A much-needed reality check

[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined Empire where The Sun never sets that was published on the Red Flag Flying website on this date in 2011:]

It seems every time an event of national significance occurs, The Sun is there to put its almighty foot in it with some headline of blinding stupidity. From the hideous ‘Gotcha!’ in response to the arguable war crime of the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War (a vessel leaving the combat zone), to ‘It’s The Sun wot won it!’ (yes, a tabloid claiming responsibility for the result of a democratic election is a little like proudly owning up to the Omagh bombing), there is always The Sun’s exclusive reductive right-wing trash there to serenade the march of history. (...)

Today’s headline blares ‘That’s for Lockerbie’, accompanied by a picture of a bleeding Colonel Gaddafi. Really? Since when did The Sun laud violence as a solution to political problems? During the tuition fee demonstrations and August riots, they were busily screaming at anyone who took a window, let alone a life (of course, the solution was ‘break all their kneecaps’ or something - the paper has never had a massive problem with hypocrisy.)

As far as Lockerbie goes, it is difficult to imagine how much more of a tenuous link could be made. Professor Robert Black, a Scots law expert, calls the Adelbaset al-Megrahi conviction ‘the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years’, whilst an independent non-profit thinktank reminds us that ‘all of the Crown’s witnesses in the 36-week trial…have been discredited.’ Assuming for one moment in the absence of much substantive evidence that al-Megrahi was at fault, does that instantly imply Colonel Gaddafi was personally responsible? Not in the slightest.

The headline goes on to refer to Yvonne Fletcher and IRA Semtex victims. It is time for a much-needed reality check. Yes, Gaddafi sold arms to the IRA, and yes, agents of the Libyan regime shot dead a policewoman. We of course assume that selling arms to ‘terrorists’ is wrong, as is shooting people. So where was The Sun when British business was busy selling weapons to the Israeli regime that deploys them against civilians regularly in the Occupied Territories? Where were they when British special forces weren’t merely arming, but training Bahraini forces in the repression of their own people in the midst of the Arab spring? What about the backing for Iraq’s brutal and dirty attack on Iran? The millions dead and millions more displaced in the Iraq War? (Murdoch backed the Iraq War on the grounds it would cheapen oil prices- cutting straight past even a pretence of humanitarianism.)

IRA supplier named as ‘Lockerbie mastermind’

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

A Libyan intelligence officer who helped supply the IRA with explosives in the 1980s is suspected of being the mastermind of the Lockerbie bomb plot.

A TV documentary to be aired this week in the US claims that Nasser Ali Ashour, who was the link between the IRA and the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, led the group responsible for the attack. He is among eight suspects sought by Scottish prosecutors, of whom only three are believed to be alive.

Last week, The Times reported that one, Abu Agila Mas’ud, believed to have manufactured the bomb, was being held in a Libyan prison, accused of unrelated charges. Another, Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, has been sentenced to death in Libya.

The documentary, part of the PBS TV programme Frontline, is the work of Ken Dornstein, whose brother David died when Pan Am flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in December 1988.

Ashour’s name has long been known to British intelligence. When a cargo ship, the Eksund, was captured by French customs in 1987, and found to be carrying Semtex explosives and weapons bound for Ireland, its captain named Ashour as the Libyan operative who had supervised the loading of the cargo in Tripoli.

Later he emerged as the senior intelligence officer who supervised the return to Libya of members of the Libyan embassy after the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in London in 1984.

Mr Dornstein has uncovered evidence that allegedly ties Ashour to the plot. The CIA also had him in their sights. He was interviewed by investigators after the bombing and although he denied any involvement, he was revealed in CIA cables to have travelled to Malta before the bomb was loaded on to a flight that linked to PanAm 103. [RB: But as Dr Morag Kerr has conclusively demonstrated in Adequately Explained by Stupidity?: Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, the bomb suitcase was already in the Heathrow luggage container AVE4041 before any luggage from the relevant Malta flight could have arrived from Frankfurt.]

Ashour was accompanying the only man convicted of the bombing, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi.

A letter passed to the CIA by Edwin Bollier, a Swiss businessman who supplied the bomb timer to the Libyans and was a witness at al-Megrahi’s trial, includes Ashour’s telephone number.

Ashour was named in the Lockerbie judgment as head of operations in the Jamahiriya Security Organisation, the Libyan secret service under Colonel Gaddafi. He was said to have bought the timers from Bollier. One was later found at the Lockerbie site.

