No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth

[What follows is an article by John Pilger that appeared in the New Statesman on this date in 2009:]

The trial of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was worse than a farce; we must recognise the disgrace.

The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown's "repulsion" to Barack Obama's "outrage", the theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. "But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?" whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. "What will you say to your constituents, then?"

Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he "pays" for his "heinous crime": the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose "compassion" allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to "face justice from a higher power". Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as "a babbling brook of bullshit". Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi's release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of "strategic interests".

“The endgame came down to damage limitation," said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, "because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi's] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice." New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft - he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shopowner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognise him in the courtroom.

The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, "discovered" in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi's suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was "transferred" through two airports undetected to Flight 103.

A "key secret witness" at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused, al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted), loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a "protected witness". The defence exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans' conviction, up to $4m as a reward.

Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in "neutral" Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark  investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a "mass of conflicting evidence" and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page "opinion", wrote Foot, "is a remarkable document that claims an honoured place in the history of British miscarriages of justice". (...)

Perversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran's support as he built a "coalition" to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. "Like lazy and overfed fish," wrote Foot, "the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and open warmongering against Libya." The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US defence intelligence agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be the centrepiece of Megrahi's defence.

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi's case for appeal. "The commission is of the view," said its chairman, Graham Forbes, "based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice."

The words "miscarriage of justice" are entirely missing from the current furore, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that "higher power". What a disgrace.

"No convincing objective evidence" Libya responsible

[I am grateful to a reader of this blog for drawing my attention to an item headed Bravo Blair! published on 31 August in Peter Hitchens’s Blog on the Mail Online website. It reads in part:]

Bravo Anthony Blair. Yes, I’ll repeat that : Bravo Blair! In all fairness, I have to give the ghastly creature the credit for trying to stop David Cameron’s overthrown of Colonel Gaddafi, which has led directly to the great migration disaster and to other horrors yet unknown. I see from The Times this morning that various blowhard Tory MPs want to condemn and investigate Mr Blair for this action. On the contrary, we should all wish that he had succeeded.

This emerges in extracts from Anthony Seldon’s new book about David Cameron (...)

[T]he key extract (it’s mostly told in the present tense, like a historian discussing the distant past on the TV or the radio) is:

‘Tony Blair telephones Number 10 to say he’s been contacted by a key individual close to Gaddafi, and that the Libyan leader wants to cut a deal with the British. Blair is a respected voice in the building and his suggestion is examined seriously. ‘

But Mr Cameron decided that on this occasion his political hero and example, referred to by George Osborne as ‘the Master’ is not to be heeded:

‘Cameron had been repulsed by Blair’s decision to rehabilitate Gaddafi, and as opposition leader had argued strongly in 2009 against the Scottish government’s return of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to Libya on the grounds of illness.

‘Policewoman Yvonne Fletcher was killed by a Libyan outside their embassy in London in 1984, when Cameron was still at Eton. Four years later came the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 killing 270 people. When the bomb was proven to be planted by a Libyan, Cameron became still more angry.

‘Gordon Brown claimed the Scottish government took the decision on al-Megrahi. Cameron did not believe him, and once inside Number 10, ordered a review into the episode. It concluded that the previous government ‘did all it could to facilitate’ the release of al-Megrahi’.

Cameron decides not to follow up Blair’s approach regarding a deal with Gaddafi: he wants to avoid doing anything which might be seen to give the Libyan leader succour. Richards’ complaints do not let up: he feels Cameron and the NSC are interfering with the military operation even down to the most tactical level.’ (...)

Readers of this blog [RB: and of my blog] will know that I do not believe that Libya was responsible for the Lockerbie outrage. There is no convincing objective evidence that this was so,   

Whereas it was (rather more convincingly) believed by intelligence experts at the time of the atrocity that the crime originated in Syria as part of an Iranian-inspired revenge (as the Ayatollahs saw it) for the shooting down of a civilian Iranair Airbus by the American missile cruiser USS Vincennes (an incident with startling parallels to the equally unintentional and equally horrible shooting down by Russian-backed rebels of a Malaysian airliner).  

The blaming of Libya for Lockerbie was a consequence of the first Gulf War, in which Syria was (comically as it now seems ) viewed as an ally by the ‘West’.

