It's funny how little things happen in life that make everything turn out differently.
In November of 1988, I was serving as a soldier in West Germany. I wanted to go to the U.S. on leave to visit my family, and a girlfriend who had just moved to Alabama. So I went to the military travel office - SATO - and tried to book a flight out of Frankfurt to New York for December 21st. I figured that would give me time to work out the jet lag, celebrate New Years with the girlfriend, after Christmas with my family in New York. The travel agent got a tentative reservation for the flight, there would be a transfer at Heathrow, and asked for payment. When I whipped out my checkbook, she said she couldn't accept checks from soldiers below a certain grade - I think it was E-7 or something. I was mildly insulted based on my paygrade, and extremely irritated at this petty bureaucratic rule. Nevertheless, I wanted to get home for Christmas, so I went to the military community bank, the American Express Bank, to get cash or a cashier's check, or some other form of tender that SATO would find acceptable coming from such an unworthy person.
There was some delay at the bank, it may have been their lunch hour or something, or maybe I had to meet somebody at lunch on the way to the bank. I don't remember, but it took a little while. When I got the money and came back 45 minutes later, I went to pay for the booking but the last seat had been taken. I asked the travel agent to book me on the same flight, next day. She did that, I paid, and then I forgot about it.
About three or four weeks later, a little after dinnertime on December 21st, a British soldier in the garrison bar confronted me about his unit's big Christmas party having been canceled. He was angry in the extreme, and wanted to pick a fight with me, saying it was "all the Americans' fault." I had no idea what he was talking about, when one of the bartenders clued me in, that a flight full of Americans had been blown up in Scotland, and wreaked havoc as it crashed into a Scottish neighborhood.
I didn't think a whole lot about it until I got to Frankfurt the next day to fly to Heathrow. It was a confusing transfer in Frankfurt because the numbers of my flights had been changed, and the stopover had been changed from Heathrow to Brussels. My itinerary looked totally different from how it had looked when I confirmed it the previous afternoon.
That's when it hit me: Flight 103, blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, might have been the plane I had tried to get a reservation on. I'm not entirely positive it was; Pan Am had a lot of flights going out on the same day and it may have been a different one. Still, it was close enough to the flight I tried to book that I found it chilling. Thank goodness for the stupid little bureaucratic rule that kept me off that flight, eh?
Making matters worse, I found out that two guys in my unit - not close friends but buddies, guys I knew to speak with or hang out with - were on that flight. There was also a bunch of Syracuse University students, with whom a few of my friends in Syracuse had ties.
Christmas was okay that year but it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped. A bit of a pall hung over it. Still, I moved past it and I don't think about it often, any more than you'd think about nearly being hit by a bus five years ago. That kind of thing normally doesn't bubble to the surface spontaneously.
This week, Flight 103 and the man convicted of committing the mass murder have been in the news. It seems that he guy is ill, so the Scottish government has decided to release him back to Libya on humanitarian grounds. It has been reported that he has returned to a hero's welcome.
Humanitarian grounds, huh?
I'm wondering the Scottish government will bring my buddies, or any of the other 268 people who were murdered in cold blood, back to life on humanitarian grounds?
I don't like to wax expressly political here but this particular event hits a bit close to home for me. On of the things that bothers me about Oprah Society is that we don't take anything seriously, starting with the value of human life. Letting a guy convicted of killing 270 people out of jail after seven or eight years served basically spits on his victims and their survivors and friends. It says that the great loss unfairly and unjustly inflicted on the victims and those tied to them by bonds of blood and affection just doesn't rate compared to the delicate sensitivities of some Scottish judge or some diplomat. It is unjust in the extreme. I'm not saying we need to be cruel to the mass murderer; but we do need to insure that men like him leave this life from behind bars. Society put a price on the victims' lives when they convicted this man to life imprisonment. When they released him, the price stood at about 10 days served for each victim.
