Refutation of Fox News's claim that CNN's Megrahi footage was staged

[The following are excerpts from a long report published today on the Mediaite website.]

The recent unrest in Libya has brought a fascinating secondary headline: the reexamination of the strange case of convicted Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi. Last weekend, the controversial and convicted murder was found in his opulent Tripoli home, bed-ridden and in a coma, by CNN’s Nic Robertson. But Frank Duggan, president of Victims of PanAm 103, alleges that there was no 'discovery', and that Robertson had been invited to the house, along with other reporters. These potentially damning allegations were then reported by CNN competitor Fox News. Mediaite caught up with Robertson, who explained how he found al Megrahi.

First, some background. The discovery of al-Megrahi was first reported over the weekend, which Mediaite covered Monday morning of this week. Because of the controversial nature of the release of the convicted bomber, this was then reported by many other news outlets, a nice scoop by Robertson, who is a veteran and well-respected reporter from areas of conflict. During a report on Fox News's Studio B hosted by Shep Smith, made by Jonathan Hunt cited that the head of the Victims of Pan Am 103 group was alleging that Robertson’s discovery was “trash.” Hunt reported on-air:

'In the last couple of minutes we got an e-mail from Frank Duggan, President of the group Victims of Pan Am 103. We do not have that on the screen but I will read part of it. He says in the e-mail to us “Give us a break. His family is trying to make a sympathetic character out of an unrepentant murderous monster.” He then talks about the other network which first claimed to have found Abdel Basset al-Megrahi saying, and I quote, “the CNN exclusive expose that they discovered his hiding place was total,” — (interrupting himself) I will use the word trash but he used a different view — “that reporter was invited to the house as was Sky News and the Telegraph and other newspapers and Abdelbhaset al-Megrahi’s son e-mailed this information to the Libyan people.”'

Hunt went on to report that Senator Chuck Schumer also had issued a statement that claimed “this wouldn’t be the first time that Libyan officials claimed Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was on the death bed,” before adding that there was a “whole lot skepticism that he is near-death.”

Mediaite reached out to Mr Duggan, who told us that he didn’t “have concrete knowledge of the media being invited to Megrahi’s home” and that he was just being “reasonably skeptical.” He then pointed us to a SkyNews report of Megrahi’s family emailing journalists. [RB: The above account demonstrates Mr Duggan's cavalier attitude towards evidence.]

[The following two pages of the Mediaite report consist of the transcript of an interview with CNN's Nic Robertson in which he explains the circumstances of his visit to Megrahi's bedside.]

Jim Swire: one of the noblest men alive

[This is the headline over an article published today in the Scottish Review by the editor, Kenneth Roy. It reads in part:]

As we were packing up for the move [of the editorial office from Kilmarnock to Prestwick], one press cutting, and one alone, fluttered out of a desk drawer stuffed with long-discarded items. It was a three-year-old piece from the Scottish Sunday Express with a familiar byline.

Why did I keep this one small product of British journalism when all the others that had passed through my hands in our nine years at Kilmarnock had been wrapped round the proverbial fish and chips? What was its special quality?

The headline was unusual enough. 'Mercy the best route for us all', it said simply. It would be hard to argue with this conclusion, as we see its truth being worked out in so many daily situations. Yet the media do not generally do mercy. The media do punishment and the media do revenge. Old Testament to a man – or, just as ferociously, woman.

In the case of Megrahi, whose photograph occupies a quarter of the page of this cutting, they would have had him executed years ago. Why, it is only a few days since one of the tabloids – The Sun, of course – used the word 'Fiend' to describe him in a front-page headline, announcing excitedly that the SAS was pursuing him.

In the lexicon of the popular press, the SAS is no longer so much a body of fighting men as a macho symbol of clinical aggression to be invoked, usually symbolically, whenever a target of its homicidal lust hoves conveniently into view. It is impossible to say whether there was a shred of fact in The Sun's latest boys' own adventure, but the SAS would not have had far to look: they would have found their target on his deathbed. How's that for anti-climax?

Meanwhile, the deputy prime minister, the ever-opportunistic Nick Clegg, was not gunning for Megrahi's head, merely for his return to prison – wired up to an oxygen mask, presumably, but not before he was chained to his own stretcher. Charming fellow, Mr Clegg. He reminds me of the old saying about Liberals, that they are the sort of people who fire their staff at Christmas.

So, mercy. Not a lot of it around these days (...)

The familiar byline was that of Dr Jim Swire, spokesman for UK Families Flight 103. At the distance of almost three years, his leader-page article has a certain poignancy. It was written 10 months before Kenny MacAskill, Scotland's justice secretary, freed Megrahi from Greenock prison on compassionate grounds, but already Dr Swire was begging the Scottish government to order his release – 'perhaps to a special facility where he could be with his family, yet be safe and have specialist palliative care to hand'. In August 2009, the special facility, rightly or wrongly, turned out to be Libya.

Unlike the good old British journalist – whom there is no need to bribe 'seeing what he will do unbribed' – Dr Swire and the other UK relatives had no desire for vengeance. 'We wanted the truth,' he writes.

I have spoken at length to the victims of mass murder – at Dunblane and on 7/7 – and the search for the truth is a constant pre-occupation of the families; it over-rides everything else. It is always accompanied by a determination that those who died, and the events themselves, will never be forgotten. (The best book about Dunblane, by Mick North, is actually called Dunblane: Never Forget). So Jim Swire's statement, 'We wanted the truth', should surprise no-one who has explored the psychology of victims.

For Dr Swire, the search for the truth led to one inescapable conclusion: the innocence of Megrahi. It was the evidence at the trial in Holland that convinced him that the case against Megrahi was invalid. Time and again that evidence pointed to the involvement of Iran and Syria, not Libya.

Robert Black QC, the architect of the Camp Zeist trial, recently put it to me another way: the trial persuaded him that there was no evidence to justify conviction, but it was only when he met Megrahi in prison that he knew he was innocent. There is a difference; sometimes all the difference in the world. Robert Black, like Jim Swire, has fought tirelessly to establish Megrahi's innocence and made a thorough nuisance of himself with the Edinburgh legal establishment. I have never asked him how much the campaign has cost him professionally or personally. Perhaps he has given up caring.

With Jim Swire, there is a more painful dimension: the human factor. His daughter Flora was one of the 270 lives – many of them young lives – lost 38 minutes after Flight 103 left Heathrow that day. He had less reason than most – he had no reason at all, other than a personal commitment to humanity and justice – to devote the rest of his life to proving the innocence of the man convicted of Flora's murder. HIs self-sacrifice, in so many ways, is humbling. He is now a man in his 70s, yet still he goes on fighting for Megrahi.

I have met him only once: in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when I chaired a public meeting at which he spoke. I thought then he was an impressive human being, but my admiration for him has deepened over the years. Now I think he is one of the noblest men alive.

When Jim Swire wrote that piece in the Scottish Sunday Express in 2008, it was almost six years since Megrahi had requested a second appeal. After three years of delays, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had agreed that his trial might have been unfair, had conceded in effect that there were gaping holes in the prosecution, and that the case should go to further appeal. His frustration at the lack of progress, at the continuing obstruction of justice, leaps from the page.

