This is a big deal, Mr Linklater

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

Magnus Linklater tells me he has read my book (Adequately Explained by Stupidity? – Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, Troubador, £12.99), but you really wouldn't know from his treatment of it in his article for the Scottish Review (8 January). He quotes a couple of ambiguous passages that might have been taken from the publicity material, and then proceeds to criticise what seems to be an entirely different volume.

Surely the very title might suggest to him that his favourite pejorative, 'conspiracy theorist', might be misapplied, but not a bit of it. This is a contemptuous dismissal, nothing more than a lazy slur, used to avoid a proper examination of challenging facts and evidence. It is a put-down, intended to insult, discredit, belittle and embarrass. And Mr Linklater pulls it out repeatedly.

I'll say it one more time. I do not allege any conspiracy. I see an investigation that went off the rails at an early stage for reasons that are unclear, which pursued a red herring down a blind alley, which refused to backtrack when it could find no evidence of the obvious suspects in that cul-de-sac, and in the end found some poor person called Abdelbaset al-Megrahi who happened to be in the right place at the right time with just enough nebulous suspicion surrounding him for a case to be manufactured.

The eventual conclusion of the investigation was politically convenient, to put it mildly, but that tells us nothing about the sincerity of those who arrived at that conclusion. As I said in my book, there is nothing quite so lethal as a policeman, or a prosecutor, or indeed a forensic scientist, who is absolutely and sincerely convinced of a suspect's guilt.

Mr Linklater admits that he is not a Lockerbie expert, seeming to base his position mainly on a blind trust in the court and the judicial processes, plus a few talking points gleaned from insiders with an axe to grind. Those of us who have become convinced of Megrahi's innocence, however, have based this conviction on the facts of the matter. The case against Megrahi (and his associate Fhimah) was founded on a few crucial points, and if these are disproved the entire house of cards falls to pieces. These points have indeed been thoroughly disproved, and it is this that Mr Linklater must confront, rather than taking refuge in insults and unsubstantiated assertion.

The investigators were convinced that the bomb had been introduced into the baggage system at Luqa airport, Malta, as illegitimate unaccompanied luggage. It was then, they proposed, transferred to the Pan Am 103 feeder flight at Frankfurt, then again to Maid of the Seas waiting at Heathrow. There were two reasons for this belief. First, because some of the clothes which appeared to have been packed in the suitcase with the bomb were traced to a small shop only three miles from Luqa airport, and second, because analysis of the confused and partial baggage records recovered at Frankfurt seemed to show an item of luggage being transferred from a flight from Malta, although there was no passenger booked to make such a transfer.

The provenance of the clothes appears to be quite genuine, however the proposition that clothes bought on Malta weeks before the disaster prove that the bomb began its journey that day from the island is clearly nonsense. Whatever he may say about it now, Megrahi's advocate Bill Taylor understood this perfectly well at the time of the trial, pointing out quite rightly that clothes may be transported anywhere at all in the time available, and that such a conspicuous purchase of easily-traceable items in a small shop might well have been intended as a deliberate red herring pointing away from the real scene of the crime.

The baggage records are another matter. The security system at Luqa in 1988 was extremely stringent. Years of investigation on Malta failed to find any evidence that an illegitimate suitcase had been smuggled on to the plane in question, and indeed the evidence that this had not happened was extremely strong. The judges at Camp Zeist acknowledged this, but sailed right on past the 'major difficulty' without further comment.

The evidence relied on to assert the Malta origin lay not at Luqa but at Frankfurt, in a single page of luggage listing which was all that was recovered after the computer record for the day was accidentally wiped a week after the disaster. Lacking the full dataset, its interpretation was problematic. Twenty-five items were recorded as being transferred to the PA103 feeder from incoming flights, but only 10 of these could be matched to legitimate transfer luggage by the method prescribed for interpreting the listing. Eight or nine additional items were discovered which must also have been transferred in this way, but these could only be matched to the written records by guesswork. This left not just one but six or seven of the recorded transfer items unidentified, and there were no further known items of luggage to fill these slots. These mystery items seemed to come from four airports – Bombay, Berlin, Warsaw, and Malta. The investigators were so enchanted by the match to the Maltese clothes that they didn't even visit the other three airports.

