The last thing that Washington wants is the truth about Lockerbie

[On the occasion of Tam Dalyell‘s 82nd birthday, I was trawling through posts on this blog that mentioned him and came upon one from 17 August 2009 headed The truth about Lockerbie? That’s the last thing the Americans want the world to know. Here are some excerpts:]

Why have US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her officials responded to the return of Megrahi with such a volcanic reaction? The answer is straightforward. The last thing that Washington wants is the truth to emerge about the role of the US in the crime of Lockerbie. (...)

Not only did Washington not want the awful truth to emerge, but Mrs Thatcher, a few - very few - in the stratosphere of Whitehall and certain officials of the Crown Office in Edinburgh, who owe their subsequent careers to the Lockerbie investigation, were compliant.

It all started in July 1988 with the shooting down by the warship USS Vincennes of an Iranian airliner carrying 290 pilgrims to Mecca - without an apology.

The Iranian minister of the interior at the time was Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, who made a public statement that blood would rain down in the form of ten western airliners being blown out of the sky.

Mohtashemi was in a position carry out such a threat - he had been the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1984 and had developed close relations with the terrorist gangs of Beirut and the Bekaa Valley - and in particular terrorist leader Abu Nidal and Ahmed Jibril, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command.

Washington was appalled. I believe so appalled and fearful that it entered into a Faustian agreement that, tit-for-tat, one airliner should be sacrificed. This may seem a dreadful thing for me to say. But consider the facts. A notice went up in the US Embassy in Moscow advising diplomats not to travel with Pan Am back to America for Christmas. (...)

Places became available. Who took them at the last minute? The students. Jim Swire's daughter, John Mosey's daughter, Martin Cadman's son, Pamela Dix’s brother, other British relatives, many of whom you have seen on television in recent days, and, crucially, 32 students of the University of Syracuse, New York.

If it had become known - it was the interregnum between Ronald Reagan demitting office and George Bush Snr entering the White House - that, in the light of the warning, Washington had pulled VIPs but had allowed [Bernt] Carlsson, the UN negotiator for [Namibia] whom it didn't like, and the youngsters to travel to their deaths, there would have been an outcry of US public opinion.

No wonder the government of the United States and key officials do not want the world to know what they have done.

If you think that this is fanciful, consider more facts. When the relatives went to see the then UK Transport Secretary, Cecil Parkinson, he told them he did agree that there should be a public inquiry.

Going out of the door as they were leaving, as an afterthought he said: 'Just one thing. I must clear permission for a public inquiry with colleagues'.

Dr Swire, John Mosey and Pamela Dix, the secretary of the Lockerbie relatives, imagined that it was a mere formality. A fortnight later, sheepishly, Parkinson informed them that colleagues had not agreed.

At that time there was only one colleague who could possibly have told Parkinson that he was forbidden to do something in his own department. That was the Prime Minister. Only she could have told Parkinson to withdraw his offer, certainly, in my opinion, knowing the man, given in good faith.

[Tam then tells the story of a conversation he had with Margaret Thatcher at a dinner in 2001 hosted by the Colombian ambassador:]

Raising the soup spoon, I ventured: 'Margaret, tell me one thing - why in 800 pages...'

'Have you read my autobiography?' she interrupted, purring with pleasure.

‘Yes, I have read it very carefully. Why in 800 pages did you not mention Lockerbie once?' Mrs Thatcher replied: 'Because I didn't know what happened and I don't write about things that I don't know about.'

My jaw dropped. 'You don't know. But, quite properly as Prime Minister, you went to Lockerbie and looked into First Officer Captain Wagner's eyes.'

She replied: 'Yes, but I don't know about it and I don't write in my autobiography things I don't know about.'

My conclusion is that she had been told by Washington on no account to delve into the circumstances of what really happened that awful night. Whitehall complied. I acquit the Scottish judges Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord MacLean at Megrahi's trial of being subject to pressure, though I am mystified as to how they could have arrived at a verdict other than 'Not Guilty' -or at least 'Not Proven'.

As soon as I left the Colombian ambassador's residence, I reflected on the enormity of what Mrs Thatcher had said. Her relations with Washington were paramount. She implied that she had abandoned her natural and healthy curiosity about public affairs to blind obedience to what the US administration wished. Going along with the Americans was one of her tenets of faith.

On my last visit to Megrahi, in Greenock Prison in November last year, he said to me: 'Of course I am desperate to go back to Tripoli. I want to see my five children growing up. But I want to go back as an innocent man.'

I quite understand the human reasons why, given his likely life expectancy, he is prepared, albeit desperately reluctantly, to abandon the appeal procedure.

