Lockerbie chat on Independence Live

This evening’s Skype chat between David McGowran and me is archived here. It was intended to be a video chat, but the technology let us down and it is audio only.

Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer contributed a reference to an article published today on the website of The Guardian. I had not in fact seen it, but have now had a chance to read it. Absolutely fascinating: Cooperation between British spies and Gaddafi’s Libya revealed in official papers. 

Dr De Braeckeleer also mentioned the recent death of the Argentinian investigating judge Alberto Nisman. How does that relate to Lockerbie? Here is an excerpt from an article published today on the website of The Christian Science Monitor:

"Mr Nisman had been obsessively on the trail of the perpetrators of the July 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires for the past decade. He was tasked with the investigation by Nestor Kirchner, the former president and deceased husband of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Nisman died at home on Sunday night, shortly before he was to expound publicly on a political bombshell he laid on Argentina's public earlier this month, namely that President Kirchner had promised to cover up Iran's involvement in the 1994 terrorist attack, the worst in Argentina's history, in which 85 people died. (...)

"Mr Nisman took over in 2005.

"By 2006, he was claiming that senior Iranian officials were involved in the attack, including the country's former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. His key witness? Abolghasem Mesbahi, an alleged former Iranian intelligence officer, who has made a career of leveling accusations against Iran since his defection in 1996. He claimed that former President Carlos Menem was paid about $10 million to hide Iran's involvement.

"Mr Mesbahi has also insisted that Iran was behind the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, instead of Muammar Qaddafi's Libya. A Libyan intelligence agent was ultimately found guilty of murder by a special tribunal; Mr Qaddafi's regime paid substantial reparations over the attack."

Lockerbie lies

[This is the headline over an article in today’s edition of the Morning Star.  It reads as follows:]

On the 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on British territory, Steven Walker looks at the evidence that the wrong person was convicted of the crime.

December 21 1988 is a date etched into the memory of the people of Lockerbie and Scotland more generally as the night all hell rained down from the skies above them.

What followed was a criminal investigation which quickly became mired in rumour, suspicion and evidence that the wrong people were blamed for the terrorist outrage that blew a Pan American airliner to pieces.

It is widely believed that the truth is yet to come out about who was responsible.

Relatives of those killed in the disaster, together with the family of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who is widely believed to have been innocent of the crime for which he served a prison sentence and died two-and-a-half years after being released, are still awaiting justice.

There is a new bid to get a Scottish court to review the original court proceedings, which were suspected of being part of a cover-up involving the CIA and the British government.

The relatives lodged an application in June with the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), a body that reviews alleged miscarriages of justice in criminal cases and has the power to refer a case back to the High Court.

Megrahi was the sole person found guilty of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in 1988, in which 270 people were killed.

Previous official inquiries have raised more questions than answers about who was really responsible for the atrocity.

The Lockerbie case has been mired in controversy almost from day one of the investigation.

Critics have long wondered what the truth is.

Despite unreasonable pressure from a variety of sources, investigative journalists have established that many issues are still not resolved.

For example, a local Cumbrian GP who was brought in to recover and label bodies scattered over a wide area tagged 59 corpses but discovered that in the official records later published the total had dropped to 58.

His personal credibility and professional competence were questioned at the inquest but he remains adamant that one of the bodies had “disappeared” with no explanation.

Testimony from an eyewitness, a local farmer, was ridiculed by police when he saw a large tarpaulin covering an item in a field being guarded by an armed soldier while an unmarked helicopter hovered overhead.

The official inquiry contained no mention of the mysterious item under cover or reference to a helicopter on site.

Another farmer at Tundergarth Mains, Jim Wilson, found his fields were littered with bodies and debris from the airliner. The mess included a suitcase, neatly packed with a powdery substance that looked like drugs.

Wilson was one of the first witnesses to give evidence when the fatal accident inquiry started in October 1990. Yet no-one asked him about the drugs suitcase.

Two senior CIA agents were aboard Pan Am 103. The fact that Major McKee and his CIA associate Matthew Gannon, formerly deputy CIA station chief in Beirut, were among the dead passengers has raised suspicions that the US and British authorities interfered in the initial investigation of the crash site in order to ascertain whether national security might be compromised by a Scottish police investigation.

Up until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 the received view among Western media fed by government sources was that Iran or Libya was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.

