This is the title of a powerful and compelling article by Ian Bell in the Sunday Herald of 5 August 2007. See
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12770175.Trust_no_one__believe_nothing/
Bell makes interesting comparisons between the behaviour of the authorities in the Lockerbie affair and in the shooting in London of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Ian Bell. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Ian Bell. Sort by date Show all posts
Sunday 5 August 2007
Tuesday 10 February 2015
The farrago of al-Megrahi's farcical conviction
[Yesterday I reproduced on this blog an article by Ian Bell that was published four years ago in The Herald. What follows is the text of a piece that he published the following day on his own blog (regrettably no longer available online, as far as I can see):]
Lockerbie: some shrapnel
Something stuck in my mind. It came to me just after the wave of fatigue you get from the sort of approbation you neither need nor seek. Specifically, it was this: a brief comment in the Telegraph, that blunderbuss among reactionary snipers, on August 21, 2009.
On Wednesday night, I was still thinking about Lockerbie. We had just driven back and forth in a day and night to the Humber’s edge so that my wife could sit with her dying mother. But I’m a hack. In the car, coming back across the border, I thought: Fucking Brian Wilson. Must look it up.
I’m so old, I keep cuttings. Not just any old cuttings; only the important mounds. August 21, 2009.
Wilson is a hack, too, of long-standing, who surely won’t mind if I remind the world that he was locally-minded, once, and may even have made a youthful political gesture of nationalism (with a tiny n), and later gained some expertise as a minister with an energy brief, before he grew energetic, post-ministerially, for Energy. That stuff is none of Scotland’s concern, of course.
Anyhow, in the cutting Wilson’s sub stunted a cunning paraphrase: “The SNP’s Libya stunt has shamed my nation”. With a determination born of free West Highland localism, the writer began: “The Scottish Nationalists have never been too fussy about the international company they keep”.
He then excoriated Alex Salmond for opposing the bombing of Belgrade. This sally was in tribute to the late Robin “Ethical” – unless you happened to have met him – Cook. Apparently, Cookie was Wilson’s companion on the British parliamentary – sorry, I’m straining this joke – road to socialism.
Let the quote do some work instead. Wilson wrote – on August 21, 2009, mind you: “Rarely can so many decent Scottish stomachs have turned than at the sight of the Saltire being flourished in Tripoli as a centre-piece of the repulsive celebrations to welcome home the mass murderer Megrahi, courtesy of the SNP”.
Wilson judged the entire affair to have been a matter of self-aggrandisement. He wrote that, “The vast global audience for the rantings of Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Minister, could have been forgiven for assuming him to be the spokesman for a sovereign state, albeit a tinpot one with curious moral values”.
Bear that phrase in mind: “curious moral values”. History being slow but oddly quick on its feet sometimes, how are those turning stomachs now?
The net’s Nationalists will give you a quick answer. Labour’s multifarious duplicities stand exposed. MacAskill has been vindicated. I’d get the usual reflexive praise just for saying so, over and over.
The rantings of Brian Wilson were of a piece with each of Labour’s stitched-to-order lies levelled against the Justice Secretary. For some people, that’s better than enough. They’d like me to say nothing else from now until – My, is that the time? – May.
But here’s a problem: Kenny MacAskill is still Justice Secretary; al-Megrahi is still “a convicted mass-murderer”; and a government of Nationalists still refuses to attempt to make public the facts that each one of them, MacAskill in the van, understands.* To paraphrase that Telegraph sub-editor, someone is shaming my nation.
Labour have had their turn. Wilson’s siblings have been exposed. But they are not in government, currently, in Scotland, where the plane fell from the sky. That would be another party.
Nationalism’s bots course through the local web demanding that the MSM tell the truth. Good luck with that. But here’s weird: MacAskill has part of the truth about Lockerbie at his fingertips. He and Alex Salmond, his First Minister, could find out a great deal more with a full public – not parliamentary, please – inquiry into the massacre. The farrago of al-Megrahi's farcical conviction is a stain on Scotland’s honour: what greater cause for truth could there be?
What’s the worst that could happen? That Salmond and MacAskill could join the likes of Wilson in defending the conviction, yet again? Surely not. Surely it would take a mainstream media plot to make that smear true?
But it is true. Someone else is shaming my nation.
* I should have said that, in this, I exempt Christine Grahame MSP from criticism. Apologies.
[RB: The comment that I appended at the time to this post was “Wow!” I now repeat it -- Wow!]
Saturday 2 April 2011
Libya & Lockerbie: secrets for sale
[This is the heading over an article just posted on Scottish national treasure Ian Bell's Prospero blog. A shorter version appears in The Sunday Herald. The blog version reads as follows:]
Moussa Koussa, Libya’s foreign minister until last Wednesday night, must be giving Her Majesty’s government a lot to think about. His insights into the state of the Gaddafi regime – if reliable – will be receiving undivided attention. His opinions on what might happen next will be scrutinised in minute detail. Above all, the question of what this defector really hopes to gain will surely keep MI6 busy for many an hour.
And then there’s Lockerbie. As the indefatigable Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, has already said, “This is a guy who knows everything”. Koussa’s flight is therefore “a fantastic day for those who seek the truth”. Specifically, Dr Swire wants to hear the former head of the Libyan Bureau for External Security explain the how and why, if Libya was responsible, of the atrocity. After almost 23 years of evasion, obstruction and power politics, at home and abroad, that’s little enough to ask.
Some caution is required, however. Koussa is not just the latest in a succession of rodents quitting the foundering SS Gaddafi. The charge sheet is a long one. The Libyan rebel administration in Benghazi wants him returned for trial for bloody crimes that have nothing to do with Lockerbie. His alleged involvement in terrorism and internal repression goes back a very long way. If the Colonel is due a visit to the International Criminal Court, so is Koussa.
Yet here he is, in effect, handing himself over to British custody without – so we are told – preconditions. We are further assured that immunity from prosecution has not been granted. So let’s get this straight: he has preferred to flee Tripoli while Gaddafi yet survives and chosen to risk the possibility – it should be a certainty – of a trial for mass murder in a Scottish court, and much else besides? Either he has proof that would stand every Lockerbie allegation on its head, or he is not much of a terrorist mastermind. Or things are not as they seem.
I’ve been wondering about that. Consider, for one example, a report from the Washington Post dated February 24. This described Koussa as “a key CIA contact in the war on terror and the removal of [Gaddafi’s] weapons of mass destruction”. The foreign minister was central, in other words, to the brief rehabilitation of the regime. Such were his crimes, according to the Post, “he cannot defect to the opposition like other top Libyan officials”. The consensus a month ago was that Koussa “may have no option now but to go down with the ship”.
Clearly, the so-called “envoy of death” had other ideas. Having been Gaddafi’s “point man in clandestine meetings with top CIA and British officials” he may have lost the dictator’s trust. He may therefore have gained some trust elsewhere, or secured a stock of that commodity some time ago. Flying into London with (supposedly) no guarantee of immunity from prosecution over Lockerbie and a host of other terrorist acts suggests a certain confidence, if nothing else.
Koussa could tell us, as Dr Swire says, a very great deal. For one thing, he was said to be at the heart of Libyan efforts to secure the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, personally issuing threats – the only relevant word – to Scottish ministers. He would know better than most what went on. He would certainly know why al-Megrahi came to be the only person convicted of the murders of 270 people in December of 1988, the shambolic legal process that sealed and resealed the conviction, and the persistent efforts of various governments, Britain’s above all, to deflect serious questions.
Instead, we have a “key CIA contact” who is either prepared to deal with his responsibility, if any, for Lockerbie, or a man well known to “British officials” who foresees no difficulties in that regard. William Hague, foreign secretary, reiterates his refusal to offer an immunity from British or international justice. Hague fails to clarify a more important point: is Koussa therefore under arrest? If not, why not?