The importance of being awkward

Today is the 82nd birthday of Tam Dalyell, former Labour MP (1962-2005) and Father of the House of Commons (2001-2005), former Rector of the University of Edinburgh (2003-2006) and continuing stalwart of the Justice for Megrahi campaign. During the seven years of this blog's life he has featured frequently. His appearances are gathered together here.

A verdict contrary to the evidence

[On this date three years ago, an item appeared on this blog that contained the following excerpts from an article in The Times:]

One of Scotland’s top legal experts claimed last night that the three judges at the trial of the Lockerbie bomber reached a guilty verdict “contrary to the evidence” because “consciously or subconsciously” they were under pressure to convict from the then Lord Advocate.

Robert Black, Professor Emeritus of Scots law at the University of Edinburgh, added that there was no doubt that the conviction of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi for mass murder had been a miscarriage of justice. (...)

Professor Black dismissed the notion that the trial judges, Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord MacLean, had been “nobbled” by politicians, but instead said that they had been influenced by the power of the Lord Advocate, Scotland’s leading legal official. (...)

“The Lockerbie case was the most important criminal case there had ever been in Scotland,” Professor Black said. “For the outcome of that case, after all the publicity about the investigation ... for that investigation, and that prosecution to result in two verdicts of not guilty would have been a slap in the face of the Lord Advocate. Consciously or subconsciously these judges were not willing [to do that].” [RB: It is noteworthy that one of the six reasons given by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for finding that Megrahi's conviction might have been a miscarriage of justice was that no reasonable tribunal could, on the evidence, have made the finding in fact that Megrahi was the purchaser on Malta of the clothes that surrounded the bomb. Without that finding, Megrahi could not in law have been convicted.]

Professor Black was sharing a stage with Jim Swire, 75, the GP whose daughter Flora was among the victims of the bombing, following a production of the play Lockerbie [: Unfinished Business] at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Written and performed by David Benson, it dramatised Dr Swire’s emotional journey, from his first anxiety about his daughter’s safety when news of a terrorist bomb broke in December 1988, through his decades of struggle to establish the identity of the terrorists who had killed her.

[The Lord Advocate at the time of the Zeist trial, Lord Boyd of Duncansby, now a judge of the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary, reacted angrily to my comments.  His response and my rejoinder are recorded on this blog here and here.]

Lockerbie investigators "hand in hand ... praying for justice"

[Various Dutch newspapers are today running an article headlined De lessen van Lockerbie (The lessons of Lockerbie). What follows are excerpts taken from Dagblad van het Noorden, translated courtesy of Google Translate, as modified by me via my knowledge of Afrikaans. The original Dutch text is appended.]

The Pan Am flight 103 disaster on December 21, 1988 sowed death and destruction in the small village of Lockerbie. Exactly 38 minutes after the plane takes off from London Heathrow, at a height of 10 kilometers, something goes terribly wrong. The ‘Clipper Maid Of The Seas' explodes, falls into thousands of pieces, and destroys much of Lockerbie. Eleven residents and 259 passengers are killed.

Because there were 189 Americans on board, the FBI is also involved in the investigation. The leader of the team was Richard Marquise. With pain in his heart, he looks at what is happening in Ukraine.  “We both have many compatriots lost in a foreign country. But we had one great advantage, and that was that the Scottish police did ​​a very good job. Directly after the disaster there were thousands of police and soldiers on hand to help search for victims and wreckage."

Marquise calls the war in Ukraine a nightmare for the Dutch investigators who ultimately have to find the perpetrators. There are, according to him, so many people who have an interest in ensuring that there is no evidence to be found. International observers have already indications that wreckage has been tampered with. “It is hoped that these were people who did not know exactly where to go looking. So perhaps forensic experts with all their advanced techniques can still find something useful."

Yet there is one bright spot, according to Marquise. The Netherlands already knows that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was probably downed with a rocket.  “The first few days we still had no idea why the Pan Am aircraft had crashed.” (...)

A piece of wreckage, however small, can be invaluable, as became clear in the investigation into the Lockerbie disaster. Investigators found a tiny chip from the timer that activated the bomb in a suitcase. By means of this, investigators eventually exposed the Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. He smuggled the bomb suitcase on board the Pan Am aircraft. But in the absence of this kind of hard evidence it will be a very tough job to identify the perpetrators, predicts Marquise. “Unless someone comes forward who says ‘It was him.’”

What Marquise would like to see is a “golden informant” such as they had in the Lockerbie investigation. (...) [RB: Presumably this is a reference to Abdul Majid Giaka. If that is so, it is interesting that he should still today be being referred to as “golden” after his performance at Zeist.]

If the Dutch - despite all the difficulties - find the perpetrators then a suspect can be arrested even after years of waiting, as the Lockerbie investigators have cause to know. Al-Megrahi, the man who placed the bomb suitcase in the Pan Am aircraft, was a Libyan. That country already had a reputation as a rogue state that was not cooperative. “Gaddafi simply denied that it had happened,” says Marquise.

