Free Republic

Excerpt - TRIPOLI, Libya -- Recently, Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Gadhafi wrote a letter to President Bush, asking: Where are we going with our relationship? Five years ago, the Bush administration helped persuade Libya -- for decades one of the world's leading sponsors of terrorism -- to scrap its nuclear ambitions and dismantle its terror infrastructure. It ranks as one of the president's signature foreign-policy successes and was supposed to blaze a path for other rogue states, principally North Korea and Iran. Now, these ties are fraying. According to Libyan diplomats who have seen the letter, sent in early March,...

THE Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, wants Germany to pay millions of pounds in compensation for landmines left in the desert sands by Afrika Corps troops commanded by Rommel in the Second World War.Berlin, which only recently brokered compensation payments from Tripoli for the Libyan-backed terrorist blast at the La Belle disco in the city in 1986, is said to be shocked by the demand. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is in Libya now, trying to negotiate trade deals worth billions for his country. Officials say he has been "thrown" by the suggestion that Germany should compensate for a war...

BERLIN (AP) -- Libya agreed Tuesday to pay $35 million in compensation for victims of a 1986 bombing in Berlin that killed two U.S. servicemen and a Turkish woman and injured 229 others, the Libyan ambassador to Germany said. The deal applies to Germans who were wounded in the April 5, 1986 attack on the LaBelle disco and the family of the slain Turkish woman, but not the families of two Americans, Ambassador Said Abdulaati told The Associated Press. It is the latest step in an effort by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to end his country's pariah status, following...