Missing witnesses

[On this date in 2000 the Lockerbie trial was adjourned for two weeks. This adjournment had proved necessary largely because of difficulties encountered by the Crown in inducing witnesses (particularly from Malta) to attend at Camp Zeist to give evidence.  During the break in court proceedings I wrote a number of articles for The Lockerbie Trial website, curated by Ian Ferguson and me. Here are two of them:]

THE MISSING WITNESSES

When the trial resumes at Camp Zeist on Tuesday 11 July 2000, it will be the thirty-first day of evidence.  Many witnesses have been called into the box to testify, a substantial number of them regarding matters not disputed by the defence and in respect of which it might have been thought that agreement could have been reached between prosecution and defence to obviate the necessity of their attendance.  But if some of the witnesses have seemed to the outside observer to be superfluous, it is equally the case that persons whose presence as witnesses might have been expected, have been conspicuous by their absence.

Prominent amongst these is John Orr who, as a Detective Chief Superintendent and Joint Head of Strathclyde CID and latterly as Deputy Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway, headed the Scottish police investigation into the Lockerbie disaster.  In a normal Scottish murder trial the officer in charge of the police investigation team is usually one of the earliest witnesses to be summoned to give evidence.  The absence of Mr Orr, who is now Chief Constable of Strathclyde, from the ranks of police witnesses at the proceedings at Zeist has caused a number of raised eyebrows. 

Other absentees are Oliver "Buck" Revell and Vincent Cannistraro.

Revell was the chief FBI agent assigned to the Lockerbie investigation.  In The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror by David Hoffman (1998, Feral House, Venice CA) he is described as Associate Deputy Director of the FBI and as the FBI counter-terrorism chief.  His son had been booked as a passenger on Pan Am 103, but switched to another flight some time before the plane departed. Cannistraro was the chief CIA operative assigned to the Lockerbie investigation.  In Libya: The Struggle For Survival by Geoff Simons (2nd edition, 1996, Macmillan, London) he is described as "the head of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre who led the American investigation into the bombing" and in The Oklahoma City Bombing he is described as a "CIA intelligence advisor to the National Security Council."  Both of these men are now retired, and in the years since November 1991 when the two Libyans were first accused of the atrocity, have been far from reticent in making known their views on the subject of Lockerbie in the media.  It is a pity that the Crown has not seen fit to call upon them to share with the Court, from the witness box, their very great knowledge of the Lockerbie affair.

Members of the defence team asked Mr Cannistraro to meet them for the purpose of precognition (the Scottish equivalent of taking a pre-trial deposition), but he refused to do so. 

In Scotland, there is a legal duty upon citizens to make themselves available for precognition by both the prosecution and the defence.  As one of Scotland's most distinguished criminal judges, Lord Justice Clerk MacDonald, said: "I consider it to be the duty of every true citizen to give such information to the Crown as he may be asked to give in reference to the case in which he is to be called; and also that every witness who is to be called for the Crown should give similar information to the prisoner's legal advisers, if he is called upon and asked what he is going to say....  I have been asked to express my view, and it is that every good citizen should give his aid, either to the Crown or to the defence, in every case where the interests of the public in the punishment of crime, or the interests of a prisoner charged with crime, call for ascertainment of facts."

But none of this seems to cut any ice with Mr Cannistraro.

UNWILLING WITNESSES

Courts of law in general have powers of compulsion only in respect of persons who are physically present within their territorial jurisdiction.  Amongst other things, this means that only such persons can be compelled to attend and give evidence before them.  This limitation on its coercive powers is not something which is unique to the Scottish Court sitting at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands or to Scottish courts in general.  It would have applied equally if the Lockerbie trial had been held in a court in, for example, the United States of America.

A number of Maltese witnesses, mainly persons employed or formerly employed at Luqa Airport, have refused to attend to give evidence at Camp Zeist, and because of this the prosecution have been compelled to seek (and have been granted) yet another adjournment to enable them to secure the attendance of other witnesses.