Tray 8849, the listing apparently connecting to the Malta flight, is far from an isolated anomaly screaming 'bomb here!'. We have no idea what was in any of these unidentified trays, but they certainly weren't all carrying the bomb. The fact is, the surviving records are simply too incomplete to support the interpretation being placed on them. The reason the judges were prepared to trust these confused and confusing records over the complete and perfectly clear Luqa records was not, of course, simply that the clothes had been purchased on Malta.

They came to their conclusion because it was alleged that Megrahi, who was present at Luqa airport when the flight to Frankfurt departed, was the man who made that purchase. The so-called eyewitness identification that supported this allegation has however been the subject of detailed and damning criticism, not least by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission itself.

The SCCRC in effect declared the Camp Zeist verdict to be unreasonable, when it noted that 'there is no reasonable basis in the trial court's judgement for its conclusion that the purchase of the items took place on 7 December 1988'. Make no mistake about it, this one statement destroys the entire judgement, because the date of 7 December for the clothes purchase was the hook on which the whole daisy-chain of inference and supposition was hung. If the clothes weren't bought on 7 December, Megrahi wasn't the man who bought them. And if the man who bought the clothes wasn't at Luqa airport when the flight for Frankfurt departed, then the justification for the finding that the bomb suitcase must have been in the mysterious tray 8849 vanishes.

Of course there was more to it than that, which Mr Linklater must be aware of as he claims to be familiar with the SCCRC report, and indeed to admire it. Tony Gauci, the shopkeeper, originally described his customer as a burly, dark-skinned man, about 50 years old and over six feet tall. Megrahi was of slight to medium build, light-skinned, five feet eight inches tall, and in 1988 he was only 36 years of age. Gauci first picked out a very poor-quality passport photo of Megrahi well over two years after the clothes purchase, and it was a mind-boggling 11 years after the encounter before he picked Megrahi out of a live identity parade.

Even the judges acknowledged that the composition of the line-up meant that Megrahi was 'comparatively easy' to pick out as the suspect, and of course by 1999 he was nearing the age the customer was said to have been in 1988. Gauci never made a confident identification, merely testifying to a resemblance, and indeed his first words following the 1999 identity parade were, 'not the man I saw in the shop, but...'.

The other points relating to police pressure on Gauci to make an identification, his familiarity with photographs clearly identifying Megrahi as the Lockerbie accused before his attendance at the identity parade, his awareness of the eye-watering reward being offered by the US Department of Justice, and the eventual payment to him of at least $2 million after Megrahi's conviction had been secured, will also be familiar to anyone who is a fan of the SCCRC report.

A quite separate piece of evidence apparently linking Megrahi to the bombing was the tiny fragment of printed circuit board said to have been part of the timer which had detonated the bomb. This was said to have been one of only 20 such items to have been manufactured, all of which had been supplied to the Libyan military. Megrahi was the co-owner of a company which rented office space in the same building in Zurich as the manufacturer, and had done business with that company – though not in relation to the timers.

The identification of the small shard of PCB as apparently originating from a type of timer supplied exclusively to Libya was a major breakthrough in the investigation. However, as has been ably demonstrated by John Ashton, this identification was fatally flawed. A crucial metallurgical peculiarity of the fragment, known about from an early stage in the investigation, was not present in the timers supplied to Libya. The simple fact is that we do not know what this PCB fragment is or where it came from, but one thing we do know is that it is not what the prosecution said it was.

Despite having read my book, Mr Linklater failed to make any reference to its central revelation, the whole point of the narrative. He continues to assert that the trial court, the first appeal and indeed Megrahi's defence 'tested to destruction' the theory that the bomb suitcase was introduced not on Malta but at Heathrow airport. This was never the case. The defence made a spirited and rational case for a Heathrow introduction, however the judges, while acknowledging this as a possibility, chose to prefer the fragmented and inferential case for the Malta-Frankfurt routing. The court, however, was not shown the full story.