Only after years of economic sanctions did Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi give in and two suspects were extradited in 1999. One of them was acquitted. Al-Megrahi was imprisoned in 2001 for life. So there was finally justice, thirteen years after the disaster.

Marquise remembers that day like yesterday. He was with the Scottish detectives at Camp Zeist, when the judges delivered judgment. Hand in hand they listened to the verdict, praying for justice. “All those years of hard work had led us to this man. But only when the judge pronounced the word "guilty", were we sure: ‘we got him’.”

De ramp met Pan Am-vlucht 103 zaait op 21 december 1988 dood en verderf in het kleine dorpje Lockerbie. Precies 38 minuten nadat het toestel is opstegen vanaf Londen Heathrow, gaat het op 10 kilometer hoogte vreselijk mis. De ‘Clipper Maid Of The Seas' explodeert, valt in duizenden stukjes uiteen en vermorzelt een groot deel van Lockerbie. Elf bewoners en 259 passagiers komen om het leven.

Omdat er 189 Amerikanen aan boord waren, wordt ook de FBI bij het onderzoek betrokken. Leider van het team was destijds Richard Marquise. Met pijn in zijn hart kijkt hij naar wat er nu in Oekraïne gebeurt. ,,Wij hebben beide veel landgenoten verloren in een vreemd land. Maar wij hadden één groot voordeel en dat was dat de Schotse politie heel goed werk verrichtte. Na de ramp waren er direct duizenden agenten en militairen op de been om te helpen zoeken naar slachtoffers en wrakstukken.''

De oorlog in Oekraïne noemt Marquise een nachtmerrie voor de Nederlandse onderzoekers die uiteindelijk de daders moeten zien te vinden. Er zijn volgens hem zo veel mensen die er belang bij hebben dat er helemaal geen bewijsstukken worden gevonden. Internationale waarnemers hebben al aanwijzingen dat er met de wrakstukken zou zijn gerommeld. ,,Het is te hopen dat de mensen die dat hebben gedaan niet precies wisten waar ze naar moesten zoeken. Zo kunnen forensische experts met al hun geavanceerde technieken misschien toch nog iets bruikbaars vinden.''

Toch is er volgens Marquise een lichtpuntje. Nederland weet al dat vlucht MH17 van Malaysia Airlines hoogstwaarschijnlijk naar beneden is gehaald met een raket. ,,Wij hadden de eerste dagen nog helemaal geen idee waarom het Pan Am-toestel was neergestort.'' (...)

Een wrakstuk, hoe klein ook, kan goud waard zijn, zo is duidelijk geworden in het onderzoek naar de ramp in Lockerbie. De minuscule chip die onderzoekers vinden, blijkt een deel van de timer waarmee de bom in een koffer is geactiveerd. Rechercheurs ontmaskeren hiermee uiteindelijk de Libische geheim agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Hij heeft de bomkoffer aan boord van het Pan Am-toestel gesmokkeld. Maar als dit soort harde bewijzen uitblijven, wordt het achterhalen van de daders een heel zware klus, voorspelt Marquise. ,,Of er moet iemand opstaan die zegt: hij was het.''

Wat had Marquise graag gezien dat er ook in het Lockerbie-onderzoek een gouden tipgever was opgestaan. (...)

Slagen de Nederlanders er – ondanks alle moeilijkheden – toch in de daders te vinden, dan kan het daadwerkelijk arresteren van een verdachte nog jaren op zich laten wachten, weten de onderzoekers van Lockerbie. Al-Megrahi, de man die de bomkoffer in het Pan Am-toestel plaatste, was een Libiër. Dat land had toen al de reputatie van een schurkenstaat waarmee niet viel samen te werken. ,,Gaddafi ontkende simpelweg dat het was gebeurd'', zegt Marquise.

Pas na jarenlange economische sancties zwichtte de Libische leider Muammar Gaddafi en werden in 1999 twee verdachten uitgeleverd. Een van hen werd vrijgesproken. Al-Megrahi kreeg in 2001 levenslang. Zo was er dertien jaar na de ramp eindelijk gerechtigheid.

Marquise herinnert zich die dag nog als gisteren. Hij zat samen met de Schotse rechercheurs in Kamp Zeist, waar de rechters het oordeel velden. Hand in hand luisterden ze naar de uitspraak, biddend voor gerechtigheid. ,,Al die jaren hard werken hadden ons naar deze man geleid. Maar pas toen de rechter het woord ‘schuldig' uitsprak, wisten we het zeker: we got him.''