The refusal of the Maltese witnesses to attend does not mean that their evidence is necessarily lost to the Court.  It is open to the Scottish Court by Letter of Request to seek the assistance of the appropriate Maltese judicial authorities in obtaining, if necessary compulsorily, the testimony of the witnesses in question.  This might involve either the witnesses giving evidence from Malta by means of a live television link to the courtroom at Zeist or the witnesses being examined before a magistrate or judge sitting in Malta and a transcript of their evidence then being supplied to the Scottish Court.  These procedures are competent in a Scottish criminal court by virtue of the Criminal Justice (International Co-operation) Act 1990, section 3, and the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, sections 272 and 273.

As a last resort, the Crown, if able to satisfy the Court that it was not reasonably practicable to secure the attendance of the witnesses at the trial or to obtain their evidence in any of the ways mentioned above, and notwithstanding the general prohibition on the use of hearsay evidence in criminal proceedings, would be able to use as evidence any statement made by the witnesses in question, e.g. to police or other investigators, in the course of the Lockerbie investigation.  This is provided for under section 259 of the 1995 Act.  It does, of course, affect the weight likely to be accorded to the evidence that it is not given by the witness personally in court and is not subject to cross-examination.

If the Crown are having difficulty in securing witnesses to appear before the Court, and their need to request an adjournment when these Maltese witnesses (whose reluctance to attend has been known for months) balked at appearing seems to suggest that they are, perhaps they should reconsider their apparent decision not to call Chief Constable John Orr, Oliver "Buck" Revell and Vincent Cannistraro.

Just a suggestion.

Father of Lockerbie victim supports coronavirus memorial cairn campaign

[What follows is excerpted from an article published in today's edition of The Herald:]

As the father of Lockerbie victim Flora Swire, he sadly knows only to well how important having a place to mourn a loved one can be.

Dr Jim Swire and his wife Jane lost their daughter on the night flight Pan Am 103 was blown out of the sky over the small Dumfriesshire town.

And a memorial was later created in Dryfesdale Cemetery following the tragic events of December 21, 1988 which saw 259 passengers and cabin crew lost their lives and 11 people from the town also died.

When he read of our plans, Dr Swire contacted The Herald to offer his backing to our campaign to create a memorial cairn with the name of every Scot who has died from coronavirus. (...)

Dr Swire said: “Many a time, on our way north to Skye my wife Jane and I have visited Dryfesdale cemetery and seen again the name of our dear daughter Flora on the Pan Am 103 memorial there.

“I would like to thank all those involved in the maintenance of that memorial and for the sympathetic and caring response we have always found in the town whenever anniversaries and other occasions have reminded us all of that awful night in December 1988.

“I cannot speak for others but I would personally warmly support the creation of a memorial cairn for the relatives of the virus victims in Scotland now.” (...)

The Swires' holiday home in Skye is somewhere they still like to travel to, outwith current restrictions, and is a place where Flora visited as a child. (...)

Flora was born on December 22, 1964, near their Gloucestershire family home. She was named after her paternal ancestor Flora MacDonald, who famously helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from Skye following the battle of Culloden.

She was training to be a neurosurgeon when she met young American doctor Hart Lidov. She began commuting regularly across the Atlantic to see him and, just before Christmas, decided on a whim to fly to New York so they could spend the holiday together. [RB: The CIA's Oliver "Buck" Revell sued Dr Lidov over an article that he wrote about the Lockerbie case. Revell lost.]

As her sister Cathy dropped her at the airport, she was on top of the world, having just won a place to complete her training at Cambridge, her father's old university.

But just 38 minutes after her plane took off, a suitcase exploded in the hold. All on board died. Now her ashes are buried in the pretty churchyard of the ruined St John's Chapel in Caroy.

When the news first broke on television, the Swires tried to quell rising panic with a conviction that it couldn't be her plane - the timing didn't match the details she had given. But as they realised it had been delayed, the terrible truth hit.