How much more frustrated must he feel now? The justice secretary's decision to release Megrahi was well-founded, but the subsequent failure of the Scottish Government to release all the facts known to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission is a continuing scandal and a blot on the conscience of Scotland.

Of one thing we can be sure: Megrahi's imminent death will not put a stop to Jim Swire's quest. That will go on as long as it takes.

[A related post on the Ian Hamilton QC blog can be read here.]

Lockerbie in Libya

[This is the heading over a section of a long article by Diana Johnstone entitled Gaddafi’s Libya as Demon published today on the CounterPunch website. The section reads in part:]

My visit to Libya in January 2007, to attend an international conference on the International Criminal Court, gave me the opportunity to hold private conversations with a number of well-educated Libyans who clearly knew a lot more about the West than the West knew about them. I was particularly interested in getting the take of unofficial Libyan citizens on two issues that at the time dominated Western perception of Libya: Lockerbie and the affair of the Bulgarian nurses. I should mention that I never got near Gaddafi, and the conference was sponsored by academics who held diverse opinions on important issues, often unlike those of the Leader, which didn’t seem to bother anyone. But on the issue of Lockerbie, I discovered two general widespread points of agreement.

On the one hand, nobody believed that Libya was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. It was taken for granted that Libya had been unfairly accused for political reasons.

On the other hand, it was clear that the sanctions imposed by the West to punish Libya for its alleged guilt had caused hardship and discontent. The power of the West both to impose sanctions and to project its images amounts to serious interference in the domestic politics of targeted countries, since very many people, especially the young, want to live in a “normal” country and may resent leaders who cause them to be treated as pariahs by the West. Therefore, it was understood that Gaddafi had finally given in to Western pressure to accept responsibility – but not guilt – for Lockerbie merely in order to get the unpopular sanctions lifted. The fact that he agreed to turn over two Libyan citizens to a Western court to be tried for the crime and to pay over two billion dollars of compensation to the victims was explicitly not an admission of guilt, but rather a response to blackmail by Great Powers in order to normalize relations and improve daily life.

This did not surprise me, since over the years I had read a lot about the Lockerbie case. Indeed, a great deal has been written exposing the weakness of the prosecution’s case, based on a totally implausible scenario (a bomb to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight was allegedly sent via airports in Malta, Frankfurt and London), technical “evidence” that had been tampered with by CIA agents, and a witness who was richly rewarded for testimony which did not fit the facts. All this has been told many times, for instance Andrew Cockburn in the CounterPunch newsletter [RB: A related account by Alexander Cockburn is available here], or the London Review of Books, The Framing of al-Megrahi by British lawyer Gareth Peirce. But the fact that the case has been repeatedly exposed by careful analysis as a probable frame-up has not made the slightest impression on mainstream media and politicians who continue to blast Gaddafi as the monster who ordered the Lockerbie massacre.

One may add that at the time of the event in 1988, it was widely assumed that Iran had ordered the attack in retaliation for US downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf. When the United States, switching from its anti-Iran alliance with Iraq to war against Saddam Hussein, decided to accuse Libya instead, no motive was ever produced. But when a “dictator” has been stigmatized as a monster, no motive is needed. He just did it because that is the sort of thing evil dictators are supposed to do.

The two accused Libyan airline employees working in Malta had been put on trial in 2000 by three Scottish judges without a jury in a specially built court in the Netherlands. One of the Libyans was acquitted and the other, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. The United Nations observer at this peculiar trial, Hans Köchler, called the guilty verdict “incomprehensible”, “arbitrary, even irrational” and noted “an air of international power politics” surrounding the proceedings.

On November 12, 2006, the Glasgow Sunday Herald quoted top State Department legal advisor Michael Scharf, who was the counsel to the US counter-terrorism bureau when the two Libyans were indicted for the bombing, as calling the case “so full of holes it was like Swiss cheese” and said it should never have gone to trial. He claimed the CIA and FBI had assured State Department officials there was an “iron-clad” case against the two Libyans, but that in reality the intelligence agencies knew well in advance of the trial that their star witness was “a liar”. But Great Powers can’t back down. Their sacred “credibility” is at stake. In short, they must keep lying to preserve the illusion of infallibility.

At the time I was in Tripoli, the defense team of the convicted Libyan was trying to appeal the conviction to a higher court. I was able to call on one of the lawyers on Megrahi’s defense team. I spent a long time in her office, trying to overcome her reluctance to speak about the case. Finally, she agreed to talk to me when I promised to keep our conversation to myself, so as not to risk harming the appeal. By now, the circumstances have changed drastically.

Here, briefly, is what she told me.

The Scottish judges were under enormous pressure to convict the two Libyans. After all, for years their guilt had been trumpeted by the United States demanding that they be “brought to justice”. A special court had been set up with the obvious purpose of convicting them. Yet the evidence which would merit conviction in a proper Scottish court was simply not there. The best the judges dared to do was to acquit one of the defendants and pass along the responsibility for acquitting the other to a higher court. But to the dismay of the Libyan defense team, the designated court of appeals evaded the dangerous issue (...)

[O]n June 28, 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which had been investigating the case since 2003, recommended that Abdel Basset al-Megrahi be granted a second appeal against his conviction. The Commission said it had uncovered six separate grounds for considering that the conviction may have been an injustice. The announcement caused a sensation in the small circles following the affair. It seemed that Scottish justice was courageous enough to assert itself and allow hearings that would expose the CIA frame-up.

That sort of thing may happen in movies, but the real world is something else.

A sordid bargain

What happened after that helped set the stage for the NATO attack on Libya this year.

Time passed. It was two years later, in April 2009, that the appeal finally was due to get underway. But meanwhile, behind the scenes, secret bargaining was going on, amid leaks and rumors.

On August 21, 2009, on grounds that he was suffering from terminal cancer, Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was released from prison in Scotland by the Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill and allowed to “go home to die”.

Now, it so happens that in 2007, Tony Blair went to Libya to negotiate a British-Libyan agreement with Gaddafi covering law, extradition and prisoner transfer. Under this Prisoner Transfer Agreement, Libyan authorities asked for Megrahi to be sent home due to his illness.

The catch was that the Prisoner Transfer Agreement could be applied only when no legal proceedings were outstanding. So in order to benefit from it, Megrahi had to drop his appeal.

The matter is confused by the fact that he was formally released on “compassionate” grounds. One way or another, the deal was clear: al-Megrahi could go home, but the appeal was dead. Hans Koechler, UN-appointed special observer to the Lockerbie trial, thought Megrahi may have been subjected to “morally outrageous” blackmail to abandon his appeal against his will.

The sordid aspect of this bargain is that it deprived Megrahi of the right to clear his name, while leaving the CIA frame-up officially unexposed. There was nothing to counter the chorus of protestations from Hillary Clinton on down denouncing Scotland for having “freed the Lockerbie bomber”. Two years later, news that Megrahi has failed to die has elicited further indignation from Western media, who see this as proof that the UK had “sold the Lockerbie bomber for Libyan oil”. Naturally, the impression must be conveyed that the sly Libyan dictator tricked the naïve but greedy Brits into selling out their principles for petroleum.

