Monday 25 February 2013

Libya "had nothing whatsoever to do with ... Pan Am 103"

[What follows is an excerpt from the transcript of a radio interview conducted by John Robles with Dr Edward S Herman, published yesterday on the website of The Voice of Russia:]

Herman: (...) The standard procedure of the United States and the NATO powers is to demonize whoever they are going to go after. So, Milosevic was made into a devil and the Serbs were made into an evil population. And of course the Bosnian Muslims loved that and latched onto that and they are still using it to achieve some of their aims. Countries finds it extremely difficult to throw off the burden of demonization and hatred by the West.

After we crushed Vietnam, we allegedly lost that war, but we damaged Vietnam horribly, we actually succeeded in maintaining an 18 year boycott of this victim to whom we ought to have been paying huge reparations. We actually should be paying gigantic reparations to Serbia for the illegal bombing war. But the West does this demonization and the demon charge hangs on.

So, each successful target you find this demonization process at work and the hypocrisy involved here is absolutely mindboggling because sometimes you have us changing our mind in mid-stream as with Saddam Hussein, when he was warring against Iran in the 1980s, he was a friend of the United States and they actually provided him with weapons of mass destruction. And then he became worse than Hitler. But the media doesn’t stress this and avoid it, they ignore the fact that he was our ally and then the next day he is a demon.

Robles: Same thing with Muammar Gaddafi, I mean he became a friend, again, what you were saying. Disarm! Disarm! Ok, he disarmed. The same with Hussein, he disarmed.

Herman: I don’t think we ever really loved Gaddafi or Assad but we did get along with them at least for a while. But Gaddafi was always a handy villain we could turn to, like in a Lockerbie case, that was really an amazing business, because after Pan Am 103 was shot down.

Robles: Sure! Do you think he was behind that? Do you believe that?

Herman: No, absolutely not! Right off the bat. The shoot down of Pan Am 103 followed by six months the United States shooting down an Iranian airliner killing 290 people. And six months after that there was Lockerbie, the Pan Am 103, so everybody knew. And in fact the CIA claimed for two years it was clear fact that Iran and Syria had been behind that bombing.

But the geopolitics changed and suddenly we were having to deal with Saddam Hussein, we needed Iran and Syria to be our temporary friends and Gaddafi was brought into the picture. The convenient villain. I’m totally sure, I’ve studied that Lockerbie case and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the shooting down of Pan Am 103.

But it is like the Srebrenica massacre. The capability of the West and the media to manipulate facts, and the CIA to manipulate facts and demonize, and have an effective case against whomever we have demonized, it is amazing how the West does this.

6 comments:

  1. I recall Stephen Pollard (editor of the Jewish Chronicle and advocate of the destruction of Iraq) appearing on Question Time.

    He responded to criticism of Israel’s disproportionate kill rate in Gaza, by saying he was the real victim, because he felt unsafe walking the streets of North London after Hamas had threatened to ‘kill all the Jews’!

    This neo-con mind set in which the aggressor becomes the victim explains the absolutely mindboggling hypocrisy of the West, because even as we massacre them, we do so as victims protecting ourselves from the guilty who would like to kill us in our beds!

    This mind set means whatever we do is good, and whatever they do is bad and no punishment is too small.

    The same mind set (mental illness) explains the shameless use of the term ‘humanitarian intervention’ when we inflict crimes against humanity on defenceless countries.

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  2. He said (twice) that Pan Am 103 was 'shot down.' Who fired the missile? What about the forensic evidence that the bomb went off inside the container?

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  3. A slip of the tongue, I suspect, Peter. As I know from bitter experience, it can happen all too easily in live radio and TV interviews.

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  4. I doubt a slip of the tongue, not twice, because it is logical to believe Pan Am 103 was shot down, if you think Lockerbie was a reprisal for Iran Air Flight 655.

    And for the uninformed this CIA promoted explanation does sound plausible, except that atrocity was just one incident in a 10 year war between Iran and Iraq (Iraq backed by everyone) that had inflicted over a million casualties.

    Why pick out Flight 655 as a reason for revenge when in a long war you have plenty of reasons to attack your enemies.

    But for those in doubt, surely if Iran was responsible they would have definitely ‘shot the plane down’, and not sought revenge in such an amateur and anonymous way.

    Because if you want revenge you would devise a hit, rather than a hit and miss plan and you would do so publicly, because unless people know you did it, it may be punishment, but it’s not revenge?

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  5. Dave, are you saying that Iran shot down Pan-Am 103? How did they do it? I thought you believed it was caused by a faulty cargo door.

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  6. Grendal,

    No, they didn’t and I do.

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