UK government "doing their best to support the US in a cover up"

[What follows is excerpted from a report by Martin Jay headlined Lockerbie: Papers reveal Mandela didn’t buy Blair’s Libya ruse published today on the Maghrebi.org website:]

Confidential documents which became released in the UK might be the reason why the Americans recently kidnapped a third Libyan suspect who they have framed for the Lockerbie bombing.

On December 29th, it was revealed that documents held in the national archive showed that Nelson Mandela actually told the UK it was wrong to hold Libya responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, according to reports. 

They reveal discussions between former British prime minister Tony Blair and his cabinet and Mr Mandela, who was acting as an intermediary for Libya, after the Lockerbie bombing with the South African icon firmly believing that Libya had no hand in the Lockerbie bombing. (...)

In the meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Mandela on April 30, 2001, Mr Mandela opposed the UN stance.

“Mandela argued it was wrong to hold Libya legally responsible for the bombing,” the cables revealed.

“He had studied the judgment from the trial and was critical of the account the judges had taken of the views of the Libyan defector, even though they had described him as an unreliable witness.

“He had discussed it with Kofi Annan [former secretary general of the United Nations] as he felt the Security Council resolution requiring that [Libya’s president Muammar] Qaddafi accept responsibility were at odds with the legal position. (...)

In May 2003 that Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing and had previously agreed to set up a $2.7 billion fund to compensate families of those killed in the explosion, although few experts even believe that Gaddafi accepted culpability but was trying to find a diplomatic solution.

Al Megrahi being found guilty and the compensation package was a way out for the Libyan leader.

The Libyan intelligence agent was framed and was the only man convicted over the attack. He was sentenced to life until his release on compassionate grounds in 2009 after a cancer diagnosis. He died in Libya in 2012. [RB: The only evidence that Megrahi was involved with Libyan intelligence came from Majid Giaka. The judges found Giaka to be a fantasist, wholly incredible and unreliable, but (with no explanation) accepted his evidence on this one issue.] 

The efforts by Margaret Thatcher, John Major and finally Tony Blair to support the Libyan angle are highly suspicious though, as a number of experts believe that the UK governments were simply doing their best to support the US in a cover up.

If American families knew the truth about the Lockerbie bombing – that the Pan Am flight was carrying drugs and money under the supervision of CIA officers on board as part of a whacky scheme of Ronald Reagan to cooperate with terrorists in Beirut – then the legal cases would be unprecedented in US history.

Because of this gargantuan cover up, America, still to this day needs to keep the Libyan ‘story’ alive.

Consequently, a Libyan man, Abu Agila Masud, was recently accused of making the bomb that destroyed the Pan Am flight and was taken into US custody through an illegal rendition helped by rogue militias in Libya believed to have been paid by the US. Some sceptical analysts might conclude that the date of the released documents was known by the US, hence the timing of the kidnapping of Masud.

Embellishing intelligence reporting to fit a preconceived outcome

[What follows is excerpted from an article by John Holt published today in The Blogs section of the website of The Times of Israel:]

As a former CIA operations officer, I am breaking 20 years of silence about one of the most heinous plane bombings on record, Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988. I can now tell you, as I have been telling the CIA and FBI since being interviewed by them in early 2000, that I and many other intelligence officers do not believe that Libya is responsible for the bombing. Iran, as the original evidence clearly showed, is the true perpetrator of this deadly attack and should be brought to justice.

Two weeks ago, just before stepping down as US attorney general, William Barr, who was also AG in 1992 and oversaw the investigation and indictment of the case, announced new charges against a Libyan man known as Masud for supposedly constructing the bomb that detonated on the plane. I believe Barr and the Justice Department announced this new indictment purely for the purpose of shoring up Barr’s original, faulty 1991 indictments.

The evidence and logic in the current case against Mr Masud are as flimsy as the cases were two decades ago when Barr steered focus away from the obvious culprit, Iran.

I know Libya is not behind the bombing because I was the long-time handler for the principal US government witness Abdul Majid Giaka, a Libyan agent who never provided any evidence pointing to Libya or any indication of knowing anything about that nation’s involvement in the two years after the bombing. Yet years later, he testified against the convicted Libyan intelligence officer, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, at the Lockerbie bombing (Pan Am 103) trial conducted at The Hague in 2000.

The US Government prevented my testimony and hid from evidence the cables I wrote that proved Giaka knew nothing. When my cables were finally released to the trial at the demand of the defense, the court dismissed Giaka along with the two CIA operations officers sent to the trial to testify to his credibility.

Yet today, the charade continues. The FBI acknowledges they have not even interviewed Mr Masud themselves and are entirely dependent on an 8-year-old statement by an unnamed Libyan police officer from a country in the midst of a devastating civil war. Moreover, Masud had no history or signature for making the type of bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 nor for concealing bombs in Toshiba radios. The PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command) did.

We just observed the 32nd anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am 103. It is time to drop the routine CIA procedure of embellishing intelligence reporting to fit a preconceived outcome rather than following the facts. The families of Pan Am flight 103 victims have suffered long enough and deserve to now be able to rest assured that the real perpetrators of this act of terrorism, Iranian actors, are brought to justice.

I am asking that the case be reexamined due to the availability of evidence against Iran and irregularities in the US government presentation of evidence at the first trial. The son of the man convicted made a similar request. He recently appealed the conviction of his father to the High Court in Scotland. The panel of five judges is currently reviewing the appeal, which was presented in late November 2020.

Now is the time for former Attorney General Barr, who signed the original warrants against Megrahi, and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who led the DOJ investigation, to answer some questions: If Libya is truly the culprit, why did the US not indict Libyan intelligence chief Sanussi, who has reportedly been sitting in a Libyan jail since that nation’s revolution in 2011, and would have been in charge of any such high profile operation at the time of the bombing? And why was credible evidence pointing toward Iran ignored, given Iran’s clear motive for the attack as retaliation for the downing of a civilian Iran Air Airbus and its proven capacity to carry out attacks similar to the bombing over Lockerbie? (...) 