Walking past a mountain of evidence "a howling scandal"

[For those who enjoyed Dr Morag Kerr’s piece posted yesterday, there is more from her that is just as good in the comments following Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow". And here is a comment from Dr Kerr on yesterday’s article:]

Two different states investigating the bombing, with different agendas. Not necessarily conflicting, but separate. The Brits don't want their favourite airport to be blamed - far better if the security lapse was somewhere else. The Yanks don't want it to have been Iran, because if it was that means that their mishandling of the IR655 disaster has caused the loss of another 270 lives. Far better if it was the catch-all blame-taker, Gaddafi.

At first it looks as if the Yanks are on a loser, but the British machinations prevent the case being solved the easy way, and in the end the Americans get the chance to put their agenda back on the rails.

That's kind of the easy bit.

There's also the positive misdirection. It looks very much as if someone was laying a trail of sweeties to Malta, which was only picked up on because there was a police force happy to look anywhere but where the real evidence pointed. It also looks as if someone might have been laying a trail pointing to Libya. PT/35b and so on. The catch-letter too, possibly.

Is this again confusion caused by two separate agencies pursuing different agendas? Perhaps the real culprits laying the trail to Malta, and the CIA slipping in evidence to point to Libya? Could the latter even have prepared one or two things, just in case the Ayatollah somehow succeeded in doing what he was threatening to do?

But Malta is very close to Libya, ain't that convenient. And somehow the clothes purchaser managed to leave the impression he was Libyan, as he was acquiring the eminently traceable clothes pointing to Malta. So were the two exercises entirely separate? Bearing in mind that the PFLP-GC appeared to have been infiltrated and Khreesat was a Jordanian asset?

And then again, was Megrahi's presence at the airport at just the right time yet another convenient coincidence, or was that somehow factored in? What was Abu Talb doing with all these Maltese clothes, in his flat in Sweden?

All moonshine, probably. But the bomb being introduced at Heathrow and the Scottish police and English authorities walking straight past a mountain of evidence to that effect isn't moonshine. It's a howling scandal.

Steering the Lockerbie investigation away from Heathrow

[What follows is a lightly-edited amalgamation of two comments posted today by Dr Morag Kerr (Rolfe) on the thread Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow".]

It is my belief that John Orr deliberately steered the investigation away from Heathrow from the very earliest days of the inquiry. That Times article [Disaster bomb was ‘placed on board Jumbo at Frankfurt’ The Times, 31 December 1988] which must have been written on 30 December didn't come out of nowhere. It has a startling amount of detail on the methodologies of the PFLP-GC as well as the headline that the bomb came from Frankfurt and not Heathrow.

It takes a very special sort of stupid to receive Bedford's 9th January statement describing a brown Samsonite hardshell in the container in the interline shed at Heathrow, and reports (the same month) from the forensic scientists that the bomb had been in a brown Samsonite hardshell, and do NOTHING to connect the two. I mean, Bedford described two suitcases which appeared while he was on his break, and then concentrated on "one of them", which he described in detail. The one on the left was in the correct position to have been the bomb, the one on the right wasn't. Nobody even asked him which of the two cases he was referring to as a brown Samsonite hardshell. (Only at the FAI [Fatal Accident Inquiry], in October 1990, did he answer that he was talking about the one on the left.)

On 2 February 1989 Ray Manly's statement was received at Lockerbie. It was entered into HOLMES and filed away as being of no interest whatsoever to the inquiry. In other words, Heathrow had already been discounted as early as that.

The "nonsense on stilts" at the March meeting about most of the damaged luggage being from Frankfurt so probably the bomb suitcase was too, has more than a whiff of deliberate obfuscation about it. Are we really supposed to believe that a senior detective heading an inquiry of this magnitude is that stupid? But who would dare contradict him?

It wasn't just Orr, though. Parallel with his ignoring of the Heathrow baggage evidence, we see the forensics officers unite as one to declare that the explosion had not been in the suitcase on the floor of the container. This wasn't just the RARDE experts (principally Feraday, but also Cullis and Hayes), but also the AAIB inspectors, principally Claiden and Protheroe. The first report containing this opinion was written by Peter Claiden and is dated April 1989.

Now, the explosion WAS in the suitcase on the floor of the container. That's incontrovertible, once you realise where PK/139 was positioned within the container. (Nobody even mentions PK/139 in any of the reports. It's just sitting there in a composite photo, mutely screaming "look at me", and nobody paid the slightest attention to it.) And PK/139 is just the single most blindingly obvious piece of evidence - multiple strands of evidence reinforce each other to show that there was no suitcase below the bomb suitcase.

So how come we have about six investigators from two different institutes, who were officially working separately on the case, lining up to ignore the bleedin' obvious, and declare a mystic knowledge that the recovered floor of the container would have looked different if the bomb had been in the bottom suitcase?

Not once in any of their reports is there any acknowledgement that the case on the bottom was from Heathrow, while the case on the second layer was from Frankfurt. All that vehemence to exclude the bottom case, and they don't even seem to know that by doing this they are absolving Heathrow. And yet, why bother making the distinction in the first place unless you know that the two cases have different provenances?

