#pan am 103

[saleintothe90s]

492. Ed's Party in Lockerbie (June 2, 1989)

Sometimes kids have ideas, and they should just stay ideas, you know? Sometimes we shouldn't listen to the kids--but Pan American Airlines did.

Shortly after the December 21st, 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, 14 year old Ed Blaus of New Jersey sent a request to Pan Am to send the children of Lockerbie Christmas presents. Seems weird that a 14 year old would ask an airline to do this, but ok. A small child, maybe, but a fourteen year old?

I'm sure he meant something like a gift drive for the kids in town who lost everything that Christmas. Pan Am would give presents to the kids that following Christmas, right?

No, there was going to be a party for all of Lockerbie, and boy when the victims families found out, they were pissed and were assaulting the airline in the press:

Susan Cohen, of Port Jarvis, N.Y., who lost her 20-year-old daughter Theodora in the bombing, said the party was 'tasteless' and charged it was a publicty stunt by Pan Am 'to polish their tarnished image.'

'We're appalled by it,' Theodora Cohen's father Dan Cohen said of the party. 'Right now the rock band should be playing on the soccer field about a block and a half from where 75 bodies were found -- which is obscene. They should end their mourning but this is ridiculous.' 3

[...]

"I'm outraged," said a tearful Florence Bissett, whose 21-year-old son, Kenneth, was killed in the bombing. "How can they do something like that - picnic where bodies were found?"

Susan Cohen of Port Jervis, N.Y., said, "We feel Pan Am should be putting its money into security, not parties."

Joe Horgan of West Point, Pa., a member of the Victims of Pan Am 103 group, was quoted by the Dumfries and Galloway Standard as saying, "It is good for them to have a party, but Pan Am's involvement is despicable. We see this purely as a public relations exercise on their part." 4

"Having this picnic is cruel . . ." said Lynne Fraidowitz of Staten Island, whose 20-year-old son, Daniel Rosenthal, was killed. "It would have been easier on me if they had just ripped my heart out." 5

From what I've read in the scant articles I've found, Pan Am played a "he said, she said" with Ed and his idea. In one article, the airline stated that Ed conceived and raised money for the party, but also wrote the airline for help. The airline stated that they simply flew Ed and his family to Scotland. 1 However, a resident of Lockerbie said that PanAm had the idea of a "Summer Christmas", but townspeople suggested it be a party instead.2 Originally, Disney was going to send some costumed characters to Scotland, but due to outrage from the families, this was redacted. Hebrew National who was to supply food for the party also backed out. 3 

(Business Insider)

While families picketed outside of the PanAm headquarters in New York City, in Scotland the party went on with a concerts, bagpipes and food. 2 A football coach from Syracuse University (which lost 37 students in the bombing) came to give kids football lessons, which was a peculiar choice. Apparently there was no representation from Pan Am at the actual party.3

I found a Facebook post from the Annandale Herald and Moffat News on the 30th anniversary of the party. Most partygoers who were probably kids at the time, mostly remembered eating pizza.

Kinsey Wilson. 1989. "Kin of Jet Crash Victims Assail Plans for Party in Lockerbie: [NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition]." Newsday, May 21, 38. 

Daily Press. “Reaction to Lockerbie Party Mixed.” June 4, 1989.

Deseret News. “CONTROVERSY DIDN’T DASH LOCKERBIE BASH,” June 4, 1989. https://www.deseret.com/1989/6/4/18809762/controversy-didn-t-dash-lockerbie-bash.

"Lockerbie Party Outrages Bereaved: [Final Edition]." Edmonton Journal, Jun 04, 1989.

Joseph W. Queen. "Party in Lockerbie, Outrage in NY: [NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition]." Newsday, Jun 04, 1989, Combined editions.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

25 March 2024

The Princess Royal has paid her respects to those who lost their lives in the Lockerbie bombing, which happened 35 years ago.

On 21 December 1988, a bomb exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit as it flew above the Dumfries and Galloway town, killing all 259 passengers and crew onboard.

