Lockerbie, and the mangled logic of Magnus Linklater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A message from Susan Lindauer

[The following message was posted yesterday on Facebook by Susan Lindauer.]

The current situation creates an unexpected opportunity for the Pan Am 103 families to demand that the Scottish courts review the sealed deposition of Dr Richard Fuisz, in the closing days of the Lockerbie trial. The deposition was given in the US Federal Court of Alexandria, Virginia in January, 2001, and sworn before Judge White. Curiously, the deposition was sealed in the US and could only be read overseas, putting it out of reach to the US families concerned with Lockerbie. However, within the sealed portion of the deposition is a Double Seal. Attorneys for Butera & Andrews in Washington were prohibited from advising Edward MacKechnie [RB: solicitor for Fhimah during the Zeist trial and later solicitor for Megrahi] about its contents. However, as Dr Fuisz's former asset of many years, I have privileged access to know what that contains: a list of 11 names of the individuals involved in the attack, and the map laying out their conspiracy.

By gathering together now, while attention's hot on this Libyan defector, [Moussa] Koussa, we can force the issue, and compel the Scottish courts to examine the double seal.

[More on Susan Lindauer can be read here and by inserting her name in this blog's search facility.]

Case against Susan Lindauer dropped

On 17 October 2007, I posted on this blog an article by Michael Collins about Susan Lindauer and her connection to the Lockerbie case. That post can be read here. In a new article in Scoop Independent News, Collins reports that the US federal Government on 15 January 2009 dropped the charges (of acting as an unregistered agent for Iraq) against Ms Lindauer. One paragraph reads:

'Lindauer offered an affidavit concerning the Lockerbie bombing in 1998. Her statement was based on her discussions with Dr Richard Fuisz, whom she named as her CIA handler. Dr Fuisz was said to be "a major operative in the Middle East in the 1980s." Since then the Scottish Criminal Cases [Review] Commission has since uncovered irregularities in the evidence against the two Libyans convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.'

Lockerbie, Megrahi, Ashton and Linklater

[The following item has been published today on John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury website:]

Below is an unpublished letter, which I wrote to The Times in response to Magnus Linklater’s article of 21 December (to which I responded at greater length in an open letter). It provoked a response from Mr Linklater, which I have included below. I shall be responding to it in due course. As yet, he has not responded to either of my open letters, the first of which can be read here.

Dear Sir,

Not for the first time, Magnus Linklater (Times Scottish edition 21 December) seriously misrepresents the position of the majority of those who believe that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – the so-called Lockerbie bomber – was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Once again he resurrects the claim that we are conspiracy theorists and ignores the fact that our chief concerns – that the trial court judgment was unreasonable and that numerous items of exculpatory evidence were withheld from the defence lawyers – were shared by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which referred the case back to the appeal court on no fewer than six grounds. Mr Linklater praises the SCCRC’s lengthy report, yet ignores the fact its conclusions were a damning indictment of the Scottish criminal justice system.

He also attaches the conspiracy theorist label to those who suggest that Iran, rather than Libya, was to behind the bombing, while turning a blind eye to the fact that the role of Iran and its terrorist proxies, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, is confirmed by numerous declassified US intelligence documents and is spoken to by two former CIA agents Mr Robert Baer and Dr Richard Fuisz.

Most outrageously, he suggests that Mr Megrahi’s supporters have accused his original defence team of knowingly overlooking or suppressing evidence that might have helped his defence. As Mr Linklater, should know, that is not the view of the Justice for Megrahi group, nor is it mine.

Journalists who conflate fringe views with those of the mainstream and ignore facts that sit uncomfortably with their own opinions should be sent back to journalism college, not let loose on the pages of a respected newspaper.

Yours sincerely,

John Ashton

Dear John Ashton

I don’t know if The Times will publish your letter — that is up to them.

But if you find the phrase “conspiracy theorists” insulting, then I find your suggestion that I should go back to “journalism college” offensive. I’ve been in the husiness for more than 40 years, and have learned over that time a simple principle of reporting: that good investigation requires sound proof.

I use the word conspiracy advisedly. It describes the whole gamut of the pro-Megrahi school, which runs from CIA plots to drug-smuggling, tampered evidence, conniving lawyers, and complacent judges. Your own (first) book sets so many hares running it is quite impossible to track them down. And others have done the same. Only last week the Daily Mail had Dr Swire confronting Abu Talb, whom even you know was not responsible, as the principal suspect; and on  Saturday your fellow-theorist Morag Kerr alleged in a  radio discussion with me that the Crown had deliberately subverted evidence to support their case. If that is not a conspiracy I don’t know what is. 