After Saddam Hussein had finished his war with Iran in 1988, his regime was sold weapons by US, French and British arms manufacturers eager to re-equip his massive army and make huge profits on arms sales. Suddenly, with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the West needed Iran’s support and the story changed to suggest that Libya alone was behind the bombing.

In August 1997, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a long article about Lockerbie. It cited a new credible witness named as Abolghasem Mesbahi. What he was saying contradicted “the Anglo-American thesis of the sole involvement of Libya.”

Mesbahi’s story suggested that the bomb had been loaded in single pieces at Frankfurt airport into an aeroplane to London. The head of Iran Air at Frankfurt at that time, a secret service man, had smuggled them past the airport controls. They had then been assembled in London and put on Pan Am 103 at Heathrow airport.

Some of the British relatives argue that the wrong man was put behind bars and that the truth about who murdered their loved ones remains elusive. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was found guilty of mass murder following a trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in 2001 and jailed for life.

He lost his first appeal in 2002. The following year, he applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for a review of his conviction. An investigation costing £1.1m by the body led to a finding in June 2007 of six grounds on which it believed a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.

But perhaps one of the most compelling facts which receives little mention in all the confusing theories, missing evidence and attempts to thwart the legal process by the US and British governments, is that an Iran Air A-300 Airbus was shot down over the Gulf in July 1988 by the US warship Vincennes, which wrongly identified it as an attacking fighter. All 290 people on board were killed.

There are credible reports that the Iranians hired freelance operatives to deliver an act of revenge against a US civilian airliner. Pan Am 103 was downed five months later.

At the time Iran was being targeted as the new threat to Middle East security. Iraq had been supplied with arms by the US to prolong its war with Iran, despite Iran being cynically used by President Ronald Reagan to fund illegal payments to the anti-Nicaraguan right-wing contras in exchange for selling the Iranians arms.

It is not unreasonable to suppose the Iranians were not best pleased at being betrayed in the war with Iraq and then have their civilian airliner shot down, and thus subsequently decided to exact revenge.

Of course Libya paid $2.5 billion in compensation for the Lockerbie bombing, which strongly suggests Colonel Gadaffi accepted guilt for the atrocity.

But this ignores the fact that Libya was desperate to have sanctions lifted and admitting guilt for Lockerbie was the price to be accepted back into the fold to do business with the West.

But whatever the truth, Lockerbie remains a textbook case of a terrible tragedy in which the pain and suffering of relatives whose search for answers about why and how their loved ones died has taken second place to geopolitical manoeuvres and deliberate meddling in legal processes, and the murky world of secret service wheeling and dealing on behalf of governments with no respect for human decency. 

[A further report in today's Morning Star is headlined Megrahi conviction "must be reviewed".]

Filmmaker and pilot takes a close-up view of Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article in today’s edition of The Herald.  It reads as follows:]

A novel about the ­Lockerbie bombing has been published by a film-maker and director who has worked on the hit television drama Hamish Macbeth.

Paddy Carpenter, a first assistant director on films and TV series who has worked with actors such as Omar Sharif, wrote the 500-page book over the past two years after becoming fascinated with the atrocity while filming in Scotland.

Unsafe: The Script of One-Zero-Three tells the story of screenwriter Ray Scriver and his efforts to get his work taken up by Hollywood.

Mr Carpenter, who has also worked on the TV ­detective series Minder, said the novel explores both the downing of Pan Am 103 and the politics of the film industry.

It is set in a number of locations including New Zealand and Scotland.

The qualified pilot, who lives in Gloucestershire, said: "Lockerbie is obviously a very dark subject, but basing the novel in the film industry allowed me to introduce an element of light into the plot.

"There are lots of twists and turns and suprises in the story. It moves about quite a lot to keep interest. There is a lot of foreboding in it, not just about the bombing, but about what is going to happen to Ray and his script."

All 243 passengers and 11 crew died when Pan Am 103 was blown up over ­Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. Eleven people on the ground were also killed. It remains the biggest terrorist attack in Britain.

Abdelbaset al Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was convicted of the bombing at a special court in The Netherlands in 2001.

But new theories have arisen over who was responsible. In March this year ex Iranian spy Abolghassem Mesbahi claimed the attack was ordered by Iran in revenge for the accidental downing of an Iranian commercial jet by the US Navy in 1988.

