The demand for truth is more than rhetoric

This is the headline over the Saturday essay by The Herald's distinguished columnist, Ian Bell. Here are excerpts:

'I was in The Herald newsroom, a bit-player, on the night Pan Am Flight 103 fell on Lockerbie. I was back - still more reluctance - a decade ago. Sherwood Crescent; Rosebank Crescent; Dryfesdale Cemetery; the brooding silence at Tundergarth: in these honest, inconspicuous places the war on terror - selected, manipulated, the fount of a thousand lies - properly began. Poor Lockerbie.

'The "anniversary piece", as we call it, rarely illuminates anything much. Prose becomes a little purplish and reverential, but that tends only to distress the bereaved further. They know what happened. They would rather know why it happened, and whether those responsible have been punished. Twenty years after Lockerbie, the truth - like Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the only man convicted of the mass murder of 270 people - remains locked away.

'He didn't do it. If he was in any way involved he was neither the sole nor the principal actor. His country, Libya, is these days back in the oil-vending, terrorism-fighting fold. "Compensation" paid, it once again cuts Blair-brokered deals with the west. Syria, Iran, the CIA and geo-politics, US-style, have moved on. But the evidence against the man dying of stage-four prostate cancer in HM Prison Greenock remains flimsy, inconsistent, contradictory and deeply, as his lawyers might say, unsatisfactory.

'This is not meant as another rehearsal of numerous theories. Suffice it to say that we have been told often enough by members of the American security apparatus - ask the bereaved Dr Jim Swire, if you doubt me - that the truth will not be made available. But here's the thing: if Lockerbie marked the real beginning of the terror war, long before 9/11, why are truth and facts still so dangerous? Why are those commodities always, persistently, as a matter of routine, withheld? Democracies depend, at minimum, on disclosure. Why did we wage war in Iraq? Why the war in Afghanistan? It is attested that these have been noble, necessary causes, essential in the struggle against dark, implacable forces. Perhaps. Bombings in London, Bali or Madrid were not fictions. The attack on Glasgow airport was no fantasy. So why does my government fight so hard to prevent me from reading the minutes of the Cabinet meetings during which the occupation of Iraq was discussed? (...)

'I despise conspiracy theories. They make life too easy for the powerful, who much prefer to dismiss every inconvenient truth as fantasy. But when 20 years elapse and the truth of the Lockerbie massacre remains contestable, when six bloody years go by with Iraq selected as the useful evil-of-the-month, the demand for truth is more than mere rhetoric.

'It functions as a reminder, in fact, of the state we're in. We can call for facts, and insist on truth, and yet receive neither. We can whistle. In the dark.'