The British, American and Scottish governments appear shifty

[What follows is the text of an article by Lesley Riddoch published in The Scotsman on this date in 2009:]

Kenny MacAskill is now facing an almost impossible situation over the man convicted in 2001 of the Lockerbie bombing.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi wants early release from his 27-year minimum sentence on compassionate grounds – he's expected to die within three months of prostate cancer. Such compassion has recently been shown to Ronnie Biggs and in Scotland, of the 30 such requests made since 2000, only seven have been denied. Even though there's every prospect he will arrive in Libya like a returning hero, that must have nothing to do with the medical and legal decision here.

But Megrahi's surprise decision to end his appeal has queered the pitch, raising suspicions that a prison transfer has been agreed instead to temper American anger that a convicted mass killer should be shown any compassion at all. The fate of Megrahi is emotive and urgent, but it is not actually the most important issue at stake.

Trust in government and faith in the law also hang in the balance, partly because faith in Scotland's ability to do big things well is easily dented – and Megrahi's conviction by Scottish judges under Scottish law at Camp Zeist was perhaps the biggest ever moment for our distinctive legal system – but mostly because the official explanation for the Lockerbie bombing is at least as unconvincing as the most compellingly argued rivals.

Conspiracy theories abounded in 1994 when the London Film Festival dropped its planned screening of The Maltese Double Cross – a documentary blaming Iran not Libya – and this newspaper took the decision to screen it.

As assistant editor, I sat with a reporter for a full week, checking claims made by American film-maker Allan Francovich.

Scotsman lawyers needed sight of relevant documents and sworn affidavits from interviewees – including one from a witness living in hiding in Sweden. After three small edits, the film was "legalled" and ready, but our booked venue in Edinburgh suddenly discovered a double-booking. The Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) stepped in – though it received phone calls threatening legal action from men purporting to be lawyers for one of the American Drug Enforcement Agency officials named in the film.

Cuts were still being made in London the night before the GFT screening – so Lockerbie relative Dr Jim Swire was asked to bring the final version north with him the following morning. Jim had attended the first private screening of the film by Tam Dalyell in the House of Commons – protected from possible libel claims by parliamentary privilege – and apparently sat with a blanket at the open front door all night to make sure he didn't miss the dispatch rider who arrived at 3am with the completed film.

That morning, we got news that the only other copy of the film, held by a human rights group in Birmingham, had been destroyed in a mysterious overnight fire. I travelled with the large Beta cassettes of the film in a rucksack, reckoning that a casual appearance was the safest strategy.

The audience settled, the film was shown, there was a question-and-answer session with Jim Swire, and we held our collective breath. Would The Scotsman, as one prominent journalist had warned, find itself frozen out of Crown Office briefings for a decade? Would we be sued, contradicted, even disappeared?

In fact, next to nothing happened. The Edinburgh Film Festival awarded Best Documentary prize to the Double Cross and, bizarrely, Francovich died of a heart attack three years later at the relatively young age of 56. The "unsayable" had been said: that Palestinians, backed by Iran, may have been responsible for Lockerbie. Like all well-formed conspiracy theories, it shook faith in the conventional explanation but didn't offer a foolproof alternative. And, despite the emergence of key bits of information since then, there still is none.

There doesn't have to be. Our legal system works on the basis of reasonable doubt, and even if judges in Camp Zeist had none, key politicians, relatives and lawyers still do. And that matters, especially now.

The public was sold a pup on the existence of WMD in Iraq, and another on the 45-minute warning. We were sold a pup on the health of our banks and an almighty pup on the promise that bankers' bonuses would never reach those judgment- distorting, greedy, heady heights ever again. Governments lie. Bankers lie. And people lie – even under oath.

The stitch-up exists, but the cock-up is infinitely more common. Conspiracies appeal to the anti-authoritarian streak in the Scottish psyche. Yet most are compelling nonsense. So what is the public to believe?

Scottish philosopher David Hume suggested a miracle occurs when believing witnesses are lying is more incredible than believing their claims. That observation describes perfectly the flawed business of human judgment. In the absence of all the facts, the public doesn't suspend judgment; it bases opinion on the demeanour of the parties involved.

The American relatives are still angry and punitive. The British, American and now Scottish governments appear shifty. Jim Swire alone has demonstrated dignity and tenacity, and he wants a public inquiry: even though no public inquiry – from Holyrood to Cullen, from Butler to Bloody Sunday – has ever completely answered the big questions.

