World Court Lockerbie case dropped

[What follows is excerpted from a document to be found on The Hague Justice Portal:]

On 10 September 2003, after more than ten years of proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the disputes between Libya and both the United Kingdom and the United States concerning the extradition of two Libyan citizens were removed from the Court’s List following the Parties’ withdrawal from the proceedings. (...)

By two letters of 9 September 2003, the Governments of Libya and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and of Libya and the United States of America on the other, notified the Court that they had "agreed to discontinue with prejudice the proceedings".

Following those notifications, on 10 September 2003 the President of the Court, Judge Shi, made an Order in each case placing on record the discontinuance of the proceedings with prejudice, by agreement of the Parties, and directing the removal of the case from the Court’s List.

In the meantime, Libya had agreed that the two accused, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Ali Amin Khalifa Fhimah, be tried by five Scottish Judges sitting in a neutral Court, in the Netherlands. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was found guilty on 31 January 2001. He was convicted of 270 counts of murder for his part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and sentenced to life imprisonment. His co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah was found not guilty and released.

[Here is what I have previously written about this chapter in the Lockerbie affair:]

[This] is what I wrote in an article headed “The Lockerbie Disaster” published in (1999) 3 Edinburgh Law Review 85-95:

On 27 November 1991 the Governments of the United Kingdom and the United States each issued a statement calling upon the Libyan Government to hand over the two accused to either the Scottish or the American authorities for trial.  Requests for their extradition were transmitted to the Government of Libya by diplomatic channels.  No extradition treaties are in force between Libya on the one hand and the United Kingdom and United States on the other.

Libyan internal law, in common with the laws of many countries in the world, does not permit the extradition of its own nationals for trial overseas.  The Government of Libya accordingly contended that the affair should be resolved through the application of the provisions of the 1971 Montreal Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation, to which all three Governments are signatories.  Under article 7 of that Convention a state in whose territory persons accused of terrorist offences against aircraft are resident has a choice aut dedere aut judicare, either to hand over the accused for trial in the courts of the state bringing the accusation or to take the steps necessary to have the accused brought trial in its own domestic courts.  In purported compliance with the second of these options, the Libyan authorities arrested the two accused and appointed a Supreme Court judge as examining magistrate to consider the evidence and prepare the case against them.  Not entirely surprisingly, perhaps, the UK and US Governments have refused to make available to the examining magistrate the evidence that they claim to have amassed against the accused who, to this day, remain under house arrest.

The United Nations Security Council first became involved in the Lockerbie affair  on 21 January 1992 when it passed Resolution 731 strongly deploring the Government of Libya's lack of co-operation in the matter and urging it to respond to the British and American requests contained in their statements of 27 November 1991.  This was followed by Security Council Resolution 748 (31 March 1992) requiring Libya to comply with the requests within a stipulated period of time, failing which a list of sanctions specified in the Resolution would be imposed.  Compliance was not forthcoming and the sanctions duly came into  effect.  On 11 November 1993 the Security Council, by Resolution 883, further extended the range and application of the sanctions.  The imposition of sanctions under the last two Resolutions was justified by the Security Council by reference to Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations on the basis that Libya's failure to extradite the accused constituted a threat to peace.

On 3 March 1992 (after the passing of Security Council Resolution 731, but before Resolutions 748 and 883), Libya presented applications to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for declarations that she was entitled under Article 7 of the 1971 Montreal Convention to put the accused on trial in Libya and that the United Kingdom and the United States were in breach of their obligations under that Convention in insisting upon trial in the UK or the USA.  The Governments of the United Kingdom and United States sought to have these applications dismissed without a hearing on the merits on the grounds inter alia that (1) the ICJ had no jurisdiction to consider them and (2) the Security Council Resolutions of 31 March 1992 and 11 November 1993, imposing upon Libya an international obligation contended by the UK and the USA to be superior to that embodied in Article 7 of the Montreal Convention, had rendered the applications pointless.  On 27 February 1998 the judges of the ICJ by substantial majorities [RB: 13 to 3] (and with the American and British judges dissenting) rejected the submissions of the UK and the USA, thereby clearing the way for decisions at some time in the future on the merits of Libya's applications.

