What do you say, Mr Linklater?

[What follows is the text of a letter to the editor of The Times by Len Murray (a committee member of Justice for Megrahi who has been described by a Scottish High Court judge as the most distinguished pleader of his generation) following Magnus Linklater’s most recent Lockerbie article in that newspaper. As with James Robertson’s letter, it has not been selected for publication:]

Why does Magnus Linklater insist in keeping his head buried in the sands of Libya?  Why does he not face up to the facts of the scandalous conviction of Abdul Basset Al-Megrahi?

The judges found that the unaccompanied suitcase containing the bomb was put on a flight to Frankfurt from Malta when there was not even a scintilla of evidence to justify that finding.  What made that finding worse (if that were possible) was the fact that the records at Luqa Airport accounted for every single piece of luggage and there was none which was unaccompanied.

Their Lordships also held also that this same suitcase managed to make its way, still unaccompanied, from Frankfurt to Heathrow when there was no adequate evidence to justify that conclusion.

Gauci, without whom the Crown had no case, never positively identified Megrahi as the purchaser of the clothing wrapped around the bomb.  His earlier descriptions of the purchaser were so far out in age, height and colouring that they surely constituted proof that Megrahi was NOT the purchaser.

What do you say, Mr Linklater, about the $2 million dollars paid to Gauci by the CIA and which was never mentioned at the Trial?  Or the break-in at the Pan Am hangar right next door to Air Iran only 16 hours before Pan Am 103 took off?

Or what does he make of the finding that the purchase was made on 7 December when Megrahi was on Malta when the preponderance of the evidence was that the purchase was made on 23 November when he was not?

What do you say, Mr Linklater, of the subsequent discrediting of the forensic scientists who gave evidence at Megrahi’s trial?

Why was it that every single inference unfavourable to Megrahi was drawn when there were so many innocent explanations available?

These are the facts of the disgraceful conviction of Megrahi, a conviction utterly condemned by, amongst others, the UN observer at the trial.

But Mr Linklater does not stop at ignoring the facts.  He goes on to say something that is nothing short of astonishing.  He says:  “….every thread of evidence has been examined to distraction and has led nowhere.”  An astoundingly misleading assertion.  Examined where and by whom?

Certainly not the Appeal Court who have never had the opportunity of looking at Megrahi’s conviction.  The first appeal was taken on the wrong grounds and so the evidence was never examined; the second appeal was abandoned before any hearing and Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds.

The nearest the case got to a judicial tribunal was when the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission examined the conviction and referred it to the Appeal Court since they detected no fewer than six possible grounds of a miscarriage of justice.

Even some of the relatives of the victims wanted SCCR to examine the case since they are unhappy about the conviction.

These are the facts of the Megrahi case.  May I respectfully suggest to Mr Linklater that he lift his head out of the sands of Libya and face up to the truth of this national disgrace.  We of Justice for Megrahi would welcome his considerable abilities.

Megrahi's son joins campaign to clear his father's name

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

The son of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has joined a Facebook group protesting his father's innocence to help dispel the notion that an application for a posthumous appeal is not backed by his family.

Khaled El Megrahi has joined the Friends of Justice for Megrahi group and has been welcomed warmly by the other 180 members committed to clearing his father's name.

They include British relatives of the 270 victims who perished 26 years ago, Professor Robert Black, the architect of the trial under Scots Law in a neutral country, and prominent figures like James Robertson, one of Scotland's greatest novelists. Robertson's acclaimed novel, The Professor of Truth, was based loosely on the Lockerbie atrocity which killed 270 people in December 1988.

Shortly before El Megrahi joined the group, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had expressed doubts about continuing the investigation that could lead to a fresh attempt to overturn the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi.

The commission had asked the High Court to decide whether it could continue with the application, submitted earlier this year by Aamer Anwar, the Scottish solicitor acting for the Megrahi family and other supporters.