So, at the same time Orr was ignoring Bedford, Feraday and assorted hangers-on were insisting that the case in the position of the one Bedford saw wasn't the bomb. Quite independently, of course. And equally in defiance of the evidence in front of them. 

I think Orr probably used this forensic opinion later to justify ignoring the Bedford case, but that's retrospective, as he was ignoring it well before the opinion was reported.

So, if Orr was acting on instructions from on high, it seems quite plausible that someone in the forensics team (probably Feraday) was also receiving instructions to interpret the evidence in a way that would deflect from Heathrow. (I suspect Claiden's April 1989 report might have had a wee nudge from Feraday, although at the FAI he was at some pains to declare that the two teams who were examining the wreckage together - and probably eating lunch together and so on - didn't communicate at all.)

So, was one agency directing both Orr and Feraday in this? Seems likely. All to prevent BAA and Heathrow from being culpable in the loss of 270 lives, and to hell with whether the actual bombers were caught or not. So who?

Who privatised BAA in 1986? Who wrote stuff in her memoirs which pretty clearly indicated she knew full well that Gaddafi had not been behind the Lockerbie bombing? [RB: Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 1993, page 449.]

Well, I'm speculating as to motive. However, I have an extremely strong sense of both arms of the investigation (police and forensics) being separately pressurised to deliver opinions that absolved the Bedford case. And it seems only logical that the same person or body was pressurising both groups.

I very much doubt if there was any US influence in this area at all. I think the Americans were frying entirely different fish. It smells home-grown to me. So, I go figure.

I think the Americans wanted to blame Libya and Gaddafi, but if it had been proved to have been the PFLP-GC they'd have had to accept that. At first the evidence pointing to the PFLP-GC appeared overwhelming, and they seem to have conceded the point. However, nobody could find any connection between the PFLP-GC and KM180 at Malta.

If you're looking for the right culprit in the wrong place, you're doomed to fail. The police failed, but never considered that was because they were looking in the wrong place. They ran into the sand. Which was a convenient moment for the US authorities to step in and resurrect the idea that maybe they should all have been looking for Libyans not Palestinians, and maybe if they investigated this Libyan guy they'd find something.

Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow"

[What follows is an article by Ian Ferguson headed Confidential memo discloses reason police suspected PFLP-GC published in August 2000 on TheLockerbieTrial.com, a website that he and I edited:]

It is not expected that Heathrow Airport will take up much time in the presentation of the Crown case.

Police investigations in this case moved very quickly away from Heathrow and focused on Frankfurt instead.

As early as twelve weeks after it was established that a bomb had brought down Pan Am 103, Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr, the senior investigating officer was briefing his colleagues in the FBI and the German BKA and told them on 28 March 1989: "To date 14 pieces of explosive damaged baggage have been recovered and enquiries to date suggest that on the balance of probability the explosive device was likely to be amongst the Frankfurt passengers baggage items. Of all the currently identified explosive damaged baggage, all but one item originated from Frankfurt."

This extract is from a "confidential" report of the Lockerbie Incident Investigation: International Co-ordination Meeting held on 28 March 1989 and obtained by us.

The report is illuminating and describes in detail how John Orr told the meeting of the "evidential connection between the murder of 270 persons at Lockerbie and activities of the PFLP-GC in Germany."

He went on, "There were a number of important factors to be considered including: the history of this organisation (PFLP-GC); the fact that a Toshiba make radio cassette recorder packed with 300 gramms of Semtex Explosive was found in West Germany; at least one hard-shell suitcase, possibly Samsonite, was traced to a member of the PFLP-GC in West Germany in October 1988; previous conduct of this organisation which makes clear that the group is prepared to make repeated attacks on similar targets with identical Modus Operandi."

Despite the very early stages of the investigation it is clear from these extracts that Heathrow had taken second place to Frankfurt and at this stage Malta was nowhere in the picture.

It is interesting though that then Detective Chief Superintendent Orr, now Chief Constable Orr, chose to describe the modus operandi of the PFLP-GC as being "identical" to that which blew up Pan Am 103.

A number of police officers, including some who worked at Heathrow, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told us that they felt the investigation at Heathrow was not an in-depth investigation and one even described it as being "cursory".

Whatever the depth of the Heathrow investigation the extracts of the confidential report above show that the investigators were heavily leaning towards the PFLP-GC and Frankfurt airport.

At the time of the bombing, the terminal for Iran Air, the national airline of Iran was situated next to Pan Am's terminal at Heathrow. Iran is alleged to have been one of the financial sponsors of the PFLP-GC in the 80s.

