Hollywood’s Pan Am 103 Truthers

[This is the headline over an article published yesterday on the website of The Daily Beast.  It reads as follows:]

Acclaimed movie director Jim Sheridan has stirred up a hornet’s nest with his claim that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan spy held responsible for blowing Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and killing 270 people in December 1988, was innocent.

The FBI officials in charge of the US investigation as well as families and friends of the victims, 190 of whom were Americans, are especially troubled that the 65-year-old Sheridan is planning a feature film that will portray Megrahi—who died of cancer in May 2012 after being sprung from a Scottish prison on a controversial “compassionate release”—as blameless and wrongfully convicted of the crime.

“It kills me to think that they would go off and just tell some completely wrong story just because they like the way it sounds or there’s got to be another twist to it,” said Pan Am 103 widow Kathy Tedeschi, whose husband, Bill Daniels, was a passenger on the doomed flight. “There are too many people, like the FBI and Scotland Yard, who investigated this case, and I firmly believe they knew what they were doing and they got the right man.”

The Irish-born Sheridan, whose Oscar-nominated movies include In the Name of the Father and My Left Foot (for which Daniel Day-Lewis received the Best Actor award), told The Hollywood Reporter that he’s writing a screenplay with fellow Irish writer Audrey O’Reilly that will dramatize the experience of English physician Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died on Pan Am 103. Swire treated the ailing Megrahi in jail, became convinced of his innocence and launched a still-ongoing campaign to clear the Libyan’s name. [RB: Dr Swire visited Megrahi in jail, but he did not treat him.]

“It was this weird thing where you think you’ve found the person who killed your daughter, and then Jim ended up in the cell looking after him—because he’s a doctor and the guy wasn’t well—and it’s obvious as the nose on your face that Megrahi didn’t do it,” Sheridan told The Hollywood Reporter, adding that Swire will be among his guests at the inaugural Dublin Arabic Film Festival, which Sheridan is staging in Ireland on May 8. The director’s Hollywood publicist said Monday he was traveling and unavailable for comment.

“Somebody should reach out to Mr. Sheridan and tell him he’s betting on the wrong horse,” said Frank Duggan, president of the nonprofit group, Victims of Pan Am 103 Inc, which represents relatives of the Americans killed in the Boeing 747’s explosion. “It would do a lot of damage,” added Duggan, who served as the family liaison for  the President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, which was established in response to the Lockerbie tragedy. “It keeps stirring the pot for all the crazies and deniers to say, ‘Aha! See, we were right!’”

Retired FBI agent Richard Marquise, who led the US task force during the Lockerbie investigation and has written extensively about the case, said Sheridan seems to be aligning himself with “10,000 conspiracy theories, none of which has ever been tested in court. It’s a bunch of speculation and hypotheses and I feel bad that somebody is going to stake his reputation on it…Maybe that would sell a movie, but it wouldn’t be the truth.”

Retired FBI official Oliver “Buck” Revell, the bureau’s associate deputy director who rode herd on the American end of the Lockerbie investigation, told The Daily Beast: “As with our Hollywood filmmakers, truth has little or nothing to do with filmmaking and most documentaries. I am well satisfied to let the verdict and evidence that supported it stand. I do favor the investigation continuing, for I am certain that many of Megrahi’s superiors were complicit in this terrible crime.”

Megrahi, who when Flight 103 exploded was head of security for Libya’s national airline and allegedly a Libyan intelligence agent, was convicted of 270 counts of murder, and sentenced to life in prison, by a three-judge Scottish panel in January 2001. The evidence against him was circumstantial; a shopkeeper in Malta, where the bomb was allegedly put aboard the 747, identified Megrahi as the man who purchased the clothes that were found in the suitcase where the device had been concealed. Megrahi also had a business relationship with a Swiss company that manufactured the device’s timer, and he had traveled to Malta from Tripoli on a false passport—all damning pieces of evidence.

