1988: Iran Air 655 - Casus Belli Behind Lockerbie Bombing?

Caustic Logic
July 4, 2015

Note, July 4, 2015: I'm simply re-publishing this post from another of my blogs (original posting from March 15, 2010) to mark the 27th anniversary today of this horrific and dubious incident that seems to have sealed the fate of Pan Am 103 later in the year (see whole site connected to that post).

The USS Vincennes and the Downing of IA655:
Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled 28-minute flight from Bandar Abbas airport to Bahrain, on July 3 1988. An Airbus A300B2 flown by Capt. Mohsen Rezaian, IA655 left the ground at 10:17 am local time to cross the Straits of Sidra. It seems the plane was talking normally with ground control on open frequencies, was listed in flight registries, flying well within an established civilian air corridor, and transmitting the right civilian transponder code that clearly means something like the car window sign "Baby on Board." [1]

As IA655 steadily climbed to cruising altitude (14,000 feet for this short journey), it was suddenly struck with two powerful SM2 missiles fired from an American ship in Iranian waters below. The 290 passengers and crew (including 66 children) were all killed, either in the explosion and breakup, or after a three mile fall to the Persian Gulf below.

Officially, the crew of the USS Vincennes, which had opted to fire the missiles at that plane, had simply gotten confused in the thick of a separate naval battle they'd gotten into. After missing IA655's listing in the 'do not shoot' registry, misreading its transponder code as of military origin, and erring on its speed, heading/location, and altitude profile, the crew had decided the airbus was a fighter jet swooping down towards them for the attack, as all their misreadings jointly suggested. [2]

The troubling details and explanations of this bizarre accident are worth covering elsewhere, but ascribing the best intentions, the Vincennes fired in what seemed clear-cut self-defense, while they happened to be within Iranian waters. As such they fully earned their later commendations, like the responsible air-warfare coordinator, who won a navy medal for "heroic achievement [...] under fire." [3]

End of the War
At the Iraq-Iran war's commencement in 1980, the United States had sanctioned the bloodshed, so long as Iraq was on top. By the latter 1980s, the situation had shifted. Increased U.S. assistance and even direct shooting reflected fears that Iraq might lose forever the territory Iran was gaining. By the end of 1987, “we became,” a senior U.S. officer told ABC News, “forward air controllers for the Iraqi air force.” [4]

Operation Praying Mantis responded to Iranian mining of the Gulf with escalated U.S. attacks on Iranian gunboats, oil platforms, and tankers in April. [5] Immediately, protection of "neutral shipping" was also expanded; it was to enforce this protection that the Vincennes had been called to the Gulf. 

At the same time, Washington and thence the UN Security Council was calling, with Resolution 598, for the war to simply end with past borders restored. Both sides had to see the benefit of an end to the grueling war, but after their own heavy sacrifices had improved their odds, Iran was reluctant to concede on the West's terms and timetable.

Along with a renewed Iraqi air and chemical offensives into Iran's cities in the spring and summer of 1988, the bizarre accident of IA655 had to have hastened  Iran’s effective surrender a few weeks later. The precise role it played – minor, major, or peripheral - cannot be known for sure. However, an Iranian scholar stated at a conference hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center [paraphrased]

"A turning point in Iran's thinking came with the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in July 1988 by the American cruiser USS Vincennes. That incident apparently led Ayatollah Khomeini to conclude that Iran could not risk the possibility of U.S. open combat operations against Iran and he decided it was time to end the conflict." [6]

There is every reason to believe that’s just what the Americans wanted to get across, after the tragedy if not shortly before as well. Aside from unapologetic "regret” over the loss of innocent life, and blaming Iran for the warship's mistakes, the American message was best put by White House media handler Marlin Fitzwater in putting the accident in context:

Only an end to the war, an objective we desire, can halt the immense suffering in the region and put an end to innocent loss of life. Our goal is peace in the Gulf and on land. We urge Iran and Iraq to work with the Security Council for an urgent comprehensive settlement of the war pursuant to Resolution 598. Meanwhile, United States forces will continue their mission in the area, keenly aware of the risks involved and ready to face them. [7] 

That is, as the Iranians likely read it, "we’ll keep on shooting at anything that might possibly be a threat as long as we “have to” hang around there, which is until Iran surrenders." About seven weeks after IA655 was torn down, an agreement was reached and hostilities between Iraq and Iran were officially and physically ended on August 20 1988. No territory was lost, but nearly a million people were. 

But even after the cease-fire, one more battle loomed. It would be just as one-sided as the battle of IA-655, just about as deadly, and just as unacknowledged. Again, the perpetrators would go unpunished as innocents paid the price for others' crimes.  

Revenge Pronouncements / Connective Tissue
Only in 1996 was a comprehensive legal agreement over the incident settled between Iran and America. Officially Iran accepted the accident story and took a small settlement $132 million and no acceptance of any guilt, exactly as offered by the US eight years earlier. [8] "Official" acceptance doesn't always mean that much; especially when the blood was fresh and tempers hot, Tehran never bought the bland American statements that the shoot-down was purely accidental. It's not even an unreasonable suspicion on their part - it's their apparent response I can't agree with.

Researcher Ludwig De Braeckeleer has assembled a useful compendium of Iranian death threats following the supposed accident. By this, various officials and ambassadors accused the United States of ''a barbaric massacre'' and an "act of terrorism." They pledged to launch "an appropriate response," to the "American crime," to "avenge the blood of their martyrs," and mete out "punishment to prevent further occurrence or recurrence of such unfortunate incidents." Most pointedly, hardliner Ali Akbar Mohtashemi (alt Mohtashemi-Pur), widely believed to have headed up the "appropriate response" planning, publicly "swore that there should be a "rain of blood" in revenge." [9]


This wasn't just hardcore posturing for the Iranian street, but something representing a real danger; everyone in the know expected retaliation, and likely in-kind - the Iranians would seek to now kill American civilians on an airplane and see how we liked it.  While uncertainty persists with no adequate investigation, the supposed payment was $10 million to the Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC. An early 1991 report, prepared by the National Security Agency for Gulf War intelligence use, stated:

"Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus." [10]

The revenge moved swiftly, it seems, perhaps starting before the cease-fire even. It was in early October that the GC cell in Neuss, West Germany was set up, October 13 that bomb maker Khreesat arrived and set to work, and October 26 when the cell was busted up in Operation: Autumn Leaves. Most have always suspected their goal had been to destroy an American airliner on Iran's instruction and with support from Syria, using the type of radio-disguised altimeter bomb found in the car with Khreesat.

Three other such bombs were missed in the first raid and only found later, and one bomb at least was never intercepted. Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA's Lockerbie probe, was interviewed for a program Shadow Over Lockerbie:

"[Cannistraro] says authorities focused on the likelihood that Marwan Khreesat's fifth bomb had blown up the Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie. "The immediate feeling was: we've missed someone. That someone in that cell had escaped with one of the explosive devices and succeeded in planting it on Pan Am 103." [11]  

In other words, the terror tree was shaken and the "Autumn Leaves" had fallen and scattered, but they weren't all raked up neat. One may have drifted into the belly of PA103.

