[What follows is excerpted from an article by Gwynne Dyer published on this date in 2007 in the New Zealand Herald:]
Over a period of several years in the later 1990s, 438 children in a Benghazi hospital in eastern Libya were infected by HIV-contaminated blood transfusions. By now, 56 of the children have died of Aids.
Similar tragedies have happened in other countries, and those who made the mistakes have been disciplined - but this was Libya, where it's always the fault of foreign enemies if things go wrong.
So in 1999 the Libyans charged five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were working at the hospital with murder. Gaddafi claimed that they were working for the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, seeking to destabilise his regime by undermining confidence in Libyan health care.
They all confessed to it, too, after they had been tortured for a while, but it was absurd: just another tinpot dictator shifting the blame for his regime's incompetence. The HIV infections, which began before the six foreign scapegoats arrived in Libya, were probably due to poor hygiene in the hospital, but the foreigners were convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
Early this month, however, as part of a deal with the EU, the Libyan high court commuted their sentence to life imprisonment, and then allowed them to go to Bulgaria to serve out their sentences. On arrival in Sofia, they were immediately "pardoned," and the case was closed.
Nobody admitted any blame, nobody lost face, and no blackmail was paid. The fact that each of the 438 Libyan families involved will get $1 million from EU sources is purely coincidental. Colonel Gaddafi may be a head case, but Libya still has some oil, so his peccadilloes are overlooked.
And before people in other places start feeling superior, let us recall another case involving Libya in which some shifting of blame may have occurred.
On December 21, 1988, Pan American flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Most were Americans, and it was initially suspected that Iran carried out the operation - possibly with the help of its Syrian ally - in revenge for the killing of 290 Iranians six months earlier aboard a civilian Iran Air flight that was shot down by a US warship in the Gulf.
(The United States was backing Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, and the American warship mistakenly believed that it was under attack by the Iranian Air Force.)
US and British investigators started building a case against Iran and Syria - but a year and a half later Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, turning overnight from an ally to an enemy of the United States.
In the US-led war to liberate Kuwait that was being planned, the co-operation of Iran and Syria was vital - so suddenly the Lockerbie investigation shifted focus to Libya, and in due course (about 10 years) two Libyan intelligence agents were brought to trial for the crime.
In 2001 one of them, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland, where the plane came down. Libya paid $2.7 billion in "compensation" to the victims' families, without ever admitting guilt, but the verdict always smelled fishy.
Jim Swire, father of one of the victims on Pan Am 103, said: "I went into that court thinking I was going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of my daughter. I came out thinking [al-Megrahi] had been framed."
Late last month, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission declared al-Megrahi's conviction "unsafe" and granted him the right to appeal against the verdict because "the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice".
That may well be true, and it may not have been an accident either. But, as former British ambassador to Libya Oliver Miles told the BBC recently, "No court is likely get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence."
And so it goes.
You just re-post this so I can point out once again that the timings don't work for the switch to Libya to have been a reaction to the invasion of Kuwait, don't you?
ReplyDeleteSaddam Hussain invaded Kuwait at the beginning of August 1990. "Operation Desert Storm" began in January 1991. The actual reason for the Lockerbie investigation switching its attention to Libya was the identification of PT/35b as (allegedly) part of a timer supplied to the Libyan armed forced.
PT/35b was actually identified as part of an MST-13 timer in June 1990. It was incontrovertibly present in the evidence chain in January 1990, when it was given to the Scottish police and they began their detailed forensic examination of the fragment. Even if it was fabricated and introduced into the chain of evidence fraudulently, as some people claim, it would have had to have been planned and executed before January 1990. Eight months before the invasion of Kuwait. How prescient are these people?
Indeed, the provenance of May 1989 for the thing being discovered inside the shirt collar at RARDE has not been disproved despite the highly muddled and indeed dodgy paper trail, and it's not impossible that it really did fall out of the sky with the collar on the evening of the disaster.
The timing of the switch to Libya seems to have been fortuitous, politically, but it wasn't cause and effect.
Not only that, there are clear indications in the narrative of a strong desire on the part of the US authorities to blame Libya right from the very beginning. That desire was only thwarted by the extraordinarily strong circumstantial evidence pointing to the PFLP-GC that was discovered in the last week of December 1988. It appears that Libya as the preferred culprit was put on the back burner at a fairly early stage, only to surface 18 months later as a result both of the failure of the investigators to find any evidence that the PFLP-GC had put the bomb on to KM180 at Luqa (understandable, because they put it directly on to PA103 at Heathrow), and the emergence of PT/35b as a tangible link to Libya.
I'm sure George Bush was very happy about being able to pin Lockerbie on Libya at long last, especially in view of the timing when the invasion of Kuwait happened at about the same time, but it wasn't cause and effect.