Libya: Looking Toward a Post-Lockerbie Future

Getting to Know the Colonel: Libya’s Leader Muammar Al-Qaddafi

By Andrew I. Killgore

“We were made to be enemies of Israel.”—Col. Muammar Al- Qaddafi, Nov. 13, 2000

marked: “Being an object of attack, suspicion or vengeance”—Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary

“Flee, flee the city and get away from the smoke.…Flee from the lethargy and waste, the poison and boredom and yawning. Flee from the nightmare city.”—Muammar Al-Qaddafi, “The Village,” in Escape to Hell and Other Stories.

When the Washington Report called on Libyan leader Col. Muammar Al-Qaddafi in Tripoli on Nov. 13 he carefully placed an alarm clock on a small table by his side. Two or three moments later he moved it slightly, to a position exactly to his liking, and very obviously to let us know that our time with him would be limited. We suspected that his previous encounters with American journalists had made him impatient with adversarial interviews.

The Libyan leader did not walk with a cane, nor did he limp. Dressed carefully in loafers, shirt and slacks, Qaddafi looked healthy, but tired.

Although we were there to interview Colonel Qaddafi, it was he who posed the first question: “How come,” he inquired rhetorically, “a country that calls itself a democracy does not allow its citizens to travel wherever they like?” He seemed somewhat surprised by our nonrhetorical reply that the U.S. State Department was being run by officials who made it a priority to look out for the interests of Israel. It was not an answer he expected from Americans.

When we asked about the effect on his country of recently suspended U.N. and continuing U.S. sanctions, it was clear that the Libyan leader reflected his people’s pride. “Although of course we have suffered,” he said, “we have been able to bear this injustice. We were not brought to our knees, and things are improving now. The Great Man-Made River Project is progressing well, and we are not extravagant in using our oil supplies.”

Asked if Libya planned, as we had heard, to increase its oil-production capacity to two million barrels a day, Qaddafi replied with an edge, “Why should we increase production? Prices are high now, so we should cut production. We will act as a bloc with OPEC.”

Regarding the Middle East peace process, the colonel said he favored the South African model as a solution to the Palestinian problem, a proposal which had been presented at the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit. Failing such a solution, Qaddafi predicted continued fighting. Comparing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Kurds to that of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, he asked why the U.S. didn’t respond to Israel and Turkey as it had to Yugoslavia.

Although he responded politely and patiently to our questions, it was when we asked what he would like to say to the American people that the meeting came alive. The Libyan leader pushed the clock aside, and his words poured out.

“We don’t hate Americans,” Qaddafi began. “After all, America as a country includes people from all over the world. How can we hate a people when our own people, our sons and daughters, may become Americans?

“We are against the Zionist and imperialist circles which exploit America’s strength and use it against the world,” he said. “Wake up, America! What benefit does the U. S. get from Israel?

“The Arabs and Muslims are a thousand times stronger than Israel,” Qaddafi continued. “Israel is only your ‘ally’ on the surface. Underneath you are in conflict. Why? Because the Zionist project wants to dominate and use the U.S. for the sake of Israel.

“We were made to be enemies of Israel,” the Libyan leader insisted. “We have been given a false image. We are not the ‘terrorists’ that we have been labeled. The U.N. [sanctions] have deprived us of the very basics, while we are [falsely] charged with looking for space-age technology.

“The U.S. government is betting on a losing horse,” Qaddafi said. Israel is skating on thin ice, just like South Africa. A racist state in the Middle East is not viable, especially during this era of globalization. A country whose boundaries are based on race and language is not possible, especially since the era of the nation-state is over. Now we live in an era of big spaces.”

Nearly 40 minutes had elapsed. Qaddafi’s statement, “We were made to be enemies of Israel” struck in our heads. A “ready-made” enemy? One destined to be an enemy of Israel and of Zionism’s goal to seize Arab Palestine and empty it of Palestinians?