Lockerbie questions that US Attorney General William Barr needs to answer

[What follows is excerpted from an article by John Schindler published today on the Top Secret Umbra website:]

With just six weeks left for the Trump administration, speculation is swirling that Attorney General William Barr may step down before the official presidential transition on January 20. Barr has fallen out of favor with the White House since his admission last week that the Department of Justice’s investigation of our November 3 election has uncovered no significant voting fraud, contrary to the loud claims of President Donald Trump and his enraged surrogates. A longtime liberal bugbear, Barr suddenly became the Oval Office’s new whipping boy instead, and the attorney general is reportedly tired of the public presidential abuse. 

That would be the second time that Barr steps down as the attorney general (...)

Before we get to his decisions as Trump’s attorney general, we should first ask Bill Barr about what happened the last time he headed the Justice Department.

Above all, why did Attorney General Barr back in mid-November 1991 decide to indict two Libyan spies for the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, a terrible crime that killed 270 innocent people. Barr’s announcement stunned our Intelligence Community, which had investigated that terrorist atrocity for nearly three years in voluminous detail, yet never suspected that Libya stood behind the attack.

Three decades ago, the Lockerbie tragedy loomed large in American news. A bomb inside a suitcase stowed in the Boeing 747’s forward left luggage container tore the airliner apart as it cruised at 31,000 feet, headed for New York. All 243 passengers and 16 crew on the Pan Am jumbo jet died, as did 11 people in the town of Lockerbie, which was showered by the flaming wreckage of the shattered 747. One hundred and ninety of the dead were Americans, including 35 Syracuse University students headed home for Christmas after a European semester abroad.

It didn’t take long for diligent British investigators to find the remnants of the Samsonite suitcase which contained less than a pound of Semtex plastic explosive manufactured in Czechoslovakia and hidden in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder. That trail quickly led to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, a radical Arab terrorist group that was headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army officer. In the eyes of Western intelligence, the PFLP-GC was little more than an extension of Syria’s security services.

Intriguingly, less than two months before the Lockerbie attack, West German police rolled up a PFLP-GC bomb-making cell around Frankfurt, seizing four bombs made of Semtex hidden in Toshiba radios. Since Pan Am 103 originated in Frankfurt and that was the exact same kind of bomb which took down the doomed airliner, none of this seemed coincidental. Western intelligence circles heard chatter in the autumn of 1988 that the PFLP-GC, whose fifth Frankfurt bomb was never found by police, was planning to blow up U.S. airliners. Plus, one of the men taken into custody was Marwan Khreesat, a veteran bomb-maker who was believed to be behind the downing of a Swissair jetliner back in 1970, a terrorist attack which killed 47 people.

Before long, American intelligence believed that Iran was really behind the downing of Flight 103, given known close connections between Syrian intelligence and Iranian spy agencies. Neither was Tehran’s motive difficult to ascertain. A few months before, on July 3, 1988, the cruiser USS Vincennes, on station in the Persian Gulf, mistakenly shot down an Iran Air Airbus, a terrible accident which killed all 290 people aboard, including 66 children. Iran’s revolutionary regime promised revenge, and the Intelligence Community assessed that they got it over Scotland. As I explained on the thirtieth anniversary of the Lockerbie horror, that Iran stood behind the attack:

Was the conclusion of US intelligence, particularly when the National Security Agency provided top-secret electronic intercepts which demonstrated that Tehran had commissioned the PFLP-GC to down Pan Am 103 (...) One veteran NSA analyst told me years later that his counterterrorism team “had no doubt” of Iranian culpability. Bob Baer, the veteran CIA officer, has stated that his agency believed just as unanimously that Tehran was behind the bombing. Within a year of the attack, our Intelligence Community assessed confidently that Lockerbie was an Iranian operation executed by Syrian cut-outs, and that take was shared by several allies with solid Middle Eastern insights, including Israeli intelligence.

The IC was therefore taken aback on November 14, 1991, when Attorney General Barr announced the indictment of two Libyan spies, Abdelbaset el-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, for the downing of Pan Am 103. Libya denied the accusations, as did the two Libyan intelligence officers, and it took Britain almost a decade to bring the men to trial. In a unique arrangement, the trial was held in the Netherlands under Scottish law. In the end, the court did not convict Fhimah but did find Megrahi guilty of 270 counts of murder in early 2001. Megrahi maintained he was framed and, suffering from cancer, he was released on compassionate grounds in 2009. He returned to Libya and succumbed to cancer there in May 2012, protesting his innocence to the end.

Quite a few people who looked at the evidence believed that Megrahi really may have been innocent, including some relatives of Pan Am 103 victims. Many in intelligence circles had doubts too, particularly because the prosecution’s star witness, Abdul Majid Giaka, was another Libyan intelligence officer who became a CIA asset. Giaka claimed to have witnessed Megrahi and Fhimah’s preparations in Malta to take down Pan Am 103 with a bomb made by Libyan intelligence. The Scottish court found Giaka less than credible, yet his claims against Megrahi stood up adequately to produce a conviction.

CIA made Giaka available to the court as the star witness, while obscuring some of their clandestine relationship with the Libyan spy. Langley offered several of its own officers to the court as well, something CIA recounted with pride in its official telling of their support to the Lockerbie trial, but the agency was careful to only produce officials who endorsed the Libya-did-it hypothesis.

There was the rub. Some CIA officers who were close to Giaka did not find his claims about Pan Am 103 and his own intelligence service’s involvement to be credible; in fact, they considered their “star” to be an unreliable fabricator. However, this secret – which raises fundamental questions about the US government’s official position on Lockerbie since late 1991 – was kept confined to spy circles for decades. Until now.

