Exit the Colonel Read Online Free PDF Page B

barriers to information both within the country and within the US government in terms of what products could and could not be sold. The Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act (FCPA) discouraged many large companies without clear and compelling interests in Libya from pursuing business opportunities, as Libya figured among the most thoroughly corrupt business environments in the world. Bribes and kickbacks were a recognized way of doing business. General Electric’s desalination division opted out of Libya entirely at one point, due to the local subsidiary’s inability to get anything done without paying significant bribes. The local agent described the endless requests by Libyan partners and officials for cash or favors like accommodation or other forms of hospitality abroad.
    In the early days of the US-Libya rapprochement, it was up to the legislative branch, not the executive, to advocate for US business, with oil notably at the fore. Within the Senate, several veteran members, including Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Norm Coleman (R-MN), took strong stances in favor of developing US-Libya commercial ties. In August 2005, President Bush asked one of the highest-ranking US officials to visit Libya to that point, Richard Lugar (R-IN), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to help speed up the normalization process.
    Inevitably, these were not wholly ideological gestures. The oil lobby helped to maintain a steady drumbeat as the 2005 deadline for reactivating “standstill agreements” on concessions left in 1984 approached. A former senior State Department official maintained that US oil company influence was “not as high as one might think,” but noted the prominence of ConocoPhillips (one of the original Oasis Group, consisting of Marathon Oil, ConocoPhillips—formerly Continental—and Amerada Hess) in the lobbying efforts. The Sunlight Foundation, whose website describes its mission as “working toward the goal of transparency and accountability in the United States government,” published in late February 2011 a list of seventeen companies on the “who’s who” list of US and European conglomerates, which actively lobbied the US government. They included Royal Dutch Shell/Shell Oil, ExxonMobil, BP (British Petroleum), Chevron, Caterpillar, Boeing, Dow Chemical, Fluor Corporation, Raytheon, Marathon Oil, Motorola, Halliburton, Occidental Petroleum, and others, between 2005 and 2010. 12
    Corporate lobbying of Congress on Libya issues was particularly intense between 2006 and 2008, coinciding with deliberations about lifting Libya from the terror list and a possible repeal of the Libyan Claims Resolution Act (also known as the Lautenberg Amendment), which made it easier for victims of US victims of terrorist acts on foreign soil to seize the assets of those companies in the US, in the form of the US-Libya Claims Settlement
Act. 13 These efforts declined after Libya paid, in October 2008, $1.5 billion of $1.8 billion to clear outstanding claims unrelated to Lockerbie and the UTA cases. This payment also cleared the way for visits to the US of senior Libyan officials, including members of the Gaddafi family.

Selling the Libyan Private Sector on Reform
    For Gaddafi, it was almost as important to convince Libyan expatriates (as foreigners) that the reform process underway was not just another subterfuge, because the regime needed the expertise and commitment of its own small, commercially savvy class to create and sustain the necessary narrative. With this in mind, in June 2003, Gaddafi appointed Shukri Ghanem, a former head of OPEC’s secretariat, to the post of prime minister. This move was meant to reassure the Libyans and foreigners alike that the reform process would be handled professionally. A consummate technocrat, at home in both Libya and the West, with an eminently useful professional pedigree, Ghanem was one of the few Libyans who could have