Scots Law allows for posthumous appeals to be pursued by the executor of the deceased, and leaves it open to others with an irrefutable interest to pursue justice, but their right is not enshrined in the same way as the executor's.

The SCCRC is seeking clarification about whether the victims' families alone could pursue a fresh appeal without the support of Megrahi's executor.

The confusion has arisen because the SCCRC insists it must have the original document confirming El Megrahi as his father's executor.

Mr Anwar said that the current climate in Libya made it extremely unlikely the legal team could travel there soon to obtain the necessary documentation, nor would they ask the Megrahi family to put their lives at risk.

He added: "With regards to the rights of the victims' families to pursue an appeal, we would submit that there is a fundamental duty on the state to protect the rights of victims of crime, which includes responsibility for the administration of justice."

Without the original executry documents, other Megrahi family members and "outsiders" like the British relatives of the victims, including Dr Jim Swire and the Rev John Mosey, would have to persuade the High Court of the legitimacy of their interest.

Given the stakes for the Scottish criminal justice system, there are fears that the judges who decide on the SCCRC's submission will not be easily convinced to encourage further close scrutiny of crucial aspects of the case, most notably the conduct of police, prosecutors and expert witnesses.

El Megrahi's public support for his father, therefore, could be very significant.

The SCCRC in 2007 referred the case back to the appeal court for what would have been a second appeal on six grounds that suggested there might have been a miscarriage of justice.

Since then, the case for an appeal has been strengthened by fresh scientific evidence showing that a fragment said to be from the timer that detonated the bomb was not a match for a type of device that the court accepted had been used and had been sold only to Libya.

Megrahi died on 20 May 2012, some 33 months after his release on compassionate grounds as he was dying from cancer.

He abandoned his appeal believing it would help secure his compassionate release, and although the Scottish Government has always denied a deal was done, his controversial release was confirmed soon after.

El Megrahi was welcomed to the Facebook group by Prof Black, who said: "I hope that 2015 will be the year when the injustice to your father, and your family, will begin to be rectified."

The sentiment was echoed later by other members, and El Megrahi later posted short messages thanking supporters, expressing hope for progress, and offering best wishes and a happy new year to all members.

[RB: Other members of Abdelbaset Megrahi’s immediate family are also members of the Facebook group.]

A permanent stain on Scottish justice

[At the Edinburgh International Book Festival today James Robertson featured at an event entitled What kind of Scotland do we imagine? The following are excerpts from a review on the Literature for Lads website:]

James Robertson was introduced by the Chair of the event and fellow author, Allan Massie as "a distinguished and versatile novelist having written about topics such as slavery, Calvinism and Scottish history… In addition in his latest novel The Professor of Truth he examines the question of truth and what is justice." Over the next hour Robertson gave his views on many of these topics whilst also engaging in interesting debate with both the Chair and members of the audience. 

Robertson opened proceedings by reading a section from The Professor of Truth which featured a discussion between two of the characters and their views on the justice system.  Following this Robertson shared with the audience his belief that the justice system is in many regards flawed.  He believes that in the past '...the truth is not always achieved. Justice has not always been done. This has implications for all of us as Law is fundamental to any society. If it's not working it is a problem for all of us'. Although both Allan Massie and Robertson were keen to point out that The Professor of Truth is a work of fiction it is clearly based on the Lockerbie bombing and the subsequent legal case.

Chair Massie questioned Robertson about the pending appeal in the case of the Lockerbie bomber. "If it's rejected what does it say about Scottish Law?" Robertson believes "there will be a great deal of unfinished business if the outcome is not challenged. Currently it's a permanent stain on Scottish justice. The system has a shadow hanging over it… it's crucial to lay to rest many of the severe doubts people have." (...)

Robertson is an outstanding novelist and respected cultural voice in the world of Scottish politics. Today he shared his views with an interested and animated audience who were keen to engage him in debate and discussion both on his novels and on the impending Scottish referendum. There is no doubt that whatever the outcome of next month's referendum he will continue to remain one of Scotland's leading novelists and cultural commentators.

