Doubts over witness led to fears Lockerbie trial would collapse

[This is the headline over a report in today's edition of The Times. It reads in part:]

Prosecutors in Edinburgh and Washington feared the case against the Lockerbie bomber would collapse if their concerns over the integrity of the star witness were made public, declassified documents have revealed.

The papers show that senior Scottish and US officials privately raised doubts over his reliability and are set to trigger fresh claims of a miscarriage of justice.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was sentenced to 27 years by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands after being found guilty of masterminding the 1988 atrocity in which 270 people were killed.

The testimony of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who claimed he sold clothing — believed to have been wrapped around the bomb — to a man resembling al-Megrahi, proved pivotal to securing his conviction in 2001. However, concerns were raised about the “soundness of Gauci’s identification” and the UK and US feared the case would founder if this became known.

The new information, disclosed last night, on the 33rd anniversary of the terrorist attack, has renewed calls for an appeal against al-Megrahi’s conviction.

Hans Koechler, who served as the UN’s independent observer at his trial, said: “I am even more convinced that a miscarriage of justice occurred.”

A report of a meeting between Alan Rodger, then Scotland’s lord advocate, and Robert Mueller, US assistant attorney-general, in Washington in 1992, states: “If it became known we or the US were sending people to check on the soundness of Gauci’s identification that would signal that we did not have a case on which we could confidently go to trial. The US Department of Justice maintained that they could not go to trial on the present identification.”

Gauci was the sole witness to link al-Megrahi directly to the bombing of Pan Am 103, over the town of Lockerbie.

In 2000 he told a panel of judges that al-Megrahi “resembled a lot” a man who bought clothes from his shop. But in 1992 a letter from the Crown Office to Mueller raised doubt. “Further inquiries concerning the identification made by the shopkeeper Gauci could be seized upon by those in Malta, Libya and elsewhere hostile to the conclusions of the investigation.” In 2007 it emerged that the US had paid $2 million to Gauci.

Robert Black, professor emeritus of Scots Law at Edinburgh University, who masterminded the trial, said: “It is now more obvious than ever that the Megrahi conviction is built on sand. An independent inquiry should be instituted into the case by the Scottish government, the UK government or both.”

The Crown Office said it would be inappropriate to comment further while leave to appeal (by al-Megrahi’s son Ali) is being considered by the UK Supreme Court. Police Scotland have confirmed that their investigation remains live. (...)

The confidential documents also show that British officials threatened to veto Malta’s application to join the EU if they did not back their demands over the Lockerbie bombing.

The UK and US insisted that the bomb which exploded over Scotland 33 years ago was loaded on to Air Malta flight KM-180, which left the island for Frankfurt on December 21. They contended it was then taken to London and transferred to Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie with the loss of 270 lives. The Maltese authorities strongly disputed this version of events, insisting it was technically impossible.

Their stance provoked considerable anxiety. A March 1992 memo to the Foreign Office from diplomatic staff in New York states: “We understand that the Maltese government is considering stating publicly that the allegation that the bomb was planted in Malta was not proven and instructed their ambassador to the UN to explain this to non-aligned members of the Security Council. We hope the Maltese government will think carefully on this and reconsider its position. The US embassy here have told us that their embassy in Valletta has been instructed to take action at the highest level.”

The Maltese were then told the UK would not support their attempt to join the European Community (EC), the precursor to the EU. (...)

The following month British officials noted with satisfaction: “Malta will now comply with mandatory sanctions, while not agreeing with them.”

Guido de Marco, Malta’s justice minister at the time of the bombing, wrote in 2010 shortly before his death that there had been “so much room for error” in the British version of events.

Officials ordered to monitor ‘troublesome’ relatives of victims

An independent investigation into the Lockerbie atrocity launched by bereaved family members posed “great potential for trouble” and should be carefully monitored, government officials were told. (...)

In 2018 relatives of the Lockerbie bomb victims told The Times they had been repeatedly bugged by the security services after official documents suggested that they needed “careful watching”.

The Rev John Mosey, a church minister who lost his teenage daughter, Helga, in the bombing, said that after speaking publicly his phone calls were often disrupted and documents relating to the bombing had gone missing from his computer.

Jim Swire, a GP who became the public face of the campaign to secure an independent inquiry into the atrocity, reported similar intrusions and deliberately included false information in private correspondence, only for it to appear in the press days later.

Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed, said: “I cannot believe that a supposedly decent country could behave in such a way towards grieving people whose only crime was to seek the truth.”