Earlier this year the family of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person to be convicted and jailed for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, were told they can launch a posthumous appeal against his conviction, by Scotland's criminal appeals body has ruled.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) has referred his case to the High Court, after ruling a miscarriage of justice may have occurred in the conviction.

The ruling paves the way for a posthumous appeal and is something which Dr Swire supported. Dr Swire has long believed that Megrahi was wrongfully convicted of the bombing and that Libya was not behind the plot.

The court ruled the review of Megrahi’s conviction met two statutory tests for referral – it may have been a miscarriage of justice and it is in the interests of justice to refer it back to the court.

Former Libyan intelligence officer Megrahi was the only person convicted of the bombing, having been found guilty in 2001 of mass murder and jailed for life with a minimum term of 27 years.

Megrahi died aged 60 in 2012, still protesting his innocence.

CIA wanted the suspects eliminated to stop any trial taking place

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2013.

CIA ‘wanted to kill Lockerbie bomber before trial’

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The Scotsman, published the day after this item appeared in this blog.  The Scotsman’s story reads in part:]

The CIA wanted to assassinate Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and his co-accused, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, before their trial, a former Washington lobbyist has claimed.

William C Chasey, 73, made the sensational allegation in his autobiography, Truth Never Dies, which is to be turned into a film.

He claims agents tried to convince him to plant homing devices on Megrahi and Fhimah as part of the plot.

However, a former FBI chief has dismissed the claim as “nonsense”. (...)

Mr Chasey, president of the Foundation for Corporate Social Responsibility, a non-governmental organisation, became involved with Libya and the Lockerbie investigation when he was a lobbyist in Washington.

“On behalf of business clients, I went on a lobbying mission in 1992 with a US congressman in a bid to stabilise relations between the US and [Muammar] Gaddafi’s hated regime,” he said.

He told how he was taken to a private meeting with the two Lockerbie accused at a house in Tripoli. “Myself and the congressman and his wife then met Gaddafi and heard his pleas for help within Washington to get sanctions lifted, and heard his claims that Libya was not involved in Lockerbie,” Mr Chasey said.

“He spoke of the death of his daughter in a US air attack on his home and appealed directly to the congressman’s wife, as a mother, to get her husband to use his influence.”

Mr Chasey claims this clandestine meeting raised suspicions at the FBI, which launched a lengthy investigation into him.

Then, in 1995, he wrote a controversial book, Foreign Agent 4221: The Lockerbie Cover-Up, which claimed Libya was not responsible for the bombing.

“The FBI investigation, along with a probe by the US tax service, damaged my business and put incredible pressure on my wife, Virginia, and our young daughter Katie,” he said.

The family moved to Poland, where Mr Chasey had ties.

He said: “I was hit with 21 felony charges over crimes including wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, even larceny and forgery over allegations I stole headed notepaper from congressional offices.”

He denies the claims and says all but one were dropped in 1998 when he agreed a plea bargain and admitted a charge of filing a false tax return.

It was at this point he claims he was contacted by the CIA at Dulles Airport in Washington. “An agent approached me and asked if I could meet again with Megrahi and Fhimah to pinpoint their location so the CIA could assassinate them. In return, the charge would be dropped and my record expunged,” he said.

“He wasn’t explicit but my belief is that the CIA wanted the suspects eliminated to stop any trial taking place and bury the alternative view that Iran and Syria were behind Lockerbie.”

Mr Chasey, 73, was sentenced to 75 days in jail, 75 days in a half-way house and two years probation for the tax offence. He said: “I was sent to Allenwood Federal Prison in Pennsylvania and was amazed when I was joined in the canteen one day by the same CIA agent and one of his colleagues, dressed as inmates.

“They offered to free me and clear my record, but I said I would not take part in their plot to put electronic homing devices in the suspects’ residences so they could be targeted. I told them, ‘With all of your vast resources, the one thing you will never be able to destroy is my character’.”

