The eight elements that destroy the Megrahi conviction

[What follows is an article headed Eight inconvenient truths about Lockerbie, which the media and authorities are ignoring posted by John Ashton today on his Megrahi: You are my Jury website:]

Today, the 26th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, the media is full of articles about the case. All report the claims of Scotland’s chief prosecutor, the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC, that a review of the case has confirmed the guilt of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man so far convicted of the bombing. However, Mr Mulholland and – with the exception of a couple of Scottish newspapers – the media have barely touched upon key facts that suggest Mr Megrahi was not guilty.

Before I list these, a bit of background for those unfamiliar with the story. The prosecution case, which was accepted by the Scottish judges who convicted Mr Megrahi, was that on the morning of 21 December 1988, while travelling under a false name, he managed to smuggle a brown Samsonite suitcase containing a bomb onto an Air Malta flight from Malta to Frankfurt. An expert in airline security and alleged senior intelligence officer, Megrahi was said to have labelled the case for onward transfer to Pan Am flight 103A from Frankfurt to London Heathrow and Pan Am 103 from Heathrow to New York.

He supposedly bought clothes for the suitcase at a small Maltese shop called Mary’s House on an earlier visit to the island on 7 December. The shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, who was the prosecution’s star witness, told the court that Mr Megrahi resembled the man who had bought the clothes. The Malta link was confirmed by baggage records from Frankfurt airport, which appeared to show that a suitcase from the Air Malta flight had been forwarded to Pan Am 103.

Another key plank of the case was a fragment of electronic circuit board, found embedded within part of a blast damaged, Maltese shirt. A British forensic investigator told the court that the fragment matched boards in timers supplied to Libya by Swiss company Mebo, which shared its offices with a Libyan company called ABH, in which Megrahi was a shareholder.

Surely open and shut case? Er, no. Here are just a few of the reasons why.

1. The guilty verdict was “incomprehensible”

Not my description, but that of Professor Hans Köchler, a UN trial observer. He came to this conclusion because, according to the prosecution, Mr Megrahi coud only have carried out the bombing with the help of another Libyan, Lamin Fhimah, who stood trial with him. However, the judges acquitted Fhimah, which begged the question – as yet unanswered – how could Mr Megrahi acted alone?

2. The clothes buyer was clearly not Megrahi
In his statements to the police, the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, consistently described the clothes buyer as around 50 years old, six feet tall, dark skinned and with a full head of hair. Mr Megrahi was around 5ft 8 inches tall, light-skinned, had thinning hair and, at the time of the incident, was just 36.

3. It’s official – the court judgment was unreasonable
In 2007, following a four-year review of the case, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (the official body responsible for examining alleged miscarriages of justice) referred Mr Megrahi’s conviction to the appeal court on no fewer than six grounds. He abandoned the appeal in 2009 when terminally ill with cancer in the belief that it would help smooth the way for his release from prison on compassionate grounds.

Crucially, one of the SCCRC’s six grounds was that there was no “reasonable foundation” for the crucial finding that he bought the clothes on 7 December 1988, which was his only window of opportunity. Why did the commission reach this conclusion? Because Mr Gauci was clear that, as he was leaving the shop, the clothes purchaser bought an umbrella because it had started to rain. Yet meteorological evidence heard by the court demonstrated that there was no rain on 7 December. If Mr Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes on 7 December, the prosecution case collapses, so the SCCRC had come as close as it legally could to saying that the guilty verdict itself was unreasonable.

4. The prosecution withheld a stack of evidence that was helpful to Megrahi
During their review, the SCCRC found that the prosecution had withheld important documents that cast doubt on their own case. Four out of the commission’s six appeal referral grounds concerned such non-disclosure.

Among the documents were secret police memos noting that Tony Gauci had expressed an interest in receiving a substantial reward, and that he was under the strong influence of his brother Paul, who regularly nagged the police about being rewarded. The SCCRC discovered that Tony was later secretly paid $2 million by the US Department of Justice and Paul $1 million. Among the documents uncovered by the commission was a begging letter from the police’s senior investigating officer to the DoJ, in which in which he acknowledged that the Crown Office was prevented by its own rules from seeking a reward for the brothers, but saw no problem in the police doing so.

