Only Rice and the Bushies Would Do This: Trade Justice in Exchange for Oil

Written by Susan Cohen, the mother of one of the young adults killed on Pan Am flight 103 in the late 1980s, in a Yahoo piece copied from USA Today:

Sometimes, holding your nose just isn't enough. You have to do the whole "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkey routine. That's what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the rest of the Bush administration want us to do about their Libyan decision.

Rice would have us believe that Iran and North Korea will follow Libya's lead in giving up weapons of mass destruction. That's a bad joke because Iran and North Korea do have weapons of mass destruction or soon will have them. That's real power.

Libya had nothing except some stuff it purchased from Pakistan that might some day, somehow, have been used to make nuclear weapons. They traded nothing of value for full exoneration for blowing up Pan Am 103.

The secretary of State also says we will now be discussing human rights, freedom of speech and expression, and "political reform consistent with President Bush's freedom agenda" with Libya. This is even a worse joke. Anyone in Libya who criticizes or even questions the wisdom of Col. Moammar Gadhafi has the life expectancy of an ice cube in the desert.

No, our new embrace of the murderous and megalomaniacal Gadhafi is all about oil. He has it and we want it, and we will pay even more than $70 a barrel for it. We will pay with our own security and with our national dignity.

No one in the world will be fooled byRice's attempt to put a blanket of respectability over this deal. Gadhafi blew up an American plane, and my daughter was on it. He has never shown any remorse for this act of terrorism; indeed, he has never even admitted Libya was responsible. The Bush administration just pretends he did in order to get around that sticky little point.

Sure, Gadhafi paid the Pan Am family members lots of money - I guess that's known as blood money. I refused to take any of the money connected to the lifting of U.S. sanctions. You can just hold your nose so long, and you begin to choke.