Let us praise Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, having served about eight years of a life-sentence imposed on him in 2001 for his role in bombing Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 259 crew and passengers and 11 people on the ground, was set free last month as an act of executive clemency by Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill.
Megrahi is terminally ill with cancer, the minister of Scottish justice assured the media. He was given three months to live. "My decision is that he returns home to die."
Before dying, though, Megrahi had some social obligations. When he got out of Greenock prison, one of Gaddafi's sons waited for him in a private jet to whisk him away to Libya for a hero's welcome, including an embrace by the Libyan leader himself.
Did Libyans celebrate Megrahi because they took him for a murderer or for an innocent man? Those who know the Arab world answer: Why shouldn't we celebrate someone you release?
Well, why did Scotland release him? Those who know the West have a better question. Why did Scotland jail him in the first place?
The crime was heinous; the investigation slipshod, even corrupt. The evidence against the two Libyan suspects, Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was so flimsy it left the Scottish judges no choice but to acquit Fhimah. They did convict Megrahi, but defensively, as if they were performing a patriotic rather than a judicial duty. The case against the Libyan rested on the evidence of a single witness, a Maltese shopkeeper named Tony Gauci. If he was mistaken, Megrahi had no tie to the atrocity.
If the trial proved anything, it was that Lockerbie wasn't Megrahi and Fhimah's idea. They didn't order or finance it. At most, they were extras in a horror movie. For the investigators to put two minnows in the dock for a Moby Dick of a crime was itself a mockery.
The initial assumption was that the Pan Am jet was sabotaged by order of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Still the leader of Iran in 1988, the Ayatollah had promised the skies would "rain blood" after a missile from the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iran Air passenger flight with a loss of 290 lives a few months before.
The focus shifted to Libya later. A theory that Col. Gaddafiwished to get back at the U. S. and Britain for the 1986 bombing of his country seemed feasible. It also suited three U. S. administrations seeking to mend fences with Iran and Syria to build a coalition against Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
There had been other theories. One, described in the London Guardian by Ian Black, had terrorists backed by Syria and Iran smuggle the explosives on board the doomed flight. They supposedly "infiltrated a U. S. intelligence operation which used Pan Am Flight 103 to smuggle heroin, in a complex dirty-tricks, drugs-for-hostages deal."
This theory actually became Pan Am's defence in a 1990s civil suit launched by the victims' families. The airline tried to show it wasn't lax security but a rogue CIA operation that caused the disaster. Eventually both the courts and the media dismissed the theory as mendacious. It probably was, but worse, it was inconvenient. The intelligence and political establishment wanted Lockerbie to be a Libyan outrage.
Amazingly, so did Libya.
Colonel Gaddafi, a genius wearing a fool's mask, calculated that letting Western investigators pin the crime on his underlings, and then accepting "responsibility" for it in an abstract kind of way, would please everybody.
The jihadists would be pleased because the sky did rain blood, just as the Ayatollah promised, yet now the heat was off at no cost to them.
Western governments would be pleased because they could engage in clever games of realpolitik with everybody -- Iran, Syria, whatever -- without having to feel guilty about dealing with terrorists.
The victims' families would be pleased (to say nothing of their lawyers) because they would share US$2.7-billion in blood money when Gaddafi put it on the table (he did in 2003).
Western oil companies like BP would be pleased because if Libya accepted responsibility and paid compensation business could go on as usual.
Libyan ruling circles would be pleased because US$2.7-billion gave enough leverage to tie it to the lifting of UN sanctions and normalization of relations, without anybody demanding silly things like regime change.
Western public opinion would be pleased because somebody would have owned up, paid up and gone to jail.
Last but not least, Colonel Gaddafi would be pleased because he wouldn't have to worry about facing some international tribunal in the Hague one day, for Lockerbie or whatever.
This would leave only the souls aboard Flight 103 whose lungs burst as they spilled from the disintegrating fuselage into a tornado-force wind at 31,000 feet, and the souls incinerated on the ground -- but souls were hard to please. As for Megrahi, who may have spent his last years in jail without having had anything to do with anything, at least he got to shake hands with Libya's astute leader.
National Post
My God - how is someone like me from the praries and brung up on the Orphan Annie philosophie ( keep clean, tell the truth and Daddy Warbucks will rescue you) suppose to navigate the games, within games, within games world that George Jonas describes? Til I read this article I naively operated under the illusion that I was relatively sophisticated. Now I'm feelng I shouldn't be let out after dark.
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