Seems to me that is treating human life awfully cheaply.
I can't help but wonder if a society that cheapens life in that extreme of a manner will not face other major social problems later on. It's easy to disregard crime if it doesn't happen to us, war, terrorism, all that other crap. That stuff is remote, right? But the thing is, society is like a big blanket. It's made out of a lot of threads. You ignore the way it's getting frayed on the edges, and pretty soon, you're looking at great big runs in the fabric, right across the middle of it. You can't let some shitweasel pull away at the threads on one corner, and expect that the rest of the blanket will stay intact. All those little threads, those little strands of life in society, are interwoven. That's the point of discussing my associations with this distant event, that on its surface, has nothing to do with some guy who rides a bike in D.C. Nah, I'm not saying you're either with me or you're with the terrorists. But I am saying that if you don't bat an eye to events like this, you're ignoring societal unraveling, an ignorance that in the long run won't be in your best interest. Broken windows policing, people. Broken windows.
Sorry not to be spreading the joy here like I usually do on Fridays but this little bit of news has given me a serious WTF moment.
16 comments:
Sentencing and what people actually serve after sentencing is always a bit of a screw up. This weasel gets life serves 7 years and is released. AT least according to the docs he has in fact still served out about 99 percent of his life and although it doesn't help his victims neither did his sentence help them. Now a tiny bit of mercy is shown to him. Who's to say some nephew or cousin or other who was about to become a terrorist changes his mind and decides the west isn't all bad after all.
Then on the other end you get Madoff. 70 odd years old and sentenced to 150 years. What are they going to do keep the remains around that long.
Our justice system isn't supposed to be about revenge but that is in fact what most people want it to be.
Who's to say some nephew or cousin or other who was about to become a terrorist changes his mind and decides the west isn't all bad after all..
The guy was an intelligence officer who committed an act of state sponsored (and in fact state-directed) terrorism, not a self-recruited ideological terrorist. He did it because he was told to do it.
I think the lesson that is mostly likely to be drawn from this is going to be drawn by the leaders of police states and tinhorn dictatorships, and the lesson is that terrorism works. Insofar as the man in the street learns a lesson from this, it's probably that the West is the pathetic "weak horse" that bin Laden speaks of his in strong horse/weak horse call to arms.
As for revenge - I guess you could call retributive justice revenge, but I don't think it is. I think it mitigates the human desire for revenge. Retribution - a weighed, rational payback - would have this guy spending his last day in jail. Revenge would be taking him out and handing him to a crowd of the families of the Lockerbie victims. His serving a prison sentence for his enormous crime isn't revenge any more than paying your credit card bill at the end of the month is revenge against you on the part of the bank.
I had a girlfriend whose uncle died on the Lockerbie flight. I think Scotland was wrong. To a society (Libya) which has long espoused "eye for an eye," this isn't a message of compassion. This is a message of "the infidel is weak." Plus I think the scumbag ought to rot.
The triumphal public reaction in Libya exhibits not the slightest consciousness of mercy, merely enjoyment of victory. But the the Foreign Secretary finds it "deeply distressing", so that's all right...
BTW, Bandobras, I'm not trying to beat on your head here or anything. Your position is reasonable, and reasonable minds can differ on important topics. I respect your stepping up and commenting on it and disagreeing with me. I realize that this may be a fairly warm topic and hope that follow-on comments maintain your degree of civility in agreeing or disagreeing - civility being something we seem to have utterly lost in public discourse these days. Again, thanks for speaking up.
Bob & Chuck - my view of the guy is that he was a paid hitman who managed 270 hits. Or perhaps one or two critical hits - look up the passenger manifest and you'll see what I'm talking about - with 269 mostly American fortuitous collateral casualties. Thought experiment: in your mind, when you read the article, call the guy "Fat Tony" instead of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, and see if that changes how you think about him.
Creepy, Jim, like something out of Final Destination.