It was carried out by ­Palestinian terrorists based in Syria, he said, and not on the orders of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

[The blurb for the novel on Amazon.co.uk reads in part:]

English screenwriter Ray Scriver's latest script lifts the lid on the real guilt behind the Lockerbie bombing, so will find powerful opponents. When his film, One-Zero-Three, moves nearer to production, and knowledge of his explosive conclusions can no longer be contained, his life begins to feel increasingly precarious. Just as with the Lockerbie flight itself, its investigation, evidence at the trial, the verdict and the whole public perception of the case, Scriver wonders if he too is now unsafe. A novel set in the larger than life world of film-making, Unsafe – The Script of One-Zero-Three is centred around a screenplay which aims to stir the muddy waters of a real terrorist plot, the actual outrage above Scotland and a cynical 25 year cover-up by agencies and governments. So the book is also a fascinating, no-stone-unturned, true crime reinvestigation of the UK's largest ever mass-murder and its aftermath.

Lockerbie suspect 'killed in al-Qaeda bomb blast'

[This is the headline over a report by Martin Williams in today’s edition of The Herald.  It reads as follows:]

A terrorist suspected of being the real mastermind of the Lockerbie bombing has been killed in a bomb blast, according to unconfirmed reports.

Ahmed Jibril who has been on America's 'most wanted' list for decades was reported to have been assassinated by an al-Qaeda affiliated group.

Jordanian media reported that Jabhat al-Nusra, an off-shoot of al-Qaeda, used an improvised explosive device to kill the 76-year-old who is a strong supporter of Syria's President Assad.

The reports state that the attack on Jibril took place several days ago and although the Palestinian leader survived the initial attack he succumbed to his injuries in a Damascus hospital on Monday.

Yesterday the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), which Jibril founded and remains general secretary, denied that he was dead or even wounded.

Robert Black, Professor Emeritus of Scottish Law at the University of Edinburgh, often referred to as the architect of the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands did not believe that if Jibril died that it would make much difference to the search for the truth about the disaster.

He said: "He was never likely himself to admit responsibility.

"It is possible, though unlikely, that his absence from the scene might give others the courage to speak up about his involvement.

"But I think we will just be left with what evidence already exists, particularly the $10million payment from Iran into the PFLP-GC's coffers a few days after 21 December 1988.

"There are those in the West and in the Middle East who think that Jibril and the PFLP-GC were never really important figures in the Palestinian struggle: good at raking in funds but leaving the fighting to others.

"Certainly, Jibril and the PFLP-GC are thought by some to be seriously in the frame, as contractors for Iran which was seeking revenge for the shooting down of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in July 1988, six months before Lockerbie.

He added: "And at the Camp Zeist trial the defence lodged a special defence of incrimination blaming Jibril and the PFLP-GC for the crime."

In March an Iranian defector, a former intelligence agent, claimed that the Lockerbie attack was ordered by Iran in revenge for the accidental downing of an Iranian commercial jet by the US Navy in 1988.

It was carried out by Palestinian terrorists based in Syria, he said, and not on the orders of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The atrocity killed 243 passengers, 16 crew and a further 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie.

Ex-spy Abolghassem Mesbahi claimed in a documentary that former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to mirror the 1988 US strike on an Iranian Airbus and recruited a Syrian-based group to plan an attack.

Evidence unearthed by the documentary-makers included the names of four suspects belonging to the Syrian-based radical group, the PFLP-GC, with Ahmed Jibril identified as the plot's mastermind.

It was claimed he recruited one of his most trusted deputies Hafez Dalkamoni, a Palestinian PFLP-GC member, and Jordanian bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat

These recruits were arrested by German police, who discovered four bombs, months before Lockerbie. A US intelligence cable obtained by Megrahi's defence team is alleged to have said: "The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmed Jibril…money was given to Jibril upfront in Damascus for initial expenses - the mission was to blow up a Pan Am flight."

PFLP-GC's name was identified during the Lockerbie trial - in which Libyan agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1989. Megrahi, who was released from jail by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, died in 2012 protesting his innocence and his family said they planned to appeal against his conviction.

Jim Sheridan plans Pan Am terror attack film

[This is the headline over a report published yesterday on the website of The Hollywood Reporter.  It reads as follows:]

Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan is lining up a movie about the 1988 Pan Am terrorist bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which left 270 passengers and town residents dead.

