"From Posterboy to Wanted Poster"

Going After Qaddafi (Again)

By KURT NIMMO, www.kurtnimmo.com

Remember when the Bush Ministry of Disinformation made such a big deal out of Qaddafi's reported deal to stop working on nuclear weapons? Mu'ammar's so-called "renunciation" had neocons and Bush warmongers strutting around declaring the invasion of Iraq -- and the murder of 11,000 innocent Iraqis -- was a good and righteous thing because it scared the heck out of Arab dictators and will force them to the table to negotiate their emasculation.

Of course, since al-Qaddafi will always be an Arab -- and neocons instinctively loathe Arabs and want to destroy them (neocons love Israel more than anything, even their own country) -- it stands to reason Mu'ammar will backslide on his agreement, so far as the neocons are concerned. "So long as Qaddafi alone determines what are Libya's policies, we can never be certain whether he will stick with his renunciation of WMD or change his mind tomorrow. In other words, the key threat to the Libya WMD agreement is that Qaddafi will renounce it," warns Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a neocon operation where the Islamophobe Daniel Pipes is an adjunct scholar. The neocons really don't want Mu'ammar's cooperation. Instead, they want to bomb Libya like the now dead Reagan did in 1986, killing the adopted daughter of Qaddafi and 37 civilians (see William Blum, Ronald Reagan's Legacy: Eight Years of CIA Covert Action, Covert Action Quarterly, Winter 1990).

It does not help the neocon cause of humiliating everything Arab that Bush's sidekick Tony Blair rushed off to Tripoli and shook hands with Mu'ammar at the behest of Shell Oil. Shell desperately needs access to Libya's oil and gas fields after the multinational revised down estimates of its reserves in response to the fact it was caught partaking in that most popular of corporate pastimes, cooking the books. The revisions prompted investigations by London's Financial Services Authority and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Sunday Times reported in March.

It is one thing for Shell to make billion dollar gas and oil deals with Libya after Mu'ammar threw them out in the early 1970s, but quite another to rehabilitate an old adversary, especially now that the neocons and their neolib fellow travelers need Arab demons to shake a big stick at in Bush's war on terr'ism.

Just in the nick of time surfaces a report that Qaddafi "ordered a covert operation to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia last year and throw the oil-rich kingdom into disarray," as the ever dutiful neocon tool, Fox News, reports. Naturally, the neocons spare no love for the medieval Saudi monarchy, but apparently they are unable to ignore this too-good-to-pass-up information; word of the plot allegedly comes from Col. Mohamed Ismael, a Libyan intelligence officer in Saudi custody. Ismael apparently gave separate statements to American and Saudi officials, according to the New York Times, a less than reliable source considering it now admits to selling Bush's lies to the American people (and it continues to employ the liar par excellence, Judith Miller).

Of course, US lies about Libya and Qaddafi are nothing new. In 2000, the Clinton administration threatened Dr. Richard Fuisz, a former CIA agent, with ten years in prison if he revealed what he knew about the Lockerbie bombing, the Sunday Herald wrote at the time. But what the Herald did not mention is that Charles McKee, a US intelligence captain in the DIA, was on the doomed flight and he allegedly had in his possession a briefcase containing "files on [a] CIA-Hizbullah-Mossad drugs ring," the Guardian reported in 1999. The Guardian article also mentions Victor Ostrovsky, a Canadian former intelligence colonel with Israel's Mossad, who says Mossad commandos planted a transmitter in Tripoli that generated false telex signals implicating Libya in the April 6, 1986 La Belle discotheque bombing in Berlin that killed three US soldiers. Reagan used this bombing as a pretext for retaliation against Libya.

For the Bush neocons, it is essential that Qaddafi remain unrepentant and untrustworthy, regardless of his overtures and allowing Shell Oil to make piles of money on Libyan oil and gas after all these years. Murdering his daughter and pinning Lockerbie on him is hardly enough. Qaddafi, the Iranian mullahs, and Syria's Bashar al-Assad are targeted for "regime change," a plan to likely remain on the neoliberal drawingboard even if John Kerry happens to win in November.

Israel, after all, has declared: Make it so.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.