And he's right. A public inquiry, or a de facto inquiry based on a court case triggered by human rights legislation, must now take place, and for one simple reason – the same reason that prompted The Scotsman to show The Maltese Double Cross film 15 years ago – 270 people were murdered on Scottish soil. Reasonable doubt about the full circumstances of their murder remains. So we must hear it.

Never mind what Hillary Clinton thinks, and never mind what ultimately happens to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.

US Lockerbie relative attacks Francovich film project

[What follows is the text of a report published in The Herald on this date in 1994:]

The father of an American victim of the Lockerbie bombing has launched a bitter attack on documentary film maker Allan Francovich, who claims that his soon-to-be completed work on the destruction of PanAm flight 103 will make startling new revelations about the identity and background of the bombers.

In a letter in today's Herald, Mr Daniel Cohen, whose daughter Theodora was among the 270 people who died when the jetliner was bombed in December 1988, accuses Mr Francovich of being a ''Libyan dupe'' who is ''at best a journeyman film maker''.

The Herald reported last week that Mr Francovich's film was nearing completion. He maintained then that his efforts were being thwarted by a campaign to diminish his efforts and to undermine his professional standing.

He said anyone who challenged the official version of events, which was that the jet was bombed by the two Libyans subsequently charged by the Scottish and American authorities, was subjected to a tirade of abuse and harassment in the US.

Mr Francovich felt that the campaign was linked to Western intelligence agencies and also to the civil litigation involving PanAm and many relatives in the US courts.

However, Mr Cohen's position is at variance with that adopted by another relative, English GP Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora also died on flight 103. Last week, Dr Swire wrote to The Herald commending any attempt to investigate the affair further.

Yesterday, he said: ''I am sorry that the Cohens have taken this attitude but they lost a daughter at Lockerbie, as I did, and because of that I can forgive them anything. However, Allan Francovich, in the absence of anything else, is at least making the effort to inquire further and to challenge the current situation. Nobody else is doing that. Why not let him get on with it and then judge him on whatever he comes up with?''

Dr Swire, who is a leading campaigner on behalf of British relatives, added that the reason the affair was still wide open to speculation was because there had not been a trial of the two Libyans.

''However, the thing that makes me most angry about this whole affair is that there is continuing evidence to suggest that Western intelligence agencies were warned about what was going to happen. Francovich says he has hard evidence to this effect,'' he said.

''If it is true, I want the Western intelligence agencies to know that they can't just play about with evidence like this as if it was of no importance because at the end of the day a lot of people died.''

In Paris yesterday where he was continuing to work on the film, provisionally entitled Maltese Double Cross, Mr Francovich said the charges which Mr Cohen had levelled against him were those he had often made since filming started last autumn.

''He mentions my reputation as a film maker. Well it is probably not for me to say but my work has been shown at film festivals all over the world. I have won prestigious awards and my films have been shown on BBC and Channel 4.

''He says that our negotiations with Channel 4 for broadcasting the Lockerbie film were thwarted because we had been 'bragging' about the film. Frankly, that is nonsense. The negotiations were discreet in the extreme and I still maintain that they became public by means of telephone surveillance and because of a campaign mounted by someone acting on behalf of certain relatives' interests in the US,'' said Mr Francovich.

''Mr Cohen says that the British Government has never said that they were going to ban the film.

''Well, it wasn't me who originally said that they had. These were stories printed in the Scottish press quoting unnamed Government sources.''

Mr Francovich has also been accused by Mr Cohen of being funded by the Libyans. This follows the revelation that the Lonrho subsidiary which Mr Francovich says commissioned the film was itself partly funded by the Libyan Arab Finance Company.

Mr Francovich said yesterday: ''I can only say this over and over again. This is not a pro-Gaddafi film and the public will be able to come to their own conclusions when it is shown. Frankly, this assertion is probably actionable and it may well be that our production company's lawyers will have to take legal action if the Cohens continue with this campaign against me.”