Obvious, Then Nothing
When the other shoe fell, the horror and carnage clearly mirrored IA655 with a mid-air explosion leaving 259 to deal with five miles of pure gravity however they did before dying against the cold winter soil of Scotland. To clarify the issue, just hours after the attack, two phone calls were placed from London to the Associated Press and UPI declaring in broken English:

"We, the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, are undertaking this heroic execution in revenge of blowing the Iran Air plane by America a few months ago." [12]

A CIA memo of the following day listed this first among a short list of responsibility claims. Among Islamic Jihad, the Ulster Defense League, and Mossad, the report said "we consider the claim from the Guadians of the Islamic Revolution as the most credible; previous attacks claimed by this group suggest it is pro-Iranian." It then listed several, with responsibility usually called in by an anonymous man: two assassination attempts on exiled Shah era leaders in exile, a plane hijacking a plane to secure the release of said assassins, and killing by car bomb a German businessman accused of selling missiles to Iraq while the war was on. [source]

Avenging the killing of 290 innocent Iranians by a US gunship seems in-line with the Guardians' philosophy, or perhaps some other Iranian agency, and most likely with technical help of the altimeter-triggered kind. Investigators, media reports, and the whole public mind went that way at first for at least a year, from no later than this ABC News broadcast of Feb 16 1989. Behind the suspicions of the PFLP-GC cell and its Khreesat bomb "a senior source overseeing the investigation" revealed that  "some hard-line members of the Iranian revolutionary guard" may have arranged for the attack through these suspects. "Revenge for the shooting down of the Iranian Airliner by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf last summer was their motive," said reporter Brian Dunsmore in Lockerbie.  [13]

And still in early 1990 Steve Emerson and Brian Duffy wrote in The Fall of Pan Am 103 how sponsorship ran with Syrian supports up to Tehran, driven by revenge for IA655, "shot down for the Fourth of July holiday, the Mullahs believed, to celebrate America's independence." [14] To repay these expensive 4th of July fireworks with an early Black Christmas present, followed by a Body Boxing Day and a few more, might be a potent signal.

Officially, Iran denies involvement in the bombing, but some, like suspected mastermind Mohtashemi, have claimed a leading role on candid occasions. In 1995, an Iranian magazine ran an interview where "Mohtashami-Pur said that he would soon reveal the "Lockerbie files" to the readers." The report was quashed from above and the magazine closed down. [15] Former Iranian president Abdulhassan Bani Sadr also has admitted proudly, in the 1990s, that “Iran ordered the attack and Ahmed Jibril carried it out,” [16] a claim he repeated to deBraeckeleer in 2008. [17]

As these statements were made and as of late 1991 the U.S. was officially and exclusively pursuing Libya for the crime, freeing some Persian tongues to confess with impunity, it seems. And yet, the U.S. says, there was no Iranian revenge. The faint possibility of Tehran's involvement in Libya's atrocity has been whispered, but never clarified or pursued in the slightest. [see: Iranian vs. Libyan Role in the Lockerbie Bombing]

Iranian leaders had planned to take down an American plane (at least one), had paid for it and had bombs built and ready to go. With hard cash, glory, and blood vendetta driving them, Mohtashemi and and his contractors must have given up after the Germany bust. This is just what the FBI, CIA, USG, Scottish Police, Camp Zeist judges, and others claim to find most likely. And then just as precisely as item 8849 from Malta replaced the Bedford suitcases in the luggage container's deadliest corner, the Libyans took their own incidentally identical revenge at just that time. 

It's never been decided which motive drove the Libyans, but it's widely presumed to be the nearly three-year-old Operation: Eldorado Canyon bombings by U.S. forces. For the death of his adopted toddler daughter and a few dozen other Libyans, he ordered the Lockerbie bombing, while the level-headed Iranians waited for the court settlement and reparations after IA-655.  


At least, that's what the FBI's SCOTBOM evidence strongly illustrates. A desperate defector, an amazingly resilient timer fragment, a bizarre unverifiable printout, and a pliable soon-to-be-millionaire witness, all prove the Libyans did it through Malta, however much sense that makes. And nothing solid implicating Iran or Syria or the PFLP-GC was found anywhere in there. Move along, nothing to see here - the real Lockerbie bomber was behind bars for a while.  
---Sources: 
[1] Ghasemi, Shapour. “Shooting Down Iran Air 655 [IA655]” Iran Chamber Society: History of Iran. 2004. http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/shootingdown_iranair_flight655.php
[2], [3] Charles, Roger. "Sea Of Lies: The Inside Story Of How An American Naval Vessel Blundered Into An Attack On Iran Air Flight 655 At The Height Of Tensions During The Iran-Iraq War-And How The Pentagon Tried To Cover Its Tracks After 290 Innocent Civilians Died." Newsweek. July 13 1992. http://www.newsweek.com/id/126358
[4]  "The USS Vincennes: Public War, Secret War" ABC Nightline, Aired July 1 1992. Full Transcript, with extensive notes. ...
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/ir655-nightline-19920701.html
[5] Operation Praying Mantis. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Praying_Mantis
[6] Steinberg, Dana. "The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War: A CWIHP Critical Oral History Conference." http://wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.print&news_id=90411&stoplayout=true 
[7] See [1]
[8] Wikipedia. Iran Air Flight 655. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
[9] DeBraeckeleer, Ludwig. "Tehran: 'The Blood of Our Martyrs Will Be Avenged' [Diary of a Vengeance Foretold] Part 2." Oh My News International. July 4 2008.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=c10400&no=383015&rel_no=1
[10], [15], [17] DeBraeckeleer, Ludwig. "Former Iranian President Blames Tehran for Lockerbie." http://www.thetorah.tv/misc/Former%20Iranian%20President%20Blames%20Tehran%20for%20Lockerbie.htm
[11] Biewen, John and Ian Ferguson. Shadow Over Lockerbie. 2000, American Radio Works. http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/lockerbie/story/printable_story.html 
[12]  Emerson and Duffy p 56
[13] ABC News. Feb. 16, 1989: Pan Am 103 Flight Investigation. "A bomb hidden in a cassette player brought down Pan Am 103 in December 1988." Anchor, Ted Koppel. Reporter, Barry Dunsmore, Lockerbie. Video currently viewable at:
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=9443717 
[14] Emerson and Duffy, p 59.
[16] The Maltese Double Cross. Produced, written, and directed by Allan Francovich, Hemar Enterprises, released November 1994. 2 hours, 36 minutes. Quote at 34:00 mark. Google Video 

The Sirte Massacres: The Mahari Hotel Massacre

October 30, 2011
(incomplete rough draft)

<< The Sirte Massacres

A Seafront Find and a Sea Change

Some of the massacre victims, bagged up.
Photo: Peter Bouckaert/HRW (source) 

Again on October 21 a large batch of bodies in civilian clothes was discovered in a "recently-liberated" area of Libya. There were 53 this time, bound and killed with gunshots, at the Mahari hotel outside of Sirte. They were discovered by locals and, two days later, shown to Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch. By then they were badly decomposed, most placed in body bags, and laid across the seaward side of the hotel's garden. For once, no one among the rebels (to my knowledge) or even in the Western mainstream media is calling this a crime of Gaddafi loyalists.

