American Cassandra - Susan Lindauer’s Story

The fascinating story of Susan Lindauer and her connection to the Lockerbie case, as told by Michael Collins in Scoop Independent News at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0710/S00266.htm

By Michael Collins
“Scoop” Independent News
Washington, D.C.

Above all, you must realize that if you go ahead with this invasion, Osama bin Laden will triumph, rising from his grave or seclusion. His network will be swollen with fresh recruits, and other charismatic individuals will seek to build upon his model, multiplying those networks. And the United States will have delivered the death blow to itself. Using your own act of war, Osama and his cohort will irrevocably divide the hearts and minds of the Arab Street from moderate governments in Islamic countries that have been holding back the tide. Power to the people, what we call “democracy,” will secure the rise of fundamentalists. Susan Lindauer’s last letter to Andrew Card, January 6, 2003*

Susan Lindauer sent her eleventh and last letter on the Iraqi political situation to then Bush chief of staff Andrew Card on January 6, 2003, just two months before General Franks gave the command to invade on March 20, 2003. She’d sent ten other letters on Iraq to Card, her second cousin, over a two year period.

In her final letter she made a prophetic plea to head off the war. Through Lindauer’s back channel contacts at the Iraqi United Nations mission, Lindauer said that she’d gathered a great deal of information. She had good reasons to believe that the Iraqis were ready to offer huge concessions on inspectors and on other United States demands.

As the opening quotation shows, she correctly predicted what other knowledgeable observers believed. While the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan had al Qaeda on its knees, an Iraqi military defeat would lead to a civil chaos. This would provide the basis for a resurrection of bin Laden’s operation and then revive the al Qaeda terrorist risk to the United States.

Lindauer was arrested on March 17, 2004, fifteen months after the last letter to Andy Card and two years after the trip to Baghdad referenced in the indictment. She was charged with “conspiring to act and acting as an unregistered agent of the government of Iraq” and “forbidden financial transactions” with Iraq totaling $10,000 relating to those acts. The charges cover the period of October, 1999 through February 2004.

She denies acting as an Iraqi agent and says that she’d been recruited by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency to open a back channel for contact with Middle Eastern nations that lacked formal diplomatic ties the U.S. She asserts that CIA was overseeing her contacts with Iraq and that the U.S. government was fully informed of her activities.

She was very specific when she said that she had no knowledge of or contact with the two Iraqis named in her indictment. In his final ruling on the case, Judge Mukasey observed that:

It bears emphasis here that it was never the government's theory that Lindauer participated in such conduct, or indeed that she even knew the Al-Anbuke brothers. Rather, she and they were charged together only because both allegedly conspired with IIS. Judge Michael B. Mukasey, Opinion and Order, September 6, 2006.

At her preliminary hearing, she was remanded for trial in federal court, Southern District, New York, and placed on $500,000 bail

Another 18 months passed without action until the prosecution requested that Lindauer undergo a psychiatric evaluation. The prosecution argued that she was unfit to stand trial for two reasons: she believed that she was not guilty and she was therefore unable to contribute to her defense since she didn’t understand that she might be convicted. Her failure to accept guilt by denying what the prosecution called delusions somehow proved mental incompetence.

Based on the psychiatric evaluation, Judge Mukasey ordered Lindauer to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, Federal Medical Center (Carswell FMC), Ft. Worth, located on the grounds of Carswell Air Force Base. Lindauer reports considerable distress at confinement and the condition of her fellow female inmates.

Lindauer has consistently maintained her innocence throughout this entire affair. After seven months at FMC Carswell, she had a hearing with Judge Mukasey in early May 2006. The psychiatrists at the federal prison facility wanted to force her to take psychotropic medication, a position strongly supported by the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case. She vigorously objected to this, which was the basis for the May hearing. The government’s rationale for forced medication and the treatment at Carswell FMC will be discussed in more depth in the second part of this series.

Rather than being sent back to the prison facility, she spent four months at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. Finally, on Sept. 8, 2006 she was released by order of Judge Mukasey. He flatly denied the U.S. Attorney’s request for forced medication, noting contradictory opinions on diagnosis and poor support for the efficacy of the medication recommended by court appointed and prosecution experts.

His opinion and order implied that there was not much of case against her: “There is no indication that Lindauer ever came close to influencing anyone, or could have.” Opinion and Order, Judge Michael B. Mukasey, Sept. 6, 2006

The Judge ordered that Lindauer be released from jail. She remains free to this day. Through former U.S. Attorney Brian Schaunnessy of Washington, D.C., she is seeking a trial on the charges levied and sees that as a public forum to verify her story and clear her name.

Susan Lindauer’s Story

After seeing an article I wrote on Attorney General nominee Mukasey, Susan Lindauer emailed Jeff Tiedrich, publisher of the political web site that carried the story. She complimented my analysis of Mukasey, which had mentioned her case. I received the email, contacted her, and requested an interview. She agreed.

Susan Lindauer and I met on two occasions for a total of about six hours. In addition, there was an additional two hours of phone contact to assure that I accurately represented her story. She says this is the first time anyone contacted her for an in depth interview on her story and experience.

She was engaging, articulate, and energetic during the interviews and follow up calls. In this article, I present her story as she told it to me. In part two of the series, I cover her confinement at FMC Carswell, examine how the initial round of her case was handled, including Judge Mukasey’s dismissive remarks about the merits of the case against her. I will also present information from individuals who support her character and knowledge of Lockerbie and Iraq and offer some speculation on motives and handling of her arrest.

What follows is neither a brief in favor of her case, nor is it a fishing expedition to generate cheap shots regarding her claims. It’s simply her story.

