Friday 10 June 2011

The Libyan myth

[This is the heading over a section of a long article entitled Three deadly war myths on the Consortium News website by American investigative journalist Robert Parry. The section reads as follows:]

Today’s third deadly myth is Washington’s certainty that Libyan dictator Gaddafi was responsible for the Pan Am 103 attack and thus must be removed from power by force and possibly by assassination.

The alternative option of taking Gaddafi up on his offers of a cease-fire and negotiations toward a political settlement has been rejected out of hand by both the Obama administration and by nearly all the influential pundits in Washington, in part, because of the Pan Am case.

Repeatedly citing Gaddafi’s killing of Americans over Lockerbie, the US debate has centered on the need to ratchet up military pressure on Gaddafi and even chuckle over NATO’s transparent efforts to murder the Libyan leader (and his family members) by bombing his homes and offices.

The Obama administration is sticking with this violent course of action even though Libyan civilians continue to die and the cutoff of Libyan oil from the international markets has exacerbated shortages in supplies, thus contributing to the higher gas prices that are damaging the US economic recovery.

But President Obama apparently sees no choice. After all, the conventional wisdom is that Gaddafi is guilty in the Pan Am 103 case. All the leading US news organizations, such as The New York Times, and prominent politicians, such as Sen John McCain, say so.

“The blood of Americans is on [Gaddafi’s] hands because he was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103,” declared Sen McCain, R-Arizona, after an early trip to rebel-held Benghazi.

However, the reality of the Pan Am case is much murkier – and some experts on the mystery believe that Libyans may have had nothing to do with it.

It is true that in 2001, a special Scottish court convicted Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi for the bombing. But the judgment appears to have been more a political compromise than an act of justice. Another Libyan was found not guilty, and one of the Scottish judges told Dartmouth government professor Dirk Vandewalle about “enormous pressure put on the court to get a conviction." [RB: The High Court information officer, Elizabeth Cutting, has denied that this ever happened.]

Megrahi’s conviction assuaged the understandable human desire to see someone punished for such a heinous crime, albeit a possibly innocent man.

In 2007, after the testimony of a key witness against Megrahi was discredited, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to reconsider the conviction as a grave miscarriage of justice. However, that review was proceeding slowly in 2009 when Scottish authorities released Megrahi on humanitarian grounds, after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

Megrahi dropped his appeal in order to gain the early release, but that doesn’t mean he was guilty. He has continued to assert his innocence and an objective press corps would reflect the doubts regarding his curious conviction.

The Scottish court’s purported reason for finding Megrahi guilty – while acquitting his co-defendant Lamin Khalifa Fhimah – was the testimony of Toni Gauci, owner of a clothing store in Malta who allegedly sold Megrahi a shirt, the remnants of which were found with the shards of the suitcase that contained the bomb.

The rest of the case rested on a theory that Megrahi 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 unlikely way to undertake an act of terrorism given all the random variables involved.

Megrahi would have had to assume that three separate airport security systems – at Malta, Frankfort and London – would fail 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.

As historian William Blum recounted in a Consortiumnews.com article after Megrahi’s 2001 conviction, “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.”

There also were problems with Gauci’s belated identification of Megrahi as the shirt-buyer a decade after the fact. Gauci had made contradictory IDs and had earlier given a physical description that didn’t match Megrahi. Gauci reportedly received a $2 million reward for his testimony and then moved to Australia, where he went into retirement.

In 2007, the Scottish review panel decided to reconsider Megrahi’s conviction after concluding that Gauci’s testimony was unbelievable. And without Gauci’s testimony, the case against Megrahi was virtually the same as the case against his co-defendant who was acquitted.

However, after Megrahi’s conviction in 2001, more international pressure was put on Libya, which was then regarded as the archetypal “rogue” state. Indeed, it was to get onerous economic sanctions lifted that Libya took “responsibility” for the Pan Am attack and paid reparations to the victims’ families even as Libyan officials continued to deny guilt.

In April, there was some excitement over the possibility that Gaddafi would be fingered personally as the Pan Am 103 mastermind when former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa defected. He was believed to be in charge of Libyan intelligence in 1988 and thus almost certainly in the know.