Two factors at least set this case apart from most previous massacres. For one thing, the victims were recognizable Gaddafi loyalists, including some senior but little-known figures. There's no clear reason, to put it softly, that their besieged colleagues would want to off them amidst the brutal NTC onslaught.

That was also the case, however, for the Abu Salim trauma hospital, where around 75 bodies of executed patients and civilians were found in Tripoli. Black "African fighter" types, and at least one card-carrying special forces soldier, were killed in their beds, and a loyalist staff of a loyalist hospital just vanished, leaving only fine-spray blood spatters in their wake. At the time, nearly all of the dozens of journalists at the scene ignored these clues. It wasn't pinned on loyalists, just left hanging as a terrible mystery.

But that's not happening here. So we turn to the other factor, that Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi had been captured, brutalized, and executed by "former rebel" forces on October 20, four days prior to the announcement of this discovery. Sooner or later, the NTC would be the (relatively) unchallenged rulers of Libya, and due to the need for pressure points for external influence, would start being blamed for their own crimes. And if they become any trouble at all, perhaps for other peoples' crimes as well (see side-box below). Within four days of the leader's death, HRW was there to let us know the switch-over had happened, and it's time to start looking closer at what Libya's new rulers have been doing the last eight months and might be expected to do in the future. Whether this is by design or just "how things work out" doesn't effect the positive turn this shift will be for readership of this site.

HRW's Details

Human Rights Watch, press release, October 24:

Fifty-three people, apparent Gaddafi supporters, seem to have been executed at a hotel in Sirte last week, Human Rights Watch said today. The hotel is in an area of the city that was under the control of anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata before the killings took place.
[...]
“We found 53 decomposing bodies, apparently Gaddafi supporters, at an abandoned hotel in Sirte, and some had their hands bound behind their backs when they were shot,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, who investigated the killings.
[...]
Human Rights Watch saw the badly decomposed remains of the 53 people on October 23, 2011, at the Hotel Mahari in District 2 of Sirte. The bodies were clustered together, apparently where they had been killed, on the grass in the sea-view garden of the hotel.

Anti-Gaddafi fighters from Misrata had held that area of Sirte since early October, according to witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch. On the entrance and walls of the hotel Human Rights Watch saw the names of several brigades from Misrata.

"The condition of the bodies suggests the victims were killed approximately one week prior to their discovery, between October 14 and October 19 [...] About 20 Sirte residents were putting the bodies in body bags and preparing them for burial when Human Rights Watch arrived at the hotel. They said they had discovered the bodies on October 21, after the fighting in Sirte had stopped and they returned to their neighborhood."

Human Rights Watch "called on Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) to conduct an immediate and transparent investigation into the apparent mass execution and to bring those responsible to justice." Peter Bouckaert, the main investigator here, said. “If the NTC fails to investigate this crime it will signal that those who fought against Gaddafi can do anything without fear of prosecution.” 

Well, it's worked so far...

Victim Identification

Special Note: Seeing the name Ezzadin al-Hinshiri, “allegedly a former Gaddafi government official,” among the dead strikes a chord with me, in that I've run into him before in my research. He was (implicitly) accused by a strange little liar for being involved with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the “Lockerbie bombing” of 1988. In February 1991, Swiss electronics maker and apparent CIA asset Edwin Bollier wrote to his “friend” Mr.Ezzadin Hinshiri, of the Libyan JSO (intel agency), about his work with investigators of the bombing.The letter was neither warning nor threat, just a friendly tip-off that the Libyans were in the process of being framed by someone, and to make sure they "wouldn't think that we had made up the story in order to accuse the Libyans,”as Bollier said at the 2000 trial. Bollier mentioned therein a suitcase, which he says he was tricked into carrying to Libya shortly before the bombing. An intermediary brought him a brown suitcase full of “clothes for a friend" and “asked me to deliver the suitcase and its contents to Ezzadin's office in Tripoli.” Among his shifting stories of what was and wasn't in the suitcase, which he peeked into, was "a blue children's suit" very like the “blue babygro” that became a crucial clue from the bomb bag, pointing to Malta, to Tony Gauci, and to "bomber" al Megrahi. Elsewhere, Bollier says he himself added the baby-suit, as a gift for the driver (Mr. Ali) who was to actually deliver the suitcase to Hinshiri. He didn’t get blamed for Lockerbie, but its legacy underpins all that’s happened to Libya since. Now Ezzadin has died at the crescendo of the decades-long operation, just before his leader he was bound and shot in the head by CIA-backed, Islamic fanatic Libyan Contras.

The locals identified to Bouckaert four of the dead as two Sirte residents, Amar Mahmoud Saleh and Muftah al-Deley, a military officer named Muftah Dabroun, and one Ezzidin al-Hinsheri, according to HRW "allegedly a former Gaddafi government official." (indeed, by the name, he was - see box at right). 

The other 49 remain publicly unknown. The story of their final hours will probably never be told truthfully, so in a way, they died alone like so many others have over the past eight months.

Implications for the Misrata Brigades:
Not good.

More coming...

Another Sub-Heading to Help Fill This Space


And more yet, later...

External images of pre-bagged dead:

http://74.200.236.118/~echorouk/ara/files.php?file=1_363272355.jpg

http://74.200.236.118/~echorouk/ara/files.php?file=4_313405781.jpg

One of these made into a clever poster that makes one yearn for more people power adventures in Syria and beyond:

Interesting Times

By Robert Forrester, secretary, Justice for Megrahi campaign
Posted April 28 2011
Originally published, in shorter form, at The Firm, April 14
(bolding by Caustic Logic)

Even though the current unrest in North Africa and the Middle East is far from over, it has still managed to throw up some fascinating developments. We’ve seen presidents throwing in the towel, prime ministers being sacked or resigning, and given the potential for carnage, there seems to have been remarkably little bloodshed on the whole. Some regimes may have been decapitated, however, where that has happened, the basic power structures have remained in place. In the case of Egypt, the demonstrators told Blair exactly where he could get off, Mubarak eventually caved in, and the way became clear to getting back to business as usual. So much so that the UK’s gaffe plagued David Cameron was out of his starting blocks like Harry the Hare to perform his duty as the nation’s arms industry envoy to Cairo. Well, Tony always used to say that if we didn’t do it, somebody else would. And it’s not as if we make much else in Britain anymore.