Francovich film shown on UK TV 20 years ago

[On this date twenty years ago a version of Allan Francovich’s The Maltese Double-Cross was broadcast on television in the United Kingdom. What follows is an excerpt from the relevant entry in Wikipedia:]

The UK's Channel 4 had planned to broadcast the film as early as 1994 but apparently backtracked when several American relatives of PA 103 victims wrote a letter to a newspaper alleging that the film was partially funded by Libya and used a number of "confidence tricksters" as sources. After the Special Broadcasting Service of Australia agreed to screen the film in its entirety, Channel 4 re-entered negotiations with Francovich and reached a compromise to broadcast a slimmed down, 92-minute version of the film which cut material that could have caused legal problems. The shortened version of the film was ultimately shown on Channel 4 on 11 May 1995, but some American relatives of the victims again criticised the decision and accused Channel 4 of giving air-time to "Libyan propaganda." A Channel 4 spokeswoman said the decision to broadcast the film was based on the view that it needed to be shown to a wider public.

The film has never been shown on television or in cinemas in the United States.

[The full version, not the Channel 4 abridgement, can be viewed here.]

Death of Allan Francovich in 1997

[What follows is the text of a report in The Herald on this date in 1997:]

US film-maker Allan Francovich, whose controversial documentary challenged the official British and American view that the Lockerbie bombing was solely the work of two Libyan agents, has died. A friend said Mr Francovich collapsed on April 17 at Houston airport, Texas.

He was pronounced dead at hospital where the cause was given as a heart attack. Mr David Ben-Aryeah, a friend, said Mr Francovich would be cremated in San Antonio, and that his ashes would later be brought to Skye for a ''service of celebration''.

Mr Francovich, who was in his early 50s [RB: He was 56], had written a script while on Skye and had also visited the island with bereaved Lockerbie parent, Dr Jim Swire, while making the Lockerbie documentary The Maltese Double Cross. Mr Ben-Aryeah said: ''While he was there he came to love the island, its tranquillity, its scenery and its people.''

The American made several other controversial documentaries, mostly concerning the work of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Maltese Double Cross, which was shown to MPs in the Commons before being screened publicly in 1995, challenged the official US and British version of how a bomb brought down the New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988.

Last night Linlithgow Labour MP Tam Dalyell, who collaborated with Mr Francovich in making the documentary, said he was ''very upset'' by news of his death. The MP described him as ''one of the most persistent seekers-of-truth'' he had ever met, ''an exceedingly brave man''.

Dr Swire, whose daughter died in the disaster, said he would be ''very much missed'' by those who considered that the truth on the Lockerbie disaster had yet to be told.

The 90-minute documentary, directed by Mr Francovich, claimed a huge cover-up had taken place. The film maintained that Iran and Syria plotted to bring down the aircraft as revenge for the US shooting down an Iranian Airbus months before the Lockerbie tragedy. It argued that the authorities knew the plane was going to be bombed, but did nothing to prevent it for fear of exposing a US-sponsored drug-smuggling operation.

Scotland's top law officer at the time, the Lord Advocate, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, criticised the screening by Channel 4. He said he deprecated all attempts to give a version of the atrocity ''from whatever angle'' while criminal proceedings were pending.

However, relatives of the 270 people who died welcomed the showing of the documentary saying people should be allowed ''to make up their own minds''.

Mr Dalyell said: ''It was my privilege to be Allan Francovich's collaborator in making the film, The Maltese Double Cross, which I believe exposed the truth that the Libyans were not responsible for the Lockerbie crime. ''I could not criticise the American and British governments more strongly for their refusal to address properly the explanations of Lockerbie.''

Dr Swire said: ''Speaking personally we view the loss of Allan as the loss of a close friend whose humour and determination was much appreciated and will be greatly missed.

[RB: Tam Dalyell’s obituary of Allan Francovich in The Independent can be read here.]

"Libya’s vulnerable..., small country, Gaddafi’s hated, let’s go for it"

[The following are excerpts from an article by Alexander Zaitchik headed Lockerbie: the truth and those who dared to reveal it published yesterday on the Muslim Village website:]

The final documentary produced by the American filmmaker Allan Francovich, The Maltese Double Cross: Lockerbie was buried by the American press upon its release in 1994. It was dismissed and attacked for including testimony from terrorists, convicted felons, turncoat spooks, and others of dubious character. But mostly it was ignored. Unlike Francovich’s previous films about the US intelligence world, no art house theater screened it; no public television station aired it.