Dumfries and Galloway Police certainly want a word, as does the Crown Office. [RB: So they say.] Both would be obliged to seek an interview with any member of the Libyan regime. That doesn’t exactly put an inquiring mind at rest, however. Our prosecution service has not been exactly quick on its toes when previous opportunities for interview/investigation have presented themselves.
When was a request lodged, for one example, to interview Mustafa Abdul Jalil, former Libyan justice minister and the first defector to claim to know “for certain” about the planning and execution of the 1988 atrocity? Lockerbie remains a scandal and an open wound because, to put it no higher, domestic agencies have failed repeatedly to resolve the issues at stake.
But Koussa is different, in any case, from all the other defectors who have told the western media what the media want to hear where Lockerbie is concerned. Simply to say “Gaddafi did it” when Nato aircraft are supporting a rebellion and your neck is at risk is not the same, not remotely the same, as providing chapter, verse, eye-witness testimony, and an explanation of your personal involvement, if any, in mass murder.
So another question falls to Hague. Can the British public, the Scottish public in particular, be assured that Koussa will not be leaving these shores, that there is no deal in place concerning the Lockerbie atrocity or any other crimes? The government has already conceded that Gaddafi might be allowed to slip away into exile if he yields to the Libyan rebellion. Is Koussa to be granted the same consideration?
Or is he, as some suspect, only in Britain to negotiate such an arrangement on behalf of the whole Tripoli gang? Does that also merit an “amnesty”? Not where Lockerbie is concerned, even if playing nice with Koussa is being presented, in all media outlets, as a necessary stratagem to persuade others to desert the Colonel.
An amnesty and a plane ticket might be the pragmatic way to prevent further bloodshed in Libya, even if it did little for the standing of the international court. As an answer to those bereaved by Lockerbie, however, it would count as (yet another) insult. If Koussa has resigned as foreign minister, as the government claims, he has no diplomatic immunity. If his crimes are as extensive as his victims and his enemies allege, he should be facing arrest irrespective of Pan Am 103. An “unscheduled visit”, as former foreign secretary Jack Straw creepily describes it, hardly fits the case.
Never mind the Dumfries and Galloway force: the Scottish government should be saying as much. A prior claim exists, in the names of 270 individuals, that in no sense impinges on the progress of the Libyan rebellion. The Edinburgh political and legal coterie can parrot the line – another fine little mystery – that al-Megrahi’s conviction was and remains safe. The fact is that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), after four years of study, found fully six grounds (still buried beneath legal manure) for doubt.
For Scotland, and for Scots law, that remains the heart of the thing. The $3 million paid by US authorities to a pair of Maltese “witnesses” who could not remember the weather, far less a face, might be explained. The conduct of the Camp Zeist trial – sufficiently contentious to have the UN’s observer, Professor Hans Kochler, decrying a “spectacular miscarriage” – could even be overlooked. The presence of intelligence officers in the well of the court itself could be chalked up to bitter – if infinitely suggestive – experience. But the SCCRC referral hangs over all talk of justice.
Koussa, if anyone, is central to everything where Lockerbie is concerned. Dr Swire is dead right about that. I only hesitate over celebrations because I find it hard to believe no deal has been done. The former foreign minister may have been in the frying pan. Would he really jump into the fire, unprompted, when there is serious talk of Gaddafi being allowed to escape into exile? Or are we supposed to believe that Koussa has grown himself a conscience?
With luck, some parliamentarian will be asking Hague these questions before long. Where Lockerbie is concerned it is not enough, and never was enough, just to say “Gaddafi did it”. If the order was his, the order was followed. How – for the purposes of argument – and by whom? It is a long time since blind obedience to orders was last accepted as any sort of excuse.
The British government’s approach to this little problem is liable to be fascinating. David Cameron has spent a great deal of parliamentary time condemning al-Megrahi’s release. He has said, repeatedly, that he would never have agreed to such a thing. He has dismissed the Scottish government’s arguments in favour of compassionate release. Our Dave is unflinching, by his own account, in matters of justice, terrorist crime and condign punishment. So let’s see, where Moussa Koussa is concerned, whether he is also consistent.
But consider: if the truth is ever allowed to escape, Koussa might not be the only double-dealer, home and abroad, who finds himself in an uncomfortable position. Yet again, I suspect, opinion is being nudged towards the belief that “Gaddafi did it” settles all questions. Simultaneously, a spurious Lockerbie “resolution” will be a handy distraction, no doubt, amid the Libyan aftermath.
And if Koussa winds up in the United States for the sake of “intelligence sharing” and old alliances, we will all be just a little wiser. Dr Swire and many others deserve better. But they always did.
Moussa Koussa, Libya’s foreign minister until last Wednesday night, must be giving Her Majesty’s government a lot to think about. His insights into the state of the Gaddafi regime – if reliable – will be receiving undivided attention. His opinions on what might happen next will be scrutinised in minute detail. Above all, the question of what this defector really hopes to gain will surely keep MI6 busy for many an hour.
And then there’s Lockerbie. As the indefatigable Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, has already said, “This is a guy who knows everything”. Koussa’s flight is therefore “a fantastic day for those who seek the truth”. Specifically, Dr Swire wants to hear the former head of the Libyan Bureau for External Security explain the how and why, if Libya was responsible, of the atrocity. After almost 23 years of evasion, obstruction and power politics, at home and abroad, that’s little enough to ask.
Some caution is required, however. Koussa is not just the latest in a succession of rodents quitting the foundering SS Gaddafi. The charge sheet is a long one. The Libyan rebel administration in Benghazi wants him returned for trial for bloody crimes that have nothing to do with Lockerbie. His alleged involvement in terrorism and internal repression goes back a very long way. If the Colonel is due a visit to the International Criminal Court, so is Koussa.
Yet here he is, in effect, handing himself over to British custody without – so we are told – preconditions. We are further assured that immunity from prosecution has not been granted. So let’s get this straight: he has preferred to flee Tripoli while Gaddafi yet survives and chosen to risk the possibility – it should be a certainty – of a trial for mass murder in a Scottish court, and much else besides? Either he has proof that would stand every Lockerbie allegation on its head, or he is not much of a terrorist mastermind. Or things are not as they seem.
I’ve been wondering about that. Consider, for one example, a report from the Washington Post dated February 24. This described Koussa as “a key CIA contact in the war on terror and the removal of [Gaddafi’s] weapons of mass destruction”. The foreign minister was central, in other words, to the brief rehabilitation of the regime. Such were his crimes, according to the Post, “he cannot defect to the opposition like other top Libyan officials”. The consensus a month ago was that Koussa “may have no option now but to go down with the ship”.
Clearly, the so-called “envoy of death” had other ideas. Having been Gaddafi’s “point man in clandestine meetings with top CIA and British officials” he may have lost the dictator’s trust. He may therefore have gained some trust elsewhere, or secured a stock of that commodity some time ago. Flying into London with (supposedly) no guarantee of immunity from prosecution over Lockerbie and a host of other terrorist acts suggests a certain confidence, if nothing else.
Koussa could tell us, as Dr Swire says, a very great deal. For one thing, he was said to be at the heart of Libyan efforts to secure the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, personally issuing threats – the only relevant word – to Scottish ministers. He would know better than most what went on. He would certainly know why al-Megrahi came to be the only person convicted of the murders of 270 people in December of 1988, the shambolic legal process that sealed and resealed the conviction, and the persistent efforts of various governments, Britain’s above all, to deflect serious questions.