John Holt, a retired CIA officer who served as Giaka’s handler three decades ago, has broken his silence, granting a detailed interview to British media about his role in this sensational case. The 68-year-old Holt spoke out for the first time about what really happened behind the scenes with Giaka, whom he dismissed as an asset who was prone to “making up stories.” Giaka was far from a reliable source and the former American spy opined that CIA kept Holt away from the trial, since agency leaders knew that his account contradicted the official US position on Lockerbie. As he explained:

I handled Abdul-Majid Giaka in 1989 for a whole year during which he never mentioned Libyan involvement in the bombing. My cables [back to CIA headquarters] showed he was a car mechanic who was placed by Libyan Intelligence as Malta Airport office manager with Libyan Arab Airlines and had very little information about anything to do with bombs – or Lockerbie. He felt humiliated by Megrahi, who was an official with the Libyan Intelligence Service. “I was treated,” he said, “like a dog when Megrahi came to the office.” That's all reported in my cables, so CIA knew Giaka had a grudge against Megrahi.

This was a personal vendetta, in other words, one that was driven by Giaka’s needs and his changing memory, as Holt elaborated:

Every time I met Giaka, which was each month or two, I would also ask him if he had any information at all about the Pan-Am bombing. All of us CIA and FBI field officers were asked by the CIA to keep pressing our assets for any answers or clues.  His answer was always: No.

I expressed my opinion to the FBI that Giaka was nothing more than a wannabe who was not a real Intel Officer for the Libyans. He had no information [about] Lockerbie, and I told the CIA all this in comments I made in my cables. He went back to Libya at the end of 1989 and I moved on to another assignment.  

In 1991, Giaka told the CIA that he had been exposed and the Libyans would kill him. When he was told he was useless to our intelligence services, he began making up stories. It was only when he needed desperately to get some financial and logistical support from the US to flee Libya in 1991 that he started telling the CIA things relevant to the Pan Am 103 bombing.

This fix was in, however, and Holt found his first-hand view of the case sidelined by his own agency. His cables which illuminated Giaka’s unreliability as a source were not shared by CIA with the Scottish court, while Langley declined to let Holt provide evidence at the trial. “We now all need to admit we got the wrong man, and focus on the real culprits,” Holt explained, pointing a finger at Bill Barr:

I have reason to believe there was a concerted effort, for unexplained reasons, to switch the original investigations away from Iran and its bomb-making Palestinian extremist ally the PFLP—General Command. Now we should focus a new investigation on the Iranians and their links with the bomber…I would start by asking the current attorney general, William Barr, why he suddenly switched focus in 1991, when he was also attorney general, from where clear evidence was leading, toward a much less likely scenario involving Libyans.

In May of this year, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ordered a fresh look into Abdelbaset el-Megrahi’s conviction. So far, this review has revealed claims that the prosecution presented a distorted version of the late Megrahi’s alleged role based on “cherrypicked” evidence in order to obtain a conviction. Bill Barr won’t be attorney general for much longer and he ought to avail himself of the opportunity to explain why credible information from veteran intelligence officers like John Holt was ignored to make a case against Megrahi, who may not be guilty of his supposed role in the murder of 270 innocent people.

Nearly a year ago, Attorney General Barr delivered remarks about the Pan Am 103 tragedy at a memorial service held at Arlington National Cemetery. He commemorated the dead of Lockerbie: “The Americans who died that day were attacked because they were Americans. They died for their country. They deserve to be honored by our nation.” Barr added that the case remains far from over for him: “In 1991, I made a pledge to you on behalf of the American law-enforcement community: ‘We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice.’ That is still our pledge. For me personally, this is still very much unfinished business.” The thirty-second anniversary of the Lockerbie attack is two weeks from today. If Barr meant what he said about resolving that tragedy’s unfinished business, John Holt’s testimony is an excellent place to commence the search for the full truth about what happened to Pan Am 103.

Majid Giaka's CIA handler speaks out "after a lifetime of silence"

[What follows is excerpted from a report by Paul Martin headlined Former CIA agent reveals he was excluded from Lockerbie bombing inquiry published today on The Telegraph website:]

A former CIA agent has claimed he was excluded from the original Lockerbie bombing trial and that investigators should turn their attention to the "true culprit" – Iran.

John Holt, 68, says he was the author of secret cables showing that the Libyan double agent put forward by Scottish prosecutors as the star witness in the Lockerbie bombing trial had a history of "making up stories".

Mr Holt was never sent to the trial by his bosses, even though he had been the CIA handler for Libyan double agent and principal witness Abdul-Majid Giaka.

"I have reason to believe there was a concerted effort, for unexplained reasons, to switch the original investigations away from Iran and its bomb-making Palestinian extremist ally the PFLP General Command. Now we should focus a new investigation on the Iranians and their links with the bomber," he told The Telegraph in an exclusive interview.

"I would start by asking the current Attorney General, William Barr, why he suddenly switched focus in 1991, when he was also Attorney General, from where clear evidence was leading, toward a much less likely scenario involving Libyans."

Mr Holt spoke out for the first time as Scottish Supreme Court judges consider whether to quash the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who died of cancer in 2012. (...)

Giaka became a US asset after claiming he had information about Libyan involvement with terrorism while working as an assistant to the station manager of Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA) in Malta.

Explaining the key importance of his cables, Mr Holt said: "I handled Abdul-Majid Giaka in 1989 for a whole year during which he never mentioned Libyan involvement in the bombing.

"My cables showed he was a car mechanic who was placed by Libyan Intelligence as Malta Airport office manager with Libyan Arab Airlines and had very little information about anything to do with bombs – or Lockerbie.

"He felt humiliated by Megrahi, who was an official with the Libyan Intelligence Service. 'I was treated,' he said, 'like a dog when Megrahi came to the office.'  

"That's all reported in my cables, so the CIA knew Giaka had a grudge against Megrahi.

"Every time I met Giaka, which was each month or two, I would also ask him if he had any information at all about the Pan-Am bombing. All of us CIA and FBI field officers were asked by the CIA to keep pressing our assets for any answers or clues.  His answer was always: No.