Later, in this strange game of ‘good guy ‘and ‘bad guy’ in the Middle East, Libya’s supposed abandonment in December 2003 of (probably non-existent) weapons of mass destruction was cited by American neo-conservatives as a success for their Iraq policy. Gaddafi had also condemned the September 11 atrocity, and suppressed Saudi-type Islamism at home.  After this,  Gaddafi also made his peace with the EU, accepting a huge payment for halting migration across the Mediterranean. In the light of this fact it’s amazing that Britain and (more especially) France were so keen to overthrow him a  few years later. Did it not even occur to them that the current crisis might follow?

Mr Blair went twice (once in 2003 and once in 2007) to meet the Colonel in the Libyan desert. In May 2007 he declared:’The relationship between Britain and Libya has been completely transformed in these last few years. We now have very strong cooperation on counter terrorism and defence.’

To this day I’m still not sure how we moved in months from this position of cynical but self-interested collaboration with an unpleasant but co-operative and stable regime,  into support for rebels we barely knew, who were then unable to control this crucial country.

However strong Mr Cameron’s Famous Five type enthusiasm for doing good, his government continued the Blair policy when it came to office. As I wrote on September 10th 2011, almost exactly four years ago:

‘Somehow we’re being sold the idea that the Blair-Brown regime sucked up to Colonel Gaddafi, but our current Government kept their distance.

‘This is false. Archives reveal that the  ‘Minister for Africa’, Henry Bellingham slurped up to the Colonel (referring to him as ‘Brother Leader’) at an EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli on November 30, 2010. A few weeks before, another Minister, Alastair Burt, told the Libyan British Business Council that Libya had ‘turned a corner’ which ‘has paved the way for us to begin working together again’.

Maybe Mr Cameron didn’t know or understand what his own appointed ministers were doing, almost exactly six months before we overthrew Gaddafi.  In which case, he should have checked. The Seldon book suggests that Mr Cameron fell victim to what was  little more than an emotional spasm, not the sort of thing we expect Prime Ministers to suffer from.

It was the single gravest mistake of his time in office and will haunt Europe for decades to come. I sometimes wonder how profound the effect of all this mass migration is going to be on those parts of this country which have, hitherto, remained more or less undisturbed by the vast changes which are overtaking Europe. On this occasion, we would all be much better off if they had listened to Mr Blair. I did not think I would ever find myself saying that.

Inherent implausibility of official Lockerbie scenario

[The Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist was covered for Maltese news media by journalist Joe Mifsud. What follows is an article that he wrote in September 2000 for The Lockerbie Trial website:]

A terrorist, like any other criminal, will do what he can to cover his tracks.  The Maltese origin of clothing in the bomb suitcase does not establish that either the suitcase or the bomb was once in Malta.

The clothing in the bomb suitcase, which was identifiable as having been manufactured in Malta, bore labels to this effect, enabled Royal Armament Research and Development (RARDE) to determine the country of origin as Malta.  So these labels had not been removed by the terrorists.

The Lockerbie investigators established that six items of the clothing and an umbrella, which originated in Malta were new and had been purchased new from the same shop in Malta on the same occasion.

These items of clothing had been purchased from Mary’s House in Sliema, weeks not days before 21 December 1988.  The prosecution is claiming that the clothes were bought on 7 December, while the defense is suggesting 23 November 1988 as the date.

In my opinion the facts and matters set out above are consistent with an attempt by the terrorists to distract the attention of the investigating authorities away from Frankfurt or Heathrow to Malta in the event of the bomb being detected or as in fact happened of the bomb exploding above land and debris from the bomb and the bomb suitcase being recovered.

It is inherently unlikely that terrorists would have tried to place the bomb suitcase on board Air Malta KM 180 on 21 December 1988 for the following four reasons.

1.  Terrorists do not expose themselves and their plans to any unnecessary risk of detention or of error;

2.  Accordingly the terrorists responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103 would not have routed the bomb suitcase through Frankfurt and chosen to run the risk of it passing undetected through the security systems of three different airports on two different airlines when Air Malta during that period flew only three flights each week to Frankfurt but ten flights each week to Heathrow.

