By Alexander Cockburn
Retail sales in the US were off 0.4% in March, which spelled bad news for Libya. Another couple of months' worth of poor economic numbers, and the bombs surely fall on Tripoli.
Even by the brazen standards established in the Iraq affair, the United States' and hence the UN Security Council's breaches of international treaties and laws are astonishing. As an Egyptian columnist recently remarked in the Cairo newspaper Al Ahram: "What this shows is that the new world order is a system of codified international piracy".
Libya is acting in accord with international laws and treaties. Having instituted proceedings against its two citizens, it is under no obligation to extradite them to either the US or UK. In fact, Libya's only legal infraction came when it offered to release the two to the Arab League.
Francis Boyle, a well-known and distinguished professor of law at the University of Illinois, has dealt trenchantly with the legal issues. As he points out, Libya has repeatedly offered to submit this dispute to international arbitration, to the International Court of Justice, to an international commission of investigation or to some other type of ad hoc international institutional arrangement for the impartial investigation and adjudication of these allegations. So far, both the United States and the United Kingdom have rejected all of these good faith efforts by Libya to resolve this dispute in a peaceful manner. Moreover, Boyle also demonstrates that the Security Council violated its own charter through the adoption of Resolution 731.
But, so far as the US and its poodles in the UN Security Council are concerned, law is not the issue. As US ambassador to the UN Thomas Pickering so brusquely proclaimed, "The issue at hand is not some difference of opinion and approach that can be mediated or negotiated". These are the words of international brigandage. Central to all the procedures, indeed to the very mandate of the United Nations, is peaceful arbitration of disputes. Pickering's is the language of Hitler.
As repulsive as this junking of the UN Charter is the moral and political hypocrisy of the US and its allies. France is presently pressuring Switzerland to deny extradition of a French agent sought by New Zealand in connection with the bombing (with one death) of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior. Britain, a few years ago, denied extradition to Italy of a convicted terrorist, saying piously that "his personal conduct" was not "such as to constitute a present threat to one of the fundamental interests of society". The Air India plane that blew up off Ireland in 1985, with 329 people killed, had been targeted by men trained in a paramilitary camp. A few months later, in India, the then [US] attorney general, Ed Meese, conceded obliquely that there was some truth to these charges. That was the end of it. In the US, there was no intense Lockerbie-type investigation and almost no press interest. No one called for sanctions against the US or the bombing of Washington.
For years, Costa Rica has been calling for the extradition of US citizen John Hull, charged with premeditated homicide, drugs and arms trafficking, along with other criminal acts including participation in the 1984 bombing of a news conference at La Penca, in which six died. The request, made as recently as last November, when the uproar about Libya's refusal to hand over its two suspects was at its height, was duly ignored.
Libyan laws on extradition are similar to those of the US, which confer the power to extradite only during the existence of any treaty of extradition with such foreign government. There is no extradition treaty between the United States and Libya.
It's likely that the decision to blow up Pan Am Flight 103 was made in Tehran, in revenge for the downing of an Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes in 1988, killing 290 civilians. There is strong evidence suggesting the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time. US Navy Commander David Carlson wrote a year after the episode, in the US Naval Institute's Proceedings for September 1989, that he "wondered aloud in disbelief" as from his nearby vessel USS Sides he observed the Vincennes shoot down what was plainly a commercial airliner in a commercial corridor, perhaps out of "a need to prove the visibility of Aegis", the missile system aboard the Vincennes. Carlson described the Vincennes as a "Robo Cruiser" looking a fight.
In April of 1990, George Bush conferred upon the brave Airbus-slaying Captain Will Rogers the Legion of Merit, an honour also bestowed upon the officer abroad the Vincennes responsible for anti-aircraft warfare. The captain's citation, which made no mention of the fatal rendezvous between missiles and 290 civilians, commended the captain for "exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service" and for the "calm and professional atmosphere" prevailing aboard the Vincennes.
Reverse it. A Libyan vessel inside US waters, eager to test its equipment, shoots down a US civilian airliner. On return to its home port in Tripoli, the ship is given a huge welcome. Later, Qadhafi honours the captain in a moving public ceremony.
Most people I meet wag their heads in agreement at the proposition that Libya is a cornerstone in Bush's re-election bid. On the evidence of opinion swings when the bombing of Iraq began, this won't prevent the public from cheering lustily when Bush orders the bombers to take off. Better pray for good economic numbers and not a triple dip recession. Otherwise, those folks in Libya are going to pay the price.
[From New Statesman & Society.]