Tuesday 26 February 2013

Incompetent people making a complete pig's ear of the investigation

[What follows is a comment by Rolfe on Saturday’s blogpost Dr Jim Swire calls on Scottish Government to institute inquiry into Crown Office Lockerbie failings.  In my view it merits stand-alone status.]

The information about the [Heathrow] break-in was buried at the beginning of February 1989, two years before Megrahi's name even entered the frame for Lockerbie. The information was passed to the investigators at Lockerbie, who said ho hum so what, and filed it. It was never looked at again. When the other Heathrow witnesses were being re-interviewed and re-re-interviewed, nobody said another word to Ray Manly. His evidence was never part of the narrative of the case and it would have remained unknown if he himself had not approached Megrahi's defence team after the verdict in 2001.

It's tempting to read all sorts of conspiracies into this, and there's certainly a case to be made that in early 1989 someone was distinctly unkeen for Heathrow to take the blame for the disaster, but the more I see of the primary evidence, the more it looks to me like nothing more than the most monumental cock-up of the second millennium.

Some pretty underhand and reprehensible things were done as part of this inquiry and prosecution, there's no doubt about that. But whether they were done as part of a grand, over-arching, machiavellian plan is an entirely different matter.

I see incompetent people who were far from being the sharpest knives in the drawer, but who had a very puffed-up sense of their own importance, making a complete pig's ear of the investigation. The recovery and examination of the evidence was absolutely stellar. World class. But then the evidence had to be analysed, and deductions and conclusions drawn. That's where it fell apart.

Lack of communication, personal egos, premature jumping to conclusions and sheer lack of analytical skills are there in abundance. Then the more you get it wrong the more you have to fudge and manipulate in order to defend what is becoming an indefensible position.

I'm not even sure they realise they got it wrong. Maybe some of them do. But some of them are so enamoured of their own cleverness in pinning the atrocity on Libya and Megrahi they can't see beyond that.

There is so much evidence to show that much of this debacle was caused by people in positions of responsibility simply not having the intellectual capacity to work through the inferences from A to B to C. Which makes it quite hard to believe that these same people were running an incredibly clever and complicated conspiracy.

18 comments:

  1. My God, Prof, you might warn a girl! If I had any idea you were going to do that, I'd at least have re-read it before clicking "publish"!

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  2. Rolfe, on the subject of the recovered evidence, do you know if there is an annotated map of the debris field detailing where each item of debris was found? I am particularly interested in seeing which items were later connected to particular cases and noting where these items landed. It seems to me that some of the items within the primary suitcase should have been first out of the stricken plane and probably most fragmented. Out of all the "suitcase debris" these items should have tended to land, on average, furthest from the explosion point while the surrounding cases and their contents should have been less damaged and being, on average, heavier should have blown less far from the crash site. Some might also have left the plane a few seconds after the primary suitcase (as the plane fragmented) and therefore items of similar size and weight to the corresponding items of "primary" debris are likely to have hit the ground north-west of the "primary" debris. I know that you are trying to deduce how the luggage was stacked around the primary suitcase using other methods but do you know if anyone has tried to deduce this using information on where the debris from each individual case landed? I know that debris was labelled in zones (where found) and these individual zones seem to have been pretty wide. I also know that the registering of the debris might not have been entirely accurate but your description of the recovery process as being "absolutely stellar" suggests to me that such an examination might still be possible. Do you know if anyone has put together a "map" of items found specifically tied to source suitcase?

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  3. It might be possible to do it, as I think everything that was found had a grid reference recorded - though I suspect the reference referred to the field in question rather than the exact spot. However, Hayes's notes don't have the grid references recorded, so you'd have to go back to the original police records for that, if they could be acquired. A big job that I don't think anyone has contemplated.

    I suspect it would be unrewarding, because there was a 90 m.p.h. gale blowing up there at the time, and a lot of the stuff that was released by the explosion seems to have crossed the slipstream of the aircraft as well. The variabiities in weight, wind resistance and exactly how each item caught the eddies of the gale probably wipe out any useful information from that exercise, I suspect.

    Actually, most of the cases weren't blown apart by the explosion and fell intact, though a fair number then split apart when they landed. Apart from the bomb suitcase only two other suitcases were sufficiently torn apart to have lost all their contents due to actual blast damage. And at least one holdall as well.

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  4. "Which makes it quite hard to believe that these same people were running an incredibly clever and complicated conspiracy."