Libya has been a slightly different kettle of fish though, and, in many ways even more intriguing. The Western powers have been waiting for a viable opportunity for decades to oust Gaddafi. All nations have their contingency plans after all. And everything seemed to be going so swimmingly well for the coalition, led by the US with the UK France and Italy etc chipping in to see what crumbs might fall their way, until recently. Countless cruise missiles and bombing sorties later, with Gaddafi’s air force removed from the equation, along with munitions dumps and artillery, and the rebel forces of the Benghazi based National Transitional Council (also known as the Interim National Council or the Libyan National Council) seemingly heading inexorably towards the gates of Tripoli, Obama decides to hand the whole operation over to NATO in an apparent effort to sidestep the need to send US ground troops in. Probably not precisely what the UK and the other hangers on were hoping for, less still the leaders of the National Transitional Council in Benghazi. No sooner then do the bombing raids stop than all the ground that the rebels gained with the support of the foreign offensive is immediately lost as the rebels hightail it back to whence they had come.

It is hard now to predict just how this fiasco will eventually pan out, especially as it seems that the rebels no longer have control over any oil bearing territory worth writing home about. The US is not going to entertain the thought of committing ground troops for very good reason, the UK hasn’t got any and is being defeated in Afghanistan, yet again, and the others, France and Italy etc, probably never intended to in the first instance. Meanwhile, Libyan assets have been frozen and the shambolic rabble that represents the alternative to Gaddafi has run out of ammo and is probably going to be running out of other more basic essentials very soon too. The only good development to have emerged thus far is that despite all the quite justified support for the conspiracy theory of history over the years, this particular event definitely gives a major boost to adherents of the cock up persuasion.

Given that the coalition partners had been doing so much lucrative business with Libya of late and they didn’t have the advantages availed to George and Tony by the World Trade centre attack in order to stitch Gaddafi up the way they did with Saddam, they had to be more circumspect when it came to flouting inconveniences like the UN. The disturbing question then is: what intelligence did they have to convince themselves of success? Surely they weren’t swayed by the claims of Gaddafi’s ex justice minister, Mustafa Adbel-Jalil, and newsreels of the smiling rebel ‘army’ confidently waving peace signs and firing off rounds with their AKs from the backs of pick-up trucks prematurely celebrating victory. Now that their ordinance is running low, they may be reminded of the sage words of one of the most celebrated military figures in recent history to have toured Libya, Erwin Rommel, when he said: “The victor is he who has the last round in his magazine.”

Perhaps it really is that bad though. Perhaps in their enthusiasm to thump Gaddafi, the coalition’s judgement has ultimately been clouded by the confidence of Abdel-Jalil and the rebels. And perhaps they aren’t the only ones to have been taken in.

No matter how painful the events may be to many, clearly there are more pressing matters at hand in Libya at the moment than an atrocity dating back almost a quarter of a century and a conviction now some ten years old. Nevertheless, as all good carpetbaggers know, where there is war, there is opportunity. And while the news is largely dominated by the military conflict, HMG and the British Crown seem to have seen fit to try to exploit what leverage they can to bolster the official line in the UK that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was justly convicted in Kamp van Zeist in 2001 of bombing PA103 over Lockerbie on the back of this current turmoil. Three main elements to theses shenanigans have thus far emerged into the public domain: Abdel-Jalil’s ‘evidence’ of Libyan involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, what Mr Koussa may know about it, and finally, the recent attempts of a British lawyer to persuade the rebel leaders to incriminate Libya for involvement in a range of terrorist activities.

From the earliest days of the Libyan rebellion, Abdel-Jalil claimed that he had incontrovertible proof that Mr al-Megrahi had done the deed and that Colonel Gaddafi had been behind it. This, of course, generated much enthusiasm in Westminster as it provided a moral platform for the military action. Then on April Fools Day no less, we were treated to the stunning revelation from Abdel-Jalil that his proof amounted to no more than the fact that he knew that Colonel Gaddafi had supported Mr al-Megrahi throughout his incarceration. Oh dear. If the Champagne corks had already been popped in anticipation at 25 Chambers Street, not to worry. As Napoléon used to say: “In victory, you deserve it, in defeat, you need it.” Before Abdel-Jalil had finished though, he pointed out that Moussa Koussa, the Libyan Minister of Foreign Affairs and former head of the Libyan Intelligence Agency, who had recently defected to the UK, would be able to provide more details. End of round one then.

Mr Koussa is well-known to political circles in London and has been for many years. Most recently, he was key to the negotiations which brought Libya back into the international fold, and in those surrounding Mr al-Megrahi’s release, meeting with both UK and Scottish political figures in that regard in 2008 and 2009. When he arrived in the UK on the 30th of March, politicians and the media claimed that he had defected. Indeed, there was much bluster for public consumption about his not being immune from prosecution. Despite the fact that some media outlets portrayed Mr Koussa’s arrival in the UK as being comparable to that of Rudolf Hess’s in 1941, nothing could be further from the truth. Moussa Koussa is probably closer to being an éminence grise in Libyan politics than Hess ever was in the Third Reich. He prefers to maintain a low profile, rather in keeping with his choice of suits; for his 2008 UK visit for example, he travelled under the guise of an interpreter. It is highly likely, therefore, that his most recent trip was not quite so unexpected as it came over in the press at the time, and furthermore, he may have come as a negotiator, with all the necessary diplomatic protection well in place before the trip was made. This appears to be confirmed as he has now departed the UK for a conference in Qatar completely unhindered. The UK authorities say that he is welcome to return when ever he wishes.

Where then does this leave the talk of interviewing him on the subject of Lockerbie by the Crown and Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary? It is all looking very embarrassing. It is extremely unlikely that anything was learned in the interview that wasn’t already known, namely: that Libya didn’t do it. Nevertheless, representatives of the Crown and Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary were put up in a hotel in London for a week before eventually meeting Mr Koussa. Having concluded their interview they refused to divulge its content since to do so might compromise their on-going investigation. One must bear in mind here that, despite Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini’s persistent abuse of the word ‘team’ to describe the number of officers working on the on-going Lockerbie case, until the arrival of Mr Koussa, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary had allocated an entire ‘team’ to the job consisting of just one officer. So, what happens now? Yet more on-going file management by the sole officer, the Crown will maintain that to talk publicly about the interview could damage the ‘investigation’, and the great unwashed will be kept in their usual mushroom culture. The long and the short of it is that if they had had any road to Damascus experience in London, they’d have been singing it from the roof tops. Not that they would have revealed any details, however, one might have expected comments along the lines of: ‘highly productive … most informative … new leads … confirms our evidence and the verdict … etc’. At least they probably knew not to bother taking any Champagne with them for this particular little wheeze.

