A commentary on the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of the murder of 270 people in the Pan Am 103 disaster.
Monday 31 October 2016
FBI Special Agent Thomas Thurman
Tuesday 28 May 2013
The leading statement of the Iran responsibility thesis
In an interview conducted on May 16 [2008], Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, told me that Tehran, not Libya, had ordered the bombing of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes a few months earlier.
On July 3, 1988, the navy cruiser USS Vincennes, also known as "Robocruiser," shot down Iran Air Flight 665 over the Persian Gulf. The civilian airliner was carrying mostly Muslims on their pilgrimage to Mecca -- 290 died, most Iranians.
According to Bani-Sadr, in the immediate aftermath of the Lockerbie tragedy, [Ali Akbar] Mohtashemi-Pur, the then minister of the interior, acknowledged in an interview that he had contracted Ahmad Jibril, the leader of a Palestinian organization, to bomb an American airliner. The interview was scheduled for publication the following day. Hours before distribution, the newspaper was shutdown.
In the aftermath of the USS Vincennes accident, top figures in the Iranian government held a series of meetings in Beirut with leaders of Ahmed Jibril's terror group, the PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command).
"Everybody in US intelligence knew about Iran's intention to bomb an American airliner in response to the downing of one of its own only months earlier. We knew that," former CIA operative Robert Baer explains.
"There was a smoking gun in July '88 that Iran hired Jibril to knock down at least one American plane," Baer told me. And indeed, media have long reported that high-ranking Iranian officials held a meeting with [Hafez] Dalkamoni, a trusted lieutenant of Jibril and a man said to be only known by the CIA as Nabil. In late October '88, Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar, alias Nabil Massoud, were arrested in Frankfurt where they were running an operation to destroy airliners.
"I was assigned to Paris in 1988 running down leads with French police on both Pan Am 103 and UTA [Union des Transports Aeriens] -- I do not know the ultimate judgment on the leads we produced. Or why precisely the case is being reviewed by Scotland. Keep in mind in your research that intelligence and evidence are two separate domains. Often it's the case [that] compartmented intelligence is not shared with the FBI. I do not know what the FBI was given or not given," Baer added.
"There's a world of intercepts and information from sources that is never shared with the FBI. This is because the controller of the information doesn't want to compromise the source. At the CIA, we look at the FBI as trying to get convictions, while intelligence is to get at a proximate truth."
Reacting to the downing of Airbus 665, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur swore that there should be a "rain of blood" in revenge. Mohtashemi had been the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1985. He is widely believed to have helped to found Hezbollah in Lebanon and had close connections with the terrorist groups of Beirut and the Bekaa Valley.
The National Security Agency intercepted and decoded a communication of Mohtashemi linking Iran to the bombing of Pan Am 103. One intelligence summary, prepared by the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, was requested by lawyers for the bankrupt Pan American Airlines through the Freedom of Information Act.
A classified document prepared for the Multi-National Force during the first Gulf War reads: "Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups. He is actually a long-time friend of Abu Nidal. He has recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus."
Caveat: Former FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise led the Lockerbie investigation. Marquise has told me that the document came from a source of unknown reliability. However, careful reading shows that the source makes a clear difference between rumours and facts.
While parts of the document reads: "Mohtashemi is said to [have done this or that]," the paragraph regarding Pan Am 103 is factual. It reads: "He has recently paid…"
The difference of style cannot be ignored.
Thursday 13 March 2014
Magnus Linklater: There may be a case for staging a fresh inquiry into Lockerbie
There may be a case for staging a fresh inquiry into Lockerbie. This film does nothing to advance it. For all the sensational headlines it has provoked, it contributes no new evidence, merely a recycling of familiar allegations.
Those allegations are, of course, far more enticing than the evidence that originally convicted the Libyan, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi — conspiracy theories always are. The al-Jazeera documentary suggests not only that the guilty verdict passed on him by a Scottish court was a miscarriage of justice, but that an “executive decision” to redirect the evidence and implicate Libya rather than Iran was taken early on.
Asked after the film was shown in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, how high up this decision went, the producer suggested that it was taken in the White House. That is some claim. In order to believe it, however, one has to accept the kind of evidence that would be described in a court of law as hearsay.
For all the talk about CIA documents, incriminating cables and terrorist cabals meeting in secret to plan the bombing, no new written evidence is produced to back it up.