I am amazed that you should be touting shadowy CIA agents like Fuisz and Baer, whose evidence would never stand up in court. The way that Baer was exposed in the SCCRC report should make you think twice about using his name again. 

Yes, it is true that the SCCRC found grounds for referring the case back to appeal. They mainly centred on Gauci’s evidence. That is certainly worth examining again, and might or might not undermine the prosecution case. But it is grounds for appeal, no more, and it  demonstrates  what an objective and  well-balanced inquiry the SCCRC  was. Far from being “a damning indictment” of the Scottish justice system,” it shows the system working. Of course, Megrahi himself had the opportunity of using the appeal process  to his advantage. But he chose not to. 

I much prefer the meticulous way in which the SCCRC disposed of the various conspiracy theories involving Iran and the PFLP-GC by going back to first principles and invetigating them properly, rather than the wild, headline-grabbing claims that you and your coleagues deploy [sic].

Regards

Magnus Linklater

Charges against Susan Lindauer dropped

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Michael Collins published on the Scoop website:]

(Jan 16, Wash DC) The Department of Justice entered a motion to drop all charges against Susan Lindauer yesterday morning, Jan 15, 2009. The filing (...) at the federal district court in lower Manhattan ends the government's attempt to prosecute her for allegedly acting as an "unregistered agent" for Iraq. Since her arrest in early 2004, she has repeatedly asked for a trial to present evidence that she had been a United States intelligence asset since the early 1990s.

By filing this order, the government surrendered forever its ability to prosecute Lindauer as an "Iraqi foreign agent" and for lesser charges contained in the indictment, including a one week trip to Baghdad in March, 2002.

Lindauer made the following statement today, Jan 16, 2009: "I am disgusted by this case. They think that they have defeated me by denying my day in court. It could not be more wrong. If we can't have a criminal trial, we're going to have a civil trial for damages."

Lindauer was arrested in March, 2004 shortly after offering to testify before a Bush appointed blue ribbon commission evaluating US pre-war intelligence on Iraq. In late February, she informed the offices of two commission members, Sen McCain (R-AZ) and Trent Lott (R-MS), that she could testify that US pre-war intelligence was proactive and effective, not a popular view at that time.

Lindauer has adamantly maintained her innocence of all charges since her arrest. In addition to the "unregistered agent" charge, the government alleged that she had taken an unauthorized trip to Baghdad, and attended meetings with Iraqi intelligence agents at the Iraqi Embassy at the United Nations. Lindauer planned an aggressive defense with evidence that showed both government knowledge and authorization of her activities plus a history of activity on behalf of US intelligence.

Lindauer offered an affidavit concerning the Lockerbie bombing in 1998. Her statement was based on her discussions with Dr Richard Fuisz, whom she named as her CIA handler. Dr Fuisz was said to be "a major operative in the Middle East in the 1980s." Since then the Scottish Criminal Cases [Review] Commission has since uncovered irregularities in the evidence against the two Libyans convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

[RB: The Susan Lindauer saga can be followed here.]

More on the Susan Lindauer saga

The PhoeniciaPhoenix blog today publishes a lengthy post headed "Former CIA asset speaks out after criminal charges dropped." It reads in part:

'Former CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) non-official cover (NOC) asset Susan Lindauer is speaking out after, in one of its final acts, the Bush Justice Department dropped all criminal charges against her for acting as an "unregistered" agent of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, traveling to Baghdad, and other acts. Lindauer was arrested in March 2004 after she volunteered to testify before a blue ribbon commission on pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Lindauer, the second cousin of George W. Bush White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and the daughter of a one-time Republican gubernatorial candidate in Alaska, approached two commission members, Trent Lott of Mississippi and John McCain of Arizona with her offer of testimony about intelligence. It was after she made her approach that she was arrested on charges of acting on behalf of Iraq's government. (...)

'In her NOC asset role, Lindauer covered the Iraqi and Libyan missions to the United Nations in New York. She refused to discuss details of the non-official cover status under which she worked, saying it remains sensitive information. Neither country had diplomatic relations with the United States and, therefore, had no embassies in Washington, DC. Lindauer was responsible for maintaining "back channel" links between U.S. intelligence and Iraq and Libya, primarily dealing with counter-terrorism matters. (...)

