ZGram - 10/15/2002 - "Selling Anti-Semitism" - Part II

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

October 15, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This is a follow-up on "The Selling of Anti-Semitism" theme:

[START]

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1999, pages 22-23

Special Report

The Israeli Deception That Led to the Bombing of Pan American Flight 
103 Over Lockerbie, Scotland

By Richard H. Curtiss

With the handover to the United Nations this spring for trial in The 
Hague of two Libyan suspects in the bombing of Pan American Flight 
103 over Lockerbie Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988, United Nations 
sanctions upon Libya were "suspended," but not lifted. This ended the 
principal hardships imposed since 1992 upon the Libyan people, which 
were the ban on international air travel to and from Libya, and the 
resulting high prices and scarcity of foreign-made goods and 
equipment, which had to be imported via Libya's neighbors.

U.S. sanctions against Americans doing business with Libya or even 
travel by Americans to Libya remain in place, but obviously will be 
re-examined at some point. The original object of the U.S. sanctions 
was to force Libya to turn over the suspects and, if they are found 
guilty, to force Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to accept 
responsibility for the crash of the Boeing 747 in which all 259 
passengers, of whom 189 were Americans, and 11 people on the ground 
were killed. However, Qaddafi already has distanced himself from the 
suspects by saying, in a BBC interview in October 1998, that the 
bombing might have resulted from Libyans "taking their own revenge" 
for the U.S. bombing of Tripoli two years earlier.

The principal effects of the U.S. sanctions have been to penalize 
U.S. oil companies, which now operate in Libya with a U.S. government 
waiver but without U.S. citizen employees there, and to discourage 
other U.S. companies from doing any business at all with Libya. As 
for any effect of the U.S. sanctions on Libya itself, no other 
countries have the success rate of American exploration and drilling 
companies in finding and extracting petroleum around the world, but 
there are few other goods or services provided by U.S. firms in any 
field that cannot be matched by European, Asian or other sources.

So the principal result of the U.S. sanctions is to exacerbate the 
unfavorable U.S. balance of payments, and to inflict some residual 
hardships on Libyans with relatives in or educational or business 
ties with the United States. Probably, therefore, as many Americans 
as Libyans are hoping that the trial of the two suspects, Abdel 
Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, who have been on leave 
with pay from their jobs with Libyan Arab Airlines for the past seven 
years, will somehow bring closure to the long-running dispute.

A "not proven" verdict is also available under Scottish law.

There is little other than circumstantial evidence that Libyans had a 
hand in the catastrophe. Perhaps the most compelling such item is 
that nine months later, in December 1989, a French airliner also blew 
up in the skies over Africa, with the loss of 170 people, after 
=46rance had intervened against Libya in its border war with Chad.

The conventional wisdom, therefore, is that if the defendants are 
acquitted, the U.S.-compiled case against Libya collapses, opening 
the way for a lifting of the U.N. sanctions. Or that a guilty verdict 
will open the way to a Libyan government compensation offer to 
survivors of the victims, which they can accept or reject in favor of 
civil damage suits against the Libyan government.

However, a third verdict, "not proven," is also available under 
Scottish law, under which the two Libyans will be tried in the 
international court in The Hague. In the likely event that the court, 
consisting of three Scottish judges, reaches that conclusion, the 
defendants walk, the U.N. will probably change the status of its 
sanctions from "suspended" to abolished, and the U.S. will be left 
with no face-saving way to re-establish a normal relationship with 
Libya comparable to Libyan relations with virtually all other nations 
in the world.

Such a result will call for more creative U.S. diplomacy than a North 
African version of the made-in-Israel policy of "dual containment" 
which initially dominated Clinton administration Middle Eastern 
diplomacy, and which has had no ameliorating effect on the conduct of 
either Iraq or Iran, the two countries at which it was aimed.

The U.S., in fact, has been quietly backing away from dual 
containment for the past two years, despite vigorous complaints from 
what Israeli peaceniks have come to call "the Jewish thought police" 
in the United States, meaning Israel's vigorous Washington, DC lobby 
and some of its unquestioning supporters within the U.S. Jewish 
community.

In deciding what the U.S. should be doing about the impasse it has 
reached with Libya, a country of only five million people, there are 
two initial questions to consider. Is Colonel Qaddafi, Libya's 
principal leader ever since he led a successful military coup against 
the pro-Western monarchy there in 1969, a seemingly incurable 
troublemaker or have his actions and eccentricities been exaggerated 
deliberately by the Western media?