Public concern that a great injustice may have been done in 2001

[What follows is a review by Graeme Purves on the Bella Caledonia website of Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.]

Most of us who are old enough will remember the shock with which we learned of the atrocity which ended the lives of 270 people at Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.  I first heard about it from an evening BBC radio news bulletin while lying in bed with a nasty dose of flu.  At first I thought it was a preposterous fantasy conjured up by my fevered condition and staggered through to the television in the sitting room to have the horror confirmed.

Dr Morag Kerr is a Borders-based vet who has previously written books on veterinary laboratory medicine and pet care.  A trip which involved driving along the A74 less than two days after the Maid of the Seas fell from the sky was the initial stimulus for her meticulous research into how that terrible event came about.  She has been Secretary Depute of Justice for Megrahi since 2010.

The safety of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction at the trial at Camp Zeist has troubled the national conscience for the last 13 years.   Dr Jim Swire whose daughter Flora died at Lockerbie was one of those not persuaded by the prosecution case.  He subsequently befriended Megrahi and has campaigned tirelessly and with great integrity and dignity for a re-examination of the evidence.  Dramatisations challenging the version of events accepted in the Camp Zeist judgement have played to packed houses at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  James Robertson’s novel, The Professor of Truth, draws its power from the widespread unease over the official attribution of responsibility.

A number of books have examined the voluminous evidence accumulated as a result of the investigations into the crime. John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury explores in detail the provenance of the circuit board fragment identified by investigators as part of a timer used in the bomb and the questions over the reliability of Tony Gauci’s identification of Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes packed in the bomb suitcase.  And disquieting revelations about the case continue to emerge.  On 20 December, Channel 4 News reported that between 1990 and 1995 several senior Syrian officials had told CIA agent Dr Richard Fuisz that the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril, was responsible for the bombing.

Morag Kerr’s book is the first book about Lockerbie to deal rigorously with the detail of the transfer baggage evidence.  On the basis of a careful analysis of reports, statements and photographs not previously available to the public she presents compelling evidence that the Samsonite hardshell case containing the bomb could not have been loaded on flight KM180 in Malta because it was already in luggage container AVE4041 in the interline shed at Heathrow an hour before the connecting Boeing 727 from Frankfurt (PA103A) had landed.

If the bomb was indeed introduced into the luggage transfer system at Heathrow, then the whole case against Megrahi and Libya crumbles away.  Morag Kerr wants to see an inquiry into the police and forensic investigations of Lockerbie which she regards as seriously flawed.  Given the growing body of evidence which cannot readily be reconciled with the Camp Zeist judgement, only a fresh consideration of the case by a Scottish court can assuage public concern that a great injustice may have been done in 2001.

Conviction that the truth has yet to come out

[What follows is a review of James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth published yesterday on the 1streading’s Blog:]

James Robertson also features on the 50 best Scottish books of the last 50 years list. Surprisingly, it is his 2003 novel Joseph Knight rather than his playful evocation of James Hogg, the more celebrated Testament of Gideon Mack. If that is Robertson’s stand out novel, however, it is only because he engages so nakedly with Scottish literature rather than Scottish history. Robertson is always an ambitious writer, no more so than in his previous novel,As the Land Lay Still, an attempt to describe Scotland’s twentieth century in fiction. Robertson’ latest, The Professor of Truth, while depicted on a smaller canvas, is just as urgently concerned with Scotland’s past.

Taking the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 as his starting point, he has created a fictional version of events from the conviction that the truth has yet to come out.

His central character is a university lecturer, Alan Tealing, who lost both his wife and daughter in the bombing. Twenty one years later, Tealing has not been able to let go, despite pleas from his own family and that of his dead wife. The novel begins with the death of Khalil Khazar –the fictional version of al Megrahi – but Tealing is certain Khazar was innocent:

“Everything is still as it was, we are no closer to finding out the truth about who really killed all those people twenty-one years ago, who killed my wife and daughter.”