It is also very surprising that the Crown have not called Chief Constable John Orr to testify at Camp Zeist considering that, at the time, he was the senior detective and effectively in charge of the Lockerbie investigation.

Call to Alex Salmond to show same resolution and confidence over Gaza as over Megrahi release

[What follow are excerpts from an article by Derek Bateman headed Take a stand published today on his Derek Bateman Broadcaster website:]

Israel is still responding to acts of terror – that’s what firing rockets into their territory amounts to – but the reaction this time has awakened a hurricane of popular fury that goes beyond the committed Left and western critics. (...)

But public opinion even among the normally staunch US Jewish community is saying enough is enough as we witness the scale of devastation and the images of death and horrific injuries. The realisation that the all-powerful and heavily-armed Israeli Defence Force is prepared to smash anything near a potential target in defiance of world opinion is hardening opposition in Hamas’ favour. Yesterday’s strike on a UN school occurred because they were aiming at militants on a passing motorbike. That sounds cavalier and certainly uncaring of potential innocent death. It isn’t just that this prolonged attack is enough, it is that the situation which permits it is also now too much to bear. Instead of just the Americans, who help arm the Israelis, who hold the ring, it is the world community which needs to find a new resolution, a determination to force a change in attitude that decrees a settlement must now be formulated. (...)

But here’s the thing…for all that we protest and complain our voices need the loudspeaker of the government. Tomorrow Alex Salmond has an opportunity to put Scotland on the map in the Gaza disaster by making a statement during the televised debate condemning Israeli aggression. He can take a lead, following the offer of treating the injured, that would be bold and echo the feelings of the Scots by speaking out on behalf of the Scottish government and demanding not just an end to the bombardment and immediate reparations but urging a UN peace conference. And offering to host it. (...)

Isn’t independence about taking our place in the world and playing a full role? What better sign could we give than to put into official words the message that is resounding around the world…

The SNP showed itself resolute and confident when it freed Megrahi – in the teeth of world and Washington opinion. This would be much less controversial and be hailed abroad if not at home where Salmond’s opponents would display the customary  national self-loathing by jeering him for saying what they themselves believe and what their own party leadership is saying. That can be laughed off.

It isn’t an easy decision. No administration seeking approval for cutting against the grain to win its independence wants to alienate neighbours and international power bases unnecessarily but has there ever been a moment of such disgust coinciding with a mass audience when the voice of the Scottish people can be heard so clearly? There are times, and this one, when it is plain humanity, not politics that is to the fore. Whichever side you are on, whatever doubts about Hamas and its policies you hold, you can put up a hand and say Enough.

A scapegoat wrongly convicted in the biggest criminal case in Scottish legal history

[The same issue of Perspectives magazine as carries Dr Jim Swire’s essay contains an article by James Robertson on the links (and differences) between the Lockerbie disaster and his novel The Professor of Truth.  The article reads as follows:]

One of the functions of a novel is to ask what it is to be human, exploring this question more subtly than is sometimes possible through, for example, the hard facts or loaded opinions of journalism. This is what I have attempted in The Professor of Truth, a work of fiction populated by imagined, invented characters.

It would be absurd, however, to pretend that the book is not also influenced and inspired by a real event, namely the Lockerbie bombing of 21 December 1988 and the long trail of events that followed that horrific night. Even as the trial of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and his co-accused Lamin Khalifa Fhimah was in progress, and at a growing volume after the acquittal of Fhimah and conviction of Megrahi in January 2001, concerns were being raised that Megrahi, who always maintained his innocence, might be the victim of a gross injustice: in short, that he was a scapegoat and had been wrongly convicted in the biggest criminal case in Scottish legal history. People with far greater expertise and knowledge than I had found the prosecution’s evidence and the reasoning of the published judgment far from persuasive.  Since then, more and more information has come into the public domain which leaves the case against Megrahi in shreds: some evidence was withheld from the defence or suppressed by the prosecution or by the police; new evidence has emerged which further undermines the Crown’s case; and key witnesses, without whose testimony he could not have been found guilty, have been largely discredited.

I had become increasingly fascinated, disturbed and angered by this long drawn-out saga, not least because, if Megrahi was innocent, then the real murderers of 270 people remained unidentified and unpunished. Furthermore, if the trial had indeed reached the wrong conclusion, then a massive stain was disfiguring the Scottish justice system. This has important political implications. A fair, open and properly functioning justice system is a prerequisite for a fair, open and properly functioning modern democracy. Whatever the outcome of the coming referendum on independence, this proposition is still valid: the prospect of opening a new chapter in our history – whether as an independent country or as a continuing part of the UK – with questions over the Lockerbie case unresolved is not a good one.

