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THE TALK SHOW AMERICAN: After 9/11, Gadhafi Feared for His Existence

Friday, April 07, 2006

After 9/11, Gadhafi Feared for His Existence

After the 9/11 attacks, Libyan strongman Muammar Gadhafi was terrified that the U.S. would blame Libya and retaliate by attacking his country, a newly declassified diplomatic cable reveals.

Gadhafi and Sudan's leader Omar Bashir made desperate pleas to Egypt's president and Jordan's king to urge the U.S. to spare them, according to the cable obtained by the New York Sun. The September 20, 2001, cable came from America�s embassy in Libya and described Gadhafi as calling "every Arab leader in his Rolodex" to intercede on his behalf with Washington.

It also stated that Sudan's ambassador to Egypt at the time spoke in a "quivering voice" to officials at the Foreign Ministry in Cairo.

The cable was released Wednesday after a freedom of information act request from a conservative legal group, Judicial Watch. It disclosed that Arab diplomats had relayed that Gadhafi was "hysterical in his telephone phone call to [Jordan�s] King Abdullah as if only his personal intervention would prevent U.S. action."

The cable also shows that six days after the 9/11 attacks, Egypt's ministry of foreign affairs said Gadhafi had voiced his concern "that he had no direct communications with the [U.S. government] other than through his speeches."
Shortly after that, the CIA and Britain's MI6 began talks with Libya over its nuclear weapons program, which resulted in an announcement at the end of 2003 that Gadhafi had agreed to dismantle his nuclear program in exchange for normalizing ties with America, the Sun reports.

Soon after the attacks of September 11, the Sudanese offered the U.S. a download of their intelligence files on al-Qaida, and said America could use its airspace for any attacks on terrorist targets.

According to the cable, Arab diplomats described President Bashir as "afraid."

Danielle Pletka, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee senior staff member, said the declassified cable was not surprising. "Everyone with a guilty conscience thought they were going to be attacked. The Iranians were worried. The Syrians were worried. Everyone was worried."

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