Susan Lindauer seeks a trial on the charges to prove her innocence.

She says that:

• She worked for United States intelligence to create back channel communication with key Middle Eastern states and all of her actions were under the supervision of U.S. intelligence.
• She was recruited by U.S. intelligence to perform this function in 1994 due to her anti sanctions position and the belief that the targeted states would find someone with her position and contacts appealing.
• She made significant contributions through her U.N. diplomatic contacts with Libya for the hand over of accused Lockerbie bombers to Scottish authorities. After Lockerbie, she worked as a back channel to Iraq on resuming weapons inspection.
• She is innocent of all charges filed.

Lindauer reports that her role as a back channel operative for the U.S. resulted from a 1994 meeting with Dr. Richard Fuisz in Chantilly, Virginia. He approached Lindauer who was then on the staff of Representative Ron Wyden (D-OR), now a U.S. Senator. She says that Fuisz, reportedly a CIA operative, wanted to get out information on terrorist threats from Syria and its proxies who he said were responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. Fuisz claimed that he could identify the specific culprits behind the Lockerbie – Pan Am 103 bombing.

She noted that her knowledge of Arab culture and her positions as an anti sanction, pro peace advocate positioned her for service as a conduit to nations hostile to United States. This put her in a position, “to open a back channel to receive terrorism information from those nations under sanctions.”

Lockerbie, Scotland and the Bombing of Pan Am 103

The Clinton administration was interested in using her as an entrée to communicate with Libya officials, according to Lindauer. Her specific task was to help obtain the hand over of two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing to stand trial for the destruction of the Pan Am flight and deaths of 259 passengers and 11 Lockerbie citizens

Lindauer described playing an instrumental role in negotiating the handover of the two suspected bombers from Libya through her Libyan contacts at the U.N. mission. She performed the liaison role through the Libyan mission at the U.N. As a result of her work and other efforts, she reports that Libya turned over two male suspects, al-Megrahi and Fhimah, to Scottish authorities. They were indicted and tried for the bombing and 270 deaths. Scottish prosecutors convicted Al Megrahi but not Fhimah.

During the lead up to the trial, Lindauer had serious questions about the guilt of the Libyans that she helped secure for trial. She says, “Other Arab contacts told me that Mohammed Abu Talb, Abu Nidal, in addition to Ahmed Jibril were the key to this awful crime.”

In 1998, she provided U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan with a deposition containing information that she obtained from Dr. Richard Fuisz. This was prior to Annan’s visit to Libya which Lindauer says was for a meeting to discuss the Lockerbie trial with Gadaffi. In the deposition, she offered this: “(Fuisz) says freely that he knows first hand that Libya was not involved in any capacity whatsoever. It's my understanding that he can provide further details regarding his part in the investigation, or details identifying the true criminals in this case.”

However, Fuisz was the subject of a 1990’s gag order and required specific permission from the U.S. in order to give a sealed deposition for the Lockerbie trial.

Lindauer’s statement on Lockerbie caught the attention of the Scotland’s Sunday Herald:

[In 1994] One month before a court order was served on him (Fuisz) by the US government gagging him from speaking on the grounds of national security, he spoke to US congressional aide Susan Lindauer, telling her he knew the identities of the Lockerbie bombers and claiming they were not Libyan. Sunday Herald May 28, 2000

The Herald discussed her role in negotiations with Libya:

Congressional aide Lindauer, who was involved in early negotiations over the Lockerbie trial, claims Fuisz made "unequivocal statements to me that he has first-hand knowledge about the Lockerbie case". In her affidavit, she goes on: "Dr Fuisz has told me that he can identify who orchestrated and executed the bombing. Dr Fuisz has said that he can confirm absolutely that no Libyan national was involved in planning or executing the bombing of Pan Am 103, either in any technical or advisory capacity whatsoever.” Sunday Herald May 28, 2000

Her position was not that different than an analysis offered in Time Magazine in 2002. Both she and Time speculate that Ahmed Jibril, a Palestinian resistance leader allied with Syria, was responsible for the bombing. Time magazine even suggested that the terrorist act was a “hit” on a special U.S. military group seeking to free American hostages held in Lebanon.

Just recently, Time ran another article on findings by investigators raising factual questions that cast doubt on the guilty verdict of the one suspect actually convicted in the case.

On June 28, 2007, Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) made a referral of the al Megrahi conviction for further review due to a critical flaw in the case. Evidence from a Maltese shopkeeper that helped convict al Megrahi was accepted by trial judges without a “reasonable basis”. The SCCRC is empowered to refer flawed decisions to Scotland’s Supreme Court, which must hear the case.

Just recently, October 2, 2007, The Scotsman reported that “Fresh doubt has been cast over the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber after it emerged a document containing vital evidence about the bomb timer has never been shown to the defense.”

In addition, The Scotsman, Oct. 6, 2007, reported that two key witnesses, the Maltese shopkeeper and the head of the company that manufactured the timing devise for the bomb, were offered $2 million and $4 million respectively by U.S. officials to tilt their testimony for a conviction of al Megrahi.

Lindauer said that her work on Lockerbie started in 1995, “I was being used aggressively at this point for positive things.” She didn’t see any inconsistency between her activism and her work with the intelligence community. She opposed both sanctions by the United States and violence by terrorist states.

Thus, by her logic, her work for U.S. intelligence was no different than her activism – the goals were the same. She said, “From the perspective of my life, I was able to work against sanctions” and also work against terrorism emanating from rogue states. Noting the global reach of the events and the stakes, she now says, “This work makes you know how small you are.”