“Ashour is the most significant person who got away,” said Mr Dornstein.

“He has a history of supplying Semtex explosives. Edwin Bollier in his FBI statement in 1991 said that if he had to name the person who he thought was the prime suspect in the [Lockerbie] bombing, it would be Nasser Ashour.”

Ashour, whose whereabouts are unknown, was also a close colleague of another senior Libyan intelligence officer, Said Rashid, who died of a heart attack before he could be questioned. Rashid’s widow, who spoke to Mr Dornstein, said that she had always suspected that he had been involved in the bomb plot. (...)

A spokesman for the Lord Advocate said: “The Crown Office is aware of this individual. Evidence in relation to him featured at the original trial of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi at Camp Zeist.”

[RB: Ken Dornstein's revelations are not new. They have been circulating since the US State Department distributed in April 1992 its notorious (and now deleted) Briefing Note on Lockerbie. Details can be found on this blog here and here.

A further article by Mr Linklater in the same newspaper is headed One man's mission to find Lockerbie bombers.]

"No convincing objective evidence" Libya responsible

[I am grateful to a reader of this blog for drawing my attention to an item headed Bravo Blair! published on 31 August in Peter Hitchens’s Blog on the Mail Online website. It reads in part:]

Bravo Anthony Blair. Yes, I’ll repeat that : Bravo Blair! In all fairness, I have to give the ghastly creature the credit for trying to stop David Cameron’s overthrown of Colonel Gaddafi, which has led directly to the great migration disaster and to other horrors yet unknown. I see from The Times this morning that various blowhard Tory MPs want to condemn and investigate Mr Blair for this action. On the contrary, we should all wish that he had succeeded.

This emerges in extracts from Anthony Seldon’s new book about David Cameron (...)

[T]he key extract (it’s mostly told in the present tense, like a historian discussing the distant past on the TV or the radio) is:

‘Tony Blair telephones Number 10 to say he’s been contacted by a key individual close to Gaddafi, and that the Libyan leader wants to cut a deal with the British. Blair is a respected voice in the building and his suggestion is examined seriously. ‘

But Mr Cameron decided that on this occasion his political hero and example, referred to by George Osborne as ‘the Master’ is not to be heeded:

‘Cameron had been repulsed by Blair’s decision to rehabilitate Gaddafi, and as opposition leader had argued strongly in 2009 against the Scottish government’s return of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to Libya on the grounds of illness.

‘Policewoman Yvonne Fletcher was killed by a Libyan outside their embassy in London in 1984, when Cameron was still at Eton. Four years later came the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 killing 270 people. When the bomb was proven to be planted by a Libyan, Cameron became still more angry.

‘Gordon Brown claimed the Scottish government took the decision on al-Megrahi. Cameron did not believe him, and once inside Number 10, ordered a review into the episode. It concluded that the previous government ‘did all it could to facilitate’ the release of al-Megrahi’.

Cameron decides not to follow up Blair’s approach regarding a deal with Gaddafi: he wants to avoid doing anything which might be seen to give the Libyan leader succour. Richards’ complaints do not let up: he feels Cameron and the NSC are interfering with the military operation even down to the most tactical level.’ (...)

Readers of this blog [RB: and of my blog] will know that I do not believe that Libya was responsible for the Lockerbie outrage. There is no convincing objective evidence that this was so,   

Whereas it was (rather more convincingly) believed by intelligence experts at the time of the atrocity that the crime originated in Syria as part of an Iranian-inspired revenge (as the Ayatollahs saw it) for the shooting down of a civilian Iranair Airbus by the American missile cruiser USS Vincennes (an incident with startling parallels to the equally unintentional and equally horrible shooting down by Russian-backed rebels of a Malaysian airliner).  

The blaming of Libya for Lockerbie was a consequence of the first Gulf War, in which Syria was (comically as it now seems ) viewed as an ally by the ‘West’.

Later, in this strange game of ‘good guy ‘and ‘bad guy’ in the Middle East, Libya’s supposed abandonment in December 2003 of (probably non-existent) weapons of mass destruction was cited by American neo-conservatives as a success for their Iraq policy. Gaddafi had also condemned the September 11 atrocity, and suppressed Saudi-type Islamism at home.  After this,  Gaddafi also made his peace with the EU, accepting a huge payment for halting migration across the Mediterranean. In the light of this fact it’s amazing that Britain and (more especially) France were so keen to overthrow him a  few years later. Did it not even occur to them that the current crisis might follow?