A further 11 people died on the ground as parts of the wreckage landed on homes in the town.

Princess Anne visited Dryfesdale cemetery and the visitor centre on the town’s outskirts to remember those who lost their lives to the bombing.

She met officials from Dumfries and Galloway Council, as well as others involved in keeping the memory of those who lost their lives alive.

She was joined by Fiona Armstrong, Lord Lieutenant of Dumfries.

Ms Armstrong, also a newsreader and reporter, covered the bombing while working as a journalist.

The princess was shown around the visitor centre and spoke those in attendance.

She signed the visitor guestbook and unveiled a small plaque created in honour of her visit to the site.

Shortly afterwards, she walked through the graveyard to the official memorial for those who were killed as a result of the bombing, where she laid a special wreath signed by her in commemoration of the dead.

Ahead of laying the wreath, Ms Armstrong said:

“I was there on that night and I saw first-hand how this town rallied, how it copes and has continued to cope over the decades.

You could never be more proud of a community. A disaster like this can never be forgotten.

So much grief, such senseless losses, 270 innocent lives, remembered here on this memorial, each and every name will never be forgotten.

Lockerbie’s moto is forward, and we move together in hope.

Your Royal Highness, your brother, now the King, came here following the disaster.

Your mother, the late Queen; your father, the Duke of Edinburgh; also came here some years after to pay their respects.

And how we are honoured to have you here today, as the Princess Royal, but we also ask you to lay a wreath, please, of remembrance.”

Former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, remains the only person to have been convicted following the atrocity.

He was found guilty of 270 counts of murder by a panel of three Scottish judges, sitting at a special court in the Hague in 2001 and was imprisoned in Scotland.

He was granted compassionate release in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and returned to Libya where he died in 2012.

Libyan Abu Agila Masud is alleged to have helped make the bomb.

He is to go on trial in the US in May 2025 facing three charges which he denies.

[ruleof3]

[oconnormusicstudio]

Under His Wings

Pan Am Flight 103 Memorial Cairn On December 21 at 1:30PM, the Pender UMC Choir traditionally sang for the Pan Am Flight 103 (Lockerbie) Memorial Service at Arlington National Cemetery. One of the songs we sang at this service – “Under His Wings” – was composed in memory of the victims.  It can be heard in the videos below. On June 20, 2022, a Memorial Concert was held for long-time choir member,…

[thiziri]

Princess Anne visiting Lockerbie. She toured plastic roads firm MacRebur first then went on to the Dryfesdale Lodge Visitor Centre and laid a wreath at the Pan Am 103 air disaster memorial, on 25 March 2024.

© Annandale Harald and Moffat News

[enriquemzn262]

A horrible fact I wish I didn’t knew is how the remains of Pan Am flight 103, a Boeing 747 destroyed in a terrorist attack over the skies of Lockerbie, Scotland, on the 21 of December 1988, the worst terrorist attack in British history, lay abandoned in a scrapyard next to a go-kart racetrack, because apparently it’s still considered an ongoing investigation, so they cannot be destroyed.

259 souls were onboard that plane, none of them survived, yet somehow the plane’s remains still exist, basically as trash, 35 years after the fact.

It just feels so wrong…

[maximumwobblerbanditdonut]

Lockerbie

The BBC and Netflix have announced casting for Lockerbie, the forthcoming factual drama made by World Productions.

The six-part series is based on the real events surrounding the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the joint Scots-US investigation which sought to bring the perpetrators to justice. Lockerbie. The flight disaster of Pan Am Flight 103 was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom.

Pan Am Flight 103 was a flight of a passenger airliner operated by Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, after a bomb was detonated. All 259 people on board were killed, and 11 individuals on the ground also died. All were killed, along with 11 residents of Lockerbie, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

What seemed at first like a horrific accident was soon proven to be the result of a terrorist bomb planted in a radio cassette recorder inside a suitcase in the forward cargo hold.