An Opening to Iraq

After Lockerbie, Lindauer says her work focused exclusively on Iraq, although she’d started contact with Iraqi diplomats at the U.N. in August, 1996. She followed her previous approach and sought out diplomats at the Iraq mission to the U.N. Her assignment was to help gain a resumption of weapons inspections based on the rigorous standards outlined by the U.S. She also made a trip to Iraq one year before the U.S. invasion.

During 2000, Lindauer began her efforts to cultivate Iraqi contacts for better relations with the U.S. She described an extraordinary opportunity that might have changed the entire direction of U.S. - Iraq relations. As the secular dictator of an Arab state, Hussein was not fond of Islamic terrorists. Lindauer reported to her U.S. contacts that the Iraq government would welcome an F.B.I. taskforce into Baghdad. She reported further, that “The F.B.I. would be able to interview witnesses and make arrests.” Further, she says that:

Iraq also offered banking records and proof of financial transfers that would prove Middle Eastern involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing and the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

The program met with a frosty reception from the newly installed Bush administration. Lindauer said, “I was told that the new administration was evaluating its position on Iraq, in light of collapsing international support for sanctions.” There was no action on the plan. In fact, based on what we know now, improved relations with Iraq were not on the agenda from the beginning of the Bush-Cheney era.

This leads to the second phase of her activities regarding Iraq, the events that ended with Lindauer’s arrest, indictment, and incarceration at FMC Carswell, Ft. Worth, Texas.

Cassandra

A year before the invasion, in March 2002, Lindauer took a trip to Iraq to meet with government officials. She smiled broadly as she affirmed the value of that mission: “It would be regrettable if the US government lied about its knowledge of this trip.” She paused and smiled again, “We can prove their total awareness.”

Lindauer sent 11 letters to Card staring in 2001 leading her to pose this question: “If he wanted to discourage me to stop talking to the Iraqis, all he had to do was say so.”

In the final letter sent to Card, Lindauer delivered her accurate prediction of the results of the invasion she worked to avoid – a disaster in Iraq fueling resistance groups hostile to the U.S. along with a revival of al Qaeda.

She accurately estimated the true value of the exile groups cultivated by the Bush administration and, in the case of Ahmed Chalabi, used almost exclusively by New York Times writer Judith Miller as the basis for her discredited claims in New York Times that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Once U.S. bombing starts, the Iraqi exiles will have no credibility as leaders. None whatsoever. They will be hated as pawns of the United States, and my God, let me tell you Arabs can hate. A U.S. victory will never be sweet for long. Lindauer letter to Card, January 6, 2003*

She argued passionately, with dramatic emphasis, that there was a deep well of hostility towards the U.S. as a result of deaths caused by U.S. supported U.N. sanctions from 1990 through March 22, 2003. This is a story not well covered in the U.S. press but one with palpable results for the people of Iraq.

That hatred has kindled deeply because of the sanctions, Andy. Sanctions have killed 1.7 million human beings, including almost one million little children. Stop and think. What would an American father do to the man who killed three of his children, once that father could finally lay hands on the aggressor? Would he throw candy in the streets? No, he’d beat him to death and stab him 100 times until his arms were sore. And then he’d look for the next man, stalking until the right moment. In Baghdad, I met a man who lost 8 members of his immediate family in one year. That’s right, eight dead in ONE year. Multiply that by 20 million people.” Lindauer letter to Card, January 6, 2003*

While the Department of Justice questions Lindauer’s role as a cooperator with U.S. Intelligence and a question was raised about her ability to “influence anybody,” there can be little doubt about her analysis and predictions concerning post-war Iraq. Just in this final letter, she nailed down the myth of the exiles and their role in building a new Iraq, the extreme hostility of Iraqis toward the U.S. presence and personnel, and the resurrection of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Whatever her sources and inspiration, Susan Lindauer is truly an American Cassandra.

Note by RB: The Judge Michael B Mukasey mentioned above is President George Bush's nominee for the position of Attorney General of the United States to replace Alberto Gonzales. He is currently undergoing nomination hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7003532,00.html
and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7047261,00.html
and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-7053610,00.html
He has now been confirmed as Attorney General by the US Senate:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-mukasey9nov09,1,3685347.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

Lockerbie: the CIA drug-running scenario

[On this date in 2011, Susan Lindauer’s article Lockerbie Diary: Gadhaffi, Fall Guy for CIA Drug Running was published on the Scoop website. The following are excerpts:]

From May 1995 until March 2003, I performed as a back channel to Tripoli and Baghdad, supervised by my CIA handler, Dr Richard Fuisz, who claimed from day one to know the origins of the Lockerbie conspiracy and the identity of the terrorists. http://issuepedia.org/1998-12-04_Susan_Lindauer_Deposition He swore that no Libyan participated in the attack.

Armed with that assurance, our team started talks with Libya's diplomats for the Lockerbie Trial, and I attended over 150 meetings at the Libyan Embassy in New York. After the hand over of Libya's two accused men, our team engaged in a concerted fight to gain permission for Dr. Fuisz to give a deposition about his primary knowledge of the conspiracy, during the Lockerbie Trial In a surprise twist, the US Federal Judge in Alexandria, Virginia imposed a double seal on a crucial portion of Dr Fuisz's deposition. The double seal can only be opened by a Scottish judge. In my opinion, that should be a priority, as testimony hidden by the double seal maps out the whole Lockerbie conspiracy. Most significantly, it identifies 11 terrorists involved in the attack. Dr Fuisz's testimony could put the whole matter to rest forever.

