RECALL PAN AM 103? IT'S STILL OPEN SEASON ON AMERICANS
Published on MONDAY, December 11, 1989
© 1989 The Arizona Republic

THE signs along the motorway were oddly chilling -- Lockerbie/1 mile. Lockerbie/Next Right.

Lockerbie, Scotland. Another obscure, heretofore anonymous place whose name was suddenly illuminated by an unpredictable convergence of greater events and larger forces -- Gettysburg, Verdun, Normandy, Auschwitz, Lockerbie -- a name forever associated with something heroic or tragic or historic.

We did not pull off the motorway as we drove north into Scotland. I resisted the temptation to indulge a morbid interest.

Also, in honesty, I knew there would be nothing left to see 10 months after Pan Am Flight 103 fell on the village, a fiery apocalypse out of the cold, starry night.

And the fields in which the wreckage -- human and machine -- was strewn were green and pretty, dotted with sheep.

Long since removed was that indelible image, a white-and-blue 747's nose section lying crushed on its side. We drove on toward Edinburgh.

It's been almost a year since the Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt via London's Heathrow blew up over Lockerbie, killing 270, victims all of a terrorist's bomb.

Remember the outrage?

Remember your seething anger that anyone could commit such an inhuman act?

Remember the righteous indignation of thundering American and European leaders? The impassioned exclamations of rage, and promises to track down the killers to the far corners of the globe if that's what it took, by God? Recall the noble vows to honor the dead by bringing the culprits to the bar of justice?

What's become of all that a year later?

It's all turned into a ''cesspool of unaccountability'' in the words of Bert Ammerman, who lost his brother on the flight and who now heads up a group of survivors trying to get answers and action out of our government.

In fact, Pan Am 103 has receded inexorably into the impenetrable recesses of the government's consciousness, a development I predicted in an editorial I wrote in February.

The White House has no interest in identifying publicly the Pan Am murderers. To do so would require doing something about it, and of that President Bush wants no part.

And so, the government is not talking about what it knows or what its investigation has turned up regarding who was responsible and what governments if any were involved. Washington would just as soon that memories of Pan Am Flight 103 and the surviving wives and sons and daughters would simply fade away.

Our government claims it does not know for certain who planted the bomb on the Pan Am flight, but other sources are not so circumspect. It is known that Iran was involved, seeking revenge for the mistaken downing of an Iranian Airbus by the USS Vincennes.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command was the bomb maker and planter. West German police apprehended 16 PFLP-GC members two months before the Pan Am disaster and found a cache of plastic explosives and electronic gadgetry similar to what destroyed the 747 eight weeks later. The suspected terrorists, however, were released, and one of them is thought to have constructed the Pan Am device.

Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC is headquartered in Damascus where it operates openly and with the sanction of President Hafez al-Assad. Mr. Jibril is also linked closely with Libya, which had a hand in both the Pan Am and UTA bombings.

But to do something about the terrorists would require that we do something about the nation-patrons of terror, without whose logistical support and sanctuary modern international terrorists would be impotent.

President Bush, however, would rather play footsie with these outlaw regimes. The lives of the 270 Pan Am victims mean less than geo-political gamesmanship.

For example, Mr. Bush, hoping to ingratiate himself with Iran's new ''moderate'' leaders -- ''clearing the underbrush'' is how he put it -- recently returned some of Iran's assets that were frozen during the 1980 hostage crisis. Never mind that these ''moderates'' are the same gang that was in power at the time of the Pan Am unpleasantness. Iran's moderates, by the way, told Mr. Bush to stuff it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Pan Am dead are underbrush in U.S. foreign policy.

Face it: no one is going to do anything about Flight 103. Not now, not ever.

If that doesn't bother you, it should. It means that it's open season on Americans and there isn't a damn thing your government is going to do about it.