Air Malta wins out-of-court settlement over Lockerbie programme

[This is the headline over a report published on this date in 1993 in the Maltese newspaper The Times. It reads as follows:]

Air Malta has won an out-of-court settlement from an independent British television company over a programme it felt implied negligence on its part in the 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am airliner bombing, lawyers for the Maltese carrier said yesterday.

Granada Television agreed to pay Air Malta Company Limited £15,005 to settle the dispute in connection with a dramatised documentary Why Lockerbie? About the bombing of the Pan American World Airways Boeing 747 over Scotland in which 270 people were killed.

The payment was made without any admission of liability, Air Malta’s lawyers said in a statement.

Air Malta had objected to a reconstruction of how the bomb might have been smuggled into the international airline system. The dramatized segment showed an Arab checking the bag on to an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt.

The Pan Am flight from London to New York, carrying some passengers who had travelled from Frankfurt, was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988. Two suspected Libyan intelligence agents have been accused of carrying out the attack but Tripoli has not handed them over for trial.

[RB: Granada was compelled to settle because there was no credible evidence that the bomb started from Luqa Airport in Malta. The judges at the Zeist trial held that it had done so. What follows is my published comment at the time of the verdict:]

The trial judges held it proved that the bomb was contained in a piece of unaccompanied baggage which was transported on Air Malta flight KM 180 from Luqa to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and was then carried on a feeder flight to Heathrow where Pan Am flight 103 was loaded from empty. The evidence supporting the finding that there was such a piece of unaccompanied baggage was a computer printout which could be interpreted to indicate that a piece of baggage went through the particular luggage coding station at Frankfurt Airport used for baggage from KM 180, and was routed towards the feeder flight to Heathrow, at a time consistent with its having been offloaded from KM 180. Against this, the evidence from Luqa Airport in Malta (whose baggage reconciliation and security systems were proven to be, by international standards, very effective) was to the effect that there was no unaccompanied bag on that flight to Frankfurt. All luggage on that flight was accounted for. The number of bags loaded into the hold matched the number of bags checked in (and subsequently collected) by the passengers on the aircraft. The court nevertheless held it proved that there had been a piece of unaccompanied baggage on flight KM 180.

[RB: Dr Morag Kerr has since, in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, conclusively established that the bomb suitcase started its fatal progress at Heathrow Airport, not Luqa.]

Parliamentary questions and answers on Lockerbie

[On this date in 1995, Tam Dalyell MP received answers in the House of Commons to several written questions about Lockerbie. The following are three of the questions and answers:]

Mr Dalyell: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs following the court case, Air Malta v Granada Television, and pursuant to the Prime Minister's answer of 31 January, Official Report, column 558, what evidence has been found to substantiate a Malta connection with the Lockerbie bombing.

Mr Douglas Hogg: Two Libyan nationals are accused of having placed, or having caused to be placed, the bomb which destroyed flight PA 103 on board an Air Malta flight from Luqa airport on 21 December 1988. As the hon. Gentleman knows, I cannot comment on the detail of the evidence against the two accused while criminal proceedings are pending. The recent out-of-court settlement between Air Malta and Granada Television has no bearing on the prosecution case against the two accused. I understand that the story in relation to which Air Malta brought the action was based on allegations different in detail from those contained in the warrants for the arrest of the two Libyans accused.

Mr Dalyell: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what consideration has been given to evidence involving officials of countries other than Libya in relation to Lockerbie; and what efforts Her Majesty's Government have made to obtain such evidence concerning nationals of countries, other than Libya, undertaken on 20 January 1992, Official Report, column 159.

Mr Douglas Hogg: The Lockerbie investigators have given exhaustive consideration to all information relevant to the Lockerbie bombing. The possible involvement by nationals of a number of countries has been very closely investigated. Despite the unprecedented scale of the investigation, the available evidence does not support charges against the nationals of any country besides Libya. But the investigation remains open and any relevant new information will be considered.

Mr Dalyell: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs for what reason Her Majesty's Government supported the United States decision that the Montreal convention, requiring attempts at conciliation and arbitration, should not be applied in relation to Pan Am 103 and Lockerbie; and what the preferred action was through the UN Security Council.

Mr Douglas Hogg: The question of the applicability of the Montreal convention is pending before the International Court of Justice. We and the US Government referred to the UN Security Council Libya's failure to surrender the two accused of the Lockerbie bombing in view of the frequently expressed concerns of the United Nations about the effect of terrorism on international peace and security.

Pan Am 103 case: A study in propaganda service

[This is part of the headline over a long article by Professor Emeritus Edward S Herman of the University of Pennsylvania that was published on the Global Research website on this date in 2007. It reads as follows:]

New York Times propaganda service has often been dramatically displayed in connection with the shooting down of civilian airliners. The editors were hysterical over the Soviet shooting down of Korean airliner 007 on August 31, 1983: 270 articles and 2,789 column inches during September 1983 alone, along with an editorial designation of the incident as “cold-blooded mass murder.” The paper took as truth the official and party line that the Soviets knew they were shooting down a civilian airliner. Several years later the editors acknowledged that their assumption had been wrong, but they blamed this on the government, not their own gullibility (ed, The Lie That Wasn’t Shot Down, Jan 18, 1988). It had done no investigative work on the case in the interim, and the lie was shot down based on information developed outside the media.