There's good reason for my confidence. Much to my surprise, during the Lockerbie talks, Dr Fuisz's allegations of CIA opium running in Lebanon received unusual corroboration. One day, as I left the office of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun on my lunch break, an older spook caught up with me in front of the US Supreme Court. From out of nowhere, he stepped in my path and invited me to lunch. With extraordinary candor, he debriefed me as to what motivated the CIA's actions. I remember it as one battle-hardened old spook sharing the perils of fieldwork with a gung ho young Asset, anxious to get started on great adventures.

It was a morality tale for sure. According to him, the CIA infiltrated opium and heroin trafficking in Lebanon as part of a crisis operation to rescue AP reporter Terry Anderson and 11 other American and British hostages in Beirut, including CNN bureau chief Jeremy Levin and Anglican envoy Terry Waite. The hostage crisis was a legitimate CIA concern. The CIA Station Chief of Beirut, William Buckley, was also kidnapped by Islamic Jihad and brutally tortured to death, his body dumped in the street in front of CIA headquarters. The rescue was protracted and complicated by Lebanon's Civil War—ultimately, Terry Anderson's captivity lasted seven years. Many of the hostages suffered beatings, solitary confinement chained to the floor, and mock executions.

The older spook who refused to identify himself swore that the CIA considered it urgently necessary to try every possibility for recovering the hostages. The concept of infiltration into criminal networks cuts to the murky nature of intelligence itself. Drug enforcement frequently rely on the same strategies. Where the CIA went far wrong was in pocketing some of those heroin profits for itself along the way. The dirty little secret is that the CIA continued to take a percentage cut of opium and heroin production out of Lebanon well into the 1990s.

As for the hostage rescue itself, considering the operation took years to accomplish, it's always been whispered that a corrupted CIA officer enjoying those opium profits might have swallowed reports on the hostages' locations, or otherwise diverted his team in order to protect his narcotics income.

That appears to have become a serious fear at the time, among other US officers jointly involved in the rescue.

In December 1988, infuriated Defense Intelligence agents issued a formal protest, exposing CIA complicity in Middle East heroin trafficking. When teams from both agencies got summoned back to Washington to attend an internal hearing, they boarded Pan Am 103. A wing of militant Hezbollah led by Ahmed Jibril, his nephew Abu Elias, Abu Talb and Abu Nidal took out both teams in order to protect their lucrative cartel.

Classified Defense Intelligence records show that Jibril and Talb had been toying with a conspiracy to bomb a US airplane during the 1988 Christmas holidays anyway. They planned to bomb a US airliner in revenge for the USS Vincennes, which shot down an Iranian commercial airliner loaded with Hajiis returning from Mecca in July, 1988. However the Defense Intelligence threat to expose their heroin network put the bombing plan into action. Islamic Jihad's ability to discover actionable intelligence on the flight schedules would definitely confirm that somebody at CIA was operating as a double agent, keeping Islamic Jihad a step ahead of the rescue efforts.

That's the dirty truth about Lockerbie. It ain't nothing like you've been told. (...)

But the bottom line is that Libya had nothing to do with the bombing of Pan Am 103, which exploded over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland. We should care about Lockerbie because of the serious problem that it exposed. Opium trafficking out of the Bekaa Valley provides a major source for global heroin production. In turn, the global pipeline of narco-dollars keep militant operations alive world-wide from the Middle East to Indonesia, Colombia, Burma and the Far East.

Lockerbie, and the mangled logic of Magnus Linklater

[This is the headline over an article by John Ashton in today’s edition of the Scottish Review.  It reads as follows:]

Earlier this month, together with other supporters of the 'Lockerbie bomber', Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, I found myself accused in the Scottish Review of being an obsessive conspiracy theorist, impervious to fact or reason. The article's author, The Times' columnist Magnus Linklater, believes that, far from being a stain on Scottish justice, Mr Megrahi's case 'triumphantly vindicates' it.

He argues that we prefer innuendo, myth, and half-truths to straight evidence and independent judgement, yet he displays exactly that preference. For good measure, he misrepresents his opponents, mangles logic and contradicts himself.

He ascribes to us two related conspiracy theories: firstly that the bombing was commissioned by Iran and carried out by the Syrian-based anti-PLO, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command; and, secondly, that there was a grand conspiracy to shift blame to Megrahi and Libya, to which the police, the Crown Office, witnesses, judges, senior politicians and the intelligence services were all willing parties.

A word about that term 'conspiracy theory'. It's a cheap and nasty little put-down that herds honest truth-seekers into the same pen as the Elvis-was-abducted-by-aliens crowd, while relieving the user of the obligation to properly address the facts.

If the Iran/PFLP-GC scenario is a conspiracy theory, then so too is what the Crown posited at Megrahi's trial. That theory went as follows. On 21 December 1988 he placed a suitcase on board Air Malta flight KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt. It contained a bomb concealed within a Toshiba BomBeat radio-cassette player and was labelled for New York on PA103. From Frankfurt it was transferred to a Heathrow then loaded onto PA103.

The suitcase was packed with clothes that Megrahi had bought in Malta on 7 December, from a shopkeeper called Tony Gauci. He took the case to Malta on 20 December and the following morning flew home on a flight whose check-in time overlapped with KM180's. Before leaving, he managed to place the suitcase on KM180 with the help of his former LAA colleague Lamin Fhimah, with whom he stood trial.

The two men fronted companies for the Libyan intelligence service, the JSO. One of them, ABH, co-owned by Megrahi, shared Zurich offices with electronics company Mebo, which, three years before Lockerbie, had supplied 20 unique electronic timers to Libya, one of which was used in the bomb.

As conspiracy theories go, it was pretty lousy. Mr Linklater acknowledges that the case was entirely circumstantial. What he ignores is that, towards the end of the trial, the Crown amended the indictment, quietly dropping many of the conspiracy claims, a tacit admission that much of its theory was unsupported.