Meanwhile, back in Libya, there is the question of British lawyer to the celebs, Jason McCue [An illuminating profile of Mr McCue]. Prospects are not looking good for the Libyan rebels at the moment: they have lost all the territorial gains they made during the coalition bombing raids, they are rapidly running out of ordinance, and now, they cannot gain access to money to pay civil service salaries or buy basic essentials due to the fact that Libyan assets abroad have been frozen. But help, it appears, may be at hand. According to officials of Abdel-Jalil’s Benghazi based National Transitional Council, the council came under pressure to invite Mr McCue to talks with them. They understood that Mr McCue was representing a group of British diplomats led by the UK’s ambassador to Rome, Christopher Prentice. It appears that McCue is heading up something called the Libya Victims Initiative, which he says is seeking an unequivocal apology from Libya for international crimes carried out by the Gaddafi regime including Lockerbie and deaths resultant from IRA activities where Libyan supplied Semtex was employed. For the IRA victims he claims to be asking for $10,000,000 in compensation for every fatality. The National Transitional Council says that it has in fact signed such a document, however, from a statement by their spokesman, Essam Gheriani, this appears to have been done under duress and in the hope of alleviating their dire circumstances. Since Lockerbie was mentioned in connection with this initiative, Justice for Megrahi (JFM) investigated whether or not any of the UK families had sanctioned Mr McCue’s adventure and drew a blank. On the other side of The Pond, Mr Frank Duggan, who frequently represents the main body of the US Lockerbie victims, claims that Mr McCue has no backing from them. This then leaves the rebels contention that Mr McCue seems to be representing HMG’s interests as feasible. Ambassador Prentice has declined to comment.

If The National Transitional Council and the reports in the press are to be believed, the story seems to be the following. Abdel-Jalil reveals that his proof of Gaddafi’s involvement in Lockerbie turns out to be nothing more than an embarrassing joke. It is also likely that Moussa Koussa has added little or nothing to bolster the Zeist conviction of Mr al-Megrahi, something which was doubtless known all along. So, what to do? The National Transitional Council rebels have presented the UK and others with the best opportunity in years to give Gaddafi a bloody nose and get their hands on the Libyan mineral wealth, unfortunately however, they are in a desperate situation. Solution: kill two birds with one stone. Send in McCue to promise them that we will do everything we can to free up Libyan assets abroad thus allowing them to get hold of much needed essentials just so long as they sign a document admitting that Libya was responsible for Lockerbie and other sins. And the person doing the signing, of course, is the very man who has just recently demonstrated publicly that he has no actual proof that Gaddafi or al-Megrahi were in fact behind Lockerbie.

If there is any truth behind the suggestion that HMG has sanctioned McCue to go to Libya to do a spot of ambulance chasing, this must constitute one of the most revolting developments of the conflict thus far.

Never mind for now the circus that was Zeist: the fact that Luqa comes out with a clean bill of health, as does flight KM180; the Heathrow break in; the Bedford suitcase; the dubious print out from Frankfurt Airport; the fairy tale story of how a suitcase managed to get from Malta to Heathrow unaccompanied and undetected; the financial ‘inducements’ provided to Crown witnesses; the multitude of discrepancies in Tony Gauci’s testimony; forensic testimony for the Crown by discredited witnesses; the bizarre circumstances surrounding the fragment of printed circuit board; the Lumpert affidavit; the conduct of US representatives in the well of the court; and, the fact that the Crown played the roles of prosecutor, judge and jury. Put all that to one side for a moment and instead consider the amount of effort that has gone into obfuscation and the blocking of any moves to have Mr al-Megrahi’s conviction independently investigated. Justice for Megrahi was founded around the back end of 2008 precisely because it was felt that it was no longer sufficient to depend solely on applying judicial pressure in the hope of addressing this problem, particularly given the way in which the Crown had planned to hear Mr al-Megrahi’s second appeal. In short, it was time to become more political. Since JFM’s founding some two and a half years ago, we have had: the dropping of the second appeal in highly questionable circumstances; the Scottish government claiming that it didn’t have the power to open an inquiry, then after a year of correspondence, having to back down and admit that it does; HMG’s Foreign Secretary claiming that an inquiry would not be in the public interest; the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, apparently feeding erroneous advice to the Scottish Government regarding the status of the case; the passing of emergency legislation, more akin to that found under fascist regimes, handing unprecedented new powers to the Crown regarding which cases to accept and reject for appeal hearings; the publication of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s (SCCRC) Statement of Reasons being blocked; the government claiming that entirely unnecessary and time consuming legislation will be required to enable it to publish the SCCRC’s Statement of reasons; a standard of polemic being employed by the Lord Advocate which is more consistent with that which one expects from a child at kindergarten; claims that one police officer constitutes a team; and now, if the reports are accurate, HMG seems to be employing someone to go ambulance chasing in Libya to get some signatures confessing to crimes it is highly doubtful that the Libyans had either anything to do with or know anything about. All in all, it beggars belief. It has clearly escaped the attention of the authorities that there is one rather simple way of avoiding all this complicated subterfuge and endless embarrassment: open an independent inquiry.

There is an ancient Chinese curse which goes along the lines of: ‘May you live in interesting times’. The Chinese, of course, know all about British ‘diplomacy’ for when the UK failed to obtain the trade concessions it wanted from China in the 19th century, the Victorians promptly attempted to get the Chinese hooked on Opium. This resulted in war. If it is true that Mr McCue is doing some carpet-bagging at the behest of HMG, it is not hard to imagine Colonel Gaddafi, or even Abdel-Jalil now, casting an Arabic version of the same curse in the direction of Whitehall. We live in most interesting times indeed.

Material Motives

Posted April 27 2011
last edits May 18

Could it be? A war claimed to be fought for purely moral reasons, actually motivated by, at base level, economic concerns? We're there to "prevent a bloodbath," then to stop all government attacks on "civilian targets" (rebel-held, secessionist cities), responding to atrocities in the east - real or reported - with attacks in Tripoli, and providing tactical air support to rebel advances. This all steadily and predictably (to some) is shifting towards regime change and perhaps the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi as the only "acceptable" solution.

Of course, the nation's economy will have to be re-jiggered, as a side effect, once the colonel's green machine has been scrapped...

The following will be expanded, re-organized, and split-up with links until it's the best possible not-too-huge resource to understand what these side effects might entail. I'm putting it up partly empty, and invite   submission, via comments, of further motive categories and quotes/links to fill in beneath them.

John Pilger, April 6:

The Euro-American attack on Libya has nothing to do with protecting anyone; only the terminally naive believe such nonsense. It is the West’s response to popular uprisings in strategic, resource-rich regions of the world and the beginning of a war of attrition against the new imperial rival, China.
[...]
There is a civil and tribal war in Libya, which includes popular outrage against Gaddafi’s human rights record. However, it is Libya’s independence, not the nature of its regime, that is intolerable to the west in a region of vassals; and this hostility has barely changed in the 42 years since Gaddafi overthrew the feudal king Idris, one the more odious tyrants backed by the west.

http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/david-cameron-s-gift-of-war-and-racism-to-them-and-us

Oil, obviously ...
Libya is has the largest oil reserves in Africa. The U.S. Energey Information Administration cites 44.3 billion barrels proven reserves, as of 2010 (the next up: Nigeria at 37.2 and Algeria at 12.2 bbl)
http://ei-01.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Libya/Oil.html
Libya's state-run oil companies have generally excluded Western corporations, and external economic sanctions have both hampered full exploitation of oil in the 1990s. Only in 2003 did Libya's oil fields open up to some corporate involvement. This era, and BP's famous off-shore exploration deal linked in the media with their Gulf of Mexico spill and the release of "Lockerbie Bomber" al-Megrahi, has come to symbolize Libya's purported openness to Western greed. It has led many to believe there is no problem getting at Libya's oil as things stood.