Sheridan said he is working on a script with Irish screenwriter Audrey O’Reilly and that the film would "definitely happen in the next few years."

The attack continues to occupy hearts and minds on both sides of the Atlantic, as many of the dead were American and British.

"It’s a drama basically looking at the effect on a family of terrorism,” said Sheridan.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker said that the narrative is set to follow the real-life story of Jim Swire, an English doctor whose daughter Flora was among the dead when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over the Scottish village on its way from London to the US.

Swire soon became a leading campaigner in the hunt to discover the truth about the terror attack and was unconvinced by the trial and the accusations leveled at Libya.

Eventually the doctor would go on to meet Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the alleged Libyan intelligence officer who was jailed for the bombing, as a working medic.

Megrahi was released by the Scottish authorities on compassionate grounds to return to Libya to die in 2012 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

"It was this weird thing where you think you’ve found the person who killed your daughter, and then Jim ended up in the cell looking after him -- because he’s a doctor and the guy wasn’t well -- and it’s obvious as the nose on your face that Megrahi didn’t do it," said Sheridan.

Lockerbie recently returned to the headlines with a report in UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph claiming that the bombing was actually carried out by a Syria-based terror group under orders from Iran.

Abolghassem Mesbahi, a former Iranian intelligence officer who's since defected to Germany, claimed that the plane was downed in response to a US Navy strike just six months earlier on an Iranian commercial jet that killed 290 people.

"It’s scary what they didn’t reveal to us at the time," said Sheridan. "It doesn’t really matter, the people are dead and you can’t bring them back to life. But in the future, we need clear investigations of these things or else you’re going to end up with flight MH370 [the missing Malaysia Airlines plane]."

Swire is scheduled to be among the special guests at Sheridan’s inaugural Dublin Arabic Film Festival, which kicks off in the Irish capital’s Light House Cinema on May 8.

Other speakers at the four-day event are set to include Omar Sharif, who opens the festival with his acclaimed 2003 drama Monsieur Ibrahim, and Hany Abu-Assad, the director of Oscar-nominated Palestinian dramas Omar and Paradise Now.

Sheridan's 1989 debut, My Left Foot, garnered Oscars for Daniel Day-Lewis and co-star Brenda Fricker.

Sheridan followed up with In the Name of the Father, which won the Golden Bear at the 44th Berlin International Film Festival, and his resume also includes The Boxer, In America, Get Rich or Die Tryin' and Brothers.

[A further report on the same website can be read here.]

Lockerbie: 25 years of geopolitics over truth

[This is the headline over an article by David Samel, an attorney in New York City, published today on the Mondoweiss website. It reads in part:]

It has now been a quarter-century since Pan Am 103 exploded in the air and dropped onto the quiet town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 passengers and crew and 11 villagers.  No credible claim of responsibility was ever made, and the saga of the search for the guilty parties, still continues with various twists and turns.  A Libyan was convicted of the mass murder, but according to an Al Jazeera documentary that aired in the US last week, he was innocent. Relying in part on disclosures made by a recent defector from the Iranian intelligence service, Abolghassem Mesbahi, the documentary concludes that Iran, Syria, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC, headquartered in Damascus), were to blame.

Ordinarily, the “revelations” of an intelligence service defector that conveniently accuse the enemies du jour of some spectacular crime should be treated with skepticism, if not downright contempt.  But this is no ordinary case.  In fact, the new documentary’s theory was the original focus of British and U.S. investigators for nearly two years following the air disaster.  Six months before Lockerbie, a U.S. Navy ship engaging in unnecessarily provocative games in the Mediterranean had mistaken an Iranian civilian airliner as a threatening military response and shot it down, killing all 290 aboard.  Iran had vowed revenge, and was believed to have recruited the “Syrian-sponsored” PFLP group to carry out the retaliatory attack against the Pan Am jet.  Mohammed Abu Talb, a Palestinian arrested in Sweden shortly after Lockerbie and charged with several other bombings, was suspected of being one of the principals who had the bomb placed on board the plane. (...)

