Wednesday 25 November 2009

Convicted Lockerbie bomber probably not guilty—so who is the real criminal?

[This is the headline over an article in the current issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs by the magazine's publisher, Ambassador Andrew I Killgore. The following are excerpts.]

On Aug 21 Scotland freed Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi—convicted under Scottish law at a special court in The Netherlands of destroying Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on [December] 21, 1988. Killed were 259 persons, including 189 Americans on board and 11 people on the ground. The terminally ill Megrahi, after dropping his second appeal, was released on compassionate grounds. Back in Libya, he continues to protest his innocence. (...)

At the Lockerbie trial so-called “key witness” [Tony] Gauci would identify Megrahi as the purchaser of certain items of clothing found at the crash site that Gauci claimed were purchased at his shop in Valetta, Malta. But on the witness stand Gauci proved to be a flop at identification. An FBI officer, Harold Hendershot, called to the witness stand to bolster Gauci’s testimony, also appeared to lack credibility.

Another puzzling aspect of the Lockerbie trial was that, despite the prosecution’s insistence that the bombing could only have been a two-man job, Megrahi’s co-defendant, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted. No explanation was ever forthcoming. A middle-aged American (judging by his accent) attending the trial was overheard by this writer on a BBC broadcast expressing uncertainty about the testimony: “I wonder who killed our relatives?”

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the crash, is sure that Gauci identified the wrong man. Swire is an unusual man. As an officer in the British army, he was trained in the use of plastic explosives. After completing his army national service, he worked for the BBC as an electronics engineer before studying medicine and becoming a practicing physician. Dr Swire cannot accept as credible the Lockerbie trial’s technical details about the explosives that brought down Pan Am 103. He became a spokesman for relatives of British nationals killed in the crash. Overwhelmingly these relatives do not believe that Megrahi is guilty.

Dr Swire is convinced that shopkeeper Gauci identified an innocent man as the bomber. In a Dec 27, 2007 e-mail from Swire to this writer, Swire quoted Gauci as saying that Megrahi was “like” the man who bought clothes in his shop, but that the age and height were “very different.” Nevertheless, the Scottish judges accepted Gauci’s testimony.

Gauci reportedly now lives in Australia with a $2 million (some reports say $4 million) reward from the American government. According to the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” Web site, since its inception in 1984 the program has paid $77 million to more than 50 people.

But the biggest reason for questioning the validity of the “Libya-did-it” scenario is the sheer improbability of placing a bomb on a plane in Valetta, Malta, bound for Frankfurt, Germany, there to be offloaded on a second plane bound for London, where it would be offloaded on a third plane bound for New York, to explode 38 minutes later. Common sense would dictate a far more simple scheme: load the bomb aboard a plane in London with a simple pressure mechanism to go off when the plane was safely out to sea (...)

In the aforementioned e-mail, from which I am free to quote, Dr Swire said the Lockerbie court heard of a “specialized timer/baroceptor bomb mechanism” made by the PFLP-GC in the Damascus suburbs. This device would explode within 30 to 45 minutes after takeoff, but was stable indefinitely at ground level. The court heard that these devices could not be altered. “Yet the court believed,” Swire wrote, “that Megrahi ‘happened’ to set his Swiss timer in such a way that it went off in the middle of the time window for the Syrian device, surviving changes of planes at Frankfurt and London.”

Dr Swire told the BBC News of Aug 20, 2009 that the prosecution at the Lockerbie trial failed to take into consideration the reported break-in of the Pan Am baggage area at Heathrow in the early morning hours of the day of Pan Am 103’s doomed flight.

Many of the British relatives of Pan Am 103 victims have come to believe that the bomb was loaded in London, and thus that Megrahi could not be guilty. These relatives and Dr Swire were opposed to Megrahi’s withdrawing his second appeal on the grounds that further evidence would come out that might have pointed to the real culprit.

In a Jan 4, 2008 e-mail, Dr Swire warned that “there is some deep secret hidden in this tragedy which evokes virulent responses...when questions are raised.”

In an Aug 20, 2009 e-mail response to this writer’s inquiry, Dr Swire said “that it appears that the Iranians used the PFLP-GC as mercenaries in this ghastly business.” According to this theory, held by many who doubt Megrahi’s guilt, including CounterPunch’s Alexander Cockburn, Iran hired the PFLP-GC to avenge the July 3, 1988 shooting down by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian Airbus passenger plane, killing 290 passengers, including 66 children. The US ship’s officers later received medals for heroism in combat.

