The Professor of Truth to be read on BBC Radio 4

[From programme information on the BBC website:]

Award-winning author James Robertson's new novel is a powerful work of fiction inspired by some of the aspects and events surrounding the Lockerbie bombing.

Twenty-one years after his wife and daughter were murdered in the bombing of a plane over Scotland, Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, still does not know the truth of what really happened on that terrible night. Obsessed by the details of what he has come to call 'The Case', he is sure that the man convicted of the atrocity was not responsible and that he himself has thus been deprived not only of justice but also of any chance of escape from his enduring grief.

When an American intelligence officer, apparently terminally ill and determined to settle his own accounts before he dies, arrives on his doorstep with information about a key witness in the trial, a fateful sequence of events is set in motion.

The reader is Peter Firth. Written and abridged by James Robertson.

Producer: Kirsteen Cameron for the BBC.

Monday 24 June to Friday 28 June, 10.45-11.00pm

BBC Radio 4

Court finds Obeidi and Zway not guilty; Attorney General to appeal

[This is the headline over a report published late yesterday on the website of the Libya Herald.  It reads as follows:]

Qaddafi regime Foreign Minister Abdulati Al-Obeidi and Mohamed Al-Zway, the former secretary of the General People’s Congress, were found not guilty by a Tripoli court today. However, the Attorney General says he is appealing against the decisions and has ordered the two men to be returned to prison pending the appeal.

The verdict is seen as important because it shows the impartiality and independence of the Libya courts at a time when many voices outside the country claim that a fair trial is impossible in Libya, in particular in the case of Saif Al-Islam and Abdullah Senussi. The impossibility of a fair trial is one of the main planks of the International Criminal Court’s demand that Libya hand over both men to it.

Obeidi and Zway were first arrested in July 2011. Obeidi had served as Prime Minister from 1977 to 1979, then as nominal head of state from 1979 to 1981 and finally as Qaddafi’s last Foreign Minister after Musa Kusa fled in March 2011.

Zway, a close friend of Qaddafi from schooldays in Sebha, was Libya’s ambassador to the UK. In 2010 was chosen by the dictator to be Secretary-General of his General People’s Congress.

Their trial opened on 10 September last year.  They were accused of poor performance of their duties while in office and of maladministration, specifically wasting of public funds in respect of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The prosecution claimed that it was wrong to organise a compensation deal of $2.7 billion to the victims’ families in return for having Libya removed from the list of the states sponsoring terrorism.

It also alleged that Obeidi and Zway had paid out double the amount originally planned – a charge at variance with claims by others linked to the compensation plan that the $2.7 billiion was itself never fully paid.

At the opening of the case, the judge said that the deal “was a waste of public money especially when there was no guarantee the charges in the Lockerbie case would be dropped if the compensation was made”.

Just before their trial, the former Justice Minister Mohamed Allagi who is president of Libya’s National Council for Civil Liberties and Human Rights, claimed that the trial and those of other Qaddafi officials were “invalid” because the law was not being properly implemented.

The charges against Zway and Obeidi surprised many observers at the time as they implied that the two should have been more effective in serving the Qaddafi regime and that the Lockerbie deal should never have happened.

Both men consistently denied the charges.

Today’s “Not Guilty” verdict was greeted with jubilation from the two men’s families. “We are satisfied that the verdict proves that Libyan justice is transparent and equal,” a nephew of Obeidi was quoted saying at the end of the proceedings. 

[The Herald today contains a report (with a quote from me) on the acquittal.]

Lockerbie compensation: Libyan officials acquitted

[This is the headline over a report just published on the BBC News website. In its original form (it has now been slightly expanded), it read as follows:]

Two senior Libyan officials have been acquitted of "squandering public funds" by agreeing to pay $2.7bn (£1.7bn) in compensation to victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

Former Foreign Minister Abdelaaty al-Obeidi [a long-serving member of the Libyan Lockerbie committee] and former General People's Congress head Mohamed al-Zway [a long time ambassador in London] have been on trial since September 2012.

Col Muammar Gaddafi agreed to pay the compensation in 2003.

These are the first verdicts against his officials since he was ousted.

[I am delighted to hear of these acquittals. Between 1993 and 2010 I had numerous dealings with Messrs Obeidi and Zwai over the Lockerbie case.  I found both of them to be straightforward, honest and trustworthy.  They were two of the good guys of the Gaddafi regime, in my view.  The saga of their arrest and trial after the collapse of the old regime can be followed here.