What of the evidence? Mr Linklater's summary thoroughly exaggerates its strength: 'It placed al-Megrahi in Malta on the relevant date, travelling in the company of another intelligence operative, holding a false passport, and identified as the purchaser of clothing, later found in the case which held the explosives. Forensic evidence, in the form of a fragment of timer used to detonate the bomb, had been supplied to the Libyans by its Swiss manufacturer. Subsequent evidence also turned up some $1.8 million in al-Megrahi's personal bank account, calling into question the Libyan government's description of him as a low-ranking airline worker'.

To summarise more accurately: the evidence suggested that Megrahi was not in Malta on the clothes purchase date; there is no evidence that his travel companion was an intelligence operative and the evidence suggests that he only worked for the service in 1986 (the claim that he was a senior intelligence agent was made by discredited Libyan CIA informant Magid Giaka, who also alleged that Colonel Gaddafi was a freemason); he kept the false passport and handed it over at trial – hardly the actions of a terrorist; forensic evidence proves that the timer fragment was not from one of the 20 Libyan timers; Megrahi never described himself as a low-ranking airline worker, rather he admitted that he used his connections to senior Libyan officials to make a nice living importing goods through ABH; had he testified at trial, the court would have been shown bank and company records that support his claim that all the bank transactions were legitimate. (...)

Many aspects of the Crown's theory were incredible. For example, Megrahi chose to buy clothes in a small shop and did so in a random manner, which seemed designed to bring attention to himself. Rather than compartmentalising the operation, as any sensible terrorist would, he returned to the island a fortnight later to plant the bomb. Furthermore, he chose to launch it on a three-stage journey from Malta's Luqa airport, where Mr Fhimah was well known, and which had unusually strict baggage procedures.

Libya's supposed motive was revenge for the US air raids of 1986. This element of the theory was contradicted by none other than Margaret Thatcher, who wrote in her autobiography that the 'Libyan counter attack did not and could not take place…There was a marked decline in Libyan-sponsored terrorism in succeeding years'.

Since the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, no evidence has emerged publicly to suggest that Libya was involved in the bombing – this despite the fact that the opposition leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil claimed to have proof of Gaddafi's involvement. (When pressed on the claim by the BBC, the best he could offer was that the government had paid for Megrahi's legal case.) Inconveniently for the Crown, some senior anti-Gaddafi figures have challenged claims of Libyan involvement.

In defending the official narrative, Mr Linklater offers the following king-sized non-sequitur: 'Even the Libyan government appears to accept that the origins of the plot lie in their country – it has appointed prosecutors to liaise with Scottish investigators in their search for further proof'. The appointment of prosecutors does not connote an acceptance of Libyan involvement.

Mr Linklater points out that my books barely touch upon another alleged case of Libyan aviation terrorism, the bombing of UTA flight 772 in 1989. The reason is simple: I am not an expert on it and am therefore happy to accept that Libya might have been to blame. (French journalist Pierre Péan, who is an expert, has, I am told, destroyed the official case.) The UTA bombers' use of a Samsonite suitcase and a timer, according to Mr Linklater, makes the attack 'strikingly similar' to Lockerbie, yet the Sikhs who blew up Air India flight 182 in 1985 also used a Samsonite case and a timer.

A more startling parallel, in my view, is the fact that the forensic cases both rested on tiny fragments of the alleged timers recovered from a vast crash site, which were analysed by the same discredited FBI expert, and traced to a shady European supplier. And, as with Lockerbie, the prosecution rested upon the erratic testimony of a single witness.

What, then, of the Iran/PFLP-GC conspiracy theory? Mr Linklater ascribes it to Megrahi's supporters, yet the Justice for Megrahi campaign, to which most of the supporters are signatories, is deliberately neutral on the matter. For reasons I am about to explain, however, as I cautioned in my book Megrahi: You are my Jury, the case against these alternative suspects may turn out to be as flawed as the one against Megrahi – a statement that undermines Mr Linklater's characterisation of me as wholly wedded to this counter theory.

Iran had a powerful motive: revenge for the US Navy's shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655, which killed 290 six months before Lockerbie. Declassified US intelligence documents state as fact that Iran hired the PFLP-GC. Another, written months after the investigation had switched to Libya, stated that Iran's interior minister had paid the bombers $10 million. In October 1988 a PFLP-GC cell in West Germany was caught by the police planning an attack on western airlines. Its bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat, confessed that he had made five barometrically triggered bombs, two of which he had concealed within a mono Toshiba BomBeat radio cassette players. The Lockerbie Toshiba BomBeat was stereo.

According to Khreesat, a senior group member and airline security expert known as Abu Elias evaded arrest. Less than three weeks before the bombing, without naming the PFLP-GC, a US State Department security bulletin warned of an imminent attack by anti-PLO Palestinian terrorists based in Europe. It added: '[Targets] specified are Pan Am airlines and US mil[itary] bases'.

Apologists for the official line have claimed that the intelligence documents merely recycled old and unreliable intelligence, yet a deep-cover CIA asset called Richard Fuisz was told by numerous high ranking Syrian officials as late as 1995 (four years after the two Libyans were indicted) that the PFLP-GC's leader, Ahmed Jibril, was taking credit for the bombing. These sources, said Fuisz in a 2001 court hearing, the scope of which was severely limited by the CIA, interacted with Jibril on a constant basis.

