Justice Committee to consider Justice for Megrahi petition on 4 June

[The Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee will be considering Justice for Megrahi’s petition (PE 1370) calling on the Scottish Government to institute an independent inquiry into the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and conviction at its meeting on Tuesday, 4 June at 09.45 in Committee Room 2 (agenda item 5). The proceedings will be viewable here. Members of the Justice for Megrahi campaign group will be present at the meeting (but not me: I'll be wending my way back from the Roggeveld Karoo to Edinburgh). 

A paper by the Justice Committee’s clerk reads as follows:]

Background

1. Petition PE1370 by Justice for Megrahi (JFM) calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to open an independent inquiry into the 2001 Kamp van Zeist conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988.

2. The petition was lodged on 1 November 2010. The petition was carried over to Session 4 and on 28 June 2011, the new Public Petitions Committee referred it to the Justice Committee for further consideration.

3. The Justice Committee last considered the petition at its meeting on 11 December 2012 where it agreed to keep the petition open pending allegations against the Crown Office and the police being investigated. 

Recent Submissions

4. The petitioners have provided the Committee with an update on the complaints they have raised against the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) and the police. The published versions are attached to this paper as an Annexe. Clerks have circulated the unredacted submissions to the Committee.

5. JFM’s submissions give accounts of their recent interaction and correspondence with the Scottish Government, COPFS and the police.

Justice Directorate of the Scottish Government

6. JFM believes that without an independent inquiry into their allegations, there is a conflict of interest where Police Scotland and COPFS are investigating complaints against themselves.

7. JFM’s submissions indicate that it has asked for an independent investigator to be appointed to look into their allegations against the COPFS and police. It believes that the Scottish Government has powers, under the Inquiries Act 2005, to appoint an independent investigator.

8. The Committee is asked by JFM to write to the Scottish Government to ascertain whether it accepts JFM’s assertion that it has the powers under the Inquiries Act 2005 (or any other Act or common law) to appoint an independent investigator and, if so, whether it would be willing to do so to investigate JFM’s allegations.

Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service

9. JFM also has expressed concerns about how it has been portrayed in the press by the Lord Advocate while considerations of their allegations were being considered.

10. JFM requests that the Committee writes to COPFS to ask for comment or further information on the following points:

a. whether it will account for the public criticism of JFM when a

police investigation of their allegations were imminent;

b. what resources have been allocated to the investigation of JFM’s

allegations;

c. whether it will keep JFM informed of developments in the

investigation of their allegations; and

d. whether it has instructed the police on how to proceed with the

investigation into JFM’s allegations.

11. If the Committee agrees to write to COPFS, it is invited to consider whether it wishes to raise all or only some of the above points with COPFS. 

Police

12. JFM’s allegations are being taken forward by the police and investigations are ongoing. Supplement 1 (pages 9 and 10 of this paper) to the petitioners’ submission gives an account of a meeting with former Chief Constable Shearer, who is heading up the investigation for Police Scotland. 

Possible options for action

13. The Committee is invited to consider the petition and agree a course of action:

a. whether to keep the petition open or not;

b. whether to write to the Scottish Government on behalf of the petitioners asking for comments on its powers to appoint an independent investigator into JFM’s allegations; and

c. whether to write to COPFS on behalf of the petitioners and in what terms to do so.

[A Justice for Megrahi press release issued today contains the following:]

The petition should  be considered at approximately mid-day. Dr Jim Swire, Robert Forrester, Iain McKie, Tessa Ransford OBE, James Robertson and other members of the  ‘Justice for Megrahi’ Committee and its signatory membership will attend the meeting and will be  available for interview in the Parliament’s main reception area after the meeting. 

Justice for Megrahi in their most recent submission to the Justice Committee in respect of petition PE 1370, state:

‘The manner in which the Justice Directorate and the Crown Office are currently dealing with our entreaties is something which ought to be of deep concern to anyone who today falls under Scottish jurisdiction. We believe that the Justice Committee members understand that it is not the allegations themselves that is their direct concern but the arrogant, prejudicial and unaccountable manner in which they are being dealt with. We believe it is the committee’s duty to ensure that issues of confidentiality, public officials acting in their own interests, prejudgment of our allegations and the maintenance of equity and accountability are examined. Only the Justice Committee can protect the public interest when complainers like ourselves are subjected to such oppressive conduct at the hands of the state.’

Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil

This is the title and The SCCRC Statement of Reasons in Relation to the MEBO Timer Fragment is the sub-title of a long and detailed analysis and critique of the findings of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in relation to the infamous label productions PT35(a) to (d) published yesterday by Baz on his blog The Masonic Verses. It could be read here earlier this morning, but for some reason the piece seems now to have disappeared from the website. 

The article is once again available on Baz's website.

The Scottish Government will have to cast the Crown Office adrift

“Sooner or later, to protect itself, the Scottish Government will have to cast the Crown Office adrift and abandon the fiction that Megrahi’s conviction is safe.”

From the website for the performances of Kenneth N Ross’s play The Lockerbie Bomber on the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 31 July - 13 August (Venue 34, Adam House, Chambers Street). The venue is virtually next door to the Crown Office. I suppose it’s too much to hope that the Lord Advocate and the Crown Office’s Megrahi bitter-enders might pop along.

Senator Rand Paul on Libya and Lockerbie

[What follows is an excerpt from an article by US Senator Rand Paul published yesterday on the CNN website:]

The United States has a history of often picking sides in Middle East conflicts to its own detriment. (...)

Moammar Gadhafi eventually accepted responsibility in the 1988 bombing of an airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed hundreds of people, including American schoolchildren. [RB: “Responsibility in” is an interesting variant on the usual American phrase “responsibility for”. What Libya actually formally acknowledged in relation to Lockerbie can be read here.]

President Reagan called Gadhafi the "mad dog of the Middle East." 

Fast forward to 2008, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to Libya to meet with Gadhafi to offer American support.

In 2009, members of the US Senate -- Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain and an independent, Joe Lieberman -- would travel to Libya to meet with Gadhafi to offer further aid. Sen McCain said: "We discussed the possibility of moving ahead with the provision of nonlethal defense equipment to the government of Libya." President Obama would eventually meet with Gadhafi to reconfirm the same relationship established during the Bush administration.

By 2011, President Obama was arming Libyan rebels and ordering airstrikes to overthrow Gadhafi. Some of the president's most vocal supporters were the same Republicans who traveled to Libya two years before to help Libya's strongman acquire military equipment. Sen McCain said of the Libyan rebels: "I have met with these brave fighters, and they are not al Qaeda. ... To the contrary: They are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation. We should help them do it."

We did help them, something I opposed on the Senate floor as an unconstitutional overreach by the executive branch. We now have reason to believe that the Libyan rebels did contain elements of al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.

James Robertson (and Jim Swire) at London Lit Festival 13

A reminder that on 1 June at 1pm James Robertson will be appearing (along with Dr Jim Swire and Alan Little) at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Lit Festival 13.  Details here.

A new five-star review of James Robertson's The Professor of Truth can be read here.

Eleventh anniversary of Libyan settlement offer to Lockerbie families

[From CNN’s report Libya offers $2.7 billion Pan Am 103 settlement:]

Libya has offered $2.7 billion to settle claims by the families of those killed in the Pan Am 103 bombing, with payments tied to the lifting of US and UN sanctions, according to lawyers representing some families.

The proposed settlement would work out to $10 million per family, according to a letter from the families' lawyer detailing the offer. It includes relatives of those killed on the ground in the Scottish town of Lockerbie. But compensation would be paid piecemeal, with installments tied to the lifting of sanctions.

The letter says 40 percent of the money would be released when UN sanctions are lifted; another 40 percent when US commercial sanctions are lifted; and the remaining 20 percent when Libya is removed from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Jim Kreindler, of Kreindler & Kreindler, the firm representing 118 victims' families said the families are "seriously considering" the Libyan offer.

[From the Compensation from Libya section of the Wikipedia

article Pan Am Flight 103:]

On 29 May 2002, Libya offered up to US$2.7 billion to settle claims by the families of the 270 killed in the Lockerbie bombing, representing US$10 million per family. The Libyan offer was that:

• 40% of the money would be released when United Nations sanctions, suspended in 1999, were cancelled;
• another 40% when US trade sanctions were lifted; and
• the final 20% when the US State Department removed Libya from its list of states sponsoring terrorism. (...)

