Friday, 9 September 2011

Pilger on Libya and Megrahi

[The following is an extract from an article by John Pilger published yesterday on the Information Clearing House website:]

Gone from the Murdoch press are pejorative "insurgents". The action in Libya, says The Times, is "a revolution... as revolutions used to be". That it is a coup by a gang of Muammar Gaddafi's ex cronies and spooks in collusion with Nato is hardly news. The self-appointed "rebel leader", Mustafa Abdul Jalil, was Gaddafi's feared justice minister. The CIA runs or bankrolls most of the rest, including America's old friends, the Mujadeen Islamists who spawned al-Qaeda.
 
They told journalists what they needed to know: that Gaddafi was about to commit "genocide", of which there was no evidence, unlike the abundant evidence of "rebel" massacres of black African workers falsely accused of being mercenaries. European bankers' secret transfer of the Central Bank of Libya from Tripoli to "rebel" Benghazi by European bankers in order to control the country's oil billions was an epic heist of little interest.

The entirely predictable indictment of Gaddafi before the "international court" at The Hague evokes the charade of the dying "Lockerbie bomber", Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, whose "heinous crime" has been deployed to promote the west's ambitions in Libya. In 2009, al-Megrahi was sent back to Libya by the Scottish authorities not for compassionate reasons, as reported, but because his long-awaited appeal would have confirmed his innocence and described how he was framed by the Thatcher government, as the late Paul Foot's landmark expose revealed. As an antidote to the current propaganda, I urge you to read a forensic demolition of al-Megrahi's "guilt" and its political meaning in Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice (Verso) by the distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce.

3 comments:

  1. Robert, what is happening with the SCCRC related legislation that was supposed to go before parliament this week?

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  2. The Bill has not yet been introduced into the Scottish Parliament, as far as I can see from the Parliamet's website. But even when it is, it appears that it will be so circumscribed that what is published won't go anywhere near telling us what we want to know:
    http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2011/09/criminal-cases-punishment-review-bill.html

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  3. "...won't go anywhere near telling us what we want to know."

    I assume it will be edited thin so nobody would get hurt, which would have been the intention from the beginning.

    As Hans Köchler said:
    "In giving exoneration to the police, prosecutors and forensic staff, I think they show their lack of independence. No officials to be blamed: simply a Maltese shopkeeper."

    That the report now will be further edited will probably complete the whitewash.

    But it never mattered the very least, as when it comes to deciding on whether the conviction Megrahi was sound.

    Reading the verdict was already enough.

    We would not even have needed to know about the bribing of Gauci and his early statements, the break-in in Heathrow, the negative-test of the timer fragment, the discrediting of Thurman and Fereday and Hayes with his mysteriously renumbered journal pages and, for all of them, proven fabricated evidence in other cases...

    Unless the SCCRC-report disproves any of that is it largely unimportant for the new Lockerbie trial.

    The accused are the Scottish legal system, the leaders who will lie and deny to protect it and themselves, and those witnesses who so far has escaped the punishment for perjury or gross incompetence.

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