Was it banned in the US because Muammar Qaddafi was behind the production?
Banned in the US? Whatchu talkin' bout, Grumble?
It had a general release to theaters (I recall the ads on TV and the posters in the marquee, though I didn't see it at the time), was released on VHS and available at Blockbuster -- if anyone else around here is old enough to remember what Blockbsuter or VHS were -- and is now readily available on DVD. I might well be able to find it on Netflix, and given the reviews I have read today I might well go check it out tonight.
It is exceedingly difficult for a movie, or any form of media / literature to be "banned" in the US. Might be unpopular, but banning? Yikes. We have that whole "Congress shall make no law …abridging freedom of speech, or of the press" bit going on. Hard to get around -- can be done in extreme cases, but it isn't easy to do.
Anyone have an example of a movie that was actually banned in the US? Occasionally some content can get stopped at the border by US Customs. This happened with Joyce's novel Ulysses in the 1930s, due to assertions that it was pornographic. Some say it was banned, but in fact it would have been perfectly legal to print it and sell it (if you could get a license from the publisher), you just couldn't import it. So not actually "banned".
Even Karl Marx's Communist Manifest and Mao's Little Red Book were available at the heights of the Cold War. Despite frequent claims to the contrary, the typical reason for some politically unpopular literature or media content being hard to find is that they are commercial failures (note that "unpopular" and "commerical failure" are often correlated aspects).
Got nothing to do with banning.
All of that said, I do believe it was banned in Italy. But that's a different legal system, with a different constitution, and probably had less to do with Quadgadfly and more to do with the movie's presentation of Italian actions in that time.
Or so I expect. Could be wrong..
-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)