Moussa Koussa was questioned by Scottish authorities but apparently shed little new light on the case. He was allowed to go free after the interview. Very quickly the press interest over Moussa Koussa faded away, except for the recurring assumption in some Western press articles that he must have implicated Gaddafi.

Despite the doubts about the Pan Am 103 case — and the tragic human and economic toll from the Libyan war – the US news media and politicians continue to treat Libya’s guilt as a flat fact. It appears that no big-time journalist or important official has even bothered to read the Scottish court’s bizarre judgment regarding Megrahi’s 2001 conviction.

Instead, NATO’s bombing campaign against Libyan targets continues, including the recent leveling of tents where Gaddafi greets foreign dignitaries and the destruction of Libyan TV.

Rather than making war policies based on serious factual analysis, the United States and NATO continue to be guided by politically pleasing myths. It is a recipe for an even-greater disaster and unnecessary deaths.

25 comments:

  1. Professor Black.

    As a lay person with little knowledge of Law and, thankfully, even less experience; my expectation is limited to its ability and commitment to dispense justice.

    My curiosity on Lockerbie was raised after I read a report of the UN observer, which lead to my downloading the findings of the trial and appeals.

    Without going into to detail I can only say that having read all three and trying to find logic in each let alone in relation to each other made me wonder where, let alone if, justice came in to any of the process.

    In lay terms - every piece of evidence was not only in the main circumstantial, but also had the ring of being contrived.

    Most of the controversial elements are now well known and commented on, but there were a few that occurred to me at the time which, as far as I'm aware, have never featured.

    The first is I found no reference to any of the physical evidence - clothing, suitcase,circuit board etc being tested for DNA? I accept at the time of the act such tests were untried, but by the time of the court case testing was fairly well established.

    The second has to do with the randomness inherent in the so called 'route' the case is alleged to have taken. My query relates to the size and capability of the bomb. Specifically, had it the capability, wherever it was placed, to down the aircraft? And if not. would that not place greater relevance on the unlocked door(break in)at Heathrow?

    That said - would the Scottish judiciary admit their fallibility even if the CIA director at the time admitted he had had the script they were presented with written and edited?

    Because, stripped of all the platitudinous esoteric jargon, it simply reeks of a carve up.

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  2. Nobody ever mentions DNA. I would imagine that the severely damaged state of the items recovered from the bomb suitcase might hve made any such testing very questionable anyway.

    Your point about the power of the device is a very good one, and one I have speculated about myself. We have never been told, by the explosives experts, just how close the suitcase would have had to be to the skin of the plane to produce a fatal result. We'd need to know that to assess the probability that a suitcase randomly placed when coming off the conveyor from the feeder flight would actually do the trick. My guess is that the chance is significantly less than 50%.

    Put that on top of the chance that the suitcase might have been pulled out for inspection at the Frankfurt x-ray screening (because of the radio) and the bomb spotted (should have happened, actually), the chance that the case might have been misrouted and exploded harmlessly in a luggage store somewhere, and the chance that PA103 might have missed its slot and still been on the tarmac at 7.03 (when again the explosion would have been harmless), and the whole thing is beyond brain-dead.

    What was the probability that a booby-trapped suitcase would get past Maier, the Frankfurt x-ray man? As it turned out he was poorly trained and had decided that any radio with a visible plug was safe, but did the terrorists know that? There should have been a (much) better than 90% chance the bomb would have been spotted at Frankfurt.

    What was the probability the suitcase might have been mis-routed? I don't know, but given the popular reputation of airline baggage handling systems, far from negligible on an unaccompanied three-flight hop.

    What the the probability that PA103 might have missed its slot? Again I don't know, but it damn near did, twice - once when the feeder flight was late, and they only just managed to get the pasengers and luggage transferred in time, and a second time when a passenger with checked-in luggage was a no-show at the gate. They solved that one by just taking off without him, probably to this day the luckiest man in known space.

    And if the suitcase had such a charmed life that it successfully negotiated all that, then it was essential for the tarmac loading team to put it on the right side of the container, and the right way round, or it would have been just another damp squib.

    The judges hand-waved all this away by saying, well, the cases could sometimes be rearranged by the tarmac baggage handlers, so putting the thing in the container at Heathrow woudln't have offered the terrorists any advantage anyway.

    That is just ridiculous.

