CIA’s Lockerbie role must be reviewed

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Jim Swire published in today’s edition of The Scotsman. It reads as follows:]

The trial of two Libyans in Zeist in 2000 over the Lockerbie atrocity first convinced some UK relatives and exp­erts in criminal law that we were not seeing a fair trial, but a cynical intelligence-led perversion of the Scottish criminal justice system.

For instance, the prosecution alleged that the bomb had been placed aboard a plane in Malta, and transferred at Frankfurt and 
Heathrow to the target plane on which our families died.

This clearly would have requir­ed a long-running timer, and a fragment of 
circuit board allegedly from such a timer was duly led in evidence in court.

However, post-trial, we now know, and have independent scientific proof, that the technology used to 
create that fragment was fundamentally different from that used in the Libyan 
timers allegedly powering the Lockerbie bomb, and simply could not have come from one of them.

The fragment was claimed to have been found by UK forensic “experts” within a Scottish police evidence bag.

The crash site had been overrun by CIA agents immediately after the crash and potentially evidential material visibly tampered with. The Scottish police were working in close contact with the CIA throughout the investigation.

Neither the UK nor the Scottish Governments have been prepared to listen to our constant pleas since the trial for an inquiry into the whole case.

Now that it seems clear that at least some sections of the CIA using a remarkable degree of autonomy from their executive had long cast any moral restraint aside, is it not high time that their management of the Lockerbie evidence also be re-examined?

It is not simply that we relatives have a right to know the whole truth; the verdict of that court must have been a powerful factor in “justifying” the Nato bombing of Libya, which has resulted in such misery to that unfortunate country, to the rise of Isis training camps round Bengazi and the redistribution of Libyan arms to terrorists throughout much of the Sahel region.

I do not believe that the UK and US Governments would want to try to conceal such wicked actions by their own intelligence services and 
police if the leaders only knew of them.

To take positive action to objectively review their 
intelligence management of the Lockerbie atrocity might alleviate a great deal of unnecessary ongoing suffering for us even now.

It might also offer a golden opportunity to lay blame, if blame there truly be, where it is properly due.

That could then underpin improvements in the behaviour and status of our nations in the future.

We are not going to abandon our search for the truth, – far better to lance the boil now rather than let more hostile agencies do it later.

I believe that if he knew about this further intelligence scandal, then in the spirit of his great Cairo speech following his election, President Obama would not want this concealed one moment longer.