RB: This judgement was followed within six months by the UK and US volte face whereby they agreed to a neutral venue trial. Here is what I wrote in the article mentioned above:

For four years and seven months the Government of the United Kingdom (and that of the United States) consistently maintained that the "neutral venue" scheme proposed by the writer and accepted by the Libyan Government and defence lawyers in January 1994 was impossible, impracticable and inherently undesirable.  For a flavour of the strength and vehemence of the Government's opposition, the interested reader is referred to "The Lockerbie Trial"  1998 Scots Law Times (News) 9 by Lord Hardie, a response by the Lord Advocate to the present writer's "The Lockerbie Proposal" 1997 Scots Law Times (News) 304.

However, on 24 August 1998 the Governments of the United Kingdom and United States announced that they had reversed their stance on the matter.  In a letter of that date to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, the Acting Permanent Representatives of the UK and the USA stated:

".... in the interest of resolving this situation in a way which will allow justice to be done, our Governments are prepared, as an exceptional measure, to arrange for the two accused to be tried before a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands.  After close consultation with the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, we are pleased to confirm that the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands has agreed to facilitate arrangements for such a court.  It would be a Scottish court and would follow normal Scots law and procedure in every respect except for the replacement of the jury by a panel of three Scottish High Court judges.  The Scottish rules of evidence and procedure, and all the guarantees of fair trial provided by the law of Scotland, would apply."

RB: Once the trial and appeal at Camp Zeist were concluded, the World Court case brought by Libya was quietly dropped, to the enormous relief of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, who were in fear and trembling that the court was going to recognise what would, in effect, have been a form of judicial review of the legality of the acts of the Security Council. And that would never do. Good heavens, it might have judicially prevented the invasion of Iraq!

The farcical imprisonment of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi

[What follows is the text of a letter from Dr John Cameron published in today’s edition of The Scotsman:]

Italy’s highest court of appeal has issued its written explanation for dismissing out of hand the conviction of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in the Meredith Kercher murder trial.

In a scathing critique of the prosecution’s hopelessly flawed case it said there was a “total lack of any biological evidence” that they were in the room or had touched the body.

The trial had shamed the Italian justice system and yet, in the end, it proved self-correcting unlike our own system in the equally farcical imprisonment of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Politics and justice: the Lockerbie trial

[This is the title of a radio programme broadcast on this date in 2007 by Australia’s ABC Radio National. Dr Jim Swire, Professor Hans Köchler and I participated. What follows is a transcript of the programme:]

Keri Phillips: This is ABC Radio National. Keri Phillips here with Rear Vision.

Newsreader: In what could be one of the world's worst air disasters, a Pan Am jumbo jet has crashed into a small village in Southern Scotland.

Reporter: It hit a petrol station in the centre of the town of Lockerbie. Police say there are many casualties.

Man: We initially heard a rumbling over the hotel. We thought the roof was falling in, and then we heard a tremendous shudder on the ground, as though it was an earthquake.

Keri Phillips: Two hundred and seventy people died when Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, a few nights before Christmas in 1988. Although sabotage was not immediately assumed, once the cause was identified as a bomb planted inside a cassette player, suspicions fell initially on a Syrian-backed group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command - the PFLP-GC, possibly acting for Iran, which had threatened revenge for the mistaken American downing of an Iran Air passenger plane a few months earlier. But by the time anyone was charged over Lockerbie, it was two Libyan men who were indicted in 1991. Negotiations between Libya and the US and the UK over how the trial would proceed took years, but finally in 2001, one of the men, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was found guilty of placing the suitcase containing the bomb on the plane and he is now serving a life sentence in a prison near Glasgow. Recently however, after mounting disquiet over the original finding, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has decided to refer Megrahi's case to the High Court, a step it takes in cases where it believes there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

Today on Rear Vision, we'll look at what happened at the original trial and hear from three men who are relieved that Megrahi will finally have a chance for a proper appeal against his conviction.

Robert Black, QC, is the former Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh. It was he who proposed that a non-jury trial under Scottish law be held at a neutral venue in the Netherlands.

Robert Black: Normally, trial for a major crime in Scotland like murder, would be before a single judge, sitting with a jury of 15 people. Now the Libyan defence team were not convinced that their clients could get a fair trial before an ordinary Scottish jury of 15 people. There had been so much advance publicity about the Lockerbie affair and much of that advance publicity simply assumed as true the government contentions about who was responsible for the atrocity, namely these two Libyan men, and it was in that context that I came up with the idea of having a trial under Scottish procedure, but without a jury. And also because they were worried about the physical safety of their citizens if they were tried in Scotland, I also suggested that perhaps the trial should be held in a neutral country, like the Netherlands. And so that was the basis upon which I put forward the original proposal, and the Libyan government and the Libyan defence team accepted that proposal within hours of my formally submitting it to them in writing.

