Vic Socotra

28 September 2009

Nolo Contendere

(Flight Deck of Pan Am Flight 103)

I wish Bill Safire was here to help frame the debate about what to do about Iran. Man, he could turn a phrase.

I don’t think anyone will ever top that “Nattering Nabobs” line he crafted for Vice President Agnew, a nolo contendere crook of the Nixon era. That is a Latin legal term of art, which is essentially a “no contest” plea that is substantially, but not technically, an admission of guilt which subjects the defendant to punishment, but permits denial of the alleged facts in other proceedings.

That sums up a lot of what went on in the 1970s. President Nixon last visited Tehran in 1972, for 21 hours on a lay-over between negotiations with the Soviets about nuclear weapons and the extinction of the species. He and Pat got the golden keys to the city from the Mayor, and enjoyed a nice session with the Shah and his bride.

My, how the world has changed!

NASA just announced that they don’t have enough of their special Plutonium to do deep space missions, the Russians want to cash in some intercontinental systems they can no longer afford, and the Iranians are the ones launching rockets!

Seven years after the Nixon visit, I was on a warship off the coast at Bandar Abbas, and we were in the process of figuring out how to intervene and rescue our hostages.

I was reviewing the blather from the FARS News Agency on the latest missile tests this morning when I got a note from a pal who had just flown back from Italy.

I was not sure which stream of information was the more entertaining- on the one hand, the Iranian television produced images from this morning purporting to be the launch of the solid-fueled Shahab 3 and Sejil missles the former capable of reaching Europe and Israel and the latter a new system with which I am unfamiliar.

The demonstration was probably scheduled before the revelation that Iran is building a second uranium enrichment plant of the “hard and deeply buried” variety in advance of this week’s international talks on Tehran's peaceful nuclear program.

I much preferred my friend’s narrative.

He described the usual grace and chaos that attends all things Italian, and noted that in the general pandemonium, seven layers of security had permitted a full bottle of mineral water to pass through the rigorous screening process.

Ah, I thought, if only my trusty bottles of Popov could still travel along with me! Airline security is a joke, I grant, but a necessary inconvenience. In response, I travel less and drive more, and have almost completely cut out international travel.

In the process of looking for something else last week I stumbled across the complete accident investigation on Lockerbie. I was chilled deep with the thoroughness of the There was a minor flurry of interest in the old murders when the convicted Libyan bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was released on humanitarian grounds.

A lot of people jumped on the Labour government in Britain for caving in to the pressure of oil money, but I shrugged. If al-Megrahi was just a patsy, like Lee Oswald, there were actually some old scores that have not been settled.

It is interesting. The conventional wisdom still accepts that the Libyans were responsible- their government as much as pled nolo contendere on the matter, and paid off some claims to the victims families to rejoin the community of nations and give long rambling speeches at the UN.

The truth has been out there for a decade. “60 Minutes” reported on it in 2000, and I talked to a senior analyst who was in a position to know at the time, and he is dead certain it was Iran that blew up Pan Am 103 in payback for the 1988 USSVincennes Robo-Cruiser shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655.

I asked my analyst friend why nothing had been done about the murders, if it was well known. He shrugged and said every Administration was briefed on the story when they assumed watch, and they all went: "Shit, like what are we supposed to do?"

Better to have the Libyans take the rap.

Reading the last two minutes of the flight over Lockerbie is pretty chilling, though I guess all air disasters are that way. No one on the flight deck even got a chance to say "Shit," and after plunging 31,000 feet from the sky, there were reports that some people lived, briefly, on the ground.

Mr. Safire has laid down his pen for the last time, and left us. He could be brutally honest- he called the current Secretary of State a congenital liar, which verges on the ungentlemanly, even if true.

For her part, Secretary Clinton said on Sunday that Iran will be put "to the test" to reveal facts about its nuclear activities at Thursday's talks in Geneva. She said sanctions will follow if the talks between China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany fail.

SECDEF Gates was on the Sunday talk shows, too, and he is nothing if not a team player. He stressed the need for diplomacy with Iran, saying military action would only "buy time" to slow down Iran's nuclear program. He said there was a rich palate of things we could do to stress out Terhan, many of them apparently things we could have tried years ago but haven’t got around to yet.

Ten years ago, when I still watched news on the television, I recall a senior US official telling Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes that "The government wants to get to the truth of all terrorist incidents, and we do not turn a deaf ear when people offer credible information."

William Safire would have been able to turn a neat phrase about that sort of hypocrisy, maybe crafting as a no-contest plea in Latin. But I suppose at the end of the day, the only thing we can say is the last word recorded on the Black Box of every air disaster.

You know what that is.

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