Instead, we have a “key CIA contact” who is either prepared to deal with his responsibility, if any, for Lockerbie, or a man well known to “British officials” who foresees no difficulties in that regard. William Hague, foreign secretary, reiterates his refusal to offer an immunity from British or international justice. Hague fails to clarify a more important point: is Koussa therefore under arrest? If not, why not?
Dumfries and Galloway Police certainly want a word, as does the Crown Office. [RB: So they say.] Both would be obliged to seek an interview with any member of the Libyan regime. That doesn’t exactly put an inquiring mind at rest, however. Our prosecution service has not been exactly quick on its toes when previous opportunities for interview/investigation have presented themselves.
When was a request lodged, for one example, to interview Mustafa Abdul Jalil, former Libyan justice minister and the first defector to claim to know “for certain” about the planning and execution of the 1988 atrocity? Lockerbie remains a scandal and an open wound because, to put it no higher, domestic agencies have failed repeatedly to resolve the issues at stake.
But Koussa is different, in any case, from all the other defectors who have told the western media what the media want to hear where Lockerbie is concerned. Simply to say “Gaddafi did it” when Nato aircraft are supporting a rebellion and your neck is at risk is not the same, not remotely the same, as providing chapter, verse, eye-witness testimony, and an explanation of your personal involvement, if any, in mass murder.
So another question falls to Hague. Can the British public, the Scottish public in particular, be assured that Koussa will not be leaving these shores, that there is no deal in place concerning the Lockerbie atrocity or any other crimes? The government has already conceded that Gaddafi might be allowed to slip away into exile if he yields to the Libyan rebellion. Is Koussa to be granted the same consideration?
Or is he, as some suspect, only in Britain to negotiate such an arrangement on behalf of the whole Tripoli gang? Does that also merit an “amnesty”? Not where Lockerbie is concerned, even if playing nice with Koussa is being presented, in all media outlets, as a necessary stratagem to persuade others to desert the Colonel.
An amnesty and a plane ticket might be the pragmatic way to prevent further bloodshed in Libya, even if it did little for the standing of the international court. As an answer to those bereaved by Lockerbie, however, it would count as (yet another) insult. If Koussa has resigned as foreign minister, as the government claims, he has no diplomatic immunity. If his crimes are as extensive as his victims and his enemies allege, he should be facing arrest irrespective of Pan Am 103. An “unscheduled visit”, as former foreign secretary Jack Straw creepily describes it, hardly fits the case.
Never mind the Dumfries and Galloway force: the Scottish government should be saying as much. A prior claim exists, in the names of 270 individuals, that in no sense impinges on the progress of the Libyan rebellion. The Edinburgh political and legal coterie can parrot the line – another fine little mystery – that al-Megrahi’s conviction was and remains safe. The fact is that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), after four years of study, found fully six grounds (still buried beneath legal manure) for doubt.
For Scotland, and for Scots law, that remains the heart of the thing. The $3 million paid by US authorities to a pair of Maltese “witnesses” who could not remember the weather, far less a face, might be explained. The conduct of the Camp Zeist trial – sufficiently contentious to have the UN’s observer, Professor Hans Kochler, decrying a “spectacular miscarriage” – could even be overlooked. The presence of intelligence officers in the well of the court itself could be chalked up to bitter – if infinitely suggestive – experience. But the SCCRC referral hangs over all talk of justice.
Koussa, if anyone, is central to everything where Lockerbie is concerned. Dr Swire is dead right about that. I only hesitate over celebrations because I find it hard to believe no deal has been done. The former foreign minister may have been in the frying pan. Would he really jump into the fire, unprompted, when there is serious talk of Gaddafi being allowed to escape into exile? Or are we supposed to believe that Koussa has grown himself a conscience?
With luck, some parliamentarian will be asking Hague these questions before long. Where Lockerbie is concerned it is not enough, and never was enough, just to say “Gaddafi did it”. If the order was his, the order was followed. How – for the purposes of argument – and by whom? It is a long time since blind obedience to orders was last accepted as any sort of excuse.
The British government’s approach to this little problem is liable to be fascinating. David Cameron has spent a great deal of parliamentary time condemning al-Megrahi’s release. He has said, repeatedly, that he would never have agreed to such a thing. He has dismissed the Scottish government’s arguments in favour of compassionate release. Our Dave is unflinching, by his own account, in matters of justice, terrorist crime and condign punishment. So let’s see, where Moussa Koussa is concerned, whether he is also consistent.
But consider: if the truth is ever allowed to escape, Koussa might not be the only double-dealer, home and abroad, who finds himself in an uncomfortable position. Yet again, I suspect, opinion is being nudged towards the belief that “Gaddafi did it” settles all questions. Simultaneously, a spurious Lockerbie “resolution” will be a handy distraction, no doubt, amid the Libyan aftermath.
And if Koussa winds up in the United States for the sake of “intelligence sharing” and old alliances, we will all be just a little wiser. Dr Swire and many others deserve better. But they always did.
Friday 4 September 2009
Why do we still cling to mythical link with US?
[This is the headline over Ian Bell's Saturday Essay in The Herald. The following are excerpts.]
[T]hat dilapidated heirloom, the special relationship, is being disowned by Americans and their leaders. Like those extradition laws by which the US demands and Britain requests, it turns out to have been a one-way street. So do we fret, or move on?
Matters have been brought to a head by the Lockerbie row. The Americans are justifiably aggrieved and, simultaneously, in the wrong. Sir Christopher Meyer, former ambassador to Washington, attests that there was a "clear political and diplomatic understanding" in 1998 that, if convicted, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi would serve his time in a Scottish prison. Now we learn that, while Britain talked trade, Gordon Brown was conveying an entirely different message to the Libyans.
The Americans smell a rat. This is not how loyal allies, as defined in Washington, are supposed to behave. Yet neither the American media nor the US government have shown the slightest interest in examining the safety of Megrahi's conviction. In fact, the administration is facing legal action just to force the release of documents that could shed light on the case. As for compassion, the integrity of Scots law or the memory of recent services rendered, these are of no account.
The reaction towards "the Brits" in the American popular press has been contemptuous. According to the New York Daily News, the special relationship has "gone". Brown is a "betrayer". The Republican right, in particular, has reached for every cliche in the book covering effete, duplicitous, post-imperial losers. As with the recent fantastic propaganda traducing the NHS, not a thought has been given to British opinion. Who cares, after all?
In fact, evidence that Scots are split evenly over Megrahi's release, as demonstrated in yesterday's opinion poll, would only harden attitudes, were it ever to penetrate. Such signs of pathetic weakness, like the British Army's alleged inadequacies in the field, are no more than a certain sort of American has come to expect. The belief that Britain is held in wide esteem in the US is our delusion.
[T]hat dilapidated heirloom, the special relationship, is being disowned by Americans and their leaders. Like those extradition laws by which the US demands and Britain requests, it turns out to have been a one-way street. So do we fret, or move on?
Matters have been brought to a head by the Lockerbie row. The Americans are justifiably aggrieved and, simultaneously, in the wrong. Sir Christopher Meyer, former ambassador to Washington, attests that there was a "clear political and diplomatic understanding" in 1998 that, if convicted, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi would serve his time in a Scottish prison. Now we learn that, while Britain talked trade, Gordon Brown was conveying an entirely different message to the Libyans.
The Americans smell a rat. This is not how loyal allies, as defined in Washington, are supposed to behave. Yet neither the American media nor the US government have shown the slightest interest in examining the safety of Megrahi's conviction. In fact, the administration is facing legal action just to force the release of documents that could shed light on the case. As for compassion, the integrity of Scots law or the memory of recent services rendered, these are of no account.