“I expressed my opinion to the FBI that Giaka was nothing more than a wannabe who was not a real Intel Officer for the Libyans. He had no information re Lockerbie, and I told the CIA all this in comments I made in my cables. He went back to Libya at the end of 1989 and I moved on to another assignment.  

"In 1991 Giaka told the CIA that he had been exposed and the Libyans would kill him. When he was told he was useless to our intelligence services [the CIA and FBI], he began making up stories.

"It was only when he needed desperately to get some financial and logistical support from the US to flee Libya in 1991 that he started telling the CIA things relevant to the PanAm-103 bombings – like hearing Megrahi and another man talking about a plan to bomb an American airliner." (...)

Mr Holt alleges he first realised there was an effort to distort the realities when called into the office of the CIA director George Tenet.  

There, his description of Giaka was not included in the initial presentation of evidence to the trial. Later, summoned a second time to the director's office, his cables were thrust in front of him by FBI agents and he claims he was told to sign that they were written by him. He says no explanation was given. These were eventually released to the trial by the CIA, with some 'redaction', in 2000.

"Operational cables that I wrote did not get sent to the original trial," he revealed. "They were withheld by the CIA and the FBI, who – even when my cables did emerge – declined to let me give evidence to the Scottish court hearing, held in Camp Zeist near Utrecht.  

"We now all need to admit we got the wrong man, and focus on the real culprits."

After 24 years of distinguished service with the CIA, Mr Holt has had deep concerns about speaking out. He has chosen his words with great caution, anxious to avoid accusations that he has leaked any secrets that could compromise his former agency.

"I'm speaking out now, after a lifetime of silence. But I feel deeply frustrated and I want justice to be done," he said.

Mr Holt believes intelligence services worldwide already have enough evidence to pinpoint the Lockerbie perpetrators.

"Whatever the Scottish Supreme Court decides, Britain should reopen the whole Lockerbie saga, have a heart-to-heart with the Americans, and go after Iran," he told The Telegraph.

"I have reason to believe that the three security agencies of the US Government were working on evidence pointing directly to Iran, before the Libyan connection was brought into play.  I believe the US Government tried to hide evidence for political reasons, and Britain also was willing to go along with this.

"I have reason to believe that a crucial decision was made in 1991 by the US Justice Department and its enforcement arm the FBI: to drop all evidence pointing toward Iran and instead manipulate the evidence to place blame on Gaddafi's Libya. Gaddafi was a long-time nemesis to numerous US presidents."

Mr Holt feels that Americans were particularly keen to pin the blame for Lockerbie on Libya because of an ongoing feud. After the coup that brought Gaddafi to power, the Libyans had expelled American oil companies from oil drilling fields, and US forces from a massive American-built airbase constructed during the Cold War.

And in the 1980s the Gaddafi regime was suspected of being a massive danger to the West by developing a secret WMD programme.

He said the first thing British and US intelligence officers should do is demand access to the former chief of Libyan intelligence, Abdallah Senoussi, son-in-law of Colonel Gaddafi, who is still languishing in a Libyan jail under sentence of death. 

Gaddafi and his henchmen were overthrown, with British military intervention, in 2011 and Senoussi, now aged 60, was convicted in 2015 for crimes against humanity that had no connection with Lockerbie.

"An interpretation is that the British and the US are not demanding to see him – because they already know Libya did not do it," says Mr Holt.

Thirteen years of Crown obstruction and obfuscation

This blog is thirteen years old today.

I started the blog in 2007 just after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had referred Abdelbaset Megrahi’s conviction back to the High Court of Justiciary for a further appeal. It seemed to me that a commentary on the appeal process would be of some value. My expectation was that, even allowing for the law’s notorious delays, the blog would not be needed for longer than two years -- or two-and-a-half at the outside. Foolishly, of course, I gravely underestimated the Crown Office’s ingenuity in delaying proceedings (with the connivance or condonation of the appeal judges) and the obstructiveness of the then UK Government in the persons of the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, and the Advocate General for Scotland, Lord Davidson of Glen Clova QC. The result was that the appeal hearing had only barely got into its stride when Megrahi’s illness led to his abandoning the appeal and being released on compassionate grounds in August 2009. So the Megrahi case lingers on, as does this blog. Perhaps the appeal resulting from the current SCCRC reference back to the High Court will enable the case and this blog to be decently buried. But don’t expect it to be anytime soon.

The first item to appear on this blog was the text of an article published by me in a legal journal: Lockerbie: A satisfactory process but a flawed result. What follows is the second item published in the blog on the same day.

The SCCRC Decision

On 28 June 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi’s conviction of the Lockerbie bombing back to the High Court of Justiciary for a further appeal. The case had been under consideration by the SCCRC since September 2003 and its statement of reasons (available only to Megrahi, to the Crown and to the High Court) extends to over 800 pages, accompanied by thirteen volumes of appendices. The Commission, in the published summary of its findings, rejected submissions on behalf of Megrahi to the effect that evidence led at the trial had been fabricated and that he had been inadequately represented by his then legal team, but went on to indicate that there were six grounds upon which it had concluded that a miscarriage of justice might have occurred. Strangely enough, however, only four of these grounds are enumerated in the summary. They are as follows:

“A number of the submissions made on behalf of the applicant challenged the reasonableness of the trial court's verdict, based on the legal test contained in section 106(3)(b) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995. The Commission rejected the vast majority of those submissions. However, in examining one of the grounds, the Commission formed the view that there is no reasonable basis in the trial court's judgment for its conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary's House, took place on 7 December 1988. Although it was proved that the applicant was in Malta on several occasions in December 1988, in terms of the evidence 7 December was the only date on which he would have had the opportunity to purchase the items. The finding as to the date of purchase was therefore important to the trial court's conclusion that the applicant was the purchaser. Likewise, the trial court's conclusion that the applicant was the purchaser was important to the verdict against him. Because of these factors the Commission has reached the view that the requirements of the legal test may be satisfied in the applicant's case.