Mr Chasey said he had decided to speak out now after being diagnosed with incurable cancer.

“Apart from my wife, no-one has known about this until now. I love my country, but I fear my government”, he said.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora, 23, died in the bombing, believes Megrahi was innocent. He said he had read Mr Chasey’s book and thought it was believable. “I think Bill Chasey is telling the truth about the CIA,” he said. “He is a respected philanthropist and was a leading lobbyist in Washington, so he’s not a crank.”

However, former FBI assistant director Buck Revell, who oversaw its Lockerbie investigation until 1991, said of Mr Chasey’s claims: “That’s nonsense.”

The CIA refused to comment.

Lockerbie questions for the FBI

What follows is an article originally posted on this blog on this date in 2012.

What the SCCRC should have asked the FBI

[This is the heading over an item posted today by John Ashton on his Megrahi: You are my Jury website.  It reads as follows:]

On 18 March Scotland on Sunday ran an article headlined Megrahi probe ‘failed to speak to FBI agents’, which reported criticisms of the SCCRC by FBI officers Oliver ‘Buck’ Revell and Richard Marquise. [RB: See here and here.]

It states:  Oliver “Buck” Revell, the former associate deputy director of investigations for the Federal Bureau of Investigations, has reacted angrily to the examination into the case by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). In an e-mail seen by Scotland on Sunday, Revell expressed frustration that no-one from the FBI was consulted by the SCCRC when it compiled its report into the safety of Megrahi’s conviction … In his e-mail to government and legal officials in Scotland and the US, Revell complained that the SCCRC failed to interview members of the FBI for its Statement of Reasons. The e-mail pointed out that the original Lockerbie investigation was carried out by Scottish police, Scotland Yard, the German BKA and the FBI. Revell added: “I don’t know what the SCCRC expects to determine when it is not even interviewing the actual investigators involved in solving this terrible crime.”

Marquise said:  “I don’t know if you can say you have done a comprehensive report unless you speak to key people. To me it is an incomplete report whatever they are going to publish. They never did speak to the people who might be able to shed some light on whatever it is that they were looking to find out. If you are going to say you have done a complete investigation, you should talk to everybody who was key, and I like to think people in the FBI were key. I like to think some people in the CIA were key and they could and should have been interviewed.”

While neither man shed any light on what the FBI investigators could have told the commission, we might infer from their comments that the Bureau held further evidence of Abdelbaset’s guilt. Of course, it almost certainly didn’t, because any such evidence would have been handed to the Crown.

That said, I share Revell’s and Marquise’s disappointment that the SCCRC failed to interview anyone from the FBI, as many important questions remain unanswered. For example:

1. What did FBI agent John Hosinski discuss with Tony Gauci when he met him alone on 2 October 1989?

2. What did Senegalese official Jean Collin reveal when interviewed in the US in December 1990?

3. Was the content of Collin’s interview revealed to the Scottish police? And, if not, why not?

4. Why did the FBI’s Tom Thurman ‘front’ for the CIA in relation to the identification of the timer fragment?

5. According to FBI agent Hal Hendershot, Thurman had a laboratory in Lockerbie within days of the bombing. What forensic work did he undertake and was that work shared with the Scottish investigators?

6.When, in June 1990, Thurman demonstrated to the Scottish police that PT/35b matched the control sample MST-13 timer, why did he not reveal that he was already aware that the timers were made by Mebo?

7. Why was Hendershot aware of the contents of the Toshiba manual fragment PK/689 before it was examined for the Scottish police at RARDE?

8. Why was the FBI able to investigate debris item PI/1389 (a blue T-shirt, which, according to the FBI’s Bonn legal attache David Keyes, showed blast damage and the imprint of the grills of two radio speakers) before RARDE?

9. What information did Hendershot, Thurman and Bob Howen uncover in relation to the crystals used in the MST-13 timers? In particular, were they able to establish the date of manufacture of the crystal used in the control sample timer K-1, which was recovered from Togo and which Thurman used for comparative purposes with the fragment PT/35b?