However, the last two or three years had seen gradual pull-out of many of these companies in the face of unpopular limitations and terms. A regime change might just change those problems. Guy Chazan, Wall Street Journal, April 14:

"Libya has gone from the world's most exciting oil-exploration hot spot in 2005 to another geologically, politically and fiscally risky also-ran," says Charles Gurdon , a North Africa expert at Menas Associates, a consultancy.
[...]
Libya kept its crown jewels off limits to foreigners. The huge onshore oil fields that accounted for the bulk of its production remained the preserve of Libya's state companies. Yet without advanced foreign technology to improve oil-recovery rates, output at these big fields gradually declined, by as much as 6% a year in some cases.
[...]
Politics continually intruded, particularly in 2009, the year the Scottish authorities released Abdel Baset al-Megrahi , the Libyan imprisoned for his role in the bombing of a passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, on compassionate grounds. The Canadian government expressed disapproval at the hero's welcome Mr. Megrahi received on his return to Tripoli. Shortly afterward, Libya told Petro-Canada, a Canadian company, to halve production from its Libyan fields. Libya said the reduction was needed to make sure Libya was in compliance with OPEC quotas. But other companies weren't targeted, analysts say.
[...]
Gradually, foreign oil companies' interest in Libya faded. When Libya offered them the right to bid on exploration tracts in December 2007, half of the blocks attracted no bids.

A clutch of companies left Libya as their five-year exploration licenses began to expire, among them Chevron Corp., BG Group PLC and Australia's Woodside Petroleum Ltd.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-wests-oil-firms-no-love-lost-in-libya-2011-04-14

Susan Lindauer, March 28:

Last October, US oil giants— Chevron and Occidental Petroleum— made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi’s government.
[...]
About July, I started hearing that Gadhaffi was exerting heavy pressure on U.S. and British oil companies to cough up special fees and kick backs to cover the costs of Libya’s reimbursement to the families of Pan Am 103. Payment of damages for the Lockerbie bombing had been one of the chief conditions for ending U.N. sanctions on Libya that ran from 1992 until 2003.
[...]
Knowing Gadhaffi as well as I do, I was convinced that he’d done it. He’d bided his time until he could extort compensation from U.S. oil companies. He’s a crafty bastard, extremely intelligent and canny. That’s exactly how he operates. And now he was taking his revenge. As expected, the U.S. was hopping mad about it. Gadhaffi wasn’t playing the game the way the Oil Bloodsuckers wanted.

http://news-now.org/2011/04/susan-lindauer-libya’s-blood-oil-vampire-war/

Some have suggested Qatar's reward for its fervent support of the rebel cause will be control and develop Libya's oil system - they were given supervision of the first exports, for starters.
Azerbaijan Business Center:
http://abc.az/eng/news/52557.html

Banking.
Libya has a 100% state-owned central bank, funded with nationalized oil, and with zero IMF debt. This will almost certainly change if/when the folks described below take over.

General Economic Restructuring: Privatization and "Free Markets"
See the post Libya's Free Market Future.
Vijay Prashad:

The Benghazi council chose as its leader the colorless former justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil. Jalil's brain is Mahmoud Jibril, a former head of the National Economic Development Board (NEDB). A U.S. embassy cable from May 11, 2009 (09TRIPOLI386) describes Jibril as keen on a close relationship with the U.S. and eager "to create a strategic partnership between private companies and the government." Jibril's NEBD had collaborated with Ernst & Young and the Oxford Group to make the Libyan state more "efficient." Jibril told the ambassador that "American companies and universities are welcome to join him" in the creation of new sectors outside hydrocarbons and that "we should take him up on his offer." His Ph.D. in strategic planning from the University of Pittsburg is useful in this context.

A 1994 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) discussion entitled “Post-Qaddafi Libya: The Prospect and The Promise, featured one Dr Ali Tarhouni, Libyan expat in America, professor in Seattle, who stated at the conference, “with privatization, entrepreneurs will reach out and get involved in regional cooperation by searching for markets.” [source] Now 17 years later he's back in Libya on invite to be the Transitional National Council's minister of finance, oil and economics. He recently ventured back to Washington DC to lobby for a chunk of the $30 billion-plus of the Libyan peoples' money stolen/frozen by the Obama administration, ideally, to dole out as it sees fit. Dr. Tarhouni said:

“We’re faced with the same sanctions as Gadhafi,” he said, referring to U.S. sanctions that have frozen more than $34 billion of Libyan government assets, in addition to U.N. and European sanctions. “I don’t have access to any foreign exchange to cover any purchases, open lines of credits to merchants, so that’s a very challenging aspect to what I do.” [source]

This ultimately pro-Wall Street angle is a consistent feature of the rebel TNC leadership, and probably the one that makes them so attractive to the Western elites who decided at the outset to support them, despite professing "little knowledge" of who the rebels really were... As I said in the Free Market Future article:

The handy thing is how many talking heads and think-tank experts there are to back these guys up. "Of course privatization is the answer! Gaddafi was against it and he was evil! Had mercenaries on Viagra rape kids! Just look at the state Libya was in before under Gaddafi's Green Book sytem!" Indeed, take a look - ask for specifics. Environmentally speaking, do we need more bio-diversity, or more monoculture? Why is it different when it comes to economic systems?

And let's be honest a moment - in an age of such Western economic failure, is the Euro-Atlantic community really more likely to be dispesnsers of good advice - good enough for a regime change war - or to be looking for some stored up financial blood to suck - via a regime change war and the plunder-tization of Libya?

Water
Pepe Escobar again:

The water privatizers
Few in the West may know that Libya - along with Egypt - sits over the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer; that is, an ocean of extremely valuable fresh water. So yes, this "now you see it, now you don't" war is a crucial water war. Control of the aquifer is priceless - as in "rescuing" valuable natural resources from the "savages".

This Water Pipelineistan - buried underground deep in the desert along 4,000 km - is the Great Man-Made River Project (GMMRP), which Gaddafi built for $25 billion without borrowing a single cent from the IMF or the World Bank (what a bad example for the developing world). The GMMRP supplies Tripoli, Benghazi and the whole Libyan coastline. The amount of water is estimated by scientists to be the equivalent to 200 years of water flowing down the Nile.