The reaction towards "the Brits" in the American popular press has been contemptuous. According to the New York Daily News, the special relationship has "gone". Brown is a "betrayer". The Republican right, in particular, has reached for every cliche in the book covering effete, duplicitous, post-imperial losers. As with the recent fantastic propaganda traducing the NHS, not a thought has been given to British opinion. Who cares, after all?
In fact, evidence that Scots are split evenly over Megrahi's release, as demonstrated in yesterday's opinion poll, would only harden attitudes, were it ever to penetrate. Such signs of pathetic weakness, like the British Army's alleged inadequacies in the field, are no more than a certain sort of American has come to expect. The belief that Britain is held in wide esteem in the US is our delusion.
Monday 9 February 2015
Guilty of monumental hypocrisy
Truth lies hidden beneath the blather about Megrahi
[This is the headline over Ian Bell's column in today's edition of The Herald. It reads as follows:]
Sir Gus O’Donnell’s trawl through certain documents relating to the Lockerbie bombing has become very bad news for Labour.
It is bad in London, bad in Edinburgh; bad for reputations, bad for careers. On both sides of the border, the charge is the same: saying one thing, doing another. The only difference is that some things were shouted in one place and whispered elsewhere.
David Cameron handled the report with a certain vicious elegance in the Commons, in his best more-in-sorrow-than-anger voice. Too many things, he pointed out, were left unsaid by Labour ministers. Whether he would have behaved any differently in their shoes was a point he was happy to leave moot. He had certain aims in mind, and he achieved them.
Thus: blame Labour, blame the SNP, placate America, exonerate BP, and remind us that he was always opposed to the freeing of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi on any grounds. Better still, for the eternal interests of Her Majesty’s Government, nothing in O’Donnell’s document obliged Cameron to deal with a real question: what of profound doubts over the original conviction?
No-one in the Commons, as usual, had a word to say about that.
Labour was all over the place. Gordon Brown was forced into a statement that answered no questions. Jack Straw, England’s Justice Secretary in the period at issue, fell to parsing any phrase that might provide an excuse. Meanwhile, the Scottish party found itself in a truly hideous position.
Either its leading members knew about London’s efforts to “facilitate” a release deal with Libya, or they did not. If not, what does that tell us about relationships between Labour in Edinburgh and Labour in Westminster?
But if all was known, what excused the many, vehement accusations hurled at Kenny MacAskill, the SNP minister who freed Megrahi? Labour in Scotland was still at that game this week, even when it was beyond doubt that its colleagues in London had connived in Libyan efforts. Straw, O’Donnell tells us, even thought of supplying a supportive letter.
It’s possible, of course, that some Scottish Labour figures were “in the loop” and some were not. The Scotland Office, first under Des Browne, and by October 2008 in the charge of Jim Murphy, was under no illusions. The latter minister was certainly given the minutes of calls between Straw and Alex Salmond. So what about Holyrood?
But this means that some passionate opponents of Megrahi’s release were permitted – encouraged? – to go on conducting a campaign against MacAskill while the truth was otherwise kept hidden. Take your pick: scandal, shambles, or a bit of both?
None is easy to spin, but Labour has done its best. Supported by the – no doubt unprompted – right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes, a tale filtered into the London media this week to the effect that MacAskill was prepared, late in 2007, to amend the Scottish Government’s opposition to Labour’s prisoner transfer agreement with Libya. The alleged price: cash to pay off human rights claims over prison slopping out, and devolved control over airgun legislation. And how tawdry would that have been?
O’Donnell certainly relates – of exchanges in November, 2007 – that “it is clear that HMG’s understanding was that a PTA without any exclusions” – meaning Megrahi, the only Libyan in a British prison – “might be acceptable to the Scottish Government if progress could be made with regards to ongoing discussions...” (on slopping out and firearms law). The Cabinet Secretary’s footnotes then refer the reader to letters between Straw and Browne in which the two allude to that “understanding”.
But O’Donnell’s very next sentence in the body of his text records that, “Kenny MacAskill restated the Scottish Government’s position that any PTA should exclude anyone convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in a letter to Jack Straw on 6 December 2007”.
So much was already in the public domain, thanks to the Scottish Government’s website. Nor did the SNP deviate from that position.
Labour’s attempt to establish otherwise this week depends entirely on a “leaked” email from John McTernan, Brown’s adviser, who gleaned his “understanding” from unnamed “officials”.
You wouldn’t base a Scottish election campaign on that, I’d have thought. But what else does Iain Gray and his Holyrood party now possess? Continued demands for the release of Megrahi’s medical records? Such material is redacted even in O’Donnell’s report, on data protection grounds. An oncologist would tell you, meanwhile, that a prognosis is not a prediction, but add that prostate cancer treatments – and hence survival rates – are improving yearly.
Even given the horrific scale of Lockerbie, an attack on compassion is tricky. It’s also beside the point. As is O’Donnell’s report, and Cameron’s lofty satisfaction, and Brown’s floundering response.
The fact that Labour has been found guilty of monumental hypocrisy is important in its own right, no doubt, but it is only one part of a larger argument. In the matter of mass murder, the question of guilt is paramount. Unless it is settled, beyond doubt, every other “row” is chatter, and distracting chatter at that. In the case of Megrahi, despite anything politicians claim, there is no certainty.
We do know, though, of $3 million paid by US authorities to Maltese brothers, Toni and Paul Gauci, for the sake of identification evidence. We know that Lord Peter Fraser, then Lord Advocate, would later describe the former brother, supposedly a star witness, as less than the full shilling and “an apple short of a picnic”.
We know, furthermore, that the forensic “experts” on both sides of the Atlantic, providers of still more “key evidence” at Camp Zeist, were later discredited thoroughly. We know Professor Hans Koechler, Kofi Annan’s UN observer, damned the trial as an outrage and an abuse.
There’s more, much more. We don’t know, though, why Megrahi still fails to provide proof of his innocence. We don’t know why no political party – the SNP included – is prepared to entertain even an inquiry into the conviction.
Those rows over the compassionate release of “the Lockerbie bomber” will do instead, at least until some successor to Sir Gus cares to examine a few more of the papers salted away in the hidden record.
Saturday 22 August 2009
Caught in the middle of a transatlantic storm
[What follows is the Saturday essay in The Herald by Ian Bell, in my opinion (and that of many others) Scotland's best and most distinguished columnist.]
Unless the doctors are very wrong, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi has almost served his life sentence. That's relevant. As things stand, prostate cancer will claim him before November's end. If he has escaped justice, however you care to define it, his victory will be brief. If he is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing, as he still insists, three months spent facing death among his family will be scant consolation.
Cancer is an actor, if that's the word, in this sorry tale. It rendered any hope the truth would be uncovered during Megrahi's second appeal meaningless long before Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Secretary, began to ponder compassion. The original prosecution case, encompassing six aspects of the trial pointing to a possible miscarriage of justice (at least according to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission), was never liable to be tested. A lot flows from the fact.
Who wanted the truth, in any case? The question is not meant to be callous or perverse. Washington's preferred outcome, it seems, was for Megrahi to die, and die soon, in Greenock prison. London, with a new friend in Tripoli, wanted the convicted mass murderer out of the way. A prisoner transfer deal, hatched by Tony Blair and Colonel Gaddafi two years ago, was the first choice. Compassionate release will do instead. Those left bereaved in the United States are, meanwhile, unswerving, in the main, in their belief that the convicted killer of 270 people has no right to compassion. Yet many of their British counterparts, no less grief-stricken, are deeply sceptical. They continue to ask questions.
Disputed identification evidence, withheld documents, allegedly suppressed warnings, arguments over timers, the loading of the bomb and a supposedly coincidental break-in at Heathrow: these issues amount to a divide as wide as the Atlantic. For most of the Americans, the truth has been established. For most of the Britons, the truth has been placed beyond reach. Someone is wrong.