A careful and detailed analysis of the totality of the evidence from Heathrow, something which was never undertaken either by the original forensic investigation, the prosecution team or the defence experts, shows quite conclusively that the bomb was indeed in a suitcase that was seen in the baggage container while it was still in the interline shed at Heathrow, an hour before the feeder flight landed.

The court judgement depended on the assumption that a blue American Tourister suitcase was underneath the bomb suitcase. The forensic evidence clearly shows it was on top. The judgement depended on the assumption that the bomb suitcase had not been the one on the bottom of the stack. The forensic evidence clearly shows that is exactly where it was. The judgement depended on the assumption that the Heathrow interline luggage was rearranged when the feeder flight luggage was added to the container. The baggage handler who carried out that task (who was not called as a witness) was insistent that he did no such thing.

Mr Linklater notes that Megrahi was in Malta on the day of the bombing, and presents this as a major point for the prosecution. However, if the scene of the crime was Heathrow, then far from Megrahi's location that day being incriminating, it provides him with an unbreakable alibi. At the time the bomb suitcase appeared in that baggage container, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was in fact in Tripoli, having travelled there from Luqa on a morning flight.

I realise it can be hard to take on board the fact that something this simple and this obvious has only emerged 25 years down the line, but that's how it is. This is a big deal, Mr Linklater, and it deserves a more honest response than misdirection and point-scoring.

Something which an astute journalist might want to investigate is why the Scottish police and the Crown Office have failed even to interview the metallurgist who demonstrated the discrepancy between the PCB fragment found at Lockerbie and the timers supplied to Libya, nearly two years after the discrepancy was first made public.

Similarly, it is nearly a year since the detailed analysis showing the bomb to have been introduced at Heathrow was made available to the police, but they have still not commissioned an independent forensic evaluation to test and verify the findings presented. Instead they continue chasing off to Libya, where the much-trailed evidence pointing to Megrahi's so-called accomplices has so far proved as elusive as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Something else a journalist with a real nose for a story might find interesting is the sheer amount of exculpatory evidence that was not disclosed to the defence at Megrahi's original trial or indeed later. The documents that led to the discovery of the metallurgical discrepancy relating to the PCB fragment were not disclosed until July 2009, six weeks before Megrahi returned to Libya. The unedifying saga of the non-disclosure of the unredacted CIA cables, which revealed the Crown's original 'star witness' Majid Giaka to be a money-grabbing fantasist, is there to be read in the court transcripts themselves. And these are only two examples.

Mr Linklater seizes on this aspect to bolster his favourite allegation. This is a conspiracy you're alleging. Therefore you are a conspiracy theorist. And so the uncomfortable facts are given a body-swerve. Whether or not the non-disclosure may be described as a conspiracy is a subjective matter, but the non-disclosure itself is a matter of simple fact which doesn't go away simply because the c-word is used.

A final matter Mr Linklater takes issue with is the suggestion that the real bombers might have been a Palestinian terrorist group known as the PFLP-GC. This group had extensive experience in bringing down airliners in flight dating back to the 1960s, and they were known to have re-formed in Germany in October 1988. This time, they were said to be in the pay of the Iranian government, who had commissioned them to exact revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by a US warship a few months previously. The PFLP-GC were the original suspects for Lockerbie, and remained such until 1990 when the PCB fragment was linked to the timers supplied to Libya.

Mr Linklater insists that the involvement of this group was thoroughly disproved by the original inquiry, and that neither the defence nor the SCCRC were able to find anything to substantiate their involvement. I've got one thing to say about this. If investigators are looking in the wrong place, at a false modus operandi, they are not going to solve the case, even if they are looking for the right suspects. These are the people who failed to carry out the extremely simple analysis of the blast-damaged suitcases that shows quite clearly that the explosion happened in the bottom suitcase in the stack, the one loaded at Heathrow.

