Was the 'Lockerbie bomber' framed?

[This is the heading over a long and detailed article on the consortiumnews website by Morgan Strong, a former professor of Middle Eastern History at the State University of New York and advisor on the Middle East for CBS News “60 Minutes.” The following are excerpts.]

President Barack Obama has said Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill was wrong to order the compassionate release of Ali al-Megrahi, a former Libyan Intelligence agent who was the only man convicted of the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, an appalling act of terrorism that killed all 259 passengers aboard and 11 more on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.

“We have been in contact with the Scottish government, indicating that we objected to this, and we thought it was a mistake," Obama declared.

The President, however, did not appear to be fully informed about the Megrahi case, perhaps understandable given the one-sided coverage that it has received in the U.S. news media. Left out of much of that coverage was the fact that in 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to reconsider Megrahi’s conviction in 2001 out of a strong concern that it had been a miscarriage of justice. (...)

The [judges'] principal stated reason for finding Megrahi guilty – while exonerating [Fhimah] – was the testimony of Toni Gauci, the owner of a clothing store, Mary’s House, in Malta. Gauci allegedly sold a shirt to Megrahi, the remnants of which were found with the shards of the suitcase that contained the bomb. The shirt was traced to Gauci’s shop.

The remainder of the case rested on a theory that Megrahi could have put the luggage on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to a connecting flight to London, where it was transferred onto Pan Am 103 bound for New York, a decidedly idiosyncratic way to undertake an act of terrorism given the random variables involved.

It would be a brilliant example of evil genius – or a case of bewildering stupidity – to assume that at a time of heightened scrutiny about possible airline terrorism that an unaccompanied bag would be mindlessly transferred from plane to plane to plane.

For the prosecution’s theory to be correct, one would have to assume that three separate airport security systems – at Malta, Frankfort and London – failed to give any serious scrutiny to an unaccompanied suitcase or to detect the bomb despite security officials being on the lookout for just such a threat. (...)

The case for the suitcase's hypothetical travels must also deal with the fact that, according to Air Malta, all the documented luggage on KM180 was collected by passengers in Frankfurt and did not continue in transit to London, and that two Pan Am on-duty officials in Frankfurt testified that no unaccompanied luggage was introduced onto Pan Am 103A, the feeder flight to London.

Plus, there was the problem with Gauci’s belated identification of Megrahi as the shirt-buyer 10 years after the fact (and only after Gauci had made contradictory IDs and given a physical description that didn’t match Megrahi). (...)

To get the costly sanctions lifted, Libya was required to accept "responsibility" for the Pan Am 103 bombing and pay about $1.8 billion in compensation to the victims’ families. Libya, however, never admitted that it actually had carried out the bombing and Megrahi continued to protest his innocence.

After Megrahi’s release last month as a humanitarian gesture because he is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, the U.S. news media, American politicians and some victims’ family members went into overdrive with their condemnations of what they called Megrahi’s “hero’s welcome” back to Libya.

The outrage in the United States might have been more measured if the U.S. press corps had reprised the fragility of the case against Megrahi, but his conviction was treated nearly universally as a closed case. (...)

There have been examples of the U.S. news media making brief references to Megrahi’s continued claims of innocence but the evidence of his innocence has been played down or ignored.

For instance, you have to read to the end of a recent New York Times article, which puzzles over why Qaddafi had “overreached” in welcoming Megrahi home, to spot this stunning revelation by Dirk Vandewalle, associate professor of government at Dartmouth.

“I remember talking to one of the judges from the panel that convicted him,” Vandewalle recalled. “He said there was enormous pressure put on the court to get a conviction.”

This comment from one of the Scottish judges – indicating that Megrahi was railroaded – was extraordinary, and it might have gone a long way to explain why the Libyans hailed Megrahi as a hero: because they consider him an innocent man wrongly imprisoned in large part because he was a Libyan. But the judge's admission was ignored by most of the U.S. news media.

Instead, the U.S. press corps joined the outrage over Megrahi’s release and published, without skepticism, a harsh attack from FBI Director Robert Mueller, who had been a U.S. prosecutor involved in the Pan Am 103 investigation. (...)

However, the intensity of Mueller’s protest may have been meant more to obscure the weakness of the case against Megrahi and to further discourage the U.S. press corps from reexamining the evidence, including the possibility that other terrorist elements in the Middle East may have been responsible -- and that the FBI had bungled the whole affair.

Despite the fact that warnings of a possible terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 were circulating in 1988, the FBI and CIA failed to take effective action, especially regarding the chief suspect, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or the PFLP-GC headed by Ahmed Jabril.

At the time, there was strong evidence that Iran was desperate to get revenge for the destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988, by a missile fired from the American destroyer, the U.S.S. Vincennes. Though excused by U.S. officials as an unfortunate mistake, the missile killed 290 people aboard, including 66 children.

The PFLP-GC allegedly received several million dollars from Iranians to get revenge. The evidence of this Iranian/PFLP-GC collaboration included interviews with PFLP-GC intelligence officer, Major M. Tunayb [RB: probably means Major Khalil Tunayb] who identified one of the group’s members as the person who planted the bomb in a suitcase that was carried onto Pan Am 103.

Knowledge of this complicated history among Europeans is one of the reasons that there has been a more subdued reaction to the Megrahi release in Europe than in the United States, where the fury has bordered on hysteria. (...)

As for the U.S. news media, it clearly finds selling outrage and pain a lot easier than confronting the difficult issues raised by the Megrahi case. Some journalists also might cringe at the possibility of being labeled “Libyan apologists” or “conspiracy theorists” if they challenge the official story.