Compensation for the families of the PA103 victims was among the steps set by the UN for lifting its sanctions against Libya. Other requirements included a formal denunciation of terrorism—which Libya said it had already made—and "accepting responsibility for the actions of its officials".

On 15 August 2003, Libya's UN ambassador, Ahmed Own, submitted a letter to the UN Security Council formally accepting "responsibility for the actions of its officials" in relation to the Lockerbie bombing. The Libyan government then proceeded to pay compensation to each family of US$8 million (from which legal fees of about US$2.5 million were deducted) and, as a result, the UN cancelled the sanctions that had been suspended four years earlier, and US trade sanctions were lifted. A further US$2 million would have gone to each family had the US State Department removed Libya from its list of states regarded as supporting international terrorism, but as this did not happen by the deadline set by Libya, the Libyan Central Bank withdrew the remaining US$540 million in April 2005 from the escrow account in Switzerland through which the earlier US$2.16 billion compensation for the victims' families had been paid. The United States announced resumption of full diplomatic relations with Libya after deciding to remove it from its list of countries that support terrorism on 15 May 2006.

On 24 February 2004, Libyan Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem stated in a BBC Radio 4 interview that his country had paid the compensation as the "price for peace" and to secure the lifting of sanctions. Asked if Libya did not accept guilt, he said, "I agree with that." He also said there was no evidence to link Libya with the April 1984 shooting of police officer Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London. Gaddafi later retracted Ghanem's comments, under pressure from Washington and London.

[It is for negotiating this compensation settlement that former Foreign Minister Abdel Ati al-Obeidi and former London ambassador Mohammed Belqasem al-Zwai are awaiting trial in Tripoli for wasting state funds.]

The leading statement of the Iran responsibility thesis

[Five years ago today OhmyNews International published a long article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer headed Former Iranian President Blames Tehran for Lockerbie. The following is merely a short excerpt:]

In an interview conducted on May 16 [2008], Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, told me that Tehran, not Libya, had ordered the bombing of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes a few months earlier.

On July 3, 1988, the navy cruiser USS Vincennes, also known as "Robocruiser," shot down Iran Air Flight 665 over the Persian Gulf. The civilian airliner was carrying mostly Muslims on their pilgrimage to Mecca -- 290 died, most Iranians.

According to Bani-Sadr, in the immediate aftermath of the Lockerbie tragedy, [Ali Akbar] Mohtashemi-Pur, the then minister of the interior, acknowledged in an interview that he had contracted Ahmad Jibril, the leader of a Palestinian organization, to bomb an American airliner. The interview was scheduled for publication the following day. Hours before distribution, the newspaper was shutdown.

In the aftermath of the USS Vincennes accident, top figures in the Iranian government held a series of meetings in Beirut with leaders of Ahmed Jibril's terror group, the PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command).

"Everybody in US intelligence knew about Iran's intention to bomb an American airliner in response to the downing of one of its own only months earlier. We knew that," former CIA operative Robert Baer explains.

"There was a smoking gun in July '88 that Iran hired Jibril to knock down at least one American plane," Baer told me. And indeed, media have long reported that high-ranking Iranian officials held a meeting with [Hafez] Dalkamoni, a trusted lieutenant of Jibril and a man said to be only known by the CIA as Nabil. In late October '88, Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar, alias Nabil Massoud, were arrested in Frankfurt where they were running an operation to destroy airliners.

"I was assigned to Paris in 1988 running down leads with French police on both Pan Am 103 and UTA [Union des Transports Aeriens] -- I do not know the ultimate judgment on the leads we produced. Or why precisely the case is being reviewed by Scotland. Keep in mind in your research that intelligence and evidence are two separate domains. Often it's the case [that] compartmented intelligence is not shared with the FBI. I do not know what the FBI was given or not given," Baer added.

"There's a world of intercepts and information from sources that is never shared with the FBI. This is because the controller of the information doesn't want to compromise the source. At the CIA, we look at the FBI as trying to get convictions, while intelligence is to get at a proximate truth."

