On 8 July the Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, announced that the Libyan Government accepted ‘general responsibility’ for the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and normal diplomatic relations with Libya were being restored. The media reporting of this accepted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spin that it meant the Libyans have admitted killing Fletcher. The Daily Mail for example, headlined their piece ‘Libya finally takes blame 15 years after Yvonne died’. No one seems to have asked the obvious question: what does ‘general responsibility’ amount to?
The reality is, of course, that the Libyans have not admitted they killed Yvonne Fletcher and the British state has decided that this is not important enough to prevent reestablishing diplomatic and economic links. A form of words, ‘general responsibility’, was thus cobbled together which both sides could accept: the FCO spun the story as the ‘Libyans admitted it’; and the Libyans can deny they did anything such thing.
An obvious point not made by the journalists’ reporting of this story is this: the British state would not have reestablished diplomatic and economic relations with Libya if they thought there was the slightest chance that the two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing would be found guilty. Given that the trial is taking place under the Scottish legal system, what are the odds that the outcome will be that unique Scottish verdict ‘not proven’?(1)
The simplest explanation is that the UK is once again being the proxy for the Americans, bringing Libya back into ‘the international community’ where the US government feels unable to do so – yet. Libya, after all, has oil; and America runs on cheap oil. Post-war American foreign policy is very largely about getting oil. This explanation of British recognition of Libya is likely if only because the British Government would not do something as significant without US approval.
However, if we push this a little further in the paranoid direction, we notice that the gloss on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office briefing by the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Ian Black, appears to include anti-American hints. Listing things which ‘did not help’ reestablishing relations with Libya, he includes the 1986 bombing of Libya by the US, using bases in the UK; ‘the charge’ – n.b. not the fact – that the Libyans were responsible for the Lockerbie bombing; and the subsequent US sanctions. There are all acts by the US; but all carried out by Republican governments. Is it possible that on both sides of the Atlantic the professional diplomats and the rational core of the intelligence community are slowly throwing off some of the vile nonsense perpetrated in the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher years? The release of various official US documents which could easily have been withheld on national security grounds – eg on the CIA’s role in Guatemala in the 1960s – suggest something like this.(2) The atrocities of the 1980s in Central America, for example, are becoming more visible. President Bill Clinton’s apology while on a visit to Central America in March 1999, for US ‘support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression’ suggests the same thing.(3) The abandonment of the demonisation of Libya began in the 1980s may be an example of the change of regime in Washington making a difference.
It must have been pretty grim for a while for the ladies and gentlemen of the FCO watching the yahoos running things in America in the 1980s. But all things pass….(4)
Quid pro quo?
Both the Ian Black piece in the Guardian and Rupert Cornwell’s version in the Independent referred to ‘conspiracy theorists’ who believed that the Libyans had not shot Fletcher, but believed that it had been done by, or at the behest of, the United States Government. Among those ‘conspiracy theorists’ was the TV company which made the programme broadcast on Channel 4. That programme included testimony from Dr Hugh Thomas on the analysis of the wound which killed Fletcher which suggested that the Libyan embassy was not the source of the shot.(5) Does the deal done with the Libyans include the rubbishing of those who never believed the Libyan story in the first place?
If Thomas’s opinion in this subject is now to be discarded as ‘conspiracy theorising’, it is offered as ‘expert’ in another. The Sunday Telegraph of 25 July quoted Thomas, ‘a senior Armed Forces consultant surgeon…..and established ballistics specialist and expert witness for more than 20 years’, on the direction of some of the shots which killed three of the demonstrators on ‘Bloody Sunday’. Thomas says three of the shots came from above and thus could not have been fired by members of the Parachute Regiment, who were on the ground.
Notes
- This speculation was bolstered by the appearance of a story in the Mail on Sunday, 24 October 1999 (‘Tainted evidence threatens Lockerbie trial’ by James Grylls and John Bald) and one similar in the Guardian a few days later, pointing out that what had been presumed to be the central forensic evidence linking the two Libyans accused of the deed to the bomb had evaporated – something I thought had been established about 5 years ago! The Scottish judges may, of course, decide there is no case to answer…..
- The Guatemala documents are in the National Security Archive, on-line at www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/
- This is quoted in Robert Parry’s Lost History, reviewed in this issue, p.27.
- David Shayler sat on MI5’s Libyan desk for a while and he saw material which persuaded him that the Libyans did Lockerbie. Which tells us that the disinformation prepared by the US to show Libya guilty was sufficiently convincing to persuade a professional intelligence officer. See Hollingsworth and Fielding, Defending the Realm (reviewed below), p.147.
- See Peter Smith’s ‘Is Libya still the prime suspect in the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher?’ in Lobster 32.