[This is the headline over a letter published yesterday on the website of the Rhode Island newspaper the Providence Journal. It reads as follows:]
Providence Journal columnist Edward Fitzpatrick’s “A wrenching reminder of Flight 103” (column, Aug 7), which recounted the bombing in December 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 259 people, including some of Fitzpatrick’s fellow students from Syracuse University, is moving but not balanced.
While he points to two Libyan intelligence agents as responsible for that horror, he neglects the fact that investigators believe the Libyans were retaliating for the July 1988 US shootdown of the commercial Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which was in Iranian territorial waters, during the Iran-Iraq War. All 290 passengers died, including 66 children.
Perhaps telling the whole story could motivate Americans to do what is within our power: Pressure our government to stop committing imperialistic atrocities around the world, first because we don’t condone such acts, and second because the targets of those acts will surely come back to wipe out innocent American lives as well.
Catherine Orloff
Providence
Somebody seems a little confused. Why would Libyans have been taking revenge for the loss of an Iranian airliner?
ReplyDeleteQuite. The Libyans were allegedly getting revenge for the bombing of Libya in 1986, which in turn was supposed to be revenge by the US for the bombing of the La belle Disco in West Germany. Unless of course you fancy the revenge-by-proxy option whereby the Libyans did it to help out the Iranians whose original proxies had managed to cock it up.
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