In a markedly contrasting response, when Israel shot down a Libyan airliner over the Sinai desert in February 1973, although in this case there was no question but that the Israelis knew they were downing a civilian airliner, the New York Times covered the incident much less intensively and without expressing the slightest indignation, let alone using words like “cold-blooded” or “murder.”

Equally interesting, the paper recognized the political importance of their treatment of each of these events: in the Soviet case, in a year-later retrospective, Times reporter Bernard Gwertzman wrote that US officials “assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its relations with Moscow.” With the orchestrated intense and indignant coverage of this shootdown the Soviets had suffered not only harsh criticism but boycotts for its action. By contrast, Israel suffered not the slightest damage. The New York Times editorialized that “No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan plane in the Sinai peninsula last week” (ed, March 1, 1973). Within a week of the shootdown, the Israeli Prime Minister was welcomed in Washington without incident or intrusive questions. In short, blame and debate is a function of utility, which is to say, political advantage. Where it helps, as in putting the Soviets in a bad light, we support assigning blame, indignation and debate; where it would injure a client, “no useful purpose” would be served by such treatment. And somehow the UN and “international community” react in ways that conform to what the US government and New York Times perceive as useful.

In the case of Pan Am 103, the political aspect of assigning blame has been clearly and, arguably, overwhelmingly important. The plane was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, with 270 plane casualties (and 11 persons killed on the ground). This followed by only five and a half months the US navy’s shooting down of Iranian airliner 655 in July 1988, killing 290, mainly Iranian pilgrims. The link between the two events was quickly seen, and the likelihood that the later event was an act of vengeance by Iran was a working hypothesis, supported further by an unproven claim of Western security forces that Iran had offered a $10 million reward for a retaliatory act. As the case developed it was soon a consensus of investigators that the Pan Am action had been the work of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) under the leadership of Ahmed Jibral, based in Syria, and responding to the Iranian offer.

But then, as relations with Saddam Hussein deteriorated in 1989 and 1990, and the United States sought better relations with Syria and Iran in the run-up to the first Persian Gulf War, Western officials became quiet on the Syria-Iran connection, followed by a fairly rapid shift from “definitive” proof of PFLP-Syrian-Iranian involvement to “definitive” proof that it was a Libyan act. As Paul Foot noted, “The evidence against the PFLP which had been so carefully put together and was so immensely impressive was quietly but firmly junked” (Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice, Private Eye, May/June 2001, p 10). Libya provided a suitable new culprit, as it was already on the U.S.-UK hit list and had been subjected to a series of efforts at “regime change,” a hostility based on its independence, support of the Palestinians and other dissident forces (including the ANC and Mandela in their resistance to the apartheid regime), as well as occasional support of anti-Western terrorists. So Libya it was.

The Libyan connection lasted in pristine condition from 1990 into 2007, during which time Libya was subjected to intensive vilification, costly sanctions imposed by the Security Council, and a highly publicized trial in Scotland that resulted in the conviction of a Libyan national for the Lockerbie murders, with further bad publicity for Libya and Kaddafi, and a payment of several billion dollars in victim compensation that Libya felt compelled to provide (although still denying any involvement in the shootdown). All this despite the fact that many experts and observers, including some victim family members, felt that the trial was a political event and a judicial farce that yielded an unwarranted and unjust conviction.

This belief in the injustice of the court decision was greatly strengthened in June 2007 when a Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission issued a decision that found the 2001 trial and decision flawed and opened the way for a fresh appeal for the convicted Libyan. If this decision is validated, the world will be left without a party responsible for the Pan Am-103 bombing, but with the strong likelihood that attention will be refocused on the PFLP and its sponsors, Syria and Iran. Is it not an amazing coincidence that this second turnaround occurs as Libya becomes more acceptable to the United States and its allies and these Western powers are now retargeting Syria and Iran?

We should note one other set of facts in this controversy that bears on the quality of “international justice.” That is, the treatment by the United States, New York Times, and international community of the shooting down of the Iranian airliner 655 by the US warship Vincennes in July 1988 and the process of bringing justice to the families of the victims of that act. It is true that this was not a planned destruction of an airliner, but it was carried out by a U.S. naval commander noted for his “Rambo” qualities and the civilian airliner destroyed was closely following its assigned air space (in contrast with 007). A point rarely mentioned in the U.S. media is that the U.S. naval vessel that shot the plane down was on a mission in aid of Saddam Hussein in his war of aggression against Iran.

The Reagan administration did express “deep regret” at the incident, although blaming Iran for hostile actions that provoked the U.S. action (which were later shown to have been non-existent) and for failing to terminate its war against Iraq–and as the United States was supporting Iraq, by definition Iran was the aggressor. It also paid some $132 million as compensation, including $62 million for the families of the victims. This is, of course, substantially less than Kaddafi felt obligated to pay the victims of Pan Am 103, the ratio of payments to the respective victims being roughly 30 to 1.