Forgive me if I don't immediately assume that their failure to close the deal on the PFLP-GC means that that group, which we know was making bombs designed to bring down a plane in just the way Maid of the Seas was brought down, may be assumed to be innocent.

Lastly, though, I will concede that the title of my book includes a question mark. Can this atrocious debacle really be completely explained by tunnel vision and confirmation bias? While I don't allege a conspiracy, it would be naive to assume that a conspiracy can be categorically ruled out. Just as irrational as the propensity to see nefarious conspiracies in every major public event is the blind refusal to admit that anything could ever be a conspiracy. From Iran Contra to Watergate to Hillsborough, we know that conspiracies happen. The Lockerbie investigation may yet prove to be one of them.

However, at this stage, that isn’t the point. The point is that Megrahi was not 'the Lockerbie bomber'. The evidence against him falls apart under even moderately close scrutiny, and worse than that, he was provably more than 1,000 miles away when the bomb was introduced into the baggage container. This is what those Mr Linklater dismisses as 'Megrahi's supporters' are seeking to highlight. Wild accusations of 'conspiracy theorist' are a distraction to avoid reasoned argument, and unworthy of anyone making a serious contribution to the debate.

Morag Kerr is the author of 'Adequately Explained by Stupidity? – Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies' 

[Posted from Lüderitz, Namibia.]

Lockerbie families consider third al-Megrahi appeal

[This is the headline over a report (behind the paywall) in today’s edition of The Times.  It reads as follows:]

British relatives of Lockerbie bombing victims will consider making another appeal against the conviction of the only man found guilty of the atrocity.

Some members of the UK Families Flight 103 group will meet lawyers in the new year to discuss whether to apply to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), according to Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died in the bombing in December 1988.

“The intention of some members is to meet with lawyers in January and discuss the best options, the best way to get the truth,” he said. “It’s a disgrace that we have to wait 25 years to get the truth that should be available from our governments.”

The group will also consider whether an inquiry is the best route to get answers. Dr Swire is part of another group pursuing a long-running petition at the Scottish parliament calling for the Scottish government to open a full public inquiry into the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Last December, Dr Swire said that the family of the convicted bomber could be risking their lives if they were to raise the prospect of a fresh appeal against conviction, possibly leaving it to victims’ families instead.

Dr Swire said that new evidence needed to be investigated, including allegations surrounding a break-in at Heathrow before the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people in the air and on the ground. “It’s clear following the evidence and the behaviour of certain governments that Megrahi wasn’t involved at all,” he said.

If successful, a new application to the SCCRC could start the third appeal into the conviction. Al-Megrahi lost his first appeal in 2002, a year after he was found guilty of mass murder and jailed for life.

The SCCRC recommended in 2007 that al-Megrahi should be granted a second appeal against his conviction. He dropped the appeal two days before being released from prison in August 2009 on compassionate grounds.

Details of six grounds for referral to appeal were published last year. Four of the reasons refer to undisclosed evidence from the Crown to al-Megrahi’s defence team.

The grounds cover evidence about a positive identification of al-Megrahi by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who said that he had sold clothes to a Libyan man. The clothes were linked to a suitcase loaded on to the aircraft, which was then linked to the bomb and eventually to al-Megrahi.

The SCCRC has raised concerns that evidence suggesting Mr Gauci had seen a magazine article linking al-Megrahi to the bomb had not been passed to the defence. Contradictions about the day al-Megrahi was said to have bought the clothes were also highlighted. The trial was told that they were bought on December 7 but the SCCRC said that Mr Gauci also thought it might have been November 29. [RB: The two dates that were canvassed as real possibilities were 23 November and 7 December.] 

Also of concern to the SCCRC was undisclosed evidence about Mr Gauci’s interest in rewards. The commission said that the defence should have been told that a substantial reward was on offer from the US Government.