An Unrelenting Campaign

Surprisingly, the Israel lobby's principal American think tank, the 
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, predicts "a fundamental 
reorientation of Libya's foreign policy" in a study it released Aug. 
16. It complains, however, that Qaddafi's "antagonism toward Israel" 
has not "ameliorated." This means that Israel's backers in the U.S. 
media will continue an unrelenting campaign to keep alive the memory 
of his transgressions, real or imagined.

There is a sinister aspect to this campaign of which Americans should 
be aware in making judgments about where U.S.-Libyan relations should 
go from here. That is the fact that the current U.S.-Libyan problems 
were deliberately instigated by Israeli actions. Unfortunately, and 
this is the sinister part of it, the U.S. media observe a nearly 
total taboo in discussing this Israeli role, although the facts are 
indisputable.

=46or example who, besides the Libyans themselves, remembers that the 
first victims in the brutal and seemingly endless tit-for-tat acts of 
retaliation involving Libya and, later, the U.S. were the 111 
passengers and crewmembers killed in the crash of a Libyan commercial 
airliner downed on Feb. 23, 1973 by Israeli guns as it descended, 
slightly off course during a dust storm, over Israeli-occupied 
Egyptian Sinai for a routine landing at Cairo International Airport?

The Israelis called it a case of mistaken identity. It is not clear 
whether U.S. journalists ever asked why the Israeli soldiers along 
the Suez Canal were firing ground-to-air missiles at a civilian 
airliner at all, regardless of its identity. Nor why the U.S. media 
obstinately refuse to recognize the role of this early outrage, only 
four years after Qaddafi came to power, and Western indifference 
toward it, in the shaping of his mindset about the West in general, 
and the U.S. in particular.

Whether the Israeli killing of such a large number of Libyan and 
Egyptian civilians was or was not accidental, the next documented 
Israeli intervention was a deliberate and successful attempt to 
instigate hostilities between Libya and the United States in February 
1986. It led directly to the April 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya's two 
major cities, Tripoli and Benghazi, in which there were some 40 
Libyan casualties, including the death of Qaddafi's infant adopted 
daughter. (She had been orphaned when her father, a former Syrian air 
attach=E9 in Libya, was killed in aerial combat with Israel.) If, 
indeed, the two accused Libyans were responsible for the Lockerbie 
bombing, it clearly was direct retaliation for the U.S. attack.

The manner in which Israel's Mossad tricked the U.S. into attacking 
Libya was described in detail by former Mossad case worker Victor 
Ostrovsky in The Other Side of Deception, the second of two revealing 
books he wrote after he left Israel's foreign intelligence service. 
The story began in February 1986, when Israel sent a team of navy 
commandos in miniature submarines into Tripoli to land and install a 
"Trojan," a six-foot-long communications device, in the top floor of 
a five-story apartment building. The device, only seven inches in 
diameter, was capable of receiving messages broadcast by Mossad's LAP 
(LohAma Psicologit-psychological warfare or disinformation section) 
on one frequency and automatically relaying the broadcasts on a 
different frequency used by the Libyan government.

The commandos activated the Trojan and left it in the care of a lone 
Mossad agent in Tripoli who had leased the apartment and who had met 
them at the beach in a rented van."By the end of March, the Americans 
were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan," 
Ostrovsky writes.

"Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long 
series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan 
embassies around the world," Ostrovsky continues. As the Mossad had 
hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and 
construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of 
terrorism. What's more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports 
confirmed it.

"The French and the Spanish, though, were not buying into the new 
stream of information. To them it seemed suspicious that suddenly, 
out of the blue, the Libyans, who had been extremely careful in the 
past, would start advertising their future actions=8AThe French and the 
Spanish were right. The information was bogus."

Ostrovsky, who is careful in what he writes, does not blame Mossad 
for the bombing, only a couple of weeks after the Trojan was 
installed, of La Belle Discoth=E8que in West Berlin, which cost the 
lives of two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. But he 
convincingly documents the elaborate Mossad operation built around 
the Trojan, which led the U.S. to blame Libya for the bombing of the 
Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers. The plot was given 
added credibility since it took place at a time when Qaddafi had 
"closed" the airspace over the Gulf of Sidra to U.S. aircraft, and 
then suffered the loss of two Libyan aircraft trying to enforce the 
ban, which were shot down by carrier-based U.S. planes.

