Tuesday 24 May 2011

Gareth Peirce: “layers and layers of deceit” in Pan Am 103 case

[Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm has just published on its website a long interview with Gareth Peirce, the solicitor for the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, and a related news item. What follows is an excerpt from the latter.]

Peirce says that the construction and maintenance of the discredited case against Megrahi has required active participation from those at all levels of the criminal justice system, with both tacit and overt support from the top of the political hierarchy.

“In the most notorious cases, everyone played their part, absolutely everybody,” she says.

“A big part of the blame lies within those who form the criminal justice system. It looks as if in the prosecution of the Lockerbie case, the defendants met the same fate, even to the extent of the same personnel featuring, in the person of the forensic scientists.”

The principal forensic analyst, Thomas Hayes, employed by the Crown to testify against Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was the same discredited analyst who was proven to have fabricated his evidence in the manufactured case against the Guildford Four.

He and Alan Feraday testified that the key forensic evidence, a fragment of circuit board, survived the explosion of Pan Am 103 and left traces of clothing connected to a shop in Malta. The owners of that shop provided the identification of Megrahi to the court, and were later found to have been paid in millions of dollars for their testimony. This testimony has been widely discredited by EU explosives consultant John Wyatt and others who claim that such an thing is not possible in physics.

“That was the most shocking revelation to me,” Peirce says.

“Exactly the same forensic scientists who produced the wrongful conviction of Guiseppe Conlon, the Maguire family and of Danny McNamee, and had been stood down for the role they played. Yet here they were. Without them, there wouldn’t have been a prosecution, far less a conviction in Lockerbie.

“What shocked me most was that I thought that all that had been gone through on Guildford and Birmingham, the one thing that had been achieved was that nobody would be convicted again on bad science. But yet in the Lockerbie case, it isn’t just the same bad science, it is the same bad scientists.”

In July 2007 former MEBO employee Ulrich Lumpert swore an affidavit claiming that he had manufactured the crucial circuit board evidence and passed it to named individuals charged with investigating the Pan Am 103 case during 1989.

“All of this is screaming out for an inquiry. The ingredients that make up the prosecution’s case are really so rotten. They can’t and they shouldn’t sustain the weight of a presumed safe finding. You can see that they are utterly contaminated. They have no integrity. The forensic findings lack all the ingredients that should make them safe. The continuity of exhibits is all over the place. The only other pillar on which it is held up is this non-identification. It is just a catastrophe. The whole edifice is rotten, and it is astonishing it was ever stood up in the first place.”

4 comments:

  1. MISSION LOCKERBIE, 2011, doc.1445.rtf. (google translation, german/english):

    The European Union with a professional liar co-operates ?

    Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the head of the rebels' provisional administration had its position in the UK and later with EU received through a malicious lie ?
    Interview on Swedish Newspaper "Expressen" on 23. Feb. 2011, quoted Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, "I have proof that Muammar Gadhafi personally gave the order about Lockerbie" ...

    He told "Expressen" Gadhafi gave the order to Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, "To hide it, he (Gadhafi) did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland", Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.

    Rebel Jalil was between time in France with President Nicolas Sarkozy,
    in Great Britain by Prime Minister David Cameron and in Alitalia by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
    Why Mustafa Abdul Jalil not gave the world answer over the evidence about the PanAm 103 Bombing ?

    by Edwin Bollier, MEBO Ltd. Telecommunication Switzerland, URL: www.lockerbie.ch

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  2. Gareth Peirce said: "Scotland and England both say the other is the responsible jurisdiction, even when it is very clear that you cannot compartmentalise responsibility for what went wrong."

    There are in fact four jurisdictions in the case against Libya: Scotland, England, France and the United States.

    Examine UN Security Council Resolution 731 of 21 January 1992, which expressed its concern over the results of investigations into the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and UTA Flight 772 over Niger, and which implicated officials from the Government of Libya.

    Take a look at Lockerbie: CIA 'fitted up' Gaddafi at the United Nations.

    It then becomes clear that "the same bad scientists" (Feraday and Hayes) are simply the tools of Thomas Thurman of the FBI Laboratory, of the FBI's chief investigator Richard Marquise, of the CIA's Vince Cannistraro, of former US Ambassador at the UN and former Director of the CIA, President Bush Sr, and of Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

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  3. In 1999, the Headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency located in Langley, Virginia, was named the 'George Bush Center for Intelligence' as a reminder that former President George Bush Sr was Director of Central Intelligence and head of the CIA from 30 January 1976 to 20 January 1977.

    At the naming ceremony, former President Bush Sr said: "I left here some 22 years ago after a limited tenure, and my stay here had a major impact on me. The CIA became part of my heartbeat back then, and it's never gone away."

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  4. Former President Bush's quickening of his CIA empathetic heartbeats aside (and thank you for that) - something(s) is/are rancid about this whole affair.

    Upfront and so I mislead nobody, I am a now foreign based Scot of 22+ years trained in philosophy, education and linguistics. I am also a Workers Party of Scotland member and I am not trained in the "black arts" of the law and its casuistical subsidiaries. However. It strikes me that something is and has been seriously and fundamentally afooter here from the "get go".

    It has the stink of a shite overflowing midden (please excuse my language).

    Perhaps or even indeed, the First Minister - as part of the drive towards independence and sitting down as an equal at the world's table - needs to implement a gutting of the legal establishment at home: A contemporary version of the Napoleonic evisceration of the moribund and corrupt but in consultation with the whole body politic in Scotland in tandem with sourcing best international legal philosophy and praxis as well as the extant versions of Brehon law?

    The alternative is scandal foul and bogging the nostrils with its vomit inducing stench.

    Kindest best wishesp

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