Compare this to the so-called three sisters - Veolia (formerly Vivendi), Suez Ondeo (formerly Generale des Eaux) and Saur - the French companies that control over 40% of the global water market. All eyes must imperatively focus on whether these pipelines are bombed. An extremely possible scenario is that if they are, juicy "reconstruction" contracts will benefit France. That will be the final step to privatize all this - for the moment free - water. From shock doctrine to water doctrine.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC30Ak01.html

Military-political organizations
NATO, as Pepe Escobar writes, intends to subordinate the last Mediterranean country (aside from Syria and Lebanon) not allied with NATO, to make the Med "a NATO lake." Further, the U.S. African Command (Africom) does not want to co-exist with the Libya-favored African Union.

Pepe Escobar, "There's no business like war business", Asia Times, March 30

It started with Africom - established under the George W Bush administration, beefed up under Obama, and rejected by scores of African governments, scholars and human rights organizations. Now the war is transitioning to NATO, which is essentially Pentagon rule over its European minions.

This is Africom's first African war, conducted up to now by General Carter Ham out of his headquarters in un-African Stuttgart. Africom, as Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies and political science at Syracuse University puts it, is a scam; "fundamentally a front for US military contractors like Dyncorp, MPRI and KBR operating in Africa. US military planners who benefit from the revolving door of privatization of warfare are delighted by the opportunity to give Africom credibility under the facade of the Libyan intervention."

Africom's Tomahawks also hit - metaphorically - the African Union (AU), which, unlike the Arab League, cannot be easily bought by the West. The Arab Gulf petro-monarchies all cheered the bombing - but not Egypt and Tunisia. Only five African countries are not subordinated to Africom; Libya is one of them, along with Sudan, Ivory Coast, Eritrea and Zimbabwe.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC30Ak01.html

Terrorists 1 and 2! Ah, I see you’ve met!

Reflections on the Libya conflict, Gaddafi, bin Laden, and their shared history
Re-poted April 26 2011
Original posting, March 21

Paul Hudson, father of a Lockerbie victim and co-president of the Families of Pan Am 103/Lockerbie – a separate group from Victims of Pan Am 103 Inc. - posted a press release about a week ago, on the eve of the UN vote about a no-fly zone over Libya. It’s a pretty militant dispatch filled with minor inaccuracies (Libya was not on Bush's “axis of evil,” for one) and the usual annoying spin the U.S. family members of 103 victims are so well-known for. Something about believing that their children were killed by Gaddafi’s regime might have something to do with that.

As others have been doing, he seems to believe every report from the rebel side and hears none from the other, and falls back on alarmist tactics to urge sterner measures against the Gaddafi regime. He called for immediate military strikes and recognition of the new government in Benghazi, to prevent a “genocide” against the “peaceful protesters.” Out inaction in this war has the danger of "starting a war," he cautioned.

Hudson’s advice and the thousands who share the same view has apparently made it happen. The United States, UK, and France pushed through a 10-0 vote at the United Nations security council on the imposition of an enforced no-fly zone. And it has just-now-noticed additions specifying Gaddafi’s forces can also not drive tanks, or do anything ground based that threatens “civilian targets.” The meaning of civilian is unclear; it seems by the news reports of actions taken so far to include protesters, and also the half of Libya now under rebel control, and also their advancing forces. Witness the famously photographed rebel fighter jet shot down over Benghazi. Officially (by rebel accounts) this was shot down by Gaddafi's forces, who were close enough to both shoot it and to be threatened by it. They were guilty of breaking the cease-fire, an unprecedented one-sided one, with an open-ended military license to back it up, in the middle of a rather sudden mass defection and war that is not clearly understood by most people (myself included).

Clearly what’s needed is to rush into this fray before we can figure out what the hell’s going on there. Make no mistake, supporting the protesters is an urgent and a humanitarian impulse, we’re told by the US ambassador to the UN: "the violence must stop, the killing must stop, and the people of Libya must be protected and have the opportunity to express themselves freely." And as a French government spokesman clarified, the “free expression” referred to is "go(ing) all the way in their drive for freedom, which means bringing down the Kadhafi regime." [source]

What a novel concept, sure to be introduced here or there, in the heartlands of revolutionary enlightenment freedom themselves. Following this overseas trial run, of course. Or perhaps not.

It's not an entirely savory bunch we are going in to protect, either. There are the deep-east-Libyan Arab racists among them, identifying African “mercenaries” often just by skin color, venting their dislike of Gaddafi’s pan-African ideas by cutting down immigrant workers and lifetime citizens alike in the dozens, according to a number of reports. [see here and here] Many others escaped such harm only by fleeing quickly enough.

But then there’s Daffy Qadhafi’s loony charge that al Qaeda, its north African branch at least, is behind the revolt. He said this from the beginning, to a general response in the west of hysterical laughter. As impassioned commentator David Rothscum aptly put it “ we consider him to be a schizophrenic autistic nutcase of course.” It doesn't help that he added that they were tripping on hallucinogens, of course, in a surreal and contradictory twist.

Again on the eve of serious bombardment, Gaddafi tried to explain to the world: "If you come here to carry out air strikes, you are not coming to protect the human rights of civilians, you are... going to be opening the door to al Qaeda." Strangely, as President Obama orders missiles, his anti-terrorism Czar John Brennan, for one, concedes there is cause for just that concern, as with any Muslim nation being destabilized. Or perhaps more so. Early on in the Libyan uprising, it was reported on CNN and elsewhere that Al Qaeda's North African wing offered through a website to "do whatever we can to help" the rebels. This tends to go against Gaddafi's idea they had initiated the revolt. But just now, they've issued a "warning against America" to the rebels of their stripe.

Brennan was however all but sure of renewed terrorism if Gaddafi remains. Indeed, he might be more angry, for some reason, and so must go, opening the door for someone. And clearly Gaddafi’s death machine and bin Laden’s are in the same group to Americans and the French – Arabic speaking airliner-scale terrorist bad guys, and the worst two among them. As Mr. Hudson noted

"[Gaddafi is] the admitted No. 2 international terrorist, second only to Osama Bin Laden, having caused the murder of hundreds of Americans, French, UK and other innocent citizens in the bombings of U.S. bound Pan Am 103 killing 270, UTA flight 772 killing 170, the La Belle Disco bombing in Berlin, dozens of other terrorist attacks, and delivering large shipments of plastic explosives for IRA terrorist bombings, plus killing thousands of his own people who regularly disappear into his torture chambers or are assassinated abroad. (...)

I’m confident some portion of that list is true, but at the very least the deadliest among them and the one that brought Mr. Hudson into such impartial and scholarly contact with this ring of terror, has been sadly misattributed. (see: the rest of this site).

The two Libyan agents accused of bombing Flight 103, Abdelbaset al Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah, were indicted in 1991 on flimsy and dubious evidence. Of three witnesses against the accused, at least two were paid $2 million each, and still managed to provide almost zero credible evidence between them.   The trial judges themselves in 2000 dismissed one of them, the star witness Giaka, for likely mass-fabrication, and acquitted the accomplice, convicting Megrahi alone for a crime he couldn't do alone. This itself was decided on reasoning seriously questioned on official review in 2007. Gaddafi and Libya never did "admit" to this crime, this alleged Libyan plot on Malta. There’s also much better circumstantial evidence and a truckload of cover-up indicators pointing elsewhere.