“New evidence not heard at the trial concerned the date on which the Christmas lights were illuminated in thearea of Sliema in which Mary's House is situated. In the Commission's view,taken together with Mr Gauci's evidence at trial and the contents of his police statements, this additional evidence indicates that the purchase of the items took place prior to 6 December 1988. In other words, it indicates that the purchase took place at a time when there was no evidence at trial that the applicant was in Malta.

“Additional evidence, not made available to the defence, which indicates that four days prior to the identification parade at which Mr Gauci picked out the applicant, he saw a photograph of the applicant in a magazine article linking him to the bombing. In the Commission's view evidence of Mr Gauci's exposure to this photograph in such close proximity to the parade undermines the reliability of his identification of the applicant at that time and at the trial itself.

“Other evidence, not made available to the defence, which the Commission believes may further undermine Mr Gauci's identification of the applicant as the purchaser and the trial court's finding as to the date of purchase.”

The implications for the verdict of guilty

The reasons given by the Commission for finding that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred in this case are not limited to the effect of new evidence which has become available since the date of the original trial and the non-disclosure by the police and prosecution of evidence helpful to the defence.    The prima facie miscarriage of justice identified by the Commission includes the trial court’s finding in fact on the evidence heard at the trial that the clothes which surrounded the bomb were purchased in Malta on 7 December 1988 and that Megrahi was the purchaser.  This was the very cornerstone of the Crown’s case against him.  If, as suggested by the Commission, that finding in fact had no reasonable basis in the evidence, then there is no legal justification whatsoever for his conviction by the trial court.

The implications for the Scottish criminal justice system

The present writer has always contended that no reasonable tribunal could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led at the trial.  Here is just one example of the trial court’s idiosyncratic approach to the evidence.  Many more could be provided.

A vitally important issue was the date on which the goods that surrounded the bomb were purchased in a shop in Malta.  There were only two live possibilities:  7 December 1988, a date when Megrahi was proved to be on Malta and 23 November 1988 when he was not. In an attempt to establish just which of these dates was the correct one, the weather conditions in Sliema on these two days were explored. The shopkeeper’s evidence was that when the purchaser left his shop it was raining so heavily that his customer thought it advisable to buy an umbrella to protect himself while he went in search of a taxi.  The unchallenged meteorological evidence led by the defence established that while it had rained on 23 November at the relevant time, it was unlikely that it had rained at all on 7 December; and if there had been any rain, it would have been at most a few drops, insufficient to wet the ground.  On this material, the judges found in fact that the clothes were purchased on 7 December.

On evidence as weak as this how was it possible for the trial court to find him guilty?  And how was it possible for the Criminal Appeal Court to fail to overturn that conviction?  The Criminal Appeal Court dismissed Megrahi’s appeal on the most technical of technical legal grounds: it did not consider the justifiability of the trial court’s factual findings at all (though it is clear from their interventions during the Crown submissions in the appeal that at least some of the judges were only too well aware of how shaky certain crucial findings were and how contrary to the weight of the evidence).

It is submitted that at least part of the answer lies in the history of the Scottish legal and judicial system.  For centuries judges have accorded a specially privileged status to the Lord Advocate.  It has been unquestioningly accepted that, though a political appointee and the government’s (now the Scottish Executive’s) chief legal adviser, he (now, of course, she) would at all times, in his capacity as head of the prosecution system, act independently and without concern for political considerations and would always place the public interest in a fair trial above the narrow interest of the prosecution in gaining a conviction.  This judicial vision of the role of the Lord Advocate was reinforced by the fact that, until the Scottish Judicial Appointments Board commenced operations in 2002, all Scottish High Court Judges (and sheriffs) were nominated for appointment to the Bench by the Lord Advocate of the day.  This meant that, in all criminal proceedings, the presiding judge owed his position to the person (or one of his predecessors in office) who was ultimately responsible for bringing the case before him, and for its conduct while in his court.

The behaviour of the Crown in the Lockerbie trial was certainly not beyond criticism -- indeed casts grave doubt on the extent to which the Lord Advocate and Crown Office staff can be relied on always to place the interest of securing a fair trial for the accused above any perceived institutional imperative to obtain a conviction. To illustrate this in the context of the Lockerbie trial it is enough to refer to the saga of CIA cables relating to the star Crown witness, Abdul Majid Giaka, who had been a long-standing CIA asset in Libya and, by the time of the trial, was living in the United States under a witness protection programme.

Giaka’s evidence was ultimately found by the court to be utterly unworthy of belief. This was largely due to the devastating effectiveness of the cross-examination by defence counsel. Their ability to destroy completely the credibility of the witness stemmed from the contents of cables in which his CIA handlers communicated to headquarters the information that Giaka had provided to them in the course of their secret meetings. Discrepancies between Giaka's evidence-in-chief to the Advocate Depute and the contents of these contemporaneous cables enabled the defence to mount a formidable challenge to the truthfulness and accuracy, or credibility and reliability, of Giaka's testimony. Had the information contained in these cables not been available to them, the task of attempting to demonstrate to the court that Giaka was an incredible or unreliable witness would have been immensely more difficult and perhaps impossible.

Yet the Crown strove valiantly to prevent the defence obtaining access to these cables.

At the trial, on 22 August 2000, when he was seeking to persuade the Court to deny the defence access to those cables in their unedited or uncensored form, the then Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC,  stated that the members of the prosecution team who were given access to the uncensored CIA cables on 1 June 2000 were fully aware of the obligation incumbent upon them as prosecutors to make available to the defence material relevant to the defence of the accused and, to that end, approached the contents of those cables with certain considerations in mind.