But it is just as likely that it was the naïve Libyan dictator who was tricked by the unscrupulous British into thinking he had made a “gentleman’s agreement”. Rather than pursue an appeal which risked causing acute embarrassment to Western authorities, Megrahi could be released and the matter forgotten. The popular rejoicing at Megrahi’s return home was muted in Libya, but Western media pretended to be scandalized that a convicted mass murderer received a hero’s welcome. In reality, he was welcomed home discreetly as an innocent man who had been unjustly convicted, not as a mass murderer. And whenever he has been able to make himself heard, he has reiterated his desire to clear his name.

US: No plans to tie Libya aid to Lockerbie case

[This is the headline over a report issued today by The Associated Press news agency. It reads in part:]

The Obama administration said Wednesday it will continue to press Libyan rebels to review the case of the convicted Lockerbie bomber but ruled out making the transfer of frozen Gadhafi regime assets contingent on his return to prison.

Getting the money to the opposition is a higher initial priority than handling the case of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the State Department said. (...)

Some lawmakers, including Clinton's former Senate colleague, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer have called on the Obama administration to withhold U.S. support for the rebels until Megrahi is jailed and independently examined by medical professionals to determine his health status. Other lawmakers and at least one Republican presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, have urged the administration to demand that the opposition arrest and extradite al-Megrahi.

But [State Department spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland said that the Libyan opposition's most important tasks are finishing its apparent victory over Gadhafi, restoring stability and starting a democratic transition. She said the administration would keep up pressure over the al-Megrahi case but would not link it to the return of assets. She also noted that it was Gadhafi, not his foes, who had treated al-Megrahi as a hero.

"We all have to take a hard line, and we have been, on Megrahi and anybody else who has blood on their hands from the Lockerbie bombing, and we will continue to do so," she told reporters.

"We need to give the TNC a chance to do job one, which is to finish the job of ousting Gadhafi and his regime; begin the job of establishing Libya on a democratic path," Nuland said. "And we are very gratified by the fact that they have made clear that they are willing to look into this. We will continue to talk to them about it, and we will certainly make sure that Congress's views are conveyed."

The opposition has pledged to look at the handling of the al-Megrahi case once it has established itself as a fully functioning government.

That is apparently not soon enough for some. (...)

New York's other senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, and New Jersey Sens Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg have also made the al-Megrahi case an issue.

Where do they get these people?

[The following are excerpts from an item posted this evening on a blog on the US congressional website The Hill:]

Sen Charles Schumer (D-NY) says the United States should cut off aid to the rebel government taking power in Libya if the country refuses to extradite convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

“If the new Libyan government continues to shield this convicted terrorist from justice, then they should not get one more cent of support from the United States,” Schumer told NBC. “We put American lives and money on the line to help the Libyan people secure their freedom. It’s time the Libyan government lives up to its commitment to create a free and accountable society by handing over al-Megrahi so that justice can finally be done.” (...)

The rebels’ transitional council has ruled out extraditing the convicted bomber back to Scotland.

“We will not give any Libyan citizen to the West,” Libyan Justice Minister Mohammed al-Alagi said. “Megrahi has already been judged once and he will not be judged again. We do not hand over Libyan citizens. (...)"

Libya: Why we should reserve our judgment

[This is the headline over an article by Linda S Heard, a specialist writer on Middle East affairs, published today on the Al Arabiya website. It reads in part:]

The danger for Libyan independence is that NATO member states may attempt to exact some type of quid-pro-quo from the post-Qaddafi leadership such as cheap oil and gas — or worse, permanent military bases. If NATO countries prove me wrong then I’m ready to take to the streets wrapped in the Atlantic Alliance’s flag. Right now, the signs don’t bode well on that score.

Firstly, now that the UN — and more importantly, the Arab League — has blessed the National Transitional Council (NTC) as a responsible caretaker government, there is no excuse for the NTC’s acting prime minister having to plead for the unfreezing of Libya’s assets abroad or being forced to account to foreign governments for the use those funds are put to.

Secondly, neither the US nor the UK has the moral — and doubtfully the legal — right to demand the extradition of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi who has already had his day in court and who served his prison sentence in Scotland before being released on compassionate grounds. OK, so the man didn’t die from prostate cancer within the projected three months, which some in the US Congress interpreted as deceit or defiance, he’s now been tracked to his home where, hooked up to an oxygen bottle, he’s in a near-death coma.

Now some of those who were ghoulishly praying for his demise are upset because he may cheat the arm of the law. Similarly, some UK politicians have prioritized grabbing the Libyan suspected of shooting and killing Yvonne Fletcher a British policewoman in 1984 which is ironic when they’re advising the Libyan people to forgive the past and move on.

I’m comforted by the response of the NTC’s justice minister who confirmed within recent days that his government “will not give any Libyan citizen to the West” and “Al-Megrahi has already been judged once and will not be judged again.” Other council high-ups have fudged this issue. I think this will be a test of the NTC’s independence from their Western collaborators.

Scottish censors to edit Megrahi report

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

Plans for "open and transparent" publication of a report that questions the Lockerbie bomber's conviction took a hit after Scotland's Justice Department said it may have to accommodate data-protection law, European human rights and the concerns of UK and US intelligence agencies in a redacted version of the findings.

The Scottish Government is set to announce next week it will fast-track new primary legislation designed to bypass restrictions on the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

The commission is currently prevented from publishing the findings of a four-year, £1m investigation into the trial and conviction in 2001 of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. (...)

In 2007, the commission delivered a summary version of the full Megrahi report, which runs to 800 pages and 13 volumes of appendices. It said that "based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence that was not before the trial court [in 2001] that the applicant [Megrahi] may have suffered a miscarriage of justice."

After enquiries in the UK, Malta, Libya and Italy, the commission identified six grounds where it believed a miscarriage of justice may have occurred. Senior lawyers at the commission believe any new legislation enacted by the Holyrood parliament will only be one hurdle that will have to be overcome before the full report on Megrahi can be published.

The commission's concerns include material guarded by laws on sensitive and personal data issues relating to the Human Rights Act and privacy.

A spokesman for the Scottish Government said: "We want to be open and transparent and to go as far as possible because we have nothing to hide in this [Megrahi's] case."

But there was an admission that nothing had yet been finalised on the shape of the new legislation. He added: "We will be looking at a range of issues, including data protection, privacy, and human rights. Intelligence and security concerns will also be taken into consideration."

[They're at it again. The current legislation relating to SCCRC disclosure (Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995) reads as follows]:

194K Exceptions from obligation of non-disclosure
(1) The disclosure of information ... is excepted from section 194J [Offence of disclosure] of this Act by this section if the information is disclosed ... --

(f) in any circumstances in which the disclosure of information is permitted by an order made by the [Scottish Ministers].

(4) Where the disclosure of information is excepted from section 194J of this Act by subsection (1) ... above, the disclosure of the information is not prevented by any obligation of secrecy or other limitation on disclosure (including any such obligation or limitation imposed by, under or by virtue of any enactment) arising otherwise than under that section.

[The effect of the italicised portion of the above provision is that an appropriately drafted Statutory Instrument (primary legislation is unnecessary) would override all statutory and common law bars to disclosure, other than those -- and I cannot imagine what they are -- founded on human rights concerns.]