5. The circuit board fragment was not from one of the timers supplied to Libya
Evidence uncovered in 2009 demonstrated that the circuit board fragment could not have originated from one of the Libyan timer boards. The evidence concerned the metallic coating on the fragment’s copper circuitry. Back in 1990, two independent scientists consulted by the police established that the coating was pure tin, but when, two years later, they examined a board from the same batch that was used to make the timers supplied to Libya, they discovered that it was coated with a tin-lead alloy. As neither scientist was an electronics expert, they were unaware of the potential significance of the difference. However, in 2009 Mr Megrahi’s lawyers spoke to the prosecution witness who had made the boards used in the Libyan timers, who was certain that all of them were coated with tin-lead alloy and therefore equally certain that he could not have made the board from which the fragment originated. The lawyers also discovered notes by the prosecution forensic expert who had claimed in court that the fragment matched the boards in the Libyan timers. These demonstrated that he too was aware of the metallurgical disparity, which, as an electronics expert, he should have recognised the significance of.

6. The luggage evidence points to Heathrow rather than Malta
It was not disputed at Mr Megrahi’s trial that the Lockerbie bomb was packed within a brown Samsonite suitcase. Of all the witnesses who were involved in the loading of the three flights on which, according to the prosecution, the bomb was carried were interviewed by the police. Only one of them could recall seeing such a case – a Heathrow baggage handler called John Bedford. Significantly, it was positioned within the luggage container within which the explosion later occurred, very close to the centre of the blast. Crucially, Mr Bedford went off duty BEFORE Pan Am flight 103A arrived from Frankfurt, which means that the suitcase he saw could not have originated on the Air Malta flight

Researcher Dr Morag Kerr, who has exhaustively studied the luggage evidence, has made an extremely compelling case that the Bedford suitcase contained the bomb. Furthermore, records from the Maltese airport suggest that no rogue baggage made it on to the flight to Frankfurt. (For further details see her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?)

7. There is no reliable evidence that Megrahi was a senior intelligence agent
The claim that Mr Megrahi was a senior intelligent agent originated from a junior colleague in the state-owned Libyan Arab Airlines. At Mr Megrahi’s trial, this witness, Magid Giaka, was revealed to be a CIA informant. Not only that, but the CIA considered him so unreliable that it was on the verge of sacking him before he became useful in the Lockerbie case. Declassified CIA cables examined by the court showed him to be a money-grabbing fantasist. As well as alleging that Mr Megrahi was an intelligence agent, he claimed that colonel Gaddafi was a freemason. The judges rejected most of his evidence, yet chose to believe his unsupported claim about Mr Megrahi.

Mr Megrahi does not deny that travelling on a false passport, which he says was issued to him because he was involved a US sanctions-busting efforts to source spare parts for the airline. Crucially, he kept the passport for eleven years after the bombing and was happy for it to be passed to the prosecution at trial – hardly the actions of a guilty man.

8. No evidence has emerged from Libya since the fall of Gaddafi
A few days after the start of the Libyan revolution, in February 2011, Colonel Gaddafi’s ex-justice minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who was soon to become head of Libya’s National Transitional Council, told the Swedish newspaper Expressen that he had proof that Gaddafi had ordered the bombing. A few days later, he told the Sunday Times that Mr Megrahi had blackmailed Gaddafi into securing his release from prison by threatening to expose Gaddafi’s role in the bombing, and had ‘vowed to exact revenge’ unless Gaddafi complied. However, when, a few weeks later, he was pushed to reveal his proof, the best he could offer was that the Gaddafi regime had funded Megrahi’s legal case. He later claimed that Expressen had misquoted him. The Scottish police and prosecutors hoped that the regime change would yield more evidence about Mr Megrahi’s and Gaddafi’s role in the bombing, but, nearly four years on, no such evidence has surfaced publicly. The only significant document to emerge was a letter from Megrahi to his relative Abdullah Sennousi, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal. In it he stated: “I am an innocent man”. He wasn’t lying.

"If you open your eyes you cannot fail to see that there is a problem"

[What follows is an excerpt from an article in today’s edition of the Sunday Post:]

Earlier this year, Megrahi's relatives embarked on a legal bid to clear his name amid claims that his case is the "worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history".

Six immediate members of his family joined forces with 24 British relatives of those who died in the atrocity to seek, ultimately, a third appeal against his conviction in the Scottish courts.

They united to submit an application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) for a review of the conviction, a move which could see the case referred back to the High Court.

One of those British relatives, Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died in the bombing, has expressed his disappointment at Mr Mulholland's latest comments.