3.  Further if the bomb consisted of a timer device, terrorists would not have run the unpredictable risk of the passage of the bomb suitcase being delayed in one or more of the following ways:

a)  on the ground at Luqa as a result of mechanical failure, poor weather, security alert, air traffic control or any other reason;

b)  by being diverted away from Frankfurt for any of the reasons at above;

c)  above Frankfurt as a result of air traffic control delays for incoming flights (as in fact happened);

d)  by missing the interline connection at Frankfurt as a result of the bomb suitcase being lost, mishandled or detected in the course of x-ray or baggage reconciliation procedures;

e)  on the ground at Frankfurt for any of the reasons at (a) above;

f)  by being diverted away from Heathrow for any of the reasons at (a) above;

g)  above Heathrow as a result of air traffic control delays for incoming flights;

h)  by missing the interline connection at Heathrow for any of the reasons at (d) above;

i)   on the ground at Heathrow as a result of the connecting transatlantic aircraft being delayed, mechanical failure, poor weather, security alert or any other reason.

4.  Further if the bomb consisted of a barometric pressure device triggered by altitude which itself triggered a timer, terrorists could not have avoided (alternatively would not have risked) the bomb being prematurely triggered on board KM 180 or on board PA 103A from Frankfurt to Heathrow, and then detonating on board either of these flights or on the ground at Frankfurt or at Heathrow.

No terrorist could have predicted in advance the exact altitude at which either flight would have flown or, if such a prediction had been made, no terrorist could have guaranteed that the aircraft would have remained at that altitude and would not have been ordered away from it by air traffic control.  The bomb on board Pan Am 103 exploded approximately 35 minutes after take-off from Heathrow.

It is not clear for me why the Lockerbie investigators choose to blame Malta and Air Malta in this case, when it is so clear that we are the scapegoats for others that lacked security at their airports.

[After a distinguished career at the Maltese Bar, Dr Mifsud was earlier this year appointed as a magistrate (a full-time judicial appointment roughly equivalent to a judge of the Outer House of the Court of Session in Scotland or a puisne judge of the High Court in England).]

Lockerbie investigators interview Tony Gauci in Malta

It was on this date in 1989 that Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci was first interviewed in connection with the Lockerbie investigation. His witness statement, taken by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell, can be read here. An item on this blog contributed by Dr Kevin Bannon entitled Tony Gauci’s Lockerbie testimony can be read here. The comments that follow the item are also very valuable.

CIA memos reveal doubts over 'key' Lockerbie witness

[This is the headline over a report published in The Independent on this date in 2008. It reads as follows:]

A Libyan "double agent" who was central to the CIA's investigation into the Lockerbie bombing exaggerated his importance in Tripoli's intelligence apparatus and gave little information of value, yet is still living at the US taxpayers' expense in a witness protection programme, according to previously unseen CIA cables.

Five months before the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988, 27-year-old Majid Giaka turned up at the US embassy in Malta and "expressed a desire to relocate ... in return for sensitive information on Libya", in the words of a cable sent by a CIA case officer to his headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the same day. Mr Giaka claimed he was an agent of Libya's feared Jamahiriya security organisation, but it later turned out that he worked in the agency's garage.

More than 60 cables, uncovered in a BBC investigation, detail the relations between the Americans and a man later described in court as a real-life Walter Mitty. Mr Giaka, who said that he worked for Libyan Arab Airlines at Malta's Luqa airport as a cover, told the CIA that he wanted to remain in Malta. He promised he would co-operate fully with the CIA – in return for money.

At the time Libya was public enemy number one. But the CIA had few sources of information on the country, and Mr Giaka was put on the payroll. In return for information about Libyan officials coming and going from Malta, he received $1,000 a month and gifts. His handlers even agreed to fund $6,000 of fake surgery on his arm, so that he could avoid military service back home.

In the summer of 1989, the Lockerbie investigation was uncovering evidence which pointed to a Libyan connection, and the FBI believed the suitcase which blew up Pan Am flight 103 had started its journey from Luqa airport. The CIA hoped its Libyan agent would have inside knowledge, but the case officers reported back: "Giaka does not believe explosives hidden in an unaccompanied suitcase could be inserted into the handling process at Luqa International Airport."

The Libyan mole acknowledged that it could have been theoretically possible for officials in Tripoli to bring explosives on to the island via the diplomatic pouch, but "because Giaka believes he had the best contacts of LIA [Luqa International Airport], he does not think this type of operation could have been slipped by him".

The case officers cabled: "It is clear that Giaka will never be the penetration of the ESO [Libyan External Security Organisation] that we had anticipated ... unfortunately, it appears that our assisting him in scam surgery on his arm to avoid military service has had the reverse result that we had intended – it has also allowed him to avoid further service with the ESO, Giaka's true intention from the beginning".

