Embracing Qaddafi (State Department poised to resuscitate Tripoli’s tyrant.)

Following a series of meetings with Libyan officials that has intensified in recent months, the State Department is close to relegitimizing Muammar Qaddafi, according to senior administration officials and other sources close to the talks. While State officially claims that its actions are in accordance with the U.N. Security Council resolution relating to the Pam Am Flight 103 bombing, it is nonetheless baffling that State should embrace a man who is an enthusiastic sponsor of terrorism, who has both known terrorists and weapons of mass destruction within his country's borders, and who is actively developing nuclear weapons.

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns, who represented the U.S. in the talks, is briefing families of the Pam Am victims in Washington Wednesday. Some of the families are irate that they are being used as pawns in State's ploy to revive Qaddafi; others believe State is simply fulfilling its obligations under the Security Council resolution. But the issue is even more charged within the administration, where officials outside of State's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs — which has never met a tyrant it didn't like — have been frozen out of Libyan negotiations.

Since the beginning of last year there have been at least three publicly announced meetings with Libyan officials — in addition to others that were held in secret — to achieve the State Department's goal of completing Qaddafi's campaign for redemption. "Compensating the victims' families is just a convenient excuse for State to bring Qaddafi back to the world stage," says a senior administration official.

Even though fighting the war on terror necessarily means fighting Qaddafi's actions to bolster terrorists and develop WMDs, the State Department is actually using the war as further justification for "engagement" with the despot. State has pointed to recent cooperation Libya has provided in terms of intelligence on al Qaeda — even as Qaddafi has paid untold millions into al Qaeda's coffers, a senior administration official confirms. Qaddafi is cunning, though: His method is to either pay "ransoms" to al Qaeda affiliates, or give money to "liberation" groups who happen to exist for the purpose of killing innocents.

State is so eager to normalize relations with Qaddafi that officials there are claiming that the tyrant of Tripoli is a changed man. A particularly striking example of the spin machine in action can be found in a preface to a January 10, 2003, Newsweek interview with Qaddafi, in which the reporter states, "U.S. officials concede that the former master of terror appears to have gotten out of the terrorism business." Nothing could be further from the truth, according to senior administration officials.

Apart from its weapons purchases from the Iranian mullahs, Libya is also stockpiling assorted chemical and biological agents. But Qaddafi's actions do not stop there. His regime is far enough along in developing nukes that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon noted last August that Libya could be the first nation in that part of the world to acquire nuclear capability. This news could hardly have come as a surprise to the U.S., though — Sharon made his declaration on the basis of U.S. intelligence.

If the State Department succeeds in striking a deal with Qaddafi on matters relating to the Pam Am 103 bombing, the White House will be in an awkward position. By linking compensation for the families of the victims of Pan Am flight 103, State has made not supporting Qaddafi's revival a tricky — and difficult — proposition, even though the White House is not keen on welcoming the despot back with open arms. "State is acting in contravention of the policies clearly established by this president," notes a senior administration official, "but State has chosen a good hook to get what it wants."

News reports last year pegged the proposed settlement amount at $2.7 billion, a tidy sum that will no doubt help State sell the trade-off of compensation for legitimizing Qaddafi. In anticipation of attacks, State has insisted on a fig-leaf cover on the terrorism front, whereby Qaddafi must "renounce" terrorism — probably in terms as strong as those with which North Korea pledged to abandon its nuclear program back in 1994, or with which Saddam Hussein promised to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors.

The victims' families deserve compensation, and they deserve it from the sponsor and protector of the man found guilty of the bombing. What they don't deserve is to be used to redeem the very man ultimately responsible for the murder of their loved ones.

FWIW, it's Eric Margolis back when.....

Britain's Plot To Kill Khadaffi
by Eric Margolis © 1998 Eric Margolis
NICE, FRANCE - Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, tried to assassinate Libya's leader, Col. Muammar Khadaffi, in 1996, according to a defecting agent, now under arrest here in France.

David Shayler, who held a mid-level position in MI5, Britain's domestic security agency, told the BBC he learned MI6 channeled US $160,000 to an underground, Islamic fundamentalist group in Libya to assassinate Khadaffi. Shayler was attached to the joint MI5/MI6 joint Libyan task force.

Shayler claims the Libyan extremists planted a large bomb in February, 1996,on a road along which the Libyan strongman's motorcade was to travel. The bomb detonated under the wrong vehicle. A considerable number of bystanders, government officials, and security personnel were killed. Khadaffi escaped unharmed.

A clearly embarrassed British government dismisses Shayler's story was a total fabrication. Yet it urgently demanded France arrest Shayler, who had fled to Paris after his interview, and extradite him to England to face criminal charges under the draconian Official Secrets Act. France promptly jailed Shayler on 1 August. Curious treatment for a man making claims that were, in the words of Britain's Foreign Secretary, `pure fantasy.'

Shayler's charges come at a time when Britain and the US are loudly denouncing terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, and have just themselves suffered terror bombings in Northern Ireland and Africa. Making matters worse, a MI6 agent, Richard Tomlinson, who worked with Shayler on the MI5/MI6 Libyan task force, defected to New Zealand. Tomlinson backed Shayler's charges, and further accused MI6 of covering up blunders and criminal activities by its agents. He was promptly arrested in Auckland, and held for extradition to the UK.

An assassination attempt was, in fact, made on Khadaffi in September, 1996 by Libyan fundamentalists. Britain harbors a number of anti-Khadaffi exile groups. CIA and MI6 finances them to overthrow the eccentric Libyan regime, which has long financed anti-western groups, and some outright terrorists. Khadaffi told me the British and Americans had mounted numerous attempts to kill him.

Oil-rich Libya was a lucrative British protectorate until 1969, when Col. Khadaffi overthrew London's puppet ruler, King Idris, kicked out the English, and had the impudence to raise oil prices. Khadaffi further annoyed Washington and London by loudly accusing the oil monarchs of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf of being US-British stooges who give away their nation's only resources in exchange for western protection from their own people.

My sources say Britain was, in fact, behind the 1996 assassination attempt. London's frantic, hamfisted reaction certainly reinforces this belief. The US and Britain rarely use their own agents to assassinate foreign opponents: they work through local opposition groups, or friendly intelligence services.

For example, CIA organized Iraqi opposition groups to try to kill Saddam Hussein; and Iran's marxist underground, `mujihadin-i-khalq,' to plant bombs that killed many members of Iran's Islamic government. Afghan leader Gulbadin Hekmatyar told me local agents paid by CIA tried to kill him in Peshawar using powerful truck bomb. CIA got Lebanon's intelligence service, the Deuxieme Bureau, to mount an unsuccessful attempt to kill Shia leader, Sheik Fadlallah, with a car bomb that killed 100 people.

According to the highest French intelligence source, France's spy agency, SDECE, was ordered to assassinate Khadaffi during the brief conflict a decade ago between Paris and Tripoli over Chad's Aozou Strip. French agents secreted an altitude-triggered bomb in a fire extinguisher aboard Khadaffi's private jet. When French Foreign Legionnaires disguised as Chadian tribesmen drove the Libyans out of Chad, and relations between Paris and Tripoli improved, SDECE agents were ordered to covertly remove the bomb.

In a tit for tat, Libya now demands France hand over Shayler - just as the US, Britain, and France demand Libya extradite agents suspected in bombing PanAm and UTA jetliners. It's all enough to make one cynical.

[Eric Margolis is a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and broadcaster based in Toronto, Canada.]

Copyright © 1998 Eric Margolis - All Rights Reserved

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