Mr Blair went twice (once in 2003 and once in 2007) to meet the Colonel in the Libyan desert. In May 2007 he declared:’The relationship between Britain and Libya has been completely transformed in these last few years. We now have very strong cooperation on counter terrorism and defence.’

To this day I’m still not sure how we moved in months from this position of cynical but self-interested collaboration with an unpleasant but co-operative and stable regime,  into support for rebels we barely knew, who were then unable to control this crucial country.

However strong Mr Cameron’s Famous Five type enthusiasm for doing good, his government continued the Blair policy when it came to office. As I wrote on September 10th 2011, almost exactly four years ago:

‘Somehow we’re being sold the idea that the Blair-Brown regime sucked up to Colonel Gaddafi, but our current Government kept their distance.

‘This is false. Archives reveal that the  ‘Minister for Africa’, Henry Bellingham slurped up to the Colonel (referring to him as ‘Brother Leader’) at an EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli on November 30, 2010. A few weeks before, another Minister, Alastair Burt, told the Libyan British Business Council that Libya had ‘turned a corner’ which ‘has paved the way for us to begin working together again’.

Maybe Mr Cameron didn’t know or understand what his own appointed ministers were doing, almost exactly six months before we overthrew Gaddafi.  In which case, he should have checked. The Seldon book suggests that Mr Cameron fell victim to what was  little more than an emotional spasm, not the sort of thing we expect Prime Ministers to suffer from.

It was the single gravest mistake of his time in office and will haunt Europe for decades to come. I sometimes wonder how profound the effect of all this mass migration is going to be on those parts of this country which have, hitherto, remained more or less undisturbed by the vast changes which are overtaking Europe. On this occasion, we would all be much better off if they had listened to Mr Blair. I did not think I would ever find myself saying that.

Restoration of UK diplomatic relations with Libya

On this date in 1999, three months after the arrival of Megrahi and Fhimah at Zeist, diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Libya were restored, having been broken off in April 1984 following the shooting of PC Yvonne Fletcher. The announcement was made in the House of Commons by the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. Mr Cook’s statement is well worth reading, as are the contributions to the debate that followed, particularly those of Tam Dalyell and Sir Teddy Taylor.

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

[What follows is the text of an article published in The Guardian on this date in 1999. Some of the "conspiracies" have since been comprehensively debunked. Others have not:]

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

A

is for Africa, South

Several pieces of evidence (see H and W) suggest that the authorities knew in advance that the Boeing 747 which blew up over Lockerbie in southern Scotland on December 21 1988 was in danger. The German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, intended to fly on Pan Am 103 but had been warned off. Mr Botha flew on an earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow. No one has been able to definitively confirm or refute the Die Zeit story.

B

is for bomb-maker

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see J, O and P) led to the arrest of bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat weeks before the Lockerbie disaster. Khreesat was released after a few days because of a lack of evidence. In April 1989 further German police raids resulted in the discovery of two more bombs designed by Khreesat specifically to blow up aircraft. Did he make the bomb which was placed on feeder flight Pan Am 103A before it left Frankfurt for Heathrow?

C

is for coffin

Two coach-loads of officials arrived at the disaster scene in the day after the crash. Many were plain-clothed Americans with no obvious affiliation. Among their baggage was a single coffin for which no explanation has ever been given. Labour MP Tam Dalyell later produced evidence indicating that the Americans had "stolen" a body from the wreckage. A local doctor identified and labelled 59 bodies and was then puzzled to find that the Americans had relabelled and tagged only 58 in the area where he had been working.

D

is for drugs

Lockerbie farmer Jim Wilson found a suitcase full of cellophane packets containing white powder among the debris in his fields. The suitcase was taken away, no explanation was given, and the authorities continued to insist that no drugs (apart from a small quantity of cannabis) had been found on the plane. But it was later discovered that the name Mr Wilson saw on the suitcase did not correspond with any of the names on the Pan Am 103 passenger list.

E

is for the Express

Ten days after the Lockerbie disaster, the Daily Express devoted its front page to exposing a Lebanese American called Khaled Jafaar whom it named as the "bomb carrier". The Express's sources were "the FBI and Scotland Yard". The Interfor report (see I) also named Khaled Jafaar as the bomb carrier.

