By Ray Hanania

Distributed by the Arab American Syndicate
 

Several major American newspapers recently carried very expensive, full page advertisements entitled "If We Forget ..."

The ads reminded the world of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded in midair on Dec. 21, 1988, killed 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.

And, the ads, alleged, two Libyan nationals, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Basset Ali Al-Meghrahi, are responsible. It offers a $4 million reward for information on the two suspects, who were indicted by a US court.

The United States used its power to force the United Nations to impose an embargo against Libya, demanding that the two suspects be extradited to England or the United States. Libya has refused, responding that the two should be extradited to a "neutral" country where they have a better than even chance of receiving a fair trial.

In this case, the United States government is not really interested in justice.

Libyan refusal to surrender the two suspects to America's kangaroo court -- an American term used to describe a judicial system that has already made up its mind against a suspect -- has given the United States plenty of ammunition to punish Libya, which has remained a stalwart critic of Israel and American double standards.

Libya has offered to compensate the families of the victims, but the victims have refused.
You see, in America, the life of one American does not have a price tag. The life of a foreigner, however, can be evaluated in terms of dollars.

Five months before Pan Am Flight 103 crashed in a fiery explosion, gunmen on the USS Vincennes, ostensibly patrolling international waters off the coast of Iran, fired upon Iranian Airbus A300, destroying the commercial civilian aircraft and killing all 290 people on board.

The ship's commander claimed his crew "mistook" the giant commercial Boeing 747 plane for a much smaller, military F-14 fighter jet.

A hastily arranged investigation by the United States, blamed one "operations officer," and issued the lowest possible punishment, a letter of reprimand placed in the unknown officer's personnel file. Behind-the-scenes, US Officials passed on rumors that the Airbus had been pre-loaded with dead bodies, and intentionally sent to the war zone believing it would be shot down to create a situation to rebuke the Americans. (This was repeated often by family members of the victims on national TV.)

For more than four years, US officials insisted the Airbus was at fault and had veered out of Iranian airspace into international waters, and thereby justified the attack. Finally, in 1992, evidence surfaced that in fact, the commercial Iranian airline had been on course and was in Iranian airspace. It was the USS Vincennes that had been of course by more than 20 miles.

Additional evidence showed that the commander of the American cruiser, Capt. Will C. Rogers III, may have intentionally shot the commercial airline down, and that he was egging for such a military hit. The Vincennes had been called into the waters near Iran as a result of the Iran-Iraq war and they claimed tiny little Iranian gunboats had fired upon the massive US cruiser.

In all the bluster from then President Ronald Reagan, he never once expressed remorse for the murder of the 290 Muslim civilians.

The United States has never publicly apologized for the downing of the commercial plan, and have resisted all efforts by the Iranians to investigate Capt. Rogers and his crew.

However, the United States was quick to offer monetary compensation to the families of the 290 victims. More than $131 million was paid to sweep the controversy under the rug.

Iranian protests to the United Nations were muted by allies of the United States government.

No UN embargo was imposed on the United States.

No full page advertisements were purchased calling for the extradition of that American buckaroo, Will C. Rogers. All evidence suggests he knew it was a commercial Iranian airline, but wanted to bring it down anyway.

The families of the victims of Airbus A300 did not form a special organization to hire lawyers to exact a punishment from the Americans. They weren't given a forum on national American TV, as were family members of the Pan Am 103 disaster.

And, no court marshall was held to indict Will C. Rogers for a crime that he and the US Navy struggled to cover up these past 10 years.

Maybe the victims of Pan Am 103 downed off of Lockerbie, Scotland do deserve justice.
But do they deserve any more justice than the victims of Iranian Airbus A300?

(Ray Hanania is a Palestinian Arab American journalist and author.)