10. Regarding the episode at Frankfurt airport, witnessed by FBI agent Lawrence Whittaker and DI Watson McAteer, in which a baggage handler apparently entered a bag into the automated transit system without recording the transaction, why was Whittaker’s trial testimony at odds with McAteer’s statement S3743A?

11. How many FBI FD302 reports by Lockerbie field agents were handed to the Crown? (Only a handful were provided to the defence.)

12. The US Department of Justice has stated that only three reports were produced in relation to the FBI’s inquiries in Malta. Given the centrality of Malta to the case, why were there so few?

Perhaps Mr Revell and Mr Marquise can answer these questions.

The article is also notable for the following quote by Marquise:  “On the issue of witnesses being paid, no witness [was paid] to my knowledge. What some police officer or FBI agent might have told somebody in the corner in a dark room in the middle night that I don’t know about, I can’t vouch for that. But everybody that worked for me were under orders that they were not allowed to tell people that they could get money for this case. So, as far as I know, nobody was promised or paid money to testify.”

The SCCRC report states, at paragraph 23.19:  Enquiries with D&G [Dumfries and Galloway Police] have established that, some time after the conclusion of the applicant’s appeal against conviction, Anthony and Paul Gauci were each paid sums of money under the “Rewards for Justice” programme administered by the US Department of State. Under that programme the US Secretary of State was initially authorised to offer rewards of up to $5m for information leading to the arrest or conviction of persons involved in acts of terrorism against US persons or property worldwide. The upper limit on such payments was increased by legislation passed in the US in 2001.

According to DCI Harry Bell’s diary, on 28 September 1989, FBI agent Chris Murray told Bell that he (Murray): ‘had the authority to arrange unlimited money for Tony Gauci and relocation is available. Murray states that he could arrange $10,000 immediately.’  Murray would not have said these things unless he believed that the offer might have been put to Gauci, yet, according to Marquise, “everybody that worked for me were under orders that they were not allowed to tell people that they could get money for this case.” So, was Murray acting against Marquise’s orders? And, if so will he be held to account? Again, maybe Marquise and Revell can enlighten us.

“They're never going to tell”

[On this date in 1990, members of President George [H W] Bush’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) met members of the families of UK Lockerbie victims at the US embassy in London. What follows is taken from the Wikipedia article Pan Am Flight 103:]

On 29 September 1989, President [George H W] Bush appointed Ann McLaughlin Korologos, former Secretary of Labor, as chairwoman of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) to review and report on aviation security policy in the light of the sabotage of flight PA103. Oliver "Buck" Revell, the FBI's Executive Assistant Director, was assigned to advise and assist PCAST in their task. Mrs Korologos and the PCAST team (Senator Alfonse D'Amato, Senator Frank Lautenberg, Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt, Representative James Oberstar, General Thomas Richards, deputy commander of US forces in West Germany, and Edward Hidalgo, former Secretary of the US Navy) submitted their report, with its 64 recommendations, on 15 May 1990. The PCAST chairman also handed a sealed envelope to the President which was widely believed to apportion blame for the PA103 bombing. Extensively covered in The Guardian the next day, the PCAST report concluded:

"National will and the moral courage to exercise it are the ultimate means of defeating terrorism. The Commission recommends a more vigorous policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists, but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions."

Before submitting their report, the PCAST members met a group of British PA103 relatives at the US embassy in London on 12 February 1990. Twelve years later, on 11 July 2002, Scottish MP Tam Dalyell reminded the House of Commons of a controversial statement made at that 1990 embassy meeting by a PCAST member to one of the British relatives, Martin Cadman: "Your government and ours know exactly what happened. But they're never going to tell." The statement first came to public attention in the 1994 documentary film The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie and was published in both The Guardian of 29 July 1995, and a special report from Private Eye magazine entitled Lockerbie, the flight from justice May/June 2001. Dalyell asserted in Parliament that the statement had never been refuted.