F

is for fiction

It has been argued that talk of the CIA, cover-ups, bombs, timers and Maltese trousers (see M) is just entertaining fiction. Some observers believe that there was no bomb on Pan Am 103 and that explosive decompression or an electrical fault caused the Lockerbie disaster, as they caused other Boeing 747 crashes.

G

is for Garrick

Paul Channon, British Secretary of State for Transport, lunched five journalists at the Garrick Club three months after Lockerbie and told them, off-the-record, that the Lockerbie killers had been identified and would soon be arrested. Yet the two Libyans who came to be the prime suspects were not charged until November 1991. It seems likely that at that time Mr Channon was confident that the Lockerbie bomb was the work of the Palestinians (see P).

H

is for Helsinki

Sixteen days before the disaster, a man rang the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and warned of a bomb aboard a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the US. The 1990 US President's Commission report on aviation security said that "thousands of US government employees saw the Helsinki threat". Not a single US worker at the Moscow embassy took flight Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt, a standard and popular route home for Christmas. But the British Department of Transport had told Pan Am in December that British intelligence dismissed the threat as "not real".

I

is for Interfor

A report by Interfor, a New York corporate investigative company hired by Pan Am, suggested that a Palestinian gang (see P) had got the bomb on to the airliner at Frankfurt by exploiting a US intelligence deal (see U). In a bid to free American hostages in Beirut, American intelligence agents had apparently struck a deal with Syrian drug smugglers: in exchange for hostage information, the agents smoothed the Lebanon-US drugs route by relaxing security restrictions and allowing drug luggage to sail through customs. The terrorist gang simply switched the drug luggage for a bomb.

J

is for Ahmed Jibril

Ahmed Jibril was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) (see P). He enjoyed the protection of the Syrian government. Intelligence agents reported that Jibril had been assigned by a furious Iran to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airbus by a US warship in 1988 (which killed 290 people). The leader of Jibril's terrorist gang, Hafez Dalkamoni, was one of the Palestinians arrested in Operation Autumn Leaves (see O).

K

is for Kuwait

In 1990 Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein. Anglo-American attitudes to the Middle East were transformed. Paul Foot and John Ashton argue that theories about Lockerbie are inextricably linked to this changing political situation. In 1989 intelligence-based evidence fitted snugly with US and British foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria, and the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988 with America and Britain continuing to be hostile to Iran and supportive of Iraq. The US and British governments were content with the prime Lockerbie suspects: a Palestinian gang (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. But in 1990, the impending Anglo-American war against Iraq necessitated neutralising Iran and winning the support of Syria. Britain's diplomatic relations with Syria were duly restored in November 1990 and the Gulf war commenced in 1991. Sure enough, the credibility of intelligence theories about the Lockerbie bombing being masterminded by the Iran- and Syria-backed Palestinian gang was soon dismantled.

L

is for Libya

In November 1991, the American and British governments charged two Libyan airline officials, Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, with planting the Lockerbie bomb. To justify the radical change in the investigation's focus away from the Palestinians, the US State Department said: "Fresh evidence undermined the initial theory linking the PFLP-GC (see P) to the bomb". This included evidence that the Lockerbie bomb's "sophisticated electronic timer" had been delivered from Switzerland to Libya. And, in contrast, the bombs discovered in the hands of the Palestinians in Germany (see B) had "relatively crude timers".

M

is for the Maltese connection

A series of Sunday Times investigative pieces reported that the Lockerbie bomb had first been put on a plane in Malta. The bombing had been carried out by the Palestinian group (see P), after a gang member, Abu Talb, visited Malta. He was identified by a Maltese boutique owner as the man who bought clothes later found in the bomb suitcase. A bag which ended up on Pan Am 103 was identified by a baggage handler as coming from an Air Malta flight. When a Granada TV documentary repeated the allegations, Air Malta sued Granada for libel. A hitherto unpublished document from Air Malta's lawyers demonstrated that there were no bags on the flight which went on to Pan Am 103 or 103A. Granada settled out of court.

N

is for not proven

Legally defined as "a criminal verdict, somewhere between guilty and not guilty, the consequences of which are that the accused is treated as if found not guilty". Britain and the US fear that if attention is paid to the conflicting conspiracy theories, the case against the Libyans in The Hague could only be "not proven".