But seriously, I'm of two minds on this one. I understand the humanitarian aspect and the fact that he has effectively served 99% of his life.
But... I distinctly remember that day in 1988. I grew up in upstate NY -- not in the Syracuse area -- but close enough that it felt more than an abstract event. I remember watching the news the following night and seeing the shots of the debris scattered across Lockerbie.
One image stays with me still: An intact airline seat embedded in the roof of a house. It hit me then that most of the people did not die in the expolosion -- instead they tumbled, screaming, from tens of thousands of feet knowing they would shortly die. Men, women, kids. Kids, man. Falling without the comfort of a mother or father to lie to them and tell them that it will allbe OK.
And it's at that point that I feel that neither remorse, redemption, nor terminal illness will ever -- EVER -- heal the holes that the Lockerbie bombing created.
Wow, Jim. When I first started reading, I thought this was going in a totally different direction. I'm going to comment like I just read the first few paragraphs, and then I'll acknowledge the whole thing.
We were over in the FRG about the same time. I'd forgotten how SATO was f'ed up like a football bat. I ended up paying full price for a Pan Am ticket due to one of their screwups. GRRRRRRR!
They wouldn't trust a check from an SFC? WTF?? After I had become hard and cynical, the typical response to a soldier's f up was, "Here's your wife's manifest for her MAC flight home. You're moving into the barracks, tonight. Give the platoon sergeant your checkbook." I'm going to stand on my demonstrated record of trusting SFC's with checkbooks while I ridicule SATO's policy. Heck, they had their own free "Letter From the Squadron Commander" collection agency, right there on the kaserne. The pawn shops, stereo sellers, and payday loan folks knew it - what was up with SATO?
On to Lockerbie. I had a girlfriend at Syracuse during that time. So yeah, the Lattice of Coincidence, or Blanket of Threadishness, or whatever, is smaller than we think.
Opinion - when you're dealing with Bad Men, all they understand is strength. This is just more evidence to those Bad Men that we don't have the guts to go toe-to-toe with them. When the civilian leadership ran away from Mogadishu after that terrible day where we sent out a patrol without a reaction force of our own (thanks, Les Aspin), we gave a whole bunch of bad guys confidence to attack. This gesture will be unhelpful in the same way. I'm not saying we have to throw out our values and answer barbarism with barbarism. I think it's possible to be ethical, fair, and tough at the same time (if you don't have ambitious yes men writing all the legal opinions).
If there's karmic justice, that cancer is going to hurt. We can only hope he'll be in Hell soon.
My sense of cognitive dissonance is attenuated a little bit by the thought that perhaps this is a behind-the-scenes quid pro quo. Maybe some intelligence official who thinks He Knows Better Than Everyone Else made a trade with a newly-cooperative Libyan intelligence official. Guys like that don't care much about civilian notions of justice, and they are very myopic about the Oliver-Northian implications of their actions, but maybe that's it. I don't have to like it, but the fantastical logic of it quiets the ringing in my ears.
To sum up, though, this is completely bewildering. WTF?
It's time to fire up my "surf music" channel on Pandora - the one with all the thumbs up on the Southern Culture cuts. That might get me out of my low hover.
Oh yeah - I hope you said, "it's Libya's fault, it's Libya's fault, ..." with each punch, as you kneeled on that British guy's chest and "corrected" his faulty logic. :D
Jim,
I remember that day in 1988 when PanAm flight 103 was blown-up in mid-air over Lockerbie, Scotland. I also remember the events that occurred after the event. I recall the long time it took for them to extradite the guy from Libya in the first place to get him to stand trial. But I also remember when the US military bombed Tripoli in an attempt to take out Ghaddafi. I remember Reagan considering him the greatest risk to the world. I remember seeing the pictures of Ghaddafi standing there in the rubble holding his dead son. I don't remember Libya doing anything to provoke our attack but I do remember thinking that we probably shouldn't have done that (there would be repercussions). Believe me, I am not justifying the bombing of flight 103, but I do understand that it was part of Libya's reaction to the bombing of Tripoli by the U.S. I am not sure how I feel about them releasing the guy. I do know that he was following orders and that we consider what was done to be state-sponsored terrorism. Just like the pilots and air crew members of the US planes that bombed Tripoli were following their orders and the Libyans probably considered to be state-sponsored terrorism. Maybe I would feel differently if were more personally connected to the incident like you were. I can't say. Unfortunately, I also can't say that we have learned from this series of events, either nationally or internationally.
