Nothing worried the former commander of the Libyan military intelligence services, Abdullah Sanoussi, more than his desire to revoke or to appeal the life imprisonment sentence issued against him by a French court after being convicted of having shot down a civilian plane. But the late colonel, Muammar Gaddafi, liked the fact that the man is convicted and that he could not get rid of a court ruling that followed him wherever he went. This pushed Sanoussi to do anything in order to please Gaddafi. Thus, the relationship between the two men exceeded a mere relation of discipline and was more of a dependence where Sanoussi was the inseparable shadow of Gaddafi. Gaddafi practiced his tendency to liquidate his opponents by allowing Sanoussi to strangulate people and break their necks. He used to find a pleasure in stirring the conflicts between the members of the military and external intelligence through the circle of his close entourage. Indeed, he was obsessed with interfering in the personal lives of the people loyal to him just for fun and sometimes in order to insult them even more. Sanoussi was good at finding other people's mistakes and fabricating them when he needed a proof. He could not draw any closer to the colonel except by running over people and coming up with exciting stories and enticing the “leader” by telling him about the plots weaved behind the scenes. Gaddafi and Sanoussi knew each other very well. They were twins born of the joint womb of tyranny. When Moroccan General Mohammad Oufkir needed to highlight the need for his “security” services, he used to extract from his black history shelves, scenarios about attempts at overthrowing the regime of the late King Hassan al-Thani. Indeed, there is a security school that only thrives by spreading an atmosphere of fear and concern. Perhaps the difference between Oufkir and Sanoussi is that the former got involved in a failed coup attempt in order to mask his involvement in this issue. Meanwhile, Sanoussi remained “loyal” to himself and to his master like a Mafioso as he shed rivers of blood just for the sake of shedding blood. Gaddafi was well aware that without him, his favorite intelligence man would be powerless. Similarly, Sanoussi knew that massacring Gaddafi's opponents at home and abroad is the immolation that will bring him closer to the man who used him to terminate all the elements of the state. The two men used to rescue one another from the embarrassment by dipping their hands in the quagmire of blood. A ruler becomes the prisoner of his intelligence services when he doesn't know; and he becomes their protector when he knows more but fails to take the time to scrutinize the information and reports presented to him. However, he becomes a part of the services when he starts measuring loyalty by the numbers of dead victims and prisoners. This is exactly where Gaddafi made no separation between a state man and an intelligence man who is only good at gossip and killings. The problem of Gaddafi and his intelligence forces is that they were constantly concerned with getting rid of the wise voices whether these came from within or from abroad. Indeed, wisdom was their common enemy. People choose their own end. Some of them carry clear pictures on their shoulders and travel with them all over the world with no fear of being subjected to any pursuit. However, those who leave their posts to go to their unmarked graves would be reaping the outcome of their own actions, since they had deprived the families of the victims from having graves to cry over. Had Gaddafi not found officials among his apparatuses who beautified his actions and justified his crimes, he wouldn't have proceeded with his oppression of the opposition voices. And had Abdullah Sanoussi not been encouraged by the many sins of the regime to turn from a docile young man into a savage beast, he would have been unable to hold the post that pulled him up then threw him into the claws of crime. There are always people who create tyranny and others who enjoy it. And when they wake up from their madness, they disappear with no one feeling sorry for their sinister fates.