Suspects are approached for confirmation about their roles, and shy away from the confrontation; lines of inquiry are left hanging in the air; worse, the main source of the allegations — a defecting Iranian — has been touting his information around for at least 15 years.
There may well be grounds for appeal. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission reported that the identification of al-Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes in which the bomb was wrapped was based on unreliable evidence, which it thought should be tested again. However, it is a long road from that to a claim that the entire Lockerbie case was a miscarriage of justice.
Just one section of the film serves to illustrate the point. A former CIA agent, Robert Baer, is interviewed at length. He claims that the bombing was carried out by a terrorist suspect called Abu Talb, who was rewarded after its success with large amounts of Iranian money.
The commission examined this in great detail, interviewing Baer three times in all. In the end, however, the Commission concluded that nothing he said would have stood up in court.
“As with all intelligence,” it reported, “the validity of [his] information was very much dependent upon the reliability of its source, for which in many cases Mr Baer was unable to vouch.”
It would, of course, be good to have the Lockerbie evidence tested again in a court of law. However, the one opportunity to do that was forfeited by al-Megrahi himself, when he chose to return to Libya rather than pursue his appeal. If he remains a convicted terrorist in the eyes of history, he only has himself to blame.
[More about Magnus Linklater’s views on Lockerbie and the Megrahi conviction can be found here.]
Saturday 16 August 2014
The London origin theory
Thursday 24 December 2020
The search for justice goes on and William Barr's actions are unlikely to help
[This is part of the headline over a long article by Kim Sengupta in The Independent. It reads in part:]
With great fanfare, on the anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, the US has announced charges against the supposed bomb maker who blew up Pan Am flight 103, the worst act of terrorism in this country, with 270 lives lost.
One of William Barr’s final acts as Donald Trump’s Attorney General, a deeply controversial tenure, is supposed to fit one of the final pieces of the jigsaw in the hunt for the killers.
There are historic links between the Lockerbie investigation and the current, turbulent chapter of American politics. Barr was also the Attorney General in 1991, in the George W Bush administration, when charges were laid against two Libyans, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, over the bombing. The inquiry was led at the time by Robert Mueller, the head of the Department of Justice’s criminal division.
Mueller, of course, became the Special Counsel who examined if Trump was the Muscovian candidate for the White House. Barr was the Attorney General, in his second term in the post, accused of distorting the findings of Mueller’s report to protect Trump from accusations of obstruction of justice, which he denies.
The charges which have been laid against Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, another Libyan, are intrinsically connected to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who is the only person to have been found guilty by a court of the bombing.
Megrahi is now dead. There are good reasons to hold that the investigation, trial and verdict which brought his conviction were flawed and a miscarriage of justice has taken place. This is a view shared by bereaved families, international jurists, intelligence officers and journalists who had followed the case.
Last month, an appeal hearing began at the High Court in Edinburgh to posthumously clear Megrahi’s name. This was the third appeal in the attempt to prove that the verdict against him was unsound, with his legal team focusing on the veracity of the prosecution evidence at his trial.
Much of the case against Masud, a former Libyan intelligence officer, now charged, comes from an alleged confession he made in jail, where he had ended up after the fall of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Masud, according to the FBI, named Megrahi and Fhimah as co-conspirators, who had together manufactured an explosive device using Semtex during a trip to Malta. Masud has said that he had bought the clothing which had been wrapped around the bomb, hidden in a radio-cassette player, before being placed in a Samsonite suitcase which was put on the flight.
There are two points which are immediately relevant. The same trial which convicted Megrahi had acquitted Fhimah of all charges. And one of the key allegations against Megrahi, which the judges said made them decide on the verdict of guilt, was that it was he who had bought the clothing put around the explosive device.
These contradictions are among many, big and small, which have marked the official narrative presented by the US and UK authorities of what lay behind the downing of the airliner.
I went to Lockerbie on the night of the bombing, attended the trial of the two Libyan defendants, and met Megrahi at his home in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, where he had been allowed to return after suffering from cancer. I have followed the twists and turns of the case throughout.
Soon after the downing of the Pan Am flight, American and British security officials began laying the blame on an Iran-Syria axis. The scenario was that Tehran had taken out a contract in revenge for the destruction of an Iranian civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, which had been shot down by missiles fired from an American warship, the USS Vincennes, a few months earlier. The theory went that the contract had been taken up by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which specialised in such operations.
