recedented and, in fact, should have been foreseen (if not in their particulars) by American government officials.
Johnson details numerous examples of what he believes to be troubling American foreign policy and the resulting ôblowbackö in the book. His examples demonstrate that blowback can occur in both direct and indirect forms. For instance, he claims that the 1988 bombing of Pan American flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, was blowback for a 1986 raid in Libya by American military forces that killed Libyan President Muammar KhadaffiÆs four-year-old stepdaughter (Johnson, 2000, p. 8). That bombing could be described as a direct retaliation by one country against another.
JohnsonÆs argument is supported by news reports in American media. For example, on February 1, 2003, media outlet MSNBC also reported that the CIA believed the bombing of flight 103 was blowback for the Reagan administration bombing in Tripoli, Libya that killed KhadaffiÆs daughter. MSNBC, however, went on to report that Khadaffi actually organized a series of attacks against American targets, including the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking in Karachi, Pakistan in September 1987 that killed 22 people and the bombing of a French airline bombing over Chad in September 1989 that killed 171 people (Windrem, 2003). In addition, Robert Windrem claims that a CIA report also concluded that the Libyans contracted out other attacks to militant groups, including JapanÆs Red Army, which launched a rocket at the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia not long after the Reagan administrationÆs 1986 attack.
Thus, WindremÆs report supports JohnsonÆs argument for the theory of blowback. But Windrem goes even further. He cites a report by the U.S. Department of Defense that concluded that discovery of the extent of the Libyan response to the 1986 bombing contradicted American popular belief that the U.S. attack had suppressed Libyan terrorism. Inst...