I am saddened to discover the following addition to the BBC’s report made at 16.08:]

State prosecutor Sidiq al-Sour later told journalists that the pair would face separate charges over the "systematic repressive policies practised" by Col Gaddafi's government during the 2011 uprising which toppled him.

He said they would face charges such as forming armed criminal groups, inciting rape and illegally detaining individuals. 

[An Agence France Presse news agency report on the Star Africa website contains the following:]

A Libyan court acquitted two former aides of slain dictator Moamer Kadhafi on Monday of charges connected to the deadly 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.

“On behalf of all people, the court decides to acquit Abdelati al-Obeidi and Mohamed Belgassem al-Zwai of all charges against them,” the judge said to shouts of “Long live justice!” from the defendants’ families. (...)

It was unclear if Obeidi, a former foreign minister, and Zwai, ex-parliament speaker, would be released following their acquittal or if there were other charges outstanding.

“We are satisfied that the verdict proves that Libyan justice is transparent and equal,” said Sami, a nephew of Obeidi, as he left the courtroom.

The two men were accused of mismanaging public funds in compensating families of victims of the Lockerbie bombing.

The prosecution had charged that Obeidi and Zwai were responsible for negotiating settlements with the Lockerbie families and had paid out double the amount originally planned. 

[Further clarification can be found in this report from the news agency Reuters and in this report on the Middle East Online website.

I can find no recent information on the criminal proceedings against Abuzed Omar Dorda, another Gaddafi-era official heavily involved in seeking a resolution of the Lockerbie affair.]

Lockerbie forensics

Two years ago today I reproduced on this blog a substantial part of a long article by physicist and former Church of Scotland minister Dr John Cameron entitled Forensic report on the Lockerbie bombing. 

Although it came before the devastating disclosures about the dodgy timer fragment (PT35b) in John Ashton's Megrahi: You are my Jury, the article is still well worth reading, as are the comments that it generated from Rolfe, Vronsky and Richard Marquise amongst others.

Canadian PM uses Lockerbie to justify intervention in Libya

[The following are excerpts from a report published today on the website of the Toronto Star:]

Prime Minister [of Canada] Stephen Harper evoked the ideals of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher in a speech to British parliamentarians that stressed the need for shared vigilance in a world threatened by the “monsters” of terrorism. (...)

Above all, he told Members of Parliament and Lords, “Syria cannot be allowed to become another safe haven for the hydra-heads of terrorism.” (...)

The wide-ranging, 28-minute address to more than a hundred Members of Parliament and Lords recounted the risks British and Canadian soldiers have shared from World War II to Libya.

“Britons and Canadians have pursued what is right in the world, often at great cost,” Harper said.

In a reference to former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, he said Canada and Britain had used military might to save Libya from “massive and imminent slaughter at the hands of the psychotic architect of the Lockerbie horror.” That recalled the terrorist bomb that brought down a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.

[I really don't know whether to regard it as sad or as comforting that British Prime Ministers are not the only Prime Ministers to spout nonsense about Lockerbie.]

Further payments for Lockerbie victims?

[The following is an excerpt from a report published on Tuesday on the website of the Libya Herald:]

The government has asked the GNC to approve an additional  LD 15.25 billion for urgent items that did not feature in its original budget. Congress is expected to vote on the requests on Sunday.

“The prime minister Ali Zeidan asked for the additional budget for some item which were not included in the general budget of 2013,” Fareeha Barkawi, a member of the GNC finance committee told the Libya Herald. These covered compensation, urgent development projects and the security situation.

Barkawi explained that the proposed compensation included the settlement of salaries for workers at foreign companies obliged to abandon projects at the start of the revolution.  There were also payments ear-marked for Lockerbie victims and extra money for municipalities for rehabilitation schemes.

[It is not clear to me on what basis further payments for Lockerbie victims are envisaged as being due or necessary.]

Odd obituary of US Senator Frank Lautenberg

Today's edition of The Herald contains an obituary of US Senator Frank Lautenberg, who died on 3 June. There is only one good reason that I can think of for a Scottish newspaper to run an obituary of this minor American politician: his rôle on the periphery of the Lockerbie case. But The Herald's obituary never mentions this!

The architect of the cover-up of the Lockerbie bombing

[What follows is the text of a letter from Professor Francis A Boyle published today on the World Socialist Web Site:]

And be sure to add to your list of FBI cover-ups since 9/11/2001 the FBI covering up the DOD/CIA origins of the anthrax attacks in October 2001. See my book Biowarfare and Terrorism (2005). The retiring FBI Director Mueller was also the architect of the cover-up of the Lockerbie bombing, blaming Libya instead of whoever the real culprits were: see my book Destroying Libya and World Order (2013).  I would recommend your readers have a look at Swearingen, FBI Secrets (South End Press). There the author, a retired and decorated FBI agent, repeatedly calls the FBI “an American Gestapo.” The FBI/CIA also put me on all the US government’s terrorist watch lists when I refused to become an informant for them on my Arab and Muslim clients. QED.