In the middle of all this stands the Scottish Government. First, it had to assert its rights over Blair's deal then watch while, this spring, Jack Straw rushed the transfer agreement through parliament to avoid damaging "relations" with Libya. More recently, Edinburgh has been subjected to a barrage - suspiciously belated - from the big guns in Washington. Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Barack Obama: the attempt to bully a minor administration with clear jurisdiction has been explicit.
Things have been busy on the home front, too. MacAskill could not allow Megrahi's request for transfer because, for some reason, the Crown failed to withdraw its appeal against the original sentence. Yet when, on Thursday, the Justice Secretary decided to release the prisoner on compassionate grounds, Labour politicians attacked him for it.
The ink was scarcely dry on the transfer legislation that was intended to achieve the same end, in other words, but London elected to echo Washington's displeasure. As a footnote, it emerged that Lord Mandelson had "bumped into" Gaddafi's son on a yacht in Corfu recently. As one does.
MacAskill consulted all relevant parties. Who else can say the same? London first claimed that Blair's deal would not involve Megrahi, the only Libyan in the Scottish penal system, then changed its mind while granting Edinburgh a veto, of sorts. Yet while the veto was allowed, and while preparations for the second appeal were in train, the transfer treaty was ratified. Libya's government duly made application.
All this, we were asked to believe, came as news to the Americans. Washington claimed to have an assurance that Megrahi would serve out his time in Scotland. London said that no such agreement existed. Compassionate release, available in theory to any prisoner, became Edinburgh's only realistic choice short of retaining the prisoner in an institution incapable of providing proper care.
Simple facts and devious motives collide. London could go some way to satisfying bereaved British relatives by ordering a public inquiry. The Scottish Government has no such power. The questions involved are substantial and serious, at least according to the criminal cases review commission, yet no inquiry is forthcoming.
Then again, such an inquiry would doubtless involve further arguments over classified documents. In that regard, as Megrahi's lawyers know only too well, the Westminster government has form. So is that to be it? The truth about the worst mass murder on British soil or some version, neither justified nor explained, of the national interest?
Official American displeasure at MacAskill's decision also has a context. Successive US administrations have seen not the slightest problem with the original verdict. Alternative explanations for the destruction of Pan Am 103, with Syria and Iran as candidates, have not been pursued. The UN observer at Megrahi's trial condemned the entire proceedings, yet the White House is aroused over one man's whereabouts in the last three months of his life?
Scotland's SNP government has just had a lesson in geopolitical realities. Playing things by the book is construed as naivety. Defiance in the name of democratic rights tends to be punished. Twenty-one years after the event, it is worth recalling the arguments that once raged even over the idea that a Scottish court should even have jurisdiction: in the matter of Lockerbie, Scotland has been a nuisance to any number of people. The idea that we are better than terrorists and should act accordingly has, it appears, caused the most offence.
Appearances don't count for much. Prostate cancer does not render Megrahi innocent, but nor would his continued imprisonment settle the case against him beyond reasonable doubt. Nothing prevents him from publishing the evidence and arguments that would have supported his appeal. Equally, there is nothing to prevent the British government scrutinising such a document in a public inquiry. What are the chances?
One man who is said to have travelled to Malta under a false passport on the day of the bombing: that's about the size of it. Nevertheless, the governments of two major powers have been disinclined to take matters further, to put minds at rest, or to settle doubts, reasonable or otherwise. And, yet, the atrocities of 9/11 aside, the worst act of terrorism the west has seen is at stake, with the devolved administration of a small country left to hold the ring. Implausible, but true.
In these parts, meanwhile, the usual editorialising suspects have been assuring us that the Scottish Government - predictable, eh? - was not up to this job. Holyrood will return on Monday for more of those self-inflicted wounds.
An "ill-advised" minister visited a dying man in prison in order to reach a judgment. In this dark wood, attention has been fixed on some very small trees while London manoeuvres and Washington moralises.
I can't prove anything in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. I can, though, adduce reasons for real concern, and enough of them to reach an opinion. The review commission took more than three painstaking years to come to a similar conclusion. The fact that the case was referred yet again to the Court of Appeal should, you might think, make anyone pause. Strangely - or not so strangely - the larger forces which dominate our world prefer not to notice. A small country with a new parliament should draw a lesson from that.
Unless the doctors are very wrong, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi has almost served his life sentence. That's relevant. As things stand, prostate cancer will claim him before November's end. If he has escaped justice, however you care to define it, his victory will be brief. If he is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing, as he still insists, three months spent facing death among his family will be scant consolation.
Cancer is an actor, if that's the word, in this sorry tale. It rendered any hope the truth would be uncovered during Megrahi's second appeal meaningless long before Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Secretary, began to ponder compassion. The original prosecution case, encompassing six aspects of the trial pointing to a possible miscarriage of justice (at least according to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission), was never liable to be tested. A lot flows from the fact.
Who wanted the truth, in any case? The question is not meant to be callous or perverse. Washington's preferred outcome, it seems, was for Megrahi to die, and die soon, in Greenock prison. London, with a new friend in Tripoli, wanted the convicted mass murderer out of the way. A prisoner transfer deal, hatched by Tony Blair and Colonel Gaddafi two years ago, was the first choice. Compassionate release will do instead. Those left bereaved in the United States are, meanwhile, unswerving, in the main, in their belief that the convicted killer of 270 people has no right to compassion. Yet many of their British counterparts, no less grief-stricken, are deeply sceptical. They continue to ask questions.
Disputed identification evidence, withheld documents, allegedly suppressed warnings, arguments over timers, the loading of the bomb and a supposedly coincidental break-in at Heathrow: these issues amount to a divide as wide as the Atlantic. For most of the Americans, the truth has been established. For most of the Britons, the truth has been placed beyond reach. Someone is wrong.
In the middle of all this stands the Scottish Government. First, it had to assert its rights over Blair's deal then watch while, this spring, Jack Straw rushed the transfer agreement through parliament to avoid damaging "relations" with Libya. More recently, Edinburgh has been subjected to a barrage - suspiciously belated - from the big guns in Washington. Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Barack Obama: the attempt to bully a minor administration with clear jurisdiction has been explicit.
Things have been busy on the home front, too. MacAskill could not allow Megrahi's request for transfer because, for some reason, the Crown failed to withdraw its appeal against the original sentence. Yet when, on Thursday, the Justice Secretary decided to release the prisoner on compassionate grounds, Labour politicians attacked him for it.
The ink was scarcely dry on the transfer legislation that was intended to achieve the same end, in other words, but London elected to echo Washington's displeasure. As a footnote, it emerged that Lord Mandelson had "bumped into" Gaddafi's son on a yacht in Corfu recently. As one does.
MacAskill consulted all relevant parties. Who else can say the same? London first claimed that Blair's deal would not involve Megrahi, the only Libyan in the Scottish penal system, then changed its mind while granting Edinburgh a veto, of sorts. Yet while the veto was allowed, and while preparations for the second appeal were in train, the transfer treaty was ratified. Libya's government duly made application.
All this, we were asked to believe, came as news to the Americans. Washington claimed to have an assurance that Megrahi would serve out his time in Scotland. London said that no such agreement existed. Compassionate release, available in theory to any prisoner, became Edinburgh's only realistic choice short of retaining the prisoner in an institution incapable of providing proper care.
Simple facts and devious motives collide. London could go some way to satisfying bereaved British relatives by ordering a public inquiry. The Scottish Government has no such power. The questions involved are substantial and serious, at least according to the criminal cases review commission, yet no inquiry is forthcoming.