Libyan justice minister promises Lockerbie inquiry

[This is the sub-heading over the lead story on the front page of today's Scottish edition of The Times. It does not appear on the newspaper's website. The article reads in part:]

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi will be given a public trial and executed in private by firing squad if caught and convicted of crimes against humanity, Libya's new Justice Minister told The Times yesterday.(...)

Mr [Mohammed] al-Alagi, a former head of Libya's Human Rights Association, complained that British and American politicians were putting unfair pressure on Libya's fledgling government to send the Lockerbie bomber back to Scotland, but promised to do all he could to reveal who was really responsible for Britain's worst terrorist outrage.

[Mr al-Alagi has already stated that Megrahi is innocent.

The first leader in The Times (behind the paywall) contains the following:]

We may never know whether pressure from the Libyan government, who made it repeatedly clear that it wanted al-Megrahi returned, played any part in the decision to grant compassionate release. But the timing of that decision could hardly have been worse, because it allowed the suspicion to fester, while denying the opportunity of allowing Scottish justice to run its course.

An appeal, which would have come before the Scottish courts some time early in 2010, would have examined all the outstanding evidence — of those who claimed that he was innocent on the one hand, and those who had secured his conviction on the other. When, in August 2009, al-Megrahi’s legal team announced unexpectedly that it was dropping his appeal, the idea inevitably grew that this was a condition of his release. The ill-advised visit paid to him in his prison cell by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Miniser, fuelled that view. Ministers have denied, angrily and repeatedly, that there was any deal. But the doubts linger.

They will be bolstered by a comment made yesterday by Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the tragedy, but who has often repeated his long-held belief that al-Megrahi is innocent. He said, among other things: “This is a man who withdrew his appeal so that he could be allowed to die close to his family, and he deserves to be left in peace for his last days.”

A slip of the tongue? Or a hint that there was indeed a quid pro quo — that dropping the appeal was a condition of his release. Now that Gaddafi himself is on the run, and the transitional government has promised to re-examine the evidence, we may eventually learn more about the circumstances of al-Megrahi’s return, and whether the Libyan leader himself was involved in helping to secure it. In the meantime, we are left with a legacy of doubt, suspicion, rumour and innuendo. The fact that the Lockerbie bomber is now finally dying will do little to dispose of it.

Megrahi conviction was a “politically motivated crusade”

[This is the headline over an article published today on the Newsnet Scotland website. It reads in part:]

Lockerbie campaigner Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora perished in the tragedy, has claimed that the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was a “politically motivated crusade”.

Dr Swire was speaking on Radio Scotland after the Libyan was discovered close to death in his parent’s home in Tripoli, disproving earlier media reports that he had fled the city.

“I bitterly resent the fact that having been present throughout the trial of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, what I heard convinced me, not that he was one of the murderers of my daughter, but that he wasn’t involved as accused.” he said.

Dr Swire added “I bitterly resent the fact that my daughter’s murder and all those two hundred and sixty nine other murders are couched in what seems to me to have been a politically motivated crusade to ensure that the blame was passed to Megrahi and Gaddafi.

“In fact the evidence did not stack up.”

As part of the Justice for Megrahi group Dr Swire has been at the forefront of a campaign for a full inquiry into Megrahi’s trial. He said he found it “appalling” that the Scottish government had thus far “failed to find a venue for re-examination of the verdict”.

He suggested that subsequent revelations about the trial process, including allegations that the main witness against Megrahi had been paid $2 million by the US, was to Scotland’s shame and also criticised the withholding of vital evidence citing the break in at a Heathrow airport hanger in the hours prior to Pan Am 103 taking off that was not presented at trial. (...)

Dr Swire described the calls from the American Senators and various UK politicians as “monstrous” and predicted that when the truth of Lockerbie finally emerges there will be "a lot of red faces". [RB: According to an Agence France Presse news agency report, the egregious US Senator Robert Menendez has written another of his letters to Hillary Clinton, this time insisting that US investigators must have access to Abdelbaset Megrahi in Libya to assess his health and question him about the attack.]

Responding to suggestions that there may be information yet to emerge from Libya about Lockerbie, Dr Swire warned against believing anything that came out a country he described as being “submerged in the fog of war.”

An investigation carried out by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission cast doubt on the trial verdict and the results of the report are expected to be published soon by the Scottish government.

Dr Swire suggested that people may have to accept that Libya may not have been the prime mover in the Lockerbie atrocity and insisted that the modus operandi of a 38 minute timer pointed to a Palestinian terror group having been responsible.

Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi maintains innocence

[This is the headline over a report just published on The Telegraph website. It reads in part:]

Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man convicted over the Lockerbie bombing, maintained his innocence as recently as three years ago, according to a letter seen in Libya's intelligence headquarters.

In a private letter from Megrahi, he told Abdullah al-Senussi, a close Col Muammar Gaddafi aide: "I am an innocent man".

The letter, seen by The Wall Street Journal, was apparently written in late 2007 or early 2008, while he was serving a life sentence in Scotland.

He blamed his conviction on "fraudulent information that was relayed to investigators by Libyan collaborators", as well as "the immoral British and American investigators".

He also criticises a Maltese clothes merchant who told his trial that he purchased clothes from him that were found in the suitcase that contained the bomb that brought down PanAm Flight 103. He also asks Mr Senussi to send regards to "our big brother", Col Gaddafi.

[A report published this afternoon on the Newsnet Scotland website contains the following:]

A letter discovered in the offices of Libya’s former Intelligence Chief Abdullah al-Senussi appears to cast more doubt on claims that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was involved in the Lockerbie atrocity.

In the letter, written by the Libyan when he was still in Greenock prison, Megrahi insists he is innocent of the crime and blames his conviction on “fraudulent information”. (...)

If authentic then the letter will undermine the current claims from many Scottish media commentators who, since the discovery of Megrahi dying in his family home, are insisting that the Libyan knew more about Lockerbie.

It also calls into question the role of Libya itself in the atrocity given that the letter was addressed to the head of Gaddafi’s Intelligence Services who, had the state been involved in the downing of Pan Am 103, would have certainly been in a position to know that Megrahi was innocent or not.

No legal justification for Megrahi extradition

[This is the headline over an article in today's edition of The Scotsman by Glasgow University Law School's Clare Connelly. It reads in part:]

The legal basis for Megrahi's release from prison has not changed. In terms of his release on licence, the only threat to that was either reoffending by Megrahi or a breach of conditions should the authorities in East Renfrewshire be unable to establish contact with him. Reoffending has not occurred and they have now located him.

There have been calls from American politicians for Megrahi to be extradited and face another trial in the US, while UK politicians have called for a return to custody in Scotland. Neither of these courses of action is supported by the legal rules and international agreements that governed Megrahi's extradition to face trial in Camp Zeist or the legislation that governed his release on compassionate grounds.

Underlying these comments, therefore, may be a lack of understanding of the long and protracted negotiations that finally resulted in the extradition of Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Megrahi for trial. The level of negotiation that was involved in the original extradition of Megrahi for trial would make it clear to anybody that if you were to go down that path again, the sheer amount of time involved is something that Megrahi doesn't have. [RB: Megrahi was NOT extradited. He voluntarily surrendered for trial. How that came about is explained in detail in my article From Lockerbie to Zeist (via Tripoli, Tunis and Cairo).]