A Prompt Reaction

The U.S. reacted promptly to the attack on the Berlin nightclub. On 
April 16, 1986 it sent U.S. aircraft from a base in England and from 
two U.S. carriers in the Mediterranean to drop more than 60 tons of 
bombs on Qaddafi's office and residence in the Bab al Azizia 
barracks, less than three blocks from the apartment containing the 
Trojan transmitter, and on military targets in and around the two 
Libyan cities. Some of the U.S. missiles and bombs went astray, 
inflicting damage on residential buildings, including the French 
Embassy in Tripoli. The planes flying from England were forced to 
skirt both French and Spanish airspace, and one of them, a U.S. 
=46-111, was shot down over Tripoli, killing the two American crew 
members.

"Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad's greatest successes," 
Ostrovsky writes. "It brought about the air strike on Libya that 
President Reagan had promised-a strike that had three important 
consequences. First, it derailed a deal for the release of the 
American hostages in Lebanon, thus preserving the Hezbollah as the 
number one enemy in the eyes of the West. Second, it sent a message 
to the entire Arab world, telling them exactly where the United 
States stood regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Third, it boosted 
the Mossad's image of itself, since it was they who, by ingenious 
sleight of hand, had prodded the United States to do what was right=8A

"After the bombing, the Hezbollah broke off negotiations regarding 
the hostages they held in Beirut and executed three of them, 
including one American named Peter Kilburn. As for the French, they 
were rewarded for their non-participation in the attack by the 
release at the end of June of two French journalists held hostage in 
Beirut."

Ostrovsky doesn't mention, however, the other apparent direct result 
of the Mossad "success": the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Despite the refusal by mainstream American media to revisit the 
well-documented facts presented above, they contain some obvious 
political lessons for the United States. For example, the U.S. 
government might decide to continue its sanctions on Libya in 
retaliation for the deaths of the 270 victims of the Pan Am bombing, 
regardless of the verdict of the Scottish judges. In that case, 
however, true justice would also require imposition of similar U.S. 
sanctions against Israel for deliberately instigating the U.S. 
bombing of Tripoli, in retaliation for the bombing of La Belle 
Discoth=E8que, a crime which the Israelis knew from the beginning that 
the Libyans had not committed.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report 
on Middle East Affairs and was a high-ranking US official with vast 
hands-on, local experience in the Middle East during his 
distinguished career.

(Source:  OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1999, pages 22-23

Special Report

The Israeli Deception That Led to the Bombing of Pan American Flight 
103 Over Lockerbie, Scotland

By Richard H. Curtiss

With the handover to the United Nations this spring for trial in The 
Hague of two Libyan suspects in the bombing of Pan American Flight 
103 over Lockerbie Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988, United Nations 
sanctions upon Libya were "suspended," but not lifted. This ended the 
principal hardships imposed since 1992 upon the Libyan people, which 
were the ban on international air travel to and from Libya, and the 
resulting high prices and scarcity of foreign-made goods and 
equipment, which had to be imported via Libya's neighbors.

U.S. sanctions against Americans doing business with Libya or even 
travel by Americans to Libya remain in place, but obviously will be 
re-examined at some point. The original object of the U.S. sanctions 
was to force Libya to turn over the suspects and, if they are found 
guilty, to force Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi to accept 
responsibility for the crash of the Boeing 747 in which all 259 
passengers, of whom 189 were Americans, and 11 people on the ground 
were killed. However, Qaddafi already has distanced himself from the 
suspects by saying, in a BBC interview in October 1998, that the 
bombing might have resulted from Libyans "taking their own revenge" 
for the U.S. bombing of Tripoli two years earlier.

The principal effects of the U.S. sanctions have been to penalize 
U.S. oil companies, which now operate in Libya with a U.S. government 
waiver but without U.S. citizen employees there, and to discourage 
other U.S. companies from doing any business at all with Libya. As 
for any effect of the U.S. sanctions on Libya itself, no other 
countries have the success rate of American exploration and drilling 
companies in finding and extracting petroleum around the world, but 
there are few other goods or services provided by U.S. firms in any 
field that cannot be matched by European, Asian or other sources.

So the principal result of the U.S. sanctions is to exacerbate the 
unfavorable U.S. balance of payments, and to inflict some residual 
hardships on Libyans with relatives in or educational or business 
ties with the United States. Probably, therefore, as many Americans 
as Libyans are hoping that the trial of the two suspects, Abdel 
Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, who have been on leave 
with pay from their jobs with Libyan Arab Airlines for the past seven 
years, will somehow bring closure to the long-running dispute.