The late Arnaud de Borchgrave and Lockerbie

[Arnaud de Borchgrave died on Sunday, 15 February 2015. Obituaries are to be found in The Washington Times, The New York Times and The Guardian. His contribution to the Lockerbie affair is recorded in the following two items on this blog:]

Friday, 1 January 2010

Gadhafi admitted it!

This is the subject-heading of an e-mail sent by Arnaud de Borchgrave to Frank Duggan and copied by the latter to me. It reads as follows:

"As Gaddafi explained it to me, which you are familiar with, it was indeed Iran's decision to retaliate for the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on its daily flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai that led to a first subcontracting deal to Syrian intel, which, in turn, led to the 2nd subcontract to Libyan intel. As he himself said if they had been first at this terrorist bat, they would not have put Malta in the mix; Cyprus would have made more sense to draw attention away from Libya."

According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, Gaddafi made the admission, off the record, in the course of an interview in 1993. His published account [28 August 2009] reads:

"Megrahi was a small cog in a much larger conspiracy. After a long interview with Gaddafi in 1993, this editor at large of The Washington Times asked Libya's supreme leader to explain, off the record, his precise involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, and for which Libya paid $2.7 billion in reparations. He dismissed all the aides in his tent (located that evening in the desert about 100 kilometers south of Tripoli) and began in halting English without benefit of an interpreter, as was the case in the on-the-record part of the interview.

"Gaddafi candidly admitted that Lockerbie was retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of an Iranian Airbus. Air Iran Flight 655, on a 28-minute daily hop from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz to the port city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on the other side of the Gulf, was shot down by a guided missile from the Aegis cruiser USS Vincennes. The Vincennes radar mistook it for an F-14 Tomcat fighter (which Iran still flies); 290 were killed, including 66 children. A year before, in 1987, the USS Stark was attacked by an Iraqi Mirage, killing 37 sailors. The Vincennes skipper, Capt. William Rogers, received the Legion of Merit, and the entire crew was awarded combat-action ribbons. The United States paid compensation of $61.8 million to the families of those killed on IR 655.

"Gaddafi told me, 'The most powerful navy in the world does not make such mistakes. Nobody in our part of the world believed it was an error.' And retaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). 'Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?' said Gaddafi. 'We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was,' Gaddafi added.

"As he got up to take his leave, he said, 'Please tell the CIA that I wish to cooperate with America. I am just as much threatened by Islamist extremists as you are.'

"When we got back to Washington, we called Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey to tell him what we had been told off the record. Woolsey asked me if I would mind being debriefed by the CIA. I agreed. And the rest is history."

On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.

Saturday, 2 January 2010

Reaction to "Gadhafi admitted it!"

[The following comment on the "Gadhafi admitted it!" thread comes from Peter Biddulph. It was too long to be posted directly as a comment on that thread.]

The timing of this information is most strange.

According to Wikipedia and other sources, Arnaud de Borchgrave appears to have an impeccable background. According to him, the CIA debriefing arranged by Woolsey took place in 1993.

But I am informed by an expert on these matters that Gaddafi never, repeat never, was without at least one armed personal bodyguard. To be alone with an American journalist with many contacts in Washington would be, for Gaddafi, impossible.

And if this information was known in 1993, why on earth did the CIA, the FBI and the Scottish Crown office not know of it in the next seven years leading up to the trial?

Why was de Borchgrave not invited to be deposed or give evidence to the Lockerbie trial, or even an affidavit?

It might be said to be hearsay, and therefore not admissible in court.

But several hearsay issues and affidavits were extensively investigated by the court, notably the Goben Memorandum, and the account of the interview of bomb maker Marwan Khreesat by FBI Agent Edward Marshman. Even a hearsay account that Gaddafi confessed to the crime would have cast serious doubt on al-Megrahi's defence.

