Thursday, September 04, 2003

Saddam fate not lost on Qadhafi

By PV Vivekanand

THE example that the US set with its invasion of Iraq and ouster of Saddam Hussein has not been lost on Libya's Muammar Qadhafi, who has now made deals involving acceptance of responsibility and payment of compensation for attacks outside Libya that are blamed on his agents.
That also proves that the US has succeeded largely in its drive -- launched with the war on Iraq — to establish itself as an unchallenged power in the world and warn off anyone who stands against American interests anywhere in the world.
Indeed, it could be argued that the Libyan moves towards settling its dispute with the US and UK over the 1988 bombing of an American airliner over Scotland and with France over the 1989 bombing of a French passenger plane over Niger were launched much earlier than the 2003 US-led ouster of Saddam from power in Iraq.
However, the way in which Libya succumbed to pressure and agreed to accept responsibility for the downing of PanAm Flight 103 in 1988 and pay $2.7 billion as compensation and also to increase by an unspecified amount the compensation for victims of the 1989 bombing of a French UTA plane clearly indicates that Qadhafi was and is concerned that he might eventually have faced the same fate as Saddam Hussein if he had rejected the demands.
Had Libya not accepted the French demand for an increase in compensation in the UTA bombing, its moves to close the Lockerbie file with the US and UN would not have come through since France would have blocked a Security Council resolution lifting the UN sanctions against Libya. That situation would have left a Damocles threat hanging over Qadhafi.
Equally importantly, Libya needs advanced Western technology and equipment for its oil industry and this would not have come through without an end to the UN sanctions against it.
This week, Libya and France has reached a deal to settle the dispute over compensation for victims of the UTA bombing, which, according to a verdict by a French court, was carried out by Libyan agents.
Under the agreement over the PanAm blast that Libya worked out with the governments of the US and UK, it has already transferred $2.7 billion to an escrow account in the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland as compensation to the relatives of those killed in the bombing.
Technically, the transfer, coupled with the deal over the UTA bombing — signal the closure of the file on the bombing and should lead to the lifting of UN sanctions against Libya in 1991 when it refused to hand over two Libyans accused of the bombing.
Under the Lockerbie deal, 40 per cent of $10 million will be released to relatives of the 270 victims immediately upon the lifting of United Nations sanctions against Libya, another 40 per cent with the removal of US sanctions, and a final 20 per cent in return for Libya being removed from the US list of states “sponsoring terrorism.”
It was the disparity in the compensations that Libya agreed to pay in the Lockerbie case and the UTA case that prompted Paris to demand a comparable level of compensation for UTA 772’s victims.
Six Libyan officials were convicted in a French court in absentia for the UTA bombing attack and the victim’s relatives were paid up to $33,000 each by Libya.
It is not known how much Libya agree to pay more to settle the feud with France.
Qadhafi announced on state television late Sunday that an agreement had been reached following weekend negotiations in Tripoli.
"We can say that the UTA affair and the Lockerbie affair are now behind us and that we are turning a page with France and the United States," Qadhafi said. "The money is of little importance to us. We have our dignity."
It was as much a national need for Libya to strike a deal in both Lockerbie and UTA cases -- although the latter was not directly tied to UN sanctions -- in order to remove the sanctions.
Libya has been under strong American and British pressure and the UN sanctions had started to bite at the Libyan oil industry towards the late 90s and that was when Qadhafi worked out a compromise and allowed the two Libyans to be tried in a special Scottish court set up in the Netherlands.
The court tried the two, Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. It acquitted Fhimah but convicted Megrahi and sentenced to life in prison in Scotland.
However, the matter did not end there since an end to the UN sanctions — as well as sanctions adopted by the US on its own -- was contingent on Libya owning up responsibility for the blast and paying compensation to victims of the bombing.
It is clear that Qadhafi accepted the conditions and moved to settle the dispute once and for all because -- apart from concerns raised by the Saddam affair — he needed American and European involvement in his country's oil industry.
Libya holds the sixth largest known deposit of oil and is the eighth largest oil exporter and it is vital that it has access to advanced technology in oil exploration and production that was denied to it under the sanctions.
Therefore, the acceptance of responsibility and payment of compensation should be seen as political as well as technical rather than what it implies on the surface.
That leaves the key question hanging in the air: Who was behind the Lockerbie bombing?
That question has dogged all those who have been following up the case since the day the PanAm plane went down.
The question stemmed from the considerations of the following factors:
Researchers had unearthed circumstantial evidence suggesting that responsibility for Lockerbie may lie primarily with the intelligence services of several Western governments, particularly the United States. Researchers say the media were blindly following the official line and that no major British or US newspaper, radio, or TV channel undertook a sustained investigation of this possibility
At the very outset of investigations, the US said it suspected Iran was behind the bombing, and a few weeks later claimed it had prima facie evidence that a Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) led by Ahmed Jibrial, had planted bomb at Tehran's behest. Tehran was said to be exacting revenge for the downing of an Iran Air passenger plane in the Gulf by an American warship at the peak of the Iran-Iraq war.
Why was it then that the Iran angle was quietly dropped from the investigations and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) zeroed in on Libya?
Why did then, the then US president, George Bush Senior, personally asked the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher not to pursue the Iranian angle? (That Bush made that request and Thatcher accepted it was reported in the British press and was not denied by the British or American governments).
