A lamentable failure of wisdom and compassion

[In 2009, I reproduced on this blog a column written by me that appeared four years ago today in the Scottish lawyers’ magazine The Firm.  It was headed The waiting game and I think it is worth a further glance:]

It took three years for the SCCRC to conclude that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmad al- Megrahi may be the victim of a miscarriage of justice, and a further two years will have passed before his appeal is heard, by which time he may have died. Professor Robert Black QC calls on the Scottish authorities to show some courage before it is too late.

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi should never have been convicted for the Lockerbie atrocity. His conviction, on the evidence led at the trial, was nothing short of astonishing. It constitutes the worst miscarriage of justice perpetrated by a Scottish criminal court since the conviction of Oscar Slater in 1909.

It should never be forgotten that one crucial ground on which the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission held that there might have been a miscarriage of justice in Megrahi’s case, was its view that no reasonable court could have reached the conclusion that the trial court did, on a matter absolutely central to its reasons for convicting.

The delay in bringing Megrahi’s current appeal to the hearing stage has been scandalous. Had a modicum of urgency been shown, it is entirely conceivable that the appeal could have been over before now and the appellant back with his wife and children in his own country, a free man. The SCCRC had his case under consideration for more than three years before referring it back to the High Court. But the issue of the trial court’s unreasonable findings is a very simple and straightforward one and required virtually no investigation other that a perusal of the relevant portions of the transcript of evidence. If the SCCRC decided early in its deliberations that the case was going to have to be referred back on this ground – and it is difficult to believe that it did not – then delaying taking that step for three years is hard to justify.

Then there is the delay that has occurred after the SCCRC referred the case to the High Court in June 2007, attributable in large part to the Fabian tactics of the Crown and the spurious public interest immunity claims of the UK Foreign Office. Two whole years have passed since the SCCRC reference. Eighteen months have passed since the appellant’s full written grounds of appeal were lodged with the court. And it was only at the end of April 2009 that the first tranche of the appeal was heard. On the leisurely timetable that the appeal court has set, it would require a minor miracle for the proceedings to be concluded by the twenty-first anniversary of the disaster in December 2009.

What makes all of this worse is that the appellant was diagnosed in October 2008 with terminal, late-stage prostate cancer. His condition has recently deteriorated to such an extent that he was unable to attend court for the first tranche of the appeal or, indeed, comfortably to follow the proceedings over the TV link that had been set up.

The recently lodged prisoner transfer application would enable him to return to Libya to spend his remaining weeks with his wife, children, aged mother and siblings, which is – understandably – now his overriding priority. But, for prisoner transfer to be granted by the Scottish Government, Megrahi would have to abandon his appeal. This, clearly, would bring joy to the hearts of the Crown Office and the Scottish Government Justice Department. The manifold concerns over the Lockerbie conviction could be gleefully swept under the carpet and the pretence maintained that the system had worked perfectly and a guilty man had been justly convicted. 

However, there is another course of action open to the Scottish Government, if Ministers have the strength of will and character to withstand the pressure of civil servants assiduously punting the prisoner transfer option. That course of action is compassionate release. This would enable Megrahi to be freed on licence and return to Libya. His appeal would run to its natural conclusion. If he died before the appeal court reached its decision, the appeal could be transferred to his executor or any person having a legitimate interest.

The Scottish public interest demands nothing less than that the concerns over Megrahi’s conviction be ventilated fully in court. Compassionate release provides the only mechanism whereby this can be achieved alongside the humanitarian goal of allowing him to die at home. Have Scottish Ministers the wisdom and the courage to embrace it?

[The answer to my question was, of course, “No” since the Justice Secretary, quite unnecessarily, insisted on dealing with the applications for prisoner transfer and compassionate release simultaneously and the former required Megrahi's SCCRC-mandated appeal to be abandoned.]

Appropriate commemoration

[What follows is the text of a written question and answer in the Scottish Parliament:]

Question S4W-16039: John Finnie, Highlands and Islands, Independent, Date Lodged: 25/06/2013

To ask the Scottish Government what it is doing to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster.

Answered by Michael Matheson (18/07/2013):

Previous anniversaries of the Lockerbie air disaster have been commemorated in a manner decided by the wishes of the bereaved families. With the 25th anniversary approaching later this year, the Scottish Government will be guided by the wishes of the bereaved families in terms of how such a terrible tragedy should be commemorated appropriately.