But then there was a delay of about 4-1/2 years until the government of Britain and indeed the government of the United States consented to it, largely because they didn't want to be seen for public relations purposes, to be making any concessions to Libya. Libya was a rogue State, a pariah State, and the attitude of Britain and America that there had to be an ordinary trial either in Scotland or in the United States, simply meant that there never would be a trial at all. And eventually after a long time, I think Britain and America realised that.

Reporter: In Tripoli there was much ceremony when in front of 40 Libyan and Arab and South African diplomats, the two men were handed over to the UN's Chief Legal officer, Hans Korel. Wearing business suits and flashing victory signs, Megrahi and Fahima looked confident as they boarded the special UN flight to Holland.

Keri Phillips: Attention had switched to Libya after the first Gulf War, when, some suggest, Iran became an important Western ally. For those who'd lost loved ones, the beginning of the trial in 2000 was a relief, although some were mystified that the responsibility had been shifted from Iran to Libya. Jim Swire lost his 24 year old daughter, Flora, on Pan Am 103.

Jim Swire: We had had meetings with politicians in all sorts of different countries in Cairo and in Britain and Libya, including three visits to see Colonel Gaddafi himself, and once the indictments were issued, it was an extraordinary event, because we knew that up until that point the criminal investigation had been presuming that Iran was behind it, because she had the strong motive of having had her airbus shot down two months before by the Americans, and that the Syrian terrorist group had been the executives because they were known to have the technology that fitted perfectly for what had happened. That was the basis behind my thinking at the time. But we had been told also by a chap called Douglas Hogg who was No.2 to the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hird in Britain at the time, that there was no evidence against any nation other than Libya, and we knew that that statement simply wasn't true, and we couldn't find ourselves believing what we were told. So my position was that I needed the court case to confirm to me that what the politicians were telling me, which was that of course it was a Libyan job from beginning to end, what are you worrying about? I hoped that the court would confirm that. In fact, the court had exactly the opposite effect. I went into the court thinking these just be the guilty guys who blew up my poor daughter, and I came out of thinking Well these clearly were not the guys, so who the heck was it who did do it and why am I being mistakenly led to believe that these two were responsible when clearly they weren't.

Robert Black: Many outside observers, including myself, couldn't actually understand the reason for this shift in attitude, because I have seen the official minutes of the investigation into Lockerbie, and it is perfectly plain from those official minutes that the investigators at that time were convinced that they had the solution to Lockerbie, and it had nothing to do with Libya and it had everything to do with the PFLP-GC, the Palestinian group. But suddenly, and for no good reason that I can see, the focus of attention changed.

Keri Phillips: Robert Black, who'd continued to take a close interest in the case, says that during the trial the weakness of the evidence against Libya was revealed.

Robert Black: The evidence that was led by the prosecution was much as I think followers of the affair had anticipated. So there were no, I think, real surprises in the prosecution case. But what I think did come as a surprise to some people was how weak some of that evidence turned out to be, particularly the evidence linking Mr Megrahi with Malta, and with the purchase of the clothes which surrounded the bomb. Now these clothes were purchased, so the Crown contended, in a particular shop in Malta. And one of the main planks of the prosecution case against Megrahi was to establish that he was the person who had bought those clothes in that shop in Malta. I think it was partly the problem of the witness, the shopkeeper who actually sold the clothes. He never actually came out and positively said 'I identify Abdel Bassett Megrahi as the person who bought the clothes in my shop.' The most that he would say and the most that he ever said in the run-up to the trial, and in the trial itself, was that Megrahi resembled a lot the person who bought the clothes.

But he had also, in the past, given descriptions of the person who came into the shop and bought these clothes. And that description did not in any way tie up with the physical appearance of Megrahi. For example, in his first statement to the police, the shopkeeper said, 'The person who came into my shop and bought the clothes was over 6-feet tall and was more than 50 years of age'. Now Abdel Basset Megrahi at the relevant time was 36 years old, and was 5-feet 8-inches tall. This came out at the trial. The judges accepted that the shopkeeper effectively had identified Megrahi as the person who bought the clothes, which he never did. And as I say, most neutral, unbiased observers thought that that was an absolutely perverse decision by the judges on the evidence which had been led in court. If it had not been that the court wrongly, in my view, accepted that it had been established that Megrahi was the person who bought the clothes in Malta, there would have been no justification whatever for convicting him. There really wasn't any other significant evidence at all against Megrahi.