Dr Swire told Sky News: "For the Lord Advocate to say there isn't a shred of evidence to suggest that the trial was anything other than what it should have been is analogous with the late Mandy Rice-Davies when she says 'he would say that, wouldn't he'."

He added that Mr Mulholland "wasn't around at the time of Lockerbie, whereas I was, unfortunately".

"Twenty-six years ago is a long time and I suppose he means people currently in his Crown Office don't believe there is anything wrong with the evidence.

"But I think if you open your eyes and look you cannot fail to see that there is a problem.

"More importantly than that, Scotland's own Criminal Cases Review Commission years ago found six reasons why this case should be revisited and reviewed.

"So for the Lord Advocate now to say there isn't a shred of evidence flies in the face of what the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission actually told the world years ago."

The four elephants in the room which suggest the Lord Advocate is wrong

[This is the headline over an article by John Ashton published in today’s edition of the Sunday Herald. It reads as follows:]

The Crown Office has used the 26th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing to proclaim the safety of the conviction of Abdelbaset al Megrahi, the only man so far convicted of the bombing.

The department briefed yesterday that a review of the case had "confirmed beyond doubt" the Libyan's guilt, while today its head, Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC, has personally reaffirmed that guilt.

Mulholland has been unusually vigorous in denouncing Megrahi's supporters, who include relatives of the Lockerbie dead, branding them "conspiracy theorists" two years ago. It is hard to imagine his opposite number in England and Wales, the director of public prosecutions, taking to the media to defend a conviction and take on critics. But while this strident tone has raised eyebrows, Mulholland's statements are more notable for ignoring four large elephants in the middle of his legal chambers.

The first is the ongoing review of the case by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), the statutory body that has the power to refer convictions to the appeal court. As Mulholland well knows, a previous review by the commission referred the case on no fewer than six grounds. The terminally ill Megrahi abandoned the resulting appeal to improve his chances of being granted compassionate release, but was confident that his name would one day be cleared. Remarkably, one of the six grounds was that the three Scottish law lords who convicted him had made a fundamental error of judgment when they found that the clothes incriminating Megrahi had been bought on December 7. In doing so, the commission, in the eyes of some, came as close as it legally could to saying that the guilty verdict was itself wrong.

More seriously for the Crown Office, four of the other grounds concerned its failure to disclose important evidence to Megrahi's defence team. This included evidence that the Crown's star witness, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, had expressed an interest in receiving a substantial reward and was under the strong influence of his brother Paul, who regularly nagged the police about being rewarded. The SCCRC discovered Gauci was later secretly paid $2 million by the US Department of Justice, and his brother Paul $1m.

When, in 2012, this ­newspaper published a leaked copy of the SCCRC's 800-page review, the Crown Office went into panic mode, anonymously briefing a Scottish tabloid that Megrahi's case had "more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese" then issuing a press statement that significantly downplayed the commission's findings.

The second elephant is the two-year-old police investigation, led by Police Scotland's Deputy Chief Constable Iain Livingstone, into criminal allegations made against some of those originally involved in the inquiry by the committee of the Justice for Megrahi group.

When the allegations were first made to the then Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, the Crown Office immediately denounced them as groundless, despite not having seen the detailed dossier of evidence assembled by the committee. Many were shocked by the intervention, believing it might compromise the police inquiry and that it raised serious questions about Mulholland's independence as the chief public prosecutor. Unfortunately for the Crown Office, the police clearly do not share its contempt for the allegations. If the investigation concludes there was no criminal misconduct, the Crown Office still has to explain why it failed to disclose so much important evidence. In the view of its critics, notably Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the bombing, the matter must be addressed in a public inquiry - something successive Scottish governments have been reluctant to grant.

The third elephant is forensic evidence concerning a small fragment of electronic circuit board, recovered from an item of clothing that was supposedly in the same suitcase as the bomb. According to the prosecution, it matched boards in timers supplied to Libya by a Swiss firm called Mebo, which shared offices with a Libyan company part-owned by Megrahi.

Evidence uncovered prior to Megrahi's abandoned appeal demonstrated that the fragment could not have originated from one of the Libyan timer boards. The discovery has fuelled claims the fragment was a plant, which has in turn encouraged the Crown Office to call its opponents conspiracy theorists. However, as Mulholland must be aware, the breaking of the link between the fragment and the Libyan timers leaves the prosecution case in shreds, regardless of whether it was planted.