Megrahi consistently asserted his innocence. He appealed the verdict and lost, and a second appeal was abandoned after his defense team decided it might hamper legal efforts for an early release. Over bitter protests from the Obama administration, Scottish officials ultimately released him in August 2009, on the grounds that he was suffering from advanced prostate cancer and had only an estimated three months to live.

He was flown back to Libya on Muammar Qaddafi’s personal jet, accompanied by Qaddafi’s son Saif, and greeted by a triumphal celebration at the airport—a spectacle that enraged US government officials and American relatives of the Lockerbie dead. He survived another three years, living out his last days in a posh villa in Tripoli. Ironically, he outlasted Qaddafi, who was killed in a popular uprising in October 2011, after being toppled from power and dragged bruised and bleeding through the streets.

Dr Swire is among the more conspicuous supporters of Megrahi’s innocence and alternative theories of the Flight 103 disaster, which include claims that the explosion was the result of a drug deal gone bad, the work of Palestinian terrorists, or even retaliation by the Iranians, whose civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, was shot down without justification by a US Navy missile cruiser, killing all 290 people aboard, just 5 1/2 months before the Lockerbie disaster.

“Dr Swire is not a credible figure,” Duggan said, adding that US investigators initially liked the Iranian theory but were unable to find any evidence to corroborate it. “I’d like to say to Sheridan that you need to learn the facts before you assume that Megrahi was innocent. You need to look at other family members besides Dr Swire. I don’t know any American family members who agree with him.”

[Frank Duggan, a man whose knowledge of the facts of Lockerbie is so sketchy that he was able to be shown up on air by George Galloway, says that Dr Jim Swire is not a credible figure.  That really is rich!]

A missive from Frank Duggan

[What follows is the text of an email sent yesterday by Frank Duggan to me, Jim Swire, Father Pat Keegans and lots of others. I reproduce it here to illustrate, if further illustration were necessary, what a delightful human being Mr Duggan is:]

This monster [Gaddafi] was aided and abetted for the last quarter century by the likes of Prof Black and his always wrong legal experts; a sensationalist and disgraceful media, including news outlets (Scottish Herald, The Scotsman, and comical tabloids); media producers from BBC and others; shameless UK politicians like that dingbat Christine Grahame; book and movie promoters (the latest being John Ashton and Morag Kerr); the businessmen and diplomats who assisted Gaddafi's successful effort to have Megrahi released from the Scottish prison; and more.  Added to this incomplete list should be the UK family member, a supporter of Gaddafi from the very beginning, who sat with the Libyans during legal proceedings, went to Libya to hug Gaddafi, the man who murdered his daughter, and who called the detestable little murderer Megrahi "my friend" and a "gentle Muslim".

No one can take any pleasure reading these revelations about Gaddafi, but at least the thousands of investigators, police, prosecutors and law enforcement professionals who worked on the Lockerbie bombing can take some pride in not being persuaded by the many shills supporting Gaddafi. The Scottish justice system and the Crown Office is still being slandered, amazingly, in the UK press, even as they are seeking further proof in Libya. A handful of journalists, most recently Magnus Linklater, are derided when they report on the Libya supporters, who are more interested in publicity than justice. 

When Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, in cooperation with the new Libyan investigators, find more evidence, as they will, the enablers will do little to change their execrable promotion of Megrahi and his Libyan government sponsors.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/television/9130692/why-the-west-let-gaddafi-get-away-with-murder/

[Posted from Swakopmund, Namibia.]

Megrahi trial and first appeal lawyers defend their performance

[I am grateful to both Richard Marquise and Frank Duggan for sending me the text of the following report published in The Times on 21 December. It was not referred to on this blog at the time because it did not, for some reason, appear on the newspaper website (to which I subscribe, albeit through gritted teeth given my reluctance to contribute to the Murdoch coffers). It reads as follows:]

One of the key lawyers involved in the Lockerbie case has broken silence to condemn critics of the Scottish justice system,  who claim that Libya was not responsible for  the atrocity.

Bill Taylor QC, who defended  the  convicted Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, argues that allegations claiming the attack was ordered by Iran rather than Libya were examined in detail at the time of the trial, and dismissed, because they did not stand up to detailed scrutiny.