Reacting to the downing of Airbus 665, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur swore that there should be a "rain of blood" in revenge. Mohtashemi had been the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1985. He is widely believed to have helped to found Hezbollah in Lebanon and had close connections with the terrorist groups of Beirut and the Bekaa Valley.

The National Security Agency intercepted and decoded a communication of Mohtashemi linking Iran to the bombing of Pan Am 103. One intelligence summary, prepared by the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, was requested by lawyers for the bankrupt Pan American Airlines through the Freedom of Information Act.

A classified document prepared for the Multi-National Force during the first Gulf War reads: "Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus."

Caveat: Former FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise led the Lockerbie investigation. Marquise has told me that the document came from a source of unknown reliability. However, careful reading shows that the source makes a clear difference between rumours and facts.

While parts of the document reads: "Mohtashemi is said to [have done this or that]," the paragraph regarding Pan Am 103 is factual. It reads: "He has recently paid…"

The difference of style cannot be ignored.

Steadfast refusal to review multiple and obvious mistakes

[What follows is the text of a letter submitted by Dr Jim Swire to The Herald on 23 May but not (as yet) published:]

Whatever the jihadist background may have been to the brutal slaying in London [Woolwich], we should not forget that the front line against jihadist hatred is our intelligence services, who usually are effective in preventing such attacks. We owe them a great deal.

The second line however is our justice system, which is charged with assembling the evidence against those who are alleged to have broken our laws and conducting a trial where the evidence is impartially shared by prosecution and defence before judges who depend upon the authenticity and completeness of the evidence led, to reach their conclusions, then administer to the guilty the punishments agreed by the society which those judges serve.

To function properly that justice system needs not only to weigh the facts fairly, but to be seen to do so by the community it serves.

Unfortunately in the case of Lockerbie, the worst terrorist outrage we have yet seen in  our country, far from transparency, we see the combined proprietors of our Scottish justice system - our Crown Office and our SNP Government colluding to prevent a clear review of what may have gone wrong. Make no mistake, our prosecution system is now interdependent with our Government.

There has been steadfast refusal to review multiple and obvious mistakes to an extent which must make even the most avid critics of 'conspiracy theorists' uneasy. Within one of our own police evidence bags was found a fragment of circuit board which seemed to support the long journey of a Lockerbie bomb via Frankfurt from Malta and thence from Libya.

That bag contained a fragment of circuit board, a mimic of a corner of a Libyan owned timer unit, yet for 15 months now we have known that the fragment could not have come from such a timer because its detailed metallurgy conformed to cutting edge production trechnology of the late 80s but was simply not compatible with that on the older Libyan timer boards from which it was accepted by the court as having come.

One would expect that there would be alarm in judicial or even Scottish Government circles about this discrepancy, for make no mistake, this fragment was crucial to the alleged circuitous transfer of a Libyan bomb from Malta via Frankfurt to Heathrow, and thus to the conviction of the late Baset al-Megrahi.

Yet in the fifteen months since this definitive discovery, complete with the corroborating evidence of independent scientists based in the UK was made public, neither the Crown Office nor their investigating police force nor any arm of Scottish Government had even bothered to check the findings of these scientists.

If our criminal justice system is to remain our ultimate bulwark in the West in dealing with those who can be shown to break our laws, it's own legitimacy must be its impartiality and transparency. But the law is a human creation and therefore can make mistakes. It must therefore be required to review alleged errors in the interest of improving future performance and maintaining public confidence.

When neither those involved in prosecutions, nor those involved in Government who do have the power to do so, are prepared to stand up for true justice, let Scottish citizens beware should they ever have occasion to quarrel with our leaders in future.

Review by Alan Taylor of The Professor of Truth

[The following are excerpts from a review by Alan Taylor, editor of the Scottish Review of Books, in today’s edition of The Herald:]

Conspicuous by its absence in James Robertson's fifth novel is any mention of Lockerbie.

This may strike some readers as odd because The Professor Of Truth is also concerned with the bombing of a plane bound for New York which falls from the sky onto a small Scottish town killing hundreds of people, including the wife and daughter of its narrator.

