Private Eye exposes the BBC’s shabby behaviour

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

The latest issue of Private Eye carries the following article, under the headline Source sauce, about the BBC’s recent tawdry scoop on Abdelbaset’s private life:

'The BBC has failed to protect its journalistic sources over its recent “revelation” about Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, and his trips to Malta for sex. The claim was attributed to “previously secret documents, seen by BBC Scotland” - ie the report by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which concluded that the Libyan may have been wrongly convicted. But the Beeb is now accused of breaching the trust of the man who gave the information to programme-makers to satisfy lawyers’ concerns over last month’s BBC Scotland documentary on the case. John Ashton, author and researcher for Megrahi’s defence team, says that when he was asked by the BBC if it could release more of the document, he specifically forbade it by phone and in writing, saying that doing so would betray the key source of its documentary.

'BBC Scotland’s home affairs correspondent Reevel Alderson used it anyway to “reveal” how Megrahi had told his defence lawyers that as an airline worker he could fly in and out of Malta without a passport, enabling him to travel undetected - as documented by Ashton in his book, Megrahi: You Are My Jury. (The secret lover was omitted because of sensitivity towards Megrahi’s wife.)

'Alderson’s article on the BBC news website said that “lawyers had realised if the original trial had known how easily Megrahi could travel undetected to Malta it could have strengthened the prosecution case”. But what he failed to add was what the SCCRC actually concluded about the issue: that while it was unhelpful to his defence, it raised the question of why he didn’t travel that way on the crucial dates - when he used passports. A terrorist surely would have done so.

'Ashton has complained formally to the BBC which is investigating.'

What the SCCRC should have asked the FBI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps Mr Revell and Mr Marquise can answer these questions.

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

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

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


[The commentary on this issue in Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm can be read here.]

Still no justice for Megrahi

[This is the headline over John Ashton’s article in the current edition of the New Statesman. The text is also available on the Megrahi: You are my Jury website.  It reads as follows:]

The killing of 270 people on 21 December 1988, when a bomb destroyed the New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, was Britain's worst mass murder. It resulted in the conviction in 2001 of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi - which to many who have studied the case is the country's worst miscarriage of justice. Yet, for the wider public, the only cause for concern is that Megrahi was allowed to go home to Libya. In the two and a half years since his plane took off from Glasgow Airport, David Cameron and Scotland's opposition parties have missed no opportunity to sling mud at the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill of the SNP, for his decision to grant the terminally ill prisoner compassionate release.

Everyone recalls Megrahi being greeted by saltire-waving supporters in Tripoli, but few know that, two years earlier, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC - the statutory body that examines alleged miscarriages of justice) referred his case back to the Court of Appeal on six grounds, including that the trial court's judgment was unreasonable.

In convicting Megrahi, three Scottish law lords accepted the Crown's case that, on 7 December 1988, he went to a small shop in Malta and bought clothes, which were later placed inside the same suitcase as the bomb. At first glance, it appeared to fit: Megrahi was in Malta that day and the shopkeeper Tony Gauci said that he looked similar to a man who had bought clothes a few weeks before the bombing. But Gauci was certain that it was raining as the man left the shop; weather records showed that there had been no rain that day - Megrahi's only window of opportunity. Gauci also described a man taller and older than Megrahi.

The SCCRC discovered that the Crown had failed to disclose evidence to Megrahi's defence team, including documents proving that, before he first picked out Megrahi from a photo line-up in 1991, Gauci knew that a large reward was on offer from the US government and had "expressed an interest in receiving money".

Saving face
Why did Megrahi abandon his appeal? His explanation, revealed for the first time last month, is that MacAskill privately told a Libyan government minister that it would be easier for him to grant compassionate release if he dropped the appeal. MacAskill denies this, claiming that his SNP government had nothing to fear from the appeal.

Others disagree, among them Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing and believes that Megrahi was wrongly convicted. They note that the Libyan's decision averted possibly the biggest crisis that Scotland's criminal justice system, the country's foremost independent institution, has ever faced. A different outcome would have caused acute discomfort to a party that stands for full independence.

Alex Salmond and his justice minister have stuck faithfully to the Crown Office line that nothing is amiss with Megrahi's conviction. The longer they maintain this fiction, the greater the scandal they are creating for themselves. Sooner or later, they will have to explain why they ignored all the warnings that their cherished system had got things very wrong. They would do well to start working on their explanations now.

Poisoning the well

[An article in today’s edition of The Independent by columnist Nicholas Lezard contains the following:]

I think we long ago passed the My-Eyes-Glaze-Over moment when it comes to JFK's assassination. (...)

Unless, of course, you are a diehard conspiracy theorist, one of those for whom the assassination of the warmongering, hypocritical and mendacious US President has something approaching the status of a creation myth. The compound adjective most often used to describe the people obsessed with grassy knolls and so on is "swivel-eyed", but these men (and they are, invariably, men) actually betray a terrible fixity of vision in which they see only what they would like to see.

This kind of thing would be harmless, sort of, if these people hadn't, somewhere along the way, mutated into the kind of nut-jobs who think Obama isn't an American citizen, or is a Muslim, or that 9/11 was a put-up job (although they can't agree on whether the job was put up by the Pentagon, the President, the Jews, or Mickey Mouse). They also poison the well for those who have legitimate grounds for doubting official versions of events – the most interesting at the moment being, for my money, the ongoing doubts about the conviction for the Lockerbie bombing.

US "interested" in what Senussi has to say about Lockerbie

[The US State Department daily press briefing on 19 March 2012 conducted by spokesperson Victoria Nuland contains the following exchange:]

QUESTION: Okay. Just on the capture over the weekend of Mr Senussi, I’m just wondering if you can tell us if the US has any interest in talking to him about potential connections with Lockerbie. Are you in contact with the Mauritanians, seeking either to get access to him there or to figure out where he’s going to go next, given the number of requests for his extradition?

MS NULAND: Well, first of all, to say that Abdullah al-Senussi’s capture in Mauritania is a crucial step towards justice and accountability, and another welcome step away from the dark 40-year history of Libya. As you know, he’s been accused of crimes against humanity and acts of terrorism, and the international community has been very clear that he needs to be held to account.

We are in contact with the Government of Mauritania about him. I’m not going to speak any further about what we may or may not be consulting about in that context. But as you know, both Libya and the Government of France have asked for extradition of him, the French Government in connection with a terrorist – the terrorist incident with UTA; the Libyans, for obvious reasons.

So we want to see him brought to justice and we will – right now we have a Libyan delegation in Mauritania, so we’ll see where those contacts go.

QUESTION: Are you able to say whether or not the US Government regards him as a person of interest in connection with the Lockerbie case?

MS. NULAND: Well, I think we’ve always been interested in what he has to say about that, of course.

QUESTION: But you’re not – you can’t say whether or not you’re actually trying to get him to tell US Government officials what he might know?

MS. NULAND: I’m not in a position to speak about whether we will be involved at all, but obviously the Mauritanians are cooperating with everybody who has an interest in him.