[RB: It is no surprise that those at the top of the Lockerbie prosecution team in both Scotland and the United States were gravely concerned about the quality of the evidence that Tony Gauci would give at Camp Zeist. What is surprising is that the prosecution was prepared to proceed to trial in reliance on that evidence, and that the judges at the trial found that Gauci's evidence amounted to an identification of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and that it was credible and reliable. Had they not done so, there was insufficient evidence in law for Megrahi to be convicted. 

The most rigorous analysis of Gauci's statements before and during the trial has been provided by Dr Kevin Bannon: https://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-centrepiece-of-case-against-megrahi.html. Here is part of what he found:

"The development of Tony Gauci’s statements from his first police interviews in September 1989 through to his testimony in court, reveal his recollections systematically developing in favour of the Crown narrative, in increasing contradiction of all his freshest recollections.

"... it is not merely the case (as has often been stated) that Gauci’s evidence was contradictory, but that in every aspect, it changed in favour of the Crown narrative, in some instances quite drastically. Gauci’s original, freshest recollections about the appearance of the Libyan purchaser and the time of his visit, would have, and should have, categorically eliminated al-Megrahi from suspicion.

"Gauci’s testimony, the centrepiece of the case against al-Megrahi and, by implication, the principal Libyan connection to the crime, simply has no integrity whatsoever - nevertheless he was given a substantial financial reward for his latter evidence. These discrepancies render the entire case against al-Megrahi invalid."

Had the newly released documents been available before the most recent appeal, it is possible that the Megrahi family's lawyers could have made use of them in their case. But I see no realistic prospect of a further posthumous appeal. It is now more than ever obvious that the Megrahi conviction is built on sand. What should now happen is that an independent inquiry should be instituted into the Lockerbie case by the Scottish Government, the UK Government or both in tandem. There is much evidence now available that has not been considered in any of the Scottish Lockerbie appeals, in part because of the highly restrictive rules governing what material can be made use of in Scottish criminal appeals. Only with an independent inquiry is there a possibility that the false narrative supported by the shameful conviction of Megrahi can be rectified.]

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? (...) 

The search for justice goes on and William Barr's actions are unlikely to help

[This is part of the headline over a long article by Kim Sengupta in The Independent. It reads in part:]

With great fanfare, on the anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, the US has announced charges against the supposed bomb maker who blew up Pan Am flight 103, the worst act of terrorism in this country, with 270 lives lost.  

One of William Barr’s final acts as Donald Trump’s Attorney General, a deeply controversial tenure, is supposed to fit one of the final pieces of the jigsaw in the hunt for the killers.  

There are historic links between the Lockerbie investigation and the current, turbulent chapter of American politics. Barr was also the Attorney General in 1991, in the George W Bush administration, when charges were laid against two Libyans, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, over the bombing. The inquiry was led at the time by Robert Mueller, the head of the Department of Justice’s criminal division.  

Mueller, of course, became the Special Counsel who examined if Trump was the Muscovian candidate for the White House. Barr was the Attorney General, in his second term in the post, accused of distorting the findings of Mueller’s report to protect Trump from accusations of obstruction of justice, which he denies.  

The charges which have been laid against Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, another Libyan, are intrinsically connected to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who is the only person to have been found guilty by a court of the bombing.  

Megrahi is now dead. There are good reasons to hold that the investigation, trial and verdict which brought his conviction were flawed and a miscarriage of justice has taken place. This is a view shared by bereaved families, international jurists, intelligence officers and journalists who had followed the case.  

Last month, an appeal hearing began at the High Court in Edinburgh to posthumously clear Megrahi’s name. This was the third appeal in the attempt to prove that the verdict against him was unsound, with his legal team focusing on the veracity of the prosecution evidence at his trial. 

Much of the case against Masud, a former Libyan intelligence officer, now charged, comes from an alleged confession he made in jail, where he had ended up after the fall of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Masud, according to the FBI, named Megrahi and Fhimah as co-conspirators, who had together manufactured an explosive device using Semtex during a trip to Malta. Masud has said that he had bought the clothing which had been wrapped around the bomb, hidden in a radio-cassette player, before being placed in a Samsonite suitcase which was put on the flight.  

There are two points which are immediately relevant. The same trial which convicted Megrahi had acquitted Fhimah of all charges. And one of the key allegations against Megrahi, which the judges said made them decide on the verdict of guilt, was that it was he who had bought the clothing put around the explosive device.  

These contradictions are among many, big and small, which have marked the official narrative presented by the US and UK authorities of what lay behind the downing of the airliner.  

I went to Lockerbie on the night of the bombing, attended the trial of the two Libyan defendants, and met Megrahi at his home in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, where he had been allowed to return after suffering from cancer. I have followed the twists and turns of the case throughout.   