O

is for Operation Autumn Leaves

Five weeks before the Palestinian warning (see I) was received, a German anti-terrorism campaign, Operation Autumn Leaves, arrested a "team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO" in possession of a bomb in a cassette recorder (see T) strikingly similar to the Lockerbie bomb. These Palestinians, including Hafez Dalkamoni (see J) and Marwan Khreesat (see B) had been arrested outside a flat in Neuss - two hours' drive from Frankfurt, from whose airport Pan Am 103's feeder flight had originated. They were released after five days because there was not enough evidence against them.

P

is for Palestinians

Operation Autumn Leaves led to the arrest of a gang associated with a splinter group of the Palestinian movement the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). Was Pan Am 103 blown up by a Palestinian gang, protected by Syria and paid for by Iran?

Q

is for Queen's English

The official air accident report concludes: "The detonation of an improvised explosive device led directly to the destruction of the aircraft". If it was a bomb why wasn't it called a bomb in plain English?

R

is for red tarpaulin

On the night of the disaster teams of rescue volunteers scouring the area discovered a large object under a red tarpaulin. As they approached it, they were warned off by gunmen in the doorway of a hovering helicopter. A local farmer, Innes Graham, was also warned by US investigators to stay away from a small wooded area a few miles east of Lockerbie.

S

is for the Swiss circuit board

A central piece of evidence which pointed to the Libyans (see L) was a tiny fragment of a circuit board found among the Lockerbie debris. This was traced to a firm in Switzerland which exported timers to Libya. Apart from the confusion over when and where the circuit board was found (reports vary between June and November 1990), the Libyan connection to the timers is not as clear-cut as investigators have claimed. The US state department maintained that all timers from the Swiss firm had been delivered to Libya, but a BBC radio programme later proved that the firm had provided identical timers to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

T

is for Toshiba

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see O) discovered a Toshiba cassette recorder packed with semtex. Pieces of a similar model of recorder had been found in the wreckage at Lockerbie.

U

is for US intelligence

There have been several claims that the bomb was planted on Pan Am 103 by a crack team of US intelligence agents. A Radio Forth journalist reported the claim and, within an hour, was threatened with prosecution or, bizarrely, invited to disclose his source to the Prime Minister. The Interfor report (see I) also alleged that Major Charles McKee, the head of the US intelligence team, who was travelling on the plane, was shocked by his colleagues' deal with Syrian drug smugglers and was returning on Pan Am 103 to report them. The inference was obvious - Pan Am 103 was sacrificed by the intelligence community to get rid of Major McKee. But the Interfor report was greeted with widespread scepticism.

V

is for Vincent Cannistraro

In the early 1990s the Lockerbie investigation shifted from the Scottish Borders to the CIA base in America. The man in charge there was Vincent Cannistraro. Mr Cannistraro had worked with Oliver North in President Reagan's National Security Council and, Paul Foot and John Ashton argue, he "specialised in the US vendetta against Libya". Mr Cannistraro was part of a secret programme to destabilise the Libyan regime which culminated in the US bombing of Libya in 1986. He retired from the CIA in September 1990 but by then had helped lay the foundations for a completely new approach to the bombing investigation, in which the chief suspect was not Iran or Syria, but Libya.

W

is for warning

Three days before the Helsinki threat (see H), an intelligence source in the US state department's office of diplomatic security warned that a team of Palestinians, not associated with the PLO, was targeting Pan Am airline and US military bases in Europe. The comment attached to the message read: "We cannot refute or confirm this".

X

is for xenophobia

In 1989 Anglo-American intelligence services and politicians widely blamed the Lockerbie bomb on a Palestinian terror group (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. In 1990, (see K) Iraq became the Anglo-American Arab enemy number one in the run-up to the Gulf war; Iran became neutral and Syrian troops joined the Allied forces. Only Libya remained adamantly aligned with Iraq. Suddenly, coincidentally, the Lockerbie bomb was blamed on the Libyans.

Y

is for Yvonne Fletcher

PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, causing diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya to be severed. The file on Yvonne Fletcher is still open and Britain continues to demand Libyan co-operation on the matter. The fairness of the trial of the two Libyan suspects could yet affect this case.

Z

is for Zeist

Camp Zeist is the former US air base in The Hague where the two Libyans are being tried under Scottish law. But even the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah seems unlikely to still the disquiet and conspiracies that continue to surround flight Pan Am 103.