This week, Frank Mulholland, QC, the Lord Advocate, announced that Libya had appointed two prosecutors to work on the investigation into the bombing.

[A similar article appeared in yesterday’s edition of The Scotsman, along with an opinion piece by Dr Jim Swire which reads in part:]

Try to imagine what it is like to know that your daughter went, unaware of her danger, through the corridors of an airport which knew that its “secure” airside had been broken into, and knew that there was a high terrorist threat to US aircraft at the time and yet still decided not to investigate who had broken in or what his motive might have been. Then try to imagine that you have tried in every way you can think of for 25 years to get an inquiry into why Lockerbie was not prevented and how things could be improved for the future, and been blocked at every stage.

It also took us until 2012 to get official confirmation – in a letter to me from the former Chief Constable (Dumfries and Galloway police) Patrick Shearer – that the investigating police had had complete files about that break-in in their computer from February 1989. That letter also explained that the file had been passed to the Crown Office before the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi had even started. Yet still the prosecutors failed to share their knowledge with the defence.

It is probable that the suppression of this break-in evidence was caused by blind adherence to the hypothesis that the bomb must have come from Malta because of some associated clothing that had indeed originated there. Once a force has formed a strong hypothesis, it takes an earthquake to convince it that other evidence, particularly if hostile to the favoured hypothesis, ought to be shared with the defence. That is a problem we see again and again in miscarriage of justice cases. (...)

The United Nations special observer to the trial (Professor Hans Koechler of Vienna) was in no doubt that it did not represent justice. How could it have done when the break-in information describing an obvious possible avenue for the introduction of the bomb at Heathrow was simply denied to the defence? There were other signs of something far more sinister: Early in 1990, we UK relatives were called to the US embassy in London. In an aside to one of us there, an American official said privately of Lockerbie: “Your government and ours know exactly what happened, but they’re never going to tell.”

Then, in 1993, the late Baroness Thatcher wrote of her support for the 1986 US air force (USAF) raid on Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi: “It turned out to be a more decisive blow against Libyan-sponsored terrorism than I could ever have imagined…the much vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not and could not take place.” Yet two years before, in 1991, two Libyans had been officially blamed for the Lockerbie bombing. (...)

In the post-Snowden world, we all know how extensive is the reach, even among their own citizens, of US and UK intelligence gathering. What we do not know is what aspects of that intelligence are deliberately hidden from citizens who desperately need access to it in their grief, or indeed why any of it should be kept from them.

We relatives need the truth about who murdered our families and article 2 of human rights legislation guarantees our right to have it. While that truth is hidden, the true perpetrators are protected.

Next year, in the face of the blank refusal of governments to mount any meaningful inquiry, certain relatives will apply to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for a further appeal against the Megrahi verdict. It is likely that some of us will also pursue other routes to force an honest inquiry out of obdurate governments; 25 years is too long, and we should not be opposed by our own elected governments.

If you look at terrible UK disasters – Northern Ireland and the IRA trials, the Hillsborough disaster and also Lockerbie, it is the denial of truth to the victims that is the common thread. So, indeed, there is a thread and that thread is truth.

[The announcement by the Lord Advocate that Libya had appointed two prosecutors to work on the investigation into the bombing has been widely reported in the media.  Examples can be found here (BBC News); here (The Herald); and here (Dundee Courier).  It is also reported that US and UK investigators are to be allowed to question Abdullah al-Senussi, the Gaddafi regime’s security chief who is currently awaiting trial in Libya. Here are examples from ITV News and from the Libya Herald.

The recently-retired Director of the FBI, Robert S Mueller III, has expressed confidence that others will be charged in connection with the Lockerbie bombing. A report on the BBC News website contains the following:]

In a rare interview, to mark the 25th anniversary of the deadliest act of terrorism in the UK, Mr Mueller said he was confident the ongoing investigation would "continue to produce results".

"We have FBI agents who are working full-time to track down every lead, as we have since it occurred 25 years ago," Mr Mueller said.