Soon after the downing of the Pan Am flight, American and British security officials began laying the blame on an Iran-Syria axis. The scenario was that Tehran had taken out a contract in revenge for the destruction of an Iranian civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, which had been shot down by missiles fired from an American warship, the USS Vincennes, a few months earlier. The theory went that the contract had been taken up by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which specialised in such operations.  

But the blame switched to Libya, then very much a pariah state, around the time Iran and Syria joined the US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. Robert Baer, the former American intelligence officer and author, was among those who held that the Iranian sponsored hit was the only plausible explanation for the attack. This was the firm belief held “to a man”, he stated, by his former colleagues in the CIA.  

After years of wrangling, Megrahi, the former head of security at Libyan Airlines and allegedly in the Libyan security service, and Fhimah, allegedly a fellow intelligence officer, were finally extradited in 1999. (...)

The two men were charged with joint enterprise and conspiracy. Yet only Megrahi was found guilty. (...)

So, deprived of finding a partner in crime for Megrahi, the prosecutor switched to claiming, and the judges accepting, that he had conspired with himself.  

The prosecution evidence was circumstantial; details of the bomb timer on the plane were contradictory; and the testimony of a key witness, a Maltese shopkeeper, extremely shaky under cross-examination. Five years on from the trial, the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmville – who had been responsible for initiating the Lockerbie prosecution – described the witness, Tony Gauci, as “an apple short of a picnic” and “not quite the full shilling”. Gauci was, however, flush in dollars: the Americans paid him for his testimony.  

The performance and evidence of a supposedly prime “CIA intelligence asset”, Abdul Majid Giaka, codenamed “Puzzle Piece” who turned up in a Shirley Bassey wig, was widely viewed as risible. It emerged later that important evidence had not been passed on to the defence lawyers. Ulrich Lumpert, an engineer who testified to the validity of a key piece of evidence, admitted later in an affidavit of lying to the court.  

It has also emerged that Giaka had been described by his CIA handler, John Holt, in an official report as someone who had a “history of making up stories”.

Holt was denied permission to appear at court. Earlier this month he reiterated in an interview that, like his CIA colleagues, he believes the Libyan connection was a concocted red herring and culpability lay with PFLP (GC). "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”, he said.  

The observer for the UN at the trial, Hans Kochler severely criticised the verdict. Writing later in The Independent, he described a case based on “circumstantial evidence”; the “lack of credibility” of key prosecution witnesses who “had incentives to bear false witness against Megrahi”; the fact that one was paid cash by the Americans; and that “so much key information was withheld from the trial”.    

Robert Black, a law professor born in Lockerbie, who played an important role in organising the Camp Zeist proceedings, later became convinced that a great injustice had taken place, as have many other eminent jurists.  

Some who were in Lockerbie on that terrible night and dealt with the aftermath also felt the same way. Father Patrick Keegans, the parish priest at the time, joined the “Justice for Megrahi” campaign after meeting the convicted man’s family and has backed appeals to clear his name.  

Many members of the bereaved families feel that justice has not been done, among them Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing and became a spokesman for “UK Families 103”.  

When there were objections to the severely ill Megrahi being allowed to return to Tripoli, he pointed out “the scandal around Megrahi is not that a sick man was released, but that he was even convicted in the first place. All I have ever wanted to see is that the people who murdered my daughter are brought to justice.”  

After the charging of Masud, Dr Swire said: “I'm all in favour of whatever he's got to tell us being examined in a court, of course I am. The more people who look at the materials we have available the better.”  

He wanted to stress: “There are only two things that we seek, really. One is the question of why those lives were not protected in view of all the warnings and the second is: what does our government and the American government really know about who is responsible for murdering them.”  

Some bereaved families have criticised the presentation and motivation of the US move. The State Department had sent an invitation for livestreaming of the event.  

Reverend John Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter Helga in the bombing, said the “timing and particularly the choice of this specific day, which is special to many of us, to be bizarre, disrespectful, insensitive and extremely ill considered”. He added: “Why exactly, when the Attorney General is about to leave office, has he waited 32 years to bring charges?”  

Behind the controversy over who carried out the attack, the political manoeuvres and legal actions, lay the human tragedy of Lockerbie, a scene which is difficult to forget, even after three decades, for many of us who went there.  (...)

There is also the memory of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, at his home in Tripoli in 2012. He lay in his bed attached to a drip, on red sheets stained by dark splashes of blood he had coughed up. An oxygen mask covered his skeletal face; his body twitched as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was in the advanced stages of cancer: medicine he desperately needed had been plundered by looters; the doctors who had been treating him had fled. He died a few months later.  