The omission is of course deliberate, for Robertson is a novelist and not an investigative reporter. As such he inhabits a world where concepts such as truth and justice and retribution require more subtle coloration than that offered by black and white. Nevertheless he has chosen as his protagonist a man who needs desperately to get to the bottom of things for his own peace of mind.

It's what is routinely described as closure, which others who have lost loved ones are often inclined to embrace even when they suspect the evidence is inadequate or planted. Alan Tealing, however, does not believe that Khahil Khazar, the man convicted of planting the bomb which killed Emily and Alice, is guilty. Hence his obsession with what he calls "The Case".

Alan is a lecturer in English Literature at a university which bears glib comparison to Stirling. He is – as he is at pains to stress – not really a professor. Rather he is "the PhD kind of doctor" and would otherwise have been content to melt into the crowd. But what makes him special, what makes him unusual, are the deaths of his wife and daughter. Thus where others of his ilk might inspire disdain, he receives "a hushed kind of reverence".

As Robertson demonstrated most recently in And The Land Lay Still, he is adept at creating and empathising with characters who are in some way damaged and having difficulty in coping with the hand they've been dealt. (...)

The Professor Of Truth is touted by its publisher as a thriller in the mode of Graham Greene or John le Carre, but neither of these writers came to mind as I read it. Rather it operates on another level. Alan is not in mortal danger but on a quest. What he thinks he wants is an answer to a simple question: who really planted the bomb which killed Emily and Alice? But what he discovers is that simplicity is as elusive as truth or justice.

To learn this he must travel to the other side of the globe. His informant is called Ted Nilsen, an erstwhile agent of the American government, who turns up on his doorstep and offers hope of resolution. "We didn't just want to solve the case," Nilsen tells Alan. "We needed to solve it. There's an investment. I'm not talking budgets here, I'm talking emotional capital, mental capital. The bigger the crime, the bigger the investment." Nilsen supplies the name of a place in Australia where Parroulet is now living, having been given two million dollars for identifying Khazar. What option does Alan have but to seek him out?

Thus The Professor Of Truth moves from Old World to New. I don't know whether Robertson visited Australia but his depiction of it is vivid and tangible, especially the blistering heat and the boorish nature of the antipodean male. What is likewise convincing is Alan's ineptitude as a sleuth. "I felt like a student outside his tutor's room, about to deliver an essay or have one returned," Alan recollects as he is about to meet Parroulet. What he wants to hear from him is a confession of his false witness, that he is sorry for implicating an innocent man who is now dead, like Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for the Lockerbie bombing.

It is a fascinating scenario and one which Robertson handles beautifully. "Tell me, were you even alive before the bomb went off. I mean, really alive?" asks Nilsen of Alan, who insists he was. It is a question that recurs and to which Alan's answer is never wholly convincing. He loved his wife and daughter but did he realise how much until they were killed? It's as if he's taken on The Case out of guilt. This is one of fiction's great strengths, the ability to question the motives even of those who are good. But it takes courage and talent and integrity to do so, of all of which James Robertson has an abundance.

James Robertson

Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

The Professor Of Truth

The same bad science and the same bad scientists

An item from this blog, two years ago today:

[Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm has just published on its website a long interview with Gareth Peirce, the solicitor for the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, and a related news item. What follows is an excerpt from the latter:]

Peirce says that the construction and maintenance of the discredited case against Megrahi has required active participation from those at all levels of the criminal justice system, with both tacit and overt support from the top of the political hierarchy.

“In the most notorious cases, everyone played their part, absolutely everybody,” she says.

“A big part of the blame lies within those who form the criminal justice system. It looks as if in the prosecution of the Lockerbie case, the defendants met the same fate, even to the extent of the same personnel featuring, in the person of the forensic scientists.”

The principal forensic analyst, Thomas Hayes, employed by the Crown to testify against Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was the same discredited analyst who was proven to have fabricated his evidence in the manufactured case against the Guildford Four.