The fourth elephant is the lack of evidence from Libya to implicate either Megrahi or the Gaddafi regime in the bombing. During the country's 2011 revolution, senior officials, keen to curry favour with the West, lined up to accuse the regime of sponsoring the attack.

The best known of them, the head of the National Transitional Council and former justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil, claimed to have proof that Gaddafi ordered the bombing.

All this must have been music to the Crown Office's ears, but, when pushed to reveal his proof of the regime's guilt, the best Jalil could offer was that it had funded ­Megrahi's legal case.

Sadly, Libya has become too dangerous for the Scottish police to conduct investigations there. Even if it were not, they would likely find the cupboard was bare. In the four years since the revolution, ­nothing has emerged publicly from the ruins of the old regime to affirm Megrahi's guilt, let alone Libya's.

No doubt Mulholland's public declarations will continue to ignore the four elephants in his legal chambers, but he must knows that their ever-fiercer stamping may one day bring Megrahi's conviction crashing around his ears.

John Ashton is the author of the authorised ­biography of Abdelbaset al Megrahi, Megrahi: You are my Jury, (Birlinn, 2012) and Scotland's Shame: Why Lockerbie Still Matters (Birlinn, 2014). From 2006-09, he worked as a researcher with Megrahi's legal team. 

[Here are links to some other reports in the media:

Megrahi was innocent of Lockerbie bombing, insists victim's father
Lockerbie victim's father criticises prosecutor's comments
Lockerbie bombing: Prosecutor's comments about al-Megrahi 'unfortunate'
Remember Lockerbie as crimes of intelligence services are exposed
Lockerbie: Lord Advocate to track down accomplices

And here is a moving reminiscence from someone engaged in the rescue operations on 21 December 1988:
Lockerbie -- 26 years on.]

We got it right, says Lord Advocate

[Today’s edition of The Times contains a report by Magnus Linklater headed Lockerbie conviction is upheld by review. It reads as follows:]

A review of the Lockerbie bombing case by Scottish investigators has concluded that there is “not a shred of evidence” to support claims that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was wrongly convicted.

Not only have investigators confirmed beyond doubt that the Libyan was the man responsible for the deaths of 270 people on December 21, 1988, they believe his fellow accused, Lamin Fhimah, who was acquitted, was almost certainly involved as well.

The findings will come as a blow to those, such as Jim Swire, whose daughter was one of those killed, and Robert Black, QC, who maintain that prosecutors advanced a flawed case and that judges presided over a miscarriage of justice. Ever since Megrahi was convicted in 2001 there have been allegations that evidence was manipulated to implicate Libya, steering suspicion away from Middle Eastern states.

Scottish prosecutors have been accused of deliberately ignoring evidence that the bomb was put aboard Pan Am Flight 103 at Heathrow rather than at Malta, and that the timer fragment, the principal piece of forensic evidence against Libya, was planted or altered.

The claims have been examined in detail in the course of the investigation by the Crown Office and Police Scotland, which have been working on the case with the FBI to identify others who were involved in the bombing.

Sources close to the investigation said there was “not a shred of evidence” to suggest the prosecution got it wrong.

Active pursuit of the case in Libya, they added, has served to confirm rather than undermine the evidence against both Megrahi and Fhimah.

Last night Frank Mulholland, QC, the Lord Advocate, said: “During the 26-year-long inquiry not one Crown Office investigator or prosecutor has raised a concern about the evidence in this case . . . our focus remains on the evidence, and not on speculation and supposition.”

Evidence on the bomb itself, and the crucial timer fragment that linked the attack to Libya, found three weeks after Pan Am 103 exploded, have undermined the conspiracy theory.

Critics say the fragment was either planted at the site, exchanged later for another, or was tampered with to show a link to Libya that was never there.

Police are adamant, however, that the fragment was under supervision. They point out that the evidence would have to have been planted within 23 days, requiring knowledge of all the evidence to come — including Megrahi, whose existence was then unknown.

Set against the speculation are facts that have never been disproved: the presence of Megrahi in Malta, carrying a false passport, on the day the prosecution says the bomb went on board flight KM180 to Frankfurt; Fhimah arriving with him; and their subsequent telephone conversations.