The bitter accusations and recriminations over Lockerbie are unlikely to cease. But the search for justice for this terrible act of violence which took so many lives, and caused so much pain and grief, continues to remain elusive among the secrets and lies. 

MacAskill: I’ve never believed Megrahi to be the bomber

[An article by Kenny MacAskill in today's edition of The Scotsman is headlined Lockerbie bomber was freed ‘to protect Scotland’, says Kenny MacAskill. It reads in part:]

... as justice secretary in 2009, it was my responsibility to consider applications for prisoner transfer and compassionate release made by Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the only man every convicted of the crime. That saw me engage with state leaders as well as with the families of the victims from around the globe, for Lockerbie was truly international in its dimensions both with those who perpetrated it and those who suffered by it.

As with the atrocity itself, that period is also ingrained in my memory. It couldn’t be anything else given the significance of it and the focus that fell upon me. I realised it was going to be big but it was impossible at the outset to realise just how big. Later, finding my face on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and other international media brought it home.

But, though I’m now part of what seems a never-ending saga, my own involvement was quite truncated, most taking place over a short space of time from spring 2009, when an application for prisoner transfer was submitted by Libya, through to August of that year when I made my decision to release on compassionate grounds.

Of course, there had been involvement before as, just weeks into my tenure in 2007, it was announced that the UK and Libya were seeking to conclude a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA). There was of course only one Libyan national detained in Scotland and it was evident that the UK’s intention was his release. Indeed, Jack Straw, the UK justice secretary, was quite open about it when I spoke to him. BP were seeking a major oil contract and without it the deal would go to an American competitor.

New Labour had either forgotten about devolution or failed to notice that an SNP administration was now in charge at Holyrood. The First Minister quickly raised objections and the UK realised that there were complications. However, though I was involved in discussions, much was dealt with by Alex Salmond given the constitutional aspect.

As debate raged on over the PTA, however, a further twist in the tale came when Megrahi was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. I was advised of that in September 2008 but things still seemed a long way off, as arguments over prisoner transfer continued and his illness was in its early stages. Indeed, I recall a conversation with my wife at Hogmanay that year when I explained it would be my decision but there still seemed no immediacy.

But, by spring 2009 the pace was picking up as the UK ignored Scottish objections and signed a treaty with Libya. Likewise, Megrahi’s health was worsening and it would only be a matter of time before an application for compassionate release would be submitted.

The months following were to become quite frenetic. Prisoner transfer applications have set timetables and accordingly the clock was ticking. Invariably the responsibility was compounded by us being not just a minority administration but the first ever SNP one. If there were to be political casualties then they would be limited to one. The decision would be for me alone.

However, I was remarkably well supported by staff, even more so as the days passed and pressure mounted. There was no consensus that could be brokered or solution that would see it all just go away. Accordingly, I resolved that the decision I had to make wouldn’t be subject to economic or strategic issues but based on the laws and guidance that applied. They would be followed scrupulously and wherever possible information and actions would be open and public.

That remained the policy of the Scottish Government throughout.

The only red line I ever set was that Megrahi wouldn’t die in a Scottish prison cell. Rejection of either or both applications remained open until my final conclusions but it simply meant that he’d never be allowed to pass away here, even if it meant being medically evacuated at the very last moment. I wasn’t prepared to risk the lives of those who worked in health or prisons through the creation of a martyr and attacks following from those who perpetrate such terror. Events in cities around the globe since then have simply confirmed my view.

But increased security soon surrounded me as governments and organisations from far and wide sought to make their views known. Locked car doors and being driven everywhere were immediately noticeable, though to the chagrin of my driver I often insisted on walking. Hourly drive-bys by police vehicles at home and my office, and even panic alarms installed at both. Sadly, that level of intrusion also impacted on others as my wife from whom I’d recently separated also required to endure it.

It did, though, create a bond with those who worked with me and shared the risks that I’ll take to the grave.

My staff did their best to insulate me from undue pressure and I recall being advised that Robert Mueller, currently investigating President Trump but then FBI director, had sought to have a letter delivered personally to me. It was out of office hours and contrary to diplomatic protocols and his request was speedily rejected by my office, who advised it could be delivered to St Andrews House in the usual manner. I remained sound asleep oblivious to it all but was told that a police armed response team had been scrambled to my address just in case, greatly endearing me to them ever since.