Mr Boyd said: "First of all, they considered whether or not there was any information behind the redactions which would undermine the Crown case in any way.  Secondly, they considered whether there was anything which would appear to reflect on the credibility of Mr Majid… On all of these matters, the learned Advocate Depute reached the conclusion that there was nothing within the cables which bore on the defence case, either by undermining the Crown case or by advancing a positive case which was being made or may be made, having regard to the special defence... I emphasise that the redactions have been made on the basis of what is in the interests of the security of a friendly power... Crown counsel was satisfied that there was nothing within the documents which bore upon the defence case in any way."

One of the judges, Lord Coulsfield, then intervened: "Does that include, Lord Advocate ... that Crown counsel, having considered the documents, can say to the Court that there is nothing concealed which could possibly bear on the credibility of this witness?"

The Lord Advocate replied:  “Well, I'm just checking with the counsel who made that...  there is nothing within the -- -- there is nothing within these documents which relates to Lockerbie or the bombing of Pan Am 103 which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Mr Majid on these matters."

Notwithstanding the opposition of the Lord Advocate, the court ordered the unedited cables to be made available to the defence, who went on to use their contents to such devastating effect in questioning Giaka that the court held that his evidence had to be disregarded in its entirety.  Yet, strangely enough, the judges did not see fit publicly to censure the Crown for its inaccurate assurances that the cables contained nothing that could assist the defence.

Beyond the Lockerbie trial, the failure of the Crown to place the public interest in a fair trial above the interest of the prosecution in obtaining convictions is illustrated by the extent to which the Lord Advocate has recently had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, through the Privy Council in London before making available to the defence material in the prosecution’s possession that no-one could conceivably deny was of relevance and assistance in the accused person’s defence: see Holland v HMA 2005 SCCR 417;  Sinclair v HMA 2005 SCCR 446. So much for the fairness of the trial being the Crown’s primary and predominant motivation!

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” I Corinthians xiii.11. It is high time for all involved in the Scottish criminal justice system to put away childish things. All of us, judges included, are surely too old to believe any longer in fairy tales. Fairy tales can be convenient and comforting and can bolster our self esteem. But, as in the case of the belief that the Crown can uniformly be relied upon always to act selflessly in the public interest, they can be dangerous and, if acted upon, work terrible injustice.

It is submitted that the Lockerbie case demonstrates just how necessary it is, if public confidence is to be maintained, for the Scottish Executive to institute a high-powered, independent, investigation into all three aspects – investigation, prosecution and adjudication -- of the Scottish criminal justice system.

The Crown and the CIA

[This is the headline over an article authored by me that was published on this date in 2000 on TheLockerbieTrial.com website which Ian Ferguson and I ran during the period of the Zeist trial and first appeal. It reads as follows:]

When the trial resumed on Tuesday 22 August [2000], the defence teams complained to the Court that they had just learned the previous day that certain CIA cables relating to the Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka, which they had thought had been made available to both the prosecution and the defence only in a censored or redacted form, had in fact been seen by members of the prosecution team on 1 June 2000 in uncensored or unredacted form.  The defence contended that the principle of equality of arms enshrined in article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights required that the defence should have similar access to this material.  The Crown opposed the defence's application.  They conceded that it is the duty of a Scottish prosecutor to supply to the defence any material available to the prosecution which advances the defence case or is relevant to a defence attack on the credibility of a prosecution witness. However, in the course of the Crown's lengthy submissions, it was stated by the Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC, that the deletions from the versions of the cables supplied to the defence related only to matters which were (a) irrelevant both to the facts in issue in the Lockerbie trial and to the credibility of the witness Majid Giaka or (b) related to sensitive matters of United States national security.  Indeed, it was for the purpose of ensuring that the Crown were in a position to fulfil their disclosure obligations that members of the Crown team inspected the unredacted cables on 1 June.  To quote the Lord Advocate:

"First of all, they considered whether or not there was any information behind the redactions which would undermine the Crown case in any way.  Secondly, they considered whether there was anything which would appear to reflect on the credibility of Mr Majid.  They also considered whether was anything which might bear upon the special defences which had been lodged and intimated in this case.

"On all of these matters, the learned at Advocate Depute reached the conclusion that there was nothing within the cables which bore on the Defence case, either by undermining the Crown case or by advancing a positive case which was being made or may be made, having regard to the special defence... 

"There is nothing within these documents which relate to Lockerbie or the bombing of Pan Am 103 which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Mr Majid on these matters."

The Court was unimpressed by the arguments of the Lord Advocate and instructed him to use his best endeavours to secure the release by the CIA to the defence of the unredacted or uncensored cables. 

These cables were in due course made available to the defence, and on Tuesday 29 August various excerpts from them were read out in open court by defence counsel in an attempt to convince the judges that further CIA cables relating to Giaka should be made available to the defence, if necessary by means of a request by the Scottish Court at Camp Zeist to the appropriate Federal Court in the United States of America for an order compelling the CIA to disgorge the relevant material.  The Court, wishing to avoid the delays which would necessarily be caused by any recourse to the American courts, has instructed the Lord Advocate again to use his best endeavours to secure the release by the CIA of these additional cables.  Only if he is unsuccessful will the Scottish Court reluctantly consider the option of a formal request through the American courts. 

The previously blacked-out passages read out to the Court from the cables now in the hands of the defence indicated that, as at 1 September 1989 (more than eight months after the destruction of Pan Am 103), Giaka's CIA handlers were highly critical of him and of the lack of important information supplied by him.  He is described in the now-revealed portions of the cables as a man in the business of selling information for his own benefit; as someone who will never have the penetration of Libyan intelligence services that had been anticipated; as someone who had never been a true member of Libyan intelligence; and as someone whose CIA salary of $1000 per month should be cut off if he supplied no significant information.  It seems to be the natural inference from this that, by 1 September 1989, Giaka had still not informed his CIA masters that his Libyan colleagues in Malta had been responsible for the Lockerbie bombing: if he had done so, it is difficult to see how these criticisms of his value and of the worth of the information supplied by him could conceivably been made. 