The New York Times, which had had an editorial entitled “Murder” in connection with the 007 shootdown, asserted back in 1983 that “There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner,” but it predictably found one for the 655 case: “the incident must still be seen as not as a crime [let alone “murder”] but as a blunder, and a tragedy.” Neither the UN Security Council nor International Civil Aviation Organization condemned the United States for this action, although both had done so as regards the Soviet Union in the case of Korean airliner 007, and of course the Security Council would eventually take severe action against Libya in regard to Pan Am 103. There was no punishment whatsoever meted out to Rambo Captain Will Rogers, who got a “hero’s welcome” upon his return to San Diego five months after the shoot-down (Robert Reinhold, Crew of Cruiser That Downed Iranian Airliner Gets a Warm Homecoming, NYT, Oct 25, 1988), and was subsequently awarded a Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service.” The Iranians were naturally angry at this reception and treatment of the man responsible for killing 290 mainly Iranian civilians, and were possibly a bit resentful at the workings of the system of international justice as it impacted them.

Polls indicated that the warm greeting Rogers got in San Diego was not an aberration—the public was pleased with his accomplishment. This reflected the fact that media coverage of the 655 shootdown had focused on official claims about the reason for the deadly act, not the plight of the victims and the grief of their families—which was the heavy and continuing focus of attention in both the 007 and Pan Am 103 cases. The alleged suffering of Captain Rogers got more attention than that of the 290 victims and their families. We are back to the contrast between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, and the “useful purpose” of the focus of attention, as seen by the U.S. establishment and media.

One further note on international justice concerns the treatment of the US bombing of Libya on April 14, 1986. That attack followed by little more than a week the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin that was quickly blamed by the Reagan administration on Libya, though proof of this connection was never forthcoming. The US bombing attack targeted Kadaffi’s residence, and, while failing to assassinate him, killed his young daughter along with 40 or more Libyan civilians. This was an act of state terrorism and a straightforward violation of the UN Charter, but here again a US (along with supportive British and French) veto prevented any UN Security Council condemnation, let alone other action, in response to this terrorism. The UN can act only when the United States wants it to act; it can never do anything in response to US or US client state violence, no matter how egregious. And the case of Libya and Pan Am 103 affords strong evidence that when the United States wants the UN to act against a target, serious penalties and other forms of damage can be inflicted that are based on false charges and a corrupted legal process (as described below).

We may note also that the New York Times editors were delighted with the 1986 terroristic attack on Libya. Their editorial on the subject stated that “The smoke in Tripoli has barely cleared, yet on the basis of early information even the most scrupulous citizen can only approve and applaud the American attacks on Libya” (ed, The Terrorist and His Sentence, April 15, 1986), The “early information” showed only that while the assassination attempt had failed scores of what the editors would call “innocent civilians” in a reverse context were killed. Thus once again the editors expose their belief that international law does not apply to the United States, and it demonstrates once again that civilians killed by the US government are “unworthy” victims whose deaths the editors can literally applaud.

As in the case of the shooting down of 007, on November 14, 1999 the New York Times had big headlines and lavished a great deal of attention and indignation on the US-British indictment of two Libyans alleged to have been the bombers of Pan Am 103, and it provided similar headlines, attention and indignation when the Scottish court found one of the two Libyans guilty on January 31, 2001. By contrast, the report that the Scottish Review Court had found the trial of the Libyans badly flawed and suggested that justice called for a new trial, was given no editorial attention and a single question-begging article (Alan Cowell, Lockerbie Ruling Raises Questions On Libyan’s Guilt, June 29, 2007).

At no time did any of the 15 Times editorials on the Pan Am 103 shootdown and Libya connection express the slightest reservation about the process or substance of the charges against the Libyans. As regards the politics of the case, with the seemingly strong case involving the PLP, Syria and Iran abandoned just when the United States was briefly cozying up to Syria and Iran, shifting to the continuing target Libya, the editors did refer to “cynics” who thought the administration “finds it convenient to downplay Syria’s dreadful record now that Damascus has joined Middle East peace negotiations” (ed, “Seeking the Truth About Libya,” March 30, 1992), but the editors refused to accept this cynical notion and, most important, it didn’t cause them to examine the evidence against Libya more closely. This was their government, Libya was a villain, and patriotism and built-in bias kept their blinders firmly in place.

As regards legal process, following the US-Scottish charges against the two Libyans, Libya immediately arrested the two suspects and started a judicial investigation, which followed precisely the requirements of the 1971 Montreal Convention dealing with acts of violence involving civil aviation. Libya promised to try the two men if evidence was supplied it, and it offered to allow observers and requested international assistance in gathering evidence. The United States and Britain rejected this on the ground that Libya would never convict its own, although if the trial was flawed they could have demanded action from the World Court. An exceptional Times op-ed column by Marc Weller argued that what Libya did was in accord with international law and that the US-UK action was not only illegal but also abused and politicized the Security Council (“Libyan Terrorism, American Vigilantism” Feb 15, 1992).

The Times’ editors ignored the Weller argument: as always, for the editors international law doesn’t apply to the United States. Also, it was clear to them that Libya could not be trusted to try its own—just as it never occurred to them that a trial of Libyans in the West could be anything but justice in action, even though the advance publicity by Western officials, once again demonizing the alleged villains and alleging “irrefutable evidence,” put great pressure on judges and juries and made a fair trial problematic.