Keri Phillips: Today's program is revisiting the conviction of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, after a Scottish Judicial Commission has decided that there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

Reporter: After such an exhaustive trial the verdict in the case against the two Libyan men charged with blowing up Pan Am flight 103, was something of a surprise. Hopes were high but few people really expected a conviction. In the end though, the three Scottish judges agreed that the prosecution had proved beyond reasonable doubt that one of them, Abdel Basset ali-Mohamed al-Megrahi was the man who planted the bomb.

Keri Phillips: Professor Black says that one of the other mysterious aspects of the case is that only one of the Libyans was found guilty.

Robert Black: This is very, very surprising, isn't it, because the basis of the Crown's case against the Libyans was that Megrahi was the brains behind the plot. The bag-carrier if you like was Fahima, the other accused. But the importance of Fahima in the Crown scenario, the Crown explanation of Lockerbie was that Fahima was the one who had the ability to get the case containing the bomb into the airline baggage handling system, because Fahima was the station chief of Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, and he was the one, according to the Crown, who could arrange for the suitcase containing the bomb, to be transported as unaccompanied baggage from Malta to Frankfurt, then from Frankfurt to Heathrow and at Heathrow then to be laden on to Pan Am 103. So that was Fahima's role. He wasn't the brains, but he was a necessary instrument in getting this bomb into the airline baggage handling system as unaccompanied baggage.

Now when the trial court held that there was not actually sufficient evidence to show that Fahima had done any of these things, that left an enormous gap in the Crown case, because they now could not provide an explanation of how this suitcase containing the bomb actually got into the interline baggage transfer system at all, because if Fahima wasn't responsible for it, there was no other explanation. So many people thought it's absolutely amazing that the person who supposedly was the one who actually sent this piece of baggage on its fatal journey, once he's out of the picture, how on earth are you still able to convict the other man?

Keri Phillips: Professor Hans Köchler is a specialist in political and legal philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. He was appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to attend the trial as an observer for the United Nations.

Hans Köchler: In brief, the trial was in both phases, the trial itself, plus the first appeal from 2001 to 2002, both of the proceedings were not fair, there was a lot of political interference, and as I said, at the end of the appeal, I suspected a miscarriage of justice. That means specifically I was of the view that the person who was declared guilty may be the wrong person, that this man who was now sitting in a Scottish jail, may not be guilty as charged.

Keri Phillips: You said that there was political interference; can you spell out for us what kind of political interference there was?

Hans Köchler: To some extent one can spell it out. Of course most of this goes on behind the scenes, but as an observer who is alert to some extent, I noticed and I was the first to make it public, the presence of representatives of foreign governments in the court room interacting during court sessions with the Prosecution team and the Defence team respectively. The one country I refer to is the United States, the other country is Libya. It is totally irregular because that was a Scottish court, and there were two officials of the United States Department of Justice who interacted with the Prosecution team and there was one Libyan lawyer who officially was a kind of adviser of the Defence team, but in fact was a Libyan official. He's deceased by now and he of course interacted with the Defence team. There was absolutely no point if this is a Scottish court, why there should be people representing a foreign governmental interest, first of all sitting next to either Defence or Prosecution in the court room while the court is on session. And secondly, why during the session they should interact with the official actors of the trial. Both of these groups of people should have been placed together with us, the international observers, behind the bulletproof glass wall. That was the place where the observers of the United States Embassy and of the Libyan Embassy were also seated.

Jim Swire: What I do know is that were circumstances surrounding the trial which one can just credibly say may have misled the judges. And those are things like the fact that the body of the evidence was essentially obtained and offered up by intelligence services in the West, particularly of course the CIA and the FBI. And intelligence services are not known as seekers after truth. If they're doing their job properly they will be doing what they believe is in the interests of the country for which they work, and that may or may not coincide with the truth. I think that's fairly self-evident. So that's the first thing. The real powers behind the assembly of evidence were not uninvolved, objective-minded people, they were people who had a job to do, and I think that at Zeist we saw them doing it.

Another thing was that I felt very uncomfortable; there were members of the US State Department in court who appeared to me during the actual hearings to be coaching one or two of the witnesses, by giving the very slightest of nods to indicate that he should answer yes to that question during the proceedings. And to have powerful representatives of the accusing power present in full view of the witnesses and apparently acting in that way, was totally and utterly unacceptable I think. And I think in this context we should remember what the great Nelson Mandela said to us and had published just before President Clinton gave the go-ahead for the trial in the first place, Nelson Mandela went public and told everyone No one country should be complainant, prosecutor, and judge. But if you take the UK and the USA as acting as one entity in this issue, the UK and the USA were the complainants, the prosecutor and really they were the judges.