Public attention first turned to Libya around October, 1990.  Not surprisingly, there also was brief mention of Iraq as a possible culprit.  It took a little while for official disinterest in Syria to filter down to the media.  In November, 1990, the NY Times still pronounced that “Syria is home to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which is believed to have been deeply involved in the bombing of a Pan American World Airways jumbo jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, two years ago with the loss of 270 lives.”

But soon, the focus was entirely on Libya.  By the end of 1991, two Libyans, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, had been indicted and the UK/US were demanding their extradition for trial.  When Libya balked at turning over the suspects, sanctions already imposed were tightened. The standoff continued for years, until finally, in 1999, after suffering tens of billions of dollars in sanctions, Libya complied with the demand and handed over Fhimah and Megrahi.

The 2000 trial was held in the Netherlands before a panel of three Scottish judges and no jury.  While interest in a Libyan connection may at first have been genuinely based on circumstantial evidence worth investigating, it wasn’t long before the case against Fhimah and Megrahi looked thin and tenuous at best.  For just one example, the prosecution, with the assistance of a large cash reward of two million dollars, managed to obtain at best the lukewarm identification testimony of a Malta clothing store owner who sold garments packed next to the bomb.  The store owner, named Gauci, identified Megrahi as someone who looked like the clothes buyer, although his physical description of the suspect was of a much taller man.

The NY Times coverage of the trial was actually quite fair, with reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr repeatedly expressing skepticism about the prosecution, and giving prominence to commentators, such as Scottish Law Professor Robert Black, whose criticism of the Crown’s presentation bordered on ridicule.  In one article, Professor Black was quoted as stating unequivocally, “A conviction is — I kid you not – impossible.” Journalists Andrew and Alexander Cockburn wrote at length of the legal farce in a less Times-like manner, calling it a “frame-up.” [RB: I have no recollection of saying what is attributed to me above (and the link is broken) but I am prepared to accept that I did.  I certainly have said the following: “Before the verdicts in the original trial were delivered, I expressed the view that for the judges to return verdicts of guilty they would require (i) to accept every incriminating inference that the Crown invited them to draw from evidence that was on the face of it neutral and capable of supporting quite innocent inferences, (ii) to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, positively identified Megrahi as the person who bought from his shop in Sliema the clothes and umbrella contained in the suitcase that held the bomb and (iii) to accept that the date of purchase of these items was proved to be 7 December 1988 (as distinct from 23 November 1988 when Megrahi was not present on Malta). I went on rashly to express the opinion that, for the judges to be satisfied of all these matters on the evidence led at the trial, they would require to adopt the posture of the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, when she informed Alice "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." In convicting Megrahi, it is submitted that this is precisely what the trial judges did.”] 

Prof Black’s prediction was wrong, of course, as the Scottish judges found Megrahi guilty while acquitting co-defendant Fhimah.  The judges’ written decision acknowledged the ”uncertainties and qualifications” of the prosecution’s case, that key witnesses had repeatedly lied, and that the prosecution had not explained how the bomb had been placed on the Pan Am plane.  Perhaps it was these deficiencies that led Professor Black to his misplaced certainty of total acquittal, but apparently he did not count on the intangible forces at work behind the scenes, including government pressure for at least some vindication of the high-profile accusation against a public enemy country.

Once again, Times reporter McNeil critically assessed  the judges’ reasoning.  However, once the verdict was in, Megrahi’s status as terrorist/bomber/murderer of 270 more or less became etched in stone.  If anything, the verdict acquitting Fhimah was portrayed as the more scandalous finding.

Megrahi’s initial preliminary appeal was denied, but after a four-year investigation, another Scottish appellate tribunal issued a mostly secret 800-page report concluding that “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.”  [RB: Not an appellate tribunal, but the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.] This would be one of the rare cases in Scottish jurisprudence, fewer than 10%, in which the defendant would be entitled to a full-blown second appeal, the majority of which result in overturning convictions.

So the stage was set for a fresh look at all the facts, including new evidence not considered by the original three-judge panel, such as the multimillion dollar payment to secure Gauci’s ID testimony.  But fate intervened.  Megrahi contracted [prostate] cancer, which by 2009 appeared likely to be imminently fatal.  The British eagerly jumped at the opportunity to release Megrahi on “humanitarian” grounds to die in his home country.

