A political fiction convenient to US foreign policy

[What follows is the text of an open letter sent by Dr Jim Swire on 14 December 2014 to Sir Malcolm Rifkind KCMG QC MP, Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament:]

I applaud your statement on Radio Four this morning, as chairman of the intelligence and Security committee that you will seek clarification from the Americans over the heavily redacted Senate report on CIA torture.

Of course you will want to know whether aircraft spotted transiting Prestwick airport really were part of the CIA run 'extraordinary rendition' programe which is widely alleged to have included the sending of British Nationals to Libya to be tortured.

May I remind you that prior to that in President Reagan's day, the CIA were deeply involved in the deeply illegal Iran Contra activities of the mid 1980s, involving extra-judicial killings on an industrial scale.

The present investigation was into post 9/11 (2001) CIA activities.

In 1988 in your own homeland of Scotland the Lockerbie disaster occurred.

At the subsequent trial at Zeist the CIA were seen to have blatantly attempted to mislead the court by concealing the lying and fantasizing of their 'star witness' known as Jiaka, to the point where, after the then Lord Advocate Colin Boyd had been brought to the very edge of perjury in his attempts to prevent the court from hearing the truth contained in the CIA cables concerning 'Jiaka' the court rejected him as a reliable witness.

What the court did not know because the information was not made available to it, was that a technical forensic item which was produced in court, seeming to be a piece of circuit board from Libya, had in fact been manufactured using technology not even available to manufacturers in the late 80s.

This item accepted by the court seems clearly to have been designed expressly to deceive the court.

Its technical excellence suggests a sophisticated organization behind its production.

Please will you therefore request that the Americans also to research and divulge divulge to your committee what actions were taken by the CIA during the years between Iran/Contra and '9/11' which were relevant to the UK, particularly with respect to their major role in providing evidence to the court which convicted a Libyan over Lockerbie?

As a distinguished Scot you must surely be deeply concerned were any proof to emerge that our Scottish Criminal Justice system had been deliberately subverted by the CIA.

Would you also, having the ear of the Prime Minister, please inform him of this letter and of any information from America relevant to Lockerbie, and then explain to us why you believe there is no need for a full inquiry, denied us for 26 years over the slaughter of our families?

As recently as 2012, Downing Street claimed publicly that a book published in Edinburgh confirming, with independent and responsible scientific support, that false forensic evidence had been introduced at Zeist, was "an insult to the relatives".

I would like him to be aware that the Downing Street statement about this book was the insult to many UK relatives of the Lockerbie dead, not the evident confirmation of some of our worst fears contained in the book.

We still seek the truth about who murdered our families. We are not going to go away until we know the truth and see it publicly confirmed. That is our right. It has long been evident to some of us that the blaming of the two Libyans was a political fiction convenient to US Foreign policy.

In the past you have taken quite a hostile attitude to our attempts to discover the whole truth, but you may well have been unaware at the time, of the information certainly denied to the public and the trial court, but now widely available. The post 9/11 Senate report even as published reveals an ongoing ethos of contempt within the CIA for the restraints which the law imposes. I feel sure that you will wish to pursue this hitherto enigmatic horror story through to the truth on which it must eventually be founded, for the sake of Scotland's reputation and in the name of justice.