Robert Black: I think that consciously or subconsciously, these judges appreciated that if neither of the two Libyan accused were convicted in this trial, this would be an enormous embarrassment to the Prosecution system in Scotland. And the person in charge of the Prosecution system in Scotland is an officer called the Lord Advocate. Now the Lord Advocate is roughly like the Attorney-General in English and English-based legal systems, but in Scotland the Lord Advocate actually was a much more important figure in the legal system, even than Attorneys-General are in English and English-based legal systems, because he was actually at the very head of the criminal justice system. Not only was he the Prosecutor, he was also the person who nominated judges for appointment to the bench. Every judge in Scotland at the time of the Lockerbie trial had achieved his or her position on the bench through being nominated for appointment by the Lord Advocate. There are those and some of these people are in high positions in Libya, who think that there was overt political pressure placed upon the judges to reach a conclusion that was satisfactory to the British and American governments over Lockerbie. I myself don't actually believe that the British government or the American government in any way tried to influence the judges to reach a politically acceptable decision. I really do believe that the reason for Lockerbie and what I am convinced was a perverse decision to convict Megrahi is to do with internal Scottish legal politics. It distresses me because I've been a part of the Scottish justice system now for 35 years as an advocate, as a part-time judge, as a teacher of law and procedure, and it actually came as a shock to me that something within the Scottish criminal justice system could go so badly wrong. I mean even the best-regulated system can make mistakes and we accept that, and that's why you've got appeal courts, to put these mistakes right. But Lockerbie was more than that. Lockerbie brought home to me as I don't think any other case could have done, that actually there is something wrong in the system. It's not just a one-off mistake, there was actually something (I hesitate to use the word, but I think it's justified) there was actually something rotten about the system. And as I say, as somebody who's been involved in that system in one capacity or another for 35 years, I found that personally very distressing.

Keri Phillips: Some, like Daniel Cohen, an American who lost his 20-year-old daughter, Theodora, in the explosion, remain convinced that Libya was responsible, but for Jim Swire:

Jim Swire: What I would like to come out of this is first and foremost no more delays; I think Megrahi should be sent home and his verdict should quashed. I as an individual think that he as an individual deserves that, a profuse apology and compensation and so on for what happened to him as a result of what I believe to have been a deeply flawed trial. But the other thing is, that will leave of course the world saying OK, well if those guys didn't do it, then who did? And trying to divine what the vibes are telling me that I pick up, I mean there are some very professional people involved in the run-up to the next appeal who quite rightly won't tell me things that professionally they shouldn't tell me. But I divine that there is now new evidence concerning the Lockerbie case, which will point us strongly in the correct direction, whatever that may be. I think it'll be Iran and Syria, but whatever that direction may turn out to be, I think incidentally it could also be Egypt, but that's another issue. But wherever it does point us, I think it will give us a helping hand towards discovering the truth, and all we've asked for over the past 18 years in this context is truth and justice, and so far I think we've had neither and I think that we will be asking very serious question about why we have been kept at arm's length and denied the truth for 18 years.

Robert Black: I know that people like Dr Jim Swire who have never been convinced of Megrahi's guilt, even after sitting through the whole of the trial and listening to all of the evidence, their view has been All right, we think an innocent man was convicted and we will fight to get him released. But I think their motivation was largely to the effect that until we get this miscarriage of justice rectified, there will always be a blockage in our path towards finding out the truth about Lockerbie, because every time we say to governments Hold an inquiry into what happened at Lockerbie, the government says We don't need to. We've had a trial and a man's been convicted. We know what happened at Lockerbie. Why are you asking for an inquiry? So to people like Jim Swire you've got to get the blockage caused by Megrahi's conviction removed, and then you can go back to government and say OK, now what reason can you come up with for not holding an inquiry into Lockerbie? And so I think that's part of Jim Swire's motivation, and I support him in that, but I honestly don't think that even if we have an inquiry, that will lead with any certainty to a conclusion as to who was responsible. It may point in certain directions but I personally now think too much time has passed and that we will never actually get an answer that beyond reasonable doubt convinces everyone this is what happened at Lockerbie.

Keri Phillips: And it may take a year before Megrahi's case will be heard in a Scottish appeal court.

If you'd like to find out more about this story, do go to the Rear Vision website. I've put a link to Professor Köchler's Lockerbie website there and you can find his reports to the UN, the court judgments and a lot of other articles on the trial.