To make a decision, evidence had to be heard from victims’ families and States. Much was harrowing indeed with many meetings being distressing for staff and myself. Governments varied in their attitudes. The Libyans convivial but with an underlying hint of menace; the Americans business like but co-operative with information; whilst the UK was shameless, all the time conniving for Megrahi’s release but equally insisting it was nothing to do with them.

Many politicians were equally shameful. Labour in Scotland simply opposed whatever I did despite the risks to the nation and the collusion of their London colleagues with Libya. Tories likewise condemned whilst former Tory ministers sought to lobby on behalf of Anglo-Arab business interests.

As is now well known I refused the prisoner transfer request as it was clear that there had been a UN brokered agreement between UK/USA and Libya that sentences would be served in Scotland.

The legal criteria for compassionate release were also met and so I rejected the former but granted the latter.

It’s a decision I stand by to this day and whilst some disagree, with it few can fault the procedure. Indeed, information that has since come to light since has simply confirmed my view. I always knew that Scotland was but a small cog in a much bigger international wheel. The British and Americans, whatever their public utterances, were colluding with Gadhafi on everything from training his special forces to rendering prisoners to him. Tony Blair’s embrace of the Libyan despot was matched by the fawning over his family by Hillary Clinton and the desire of the west for trade deals and strategic alliances

At the same time the supposed hero’s welcome received by Megrahi on his return to Libya was shown to have been fake news which the British and Americans were aware of. But they were never going to allow truth to stand in the way of an opportunity to heap opprobrium on Scotland. (...)

Questions remain over the conviction of Megrahi but whilst I’ve never believed him to be the bomber, he most certainly was no innocent abroad. He was the highest-ranking official Libya would release and the lowest one the west would accept. [RB: There is absolutely no evidence that I am aware of that the west sought higher-ranking officials than Megrahi and that Libya refused; and, given my contacts with the Libyan government during my efforts to secure a Lockerbie trial, I am sure I would have been informed.]

But the UK and USA know the full story, even if a court never will, having their spies and even getting their sources out. Sadly, that’s why the conspiracy theories will run for ever with me now part of them.

A mosaic of supposition and surmise

[What follows is a short excerpt from a profile of special prosecutor Robert Mueller published in today's edition of the Sunday Herald:]

In 1982, he became an assistant US attorney in Boston, investigating and prosecuting major cases that ranged from terrorist to public corruption. He then had spells as partner in law firms or in public service. In July 1990, he took over the criminal division of the US Department of Justice.

In his book Enemies: A History of the FBI, author Tim Weiner says FBI agents “instinctively liked [Mueller], despite his aristocratic demeanour ... [He] had a sharp mind, a first-rate temperament, and a high regard for well-crafted cases ... [He] was a born leader”.

One of the cases that fell to him was the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie. Weiner says that at that time, the investigation was “a mosaic of supposition and surmise ... Someone needed to take charge”. Mueller quickly put FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise, who had been involved with the case from the outset, in full charge of it now, tasking him with turning intelligence into evidence.

Intelligence began to be shared much more widely and diligently, and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was charged and convicted.

The dark past of special prosecutor Robert Mueller

[This is part of the headline over an article published today on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer's Intel Today website. What follows is the section of the article devoted to the Lockerbie case:]

Robert Mueller was assistant attorney general in the United States in 1991 when indictments were issued for the two Libyan suspects, Megrahi and Al-amin Khalifa Fimah. At the Zeist trial in 2001, Fimah was found NOT guilty but Megrahi was found guilty.

During the indictment speech, Mueller explained the importance of PT/35(b), a small fragment of a circuit timer that was allegedly found among the debris of Pan Am 103 near the town of Lockerbie.

RELATED POST: PT/35(b): “A RIDDLE, WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY, INSIDE AN ENIGMA.”

PT/35(b) was the key piece of evidence of the Lockerbie Case. As Richard Marquise (FBI Agent who led the US side of the investigation and reported directly to Mueller) himself said:  “Without PT/35(b), there would have been no indictment.”

This fragment was eventually matched to a timer (MST-13) discovered among the weapons and material seized from rebels after an attempted coup in Togo on 23rd September 1986.

RELATED POST: Lockerbie — The Fairy Tale of the Togo Timers

RELATED POST: Blast From The Past — Reagan and the 1986 “Libyan Terrorism” Disinformation Op

This MST-13 had been manufactured by the Swiss company MEBO and supplied “solely” to Libya.

Today, we know that PT/35(b) is a forgery. We also know that at least one witness was well aware that PT/35(b) could not have been part of the MST-13 timers delivered to Libya and that this witness deliberately withheld  this information from the court.