But the blame switched to Libya, then very much a pariah state, around the time Iran and Syria joined the US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. Robert Baer, the former American intelligence officer and author, was among those who held that the Iranian sponsored hit was the only plausible explanation for the attack. This was the firm belief held “to a man”, he stated, by his former colleagues in the CIA.
After years of wrangling, Megrahi, the former head of security at Libyan Airlines and allegedly in the Libyan security service, and Fhimah, allegedly a fellow intelligence officer, were finally extradited in 1999. (...)
The two men were charged with joint enterprise and conspiracy. Yet only Megrahi was found guilty. (...)
So, deprived of finding a partner in crime for Megrahi, the prosecutor switched to claiming, and the judges accepting, that he had conspired with himself.
The prosecution evidence was circumstantial; details of the bomb timer on the plane were contradictory; and the testimony of a key witness, a Maltese shopkeeper, extremely shaky under cross-examination. Five years on from the trial, the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmville – who had been responsible for initiating the Lockerbie prosecution – described the witness, Tony Gauci, as “an apple short of a picnic” and “not quite the full shilling”. Gauci was, however, flush in dollars: the Americans paid him for his testimony.
The performance and evidence of a supposedly prime “CIA intelligence asset”, Abdul Majid Giaka, codenamed “Puzzle Piece” who turned up in a Shirley Bassey wig, was widely viewed as risible. It emerged later that important evidence had not been passed on to the defence lawyers. Ulrich Lumpert, an engineer who testified to the validity of a key piece of evidence, admitted later in an affidavit of lying to the court.
It has also emerged that Giaka had been described by his CIA handler, John Holt, in an official report as someone who had a “history of making up stories”.
Holt was denied permission to appear at court. Earlier this month he reiterated in an interview that, like his CIA colleagues, he believes the Libyan connection was a concocted red herring and culpability lay with PFLP (GC). "I would start by asking the current Attorney General, William Barr, why he suddenly switched focus in 1991, when he was also Attorney General, from where clear evidence was leading, toward a much less likely scenario involving Libyans”, he said.
The observer for the UN at the trial, Hans Kochler severely criticised the verdict. Writing later in The Independent, he described a case based on “circumstantial evidence”; the “lack of credibility” of key prosecution witnesses who “had incentives to bear false witness against Megrahi”; the fact that one was paid cash by the Americans; and that “so much key information was withheld from the trial”.
Robert Black, a law professor born in Lockerbie, who played an important role in organising the Camp Zeist proceedings, later became convinced that a great injustice had taken place, as have many other eminent jurists.
Some who were in Lockerbie on that terrible night and dealt with the aftermath also felt the same way. Father Patrick Keegans, the parish priest at the time, joined the “Justice for Megrahi” campaign after meeting the convicted man’s family and has backed appeals to clear his name.
Many members of the bereaved families feel that justice has not been done, among them Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing and became a spokesman for “UK Families 103”.
When there were objections to the severely ill Megrahi being allowed to return to Tripoli, he pointed out “the scandal around Megrahi is not that a sick man was released, but that he was even convicted in the first place. All I have ever wanted to see is that the people who murdered my daughter are brought to justice.”
After the charging of Masud, Dr Swire said: “I'm all in favour of whatever he's got to tell us being examined in a court, of course I am. The more people who look at the materials we have available the better.”
He wanted to stress: “There are only two things that we seek, really. One is the question of why those lives were not protected in view of all the warnings and the second is: what does our government and the American government really know about who is responsible for murdering them.”
Some bereaved families have criticised the presentation and motivation of the US move. The State Department had sent an invitation for livestreaming of the event.
Reverend John Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter Helga in the bombing, said the “timing and particularly the choice of this specific day, which is special to many of us, to be bizarre, disrespectful, insensitive and extremely ill considered”. He added: “Why exactly, when the Attorney General is about to leave office, has he waited 32 years to bring charges?”
Behind the controversy over who carried out the attack, the political manoeuvres and legal actions, lay the human tragedy of Lockerbie, a scene which is difficult to forget, even after three decades, for many of us who went there. (...)
There is also the memory of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, at his home in Tripoli in 2012. He lay in his bed attached to a drip, on red sheets stained by dark splashes of blood he had coughed up. An oxygen mask covered his skeletal face; his body twitched as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was in the advanced stages of cancer: medicine he desperately needed had been plundered by looters; the doctors who had been treating him had fled. He died a few months later.