'Lindauer said her CIA handler, Richard Fuisz, a long-time U.S. intelligence agent in the Middle East, said the CIA learned from the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland that terrorists might use hijacked planes as weapons. (...)

'Like CIA NOC Valerie Plame Wilson, who, along with her NOC firm Brewster Jennings & Associates, was outed by the Bush White House, the failure of the Bush administration to protect Lindauer and her contacts had potentially catastrophic consequences. Lindauer said her intelligence work with Iraq and Libya had made her enemy number one for Syrian-based Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, the actual perpetrators, along with Iran, of the Pan Am 103 bombing.'

Susan Lindauer: Secret Charges and The Patriot Act

In the course of a lengthy interview conducted by Michael Collins and reported on the Scoop Independent News website, Susan Lindauer discloses that charges (now dropped) were brought against her under the Patriot Act. Relevant to the Lockerbie case is the following brief extract:

'I had my entire legal strategy mapped out in the first couple of hours after my arrest. I could see mistakes in the indictment, and I quickly identified which witnesses and evidence would be necessary to repudiate the whole lot.

'My witness list was outstanding. It included international attorneys from the Lockerbie Trial, former Congressional staffers, even a couple of international journalists. One of Scotland's finest Solicitors, Edward MacKechnie, who won acquittal for his Libyan client in the Lockerbie Trial, immediately promised to travel at his own expense to testify for me as to the identity and credentials of Dr. Richard Fuisz, my CIA handler. I have the emails to prove it. His participation was beyond dispute.'

The full interview can be read here.

Lockerbie secret files

[What follows is a section headed Lockerbie Secret Files from an article published today on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer's Intel Today website:]

Until this week, we knew of two secret sets of Lockerbie files. The first is the so-called Lockerbie X file. This set of docs deal with Major McKee, CIA Matt Gannon — and others US personal — who died on Pan Am 103. IT probably also deals with the large amount of cash and drugs recovered from the crash site as well as the presence of US explosives illegally carried by the civilian airliner. It is unlikely that this file was updated in 1992-93.

RELATED POST: FBI PSA : “Think Before You Post” — FLASHBACK : “The Helsinki Warning”

We also knew from the SCCRC Report that the two secret letters (under PII) were sent by the King of Jordan to John Major in September 1996.

I have already explained that the SCCRC findings clearly suggest the content of this letter. The reasoning of the SCCRC implies  that these “SECRET Letters” point to the PFLP-GC having received – one way or another – at least one MST-13 timer. (Whether this allegation is true or false is yet another story.)

The SCCRC concluded that if these documents had been made available to the defence, the judges could not have reached some of the conclusions that were necessary to convict Megrahi.

RELATED POST: LOCKERBIE SECRET DOC – What Do We Know?

RELATED POST: The Lockerbie Secret Doc: Khreesat and the Swiss

The undisclosed 1992-93 Lockerbie file from the Prime Minister almost certainly deals with yet another aspect of this extraordinary scandal.

[RB: The introduction preceding the section reproduced above, and the remaining sections of the article, headed Dr Richard Fuisz & the TEREX Affair and Why Hiding the 1992 Lockerbie File? should also be read.]

Public concern that a great injustice may have been done in 2001

[What follows is a review by Graeme Purves on the Bella Caledonia website of Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.]

Most of us who are old enough will remember the shock with which we learned of the atrocity which ended the lives of 270 people at Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.  I first heard about it from an evening BBC radio news bulletin while lying in bed with a nasty dose of flu.  At first I thought it was a preposterous fantasy conjured up by my fevered condition and staggered through to the television in the sitting room to have the horror confirmed.

Dr Morag Kerr is a Borders-based vet who has previously written books on veterinary laboratory medicine and pet care.  A trip which involved driving along the A74 less than two days after the Maid of the Seas fell from the sky was the initial stimulus for her meticulous research into how that terrible event came about.  She has been Secretary Depute of Justice for Megrahi since 2010.

The safety of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction at the trial at Camp Zeist has troubled the national conscience for the last 13 years.   Dr Jim Swire whose daughter Flora died at Lockerbie was one of those not persuaded by the prosecution case.  He subsequently befriended Megrahi and has campaigned tirelessly and with great integrity and dignity for a re-examination of the evidence.  Dramatisations challenging the version of events accepted in the Camp Zeist judgement have played to packed houses at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  James Robertson’s novel, The Professor of Truth, draws its power from the widespread unease over the official attribution of responsibility.