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  3. To expand on a point I made above, there is another little wrinkle there that I haven't seen discussed, and that is the orientation of the case.

    The "trial loading" of an identical suitcase with identical clothes and an identical radio, produced in court, is wrongly packed. Photographs show the radio centrally placed along the back of the open case. That is of course impossible, given the known position of the explosion a few centimetres into the overhang section of the container, and the fact (also known) that the case handle was to the back, not the side.

    The case must have been packed with the radio along one side, asymmetrically. This is a very unintuitive way to pack such a case, and not what you would expect someone to do who had no control over the final placement of the case in the container. However, it is exactly what someone would do if he knew he had control over the orientation of the case in the actual container.

    Given all we know about Heathrow, and about the luggage on the plane, what was the case Bedford saw if it wasn't the bomb?

    The court chose to believe it was an innocent piece of luggage belonging to a passenger - but the detective who studied the passengers and their luggage gave evidence to the FAI that no passenger on that plane had a brown hardshell suitcase. Funnily enough, he wasn't called to give evidence at Zeist. I wonder why? If he had been, surely the court coudn't have gone along with the theory that the case Bedford saw was legitimate passenger luggage - that just happened to be a clone of the bomb bag, seen in almost the exact position of the bomb bag, but subsequently moved elsewhere, oh and then it vanished.

    You couldn't make this up.

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  4. Rolfe -I accept the possibilities you outline regarding DNA. But my argument is if any were found and it was not matched to Megrahi, especially on the suitcase - where if memory serves, they claim to have recovered the handle. Or any of the clothing where, despite the degree of damage, they claim to have formed a surprisingly comprehensive inventory even before the uncovered the alleged source? Surely, if only for the purpose of elimination, a DNA check is required.

    Further, regarding the Gauci (of the doubtful memory) evidence, not one mention of checking his books, sales, orders, till receipts, bank records etc. Malta, may or may not be lax in these matters but I doubt if they run a completely record or paperless administration.

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  6. Because, stripped of all the platitudinous esoteric jargon, it simply reeks of a carve up."

    Crinkly.......and that's before you even consider the SCCRC report. The report MacAskill ensured couldn't be published thanks to his swift use of a cheeky wee piece of legislation known as a statutory instrument whereby he added "consent" clauses. Thus the SCCRC was gagged.

    We know for sure that the intended payment, by the US, of millions of dollars to the Gauci brothers, for testimony, had it been known to a Scottish Court, would have rendered both "witnesses" unreliable. Maybe we should call it testimoney, but for now let's just call it bribery ; )

    I grow weary listening to Salmond and MacAskill waxing lyrical about this great "justice" system of ours. In truth, it is bent, it is corrupt and the principle of justice itself does not live there.

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  7. Certainly, bribing Tony (and Paul) should have brought the case to a screeching halt. But I'm slightly uneasy with majoring too much on the bribery. It smacks, to some extent, of a technicality.

    People might say, but Tony picked Megrahi out, twice. So they shouldn't have offered or paid him money, but he still recognised Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes.

    Well of course he didn't. That has to be explained, carefully and patiently, and the bribery only added as the icing on the cake.

    I think, anyway.

    By the way, what do people think of this explanation, just of the recognition part, not the date of purchase.
    www.vetpath.co.uk/lockerbie/photoid.pdf

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  8. Going back to what Crinkly said....

    I doubt if DNA was ever a realistic prospect, actually. I'm not a molecular biologist nor do I play one on TV, but I think back in 1988 nobody really thought DNA could be recovered from something like a suitcase handle, or clothes someone hadn't even been wearing but had only handled. DNA then was something you got from body fluids - blood, semen or maybe saliva.

    So maybe any specimen that might have been a suspect's body fluid might have been specially preserved back then, but not something the suspect might merely have touched. The concept of "touch DNA" is a lot more recent, along with low copy number and techniques like that. And years later, I doubt if there would be any possibility of the items in question having been preserved in such a way that valid touch DNA could now be recovered.

    There were receipts and orders from Mary's House though. The delivery date of the checked Yorkie trousers was 16th November, giving the earliest possible date the purchase could have taken place. Tony thought he sold the man two pairs of pyjamas, which were the last ones he had. He ordered more the next day. There was an order for more pyjamas recorded on 24th November.

