Of course Papa Bush often looked like an idiot, and this is one of those times. This statement was made while Bush I was on the campaign trail, just four months before the 1988 presidential elections, so it was probably a little more testosterone-laden than usual. Still, idiotic.

Thanks, I never knew any of this before.

Nell, in the comments to Jonathan's post about his ex-lab partner:

Wonder what difference it might have made if, instead of refusing to apologize and giving the Vincennes crew medals, Bush I had immediately accepted responsibility, apologized, offered reparations, and relieved the ship's commander...

Well, for one thing I'm pretty sure I would never have heard of Pan Am 103. What a lovely world to daydream about, where our leaders can admit mistakes and try to make reparations. But people like that never get near the levers of power in the first place, do they.

And besides, being a superpower means never having to say "I'm sorry."

Jon--This reminds me, I was at your lab partner's house the night the Soviets shot down the Korean airliner, killing an American congressman. His dad was livid about it.

Those guys were building bombs and stuff for a long time before the Vincennes massacre. They always used to order chemicals from a wholesale catalog, and would solicit orders from other kids to bulk up the order and share the shipping costs.

Ah the Reagan years, when Jewish, Muslim and Catholic teenagers could happily build pipe bombs together with no concerns of interruption by Homeland Security stormtroopers. Those edenic times are far behind us. Now they surely would have been caught early on and jailed for decades.

The CIA team on Pan Am 103 was known as the McKee Team. They had been in Beruit and had allegedly come across information on the American hostages there. The rumors were that they were returning to the U.S. against orders. The drugs (heroin) found after the crash were allegedly part of the infamous Monzer al-Kassar's government-protected pipeline. At the time al-Kassar was supposed to be the biggest supplier of heroin to the U.S. (This information from a congressional report from Chuck Schumer's House committee.)

Al-Kassar turned out to also be an arms dealer, moving weapons to Iran and to the contras in Nicaragua for the Reagan Administration (not unlike how Viktor Bout both flew weapons into Afghanistan as well as made money flying heroin out). The PFLP-GC allegedly got al-Kassar's permission to use the drug courier's protection to put the bomb on the plane.

For al-Kassar to give up his drug route to enable the Frankfort cell of the PFLP-GC to blow up a plane with a CIA team on it while moving weapons for the U.S. to Iran makes the game a little more complicated. Clearly, the U.S. government didn't seem particularly interested in this angle of the investigation.

According to the Interfor Report (Interfor was an Israeli security firm run by ex-Mossad agents and hired by Pan Am after the bombing) the CIA headquarters had known of one of the drug courier's suitcases switched at Frankfort and had told the BND agents to "let it go."

Suspicions at the time suggested that there was something very damaging that McKee et al found from their work in Beruit: hostage dealings, arms smuggling, the drug route through the Bekaa Valley (where many heroin labs were operating at the time). As I recall there was a Mossad agent named Nir who died in a small plane crash in Latin America about the same time who was reported to have been at a meeting with McKee, an agent named Gannon (also on 103), and representatives from the Reagan Administration a few years earlier, this about Ollie North's "Enterprise." So maybe it was just a clean-up operation and the agents were placed on the plane to be eliminated.

Monzer al-Kassar had been married into the Syrian political elite. He had connections to the Achille Lauro hijacking (the terrorists' leader Abu Abbas used al-Kassar's private jet to escape), was supplying weapons to all sorts of shady militias during Yugoslavia's demise, was connected to Carlos Menem in Argentina, and has done money laundering on the side. He had been spending his dotage in Marabella, Spain for the last couple of decades, enjoying the sun and the beautiful women there, but he was turned over to the DEA a couple weeks ago for selling weapons to the rebels in Colombia, similar to what happened to Bout. What's the DEA doing arresting people for funky arms deals? Funny, you'd think you'd hear a lot about him in the news. Oh well.

(I wrote two articles about 103 in the now-defunct Portland Free Press back then.)

Bob in Pacifica: DAMN!!!