[It is respectfully suggested that the most appropriate way of commemorating the tragedy would be to announce the setting up of the independent inquiry that many of the UK relatives of the victims have called for.]

Lost and stifled voices of Lockerbie must now be heard

[What follows is a recommendation written by Dr Jim Swire for the play Lockerbie: Lost Voices to be performed on the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe (August 2 - 26, Scottish Storytelling Centre, Venue 30a) by The Elements World Theatre:]

270 voices were stilled forever that dreadful night before Christmas over Lockerbie town. To those who have failed us it may seem that the voices of some of us who are left are heard too often, but the rights of relatives to know the truth, and the rights of Scottish people to a transparent and fair criminal justice system demand that they now be heard almost a quarter of a century later.

At the trial of the two Libyan suspects the prosecution claimed the bomb had come from Megrahi's hand in Malta, using a Libyan timer, and they had a fragment of such a timer to show the court that this was true.

The defence claimed that a Syrian made bomb, triggered by falling air pressure in flight and having an unalterable flight time of 30-45 minutes was used: that was what dictated the strange short flight time of 38 minutes. It could not be flown in from Malta since it would have exploded long before reaching Heathrow. But with the evidence heard in court and with smart footwork by the prosecution they couldn't persuade the court that their Syrian device had been put aboard at Heathrow.

Only after the verdict did it emerge that the prosecution's timer fragment was bogus.

Only after the verdict did we discover that Heathrow had been broken into before the bombing, close to where the bomb was loaded, which the Crown Office had known all along but concealed from the court. Such a trial with such illegal concealment of such critical evidence could never have been fair.

Since the verdict, for over a decade, the voices of the relatives of the dead have been muffled by the stifling hand of the Crown Office and our SNP Government.

For the sake of those who died and for the right of all our citizens to a fair justice system those lost and stifled voices of Lockerbie must now be heard.

A spectacular failure of accountability

[This is part of the headline over an article by Justin Schlosberg published today on the New Statesman website. It reads in part:]

Ten years after the death of intelligence analyst David Kelly, the campaign for a formal inquest wages on. Shortly before his unnatural death in 2003, Kelly was outed as the BBC news source for a controversial report suggesting the government had lied in building its case for war with Iraq earlier that year. The fact that key questions remain unasked about an official investigation into a controversial death is nothing unheard of in British politics. But the Kelly case is unique because the most vociferous opponents of due process are not officials or politicians, but journalists. (...)

But there is something else we know which is that there has been unprecedented misinformation, obstruction of justice and on-going suppression of information in relation to this case. Only around a quarter of the police documents submitted to Hutton have been published and much of the remaining evidence has been sealed under an extraordinarily high level of classification for 70 years. It includes medical reports, photographs of the body and supplementary witness statements. The justification for this enduring secrecy is to prevent undue distress to the bereaved. But David Kelly was a public servant who suffered an unnatural death in extremely controversial circumstances. In far less controversial cases, the interests of the bereaved never outweigh that of the public interest in having a formal coroner’s inquest into an unnatural death.

With occasional and notable exceptions, journalists’ persistent refusal to engage with the substance of this controversy reveals a blind spot in our system of democratic accountability, encapsulated by the label of "conspiracy theory". This taboo, which operates within journalist and academic circles alike, has some sound basis. It discriminates against conjecture often associated with tabloid sensationalism or internet subcultures that respond to secrecy or uncertainty with unfounded reasoning. This kind of theorising has also provided the foundation for racist and extremist ideology upon which acts of terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing have been predicated.

Such a cautionary approach, however, has led to an outright rejection of the idea that particular groups of powerful people might make, in the words of terrorism expert Jeffrey Bale, “a concerted effort to keep an illegal or unethical act or situation from being made public”. Yet both historical precedent and contemporary events suggest that such instances are a regular feature of real-world politics. The Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq War, for instance, has surfaced considerable evidence that the decision to invade Iraq was taken in secret and long before it was publicly announced and justified on what turned out to be false intelligence. The problem amounts to an “intellectual resistance” with the result that “an entire dimension of political history and contemporary politics has been consistently neglected” (Bale 1995). (...)

Above all, it is the enduring silence of newsrooms which has shielded successive governments from pressure for an inquest or from challenge to their persistent refusals to hold one.