Following a three-year joint investigation by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), arrest warrants were issued for two Libyan nationals in November 1991. In 1999, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi handed over the two men for trial at Camp Zeist, the Netherlands, after protracted negotiations and UN sanctions.

In the year 2001, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was jailed for life after being found guilty of 270 counts of murder in direct connection with the bombing.

Megrahi was found guilty of playing a central role in the bombing

In August 2009, he was released by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died in May 2012 as the only person to be convicted for the attack.

‘Lockerbie’: Lead Cast Of BBC & Netflix Series Patrick J. Adams, star of Suits — is returning to Netflix. He will star opposite Connor Swindells of SAS and Netflix’s Sex Education, Merritt Wever, two-time Emmy winner, for Netflix’s Godless and Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, the leads in the BBC and Netflix six-part limited series.

The cast also includes Ozark alum Peter Mullan, Tony Curran (Mary & George), Downton Abbey‘s Phyllis Logan, Eddie Marsan (The Pact), Lauren Lyle (Vigil), Andrew Rothney (The Undeclared War), Parker Sawyers ( P-Valley), James Harkness (The Sixth Commandment), Khalid Laith (Vigil), and Amanda Drew (Wolf).

Congratulations to Tony Curran and Lauren Lyle for Lockerbie a new drama series alongside the Oscar winner best actor Colin Firth’s competition.😊 Both of you are in good company.

Posted 6th March 2024

#Lockerbie #TheLockerbieBombing #BBC #Netflix #truestory #bombing #Scotland #PanAmflight103 #DumfriesandGalloway #disaster #filming #newdrama #series #plane #Libyanterrorists #terrorism #airdisasterinUK

@castlemaine123 Wait until you see “Lockerbie” with Colin Firth which began filming last February in Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

@castlemaine123 Yep! ! The actors are in interesting projects. The wait for Outlander 7.2 and season 8 is losing interest. BOMB's new actors will surprise, showing that SH is not the only Scottish actor in Scotland as his fans think. He may continue to make profits in his new career as a door-to-door alcohol salesman and posing as a barman.

[ivygorgon]

An open letter to the U.S. Congress

Pass a bill to make Trump’s trial viewable by ALL Americans!

1,333 so far! Help us get to 2,000 signers!

I understand that the Senate just passed a bill, S. 3250, to permit victims of crimes associated with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 to access court proceedings in the criminal case against the perpetrators. This new law will mean that affected people who are too old or infirm to travel to Washington, D.C., or those who are too far away to readily make the trip will still be able to observe court proceedings. Prosecutors at the Justice Department supported the move because they thought it was important for people affected by the crime to see justice in action. They are correct. Bearing this precedent in mind, I would like Congress to swiftly pass a similar bill for Trump’s prosecution for interference in the 2020 election. This case, United States v. Donald J. Trump, is of even more singular importance than the Lockerbie case. If such access can be offered for those victims it can be offered to the American people for a trial in which they have a distinct and unparalleled interest. This is one of the most important court cases this country will ever see. It is in the best interests of every US citizen to provide full access to it. There are, furthermore, no compelling reasons not to do so. Please introduce and/or support such a bill right away. People will be able to learn more about the arguments being made and it is more difficult to pass off disinformation about a proceeding that the public has full access to. Thanks.

▶ Created on January 22 by Jess Craven

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[nebris]

Today in History [1988]

Pan Am Flight 103 is blown up by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland. ~I have two personal connections to this event: ~Seven years earlier, my mother and I took that flight back to New York. We'd been seeing my grandmum in hospital in London. [She died a few days after we got back.] I have wondered if any of the attendants who served us were on that particular aircraft. We'd traveled First Class, so we got a lot of attention. ~I had a holiday temp job at what was then Arthur Anderson Associates in New York on the day of the bombing. The mood there was quite somber as a half dozen Anderson employees had been on board that flight, including a friend of the women I was working for. She just sat in her office and softly wept.

