Lockerbie, USS Cole
Washington puts political
aims before facts
By
Deirdre Griswold
Over
100 agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and countless U.S. military
personnel are in Yemen. They are reported to have interrogated at least 1,500
people and set up concentration camps full of suspects. They are said to be
investigating the explosion that crippled the destroyer USS Cole on Oct. 12,
leaving 17 U.S. sailors dead and 39 wounded.
High-ranking
officials of the Pentagon and the Clinton administration claim their agents are
conducting a criminal investigation to find out who was behind the
explosion.
Judging
by previous incidents, however, what is happening in Washington is not an
examination of facts but a political discussion about whom to attack next.
That
is certainly what happened after the explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over
Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. All 259 people aboard the plane plus 11
on the ground were killed. The United States quickly blamed Libya for the
explosion--not because it had convincing evidence that Libyans were responsible,
but because it had political reasons for wanting to isolate and intimidate this
independent-minded oil-producing country. It imposed brutal sanctions on Libya
that have lasted until the
present.
For
years, the U.S. demanded that President Muammar Qaddafi turn over two Libyan
airport employees for trial. In April 1999, after suffering under both United
Nations and U.S. sanctions, the Libyan government surprised Washing ton and
London by agreeing to a proposal that the two men be tried by a Scottish court
in a neutral country--the Netherlands. The trial began in May of this
year.
Case
falls
apart
Now
the case against Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, the two
Libyans charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder and contravention of
airport security, has come apart. The "star witness" presented by the U.S. and
Britain--a Libyan contract employee for the CIA who has lived under the U.S.
witness protection program since 1991--has turned out to be a
dud.
The
prosecution made a big deal of the testimony of Abdul Majid Giaka, who had
worked at the Tripoli airport with the accused. They put him behind a
bulletproof screen. People in the courtroom saw and heard him on
computer-distorted television. But after all the drama, he could not testify
that the two Libyans had put a bomb on the
plane.
The
prosecution had no other credible evidence to
present.
As
we go to press, it is being reported that the trial of the Libyans has been
suspended, and that a Palestinian, Abu Talb, who is already serving a life
sentence in Sweden, has "confessed" to the bombing. This, of course, is
politically more useful to the U.S. at this time, when there is a general
uprising of the Palestinian people against the U.S. client state,
Israel.
As
President Yasser Arafat meets with Bill Clinton in Egypt, hanging over his head
is the threat that the U.S. will now blame both Pan Am 103 and the Cole
explosion on Palestinians in an effort to whip up public support for acts of war
contemplated by U.S. forces or their Israeli
counterparts.
Nor
is Arafat the only Arab leader waiting to see how Washington will play this. Any
Middle East country or group in a struggle with U.S. imperialism--especially
Iraq--has good reason to worry about where the blame will
fall.
Khartoum--another
Alice in Wonderland
scenario
Lockerbie
isn't the only example of this. There was also the U.S. missile attack on a
pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, after U.S. embassies in Tanzania and
Kenya were bombed on Aug. 7, 1998. It is now admitted that the U.S. had no
evidence that Sudan or the owners of the factory had anything to do with the
embassy bombings. But that didn't
matter.
"Sentence
first--verdict afterwards," as the Queen of Hearts said in "Alice in
Wonderland." Washington wanted to show its immense military power, and any
target would do--even an innocent factory that provided half of Africa's
medicines.
When
Pan Am flight 103 blew up, the speculation over who might have had a grudge
against the U.S. read like a list of the countries assaulted and humiliated by
Washington.
At
the top of the list was Iran. Hadn't the USS Vincennes blasted a civilian
Iranian airliner out of the sky that year, killing 290 people? The captain of
the Vincennes said he had mistaken the plane for a jet fighter--an obvious lie
that infuriated the Muslim world. So the press had everyone convinced that Iran
must have planted the Pan Am
bomb.
Washington
eventually decided, however, that it wanted to go after Libya. And, in a classic
case of "blame the victim," it said Libya had to be behind the Pan Am explosion
because it wanted revenge for the 1986 Pentagon bombing of
Tripoli.
Bring
the troops and ships
home
Lost
in all the media focus on the Cole explosion is any discussion of why people in
the Middle East are so enraged at the U.S. that they will sacrifice their lives
in such an attack.
U.S.
and British imperialism control the enormous oil wealth of the Middle East
through a monopoly on its marketing and transportation. In countries like Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, they keep a privileged oligarchy in power without
even the pretense of
democracy.
Over
the past two decades Washington has fueled war and violence against not only the
Palestinian people but against Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Afghan istan, Yemen and
others. U.S. troops are stationed throughout the region. U.S. ships prowl the
waters of the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the
Gulf.
Inevitably,
U.S. military personnel like the crew of the Cole become the targets of popular
anger. The politicians here tell the grieving families that their wives,
husbands, sons or daughters "died for their country." But the truth is that they
died for Gulf Oil and Exxon-Mobil. They are victims of these rapacious
corporations, as are the Palestinians and the peoples of the Middle
East.
Who
was to blame for the deaths of young German soldiers in World War II? Was it the
Yugoslav and French Partisans who fought the Nazis with "sneak attacks" because
they had no tanks or planes? Or was it Hitler and German
imperialism?
The
war hawks tried to blame the Vietnamese people for U.S. combat deaths in
Vietnam. But the soldiers themselves began to realize that their biggest enemy
was their own officers. The anti-war movement knew that the way to save their
lives was to bring them
home.
Would
forcing the U.S. out of the Middle East be a defeat? Only for the corporate
billionaires and the military-industrial complex. Just as with Vietnam, it would
be a victory for the workers and all oppressed peoples.
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