A standard form of propagandistic journalism is to provide “balance” by citing on the “other side” the villains and their sponsors rather than independent critics. In past years the New York Times regularly cited Soviet officials for balance, rather than dissident US citizens who would have had more credibility with US audiences. In the Libya-Pan Am 103 case, the Times regularly cited Kaddaffi (“ranting”) and other Libyans as charging political bias in the proceedings, while neglecting Westerners with more authority. Most notorious, the Times has yet to cite Dr. Hans Köchler, [an Austrian] legal scholar who was Kofi Annan’s appointed observer at the trial of the two Libyans in the Netherlands (Camp Zeist) under Scottish law. Köchler produced a powerful Report and Evaluation of the Lockerbie Trial in February 2001 that was widely reported and featured in the Scottish and other European media, but was never once mentioned by the Times in its news or editorials. The other expert almost entirely ignored by the Times was Professor Robert Black, a Scottish legal authority who was an important contributor to the arrangements for the trial at Zeist, who followed it closely, and was immensely knowledgeable on both the trial and Scottish law. Black was mentioned briefly twice in Times news articles, but never in an editorial. It can hardly be a coincidence that the ignoring of Köchler and marginalizing of Black paralleled their finding the trial a travesty, badly politicized (Kochler) and with a judicial decision unsupported by credible evidence (Black [“a fraud”] and Kochler).

The Times has repeatedly claimed that the case against the Libyans resulted from a model police effort—they used the phrase “meticulous British and American police work” more than once—and it was allegedly supported by “hundreds of witnesses” and “thousands of bits of evidence.” Thus, while the trial never yielded a smoking gun, it provided compelling “circumstantial evidence.” At no point does the paper acknowledge any possible mismanagement or corruption in the collection and processing of evidence. Among the points never mentioned are that:

Not only “police” but the US CIA and other personnel were on the crash scene on December 21, 1988 within two hours of the disaster, moving about freely, removing and possibly altering evidence in violation of the rules of dealing with crash-scene evidence, and over-riding the supposed authority of the Scottish police (for details, John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, Cover-Up of Convenience, chapter 12, “’An Old-Fashioned Police Investigation’”). Presumably, for the Times, just as international law doesn’t apply to the United States, neither do the rules of proper assembling of evidence.

The key piece of evidence, a fragment from a timer, was first marked “cloth, charred,” but was later overwritten with the word “debris,” a change never adequately explained. Some months later, upon examination by UK forensic expert Thomas Hayes, a note about this fragment was written by him, but the page numbers were subsequently overwritten and renumbered, again without explanation. Months later, marks on the timer were allegedly identified with MEBO, a Swiss firm that manufactured timers, and one that did business with Libya. This was “conclusive evidence,” although MEBO also sold the timers to East Germany, Libya might have provided the timer to others, MEBO had reported several break-ins at its factory to the Swiss police between October 1988 and February 1989. Furthermore, when finally shown the fragment MEBO’s owner said it was a different color from his own, and it turned out that the CIA had this very timer in its possession.

All three forensic scientists who worked intensively on this case, one for the FBI (Tom Thurman) and two for a branch of the UK ministry of defense (Allen Feraday and Thomas Hayes) had run into trouble in the past for concealment of evidence (Hayes), wrong conclusions (in one case, false testimony on a explosive timer—Feraday), and fabrication of evidence (Tom Thurman). (See Foot, op cit, App 2, “The Three Forensic Geniuses.”)

The CIA had a major role in creating the case, their primary witness being the Libyan defector Majid Giaka. The CIA offered him to the prosecution even though years ago they had decided that he was a liar and con man. Giaka had said nothing about any Libyan connection to the Pan Am bombing for months after it took place, and he came through only when threatened with a funds cutoff. Paul Foot asks ” Why was such an obviously corrupt and desperate liar produced by the prosecution at all?” It is also testimony to the quality of the legal process that for a while the CIA refused to produce cables and e-mail messages regarding Giaka, arguing that they were irrelevant. When finally reluctantly produced they were not irrelevant, but showed the CIA’s own low opinion of Giaka. The Times did have a news article or two that described Giaka’s poor record and malperformance on the stand, but none of the 15 editorials mentioned him or allowed this phase of the proceeding to limit their admiration for police and prosecution.

Neither the US nor UK governments nor the Zeist court was willing to explore alternative models, several of which were more plausible than the one involving Libya. The one already mentioned, featuring the PFLP-Syria-Iran connection, was compelling: PFLP’s German members were found in possession of radio cassettes and workable timers; they had already used these in bombing attacks; they were known to have cased the Frankfurt airport just before the day of the bombing; one of their operatives had visited Malta and the shopkeeper who sold the clothes found in the Pan Am-103 debris first identified this individual (Abu Talb) as the purchaser; and there was evidence of this group’s link to Iran and claims of a paid contract, among other points.

