Muammer Qaddafi and the "Assassination Plot" against Barack Obama

Although it was emphasised that the President was not in an immediate danger, the Secret Service in Washington stated on Monday that a man who was plotted to kill Barack Obama had been arrested by the Turkish National Police two days before the President came to Turkey. According to the Saudi newspaper Al Watan, the suspect of Syrian descent confessed that he wanted to stab Obama with a knife.

In response to reports that the man in custody was carrying a press card of Al Jazeera,  the network's bureau chief in Ankara, Yucef al-Sharif, stated that the suspect had almost certainly forged the card as the Turkish security services knew everyone who worked in Al-Jazeera’s Ankara office.

So up to now, this plot seemed to be simply that of an extreme individual, just as it had with  four people were arrested in August 2008 on suspicion that they wanted to harm Obama. However, we may now have word that the assassination attempt is a new and ‘deep’ point of view to ‘shed light into Obama’s inauspiciousness’.

The source? Libya’s Muammer Qaddafi.

He said  that “Obama is a flicker of hope in the middle of the imperialist darkness,” so he feared that the President, whose “political discourse has been reasonable so far, breaking with the arrogance that was prevalent in statements by former US presidents”, could be assassinated.  Qaddafi points to the shootings of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King as historical examples.

Could it be that a Libya that gave up its clandestine weapons of mass destruction programs, put an end to its missile threat to  US bases in the Mediterranean, and paid compensation to the families of the Lockerbie victims  --- and who, in return, succeeded in getting US and international sanctions lifted --- is guarding against intensifying criticism of its ‘undemocratic’ regime?

Or is Qaddafi just being a concerned citizen of the world?