JFM secretary's report on Justice Committee consideration of Megrahi petition

[What follows is the report by Justice for Megrahi’s secretary, Robert Forrester, on the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee’s consideration of JFM’s petition on 4 June:]

Most of you will already be aware of Tuesday's result, however, for those who do not, I enclose here various links to the event to put you in the picture. In brief, again, the Justice Committee is to be thanked for maintaining the status of our petition, PE 1370, as open. Moreover, they are also to be thanked for agreeing to write to both the Justice Directorate and the Crown Office on our behalf in order to establish a variety of factual information relating to the allegations we have lodged with Police Scotland. I will not go into the details of this here since it is all contained in our submissions to the Justice Committee and is self evident in the Committee's official report.

Clearly this is a positive result, however, and if not too late, the JFM Committee would like to enquire of the Justice Committee whether or not the letter to the Justice Directorate could be made a little more specific. Our feeling is that the form of the question is somewhat open in that it does not specify the laws that we have quoted as being the ones which provide the government with the power to farm out our allegations to an independent investigator: this being of particular relevance here where Mr MacAskill has, by offering us no alternative but to lodge our allegations with Police Scotland, created extraordinary and highly dubious circumstances in which the Crown Office and Police Scotland have become investigator, judge, jury and accused all rolled into one. Whilst there is a directness and simplicity to the from of words chosen by the Justice Committee in the letter, Mr MacAskill has a record of saying 'I 'beg to differ with JFM' in the interpretation of law. This occurred when we gave evidence on the Punishment and Review Act (shortly before the publication of the Statement of Reasons for Mr Megrahi's second appeal in The Herald). The fact is that his interpretation of the law was wrong then because the Scotland Act superseded the Data Protection Act, and Westminster had not seen fit to include the Data Protection Act in the Scotland Act as a reserved issue, therefore, the issue of its being raised at all with Westminster was indeed a red herring, as we said at the time. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that The Herald's actions rendered the whole business redundant, he got away with it on the day. We will be writing to the Justice Committee to see if it is possible to modify this current letter to the Justice Directorate, and I will inform you of the result as soon as I know it.

In the meantime, see here below the relevant links covering the Justice Committee's consideration of PE 1370. I have also included a link to an interview given by James Robertson immediately after the hearing. James's most recent novel, The Professor of Truth was launched in Edinburgh on Thursday to a packed house, and has been receiving enthusiastic and very well-deserved reviews. James has been extremely courageous with this work: a book which, whilst it stands firmly on its own two feet without the references to actual events, quite obviously poses a significant challenge for the author simply because it does have these associations. I strongly recommend it to you all.

The committee wishes to thank both Tessa Ransford and James for joining us at the hearing on Tuesday, and to all of you for your constant support. 

Parliament PE 1370 general references page:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/CurrentCommittees/44107.aspx

Parliament TV broadcast of 4th June JC consideration of PE 1370:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/newsandmediacentre/41408.aspx

JC official report:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28862.aspx?r=8193

Letter from JC to JD:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_JusticeCommittee/Inquiries/20130606_CG_to_Cab_sec.pdf

Letter from JC to COPFS

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_JusticeCommittee/Inquiries/20130606_CG_to_Crown_Agent.pdf

James Robertson BBC interview immediately subsequent to 4th June JC consideration of PE 1370:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0210pmg/The_Culture_Studio_with_Janice_Forsyth_04_06_2013/

New Dumfries police chief talks about her Lockerbie experience

[What follows is an excerpt from an article published today in the Scottish edition of The Sun:]

One of Scotland’s top cops told last night how she plunged into despair as she struggled to cope with the horror of the Lockerbie bombing.

Chief Superintendent Kate Thomson had just finished her FIRST shift as a rookie when Pan Am flight 103 smashed into the town.

The officer, then aged 21, was one of the first emergency workers to witness the hellish scene of devastation on December 21, 1988.

She was quickly tasked with converting the town hall into a makeshift mortuary — and identifying all 270 victims of the outrage.

It was a living nightmare that would take its toll years later as the traumatised young PC was engulfed by grief.

And, in a remarkably candid new interview, Ch Supt Thomson revealed: “I found it hard to get my head around how someone could do something like that.