With the 26th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Francovich has been vindicated. The basic elements of his film’s alternative theory — that the bombing of Pan Am 103 was an Iranian hit in revenge of the US downing of Iran Air 655, contracted out to a Syrian-backed, Beirut-based splinter group of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — are sturdier than ever. The official story of a lone Libyan in Malta, meanwhile, has never looked so pathetic or full of holes, especially in Scotland, scene of the crime, where polls show a majority still wants an independent investigation. This past March, the publication of a three-year Al Jazeera investigation added more ballast corroborating the basics of Double Cross.

The Maltese Double Cross was never screened or aired in the United States. Because of legal threats and official pressure, it almost never aired or screened in the UK, where the bombing killed 270 people on Dec 21, 1988. The doc’s controversial Glasgow debut followed a series of sudden cancellations, including a high-profile, last-minute erasure from the schedule of the 1994 London Film Festival. Double Cross finally opened under the defiant banner of the Scotsman newspaper, whose editors, supported by victims’ families, risked consequences to bring the film to the public. One of those editors, Lesley Riddoch, remembers thinking as the curtains parted, “Would The Scotsman, as one prominent journalist had warned, find itself frozen out of Crown Office briefings for a decade? Would we be sued, contradicted, even disappeared?”

The film and its many advocates, it turned out, weren’t easily suppressed. In 1994, nearly six years after the bombing, the British public had not forgotten the government’s sudden messaging shifts about the likely culprit, which seemed to follow a US lead, or its refusal to allow an independent investigation. Double Cross, for all of its problems, presented plausible explanations for both, often from the mouths of high U.S. officials. Following the Glasgow open, Double Cross won Best Documentary at the Edinburgh Film Festival; that spring, a truncated version of the sprawling 155-minute film aired on the UK’s Channel 4 and on Australian television.

When I first watched Double Cross in the pre-streaming year of 1995, it felt a little like watching a banned movie. A college buddy had returned from a semester at St Andrews with a choppy VHS bootleg of the Channel 4 broadcast in his suitcase. Everyone we showed it to had the same question: How was it possible this film wasn’t being shown anywhere in the US? It’s easy to forget how big a deal Lockerbie was into the mid-‘90s.

The Christmas bombing of the Pan Am jumbo jet, last century’s symbol of U.S. civilian air power, killed 189 Americans, making it the country’s deadliest act of international terrorism prior to 9/11. But after a brief flurry of skeptical reporting following the bombing, questions about Lockerbie dropped off in the US, where legal threats against broadcasters and theaters kept Double Cross off screens. The full-length version of the film is now available on YouTube.

Even the abbreviated version of Double Cross required an open notebook and heavy use of the pause and rewind buttons. Francovich, who produced several documentaries about the CIA for PBS and the BBC, was not afraid to make audiences work. He believed in letting his subjects tell the story. They talk at length, sometimes at cross-purposes, often in a domino-row of interviews without connecting tissue or explanatory bone-tosses to the viewer. But for all of its editing failures, substantive errors and questionable sources, the film deserves praise and revisiting, both as investigatory feat and intelligence-world rabbit-hole for the ages.

Few have chased rabbits home with as much energy as Francovich. Critics sometimes dismissed him as a conspiracy theorist, but he didn’t care. He dug as hard as anyone in the business, and his films were in no way analog antecedents to the investigative amateur-hours that animate the 9/11 Truth movement. His BBC2 investigation into Operation Gladio — a network of clandestine paramilitary “stay-behind” cells scattered throughout NATO countries that trained for post-apocalypse guerilla war — explored one of the juiciest Cold War veins ever tapped. His PBS dive into the CIA, On Company Business, won best documentary at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival.

For Double Cross, Francovich and his main researcher, the Scottish journalist John Ashton, interviewed hundreds of subjects up and down the chain before arriving at an elaborate theory, strong in some areas, weaker in others. Like Gary Webb’s investigation, it relied on much that was already public record. But he put it all together for the first time, and worked through every implication to advance the story.

Double Cross posits that after a US warship in the Strait of Hormuz mistakenly shot down an Iran Air flight in July 1988, the Iranian regime put up $10 million to finance a revenge attack. The exiled former Iranian president Abulhassan Bani Sadr tells Francovich, “All Iranians viewed the US act as a crime [requiring justice]… Iran ordered the attack and Ahmed Jabril carried it out.”