[RB: The police investigation here referred to is not that which is currently being conducted by Police Scotland (under the supervision of an independent QC) into Justice for Megrahi’s allegations of criminal misconduct in the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and trial. Progress reports on that investigation can be accessed here. Furthermore, an application (at the joint instance of the Megrahi family and a group of victims’ relatives) for Megrahi’s conviction to be referred back to the High Court for a further appeal is currently under consideration by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. In these circumstances and in the light of the evidence disclosed by John Ashton and Dr Morag Kerr in their respective recent books it seems somewhat rash and premature for the Lord Advocate to be trumpeting his confidence that they got the right man after all. But Mr Mulholland, of course, is not noted for circumspection: he characterised Justice for Megrahi’s criminality allegations as “defamatory and without foundation” before they had even been investigated.

Today’s edition of The Times also contains a long comment piece by Magnus Linklater headlined Lockerbie review kills conspiracy theories. Mr Linklater has long been convinced that concerns about the Megrahi conviction are the province of conspiracy theorists (all too often, of course, a lazy slur). In view of his confident certainty, it does seem a pity that he has never responded to John Ashton’s two open letters to him, having indicated that he would do so.]

Lockerbie evidence planted or "improved"? "I don't know" said Lord Advocate Fraser.

What follows is an item posted on this blog six years ago on this date:

Peter Fraser pins colours to the mast

In an article in The Times, the Lord Advocate at the time that charges were brought against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah for the destruction of Pan Am 103, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie QC, expresses his confidence in the evidence that led to the conviction of Megrahi. Here are excerpts:

'Lord Fraser does not discount the involvement of other states, but he points out that no definitive evidence has been produced to link them to the attack. The Libyans, on the other hand, were traced through the diligence of Scottish detectives, who managed to identify the manufacturers of clothing found in the suspect suitcase that had held the bomb. By proving that the clothing had been bought in Malta, and then establishing that the purchaser was al-Megrahi, they laid the foundations of the Crown case. “For me that was the most significant breakthrough,” Lord Fraser says now.'

'Tam Dalyell, the former MP, has argued that the CIA may have known about the attack beforehand. Lord Fraser rejects that. “I told Tam Dalyell: if there was a conspiracy, then I am in it up to the neck. I have to be involved. The only other possibility is that I have been so naive that bits of evidence have been planted, and I have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. But four other Lord Advocates have also examined the evidence and they have all concurred with it.”'

On the issue of the provenance of the MST-13 circuit board fragment which was crucial to the establishment of a link between Libya and the destruction of the aircraft, Lord Fraser hedges his bets somewhat:

'The discovery of a fragment of circuit board from a timer made by a Swiss company with links to Libya was critical to the prosecution. But accounts of how, where and by whom it was found varied. The original fragment was found several miles from the wreckage, and some weeks after the disaster.

'It was not until very much later that the CIA claimed to have identified it and matched it with a circuit board manufactured by Mebo of Zurich, a company run by Edwin Bollier, who had supplied timers to the Libyan Government. Some experts have argued that the find was just a bit too convenient to the US investigators, since, by targeting the Libyans, they could avoid falling out with Iran and Syria, important allies at the time of the Gulf War. So could the CIA have planted the evidence? “I don’t know,” says Lord Fraser. “No one ever came to me and said, ‘Now we can go for the Libyans’, it was never as straightforward as that. The CIA was extremely subtle. For me the significant evidence came when the Scottish police made the connection with Malta.” Pressed for his own view, he cites a Scottish murder case, that of Patrick Meehan, in which, it was alleged, the prosecution case had been “improved” by the planting of evidence. Was there a similarity? “I don’t know,” he said again, “but if there was one witness I was not happy about, it was Mr Bollier, who was deeply unreliable.”'

The botched and bungled Lockerbie bombing farce

[I am grateful to Sharyn Bovat for drawing my attention to an article by Andrew McKillop headed Torture, Terror And Elite Schizophrenia In The UK published on 16 December on The Market Oracle website. The following is a brief extract:]

The BBC excelled itself in the bizarre quest of justifying torture (even revelling in its use), while stoutly telling viewers and listeners that "we don't do that here". BBC News TV's first response and reaction to the Senate report included a 30-minute special report in peak viewing time "with data compiled by the BBC itself" on its claimed tally of Islamic terror deaths around the world in the month of November. The total was a suspiciously exact 5042 and Iraq and Nigeria topped the "goal average' of dead the BBC registered in, or concocted for, third-place Afghanistan. But curiously enough, Syria wasn't even mentioned.  Not a single terror war death happened in Syria in the whole of the month of November 2014 - despite all the terror war funding by the football-loving and hotel-buying Arab Gulf petro-states which are "moving towards democracy"! My oh my.