The fires of injustice rage unabated. It took a lot longer than ten years for the relatives of Stephen Lawrence, Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough victims to get some semblance of accountability from the state. For the relatives of Daniel Morgan, the victims of the Iraq War, Lockerbie, secret rendition and torture, the struggle continues. If nothing else, campaigners for an inquest into David Kelly’s death have succeeded in drawing some attention to yet another spectacular failure of British justice.

Jim Swire and James Robertson at Skye Book Festival

[The following is from Dr Jim Swire:]

On Friday 26 July I shall be at the Aros Centre in Portree at 7pm with author James Robertson [as part of the Skye Book Festival] discussing his latest book The Professor of Truth, an allegory based on the Lockerbie disaster. Robertson did not collude with real life Lockerbie relatives like myself during the writing of this book, but he intuitively writes with understanding of the emotional turmoil the disaster and the denial of truth still causes for those affected.

The disaster was so long ago and the stories surrounding it so complex that I thought you might like to allow your readers to see how the pursuit of the truth for 25 years now looks to me, the father of Flora Swire (a descendent of the Flora MacDonald of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s day) who spent his boyhood on Skye.

Two stories of who had caused it unfolded in court in Holland. I listened to both throughout the trial and came to judge one to be true and one false. Subsequent events have confirmed one of these stories and rendered the other unbelievable. So clear is the distinction between them now that there is little doubt in many people’s minds as to where the truth lies.

I hope that this piece will influence your readers for I have always wanted people to search for the truth and believe that my comments are as accurate as is possible in the face of ongoing concerted attempts to conceal aspects of that truth.

UTA 772 and Pan Am 103

Today being Bastille Day, it seems appropriate to provide a reminder of what may be regarded as the principal link between France and the Lockerbie disaster.  This is the destruction of UTA flight 772 over Niger on 19 September 1989 resulting in the deaths of all 170 passengers and crew on board the DC-10 aircraft. References to this tragedy on this blog, dating from 7 January 2008 to 28 May 2013, can be accessed here.

"Important and permanent" contribution to Lockerbie affair

[A report on the memorial service for Lord Fraser of Carmyllie was published yesterday on the STV News website.  It reads in part:]

Friends, family and former colleagues have paid their last respects at a thanksgiving service to Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the former Conservative MP and Lord Advocate who died suddenly last month.

The peer served in Margaret Thatcher and John Major's governments and drew up the indictments against the two Libyan men accused of orchestrating the Lockerbie bombing. (...)

A string of Tory grandees filed in to Dundee Parish Church St Mary's for what was described as a moving and humorous tribute to one of the party's elder statesmen.

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said: "It is a sad day. Peter was a huge personality and he served both in Parliament and in Government with great intelligence but also a great deal of wit and humour and that's what we remember today." (...)

Former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind said: "Peter had a lot of specialist knowledge to provide on legal issues.

"Obviously he was associated with the Lockerbie affair and put a huge amount of effort into that and made a fantastic and important and permanent contribution to that work, but more broadly he had a range of interests and, of course, in the later years in the House of Lords he was amongst other experts and I know they respected him greatly as well."

[A rather more balanced assessment of Peter Fraser’s career can be found here and here.]

Megrahi conviction ought to be on British and American consciences

[A year ago today a review by Neil Berry of John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury was published on the website of the Khaleej Times.  I reproduced it at the time on this blog.  It is well worth a further perusal:]

Published by the plucky Scottish press Birlinn, John Ashton’s new book Megrahi: You Are My Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence casts grave doubt on the validity of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi’s conviction as the Libyan terrorist responsible for blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 and murdering 259 mostly American people in December 1988. At the same time, it raises deeply disturbing questions about the United States and United Kingdom’s boasted commitment to truth and justice.

It is perhaps no surprise that the mainstream British media are fighting shy of this bulky volume the attention it deserves. For to discuss its contents would mean re-visiting a vastly acrimonious episode that threatened to poison relations between Britain and the US: the early release in August 2009 from his Scottish prison — on grounds that he was dying of cancer — of a Muslim convict who was seen by many as the personification of evil.