Mr Linklater wrote in an email to me: 'I am amazed that you should be touting shadowy CIA agents like Fuisz…whose evidence would never stand up in court'. He stopped short of calling Fuisz a liar, because there is nothing to suggest that he is, but the pejorative verb and adjective carried the innuendo that neither of us were to be trusted. How does Mr Linklater know that Fuisz's evidence would not stand up? If the CIA had loosened its leash on Fuisz, he could have named names, and provide leads and evidence that would have been accepted in court.

On to that second conspiracy theory. According to Mr Linklater's Times column of 13 August 2012, we allege a huge plot to shift the blame from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya, which involved: 'the planting or suppression of forensic evidence, the control of witnesses by intelligence services, the approval of senior politicians, the complicity of police officers, a prosecution team prepared to bend every rule to secure a conviction, and a set of senior Scottish judges willing to go along with that'.

The last sentence is key. It suggests that we claim that everyone from the police to the judges plotted with government and intelligence services to protect the likely bombers and convict those whom they knew to be innocent. The trouble is neither I, nor the great majority of Megrahi's supporters, have ever made such a claim.

To be clear, I believe that two different things happened: firstly, the US government ensured that blame was from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya; secondly, the Scottish criminal justice system screwed up massively. The first I consider likely, but unproven, the second I consider a cert. Both are based upon a rational evaluation of the available facts. I do not believe that the second occurred because the Americans told the Scots to exonerate the real culprits and frame innocents, indeed I find such suggestions fanciful.

In an email to me, Mr Linklater wrote: 'I've been in the [journalism] business for more than 40 years, and have learned over that time a simple principle of reporting: that good investigation requires sound proof'. Yet he has failed to produce any evidence that the majority of Megrahi's supporters have posited a grand conspiracy. The Justice for Megrahi campaign committee has formally alleged that some of the failures might have involved criminal conduct by certain Crown servants. They do not, however, claim that it happened at the behest of governments and intelligence services.

The US government was motivated to exonerate Iran, I believe, because the Iranians knew where the Iran-Contra skeletons lay and also held sway over the US hostages held in Lebanon – whose safe return was an obsession of the Reagan-Bush White House. Another obsession was Libya. As Watergate journalist Bob Woodward revealed, CIA director William Casey launched one of the biggest covert programmes in the agency's history, with the clear aim of toppling Gaddafi. Disinformation – that is, lying and fakery – was at its core.

The Lockerbie investigation was supposedly driven by old-fashioned detective work, but, as we have learned over the years, behind the scenes the CIA played a key role. We now know that the timer fragment was not from one of the 20 timers to Libya. Is it really far-fetched to suggest that the CIA planted it in order to conclusively link Libya to the bombing?

I have done many months of my own old-fashioned detective work among the hundreds of people who searched the crash site. They witnessed American officials in Lockerbie within two hours of the crash, CIA agents searching the site without police supervision, and substantial drug and cash finds – all things that have been officially denied. There may well be innocent explanations for these events, in which case the authorities should reveal them. And, instead of writing me off as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps Mr Linklater should do some door knocking of his own.

The core of his argument is that we have dismissed hard evidence in favour of speculation, yet our chief concern is not the suspicion that blame was shifted. Rather, it is that the evidence that convicted Megrahi was anything but hard, and that the hard evidence that should have acquitted him was withheld.

Our case is built on facts, not speculation – these facts in particular:

1. The trial court judgement, delivered by three of Scotland's most senior judges, was deemed unreasonable by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, indeed the commission came as close as it legally could to saying that the guilty verdict itself was unreasonable.

2. The SCCRC discovered that the Crown had withheld numerous items of evidence that, in its view, would have been important to Megrahi's defence. No fewer than four of the SCCRC's six appeal referral grounds concerned such undisclosed evidence.

3. During the trial, two senior prosecutors viewed the previously redacted extracts of CIA cables concerning the key Crown witness and CIA informant Magid Giaka. They reported back to their boss, the Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC, that there was nothing within them that might assist the defence, and he relayed the assurance to the court. However, when that material was later disclosed to the defence, it was found to contain numerous damaging details, including the fact that his CIA handlers had grown so dissatisfied with him that they had been on the verge of sacking him. The revelations prompted Fhimah's leading counsel, Richard Keen QC, to comment that he found it 'inconceivable' that the Crown could have considered the material had no bearing on the case. The SCCRC noted that Mr Boyd's assurance to the court was 'difficult to understand'. (...)

4. The Crown Office allowed the police to obtain a $2m reward for the most important prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, despite the payment of such rewards being against its own rules (a subject on which I have also written for the Scottish Review). The Crown withheld the results of forensic tests, which had been supervised by the chief prosecution forensic scientist, that directly contradicted his crucial assertion that the timer fragment was 'similar in all respects' to the boards used in the timers supplied to Libya.

5. Despite being under a legal obligation to investigate all leads, not only those that point to Libya, the police and Crown Office have failed to interview witnesses who can attest to the fact that the fragment could not have originated from the Libyan timers.

6. When, in 2012, the committee of Justice for Megrahi submitted a summary of their allegations of criminal misconduct in confidence to the justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, and invited him to appoint an independent investigator to consider them, MacAskill instead passed them to the Crown Office and told them to take the allegations to the police, even though Crown Office officials and police officers were named in the allegations. Despite having seen neither the detailed allegations, nor the supporting evidence, the Crown Office immediately declared publicly that they were 'without exception, defamatory and entirely unfounded' and that the committee had been 'deliberately misleading', i.e. were liars.

These are all facts, not opinions or theories. Mr Linklater fails to acknowledge most of them and the rest he brushes over lightly. I believe that they add up to the greatest scandal in Scotland's post-devolution era. The Crown Office's response to the Justice for Megrahi committee's allegations is especially disturbing. The allegations remain unproven and their subjects are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but they were made in good faith by people of intelligence and integrity, among them a former police superintendent, the former parish priest of Lockerbie and the father of one of the Lockerbie victims. However, the Crown Office's petulant and partisan response excluded from the outset any prospect of prosecutions.