Then again, such an inquiry would doubtless involve further arguments over classified documents. In that regard, as Megrahi's lawyers know only too well, the Westminster government has form. So is that to be it? The truth about the worst mass murder on British soil or some version, neither justified nor explained, of the national interest?
Official American displeasure at MacAskill's decision also has a context. Successive US administrations have seen not the slightest problem with the original verdict. Alternative explanations for the destruction of Pan Am 103, with Syria and Iran as candidates, have not been pursued. The UN observer at Megrahi's trial condemned the entire proceedings, yet the White House is aroused over one man's whereabouts in the last three months of his life?
Scotland's SNP government has just had a lesson in geopolitical realities. Playing things by the book is construed as naivety. Defiance in the name of democratic rights tends to be punished. Twenty-one years after the event, it is worth recalling the arguments that once raged even over the idea that a Scottish court should even have jurisdiction: in the matter of Lockerbie, Scotland has been a nuisance to any number of people. The idea that we are better than terrorists and should act accordingly has, it appears, caused the most offence.
Appearances don't count for much. Prostate cancer does not render Megrahi innocent, but nor would his continued imprisonment settle the case against him beyond reasonable doubt. Nothing prevents him from publishing the evidence and arguments that would have supported his appeal. Equally, there is nothing to prevent the British government scrutinising such a document in a public inquiry. What are the chances?
One man who is said to have travelled to Malta under a false passport on the day of the bombing: that's about the size of it. Nevertheless, the governments of two major powers have been disinclined to take matters further, to put minds at rest, or to settle doubts, reasonable or otherwise. And, yet, the atrocities of 9/11 aside, the worst act of terrorism the west has seen is at stake, with the devolved administration of a small country left to hold the ring. Implausible, but true.
In these parts, meanwhile, the usual editorialising suspects have been assuring us that the Scottish Government - predictable, eh? - was not up to this job. Holyrood will return on Monday for more of those self-inflicted wounds.
An "ill-advised" minister visited a dying man in prison in order to reach a judgment. In this dark wood, attention has been fixed on some very small trees while London manoeuvres and Washington moralises.
I can't prove anything in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. I can, though, adduce reasons for real concern, and enough of them to reach an opinion. The review commission took more than three painstaking years to come to a similar conclusion. The fact that the case was referred yet again to the Court of Appeal should, you might think, make anyone pause. Strangely - or not so strangely - the larger forces which dominate our world prefer not to notice. A small country with a new parliament should draw a lesson from that.
Sunday 11 December 2016
Two hundred and seventy were murdered, and still we fail them
[On this date in 2015, I learned with deep sadness of the death of Ian Bell. His writings on Lockerbie can be found listed here. What follows is an example from April 2011:]
One of my favourite pictures is Raeburn’s portrait of Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn, once judge within the Court of Session. It’s there in a glance, cool as you like, direct from an age of reason. It says: here are my principles; convince me.
I once entertained a theory that most of Scotland’s high-end prose, Walter Scott’s most obviously, descended from Scots law. Years ago, I even tried to convince an audience that Robert Louis Stevenson could not have written nit-picking tales of moral difficulty without Hume and the Faculty of Advocates. They wondered what I was on about.
Scotland is soaked in the language of lawyers. After the churches and education, the law was the one inviolable (supposedly) thing we rescued from Union. We are a country of laws, of legal tradition, and of reasoned prose. Most of our politicians have been lawyers, and most of our hired legal hands have been political. They can’t help themselves.
Cockburn concludes his Memorials with the news that he’s getting on in the world. Thanks to the usual patronage, the boy from Edinburgh’s Hope Park is to be Solicitor-General. He writes: “I trust that we [Jeffrey had bagged Lord Advocate] shall do our duty. If we do, we cannot fail to do some good to Scotland. In the abuses of our representative and municipal systems alone, our predecessors have left us fields in which patriotism may exhaust itself”.
So, Cocky: what would you have made of Moussa Koussa?
Here we have an unresolved mass murder. Here we have a witness. Here we have (it is suggested) “abuses of our representative and municipal systems”. Here we have certain subservient protocols attendant to a treaty of Union. Still, one would wish to at least detain the witness, surely?
We get a legal letter instead. The indefatigable Brian Fitzpatrick writes, in timely fashion, to the oldest daily newspaper in the English-speaking world with a note of support, it seems, for a public inquiry into the Lockerbie atrocity.
Or rather, one from the Faculty suggests, there might be “scope” – Cockburn would have flinched – “for laying to rest some of the more egregious claims of the tribe of Lockerbie conspiracy theorists – those who have made a life’s work of the now unravelling assertion that somehow Libya and its senior operatives, including Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, were not to blame".
Send lawyers, as the song used to go, guns and money.
The brief then goes on to lavish praise on pillars of our legal temples. He suggests that the Camp Zeist trial was terribly hard – unpaid? – work for those who allowed security spooks to infest the well of the court. He overlooks the Socratic wisdom that entertained the bribing ($3 million to a pair of those crucial Maltese witnesses) of participants by American “authorities”. He does not trouble himself with forensic difficulties.
But, first and foremost, this lawyer nowhere mentions the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). It counts as a significant omission. It makes no odds to me whether “Gaddafi did it” or not. I just want to know what went wrong with Scots law, why the SCCRC found six reasons – after years of work, and 800 pages – for doubting the conviction of al Megrahi, and why the rest of us, we sometime citizens, are barred from knowledge granted as pub gossip to every lawyer in the land. And then told to forget about it.
“Conspiracy theorists” is neat. It suggests that anyone who might wonder about the habits of our legal-political establishment has problems – a ticklish inversion – with reality. It is meant to shut down argument. The conviction is as safe, it seems, as all those blasted, bloodied Lockerbie houses that no longer stand.
The real mistake was to believe that Gaddafi’s fall would give oxygen to the truth. Instead, in the blood and the mire, there’s a big carpet being unfurled, and a lot of sweeping going on. On this point, I am liable to sound repetitive: why isn’t Moussa Koussa under arrest?
More particularly: why has he not been taken into custody by officers from Dumfries & Galloway? Students of the Treaty of Union may take another view, but I had thought – certainly in the case of al Megrahi – that Scots law held sway. So why has our Crown Office been “negotiating” with the Foreign Office over this witness, of all witnesses?
Saif Gaddafi, heir to idiocy, says there are no secrets. Washington and London, he tells the BBC, know all there is to know about Lockerbie. Scotland’s lawyers, some of them, know exactly what he means. But Scotland’s people have been given no such advantages.
What was asked of Moussa Koussa? That’s not a complicated, nor legally compromised, question. Having won London’s sanction – ignoring questions of jurisdiction – what followed? Just state the question, or the area of inquiry: we have a right to know. Disclosure is in no sense be prejudicial to a possible trial, far less to a public inquiry.
The obvious fact is this: “Gaddafi did it” is not the point. The safety of a conviction, and the suborning of a legal system by security services is another, bigger, deal. Cockburn wouldn’t have sat still for it. Brian Fitzpatrick prefers a lesser prose.
You have to ask yourself: why does it still matter, and matter so much, to those who promenade around Parliament Hall? Why does it still, after all these years, infect every party? You might have thought, if naive, that an SNP government would be rushing to settle the Lockerbie business, if only to discomfit Labour placemen and Tory hacks. No chance.
Three hundred and odd strollers in the Faculty count for more, in Scottish public life, than any other constituency. Which is odd. Lockerbie wasn’t their doing. They did not infect the evidence. They didn’t nobble the politicians, or write the editorials, nor do a squalid deal in the desert. They were just legal cabs for hire.