"My expectation is that continuously we will obtain additional information, perhaps additional witnesses, and that others will be charged with their participation in this.

"We do not forget. And by that I mean the FBI, the US Department of Justice, we do not forget," he said. (...)

Mr [Frank] Mulholland, Scotland's lord advocate, said on Monday that Libya had appointed two prosecutors to work on the Lockerbie case.

He told the BBC that the Libyans would work alongside Scottish and American investigators and described this as a "welcome development' which he said would hopefully lead to progress in the case.

Robert Mueller said there had been progress since the revolution in Libya and he expected that to continue.

But he acknowledged that violence and instability in Libya was making things more difficult.

"The problem in Libya now is the government is struggling to maintain security and order and bring peace to the country," he said. (...)

Robert Mueller said he was open to new evidence but remained convinced "the proof was solid on Megrahi".

He said: "My expectation is there are others who may well be brought to justice as a result of continuing investigation by both ourselves as well as the Scottish authorities".

Mr Mueller has been involved with the Lockerbie case for more than 20 years.

He was assistant attorney general in the United States in 1991 when indictments were issued for the two Libyan suspects, Megrahi and Al-amin Khalifa Fimah. (...)

Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, freed [Megrahi] on compassionate grounds in August 2009 because he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

At that time, Robert Mueller wrote a scathing letter to Mr MacAskill in which he said his decision "gives comfort to terrorists around the world".

In his BBC interview, which he said would be his last, Mr Mueller was asked if he had reflected on this intervention.

"My letter still stands," he said.

[Mr Mueller has featured regularly on this blog. The relevant items can be found here.  By contrast, here are some very sensible comments from Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga died on Pan Am 103:]

A minister who lost his 19-year-old daughter in the Lockerbie bombing told ITV News the government are "looking in the wrong place" for the perpetrators after UK authorities were given permission to interview Muammar Gaddafi's former intelligence chief.

Reverend John Mosey said he was "very sceptical of any good" coming from the interview with Abdullah Senussi because the link between the 1988 disaster and Libya had been "blown out of the water."

He also added that the new Libyan regime are "desperate to pin it all on Gaddafi."

A spectacular failure of accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lockerbie, too?

[The following are excerpts from an article by Mark Lawson in today’s edition of The Guardian:]

In an early scene of the new Channel 4 drama series Utopia, an academic rejects a student's proposal for a PhD on conspiracy theories with the clincher: "I mean, conspiracies aren't very now, are they?" The line is winking inwardly because Utopia is the second conspiracy thriller in a row on this network, following Secret State – with a third, Complicit, soon to come.

So conspiracies are very now, and about to become even more so with the return of the genre's dark lord and author of what is more or less the bible of the form, The Da Vinci Code or, as it is known to non-believers, The Bad Book. Dan Brown revealed this week that his new novel, Inferno, will be published on 14 May. (...)

Although Brown's books frequently present religion as an agent of conspiracy, his literary career has benefited from a general western decline in faith. The human instinct to see a shape to our days, which once drove people to the Bible and Dante's Inferno, now sends them to The Da Vinci Code and Brown's Inferno. In frightened, sceptical times, conspiracy theories flourish.

And those who question official histories have recently received vindication, though not in the areas they hoped. While no truth has ever been proved in the favourite fantasies of conspiracy theorists – that, for example, the Apollo moon landings were faked, Princess Diana was murdered or President Obama is not an American – numerous grave conspiracies have been exposed.

The work of Bishop James Jones's commission of inquiry has exposed that the circumstances and causes of the deaths of 96 football supporters at Hillsborough were hidden by the police and other authorities in establishment machinations far more concrete and shocking than those long summoned up in sceptics' seances over the Kennedy assassination or the moonshots.

During much of the same period of British history, the activities of Sir Jimmy Savile and Sir Cyril Smith benefited from at the very least a conspiracy of silence, if no greater collusion, among some of those in the circles in which they moved. And, at a lesser level of human suffering, it is now established that intrigues and cabals existed in the banking sector to fix the Libor lending rate and seems likely that other collusions contributed to the wider banking collapse. And who knows what secret deals may be revealed by the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war if (after a delay that is itself the subject of conspiracy theories) it is eventually published?