These were some of the motivations behind writing The Professor of Truth. Why, though, use fiction to explore this complex territory? First, because it is my craft. Second, an enormous amount of non-fiction material already exists on Lockerbie – in the form of books, journalism, legal and other expert opinion, documentary film and official records both on paper and on-line – to which I could add little of any value. Third, when real events resist full explanation it is sometimes possible for fiction to cast a fresh and useful light on those events. Fiction, as Julian Barnes has written, is a way of telling the truth through telling lies. However, you won’t find the names Lockerbie, Libya, Malta or Megrahi anywhere in The Professor of Truth. Obviously I have researched the real history very deeply, but the fiction I’ve created is not an attempt to explain what really happened in 1988 and thereafter. If I knew that I wouldn’t have written a novel.

What I have tried to do is explore some of the issues at the heart of the case: what is truth, what is justice, and how can we recognise them? How are narratives constructed and shaped to serve the interests of those in power, and how do other narratives emerge to challenge them? One of the characteristics of fiction is that it can ask questions without necessarily supplying all the answers. And a novel is a two-way process: it is the reader as well as the writer who must grapple with such questions.

I also wanted to imagine what happens to a man who has to contend not only with terrible loss through an act of terrorism but also with a growing belief that the truth of what happened has been denied to him. This is the situation of my main character, the story’s narrator, a lecturer in English literature called Alan Tealing. Alan has been on an emotional, psychological and philosophical journey – one littered with obstacles – for 21 years when the book opens. He is visited, in the depths of winter, by a retired American intelligence officer, who brings him a piece of information about a witness in the trial. This information will send Alan on a physical journey from a landscape of ice to one of fire: from snowbound Scotland to Australia in the middle of a heatwave.  He goes hoping to find those elusive things, truth and justice, but – as a lawyer colleague warns him – they may not look the way he expects them to if he does.

I was conscious as I wrote the book that I was treading on sensitive ground, because to many of the families of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing the idea that Megrahi might not have been guilty is deeply upsetting. I also saw that the assumption would inevitably be made that Alan Tealing is a thinly disguised version of Dr Jim Swire. This is not the case, even though Tealing undergoes some of the experiences that Dr Swire has undergone in his long quest for truth. I deliberately made no contact with Jim Swire during the writing of the book. I wanted free rein to look at the issues discussed above, and was writing a novel, not a thinly disguised biography. After I had completed the book, I contacted him to ask if he would like to read it before publication – not to seek his approval or endorsement, but as a courtesy. He responded to the novel with the intelligence, integrity and humanity that anyone who has seen him making his case over the years will have recognised.

Quite independently, and for totally different reasons, we have come to the same conclusion: that the Lockerbie trial resulted in a miscarriage of justice which only compounds the injustice done to Jim’s daughter Flora and the other 269 victims, and also to the people of Libya, who for many years suffered appallingly as a result of the UN sanctions imposed upon their country at the behest of the American and British governments.

Mandela's strategic moral diplomacy over Lockerbie a lesson for Gaza

[It is interesting that Lockerbie is now being referred to not only in relation to Malaysia Airlines flight 17, but also in the context of events in Gaza. What follows is a brief excerpt from an article headed Gaza ceasefire crumbles while West embarks on a new round of hand-wringing by Professor Michelle Pace published yesterday on The Conversation website:] 

Israel, for one, needs a thorough soul-searching exercise on what its oft-invoked idea of “security” actually means in practice, and whether its chosen definition really has anything to do with “defending itself”. Hamas, by the same token, must reflect on the wisdom of indiscriminately firing rockets into the territory of one of the mightiest military forces in the world.

But the international community, too, has to improve on its woeful diplomatic performance throughout this catastrophe. There are plenty of examples from which to draw inspiration.

Think of how Nelson Mandela, for example, used strategic moral diplomacy to resolve the seemingly intractable stalemate between Libya, the US and the UK in the handling of two suspects accused of the Lockerbie bombing.

The point of this example is that moving away from the idea that our enemies are simply evil, and towards a more pragmatic moral position, is often the only hope in intractable, unstable negotiations between warring factions.

[The tale of Nelson Mandela’s part in shaming the United Kingdom and the United States into accepting a Lockerbie solution that had for years been accepted by Libya has been told often on this blog.  Here is one instance.]

Tony Gauci’s Lockerbie testimony

[This essay is based largely on research by its author, Kevin Bannon, for a thesis submitted in 2013 at Swansea University and later successfully defended for the award of the degree of PhD.  It is to be hoped that the thesis itself will soon be more widely available.]

The conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was based primarily on the police statements and court testimony of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who identified him as the man who bought a number of items from his clothing shop two weeks before the bombing. Identical items were found at the Lockerbie crash site and by their condition, forensic investigators established that they were packed in the same suitcase as the bomb when it exploded.