Where the novel departs from reality is in the appearance of a shady American character, Nilsen, who arrives at Tealing’s door. Nilsen worked at the crash site creating the “narrative” of what happened. In a novel that is about facing death, Nilsen is dying of cancer and has come to tell Tealing (some of) what he knows. In particular, he gives him information on the whereabouts of the witness, Parroulet, that placed Khazar at the airport where it is claimed the bomb was loaded (“ingested”) onto the plane. Tealing has always believed that this witness was pressured to identify Khazar thus preventing any further investigation.

If this makes it all sound a little le Carré, Robertson also uses Nilsen’s visit to tell us about Tealing’s life. This is where, as a novelist, he can give the story a dimension that another book about Lockerbie couldn’t. One small but telling moment is when Tealing sees a father and daughter playing a game looking at the pictures in a newspaper on the bus. Not only does it bring home to him his own lost relationship but the girl’s innocence in the face of world disasters. (Her comment on an article about floods is, “Why are they swimming?”)

This first section of the novel takes place in snow and ice, presumably reflecting the way in which Tealing’s life, and also to some extent his emotions, have become frozen. In the second section the action moves to Australia as Tealing goes in search of Parroulet. Obviously to say much about this would rather spoil the thrilleresque elements of the novel, but Robertson’s decision to set this during a season of fierce bushfires is a stroke of genius. Not only does it balance the symbolism, expressing both the potential of cleansing or destruction, but it emphasises the wider themes of facing up to both death and life.

In his comments on his choice of Joseph Knight, Stuart Kelly talks about how the past in Robertson’s novels is “urgent, pressing and angry.” That is certainly true of The Professor of Truth. The novel’s success, however, lies in it not only working as a political expose, but as a moving character study of loss.

Lockerbie miscellanea

1.  A Lockerbie timeline has recently been posted on the CNN website.  For those wishing an overview of the chronology of the Lockerbie affair (from an American perspective, of course) it is useful. Other Lockerbie timelines have been produced, eg by the Scottish Government and The Guardian.

2.  A favourable review of James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth has appeared on the website of Minnesota’s Star Tribune newspaper.  The US edition of the book was published on 9 September.

3.  James Robertson will be talking about The Professor of Truth at the Wigtown Book Festival, today at 16.30.

James Robertson's "Lockerbie novel" published in USA

James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth, published in the UK in June, is today published in the United States of America.  Publishers Weekly, which has selected it as one of its best new books of the week, also contains a review which reads as follows:

Big life-and-death questions lie at the center of Robertson’s contemplative new novel, but its premise is as commercial as that of a bestselling thriller, amped up by real-life roots. Still haunted by the deaths of his wife and daughter in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland more than 20 years ago [RB: the aircraft in the novel is not Pan Am 103], British literature professor Alan Tealing gets a surprise visit from a man named Ted Nilsen, who asks him provocative questions. After some verbal fencing, Nilsen explains that he’s a retired American intelligence officer with information that Tealing, who has made a second career of gathering information about the crash, will want to know. Like many others, Tealing believes that Khalil Khazar, the man convicted of the bombing, was not responsible. When Nilsen challenges him to deepen his investigation, the professor, conveniently on sabbatical at the time, accepts. The Scottish tragedy provides the framework for a deeper philosophical treatment of justice and loss and grief, all well served by Robertson’s measured, literary prose. Robertson (The Testament of Gideon Mack) makes a case for the messy complexity of truth.

Fact or fiction?: James Robertson and Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a review in today’s edition of the Scottish Review by Andrew Hook, Bradley Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow from 1979 to 1998.  It reads in part:]

James Robertson's bold and extraordinary new novel – The Professor of Truth – has already sparked controversy. Hardly surprising given that its prime subject matter involves the most controversial episode in the modern history of Scottish justice: the conviction and imprisonment of the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi as the terrorist responsible for the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December, 1988.

