Breaking news: U.S. to Renew Diplomatic Ties With Libya.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has decided to restore normal diplomatic relations with Libya for the first time in over a quarter century after taking Moammar Gadhafi’s country off a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, State Department officials said Monday.

“This is not a decision that we arrived at without carefully monitoring and assessing Libya’s behavior,” Assistant Secretary of State David Welch said.

Welch said the United States will soon upgrade its diplomatic office in Tripoli to a full embassy. The move culminates a process that began three years ago when Tripoli surprised the world by agreeing to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

There have been no normal relations with Libya since 1980. The State Department for several years listed Libya among nations the U.S. government considered as official sponsors of terrorism.

Libya was held responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, which claimed 270 lives, most of them American. But Libya has made a decisive move away from terrorism in recent years, officials said.

Apparently, supporting the genocidal goals of Hamas is not considered terrorism by the Bush administration any more. All our other Arab/Islamic “allies” either covertly support the destruction of Israel or are actively working at it. Come on in, Gaddafi! The water’s fine.

Maybe that famous Bush quote should be reworded: “You can be with us and be with the terrorists.”

UPDATE at 5/15/06 9:02:49 am:

Beautiful Atrocities has more on our new non-terrorist ally.

Libyan Supreme Court will rule May 31 on whether it will uphold death sentence of 5 Bulgarian nurses & Palestinian doctor convicted of intentionally infecting 380 Libyan children with HIV under orders from the Mossad & CIA. The nurses, who have been detained since 1999, say their confessions were extracted by beatings, rape, & electric shocks.

EU activists say infections were caused by Libyan Health Ministry’s failure to screen blood. HIV discoverer Luc Montaigner testified that the children were infected in 1997, before the nurses arrived. Outside a hearing this week, entirely spontaneous protesters chanted Death! Death to the killers of our children. Oh Leader! Liquidate them as you liquidated monarchy rule!

Colonel Gaddafi: “The Bulgarians have killed our children. I swear by Allah that some Western officials come to me & say, ‘We want to take them back today, so release them.’ The West told us the opinions of your people do not interest us, our people are sheep & that we have no public opinion.”

Seif Gaddafi contradicted his father, saying the women would not be executed & might be extradited to Bulgaria. Colonel Gaddafi said he would free nurses if Bulgaria paid compensation equal to the amount Libya paid to relatives of the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Bulgaria declined the ransom, but may write off some of Libya’s debt to obtain nurses’ release. (The trial of 10 Libyan police whom the nurses claim tortured them was postponed for a second time.)

UPDATE at 5/15/06 9:23:55 am:

On the other hand, Victor Davis Hanson comments on the Libyan people’s pro-Americanism, at Radio Blogger:

VDH: Well, you know it’s very interesting. I started having some problems, about 24 hours, and then because the country has just been opened up to Americans. There’s nobody really there. There’s no Embassy, and nobody has any experience with it, Qaddafi’s Libya. But I got a government person to escort me, and they found a Red Crescent clinic at Two in the morning. They found a doctor who was trained in Cairo, and he basically gave me an excellent diagnosis, and said I had about ten hours to either fish or cut bait. And he operated, took out the mess, and gave me some pretty strong antibiotics for peritonitis. They don’t give you opiates there, or any post-operative pain killers, because…

HH: What, no drugs???

VDH: No drugs in Qaddafi’s utopia. But the funny thing was that oddly enough, even though it was a bad experience, there on my back, I got a lot of people from the Libyan government that came to talk to me. And it was very amazing what they said. I mean, the country has just been opened up to cell phones, internet, satellite dishes, and it’s a very small country. Very large territorially, but only five, six million people. But they’re very, very pro-American. They really want better relations with the United States, as much as they can talk freely in that state.