In a related scenario, the bomb was introduced by the PFLP into the suitcase of Khalid Jaafar, an agent in a drug-running operation, protected by the CIA as part of its hostage-release program. The CIA involvement in this drug-running operation may have been one reason for the hasty and aggressive CIA takeover of the search at the crash site; and it, and the closely related desire to avoid disturbing negotiations with Syrian and Iranian terrorists holding Western hostages, may also help explain why President Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher apparently agreed in March 1989 to prevent any uncontrolled investigation of the bombing.

Not only were these governments unwilling to look at alternatives, they actually blocked other inquiries and pursued and tried to damage individuals who did so (see Ashton and Ferguson, Cover-Up, chap 8, “The Knives Come Out”). The Zeist court conformed to this program, with the result that actors for whom the “circumstantial evidence” was far more compelling than in the case of the Libyans were excluded from consideration.

The Times found the original US-British charges and the Scottish court’s decision satisfying, although based only on “circumstantial evidence.” They provided no serious analysis of this evidence, and both Robert Black and Hans Köchler, among many others, found the evidence completely inadequate to sustain a conviction except in a court where a conviction was a political necessity. Consider the following:

Although the case was built on the argument that the two Libyans carried out the operation together as a team, only one was convicted. As Köchler said: “This is totally incomprehensible for any rational observer when one considers that the indictment in its very essence was based on the joint action of the two accused in Malta.” This result can best be explained by the need to have somebody found guilty.

There is no evidence that the convicted Libyan, Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, put a suitcase on the connecting flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was supposedly transferred to Pan Am 103. Air Malta is notable for its close checking of baggage, and when UK’s Granada Television claimed that the death bag had gone through it to Pan Am 103, Air Malta sued. Its evidence that only 55 bags with ascribed passengers—none of whom went on to London–were on that flight was so compelling that Granada settled out-of-court, paying damages and costs. This of course never made it into the New York Times, and had little effect on the Zeist court, which eventually said that how the unaccompanied bag was put on the plane “is a major difficulty for the Crown case,” but it didn’t interfere with the finding of guilt.

The identification of al-Megrahi as the Malta purchaser of the clothing whose remnants were found in the wreckage was a travesty of judicial procedure. The selling storekeeper, Tony Gauci, originally said the buyer was six feet tall and 50 or more years old—al-Megrahi is 5-8 and was 37 years old in 1988. Gauci then identified Talb as the man, but eventually latched on to al-Megrahi after having seen his picture in the paper. There were many other weaknesses in this identification, including the timing of the purchase, so that like the disposition of the suitcase this also was another beyond-tenuous “circumstantial.”

The logic of the official scenario also suffers from the fact that putting a bomb-laden bag through from Malta that had to go through a second inspection and two stopovers in the delay-frequent Christmas season, would be poor planning as it risked either apprehension or a badly timed explosion; and including clothing that could be traced to Malta and with the alleged bomber (al-Megrahi) making his purchase openly would be extremely unprofessional. On the other hand, a timer frequently used by the PFLP was estimated by a German expert to explode 38 minutes after takeoff, and Pan Am 103 exploded 38 minutes after takeoff.

As noted earlier, the timer with the MEBO insignia came forth belatedly. It was gathered in a crash scene effort that violated all the rules and was then worked over in questionable circumstances by people who had an established record of creating and massaging evidence. These lags and problematics should have ruled out the acceptance of this evidence in a criminal trial by a non-political court. But even taking it at face value it fails to prove Libyan involvement in the bombing attack as this timer was available to others, and may have been stolen from the MEBO factory in the 1988-1989 break-ins.

The Times notes that “prosecutors credibly linked him [al-Megrahi] to bomb-making materials and presented persuasive testimony that he worked for Libya’s intelligence services.” Yes, this goes beyond his Libyan.citizenship, and the man was also sometimes in Malta! Imagine how the Times would treat an accusation against a CIA agent based on the fact that the accused had “access to weapons” and was in fact a member of the CIA! The Times doesn’t ask for much in the way of “evidence” when in the patriotic mode.

In its low-keyed news article on the Scottish Review Commission’s repudiation of the Zeist court’s decision ( “Lockerbie Ruling Raises Questions on Libyan’s Guilt,” June 29, 2007), Times reporter Alan Cowell does a creditable job of protecting his paper for failing to question another “lie that wasn’t shot down.” The Review Commission apparently leaned over backwards to avoid charging the Zeist court with judicial malpractice, so Cowell latches on to the fact that the Review stresses “new evidence that we have found and new evidence that was not before the trial court,” as well as their denial that there was proof of fabricated evidence. But much of that new evidence was deliberately excluded by the trial court, and some of it was hidden by the prosecution and its US and UK political and intelligence sponsors. And while there is perhaps no hard proof of fabricated evidence, there is solid documentation of its questionable handling and possible fabrication, which should have precluded its acceptance by the trial court.

Instead of citing Hans Kochler or Robert Black, Cowell quotes Dan Cohen, whose daughter went down with Pan Am 103, who expresses regret that al-Megrahi might go home a hero. Possibly more honorable would have been a Times apology and expression of sympathy for the Libyan victim, who will have spent 6 or 7 years in prison on the basis of manipulated and laughable evidence in another show trial, but which the Times repeatedly claimed was justice in action.