Robertson sticks closely to the circumstances and characters involved in the Lockerbie tragedy and its aftermath, but what he has written remains a novel, a work of fiction. The book's central character is closely based on that of Jim Swire, the English doctor who lost his daughter on Flight 103, but who has subsequently become celebrated for his public and outspoken rejection of the validity of the trial and conviction of Megrahi. Dr Swire here becomes Alan Tealing, a lecturer – significantly not a professor – in the Stirling University department of English literature. He has lost his wife as well as his daughter in the disaster. Likewise Megrahi has become Khalil Khazar.

In the first section of the novel, entitled 'Ice', the setting remains a wintry Scotland, and Robertson creates a full and moving imaginative account of Tealing's response to the loss of his family and the existential freezing of his life and experience that follows. But in the book's second and final section – called 'Fire' – the scene shifts to a wholly imaginary experience of Australia where Tealing tracks down a Maltese character called Parroulet, clearly based on the real-life Maltese clothes shop owner, Tony Gauci, whose evidence was crucial in the trial and conviction of Megrahi.

Given this context, the novel inevitably raises a series of familiar quasi-philosophical questions: about the relationship between life as it is lived and how it is depicted in a work of art, about fiction and reality – not to mention others about how far the ideals of truth and justice actually operate in the practice of the law, and the validity of realistic or idealistic visions of human experience. So much so that one reviewer has referred to the Scottish section of the novel as a 'tutorial' on such issues. Perhaps there is a potential problem here for the novelist, but to my mind at least, the particulars of Alan Tealing's predicament, which we never lose sight of, prevent any descent into mere abstraction. Issues surrounding the meaning of truth and justice have come to define Tealing's life.

Another reviewer – Alexander Linklater in The Observer – raises a more central issue. He argues that the book is at its best when it is most fictional: it 'feels most real at the points where it is clearly fictional'. I agree. Again and again James Robertson’s creative imagination provides the tiny, telling detail which confirms the human reality of what is being described. Over the years, Tealing's relations with his wife's family in America slowly deteriorate. They cannot understand his rejection of the court's verdict. Their phone calls become infrequent; they have less and less to say to each other. 'When we spoke', Tealing tells us, 'I pictured the ocean rolling between us, vast and grey and cold'. (...)

For Linklater, the problem stems from Robertson's over-commitment to the truth and accuracy of Swire's rejection of the Scottish court's verdict. In his view the novel would have been more satisfying had Tealing been less sure that, say, Parroulet's withdrawing or qualifying his original evidence would lead to 'Khazar's' acquittal. In fact, Tealing is frequently shown struggling with doubt over the usefulness and value of his total commitment over so many years to the pursuit of the truth behind what he calls 'The Case'. Like the governess in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, he is even ready to entertain – momentarily – the horror of his being entirely wrong.

What is actually in question here is a larger issue. Linklater's position (or preference) is very much a current, postmodern one. Contemporary art in all its forms prefers the uncertain, the problematic, the unresolved, the fragment. For the majority of today's artists there are no finalities, no absolutes, no firm or unchallengeable truths of any kind. But when in 1898 Emile Zola took on the French legal and political establishment with the publication of J'Accuse, a man – Alfred Dreyfus – was in prison for a crime he did not commit. A great wrong existed which could and should be righted. Eight years later, it was.

Writing The Professor of Truth, even if he chooses not to challenge the Scottish legal establishment head-on, James Robertson is clearly on Zola's side. Will the Lockerbie story be a different one eight years from now? 

[Because of popular demand, a second event involving James Robertson has been arranged at the 2013 Edinburgh International Book Festival. The programme states: "We are delighted to announce that James Robertson, one of Scotland’s foremost literary talents, will appear at a second event at the Book Festival.

"Tickets for his first event on 18 August sold out swiftly so anyone who was unable to secure tickets can now take the opportunity to see the novelist on Friday 23 August at 12 noon. Tickets are on sale now here on the website or you can ring our Box Office on 0845 373 5888."]