A number of books have examined the voluminous evidence accumulated as a result of the investigations into the crime. John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury explores in detail the provenance of the circuit board fragment identified by investigators as part of a timer used in the bomb and the questions over the reliability of Tony Gauci’s identification of Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes packed in the bomb suitcase.  And disquieting revelations about the case continue to emerge.  On 20 December, Channel 4 News reported that between 1990 and 1995 several senior Syrian officials had told CIA agent Dr Richard Fuisz that the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril, was responsible for the bombing.

Morag Kerr’s book is the first book about Lockerbie to deal rigorously with the detail of the transfer baggage evidence.  On the basis of a careful analysis of reports, statements and photographs not previously available to the public she presents compelling evidence that the Samsonite hardshell case containing the bomb could not have been loaded on flight KM180 in Malta because it was already in luggage container AVE4041 in the interline shed at Heathrow an hour before the connecting Boeing 727 from Frankfurt (PA103A) had landed.

If the bomb was indeed introduced into the luggage transfer system at Heathrow, then the whole case against Megrahi and Libya crumbles away.  Morag Kerr wants to see an inquiry into the police and forensic investigations of Lockerbie which she regards as seriously flawed.  Given the growing body of evidence which cannot readily be reconciled with the Camp Zeist judgement, only a fresh consideration of the case by a Scottish court can assuage public concern that a great injustice may have been done in 2001.

While most Americans refuse to accept Megrahi was innocent, it happens to be true

[What follows is the text of an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2009:]

Susan Lindauer interview

The Intelligence Daily today carries an extended interview by Michael Collins with Susan Lindauer. One section reads as follows:

'Collins: What first triggered your concern about a possible attack involving airplanes and the World Trade Center? How did Lockerbie figure into the 9/11 warning?

'Lindauer: The Lockerbie Trial in the year 2000 got us thinking of what the next terrorist scenario would look like. The bombings of Pan Am 103 in December, 1988 and UTA (French airlines) in September, 1989 were the last attacks involving airplanes prior to September 11, 2001. Our team worried openly that the Trial of the two accused Libyans would inspire a sort of "tribute attack" to the success of Lockerbie.

'The problem is that while most Americans have refused to accept that Libya's man, Mr Megrahi was innocent of the crime, it happens to be true. And terrorists groups know that. They know very well who was responsible for planting the bomb on Pan Am 103, and they know that those individuals have never been brought to justice. Indeed, throughout the Trial, when the US made such a poor showing of forensic evidence against the accused Libyans, that US failure was gossip throughout the Middle East. As Dr [Richard] Fuisz used to say, terrorist groups thought that for all the mighty resources of US Intelligence, the US was either too stupid to catch them. Or we were afraid because the real terrorists are "too big."

'Either of those beliefs stood to create a huge and irresistible provocation to the younger generation of jihadis. It was an easy step to anticipate that younger terrorists would be inspired to launch a tribute attack to the "heroes" who came before them. On that basis, we drew up an extreme threat scenario that the next major attack would most likely involve airplane hijackings or airplane bombings.

'That is exactly what happened by the way. Back in the 1980s, Osama bin Laden called Ahmed Jibril "a hero" and "the greatest fighter against Israel who ever lived."

'Sure enough, my own extensive sources in the Middle East have repeatedly told me that Ahmed Jibril was the true mastermind of Lockerbie - and so we find the 9/11 puzzle fits together exactly.'

[RB: The Intelligence Daily website no longer seems to exist. However, the interview can be read in full here.]

Fresh twists in the Lockerbie case

[This is the headline over a long article by John Ashton on the Consortium News website. It reads in part:]

On Oct 15, Scotland’s prosecuting authority, the Crown Office, announced that two Libyan men are being treated as suspects in the 28-year-old Pan Am 103 bombing case. They were widely reported to be Abu Agila Masud, an alleged bomb-maker, and Abdullah Senussi, Muammar Gaddafi’s former security chief. Both were associates of the only person convicted of the bombing, Abelbaset al-Megrahi, who died in 2012.

The development came almost 15 years after Megrahi’s trial, but only two days after the broadcast by PBS Frontline of a three-part documentary My Brother’s Bomber. Trailed by a long article in the New Yorker, the film was made by Ken Dornstein, a former Frontline staffer whose older brother David was one of 270 who died when Pan Am 103 was destroyed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on Dec 21, 1988.