“We did raise all of these other possibilities in the course of our defence,” he said. “They were examined in the greatest detail, and fully investigated, but they did not stand up.  It’s like all the theories in the Kennedy assassination. They  are simply doors that have to be opened, and investigated if you are defending – as  we did.”

Mr Taylor’s intervention comes on the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, and follows a spate of conspiracy theories  aimed at undermining  the original verdict, which resulted in the conviction of al-Megrahi. The Libyan was imprisoned in Scotland, before being released and returned home  by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds in 2009.

Campaigners, led by Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the disaster, have long claimed that al-Megrahi was innocent, that Libya played no part in the bombing, and that the atrocity was ordered by Iran in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian airliner by an American warship in 1988.

However, lawyers involved at the time of the trial, who have not felt able to speak out in response, say that the Iran connection and other theories were subjected to rigorous scrutiny at the time, and failed to pass the standards required in a court of law.

In particular, the suggestion that the bomb was put on board at Heathrow rather than in Malta as the prosecution stated, was “tested to destruction” by the defence team, whose case would have been vindicated if it had stood up in court.

But it did not. They point out that those who now back the Heathrow theory have not been able to explain how clothes, purchased in Malta, were found in the suitcase in which the bomb was packed.

“If the suggestion is that the bomb was placed on board at Heathrow, how on earth did it occur to anybody to take a trip to Malta in order to buy some children’s clothing,  in order to take that clothing back to London to assemble a bomb?  It just doesn’t stack up,” said one member of the defence team.

Defence lawyers have always argued that  the identification evidence against al-Megrahi supplied by the Maltese shop-keeper Tony Gauci, was weak, and that if it had been tested in front of a jury, rather than being heard by three judges,  the Libyan would have been acquitted on those grounds.

The Scottish Crimninal Cases Review Commission, which examined the evidence in detail, concluded that this did constitute grounds for appeal. However, al-Megrahi returned to Libya before the appeal could be heard.

The evidence that he was involved in the plan to insert a bomb remains strong. At the time of the trial the prosecution sought to introduce additional evidence about the money he was paid by the Libyan government. Accounts totaling several million  dollars were found, which would have undermined al-Megrahi’s claim that he was only a low-level official. The evidence  was disallowed, because not enough time had been given to consider it.

Mr Taylor added  that the  decision by the  Libyan administration,  announced this week by the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, to appoint prosecutors to examine the evidence, undermined the  argument that Libyan was not involved in the outrage.  

He said: “If the bomb  was  planted in Heathrow or Frankfurt by people who were many  miles away in Libya, and of which the Libyans knew nothing, why is the new administration in Libya appointing two prosecutors,  who will be liaising  with the Lord Advocate in the discovery of any fresh evidence?”

[A commentary on this report will appear on this blog in due course. But in the meantime, for a rebuttal of the quite ludicrous assertion that the thesis of Heathrow rather than Malta ingestion of the bomb suitcase was “tested to destruction” by Megrahi’s defence team, readers are referred to Dr Morag Kerr’s book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. An account of the performance of Megrahi’s then legal team during the Zeist trial and the first appeal can be found here.]

Jim Swire responds to Frank Duggan's falsehood and fable accusation

[What follows is Dr Jim Swire’s response to Frank Duggan’s assertion that UK relatives are lying and promoting a fable when they refer to a member of  the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism saying: "Your government and mine know exactly what happened but they're never going to tell."]

I do not usually reply to statements in the media from Mr Frank Duggan, however he has recently very publicly accused me of lying, concerning an event which happened in the United States embassy, where Mr Duggan was present, acting as relatives' liaison officer over the Lockerbie case, I believe.

I was also present.

Mr Duggan now claims that an alleged remark to one of the British relatives was not made.

It is hard to understand how he would know that because the remark was made 'off the record', confidentially in an aside to the father of another British victim.

I know and trust that victim's father.

The remark made to him was "Your government and ours know exactly what happened but they're never going to tell.”

