Last night I watched the weekly news summary programs, "Inside Washingon" on CBS and "The McLaughlin Group" on NBC (or at least the local Washington affililiates thereof). Nothing on McLaughlin. Inside Washington managed to get around to it briefly at the very end, but what was reported was either false or extremely distorted.
There was a general agreement among the panelists that the accused were certainly guilty, but are just little fish. The shame of the matter, they felt, was that the real culprit, Mohammar Ghadaffi, could not be put in the dock.
Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post went one step further. He said that the only proper response to such acts of terrorism was retaliation in kind the way Israel does it. Evan Thomas interjected that terrorism against Israel continues unabated, but Krauthammer responded that Israel would no longer exist had it not used the mailed fist so freely.
Thomas recovered from his lapse into rationality by volunteering that the case took as long as it did to come to trial because of the distraction of various "wild conspiracy theories." Nina Totenberg chimed in that there was "hard evidence" indicating that the Libyans are guilty, and that's all that was said.
One can be sure that this rogues gallery knows a lot more than they are telling the American people. The average reader of any respectable European newspaper certainly knows a good deal more, which is why the trial stands a much greater chance of rendering justice than the average American political trial. Too many people are looking over the judges' shoulders for them to get by with the sort of mockery that we have seen in matters like the death of Deputy White House Counsel, Vincent Foster or the recent railroading of a patsy in the Starbucks killings.
Some comments on Inside Washington: Krauthammer's call for miltary retaliation presupposes that Libya is guilty. But for most of two years we proceeded upon the assumption--based upon quite strong evidence--that Iran and Syria were behind the bombing. I guess with a Krauthammer running the country we would have first bombed those two countries and then turned our guns on Libya after giving Iran and Syria an "oops, sorry." But I'm sure Krauthammer knows that the evidence against the two Libyans is about as strong as the evidence that that Sudanese pharmaceutical plant that the CIA fingered was making nerve gas. Now what if we had bombed that factory...? Oh, we did? Never mind.
Thomas' lie was more direct. The case took a long time to come to trial because we insisted that it be held in Britain or the U.S. We knew Libya would never agree to that, so we thought we were safe with our preposterous charges. But Ghadaffi called our bluff by agreeing to a compromise in which a Scottish court could preside at a former military base in The Netherlands. Had we not acceded it would have been all too clear that we really didn't want a trial. What Thomas calls "wild conspiracy theories" are, as is usually the case, what really happened, and, in fact, is the track our sleuths were on initially.
Keep an eye on my web site for past articles from the Sunday Telegraph of London for information about the case that this bunch of propagandists is confident you do not have or they couldn't get by with feeding us this garbage. In the meantime, you might get up to speed on the case by studying http//Geocities.com/Capitol Hill
Oh, and Miss Totenberg? She may be as dumb as she is ugly and really believe that the evidence against the Libyans is solid, but I seriously doubt it. She's as shameless a propagandist as the rest of them. Nobody's that dumb.
David Martin
THE GREAT SPECKLED BIRD
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