Jabril was the Beirut-based leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [-General Command], a group known for its sophisticated bomb expertise. Jabril sent some of his best bomb makers to Frankfurt, where they caught the attention of German intelligence. In October 1988, German police arrested 17 members of the group (some with ties to Syrian intelligence) and confiscated caches of weapons and bomb material, including a primed Toshiba cassette player of the exact type used to bring down Pan Am 103. But the sweep did not put the entire cell behind bars, or stop the bombing. In early 1989, months after the downing of 103, German police conducted another raid on a PFLP safehouse in Neuss, northeast of Frankfurt, where they discovered more electrical-device bombs. Some of these bombs had altitude triggers used to bring down planes. All of this pointed clearly in the direction of Iran and Syria.

Then, on a dime, during the runup to the Gulf War, the official story told by American and British officials shifted to Libya. Jack Anderson, the muckraking syndicated columnist, reported in a January 1990 column that intelligence sources had told him that George H W Bush and Margaret Thatcher agreed to downplay the evidence pointing to Jabril, Syria and Iran. (Anderson suggests the need to keep Syria on board for the Gulf War coalition as a factor.) Forty minutes into Double Cross, Howard Teicher, senior director of Reagan’s NSC from 1985 to 1988, says he finds it unlikely the leaders of the free world would choose to frame Libya because so much corroborated intelligence “clearly links the bombing to [Iran and Syria].”

And yet, in November 1991, U.S. and UK authorities indicted two Libyans who worked for Libyan Airlines at the Malta airport, Abdel al-Megrahi and Lamen Fhimah. The key witness against al-Megrahi, the only one ultimately convicted, was a Malta shopkeeper named Tony Gauci, a witness as unreliable as anyone Francovich interviewed for his movie. Gauci picked al-Megrahi out of a suspect book after coaching from the FBI, and said he recognized him from media reports. During the trial, he said he “resembled a lot” the man who bought the clothes found at the crash site in Lockerbie, but couldn’t place his age and height in the right ballpark. He was given a $2 million reward.

The new focus on Libya timed to the arrival of Vincent Cannistraro to run the CIA’s Lockerbie investigation. During the 1980s, Cannistraro (interviewed extensively in Double Cross) and Col Oliver North ran a covert effort to undermine and destroy the Qadafi regime. In his front-page story about the program, Bob Woodward wrote that “deception and disinformation” were at the program’s heart. (...)

Subsequent reporting has vindicated Francovich’s core thesis that the Libyans were framed, and that the bombing was a tit-for-tat case of blowback caused by a trigger-happy U.S. Naval commander. In 2012, Al Jazeera acquired classified Defense Intelligence cables stating, “The execution of the operation was contracted [by Iran] to Ahmad Jabril, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) leader. Money was given to Jabril upfront in Damascus for initial expense. The mission was to blow up a Pan-Am flight.”

The network also attained a copy of the Scottish police report showing dismay over the holes in the case against al-Megrahi. Had the Libyan been allowed an appeal, the report claims, he would have easily won. But appeal was denied following his non-jury trial in Holland in 2001. (At the time, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook hailed the use of a third-country court as “an historic innovation in international legal practice.” Robert Black, meanwhile, the Scottish legal scholar known as the “architect” of the trial, has emerged as a leading critic of the proceedings and the official story generally.)

At the end of all this, the big question, why? Why would the US and Britain let the real culprits off the hook? Among the people interviewed in the recent Al Jazeera report is former CIA official Robert Baer, who worked on the Lockerbie investigation. “As far as I can tell,” he says, “someone said, look, Libya’s vulnerable to prosecution, small country, Gaddafi’s hated, let’s go for it. It was an executive decision, and then once that happened everybody lined up.” This accords with much earlier reporting and many of the interviews in The Maltese Double Cross.

Although mostly Americans died on Pan Am 103, conversation about Lockerbie in this country today revolves around the subject of victim pain. In October, NPR broadcast a segment about a “poignant letter” that emerged from the tragedy. The Smithsonian Channel produced a maudlin hour-long documentary last year that exploits the harrowing screams of a mother getting the news at JFK, but never touches the questions around the official story. As for Allan Francovich, he died in 1997 at the age of 56, a few years after the Glasgow premier of Double Cross. He suffered a heart attack in in the customs section of Houston’s George H W Bush International, the only airport named after a CIA chief, shortly after being detained by officials on his arrival from London. 

