We found this happy snap of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shaking hands in 2009 with one of Colonel Gadhafi’s sons, Mutassim, at Creeping Sharia. Also through them we found the following story about another of the Libyan dictator’s sons, Khamis, coming recently to the US as an intern with AECOM:

From the Daily Caller:

A son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi toured U.S. ports and military facilities just weeks before he helped lead deadly attacks on rebels protesting his father’s authoritarian regime.

Khamis Gadhafi, 27, spent four weeks in the U.S. as part of an internship with AECOM, a global infrastructure company with deep business interests in Libya, according to Paul Gennaro, AECOM’s Senior Vice President for Global Communications. The trip was to include visits to the Port of Houston, Air Force Academy, National War College and West Point, Gennaro said. The West Point visit was canceled on Feb. 17, when the trip was cut short and Gadhafi returned to Libya … The uprising there began with a series of protests on Feb. 15….

Gennaro said the U.S. State Department approved of the trip, and considered Gadhafi a reformer. He said the government signed off on the itinerary, at times offering advice that affected the company’s plans for Gadhafi.

State department officials denied any role in planning, advising or paying for the trip. “We did greet him at the airport. That is standard courtesy for the son of the leader of a country,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner. Toner said the government was aware of Gadhafi’s itinerary, but “did not sign off on it.” …

One or the other is lying. Our guess, it’s the State Department.

So the State Department regularly greets the children of all national leaders when they arrive at a US airport? Even if the national leader is a dictator responsible for the deaths of American servicemen in a Berlin discotheque and hundreds of civilians in the Pan Am plane he had blown up in the air?

Gennaro was one of the AECOM executives who met with Gadhafi during the trip, to educate him on U.S. corporate practices. He said Gadhafi was “very, very interested in the planning, design, how do you advance large infrastructure projects. That was the nature and the tenor of this internship” …

Khamis Gadhafi was [reported] killed earlier this week after a disaffected Libyan air force pilot crash-landed his jet in the ruling family’s headquarters … [He had] led the Khamis Brigade, one of several professional military units that are loyal to leader Moammar Gadhafi. …

U.S. diplomats in leaked memos have called it “the most well-trained and well-equipped force in the Libyan military.”

In one brutal attack, his forces surrounded Zawiya while rebels in the city celebrated their victory and cared for the injured. The Khamis Brigade then unleashed an all-out assault from three sides, unloading their weapons and artillery as they stormed the city.

Maybe some of those rebels are among the “thousands of lives” that Hillary Clinton “knows” were saved by US intervention.

If Gadhafi ends up deposed or dead, he’ll possibly be replaced by one of the rebel leaders who fought against Americans in Iraq or was trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He too, and his close relations, would of course be welcome in America and treated with the State Department’s standard courtesy.