Discontent has been expressed by people in the US since Megrahi's conviction. Some felt the original sentence was too lenient and, indeed, that anything short of the death penalty was unacceptable. Given this, it was no surprise that uproar followed his release on compassionate grounds. This reflects not only a difference in legal rules and process but also a culture within and beyond law. (...)

Release on compassionate grounds was also misrepresented as driven by commercial desires. Whilst there was anecdotal evidence that the "deal in the desert" between Tony Blair and Colonel Gaddafi was very much driven by commercial interests and opportunities, and entered into to facilitate the transfer of Megrahi, the only Libyan prisoner in UK custody, the same cannot be said of the rules governing release on compassionate grounds that pre-existed the case in question.

At the end of the day, if the transitional government is saying that no-one is being extradited, then that's pretty much an end to it. Even if their position was different, and they might entertain such an application, it would raise issues of due process and fairness, given that trial conviction and sentence has already occurred. There's a humanitarian concern and the practical issue of moving someone who is very ill and in the last stages of life.

Lockerbie bomber: al-Megrahi saga about to end after 23 years

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

The gate of the luxury mansion remained firmly shut. It was clear Abdelnasser al-Megrahi had no intention of letting anyone pass. The world would have to accept it was time to let go of his dying brother. A grim saga that began 23 years ago and 2,000 miles away was all but at an end.

A short distance away lay the cancer-ridden body of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. It was evident on Monday that the campaign for his extradition from Libya was effectively over.

Calls for his re-arrest from US senators, lawyers and relatives of the Lockerbie bombing appeared redundant given Megrahi's condition, apparently close to death, filmed at his mother's house on Sunday and broadcast around the world. (...)

Asked about Megrahi's condition, he [Abdelnasser Megrahi] replied: "He is very sick. The coma came two or three months ago. Sometimes he speaks to his wife or mother, sometimes he is in a coma. His life is in danger now."

He reiterated that his brother had been without proper medical attention for several days. "Medicines have been stolen and we couldn't get them. He did have professional doctors from Italy and Germany and England, but now there is no one, only the doctor here. "

He said the family had emailed a medical report to the Scottish government – with whom Megrahi is obliged to be in regular contact – on Sunday and requested that it send medicine. [RB: This aspect of the saga is the subject of a long article in today's edition of the Daily Mail and another in The Scotsman.]

Abdelnasser Megrahi also insisted that his brother was not guilty of the Lockerbie bombing. "From day one I believed he was innocent. The case was more political than a crime. There is no actual evidence. The world knows my brother is innocent."

He said Megrahi receives messages of support from Scotland and around the world and criticised the US for continuing to demand his extradition. "He was released by the court. He did not escape. The Americans are being too cruel. They don't even respect him as human being because of his condition."

The American effort now seems increasingly futile. Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond, said recent speculation about Megrahi's disappearance had been "completely inaccurate". Salmond told Sky News: "The only people who have any authority in this matter are the Scottish government, who have jurisdiction in this matter … and the new Libyan transitional council, who are the new duly constituted legal authority in Libya.

"We have never had and don't have any intention of asking for the extradition of Mr Megrahi. It's quite clear from the Libyan transitional council that following their own laws that they'd never any intention of agreeing to such extradition."

Andrew Mitchell, the UK government's secretary for international development, said the question was now moot: "It's clear that many of these matters are now academic as his life is drawing to a close... It's clear from reports today that he has not got much longer to live."

The Obama administration said that the Libyan rebels' National Transitional Council (NTC) had agreed to review Megrahi's case once it has established a fully functioning government.

State department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said: "This is a guy with blood on his hands, the lives of innocents. Libya itself under Gaddafi made a hero of this guy. Presumably, a new, free, democratic Libya would have a different attitude towards a convicted terrorist. So it is in that spirit the NTC will look at this case." (...)

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, said Megrahi should have received the death penalty.

"To me it will be a signal of how serious the rebel government is for good relations with the United States and the west if they hand over Megrahi for trial," he said. "He killed 270 people. He served roughly 10 years in jail before he was released by British authorities. Do the math – that means he served roughly two weeks in prison for every person he killed. Two weeks per murder. That is not nearly enough."

[A report from Tripoli by David Pratt headlined Uncertainty over Megrahi’s status will fuel political row appears in today's edition of The Herald.

Fox News and some US Lockerbie relatives think the CNN report and pictures are a scam. A report in The Daily Beast goes along the same road.]

Disgraceful inaccuracy in Time magazine

[An article published today on the website of Time magazine contains the following:]

"We will not give any Libyan citizen to the West," the rebels' newly appointed Justice Minister Mohammed al-Alagi bluntly told reporters in Tripoli. "It was Gaddafi who handed over Libyan citizens." A member of the rebels' National Transitional Council (NTC), Libya's caretaker government, told the London Sunday Times that "Libya has never extradited or handed over its citizens to a foreign country."

That statement is not true. In reality, Gaddafi rewrote Libya's fortunes and his own by signing extradition orders for two Libyan citizens. In 1999 he sent al-Megrahi and another Libyan to the Netherlands to stand trial for mass murder in the Lockerbie bombing and paid $10 million to the family of each Lockerbie victim.

[Mr al-Alagi's statement is perfectly true. Gaddafi signed no "extradition orders" in respect of Megrahi and Fhimah. As I wrote in an earlier blog post:]

It should be noted that Libya did not extradite Megrahi and Fhimah for trial at Zeist, for exactly the reason set out above -- Libyan law (like that of many other countries) does not permit the extradition of its citizens for trial abroad. Megrahi and Fhimah voluntarily surrendered for trial, a decision that Megrahi at least must now bitterly regret.

[An article on Megrahi's situation published today on the website of The Tripoli Post can be read here.]

The Lockerbie affair and Scottish society

[This is the title of the 2011 Saltire Society Lecture delivered at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 28 August by Scotland's most distinguished living novelist, James Robertson. What follows is the text of the lecture.]

Since it is because of my occupation as a writer of fiction that I am giving this talk, why do I wish to devote it to something so clearly and tragically real as the Lockerbie bombing and its aftermath? There are two reasons. First, I believe that fiction and reality are by no means mutually exclusive: through fiction, or literature more generally, there is sometimes the possibility of reaching for truths about the human condition that cannot readily be grasped as we lead our daily lives, either because our lives are too busy or too difficult, or because other people and powers keep those truths from us. Second, this session is sponsored by the Saltire Society, which, as its website says, was founded 75 years ago ‘to encourage everything that might improve the quality of life in Scotland’. While the Saltire Society’s principal concern over those years has been with the cultural life of the nation, ‘culture’ is a very big concept, and I don’t think it is possible, or indeed desirable, to treat such things as architecture, arts and crafts, history, music, science and literature as if they are separate and distinct from the political, legal and social framework of the community in which they happen. The health and wellbeing of a community, of a country, of a nation – and Scotland is each and all of these – can be measured in many different ways, but if those of us engaged in ‘culture’ shrink from engaging with politics and the law, then neither our politics, nor our law, nor our culture in the widest sense, will be honest or progressive, or in tune with the Saltire Society’s aim of improving the quality of Scottish life. Quite the reverse: without that engagement, at a time in our history when there is so much public rhetoric about Scots taking more responsibility for running our own affairs – an aim I completely support – we run the risk of suggesting to our lawmakers and elected leaders that we hand them that responsibility without much caring what they do with it. I for one care very much.