But back in 1992, it would appear that some folks at the Crown office had their own doubts…

RELATED POST: PT/35(b) TIMELINE PART V: Scientific Inquiries in 1992

Following submission of the Police Report (section 30.0 dealing with PT/35b to the Crown), it was requested that certain further tests which had earlier been carried out on the fragment also be performed on the control sample [ DP/347(a)] of MST-13 circuit board.

Five tests were carried out in the period from 28 February 1992 to 6 March 1992. The conclusion of the report states that none of the scientists would say conclusively that PT/35(b) and DP/347(a) were specifically the same material or from the same source.

In fact, all these scientists had pointed out correctly various methods to establish that PT/35(b) was NOT similar to the control sample of the timers delivered to Libya.

RELATED POST: PT/35(b) — How was the Lockerbie Key Evidence Forged? [UPDATE & Comments]

At that point in time, it would have been scientifically straightforward to demonstrate that PT/35(b) — the key piece of evidence linking Libya to Lockerbie — was a forgery.

But nothing was done and a few weeks later — on 31 March 1992 — the UN Security Council passed resolution 748 imposing mandatory sanctions on Libya for failing to hand over Megrahi and Fhimah.

The culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain

[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined Robert Mueller's Questionable Past that appeared yesterday on the American Free Press website:]

During his tenure with the Justice Department under President George H W Bush, Mueller supervised the prosecutions of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, the Lockerbie bombing (Pan Am Flight 103) case, and Gambino crime boss John Gotti. In the Noriega case, Mueller ignored the ties to the Bush family that Victor Thorn illustrated in Hillary (and Bill): The Drugs Volume: Part Two of the Clinton Trilogy. Noriega had long been associated with CIA operations that involved drug smuggling, money laundering, and arms running. Thorn significantly links Noriega to Bush family involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Regarding Pan Am Flight 103, the culprit has swayed with the immediate need for a villain. Pro-Palestinian activists, Libyans, and Iranians have all officially been blamed when US intelligence and the mainstream mass media needed to paint each as the antagonist to American freedom. Mueller toed the line, publicly ignoring rumors that agents onboard were said to have learned that a CIA drug-smuggling operation was afoot in conjunction with Pan Am flights. According to the theory, the agents were going to take their questions to Congress upon landing. The flight blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Where, I ask, is the justice?

[What follows is excerpted from an article published today on the CNN Politics website:]

[Robert] Mueller, now 73, began his Department of Justice career in 1976 as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco, and during the decades that followed took only two breaks to try out the private sector, each lasting no more than a couple of years.

The stints were so short-lived because of a simple fact, according to Graff: Mueller couldn't stand defending those he felt were guilty. (...)

That black-and-white outlook served Mueller well at the Department of Justice, where he oversaw some of the highest-profile cases of the last few decades including the prosecution of mobster John Gotti and Panamanian Dictator Manuel Noriega. But it was his investigation into the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland that would most profoundly affect him.

"It was a very personal and a pivotal investigation of his career," according to Lisa Monaco, who served as Mueller's chief of staff when he was FBI director. "It is something that has stuck with him, and I think it was because he was so affected by walking the ground in Lockerbie after that plane went down, seeing the remnants of that plane, seeing the piecing together of the plane and the Christmas presents the passengers on that plane were carrying home to their family members, and seeing that all literally get pieced together in a warehouse in Scotland at the beginning of the investigation."

For years after the trial of the two Libyan terrorists, Mueller would quietly attend the annual December memorial service organized by the families, consoling those he had come to know well. When Scottish authorities announced in 2009 that they were releasing the one terrorist convicted in the case, Mueller was outraged.

"That did not sit well with him. He thought it was an injustice, a fundamental injustice for the families, and he did something very out-of-the-ordinary for him," Monaco said.

Mueller wrote a scathing letter to the Scottish authorities, saying in part, "your action makes a mockery of the grief of the families who lost their own. ... Where, I ask, is the justice?"

It was an unusual outpouring of emotion for a man who, according to those closest to him, regularly keeps to himself.