“As soon as we arrived at Lockerbie we could see the flames.

“I had never experienced anything like that grief, that horror.”

In 1991, the nightmare finally caught up with her and she realised she needed counselling.

Ch Supt Thomson, now the area’s Divisional Commander for the new Police Scotland, said: “I struggled. I cried buckets. It was so heartbreaking to think of the loss of human life.

“But I was professional in seeking help. You are not a machine — you are a human being.

“I went for six counselling sessions and it helped. You have to hear yourself saying there was nothing you could have done.”

The young PC Thomson completed her first day on the beat at Dumfriesshire’s nearby Langholm police station just hours before the terror attack.

She was at home when two ashen-faced colleagues hammered on her door.

They raced to a car where the voice of a senior officer crackled over the radio.

She recalled: “He told us, ‘We have found the cockpit and it says Pan Am Maid of the Seas’.

“We knew then that it was a passenger flight and there would be fatalities on a large scale.”

As emergency crews descended on Lockerbie, she was handed the heartbreaking job of identifying the victims.

Many were American — with shocked relatives thousands of miles away across the Atlantic.

She said: “We were just running backwards and forwards getting information so we could let families know we had their loved ones. They had to know we were looking after them.”

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi — the only person convicted over the bombing — was freed in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died at home in Libya last May, aged 60.

Ch Supt Thomson said: “I have my own personal view of the people who did this dreadful thing.

“But, for me, it was the loss of life that was so hard to get my head around.”

After confronting her own pain, she rose through the ranks at Dumfries and Galloway Police.

[It might have been worth mentioning that allegations of criminal misconduct in the course of the Lockerbie investigation have been made by Justice for Megrahi and are currently under investigation by the former Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway Police, Pat Shearer.]

Minutes and Official Report of Justice Committee consideration of Megrahi petition

The minutes of the meeting of the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee held on 4 June contain the following (agenda item 5):  

“The Committee considered (...) current petitions and agreed in relation to Petition PE 1370 by Justice for Megrahi calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to open an independent inquiry into the 2001 Kamp van Zeist conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988, to keep the petition open and to write to the Scottish Government and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service seeking further information on issues raised by the petition”. 

The Official Report (Hansard) of the committee’s discussion of the petition can be read here (columns 2961 to 2964).  I would wish to draw particular attention to the contributions of John Finnie MSP.

Lockerbie is an existential nightmare

[My attention has just been drawn to a review by Mike Wade in The Times (behind the paywall) of James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth.  It reads in part:]

On December 21, 1988, a bomb aboard a flight from London to New York exploded 31,000ft above southern Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, and when the wreckage of Pan Am 103 hit the ground, 11 others perished in the village of Lockerbie. More died that evening than in any other terrorist attack in Britain.

For the bereaved, a long, dark journey had begun. They had to wait years for the lineaments of an inquiry to take shape and for suspects to be identified. When, in 2000, two Libyans came to trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, one walked free. The other, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, was identified by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

With al-Megrahi’s conviction, many of the bereaved found closure. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora had been killed, did not. Already well known as a spokesman for the relatives of the dead, he believed the convicted man had been framed, and embarked on a mission to exonerate him, and reveal, he hoped, the truth behind Flora’s murder. This much is fact, but in James Robertson’s latest fiction,The Professor of Truth, only some of the details and none of the names are precise. Lockerbie is never identified. Megrahi is renamed Khalil Khazar; Gauci becomes Martin Parroulet, a taxi driver; and Swire, a Worcestershire GP, is transformed into Alan Tealing, the academic referred to in the title of the book.

In his disclaimer, Robertson insists that these characters are “products of the imagination”, though of course Swire would be most unlikely to sue even if they weren’t. The novel sets out to undermine the verdict of the real trial and is profoundly humane in its examination of Tealing’s remorseless obsession with “the case”. By the end, it is pity we feel for him, not admiration.

Robertson is a great storyteller. His earlier works won comparisons with Walter Scott and James Hogg; And The Land Lay Still, a sprawling Scottish nationalist epic, paradoxically evoked the work of J B Priestley. This time around there are shades of Graham Greene in the eerie sense of menace that surrounds his central character. It is a tense and gripping read.

Set in the present, the narrative takes place over little more than a week. It opens in winter, when, out of nowhere, Nilsen, a CIA agent, appears at Tealing’s home. The American is terminally ill, but before he dies he hopes to provide a piece of information to help the Englishman find peace. Tealing at first resents his visitor, but when circumstances force him to act on this new lead, he sets off in pursuit of Parroulet, the crucial witness.