With regard to the Lockerbie affair, many serious questions have been asked over the years, honestly, reasonably and intelligently by many different people, some of them directly affected by the event, some not – questions about the conduct of the investigation, about the resulting trial, about the conviction of one of the two accused, and about the subsequent release from prison of that same man. Where they remain unanswered, or have been answered in wholly unsatisfactory ways by the authorities, these questions hang like spectral shadows over the future of our country. If we cannot feel confident that the biggest criminal trial in Scottish history achieved a just, and convincingly just, outcome, then not only do those whose loved ones were murdered go on suffering, but Scotland as a whole suffers.

When I decided, back in March, to make Lockerbie and its continuing reverberations the subject of this session, I was conscious that the background against which I would be speaking might be very different to that which then existed. So indeed it has turned out. It was possible, for example, that the man convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, who as we all know was released from prison in August 2009 on compassionate grounds, might have died from the prostate cancer from which he was suffering. It was possible that Colonel Gaddafi would have been removed from power by the rebellion in Libya, and that he too might be dead. It seemed highly probable that NATO – or elements within NATO – would not be much dismayed if its bombing campaign in Libya resulted in eliminating not only Gaddafi but also Megrahi, neither of whom would then be able to dispute what might be termed ‘the conventional wisdom’ on Lockerbie, as it has been maintained since Mr Megrahi’s conviction in January 2001. Mr Megrahi appears to have survived the NATO bombs, but it remains to be seen whether he will escape being snatched by, or handed over to, the Americans, some of whom are keen to set an example to their new friends in Libya of how to dispense justice by retrying a convicted man, changing the sentence he received – quite possibly to a lethal one – and overriding the justice system of another country (Scotland) because they don’t like its perfectly legal and properly conducted processes and outcomes. God help us all and not only Mr Megrahi if the new Libyan administration and the Scottish Government do not resist such moves. There is precious little, in statements made by William Hague, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, to indicate that the UK Government will object, although I am gratified to read statements from the National Transitional Council in Libya that they have no intention of handing Mr Megrahi over to anybody.

Other changes in circumstance between March and now were also possible: for example, some specific evidence might have been provided by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the former Libyan Justice Minister, now chair of the National Transitional Council, to support his claim, made in February, that he had proof that Gaddafi personally ordered the bombing. What have we heard from Mr Jalil since about Lockerbie? As far as I am aware, absolutely nothing of any substance. Or we might have heard from Moussa Muhammad Koussa, who was Libya’s Foreign Minister until he defected to the UK in March. Mr Koussa was formerly Head of Libyan Intelligence from 1994 to 2009,and before that worked for the Bureau for External Security, the Mathaba, which has been accused of responsibility for the bombing itself. If Libya had anything to do with Lockerbie, Mr Koussa is the man who would know. He was duly interviewed by British intelligence and the Scottish police, then allowed to leave the UK for Qatar. Had he told the police anything that incriminated either himself or other Libyans, or provided more details to support the conviction of Mr Megrahi, it is hard to imagine that the British Government would not have been eager to tell us. But neither they nor the police have said anything. Who, one might ask, is the more cynical? Those of us who are not surprised by this silence, or those who maintain it while also maintaining that they – to recycle the oft-used phrase – ‘do not doubt the safety of Megrahi’s conviction’?

We have heard from Guma el-Gamaty, the UK co-ordinator for the National Transitional Council, who two weeks ago said that Mr Megrahi’s release by the Scottish Government had ‘handed a political and diplomatic victory’ to the Gaddafi regime. But his statement was essentially about distancing the NTC from the regime’s past activities, and it studiously avoided admitting Libyan responsibility for Lockerbie. If Megrahi and his co-accused were involved, Guma el-Gamaty said, they were ‘very, very small fish in the chain’. He criticised previous British Governments’ dealings with Gaddafi and pointed an accusing finger at Moussa Koussa. None of this reveals anything new about Lockerbie.

It might also have been posited back in March that the political landscape of Scotland would change after the parliamentary election in May. This of course did happen, dramatically so, and the result – an SNP government with an overall majority – does have a bearing on the continuing significance of the Lockerbie affair. Before the SNP came to power in 2007 as a minority administration, it was, unlike the Conservatives and Labour, a party with clean hands as far as Lockerbie was concerned, largely because it had not previously been in government. Many of us hoped then that this would enable a fresh appraisal of the case to take place, especially as, in June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission announced its decision to refer Mr Megrahi’s case back to the High Court for a second appeal because it concluded that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred at his trial. But for the next two years legal proceedings dragged on, and the appeal remained unheard. Mr Megrahi meanwhile, in September 2008, was diagnosed with cancer. By the summer of 2009 his illness was considered by medical advisers to have progressed so far that the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill authorised his release from prison on compassionate grounds. Mr Megrahi dropped his second appeal just before he was released, although there was no legal requirement for him to do so. The political storm that followed his release and his return to Libya completely diverted attention from the question, should he have been in prison in the first place?

It appears to me that, whether one approved or disapproved of Mr MacAskill’s decision, the Scottish Government acted absolutely according to protocol and legal process as far as prisoner release on compassionate grounds was concerned. The howls of outrage from the then Labour Government have since been revealed to be, largely, howls of hypocrisy and dishonesty. Nevertheless, the Scottish Government repeatedly stated at the time that it did not doubt the safety of Mr Megrahi’s conviction. Given the absolute consistency with which it has maintained this position, the exercise of the Justice Secretary’s discretionary powers to release him was and continues to be highly controversial. Arguably, though, one could hardly have expected the Government to express doubts about the conviction. Had it done so, it – the executive component of our political system – would effectively have been challenging the efficacy and independence of the judicial component.

With the May election result, however, we entered new political territory. The SNP has an overall majority, and will presumably be in power till 2016. Within weeks of the election, a furious row broke out over the relationship between the Scottish courts and the Supreme Court in London. The Scottish Government objected to the Supreme Court’s ruling that in a criminal case heard at the High Court in Scotland the human rights of the accused, as defined by the European Convention, had been infringed by the Crown’s failure to disclose vital evidence to the defence. On this occasion the First Minister and Justice Secretary showed no reluctance at all in expressing their opinions about the efficacy and independence of the judiciary. They seem to have objected to the Supreme Court’s decision not because they disagreed with the idea of accused persons having human rights, but because the Supreme Court was based in London rather than Strasbourg. There may have been some validity in their arguments, but the way those arguments were made did not indicate much respect for the principle of the separation of executive from judicial powers. It indicated instead a worrying complacency that everything in the Scottish judicial system was working perfectly well, and that any suggestion that it was not, even from two of the most experienced Scottish legal figures of their generation, Lord Hope and Lord Rodger, was unwelcome.