We also now know that the private lives of the well known and those thrown into the news by tragedy or grief were routinely suffering intrusion from a conspiracy of journalists. (...)

The biggest conspiracies are to be found not in fiction about the far past, but in the facts of the present.

The darkest of our days

[This is the headline over an item published today on the Lockerbie Truth website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph.  It reads in part:]

Today, the 21st of December, the darkest day of our year.  

Dark for those who, twenty four years ago, lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, babes in arms in the greatest terror attack against our nation since the Second World War.

Dark for those relatives who watched at Kamp Zeist a travesty of a trial when two Libyans were accused of the great crime we know as "Lockerbie".

And dark for those Scottish police, forensic scientists, lawyers, the American FBI and Britain's MI6, all of whom were responsible for a miscarriage of British justice perhaps greater than any that had occurred before. (...)

And so the history of Lockerbie has in general revealed a deceit greater even than that contrived by the police following the Hillsborough disaster. In that case it is now known that important evidence was concealed and scores of police statements altered so as to make it appear that the many fans who were crushed were responsible for their own deaths. Thankfully the original inquest verdict which formed that view has now been overturned by an act of the British parliament, and a new inquest ordered.

And so we are drawn inevitably to the following questions:

Will the Scottish government at least consider that a Lockerbie verdict based on evidence by bribed identification witnesses and a bomb timer fragment possessing all the hallmarks of a clandestine plant might be overturned by judicial inquiry?

Will action be taken against [the Scottish police officer] who concealed from the trial and appeal judges his personal record of offers of multi-million dollar rewards to the only two identification witnesses in the Lockerbie case?

Or might a more comprehensive inquiry ask why several warnings of intended bombings prior to the Lockerbie attack were consciously ignored?

Who might now ask why a break-in at the terminal adjoining the loading areas of Pan Am and Iran Air on the night preceding the attack was discounted, the security officer's report routinely filed, and evidence given thirteen years later by that same officer, by then close to death, mocked in a court of appeal?

As this darkest of days ticks away the minutes, where does the great deceit of the Lockerbie trial now stand? And why do the British and Scottish parliaments remain silent?

[Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm has just published an article headlined Swire: Pan Am 103 a greater deceit than Hillsborough.]

Lockerbie, Hillsborough, Finucane

[In today’s edition of The Scotsman a letter is published from Dr Jim Swire. It reads as follows:]

The unanimous decision of the Holyrood justice committee on 11 December, to keep open petition 1370 from JFM (Justice for Megrahi) calling for an independent inquiry into the handling of the Lockerbie case, came at an opportune moment.

The powerful allegations of criminality lodged with justice secretary Kenny MacAskill by the same group in September had been referred for investigation to Dumfries and Galloway Police, the force which had responsibility for the investigation which led to the verdict – a stark contrast with the call embodied in the petition for an independent inquiry.

The material which emerged from Hillsborough concerning the deliberate altering of police statements to incriminate football fans and exonerate the police, and the astonishing involvement of MI5, the Northern Ireland police, the British Army intelligence units and others over the brutal murder of Pat 
Finucane, must place the Dumfries and Galloway chief constable in a deeply invidious position in assessing his own force’s previous performance in the Lockerbie investigation.

At a discussion group at the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, titled “A spectacular miscarriage of justice?”, Magnus Linklater alone claimed that the idea of a conspiracy concerning the Lockerbie case was not credible. [RB: Mr Linklater’s subsequent article in The Times can be read here.]

It was clear that even then, the bulk of the audience did not agree with him. Yes, he is a 
respected former editor of your estimable newspaper, but I wonder whether he now regrets his intervention.

[Ian Bell's powerful article in today's edition of The Herald Britain's shameful role in rendition in the dock is also very much in point.]