In her 1993 memoir The Downing Street Years, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote that after the 1986 US bombing of Libya, which used British airbases and in which Kaddaffi’s two-year old daughter was killed, “There were revenge killings of British hostages organized by Libya, which I deeply regretted. But the much vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not and could not take place.” Ms Thatcher seems to have forgotten Pan Am 103, or could she have momentarily forgotten that Libya was supposed to have been guilty of this act, and, writing honestly but carelessly for the historical record implicitly acknowledged here that this was a fraud that she had helped perpetrate. This nugget was reported in South Korea’s OhMyNews, but was somehow overlooked by the paper of record.

Intelligence agencies and disinformation

[I wish a happy Christmas to all readers of this blog.

What follows is an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer published by OhmyNews on Christmas Day 2007:]

British journalists -- and British journals -- are being manipulated by the secret intelligence agencies, and I think we ought to try and put a stop to it.  --David Leigh[1]

Intelligence agencies can manipulate journalists and their newspapers in various ways. Firstly, spies may recruit journalists or even impersonate them. It goes without saying that these long and broadly practiced activities are unhealthy as they put the life of every single journalist in danger, and particularly those who work as foreign correspondents.

Secondly, intelligence agencies can plant disinformation in mainstream media under false identity. In the months preceding the 1953 overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, intelligence agencies used this technique abundantly and without any difficulty, according to a copy of the CIA's secret history of the coup, which surfaced in 2000. "The Iran desk of the [US] State Department was able to place a CIA study in Newsweek, using the normal channel of desk officer to journalist. The article was one of several planted press reports that, when reprinted in Tehran, fed the war of nerves against Iran's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh," the document said. The third way for the spook to gain access to the media is rather subtle and particularly insidious. It consists of exploiting the vanity of journalists to impress on them to hide or lie about the real identity of their sources. Spies are said to have used this technique -- known as "I/Ops" for Information Operation -- heavily in the British press. Yet, it can rarely be documented. But once in a while, an I/Op gets out of control, giving the public a rare opportunity to take a peek inside the world of disinformation. In November 1995, The Sunday Telegraph published a sensational story about one of our then favorite villains: Libya. The paper accused Col Muammar Qaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, of running a major money laundering operation in Europe intended to fund weapons of mass destruction: Saif al-Islam is a "thoroughly dishonest, unscrupulous and untrustworthy maverick against whom the international banking community has been warned to be on its guard." The article had been written by then-senior correspondent Con Coughlin. Coughlin's source was described as a "British banking official." When The Sunday Telegraph was served with a libel writ by Qaddafi's son, the paper was unable to back up its allegation. The paper lodged three defenses. First, the lawyers argued that the newspaper had not injured Gaddafi's reputation. Second, they argued that the article about him was true. Finally, claiming the defense of qualified privilege, the lawyers argued that it was in the public interest to publish the articles even if they turned out to be untrue. For those who follow the Lockerbie farce -- the Megrahi second appeal over the Lockerbie judgment -- it is hard not to notice the irony of the last argument. Indeed, it seems that in the UK it is good for the public to be told lies while at the same time it is good for the same public not to be shown secret documents believed to be vital to unearthing the truth about the largest crime ever committed on UK soil. "Is it in truth a classic muddle? A story of security service incompetence, a story of black propaganda, a story The Sunday Telegraph did not take that much care with because it never thought the matter would come to court?" asked James Price, QC, for Saif al-Islam. During the trial in April 2002, bits of the true story began to emerge. On Oct 19, 1995, the Conservative foreign secretary Malcom Rifkind had arranged a lunch that Coughlin attended. During that meeting, Coughlin was told by Rifkind that Iran was trying to get hold of hard currency to fund its WMD program in spite of UN sanctions. Rifkind encouraged Coughlin to follow this story. The dispute was settled in less than two days of trial.[2] "There was no truth in the allegation that Gaddafi participated in any currency sting," said Geoffrey Robertson, QC, representing Telegraph Group Ltd. "The Sunday Telegraph has accepted not only that there is no truth in these allegations, but that there is no evidence to suggest that there is any truth in them, and they have agreed to apologize to the claimant [Saif al-Islam] in this court and in the newspaper," Price told journalists. One had to wait for the publication of David Hooper's book Reputations Under Fire to learn that the source of the article was not a "British banking official." Actually, they were intelligence officers working for MI6. It is now understood what really occurred. On Oct 25 and 31, 1995, Coughlin was briefed by a MI6 man (source A) who appeared to be his regular contact with the agency. Source A gave Coughlin an overview of the plan. Through an Austrian Company, Iran was selling oil on the black market to fund its secret military nuclear program. Moreover, on Nov 21, 1995, source A introduced Coughlin to a second MI6 person (source B) who described the involvement of Saif al-Islam in the counterfeiting scam.[3] Source B requested strict confidentiality. The next day, the two MI6 officers described the money laundering deal in great detail during a four-hour meeting. Eight billion dollars would be transferred out of banks in Egypt and replaced by Libyans dinars, minus a substantial commission. The Libyans would hide their involvement through a Swiss branch of an international finance company. Meanwhile, an Iranian middleman would provide a large amount of fake currency. On Nov 23, Coughlin met once more the two intelligence officers who showed him copies of the banking records. There is just one problem with the story. The intelligence officers made it up. It was pure fabrication and Coughlin bought it while hiding the true identity of his source. "I believe he [Coughlin] made a serious mistake in falsely attributing his story to a British banking official. His readers ought to know where his material is coming from. When The Sunday Telegraphgot into trouble with the libel case, it seems, after all, to have suddenly found it possible to become a lot more specific about its sources," wrote David Leigh. "Our first task as practitioners is to document what goes on in this very furtive field. Our second task ought to be to hold an open debate on what the proper relations between the intelligence agencies and the media ought to be. And our final task must then be to find ways of actually behaving more sensibly." Has Coughlin learned anything from the affair? It seems that the answer to this question is definitely no. He went on writing about the false link between Saddam and al-Qaida and the false allegations concerning the Iraqi WMDs. He wrote that the Iraqis could access their WMDs within 45 minutes. Coughlin has written numerous articles about the alleged Iranian military program such as "Meanwhile, Iran Gets On With Its Bomb," "Israeli Crisis Is a Smoke Screen for Iran's Nuclear Ambitions," "Iran Accused of Hiding Secret Nuclear Weapons Site," "Iran Has Missiles to Carry Nuclear Warheads," "UN Officials Find Evidence of Secret Uranium Enrichment Plant," "Iran Plant Has Restarted Its Nuclear Bomb-Making Equipment," and "Iran Could Go Nuclear Within Three Years." Not a single one of these articles quotes a named source. 1. "Britain's Security Services and Journalists: The Secret Story," British Journalism Review, Vol 11, No 2, 2000, pages 21-26. David Leigh is assistant editor of The Guardian. He is former editor of The Guardian's comment page and former assistant editor at The Observer. He is a distinguished investigative reporter and formerly a producer for Granada Television's World in Action program. In 2007, he was awarded the Paul Foot prize, with his colleague Rob Evans, for the BAE bribery exposures. 2. Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington, D.C., and a nephew of King Fahd, is understood to have brokered the settlement at the request of The Sunday Telegraph. 3. The reader should keep in mind that in late November 1995, MI6 was approached by Libyan dissidents concerning their plan to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in February 1996. MI6 met with one member of the group, code name Tunworth, in late November 1995.