Anon 10:06:
I don't remember Libya doing anything to provoke our attack but I do remember thinking that we probably shouldn't have done that (there would be repercussions).
Let me refresh your memory. The U.S. struck at Gaddafi in retaliation for the La Belle disco bombing, Berlin, 1986, which killed two U.S. troops and a Turkish woman, and wounded over 229 other people. As the BBC story puts it, "Intercepted messages between Tripoli and agents in Europe made it clear that Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was the brains behind the attack." The East German Stasi files that surfaced after German reunification made it clear that Gaddafi did this with Stasi knowledge, if not assistance. The Stasi, of course, sponsored the Red Brigades, which conducted a lot of mischief in Germany in the name of marxist revolution, including a lot of assassinations and one fine morning bombing a facility that I worked in, which was mercifully empty at the time due to the unit's unusual training activities that day. But I digress.
Gaddafi's attack on the disco was possibly in retaliation for the U.S. shooting a couple of his fighters out of the air after one of them fired an air-to-air missile at U.S. aircraft exercising in the Gulf of Sidra. The aircraft were there along with a carrier battle group in an effort to keep the area open to international shipping. Libya had asserted a territorial claim to control shipping in international waters outside normal internationally recognized limits, and threatened to cut of a good chunk of the world's oil supply.
Others postulate the attack was simply Gaddafi's bid for increased prestige in the middle east; it was after all the era of the Red Army Faction, the PFLP, Hezbollah, Action Directe and the Red Brigades, so that seems just as plausible.
Yeah, there's always repercussions when you stand up to bad guys. What I've learned from it Gaddafi that the U.S. can't win in confronting dictators, terrorist masterminds and warlords. Call for Democracy and the counter-argument is, "who are we to tell others how to live." Confront a madman early in his career, and the charge of warmongering and imperialism will be thrown at the government. Confront him late and the charge will be dereliction of duty for having failed to stop him much earlier at much lower costs. The bottom line is that I think U.S. leaders do the best they can with imperfect knowledge, and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. How's that for a sweeping pile of banality posing as analysis?
Worth watching if nothing to hear directly from the guy who released him.
http://tinyurl.com/n4wnwy
Jason.
Kudos on the post and well-reasoned and articulated posts. A real contrast to reading the comments in the local papers!
Man I hope I get off early enough to ride this afternoon!
I guess part of what I'm trying to get at can be found here in the comments. Libya did this, then we did that, then they did this, then we did that, on and on, and on. The only solution to this is not extra force, on either side, there is never enough force to stop aggression and hatred. Like it or not the only solution is talking and finally compromise. Often with people you don't like and even know would and should be considered vile and despicable. Now decades later Qaddafi is no longer a terrorist but a national leader and his henchman is sent home to die.
I'm not suggesting I like it or that anyone else has to like it but this sort of co-operation and compromise is in fact the only way to finally end carnage.
Bandobras - Qaddafi might hasten the journey to this utopia full of peace and love by not welcoming al-Megrahi as a hero, and making him guest of honor at the party for the 40th anniversary of his coup.
Well who'd of thunk it. After all the crap about this it is starting to come out that Britain was apparently caving in to Libya because of a mega oil deal they want to seal.
Good to know that the belief in law and justice is still for sale in the democracies that constantly lecture about it. I come from Scottish ancestry but I'm a bit less proud of that today.
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