Rather than engaging with the SCCRC report's awkward contents, Mr Linklater has used it to mow down his straw men of conspiracy nuts. In a Times article he claimed that the report 'triumphantly vindicates' the justice system. This is like suggesting that the emergency services who save lives at a train crash are a triumphant vindication of rail safety.

He asserts that the SCCRC disposes of most of our 'cherished theories' in particular claims that evidence had been manipulated by the police. These allegations emanated not from Megrahi's supporters, but from a former police officer known as the Golfer. I have also been critical of the Golfer. Strange, then, that Mr Linklater should have inferred that I cherish the Golfer's claims.

He accuses us of rejecting parts of the report that don't suit us, when we in fact accept most of them. But if, as we believe, the report is a curate's egg, are we not entitled to say so? Parts of it are demonstrably poor; for example, the commission conducted a lengthy review of the evidence concerning the timer fragment, yet failed to uncover the crucially important fact – based upon the evidence of Crown witnesses – that it could not have originated from one of the Libyan timers. Its investigation of events at the crash site was very limited and it failed to interview any of the civilian and military witnesses who attest to the events and finds that I have described above.

It is not only Mr Linklater's conspiracy theorists who don't accept all the SCCRC's findings: neither did the lawyers who led Megrahi's second appeal (which, sadly, he felt compelled to abandon in order to secure compassionate release). They also contended that there were serious failings in the conduct of his defence and that the defence team was mistaken in not leading certain evidence in relation to, inter alia, the PFLP-GC, Heathrow airport and Tony Gauci.

I am not a lawyer and therefore make no judgement on the defence team, who have vigorously contested these claims. But to imply, as Mr Linklater does, that it is a matter of uncontested fact that they properly evaluated all the evidence is simply misleading.

Mr Linklater is apparently oblivious to the contradictions in his own arguments, with occasionally hilarious consequences. For example, having dismissed my summary of the police investigation as 'little more than a caricature', he delivers this cartoon-like portrait of his antagonists: 'Once seized with the virus of suspicion, nothing in the way of fact or reason will deter those who are determined to prove their case'.

He berates me for using the phrase 'we may never know', declaring that he has always distrusted it as 'it is a means of dropping a hint without ever revealing whether there is any truth in it'. How marvellous that he later writes: 'The SCCRC raised questions about the identification, which, it determined, were grounds for appeal. Whether that would have overturned the verdict we may never know'.

The hint dropped by this particular 'we may never' is that the verdict would have stood. To drive home the point he claims that Megrahi might have been convicted, even if he had not been correctly identified as the clothes purchaser. If he has properly read the court's judgement, he should know that the 'identification' – not an identification at all, of course – was central to the conviction. But maybe he hasn't properly read it, because, as he acknowledges, he is not a Lockerbie specialist. This is especially apparent in his account of the Heathrow evidence, which has come under fresh scrutiny thanks to the publication of the book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? by another of his targets, Dr Morag Kerr.

Mr Linklater's Times article of 21 December highlighted an assertion by Mr Megrahi's trial counsel, Bill Taylor QC, that the Heathrow evidence was 'tested to destruction'. An unnamed member of the defence team added the suggestion that the bomber had bought clothes in Malta then planted the bomb at Heathrow: 'just doesn’t stack up'. Again, this was odd, because during his final submissions to the court Mr Taylor argued, quite rightly, that Maltese clothing did not prove the bomb's origin. Clothes bought weeks earlier had plenty of time to leave the island prior to the bombing.

Mr Linklater says that the implication that the bomber bought clothes in Malta and planted the bomb at Heathrow 'requires a heavy suspension of disbelief'. The idea that the same person bought the clothes and planted the bomb is, I agree, far fetched (although this is what the Crown posited at trial), but is not the suggestion that the bombers used the clothes to lay a false trail to Malta. As Mr Taylor asked during his final submissions: 'If the clothes buyer had intended to place the bomb bag on to a plane at Luqa, having regard to the high level of risk of detection, wouldn't one have expected him to remove the clothing labels?'.

Mr Linklater claims that the SCCRC found the evidence of a Heathrow bomb 'so thin' that it did not bother to examine it. What the SCCRC actually said was that it did not examine the Heathrow evidence because it received no submissions on the matter, and because it received substantial attention at trial. The evidence we found when preparing Megrahi's second appeal was, in the view of senior counsel, significant and should have been before the trial court. It is clear, both from Dr Kerr's analysis and the second appeal team's, that the trial court was not given a clear view of the Heathrow evidence. (I wrote more about this in an open letter to Mr Linklater, to which he has so far failed to respond.)

Mr Linklater's biggest howler is his assertion that Dr Kerr and I claim that the bombing was linked to a break-in that occurred at Heathrow 15 hours earlier. We do no such thing, indeed we both accept that the break-in may well be wholly irrelevant. Mr Linklater points out, as I have previously, that the matter was considered and rejected at Mr Megrahi's first appeal, but this does not excuse the Crown's failure to disclose it.

For all that he insults me as an irrational conspiracy theorist, we should be grateful to Mr Linklater for his contributions. The Megrahi case deserves public debate and, until he emerged as the voice of the 'it-couldn't-happen-here' tendency, that debate was very one-sided. When boiled down, his defence of the conviction is that the Crown case 'has been tested and re-tested under the strict conditions imposed by a court of law', whereas the counter evidence has not. Yet he knows that court scrutiny is no guarantee of a conviction's safety.

