I was writing a report on the U.N. last year when I came upon the stories of a U.N. role in brokering a deal over Pan Am 103. I have talked extensively to the Pan Am family members appearing here today. George Williams lost a son; Rosemary Wolfe lost a step-daughter; Stephanie Bernstein lost her husband. A total of 270 dead -- 189 of them Americans. The conclusion is inescapable: the Clinton Administration is helping Libyan terror chief Moammar Gadhafi get away with mass murder.

To understand the depth of this betrayal, remember back to Iran-Contra, when it was discovered that the Reagan Administration had been dealing with Iran to get hostages out of Lebanon. That was designed to save lives, but it involved dealing with terrorists. The profits went to support the Nicaraguan Contras. That scandal almost toppled a president.

Here, we have something worse: an Administration deal, through the U.N., with Moammar Gadhafi over Pan Am 103. This isn't an attempt to save lives; rather, this is a deal to sacrifice the lives of 189 Americans. For what? Oil. The profits in this case are going to American oil companies, in particular Occidental Petroleum, which funnel money into political campaigns.

Some of the panelists here were told about the deal. It says to Gadhafi that if he turns over the two scapegoats, as he has done, the trial will be designed so that it does not "undermine" his regime. As the Washington Post put it in an April 3, 2000, editorial, the U.S. has agreed that the trial will "focus on the suspects and not on his [Gadhafi's] regime." Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland identified the policy in a March 26, 2000, column as "giving up on confronting the dictator who would have had to authorize Libyan participation in the bombing."

Clearly, the documents protect Gadhafi and his regime from the impact of the trial. They reportedly promise him that the suspects will not be questioned about the Libyan regime's involvement in this crime or other acts of terrorism. The families of the suspects are being held in Libya as "hostages," according to one U.S. official quoted in USA Today. This also guarantees their silence about Gadhafi's complicity in the crime.

I filed a Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, request for the documents outlining the deal. They consist of a letter from Kofi Annan to Gadhafi, and a related document, an annex to the letter. The State Department refused to release them, saying they were "classified." That is, documents provided to Gadhafi himself could not be provided to the American press, the public or even Pan Am family members.

I wrote a report on the Pan Am trial, available at www.usasurvival.org., which has the exchange of correspondence with the State Department.

In September, 1998, President Clinton authorized almost $8 million to be spent on the upcoming Pan Am 103 terrorism trial. The bill could eventually reach tens of millions of dollars. But I have to join Senator Bob Smith, who said, in an April 17 letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that the trial appears to be "a dangerous sideshow designed to permit Gadhafi to remain in power and enable the U.S. to establish diplomatic relations with the regime."

Being part Scotch-Irish myself, I wish I could give the benefit of the doubt to the Scottish prosecutors. But the fact is that the English run the foreign policy of Scotland. The Scots are dependent on the English for the evidence necessary to press the case against Gadhafi and his agents. The May 23, 1999, London Sunday Times revealed that the British government has secret intelligence information implicating Gadhafi personally in the bomb plot. Yet the British have already restored relations with Gadhafi and have prohibited the release or publication of that evidence.

In view of that, Secretary of State Albright's claim that the Scottish prosecutors will pursue the evidence wherever it leads is misleading. Her assurance that there are no "external or negotiated limits" on the authority of the prosecutors is similarly misleading.

Without disclosing the actual contents of the documents provided to Gadhafi, Albright also claims they are mere "trial arrangements," negotiated by Kofi Annan, and that they were authorized by U.N. Security Council resolution 1192. But that resolution only permitted the Secretary-General to arrange for the physical transfer of the two accused from Libya to the Netherlands, where the trial is being held.

By approving Annan's negotiations with Gadhafi, Albright and the State Department have violated the U.N. resolution as well as the State Department's own guidelines prohibiting negotiations with terrorists. What's more, as former top FBI official Oliver "Buck" Revell put it, Administration conduct appears to rise to the level of obstruction of justice.

As the trial begins, we will be hearing stories about how Gadhafi or his agents have been framed for this mass murder. But the evidence was sufficient to convince the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Gadhafi. The world knows Gadhafi's terrorist record. It is also clear that if Gadhafi were innocent of involvement in this crime of international terrorism, he would have turned over the two who are going on trial without any negotiations or guarantees whatsoever. He could have been confident that they would have been cleared.

This pro-Libya policy is being implemented at a time when the Gadhafi regime has been caught smuggling Scud missile parts from Communist China. Libya holds the dubious distinction of being one of the few nations in the last decade to have used chemical weapons, and Gadhafi previously launched a missile strike on an American military base in Italy. He tried to build the world's biggest poison gas plant and, during a trip to Beijing in 1982, he offered to buy two nuclear weapons for a billion dollars in cash.

If the trial is not a dangerous sideshow, Secretary Albright should announce that the State Department intends to work through the U.N. to initiate international legal proceedings against Gadhafi, not only over the Pan Am 103 case, but other acts of international terrorism. The LaBelle bombing, which killed two American servicemen, and the bombing of the French UTA flight, which killed 7 Americans, come to mind. The correct course is to enlist our allies in a global effort to hold Gadhafi responsible for his acts of international terrorism before new oil deals with American firms enable him to generate additional revenue for weapons of mass destruction. (30)

 

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