Prelude
It is January 27th, as I finish editing this article. The Guardian reports that the US is considering a deal in which it will pay for Libya to destroy it’s weapons programmes. The phrasing of the headline is curious, because it uses the term “weapons” to refer to what it later describes as “nuclear and chemical weapons programmes”, a different thing entirely. The United Kingdom government takes enormous pride in its negotiation of this ‘disarmament’ process, even though Libya voluntarily offered to relinquish the weapons it did not have . Even if such weapons existed, it would behoove Blair and Bush to abstain from their triumphant declarations that they have made the world a safer place. After all, Libya is being asked to disarm itself unilaterally. Imagine if someone were to suggest that the US and UK should rise to the moral level of Libya and disband its WMD programmes unilaterally.

Elementary perceptions such as these are usually reduced to complaints about “double standards”. But the US and UK are not schizophrenic, or morally confused. The appearance of double-standards merely points toward a single, hidden standard which eludes mainstream discourse. That standard, obviously enough, is self-interest. It could only be missed if you were eager to impute noble motives to our leaders. The story of Libya in the last two decades, however, militates powerfully against any such fantasies.


"Preemptive" Attack on Libya
On April 14th, 1986, the US launched a massive bombing assault on Libya, striking targets in Tripoli, and killing anything between 40 and 100 civilians. That this number seems low in the register of atrocities is a sobering, but not redeeming, point. The French embassy was destroyed, while Qaddafi's adopted daughter was killed. The official raison d'etre for this assault was the alleged Libyan involvement in the bombing of a West German nightclub nine days earlier, which had resulted in the deaths of two US soldiers and one civilian. Larry Speakes, the Ari Fleischer of his time, hoped that this attack would "preempt and discourage" future terrorist actions by Libya. The attack occurred the same week that the House of Representatives was to have a renewed debate on US assistance to Contra terrorists devastating towns and villages in Nicaragua. Reagan reminded the House that Qadaffi had sent "$400 million and an arsenal of weapons and advisers into Nicaragua".

The intention, it was quietly admitted, was to assassinate Qadaffi and bring about regime change. (Seymour Hersh, "Target Qadaffi", New York Times Magazine, February 17th, 1987).
Voice of America told the Libyan people that as long as they took orders from Qadaffi, they must "accept the consequences". The evidence that Libya was involved in the attack in West Germany was a pair of wire communications between Libya and it's embassy in East Berlin. Libya, it was claimed, had ordered the embassy to orchestrate a night of carnage in the nightclub and "cause maximum and indiscriminate damages". The embassy allegedly wired back that Tripoli would be happy when it saw the headlines the following day. This is the NSA's particular confection, because the German BND, who had assisted in the decoding of the two wire messages, reached a rather different conclusion. German security officials looking into the attack insisted that the accusation was premature, and continued to look into other possible culprits. German politicans, moreover, remained critical of the bombing of Libya and the US position on the attack in Berlin.

US Assault on Libya; Was Qadaffi sponsoring Hinckley?
Supposing that the US position is in each essential true, there are good reasons for positing that such an attack could well have been a response to terror campaigns on Libya itself, which began with an apparently failed assassination attempt on Qadaffi himself. On 27th June 1980, a VIP Italian airplane was shot down by a sidewinder missile, in what the Italians said was likely to be a NATO attack. As the attack occurred, a Libyan plane which may have been carrying Qadaffi was flying in the vicinity. As Reagan and his band of mercenary reactionaries took office, the first decision on the question of Libya was to authorise the CIA to concoct a wide-ranging, large-scale plan to overthrow Qadaffi. The plan included everything from propaganda operations to paramilitary campaigns and guerilla operations. (Newsweek, 3rd August 1981).

On August 19th, US planes entered Qadaffi's territory in the Gulf of Sidra and shot down to Libyan jets. Qadaffi accused the US of "international terrorism", and allegedly threatened to assassinate Reagan in a telephone call to the Ethiopian leader, (apparently he was trying to impress Jodie Foster). Shortly thereafter, the US government claimed that a Libyan hit-squad had entered America and were planning to kill Reagan. They had the evidence, Reagan claimed, and Qadaffi knew it. The evidence, when requested by the press, was not forthcoming. It later transpired that the alleged "assassins" were anti-Qadaffi Libyans who had assisted in securing the release of hostages from Iran. Nevertheless, stories of Qadaffi's perfidy abounded, and he was rumoured to be behind a number of plots on American lives, including that of the diplomat Christian Chapman, although no unsullied evidence emerged.