Stalinist thinking about the infallibility of police and prosecutors

[On this date in 2009, I posted on this blog an item headed That letter from the FBI to the Justice Secretary: is it real?  The first of its two sentences read simply “This is the heading over a devastating exposure by Jonathan Mitchell QC on his blog of the misconceptions and errors of fact and law in the letter from the Director of the FBI to Kenny MacAskill.” Mr Mitchell’s article reads as follows:]

My last post covered two issues; the hypocrisy of the attack on the decision to release Megrahi, and the law relative to compassionate release of prisoners in Scotland. But in linking these I noted in passing that much of the attack on MacAskill was simply ignorant, and wrote “FBI Director Robert Mueller, in his much-quoted open letter to MacAskill, obviously intended primarily for US domestic consumption, thought the Justice Secretary was a ‘prosecutor‘.“. That touched a nerve with one anonymous commenter, who wrote me a poison-pen message in the middle of which he stated:

The first paragraph of the FBI director’s letter he’s clearly putting it forth that he generally stays out of another jurisdiction’s case–in his experience as a prosecutor the cases of other prosecutors–though the phraseology might be a good target for a pendant punching above his weight class. Indeed, in the US and presumably Scotland, the prosecutor’s ultimate boss is the Attorney General of the US (or Justice Minister there). When the director talks about the effect of the release it is on terrorists in general and their conviction in a ‘…the conviction of trial by jury’. He obviously means it in a general sense or perhaps you’d have his sentence read something like ‘…the conviction of trial by jury–unless of course the crime is one that the statute allows the defendant to select a panel of judges or a judge instead–after the defendant is given all due process…’.

Now, I wouldn’t normally bother about poison-pen writers, but this made me go back to the letter to see if I had misread it. I didn’t. It contains glaring errors about the Lockerbie process. But what on reflection is interesting is that Robert Mueller is an extremely experienced lawyer who worked for many years on the Lockerbie prosecution, (although he was not, as the letter claims, ‘in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991‘; that was the Lord Advocate). It seems inconceivable that he would not have known the truth; and I don’t believe he actually can have been as ignorant as I suggested. I apologise for that. I have to wonder if he actually wrote this letter, with its collection of howlers. Let’s look at what it says, and at the true facts.

The first weird statement is the one about staying out of another jurisdiction’s cases, to use the commenter’s re-hash. This is what Mueller wrote:

Over the years I have been a prosecutor, and recently as the Director of the FBI, I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors, since only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision.

Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case.

Now, the ‘practice‘ he says he’s abandoning is the practice that he does not ‘comment on the actions of other prosecutors‘. But the Justice Secretary is not a prosecutor; he has nothing to do with the prosecution process. He is not the ‘prosecutor’s ultimate boss‘; that’s the Lord Advocate, whose constitutional independence of the Justice Secretary is fundamental to the system. Section 48 (5) of the Scotland Act states “Any decision of the Lord Advocate in his capacity as head of the systems of criminal prosecution and investigation of deaths in Scotland shall continue to be taken by him independently of any other person.” 1. If the Justice Secretary tried to tell prosecutors what to do, or how to do it, he would be told to sling his hook; and vice versa. Robert Mueller knows this. He is not stupid. He worked with several Lord Advocates over many years. If Robert Mueller wrote the quotation above, he was telling a deliberate untruth. That seems strange. Why should he bother, just for a minor rhetorical flourish? It seems more likely that the author was some minion who shared the lazy assumption of my commenter that the Justice Secretary just had to be a prosecutor, because that’s the American system.

Now, later in the letter the same howler is repeated in different language:

You apparently made this decision without regard to the views of your partners in the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the Lockerbie tragedy.

The Justice Secretary is not a ‘partner in investigation and prosecution‘, any more than he is a ‘partner’ of the accused or the defence. He is independent of both, as a judge is. Here again we see language that suggests a basic ignorance of the separation of powers.

There’s another error which I didn’t mention, the reference to ‘conviction by jury‘, which Anonymous nevertheless identifies and defends:

Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world who now believe that regardless of the quality of the investigation, the conviction by jury after the defendant is given all due process, and sentence appropriate to the crime, the terrorist will be freed …

It seems obvious from this language that its author thought Megrahi was convicted ‘by jury‘. But Mueller knows as well as Megrahi himself that he was not. He sat through much if not all of the trial. Here, again, it seems extraordinary that for a pointless two words Mueller would write something which he knew perfectly well was wrong. Juries are fundamental to the American system (except, of course, for alleged terrorists), but surely Mueller knows they aren’t the norm in most countries affected by terrorism.

There are other errors, most notably the central fatuous and hysterical claim that the release will give comfort to terrorists: what will actually give them comfort is the Faustian pact of successive American and British governments to forgive the entire chain of command in the Libyan intelligence service and government so as to encourage business opportunities2. If you cheerfully sup with the devil, you… the reader can complete this sentence.

Yet neither Mueller nor the FBI have ever gone on record as critical of the decision of successive US administrations to grant amnesty and forgiveness to those who, they say, gave Megrahi his orders; to give them hospitality, trade with them, sell them military equipment.