The bitter accusations and recriminations over Lockerbie are unlikely to cease. But the search for justice for this terrible act of violence which took so many lives, and caused so much pain and grief, continues to remain elusive among the secrets and lies.
Wednesday 26 August 2009
A view from The New Yorker
The compassionate release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, has been roundly condemned by both the US government and the American media. President Obama called the release “a mistake,” and Hillary Clinton, who had already said it would be “absolutely wrong” to free him, was “deeply disappointed.” There are two primary questions here. The first is whether Megrahi, and, indeed, Qaddafi’s regime in general, was responsible for the bombings, a question I raised in my 2006 examination of the Libyan political system for this magazine. The second is whether dying people, no matter how gross their sins, deserve compassion, and should be allowed to die at home. But the real issue lies in the conjunction of these two problems. Does the possibility that someone has been wrongly imprisoned increase the imperative to offer compassionate release?
The fact that Megrahi was convicted on thin evidence has been noted by many who were close to the original trial and the hastily assembled first appeal. Robert Black, the Scottish lawyer who was the architect of the original trial, described it as “the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for a hundred years.” Professor Hans Köchler, appointed by Kofi Annan to observe the trial for the UN, called the second court’s decision a “spectacular miscarriage of justice.” One of the primary witnesses—Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who identified Megrahi as having bought the clothes that investigators believed were wrapped around the bomb—has been largely discredited, and the assertion that the Swiss Mebo MST-13 timer used to detonate the bomb had been sold only to the Libyans has proved false. The original CIA inquiries focussed on Tehran, where there had been calls for vengeance after a US Navy cruiser accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane. Robert Baer, who worked on the case for the CIA, has said that Iran was responsible, and “60 Minutes” put forward, in 2000, the possibility that Tehran hired a Syria-based Palestinian organization to stage the attack. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review, which examined all this material, determined there was evidence for a second appeal, and that appeal was underway when doctors said Megrahi had only three months to live. Conspiracy theories abound: that the Libyans were fingered in the first place to avoid a confrontation with Iran at a delicate time; that this political jig would have become broadly known if Megrahi hadn’t dropped the appeal in exchange for compassionate release; that Scotland released Megrahi in order to gain access to Libyan oil; and many others too baroque to rehearse here. Any of these may be true, but they would take many years to unfurl. While the conviction of Megrahi may prove to be right, no one could describe it as anywhere near watertight, and reasonable doubt does remain a standard for legal innocence.
Imprisonment serves three functions. It removes people who might commit further crimes from a context in which they can commit them. There was no need to keep Megrahi behind bars with this objective. It sends a signal to others tempted to commit similar crimes that there is a cost. Megrahi’s release on his deathbed will not encourage terrorists; indeed, shows of humane treatment of this kind dampen Islamic anti-Americanism. Finally, it allows those who were injured in a crime to feel the satisfactions of revenge—the retribution principle. This is the ugliest of the three reasons, and indulging it is a problematical standard for compassion. It’s not that it’s wrong, per se, but that it has limits, and the dying days of a man who is possibly innocent of this particular crime seem too high a price to pay for it.
Megrahi has received a hero’s welcome in Libya because Libyans feel that they have been unfairly scapegoated by the West, and that Megrahi has been a martyr to international prejudice against them. They are angry that the US appears not to have fulfilled what they understood as promises of complete diplomatic recognition following Qaddafi’s payment of damages to the Lockerbie families and his renunciation of a nuclear program. They believed in Megrahi’s innocence all along and now feel vindicated, and are thoroughly enjoying the spectacle of American outrage, which is to them as jingoistic as we perceive their jubilation to be. The posture of the President and the Secretary of State is designed to cater to the tough-on-terrorists approach required of all American politicians, and to play to those Lockerbie families who reconciled themselves to tragedy only by believing that the guilty were caught and punished. In the U.S., the voices of the vengeful have been loudest. But, in fact, many Lockerbie families believe that Megrahi was wrongly convicted. Martin Cadman, who lost a son in the disaster, said the trial was “a farce” and that the release of Megrahi was “just righting a wrong.” Jim Swire, who lost a daughter, said, “As time goes by it will become clear that he had nothing to do with it.” The Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, now under attack, was courageous in allowing the confusing evidence to tilt in favor of letting a sick man go home.