The documentary reveals that Masud was named by a German judge as the technical expert responsible for the 1986 bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin. That attack, which killed three, including two US servicemen, and injured many more, led to the US air strikes on Libya, for which Libya allegedly took revenge with the bombing of Pan Am 103.

Megrahi flew with Masud from Malta to Libya on the morning of the Lockerbie bombing having, according to the prosecution, placed a suitcase containing a bomb on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt. The unaccompanied suitcase was allegedly transferred to a feeder flight to London Heathrow and again at Heathrow on to Pan Am 103.

Megrahi denied knowing Masud, yet the two men were on other flights in the run-up to Lockerbie and, according to the film, Masud was in the car that met him on his return to Libya in 2009, following his release from prison in Scotland. (...)

There is no doubt that Libya supported terrorist groups and that at least one Libyan, Musbah Eter, who was an official at the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin, was involved in the La Belle bombing. Eter was convicted for his role following a confession in which he implicated his co-accused, Palestinian Yassar Chraidi, Lebanese-born German Ali Chanaa (both of whom worked at the People’s Bureau) and Chaana’s wife Verana.

He implicated a number of others, including Masud, whom he described as a bomb technician. Masud was never apprehended for the bombing and when German prosecutor Dethlev Mehlis went to Libya to interview witnesses all denied his existence — as did the Libyan witnesses in the Lockerbie case.

Less Straightforward

There is also no doubt that the La Belle case is far less straightforward than portrayed in the film. At the time of the bombing, the Reagan administration was involved in a large, secret and dirty war against Libya. From the time Reagan took office in 1981 his government exaggerated the country’s role in terrorism, which it claimed — falsely — was central to a Soviet-directed global conspiracy against the West.

At the same time, the Reagan administration downplayed the role of equally active terrorist states Syria and Iran. There were two reasons for this: firstly, those countries held far greater strategic power in the Middle East than Libya; and secondly, their militant proxies held US hostages in Lebanon. The hostages’ safe return was an obsession that led the administration into the Iran-Contra scandal.

Under the direction of CIA’s rabidly neocon director, William Casey, the Agency launched a massive covert campaign against Libya, aimed at toppling Gaddafi. It was run from the National Security Council by the same people who ran the Iran-Contra operation, including Oliver North.

Disinformation was central to the campaign. In 1981, the CIA put out a false story that Gaddafi has sent a hit squad to the US to assassinate Reagan. The White House played along using an unmarked car to drive Reagan while decoy limousines were used to dupe the non-existent gunmen.

By the mid-1980s, the White House hardliners were hungry for an excuse to attack Libya and NSC staff drew up plans to provoke Libya in to a response that would provide the excuse they needed. Naval exercises were conducted off the Libyan coast in which Libyan vessels were hit and territorial water repeatedly violated.

Gaddafi appeared not to take the bait. Then, on April 5, 1986, came the La Belle bombing. The White House soon announced that it had irrefutable evidence of Libya’s involvement. Nine days later came the air strikes against Libya, which came within a whisker of killing Gaddafi.

The “irrefutable evidence” was intercepts of incriminatory messages sent between the Libyan government and the East Berlin People’s Bureau. Libyan intelligence traffic was normally processed and evaluated by a group known as G-6 at the National Security Agency, before being forwarded elsewhere.

An investigation by Seymour Hersh for The New York Times established that the La Belle intercepts were never sent to G-6. An NSA official told him “The G-6 section branch and division chiefs didn’t know why it was taken from them. They were bureaucratically cut out and so they screamed and yelled.”

Another explained, “There is no doubt that if you send raw data to the White House, that constitutes misuse because there’s nobody there who’s capable of interpreting it. . . . You screw it up every time when you do it –– and especially when the raw traffic is translated into English from a language such as Arabic, that’s not commonly known.”

The eventual prosecution of Eter and his three co-accused was reliant upon Eter’s confession and corroborating material from the files of the former East German security service, the Stasi. (Chaana also confessed but his evidence was not considered as important and Eter’s.) The Stasi had a number of informants within Berlin’s Arab communities, including Chaana, and kept a close watch on the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau.

Double-Dealing

During the 1980s, Berlin was a pit of Cold War double-dealing. The Stasi files indicate that among the Arab communities survival and personal advancement often trumped loyalty to any particular cause. The information relayed to the Stasi by its Arab informants might be cast iron, but against this background it’s also possible that they were recycling each other’s inventions.