Having lost his daughter in the Pan Am crash, and as an expert in explosives, Dr Swire is uniquely qualified to examine the Pan Am tragedy. America and its mainstream media did not reflect credit on themselves by refusing to acknowledge questions about Megrahi’s guilt.

Dr Swire may well be right in blaming the PFLP-GC for the tragedy. But this writer still has his doubts — because the ineptness of the trial and Washington’s fanaticism in pushing such a flimsy case against Libya leave an impression that it must be covering up for the real criminals. Somehow it seems unlikely that the US would go to such lengths to protect Iran, much less the PFLP-GC.

10 comments:

  1. This article was OK but I would have expected some deeper analysis of the political considerations that led to the creation of the Libyan solution.

    I certainly agree with the final paragraph but I doubt Mr Killgore would have considered that this arose because agencies of the US Government colluded in the bombing.

    p.s.Was Tony Gauci's first name really Abdulmajid? (As stated in the article).

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  2. It looks as if Mr Killgore has conflated Tony Gauci and the Libyan defector (and "star witness" at the Zeist trial) Abdul Majid Giaka.

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  3. WRMEA - probably hinting at Israel at the end. Kidding. I think.

    Not the most informed article but I hope it brings news to someone mew.

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  4. Oh yes, I see what you mean. That's ridiculous, but I've seen a few paranoid nutters go that route.

    I think the US was trying to protect the PFLP-GC because it would have led to stuff like Khreesat being a Jordanian (and hence US) asset who was freed in October because of this and went on to bomb PA103. And maybe stuff about a drug courier route, maybe connected to hostage negotiations, even if that didn't have any connection to the bomb going on.

    Maybe. All that has at least been speculated.

    Then there is the point about the PFLP-GC working for Iran, and the political desirability of not going after Iran.

    There are plenty possible motives for the US wanting to leave Jibril and his mates alone, and not understanding that shows once again how superfical the author's grasp of the affair really is.

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  5. Certainly Rolfe knows that when we look closer at it it is too simple to speak about "the US" wanting anything.
    In the Lockerbie game we can assume that there were bloody rivalries between and inside the various agencies, CIA, DIA, DEA and so on. And the FBI was the last ass of the regiment.

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  6. I bet he did mean Israel. (Or perhaps South Africa!)

    The worst article I ever read on Lockerbie was by a journalist called Russell Warren Howe whose article was reprinted in the Guardian in 1999.(The on-line version does not do this nonsense justice.)

    This was littered with ludicrous errors i.e. "Gannon and his team took the Air Malta flight from Valetta to Frankfurt", "Megrahi's barrister Alastair Duff" and "the Vincennes crew thought it was an Iranian MiG".

    This piece concluded on the bais of some convoluted "false flag" logic and no evidence whatsoever that Israel was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing (the original article was printed in the Arabic weekly Al-Wazak.)

    Russell Warren Howe died in December 2008. A tribute to him was published in the March 2009 edition of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs written by Andrew I.Killgore.

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  7. There is no convincing hint that points to any Israeli involvement. Though: It is unbelievable that the Mossad did not know anything about the Lockerbie desaster - ahead of the crime or thereafter. And we can assume that they cooperated with the Americans in this case. Therefore it is interesting that even the word Mossad is not mentioned one single time in the Zeist trial.
    Could it be that the documents that are kept secret due to "security reasons" by the prosecution are Mossad documents?
    I would say yes.

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  8. Also it's strange that the US/UK aren't covertly through the media putting the blame on Iran when it would be to their interest to do so.

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  9. I do not think it is in the interest of the Obama administration to create a new front line additional to the existing.
    But certainly it would be in line with the Israeli government politics to point to Iran.

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  10. Adam - During the Gulf War and beyond Israel was pro-Iran. Indeed the "Iran-Contra" affair arose from North and his pro-Israeli, pro-Iranian associates hijacking or piggybacking the Israeli operation to supply weaponry to Iran. I suppose Israel's interest was in prolonging the conflict.

    "There is no convincing hint that points to any Mossad involvement"

    This may be true but there are five or six Jews involved in the case (depending on the true identity of "Joe Vialls") all of whom had a real or purported relationship to the "intelligence community". Two (or three) claimed to have been former Mossad officers. (LeWinter's modus operandi was to claim to be a CIA officer.)

    The late Ian Spiro (nephew of an MI6 officer Edward Spiro) purported to be a "deep cover agent" in Beirut working for British and American intelligence. I presume he was known to the Israelis. Following his death Con Coughlin wrote of "wild allegations Spiro betrayed the travel plans of the US agents who perished at Lockerbie"!

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