FOR PAN AM 103 VICTIMS, A BILL FROM THE IRS 

Officially the United States seeks to punish Libya for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 just before Christmas six years ago. But in practice U.S. officials have turned their responsibilities inside out: While diplomats reassure Moammar Gadhafi's friends that Washington bears them no hard feelings for supporting Libya, other bureaucrats harry families who lost relatives in the Pan Am tragedy. 

 Ask John and Barbara Zwynenberg of Nyack, N.Y. Their son Mark, 29, was one of the 189 Americans killed by the powerful bomb that hurled their jetliner from the sky over Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988. The terrorists evidently struck an American civilian target to avenge the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986, after a Libyan attack on a Berlin discotheque in which one U.S. serviceman was killed. 

 Last month the Internal Revenue Service mailed the Zwynenbergs a deficiency notice of $6.4 million, due in 90 days, based on an IRS estimate of what their son's estate may get some day from a still pending suit against the now defunct airline and its insurer. That followed earlier IRS warnings to the Zwynenberg family to agree to pay smaller amounts to settle the IRS claim. 

 Mistakes happen. Computers do dumb things. Surely the IRS isn't serious. 

 Those were my first reactions, and those of the Zwynenbergs as well. But their calls and my follow-up contacts elicited only stonewalling from the Hartford, Conn., district office that mailed the retired couple the estate tax liability notice dated Nov. 17. As far as the IRS is concerned, the deficiency notice stands. Merry Christmas. And goodbye. 

 IRS Commissioner Margaret Milner Richardson should check into what is being done in her name in this case. It is Kafkaesque. 

 As a group, the families of the victims of Pan Am 103 have repeatedly spurned attempts by highly paid American lawyers working for Gadhafi and Egyptian go-betweens to buy them off. The families want justice, not money. They want the two Libyan agents identified as the bombers by history's most extensive criminal investigation handed over for trial in Britain or the United States, as United Nations resolutions demand. 

 The IRS falls to the level of the Libyans' hired legal guns by reducing this tragedy to one more payday. The Zwynenberg case is a ludicrous example of the bureaucracy's insensitivity to the large issues of morality, justice and America's standing abroad that the unresolved bombing of Pan Am 103 raises. 

 What solicitude the American government has shown in this case is being lavished instead on the Egyptian government, which is upset over articles in the American press calling attention to President Hosni Mubarak's close ties to Gadhafi. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Pelletreau was quoted in a Dec. 4 Egyptian newspaper interview as having reassured Egypt that the United States was not critical of the Mubarak government's ties to Libya. The account, published in Cairo's most important daily, Al Ahram, has not been officially challenged by the State Department. 

 Pelletreau will have an opportunity to spell out what he said. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has taken a consistent interest in Pan Am 103 and has written asking Pelletreau to explain the department's view of Egypt's links to Libya. 

 The unnecessary stroking of Mubarak for the Egyptian public smacks of the kind of clientitis -- the patronizing explaining away of a client's vulnerability -- that has led the United States into disasters in Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. 

 It reinforces my sense of a letting down at the State Department in the official campaign against Libya, despite Secretary of State Warren Christopher's personal commitment to "maintain the rigor of sanctions and increase them" soon. The Near East bureau seems to have bought the Egyptian line that Gadhafi represents "a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism" -- a lesser evil. 

 The vigorous protests that Algeria has recently made over Gadhafi's support for fundamentalist revolutionaries there puts the lie to that view. Nor has he abandoned his support for terrorism, as Cairo claims. 

 When the French recently arrested and then quickly released Ali Omar Mansour, a key Libyan intelligence agent, without letting the United States question him about Pan Am 103, the head of the State Department's counterterrorism unit blandly assured me that he had no idea who Mansour was and expressed no concern about the French action. 

 Maybe that is business as usual for counterterrorist heads, just as dunning a bereaved family is for the IRS and stroking clients is for assistant secretaries of state. Taken together, they are the acts of a government that has lost sight of the meaning of the terrorist crime of the century -- not just for the families but for America's sense of itself and its national honor. 

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.