The East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau, in particular, hosted numerous personal rivalries and little mutual trust. Eter was one of the more interesting vipers in the nest. According to the Stasi and a 1998 investigation by the German TV channel ZDF, he was a CIA asset. ZDF discovered that, at the time he made his confession in 1996, he was running a CIA front company in Malta.

The year before La Belle he was named as a suspect in the assassination in West Germany of a Libyan dissident called Jibril el-Dinali. (Der Spiegel reported at the time that dissidents believed that the German federal police, the BKA, had supplied their secret addresses to Libyan officials in return for intelligence about the German terrorist group the Red Army Faction, which had received Libyan support.)

Eter is Ken Dornstein’s key witness and will be central to any prosecution of Masud and Senussi. According to the film, since Dornstein made contact, he has told the FBI that Masud and Megrahi were pivotal to the Lockerbie plot. He claims that Masud told him personally that he was responsible for both the Lockerbie and La Belle bombings.

Unfortunately for anyone tasked with prosecuting at a trial of the new suspects, the CIA connection and his murderous past leave Eter with a credibility problem. So too does the fact that he waited 19 years after confessing to talk about Lockerbie.

Other Stasi informants involved in the case had a relationship with the CIA, as did some of those originally implicated in the bombing. One was a close associate of Chraidi’s, Mahmoud Abu Jaber, who with his brother Mohamed ran a freelance Palestinian terrorist cell that was mistrusted by other Palestinians.

The Stasi learned that the CIA knew that Mahmoud Abu Jaber and another cell member, Khaled Shatta, were involved in the bombing. They mixed regularly with the Chraidi and the other defendants and hours before the attack they travelled to West Berlin. They were watched by the Stasi and KGB, both of which concluded that they were working for Western intelligence.

One declassified KGB document suggested that Mahmoud Abu Jaber was a CIA agent provocateur, who was used to create a case against Libya. Group member Mahmoud Amayiri, who was both Shatta’s brother and Mahmoud Abu Jaber’s right-hand man, confirmed to ZDF through his Norwegian lawyer that he had been working for Mossad. He had fled Germany for Norway in 1990, following the issuing of an arrest warrant, which was later dropped.

The idea that some of the La Belle plotters were western agents provocateur is not far-fetched. A 1997 investigation by British Channel 4 TV’s Dispatches series revealed that the CIA-funded anti-Gaddafi terrorist group Al-Burkan was involved in the 1984 murder of police officer Yvonne Fletcher, who was killed when staff at the London Libya People’s Bureau opened fire on a crowd of anti-Gaddafi demonstrators.

A member of a Berlin criminal gang connected to Al-Burkan described transporting the murder weapon to London and handing it over to an Al-Burkan member. The program uncovered evidence that the fatal shot was fired from a building adjacent to the People’s Bureau used by the UK intelligence services. It also claimed that Al Burkan had moles within the People’s Bureau.

Reluctant Cooperation

The US government was reluctant to share its intelligence about La Belle with the Germans and it was not until 1996 that it did. It appeared to be convincing and included transcripts of intercepted messages, allegedly between Tripoli and the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau. Among other things, these suggested that senior Libyan intelligence official Said Rashid, a friend and relative of Megrahi’s, coordinated the attack.

The US government may well have believed the intercepts to be genuine, but, according to former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, they were an elaborate hoax. In his 1994 memoir, The Other Side of Deception, he claimed that the messages were in fact part of a Mossad disinformation operation codenamed Trojan.

Ostrovsky said that a few weeks before the bombing Israeli commandos secretly installed special communications equipment in an apartment near Colonel Gaddafi’s headquarters, which was subsequently used to broadcast phony terrorist orders. Neither German prosecutor Mehlis, nor the FBI, contacted Ostrovsky about his claims.

While none of this rules out Libyan sponsorship of La Belle, it does flash a warning that we should treat the official account with caution.

An even thicker fog surrounds Lockerbie. The CIA’s campaign against Libya did not end with the 1986 raids, indeed a few months after them President Reagan signed a secret National Security Decision Directive, which, according to a leak to Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, ordered “covert, diplomatic and economic steps designed to . . . bring about a change of leadership in Libya.”

In view of what we now know about Lockerbie, it’s not outlandish to suggest that those covert steps may have included manipulating the investigation behind the backs of the police and prosecutors.

Declassified US intelligence documents state as fact that the bombing was not Gaddafi’s revenge for the 1986 raids, but was rather Iran’s for the US Navy’s accidental shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 over the Arabian Gulf, which killed 290 people six months before Lockerbie.