Granada Television's "Why Lockerbie?"

[On this date in 1990 Granada Television’s dramatised documentary Why Lockerbie? was broadcast in the United Kingdom. It was later broadcast in the United States under the title The Tragedy of Flight 103. Paul Foot in his Private Eye special report Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice had this to say (page 7):]

The programme focused on a bakery in Malta and a Palestinian cell based there. The programme made the same connection as the Sunday Times had done a year earlier – between the fact that the clothes in the bomb suitcase were bought in Malta and the less certain fact that an unaccompanied bag from Malta was loaded onto a Pan Am feeder flight from Frankfurt to London and thence to Pan Am 103. To illustrate this hypothesis, the programme showed a sinister-looking Arab checking in a bag at Malta airport and then sliding surreptitiously away while the plane took off.

This was too much for Air Malta, who sued Granada for libel. Norton Rose, the London commercial solicitors, compiled a huge dossier detailing almost everything about the flight from Malta to Frankfurt on the day of the Lockerbie bombing and proving that all 55 bags checked in on the flight could be ascribed to passengers, none of whom travelled on to London. The evidence was so powerful that Granada settled the action before it got to court. They paid Air Malta £15,000 damages and all the costs of the case. The only time these matters had been tested in a legal action, the Maltese connection to the bomb suitcase was comprehensively demolished.

The case that won’t go away

[This is the headline over an article by John Wight published on this date in 2010 on the Socialist Unity website. It reads as follows:]

The case of convicted Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, and the controversy surrounding his release on compassionate grounds by the Scottish Government last year, refuses to go away.

At time of writing both Kenny McAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary responsible for releasing Mr Megrahi, and Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, have turned down requests to appear before a US Senate Committee Hearing into Megrahi’s release and whether or not any back door deals between the Libyan and British governments involving BP had any bearing on it.

The stridency and vehemence of the criticism that came from the US at the time of Megrahi’s release, and which continues to this day, reflects the double standards, hypocrisy, and dissembling which denotes US relations with the rest of the world.

Convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2001, 11 years after the bombing was carried out, and after a trial in the Netherlands conducted under the strictures of the Scottish legal system, which for the uninitiated remains separate and distinct from its counterpart in the rest of the UK, Megrahi has consistently protested his innocence of the biggest terrorist attack ever committed in Britain, when 270 people were killed after a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988. The victims comprised all 243 passengers and 16 crew members on board, along with 11 residents of the small Scottish town which gave its name to the atrocity thereafter.

Some of the relatives of the victims had consistently cast doubt over Megrahi’s conviction. One of those, relatives Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the bombing, told BBC radio at the time of his release. “I don’t believe the verdict is right. It would be an abominable cruelty to force this man to die in prison.” Other relatives remained circumspect and had called for Megrahi’s scheduled appeal hearing, which he dropped a few days before his release, to go ahead. Pamela Dix, whose brother Peter died in the attack, said. “I am not absolutely convinced of Megrahi’s guilt nor of his innocence. We simply at this point do not know enough to be able to make that judgment.”