Police detectives first met Gauci in Malta in September 1989, nearly nine months after the bombing and in his initial statements he firmly recollected and reiterated that the purchaser of the clothes was 50 years old and six feet tall. He said that it was raining at the time of the purchase, prompting the man to buy an umbrella, and in interviews one year apart or more, he asserted that the purchase had taken place in late November 1988 and that the local Christmas decorations were not yet up.

Al-Megrahi was 36 at the time of the purchase and was measured at 5’8” at trial – though both his passports noted him as 170 cm tall – slightly under 5’7”. Records showed that the hanging of illuminated Christmas decorations outside Gauci’s shop was completed on 6 December when they were switched on. It is accepted that Al-Megrahi was not in Malta until 7 December, a day when local meteorological records revealed that it was almost certainly not raining. On the basis of this testimony - Gauci’s freshest recollections - the purchaser was evidently not al-Megrahi. In any event, Gauci was quite certain that the man had not purchased any ‘Slalom’ style shirts, one of which was to prove the most crucial item accompanying the explosive device.

However, during intermittent interviews over the following year and beyond, Tony Gauci modified his recollections and these modifications proved to be entirely in favour of the Crown narrative. Indeed, by the end of his court testimony in July 2000, virtually every aspect of his evidence had changed, and in several instances it had changed drastically. Now the rainfall had been reduced to a brief, light shower – hardly wetting the ground and falling just as the man was leaving the shop. Now Gauci was “sure” the Christmas decorations were up and lit when the Libyan buyer visited his shop. The purchaser visited “about a fortnight” before Christmas – eliminating a November purchase - and Gauci now stated that the man had bought two ‘Slalom’ shirts. In court Gauci said, cryptically, that the purchaser was “...below six feet...he wasn’t small. He was a normal stature.” The descriptions of other items purchased were revised, becoming more similar to those in the suspect suitcase: the colour of the Slalom shirt, the pattern on pyjamas, the motif on a baby’s romper suit, the colour and quantity of cardigans.

Police investigators sought Gauci’s help in identifying the purchaser from photographs. After several previous photo-identification sessions, on 15 February 1991 Gauci inspected a card with 12 photos. This session took place in the company of four police investigators, all of whom knew which picture was of the suspect and the pictures were placed far enough apart for them to be aware which one was being examined by the witness – improper conditions for such a photo-session. At first Gauci had said ‘they are all too young’ but he was advised to allow for the age discrepancy and told that the man he saw ‘could be 10-15 years older’ – a blatantly illicit prompt. Gauci stopped at al-Megrahi’s picture (‘no. 8’ middle row right) and declared “This is similar but is maybe 10-15 years younger” confirming the age discrepancy of Gauci’s early recollections of the purchaser. Police investigators and Camp Zeist judges alike regarded this vague statement as the clinching identification of al-Megrahi. In fact Gauci had twice identified a newspaper picture of Abu Talb as looking like the purchaser. Abu Talb was 15 years junior to al-Megrahi, is more slightly built and has a pronounced limp – obviously quite different to any of Gauci's other descriptions of the purchaser.

As the picture of al-Megrahi was said to be dull and grainy, DCI Harry Bell had the other pictures dulled-down so that the ‘suspect’ photo would not unduly stand out; but al-Megrahi’s picture remains of singularly poor quality by comparison. The thickness of the hair styles on some of the photos appear to have also been graphically enhanced with something like a felt pen. The middle pictures in the bottom row for example make their subjects look ridiculous as if they are wearing theatrical wigs. Presumably the purpose of this exercise was also to equalise the photographs but it gives away that these pictures are the ‘fillers’ and not the image of the suspect.

By the time Tony Gauci picked out al-Megrahi at an identification parade at Camp Zeist in April 1999, he had been exposed to pictures of him in the international media. A Maltese police officer present at the parade admitted in defence precognition that he himself would have been able to pick out al-Megrahi though never having met him - such had been the media coverage. Therefore neither this parade nor the photo-session had been properly controlled identification processes – quite the opposite.

In 1990 police investigators described Gauci as confused and ‘difficult to believe’ but this was not disclosed in court. Nor was it revealed that they had become concerned at the apparent suggestibility of Gauci, noting that he had been ‘trying to please’ them. The US Department of Justice fell over themselves to please Gauci, eventually paying him ‘in excess of $2m’ as a reward for his assistance with the investigation.

In court the details of a six feet tall, 50 year old purchaser in Gauci’s freshest recollections, were skipped over by Defence counsel and brushed aside in the judges’ deliberations. In their 80 page explanation of their verdict, the judges admitted to having a ‘major difficulty’ with the introduction of the bomb at Malta’s Luqa airport, which remains unexplained – as was its subsequent, automatic transit through Frankfurt airport and Heathrow. Nevertheless the judges cited Tony Gauci’s evidence as ‘accurate’ and ‘entirely reliable’ - one of the many absurdities to emanate from Camp Zeist.