So I have to ask: who actually wrote this letter? If it was Robert Mueller, he must have been on the juice, which may perhaps have been what Lord Fraser had in mind when he kindly suggested Mueller visit Scotland to ‘discuss some good whisky‘. If it was some underling, he didn’t do his homework.

Whoever it was, it was someone with the Stalinist thinking about the infallibility of police and prosecutors which coloured the UK governments strenuous efforts to keep the evidence in the recent appeal effectively secret, but in a less disguised form. Look at this:

… only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision.

That’s the thinking that led to the founding of the Cheka in 1918. As Hector MacQueen pointed out, it’s the old chestnut that we don’t need courts or judges to “reach the appropriate decision“; still less any defence. The prosecution, after all, is infallible. No wonder then, perhaps, that the writer of this letter, whoever he or she may have been, was so appalled at anyone not following its instructions. Thus the complaint “You never once sought our opinion” on the release. As the Justice Secretary rightly pointed out in Parliament, however, in Scotland “we have separation of powers“. Someone in the FBI, however, does not believe in this.

There’s a phrase for this, and the phrase is ‘police state’.

1. See this description in a recent paper by the Judiciary on reform of the Lord Advocate’s status for a fuller analysis.
2. Musa Kusa, who the British government expelled in 1980 after he announced “The revolutionary committees have decided last night to kill two more people in the United Kingdom. I approve of this“, and who the CIA found had direct responsibility for the PanAm 103 bomb (and indeed many other murders), was in 2003 entertained by both governments in the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London. The last time I was in the Travellers Club, I noticed the fine portrait of Lord Castlereagh half-way up the staircase. He was the Foreign Secretary of whom Shelley wrote in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ ‘I met Murder on the way/He had a mask like Castlereagh/Very smooth he looked, yet grim/Seven bloodhounds followed him/All were fat, and well they might/Be in admirable plight/For one by one and two by two/He tossed them human hearts to chew/Which from his wide cloak he drew…‘ . Was the setting deliberate? Castlereagh would have been an appropriate host.

‘‘We brought in the CIA... the Scots… MI5”

[What follows is excerpted from a long article headlined How Donald Trump Misunderstood the FBI that was published yesterday in The New York Times Magazine:]

President George W Bush [chose] Robert Mueller as the sixth director of the FBI.

Born into a wealthy family, Mueller exemplified ‘‘the tradition of the ‘muscular Christian’ that came out of the English public-school world of the 19th century,’’ Maxwell King, Mueller’s classmate at St Paul’s, the elite New England prep school, told me. Mueller arrived at FBI headquarters with a distinguished military record — he earned a bronze star as a Marine in Vietnam — and years of service as a United States attorney and Justice Department official. It was a week before the Sept 11 attacks, and he was inheriting an agency ill suited for the mission that would soon loom enormously before it. Richard A Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar under Clinton and Bush, later wrote that [Louis] Freeh’s FBI had not done enough to seek out foreign terrorists. Clarke also wrote that Freeh’s counterterror chief, Dale Watson, had told him: ‘‘We have to smash the FBI into bits and rebuild it.’’

Mueller had already earned the respect of the FBI rank and file during his tenure as chief of the criminal division of the Justice Department. When he started work at the Justice Department in 1990, the FBI had been trying and failing for two years to solve the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. ‘‘The FBI was not set up to deal with a major investigation like this,’’ Richard Marquise, an FBI intelligence analyst who became the leader of the Lockerbie investigation under Mueller, said in an FBI oral history. ‘‘I blame the institution.’’

Mueller used his power under law to obliterate the FBI’s byzantine flow charts of authority in the case. ‘‘We literally cut out the chains of command,’’ Marquise said. ‘‘We brought in the CIA. We brought the Scots. We brought MI5 to Washington. And we sat down and we said: ‘We need to change the way we’re doing business.... We need to start sharing information.’ ’’ It was a tip from the Scots that put Marquise on the trail of the eventual suspect: one of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi’s intelligence officers, whose cover was security chief for the Libyan state airlines. Qaddafi’s spy, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was indicted in 1991. It took until the turn of the 21st century, but he was convicted.

It meant a great deal to Mueller, in the Lockerbie case, that the evidence the FBI produced be deployed as evidence in court, not justification for war. In a speech he gave at Stanford University in 2002, concerning the nation’s newest threat, he spoke of ‘‘the balance we must strike to protect our national security and our civil liberties as we address the threat of terrorism.’’ He concluded: ‘‘We will be judged by history, not just on how we disrupt and deter terrorism, but also on how we protect the civil liberties and the constitutional rights of all Americans, including those Americans who wish us ill. We must do both of these things, and we must do them exceptionally well.’’