[It would appear that this article was first published on 15 December 2014 on the AlterNet website.]

New US radio programme on the Lockerbie case

[What follows is from a programme summary on the US radio4all.net website:]

26 years on, was the Lockerbie airliner bomb planted at Heathrow Airport? Were British intelligence services involved? New revelations about 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am Flight 103 bombing with Jim Swire, father of victim Flora. Discussion and clips from Allan Francovich's documentary financed by Tiny Rowland The Maltese Double Cross. Film blocked. Break-in at Heathrow airside the night before Lockerbie bombing. "Your government and mine know exactly what happened at Lockerbie, but they're never going to tell". Oliver North ordered Oswald DeWinter to lay a false drug trail to implicate Libya. Drugs cocaine and heroin on the aircraft. Dr Bill Chasey, Dr William Chasey persecuted in the US by the CIA for trying to get justice. Vincent Cannistraro detailed by Regan to run PR against Libya then appointed to be chief investigation of the Lockerbie bombing. Dr David Fieldhouse found a body that then 'disappeared' and was smeared by the police. 

[The programme can be downloaded here.]

Documents to accompany Dr Swire's EIBF contribution

The following documents accompany Dr Jim Swire’s contribution to today’s Edinburgh International Book Festival session Megrahi: A spectacular miscarriage of justice?

1.  Foreword by Tam Dalyell MP to Cover-up of Convenience by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson (2001)

Seldom can an act of terrorism have had so many layers of sinister intrigue as the Lockerbie bombing. It was ten days after the disaster, on the evening of 31 December 1988 – Hogmanay – that I first became aware something very odd was afoot. A constituent, who I knew was an off-duty Lothian and Borders Police officer, pulled me aside at a function. He told me in confidence about disturbing events he had witnessed in the preceding days, while assigned to the Lockerbie crash site helping the Dumfries and Galloway force search the site. He described how American agents were swarming around the area, openly removing items of debris. He was concerned, not only because they appeared to be riding roughshod over the rules of evidence gathering required of a criminal investigation, but also because the police were doing nothing to stop them. My initial reaction was, ‘Well, one can hardly deny the Americans, since they’ve lost 175 citizens.’ During the following weeks I talked to more officers, some of whom had been left seething by similar experiences with the mysterious Americans.

Five years later, because I had repeatedly raised Lockerbie issues in the Commons, I was introduced to Allan Francovich, a remarkable American film-maker who had just begun to make his landmark Lockerbie documentary The Maltese Double Cross. His dogged investigation suggested that the ‘official version’ of the bombing (which insisted it was, in the words of one US official, a ‘Libyan government operation from start to finish’) was a sham and that the real culprits lay outside of Libya. More worryingly, he presented compelling evidence that the CIA was complicit in the disaster and, in so doing, made sense of the troubling accounts of my police sources.  Although not the first investigator to advance this ‘alternative version’, he did so with a degree of detail that was too great to be ignored. The British and American governments’ extraordinary joint campaign to discredit the film was both an indicator of how close Francovich had got to the truth and a disturbing reminder of the lengths to which some of those in authority would go to keep the lid on the affair.

Francovich’s sudden death in 1997 came as a massive blow, but
thankfully his deputy John Ashton has kept alive his spirit of inquiry.

In 1999 I became aware of another earnest seeker after the truth, Ian Ferguson, who was at the time producing a documentary for US National Public Radio. He is one of those rare individuals who, like Francovich and Ashton, is prepared to ask the awkward questions and devote many long hours to the search for answers. His reporting of the events surrounding the trial, for Scotland’s Sunday Herald newspaper and on his website thelockerbietrial.com, has been unsurpassed and has frequently rattled the cages of authority. I was delighted to learn that he and Ashton had collaborated to produce this book.