Henry Cockburn saw them coming. I don’t even know if Memorials of His Time is in print. Still, the good judge had witty things to say about small countries and the profession of principle. The reason we don’t know about Lockerbie is this: the lawyers don’t like it. And they respond to argument by any means necessary.
How come? What worries them so much? Why has there been no public inquiry? Who – pace Fitzpatrick – would be harmed? Why isn’t Moussa Koussa under close arrest? Why does the government of Scotland, another party to the safety of an absurd conviction, fail to assert the rights of an independent legal code?
So: is Brian Fitzpatrick supporting a properly independent public inquiry into all that befell the Lockerbie prosecutions? He doesn’t quite say as much. Why not? Instead, he seems to believe that anyone in doubt over the independence of our judiciary has fallen in with “a tribe”.
I’d be interested in a test case. What would one propose, tomorrow, as a paid defence strategy – with an SCCRC judgement to hand – for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi? And how would the betting go, up at the courts, around the dockets, or by the Shirra’s seat, for that one?
Cockburn said: “In the abuses of our representative and municipal systems alone, our predecessors have left us fields in which patriotism may exhaust itself”. Two hundred and seventy were murdered, and still we fail them.
Thursday 9 February 2017
Guilty of monumental hypocrisy
[On this date in 2011 I reproduced on this blog Ian Bell’s column in that day’s edition of The Herald. It no longer seems to appear on the paper’s website, but it is worth repeating here:]
Sir Gus O’Donnell’s trawl through certain documents relating to the Lockerbie bombing has become very bad news for Labour.
It is bad in London, bad in Edinburgh; bad for reputations, bad for careers. On both sides of the border, the charge is the same: saying one thing, doing another. The only difference is that some things were shouted in one place and whispered elsewhere.
David Cameron handled the report with a certain vicious elegance in the Commons, in his best more-in-sorrow-than-anger voice. Too many things, he pointed out, were left unsaid by Labour ministers. Whether he would have behaved any differently in their shoes was a point he was happy to leave moot. He had certain aims in mind, and he achieved them.
Thus: blame Labour, blame the SNP, placate America, exonerate BP, and remind us that he was always opposed to the freeing of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi on any grounds. Better still, for the eternal interests of Her Majesty’s Government, nothing in O’Donnell’s document obliged Cameron to deal with a real question: what of profound doubts over the original conviction?
No-one in the Commons, as usual, had a word to say about that.
Labour was all over the place. Gordon Brown was forced into a statement that answered no questions. Jack Straw, England’s Justice Secretary in the period at issue, fell to parsing any phrase that might provide an excuse. Meanwhile, the Scottish party found itself in a truly hideous position.
Either its leading members knew about London’s efforts to “facilitate” a release deal with Libya, or they did not. If not, what does that tell us about relationships between Labour in Edinburgh and Labour in Westminster?
But if all was known, what excused the many, vehement accusations hurled at Kenny MacAskill, the SNP minister who freed Megrahi? Labour in Scotland was still at that game this week, even when it was beyond doubt that its colleagues in London had connived in Libyan efforts. Straw, O’Donnell tells us, even thought of supplying a supportive letter.
It’s possible, of course, that some Scottish Labour figures were “in the loop” and some were not. The Scotland Office, first under Des Browne, and by October 2008 in the charge of Jim Murphy, was under no illusions. The latter minister was certainly given the minutes of calls between Straw and Alex Salmond. So what about Holyrood?
But this means that some passionate opponents of Megrahi’s release were permitted – encouraged? – to go on conducting a campaign against MacAskill while the truth was otherwise kept hidden. Take your pick: scandal, shambles, or a bit of both?
None is easy to spin, but Labour has done its best. Supported by the – no doubt unprompted – right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes, a tale filtered into the London media this week to the effect that MacAskill was prepared, late in 2007, to amend the Scottish Government’s opposition to Labour’s prisoner transfer agreement with Libya. The alleged price: cash to pay off human rights claims over prison slopping out, and devolved control over airgun legislation. And how tawdry would that have been?
O’Donnell certainly relates – of exchanges in November, 2007 – that “it is clear that HMG’s understanding was that a PTA without any exclusions” – meaning Megrahi, the only Libyan in a British prison – “might be acceptable to the Scottish Government if progress could be made with regards to ongoing discussions...” (on slopping out and firearms law). The Cabinet Secretary’s footnotes then refer the reader to letters between Straw and Browne in which the two allude to that “understanding”.
But O’Donnell’s very next sentence in the body of his text records that, “Kenny MacAskill restated the Scottish Government’s position that any PTA should exclude anyone convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in a letter to Jack Straw on 6 December 2007”.
So much was already in the public domain, thanks to the Scottish Government’s website. Nor did the SNP deviate from that position.
Labour’s attempt to establish otherwise this week depends entirely on a “leaked” email from John McTernan, Brown’s adviser, who gleaned his “understanding” from unnamed “officials”.
You wouldn’t base a Scottish election campaign on that, I’d have thought. But what else does Iain Gray and his Holyrood party now possess? Continued demands for the release of Megrahi’s medical records? Such material is redacted even in O’Donnell’s report, on data protection grounds. An oncologist would tell you, meanwhile, that a prognosis is not a prediction, but add that prostate cancer treatments – and hence survival rates – are improving yearly.
Even given the horrific scale of Lockerbie, an attack on compassion is tricky. It’s also beside the point. As is O’Donnell’s report, and Cameron’s lofty satisfaction, and Brown’s floundering response.
The fact that Labour has been found guilty of monumental hypocrisy is important in its own right, no doubt, but it is only one part of a larger argument. In the matter of mass murder, the question of guilt is paramount. Unless it is settled, beyond doubt, every other “row” is chatter, and distracting chatter at that. In the case of Megrahi, despite anything politicians claim, there is no certainty.
We do know, though, of $3 million paid by US authorities to Maltese brothers, Toni and Paul Gauci, for the sake of identification evidence. We know that Lord Peter Fraser, then Lord Advocate, would later describe the former brother, supposedly a star witness, as less than the full shilling and “an apple short of a picnic”.
We know, furthermore, that the forensic “experts” on both sides of the Atlantic, providers of still more “key evidence” at Camp Zeist, were later discredited thoroughly. We know Professor Hans Koechler, Kofi Annan’s UN observer, damned the trial as an outrage and an abuse.
There’s more, much more. We don’t know, though, why Megrahi still fails to provide proof of his innocence. We don’t know why no political party – the SNP included – is prepared to entertain even an inquiry into the conviction.
Those rows over the compassionate release of “the Lockerbie bomber” will do instead, at least until some successor to Sir Gus cares to examine a few more of the papers salted away in the hidden record.
Thursday 27 August 2009
Tales of torture prove US has no right to moral leadership
[This is the headline over an article by Ian Bell in today's edition of The Herald. The following are the first four and the last two paragraphs.]
Since this seems to be the week for offending American opinion, let's cram Stalin and the CIA into the same sentence. It's not too much of a stretch. History relates, in gory detail, that the NKVD and sundry other forerunners of the KGB routinely achieved their ends by threatening the families of prisoners. It concentrated minds wonderfully.
The important difference is, of course, that Stalin's psychopaths as often as not carried out their promises to murder children and rape women. They did not serve freedom's cause, either. Still, the point is that there is nothing new in the dark, repulsive world of torture. And its practitioners always claim a higher purpose.
How should we respond, then, to the long-suppressed internal CIA report into the activities of certain of its agents in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks? Cancel a few holidays? Boycott bourbon? Remind ourselves that there is mounting evidence that Britain, too, has been in receipt of intelligence extracted illegally?
Eric Holder, the US attorney- general, has elected to publish the report and has appointed John Durham, an experienced federal prosecutor, to investigate a dozen or so cases. That's progress, of sorts. It will dismay the White House, inflame the Republican right and partly satisfy the American Civil Liberties Union. Whether it will redeem America's sense of rectitude is another matter. (...)
