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Gadhafi Banished From Garden State

Planned to pitch a suburban tent for U.N. confab

by
Michael Weiss
August 31, 2009

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi will be coming to the United States to attend the U.N. General Assembly in a few weeks, but he’ll be confined New York City. He had planned to stay in a Bedouin tent at a Libyan government-owned estate in Englewood, New Jersey, right next to an Orthodox yeshiva. The visit, and Gadhafi’s prospective suburban headquarters, had fomented a small but heated controversy in the Garden State, with Governor Jon Corzine, Senator Frank Lautenberg, and a host of other officials angrily denouncing the plans. And, though relations between the United States and Libya have warmed since Gadhafi turned over the full contents of his nuclear program to weapons inspectors in the wake of the Iraq invasion, his standing his fallen here after he hosted a lavish homecoming in Tripoli for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber who was released from his Scottish jail due to terminal health problems. Over the weekend, the Libyan government relented, saying Gadhafi will remain in Manhattan.