Scarcely 3 days later however, by Sunday 14 December the British mainstream media's tone had dramatically changed. The previous propaganda blitz cracked asunder. Suddenly the UK's elite-serving mainstream press was asking in a stern way: "How much did the UK government know?", and what bits of the Senate report were "redacted" to censor details of active British participation in CIA torture since the years 2001-2004? It was now urgent to know. Three days before, there was no such thing as UK complicity in American torture!

One likely or probable reason for this "sea change" includes the fact that the bulk of UK complicity and aid to CIA torture and "extraordinary rendition" or kidnapping followed by torture, was decided under a Labout government headed by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw, in which Labour Party leader Ed Miliband's brother was Foreign Secretary for a while. The true blue press and media, like the BBC can therefore rally to support the clean-fingernailed English Conservative party by suddenly trumpeting the horrors of UK complicity in US torture. You can trust the media!

Extraordinary rendition, as its tastefully called, was firstly described as "not in any way really concerning the UK", give or take a few isolated cases, such as the botched and bungled Abdul al-Megrahi Lockerbie bombing farce, in which al-Megrahi was released early on "compassionate grounds" to prevent his appeal being heard, where his Scottish lawyers would have produced devastating proof that the prosecution had used completely tainted and false testimonies, including purchased testimonies, and completely false material evidence invented by "you guess who".  

[RB: Extraordinary rendition was not involved in he cases of Megrahi and Fhimah. Nor was extradition. They voluntarily surrendered themselves for trial. But I have no quibble with the rest of the account.]

Equality of arms? Fair trial? Forget it!

What follows is an item posted on this blog on 17 December 2007:

Crown refuses to reveal secret Lockerbie paper

This is the title of a front-page article in The Herald by Lucy Adams. Whereas I on this blog on 14 December merely speculated that the reason for this week's procedural hearing might be that the Crown had refused to hand over to Mr Megrahi's legal team the document relating to timers seen by the SCCRC, Lucy Adams (whose sources are usually impeccably reliable) states as a fact that this is the reason why the hearing has been called. She writes:

"Two months ago, the Crown Office was instructed to pass on the document or provide substantial reasons as to why it could not be given to the defence.

"However, The Herald can reveal the Crown has since opposed the petition and suggested it has no duty to disclose. It has refused to reveal, even to the defence, the country from which the document originated, or its full reasons for not sharing the information.

"The defence team is understood to be seeking the document which relates to supply of timers and an additional paper."

For the full story, see

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.1911239.0.Crown_refuses_to_reveal_secret_Lockerbie_paper.php

The Edinburgh Evening News has picked up the story:

http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/scotland/Crown-refuses-to-reveal-secret.3599269.jp

And here is a link to Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer's commentary on OhMyNews:

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=3&no=381263&rel_no=1

It looks, therefore, as if the Crown is claiming Public Interest Immunity in relation to the document, on the basis of the public interest in maintaining good relations with the foreign country which supplied the document with the condition that its confidentiality be preserved. What the judges of the High Court will be required to do, in deciding whether to order the document to be handed over, is to balance that aspect of the public interest against the public interest in a fair trial (protected, inter alia by article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights) which involves an accused person having access to all evidence that might assist his case.

If this is indeed what the procedural hearing will be concerned with, I, for one, will find it interesting to hear the the Lord Advocate's representative arguing that maintaining good relations with a foreign country is a matter that should take precedence over the fairness of Scottish criminal proceedings.

[The sordid saga of the UK Government’s successful attempt to prevent Abdelbaset Megrahi’s lawyers obtaining access to this document, aided and abetted by the Scottish Crown Office, can be followed here.]

A political fiction convenient to US foreign policy

[What follows is the text of an open letter sent by Dr Jim Swire on 14 December 2014 to Sir Malcolm Rifkind KCMG QC MP, Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament:]

I applaud your statement on Radio Four this morning, as chairman of the intelligence and Security committee that you will seek clarification from the Americans over the heavily redacted Senate report on CIA torture.

Of course you will want to know whether aircraft spotted transiting Prestwick airport really were part of the CIA run 'extraordinary rendition' programe which is widely alleged to have included the sending of British Nationals to Libya to be tortured.

