This is a guest post by Michael Weiss
When Colonel Muamar Qaddafi announced his plan to spend the better part of this month’s forthcoming U.N. General Assembly meeting at an estate owned by his regime in Englewood, New Jersey, anyone familiar with that tony enclave might have predicted what followed. That the “mad dog” of the Middle East, who, upon seizing power in Libya in a 1969 military coup, confiscated all Jewish property (or what remained of it after decades of Italian fascism), canceled all Jewish debts, and outlawed all Jewish emigration would seek to literally pitch a tent in a U.S. suburb with a high Orthodox population–well, that’s just too easy for area newspapers. But that Qaddafi should have sought to install his Bedouin bower between a yeshiva and the private residence of Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, Oprah’s favorite pop Talmudist and host of the radio program “Shalom in the Home,” seems a challenge that might bedevil the inspired headline-writers at the New York Post. (Boteach, who’s greatest fear is failing to have an opinion about something tangentially Jewish, at first consenting to his temporary next door neighbor, before a chorus of indignation was raised by Sen. Frank Lautenberg and other New Jersey officials.)
Indeed, a strong odor of absurdity—the East-meets-West Point wardrobe, the Gene Simmons haircut, the harem of nubile bodyguards—has always surrounded Qaddafi even as he’s engaged in acts of dictatorial malice. The latest of these was his warm reception of Abdel Baset al Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of carrying out the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people after it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. A “hero’s welcome,” as most journalists have perfunctorily described Megrahi’s homecoming, this event could never have been because Qaddafi himself has more or less confessed to Megrahi’s villainy. In 2003, Libya submitted a letter—still on file at the United National headquarters in New York—accepting responsibility for its officials in relation to the Lockerbie mass murder and vowing not to support or “acquiesce” to further acts of international terrorism. Qaddafi even agreed to pay the victims’ families $2.7 billion, or up to $10 million each, in reparations money. His goal was to end UN sanctions against Libya, though even cynicism cannot be overshadowed by what Richard Marquise, a 31-year FBI veteran who headed the US task force assigned to investigate Lockerbie, recently told the Jerusalem Post: “I have to think [Qaddafi] knew something was going to happen, something that the US would be pissed about, and he said OK.”
Megrahi had been incarcerated in Scotland since his conviction in 2003, and he was to stay there to complete the remainder of his 27-year sentence until Kenny MacAskill, the tender-headed Scottish justice secretary, pleaded compassion for a man afflicted with terminal prostate cancer. As reported by Scotland’s daily newspaper The Herald, Qaddafi’s own son and heir, Saif, indicated that the timing was more than fortuitous: Libya had been negotiating a trade and energy deal with Britain at the same time the two countries began conferencing about a “prisoner transfer program,” which might otherwise be described as “blood for oil” were that phrase so out of vogue. Though the younger Qaddafi claims no direct quid pro quo arrangement in Megrahi’s release, the reader is invited to consider the chronology and logic of the following:
“For the last seven to eight years we have been trying very hard to transfer Mr Megrahi to Libya to serve his sentence here, and we have tried many times in the past to sign the PTA (prisoner transfer agreement) without mentioning Mr Megrahi, but it was obvious we were targeting Mr Megrahi and the PTA was on the table all the time.
“It was part of the bargaining deal with the UK. When Tony Blair came here we signed the agreement. It is not a secret. But I want to be very clear to your readers that we didn’t mention Mr Megrahi. People should not get angry because we were talking about commerce or oil. We signed an oil deal at the same time. The commerce and politics and deals were all with the PTA.”
If that doesn’t give you some indication as to Saif’s troubled role as spokesman for his government, then consider that this bumbling scion also told Megrahi on his flight home, in front of media cameras, that his release was “on the table” whenever oil and gas deals were discussed. These are plausible claims that have so embarrassed the already anemic administration of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that he has tried shunt all responsibility for this scandal onto Scotland, a country that is still part of the United Kingdom and exercises limited self-government. (It taxes the imagination of most Britons to think that had London exerted even the slightest pressure on Edinburgh to stop the transfer of such a high-profile criminal it would have failed to do so.)
Brown’s case is looking increasingly weak. On September 1 there emerged a letter that was written in 2008 by Britain’s own Justice Secretary Jack Straw to Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, and read in part, “Developing a strong relationship with Libya, and helping it reintegrate into the international community, is good for the U.K.” Straw also argued that it was in the U.K.’s “overwhelming interest” to include Megrahi in any prisoner transfer agreement. Exports from Britain to Libya are up 50% this year, and Whitehall would not disclose the name of the state official it sent to the weeklong Libyan saturnalia celebrating Qaddafi’s 40th year in power—the longest reign of any African strongman. In attendance will be Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for his orchestration of genocide in Darfur. The only EU official to RSVP is Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who has found time away from his mistresses to break ground on an Italian-Libyan mega-highway.
Meanwhile, as Bernard Henry Levi has written, for Qaddafi to praise his “friend” Gordon Brown and categorize this abortion of justice as recompense for the Crusades is to summon the feeling that a thug and buffoon who has overstayed his welcome as an enemy of the West is “spitting on Winston Churchill and the heroes of the Battle of Britain.”