[plague-vulture]

my professor is telling us about how he was almost on pan am 103

[broadcastnewsarchive]

Animation depicting the events of the crash of Pan Am flight 103, also commonly called the Lockerbie bombing.

Coverage by CBS

5:31 PM EST (2131Z) 1988-12-21

[x]

[beardedmrbean]

Nearly 34 years after 270 people, including 190 Americans, died in the mid-air bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the Libyan intelligence officer accused of building the explosive device has been taken into custody by the United States to face justice, federal officials told ABC News.

Abu Agila Mas'ud will face criminal charges in the United States for his suspected role in the deadliest terror attack on British soil and among the largest involving Americans, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Justice.

The United States has charged Mas’ud with building the device used to blow up the Boeing 747 about 38 minutes after it took off from London's Heathrow Airport en route to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The flight originally started in Frankfurt, Germany, and was scheduled to end in Detroit after it stopped in New York.

Among those killed were 35 Syracuse University students returning home for the holidays after a semester studying abroad.

"The United States has taken custody of alleged Pan Am Flight 103 bomb maker Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi," the DOJ said in a statement.

Mas'ud was booked into the Alexandria Adult Detention Center Sunday night, the Alexandria Sheriff's Office said.

It was not immediately clear when Mas'ud will appear in court. He is expected to make his initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, according to the DOJ.

"The families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing have been told that the suspect Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi is in U.S. custody,” a spokesperson for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, Scotland’s public prosecution service, said in a statement to ABC News.

"Scottish prosecutors and police, working with UK Government and US colleagues, will continue to pursue this investigation, with the sole aim of bringing those who acted along with Al Megrahi to justice," the statement said, referring to a Libyan intelligence operative convicted in 2001 for his role in the Pan Am bombing.

'It is unbelievable'

Stephanie Bernstein, whose husband, Michael, was among those killed in the bombing, said she learned Mas'ud was in U.S. custody in a phone call from federal authorities before dawn Sunday.

"It is unbelievable. When I first learned about it, I thought I was dreaming,” Bernstein told ABC News. "This would not have happened without the top levels of the government and their commitment to bringing this individual to justice."

Before his death, Michael Bernstein worked for the Justice Department tracking down former members of the Nazi regime.

[robert-carmona]

Feb 18th, 1966

Pan Am Building (1963) started its helipad service on Dec 22nd, 1965. New York Airways flew passengers mostly to Pan Am's terminal at JFK Airport.

In 1967, it briefly also flew passengers also to Teterboro Airport.

Chopper service was stopped on Feb 18th, 1968 due to declining ridership and contract issues.

Talks started in 1969 to restart it but approval was not granted until February 1977. But soon after a deadly tragedy occurred, ending the chopper service for good.

On May 16th, 1977, 1 min after landing and 20 passengers got off an S-61L, its landing gear collapsed (right, front), causing the chopper to fall sideways, with its rotors still running.

One of five blades then detached. The 20-foot blade killed 4 men waiting to board. The runaway blade then fell off the roof of Pan Am Building, killing a woman on the sidewalk at Madison and 43rd St. Two others suffered serious injuries.

After 1978 airline deregulation, Pan Am (1927-1991) struggled to compete. Pan-Am then went bankrupt on Jan 8th, 1991.

The Gulf War (1990-91) was the final blow with rising fuel costs, as it was still suffering from the Dec 21st, 1988, Pan Am 103 Lockerbie disaster.

Among those who missed Flight 103 were Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten aka John Lydon (late from Christmas shopping), future Sex and The City star Kim Cattrall (also for Christmas shopping) and tennis star Mats Wilander. Robert Mueller oversaw the disaster investigation.

Pan Am was the first airline to fly worldwide, use Jumbo jets and book reservations with computers. At its peak, Pan Am flew 11 million passengers to 86 countries in 1968.

