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U.S. Congressional Delegation to Meet With Qadhafi Today
A delegation of lawmakers from the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is expected to meet today in Libya with leader Col. Muammar Qadhafi and other senior officials, a senior committee member said yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 11). The purpose of the visit by the six-member delegation is to assess the accuracy of earlier intelligence on Libyan WMD efforts, said Representative Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. “We now have a way to compare what we thought we knew with what we will learn on the ground,” she said (Douglas Jehl, New York Times, Feb. 13). Meanwhile, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said yesterday that the United States and Libya have discussed measures to remove sanctions against Tripoli. “The precise way in which the various applicable U.S. restrictions on dealings with Libya will be removed is a subject we’ve been considering internally. We’ve discussed it with the Libyans and I think you’ll see it unfolding,” he said. Bolton, though, refused to say when the sanctions would be lifted. “The responsibility is really now with the government of Libya to carry through on the commitments they made,” he said. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday praised Libya for agreeing to dismantle its WMD programs, but said Tripoli needed to stop causing “trouble” in Africa before a full relationship with the United States could be reached. “Libya, over the years, has shifted its attention and focus to different parts of Africa. When it sort of fails in one part of Africa, it sort of pops up elsewhere, fomenting difficulty. We have made sure that what we discussed is their activities in Africa, which must cease to be destabilizing, cease to fund despotic regimes and cease to cause trouble,” Powell said during a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing (Daily Star, Feb. 13). In addition, Hong Kong announced today the formal end to trade and flight sanctions against Libya. Trade between Hong Kong and Libya resumed in 1999 after Hong Kong passed a law to suspend U.N. sanctions imposed against Libya (Agence France-Presse/Business Day, Feb. 13).
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