There was a sense, nevertheless, that the Scottish political context for discussing the correctness of the Lockerbie judgment might have shifted. But has it? One of Alex Salmond’s pre-election pledges was that, recognising the widespread concerns about Mr Megrahi’s case, his government if re-elected would bring forward primary legislation to allow the SCCRC to publish its findings without the consent of the various interested parties who had supplied information to the Commission. Robert Black, Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University, architect of the Camp Zeist trial in the Netherlands and a persistent critic of the outcome of that trial, has argued that the laborious process of introducing primary legislation through Parliament is not necessary: ‘It can, and should be done by Statutory Instrument (secondary legislation),’ Professor Black has said, ‘just as the Scottish Government did earlier when it permitted publication but only if those who supplied the information to the SCCRC consented. An unqualified permission to publish can be given through exactly the same legal mechanism as the earlier qualified permission.’ But, this aside, even were such legislation to be passed, what would change? It has been stated several times by the Government that the SCCRC’s ability to publish its findings would still be subject to ‘legal restrictions applying to the Commission such as data protection, the convention rights of individuals and international obligations attaching to information provided by foreign authorities’. This sweeping set of conditions, it seems to me, all but wipes out the possibility of the SCCRC being able to publish its findings – certainly not without serious further delays.

In June Al Jazeera’s English language channel showed a new documentary film called Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber. This film raised fresh concerns over particular aspects of the case. After watching it, I wrote to the First Minister, urging the establishment of an inquiry into Lockerbie, something many others have argued for. I received a reply on his behalf from the Justice Directorate, which stated that it was ‘not possible for the Scottish Government to comment on decisions of the courts’, that the conviction of Mr Megrahi was a judicial matter and that ‘it would not be appropriate for the Scottish Government to either influence the process or to make comment’ – something it had certainly not been backward in doing vis-a-vis the Supreme Court. The letter reiterated that ‘the Scottish Government do [sic] not doubt the safety of the conviction of Megrahi’ – which is surely a comment of some sort.

With regard to an inquiry, the Scottish Government has repeatedly argued, from Kenny MacAskill’s statement explaining his reasons for releasing Mr Megrahi onward, that ‘the questions to be asked and answered in any such inquiry would be beyond the jurisdiction of Scots Law and the remit of the Scottish Government, and such an inquiry would therefore need to be initiated by those with the required power and authority to deal with an issue, international in its nature.’ I hear the sound not so much of hands being tied as of hands being washed. Here we have a Nationalist administration – keen to persuade us of the virtues of independence, and willing to attack what it considers the interference of the Supreme Court in matters under Scottish jurisdiction – using the limitations of its devolved status as an excuse for inaction. I am sorry to sound so critical of the current Scottish Government, because I believe it has acted with more honesty over Lockerbie than any British Government has since 1988. But it is precisely because Scotland has in the intervening years acquired a substantial measure of devolved power and responsibility, and is in the process of acquiring more – in my view an entirely positive development – that I make these points. There is no prospect of the British authorities addressing the outstanding issues surrounding Lockerbie – it is not in their interests to do so. But it is in the interests of Scotland to address them. What is the point of a Scottish government if it will not, or the point of the Scottish Parliament if it cannot, engage with legitimate concerns raised over a judgment made by a Scottish court about an event that took place in Scotland? We are not talking about local planning regulations here. We are talking about the biggest criminal case in Scottish history.

In forming a view on the Lockerbie affair, I have always tried to keep at a distance anything that has the whiff of a conspiracy theory. The thing about conspiracy theories, though, is that they rush to fill an information vacuum. The more I look, the more I am forced to the conclusion that if there is a conspiracy around Lockerbie, it is not one concocted by those who doubt the guilt of Mr Megrahi but a conspiracy of silence in which the US, UK and Scottish Governments are all, though not from shared motives, implicated. And this has far-reaching consequences for the wider relationship between those who govern and those who are governed, and I want to say something more about that in a few minutes.

First, however, I need to revisit some of the reasons for doubting the judgment of the special Scottish court at Camp Zeist, which in 2001 found Mr Megrahi, but not his co-accused, guilty of the bombing. And let me say here and now that if anybody can demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that my doubts are unreasonable, I will put my hand up and apologise for my scepticism. I think nearly everybody who has expressed concerns about Mr Megrahi’s conviction would be prepared to say the same thing.

The difficulties with the case against Mr Megrahi are too many to list in full here, so I will outline just six of them. First, there is no convincing evidence of an unchecked, unaccompanied suitcase having been put on the Air Malta flight (KM180) that left Luqa Airport in Malta on 21st December 1988, nor of such a case being transferred at Frankfurt to Pan Am feeder flight 103A, before finally being transferred onto Pan Am flight 103 at Heathrow. The judges themselves acknowledged this: ‘If… the unaccompanied bag was launched from Luqa,’ they said, ‘the method by which that was done is not established, and the Crown accepted that they could not point to any specific route by which the primary suitcase could have been loaded. The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 is a major difficulty for the Crown case.’ Second, the only location where a brown Samsonite hardshell suitcase like the one containing the bomb was actually identified by a witness, was at Heathrow, a much more probable ingestion point for the bomb. Third, it is highly debatable whether Mr Megrahi was in Malta on the day that the clothing which ended up in the suitcase containing the bomb was purchased at Tony Gauci’s shop in Sliema, Malta. There were two possible dates for the purchase of the clothing: overwhelmingly the circumstantial evidence points to one of these dates as that on which the purchase was made; the judges opted for the other. Fourth, there is the problem of a crucial fragment of circuit board which was found embedded in a piece of that clothing, and which indicated that the bomb was detonated by an MST-13 timer rather than by a barometric device. Again, all the circumstantial evidence points to the latter type of detonator (activated by air pressure change) having been used, apart from the fragment of circuit board, which was introduced into the chain of evidence through a highly contentious route. Time prohibits me from saying more on this complex matter of the circuit board fragment, but the information is in the public domain for anyone who wishes to explore it. Fifth, during the night of 20th/21st December 1988, about 16 hours before Pan Am Flight 103 took off, a padlock was cut through on a door giving access to the Pan Am baggage build-up area at Heathrow, the very location where the hardshell Samsonite suitcase was seen next afternoon. The fact of this breach of security was either mislaid or suppressed by the police and Crown during the trial, and though known to his lawyers by the time of Mr Megrahi’s first appeal, was dismissed by the appeal court as ‘coincidence’. Sixth, we have three witnesses whose identification of Mr Megrahi linked him to the atrocity. One of these witnesses, a Libyan CIA informant based in Malta called Abdul Majid Giaka, the judges said they were unable to accept as a ‘credible or reliable witness’. The second, Edward Bollier, who supplied electronic timers to Libya, the judges found to be ‘at times an untruthful and at other times an unreliable witness’, although they did accept some of his evidence. The third and key witness was Tony Gauci, the owner of the shop where the clothes that were later packed around the bomb were bought: Mr Gauci initially so signally and emphatically failed to identify Mr Megrahi as the purchaser that he had to be visited over and over again by police till he did. The court recognised that Mr Gauci’s was ‘not an unequivocal identification’. He was coached, given treats and financial inducements, and according to documentation now in the public domain was offered, and after the trial paid, a sum of $2million through the United States ‘Rewards for Justice’ programme. This last fact was not known to the court at Camp Zeist, and indeed appears to have been withheld by the police and the Crown prosecutors. Had it been known, Mr Gauci’s evidence would have been tainted beyond redemption, and probably deemed inadmissible by the court. Ironically, had all or even some of this information been presented to a jury in, say, Glasgow or Dundee, it is hard to imagine that Mr Megrahi would have been convicted.