But apart altogether from that, if the excerpts read out in court on Tuesday 29 August and summarised in the preceding paragraph accurately reflect passages from the cables which had been blacked out from the versions originally supplied to the defence, it is somewhat difficult to appreciate how it could possibly have been accurate or justifiable for the Crown to state to the Court on Tuesday 22 August that the redacted or censored portions within the documents contained nothing "which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Mr Majid."

Criminality allegations submitted to Justice Secretary

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on the website of The Scotsman on this date in 2012:]

Lockerbie campaigners have lodged “fresh allegations” with justice secretary Kenny MacAskill about the conduct of the Scottish authorities at the trial 11 years ago.

Demands for a fresh inquiry into the bombing of the Pan Am jet in 1988 will come before MSPs on Holyrood’s justice committee today. The Justice for Megrahi (JfM) campaign has compared the “cover-up” surrounding the trial to the recent Hillsborough revelations. But the claims were branded “false and deliberately misleading” by Scotland’s Crown Office yesterday.

In a submission to the committee, the JfM group states: “The outcome of the Hillsborough inquiry has undoubtedly shone a light on the inner workings of a justice system that purported to keep its citizens safe and secure.

“Now we can see that protection of the system and the wrongdoers within it took precedence over protection of the individual citizen. If Hillsborough was England’s shame, then Lockerbie is Scotland’s, and much of the indifference and arrogance identified within the former can be identified in the latter.”

The campaign submitted a letter to Mr MacAskill which lodges “serious formal allegations” relating to the conduct of the investigation and the Kamp van Zeist trial.

[RB: JfM’s letter to Kenny MacAskill, with names of individuals removed, reads as follows:]

The Committee of Justice for Megrahi hereby formally lodge with you complaints alleging criminal wrongdoing in the investigation and prosecution of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah for the murder of 270 people in the downing of Pan Am 103 on 21 December 1988.

These complaints are directed against the persons and bodies named below whom, for the reasons given, we believe may be guilty of the criminal offences specified.

1.  On 22 August 2000 the Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC, communicated to the judges of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands information about the contents of CIA cables relating to the Crown witness Abdul Majid Giaka that was known to members of the prosecution team [A B and C D] who had scrutinised the cables, to be false. The Lord Advocate did so after consulting these members of the prosecution team. It is submitted that this constituted an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

2.  Members of the Lockerbie prosecution team, including but not limited to [C D], devised and presented or allowed to be presented to the trial court a scenario regarding the placement of items in luggage container AVE4041 which was known to be false, in order to obfuscate and conceal compelling evidence that the bomb suitcase was introduced by a terrorist infiltration at Heathrow airport. It is submitted that this constituted an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

3.  Dumfries and Galloway Police, and those individuals employed by that force responsible for the recording, prioritising and submission to the Crown Office of evidence gathered in the investigation into the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, and the Crown Office, and those individuals in that organisation responsible for the analysis of said evidence and identifying what material required to be passed on to those acting for Megrahi and Fhimah, concealed the witness statement relating to the break-in to Heathrow airside giving access to the luggage loading shed used by Pan Am 103 in the early hours of 21st December 1988 which was provided by Heathrow Security Officer Raymond Manly to the Metropolitan Police shortly after Mr Manly’s discovery of the break-in. It is submitted that the concealment of this witness statement, which was or ought to have been known to Dumfries and Galloway Police and the Crown Office to be of the highest possible significance to the defence, constituted an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

4.  [In the course of his testimony at Camp Zeist, witness E F] told the Court that the materials and tracking analysis of fragment PT/35b, the sliver of printed circuit board said to have originated from a circuit board contained in one of the 20 MST-13 digital timer instruments supplied by MEBO AG to Libya (the boards for all these timers having been custom-made for MEBO by Thuring AG), were “similar in all respects” to the control samples of MST-13 circuit boards. [E F] consistently used this form of words to describe analyses of items which were identical or of common origin. This statement was false. While the tracking pattern was indeed identical, [E F] was aware that the coating on the circuitry of the control boards was the standard alloy of 70% tin and 30% lead, while the coating on the circuitry of fragment PT/35b (most unusually) lacked the 30% lead content. It is submitted that his statement to the Court was a deliberate falsehood designed to conceal a significant and material difference between the evidential fragment and the control items, and thus constituted both perjury and an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

5.  The Lockerbie investigation, and in particular [police officer G H], knew by 1990 that the coating on the circuitry of fragment PT/35b was composed of pure tin, and that this composition was highly unusual, being described as “by far the most interesting feature” of the fragment by all the experts who were consulted, “without exception”. By early 1992 [G H]  and those in the Crown Office to whom he reported also knew that the metallurgy testing on the control MST-13 circuit boards showed the circuitry on these boards to be coated with the standard 70% tin / 30% lead alloy. [G H] and those in the Crown Office to whom he reported

either failed to inquire with the manufacturer Thuring AG whether they had supplied any MST-13 timer boards with the unusual lead-free coating, or did make such inquiries and failed to disclose the results of these inquiries to the defence. It was discovered by the defence team in 2008 that Thuring AG did not manufacture printed circuit boards with a lead-free coating, and indeed lacked the manufacturing capacity to do so. If [G H] and/or those in the Crown Office to whom he reported failed to make the relevant inquiries with Thuring AG, it is submitted that this omission was grossly negligent. If [G H] and/or those in the Crown Office to whom he reported made such inquiries and failed to disclose the results to the defence, it is submitted that this failure constitutes an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

6.  From our assessment of the ‘SCCRC Statement of Reasons’, relating to its referral of Mr Megrahi’s case to the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2007, and the ‘Grounds of Appeal 1 and 2' documents prepared by his legal team in furtherance of that appeal, it is clear that a number of questions have been raised in relation to the process which led to the identification of Mr Megrahi by witness Mr Anthony Gauci. These include doubts about the legitimacy of the process by which Mr Gauci’s identification evidence was obtained, assessed and delivered, and what prompted significant failures by the Crown to disclose related material information. From these documents it appears that [police officer I J] and other police officers who were involved in this identification process might well have been aware that a number of the aspects of the process they were following were flawed and did not accord with guidelines extant at the time or with any general principles of fairness to the accused. It is submitted that the omissions and failings referred to in the relevant reports indicate that [I J] and others have important questions to answer in connection with the identification process, and we believe, taken as a whole, that their conduct constitutes an attempt to pervert the course of justice and a breach of section 44 (2) of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967 (violation of duty by a constable).

