Evidence 'very weak'
Washington uses Lockerbie trial to attack Libya
By John
Catalinotto
Even Robert Black, the Scottish law professor who devised
the trial, called the evidence "very, very weak." But that
didn't stop the court from finding Libyan Abdul Baset
al-Miqrahi guilty and sentencing him to life imprisonment on
Feb. 1.
And it didn't stop the U.S. and British governments from
stating that they would continue nine years of sanctions
against Libya and demand that Libya pay "compensation" to the
families of those who died when Pan Am Flight 103 crashed in
Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
What Black's statement did, however, was show that the trial
held in Camp Zeist in the Netherlands was a political trial.
Its aim was to continue pressure on Libya and to show the power
of U.S. and British imperialism to punish whatever "enemy" they
choose, regardless of evidence.
The second accused person in the Lockerbie issue, Elamine
Khaleifa Faheima, was found not guilty by the court. He arrived
back in Tripoli, Libya, a day later.
Libya's leader, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, denied a Libyan
role in the bombing and insisted that Al-Miqrahi was innocent
and a hostage of the U.S. and Britain. He asked that the
sanctions end, as did the Arab League and the People's Republic
of China.
International pressure has been growing to end the sanctions
against Libya, just as it has for ending the sanctions against
Iraq.
The strongest evidence that a Libyan had a motive for the
Pan Am crash--any Libyan--was the crimes of U.S. imperialism
against that north African country. The rest was concocted by
U.S. and British government agents and experts who had control
of the evidence.
To understand how the U.S. government manipulated the
propaganda around the trial, it helps to review some of the
events leading up to the December 1988 crash.
Crimes of U.S. imperialism
In 1986, the U.S. launched a sneak bombing attack on the
Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi from air bases in
Britain. The public excuse from the Reagan administration was
that Libyan agents allegedly set off a bomb at a Berlin disco
frequented by U.S. soldiers in the then-divided city. These
charges were later abandoned.
The real reason was that the Libyan government was trying to
defend its sovereignty against imperialism. A clash had taken
place in early 1986 between U.S. warships trying to invade
Libyan territorial waters in the Gulf of Sidra and the Libyan
coast guard.
The Reagan administration was constantly tightening economic
restrictions on Libya in that period. It used Libya's alleged
connection with the Berlin blast as a pretext to launch the
100-plane bombing raid, which targeted Qaddafi's family home as
well as air bases and barracks. One of Qaddafi's young
daughters was killed in the raid, along with other Libyans.
The French Embassy in Tripoli was also bombed, which the
Pentagon claimed was a mistake. France had refused to let U.S.
bombers fly over its air space on their way to bomb Libya.
This was a state-sponsored terrorist attack on Libya with
the aim of assassinating that country's president. The media
here presented it differently. But the rulers knew what they
were doing, and they knew it was a crime. They knew Libya had
every moral right to strike back.
But Libya was not alone in this condition.
U.S. terrorism against Iran
In the summer of 1988, the USS Vincennes, stationed in
Iran's territorial waters in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, shot
down an Iranian airliner. Some 290 civilians were killed. The
official Pentagon story was that this was an accident.
The Pentagon had intervened in the war between Iraq and
Iran. U.S. policy, as explained so coldly by Henry Kissinger
later, was to goad the Iraqis and Iranians into killing each
other to weaken both. By 1988, however, Washington was more
interested in weakening Iran, then considered more hostile to
U.S. interests.
This may seem strange after the last 10 years of open U.S.
aggression against Iraq, but it was the situation then. U.S.
imperialism, like British colonialism of the 19th Century, has
no permanent allies. Washington has only the permanent
interests of the bankers and billionaires it represents.
Shooting down the civilian airliner was another type of
terrorist attack that U.S. forces carried out, not with a
hidden bomb but with a sophisticated rocket.
By ordering the murder of civilians in Libya and Iran, and
later in Iraq, by its aggression not only in the Middle East
but worldwide, Washington puts the lives of ordinary U.S.
citizens at risk. Then when someone strikes at a U.S.
target--be it a warship off Yemen, an airbase in Saudi Arabia,
an airliner or a skyscraper--Washington knows it has lots of
enemies to choose from.
U.S. police agencies lie
That it has enemies, however, doesn't mean that they carried
out a particular action against U.S. imperialism. Nor does it
mean that "evidence" is more important to Washington than its
immediate political needs.
In August 1998, for example, someone bombed U.S. embassies
in Tanzania and Kenya. The Clinton administration claimed it
was a team directed by Osama bin Laden, and ordered rocket
attacks on an alleged mountain base in Afghanistan and on a
medicine factory in Sudan.
During the civil war in Afghanistan, Bin Laden was an ally
of Washington against the USSR and received weapons from the
U.S. The factory in Sudan made medicine, not chemical weapons
as the Clinton administration charged, and had nothing to do
with Bin Laden. Yet this didn't stop the attack.
To consider a domestic example, the FBI and U.S. courts will
concoct a case against someone like Leonard Peltier--a
political leader of the American Indian Movement at Pine Ridge,
S.D.--when it has no real evidence he shot two FBI agents who
had invaded the reservation. They will do the same against
Libya or Iran or north Korea or Yugoslavia or whatever "enemy"
they wish to demonize.
It is unfortunate that the honest and heartfelt feelings of
grief and anger of the relatives of those who died on Pan Am
Flight 103 have been manipulated against Libya. It would be
more fitting if they would join with Libyan, Iranian, Iraqi and
other victims of U.S. aggression and exploitation and point
their fingers at the real terrorists in Washington and the
Pentagon, in the CIA and Congress, who assault the people of
the world.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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