May I remind you that prior to that in President Reagan's day, the CIA were deeply involved in the deeply illegal Iran Contra activities of the mid 1980s, involving extra-judicial killings on an industrial scale.

The present investigation was into post 9/11 (2001) CIA activities.

In 1988 in your own homeland of Scotland the Lockerbie disaster occurred.

At the subsequent trial at Zeist the CIA were seen to have blatantly attempted to mislead the court by concealing the lying and fantasizing of their 'star witness' known as Jiaka, to the point where, after the then Lord Advocate Colin Boyd had been brought to the very edge of perjury in his attempts to prevent the court from hearing the truth contained in the CIA cables concerning 'Jiaka' the court rejected him as a reliable witness.

What the court did not know because the information was not made available to it, was that a technical forensic item which was produced in court, seeming to be a piece of circuit board from Libya, had in fact been manufactured using technology not even available to manufacturers in the late 80s.

This item accepted by the court seems clearly to have been designed expressly to deceive the court.

Its technical excellence suggests a sophisticated organization behind its production.

Please will you therefore request that the Americans also to research and divulge divulge to your committee what actions were taken by the CIA during the years between Iran/Contra and '9/11' which were relevant to the UK, particularly with respect to their major role in providing evidence to the court which convicted a Libyan over Lockerbie?

As a distinguished Scot you must surely be deeply concerned were any proof to emerge that our Scottish Criminal Justice system had been deliberately subverted by the CIA.

Would you also, having the ear of the Prime Minister, please inform him of this letter and of any information from America relevant to Lockerbie, and then explain to us why you believe there is no need for a full inquiry, denied us for 26 years over the slaughter of our families?

As recently as 2012, Downing Street claimed publicly that a book published in Edinburgh confirming, with independent and responsible scientific support, that false forensic evidence had been introduced at Zeist, was "an insult to the relatives".

I would like him to be aware that the Downing Street statement about this book was the insult to many UK relatives of the Lockerbie dead, not the evident confirmation of some of our worst fears contained in the book.

We still seek the truth about who murdered our families. We are not going to go away until we know the truth and see it publicly confirmed. That is our right. It has long been evident to some of us that the blaming of the two Libyans was a political fiction convenient to US Foreign policy.

In the past you have taken quite a hostile attitude to our attempts to discover the whole truth, but you may well have been unaware at the time, of the information certainly denied to the public and the trial court, but now widely available. The post 9/11 Senate report even as published reveals an ongoing ethos of contempt within the CIA for the restraints which the law imposes. I feel sure that you will wish to pursue this hitherto enigmatic horror story through to the truth on which it must eventually be founded, for the sake of Scotland's reputation and in the name of justice.

Malpractice at the CIA and the Lockerbie trial

[What follows is the text of a letter submitted by Dr Jim Swire to The Times on 10 December but not (as yet) published:]

The Senate inquiry [into torture and the CIA] was essentially limited to post 9/11 behaviour by the CIA.

During the Lockerbie trial of two Libyans over the Lockerbie disaster the CIA was the major provider of evidence to the court.

Their attempts to conceal the true status of their key witness by selective redaction and concealment of their cable traffic led to their Lordships rejecting his entire evidence. It emerged that the man was a liar, a fantasist and a corrupt consumer of their resources and that the CIA knew this before the trial.

Scotland's then Lord Advocate was led to the very brink of perjury in trying to defend that evidence. [RB: More about this disgraceful episode can be read here.]

Since the trial it has now become clear that a key forensic item  allegedly from the crash site had in fact been manufactured using advanced electronic technology simply not in use at the time of Lockerbie.

The verdict reached has contributed to NATO's decision to bomb the unfortunate Libya into current chaos, the murder of Colonel Gaddafi and a failed State where ISIS is already training jihadies, an whence arms have infiltrated the terrorist groups throughout much of the Sahel region.

It also led to the conviction of an innocent Libyan, the destruction of the reputation of Scottish Justice the protection of the real Lockerbie perpetrators, and much extra suffering for inquisitive Lockerbie relatives.

I have faith in the philosophy underlying the Obama regime, based on his magnificent Cairo speech after election. I believe the President should now seek an extension of investigation of the CIA prior to 9/11 as well.

If one is to lance a boil it is wise to curette out all the pus on the same occasion.