But even after it turned out that he had only worked in the ESO garage, he was the only Libyan agent the CIA had in Malta, so it kept him on. By the autumn of 1989, a former Libyan Arab Airlines security official, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, was chief suspect for having planted the bomb on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt (where it was transferred on to a Pan Am flight via London). But Mr Giaka "had no further information" on his one-time colleague.

Mr Giaka eventually returned to Tripoli in 1990 after the CIA money dried up. But the agency kept in touch with him and finally persuaded him in 1991 to come to America. Nine years later, Majid Giaka arrived at the Lockerbie bombing trial in the Netherlands. He described how he had seen Megrahi and his co-accused, Khalifa Fhimah, at Luqa airport before the bombing with a large brown suitcase. But the CIA cables confirm that nearly two years before, Mr Giaka didn't remember anything.

At the Lockerbie trial, the four judges described some of his evidence as "at best grossly exaggerated and at worst simply untrue" and concluded he was "largely motivated by financial considerations".

Megrahi to Senussi "I am an innocent man"

[What follows is excerpted from an article published in The Wall Street Journal on this date in 2011:]

Convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi maintained his innocence in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 throughout his trial and appeals—and did so in a private letter to Libya's intelligence chief, discovered on Monday in intelligence headquarters in Tripoli.

"I am an innocent man," Mr Megrahi wrote to Abdullah al-Senussi, a powerful official who was regarded as one of Col Moammar Gadhafi's closest aides, in a letter found by The Wall Street Journal. The letter, in blue ink on a piece of ordinary binder paper, was apparently written while Mr Megrahi was serving a life sentence in the UK.

In August 2009, after serving 8½ years, Mr Megrahi was released to Libya on compassionate grounds on the basis that he had terminal prostate cancer and only a few months to live. (...)

The letter to Mr Senussi was found in a steel, four-drawer filing cabinet in the intelligence chief's office in Tripoli. The cabinet had been forced open, apparently by rebels who shot holes in the lock. The office lay in shambles, but many of Mr Senussi's personal papers appeared untouched. There was no way to immediately confirm the authenticity of the letter. (...)

Mr Megrahi was sentenced by a Scottish court to life imprisonment in 2001. In the letter to Mr Senussi, Mr Megrahi mentions that he had been jailed for seven years, suggesting it was written sometime in early 2008 or late 2007, in the run up to the second appeal of his conviction.

It is unclear why he would have had reason to profess his innocence to Mr Senussi, who was in a position to already know details about the bombing. (...)

Mr Megrahi insisted he was innocent throughout his original trial and subsequent appeals. Even after his conviction, mystery and unanswered questions about who else may have been involved have surrounded the case.

In the letter, addressed to "My dear brother Abdullah," Mr Megrahi blamed his conviction on "fraudulent information that was relayed to investigators by Libyan collaborators."

He blamed "the immoral British and American investigators" who he writes "knew there was foul play and irregularities in the investigation of the 1980s."

He described in detail his latest legal maneuvering, focusing on the testimony by a Maltese clothes merchant that was critical to his conviction. The Maltese clothes merchant in question testified that Mr Megrahi had purchased clothes from him that were later found in the suitcase that contained the bomb that brought down Flight 103.

"You my brother know very well that they were making false claims against me and that I didn't buy any clothes at all from any store owner in Malta," Mr Megrahi wrote to Mr Senussi.

Mr Megrahi also had a message for "our big brother," a likely reference to Col Gadhafi, "that our legal affairs are excellent and we now stand on very solid ground."

"Send my regards to our big brother and his family and by the will of God we will meet soon and we will be victorious," he wrote. "I only hope that the financial support will continue in the coming period," he added.

Mr Megrahi eventually dropped his appeal as a condition of his application for extradition to Libya.

Reconsidering the “Lockerbie Bomber”

[The American WhoWhatWhy website has just republished a long article by Russ Baker headlined Reconsidering the “Lockerbie Bomber”  that originally appeared in 2012. It reads as follows:]

I first learned about the death of the “Libyan bomber” Ali Megrahi from a television screen. The sound was off, but I could see the closed captioning on CNN. Newspeople and guests were talking about the terrible thing Megrahi had done, and the closure or lack thereof from his passing. One man was noting that the perpetrator was a high official of Libyan intelligence, and that the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 had been ordered at the very top—by Muammar Qaddafi. The deaths of 270 people, 189 of them Americans, it was implied, justified last year’s removal of Qaddafi, and the dictator’s own abrupt and horrible death.

