U.S. adopts shoot first, ask questions later policy

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Here's another reason to doubt that Sudanese factory was really making poison gas. One of the 'experts' wheeled out last week to confirm that Osama bin Laden planned chemical attacks on the United States, after bombs outside U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and retaliatory U.S. missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, was none other than Vince Cannistraro, formerly counter-terrorism chief at the Central Intelligence Agency.

This is the same Cannistraro who told us in early 1989 that the CIA had "convincing evidence" that Palestinian terrorists with Iranian and Syrian backing were responsible for the bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 the previous December, which killed 270 people on the jumbo jet and in the Scottish village of Lockerbie below.

"From an intelligence point of view this case is solved," he said. "There is a lot of evidence which puts this at the doorstep of the Iranian government." But in 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait -- and suddenly the "convincing evidence" became a lot less convincing.

"The West wanted Syria and Iran to be benevolent towards military action against Saddam Hussein," explains Scottish MP Tam Dalyell, who follows the Lockerbie case closely. So Washington blamed Libya's Colonel Moammar Qaddafi for the atrocity instead -- and it was a turning point in U.S. policy, for it didn't immediately bomb him. Instead, it tried to bring his alleged agents to trial.

The Lockerbie bombing in 1988 was the climax of a long escalation in which the U.S. replied to terrorist attacks by prompt and often illegal counter-violence against the suspected sponsors, like President Ronald Reagan's 1986 bombing raids on Libya. But in the shocked aftermath of Lockerbie the U.S. government realized, as one of Cannistraro's colleagues put it, that "(our policies) just set up the next round of terrorism." So U.S. policy changed: in future, terrorist suspects would be pursued by legal means.

One of the first results of the new policy was the 1991 indictment of two Libyan citizens for bombing Pan Am Flight 103, and a demand for their extradition from Libya for trial in a British or American court. Nobody really expected Qaddafy to hand them over, but his refusal would provide a justification for slapping a punishing embargo on Libya.

But Qaddafy is no fool: he obeyed the law. As soon as the Lord Advocate of Scotland charged two Malta-based employees of Libyan Arab Airlines, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Basset Al- Megrahi, with putting a bag with a bomb into Malta airport's luggage system for transfer to Flight 103, Qaddafy arrested them, appointed an investigating magistrate, and asked for the evidence against them.

This was in precise compliance with the 1971 Convention to Suppress Acts of Violence Against Civil Aviation. But neither Washington nor London was willing to let Libya try the men (since they thought Qaddafy himself was the chief terrorist), and demanded that they be handed over for trial in Britain or the U.S..

Qaddafy outsmarted his opponents at every move. He offered to let British and American officials interview the suspects in a neutral venue. He suggested that they might be tried in some other country. He appealed to the International Court of Justice in The Hague (the World Court) to protect Libya's rights under the law.

His tactics won much sympathy in the Third World -- and in 1992 he was about to get a favorable interim ruling from the World Court when Washington bypassed the legal process by ramming through a United Nations Security Council resolution banning air travel and arms sales to Libya. Since much of Europe's oil comes from Libya, however, Libyan oil exports were not banned -- so Qaddafy has shrugged off the UN sanctions and run rings around his enemies.

In 1996 he formally offered to let the suspects be tried under Scottish law in a neutral location, and began working to win the support of African and Arab nations for an end to the embargo. His first big success came last October, when South Africa's President Nelson Mandela defied sanctions and went to see Qaddafy (who backed the anti-apartheid struggle generously when the U.S. and Britain were still cozy with the white regime).

In February, the World Court ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear Libya's case against Britain and the U.S., and Arab countries decided to ignore the air embargo. In July, African countries voted to stop obeying sanctions altogether unless the UN Security Council agreed by September to allow a third-country trial.

So Washington and London have given up and re-packaged Qaddafy's proposal as their own. If he hands the suspects over for trial in the Netherlands before Scottish judges under Scottish law, sanctions will end immediately.

But more than that, the U.S. has given up on sanctions and the legal route in general. From now on, says National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, unilateral U.S. retaliation with bombs and missiles will be "the long-term fundamental way in which the U.S. intends to combat the forces of terror." Whether they know who did it or not.

It's more satisfying emotionally: blowing things up makes it look like something is being achieved. It also makes a bigger splash in domestic politics, as President Clinton was quick to note. So the tit-for-tat violence will continue and escalate until some U.S. blunder that kills a lot of innocent foreigners, or some huge terrorist success like Lockerbie, forces another change of the policy and we come full circle.

Meanwhile, what of Lockerbie itself? If Qaddafy hands over the suspects, the trial will take up to a year -- and then they will probably get off. As Prof. Mike McConville of Warwick University's law school puts it: "The prosecution task is not impossible but it is still going to be formidable. The evidence...would have to be stronger than the material which has so far come into the public domain if there were to be convictions."

In fact, given that this is a Scottish court, the likeliest verdict is neither 'guilty' nor 'innocent', but just 'not proven'.