A member of Megrahi’s legal team, John Ashton is liable to the charge that his familiarity with the Libyan has clouded his judgment, but his book — which intersperses an exhaustive examination of the evidence that led to his conviction with Megrahi’s own testimony — collates the work of several hands and is a model of forensic rigour. It is indeed hard to believe that any fair-minded person could read it without being persuaded that Megrahi was the victim of a grotesque miscarriage of justice. The powerful impression left by the book is that Megrahi, who had run security for Libyan Arab Air Lines while engaging in clandestine trading, had the ill-luck to be in Malta, the putative point of origin of the Lockerbie bomb, at the wrong time, and that he was framed because the US found it convenient to point the finger of blame at Libya.

What has never been widely recognised is that the blowing up of Pan Am 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie took place six months after the shooting down of an Iranian airbus over the Arabian Gulf in July 1988 by the American battle cruiser, the USS Vincennes, with the deaths of 290 Iranians, most of them pilgrims bound for holy city of Makkah. It was an outrage Iran immediately vowed to avenge, and all the indications were that it was Iran, acting through the shadowy terrorist splinter group, the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, that mandated the Lockerbie operation.

If, in the aftermath of Lockerbie, the US shrank from confrontation with the Islamic Republic, it was because, on top of seeking to negotiate the release of American hostages held by Iranian-backed terrorists, it was concerned to have a free hand in repelling Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait to Iraq. Yet a scapegoat for Lockerbie was imperative and Libya, with an egregious leader, Colonel Gaddafi, whose image in the West was that of a deranged tribal savage, figured as the ideal candidate.  John Ashton’s book underlines how readily the Western public accepted the case for imposing crippling sanctions on Libya as the culprit for Lockerbie. Few demurred when —  even before he was sentenced by three Scottish judges at a special court in the Netherlands in 2001 — US President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright repeatedly described Megrahi not as a suspect but as a mass murderer. All this would be chilling enough — even if the case against Megrahi were a more compelling one.

In truth, his conviction relied on the testimony of a shopkeeper in Malta who had but the sketchiest memory of selling clothes to an Arab customer around the time when a suitcase containing the bomb was supposedly put on a feeder flight to London, there to be loaded onto Pan Am 103. It relied, too, on a circuit board, alleged to have been part of the bomb and to have derived from a batch of Swiss timing devices sold to Libya, though it was to transpire that this item of evidence — found far from the Lockerbie crash site — had nothing to do with the timers in question.

What is particularly shocking is how much material evidence was withheld from Megrahi’s trial — including the striking circumstance that the night before Pan Am 103 flew from London Heathrow, the airport was broken into.

The assumption that the Lockerbie bomb originated in Malta may well have deflected attention from a far more productive line of inquiry. Megrahi endured his eight-year Scottish incarceration in the bitter knowledge that he had been convicted on a basis that came nowhere near to satisfying the principle that guilt should be proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.

Following 9/11, however, he felt that his chances of ever clearing his name had all but vanished. Certainly, the belief that he was the ‘Lockerbie bomber’, a malevolent Muslim who had carried out Britain’s worst ever terrorist atrocity, lodged deep in the public mind — so deep that when he was diagnosed as having only months to live and Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, decreed he should be allowed to return to Libya to die, there was widespread outrage, not least in the United States. In Britain and the US, many were of the opinion that that Megrahi was the beneficiary of a squalid oil deal struck with General Gaddafi by Britain’s sometime Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and that British and Scottish politicians were not only colluding with a vile regime but insulting the dead.

Outrage about the commutation of his sentence grew as Megrahi confounded Scottish medical expectations regarding his survival prospects, living on in Tripoli until May of this year. And though he remained desperately ill, there were to be vindictive demands, following the toppling of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, that he be made to face justice in the United States. Yet on the evidence of John Ashton’s book it is not his truncated sentence that ought to be on British and American consciences. It is the fact that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was ever convicted at all.

Mandela intervention over Lockerbie

[The following are brief extracts from a long article just published on the website of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:]

Nelson Mandela is inextricably linked to the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa. Although he long withdrew from active politics after a one-term presidency (1994-99), he remained his country’s moral conscience in terms of domestic issues, and a principled defender of human rights internationally. (...)