An independent investigation conducted by an agency hired by PanAm had reported that the explosives-laden suitcase which exploded on board the plane over Lockerbie was supposed to have contained drugs and was part of an operation involving the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
It was then reported that the CIA was co-operating with a Lebanon-based drug trafficking group in return for seeking to use the group's underworld connections to get to militants who were holding more than 10 Americans are hostage. As part of the deal, the CIA allowed the suitcase to pass unchecked and be placed aboard the PanAm plane. Reports said somewhere along the line before it went aboard, the contents of the suitcases were switched to explosives.
Charles McKee, a US Army Special Forces major who was leading the hostage rescue efforts in Lebanon, was aboard the plane and it was suggested that he might have carried the bomb-laden suitcase without being aware that it contained explosives instead of drugs.
The evidence that led to the conviction of the Libyan, Megrahi, was based on shreds of clothing that was used to wrap the radio cassette player which was rigged with the explosives in the suitcase.
US and British forensic experts traced the clothing to a shop in the Mediterranean island of Malta and the shop's owner testified that Megrahi "could have been" the man who bought the clothes. Apart from that, there was no evidence linking Megrahi to the bombing except an unproven contention that he had placed the suitcase at a luggage ramp at Malta with a New York tag and it found its way aboard the Pan Am flight from London where it had arrived via Frankfurt, Germany.
A tiny piece of debris recovered from the wreckage was found to be that of a timer manufactured and supplied to Libya by a small electronics company called MEBO based in Zurich, Switzerland.
However, similar timers were supplied to several parties, including the Stasi secret service of former East Germany which had close ties with the PFLP-GC.
Another theory said that the CIA station chief in Lebanon, who was travelling aboard the PanAm flight, was the actual target of the bombing and the plot involved "rogue" CIA agents who faced trial in the US on "treason" charge. The CIA chief in Lebanon was reportedly carrying with him evidence that implicated them and enough to convict them. That evidence, presumably under this theory, was also destroyed in the blast.
When Megrahi was first convicted in 2001, Libya appealed the ruling and said it would unveil "shocking" revelations of the mid-air blast during the appeal.
Qadhafi said Libya had in its possession evidence that pointed the figure at the "real culprit" behind the bombing, which the US says was Libya's revenge for a 1985 US bombing of Libyan cities.
He asserted that when he produced the purported evidence, it would leave the trial judges with the choice of quitting their profession or committing suicide.
But he never came forth with the evidence, obviously because that would have tied him down in a continuing dispute with the US, with no end in sight for the UN sanctions on his country. Megrahi's conviction was upheld by an appeals panel in early 2002.
Among new evidence unearthed by researchers and cited in a recent book, it is reported that the then US ambassador to Lebanon, John McCarthy, and South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha had their travel plans altered at the last minute in order to avoid the ill-fated PanAm flight.
Libya, whose Qadhafi was spewing anti-US rhetoric and supporting anti-US groups around the world, was indeed an ideal target to be implicated in the affair.
A book on the Lockerbie affair written by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson has brought up additional elements that raise further questions about the published and unpublished facts about the downing of the plane.
Both writers have worked with the case for years - Ashton as deputy to the late British film maker Allan Francovich, whose film The Maltese Double Cross, favouring the theory that the bombing was a consequence of a CIA-controlled drug running operation utilised to spy on Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian groups, and Ferguson, a journalist, has written many articles on Lockerbie, and along with Scottish lawyer Robert Black.
They have done extensive research and interviews with a large number of people involved in the disaster
They note in their book that:
-- After the 1988 American attack by the USS Vincennes on an Iranian Airbus, in which 255 pilgrims were killed,, Iranian broadcasts warned that the skies would “rain blood” in consequence. -- The PFLP_GC , which has a history of attacks on passenger aircraft, was known to be operating in Germany.
-- A bomb, rigged up in a Toshiba tape recorder identical to the one that was found to have caused the Lockerbie crash, was reported to have gone missing after a German police raid on a PFLP-GC group one year before the PanAm bombing.
-- American diplomats in Moscow were advised not to fly PanAm around Christmas time in 1988.
-- In two hours after the crash, US intelligence officers landed in Lockerbie and worked independently and were searching for particular pieces of debris, luggage and particular corpses.
A forensic expert from British police says that one body was moved, after it had been tagged and its location noted, while another disappeared entirely.
-- Large quantities of cash, cannabis and heroin were found in the wreckage.
-- Intelligence papers owned by make were removed from his luggage and replaced. A report noting the location of hostages held in Beirut was apparently found on the ground.
-- Among those who alleged possible CIA involvement include an Israeli spy, Java Aviv, hired by Pan Am to investigate the bombing, ex-US spy Lesser Coleman, who at one point sought political asylum in Sweden, William Chase, a Washington DC lobbyist, and Time journalist Roe Rowan. None of them was questioned by the American/British investigators.
"Under conditions where the US government is refusing to investigate its own intelligence failures leading up to the September 11 terror attacks, any exposure of a possible CIA role in aircraft terrorism clearly assumes great significance," said a review of the book written by Freemason and Ashton.
It says:
"Without making wild or unsustainable accusations, and despite serious political limitations, Ashton and Ferguson have provided an essential reference for anyone seeking to understand why a Boeing 747 should explode in mid-air killing hundreds of ordinary air travellers, and yet.... there is still no generally accepted explanation of why it happened and who was responsible."