The original 1991 indictment could have been varied to reflect the latest knowledge. Indeed, the final version of the indictment was agreed by the US Department of Justice and the Scottish Crown Office in 2000, only three weeks before the trial commenced.

If the FBI did know it, why did they not mention any of this in a May 1995 Channel 4 discussion following the screening of the documentary The Maltese Double Cross? Buck Revell of the FBI became quite intense in answering Jim Swire's questions and those of presenter Sheena McDonald. But he said not a word about the Gaddafi "confession". Why?

Also, how come Marquise - as he says himself "Chief FBI Investigator of the Lockerbie bombing" - was not aware of it in the seven years leading up to the 2000 trial or the nine years since? That is, sixteen years of ignorance?

And why did CIA Vincent Cannistraro himself not mention it when interviewed on camera on at least two occasions in 1994 by Alan Francovich for the documentary film The Maltese Double Cross?

As head of the CIA team investigating Libya, Cannistraro would be the first to be briefed by the Langley central office. He was happy to provide hearsay evidence to the media and film camera against Oliver North and any Libyan or Iranian that got in his way. He spoke at length about green and brown timer boards, and potential witnesses.

To relate on camera the Gaddafi "confession" would have been greatly to Cannistraro's advantage, a slam-dunk in the public mind. Indeed, even a hint in the media would have ham-strung al-Megrahi’s defence before proceedings commenced.

But between 1993 and 2009 from Cannistraro not a word. And when it comes to America's interests, the CIA never follow Queensberry rules.

CIA [officer] Robert Baer too, as a Middle Eastern specialist has given no hint of this. Such information would surely have come within the "need to know" category. Yet he has maintained on two occasions that Iran commissioned the job and paid the PFLP-GC handsomely two days after the attack. His conclusion suggests strongly that the so-called fragment of the bomb was planted.

The real reasons for this late announcement, we believe, are as follows:

1. It is well known among those who study these things in the field that there are two candidates shortly to succeed Gaddafi. His son Saif, and his son-in law Sennusi. Meanwhile Sennusi is not top of the pops with Arab leaders in the region. They would love it if he were out of the frame. The Borchgrave revelation discredits Sennusi perfectly.

2. The SCCRC is shortly to publish information which some believe will cause serious embarrassment to the FBI And CIA. The Borchgrave email is huge smoke and mirrors, a spoiler.

It all looks highly suspicious. Just another carefully crafted phase in a long, long history of disinformation.

Hollywood’s Pan Am 103 Truthers

[This is the headline over an article published yesterday on the website of The Daily Beast.  It reads as follows:]

Acclaimed movie director Jim Sheridan has stirred up a hornet’s nest with his claim that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan spy held responsible for blowing Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and killing 270 people in December 1988, was innocent.

The FBI officials in charge of the US investigation as well as families and friends of the victims, 190 of whom were Americans, are especially troubled that the 65-year-old Sheridan is planning a feature film that will portray Megrahi—who died of cancer in May 2012 after being sprung from a Scottish prison on a controversial “compassionate release”—as blameless and wrongfully convicted of the crime.

“It kills me to think that they would go off and just tell some completely wrong story just because they like the way it sounds or there’s got to be another twist to it,” said Pan Am 103 widow Kathy Tedeschi, whose husband, Bill Daniels, was a passenger on the doomed flight. “There are too many people, like the FBI and Scotland Yard, who investigated this case, and I firmly believe they knew what they were doing and they got the right man.”

The Irish-born Sheridan, whose Oscar-nominated movies include In the Name of the Father and My Left Foot (for which Daniel Day-Lewis received the Best Actor award), told The Hollywood Reporter that he’s writing a screenplay with fellow Irish writer Audrey O’Reilly that will dramatize the experience of English physician Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died on Pan Am 103. Swire treated the ailing Megrahi in jail, became convinced of his innocence and launched a still-ongoing campaign to clear the Libyan’s name. [RB: Dr Swire visited Megrahi in jail, but he did not treat him.]