Technical producer for today's Rear Vision is Jenny Parsonage. I'm Keri Phillips. 'Bye till next time.

Invitation to attend Justice Committee's Megrahi petition session

[If any supporters of Justice for Megrahi would be interested in attending the next meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee at which JFM’s petition is to be considered, please contact JFM’s secretary, Robert Forrester, as soon as possible (forrester.robert[at]gmail.com). The circumstances are outlined in the following communication from Mr Forrester:]

I have been informed by the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament (JC) that the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) petition, PE1370, will be called for consideration before the JC on the morning of Tuesday, 15th September 2015.

The JFM Committee has already presented its submission for the event. At the JC's request we have done this well in advance of the normal deadline, should any pertinent matters arise in the interim, we will, of course, send in a supplement to cover this. We will doubtless be in a position to make our submission available to you before the JC session, however, for the time being, we must observe parliamentary protocols.

This particular session is of great significance to our cause since we are now in immediate confrontation with the Lord Advocate and the Crown Office over the issue of our request for an independent prosecutor (ie: independent of the Crown Office, and appointed by an individual or body independent of the Crown Office) to consider the Police Scotland report on the 9 JFM allegations of criminality levelled at Crown, police and forensic officials. Under normal circumstances, of course, such a report would be considered by the Crown Office, however, these are far from normal circumstances.

I include this link, which has been up on the JC site for some months now, in order to provide some context: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_JusticeCommittee/General%20Documents/20150526_JFM_response_to_LA.pdf

I intend to make a maximum seat booking for JFM (9 seats total). Around half of these are already spoken for by our committee members. I will not be in a position to make the booking until the window opens on Thursday 10th. Therefore, if any of you would like to state an interest in attending, please inform me as soon as possible: first come, first served.

At the end of next week, along with any additional information, I shall send out the usual details regarding how the session may be watched live on the parliamentary television broadcast.

Thank you as ever for your support. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber

What follows is excerpted from an article headed UK and Libya posted by Craig Murray on his website on this date in 2009:]

It was absolutely right to release al-Megrahi. Every dying person deserves what comfort, pain alleviation and disease amelioration can be provided by the presence of family and by medical treatment. There should be no place in a justice system for the cruel vindictiveness of making a now harmless person die in jail. Scotland and the SNP have shown a civilised example; those who attack them have shown ugliness. There is a secondary but also valid utilitarian argument that to keep al-Megrahi in strict confinement while providing necessary medical treatment would have cost the taxpayer hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of pounds. to no purpose other than making some vicious people happy.

The Tories have shown their blood-baying, American bum-sucking true colours. New Labour have been caught in their usual horrible hypocrisy, attempting to capitalise on anti-SNP right wing media reaction, while having been deliberately paving the way for the release for years.

Those who believe that al-Megrahi was the Lockerbie bomber. believe he acted on Colonel Gadaffi’s orders. I have neard no-one argue that al-Megrahi acted alone. Even mad Aaronovitch, who loves attacking conspiracy theories, appears to believe that there was a Libyan government organised conspiracy to blow up the plane. So if Gadaffi was responsible, what logic is there in a view that it is fine for Blair and Brown to be pictured smiling with Gadaffi, but al-Megrahi must rot in jail? Who is more guilty, the man who gave the order, or his tool? But New Labour have been doing everything they can to give the impression that Gadaffi is now absolutely fine and rehabilitated, but the SNP were wrong to release his agent. Where is the logic in that?

Jack Straw has admitted that trade was the deciding factor in his agreeing that al-Megrahi should not be excluded from the prisoner exchange agreement. Bill Rammell has admitted that as an FCO Minister he told the Libyans that Gordon Brown did not want to see al-Megrahi die in jail. There is no room to doubt that the UK’s assiduous courting of LIbya saw all kinds of positive signals given quietly on al-Megrahi, whose release was an obvious Libyan demand in the normalisation of relations.

The infuriating thing is that New Labour actually did the right thing in their dealings with the Libyans. Jack Straw’s positions and Gordon Brown’s message were the right ones. But a combination of fear of the United States, a right wing populist media instinct and a desire to attack the SNP has led New Labour to tyy to hide the truth – and try so badly as to bring down more media scorn than if they had just come out and supported the release in the first place.