The most notorious miscarriage of justice cases, like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, were only resolved when the courts accepted the evidence and arguments of the victims' supporters. Which begs a big question: when those convictions still stood, but their weakness were widely known, would Mr Linklater have defended them with the equivalent vigour? As he might say, we may never know.

John Ashton is a writer, researcher and TV producer. He has studied the Lockerbie case for 18 years and from 2006 to 2009 was a researcher with Megrahi's legal team. His book 'Megrahi: You Are My Jury', is published by Birlinn  

[An expanded version of this article can be found on Mr Ashton's Megrahi: You are my Jury website.]

Today's Channel 4 News Lockerbie revelations

[What follows is the text of an item posted tonight on John Ashton’s website Megrahi: You are my Jury:]

There follows the text of a press release issued this afternoon by Channel 4 News. I shall be releasing the documents upon which the report is based on this blog at 7.30 pm. [RB: The documents in question have now been released by John Ashton. They can be accessed here. An introduction to them by Mr Ashton can be read here.]

REVEALED:

Secret CIA testimony identifies true Lockerbie mastermind

Strictly Embargoed: 6.00pm Friday, 20 December 2013

Please credit Channel 4 News with all content used

Documents released for the first time today reveal that both high-level Syrian officials and the CIA independently stated that a Syrian-based Palestinian group, not Libya, was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.

An exclusive report to be broadcast on Channel 4 News reveals that a deep cover CIA agent was told by up to 15 high-level Syrian officials, and the CIA itself, that a Syrian-based Palestinian group, rather than Libya, was responsible for Lockerbie.

The documents which will feature in tonight’s programme, were made in two US court depositions by CIA agent Dr Richard Fuisz in late 2000 and early 2001.

Fuisz stated that in 1989 he was briefed by the CIA that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command had carried out the bombing. More importantly, he added that, between 1990 and 1995, 10 to 15 senior Syrian officials also told him that the group was responsible. He said that the officials interacted with the PFLP-GC’s leader, Ahmed Jibril, ‘on a constant basis’ and that he was the mastermind behind the bombing.

Fuisz gave a deposition at the request of defence lawyers for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah, who were, at the time, on trial for the bombing. However, the revelations came too late to be used at the trial, which ended within days of the second hearing. Three unnamed CIA officers and a US department of justice lawyer were present throughout the hearings, ensuring that Fuisz was prevented from answering many of the questions.

The PFLP-GC were the original prime suspects in the bombing. Declassified US intelligence documents claim that the group was paid by the Iranian government to avenge the 290 lives lost when Iran Air flight 665 was accidentally shot down by a US battleship of over the Persian Gulf a few months before Lockerbie. Members of the PFLP-GC were arrested in West Germany two months before Lockerbie. During the raids the police recovered a Toshiba radio-cassette player containing a barometric bomb. Forensic investigators determined that the Lockerbie bomb had also been contained in a Toshiba radio-cassette player.

The transcripts of the hearings, and related documents, are being released by Scotland’s Shame author John Ashton, who found them earlier this year in the Libyans’ legal files. Mr Ashton has been involved a Channel 4 News item about the new evidence, which will be broadcast tonight.

Mr Ashton said today: ‘This evidence is yet another indication that the real Lockerbie bombers got away and that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was wrongly convicted. The British and American governments declared in 1991 that Libya was solely responsible for the bombing, yet for years after senior Syrians were saying that the PFLP-GC was responsible. It seems it was an open secret that the real bombers lay outside Libya.’

[An accompanying article on Mr Ashton’s website can be read here.]

CIA held Syrian militants responsible for Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over an article by Jon Swaine that was published on The Telegraph website on this date in 2013. It reads as follows:]

The CIA secretly held Syrian militants, rather than Libya, responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, according to newly unearthed testimony from a former US spy in the Middle East.

Dr Richard Fuisz said in a sworn deposition in 2001 that he was told by up to 15 senior Syrian officials that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) had carried out the attack.

He also testified that CIA bosses told him the PFLP-GC was responsible, according to a lawyer's note of a second deposition. Ahmed Jibril, the group's founder leader, who is still alive at 75, was singled out as being to blame for the downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988, killing 270 people.

"Numerous high officials in the Syrian government were quite affirmative on Jibril's involvement in Pan Am 103," Dr Fuisz told lawyers, during his deposition in Virginia in 2001.

Dr Fuisz gave his depositions in 2000 and 2001 at the request of Megrahi's defence lawyers. However, the evidence came too late to be used in the trial. They were first published by Channel 4 News. The CIA declined to comment.

Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime was publicly blamed by the US for the attack, and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the bombing in 2001. He was later released and died last year in Libya.

But serious doubts about the conviction have been raised by investigative journalists for several years, centring on forensic evidence, and Libya has strenuously denied involvement.

The PFLP-GC were in fact the first prime suspects in the investigation.

Experts suggested it may have been ordered by the Iranian government as revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet by a US battleship months earlier, killing 290.

They added that blame may have been diverted from Iran in order to protect secret and delicate negotiations by George Bush's US administration over western hostages.

Dr Fuisz, a businessman who is said to have been a senior US intelligence asset in the Middle East in the 1980s and 90s, said that the Syrian officials he spoke to interacted with Jibril "on a constant basis" and that he was widely regarded to be the mastermind behind the bombing.

Asked who the Syrian officials cited as their source for the information, he said: "My recollection is they were direct. They were not hearsay sources on their part." Asked if that he understood that to mean that he was "being told by members of the Syrian government that Jibril, and or members of the PFLGC were taking credit for the bombing," he replied: "Yes".