first International Conference of the World Green Book Supporters Society was an attempt to keep the tenets of his popular revolution alive in countries around the world, with a pitch for his brand of direct popular rule even being made to the United States. However, as multinational corporations continue to pour into Libya with construction of new hotels, a major international airport, and a state-of-the-art conference center now underway, Qaddafi's "Green Revolution," rather than being exported may succumb to the sudden and pervasive import of Western pop culture. In a few years, highways billboards that extol the virtues of the Green Book may be replaced by advertisements pushing Libyans, who now live in a dry country, to drink from the "green bottle," Heineken.
The seaside former Royal Palace of King Idris (center spire) was offered by Qaddafi to the Americans as the site of the new US Embassy. Hillary Clinton's State Department rejected the offer favoring bilking the US taxpayers for another multi-million dollar "Super Max" embassy like those in Baghdad, Kabul and Islamabad. WMR photo.
Qaddafi trying to keep his popular revolution alive by opening up Green Book branches around the world. Delegates from 91 countries gathered in the People's Hall in Tripoli the evening before Qaddafi received the delegates in a tent at his headquarters. The editor was present in the front row in front of Qaddafi as he explained how parliamentary government was inherently corrupt and non-representative of the popular will. WMR photo.
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