A Bedouin Arab Nationalist

What manner of man is this Muammar Al- Qaddafi, depicted in the West, particularly the United States, as a dangerous terrorist, yet so quietly persuasive when the Washington Report interviewed him? He is, of course, an Arab nationalist and a bedouin.

He is not the simpleton author of The Green Book, so relentlessly ridiculed by American journalists anxious to demonstrate their worldly sophistication. His remarks to us, in fact, made it clear why some of his countrymen refer to him as “the thinker.” (Since he refuses the title of president or any other official position, he is usually called“the colonel” or, at most, “the leader.” Libyans, however, continue to try to describe his importance to the country.)

An entirely different Qaddafi, of emotional and psychological depth, is found in his book Escape to Hell and Other Stories, with a long introduction by Pierre Salinger, press spokesman for President John F. Kennedy. There he is lyrical in his love of village and tribal life. In the same volume, his reaction to what he sees as the impersonal horror of city life is powerful enough to recall the most vituperative attacks on the city to be found in 19th century Western literature.

Born Muammar Muhammad Abu Salem Hamid Abu Minyar in 1942 in the northern city of Sirt, the future leader of Libya might have kept his own family name, or used the tribal name of Qaddafi, as is the right of any member of that bedouin tribe. He chose Qaddafi, as did others, so there are many Qaddafis in Libya not related to the colonel by blood.

Qaddafi greatly admired Egyptian President Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had become a hero to Arab nationalists. Soon after Qaddafi gained power by overthrowing an exhausted monarchy in 1969 it was clear that Wheelus Field, the U.S. Air Force base near Tripoli from which we launched air flights near or over the Soviet Union, would have to go. More than not wanting to take sides in the Cold War, the Libyan leader saw that the United States, as the ally of Israel, was complicit in the loss of Palestine and the brutalization of Palestinians.

The Libyan leader sympathized with the plight of Palestinians and gave them financial support. This automatically converted Qaddafi—he was “made to be,” in his own words—into a “marked” man, an enemy of an Israel whose basic philosophy was not reconciliation with the Arabs, but rather a “mailed fist” relentlessness.

But Qaddafi presented Israel with a special problem. He was not only an Arab nationalist. He had money that he was willing to spend on Arab causes. Moreover, Libya was too far away from Israel to be effectively intimidated by Israeli military action. That meant that the United States had to be manipulated into hating and fearing Libya and Qaddafi.

Thus the Libyan leader always has been presented to the American people, via a pro-Israel media, as an incurable troublemaker. Is that true? Or have his eccentricities been deliberately exaggerated in the Western media? The evidence makes the answer clear.

The “Libyan hit squads” hoax of 1981 is a good place to start. Hardly had President Ronald Reagan settled in the Oval Office than Libyan assassination squads were said to be forming up in the Middle East and Europe to kill members of Reagan’s cabinet.

The Washington Post, the national capital’s leading newspaper, filled its front page for three weeks as the “squads” progressed from the Middle East, to Europe, then to Canada. Eventually the hoax simply vanished. Meanwhile, however, concrete barriers were put in place around the White house, the Congress and the State Department, where they still stand. The Post quite dishonestly never acknowledged that the hoax was a hoax, so the false residue of a “terrorist” Qaddafi still hangs in the American air.

An even more pernicious example of Israel cum U.S. “character assassination” against Qaddafi involves the tangled story of Pan American Flight 103, which was destroyed over Lockerbie, Scot-land on Dec. 21, 1988. An on-board explosive device destroyed the plane, killing 259 persons aboard, most of them American, and 11 people on the ground.

The Pan Am tragedy is part of a tit-for-tat deception by Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, which in February1986 placed a communications device in an apartment building in Tripoli. This device, called the Trojan, made it seem that Libya was broadcasting terrorist orders to its embassies overseas. The U.S., France and Spain picked up the broadcasts. France and Spain decided they were fake. The U.S., encouraged by Israel, took them to be real.

