Parade of Despots Heading For New York

The usual September parade of world leaders descending on New York City for the opening of the annual United Nations General Assembly will be characterized this year by the presence of some of the world’s most appalling figures.

Likely to provoke the most ire this year will be Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who plans his first visit ever to the United States at a time when his emergence from international isolation has been set back by the release of the Libyan convicted in the Lockerbie bombing. Of the 270 people killed when the New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up after taking off from London in 1988, 189 were Americans.

But his presence will still be provocative, with families of Lockerbie victims and the American Libyan Freedom Alliance among those planning to protest.

The alliance, which says its objective is to promote democracy, human rights and the rule of law in Libya, said it had expressed its disappointment to U.S. and U.N. officials about the planned attendance by Gaddafi

“despite all his well documented international and domestic crimes"

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also plans to attend the UNGA session, as he has for the past four consecutive years, but this time the visit comes on the heels of his disputed re-election and subsequent state crackdown. Adding to the storm, Ahmadinejad has nominated as defense minister a man wanted by Argentina and Interpol for his alleged role in the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires... [snip]

Under the 1947 United Nations Headquarters Act, foreign delegates are permitted unimpeded access to a demarcated “headquarters district” in New York City.

Leading calls this year for Ahmadinejad to be denied a visa is Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

She argued in a letter to Obama that the threat posed by Ahmadinejad to American national security interests outweighed U.S. responsibilities under the U.N. Headquarters Act.

The Reagan administration in 1988 set a precedent by denying PLO chairman Yasser Arafat a visa, citing “associations with terrorism"...

READ MORE