According to the documents, the Iranians contracted out the job to the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command, which had a track record of blowing up aircraft. One document, from 1991, stated, without naming the PFLP-GC, that the Iranian interior minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi paid the bombers $10 million.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer has provided some of the details of the Iranian/PFLP-GC plot and another, Richard Fuisz, revealed in a court deposition that he was told by numerous senior Syrian officials closely connected to the PFLP-GC that the group carried out the attack.

Two months before Lockerbie members of the group were arrested in Germany, including bomb-maker Marwan Kreesat, who had made the bombs used in previous attacks. He admitted building bombs into Toshiba BomBeat radio cassette players — the same brand that housed the Lockerbie bomb —and said the group was planning to strike a western airliner. Other members of the group and at least one of his bombs evaded detection.

A Strange Warning

Less than three weeks before the bombing, the State Department’s Office of Diplomatic Security (ODS) warned that unnamed radical Palestinians in Europe were planning to target Pan Am. The warning came three days before the better known and entirely separate warning received by the U.S. embassy in Helsinki that an attack on Pan Am was imminent.

Whereas the Helsinki warning was written off as a hoax, the ODS warning, which was not revealed until seven years after the bombing, has never been adequately explained.

The key evidence that led the investigators away from Iran and PFLP-GC towards Libya was a small piece of circuit board known as PT/35(b), found within a blast-damaged piece of a Maltese-made shirt. The prosecution case at Megrahi’s trial was that it matched boards made to order for Swiss company Mebo by its supplier Thüring.

Crucially Mebo used the boards in timers called MST-13s, which it had designed and built 20 for the Libyan intelligence service. Megrahi was a partner in a Libyan company that rented part of Mebo’s Zurich offices.

Well before Lockerbie, the CIA had an MST-13 timer that had been seized in Togo in 1986 and photos of the one seized in Senegal in 1988. Prosecution statements by a CIA technical expert, disclosed six years after Megrahi’s conviction, revealed that the Agency was also aware before Lockerbie that the timers had been made by Mebo and supplied to Libya.

The Agency had a backchannel to Mebo boss Edwin Bollier via the Swiss police, so it’s likely that it knew of Megrahi’s connection to Mebo via his company ABH. (The Stasi, who had a relationship with Bollier from at least the early 1970s, were convinced by the late 1980s that he was a direct CIA asset.)

The story of the PT/35(b) fragment is ridden with evidential anomalies. Megrahi’s trial team highlighted a number of discrepancies concerning the fragment, including the fact that the handwritten description on the police label attached to the piece of shirt had been surreptitiously changed from “Cloth” to “Debris.”

There were numerous other discrepancies not raised at trial. These included German documents that reported that the Scottish police had told the German federal police that PT/35(b) had been found in January 1990, seven months after it was officially found.

In his memoir Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation, the head of the FBI’s Lockerbie investigation, Richard Marquise, revealed that he and his Scottish counterpart, Stuart Henderson, speculated that the fragment was a CIA plant. They dismissed the suggestion on the grounds that “Neither of us believed the CIA or any government official would do such a thing.”

However, Marquise also revealed that their Swiss police counterpart suspected it was a plant. This is especially interesting in view of a claim made in an affidavit by Mebo technician Ulrich Lumpert, who designed the boards and produced prototypes, that a year before the Lockerbie investigators had linked PT/35(b) to Mebo the Swiss police visited him and took with them a prototype board.

Shortly before Megrahi’s trial, the Scottish prosecutors received information from witnesses in the US suggesting that an electronics company in Florida had made replica MST-13s for the CIA, but the lead was not properly investigated.

A Miscarriage of Justice

Documents unearthed by Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) — the statutory body that investigates alleged miscarriages of justice in Scotland — highlighted more anomalies. They included a police memo stating that PT/35(b) had been tested for explosive residues and found to be negative, which contradicted the court testimony of the Crown’s forensic experts, who said that no such tests had been done.

As Frontline’s documentary, My Brother’s Bomber, points out, the SCCRC investigated Bollier’s claim that the fragment was fabricated and found it to be baseless. However, the film fails to mention that both the SCCRC and Bollier missed the most important discrepancy concerning PT/35(b), which only emerged during preparations for Megrahi’s second appeal in 2009.