There were, nevertheless, real plans to do away with Qadaffi, involving the US and French intelligence. These plans were dropped when Giscard lost the 1981 election. However, they were resuscitated in 1984, when the CIA placed itself at the service of a French plot to either assassinate Qadaffi or overthrow him (he appeared to threaten French interests in Africa, an abiding concern to this day). The operations resulted in gun battles between Qadaffi loyalists and Libyan exiles. (Hersh, op cit).

The Incredible, Disappearing, "Irrefutable" Evidence Again
In Christmas, 1985, bomb attacks at Rome and Vienna airports killed 20. It didn't take long for the US to add Libya to the rapidly-expanding list of suspects. It turned out that three of the attackers had Tunisian passports, apparently traceable to Libya. Shortly thereafter, Reagan declared that there was "irrefutable" evidence of Libyan involvement in the attacks. Renewed economic sanctions were applied to Libya and, in March 1986, US navy jets once more crossed into Libyan territory. Receiving no rebuke in word or action, they returned the subsequent two days to attack a Libyan anti-aircraft site and blow up three or four ships. The Whitehouse claimed that Libya had fired two missiles at the aircraft on their return, prompting the attacks. It isn't clear who fired first, but let's once more set aside judgment and assume the Whitehouse story is unalloyed fact. Imagine another country sent military jets into US airspace, not once, but repeatedly. It is likely that not only would the jets be shot down, but the intruding nation would probably be subject to some kind of military attack - recalling that the US reacted to an alleged, failed attempt on Bush senior's life by sending 23 Tomahawk missiles into a residential area in Baghdad, killing eight and wounding a dozen. Once more, the dissoluble evidence against the alleged perpetrators was "circumstantial ... rather than ironclad". (See Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New, Pluto Press, 1994, pp 16-17).

Since it isn't permissible to judge Libya by the standards the US submits itself to, Libya was deemed the "aggressor" in this case, and attempts at opening third party discussions with the US were rebuffed accordingly. (The Guardian, 3rd April, 1986). Aid was disbursed to Libyan exile groups in an attempt to unite them into an effective opposition, while financial support was given to France and Egypt to encourage activities against Libya, possibly including assassination. Although John Poindexter, the Iran-Contra criminal, noted in in August 1986 memo that no "hard evidence" existed with respect to Libya's alleged terrorist activities, Qadaffi was being blamed for every possible atrocity, and would doubtless have copped it for the earth tremors in Los Angeles if possible. The climate was being readied for an attack on Tripoli.

Pan Am 103; "The Flight From Justice"
Private Eye's prolonged recording of the campaign of deceit and illusion around the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie stands as one of its greatest achievements. The evidence, carefully marshalled, blows the official case to shreds. The trial, a mockery of justice, ended with what could have been Qadaffi's first sacrafice at the altar of international respectability, the imprisonment of one his intelligence agents for a crime which he could not have committed. The repeated warnings to Washington told of a likely plot by associates of Abu Nidal to place a bomb on a Pan Am flight. The warnings were taken so seriously that US embassy staff in Moscow were warned of the threat, and none took the Pan Am 103 flight via Frankfurt, a common and popular means of transport back to the home country. The British Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, acknowledged that Britain itself had received 16 less specific threats. The State Department had received warnings of an attack by a "[t]eam of Palestinians not associated with Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)", with likely targets being "Pan Am airlines and US mil. bases".

A New York investigative company, Interfor, was hired by Pan Am and its insurers to look into the facts behind the explosion. Their findings included the suggestion that Lebanese terrorists, namely the Dalkamoni gang, had got the bomb on the airliner at Frankfurt by exploiting a security loophole. The bomb was alleged to have been in luggage which US intelligence officials believed contained drugs, which Interfor said they had been facilitating in its route from Lebanon to the US in exchange for information on US hostages in Beirut. Major Charles McKee, the head of US intelligence on the plane, had apparently been shocked by the deal, and was preparing to return home and blow the whistle. Interfor therefore infers that Pan Am 103 was sacraficed by US intelligence at least in part to do away with the whistle-blower. This would account in some measure for the appearance of suited men carrying a coffin draped in a US flag in Heathrow airport the evening Pan Am scattered in flaming ruins over Lockerbie.