Internationally, Mandela’s iconic status impacted beyond South Africa’s borders. He pressed the warring factions into a power-sharing constitution in Burundi in 2000, although the civil war did not cease. Before his retirement, he continued to lead by example, whether on AIDS education or as the lone critic of a Nigerian military dictatorship when nobody dared to follow him. In contrast, his successor, Thabo Mbeki, supported the Nigerian military strongman Sani Abacha after the execution of the Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Mandela also intervened successfully in the long simmering Lockerbie bombing crisis, by sending his chief of staff to work out a deal with Ghaddhafi in Libya. [RB: This is a reference to Jakes Gerwel.]

Swire hails new play on Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The Herald.  It reads as follows:]

A new play about the Lockerbie bombing has been described by the father of one of its victims as "searing and soul-searching".

The Lockerbie Bomber, written by Alan Clark, will be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and will look at the links the CIA had to Libya around the time of the 1989 atrocity, which claimed 270 lives.

Dr Jim Swire, who lost a daughter at Lockerbie, said: "The Lockerbie Bomber is a searing and soul-searching drama of international significance, which dramatically shows how absolute power corrupts absolutely and how individuals and nations are diminished by the lies told in their names."

Mr Clark claims in his work that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, was made a scapegoat for the bombing, which he described as an open wound. The playwright, from Falkirk, said: "I started with an open mind but the more I researched, the clearer it became that governments and agents have systematically covered up the truth for nearly 25 years."

The Crown Office is re-examining events leading up to the attack.

[The press release on which The Herald’s story is based reads as follows:]

The revelation today (July 5) that the CIA sought to assassinate Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and his co-accused Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah comes as no surprise to the Scottish author of a new play about the atrocity that’s being staged at the Edinburgh Fringe later this month.

“I believe the CIA wrote the script to incriminate Libya,” says Alan Clark, author of The Lockerbie Bomber.

The Washington lobbyist William C Chasey made the allegation in his autobiography, Truth Never Dies.

“The murky involvement of the CIA is a central strand in the play,” said Falkirk-basedClark. “There’s a widespread view it wanted Megrahi and Fhimah quietly removed, as this would prevent a public trial taking place which would show that Iran and Syria, not Libya, were behind Lockerbie following the destruction of an Iranian passenger aircraft by the USS Vincennes.

“And then when the trial did take place, there are allegations they fabricated evidence and paid witnesses for their evidence. So their fingerprints are all over Lockerbie.

“These issues are all covered in the play which concentrates on their attempts to cover up the truth and why Megrahi was made a scapegoat. This in itself raises serious questions, such as who in Scotland permitted it all to happen.”

Dr Jim Swire, who lost a daughter at Lockerbie, said: “The Lockerbie Bomber is is a searing and soul-searching drama of international significance which dramatically shows how absolute power corrupts absolutely and how individuals and nations are diminished by the lies told in their names.”

Clark added: “Lockerbie has been described as "an open wound", "an indelible stain on the reputation of Scotland and its justice system" and “our national shame”. I wrote the play as a reminder that the 270 victims and their families still await justice and the truth. I started with an open mind but the more I researched, the clearer it became to me that Governments and their agents have systematically covered up the truth for nearly twenty-five years. Allegations that evidence was withheld. Evidence fabricated. Witnesses paid for their testimony. Scottish justice reduced to the level of a banana republic. It stinks.”

The Lockerbie Bomber is being staged at C Venues in Edinburgh's Chambers Street from July 31-August 13 at 12 noon daily.

CIA ‘wanted to kill Lockerbie bomber before trial’

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The Scotsman, published the day after this item appeared in this blog.  The Scotsman’s story reads in part:]

The CIA wanted to assassinate Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and his co-accused, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, before their trial, a former Washington lobbyist has claimed.

William C Chasey, 73, made the sensational allegation in his autobiography, Truth Never Dies, which is to be turned into a film.

He claims agents tried to convince him to plant homing devices on Megrahi and Fhimah as part of the plot.

However, a former FBI chief has dismissed the claim as “nonsense”. (...)

Mr Chasey, president of the Foundation for Corporate Social Responsibility, a non-governmental organisation, became involved with Libya and the Lockerbie investigation when he was a lobbyist in Washington.

“On behalf of business clients, I went on a lobbying mission in 1992 with a US congressman in a bid to stabilise relations between the US and [Muammar] Gaddafi’s hated regime,” he said.

He told how he was taken to a private meeting with the two Lockerbie accused at a house in Tripoli. “Myself and the congressman and his wife then met Gaddafi and heard his pleas for help within Washington to get sanctions lifted, and heard his claims that Libya was not involved in Lockerbie,” Mr Chasey said.

