Inventing the Lockerbie Chronology

by bert

War mongerers routinely mangle history. But there is one whopper I just heard told again -- while driving the Great Divide on family vacation -- that irks me enough to bust them on it.

Here is Rush Limbaugh just last Friday propping up an invented Libyan chronology.

It was the fear of God (or fear of Allah) that was put into the mind of Khadafy. Don't forget, he's already sitting there quaking in his boots because Reagan bombed his tent, after Khadafy was widely held responsible when Pan Am flight 103 [this transcript fixes the on-air fact Rush fumbled for the right flight number] went down over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Jonathan Green of WTMJ radio also claimed a couple of years ago that Reagan's bombing raid against Qaddafi was a response to Lockerbie. I remember this because it irked me enough then to write to him.

It would be comforting if this sequence of events were true, because it would then resemble the plot of a Hollywood Western: A dark-skinned terrorist kills 270 innocent Pan Am 103 passengers, including 189 Americans. Then a sheriff with a white hat and balls of brass whips out his F-111s to exact justice. Problem solved, thanks to the manly application of military strength.

But, don't let them get away with this crap!

The easily verifiable truth is that the U.S. bombing attack on Libya, called operation El Dorado Canyon, took place on April 14 and 15, 1986. This raid was revenge. It was in response to the death of a single American, a soldier killed earlier that April in a Berlin nightclub bombing. But it was not in response to the 189 Americans killed at Lockerbie, Scotland, because the bomb inside Pan Am flight 103 blew up more than two years later on Dec. 21, 1988. Libya eventually admitted its people were responsible.

This whopper is a piece in a larger mosaic. The White House and its AM radio suck-ups don't bother with facts on their way to ruining the U.S. for their own sake. Frank Rich, in his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold, gives us this big picture:

Remember that White House aide, quoted by Rich in his introduction, who said that a “judicious study of discernible reality” is “not the way the world really works anymore”? For him, the “reality-based community” of newspapers and broadcasters is old hat, out of touch, even contemptible in “an empire” where “we create our own reality.”

My point is that they can try to create or invent all the history they want. But we the people are not always as stupid as they think we are.