That is not the kind of remark which any bereaved parent is ever likely to forget, but Mr Duggan could not have overheard it; perhaps he also does not understand its implications for a bereaved family.

Perhaps whatever Mr Duggan does not hear does not happen?

[RB: Jim Swire here wrote a sentence about PCAST which I have omitted because it referred to the wrong PCAST. Dr Swire has now circulated a correction. In an email to me he says: 'In demonstration of the fallibility of my memory I must also point out that Google led me to the wrong use of PCAST.' I may add that I should be happy if my own memory were only as fallible as Dr Swire's.]

I do however owe Mr Duggan and others an apology: the meeting in the US embassy in London apparently took place in February 1990 not in 1989 as I had thoughtlessly previously claimed. Forgive the weakness of an old man's memory for dates, Mr Duggan, but these days there is always Google.

Those who wish to view Mr Duggan in action may like to dig out of the net the Channel Four showing of a film about Lockerbie called The Maltese Double-Cross, which was followed by a live on air discussion where again I was present, as was Mr Duggan and where I had to ask a Mr Buck Revell of the FBI (appearing by satellite) why his son had canceled his flight on Pan Am 103 instead of getting murdered like my daughter. Mr Revell is, I understand, no longer in the FBI. If I recall correctly he told us that his son had received an unexpected change of leave dates from the army. His son was not claimed to be a member of the staff at the US Embassy in Moscow, where warnings about a terrorist threat specific to Pan Am had been posted on a staff notice board well before the tragedy. [RB: I cannot find this particular discussion online. But another instructive media performance by Frank Duggan can be viewed here.]

We have always been mystified as to why the Pan Am 103 plane was 'only' 2/3 full just before Christmas.

I won't ascribe a date to that discussion group, in case my memory might again prove defective.

There was also a British near equivalent to this amazing revelation from PCAST. In her autobiographical book published in 1993 - two years after the two Libyans had been indicted over involvement in the Lockerbie disaster. Lady Thatcher wrote, speaking of the attack by the USAF on Tripoli in 1986, itself an alleged reprisal for a terrorist bombing of a German disco:

“It turned out to be a more decisive blow against Libyan sponsored terrorism than I could ever have imagined....the much vaunted Libyan counter attack did not and could not take place. Gaddafi had not been destroyed but he had been humbled.” (The Downing Street Years, pp 448-9)

I fear, Mr Duggan, we shall continue to seek the truth and since we are European citizens we have an inalienable right to that truth under the provisions of the ECHR. Please Google that.

UK Lockerbie relatives lying and promoting fable, says Frank Duggan

On 14 November I posted on this blog a letter from Dr Jim Swire published in that day’s edition of The Herald.  It contained the following sentences: ‘Outside a recent presentation of the Scottish play The Lockerbie Bomber in Malta there was an installation with a rotating base carrying the words "Your government and mine know exactly what happened but they're never going to tell". These words were confided in 1989 to a British relative who, like me, had been invited to the US Embassy in London to hear the results of a US presidential inquiry into Lockerbie.’

In response, the President of the US relatives’ organisation Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 Inc, Frank Duggan, has sent out to me and others an email in the following terms:

“This never happened and the story has been peddled for 25 years. I served on the Commission (President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism 1989-90) and was at the meetings held in London and Scotland where the statement was allegedly made by one of us to the father of one of the flight attendants in 1989. We were charged with investigating how it was done, not who did it. Everyone had suspicions, but there was a criminal investigation, at that time the largest ever, that had this responsibility. No one really knew who did it in 1989, since the timer that turned the investigation toward Libyan terrorists was not found until a year later. A father of one of the American victims tried repeatedly to demonstrate that this statement was never made, and offered to show photographs of everyone on the trip to the person who claimed he heard this. The proponents of this fable are not interested in the truth and would rather repeat it to UK tabloids, self promoting bloggers, dubious experts in the case, and assorted nutcases. The story is a lie.”

If it comes to a competition between the credibility of Martin Cadman and Dr Jim Swire on the one hand and Frank Duggan on the other, I know which side I would unhesitatingly choose.