“It was this weird thing where you think you’ve found the person who killed your daughter, and then Jim ended up in the cell looking after him—because he’s a doctor and the guy wasn’t well—and it’s obvious as the nose on your face that Megrahi didn’t do it,” Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter, adding that Swire will be among his guests at the inaugural Dublin Arabic Film Festival, which Sheridan is staging in Ireland on May 8. The director’s Hollywood publicist said Monday he was traveling and unavailable for comment.

“Somebody should reach out to Mr. Sheridan and tell him he’s betting on the wrong horse,” said Frank Duggan, president of the nonprofit group, Victims of Pan Am 103 Inc, which represents relatives of the Americans killed in the Boeing 747’s explosion. “It would do a lot of damage,” added Duggan, who served as the family liaison for  the President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, which was established in response to the Lockerbie tragedy. “It keeps stirring the pot for all the crazies and deniers to say, ‘Aha! See, we were right!’”

Retired FBI agent Richard Marquise, who led the US task force during the Lockerbie investigation and has written extensively about the case, said Sheridan seems to be aligning himself with “10,000 conspiracy theories, none of which has ever been tested in court. It’s a bunch of speculation and hypotheses and I feel bad that somebody is going to stake his reputation on it…Maybe that would sell a movie, but it wouldn’t be the truth.”

Retired FBI official Oliver “Buck” Revell, the bureau’s associate deputy director who rode herd on the American end of the Lockerbie investigation, told The Daily Beast: “As with our Hollywood filmmakers, truth has little or nothing to do with filmmaking and most documentaries. I am well satisfied to let the verdict and evidence that supported it stand. I do favor the investigation continuing, for I am certain that many of Megrahi’s superiors were complicit in this terrible crime.”

Megrahi, who when Flight 103 exploded was head of security for Libya’s national airline and allegedly a Libyan intelligence agent, was convicted of 270 counts of murder, and sentenced to life in prison, by a three-judge Scottish panel in January 2001. The evidence against him was circumstantial; a shopkeeper in Malta, where the bomb was allegedly put aboard the 747, identified Megrahi as the man who purchased the clothes that were found in the suitcase where the device had been concealed. Megrahi also had a business relationship with a Swiss company that manufactured the device’s timer, and he had traveled to Malta from Tripoli on a false passport—all damning pieces of evidence.

Megrahi consistently asserted his innocence. He appealed the verdict and lost, and a second appeal was abandoned after his defense team decided it might hamper legal efforts for an early release. Over bitter protests from the Obama administration, Scottish officials ultimately released him in August 2009, on the grounds that he was suffering from advanced prostate cancer and had only an estimated three months to live.

He was flown back to Libya on Muammar Qaddafi’s personal jet, accompanied by Qaddafi’s son Saif, and greeted by a triumphal celebration at the airport—a spectacle that enraged US government officials and American relatives of the Lockerbie dead. He survived another three years, living out his last days in a posh villa in Tripoli. Ironically, he outlasted Qaddafi, who was killed in a popular uprising in October 2011, after being toppled from power and dragged bruised and bleeding through the streets.

Dr Swire is among the more conspicuous supporters of Megrahi’s innocence and alternative theories of the Flight 103 disaster, which include claims that the explosion was the result of a drug deal gone bad, the work of Palestinian terrorists, or even retaliation by the Iranians, whose civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, was shot down without justification by a US Navy missile cruiser, killing all 290 people aboard, just 5 1/2 months before the Lockerbie disaster.

“Dr Swire is not a credible figure,” Duggan said, adding that US investigators initially liked the Iranian theory but were unable to find any evidence to corroborate it. “I’d like to say to Sheridan that you need to learn the facts before you assume that Megrahi was innocent. You need to look at other family members besides Dr Swire. I don’t know any American family members who agree with him.”

[Frank Duggan, a man whose knowledge of the facts of Lockerbie is so sketchy that he was able to be shown up on air by George Galloway, says that Dr Jim Swire is not a credible figure.  That really is rich!]