Lockerbie Release: Terrorist States Continue to Benefit from U.S./Allies’ Naïveté

The drama playing out over the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland reveals a continued and tragic blindness of the United States and its allies about the origins of terrorism. The President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism recommended after reviewing the case “a more vigorous policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists, but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions.”

In most of the discussions of the case in the ensuing years, attention has focused almost entirely on Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer and the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), who was convicted of the bombing in 2001, some ten years after his indictment. The Libyan government, under sanctions for its role as a state sponsor of terrorism, admitted being responsible for the activity of its employee, al-Megrahi, but denied responsibility for the crime.

The law firm involved in the end of the Libyan sanctions and the payment of over $7 billion part of which was for the victims of the Lockerbie bombing said the settlement was the first time “that any of the states designated as sponsors of terrorism have offered compensation to families of terror victims.” In short, Libya basically returned oil revenue to those who paid for its gasoline in the first place, admitted no responsibility for decades of terrorism, and attracted new business and investment to Libya. (Are there parallels to Iran and the continued fight to impose effective sanctions, and to do so seriously?)

But that is not the end of the story. The US Defense Intelligence Agency alleged that Ayatollah Mohtashem, a key member of the Iranian government, paid US $10 million for the bombing. At the time, the CIA said a group called “Guardians of the Islamic Revolution” took credit for the attack. Other reports were that Syrian officials were hired to do the job by the Iranians but their role was discovered and the bombing was then outsourced to the Libyans.

In addition, key US intelligence officials from Beirut were on the plane, a further connection to previous Iranian terror attacks, specifically the 1983 bombing of our marine barracks in Lebanon. Although usually attributed to Hezbollah, that terror organization was being formed by Iran at the time. The murder of our Marines at the time was an Iranian operation, using its terror proxy that would become known as Hezbollah as its tool.

And this brings us back to the beginning of our story. The terror attacks against the US starting with the seizure of our embassy in Iran, through the World Trade Center bombings of 1993 and 9/11 and the continued murders of Americans and her allies in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been the work of states, their intelligence agencies and an assortment of allied arms companies, financiers, mullahs, and mosques.

This “terrorism” was described years ago as a “poisonous coalition” led by intelligence agencies and states, by Ahmad Shah Massoud a Kabul University engineering student turned military leader who played a leading role in driving the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. He was known by many as the Lion of Panjshir. He knew who the puppets were and who were the puppeteers!

Following the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Massoud returned to the role of an armed opposition leader, serving as the military commander of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (known in the Western and Pakistani media as the Northern Alliance). On September 9, 2001, two days before the September 11 attacks in the United States, Massoud was assassinated in Takhar Province of Afghanistan.

The release on compassionate grounds of the convicted al-Magrehi was bad enough, whether the US approved of the release or went along with it. What is worse is that the US and its allies, Britain included, for too long, still fail to see that an assortment of nation-states, armed with the most deadly of weapons, use terrorists for their own purposes and have for decades. This is no different than what we faced throughout the Cold War from the Soviet Union, the world’s foremost purveyor of terrorism. These are the people who are at war with us. To that fact we need to awake. Remember Sun Tzu:  to know your enemy is most of the battle.