If you read the judgment, as anybody can on-line, it is hard not to be struck by the number of gaping chasms in the chain of evidence, and the impressive leaps across those chasms that the judgment manages to perform. In the penultimate paragraph of the judgment the most acrobatic leap of them all is made: ‘We are aware,’ the judgment concludes, ‘that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications. We are also aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified. However, having considered the whole evidence in the case, including the uncertainties and qualifications, and the submissions of counsel, we are satisfied that … there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused, and accordingly we find him guilty.’

In the documentary film already mentioned, Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber, the matter of treats and financial inducements to Mr Gauci, was put to Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, who as Lord Advocate in 1991 drew up the original charges contained in the warrants for the arrest of Mr Megrahi and his co-accused (Lamin Khalifa Fhimah). Lord Fraser’s response was as follows: ‘I have to accept that it happened. It shouldn’t have and I was unaware of it.’ He has also been quoted as saying, ‘I… warned our investigators that the eyes of the world were on us, and everything had to be done by the book. It would be unacceptable to offer bribes, inducements or rewards to any witness in a routine murder trial in Glasgow or Dundee, and it is obviously unacceptable to have done it in the biggest case of mass murder ever carried out in Europe.’ This, incidentally, is the same Lord Fraser, the same former Lord Advocate, who, according to the Sunday Times on 23rd October, 2005, described Mr Gauci, the Crown’s key witness, as having been ‘not quite the full shilling’ and ‘an apple short of a picnic’, and the same Lord Fraser who has just been appointed as an adviser to the Scottish Government on standards of ministerial conduct. I am not aware that Lord Fraser has ever disputed these attributions or retracted them.

Let us accept, as we must, that what is displayed in a court of law, any court of law, is not the truth but evidence, and that truth and evidence are two very different things. This is not a cynical view, merely a realistic one. Accepting it, and looking objectively at all the evidence, I for one cannot conclude that it proves beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Megrahi planted the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103, or indeed that he had anything to do with it. What the truth of the matter is – who really carried out the atrocity – we do not know. But we certainly will not arrive at the truth by studiously avoiding the compelling arguments that challenge the rightness of Mr Megrahi’s conviction. One wrong does not cancel another; it compounds it.

What are the consequences of all this for Scotland as it moves further down the road of political self-determination, that is to say as our politics and form of governance become more like our legal system, the independence of which was so jealously guarded at the Union of 1707? I believe that a failure to deal for so long with what are very legitimate concerns in the Lockerbie case is symptomatic of a malaise in the Scottish body politic, a failure of accountability. This malaise has been in part exposed by the re-establishment of a Parliament in Edinburgh, and indeed through that Parliament’s existence huge strides to cure it have been taken in the last dozen years. But devolution has also in part exacerbated the malaise, because sometimes political accountability falls conveniently somewhere between London and Edinburgh. It could be argued that this is a straightforward constitutional matter that will be resolved if and when Scotland becomes fully independent, but that I think would be naïve and wrong-headed: about as wrong-headed as the old Unionist canard that the Scots are somehow uniquely incapable of running their own affairs, and for the same reason – because it is not a uniquely Scottish problem. The implications of the Lockerbie affair have particular application to Scotland but are relevant to all democratic societies trying to balance freedom of information and open justice with issues of confidentiality and security. What kind of trust is there to be between the governed and those who govern? Can a culture of trust be built, or should we, the governed, trust only in the natural tendency of governments, of whatever complexion, to withhold information from us?

It seems to me that if as a community, a country, a nation, we do not address the outstanding matters of the Lockerbie case, then we are unlikely to address these wider concerns of trust and openness when they arise elsewhere, as they already have and inevitably will again, in our justice system and in our politics. This is not just about politicians, the makers of laws; it is at least as much about the legal system and the dispensers of justice. Faith that justice will ultimately prevail is a laudable virtue; but faith alone will not ensure that it does. We also require scepticism. It will be necessary to question, to doubt, and to require those who make and dispense the law to have the courage to answer those questions and allay those doubts, if we are to build the mature, dignified, morally defensible society that we should all want Scotland to be.

To return to where I started, to literature, but to poetry this time, not fiction. Do you remember the poem by Edwin Morgan that Liz Lochhead read on his behalf at the opening of the new Parliament building in 2004? What the people do not want, Morgan wrote, is a nest of fearties, a symposium of procrastinators, a phalanx of forelock-tuggers or a collection of ‘it wizny me-ers’? The poem, which is, appropriately, entitled ‘Open the Doors!’, goes on to say this:

Dear friends, dear lawgivers, dear parliamentarians,
you are picking up a thread of pride and self-esteem
that has been almost but not quite, oh no not quite,
not ever broken or forgotten…
We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest and dearest wish to govern well,
don’t say we have no mandate to be so bold.

That is the spirit in which I have said what I have said this evening.

'Let Megrahi die in peace' says Lockerbie victim's father

[This is the headline over a report published this afternoon on the website of The Independent. It reads in part:]

The father of one of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing today called for the man convicted of the atrocity to be left in peace to die.

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora, 23, said that he would treat Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi himself, if he could, to allow him a dignified death. (...)

Today American news channel CNN aired images of the convicted bomber, apparently comatose and near death, in his villa in the Libyan capital. (...)

Speaking about the CNN footage, Dr Swire, who has always maintained Megrahi's innocence, said: "It is obvious he is sufficiently ill and in need of pain relief and medical care. His medical treatment has been withdrawn due to the circumstances in Tripoli, and his family are saying his drugs have been stolen.

"I feel in view of all he's been through that he should have been accorded a peaceful end in Tripoli with his family. The idea of extraditing him is a monstrous one.

"I would be happy to go and try to look after him if that could be arranged, but I don't know how that could be. He will need pain relief and medication to allow him a dignified end.

"This is a man who withdrew his appeal so that he could be allowed to die close to his family and he deserves to be left in peace for his last days." (...)

Dr Swire dismissed the idea of extradition, saying: "Mr al-Megrahi has never wavered in his claim he was innocent and the evidence led against him was so polluted by political influence that it should never have led to his conviction.

"It's a great shame the overturning of the verdict will not happen while he is still alive to see it." (...)

Martin Cadman, whose son Bill, 32, died in the Lockerbie bombing, said British relatives still had questions as to the circumstances surrounding the attack.

Speaking from his home in Norfolk, Mr Cadman said he believed the Americans knew more than had already emerged.

He said: "Megrahi was not the only person, if he was any person, in this thing. At some time we've got to have the truth about it and the Americans have got to come clean about it."

Mr Cadman said he did not believe "any evidence" had been shown that Megrahi was involved in the bombing, adding: "I do hope that somehow this event now, Megrahi on the point of death, is going to make someone own up."

[Similar views about allowing Megrahi to die in peace have been expressed by First Minister Alex Salmond.]