The above numbered complaints simply constitute the basic allegations. Documents containing detailed supporting material have been prepared and will be made available to the investigating authorities as and when requested by them.

You above all will realise the seriousness of these allegations which strike at the very heart of the Lockerbie investigation past and present. Effectively, we are complaining about the actions of Crown Office officials, the prosecution and investigating authorities including the police, and certain other agencies and individuals. Given the controversy surrounding this whole affair we request that you give serious thought to the independence of any investigating authority you appoint. As a group we believe that you should appoint someone outwith Scotland who has no previous direct or indirect association with Lockerbie or its ramifications.

You will be aware of the disquiet we feel about the delay and obfuscation which have surrounded this whole affair since 1988. Nevertheless we understand you will require reasonable time to inquire into these allegations and decide how you wish to proceed. We therefore propose to keep these matters private and confidential for a period of thirty days from the date of this letter to allow you to carry out the necessary enquiries, decide how you wish the matter to be investigated, and respond to us. We thereafter reserve the right to make the above matters public as and when we feel appropriate and reasonable. Furthermore, on the grounds that PE1370 is due for consideration on 25th September, we also reserve the right to inform the Justice Committee of the fact that we have lodged this document with yourself, making reference (in general terms only) to the fact that it contains serious allegations relating to the Lockerbie/Zeist case.

In passing we would also note the recent publicity given to the perceived lack of independence in Scotland between the Lord Advocate and the Scottish Government by Mr Andrew Tickell. (http://lallandspeatworrier.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-unpolitical-snps-pied-lord-advocate.html)

We also share this concern and would hope, for reasons that must be obvious from the foregoing, that your response to this letter will be free from Crown Office influence of any kind.

We thank you for your time and attention in this matter and look forward to an acknowledgment of receipt by return.

[RB: Three additional allegations were added by JfM at a later date. These nine allegations remain under investigation in Police Scotland’s Operation Sandwood.]

CIA memos reveal doubts over 'key' Lockerbie witness

[This is the headline over an article published in The Independent on this date in 2009. It reads as follows:]

A Walter Mitty type convinced the Americans he was a Libyan intelligence agent when he worked in the agency's garage

A Libyan "double agent" who was central to the CIA's investigation into the Lockerbie bombing exaggerated his importance in Tripoli's intelligence apparatus and gave little information of value, yet is still living at the US taxpayers' expense in a witness protection programme, according to previously unseen CIA cables.

Five months before the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988, 27-year-old Majid Giaka turned up at the US embassy in Malta and "expressed a desire to relocate ... in return for sensitive information on Libya", in the words of a cable sent by a CIA case officer to his headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the same day. Mr Giaka claimed he was an agent of Libya's feared Jamahiriya security organisation, but it later turned out that he worked in the agency's garage.

More than 60 cables, uncovered in a BBC investigation, detail the relations between the Americans and a man later described in court as a real-life Walter Mitty. Mr Giaka, who said that he worked for Libyan Arab Airlines at Malta's Luqa airport as a cover, told the CIA that he wanted to remain in Malta. He promised he would co-operate fully with the CIA – in return for money.

At the time Libya was public enemy number one. But the CIA had few sources of information on the country, and Mr Giaka was put on the payroll. In return for information about Libyan officials coming and going from Malta, he received $1,000 a month and gifts. His handlers even agreed to fund $6,000 of fake surgery on his arm, so that he could avoid military service back home.

In the summer of 1989, the Lockerbie investigation was uncovering evidence which pointed to a Libyan connection, and the FBI believed the suitcase which blew up Pan Am flight 103 had started its journey from Luqa airport. The CIA hoped its Libyan agent would have inside knowledge, but the case officers reported back: "Giaka does not believe explosives hidden in an unaccompanied suitcase could be inserted into the handling process at Luqa International Airport."

The Libyan mole acknowledged that it could have been theoretically possible for officials in Tripoli to bring explosives on to the island via the diplomatic pouch, but "because Giaka believes he had the best contacts of LIA [Luqa International Airport], he does not think this type of operation could have been slipped by him".

The case officers cabled: "It is clear that Giaka will never be the penetration of the ESO [Libyan External Security Organisation] that we had anticipated ... unfortunately, it appears that our assisting him in scam surgery on his arm to avoid military service has had the reverse result that we had intended – it has also allowed him to avoid further service with the ESO, Giaka's true intention from the beginning".

But even after it turned out that he had only worked in the ESO garage, he was the only Libyan agent the CIA had in Malta, so it kept him on. By the autumn of 1989, a former Libyan Arab Airlines security official, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, was chief suspect for having planted the bomb on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt (where it was transferred on to a Pan Am flight via London). But Mr Giaka "had no further information" on his one-time colleague.

Mr Giaka eventually returned to Tripoli in 1990 after the CIA money dried up. But the agency kept in touch with him and finally persuaded him in 1991 to come to America. Nine years later, Majid Giaka arrived at the Lockerbie bombing trial in the Netherlands. He described how he had seen Megrahi and his co-accused, Khalifa Fhimah, at Luqa airport before the bombing with a large brown suitcase. But the CIA cables confirm that nearly two years before, Mr Giaka didn't remember anything.

At the Lockerbie trial, the four judges described some of his evidence as "at best grossly exaggerated and at worst simply untrue" and concluded he was "largely motivated by financial considerations".