A "not proven" verdict is also available under Scottish law.

There is little other than circumstantial evidence that Libyans had a 
hand in the catastrophe. Perhaps the most compelling such item is 
that nine months later, in December 1989, a French airliner also blew 
up in the skies over Africa, with the loss of 170 people, after 
=46rance had intervened against Libya in its border war with Chad.

The conventional wisdom, therefore, is that if the defendants are 
acquitted, the U.S.-compiled case against Libya collapses, opening 
the way for a lifting of the U.N. sanctions. Or that a guilty verdict 
will open the way to a Libyan government compensation offer to 
survivors of the victims, which they can accept or reject in favor of 
civil damage suits against the Libyan government.

However, a third verdict, "not proven," is also available under 
Scottish law, under which the two Libyans will be tried in the 
international court in The Hague. In the likely event that the court, 
consisting of three Scottish judges, reaches that conclusion, the 
defendants walk, the U.N. will probably change the status of its 
sanctions from "suspended" to abolished, and the U.S. will be left 
with no face-saving way to re-establish a normal relationship with 
Libya comparable to Libyan relations with virtually all other nations 
in the world.

Such a result will call for more creative U.S. diplomacy than a North 
African version of the made-in-Israel policy of "dual containment" 
which initially dominated Clinton administration Middle Eastern 
diplomacy, and which has had no ameliorating effect on the conduct of 
either Iraq or Iran, the two countries at which it was aimed.

The U.S., in fact, has been quietly backing away from dual 
containment for the past two years, despite vigorous complaints from 
what Israeli peaceniks have come to call "the Jewish thought police" 
in the United States, meaning Israel's vigorous Washington, DC lobby 
and some of its unquestioning supporters within the U.S. Jewish 
community.

In deciding what the U.S. should be doing about the impasse it has 
reached with Libya, a country of only five million people, there are 
two initial questions to consider. Is Colonel Qaddafi, Libya's 
principal leader ever since he led a successful military coup against 
the pro-Western monarchy there in 1969, a seemingly incurable 
troublemaker or have his actions and eccentricities been exaggerated 
deliberately by the Western media?

An Unrelenting Campaign

Surprisingly, the Israel lobby's principal American think tank, the 
Washington Institute for Near East Policy, predicts "a fundamental 
reorientation of Libya's foreign policy" in a study it released Aug. 
16. It complains, however, that Qaddafi's "antagonism toward Israel" 
has not "ameliorated." This means that Israel's backers in the U.S. 
media will continue an unrelenting campaign to keep alive the memory 
of his transgressions, real or imagined.

There is a sinister aspect to this campaign of which Americans should 
be aware in making judgments about where U.S.-Libyan relations should 
go from here. That is the fact that the current U.S.-Libyan problems 
were deliberately instigated by Israeli actions. Unfortunately, and 
this is the sinister part of it, the U.S. media observe a nearly 
total taboo in discussing this Israeli role, although the facts are 
indisputable.

=46or example who, besides the Libyans themselves, remembers that the 
first victims in the brutal and seemingly endless tit-for-tat acts of 
retaliation involving Libya and, later, the U.S. were the 111 
passengers and crewmembers killed in the crash of a Libyan commercial 
airliner downed on Feb. 23, 1973 by Israeli guns as it descended, 
slightly off course during a dust storm, over Israeli-occupied 
Egyptian Sinai for a routine landing at Cairo International Airport?

The Israelis called it a case of mistaken identity. It is not clear 
whether U.S. journalists ever asked why the Israeli soldiers along 
the Suez Canal were firing ground-to-air missiles at a civilian 
airliner at all, regardless of its identity. Nor why the U.S. media 
obstinately refuse to recognize the role of this early outrage, only 
four years after Qaddafi came to power, and Western indifference 
toward it, in the shaping of his mindset about the West in general, 
and the U.S. in particular.

Whether the Israeli killing of such a large number of Libyan and 
Egyptian civilians was or was not accidental, the next documented 
Israeli intervention was a deliberate and successful attempt to 
instigate hostilities between Libya and the United States in February 
1986. It led directly to the April 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya's two 
major cities, Tripoli and Benghazi, in which there were some 40 
Libyan casualties, including the death of Qaddafi's infant adopted 
daughter. (She had been orphaned when her father, a former Syrian air 
attach=E9 in Libya, was killed in aerial combat with Israel.) If, 
indeed, the two accused Libyans were responsible for the Lockerbie 
bombing, it clearly was direct retaliation for the U.S. attack.