In contradistinction, victims’ families in the US had called for Megrahi to complete his sentence in Scotland and continue to be convinced of his guilt. In this they’ve been joined by their government, which in the days and weeks leading up to the Libyan’s release made strong representation to Kenny MacAskill in the form of public statements, letters from ranking senators, and even a personal phone call from US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

Despite such an outpouring of protest in advance and in the wake of Megrahi’s release, and up to this day, it is well nigh certain that he was convicted and imprisoned for something he didn’t do.

During the original trial no material evidence was presented linking the Libyan to the bombing, let alone any evidence that he put the bomb on the plane or that he handled any explosives. Even the prosecution subsequently questioned the credibility of its star witness.

The central pillar of the prosecution’s case was that Megrahi wrapped the bomb in clothes before checking it on to an aircraft in Malta without boarding the aircraft himself. The bomb, the prosecution alleged, was subsequently transferred at Frankfurt on to the flight to London, and then loaded on to the flight to New York. Two years after the bombing Granada Television made a documentary of the event which included a dramatic reconstruction. In it a bag containing a bomb was loaded on to an Air Malta flight by a sinister-looking Arab, who then sloped off without boarding. Upset by the damage to its reputation, Air Malta sued Granada. The airline’s solicitors compiled a dossier of evidence demonstrating that all the bags checked on to the flight which Megrahi was supposed to have planted the bomb were accompanied by passengers and that none of those passengers travelled on to London.

The evidence was so compelling that Granada settled out of court.

Since the Crown never had much of a case against Megrahi, it was no surprise when the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) found prima facie evidence in June 2007 that the Libyan had suffered a miscarriage of justice and recommended that he be granted a second appeal.

The truth is that this entire case, from the bombing in 1988 all the way up to Megrahi’s release in 2009, reflects a shift in the geopolitical and strategic interests of the nations concerned. Back in 1988 Libya occupied the status of international pariah in the West. The Libyan government, then as now led by Colonel Gadaffi, at one time funded and supported national liberation organisations and movements as disparate as the Provisional IRA and Black September, as well as various militant groups throughout the developing world. Relations between Libya and the West reached their nadir in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration sought to overthrow the quixotic Libyan president. Indeed, a US airstrike in 1986, carried out from military bases in Britain, almost succeeded in killing Gadaffi, who only narrowly escaped.

The overwhelming view of informed opinion is that Lockerbie was the work of Iran in conjunction with the Syrians. The Palestinian splinter group, PFLP-GC, led by Ahmed Gibril, were contracted to carry out what was an act of retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger aircraft over the Strait of Hormuz in July 1988 by the USS Vincennes. It came just two years after the story broke that officials within US intelligence and the US Government had conducted secret arms deals with Iran in an attempt to obtain the release of American hostages being held by Iranian backed militias in Lebanon. The money paid for the weapons was used to fund Contra death squads then operating in Nicaragua. In March 1988, Colonel Oliver North and John Poindexter, a former naval officer and National Security Advisor within the Reagan administration, were convicted in relation to the scandal, known to the world and to history as Iran-Contra.

The difference today is that Libya is no longer treated or perceived as a rogue state in the West. In fact, ever since renouncing his weapons of mass destruction programme in the wake of the US and British invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, Colonel Gadaffi has been rehabilitated as a leader the West can do business with. Given its prodigious oil and gas reserves the official visits to Libya first by former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in 2004, followed by former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in 2008, were as predictable as they were revelatory. It is known that BP in particular was keen for Blair to restore relations with Libya in order to allow access to Libyan oil reserves and lobbied the government to this effect in 2007.

Part of this deal on the Libyan side involved the release of Megrahi, a member of Libyan intelligence, who was sacrificed by his government to the arms of the Scottish Justice System in an attempt to break out of the country’s economic isolation and normalise relations with the West. The expectation was that he’d be found not guilty. The expectation proved wrong.

In 2009 a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) was drawn up between both countries. At the time the only Libyan being held within the UK prison system was Megrahi, thus preparing the ground for his release.

Conveniently, Blair and Straw landed the controversy on the lap of the SNP Scottish Government, citing jurisdiction, whose decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds was made at the expense of his appeal going ahead. It was an appeal hearing which promised to reveal that his conviction had been bogus, a fact known to both the British and Americans at the time he was found guilty and sent to prison. The political fallout from such an eventuality would obviously have been enormous.

Regardless of the geopolitical context surrounding the Megrahi case the Scottish Government has been principled and correct in refusing to bow to US pressure both at the time of the release and now in refusing to appear in front of a Senate Hearing into the case. The issue of sovereignty is involved, as is the issue of jurisdiction.

The release of al-Megrahi was right and just. Relying on medical advice at the time, Kenny McAskill was entitled to believe that the prisoner had only three months to live. It was the decent thing to do to allow him to spend what time he had left with his family in Libya. That he’s survived this long is a moot point under the circumstances.

As for the victims of Lockerbie, justice for them continues to be denied as a result of the geopolitical machinations of their respective governments. Twas ever thus.