It rightfully seemed bizarre and outrageous, especially to many grieving families, that a man who deliberately murdered hundreds of innocent people would be released for compassionate reasons rather than be allowed to die in prison, a fate far less horrendous than that suffered by his victims.  It seemed even more outrageous when Megrahi refused to die on schedule and lasted three more years rather than three months. But there obviously was more to Megrahi’s release than British officials were eager to publicize.  One of the conditions for release was that he withdraw his pesky appeal, which promised new scrutiny and new evidence that would have been highly embarrassing to governments and law enforcement and judicial authorities alike.

Against the backdrop of condemnation of Megrahi’s release by the likes of John Kerry, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and President Obama himself, Robert Mackey, in his Lede blog at the Times, valiantly revisited the case.  Mackey acknowledged the “firestorm of anger” over the compassion shown to a convicted mass murderer, but observed that such outrage was “clearly based on the belief that [Megrahi] was responsible for the bombing.”  Mackey also refused to classify doubts about the conviction as the product of wild imagination, noting that such doubts “existed outside the murky precincts of the Internet where wild conspiracy theories are spun out.”  He then proceeded to review the questionable trial evidence in detail, and rue the fact that Megrahi’s appeal would never be heard.

Nearly a year later, a mini-scandal erupted when it was disclosed that oil giant BP, which had recently achieved mega-villain status for its Gulf Coast oil spill, had lobbied the British government for Megrahi’s release to protect an investment off the Libyan coast.  Kerry thundered that “commercial interests — oil or otherwise — should never be prioritized over justice for victims of terrorist acts and severe punishment for convicted terrorists.”  He might have added, “Geopolitical interests?  Well that’s a different story.”

By the time Megrahi died in 2012, the troubling questions about his guilt, including the original focus of investigators on Iran and Syria, had predictably been reduced to dismissible “conspiracy theories.” Times reporter Harvey Morris noted that Megrahi had “either cheated the Scottish justice system or … cheated death by surviving beyond his allotted time.”  Morris asked, “But has he also cheated relatives of the Lockerbie victims by taking the real truth about the bombing to the grave?”  Apparently unfamiliar with the far superior coverage appearing in his own paper by McNeil and Mackey, Morris did not contemplate that the man might be innocent.

So if it was not Libya, was there any credibility to the original theory of Iran/Syria/PFLP-GC/Abu Talb complicity, the one that exclusively occupied investigators’ attention for two years after Lockerbie?  Alex Cockburn thought so, and this conclusion has now been embraced by the new Al Jazeera documentary.  Libya is no longer on the official enemies’ list, and with the existence of bona fide evidence against Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians, will there be renewed interest in this theory that was dropped in 1990 for no apparent reason other than galvanizing support for the first Gulf War?  David Horovitz,  the British-Israeli neocon at the Times of Israel, already has heartily endorsed the Alex Cockburn/Al Jazeera version.  I wonder if he ever thought he would side with those two against the official US/UK line.  There have been a handful of others to take notice as well.

Will the UK and US jump on board?  Very doubtful.  The UK already risked, and received, public criticism and ridicule for releasing Megrahi, deemed a small price to pay to save the embarrassment of his probably successful appeal.  Although it was a British prosecution, the US was steadfast in its support throughout. Together, these two countries deliberately suppressed the truth, hounded an innocent Libyan man to his grave, perverted the Scottish justice system with political pressure, fabricated testimony purchased with millions of dollars, protected the guilty parties, extorted billions of dollars from Libya in sanctions and compensation payments to the families, and cared not one iota for the hundreds of grieving families who depended on their officials to seek actual justice.  One can hardly expect them to acknowledge perpetration of a two-decade long miscarriage of justice just to claim that Iran and Syria committed an awful crime in 1988.

And what about Israel?  Netanyahu, who professes to be 100% certain of Iranian guilt for every atrocity before the smoke clears and bodies are removed, has so far held his tongue.  On the one hand, Iranian guilt for one of the worst acts of terrorism in recent decades, at least against the West, seems too good to be true, not that truth matters a whole lot to Netanyahu.  On the other hand, even a credible allegation of Iran’s role is a little stale by now, and it may not be worth embarrassing Israel’s closest allies.

While this tale of government fabrication and suppression of truth for craven purposes is hardly unique, the scope of this dishonesty and the ease with which it was carried out are somewhat astonishing.  The last word goes to Cockburn, who loved to quote his father Claud:  “Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.”