But there’s something wrong with that scenario.

How do I know? I read the New York Times. Especially the best part…..the fine print.

The Times Opens A Door…and Shuts It

Check out this article, from Robert McFadden, the Times’ septuagenarian obit writer and rewrite man extraordinaire. Under the appropriately neutral headline, “Megrahi, Convicted in 1988 Lockerbie Bombing, Dies at 60,” McFadden nailed the true import of Megrahi’s death in the second paragraph:

The death of Mr. Megrahi, who insisted that he was not guilty, foreclosed a fuller accounting of his role, and perhaps that of the Libyan government under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, in the midair explosion of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.

Most of the front half of the article lays out the conventional line on the plane that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland. But anyone getting to the latter part will notice that it is dominated by evidence casting doubt on the official story.

Thus, if you read those second-half paragraphs carefully, you see what the reporter (and perhaps his bosses) may actually wonder: whether Libya was framed by some enemy, with hints on who that might be.

The trial lasted 85 days. None of the witnesses connected the suspects directly to the bomb….The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable…Much of the evidence was later challenged….The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight was also cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored….Hans Köchler, a United Nations observer, called the trial “a spectacular miscarriage of justice”…. Many legal experts and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling Mr. Megrahi a scapegoat for a Libyan government long identified with terrorism. While denying involvement, Libya paid $2.7 billion to the victims’ families in 2003 in a bid to end years of diplomatic isolation.

But the Times was not finished with the story. It would have more to say, though not pursuing the line developed by the desk-bound McFadden, a 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner. Someone apparently decided that “more reporting” was needed, this time from another Pulitzer Prize winner, the longtime war correspondent John Burns.

His article, headlined “Libyan’s Death Brings Up Debate Over His Release,” focuses in part on the fact that Megrahi was given early release from prison because he suffered from cancer. But it also expanded on McFadden’s theme of doubts about Libya’s involvement. It actually goes a bit further in that direction, raising the theory that Libya was not involved.

Then it suggests that the true sponsor is…Iran.

The Times’s John Burns focuses on one relative and his theory.

In the aftermath of Mr. Megrahi’s death, his defense was taken up anew by the most persistent — and most controversial — of Mr. Megrahi’s defenders in Britain, Dr. Jim Swire, a 75-year-old retired family doctor whose 23-year-old daughter, Flora, died in the bombing. Years before Libya handed Mr. Megrahi and another man, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, over for trial, Dr. Swire voiced strong doubts about the Scottish case, and he fainted in court when Mr. Megrahi was convicted and Mr. Fhimah acquitted.

In the years since, he has been a vociferous advocate of a new independent inquiry into the bombing, saying that there was no reliable evidence that Mr. Megrahi was involved, and much that pointed to Iran, not Libya, as the culprit.

If Swire is so “controversial,” why give his claims such attention?

By citing Swire, Burns, wittingly or not, pulls out one of the oldest tricks in the book. He seems to be himself advancing legitimate inquiry by proposing an alternative theory that is not alternative at all. Indeed, what he does is redirect criticism from a former enemy of the United States establishment to a current one. The “controversial” disclaimer is also an old trick. It insulates the Times from any accusations that it has fallen into its predictable role of advancing the agenda of the American establishment. (Remember The Times’ former star reporter Judith Miller and all those Weapons of Mass Destruction that served as the Bush administration’s justification for the Iraq invasion?)

Even better, Burns cites “broadcast interviews” in which Swire had just repeated his assertions. Thus, it’s not The Times that is responsible for this. It is just “reporting on reporting.” Of course, those who trust the Times for their understanding of the world will not likely focus on any of these implied disclaimers at all. What they will remember is this: it was either Libya….or it was Iran.

Been Here Before, Ladies and Gents

Anyone really interested in figuring out who bombed that plane, and why, cannot ignore history. It is a history of our own government’s playing hardball, sometimes even doing (or at least contemplating) crazy and evil-seeming things in the service of a perceived greater cause. One example of this, and not the only one, is Operation Northwoods, a proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejected by an incredulous John F Kennedy, which would have involved committing acts of terrorism on US soil that could be blamed on Fidel Castro’s government. It was seen as regrettably leading to the loss of innocent life. But the proponents argued that the ends—setting the stage for an American invasion and the removal of Castro—justified the means.