    No. They were. They're still stupid though, becuase we've found them out.

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  5. Thanks for that, Rolfe. I assume that the two other suitcases and the holdall were loaded adjacent to the primary suitcase. Do you know whose they were?
    While I accept what you say about the eddys and the wind-resistance of the fragments etc I think it would be possible to compare like with like if there were a good number of fragments. Remember, at least one of the adjacent bags would be blasted back into the body of the plane and so we would expect its contents to leave the plane slightly later than, say, those from the primary suitcase. I'm not sure of the speed of the plane at the time of the blast but it must have been covering a quarter of a mile every two or three seconds. I still suspect that if you, say, colour code the case debris and contents around where they landed you might see a pattern if there there were enough fragments.
    Such an examination might be useful to prove/disprove the "theory" that the primary case and contents, including the timer fragment, were planted.
    Another difficulty is the only way the contents of the primary suitcase could be connected to it would be through examination of the fragments (though I understand that some charred items were related by forensics to the contents of other cases) and it would be interesting to examine their distribution ie were all the lighter, smaller blast-damaged fragments found further from the point of the explosion than the larger ones?
    Any intact cases would fall almost vertically or at least much closer to the vertical than debris from the fragmented cases, so their contents would only ever blow away after hitting the ground and would not go far.
    Of course, many of the small, light items from the plane were not case-contents at all and this must have made identifying fragments extremely difficult.
    I'm sure we discussed the Christmas cards found by Mr and Mrs Horton near Newcastleton on another forum and I still find what seems to be a very dense concentration of cards so far from the point of explosion a bit odd. If they left the aircraft in a thick, intact postal bag I can't see how they would ever have made it so far but if the bag burst open in the blast then they would have been much more widely scattered. But maybe you are right and I'm failing to take into account the many imponderables!

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  6. The completely fragged cases were Patricia Coyle's blue American Tourister which was directly on top of the bomb suitcase, and Bernt Carlsson's grey Preskihaaf hardshell which was the left-hand one of the upright row along the back and so was immediately behind the part of the bomb suitcase where the IED was packed.

    One of Karen Noonan's blue holdalls was also pretty much obliterated, and I think it was immediately to the left of the bomb suitcase, in the overhang - or maybe on top of the left-hand side. I think there must have been another fragged holdall, the one to the left of the Carlsson case, but I'm not sure which one that would have been.

    The two other cases that were quite badly blast-damaged on one side but didn't lose all their contents were one of Charles McKee's, which was immediately to the right of the Carlsson case, and Susan Costa's case, which might have been on top of the Carlsson case.

    Johannes Schauble's case was on top of the Coyle case, but wasn't ripped apart. The stack on the right were apparently Michael Bernstein's suit carrier, Lawanda Thomas's case and Willis Coursey's case, in that order. These showed very clear but relatively peripheral blast damage.

    This is pretty easy to figure out from the Joint Forensic Report and accompanying photographs. What is also clear is that there is no sign of a case that could have been underneath the bomb suitcase. Oh, and that the nature of the damage to the Carlsson and McKee cases sitting upright behind the bomb shows that there was no case on the bottom layer shielding the bottom corners of these cases from the explosion.

    It is jawdropping that nobody figured this out, but there is no sign at all in any of the reports of anyone trying to fit the blast-damaged cases together to see how they were loaded. It literally doesn't seem to have occurred to them.

    One problem is that as far as I can see the RARDE scientists were never given access to the rest of the information - the baggage handlers' statements, the flight arrival records and the reconciliation of the recovered luggage to its owners. They don't seem to have been aware that there was anything particularly suspicious or unusual about the left-hand bottom case. But even without that, they should have been able to figure out some of it.

    All these original notes from early 1989, when the evidence is literally staring them in the face, and they're just not getting it. They're recording it all beautifully, and completely failing to analyse their data.

    It's like a biochemistry lab which does a perfect job of analysing the patient's blood sample, but then nobody at the lab or at the doctor's surgery succeeds in figuring out what the obvious diagnosis is from these figures.

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  7. As far as the idea that the entirety of the primary suitcase and contents were planted, I really don't think that flies at all. The amount of detail in the forensic evidence as regards picking bits of it out of various other cases and so on is enormous - and it starts very early indeed. These bits were being identified right at the start, within a week to ten days of the disaster.