Shortly after the fake Libyan broadcasts began, a Berlin nightclub was bombed, killing two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. Assuming, based on the fake broadcasts from Tripoli, that Libya was the culprit, U.S. planes from Britain and from American 6th Fleet carriers in the Mediterranean bombed Tripoli and Benghazi on April 13, 1986, killing or wounding many Libyans, including Colonel Qaddafi’s small adopted daughter, who was killed in his home in Tripoli.

The background details on Israel’s misdirection of the United States are spelled out in The Other Side of Deception by former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky. But the tit-for-tat goes on; the downing of Pan Am 103 was deemed, at least by the United States and the U.S. Zionist media, to be Qaddafi’s revenge for the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi.

“Libya did it,” is the operating theory of the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie trial now being conducted by three Scottish judges under Scottish law at Camp Zeist, a former U.S. military base near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Three verdicts are possible in the trial: Guilty, not guilty or not proven.

The Lockerbie trial took some puzzling twists and turns. The highly touted key witness for the prosecution, Libyan intelligence service defector Abdul Majid Giaka, lacked credibility on the witness stand. CIA officer Harold M. Hendershot, put on the stand to “buttress” Giaka’s testimony, also was vague and weak.

The speculation is that a “not proven” verdict eventually may be forthcoming. That would leave the question of who did destroy Pan Am Flight 103, if Libya did not? A more troubling question is why the United States would push the Lockerbie trial if it did not have a good case against Libya?

Was the case ever expected to come to trial? Or was it part of a tangled scheme by a party or parties still unknown which would have kept Qaddafi permanently in the dog house, with no chance to refute unproven charges?

The latter question has special significance when it is recalled that, except for a fluke of nature on Dec. 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 “should” have blown up over the Atlantic, where no proof of the culprit ever would be found. High gale-force winds that day pushed the pilot to fly north to avoid the tempests, and to be over Lockerbie when the bomb exploded.

We visited Qaddafi’s badly wrecked house, bombed by U.S. planes on April 13, 1986. It sits 150 yards from his tent in which we were received. On one wall of the demolished home hangs a photo of his young daughter lying mortally wounded in hospital.

In spite of U.S. laws against assassination, the evidence we saw was of an assassination attempt against Qaddafi that might well have succeeded except for his absence from the house that night. Is there any wonder, then, that Colonel Qaddafi received us, as Americans, so warily?

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

SIDEBAR 1

Libya: Rogue State or Punching Bag?

In a September 1997 article in Z Magazine, Noam Chomsky examined the concept of the “rogue state.” His basic premise is that once the Cold War ended, the U.S. still needed a reason to justify spending taxpayers’ money on weapons funding. The U.S. no longer needed to protect the world from John F. Kennedy’s “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” or Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire”—so new enemies were needed. “A secret 1995 study of the Strategic Command, which is responsible for the strategic nuclear arsenal, outlines the basic thinking,” Chomsky wrote. “Released through the Freedom of Information Act, the study, ‘Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,’ shows how the United States shifted its deterrent strategy from the defunct Soviet Union to so-called rogue states such as Iraq, Libya, Cuba and North Korea.…Libya was a favorite choice as ‘rogue state’ from the earliest days of the Reagan administration. Vulnerable and defenseless, it is a perfect punching bag when needed.”

As an example, Chomsky narrates a tale that begins on July 3, 1988, when the U.S.S. Vincennes—then within Iranian territorial waters—shot down a civilian airliner, Iran Air 655, in a commercial corridor in Iranian airspace. A few months later Pan Am 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland, in what according to Iranian intelligence defector Abolhassem Mesbahi was Iranian retaliation for the downing of its plane. A 1991 National Security Agency intelligence document, declassified in 1997, draws the same conclusion, alleging that Akbar Mohtashemi, a former Iranian interior minister, transferred $10 million ‘to bomb Pan Am 103 in retaliation for the U.S. shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus.’ It is striking that, despite the evidence and the clear motive, this is virtually the only act of terrorism not blamed on Iran. Rather, the U.S. and UK have charged two Libyan nationals with the crime.”

—DCH

See article at http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/