A longer account of Mr Duggan's views can now be found in this article in The Christian Science Monitor.

Victims group continues search for answers in Pan Am 103 bombing

[This is the headline over a report published earlier this week in The Daily Orange, the newspaper of Syracuse University, New York, which lost 35 students in the Lockerbie disaster.  It reads in part:]

In the late-December days following the Pan Am Flight 103 explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, friends and family of the 259 passengers boarded their own flights across the Atlantic.

“Victims’ family members went to Lockerbie because they just wanted to be there,” said Frank Duggan, president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Inc. “They were still bringing bodies in from the field.” (...)

The group formally organized in February 1989 to discover the truth about the bombing, said Duggan, who said he did not know anyone on the plane. The founding members advocated for airline safety and created a support network for grieving family and friends. While the passage of various air safety and victims advocacy legislation speak to the weighty influence of the victims’ group, current board members say the group continues to be an active political force working toward its founding goals. (...)

Aside from airline security, the Pan Am victims have played a significant role in shaping the way the US government deals with victims of disasters, said Richard Marquise, a retired FBI agent who worked on the investigation from the day of the crash.

“We did not have a lot of experience in dealing with victims,” Marquise said. “This was the first big one where we had to deal with 189 American victims and you actually had a cohesive group that came together and started asking questions of investigators.”

Marquise said he remembered the first time he addressed the victims group in Albany, NY, in early 1991 and the painful experience of hearing the family members say they felt the FBI wasn’t making any progress in the investigation.

“In terms of dealing with victims, it’s something that we did not do very well in the late 80s and 90s,” Marquise said.

But since then, he said, Congress has passed legislation to give victims more rights and ultimately deal with victims in a more proactive manner. “I won’t say they came out of Lockerbie, but part of the Lockerbie experience fed into how it’s in the government today,” he said.

The relationship between the victims group and the government continues to develop, said Duggan, president of the group, considering the investigation into the bombing is still open despite the indictment of Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi.

“To this day, 25 years later, they convicted one guy and we know that he didn’t do it himself,” Duggan said.

He said the group met with former FBI Director Robert Mueller for a briefing on the investigation before Mueller’s retirement in September. At the briefing, nearly 25 years after the actual bombing, Duggan said, Mueller promised to find who else was involved in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

Said Duggan: “We’ve been promised that by the US government and I believe the US government is going to do the best they can to get to the bottom of that.”

[If the US government, like the Scottish police and Crown Office, are looking only in Libya they are unlikely to get anywhere.  But that, of course, may be the whole point.  

An interview with Frank Duggan has today been posted on the Syracuse website of The Post-Standard.]

French author accused of making capital out of the Lockerbie bombing in spy novel

[This is the headline over a report published today on the Daily Record website.  It reads in part:]

A French writer has been accused of exploiting the Lockerbie bombing in a tacky spy novel.

Gerard de Villiers has angered the families of those killed in the terrorist attack with his book Ghosts of Lockerbie. (...)

According to his novel, the Iranians carried out the bombing in a revenge attack and persuaded Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to take the blame for it.

De Villiers, 83, is regarded as France’s equivalent to James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

Susan Cohen, whose daughter Theodora died in the Lockerbie bombing at the age of 20, said: “It is an exploitation of the Lockerbie tragedy. The families have had to live with a lot of pain caused by these things.

“I would like to see Lockerbie treated with at least some dignity.

“It was a horrible tragedy and I don’t like it being turned into an escapist novel.

“The book is fiction but the sad thing is that fiction is often taken to be the truth by people, particularly if they don’t know anything about the subject.”

Les Fantômes de Lockerbie is de Villiers’s 197th novel in his SAS series about Austrian prince and CIA agent Malko Linge. (...)

The series has sold about 100 million copies worldwide, though most of his books have not been translated into English.

In the Lockerbie book, de Villiers’s fictional spy is sent by the CIA to find evidence of Iran’s involvement to force them to abandon their nuclear programme.