PHOTO: F. Roy Kemp

[mariacallous]

Protests in Iran spurred by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the country’s so-called morality police have continued, with escalations by the regime—including the executions of a well-known wrestler and a dual national—failing to dampen public anger. Looking for a silver bullet to silence its restive public, Tehran has failed to find one. But the Iranian people have failed equally, being yet unable to find their own silver bullet to topple the ayatollahs for once and for all.

But it may be that bullet exists: corruption. And it’s lacking only a responsible Western power to pull the trigger.

Before digging into the ordure of Iranian official thievery, take a moment to recall the tales of other deposed regimes. In too many cases, leaders and cronies of various tyrannies were fully fledged members of the community of nations—with a seat at the United Nations, reception at the White House, and/or a nose at the U.S. taxpayer’s trough, among other seals of approval—only to be ousted and for the world to discover with shock—shock!—that the despot had been skimming billions of dollars from their country’s coffers.

Remember Washington’s dear pal, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak—a Camp David attendee who conducted annual visits to Washington and received tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military and economic assistance? He was ousted in 2011, but his corruption was legend inside Egypt—unofficially, of course—with only the smarmiest of admirers ignoring its manifest evidence. It should have been obvious in Washington as well. Mubarak owned property in Beverly Hills, a share of resorts in the Egyptian seaside city of Sharm el-Sheikh, and houses in London and New York. Experts estimated his fortune at a cool $70 billion, with his two kids also allegedly billionaires.

Or how about former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who had been Washington’s darling before that embarrassing 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Throughout the 1990s, he used a United Nations-administered oil-for-food program to skim millions of dollars for his and his sons’ personal profit, with some of his dealings also reportedly enriching then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin and a young Vladimir Putin. The U.S. government was also well aware of Saddam’s evasions of oil sale restrictions, including to U.S. allies in Jordan, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf. (By the way, guess who was also profiting from Saddam’s dirty business? Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. Also, one-time U.S. ally in the war on terrorism Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.)

And then there was former Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, the same Qaddafi who sponsored the downing of U.S. carrier Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing all 259 people aboard as well as 11 people on the ground. True, he was no one’s darling, even after a brief post-9/11 rapprochement with the West. But after then-U.S. President Barack Obama finally turned on the aging Qaddafi in 2010, implicitly supporting the Libyan mobs that ultimately captured and killed him, the press professed itself shocked: “As Libya takes stock, Moammar Kadafi’s hidden riches astound,” the Los Angeles Times marveled. The mercurial Qaddafi was discovered to have more than $200 billion stashed around the world. The kicker? Around $37 billion were reportedly in U.S. banks.

And like his neighbor Mubarak, the Libyan dictator shared with his kids, as did everyone seeking to curry favor with the leader. A friend of his son Saif earned $58 million in “advisory fees” from French financial services firm Société Générale, per Transparency International. The international anti-corruption watchdog also noted a Canadian company with Qaddafi’s daughter-in-law on its payroll. In 2019, the Independent reported on a “deadly web of global corruption” that risked entangling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The stories go on and on and on. And apparently, someone is still stealing the money Qaddafi stole first.

As this litany makes clear, any exposé of kleptomania in the Middle East could stretch for terabytes. Lebanon alone suffers from titanic levels of elite and government corruption that have destroyed what little Iran and Syria have left for the Lebanese people. Also clear is that most (though not all) such corruption is revealed after the fact; serious U.S. government action against corruption in, for example, Russia only came after Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Which brings us to Iran.

There was a time when both Sunni and Shiite Islamists prided themselves on their resistance to the corruption endemic in the Middle East, but those days are long gone. Infamous former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was said to have millions of dollars to his name. Anti-regime organization United Against Nuclear Iran runs through a timeline of official thievery, detailing billions of dollars stolen inside the Iranian oil ministry, billions more embezzled from state banks, tiny percentiles of government appropriations for health actually spent on medicine and supplies. After current Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was appointed to run the nation’s judiciary in 2019, his predecessor was nailed for depositing bail money into 63 different bank accounts to the tune of almost $100 million.