“He spoke of the death of his daughter in a US air attack on his home and appealed directly to the congressman’s wife, as a mother, to get her husband to use his influence.”

Mr Chasey claims this clandestine meeting raised suspicions at the FBI, which launched a lengthy investigation into him.

Then, in 1995, he wrote a controversial book, Foreign Agent 4221: The Lockerbie Cover-Up, which claimed Libya was not responsible for the bombing.

“The FBI investigation, along with a probe by the US tax service, damaged my business and put incredible pressure on my wife, Virginia, and our young daughter Katie,” he said.

The family moved to Poland, where Mr Chasey had ties.

He said: “I was hit with 21 felony charges over crimes including wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, even larceny and forgery over allegations I stole headed notepaper from congressional offices.”

He denies the claims and says all but one were dropped in 1998 when he agreed a plea bargain and admitted a charge of filing a false tax return.

It was at this point he claims he was contacted by the CIA at Dulles Airport in Washington. “An agent approached me and asked if I could meet again with Megrahi and Fhimah to pinpoint their location so the CIA could assassinate them. In return, the charge would be dropped and my record expunged,” he said.

“He wasn’t explicit but my belief is that the CIA wanted the suspects eliminated to stop any trial taking place and bury the alternative view that Iran and Syria were behind Lockerbie.”

Mr Chasey, 73, was sentenced to 75 days in jail, 75 days in a half-way house and two years probation for the tax offence. He said: “I was sent to Allenwood Federal Prison in Pennsylvania and was amazed when I was joined in the canteen one day by the same CIA agent and one of his colleagues, dressed as inmates.

“They offered to free me and clear my record, but I said I would not take part in their plot to put electronic homing devices in the suspects’ residences so they could be targeted. I told them, ‘With all of your vast resources, the one thing you will never be able to destroy is my character’.”

Mr Chasey said he had decided to speak out now after being diagnosed with incurable cancer.

“Apart from my wife, no-one has known about this until now. I love my country, but I fear my government”, he said.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora, 23, died in the bombing, believes Megrahi was innocent. He said he had read Mr Chasey’s book and thought it was believable. “I think Bill Chasey is telling the truth about the CIA,” he said. “He is a respected philanthropist and was a leading lobbyist in Washington, so he’s not a crank.”

However, former FBI assistant director Buck Revell, who oversaw its Lockerbie investigation until 1991, said of Mr Chasey’s claims: “That’s nonsense.”

The CIA refused to comment.

Forthcoming US Lockerbie-related film

[I am grateful to Dr Jim Swire for drawing my attention to the following item on the Deadline Hollywood website:]

John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who’ve scripted The Game andTerminator 3, have been set to write Influence, a thriller that incorporates a true story and terrorism and the dynamics of geopolitical power. Based on Dr William Chasey’s book, Truth Never Dies, the story details how Chasey, a high-powered Washington lobbyist, took a job representing Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya in the wake of the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103, only to see his life systematically dismantled by the US government.

In his quest to understand why, Chasey discovered a CIA-led conspiracy to conceal the truth behind one of the worst terrorist acts in history. Mad Chance’s Andrew Lazar and Richard Middleton (The Artist) will produce along with the author, Renée George will be exec producer.

[From the Wikipedia entry on Dr Chasey:]

Chasey’s first two successful non-fiction books, Foreign Agent 4221, and Pan Am 103: The Lockerbie Cover-up, drawn from personal experience, tell the story of Chasey’s attempt to normalize relations between the US and Libya over the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. He concludes that the Pan Am bombing was wrongfully attributed to the Qadhafi regime and was, in fact, the work of Syria and Iran in response to the USS Vincennes incident.

Truth Never Dies: The Bill Chasey Story, Chasey’s third book, was a 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Literature entrant, and is also drawn from personal experience. It tells of his efforts to help normalize relations between the US and the Government of Libya. 

[From the Truth Never Dies website:]

[The book] focuses on abuses of state power in which the CIA, FBI, IRS and the Federal Judiciary conspired to prevent him from opening a dialogue between Libya and the US Congress, and then tried to blackmail him into using his unique access to the Libyan leadership to initiate a CIA sponsored assassination of the two Libyan Intelligence Officers who were indicted for blowing up Pan Am 103.