But Frank Duggan, of US-based Victims Of Pan Am Flight 103, said: “There was, and is, some suspicion that Iran had a role in the Lockerbie bombing but there was never a shred of evidence.

“Gaddafi and the Libyans clearly planned it, put the bomb on the plane and admitted it was because the US had bombed Tripoli in 1986. [RB: I should like to see the evidence on which Mr Duggan bases his assertion that Libya "admitted it was because the US had bombed Tripoli in 1986".]

“The case against a state-sponsored terrorist was decided by a unanimous Scottish court and upheld on appeal.

“I am sure it will be a good book and perhaps a movie but it is fiction.” (...)

According to de Villiers’s novel, the Lockerbie attack was carried out in retaliation for American warship USS Vincennes downing an Iranian passenger flight five months earlier, killing 290 people.

Earlier this year, De Villiers said: “I don’t consider myself a literary man. I’m a storyteller. I write fairytales for adults.”

[Only works of fiction that do not swallow hook, line and sinker Libyan responsibility for Lockerbie (like James Robertson’s forthcoming The Professor of Truth) seem to be characterised as “exploitation of the Lockerbie tragedy” by people like Mrs Cohen. Novels predicated on Libyan guilt -- like Vince Flynn’s Kill Shot -- escape the criticism.  Funny, that.]

Lockerbie bomb families say 'no' to more compensation cash from Libya

[This is the headline over an article published yesterday (Sunday) on the Daily Record/Sunday Mail website, following on from an item featured on this blog on Tuesday.  The article reads as follows:]

The families of those who died in the bombing say they aren't interested in the cash as all they want is justice for the victims.

Their announcement comes after reports that Libya wanted to end the investigation into the 1988 disaster which killed 270 people amid fears that the country would have to pay out extra cash to relatives.

Scottish police officers and prosecutors travelled to Libya last month to probe the bombing.

Libyan Abdelbaset al Megrahi was the only person convicted of the terrorist attack but Scottish authorities believe others were involved.

He died last year, three years after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and freed from jail in Scotland on compassionate grounds.

US-based Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 have written to Ali Suleiman Aujali, Libya’s ambassador to the States, to insist they are not looking for fresh pay-outs.

The late Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi paid families more than $2billion 10 years ago, although his regime insisted it was a political move and continued to deny being behind the bombing.

Frank Duggan, president of the relatives’ group, told the ambassador that the families aren’t interested in cash.

He said: “Justice is all that our victims’ families seek and our efforts have never been about monetary compensation, which surely cannot replace lost lives.

“We hope that your new government can prosper as a democratic state with justice for all of your citizens.”

The Crown Office said they could not comment as the Lockerbie case is a live investigation.

US Lockerbie relatives "seek justice, not more money" from Libya

[What follows is an excerpt from the Embassy Row column of 3 March on the website of The Washington Times:]

The relatives of victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing say they are still seeking justice, not more money, from the Libyan government, which admitted responsibility for the terrorist attack that killed 270 people.

The Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 wrote Friday to Libyan Ambassador Ali Suleiman Aujali to distance the group from a British news report that quoted Libyan Justice Minister Salah al-Marghani, who complained about British and U.S. requests to reopen the investigation into the bombing of the U.S. airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988.

“If they want to reopen the case they have to promise not to ask for more compensation,” he told the London Daily Telegraph.

Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi paid the families more than $2 billion in 2003. Gadhafi was overthrown and killed about eight years later.

Frank Duggan, president of the Pan Am relatives group, told the ambassador that the families want no more money.

“Justice is all that our victims’ families seek, and our efforts have never been about monetary compensation, which surely cannot replace lost lives,” he said.

The families support further investigation into the bombing, especially because only one Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was ever convicted of the attack. A Scottish court sentenced him to life in 2001, but the Scottish government released him in 2009, believing he had terminal cancer and only three months to live. He died last year in Libya.

Mr. Duggan told Mr. Aujali that the Pan Am families hope for the best in the Libyan government. “We hope that your new government can prosper as a democratic state with justice for all of your citizens,” he said.