    The surreal thing about the suitcase evidence is that the whole thing hangs together beautifully, and fits with the evidence the baggage handlers gave quite independently about what they handled and how they stacked the luggage - and it all points quite inexorably to the Bedford suitcase being the bomb. If you're going in for a major fabrication exercise, then surely the cardinal rule is to make your evidence fit the story you want to tell! What we have here is meticulously recorded evidence clearly showing one thing, while the investigators completely fail to realise this and go charging off in an entirely different direction.

    If there has been fabrication and/or manipulation of the evidence, I think it must have been done at a much later date, by altering or adding to items that were already within the chain of custody. So in that sense, figuring out where the different items were found may not reveal anything.

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  8. Of course you are correct, Rolfe. Also, most of the contents were in the police possession well before Libya was placed in the frame, at least by the "mainstream" investigators. And although I have not always been a big fan of the "Heathrow entry" theory I now think it is the most likely, mainly because the barometer trigger scenario seems to fit so well. However, my doubts about Heathrow include my difficulty in visualising someone with bolt-cutters cutting away at an entry gate to airside in such a busy working airport. The fact that there seems to have been such a small explosive load in the case also points to a Heathrow ingress as the positioning of the case would have been crucial to the destructive potential of the bomb. Having said that, the Heathrow loaders could easily have repositioned it anyway (as it seems they often did). I wonder why the bombers didn't just use more explosives. Anyway, almost all of the alternative scenarios are more likely than the Zeist fantasy.

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  9. Having seen the details of the Heathrow and the Frankfurt baggage transfer records, and the full forensics on the damaged luggage, it's not a theory any more. That bomb definitely went on at Heathrow, and Bedford fortuitously saw it and was actually able to describe the suitcase to the police a couple of weeks later.

    To put it in a nutshell, nobody moved the luggage after Bedford described the position of that suitcase. And the bomb exploded in the suitcase that was on the bottom layer of the luggage in the container. Bedford's suitcase does not exist as a separate item from the bomb suitcase, and the explosion happened where it was situated. It's that simple.

    It's perfectly possible the bomb was smuggled into the airside area without the break-in having anything to do with it. However, given that the break-in happened and it does make some sort of sense that the bomber wouldn't want to go through staff security with a black-market pass and a suitcase full of Semtex, I think it's likely to be related. Heathrow closes at night. The break-in happened when it was closed for the night. It wouldn't have been busy at midnight.

    It wasn't really possible to get more Semtex into that radio. This was Khreesat's modus operandi, which he'd been using since the 1970s. Originally these things were sent by post, and later they sweet-talked western girls to take them in their luggage, believing they were presents. Indeed it might have been possible to forego the radio disguise in this case, but they'd have been taking quite a risk at any customs stop on the way into England.

    More importantly, I think the plan in this case included the willingness to let the case be x-rayed if the bomber failed to find the container unattended. It would probably have worked, as Kamboj was unaware of the Autumn Leaves warning, and he might well have allowed some random baggage handler kindly bringing over a misdirected suitcase to place it in the container.

    There was no rule to say that a suitcase must never be moved after being loaded into a container, obviously. But baggage handlers don't stand around playing Tetris with the damn things just for the fun of it. If a suitcase was in a sensible place, it was a very good bet it would stay there. The tarmac loader who dealt with the Frankfurt luggage said these cases were loaded OK and he didn't move them. That was a pretty fair probability I'd say.

    I don't suppose there's such a thing as a foolproof plan. Khreesat's bombs had gone off at half-cock before, for various reasons. But this was a fairly robust plan and as they say, you only have to be lucky once.

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  10. I think Rolfe has mistaken the Professor’s tongue in cheek comment as a complement.

    I’m sure he means ‘merits stand-alone status ’, as in, ‘fit for an examination on the psychologist couch’.

    As Rolfe’s tide of nonsense above confirms?

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  11. I think Dave and his silly comments, unhindered as they are by knowledge or experience of this case, are best ignored.