He and Alan Feraday testified that the key forensic evidence, a fragment of circuit board, survived the explosion of Pan Am 103 and left traces of clothing connected to a shop in Malta. The owners of that shop provided the identification of Megrahi to the court, and were later found to have been paid in millions of dollars for their testimony. This testimony has been widely discredited ...

“That was the most shocking revelation to me,” Peirce says.

“Exactly the same forensic scientists who produced the wrongful conviction of Guiseppe Conlon, the Maguire family and of Danny McNamee, and had been stood down for the role they played. Yet here they were. Without them, there wouldn’t have been a prosecution, far less a conviction in Lockerbie.

“What shocked me most was that I thought that all that had been gone through on Guildford and Birmingham, the one thing that had been achieved was that nobody would be convicted again on bad science. But yet in the Lockerbie case, it isn’t just the same bad science, it is the same bad scientists.”

In July 2007 former MEBO employee Ulrich Lumpert swore an affidavit claiming that he had manufactured the crucial circuit board evidence and passed it to named individuals charged with investigating the Pan Am 103 case during 1989.

“All of this is screaming out for an inquiry. The ingredients that make up the prosecution’s case are really so rotten. They can’t and they shouldn’t sustain the weight of a presumed safe finding. You can see that they are utterly contaminated. They have no integrity. The forensic findings lack all the ingredients that should make them safe. The continuity of exhibits is all over the place. The only other pillar on which it is held up is this non-identification. It is just a catastrophe. The whole edifice is rotten, and it is astonishing it was ever stood up in the first place.”

[Further contributions from Gareth Peirce to the Lockerbie debate can be accessed here.]

Pinned on Libya despite flimsy evidence

[What follows is an excerpt from a long article entitled Let’s Play Benghazi – A Game of Double Standards published yesterday on the Daily Kumquat website:]

After the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland – an event that was pinned on Libya despite flimsy circumstantial evidence – Qaddafi became an international pariah. Keen to be liberated from UN and US trade sanctions, and to have his country removed from the State Department’s list of terror sponsors, Qaddafi eventually took responsibility for the bombing (without acknowledging culpability) and agreed to set up a $2.7 billion reparations fund. Not coincidentally, this came in 2003, when the Bush Administration was demonstrating to the world its willingness to topple world leaders it didn’t like. Trade sanctions quickly evaporated, and all the western companies that had been chomping at the bit to enter Libya were off to the races. Indeed, it would not be long before BP started lobbying the British government to release Libyan prisoners to protect its commercial interests. The Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing,  Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, was released on claimed medical grounds in 2009, with BP denying any involvement in his case. Apparently, however, that wasn’t enough to placate Qaddafi. Later that same year, Qaddafi threatened the security of the big oil companies’ leases if they did not fork over approximately $1.5 billion to help him cover the Lockerbie reparations.

According to Russ Baker’s reporting, the figure demanded by Qaddafi did not just come out of thin air. In early 2008, Libya placed $1.3 billion into a complicated investment fund with Goldman Sachs. The crash soon erased 98% of that fund’s value. As the pugnacious Matt Taibbi reported, Goldman executives were so frightened by Qaddafi’s possible response to their misrepresentation and incompetence that they decided to sell their soul to the devil, offering Qaddafi a huge equity stake in Goldman itself. When that offer was spurned (and one must take a moment to ponder the deliciousness of the irony here), Goldman continued to make other proposals, including one deal that included a sweet $50 million payment to an investment firm “run by the son-in-law of the head of Libya’s state-owned oil company.” As Taibbi puts it:

This is classic modern investment banking. You pitch some kind of deal to a city, state, or country, and it may or may not be a good deal for the actual citizens/residents whose money is at stake. But you can make it objectively a great deal for the individual officials with the power to sign off on the deal by sending a big fat check either to the politician in question or to some local slimeball consulting firm of his or her choosing. Anyway, there is some reason why we journalists are not supposed to call things like Goldman’s proposed “$50m payment” bribes, but I can’t remember what it is.[...]

I’ve talked to a lot of people who got on the wrong end of a bad Goldman deal, and I never heard any hint of Goldman coming back with flowers and chocolates after the date rape. What makes the Libyans deserve such special attention? One wonders if you get better service from an American investment bank if the threat of beheading is behind your business deals.