    But hey, said the judges, there could quite easily have been another order on 8th December, nobody produced any evidence there wasn't! Winter pyjamas sell well at that time of year.

    Yes, your Lordships, but 8th December was a public holiday, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception I think. The shop was shut. That was raised in connection with Tony's impression that the sale had occurred midweek.

    Sometimes I could take the Noble Lords and just bash their heads together.

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  9. If the authorities were still looking for a conviction on this case they would be examining all the evidence using the new DNA techniques (low copy number available since 1999) and dealing with whether any positive result could be presented in court as a separate matter.
    But they're not looking for a conviction, are they?

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  10. I don't think it is correct to say that the "Scottish review panel" concluded in 2007 that Tony Gauci's evidence was "unbelievable".

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  11. It could be argued the payment to the witness was more in the light of 'witness protection' than outright bribe!

    My reference to the books was more on the lack of an audit trail, rather than the chance of isolated stock orders which can be played either way.

    I appreciate the difficulties regarding the chances of a hit with DNA, but they have relatively few items which would need to checked and if they were to find traces which connected to Megrahi then the books could be quietly closed and the authorities vindicated. If they find none at all, nothings changed.

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  12. It could be argued the payment to the witness was more in the light of 'witness protection' than outright bribe!

    I'm sure it "could be argued"! That's exactly what the US authorities say. However, that isn't how it comes over at all. It's not, don't be afraid to tell us what you know, we can arrange for you to disappear. It's an offer of lots of money if Tony can help the inquiry.

    It was paid from the US "Rewards for Justice" programme, which is supposed to encourage people to come forward with evidence. Tony didn't come forward, he was tracked down by the police. Since when has being identified as a witness in a case and co-operating with the police been a meal ticket for life?

    Also, he didn't disappear. He was on TV this week, completely non-disappeared.

    My main objection to concentrating on the bribery is that it leaves open the view that Tony picked Megrahi out anyway, so why does it matter if he was paid. Tony performed a "Clever Hans" trick to pick out the odd-looking photo that was fairly obviously the one they were interested in, and then at Zeist he merely agreed to the identity of a man he had learned to recognise from many press photographs and possibly video interviews.

    My reference to the books was more on the lack of an audit trail, rather than the chance of isolated stock orders which can be played either way.

    Tony didn't keep any records of items he sold, either per sale or on a day-to-day basis. If he had, that would have saved an awful lot of trouble. And the mystery shopper paid cash. I think they checked what they could, given the reference to delivery notes and suchlike during the trial.

    I appreciate the difficulties regarding the chances of a hit with DNA, but they have relatively few items which would need to checked and if they were to find traces which connected to Megrahi then the books could be quietly closed and the authorities vindicated. If they find none at all, nothings changed.

    At the time of the disaster, DNA technology wasn't up to much. They cremated a bunch of body parts they couldn't identify, whereas now they would be able to ID these with DNA. I doubt very much that any of the evidence was preserved in such a way that it would be useful for low-copy DNA analysis decades down the line. They'd have been handled by numerous other people in the interim too.

    But mainly, I suspect they'd be too damn scared to try in case they got an unidentified profile that pointed elsewhere.

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  13. Well I think bribery is bribery and $3 million dollars is a hell of a bribe and not one any Scottish Court, had it been known, could have accepted Gauci as a reliable witness.
    Marquise knew it too which is why he refused to admit Gauci had even been given that amouont of money, remember?

    There is also evidence to prove that Gauci was treated to all expenses paid trips to Scotland, stayed in top hotels, went fishing on the Tay. As Prof B said in the programme this is not the sort of relationship the investigating team and the prosecution has with a witness.

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  15. "Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the former Lord Advocate who oversaw the issue of indictments in the Crown's discredited case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, has conceded that the key prosecution witness in the Lockerbie trial was bribed for his testimony.

    "I have to accept that it happened," Fraser told Al Jazeera.

    "It shouldn’t have and I was unaware of it.”

    Fraser now says the payment of "bribes, inducements or rewards" is unacceptable, and "it is obviously unacceptable to have done it in the biggest case of mass murder ever carried out in Europe.”"

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  16. "If they find none at all, nothings changed."