    Rolfe is spot-on when he talks about the Toshiba-based IED containing as much Semtex as it could. The main reason for packing the explosive, the barometer trigger and the timer INSIDE the Toshiba machine was so that it would not be detected by X-ray or by external visual inspection. The Khreesat devices were fiendishly brilliant. Not only would they pass X-ray and visual inspection; they would detonate using the correct batteries for that Toshiba model, thereby not attracting any suspicion; and the devices were to be primed (or made safe) by inserting a small plug into the Toshiba's own antenna socket. The IEDs would appear to be innocent Toshiba cassette/radios, even to close visual inspection. The Semtex inside the machine was also shaped and placed to look like it was part of the normal circuitry. It is interesting to compare this with the official version of events which has Megrahi using a MST timer. As the MST timer (with or without its casing) is too big to fit inside the Toshiba machine, this would have required the timer to sit outside the Toshiba with wires running from the batteries to the timer and from the timer back to the Semtex and detonator inside the machine. It would have been much more likely to have been discovered by routine X-ray than the a Khreesat fully self-contained IED. Megrahi, as Head of airline security would have been very much aware of this. This is but one more reason why the MST theory does not stand up to scrutiny.

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  12. Yes, Dave. I'm sure we all appreciate this valuable insight.

    Rolfe is spot-on when he talks about the Toshiba-based IED containing as much Semtex as it could. The main reason for packing the explosive, the barometer trigger and the timer INSIDE the Toshiba machine was so that it would not be detected by X-ray or by external visual inspection. The Khreesat devices were fiendishly brilliant. Not only would they pass X-ray and visual inspection; they would detonate using the correct batteries for that Toshiba model, thereby not attracting any suspicion; and the devices were to be primed (or made safe) by inserting a small plug into the Toshiba's own antenna socket. The IEDs would appear to be innocent Toshiba cassette/radios, even to close visual inspection. The Semtex inside the machine was also shaped and placed to look like it was part of the normal circuitry. It is interesting to compare this with the official version of events which has Megrahi using a MST timer. As the MST timer (with or without its casing) is too big to fit inside the Toshiba machine, this would have required the timer to sit outside the Toshiba with wires running from the batteries to the timer and from the timer back to the Semtex and detonator inside the machine. It would have been much more likely to have been discovered by routine X-ray than the a Khreesat fully self-contained IED. Megrahi, as Head of airline security would have been very much aware of this. This is but one more reason why the MST theory does not stand up to scrutiny.

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  13. Why worry about being detected by X-ray or by external visual inspection if the plan involves by-passing customs?

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  14. Customs? Who mentioned Customs? The crucial X-ray and other ( pressure test, explosive trace detection) inspection takes place after bags have been checked in or transferred from another carrier. This process is aimed at detecting and stopping any explosives about to be loaded onto a plane. Customs has absolutely nothing to do with it.

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  15. Aku, the theory about the MST-13 was that its components had been taken out of their case and then installed, still in working order, inside the Toshiba. According to Feraday, there were several ways you could slide the components into the interstices in the radio mechanism, and still have it function as a timer.

    You know, the more I think about that part, the dafter it seems.

    And we know about the metallurgey results, too.

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  16. Rolfe, thanks for clarifying - I'd not been aware that Allen Feraday had tried to suggest that the MST timer had been somehow slotted into the Toshiba. That really IS daft. Is this in the trial transcript?

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  17. Aku, if they loaded it at Heathrow, they had to get it into England somehow. If they brought it by air, unarmed, that's the same problem as getting it on to the target flight. I don't think they would have tried that. It was just as vulnerable to being spotted on that flight as on the target.

    I suspect it got in by sea, by Channel or North Sea ferry. The radio disguise would have been easily enough to do it for that purpose. I also think they may have been prepared to let Kamboj or Parmar x-ray it if they failed to get a clear run at the container unattended. If he'd passed it, then the bomber (dressed as a baggage handler for another airline) could then have gone right on to put it in the container. If he'd got suspicious and called a supervisor, the bomber could simply have sloped off before anything got serious.

    To a large extent though, these radios were Khreesat's modus operandi. That was what he did. These people tend to stick with what they know. What he knew was about a pound of Semtex in some innocent-looking item of consumer electronics.

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  18. Aku, the bit about the timer components being slotted in among the components of the radio is in the Joint Forensic Report. As far as I recall it's mentioned and sort of implicit throughout the trial without making a big deal about it. I think if you look at the photo of the mock-up radio you can see the MST circuit boards sort of pushed in close to the Semtex.

    In the witness box, Edwin said the timer wouldn't fit in there "unless maybe you took the radio out". I think he was thinking of taking the radio components out to get the boxed timer in. But we know the radio components weren't taken out. It's believed it would actually have worked as a radio. Feraday thinks, as I said, that the opposite was done and the unboxed bits of timer were squirrelled inside the working radio.

    You're right, the more you think about this the dafter it is.

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