Libya and Lockerbie: A Questioned Past, an Uncertain Future

October 16, 2011

I've still not been blogging at this site, remaining intensively pre-occupied with more current Gaddafi crime accusations - like this and this - along the path to the destruction of the green revolution and all those who dare to fight for it. There will be far less of them in short order, judging from the siege of Sirte and now the massacres.

My two big thoughts on Lockerbie these days are:

1) It's odd how even the new government is willing to cause some friction with its European sponsors to insist the Lockerbie case is closed and no one's going to be re-tried or re-jailed. The oil is negotiable, and resistant loyalists can be slaughtered on sight, but apparently handing Mr. al-Megrahi back to the Brits or anyone else is such a sore spot that they'd better not try it.

2) With no Gaddafi regime left to hang the crime on, and Iran coming into the limelight again, along with its proxy Syria, the truth may be allowed to emerge now of the Iranian-Syrian(?)-PFLP-GCplot that actually did destroy Pan Am 103. It would be for all the wrong reasons, however - mainly to "justify" the next regime change project(s) of an increasingly bold and desperate grab for the world's oil reserves.

Anyway, on the justifications for destoying Libya this year, old and new, I have discovered a prominent ally. I recently ran across a video interview, in French, with Yves Bonnet, a French terrorism expert and former high counter-terror official.  From the text summary of the September 1 interview, and what I can make out, he's explaining how Gaddafi's Libya wasn't so bad from a terrorism point of view, and didn't do Lockerbie, at least. I can make out the name Ahmed Jibril being mentioned.

Bonnet is a co-founder of CIRET-AVT (International Center for Research and Study on Terrorism and Aide to Victims of Terrorism), along with a Belgian parliamentarian and a former Algerian government minister. With this intriguing genesis, CIRET-AVT has gone on to do unusually brilliant things. Along with another group (CF2R - Center for Research on Intelligence), they wrote a rare, really good report on the Libyan Civil War and the "uncertain future" of the country after the violent, NATO-backed Islamist uprising there (see "Un Avenir Incertain" in Libya)

Unlike most who traveled to Libya on fact-finding missions, their team actually talked with Tripoli and took them seriously, allowing their report to wind up making sense. A sample, on the "popular uprising" in Az Zawiyah, near the capitol:

During three weeks, the police received written orders not to do anything against the insurgents, not to shoot, not to confront them.
[...]
During those three weeks, all the public buildings were looted, ransacked, and burnt; police stations, offices of the security department, court houses, town halls, etc. ... There were also atrocities committed (women who were raped, and some police officers who were killed), as well as civilian victims during these three weeks. . . . The victims were killed in the manner of the Algerian GIA [Armed Islamic Group]: throats cut, eyes gauged out, arms and legs cut off, sometimes the bodies were burned . . .

The old and mixed (?) record of 1980s terrorism accusations aside, there were terrorists of the al Qaeda/LIFG/GIA breed that Tripoli was clearly working against, along with Algeria, and certain Westerners willing to co-operate in the age where al Qaeda was everyone's enemy. Yet to a large extent, these same wound up being armed and covered-for by the same western powers that first used al Qaeda against Gaddafi back in 1996. Fifteen years later, Bin Laden himself was just killed but his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri is declaring a victory in Libya:

"And if I congratulated our people in Libya for their victory over the tyrant, I call upon our people in Algeria to follow their footsteps," Zawahiri said in the video. "Here are your brothers in Tunisia and then in Libya having thrown out the two tyrants to the trash can of history, so why don't you revolt against your tyrant?"

Interesting times.