[The following paragraph is taken from an article headed Syria and Bahrain – what’s the difference? published yesterday on Peter Hitchens’s blog on the Mail Online website:]
Syria stayed out of the West’s bad books even after it was pretty clear that Syrian-sponsored terrorists had been involved in the Lockerbie mass murder. That line of inquiry was dropped because Syria was ‘helpful’ to the West during the first war against Saddam Hussein. It is this but of politics that is the origin of the bizarre and evidence-free subsequent claim that Gadaffi’s Libya was behind that bomb. Amazing what people will believe and continue to believe, when it suits them.
[Earlier Lockerbie-related comments from Peter Hitchens can be read here and here.]
There seems to be a presumption that because the CIA, from the very beginning, blamed a ‘Syrian backed Palestinian group funded by Iran’ for Lockerbie, rather than Libya, then the former must have done it, now that we know Libya didn’t!
ReplyDeleteBut if the CIA claims had any merit, wouldn’t they have been accompanied with American demands for a public enquiry and official protests at the UN?
The idea that the American government and media would not blame ‘the enemies of Israel’ if they were truly responsible, ignores the influence of the ‘end of days Zionist and neo-con lobby’ who would love some real rather than fabricated facts, to use as an excuse to inflict more bloodshed in the Middle-East.
The reason the initial scapegoats were chosen, was simply because they were an easy sell and an excuse to avoid holding a public enquiry.
You forget the important part. That that group were known (in October 1988) to be making bombs designed to blow up an aircraft about 35-45 minutes after takeoff. Maid of the Seas blew up 38 minutes after her wheels left the tarmac.
ReplyDeleteWhich is an insane time to set a bomb to go off if you are using any other sort of timing device.
My own reading of the sequence of events is a bit more mundane. The investigators completely screwed up and missed the evidence showing where and how the bomb was actually put on board, and instead chased a red herring down a blind alley to Malta. When they could find no sign of the expected perpetrators having so much as stepped on a crack in the pavement on Malta, the whole thing sort of ran into the sand.
ReplyDeleteThat left the way clear for the crime to be pinned on anyone who happened to be handy on Malta at the time. The CIA gave Megrahi's name to the Scottish cops, and the Scottish cops duly obliged.
A ‘Syrian backed Palestinian group funded by Iran’ is a good catch all phrase for propagandists, but also proves they didn’t do it.
ReplyDeleteThe franchise PFLP-GC was incapable of organising a sophisticated and anonymous hit because they had been thoroughly infiltrated by everyone.
And if they really had the backing of a State for the revenge attack, they would have been supplied with the necessary bomb, rather than left to experiment making ‘IEDs’ in their living room.
Also the idea that the investigators simply screwed up and fitted up Libya out of desperation to avoid retracing their steps to find the real culprits is silly.
Silly? Try looking at the actual evidence, rather than swallowing conspiracy theory web sites whole.
ReplyDeleteYou come out with statements, but they're just words, copied from other people. And you prefer the people who make up wild and fantastical claims to those who actually study the evidence.