This kind of thing is unpleasant, to put it mildly—almost too awful to contemplate. And discussing it is to invite tremendous hostility from those who don’t know better (and from those who do as well). But raising these uncomfortable truths is called….journalism. History shows us that US and allied intelligence operations will go to almost any lengths to gain the upper hand psychologically, to defame enemies of the state in order to persuade the public to go along with more overt moves, ideally by surrogates. (See Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo and Dominican Republic 1961, Vietnam 1963, Indonesia and Congo 1965, Cambodia 1970, Chile 1973…may we stop here?).

Meanwhile, governments like Libya under Qaddafi, or Iran under the mullahs, despicable though they are in many respects, have little real incentive to commit such acts against much more powerful countries. They gain nothing and stand to lose everything. Indeed, we can see strong indications that Qaddafi was railroaded over many years (but the effort was put on a bullet train last year) using Lockerbie as well as allegations of mass rape and mass murder, among other issues, as laid out here.  If getting rid of the irksome and fiercely independent Qaddafi was a priority, Iran is much, much more important. The effort to remove the current leadership of Iran and bring it back into the Western political, military and corporate fold is one of the highest priorities of the US, its allies, and their spinmasters. (Read this and this to learn more)

Burns’s Times piece is yet another in a long string of unsupported claims of Iranian nefariousness, which are practically a staple of the Western news diet. But reporters needn’t be complicit. One can accept that the Iranian mullahs and their cohorts are brutal and contemptible without being willing to traffic in falsehoods about them.

Beyond Burns

If the repositioning from McFadden’s good work that Burns’ piece represented wasn’t enough, we get this, from the Times-owned International Herald Tribune and republished by The Times, headlined “Lockerbie Bomber Dead, Conspiracy Theories Survive.”  The message is, “If you don’t have time to read this, and you probably don’t, just remember: when anyone tries to tell you there’s more to this story, just dismiss them and their notions with the back of your hand.”

Every time we see a journalist use the term “conspiracy theory,” let’s add one of two thought bubbles: Either “I’m lazy” or “I’m worse.” It usually means the reporter is not actually looking into any of the assertions, just taking five minutes to type out references to them, and then subtly undermine the whole train of thought. Because the term “conspiracy theory” immediately telegraphs to readers that they can safely ignore the claims contained therein.

A proper headline, based on the cumulative facts, would be, “Lockerbie Bomber Dead, Big Questions on Bombing Sponsors Unresolved.” (Message to Times and IHT: Happy to help you with headline accuracy—and even headline buzz!)

The Plot Thickens—and Another Person Dies

If you’re still not convinced that dark forces of a particular sort have a deep interest in how this all plays out, consider this development: the mysterious death Sunday of Sukri Ghanem, Libya’s former Oil Minister. Ghanem’s early defection turbocharged the effort to unseat Qaddafi. What’s so interesting, besides his ending up floating in the Danube, is that he had long insisted that Libya had no connection to Lockerbie, nor to the 1984 shooting of a British policeman outside the Libyan embassy in London, four years before Pan Am 103, that was cited as the basis for severing UK-Libyan ties.

Call Ghanem the man who knew too much. And please compare to a fellow defector, the Libyan Justice Minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil, who, unlike Ghanem, was perfectly happy to stoke the fires against Qaddafi—by announcing, after he had switched sides, that Qaddafi personally ordered the bombing, and promising to produce evidence.

He…..never has. It is now more than a year since the media ran its Jeleil headlines that were so damaging to Qaddafi, and no one, including the Times , has bothered to go back and see if he kept his word. (Background on that can be found here.)

The Pan Am 103 story could provide crucial linkage to the invasion of Libya and removal of Qaddafi—and lead to a real understanding of why some “accidents” happen, of why some “unavoidable interventions” happen. And no, it’s not always, or even usually, for the stated reasons. Just as the isolation of Libya over Lockerbie was, it seems, not really motivated by justice, the Western support of an externally-planned and -stimulated “indigenous” uprising was not really motivated by a concern for the human rights or the lives of the Libyan people.

This is not to pick on any particular reporter. On some level, all but the very stupidest journalists know how things really work. But they aren’t permitted to tell the rest of us. Thinking of digging deeper when that’s strongly (albeit implicitly) discouraged? There’s a simple choice: your conscience or your job.

To read Megrahi’s claims of innocence, go here.  (If you are in the UK or just want to read the more extensive British reader comments, go here.)