The manner in which Israel's Mossad tricked the U.S. into attacking 
Libya was described in detail by former Mossad case worker Victor 
Ostrovsky in The Other Side of Deception, the second of two revealing 
books he wrote after he left Israel's foreign intelligence service. 
The story began in February 1986, when Israel sent a team of navy 
commandos in miniature submarines into Tripoli to land and install a 
"Trojan," a six-foot-long communications device, in the top floor of 
a five-story apartment building. The device, only seven inches in 
diameter, was capable of receiving messages broadcast by Mossad's LAP 
(LohAma Psicologit-psychological warfare or disinformation section) 
on one frequency and automatically relaying the broadcasts on a 
different frequency used by the Libyan government.

The commandos activated the Trojan and left it in the care of a lone 
Mossad agent in Tripoli who had leased the apartment and who had met 
them at the beach in a rented van."By the end of March, the Americans 
were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan," 
Ostrovsky writes.

"Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long 
series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan 
embassies around the world," Ostrovsky continues. As the Mossad had 
hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and 
construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of 
terrorism. What's more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports 
confirmed it.

"The French and the Spanish, though, were not buying into the new 
stream of information. To them it seemed suspicious that suddenly, 
out of the blue, the Libyans, who had been extremely careful in the 
past, would start advertising their future actions=8AThe French and the 
Spanish were right. The information was bogus."

Ostrovsky, who is careful in what he writes, does not blame Mossad 
for the bombing, only a couple of weeks after the Trojan was 
installed, of La Belle Discoth=E8que in West Berlin, which cost the 
lives of two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. But he 
convincingly documents the elaborate Mossad operation built around 
the Trojan, which led the U.S. to blame Libya for the bombing of the 
Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers. The plot was given 
added credibility since it took place at a time when Qaddafi had 
"closed" the airspace over the Gulf of Sidra to U.S. aircraft, and 
then suffered the loss of two Libyan aircraft trying to enforce the 
ban, which were shot down by carrier-based U.S. planes.

A Prompt Reaction

The U.S. reacted promptly to the attack on the Berlin nightclub. On 
April 16, 1986 it sent U.S. aircraft from a base in England and from 
two U.S. carriers in the Mediterranean to drop more than 60 tons of 
bombs on Qaddafi's office and residence in the Bab al Azizia 
barracks, less than three blocks from the apartment containing the 
Trojan transmitter, and on military targets in and around the two 
Libyan cities. Some of the U.S. missiles and bombs went astray, 
inflicting damage on residential buildings, including the French 
Embassy in Tripoli. The planes flying from England were forced to 
skirt both French and Spanish airspace, and one of them, a U.S. 
=46-111, was shot down over Tripoli, killing the two American crew 
members.

"Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad's greatest successes," 
Ostrovsky writes. "It brought about the air strike on Libya that 
President Reagan had promised-a strike that had three important 
consequences. First, it derailed a deal for the release of the 
American hostages in Lebanon, thus preserving the Hezbollah as the 
number one enemy in the eyes of the West. Second, it sent a message 
to the entire Arab world, telling them exactly where the United 
States stood regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Third, it boosted 
the Mossad's image of itself, since it was they who, by ingenious 
sleight of hand, had prodded the United States to do what was right=8A

"After the bombing, the Hezbollah broke off negotiations regarding 
the hostages they held in Beirut and executed three of them, 
including one American named Peter Kilburn. As for the French, they 
were rewarded for their non-participation in the attack by the 
release at the end of June of two French journalists held hostage in 
Beirut."

Ostrovsky doesn't mention, however, the other apparent direct result 
of the Mossad "success": the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Despite the refusal by mainstream American media to revisit the 
well-documented facts presented above, they contain some obvious 
political lessons for the United States. For example, the U.S. 
government might decide to continue its sanctions on Libya in 
retaliation for the deaths of the 270 victims of the Pan Am bombing, 
regardless of the verdict of the Scottish judges. In that case, 
however, true justice would also require imposition of similar U.S. 
sanctions against Israel for deliberately instigating the U.S. 
bombing of Tripoli, in retaliation for the bombing of La Belle 
Discoth=E8que, a crime which the Israelis knew from the beginning that 
the Libyans had not committed.

[END]

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report 
on Middle East Affairs and was a high-ranking official with vast 
hands-on local experience in the Middle East during his distinguished 
career.