How the Lockerbie Trial Paid Off For U.S. Security Interests

By Michael P. Scharf, for the Boston Globe, February 10, 2001

The mixed verdict and limited findings in the Lockerbie Case have left the public questioning whether the trial succeeded in achieving justice and truth. But as the State Department's counsel to the Counter-Terrorism Bureau during the Pan-Am 103 investigation and Attorney-Adviser for UN Affairs when sanctions were imposed on Libya, I suggest that an equally important measure for judging the success of the Lockerbie Trial is the extent to which it contributed to peace and security.

The Lockerbie trial must be viewed in the context of the 30-year-long, low-intensity conflict between Libya and the United States.

When Colonel Moammar Khadafy came to power in 1969, Libya nationalized US corporate-owned oil wells and refineries and began to support anti-Western terrorist organizations.
In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration conducted naval and air exercises off the coast of Libya, provoking the first of several minor military confrontations.

Then, when terrorists detonated a bomb in the LaBelle Disco in Germany, killing several American servicemen, the Reagan administration claimed that Libya was behind the bombing and launched a surprise airstrike on Khadafy's residence in Tripoli, which injured his son and killed his infant daughter.

The verdict in the Lockerbie case confirms the US government's charge that the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988 was undertaken by Libyan agents in retaliation for the 1986 US airstrike on Tripoli.
When evidence of Libyan involvement first came to light in 1991, officials throughout the US government debated the best way to respond. It was generally agreed that use of force would only lead to international condemnation as well as further Libyan attacks against US citizens.

Instead, a decision was made to employ the mechanism of criminal prosecution.

But achieving justice was never the main objective. Indeed, the fact that the United States issued a public, rather than a sealed, indictment indicates that US authorities never expected that the accused would ever actually be brought to trial.

Instead, US officials saw the indictment itself as a diplomatic tool that would help them persuade members of the Security Council to impose sanctions on Libya, thereby furthering their goal of isolating a rogue regime. The so-called money bomb ended up costing Libya more than $18 billion in lost revenue during the 1990s.

Choking under the effects of sanctions, Khadafy ultimately agreed to surrender the two Libyan defendants to a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands because his advisers told him that the case would likely result in acquittal, and even if there were a conviction, there would be no evidence linking the defendants actions to Khadafy himself.

At this point, with international support for expanding or even continuing the sanctions quickly fading and American companies clamoring to regain access to Libyan oil fields, the Clinton administration viewed a Scottish trial in the Netherlands as a convenient way to put the Lockerbie incident behind it.

Despite its inadequacies, the judicial response has apparently succeeded in severing the cycle of violence between the United States and Libya. Libya has made a show of terminating its support for terrorist groups, and its actions
are now more closely scrutinized by the international community.

Libya will soon pay billions of dollars to the families of the victims to settle the pending lawsuits. And the renewed flow of Libyan oil to the West may help stave off worldwide inflation and recession.

From the standpoint of US security interests, the Lockerbie trial was an unmitigated success.