or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
•
"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
•
"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
June 28, 2007
How The USS Vincennes Killed My High School Biology Lab Partner
Violence never ends just with its intended consequences (as horrible as those might be). Violence also always has enormous unintended consequences. And these unintended consequences are completely unpredictable—not in the sense that few people can correctly predict them, but in the sense no one anywhere can predict them.
I was thinking of this recently when I read this excellent article in the London Review of Books. It's about the December 21, 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie and the ongoing appeal by the Libyan intelligence agent who was convicted of the bombing in 2001.
Anyone who follows this knows the conviction was probably fraudulent. It's far more likely the bombing was carried out by Iran, with assistance from Syria. But the US didn't want to blame them, for two reasons: (1) it was in retaliation for the USS Vincennes shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 in July, 1988, killing 290 people; and (2) the initial prosecution took place in the build up to the Gulf War in 1990, and we wanted to get Syria on board.
All in all, it's international politics at its ugliest. It demonstrates normal people's lives have no value from the perspective of their governments, and the US can successfully lie for decades with no one here ever noticing.
But the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus had consequences beyond the bombing of Pan Am 103. Here's a story from the Washington Post on January 1, 1989:
4 YOUTHS DIE IN MD. EXPLOSION;
POWERFUL BLAST RIPS DOORS OFF BETHESDA GARAGEBy: Paul Duggan, Lisa Leff, Washington Post Staff Writers
First Section; Page A1Four Maryland teen-agers, including the 15-year-old son of a Brazilian Embassy attache, were killed early yesterday when a powerful explosive device detonated while the youths were tinkering with it in the diplomat's garage, Montgomery County police said.
Three of the young men were described yesterday as close friends and as highly intelligent, science-oriented 1988 graduates of Bethesda's Walt Whitman High School. One of them, Samir Gafsi, showed a recent interest in explosives, according to his girlfriend, Sharmi Banik.
"He was telling me about the explosion on the Pan Am jet" that crashed in Scotland Dec. 21 after a bomb went off, Banik said yesterday. She said Gafsi recently told her that he and his friends could "do better than that." Another of the victims also had a keen interest in explosives, a teacher said...
Sam Gafsi was my lab partner in high school biology. He was pretty good at counting those drosophila melanogasters. Who aboard the Vincennes could have predicted that when they pulled the trigger on that Sunday morning in the Persian Gulf, they were also killing Sam?
In almost every circumstance, violence is a very, very, very, very bad idea.
AND: The above stamp was issued by the Iranian government soon after the shootdown of the Airbus. Iran's government may or may not be as depraved as that of the US, but they certainly deserve credit for effort.
Posted at June 28, 2007 12:28 PM | TrackBackHow was he anyway? Did he shows signs of being that foolhardy in high school?
Posted by: En Ming Hee at June 28, 2007 12:43 PMI think it was just a little bit of foolhardiness, which grew into lots of foolhardiness in the fertile petri dish of 18 year-old boys hanging around together.
It's very sad in many different ways. He and his friends got interested in chemistry because the school had a fantastic chemistry teacher whom everybody loved. They had gotten fascinated with blowing things up and, unbeknownst to the teacher, were doing so off on their own.
Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at June 28, 2007 12:58 PMJon, I'm in that category of people who've followed the case, to whom it's been obvious that the U.S. government did everything it could to deflect the prosecution onto the Libyans. But that's entirely from reading non-mainstream analysis. Do you have a sense of the extent to which any of this this (the evidence-tampering, etc.) has appeared in major news outlets over the last nineteen years?
Posted by: Nell at June 28, 2007 01:48 PMI can never recall a single instance in the US media. Everything I've seen has been in the British press, online, etc. But I haven't followed it so closely that I might not have missed something.
Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at June 28, 2007 02:01 PMThere's foolhardy and then there's directed foolhardy. A friend of mine in high school nearly burned his hand off using powdered magnesium to fuel a sort of primitive mortar. He wasn't ideologically driven -- he was from a working-class Catholic family in the Northwest -- he and a buddy (not me) just liked to go up into the cemetaries and blast gravestones. He could have done more damage.
Posted by: darrelplant at June 28, 2007 02:21 PMThere's foolhardy and then there's directed foolhardy. A friend of mine in high school nearly burned his hand off using powdered magnesium to fuel a sort of primitive mortar. He wasn't ideologically driven -- he was from a working-class Catholic family in the Northwest -- he and a buddy (not me) just liked to go up into the cemetaries and blast gravestones. He could have done more damage.
Posted by: darrelplant at June 28, 2007 02:33 PMyou went to whitman?! I went to whitman! damn, that's weird.
Posted by: scats at June 28, 2007 02:38 PM"it was in retaliation for the USS Vincennes shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 in July, 1998, killing 290 people"
I think you mean 1988.
Posted by: Jean at June 28, 2007 03:20 PMSorry to hear about Sam.
Posted by: Batocchio at June 28, 2007 03:56 PMReminds me of the wonderful poem by Howard Nemerov
"Power to the People"
"Why are the stamps adorned with Kings and presidents?
That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads"
Not with this Iranian stamp! So, class, what can we learn about countries from their postage stamps?
Posted by: donescobar at June 28, 2007 04:12 PMYou don't think we'll have 'Twin Towers September 11' stamps here someday?
Posted by: Nell at June 28, 2007 04:42 PMToo "negative" for the American people.
Maybe a pic of Saddam dangling, with "Mission Accomplished" printed underneath. Too gruesome? Not from watching the coming attractions at the Cineplex.
Well, Saudi Arabians attack the towers and WE BOMB IRAQ. How is that ANY different from arrest and KANGEROO trial of the WRONG guy for Lockerbe? 1988 T0 2007, 19 YRS of the WRONG guy investigated and the RIGHT GUY skates. (to do it again and again)
Posted by: Mike Meyer at June 28, 2007 06:17 PMOutside of the US, it is oommon knowledge that Libya was not responsible for Lockerbie.
Just like I said when I noticed the drumbeat starting up for this war, I am sick and tired of the Bush Family Empire blaming their friends' violence on everyone else.
Posted by: Avedon at June 28, 2007 09:22 PMSo it was really the Iranians with the connivance of the Syrians, Hezbollah and the Palestinians who done Lockerbie? Oh. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that some guy writing for the London Review of Books would connect these dots now -- now that Bush & friends are looking for excuses to widen the GWOT.
Posted by: Winston Smith at June 29, 2007 04:23 PM@Winston Smith: People on the left have been writing about this for the last fifteen years or more. The dots are not just being connected now.
I'm as opposed to war on Iran as the next person, but that doesn't mean I'm unwilling to credit this kind of action on the part of Khomeini's government -- particularly in the aftermath of the Vincennes' shootdown of 290 pilgrims to Mecca.
Posted by: Nell at June 29, 2007 05:05 PM"People on the left," middle and right are a lot less likely to believe this story if it came from World Net Daily or Front Page Mag. The nutjob right has discredited itself. Better that the case for war be made in a tonier publication -- and the word be spread on liberal and 'progressive' blogs.
Posted by: Winston Smith at June 30, 2007 06:44 AMI don't understand--why was he obsessed with outdoing Pan-Am? What about the comments of his girlfriend?
Posted by: ralph at June 30, 2007 04:37 PMHey Donny, you can also learn a lot from a country when it puts a religious symbol on its national flag as not to insult/degrade/humiliate the huge number of people there who don't worship in said symbols' faith. Not even Iran is so hopelessly arrogant(and that says a lot right there). Just saying....
Posted by: at July 2, 2007 05:29 PM