A country that believes it can treat alleged terrorists in any way it sees fit, and then fails to deal with the truth of its actions, is a poor candidate in the moral leadership stakes. Its President's own claims to leadership, especially when he chooses to lecture others, then lose all credibility.
So remind me: what was it that was so especially heinous about the recent actions of Scotland's government?
Since this seems to be the week for offending American opinion, let's cram Stalin and the CIA into the same sentence. It's not too much of a stretch. History relates, in gory detail, that the NKVD and sundry other forerunners of the KGB routinely achieved their ends by threatening the families of prisoners. It concentrated minds wonderfully.
The important difference is, of course, that Stalin's psychopaths as often as not carried out their promises to murder children and rape women. They did not serve freedom's cause, either. Still, the point is that there is nothing new in the dark, repulsive world of torture. And its practitioners always claim a higher purpose.
How should we respond, then, to the long-suppressed internal CIA report into the activities of certain of its agents in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks? Cancel a few holidays? Boycott bourbon? Remind ourselves that there is mounting evidence that Britain, too, has been in receipt of intelligence extracted illegally?
Eric Holder, the US attorney- general, has elected to publish the report and has appointed John Durham, an experienced federal prosecutor, to investigate a dozen or so cases. That's progress, of sorts. It will dismay the White House, inflame the Republican right and partly satisfy the American Civil Liberties Union. Whether it will redeem America's sense of rectitude is another matter. (...)
A country that believes it can treat alleged terrorists in any way it sees fit, and then fails to deal with the truth of its actions, is a poor candidate in the moral leadership stakes. Its President's own claims to leadership, especially when he chooses to lecture others, then lose all credibility.
So remind me: what was it that was so especially heinous about the recent actions of Scotland's government?
Friday 30 June 2017
Lockerbie: a disgraceful episode for Scots law
[This is the headline over an article by Ian Bell that appeared in The Herald on 30 June 2007. It reads as follows:]
Sometimes, justice miscarries. Mistakes are made. The innocent pay a heavy price for innocent stupidity and duly we mourn those dull, collective human errors, our endless, fathomless fallibility. Sometimes.
At other times, legality becomes a lethal weapon. Everyone becomes a conspiracy theorist. Who did kill Jack Kennedy? A mere five words, but a big question. Who bombed Lockerbie? Just three words, but worth the asking, I think, for the sake of 270 dead in a shower of falling corpses over a corner of Scotland.
Someone - the eternal "they" - ignited an aircraft over my small country. They then attempted to hinder an investigation, prevent a trial and sought to keep the bereaved from the truth. They, the hag-ridden Foggy Bottom desk-jockeys, did not even plant the bomb. So who did?
Not many days ago, the First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, was being accused of vote-grubbing because he suggested that an occupant of 10 Downing Street was trading prisoners without the consent of the Holyrood parliament. Not for the first time, mass murder and diplomacy appeared to be in conflict. Salmond, they said, was "picking a fight" with London. Over mass murder?
He's glib, but not that glib. I'm glib, too, but I can write a bit, sometimes. If the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has concluded that the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is "unsafe" what, exactly, is going on?
This is the man's second appeal. This is merely the latest confirmation that an £80m "Scottish" trial in the Netherlands was rigged. This is still more proof that Iran/Syria did the job, as was always obvious. This is the proof, if you needed such, that you live in a comatose colony of the United States of America, with justice for all.
Grow up. Lockerbie was traded away as necessary barter when Gulf War I mattered most to the ruling party in Washington. Afterwards, it became a mere nuisance. Who planted the bomb and slaughtered all those people? Who - and I offer the merest gloss of the cruel official paraphrase - cares?
Another device has just turned up in London, as I write. It is, might have been, a big one, tucked into a nice, big, unassuming car. He bombs us; we bomb him; so civilisations clash. It is intended to be understood as a lesson. Welcome to the job, Mr Brown.
But is that how it really is, or ever was? You cannot argue with a very large explosive device. I saw bleeding Omagh on the morning after: I am not actually naive. I do wonder, though, about the political uses of terror, or rather about the political utility of ignorant fear. They like us to be worried.
Lockerbie was not designed by one of Tony Blair's "implacable foes". Bin Laden, far less Libya and the poor sap, Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, had nothing to do with it. The atrocity was a trading of blows, diplomatically-speaking, and meant to be understood as such by people who mean to matter, after America "accidentally" brought down an Iranian passenger jet. Just the 270 dead in Scotland, then.
This is how they run your world. Your faiths and allegiances are entirely incidental. The real point about Lockerbie is that it happened above and inside a very small country that did not have the means to object, or to respond. The "integrity of the Scottish legal system", once co-respondent in the birth of the European Enlightenment, was treated as a joke. Is it to remain a joke?
Let's see. When the criminal cases review commission detects the possibility of legal discomfort for the body politic, it is saying, in effect, that a conviction stinks.
It's lousy. The commission has spent years on this case and it reports, at your considerable expense, that Scots law cannot begin to digest the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. Where now?
Salmond, First Minister, has said a very few words. The apparatus of the Scottish state will not expand on those, when last I checked. Legally, things are very tricky, possibly by design. But the worst terrorist atrocity in our history should count for more than a squabble between Edinburgh and London. A few CIA men in a Scottish court, with their past and present masters in tow, might suffice.
Don't hold your breath, though. It is a truly shocking thing to say about the Lockerbie carnage, but that slaughter was a mere glimpse of how this world is run. Oddly - a plot may be involved - I didn't need a conspiracy theorist to tell me as much. Why will the al-Megrahi case refuse to go away? Why will no-one answer the questions? Why is Scots law debased? Why, for that matter, are "improvised explosive devices" being found on the streets of London?
This space is reserved for an "essay". I take it to mean that I should provide more than the usual comment. I take that to suggest I should attempt a meaning, if any, in Mr al-Megrahi's inevitable return to court, what it implies for Scottish justice and what it says about the British state.
The former would be better off without the latter. An innocent man would have done better under a real democracy than in our version of a civic society.
And London bombs may yet speak for themselves.
Risk an idea. Ask yourself if the horror of 9/11 did not, in fact, begin over Lockerbie. Then ask yourself why either horror was imaginable, or imagined.
Ask yourself what is being done in your name. In London, glib as I could ever manage, the revisionists these days mock the notion. They think "Not in My Name" is funny. I've h eard them laugh.
So who murdered the Lockerbie innocents? As well, ask who put a pair of 20-year-olds from Fife into a British uniform, in someone else's country and invited a sacrifice for no reason I could name.
That was this week: history already. My fumbling point is that these things are connected. If you need an essay on the dignity of Scots law, think of our security state and our traditions of jurisprudence. Are we truly at war? With whom? Why? By which Act of either parliament?
Justice miscarries, sometimes. Cops and lawyers and courts get it wrong, now and then. Those same fallible people spend many days protecting the rest of us from ourselves.
But the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is an example of a system corrupted, for base political ends, by people who do not take your democracy seriously.
He didn't do it. No-one with a straight face thinks otherwise.
The Americans, the Iranians, Gaddafi, the Syrians and some pensionable suits in Whitehall can supply the details.
So Salmond picks a fight with London? Not exactly. For now, our executive is very circumspect. It needs, so it believes, to take care. But as this case continues to unravel, a robust political exchange, as such things are known, may become unavoidable.
The atrocity happened on our soil. Our national legal system was somewhat compromised. Scotland was wounded, then insulted, then treated as a colony's colony.
I don't think I've used the word too often before, but the al-Megrahi case is a disgrace.
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