Nonetheless, back in the early 1990s, the politically leveraged indictments led into demands for a trial Libya couldn’t agree to, leading to a UN air embargo and steep sanctions. These caused an unknown number – reportedly thousands - of preventable Libyan deaths, possibly included in Mr. Hudson’s numbers as Gaddafi’s fault. This only ended after the two accused surrendered for a compromise trial in 1999. Mr. Hudson noted an agreement to limit the trial’s fallout, unjustly he thinks.

Prior to turnover of the Pan Am 103 indicted terrorists for trial, a letter by former UN Secretary Kofi Annan stated that the U.S. and UK had agreed not to pursue the case so as to destabilize the Gaddafi regime.

Yes, political assassination was a genuine concern, as that was likely the US and UK goal in framing and pursuing the two Libyan agents. And this wasn’t the only thing the Anglo-American alliance has used to destabilize or kill the colonel. Cruise missile accidentally hit his house in 1986, killing a a baby daughter of his. Another thing once used, a decade later, was the no. 1 terrorist on Hudson’s list – Osama bin Laden and his once obscure al Qaeda network.

David Shayler is our troublesome original source for this, a former MI5 officer, who is now certifiably nuts. But this 2002 article by Martin Bright in the UK Guardian makes quite clear that he had at least one dynamite conspiracy find earlier on: the UK MI6 (foreign intelligence) worked in the mid-1990s with al Qaeda's north African network, in Libya, on a plot to assassinate Gaddafi. The cell there, called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), included one Anas al-Liby ("the Libyan"), a fairly senior member close to bin Laden in his days in Sudan. As Bright explained the LIFG's bold and British-sponsored move:

The assassination attempt on Gadaffi was planned for early 1996 in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte. It is thought that an operation by the Islamic Fighting Group in the city was foiled in March 1996 and in the gun battle that followed several militants were killed. In 1998, the Libyans released TV footage of a 1996 grenade attack on Gadaffi that they claimed had been carried out by a British agent.

The west played that down, and the escaped British agent al-Liby took part in the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. For this he was indicted in 2000 and fled, from asylum in the UK (Manchester). With a $25 million bounty on his head, he wound up in the Afghanistan area, joining the post-9/11 Jihad.

Shayler was on trial for revealing some genuine secret or other (I'm unclear what), and his explanation of why, this Libya plot he had to expose, was called “pure fantasy” by the government. But during the trial amazing lengths were gone to to keep it all quiet. Public Interest Immunity certificates were issued, Mr. Shayler was barred from saying or entering anything about it, the media was gagged from reporting on it, and so on. The article explained:

Astonishingly, despite suspicions that he was a high-level al-Qaeda operative, al-Liby was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000 when he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad. The raid discovered a 180-page al-Qaeda 'manual for jihad' containing instructions for terrorist attacks.

The MI6 officer who ran this fiasco were named, but thought to be relocated and re-named by then. The operation is said to have hampered Libya's efforts to arrest Osama himself, or take a hard-line against his nascent network. Indeed, Muammar Gaddafi's terrorist regime was the first in the world, in May 1998, to declare bin Laden a wanted criminal. Shayler had insisted it, and supporting evidence came out in the 2002 book Forbidden Truth by Dasquie and Brisard. Thus, the West's obsession with Gaddafi could have had some role in allowing the attacks of September 11, 2001 and others, before and since.

Al-Liby remained in the fight until he was killed in Pakistan, in 2008. But some of his affiliates remained in Libya, mostly the heavily Islamist eastern half that now, it's proudly boasted, "has never accepted Gaddafi's rule." In fact, he's sometimes referred to there, perhaps literally, as the "anti-Christ."

The government has taken a different tone on the LIFG today, a softer one, partly to respect international criticism of human rights abuses. Now they are "rehabilitating" the terrorists rather than executing as before. Nonetheless, as reported, "the LIFG in 2007 reaffirmed its determination to topple Kadhafi's regime and to replace it with an Islamic state, and also stated its affiliation to Al-Qaeda."

Under these peoples' influence, parts of neglected eastern Libya have spawned at least two things of note in the last decade. One is the highest rate of al Qaeda volunteers, per capita, in the Arab world, and now the mutiny against Gaddafi.  A further 110 rehabilitated LIFG members were released, as scheduled, a day before the planned "day of rage" that started the revolt in February. And now, some of al-Liby's offspring are, or had better be, planning a coalition government over Africa’s largest oil deposits, if they are to replace a long-despised “terrorist” regime. Or just hold onto what the allies up north seem to think they have a right to.

Now of course, all the rebels are not al Qaeda fanatics, but just how many are is unclear. As David Wood reported for the Huffington Post:

U.S. officials declined to discuss the make-up of the anti-Gaddafi forces in eastern Libya, and U.S. intelligence agencies declined to comment publicly.

It’s presumably hoped that the "undesirable elements" will be co-opted or weeded out one way or another after things have settled and freedom is realized.

And similarly, not all of the protesters we're protecting are war criminals. But some apparently are. An amateur video (view with discretion) shows rows of dead Libyan soldiers "who refused to obey orders to shoot their fellow Libyans and they were executed by the regime and its mercenaries.” it was the major incident you heard about, the one near al-Baida, where 130 of Gaddafi's soldiers were killed somehow, surely added to the figures against him, and claimed by the rebels as a platoon of martyrs for their freedom fight. Refusing orders to kill innocents, faces blown off. The world was moved.

But another video, shown on Libyan state TV from footage intercepted somehow, shows a number of the same soldiers (apparently, by clothing, build, etc.) and their captors before the killing. From that it seems the rebels themselves themselves blew the heads off of these helpless prisoners, and passed off the edited cut to an accepting world * as another predictable Gaddafi slaughter. Or we have to give the regime very high marks for rapid and convincing video fakery. (Please see the explanation of this at my favorite skeptics forum).

Well, now with some help from northerners, seizing the sky again from a murderous tyrant, the rebels might have the whole regime on its way to being just as bound and helpless as those claimed “martyrs”  near al-Baida. Amid the pools of blood at slaughter's end, we’ll hear the explanation – as usual, it was all Gaddafi’s fault. The world will cheer for the freedom fighters. And then some other things will happen, who knows what.

* (Previously I’d noted here the alleged work of the extra-brutal Palestinian terror group PFLP-GC in Bosnia, fighting alongside proto-al Qaeda elements for Bosnian freedom from Serbian rule. Starting in May 1992, some of these terrorist elements reportedly killed civilians and conducted other false flag atrocities blamed on Serb forces and used to help win NATO air support to protect human rights. [source] It is my belief that the PFLP-GC also organized or at least equipped the murder of Mr. Hudson’s daughter in 1988, despite Libya taking the blame.)