Tealing’s back story is revealed in contemplation and reminiscence. He recalls the week spent around the village in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, imagining the fate of his wife and daughter, plummeting through the night. “They would have fallen with everything else, suitcases, handbags, blankets, the paraphernalia of air travel, a precipitation of human lives and possessions. That terrible downpour filled my head. Day and night, it never ceased.”

When at last he manages to break a police cordon around the disaster area, he rescues a plastic peg from the heather, the kind of rotating clip that secures a passenger’s table. It stays on his desk at home for the rest of his life, a memento of his family’s last moments.

These details are beautifully imagined. Others are all too real: Parroulet’s inconsistent evidence, the pressure brought to bear on him by the police and, finally, the reward he takes for helping to jail a terrorist, are all traced from Gauci’s life. In the real world of the bombing, it was confirmed in 2007 that a reward of $2 million (£1.3 million) had been promised to the shopkeeper for his testimony at Camp Zeist. The revelation was one of the six grounds cited by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for granting al-Megrahi leave to appeal.

The case was never heard. Within a year the Libyan had cancer diagnosed. His lawyers claim that he agreed to drop his appeal in return for his release on compassionate grounds; he later died in Tripoli. Meanwhile, Gauci, like Parroulet in the novel, has gone to ground with his money, in Australia. Swire maintains a website, www.lockerbietruth.com, to keep the case in the public eye.

Robertson’s fiction shows that, in fact, Lockerbie is an existential nightmare for the people it left behind. The horror is summed up by the cynical CIA agent, who has the measure of Tealing’s restless 25-year quest, asking: “Were you even alive before the bomb went off?”

The Professor of Truth by James Robertson; Hamish Hamilton, 257pp, £16.99; e-book £10.

Dissatisfaction and disquiet

[The Waterstones Scottish book of the month is James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth. Here is what he writes about the novel on the Waterstones website:]

After my last novel, And the Land Lay Still – which fills nearly 700 pages, has a huge cast of characters and covers 60 years of social and political change – I was keen to write something more concise and closely focused. At the same time, I had become increasingly interested in, and disturbed by, the story of the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie 25 years ago this year, and its long and complicated aftermath. Gradually I came to realise that these two strands of thinking were not in competition but were drawing together. The Professor of Truth is the outcome of that process.

Like many other people, I can remember exactly what I was doing on the evening of 21st December 1988 as news of that terrible event broke. I was working as a bookseller in what was, at the time, the only Edinburgh branch of Waterstones, on George Street. The shop was crowded with customers buying Christmas presents. A colleague who mistakenly thought I was from the Lockerbie area phoned in to tell me there’d been a plane crash there. When I got home later, that was the only story on the news. The scale of the devastation, the fact that it had happened in Scotland, and the announcement a few days later that it had been caused not by bad weather or mechanical failure but by a bomb, made a deep and lasting impression.

The ramifications of the Lockerbie bombing have spread far beyond Scotland, of course. There has been much dissatisfaction and disquiet over the conduct of the investigation into the bombing, the process and outcome of the trial of the two men accused of carrying it out, the conviction of one of those men, and his subsequent release from prison, on compassionate grounds, eight years later. A year ago that man, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, died of cancer even as his country Libya was emerging from a bloody revolution. Yet despite his death and the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, blamed by the USA and UK for the bombing, serious questions about Lockerbie persist, and the affair continues to cast a long shadow over the Scottish justice system.

Julian Barnes has said that fiction is “telling the truth by telling lies”. One of the functions of a novel is to explore what it is to be human, and to do this more subtly than is possible through, for example, the hard facts or loaded opinions of journalism. I could have attempted a work of non-fiction about Lockerbie, but there is no shortage of such material on the subject, both in print and on-line. What I wanted to do instead was move away from the real event, and imagine the emotional and philosophical journey that might be taken by a man after losing his loved ones in a similar set of circumstances. In the novel, that journey also becomes a physical one: Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, receives a visit from an American former intelligence officer, and this prompts him to travel from snowbound Scotland to Australia, in one last attempt to unravel the truth about who killed his wife and daughter.

So The Professor of Truth is a novel which grew out of, rather than is about, the Lockerbie affair. I hope it is read, and is readable, as a novel, but if it can also help to expose some of the still hidden aspects of the real events that inspired it, that in my view would be no bad thing.

James Robertson, for Waterstones.com/blog

The Professor of Truth, by James Robertson, is available at your local Waterstones bookshop (http://bit.ly/Yu5LpV) or online at Waterstones.com (http://bit.ly/15x6PuV)