[The following is an excerpt from a review on the Morning Star website by Brendan Montague of the recently-published history of MI5 The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew.]
The secret service has enjoyed billions of pounds of funding since its formation 100 years ago and would like us to think that it has hired the finest young men and occasional woman from Oxbridge.
However, an agent with access to a local lending library and a newsagent would have better intelligence than MI5, if you are to believe anything in Christopher Andrew's 1,032-page tome.
For a start, even I could tell them that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi most likely did not place the bomb on the Pan Am Boeing 727 which crashed into Lockerbie in December 1988.
The evidence against him is weak even before you consider the millions in CIA cash paid to witnesses.
It's baffling how Andrew can keep a straight face while writing: "No significant hard evidence pointed towards Libya until some fragments of clothing classed as 'category one blast-damaged' and therefore from inside the case containing the bomb, were eventually traced to an outlet in Malta, where the shopkeeper recalled selling the clothing to a man resembling a suspect intelligence officer."
This does in fact sum up the prosecution case and should never have troubled a judge because of the self-evident weakness. Just read the parts of the sentence before and after "therefore."
What the MI5 official history fails to state is that the shopkeeper was paid millions by the CIA and his initial description did not resemble Megrahi in the slightest.
The evidence was, literally, threadbare.
"Intelligence" and Criminal Investigation are two different things. The former is often the art of politically motivated deceit.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the relationship between MI5 and the Lockerbie case? In the official version of events none at all although from David Leppard's book we learn that a couple of MI5 agents would occassionally visit the LICC.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Christopher Andrew's book features Stella Rimington's boast in the 1994 Dimbleby Lecture Security and Democracy in the Modern World that "it was MI5 who identified the two Libyan culprits"?
As I have pointed out before by happy coincidence the identification of Libya as responsible for the Lockerbie bombing led to the demand made subsequent to the imposition of UN sanctions that;
"Libya cease all support and aid to the Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and provide the British authorities with all available information regarding that relation".
(See Lockerbie - Criminal Justice or War By Other Means at http://e-zeecon.blogspot.com)