Some of this corruption has been detailed in domestic newspapers and reports inside Iran. But the closer to the top the miscreant gets, the less likely there is to be any news. Infamously corrupt former senior IRGC officer and Tehran mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf allegedly bribed state officials to avoid fraud charges. Former IRGC-Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani was also implicated, with all revealed in a leaked recording.

The story received extremely limited coverage inside Iran because of Ghalibaf’s ties to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Soleimani’s so-called martyrdom. Indeed, Khamenei slammed newspapers for reporting the story at all, labeling the leaks as enemy efforts to “[slander] the central elements that played a role in the advancement of the revolution; one day it’s the Majles [Iran’s parliament], one day it’s the Guardian Council, and one day it’s the IRGC. Today, it’s the IRGC’s turn. Today, they slander the IRGC and try to tarnish it and the great martyr Soleimani.”

Khamenei similarly swept sexual assault charges away in the case of a favored Quranic orator, censured newspapers and ministers that reported on corruption within the government, and denounced charges of corruption against former Chief Justice Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani, who was accused of tolerating widespread theft. (His former deputy was actually arrested for financial crimes in 2019.) Larijani was ultimately replaced by Raisi, who is now considered a likely candidate to replace the ailing supreme leader after his death. And when Rafsanjani began detailing Khamenei’s sons’ vast wealth in 2016, his own son was quickly arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Opposition cleric Mehdi Karroubi, who has been under house arrest since 2011, wrote an open letter to the supreme leader in 2018, accusing him of tolerating systemic corruption and impoverishing tens of millions of Iranians while enriching a small elite. “Under such conditions,” he warned, “it is natural that the lower classes, who were the grassroot supporters of the Islamic Revolution, will turn into a gunpowder barrel.”

Given widespread awareness of corruption inside Iran, curious people may wonder why additional sordid details could tip the balance of what is already a widespread revolution inside Iran. But there is a huge hole in reporting on graft at the most senior levels of Iran’s government, with allegations about Khamenei’s own crimes appearing only on exile and hostile foreign websites.

In short, Khamenei does not want his citizens (or lesser government officials) to know about the breadth of his own sins. And small wonder: Iran’s own Ministry of Cooperatives, Labour, and Social Welfare reported in January that around 60 percent of the country’s 84 million people live below the poverty line, with one-third living in “extreme poverty”—double the number of the previous year.

Far from blaming the United States or international sanctions for their strife, Iranians have made clear they blame their own government. Were they to know in real time—rather than after the fact, Qaddafi- and Mubarak-style—just how much money their supreme leader and his cronies had stolen, it could, as Karroubi warned, tip the balance and finally turn the regime’s remaining supporters in the security forces and the public against them.

How could this happen? Trump administration officials accused Khamenei of being worth around $200 billion. (A previous Reuters investigation detailed assets worth at least $95 billion.) But that’s the extent of U.S. government jabs at the supreme leader. Much as the Trump administration began detailing Khamenei’s personal wealth, the U.S. and European governments could begin unraveling the web of concealed assets owned by the supreme leader and his family—and act on the information.

Subsequent to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. government froze Saddam’s assets. Ditto the assets of Qaddafi and his cronies once the United States decided he had to go. True, some of these assets were sovereign—nominally the foreign government’s money. But not all. So why wait? If corrupt enemies of the United States can have their assets frozen in the event of their ouster or war, then why not do it preemptively? As the Biden administration has made crystal clear in the case of Russian oligarchs and Putin’s cronies, it has the legal authority to freeze the proceeds of corruption.

Most of the Middle East’s late dictators had money and real estate in the United States under the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal government. The United States has multiple avenues to communicate details to the Iranian people, whether through whatever U.S. press leaks in, Persian-language Radio Farda (part of U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), or the U.S. president’s own bully pulpit.

If, as senior U.S. officials have suggested to me, corruption is truly the Iranian regime’s Achilles’ heel, isn’t it time someone started exploiting that weakness to the benefit of the long-suffering Iranian people?