Theories abound as to where and when the bomb was planted, and it has been correctly pointed out that Interfor would have every reason to concoct an explanation that would protect Pan Am from charges of negligence. On the other hand, new evidence began to emerge that perhaps the bomb originated in Malta. It seemed that Abu Talb, a well-known Palestinian terrorist associated with Dalkamonie, had visited a boutique in Malta and purchased the very clothes which were in the suitcase with the bomb. Moreover, an item of luggage was recorded on that fatal Pan Am flight as having originated from an Air Malta flight, subsequently transferred by baggage handlers at Frankfurt. There were no passengers transferring from Air Malta to Pan Am that night, so it seemed initially plausible that the bomber had let the bag go unaccompanied onto that flight. The trouble was, according to Norton Rose solicitors that the relevant documents were not designed to indicate the flight from which the bags had come. Additionally, they relied too heavily on the memory of overworked baggage-handlers. And, even if accurate, they did not preclude the possibility that the suspect bag had in fact been planted in Frankfurt airport. A compelling theory was based therefore on slender threads of evidence.

Enter Libya (boo hiss!). Vincent Cannistraro, the man in charge of the Lockerbie investigation in the US, had been involved in directing the Reagan administration's vendetta against Libya during the 1980s. His intellectual handiwork laid the basis for a new charge, emerging in 1991, that Abdel Bassett Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifah Fhimah, two Libyan airline officials, had planted the bomb at Malta. One of the chief reasons for blaming Libya was that the timers which the Swiss were alleged to have sold to the Libyans were similar to the timer fragment retrieved from Lockerbie searches. Several sources report this differently, but the link's credibility at any rate depended upon the suggestion that the Swiss had only ever supplied these timers to Libya, a thought considerably diluted by the revelation that the East German Stasi had also been supplied with such timers - not an unknown source of military materials once the Eastern Bloc fell.

Nevertheless, the finger remained pointing firmly at Libya, despite all indications that other forces had been at work, and despite the flimsiness of the evidence against the two supposed culprits. Economic sanctions were weakly applied to Libya, whom the US called upon to submit the pair for trial. Libya, unapprised of any evidence against them, refused to do so. They did, however, offer to allow the men to stand trial in a neutral country like Holland or Switzerland, a plan rejected by the US and Britain for almost a decade. The relatives of victims wrote repeatedly to the authorities to ask for a trial in a neutral country, but no reply was forthcoming.
When the trial finally went ahead, its procedure was farcical, vital evidence was not heard, the most compromised evidence was allowed to stand. Several witnesses, it transpired, had been paid by the US. And, what is more, the Maltese boutique owner I referred to earlier as having incriminated Abu Talb had decided that al-Megrahi was the man he had served, and testified as such. On such flimsy grounds as these, Megrahi was sentenced to twenty years in prison, and Col Qadaffi began his journey back into the hearts of decent folks by accepting responsibility for the attacks and paying compensation to the victims - many of whom were, justifiably, loathe to accept it. It would not be the last time that Libya would confess to crimes not of its making.


Libya's Rapprochement With the West
Following years of attacks on Libya's soil, including a couple of jets shot down on the orders of Bush senior in 1989, Qadaffi made one last serenade for the tender gaze of America and it's dwarfish "coalition of the willing". It publicly repudiated its past errors, and offered to dismantle all of its programmes of Weapons of Mass Destruction under the watchful eye of inspectors. This, following the controvery over Iraqi WMDs, was a gift to the UK which was creditted with having engineered the diplomacy behind the moves. There are, the Washington Post avers, "lessons" for other "belligerent nations" who threaten America with destruction each and every day. These countries, it transpires, will learn that they "would do far better spending the funds on the welfare of their people." Yet more moral truisms which would find a good application in Britain and America.

There are lessons to be learned, but they are not the mealy-mouthed platitudes of establishment liberalism. They are in fact even more banal than that: crime pays, power prevails, terrorism works. Welcome to Blanket Security.