Lockerbie is still unfinished business

[A long and perceptive review by Malcolm Forbes of James Robertson’s latest novel has just been published on the website of the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National.  The following are excerpts:]

"Scotland's a wee place," says one of James Robertson's characters in his 2010 magnum opus, And the Land Lay Still. Be that as it may, for each of his four novels Robertson has mined his native land and extracted enough rich and vital ore to do big things. As with Walter Scott, the subject of his doctoral study, Robertson is in many ways a historical writer. The Fanatic (2000) spliced modern-day Edinburgh with tales of 17th-century skulduggery including witchcraft and assassinations. Joseph Knight (2003) chronicled the search for a former slave in 19th-century Scotland. When Robertson doesn't plunge into the past, he allows it to encroach upon the present: from the wondrous, James Hogg-flavoured gothic fable, The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), the personal account of a "mad minister who met with the devil and lived to tell the tale", to the epic panoramic vision of modern Scotland on show in And the Land Lay Still.

Now, after a three-year hiatus, comes a fifth novel, The Professor of Truth. As it is set in the present but taps into the past - at times feeds hungrily from it - it clearly belongs to that second group of novels. (...)

The Professor of Truth is a scintillating read - part political thriller, part meditation on grief, truth and the internal struggle to speak out, be heard and right wrongs. (...)

The book is energised by tension, charged by Robertson's treatment of a man going it alone, out of his depth, prepared to risk all to obtain a final, critical reckoning. The drama unfolds through Tealing's intense and intimate first-person narration, which pulls the reader further in and places us firmly on Tealing's side. We sympathise with his plight and cheer his defiance. Like the faithless Gideon Mack, he is unable to find succour in God. He has been dismissed as an obstinate fool, a crank in thrall to conspiracy theories, rooting around for a smoking gun and an unpunished murderer, neither of which exists. His wife's parents sever the connection with him when he visits Khalil Khazar in prison, a man Tealing believes innocent of their daughter's murder. His sister urges him to move on. A lawyer mocks his idealism and thinks his perception of truth is naive: "It is not pure and separate. It is dirty and decayed and has frayed edges, and holes and tears in it. The last thing the truth does is gleam." Only his new partner, Carol, spurs him on.

Much is made of Tealing's grief. In a less skilled writer's hands we would be plodding through maudlin passages on the heels of a moping protagonist. But Robertson is too good for that, and eschews woe-is-me navel-gazing for heartfelt soul-searching and has his hero retrace his steps in pertinent, life-changing events rather than aimlessly wander down Memory Lane. Tealing's recollections of the crash and his day spent looking for wreckage are superbly managed, swinging powerfully, though unsettlingly, between unsparing recorded detail and creative reconstruction. (...)

Robertson excels as much with what he says as what he withholds. The Professor of Truth, like Robertson's previous novels, delves into Scotland's past, and this time round his source is the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. However, Lockerbie is never mentioned. The bomb begins its journey from an unnamed island in the Mediterranean. Khalil Khazar and another suspect come from an undisclosed "hostile regime", a "rogue state". Even Tealing's university town is anonymous, given only as a place in Scotland that "positively groans under the accumulation of history". A dead body that may or may not be Nilsen is found in the snow. Al Megrahi becomes Khazar; the rest - Lockerbie and Libya, Qaddafi and Pan Am Flight 103 - all go unsaid and perhaps rightly so. Robertson has gone on record as saying that the true story of Lockerbie "is still unfinished business, and for some it always will be". His novel reflects and articulates this reality and, although it exhibits clear parallels, it offers no neat conclusions. Ambiguity reigns. Smoke and mirrors prevail at every turn to conceal that hard-sought-for truth.

Not every literary author is capable of changing gear and successfully pulling off a thriller, not least one that is thought-provoking instead of action-packed. Most end up like John Updike's belly-flop, Terrorist: tendentious efforts that preach, generalise, rationalise and aim to resolve. Robertson does the opposite and beguiles us with broken lives and loose ends. Rather than answer, his novel asks: What, if any, are the limits to the grieving process? How, if at all, do we achieve closure? Is truth everything? And how much of what we do is chance and how much choice?