Metallurgical analysis showed that the fragment’s copper circuitry was plated with pure tin, whereas the boards made by Thüring, which were used in the timers supplied to Libya, were plated with a tin-lead alloy. Crown scientists had speculated that the explosion had changed the plating, but tests commissioned for the appeal disproved the theory. The work demonstrated beyond doubt that the Lockerbie fragment was not, as the court had accepted, a match for the Libyan MST-13s.

Other important forensic items had a dubious provenance. Among them was a collection of small charred circuit board fragments that apparently originated from a Toshiba BomBeat RT-SF16 radio cassette player.

A large proportion of the global production total of the model had been bought by the Libyan General Electrical Company, which was run by Said Rashid. The fragments appeared to be compelling evidence of Libyan involvement in the bombing, but, like PT/35(b), their origin is questionable. They were discovered by an air accident investigator within a folded piece of aluminum from the luggage container that housed the bomb suitcase.

Giving evidence at Megrahi’s trial, the investigator could not suggest how the blast could have caused the fragments to become trapped within the aluminum. He was sure that the fold had not occurred at the time of the explosion, which suggested that someone had placed the fragments within the aluminum after the blast.

Also of great importance to the prosecution case was a fragment of brown checked trousers containing a sewn-in label of a Maltese manufacturer called Yorkie. The item led the police to a shop in Malta called Mary’s House, where the proprietor, Tony Gauci, recalled selling a bundle of clothes — including brown checked trousers and other items found among the Lockerbie debris — to an oddly behaved Libyan a few weeks before the bombing.

Two years later, Gauci picked out Megrahi from a photo line-up, although he was considerably younger, smaller and lighter skinned than the man described by Gauci.

When the trouser fragment was first examined, the Yorkie label was seen by neither the forensic examiner nor the police officer present despite being easily visible. When questioned about it by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, both said they could not have missed it, which suggested that the label appeared after the examination.

The CIA not only knew before Lockerbie that Mebo had supplied MST-13 timers to Libya, they also knew that Megrahi regularly travelled to Malta, that he was related to Said Rashid and others high up within Libyan intelligence and security, and that Rashid was the head of the Libyan General Electrical Company. Much of this knowledge it attempted to conceal.

No Dissident

According to the former deputy chief of the US State Department’s counterterrorism division, the Diplomatic Security Service, Fred Burton, a CIA official told him before New Year in 1988 that the bomb was in a Maltese-originating brown Samsonite.

Burton is no Lockerbie dissident — he believes Megrahi and Libya were guilty — but, if true, his indiscretions throw a big wrench into the prosecution narrative, which held that the evidence to support the claim was uncovered by the police well in to 1989.

A number of rescue volunteers have described to me arriving in Lockerbie within two hours of the bombing to find a group of American agents already present. According to the official narrative, this never happened and the first US government staff only arrived three hours later.

Police officers reported concerns that Americans had unsupervised access to the crash site and a British helicopter crew member told me that the day after the bombing his crew ferried CIA agents around the site.

Some potentially significant forensic items found at the crash site disappeared, among them an AA battery with a piece of wire soldered to one of its terminals. German police photographs of the PFLP-GC’s Toshiba bomb showed that it incorporated AA batteries with wires soldered to their terminals.

Anyone raising these evidential anomalies gets branded a conspiracy theorist by the supporters of the official narrative, yet that narrative and the one newly minted by My Brother’s Bomber are themselves elaborate conspiracy theories.

When the theories and counter-theories are cast aside in favor of hard facts, the official narrative is no longer tenable. Not only did PT/35(b) not originate from one of the timers supplied to Libya, but Megrahi was clearly not the man who bought the clothes for the bomb suitcase and that purchase took place when he was not in Malta. New analysis of the baggage evidence demonstrates that the bomb suitcase originated from London Heathrow, rather than Malta.

Perhaps the hardest fact of all for the defenders of Megrahi’s conviction — which has barely been reported in all the coverage generated by My Brother’s Bomber — is that in 2007 the conviction was referred back to the appeal court by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on no fewer than six grounds.

One of these was that the trial court judgment, delivered by three of Scotland’s most senior judges, was unreasonable. Four of the other grounds concerned non-disclosure by the prosecution of important evidence.

The terminally ill Megrahi abandoned the appeal in the belief that it would aid his application for compassionate release from prison. Sadly, the commission this month rejected an application by family members and relatives of some of the British victims of Pan Am 103 for a further review of the conviction.

It may be that the only way to re-test the evidence against Megrahi will be a trial of the two newly announced suspects. If that happens, don’t hold your breath for a guilty verdict.