In the mid-1980s, I had an eight-hour session with Colonel Muammar Gadhafi that began at midnight at an encampment by the Gulf of Sidra in Libya.

Like several press interviews before and after, it essentially consisted of an uninterrupted monologue about his "Green Book" — a thin volume of platitudes he authored — along with his theories on human evolution, relations between males and females, and his belief that Shakespeare was an Arab Bedouin whose original name was Sheik Zubair. (No kidding.)

A few years ago, Colonel Gadhafi's daughter famously declared that she was quitting the Sorbonne in Paris (where the French were obsequious enough to enroll her as a student) because she said political science was a fake Western invention to exploit the world. His sons, who hold the right of life and death over Libya's population, barely completed middle school. The great leader himself is so heavily medicated that his conversations are fittingly out of this world.

During this and other meetings in the desert around a fire, folks drop in — including Western ambassadors, senior Arab officials, Libyan bigwigs, and sycophants of all kinds. Always they sit attentively, pretending to be mesmerized by the great leader's wisdom. At such moments, one wonders how far can the farce go?

I recall these stories on the occasion of the Bulgarian hostages finally being released from Libya late last month. There was never a doubt, from their arrest in 1998 through their nine years of imprisonment and torture, that the five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian Arab doctor accused of injecting 400 Libyan kids with the HIV virus were innocent victims of Colonel Gadhafi's megalomaniacal regime.

The culprit, all along, was Libya's failed hospital system; in this case, the El-Fath Children's Hospital in Benghazi, one of many filthy hospitals that are a hallmark of the decrepit Libyan welfare system. Last week, Colonel Gadhafi's eldest son and anointed successor even confirmed it: Seif al-Islam al-Qaddafi said the allegations were fabricated, that investigators had tortured the medics with electric shocks and threatened to target their families in order to extract their "confessions," and that the Libyan children had been infected with HIV before the six medics even arrived in Libya.

But last week, the farce went further. Libya requested a special meeting of the League of Arab States to look into proper punishment for Bulgaria for "violating" the terms of an agreement that it said stipulated jailing the nurses at home. And for acknowledging its "error," France offered to sell weapons to Libya.

There are many aspects of these situations that merit pause; foremost among them is the dysfunctional relationships that Western governments maintain with certain regimes. How low do you have to go as a country for the West to stop trading with you or selling weapons to you?

Libya ranks as an ongoing nut case. The North African country was let out of a straightjacket of sanctions a few years ago in return for turning over its security files on the wide variety of terror groups it supported, from the Irish Republican Army to Abu Nidal, and on its blowing up of 270 Pan Am 103 passengers over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and another 170 on a UTA flight the following year, both on the direct orders of Colonel Gadhafi. (Libya also paid compensation to the families. Whether any of this was enough remains an open question.)

Then came the Bulgarian episode. While it is hard to argue with the European-led compromise that brought about the release of the medical team because lives were at stake, why was the Libyan regime not promptly brought back to the dock?

If anything, the Bulgarian hostage situation demonstrates that a family of unstable thugs has hijacked Libya. One son contradicts the current ruler, the country's so-called justice system is used as a yo-yo, and Libyans are told the HIV infection was yet another world conspiracy.

Treating Libya as if it were a real country, meriting two visits in the past few weeks from Britain's former prime minister, Tony Blair, and President Sarkozy of France, is simply absurd.

Perhaps the best commentary came from Dr. Ashraf al-Hazouz, the Palestinian Arab doctor jailed and accused of murder along with the Bulgarians. In an interview in which he detailed both the torture and the astounding fabrications concocted by Libyan investigators, Mr. Hazouz paused to say that living in Libya made him ashamed of being an Arab.

© 2007 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC. All rights reserved.