In Julian Barnes' 2005 novel, Arthur & George, Arthur Conan Doyle is described by his sister, Connie, as "Scottish practicality streaked with sudden fire". The same can be said of James Robertson's incendiary fiction.

He may well have peaked with And the Land Lay Still, but that doesn't mean he can't continue to produce searing, sinuous, first-rate novels like The Professor of Truth. 

[Another serious and thought-provoking review is to be found here on the Scots Whay Hey! blog.]

JFM secretary's report on Justice Committee consideration of Megrahi petition

[What follows is the report by Justice for Megrahi’s secretary, Robert Forrester, on the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee’s consideration of JFM’s petition on 4 June:]

Most of you will already be aware of Tuesday's result, however, for those who do not, I enclose here various links to the event to put you in the picture. In brief, again, the Justice Committee is to be thanked for maintaining the status of our petition, PE 1370, as open. Moreover, they are also to be thanked for agreeing to write to both the Justice Directorate and the Crown Office on our behalf in order to establish a variety of factual information relating to the allegations we have lodged with Police Scotland. I will not go into the details of this here since it is all contained in our submissions to the Justice Committee and is self evident in the Committee's official report.

Clearly this is a positive result, however, and if not too late, the JFM Committee would like to enquire of the Justice Committee whether or not the letter to the Justice Directorate could be made a little more specific. Our feeling is that the form of the question is somewhat open in that it does not specify the laws that we have quoted as being the ones which provide the government with the power to farm out our allegations to an independent investigator: this being of particular relevance here where Mr MacAskill has, by offering us no alternative but to lodge our allegations with Police Scotland, created extraordinary and highly dubious circumstances in which the Crown Office and Police Scotland have become investigator, judge, jury and accused all rolled into one. Whilst there is a directness and simplicity to the from of words chosen by the Justice Committee in the letter, Mr MacAskill has a record of saying 'I 'beg to differ with JFM' in the interpretation of law. This occurred when we gave evidence on the Punishment and Review Act (shortly before the publication of the Statement of Reasons for Mr Megrahi's second appeal in The Herald). The fact is that his interpretation of the law was wrong then because the Scotland Act superseded the Data Protection Act, and Westminster had not seen fit to include the Data Protection Act in the Scotland Act as a reserved issue, therefore, the issue of its being raised at all with Westminster was indeed a red herring, as we said at the time. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that The Herald's actions rendered the whole business redundant, he got away with it on the day. We will be writing to the Justice Committee to see if it is possible to modify this current letter to the Justice Directorate, and I will inform you of the result as soon as I know it.

In the meantime, see here below the relevant links covering the Justice Committee's consideration of PE 1370. I have also included a link to an interview given by James Robertson immediately after the hearing. James's most recent novel, The Professor of Truth was launched in Edinburgh on Thursday to a packed house, and has been receiving enthusiastic and very well-deserved reviews. James has been extremely courageous with this work: a book which, whilst it stands firmly on its own two feet without the references to actual events, quite obviously poses a significant challenge for the author simply because it does have these associations. I strongly recommend it to you all.

The committee wishes to thank both Tessa Ransford and James for joining us at the hearing on Tuesday, and to all of you for your constant support. 

Parliament PE 1370 general references page:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/CurrentCommittees/44107.aspx

Parliament TV broadcast of 4th June JC consideration of PE 1370:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/newsandmediacentre/41408.aspx

JC official report:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28862.aspx?r=8193

Letter from JC to JD:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_JusticeCommittee/Inquiries/20130606_CG_to_Cab_sec.pdf

Letter from JC to COPFS

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_JusticeCommittee/Inquiries/20130606_CG_to_Crown_Agent.pdf

James Robertson BBC interview immediately subsequent to 4th June JC consideration of PE 1370:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0210pmg/The_Culture_Studio_with_Janice_Forsyth_04_06_2013/