As an MP, I have seen it as my role to complement the efforts of the various investigators and the equally remarkable work of the British Lockerbie victims’ relatives, by raising questions in Parliament, and to that end I have so far initiated 16 adjournment debates. The sixth of these, held on 1 February 1995, was answered by the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. I am told it was the only occasion since the war that a senior cabinet minister had replied to a backbencher’s adjournment debate. I am a creature of instinct and I sensed that he and the other ministers who have replied over the years were uncomfortable with having to peddle the official line. Later that day, Douglas spotted me talking to his then shadow and eventual successor Robin Cook MP. My diary entry for the day reads:

“Douglas [Hurd] swooped down on Robin and myself in the corridor by the window opposite the clerk’s assistant’s office. He said, ‘I really do ask you two to believe that as Foreign Secretary I cannot tell the [Scottish] Crown Office [which was in charge of the Lockerbie case] what to do, nor does the Foreign Office have detailed access to evidence which they say they have. You must understand that law officers really are a law unto themselves.’ Robin and I agreed that Douglas Hurd was not unfriendly towards us, and was probably correct in outlining the rules. Robin said that he guessed that Hurd was being honest with us and did not know the full story. I shrugged my shoulders, and told Robin he was probably right.”

One of the most remarkable, but least reported, revelations in the recent trial of the two Libyans was that even the Crown Office did not know the ‘full story’ when it indicted the pair in 1991. Indeed, it was not until the trial was underway that it learned that its star witness was highly unreliable. The CIA had known this for well over a decade, yet had not seen fit to make available the crucial paperwork documenting this man’s failings. Evidence heard at the trial also confirmed the long-held suspicion that CIA agents were involved in the highly irregular activities at the crash site witnessed by my police sources.

In my view, these facts alone warrant the public inquiry that has always been the demand of the British victims’ relatives. I have no doubt that there is much else in this book that will add weight to that demand. My government colleagues promised such an inquiry when in opposition and I trust that, as men of honour, they will make good that pledge.


2.  Letter  to Jim Swire from Chief Constable, Dumfries & Galloway Police

Dear Dr Swire,                                                   2 April 2012                           

I refer to your recent correspondence headed ‘Apparent Suppression of Evidence’. This letter seeks to fulfil the undertaking I gave you to provide you with an unambiguous response to concerns you raised regarding the handling of statements and evidence in connection with the insecurity detected at Heathrow.

I can confirm the following:

1.    In January 1989 BAA security notified the Metropolitan police that an insecurity had been detected within terminal 3 at Heathrow during the early hours of 21 December 1988.

2.    The Metropolitan police passed this evidence to the Police Incident Room at Lockerbie and Actions were raised to investigate this matter.

3.    During the course of this investigation Mr Manly, the BAA Security Team Leader who discovered the insecurity, was interviewed by an officer from the Metropolitan Police and a statement was obtained from him. The interview took place on 31 January 1989. A number of other witnesses were also traced and interviewed regarding the insecurity.

4.    Mr Manly’s statement was passed to the police incident room at Lockerbie and was registered on the HOLMES system on 2 February 1989. This statement and those from other witnesses identified At Heathrow were considered by enquiry officers at the time in the context of a range of emerging strands of evidence.

5.    In 1991 the police report outlining the evidence against Mr Megrahi and Mr Fhima was submitted to the Crown Office. This report did not contain a reference to the insecurity at Heathrow and made no mention of Mr Manly's statement.

6.    The surrender of Mr Megrahi and Mr Fhima for trial in the Netherlands prompted a massive preparation exercise during the course of which over 14,000 witness statements were provided to Crown Office in 1999. Mr Manly's statement was included in the material supplied to Crown though again the police made no reference to it.

7.    In 2001, as a result of Mr Manly contacting defence representatives, the insecurity at Heathrow was subject to a fresh investigation, the Crown disclosed the relevant statements to the defence and as you know the matter was considered during Mr Megrahi's first appeal. The appeal judges, in rejecting the appeal, made it clear that their assessment of the significance of this additional evidence must be conducted in the context of the whole circumstantial evidence laid before the trial court and concluded that "it cannot be said that the verdict falls to be regarded as a miscarriage of justice on account of having been reached in ignorance of the additional evidence" As the Lord Advocate explained at the meeting in London it is not for the appeal court to look at the case "afresh", it has to consider the new evidence in the context of the whole case that the trial court had before it.

In summary I can categorically state that no suppression of evidence took place and I hope this information alleviates your concerns in that regard.

(Signed) Patrick Shearer, Chief Constable.


3.  The place of Lockerbie in world events, a review by Neil Berry of John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury

Published by the plucky Scottish press Birlinn, John Ashton’s new book Megrahi: You are my Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence casts grave doubt on the validity of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi’s conviction as the Libyan terrorist responsible for blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 and murdering 259 mostly American people in December 1988. At the same time, it raises deeply disturbing questions about the United States and United Kingdom’s boasted commitment to truth and justice.