Al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber. The scandal is not that trade deals and the realpolitik of relationship normalisation led to his release. The scandal is that trade deals and the realpolitik of relationship normalisation were what led the Libyans to hand him over in the first place – very much in the way their ancestors had given hostages to Imperial Rome. His family were richly rewarded, made wealthy for generations by his acceptance of the role of sacrificial lamb, and there was the hope that he would be acquitted. That he was convicted on very dubious evidence shocked many, especially Dr Jim Swire, representative of the victims’ families, who followed the evidence painstakingly and has never accepted al-Megrahi’s guilt.

Syria was responsible for the Lockerbie bomb. But in the first Iraq war, we needed Syria’s support, while Libya remained a supporter of Iraq. Lockerbie was a bar to our new alliance with Damascus, so extremely conveniently, and with perfect timing, it was discovered that actually it was the Libyans!! Anyone who believes that fake intelligence started with Iraqi WMD is an idiot.

It haunts me that I had a chance to read the intelligence reports which, I was told by a shocked FCO colleague in Aviation and Maritime Department where I then worked, showed that the new anti-Libyan narrative was false. I say in self-defence that at the time I was literally working day and night, sleeping on a camp bed. I was organising the Embargo Surveillance Centre and I was convinced that a watertight full physical embargo could remove the need to invade Iraq. I was impatient of the interruption. I listened to my colleague only distractedly and did not want to go through the rigmarole of signing for and transporting the reports I hadn’t got time to look at then. Events overtook me, and I never did see them.

Which is not to say the Libyan regime was not a sponsor of terrorism. It was. It just didn’t do Lockerbie. It did indeed supply Semtex to the IRA. I have an obvious sympathy with the victims of IRA bombing, and their desire to obtain compensation.

"I defy anyone to conclude that his guilt was proved beyond reasonable doubt"

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Oliver Miles (former UK ambassador to Libya) published on the Mail Online website on this date in 2009:]

From Libya there is always something new. So said Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. And for the past two weeks, my telephone has not stopped ringing with friends, acquaintances and the media seeking my views on the ‘Megrahi affair’ – a continuing storm that few people even pretend to understand.

Many people have been bemused by Westminster and Tripoli’s tentative pas-de-deux, asking why Britain should negotiate over the fate of a convicted Lockerbie bomber. Was there some kind of deal? Was it oil, was it trade?

Others find it difficult to understand why so much effort has been expended in building links with Gaddafi – or why Libya should court Britain.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s acknowledgement that the prospect of trade and oil deals with Libya played a part in the Government’s handling of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al Megrahi has heightened the intrigue.

One British motivation is clear: Libya, dirt poor in everything except oil and gas, has been an important energy producer for half a century. It sells £40billion of oil per year – mainly to Europe – and buys from every trading country in the world. Britain has become a major supplier.

Furthermore, Libya is that rare thing, a ‘rogue state’ which sponsored terrorism before being brought back into the international fold by diplomacy.

Tripoli favours links with Britain for several reasons. Many Libyans speak English, visit the UK for healthcare and education and are comfortable with London as an international crossroads. And Britain is the home of multinational companies, such as BP and Shell, with which the Libyans would like to do business.

For 15 years Libya has been slowly emerging from its status as international pariah, and dealing with London is regarded there as a staging post to its ultimate goal – the normalisation of relations with the United States.

There is also the matter of Megrahi, an important man from an influential tribe – the same as Abdullah Sanusi, the head of Libya’s internal intelligence service (equivalent to MI5 and MI6). Sanusi is related to Gaddafi by marriage and tribal solidarity is a strong link. Megrahi’s close family and tribal elders would have been putting pressure on the Libyan leader to do something about bringing their man home.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Libya has actively sought to deal with the international community, often using Britain as a diplomatic bridgehead to the US, which was in the past much more aggressive. It ended support for terrorism, paid compensation to victims on a vast scale and abandoned illegal programmes of weapons of mass destruction.

All this has made Libya increasingly attractive to the West. (...)

Gaddafi views Al Qaeda as the biggest internal threat to his secular regime and it has made at least one attempt to assassinate him. Anxious to protect his own position, he was prepared to share intelligence on Al Qaeda – and even to make some limited progress on human rights. As a result, the United Nations lifted sanctions in 2004, paving the way for American and international oil companies to return.

Lockerbie has been central to Libya’s international rehabilitation. Under arrangements worked out in 1999 by Robin Cook and the Foreign Office, involving a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands, Megrahi was convicted of responsibility for the destruction of the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie in 1988 which killed 270 people.

There have always been doubts about the evidence against him. Some believe, as I do, that the Libyans delivered him for trial only because they felt he was unlikely to be convicted.