    A lot has changed Crinkly: it changed four years ago this month. That was what the SCCRC findings were about. They just weren't permitted to publish. Those six grounds raised have still to be addressed.

    All we need now is for Mr Salmond to honour the promise he made in February that, if re-elected, the report would be published.

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  17. "In 2007, after the testimony of a key witness against Megrahi was discredited, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to reconsider the conviction as a grave miscarriage of justice. However, that review was proceeding slowly in 2009 when Scottish authorities released Megrahi on humanitarian grounds, after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer."

    This guy is an investigative journalist? Scary!

    The SCCRC did not agree to consider anything in 2007: it announced in 2007 there were six grounds to suggest a miscarriage of justice may have occurred at Megrahi's trial. Its "considering" had been done during the three or four years previous!

    Its review was NOT "moving slowly" in 2009. The Appeal it had recommended in 2007 had been repeatedly delayed by the Scottish Judiciary.

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  18. Good catch, Jo.

    There were other errors, like saying Megrahi was already in Barlinnie when the first appeal happened. Nevertheless, big picture and all that.

    I agree, the bribery should kill the conviction stone dead. I just don't want the impression left that Gauci did recognise Megrahi as the clothes purchaser, and it was just those stupid cops that mucked it up by offering him money.

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  19. "I just don't want the impression left that Gauci did recognise Megrahi as the clothes purchaser, and it was just those stupid cops that mucked it up by offering him money."

    I take your point Rolfe. People mainly believe Gauci identified Megrahi outright and that was simply not the case.

    The other biggy for me is the break-in at Heathrow which was withheld from the court too.

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  20. The other biggie for me is that Derek Henderson was never called at Zeist, because his evidence would have shown that the brown suitcase Bedford saw could not have belonged to a passenger.

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  21. Rolfe, I had missed an earlier thread here, about the really technical stuff concerning the bomb itself. Just read it today. Now I'm not saying I understand it but I'm trying although I think I never will because I'm not good at that stuff. Your knowledge and the contributions of others on that thread was overwhelming. Where did you learn all that stuff?

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  22. Here and there. Paul Foot is a good place to start. Some of it I found out for myself - for example about Derek Henderson by reading the findings of the FAI.

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  23. Jo G - may I also recommend David Leppard's much maligned "Cover-up of Convenience".

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  24. David Leppard's book is called "On the Trail of Terror".

    "Cover-up of Convenience" was written by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson.

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  25. 'Today’s third deadly myth is Washington’s certainty that Libyan dictator Gaddafi was responsible for the Pan Am 103 attack and thus must be removed from power by force and possibly by assassination'

    why do writers keep calling gadaffi a dictator? Do they know nothing about him and need to invent?


    'On February 16, 2009, Gaddafi took a step further and called on Libyans to back his proposal to dismantle the government and to distribute the oil wealth directly to the 5 million inhabitants of the country.
    However, his plan to deliver oil revenues directly to the Libyan people met opposition by senior officials who could lose their jobs due to a parallel plan by Gaddafi to rid the state of corruption.
    Some officials, including Prime Minister Al-Baghdadi, Ali Al-Mahmoudi and Farhat Omar Bin Guida, of the Central Bank, told Gaddafi that the measure could harm the country’s economy in the long term due to “capital flight.”
    “Do not be afraid to directly redistribute the oil money and create fairer governance structures that respond to people’s interests,” Gaddafi said in a Popular Committee.
    The Popular Committees are the backbone of Libya. Through them citizens are represented at the district level.
    “The Administration has failed and the state’s economy has failed. Enough is enough. The solution is for the Libyan people to directly receive oil revenues and decide what to do with them,” Gaddafi said in a speech broadcast on state television. To this end, the Libyan leader urged a radical reform of government bureaucracy.
    Despite this, senior Libyan government officials voted to delay Gaddafi’s plans. Only 64 ministers from a total of 468 Popular Committee members voted for the measure. There were 251 who saw the measures as positive, but chose to delay their implementation.
    Given the rejection of the Committee, Gaddafi affirmed before a public meeting: “My dream during all these years was to give the power and wealth directly to the people.”
    '
    http://redantliberationarmy.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/reason-for-war-gaddafi-wanted-to-nationalise-oil/

    the media, left or right, has a real problem telling the truth

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