It is perhaps no surprise that the mainstream British media are fighting shy of according this bulky volume the attention it deserves. For to discuss its contents would mean re-visiting a vastly acrimonious episode that threatened to poison relations between Britain and the US: The early release in August 2009 from his Scottish prison — on grounds that he was dying of cancer — of a Muslim convict who was seen by many as the personification of evil.

A member of Megrahi’s legal team, John Ashton is liable to the charge that his familiarity with the Libyan has clouded his judgment, but his book — which intersperses an exhaustive examination of the evidence that led to his conviction with Megrahi’s own testimony — collates the work of several hands and is a model of forensic rigor. It is indeed hard to believe that any fair-minded person could read it without being persuaded that Megrahi was the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice. The powerful impression left by the book is that Megrahi, who had run security for Libyan Arab Airlines while engaging in clandestine trading, had the ill-luck to be in Malta, the putative point of origin of the Lockerbie bomb, at the wrong time, and that he was framed because the US found it convenient to point the finger of blame at Libya.

What has never been widely recognized is that the blowing up of Pan Am 103 over the Scottish town ofLockerbie took place six months after the shooting down of an Iranian airbus over the Persian Gulf in July 1988 by the American battle cruiser, the USS Vincennes, with the deaths of 290 Iranians. It was an outrage Iran immediately vowed to avenge, and all the indications were that it was Iran, acting through the shadowy terrorist splinter group, the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, that mandated the Lockerbie operation. If, in the aftermath of Lockerbie, the US shrank from confrontation with Tehran, it was because, on top of seeking to negotiate the release of American hostages held by Iranian-backed terrorists, it was concerned to have a free hand in repelling Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait to Iraq.

Yet a scapegoat for Lockerbie was imperative and Libya, with an egregious leader, Col Qaddafi, whose image in the West was that of a deranged tribal savage, figured as the ideal candidate. John Ashton’s book underlines how readily the Western public accepted the case for imposing crippling sanctions on Libya as the culprit for Lockerbie. Few demurred when — even before he was sentenced by 3 Scottish judges at a special court in the Netherlands in 2001 — US President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright repeatedly described Megrahi not as a suspect but as a mass murderer.

All this would be chilling enough — even if the case against Megrahi were a more compelling one. In truth, his conviction relied on the testimony of a shopkeeper in Malta who had but the sketchiest memory of selling clothes to an Arab customer around the time when a suitcase containing the bomb was supposedly put on a feeder flight to London, there to be loaded onto Pan Am 103. It relied, too, on a circuit board, alleged to have been part of the bomb and to have derived from a batch of Swiss timing devices sold to Libya, though it was to transpire that this item of evidence — found far from the Lockerbie crash site — had nothing to do with the timers in question. What is particularly shocking is how much material evidence was withheld from Megrahi’s trial — including the striking circumstance that the night before Pan Am 103 flew from London Heathrow, the airport was broken into.

The assumption that the Lockerbie bomb originated in Malta may well have deflected attention from a far more productive line of inquiry.

Megrahi endured his 8-year Scottish incarceration in the bitter knowledge that he had been convicted on a basis that came nowhere near to satisfying the principle that guilt should be proved “beyond reasonable doubt.” Following 9/11, however, he felt that his chances of ever clearing his name had all but vanished. Certainly, the belief that he was the “Lockerbie bomber,” a malevolent Muslim who had carried out Britain’s worst ever terrorist atrocity, lodged deep in the public mind — so deep that when he was diagnosed as having only months to live and Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MackAskill, decreed he should be allowed to return to Libya to die, there was widespread outrage, not least in the United States.

In Britain and the US, many were of the opinion that Megrahi was the beneficiary of a squalid oil deal struck with Qaddafi by Britain’s sometime Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and that British and Scottish politicians were not only colluding with a vile regime but insulting the dead.

Outrage about the commutation of his sentence grew as Megrahi confounded Scottish medical expectations regarding his survival prospects, living on in Tripoli until May of this year. And though he remained desperately ill, there were to be vindictive demands, following the toppling of Col Qaddafi in 2011, that he be made to face justice in the United States.

Yet on the evidence of John Ashton’s book it is not his truncated sentence that ought to be on British and American consciences. It is the fact that Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi was ever convicted at all.