Having read the legal judgment of his trial, I defy anyone to conclude from it that his guilt was proved beyond reasonable doubt. Yet his first appeal, in 2002, was dismissed. He always insisted on his innocence and only abandoned his second appeal in the hope of a return to Libya.

Most of Libya’s changes had already been achieved by the time Tony Blair made his first visit to Tripoli, in 2004. But Blair is a man with a keen eye on a photo opportunity and was even then thinking of his ‘legacy’.

On his second visit, in 2007, he launched a number of initiatives, including assisting the return of BP to Libya.

He also unwittingly laid the foundations for the current furore by proposing a Prisoner Transfer Agreement to allow British prisoners convicted in Libya to serve their sentences in Britain and vice versa – an arrangement which exists between many countries.

The Libyans saw it as an instrument to get Megrahi home.

But Blair seems conveniently to have overlooked the fact that Megrahi’s fate rested with the devolved government in Scotland. Given the bad relations between the Labour Party and the Scottish Nationalists, this was more than a formal problem.

Blair also overlooked an even bigger obstacle. Under the Lockerbie trial agreements, any sentence arising from it had to be served in Scotland (the Libyans insisted on this since they feared Megrahi might be handed to the Americans and executed).

The Lockerbie agreements are not properly documented, but the commitments were well known to the Foreign Office, the Americans and the Libyans. Tony Blair may not have bothered about them as he didn’t like inconvenient advice from officials.

As these difficulties emerged, the Libyans began to feel that they had been led up the garden path. And when it became known last year that Megrahi was terminally ill with prostate cancer, Tripoli began to issue not-very-veiled threats that if he died in jail relations between Britain and Libya would suffer.

When his condition deteriorated, two things happened: he inexplicably abandoned his appeal, and a story was leaked to the BBC that Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill was to grant compassionate release.

The reaction in the US was fevered amid rumours of a deal involving business and oil. The Americans have taken a line which they would call robust and I would call vindictive.

Some reactions have been foolish (Obama’s suggestion that Megrahi should have been put under house arrest in Tripoli), and others outrageous.

The demand by Obama and Brown that Megrahi should not receive a ‘hero’s welcome’ was a classic example of demanding that water should run uphill.

I believe Megrahi’s release was influenced more by the Scottish government’s desire to assert its independence rather than by any deal. Others may disagree, but time will tell.

Widespread doubt about Megrahi guilt, says Dershowitz

[What follows is the text of an article headlined Dershowitz Blacklisted that was published in the The Jewish Journal on this date in 2001:]

Celebrity Harvard law professor Alan M Dershowitz, the prolific author and veteran battler for human rights, is a much-sought-after speaker, but Temple Adath Yeshurun in Syracuse, NY, may have scored a first by withdrawing an invitation to him.

Dershowitz was to have delivered the keynote address and accepted a Citizen of the Year award at the temple's festive dinner Sept 6, but that was before dinner chairman Alan Burstein received some unsettling news.

The Harvard professor had agreed to serve as counsel to a British law firm that is appealing the conviction of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi. The Libyan intelligence officer has been found guilty by a panel of Scottish judges of murdering 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec 21, 1988.

The terrorist act hit the city of Syracuse particularly hard, because aboard the doomed plane were 35 students from Syracuse University. Slated as honorees and participants at the temple dinner were the chancellor of Syracuse University, his wife, and faculty members who still bear the emotional scars of the tragedy.

Under the circumstances, it would have been the height of insensitivity to ask the university leaders to share the dais with a man perceived to be an ally of the convicted terrorist, Burstein said.

Dershowitz responded with characteristic vigor, telling The Jewish Journal, "This is a 21st century version of legal McCarthyism."

He noted that there was widespread doubt among Western intelligence agencies and even some of the families of the British victims that al-Megrahi was the actual perpetrator.

"It is at least as likely that the bombing was carried out not by a Libyan agent, but by someone connected with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command," Dershowitz said. He said his own role was limited to objectively evaluating the validity of the eyewitness testimony that helped convict al-Megrahi.

"It is preposterous to criticize any lawyer for seeking the truth," Dershowitz said. "I have been doing that all my life and will continue to do so as long as God gives me the strength."

During a number of phone interviews, the two principals agreed that if Dershowitz had been aware of the special loss by the Syracuse community, and Burstein of the very limited role of Dershowitz in the appeal, the unhappy incident might have been avoided.

Dershowitz is to appear at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance on Sept 20 to discuss his new book, "Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000," with a panel of legal experts.

"I invite anyone with doubts about my role in the Lockerbie case to come and ask questions," Dershowitz said.